Torque Control

Review of 2005

… 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.)

Introduction

Look, we have a blog! And a website! We, by the way, being the editors of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association: myself, Geneva Melzack, and my co-editor Niall Harrison.

We’ve put some articles from issue 245, which was the first issue Niall and I edited after taking over from previous editor Andrew M. Butler, up on the website, as well as some articles from issue 246 which has just come out. We plan to post a couple of articles and a selection of reviews from each issue online, to give a bit of a flavour of what we’re publishing in Vector, and hopefully to spark some interest in the kind of issues we want to use Vector to talk about.

I’d just like to take this opportunity to pimp the stuff from issue 245, which was on science fiction manifestos and movements. In his article ‘No More New World Orders‘ Martin Lewis explores some of the genre’s major movements by looking at the books that are thought to represent them. Meanwhile, in ‘Morning Children,’ the first of his regular columns for Vector, Graham Sleight ponders the implications online communication is having/will have for sf movements. The rest of the issue also included articles by Ian McDonald and Trent Walters on the Mundane manifesto, Norman Spinrad on the New Weird, and Meghan McCarron with a brief and terrible history of Infernokrusher.

Niall and I will be using this blog to point out more of the great articles we’ll be putting on our website, so expect to hear more soon about the articles we’ve already put up from issue 246, which was the Review of 2005 issue. And we’ll also be blogging about the interesting writings we find around and about on the ‘net, and posting our own thoughts on various matters to do with sf, books and reading.

Note: Links redirected to Internet Archive in February 2021.

Vector #245

Vector 245Download

In this way I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the Mundane Manifesto: I just feel that it is incapable of producing ‘better’ science fiction. It will not reinvigorate the genre. Science fiction is an imaginative literature, not a realist one. Much of its strength and power lies in its ability to mythologise – the Manifesto condemns as stupidities many of the genre’s most powerful myths: the alien, time-travel, the artificial intelligence made in our own image.

Ian McDonald

But before you go and read everyone else’s manifestos, we thought we should set out our own. After all, although you may recognise our names from the reviews sections of this magazine and Matrix, we’re still relative newcomers to the BSFA, and we’re only just joining the Vector editorial team with this issue, following in the illustrious footsteps of Andrew M. Butler, under whose guidance Vector was the sort of magazine we discovered we wanted to read – and edit.

Niall Harrison & Geneva Melzack

Moorcock also had a theory about the uses of prose itself, too complex to go too deeply into here or even in his introduction to the anthology. Briefly, rather than being confined to ‘transparent’ narration of the surface phenomenology of the story, the prose line could skip allusively along its surface or swim in the iconographic and archetypal imagery beneath it, rather in the manner of poetry. Which perhaps was why the magazine paid serious attention to serious poetry, too.

Norman Spinrad

I blew up the plums

which were in the icebox

and which you were probably saving

Meghan McCarron

Reading ‘Amnesty’ recalls for me every traumatic and wonderful Butler book I’ve read, and reminds me, again, of how much reading Butler has changed my view of my world and my place in it. What changed me was Butler forcing me to root for characters who didn’t stand up for their rights (because it would have gotten them killed) but rather compromised out of necessity. She forced me to look at myself, at my often silly insistence upon abstract rights in the face of daily, unbearable, soul-destroying compromise. Would I be able to be a slave? Could I do what was necessary to save not only myself but my entire community? What would I do in a situation in which I had no good choices?

Claire Light

Note: Marked 2005 on cover.

Vector #235

Vector #235Download

Over the past two years or so I’ve been building up piles of back issues of magazines and journals I use. I’d had a sizeable run of Foundations for a while, and filled in all but about four gaps, even the Philip K. Dick issue which sold out centuries ago; but my five years’ worth of Science Fiction Studies expanded to cover virtually the entire run (again four issues or so missing) and I’ve even found most of the Extrapolations since the mid-1970s, leaving the first third to get. As far as I can tell, that’s going to involve waving my flexible friend at some American bookdealers. (Note to Word fans – my spellchecker tells me that should be booksellers. Ho hum.)

Vector was more hit and miss. I had a patchy run of the various times I joined and fell off the mailing list, a pile I acquired off the back of a lorry, and a much larger pile I’d been given by the former administrator, Maureen Kincaid Speller, when I took the job on. But that only really took me back to issue 123 and (this is sad – I have a table telling me these things) the end of 1984. OK, so getting on for twenty years’ worth, with some gaps, but still less than half the run – plus there were issues of Focus, Paperback Inferno, Matrix and the other, mysterious, transient BSFA magazines such as Tangent, Parabola and Hypotenuse. OK, I made some of those up.

But I’ve recently acquired two large boxes that filled many of the gaps in the collection, and pushed me at least into the mid1960s for Vector, also filling most of the runs of the other magazines. This was fortuitous, as a number of recent articles I’ve been writing have required me to read some of the early material. To every magazine there is a time and place.

We’ve come a long way from typed stencils and duplicating machines to word processing, desktop publication and burning PDFs onto CD-Roms. There are indeed letters complaining about the placing of staples, and apologies for tardiness, and authors getting upset about reviews, and people saying the rot would set in if we stopped collating the magazines manually. Oh, and editors getting upset about only having six pages of letters of comment. One thing struck me as I’d been in a reflective mood and taking stock of my life, counting how many issues I’ve edited, how many I’ve got left: the recurring commentary on the role of the editor of Vector. It is made clear by contributors, chairs and editors alike, that the job is one held in trust. The magazine is not the mouthpiece of the editor, but the mouthpiece of the BSFA.

Any decisions and tone should reflect the feelings and opinions of the BSFA. I’m not sure how far this is the case today – I don’t think there is the same sense of ownership and stakeholding. It is clear that personalities have been reflected in the magazines, and priorities have altered over the years. I’ve largely been allowed to get away with what I’ve wanted to do, as long as I’ve kept to schedule and not gone on too long. Certainly when Cary S. Dalkin and I took over as feature editors in 1995, we were given instructions about the party line and told not to frighten the horses. Perhaps the horses are beyond frightening now. Perhaps the editorial structure — Tony Cullen as layout/production/general editor, Cary and I and then just me as features editor(s) and the various reviews editors — has meant that a single voice has not dominated, that we balance each other. There is no editor of Vector as such.

Perhaps we’re just too close to it — and in 2024 the editor of the holographic interactive Vector will laugh about how that old guy, Whatisname, used to go on about stuff and the old days; this is sf, ferchrysakes, it’s meant to be about the future. And as she searches for some inspiration for the topic of her next editorial, there is a bleep from her mobile phone to indicate a txt msg has been received (she knows it’s archaic, but there are still some members who prefer to receive Vector that way. OK, so they lose a bit in boiling it all down to 256 character chunks, but the highlights can be digested). Apparently the virtual staples are in the wrong place.

Andrew Butler

Vector #230

Vector #230Download

Another scene that would be read as mystical or magical, is the initiation ceremony where Eyvind becomes a Wolfskin, and again I’ve tried very hard not to spell out what happens in that scene. While there is something that is supremely mystical and life-changing, I don’t spell out how much of it is physically real and how much of it is in his head. Even towards the end, where the magical harp plays its music, I’ve tried not to say how it sounds, just that it’s different for each person. It’s not overtly magical, but that magical thread is there throughout.

Juliet Marillier

Litt, on the other hand, made the familiar argument (hey, I’ve made it myself enough times) that fantasy and horror is the tradition, and realism the genre-come-lately. I suspect the fantastic as a term does not make sense until you get a highly developed notion of imitative realism to contrast it with, but I more than take his point. He also riffed nicely on the engraving with the words “the sleep of reason produces monsters,” and discussed the monsters of reason, reasonable monsters. He, like the chap from Time Out, seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that science fiction is about the future, which I don’t find convincing. And because science fiction actually has a rather poor record when it comes to prediction — stopped clock being right twice a day — it only allows you to dismiss the genre. He rightly notes the technomelancholia in Gibson, but melancholy is there in many sf writers, especially the new wave and post-new wave — in particular post-imperial melancholy. Indeed, one of the tones of cyberpunk is nostalgia.

Andrew M. Butler