I have it on good authority that Vector 247 has been sighted in the wild. Or at least in peoples’ letterboxes. The theme this time around is “international sf”. Here’s the damn fine lineup:

Torque Control — editorial
Che Guevara on a Greyhound Bus — translator and editor Marcial Souto interviewed by Ian Watson
The Future That Never Began — Michael Froggatt on Soviet SF
Colourful Stories — Nisi Shawl on African-descended SF
The Search for South African SF — Nick Wood
Bears, Bombs and Popcorn — Judith Berman on cultural source-mining
Archipelago — Dan Hartland on the stories of Zoran Zivkovic
First Impressions — book reviews edited by Paul N. Billinger
The New X: The Walls Are Down, Unfortunately — a column by Graham Sleight

As usual, we’ll be putting some of the articles and reviews up on the website over the next week or two. Of course, to get the whole thing (and Matrix, and Focus), those of you who aren’t already members could just join the BSFA.

Or so reports the Guardian blog. Don’t they do this survey about once every eighteen months? Surprisingly, this time sf doesn’t seem to feature in the list of turn-off genres (and not only that, the picture in the post is of someone reading a fantasy novel. A Booker-longlisted fantasy novel, admittedly, but even so). There is this rather good story about a third of the way down the comment thread, though:

My worst ever literary experience came from re-reading Asimov’s I, Robot. The film had just come out; I hadn’t read any sci-fi since I was 14 and I wanted to go back and see if there was anything to it.

Obviously I took great care on my morning commute to shield the book from the view of the several attractive women sitting near me. However this was a Routemaster (no. 12), and when the conductor came to check my ticket he spotted the cover and launched into a 20 minute conversation/monologue about the merits of various sci-fi authors and novels, in the course of which I was compelled by politeness to admit familiarity with several of those authors, in full view of girls.

Astonishingly, the exact same thing happened the next day with a different conductor. I did not mourn the advent of the bendy bus.

Maybe they have a reading group.

Since I’ve been tagged:

1. One book that changed your life?

I always use the same answer for this question, but it’s kinda true, so: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. When I went to university and joined OUSFG, one of the perks was being able to choose a book for the society to buy for its library. The Sparrow had won the Clarke Award that year, and seemed like an obvious choice. It handily blew me away, and I started to pay a lot more attention to what I was reading, rather than (as had been previous practice) omnivorously consuming whatever I could get.

2. One book you have read more than once?

I don’t tend to do much re-reading these days, but Kim Stanley Robinson seems to be an author I revisit with some frequency. I’ve read Red Mars several times, and I keep meaning to find time to go back to Pacific Edge.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

I have utterly no idea. Maybe on a desert island I’d finally have time for the Baroque Cycle …

4. One book that made you laugh?

At the moment, I’m working my way through the latest volume of The Complete Peanuts. Sometimes, when I tell people I find Peanuts funny, they look at me as though I’m a little bit crazy. But I’m a Peanuts kid; my Dad has several shelfloads of the small paperbacks from the 50s and 60s and 70s (the ones with titles like Good Grief, Charlie Brown and You’ve Come A Long Way, Charlie Brown) and for the majority of my childhood they were all not-so-neatly packed into a bookcase that sat just outside the bathroom, making them perfect loo break reading. There’s something in the sensibility of the strip, the mix of resignation and optimism, that gets to me; makes me laugh, makes me smile, makes me ache with the truth of it, sometimes. (I’m not so good with humour in prose fiction; I don’t find Terry Pratchett or Robert Rankin or Jasper Fforde funny, for instance, or at least not enough to make me laugh.)

5. One book that made you cry?

The closest I’ve come in recent years is at one scene about half-way through Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I tend to be quite internal in my responses to books.

6. One book you wish had been written?

Foundation and Zombies.

7. One book you wish had never had been written?

I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question. Books are axiomatically good, aren’t they?

8. One book you are currently reading?
9. One book you have been meaning to read?

I’m going to double up on this, because I’m going through a phase of dipping into a lot of things. And I have been trying not to acquire book this year, honestly I have. I’ve been very good about not wandering into bookshops and impulse-buying, and almost as good about not going to Amazon. Despite this, my to-be-read pile seems to exist in a state of punctuated equilibrium. Most of the time books are added at about the rate they are removed; every so often, though, the pile suddenly has a growth spurt. This is one of those times. (It never shrinks, of course.)

There are the books that are totally not my fault. Warren Ellis’ Ocean was a present, for instance, as was Oxford by Jan Morris (although that just makes me feel guilty for not having finished A Writer’s World yet). And Daughters of Earth (some of which, including the introduction, is online here) was an offer that was just too tempting to refuse.

Then there are the books that I obviously had to buy, such as Theodora Goss’s collection In the Forest of Forgetting and Michel Faber’s The Fahrenheit Twins. Orhan Pamuk’s Snow fits here as well, as recommended to me by Abigail; and since she’s got around to writing about what I recommended to her, I should probably get around to reciprocating. Though Twenty Epics keeps sneaking up on me at the moment, since it is shinier and has a better index.

And of course there are books for review: I’ve just finished Sonya Taaffe’s collection, Singing Innocence and Experience, for NYRSF, after which I have Mark Budz’s new novel, Idolon, to review for Strange Horizons. And I’m sure something else will be along in a moment. Not to mention the fact that Clarke Award books are starting to trickle in …

In conclusion: at this point, I’m almost more worried about my flat bursting at the seams than about my ability to ever read everything. I’m not going to tag anyone else and insist they do this meme, but if anyone wants to confess their own recent book-acquisition guilt and help me to feel less like a hopeless case, that would be more than welcome.

In the June NYRSF, Graham wrote of David Marusek’s Counting Heads (review) that:

It embodies as elegant an approach as I’ve ever seen to the central and unique technical problem of sf: a science fiction story not only has to draw a narrative line through a world (like mimetic fiction), but also has to explain how that world is different from ours and how it got like that. (If there’s one term I’d like to see removed from the sf critical vocabulary—including mine—it’s “infodump”: a disastrously pejorative and un-nuanced way of describing the range of solutions sf authors find to this problem.)

There are probably almost as many solutions as there are writers, but off the top of my head I can think of five general approaches.

1. Lecture-to-reader: breaking off the narrative to allow the individual telling the story, or even the author, to talk directly to the reader. The most impressive recent example of this is surely Charles Stross’s Accelerando:
   

   Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.

   It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2×10²⁷ kilograms. Around the world, labouring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10²³ MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10²³ MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system’s installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold—one million instructions per second per gram of matter. Beyond that, singularity—a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to double-digit months …

   The advantage of this is that a high density of information can be conveyed, because it temporarily abandons any attempt to draw a narrative line, and simply tells you about the world. If thought is given to the identity of the narrator—as it is in Accelerando—it can be revealing on more levels than just the didactic, though. The extract above gives us a clear sense of what the narrator is, and how the terms in which it views the world differ from the terms in which we view the world.

2. Lecture-to-character: this would include all the “As you know, Jim” dialogue ever written. A slightly more sophisticated version has an expert explaining something to an innocent abroad; Stephen Baxter has a fairly stock polymathic genius character who crops up in a lot of his novels to serve this function.
3. Tourism: acknowledges that both the writer and the reader are outside the world being created, looking in. It’s the inclusion of unfamiliar concepts and words, gradually explaining them as the story unfolds. This is, in a sense, simply an intensification of the work every story has to do to convince its readers of its setting: an intensification because it involves noticing more. I suspect this is what people think of by default when they think of “infodumps”. When a mimetic novel uses this technique—treats the real world as unfamiliar—you get interesting effects, as in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (which is often described as ‘sfnal’) or David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (which has been described by several reviewers as having the feel of the fantastic to it).
4. Embedding: narratives that are scrupulously written as though they come from the world they describe. For example, take this from ‘Nekropolis’ by Maureen McHugh:
   

   I grew up in the Nekropolis. We didn’t have running water, it was delivered every day in a big lorritank and people would go out and buy it by the karn, and we lived in three adjoining mausoleums instead of a flat, but other than that, it was a pretty normal childhood. I have a sister and two brothers. My mother sells paper funeral decorations, so the Nekropolis is a very good place for her to live, no long tube rides every day. The part we lived in was old. Next to the bed were the dates for the person buried behind the wall, 3673 to 3744. All of the family was dead hundreds of years ago, no-one ever came to this death house to lay out paper flowers and birds. In fact, when I was four, we bought the rights to this place from an old woman whose family had lived here a long time before us.

   On the surface this gives us a lot of information, but we can’t take it neat, as we might be able to in a tourist story; we have to process it to work out what kind of world we’re in, because the narrator only tells us what seems natural to her. To take the most obvious point, we’re not given the date of the story, for instance, we’re given a date hundreds of years in the past of the story. We’re given some idea of what a ‘normal childhood’ is, and we’re given an unfamiliar word, karn, that we have to puzzle out from context. When this sort of story switches to dialogue, the author can also convey a large amount of information through what the characters don’t say. Some alternate histories work this way, although most eventually give us a history lesson; in a similar way, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is brilliant at it for 90% of its length, but spoils things with an unnecessary explanation in the penultimate chapter.

5. Never explain: the ultimate in embedded narratives. Even a story like ‘Nekropolis’ usually relents and slips in an explanation of its more idiosyncratic elements; but there are some stories that resist the temptation to the end. Oddly, the first example that comes to mind is a non-sf novel (albeit one popular with sf readers), to wit Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which never tells the reader that its narrator has Asperger’s Syndrome. The reader is expected to work it out. Within sf, Gene Wolfe is fond of this approach (although often, to my mind, it leaves his writing feeling rather dry).

There’s a lot of overlap in these categories, reflecting both the fact that stories are organic, and will use a combination of strategies to convey information, and the fact that I’ve jotted this down in half an hour.

It was all inspired by the recent discussion of infodumps elsewhere over the past month or so. Matt Cheney wrote about the conventions of infodumping, and in particular how it differs from exposition; The Little Professor talked about infodumps in nineteenth-century novels; in the comments of that post there’s a link to Jed Hartman’s “How I explained infodumps and saved humanity“, which anatomises the types of infodump in a different way to my list above; and most recently, Dan Green discusses the difficulty of reading infodumps with reference to Philip K. Dick. His conclusion:

One might say that Dick attempts to portray an unreal world by realistically depicting his characters’ response to living in that world. The “infodump” remains a perhaps unavoidable limitation of such an effort, one that may even call into question the aesthetic integrity of the effort in the first place.

Probably needless to say, given all the foregoing, I think this is a bit strong. In fact, I think it’s aiming at a target that isn’t there: depicting the characters’ response to their world is only a stopping point on the way to the ultimate goal, which is to convey to us the experience of living in that world. This is not to say that sf can make do without character (unless you’re Olaf Stapledon), and certainly there is a good deal of sf in which all the infodumping will be buried in the characters’ viewpoints, done in hints and glances, as noted above. But a writer’s choice to describe the world more or less explicitly for our benefit is ok too; it may or may not be to an individual’s taste, but it has its own aesthetic integrity.

A couple of articles from the most recent issue of Matrix (one of Vector‘s sister magazines) are now online.

First up, there’s a guest editorial by Keith Brooke, on the success of Infinity Plus:

Late last year I realised that a whole bunch of milestones for the site were arriving at around the same time: we had just passed 100 interviews, soon we will pass 1,000 book reviews and, as I write this in January 2006, we’re very close to 2 million words of fiction, all available on the site for free.

Second, Stephen Baxter revisits Dan Dare and Quatermass:

Some of the great British sf franchises of the Sixties, notably Doctor Who and the Gerry Anderson shows such as Captain Scarlet, are still imaginatively alive in a new century. But those creations were influenced by what went before them. I was born in the Fifties, and the media icons of that grey-tinged decade, like Dan Dare and Quatermass, have been names in the background all my life. Now, thanks to some helpful reissues and repackaging, we have access to these monuments of a vanished age.

There are also reviews of, among other things, Silent Hill and Mirrormask.

Some Saturday-morning reviews for you, from Vector 245.

Neil Barron’s Anatomy of Wonder, reviewed by Steve Jeffrey:

This is the fifth, and judging by Barron’s valedictory Preface, possibly the final edition of Anatomy of Wonder. It has been substantially updated, revised and enlarged from its 1995 predecessor and now weighs in at over twice the length of its original incarnation in 1976. The first and third editions of this Guide were previously reviewed in Vector by Brian Stableford (Nov 1976), and Paul Kincaid (April 1988) who are both contributors to this volume, alongside an impressive list of critics, reviewers, academics and commentators.

J. Shaun Lyon’s Back to the Vortex, reviewed by Martin McGrath:

Back to the Vortex is a perfect example of a book designed to serve a market that cares how many times someone says the word “fantastic” in the new series of Doctor Who or the number of people who die in each episode. As such, the author, J. Shaun Lyon, should be congratulated. I can’t imagine a more comprehensive volume. But it is not without flaws.

And Holly Phillips’ In the Palace of Repose, reviewed by me:

It is perhaps only in the sf field that a debut short story collection consisting mostly of original stories might be greeted with suspicion. Where, we wonder (I wonder, before I catch myself doing it) are the publication credits? Why were these stories not published in the magazines? What’s wrong with them? And yet to think along such lines is, increasingly, to miss out: here is a debut collection where the majority of the stories are making their first appearance, but which without a doubt marks the arrival of an interesting new voice.

We plan to put a few reviews online from each issue, so watch this space for more.

… and it’s hello from me. To explain a little more about scheduling: the BSFA publishes three magazines, Vector, the news magazine Matrix, and the writers’ magazine Focus. Vector and Matrix are bimonthly, and Focus is biannual; unfortunately, this year we’ve had a bit of a publication backlog, because the distribution company that actually did the magazine mailing went bust, and it’s taken a little while to get a replacement lined up.

Still, everything seems to be working again now. The March/April issue, which as Geneva mentioned was the Review of 2005 issue, has now been published. It features articles by Colin Odell and Mitch LeBlanc on the films of the year, Mattia Valente on 2005’s TV, Claire Brialey on ‘Best Related Relatedness’ (non-fiction, critical and academic happenings), and a couple of pieces we’ve put on the website: a second column by Graham Sleight, on ‘The Vanishing Midlist, Revisited‘, and Matthew Cheney’s ‘Confessions of a Short-Story Burnout‘, his thoughts on the short fiction of 2005.

Most importantly, the issue features the results of the annual Vector survey of the best books of the year, compiled and with commentary by the reviews editor, Paul N. Billinger. The raw results of the survey, plus the complete list of nominated titles (which we didn’t have room to print in the issue itself) can be found here. This year’s winner was 9Tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood (reviewed by Paul Billinger here), with Charles Stross’s Accelerando (reviewed by Paul Kincaid here) the runner-up.

You may well notice what may look like some slightly odd nominations as you look down the list. This is a feature, not a bug; unlike, say, the Locus Recommended Reading List, or the SF Site readers’ and editors’ picks of the year, the Vector survey asks for what respondents read in the previous year, not what was published in the previous year. Preference is given to recent books, and to sf/fantasy books, but so long as someone read it and thinks it’s ‘of interest to BSFA members’, it’s fair game. Which is how you can get last year’s winner, Ian McDonald’s River of Gods, making a respectable showing this time out as well.

(Mind you, Pride and Prejudice does still seem like a bit of a stretch.)