Locus Roundtable

An itch that had to be scratched

2010-04-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

After my recent reread of Heinlein's Double Star, I couldn't resist revisiting John Varley's The Golden Globe.*

Like Star, Globe is about a down on his luck actor. Kenneth "Sparky" Valentine made his nut on Luna as the kid star of a kid show. Right as Valentine is transitioning into adult roles, he is entangled in a crime and forced to run to the outer planets, where he works under a series of assumed names and in increasingly tenuous circumstances. Along comes the chance to play Lear and Sparky plots a trip back to where he is most wanted.

Both Valentine and Heinlein's Smythe are self-centered enough to almost have tangible gravity wells. Both are convinced that they are the best actors who ever trod the boards. Both have a lot of growing up to do. And one is certainly a nod to the other.

Both Varley and Heinlein have distinctive voices that are built on concise but somehow also lyric prose. Both create universes that feel lived-in. Both wrote (and write, natch) books whose worlds interlock, either through characters or events. And one certainly absorbed much about the field and the craft from the work of other.

While there are many, many similarities, the stories couldn't feel more different. Smythe's path is relatively straightforward. Valentine's twists and doubles back and redoubles again. Varley has given Valentine a believable back-story about the abuse his father heaped on him and how that abuse shaped the damaged man he became. And the world that Varley created is rich with engaging detail that almost leaps off of the page. In many ways, it feels like he's just reporting from an already existing future, rather than one that he's making up as he goes along.

My only problem with Globe is that Valentine is so fully imagined and drawn that it feels as if he stole narrative control away from Varley, which is high praise and a criticism. Valentine's love of his own words takes over when he describes how to jump a freight ship or run a short con. Varley might have been well served to remind his creation that less is frequently more.

Some other thoughts:

1) I commented earlier that acting is a craft that won't be influenced by technological developments. In Globe, Varley has proved me wrong. Valentine's gizmos that let him change his appearance from his bones outward might be the next big theatrical tool.

2) This is a selfish want but I want more books with Hildy, who is one of my favorite characters ever. Not just in Varley's work, mind. My love for Hildy crosses all borders. And, yes, she shows up in Globe.

3) I suspect there is an entire dissertation on the occurrence of magical luggage in speculative fiction.** Here it's the Pantech, an actor's trunk that is full of surprises. Examples include now the Pantech, Rufo's folding box and Pratchett's the luggage. What am I missing?

4) I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Varley's Heinleiners, the Lunarians who have given up on the city and moved outside of the domes to set up their own very loose society of make-do-and-menders. Their one shared goal is to go to the stars. In Globe, they might just get there.

5) I have a degree in theater and spent a good decade working behind the curtains. Varley is one of the few writers who nails all of the details of that life. Heinlein tried, mind you, and covered up with hand waving what he didn't have experience with. But Varley captures all of the tangible and emotional truths of the life that others gloss over.

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* My fingers insist on typing this as "The Golden Glob," which would be a great SF novel as well.

** In Southern and Gothic fiction, there's been a number of papers about the appearance of the white mule. Magical luggage seems not that far removed and entirely more practical.

Clarke Award shortlist

2010-03-31T01:18:00.000-07:00

The shortlist for this year's Arthur C Clarke Award, for the best science fiction novel published in the UK in 2009, has been announced:

Spirit, Gwyneth Jones (Gollancz)
The City and The City, China Mieville (Macmillan)
Yellow Blue Tibia, Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
Galileo's Dream, Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperVoyager)
Far North, Marcel Theroux (Faber)
Retribution Falls, Chris Wooding (Gollancz)

I'll be appearing on the "Not the Clarke Award" panel at Odyssey, the UK Eastercon this weekend, and so I'll save my thoughts about the specific books for then. But some general comments:

1) This is not one of the Clarke shortlists that occasionally emerges and prompts everyone to question the sanity of the judges. Though there are books I'd personally have argued should go on the list - most obviously Paul McAuley's Gardens of the Sun - there's no question that this is a pretty good representation of the best sf published in the UK.
2) The list does, however, underline the degree to which the sf published in the UK and the US has diverged. Unless I'm missing a trick, only three of these books (the Mieville, Robinson, and Theroux) are seeing US publication. And hardly any of the US-written books perceived as being the best of 2009 (eg Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, Priest's Boneshaker, Marusek's Mind Over Ship - just for a start) are getting UK editions.
3) This was a year when a lot of good UK-published books were either too clearly fantasy (Le Guin's Lavinia, Holdstock's Avilion) or not submitted for the award (top of the list: Patrick Ness's The Ask and the Answer).
4) There will inevitably be discussions about definitional stuff - most obviously, "Is The City and The City sf?"
5) The surprising item on the list, for once, is not something from literary left-field, but Chris Wooding's Retribution Falls - probably more of a straightforward sf romp than any of the others.

6) And a winner...? I'm not sure. At the very least, though, The City and the City is the book that seems most talked about, as it was when I did a discussion last week on the novel most likely to win the BSFA Award.

Locus Wants Interns!

2010-03-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

Hey, it's worth mentioning again.

We're a fun group of people to work with, and this type of work looks great on a resume. In this economic climate, many people are out of a job. . . now's the time to bulk up your resume with an internship at Locus, the leading monthly trade journal covering science fiction, fantasy, and horror. We offer part-time unpaid internships to enthusiastic science fiction readers, in a geek-friendly and open but goal-oriented atmosphere. If you prefer, we might be able to do a full-time internship, but we understand that people have other commitments.

Tasks may include running errands (must be comfortable driving a minivan), general office work (mailing, filing, faxing), customer service, occasional proofreading, grant research, grant proposal writing, archival work and cataloging, data entry, etc. You will become familiar with all aspects of the magazine, including photo colorbalancing, page layout, and small-business administration. The position is well suited to a recent graduate or current college student interested in journalism and literature, but we're open to all applicants.

Requirements:

Driver's license and good driving record
Good phone manner
Ability to follow through with tasks under stress
Basic knowledge of Word and Excel
Familiarity with the science fiction genre
Photoshop, Quickbooks, and InDesign skills a plus

To apply, please email a resume and a cover letter describing your interest in science fiction to locus@locusmag.com.

Resumes without cover letters will not be considered. College credit is possible through Peralta. This is an unpaid position. Hard work will be rewarded with insider knowledge and chocolate. Job location is in the hills of Oakland, California; we strongly prefer local applicants who have their own transportation, but if you don't have a car, we might be able to work something out.

Genres of Sequels and Series

2010-03-15T21:29:00.000-07:00

Of all original novels published each year, how many are sequels or books in series, and how many are independent, original, stand-alones? Take a guess before reading further.

For some time now I've been toying around with maintaining tallies of how many new books in our field are published each year that are in each subgenre (SF, fantasy, or horror), and more interestingly, how many are stand-alone singletons as opposed to those that are parts of series, or sequels to earlier books. As I compile the online "New Books" listings every week or so, I am numbed at times by how many books are Xth volumes in seemingly endless series. It seems as if the majority of original books in SF/F/H are sequels and series, not independent stand-alones. This seems especially true in fantasy... at least in 'urban' fantasy.

I started tabulating novels published last year, 2009, but have never finished -- the task required reviewing records of some 400 or 500 novels published that year in my database and setting appropriate fields, which sometimes could be derived straightforwardly from the descriptions I had already written for online posting, but which at other times required me to go out to Amazon.com or look up a Locus review in order to glean enough from their descriptions to categorize them. I still haven't finished all those, but more recently I did spend an hour and did the categorization for the more modest number of 2010 novels published so far this year, and have set up an initial page with the results.

There's a little table of subtotals at the top.

Perhaps it's no surprise to anyone -- but there are more fantasy novels published than SF novels! More than twice as many, in fact. Also, unsurprisingly, confirming my impression, the majority of the fantasy novels, some 80% of them, are books in series.

I should stress of course that I don't pretend the lists on these directory pages are comprehensive -- there are likely dozens, if not hundreds, of titles that I haven't seen, or have noticed but not bothered to compile. (Locus Magazine does try to do a comprehensive job of this, and they do update running counts of new books published each month, but only categorize them by type of book -- novel, collection, anthology, etc. -- not by genre, or standalone/singleton.) Still, the titles I do overlook, deliberately or not, tend to be the fantasy and horror titles, since those are more apt to be marketed as generically vague. As I've mentioned on the weekly bestseller pages, there are dozens of romance novels with possible fantasy elements published every year, many selling quite well, which I don't bother to compile (and I suspect Locus Mag doesn't track all of them down either). And the whole field of YA fiction, where every other novels seems to have some fantastic element, is another area that I admit isn't covered very well on the website. There is only so much time.

Thus, my little tally most likely underestimates the dominance of fantasy series, if anything, and in turn the number of genre books that are parts of series.

So what does this mean?, is it significant?, or already obvious to everyone and hardly worth mentioning?

One thought I have is that this shows how the sf/f/h genres, moreso than 'literary' or other genre fiction, are analogous to film and TV, where the most popular items tends to be sequels and series. Conversely, the films that are not sequels -- and the novels that are not sequels -- are more likely to attract critical attention and awards. TV, on the other hand, tends to reflect the gravitation in pop culture, including sf/f/h, away from singleton stories to ongoing stories of scope and complexity that was impossible before the age of DVD sets -- and online booksellers that made acquiring past volumes of book series so easy.

A corollary here is that, for those readers of sf/f/h (including most reviewers, I might guess) who are less interested in repeats of familiar material and more interested in what's new and completely original, is that they have a lot less to read than it might appear, given how many hundreds of original books are published each year. This is a *good* thing -- ignore all the series and sequels, and it's not impossible to keep up with what's new.

The new page isn't quite fully automated, but it will be shortly, and will be updated regularly (once a week or so) with all the other directory pages. And I may break the tallies down further, by subgenre varieties within each sf/f/h grouping.

Other eyes

2010-02-21T00:04:00.001-08:00

I had a very genteel argument with Martin Lewis earlier this week about Bob Shaw's story "Other Days, Other Eyes", which Martin had read as part of David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's anthology The Ascent of Wonder. My admiration for the story is already on record, but the thing that struck me as I reread it was how much it feels like Shaw's work has become forgotten since he died in 1996. So far as I can tell, none of his books are in print on either side of the Atlantic, and his name rarely comes up in discussion of British sf.

There are probably reasons for this, but not ones to do with the quality of his work. He was unashamedly an old-fashioned writer, whose tendency was to create high-concept sf ideas but describe them in straightforward, journalistic prose. After the formal innovations of the New Wave, or even compared with contemporaries like Christopher Priest or Ian Watson, his work must have seemed small-c conservative. As Dave Langford suggests in his eloquent memorial piece, Shaw was as well known in fan circles for his "Serious Scientific Talks" as for his fiction. But there's a huge amount in his work that's work celebrating.

Quite apart from Shaw's ability to imagine huge sf venues such as Orbitsville, there was also a set of obsessions around time and memory. A late short story like "Dark Night in Toyland" is very much about nostalgia and the passing of the years. Slow glass is a wonderful way of literalising these ideas: an image enters the glass and is only visible on the other side months or years later. As Mike Harrison says in the comments to Martin's post, it's a way of making storyable the idea of deferring or avoiding the real. It also ties into another Shaw motif, sight. This comes to the fore in his novel Night Walk (1967), whose blinded protagonist has to create a new way to see. It's also there in A Wreath of Stars (1976), which gradually reveals a neutrino-world visible as a ghostly image inside our own.

If I had to nominate one passage from Shaw to point new readers at, it'd be the central set-piece of The Ragged Astronauts (1986). The set-up (in an alternate universe, so real-world physics objections don't apply) is that there are two planets, Land and Overland, close enough to each other that they are linked by an hourglass of shared atmosphere. So it's possible to travel from one to the other by hot-air balloon. The first voyage of this kind is one of the purest sf journeys of exploration I can remember - but described in a way that's so explicable, so transparent, that it seems the most plausible thing imaginable. But others, I'm sure, will have different favorite Bob Shaw moments....

No future?

2010-02-14T02:14:00.000-08:00

Having gone on last year about how and why there's not much science fiction theatre [1], I felt duty-bound to go and see Tamsin Oglesby's Really Old, Like Forty-Five, which is unashamedly set in the future. It deals very directly with the question of what's going to happen as an increasing chunk of society is over working age, and the sorts of ideas that might get floated to address this.

So it is - I know it's a heartsinking phrase - an "issues play", but a satirical one, with plenty of incidental jokes along the way. It's set in Britain some time in the near-future. (I think I caught "midway through the 21st century" in an early speech, but then couldn't find it in the published playscript.) It focuses on three elderly siblings, Alice, Robbie, and Lyn. Also in the forefront are Cathy, Lyn's daughter, and Dylan, Alice's grandson. At the same time, there's a world of policy-wonks inhabiting an upper level of the set coming up with bright ideas about how to deal with the problems of old age. We're asked to believe that, along with an increasing number of people over 65, there's also been a huge leap in under-16s without a stable family to look after them. Hence the old are presented with two new options. They can adopt one of these children (as Lyn does) or otherwise prove they're capable of work. Or, especially if they're suffering from dementia, they can go into the new "Arks", hospitals where they're cared for free of charge but are required to participate in tests for new anti-Alzheimer's drugs. There also seems to be limited scope for euthanasia, but it's not central to the play.

The good things first. As a production, it's energetic, and there are some fine performances on stage. The show-stopper, actually, is Michela Meazza as a robot nurse: a sufficiently non-human performance to be well into uncanny valley. Of the siblings, Marcia Warren as Alice is the most affecting, not least because she seems most fully prepared for what old age olds; Gawn Grainger, as Robbie, is all too convincing as someone who desperately and implausibly wants to hang on to his youth.

The paragraph about the bad things is going to be, I'm afraid, much much longer. An issues play like this actually, oddly, has many of the same problems a science fiction story does: how do you give the audience the factual information they need to understand what's at stake? This play uses that old device, a lecture given by one of the policy experts. There are some decent jokes, but the point is made painfully clear that this play is meant to be good for you. The striking thing, actually, is how little has changed. People still read newspapers, use computers much like the ones we have, and play console games on their televisions. It's as if the author hadn't cared to think about the world beyond the immediate sphere she was concerned about. In fact - for the sf fan - the tone is very similar to the sort of light satirical sf you'd have found in, say, Galaxy in the 1950s. An idea is offered, some consequences are worked through, and it's left as a dire warning. There are, of course, very much more sophisticated treatments of this idea in sf: Geoff Ryman's VAO is the obvious example to spring to mind, but also Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, James Tiptree Jr's Brightness Falls from the Air, Logan's Run or (admittedly a very different kind of work) John Scalzi's Old Man's War.

The real weakness of the play, though, is how little it exploits the potential of its subject matter. Any work about old age will to some extent use two vast potential sources of emotional weight: memory and death. This play hardly uses the first, and the second only becomes a presence half an hour before the end. You could get more sense of dread from reading the first ten lines of Larkin's "Aubade" than from these two hours. A lot of time is spent, instead, on the dynamics of the family, on attempts to avoid thinking about old age, and on a rather overworked metaphor about turtles. There's very little sense that these characters have a past, and when they do talk about it their reminiscences seem weirdly second-hand, unfelt. Equally, the political material lacks precision in how it's presented. Do these policy-wonks work for the government or for pharmaceutical companies? Or is a convergence between the two being suggested? And given how quickly the Ark project seems to go wrong, it's implausible that the consequences wouldn't get played out in public - yet this seems to be what the play suggests.

I'm sure that an affecting and hard-hitting play about how old age is seen could be written without the sf elements that Oglesby has co-opted. There is, for want of a better word, a problem of gearing between the family scenes and the sf ideas here. Given how many people now deal with the agonising problems of dementia and old age, it's a real shame how much this play seems like a missed opportunity.

[1] And I'm not the only one.

Insert "Star" Pun Here

2010-02-11T08:53:00.000-08:00

Thanks to yesterday's northeastern Snowmageddon, I was able to plow through a re-read of Heinlein's Double Star. In short: More than 50 years past initial publication, this Hugo Award Winner holds up and remains an enjoyable read.*

Most of its endurance can be explained by the book's focus on one character, the Great Lorenzo Smythe, rather than on the technology around him. Smythe is a down on his luck actor, sitting in a bar, hoping to hustle some credits out of a stranger. In walks Dak Broadbent, a spacer who eventually makes Smythe an offer he can't refuse -- an acting challenge that will keep a potential human/martian war from igniting.

Acting -- in the actual past and in Heinlein's imagined future -- is not a tech heavy profession. While the modes of experiencing performances have changed, the basic tools will always remain the same. Acting is about what an actor can do with her body, her voice and her brain that drives the character. Even James Cameron will cop to this.**

The world against which Smythe exists is simply but thoroughly painted by Heinlein, as he does so well. Mars, Venus, the Moon all have major human settlements. On Mars, the humans are working to co-exist with the Martians, who are easily recognized as the same Martians from 1961's Stranger in a Strange Land. There are futuristic breathing apparatuses and physics-defying space ships. Again, Heinlein, like so many writers of his era, failed to predict cell phones. And, again, a cell phone would have greatly changed bits of the plot.

Heinlein's knee-jerk heteronormativity shows up here, too. When Broadbent invites Smythe to a hotel in order to discuss the job at hand, Smythe muses, "You don't pick up a stranger in a bar and then insist that he come to a hotel room -- well, not one of the same sex, at least." Indeed.

Because Double Star is about Smythe's journey from self-absorbed prig into a fully functional Heinleinian human, all of the moments like these that signal the book's age don't feel nearly as important as what Heinlein does to his character. Double Star is Smythe's book. Even the standard Heinleinian didactic rants -- here focused on the usefulness of politics and ethics -- flow seamlessly into the narrative as Smythe ponders his ideals rather than jut out like awkwardly inserted lecture clumps.

Which isn't to say that Heinlein doesn't opine about some of his favorite topics, just that said opines*** are organically integrated. Like this one, which is part of a speech Smythe gives in a press conference:

"Let us protect our own -- but let us not be seduced by fear and hatred into foolish acts. The stars will never be won by little minds; we must be as big as space itself."

Fifty years on, we still forget this. Will we have a better grasp of the concept fifty years on?

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* Somehow, Jo Walton and I are on a similar rereading kick. And the laughable "modern" technology -- like vacuum tubes and robot diaper changers -- as well as the unsettling relationship factors Walton finds in The Door Into Summer are entirely absent in Double Star, which helps keep a modern reader from being thrown out of the story as violently.

** I am now seized by a compulsion to re-read Varley's The Golden Globe, if only to see how he approached the actor's craft.

*** It is too a word, just maybe not when used this way.

more later...

2010-02-01T15:52:00.001-08:00

Yes, I'm still stuck on Heinlein.

Two small things recently wandered across my field of vision, tunnel-like as it is with the start of classes:

1) io9's Josh Wimmer talked about the Catcher in the Rye-ness of Stranger in a Strange Land. I mostly agree with him. You?

2) Does anyone know if there are Heinlein universe fan stories that use the same characters/settings? Any Friday/Kettlebelly Baldwin slash? Or is that just too odd? Or are Heinlein's books just too old?

Walking the Glory Road

2010-01-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

During the long, long break, I re-read Glory Road. And, again, by way of caveat, there is no particular reason - other than sheer whimsy - I chose this particular title off of my Heinlein shelf.

Glory Road, for the uninitiated (or those who need a refresher), concerns the journey of a hero, E.C. "Oscar" Gordon as he reclaims an item of power* for a very important woman, Star, who turns out to be the Empress of a collection of universes. The first three-quarters of the book follow the standard quest narrative - start of journey, obstacle, victory, obstacle, victory (lather, rinse, repeat), climatic battle and ultimate success.

But the last quarter of the story doesn't hew to the predictable script. Oscar has to figure out what to do with himself once he's fulfilled his destiny. My knowledge of pre-1963 fantasy is not vast. This twist, however, does appear to be a new one for the time. I know blog readers won't hesitate to set me straight on this point.

Two things struck me during this re-read:

1) I can now pinpoint this book as the source of all of my confusion about the difference between fantasy and science fiction. Ostensibly, Glory Road fall into the fantasy camp, what with all of the sword fights, horse analogues and feudal lands. Heinlein, however, keeps tossing out science-based explanations for all of the goings-on, like the Empress explaining that the pentagrams that allow them to travel between universes are really just complicated circuit diagrams.

Take Oscar's defeat of the Igli, a ferocious, unkillable beast. What the hero does is "feed the Igli to the Igli" or, put another way, start stuffing the Igli's appendages into the Igli's mouth and rolling the body into smaller and small balls until they disappear. As the Empress explains, this solution wasn't mystical but geometrical:

What happens when you place an insupportable strain on a mass, such that it can't remain where it is? While leaving it nowhere to go? This is a schoolboy problem in metaphysical geometry and the eldest proto-paradox, the one about the irresistible force and the immovable body. The mass implodes. It is squeezed out of this world into some other. This is often the way the people of a universe discover the Universes -- but usually is as disastrously as you forced it on Igli; it may take millennia before they control it. It may hover around the fringes as 'magic' for a long time, sometimes working, sometimes failing, sometimes backfiring on the magician.

Heinlein, with one frequently-recited swoop, is able to wave his hands and turn magic into avenues of math that we haven't yet discovered. It's a neat trick -- and one that makes me wander down the thorny path of what fantasy (or science fiction, for that matter) actually means.

On a more practical note w/r/t "magic:" I want one of Rufo's folding boxes.** Because, origin stories aside, the ability to store all of your stuff in another dimension would be a handy way to solve my yarn storage problem.

2) When I was in Junior High, I have a clear memory of a male civics teacher explaining that a woman could never be president because she would never be able to control her mood at certain points during her menstrual cycle and would wind up nuking Russia because she's a hormonal mess.***

Which is why this passage stuck out:

By endocrine control of some sort [more magic, it appears -am], Star was left free of Eve's rhythm but in all ways young--not pills nor hormone injections; this was permanent. She was simply a healthy woman who never had "bad days." This was not for her convenience but to insure that her judgement as the Great Judge would never be whipsawed by her glands. "This is sensible," she said seriously. "I can remember there used to be days when I would bite the head off my dearest friend for no reason, then burst into tears. One can't be judicial in that sort of storm."

Which makes me wonder how both Heinlein and that civics teacher would feel about women on the Supreme Court. Does Sotomayor hand down especially vindictive decisions every 28 days? Can women have positions of power only after they've passed menopause (which brings up other issues about what a women is worth)? Or is the whole monthly cycle thing just a convenient excuse to continue to discount the higher reasoning skills of half of the species?

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* Does anyone else see a similarity between the Empress' Egg and Zerika's Orb?

** Does anyone else see a similarity between the Rufo's luggage and Pratchett's the Luggage?

*** Really.

Happy New Year

2009-12-31T02:35:00.000-08:00

This year we lost our friend and Locus founder, Charles N. Brown. There were many wonderful works of science fiction and fantasy published, which will no doubt be discussed in our traditional year-in-review issue in February, but this is what rocked me the most in 2009.

I hope that in 2010 everyone's year is peaceful, happy and filled with success, and that the darker side of life doesn't cast its shadow on your door. Oh, and Happy New Year!!!!

RAH heirs?

2009-12-16T12:55:00.000-08:00

Since Heinlein's death -- actually, well before he died but the situation became more acute post-mortem -- the genre has been trying to find the writer who will replace the Grand Master. Various names have been bandied about. Spider Robinson has long been a contender and was tapped to finish, Variable Star, a partial manuscript Heinlein left behind. Charlie Stross's Saturn's Children was an homage/pastiche/tribute of Heinlein's Friday. John Scalzi's Old Man's War books get dropped in the Heinlein hopper as well, if only because they capture RAH's clear prose and smart heroes.

Admittedly, it's a silly task, this trying to find someone who will give readers the same experience as one of the field's icons. Writing in another person's style is akin to wearing another person's underpants. It's unsettling and uncomfortable on a number of levels.*

But if I had to anoint one current writer as the one who captures that feeling I get when I read Heinlein, I would drip the oil on John Varley's forehead.

I have read Steel Beach more times than I can count, frankly, and love it more each time. Ditto The Golden Globe. My abiding affection for these books comes not from their Heinlein-ness but from their Varley-ness, whose work has a singular voice that hits all of the best notes of Heinlein's work while investing it with a greater sense of human failings and modern panache.

This carries into Varley's last three titles -- the Red Thunder, Red Lightening, Rolling Thunder series -- that are clear hat-tips to Heinlein's juveniles without ever attempting to imitate them. Varley knows that a wide number of his readers will get all of the Heinlein references** but doesn't let them stand in the way of spinning his adventure stories that rely both on the moxie of his young heroes and on the reader's knowledge of the last 30 years.

So while I wait for Varley to publish his next book, whose work do you think captures the Heinlein voice and ethos while still maintaining their own voice and ethos? And do you think it is fair to label any given writer "the next Heinlein?"

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* Some of those titles succeed because the writers in question never tried to bend their voice into a strange shape. And some of those titles, imo, fail because the writers tried too hard to make it work.

** Two of my favorites are from Rolling Thunder:

1) "Somebody once said that teenagers should be raised in a barrel and fed through the bunghole, then decanted when they're twenty. I should know; I admit it, I was a prime candidate for encooperage...until recently."

2) SPOILERISH: "I'm going to miss my home, the Red Planet. But now I'm between planets. Now it's time for the stars."

Friday links

2009-12-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

Light posting round here because I'm still getting back on my feet. Some links:

- The Robert Holdstock memorial fund
- Short fiction from non-anglophone authors in the big three magazines: a comprehensive survey. (ETA: Updated here.)
- In case you hadn't seen it: John Scalzi takes Black Matrix publishing to task for breathtakingly low fiction payment rates (1, 2); SF signal publishes attempted rebuttal; epic comment thread ensues.
- Today's (London) Times had a banner headline "First review of Avatar"; as Emily Bell tweeted, "presumably for people without internet access"
- Helpful summary of New Moon.
- Whither fantasy? from Hal Duncan (at length) and M John Harrison (not at length).
- Matte vs Gloss, the eternal debate.
- Gorgeous (but currently sold out) mix of 20th and 21st century audio tech.
- The UK may be drowning in government debt, but we're getting our own space agency! I do hope they employ Stephen Baxter.

And finally, not particularly sf-nal, but an impossibly addictive Flash game.

ETA: And happy 80th birthday, sf fandom!

More RAH rereading

2009-11-30T11:42:00.000-08:00

Since Citizen of the Galaxy held up so well, I reread The Star Beast over the weekend. IMO, the years have been less kind to this tale.

[Warning: spoilers ahead.]

John Thomas -- the most recent iteration in a series of John Thomases -- was left Lummox, the titular star beast, by his father. Who was left the beast by his father. And so on, back at least a century to the John Thomas who smuggled the young lummox off of his (or her, depending) planet of origin. The Lummox has grown from housecat size to dumptruck size over the years and has begun innocently causing property damage in John Thomas' hometown. The population does all but carry fiery torches over to the kid's house after Lummox's most recent escape. So begins the plot.

While The Star Beast is ostensibly a coming of age story, it is more about the use of diplomacy. Mr Kiku* and his cohort Sergei Greenberg spend most of the book negotiating with the rest of Lummox's race in order to keep the Earth from being blown up by them. The passages about the Beast and John Thomas are interesting -- but it feels like Heinlein really goes off on one of his giddy didactic tears when he gets into the gritty details of status, power and gesture.

It's hard to say who the main character really is. John Thomas is the one who is leaving home - but he never seems to be the agent of his choices. He reacts against his overbearing mother**, is manipulated by his girlfriend*** and is ultimately rescued by the Lummox. Mr Kiku, who is the agent of all of his own actions, feels more like the protagonist but hasn't changed in any substantial ways by the time the story ends.

Some of Heinlein's pet themes show up here, of course. Like how every culture has language that describes xenophobia. How brains are frequently more effective than brawn. How parents do not own their children or, as Mr. Kiku points out, that "sons are lost from the beginning."****

On that last one - I've often wondered what was in Heinlein's past that made this such a common idea in his books. Does it turn up just because of his audience for the juveniles or is there something else going on? I also wonder what his parent characters would have looked like had he had children. But that is an unanswerable question, sadly.

The Star Beast, like most Heinlein, is an enjoyable read and, unlike the recent US edition of Citizen of the Galaxy, my 1984 Del Rey edition has been proofread, which makes the reading that much easier. The plot clips along nicely, even if the author is a little too enamored with trying to teach us everything he knows about making a deal. What's harder to figure out is what (and who) the story is about.

* Mr Kiku's job: "Anything and everything outside of the Earth's ionosphere was Mr. Kiku's responsibility and worry. Anything which concerned the relationships between Earth and any part of the explored universe was also his responsibility. Even affairs which were superficially strictly Earthside were also his concern, if they affected or were in any way affected by anything which was extra-terrestrial, interplanetary, or interstellar in nature -- a very wide range indeed."

** A telling exchange:

"...take off your shoe, dear. I want to measure your foot."

Baffled, [John Thomas] started to remove his shoe. Suddenly he stopped. "Mum, I wish you wouldn't knit socks for me."

"What, dear? But mother enjoys doing it for you."

"Yes, but ... look, I don't like handknit socks. They make creases on the soles of my feet...I've showed you often enough!"

"Don't be silly! How could soft wool do your feet any harm? And think what you'd have to pay for real wool, real handwork, if you bought it. Most boys would be grateful."

"But I don't like it, I tell you!"

She sighed. "Sometimes, dear, I don't know what to do with you, I really don't."

*** At the end of the book she is described as having the "morals of a snapping turtle and the crust of a bakery pie." I still can't figure out what that last bit means. She's light and flakey?

**** Which makes one ask: What about daughters? It's a spot where it's clear how much society has changed since Heinlein's day -- and how much it hasn't.

Robert Holdstock

2009-11-29T08:57:00.000-08:00

I was meaning to post about something else tonight, but the news has overtaken me: David Langford's Ansible reports that Robert Holdstock has died, at the age of 61, following his collapse with an E. coli infection on 18th November. I only knew him in the most tangential way, but this is a hell of a shock. His Mythago Wood sequence of books is absolutely central for anyone trying to get a hold on what fantasy literature in Britain has done since Tolkien. It evokes a version of the country's past that's rich but harsh and unsentimental, and makes all those old tropes like the Green Man or the Wild Hunt new and threatening again. And there are plenty of other works, like The Fetch, or the Merlin Codex sequence, which dig deep into other myths that get taken for granted. In person, I remember him being ebullient, thoughtful, and welcoming to newcomers; others who knew him better say the same; all sympathy to them.

Rescued Candour

2009-11-15T12:48:00.001-08:00

In the light of this weekend's announcement that Syfy.com are discontinuing all their columns, including "Excessive Candour" by John Clute, I thought Roundtable-types might be interested in Erin Kissane's heroic work excavating links to all the columns dating back to 1997.

Because it was there

2009-11-09T07:41:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend, I re-read Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy.

I use the word "re-read" loosely, however; I am certain that I read it as a teenager but have no memory of the plot, characters or themes. This may be the first post in a series about the RAH books I read during those years - which would be all of the ones published before 1983ish - but can't remember all that well. Because the biggest thing that I'd forgotten about Heinlein is how fiendishly enjoyable his books are, even if you have some qualms about some of the issues they bring up.

Citizen of the Galaxy is one of RAH's classic juveniles: boy meets older mentor who is something of a genius, mentor dies, boy becomes man of honor after Thrilling Adventures. While the plot is predictable, the texture of the adventures make it worth the read.

Others have mentioned how seamless Heinlein's worlds are but I'm always gobsmacked by them, even now. You know that the writer was only showing the iceberg's tip of what he knew about any of his imagined outposts -- like Jubbulpore or the Free Traders' Sisu -- but what he chose to show was exactly what you needed to know. All of the needful stuff is condensed into the man's clear prose, which is never enamored with its own cleverness. In other hands, such concision could be a dull read but this reportorial approach works in Heinlein's hands.

I'd also forgotten how academically-based a lot of his cultures are. Citizen has the subtext of an anthropology primer while it tells a fast-paced coming-of-age story that captures the scope and imagination of space opera. The ending - which falls just as Thorby, the boy in question, launches himself in a new direction - seems to imply that Heinlein was going to revisit Thorby's continued quest in another work. Does anyone know if that was intended? Or begun? And have you re-read any Heinlein lately?

(A note, however, on editions. Unless you are a big fan of reading a book that doesn't appear to have been proofread, avoid the U.S. Pocket Books publication. I suppose I should be happy that the book is still in print but wish that Pocket had forked out the extra cash for a decent proofreader.)

Saturday links

2009-11-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

Awwww, it's Lil Cthulhu!
Some follow-ups to earlier discussions here: L Timmel Duchamp on Adrienne's WOACA post, and io9 on my post on books that stick with you.
Abigail Nussbaum on The Magicians and a lot of the meta-talk surrounding it.
Further to Adrienne's post, some more responses to Publishers Weekly's all-male, no-genre Top 10 list: the Huffington Post, the (London) Guardian, Nicola Griffith; a whole bunch more.
PW's rationale, as explained by reviews director Louisa Ermelino.
A blue sun.
Cory Doctorow on "radical presentism", follow-up debate at Making Light.
Margo Lanagan responds to her World Fantasy Award win. (See also ML's own blog: "I'm on a nice high horse there, aren't I?")
Books I haven't read, but clearly need to, no 324: David Constantine, The Shieling.
Send a card to William Tenn.

Tipping-point

2009-11-06T18:03:00.000-08:00

I don't want to go on about my current condition, but reading horror stories while stuck at home with a broken leg (and on painkillers) is an odd experience. I've been working my way through Peter Straub's new two-volume set of American Fantastic Tales, plus the old classic Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Although the good stories are having the desired effect of safe scariness on me, I haven't at any stage felt I shouldn't go on reading for fear of bad dreams or similar. (That said, the one book I have wimped out of re-reading is King's Misery; but I'm sure that's irrational and there aren't any Locus subscribers who would come round here and force me to retype me reviews to accord with their opinions...)

Anyhow, it occurred to me that there's one moment that's common to an awful lot of horror stories, and it's the moment encapsulated in one of my favorite scenes from any movie, the bathroom scene in Kubrick's The Shining (spoilers, obviously):

There are so many wonderful things in this scene I don't know where to start: Grady (Philip Stone)'s supernatural stillness; the relish with which he rolls the R's in "corrected"; Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson)'s superb delivery of the racial epithet that Grady throws out, showing both his discomfort at the word and the fact that he wants the conversation to continue; the distant ballroom music filtering through. But the structural point of the conversation is how it flips over and reveals the true shape of the story (and the horror) that's to come.

Actually, it flips over twice. Having started with Grady being obsequious to Torrance for spilling a drink over him, Nicholson seems to be getting the upper hand in the first two minutes, when he recognises Grady as the past caretaker who killed his family. Apart from anything else, it signals clearly that we're in fantastic territory and that Torrance accepts this. This is affirmed by Grady's from-the-tomb delivery of "You are the caretaker; you've always been the caretaker." And somehow, that's the point where he takes control of the scene. As he reveals the "talent" of Torrance's son, his implacable fervour gradually co-opts Torrance. (Part of the subtext, I think, is him challenging Torrance: Are you enough of a man to keep your wife and child under control, as they should be?) You can see how much Torrance wants his respect when he takes Grady's phrase "against your will" and puns on it, with a little smirk, as "He is a very wilful boy." And so the shape of the rest of the film, and Torrance's rampage, is set.

The more general point is that lots of stories have this moment (though not always so meticulously executed). The forbidden book is opened and read; the ancient temple is peered into; and the reader (and maybe the protagonist) realise just how bad things are going to be. Sometimes the protagonist may not fully realise their own condition, as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic "The Yellow Wallpaper", and the reader has to supply an awareness of just how trapped that story's narrator is. At the other extreme is what John Clute has called the Club Story, where a horror tale is not only told, but seen to be told to an audience of some kind. The horror is not only recognised, but can be reflected upon in the frame story: "Heart of Darkness", for instance.

The same kind of moment, of course, occurs in plenty of other kinds of stories: in sf, they're what Peter Nicholls has called the conceptual breakthrough moment. But the horror version has a particular kind of affect. The Straub volume includes a very short and pulpy piece by David H Keller, "The Jelly-Fish" (PDF here), in which a boastful professor on a marine expedition boasts to his colleagues that he can achieve anything he wants, including miniaturising himself. He does so, appearing on a microscope slide along with a captured jellyfish. He is ready to return to normal, but...I don't need to tell you the rest, do I?

Same song, another verse

2009-11-05T07:31:00.000-08:00

When the 2007 Hugo ballot was released, there was a hailstorm of commentary about the lack of women on the list. I'm not sure how much the situation has changed in the genre (not much, imho) but I think it's interesting that a very similar controversy is swirling around the "legit" literature circles right now. Clearly, this keeps happening because women can't write their collective way out of a damp paper bag. And, yes, that's sarcasm.

Where are the WOACAs?

2009-10-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

A recent Making Light post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden about her invisibility at Home Depot got me to thinking about women of a certain age,* one of which I am rapidly becoming. Not only are we difficult for Home Depot employees to see, we also seem to be largely invisible in science fiction as well. ** In fact, I'm not sure I can think of more than a half-dozen. And even a couple of those are fraught, like Maureen in To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

But what's more interesting to me is that the WOACAs who do show up, don't get to do all that much. I can list quite a few men in the same age range who are the SF story's main actor. But women like Bujold's Cordelia don't get to do all that much once they are done with having their young. Is it that they stop being interesting after that point?

I feel as if I'm missing quite a few of these characters, however. Who would be on your list? And what part in the story does she play?

* Note one: quick definition, which may get refined as we go: WOACA means those who are past the knitty-gritty of childbearing (yet may still have children under age 18) but not yet old enough to qualify as a crone. Patricia Heaton, Catherine Keener and Daryl Hannah are WOACA, if stunning ones. Betty White is not. I think Meryl Streep is; however, many may not. In terms of SF, Cordelia in Bujold's A Civil Campaign is. Cordelia in Shards of Honor is not. Celebrities aside, most of these women aren't seen as objects of desire anymore but do not yet have the sheen of wisdom.

* Note two: Fantasy has its own set of baggage about WOACAs. That's a different post.

28 days later

2009-10-22T09:59:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Strahan sent an email a few days ago to the Locus reviewers reminding us that the deadlines for our year-end pieces (to appear in the February 2010 issue) were coming up at Christmas time, and so we should start thinking about what we wanted to discuss there. So I went back and looked at my halfway-through-the-year-novels-post, started making a list of what I'd read and liked since, and...something odd happened.

The thing is, as a reviewer, your interactions with new books tends to take a certain form. You get the book, you have to read it and write about it quite quickly, and you move on to the next one. So you don't often get the luxury of looking back on a book from the distance of three or six months. You don't often get the chance to say (in print, at least) "Well, after some reflection, my views have shifted..." I hear a lot of writers say that they'd like to put completed manuscripts away in a drawer for three months. It'd be nice - though obviously not practical - for the same to happen with reviews.

Example. Of the books I mentioned I liked in my half-year post, the one that has grown on me most since is China Mieville's The City and The City. I haven't read it again, though I did take part in an energetic discussion about it at Readercon (excerpted for the Aug 22 edition of Hour of the Wolf). The Mieville has preoccupied me not particularly because of the noir story or the writing per se but the central metaphor, and my thinking what an extraordinary, haunting, political way it is to see the cities most of us now live in.

Another example. As I've mentioned here before, I'm gobsmacked - as we Brits say - with admiration for Greer Gilman's Cloud and Ashes. It's not a book I can claim to understand anything like fully and so, as in the past, I'll duck out of offering a full review. But individual bits of it, images or aspects of its use of language, keep coming back to me like depth-charge puns you only get three months after the fact. (The same is true of another great playing-with-language novel, Damon Knight's Humpty Dumpty: An Oval.)

And sometimes the stuff that stays with you is just plain weird, like the cliff made of earlobes in M John Harrison's otherwise seemingly mimetic Climbers, the description of the desert in Joanna Russ's "Bodies", or - perhaps my favorite piece of prose anywhere - the two pages about toothpaste tubes in Gravity's Rainbow. Nothing really links all of these examples, except that for me (an enormously subjective measure, I know) they stick with me. I can't even articulate any comprehensive reason why - some of them are visual images, some not; some are specific passages of description, some are more generalised ideas or concepts. I suppose the most prominent example in the field is Delany's Dhalgren. As William Gibson says in his superb introduction to the current (Vintage) edition, it's not a book that makes sense in any orthodox way; but if it works for you, it becomes a particular climate of the mind, a way of understanding and perceiving the world that you can't ever forget.

So, to broaden this out a bit, what stories or books have for you the effect I'm describing? That is, regardless of how you feel about them on first reading, they wind up having a greater effect on you in the weeks and months that follow? And - fully aware that I've failed to answer the question myself - why do you think this might be?

journal of the plague week

2009-10-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

Schools in my area of the U.S. are shutting down because kids and staff are too ill to work. My oldest was just sent home sick, even though she's not overly sick, because the nurse is understandably twitchy about keeping everyone contagion free. I wouldn't say that anyone is hysterical about the whole thing -- we Northeasterners are not known for our flights into hysteria because we learned a lesson after the whole Salem witch debacle -- but we are keeping a firm eye on the situation.

Which, of course, doesn't concern you at all, really, unless you live nearby. But it did get me to thinking about great genre books about pandemics. The first that leap to my mind is King's The Stand. The second was Willis' gorgeous The Doomsday Book. I couldn't come up with a third, however. Or, at least, not one that I'd recommend.

So I thought I'd toss it out to you. What are the great genre books about pandemics?

Recovery reading

2009-10-17T05:16:00.000-07:00

I try to shy away from first-person writing about books, but there's no other way to do this post. On October 6th, I broke my leg while on my way into work, and after four days of excellent treatment in hospital, I've been recuperating at home. All the indications are that I should get back to normal eventually - after 4-6 weeks - and I'm already contemplating a gradual process of starting to do my day-job from home. But in the meantime, as you can imagine, I've been reading a lot.

The first thing I did was plough through the pile of books I'd accumulated for my December Locus retrospective column, on Brian Aldiss. (I'd originally contemplated covering Gene Wolfe next, but felt that "under the influence of morphine" was not the best state in which to arrive at stable readings of The Fifth Head of Cerberus and The Book of the New Sun.) But now, as you can imagine, I have a large pile of to-be-read stuff looming over me and (especially tempting in my current state) an equally large set of books that I know I like and could re-read. To be clear, it's not that I'm having a problem concentrating on long works, or ones that require some memory of past events - one of my projects, which is going fine, is to get through all of Shelby Foote's 3000-page trilogy on the US Civil War. But there are some things I'm bouncing off at the moment: the more affected or baroque prose styles, stories that mess around with the whole one-thing-entails-another thing that constitutes the spine of story, stories that spend too long foreshadowing and not getting to the point. (I'm probably forming a very unfair impression of the new Iain Banks, Transition, for this last reason, but it has a Prologue that consists almost entirely of trailers for the half-dozen plot-strands the Prologue is delaying me from reading. My patience was quickly exhausted.) On the other hand, the things I've been enjoying have been things set in self-contained worlds which knit themselves up neatly (too neatly?) within that frame - Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown stories, or almost anything by P G Wodehouse.

So... from your own experience, or from what I've said above, any more suggestions for recovery reading?

Yes but what's it for?

2009-10-13T12:34:00.000-07:00

Amy Hertz' lead-off column for the Huffington Post's new books section has bunched up the undergarments of some folks in the industry. Some commenters think her "no reviews" stance is pure genius; some think it's delusional. Myself, I vote for a bit of both but that we won't know if it leads more toward genius or delusion for a few months yet.

But that's another discussion.

What struck me was this passage: "Book reviews tend to be conversation enders, and when you're living in the age of engagement, a time when people are looking for conversation starters, that stance gets you nowhere."

So what purpose do book reviews have in this "age of engagement?" Are they a dinosaur waiting for the information of its death to reach its brain? Or are book reviews about something else, especially in a magazine like Locus?

I don't know that I have any good answers. I'm hoping that you all might have some thoughts. Why do you read book reviews? What do you hope to get out of them? Or are they already a dead medium?

Commonplaces

2009-10-01T20:17:00.000-07:00

A couple of things that have caught my eye lately in contexts unrelated to sf. First, the opening lines from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra:

PHILO. Nay, but this dotage of our general's
O'erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,
That o'er the files and musters of the war
Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front: his captain's heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gipsy's lust.

[Flourish within.]

Look where they come:
Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transform'd
Into a strumpet's fool: behold and see.

[Enter ANTONY and CLEOPATRA, with their trains; Eunuchs fanning
her.]

CLEOPATRA. If it be love indeed, tell me how much.

ANTONY. There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd.

CLEOPATRA. I'll set a bourn how far to be belov'd.

ANTONY. Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

It occurred to me that, if no-one has ever used this quote as the epigraph for an sf novel, they really should. (And if they have and I wasn't aware of it, please tell me in comments...) It seemed such a wonderful idea that love could become so much of a solipsism that it could be used as a justification for remaking the world. One of the glories of Antony and Cleopatra is that the lovers' inward plight (and, yes, solipsism) seems almost to turn the world. Sf offers the chance to literalise an idea like that: what would the new heaven and new earth be? A virtual world? A terraformed planet?

Second - and I realise I'm about to get the Pretension Police called on me for this - is something from the philosopher Wittgenstein's Blue Book.

A great many philosophical difficulties are connected with that sense of the expressions "to wish", "to think", etc. These can all be summed up in the question "How can one think what is not the case?"
[...] Supposing we asked [instead]: "How can we imagine what does not exist?" The answer seems to be: "If we do, we imagine non-existent combinations of existing elements." A centaur doesn't exist, but a man's head and torso and arms and a horse's legs do exist. "But can't we imagine an object utterly different from any one which exists?" - We should be inclined to answer: "If redness, roundness and sweetness did not exist, we could not imagine them".

I don't know offhand of any other passages from major philosophers that are so directly about how to create cool aliens in science fiction stories. I find it very difficult to think of any sf stories where the aliens are not in some respect created by analogy. Even in a book like Stapledon's Star Maker - rightly considered as the definitive work of sf-nal radicalism in its speculation about life on other worlds - the creatures are modelled one way or another on earthly examples. So far as there are aliens in sf that are really, irreducibly, strange, (I think) it's not so much in their physical forms but in how they relate to humans or respond to the universe. (Greg Bear's "Hardfought", a very Stapledonian work, is one of my benchmarks here.) So...any counterexamples to Wittgenstein? Are there any sf creatures not composed of elements we already know?