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.

Nor is it a drill – my review of Walter Jon Williams‘ This Is Not a Game went up at Strange Horizons yesterday, so you can go read my attempts to taxonomise a genuine (and really pretty decent) hybrid of near-future sf and technothriller.

In some respects I’m kind of grateful it hasn’t generated the same degree of fierce controversy as the review preceding it (or, indeed, any feedback at all)… though the mean little voice at the back of my head likes to tell me that’s probably because my opinions are pedestrian and equivocal.

Shut up, mean little voice.

[In case you were wondering, I've used the US editon cover art here because I was distinctly underwhelmed by the UK version. YMMV.]

Yeah, slacking off this week, for a whole assortment of reasons – but principally because I played a gig last night and am hence very much the worse for wear. But it went pretty well, and we’ve been offered our first support slot at a big venue (way off in October) so we’re pretty stoked.

If you’re really hankering to read some of my pontifications, though, you can pop on over to issue #4 of Fruitless Recursion, where my review* of Reading Science Fiction is now available to one and all.

Have a good weekend!

[ * It kinda mutated into a discussion of potential new platforms for collaborative criticism and dialogue around science fiction. What can I say - non-fic collections designed with generalism in mind are hard to review in any interesting fashion. Selah. ]

Some RSS feed synchronicity for you; juxtapositions and contrasts FTW.

First, Seth Godin on transparency:

Science & Islam, a History – Ehsan Masood

Icon Books, HBK £14.99 RRP; 8th January 2009

ISBN-13: 9781848310407

###

Accompanying a BBC television series that I’ve not seen, Ehsan Masood’s Science & Islam, a History is a readable pop-sci-history book and a great introduction to what lies behind the veil of the mythical Dark Ages, which I remember being taught were a period of scientific and philosophical vacuum. Behind the curtain of Western Europe’s descent into superstition and ignorance lies a largely untold story – that of the scientific achievements of the Islamic peoples. Continue reading “Book review: Ehsan Masood – Science & Islam, a History”

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.

A website called The Short Review has just republished a review of the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume 2 which I wrote for Interzone a while back.

Evidence arises, if such were needed, to suggest that a review should be about the book, and nothing more.

To make myself perfectly clear, I think both Pat and Simon Spanton have some good points to make in that exchange (though I side more with Spanton’s definition of hype, because it is the one that most closely matches my experience).

However, the echo-chamber chorus in the comments who seem unable to actually detect the nuances of the argument beyond “hey, that editor guy just disagreed with a blogger we like, booo” is enough to make me want to headbutt a desk. So, for clarification:

Sending out advance review copies of a book and then reporting on the positive ones is not hype. It is marketing of the old school, merely done at a more rapid rate.

Hype is hard for people to spot because it’s a part of their daily diet; anyone who buys a tabloid newspaper or magazine, or who watches commercial television, invites hype into their lives on a four-times-hourly basis. This is a wood-for-the-trees issue.

As someone who sees it from both sides, at least as far as the music industry is concerned (and no one does hype like the music industry), let me tell you what hype is: hype is tabloid stories about the artist falling out of a nightclub drunk with white dust under their nose; hype is endless puff pieces in the mainstream media where the artist is portrayed as godlike yet still accessible; hype is, in other words, promotional material for an item THAT HAS NO CONNECTION TO THE ITEM ITSELF AND EXISTS ONLY TO REPEAT THE ARTISTS NAME AD NAUSEUM.

The irony of people piping up with comments along the lines of “yeah, well, by getting this email exchange posted, Spanton’s just extending the book’s time in the spotlight” is palpable. Right on, guys – if he was doing that, the last thing you’d want to do was, oh, I don’t know, chime in on the debate yourself? Wouldn’t want to fuel that corporate hype machine any, would you? Now, what time does Big Brother start?

[ Full disclosure - Richard Morgan is a client, and I haven't yet read The Steel Remains. My opinions expressed here are my own, and do not represent the opinions of any of my clients, past present or future. ]

IMPLIED SPACES by WALTER JON WILLIAMS

Night Shade Books hardback, 256pp, RRP US$24.95, ISBN 978-1-59780-125-6 – June 2008

Night Shade Books must know that people like myself – despite believing ourselves to be sophisticated and resistant to slick marketing and simple sub-genre categorisation – are actually easy marks. I caught sight of the gorgeous Dan Dos Santos cover of Walter Jon Williams’s Implied Spaces, noticed it was described as a “novel of the Singularity”, and I just had to read it. Thankfully, this swift little novel is rewarding in proportion to its promise.

The upfront marketing makes more sense once you start reading, because Implied Spaces starts off reading more like a Middle Eastern fantasy, and stays that way for a good three chapters. Our hero Aristide is a travelling warrior-poet with a talking cat who gets mixed up in a conflict with a notorious and fanatical gang of caravan bandits in a sort of remixed Arabian Nights scenario.

While there are subtle clues for the experienced reader of sf that all is not as it may initially seem, it’s some time before the setting is revealed to be the immersive simulation that it actually is. It’s a brave move on Williams’s part – one that an author of lesser reputation could probably not risk taking – and it has the desired effect of bonding us to Aristide and his complex fighting-philosopher persona.

It transpires that Midgarth, the region where Aristide was roaming, is one of many “pocket universes”, created by posthumanity through wormhole-related jiggery-pokery as part of a civilisation-wide reaction to the Existential Crisis – the question of what-to-do when you’re functionally immortal and technologically omnipotent. Williams manages to humanise posthumans with this neat and believable philosophical sleight-of-hand, while simultaneously retaining all the aspects that make them fun to read about, resulting in a civilisation that resembles Iain M Banks’s Culture in some respects.

The big difference is that in the Culture, conflicts begin at the fringes; in Implied Spaces, Williams has the rot setting in at the core. Williams has a faster pace and sparser style than Banks, too – once we’re out of Midgarth and Aristide is revealed to be a much bigger player than was initially apparent, we move rapidly through escalations of crisis that bring posthumanity to the brink of extinction in pretty short order.

Despite the setting, Implied Spaces has a familiar sf-nal plot shape, and Aristide has more than a hint of the Heinleinian Capable Man about him. But this is where the value of those early chapters comes into play; we’ve already learned that there’s some genuine contradiction and compassion beyond the adaptable have-a-go hero, and we’re less tempted to dismiss him as a Mary Sue as a result.

Williams also invokes Golden Age sf in his battle scenes and their dispassionate mega-deaths, which are ludicrously (and enjoyably) immense; many reviewers have already compared Implied Spaces to Doc. Smith’s output, and while I’ve not read the Lensman books I know enough of them to see it’s a point well made.

I suspect there’s more than simple homage at play, however. In fact, to be blunt, I think Williams succeeds in having his cake and eating it, delivering sly winks all the while. After all, what’s the fun in painting a huge canvas if you can’t play games in the details?

Though Draeger was centuries old, her biological age was never more than sixteen: she wore her hair in ponytails that dropped from high on her head nearly to her waist, and she had equipped herself with eyes twice the size of the human norm. All the humans in her division were industrial designers from New Penang, and they had equipped their fighters with picturesque but non-functional innovations: weird frills, decorative antennae, brilliantly-coloured camouflage projections, and full sets of teeth.

“Death For Art’s Sake!” Draeger cried, the divisional motto, and her division kicked its way through piles of wrecked robots and swung over to the attack. [pp189]

You can picture the grin Williams must have worn as he typed some of these passages – because unless you’re a more cynical reader than myself, it’ll be the same one that’s plastered on your own face. This is another commonality Williams shares with Banks, these nudges and wry subtexts; their styles are very different, but they play the same game. Other examples include Williams’s deft posthuman spin on the hoary B-movie zombie trope; enjoyably schlocky, but a convincing threat within the framework of the fictional space.

As should be expected from a “novel of the Singularity”, Implied Spaces is knowingly postmodern. Williams reappropriates old riffs and gags, takes humour seriously and seriousness flippantly, tacitly acknowledges the book’s status as a fictional text within a universe of other fictional texts (naked in-genre references ahoy!) but never entirely steps outside of the pact with the reader – although he more than occasionally taps on the glass of the fourth wall and winks.

Williams isn’t just writing the disposable pulp that you could easily treat it as. The book is shot through with some surprisingly rich philosophical issues that show he’s gotten to grips with the real human implications of a post-Singularity civilisation in a way that few writers achieve, as well as working in contemporary themes like religious extremism and the surveillance-society panopticon.

There’s genuine food for thought behind most of the plot twists, and plenty of good old-fashioned sensawunda – in fact, given the recent rush for that particular bandwagon, I’m very surprised that Night Shade didn’t think to push Implied Spaces as a Young Adult novel. It’s got all the flash-bang gosh-wow and clear plotting that the YA market demands, but also contains deeper layers to reward the older (or simply closer) reader. It’s fast, fun and smart – and you can’t ask for much more than that from a posthuman space opera.

The Sam Gunn Omnibus by Ben Bova

Tor Books, 704 pp; $29.95 HBK (US RRP); ISBN 978-0765316172; pub. Feb 2007

As the title suggests, the The Sam Gunn Omnibus is a fix-up novel that collects all of Ben Bova’s stories about the eponymous hero, written for and published in the US science fiction magazines of the late 1980s and early ’90s.

So, who is Sam Gunn? He’s the boom-bust entrepreneur incarnate, an embodiment of laissez faire capitalism in space exploration who names spaceships after free-market economists and sees a profit in every problem, large or small. He’s also a reincarnated Huck Finn in a space suit; a tireless braggart and womaniser; the natural enemy of rules, regulations and corporate methodology. If it wasn’t for his redeeming habit of helping out his friends en route to his next pile of riches, you’d have to hate him on principle – and most people already do.

And that’s as far as it goes for character development. Gunn is an avatar, a plot device through which Bova explores and exploits the solar system using scientifically plausible methods that governments and corporations have so far refused to use, for various reasons. As such, these tales of the first businesses, hotels and habitats in orbit should be hugely relevant in this era of nascent space tourism operations, inspiring grandiose dreams of a brighter bolder future for our species.

And they might still have been, if the stage wasn’t hogged by the overbearing and improbable Gunn. The other characters are no better – a roster of crude geopolitical stereotypes and caricatures – and it is probably the attitudes implicit in these characterisations that most clearly date these stories as relics of a bygone era. The life of Sam Gunn reads like an apologia for greed and misogyny, and even readers sympathetic with Bova’s yearnings for the human race to escape the gravity well may find themselves tiring of the same successful-underdog plot continually reiterated against a slightly different backdrop.

Perhaps I’ve just missed the point, even though Bova’s introduction suggests that there is no point to miss. As pure escapist wish-fulfilment, the Omnibus succeeds, but the reader in search of true sensawunda may wish to search elsewhere.

[This review was originally published in Interzone some time early in 2007; the precise issue number currently escapes me. It is offered in lieu of more substantial and original content during this particularly busy week.]