I’m a big fan of Wikipedia. It’s both informative and entertaining. Of course, only a fool would use it uncritically. But where else would you find articles on quantum computing, kings of Poland, the club sandwich, and Finnish heavy metal bands?

The fact that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone is both a blessing and a curse… Which is how you can end up with an article on Finnish heavy metal band Heavy Metal Perse which includes the following line:

While their name in English might be viewed as “Heavy Metal Per Se”, in Finnish it has no specific meaning, except for the word “perse” meaning “ass”.

According to the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis, language influences thought. Which makes you wonder what the writer of the following was thinking –

“Although the band’s music is very (and I emphasize on very) unique…”*

Are there different grades of uniqueness? Can something be only “slightly unique” – meaning, there’s more than one of them? What sort of world would be inhabited by a person who considers “unique” to include quantities of greater than one? Some weird kind of optimistic one, I suppose.

(* from a review of Lover, The Lord Has Left Us by The Sound of Animals Fighting)

The following comment appeared during a discussion on a literary mailing list:

“And please remember that anyone who is a professional reviewer, i.e. who earns a significant part of his/her income from reviewing, as I myself have done, does not in fact read the whole book – how could they, if they reviewed 2-3 books per week and held down a ‘day job’?”

I find this comment… horrifying. I used to review books for Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. I would never have dreamt of writing a review without reading the entire book. Admittedly, I wasn’t reviewing two or three books a week – more like two or three every couple of months. But to not read the book, to cobble together a review from a quick skim… That’s unfair to the book and its author, and it’s unfair to those who buy the book based on the review.

But then you have the likes of Harriet Klausner. As I write this, she has reviewed 14,022 books on Amazon (no doubt it will be more by the time you read this). Given that Jeff Bezos launched his on-line book shop in 1995, then Klausner has read an average of 1,167 books a year, or 3.2 books a day each and every day. Of course, that assumes she began reviewing the day Amazon went on-line. Which is unlikely. She could be posting reviews written prior to 1995 – according to her profile on Amazon, she was a librarian and “wrote a monthly review column of recommended reads”. I have neither the time nor the inclination to trawl through her 14,000 reviews to discover which books were published prior to 1995, however.

Is Klausner providing a useful service? Personally, I think her Amazon reviews are next to useless. She gives every book 4 or 5 stars – and some patently don’t deserve that. Her review of Hunters of Dune, a book – sadly – I have read myself, inaccurately summarises the plot, and then finishes on the nonsense line: “Still this is a fine entry that adds to the mythos while paying tribute to its founding father as the scientific techno concerns involving genetic engineering that Frank Herbert voiced years ago seems so valid now.” I’ve no idea what this means, or how it relates to Frank Herbert’s oeuvre. Certainly, he discussed genetic engineering in several of his novels – most notably in The Eyes of Heisenberg – but to some extent all of his novels were cautionary tales.

There are, of course, many good reviewers out there – both amateur and professional. Genre magazines such as Interzone and Locus (to pick two titles at random) have run book reviews since their first issues. It’s a standard component of any science fiction or fantasy magazine. In recent years, litblogging has also become an important resource. Like reviews in magazines, you soon learn which ones point you towards books and authors you would enjoy. It’s a shame some of the more traditional elements of publishing have yet to realise the usefulness of blogs. Actually, it’s not a shame – it’s just another indication of their blinkered snobbery.

Still, if they don’t read the books they review, why should they read blogs?

Saturday 28 April was alt.fiction, a one-day science fiction and fantasy writing event in Derby. I went to the first one last year – it was good. And so was this one.

I nearly didn’t make it. The day before, Amazon had rejected my debit card on an order, so I rang my bank. They assured me there were no problems with my account. Saturday morning, the cash machine “retained” my card. I rang the bank again, and ranted at them. Apparently, my account had been marked “contact lost”, as correspondence had been returned. Surely my conversation with the bank the day before surely qualifies as “contact”? I later learned the returned correspondence had been sent to an address I’d vacated three years ago – and I’d never told the bank I lived there. Someone definitely screwed up somewhere. Still, it’s my own fault: only a couple of days before, I’d told a friend that I was happy with my bank and had experienced no problems with them…

I ended up using my credit card to withdraw cash. For some unknown but slightly prophetic reason, I’d decided to fetch money earlier than planned, so the delay didn’t actually result in me missing my train. I still arrived at the station with plenty of time to spare. There were a lot of blokes on the platform drinking tinned lager. Football fans. That was a bit worrying. For one thing, it meant the train would be full. When the train arrived, I managed to get a seat. It was reserved, but not until the next stop. And there was always a chance the person who’d booked it wouldn’t show. But they did. So I spent the rest of the trip standing.

alt.fiction began at noon, and I’d calculated that my travel plans would get me there no more than ten or fifteen minutes afterwards. I actually arrived at the Assembly Rooms at 12:05. I handed over my ticket, got my badge. I’d expected to see some familiar faces, and the first one I saw was Christian Dunn of Solaris. In the bar, of course. Over the course of the afternoon, I met the rest of the Solaris team. I spoke to a number of people throughout the day. It was good to catch up with friends, including some I’d not spoken to for many years, and also to meet new people. Topics of conversation were entirely normal and relevant, unlike at Contemplation: SFX‘s two new rival magazines, SciFiNow and Death Ray (are those really the best titles they could think of?); writing techniques with George Mann; the uncollected short stories of Peter F Hamilton; why tagging is a fundamentally flawed concept with Jyoti Mishra and Tony Ballantyne; book-selling with Brian Ameringen; novelisations with Tim Lebbon; and various other subjects I can’t recall. All this took place in the bar. Happily, the drummers who had been practicing behind a partition last year weren’t present.

I only made it to a single programme item – Iain Banks reading from his new Culture novel, Matter (due out next year). Probably because I was still in a foul mood from the cash-machine shenanigans that morning. In that sort of mood, my short attention span is even shorter, so I knew I’d not last 60 minutes listening to a panel. In that respect, alt.fiction seemed less successful to me than last year. That’s entirely my own fault, of course, and doesn’t reflect on the organisers. It was certainly a bigger event than 2006 – a longer programme, and more big names as guests. And more people attended too. I’ve only myself to blame for not making it out of the bar. And for my poor book-haul – a mere two books. A first edition of M John Harrison’s Signs of Life from Cold Tonnage, and Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain in paperback from Porcupine Books. Well, okay, I can blame the poor book-haul on a reluctance to spend cash due to an inability to access my bank account because my debit card had been swallowed by an ATM. So it was really the bank’s fault.

I left straight after Banks’s reading. Taxi to the station, a cup of dangerously hot coffee from whatever food franchise they have in the concourse, and a 20 minute wait for a train. I got back home around half past nine, in plenty of time to meet friends who were out drinking in the town centre. This was in a “trendy” pub called Bungalows & Bears – and no, I’ve no idea what the name means. Given that, and the two new sf magazines mentioned earlier, I’m tempted to think people have lost the art of naming things… A good name is important. SciFiNow, Death Ray and Bungalows & Bears are not good names.

I forget what time I left the pub, but it was late. I ended up walking for over a mile before I managed to flag down an empty cab. I finished off the day with a doner kebab – all I’d had to eat that day since a sandwich from M&S on the train to Derby.

A… mixed day. My mood probably spoiled alt.fiction for me – or rather, my bank probably spoiled alt.fiction for me. I enjoyed myself there, but I think I would have done so more if it hadn’t been for the cock-up with my debit card. Who said money can’t buy you happiness…?

Back around the turn of century, the only English language radio station in Abu Dhabi, Capital Radio, rebadged itself as Emirates Radio and split into two stations. Called, of course, Emirates Radio 1 and Emirates Radio 2. A change in programming also went with the change in name. One DJ decided to liven up his afternoon show with some “games”. Most days of the week, this was a quiz – answer five questions in a row correctly, and you win a prize. Sometimes, it was Radio Hangman. Sometimes, it was Twenty Questions…

The object of the game was simple enough: discover the identity of the person the DJ was pretending to be. But only by asking questions that could be answered with a “yes” or “no”. Not everyone managed to grasp this…

DJ: Okay, we’ve already established I’m a person and I’m a politician. Next caller, what’s your question?
Caller: Hello. Are you a river or a lake?
DJ: We’ve already worked out I’m a person. And you can only ask questions that I can answer yes or no.
Caller: Oh. Okay… Are you dead or alive?

Most callers seemed to find it difficult enough to follow the game, but one caller managed to outdo all the others:

Caller: I have to guess your name?
DJ: Yes, I’m a person.
Caller: You are a pop star.
DJ (pleased that someone seems to have finally caught on): Yes.
Caller: Henry?
DJ: Ah, you’re going straight to the name. No, it’s not Henry.
Caller: William?
DJ: No, no, I’m female. We’ve already established that.
Caller: No, you are a man.
DJ: I’m not. I’m a woman.
Caller: No, no. You are definitely a man. This much I know. George?
DJ: No, I’m not a man! I’m a female!
Caller (heatedly): You cannot tell me you are a woman. I may not know much, but this much I know.
DJ (finally twigging that caller thinks she is identifying the DJ and not the person he is pretending to be): No, no. It’s a game. I’m pretending to be a woman. You have to guess who I am.
Caller (determinedly): You are a man. Is your name Peter?
DJ (quickly): Thank you very much for calling…

When a secretary once asked for more papyrus, the Umayyad caliph ‘Umar II apparently replied: “Sharpen your pen and write less. It will be more swiftly understood.”

Words to live by.

(quote taken from The Middle East by Bernard Lewis)

… an all-time best science fiction / fantasy contest. Let me guess: the most popular book will win – the one that has sold the most copies. So that would be… The Lord of the Rings? Jennings Goes to Wizard School?

And look at the match-ups: Ghormenghast versus Dune? The Gunslinger versus Hyperion? The Shadow of the Torturer versus The Colour of Magic?

Sigh.

It’s bad enough the sf / fantasy community handing out awards in popularity contests*. Choosing a “best” book is such a subjective process, anyway – and that’s assuming a representative sample actually bothers to vote. On a shortlist which is itself unanimously agreed to contain the “best” works of the year…

(* judging by this year’s Nebula Award shortlists, it seems you can’t trust jury awards either…)

Stephen E Andrews, one of the authors of 100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels, has written a long comment to my earlier post on his book. My replies to his points proved just as long, so I’ve posted it all up here. His comments are in italics.

25 titles of our 100 were published in the last 27 years. 12 of these were published in the last 17 years. I think both proportions are generous when you consider our book spans 1818 to the present day in terms of its main entries.

That’s a little disingenuous – you have an entire century (the Nineteenth) represented by five books. But…

I’ll also mention that part of our aim was to cover all the major themes that recur in SF and we felt these were best represented by some of the seminal books that pioneered these ideas.

I can’t argue with that. Themes have their moments in time like everything else, and a restriction by chronology would probably result in a restriction of themes. For example, swords & planet (AKA planetary romance) seems to be making something of a comeback – Chris Roberson’s Paragaea, Karl Schroeder’s Sun of Suns, Leigh Brackett’s Sea-Kings of Mars in the Fantasy Masterworks series, a film of ERB’s A Princess of Mars in development…

In my thirty years plus of reading SF and talking with other devotees, one thing I’ve noticed is that the more committed, active fans are always keen to emphasise what is happening currently in the genre – which is admirable as they are working hard to keep SF alive and kicking.

I’ve never questioned the motives of sf fans in promoting books. On the whole, I think that they do so is a Good Thing. But I have seen, particularly on on-line forums, fans reel out lists of pre-1960 science fiction when asked to recommend genre books. Typically, such lists are presented as “good” sf, not “classic” sf. I think this is wrong.

Nick and I put a greater emphasis on the 1950s-1970s as this is when we believe the greatest steps forward were taken by writers of genre SF: it is no coincidence that the rise of SF is closely related to Modernism in the arts.

Ah, now this is where you and I part company a little. My own personal theory has it that science fiction is indeed a modernist art-form. But it has always been one. Ever since it began in 1926. Gernsback not only coined the term, he also created the community which defines the genre, and his insistence on scientific accuracy (or plausibility) is what differentiates sf as modernist from early prototypes by Wells, Verne, Poe or Shelley, or indeed from fantasy.

This modernist spirit of innovation is especially relevant to the very nature of SF; the ‘sense of wonder’ at the new, conceptual breakthrough, paradigm shift, whatever you want to call the shock of fresh vistas opening up before our consciousness is the mark of important SF.

The Turkey City Lexicon trivialises these as “eyeball kicks”, but I think that de-emphasis is actually necessary – the term has become linked with visual spectacle, rather than paradigm shift. A foregrounding of “sense of wonder” leads to the lack of a central science-fictional conceit – as I mentioned in an earlier post.

But as we were aiming in part at a historical overview rather than a snapshot of the genre now, ‘classic’ texts have to be considered as valid even today.

Perhaps that’s the problem – mis-labelling. Calling the book 100 Must-Read Classic Science Fiction Novels might have been better.

Readers often need to be pointed toward innovators so they can discover how radical such writers were for their time – many contemporary writers cannot claim to be anywhere near as groundbreaking as many classic authors who first tackled the ideas today’s writers build on.

When Kirk first kissed Uhura on national American television, it was controversial and ground-breaking. Imagine how viewers of the time felt when they saw it. We can’t, of course. Not now. So how are we able to judge the “radical” credentials of a piece of fiction that was written before we were born? Ralph 124C 41+ was no doubt a radical piece of fiction in 1911… but it is by all accounts near unreadable these days.

SF has always been as much about the present as the future. My view is that most really good SF is about the present.

Exactly! Was it John Clute who said every sf novel has two dates: the date on which it was written, and the date on which it is set? After all, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is set in 1992.

With this in mind, reading classic texts in order to put today’s SF into some kind of objective social context is supremely relevant.

Most readers won’t have that social context. And not only because they’re young. But perhaps also because the context is relevant to another country – any novel which uses McCarthyism as a theme is going to be wasted on me because I’m British. Even Anthony Burgess’ 1985 means little to me since I spent my childhood in the Middle East and missed the Winter of Discontent… On the non-genre front, there’s not much point in reading a translation of Kitab al-Hayawan, without some understanding of when and where its author, Jahiz, lived.

I’m willing to bet that lots of quite hardened fans haven’t read much by Leigh Kennedy, Barrington J. Bayley or Barry N. Malzberg (to name just three).

I’ll not be taking that bet… I consider myself reasonably well-read in the genre, but there are still well-known authors whose books I’ve never read.

Not only that, there is no objective argument that today’s SF is better simply because there is more of it: quality rarely equals quantity. Referring to The Reality Dysfunction, one of the two 21st century books we selected, yes, the writing is arguably better than that to be endured in Foundation, but I personally wouldn’t call it a literary masterpiece…

I never said that more equals better. Although, by Sturgeon’s Law, there has to be more in that 1% if there’s more to begin with. I only pointed out that a lot of sf novels have been published recently, which your approach to the genre by definition ignored. And I second your feelings on Hamilton.

…(though I would make that claim for Ballard’s Super-Cannes, a book that some would argue isn’t SF, possibly proving that this writer at least is not totally ‘hung up on idea’).

I didn’t like Super-Cannes all that much. Some parts of it struck me as implausible – as if the story were subservient to the point Ballard was trying to make. As Brian Aldiss put it: yuppa ga…

I have consistently found that giving a reader new to the genre a contemporary book full of hi-concept material is quite likely to put them off SF for good.

My experience of non-sf readers currently in their twenties and thirties is that they’re familiar enough with many of the tropes and concepts to cope quite easily with contemporary sf. Admittedly, I’m not a book-seller, and I work in information technology… which means my sample is likely skewed…

Most readers over a certain age unfamiliar with genre SF are baffled by (for example) some of the ideas they encounter in a book like Altered Carbon (probably because they haven’t read something seminal like Neuromancer), though I will admit that younger readers who have grown up in the post-modern era can manage such books as early attempts to ‘get into’ SF.

This does sort of beg the question: what is your intended readership for 100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels? Not myself, obviously, since I’m a sf fan.

Samuel R. Delany is just one prominent literary figure whose viewpoint sides with my own on the difficulties some general readers have with the terminology of SF.

Isn’t Delany’s point that non-sf readers can mistake a literal phrase for metaphor because they don’t recognise that a literal meaning is possible – cf “her world exploded”?

As for ‘current day narrative techniques’, ‘Styles’ and ‘attitudes and sensibilities’ of today’s novels compared to older works, I don’t see a lot of genre SF writers (Hamilton for example) using approaches that different to those of the fifties, as experimental and Modernist techniques used heavily in the 1960s are only utilized by some contemporary writers.

The attitudes and sensibilites embedded in texts certainly differ between twenty-first century texts and 1960s ones. And that’s not just the repeated references to breasts in EE ‘Doc’ Smith’s Masters of Space. It’s even true of mainstream fiction. There’s a casual low-level racism in much fiction written in the first half of the Twentieth Century that is unacceptable today. The narrative techniques… I was referring to lower-level techniques, such as the prevalence of tightly-coupled third person point-of-view, or the general dislike of the omniscient voice.

Whether Now really is the Golden Age of SF that can confidently be recommended to all kinds of readers is something equally as debatable as which novels are representative must reads in the history of the genre as a whole.

It’s not that sf now is superior to older sf and so should be recommended, but that sf now is Now. And that’s why it should be read.

Thanks for your comments, Stephen.

I went out with friends on Saturday night – nothing too exciting, just our usual stumble around “beer valley”. Towards the end of the night, we’ve all had a few, and I start telling a friend* about this amazing film, Divine Intervention (just in case he’d not read about it on my blog). I must have done something right. The following morning, he apparently woke up, checked his email… and discovered one from Amazon thanking him for ordering Divine Interventionthe night before. He has no memory of buying it.

Next time I see him, I plan to discuss some of the books mentioned on this blog. The more expensive ones, I think…

(*Don’t worry: I won’t tell anyone your name, Andy – oh, wait…)