Your Favourite Show Sucks
Patrick West watches Torchwood and asks why are the British incapable of making decent television science fiction? There are two main problems with this:
a) Holding Torchwood up as an exemplar in this way is like scrapping up a plateful of sick from the pavement outside Leicester Square tube and presenting it as proof the British can’t cook.
b) No one is capable of making decent television science fiction (at least on the available evidence).
Torchwood is a programme for people who found Doctor Who – a programme for under tens – too sophisticated. As it happens, I accidently saw the fifth and final episode of Torchwood – Children Of Earth on Friday. Like 24 its main aim was to wring cheap drama out of tawdry manipulation of the audience, although here Jack Bauer having to torture a terrorist to prevent a nuclear bomb going off is replaced by Captain Jack having to shoot a puppy to save the world. Sort of. West’s point is pretty similar: Torchwood is utter toss. Where he slips up is in his comparison to US television:
But whereas the US has given us Flash Gordon, The Twilight Zone, many incarnations of Star Trek, The X-Files, Quantum Leap, Futurama and, more recently, a re-vamped Battlestar Galactica, Britain’s principal contribution to the field can be summed up in two words: Dr Who.
It is notable that none of those US shows are currently on the air but it is also debatable how many of them were actually any good. Battlestar Galactica which has garnered more column inches and mis-directed praise than any SF show in recent memory (except perhaps Dr Who) was The West Wing in space but re-written for the politically illiterate and morally confused. I gave up on after the first season and, by all accounts, goes into Total Bollocks Overdrive thereafter. Futurama is, of course, great but it is strange he includes it when he dismissed The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as being “sci-fi parody” that “inadvertently betrayed our timidity when it came to taking this genre seriously”. Quantum Leap? Seriously? It is true that American serial dramas are usually superior to British ones but this probably has something to do with the fact Britain doesn’t actually make any serial dramas. Even in America though, no SF approaches the truly great television of the last couple of years: The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire and so. Hell, it doesn’t even approach the level of second string shows like The Shield or ER.
The Guardian Tackles Popular Culture With Questionable Results
It started with Star Trek fans writing stories about a Kirk/Spock love affair, and it quickly became a craze. Fantasy fiction, or “fanfic” websites now attract contributions from large numbers of obsessive fans, and new genres are emerging at a remarkable rate: “slash” fanfic focuses on gay relationships (the Lord of the Rings characters provide particularly fertile ground), with “femslash” for lesbian characters; and then there’s “real person popslash”, where the unlucky subjects are celebrities in the music business.
It is not always easy to figure out what is going on in the world of novelisations. Consider Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Novelisation by Alan Dean Foster. Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Novelisation is not to be confused with Timothy Zahn’s Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes – The Official Movie Prequel. Nor is it to be confused with Terminator Salvation: Sand in the Gears – The Official Movie Prequel Graphic Novel. Here, a bit of supplementary material about all this supplementary material may be helpful. Novelisations are based upon movies that already exist. Official prequels are novels based on the outline of a movie that has already been greenlighted, but may not yet have been shot. Prequels may thus contain scenes that ultimately get cut out of the finished film. For example, even if Hannah Montana ran away to join the Ladies’ Taliban in the prequel to her next movie it wouldn’t necessarily mean that she would do so in the upcoming film. In fact, it’s pretty unlikely. It could simply be the mad, zany fantasy of some out-of-control prequelist.
Paprika
My review of both Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui and the anime adaptation by Satoshi Kon is now up at Strange Horizons.
Tick Tock
My review of God Of Clocks by Alan Campbell is up now at Strange Horizons.
In my first draft I went off on one about the evils of trilogies, missed deadlines and modern publishing in general. Thankfully for you lot most of this got cut. However, I will take this opportunity to reproduce the full quote from Richard Morgan that I mention in the review:
See, I’d always talked a good fight about making each book in this trilogy a self contained novel, but it wasn’t until quite recently that I realised how deeply satisfied I was with the ending of The Steel Remains. Sure, there are loose ends, but when wasn’t that true of one of my books? But my characters all ended up where I wanted them to be, they bedded down into the consequences and outcomes of what they’d seen and done with the pleasing clunk of emotional deadbolts falling into place – so rolling them all out of bed again, splashing water on their faces and getting them to open up and let in the morning light has proved a lot more problematic than I’d expected. I started at least twice and then had to tear up what I’d written because it was some weak-assed shit. Worse still, when I did finally get onto what felt like the right track, it involved at least a couple of scenes that I really didn’t want to write. If you guys thought The Steel Remains was brutal, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
These People Are Not Your Friends
On Thursday Steven Wells died. Swells was many things but most importantly for me he was a writer for the NME. I read both the NME and Melody Maker religiously between 1992 and 1998, pretty much the last gasp for both publications. My dad had been a subscriber since before I was born and every Thursday after school I’d go to the newsagent to collect them. Swells and writers like him had a huge influence on not just my musical taste but my writing style and beliefs about journalism and criticism.
In a piece of serendipity that is also slightly ill-timed another NME writer of that era, John Harris, asks where have all the good music writers gone? There is no mention of Swells. As the writer himself alludes to, Harris is now part of the dad rock tendency and this hangs over his article.
Speaking of dad rock, Bruce Springsteen was pretty special last night.
Metropolitan Manners
This is what happens: a promising first novel comes in; you read it with excitement, wondering vaguely what the second will be like; within what seems to be about a quarter of an hour, the second is glistening on your desk; you read it with reserved admiration; then, slap, comes the third; you read it with growing unease; then comes the fourth—and you read it if you can. The way things are, most SF authors have to write more than a book a year to go on being SF authors. They spin short stories into novellas, novellas into novels. They write faster and faster, and with less and less energy. They turn into hacks before your eyes.
Martin Amis, The Observer, 8 May 1977
Matthew Davis has a long article at Strange Horizon about Martin Amis’s tenure as the Observer’s science fiction reviewer. He goes into quite a lot of detail, perhaps more than was necessary to make his point, and the most interesting parts are when he moves away from the forensic to talk more generally about reviewing science fiction:
Amis is famously Nabokovian in his prescription that “there is only one school of writing—talent.” As a reader and reviewer, his special concern is to determine the resiliency, precision, craft, and quality of the reviewed writer’s prose and his formative sensibility. Amis treats SF in general with respect, though not always all SF writers with the same consideration… What pained the SF fraternity was Amis’s exercise of metropolitan literary manners, since his idea of entertaining writing could be fierce. As Jonathan Raban notes, there is an off-the-peg standard issue accent for the smart English reviewer: smartyboots, mocking, alternating between a donnish high-Augustan pose and come-off-it-mate low slang.
This clash of manners which leads to arguments about tone rather than substance is something I’ve been thinking about since the various discussions about my review of Nights Of Villjamur. Davis goes on to conclude:
To say a book was a better one of its type, be it planetary adventure, historical novel, or even interior monologue, is only incidental to saying whether it is a good book, for the only real, demonstrable proof of quality is a personal vision realized in crafted prose of distinct metaphorical intensity. It is probably easier for SF writers to sustain the hurt of SF being dismissed en masse (and indeed this dismissal probably contributes to a bumptious sense of community pride) than it is to have the finger jabbed directly for individual failings. All writer-critics are necessarily cranky, as they intentionally or not use the book under review to explicate the prejudices and practices that underlie their own works.
I’m not sure how writer-critics differ from any other critics in this respect. This ties in with a recent post at Ruthless Culture in which Jonathan McCalmont suggests that people pay more attention to the pre-theoretical values their criticism embodies.
Mea Culpa
Hal Duncan has written several posts about criticism, authority and prescriptivism. They are very, very long. I am only interested in this one because it mentions me. A couple of years ago I reviewed Vellum for Vector. I concluded the review by saying:
This is not the one great, insurmountable problem with this book though. That problem is simple: it is not a novel. As is increasingly common these days it is instead half a novel, a single work that has been arbitrarily cleaved in two. There is no need for this and, as I have suggested above, it is not as if Duncan doesn’t provide ample opportunity for cuts to be made. Indeed so long and knotted is the book that what is initially a delight to read starts to drag in its final quarter. Once we have struggled through the bewildering, disorienting text with its multiple cul-de-sacs we are rewarded with… nothing. Merely the promise of more to come.
Duncan responds:
This is simply inaccurate. Had the same “shows every sign of being” phrase been included here there would be no issue, but as it stands the review presents a speculation that Lewis does not and cannot know to be true — because it is actually false — as a spurious assertion of “fact”. (In actuality the structural decision to write a diptych of two novels was made after much deliberation, (rather than arbitrarily,) on aesthetic grounds that I considered to outweigh the potential for misreading to occur, (again, rather than arbitrarily,) and with the vast majority of the actual writing still to be done, (which is to say, before there was a coherent novel to be halved, a single work to be cleaved.) Factual error corrected, I’ll make no defensive claims here that Lewis’s impression of a sundered novel is rendered illegitimate by this actuallity. The author is dead. I won’t stink up the room.)
This then is the peril of making assumptions. As it happens, sometime after I wrote that review, I attended an interview Duncan gave where he made clear the level of structural formalism he had brought to the diptych. This was something I missed and although I still find the presentation of the diptych problematic I was clearly wrong here.
Kool And Sexy And Popular
M John Harrison feels he is beating his head against a brick wall:
Good luck to Richard [Morgan] with his arguments for a realistically human view of humanity. I’ve been making them for many years & no one in f/sf has paid the slightest attention.
Harrison has achieved a lot in his career and yet he still finds himself having to make the same arguments he first made forty years ago. I can see why this is frustrating. The message is being heard in at least some quarters though.
OF Blog of the Fallen has more commentary here, including a long comment from Vacuous Wastrel:
I also think that, although I know you’re a Harrison fan, talking about him as a prophet in the desert cursed by his courage to a short and brutal life, killed by us the unthinking mob, might just possibly be slightly overdramatising, and over-idolising, the man and his importance. He’s not actually a martyr, he’s just not as unpopular as other people. Popularity is not a right, and its absence is no deprivation. His stoning to death by the public consists in him being substantially wealthier, more influential and more popular than most of those who hold less ‘prophetic’ opinions.
VW goes on to post about this and China Mieville’s recent comments on Tolkien, where he concludes:
Going by what I’ve read said by both of them, I consider Papa Tolkien not only more successful and a better writer than Harrison, I also consider him a better, more admirable, more emulandory person. I’m quite happy with the side I’ve been born (or raised) on. What reason does anyone have to pay attention to Harrison’s hegemonic sociopolitical opinions (which is what the geek-hate ultimately is)?
The last sentence tips it over into comedy, and I’m not sure what “emulandory” means but without having any interest in martyrs or messiahs I know who I would prefer to emulate.
This Is An Excuse
Jetse de Vries has an post in which he sets out seven reasons (although he calls them “excuses”) why SF writers might not want to produce positive SF. As you might expect from that framing it contains more than its fair share of tendentious crap but I was interested to what his rebutal of my position was. He summarises this position as “I will not confirm to your positivist agenda: nobody tells me what to write.”
The first thing to say is that de Vries proceeds from a fundamentally different starting to me, for him “the genre is overwhelmingly bleak”. If it is I hadn’t noticed. He also describes it as “highly reactionary” and “a comfort zone for unambitious writers” which I am happier to agree with, although not in the way he means. So de Vries sees a problem in need of a solution and I see, well, nothing much. In contrast to the status quo, he sees positive Sf as difficult, risk-taking and relevent and because of this writers are scared of it. There is nothing like patting yourself on the back.
Returning to the “excuse”, de Vries says that saying writers should write what they want is tantamount to saying they should never be questioned or challenged. As he goes on to say in his next sentence, this is nonsense (he then digresses into the economic health of the genre). The point about challenge is interesting though. Challenge is, of course, healthy but if the challenge is to be succesful – positive, we might say – it has to be specific and accurate. The positive SF movement amounts to what is essentially a broadside, a huge generalised criticism that attacks everything but refuses to name names, with the result that it seems more motivated by ideology than art. This is fair enough if you take the utterly functional view of science fiction that de Vries seems to but for those of us who don’t it is always going to be unpersuasive.
(If the original post is tl;dr – or, more likely, too thin; couldn’t read – then James Bloomer summarises at Big Dumb Object.)
