(1) MORE MAPS. Ursula K. Le Guin shares the Hainish Endpapers from new editions of her books:
- Gethen Map by UKL Colorization by Donna G. Brown
- List of Known Hainish Worlds by Donna G. Brown, LoA.
(2) IT’S BEGINNINNG TO LOOK A LOT LIKE ADVENT. Hingston and Olsen have included stories by several sff authors in the 2017 “Short Story Advent Calendar”.
For the third straight year, the Short Story Advent Calendar is here to be the spice in your eggnog, the rum in your fruitcake—another collection of 24 brilliant stories to be opened, one by one, on the mornings leading up to Christmas.
These stories once again come from some of the best and brightest writers across North America, and beyond. Plus, this year featuring more all-new material than ever before!
Contributors to the 2017 calendar include:
- Kelly Link (Get in Trouble, Magic for Beginners)
- Jim Gavin (Middle Men, AMC’s forthcoming Lodge 49)
- Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
- Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie, The Grace of Kings)
- Maggie Shipstead (Astonish Me, Seating Arrangements)
- and [REDACTED x 19]!
As always, each booklet is sealed, so you won’t know what story you’re getting until the morning you open it.
(3) WSFS PAPERS. Kevin Standlee announced more documentation from the 2017 Worldcon Business Meeting has been posted:
The 2018 WSFS Constitution (including all of the amendments ratified in Helsinki), Standing Rules for the 2018 WSFS Business Meeting, and Business Passed On to the 2018 WSFS Business Meeting are now online at the “WSFS Rules page”.
The Resolutions & Rulings of Continuing Effect are being reviewed by the WSFS Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee, and I expect them to be online at the same page within a week or so.
Thanks again to Linda Deneroff for pulling this all together and putting up with me futzing around with the documents.
(4) I CHING, YOU CHING. At Galactic Journey, The Traveler has just gotten his hands on PKD’s brand new novel! “[November 6, 1962] The road not taken… (Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle)”.
Philip K. Dick has returned to us after a long hiatus with a novel, The Man in the High Castle. It is an ambitious book, longer than most science fiction novels. Castle‘s setting is an alternate history, one in which the Axis powers managed to defeat the Allies…somehow (it is never explained). Dick explores this universe through five disparate viewpoint protagonists, whose paths intertwine in complex, often surprising ways…
Surprisingly, The Traveler scoffs at the alternate history premise.
There are significant problems with Castle, however. For one, it suffers from lazy worldbuilding. The book is an opportunity for Dick to draw a wide cast of characters and depict their complex web of interactions. But the underpinnings of the world they inhabit are implausible. First and foremost, it would have been impossible, logistically, for the United States to have fallen to the Axis Powers. For that matter, I have doubts that the Soviet Union was ever in existential danger. Certainly the Reich never came close to making The Bomb – their racial theory-tinged science wouldn’t have allowed it. It is sobering when you realize that the Allies managed to fight two world wars and develop the most expensive and powerful weapon ever known all at the same time. An Axis victory in World War 2 resulting in the conquest of the United States is simply a nonstarter.
(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites everyone to “Sink your teeth into samosa with Karin Tidbeck” in episode 51 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Karin Tidbeck
This time around, you get to listen in on my lunch at Mero-Himal Nepalese Restaurant with Karin Tidbeck during the penultimate day of the con. Tidbeck writes fiction in both Swedish and English, and debuted in 2010 with the Swedish short story collection Vem är Arvid Pekon? Her English debut, the 2012 collection Jagannath, was awarded the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts William L. Crawford Fantasy Award in 2013 and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her novel debut, Amatka, was recently released in English.
We discussed the serious nature of Live Action Role-Playing games in Nordic countries, the way pretending to be a 150-year-old vampire changed her life, how discovering Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics made her forget time and space, the most important lesson she learned from the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writing Workshop, how she uses improvisational exercises to teach beginning writers, why Amatka grew from a poetry collection into a novel, what made her say, “I’m not here to answer questions, I’m here to ask them,” and more.
(6) CAN YOU EXPLAIN THAT AGAIN? Scholars contend: “Science Fiction Makes You Stupid” in a post at The Patron Saint of Superheroes.
That is a scientifically grounded claim.
Cognitive psychologist Dan Johnson and I make a version of it in our paper “The Genre Effect: A Science Fiction (vs. Realism) Manipulation Decreases Inference Effort, Reading Comprehension, and Perceptions of Literary Merit,” forthcoming from Scientific Study of Literature.
Dan and I are both professors at Washington and Lee University, and our collaboration grew out of my annoyance at another study, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” published in Science in 2013. Boiled down, the authors claimed reading literary fiction makes you smart. And, who knows, maybe it does, but if so, their study gets no closer to understanding why–or even what anyone means by the term “literary fiction” as opposed to, say, “science fiction.”
Our study defines those terms, creates two texts that differ accordingly, and then studies how readers respond to them. The results surprised us. Readers read science fiction badly. If you’d like all the details why, head over to Scientific Study of Literature.
Arinn Dembo says about the article:
This is an interesting study. It strongly suggests that years of internalized stereotyping might influence the way you read and are *able* to read, in and out of the pulp genres you might favor. I said years ago, in my first published review, “If you don’t read outside the genre… soon you won’t be able to.”
But it might just be that if you listen too long to what arrogant, dismissive people think of your genre, you’ll stop being able to read it intelligently.
(7) VERSE WARRIORS. E. Catherine Tobler (Shimmer editor), Rachael K. Jones (recently nominated for World Fantasy Award for short fiction) and Aidan Doyle have launched a Kickstarter appeal to fund “Sword and Sonnet” an anthology of genre stories about battle poets.
“Sword and Sonnet” will be an anthology featuring genre stories about women and non-binary battle poets. Lyrical, shimmery sonnet-slingers. Grizzled, gritty poetpunks. Word nerds battling eldritch evil. Haiku-wielding heroines.
We have a wonderful group of writers who have agreed to write stories for us: Alex Acks, C. S. E. Cooney, Malon Edwards, Spencer Ellsworth, Samantha Henderson, S. L. Huang, Cassandra Khaw, Margo Lanagan, Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, Tony Pi, A. Merc Rustad and A. C. Wise. We’ll also be holding an open submission period.
The cover art is by Vlada Monakhova. The project is live on Kickstarter throughout November. At this writing they have raised $1,982 of their $7,654 goal.
(8) IN PASSING. Here’s a photo of the late Ben Solon, a Chicago fan whose death was reported the other day.
L to R: John D. Berry, Ray Fisher and Ben Solon at a party at late Sixties Worldcon. Photo copyright © Andrew Porter
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Darrah Chavey found the reason for the season in Cul de Sac.
- John King Tarpinian noted The Argyle Sweater getting its laughs at the pharmacy.
(10) TEMPLE TALK. Kim Huett writes to say he has updated his William F. Temple article with corrected information supplied by Rob Hansen in a comment.
Meantime, Bill Burns says he was “Surprised to see that when you posted Kim’s piece on Bill Temple the other day you didn’t also mention Rob Hansen’s excellent new compilation of Bill’s fan writing, Temple at the Bar – free in promotion of TAFF!”
It’s one of the free ebooks at Dave Langford’s TAFF site.
(11) MOO SIXTY-NINE. NASA’s New Horizons team is looking for help naming their next target — “Help us Nickname a Distant World”.
On January 1, 2019, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly past a small, distant, and cold world at the outer frontier of our solar system. The spacecraft is about to set the record for visiting the most remote world ever explored by humankind.
For now, our destination goes by the unexciting name “(486958) 2014 MU69“, or “MU69” for short. We would like to use a more memorable nickname when we talk about our target body.
At this site, we are asking you—the public—to suggest your ideas for the nickname to assign to MU69, and to vote for your favorites. The New Horizons team and NASA will review your best ideas and announce our selection soon—in early January, 2018.
… From here you can:
Would you believe — right now, Mjölnir is leading the poll.
(12) TRAD PIZZA. In “Papa John’s condemns new customers: White supremacists” the alt-right rationale that a business is “failing” – because it didn’t grow as fast as predicted (mind you, it still grew) – sounds like the same criticism recently levied against a sff writer who said his productivity was down.
Papa John’s pizza has a new customer, the alt-right.
In the days following a rant by Papa John’s CEO and Louisville resident John Schnatter where he blamed the NFL and anthem protests for low sales, a white-supremacist publication claimed it as their official pizza.
In a blog post at the Daily Stormer, a photo of pizza with pepperonis arranged in a swastika has a caption that reads “Papa John: Official pizza of the alt-right?”
“This might be the first time ever in modern history that a major institution is going to be completely destroyed explicitly because of public outrage over their anti-White agenda,” Daily Stormer writer Adrian Sol said.
Peter Collins, the senior director of public relations at Papa John’s, said the company was taken off-guard by the endorsement.
“We condemn racism in all forms and any and all hate groups that support it,” Collins told Courier Journal. “We do not want these individuals or groups to buy our pizza.”
Papa John’s released third-quarter sales figures last week that show diminished rates of growth at established North American locations: 1.5 percent this year as opposed to a projected 2- to 4-percent increase. In 2016, North American sales increased 5.5 percent during the same period.
(13) TWO-LEGGED SYLLOGISM OF THE DAY. In a piece mainly devoted to slandering David Gerrold, Dr. Mauser informs the sff community “The Science Fiction is Settled”, indulging in the fallacious logic that if any member of a group wrote sff in the early days of the genre, by that date the field was wide open to writers from that group.
And then, tragedy strikes. Because to Gerrold, Change has an Arrow on it, with a single destination, and it’s pointing to the left. He launches into a paean about Immigrants and diversity and the global village because Diversity is Strength! And then:
So, yes, it is inevitable that science fiction authors will explore that diversity — expanded roles for women, new definitions of gender and sexuality, the contributions of People of Color and other non-white ethnicities. We’ve discovered the overlooked skills of the aged and the disabled, the unusual and extraordinary ratiocinations of people who are neuro-atypical. The next generation of authors are exploring vast new landscapes of possibility — places to explore and discover ways of being human previously unconsidered.
It’s not that SF CAN explore those things, but that SF SHOULD explore those things he seems to think. Forget exploring the stars or asking “What if we’re not alone in the universe?” Nah, we’re alone, so let’s spend all our speculative energies on exploring our own bad selves. He grudgingly admits that while we have probes going past Pluto, “some of our most ambitious authors are turning their attention to a different frontier —exploring the workings of the human soul.” I suppose our navels give us much more instantaneous gratification than the stars. But really, that kind of narcissism is only interesting to the narcissist.
And at this point, we can see where the train leaves the tracks, because he switches from talking about science fiction, to the science fiction community, while trying to carry the same points. He talks about the changes in the SF Community from all these new folks of diverse backgrounds showing up. The only problem with this theory is that they have always been here. There’s a case of DoubleThink going on here when the same folks who like to claim Mary Shelley as one of the first female authors of Science Fiction, and then set it out there as if women are something new, and even more patronizing when they act as if their side’s genuflecting to Feminism is somehow responsible for their appearance. No, this is not a change. Try reading some C.L. Moore and realize that not only have women been in SF all along, they have been awesome.
Likewise with minority writers. The publishing world is, or at least was, the ultimate meritocracy. Since most of the business was conducted by mail, a publisher had no clue about the racial background of an author. Bias was eliminated through the medium of the Manila envelope. It takes very little research to find out that Black authors have been writing science fiction since the turn of the century. No, not this century, the previous one. Likewise for Gay authors, an obvious example being from the previous list, Samuel R. Delany. He was first published in 1962. That’s FIFTY FIVE years ago. This “change” Gerrold is touting really is nothing new.
Do you think there’s much chance that David Gerrold will be stunned to learn a gay author wrote sf in the Sixties?
(14) TURNOVER AT CASTALIA HOUSE BLOG. Jeffro Johnson is leaving the Castalia House blog. Contributor Morgan Holmes will take charge. Culture warrior Johnson said in his farewell post —
I remember when Sad Puppies first came to my attention. Upon reading the most vilified author of the whole crop– Vox Day, of course– I saw a nominated story that’s worst fault could only be that it was explicitly Christian. Looking up the publishing house it was produced at, I found a manifesto stating their goal to restore fantasy and science fiction to more what it was like when it was written by Tolkien and Howard. (And yeah, I had no idea how the person that wrote that could possibly think that a pulp writer like Robert E. Howard could be anywhere on par with J. R. R. Tolkien. And even more ironically, I couldn’t imagine how a “Campbellian Revolution” they claimed to want could be anything other than good.)
…So much is happening in the wider scene today that I can barely keep up with even a portion of it. Along with that, I find that areas of my life outside of gaming and fiction have increasingly laid greater and greater claims to my time. And while I wish I could do all the things that I can think of that could really capitalize on everything that’s developed here… I’m afraid I instead have to admit that I’ve run with all of this about as far as I can.
It’s a tough thing to do, but I think it’s the right thing for me at this time. So I’m handing over editorship of Castalia House blog to Morgan Holmes, who has been writing about classic fantasy and science fiction here almost as long as I have. (Good luck, man!)
(15) ONE THING PEOPLE SEEM TO AGREE ABOUT. On National Review Online, Heather Wilhelm, in “The Surprising Joy of Stranger Things”. praises the show for being “a good, non-angry, non-political TV show.”
The show features “a prelapsarian world of walkie-talkies, landlines, and suburban kids left free to roam wherever they want on their bicycles,” wrote Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker last year. Or, as Ross Duffer told Rolling Stone: “We were the last generation to have the experience of going out with our friends to the woods or the train tracks and the only way our parents could connect with us was to say, ‘It’s time for dinner.’” That world is largely gone, and with it, many childhood adventures. The image of a freewheeling kid on a bicycle, so integral to iconic films such as E.T. — Matt and Ross Duffer make no secret of drawing inspiration from classic ’80s blockbusters — is also integral to Stranger Things. Tooling around town or in the local woods on a bike is almost diametrically opposed to most widely approved childhood activities today, which tend to involve hyper-organized and ludicrously time-consuming team sports that seem purposely designed to torture kids and parents alike. Tooling around town or in the local woods on a bike is almost diametrically opposed to most widely approved childhood activities today. But given free rein on their bikes in and around the town of Hawkins, the kids of Stranger Things can meet up, explore, barrel through the forest, investigate baffling occurrences, and evade a posse of bad guys from a sinister government agency gone awry. That would be the Hawkins National Laboratory, a hulking structure nestled deep in the midwestern woods, packed to the gills with mysteries. According to the Duffer brothers, it was inspired mostly by “bizarre experiments we had read about taking place in the Cold War.”
(16) HERDING CATS. Camestros Felapton expanded his survey of animals in sff blogs (“Blogstrology”) to include one more —
Rocket Stack Rank www.rocketstackrank.com is interesting because the animals mentioned would be more determined by their incidence in short fiction. Overall low frequencies and RSR has no presence on the otter or goose dimensions. Wolf-Rabbit-Cat blog – “Cat” strongly assisted by reviews of the works of Cat Rambo.
Goat has a presence but is just shy of the top 3.
(17) GLASGOWROK. Apparently he’s a riot pronouncing the word “bairn” — “Jeff Goldblum Answers Scottish Themed Questions About the End of the World Posed by Wee Claire”.
While promoting his new film Thor: Ragnarok, the wonderfully affable Jeff Goldblum sat down with Wee Claire of the BBC Scotland show The Social to answer a few Scottish-themed questions about the end of the world.
(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Time Travel in Fiction Rundown” on YouTube is a look at how lots of movies and Ender’s Game and Harry Potter and the Prisomer of Azkaban handle the time travel theme.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, James Davis Nicoll, Bill Burns, Kim Huett, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Carl Slaughter, and Scott Edelman for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
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11) The name will inevitably be Planety McPlanetface
Pixely McPixelface? Scrolly McPixelface?
2) Are there people who would only read one story a day? And not the whole package on day one? Sounds like a nice collection.
@4: Is the Time Traveler reflecting the common ignorance of their time?
is bull — the German attempt to build an A-bomb may have been slowed by some induhviduals’ dismissal of fission as “Jewish physics”, but it definitely existed — but I don’t know how much this was generally realized/acknowledged 50 years ago. It’s become at least a little more known since, thanks inter alia to plays like Copenhagen and Operation Epsilon.
11) No, they’ve designed the process not to allow Kupierie McBeltface or the like. Suggestions they like will be added to the ballot, and others ignored.
What I’m surprised at is Mike not mentioning that options include Z’ha’dum from Babylon 5, currently in 4th, and Camalor from Robert L. Forward’s Camelot 30K (although perhaps they weren’t yet on the ballot when he looked). Mjolnir’s dropped to second, and first is currently the baffling to me due to its boringness “Peanut, Almond, Cashew” (shapes the object(s) likely to be; buried in only one place I found is the comment that the object may be 2 or more objects, so they’d like new suggestions to include at least two thematically linked names).
(4) I do not scoff at the Alternate History premise. I am a big fan of Alternate History. I scoff at its Alternate History premise.
But that’s not my biggest problem with Castle. In any event, I don’t dislike Castle. I just have issues with it. I hope I’ve laid my case out well.
As for Nazis with The Bomb, that’s fantasy. It was never a priority for the Ubermenschen. Rockets, sure. Jets, sure. Nukes, nope.
Not-exactly-OT:
Firefox just informed me that Stylish won’t be compatible with future versions. so we’ll need something else – they’re sending me to “Stylus” (which wants more access than I think it should have).
Clickity
(13) Dr Mauser and I exchanged some comments but sadly mine have evaporated because my writing is just so hot (or volatile? or vaporous?) 🙂
Camestros Felapton: But never let it be said that Dr. Mauser exists in a bubble. You can’t have a bubble in a vacuum. Or can you? You’re the scientist — what is the answer?
(13) god fucking damn but there’s some faulty logic in that post. Being more able to explore the experiences of other ethnicities, sexualities, genders, etc., means diddly squat to sci-fi’s ability to also explore vast imaginary worlds. In fact it only makes for a richer tapestry of the imagined.
(5) Mero-Himal did a smashing business during Worldcon, as the only decent restaurant within walking distance of Messukeskus.
(6) Given that they do not discuss anything about how they found their readers, there is no way that I can tell if their conclusions are valid or discuss them in any reasonable way. I do think that due to their methodology and their story samples, they used a poor science fiction story, in this case by having a literary story in space, similar to the western in space that much sf is accused of being. That is, science fiction by word substitution.
(13) Seems someone hasn’t read their Delany, more specifically “Racism and Science Fiction”. And it isn’t Gerrold.
And what the heck is “Burge’s Law of Institutional Liberalization” that Dr. Mauser refers to?
@Gideon Marcus
I think you may have read something into the “the” that wasn’t there.
I think it would be somewhat challenging. Even if the bubble didn’t pop, the stuff the bubble was made off would evaporate surely?
“That is, science fiction by word substitution.”
It makes me wonder how much of the “difficulty” the readers had was that they were trying to figure out exactly how much world-building was involved, to the detriment of looking for whatever it is the study-creators find important.
Yes, without being able to read the two fiction passages and the questions which were given to the study participants, I am dubious that the results actually show what the authors claim.
But it looks as though we will be expected to pay for that information, so… nah. I will let the study authors make their smug claims and go on reading the books I want to read, without worrying about whether I am reading “correctly”.
13).
I see it has the usual claims that are conveniently not sourced; nor are examples given of actual quotes. Typical.
“Since the Puppies were always about the quality of the stories, and Gerrold’s side has always been about denigrating writers on the basis of their race (if white), Gender (if male), sexual orientation (if straight), etc.“–dear god, can even they keep a straight face when saying that?
4) the underpinnings of the world they inhabit are implausible.
“‘It’s Chung Fu,’ Juliana said, ‘Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means.’
Raising his head, Hawthorne scrutinised her… ‘It means, does it, that my book is true?’
‘Yes,’ she said.”
Hawthorne’s book, of course, is The Grasshopper Lies Heavy and although it’s about a world where the Axis lost the war, it’s not about our world. So perhaps the underpinnings of the world are implausible for a reason.
15) I’m not the first to notice that today’s 1980s nostalgia echoes the 1950s nostalgia that reigned when I was a kid. (Yes, in the 1980s.)
This, but with a negative inflection. Consider what’s being erased to make the 1980s (or the 1950s) ‘prelapsarian’, and why 1950s nostalgia was big in the 1980s.
John C. Wright has a blog post up about Conan. I like Conan, but I do not like this post. Talking about 1933, Wright writes: The political world was deeply bitter about failed promises of peace which, in the Victorian Era, but twenty years before, had seemed easily within reach.
???
Most of the post is a tedious spoilery review/summary of a Conan story pretending that honest pulp is some inspired work of genius, and you wonder what the point is, until you get to the end:
There are times when the corruption of civilization grows too great, and the hands itch for a battleaxe and a straight path to the skulls of the enemy. Howard lived in such an age. As do we.
4) It’s my opinion that the point of divergence from reality in The Man in the High Castle isn’t that the Axis powers won the war, it’s that, in this universe, the I Ching works. The characters’ development is always influenced by the certain knowledge that they’re only playthings in the hands of a higher power. Like characters in a book, in fact.
6) I’m tempted to ask, what about those of us who read SF and literary stuff? I’m also tempted to get all cynical and wonder about their model of what constitutes SF, and also ask if anyone’s told them John Campbell isn’t editing Astounding any more.
@Niall McAuley
Wright is keen on the Victorian era so I imagine his “promises of peace” are the “pax Britannica” of the British Empire. Which takes wilful ignorance to believe in, but there are plenty of ageing white men here in the UK – some with newspaper columns – saying the same things.
What’s genuinely ironic, though, is that the rhetoric of a mighty cleansing war to purge the corruption of civilization was all over the popular literature of the pre-WW1 period.
@Ghostbird
There is also the small issue that the Victorian era ended in 1901, a decade before the date Wright referenced (20 years before 1933).
1) rubs hands gleefully
4) In retrospect, yes, it seems very unlikely that the Third Reich and Japan could have won WWII logistically. Just as, in retrospect, given its economic challenges, the USSR winning the Cold War probably was unlikely. There is a scale, I think of “how plausible is this AH” that not only depends on the story, but the knowledge of the person who is reading it. A person more steeped in Ming Dynasty history than I, for example, might find a POD story based on that history less plausible than I would.
13)”upon reading the most vilified author of the whole crop– Vox Day, of course– I saw a nominated story that’s worst fault could only be that it was explicitly Christian.”
Well, for one, I strongly disagree with Johnson’s characterization of Beale’s fiction.
/yarrow-stalk
18) I liked the video but question the use of Harry Potter as the exemplar of the immutable past of block time while not even mentioning 12 Monkeys (or La Jetée) which dealt with the issue rather more directly.
13: @karl-johan noren: from the comments on the post:
“As a footnote, “Burge’s Law of Institutional Liberalization” is the name I’ve coined for a meme that has been going around for quite a while in conservative circles, originally posted to Twitter by Iowahawk, David Burge. It goes:
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. Kill it.
3. Gut it.
4. Wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.”
I find it highly amusing that Mauser’s link to the editorial is to Archive.org (so I get no traffic), and that Mike’s link to Mauser’s piece is to the archive for presumably the same reason. I presume Mike was playing “what’s good for the mauser is good for the Glyer”…
Here’s David’s editorial, linked directly.
Note that it’s derivation is in response to a guest editorial, which was also responded to by Chris Barkley.
Some of the veiled implications in the comments on Mauser’s piece are disgusting; some of the rest of the logic is on a par with the conspiracy-laden, paranoiac, self-gratifying, deliberately ignorant, festering pustulence of the alt-rt.
@steve davidson: Thanks, and it just makes the Dr Mauser’s entire post even more self-serving.
[godstalk]
(13) Hoo boy, is that comments section one big circle jerk. I guess Dr. Mauser doesn’t realize that the Internet lasts forever, and his deleting your trackback accomplished exactly nothing.
16) “Goat Rambo” is my little known cousin who writes hard mil SF.
“@Gideon Marcus
I think you may have read something into the “the” that wasn’t there.”
Just clarifying. 🙂
“Hawthorne’s book, of course, is The Grasshopper Lies Heavy and although it’s about a world where the Axis lost the war, it’s not about our world. So perhaps the underpinnings of the world are implausible for a reason.”
“It’s my opinion that the point of divergence from reality in The Man in the High Castle isn’t that the Axis powers won the war, it’s that, in this universe, the I Ching works. The characters’ development is always influenced by the certain knowledge that they’re only playthings in the hands of a higher power. Like characters in a book, in fact.”
An idea I devote a paragraph to in my review. 🙂
“There is a scale, I think of “how plausible is this AH” that not only depends on the story, but the knowledge of the person who is reading it.”
Such is my curse. I’m probably *way* overknowledgeable on the subject matter of the book. That said, I remember (in another life) reading the book 27 years ago, as a teenager, and not being impressed then, either.
@Gideon Marcus
A fair point. I’m a little tired of seeing The Man in the High Castle approached as uncomplicated genre “alt hist” and it inclines me to jump to conclusions. And although I think plausibility in the SF sense was never something Dick was remotely interested in when he wrote, I have enough personal sticking-points of my own to understand how it could be a problem.
I think my opinion of the writing is somewhere between “subtly brilliant” and “just throwing vague ideas out there”. The tics and weaknesses are there, but Dick was more in control of his writing than usual and produced a book that downplays them. And it’s really a novel of character, which I think is always going to read as vague and unfocused if approached with SF reading protocols.
Mike Glyer on November 6, 2017 at 10:22 pm said:
Camestros Felapton on November 6, 2017 at 11:20 pm said:
A Dyson Sphere is a bubble. Just sayin’.
.
(6) As the comments on the article say, it’s a click-baity headline. And needlessly derogative.
I’ve got two reactions to this. One is that good SF (at least the kind I enjoy) makes you put the pieces together. I’m constantly figuring things out. On lots of different levels. The BEST SF/F gives you a different reading every time you read it. I pick up new layers every time I re-read Bujold, which is a trick as I’ve re-read some of her books five or six times.
Or look at Anathem by Stephenson. There’s a crapton of levels.
– Basic Plot
– Figuring out the words
– The fun of realizing (or even tracking down) all the our-world analogues to such things as Saunt Cartas or the Sconic movement
– Figuring out the basic worldbuilding
– Following the sub-plots, romance and otherwise
– On re-reading, you realize things where happening right there that you didn’t realize were happening the first time. (For a FANTASTIC book that does this better than any other I’ve read, go out and read, then re-read, Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein RIGHT NOW. It’s practically two different books.)
– Realizing what Antarct is
– Comprehending quantum physics and the many-worlds hypothosis
– And how that all relates to your brain (read Roger Penrose)
– What the heck is the difference between Incantors and Rhetors and which character follows which philosophy
– And then there’s Fraa Jad
Of course I would do poorly on comprehension quiz after the first read-through. Stephenson is throwing all these unfamiliar words and concepts at me.
(Aside – When I was at University, I took a class on teaching reading to elementary school children. One exercise we were given was to read a short passage about an Inuit hunting a seal–with all the native terminology–then take a comprehension quiz. Most of us failed. The point being that if you don’t have a good grasp of the cultural norms you’re reading in, your comprehension of written prose is lower than when you do. If we offered more culturally relevant reading to our “poorly performing” students their comprehension would be more on par with their peers.)
In GOOD science fiction and fantasy, we are often reading outside anybody’s cultural norms. We spend a chunk of our reading energy figuring out what a Weyr is, how ansibles work, whether we’re on Earth or some alien planet, is our Heroine imagining this or is this how the world really works? Am *I* imagining this or is that how this world really works? Why does everyone’s name start with “Vor”? And, wait, didn’t Shakespeare only write 38 plays?
My second thought is that you can’t write Science Fiction just by replacing the word bicycle with satellite dish. It sounds like they wrote what might have been a decent “Literary” fiction piece and then made a very bad Science Fiction piece out of it, which messes with their data right from the get-go.
I think Man in the High Castle the Amazon TV series is alternate history, but I don’t necessarily feel the same way about the book.
For me, the difference is that the TV series actually engages with its setting — you have the tension between the German & Japanese occupiers, the internal Japanese & internal German politics, the resistance, etc., to say nothing of the Man in the High Castle himself and his film archive.
The book, on the other hand feels like it’s set in an alternate history, but it doesn’t engage it on a larger scale; it just tells three or four slightly interconnected tales of people who happen to be living in that profoundly unpleasant timeline.
Or am I splitting alternate hairs again?
@Joe H Or am I splitting alternate hairs again?
No, I think it’s very much what I was trying to say when I called it a novel of character that doesn’t work with alternate-history reading protocols. Although, being a Dick novel, there’s wider philosophical stuff about realness and fakeness in there too.
Tell us more about the Rambo tree and their literary pursuits.
Don’t need a Pixelman to tell which way the Pixel Scrolls.
Your must read for the day: Martha Wells’ speech at World Fantasy on Unburying the Future:
https://www.tor.com/2017/11/07/unbury-the-future-martha-wells-full-speech-from-the-2017-world-fantasy-awards/
“I think my opinion of the writing is somewhere between “subtly brilliant” and “just throwing vague ideas out there”. The tics and weaknesses are there, but Dick was more in control of his writing than usual and produced a book that downplays them. And it’s really a novel of character, which I think is always going to read as vague and unfocused if approached with SF reading protocols.”
And that’s where I ended up. I gave it 3.5 stars out of 5, which is a positive score. And given the rather lackluster is has for competition in 1962, I wouldn’t be surprised if it got nominated for or even won the Hugo. 🙂
6) There’s a lot to absorb in that post, and a bunch of interesting claims to sort through, and my coffee hasn’t entirely deployed yet–but my eye is caught by this: “Our study defines those terms, creates two texts that differ accordingly, and then studies how readers respond to them.” I sense a methodological problem right there.
I look forward to seeng how the SSL journal addresses the underlying question of exactly how one does “scientifically” study literature–and how one connects that methodology with two millennia’s worth of thinking about how art is devised by makers and received by audiences. It’s not like there’s no, um, literature on the subject.
And the proposition about SF readers reading badly–Gavaler holds an MFA and teaches university-level English, so he ought to be familiar with the state of literary sophistication among undergraduates. Audiences who learn “narrativity” from movies, TV, and comics are not going to do well with any text-based form, and the narrower their experience with texts, the less able they will be to cope with any broad range of them. I see SF readers who don’t manage “literary” work as well as “literary” readers who don’t get SF (or mystery or romance or whatever). This should not be news to anyone who has taught intro to lit courses. (Or reads Amazon reviews.)
(6): If you read Gaveler’s replies to comments on his post, it’s clear that what their paper is really trying to state is not at all what you would infer from his (self-admittedly click-baity) headline, or the post itself (which doesn’t say much for his writing). What they’re really trying to say (quoting him here, comment #5) is: But I do think the prejudice against SF is broad enough that it likely produces poor reading across the SF spectrum. In other words, that people who don’t read science fiction approach SF stories with such lowered expectations about how simple and unnuanced the story will be that they don’t read it very carefully. That’s my interpretation of what he’s saying, anyway, but it seems to be confirmed by his comment #8 (quoting again):
And, yes, the results were what I predicted when I designed it: that there’s a prejudice against SF as being of lower literary quality. I was surprised though how much of an effect it had on readers, that we could objectively show that their genre expectations made them read less attentively. And I see this prejudice as against formulaic SF, which biased readers seem to assume applies to all SF. What I personally think of as SF, or “literary SF,” is exactly what you describe above, a genre that requires greater attention because of its higher inference demands. That subgenre is more challenging (and interesting to me) than almost all narrative realism.
NB: it’s very important to realize that what the paper calls ‘Science Fiction readers’ are simply the subset of online volunteers who were given the ‘Science Fiction’ version of the story to read; they are not people who identified in any way as regular readers of SF. And it’s hard to tell how much the result was influenced by what was likely a terrible SF story, since they constructed it by taking their ‘literary’ story and replacing everyday terminology with ‘SF’ terms.
Re (6), I feel that any genre requires a learning curve to truly engage with it. Polling random volunteers on the Internet will skew the results. First, you’re only going to get people interested in taking the time to do this. Second, where did they solicit for their volunteers? If they placed ads on The New Yorker, they’re going to get a very different set of readers than Locus. I would also agree with prior comments that simple word substitution doesn’t result in quality SF. I expect that if they made no changes to the story at all, but told readers that it was the opening of either a hot new literary novel or a thriller/mystery, they might have had the same results as the thriller readers would also be used to reading differently than literary readers.
bookworm1398 on November 6, 2017 at 8:08 pm said:
I did something like that earlier this year–starting in April, I read a Ken Liu story or translation in rough publication order every day until October (when he came to Capclave). It was quite fun, but exhausting when I finally got to the novels instead of the myriad short stories & translations.
PhilRM on November 7, 2017 at 9:07 am said:
Which is another problem with the study. It’s not that non-SF readers can’t understand SF, that would be a stupid and elitist take. But regular SF readers have training in … setting aside early expectations, I guess. I *expect* to not understand what’s going on in the beginning. I *expect* I have to figure it out and build contextual clues not only from scratch, but from other SF stories. I go in to a story knowing what an ansible is. I also go in knowing if the author says “the alligator bus” they are more probably being literal as opposed to a metaphor. I have a toolbox built up over the decades to help me over the unfamiliar. And the author can expect that and work with it.
Many readers with limited experience with SF literature don’t have those examples, or that built-up toolbox*. Thus many of them work a bit harder to build the cultural connotations that results in a good reading comprehension score.
This is compounded with a story that doesn’t even try to explain things. If they’re just substituting “bicycle” with “satellite dish” they’re not taking the time to drop cultural clues for new readers to pick up. No halfway decent author just says “he called them on the ansible and asked what he should have for lunch” without dropping something in the text to help readers figure out what an ansible is. (Or at least help the reader realize the call is going someplace ten light years away and getting an instant response.)
*Nowadays, more and more people DO have that toolbox. They’re picking it up out of the ether of the permeation of SF into mainstream culture. But even so, that won’t help much in figuring out what an ansible is without some context clues.
I have taught both “Araby” and “Masks” to undergrads–in different courses–and the challenges my students faced were interestingly similar. (O for a course that used both of them!) They had trouble making sense of everything from point of view to irony to particular cultural references. (Don’t get me started on “The Dead” or “The Bear.” Those two were in a single course.) My wife is still teaching intro-to-lit courses, and things haven’t changed much in the last thirty years.
I think the first time I came across the notion of reading protocols was in Delany’s “About 5,750 Words,” but by the time I read that I’d already recognized that “teaching literature” was largely a matter of introducing students to the ways texts were set up to operate–that they were designed to be read in particular ways, which meant introducing them to notions of convention, tradition, genre, trope, and so on.* Which was why I found it pretty easy to shift from teaching, say, Shakespeare and Joyce and Eliot and Faulkner to Knight and Silverberg and Heinlein and Farmer. After all, I had figured out how to navigate these spaces as a teenager, so why couldn’t anyone.
* It also meant somehow fitting a critical mass of material into a term, so they’d have a decent sample to work with–a different pedagogical problem altogether.
@ULTRAGOTHA: It’s not that non-SF readers can’t understand SF, that would be a stupid and elitist take. But regular SF readers have training in … setting aside early expectations, I guess.
Exactly. It’s a question of what reading protocols (to use a bit of critical jargon that I find helpful) you bring to a work of fiction – and those are usually acquired from experience.
@Russell Letson: I think that Delaney piece is the first place I came across the idea of reading protocols, also – at least it’s the first one I remember.
(14) TURNOVER AT CASTALIA HOUSE BLOG. [Mike noted that]Jeffro Johnson… said in his farewell post:
Setting aside “on a par with” for the moment, Howard did some crackling-good pulp… like his boxing stories (available in various book collections, like the one I found and borrowed from my library a buncha years ago, and also lots legit pub-domain free e.g. this trove, e.g.
The TNT Punch
(continued from previous comment, since I seem to have closed that tab and therefore can’t re-edit..)
another resource, the Boxing page on The REH Foundation
Re: Genre study with stupid blog title.
I linked to this on my FB when I saw it on F770 (it was late at night, I was on my phone, didn’t have time to really read it) and asked for feedback from academic friends. Our discussion covered a lot of the same points made here — and I found there’s a whole sub-category in psychology of the “science of literature” (which seems really mis-named since what they seem to be studying (Dan Johnson, Galaver’s co-author, who is a cognitive psychologist, has five peer-reviewed articles on the same sort of topic listed in PsychArticles) is human response to literature which really isn’t the same thing at all.
Now, I’m all about reception theory, but NOT the psychological approach. I admit to a knee-jerk prejudice against the discipline of psychology which has spent decades making grand sweeping claims about human psychology based primarily on empirical studies done on undergraduates at colleges (at least in the U.S.) because they can offer their students extra credit to go be test subjects. I think a lot of it is crap. And the cognitive theory (*shudders, remembering Ogi Ogas who was a cognitive neuroscientist who was going to study fanfiction and that whole debacle — see link below).
I have my FB locked to friends now or I would link, but yep, there are questions about method, selection of readers (random online types given one of the texts at random), the dumbed-down text (apparently they had to have the same text for empirical whatever, to avoid the variables that might be involved with actually reading in the actual genres), plus a bunch of other stuff. And yes, I noted the comment about his students having different responses because of what they’ve been taught.
I think I may have to write about this issue at some point, maybe a bibliographic essay on some of the scholarship just to try to figure out what the fuck they’re doing.
But also have to wait to read the entire article (which is due out a bit later)–the journal is associated with a mostly European-based academic organization that claims to use scientific methods to study literature. I remain dubious after reading their information:
https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/ssol/main
“Literature has an important role in human culture. Broadly interpreted, literature is defined as all cultural artefacts that make use of literary devices, such as narrativity, metaphoricity, symbolism. Its manifestations include novels, short stories, poetry, theatre, film, television, and, more recently, digital forms such as hypertext storytelling. This new journal, Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL), will publish empirical studies that apply scientific stringency to cast light on the structure and function of literary phenomena. The journal welcomes contributions from many disciplinary perspectives (psychological, developmental, cross-cultural, cognitive, neuroscience, computational, and educational) to deepen our understanding of literature, literary processes, and literary applications.”
My emphasis added to highlight disciplinary areas they are associated with. Notice actual literary studies is not one of them, but education is.
Reference: Ogi Ogas: the reason why I distrust the cognitive crowd
https://roughtheory.org/2009/09/02/wearing-the-juice-a-case-study-in-research-implosion/
@ULTRAGOTHA,
Have you seen Jo Walton’s piece on reading protocols? There are different skillsets for reading (for lack of a better word) different genres.
(I remember giving a friend some comics to read, and they asked, “Do you read the words or look at the pictures first?”)
Hmm, perhaps, while Dr. Mauser is dispensing these tidbits of wisdom about the history of the genre, he should consider informing Ursula K. Le Guin that there were female SF authors in the sixties. 🙂
Re: “the difference is that the TV series actually engages with its setting — you have the tension between the German & Japanese occupiers, the internal Japanese & internal German politics [snip]”
Well, I re-read the book three weeks ago (prep for starting the TV series soon), and it certainly has those. In fact I thought it handled those aspects pretty well, but in all honesty I still don’t like the book as a whole that much. I feel quite guilty about that as I consider myself quite the P K Dick fan ;-).