Science Fiction

Moorcock on Steampunk

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

In today’s Guardian Michael Moorcock reviews The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. Along the way he talks a bit about the Steampunk phenomenon.

Steampunk reached its final burst of brilliant deliquescence with Pynchon’s Against the Day and his Airship Boys. Once the wide world gets hold of an idea, however, it can only survive through knowing irony. Its tools, its icons, its angle of attack are absorbed into the cultural mainstream.

So, Steampunk has been dead since 2006, eh? Then again, Moorcock was writing it back in 1971 so he has every right to say such things.

Yes, We Have Won the Culture War

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Ron Hogan posted this video to YouTube during Worldcon and it has taken me a while to catch up with it, but I think it is still worth passing on. In it Lev Grossman explains how we have won the culture war, and expresses his gratitude to Susanna Clarke for making his book (The Magicians) possible.

Guy Kay on Writing Real People

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

More from today’s Guardian: Guy Gavriel Kay writes about the privacy threat inherent in using real people in your novels. He doesn’t go anywhere near the minefield of real-person slash, but he does make an eloquent argument for using fantasy as an alternative to claiming that your fictional character is an accurate portrayal of a real person.

LGBT Advocacy in Spec Fic

~ Cheryl ~ 13 Comments

Via Hal Duncan (on Twitter) I have just discovered The Outer Alliance, a new group dedicated to intelligent discussion of LGBT issues in speculative literature. Here’s the mission statement and pledge.

  • The Outer Alliance is a group of SF/F writers and friends dedicated to LGBT advocacy through education, support, and celebration.
  • As a member of the Outer Alliance I pledge to uphold the tenets of education, support, and celebration of LGBT contributions to the science-fiction and fantasy genres through my actions and work, online and in print.

Naturally I have asked to join. Equally naturally I will be keeping an eye on them to make sure that this is an LGBT group and not an LGb(t) group.

And y’all should sign up too.

Future Human – Bad Idea?

~ Cheryl

OK, another silly headline. Let me explain.

Bad Idea is a fiction magazine that also runs fun events in London.

Future Human is their September 10th event at which they will be workshopping flash fiction on the theme of the future of humanity. The guest panel will be: Cory Doctorow, Gwyneth Jones and Ian Watson, whom you should all know, plus Matthew de Abaitua, author of Clarke Award-nominated The Red Men.

The event is taking place at the totally awesome Old Operating Theatre Museum (the same place that we did the Lambshead Guide launch). And it is sponsored by Hendrick’s Gin so there are free cocktails with the price of admission.

Tickets only £12 and space is limited. More information, including how to submit your story for consideration, here or on Facebook (but you need to friend them first).

An SF Music Blog

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Thanks to Lou Anders I have discovered Sci Fi Songs, a blog by John Anealio that features songs inspired by SF&F books, movies and even blogs. I particularly like John’s song, “George R.R. Martin is not your bitch”, though there are also many I haven’t listened to yet. All of the music is original as well. As far as I can see, John isn’t aware of the filk community. I think I need to do some connecting.

We’re All Going To Die x 144

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

Curiously timed to coincide with Worldcon, Slate magazine is running a week-long feature entitled “How Is America Going To End?” This exercise in futurology plans get all sorts of clever (and perhaps a few not-so-clever) people to predict the form that America’s demise will take.

In addition you can play along yourself, via the Choose Your Own Apocalypse game. This provides 144 imaginative sources of terminal decline, ranging from the mildly plausible to the downright whacko. Slate‘s writers have done a pretty good job. Here are some examples of the sorts of apocalyptic disasters they predict:

  • The Rapture happens;
  • The Mayans were right about 2012;
  • Alien invasion;
  • Asteroid strike;
  • Gray goo;
  • Robot overlords; and
  • Invasion from Canada

But I am sure we can do better. There is, for example, no explicit mention of tentacled beings from beyond the stars; of the Humboldt Squid inventing machine guns; of re-animated dinosaurs; of sex change drugs in the water; or of Americans becoming addicted to yaoi. Besides, we all know that there cannot be only 144 causes of apocalypse. There have to be 666.

Your mission (Jim, should you choose to accept it), is to come up with lots of crazy new ideas. Let’s see how creative we can be.

(Hat tip to Kelley Eskridge who pointed me at the Slate article.)

SFWA Gets a New Face

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The SFWA web site has got an overhaul this weekend. It looks very nice, though I’m not sure about this tempting people with a cup of coffee on each page. It makes me thirsty just looking at it. I’m especially pleased to see that they are doing something to promote their members via the site. There’s a definite sense that SFWA is going somewhere these days.

SF Signal World Tour Concludes

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Karen Burnham’s epic Mind Meld that surveys the state of science fiction around the world has finally concluded with Part IV. That also has links to all previous parts. It is an excellent series, and not just because a whole bunch of my friends had responses in it. Recommended.

Guardian Goes Jingoistic

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Following on from Sam Jordison’s excellent tour through past Hugo Award winners, Alison Flood has decided to conduct a similar odyssey through the British Fantasy Awards. The principal rationale for this is that they have a longer history (by 3 years), but I hope she does follow up on the idea of looking at the “World” Fantasy Award too. Both awards have produced some rather odd winners at times, and both have tended to go for pure horror novels (the BFA probably more often than the WFA). Mainly, however, I’d be disappointed to see a survey of top class fantasy novels that didn’t include the likes of Little Big, Mythago Wood, Thomas The Rhymer, The Physiognomy, Declare and Ysabel.

A rather more embarrassing piece of Britocentrism was provided yesterday by Stuart Jeffries who not only managed to irritate John Scalzi, but also inexplicably left Ian McDonald and Charlie Stross off his roll call of top British SF writers. I can only assume that SF coverage has proved so popular at The Guardian that their editors are scraping the barrel looking for more contributors. If this is the best they can do, I hasten to point out that the UK is home to a large number of top flight SF critics, any one of whom could have done better than Mr. Jeffries.

Charles Brown, R.I.P.

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Today I made my way back to Darkest Somerset from Finncon. I kept up with Twitter a lot of the way, but it is hard to maintain a connection on a moving train, and while I was traveling south from Bristol the news broke that Charles N Brown, co-founder, editor and publisher of Locus, had died. Charles had been on his way home from Readercon.

It is impossible to have been involved in science fiction over the past few decades without getting to know Charles. He has won an enormous number of Hugo Awards, and his magazine has been the journal of record for the community for longer than I have been reading it. When I first started Emerald City I hoped that one day I might write reviews as well as Locus‘s star reviewer, Gary K Wolfe. I never dreamed that one day I would meet Gary, or Charles, let alone be invited to their homes, and to write for Locus myself. However, one thing that I learned very quickly is that if you established any sort of presence in the field then Charles would find you, because the science fiction community was his life and he made it his business to know what went on in it. If you had something interesting to say about books, Charles made it his business to seek you out and talk to you.

Why did he do this? Why do any of us do what we do for science fiction? Why have I traveled to conventions in Ireland, France, New Zealand, Australia and Finland already this year? We do these things because we love science fiction, because we want other people to love science fiction, and we want to encourage talented young people who are taking an interest in the genre.

Charles did this for a lot of people. He tirelessly promoted writers through Locus, he attended many conventions, and he sought out critics who were starting to make a name for themselves such as Graham Sleight, Karen Burnham and myself. Charles and I didn’t always agree about books, but we could always guarantee a good conversation about them. He bought me dinner far more often than I returned the favor, at least in part so that we could have those conversations.

I’m delighted to see from the official announcement at Locus Online that the magazine will continue to be published. Liza and her team have a huge task ahead of them. I have no doubt that they will continue to produce a great magazine. Reproducing the enthusiasm that Charles had for the field will be somewhat more challenging. He devoted his life to his favorite literature. Had anyone asked him how he wanted to go, I suspect that he might have said that he’d like to die quietly, in his sleep, on his way home from a very successful convention. Having seen various people’s reports from Readercon, I am sure that Charles will have come away thinking that the community he loved was doing very well, and continuing to produce great fiction. I will miss him very much, and I’m sure he had a whole lot of unfulfilled plans, but I think also he will have died happy with a sense of a job well done. It is certainly something he deserved.

Modes of Fantasy

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Today’s academic papers were very interesting. I don’t want to go into every paper in detail here as it would bore most of you. However, I do want to highlight a couple of ideas that came out of the discussion on Jyrki Korpua’s paper on Tolkien.

Firstly we are all used to thinking of The Lord of the Rings as the archetypal secondary world fantasy. However, Adam pointed out that one of the functions of the hobbits in the story is to stand in for the modern, middle class novel reader who can then visit the far stranger medieval and Anglo-Saxon worlds of Gondor and Rohan. When Tolkien tries to do without our hobbit intermediaries, such as in The Silmarillion, we find his books much less accessible. This makes LotR much more of a portal fantasy.

We also discussed the whole idea of the novel as the story of a character’s life journey, the Bildungsroman, and how this is actually a Renaissance invention that was possible only when people abandoned the medieval world view of an unchanging society and started to see the world as something that could and should be changed.

Bad Days, Good Days at The Guardian

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

There’s lots of Guardian posts to talk about this morning.

To start with, a small moment of relief. I had been beginning to lose my faith in the Forces of Nannyism, but I’m pleased to report that someone has at last started yelling “Moral Panic!” over Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels. Here it is. Thanks to Iain Emsley for pointing me to it. Now we can all complain about how silly this is (except for those of us also prone to attacks of moral panic).

Secondly the paper has caught up with The 99. I tweeted about it last week, but you may have missed that so here’s Riazat Butt (a religious affairs correspondent, no less) talking about Muslim super heroes, and here’s the link where you can download the Origins comic for free.

Finally Alison Flood catches up with the happy news about Chris Beckett. I particularly liked this comment:

Judge James Walton, chair of Radio 4’s The Write Stuff, said that Beckett’s win was “a bit of a surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand”.

I do also hope that Andy Hook is getting something out of this. He might be folding Elastic Press, but he still deserves plenty of kudos for having published the book.

And for those of you who are thinking the the book needs a new publisher, John Jarrold is happily thinking about a bidding war.

International Mind Meld – Part II

~ Cheryl

The second part of Karen Burnham’s excellent SF Signal Mind Meld feature on non-anglophone SF is now online. It includes material by several of my friends, and also by a bunch of people I’d love to get to meet. Apparently there’s more to come next week as well.

It occurs to me that this is one of those areas in which the Mind Meld format works really well. The topic is so vast that no one person can have more than the briefest glimpse of the whole. However, read together, all of these individual glimpses help us get a idea of just how much is going on that we can’t read.

And talking of things we can’t read, I discover from Tero that the Al Reynolds story in the latest issue of Tähtivaeltaja is actually an exclusive. It is in Finnish, so most of you won’t be able to read it, but if you are a Reynolds completist then you need to get it because there is no English version. No, even Al doesn’t have a copy in English. Details here.

See what can happen when you get drunk in a bar with a bunch of Finns…

We Stand Up

~ Cheryl

In this age of Twitter and attention deficiency there is a new fashion for writing short fiction, but Bruce Holland Rogers has been writing very short stories for years. Normally you can only get them on subscription (a remarkably good value of $10/year for 3 stories a month), but this month Bruce has opted to make one story (quite an old one) public. He did so because of the recent events in Iran, but in many ways it is also a very appropriate story to point you at on this, the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riot. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, “We Stand Up”, by Bruce Holland Rogers.