Torque Control

Talking Heads

The latest BSFA mailing dropped through my letterbox today. It’s a full one — Vector, Matrix, Focus, plus an awards ballot and a letter to members. Here’s the contents for Vector:

Torque Control — editorial
Best of British — Jo Fletcher interviewed by Graham Sleight
An Introduction to Anna Kavan’s Ice — by Christopher Priest
Politics Is What Humans Do — Richard Morgan interviewed by Martin Lewis
A report on the first SF Foundation Masterclass — by Paul Raven
First Impressions — book reviews edited by Paul N. Billinger
Particles — a books received column by Paul N. Billinger
The New X: Lost in Translation — a column by Graham Sleight

In other shiny BSFA news: the new website is live. There are a bunch of holding pages there at the moment, and undoubtedly some bugs to iron out, but you can get an idea of the feel of it, and subscribe to the RSS feed. (And here’s a livejournal feed for those who might want it.)

And in other news, I’m off to Italy on Saturday for a week of holiday. (I am taking these books, and no doubt one or two more that I cram into my bag at the last minute.) Before I go, however, I will post my much-delayed review of Subterranean 7 (the issue guest-edited by Ellen Datlow). They say people don’t read 4,000 word blog posts, but I figure if I give you all a week you’ll get through it. Right?

London Meeting: Roz Kaveney

The guest at tonight’s BSFA meeting is Steph Swainston, who will be interviewed by Graham Sleight.

As usual, the meeting is open to any and all, and will be held in the upstairs room of the Star Tavern in Belgravia (map here). The interview starts at 7.00, but there are likely to be people hanging around in the bar from 6.00 or so. And I thought I wasn’t going to make it, but as it turns out, I am!

Cover Art

A short essay on the Solaris website explains their approach to genre cover art:

As I see it, there are currently two schools of thought – to package your SF/F novel to appeal to as wide a readership as possible, in the hope of enticing readers from other areas of the bookstore to pick it up on a whim; or to package your SF/F novel to appeal to the perceived core readership of the genre, or indeed, fans of Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, people who want a book with a spaceship or a wizard on the front of it.
[…]
In setting up the Solaris imprint for BL Publishing, though, Publisher Marc Gascoigne and I decided – for better or for worse – to place ourselves directly in that second camp. The reasons for this were two-fold. Firstly, our existing imprint, the Black Library, had been successfully publishing SF/F novels for eight years – novels that tie-in to the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 fantasy worlds of Games Workshop. Experience had shown us that we already knew, as a business, how to package books for a niche audience – our recent range of Horus Heresy tie-in novels have sold over three hundred thousand copies combined since last April. Secondly, we believed we could see a gap emerging in the market, and we wanted to fill it.

Many genre imprints in both the UK and the US were taking the other route, packaging novels to appeal to a wider audience, focusing on getting front-of-store promotions and aiming for the bestseller lists. Sales expectations for genre novels seemed to be getting higher and higher. On the other end of the scale, a proliferation of small presses seemed to be flourishing, publishing limited run books for a small collector’s market. Essentially, at the heart of the genre, the midlist was disappearing. The result of this was that the core SF/F readership was not being as well served as it had been in the past; people who went into a high street bookshop to browse the SF/F section were not necessarily seeing those aforementioned books with wizards and spaceships on the front.

There’s smart commentary from Ariel and Lou Anders, who has a quote form John Picacio:

“The field must visually celebrate itself, rather than run away from itself. Couldn’t agree with you [George] more. And I realize the context in which you’re saying this, regarding the midlist specifically. When sf/fantasy publishing shows an insecurity about its visual strengths, that insecurity rubs off negatively not only on our audiences, but in the broader media, and we push ourselves backwards every time we do that.

Category Schmategory

I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for a while. Paul Kincaid reviewed The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy:

Given the increasingly complex games with authorship that her most recent novels have played, and given how much non-fiction she has written for children, it was perhaps inevitable that Pat Murphy would write a young adult novel about writing. Which is precisely what The Wild Girls is, though if you expect anything of the subtlety or complexity of those novels you are going to be disappointed. This is writing reduced to a simple lesson in life, light, appealing and entertaining but very definitely aimed at a younger audience by removing any doubts, hesitations or darker aspects.

And literaticat responded:

* young adult novel about writing…: It isn’t a YA novel. It is very clearly a middle grade novel. And yes, there’s a difference. Consider how prickly many in the SF/F community get about people who are ignorant and dismissive about SF/F. Well, that’s how children’s book people feel when people are idiots about children’s books. GRR. I don’t understand why you would want to review a mainstream children’s book when that is so clearly NOT your forte, or why you would post it on an SF site… But moving on.

* …very definitely aimed at a younger audience by removing any doubts, hesitations or darker aspects: Imagine, a children’s book aimed at children? Bust my buttons. As for doubts, hesitations or darker aspects: The dissolution of two families. The children’s struggle to cope with the emotional fallout of their parent’s disastrous marriages. Their finding their own voices in challenging times. Not doubty and dark enough? You were expecting the apocolypse, maybe?

I have issues with both these comments. To take the second comment first, I think literaticat has simply misread Paul. I do not think Paul was expressing surprise or disappointment at the fact that The Wild Girls is aimed at children, because I don’t see how you can unyoke that statement from the rest of the sentence. Paul may or may not be right that the book removes “any doubts, hesitations or darker aspects” (I haven’t read it), but it seems clear to me that it’s the concept of doing that as an approach to writing for children that he’s commenting on. And in fact, that’s the thrust of his judgement on the book — that it is “clearly written and very readable”, but that it is limited by its need to provide a lesson.

Having got that off my chest, I’m going to briefly return to my opening comment: I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for a while. YA isn’t new, and YA sf isn’t new, but the visibility of and emphasis on YA as a category certainly seems to be greater now than it was only a few years ago; and hand in hand with a more clearly defined category come the readers with allegiance to that category, and comes a more clearly defined set of expectations for what is in that category. At the same time, over the last few years there have been a number of fairly high-profile examples of YA writers getting serious props from the main stream of genre criticism (Margo Lanagan, Ysabeau Wilce, Philip Reeve), and a number of well-regarded established sf writers turning their hand to YA (China Mieville, Stephen Baxter, Ellen Klages). All of which means that it’s not a surprise that a new YA novel by a writer who has previously committed sf picks up a review on a website devoted to sf (even though it is not, apparently, sf). At some point, given that despite what I said above most sf readers are not yet habitual YA readers, friction was probably inevitable.

But I’m not completely convinced that the situation is, as literaticat would have it, analagous to a non-sf writer reviewing an sf novel. In some ways, it is. If you’re reviewing something, you should try to be aware of that thing’s context — though I note that the definitions of YA in the US (where literaticat is) and UK (where Paul is and I am) seem to be somewhat different, to the point where I’m not even sure that “middle grade” exists as a separate shelf. (And I note that on her website, Pat Murphy merely describes the book as a children’s novel.) In a very interesting discussion at Gwenda’s place, Colleen Mondor says:

What I find sometimes reading so many MG and YA books is that there are those that seem to appeal regardless of the reader’s age (Cecil Castellucci’s work would fit in here or the KIki Strike book), some that seem to appeal more to adults that kids (I think “King Dork” is an example of this to a certain degree) and then those that adults might think are okay, but kids really go nuts over. But all of them are books for kids and for reviewers not used to wading around in these waters, it can get easy to mislabel or misread something.

This is surely true, and the inherent paradox of all reviews of children’s books, but I doubt Paul is unware of it, and I don’t think it makes sense of this specific case. Literaticat isn’t (or doesn’t seem to be) saying that The Wild Girls is good because it appeals to its target audience, she’s saying that The Wild Girls is good, full stop — that it is not the simplified, reductive story that Paul paints it as. The problem is this: how can advocates of YA (or, in this case, middle grade) fiction claim, as they frequently do and implicitly do here, that YA is an arbitrary label, that YA does everything non-YA does, and that the books that bear the label are as worthwhile on their own merits as books that do not (see, for example, the reactions to Octavian Nothing last year), and yet also object to Paul’s review on the grounds that he isn’t sufficiently familiar with “middle grade” fiction?

It looks like trying to have your cake and eat it, too. If a book isn’t making concessions to its audience, or operating in category-specific ways, then I can’t see why you’d need to be familiar with the market for books aimed at that audience to review it fairly. (There is, of course, also the argument that any reader reaction is a fair reader reaction.) And I’d argue that this is different to the equivalent sf neurosis because “sf” as a marketing category not an arbitrary label; it is a description of content. Sf novels don’t do everything that mimetic novels do, just as mimetic novels don’t do everything that sf novels do, so when a reviewer approaches an sf novel expecting it to reward her in the ways a mimetic novel will (or vice versa), a disjunction can, and often does, result.

UPDATE, 21/10: Paul Kincaid has provided his own response, in the comments below and on his journal.

Hello Links, Goodbye

Nobel

As you will have heard by now, Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature:

“that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.

Most people seem pretty happy. But not Harold Bloom:

American literary critic Harold Bloom called the academy’s decision “pure political correctness.”

“Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable … fourth-rate science fiction,” Bloom told the AP.

Anyone out there feel like writing an assessment of Lessing’s sf for Vector?

Swirsky Stories

You may well have already noticed Rachel Swirsky’s name. If her fiction hasn’t caught your eye — and she’s published several interesting stories already this year, with three months still to go — then her posts at Alas, A Blog or the Aqueduct Press blog may have done. It was one of the latter that snagged me, and then I backtracked to discover, with pleasure, the same passion and directness in the former. Which is what I’m going to talk about here.

In an interview, Swirsky suggested she writes short stories because they are “close to poems. They can have a certain impressionism which approximates thought or sensation — bursts of energy instead of sustained documentation.” I can see that: a story such as “Heartstrung” (Interzone 210), a fantasy in which a mother has to literally sew her daughter’s heart onto the girl’s sleeve, is all about sensation, a short sharp punch of anger and sadness at how that society (and, of course, our own) constrains and pacifies women. But “Heartstrung” actually seems to me the least successful of Swirsky’s stories that I’ve read, precisely because of its brevity. To make its point in such a short space, the story has to be quite crudely manipulative, in a way that invites a “yes, but …” reaction as much as the visceral one that (I assume) was intended.

In contrast, a story like “The Debt of the Innocent”, from Glorifying Terrorism, takes the time to ground its awfulness, and as a result has a more lasting effect. Jamie Wrede, the protagonist, is a nurse who, in a resource-scarce future, is given the responsibility of removing the babies of poor parents from life support in favour of those from more prosperous families. Jamie is persuaded to take an action that might allow her to become a Rosa Parks for the times. “Frightening but familiar”, she is told, “the best [case] to swing public opinion”; the former statement is a reasonable paraphrase of Glorifying Terrorism‘s mission, but Swirsky’s case is more memorable than most in the book. The structure of “The Debt of the Innocent” highlights one of Swirsky’s apparent interests, which is telling stories that might not otherwise get told. Another writer’s version of the same tale could very easily have focused on Jamie, and left the stories of the families affected implicit; Swirsky makes them explicit. Interspersed with Jamie’s story we get the stories of the families of the babies she’s killed. Many of them, individually, pack as much punch as “Heartstrung” — indeed, most of them are more convincing than Jamie’s characterisation — but they also operate as part of a larger and more satisfying whole.

The interest in the marginal is even more obvious in “Scene From a Dystopia” (Subterranean 4; pdf; story starts on page 5), which manages to pack much more than “Heartstrung” into much less space, and which could also be titled If On A Winter’s Night A Handmaid:

You’ve read this book before. It’s one of the classics from the Cold War era, always worth rereading when you’ve got a little time on your hands — long plane rides, your annual winter flu, the two rainy weeks between autumn and winter when you find your mood drifting toward insular and melancholic. You feel comforted when you read the famous opening lines: “If these accounts have fallen into your hands, then you have been identified as a potential recruit for the rebellion. Take heed, for the Eyes are everywhere and you may already be in peril.” On page four, when Stanley relates his discovery of an ancient book from before the Technocracy, you enjoy the familiar tinge of mystery.

The story was published as part of the John Scalzi-edited “SF cliche issue” of Subterranean, and fulfills that remit completely and slyly: we really have read this book before, or as good as, despite the fact that it doesn’t exist, because the shape of a dystopian story is so familiar. The cliche is therefore the background of the story, a piece of assumed knowledge. When Stanley sees a beautiful girl sitting in a gymnasium, we know he will fall in love, and we know that will lead him into conflict with the state, because that’s what happens in We, in 1984, in other stories. So Swirsky doesn’t waste any time telling us what we already know, and when Stanley’s said his noble piece — “a woman is not a piece of data” — and strides on, the narrator gently stops us from following:

Ordinarily, you would follow him. Instead, allow me to waylay you here.

In the overall plot of the novel, this moment is unimportant. The entire scene occupies only two pages, from 50-52. But take a moment to explore this scene with me, to examine the story that lies not on the page, but inhabits the margins.

Now that Stanley is gone, let us venture where he never treads: into the gymnasium with Natalie.

“Scene From a Dystopia” is fanfic for a story that doesn’t exist. Moreover it’s an argument for fanfic as critique, as a particularly elegant act of criticism — or put another way, an argument for a marginal artistic form (in terms of the cultural value generally accorded to it, if not in sheer numbers), even as the surface of the story is an argument on behalf of marginal characters. By its ending, which challenges the reader’s sympathies as much as, if not more than, that of “The Debt of the Innocent”, “Scene From a Dystopia” provokes some important thoughts about the choices and assumptions made by both readers and writers as they go about their business, the most important of which is probably, simply, notice. Elsewhere, Gene wondered why a character in a story was transexual, then got called on it, and wondered why he wondered. “Scene From a Dystopia”, I think, is among other things a reminder that it’s natural to wonder. If “straight white male” is the default, then anything else indicates that a choice has been made — or at least, it implies that a more conscious choice has been made than the one made by Stanley’s author. Even if the motive behind that choice is, perfectly validly, “why not?”, the choice is there.

Which brings me to the story I thought I was going to spend most of my time talking about, “Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind” (Subterranean Online, Summer 2007), New Wave-y title and all. It has the best of the three stories I’ve mentioned above. It has the impressionistic, image- and sensation-driven feel of “Heartstrung” (and a lot of scene breaks; if Nick Mamatas really does think that scene breaks are always giant gongs, he’d probably be deafened by this story), the skillful interweaving of narratives that distinguishes “The Debt of the Innocent”, and the direct, telling-it-plain voice of “Scene From a Dystopia”. It’s something of a relief, in fact, to encounter a new writer who uses an omniscient voice that isn’t drenched in Kelly Link-style knowingness. “Dispersed …” is the short story equivalent of hyperlink cinema. It’s how the end of the world would look if you were God.

Wealthy northerners watch the event through cameras on surviving satellites. Milliseconds after impact, their screens go black as the asteroid’s collision displaces earth and rock in a hundred mile radius. Radioactive waste illegally buried in poverty-stricken Puerto Natales flies into the air, joining the plume of dirt that whirls into the chaotic weather systems caused by impact. Soil sewn with radioactive dust distributes across the globe in a storm that blocks the sun for three months.

(It could contain The Road as a sidebar.)

The last humans are an Aboriginal Australian girl, and a Nepalese man. We also see the inventor of “the last major art movement”, a Swedish woman who finds a way to create three-dimensional holograms of memories, and the perpetrator of “the last act of malice”, a man who releases the genetically modified organisms he’s been working on when it becomes clear that his government has abandoned him.

When Scalzi linked to the story, one of the less enamoured commentators (a minority), described it as “heavily didactically left-wing”. A couple of others challenged this assessment, though no debate ever really developed. I think there’s something in the characterisation: the choices Swirsky makes in the course of her story are at every stage choices to focus on people who are, in the here and now, disenfranchised, or choices to highlight the hypocrisy of those in power. When the wealthiest nations come up with their survival plan, we are told that “as for those who won’t be included […] global leaders mumble about regrettable losses then do what they have always done: sacrifice the good of the many for the good of themselves.” Is this cynical? Or just clear-sighted? Certainly the description of those who leave the safety of the north to travel south to stand, and die, with “their impoverished brothers and sisters” as “the last heroes” seems sincere. Note that I don’t intend this description as pejorative, though depending on your personal politics you might take it as such. But the story put me in mind of something Abigail said when reviewing Hal Duncan’s Book of All Hours, about the book being a manifesto. Swirsky’s story isn’t as fierce as Duncan’s, but it has something of the same steel, the same confidence to say “this is how I see it. Take it or leave it.”

And it would be a shame to leave it. “Dispersed …” isn’t as lyrical as its title might lead you to expect, but it’s certainly very atmospheric, full of images of brutal clarity — a child pulling a rib from a rotted skeleton, for instance — and brief, deft sketches. One of these concerns the last music made by mankind. It’s not much, and music is hard to write about at the best of times, but it’s enough to feel the pulse:

#

The last man is tone deaf and the light-eyed child doesn’t like to song because it reminds her that her voice is piping and high when it should be resonant and bass, so the last music mankind makes is subtle and strange. It’s the last man grunting in answer to the raven’s sporadic caws; it’s the light-eyed child splashing in the river to the beat of her heart; it’s the last man’s fingers drumming on his son’s hollow belly.

#

It’s moments like this that make “Dispersed …” the most distinctively Swirskyian story I’ve read so far. If I have a reservation about her work in general, it’s that it seems to be most successful when it has a clear template to follow. I’m going to indulge myself, and quote a John Clute line I’ve always liked about Steph Swainston’s first novel The Year of Our War, that it’s “a coughing of the throat of a storyteller being born in difficult but enthralling times”. It sums up how I feel about these stories, that they’re steps on the way to something more completely owned; what they say, and what might be said next, have the feel of things that need to be said. What will be said next, it looks like, is a story in Electric Velocipede 13, “How the World Became Quiet: a Post-Human Creation Myth”. A fluke of publishing order, no doubt, but it seems that after writing about the end, Rachel Swirsky is going to tackle a beginning.

Light

M. John Harrison writes:

As a reader I’m not interested in a “fully worked out” world. I’m not interested in “self consistency” … When I read fantasy, I read for the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know. I want the taste of the writer’s mind, I want to feel I’m walking about in the edges of the individual personality.

And as if by magic, a new story by Kelly Link appeared, which doesn’t come within ten city blocks of being “fully worked out”. It’s the story of Lindsey, a 38-year-old woman whose husband has left her, and whose gay brother has just come to stay with her. Chris Barzak says of it:

I think the rhythm and pacing of the story is different from any of her others. There’s less lyricism than usual. The characterizations feel flatter, but purposively so. The fantastical elements seem to float unfixed, as if the reader shouldn’t be able to contextualize them and understand what they “mean” or for what many readers would try to read as metaphor. In many ways it’s a fantasy that feels like science fiction, if that makes any sense at all. For me, these are different attributes than the ones that usually show up in Kelly’s stories. Or I should say, they have all appeared variously in her stories, but not all in once place as they do here. The closest story of hers that it feels similar to, for me, is “The Hortlak”. But even that story feels as if you can read the fantasy elements as a metaphor for entrapment in a world where consumerism is the lens through which people view and understand, or fail to understand, one another. I didn’t necessarily get that feeling for this story. I can make attempts to analyze it in such a way, but it feels more resistant to analysis than any other story of hers, for me.

I agree that “Light” feels resistant to analysis, but I’m not sure it’s particularly more so than the rest of her fiction. I also agree that the story it feels closest to is “The Hortlak”; both are basically linear stories, and in both the fantastic elements are described in a deadpan way that makes them just another part of the world. (As opposed to a story like “Magic for Beginners”, where the deadpan delivery makes you wonder just which aspects of the story are magical.) But for me the big difference between this story and the rest of Link’s work is the extent to which the fantastic elements saturate the landscape.

I think I’m right in saying that in every other Link story set in our world (which is most of them) the fantastic is only experienced by, at most, a small group of people — the clerks in “The Hortlak”, the poker-players in “Lull”, “The Specialist’s Hat”. The arguable exception is probably “Most of my Friends are Two-Thirds Water”, but that story isn’t explicitly a fantasy in the way that “Light” is — the blonde women might be aliens, but they might not — and even if they are aliens, nobody else knows about it. In “Light”, everyone knows that the world is very weird. In the first scene, Lindsey overhears conversations about the limitations of being raised by wolves, and about how prosthetic shadows are a “not expensive and reasonably durable” option for those born without shadows of their own — and about how children born with two shadows won’t grow up happy. (Lindsey is dismissive of this, since she had a second shadow, which itself grew up to be Alan, and had a happy childhood.) More importantly, though, she overhears people talking about “a new pocket universe”.

Although other fantastic elements are introduced throughout the story — the weather-witches; the unwakeable sleepers who it is Lindsey’s job to look after; the fact that the sky always seems to be a shade of green — it’s the pocket universes that have the most far-reaching implications. We’re told people go there on holiday, or retire there. We’re told that mermaids have come back from a Disney pocket universe. And there’s an offhand remark by one character referring to people who “want everything to be the way it was before”, which certainly gave me the fantasy-that-feels-like-science-fiction jolt that Chris refers to in his comment. It’s still a version of our world — Florida is mentioned, as is the fact that Tibet is “riddled” with pocket universes (which, like the best Linkian observations, somehow feels intuitively right) — but it’s one where magic has become ubiquitous, commonplace, accepted. (It feels, in fact, much like the way I wanted Justina Robson’s post-Quantum Bomb dimensionally-split world in her Quantum Gravity series to feel.) Having read the story, I can’t tell you what any of it means, but I can tell you what it feels like: it feels strange, defamiliarising, and like the taste of an idiosyncratic mind.

BSFA Awards — open for nominations

An announcement from Claire Brialey, the BSFA Awards Administrator:

Nominations are now open for this year’s BSFA awards, with more opportunities than ever before for BSFA members to express their opinions about what’s good in science fiction.

All current members of the BSFA are eligible to nominate and vote for the awards, which will be presented at next year’s British national science fiction convention (Eastercon). Members of the Eastercon will also be eligible to vote for the awards.

The 2008 Eastercon will be the 50th anniversary of the founding of the BSFA and we will therefore be presenting a special award for the best genre novel of 1958. This will be nominated and voted on in the same way as the awards for works published in 2007; details about what’s eligible and how to nominate can be found on the temporary BSFA website.

There will once again be four awards categories for 2007 work: novel, short fiction, artwork and non-fiction. The main change for this year is for the non-fiction category, a topic which has previously excited some opinions on Torque Control. Those of you who are BSFA members now have every opportunity to express those opinions by nominating what you consider to be the best writing about science fiction in 2007. Read the rules and then email me to nominate or to comment more generally.

I’d also like to extend many thanks to Ian Snell for his work as awards administrator last year and his help in handing back over. I shall be acting as BSFA awards administrator until Easter 2008.

Short fiction-wise I suspect I’ll be nominating Holly Phillips’ “Three Days of Rain” and Daryl Gregory’s “Dead Horse Point”, but beyond that I haven’t thought about nominations yet this year. How about you?

If On A Winter’s Night A Linker

  • John Clute’s “Fantastika in the World Storm“, a lecture delivered in Prague earlier this month. Possibly notable for including a four-stage model of sf to go with the models of fantasy and horror outlined in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy and The Darkening Garden, respectively; at least, I think it’s the first time I’ve seen such a model written down:

    Science Fiction. The basic premise is that the world depicted has an arguable relation to the history of the real world. The underlying impulse of twentieth century SF has been to view the world in this manner in order to see what’s wrong; and then fixing it. SF is the most optimisitc of genres. SF bronco-busts the world. It rides the world storm. I’ve cobbled a narrative model for SF out of other writers’ work. Though it uses a different terminology, this model closely resembles an earlier model constructed by Farah Mendlesohn for similar reasons in her essay, Is There Any Such a Thing as Children’s Fiction: A Position Piece (2004):

    1. Novum. Darko Suvin’s term for that aspect of the SF world which differs measurably from our given world.
    2. Cognitive Estrangement. Suvin’s term — modified from Vikor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht — for arguable and therefore structured defamiliarization of the world, which derives in part from the fact of Novum, and which allows the defectiveness of the ruling paradigm to be seen whole.
    3. Conceptual Breakthrough. Peter Nicholls’s term, from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979), for the thrust of release when a defective paradigm collapses and the new world — the true world — is revealed. A sense of wonder is often felt, sometimes in spaceships.
    4. Topia (U- or Dys-). The Jerusalem whose gates have been opened by conceptual breakthrough for those who have won through. From this point life is going to be led in accordance with the truths discovered.
  • Michael Swanwick’s “A Nettlesome Term That Has Long Outlived Its Welcome“, an essay about the term “fix-up” that first appeared in NYRSF.
  • I’m sure most of you have seen Ursula Le Guin’s review of Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel The Stone Gods by now, but in case not, here it is. And here is Tim Adams’ review from the Observer.
  • John Clute’s obituary for Robert Jordan (and Andrew Wheeler’s comment)
  • Jeff VanderMeer’s interview with M. John Harrison to mark the US release of Nova Swing (and Andrew Wheeler’s comment)
  • In The Guardian, Patrick Ness reviews Pratchett’s Making Money
  • Abigail Nussbaum reviews two novels by Anna Kavan
  • Jonathan McCalmont reviews Interzone 212
  • Another review of Jeff Prucher’s Brave New Words
  • Richard Larson’s thoughts on Spaceman Blues
  • Matt Cheney reports from a Jonathan Lethem/PKD event, and has the lineup of the next Library of America Dick volume: Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, and Now Wait for Last Year
  • Jeff VanderMeer’s working definition of the New Weird
  • The winners of the British Fantasy Awards. In Best Novel, Tim Lebbon’s Dusk beat Nova Swing and various others; in Non Fiction, Julie Phillips’ Tiptree bio lost to Mark Morris’ Cinema Macabre
  • Fantasy Debut: a blog that tracks, well, fantasy debuts
  • Eugie Foster has been “summarily dismissed” from Tangent Online; Dave Truesdale will be taking over as managing editor.
  • And finally, not sf but interesting: Stephen King on the state of the American short story