Seen in The Stage today, an article about the BBC commissioning new science fiction radio plays:
BBC Radio 4 commissioning editor Jeremy Howe said the success of Doctor Who meant actors are keen to appear in science fiction productions.
“There is a queue of people wanting to be in science fiction, because it’s seen to be sexy,†he said.
Wow. (Hat tip to Maura).
Interesting post by Larry Nolen on the lack of diversity in science fiction.
Matt Cheney has been having a conversation with Eric Rosenfeld on the subject of science fiction criticism and has, I suspect, got up one or two noses.
I can’t be there, but you can. John & Mary Show You Their Shorts – at Borderlands Books, tonight, 7:00pm, as per Whatever.
Kevin and I have just completed around 40 minutes worth of telephone interview for MSN Mexico. This was for Roberto De Antuñano’s Ultralinea program. He wanted to talk to someone about WSFS and the Hugos, and of course Kevin is The Man as far as WSFS is concerned. Hopefully we did a good job. I have no idea when, or if, any of this will be broadcast, but if I find out I shall let you know. I’d like to thank Roberto for giving us the opportunity to plug WSFS to his audience. Here’s hoping we see a lot more of Spanish-speaking science fiction fans in the future.
Via Neth Space I learn of yet another online networking group for readers and writers of SF&F fiction. Lovely idea, but I spend way too much time on the Internet already.
Ah, if only I had time to re-read them all. Still, there will doubtless be a lot of interesting discussion here. John Kilma explains the ideas behind the project here. Hat tip to Chris Roberson.
In today’s mail, a sample copy of the latest issue of Albedo One (thanks Frank!). And very splendid it looks too. Another semiprozine candidate. I shall take it to BASFA tomorrow for people to peruse.
Via Darren Turpin I have found this long list of blogs about SF&F novels, courtesy of Alltop.com. This is especially useful for people who are not good with RSS feeds because basically what Alltop does is decide which feeds on a given topic you ought to be reading and syndicate the lot of them. So you don’t even have to be able to subscribe to a feed for yourself.
I am perversely proud not to be listed. After all, this blog is special. You have to find it yourself.
I can’t see me using Alltop myself. I’m perfectly happy with Google Reader. But it does list a number of blogs that I don’t follow, so when I’ve got time I will check some of them out.
The latest issue of Steven H Silver’s Argentus (PDF available here) opens with an article by Paul Kincaid. The bulk of the article is a bit confused because it takes a very interesting suggested distinction between hard SF and space opera, and then tries to map that onto the much more complex spectrum of left v right politics, thereby leaving itself open to all sorts of pointless nitpickery. However, I want to take issue with just one short section, which talks about Tom Godwin’s (in)famous story, “The Cold Equations”:
What is significant about the story is not the misogyny. The fact that the victim is a little girl ratchets up the emotional impact, but the stowaway could as easily have been a little boy, the pilot’s wife, the first alien ever encountered. Who she is, is irrelevant.
Well, precisely who she is is irrelevant, but the fact that she is a young girl, not so much. Indeed, Kincaid himself admits as much earlier on when he says:
The little girl would not, could not, harm a fly
In other word, the character of a young girl was chosen as a representative of ineffectual innocence. I suspect that if the stowaway had been “the first alien ever encountered” then John W Campbell would have insisted that Godwin find a way to save it for the good of science. Had the stowaway been the pilot’s wife, a romantic plot might have been acceptable. But a young girl is disposable in a way that another character might not have been.
And if you still think that’s irrelevant, check out this article from yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News on gender selection:
Steinberg, the medical director of the Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles, uses PGD to harvest fertilized embryos, identify their sex after a few cellular divisions, and implant the chosen gender. Chinese and Indian couples from the Bay Area, who pay up to $18,000 per attempt to have a boy, are a major source of his clients, Steinberg said.
The good news is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a trend to abort female fetuses in the US.
Now that the idea of long tail marketing appears to have been debunked, Chris Anderson is looking for new things to talk about. In this interview at the BBC he speculates that “Everything wants to be free,” and suggests that we are moving towards a world in which more and more things will be available for free, but in which companies will still be able to make profits.
That, of course, sounds crazy, but he doesn’t quite mean that. What he’s talking about is the tendency in the digital world to offer limited versions of a product for free and charge for an upgrade to the premium version. This can be a very effective marketing strategy, but in addition people who can’t afford the premium version, and in many cases who don’t need it, get what they want for free.
It is interesting stuff, though I’ll be more impressed when someone offers me a free car. On the other hand, I suspect that most of the flights I take are heavily subsidized by the people traveling in first and business class. Slowly but surely, The Culture is arriving.
Over at The Guardian‘s book blog, Damien Walter looks at Steampunk.
My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present…
I’m a little late on this due to having been very busy with paying work, but allow me to point you to a post on Crooked Timber in which Henry Farrell takes issue with this lengthy article by Benjamin Kunkel from Dissent magazine.
The paragraphs that Farrell quotes sound very much like the classic LitCrit dismissal of science fiction that we are all so familiar with from the “How Others See Us” section of Ansible. If you read the whole article, however, Kunkel’s argument is a lot more complex, and I’m going to go on at some length about it.
Continue reading
Are sexbots science fiction? Maybe not. Some clever chap in Canada has invented Aiko, billed as a “Perfect Female Companion”. The inventor says that he “envisions a day when Aiko clones can be used as security in airports and other public places, assistants for house-bound disabled people, the elderly and as office assistants.” That’s very noble, but I have a sneaking suspicion what the poor girl is going to end up used for. She’s not yet in mass production and is likely to cost at least $15,000 when she does get to market, but that won’t stop some people. If you are thinking of buying one, here’s Roxy Music with a cautionary tale.
There is a new issue of Jonathan McCalmont’s critical magazine, Fruitless Recursion, available online. It has a lot of Lovecraft-related material in it, and a review by the very wonderful Karen Burnham. Also, in his editorial, McCalmont discovers that critics all have their own viewpoints from which they write. With any luck next issue he will discover that readers also have their own viewpoints from which they read.
It appears that Forry is really most sincerely dead this time. Still, 91 is a pretty good innings, and he seems to have enjoyed most of it. As usual I shall leave it to others to write the obituaries.
… Still making jokes, even about the darkest of subjects. Which makes this long interview in The Independent entertaining as well as interesting. Which is also very like Terry.
The BBC has been digging into its archives and has published a long article about the origins of Doctor Who. Well worth a look if you are a fan of the show.
There’s a whole pile of free fiction coming your way via a new web site that has just been launched. Book View Cafe is a collaborative venture between a group of (currently all) female writers. The idea is to provide a platform that is publisher and writer-independent, and which allows a whole bunch of people to do the “free sample of my work” thing. The membership list at launch includes 21 writers, one of whom is a certain Ursula K. Le Guin who I think may be known to many of you. Go check it out.