(1) LICENSE TO THRILL. Steven H Silver spotted an unusual collectible in traffic the other day —
I was unaware that Illinois issued such event specific license plate until I saw this one today (June 6). The text around Superman indicates it is for the 40th Annual Superman Festival in Metropolis, Illinois from June 7-10. On the right you can see that the plate expires on June 10, 2018.
(2) SATISFYING SPACE OPERA. Abigail Nussbaum delivers insightful and fascinating sff analysis in “A Political History of the Future: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente”, at Lawyers, Guns & Money.
To which the answer is, because talking about Space Opera gives me an opportunity to point out a glaring lacuna in almost all the works we’ve discussed so far—the way that nearly every one of them leaves out the centrality of culture, and particularly popular culture, in shaping a society and reflecting its preoccupations.
When I say “culture”, I’m talking about several different things, each integral to the believability of any invented world. Culture can mean shared cultural touchstones, classic and modern, that give people a common frame of reference, like humming a pop song or quoting the Simpsons. It can mean characters who are artists, professional or amateur. It could refer to the way that culture can become a political battleground, as we were discussing just a few days ago in response to the news that conservatives want their own version of SNL. Or it could be a discussion of material culture—fashion, design, architecture—and how it allows people to express themselves in even the most mundane aspects of their lives.
It’s very rare, however, to see science fiction try to engage with any of these aspects of culture. Even as it strives to create fully-realized worlds, art—high and low, functional and abstract, popular and obscure, ridiculous and serious—tends to be absent from them. So are artists—try to remember the last time you encountered a character in a science fiction or fantasy story who had an artistic side, even just as a hobby. Even worse, few characters in SFF stories have any kind of cultural touchstones.
(3) KILL YOUR DARLINGS. Delilah S. Dawson tells what she thinks is the real meaning of that traditional writerly advice “kill your darlings.” The thread starts here —
https://twitter.com/DelilahSDawson/status/1005851162988482560
(4) IN THE BEGINNING. The International Costuming Guild presents its research into what fans wore to the masquerade at the Second Worldcon (1940) — “Convention Costuming History: The Pre-WWII Years – Pt. III”.
The earliest Worldcon masquerades were more like informal costume contests, with several well known authors of the time participating. The costumes worn were a mix of original designs, interpretations of literary characters and what would come to be known as media recreations. 1940 – Chicon I
Following the novelty of Ackerman’s and Douglas’ costumed appearance the previous year, a “Science Fiction Masquerade Party” was featured as part of the convention programming.(1) By Forrest Ackerman’s count, there were 25 people in costume there. The co-host masters of ceremonies were fans and writers Jack Speer and Milton Rothman. Judging from the accounts of the party, the occasion was informal – there was no stage, but there were one or two skits, including one by Ackerman and “Morojo” (Douglas) wearing their outfits from the previous year.
There were several reports of who was there for the first official costumed event. Among that first group of convention costuming contestants were…
(5) ICG IN PASSING. The International Costuming Guild’s in memoriam video, presented at Costume-Con 36 (2018) to recognize those in the community lost in the previous year, is posted on YouTube.
(6) WITH CAT IN HAND. Yoon Ha Lee will be doing an Ask Me Anything on June 12.
https://twitter.com/motomaratai/status/1004158546345447425
(7) THIEVES LIKE US. A recent movie premiere inspires B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog’s listicle “12 Fantasy Heist Novels”.
There are genre tropes, and then there are those archetypes that are mainstays of not just science fiction and fantasy, but of popular culture in general. One of the best examples is the character of the Gentleman Thief (who doesn’t always have to be a gentleman). These rogues are witty, engaging, and will rob you blind with a rakish wink and a smile. You can’t help but be charmed by them. From Robin Hood to Danny Ocean, the character is a permanent favorite in books and on film….
The Holver Alley Crew, by Marshall Ryan Maresca
Maresca’s interconnected Maradaine books (multiple series examining life in the same fantasy city) are a real treat. The latest series is about the Holver Alley crew, a ragtag group of formerly retired thieves are forced to return to a life of crime when their new, respectable shop burns down. When they learn the fire was no accident, they are forced to take desperate measures. All of the Maradaine books are a treat, but this one really stands out because of the especially strong characters. In fine Oceans tradition, Asti and Verci are both brothers and ringleaders, and must assemble a skilled crew to pull of a job to rob a gambling house that took everything from them.
(8) HAWKING OBSEQUIES. Are any of you trying to get in? “Stephen Hawking: Ballot opens for Westminster Abbey service”.
The public is being offered the chance to attend a service of thanksgiving for Professor Stephen Hawking, who died in March aged 76.
It will take place in Westminster Abbey on 15 June and up to 1,000 tickets are available in a ballot.
During the service, the scientist’s ashes will be interred between Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
His daughter, Lucy Hawking, said she wanted to give some of her father’s admirers the chance to remember him.
(9) LAST DAYS. Christopher Stasheff’s son, Edward posted the following to his Facebook page on June 9:
My father, Christopher Stasheff, is currently in hospice and expected to die from Parkinson’s Disease within the next two weeks, quite possibly this week. If anyone would like to say goodbye to him, post it as a response here, and I’ll read it to him the next time I see him (I visit him in the nursing home daily). Thanks.
The most recent reports are suggesting that he may only have a day or so left.
Update: His son reports Stasheff died this evening.
My father Christopher Stasheff died at 6:45 PM on June 10th, 2018, surrounded by his wife and two of his children. The other two were able to phone in and say goodbye before he passed. He is survived by hundreds of his students and uncountable fans, and his legacy will live on in all the lives he touched.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY
- Born June 10, 1952 – Kage Baker
(11) VOLLEYED AND THUNDERED. Edmonton’s Hugo Book Club just put out a new blog post, “Is that The Canon in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”, in which they muse about literary awards and their relation to posterity and questions of enduring value. Is science fiction the new Western Canon?
It is worth noting that Harold Bloom’s 1993 list of The Western Canon included only two works that are traditionally categorized as science fiction: Ursula Le Guin’s Hugo Award winner The Left Hand of Darkness and George Orwell’s 1984.
But of Bloom’s list, I would argue the majority of the works cited are less relevant to the broad public – and to a concept of cultural literacy – than the recent Hugo Award winners and popular works of science fiction.
For example, references and allusions to Wolfram von Eschenbach’s 13th century poem Parzival are lost on the broader public, while Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One protagonist Parzival is familiar to many.
(12) ICE NINE. Galactic Journey’s Victoria Lucas has just read the new Vonnegut release – in 1963: “[June 10, 1963] Foma: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Cat’s Cradle)”
When a friend lent Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s newest novel, Cat’s Cradle to me, I thought, “Oh, I know this book!” because I saw, as I flipped through it, the “ice-nine” and “Bokonon” I’d heard people buzzing so much about. So I was glad to read it and understand the phenomenon.
But that’s where my joy ended. Vonnegut is a fine writer. His style is idiosyncratic, askew; this is a novel novel. But no one would accuse him of being optimistic or hopeful about the human future. No Pollyanna he….
(13) BBC RADIO STAR TREK DOCUMENTARY. BBC Radio 4 has just re-broadcast “Star Trek – The Undiscovered Future”, first aired December 2017. It’s available to listen to online right now.
How far have we voyaged towards Star Trek’s vision of the future and what of it is likely to be fulfilled or remain undiscovered in the next 50 years?
Kevin Fong presents archive material of the likes of Leonard Nimoy (Spock) and Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura) talking about the inception and filming of the original Star Trek series, and their thoughts about Roddenberry’s vision of the future and its impact in the United States at the time.
For example, Nichols relates how she had a chance encounter with Martin Luther King the day after she had told Roddenberry that she intended to leave Star Trek after the first series. King told her he was her number fan and almost demanded that she didn’t give up the role of Uhura, because she was an uniquely empowering role model on American television at the time.
For a perspective from today, Kevin also talks to George Takei who played Mr Sulu. Takei laments the ethnically divisive politics of the United States in 2016.
He meets Charles Bolden – the first African American to both command a shuttle mission and lead NASA as its chief administrator. In the age of the International Space Station, he compares himself to the ‘Admiral of Star Fleet’. But the former astronaut also talks about the anger he first felt in 1994 when he was asked to fly the first Russian cosmonaut ever to board an American space shuttle.
Kevin also talk to cultural broadcaster and Star Trek fan Samira Ahmed about the sexual and racial politics of the Original series.
(14) ST:D SEASON TWO. Comedian and new Star Trek: Discovery cast member Tig Notaro opened her set on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert poking fun at her inability to understand any of the tech talk from her Trek dialog. See “‘Star Trek: Discovery’: Tig Notaro Talks Technobabble” at Comicbook.com.
Tig Notaro is one of the new additions to the cast of Star Trek: Discovery in the show’s second season and while she’s excited to be a part of the Star Trek universe she doesn’t exactly speak the language.
Notaro was a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote her new comedy special Happy to be Here. She greeted Colbert by saying his theater was “like a room full of pleasant subspace particles wrapped in a tachyon field of good vibes.”
The comment is obviously a reference to her role on Discovery, though she admits “I have no idea what I’m saying on that show…I can’t even picture what I’m talking about.”
She revealed that her character is human and that she plays Commander Jet Reno, a name she got to choose for herself. As for how she got the job, “They just asked if I wanted to do it” she says.
(15) BAD WITH NUMBERS? Deadline interviewed the president of Marvel Studios: “Kevin Feige Talks Marvel’s Success, Female Directors, ‘Infinity War II’ & How He’s ‘Bad With Numbers’”.
More female directors on Marvel pics: Captain Marvel is the first Marvel title to have a female director at the helm Anna Boden (who is co-helming with Ryan Fleck. And having more female directors behind his superhero pics is a trend he plans to maintain, “I cannot promise that (the next) 20 Marvel movies will have female directors but a heck of a lot of them will,” he said in response to an audience member’s question. The Marvel boss mentioned that agencies are sending more female directors than men for Marvel directing jobs.
On the $1.3 billion success of Black Panther, Feige said that Marvel “wanted to destroy the myth that black movies don’t work well around the world,” and being at Disney with its platinum marketing department allowed the comic book studio to swing for the fences.
“The budget for Black Panther was bigger than Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War, and you can’t do that without the support and encouragement from the leaders of the company,” he said.
Feige also applauded Black Panther director Ryan Coogler’s championing his diverse below-the-line team in Hannah Beachler as production designer, Ruth Carter’s costumes, and DP Rachel Morrison. Their resumes, like Marvel’s directors, didn’t scream tentpole experience, but Feige is grateful he heard them pitch rather than rely on his regular team.
“We can’t imagine the movie without them, and the future movies we hope to make with them,” he said.
(16) JURASSIC LARK. In Parade, “Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard Talk Dinosaurs, Parenting and Friendship”.
After their wildly successful first dino film in 2015, the pair reunited last year to film much of Fallen Kingdom on the Kualoa Ranch in Oahu, Hawaii. But even surrounded by tropical paradise, they faced more than a few challenges on camera, from filming in a chlorinated pool that fried Pratt’s hair and skin to riding in a zero-gravity gyrosphere that made Howard nauseous. And Pratt had to do some awkward face-offs with a velociraptor that wasn’t really there—until the special-effects department created it. He acts out how he’d say to the air in front of him, “Get back, get back . . .” and then “Whoa!” as he’d throw himself on the ground. The camera crew, watching on monitors nearby, “didn’t want to say how stupid it looked!”
(17) SCARIEST MOVIE. The Washington Post’s Monica Castillo, in “The story behind ‘Hereditary,’ the Toni Collette horror movie that scared the bejesus out of Sundance”, interviews Hereditary director Ari Aster who, “in his first feature, marries the horror and melodrama genres into an unnerving movie about grief.”
Aster said he deliberately amped up the drama in the film slowly. “I’m not affected by anything in a film unless I’m invested in the people at the center of it,” he said. “I wanted to take my time and immerse people in this family’s life and their dynamic, which is quite complicated. I just wanted to make a film in the tradition of the horror films I grew up loving, like ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ‘Don’t Look Now’ and ‘The Innocents.’ Films that take their time are very much rooted in character.”
Setting also plays an important role in the creepiness in “Hereditary.” The family’s luxury cabin in the woods has the right dark corners and haunted attics to make it feel like a trap where its inhabitants are left to slowly die. Annie’s miniature houses become a motif. “The miniatures just struck me as a potent metaphor for the family’s situation,” Aster said. “They have no agency, and they’re revealed over the course of the movie to be like dolls in a dollhouse, being manipulated by these outside forces.”
(18) SPONGEBOB TONY. In “How ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ invaded our brains”, Washington Post writer Sonia Rao interviews the cast and creators of SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical, which is up for 12 Tonys as best musical tonight and is making a lot of Millennials very happy.
Tom Kenny never thought SpongeBob SquarePants, a character he originated on the children’s program almost 20 years ago, would one day end up on Broadway. Why would he have? Parents clamp their hands over their ears whenever they hear SpongeBob’s helium voice, let alone his nasal laugh. The anthropomorphized sponge is no Hugh Jackman.
And yet, “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical” is up for 12 Tonys on Sunday, tied with “Mean Girls” for the most nominations. Its resonance with serious theatergoers is surprising until you consider that even as adults, those of us who watched the series can’t shake its omnipresent songs, references and memes. Somehow, it became a cultural earworm.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Lexica, Olav Rokne, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Carl Slaughter, Jonathan Cowie, Steven H Silver, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Niall McAuley.]
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tiny little nits:
(13) formatting: first paragraph is indented like a quote
(16) Jurassic, not Jurasic
Today is the first pixel of the rest of your scroll.
Kip W: Let the appertainment flow!
(9) Sad news about Stasheff
Make your Scroll kind of Pixel even if nobody else Scrolls along.
9) That’s heartbreaking. Sad news.
10) SAdly, rest in peace
3. A lot of great discussions on Twitter about “kill your darlings”. I’m lucky to follow a diverse group of authors from around the world. Below are a few different perspectives:
Jeannette Nj
Rose Lemberg
Ann Leckie
(9) Yes, very sad about Stasheff.
(14) That’s why it’s called acting. Sounds like she enjoys it, though.
2
Leckie’s books have art and music in them. (I still want to see those glass bridges!)
9: That’s very sad. I remember his work fondly even if haven’t read all of it.
(7) A darn fine list if I do say so myself.
(3) KILL YOUR DARLINGS:
Dawson’s post is presumably in response to a couple of other threads–
::googles:: ::eyes widen::
–to a great many other threads yesterday on the topic, kicked off in this thread by Jeannette Ng.
Here are some of the responses and offshoot threads:
* Ann Leckie
* Rose Lemberg
* Alex Acks
* Max Gladstone
* Time Clare
* Arkady Martine
* Chuck Wendig
–and I’m sure I’ve missed a whole bunch more. 🙂 Good stuff, and a lot of different views, aspects and angles.
(Sorry Tim Clare for the typo! I liked your thread; it was awesome!)
My own thoughts on “Kill Your Darlings” is tied to a general observation about writing advice, which is: at some point, you need to decide what it is that you’re aiming for.
And a bunch of writing advice, including “kill your darlings” and the oft-maligned “show don’t tell,” absolutely hinges on knowing what you’re aiming for in order to work.
If a lavish description of a meal is making your story better, then really, please, don’t kill it. For whatever definition of “better” you’re choosing to use — maybe it makes the story more immersive; maybe it’s showcasing some characters moments and reactions; maybe historical detail is one of the big draws of your book. It doesn’t need to be “better” for all readers, because no book is for all readers. But it should make the story better for your readers; the particular ones who should enjoy the particular kind of book you’ve written.
And then, it’s not a “darling.” You’re not keeping it in because you hold it near and dear; you’re keeping it in because the readers will get something out of it. Because the story is better with, than it is without.
And conversely, the only way I can understand “kill your darlings” as “cut out everything that doesn’t advance the plot,” is if you understand the plot as being the only thing that matters. Whereas if you do value character, atmosphere, theme, artistry, anything, then I hope you’ll understand that plot and action can be pared down just as ruthlessly and as effectively as florid prose. Do you really need that car chase? Is that big plot twist really doing anything for you? If you’re writing about a sweet friendship, then maybe a planet-demolishing threat might be too big a distraction from the story’s actual core?
—-
Obviously, the advice isn’t always provided in that way. There’s a lot of reasons I could see “kill your darlings” being dumbed down and interpreted as “this bit is boring; you should cut it.”
But I’m a little leery of some of the threads which edge into a “no rules, no masters!” kind of angle. There aren’t rules. There’s advice. Each piece of advice is one consideration amongst many, and should be weighed amongst the others in each particular instance. Pithy writing aphorisms aren’t the greatest at communicating the intricacies (they’re mostly good as a memorable headline that gets broadcast far and wide); I find discussing what the advice is and how to consider it, to be more helpful than a sweeping “don’t blindly follow pithy aphorisms,” which is kind of pithy in itself.
2) The Nussbaum Challenge: “Even as it strives to create fully-realized worlds, art—high and low, functional and abstract, popular and obscure, ridiculous and serious—tends to be absent from them. . . . try to remember the last time you encountered a character in a science fiction or fantasy story who had an artistic side, even just as a hobby.” It’s late and this is just a start, so I’ll just name some writers who address “culture”: Jack Vance (music, food, varieties of conoisseurship, food, ceramics, food. . .), John Varley, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tom Disch, Nancy Kress, William Gibson, C. J. Cherryh, Eleanor Arnason, Robert Heinlein, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Ian MacDonald. . . .
And of course we have The Culture.
2) Orange chromaturges in the Lightbringer series have a tendency to be artists (one even creates a huge, illusive work of terrifying art across a canvas of nigh-impenetrable fortifications before a battle). Destruction in Sandman enjoys painting even though he’s exceptionally bad at it. Breq from Ancillary Things likes to sing (even though the body she’s in is bad at it). The GSV Sleeper Service in Excession created tableaux using its suspended passengers/specimens. A main character in Lagoon is a rapper. Talking more broadly of culture, there’s climbing (I forget in which Culture novel), gaming (Player of Games, naturally), little touches about tea (Ancillary Stuff), gloves (Ancillary again, also Kel culture in Ninefox)…
Obviously some of this is more recent than others, but there’s some very very recent books there, as well as some that are getting on a bit these days. But really I’m not seeing this gaping void of arts and culture in SFF.
9) Ah, hell. I remember Her Majesty’s Wizard fondly.
As far as killing one’s darlings…my book Castle Hangnail was running long for a middle-grade novel and I reluctantly offered to chop out a few thousand words where the hypochondriac goldfish has an adventure, because I could have done the same work on the plot in about five lines. I loved the goldfish, but…
My agent and editor both came back saying “Nobody touches the goldfish!” So, y’know, sometimes small joyful things are worth having, even if the result isn’t stripped-down Hemingway-esque prose.
(2) I haven’t read the piece yet, so maybe it makes more sense in context. But that does seem a weird assertion; artists and artistry have always been captivating, and there’s no shortage of examples.
Asimov had a number of artists practicing new, weird art-forms, combining sound and light. Orson Scott Card had Songmaster, among several others, and wrote that he realized he was going back to music again and again. More currently, Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota has frequent references to artists and entertainers by avocation (including Thisbe’s movie scents, Apollo’s Iliad, Sniper’s showmanship, the Utopians’ reverence for art…). Some of Sarah Pinsker’s really popular stories have been about art — in a resoure-starved near-future; in a colony ship in space.
Music is cool, art is cool, creativity is cool. And that’s used, inevitably and frequently. I don’t feel like there’s been a dearth.
… I’d better go read the article.
(2) Murderbot’s serial dramas!
(6) Proof of both identity and SJW-ness. Looks to be a mixture of Siamese and tortie, which proves Yoon is a professional. That combo is not for the faint-hearted.
(2) OK, the “try to remember the last time a character had an artistic bent” may have been overshooting a bit. But the focus of Nussbaum’s piece is a consideration on tge interplay between art and culture; how the way a society treats art both reflects that society, and affects it in return.
That’s a narrower scope, but also IMHO a more interesting one 🙂 Even here, I don’t think it’s the rarity Nussbaum makes it out to be (I think Palmer and Pinsker remain excellent examples, in more ways than one), but it also feels like Valente’s Space Opera tackles this unusually directly, and has some unusual things to say.
That is awful news about Stasheff.One of the authors I got into specifically because of my sister’s recommendation.
2) The Raksura stories all feature art and artisans as part of the colony. And the characters notice other cultures’ art as they travel. The Fell don’t have art, or any other kind of creativity; that’s part of what sets them apart.
There’s a whole theme anthology, Space Opera, that focuses on music.
Mercedes Lackey’s “Bardic Voices” series, and the entire Bardic Collegium in the Valdemar books.
Master Robinton. ‘Nuff said. And, more sharply aligned to the theme of the article, the Harpers do deliberately undertake to shape Pernese culture.
Gossamer Axe by Gael Baudino.
The Goblin Emperor has Dachensol Habrobar, who makes and maintains all the signets for the noble families, and Min Vechin, the opera singer with whom Maia is briefly infatuated.
(2)
The second-to-last book I finished was “A Natural History of Dragons”, where Isabella draws and paints. Before that I read (although not finished) where Shallan also draws and paints. One of the main characters of New York 2140 is a TV star. A Fandom for Robots” is about people (and robots) writing fan fiction. That’s just off the top of my head, from this year’s Hugo finalists.
I also think Nussbaum underestimates the way fantasy novels in particular use architecture and fashion to mark class and culture. It’s almost a lazy trope to let the quality of a character’s clothes mark their social status, to have characters from “exotic” cultures marked by odd clothing, and to let new locations that a travelling hero comes to be emphasized by architecture.
(2) SATISFYING SPACE OPERA.
I don’t think Nussbaum is saying no (or few) books do this, rather that more should.
Another good example, in GoT the song Rains of Castamere is not just famous, but notorious, and gets used as a political signifier in some small parts of the plot.
I really liked Space Opera, but after I read it I moved onto The Spaceman of Bohemia, which very unluckily features someone being visited by something that may be an alien or may be a hallucination. After Space Opera I just couldn’t take it seriously, which really wasn’t what the book deserved…
Mark-kitteh: I moved onto The Spaceman of Bohemia, which very unluckily features someone being visited by something that may be an alien or may be a hallucination.
That book features so many basic research fails about astronauts and astrophysics in the beginning, that I kept reading for a while just to see what other howlers it would come up with. I’d love to see Neil deGrasse Tyson do a critique of it. He’d probably need a bottle of whiskey to get through it.
@JJ
I was too busy imagining everyone as pink flamingos to notice the science!
The original “murder your darlings” quote comes from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (as you eddicated peoples know already, natch), and it might be worth looking at it in its original context – which, like so many things, can be found online: On Style.
In that chapter, he’s talking quite a bit about the roles of writer and reader, and the courtesy owed by the first to the second…. The “darlings” he’s advising you to murder, it seems to me, are bits where the writer is writing solely for the writer – whether showing off, or exorcising some personal inner demon, or polemicizing on a personal hot-button topic. It makes a lot of sense, to me. If you’re writing a book, you’re taking up some of your readership’s time, effort and money – it’s only reasonable that you should make sure you entertain them and not just yourself.
The Goblin Emperor has Dachensol Habrobar, who makes and maintains all the signets for the noble families, and Min Vechin, the opera singer with whom Maia is briefly infatuated.
And Maia is obsessed with the jewelry and hair ornaments other people wear. The way he talks about them reminds me of Lady Alys Vorpatril and her various lessons on the statement a person makes with their clothes.
Title credits? Title credits are no good out here, I need something real.
A moment of silence for Christopher Stasheff. The Warlock In Spite of Himself was a childhood fave.
2) One of my favourite art- and artist-centered SFF novels is The Golden Key by Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson, and Kate Elliott. Low-magic alt-historyesque fantasy spanning centuries, in which art influences society and vice versa.
And of course, I love Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sarantine Mosaic duology, which is a low-magic alt-historyesque fantasy… Huh. I might just have noticed a pattern here.
But regardless of how many counterexamples we come up with, I think Nussbaum makes a valid point. We see ardently held political views, hotly debated or used to drive the actions of the protagonists, far more often than we see protest singers expressing the same ideas in ways that are more easily spread. There are plenty of revolutionaries in the annals of SFF, but curiously few artists – singers, authors, dancers, actors, or other, for want of a better phrase, creatives – among their ranks.
(9) Oh, no. I’m so sorry to hear that about Christopher Stasheff. When I was a kid I went through a phase of reading Serious SFF Only. His books broke me of that habit. They also involved Christian faith in a way I hadn’t seen much in SFF before that. If it hadn’t been for an accidental purchase through the SF Book Club, I’d never have discovered him and his work.
@O. Westin: We see ardently held political views, hotly debated or used to drive the actions of the protagonists, far more often than we see protest singers expressing the same ideas in ways that are more easily spread.
The 1632 series.
Seriously.
It’s a thread through my favorite books and short stories in the series: the deliberate development of the arts as a revolutionary and unifying tool.
(I don’t need to reread The Devil’s Opera right now. I don’t need to reread The Devil’s Opera right now. I don’t need to reread The Devil’s Opera right now….)
Condolences to the Stasheff family.
His books were a large part of my teen years. RIP, sir.
(2) and (11): Cuddly Uncle Tom Disch’s “On Wings of Song” turns into a story about how to have a minor artistic career in a economic-political dystopia, and is also listed in Harold Bloom’s “The Western Canon”.
Bloom’s canon also includes Gormenghast, John Crowley’s novels, Brave New World, Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Vonnegut’s Cats Cradle, Alfred Jarry’s Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician, and Harold Bloom’s weirdo fave David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus).
Re: 1940, The Pre-WWII Years
WWII began in 1939.
Re: Kill your darlings. Show, don’t tell.
https://twitter.com/ian_sales/status/1006136100967022592
@5: somehow I had completely missed May appearing as her own characters. I was a little busy during the 1984 show (stage-managing the Boston-in-1989 entry) but should have noticed 1983, when I was eagerly waiting for the next installment of the Pliocene Saga.
@9: I had issues with Stasheff’s work, but I also had a lot of fun with it. I know he was dealing with serious health problems several years ago;
@11: The more I bump up against Bloom, the more I think he was deliberately classist, in the mode of a founding rule of the Boston Symphony that musicians couldn’t play in dance bands even though the orchestra didn’t have a full-length season. OTOH, Bloom was at least pointing to works he thought had staying power; everything I’ve heard about Ready Player One suggests it’s so much about the trivia of its time that it will have little to do with cultural literacy (whatever that is) in the future. I’m also wondering about the writer’s claim that there was a huge row over the 1977 novel Hugo; I don’t remember hearing anyone arguing about it at the con, and that was back when I was circulating enough that I only slept 4-5 hours a night.
@16: I guess acting to nothing-at-all is standard these days; at least Ray Harryhausen gave his actors targets while filming.
@Tasha Turner (extending @3): to me those threads reflect a maxim about every problem having an answer that is simple, easy — and wrong. (There are bits of highly-focused science, such as the gas laws, that can be stated fairly simply; I’m not sure anything trying to hold up a mirror to the world can be.) As an alternative I’d point to an old/sexist/classist rule of etiquette that says a woman should look at her ensemble just before leaving the house and take off one piece of jewelry; I suspect that every piece of fresh-written prose has (in addition to a need for various tweaks) one piece somewhere that really should be taken out — but that doesn’t mean taking out everything that looks good to the author
@Russell Letson: I’m not sure whether it’s cheating to put Lloyd Biggle on that list as many of his stories are about “culture”, from basic music lessons to rediscovering classical music. I sometimes find something enlightening in Nussbaum’s work, but ISTM that she leans toward absolutist positions even when using the language of reasonableness. My immediate answer to her question is my current reading, Beasts Made of Night, in which some of the sin-eaters make grafittesque art out of their experiences. It’s true there are a lot of Bat Durston stories in which culture doesn’t appear (possibly because the market for that sort of work would choke on a he-man lead who stops even to smell the roses, let alone cultivate them), but there’s a lot of room in the SF universe.
@Standback: the Gladstone thread has a wonderful line: “Don’t let your theory of the pot get in the way of the wet clay between your hands.” As does Tim Clare: “If you can’t write dry *and* wet, your fiction lacks range”. Both make enough room to avoid the absolutism of “Kill your darlings!”
@Lee: thank you for pointing out Gossamer Axe; I loved that book but it wasn’t in my foremind.
@Steve Wright: another variation of simple/easy/wrong: “Context is everything.” As you show, pulling the shortest line out of an essay isn’t useful.
@Matthew Davis: the writer might care that some of those are fantasy rather than science fiction — but Cat’s Cradle and Brave New World certainly fit (even given Amis’s argument that the Huxley isn’t real SF because it’s too pessimistic). I wonder what the essayist was thinking; since he included 1984 I don’t see him limiting his excerpts to “intentional” (genre-focused?) SF.
@O Westin In line with the Kay, have you read CHILDREN OF EARTH AND SKY yet? One of the MCs is a painter.
@Lise Andreasen: Yes, but I expect the that’s shorthand for “The Worldcons that weren’t cancelled because of WW2”.
KSR has a lot of artists in his works – a composer/musician in “A Memory of Whiteness,” a sculptor in 2312, and various others.
3) This is absolutely what “kill your darlings” means, and as Steve Wright pointed out above, that’s pretty much what it meant in its original context, too. The fact that there was so much controversy around what it means was, from a professional writing standpoint, frankly embarrassing, like watching a bunch of professional writers publicly argue that the common turn of phrase is in fact “for all intensive purposes” and not “for all intents and purposes”.
11) Have they read Bloom’s book? (I have: several of his books, and corresponded with him briefly.) Bloom is one of those people who makes a pretty clear distinction between “high” literary culture and “low” culture. (I don’t agree with him on that score, but it’s an important point to understand if you want to talk about what he thinks the Canon is and what it should mean and who it should mean it to.) Bloom doesn’t give a millionth of a damn what is or is not relevant to the broader public; popular culture is not the target he is aiming at. He does believe that a lot of the structures the West is built on came from common touchstones and sources of meaning, and he’s not entirely wrong on that score. While he definitely is being proscriptive, in the sense that he believes these works make the foundation of Literature as High Art and are therefore the strongest things Literature has contributed the foundation of culture more generally, the book is, in that sense, also descriptive of the story so far; he doesn’t say the Canon will not, or cannot expand, and in the book he praises some of the efforts to expand it, and indeed expands it in interesting ways himself. And I agree that the efforts to expand the Canon have been valuable and necessary, and have not gone nearly far enough.
That being said, I’m of two minds; I find the idea of a Canon as a useful starting point for discussion, and Canon-building projects feel fun, exciting, and often splendidly subversive when you’re doing them–but I’m also deeply suspicious of them. They are always intensely political and subjective–it’s impossible for them not to be–and people take them far too seriously. They are, also, historical by their very nature; maps of where we think we have been, necessarily incomplete and exclusionary, saying little about the state of where we actually are now or where we go next.
This blog post was a perfectly reasonable take on what the idea of a Canon might mean to modern SF readers, but I feel like hanging it all around a really, really shallow reading of Bloom (though it’s not clear to me they actually read the book at all) seems odd.
Fantasy stories about art: I really need to reread Steven Brust’s The Sun, the Moon and the Stars again one of these years — half is kind of a retelling of a Hungarian fairy tale and half is set in a contemporary artists’ studio.
And that (the contemporary artists’ studio) also puts me in mind of Charles de Lint, many of whose Newford books center around musicians or painters.
When I hear Parzival, I think Wolfram von Eschenbach and Richard Wagner. I didn’t even know that there was a character of that name in Ready Player One.
Both “Kill your darlings” and “Take off one piece of jewellery” is advice I’ve always hated. Not that there isn’t a bit of truth in “Kill your darlings” – certain military SF novels could do with some weapons porn and political rants taken out. As for jewellery, I suppose it’s possible to wear too much, but I hardly ever see it. But then, I probably wear too much for the minimalists anyway.
@O. Westin: The singers in Delany’s “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.”
A rather different example of art and culture in science fiction: Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, with the accompanying CD of “Poetry and music of the Kesh,” and sections of text on such things as Kesh cooking–with recipes–and musical notation. We’re also told, in passing, that one of the things people use the world-spanning computer/AI network for is announcements of/invitations to musical festivals. A minor character has spent a lot of time learning how to use that network so he can find buildings (past or present, anywhere in the world) that seem beautiful to him.
Diane Duane’s Romulans have art – there’s an entire mountainside that’s painted, IIRC. (Klingon opera also comes to mind.)
(2) SATISFYING SPACE OPERA.
I see folks have beaten me to the punch on Leckie, KSR, various Star Trek cultures, Martha Wells Raksura and others.
For SF I’ve got a few ideas. My favorite, the Quantum Thief trilogy, has the Oubliette on Mars where art is important. Then there are the Zoku – do you consider games art? Another is Carve the Sky by Alexander Jablokov – art drives the story.
Another where art drives the story, is Valente’s Space Opera. Then there’s Medusa Uploaded (which I really need to finish – though the coincidences are piling up to a teetering pile that my suspension of disbelief is eyeing suspiciously) where the rebels have a movie club and music motivates the main character and it’s used to conceal the tool they use.
Fantasy is a bit harder, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something as I sit and think on it.
But to the original – if you have a culture, even if it’s in the background, you’ve got a better book. The characters seem more human, more like people and more well rounded. It might just be a quirk, but it definitely helps.
Lise Andreasen: Re: 1940, The Pre-WWII Years. WWII began in 1939.
The U.S. entered WWII in 1941. For Worldcon, 1940 was a pre-WWII year.
Meredith Moment:
Star Trek: TNG 365 by Terry J. Erdmann and Paula M. Block is on sale for $2.99 at The Usual Suspects.
Don’t know if anyone will be interested, but The Big Book of Hap and Leonard by Joe Lansdale is on sale at Amazon US for $1.99 and most of the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters is on sale at Amazon US between $1.99 to $3.99 depending on the title.
9) *SIGH 🙁
2) again. Another thing that was niggling at me as I sleepily posted last night: What about the role of “culture” in other kinds of fiction? Certainly the range of crime fiction could be seen to short-change the arts, though perhaps someone will come up with a composer- or sculptor-sleuth to go with the armies of detectives who are also B&B proprietors, pastry chefs, and the occasional poet-chief-inspector. And while Aubrey and Maturin saw away at string duos between sea battles, I don’t recall Sharpe having an artistic side. (Though I suppose he might be willing to loot the odd small painting, if there’s nothing more portable available.)
Not all SF/F is going to be fully invested in “culture” beyond sketching in some elements as part of world-building–though I’d agree that the best of it is. But adventure stories are about adventuring (as romances are about romancing and detective stories are about detecting), and there’s always going to be a part of that market in which cardboard sets and thin or merely-conventional treatments of cultural background come in a distant second to the delivering the expected kind of story in the foreground.
Mm, if I’m reading the list correctly the first non-USA Worldcon seems to be Toronto in 1948, there wasn’t one outside of North America until 1957’s Loncon, and there wasn’t one in a country that doesn’t speak English as an official language until 1970’s Heidelberg. Worldcon took awhile to embrace the World part of its name.
I would still rather Americans didn’t call 1940 pre-WWII, though. It wouldn’t be that difficult to acknowledge that WWII had already started and just wasn’t impacting on USA daily life yet rather than speaking as if it didn’t start until the USA was attacked. Kind of rude and disrespectful of our dead, especially from an organisation that claims to be international.