Torque Control

BSFA Survey Response: Paul Cornell

Survey coverPaul Cornell is a writer of novels, comics and television episodes. He is probably best-known for his work on Doctor Who; his notable novels in that franchise include Love and War (1992), the first appearance of the companion Bernice Summerfield, and Human Nature (1995), and his TV episodes include “Father’s Day” (2005) and a two-part adaptation of Human Nature: “Human Nature”/”The Family of Blood” (2007). He has also written for Casualty, Robin Hood and Primeval, and is currently the writer for the Marvel comic Captain Britain and MI-13 (2008–present). His two original sf novels are Something More (2001) and British Summertime (2002). Cornell was one of more than 80 writers to respond to the 2009 BSFA survey, and his responses are reproduced below.

1. Do you consider yourself a writer of science fiction and/or fantasy?

Yes. Although I also write other genres.

2. What is it about your work that makes it fit into these categories?

I think I look at ‘realism’, especially the representation of modern British life you see on television and in literary novels, and find it staggeringly wide of the mark when it comes to depicting reality. It’s almost as if it’s felt that that’s not actually what realism is meant to do. So I like to pick up on one particular thread of the many failings that encompasses, the lack of a presence of what might be called the numinous, the fantastic, from dreams to religion to the actual situation of human beings as standing on a planet in a spiral galaxy, and pick at that, and find all the ways that talks about the human condition.

3. Why have you chosen to write science fiction or fantasy?

I think it was chosen for me at the moment I opened a crate in my parents’ loft, and found my older brother’s books, which included runs of Galaxy and Worlds of If, Eagle Annuals and the sf of Captain W.E. Johns. When I felt that I had to be brave enough to watch Doctor Who, something that led between the playground, the social world, and that very solitary experience of reading books that even smelt different to everyone else’s books connected.

4. Do you consider there is anything distinctively British about your work, and if so what is it?

Hugely. The exasperating nature of the British, and the problems of Britishness, and indeed the nature of all nation states, leading on from that, is almost all I write about. I’m frustrated with what are these days taken to be inherent characteristics of Britishness (being uncomfortable with success, preferring a hard fought loss to a win, a general pessimism and cynicism) in the way only someone who thinks of themselves as very British can be. Of course, this means I want to go off and live in America, where I can be much happier watching Britishness from a distance. But at least I own up to that.

5. Do British settings play a major role in your work, and if so, why (or why not)?

There’s something awesome about following the path that leads from Keble College, Oxford, to the Mariner Valley on Mars. It’s a true experience as well, British people heading out to do extraordinary things in terrible new places, and then coming back to places that have stayed the same for centuries.

6. What do you consider are the major influences on your work?

R.F. Delderfield, A.J. Cronin, Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Dorothy L. Sayers, Stephen Baxter, Arthur Clarke, John Scalzi, Geoff Ryman, Terrance Dicks, Steven Moffat, Ian Fleming.

7. Do you detect a different response to your science fiction/fantasy between publishers in Britain and America (or elsewhere)?

Not at all, really. I’m also vastly keen on America, so it’s not as if I’m setting up an opposition.

8. Do you detect a different response to your science fiction/fantasy between the public in Britain and America (or elsewhere)?

Again, not at all.

9. What effect should good science fiction or fantasy have upon the reader?

I like the moment, and I think this defines sf, where, as the song goes, one feels that ‘oh my God, I can’t believe it, I’ve never been this far away from home’. That moment of complete plunge into unknown stuff, where it’s up to the reader to find the one or two carefully placed footholds that the writer has put there for them, while carefully denying them anything else. It’s why I loved Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “True Names” so much recently: no footholds!

10. What do you consider the most significant weakness in science fiction as a genre?

The way it looks in on itself. Only our crowd allowed, outsiders stay away, you’re only allowed in if you say you write sf, rather than if you just do. That’s what’s led to an almost medieval worship of the coming apocalypse, because we’ve been bad people and deserve global warming. Which is kind of the opposite of what the initial sf project was. An invasion of young faces and their authors would help. But we’re going to have to be the ones to open the gates, they’re having enough fun for themselves over there in their camp. (And other strained metaphors.) This insularity means you still get the odd Stalinist review that regards a book as ‘politically suspect’. That is, literally, that the reviewer didn’t like it because they didn’t agree with it. (It was Churchill who said something about loving Liberalism and hating Liberals, wasn’t it? Instead of ‘Liberal’, insert any description of anything I am. I’m vastly suspicious of any club that even sends me the forms.)

11. What do you think have been the most significant developments in British science fiction and fantasy over the past twenty years?

The return of Doctor Who. Seriously. There’s no better influence on young sf minds. The rise of Neil Gaiman to stardom has been a good thing all round. Ian McDonald carving out a new niche right at the border of sf and the mainstream novel. I’m missing something huge, aren’t I?

London Meeting: BSFA Awards Discussion

Tonight’s London Meeting will be a panel discussion of this year’s BSFA Awards shortlists, featuring Graham Sleight, Damien G Walter, and Martin McGrath.

As usual, the festivities will start at 7pm, though there will be people in the bar from 6-ish; the meeting is free, and open to any and all. There will be a raffle (with sf books as prizes).

The venue is the upstairs room of The Antelope, 22 Eaton Terrace, London, SW1W 8EZ. The closest tube station is Sloane Square, and a map is here. It sounds like it could be standing room only, so get there early!

BSFA Survey Response: Kit Whitfield

Survey coverKit Whitfield is the author of two novels: Bareback (2006), set in a world in which only a small percentage of people are not werewolves; and In Great Waters (2009), an unsentimental alternate history in which mermaids are instrumental to the balance of power in medieval Europe. She lives in London. Whitfield was one of more than 80 writers to respond to the 2009 BSFA survey, and her responses are reproduced below.

1. Do you consider yourself a writer of science fiction and/or fantasy?

Yes and no. If you classify books by content, mine could certainly fit in that category; I’ve written one with werewolves and one with mermaids, and those are pretty traditional staples of fantasy or horror. But it’s my belief that genre classifications aren’t really that good for either writers or readers. The main purpose they serve is to make it easier for booksellers to pitch to shops. That’s useful for business, but it can be rather cramping for books, and a writer who feels they have to fit too precisely into this artificial category is probably going to limit their own writing. My first novel, for instance, was published by a science fiction imprint in the US, a literary fiction imprint in the UK, and wound up in the Crime section of Borders, and that feels comfortable to me: the idea that a book has to fit in one category and one category only seems kind of reductive. So I’ll happily classify myself as a sci fi/fantasy writer if I get to classify myself as a literary writer and a thriller writer as well. If I have to pick just one category, I tend to dig in my heels and say that i just write books.

2. What is it about your work that makes it fit into these categories?

Pretty much the subject matter. This seems to me the way sci fi/fantasy is generally classified: if a book contains something that doesn’t exist in the real world, you can technically put them on those shelves. It’s fair enough, but it’s definitely not the whole picture.

3. Why have you chosen to write science fiction or fantasy?

I like writing about imaginative scenarios for two reasons. One, the world itself is a magical and numinous place; we get used to it, but when we really stop and look, reality is extraordinary. Writing an imaginary situation allows me to caricature the extraordinariness of reality, to create that stop-and-look effect by presenting a world that’s as new and strange to the reader as reality can be to all of us when we see it with fresh eyes. Two, it makes it easier for me to be a bad girl. If I steer too close to literal reality I start getting conscientiously worried about whether I’m portraying it accurately. If I’m portraying stuff I just made up, that gets me off the hook: I can write whatever I darn well please. It’s disinhibiting. Writing non-realistic scenarios gives me a more direct line to my subconscious, and that’s where the fire is.

On the other hand, if I get an idea for a non-science fiction or fantasy story, I’ll happily write that too. I just go with whatever ideas seem likely to come out best.

4. Do you consider there is anything distinctively British about your work, and if so what is it?

Well, my work is distinctively me, and I’m British, so inevitably my novels are distinctively British in some way. They probably have a British sensibility (or rather an English-Irish sensibility, those being the two nationalities I was raised by). I’m a member of a country with a tremendous history of imperialism and bad karma that I love nonetheless, that’s currently fallen from its power and has spent a lot of time truckling to the dangerous superpower that was Bush’s America – a nation that seemed rather to despise us and everyone else who wasn’t a member of the fatherland, which meant we got a certain dose of what we’d dished out in previous centuries, although on a smaller scale. The politics of that situation have influenced my writing: there are a lot of moral incompatibilities and power dynamics in there. Also, as a writer I tend to resist easy solutions. Having parents from two different countries, and countries that have historically been oppressor and rebel (English father, Irish mother, and the struggle for peace in Northern Ireland was very prominent in the news during my teens), has probably influenced me: I grew up in a house where there were two completely different ways of looking at the same situation, and where you came from made a big difference to how you thought. That’s a truth about human thought that tends to shape my stories.

None of this is really conscious, though. At least in my own experience, deliberate point-making tends to lead to heavy-handed writing. I just try to write as honestly as I can and let my nationality influence things how it will.

5. Do British settings play a major role in your work, and if so, why (or why not)?

In my second novel yes, because it was set specifically in an alternative England in the past. In my first novel no, because the whole idea was to create an imaginary city that would feel as much as possible like everybody’s home town; I was trying to tell a story about societal prejudice in an Everysociety, so it needed to be anonymous – and in fact, we changed some of the vocabulary in the US edition so the narrator would feel American to Americans and British to Britons. So it depends on the novel. The aesthetics of Britain tend to influence my backgrounds – grey English cities and beautiful English woodlands both spark my imagination at times – but it’s best if I just let those chips fall where they will. The settings have to work for the story, and that varies from book to book.

6. What do you consider are the major influences on your work?

Most of the writers I’d pick out have influenced me as stylists rather than storytellers. Margaret Atwood is at the top of my list for that; Toni Morrison and Antonia White are my other favourite authors. But when it comes to writing, you learn by osmosis. Probably everything I’ve read has influenced me; it’s just in the primordial soup at the back of my brain. When it comes to the writing process, the books of Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg are my touchstones; without them, I don’t know if I’d ever have discovered I could write at all.

7. Do you detect a different response to your science fiction/fantasy between publishers in Britain and America (or elsewhere)?

Oh yeah. In Britain I’m published by Jonathan Cape, a literary imprint; in America it’s Del Rey, which is popular science fiction. I’d class that as pretty different! America, in my limited experience, is a bit more likely to classify something as science fiction because it has a science fictional component, whereas Britain can be a bit more flexible in its classifications. But I could be wrong about that; it might just be that I caught the eye of different editors who happened to work in different genre imprints. A lot of the difference is packaging rather than essentials. My editors in the different countries are all original, intelligent and sensitive people who’ve had insightful things to say about the books, and the different things they’ve spotted are probably as much a mark of their personalities as their genres. Everyone’s an individual.

8. Do you detect a different response to your science fiction/fantasy between the public in Britain and America (or elsewhere)?

Different packaging, different promotion, and inevitably this will have an effect on what people expect from the books. But again, it’s more about individuals than it is about nationality. I’ve had a good relationship online with plenty of readers who post to my blog, and I know it’s less about where they live and more about who they are. The thing about the Internet is that it’s international, so I don’t really meet my readers in national groups; they come from all over the place, and that makes for a nice, vibrant mix.

Of course, this is self-selecting: I encounter the readers who introduce themselves to me, and it’s a pleasure to meet them, but I have no idea how the silent majority is reacting. I can’t control how people will react to my books once they’re out there, and it only gives you headaches to worry about stuff you can’t control, so I’ve pretty much filed reader responses in the ‘Not my business’ drawer in my mind unless the readers themselves want me to know about them. Fan-watching stresses a writer out and probably makes the readers nervous as well, so I try to adopt a laissez-faire attitude.

9. What effect should good science fiction or fantasy have upon the reader?

The same effect that any good book should have. It should be an engaging read that touches the reader in some way. Beyond that, every book’s effect will be slightly different whatever the genre, so hopefully the book will have an effect that’s close to what the writer intended – or at least an interesting one.

10. What do you consider the most significant weakness in science fiction as a genre?

Self-ghettoisation, to coin a horrible word. A lot of science fiction and fantasy readers get mocked for liking those books, and that’s bad, but some of them react to this by declaring that every other genre is rubbish, which is just as bad – or, on a lesser scale, by starting to see SFF as a political category rather than just one of a number of ways of describing a book. This can lead to the genre turning inwards. Sometimes SFF can have a rather embattled attitude, and that’s not a creative atmosphere, because there are beautiful, wonderful books in every genre and shutting oneself off from them is simply cutting off your nose to spite your face. Other genres are not our enemy. If you read them openly, they’re not even very Other. Even if people aren’t embattled, every genre has readers who only read books from that within genre; SFF is no exception to this, and while people are obviously free to read however they want, I think it’s a pity. The best thing to do is to draw influences and enjoyment from as wide a range of books as possible; if we stay in too tight a circle we’ll only get stale. Anyone who only reads within a single genre – be it science fiction, crime, romance or modernist experimental metafiction – is going to miss out.

11. What do you think have been the most significant developments in British science fiction and fantasy over the past twenty years?

I like to take every book on its own merits rather that seeing them as developments.

BSFA Survey Response: John Meaney

Survey coverJohn Meaney is a writer and black belt martial artist. His first novel, To Hold Infinity (1998), was shortlisted for the BSFA Award. Subsequent work includes the three-volume space opera Nulapeiron sequence (2000–2005), the gothic Tristopolis duology Bone Song (2007) and Dark Blood (2008), and many short stories. Just out is Edge, a near-future thriller (published as by Thomas Blackthorne), and forthcoming is Absolution, the first volume in a space opera series influenced by Norse mythology. Meaney was one of more than 80 writers to respond to the 2009 BSFA survey, and his responses are reproduced below.

1. Do you consider yourself a writer of science fiction and/or fantasy?

In the world of martial arts – bear with me: you talk to a writer, you get a fistful of metaphors – the ultimate fighting test is MMA, sometimes called cage fighting. The fighters are all-rounders operating in simultaneous modalities – jiu-jitsu, wrestling, kickboxing. Under those conditions, most martial artists fall to pieces.

In the ’90s, the field was dominated by one Brazilian family, working from their core art of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. Nowadays, the light-heavyweight champion of the major worldwide circuit (the UFC) works from my own core system of shotokan karate, taking it into other modalities at world-class level.

Some of my work spans multiple genres – two of my novels are published as fantasy in the US but science fiction in the UK (and a different publisher offered to market them as police procedurals); while my novelette “Whisper of Disks” is almost pure literary fiction.

As a writer, my core discipline is science fiction; I take it with me wherever I go.

2. What is it about your work that makes it fit into these categories?

Rigorous physics runs through my dark fantasy, which is really an alternative history deviating from our own during the formation of the solar system – as astute readers have noticed. In my hard sf, the story always depends on some deep concept or mystery from science – for example, time’s arrow. (Not a single fundamental physics equation indicates time flowing from past to future.) Critics sometimes say they cannot tell where real science ends and my fictional science begins. Sometimes I take that as high praise; other times I cry: “It’s all real, didn’t you know?”

But that’s only in the books I’ve written so far…

3. Why have you chosen to write science fiction or fantasy?

As someone deeply interested in cognitive processes – and a trained hypnotist – I’ve observed (and therapeutically utilized) the phenomenon of unconscious choice. We make choices all the time; the most important decisions rarely operate with much self-awareness. (Human beings are skilled at confabulating rational justifications after the behaviour’s conclusion; but those stories are what we cognoscenti refer to as porky pies.)

As far the conscious mind is concerned, books write themselves – and as for choice, there isn’t any.

4. Do you consider there is anything distinctively British about your work, and if so what is it?

Sometimes yes; sometimes no. It’s American critics who say that I’ve written about class-ridden culture – in my Nulapeiron books – with a sensibility only a Brit could bring to bear. But the Tristopolis books are purely transatlantic, with a dark gothamesque setting that comes straight from my love of New York.

5. Do British settings play a major role in your work, and if so, why (or why not)?

Not in the books you can buy right now. There are recurring settings in secondary storylines, and Oxford is one of the cities I keep revisiting; but so is Zurich. I have two forthcoming novels set in near-future Britain, along with an alternate history cold-war thriller with a half-English protagonist and some British settings. (That’s in addition to my big hard sf trilogy in progress, the Ragnarok trilogy, which has a European timeline set partly in the UK.)

What’s interesting is that the books set entirely in Britain will almost certainly appear under a pseudonym, because they are more (literate) thrillers than hard sf. So perhaps John Meaney isn’t much for British settings, while his alter ego is.

6. What do you consider are the major influences on your work?

In childhood: Fireball XL5, Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Clifford Simak, A.E. van Vogt. Later, Roger Zelazny (everything he wrote) and Frank Herbert (only Dune, but I loved it). In the decades since, it’s non-SF writers whose writing resonates for me: John Irving, James Lee Burke, Robert B. Parker and Stephen King are my heroes; and their books are my mentors.

Oh, did you notice they’re American?

Of course, that’s only the fiction. When it comes to other influences… that’s everything I’ve experienced and everything I’ve done. Me and every other writer.

7. Do you detect a different response to your science fiction/fantasy between publishers in Britain and America (or elsewhere)?

Yes, but some of that is timing. My recent Tristopolis books generated similar responses in Britain, America and Germany.

8. Do you detect a different response to your science fiction/fantasy between the public in Britain and America (or elsewhere)?

American readers are more likely to email me! Thanks, guys…

9. What effect should good science fiction or fantasy have upon the reader?

There should be a massive BANG! Spattered on walls and ceiling, remnants of brain slurp and drip toward the floor…

How many people flick on a light switch without considering what happens to make it work? How many people think of TV as electrons dancing in magnetic synch across the nation like a subatomic Riverdance? Or look at tiny flecks on brickwork and think: oh, fantastic, lifeforms are everywhere…

Everything’s connected. Our 13.7 billion year old universe, like a giant sponge filled with dark-matter filaments; our world existing for a third of that time; evolution and complexity turning stardust into living, thinking beings. How dare people – and mundane fiction – be so ungrateful as to ignore the wonder that surrounds and fills us?

SF should be adrenaline slamming straight to the heart, caffeine direct to the brain, injected with a hard, thrusting needle.

10. What do you consider the most significant weakness in science fiction as a genre?

Hollywood. Mind you, there are novelists who write about aliens with DNA or suchlike nonsense, on a par with sound effects in space… But the psychological associations with film and TV repel as many readers as they tempt into our genre. And some of our best books do present a barrier of geekness. Or should that be geekitude?

11. What do you think have been the most significant developments in British science fiction and fantasy over the past twenty years?

We grew confident, maybe even aggressive… and good for us! (And let’s hear it once again for David Pringle. He did us proud.) SF and fantasy writers have overwritten the old constraints, redefining the genre just as surely as MMA – and urban athletes like free runners – breathed new, exciting, energetic life into their arena.

Twenty Years, Two Surveys (and other BSFA matters)

The survey has landed! Or, at least, is landing. BSFA members should receive their copies this week (or have already received them); non-BSFA members can order a copy (for the low low price of £7.99 plus postage! That is, plus £1.24 in the UK and £4.35 overseas) here.

bsfa_two_surveys_cover2

surveybook200320101995

Along with the book, BFSA members will receive their ballot for this year’s awards; note that these need to be turned around pretty sharpish (although you can send in your votes by email), unless you’re planning to vote at Eastercon.

Also in the post to BSFA members this week: the latest mailing, comprising a new Vector (the review of 2009), a new Focus (featuring Christopher Priest, Gareth L Powell, Nina Allan and others), and this year’s short fiction award booklet. I’m thinking of hosting discussions about each of the shortlisted stories next week, in the run-up to Eastercon, to encourage people to read the last of these!

And it would be remiss of me not to note that this week’s BSFA London Meeting, on Wednesday evening, will be a discussion of the awards shortlists, featuring Graham Sleight, Damien G Walter, and Martin McGrath. Be there, as they say.

Back to the survey. All comments are, of course, very welcome — indeed, I’d love to be able to include a really substantive letter column in the summer Vector. And, as I previously noted, there’ll be a panel to discuss the survey’s findings at Eastercon; at 5pm on the Friday, to be precise, with John Jarrold, Caroline Mullan, Claire Brialey, David Hebblethwaite and myself as panelists. Please do come along and offer your thoughts, if you’re going to be there. In the meantime, however, and since in the final book each question in the survey is considered in a separate chapter, with context and analysis, to give a flavour of the project, I thought it would be nice to post some authors’ original responses. So that’s what I’ll do this week.

2010 Arthur C Clarke Award Submissions

Now we come to it! The shortlist for this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award will be announced on Wednesday 31 March, and the award ceremony will be held on Wednesday 28 April, at the Sci-Fi London Film Festival. However, as last year, the Award is releasing the list of books that were submitted and considered and you heard it, quite literally, here first. Or rather, saw it:

clarke2010montage-small

Full-sized image to follow at lunchtime, but in the meantime, far be it from me to stop people trying to work out which book covers those are. (Amazing how distinctive some of them are even at this size, I think.) Note that this is not a formal longlist; it’s the books that were submitted by publishers and considered by the judges.

UPDATE: And now, the full list.

clarke2010montage-med

Heart of Veridon by Tim Akers (Solaris)
Shadow of the Scorpion by Neal Asher (Tor)
Orbus by Neal Asher (Tor)
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury)
Twisted Metal by Tony Ballantyne (Tor)
Transition by Iain Banks (Little, Brown)
Ark by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz)
Moxyland by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)
The Accord by Keith Brooke (Solaris)
Xenopath by Eric Brown (Solaris)
Seeds of Earth by Mike Cobley (Orbit)
And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer (Penguin)
Makers by Cory Doctorow (Voyager)
The Babylonian Trilogy by Sebastien Doubinsky (PS Publishing)
The Wild Things by Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton)
Consorts of Heavenby Jaine Fenn (Gollancz)
The Stranger by Max Frei (Gollancz)
Concrete Operational by Richard Galbraith (Rawstone Media)
Nova War by Gary Gibson (Tor)
Winter Song by Colin Harvey (Angry Robot)
The Rapture by Liz Jensen (Bloomsbury)
Spirit by Gwyneth Jones (Gollancz)
Journey into Space by Toby Litt (Penguin)
The Age of Ra by James Lovegrove (Solaris)
Halfhead by Stuart B MacBride (HarperVoyager)
Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
The City & The City by China Mieville (Macmillan)
Red Claw by Philip Palmer (Orbit)
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperVoyager)
Chasing the Dragon by Justina Robson (Gollancz)
The City of Lists by Brigid Rose (Crocus)
Flashforward by Robert J Sawyer (Gollancz)
Wake by Robert J Sawyer (Gollancz)
Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi (Tor)
The Island at the End of the World by Sam Taylor (Faber & Faber)
Far North by Marcel Theroux (Faber & Faber)
Before the Gods by KS Turner (Ruby Blaze)
The Painting and the City by Robert Freeman Wexler (PS Publishing)
This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams (Orbit)
Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding (Gollancz)

So there you are: the 41 books in contention for this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award. (The Rise of the Iron Moon by Stephen Hunt was also submitted, but ineligible due to SF Crowsnest‘s association with the award.) Does it look like a good year? What would you put on the shortlist?

Polyphony 7

Signal boost: I like the Polyphony series of slipstreamy-fabulist anthologies. I would like to read volume 7; the series is well regarded, and I’ve enjoyed the earlier volumes that I read. However, the publisher is finding it tough to make that happen, and posted this back in November:

The harsh economic climate threatens to kill this vital series. Wheatland Press is asking for your help.

The authors have graciously made concessions to make Polyphony 7 a reality. They’ve agreed to a reduced pay rate to see the volume published. Now we need readers.

In order to publish Polyphony 7, Wheatland Press must receive 225 paid pre-orders via the website by March 1, 2010. If the pre-order quantities cannot be met, Polyphony will cease publication. It’s that simple. The preorder link is here: http://www.wheatlandpress.com/polyphony/v7.html.

If the preorder number is met, then Polyphony 7 will be published on or about July 1, 2010.*

I pre-ordered my copy. In all the time since then, apparently they received just over half of the pre-orders they need. If they don’t get the rest by Friday evening, that’s it. Some people have been surprised by the disparity between this number and the number of submissions Polyphony typically receives, and encouraged more writers to support the market they’re submitting to. I’d like to encourage non-writing readers to support it as well; if you like short stories, I don’t think you’ll regret doing so.

Awards

In mainstream-land, today is the day of the Orange Prize Longlist, which I always think should be more amenable to the speculative than other awards, but never is. (I suppose you can count The Little Stranger, this year, but really, they couldn’t find room on a 20-book longlist for Lavinia? Or White is for Witching? Or…?) On the upside, in SF-land we have the Tiptree Award winners and honor list:

Winners

  • Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales, Greer Gilman (Small Beer Press)
  • Ooku: The Inner Chambers (volumes 1 & 2), Fumi Yoshinaga (Viz Media)

    • Honor List

  • “Beautiful White Bodies”, Alice Sola Kim (Strange Horizons)
  • Distances, Vandana Singh (Aqueduct Press 2008)
  • “Galapagos”, Caitlin R. Kiernan (Eclipse 3, Night Shade Books)
  • Lifelode, Jo Walton (NESFA Press 2009)
  • “Useless Things”, Maureen F. McHugh (Eclipse 3, Night Shade Books)
  • “Wives”, Paul Haines (X6, coeur de lion)

There’s also a special citation for L Timmel Duchamp’s Marq’ssan Cycle. Judges this year were Karen Joy Fowler (chair), Jude Feldman, Paul Kincaid, Alexis Lothian, and Victor Raymond.

I’ve read the entire honor list, which seems pretty strong to me, but neither of the winners. I’m still not a fan of having tied award-winners, actually, but if you’re going to do it, you might as well make the two works as different as you can. And it’s interesting — though perhaps not surprising, given the indie-press lean of the list — that Ooku is the only work mentioned that’s available in the UK.

EDIT: And the website has been updated with details, including judges’ comments on the honor list, and the longlist. Pleased to see Helen Keeble and Xiaolu Guo there.

Quote for the Day

Saladin Ahmed:

I wish writers — white, Black, Arab, etc. — would just say “I have X personal experience with this place/culture, have done Y amount of research, and have tried my best. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is SOME SHIT I MADE UP.” There are lots of things in our writing we can take a deep stake in — but ‘authenticity’ is probably the least productive one.

More to the point, I wish reviewers/critics would stop using this as a criterion. 90% of critical/readerly praise for authenticity amounts to either “this guy imagines this culture in a manner which agrees with my imagining of this culture,” or “I didn’t know anything about Malaysian street culture, but now I do!”

(via.)

Tools of the Trade

From Farah Mendlesohn’s review of The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction:

Yet, as we shall see, Csicsery-Ronay succeeds in incorporating movies successfully only in his chapters on the science-fiction sublime and the grotesque, and, within that, in his discussion on the visual forms. While I accept his arguments (and those of other critics) that sf cinema and games, among other forms, are becoming the dominant cultural conception of what sf is, their values are so different, or so skewed in a specific direction that it seems to me ‘accommodation’ is neither enough nor appropriate, that the tools applied to literary forms of science fiction can only leave the impression that the non-literary forms are inadequate, and that it is past time that the academic community withdrew from a theory of everything in this field, and acknowledge instead that there are separate and immensely valuable critical approaches which place cinema and gaming and graphic novels at the centre, and leave the literary beyond the Pale when viewed through their filters

I actually said something related to Richard last week, that part of the reason I don’t write much about films or TV is that I feel I lack the vocabulary to talk about them seriously: that is, to address their specifically filmic or televisual aspects. So I’m sympathetic to the argument here (and to the criticism of Seven Beauties; although it hinges on what you mean by incorporating “successfully”, and I would allow some of the instances excluded in the review as successful), even as I’m also sympathetic to those critics arguing that visual modes of sf are culturally dominant, and feel that I should write more about film and TV. On the other hand, I can’t be so absolutist as to state that a primarily literary understanding of sf will inevitably cast non-literary forms as inadequate, or indeed vice versa. See, for example, Gattaca, Primer, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, films with goals not very different from the types of literary sf I tend to enjoy; and is a generic sf action flick any less “inadequate” as serious sf, or inadequate for radically different reasons, than your average Neal Asher novel? It’s not as though “academics” are out on a limb in placing sf films within essentially the same framework as sf books, either. Not for nothing is the fannish crack about the former being at least a decade behind the latter so familiar. Nor, I think, is it possible to deny that the relationship is a two-way street, and that we have seen an increasing amount of cinema-influenced sf. So I end up thinking that accomodation actually is the correct approach (and that I want to read more film criticism) — that there are enough points of overlap between the two modes to make co-consideration useful, as long as the non-overlapping points are not ignored. Agree? Disagree?