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Author Archives: iansales


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The sf mistressworks meme

Pushing on with the Women in SF theme, I decided to have a go at a full-on meme-type list. And here it is…

A few things to bear in mind about the titles listed below: science fiction only, no fantasy; and no YA or children’s works. One work per author, because I wanted breadth (otherwise I’d have filled it up with my favourite authors). Arbitrary end date of 2000 – which will be addressed by a subsequent list of 21st Century SF Mistressworks. Some authors who have had more books published post-2000, I’ve missed off. I’ve used my own taste in novels, awards shortlists, recommendations by various folk, and some judicious online research to generate the list. I can’t guarantee I’ve picked a writer’s best book, or indeed that any of the books on the list that I’ve not read myself are in any way “classic”.

For trilogies or series, I’ve listed the first book but put the trilogy/series name in square brackets afterwards. Asterisked titles are in Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series. And if the Masterworks series is allowed an anthology, so am I: hence the inclusion of Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind. I’ve also sneakily included one or two collections, for those writers best known for their short fiction.

The list is in order of year of publication.

You know how it works: bold those you’ve read, italicise those you own but have not read. (If you’ve read the entire named series, you can even emboldenize that as well.)

1 *Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
2 Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)
3 Orlando, Virginia Woolf (1928)
4 Lest Ye Die, Cicely Hamilton (1928)
5 Swastika Night, Katherine Burdekin (1937)
6 Wrong Side of the Moon, Francis Leslie Ashton (1951)
7 The Sword of Rhiannon, Leigh Brackett (1953)
8 Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, Zenna Henderson (1961)
9 Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962)
10 Witch World, Andre Norton (1963)
11 Sunburst, Phyllis Gotlieb (1964)
12 Jirel of Joiry, CL Moore (1969)
13 Heroes and Villains, Angela Carter (1969)
14 Ten Thousand Light Years From Home, James Tiptree Jr (1973)
15 *The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin (1974)
16 Walk to the End of the World, Suzy McKee Charnas (1974)
17 *The Female Man, Joanna Russ (1975)
18 Missing Man, Katherine MacLean (1975)
19 *Arslan, MJ Engh (1976)
20 *Floating Worlds, Cecelia Holland (1976)
21 *Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm (1976)
22 Islands, Marta Randall (1976)
23 Dreamsnake, Vonda N McIntyre (1978)
24 False Dawn, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1978)
25 Shikasta [Canopus in Argos: Archives], Doris Lessing (1979)
26 Kindred, Octavia Butler (1979)
27 Benefits, Zoe Fairbairns (1979)
28 The Snow Queen, Joan D Vinge (1980)
29 The Silent City, Élisabeth Vonarburg (1981)
30 The Silver Metal Lover, Tanith Lee (1981)
31 The Many-Coloured Land [Saga of the Exiles], Julian May (1981)
32 Darkchild [Daughters of the Sunstone], Sydney J van Scyoc (1982)
33 The Crystal Singer, Anne McCaffrey (1982)
34 Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin (1984)
35 The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)
36 Jerusalem Fire, RM Meluch (1985)
37 Children of Anthi, Jay D Blakeney (1985)
38 The Dream Years, Lisa Goldstein (1985)
39 Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind, Sarah Lefanu & Jen Green (1985)
40 Queen of the States, Josephine Saxton (1986)
41 The Wave and the Flame [Lear’s Daughters], Marjorie Bradley Kellogg (1986)
42 The Journal of Nicholas the American, Leigh Kennedy (1986)
43 A Door into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski (1986)
44 Angel at Apogee, SN Lewitt (1987)
45 In Conquest Born, CS Friedman (1987)
46 Pennterra, Judith Moffett (1987)
47 Kairos, Gwyneth Jones (1988)
48 Cyteen , CJ Cherryh (1988)
49 Unquenchable Fire, Rachel Pollack (1988)
50 The City, Not Long After, Pat Murphy (1988)
51 The Steerswoman [Steerswoman series], Rosemary Kirstein (1989)
52 The Third Eagle, RA MacAvoy (1989)
53 *Grass, Sheri S Tepper (1989)
54 Heritage of Flight, Susan Shwartz (1989)
55 Falcon, Emma Bull (1989)
56 The Archivist, Gill Alderman (1989)
57 Winterlong [Winterlong trilogy], Elizabeth Hand (1990)
58 A Gift Upon the Shore, MK Wren (1990)
59 Red Spider, White Web, Misha (1990)
60 Polar City Blues, Katharine Kerr (1990)
61 Body of Glass (AKA He, She and It), Marge Piercy (1991)
62 Sarah Canary, Karen Joy Fowler (1991)
63 Beggars in Spain [Sleepless trilogy], Nancy Kress (1991)
64 A Woman of the Iron People, Eleanor Arnason (1991)
65 Hermetech, Storm Constantine (1991)
66 China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F McHugh (1992)
67 Fools, Pat Cadigan (1992)
68 Correspondence, Sue Thomas (1992)
69 Lost Futures, Lisa Tuttle (1992)
70 Doomsday Book, Connie Willis (1992)
71 Ammonite, Nicola Griffith (1993)
72 The Holder of the World, Bharati Mukherjee (1993)
73 Queen City Jazz, Kathleen Ann Goonan (1994)
74 Happy Policeman, Patricia Anthony (1994)
75 Shadow Man, Melissa Scott (1995)
76 Legacies, Alison Sinclair (1995)
77 Primary Inversion [Skolian Saga], Catherine Asaro (1995)
78 Alien Influences, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (1995)
79 The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell (1996)
80 Memory [Vorkosigan series], Lois McMaster Bujold (1996)
81 Remnant Population, Elizabeth Moon (1996)
82 Looking for the Mahdi, N Lee Wood (1996)
83 An Exchange of Hostages [Jurisdiction series], Susan R Matthews (1997)
84 Fool’s War, Sarah Zettel (1997)
85 Black Wine, Candas Jane Dorsey (1997)
86 Halfway Human, Carolyn Ives Gilman (1998)
87 Vast, Linda Nagata (1998)
88 Hand of Prophecy, Severna Park (1998)
89 Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson (1998)
90 Dreaming in Smoke, Tricia Sullivan (1999)
91 Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle (2000)

I wanted 100 titles, but couldn’t quite manage it. So feel free to suggest books that belong on the list (given the criteria outlined above).

Thanks to Kev McVeigh, Athena Andreadis, John Stevens, and others for suggestions.

EDIT: as I should have realised from the name, Francis Lesley Ashton is apparently not female.


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Science fiction mistressworks

Since 2011 is becoming the Year of Women in SF (and so it should)… and my reading challenge for the twelve months involves reading a dozen sf novels by women writers… and various other websites and blogs have been posting on the topic since the beginning of the year… and today people were throwing around on twitter some suggested titles by female authors for Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series using the hashtag #SFMistressworks… I thought it was time for another leap onto the bandwagon. SF Mistressworks is an excellent term, I feel, to describe classics of the genre by female writers. And here are some of my suggestions. Most I’ve read, but some I’m going by others’ comments. Some are obscure but, I think, deserve to be better known. I have not included any of the titles by female writers already in the SF Masterworks series, although, of course, they deserve to be on a list such as this.

In no particular order…

Canopus in Argos: Archives, Doris Lessing
If they can include the Helliconia trilogy as one humungous paperback in the SF Masterworks series, why not this quintet?

The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
This is pretty much the definitive theocratic US dystopia novel.

Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle
Why is this even out of print?

Kairos or Life, Gwyneth Jones
Or perhaps even White Queen or Bold As Love (which won the Arthur C Clarke Award). Certainly she deserves to be on the list. The only difficulty is picking which book (or books, of course).

The Children of Anthi and Requiem for Anthi, Jay D Blakeney
Blakeney was a pen-name of Deborah Chester, who chiefly wrote YA sf novels under the name Sean Dalton. These two are actually pretty good space operas.

Halfway Human, Carolyn Ives Gilman
I remember this as one of those rare sf novels, like Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which uses the genre to comment intelligently and interestingly on gender.

Jerusalem Fire or Sovereign, RM Meluch
A pair of accomplished space operas. I’ll have to reread them, but one or the other, I suspect, would find an audience if reprinted.

Daughters of the Sunstone, Sydney J van Scyoc
Van Scyoc has long been one of my favourite authors, and the trilogy collected in this SFBC omnibus edition is perhaps her best work.

Cyteen or Downbelow Station or Angel With the Sword, CJ Cherryh
Cyteen is probably her most adult novel, and Downbelow Station her most popular. Angel With the Sword just happens to be a personal favourite.

The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
It won lots of awards.

China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F McHugh
I know only that this book is highly-regarded. It is on the list for this year’s reading challenge.

Kindred, Octavia Butler
Likewise for this one.

The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein
I just really liked this, thought it was charming. See here.

Shadow Man, Melissa Scott
Another one from my reading challenge, chosen because I’ve heard many good things about it.

Maul, Tricia Sullivan
Also from the reading challenge, but an Arthur C Clarke Award nominee too.

Any of the Jurisdiction series, Susan R Matthews
Why are these out of print? Why were they never published in the UK?

The Marq’ssan Cycle, L Timmel Duchamp
These five books are important.

Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin
I’ve been wanting to read this for years.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison
I picked this for my British SF Masterworks – see here.

The Silent City, Élisabeth Vonarburg
I’ve only read Vonarburg’s Dreams of the Sea – which I thought very good – but this is probably her most successful English-language novel.

Walk to the End of the World, Suzy McKee Charnas
Another one I’ve always wanted to read.

Angel at Apogee, SN Lewitt
Another favourite author who, I think, deserves to be on a list like this. Angel at Apogee was her debut novel and I still have a soft spot for it. Some of her later books were a bit too derivative to count as possible classics, but her last few were original and interesting.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree Jr
Because she certainly belongs on this list, but her strength lay in her short fiction. As long as the collection contains ‘And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side’, I’ll be happy.

I have no doubt missed off lots and lots and lots of suitable books. Suggest me some in the comments, then.

 

Edit: now with new added meme-type stuff! See The sf mistressworks meme list of 91 titles by women sf writers.


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Thrilling wonder tales…

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/CIW

I look at the above photograph and I feel the sense of wonder I should be getting from science fiction. That picture is the surface of Mercury, as taken by MESSENGER, a space probe. That’s about ninety-two million kilometres from Earth (averaging out the distance between the two). A robotic spacecraft slightly smaller than a Mini, and weighing less than half a tonne, has spent the last six and a half years travelling from Earth to Mercury, and on 18 March will go into orbit about the planet nearest to the Sun.

Too much sf seems to treat the universe like a giant backyard. Characters hop into spaceships and zip off to some other star. But those distances are vast. MESSENGER took six and a half years to reach Mercury (admittedly it didn’t take a direct route). Even less than a century ago, other parts of this world were great distances away. In the 1930s, flying to Australia would take a fortnight. In the decades since, the world, as they say, has grown smaller. And science fiction has, in a manner of speaking, applied the same transformation to the universe – but more perhaps in terms of time and history rather than distance. Early space operas had starships flitting about the galaxy, without giving any real indication of scale. But it’s only with the advent of new space opera (it’s not worth capitalising it anymore, I think) that history has been folded into this shortening – near-immortal characters, or alien races who first came to prominence billions of years ago… Perhaps in the genre’s early days the distances involved were mostly unknown, and so unimaginable, that the minds of writers and readers simply skipped across their surface. Now we have a better understanding and so have compressed the lightyears and megaparsecs into something conceptually manageable, and have in turn colonised the millions and billions of years stretching back to the Big Bang and forward to the heat death of the universe…

And yet there’s little need to. There are wonders a-plenty in the universe, some of them so mind-boggling your mind ends up doing that skipping-across-the-surface thing. This morning, for example, I learnt that the red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris “could swallow our sun eight billion times over”. That’s absolutely enormous. Then there are the galactic filaments, which are simply so huge your mind core-dumps at the numbers concerned. But. Scale is not sense of wonder, and a lot of sf confuses the two. VY Canis Major may be enormously huge – but it’s also a star. Like the one up in the sky. Just much bigger. Or, to choose an example from a seventy-year-old space opera (see here): using planets as mobile fortresses is sense of wonder; a fleet of over a million starships is not. A photograph of the surface of Mercury, a planet in our Solar system, is sense of wonder; a galactic empire where planets are no more than a day or two of travel apart is not.

You might well think from what I’ve written in the past on this blog – and from the fact that I also have a blog dedicated to books about space – that my subgenre of choice is hard sf. But it isn’t. Chiefly because most hard sf is appallingly written. By “hard sf”, I don’t mean science fiction that is true to known science, but rather sf that features the “hard” sciences – physics, chemistry, cosmology, etc. Unfortunately, it’s a subgenre mostly written by scientists. And it shows. For instance, I really like the idea of Ben Bova’s Grand Tour novels – a series of novels set during the exploration and colonisation the Solar system – but I find them unreadable. Which is not to say all hard sf exhibits clanking prose, cardboard characters and an anal-retentive focus on science and technology. There are a number of hard sf writers whose stories and novels I appreciate and enjoy: Stephen Baxter, Paul J McAuley, Geoffrey A Landis, G David Nordley, immediately spring to mind. I also have David G Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s The Hard SF Renaissance on the TBR, but I’m expecting it to infuriate more than it entertains.

Of all the subgenres of sf, I probably read space opera more than any other. Some of my favourite sf authors write new space opera, and as a mode of genre writing I suspect it offers the largest canvas and has the biggest toolbox. But it also occupies a well-worn rut, and few books or authors seem capable of breaking, or willing to break, out of it. Its politics are often juvenile, its psychology rudimentary, and its plots little more than privilege wet dreams or revenge fantasies. Science and technology is replaced with toys festooned with flashing lights. It makes few concessions to reality and less to plausibility. It has confused scale with sense of wonder. The universe has become merely a backdrop of stars and not a source of wonder. It tells thrilling wonder tales, but they might as well take place anywhere – in Fantasyland, or some period from human history, or some corner of the world hidden from progress… What’s the point in making the stories space opera? What’s the point in using the universe and all its wonders as a setting? That’s confusing the furniture with the genre’s characteristics.

Perhaps space opera needs to take a long hard look at Mercury.


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The future we used to have

I find the aesthetics of 1960s and early 1970s futurism enormously appealing. All those giant concrete, well, shapes masquerading as buildings, the sleek supersonic aircraft, the sheer optimism of it all… Of course, much of it remained on the drawing-board – we have no moon base, no jet-packs, and we’ve yet to reach Mars. But some of it was actually built. Here are a few photos of the ones that came true.

buildings

The National Congress Building, Brasilia

The Hayward Gallery, London

The Georgian Ministry of Highway Construction. Photograph: Frédéric Chaubin

urban transport

Monorail at the New York World Fair 1964

aircraft and spaceplanes

Ekranoplan Orlyonok

Fairey Rotodyne

 

Fairey Delta 2

giant computer brains

Semi Automatic Ground Environment computer room

décor

interior of Disneyland's House of the Future

a kitchen of the future

Retro kitchen design from http://www.fittedkitchen.org

A select filmography & bibliography
Fahrenheit 451, dir. François Truffaut (1966)
2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Stanley Kubrick (1968)
Rollerball, dir. Norman Jewison (1975)
CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, Frédéric Chaubin (2011)
Rene Burri. Brasilia: Photographs 1960-1993, Arthur Rüegg (2011)

perhaps to be continued…


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World Book Day meme

It’s a meme, you have to do it.

The book I am reading: The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson by, er, Kim Stanley Robinson.

The book I am writing: a hard sf novella set on the Moon, titled ‘Adrift on the Sea of Rains’. Plus a bunch of short stories, and a space opera treatment.

The book I love most: probably The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. I am a fan of all things Durellian.

The last book I received as a gift: do review copies count? If yes, an ARC of Son of Heaven by David Wingrove which I have to review for Interzone. If not, then an ARC of The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi given to me by a friend. It’s also my birthday in a few days, so I’ll no doubt receive a few books as presents…

The last book I gave as a gift: Information is Beautiful by David McCandless (birthday present for my sister).

The nearest books on my desk: Fielding Gray by Simon Raven, De Havilland Twin-Boom Fighters: Vampire, Venom and Sea Vixen (Crowood Aviation) by Barry Jones, and Voices from the Moon by Andrew Chaikin.

Happy World Book Day.


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A veritable bargain… or two

Old stories never die, they either sit and moulder in old magazines, or they get republished again and again. But not anymore. Thanks to the magic of modern technology, they can live again. Just reformat that Standard Manuscript Format, slap on some cover-art, and publish it for the Kindle.

Which is precisely what I’ve done for two of my stories. These are the Euripidean Space ones – ‘Thicker Than Water’ and ‘A Cold Dish’ – and were originally published in Jupiter magazine. They’ve been described as “fun, pure sf”, are set on the moons of Saturn, and are hard science fiction based upon / inspired by Ancient Greek mythology sort of. They’re available on both amazon.co.uk and amazon.com, for much cheapness.

Go on, Kindle-folk, you know you want them…


Available on Amazon UK here and Amazon US here.


Available on Amazon UK here and Amazon US here.

(Apologies for the cover-art: I’m better at the words than I am the pictures.)


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It’s all about movies…

This month’s VideoVista is now up, with my reviews of excellent Israeli thriller Ajami (review here), heavy-handed noir The Racket (review here), and sub-standard low-budget thriller Choose (review here).

Also up today is SF Signal’s Mind Meld: Movie Novelizations That Are Actually Good, in which I explain why I don’t think novelizations are a very good idea, and lots of other people actually address the topic.


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A science fiction story – with flying boats!

A week or so ago I set myself a challenge: to write a science fiction story in which a flying boat featured prominently. I was hoping to come up with some heartland sf story, something with spaceships and aliens and such. And flying boats, of course. But I couldn’t think of a plot in which a flying boat, especially a historical one, might plausibly appear in the distant future or on another planet.

I could have just invented some futuristic flying boat, but I was determined it’d be a known type – and I had in mind one of those flying boats from the 1930s which carried passengers to Australia or across the Atlantic. So I dreamt up and considered a number of ideas, and promptly discarded them… and then realised there was only one way I could justifiably have a Short Empire flying boat, for example, in a sf story. But I didn’t really want to write alternate history. I wanted something more sfnal than that.

And I think I’ve sort of done it.

It’s a somewhat experimental story – in both structure and the fact that the plot is only implied. I shouldn’t think it’s the first story, science fiction or mainstream, to ever be written in this fashion, but it’s the first time I’ve tried it. It was fun to research, and I had fun “writing” it. I hope it proves as much fun to read.

Here it is (PDF): Disambiguation

Enjoy.


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The ethical writer

There was a bit of fuss caused last week by a nitwit post claiming that epic fantasy has degenerated since the days of Robert E Howard and Tolkien (I shall not dignify the post with a link to it). Nihilism and Decadence in populist escapist literature. Oh no! We must be in the End Times! I’ll not bother responding to the article – smarter folk than I have already done that. And done a much better job. But the subject has provoked an interesting line of thought…

There are those who say a writer’s only obligation is to be entertaining. Nothing else matters, providing the text entertains the reader. The aforementioned fantasy fuss would have you believe a writer is also obliged to be morally uplifting – or rather, to reinforce a narrowly-defined moral framework belonging to the writer of the post which started off the whole thing. Which is patently bollocks. In so many ways.

Writers do indeed have obligations above and beyond making their texts entertaining. They have an obligation to get it right.

Shoddy – or indeed a total lack of – research is inexcusable, and tantamount to artistic cowardice. This could mean, in science fiction, getting the science right, for example – something media sf is notoriously bad at doing. But it’s more a repudiation of the myth that you can “make it up as you go along”. Once, perhaps; once, when genre readers were unsophisticated. Not any more. And certainly not now that we have the Internet. Anything in a story that doesn’t seem quite right, you can look it up. You can do the research the writer should have done. And then you can decide not to read anything else written by that person ever again.

Fictionalising real-world examples is no defence. Want to make your fantasyland stand out? Why not look to the caliphates for inspiration? Yes, why not misrepresent and misinterpret someone else’s history and culture just to give your novel a little colour? Those people are unlikely to read your story, so why should you care if they get upset? And anyway, it’s all “made-up”… Except it’s not. Not if its inspiration is so obvious any reader can spot the parallels. In such cases, writers have an obligation to originality in their world-building. And a concomitant obligation to be accurate when the inspirations lie close to the surface.

There are those who claim it is immoral to use real people in fiction – public people, that is, dead or alive; not people the author actually might know. It is, they claim, an “invasion of privacy”. Except, public people rely on a public persona, it is their source of revenue, it is what they “do”. And as such it could be said it no longer belongs to them. If a writer were to use such a person in their text, then they are obliged to make their portrait, when necessary, as accurate as possible. The right places at the right time (providing the point of the story is exactly not that, of course).

Writers are certainly under no obligation to reinforce the prejudices of their readers. In fact, it is the reverse: they should challenge their readers’ prejudices. A good book should make you think about the world around you. It should not make you feel more comfortable with your attitudes; it does not exist to provide a helping hand carrying your personal baggage.

So, all that about a lack of conservatism in current epic fantasy, about these heirs to Tolkien who are spitting on JRR’s grave… It seems these degenerate, nihilistic writers are meeting their obligations: they’re challenging the worldview of the writer of the original post. He may not have responded intelligently, but that’s not their fault. Is it?