The editors say up front that this is not an SF anthology (although it sort of is) so they can hardly be criticised for not publishing any decent SF stories. They can, however, be criticised for not publishing any stories with decent ideas or any humour. Thankfully ‘Auspicious Eggs’ centres on a darkly brilliant piece of speculation which provides plenty moments of appalling humour.

As you would expect from Morrow it revolves around religion, in this case imagining a Catholic church that has extended the rights of the born not just to the unborn but those with the mere potentiality of birth. Literally every sperm is sacred and so is every egg. This is rigidly enforced on Boston Isle leading to a dystopia where babies with a low chance of reproducing are subject to the Sacrament of Terminal Baptism and all adults must submit to the Sacrament of Extramarital Intercourse at times of their peak fertility. No belly laughs here but some brutally effective satire.

‘Auspicious Eggs’ was shortlisted for the 2001 Best Novelette Nebula Award. Morrow lost to Kelly Link but there is no shame in that and the story is of a quality noticeably absent from the rest of Witpunk.

Quality: ****
Wit: ***

Adam Roberts said that Tarot Sport by Fuck Buttons is the science fiction album of the year. Ooh, I thought, I’ll have to get that. It arrived this morning and I listened to the first track on the way into work. If ‘Solar Surf’ is anythinig to go by he is right. I suspect I will have to keep the album out of the car, in case I am tempted to try and reach light speed. Last time that happened I got five points.

Roberts also mentioned in passing that Tarot Sport knocked Dark Days/ Light Years by Super Furry Animals off the top spot. Ooh, I thought, did the Furries have an album out this year? They did and, in fact, a quick flick through my record collection revealed that I had already bought it. I’m turning into my dad. Anyway, I’ve stuck that on my iPod so I may post some thoughts later when I’ve given it a few more turns. At the moment though, I still think they probably haven’t had a good album since Phantom Power in 2003.

A mentally ill man decides not to take his medication and unsurprisingly goes mental. It is told in diary form and there is obviously meant to be some humour in the gap between what he believes and what we take form his writing. There isn’t, it is an overly familiar idea poorly executed which a half-hearted punchline that falls completely flat.

Quality: **
Wit: *

With a title like that I think you can guess both the level of wit on display and also the unadulterated shitness of the story. We are in Atwood territory here and not in a good way; ‘Is That Hard Science’ is a horribly jumbled satire beset with some truly awful choices about nomenclature.

Ginny Vuoto is just a normal teen girl who wants to do normal teen girl stuff. The only problem is that her mom is the inventor of cattle prod pants that act as a modern day chastity belt. These have sold millions of units worldwide and allowed her to finance the invention of the Smart Twat. Let us pause for a minute to admire this spectacularly ill-judged name. Its official name is the Sensory Motivational Assessment and Response Test but apparently everyone calls it the Smart Twat which is about as likely as the Government introducing Painball but without even the excuse of a lame pun.

Anyway, the Smart Twat is a chip designed to allow parents to spy on their kids and stop them having sex. It doesn’t make sense but then nothing in this clunking satire of the American abstinence movement does. We first meet Ginny as she is going out on a date. Despite the fact she is wearing pants like electrified oven gloves and that her mother is famous for this invention we are supposed to believe they would still instantly start dry humping. Unsurprisingly, the date ends (in electrocution) after five minutes. This is just lazy writer but What is also inept. Ginny tells us of her nervous date: “His freckles began to sweat – I never knew freckles could sweat”. The first half would be fine as a throw away remark and could work well with similar lines in terms of building a gently humourous tone but no, What has to repeat the line to point out her own joke despite the fact it isn’t actually a joke. Repeatedly What suggests through the structure of her sentences that she has delivered a punchline when she has done no such thing.

After the opening section it becomes clear that ‘Is That Hard Science’ has no real structure at all. We lurch around between disparate bits of story, swinging between different narrators, and stumbling chunks from imagined documents such as an extract from Ginny’s biography. This doesn’t extract doesn’t actually sound anything like the Ginny in the rest of the story and the imagined transcript from Jerry Springer is even more cloth-eared. There is no rhyme or reason to anything, with no preamble Ginny and her mom suddenly pitch up on an MTV reality show. Why? Apparently because What has a cheatsheet entitled ‘Lazy Cliches For First Time Satirists’.

Quality: *
Wit: *

Another Interzone story and another usually reliable writer. It is rather darker than I am used to from Langford and it is also slightly tangled in its circle of staged alien encounters.

Quality: **
Wit: **

Mark Newton says that science fiction is dying and fantasy is the future. As Larry Nolan asks in the comments, does it really matter? Not to me. For starters, I don’t really draw much of a distinction between the two, it is all SF and it will always been around. Nolan mentions the death of the Western novel as an analogy. Now, the Western is inherently a more limiting genre than science fiction so I don’t think the analogy is plausible but even so there is something appealing about a world where all the pulp trash has withered and you are just left with Cormac McCarthy and The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada.

As always, Newton is mostly interested in science fiction as a marketing category which is another reason not to be too concerned about its “death”. It does lead to him saying some slightly odd things though:

Literary fiction is eating up SF. Mainstream fiction possesses a parasitic attitude to SF, whilst contributing very little to the celebration of the genre. Jeanette Winterson, Toby Litt, Margaret Atwood – the ‘literary’ brigade are taking SF ideas, recycling them as something new, packaging them for mainstream tastes. And more importantly, dragging the ideas to a section of the bookstore or readership that aren’t likely to visit the SF section. Those sales don’t get categorised as SF sales – just general fiction. So mainstream fiction is leaching sales, and the latter is just as important in terms of the genre’s sustainability. Without sales, there is little long-term backing from bookstores, and eventually publishers. (Publishing is a business, and imprints must react to patterns in sales – else they go bust.)

Literary fiction is not eating up SF, it is at best nibbling it. Based on my own very unscientific survey of the literary landscape there has certainly been an increase in the amount of science fiction published outside the genre imprints. This is a source of considerable pleasure to me (I’m not sure how you could describe their existence as “parasitic”). There is hardly a deluge of them though; as a percentage of all science fiction novels published in a year they would barely register.

Moving on, bringing the ideas of science fiction to a new readership sounds like a positive thing to me as well. Growth seems like the opposite of death. The problem, apparently, is how you score the sales. I’ve spent some time grappling with the idea that “mainstream fiction is leaching sales” but I still haven’t got my head round it. Newton has just said these books sell to people who don’t visit the SF section of the bookshop so I’m not sure how this can also deprive the same section of the bookshop of sales. It also seems to set up a false binary opposition: you can either buy the new Atwood or the new Asher but not both.

As it happens, I agree with Newton’s wider point that fantasy is ascendant at the moment (although, as Eric Gregory points out in the comments, all such things are relative). I don’t think that is particularly interesting unless you work in the industry. None of this escapes the fact that there will always be more books I want to read than I have time to read them. The exact ratio of types of books available at any one moment in time isn’t much of an issue to me.

Off to a bad start from its opening sentence: “Fade in. My memories always start with a fade-in, because I grew up in front of a TV set.” Coyote sits next to our narrator on a Greyhound bus and proceeds to tell him an aimless, shapeless, witless tale. At the end there is something that is almost a twist but you are so un-invested in the story it is impossible to care. This is writing that consists of nothing more than setting one word down after another until some arbitrary word count has been achieved.

Quality: *
Wit: *

Sanders is best known these days as the raddled bigot behind the now defunct Helix. Once upon a time he was a writer though. Ironically, the protagonist of ‘The Scuttling’ is a racist prick who hires some Native Americans to Pied Piper his infestation of cockroaches into the sea. He doesn’t pay them so they Pied Piper him into the sea. Yawn.

Quality: *
Wit: *

With the honourable exception of Jeffrey Ford, Witpunk has so far been neither funny or good so I thought I would flip to the usually reliable Di Filippo. Unfortunately he doesn’t buck the trend.

It is traditional beginner’s advice to young wannabes not to writer about writers because of the risk of falling headlong into a recursive loop of pure tedium. Of course, rules are made to be broken; consider Ford’s superb ‘Bright Morning’. Di Filippo’s story of a SF writer with writer’s block, on the other hand, falls straight into the previously mentioned mobius. At first it does catch the attention though, thanks to the highly distinctive style it is written in:

The problem of washing one’s hands. When bums barricade the sinks. Corso hesitates, shifting his soft modern satchel from hand to socially unsanctioned postmicturating hand. When one of the mendicants departs. Leaving the taps running. So that one doesn’t even have to touch them. Saving one from contact with numerous New York germs too vile to mention.

The whole thing is like that which is okay for a couple of pages but gets tiresome quickly and after that the story really drags. Corso is suffering from hallucinations caused by stress-related mental illness. Except it isn’t mental illness, it is the “dicky fits”, a special sort of awareness of the universe that affects some science fiction writers and grants them a type of godhood. Needless to say the story is dedicated to Philip K Dick which seems rather poor taste.

Quality: **
Wit: ***

The other month when I reviewed Sex In The System I wrote:

It is often suggested that sex is hard to write. Certainly sex scenes are easily mocked once stripped of context but generally that old advice “write what you know” holds true and most people know their sexual fantasies very well indeed.

I was specifically of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award and their tendency, as one MetaFilter commenter puts it, towards “institutionally poor joke detection”. Well, it is that time of the year again and extracts of the whole shortlist are available so you can make up your own mind. The Roth clearly is very bad but are we really meant to believe Cave or Littell don’t know exactly what they are doing?

The BBC jumped on the bandwagon today – a little late but admittedly not as late as me – to ask is it difficult to write well about sex? To which the answer surely is “no more than anything else.” Taking the contrary view is a reviewer called Melissa Katsoulis:

If I was writing a novel, I wouldn’t attempt to write it except in the most Victorian and prim way, because it’s awful. It’s a cliche, but the moments of genuine frisson in books are when hardly anything happens. When you have a dream about someone you fancy, it’s because they sat down next to you on the bus or something, not because you were at it, hammer and tongs. Either be suggestive or funny, but trying to do the nuts and bolts isn’t going to work.

Prim as a Victorian, eh? Chick-lit novelist Sarah Duncan is equally squeamish in the Guardian:

In the middle of sex I’m not thinking, ooh he’s just thrust his throbbing organ against my front bottom, so why should a character? Instead of writing about actions, I concentrate on the responses, how it feels both mentally and physically. Get into the head of the character and you can create the illusion that yes, this is real, this is happening to you the reader. I write mainly for women readers, and speaking for my sex I think we like being seduced. We don’t want bedroom antics shoved in our faces, literally or metaphorically. We like a little delicacy, a little subtlety.

The comments to that article pretty much immediately start listing good sex scenes so it is well worth a butcher’s. James Salter does, of course, feature prominently.