Adaptation

Yesterday evening, I got to interview Nick Lowe as part of the BSFA's regular monthly meeting series. Though the interview was recorded, and I guess may be transcribed for Vector, some of what we talked about might be worth kicking around here. Nick Lowe is known, especially in the UK, for his film column Mutant Popcorn in Interzone, which he's been writing for close on 25 years. Sadly, none of the Mutant Popcorn material is online (yet), but you can get a taste of his writing from "The Well-Tempered Plot Device".

One of the topics we talked about in the interview was the business of adapting sf stories or novels into movies. The argument Nick made was broadly similar to the one that many sf fans make, that movies "dumb down" novels, but subtler in a couple of respects. Firstly, he suggested, the more money is about to be spent on a movie, the more risk-averse is likely to be the process of constructing it. Hence, for instance, the last Indiana Jones film, which was not particularly "good" compared to the earlier versions floating around the Hollywood ecosystem, but which was the one that fewest people said "no" to. Secondly, he argued, Hollywood has become wedded to a model of how narrative works that's increasingly narrow and prescriptive. He called this the "protagonist" model, whereby a story has to centre on a single person whom the audience has to find sympathetic and who has to grow or learn something about themselves in the process of the film. And (to finish paraphrasing Nick's point) we have to find them in some sense heroic by the end of things.

This has two problems, according to Nick, a general and a specific one. The general one is that stories-as-narratives-of-personal-growth (the "therapy plot", as he's called them in the past) can be incredibly reductive and simplistic about human nature. The more specific one is that science fiction in particular has developed a panoply of narrative models other than the protagonist-growth one, and so attempts to cram sf stories into a movie frame often take away what's most interesting about them. Just consider (say) Last and First Men, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Childhood's End, or "The Screwfly Solution". You could wrench a screenplay out of each of those that focussed on one narrator and their coming to a state of fuller awareness about themselves. But to do so would be to efface what's most potent and distinctive about each of them—that they deliver emotional and intellectual excitement in ways that purely mimetic (or purely character-driven) stories never could.

So, me talking now rather than paraphrasing Nick. For a start, I wouldn't want to (and I don't think Nick would want to) turn the "protagonist model" into too much of a strawman. Clearly, a bunch of good stories have been and can be written using it. All I'd want to assert is that it's not the only model. What interests me most about what Nick said is the idea that sf has developed a whole range of narrative strategies that are different from those we're used to outside the genre. The scientific romance is an obvious case in point and—though we didn't discuss it in the interview—Nick's thesis would be more than borne out by the number of disastrous H G Wells adaptations lately. This is not to say that sf narrative approaches can't be accurately represented in a Hollywood film; I at least would count Soderbergh's Solaris as an entirely honourable attempt to be faithful to difficult source material. But such works tend to provoke baffled head-scratching from critics not familiar with the different value-system Lem's work emerges from.

The question all this leads to—which I know is a can of worms—is that of whether (and how much) we as sf critics or readers need to assert that sf needs differing aesthetic criteria from other fields. It seems to me a particularly interesting question to raise now, when "sf" and "the literary" seem to be shuffling ever closer together in some ways. Do we still need to assert the irreducible distinctiveness and worth of, say, A E van Vogt or "Doc" Smith? Or do we just see them as the necessary developmental stages sf had to get past in order to land us in our glorious present? I find both those polar extremes unpalatable, and I know that in practice, as a reader and reviewer, I frequently find myself thinking "Only sf could do that." Is that an excuse, though, for avoiding doing characterisation (say) more fully? The Lowe model, of sf comprising a range of quite different strategies or approaches with different goals seems to me a usefully nuanced way of understanding this issue—especially when one realises that these approaches can differ far more radically than they would in mimetic literature. I hope he'll write it up one day. Oh, and I'd still like to see Star Maker: the movie.

Philip José Farmer

Philip José Farmer has died at age 91, according to his official homepage. I never met the man, and am no good at doing eloquent obituary cadences, so will just note that of all the writers I've covered so far in my "Yesterday's Tomorrows" column, he was the one who was most full of surprises. All the weird stuff he loved to pack into his stories—Tarzan, Richard Burton, sex, Joyce, loopy epistemology, historical trivia, flat earths—made it a brew like nothing else. A lot of it's still in print. If you haven't read him, you have a treat in store.

On the Hugos...

'It's an honor just to be nominated'. I don't think I really understood that before March, 2008. I'd been up for my share of awards back home in Australia, and had been delighted and honored every time, but the email I received on a Monday afternoon early that month completely threw me.

The email advised that I had been nominated by the members of the World Science Fiction Society in the Best Editor, Short Form category, and asked if I would like to accept the nomination? I was floored. Speechless for a minute or two, which will say everything to those who know me. I turned to Marianne, who was working in the kitchen and said quietly, "I'm going to Denver". She knew instantly what I meant and was delighted.

I think we had a small celebration - I know we should have. I quickly advised the Hugo people that I was thrilled to accept the nomination - I was afraid that if I waited they might change their minds - and advised them that I'd be attending the convention as a result.

I was asked not to tell anyone about the nomination until the ballot came out, so I had to sit on the information for a couple weeks. It was excruciating. There are all kinds of wonderful people who help me all the time, and I wanted to share the news. Let them know about this wonderful thing that had happened. When the ballot was announced I immediately emailed my fellow nominees my congratulations, and received a small flood of congratulations in return.

Something that's not apparent if you're not caught up in the awards is that you get to be a nominee for a long time - nearly five months. And during that time you begin to realise something really important. A group of intelligent and informed people have looked at your work and deemed it worthy of a Hugo Award, considered that it properly sits alongside the work of the other people nominated in your category. When I looked at the work done by Gordon Van Gelder, Stan Schmidt, Ellen Datlow, and Sheila Williams, I felt flattered to be counted in their number and more than a little humble about it.

I never thought I'd win the Hugo Award. There are all sorts of practical reasons, but I really didn't think it would happen, but I anticipated some kind of disappointment. When I got on the plane in August, headed from Perth to Oakland for my traditional stopover at Locus HQ I was braced for it. I spent a few tranquil days in Oakland (truthfully the best part of any trip to the US), then we went on the Denver.

The convention went by in a bit of a blur, to be honest, but at every stage the organisers made me feel a bit special and important. I got my Hugo nominees badge (not pin!), my certificate, there was the brief rehearsal and the special pre-Hugo event, then the ceremony itself. As my category approached I was braced for it, but ready to be disappointed. When they called out Gordon's name I felt good about it. I was surprised that there wasn't a trace of disappointment (in truth, I would have been shocked had they called my name out). Instead I felt what I had been feeling all along: honored, flattered, grateful, and more than a little bit pleased.

In amongst the champagne and conversation at the traditional Hugo losers party I realised that it had been true for me: for five months it had been a thrill and an honor just to be nominated. I was surprised then, and am surprised now, at just how true this was and remains to be. Even now I get a warm glow thinking about it.

And that brings me to this year. The nominations close at the end of this week. If you are eligible to nominate, please, please do so. It makes an incredible difference to everyone involved, and your voice should be heard. I'd also add a brief comment about changing categories for the Hugos. The members of the World Science Fiction Society should make whatever decisions they feel proper about the categories for the Hugos, but I'd ask them to remember this. The awards are important, and being nominated is an enormous honor. Disenfranchising anyone is a decision that should be made cautiously and compassionately.

Workspace

Jonathan's post reminded me that I'm always interested in the workspaces of other writers -- maybe I'm just plain nosy. But I find it fascinating how some writers require a pristine desk, while others thrive amidst what appears to be chaos and clutter. I'm in the midst of a move myself, leaving my longtime apartment on East 29th Street in Manhattan for the wilds of Green-Wood Heights, Brooklyn, so I can't show my bookshelves, which are in the process of being remorselessly culled. But I can show my desk:

There you can see my printer, my keyboard and monitor, with the iconic figures of Batman and Don Quixote standing by. Framed on the wall behind is the cover of my first novel, Waking Beauty, and my MA diploma from City College.

Dangling in the upper left corner are badges from past cons, and atop the housing of my computer are more iconic figures, talismans from my personal mythology whose benign influence is not to be lightly dismissed on tough writing days.

Let's take a closer look at this magical, motley crew:

Daffy, Tintin, the Penguin, Badtz-Maru, a Skeletal Typist (the writer within), a paperweight showing a man afflicted with demons or perhaps just a guilty conscience, and the Batmobile.

You might think me a superstitious soul on the basis of this menagerie, and though I wouldn't like to cop to it on a larger scale, I probably am, like a lot of writers, somewhat superstitious in the way that baseball players can be -- once you go through a hitting slump or writer's block, you are apt to resort to all kinds of magical thinking to avoid a repetition.

I'd love a tour of other workspaces...

A Locus Workspace

I've been thinking about what I would want to know about Locus, had I not spent the past twelve years working for them in one capacity or another. When I think of Locus, and especially when I think of it as a group of people and a place to work, I think of bright, energetic, intelligent people working in a distinctly whimsical environment where museum-grade artifacts mingle with classic SF artwork from the '50s and oceans of books, packing materials, and cluttered desks shoehorned into two tiny rooms.

I suspect, though, that from the other side of the front page of the magazine it must look like a distinctly monolothic entity: something large, intimidating, official and even mysterious. Locus, in my experience, is none of these things. It's a tiny, bustling cottage industry that is usually so overloaded it doesn't have time to stop and say hi. And that's why I thought I might invite you into MY Locus workspace. So that you can see that there's precious little mysterious about it, and if there's anything at all that's intimidating it's wondering how I find anything in amongst the chaos that is the Locus Antipodean Annexe.

Here in my tiny corner of the Antipodes we are renovating. That means that furniture has had to be moved to accommodate other things like painting, decorating and so on. The place that the furniture and such is moved to is my office ( a small-ish bedroom I use for most of my Locus and other editorial duties). As you can see from the photos below, there are boxes stacked in the room, stuff thrown on top of the boxes, and general anarchy in one corner of the room. That's probably more telling than I want it to be about how things run here. There are also as you can see lots of bookcases. Bookcases overflowing with new books, unreleased books, reference books, magazines, CDS, and lots of other stuff.

The bit of it, though, that seems most Locus to me is the little tableaux beside my monitor on my desk, where my Dr Grordbort's Raygun is holding WALL.E for authorities. It's whimsical and silly and kinda cool. It also sits alongside (well, on top of) Aldiss's brilliant Trillion Year Spree, Gunn's less brilliant Encyclopedia, my blood pressure medication, and some DVDs. Together it's kind of human and jumbled, but focussed on SF and all that's cool about it. And that's how I think of Locus and it's mysterious Oakland HQ. Charles doesn't tolerate this kind of chaos, but the same kinds of things are smattered throughout: a award statuette here, a wind-up robot toy there, an old Grecian urn in the corner.

I think, if you love SF, if you could visit you'd not only like it there (I love it), you'd feel very comfortable and at home. That the office team manage to produce a magazine every month in such gently distracting surroundings constantly surprises me. One day, they should have tours.

Yesterday's Horrors

While thinking about horror stories for a forthcoming post, I stumbled upon the Gaslight Archive, a repository for out-of-copyright stories "from the genres of mystery, adventure and the Weird". (There's also a discussion list attached, but it appears to be defunct.) The archive includes Charles Dickens's "The Signal-Man" (1866), Thomas Hardy's "The Three Strangers" (1903), Robert Hichens's "How Love Came To Professor Guildea" (1900), E T A Hoffman's "The Sandman" (1818), W W Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw" (1902), and Oscar Wilde's "The Canterville Ghost" (1887) - all of which are terrific. (Full list.) There's also Lovecraft's seminal study "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927) - and, elsewhere on the web, Robert W Chambers's "The Yellow Sign" (1895), Lucy Clifford's "The New Mother" (1882) and Oliver Onions's "The Beckoning Fair One" (1911). You could also read Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" (1843), but I'm a fan of the free podcast reading Mitch Benn made of it last year.

(I'm hoping that the horror post will follow at the weekend, but I have to finish my Locus column first to avoid Charles and Liza sending their unstoppable killer robots after me. Again.)

Disappearing Act

I spent a portion of this past weekend at the huge AWP convention here in Chicago--that's the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, which claims to be the largest annual gathering of writers and poets in the country. And it may well be; I've heard attendance figures in the 7,000 range, even though I haven't seen anything official, and the program itself was huge, with hundreds of panels, seminars, and readings. It was in general a very impressive event, filled with very nice people obviously having a good time. The exhibit space was filled with more small presses and university presses than I've ever seen in one space, and it seemed as though just about every creative writing program in the country was represented as well.

What I'm curious about, though, is this: I've never attended a literary gathering this large in which fantastic or genre literature was so thoroughly invisible. I scoured the program both in print and online, and could find virtually no references to science fiction, fantasy, horror, or even anything that might refer to slipstreamy hybrids. Even young adult fiction only showed up in one or two places. In the book exhibit, I had a nice talk with Lawrence Schimel, and I heard that Small Beer had a booth, but it was generally as arid as the programming.

My question, naive as it may sound, is: what's the deal with creative writing programs and fantastic or genre literature? Even the Modern Language Association, historically a bastion of scholarly austerity, has been paying at least some attention to science fiction and fantasy for many years now. And I'm aware that a number of distinguished writers in our field either direct or teach in MFA programs, but for the most part they weren't at this convention at all.

Like many of you, I've heard numerous stories of aspiring writers who were told unequivocally that genre fiction would not be tolerated in their MFA work, but when I talk with MFA teachers, most deny this and many cheerfully admit to reading at least some marginally genre work. And, of course, there are workshops like Clarion and Odyssey, but these aren't MFA programs as such.

This isn't a question about which creative writing programs are "genre-friendly," although I suspect there are more than a few young writers who'd appreciate such a list, but why, in the vast majority of such programs--at least as represented at this AWP conference--genres are simply invisible. I'd be glad to hear anyone's explanations or theories.

Advocacy & Recognition

One of the questions we've been hedging around in the year's best discussion is what different writers use SF for. Here are some partial answers I've been mulling for a while. This train of thought started when, in 2007, I did a long piece for Locus on Heinlein (see here, also subsequent discussion here.) Backing on to that, I did a panel at Readercon that year on Heinlein with Charles Brown, John Clute, and Gary Wolfe the "real year" with John Clute, Liz Hand, Barry Malzberg, and David Hartwell. One of the things I remember saying there was that I was really struck—especially compared with today's SF—how much Heinlein was an advocate. It's not especially that "The Roads Must Roll" (say) advocated the exact form of rolling roads that he described—though it did take a certain geeky interest in the working-out of the premise. But it was very clear about the sorts of behaviour that would be necessary to bring about a good future (entrepreneurial chutzpah), and what behaviours would stand in its way (truculent union grumpiness). That clarity was, of course, easily readable as political, as it continued to be throughout Heinlein's career. The crucial point about this kind of SF, though, was that it had to believe individual behaviour mattered and that it could make a material difference to the direction of the world. (It's therefore similar to, but not the same as, the hard SF outlook, which takes as axiomatic that individuals have a better chance if they try to understand the world fully, but that may not enable them to change things—"The Cold Equations" is the classic case.) A work of advocacy SF, therefore, suggests the future as a reward (or punishment) for certain kinds of behaviour—a very special case would be Joanna Russ's The Female Man, which shows four different kinds of world making the case for themselves.

Someone else on the Readercon panel—I think John, but I couldn't swear to it—then suggested that the reason some people found Neuromancer almost treasonous when it came out was that it refused that kind of advocacy. Case, its protagonist, could try to survive and maybe make some money; but there was no question that he could actually do anything to alter the course of the world. (Hence, for instance, some responses to it and other cyberpunk works, as "pessimism".) What Neuromancer offered instead, John argued, was the thrill of recognition, of seeing that our world really could move in that direction. Other recent SF works have also shared this characteristic. You can read David Marusek's Counting Heads and, despite its speculations being farther off than those of Neuromancer, recognise them as destinations that our current drives will take us to.

So that idea, of two poles in SF, advocacy/recognition, has stuck with me. Some boring caveats apply. First, it's a distinction that's useful when applied to some kinds of SF (near-future, utopia/dystopia) and not to others (space opera). It's not intended as a taxonomy, and I make no claim that a work of SF has to fall into one category or other. No warranty implied or intended; no user-servicable parts inside. It's just a cognitive tool.

What I've found myself thinking since then is a couple of things. Firstly, advocacy SF has become a lot less prominent since the Golden Age but is not dead as a mode. However, it is rarer, and the instances of it stand out more. I think this rarity may account for the the very polarised reaction to Cory Doctorow's Little Brother plainly an advocacy novel (right down to an afterword giving practical hints on how to behave like the protagonists.) It's a book that tells you very clearly what opinion you should hold of the issues it describes. Disagreement with those opinions, or with the way they're put, is going to lead you pretty directly to dislike of the book—and conversely.

Secondly, I'm increasingly coming to the idea that recognition is something that not only futures can be built around. In the magazine, Gary and Charles have talked recently about how a reading of City at the End of Time depends on (or is enriched by) knowledge of how much Bear is riffing on William Hope Hodgson. If you get that reference, it's like acknowledging a secret that you and the author share. That same idea, about recognition of tropes fuelling our responses to books, is a big factor in understanding Charles Stross's Saturn's Children, extensively riffing on late Heinlein, or Michael Swanwick's The Dragons of Babel. This sort of thing happens more and more, inevitably, as genres get older: perhaps the first great example in SF was Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun in the early '80s—a work built around the idea of history as a palimpsest of more layers than it's possible to understand.

I hope that's a useful idea for some people. (Edited to add: there was some 2007 discussion of it here.) I'm now off to write my retrospective column for Locus, this time on Frank Herbert's Dune, which falls into neither of the categories I've described...

Liza Groen Trombi: Wrapping Up

With that late entry from John Clute in (he was busy helping take care of Ellen Datlow in London), I'm wrapping up the long fiction section of 2008 Under Discussion—thanks to everyone who participated. We may have a similar moderated discussion on short fiction, with invited editors chiming in on the topic—we'll have to see how that comes along. Either way, our contributors are now freed up to blog at will...

This was an experiment of sorts for us, the moderated discussion, loosely based on Slate.com's Club format. While most have welcomed the blog and the launch discussion, we have clearly annoyed a few people by not conforming to their ideas of what we ought to be doing. I'm sure this blog will be many things in its time, and all in all I'm very pleased to have it up and running.

If you want to check out the official Locus Recommended Reading List, it is available in the February issue and online. Also in the print issue are summaries of the year, including descriptions of the works listed.

— Liza Groen Trombi

John Clute: In Response

Coming late to the Roundtable, I find there's not a lot immediately to suggest about lists and canons, the former presumably being thought of as epiphytes of the latter: canon candy. I share most everyone here's deep reluctance to generate best-of lists, and in fact usually fail to contribute to assemblages of same. Unlike some of us, I do relatively few books a year (maybe 20, and if the scifi.wire site continues to insist that navigation is yesterday, and that the definition of "book" is "to arrange a meet with film dosh", I may be doing even fewer); and 20 books out of a milliard ain't a good base to generate a best-of list, even if the project made better sense than any of us seem to credit it with...

Do demur at the thought that certain titles need less attention because they already have a lot: that seem to surrender too much of the critic's longitudinal (I quote Letson) function for my sense of things.

To go on to revolution or what: Russell says everything I would have if I'd thought it sooner about Kuhn and the false analogy between normal science and the conversation of SF, both of which are loosely thought to suffer substantially similar paradigm shifts. As Russell says, normal science works with propositional models subject to falsification (which is to say they are models which must be iterated within a testable frame); which does not describe the "riff-trading" (I'd long ago forgotten William Tenn's formulation, good to see it back again) that generates the ongoing session of a live genre. In SF, a paradigm shift is usually a function of memory rather than discovery: that a dominant writer/work remembers/rebalances the riff, and the session accretes suddenly around the new tune. Which is not to say that there is nothing new under the sun: but that the real jolt of the new is to our memory cache. Which shakes, rattles, rolls, and out pops Dhalgren doing riverrun.

Each iteration of canon is a fossil, a motor humunculus of the whole. More later, if I'm not stopped.

— John Clute

Russell Letson: Round and Round

Reviewers, unless they make themselves notorious by panning Hamlet or running off with some real writer's spouse or running for Congress, are barely remembered at all. Which is one reason I don't worry about missing the next cultural bus or backing the wrong artistic horse. (Though maybe I'll be remembered for shameless metaphor-mixing.) Reviewing is a short-term business, and even when one or two of us rates a collection of columns (I name no names), there's a good chance that even that will wind up serving as a bibilography entry in a 22nd-century grad-school course in the History of Taste in the Late Hard Copy Era, with the single surviving example preserved in the Dead Tree Vault (scan available from GoogleLib on request, expect a short delay while the off-line archive is accessed)...

I know, I know: the book reviews of William Aetheling, Jr. and Damon Knight—fanzine reviews, of all things—are foundational documents of SF criticism. And out in the secular world, we have Edmund Wilson and now James Woods. But these examples are noteworthy partly because of their rarity. (Well, all right, they're also insightful and well written. But they're still part of a tiny category.)

Reviewing is, to oversimplify and thus mildly falsify, for the immediate audience and criticism is for the longitudinal one. They are famously distinct jobs, and in my experience, while there is a great deal of overlap in the analytical tools used for them, they feel quite different in the doing. I think of a review as 20 percent recommendation and 80 percent conversation with imaginary friends about why and how a recommendation fits into others I might have made or why I am surprised to be making this one. So, yes, advocacy, but not prophecy. In fact, given my aforementioned position in the demographic bulge, I don't expect my recommendations to find a sympathetic reception outside a small segment of the general SF audience. So instead I just try to describe the object, put it in some sort of historical-generic context (there's the criticism angle), and justify my position in a way that is personal but not completely subjective.

When I'm operating in critic mode, I'm not interested in how much or even whether I like the work but how well I can account for it—that is, trace its ancestry, anatomize it, understand its operations. (I am by training and inclination a taxonomist and rhetorician with a historical bias, so value statements of all kinds are the last things I worry about.) Critic-mode is more clinical and less personal than reviewer-mode and (insofar as it is possible) unconcerned with current tastes—there is no prophecy at all, and not much advocacy, either.

— Russell Letson

Graham Sleight: Cultural Prophecy

Russell says that, "we're less bothered by lists (except, maybe Adrienne) than by arbitrary conditions or unrealistic expectations attached thereto". Yes, absolutely. To restate what I said earlier, lists arise out of pragmatism—the pragmatism of "What should I read given that time is finite?", and the pragmatism of knowing that we as a group don't have any absolute purchase on what's good: we're just a bunch of people who've read a lot. There's no such thing as a perfectly objective standpoint, and the best (or at least, least bad) way to deal with that is to try to be conscious of where each of us is coming from...

Gary raises an interesting point, though. If Anathem is 300,000 milliAmazons more popular than Pump Six and Other Stories, do we have a particular duty to flag titles that people might have missed? A book like Nisi Shawl's Filter House, for instance, is published by a small press and, even with the best will in the world, isn't easy to find. So should we be going on about that rather than something huge and unmissable like Anathem? Or, to take another example, there's Ian R Macleod's Song of Time, only published in a limited edition by PS in the UK. It's representative of yet another of SF's strands, engagement with "the mainstream"—in this case, the influence of Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea looks pretty powerful. Or, to turn the coin over, are we showing too much interest in Anathem just because of how large it looms in the mountain-range of 2008 books? (Full disclosure: although I finished Anathem, I bounced off it pretty hard—in retrospect, because I couldn't deal with all the worldbling.) As my link to Russ in the first post hinted, canons can and do get used for advocacy.

What I guess we're engaged in—without wanting to sound too pompous—is cultural prophecy. We're trying to figure out which of these books are going to wind up having an influence on our field and on readers in general. Auden said that "Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered"—but who can tell what culture's going to wind up finding fertile in the next few years? If President Obama winds up dismantling the US security state, Little Brother may lose some of the relevance it now stakes a claim to. Cultural influence sometimes comes from works that are formally innovative and look "revolutionary"—Dhalgren is a perfect example, and I'd note that many people still find it a difficult book. But I'd put at least as much money for lasting influence on The Graveyard Book as on Anathem. For all its widely noted virtues, Gaiman's book is small-c conservative in its form—more so than, say, Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go. But it winds up sitting in the mind after it's been finished like Charlotte's Web—a perfect fixing in the form of art of some ideas about growing up, life, and death. But all art is a kind of gamble: will the choices your work embodies make it appreciated on publication and last thereafter? Who can tell if you're going to be remembered like this?

— Graham Sleight

Russell Letson: Agreeing

If I'm reading us right, we're less bothered by lists (except, maybe Adrienne) than by arbitrary conditions or unrealistic expectations attached thereto—that they be "the best" or "representative" or "cutting edge" or whatever. Since the answer to who do we think are we are is a bunch of people who read with some attention but are otherwise various in our tastes, the point of a year-end exercise is less the listing (let alone ranking) than the reflecting and second-guessing and notes-comparing and tentative-curve-fairing. And since, as Gary points out, we read barely-overlapping sub-sets of the monstrous flood of titles, it's also an opportunity to assemble a partial and patchy map of what's-worth-reading and what's-going-on from a particular stretch of months...

Taken as a collective enterprise, the Locus year-end essays (or this bloggy coda) are more like the Minicon "Year in SF" panel that I'm on every Easter: not authoritative or trend-spotting but a barely-structured series of "and then I reads" and "have you seen this ones" and "if you liked X you'll love Ys." Except here I have to compose in complete sentences and can't make faces.

I'm still chewing on the matter of "revolutionary" works of art. Maybe the problem is with the metaphor of political revolution, with its suggestion of overturning power structures (and putting the losers up against a wall). If the underlying question is "how do the protocols and patterns of a tradition change in small and large ways?" then it might be more useful to draw on biology, and specifically to steal and adapt Stephen Jay Gould's notion of punctuated equilibrium. Thus genre rules change in response to one or more strong examples of innovation—a Heinlein or an Egan or a Stephenson—that demonstrate to audiences and to other producers that there is another way of arranging the materials to get new effects or to goose up the old ones. If there's a revolution, it is a continuous one, with occasional spasms of cleverer-than-usual inventiveness that inspires other writers and then readers to follow up on it. Our job as reviewers and general smartypantses is to spot these innovations as they appear, fit them into existing frameworks, and generally make sense of them. And that is another useful function for the roundup essay—to check under the sofa cushions for any small change (or big changes) we might have lost track of while trying to hit our deadlines.

— Russell Letson

Gary K. Wolfe: Reconsidering

I have to admit I'm relieved to find others sharing my hesitation over the whole notion of year's best lists, but at the same time your comments convince me that there is value in revisiting the past year's books, lists or no lists, and part of that value comes from the very points we've all raised as objections...

In the first place, we haven’t all read the same things. I share Adrienne’s concern that there’s a considerable number of books I’ve missed altogether, and it’s interesting to hear about them even if they won’t all get added to my pile of Books To Read Before I Die. Paul’s comment on K.J. Parker’s The Company, for example, has the odd effect of making me want both to read it and to flee from it. Nice trick, Paul.

Another value is that these ruminations give us a second chance to call attention to worthwhile books that may not have achieved as high a profile as we think they should. Graham mentions Paolo Bacigalupi’s Pump Six and Other Stories (OK, it’s not a novel, but let’s have some leeway here), which I agree is a very powerful collection with a distinct point of view, but which as I write is sitting some 330,000 positions behind Anathem in Amazon’s sales ranking (and no, you don’t need to remind me how unscientific, crude, and time-bound that is, either). My point is that it’s a book which shouldn’t get lost in last year’s flood of titles.

By contrast, and even though we might agree it would deserve a spot on a best list, Anathem doesn’t really need our attention. Anathem already has the biggest enclosure in the zoo. Anathem has gawkers, and probably a lot of readers as well. Anathem doesn’t need to care what we think of it.

Except—and this is my third argument in support of why we’re doing this—in terms of putting these books in context. Adrienne’s right that novels like Anathem and Nation are the work of writers who have come fully into their own voices, but I find Paul’s skepticism over Anathem’s revolutionary nature convincing, despite my earlier comments. Believe it or not, Paul, I’d actually thought about comparing it to Dhalgren in my original post, but I think you’re correct in noting that Dhalgren really seemed to upset people in the '70s in a way that Anathem doesn’t.

Maybe there really wasn’t a revolutionary SF book last year, and as Russell points out, maybe “revolutionary” here is more a metaphor than a literal application of Kuhnian ideas. But I do think there have been books and stories that stimulated other writers to rethink the ways in which SF could be written. I think Heinlein did this a long time ago, and Greg Egan more recently.

— Gary K. Wolfe

Russell Letson: On revolutionary vs normal SF (in the pseudo-Kuhnian sense) and other matters

First I have to say that the notion of revolution in art is one that puts me on guard right away—unlike scientific models, which are structures of propositions and evidence always open to reformulation, art is not an attempt to produce a coherent and testable system, nor is it fundamentally propositional, nor does it react to surprising new "data" in the way that science must if it is to remain functional. Despite the frequently cited turn-of-the-twentieth-century examples from music and painting (Stravinsky outraging audiences with "Rite of Spring" or the Fauves pissing off critics whose predecessors had been pissed off by the Impressionists), the arts do not seem to proceed by revolution, but to operate in a much more gradual and interactive manner, as practitioners respond not only to whatever internal logic their art might have but to each other and to audiences...

This is easily seen in genre fiction, where a successful innovation leads to imitation and variation—the process that William Tenn/Philip Klass likens to the back-and-forth riff-trading of jazz ("Jazz Then, Musicology Now", The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1972). Then there's the matter of aesthetic fatigue, in which writers (and audiences) tire of the same old stories being told in the same old way and start to twist their generic tails (and tales) a bit. This, I suspect, is one of the forces behind "New Space Opera" (which is a new label for same-only-different changes that had been working through the space-adventure subgenre since Poul Anderson's work of the 1950s): the introduction of hard-SF standards for imaginary or speculative technologies and the importation of motifs and tropes from neighboring subgenres and traditions (cyberpunk, Stapledonian cosmic vistas, anthropological/xenological portraits, the Singularity, and various visions of the posthuman condition).

All of which is a long-winded prologue to a meditation on what we can expect to see when looking back at any given year. The pop-journalism list culture that Adrienne dislikes (and that I don't much care for myself) is, as she suggests, driven by marketeering and publishers' perceptions of the inscrutable urges of the readership. Lists I understand—my wife and I both love to recommend books and writers, movies and actors and directors, CDs and musicians, and we are constantly writing out suggestions on napkins and the backs of register tapes. What we don't do is rank the recommendations. And the receivers of our wisdom never, ever ask "Which one is the best?" or "Could you number the top three?" We figure that they'll work their way through the suggestions, taking the good and ignoring the ones that don't work so well, and perhaps determining that that's the last time we'll ask them for a good book or movie. This is, in fact, just what I see myself doing at Locus, and at the two or three conventions every year where I'm asked what books I found interesting since last time—with the understanding that when I have the talking stick, I get to rabbit on about the history or aesthetics or political significance or plain old neatitude of the books under discussion. That's why Locus doesn't just print a bunch of titles with star ratings under our bylines.

So it doesn't matter whether The Dragons of Babel is paradigm-breaking or pseudo-Kuhnian-normal, revolutionary or bourgeois-Same-Old, or somewhere in between. It is not going to keep our collective attention (at least in the medium-to-long term) without other crucial ingredients that do not plot on the innovation scale: language, pacing, texture, and that most measurement-resistant quality, heart. Its appeal may (and does) come in part from ingenious and unexpected deployment of old materials—the kind of make-it-new inventiveness that our current culture seems to value highly. But innovation is not a quality that the longitudinal audience will see clearly (though the scholarly among them may). What they will see is a story that pulls them along, and an interplay of elements (metaphor, character, plot, setting) that creates the illusion of a whole world that means in a way that the experiential world never quite does. And there are other titles scrawled on my napkin (that's why I ask for extras) that offer that illusion and that sense of meaning while remaining "safely" within the bounds of "normal" SF—for example, Joe Haldeman's Marsbound, John Varley's Rolling Thunder (both Heinlein homages and thus smack in the middle of the standard model), Ken MacLeod's The Night Sessions, Karen Traviss's Judge, or Mike Brotherton's Spider Star. I might recommend these books to different people or for different reasons, but it doesn't make sense to see them as belonging to a hierarchy. They're not competing against each other, except perhaps in the actual commercial marketplace, and ranking there is a matter for Amazon or Bookscan, not me.

The Obama Ayers Ticket

O boy, a Blog. It's like a seat on a Panel with a blind, drunk Moderator. Here's an Op-Ed I did for the NY Times a few months ago, while Sarah Palin was riding through town ringing her Bell, gathering her Posse. The Times never ran it so I stuck it away in my Drawer, figuring (hoping) Palin was safely Alternate History just until the other night, when... but more on that later.

This is the Op-Ed the Times didn't run. (In my Alternate History they don't either)...

Conveniently forgotten in all the hoopla about Obama's "terrorist pal" is what Ayers and other "unrepentant terrorists" were protesting at the time.

The war in Vietnam. Racial injustice here at home.

While John McCain and his colleagues were bombing Vietnamese villages from the air, defoliating an agricultural country with Agent Orange, and napalming civilians and soldiers alike, the Weathermen (and millions of others, young and old) were protesting a illegal, shameful, immoral, patently racist, vastly unpopular, and ultimately unsuccessful war.

A disclosure: I was one of those millions. So was John Kerry; so were Dr. Spock, Eugene McCarthy, Martin Luther King, and, ultimately, Robert Kennedy.

Another disclosure: I thought Weather was cool. Still do. I was proud of the fact that a few young white middle-class Americans, like myself, were so outraged by the brutalities of the Vietnam War that they vowed to “bring it home.” I might not have shared their guts or their passion, but like them I saw nothing morally unjustified in bombing a country that was unleashing more bombs on a tiny Asian country than were dropped in all of World War Two. Especially since they tried their best to injure no one (and mostly succeeded).

Terrorists? Terrorism is about attacking civilians. Terrorism was policy in Vietnam (see: Christmas bombing, Hanoi; My Lai; Phoenix Program, cluster bombs, etc.). Go see the children born disfigured from Agent Orange. Do the numbers. That doesn’t necessarily make McCain a terrorist; he was just following orders, and it’s hard to be scrupulous about collateral damage from 25,000 feet.

Still, he wasn’t drafted. He was an enthusiast.

Obama has a campaign to run, so he can’t be expected to heap praise on the radicals of the sixties who fought for the dream of racial equality he embodies. But I like to think he secretly admires their commitment and principles.

So don’t tell me about John McCain and his "honorable" bombing runs.

Bill Ayers and the Weathermen (and women), and the millions of genuine American mavericks who protested the Vietnam War, are the ones I honor.

Paul Witcover: A Take on Revolutionary SF

In thinking about Gary's ideas of normal and revolutionary SF, it occurred to me that intent and reception are important factors. I wonder if there can be truly revolutionary science now—even science that yields the most surprising results and forces a paradigm shift upon us is still likely to be arrived at by means of the scientific method. And how often do scientists consciously set out to smash up the prevailing wisdom? Wouldn't a truly revolutionary science involve a substantive alteration of the scientific method—something like what Stephen Wolfram set out to do in A New Kind of Science? As for reception, would a truly revolutionary science be immediately hailed as a breakthrough, or would it, as with Wolfram, Einstein, and countless others, be attacked by the establishment?

So let's look at what is ostensibly the most revolutionary SF novel of the year... Anathem. I concur entirely with the points made by Gary, and I don't mean to slight this remarkable novel in any way—but is it really revolutionary? Or does it instead use the literary equivalent of a "scientific method"—that is, the bag of tricks and tropes available to contemporary SF writers who stand upon the shoulders of giants—not so much to reinvent the genre itself, or just tear it down, as to pose an interesting and audacious "what-if" experiment in alternate-world creation? I think the latter. It's something we've seen before, though rarely at such an accomplished level. The reception of the novel is an indication that I'm right. Nobody feels threatened by Anathem as they did, say, by A New Kind of Science, a much more revolutionary novel within the context of genre at the time. Some readers and critics have indeed felt that Anathem is not their cup of tea, but I'm not aware of anyone protesting that it means the end of SF as we know it. For all its originality, it is not strange but quite familiar.

The most revolutionary novel I read last year was probably K.J. Parker's The Company. Here is a novel, written with formidable skill and intelligence, that really does have as part of its project the intent of destroying every readerly expectation, including the notion that an implicit contract exists between writer and reader. Parker isn't revolutionary in the sense of Delany or Joyce: she is a competent but unremarkable stylist. But she attacks and seeks to undermine the very foundations of the received wisdom about the act of reading fiction—that is, to enter into a sympathetic relation with a world and characters. For Parker, this propensity on the part of readers, inculcated by the whole history of literature, is merely bait in a sadistic trap. What she is doing strikes me as dangerous, like all revolutions should be dangerous. Personally, I find it repellent—but that's also a plus when it comes to judging revolutionary bona fides. The Company was not on my list of the best novels of 2008; indeed, it was probably my least favorite novel of the year.

Finally, I think that revolutionary SF, however it's measured, must be far rarer than normal SF. Many years might go by without any novel meriting the label, just as true paradigm shifts in science are rare.

— Paul Witcover

It's Not Just About Length

By request (and not as part of the launch discussion), I am republishing this section of my editorial from the February issue of Locus to open up the discussion....

From Locus Issue #577:

I have a bone to pick with the way people count the length of works, and more generally with the way stories are written.... There are actual differences between the short story, novelette, or novella, more than word count alone: short stories generally focus on a single character and event, often within the Aristotelian unity of place, time, and action (i.e. plot). Novelettes generally have two characters, and novellas show the interactions between four characters (although one of them could be the world or the setting). As works get longer, they have a correspondingly larger story arc, greater thematic development, and the characters change more. Subplots generally don't enter until the full novel length. This used to be the way the categories were understood, and can usually be accomplished best if we redefine short stories to be up to 10,000 words, novelettes 10,000 to 20,000; and novellas 20,000 to 60,000. Since the advent of the word processor, everything is just getting more bloated. I rarely see a story of any length that I don't want to take a red pencil to.

— C.N. Brown

Adrienne Martini: Let's Call It Take 4

During the decade that I worked in the newspaper business, there were two seasons I learned to loathe. The first season was the run up to the annual "Best-Of" special section, which was a vaguely organized, blurb-filled pain in the arse that served no editorial function whatsoever other than making sure we kept our advertisers happy. The second season hit during the last couple of weeks of the year, when everyone and his or her dog had to compile a best-of list...

I’ve been assured that readers love lists. I’ve decided to take that on faith in lieu of hard evidence. (And, as a nod to the most excellent Locus editorial staff, this assertion about readers and lists has not ever come from them. And, since I joined the Locus reviewing team late in the year, I wasn’t pressed too hard to provide one for 2008. Creek don’t rise, etc., I’m planning to assemble one for 2009, however.)

The problem with year-end round-ups is mine: I just don't see the point of them.

Near as I can tell, if the point of these essays is to spot trends, a year isn’t long enough to see what they are. Given how the publishing industry works, titles that are being released now have been in the pipeline for anywhere for just a few months to a couple of years. It's hard to know what time period these annual snapshots are taking a picture of.

Trends, especially in a fairly slow business like the book industry (compared to, say, the technology sector), take years to develop. Perhaps it would be more helpful to do a round-up review at the end of each decade. From that fixed point, it might be easier to see what has changed.

If the point of these essays is to recap what was published in any given year, then I am not the one you want to have writing for you. I can just barely manage to read a small handful books published in any given month and I have significant motivation to stay as on top of current titles as I can. If there are hundreds of SF/F titles alone published in a year, the odds of my having read more than a single digit percentage of them quickly approach zero.

Sometimes, when I'm feeling especially kicky or don’t have a deadline approaching, I’ll even go back and read books that were published in previous years that I missed the first time around. And, sometimes, when the mood strikes, I'll even go back and re-read a book that I love. In fact, I just finished another go 'round with RAH's Job: A Comedy of Justice, which I hadn’t read since high school. (My short review: I'd forgotten how clean Heinlein's prose, plotting and pace is — but I'm even more squicked out by the hints of incest now that I have kids.) Should that go on my round-up for 2009? After all, that's when I read it.

My largest problem with these year-end essays is that they are even more arbitrary than a standard review. While there is a certain amount of reasoned argument and historical perspective that goes into them, the piece itself is even more of a judgment call that an opinion on a single book. The critic is electing a couple of titles to represent an entire year.

Sadly, the tendency is to lose track of the titles that don't make it onto a list — or, more irritatingly, compile these lauded titles into an uber-best-of list. It's hard then to not turn it into a competition, where you set the top book of 2008 against the top book of 2007 in order to see which title is the "best." Books aren't horses.

I'd prefer to just wait and let time (and readers, natch) sort out which titles come to represent any given span of days. Yes, it takes longer that way. So be it.

Having said all of that, I will now mention that I'm not above pressing titles into the hands of those I can, in the hopes that they'll discover how wonderful that book is. My motives are selfish. If that reader loves the book, they'll pass it on. Eventually, that book might just get into enough hands to keep it around long enough to keep it alive.

In 2008, there were two titles that I did this with: Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and Terry Pratchett’s Nation. Part of what compels me to pass these along is that each could only have been written by their authors, which sounds silly, I know. But Anathem, with all of its math geekery and distinct characters and imposing size, could only have sprung from the same head that created The Baroque Cycle and (the underrated) The Diamond Age. I also have to echo what Gary K. wrote about Anathem. Stephenson has flipped some of the genre's standard tropes inside-out in fascinating ways that make for mind-bending and rewarding read. With Anathem, Stephenson finally seems to trust himself to follow each path that his mind takes him on and has the confidence to make it all come together in a glorious, unified whole.

No one else could have written Nation, either. Pratchett's voice has long been his hallmark, certainly, and is difficult to confuse with any other writer's, no matter how many try to ape it. Nation is like a pure distillation of all of the best parts of the Discworld books. In here is all of the wit. Pratchett's love of the language is in Nation as is his ability to mix skipping whimsy with bleak reality. But what Nation does best is provide a primer on how to cope when life goes very, very wrong while telling a story whose weight you don't feel until the very end.

Are these the “best” books of the year? Do they illustrate a major trend of 2008? I have no idea—but I hope they manage to stick around.

— Adrienne Martini

Graham Sleight: Take It Back?

Gary's post lays out the ground as clearly and even-handedly as he always does. I'd like to tackle three pieces of meta-discussion before getting down to the specifics of 2008. First of all, Gary asks in his second paragraph what it is that legitimises us, or anyone else, to produce a year's best list. I’d like to add another question: what are these lists for? And why, indeed, do we like lists so much? Book lists, particularly when handed down with the aura of authority, are a tool for canonisation—one among many, to be sure, along with awards, recognition by the critical/academic community, commercial success, and so on. And however much a canon may be negotiated—may be shaped by the sort of social/political forces described in (say) How to Suppress Women’s Writing—it will very often look absolute. Here are the elect (it says), the works that you need to worry about; you don’t need to be concerned with anything else. Which is unfortunate, to put it mildly. Any act of naming or selecting creates that sort of binary world, whereas the edges (the books that just made it, or just didn’t) are actually far fuzzier. So that becomes caveat 1. And a resulting question for the readers of this blog—do you find year’s best lists useful? If so, why?...

The second bit of meta is related. I know that, the first time I saw Harold Bloom’s Western Canon list, I had a kind of vertigo: was there time to read all of the books there even in a lifetime? The Locus list is of course both less extensive and with fewer claims to absolute value. But I guess the same proviso applies to it as to Bloom’s: the raw list needs to be read in conjunction with the comments of the people who compiled it. That way, you can get far more of a nuanced sense of what we individually think is valuable on the list and why.

And the last meta issue—to start, at last, to get down to specifics—to do with “SF”. I’m not going to get into a definitional debate, because there’s almost nothing guaranteed to sap the joy from my soul so quickly. But I’d like gently to challenge Gary’s notion that there is a unitary thing that we can think of as core SF, and that works can be registered (however imprecisely) by how close they are to that core. (This is an argument implicit in many of the pieces in Gary’s book Soundings where he comes closer than he does here to identifying hard SF as that from which other SF skews.

But you might just as easily argue that SF has a whole set of interpenetrating traditions, and that (looking at 2008) different works represent many of them. So, for instance, Stephen Baxter’s Flood takes forward the Clarke tradition of the scientific romance, with images of the absolute—I won’t say what, exactly, but the spoiler’s in the title—that humanity can do precious little about. I’ve expressed elsewhere my reservations about the cost of Baxter’s methods, and was happy to find after the fact that I’d been making similar points to those Susan Sontag had in “The Imagination of Disaster”—I’ll hope to make a separate blog post about that here soon.

Or you might look at the entirely different tradition of planet-hopping space adventure, in which case McAuley’s The Quiet War (Gollancz S.F.) The Quiet War would be worth talking about, but so would Gwyneth Jones’s Spirit. It’s a colourful, densely argued story of diplomacy, betrayal, power, gender, building on the arguments and approach of her earlier Aleutian trilogy.

Or there’s political SF, which had both Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and Paolo Bacigalupi’s collection Pump Six and Other Stories as prominent representatives—both vehemently arguing against where the status quo seems to be taking us, and both sitting in the tradition of if-this-goes-on polemics with antecedents in, say, Heinlein and Huxley.

I could go on, but the general point is there: any story can be seen as the latest iteration of all the traditions it comes from. But the odd thing is, the more I read, the more I find myself valuing a distinctive voice over other virtues in a book. SF has traditionally been a stylistically conservative genre—people like Alfred Bester and Theodore Sturgeon were very much the exception. For that reason—though I still have problems with its switchback structure, which does exactly the wrong things to its pacing—the most interesting SF novel I read this year was Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World. It was in dialogue with SF, but with a whole lot else as well; and it sounded like there was someone real on the other end of the line.

— Graham Sleight

Russell Letson: Take-out, with pickle & extra napkins

Like Gary, I've never felt comfortable with "best" lists—too linear, too one-dimensional, too competitive. (I don't have any problems with making comparative judgments, but ranking an arbitrary set of works always struck me as, well, arbitrary.) And, as he said, who do I think I am anyway?

Gary's second question, about audience(s), is exactly on point... The Locus readership is hardly representative of the whole range of consumers of science fiction/fantasy narrative products. In fact, the product line extends well beyond narrative (which includes text, comics, film, and TV) to gaming and toys and Halloween costumes and anywhere else the iconography of rockets, rayguns, zombies, and elfy-welfies has penetrated. The opinions of a couple or three reviewers don't amount to a hill of beans in that crazy world.

Once science fiction/fantasy broke its banks and flooded into the lowlands of general pop culture (probably starting with Star Wars), the comparatively tidy divisions and distinctions and values that traditional fannish culture had shared became hopelessly mixed with the marketing categories devised by Big Media and the tourist-level sensibilities of audience segments who either had no experience of "real" (that is, text-based) SF/F or who had imprinted on comics or cartoons or TV or Star Wars instead of pulp magazines, year's-best anthologies, and Winston/Ballantine/Ace/DAW/Timescape imprints, the way God intended. (If you want confirmation of this, compare the discussions of various SF topics in old fanzines with those on the Talk pages of any Wikipedia article on an SF/F topic.)

All of which is prelude to a slight variation on my Standard Disclaimer: Not only do I not have any special insight into the state of the field or its destiny, I'm so far from the fat part of the demographic bulge that my opinions are pretty much irrelevant out in the big world. Which is not to say that they're worthless (50-odd years spent reading the stuff must count for something), only that Locus's circulation pretty much defines the population that might have any interest in what are essentially my personal tastes in fantastic-fiction reading matter.

Thanks to Locus's laissez-faire treatment of reviewers (which does include the occasional editorial nudge), I get to read what I enjoy without any particular program or pattern beyond following favorite writers, and only at year's end am I required to do any singling-out. Even so, my five-best list usually has eight or ten items. (For 2008, it was 13.)

The real question is not "What were the N best books?" but "Which ones did I enjoy enough to make them noteworthy in a list of books I liked to begin with?" And the question behind that one is "What is it that pops a book out of the pack?" The answer, as usual, is "It depends." It might be a bravura performance of the sort that Michael Swanwick dependably delivers, this time in the form of The Dragons of Babel, which is a knockout in just about every way that I care about: structure, parable, character, language, mythography. The success of this book is not about the state of the genre or of the market (though it's a Good Thing that there is a market broad enough to publish a Swanwick and give him repeat business)—it's about a hellacious writer making the absolute most of the materials at hand.

In fact, that's pretty much the way I feel about all my favorite writers. They both exploit and create spaces in which they can operate, so that Iain M. Banks takes the Matter of Space Opera and expands and explodes it in the Culture novels (and in the process helps to invent what we have taken to calling New Space Opera), and 20-plus years on is still finding interesting things to do with the possibilities, viz., Matter. Then Neal Asher can come along and work some transformations on that genre space and give us the quite different Polity universe and Line War and Shadow of the Scorpion. And Karl Schroeder and Walter Jon Williams can jigger together elements from a big box of adventure-story motifs from all over and give us Pirate Sun and Implied Spaces.

So there's at least one reasonably definable factor that gets my attention: the enthusiastic and inventive exploitation of the possibilities offered by various genre tropes and forms. There's a great sense of play in these books, of fun, along with the recognition that even fun can connect to matters that go beyond simple amusement.

Another factor that makes my "best" unrepresentative is that much of my enjoyment is that of the specialist, rooted in that half-century of obsessive reading of everything science-fictional or fantastical. I like books that know what they're doing with and in that great tradition. In Greg Egan I see themes and concerns and a widescreen philosophical vision that go back to Olaf Stapledon—Incandescence is a bit like Last and First Men with individual characters—while reading Ken MacLeod is like reading all the SF and thrillers he has ever read that I have also read (as well as all the political theory I haven't). Charles Stross isn't far behind in that department, even when he's not deliberately channeling Heinlein as he does in Saturn's Children.

Mostly, though, I like a good story, well written. I know that this is the unsatisfying line that agents and editors hand to aspiring writers when asked "What are you looking for?" But it's the truth. I have a low tolerance for routine execution of familiar tropes, and I can no longer read clunky prose, though I have no problem with (in fact, a great deal of respect for) a clean, "transparent" style. I will read absolutely anything by Joe Haldeman or John Varley and marvel at how easy they make it look. (I'm married to a writer, so I know it ain't.)

So I suppose I don't care what direction the field is headed, as long as the supply of smart, engaged, ingenious, well-crafted books exceeds my ability to keep up with them.

—Russell Letson

Gary K. Wolfe: Take One

Looking over an assortment of year-end reviews and "best of the year" lists, not only in the Locus February issue, but in various websites, blogs, newspapers, and even Amazon.com, I’ve become convinced that the most useful purpose of such lists is not to end discussions, but to begin them. So we’re hoping that this new interactive venture for Locus can do just that—starting with a look at the past year, and later moving on to other topics...

But I should confess up front that I may not be the best reviewer to kick things off. I’ve never been comfortable with “best” lists or best-of-year prizes in the first place, since two questions immediately come to mind: Who do we think we are? and Whose best is it, anyway? The answer to the first question is easy: I think it’s fair to say that those of us contributing to this blog have read a lot of stuff over a lot of years, have written about it for a good while, and can lay some claim to having some linear perspective and some basis for comparisons.

The second question is harder to dismiss. To claim a title as the best SF or fantasy novel of the year seems to me to imply a core readership with a common set of values and assumptions, but as far as I can tell that readership has been dismembering itself into various caucuses for several decades now. A half-century ago, a dedicated SF reader could cover the major magazines and nearly all the major novels and anthologies in a given year. In 1955, the New York Times reported that 74 science fiction titles had been published the previous year (they may have missed some small press titles, but not a lot); for 2008, Locus reports having listed 1,669 new titles in SF, fantasy, horror, and its various cross-pollinations. There were 254 SF novels and 436 fantasy novels alone. Anyone who actually tried to read all of those probably needs a hug, but isn’t someone I want to be trapped in a bar with for very long.

Instead, there are a lot of readerships, coming at all this from a lot of different angles and with a lot of different assumptions. This is an altogether healthy development, but it means that no one’s best list is going to please everyone, or even be comprehensible to everyone.

So I decided to take a slightly different tack, focusing for this first post on SF novels. I decided to take the central thesis from that most over-masticated and misrepresented of intellectual histories, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with its notions of “normal” vs. “revolutionary” science. The striking thing about “normal” scientific processes, he says, is “how little they aim to produce major novelties, conceptual or phenomenal.” Revolutionary science, in his famous term that has since been appropriated for everything from management texts to diet books, represents an entire “change of paradigm,” a rethinking of possibilities from the ground up. Contrary to popular representations, Kuhn doesn’t dismiss normal science as outmoded—it’s where most of the work gets done, and it gets back to work even after the change of paradigm.

The question, then, is: which of last year’s novels best represent “normal” SF, which aspire most successfully to revolutionary SF, and which seem to represent a successful middle ground? Needless to say, I’ve got a candidate for each.

My candidate for 2008’s most successful performance of normal SF is Paul McAuley’s The Quiet War. In terms of the familiar literary merits of character, plot, and style, it’s one of his very best novels—but as SF it’s essentially conservative, representing a 23rd-century interplanetary war of the sort we’ve seen often before, but seldom with such attention to current science and such political and psychological acumen. For revolutionary SF, my candidate is Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which may draw on a number of familiar SF tropes, but which seems to violate nearly every principle we’ve inherited about what SF usually is—in terms not only of its massive length, its leisurely pacing (at least in the opening few hundred pages), its language, its humor, its preoccupations with systems, puzzles, and entire philosophical systems for their own sake. Like much revolutionary science, it may take some years for us to realize its full effect on the field, as people actually begin to finish it.

For the best synthesis of these two types, I’d nominate Greg Bear’s City at the End of Time, which pointedly alludes to earlier traditions from Hodgson to Clarke to Stapledon, but which recombines these in a way that is utterly contemporary. Bear isn’t “doing” any of these forebears in the sense of pastiche, but rather is showing us, in an almost metafictional way, how their ideas and images can be reinvented for a kind of SF that is both hauntingly familiar and energetically innovative.

I’ll stop there, but I suspect that much the same could be done with fantasy novels. I’m fairly confident that one of my favorite fantasy novels of the year, Michael Swanwick’s The Dragons of Babel, occupies a kind of middle ground between normal and revolutionary fantasy, analogous to the Bear novel in SF. But maybe it’s really revolutionary fantasy, and if it’s not, what is? As a whole, Paul Park’s masterful Roumania quartet seemed to offer a whole new way of reading fantasy, but most of that happened in earlier volumes, prior to last year’s concluding The Hidden World. And it seemed to me that a novel such as Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book represents a first-rate performance of what is essentially a normal fantasy, but there may be other candidates as well.

Or is this whole paradigm business not working out? I’ll cheerfully engage with anyone’s alternative system for sorting out the important books of last year, but you’re going to have to pin me down with a clever wrestling maneuver to get me to unconditionally name a single best novel of the year. My answer to that question is always going to be the same: I don’t know, and you don’t either.

—Gary K. Wolfe

The Locus Roundtable blog is live!

Welcome to the launch of the Locus Roundtable blog.

We dedicated some time at the end of last year to work with our intrepid web editor, Mark R. Kelly, making plans to add to and streamline our online space; the most notable changes include the news feed on the homepage and this latest addition, a team blog covering topics of SFnal interest. Our starting line-up of contributors includes various reviewers, authors, and academics—Terry Bisson, John Clute, Rich Horton, Russell Letson, Adrienne Martini, Paul Witcover, Gary K. Wolfe—as well as some of the Locus editorial staff—Amelia Beamer, Charles N. Brown, Jonathan Strahan, and myself.

We're launching the blog with a Roundtable discussion on 2008, to complement our February Year-in-Review issue of Locus. This is not a "Best of" or "Top Ten" discussion per se, but rather a look at some standout titles from the year, how those titles fit into the field, and some introspection on choosing titles from amongst the many. The first part of the discussion takes place between some of our long fiction reviewers, and we hope to follow up with a second discussion between short fiction reviewers and invited editors.

Thanks to everyone for their contributions, especially Mark and Jonathan who were essential to getting this up and running.

I hope you enjoy the blog.

—Liza Groen Trombi, Locus Executive Editor