(1) PAID REVIEW WORTH IT? Jeb Kinnison evaluates Kirkus Reviews’ reception of sf.
So I was leery of spending my publisher’s money to get a Kirkus review done. The review was glowing, but without the coveted star that tends to get notice from other reviewers and purchasing agents. I was interested in how they had treated other genre books, so I did a quick survey.
It appears that in the past, Kirkus assigned reviewers who were less than sympathetic to the book’s genre and intended audience. This review [of GHOST by John Ringo] made me laugh: …
But other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? This is Ringo. His books aren’t likely to be accidentally purchased by people like the reviewer, so the review is useless for deciding which violent testosterone-infused male fantasy adventure book to buy for people who enjoy that sort of thing.
One of the best writers of science fiction and fantasy, Lois McMasters Bujold, never got a starred review from Kirkus. Here’s the summary of their review of middle Miles Vorkosigan in Mirror Dance: “A well-conceived series, solidly plotted and organized, though heavy going in places and, finally, lacking that spark of genuine originality that would blazon it as truly special.” Kind of missing the point, no?
(2) DOCTOR WHO PUN OPPORTUNITY. We ought to be able to do something with a character who is married to River, and whose series will be hstreamed on Amazon Prime beginning in March.
Welp, it wasn’t the longest of national nightmares, but now it appears it is over. Last week, I wrote about how and where you could watch Doctor Who following its abrupt pulling from streaming services on February 1 of this year. But it wasn’t to last, it seems; Amazon announced today via their Twitter that Series 1-8 of the show will be back on their Prime streaming service beginning in March.
#DoctorWho fans, never fear for Doctor Who might have left #Netflix, but will be coming to #PrimeVideo in March. https://t.co/0bwJqXGRdz
— Rachel Hirst (@RachelTheTall) February 23, 2016
(3) WHEN DID YOU FIRST SUSPECT? I got a kick out of Sarah A. Hoyt’s “Ten Signs That You Might Be A Novel’s Character” at Mad Genius Club. Number 10 and the Bonus sign are especially funny.
1- Nothing is ever easy, nor simple. Say you are walking across the street to get a gallon of milk. A rare make of car will almost run you down. The store that sells the milk will be out of milk. You’ll have to walk across the most dangerous area of town to get to the next store.
This means someone is making you terminally interesting….
(4) FROM REJECTION TO ANGRY ROBOT. Peter Tieryas details “My Experience Publishing With Angry Robot” at Fantasy-Faction.
My journey to being a writer almost never happened. With my new book, United States of Japan, coming out, I wanted to reflect on how I got here and what it’s been like working with the fantastic Angry Robot Books.
Perfect Edge
Back in 2009, almost seven years before I joined the robot army, I’d gotten so many short story rejections, I wondered if I was even meant to be a writer. While I’d had a series of short stories published when I was younger, there’d been a gap of about five years where I’d only gotten one piece accepted. I was devastated when I received that issue and found all sorts of typos and formatting errors in my story. What I thought would be a brief moment of victory had been ruined…..
As the decision to publish was made by the whole of Angry Robot and Watkins Media staff, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. It took USJ about four months to get to “acquisitions” which is the meeting where they make their choice to “acquire” or not. I got an email from Phil the week of the acquisition meeting telling me when it was going to happen. I could not sleep the night before and kept on hitting refresh on my emails, awaiting final word. The notification came from Phil on March 5, 2015 with a simple subject line: “You’re in.” Even though it was late, I got up and started dancing in what might be better described as an awkward fumbling of my hips.
(5) HOLLYWOOD READIES SF/F MOVIES. News of three different sf/f film projects appears in Deadline’s story “Ava DuVernay Set To Direct Disney’s ‘A Wrinkle In Time’; Script By ‘Frozen’s Jennifer Lee”.
EXCLUSIVE: Selma director Ava DuVernay has just been set by Disney to direct A Wrinkle In Time, an adaptation of the 1963 Newbery Medal-winning Madeleine L’Engle fantasy classic novel that has a script by Oscar-winning Frozen writer and co-director Jennifer Lee. Deadline revealed February 8 that DuVernay had been offered this film and was also in the mix at DreamWorks for Intelligent Life, a sci-fi thriller scripted by Colin Trevorrow and his Jurassic World collaborator Derek Connolly. DuVernay now has the offer on that film and is in negotiations on a pic that has 12 Years A Slave Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o attached to a fable about a UN worker in a department designed to represent mankind if there was ever contact with aliens, who falls for a mystery woman who turns out to be one. That film is produced by Frank Marshall, Trevorrow and Big Beach principals Peter Saraf and Marc Turtletaub.
(6) TRUST & SAFETY. Here’s Twitter’s announcement of the Trust & Safety Council in case you want more info, tweeted February 9. It lists all the members of the Council. (Somebody may have put that in a comment here already.)
As we develop products, policies, and programs, our Trust & Safety Council will help us tap into the expertise and input of organizations at the intersection of these issues more efficiently and quickly. In developing the Council, we are taking a global and inclusive approach so that we can hear a diversity of voices from organizations including:
- Safety advocates, academics, and researchers focused on minors, media literacy, digital citizenship, and efforts around greater compassion and empathy on the Internet;
- Grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements and momentum;
- Community groups with an acute need to prevent abuse, harassment, and bullying, as well as mental health and suicide prevention.
We have more than 40 organizations and experts from 13 regions joining as inaugural members of the Council. We are thrilled to work with these organizations to ensure that we are enabling everyone, everywhere to express themselves with confidence on Twitter.
(7) AXANAR SUIT DEVELOPMENT. Inverse discusses why “Paramount Must Explain ‘Star Trek’ in Court or Lose Ownership”.
Enter the lawyers. Obviously, they can claim to own Star Trek because they acquired the series from Lucille Ball’s Desilu Productions in the late 1960s. Now they’ve been merged with CBS and that’s how we’re getting both a new TV series and a continuing film franchise. But the Axanar team has a card up its sleeve.
The Paramount lawsuit claims that this infringes upon “thousands of copyrights” and the Axanar team has asked the simple question: “Which ones?” Because Star Trek now exists over several different universes, time periods, and casts, it’s not so simple. The universe is so spread out, it is almost impossible to define what Star Trek actually is. To that end, the burden is on Paramount to explain what Star Trek is — in a legal sense.
(8) CLIFF AMOS OBIT. Louisville fan Cliff Amos passed away February 22 after a long battle with heart disease. Bob Roehm wrote a fine appreciation on Facebook:
Louisville fan Cliff Amos passed away February 22. Cliff was the founder of Louisville fandom, creating both the Falls of the Ohio Science Fiction Association (FoSFA) and RiverCon. I first met Cliff around 1970 while he was teaching a free university course in SF at the University of Louisville. We had both separately attended the St. Louis worldcon the year before, but had not met. Seeing an announcement of the Free U. meeting, I began attending the weekly gatherings. A year… or two later, the local fan club was organized and in 1975 Cliff chaired the first RiverCon (combined with DeepSouthCon that year). Cliff continued to head RiverCons for several years and was a regular at Midwestcon and Kubla Khan. He was given the Southern Fandon Confederation Rebel Award in 1979, and also chaired the second NASFiC, NorthAmeriCon, that year. His interests were certainly wide-ranging and eclectic (for example, he once appeared on Tom Snyder’s late night talk show as warlock Solomon Weir), and he will be missed by his many friends both within and without the science fiction community. There will no funeral service or visitation but a memorial wake is being arranged for the near future (probably this coming Sunday); details forthcoming.
(9) GAMBLE OBIT. Australian childrens’ book artist Kim Gamble passed away February 19 at the age of 63.
The much-loved, award-winning artist is known for illustrating the best-selling Tashi books, written by mother and daughter authors Barbara and Anna Fienberg.
Gamble created the lively, elfin boy with the towering curl of hair and gypsy earrings, who looked nothing like the authors initially imagined, more than 20 years ago….
Anna Fienberg called Gamble’s imagination “a magic gift which he shared with the world”….
“Working with Kim was like learning a new way to see. It was perhaps the magical appearance of Tashi that inspired us to go deeper into the mythical land of dragons, witches, giants, ogres … the world lying beneath.”
…Gamble’s favourite book as a child was Moominsummer Madness, by Finnish writer Tove Jansson, and artists he admired included Marc Chagall and Odilon Redon.
When asked about the success of the Tashi series, Gamble said, “It’s very popular because he’s the smallest kid in the class and in every story he’s up against the odds … and he uses his head, he doesn’t fight to get out of the problem. I think kids really just enjoy how cleverness beats brawn.”
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
- Born February 24, 1786 — Wilhelm Grimm, historian and, with his brother Jacob, compiler of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
- Born February 24, 1947 — Edward James Olmos
(11) MORE MARK OSHIRO COMMENTARY. Mark Oshiro updated his Facebook readers about the response to his complaint about sexual harassment at ConQuesT.
3) MidAmeriCon II was the first to make a public statement, which you can find on their Twitter account. I wasn’t expecting a response from them, so I appreciated a very direct message about their commitment to safety for this year’s WorldCon. I *am* going to be at WorldCon, even if some of the people who were responsible at ConQuesT are on staff/the board. WorldCon has become a tradition for me because it was my first introduction to this community, so I will be there and be on programming. Say hello if you like!
4) Chris Gerrib was the first to apologize to me, and I appreciated and accepted the apology. I respect that he did so without being asked to.
5) Yesterday, Kristina Hiner sent me an apology. I am keeping it private because I see no reason to publish it. It is a *very* good apology, and I accepted it, too. I am very thankful for her response, and more so than anyone else, she was the only person I really *wanted* an apology from. I have also informed her that at this point, I actually don’t need each of the complaints followed up on at this point. It seems redundant to me. Everyone knows about the post now, and I don’t need an apology from anyone else. I just wanted someone to inform these people that their behavior was unwelcoming, rude, or hostile. I’ve now done that, so I think the board and ConQuesT can devote time and energy to future conventions instead of last year’s.
Mikki Kendall used the discussion about Oshiro to launch her post “On Bad Cons & How You Kill An Event in Advance”.
I get invited to a lot of cons that have a diversity problem. I also get a lot of requests from cons that claim to want to create anti harassment policies. Aside from my feelings on an expectation that I donate hours of work to strangers for events I have no interest in attending, there’s the sad reality that many small cons are so entrenched on reinventing the wheel they’ve missed the window to do better. Younger fans, fans of color, disabled fans…they don’t have to keep going to cons that aren’t welcoming to be able to connect with other fans. They can go to the big commercial cons, to the smaller cons that do get it & to social media for their community needs. So no, they won’t keep giving cons with bad reps chance after chance. They won’t be patient with serial offenders or the places that enable them. Why should they donate that time & energy to some place that doesn’t want them, that thinks they deserve to be hazed, deserve to be mistreated in order to prove something to bigots?
Bluntly? Most small cons will age out of existence because of bad behavior, because of a focus on the past that prioritizes the social mores of the dead over the actual experiences of the living.
(12) THE LIGHT’S BACK ON. The Wertzone says “Pacific Rim 2 re-greenlit for 2018”.
It was on, off and now back on again. Universal and Legendary Pictures are moving ahead with Pacific Rim 2, probably for a 2018 release date….
This has unfortunately meant that Guillermo Del Toro will be unable to return to direct, having already moved on to other projects. However, Del Toro will still co-write (with Jon Spaihts) and produce the movie. The new director is Steven S. DeKnight, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer veteran who went on to create Spartacus and is currently working on Netflix’s Daredevil. The film will be DeKnight’s directorial debut.
(13) THIS COULD RUIN ANDY WEIR’S SEQUEL. This video argues we can reach relativistic speeds using new technologies.
Imagine getting to Mars in just 3 days… or putting points beyond our solar system within our reach. New propulsion technologies could one day take us to these cosmic destinations making space travel truly interstellar! NASA 360 joins Professor Philip Lubin, University of California Santa Barbara, as he discusses his NASA Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) for energy propulsion for interstellar exploration.
(14) ADMIT IT, YOU DO. Motherboard asks, “Why Do We Feel So Bad When Boston Dynamics’ New Robot Falls Down?”
Even though all the things the engineers do to mess with the robot are done to showcase its ability to correct itself, recover from falls, and persevere in performing tasks, the human tendency to anthropomorphize non-sentient objects is so strong as to override our common-sense knowledge that Atlas is an object incapable of feeling. Engineers commonly kick robots to demonstrate their ability to recover, and it always feels a tiny bit cruel. It’s a strange quirk of the brain—though the tendency is stronger in some people than in others.
(15) A LONG TIME AGO IN DOG YEARS. Some Sad Puppies writing on Facebook are grieved that I have not excerpted Stephanie S.’ “Opening a Moderate Conversation on Fandom with ‘Standback’” atThe Right Geek.
Let’s talk first about what I like to call the “pre-history” of the Sad Puppies. For the past fifteen years (at least), the character of fandom has shifted in a way that many Puppies find very troubling — and by the way, for the vast majority of our number, this has nothing to do with race, gender, or sexuality. A significant number of us are women who accept the precepts of first wave feminism at the very least. A number of us are “people of color.” And a number of us are gay or, at minimum, amenable to leaving gay people alone to live their lives as they see fit. No — what has disturbed the Puppies is the increasingly strident tone that many fans have adopted in support of their favored cultural and political causes. In our perception, the vague “codes of conduct,” the “shit lists,” the pilings on, the endless internet flame-wars, and the non-falsifiable accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia/etc. have all created an environment that is extraordinarily hostile to points of view that don’t hew to a particular left-wing party line. The result? We’ve felt unwelcome and stomped on for what, to our mind, should be recognized as sincere and well-meant differences of opinion.
Over the same time frame, the Puppies have also become concerned about the artistic direction of our field. The “Human Wave” movement, the “Superversive” movement, and the more generalized complaints about “message fic” and “grey goo” that started gaining steam before last year’s Sad Puppies campaign are all flailing attempts by the Puppies to describe the flatness we’ve perceived in many recent award winners — particularly in the shorter fiction categories, where the stylistic sophistication and emotional catharsis beloved by creative writing professors and MFA programs the world over appear to be crowding out more accessible stories with identifiable plots and recognizably science-fictional ideas.
(16) EDIT AND GET CREDIT. Michael J. Martinez singles out for praise and award consideration five editors who worked on his fiction in 2015.
Yes, these are editors I’ve worked with. Each one of them has contributed both to the quality of my work as well as my ever-ongoing education as a writer. They are also lovely humans, which goes a very long way with me.
(17) ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY. Radio Times found a very funny site: “Someone is pretending to be the IT guy at Hogwarts and it’s hilarious”.
Let’s be honest: magic is great and everything, but if Hogwarts didn’t have WiFi, we probably wouldn’t be so interested.
A Tumblr account called The Setup Wizard took this premise and ran with it. The blog is the fictionalised account of an American muggle named Jonathan Dart working as Hogwarts’ first IT guy. The somewhat grumpy character is constantly solving problems and handling the struggles of being a Muggle in a magic world.
How is it that the first person in this school I’ve successfully been able to explain network bandwidth to is the 500 year old partially decapitated ghost?
Today I taught a centaur how to use a hands free Bluetooth headset. Apparently he really felt the need to make phone calls while wielding a bow and arrow.
[Thanks to Will R., Michael J. Walsh, Reed Andrus, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
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Oh sure, you may be able to *get* to Mars in three days.
But it’s rather like the quickest route to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. One can *get* there in about thirty seconds, but it’s awfully difficult to manage any kind of useful landing.
Kip W:
“Thank you all to hell, Mister Niven.” LOL!
I have to confess to a curiosity about the SFF genre shifting from hard SF to fantasy in the early ‘eighties. Did that actually happen?
In a sense that seems to be a reflection of pop culture in the US, as the glamour of the space race faded — and pretty much died with the Challenger disaster — and fantasy became the pop idiom.
But at any rate, is that a moral issue? Fashions change. The changes are often derided as immoral.
Not really, Peace. There’s always been a bunch of things going on at once in sf. Fantasy did very well in the ’80s, but so did folks like Vinge, Brin, and Bear (and Nagata and others a little later). Too often, what hard sf fans want is not just lots of rivets and equations, but a deliberate absence of serious social speculation, attention to sociology and psychology, and like that. That did suffer some, but then it’s not like Analog or Baen has gone out of business, either.
Bear, Brin and Benford didn’t shift to fantasy, but many did. And I’m not discussing an “absence of serious social speculation.” (“Rubber sociology”?) Note that one my examples of serious SF was Baen author Joanna Russ.
@Peace
Anecdotally my own observations would see the fantasy shift happening somewhat later. The sci-fi and fantasy sections of book stores were dominated by sci-fi in the 80’s and 90’s. Fantasy was thinner on the ground and frequently of the Dragon Lance variety. Somewhere in the early oughts you began to see a lot more fantasy and particularly urban fantasy on the shelves changing things to a more 50-50 distribution. On the other hand sci-fi and fantasy sections were getting bigger too. It’s probably less a shift to fantasy than a blossoming of fantasy to proportionality in popularity and publication in a larger pool of books overall. You have to ask too if this is a zero sum game where a fantasy book getting published kills an opportunity for a sci-fi book? Personally, I think not.
In any case:
The King is dead! Long live the King!
Brian Z: Science Fiction died in the 1980s
Tor Book founded in 1980
Baen founded in 1983
One wonders how the two managed to thrive all these years. I’m not going to waste my time going through their full stable of authors since then. That’s the person making the claims job. Brian Z research it helps you not look like an ignorant troll. Someday you might want to give it a try.
Do you really like being insulted and called a troll? Do you hate being treated with respect so much? You have the power within you to change how you are treated.
I request no one use replying to my post to pile on insults to Brian Z.
So you get Lyin’ Eyes stuck in my head, and then the conversation moves on? Drat you all. 😀
I never knew what to think about that song. The verses sympathize with the woman; the choruses scold her. In my head I imagine it part of a stage production, with a faithful friend singing the verses in between a judgmental Greek chorus cutting in, representing the pitiless forces of society and reputation..
Tasha,
No offense, and I didn’t take any, but maybe we are having a miscommunication.
I was riffing on the meme “Women Destroy Science Fiction” by saying that one of my favorite authors, Russ, “destroyed” science fiction in the late 70s. It’s not literally true. It’s a meme.
It is true that Russ raised very serious challenges to traditional “hard SF,” which too often took the banal and silly form of “men get into spaceships to go do stuff on alien planets.” This is something that Kim Stanley Robinson recently echoed in Aurora. I think “hard SF” got harder to do by the 80s. I think that is part of the reason many authors chose to write “science fantasy” instead.
Kip W butted in, sarcastically but with good humor, to say I was complaining that SF was never the same after Buddy Holly died. Like in the song, “the day the music died.” So I retorted, sarcastically but with good humor, that science fiction died in 1982 when the Hugo went to Heinlein’s Friday. (I confess I didn’t actually think about it long enough to realize that Heinlein was nominated but Asimov actually won.)
Nothing died in 1982. But there was a discernible shift from hard SF to science fantasy and regular fantasy.
Hugo voters these days grew up reading those kinds of SFF popular in the 80s and 90s. The Hugo used to be about rewarding authors who break new ground. Today, opinion is clearly divided, and many fans would prefer to read and reward something that is comfortable and familiar to them rather than what is most challenging. At least, that’s what it seems like, listening to commenters here.
Hope that’s clear.
@Brian Z
I would tend to disagree about a shift to science fantasy at all. Science fact has played less of a part in science fiction than folks generally admit. ‘What if’ has always been the biggest factor and often required a bit of hand waving.
I also don’t see the big shift you do in Hugo award patterns. Go look at the list of Hugo nominated novels on Wikipedia. Certainly there are some challenging books in the noms and winners but there are also quite a few that won on world building, characterization, and prose. In fact I would say there are distinctly less challenging works than not and the ones that were challenging didn’t skimp on the storytelling. I don’t see any pattern radically changing.
Perhaps it would help if you defined better what you see the difference being using specific novels before ‘the change’ and after. Otherwise it just reads like glorification of an past (that never was) while ignoring the present (as it is). How’d that poem go? ‘Farewell Romance’…
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-king-2/
– T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
@Peace: For my own part, I don’t read hard-sf, so I’m totally okay with it.
Also, in general, I hear that us modern readers grow our hair way too long and play our music too loud, and stand around the corner store smoking cigarettes. There are rumors that we might be memorizing jokes from Cap’n Billy’s Whiz Bang.
When I first started reading SFF, what I could find in the library was almost exclusively hard SF written by men. I really liked Asimov and kinda liked Heinlein, but it was Bradbury who made me fall in love with the genre. His stories were full of characters doing things that made sense and there was a beating heart in everything he wrote. I wasn’t old enough to really get how beautiful his prose was, but I liked it better than anything else I read.
I was also around for the way women burst onto the scene and happily (although sometimes confusedly) embraced the feminist revolution in SFF. I wasn’t aware of it, because I didn’t know that SF magazines existed (they weren’t in the library), but the fight between old guard and New Wave was probably raging loudly by then. I suspect the Vietnam war and the culture war exacerbated the divisions.
When I read, “Nothing died in 1982. But there was a discernible shift from hard SF to science fantasy and regular fantasy,” I don’t exactly know what to do with what seems to be a complete lack of historical perspective. The New Wave had already caused a discernible shift nearly half a generation previously, although there was still a market for hard SF. There still is a market for hard SF, it just isn’t generally on the cutting edge. I’d argue that it never really was and innovation has more often than not come from how the tales were told rather than any originality in ideas.
@Peace: For my own part, I don’t read hard-sf, so I’m totally okay with it, despite Brian Z’s implications that I should feel guilty about my reading tastes. (Which: dude, it would help if you didn’t phrase your objections to shifting genre standards such that you sounded like every English teacher who ever told me I should be reading litfic and not SF. Actually, it would help if you didn’t make People Liking Different Things into a symptom of the Kali Yuga, but here we are.)
As far as originality goes, the first thing is that I don’t care that much about new technical ideas, whether they’re science or magic. I might go “huh”, or “cool”; I wouldn’t spend three hundred and fifty pages on a theoretical document. The second is that any sufficiently good book is original in its own way, even if it’s not trying to posit new theoretical ideas or break sociologically relevant ground or whatever. Rewritten fairy tales, as a pet subgenre of mine, sound very different from Mercedes Lackey to Robin McKinley to Ursula Vernon to Angela Carter. Vast Tolkienian myths would too. There’d be character perspectives or worldbuilding details or turns of phrase that don’t show up anywhere else.
Also, in general, I hear that us modern readers grow our hair way too long and play our music too loud, and stand around the corner store smoking cigarettes. There are rumors that we might be memorizing jokes from Cap’n Billy’s Whiz Bang.
(ETA: I do not understand how post editing works, and may need to sleep. Sigh. Sorry.)
I just looked over the list of Hugo-winning novels and counted perhaps a dozen which I could truly argue were “groundbreaking” (including The Demolished Man, A Case of Conscience, A Canticle For Leibowitz, Stranger In a Strange Land, Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and Neuromancer, with a few more I would consider a good case might be made for if I needed to try).
Double Star and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress weren’t even “groundbreaking” for the author, let alone the field. If “groundbreaking” work is your threshold for awarding someone a rocket, you aren’t going to give one most years.
There are some truly fantastic books which have won the Hugo, but which can’t really be called “groundbreaking”. The Hugos go to whatever work presented on the final ballot which more than half of the voters taking part in a given year find to be “the best”, given the ballot system in use. Those voters may or may not see things the way any one individual sees them.
You cannot reasonably argue that the Hugo used to go to groundbreaking work if you look over the list of winners in the first 30-35 years of the award, because the majority of the winners cannot be considered “groundbreaking”
“Puppy Eyes” (a start on “Lyin’ Eyes” by The Eagles)
Puppy Trolls just seem to find out early
How to close discussion with a sneer
A slate campaign, and they won’t have to worry
They’ll dress up all their arguments in style
Late at night, File 770 gets lonely
I guess every form of trolling has its price
And it breaks my heart to think your love is only
Given to some books from . . . (record scratch) 20? 30? 40? 50? years ago? WTF?!?!?! (singer flounces out)
😉
P.S. With apologies to @Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little, @Tasha Turner, and of course @The Eagles.
And what Robert Reynolds said is essentially the thing. The Hugos are not, and have never been, an award for the most experimental literary technique, sociologically challenging treatise, or rigorous scientific extrapolation. They are a populist award given by a relatively small genre convention. They represent the majority taste of Worldcon in a given year. If they have gained any magic it is that the taste of Worldcon voters has tended to overlap a broad cross section of the sci-fi reading public. If that is no longer true (posited solely for arguments sake): so what? They will still reflect the taste of Worldcon voters whatever relevance they might then lack to most folks. It is not a situation in need of rescuing.
What “killed” science fiction? (scare-quotes for counter-factual emphasis)
Every time I try to brainstorm an interesting hard science fiction plot in my areas of expertise, I run up against the problem of suspending belief. [sic]
I work for a company that bio-engineers complex proteins on a molecular level and produces them at commercial scale to turn previously fatal genetic conditions into mere inconveniences. My brother has an implanted cybernetic device that monitors and corrects a physiological defect to keep him alive, and reports its functionality to his doctor via something indistinguishable from Star Trek’s medical tricorder. For me, the problem with writing hard science fiction isn’t the “hard” or the “science” part — it’s the “fiction”.
Cheryl S. on February 28, 2016 at 9:42 am said:
When I first started reading SFF, what I could find in the library was almost exclusively hard SF written by men. I really liked Asimov and kinda liked Heinlein, but it was Bradbury who made me fall in love with the genre.
Add Andre Norton and Theodore Sturgeon, and lots of Conklin anthologies to that last bit, and yep.
I think basically even in the early years what was all over the place was the hard stuff, but I was happier poking around the edges to see what else I could find.
There were always other choices.
@Kendall
Thanks for the laugh but not the continuing ear worm
@Heather Rose Jones For me, the problem with writing hard science fiction isn’t the “hard” or the “science” part — it’s the “fiction”.
Makes sense to me. We live in an amazing and constantly changing time.
@Brian Z
Done with you again. Riffing is no excuse for not doing the research. Not doing the research and making unfounded claims over and over again is what makes you a troll and gets you treated with disrespect if noticed at all. Bye-bye
@Stoic Cynic
If they have gained any magic it is that the taste of Worldcon voters has tended to overlap a broad cross section of the sci-fi reading public. If that is no longer true (posited solely for arguments sake): so what? They will still reflect the taste of Worldcon voters whatever relevance they might then lack to most folks. It is not a situation in need of rescuing.
THIS. Thank you.
This is not a problem that needs solving, folks.
@Brian Z – thanks for the link to “Who Killed Science Fiction 2006.” This is fascinating. Good to be one of the lucky 10,000 today.
I was never involved in SFF fandom until recently, other than reading. My only fanac from my misspent youth was comic conventions, sporadically in the early 90s, then regularly throughout the late 90s and 00s, so it’s always interesting to find out more about the rich and, apparently, constantly scandalous and controversial, culture of SFF fandom.
Is it safe to assume all of these “GROUP_Xs Destroy Science Fiction” anthologies coming out now are riffing on that original collection?
Oh, Heinlein:
Tedious rehashing of elderly themes will not cause the readers to applaud. I suspect, from some of the crud that one sees in print, that there are “science fiction” writers who jumped in because they thought it was a gravy train, an easy way to get rich without working.
The shift to fantasy or science fantasy is the one part where I do sort of agree w/ Brian Z. But I’m old enough to remember that fantasy really was ghettoized by SF folks once upon a time. Of course, it was the sixties where science fantasy started to rise (see Lord of Light and the oft-mentioned New Wave, which loved science fantasy), so his time frame’s a bit off. But straight-up fantasy did start to rise to prominence in the eighties. That’s when we really started to see some of the newer authors, who were often inspired by Tolkien, start to come into their own. And, for the first time, fantasy epics (other than LotR) starting to outsell good old SF.
That said, and having thus established myself as an Old Phart, I strongly disagree with his dismissal of newer SF writers like Brin and Vinge and several he didn’t mention, like Cherryh and Kress and Stross and Banks. In my opinion, they were, for the most part, a vast improvement over the likes of Asimov and Heinlein. I consider Vinge to be one of the greatest writers the field has produced. And Cherryh’s probably my favorite of all the “Grand Masters”. At the beginning of the eighties, when Brian claims SF died, we’d barely gotten a taste of the Alliance/Union ‘verse.
Of course, he really displays the flaws in his reasoning when he dismisses Redshirts. Humor is hard. And almost never gets the respect it deserves. And that book was funny. And, while I don’t think it would have won without the codas, I think that just shows that a lot of other people share Brian’s misguided view of humor as a lesser form of art which somehow doesn’t deserve awards. But I was overjoyed that it won, since it struck a blow for humor!
As for his suggestion that innovation was more common in the “good old days”—pah! I was there for the tail end, and the Golden Age authors ripped each other off left and right. If the overall quality of that era looks good, it’s almost certainly because you’ve forgotten most of the work of that era. Only the best tend to remain in our memory (and get reprinted regularly), which makes the era seem far better than it actually was. And, of course, a lot of the stuff we’ve forgotten is the reason why some of the old SF seems more innovative than it actually is.
(I can’t help but wonder if Brian’s ever read Stapledon, just for one little big, huge, changed-the-field-forever example.) 🙂
Sturgeon’s law is not a lie, and it’s always been true. Most SF was crap then; most SF is crap now. The biggest difference is that there’s a lot more people writing SF now, so the 10% that’s worth reading is bigger than ever, and the peaks are higher than ever. But the 90% that’s crap from this era is a lot more visible to a modern reader than the 90% from the “good old days” which contributes to delusions like the ones Brian is suffering from. That and a lack of taste if he honestly thinks Asimov or Heinlein is better than Brin or Vinge or Cherryh! 🙂
I shouldn’t respond to Brian Z’s comment but the call is difficult to resist and I have a flaw* in my character…
For me, he’s also become [Pixel Scroll title suggestion alert] “The Boy who cried Troll” so many times that even his attempts at humour are suspect. I guess it’s the price for persistent trolling: when you say something relevant it’s dismissed because people stopped taking you seriously a long time ago.
*Many more than one.
Here’s a general hint; If everyone bristles at your “obviously absurd, I was joking” comments and takes them at face value, it’s because they have good reason to think you are the sort of person who would say that sh** in earnest. AND (not or) you have completely failed to signal a change of tone form the hitherto earnest absurdities you’ve been spouting.
Dissing every person who says ‘pure innovation is not the be-all and end-all’ as people who only like retreads, and asserting SF died in 82, are, as it happens, similar enough in their absurdity I could not tell with absolute certainty the former was serious OR that the latter was a joke.
@Xtifr:
This is true of so many different golden ages, right back to the Greeks.
Classic.
Brian Z – The Hugo used to be about rewarding authors who break new ground. Today, opinion is clearly divided, and many fans would prefer to read and reward something that is comfortable and familiar to them rather than what is most challenging. At least, that’s what it seems like, listening to commenters here.
And you would be wrong on all counts. The Hugo has rewarded authors for a variety of reasons, including originality (New Wave, cyberpunk, amazing world building), but it has mostly been a popular award that reflects the tastes of a small group of SFF fans. In terms of originality, I still don’t know what you mean, because I’m unable to discern your dividing line between that and personally interesting.
For instance, I don’t think The Goblin Emperor – power politics and how well or ill they combine with personal ethics and a loving nature – is any less original than a satirical polemic skewering a narrow subgroup of French intellectuals. And, btw, I’m not faulting your taste, just trying to figure out what narrow niche you’re carving out of the vast expanse of current SFF and calling original and challenging.
For those here who have addressed the issue of originality, I don’t see them choosing comfortable and familiar. Instead, I see fairly impassioned opinions about the importance of story, character and heart, with originality being appreciated but not necessarily something we look for and don’t want in the absence of story, etc. Because without a beating heart, originality in structure or language or concept is just cleverness, which would be a difficult sale as to its award worthiness.
::ticky::
Looks like I missed an interesting discussion here.
I was posting to say I spent a few unfortunate minutes on the Long Time Ago in Dog Years comments on the blog post with standback. It seems it might be better to avoid discussing the issue in the comments and try to to do new posts in exchange which I have seen be a little better in seperating the wheat from the chaff.
http://therightgeek.blogspot.com/2016/02/opening-moderate-conversation-on-fandom.html?showComment=1456427698452&m=1
I will say one thing that irritates me reading the comments there is the repeated invocation of ‘we’ and ‘they’ when talking about the Hugo mess. *No-one* can speak for anyone other than themselves or speak to anyone but an individual that they can cite.
Eta: It’s a personal bug-a-boo that I am sure I have violated myself countless times but I have tried to be more careful in my comments regarding the puppy mess.
@Heather Rose Jones:
For me, the problem with writing hard science fiction isn’t the “hard” or the “science” part — it’s the “fiction”.
Reminds me of one of my favorite Doris Lessing quote (take THIS snooty litfic people who shall remain nameless who are whining about sf being destroyed):
Interview with Doris Lessing
DL: Well, some of it. In England we have, as you probably know, the perennial English novel — extremely good, wonderful,sensitive novels. And they come out every year and are suffocating as far as I’m concerned with their tight little horizons.
HB: You got savaged when you started writing your series of science fiction novels. John Leonard, in the New York Times,wrote about The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, that, “One of the many sins for which the 20th century will be heldaccountable is that it has discouraged Mrs. Lessing….She now propagandizes on behalf of our insignificance in the cosmicrazzmatazz.” He felt you had ceased to care.
DL: What they didn’t realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time. I also admire the classic sort of science fiction, like Blood Music, by Greg Bear. He’s a great writer.
The real science of science fiction
Using fiction to teach science
SInce I cannot use the stylish add on on my android phone, I saw the first person I put on the list’s comments about Joanna Russ. Nearly made my head explode (I am not speaking all that metaphorically).
Anyway, here are two nifty resources about science and science fiction that make me feel good that I thought i’d share.
@robinareid
Thanks for those links. I found the descriptions of the anthologies Bio-Punk and Beta-Life to be really interesting. On my TBR pile !
I had the fortune to grow up around several indiscriminate collections of sci fi books and magazines. Between that and living near some non-Euclidean secondhand book shops I got to see perhaps a better cross-section of older sci fi than the filtered, shaken out, and remembered stuff today.
Theodore Sturgeon was right. The sci fi of the good old days was often pretty terrible.
I enjoyed some Asimov when I was very young, got more disenchanted with it as I grew older. He wasn’t bad, but he was head and shoulders better than most of the stuff out there.
I see there are now online archives of old pulp magazines. For an eye-opening exercise, I suggest picking an issue or two and reading the entire thing, cover to cover. Yes, the poetry as well. Picking one with a major story as its headliner is fine, just so you read everything else in the magazine as well.
There’s some great stuff out there that has been forgotten. But there’s even more dubious stuff that has been forgotten.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure Rabelais was out front of Houellebecq on that.
Brian Z said:
Not long-term, but Bear is responsible for one of those very rare* books which looks like sf on the surface but turns out to be fantasy underneath: City at the End of Time. Which I strongly recommend to anyone who likes either fantasy or science fiction on an epic scale, BTW.
*So rare, in fact, that the only other example I can come up with is Gene Wolfe’s New Sun-Long Sun-Short Sun cycle.
Robert Reynolds on February 28, 2016 at 10:13 am said:
Double Star and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress weren’t even “groundbreaking” for the author, let alone the field. If “groundbreaking” work is your threshold for awarding someone a rocket, you aren’t going to give one most years.
And yet … Gary K. Wolfe in his American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s published by the Library of America included Double Star. Details here: https://www.loa.org/books/373-american-science-fiction-nine-classic-novels-of-the-1950s-boxed-set
I just recently read an essay by Donald E. Westlake from (I think) 1960, where he declared SF dead as a market and an art form, burned bridges and named names. Mainly, he was talking about what the current crop of editors would and wouldn’t buy.
His essay apparently stirred up a lot of reaction, because also included was a response by him to various of the respondees.
It’s in THE GETAWAY CAR: A DONALD WESTLAKE NONFICTION MISCELLANY, which has lots of other enjoyable stuff as well.
Nicole:
I think of the verses as descriptive, and the chorus as her inner voice, feeling guilty over her accommodations with life.
**
And I’ve got to say, I’d be flabbergasted by our local Puppy apologist trying to sneer at depth of character, writing, theme, richness, context, etc. as people just wanting the “derivative and familiar” if rank dishonesty and hypocrisy hadn’t proven to be his medium for so long now.
Who is it who’s been arguing for Nutty Nuggets and books that don’t confuse you by opening with taverns and snow?
Brian Z: The Hugo used to be about rewarding authors who break new ground. Today, opinion is clearly divided, and many fans would prefer to read and reward something that is comfortable and familiar to them rather than what is most challenging.
Yes, and those people call themselves “Puppies”.
You’re barking up the wrong tree making your arguments here. You should be making them over at MGC and VD’s blog, where they actually apply to the people who post there.
I have that boxed set; “classic” does not equal “groundbreaking.” They aren’t included in the collection, but as inducement to purchase, each novel had an online mini-essay by a contemporary writer. Here’s what Connie Willis has to say in appreciation of Double Star.
My links sometimes acquire other characters in the transition from typing to posting, so here are two relevant sections:
And:
In other words, what Heinlein was doing that made Double Star a classic packaged with More Than Human and The Stars My Destination, plus garner him a Hugo, was how he wrote, the vivid characters, the style choices he made, not some debatable and dubious originality. Not so coincidentally, people here are still looking for those things in determining what they think are award worthy.
I just can’t get enough of books opening with taverns and snow. On earth, alternative universes, or other planets. Everyone needs hot cider, a glass of wine, a mug of beer, a bowl of hot stew, and local gossip after landing their spaceship. 😀
I know Westlake declared mystery novels to be dead at around that time, by which he meant commercially: that statement is followed almost immediately by (paraphrasing) “Poetry has been dead for centuries. There are still poets.”
From here in 2016, he seems to have been wrong about mysteries (however bad the market was at the time he said that).
In the SF essay, he declares that he’s going to be sticking with mystery, and was very busy in the field for quite some time thereafter.
But if you remember where that essay appeared, I’d love to look it up.
I read it in an anthology called Murder Ink, which according to Amazon was published in 1977 (http://www.amazon.com/Murder-ink-mystery-readers-companion/dp/0894800043), and I suspect it was a reprint from at least a couple of years earlier. The title of the essay is something like “Voices Inside My Head,” and it’s structured as a conversation between Westlake and three of his pseudonyms.
And now I am reminded of the Italian essayist I read who lamented that the world was so old that everything that could be done had already been done and there was nothing new to do in art or music or ideas or architecture or poetry — written just before the Italian Renaissance first kicked into high gear.
Thanks — that one’s in the collection, too, and it starts out as an interviewer interviewing the various pseudonyms, but things go wrong. The various pseudonyms have different opinions on what shape the mystery is in. They’re responding to claims that the mystery is dead, and what that means. Richard Stark’s opinion is based on the kind of books he writes, Tucker Coe’s on his, and so on. But they all agree there’s not much money in the genre as genre, but if you write “blockbusters,” the rules change.
Mainly, it’s a comedic way to discuss different viewpoints on what the mystery novel is and how various kinds of them have changed, why some series die and others roll along, but it’s a comic piece of analysis.
The SF piece is an essay that appeared in XERO, much earlier in his career, when he’d been selling fiction for two or three years, and it’s straight analysis, talking about his experience and that of others, at a time when writers like Asimov and Randall Garrett and Arthur C. Clarke were making money doing other things than SF because the market was small, poorly-paying and, according to Westlake, very editor-controlled. He makes his case flippantly, pointing out that John Campbell wouldn’t buy any stories in which John Campbell wasn’t the hero, and suchlike things that aren’t complimentary but which his audience would recognize. It’s not analysis from a writer with lots of experience explaining that various forms of the genre have this or that commercial problem, it’s a young writer explaining that, from all he can tell, it’s impossible to make a living in SF and even if it were the editors won’t let you write anything actually good. So even though he had editors asking him for sequels and such, he was quitting cold turkey.
I’m sure people who lived through that era (even by reading it years later) would disagree with him on whether anything of quality got through, but it’s a fascinating read nonetheless.
Yes, that’s “rubber science.” Everyone does it to one degree or another in order to tell the story they want to tell. It still involves thinking about what science can tell us about what the future might look like, and how that can help us understand our society and where it might be going.
Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men was handicapped by the fact that genetics had not yet progressed far beyond Mendel. He was a philosopher, not a biologist. He made a lot of stuff up. That didn’t stop him from thinking hard about what it means to be human, and the book is still very much worth reading.
But “old school” SF authors in the sense I’m discussing will try to be exceptionally rigorous about their science. By depicting interstellar travel at a fraction of lightspeed, depicting the realistic effects of radiation on humans in deep space, or trying to work out what inputs would really be required to terraform another world. This requires constant problem solving. How can your story be told within the chosen constraints? What would need to happen to overcome the challenges?
In “old school” SF, worldbuilding means more than imagining a world with lots of details. You want others to read it and challenge you. Did you get the orbital mechanics right? The ecology? Would your society be sustainable? This is how it’s done.
This is a hallowed tradition with roots in the scientific romances of the mid-19th century (if not earlier). It is a specific literary form. It has produced, and continues to produce, great art, even timeless art.
It is by no means incompatible with good characters and prose. Just because pulp writers of the 50s didn’t always pull it off (even if they wanted to and had the chops, they often couldn’t afford to take the time to do multiple revisions) doesn’t mean we can get away with using that historical fact as a crutch today. I find two-dimensional characters who spout walls of text of physics and math to each other just as annoying as you do.
Nor was I knocking “science fantasy.” I’ve mentioned it was criminal Gene Wolfe didn’t win multiple Hugos in the 80s and 90s for New/Long Sun. But even though it was fantasy, he was also worldbuilding in a sort of old school sense. He started off with very wild and far out premises. That was probably done to avoid the challenges posed by writing “harder” SF and creating worlds that you could really make an honest case for given current scientific knowledge. But still, Wolfe was no less “serious.” He took the far out premises and rigorously worked through their implications for his world and his characters.
Most of the Horatio Hornblower space stories popular today (on both filer and puppy sides of the aisle) don’t do nearly half as well in that regard. And too much of today’s space fantasy doesn’t even try.
The New Wave was great. Some of it was rigorous, some of it was pretty careless in the use of scientific ideas. (IMO the more careless stuff doesn’t hold up as well today.) It didn’t “destroy science fiction” though. I’m pretty sure the decline of hard SF’s central place in the genre dates to the 80s and 90s.
The only people who wanted the Hugos to reward the familiar, same-old same-old were the ones that got their asses handed to them last year by No Award. The rest of the Hugo voters still like things new and challenging.
@Isabel Cooper: We got trouble, right here in Hugo City. With a capital T and that rhymes with P, and that stands for… 😉
@Cheryl S: satirical polemic skewering a narrow subgroup of French intellectuals sounds like tedious, frequently done lit-fic.
@Kendall: You stuck the flounce!
Westlake saying “John Campbell wouldn’t buy any stories in which John Campbell wasn’t the hero”… well, he wasn’t wrong there.
Can you think of an earlier novel similar to Double Star? I can’t but I can’t say I’ve read everything from the 50s either. Novels were shorter and lighter back then, too. Still, sure, he went on to produce much better books.
I can’t imagine how Moon is a Harsh Mistress would not be considered groundbreaking. I could rattle off a dozen books that owe a direct debt to it.
May seem boring when read today, but I think Rendezvous with Rama was more groundbreaking then than it may seem in retrospect. (And Ringworld, for that matter.)
Choosing Stranger in a Strange Land over Starship Troopers? Both are problematic, I’d take both or neither.
Surely Man in the High Castle? Lord of Light? Stand on Zanzibar?
Sure, some Hugo winners were less stellar, or at least they were experiments that haven’t stood the test of time (The Wanderer comes to mind) but even many of those, perhaps, were awarded in recognition of the author’s whole body of work more than the particular novel. And that’s still an issue with the Hugos today. I don’t mind it much, myself. Go ahead and recognize their whole body of work then. Why not. It’s not like we’re the Man Booker Prize committee or anything.