Oh, man. Regular readers will be well aware that Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker are two of my favourite authors. So you can probably imagine the vigorous flailing of arms and jubilant cry of “wh00t!” that occured when I found out they’ve done another collaboration short.

It’s called Hormiga Canyon, it’s in the new issue of Asimovs, and the good people there have put up a hefty chunk of it as a teaser. And guess what? It works – I’m not waiting for that story to appear in an anthology, I want to read it real soon.

So I guess I’m going to practice what I’ve been preaching and buy my first electronic version of a science fiction magazine. I’d consider subbing, if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t have enough reading time as it is* …

***

[* You know, even I'm starting to get sick of me saying this. I think that means it's time to stop.]

At least, it is up until the end of August. Any readers of VCTB hailing from South Africa (or with friends and family out that way), take note:

The Reader’s Paradise Bookstore in Cape Town, South Africa, is having a special two-month promotion on fantasy and science fiction titles, including a big selection of books that come with a free signed bookplate from the author included in the price.

They’re also selling other fantastic-related stuff, including DVDs and kid’s costumes, and there’s a raffle for goodies that include more signed books.

Sounds like a whole bunch of good reasons for South African readers to not buy from Amazon for the next few months, don’t you think?

***

[Disclosure: yeah, I know, that's a blatant free plug. But you know what? The guy just emailed and asked really nicely, and I like the idea of supporting small bookstores. Plus it's my own blog, so I make the rules.]

Futurismic is currently in redevelopment, having a new engine fitted … two evenings without posting to it, and I feel a peculiar absence. Blogging definitely has addictive properties.

So, in the interim, I’ll round up a batch of good stuff for sf heads to read on the web and post them here instead.

Kim Stanley Robinson on climate change

The man behind the much lauded Mars Trilogy (which I’ve still never read), Kim Robinson talks about climate change issues at Wired, in the context of his latest novel, Sixty Days and Counting.

Watts, MacLeod, McAuley and Slonczewski on science fiction and the biosciences

Thanks to Peter Watts, we can read [warning - PDF] a group discussion interview from Nature magazine where he, Ken MacLeod, Paul McAuley and Joan Slonczewski talk about their writing, the biological sciences, and the connections between the two.

There is apparently a longer and unexpurgated online version to come, reached by the URL at the end of the piece, but it doesn’t appear to be live yet.

(Special bonus material! Ken MacLeod is not too worried about doctors who think they can be terrorists. It’s the engineers we should be looking out for.)

Lewis Shiner gives it away

A little late to the pixel-stained revolution, but very welcome nonetheless, is Lewis Shiner’s decision to release all of his short fiction online under a Creative Commons licence. Yes, all of it, along with a manifesto about the importance of short fiction for developing one’s writing – and for cultivating readers, too.

I must confess to not having read any Shiner before, but his is a name I’ve had recommended to me countless times. Now I have no excuse, except the old ‘lack of time’ saw. Thanks to the omniprescient BoingBoing for the tip-off.

Happy reading!

UK sf fans may be amused to find that Crowne Plaza, the hotel chain who have hosted the last two Eastercons, are now offering virtual conference spaces for hire in Second Life.

Of course, until they provide some sort of virtual bar facility, fandom’s not going to make the shift to the metaverse. But I’m intrigued by the idea of parallel events …

“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’.

---

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 …

DefCon 13 2005

Originally uploaded by eliotphillips.

… are way cooler looking than any sf con badges I’ve seen so far.

My sf-nal brethren, this ires me deeply. There were sf cons way before there were hacker cons. Hell, there were sf cons way before there were hackers, full stop.

The next con bid I vote for will be the one that promises badges with the same degree of awesome as the one above, or the others from the same Flickr set. Who’s with me?

[via BoingBoing]

This will be a brief FPB, because I have to get my train home fairly soon. So here’s a shot of a street in Liverpool from when we were heading to Chinatown for a meal on Wednesday night:

Colourful sunset, I thought.

Well, you already know what I’ve been doing all week, and I have no incoming materials to report … or rather, I expect I have a mailbox brimming with those red cards the postman leaves when you’re not in to receive stuff, but what they relate to will remain to be seen.

I’ll say it again though – I’ve had a super week, met some great people and learned loads of good stuff. I’m looking forward to getting home, though, and hoping that I’ve not battered my immune system too badly with latenights and restaurant meals. What the hell – even if I have, it’s been a more than worthy sacrifice.

One hanging point is – how the hell will I have The Friday Curry? I’ve got a six hour journey home on the train, and probably won’t get in to Velcro City until well past 9pm … which isn’t too late, of course, but whether I’ll be in the mood for a takeaway after a long tenure in the vagueries of the UK rail networks remains to be seen.

Still, that’s my problem, not yours. Your problem is to have yourselves a good weekend. Everything here at VCTB should be back to normal by Monday. Until then, take care.

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.

Charles Stross – The Jennifer Morgue - Golden Gryphon Press, November 2006 (US), ISBN 1930846452

Charles Stross is probably best known for his singularity-flavoured science fiction, exemplified by the fix-up novel Accelerando (which netted its author an award from the World Transhumanist Association, as well as nominations for more conventional sfnal plaudits). However, he’s unafraid to trek off into different pastures, as The Jennifer Morgue demonstrates – there are sf tropes, plus fantastic and Lovecraftian horror elements, all wrapped up in another genre tradition that Stross has openly expressed his affection for – the classic British spy thriller.

Naturally, Stross being Stross, there-s more than a soupcon of dry humour involved. So we have as our hero one Bob Howard, who is employed as a computer expert (read as “hacker”) by The Laundry, a branch of the British Secret Service devoted to keeping a lid on multidimensional manifestations.

You see, magic is just mathematics, which means that the age of ubiquitous computing has made it very easy for some naive or stupid coder to accidentally invoke a hungry daemon or vengeful demigod, simply by trying to number-crunch the wrong formula. To paraphrase Bob, he’s no necromancer himself, but “he does countermeasures”. Basically, he’s a clean-up artist.

Or at least he used to be – right up until his employers saddled him with some active duty fieldwork, psychically entangled him with a demonically-possessed mermaid-in-mufti, and dispatched him to the Caribbean with instructions to infiltrate the machinations of a megalomaniac corporate uber-villain, complete with gun-toting goons, an immense yacht-fortress and a foul-tempered fluffy white cat.

If that sounds a little obvious, it’s supposed to. In many ways, The Jennifer Morgue is a work of metafiction – a playful, knowing and openly self-confessed deconstruction of James Bond novel and movie plots, mocking them and revelling in them at the same time. Each supporting character is a gag or cliché in his or her own right; for example, Pinky and Brains, a pair of exceptionally camp and gadget-obsessed tech support operatives who furnish Bob with the requisite tools for the task.

And the gadgets themselves, of course; Bob doesn’t get given Bond’s Aston Martin and Walther PPK, but has to make do with a two-seater Smart car and a Treo smartphone that fires silver-jacketed exorcism rounds. Bob’s innate cynicism comes through in the first-person narration, which deflects the outright silliness of the ideas into the realm of tragic comedy and farce and avoids the snake-pit of superficial spoof.

But does it work? Stross chipped into a recent resurgence of internet-based debate regarding the perennial “decline and fall of the genre” meme. In a nutshell, he suggested that one way to grow sf’s readership might be to “pitch for the Slashdot generation”, to write explicitly for an audience of intelligent and geekish outsiders who should (by rights and tradition) be sf literature’s core audience – and would be, if there was more material that flicked the right switches for them.

The Jennifer Morgue seems to encapsulate this demographic targeting, with our hero Bob providing a sympathetic lead to identify with. He hates management, ties and PowerPoint presentations; he shops online for T-shirts emblazoned with internet in-jokes; he is the socially-stunted computer nerd at your office, thrust into an unfamiliar world of deadly intrigue and occult nastiness which he sets about to hack as if it were a defective operating system.

The Jennifer Morgue is a fun book. And it’s funny too, provided you either know the Bond clichés backwards or you�re a paid-up member of the geek-and-proud subculture – probably doubly funny, should you place at the intersection of those two sets. And therein lies the flaw: The Jennifer Morgue is somewhat exclusive, in that a lot of the in-jokes and post-modernist nudges will fly straight past the average bookstore browser.

However, as a naked pitch for the I.T. crowd whose lingua franca is one of irony, knowing pastiche and a lot of acronyms, it fits the bill perfectly. Only time will tell just how hungry that audience really is for long-form written fiction. But if Stross has surmised correctly, The Jennifer Morgue‘s place in the padded laptop-bags of the techno-elite is already reserved.

[This review originally published in Vector #250; reproduced here with the kind permission of the editors.]

Well, I’m pretty much all packed, my laptop is charging, Jeremiah Tolbert’s holding the fort at Futurismic, and I’ve managed to clear pretty much all my responsibilities and obligations. In other words, I’m ready to go away for the week.

The Masterclass is going to be a lot of fun, I think, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t slightly apprehensive. After all, my last involvement with formal education in literary matter was my GCSEs, way back in 1992. I’m sincerely hoping there aren’t too many moments when someone says something like “well, of course, if viewed from a poststructuralist angle …” and I have to say something like “er, poststructuralism, if you could just remind me of the basic ideas there, please?”

Ah, I’m sure I’ll be OK. If I’m worried about anything, I should be worrying about the damned reading list!

As I mentioned before, I have no idea how often I’ll be able to get online, if at all. I’m going to schedule a few things to run while I’m away, and hopefully at the very least I’ll manage to send some photos or brief missives from my cameraphone. But essentially I’m on holiday (even if my brain will be extremely busy), so it’ll be short shrift here at VCTB until I return from the distant North next weekend.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a good week!