Welcome to part three of a rambling email-based discussion of Iain M Banks’ Matter between Niall “Vector” Harrison, Jonathan “SF Diplomat” McCalmont, James “Big Dumb Object” Bloomer and myself.

Make sure you check out parts one [does it Matter to you?] and two [mind over Matter], else you may find yourself a little lost. And if you’re the sort of person who gets twitchy about spoilers, I’d best warn you that [pirate voice]‘ere be many spoilers, me hearties[/pirate voice].

[ For the sake of context it may be worth pointing out that "the interview" we keep mentioning was the BSFA event where Farah Mendlesohn interviewed Banks ... which was a fascinating insight into Banks as a person, but somewhat obfuscatory from the perspective of attempting to actually get beneath the skin of the man's books. ]

I’m particularly proud of my conjectural thematic sandcastle that I build at the end. If anyone who’s read Matter would like to tell me that they can vaguely comprehend how I might possibly have conceived of that idea, that’s be just great. That said, calling me a nutcase is probably the easier option. YMMV.

Paul: By my calculations, my tardy response signals the requirement for another question, so I’ll step up to the plate with:

What did Matter say to you? What was the theme, as perceived by you as reader, and how was that theme expressed at various levels?

Jonathan: To me Matter is a book about social class.

This operates on two levels. Firstly, on an individual level we have the sense of class that drips from Hausk’s children as a result of their childhood educations: Ferbin as the Diplomat and Orumen as the Scholar. They’re also loaded. Their lives are completely alien to those of other individuals from their own culture who have to try and pull together a living. What is interesting about this portrayal of class is that while we are told that the Empire of Hausk the conqueror is something he created in his lifetime, the society is already showing signs of being hide-bound, with clueless upper class generals and spoiled rich kids playing at being knights while the actual business of fighting a war takes place thousands and thousands of kilometers away. It’s a very fast progression.

The second level on which Matter’s depiction of social class operates is on the civilisational level. In Excession, and arguably even way back in Consider Phlebas, we saw that the Culture universe has always had quite a strict pecking order with some civilisations being clearly less developed — both morally and technologically — than others. Banks has flirted with the idea that this hierarchy exists purely in the minds (and Minds) of the Culture, who are endlessly smug in their moral certainty. However, Matter suggests that social class also affects galactic civilisation: Elder civilisations sit back while younger and less advanced cultures desperately scrabble for position and patronage, in a manner reminiscent of Ferbin’s servant.

The end result is one of complex social stratification and a very clearly defined status quo, almost reminiscent of that present in many of the more romantic works of the fantasy genre; we even have a Big Bad whose ultimate motivations are never really discussed but who we know is bad because he threatens the status quo in a most destructive manner.

Niall: “Clearly defined status quo” – Yes. As you say, hierarchy is the key to Matter. I liked how a character’s position in that hierarchy influenced how they interpreted, well, just about anything. Anaplian, for instance, considering her father’s career from her Cultured perspective, finds herself unimpressed, thinking of him as “just another strong man, in one of those societies, at one of those stages, in which it was easier to be the strong man than it was to be truly courageous”. Moreover, to her, the development of societies through such stages is “as natural and obvious as the progression of a star along the main Sequence, or evolution itself”. (How to make history interesting to sf readers: compare it to stellar physics.) But equally, it’s made clear that the leaders of Sarl – both Hausk, and tyl Loesp after him – know exactly where they sit on the great galactic ladder, and unsurprisingly resent it more than a little. So they seize what opportunities the societies they perceive as higher offer them (indeed that’s how Anaplian came to be given to the Culture in the first place – in exchange for ideas that are slowly kick-starting an industrial revolution on the Eighth) in pursuit of a “glitteringly pragmatic future”. I think there’s even a moment when tyl Loesp thinks to himself that he hopes such brutality as defines his life will become obsolete. (Which makes him so much more satisfying as an antagonist than the straightforwardly evil Luseferous in The Algebraist. But maybe I’ve beaten that drum enough.) To achieve that goal he’s willing to allow himself and his people to be used quite nakedly. Paul, I believe this is your cue to mention postcolonialism.

Anyway, all of that means that I would say that intertwined with class, and as important to the book, is the question of what freedom means. There are characters like Oramen, who are obviously not free and characters like Anaplian, who in theory are ultimately free, but in reality are constrained in subtle ways. Oramen puts it this way: “while [inhabitants of Optimae civilizations] had what appeared to be complete freedom within their societies, the societies themselves had very little freedom of movement at all. […] There was simply not much left for them to do on any grand scale.” One of the things that made me warm to Oramen, in fact, is the way he was able to come to these realizations without (unlike Ferbin) being beaten over the head by grand revelations … meanwhile, Anaplian is wrestling with the fact that interventions that on the face of it will relieve oppression will actually “subtly, incrementally but most certainly remove all freedom and dignity from the very people one sought only to help”. If you like, it all comes down to this speech that Shoum gives, when Ferbin finally finds him:

“You find yourself the unintended victim of a system set up specifically to benefit people like the Sarl, prince; a system which has evolved over the centieons to ensure that peoples less technologically advanced than others are able to progress as naturally as possible within a generally controlled galactic environment, allowing societies at profoundly different civilisational stages to rub up against each other without this leading to the accidental destruction of demoralisation of the less developed participants. It is a system that has worked well for a long time; however, that does not mean it never produces anomalies or seeming injustices. I am most sorry.”

All the Culture novels are, in some sense, Omelas problems – what is the cost of maintaining utopia? What Matter does most satisfyingly is attack this question (or this sort of question – what is the cost of achieving and maintaining civilization) in a setting that is politically intricate and resonant with our own history, while keeping alive the sense that it is a grand and important and universal question. It investigates specifics without getting lost in those specifics.

James: I thought there was going to be some “going on a journey” theme/message, but apart from the fact that everybody went somewhere (and some came back) I don’t think that very much can be made of it.

The Galactic hierarchy left me thinking that if I had to live anywhere in that universe it would have to be in the midst of the Culture, minding my own business and living the high life. Why would anyone bother working for Special Circumstances? Even if you had to join SC to get “into” The Culture, why not then leave and take it easy? I don’t think any of the SC operatives’ motives convince me. Having said that, the person at the bottom of the pile, and not Culture, is the one who survives, but maybe more by luck than anything else.

Jonathan: That’s actually an interesting point. It occurred to me a while back that ideology seems to have drained out of SF. Heinlein’s works may have essentially became fora in which he could appear as an appropriately father-like Mary Sue and then mouth off about whatever political issue was getting his goat at the time, but I think that nowadays genre is struggling to keep in touch with the idea of people being genuinely politically motivated.

The Culture books are weird in that they’re frequently political but the politics aren’t particularly fine-grained. The result is that you have characters working for SC out of a genuine desire to further the political aims of SC but as those aims are frequently unclear, the politics serve quite poorly as character motivation, merely resulting in lots of people being enigmatic and secretive.

I think that type of writing works in morally simplistic universes as characters can be secretive, enigmatic, maybe a bit ambiguous but ultimately good. Once you remove that easy moral safety net and you have to deal with real issues that motivate real people, it becomes a lot more tricky to make it convincing.

Paul: OK, the theme of Matter. Well, the clue is in the title, and even gets referenced quite explicitly a little over half way through [page 340 or so in my ARC]. Ferbin and Holse are talking to Hyrlis about surveillance, reality, truth and the Simulation Hypothesis (though not in those terms, natch). Ferbin (true to form) ignores the revelations, but Holse has the instinctive grasp, and so Banks feeds us the core of the theme through Hyrlis to Holse and out onto the page.

“If we assume that all we have been told is as real as what we ourselves experience – in other words, that history, with all its torturings, massacres and genocides, is true – then, if it is all under the control of somebody or some thing, must not those running that simulation be monsters? How utterly devoid of decency, pity, and compassion would they have to be to allow this to happen, and keep on happening under their explicit control? Because so much of history is precisely this, gentlemen.”
[...]
“War, famine, disease, genocide. Death in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbiter of a game would set up the initial conditions to such pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.
[...]
Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality – produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw – can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think [...] could encompass such purposefully envoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness which saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility.”

The theme is certainly connected to hierarchy, but the human hierarchies are mirroring the bigger one – the hierarchy of truths, of actualities.

Now the problem is that I can’t put this into words very well, because it was one of those revelatory things that rolled on in from the sidelines while I was reading the passage in question. I suppose the best way of grasping toward the feeling it produces when I think is to talk about Russian dolls of reality – not stacked universes or dimensions or anything (though they, again, mirror the same thing) but realities as perceived by players within them.

(Banks’ love of games manifests here as well – I think he’s saying that ultimately life, consciousness, sentience etc is a game that the universe plays with itself (like an only child, perhaps?). Complexity increases as we move toward entropy and heat death; as energy coalesces into matter. Matter is an emergent form of complexity – maybe Einstein’s God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but there’s evidence that the universe isn’t averse to rolling for snake-eyes while it waits for the bus. But I digress.)

Those perceived realities have the added complication of intersecting in time and space – they are conceptual territories that share space-time with the territories of others, and so matter goes to war with matter, over matter …

I’m not explaining this well, am I? I really need to read the whole thing again with an eye for the clues and intrusions of this theme (just in case I have in fact invented the thing out of whole cloth without realising it). But I think it was more obvious because I’d been utterly buried in Brasyl prior to reading Matter, which uses a similar idea in different ways.

In short, I’m saying something like Jonathan, but I see the layering of perceived realities reaching out way beyond notions of class and civilisation, and into the way everything interacts. The class thing is just one facet, one expression of the overarching principle. From the mighty empires, transcended races and Cultures and so on, right down to ticks on horses, and chemical reactions. The WorldGod is, to Ferbin, a god. To Hyrlis, it’s just an unhinged and inscrutable member of a mostly transcended elder race. Same corporeal entity, different things to different people – and the way they see it is a function of the reality they perceive.

This is why the Shellworld is such a great set-piece. It’s not just an awesome sensawunda BDO, but a mirror of the bigger idea – nested realities, each with their own ecology of sentience that makes no sense to someone or something at a different scale.

And this is why I think Holse is chosen as the person who can actually grok it, even though it takes him a while. Holse can understand (and ultimately manipulate) hierarchy because he always saw himself as somewhat aloof from it. It doesn’t control him in the way it controls others because he is more aware of it as a system, as a set of interlocking rules and principles. He doesn’t see monarchy as some expression of divine right; monarchy simply is, and he deals pragmatically with things as they stand. This makes him a survivor, and ultimately an agent of change.

Because Holse, you see, is the Culture in microcosm.

James: All I’d add to that is that at Alt.Fiction Banks said that he used the title Matter because it was the working title for The Steep Approach To Garbadale, so he used it again to annoy everyone on the interwebtubes…

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.]

OK, you’re going to need roughly an hour, so bookmark this post and come back later if you don’t have the time right now. But I promise that sixty minutes of invested time will be of huge benefit to you, whatever sort of creative work you do. SRSLY.

First of all, you should read this New York Times article about Jan Chipchase (and consider subscribing to his Future Perfect blog while you’re at it). Here in what we used to call the First World we often talk about “revolutionary technologies”, but from our position of privilege we misunderstand the term completely; Chipchase is out there in the dust and monsoons of developing nations discovering how mobile phones really are revolutionising people’s lives in small but tangible ways, and trying to discover how to make them do so more effectively.

“This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on.”

It’s a fascinating piece, and I seriously suggest you read it - especially if you’re a fiction writer. It’s about a lot more than just market research, and there are the seeds of a thousand stories in there.

But that’s just your appetiser. The main course is the following video of Bruce Sterling giving the closing talk at an interface design conference in Germany last year. [via BoingBoing]

Even allowing for my fanboy filter amplifying the impact, I think this forty minutes of thinking will blow the top of your head clean off. If you can watch it as a writer of science fiction (or an artist, web developer, or pretty much anything else) and then email me afterwards and tell me honestly that there was nothing there you needed to know, I will give away all my worldly possessions and take up an itinerant lifestyle as your devoted disciple, spending my days sat in the dust by your feet hanging on your every word.

Basically, bad science fiction makes the same mistake made by bad design - it fails to take into account what people actually want. And people want to not have to think.

Watch … and take notes. You’re going to need them.

There’s been much in the way of writerly foresight from Jason Stoddard in recent months; plenty of people have been willing to suggest the novel will die (and less people are willing to contest the proposition as time goes by), but Jason is the only person that I’m aware of who is doing concrete thinking about future markets for creative writing from the POV of the writer.

Dude, where’s my market?

Additionally, he’s revived his popular metafiction theme. Popular metawhuta? In a nutshell, BoingBoing and io9 are popular metafiction … as well as proof that people are more than willing to read if you just put the right stuff in front of them. As Jason says himself:

“I’d like to see the science fiction magazines succeed. I’d like to see science fiction become more relevant. I’d like to see it come back to genre that is actively leading us forward, instead of telling us “there’s no use, we’re all going to die anyway.” Unfortunately, there’s little I can do to help the publications directly, so maybe this, in some small manner, will help point the way.

After all, BoingBoing grew organically. It didn’t take millions of dollars in advertising or the combined might of a television network to launch. It occupies a space where science fiction could be.”

Right; I know this first-hand. Now that I’m running Futurismic, thoughts like this weigh heavily on me - how the hell am I going to get that site to pay for the fiction and its hosting fees (let alone make anything on top)? There’s masses of traffic out there, after all; you just have to attract it to your content.

As is probably plain from my rather bitter comment on Jason’s post, I kind of resent the fact that io9 can post 90% fluff and 10% substance and still pay the payroll; it says sad things about the state of the market for fiction, and makes me wonder if I’m barking up the wrong tree entirely.

The readers are out there, they just don’t know where the good writing is

But then I look at the OMFG-Zerg-rush!!!1 we had on Leonard Richardson’s story when Cory Doctorow gave at the thumbs-up at BoingBoing - over 7000 page views within the space of a week, and a forty-deep comment thread of people raving about how awesome the story is. Some people obviously do want to read good fiction, and really enjoy it when they do so.

Hell, look at this item I included in last week’s Friday Free Fiction round-up at Futurismic - a busy gaming and media webzine is doing what its paper equivalents say is pointless, and experimenting with publishing fiction. Fiction that they’re paying the writers for. But they can do that - they have traffic, they have budget, they have leeway. They have the opportunity to throw sh*t at the wall and see if it sticks. I really hope it does, too - more paying markets can only be a good thing, I reckon.

Orienteering

So, where do I go from here? Arguably Futurismic is way closer to the contemporary metafiction model than most other genre webzines out there, and it also has the advantage of domain longevity - it’s a brand that has lasted a while. We’ve got a strong RSS subscriber base, too, and I’m doing my best to grow it further by expanding what we offer - a new non-fiction column goes up later today, as it happens.

But how can I turn that traffic into enough dollar to pay the fiction writers, cover the server bills and possibly throw a bit of cash at my non-fiction contributors too*?

There are options, sure, but they’re mostly not pretty.

Text Link Ads

There’s a couple of direct text-link ad companies who would pay pretty decent money for ads on Futurismic, but they have been proven to be a fast route to a Google blacklisting as they’re essentially a way of selling on PageRank to sites who are, shall we say, “not entirely deserving of it”. Ethically, I’m unwilling to cross that particular Rubicon - sure, there’d be enough money to pay pro rates for fiction, a reasonable column fee and chuck my blog team a bone or two, but what if I ended up boosting the online profile of some hate-group or snake-oil pharma company? Not on my watch, Admiral.

Adsense

Google AdSense offers me little control over what sort of ads are displayed (how often do you see vanity press ads on genre blogs with AdSense? - too often), and I know for a fact I’ve not clicked on an AdSense box in years; I’m not going to patronise my readers by assuming that they will do something I wouldn’t. Same applies to similar contextual ad platforms; the amount of actual clicks and/or impressions we’ll get just isn’t enough to make it worthwhile without crowding out the content with a bad signal-to-noise ratio. We’re too damn niche.

Affiliate marketing

Funnelling traffic to Amazon or similar might work if we accrue more organic click through, but isn’t going to pay the bills at current traffic rates; see above, essentially.

Direct sponsorship

I’d be willing to look into this, but I have no idea how I’d go about doing it, short of a hefty barrage of very polite cold emailing to publishers. I’d also insist on a made-public declaration from both parties that there would be no preferential coverage or favouritism. Independence and transparency is crucial for credibility, AFAIC.

Alternative ad networks

The current solution, namely Project Wonderful, has everything a niche scene like genre publishing should want out of an ad brokerage system. Seriously - I really can’t overstate the potential I see in this system, not just for Futurismic but for the whole industry’s online marketing business. Total control for advertisers and publishers; fine grain locational selection; precise budgeting, flexible low-scale payment options … it ticks all my boxes. The only problem - there’s not enough advertisers of the right type using it yet.

That last point is a shame - I think about small press publishers with a tight budget, and I know they must want to be able to target their online ads more effectively than paying for some keywords. They want to know what sort of audience those ads are going to, what those eyeballs are used to seeing and what they think is cool - they need demographic precision.

I can offer them that with Futurismic - 7000 views of one page over a week by people who expressly have an interest in written science fiction has to be worth something, right? - and so could a score of other sf webzines and blogs. But they don’t know it’s there yet - most internet ad platforms are aimed at traffic sources an order of magnitude larger than Futurismic.

So I guess yours truly has to go and be an evangelist on Project Wonderful’s behalf … which makes you realise just how crafty a business model they actually have!

The thesis

But I’m kind of digressing from my original point, which is that there’s definitely a market for fiction as long as you aren’t charging the reader for it directly. Jason also has things to say about how freeconomics effects you as a writer (in a nutshell: play the long game outside the box and you’ll be fine), but it’s us publishers that are caught in the middle. It’s our business model that’s dying, and hence the onus is on us to find a new one that works.

And this ain’t no violin solo, either - this is me thinking out loud, basically, but doing so in front of an audience I hope might chime in with some thoughts of their own. But to boil down my current thinking to the nugget - there’s enough money in genre publishing ad budgets to support the short fiction market in webzine form. I really believe this, and until I see concrete figures to the contrary I’m not going to abandon that belief - because webzines don’t need a lot of money beyond the fiction fees.

The problem is the book publishers are currently throwing their money at ineffective and imprecise advertising channels, and probably only because they don’t know the alternatives are there. If I can get them to a better channel that sends them actual interested buyers and exploits my currently under-used eyeball share, I’ve killed two birds with one stone and solidified the future of what I believe is a worthwhile short fiction market.

So, I have a strategy. What I don’t have are the tactics; I get the feeling the only way I’m going to find those is by getting muddy in the trenches and seeing what works. But if y’all have some advice (or have noticed the inevitable gaping hole in my tapestry of logic), my ears are wide open.

[ * Just to be perfectly clear, I was resigned to the idea that Futurismic will never pay me a red cent long before I took the plunge to take control of it. I am willing to subsidise it out of my earnings as a freelance for the foreseeable future ... which is a lot easier to say now that there actually are some freelance earnings on the horizon. But that's another post entirely; what I mean to say is "this is not a greed post". ]

“Giant robots could carry lunar bases on their backs“

Sometimes good things happen to good people. In this case, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Congrats, Darren - don’t forget us little people, now.

So, I was at Orbital 2008 all this weekend, over which I managed to have lots of fun and hang out with lots of cool people.

However, most other people will probably remember my presence best for moderating the soon-to-be-infamous “Sex and the Singularity” panel at midday today, which ended up being as degenerate as you might have imagined. Here’s me sat next to Charlie Stross in full pontificatory flow:

Charlie Stross on Singularity

[Image by mesmerising.]

Charlie is doubtless explaining a tangential point regarding a certain hippo parasite which you will remember if you were present. If you weren’t there, trust me - you don’t want to hear it.

I may possibly talk more about Eastercon when I am less exhausted. Suffice to say I had a great time. Fandom FTW.

Well, I’m not quite ready, to be truthful - but when am I ever?

But readiness be damned - it’s Easter weekend, and I’m off to Orbital in the wee small hours of tomorrow morning for a weekend of geeking the hell out about science fiction. wh00t! [image by jurvetson]

After last year’s shortcomings, I’m not going to make any promises about regular liveblogging that I can’t keep. But I shall attempt a few updates from the scene regardless, and those of you who’re hip to the stuff all the cool kids are doing can follow me on Twitter, if you use it or have an RSS reader.

A major feature of the weekend for me will obviously be the formal launch of ILLUMINATIONS, which will be (I hope) a proud moment.

In the interim, I should point out that copies of ILLUMINATIONS in both print and digital form can be ordered from the Odd Two Out website rightfreakingnow - the print edition is GB£6.99, and the PDF digital copy is yours for an unspecified amount, though we suggest GB£2 as a nice child-saving donation size.

Of course, digital copies and print copies of ILLUMINATIONS bought from the website won’t come personally autographed by the rakishly handsome editor, will they, eh?

Eastercon means there probably won’t be any Friday Flash from me tomorrow, so apologies in advance if you’re looking forward to it. That said, we may get something out of the workshop we’re running, so never say never.

There will be an FPB … but it will likely be brief, as it’s going to be hard enough sparing the time to do the free fiction round-up at Futurismic. And the rumour is there’ll be a mass celebration of The Friday Curry involving a hefty chunk of the Third Row Fandom crew.

My crazy rock’n'roll lifestyle, eh?

See you at Eastercon if you’re going. Otherwise, adios amigos!

As Eastercon is this weekend, I thought I’d do my bit for “paying it forward” and assemble a glossary of terms for the convention newbie.

It can all seem a bit much on your first visit to a con; these are the basic salient points I’ve picked up in the few short years I’ve been attending them.

Alcohol – popular/quasi-ubiquitous social lubricant.

Ale, Real – subspecies of Alcohol. Deceptively powerful; tread lightly if inexperienced.

Badges – everyone gets one, signifies membership of the con. Initial Newbie feelings of foolishness over wearing what may seem to be a glorified name-tag soon evaporate once you’ve had some Alcohol and forgotten the name of the new friend you’re currently talking to.

Bar – if you’re meant to meet someone but you can’t remember where, there is a good place to look. Even if they’re not there, Alcohol will be; also high incidences of Rambling Conversation/Arguments.

Committee – the foolhardy brave and hard-working people who volunteered to create, organise and run the con. If you [are introduced to]/[stumble over] a member of the Committee, thank them effusively and buy them a drink. They will invariably deserve it.

Dealer’s Room – initially populated by people who will be slightly disconsolate about having shelled out a lot of money for an insufficient space, but who over the course of four days will become immensely happy at having emptied your pockets and their boxes of stock simultaneously. Some con-goers have claimed it is possible to attend a con and not buy anything from the Dealer’s Room; no one believes these people.

Drinking Game – a game that involves drinking. May be connected (however loosely) to sf-nal themes, e.g. Blake’s Seven drinking game, wherein (allegedly) one has to keep drinking until the program becomes watchable; this is essentially a race against the clock, as the bar will have to close at some point.

Ellison, Doing An – committing behaviour with which most people cannot get away with, and which those who can almost certainly shouldn’t. Basically - if they’re not your own, don’t touch them without being asked.

Fen – plural of fan; also a regional geographical feature of Norfolk.

Filk – discovering too much about this early on could quite possibly put you off cons forever, or make you an instant convert. Your mileage may vary. This phenomena is statistically likely to intersect with Hair, Facial.

Gopher – there can never be too many of these; see Volunteering.

Guests of Honour – famous people whose names you’ve seen on book spines and television credit rolls. Will appear on Panels and at other events … sometimes the Bar, also.

Hair, Facial – very popular among older male Fen; comes in a sometimes astonishing variety of styles and colours.

Internet – increasingly popular and useful consensual hallucination, used in the planning and running of (and waffling about) cons and – probably, thanks to free wi-fi this year – in the settling/termination of Rambling Conversation/Arguments.

Jokes – omnipresent, multilayered, sometimes inexplicable even to their creators. Just laugh anyway; it’s good for your health.

Keys, Room – losing these is not recommended. However, acquiring someone else’s may be considered a great success in the right circumstances.

Lecture, George Hay Memorial – lecture given by a genuine science-y type person on a (usually) genuine science-y type subject. Generally very interesting, though this year there is another event occurring at the same time that you may wish to consider attending instead. Ahem.

Literature Stream – Panels and events about books and stuff.

Masquerade – in no other event will you find such vast potential for simultaneous horror, humour and spectacle … excepting possibly the sort of events where unusual mushrooms are popular.

Media Stream – Panels and events about telly and stuff.

Newbie, Being A – not something to worry about, although it may all seem a bit much at first. Syndrome curable by Volunteering … and/or joining in with a Rambling Conversation/Argument.

Ops – The emergent controlling sentience-nexus of the con, and a place to head if you need help. The people here may well be stressed, so be nice to them. The people here may be Smofs, so be nice to them. The place to go for Badges and Volunteering.

Panels – talking-head type events with an informal talk-show/debate structure. Not to be mistaken for Rambling Conversation/Arguments (although may devolve into one, and quite possibly emerged from one that occurred the year before).

Quizzes – often based loosely around popular Radio 2 formats with an sf-nal theme. Warning: some Rambling Conversation/Arguments may [emerge from]/[be mistaken for] Quizzes; some Quizzes may [emerge from]/[be mistaken for] Rambling Conversation/Arguments.

Rambling Conversation/Argument – could be about anything, though sf-nal topics dominate statistically. Almost as omnipresent as Alcohol; some scholars suggest a locational correlation in these phenomena, but rarely stay focused on their research for long.

Room Party – much like any other party, only taking place inside a con hotel room; Scandinavian variety noted as being particularly legendary.

Seven, Blake’s – seriously, why?

Smofs – you may see one of these, or even a number at once, but you’ll never be sure. Not to be confused with the little blue guys with white hats … unless you’ve been to a Scandinavian Room Party.

Third Row Fandom – is watching you masturbate.

Turbulence – Met Office predicting lots of it in the Heathrow air traffic region; possibly in connection with large pockets of hot air generated by Orbital panellists and/or Rambling Conversation/Arguments.

Underwear – be sure to take sufficient for the whole weekend. Unless you never wear any, of course.

V – UK sf TV show whose retrospective popularity, though strange, is infinitely more explicable than that of Blake’s Seven.

Volunteering – there’s a lot of organising, lifting’n’shifting, child wrangling and fetch’n'carry work to be done at a con; why not pitch in and help by becoming a Gopher? Great way to meet other Fen (and sometimes Guests of Honour) and make Smofs happy.

Who, Doctor – the scheduling is not fortuitous this year, much to the disappointment of the Media Stream. Buying Paul Cornell enough drinks might lead to impromptu plot-point denouements, however. Or something equally funny. 

Xenu – this really isn’t our fault at all; don’t let journalists tell you otherwise.

Yeti – appearance of genuine cryptozoologicals in the Heathrow region is highly improbable; be sure to double-check (politely) that you haven’t in fact spotted an example of Hair, Facial - especially if you have been consuming Alcohol in the vicinity of Filk.

Zaphod Beeblebear – you’ll know it when you see it.

[ Please note that the author will not be held legally or ethically responsible for any social faux pas committed as a result of reading this document, and that if you find yourself being offended by anything contained within it, it's almost certainly meant as a joke.

Except the Blake's Seven stuff. That really is rubbish, I'm afraid. ]

It doesn’t appear to have made it onto the official website yet, but the BSFA forums have the shortlist for this year’s Clarke Awards:

• The Red Men - Matthew de Abaitua (Snow Books)
• The H-Bomb Girl - Stephen Baxter (Faber & Faber)
• The Carhullan Army - Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber)
• The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall (Canongate)
• The Execution Channel - Ken MacLeod – (Orbit)
• Black Man - Richard Morgan (Gollancz)

Your yearly instalment of controversy starts here!

I’m thinking of starting a shadow award that works off of the Clarke, wherein there is a prize for the book that everyone thought was a shortlist shoo-in, and another prize for the book whose presence on the shortlist no one can understand. Now accepting nominations!