Science Fiction

Policing Gender

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Today my Twitter feed has been filled with outrage over the rather stupid article in the New York Times that dumped on A Games of Thrones on the grounds that it is “boy fiction”. Apparently all of the sex has been added to the story by HBO in a desperate attempt to gain female viewers. Naturally a whole lot of George’s lady fans, and indeed women who don’t like George’s book but do like other fantasy, are yelling about the NYT telling them what sort of books they are supposed to like.

At the same the inimitable Julie Bindel is once again dumping on trans people, because apparently trans people spend all of their time reinforcing gender stereotypes. (I am clearly falling down on the job as I am not typing this blog entry wearing a gorgeous ballgown and full make-up. Sorry.)

It occurred to me that I could perhaps point Bindel at the NYT article. Here, after all, was someone who genuinely was trying to enforce gender stereotypes. Perhaps she could go and harass them instead.

And then I realized that if I told her that trans women like fantasy fiction she’d respond that it proved that they were “really men”.

Actually that is consistent according to her weird form of feminism.

The Carol Emshwiller Project

~ Cheryl

Next Tuesday, April 12th, a very wonderful writer will turn 90 years old, and to celebrate Matt Cheney has created a special web site for her. Please go and check out The Carol Emshwiller Project. Here’s what Matt says about the site:

The creators of the site hope it can be many things — a place to collect information about Carol Emshwiller, as well as a big virtual birthday card. We like variety, not homogeneity. We like to be serious and we like to be silly. We like penetrating insight and we like absurd jokes. We insist on having joy in our cause.

I did get asked to contribute something, but I am crazy busy and don’t know Carol’s work nearly as well as I would like. So I’m doing this blog post. I’d like to wish Carol a very happy birthday, and I hope that many of you will discover her and her writing as a result of the celebrations.

Farewell, Diana

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

As I’m sure I have said before, I am rubbish at writing obituaries. So for the BristolCon website I am just linking to other people’s.

Despite the fact that we lived so close to each other, I never met Diana. I do, however, know people who were very close to her, and will be missing her very much right now. So this post is for Neil Gaiman, Charlie Butler, and everyone else who has suddenly found a large hole in their lives.

Diana, I trust, is somewhere else, where she is pain free, and able to cause much mischief and merriment.

SF at the BL

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Yesterday, as Twitter followers will know, I spent the morning at a press conference at the British Library. This summer they are putting on a major free exhibition called “Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it”. You can see their press release here.

The title is a bit cheesy, but there is a reason for it. The BL people have noticed that they have a lot of books that look like science fiction to them but which often get described as “not science fiction” by people who want to enforce ghetto boundaries. The exhibition takes aim at this silliness by presenting a broad view of science fiction, taking in authors such as Thomas More, Mary Shelley, Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell as well as HG Wells, Phil Dick, Sir Arthur and a lot of contemporary authors.

The exhibition is sponsored by Discovery who will be showing a number of science fact and fiction shows over the summer to coincide with the event. The Science Fiction Foundation has been closely involved with providing material, and Andy Sawyer of Liverpool University is the guest curator. People such as John Clute have provided a number of books from their private libraries (and I have an interview with Clute discussing this which will appear in Salon Futura before the exhibition opens).

Which reminds me, dates: May 20th – September 25th.

In addition there will be a number of special events featuring cool people. Here’s the list so far:

  • China Miéville (20 May);
  • Iain M Banks (31 May);
  • David Lodge and Stephen Baxter (8 June);
  • Audrey Niffenegger (10 June);
  • Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss (21 June)

And the one I really want to see but have already committed to be elsewhere that day:

Musicians George Clinton and Nona Hendryx will talk about the science fiction influences on their lavish stage shows and albums, and a remarkable night of futuristic music on 17 June will see The Radio Science Orchestra and Global Communication perform live at the Library.

Of course, this being the British Library, pride of place will go to many wonderful old books, some of which I was lucky enough to see yesterday. I am particularly fond of Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638) in which our hero, Domingo Gonsales, takes flight in a strange contraption drawn by geese. Godwin, a graduate of Christchurch, Oxford, held the posts of Bishop of Llandaff and Bishop of Hereford during life. In the book he states he is basing his story on Copernican principles and manages a reasonable guess at the idea of gravity well before Newton worked it all out. Goose-powered space ships might seem quaint to us, but Godwin is clearly a kindred spirit to the likes of Asimov and Clarke.

There’s load of other seriously cool old stuff as well. Hopefully a fair few of you will be able to get to see it.

Twitter followers may have noticed that the presentation yesterday focused almost exclusively on male authors, Shelley being the only woman mentioned. There were also no women presenters featured in Discovery’s trailer. For the really old stuff this is understandable, but that’s no reason to apply the same filters today. The BL people have assured us that there will be some women authors featured in the exhibition (see Niffenegger above, for example). However, next time I get told that an event can’t be sexist because while all of the people out front getting the glory are men, most of the people labouring behind the scenes to make it happen are women, I think I shall hit someone.

It’s What Fiction Is For

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

There was an interesting exchange on Twitter today sparked by a tweet by Cat Valente. Cat spent yesterday evening going through a slush pile, presumably for Apex Magazine. One one point she tweeted in frustration asking why male SF writers are always writing about prostitutes.

Several answers were offered to that, but the trail I want to follow is one that started when Kev McVeigh suggested that male writers see prostitutes as strong, independent characters. That then led other people (hi Paul, Jona) to note that a prostitute is a much more believable strong, independent character than the “kick ass babe” so beloved of Hollywood and urban fantasy.

Now in one way they are absolutely right, and it is worth noting that the “kick ass babe” is just as much a sexualised character as a prostitute. There’s a definite suggestion here that many male writers can only envisage female power in terms of sexuality. A lithe, athletic girl in a tight-fitting leather costume is not a significant improvement, in feminist terms, on a whore.

The point I wanted to make (and thanks to Kathy Sedia for nudging me into it), is that while this isn’t an improvement, that fact doesn’t absolve male writers from the need to write convincing women characters. It shouldn’t even absolve male writers from the need to write strong women characters.

A lot of my friends express a preference for gritty, realistic fiction, because it is more honest. The real world doesn’t do consolation and happy ever after, let alone sparkly ponies. I have a lot of sympathy with that point of view. But it can also lead you down a very dangerous path. You start by saying you want fiction that reflects the brutal realities of life. That means you need victims, and as women have less power in the world than men they are more often victims. Go too far along that road and before you know it you are writing the sort of fiction that appeals to people whose idea of “entertainment” is reading about women being brutally murdered.

Kudos then to Graham Sleight for mentioning Joanna Russ. The point of speculative fiction is that it allows you to imagine how the world might be different. And feminist speculative fiction therefore allows you to imagine a world in which women are strong characters and occupy positions of power in society, without having to be sexualised. It is a long time since I read an Alyx story, and I don’t have any Russ books here, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she didn’t spend all her time in skin-tight leather costumes.

Writing strong female characters isn’t hard. It just requires a bit of imagination.

Stories of Our Lives

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

OK, so I’m going to talk about trans issues again. But it will come back to fiction eventually, promise. Bear with me, please.

Early this week the campaign group, Trans Media Watch, scored a notable victory with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding by Channel 4. Basically the TV company is promising to think about how it uses and treats trans people in its programming in future, instead of simply using them for sensationalist gawping and as figures of fun, as is usually the case. As far as trans rights goes, this is a huge step forward.

Christine Burns has an excellent podcast from the event, in which she interviews various attendees and includes keynote speeches by various dignitaries. I note with concern that there was a representative from the Scottish Parliament present, but no one from the Welsh Assembly.

It is worth listening to the podcast, if only for the speech by Lynne Featherstone, the Equality Minister. Partly I’d like you to take in what she says about the teenage girl who is bullied at school because her brother is trans. We hear a lot about how sad it is that trans people are often rejected by their families, but it is also true that coming out as trans puts your family directly at risk. It is something that every trans person has to weigh up, and something others should bear in mind when self-righteously outing trans people who are not yet ready to make that big decision for themselves.

More relevant for this post, however, is where Featherstone says very clearly that the media has far more power to advance trans equality than the government does. That, of course, is because we are story-telling, and story-consuming monkeys. Stories are important.

We tend to think that there is a difference between works of fiction and reporting of the news, and certainly there is, but that difference can be wafer thin. In particular, the way in which news is presented can make a huge difference to the story we take away from it. See, for example, the recent New York Times story that presented the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl as a tragic event for the poor, helpless rapists. There’s a reason that a news report is still called a “story”.

So the way in which we present news matters, and so does the way in which we present fiction. (See, I told you I would get back to it.)

Yesterday, in The Guardian, Damien G. Walter continued his excellent crusade on behalf of speculative fiction by pointing out that not all fantasy fiction is hopelessly escapist, or indeed escapist at all.

Today Mark Charan Newton picked up on this, opening up the question of whether there is anything wrong with escapist fiction.

Now partly this is an Internet debate, and therefore full of people taking one side or the other because one side has to be WRONG!!! so that the other side can feel vindicated. But just like most other things in life, there are multiple shades of grey. It is a bit like food. I sometimes eat things that are bad for me because they taste nice. I also refuse to eat cardboard for breakfast, no matter how many ads tell me that it will make me slim and beautiful. But at the same time many people have food that they need to avoid because those foods are poisonous to them. And there are foods that people choose to avoid because their production involves extreme cruelty to animals, or unacceptable levels of environmental destruction.

Equally some fiction can be bad for us. Too much reading about heroism can lead us to think that all of the world’s problems can be solved by sending in a small group of super-soldiers. Also, somewhat inevitably, some trans people have reacted to the Trans Media Watch MOU with cries of “sellout”, because they didn’t get a sparkly magic pony as part of the deal. Consuming too much fantasy fiction can lead us to believe that Happy Ever After is the natural state of mankind, and that the Evil Overlord will always be vanquished. Indeed, it can lead us to think that the world is made up entirely of people who are either Good Guys or The Hordes of Evil.

What we consume matters, whether it be food or stories. A little bit of comfort food can sometimes be exactly what you need. But a continual diet of nothing but comfort food will do you no good at all.

SF for the Imagination-Impaired

~ Cheryl ~ 26 Comments

Yesterday on Twitter Alison Flood was asking for suggestions of SF&F books for a “you think you don’t like SF but have you tried X” article (I think for the Sunday Times). This is not as easy as it sounds. The temptation, of course, is to recommend great writers and favorite books, but just because we like something it doesn’t mean that other people will.

My article in the latest issue of Salon Futura is all about different ways in which people can be thrown out of a book, have their suspension of disbelief unsuspended. People can say “I don’t read science fiction” for all sorts of reasons. They may do so because they think that reading SF is “childish”, but in that case it doesn’t matter how good the book is, they still won’t like it. On the other hand, they may be one of those people who will happily read a book that is an intense character study, no matter when or where it is set (and will tell you that it is “not science fiction” having read it, even if the characters are all sentient slugs from another galaxy). But for the purposes of Alison’s article I think the safest thing to do is to assume that our target reader is someone who is imagination-impaired, and is therefore likely to lose suspension of disbelief if the story is too fantastical.

Given that, there’s no point in recommending Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, or M. John Harrison’s Light, fabulous books though they might be. If you want to recommend China Miéville, suggest The City and the City, not Kraken.

In addition to that Miéville, other books I thought might work are Air by Geoff Ryman, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, and The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall. But it is hard coming up with suitable books, and even harder coming up with such books by women. So I decided to pass the question on here. Any suggestions? With any luck, Alison might read this.

SF Library in WA Needs Funds

~ Cheryl

I got a press release today from Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. Apparently they have discovered a large collection of SF&F-related material in a basement. It dates back over 30 years and comprises “rare books, comics, fanzines, t-shirts and personal writings that relate to the science fiction community of Western Australia and Australia.” This includes, “copies of the Norstrilian News from 1972, Western Australian Science Fiction Association papers from 1977 and the complete personal collection of Leigh Edmonds which includes just about everything pertaining to fandom from 1972 onwards.”

Obviously such a collection needs work to catalog and preserve, and the university is reaching out to the SF&F community for help. They don’t have PayPal sorted yet, but hopefully they will do that, or something similar, soon. In the meantime you can learn more, and find out how to donate by mail, from their website.

Shame, Guilt, the Blogosphere and Kudos

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

So, remember all that Nietzsche stuff about “shame culture’ and “guilt culture”? It’s time to get back on the philosophy horse, because it explains so much.

Last week on Twitter I linked to an interesting piece of research from the University of Maryland and Harvard University. The project looked at how someone was judged following a well publicized transgression. Somewhat to the surprise of the researchers, a person who had a reputation for doing good work was not given any slack. Indeed, he was probably treated more harshly than someone with no public profile at all. The key to escaping blame for transgressions, it appears, is presenting yourself as a victim.

Now we should know this. We see it every day in the blogosphere. That’s why we keep getting the unedifying spectacle of straight white male Christian conservatives complaining about how horribly they are being discriminated against. Everyone understands that if you can present yourself as a victim then people will feel sorry for you. But what exactly is happening here?

On Friday I had one of those light bulb moments. The whole victim politics thing is driven by confusion between shame culture and guilt culture. I can’t speak for people from other cultures, but those of us with a Western European ancestry (and that includes you, white America) have a history that mixes the two ideas. Back in ancient times we tended to blame “the Gods” for our misfortunes. Then the people who ran Christianity twigged that they would have a very good means of social control if they switched to a system in which misfortune was a divine punishment for sin, so we got deep into guilt culture. Now we are working our way out of it, but subconsciously we still make decisions as to which system to apply.

So if we see a high profile, competent person accused of some transgression we recognize that person as responsible for his own actions and we apply guilt culture rules. If, on the other hand, that person can somehow present himself as a victim of circumstances rather than responsible and empowered, then shame culture applies and we are more likely to forgive.

It isn’t always clear cut, of course. A woman who is attacked will generally be seen as a victim, unless she was sexually assaulted in which case the whole thing suddenly becomes her fault. That’s because men like to see themselves as the victims of women’s sexual attractiveness, and other women can be jealous of anyone more attractive than they are.

It doesn’t help, of course, that we are all victims in our own minds. But where others are concerned it seems that we tend to make snap judgments based on the perceived status and power of the transgressor, not on the circumstances of the case.

And on Saturday it occurred to me, while listening to Paul McAuley talk about the social systems he devised for the outer planet colonies in The Quiet War, that this whole thing is a fatal flaw in kudos-based societies.

Kudos, or Whuffie as Cory Doctorow termed it, is the idea that status and wealth in a society should be based on what you do, not on how much money you have. It is an idea that occurs a lot in science fiction, and to appeals strongly to engineers and the like. I have always felt it was a really bad idea because a system that bases wealth on how well liked you are would soon be taken over by people with lots of charisma and skill at social manipulation. If you don’t believe me, check out Sunday’s Dilbert cartoon for proof.

However, the things I have been talking about above blow an even bigger hole in the idea of a Kudos-based society, because what the research is telling us is that the more Kudos you have, the more vulnerable you are to losing everything. In a money-based society, if you are caught doing something bad, at least you still have your money (especially if you can afford good lawyers). But in a reputation-based economy, the greater your “wealth”, the more you will lose if you transgress. There are, of course, certain advantages to this from the point of view of equality, but it would make the system very unstable and, I think, would result in a lot of people devoting an awful lot of time to finding ways of bringing down high status folk, much as tabloid newspapers do today.

Of course no method of social organization is perfect, and money-based societies have plenty of problems of their own. But while we are still monkeys and tend to have this knee-jerk negative view of anyone who appears competent I suspect that Kudos-based societies are doomed to failure.

More Philisophy of Fantasy

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, here are a couple more blog posts that are worth reading.

Firstly R. Scott Bakker delves into the psychology that might lead one to misunderstand fantasy as badly as the guy who set all this off did. (Warning: probably triggery if you are a conservative Christian).

And there’s more from Paul C. Smith. This is a bit abstruse in places if you haven’t had the same sort of education as Paul, but it is actually addressing a very important moral issue. He talks about the difference between a “shame culture” and a “blame culture”:

For those unfamiliar with the terms, a shame culture is one like that of the Greeks, where external forces are responsible for misfortune, while a guilt culture is one where the individual is to blame.

That’s not as theoretical as it might sound. There is direct practical application. For example, if you see someone who is disabled, do you think, “my, poor guy, what bad luck,” or do you think, “gee, he must have done something really bad for God to have punished him so.” These days we have pretty much grown out of the latter idea, but move it on and think instead of someone who is unemployed. Do you think, “my, poor guy, this economic crisis is a bitch,” or do you think, “what a slacker, why doesn’t he go out and get a job instead of sponging off the state?”

Similar arguments are applied to sexual morality. If you discover that someone is gay do you think, “poor guy, he’ll have a tough life because of it,” or “if only he had enough self-will he could resist his urges.” (Of course there are other possible responses, including “wow, great, and he’s so cute too,” but I’m giving examples that illustrate the two ways of thinking that Paul talks about.)

By this time I have probably thoroughly wandered away from the intellectual rigor of Nietzsche’s original point and Paul will chastise me for sloppy thinking. My apologies in advance. Also, as with just about everything in life, this is not a clear cut issue. Sometimes people do have to take responsibility. But our initial instincts with regard to these two ways of looking at the world can often color how we approach individual cases, and prevent us from thinking clearly about them.

Fantasy fiction, which so often deals with matters of fate and destiny, is an ideal vehicle for exploring such issues.

Worth Talking About: Fantasy, Beauty & Race

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

After yesterday’s little whinge it is only fair that I should practice what I preach and link to some blog content that I think is worth talking about. I’m not going to go into the discussion on the meaning of nihilism that we got into on Twitter yesterday afternoon, but there was some related discussion about beauty and morality in fantasy that Paul C. Smith has turned into a blog post.

What Paul is talking about there is how fantasy often associates beauty with goodness, and how some writers then subvert that idea. He notes, for example, that Elric is the most moral of the Melniboneans, and also the ugliest of them. My particular favorite subversion of the trope is in Gormenghast where Steerpike, because he is good looking and charming, rises to a position of power that he then abuses. That should be a warning to us all in our celebrity-obsessed culture.

We should also note that the standard of “beauty” that fantasy valorizes is generally one derived from North-West Europe: blonde hair, blue eyes, white skin. People with dark skin are often characterized as being innately evil. The latest episode of the Revolution SF podcast has guest writers, Ika Koek and Alaya Johnson, discussing the portrayal of race in fantasy fiction. Ika’s phone line from Malaysia doesn’t have the best sound quality, but it is a good discussion.

Hopefully no one is going to be drawing sweeping generalizations here. As Paul points out, there are fantasy narratives that subvert the “beauty = good” meme, and equally there are fantasy narratives that deal very well with race. If we talk about these things, the number of interesting and challenging works should grow.

Cool Steampunkery

~ Cheryl

It is busy, busy, busy around here, which is why there has not been much blogging. I did, however, discover something neat on Twitter this morning. It is a blog called Multiculturalism for Steampunk, which is quite wondrous enough in its own right. And the article that got tweeted about was one on gaucho costumes. There are lots of great illustrations. I particularly liked this one:

Cute gaucho

Running the Numbers

~ Cheryl ~ 26 Comments

Over on his Livejournal, Neil Clarke has been doing some analysis of short fiction category of the Locus Recommended Reading List. The numbers are quite an eye-opener. I knew we had done well, but it hadn’t occurred to me as even possible that we would tie with Asimov’s for the most selected stories. We did, with 7 each. Am I proud? You bet!

The trend towards fiction from online venues continues, and this is the first year that more short stories have come from online venues than from print magazines and books.

Also worth noting is that 38 of the 68 stories are by women. Six of Clarkesworld’s seven recommended stories are by women.

Meanwhile on Twitter there has been a great deal of fuss. It has been created by what I’m starting to think of as the UKIP wing of British fandom, because the people concerned are constantly whining about being oppressed by Locus and the Hugos in pretty much the same way as right-wing tabloid newspapers whine about being oppressed by the EU.

There story here is that a vicious cabal of Evil Americans (such as Jonathan Strahan, John Clute, Graham Sleight, Farah Mendlesohn, Tansy Rayner Roberts and myself) gather together each year to plot the downfall of British science fiction by picking only American works for the Recommended Reading List. This year, apparently, we were worse than usual, with the list being hideously skewed towards US writers, magazines and publishers. That, of course, is all part of my Evil Plan. So I decided to look at some numbers to see how Evilly I had done.

I’ve looked only at the three adult novel categories as those are the only ones I have significant input to. As a benchmark, I’m going to use the fact that there are roughly 5 times as many Americans in the world as British people, so if the list had been chosen purely at random there would be 5 Americans for every British writer. (I am assuming here that American and British writers have equal access to publishing opportunities. As far as I know, no one is arguing that they don’t. This is not analogous to a gender or race issue where there may be barriers to entry.)

There are 17 novels on the science fiction list. 11 are by Americans. Greg Egan is Australian. Canada would kill me if I identified Bill Gibson as American, even though he was born there. Johanna Sinisalo is Finnish. And three (McDonald, Reynolds, Banks) are British. That gives us 11.5 Americans to 3 British, which is about what we would expect. Must try harder!

On the Fantasy list there are 24 novels. 14 are by Americans. Michael Ajvaz is Czech, Lauren Beukes is South African, and Guy Gavriel Kay is Canadian. The other 7 (Fforde, Fox, Gilman, Miéville, Mitchell, Pinborough and Stross) are all British. So that’s a ratio of 14:7. And that, apparently, is hideous anti-British bias. Hmm.

The one that surprised me was the First Novel list. Of 15 entries, 11 were by Americans, but there was not a single Brit amongst them. At last, my Evil Plan is working. Possibly. I’ll come back to it in a minute.

Of course if you are of a UKIP frame of mind there’s little that can sway you from your feelings of oppression. There is always some excuse for why things that are doing well and appear to be British are in fact not so. For example, some of those “British” writers live in America (Gilman) or, heaven forbid, in Edinburgh! (Stross). Then again, most of them have US publishers as well as British contracts. This, I suspect, will be held up as evidence that they are writing “American” fiction, and therefore don’t count. The assumption being that if they wrote “British” fiction it would be too intelligent and left-wing for an American audience and American publishers would not buy it.

My explanation is a little different. The US publishers are well aware that British writers are very good, and so anyone from these isles who gets a bit of critical attention gets snapped up for a US contract. As the UK market is much smaller, it is much less likely that a successful US writer would get a UK contract.

Complicating matters is the international nature of publishing. Orbit, for example, tend to buy world rights to books, but it is British editor Tim Holman, based in New York, who calls the shots. Angry Robot has a US branch, but they are headquartered in Nottingham.

One area where you might expect British publishers to score is in First Novel, because the writers there might be people who were discovered by a UK operation and have not yet got a US contract. As I noted, none of the First Novel authors are British. However, three of the four non-US authors were first contracted by British publishers. That’s Terry Dowling (Australian), Hannu Rajaniemi (Finnish) and Lavie Tidhar (Israeli). So the reason why there are no British authors on the First Novel list is, at least in part, because British publishers are looking outside the UK for new talent.

Finally a brief word on magazines. The absence of Interzone from the list is obviously a clear indication of anti-British bias, right? All the other magazines are “American”. But, as noted above, a lot of the short fiction is now coming from online venues. That means that they are edited by Evil Americans like me and (as of this year in the top job at Strange Horizons) Niall Harrison.

I took a look at the numbers for Clarkesworld’s 2010 stories. 14 of the 24 were by Americans. The other authors came from a variety of countries including two British and one Irish. Non-fiction is mostly American, but I get so few submissions that it is really hard to get much diversity into the selection. In cover art, however, where excellent command of English is not required, the picture is quite different. Only 3 of the 2010 covers were by Americans. There were 2 from Brazil, 2 from Turkey, and one each from Russia, France, Bulgaria, the Phillipines and Mexico. So yeah, clearly Clarkesworld is an Evil American magazine.

Anyway, enough bashing of the English for now. Time to watch them getting bashed on the rugby field instead (I hope).

A Blast from the Past

~ Cheryl

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bryan Talbot has sent me details of an old (1981) Granada TV programme featuring him and Bob Shaw. It is part of a culture series called Celebration and includes an interview with Shaw and a production of one of his short stories, for which Bryan provides some illustrations. Bryan looks very young, Bob looks splendidly alive, and the cars look amazingly antiquated. Some things, however, don’t change. Bob can be heard complaining that science fiction gets no respect, and whenever something written as SF is good people say it is “not science fiction”.

The programme also reminded me of something else. Part of the interview with Bob has him seated at a desk, and on that desk is a familiar rocket-shaped object. It is one of these, which Bob won at the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton. There has been much muttering of late about professional writers such as John Scalzi and Fred Pohl winning the Best Fan Writer Hugo. Well Bob won it twice, in 1979 and 1980. He also won the FAAn Award for Fan Writer in 1977 and 1979. And all of this was after his novel, Orbitsville, won the 1976 British Science Fiction Association Award.

Something else that doesn’t change is that TV commercials can be really awful. The show has them at the beginning and end, for which I apologize profusely.

Due to YouTube restrictions the show is split in two parts, which I’m embedding here. The part of the time traveler is played by Jenny Eclair who is apparently famous these days for being in TV programmes that I don’t watch.

Busy Elsewhere

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

There’s a new SF Signal Mind Meld up and I’m in it. They asked what the publishing industry would be like in 10 years time. I figured that this was pretty much impossible to predict, so I went for a bit of SFnal dystopia. Of course like any dystopian prediction the idea is that it should not come true because people are forewarned. On the other hand, in all the time I have been publishing online it has never ceased to amaze me that big business has let me get away with it. It would be so easy for ISPs to require a fee before they will serve up your domain.

You may think that this could never happen because people will protest, but we humans have a long history of giving up freedom in favor of convenience. We still fly, no matter what indignities we are put through in the name of “security”. We buy Kindle books despite the DRM because the one-click purchase and automatic download is so convenient. All the media companies need to do in order to kill the Internet is to come up with something that enough of us find attractive enough that we won’t care if all the rest goes away.

And talking of the future, there’s a new Locus Roundtable post up. In this one we talk about whether science fiction’s view of the future has been overtaken by reality.

Language and Identity, SF-Style

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

On this week’s Coode Street podcast Jonathan Strahan surprised me rather by saying that he hates the term “specifc” (and also variants such as “speculative fiction”). Given that I use it quite a lot, I was interested to understand why.

In context, Jonathan explained that he encounters the term most often as a whitewash phrase used by people who don’t want to admit that they are having anything to do with science fiction. So, for example, a university English department might offer courses in “speculative fiction” in order to avoid the opprobrium that would be heaped upon them for teaching “science fiction”.

Jonathan and Gary also discussed the term “sci-fi”, which was roundly hated amongst fandom until very recently for similar but opposite reasons. The theory was that anyone who used “sci-fi” rather than “science fiction” was a froth-at-the-mouth fanboy who was only interested in films and television, and was probably unable to actually read books. People who used the term “sci-fi” gave respectable science fiction fans a bad name, and “sci-fi” was used as a term of abuse by the media, just as “queer” was used to insult homosexuals.

However, language changes and evolves. The term “queer” has been largely reclaimed, though there are still people in the LGBT community who regard it as offensive. And “sci-fi” is in such common usage now that younger fans see no problem in adopting it.

Jonathan wondered whether “specfic” was another generational issue given that his friends from the Galactic Suburbia podcast use it a lot. But I’m older than Jonathan, so I have no excuse on those grounds.

You may be wondering whether, because Salon Futura is aimed at broad minded mainstream readers as well as the science fiction community, I might be using “specfic” for precisely the reasons that Jonathan suggests — in order to avoid people having to confront the awful truth that they actually read science fiction. Actually, however, my reasons are rather different. I like “specfic” because it is a useful umbrella term.

To start with it is a lot shorter than having to write “science fiction, fantasy, horror and related literatures”. Of course you could rightly point out that the term “science fiction” is often used in exactly that sort of umbrella fashion. However, I have got very tired over the years of people who insist that whenever “science fiction” is used it can only ever mean “science fiction”, not anything that they do not accept as falling under that term. I’m talking about the sort of people who insist that, because the Hugo Awards are given out by the World Science Fiction Society at the World Science Fiction Convention then they must only be for science fiction, not fantasy or indeed anything that Hugo Gernsback would not have recognized as properly scientific, despite the fact that is says clearly in the WSFS constitution that works of fantasy are eligible.

I am also very wary of the practice of using the name of a majority or most active subgroup in a community as an umbrella term for that community. For example, you should not use “English” to mean “British”. I also wince when I see people use “transgender” as an umbrella word for the trans community, particularly if I think they are using it to imply that transsexuals are deluded and politically unacceptable. So I try to use umbrella terms that are more neutral. Of course no word is perfect, and the fact that “specfic” abbreviates to SF is bound to annoy fantasy fans. I could use Clute’s term, “Fantasktika”, But unlike many Clute neologisms that one hasn’t really caught on, and would upset science fiction fans. Specfic has a certain pedigree, and has the cachet of having been coined by Heinlein.

None of this will last, of course. Language evolves very quickly. In 50 years time those of you still alive then may find everyone using Fantastika, or that distinctions between science fiction and mainstream literature have gone away because everyone writes it. One day back issues of Salon Futura may be re-issued with every occurrence of the hideously offensive world “specfic” altered to “sci-fi”. But for now I shall continue to use specfic. Sorry Jonathan.

A New Literary Magazine

~ Cheryl

Via the Aqueduct Press blog I have learned about a new literary magazine, Cascadia Subduction Zone, aimed at Feminist spec-fic readers. It will be published quarterly and will include book reviews, feature articles and art. It doesn’t look like it will be free online, but subscriptions to the PDF version are only $10. I’m always pleased to see more people taking non-fiction seriously, and this magazine looks like it will focus on the sort of books I like. However, I’m a little bit sad that they pay so poorly.

Living in the Future

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I’ve had a weekend of being busy with Wizard’s Tower and Clarkesworld matters, but I do have a post for you. I wrote this a few weeks ago and then forgot about it. It is a report on the one-day conference at the Architectural Association that I went to last month.

What does science fiction have to do with architecture? Not a lot, you might think, but the Architectural Association begs to disagree, because its London School of Architecture run a series of seminars with the pulp-inspired title of Thrilling Wonder Stories that bring together speculative fiction writers, comics creators, video game producers and futurologists. The objective appears to be to encourage those who will build the cities of tomorrow to think about what those cities might look like. One such day of seminars too place in later November.

The role of buildings in framing the stories of our everyday lives was amply demonstrated by Will Self, promoting his book, Walking to Hollywood. Self said that if he were a dictator he would force all architects and urban planners to walk through cities as part of their training. Not that this would necessarily help, because sometimes buildings are designed to be hostile. Self reserved particular ire for airports, which he described as “a kind of abattoir of the psyche,” but he acknowledged that they were deliberately made that way to discourage travelers from getting excited about dashing around the globe at vast speeds. Airlines much prefer us to be bored and docile when we fly.

Buildings can be instruments of political oppression too. Jeff VanderMeer described how, in his novel Finch, the invading Grey Caps revise and repurpose the architecture of the city of Ambergris in order to make their mark on the landscape, and send a message to the human population that the city no longer belongs to them. Admittedly we are talking about mushroom people here, but VanderMeer pointed out that he uses fantastic settings in his fiction to encourage his readers to think more deeply about the issues he is discussing. A reader brings far less emotional baggage, and far fewer preconceived ideas, to a story about Ambergris to one about an invasion of a real world city.

Video game designers have very particular requirements for their cities. It was interesting, therefore, to discover that the ideal setting for a game in which nothing happens except that people run around with big guns killing each other is a Libertarian utopia of the type proposed by the seasteading movement.

Most architecture students, however, will have more practical problems in mind. They will not get to design killing grounds. Nor should they need to be told that mysterious ruins can impart a sense of wonder to fiction. Bryon and Shelley were playing with those ideas centuries ago. Did the guests lecturers have anything more appropriate?

Geoff Manaugh brought up the very real but somewhat exotic issue of nuclear waste depositories such as the proposed Yucca Mountain facility in America, or the actual facility at Onkalo in Finland. Given that the waste will continue to be dangerous for millennia to come, deterring curious explorers from future generations is a real design issue. Manaugh talked largely of booby traps. My suggestion of stationing a balrog and hordes of bloodthirsty orcs at the bottom of the shaft to deter trespassers did not get much traction.

Rachel Armstrong talked enthusiastically of seeding the lagoons of Venice with artificial lifeforms that would build a coral reef under the city, shoring up its foundations. Had Prince Charles been there he would doubtless have muttered darkly about “gray goo” and the end of life as we know it. But HRH has always had a fondness for the gloom-filled imaginings of Michael Crichton. I much prefer Kathleen Ann Goonan’s take on nanotechnology. Her Flower Cities are bursting with creativity, and sometimes keep the humans around as pets.

The speakers whose ideas would have the most immediate impact on our lives were Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. They describe themselves as “design provocateurs,” so perhaps their suggestions were not intended entirely seriously, but they certainly provoked comment.

Raby talked about the future of agriculture, noting that by 2050 the population of the planet will reach 9 billion. Her solution to this was a return to foraging, with people equipped with external digestion systems that would enable them to feed of a much wider range of plants than is currently possible. No self-respecting science fiction author would come up with such a solution, unless it followed a massive reduction in population. The whole point of farming is that it allows you to support a much larger population on a smaller amount of land.

Besides, thanks to Harry Harrison, science fiction readers know that in the future we will all be living on stuff called “Soylent Green”. Had Dunne known that, he would not have suggested a future in which “euthanasia parties” would be followed by burning the corpse and making a granny-powered battery that the family could take away and use. Dead bodies are too useful to burn.

Dunne also had some very strange ideas about the future of the security industry. Police forces are apparently already working on brain scanners. Dunne suggested that each neighborhood would have a local scanner operator. He’d have a friendly name like “Dave” or “Nick”, and instead of a crisp black, jack-booted outfit he’d wear an ill-fitting, second hand uniform as a result of public spending cuts. The theory was that this would make us more comfortable about having our little grey cells examined.

Another way in which our governments busily snoop upon us is Echelon, the global surveillance network. Dunne suggested that we might be more relaxed about having our emails read and phone calls listened to if the chaps doing it lived locally and were easily recognizable because they wore red hats with antennae on them. I suspect they’d have a jolly motto too — something about “three main weapons: a global surveillance network, powerful supercomputers, and pretty red hats.” Goodness only knows what Orwell would have made of this.

This, I think, is where science fiction writers are needed. Left to themselves, engineers of all types tend to obsess over functionality at the expense of thinking about how their creations will be used. One of the objectives of science fiction is to consider the effects of new technology on people. While there are those who still think that science fiction should only be about ideas, it is in the interaction of those ideas with the book’s characters where the real power of fiction is unleashed. There are many science fiction writers who do that very well.

Presents for Geeks

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Unsure what to buy your favorite science fiction fan for the holidays? Here are a few suggestions.

Top of the list has to be a railgun. The US Navy now has a working model that can accelerate a projectile up to Mach 7, hitting enemy battleships with a massive 33 MJ of energy. Take that, Klingon Warbird!

If you don’t have a military starship to outfit, how about some personal transport. Now that I have a home, a really ought to get some transport. As a former biker, I rather fancy one of these.

Cow motorbike

If you are more into flying, and have a liking for dinosaurs, you might prefer one of these.

Triceracopter

Both of those images come from the Next Nature blog. Thanks to David Roden for the links.