S. Andrew Swann had an interesting post recently (checks again: well, not all that recently, but my RSS feed coughed it up last night) about politics in SF.

He's noticed something that I think is a particular case of a general rule (maybe I can formulate it into Wheeler's Second Law* sometime) -- that writers must believe that the kind of work that they're doing, that they most want to do, is at least important and vital. More often than not, they actually believe that what they do and love is the absolute core of their particular field. This is healthy for the individual writer, but can be less useful when you get a number of writers doing different things together...

*Wheeler's (First) Law of Hype

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Jeremiah Tolbert thinks that SF has an image problem.

(I don't entirely disagree with him, but I also think that as long as "Hollywood" keeps making big dumb movies and TV shows with skiffy ideas, and poorly socialized nerds glom onto those universes with their usual fervor, that nothing written-SF people could possibly do will twitch that needle of social disapproval into the black.)

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Vanin, at OF Blog of the Fallen, wonders why Poles are much more likely to look for post-modern literary allusions (and be happy to discuss them) in SFF works than readers from other countries.

Personally, I suspect it's because the Polish SFF readership isn't as separated from the general literary world as is generally true in the Anglophone world: SFF readers in the US in particular often show great horror towards any "literary" ideas or pretensions. I wonder if this could be graphed on a map? (With the US as the most anti-intellectual and Poland as the most, would it be a diagonal line through the UK, France, and Germany, or something more interesting?)

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Matthew Cheney takes exception to Ben Bova's column from yesterday about the predictive power of SF. Bova had cited C.M. Kornbluth's 1951 story, "The Marching Morons," about "the degradation of the human germ plasm" through stupid people having more children than smart people. 

Update, 5/9: More definitively, biologist and professor PZ Meyers has also intellectually demolished the Bova essay, and, more specifically, the Kornbluth story that inspired it.

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David Louis Edelman has taken the publication of The Children of Hurin as an excuse to re-read all of Tolkien in internal chronological order -- and he'll be blogging about it as it goes.

He starts off by explaining why The Silmarillion was the central heart of Tolkien's mythos.

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Publishers Weekly has their yearly look at the SFF world this week, and the lede is the question of the genre dying. (How come no one thinks Mysteries are dying because James Patterson is published as "fiction," or that romances are clearly ailing because Danielle Steel hates the term? Why do only we get this grief?)

If you can get past that, PW also asked each major SFF publisher about the book they're most excited about in the coming months -- titles including John Scalzi's The Last Colony, Justina Robson's Keeping It Real, Brian W. Aldiss's Harm, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, Charlaine Harris's All Together Dead, and Kim Harrison's For a Few Demons More.

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The Bad Astronomer points out that there are now 28 closed-circuit TV cameras within 200 yards of George Orwell's house. Some of his commentors think that's a low estimate, too...[via James Nicoll]

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

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The current "Inside the List" column in The New York Times Book Review includes a paragraph about Jonathan Lethem, whose novel You Don't Love Me Yet was reviewed in this issue. It states blandly that "some may recall that early in his career, Lethem was often pegged as a sci-fi writer himself."

Well.

No offense meant to Lethem, who has written a number of swell books in and out of genre (and who I don't think has ever tried to pretend his SFnal writings were anything but that), but the Times once again is trying to "save" a writer from the horrible genre ghetto. Oooh, he was "pegged as sci-fi;" how horrible that must be. The Times must do their best to get those genre cooties off him.

But let's review. Lethem's first published story was "The Cave Beneath the Falls," in Aboriginal Science Fiction's Jan/Feb 1989 issue. He published other stories in F&SF, Asimov's, and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, among other deeply speculative outlets. His first four novels -- Gun, With Occasional Music, Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, and Girl In Landscape -- were all science fiction. He had a major essay of SF criticism in The New York Review of Science Fiction in 1998. (I personally remember seeing him at a SFWA Authors/Editors reception in the mid-90s at least once.) His first story collection, The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye, was science fiction.

Lethem was not "often pegged as a sci-fi writer;" he wrote science fiction. And he was damn good at it, too. He's mostly doing other things now, but that doesn't retroactively make his work not science fiction.

You Times lit-snobs, get this through your heads: there is nothing wrong with writing genre fiction. And genre fiction counts. It exists, it's real, and it's often better than the stuff you pretend is the only fiction published. You'd be better off if you'd just shut up about things like this, since you refuse to even try to understand them.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Jeff VanderMeer, who I guess gets the thoughtless "you must hate adventure fiction, being the Apostle of Literary Fantasy and all" treatment one too many times, has explained that it is indeed possible for a reader (or writer, or editor, or whoever) to like different things for different reasons.

This will apparently come as a shock to some people, but I hope their hearts can take it.

Speaking as someone who argued back-and-forth with Jeff -- in a friendly manner -- about a whole lot of fantasy stories last year when we were both World Fantasy judges, I can vouch that Jeff's tastes are not narrow or circumscribed by some notion of genre purity.

Actually, I'll go further: anybody who's at all interesting to talk with about stories can't have an attitude like the one Jeff's describing. Ideological purity, of any kind, is death to useful discourse. And good stuff must be taken where you find it -- so the more places you're willing to look, the more of it you will find.

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You know, it's not actually better when the person tarring an entire genre with a broad brush, despite not really reading in that genre, or liking it, is someone ostensibly "inside" our little ghetto.

(Case in point: SF Diplomat making sweeping generalizations about "fat fantasy" in his essay "The Aesthetics of Fantasy -- Part One," which I am indebted to SF Signal for pointing out to me.)

Anyone who constructs a single category explicitly containing Fritz Leiber, David Eddings, China Mieville, and George R.R. Martin simply cannot be taken seriously on that subject. It's not worth the time even to refute him. Just say "bah" and pass on. That's what I'm doing.

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Let us all go "boo, hoo:" a blogger named Jay (at Kill the Goat) believes "Science Fiction Sucks the Big One."

Unfortunately, her complaints are deeply lame (gosh! you can often tell what decade an old book was written in!) and badly aimed (all aliens look like humans with prosthetic foreheads -- well, yes, they do on Star Trek, but not so much in written SF).  So it's pretty easy to say "pshaw" and dismiss her entirely.

Which I will now proceed to do: pshaw!

(Please note that I have avoided the nearly overwhelming temptation to make a bad-taste reference to Ms. Jay "sucking the big one," because I aspire to be a gentleman.)

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India Edghill (who, under another name, is one of the SFBC's secret Reading Police) has explained it all: the "Official Rules for Writing 'Feminist Re-Imagings & Re-Imaginings" Historical Novels."

Learn it. Know it. Live it.

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Sarah Monette has "mashed up" (as those kids nowadays call it) Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" on her blog into a new (very short) story.

The story; the explanation.

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Paul Cornell, who's writing quite a bit of the good doctor these days, has a long essay on continuity -- in fictional universes in general and Doctor Who's in particular -- on his blog.

(I find it fascinating, but I also come at this from the comics side, where continuity is both a god that must be ritually appeased regularly and an anchor that's jetisoned or retconned out of existence every year or so. So I might think about this more than most SF readers.)

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In the "what on Earth were they thinking?!" Department:

The Independent Florida Alligator (not to be confused with the many dependent Florida alligators, or the independent alligators of Alabama) asks, with aparrent sincerity, "Does the end of the Harry Potter series mean end of reading?"

I can only point and laugh, I'm afraid; I have no words.

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We're in one of the periodic battles between spinach and marshmallow in the SF world; this time, it seems to have been started by M. John Harrison's dismissive comments on worldbuilding last week. Neth Space gathers up all of the relevant links (so I don't have to -- very kind of him), and then dives into his own essay.

I am, as usual, flabbergasted that anyone needs to defend escapism in popular fiction. SF/Fantasy/Horror are genres of entertainment; "escapism" is the very first thing they are required to provide. (Maybe if we use the more elevated term, "willing suspension of disbelief," it will be less contentious?) If fiction does not provide an "escape" from the reader's world outside the book, it hasn't even managed to hold her attention, and is an utter failure.

(Not to mention C.S. Lewis's famous quote about the people who are most obsessed with stopping escape.)

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What this field really needs is a history of SF, as seen through the lens of 20th century political movements. Lo and behold, such a thing has appeared.

[via discussions several other places]

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Ed Champion thinks that Google will buy a publisher next year.

Point 1: no offense, but you don't know Bertlesmann at all if you think they're going to sell off a book publishing arm. They might be grumbling about profits this year, but books are what Bertlesmann does -- it's always been the core of that company (and Bertlesmann is controlled by a family who believe in keeping up the company's traditions).

Point 2: Google is a massively profitable new-media engine of growth. Book publishers are large, expensive, complicated companies in a mature marketplace. Why on earth would Google spend massive amounts of money for an underperforming asset to possibly make it slightly easier to do something they're already doing and insist they already have the rights to do?

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David Louis Edelman (author of Infoquake) started a somewhat unscientific survey the other day, trying to find out how readers pick the books they read. He's now posted the results, which show that most people (of the ones he asked, at least) buy books because they already like the author, and then secondarily on a recommendation from a friend or acquaintance.

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I'm sure this was inspired by the YouTube "trailer" for Scary Mary (a horror-thriller version of Mary Poppins):

Jess Nevins at No Fear of the Future systematically dissects that cheerful Disney film Mary Poppins and proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is actually horror.

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Various people opine about what they'd like to see, skiffy-wise, in the LoA, and other, related topics:

• Tobias Buckell stumps for Cordwainer Smith
• Matthew Cheney wants a lot of things, but mostly Delany
• GalleyCat rounded up all of the usual suspects, who had various suggestions

For myself, I've already bemoaned the massive Ambrose Bierce-sized hole in the LoA. Since the LoA usually tends to completism, it doesn't always mesh well with genre fiction (and that was the basis of my problems with the Lovecraft Tales book, last year), but Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s output is just the right size for a LoA book. Ray Bradbury's best stuff would also fit nicely into one fat volume.

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The New York Times had an op-ed piece from Neil Gaiman today, about Halloween. (And it's quite nice, but I find myself wishing the Times would have been a bit more frivolous -- shake off the "Gray Lady" image a bit -- and asked Neil to say something about Christmas or Groundhog Day on October 31st instead. That would be a bit more interesting...)

Oh, and Neil's new book is Fragile Things, a new major story collection getting rave reviews everywhere, so you simply must buy it. (Notice how I pretend I know Neil Gaiman by calling him "Neil?" Such a petty wretch am I. I think we've been in the same room all of twice...)

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Beth at PowellsBooks urges us all to read more Terry Pratchett books and to do a happy dance when we find Wintersmith.

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Mark R. Kelly (the editor of Locus Online, among other things) just finished up his project of reading all of H.P. Lovecraft's major works straight through in chronological order, and he had some thoughts about it.

(I love this kind of reading project, possibly because I'm always dithering about what to read next and possibly because I like big unlikely structures. Speaking of which, I'm personally in the middle of a reading project over at my own blog -- I'm reading a book a day.)

Kelly has some interesting thoughts about Lovecraft, who is an endlessly fascinating writer. I'm also mentioning his post because he read some of these stories in my Lovecraft collection, Black Seas of Infinity, which I edited for the SFBC a few years back. And if you, too, are intruiged by Lovecraft and want to start reading him, well, you're in luck: it's still available.

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At least two major essays about the future of SF went up late yesterday -- first Lou Anders, and then, inspired by him, Ian McDonald. (I say "at least" because these things tend to spread.)

The essential question: is Star Wars the savior of science fiction...or its murderer?

Updated October 11 at 11:03: Anders has replied to McDonald, partly agreeing and party disagreeing. And here's a link to the Kristine Kathryn Rusch article from Asimov's that McDonald mentions (mostly disparagingly) in his post.

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Jonathan Strahan thinks there is no such thing as "the new space opera," but, prodded by Ellen Datlow in comments to that post, is now asking others to tell him what their definition of space opera is.

For myself, a space opera is a science fiction story involving space travel (preferably at least interstellar) in which the stakes are high and the audience is expected to be rooting for someone in particular to come out ahead in the end. It may or may not be well-written; it may or may not tackle larger issues. Space adventure without anything important (above and beyond the character's own lives) isn't space opera, to my mind. Stories set entirely on planetary surfaces also don't count -- those may be planetary romances, a related category, if they're otherwise similar to space opera. I think it is possible for a story to be both space opera and Military SF. Quality of science does not matter in space opera; in fact, I've always said that quality of science is rarely important in a SF story worth reading.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lou Anders has written a letter to Locus Online responding to Cory Doctorow's essay from last week, "How Copyright Broke."

I think Lou's mostly responding to issues from Cory's other writings -- not this essay in particular -- and this essay might actually be seen as a shift in Cory's thinking. "How Copyright Broke" is not really arguing that copyright is dying, though Cory has said that, in other ways and in other places, in the past. "How Copyright Broke" seems to be to be arguing for a radical expansion of the concept of fair use, to encompass all of the things people regularly do with creative products that they buy -- uses that, under a strict reading of the law, are illegal, but that are widespread and generally not considered a problem by consumers and creative folks. If Cory's argument takes hold, it could be damaging to the profits of some media corporations -- for example, if consumers would only need to buy songs once to have them available in any desired format for the rest of their lives -- but not, I think, damaging to the concept of copyright, or the protection of creative expression that copyright allows.

I've had problems with some of Cory's copyright-related essays in the past (see here at the SFBC blog, and then over at my personal blog Antick Musings for the more opinionated stuff), but this time I'm in complete agreement with him. The current obsession with licensing and limiting the uses consumers can make of their own property is self-defeating, ridiculously Byzantine in its complexity, and turning millions of otherwise law-abiding people into willfull lawbreakers (which is never a good idea).

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They say that it's a mistake to reply to critics, but editor Lou Anders has a long post on the Pyr blog thinking about some issues raised by Norman Spinrad in a book-review column from the October/November Asimov's.

For me, I'm already happy calling River of Gods a masterpiece, but of course we will need to see what the future thinks of it.

And I don't think there's anyone who actually likes the idea of chopping books into segments (like sausage) for publication, but sometimes it's the only thing that makes economic sense. Of course. I can afford to be sanguine about it, since the SFBC has a major line in sticking those big books back together. (So, thinking about it some more, it might actually be in my interest to promote book-fragments for trade publishers, since it helps me out. Hmm. Intriguing....)

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The Written Nerd has a great post today about books' on-sale dates (which she also calls "street dates" -- I thought that term was mostly in use in the DVD/music world, but maybe it's sneaking over to our side as well).

This is probably too inside baseball for most of you, but, hey! I'm blogging here, so I can indulge myself now and then...

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A.R. Yngve explains, in detail, How Writers Should Behave in Public.

Learn it.

Know it.

Live it.

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BookFinder.com, an out-of-print booksearch site, has published several lists of the most-searched-for titles of the past year in several different categories.

In SF/Fantasy/Horror, the list is:

1. Stephen King (as Richard Bachman), Rage
2. Sherrilyn Kenyon, Born of the Night
3. Ray Bradbury, Dark Carnival
4. Peter David, Babylon 5: Out of the Darkness
5. Martha Wells, The Element of Fire
6. Dara Joy, That Familiar Touch
7. Ira Levin, This Perfect Day
8. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
9. J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf
10. Del James, Language of Fear

(I must point out that the two Tolkien titles are current in print in the SFBC Original A Tolkien Miscellany, which I edited a few years back.)

Are these the books you folks are looking for? (Somehow I doubt SFBC members are chasing after Ira Levin and Dara Joy, but I could be wrong.)

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)