Not Enough Time, Not Enough Ears
Niall Harrison is reading Nicholas Fisk: Fisk is a cornerstone for British speculative fiction readers who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties. As Niall say, it is interesting see how his work differs from contemporary children’s literature.
Adam Roberts will be reading 2666: I will be reading Robert Bolaño’s monsters novel at some point this year but I can’t face it yet. Think of it as five novellas, they say.
Casey Samulski looks back at a review of Schismatrix Plus: I keep meaning to re-read this and, indeed, the rest of Bruce Sterling’s back catalogue. My copy was picked up in a Borders in Phoenix since it isn’t published in this country and Sterling has had a tough time of it here.
Abigail Nussbaum says don’t vote in the Locus Poll: I agree.
I’m currently listening to Contra by Vampire Weekend, There Is Love In You by Four Tet and One Life Stand by Hot Chip. The first couple of listens suggest, respectively, a grower, a shower and an oh-no-er. we shall see.
‘On Science And Science Fiction’ by Kathryn Cramer
I read Cramer’s introduction last night but was completely unable to penetrate it. I put that down to tired eyes but re-reading it today I’m still unable to make much progress. Paragraph follows paragraph with little sense of an argument building or even much of a connection between the various assertions. Not only do I have no idea what Cramer means by hard SF but I find it hard to work out what she believes about anything so often does her writing fold back in on itself.
It is also, in its own way, as disingenuous as Gregory Benford’s introduction. Early on, Cramer says: “There has been a persistent view that hard sf in somehow the core and center of the sf field.” (25) No mention of the fact Benford has just stated this view a couple of pages earlier; each introduction exists in a strange vacuum.
Vorsprung Durch Technik
There are few better ways of starting Saturday morning than with a cup of tea and copies of the Guardian, the London Review of Books and Heat. The edge was somewhat taken off this pleasure when I opened today’s Guardian Review and saw that the headline was Salinger, Updike, Mailer… Mark Lawson on the postwar. Lawson is a critic of spectacular inanity and his subject is simultaneously overly familiar and beyond his talents. In fact, this article is really an advert for his forthcoming Radio 4 series, Capturing America, and takes the form of a potted history of post-war American literature. It is every bit as bad as I feared. Take this opening gambit:
There is an obvious temptation to believe that the authors who have recently died form – with others who fought in the war (such as Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal) or were teenagers in America during it (Philip Roth) – the greatest literary generation the country has ever seen or ever will see.
No, there is no such “obvious” temptation and a definition of literary generation that encompasses both Bellow (1915) and Roth (1933) is pretty generous. He continues with this theme:
When I began to think about the series, the question of who was America’s greatest living novelist would spark lively debate at a book festival. On the eve of transmission, that medal automatically defaults to Philip Roth.
To which I can only say: bollocks. There is a paragraph after paragraph of this rubbish; I forced myself to read it to the end but I don’t have the energy to pick it apart here. Radio 4 is bad enough for my blood pressure at the best of times so you can guarantee I won’t be tuning in to the series.
Toril Moi’s LRB review of a new translation of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir is frustrating for entirely different reasons. Published in France in 1949, it was originally translated into English by HM Parshley, a professor of zoology, in 1953. In 1983 it emerged that there were serious weaknesses with the translation, not least of which was the excision of 145 pages (about 15% of the original text). As Moi puts it:
The strength of Parshley’s 57-year-old translation is that it is lively and readable. Parshley was, on all evidence, an excellent writer of English. When he understood the French, he usually found the right phrase and managed to convey nuances of irony and poetry. The most serious weaknesses are the unannounced cuts; but his complete lack of familiarity with Beauvoir’s philosophical vocabulary and the deficiencies in his knowledge of French also undermine his version of the book.
Despite lobbying, it took over twenty years for the publishers to agree to a new translation. For some reason though, they enlisted a pair of rank amateurs:
Given the profile of the book, Beauvoir specialists hoped that the publishers would turn to a first-rate translator with a track record in the relevant field… Instead, the publishers chose Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, two Americans who have lived in Paris since the 1960s and worked as English teachers at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques. They have published numerous textbooks in English for French students (My English Is French: la syntaxe anglaise), and many cookery books (Cookies et cakes and Sandwichs, tartines et canapés among others). Their track record in translation from French to English, however, appears to be slim (I have found only two catalogue essays for art exhibitions in Paris, both translated by Malovany-Chevallier).
The results are predictable. And Heat? Well, I think we are all impressed by Nicola Girls Aloud’s anti-sunbed stance and Danny McFly’s torso. Conversely, the news that John Mayer is dating Taylor Swift is what the phrase “gruesome twosome” was invented for. (If you need to pretend those last three sentences didn’t happen: Christopher Tayler reviews The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis and Patrick Ness reviews Skippy Dies by Paul Murray.)
Here Be Dragons
Fantasy readers tend to complain if their novels don’t come complete with a pretty map at the front. Non-fantasy readers tend to take the piss out of them for this. Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie laughs in the face of all this:
Having only seen it online, I had just thought it was a continuation of the imitation parchment covers for the First Law Trilogy. It was only when I had the thing in my hands I realised they had (brilliantly) put the map on the outside. It gets even cleverer. As the novel ranges across the continent of Styria, the page bearing the geographical title of each section is printed on a greyscale close up of the relevant area of the map. The jacket only credits the two illustrators but it appears to have been a real team effort:
Original concept from Simon Spanton (I believe), expanded upon by my editor Gillian Redfearn, who then put the brief together and assembled the team to carry it out (kind of like the A-Team, but with more artistic accumen and less mercy), and co-ordinated the project. The sword was painted by weapons expert Didier Graffet, the map was drawn by map-master Dave Senior, adapting my own scrawl, then the whole was combined and made to live by designer Laura Brett (also responsible for the First Law covers), who added the spatter, coins, parchmenty effects, and lettering.
The less said about the American version the better but at least the paperback edition had character. Anyway, I know I’m very late to the party but this is still worth saying. The book itself is bloody good too.
Dark Fantasy
When I saw Mark Newton using it, I wasn’t really sure what it meant so I hazarded a guess. When I saw Gav Nextread using it, I still didn’t know what it meant but that was okay because he wasn’t sure either. Now, FerretBrain tell me it is out in the wild and equally troubling to them. I feel old and confused. What year is this? Where are my spectacles? What does dark fantasy mean?
Bad Faith
Watching Town Bloody Hall the other week made me dig out my copy of How To Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ. The second chapter, ‘Bad Faith’, is only two and a half pages but is as concise a laying out of the over-riding issue as you could wish for:
Conscious, conspiratorial guilt? Hardly. Privilege groups, like everyone else, want to think well of themselves and to believe that they are acting generously and justly. Conscious conspiracy would either quickly stop, or it would degenerate into the kind of unpleasant, armed, cold war with which white South Africa must live. Genuine ignorance? Certainly that is sometimes the case. But talk about sexism or racism must distinguish between the sins of commission of the real, active misogynist or bigot and the vague, half-conscious sins of omission of the decent, ordinary, even good hearted people, which sins the context of institutionalized sexism and racism makes all too easy.
This rather more elegantly states what I was flailing towards over the course of these three posts. As recent year’s have proved, there is a lot of this around in the genre and a few more people could do with reading Russ’s book:
At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral.
Emphasis in the original and there is a lot more where that came from.
‘Real Science, Imaginary Worlds’ by Gregory Benford
This, the first introduction to The Ascent Of Wonder, is a quite remarkable piece of writing: it is zealous to the point of bigotry, actively affronted by the work it precedes and enough to put you off Gregory Benford for life. It starts with a pat on the back for the brilliance of all hard SF writers. He then moves on to discussing what hard SF is not:
The hard sf aesthetic goals may still occupy the centre of the field – though much recent sf has returned to the old styles, in which scientific accuracy and worldview are subordinated to conventional literary virtues of character or plot, style or setting. Alas, in this sense hard sf may be a paradigm more often honoured in the breach than not. (15)
Alas! Those pesky conventional literary virtues… There will be much more of this sort of thing later but for now he continues:
Still, seeking its cachet, some have tried to appropriate the hard sf name for any narrative which nods however slightly toward science at all. (J.G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin and Gene Wolfe, for example, do not feature on the hard sf fan’s list, but they have been enlisted in the corps by some.) (15)
It is a wonderfully disengenuous bit of writing. Who are these “some”? Are they, in fact, David G Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, the editors who have included two stories by each of these writers in this very volume? What Benford is essentially saying he is: Hartwell and Cramer have invited me to write this introduction to their hard SF anthology but they are talking rubbish and glory-hunters to boot.
But if these writers aren’t hard SF, what is it? He does seem to mostly define it in opposition to soft SF and match these directly to the respective disciples of science. Thus he can claim hard SF as the heart of the genre because the central images of hard SF – “spaceship, glittering future city, time machine, alien world” (16) – are also the central images of the genre. He will later concede that time travel is a bit dubious but there is nothing inherently hard about any of those things, unless Benford is rushing to embrace Flash Gordon as an exemplar of hard SF. He seems to have confused physics with physical. For someone obsessed with facts and who thinks fiction is “lies” there is a lot of this sort of muddy thinking and throwaway generalisations. For example: “It often seems more worldly and less wishful than the “soft” fiction based on the social sciences.” (16) Worldly is not usually the first term that springs to mind when one thinks of hard SF. To be honest, I’m surprised he didn’t just come out and say “manly”.
In the second section of the introduction, ‘Keeping The Net Up’, there is actually some interesting stuff about hard SF as a literature of constraint as well as discussing its history and identifying Hal Clement’s Mission Of Gravity (1953) as the first work of hard SF. Even this is marred by another throwaway, that New Wave’s “greatest effect may have been to make hard sf into a recognised opposite” (17). This history and attempted critical defense – complete with further digs at New Wave (was this really published in 1993?) – continues in sections three and four. It is the fifth and final sections, ‘Intersections’, which is the most impressive though, albeit for all the wrong reasons. It opens:
How does hard sf sit in the recent cataloguing of literature by critics – structuralist, postmodern, deconstructionist, etc? (21)
Recent? Benford doesn’t even know what he is talking about here; presumably post-structuralism is the bogeyman he is aiming at (I like that “etc” too). Obviously, this ignorance doesn’t stop him from attacking his imaginary target for the next couple of pages. In its hungry adoption of anti-literature cliches, the introduction reads like a parody of an rec.arts.sf.written poster. I’ve always liked Benford’s fiction so it is a shame to discover he is an idiot. Far from being worldly, his hard SF plays up to every stereotype of an SF fan going. The whole thing is probably best summed up by one unintentionally hilarious anecdote:
Heinlein once skewered me about the freezing point of methane, and I was mortified. (18)
Says it all really.
The Cradle Of Civilisation
What’s the difference anyway, man? I mean, war’s almost over. We’re just about done with this bitch.
In 2003, I watched the invasion of Iraq on television. Later that year Evan Wright published a series of articles in Rolling Stone on his time embedded with the First Recon Battalion of the US Marine Corps, the first coalition unit into the country. In 2004, Wright turned these articles into a book, Generation Kill, which I read in 2006. This was, in turn, filmed as a miniseries for HBO and released in 2008. In 2010, I watched the series on DVD and the war continued towards its eighth year.
All this context is by way of posing the question: what is left to be said? When the book was first published it was still a rare glimpse and an important critique. Now, as the Chilcott Inquiry daintily picks through the paperwork, it is much too late. Generation Kill has passed from journalism to entertainment. To their credit, David Simon and Ed Burns have filed off the rough edges of Wright’s functional approach to create an extremely skillful adaptation. However, if it is too late for truth, it is too early for drama.
Instead, here are two bits of meta-commentary that have lodged in my head. Firstly, Sgt Rudy Reyes – the bodybuilding object of the marines’ homoerotic gaze who find that the war interferes with his diet of sushi and vegetables – is played by… Rudy Reyes. The war has dragged on so long that he has been able to reinvent himself as an actor in his own biopic. Secondly, the guidance on the back of the DVD states that the programme “contains strong language, violence, sex references and real corpses.” What can you say?
Inkheart
A post on BLDG Blog about a book tower leads to the Shiba Ryotaro Memorial Museum and reminds me of the existence of Books At Home, a blog entirely about bookshelves, which in turn points at this Flickr group. One day, one day.
