The title says it all, folks - Mike Harrison rides again. Celebrate in whatever way you see fit.

w00t!

[Edit 10/05/07 - Mr. Wright has been good enough to apologise in reply to my response on his LJ, which makes the following look astonishingly childish and petulant with hindsight. I leave it here as a lesson for myself, and consider this matter closed.]

 ***

Oh dear. It looks like my rapidly written little rant from yesterday has upset John C. Wright:

“I cannot join Mr. Raven in the idea that it is mean or wrong-headed to have standards, or that it is somehow cruel to have high standards. I can admire things I cannot appreciate.”

Whoa!

As I mentioned in my comment left in reply, I never said that. Or at least I never meant to; I know I wrote that piece rather quickly (and not in the best of tempers), but a few re-readings fails to show me the point where I said that it was wrong to have standards. I did (and still do) say that projecting your personal standards onto others is an act of elitism, and (as was the entire point of my original post) that elitism very effectively puts people off reading classic literature.

But it appears the problem is that I have entirely misunderstood the nature of elitism. Let’s allow Mr. Wright to explain:

“The sixth reason is that it takes humility to be an elitist, whereas being a populist is the soul of arrogance. An elitist, someone who likes great books because they are great, not because he likes them, is as humble as a mountaineer standing before a titanic, mysterious, unclimbed peak. To climb that mountain is work, at least at first, we all agree. But once you have achieved the summit, and all the world is under your heel, how far you can see! What things those content with lower perspectives will not view! The humility of a mountaineer is this: he does not think of himself as he climbs, he thinks of the rock under this fingers and toes. He did not make the mountain, he is not the one who piled it up. That is the work of former years, previous generations, so to speak.

The populist, on the other hand, looks in the mirror, and seeing only his own little self dressed in his own little circles’ little fashion, preens and says he is as large as the mountain. Who can actually prove he is taller than me? (says the populist) “By my measuring rod I have invented for myself this day, I say I am taller! My taste is just as good as his. He likes the Venus de Milo, and I like Charlie’s Angels It’s the same. He reads HAMLET, I read GREEN EGGS AND HAM. To each his own!” “

Hmmm. Well, that’s me set straight. I regularly use the phrase “to each their own”, never knowing that I was actually being sweepingly arrogant to others by doing so - evidently I should have been ramming my own opinions down their throats as gospel. I wondered why my career as a reviewer and critic was moving so slowly …

Luckily, most of Mr. Wright’s supporters have had the humility to lambaste me in the privacy of his Livejournal; how shameful it would have been to be bearded in my populist’s den by such bold mountain climbers, here, in front of all those who know my populism and shelter beneath it in shame at their own lack of humility!

The one bit I still don’t get is why he called his post ‘The Judgement of Paris’. I mean, how can one be judged by a city?

Those of you who play the “VCTB Bruce Sterling drinking game” had best steel yourselves to down your beer in one.

This time round we have the inimitable Sterling on video at the Google campus, pitching a collaboration to a dissappointingly empty and unresponsive room. He’s talking about two concepts he mentions a lot these days: ‘spimes‘ and ‘the Internet of Things‘.

And this isn’t just some blind fanboy linkage, oh no. This is worth watching for sf writers, readers and critics - because not only is the concept of the Internet of Things definitely sf-nal, but also because Sterling talks about how difficult it is for an sf writer to imagine interfaces for the ideas they create. It ties together design, technology and fiction in one pitch. The other guy doing the presentation is a rather dull speaker, so you may wish to skip through him to Sterling’s ‘Q&A’* at the end, but if you have the time I’d recommend you watch it all.

[* Actually less of a Q&A than a pitch extension, as only two people have questions - not that Sterling's going to let that stop him putting out the message.]

I’m very pleased to announce that Gareth L. Powell has sold his first novel, Silversands, to Pendragon Press. It’s been quite a month for Gareth, as just a few weeks ago he announced the acceptance of his first short story collection. Congratulations, Gareth, and well deserved.

Great news via Big Dumb Object - the next Iain M. Banks novel is scheduled for release next February.

It’s set in the Culture (which was revealed a little while ago, IIRC), and will be called Matter (apparently just to annoy internet people, as that was the working title for Steep Approach to Garbadale).

According to BDO, the sample the man himself read out had all the usual IMB goodness we have come to expect. There’s a reason to look forward to the new year - as far as I’m concerned, the release of an Iain M. Banks novel should be treated as just cause for national holiday.

Banks holiday weekend, anyone?

OK, I’ll get my coat.

There’s no need to feel jealous of Google employees for getting to see lectures and presentations by the great and the good on work time - because the Big G has decided to share the wealth and let us lowly web-heads watch the events in video form. I knew they had to be buying YouTube for a reason …

Of most interest to genre fiction fans will be videos of Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link and Karen Joy Fowler, Neil Gaiman, and the incredibly recent visit by John “If rocks stars can tour, so can I” Scalzi.

There’s lots of others interesting people in the selection too; I’ve not watched them yet, but I’m guessing that Lawrence Lessig and Chris “Long Tail” Anderson will be well worth watching, too - whether you’re already interested in copyright issues and internet marketing or not.

Despite the name, science fiction isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) all about science and technology.

Sure, you need some of that stuff in there - in varying degrees, from each writer according to his or her individual preference. But first and foremost, the second part of the name is the important bit: science fiction. It’s just stories, first and foremost. And because of the way human psychology works, good stories - the ones that engage the most readers the most effectively - are about people.

Well, maybe it’s better to say characters, because in science fiction some of the ‘people’ aren’t necessarily human people, but the point still stands - and it is made successfully by Ian Hocking’s essay for Concatenation’s twentieth anniversary issue:

“When the story is put on hold for attention-stretching paragraphs, even pages, you place your fiction into the category that justifies the response of those who hate science fiction: ‘I’m not interested in all that space stuff’. You shouldn’t have to be interested in the space stuff to an enjoy an SF story any more than you need to have an intrinsic interest in African territorial jurisdiction to enjoy Casablanca, Russian history to enjoy Dr Zhivago, or time paradoxes to enjoy The Terminator…”

Reading that reminded me of one of Jeremiah Tolbert’s recent posts (that I was sure I had linked before, but can’t seem to find in the archives). He’s talking about reaching the same character-over-gimmicks realisation Hocking discusses above, and mentions that Ted Chiang’s anthology of short fiction was the catalyst for this epiphany:

“What I thought I had realized was a pattern in his collection. Each story seemed to be an idea story, only he had two ideas that he had connected at an interesting intersection. But what he was doing that I had not yet learned how to do was taking a character’s life and figuring out where that idea intersection impacted them most.”

Wise words, I think. As Tolbert’s parting shot mentions, this probably isn’t news to many readers here at VCTB. But to someone struggling to learn the basics of the craft, it’s a crucial revelation, and it’s certainly changed the way I think about writing fiction.

I’ll bet SFWA Vice-president Howard Hendrix is feeling more than a little silly right now. Or perhaps he’s sat at home railing at what he sees as the blind stupidity of his fellow professional writers. Either way, he should have worded that ‘pixel-stained technopeasant’ rant a little more diplomatically - his essential argument had some validity, but the signal got lost in the noise, and the opprobrium generated hasn’t done him any favours whatsoever.

Inadvertantly, though, he’s done a great favour to the genre fiction readership. After Jo Walton declared April 23rd to be International Pixel-stained Technopeasant Day, the science fiction weberati have come out in force and inundated the intertubes with free fiction for us to read - Andy ‘SFBC’ Wheeler has what appears to be the best roundup for those of us not connected to the web-within-the-web that is Livejournal, though there’s probably a few others floating around: leave links in the comments if you’ve spotted anything that’s worth a mention.

I’ll be bookmarking them all for a rainy day, myself - I have waaaay too many dead-tree books waiting to be read at the moment - but the prospect of being able to read Stross’s Missile Gap after missing out on the Subterranean paper edition is most satisfying.

Your added bonus material comes in the form of a podcasted panel from Penguicon (the open-source software / science fiction convention - why don’t we have one of those here in the UK?) - it features the aforementioned Mr. Stross, John Scalzi and Tobias Buckell talking about the pros and cons of giving away fiction for free as a marketing strategy. Enjoy!