Ah, the wranglings of the genre; the coincident arrival of a report from a con panel and a new column from esteemed critic Paul Kincaid seems to have revived the perennial ‘what is science fiction’ debate.

In which case, I can’t see any reason that I shouldn’t add my little dose of noise to the signal, and reiterate my belief that science fiction is a floating point variable, not a binary.

A programming metaphor

OK, so that may not make a lot of sense to someone who has never been foolish enough to teach themselves computer programming, so I’ll unpack it a bit.

When you write a computer program, you create variables – little discreet data points which can be assigned a value by the programmer or by various external stimuli. But all variables are not created equal.

A binary variable can have one of two different values: a ’1′, or a ’0′, an ‘on’ or an ‘off’. No other options are available. A binary variable is either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. That’s it.

A floating point variable, however, can be assigned any numerical value that can be made to fit inside the amount of memory allocated to it. Positive, negative, large or small – any number whatsoever, even decimal subdivisions thereof.

Can you see where this is going?

The rock music metaphor (again)

OK, so maybe you can’t. Despite the assumptions of outsiders, not all science fiction readers are computer geeks. So, I’ll deploy a metaphor that long-term readers will find familiar (maybe even distressingly so)*.

Long ago, it may have been possible to say that a particular song was a piece of ‘rock music’. It either partook of what were considered to be the tropes of rock music (the then fairly new and strange phenomena of distorted guitars, for example, or the wearing of tight trousers) or it did not.

Nowadays, that simply isn’t the case. The canon has fragmented, and the definition depends on the perspective of the listener and their conception of what the term actually means – a term whose definition has been mangled and stretched by fans, critics, marketing departments and the mass media alike.

Throw in some cliched stereotyping, and the inherently tribal nature of subcultures, and you’ve got a whole raft of cultural schisms on your hands. ‘Rock’ is in the ear of the beholder, you might say – it’s what I point to when I say it, to paraphrase Damon Knight.

Can you see where this is going now? ‘Rock’ was once a binary variable. Something either was rock, or was not rock. Now, it’s a floating point variable – each piece of music partakes of the idea of rock to a certain dgree, be it tiny or huge.

Science fiction is a quality, not an object

For me at least, it’s that simple. A book is not, in and of itself, science fiction. But it may well partake of science-fictionality (science-fiction-ness?) to a lesser or greater extent – and that extent is, at least partly, determined by my perception of the book inquestion, as well as my perception of the canon of works that inform the term ‘science fiction’.

You see? Floating point variable.

And I think the same applies to subdivisions of the genre concept – as, it appears, do several other persons considerably more learned and qualified to pontificate on such matters than me, if the discussion at Torque Control is anything to go by.

The plurality of subcultures

It’s almost like Zeno’s dichotomy paradox – no matter how much you keep dividing the set into two, you’ll never reach the final destination of a concrete definition that puts the item under discussion clearly within the set or beyond it. You can’t make a floating point number into a binary. The genie will not go back into the bottle.

This is just the way culture works. We humans develop an idea, or a concept or label, and we apply it to things. Then, humans being humans, we decide that some of the others don’t have quite the same idea of what the label really means.

And so, back in the sixties, ’rock’ music split into ‘hard rock’ and ‘heavy metal,’ and so on; bi- and tri-furcating in endless iterations, up to the current point where there are almost as many different genres as there are bands – none of whom are ever happy with the labels that get slapped on them.

If you can’t see the resonance between science fiction literature and that preceding paragraph, then either I’ve failed to explain myself properly, or I’m utterly unhinged in command of a keyboard …

… but, that said, one of the things that appeals to me about science fiction fandom is that I can actually take part in a conversation as abstract and ultimately irrelevant to the fate of the universe as this one, and in all probability have someone take me seriously enough to argue back. And that, as far as I’m concerned, rocks.

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[* In the process of fetching that link, I realised that I started that particular rant almost a year ago. Probably time for a rewrite ... or at least a reassessment.]

“Dark Space” by Marianne de Pierres (Book 1 of The Sentients of Orion)

Orbit Books, May 2007; 432pp, UK PBK; ISBN-13: 978-1841494289

Reviewed by Paul Raven

WARNING: This critique can be considered to contain ‘spoilers’.

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The strapline reads “Dark space is not really dark. Neither is it empty.” Twisting this to refer to the book itself, it’s half right: Dark Space is certainly not empty. It is, however, very dark. Unflinchingly so; it’s a complex and exciting novel, almost devoid of cheap sentiment and comfortable vindication. It’s not a cheerful read, but it is a very rewarding one.One of the established modes of science fiction is the story that asks “what if this carries on?” With Dark Space, de Pierres is performing a variation of that mode, which we might choose to describe as “what if this happened again?” Having created a world that draws heavily on the politics (and to some extent the language and other trappings) of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, de Pierres is able to examine societies and interpersonal relationships from feminist and Marxist angles without seemingly having any particular axe to grind other than that of general progressiveness – though a more coherent agenda promises to reveal itself over the course of the series.

***

If you want to read my entire critique of de Pierres’ “Dark Space”, you’ll need to pop over to T3A Space, of course. I know, I’m such a tease …

Despite an endemic shortage of sleep and excess of good times and conviviality, I feel I’ve learned a huge amount from this week, and I expect the last lecture to come this afternoon will add some more. I’m incredibly glad I came.

It’s been a great relief to find that not only am I in no way looked down upon as being the only non-academic on the course, but that my position as such is actually valued. It’s also been very flattering to be told that my contributions have had as much merit as anyone elses – for once in my life, I’m prepared to simply accept that as said and not assume it’s flattery or politeness in action.

I applied for this Masterclass because I felt I needed a wider range of interrogatory tools to use in my work as a reviewer (which I am told is a very post-modernist attitude – go figure!), and that is exactly what I have acquired. Brian Stableford’s lectures have been particularly inspirational, providing a taxonomy (partly drawing on work-in-progress by the one and only Farah Mendlesohn) for fantastic literatures that actually works when applied to almost any text. Add to that some introductions to Freudian, Marxist and Feminist critical frameworks, and I feel many times more confident about knowing what criticism is actually for, and where I can hope to go with it.

To be honest, I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with Feminism – it seems to have agendas way beyond the text it is applied to, which is all well and good in and of itself, but doesn’t really offer me the sort of tools I’m after. I’m primarily interested in making each book or story the focus of each piece of critical writing I do, rather than use the book in question to illustrate a broader agenda. Plus the jargon is incredibly dense – which coming from a man who is frequently described as having swallowed a dictionary is a strange thing to say. Selah – it’s still good to know how it works and what it stands for. I have no objections or opposition to its aims, that’s for sure. I’m just not sure I can use it in the same way I can use the other stuff.

I’ve also been inspired by my own thoughts and those of my fellow attendees. Despite the apparent demise of Scalpel (yes, OK, people warned me, but I like to give people a chance on my own terms rather than unquestioningly taking on board the opinions that others hold of them), I still believe that the science fiction criticism scene needs more communication and dialogue, and this week has only served to strengthen that opinion. I have ideas, you might even say plans. People will be getting emails once my life gets back to normal. Oh yes.

Well, it’s raining again outside, but this cafe is nice and warm, serves good coffee and doesn’t close for another hour or so. There’s lively conversation about fiction in various media forms, and a final lecture in two hours time. Life is good. Just the plenary discussions and the long journey home tomorrow, and everything will be back to normal. Which is almost a shame … but I’ve missed the familiarity of my flat and the calming ritual of writing gibberish here on VCTB. Selah. Hope you’ve all been having a good week too. See you soon.

Thanks to the benificent bonhomie of a person who shall remain nemless for the time being, I’m rinsing the University of Liverpool wireless broadband from the room in which the course sessions are being held, so I thought I’d drop a quick note onto VCTB. Then I checked my email inboxes … that was about half an hour ago. Lots of spam accumulates over the course of 24 hours.

But that’s all cleared out now, so I can let you know that this morning we had the first quarter of Andrew Butler’s lecture on ‘The Uncanny in Science Fiction’, which largely concerned with introducing and explaining the terms ‘cognition’ and ‘estrangement’, by way of Brecht and Freud channeled through Darko Suvin. Good stuff, with more to come. I’m very much relieved that it doesn’t apear to be flying way over my head.

I’ve managed to pick up a lot of what literary criticism is actually *for* from the same gentleman who has provided me with this tenuous link to the digital world. Which may sound silly, but remember I have no academic background in literature whatsoever, and everything I know has been reverse engineered. I’ve been kind of like an archaeologist rebuilding a steam engine, but not having the knowledge that the engine is supposed to connect to another piece of machinery to power it and make it do useful things. This is good to learn.

I’ve also had a little tour (tour-ette?) of the SF Foundation’s collection, held here at the University Library. For someone who likes and is familiar with archives, it was quite impressive – though to a lot of people it would just look like a whole load of books and boxes on sliding shelves. Hidden gems! Unfortunately, one cannot simply browse the shelves; one has to use the catalogue, which takes some of the fun out of the whole affair. Meh. I have too much to read as it is!

Well, at four o’clock we’ll be listening to Brian Stableford talking about the aesthetics of sf, so in the meantime I think I’ll have a cigarette and take a peek at the RSS coalface while my battery lasts. Later on there will be food and, extrapolating from last night, quite possibly alcohol too …

Having been out of town on the relevant evening, I’m late to the field in trumpeting the launch of Scalpel Magazine (although I actually mentioned it ages ago, and let the cat somewhat out of the bag in the process). Most of the genre blogosphere appears to have taken the news of a new reviews and criticism outlet fairly positively, notwithstanding Nick Mamatas and friends. There’s some fine content on there, too. I for one hope it will last the course – and not merely because I want another venue to send my own work to, either.

Pat Cadigan’s guest editorial for Scalpel mentions the decline of book reviews in mainstream print media, which is a hot topic at the moment, especially in the US. I’ve found that the Print Is Dead blog has had some wise things to say on the matter. Meanwhile, the UK’s very own Grumpy Old Bookman has added his dime to the jukebox:

“Finally, however, let us remember one simple fact. However erudite the print reviewer may be, and however exquisite his taste and critical judgement, he is handicapped by comparison with the most humble blogger. Our print man cannot link directly to other sources.

This is, I would suggest, a major problem. Twenty years ago, of course, no one could even imagine it. But now it has to be faced.”

That’s about right, I think. I’m not gloating about the declining relevance of print media (in reference to book reviews or anything else), but nor am I willing to shut my eyes on what, to me, is an obvious and irresistable trend. Selah.

Sheesh; you go up to the Big Smoke to interview a band and see their show, hence missing out on a day’s worth of RSS reading, and the mountain you find in your inbox on your return looks like a week’s worth …

First thing to share, in the name of self-aggrandisement if nothing else, is that you can read my review / critique of Mike Resnick’s Starship: Pirate at SF Site this week.

Second thing to share – utterly unrelated to anything this site normally discusses – is that the burner in my gas oven seems to have gone wrong. Is there an appliance engineer in the house?

Dutch man-mountain (and Interzone’s digital slush-reader supreme) Jetse de Vries has a story in the latest issue of online fiction mag Clarkesworld; it’s called ‘Qubit Conflicts’. I think you should go and read it; it’ll take you all of fifteen minutes, but they’ll be fifteen minutes well spent. Plus, what follows won’t then be a spoiler. Go on, off you go, and come back here afterwards for a discussion.

***[I'm really not joking about the spoilers, by the way.]***

Right. Depending on the sort of science fiction reader you are, you either thought that was brilliant or thought it was pointless. I’m voting for brilliant – because I love stories like that – but I want to take a look at why some others might not like it:

Because it breaks the rules.

Quite a few that I can think of: there’s no focal character to empathise with; there’s is no real action, per se, and all of the events described are done so retrospectively; it tells, rather than shows; and it’s absolutely chock full of hard science infodump.

But it works. That is the sort of thing that ‘sensawunda’ means to me. That’s why I read books by Stross and Egan, and stories by Stoddard. Because you can make the technology a character in its own right, if you know what you’re doing.

This may seem to jar somewhat with my previous post about letting technology be subservient to story – and in a way, I suppose it does. But I’ve chosen to point this story out as an example of an argument that Jetse himself made on the TTA Press forum the other day, namely that the only rule is that ‘it must work’.

And despite all the broken rules, despite the fact that the narrator is essentially the overmind of a solar-system sized artificial intelligence that has evolved itself to the apogee of its potential, despite the fact that we as readers have nothing in our experiences that should enable us to empathise with such a narrator – we still do.

To explain that more clearly I’m going to quote Jeremiah Tolbert’s reaction to the same story:

“… we definitely seem to be lonely, every one of us, and I think we create and consume art because it soothes that fear that we’re alone. We get to, through a complex invented system thousands of years in the making, enter the mind of another being. No matter what the narrative is, there is that, in the background, that comfort.

And SF takes that them and makes it explicit in tales of the extraterrestrial. Fantasy does the same thing.”

Precisely. The story works because, even though it breaks all the rules, it still talks to a deep part of the human psyche. It speaks a universal truth.

Congratulations, Jetse – on the sale, and on writing a story I don’t feel the need to pick holes in!

Well, well. You think us genre reviewers and critics are a stroppy lot, you should see at the literary reviewers from US newsprint media getting all hissy about their platform being eroded away from underneath them. The Print is Dead blog has this to say:

“And when Winslow himself writes that the loss of book review sections will “[choke] off such discussion of books,” he couldn’t be more wrong. There is now, because of the Web, probably more discussion of books than ever before. But what really infuriates Winslow, and many of the other critics, is that all of this discussion is happening without them. So it’s not that books are being burned; instead, what’s happening is the self-importance of book reviewers is going up in smoke.”

That really underscores why I’m glad to see the genre scene thriving online – I think we may get over that particular hump before the ‘straights’ do. I can’t think of any reviewers in sf/f who I think of as being self-important – but then (with the obvious exception) I can’t think of anyone who has made it their sole career and source of income, either. There’s a corellation there, I think.

Meanwhile, Gabe Chouinard has come back in response  to Jonathan McCalmont’s post that I mentioned yesterday. Señor Chouinard argues that a new critical venue should strive to build a new audience from scratch with innovatory approaches, rather than trying to entice away established readers from other venues:

“… street-level criticism is going to open up the genre dialogue to once and for all include people from outside of genre, rather than excluding them from the discussion. Our approach is meant for a NEW kind of audience, an audience that we have to manufacture from the ground up. There’s plenty of room for all kinds of readers in street-level criticism, and it’s my assertion that, by treating reviewing as a subset of the greater literary critical dialogue, we’re in effect opening the ghetto walls to allow outsiders to come in and have a good look around, without fear of stigma and without fear of rejection.”

Someone else responding to Jonathan (or rather, apologising for a response he neither finished or posted) is Andrew ‘SFBC’ Wheeler. After having had a while to ruminate on the matter, Mr. Wheeler has decided that his reaction to Jonathan’s post on the aesthetics of fantasy had roots in other things:

“Eventually the Clue Stick descended heavily on my head and I realized McCalmont was exactly the same sort of blogger as I was, and that was what annoyed me. (A similar realization hit me about William Lexner, previously — though I think Lexner really is trying to be incredibly obnoxious, while people like me and McCalmont just come off that way sometimes.)

So I’ve moved McCalmont into the mental category of “curmudgeons who occasionally annoy me but who I want to take seriously,” joining such excellent company as Barry Malzberg and Norman Spinrad (mostly for his book reviews, which I don’t read as often as I should these days). That doesn’t mean that I won’t post a “look at this stupid thing someone said” essay about any of them — that seems, for better or worse, to be a lot of what I do here — but I hope it means that I’ll take the idea seriously first…and only then reject it out of hand.”

As back-handed compliments go, they don’t come much bigger than that. I think.

A few other things of note, while I’m at it:

Matrix Magazine (another fine product of the BSFA stable) has an article featuring soundbite interviews with the shortlist nominee authors for the 200 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Ironic understatement award goes to Brian Stableford, talking of the importance of genre awards:

“It’s obviously better to have such reference-points than not to have them … [e]specially if they can occasionally whip up a little controversy.”

Controversy, Mr. Stableford? Surely not …

(Which reminds me, I wrote an essay ages back about the value of genre fiction awards, and it’s probably high time I looked at it again in the light of the huge amount I’ve learned since I first published it.)

As far as good reviews of the Clarke shortlist are concerned, you could do an awful lot worse than let the ladies from Eve’s Alexandra take you through them. Their take on M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing went up yesterday.

Last but not least, I propose the creation of a new award, to be given for ‘most laugh-out-loud metaphor deployed in a serious review of a serious genre novel’. The first winner for this award (which can be given out whenever I or anyone else decide it’s time for one to be announced) is Adam Roberts, for this genius line from his review of Ian McDonald’s Brasyl:

“Brasyl’s 2006, 2032, and 1732 are not, it turns out, part of the same timeline, but salami slices from different places on the sausage of the multiverse.”

As this is the inaugural award, the recipient sentence will provide the name for it; feel free to confer a Salami Award on any piece of critical writing you encounter and feel worthy.

Just a few things to share that I thought deserved more than the standard link-dump treatment due to their vague thematic connectedness:

Jonathan ‘SF Diplomat’ McCalmont has been thinking about the dichotomy in genre criticism – which is nothing new, but he’s done it out loud this time:

“So what does all of this mean? It means that SF criticism has been around as long as SF but that it is now, and has probably always been, prone to placing itself in a ghetto constituted from an inaccessible conversation between critics, authors and the occasional genre fan who wants to think a little bit more about the books he has read. The way to satisfy Le Guin’s demands is not simply by producing more critical writing, it is by making sure that genre criticism is read by as wide an audience as possible.”

It’s worth a read, even if (in fact, especially if) you don’t read much sf lit crit. It’s also (though he’ll hate me for saying so*) a little less incendiary than some of Jonathan’s other posts … unless you take offence to the Livejournal jibe.

So, two cultures, you say? A growing gap between them? Sounds like the sort of situation that causes … revolution**! Martin McGrath’s largely unpublicised stealth blog (which you should all subscribe to and read, because firstly he’s a lovely chap and a good critic, and secondly it’ll wind him up no end) features an extended version of a riff I heard Martin deploy at Eastercon, namely that revolutions that occur in science fiction novels are almost invariably improbable in their execution:

“The instantaneous change: Even in sf that obeys the laws of physics and outlaws FTL there’s always one thing that travels faster than light, revolution. Nevermind the vast amounts of time and money it takes in the real world to make things even incrementally better – in sf the mere action of announcing the revolution is often enough to have the peasants dressing better, eating better and quoting Shakespeare.”

Ouch. He has a point though, and it’s an intelligent post from someone who actually knows more than he’d really like to know about politics. Go read.

[*You can consider that revenge for the Whitney Houston gag, Jonathan. ]

[** I warned you the connection was vague, didn't I?]

Two superb bits of critical writing in the RSS feeds today.

First off, Martin Lewis looks at Richard Morgan’s Black Man (or Thirteen as it is titled across the pond) for Strange Horizons:

“Violent confrontation is the engine of all Morgan’s novels. What makes them unusual is that this confrontation is almost always verbal. At least at first. Marsalis is always happy to crush a windpipe or break a kneecap, but only after trying to assert dominance through words. It is not just winning the fight that is important: you have to win the argument. It is the praxis of force and knowledge, and it brings out the key difference between Morgan and his peers. Black Man is what you might call paramilitary SF, a point on the thriller-to-war-story spectrum somewhere between cyberpunk and mil SF.”

Lewis writes about books the way I wish I could write about books. However, doing so brings its own hazards – a gentleman in the comments appears to have taken Lewis’ critique in a way that I’m sure it wasn’t meant. Then again, maybe I’m misreading both of them – text is an inherently low-bandwidth medium, after all.

Secondly, Vicky and Nic from Eve’s Alexandria do a double-team review of Adam Roberts’ Gradisil. Interestingly, neither of them seem to have been deterred by what I have heard others describe as the very unfeminine female characters in the novel:

“Now it’s true that Roberts’ prose is sometimes pedantic and that his characters are often, and above all else, cold and distant but, as I see it, these qualities serve Gradisil’s ultimate purpose.  The Gyeroffy women, Klara and Gradi both, are quite disagreeable creatures, hard-nosed and closed off.  Neither of them exhibit ‘maternal’ instincts and neither is ‘feminine’ or ‘intuitive’ or ‘emotional’, and this is only right.  They are, after all, women living on the outskirts of life, at the very edge of the permissable.  Like all pioneers and colonists they are driven by physical hardship to positions untenable in the heart of society; and they’re both consumed by a vision of the Uplands as it was or as it could be.”

In the discussions of gender and sf that I have read or listened to, there has often been a prevailing condescending (and, sad to say, male) attitude that female readers don’t like science fiction because they find the female characters hard to reconcile with the roles that society has taught them are ‘correct’. Maybe the truth of the matter is that female readers don’t identify with female characters in sf because a great number of their mostly male writers can’t write a believably flawed female character …