Further to that round table I did on SF Signal, here are a couple of places where you can find out what is going on in YA SF&F.
The YA SF&F blog is run by Aurora Celeste, who is a member of the target audience.
The Intergalactic Academy is run by two adult writers, Phoebe North and Sean Wills, who write YA SF.
All of them know far more about the subject than I do, as do Gwenda Bond, Tarie Sabido, Tehani Wessely and Malinda Lo.
Over at SF Signal there is a long round table discussion post about YA fiction. I’m one of the participants, but I think mainly my role in it was to be the useful idiot who could say daft things and get put right by real experts in YA fiction such as Malinda Lo and Gwenda Bond. My apologies if I said anything really stupid. There are lots and lots of fine books mentioned. Check it out here.
On Twitter this morning Ken MacLeod pointed people at an essay about Iain Banks Culture novels. It is rather long, but well worth a read if you are interested in The Culture, or in political SF in general. Kudos to Prof. Alan Jacobs. You can read it at The New Atlantis.
The latest Guardian Books podcast is all about science fiction. Damien G. Walter and Sarah Crown talk to Lauren Beukes, Michael Moorcock, Al Reynolds and Jeff Noon. You can listen to it here. Mike talks a lot about New Worlds, and Jeff talks for the first time about the new novel that he’s working on.
Nice job, Damo.
You should all know by now that Australians tend to do crazy things. One of those insane projects is Not If You Were The Last Short Story On Earth, a group blog for which the members try to read as much as possible of the SF&F short fiction published each year. The end result of all this furious reading is a few weeks in an asylum some end of year recommendation lists. You can see the choices of various members via these links: Alex, Alisa, Tansy, Mondy, Sarah. Because I’m biased, I’m going to single out the Clarkesworld-published stories that they mentioned.
Thanks to all for some fine stories and dedicated reading.
The big discovery of the year appears to be Ken Liu who gets lots of mentions from several different venues. And the surprise anthology hit is Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s Teeth.
I have been following the debate over the World Fantasy Award trophy with some interest. For those of you who have managed to miss it, the story started with this blog post from Nnedi Okorafor, and discussion has ranged far and wide, including on the latest episode of the Coode Street Podcast.
I don’t particularly want to comment on the issue of Lovecraft and racism. I think Nnedi has dealt with the issue very well and I don’t have much to add beyond noting that the Lovecraft bust used as a World Fantasy trophy is spectacularly ugly, and I too am pretty sure that Gahan Wilson did that deliberately with Lovercaft’s nature in mind. I like the fact that it is ugly, and that it is rather reminiscent of an Easter Island head.
(image from The Lovecraftsman)
I have, however, been pondering how social attitudes change, and what I’d think if I ever won a trophy that was named after someone who was rampantly transphobic. The thing is that if you go back far enough then pretty much everyone was transphobic. Did Hugo Gernsback despise trans people? Probably, if someone had told him about such things. Would Verne or Wells be disgusted by me? Quite likely. Joanna Russ at least had the good grace to apologize later in life. I’m still waiting for an apology from Mary Gentle, but that doesn’t stop me loving most of her books.
One the one hand, hardly any of the authors whose work I admire had said anything bad about trans people, because there are so few of us that we didn’t come to the notice of most people until recently. On the other hand social attitudes have been such that, prior to the turn of the century, trans people were almost universally despised, so the chances are that anyone who was alive at the time was prejudiced against us.
Then again, if you go back far enough (and it doesn’t have to be that much further) then most white people had some fairly racist attitudes. The difference with Lovecraft was that he was spectacularly racist (and misogynist, and anti-Semitic, and so on), and made his feelings known in his writing. I’m not sure how I’d feel if I won an award whose trophy was a bust of Julie Bindel.
So I guess I’m still a bit confused about it. I can quite see where Nnedi is coming from. Equally I think that women, Jews and now People of Color winning the World Fantasy Award would have exploded Lovecraft’s brain. Hopefully it is also exploding the brains of people who still think like him. Goodness only knows what he would have made of me, but I’d like to continue to have the opportunity to do more brain exploding. If World Fantasy does decide to change the trophy, I shall still treasure my Howie pin and occasionally talk to it to remind HPL just how wrong he was.
It is that time of year again, and as regular readers will remember I always write a Year in Review post for Timmi Duchamp at the Aqueduct Press blog. My look back at 2011 is now online. You can read it here.
Yesterday BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives series featured none other than Philip K. Dick. The format of the series is that a celebrity is invited in to talk about someone they greatly admire. In this program Welsh actor Michael Sheen (Underworld, Twilight, Tron: Legacy, not to mention The Damned United, which doubtless means nothing to non-British readers) chose the inimitable PKD. British academic, Roger Luckhurst, was on hand to provide expert commentary. It is a pretty good program, and you should be able to listen to it here.
While you are at it, you may also be interested in the Stephen Baxter short story, “Voyage”, and the Ray Bradbury story, “Tomorrow’s Child”, which were both broadcast yesterday.
Last night brought the sad news that Anne McCaffrey had passed away. There are plenty of obituaries online, so I don’t think I need to add to them, except to note that she and Michael Moorcock bear significant responsibility for my teenage interest in SF. I wanted my own gold dragon (and, of course, a group of bronze riders vying for my attention).
What I would like to note, however, is this post from Juliet Wade, from which I was reminded that “Weyr Search”, the story that won McCaffrey a Hugo in 1968 and was eventually expanded to form Dragonflight, was first published in Analog.
Yes, Analog, that bastion of hard SF. The Pern novels have, of course, long been cited as a classic example of genre mixing. While the books do famously feature dragons, it is made clear in later volumes that Pern has been settled by human space travelers, and the dragons were genetically engineered from the smaller indigenous fire lizards.
Fans can and will argue endlessly about how the books should be classified, but the point I want to make is that I think, had the books been published now, they would be sold as YA fantasy. Equally I think that had a book like Martha Wells’ The Cloud Roads been published in the 1960s, it would have been sold as science fiction. Publishers assign books to categories based on how they think they can best sell them at the time, and that decision changes over time as different genres become more or less popular.
Debbie Moorhouse, the new fiction editor for the World SF Blog, has put out a call for submissions. They do want stories in English, but otherwise are very happy to hear from people based outside of the US/UK market. This means you, Finland. And indeed all of the rest of the world. Details here.
Yesterday’s post on women in SF led to some interesting discussion with Aurora about the visibility of women YA writers in the wider science fiction community. I thought it would be worth going over some of the issues in a separate post.
My basic thesis was that while, in the wake of the success of The Hunger Games, women writers are producing a lot of SF for the YA market right now, this isn’t being recognized by the SF community at large. I’m hearing of some very interesting books from Tansy Rayner Roberts (who may well be reading them in part because she’s a Tiptree juror this year), and Aurora mentioned a few more. Here are some that are worth checking out:
Given the way her book is picking up mainstream award nominations, Moira ought to be a serious candidate for the Campbell next year.
The question that Aurora and I were discussing is how best we can bring these writers to the attention of the SF community.
We probably shouldn’t get into discussing the YA Hugo proposal here as that’s a huge can of worms that could easily take over everything. Let’s leave that for another day, please. There are other awards.
Indeed there is already a set of awards for children’s SF&F, the Golden Ducks, which are actually given out at Worldcon. However, as far as I can see, they have mostly failed to engage the interest of the massive YA readership. They are a juried award, so young people can’t get to participate much.
SFWA, of course, has the Andre Norton Award, and welcomes YA authors as members. However, I’m not sure how successful they are in engaging with them. I saw on Twitter a few days ago that they were appealing for members to serve on the Norton jury, which suggests a lack of interest. I’m sure that the SFWA management is very busy, but equally it seems to me that this burgeoning interest in SF is a potential source of new members. I very much hope that people starting out writing YA SF will want to join SFWA, and not do an Atwood on us.
Getting a YA author as a GoH would be difficult because being a Worldcon GoH is very much a lifetime achievement prize. You need at least 25 years in the business. Ian McDonald is venturing into YA right now, and he’s very much the sort of person who deserves the honor. Indeed I’d venture to suggest that one of the reasons he hasn’t got it yet is that everyone is waiting politely to see what London does. McDonald is by no means a shoe-in, as Iain Banks hasn’t had the honor either, but the Americans won’t want to be seen as treading on London’s toes.
Worldcon can, of course, have Special Guests as well. I’d love to see Chicago try to get Suzanne Collins along, but I suspect that she’s already too big a name for them. However, getting authors to Worldcon is always a chicken and egg situation. Authors will attend a convention if they think they are likely to meet a lot of existing and potential readers there. This is why the work that people like James Bacon are doing to encourage young people to attend Worldcon is so valuable. I’m pleased to see that both Chicago and San Antonio have YA membership rates.
Locus does have occasional YA reviews from Gwenda Bond. They also have a YA category in the Recommended Reading List. I think it is about time that they did a special feature on YA dystopias (hello, Liza?).
Mostly, however, I think it is down to people to talk. If we get enough buzz going online then more people will take notice. It is always hard to get older people to take an interest in what young folks are doing, and that’s especially so when you are talking about asking old men to read books about pregnancy and marriage, even if they are SF, but talk we must. No one else will do it for us.
Well, not quite. I’d like to finish with a quick shout out to Strange Chemistry, the new YA imprint from Angry Robot. Amanda Rutter, I know the above ladies are not in your catalog, but this is very much your fight now. Glad to have you on board.
This morning I discovered an article in The Independent that trumpeted, “How women are winning sci-fi’s battle of the sexes”.
Really? Really???
If I were, say, Tricia Sullivan, or Justina Robson, or any number of other female SF writers around the world, I’d be spitting furious. But what exactly is this article all about?
A little reading soon makes it clear that, although the headline talks about “sci-fi”, the author is using the broader science fiction and fantasy genre to make specific claims about women in SF. Gillian Redfearn would not have cited Elspeth Cooper as a successful female science fiction writer.
The article cites three other successful women science fiction writers. There’s a good case for Lauren Beukes, as she won the Clarke, and Moxyland is a fabulous SF book, but was largely ignored. Zoo City, the break-out book, is much more genre-bending, as its World Fantasy nomination proves. Cinda Williams Chima is actually described in the article as a fantasy writer. And then there’s Ally Condie. She’s most definitely a science fiction writer, and a very successful one. Her books (Matched and Crossed) are YA science fiction romances. Similar claims could be made for Megan McCafferty’s Bumped, or Beth Revis’s Across the Universe, but again the books are aimed squarely at teenage girls. Many of my friends in the SF community have never heard of these books, let alone read them. The article makes no mention of the most successful recent YA SF series, one that does have a broader appeal, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.
(see Update below)
In addition the article makes mention of how much better things are for women SF writers now then they were in the 1960s. Well yes, that might be true, especially in short fiction as that market isn’t dominated by huge, multi-national publishers. But it entirely ignores what happened in between, and the current state of the market for novels.
I’d be tempted to suggest that this was selected quoting of figures, were it not for this:
Earlier this year, accusations of sexism were levelled at the British Fantasy Society (BFS) after a collection of interviews with 16 horror writers failed to include a single woman.
Actually that was in 2009, which shows you just how shoddy the writer’s research has been. I’m not going to name him, because he doesn’t deserve it, but yes, he’s a man. And as far as I can make out the main purpose of the article was to allow The Independent to print a picture of Jane Fonda as Barbarella.
Thankfully you can write good articles about SF&F fiction and get it published in major newspapers. The Sunday Guardian is published in India, and today it has a very fine piece about George R.R. Martin, written by Indian author Samit Basu. It gets to the heart of what is so good about the Song of Ice and Fire series, makes interesting comparisons with the Mahabharata, and ends like this:
So the next time someone tells you that there’s no chance of something both smart and complicated succeeding in this dumbed-down world, hit him on the head with a George R.R. Martin boxed set. And when you go to jail for murder, spend the time constructively by reading the series again.
And the next time that someone tells you that there’s no chance of something intelligent being written about SF&F literature in our dumbed-down newspapers, tell them to go to India. (With apologies to our Guardian, which manages a fascinating mix of smart articles and tabloid nonsense on the subject.)
Update: As per comments below, I’m not trying to suggest that women YA writers don’t deserve recognition as SF writers, I’m saying that they are not getting that recognition because they write YA. It seems to me that, in order to sell a science fiction novel, women writers generally need to a) include elements of fantasy, b) write for a YA audience, c) include romance themes, or d) preferably tick all three boxes. In that sort of environment it is disingenuous to suggest that they are succeeding in a male-dominated world.
I’m always on the look out for good women SF writers, and given my interests in translations that applies all over the globe. I’m therefore pleased to get news from Spain about the Albertus Magnus Science Fiction Prize. This is awarded by the Faculty of Science and Technology at UPV / EHU, which describes itself as the University of the Basque Country. The first prize was won by “Kindergarten”, written by Sara Sacristán, a young writer from Madrid with a degree in geology who is now doing a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature. The report doesn’t seem to say what the prize is worth, but second prize was €1,500 so hopefully she got a nice sum.
With a bit of help from Google Translate, this is what the winning story was about:
In “Kindergarten” there is never enough for everyone, and a color code divides the children into strong and weak, those who live and those who die. The more privileged, who have imposed themselves on their classmates by force or cunning, sense that there must be something beyond the white walls of the garden, so they try to survive at all costs, pending the day when the doors open. Only the protagonist realizes that the path to freedom is something he will have to build himself, and at whatever cost. The story aims to reflect on the limits of ambition and friendship, and the anxieties of society that derive from creating increasingly competitive individuals at the expense of humanity.
Here’s hoping we get to see that in English sometime. Many thanks to my friend @odo on Twitter for the link.
There’s some interesting news on the international front today. A press release on the World SF Blog announces that it is merging with Val Grimm’s review magazine, The Portal. While this might be seen as a reduction in the number of venues covering the world SF scene, I know only too well how much work such ventures take to keep going. If this allows both sites to expand their readership and reduce the workload on individuals then it will be a very good thing. (And hopefully it will provide Lavie Tidhar with more time to work on his burgeoning writing career as well.) I look forward to seeing what the combined site produces, especially if this means more translated fiction.
One of the highlights of the Gollancz party was the presence of Josephine Saxton. She’s over 80 now, and still very sprightly and intelligent. She had a number of books published in the 70s and 80s, and was a leading light of feminist science fiction at the time. Six of those books are available via the SF Gateway project (see Amazon), including Queen of the States which was a Clarke Award nominee in 1987.
I don’t know much about Saxton’s work myself, though I now have 6 books I can buy and read. However, I discovered last night that Roz Kaveney was her editor for some of the books. Roz dear, if you are reading this, could you please add some detail so as to encourage people to sample some of Josephine’s work? I shall have a word with Mr. Clute about the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.
The good part of yesterday evening was a fine party thrown by Gollancz to celebrate their 50th birthday. They were supposed to be launching the SF Gateway project and the new, online version of the SF Encyclopedia at the same time, but apparently the software is running a little behind time. John Clute was a little under the weather and couldn’t make it, but Dave Langford looked remarkably calm. Presumably he’s seen Martin Hoare and I sweating over software launches on many occasions before and knew how low key their issues were in comparison.
Dave mischievously suggested that the problems with the encyclopedia were due to the last minute addition of an entry for Emerald City, but if Gollancz were being besieged by legions of angry fans they hadn’t managed to find the party to picket it.
Having seen some concern from by Australian friends I did corner Darren Nash, the digital products manager for Gollancz and therefore the prime architect of all this, and inquire about availability of Gateway books Down Under. He assured me that they should be available, and promised to chase up any problems that people were having.
While the Gateway itself isn’t actually open for business, all of the Gateway books appear to be available on Amazon. The UK publishing industry was patting itself on the back on Twitter about something called “Super Thursday” with over 200 new hardcover books being launched yesterday. Gollancz launched well over 1000 ebooks on the same day. Ha!
I confess that I failed to frock up for the event. The prospect of having to wear a cocktail dress and heels for a day trip into London did not enthrall me, so I went for an alternate form of smartness instead (black top and trousers, red jacket). Justina Robson, however, was magnificent, especially the shoes. I hope someone has pictures.
I did consider trying to interview a few folks, but there was so much background noise I could barely hear myself speak, let alone other people. Sorry.
Anyway, congratulations to Jon Weir for putting on a fine event, to Simon Spanton for taking on the speechifying duties, and to Darren for some awesome products that are almost ready for launch. It was also great to see so many friends.
The second part of Sarah Hall’s Cat Women of the Moon series was broadcast on Radio 4 this morning and is available for listening here. Once again various well known people made a lot of good comments. My overall reaction, however, is a bit mixed.
The good news is that there was no obvious poking fun at SF, and no insulting trans people either. Indeed, in today’s episode Iain Banks made a point that I always make when talking about gender swapping in SF: if we are to believe in a society in which people swap genders easily and regularly, we have to assume that society has achieved gender equality. (If anyone knows which Culture novel the quote they used was taken from, please let me know. I want to quote it myself and all of my Culture books except Surface Detail are in California.)
On the downside, there wasn’t a lot of depth, and that’s entirely understandable. The programmes were clearly aimed at people who didn’t reach much, if any, science fiction, and consequently there was a 101 feeling to a lot of the discussion. Also, as anyone who has edited podcasts will know, it is really hard to patch together a bunch of separate audio clips to form a coherent narrative. You can’t just change the words as you might in print.
Given the obvious constraints, I was really quite happy with the series until the last few seconds. I’m not sure what Hall was trying to say at the end, but it didn’t come over well. The message that I got was that we could somehow avoid the potential problems that scientific progress has in store for us if we just stopped reading all that scary science fiction. Layered over that was the thought that you don’t stop thinking about good literature when you close the book, and it is stupid to suggest that you can do so. I suspect that someone at the BBC decided that they had to go out with a bang in some way, and that the ending was cobbled together in response without much thought as to what it meant.
The British Library panel on Sunday was a strange beast, but full of interesting material all the same. I’m not entirely sure what it was supposed to be about, but the panellists managed to entertain us anyway.
On the panel were Neil Gaiman, who I guess is primarily considered a fantasy writer; Rachel Armstrong, who I last talked about here; Peter Hamilton, who mostly writes space opera; and Kari Sperring who has a PhD in Celtic history and writes fantasy but was also very useful for her knowledge of Hong Kong cinema. Farah Mendlesohn had the difficult job of forging a conversation between these people without much of a topic.
Neil started out by noting that the visions of the future that people his (and my) age had admired as a kid — those produced by Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein — had mostly not come to pass, whereas those of Ballard and Dick had. I’d add John Brunner to the list of startlingly prescient writers.
Rachel is a bundle of irrepressible fangirl squee when it comes to whiz new science, and what she’d love to get out of us science fiction types are lots of stories enthusing people about science and coming up with great new ideas for avenues of research. She has boundless confidence in The Future, which is kind of rare in the West these days.
The panel showed early signs of degenerating into an Us Against The Americans rant, but Neil, who lives in America and has an American wife, so like me has a much more nuanced view of Over There, started talking about China, and suddenly we had a topic.
You see, while we Westerners might be deeply disillusioned about science (as I said in a question towards the end, our prevailing narrative of science appears to have come more from Michael Crichton than any other SF writer), other countries are not. Neil noted that a couple of years ago he was invited to an SF convention in China that was sponsored by the Chinese government. The Chinese had got the idea that they needed innovation as well as manufacturing expertise, and they had noticed that young engineers in places like Silicon Valley were all science fiction readers. Consequently they decided that SF needed to be encouraged. Damien Walter writes more about this here.
China, of course, is by no means the only country with an economy on an upswing and the confident view of the future that SF feeds off. Places like India, Brazil and Nigeria are all looking to become economic powerhouses. This could make for some interesting and different science fiction. Kari mentioned Aliette de Bodard’s recent post on getting away from American cultural tropes. We could soon be seeing some very different futures.
China, however, is by far the biggest market, and also the least known in the English-speaking world. Frankly, they don’t need us. China’s biggest science fiction magazine, Science Fiction World, claims a print circulation of 300,000. There are other publishers as well. New Realms of Fantasy & Science Fiction is apparently one of the best new magazines and is available free as a PDF or EPUB. It is all in Chinese, but it looks fabulous.
Finding Chinese SF in English is rather more difficult, but we did publish a Chinese story in Clarkesworld last month. It is by Chen Qiufan, who uses the Anglicised name of Stanley Chan. I was delighted to see that he was one of the people following the live Hugo coverage that Kevin and Mur Lafferty hosted from Reno, and he works for Google, so he’s definitely “one of us”. The translation was by Ken Liu, who kindly helped me with some of the research for this post.
As you should all know, science fiction is not really about predicting the future. Mostly it is about looking at the present through the distorting lens of speculative fiction. Even when it does try to look forward, it can be nothing more than a thought experiment. But if we start seeing SF from all over the world we will get some very interesting experiments.
These won’t all agree on what sort of future we should be envisioning. While I was tweeting about the panel a link came through for this Guardian article about British scientists creating an “artificial volcano” to test out ideas for combating climate change. I showed it to Rachel afterwards, and she was all over it, but I can just imagine what a committed environmentalist like Mark Charan Newton would make of the idea. I suspect that the drive for bold technological solutions will come mainly from other, more confident cultures. Hopefully they will find our doom-saying a useful corrective to their more wild imaginings, and they will manage to forge forward in a more considered way than we did.
John Clute and Dave Langford have let me know that Colin Harvey’s entry in the SF Encyclopedia is now available for public viewing.
Today I attended Colin Harvey’s funeral in Bath. It was a lovely location out on the edge of town with magnificent views out over the Somerset countryside. I was very impressed by the whole thing. Here’s a brief review.
The first thing I noticed was that the place was packed. There was barely room for all of us to sit down. There were very few SF people there. Besides myself we had Gareth Powell and his wife, Jo Hall and her partner, Roz Clarke, Tony Keen who had come up from Kent for the day, and Rob Rowntree who, I think, had come down from Nottingham. In addition there were a few people from the creative writing course that Colin was taking at Bath University. There were also people from the Bristol hospital where he worked, old colleagues from Uniliver, and quite likely a lot of other people as well; besides family, of course.
Although the crematorium had clearly been built with religious ceremonies in mind, Colin’s, by family request, was entirely secular, and the staff did a wonderful job of carrying that out. We arrived to the sound of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”, which summed up Colin perfectly. During the ceremony they played “Chasing cars” by Snow Patrol, and we left to the sound of Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” (which Kate told me Colin used to play when writing). The funeral director read some of the tributes to Colin that had been posted to Facebook, and also two poems, the details of which I’m afraid I have forgotten. The second poem encouraged us all not to cry, and consider the departed lost forever, but instead to smile and remember all of the good times we’d had together. Again that was perfect for Colin.
After the funeral, donations were taken for the Above & Beyond medical charity, which Colin worked for. If you’d like to remember him in some way, please consider making your own donation.
And then, exactly as Colin would have wanted, we all went to the pub.