The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones on why the creative world needs critics more than ever before:

It is the job of a critic to reject the relativism and pluralism of modern life. All the time, from a million sources, we are bombarded with cultural information. A new film or the music of the moment can enter our minds regardless of quality and regardless of our interest. In fact, in this age of overload, indifference is the most likely effect of so many competing images. If we do make an aesthetic choice it is likely to be a consumerist one, a passing taste to be forgotten and replaced in a moment.

[...]

Real criticism is not about distinguishing good from bad; it is about distinguishing good from great. There’s plenty of terrible art around, but it usually finds its level in the end. The curse of our time, in the arts, is mediocrity and ordinariness: the quite good film that gets an Oscar, the OK artist who becomes a megastar. Truly remarkable art is rare and to see it when it comes, to fight for it, to hold it up as an example for the rest – that is the critic’s true task.

Not sure I agree with him entirely (I’m not letting go of pluralism just yet, because I see it as less of a creed and more of a phenomenological map of the human cultural consensus, if that makes any sense), but I like the general shape of his argument. What about you?

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

First, Seth Godin on transparency:

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.

No, Mr Brown. You are a weasel, a fearmonger, a small man in a big man’s expensive suit, and – like your predecessor, and many others – a panderer to corporate interests and waning governments with imperial ambitions which mirror that collapsed edifice which Daily Mail readers still feel should stretch around the globe by dint of nothing more than divine grace, stiff upper lips and unbridled paranoid bigotry based in a fundamental fear of otherness.

No one in the world ever has nor ever will do as much to curtail the freedoms I was fortunate enough to born with, Mr Brown, as you and others of your ilk. You wield fear like a whip, but you turn it on those you claim you are elected to serve.

What have you ever suffered or lost through the choices made by others on your behalf, Mr Brown? What have you given up to defend what you believe? What do you really know of fear, beyond the thought of losing the privilege you have amassed? Evidently not enough; as it has always been, the people will reap what the suits have sown. I hope that one day we will all turn around and feed it to you until you choke.

“Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant and I declare him my enemy.” – Proudhon

We now return you to what passes for regular programming on this channel.

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Writing about music

Another slowish week, but that’s not at all unwelcome. Festival season means the PRs are all tied up promoting things I’m not yet a big enough wheel to be of assistance with*. I can deal with that.

Album of the week

Not a great deal to choose from, really, so The Offspring take the crown easily with their eighth album Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace.

Writing about books

The Love & Sex With Robots piece is all but finished; last few paragraphs and a brisk polish, and that badboy should be ready to roll out of the warehouse, so to speak.

I’m about a fifth of the way into Schmidt’s The Coming Convergence; it should be a swift read, because I seem to be a lot more technoliterate than the reader it is designed for (so I can skip a lot of the passages telling me stuff I already know).

Futurismic

The new Futurismic bloggers are settling in nicely, and by the end of this evening I should have fixed over 380 dead incoming links that got broken when the old Moveable Type installation collapsed on us – which I hope will boost our PageRank and SERPS somewhat, and bring with it a boost in passing traffic.

The other good news is it seems the Project Wonderful ad slots are starting to mature nicely, in that advertisers are recognising their worth and bidding competitively on them. I’m hoping for more growth in this area over the next six months – especially if the dead link fixin’ mentioned above has some effect.

Freelance

The tweaking of websites and the publicising of publishers continues at a steady pace; nothing substantial to show off yet, but there’ll be solid results by the close of business this month.

Books and magazines seen

It’s a lit-crit double whammy this week!

First off we have my long-awaited copy of Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics Of Fantasy – courtesy the author herself at last weekend’s AGM meet-up – which I have been looking forward to reading since hearing the framework of its taxonomy explained by Brian Stableford at last year’s Masterclass – bloody hell, a year ago.

Secondly I have my second review job for Foundation, namely The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (eds. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman) – which, as far as Amazon is concerned, has been out in the States since 2005. So either it’s getting a relaunch on this side of the pond, or Foundation’s reviews department makes me look like a paragon of organisation and productivity**.

I couldn’t resist it, basically, though I wonder if maybe I haven’t bitten off a little more than I can chew – I’m even less qualified to talk politics than I am lit-crit***.

But Ms Le Guin’s blurb praises the book as not just a good and valuable examination of her famous novel, but refreshingly jargon-free, so maybe I’ll be OK. One thing’s for sure, there’s gonna be plenty of food for thought in there.

Aside from those two heavy-hitters, some fantasy titles from Orbit are all for which we have to thank the deities of the postbox this week.

Coda

So, on the surface of it – and by any metric of meaningful use beyond the confines of my own emotional landscape – it’s been a pretty good week, if not as productive as I’d have liked.

However, things haven’t been entirely peachy; I shan’t go into details (because this isn’t LJ or MySpace) but I’ve been an emotional wreck for no clearly discernible reason, and have consequently been shitty to people who didn’t deserve it – so there’s a nice nugget of guilt for me to chew over the weekend. Mmm, tasty guilt.

Couple that with a growing panic about next weekend’s impending Masterclass (for which I’ve still yet to read anything from the reading list that I hadn’t read before receiving it), and a certain degree of riding herd on my new bloggers at Futurismic****, and it’s obvious with hindsight why I’ve been sleeping badly and unable to concentrate on anything. Hence nearly being assassinated by a blind taxi driver while cycling to the day job this morning tipped me into a state verging on hysteria.

Thankfully my line manager is a good person, and listened to me gibber for a bit before recommending I use some of my vast backlog of annual leave allowance and take some extra time off next week. End result: I’m working a two day week from Monday, giving me two clear days to attack the Masterclass material while clearing down all my other work; then I return to work the following Tuesday. Signing the leave sheet was such a tension-release that I almost wept. I suspect I’ve been letting things get on top of me a little.

But hey, it’s the weekend! And there are few ills that The Friday Curry doesn’t at least provide the illusion of healing. After which I may go and listen to hideously loud rock music in a side-street pub, if I haven’t already fallen asleep. Enjoy your weekends, folks – hasta luego.

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[ * Read as - no free festival passes for me this year. Meh. ]

[ ** Under-qualified like a toddler with dentist's tools, then. ]

[ *** Only kidding, Andy. ]

[ **** No discredit to them, by the way, they're doing great; it's just one of those jobs that eats waaaay more time than you ever expect it to before you start. ]

Digging in the Flickr crates for photographs this week. Here’s part of the big war memorial on Velcro City Common; I may well have posted this image before, but it’s one for which I have a great lasting affection – it’s the wallpaper image on my mp3 player:

Normally I’d just grab the camera and get a photo of one of my plants or something. The main reason I didn’t is that my camera’s battery has completely exhausted itself, and I’d only just realised. Good job I didn’t have a gig to shoot, wot? Speaking of which …

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Writing about music

A busy week, in that seven albums in my for-review stack are due out next week, so they all needed to be covered this week. Plus the live reviews from the Pilgrim Fathers show … phew!

Album of the Week [OMFG new FPB feature!1!!]

It’s a tough call on a strong week. Short Circular Walks In The Hope Valley by Pilgrim Fathers is excellent, but not quite as good as the live experience … I think it has to go to Body Language by Monotonix, which packs a lot of rock’n'roll fun into six short noisy songs.

Writing about books

No offence to my editors, but book reviewing has been relegated to a low echelon of priority this week. When things need to be put off, you put off the things that you can. In other words, the Wolfe essay remains unfinished.

In fact, now I come to think about it, I don’t think I’ve even read any fiction at all this week, except a brisk spool through a couple of potential slush survivors from the Futurismic stacks. That’s a simply horrifying thought.

Long-term readers will doubtless be unsurprised that I utterly missed the boat for the Baroque Cycle Challenge. I really quite fancied doing it, too, but life got in the way. Selah.

Futurismic

So, did you catch Jonathan’s first column at Futurismic about neuroaesthetics and book recommendations? Some interesting stuff there, all wrapped up in Jonathan’s inimitable curmudgeonly style.

Freelance

I managed to clear a huge lump of administrivia and filing over the weekend, which was probably the most daunting component of my newly-acquired portfolio of clients. I now have bookmarks and logins and passwords stored and backed up, and have a much better feel of the scope of things.

I’ve even done a few of my first jobs … mostly uploads of one sort or another, nothing major, but it feels good to be, y’know, working. Actually doing it. Yay!

Next on the agenda is to get deeper into the PS Publishing stuff. Watch this space!

Books and magazines seen

Nada, none, zilch, zero, zip. One of those weeks which, serendipitously, leaves me feeling less guilty about the looming height of my to-read pile, simply by merit of not making it grow any bigger.

Out and about

Hey, it’s the Arthur C Clarke Award ceremony next Wednesday … and yours truly has not only an invitation but a corresponding afternoon off from the day-job! w00t!

So, my scruffy self will be hob-nobbing with the sf-nal great’n'good, and (since the unblogged life is not worth living) Twittering live from the event, too*. Only one thing’s for certain … Brasyl is not going to win.

Do come and say hello if you’re there as well!

Coda

So, there you go – a week of catching up from a fortnight of complete bedlam. As is often the way, I find I can judge how stressed I was at a particular moment with the benefit of hindsight and a look through my notebooks … the last few weeks are not pretty ready, suffice to say!

Plus I now have a nice little cold sore developing. Damn things always appear once the stress is actually over and done with. Meh.

But enough of all this – I hunger. I hunger, in fact, in a manner that can only be satisfied by foodstuffs well-seasoned with cumin, chillies and cardamom. There is only one palliative for the hunger of the righteous – and that is The Friday Curry For Great Justice.

My friends, I bid you a good weekend. Hasta luego!

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[ * You can follow my Twitter feed without being on Twitter yourself, by the way - it's in the sidebar here at VCTB, and you can get it as an RSS feed. Of course, neither are as swift as the direct connection, as might be expected. ]

(a.k.a. “We like it when statistical analysis results in us receiving serendipitous recommendations for books by people we know and like”.)

Congratulations, Farah!

[ Having heard a good chunk of Farah's proposed taxonomy via Brian Stableford at last year's Masterclass, I can say with certainty that this will be a book well worth reading for anyone who likes to dissassemble their reading matter and find out what makes it tick. So maybe you should order a copy, hmm? ]

OK, it’s reached a point where I’m retrospectively ashamed of having forced LOLcats on everyone I knew over the last year or so. Because people like me, who in all innocence did exactly the same thing, have unleashed a monster.

A monster that will devour everything in its path; everything we hold sacred. Even, for example, T. S. Eliot’s The Wastelands …

III. TEH SERMON, IT BURNZ (173)

if teh river running, why not moving?
INVISIBLE WIND.
nymphoz gone.
river has trash no more.
nymphoz and friends left,
no can find.
shakey bones with big laughs r here!

rat creepin in teh banks, (186)
fisher kingz has no fishies!
rat eatin kingz relatives.
king sees mrs potter, standing in teh bubbles.
potter daughter hotter.

twitter twitter
jub jub bird.
still in rong poemz
TRUE!

Laugh, cry, sigh – choice is yours. After the day I’ve had, I just managed a wry grin. [Via the indispensable MetaFilter]

OK, so this opener isn’t strictly a photo, but it’s my blog, and I can break the rules any time I want to …

Cyberpunk Lit 101

That’s my alter-ego, Isambard Portsmouth (the scruffy bugger in the, er, cowboy hat), sitting in on a literature discussion class taking place in Second Life. The work being discussed was Neal Stephenson’s seminal Snow Crash … so we were stood in the metaverse talking about the text in which the concept of the metaverse was arguably first laid out. That appeals to my warped taste in philosophy; your mileage may vary.

It was an interesting discussion for one major reason; the kids on the course were US college age, so 18 or thereabouts. Which means that Snow Crash, or at least the bits that deal with technological change, doesn’t really shock them at all. The metaverse is just there, y’know? What’s the big fuss about?

Still, there was some interesting chat about burbclaves being a new way of couching sf’s traditional obsession with the (encounter with) / (fear of) the “other”, or the “alien”. And it’s interesting to see SL being used as a teaching platform, which I’m reliably informed is a real growth industry at the moment. More research required, methinks.

Self-mutilation for fun and fashion

The following is a special request from a reader who shall remain nameless. On finding out that I was booked in for a body piercing this week, they said “oh, well I hope you’re going to blog the evidence.” I wasn’t intending to, but for the cause of contemporary subcultural anthropology, how could I refuse?

However, because some folk read VCTB in their workplace, and some may simply be squeamish or uninterested, I will supply a link to follow rather than posting the pictures directly here.

Warning: the following link is possibly NSFW, and definitely not for trypanophobics – nor people who dislike the sight of the un-muscled torsos of 30-something blokes having pieces of metal stuck in them.

With the warning delivered, I can now present – a Flickr set of Paul Raven getting his nipple pierced.

We now return you to our regular programme.

Writing stuff: Alan Wilder interview, flash virginity lost

It’s been a slow week for writing jobs; nothing new to report. But I will point interested parties to the published version of my interview with Recoil’s Alan Wilder.

While no jobs have materialised this week, I have at least been out hunting for work. Why, only yesterday I applied for a writing position … albeit one doing interviews and similar for a, uh, “gentleman’s magazine” based in Second Life, but hey – if they’ll pay me, what the hell. It’s all portfolio.

And while not writing in the freelancing for money sense, I managed to complete and post “Downtime”, my first piece of Friday Flash Fiction, as per Gareth Powell’s new blogging meme. Whether it’s any good or not, I have no idea. I’m just pleased that I managed to finish and publish something I’m not utterly ashamed of. Go me!

Books and magazines seen this week

The use of the plural is a bit brash, really, as it’s only one of each. In the magazine intray, we have:

• Issue #39 of Obsessed With Pipework poetry quarterly

And a book I’ve long been looking forward to receiving:

Tobias Buckell – Ragamuffin (Tor Books, June 2007; ISBN-13: 9780765315076)

Tobias is a co-blogger at the recently resurrected Futurismic, but I’d have thoroughly enjoyed his first novel Crystal Rain even had I never heard of the guy before. I’m pretty confident that this sort-of-sequel is not going to disappoint. So, yet another gap to chisel into the reading schedule!

Miscellania

Well, thanks to a slow week (with two days out of action thanks to a cold), I find I’ve reported all but the most utterly insignificant events of my life in the past week in the material above – so, no miscellania. You must be gutted.

Which means all that remains is for me to bid you all a good weekend (with better weather than the last one, hopefully) before I wander off to fetch The Friday Curry Of Justice.

So, have a good weekend! Hasta luego!

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.

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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 …