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Author Archives: iansales


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Towards a new definition of hard

There is a branch of science fiction – some would say it’s the branch which actually defines the genre – known as “hard science fiction”. Like all the terms associated with sf, its meaning is confused, confusing, disputed and not always useful. Wikipedia, for instance, defines hard sf as science fiction which is “characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both”. Yet this is not what I’ve always understood by the term.

To me, hard sf has always been that mode of science fiction which features, or emphasises, the “hard” sciences – physics, cosmology, chemistry, etc. This is in contrast to soft sf, which focuses on the “soft” sciences – anthropology, psychology, archaeology, etc. The fact that two such intersecting definitions for the same thing exist is not unusual in science fiction. Indeed, the genre itself has never been satisfactorily defined.

Yet I also believe that hard sf needs to be rigorous. And Wikipedia’s definition (taken from The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction) does indeed focus on that. But some fictions which would be excluded from the label using Wikipedia’s definition I would still describe as hard sf. Indeed, the classic example given for the sub-genre is often Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity. Which features aliens and, by implication, faster-than-light travel. Neither concept is “scientifically accurate” in the most rigorous sense of the phrase. Clearly, the definition is problematical.

Categorising a fiction by the sciences which feature in it, hard or soft, is no better. Both types may be present. And if they exist in equal measure, is the fiction hard or soft? And which science is hard and which soft? In order to define hard sf, you must first define the hard sciences. So that’s not going to work either.

And then I came across this…

There’s an interesting article here on the Cosmos Magazine website about humanity’s future in space – or rather, lack of a future. Much of the author’s discussion revolves around the limitations placed on rocketry by chemistry. Rocket engines have not substantially changed for almost a century, and that’s because there’s very little that can be done to improve what is, at its most basic, a chemical reaction. The laws of chemistry dictate how much energy that reaction can generate, and those laws are not something that can be changed. This seems counter-intuitive because in so many other areas of science and technology progress is rapid and effective – computing, for example. But, as the author of the piece writes, “In the case of electronics and information systems, we are dealing with soft rules, related to the limits of human ingenuity. In the case of space flight, we are dealing with hard rules, related to the limits of physics and chemistry.”

Science fiction often has to sidestep such “hard rules” in order to tell a story. The aforementioned faster-than-light travel is a good example. The laws of physics are quite clear that the speed of light cannot be exceeded. There are theoretical ways around this, but most are either impossible or unlikely – Alcubierre’s drive, for example, would require more energy than is available in the entire universe.

So perhaps we should consider sf which stays within the boundaries of these hard limits as hard science fiction. Any fiction which requires authorial invention to circumvent these limits would thus be “soft” sf – or whatever other sub-genre its characteristics identify it as, such as space opera.

Admittedly, it’s not as if a new, or more accurate, definition of hard sf is demanded. Most genre readers and commentators are quite happy with shifting, amorphous and evolving genre categories. Others insist that science fiction is resistant to taxonomy; or even that taxonomy itself is not useful in genre conversations. But taxonomy does indeed have its uses – it allows people to compare like with like, it sets the terms of reference for discussions, it allows for commentary on thematic similarities. And my new definition at least has the benefit of being “hard” itself: we know the hard limits imposed on us by the laws of the universe, and we can recognise those concepts and conceits invented by the author to circumvent those limits.

And it does seem fitting that hard sf should be definable, that it should operate within clearly-drawn boundaries, that its definition should be as rigorous as those fictions which comprise it.


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Anatomy of a Story: Killing the Dead

The author tells us that he’d had the title in his head for years, but no real plot to go with it. “Later the idea of setting the story on a generation starship occurred to me,” he says. “And then I decided it should be about terrorism, which fit perfectly with the setting – the sealed environment of a generation starship is especially vulnerable to terrorists. The rest of the story came out of a conversation with Eric Brown as we travelled north from a convention on a much-delayed train.”

So reads part of the introduction to my story ‘Killing the Dead’ by the editors of the Postscripts magazine/anthology . It appeared in ‘Edison’s Frankenstein’, issue 20/21, dated December 2009. According to my records, I finished ‘Killing the Dead’ in June of 2008, tried it at two magazines, before it was bought by Pete Crowther and Nick Gevers of Postscripts at the end of July. It was another 18 months before it eventually saw print.

I had indeed had the title knocking around for years – the earliest version of the story I can find was written on an Amstrad PCW, and I owned that I when I was at university in the early 1990s. In the 500 or so words which are all I completed of that draft, the story is set on an alien world and in a city which, like in ancient Egypt, sits on one side of a river with a necropolis on the other. But that’s as far as I got with it. Some fifteen years later, I decided to have another go. I kept the necropolis, but moved it onto a generation starship – which then gave me a reason for preserving the bodies of the dead. And indeed for their destruction to be a major felony, with ramifications for all those aboard. It also gave me the opening image of the dark spreading across the sky.

‘Killing the Dead’ is one of the few stories I’ve written where I actually did make it up as I went along. I had a fairly clear idea of the cast and plot: members of the starship’s crew are preserved after death in necropolises with the intention of resurrecting them, and their valuable skill-sets, once the starship reaches its destination. But someone is destroying the tombs, and so jeopardising the crew’s ability to build a functioning colony when they arrive. These crimes would be under investigation by a detective, who previously has had little beyond the occasional theft or assault to look into.

The logic behind all this was hashed out in the conversation with Eric Brown mentioned above. We were on our way to our respective homes from Novacon in Wallsall in November 2007. He told me I should write the story, so I did. I finished it in less than a week. But it wasn’t very good, and needed more work. So I fiddled with it over the next six months.

I did some research, of course: I picked a suitable destination and worked out how long the journey would reasonably take. At some point I decided that I wanted the story to reference Dante’s Divine Comedy. I’d already described the necropolises as low hills of seven levels in reference to Purgatorio, but I wanted to include more. So I split the story into seven sections – including a dream sequence – and buried in each section an image derived from one of the seven terraces of Purgatory. These are:

1 The Proud, who carry huge stones on their back
2 The Envious have their eyes sewn shut
3 The Wrathful walk around in acrid smoke
4 The Slothful are engaged in a ceaseless activity of some sort
5 The Covetous lay face down on the ground
6 The Gluttonous are forever tempted by fruit out of reach (although I think the source I used mentioning running water, so I went with that instead)
7 The Lustful must pass through a wall of flame

I leave it to the reader to find the relevant sentences in the story.

Despite all this, I don’t think I’d actually figured out the end when I started the story. I didn’t know who the terrorists were. So when I did work it out, it came as a surprise – but one of those good ones, one of those ones where you realise the answer has already been set up in the story right from the start.

The same was true of the final few sentences. I’d been hiding references to purgatory throughout the story, so it seemed only natural that the journey aboard the generation starship should be cast as a form of limbo. It also occurred to me that a fear the journey’s end might leave them in hell rather than heaven could be a valid motivation for the terrorism.

Incidentally, all the named characters in the story are named for various mythologies’ gods of the dead: Arawn (Welsh), Supay (Inca), Flins (Wendish), and Jabru (Elamite).

Those few venues which did review the issue of Postscripts were positive about ‘Killing the Dead’. It didn’t set the genre on fire, although I’d have been surprised if it did. Tangent Online described the story as “Highly recommended”, and Gav at NextRead was also nice about it. And, er, that’s about it.

For those of you who want to make up your own mind, here it is (PDF).


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A portrait of the writer as a young man

I have always been a science fiction writer. I remember filling an exercise book with deck-plans for a starship when I was twelve years old. I wish I could find that book, but it has long since vanished. During my teens I played RPGs, and wrote up the sessions as fiction. After joining the British Science Fiction Association in the late 1980s, I turned my hand to writing your actual original science fiction. Not entirely successfully, it has to be admitted. And this despite the fact there seemed to be new sf small press magazines appearing every five minutes in the UK. Some of the titles I remember, and still have copies of, are: BBR, Dream Magazine, New Moon Quarterly, Works, REM, Exuberance, Critical Wave, Territories, The Lyre, Nova SF, Auguries, Strange Attractor, Opus Quarterly, Sweet Dreams Baby!, New Visions, The Edge, The Scanner, Sierra Heaven…

I submitted fiction to several of the above, but my first ever published short story was a space opera parody which appeared in The Scanner #8 in 1990. It wasn’t very good. Shortly after graduating from university, I left the UK. And spent ten years working in the United Arab Emirates. While there, I started submitting fiction to the pro magazines, with even less success. Occasionally, I tried stories at small press mags… Which is how Sierra Heaven ended up with my second piece of published fiction in their Summer 1997 issue.

Here, for your delight and delectation, your edification and edumacation, is that story. It’s a space opera metafictional story, titled ‘Pulp!’, that probably owes far too much to certain film by Quentin Tarantino. Apologies for the poor quality of the scan.

Click here: Pulp!


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The future’s so bright, you gotta wear chains

While reading Marianne de Pierries’ Dark Space last week (see here), it struck me that sf writers are all too keen to extrapolate or invent science and technology in their fictions – FTL, AI, anti-gravity, etc. – but they then insist on imagining socially regressive societies. The world of Araldis in Dark Space is markedly sexist – the women are either wives or mistresses, and have no say in Araldisian society. Why would a writer do that? After the decades of struggle for gender equality, to then write about a society in which women are once again second-class citizens just seems stupid. It’s not even a failure of the imagination because it was plainly a deliberate artistic choice.

But this is not unusual in space opera. Writers invent galaxy-spanning empires with magical technology… and then populate them with tyrants, slave traders, mass-murderers, pirates and all manner of scum and villainy, design them with systemic inequality, inequity, injustice and unfairness. True, scum and villainy exists in modern-day society, and even the twenty-first century has its share of inequality and inequity. But they don’t define it.

Space opera is an inherently right-wing subgenre. As is military science fiction. There are exceptions but, as a general trend, both subgenres tend to the right of centre. It is, I suspect, a consequence of the form, since not all writers of space opera or military sf cleave to the political right. But the vast majority of those writers – Anglophone ones, as that’s the bulk of my reading, and the area about which I know most – live in developed nations, where slavery is illegal, where everyone has the vote, where fairness in many areas of life is either legally or constitutionally protected. And yet these same authors can happily invent a future universe in which sentient beings are treated worse than animals, the first solution to any problem is unregulated violence, and inequality is institutionalised… And that inequality is all too often ignored by the protagonists, because typically they’re among the privileged. (This latter is especially true of secondary-world fantasy, with its penchant for adventuring princes; but that’s an argument for another day.)

There are, I noted above, exceptions. Iain M Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, for example. These exceptions are usually British. Having said that, while Banks’s Culture is famously a post-scarcity utopia, he still populates his novels with plutocratic shits (possibly a tautology) and the like – if only to give Special Circumstances something to do…

I’ve been wondering why space opera / mil sf needs to be so socially regressive / right wing. Is it a consequence of science fiction’s history? Military science fiction often appears to be little more than fancied-up Horatio Hornblower in Space, and so copies 17th Century British society – in all respects but the technology. It could be that Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, famously based on Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, led to the Roman Empire as a model for galactic empires in space operas. Personally, I suspect US science fiction owes an unconscious debt to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. The similarities are striking.

And why are the exceptions mostly from the UK? Is it just a consequence of domestic politics? I’d like to think British sf owes an equal debt to HG Wells, but it was plainly dominated by the US mode – at least until the advent of the New Wave. Admittedly, the last couple of decades has seen more Wellsian sf creeping into British sf, though his influence continues to be ignored by US science fiction. Which is odd, historically, as HG Wells – and Jules Verne – were both extensively reprinted in magazines during the early days of the genre in the USA.

Some have argued that space opera and military sf require conflict, that without it there’d be no story. But conflict is not the only delivery mechanism for drama. There are others – exploration and puzzle-solving are two alternatives, for example. Literary fiction does not require rapes, murders, slavery, genocide or global wars to provide drama. Further, science fiction is, above all else, about the present. And present-day society – for the majority of those who read and write Anglophone sf – is mostly fair, and has become increasingly so over the centuries. (Bar current Tory policies designed to profit the few at the expense of the many.) That fairness is not universal, true; but even those who do not currently experience it are generally better off than they would have been in earlier decades and centuries.

Perhaps it’s simply that space opera / mil sf are predominantly escapist subgenres. Perhaps they can’t aspire to anything higher. If they were to comment on unfairness, if they were to justify their regressive societies as story qua story, you’d expect to see some discussion of those it effects most in the real world. But the Other is also noticeably absent from both subgenres. Both are still characterised by the privileged expressing their privilege – mostly using awesome weaponry.

The history of space opera and military science fiction, from EE ‘Doc’ Smith through Poul Anderson and John Brunner to CJ Cherryh and now Peter F Hamilton, is almost entirely populated with examples which demonstrate the above. It has become axiomatic. That needs to be questioned. A regressive society is not, in and of itself, implicit in space opera, and should not be treated as such. Space opera need not primarily be escapist; and escapist fiction need not be defined by unfairness in its invented universe.

It’s time to think a little more intelligently about the universes we create for our fictions. It’s time our fictions reflected our ambitions and didn’t simply parrot the assumptions of past decades.

It’s time we dragged space opera, and military science fiction, into the twenty-first century.


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Oops – not a mistress, then

It has just been pointed out to me that one of the writers on my sf mistressworks meme list isn’t actually, er, female. I forget where I got the name from, but I should have realised straight away – because if Francis Leslie Ashton was female, “her” name would be Frances Lesley Ashton. There aren’t many names in English which differ in spelling by gender, but Ashton has two of them… and I still failed to spot it. Oops. So thanks to Dave Post of Worlds without End for pointing it out.

Because the meme list has already spread, I won’t bother posting a corrected list, merely updating the original one. At some point, I hope a consensus meme list might be generated and, if so, the makers might take note of Ashton’s gender.

Meanwhile, I’m still working on putting together a list of 21st century women sf writers… and I’ll make sure they are all actually women.


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Women in sf reading challenge #3: Dark Space, Marianne de Pierres

Marianne de Pierries is one of several Australian authors published in the UK by Orbit. Her first book, Nylon Angel, the first of the Parrish Plessis cyberpunk trilogy, was published in 2004. Dark Space is the first book of her second series, The Sentients of Orion. It is space opera.

A lone mineral scout with less-than-appealing personal habits accidentally discovers a huge and mysterious alien which lives in the vacuum of space, and which appears to have near-divine powers – he dies, and it resurrects him. His discovery makes him rich, and an industry springs up around Sole, as the alien entity is named, in which applicants to “godhead” have their brain chemistry altered by it. Tekton, a “humanesque” from the planet Lostol, is one such applicant. He has politicked his way to Belle-Monde, the artificial world where candidates for godhead are tested.

Meanwhile, on the planet Araldis (with its unfortunate likeness to the name of brand of glue), Baronessa Mira Fedor has just learnt that she is not to be First Pilot. The heir apparent, Principe Trinder Pellegrino, is, even though he does not have the Inborn Talent which allows him to interface with the world’s sentient organic starship, Insignia. But on Araldis, the men are in charge, and the women are good for nothing but being wives or mistresses. Araldisian society is also strictly hierarchical, with a nobility, a hereditary servant class, and peasant miners. The world’s wealth is derived from its minerals. Its climate is hot and arid. Its culture is Italianate.

Mira runs away. Trinder offends his father by flirting with his new mistress, and is subsequently banished to a Carabiniere outpost in a remote town. And then someone invades the planet, sabotaging foodstocks and the mines, and loosing Saqr, rapacious barely-sentient aliens. Both Trin and Mira survive; they are the last of the nobility. With the help of Rast, a mercenary hired by Araldis’s ruler, Mira must take Insignia to the Orion League of Sentients to beg for help to repel the invasion. Dark Space ends with the launch of Insignia.

There is no “dark space” in this novel. In fact, the first line of the book is, “Dark space is not really dark”. Given that the phrase “dark space” is not common, in science or science fiction, it seems an odd choice for a title. Nor does the prologue into which that opening line leads instill confidence – it is crude exposition, cast as the testimony of Sole’s discoverer, a thoroughly unlikeable rogue.

Happily, the narrative set on Araldis is much better. Mira is an engaging protagonist, and the planet and its culture is interesting. However, the Italianised vocabulary is over-used. I can understand its use for titles, perhaps even for objects unique to the culture such as clothing. But I see no good reason why babies are referred to throughout as bambina and bambino, why children are called ragazza and ragazzo. It’s entirely unnecessary.

Tekton’s narrative is less satisfying. He dominates it and he is not at all sympathetic. He is arrogant and self-centred. His race display their naked bodies in much the same way as people on this planet display their wealth. But then Tekton is pretty much characteristic of all the male cast of Dark Space. I’m all for redressing the gender balance in genre fiction. But to me that means writing strong female characters, writing stories that pass the Bechdel Test. It doesn’t mean populating a story with male characters who are entirely shits. Even Trinder, the male protagonist of Dark Space, is far from sympathetic – and his relationship with Mira is symptomatic of his attitude. Of course, the culture of Araldis is chiefly to blame for the unlikeability of the men… except not all of the men are Araldisian. Tekton isn’t. The rogue who discovered Sole isn’t.

Perhaps I shouldn’t complain. After all, male genre writers of the past and present have treated their female characters as badly, or worse, since the days of Amazing Stories. But the correct response to an imbalance is balance, not a swing in the completely opposite direction.

Yet, despite all this, I actually enjoyed reading Dark Space. I have books two and three of the quartet, and will likely read them too. While I can rue de Pierres’ ham-fisted characterisation of her male cast, her clunky info-dumping, her bizarre choice of vocabulary to render into cod-Italian… none of these actually spoiled my enjoyment of the book.

So, not as successful a read as Rosemary Kirstein’s The Steerswoman, nor as interesting a novel as Liz Williams’ Winterstrike – but definitely a more enjoyable read than the latter.


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The laden mantlepiece

I must not buy so many books. I must not buy so many books. I must not buy so many books. I tell myself this every day, but it doesn’t seem to work.

See:

Some mainstream fiction. Strangers and Brothers, CP Snow, the second book of the series of the same name (although the first written). I read the first, Time of Hope, a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it. Fielding Gray, Simon Raven, the first book of his Alms for Oblivion series, which I was told is similar to Snow’s. The Boat of Fate, an historical novel by Keith Roberts, an excellent sf writer best-known for SF Masterwork Pavane. The Rings Of Saturn, WG Sebald, a writer I admire much. My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, Liz Jensen – a charity shop find, which I picked up because I enjoyed her The Rapture (my review here). And Underworld, also a charity shop find, because I’ve been meaning to read some Don DeLillo for ages.

Some science fiction: Stained-Glass World, Ken Bulmer, a British sf writer of the 1960s and 1970s. A bit of a hack, by all accounts, but we’ll see. JG Ballard’s The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1, Engineering Infinity, Arslan, and More What If? I’m looking forward to reading. The last one was a charity shop find, the other three were birthday presents.

Some first editions. The Universe of Things is for the Gwyneth Jones collection. Down to the Bone is the last of Justina Robson’s Quantum Gravity series. Back of Town Blues is for the DG Compton collection. Heat of Fusion and Other Stories, John M Ford, because he is apparently a writer of excellent sf short fiction.

A bit of a mix. Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels, David Pringle, which is sort of not the companion volume to Pringle’s Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, because the actual real companion volume to that is Fantasy: The 100 Best Books by Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn (which I also own). Red Plenty, BSFA Award-shortlisted non-fiction/fiction, which many folk have told me I will like (I was going to wait for the paperback, but what the hell). And Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, a signed and numbered limited edition chapbook of Michael Swanwick short stories.

Three space books. Seven into Space, kindly donated to the Space Books collection by Adam Roberts. The Space Station and Island in the Sky were both bargains from eBay.

Finally, a pair of coffee-table books. Spomenik, Jan Kempenaers, is the book of his photographic exhibition. The title refers to WWII monuments in the former Yugoslavia. Many have been destroyed, or left to fall into ruin, but Kempenaers’ book contains photos of twenty-two of the best-preserved ones. Strange, but quite beautiful, stuff. CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, Frédéric Chaubin, is a ginormous book of photographs of many gloriously modernist buildings from the former USSR. Also strange, but quite beautiful, stuff.


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The future we used to have, part 2

Here’s yet more pictures and photos from around the internet. This is how we could be living now, instead of watching powerlessly as our scumbag Tory government robs us and stuffs the proceeds into the pockets of the filthy rich. The twentieth century, despite – or perhaps because of – two world wars, seems like it may have been a great social experiment; and we’re rapidly returning to the good old days of inequity, inequality, rampant greed and systemic abuse of privilege. Last century, they reached the peak of the world’s tallest mountain for the first time; they put twelve men on the Moon; they visited the deepest part of the ocean, where the pressure is seven tons per square inch…

This century we can’t even agree to save our own dying planet.

So let’s look at some nice pictures of where we could have been instead.

buildings

Oscar Niemeyer's University of Constantine, Algeria, 1968

Oscar Niemeyer's Cathedral of Brasilia

data centres

An IBM mainframe

IBM 360 mainframe, 1964

spaceplanes

Air launch is the way forward

Rockwell X-30 spaceplane

houses of the future

Alison and Peter Smithson in their House of the Future at the "This is Tomorrow" exhibition, 1956

 

Vacation House of the Future c. 1957, James R. Powers

moonbases

Credit: NASA

(This, incidentally, is as near I plan to get to escapism with my science fiction…)