Sometimes A Cigar Is Just A Cigar

Gary Westfahl has just reviewed The Road for Locus Online:

Like the novel, the film is deliberately vague about precisely where in America the man and son are traveling south, but in one scene the father shows his son a fragment of a map to indicate their progress toward the coast, and we see that they are approaching a coastal city named Outland. Because I can locate no evidence that such a coastal city actually exists, this may be a reference to Berkeley Breathed’s sardonic comic strip about small-town America, Outland (1989-1995), to the 1981 film Outland (a version of High Noon in outer space featuring a lonely hero surrounded by villains), or to the World of Warcraft game’s “extradimensional realm” Outland, constructed out of the shattered remains of an orc planet.

I think we can safely assume that yes, this is a reference to World Of Warcraft.

‘I Love Paree’ by Cory Doctorow and Michael Skeet

As you might expect from Doctorow, an extract of this story is available online where he comments:

I wrote the first part of this story as a sort-of response to Heinlein et al’s “bootcamp” stories; that is, stories about personal transformation brought on by violent, abusive training experiences. Having had some bootcamp-experiences (Clarion, for one, not to metion working on behind-deadline software projects), I had some opinions on the subject.

To me, it reads more like it is directly inspired by the brilliant Bruce Sterling but while it picks up the same themes Sterling uses, it isn’t written with the same quality. It is a glib story – one section is entitled Full Metal Baguette – and it is unable to reconcil this cheap delivery with the seriousness of what happens in the story. I think this is reflected in the fact Doctorow thinks that working on behind deadline software projects gives him experience of revolutionary forced labour.

Quality: **
Wit: ***

I actually like some of Doctorow’s early work, particularly Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom, but his recent fiction and non-fiction suggests he has undergone a process of dumbening.

‘Timmy And Tommy’s Thanksgiving Secret’ by Bradley Denton

Tommy is Timmy’s best friend. He is a turkey.

Quality: *
Wit: *

‘Auspicious Eggs’ by James Morrow

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: ***

Light Years

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.

‘Diary From An Empty Studio’ by Don Webb

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: *

‘Is That Hard Science, Or Are You Just Please To See Me?’ by Leslie What

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: *

‘Encounter Of Another Kind’ by David Langford

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: **

Margaret Atwood Steals The Bread From Neal Asher’s Mouth

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.

‘Coyote Goes To Hollywood’ by Ernest Hogan

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: *