Torque Control

The Siege of Links

(I owe a number of people email. Unfortunately, this situation is not likely to change in the next few days. Sorry, all.)

The Non-Fiction Category

There has been some comment on the BSFA’s decision to provide a recommended reading list of non-fiction, rather than a single award; I thought I’d round it up here, and highlight a couple of points that haven’t yet been made. I am not, in any sense, speaking as The Voice Of The BSFA in this matter. I do welcome letters to Vector on this or related issues.

To recap: this year, BSFA members were asked to nominate any written non-fiction work about science fiction and/or fantasy which appeared in its current form in 2006. Based on these nominations, a recommended reading list of five items was compiled and published. This is different to what happened in previous years. The non-fiction category was first introduced in 2001 as an award voted on by the membership, in the same way as all the other categories. It was suspended for 2004; for 2005, a different approach was piloted, in which nominations were invited as normal, and then a judging panel (of which, in the interests of full disclosure, I was a member) selected a winner and a companion recommended reading list.

Paul Kincaid has said that this was a thoroughly excellent arrangement of which he approved: this is not a consensus opinion. Criticisms of the system for the 2005 award include that it (or at least the way it was implemented) implied that BSFA members at large were not competent to judge a non-fiction award; and, from the other end of the spectrum, that recruiting sufficiently knowledgeable judges on an ongoing basis would be difficult if not impossible.

More generally, any non-fiction award faces the problems outlined by Graham Sleight in a comment on my shortlists post:

I think there are a number of problems built into it as it has stood for the last couple of years, and can’t easily see how they could be resolved. Firstly, it tends to privilege book-length over essay-length (and essay-length over review-length) stuff. Given that this is, historically, a field, where a disproportionate amount of critical work gets done in reviews, how are you going to reward that. (Example: I think David Langford is terribly undervalued as a reviewer – as opposed to a fan writer – and I can’t see anything in the non-fic award set-up that would unpick that.) Second, I think comparing stuff written within the protocols of academic writing and the world at large is not exactly apples and oranges but certainly very difficult. And thirdly, as I understand it, the non-fic award currently (and has always?) excluded stuff published in Vector and Matrix, which is a pretty big gap – Gary Wolfe’s piece in the Storying Lives issue, for instance, is one of the best I’ve read anywhere in the last year.

Graham is right that material published in BSFA magazines has always been ineligible for the non-fiction award, on the grounds that the BSFA should not be giving awards to itself. One suggested alternative to the current situation is to have an award only for BSFA-published material. Graham’s own suggestion is to have an award administered by a body other than the BSFA. (Martin McGrath suggests the sort of inter-organisation approach that the Clarke uses.)

Adam Roberts suggests that:

it’s a bit silly offering a ‘recommended reading list’ of SF criticism, rather than deciding (via bsfa vote, or if it’s thought that too few members are interested enough in crit to have read the stuff, by a panel of experts as was done last year) on a title. I assume the intention is to spread the honour around, but I don’t think it works that way: a ‘recommended reading list’ sounds like something your college professor hands to you, and insists that your read whether you want it or not; it seems, paradoxically, dispraising rather than praising the works themselves. An award makes sense in that it picks one title that deserves closer attention, or merits celebration. Otherwise the award becomes like a primary school sport’s day where everybody is given kojak-lollies just for turning up. My ha’pennorth would be: if the bsfa (I mean members, or committee-on-behalf-of-members) isn’t interested enough in Sf criticism to decide an award it should stop offering one: put out an award for TV, cinema, graphic novel instead perhaps. Don’t get me wrong: I think this would be a great shame, and that SF criticism is very poorly represented in the awards culture. But that would seem to me more honest.

Tony Keen raises one objection to the no-award route:

I think my problem with the Non-Fiction Non-Award is the message that it sends out about criticism, that in the BSFA’s opinion writing about sf really isn’t that important, and doesn’t warrant a proper award. Now, of course, actual original sf creation is always going to be more important than the secondary activity of writing about that creation. But nevertheless, good criticism is important, and I feel that part of the mission of the BSFA is promoting good criticism – that is, after all, why Vector exists in its current form. Now, one can say that the recommended reading list does promote non-fiction, and I suppose it does for someone who has time to read all five. But what of someone who doesn’t? One of the functions of the best novel award is the BSFA as a group saying, “if you’re only going to read one novel this year, we think it should be this”. Now the Association is not going to do this for non-fiction. Given, as Adam rightly observes, criticism is not overly supplied with awards, for the BSFA to pull back in this fashion seems to me to be a retrograde step.

I think I’m right in saying that, excluding graduate or society-specific awards, the only awards for non-fiction are the Pioneer Award for the best critical essay-length work of the year, and the Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to sf scholarship. There is also the Clareson Award for “outstanding service activities”, which can include sf criticism, and, in principle (although rarely in practice), the Hugo for Best Related Book.

Edward James raises another objection:

I feel really guilty about not going to BSFA meetings, or, if I go, not making my voice heard. But as someone who produces, occasionally, sf non-fiction and does NOT produce science fiction itself, I feel excluded from the organisation which I first joined 43 years ago… You don’t know why the BSFA abandoned the non-fiction award. OK: two questions — can we find out why they abandoned it, and can we restore it? The BSFA, after all, is only the totality of its members… and probably more of its members write ABOUT sf than actually write sf, so one would think that a majority of the membership did favour a non-fiction award

So, these are the questions: is a non-fiction award something the BSFA should continue to have? Is it practical? And if so, what form should it take? None of which are easy to answer. On the upside, at least one of the people on this year’s list is happy with the current arrangement:

And the nicest thing? There’s not going to be an individual winner. They’re calling it the BSFA’s non-fiction recommended reading list. And the BSFA membership won’t be voting on it. Frankly, I find that much less stressful. No getting your hopes up for a win. And looking at that shortlist, I had buckley’s. Julie’s Tiptree bio is not only the best book on that list, it’s the best book about science fiction in a very very long while.

Next week’s BSFA meeting – change of venue

Tony writes:

Due to some sudden and urgent (structural, I think) work that needs to be done to The Star Tavern, it will be closed for the week of 22-26 January, when the BSFA meeting (with Paul Cornell, interviewed by Graham Sleight) would have been held. But, splendid people that they are, The Star have organised an alternate venue for us, The Antelope on Eaton Terrace (Map here). We used this place a few years ago, when there was a double booking at The Star, some of you may remember.

Start time 6pm, as usual. Spread the word.

And the nominees are …

They’re not quite up on the website yet, but I’ve got permission to post them. From the website: the nominees for the 2006 British Science Fiction Association Awards are:

Best Novel

  • Darkland by Liz Williams
  • End of the World Blues by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
  • Icarus by Roger Levy
  • The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow
  • Nova Swing by M. John Harrison

Best Short Fiction

  • “The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDonald (extract; Asimov’s)
  • “The Highway Men” by Ken MacLeod (Sandstone Press Ltd)
  • “The House Beyond Your Sky” by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Strange Horizons)
  • “The Point of Roses” by Margo Lanagan (Black Juice, UK ed., Gollancz)
  • “Signal to Noise” by Alastair Reynolds (Zima Blue and Other Stories, Night Shade Books)
  • “Sounding” by Elizabeth Bear (Strange Horizons)

Best Artwork

  • “Angelbot” by Fangorn (cover of Time Pieces, ed. Ian Whates)
  • Cover of Farthing magazine, issue 2 (credited to Vertebrate Graphics)
  • “Droid” by Fahrija Velic (cover of Interzone 206)
  • “The Return to Abalakin” by Alexander Preuss
  • “Ring of the Gods” by Willliam Li (cover of Holland SF 206)

Non-Fiction Recommended Reading List

NOTE: There will be no individual award for non-fiction. The following is a recommended reading list based on nominations from BSFA members.

  • The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology, ed. Paul Kincaid with Andrew M. Butler (Serendip Foundation)
  • Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, ed. Justine Larbalestier (Wesleyan University Press)
  • Great British Comics by Paul Gravett (Aurum Press Ltd)
  • James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips (St Martin’s Press)
  • Polder: A Festschrift for John Clute and Judith Clute, ed. Farah Mendlesohn (Old Earth Books)

Congratulations to all the nominees! The shortlists will be voted on by BSFA members and members of Contemplation, the 2007 Eastercon; the winners will be announced at that convention. I won’t comment on the novel list, for obvious reasons (though I’d love to hear others’ reactions), but I will at least say that I like the look of the short fiction list.

BSFA Awards: Last Call for Nominations

The deadline is midnight tonight. The current list of nominations (which I can pretty much guarantee has grown since the last time you looked at it) is here. The eligibility criteria are here. You can check here to see who’s responsible for cover art, and here to remind yourself of sf novels published in the UK last year. Your own nominations should go to BSFA.Awards@gmail.com. You know what to do!

The Links Beyond Your Sky

Experimentation

When Dan Green reads Dave Itzkoff:

Itzkoff’s take on science fiction in general (or at least that branch he calls “military sci-fi”) leads me to think I might not clearly understand the ambitions of science fiction, at least among its more serious-minded authors and critics. Although I have only relatively recently begun to sample noteworthy science fiction novels and writers (that is, I am most assuredly a johnny-come-lately), I have done so under the assumption it is a genre that seeks to provide an alternative to “realism” and other conventionally “literary” practices, not just by evoking speculative worlds and looking to the future rather than the past or present but also by creating alternative forms and experimenting with the established elements of fiction (plot, setting, point of view, etc.). That SF is inherently a kind of experimental fiction is a proposition I have been convinced to take seriously by some of the more intelligent critical discussion of the genre, both on SF litblogs and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find this proposition very persuasively confirmed. The novels I have attempted, by among others Philip K. Dick, China Mieville, and Samuel Delaney, while they certainly do engage the imagination well beyond what is offered in most humdrum literary realism, do not seem to me especially preoccupied with formal experiment or stylistic innovation. (Which is not to deny that the latter two, at any rate, do write well.) Traditional plotting prevails, setting is described in the kind of minute detail a Flaubert-inspired realist would almost certainly admire, and point of view (at least in the particular novels I have read) remains transparent and undisturbed. They are, finally, resolutely traditional novels, if anything overloaded with conventional storytelling, marked as “other” only by their deliberately exotic subjects.

[…]

Perhaps having “no position at all” on real war isn’t very “commendable,” but declining to take positions in fiction, even if war is the ostensible subject, brings no moral opprobrium at all. In purely literary terms, refusing to “take a position” by sticking to, well, literature, and leaving the moral or political discourse to other, more suitable forums is as much of a “stance” most fiction writers ought to feel comfortable assuming. If John Scalzi thinks his job is to write engaging works of fiction rather than “cultivate a philosophy” by indirection, it’s all to his credit. But is Itzkoff’s own position, that the work of the science fiction writer can be reduced to the attempt to stake out a position on this or that, really shared by most writers and readers who lay claim to this genre? Is it the literary “philosophy” of SF?

Oh, crumbs. Where to start? As ever when Green writes about sf, I find myself having to translate everything he says; we have different enough starting assumptions about reading and fiction in general, never mind our approaches to sf in particular, and never mind that in this instance he seems to be under the unfortunate impression that Dave Itzkoff knows what he’s talking about. (I actually have more time for Itzkoff than some, but he’s really not the man I’d go to get a coherent articulation of what sf does and why.) As John Scalzi noted in response to the review at the time, sf isn’t short of writers who use their novels to articulate a philosophical stance of some kind, but they can hardly be held to represent a central ambition of the genre, because the genre doesn’t really have a central ambition.

Which means that sf also can’t be summarised as ‘a genre that seeks to provide an alternative to “realism” and other conventionally “literary” practices’. For starters, assuming there is a broad division of fiction into “realistic” and “fantastic”, as I understand it there is at least some debate about which camp sf should sit in. Certainly, on an intuitive basis I can see arguments on both sides — a science-fiction world is an extension of the realistic world; but of course it’s a world that doesn’t exist. But readers more knowledgeable than myself (I know you’re out there) should feel free to weigh in any time now, since I feel that I’m on quite tentative ground both here and below.

To a certain extent, I can think of examples of sf that play with the examples Green gives of the established elements of fiction. Whether or not sf is a form of realism, for example, there is something distinctive about the way language is used to create setting in sf: hence the history of discussion about sentences that are distinctively science-fictional (“The door dilated”), or that read differently depending on whether you’re approaching them as science fiction or not (“She turned on her left side”). That is, in fact, exactly the sort of thing I would expect to get from the work of China Mieville and Philip K. Dick. Similarly, I can think of stories that do interesting things with point of view, either by portraying characters who perceive the world according to radically different frameworks than our own (“Story of Your Life”, Ted Chiang, or “In Blue” by John Crowley), or by mixing up the identity of narrator, writer and character (The Female Man, Joanna Russ), or by trying to integrate standard approaches to character with a contermporary scientific understanding of how we actually think (Peter Watts, Greg Egan). I’m drawing a temporary blank on experimental plotting (the work of Hal Duncan, possibly?), but I’m sure examples exist there too.

But I get the impression that Green is looking for sf to do something formally new not found in other kinds of fiction, and I suspect he’s doomed to fail, particularly if — as his current reading list suggests — he’s sticking to canonically recognised sf writers, because they are often the writers with the most traditional plotting, the most transparent points of view. (Delany seems like he should be the exception here, but I haven’t read much Delany and I don’t know which Delany Green has read, either.) This is not to say that sf can’t be formally experimental — I’m not sure there’s much possible in sf that isn’t possible in other kinds of fictions, although I’m comfortable with the idea that there are approaches to which sf is particularly well-suited. But to the extent that sf can be described as inherently experimental fiction, I would say it’s almost never experimental as an end in itself; it experiments with the world, and any experimentation with the conventions of fiction will be a consequence of that. Or to put it another way, sf stories won’t often look like experiments, because the point is the subject.

Welcome to the Internet

Two interesting contributions to the ongoing bloggers-vs-newspaper-critics debate in the Guardian today, by Peter Bradshaw and Dorian Lynskey — interesting not so much because they advance the debate, but because they show evidence of understanding the nature of the debate in a way that most other contributors from the professional side (*cough*) haven’t managed. To all intents and purposes, Bradshaw even comes out in favour of slapfights:

This paper’s Comment Is Free and Arts & Entertainment sites regularly get a massive reaction to their featured blogs. Many believe readers will offer critics and journalists measured, friendly qualifications to their pieces. They will write: “Mmm, yes, but have you considered …” To which we will reply: “Mmm, yes, you could be right about …” And so a wonderfully civilised post-Blairite conversation will ensue. I wonder. There’s nothing very civilised about a lot of the posting happening now; it’s more like a shouting match-cum-punchup. And that’s why it’s often so entertaining. There is something about the Mmm-yes-but theory of the blog that is quite disquieting. Even if it became a reality, it could result only in hesitant journalism, bland criticism and writing that is predisposed to dull consensus.

[…]

The web and blogging have hugely increased the scope for such debates. The critic is finding that the newly empowered bloggers do not share his or her opinions about the new film, play or book, and especially his or her high opinion of him- or herself. So critics must sharpen their wits, clarify their opinions – and, just as importantly, get a sense of humour about themselves.

Lynskey has more reservations — and seems to assume that the rough-and-tumble on the Guardian blogs is representative of all blogs, which I don’t think is true; it’s possible to have extensive, lively, and intelligent discussions, such as those that often take place on Making Light or Whatever — but he still thinks (I think) that, on balance, the web is a good thing:

There is an appetite for genuine debate on the web, but it is often drowned out by the howling of people who seem to regard the very existence of professional critics as an outrageous affront. The subtext is this: anyone can be a critic, so anyone who has the temerity to be paid for the privilege deserves to be put in the stocks.

This is just one front in a wide-ranging battle between the blogosphere and so-called old media. In an ideal world, there should be room for both print critics and online ones, with plenty of overlap between them. Good writing is good writing, wherever it appears. But the campaign is in its early days and there are several years’ worth of grievances to thrash out before a peace treaty can be agreed.

[…]

With time and luck, the good will out and the bad will lose the chips from their shoulders; or, failing that, find something better to do with those slow periods at work. Until then, at least, every critic knows that it is always better to be read than ignored. No amount of abuse at the foot of a blog is quite as disheartening as the dread phrase: “Comments (0)”.

Philip K. Dick Shortlist

And so it begins: via Jeff Vandermeer, the shortlist for the 2006 Philip K. Dick Award “for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States”:

Mindscape by Andrea Hairston (Aqueduct Press)
Carnival by Elizabeth Bear (Bantam Spectra)
Spin Control by Chris Moriarty (Bantam Spectra)
Catalyst by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Tachyon Publications)
Recursion by Tony Ballantyne (Bantam Spectra)
Idolon by Mark Budz (Bantam Spectra)
Living Next-Door to the God of Love by Justina Robson (Bantam Spectra)

I’ve read three — the Ballantyne, the Budz, and the Robson — all of which are fun, but of which Living Next-Door to the God of Love is the best by a country mile. I’ve heard mixed things about the Bear, the Hairston and the Hoffman, although Carnival is already on my TBR-pile and I’d like to give Mindscape a go. Pointing out omissions is trickier, since (from this side of the pond) I don’t always have a good sense of what was published as a paperback and what wasn’t; but I’m a bit surprised to see nothing at all from Pyr.

Happy New Links