Archive for July 2014
After The Boom
In advance of Loncon 3, Strange Horizons have published ‘The State of British SF and Fantasy: A Symposium’ which includes an article by me on the boom in non-genre science fiction over the last decade:
This is because the last decade or so has seen an acceleration of what can uglily but accurately be described as non-genre SF. I don’t think that it is a coincidence that this trend has occurred in parallel with the emergence of the New Weird since it points to a generation shift. Just as contemporary genre authors are writing in the context of several mature subgenres and so are influenced by all of them, so too contemporary literary authors have increasingly been immersed in science fiction through their formative years. (Equally, you could probably say the same about non-genre fantasy but that has always been a less rigidly demarcated and fractious boundary.)
Genre fantasy is probably a bit overlooked by the symposium too. This is understandable since it takes place in the context of comparing the current state to that in the boom year’s of British science fiction in the previous two decades. However, as Andrew M Butler notes ‘Thirteen Ways Of Looking At The British Boom’, the essay that provided the springboard for this symposium:
“It is asserted that there is currently a boom within British science fiction… The Boom is thought of mostly as a British Science Fiction Boom, and to limit it to this genre is clearly within the parameters of a journal named Science Fiction Studies. But there is also a parallel boom within fantasy and horror, as well as within children’s fiction.”
It strikes me that we have seen a British fantasy boom over the last decade but we lack the critical infrastructure to discuss this in the same way as we discussed the earlier British science fiction boom. So perhaps this symposium will act as a bit of a challenge in this respect. And I wonder if this boom will have a similar effect in shifting non-genre fantasy further from its comfort zone (say the magical realist, lightly supernatural end of the spectrum) in the same way non-genre SF has gradually expanded from dystopias and post-apocalyptic scenarios. After all, literary historical fiction is extremely popular and it is only short hop over the fence into epic fantasy. Yet a book like The Kingdom Of Fanes by Amanda Prantera (1995) which does this is extremely rare (the author notes, “Ignored by critics and readers alike, I stubbornly maintain this is the best thing I have ever done.”)
The other ommission I acknowledge in my piece is the lack of coverage of children’s SF. I simply ran out of time and space but reading Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner (2013) immediate afterwards made me regret this more than usual. It is a brilliant novel, sharing something of the tone and setting of Jed Mercurio’s Ascent and making equally few consessions to the reader. It was also eligible but not submitted for the Arthur C Clarke Award the year it had an all male shortlist. The problems with the genre science fiction market for women over the last decade have been much remarked upon but what is interesting is that over the same period the literary and children’s markets offer a counterfactual in which high quality science fiction is regularly published by women. The pendulum is starting to swing back but it is an important reminder of th eneed to look beyond our doorstep.
Hugo Voting – Art
Fan Artist
1) Sarah Webb
2) Mandie Manzano
3) No Award
4) Spring Schoenhuth
5) Brad W. Foster
6) Steve Stiles
Pro Artist
1) Julie Dillon
2) Fiona Staples
3) John Harris
4) No Award
5) Galen Dara
6) John Picacio
7) Daniel Dos Santos
Best Graphic Story
1) Saga, Volume 2 written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)
2) “Time” by Randall Munroe (XKCD)
3) No Award
4) The Meathouse Man adapted from the story by George R.R. Martin and illustrated by Raya Golden (Jet City Comics)
5) Girl Genius, Volume 13: Agatha Heterodyne & The Sleeping City written by Phil and Kaja Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
6) “The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who” written by Paul Cornell, illustrated by Jimmy Broxton (Doctor Who Special 2013, IDW)
On balance, probably more interesting than the fiction categories.
BSFA Review – Vector #276
Like many of the people reading this, I own hundreds of books I haven’t read. It seems likely that I will die with some of these books unread – and I’m not planning to die for quite a while. However, as you may remember, I recently moved house so the majority of my library is still entombed in boxes. This means that when I fail to keep myself sufficiently supplied with new fiction, I am reliant on the lottery of the charity shop pile containing books rejected by our reviewers. Such was the predicament I found myself in last month.
It didn’t help that the book I had just finished was Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, a thrillingly cryptic reincarnation of New Wave SF with a thoroughly modern sensibility. You need something decent after a book like that. So my eye was drawn to his quote on the back cover of The Barrow by Mark Smylie. In hindsight, the warning signs where all there. For starters, Vandermeer’s praise – “this fresh take on highly recommended heroic fantasy” – doesn’t even make sense. Then there is the usual fat fantasy cholesterol: it is 700 pages long, preceded by half a dozen maps and rounded out with two epilogues and a glossary. But the real problem, as soon becomes evident, is that Smylie writes comics for a living and hasn’t quite figured out the transition to prose. This means that when he introduces characters, he is thinking not of his reader but of his illustrator.
Here he is introducing the first character in the novel: “He was dressed in a dark brown high-collared long coat of stiff leather, tight blue-black cloth breeches, and black leather boots, all splattered with mud and dirt… A point dagger and heavy-bladed falchion were strapped to his side by a broad black leather baldric.” And the next one: “His fine travel coat and breeches were woven of good dark wool with silk trim…” The clomping foot of nerdism is alive and well; no wonder the book is so bloody long.
I do wonder if its relative brevity is part of the appeal to adults of teen orientated fiction. So the next book I plucked off the shelf was Arclight by Josin L McQuein from Egmont’s new Young Adult imprint, Electric Monkey. It has an enjoyably prickly female protagonist and a weirder setting than the zombie apocalypse it initially resembles but it also has this:
“Move, or I’ll move you.” Tobin shifts his position for better leverage.
Desperation and lack of ideas make me stupid. I grab Tobin’s face with both hands, close my eyes, and kiss him on the mouth.
It is astonishing that such a laughable and regressive cliché can be published in 2014. It killed the book for me – I don’t want to read this rubbish and I don’t want another generation to be taught that female sexuality is a tool for averting male violence. Another of Electric Monkey’s launch titles, Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougall, will be reviewed in the next issue and sounds a hell of a lot better.
At this point, I moved to my son’s shelves and from books notionally written for children to books actually written for children. The first of these was an intriguing small press book, London Deep by Robin Price and Paul McGrory, where each page is split equally between prose and illustration with the narrative flipping seamlessly between the two mediums. It is an interesting concept and the stylised black and white art by McGrory is effective. Unfortunately this is not matched by Price’s writing which marries perhaps the most preposterous plot I’ve ever read with relentlessly clumsy prose. I had to stop after a dozen pages.
In contrast, I read dozens and dozens of pages of Zita The Space Girl, Beth Hatke’s SF graphic novel for kids, and could presumably have gone on doing so indefinitely since absolutely nothing happened. In despair, I turned to my local Oxfam where I found a copy of Stonemouth by the late, great Iain Banks for a quid. I overpaid: it is the latest and last iteration of a story he’s told before and told better, a book that makes you gag on its nostalgia. Oh, Banksy.
Luckily, at that point The Method by Juli Zeh – which I longed for in my editorial for Vector #274 – finally dropped through my letterbox. It was every bit as wonderful as I’d hoped.
Reviews
- We See A Different Frontier, edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad (Futurefire.net Publishing, 2013) and Mothership: Tales From Afrofuturism And Beyond, edited by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall (Rosarium Publising, 2013) – Reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller
- Sunshine Patriots by Bill Campbell (Rosarium Publishing, 2013) – Reviewed by Shaun Green
- Your Brother’s Blood by David Towsey (Jo Fletcher Books, 2013) – Reviewed by Mark Connorton
- Looking Landwards, edited by Ian Whates (Newcon Press, 2013) – Reviewed by Paul Graham Raven
- Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit, 2013) – Reviewed by Niall Harrison
- The Lego Movie (2014) – Reviewed by Leimar Garcia-Siino
- Ender’s Game And Philosophy: The Logic Gate Is Down, edited by Kevin S. Decker (John Wiley & Sons, 2013) – Reviewed by Jonathan McCalmont
- A Brief Guide To CS Lewis: From Mere Christianity To Narnia by Paul Simpson (Robinson, 2013) – Reviewed by Sandra Unerman
- Proxima by Stephen Baxter and On A Steel Breeze by Alistair Reynolds (Gollancz, 2013) – Reviewed by Martin McGrath
- The Age Of Scorpio by Gavin Smith (Gollancz, 2013) – Reviewed by Stuart Carter
- Plastic by Christopher Fowler (Solaris, 2013) – Reviewed by Graham Andrews
- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (Tor, 2014) – Reviewed by Mark Connorton
- The Many-Coloured Land by Julian May (Tor, 2013) – Reviewed by Sandra Unerman
- The City by Stella Gemmell (Corgi, 2013) – Reviewed by Liz Bourke
- Naomi’s Room and The Silence of Ghosts by Jonathan Aycliffe (Corsair, 2013) – Review by Gary Dalkin
- Dreams And Shadows by C Robert Cargill (Gollancz, 2013) – Reviewed by Donna Scott
- The Winter Witch by Paula Brackston (Thomas Dunne Books, 2013) – Reviewed by Alan Fraser
- Legends, edited by Ian Whates (Newcon Press, 2013) – Reviewed by Tony Jones
- End Of The Road, edited by Jonathan Oliver (Solaris, 2013) – Reviewed by Donna Scott
- A Gentle Flow of Ink by Graham Andrews (FeedARead Publishing, 2013) – Reviewed by Kate Onyett
- How To Be Dead by Dave Turner (Aim For The Head Books, 2013) – Reviewed by Kate Onyett
Coshed
I just downloaded the 1939 Retro Hugo voter package which means I now have two unread packages to read before voting closes at the end of the month. It’s gonna be tight. Once I finish that, I’ve got two whole weeks to complete my next tranche of homework: preparing for my panels.
Big Anthologies: Bookends or Benchmarks? (Friday 16:30 – 18:00)
There’s a genre tradition of doorstop-sized anthologies that attempt to synopsise a period or style: Ascent of Wonder, The Weird, Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, and others. What makes these anthologies successful, or not? Does ‘success’ mean summarising a past conversation, or influencing the conversation that’s still going on? Or are they always and inevitably doomed enterprises? Is it possible to TOC an age, or a genre? Or are these sorts of anthologies in fact arguments, rather than snapshots?
- Jo Walton (M)
- Ellen Datlow
- Jonathan Strahan
- Jeff VanderMeer
YA on the Big Screen (Saturday 15:00 – 16:30)
The YA publishing boom has been accompanied by a boom in film adaptations, but while some have seen commercial success others have stalled. What does it take to transition from book to film? Are there any special considerations when working with a young adult story? Modern YA is a genre with distinctive tropes — how are these being transferred to the screen? How is “classic” YA adapted in that context? Is this to the original story’s benefit or detriment? Which YA books have successfully made the transition–for good or ill? What stories would make great films, but haven’t yet been done?
- Carrie Vaughn (M)
- Amy H. Sturgis
- Erin M. Underwood
- Thea James
Just Three Cornettos (Saturday 16:30 – 18:00)
The Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright “Cornetto trilogy” concluded last year with The World’s End, following Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. What is the trilogy’s place in British SF? The panel will discuss why the films’ endings are so unconventional, what the trilogy had to say about topics such as society and consumerism, masculinity and maturity, and the British landscape … And they’ll decide which fence gag is best.
- Nick Hubble (M)
- Paul Cornell
- Rachael Acks
- Philippa Chapman
Dropping The M (Monday 11:00 – 12:00)
We customarily divide the work of Iain (M) Banks into his sf and his mimetic fiction, but much of the mimetic fiction slips and slides into the fantastic. What if we threw this division out: what other ways of understanding his work can we find? Macro and micro fictions, fictions of family and of friendship, fictions of thinning and fictions of recovery?
- Farah Mendlesohn (M)
- Jude Roberts
- Tony Keen
- Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
Everything Is Nice 