Two interesting links have come through today.
Firstly this one from World SF News pointing at information about SF&F in Russia.
And secondly this one on the Croatian SF blog, about the fantasy writer Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, who was apparently twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature despite writing that horrid genre stuff.
Damien G Walter was at FantasyCon. I’ve been wondering what he would write about it for The Guardian. My curiosity has now been satisfied. Damien has discovered the very wonderful Tartarus Press, and through them Arthur Machen.
Alternatively: Weird fiction – yet one more thing you can blame the Welsh for inventing.
The final panel of the day at BristolCon was supposed to be about the differences between SF and fantasy, an old and rather stale topic. However, Juliet McKenna derailed this rather cleverly by suggesting that instead we talk about the differences between speculative fiction and non-speculative (mimetic) fiction. Given the recent debate about SF and the Booker Prize, this was very topical.
As I have mentioned before (and thanks to Farah for the fine detail) publishers are only allowed to submit a limited number of books to the Booker jury. The limit is 3 books, but the key question, as Al Reynolds immediately identified when I mentioned this during the panel, is whether that is 3 books per publisher, or three books per imprint.
Why does this matter? Well, the book industry has consolidated heavily over the last few decades. There are now effectively only 4 main publishers in the UK. A small outfit such as CannonGate or PS Publishing might well submit something non-mimetic, but a big publisher like HarperCollins has more than 3 imprints. The chances of them submitting something from Voyager or Angry Robot are very small indeed.
So, does anyone know how the rules work? It makes a huge difference to what the Booker judges see.
I’d also like to know how much it costs to submit a book to the Booker jury. Because if it is expensive that would tend to discourage small presses from participating.
Update: As per the comments below, it appears that the rules are somewhat more complex. Publishers are allowed to submit 2 books, plus another 5 that they jury is not necessarily obliged to look at if they don’t want to. Also publishers who submit books have to agree to a fairly hefty financial commitment should one of their books make the short list. While the huge publicity surrounding the Booker probably means that such an investment will be covered by increased sales, it may still be enough to deter a small press.
While I was pleased to see New Scientist publishing a collection of fiction last week, I thought Stan Robinson’s associated attack on the Booker Prize was unlikely to get anywhere. The Woolf anecdote was good, but boosting one genre by attacking another is never going to work. And as the Booker folks explained to Alison Flood, they are dependent on what publishers send them, so they can’t be expected to take all of the blame.
Nevertheless, this being the Internet, is was only a matter of time before someone took exception to what Stan said and decided to play the Victim Politics card. Oh woe, we are oppressed! Us poor LitFic folks need our Booker Prize, because the evil, nasty science fiction folks have their own awards and get all the glory and the money and we have to have our own special award that’s only for us so we can get shiny things too, otherwise it is NOT FAIR!!! (Cue desperate sobbing.) Yes, really, here it is.
Also here’s someone else with an interesting table of how often different prizes get mentioned in the online media, based on searches of Google News.
That in itself is worth considering, though, because it introduces a question about what gets into the Google News search. Locus does, and io9. I’m pretty sure that SFAW doesn’t. What about, say SF Signal?
It turns out that the way to get into Google News is to ask Google if they will list you. They don’t guarantee to do so, but then after the recent HG Wells coverage it seems unlikely that they’d ban us. So, has anyone out there tried to get listed? And if so did it succeed?
BTW, the page for submitting content appears to be broken at the moment, which is why I haven’t done any experimentation.
The latest issue of the superb Finnish SF magazine, Tähtivaeltaja, has arrived in the mail. I have an article in there. The article is in Finnish (thanks for the translation, Liisa!) so I’m afraid there’s no point in most of you looking for a copy. I may post the English version at some point but obviously I need permission to do so.
This issue is guest co-edited by Anne Leinonen and while not quite women-only definitely has a strong female influence. My own article is about recent books with strong feminist themes. A number of Finnish ladies write about their favorite feminist SF as well. Many thanks to Toni Jerrman for turning his magazine over to Anne in this way.
Modern cars are getting so quiet that people are starting to complain that they can’t hear them coming. That’s dangerous. We are used to the noise of cars. Folk might start getting run over because they didn’t hear any cars coming and forgot to look. So law makers are starting to think about requiring manufacturers to make their cars noisier. The question is, what noise should they make?
According to Michael Giberson (who got it from the LA Times), Nissan thinks they should make nice, futuristic noises as if they were the flying vehicles in Blade Runner. But of course any decent car manufacturer will allow you to download your very own custom car tune. Mike has some ideas.
Being a sad aging biker, I would probably have my car sounding like a Harley in heat. It might not be very original, but it is a lovely noise.
Today the wonderful World SF News blog led me to this report from the Syrian Arab News Agency about the 2nd Science Fiction Literature Seminar in Damascus. According to the report, the seminar was, “organized by the Ministry of Culture in cooperation with the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO).” And the Minister of Culture, Dr. Riad Naasan Agha, was on hand to address the delegates.
The Minister concluded by calling for bolstering science fiction literature in Arab culture due to its ability to open up new horizons.
Can you imagine the UK ministry of culture doing anything like that? Do you even know who the UK’s Minister of Culture is? (I didn’t, and it turns out that her portfolio also includes tourism – New Labour isn’t too keen on culture unless it also brings in dollars to Theme Park Britain.)
The USA doesn’t even have a Minister of Culture (though the NYT thinks that perhaps it should), though the US does appear to make it easier for citizens to promote culture as individuals than the UK does.
Worldcon in Damascus, anyone?
No, thought not.
By the way, the conference was named in honor of Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Tufail al-Qaisi al-Andalusi, known as Ibn Tufail in Arabic countries and Abubacer in the West, a 12th Century Muslim philosopher best known for his allegorical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Wikipedia describes the book as follows:
[it] tells the story of an autodidactic feral child, raised by a gazelle and living alone on a desert island, who, without contact with other human beings, discovers ultimate truth through a systematic process of reasoned inquiry.
You may also like to check this post on a web site devoted to Muslim philosophers.
Last week Lavie Tidhar’s World SF News blog included this post about Creatures of Glass and Light: New European Stories of the Fantastic, an anthology of European SF put together for the 2007 Eurocon by my pal Klaus Mogensen. I checked with Klaus and the book is still available here, however, that web site is in Danish so if you are interested and can’t understand it ask me and I’ll put you in touch.
As a result of all that, today I got email about a Danish blog that reviews Danish-language SF in English. You can find those reviews here. (Nice use of tags to allow easy access to just the reviews.)
And don’t forget that you can keep up with developments in Danish fandom via Knud Larn’s Fan News Denmark blog.
Fancy a bit of electronica? Here’s Austin’s ArcAttack playing the Doctor Who theme on two large Tesla coils. Just what we need for the next San Antonio Worldcon?
This and much more Tesla coil goodness can be found at Jennifer Ouellette’s latest Twisted Physics column.
Gary Farber weighs in on the “what is science fiction” issue by reminding us that Damon Knight didn’t intend to set himself up as an authority figure (i.e. the person who identified science fiction by pointing at it), but rather believed that the pointing had to be a community effort.
Which is actually quite relevant because it really doesn’t matter how often the Margaret Atwoods of this world point at their work and say, “that’s not science fiction” if most of the rest of the world is convinced that it is.
It being the season for digging about in piles of numbers, Tero has been looking at gender balance in Finnish short fiction awards. And lo, it appears that since the turn of the millennium the ladies have almost totally taken control. Awards for novels don’t follow the same pattern, as far as I recall, but it is interesting all the same.
For those of you not thoroughly fed up of the whole Culture Wars thing by now I present a couple more interesting pieces.
Firstly THE Sodomite, Mr. Hal Duncan, has got himself a gig writing a column for BCS Review. His first effort takes on the history and definition of “science fiction”, passing along the way to look at the origins of the Culture Wars. I suspect it is a little more accurate than Mr. Grossman’s piece, and I can assure you that it is a whole lot more entertaining.
And for those of you who still don’t believe that genre fiction can aspire to the highest standards of literature, here’s John Crowley talking about Little Big and the influences thereon: Joyce, Pynchon, Nabokov, Carroll…
Ask science fiction fans about global warming and there’s a good chance they’ll start waxing lyrical about massive engineering projects that will Save Us All. We are, after all, used to the idea of terraforming planets so that humans can live on them. Why now terraform our own (deliberately rather than accidentally). Greg Benford is a big advocate of the newly minted discipline of geoengineering.
Well, not to be thought fuddy-duddies, the Royal Society, Britain’s premier science club, launched an investigation. Their report has just been published. Oliver Morton has a summary of it here, and the top finding is, “none of these options in any way takes the place of emissions control.” Sorry Greg. That’s not to say that such methods can’t help, but in the opinion of the Royal Society we still need the economic and political measures that are currently being put in place.
Oli and the Climate Feedback blog have both done round-ups of how the UK press has managed to (mis)understand the report.
Some of the responses to the women and the Hugos debate have suggested that we need to do more to promote SF written by women so that people know to read it. Others have said that few women are eligible, or that women don’t vote. Niall Harrison made the point that only 13% of submissions to this year’s Clarke Award were from women. Elsewhere it has been suggested that only around 39% of Worldcon attendees are female, which might introduce a bias.
We don’t get hard data on actual voters, which is a shame. I have a sneaking suspicion that, because so many women are brought up to be self-effacing and non-competitive, we are more likely to come out with excuses for not voting such as, “I don’t think I know enough to decide” or “I couldn’t bear to choose between them.”
The number of women writers, however, can be checked, sort of. The first thing to note here is that the Clarke is supposedly for “science fiction” only, while the Hugos are definitely (because it says so in the WSFS Constitution) for “science fiction and fantasy”. The Hugos are also open to all books published anywhere in the world, and I’m not going to be able to get a list of those. But I did think I could make a start. As usual, the Feminist SF Wiki has a page for eligible works by women, and people like Tempest keep an eye on the market. However, there are not many novels listed. I thought that there must be more. Also there was no comparison with male writers.
So I figured I could just go to the Locus list of Forthcoming Books and count. I confess to having done this very quickly, and there are all sorts of issues. I was by no means 100% sure which books were novels, which were not reprints, and even which people using their initials were women. Bearing that in mind, this is what I found: over the whole of 2009 Locus listed 243 novels by men, and 74 by women. That’s only 30% of the eligible novels by women.
Is that the whole picture? I suspect not. To start with Locus doesn’t list everything. I did not see any books from Juno in the list, for example. Not did I see Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue, which is a DAW book by someone well known in fandom on both sides of the Atlantic that has been getting a lot of good press. So Locus may have a bias against “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance”, or the publishers of such books may not submit data to Locus.
But the thing that really scared me was this. I looked down my list of novels by women that might reasonably be described as “science fiction” as opposed to “fantasy”. I found 9. Yes, just nine. There were two books I did not count: Justina Robson and Elizabeth Bear have both written what is clearly SF to me but which uses characters from mythology and is therefore likely to be seen as fantasy by many people. I did include a book by Margaret Atwood because it is very clearly SF no matter what the author says.
But the bottom line is that of all the Hugo-eligible novels produced this year (that Locus reports), less than 4% are science fiction by women. And because Locus under-reports classes of fantasy books that are generally written by women that number is probably an over-estimate.
I don’t like the sound of that.
The Genre v Literary “discussion” has spilled over today into The Guardian’s book blog. The post derives from a new item a few days ago in which Scottish Booker-winning author, James Kelman, speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival, lambasted his fellow Scots for writing “crap” about detectives and middle-class teenage magicians. Much local angst has followed, and today Alan Bissett takes up his sword (or perhaps claymore) on Kelman’s behalf.
Much of what Bissett has to say runs contrary to what Lev Grossman has to say in the WSJ. While Grossman felt that authors ought to write what people want to read, Bissett holds out against crass materialism and bemoans the focus of publishers on the profit motive to the exclusion of literary merit. It is an argument where I tend to come down on the side of literary merit most of the time but recognize that everyone has to earn a living. Much of what I do these days is intended to help people whose writing has literary merit earn a living. No one, however, is ever going to “win” an argument of that type. It is probably as old as Homer.
Where I take issue with Bissett (and for that matter Kelman), however, is one small sentence:
But genre fiction is, by definition, generic.
If that were true we’d have a lot less confusion.
Let’s step back a little. From the commercial point of view, the idea of “genre” is very simple. There are many readers out there who prefer to read simple, predictable books with happy endings. They want a particular style, a particular setting, a particular form to the story. So, for example, there are people who love to read books about clever detectives who solve mysterious deaths; there are people who love to read about young farm boys who discover, over 10 adventure-filled volumes, that they are long-lost princes; there are people who love to read about lonely girls from dull towns who go on holiday to an exotic country and end up marrying tall, dark handsome and very rich strangers. Much of of the book trade is geared towards fulfilling this sort of market. Often these books are very formulaic and are written by lazy writers making money from lazy readers.
But when people talk about “genre” they don’t talk about “a book with X type of formulaic plot”, they talk about “mystery” or “epic fantasy” or “romance” or, perhaps most confusing of all, “science fiction”.
Why is it so confusing to describe science fiction as a “genre”. Well, can you tell me what the stereotypical plot of a “science fiction” novel is?
No, when people talk about genre they often don’t recognize it by its plots, they recognize its by its tropes. So any book that has elves or dragons in it is “fantasy”, any book with a detective is “mystery” and any book set in the future or featuring talking squid in space is “science fiction”; and therefore, by Alan Bissett’s definition, is genre and has a lazy, formulaic plot and bad writing.
Except if the book happens to be written in 1948 but set in 1984; or if it contains talking pigs; in which case Mr. Bissett and his ilk will look at it with amazement and say, “that’s not science fiction!”
So by all means, Mr. Bissett and Mr. Kelman, complain about poor writing, encourage your fellow Scots (and the rest of the world) to write better. After all, I was unimpressed with Ms. Rowling myself. But when you do so, base your complaints on the quality of the book in question, not on the subject matter, or the label that the publisher might have given it, or its popularity.
The SF world has long been familiar with the schizophrenic nature of Mr. Banks. Omit his middle initial and he is a respectable and hugely successful writer of mainstream fiction who gets invited to literary festivals. Add that middle M. and he becomes the equally hugely successful writer of thoroughly disreputable science fiction novels that no one in the UK literary establishment would be seen dead reading.
What, then, are we to make of the provocatively titled Transition? As this review in The Independent points out, it is published under the name of the respectable, M-less Banks, but it is undeniably a world of science fiction. It is a book about parallel universes, and a secretive organization that controls passage between them (spookily similar in some ways to The City & The City, though both books must have been written at around the same time).
Ignore, therefore, the rather silly comment of reviewer Doug Johnstone that the book somehow has more gravitas because it is set of Earth rather than on some alien planet. Ponder instead on what Mr. Banks might be saying to his mainstream audience here. Is he perhaps saying, “times have changed, we won the culture war, it is time to open your minds a little”?
I don’t know. I can’t pretend to be able to get inside his head. But I do want to read that book.
The indefatigable James Bacon informs me that a book store in London’s Cecil Court (just off Charing Cross Road) now has an extensive selection of 19th and 20th Century science fiction, fantasy and crime fiction, including many magazines. There’s no web site, but if you are in London check out Greening Burland at 27 Cecil Court.
Sorry about this folks, but I do need to get some paid work out of the way before the end of the month. This is in lieu of proper blogging.
Jed Hartman pointed me at the Geek Feminism Blog, and in particular the Where are all the men bloggers? post, which is hilarious.
Justine is absolutely spot on when she says that wannabe writers tend to ask Very Wrong Questions.
Crochety claims that Jules Verne and HG Wells didn’t write science fiction because they didn’t call it “science fiction”, which I think is the stupidest thing I have heard on a very stupid topic for a very long time.
Damien Walter wants to start a Support Our Zines Day, and as he’s planning to donate money to Clarkesworld as part of it I’m certainly in favor, though there are, of course, many other fine zines out there that deserve your support.
Tim Holman has some more fascinating data, this time proving that urban fantasy is keeping the SF&F business afloat.
From the excellent World SF News blog I discover that there is now a blog (in English) about Croation science fiction. That in turn led me to the web site of Solaria magazine, which is in Hungarian so a bit difficult for me to read but very pretty.
Oh, look, here are the Hugo results in Hungarian!
In checking the links for the Best Fanwriter Panel post I discovered that issue #4 of Journey Planet has been published. This issue has a theme of… (wait for it) …science fiction!
I must admit that I found it desperately sad to find Claire Brialey feeling that she had to justify writing about science fiction, because in the fannish circles in which she moves it is apparently not the done thing for fans to actually have any interest in SF. I was kind of hoping that nonsense was dead by now, but I guess it takes dinosaurs a very long time to die.
Fortunately James Bacon and Chris Garcia have no such antiquated scruples, and the SF-special of Journey Planet has a fair amount of interesting material in it. I have to say that, of course, because one of the articles is by me. But it also has John Hertz, and a short but very welcome extract from Paul McAuley’s forthcoming Gardens of the Sun, his sequel to The Quiet War.
You can find all four issues of Journey Planet online at efanzines.com. Now they have four issues under their belts, don’t be surprised to see them on the Best Fanzine Hugo ballot next year.