It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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It’s in the Memes, er, Genes

When I resolved to read one of my favourite science fiction novels during each month of this year, I hadn’t realised quite how prevalent in the blogosphere was the idea of a themed year-long reading list. Admittedly, I saw it as more of a “resolution” than a “challenge”. After all, where’s the challenge in rereading your favourite books? Having said that, part of my intention was to determine if my list of favourites actually needed updating…

And the first update I made was to expand the list to twelve – so I could read a book for each month of the year. One of the two titles I added was Gordon R Dickson’s Soldier, Ask Not, the second book of the Dorsai trilogy. I remember the trilogy being a favourite during my teens, and I vaguely recalled that Soldier, Ask Not was the most interesting of the three. However, in a spirit of fairness, I decided to reread the entire trilogy…

Tactics of Mistake was the clearest of the three books in memory. Why this should be the case, I don’t know. It’s not as if I’d read the book more often than the other two in the trilogy. Perhaps it’s because it’s the most straightforward of the three; or perhaps it’s because, like Dune (another favourite), it features an ordinary young man who subsequently proves to be anything but. This young man is Cletus Grahame, a military officer and scholar. In the future of Tactics of Mistake, the Earth has settled into two mutually antagonistic blocs, the Western Alliance and the Eastern Coalition. These blocs manoeuvre for position and power, and occasionally fight, on the fourteen worlds so far settled by humanity. One such world is Kultis, where the settlement of Neuland is waging a guerrilla war against Bakhalla. The Western Alliance is supporting Bakhalla – a colony of Exotics, sort of Buddhist-like philosophers with arcane psychological skills; while the Eastern Coalition supports Neuland. (It’s odd how so many US sf novels of the mid-twentieth century attributed almost superhuman powers to psychologists – e.g., Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, Frank Herbert’s The Dragon in the Sea, or Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon.) Grahame has had himself posted to Bakhalla in order to try out his tactical theories against the Neuland guerillas. He also makes an enemy of Dow deCastries, a rising star in the Eastern Coalition’s upper echelons. DeCastries intends to have the Eastern Coalition rule both Earth and the off-world colonies. Under himself, of course. Grahame plans to prevent him. And he does this, in part, by turning the Dorsai, a world of interstellar mercenaries, into the most effective fighting force ever seen.

Sadly, Tactics of Mistake did not match up to memory. Grahame is a little too competent to be entirely plausible – and his dodgy knee has a touch of characterisation-by-quirks to it. His love-interest, Melissa, acts like a teenager throughout the novel. And the chief hook on which the narrative hangs – Grahame’s genius at tactics – is, well, is unconvincing. His battle plans seem to rely on the enemy screwing up – in fact, they succeed because the enemy screws up exactly as Grahame had predicted. So much for “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy”… Ah well. Fond though my memories of the Dorsai trilogy may be, Tactics of Mistake is definitely not a contender for the favourites list…

But then it was Soldier, Ask Not that I actually added to the list. This is the second book in the trilogy. Unlike the other two, I’d actually reread it back in 1995 – after I’d found a copy in a remaindered book shop in Abu Dhabi I used to visit often when I lived in the UAE (the trilogy itself was in storage in the UK at the time). This may be why I remembered the book as the most interesting of the three – although the fact that it focused on the Friendlies, a pair of worlds settled by Christian fundamentalists, also contributed. What I’d forgotten, however, was that the novel is a first-person narrative. And that the narrator, Tam Olyn, is an Earth-born newsman (and we can tell this is science fiction: newsmen such as Olyn are renowned for their objectivity). He proves to be one of the very few people able to influence historical forces (Cletus Grahame, of course, was another). Olyn is a far from sympathetic character: selfishness and arrogant. When his one selfless act results in the death of his brother-in-law in a massacre of prisoners by a Friendly mercenary, Olyn sets out to destroy the Friendlies and their way of life.

Dickson appears to have tried for a more literary tone in Soldier, Ask Not than he had used in Tactics of Mistake. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. I suppose in some respects this is the book showing its age – many of the various turns of phrase have become cliched, or are used with a clumsiness modern readers will no longer accept. Dickson also appears to confuse himself with his astrography – if not flatly contradicting his earlier self. The uninhabited world of Oriente, for example, is described as orbiting both Procyon and Sirius. There is something curiously one-dimensional about Dickson’s future setting too. There are few, if any, mentions of cultures other than West European/American; and the Friendlies are, of course, Christian fundamentalists. Yet Dickson takes great care to describe his characters as having mixed ethnicity (Jamethon Black in Soldier, Ask Not, for instance, is partly of Berber ancestry). The novel’s resolution is entirely expected – in fact, Olyn’s rehabilitation is pretty much obvious from the first page. Given that it was the presence of the Friendlies that I remembered as most interesting about this book, I was disappointed to see how they were treated. At times there’s a clear envy of their faith in the prose; and yet they’re completely monstered when required by the plot. The aforementioned massacre, for example, doesn’t seem plausible for a culture with a rigorously-defined moral framework.

The final book in the trilogy, Dorsai!, was the first book published (as The Genetic General), but was then heavily rewritten. It’s set at the same time as Soldier, Ask Not – in fact, the events of Dorsai! are mentioned in Soldier, Ask Not. Like Tactics of Mistake, its protagonist is a tactical genius, Donal Graeme, although he is not recognised as such by his peers. At least not initially. They just think he’s “strange”. Also like Cletus Grahame, Graeme sets himself in opposition to a powerful politician, William of Ceta, who also intends to control all the colonised worlds. In fact, the plot of Dorsai! bears many resemblances to that of Tactics of Mistake (or vice versa, given that Dorsai! was written and published first). In a nutshell, Graeme, a Dorsai, heads out among the colonised worlds to make a name for himself. He proposes unorthodox battle plans to his masters, which subsequently prove to be exactly what’s needed for victory, and so is promoted to ever higher positions. All of which is necessary for him to effectively block William’s plans. There’s not much in the way of jeopardy in Dorsai! – at no point do we doubt Graeme’s eventual success. But then the novel, and by extension the trilogy, always seemed more of a platform for Dickson’s theories regarding the sweep of history and splintering of humanity into specialised cultures than it was a serious attempt at well-plotted fiction.

Sadly, Dorsai! is on a par with the preceding two books in the trilogy. There are some interesting ideas in there but the books read as little more than adventure stories with a side-helping of pie-in-the-sky historical and psychological theorising. But even that doesn’t work plausibly. We have historical forces at work… and yet they can be controlled by Great Men. I always thought the two concepts were mutually exclusive. The setting of the Dorsai trilogy, contradictions aside, is lightly sketched in, which sometimes works against it. The structure of the books, however, are heavily dependent on military tactics and strategy, and their use on the battlefield, and these are not at all convincing.

So, after all that, Soldier, Ask Not becomes the first book to be dropped from the favourites list. I can see why I liked the books in my teens but, well, I’m older now and they no longer hold the same appeal. Dickson’s central premise is mildly interesting, but the implementation is disappointing. Ah well. I suppose I’ll have to turn to the almost-rans list to find a novel to take Soldier, Ask Not‘s place. Um, I seem to recall really liking Time And Again by Clifford Simak when I was younger. I suppose I’ll have to reread it…

Incidentally, here’s something Dorsai-related that is really scary…


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A Grand Day Out

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…?


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Favourites

Whenever people asked me what were my favorite science fiction novels, I always had a list of ten titles ready to trot out. Some of the books are novels I’ve returned to again and again; others I’ve read only once – but that was enough to deem it a “favourite”. It occurred to me several months ago that this list hasn’t changed in over a decade. It seemed odd that there hasn’t been one novel published in the last ten years I didn’t think good enough to be on the list. So, among the health- and finance-related New Year’s Resolutions for 2007, I decided to reread one of those favourite books each month. And, wonder of wonders, so far I’ve managed to stick to it…

Here’s the list (in order of year of publication):

(Annoyingly, most of these titles are currently out of print. Oh, and the more observant among you will have noticed that there are twelve titles in the list above – that’s so I can read one a month for the entire year.)

So far, I have read…
The Undercover Aliens – I actually read The Mating Cry (see here) – remains a favourite. It’s by no means van Vogt’s best-written novel. Nor does it have the most coherent plot of any of his books. But the mix and match of Otto Preminger-style California noir and Planet Stories-type science fiction appeals immensely. The protagonist is a classic hero; the female lead is an archetypal femme fatale. It has immortals, an alien robot spaceship, Mexican cultists, and masks in it. It is a great deal of fun.

John Varley’s debut novel, The Ophiuchi Hotline, is also fun. In a Solar System in which humanity has been booted off the Earth by gas-giant-dwelling Invaders in order to save the dolphins and whales, Lilo has been sentenced to death for illegal genetic experiments. She is rescued by Boss Tweed, mayor of Luna and head of a secret organisation dedicated to wrestling Earth from the Invaders. Lilo isn’t happy about being indentured to Boss Tweed – she’s a prisoner at a facility aboard an asteroid in the Saturn system – so she decides to escape. Well, a clone of Lilo is. And she’s not the only clone of Lilo loose in the plot. Oh, and she’s also figured out that the eponymous, er, “hotline”, a radio signal narrowcasting scientific and technological knowledge used by humanity to survive off-Earth… Well, the unknown senders have just presented their “bill”…

The plot is little more than an excuse to travel about the Eight Worlds, marvelling at its many strangenesses. And in later novels Varley flatly contradicts some of the background given here. But that’s minor. On this reread, I found the book a much lighter read than I’d remembered – Varley throws out ideas every other sentence, but there’s not much meat to the prose on which he hangs them. Lilo is a bit flat as a character (er, characters); but so are the rest of the cast. The ending had slipped from memory – which was odd, given that it involves probably the most interesting idea of the whole novel. The rest of The Ophiuchi Hotline is mere window-dressing compared to it. Despite all that, the book will remain on the list.

Next up was Stations of the Tide. The previous two novels I’d read and reread many times. This one I’d last read over ten years ago. However, I’d forgotten very little of the plot – so the twist ending wasn’t much of a twist. A bureacrat visits the world of Miranda, shortly before its sole continent is inundated by the Jubilee Tides. He’s hunting Gregorian, allegedly a magician, who has smuggled something proscribed, something apparently given to him by the avatar of post-human Earth, onto the planet’s surface. The quest plot is interspersed with sections set in the Puzzle Palace, a Palace-of-Memory-like virtual reality in which the administrators of a galactic federation live and work. Swanwick never quite categorically presents Gregorian as a “magician” – it’s not plausible in the universe Miranda inhabits; and various characters try and explain Gregorian’s tricks, albeit never entirely convincingly.

One of the remarkable things about Stations of the Tide – and a great deal moreso when it was published – is its referentiality. Its narrative riffs off a host of science fiction works – not all of the references I claim to have spotted. In 1992, this was fresh and exciting. Fifteen years later, it’s been done so often it’s almost humdrum. One thing I hadn’t noticed on previous reads was that the novel is a thinly-disguised Southern Gothic. Even down to the fat bed-ridden matriarch. The sections set in the Puzzle Palace also didn’t work as well as I’d remembered them – I seem to recall the Palace of Memory idea was popular at the time, but Swanwick’s use of it as a metaphor for a VR sensorium is mostly just confusing. For the time-being, the jury’s still out on this book. I have a handful of “also-rans”, and I suspect one of them may take Stations of the Tide place in the top ten.

Where Time Winds Blow was, like Stations of the Tide, a favourite I’d not read for many years. Something about its central premise had struck me powerfully when I’d first read it all those years ago. This one was going to be an interesting reread… And so it proved. It is, like many British science fiction novels of its time, literate, slightly mannered, and very considered in its treatment of its characters. Its central idea is the framework on which the entire plot is hung (compare this with Stations of the Tide above). On the world of Kamelios, winds blow in and out of time, picking up and depositing artefacts, and people, in different eras. Leo Faulcon is a member of team which investigates artefacts left by the time winds. When Kris Dojaan joins the team, it provokes a crisis in Faulcon. Dojaan is hoping to find his brother, who was picked up by a time wind several months before. Faulcon and Dojaan’s brother were close, but he doesn’t admit it to Kris. Faulcon is also in a relationship with the team’s leader, Lena Tanoway.

Where Time Winds Blow is a great novel… for about three-quarters of its length. The central premise is a superb idea – the time winds are strongest along along Kriakta Rift, where mysterious and unfathomable artefacts magically appear and disappear. Holdstock imbues his characters with a depth and breadth not often seen these days in science fiction (or indeed, throughout much of the genre’s history). He also carefully dissects his central cast – with an almost Graham-Greene-like callousness. The writing, however, is occasionally clumsy. And I noticed when reading Eye Among the Blind last year that his characters tend to flip between emotional states with implausible speed. But this is forgivable. What isn’t is… Prior to setting up the novel’s climax, Holdstock explains the mystery of the time winds. It’s a concept he explores in greater depth in Mythago Wood and its sequels. It’s also a disappointment, given what’s been before. Right up to the point where Faulcon discovers the “truth” about Kamelios, Where Time Winds Blow was secure in its position on the top ten. Now, I’m not so sure. It’ll need another read, I think. Perhaps next year.

To be continued when I’ve finished the next four books…


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The Language Barrier

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…


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Contemplating Science Fiction

Back from Chester and Contemplation, the 2007 Eastercon. It was put together as a replacement for the cancelled Liverpool Eastercon. A good con – the organisers did an excellent job. I didn’t, as usual, attend any of the programme items, except for the BSFA Awards – where I watched Ian McDonald hand out one award and receive another, and Jon Courtney Grimwood hand out one award and receive another… Congrats to all the winners.

The hotel was very good too – conveniently laid-out, and the staff friendly and helpful – albeit a tad more expensive than usual. Its location in the centre of Chester was an added bonus. Lots of nice restaurants within walking distance. We ate out every evening and enjoyed some good food. For me, cons are less about the programme than they are a chance to catch up with friends I otherwise wouldn’t see, make new friends, and network. I managed to do all three.

I can’t remember much of the conversations from the weekend – most probably aren’t repeatable, anyway. There was one with Neil Williamson on the voting habits of cats versus dogs, and which were more likely to vote for David Blunkett (I credit cats with too much intelligence to vote for him). There was a discussion on Stingray‘s Marina and whether it should be considered odd to fancy a puppet. (The answer is probably yes. But still, Marina…) I chatted to Ian McDonald about foreign language films and, of course, raved about Divine Intervention. He told me some of the odd-but-interesting facts he’d picked up while doing the research for Brasyl. There was a running joke on book titles for planetary romances set amongst Saturn’s moons (given that we couldn’t remember which were moons of Saturn and which were moons of Jupiter, there was some confusion). It started off relatively sane, with Warriors of Titan and Wizards of Mimas, turned alliterative and a little odd with Courtesans of Callisto, and then completely off-the-wall with Go-Go Dancers of Ganymede and Eunuchs of Europa. Someone asked, what about Io? Obvious, I said, that’ll be Dwarves of Io Io It’s Off To Work We Go… But perhaps you had to be there.

I did quite well on the book-front. Yes, the dealers’ room was smaller than is typical for an Eastercon, but I still managed to pick up some bargains and/or good books, including a signed hardback copy of Michael Swanwick’s Tales of Old Earth; Soundings, a collection of Gary K Wolfe’s reviews from Locus; a couple of small press titles by friends – Chris Beckett’s The Holy Machine and Gary Couzens’ Second Contact, each of whom signed their book for me; a few cheap Moorcock paperbacks (City of the Beasts I’ve now read and it’s rubbish); Lin Carter’s Down to a Sunless Sea (read this too and it’s even worse than the Moorcock); a Moomin paperback by Tove Jansson (it’s for children, but it’s a damned sight better written than most adults’ books – the first line is “I, Moominpappa, am sitting tonight by my window gazing into my garden, where the fireflies embroider their mysterious signs on the velvet dark”; you won’t find lines like that in Steven Erikson, George RR Martin or Jennings Goes to Wizard School…); Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys (the alien artefact is the most interesting thing in the novel, but Budrys seems more keen on bad psycho-analyses of his characters). I did buy a Leigh Brackett Ace double, The Secret of Sinharat / People of the Talisman, only to discover that both stories are in Sea-Kings of Mars, which I already have. So I sold it to Eric Brown for a pint. Which was more than the book cost.

I didn’t get that much sleep during the con – heading off to bed after one a.m. most nights, and up at seven o’clock the next morning. Saturday night wasn’t helped by some evangelicals singing Hallelujah outside the back of the hotel at 2:00 a.m. At first, I assumed they were just pissed-up drinkers on their way home. Then I realised they were harmonising a little too well. And then I heard the tambourine…

Although there were times when Contemplation felt a bit like a two-day con stretched out over three days, I had a very enjoyable time. A pleasant hotel, convivial atmosphere, good (if occasionally surreal) conversation, and a chance to catch up with people you haven’t seen since the last Eastercon. Good stuff.


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Ooh look…

… 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…)


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Seconds Away…

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.


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Super Sexed Up Sci-Fi

One of my favourite science fiction novels is AE van Vogt’s The Undercover Aliens, first published in 1950. There’s something about its mix of Californian noir and Thrilling Wonder Stories science fiction I find strangely appealing. The writing is no better and no worse than much of van Vogt’s output – and this is a writer who built his career on the advice given by a how-to-write book. The plot is much the same.

Allison Stephens, ex-GI, is the lawyer managing the Tannahill estate in Almirante, California, sometime shortly after World War II. The Tannahills are the richest and most powerful family in the town, but their family home, the Grand House, is currently empty. The previous occupant has just died, and Almirante is waiting for nephew Arthur Tannahill to arrive. He had apparently been in an accident back east, and is now suffering from amnesia. The story begins when Stephens rescues a woman from a group of Mexican cultists. She gives her name as Mistra Lanett, tells Stephens not to get involved, and disappears. Later that night, she appears at his house, having been shot by a “needle-beam”…

The Grand House is apparently thousands of years old and, as Stephens later learns, was built atop a crashed alien spaceship by early inhabitants of the region. They subsequently became immortal – and have controlled Almirante ever since, while hiding their true nature. Mistra Lanett is one of this group; as is Arthur Tannahill. A nuclear war is brewing between the US and Lorillia. Some of the immortals, led by Lanett, want to secretly attack Lorillia and scare it into backing down – the immortals have the technology to do this (where they get it from is never explained). The rest of the group want to move the Grand House to Mars, and sit out the holocaust. Lanett had caused Tannahill’s amnesia as a delaying tactic, and she uses Stephens to force a compromise solution.

There are clearly no aliens in The Undercover Aliens, undercover or otherwise. The novel was first published under the title The House That Stood Still, which may not be as catchy but is at least relevant to the plot. Recently, however, I discovered a third title for this book – The Mating Cry. Not only a different title, but apparently a “revised” version.

Compiling a bibliography for van Vogt is not an easy task. Many of his novels were fix-ups of short stories, some were republished under different titles, and revised versions of stories sometimes ended up as entirely new novels. Nevertheless, I did a little research on van Vogt and discovered that…

From 1950 to 1959, Galaxy magazine published a series of digest-sized reprint science fiction novels, offered as companions to the magazine. In 1959, they sold the series to Beacon Books, a company known for publishing novels with “mild sexual content”. Beacon subsequently published eleven sf novels, each accordingly “sexed up” and retitled. The Mating Cry is Beacon Book’s revised version of The Undercover Aliens.

I chanced across a copy of The Mating Cry on eBay a few months ago, and bought it. I wanted to see how it differed from the original. And, having read it, it’s… an odd experience. You wouldn’t have thought the addition of a couple of sex scenes could change a novel so much. And yet the character of Mistra Lanett changes completely. In The Undercover Aliens, she comes across as a maiden-in-distress, despite being clearly manipulative and determined to have her own way. But in The Mating Cry… The incident mentioned earlier where she turns up at Stephens’ house: after having her wound treated, she climbs into bed with the lawyer. In fact, every time they meet after that, they have sex. Yet she remains the Hitchcockian blonde of The Undercover Aliens. There’s nothing overly shocking about her behaviour in today’s climate, but the fact that these sex scenes have been slotted into the narrative makes Lanett appear callous and quick to use her body to twist Stephens into doing her bidding.

I’ve always thought The Undercover Aliens would make an excellent film. Perhaps you’d have to drop some of the sillier science-fictional aspects (the move to Mars, for example), but the house-of-immortals central premise would work really well. Allison Stephens is a good solid hero. And Mistra Lanett makes a classic femme fatale. You’d have to keep the story set in the years immediately following World War II, of course. That’s a big part of the story’s charm. But…

In The Undercover Aliens, you want the hero to get the girl. In The Mating Cry, you don’t.