Science Fiction

Jamming With Clute and Gary

~ Cheryl

Yesterday I promised you some more words on the podcast that I did with John Clute, Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan. Here they are.

As we were in the Clute apartment, John, Gary and I had been chatting about a bunch of issues beforehand (most interesting about Thomas More’s Utopia, but that’s another post entirely). As a consequence we got into our stride very quickly on the podcast. However, due to the technical difficulties at our end, much of what we said early on got lost. Also I know that not all of you like listening to podcasts, so here’s a few highlights.

We started out with discussion of genre definitions. I know that there are critics who are obsessed with such things, but I find them quite annoying and between us we came up with what I think is a much better way of looking at such things. When you apply a genre label (e.g. steampunk, epic fantasy or whatever) to a piece of fiction, what you are doing is not putting it in a box that defines its nature, but observing it through a particular colored lens. Some stories, of course, make no sense unless you look at them through the correct lens. But there are many stories that can be viewed through more than one lens, and which look like different stories each time you change lenses. There are some writers who enjoy creating stories like this, and those tend to be my favorite writers. Naturally such stories, and writers, infuriate those who want to use genre descriptions as rigid boxes, with a story only being allowed into one.

We also talked a bit about allegories, and how good fantastic fiction should not be written as, or read as, an allegory.

At one point I said something that I thought might have provoked debate, either during the podcast or in comments afterward. From memory it went like this:

There are only two possible endings for a story: “and then I woke up”, and “to be continued”.

I’m prepared to defend that, though I admit that the first is problematical if the story is not narrated. Hopefully you will see what I mean, though.

By the way, a lot of the discussion on the nature of genre is very relevant to the essays in Gary’s new book, Evaporating Genres, due out early next year.

The full podcast is available here.

Translation Awards Reminder

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Hello USA. Everyone recovered from their turkey-induced stupor yet?

As you almost certainly didn’t notice last week, being preoccupied with other things, I’d like to draw your attention to the fund raiser that we are running for the SF&F Translation Awards. There are a bunch of cool prizes available for some lucky donors, and since we started the thing I have had a few kind people contact me with offers of additional prizes. We’ll announce them in due course, once we are sure we won’t be paying out more in postage than we get in from donations.

I shall probably be a bit boring about this over the next month or so, because I do want these awards to be prestigious and not just something that a bunch of nutty fans and academics care about. There are loads of fabulous authors in the non-English-speaking world, but we’ll only get translations published if we can get our own publishers away from thinking that no one will ever buy a translated novel, which sadly many of them do.

It would be great if I could tap into arts funding for this, but money for that has been horribly slashed in the UK recently. The EU has arts money available, but only for projects that are limited to EU countries. As our winners may come from Japan, or Brazil, or anywhere else outside Europe, we wouldn’t qualify. And of course it is always likely that any grant application would be turned down on the grounds that science fiction isn’t worth supporting. So it really is down to us. If you can’t afford to donate anything yourself, please at least blog about it to help spread the word.

Full details, including the current list of prizes, are available here.

Podcasts of the Past

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

It was obvious really. There is a Science Fiction Oral History Association that collects recordings of things to do with science fiction. Now they have a podcast. The first episode features features Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Lester del Rey, Frederik Pohl, and Gordon R. Dickson. What more could you ask for? My friend Anne Gray has more details. Alternatively, go direct to Space Dog Podcast.

Off to London

~ Cheryl

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer will be in London next weekend. They are appearing at a one-day conference called Thrilling Wonder Stories. This is not, as you might expect, something about pulp literature, but rather an eclectic event pulling in cutting edge people from many different disciplines under the auspices of the Architectural Association’s School of Architecture. Panels will look at the future of cities and urban life from a range of different viewpoints.

As well as Jeff and Ann, the conference features Will Self, comic creator Anthony Johnston (Wasteland, Daredevil), concept artist Gavin Rothery (Moon, Grand Theft Auto) and an organization called The Why Factory who are a think tank specializing in urban futures. Jeff has more details on his blog.

I’m going to pop down to see them (and hopefully bag an interview or two while I am there). Obviously this is very short notice, and inconvenient for anyone not in the UK, but the whole thing will apparently be streamed lived through the Architectural Association’s website.

If you are in London, the event is from 12:00 to 20:00, and the Architectural Association’s offices are at 36 Bedford Square. The panels will be in the Lecture Hall, which will hopefully be well signposted. Attendance is free.

I may be a little late as I have a prior engagement at the residence of the Finnish Ambassador where they are launching Turku’s year as European Capital of Culture (which is not entirely due to it hosting Finncon, but I’m sure that helped).

The Coming Race

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

If you need any further proof that we now live in The Future, consider this: The Economist is blogging about the effect of robots on labour markets.

Of course, like any good pundit, they hedge their case:

Of course, full human employment may not be a part of a sentient robot overlord’s grand plan. As always, politics constrains economics, and so it’s difficult to make good predictions about future labour markets without knowledge of the institutional environment the machines will put in place once they become self-aware and enslave humanity.

And no mention of Asimov, presumably because it is no longer necessary.

An Evening With William Gibson #foigibson

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

As Twitter followers will know, I spent yesterday evening at an event in Bristol featuring @GreatDismal himself, William Gibson. The iPad definitely came into its own that night. A good free wifi connection in the venue (thank you, Watershed!) enabled me to tweet away, relaying interesting soundbites, and also corresponding with an audience in Sheffield who were receiving the session over a video link. It was all very 21st Century.

Soundbites, of course, do not necessarily convey all of the complexity and subtlety of what is being said, especially when the person saying it is as smart as Gibson. Numerous people have since blogged their reactions to the event, and rather than me trying to link to them I suggest you do a Twitter search on the hashtag #foigibson, which should bring up most of them. Here’s my attempt to elaborate on what was said.

Gibson began with a reading from Zero History — a section in which Milgrim is wandering around parts of London that are very familiar to me. I’m not quite sure why he chose that section to read, but it did include much of theory on which Hubertus Bigend plans to make money out of supplying clothing to the US military. As I noted at the time, Gibson pronounces Bigend as “Big End”, just like a Westerner would, not “Bee-zhond”, as one might expect from a Belgian. As I recall, this is actually mentioned in the book, and Gibson notes that Hubertus finds the whole thing rather amusing.

A lengthy question and answer session followed, and Gibson delivered a number of wonderfully perceptive answers. Here are some highlights.

Much of the questioning concerned Gibson’s writing career and his development as a writer. He talked honestly about how young men tend to write books that feature things like zombie plagues and post-apocalyptic wastelands because they lack the experience of life to write well about people. His later books, which a questioner described as much “warmer”, reflect what he sees as his greater interest in, and understanding of, people. He seemed particularly proud of one character from Zero History, Winnie the federal agent. Certainly you don’t expect such characters in a cyberpunk novel to spend time worrying about what presents they will bring home from London for their kids. Gibson noted that none of the characters in Neuromancer appear to have parents. They don’t have children either.

The attitude of authors towards their earlier works is often fascinating. Despite the runaway success of the book, Gibson clearly has an ambiguous attitude towards Neuromancer. He provided a wonderful analogy of a dragon at a Chinese New Year celebration. To the outside observer the dragon looks wonderfully impressive, but to the men inside it is a mess of old newspapers, struts of balsa wood and glue.

Other questions were focused more on the nature of science fiction and its power to predict the future. Gibson is clearly uncomfortable with his assigned role as a futurologist. He made the wonderful remark that “science fiction is part of the Dreamtime of industrial civilization,” and worried that if SF writers came up with really horrible ideas for technological advances this would only encourage some young scientist to try to make those advances happen.

Like most other SF writers, Gibson is dismissive of the predictive power of the genre. Rather than focus on the few glorious successes such as Clarke and satellites, however, he noted that John Brunner’s dystopian classics, Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, have been the only SF novels that got close to predicting the mess we are currently in.

Postulating as to why modern SF might be less interested in futurology, Gibson suggested that in order to predict the future it is necessary to have a stable present on which to build. The likes of Wells and Heinlein, he said, were sure of the nature of their world, and could thus confidently predict how it might change. The modern day SF writer is faced by a world that changes month-on-month, where technological advances come as a torrent rather than a trickle, and consequently prediction is a much more dodgy process. SF writers, he opined, were much safer dealing with space opera settings such as The Culture which are far enough advanced that there is no need to question how we got from here to there.

Gibson clearly has a great fondness for SF, and is happy to acknowledge his debt to the genre and community, but he appeared depressed by people who ask him to produce more books like Neuromancer. He said that his allegiance was to the narrative strategies of SF rather than to “genre”. Realizing he then needed to define genre, he said that it is what happens when a businessman says to you, “hey, you know that really novel experience you had last week, I can give you more like that”. A novel, Gibson said, ought to be novel.

Benefits of Globalization

~ Cheryl

Colin Harvey has a new post up at Suite 101 in which he catalogs all of the British Hugo winners in the written fiction categories. There are quite a few (though nowhere near as many as there would be had he included the fan categories). Towards the end he makes this observation: “The reader will notice a distinct surge in winners since 2001.”

And he’s right, there is a definite upswing in the number of British winners, especially in Best Novel where the frequency has gone up from around one a decade to every other year. What is the explanation for this? Have British writers suddenly got heaps better?

No, I don’t think so. Nor do I think that Emerald City had anything to do with it. What I think we are seeing here is the effect of the Internet, email and cheap air travel. It is now much easier for British writers to get published in the USA, and for them to travel to North America to meet their fans. In the next decade I look forward to seeing a sudden rise in winners from places other than the US, Canada and UK.

Dreaming En Français

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

I’ve just done a post over at the Translation Awards website about a new fiction webzine that will publish in both French and English (thanks to the wonderful World SF News for the tip-off) and have found myself intrigued by the name of the project.

The ‘zine is called Onirismes. Translation services render this as Dreams, but there is a more common French word for dream, rêve. Clearly the word is derived from the Greek word for dreams, Oneiroi, but the only place that root appears in common usage in French appears to be the word onirique, which means dreamlike. Onirismes, then, are perhaps things that appear to be dreams, but are not, which I think is a lovely way to describe speculative fiction stories.

Are there any French-speakers out there who can elucidate?

Pride Bristol Friday

~ Cheryl

Last night went very well. The film, Diagnosing Difference, was very good. Much of the material about medical approaches to trans people was slightly off target because the UK doesn’t follow US psychology practices (no DSM here, folks, we are de-pathologized). However, the wide variety of trans people interviewed was very refreshing, and the attitude very positive.

The panel also went well. Roz and I, of course, are panel veterans (though as moderator I tried to stay out of things most of the time). Finn Greig and Natacha Kennedy did well as the professional experts, but we need to drag them along to a few conventions to get panel practice. Bethany Black, being a professional entertainer, was superb. And it turns out that she’s also a total fangirl.

Beth’s bio does say that she’s a Goth, but during the panel Roz likened the experience, as a kid, of finding out that other trans people exist to the “sense of wonder” experience in science fiction. She quoted the first couple of lines of Roy Batty’s death scene from Blade Runner: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.” And Beth immediately completed the quote.

She’s also very funny. We need to get this girl to Eastercon.

Feminist SF at The Rejectionist

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

A blog called The Rejectionist is having a Feminist SF Week. They already have interview up with Liz Hand and Nnedi Okorafor, but my favorite piece to date is the introduction which contains stirring stuff like this:

Speculative fiction offers us human beings something different: not “common sense” but a sense we have in common that the world is larger and more filled with possibility than we might be able to imagine, a sense that enlarging the opportunities of other people’s lives does not have to mean making our own lives smaller. In fact, quite the opposite. If we’re writing the stories, there’s room on that spaceship for all of us.

Well, unless it is Tom Godwin’s spaceship, of course, but on balance I think speculative fiction does do rather well in this respect.

A Genre Like Any Other

~ Cheryl ~ 24 Comments

It is Booker Prize season again, and therefore time for wailing and gnashing of teeth around the blogosphere.

First up, if you want to see the long list, it can be found here.

And now the controversy. Last year, you may remember, Kim Stanley Robinson complained about the lack of recognition for his type of novel, and Booker judge John Mullan made a complete ass of himself by saying that the award didn’t look at science fiction because SF is, “bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.” Unsurprisingly, a few noses were put out of joint.

This year the chairman of the judges, Andrew Motion, has tried to head off any discussion by insisting that, despite the apparent lack of SF on the list, the jury did not “consciously” exclude it. That, of course, is exactly the same argument put forward by people defending all-white-male award lists. It is the “I’m not racist/sexist/etc., it is just that the books by white men are better than anything else” argument.

Motion compounds this with a foray into victim politics. According to The Guardian he said, “the Man Booker prize was an award for literary fiction and there were plenty of prizes for crime and sci-fi.”

That, of course, is as clear an admission as you can get that the Booker is not a general award for the “best” books of the year, but actually a very specific award for a very specific type of book: “literary fiction”.

Remember, the whole point of genre is that it is a marketing tool aimed at helping readers find “more like this”. Books are identified as belonging to a genre if they have common tropes, a small subset of expected plot structures, and generally are predictable. People whose reading is confined to a particular genre are people who don’t like reading outside of their comfort zone. Clearly Motion is one of those people.

Exactly how a “literary fiction” novel is identified is not clear, though I’m sure that Motion will know one when he sees one, just as Damon Knight did for SF. Anecdotally such books have been about middle-aged university professors with unhappy marriages who have affairs, and indeed sex seems to be an important trope as Motion bemoans the lack of it in this year’s potential nominees. The important point, however, is that “literary fiction” is not defined by being well written, it is defined by the fact that it conforms to the expectations of the literary fiction genre. A book that is well written, but does not conform to the expectations of “literary fiction” is, in Motion’s eyes, not a potential Booker candidate.

On the other side of the fence, Paul Graham Raven argues that we in the SF ghetto should not care if Motion and his pals don’t read our books. Indeed, we should worry if they did, because if they outside world ever finds out what we are up to, and starts to like it, our art will be horribly polluted by their attention.

This is exactly the same argument I am used to hearing from the crusties at Worldcon. “Don’t pay any attention to the likes of Dragon*Con and Comic-Con,” they wail, “if the sort of people who attend those events came to Worldcon our little club would be ruined, ruined I tell you!”

There’s a certain type of person who likes living in a ghetto, who likes having exclusive interests that few other people share. Often such people feel better if the outside world despises them, because it makes them feel even more special. And if that’s what they want to do, fine, but they shouldn’t expect everyone else with similar interests to want to stay in the ghetto with them. After all, for the writers (and publishers) there is money at stake; lots of it.

Of course popular culture has already invaded the science fiction ghetto. For the most part SF outsells literary fiction very nicely thank you. SF&F books can often be found on the NYT best seller lists. Sometimes they are by big names such as Rowling, Pratchett and Gaiman; in other cases they are franchised works such as the Star Wars novels (some of which are written by favorite authors of mine such as Karen Traviss and Sean Williams). So it is, I think, ridiculous to argue that SF would come to any further harm by being associated with the Booker.

What that association would do, however, is improve the sales prospects of some of the best writers in our field. Because while the Booker judges might think that their prize is only for that small subset of books that they identify as “literary”, the media and the book trade treat it as a prize for the best book of the year. Books that make the long list can expect a huge bump in sales, and the winner is guaranteed a print run in the millions.

That is why the Booker matters. If Motion and his pals want to have an award just for the sort of books that they like, that’s fine by me, but they have no right to claim that their little genre is any better than anyone else’s genre, and the media and book trade should not treat them as if it is.

The funny thing is, of course, that last year the Booker went to an historical novel, Wolf Hall, which is most definitely not a work in the literary fiction genre. Furthermore, this year there’s at least one other apparent historical fiction book on the long list. Except that, as I noted a few days ago, it is actually the first book in a trilogy of novels about immortality, with at least one immortal character in it. So despite Mr. Motion’s protestations, the Booker judges do have an SF novel on the list. It must have been the lack of talking squid that confused them.

Podcast Surfing

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I had a lot of housework to do today which meant I could catch up on a bunch of podcasts. I am totally addicted to the weekly chats between Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe, and thanks to Finncon I had two episodes to listen to. Amongst the topics in this week’s episode the boys once again talk about the sadly missed Charles N. Brown, including the story of how he met my friend Karen Burnham.

Also in this week’s episode, Jonathan recommends another podcast: Galactic Suburbia. This one is much more like Geek Syndicate, in that it has a regular structure and planned topics. It features a regular cast of three Aussie ladies, so if you want to get your ear adjusted to the accent before Worldcon you should definitely check it out. Also there’s some interesting discussion.

The topic that caused Jonathan to mention Galactic Suburbia is that old chestnut of “what is science fiction”. Pattern Recognition (and the rest of what I tend to think of as the Hubertus Bigend trilogy) comes under the microscope once again, as does Karen Joy Fowler’s Shirley Jackson Award winning story, “The Pelican Bar”. Sometimes it is the atmosphere of a novel that renders it SFnal (for some readers), sometimes it can be a single sentence. And this reminded me of something else.

In the past week on Twitter one of my friends took Locus to task for reviewing David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet on the grounds that it clearly wasn’t SF. Having had the pleasure of listening to Mitchell talk about the book, I know that one of the characters in it is immortal, though you have to read carefully to notice that. What’s more Galley Cat has reported that the book is the first part of a planned trilogy on the subject of immortality that will get more SFnal as it goes on. I’m looking forward to that.

Back with podcasts, I’ve just finished listening to the latest episode of Geek Syndicate. The final segment of the episode sees Nuge and his guest co-presenter, Stacey, speculate on the subject of their dream convention. In stark contrast to the Finncon panel on a similar theme, they said nothing about who would attend, but focused instead on the guests and the panels they would like to see. Nuge’s con would take some staging as many of the guests and panelists are dead, but he has some great ideas. And I definitely want to see Stacey’s “Neil Gaiman interviews Douglas Adams” panel.

Lots of Linkage

~ Cheryl

It has been one of those busy days online, and as I’m getting ready to head off to Finncon I am being lazy and just linking:

– Jennifer Ouellette sums up a week of controversy in the science blogging field. While I share her dislike of “advertoiral”, I also agree wholeheartedly with her view that people should be allowed to earn a reasonable fee for writing blogs.

– Guangyi Li asks, “What does China imagine?”.

– Another great podcast from Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe, this time with added Elizabeth Hand and Peter Straub.

– Graham Sleight posts as fascinating talk about how literature works that he gave at ReaderCon.

SF for Kids in Local Library

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Today we had a little arts event in the local Civic Hall (put on by these folks). As the blurb promised some focus on literature I dropped in so see what was going on. I am very glad I did, because I had a long and interesting chat with a community officer from the local library.

During the summer vacation the UK runs a national literacy initiative for kids called the Summer Reading Challenge. Basically the idea is to get the kids to read six books over the summer. This year the focus of of the challenge is very much on science fiction. Indeed, there is even a special animated web site called SpaceHop that is part of the project (beware, slightly annoying music – off switch is at bottom of screen).

What’s more, in two weeks time (July 24th) the local library here in Trowbridge will have a special open day for kids. The theme is a Doctor Who alien invasion. There will be Daleks, Cybermen and even K-9. Also Imperial Stormtroopers. The kids will be encouraged to come in costume and vote for their favorite bad guys. Obviously it is very short notice, and I’ll be away much of the time between now and then, but I’ll see if I can rustle up a few freebies for the kids.

This does sound very promising. Peter, the Librarian, was enthusing to me about Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. That’s the sort of person we need encouraging kids to read. Hopefully we can give him some help. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Liz Goes Direct

~ Cheryl

Liz Williams is going to be selling a number of short stories direct to readers through the coming year. Some of them will be Inspector Chen stories. This will be an excellent opportunity for those of you who are not familiar with Liz’s work to give it a try. The web site structures for signing up are still being put in place, but of you are interested take a look here.

There’s My Flying Car!

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

One of the first articles I bought for Clarkesworld was this one, which looks at the real-world possibilities for favorite science-fiction vehicles such as flying cars and jet-packs. Amongst the prototypes featured were the Transition from Terrafugia. The good news is that the FAA has finally given approval for it to go on sale. Production models should be available towards the end of 2011. The price is a cool $194,000, but the company claims to already have taken orders for 70 of them. Verily, we are living in the future.

Unseen History

~ Cheryl ~ 41 Comments

The weekly podcast by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe had a guest conversationalist last weekend. Amelia Beamer was on hand to talk about her debut novel, The Loving Dead, and join in the general flow of conversation. I now very much want to read that book, but the part of the podcast I want to highlight is on a rather different topic.

Jonathan, lover of short fiction collections that he is, was talking about the recent SF Signal Mind Meld on essential short story collections. Discussion has apparently happened (though I’m not sure where, it doesn’t seem to be in the SF Signal comment thread) about the gender balance of the selections. Mike Resnick’s picks are almost exclusively male. Mike (again allegedly, I’m going by the podcast here) defended himself by saying that he had focused on the old days when few women were writing. Other people then came back with names like Margaret St. Clair and Zenna Henderson who, coincidentally, were people from the Periodic Table of Women in SF whose names I was not familiar with.

Of course this is the way it works. As I have explained elsewhere, one of the primary reasons for gender imbalance is that women are invisible to many men. Consequently, when men come to write history, they often only write about what men have done. When we look back on a period in time through the lens of history we see a world in which only men were important, but that’s because it is only what the men did that got written about.

In science fiction criticism history is of interest primarily as a means of tracing influence. There is this idea of The Conversation, in which what each author writes is seen as being a response to what has gone before. In the podcast Jonathan speculates on the influence of these invisible early women writers on the field, and suggests the possibility of an alternate past for SF — a sort of reversal of the traditional alternate history idea in that we still got to where we are today, but we actually got there by a different route.

Is this plausible? If the male writers didn’t “see” the women writers, surely they would not have been influenced by them. Well, no, because one of the things you learn as a a feminist — indeed one of the things that tends to make you a feminist — is that men do hear what women say, they just do so subconsciously.

There is a common phenomenon in office life where a group of people will be having a meeting and the woman in the group makes an innovative suggestion. Everyone ignores her. Ten minutes later one of the men in the meeting makes exactly the same suggestion, and everyone praises him for his cleverness. If you don’t believe that this happens, ask any trans woman who has seen office dynamics from both sides of the gender divide. I assure you, it is very real.

So yes, I suspect that the likes of Margaret St. Clair and Zenna Henderson did have an influence on the early development of SF. One day perhaps some feminist scholar will trace those links. Writing history is an ongoing act of discovery.

(By the way, I’m sure that this phenomenon of selective seeing applies to many other social dynamics besides gender. I’m discussing it in a gender context here because that’s how it arise in the podcast.)

Arguing By Example

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

The ripples around the blogosphere caused by John Gray’s New Statesman article have been rather interesting, though a little depressing.

Laurie Penny’s original response was spot on when it said that Gray had completely ignored women writers. That’s a valid point regardless of what you might think of Gray’s argument.

Some of the follow-up on Twitter (necessarily limited by the format) appeared to ignore Laurie’s points about women and instead cast her piece in the form of “ignorant outsider dares to write about SF and is slapped down”. That’s terribly fannish, but not very helpful.

The debate has now been taken up by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber. Much of the discussion is, I think, being carried by Socialists who are upset with Gray for suggesting that it is no longer possible to speculate about a better world to come. That’s understandable, and it is a valid political discussion that the Left has been having with Gray for some time. However, it doesn’t necessarily address the point about science fiction.

The trouble is that everyone is arguing by example. To a large extent that’s Gray’s fault because his reading in SF appears rather thin, and by relying on a few high profile writers to make his point he opens himself up to citation of counter-examples by those better versed in the field. But none of this makes any sense. Gray points to a few writers and says “science fiction has developed in this way”. Other people point at different writers and respond, “no it hasn’t, you are completely wrong.” It is the old blind men and the elephant story yet again.

Instinctively the point that Gray makes has a certain validity. Science fiction no longer routinely points to a glorious, gleaming chrome technological future in the manner so beautifully parodied by Donald Fagen’s song, “IGY”. That doesn’t mean that no SF writer predicts a better world to come, but equally the fact that some do doesn’t make the general trend wrong. Of course to prove the point you’d have to make a fairly comprehensive survey of the field, and that’s something that neither I nor Gray have the time to do.

Still, at least this discussion is generating lots of mentions for interesting political SF.

SF in New Statesman

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Today sees an article about the current state of science fiction in the British political magazine, New Statesman. Written by John Gray, who is billed as the magazine’s lead book reviewer but is perhaps better known as an expert on political philosophy, the article attempts to contrast the science fiction of the 20th Century with that of today in terms of changes in its political outlook. Gray’s argument is not so much that SF has switched allegiance (it has always been home to both left-wing and right-wing thinkers), but that today’s writers no longer look forward to a better world, they simply comment on the problems of the existing one.

As arguments about SF go it is fairly simplistic, cherry-picking some key writers to make the point. But Gray’s interest is in political philosophy and if you only look at that aspect of SF then it is probably fair to say that the change he notes does indeed exist.

What I find much more encouraging is that here is a well-known British academic writing about science fiction in a mainstream magazine, and treating it very seriously. That’s yet more evidence that we are winning the culture war.

A Blast from the Past (in Peru)

~ Cheryl

World SF News has a fascinating post up about a newly discovered science fiction novel that was published in serial form in a newspaper between 1843 and 1844. And if the antiquity doesn’t surprise you, how about this: the novel, Lima From Now to 100 Years, by Julián Manuel de Portillo, was published in El Comercio in Peru.

Read more here.