Tag: Science Fiction

Books books books

Posted on by Neal Asher

Just done a massive sort-out of my own books up in the loft. All sorts of things coming to light: trade paperback Night Shade editions of Cowl; Book Club (USA) editions of Brass Man, Gridlinked, The Skinner; plenty of 1st edition mass-market paperbacks of all my latest books, a quantity of 1st editionn hardbacks (USA) of Gridlinked & The Skinner… I’ve also noticed odd things, like I never received my copies of the mass-market paperback of The Gabble from Macmillan.

Very shortly I’ll be putting a list of those books up here, so if anyone wants copies of them, signed, they can get in contact. It’ll be cover price plus postage.

Don Hasmat Suit and Jump in!

Posted on by Neal Asher

I’ve been sampling around the Internet from articles, essays and rants on the subject of the ‘death of SF’ and ‘relevant issues’. Some interesting points raised but, good grief. Apparently SF must do something, it must re-invent itself, update itself and, wait for it, it must become more socially relevant. Apparently it is conservative, racist and sexist, runs away from present science and pitches itself into the far future to escape that (?), it’s behind the curve, only highlights present ‘issues’ by visualising dystopian crashes resulting from them … on and on.
Bollocks. Science fiction is updating itself continuously. Neuromancer is a case in point (as de Vries pointed out), bringing things up to date and thereafter incorporated. Nanotech is in the fold, so is biotechnology, quantum mechanics, brane theory … in fact point at any present day science or technology and an avid SF reader will be able to point at a book in which it is included or extrapolated. Science fiction isn’t running away from present day science (hard) but leaping to a future where that science isn’t the territory of a few experts, some learned journals or struggling from the laboratory, but out in the real (or unreal) world.
There’s also the danger here of chucking out the baby with the bathwater. To be more relevant should SF, as some seem to think, discard its own history? Why should old ideas become less relevant? Arthur C Clarke wrote a paper once about satellite communications, but that’s so old, let’s get rid of it and start polishing up the new shiny thing. We should dump the lasers too, and someone needs to tell Boeing to stop shooting UAVs out of the sky with them. Spaceships, they gotta go, are you listening Branson?
But the rest, outside of real science in my terms but in the territory of ‘soft’ science in others is that ‘social relevance’. Nothing new then. Just another New Wave slopping on the beach to deposit its flotsam of liberal guilt, its need to shove away real science and get deep into humanities man. Having an interest in hard science, a preference for sensawunda and a stonking good story is conservative, apparently. Telling a story without sufficient sexual or racial diversity is sexist or racist, except, if your main character is a black woman and you’re a white male writer, you’ll get pilloried for that too. (Oh, and apparently SF awards need more positive discrimination. Call me old fashioned, but I always thought awards should be given on the basis of the product, not the colour or sex of the producer. To positively discriminate is hugely patronising and is sexist and racist in itself.)
Damn, every single point in all these debates (just like the death of SF itself) has been bludgeoned into insensibility over forty or fifty years. Do they serve any purpose, do they help to inject new life? Usually each essay, article or rant is just the vehicle of the prejudices of the writer concerned (like here) but, applying Sturgeon’s Law, something of interest or use can be found, you just need to put on your hasmat suit to go and find it.  

More on that Premature Autopsy on the Corpse of SF.

Posted on by Neal Asher

In the comments to a previous post in which I deride those who keep on telling us SF is dying, Jetse de Vries notes from the bestseller list of 2008:

…basically *one* SF novel in the top 100 (and it barely scraped in), and 5 in total in the top 150. Two of those by very well-established authors (Stephenson and Card), three of those media tie-ins. Fantasy? Already starting with Stephenie Meyer at number 3… Make no mistake: fantasy is selling better than SF, *much* better. Look at the 2010 catalogs of genre publishers, from Tor to Pyr: all predominantly fantasy titles.

I have one little problem with this and with others, like Mark Charan, who make a comparison between fantasy and science fiction sales, or cite science fiction’s proportion of the market, as proof that science fiction is in decline, dying, whatever. Why do they assume it’s a zero sum game? Why do they make the illogical leap that because fantasy is selling well science fiction must be doing badly? Do people assume that because sales of teen vampire books are on the increase, thriller sales are decreasing?

I guess what you really need to do is get data on year on year sales of SF back over six decades and plot trends. You’ll probably find all sorts of lulls and highs, so would have to be careful about making assumptions upon seeing a present upward or downward trend. Possibly science fiction sales have never been as good as they were in the Golden Age, but are they worse than they were 20 or 30 years ago? Maybe someone could put together a computer model to check all this out, in fact, I know just the guys who could do this, and give you whatever answer you wanted.

Nation — Terry Pratchett

Posted on by Neal Asher

Another excellent book from Mr Pratchett. As most readers of Pratchett will be aware, this is not one of his Discworld books, but of course he couldn’t resist injecting a touch of the fantastic. It seems as if he started out with all good intentions then by chapter two just couldn’t resist sticking in one of his footnotes – this one about a tree-climbing octopus, then later on we get the sail-fin crocodile. The fantastical elements are quite sparse, however, on a parallel Earth where Moby Dick is a true story and where the weight of history, of the dead Grandfathers, has power to affect the present … or maybe not.
If you like Terry Pratchett’s stuff you’ve probably already bought this. If you don’t get it, then possibly not, though this one is perhaps the one in which you will ‘get it’. There’s wry humour here and, as always, wisdom. And if you haven’t heard of Pratchett I have to wonder what cave you’ve been living in for the last 30 years.

The Day of the Triffids (again).

Posted on by Neal Asher

Yes, it’s yet another remake…

The triffids, apparently, are a source of fuel to supplant fossil fuels and have thus saved us from global warming. We get some thankfully understated lectures about how we fucked up the environment, with the implication that we’re getting what we deserve. This of course glosses over the fact that the disaster is due to a stellar event blinding most of the population. Maybe the ozone hole we created let the light in?

Next episode we can look forward to the hero of the hour uttering the immortal line, “Mother nature is reclaiming the planet”. Doubtless this will all end with homilies about how we should adopt a communal socialist agrarian lifestyle, sit around supping cabbage soup and farting out the tune of the Red Flag … but I’ll withhold full judgement until I’ve seen the second part.

Update:
Well, it didn’t end with the homilies but it was seriously bad. Yes, I said, this stranger appearing out of the night is going to turn out to be the hero’s dad. Why did that girl shoot at our hero, did he look like a triffid? Ah, reunion between hero and female lead, oh good grief, they’re dancing to an old gramophone record. Now the hero will have to go off on some silly mission to collect the head of a male triffid. Oops, that just got well telegraphed: the dad’s a gonner. Nope, they haven’t left that place yet because they’ve got to hang about waiting for a final confrontation with the bad guy. Ah, so pouring triffid poison into your eyes through an old African wooden mask makes triffids ignore you? That makes sense … not. And of course, the bad guy must get his just desserts from a triffid.
Lots of spoilers here, but then this – as Caroline described it – great pile of poo couldn’t really be spoiled. It was all over the place, disjointed rubbish that failed to suspend disbelief, and in which I felt absolutely nothing for the characters. Amazing how such a cast of very good actors simply couldn’t rescue it.

Hypochondriac Science Fiction.

Posted on by Neal Asher

If you have a preoccupying fear of having a serious illness you most likely suffer from hypochondria or hypochondriasis. A person with hypochondria continues thinking he is seriously ill despite appropriate medical evaluations and reassurances that his health is fine.
When I noted in my final point of the previous little rant, I’m betting there was some plonker declaring the death of SF the moment Sputnik beeped or just after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon, I hadn’t checked, but it’s nice to be proven right.
First comes a link from Gary Farber:  

Who Killed Science Fiction? won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine in 1961. The Fifties were rife with talk about the death of science fiction, and Earl Kemp’s symposia of so many sf pros and prominent fans summed it all up.

And over at Asimov’s Dave Truesdale comes up with:

“Anthony Boucher (co-founder of F&SF, with J. Francis McComas), in his introduction to the classic A Treasury of Great Science Fiction , explains it this way (remember that the then USSR had successfully launched Sputnik into orbit on October 4, 1957, and the Space Race had just begun):

“When man entered the Space Age two years ago, the writers and editors of science fiction, who had so long been living in this new age, hoped for a fresh surge of reader interest, an expression of gratitude for accurate prophecy in the past and of interest in the possible accuracy of other, as yet unfulfilled prophecies.

“It seemed a logical enough expectation, but it was a fallacious one. The new readers did not arrive—to some extent, at least, because they were put off by the cry of the press (never happier than when it can claim a miracle and coin a cliché): ‘Science has caught up with science fiction!'”

. . . “But facts are impotent against loud and frequent assertion. Readers believe that science has ‘caught up’; and somehow the very fact of s.f.’s accurate prophecies turns into a weapon against it, as if a literature of prophecy should become outmoded the instant one of its predictions was fulfilled.”

Note that in full context, Boucher was not claiming that SF was a literature of prediction, only that sometimes it turned out that way.

Why the hypochondria? Probably because there are those who love science fiction so much that the thought of it dying terrifies them, and they must continually prod and poke it to check its health. The mere fact that debates like this kick off and elicit so much of a response demonstrates that science fiction is in rude health.

The Death of Science Fiction (Again).

Posted on by Neal Asher
Oh, good grief, there it is again. On Facebook I followed links posted by Jetse de Vries, to yet another essay about the terminal decline of SF. This on top of another article a while back by Mark Charan Newton about ‘why SF is dying and fantasy is the future’ (no vested interest then from this fantasy writer) and lots of articles related to that, and now, if you search with the words ‘science fiction is dying’ you get numerous hits.
I do get heartily sick of all this effort to stick head-up-own-backside to examine one’s navel from the inside. I started reading SFF over thirty years ago, but it wasn’t until I got involved with the small presses, started finding out about organisations like the BSFA and the BFS, and started reading various magazines, that I discovered that SF seems to have a parasite literature attached to it. Whole swathes of self-styled academics pontificate about the meaning of it all, they wank off into deep critical analysis of stories and books – my first close encounter with this was discovering a review of Mason’s Rats that was about twice the length of the story itself – have lengthy discussions about ‘issues’ in SF and speak with all seriousness about gender divides in genre, the lack of representation of homosexuals, the implicit racism in something like Starship Troopers. Really, if you can be bothered to read all through these highly ‘intelligent’ waffles, the only response upon finishing the last line is to point and giggle.
And an old favourite in this rarified atmosphere is ‘the death of SF’ (or fantasy, or the short story, whatever). It surfaces with the almost metronic regularity of a dead fish at the tide line (stirred up, no-doubt, by some ‘new wave’). SF isn’t dying, it hasn’t been ill, and frequent terminal diagnoses often see the undertaker clutching a handful of nails and a hammer and scratching his head over an empty coffin. However, discussions about this demise have been resurrecting themselves in only slightly altered form since I first read ‘about’ SF rather than SF itself. I’m betting there was some plonker declaring the death of SF the moment Sputnik beeped or just after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon. Really, the whole pointless staggering debate needs a nice fat stake driven through its heart.