SF Signal Mind Meld
I’ve contributed to the latest SF Signal Mind Meld, on interesting societies in SF.
Michael G. Coney is an often-forgotten SF author when we talk of the Greats. He wrote a very effective and often trippy brew of sociological SF, and did so in an immensely readable manner. His novel, Mirror Image (1972) was a great example of showing us for what we were. Though the alien society in question in this novel were “amorph’s” (changelings that transformed into whatever we desired), it was the reflection of our own human desires – in fact, the amorphs themselves believed they were human, too. A neat and difficult trick for Coney to pull off, but the end result is a cracking novel.
Read the rest, as well as what everyone else has to say.
Worldbuilding with objects
From the BBC website – A History of the World.
The coin raises the issue of how much contact the Corieltavi tribe (the local British group living around Hallaton in the Late Iron Age) had with the Roman world and how early this occurred. This coin would have been over 200 years old when it was buried in the mid 1st century AD, around the time of the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43. Did the coin arrive as part of a diplomatic gift from the Romans in the hope of easing their passage into Leicestershire? Or did the coin gradually make its way to Hallaton from the continent via trade with other Iron Age tribes? The fact that the coin was found in a ritual deposit made around AD 43 also perhaps indicates the tensions felt by local groups caused by Roman interference.
It’s an interesting project, to look at history through objects. It’s also a useful way for fantasy writers to view their own worlds. The Denarius coin was not some explicit magical item. People carried them. People paid for things with them. They went on journeys in pockets or purses. But when the coins were found out of their usual context, they threw up so many interesting questions.
And what a great plot driver: What’s object X doing in location Y? How the hell did it get there and who was involved in that transportation?
Think about all the stories that instantly spring up from that initial question. That’s one of the reasons I’m becoming increasingly interested in history recently – especially classical history, and especially when viewed from a writer’s perspective.
Inanimate objects – and I do want to stress I’m not talking about magical trinkets, but more mundane ones – say much more than you might think. Their appearance can have profound effects in creating a realistic world (if indeed that is the aim of worldbuilding or geofiction in the first place). Their presence in your fiction can give your creations culture. How were these things used? What was the function? What did it say about certain civilisations?
And when you look at many more objects from history, you realise that ancient cultures were more sophisticated than we like to believe. I’ve spoken before about the backward-looking aesthetics of fantasy fiction: a focus on objects, then, strikes me as a great way to add complexity to your aesthetics.
When we’re dead and buried, of course we’ll have our writings and so on for people to pick apart, but surely it’s the objects we leave behind that will help give definition our current culture, be it an iPhone or a plug socket. Even if future generations can’t quite work out how they were used, unanswered questions still show how much depth the real-world possessed.
Such rules could easily apply to your own world, too.
Seattle vigilante in action
Shortly after, our hero was arrested by police for using pepper-spray.
The footage goes on to show Jones breaking up the group. Then a woman screams at him, hitting him with her high-heel shoes. Jones appears to be holding his pepper spray canister.
Those Hollywood films just don’t tell it how it really is for a superhero on the streets…
The Kitschies
I’m all for things that are good for the genre. I reckon the Kitchies – a serious new award with cash prize-money (£750 for the overall winner) and a sponsorship deal from a large drinks company – is exactly what the genre needs.
The Kraken Rum presents the Kitschies, an annual award for those books which best elevate the tone of geek culture.
The Kitschies celebrate the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works – the books that do the science fiction and fantasy community proud. Winners receive a cash prize in addition to one of our lovingly hand-crafted Tentacle trophies and a bottle of The Kraken’s fine black liquid.
What’s not to like? It’s a juried award featuring the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Lauren Beukes, and the team from genre website Pornokitsch, which has a focus on quality and an appreciation for all things geek. It’s that combination which makes me think that genre fans should really be paying attention to this, because it’s the best of both worlds.
Well, that and Kraken Rum. Read more about it here.
The Cult Of SF
A couple of interesting debates going on across the blogosphere about the value of science fiction to science. First at Damien Walter’s blog, who challenges us to discuss.
SF doesn’t just show us possible futures, it trains us to anticipate new technology, model how it will impact our lives and exploit that insight.
Second at Cheryl Morgan’s blog:
The Chinese had got the idea that they needed innovation as well as manufacturing expertise, and they had noticed that young engineers in places like Silicon Valley were all science fiction readers. Consequently they decided that SF needed to be encouraged.
But I want to pick out a particularly interesting example in Cheryl’s blog regarding Climate Change:
While I was tweeting about the panel a link came through for this Guardian article about British scientists creating an “artificial volcano” to test out ideas for combating climate change. I showed it to Rachel afterwards, and she was all over it, but I can just imagine what a committed environmentalist like Mark Charan Newton would make of the idea.
I’ll get to that bit!
Not that either Damien or Cheryl were talking about this subject specifically, as I think they both make many agreeable points about the subject.
But it certainly got me thinking about the way SF is discussed, and what I like to call the Cult of SF – that is, the faith in dreaming up Big Ideas. I can understand the need to stress the importance of Big Ideas. It’s what the genre is about, no? But in some cases – such as climate change, as mentioned in the post – this is where your future dreaming will get the world in trouble. A reliance on such visions in this particular example is a terrible thing. To paraphrase what I said in the comments:
There’s so little time to hold back anthropogenic climate change (assuming you accept the unequivocal science in the first place). Leave it too long, and it will be too late to bring back CO2 concentrations to the necessary levels, causing a huge variety of issues that I’ve gone on about many times before. Dreaming up science fiction, Big Ideas, will not address the actual problems of dumping huge amounts of greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere in the first place. Moreover, this SF is diverting attention, political and financial resources away from urgent action. What this also does is play right into the hands of corporate lobbyists who will use it as an argument to delay such urgent action even further, usually to the benefit of [insert polluting organisation here].
Blind faith in science as a solution to our ills, or as some remarkable future dreamscape, can be a dangerous thing. Also, it’s not as though our wonderful Big Ideas don’t come at a cost, such as the monopolising of the food chain. The application of science through reckless corporatism, or by not recognising the practicalities of the real world in the first place, can be devastating. I should also say that what I’ve said above is no more anti-science than being against chemical weapons is anti-chemistry, and nor does it suggest we should put a limit on our ability to imagine. Science fiction is again a wonderful thing; but if we bring it into our culture, I just don’t think we should treat it like a cult of wonder.
The best science fiction, for me, actually realises this; it has a healthy scepticism for the cult of wonder. I guess that is why, for me, M. John Harrison’s or J.G. Ballard’s bleak future visions are among the best SF stories out there. (I especially like the way MJH analysis’s the commercial exploitation of science.) It recognises the corrupting influence of humans.
Christopher Priest – The Islanders
Christopher Priest is an illusionist. If you have read some of his previous novels, you will know to expect to have the rug pulled from under your feet. You will know that the people you see on the page aren’t who you expect them to be or, if they are, they will be more slippery than Michael Gove’s bottom lip.
Entering the Dream Archipelago, Priest’s heady collection of microcosms and forgotten places, was a welcome treat for a fan. And for fans, there are Easter eggs galore: take the presence of writer, Moylita Kaine, whose first manifestation in The Islanders comes as a writer of fan letters to another novelist. We read about her first efforts to become a writer, and that she has finally written a novel, called The Affirmation.
The Affirmation? I thought to myself. Priest wrote a novel called The Affirmation, of course, but I did a little digging. I recalled a short story, ‘The Negation’ (1978) which was first included in a rare collection called The Infinite Summer, and then later the Dream Archipelago book. ‘The Negation’ featured Moylita Kaine as an established novelist. In The Islanders, she crops up again several times, and also (I think) the character with whom she interacted in ‘The Negation’, a minor finale playing out decades later. These connections between books and time will please many of those who have read a lot of Priest’s output: they’re not explicit, they’re elegant inclusions, all part of Priest’s dreamscape.
But back to The Islanders.
There are no maps or charts of the Dream Archipelago. At least, there are no reliable ones, or comprehensive ones, or even whole ones.
Chaster Kammeston, a novelist who will make an appearance later in the novel, explains this in his introduction. The book is presented as non-fiction, a strange collection of tales or accounts, letters, confessions and so on, from the Islanders of the Dream Archipelago. Nothing is certain, as the reader is plunged into mock-travel guide accounts of the many (and there are indeed many) islands that make up the Archipelago. Mixing the island names and patois, the reader is given time to absorb Priest’s fragile reality.
It seems an odd way to go about presenting a novel – if indeed by now it seems a novel – when suddenly the plot appears in an unconventional, non-fiction manner. Characters are reappearing in others’ accounts. Events begin to match up, overlap, contradict each other. Subtleties become extremely important: or, if you’re a Priest fan, possible further deceptions. The reading experience is extraordinary. It’s like a magic eye puzzle: the closer you are to the text, the less you might see. You must be vaguely passive, absorbing the shapes within, to see anything of note (and even then you might be deceived), and yet remain at all times alert. Adam Roberts, in his splendid review, discusses the phrase ‘Ergodic literature’ with reference to reading the novel.
The central plot? That depends on both what you mean by ‘central’ and ‘plot’. Certainly some of the key narratives include: a murder of Commis, a professional mime artist, and those who were involved in and around the theatre at the time, their stories before and thereafter; a radical social thinker, Caurer, and her relationship with literary sensation Chaster Kammeston, his reputation and his death (note: he wrote the introduction to the novel); add to that a famous debauched painter, Dryd Bathurst, a creative tunnelling artist, those who seek to map islands with drones, those interested in the spurious trial of the man executed for supposedly murdering Commis; and keep in mind that all of these and many more micro-narratives connect or glance off each other in all sorts of subtle ways. Ultimately you begin to wonder what the plots actually are, if indeed there are any, or if it is all a vast, blissful game in a setting comprised of multiple cultures, topographies, economies and currencies.
I should also stress some of the beauty here. Priest has always written in a minimalist, deliberately mannered and very English style, which serves his fiction perfectly, because it does not get in the way of the underground complexities. Often, some of the above narratives are heartbreaking, mesmerising, or achingly tender in places. This is certainly his most refined prose.
Ultimately, it is a remarkable book that seems to be a logical continuation, even summation, of all of Priest’s themes to date. What’s more, all of this literary playfulness does not detract from the fact that it is a wonderful, entertaining novel.
It has been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a reading experience this much.
Bored of the Weird (Fiction)
The final book in the Legends of the Red Sun series is now in with my editor, where I await her Imperial thumbs up or thumbs down. So I now have a fresh piece of paper before me, and on this I won’t be writing what gets categorised by some as Weird Fiction*.
This is mainly for two reasons.
1) I’m bored with it.
2) I don’t think most modern readers really respond all that well to things that are out-and-out Weird.
The first is simple. I’ve written four books which grew increasingly weird and experimental, and I need to clear my head. I don’t want to be one of those writers who keeps churning out precisely the same thing book after book – because that would kill the whole process for me. I enjoy having new territories to explore.
The second reason is more complex, and your milage may vary. From a casual gander at the blogoshpere and forums over the years, I think bloggers and readers – on the whole, in general – really celebrate traditional fantasy, without much appreciation for hybridisation of genres. (I don’t mind this at all; it’s just how it is out there.) Readers tend to dislike being taken out of that experience by and large. Experimentation and innovation is seen as not coming from narrative trickery or prose style, but from messing about with archetypal characters.
I can’t understand why people enjoy aesthetic conservatism, and who don’t enjoy trying different things. Perhaps it’s because readers like something that’s vaguely familiar, something which they can jump into easily. It’s accessible. It’s reassuring when they take their heads away from reality. And conservatism in this sense is different than borrowing from the Dark Ages: for now, I mean it in terms of the anti-weird.
Also, whenever I speak to general book clubs, I’ve got a sense that there are definite barriers to genre: and one of those is definitely the inability to imagine something strange and surreal. (That’s an audience I’d like to reach out to, admittedly.) Some people just don’t like strange things, but that doesn’t put them off reading fantasy – if you see what I mean. More than ever, modern audiences are interested in story. I think the Weird gets in the way for many. The Weirder the fiction, the greater the barrier.
So all these signs, to me at least, tell me I should try to take aim elsewhere. I’ve read it in the entrails. I know there’s a good niche market out there for Weird Fiction. I know some of my readers probably enjoyed the strangeness the most, but there’s more styles out there for me to experiment with and right now I’d like to concentrate on a smart and powerful story without relying on the pyrotechnics too much, without trying to gross people out, without trying to impress surreal images upon an diminishing appreciative audience for those things.
So part of this is me wanting to expand my horizons, sure, and part is me contemplating who I’m aiming future novels at, but for the foreseeable future consider me hanging up the tools of Weird Fiction.
—
*Weird Fiction? Means different things to many people, I guess, but I always take it for having absurdities, unusual aesthetics, creatures and so on; something to give either an unsettling or alienating experience perhaps. In a broader sense, I’ve always appreciated it to contain experimental style or themes.
Islands of Novels
The new Christopher Priest novel, The Islanders, arrived this morning, courtesy of the lovely folks at Gollancz. I thought I’d put my money where my mouth was when I said I was a fan of his, and take a picture of the books I’ve acquired. I’ve not read all of these, but certainly most of them. It’s been a good few years since I’ve picked up a novel of his, however, since he’s someone who takes his time. There are a couple of rarities here, including The Book on the Edge of Forever, Priest’s analysis of what happened with Harlan Ellison’s famous The Last Dangerous Visions. There’s a good bibliography on wiki.
Monstrous Histories
Historical prints featuring monsters. What’s not to like?
These are available from Alternate Histories.
Article For Huffington Post on SFF & Minorities
I wrote an article for the UK edition of the Huffington Post, on the subject of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Minorities:
Science fiction and fantasy is a genre that effectively shows the difference between ourselves and the Other. From the alien slums in District 9 to the critique of colonialism within an HG Wells novel, the genre’s disregard for reality allows cultural thought experiments to run wild. This is particularly noticeable in films such as Children of Men, where the extremities of far-right politics with regard to immigration are brought to brutal conclusions. In revealing these unusual settings to a reader or viewer, the genre is well-suited to showing displays of acceptance, too. It’s perfectly placed to help us question our attitudes to minorities, or communities who face discrimination, in a way that realism can’t always achieve.
Read the rest and let me know what you think. It’s always nice to spread the Good Word about genre fiction in mainstream venues.
The Creative Restraints Of A Fantasy Series
I’ve pretty much finished a rough draft of the final book in the Legends of the Red Sun series. I’ve got most of it done on Scrivener, and this is the point where I move everything to a Word document and start polishing, smoothing over cracks and so on. To say I’m relieved to be at this stage is an understatement, because writing this book has made me realise quite a few things about writing a long epic fantasy series.
1. It’s a marathon. You think finishing one novel is tough, tying up lots of novels, plot-threads, and personal character stories, and retaining continuity for years of your life is energy-draining work to say the least. The more complex you try to make your novels (i.e. sophisticated or subtle sub-plots, themes, references and so on) the more this bites you on the arse for the finale.
2. Creatively, writing the last book in the series sucks. I’ve tried for each of the first three novels to create self-contained stories, with new plots and characters. That approach gives me a huge amount of creative freedom, which is severely lacking in a novel that has to bring everything together. It’s a challenge to do so because you’re picking up old plots and are heading towards a resolution that was planned (in theory) ages ago, so much of what you create is pre-destined. That kills a lot of the creative spark.
3. I’ve discovered I have a new respect for those who write mammoth series, even Robert Jordan who seemed to relinquish control of his books. Sure there’s no excuse for many pages discussing the stitching dresses, but that goes to show what a toll it can take on the writer’s perception of time and detail.
4. This loss of control is why novels are often late. There are laws of motion working on plots. Things that were set into action ages ago suddenly crop up again, or need resolving. Much like life, things become more complex and tangled, and representing this when you have multiple points of view means that you have to write about things you didn’t intend to cover. You have to remember names, places and character traits you created years ago – a quick fact-check on Google won’t cut the mustard. You have to manage airtime in a totally different way. For the first novels, you didn’t have to do this as much.
5. The last books in a series are nearly always read by fewer people than the first book in a series, which really doesn’t help with motivation. You’re writing to a different, more hardcore crowd.
All of these combined factors can mean that it isn’t quite as much fun to write. All books are tough to create, sure, but when writing stops being as much fun, it becomes work. Essentially, as a writer, you’re bound by your own series. You’ve one hand tied behind your back. You’re hamstrung. You’re whatever simile or metaphor you can think of. What starts off as a neat expansion of a few ideas soon grows into an uncontrollable beast at times, and your job becomes not so much about telling that story as it is about controlling the beast and putting it back in its cage.
None of this is to say I haven’t put my heart into the project – quite the opposite. You start to feel extra love for it. But if you’re new writer trying to unleash a fantasy series upon the world, be careful what you wish for…