What It's Not

Over at Lou Ander’s blog, there’s some lively discussion about whether the reaction to Kurt Vonnegut's death and Ray Bradbury’s Pulitzer Prize are signs that science fiction is about to get its long-overdue rehabilitation. Amongst other things, he mentions the pretzel logic deployed by one of Battlestar Galactica’s executive producers to distance the series from genre antpong*:

'It's fleshed-out reality,' explains executive producer Ronald D. Moore in the sci-fi mag SFX. 'It's not in the science-fiction genre.'

Too true. Because as far as SF is concerned, ‘fleshing-out’ reality doesn’t go far enough. SF is about leading reality into really bad habits. It’s about giving reality a shot of something dark and nasty that turns its tiny little mind upside down and inside out. It’s about setting fire to the audience’s preconceptions and burying the ashes six feet deep under the foundations of something new and strange and utterly wonderful. Just to begin with, you understand. After that, it lights out for the Territory, ahead of the rest. That’s when the real fun starts.

So if rehabilitation means that SF is taken seriously for what it is, and we no longer have to listen to people who disrespect it out of reflex snobbery, then I’m all for it. Just as long as it doesn’t mean that SF has to become all respectable and sivilised, and has to start behaving itself as far as reality is concerned.


*Coined by John Clute. I wish I could remember where.

I've Got Your Dilithium Right Here

Remember those crystal-filled caves that featured as alien planet backdrops in so many SF movies and serials in the 1960s and 70s? Here’s the real deal.

Double Vision

After reading this, I rubbed my eyes and wondered if the author had seen an advance copy of Cowboy Angels. He even has the obligatory reference to Pottersville.

Gosh Wow

The discovery of an Earth-like planet in the life-zone of another star, just twenty light years away, considerably bumps up the probability of extra-terrestrial life. Although since the planet in question orbits a red dwarf star once every twenty-seven days, it’s not going to be life as we know it . . . but we knew that anyway. 2007 may look nothing like 2001: A Space Odyssey, but what the heck: we’re living in a golden age of space science.

No Big Deal

Oliver Morton sends me details of the Douglas Adams Memorial Debate, hosted by the Institute of Ideas, pointing out that, despite its title, From Star Wars to the Battle of Ideas Is science fiction good for public debate? there aren’t any actual science-fiction authors on the panel.
Given that the publicity puff rehashes ancient left-overs like ‘Do writers and directors have a responsibility to make their science accurate, or even educational?’ and ‘Does sci fi skew our understanding of science?’ we aren’t missing out on much. And besides, an earlier incarnation of the Institute of Ideas sounds rather like a sinister cult from that gnomic TV sci-fi series Sapphire and Steel; I can’t help what Douglas Adams would make of the fact that a debate named in his honour has been taken over by a cadre of humourless, libertarian-loving ex-Marxists.

Meanwhile, here’s a real, solid piece on science fiction and speculation by a science-fiction author, published in today’s Guardian.

Check It Out

Bobby Lightfoot tells it like it is.

(Thanks to William Gibson for the tip.)

And The Winners Are . . .

Now that Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road has won this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction and Ray Bradbury is the winner of a special citation, ‘for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy,’ perhaps the science-fiction community can walk a little taller, and, where appropriate, remove the ‘kick me’ notes from their backs.

Heroes Of The Write Stuff

An article in the financial section of today’s Guardian pegs a discussion of the current dismal state of highstreet bookshops in Britain on the story of how two heroes have made a success of an independent bookshop, Crockatt & Powell, near Waterloo station. Adam Powell used to work in Waterstones in Islington, one of my local bookshops, and he’s right on the mark when he comments about how depressing this once vibrant branch has become. Like all chain bookshops, its front of house is almost entirely taken up with three-for-two tables, with no sign of any individuality or attempt to cater to what Powell calls the hardcore customers - they people who buy 50-100 books a year.

Although the article is rightly scathing about the damage caused by the craven attitude of most publishers to supermarkets (and if you think Waterstones is dispiriting, check out the book shelves of a big Asda or Tescos), and doesn’t touch on the fact that almost all of the books displayed front-of-house in chains are there because the publishers have paid bungs to put them there. It costs publishers to get recommendations from chains too; it costs them even more to get their book in the window displays. It’s a scam that still doesn’t seem to be general knowledge. It’s almost killed off the midlist because no publisher is going to pay to promote a hardback thatwill probably sell no more than 2000 copies, or a paperback that won’t sell more than 5000 copies. And it’s killing off the chains because people who buy only a few books a year can get their fix at bargain prices at supermarkets, while discerning customers (who buy the most books) are fed up with being told what they should buy, and with shops that don’t stock what they’re looking for. A big hurrah, then, for people like Matthew Crockatt and Adam Powell, and let’s hope that the plan by Waterstone’s chief executive to makeover his shops so that they are able to ‘serve local communities’ succeeds without dumbing down their stocking policy in a vain attempt to match the brute buying power of the supermarkets. And if only there was some way that publishers, who are *losing money* on supermarket deals, would get together and agree to stop giving ridiculous discounts...

My own current reading? I’ve just finished Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland, a graphic novel that uses Lewis Carroll’s connections with Sunderland as the core of a phantasmagorical exploration of the tangled history of the town and its inhabitants. Provoking and poignant psychogeography that weaves a rich tapestry from individual human stories and lovingly burlesques all kinds of graphic stylings. And I’ve just started Walter Mosley’s Little Scarlet, a sure-footed thriller set in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, effortlessly carried by the strong and deceptively simple voice of its hero, Easy Rawlins.

The End Of The Beginning

It’s no more than a coincidence, but I can’t resist noting that as Cassini makes another pass close to Titan, I’ve finally reached the end of the first draft of the first of two Quiet War novels, with a penultimate scene down on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, in the caldera of a volcano.
It’s been a long haul. The novel is supposed to be around 150,000 words. I seem to have committed 200,000 so far, with a few scenes missing and a couple truncated. But on the whole it’s better to come out long than short. Now it’s cut, cut, cut, and polish, polish, polish. My favourite part of the writing process, if truth be told. Because now I have a first draft with a beginning and an end, and an endless middle, I know that I have a novel. And hopefully, somewhere in this mass of verbiage, there’s something like the novel I had in mind when I started it, good grief, back in October. (I was interrupted by a rewrite and polish of Cowboy Angels after the editing process, but still: one thing I’ve learnt, it doesn’t get any easier.)

Something like . . . Some writers plan everything with ruthless thoroughness before setting out. Others polish one chapter before starting the next, so that when they reach that last full stop, they have, more or less, the finished object. As far as I’m concerned, the first draft is a kind of exploration of the territory within the boundaries set when I first had the idea for the novel. There are things in that territory that are smaller and far more insignificant than I believed them to be when I started out, and other things that have a far greater significance. And then there are the things, to lapse into a brief Rumsfeldian mode, that I didn’t know I knew, and the characters who somehow managed to rewrite their parts to get a lot more time than I thought they would have, way back when. The discoveries that make the long labour worthwhile.

The Only Ones

I've been a fan of The Only Ones ever since my flatmate bought their first single ('Lovers of Today'/'Peter and the Pets'), and used to see them regularly in concert because I was living in Bristol back then, in the late 1970s, and their tours always seemed to finish there (I think their lead guitarist, John Perry, came from the area). They broke up in inglorious circumstances involved improbably amounts of drugs in the early 1980s, but now they're back. Truly, nothing is impossible in this strange, wonderful world. Time to dig out my 12 inch disc of 'Another Girl, Another Planet' before returning to Titan and the final haul . . .