Three things make a post, as the old gag goes. So, try this for size:

Do Androids Sleep With Electric Sheep?

That’s the title of an intriguing book I reviewed recently for SF Site; the subtitle reads “Critical Perspectives on Sexuality and Pornography in Science and Social Fiction”, and I just couldn’t pass it up. Funnily enough, I don’t think anyone else expressed an interest… I guess I’ve finally found my niche in the genre criticism ecosystem, eh?

It’s an interesting book, albeit something of a mixed bag. Skip to the money-shot:

Like good science fiction, the material collected in Do Androids Sleep With Electric Sheep? leaves us with more questions than we arrived with; if you can stomach the subject matter (which shouldn’t really appall anyone but the most prudish and conservative, to be honest, though my perceptions may be somewhat skewed), this is prime fuel for your imaginatory engines. The focal character of James Tiptree, Jr.’s story “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” suggests that, as humans, “we’re built to dream outwards” [pp 239], to project our desire onto “the other”, whoever or whatever it may happen to be. It’s an insight that makes more sense each time you read it, and serves to underline the basic commonality between sex and science fiction, or indeed art in general — they are both ways in which we try to subsume ourselves into (or control and dominate over) that which we are not.

Love makes us do strange things, after all.

It really, really does.

The (Schis)matrix reloaded; criticism and subjectivity

I can’t remember where I saw the first link to There Is No Genre, but I do remember Casey Samulski’s opening post made me think [he/she]‘d have interesting things to say in future, and subbing to the RSS feed. Today, that trust was rewarded with a repost review of Chairman Bruce’s Schismatrix (which I fully intended to review after re-reading it late last year… and so it goes) with a coda born of hindsight:

… this really is the tricky part of good criticism. Ultimately, it is subjective. An author can do their best to ensure that a particular effect resonates with his or her readership but it’s no guarantee of that outcome. No two people read something identically. We each take to a work our own experiences, including previous works read, our own sense of beauty, and our own preconceptions about the novel at hand. This is not to say that you cannot have some objectivity in this process – I have read things that I haven’t enjoyed but that I have appreciated for their craftsmanship. Instead, I would argue that objectivity is something of a distant shore to be paddled towards but never landed upon.

Preference. Mood. Taste. These are all culprits at various times and they are inevitable, responsible for sabotaging even the most sober of inspections. In order to criticize well, you must remember that these reign over your judgment, tirelessly skewing your sense of direction. Most importantly, I think you can never pretend that you understand a work completely – there must always be the admission that you are only witness to what you were able to discern and that, like all art, this does not define what is actually there.

Yes, yes, and thrice yes; I always thought that subjectivity was implicit in any and every review ever written, but the peridic cycles of angst und wagling about negative reviews and uppity critics serves to demonstrate that’s surely not the case. And now for the resonant chime in a passing pair of sentences from Jeff VanderMeer in a Booklife post:

… there’s also the uncomfortable truth that no one is ever going to perceive your book exactly the way that you intended for it to be perceived. In coming into contact with the world the text changes, given an additional dimension by readers.

[image courtesy nurpax]

Reviewing while blindfolded

But what if, to stymie future complaints about reviewer bias and preconceptional baggage, you inverted the normal anonymity curve of the reviewing process, namely naming the reviewer (generally uncredited in a lot of non-genre venues, or so I’m led to believe) but concealing the author’s identity (and, presumably, publishing details) from said reviewer?

… the editors of this magazine asked if I would be interested in being part of an experiment in criticism. They were curious what would happen if we inverted the standard “anonymous review” formula—if instead of the reviewer having the cloak of anonymity, we were to keep the book under review anonymous from its critic, and thereby shield it from any and all prejudice—whether positive or negative, whether directed at the author, the publishing house, the blurbers, the cover art, etc. I swore several oaths to stay true to the project (Eds.: “No googling”), and soon enough a book arrived at my house. Its covers, front matter, and endpages had all been stripped, and the spine blacked out with a Sharpie. I didn’t know what it was called or who wrote it or who was publishing it or when. I didn’t know if it was the author’s first or twenty-first publication. Fiction? Nonfiction? Genre? Self-published? I didn’t know anything (and at this writing, I still don’t) except that it wasn’t poetry. What could I do? I began to read.

Rose Fox of Publisher’s Weekly (thanks to whom I found that post) mentions that it mirrors periodic calls for genre venues to anonymise the slushpile – a suggestion plainly motivated by the “good stories lose out to established names” theory of short fiction publication.

The ones most readily identifiable–written by writers with very distinctive voices, or making use of familiar and copyright-protected characters or settings–would presumably be routed directly to the editors anyway, so generally anonymizing the slushpile seems like a reasonable way of reducing possible bias against authors with certain types of names. It wouldn’t do a thing to reduce unconscious bias against certain types of stories, but it would probably make it more obvious, which is not a bad thing.

Moving back to book reviewing, though, the point is made in the comments that with genre fiction, some sort of filtering is required (so that a romance reviewer doesn’t end up with a Greg Egan collection, f’rinstance)… but as I see it, that truism actually weakens the original thesis, which seems to be predicated on the ongoing fiction that there is some sort of objective measurement of quality that can be applied to all writing in the same way. With reference to the above links and quotes, I suggest that the myth of critical objectivity is long overdue for burial; there seems to be an evolving collective consensus on such matters when viewed en masse and at a distance, but once you zoom in close it’s subjectivity and personal opinion all the way down.

That this is unclear to so many people is a source of perpetual bafflement to me, but then so is Dan Brown’s status as a bestseller. So there you go.

You know, the solar system is just brim full of awesomeness. Check out the latest skinny on Mercury, once thought to be an unremarkable rock on the grand scheme of things:

Magnetic tornadoes form when the magnetic field in the solar wind links up to the field generated by a planet, a process called magnetic reconnection. Bundles of magnetic field lines connect the surface of the planet directly to the surface of the sun, and as the solar wind pushes them away from the sun, they twist and whirl like cyclones. On Earth, these cyclones (technically called “flux transfer events”) dance on the ionosphere, creating the Northern Lights and messing up GPS systems.

On Mercury, though, the twisters were 10 times as strong as any magnetic cyclones observed on Earth. With so little atmosphere to interfere, Mercury’s magnetic tornadoes are great spinning chutes that ionized gas can slide down.

“They act as magnetic channels or open windows that allow solar wind plasma from the sun, very fast and very hot, to come right down those field lines and impacts the surface,” said Jim Slavin of NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. When the gas hits the surface, it knocks off neutrally-charged atoms and sends them on a loop high into the sky.

Now there’s a hard sf novum just waiting for someone to write it; maybe a system-wide power supply based around funneling the solar wind onto the innermost planet and then harnessing it somehow? Paul McAuley, I’m looking at you. [image courtesy thebadastronomer]

Hey, look – a post on VCTB that isn’t a link-dump!

Well, it’s kind of a link-dump… Karen Burnham recruited me for another SF Signal Mind-Meld, this time on the topic of the time-travel trope in science fiction. And once again I get to look like a hand-waving waffler among erudite and considered thinkers… at least I have consistency, eh?

[ Re: the title of this post - it's also the title of a vaguely time-travel-ish story that I started a couple of years ago and have, as yet, been unable to finish; a classic case of the amateur fictioneer biting off more than he can chew. Maybe one of these days I'll get round to finishing it. ]

I’m a terrible person. I got in touch with the nice people at the BBC and they were good enough to send me an advance CD of Paul Cornell’s radio play adaptation of Iain M Banks’ “State of the Art”, oooh, weeks ago. It’s due to be broadcast any mnute now, and I’ve still not reviewed it; luckily Farah Mendlesohn does a great job over at Strange Horizons.

I have listened to it, though, and although it’s a little late I recommend that you listen to it too. It’s a great story (and, I think, the only IMB short piece set in the Culture universe, not to mention showing it intersecting with our own ‘real’ world), but it’s also a good conversion thanks to Cornell’s deft hand and the BBC voice actor types. The plummy luvvy tones of the ship Mind are just perfect, and Cornell has kept the important parts while making it an accessible story to the non-genre listener. If you miss the actual broadcast, never fear – the BBC iPlayer is your friend.

I should have said more and sooner, but life’s a bit mental at the moment – I’m posting this from my girlfriend’s front room, running Firefox from a USB stick because I can’t install stuff on her work laptop, you see. And it’s not all holiday skiving, you know – I’m up north to meet some clients and colleagues*.

While I’m here, I’ll just point out that I’ve cropped up in anther SF Signal Mind Meld; this time I unveil myself as the unadventurous reader you always suspected I was by being almost completely unable/unwilling to make any reading recommendations from outside the genre fiction field…

[ * - In the interests of complete honesty, I suppose it should be confessed that one such meeting does happen to be scheduled to take place in a very reputable curry restaurant on Saturday night... ]

The first of a mere three authors among the twenty is Neal Stephenson. He comes in six places after Will Smith. And two after Kanye West.

I suppose I should be grateful he ranks two slots above Stephanie Meyer. Your thoughts?

Jay Lake on the future of written science fiction:

Given that our field has always defined itself, and even prided itself, on outsider status, the mainstreaming of our concerns has pushed us toward specialization as a way of defending our specialness.

Is this a good thing? Probably not, but I’m not convinced it’s bad either. Literature is like rock and roll…new movements come along, but the old ones never die.

I’m sure someone else said something like that once.

So as usual, I’m balls-to-the-wall busy, but not so busy I can’t point out that we’ve got an awesome new story up at Futurismic called “The Right People”.

It’s apparently Adam Rakunas‘ first fiction sale, but if he can write this sort of gonzo stuff consistently I don’t think it’s going to be his last. I’m really chuffed we’re running it, and also pretty chuffed that we got a plug for it over at BoingBoing. w00t – happy Wednesday!

Other news – I’ve cropped up in yet another SF Signal Mind Meld, which gave me the opportunity to trot out my theories on the inherent fuzziness of subgenre boundaries. As usual, other people have more rational and interesting replies on offer, so don’t let mine put you off.

Nightmare in Silicon by Colette Phair

Chiasmus Press, $14.99 PBK, 108pp

ISBN-13: 978-0978549992

***

Billed as a novel, but weighing in on page-count to be something closer to a novelette, Nightmare In Silicon defiantly turns its back on the established sf tropes and styles as its heroine turns her back on her mortality. Colette Phair tells a harrowing tale of the hatred of one’s body, of the alienation of post-modern life, and of the consequences of trying to leave it all behind.

Nightmare In Silicon is a story about Ymo, a pretty down-and-out on the bottom edge of a near-future society who drowns her contradictory narcissism and self-loathing in a haze of hard drugs and promiscuity. Funding her drug habit (and the occasional meal) by submitting to medical tests for small fees, her health is a spiral of decline. The early stages of the book depict a desperate nihilism, a running-away from reality; the only thing that keeps Ymo from complete collapse is the company of others like her. Her greatest fear is to be alone, trapped in her own body, alive but dying.

The fear is magnified when it becomes apparent that she really is dying, but a route beyond mortality presents itself – she can agree to try an experimental procedure whereby her consciousness will be uploaded into a robot body. No pain, no lust, no hunger, no addictions… for poor Ymo, it sounds like a marginally better option than the long cold sleep of death.

Phair’s great triumph in Nightmare In Silicon is to portray the post-human ascension as something truly cold, something unsane. Ymo is almost certainly not sane to start with: her disassociation from the world and the mundanities of physical life may be amplified by drugs and deprivation, but at core she is a broken thing, in need of a gentle help that a stratified world will not provide to someone at her end of the ladder. She swings between pushing her body to the limits of sensation and wishing she could leave it behind entirely, and Phair uses this viewpoint to launch scathing attacks on our all-too-gendered culture; it is inevitable that Ymo sees her body as little more than an object to be abused, because that’s all anyone else ever seems to treat it as.

The technical details of Ymo’s rebirth as an ungendered mechanical being do not intrude into the story; she fades out in the operating theatre, and next thing we know zie is sat in front of Dr. Sleep, the man behind her metamorphosis. Indeed, plausibility isn’t a strong feature of the plot in general – after such a landmark procedure (and the investment of money one must assume it would represent), it seems infeasible that Ymo would simply be sent on zir way once it has been ascertained that she remembers her address.

But so it happens; Phair is less concerned with technical truth than emotional truth, and Nightmare in Silicon is entirely subservient to her exploration of what might happen to a mind separated from its original body. It’s a metaphysical story, and as such its disregard for the more traditional mechanics of narrative storytelling is partially justified, if still somewhat jarring at times; Ymo’s point-of-view is shaky when Phair attempts to move the tale too quickly, and Nightmare In Silicon might well have benefited from being longer and more subtly paced by comparison to its MTV-esque jump-cuts.

What cannot be faulted is Phair’s unflinching vision of what life will be like for the new mechanical Ymo. At first zie is cautiously optimistic, feeling zie has cheated death, fertility and boredom in one smooth side-step, pleased to see how little impact zir new life leaves on the world, and how newly (and dispassionately) awake to its more simple sensations of sight and sound zie is… when zie chooses to be. But soon zie realises that zie has lost something important: zir dreams.

“But you didn’t really dream before?”

“I did, I just wasn’t paying attention. There was something there, but now… The best I can do is forget I’m alive. I can never really get outside what’s happening, you know. I’m always just where I am.”

“That sounds like a real improvement to me, Ymo.”

“But the feeling… ” zie said. “You know when you have a nightmare that isn’t about anything scary, but you’re still terrified. It’s the feeling that makes it that way.”

“And what does it feel like?” he asked.

Ymo sat in silence for half a minute. “Like my life is a coat I can never take off.” [pp68]

Zie realises that emotion and sensation were what defines human life, spending the rest of the book trying to reach back across the chasm zie has leapt over, coming to terms with the cold hard fact that zie can’t.

Nightmare In Silicon is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a happy story. Nor is it brilliantly written – Phair shows more than she tells at times, and hurries to make points whose impact would have been more subtle and enduring if delivered more slowly – but treated as an intersection of feminism and transhuman sf, it peers into the dark corners of the human psyche like no book I’ve read before.

The body is meat, as the transhumanists tell us: a flawed vessel to hold the fragile thing we call consciousness whose demands can drive us to the edge of sanity, whose lumpen mortality ties us to a daily animal grind. However, Phair has realised what the transhumanists haven’t – mortality is what defines us. Nightmare In Silicon is a flawed novel, but it’s evidence of a promising writer in the making; when Phair can match her ideas with prose of equal calibre, she’ll be a force to reckon with.

“… the short fiction space is actually the equivalent to the club scene. It’s going to the underground place where people gather to dance to the new music, the experiments and the different sounds. Short stories as the white labels, dubplates and electronic battle weapons.

(And Bruce Sterling turning up with a laptop at 1am like Roedelius or a demented Bob Moog.)”

Yes. This is as it should be. This is the club I want to build.

The title says it all, folks – Mike Harrison rides again. Celebrate in whatever way you see fit.

w00t!