My main academic project at the moment (also known as “bringing a doctoral dissertation to a timely completion”) is grandiloquently titled “The Phenomenology of Utopia”. In some ways, that probably gives a misleading suggestion of what it’s actually about, because I’m not really trying to write a phenomenology of utopia, but rather it’s a gesture towards Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s changing conception of the political. I pose the question of whether some sort of telos - or better a horizon of expectation - is in fact necessary to supplement and enflesh with meaning what Weber characterised as the dullness or routinisation of political action. A horizon, though, that doesn’t entail an uncritical acceptance of liberal premises about reason and progress, but which also avoids the totalitarian qualities of Soviet Marxist dreaming. So, in a way, it’s an argument for the necessary intertwining of historical meaning and political action coupled with an awareness that it’s impossible to endow history, or politics, with a universal meaning. That’s a paradox, I’d argue, that is far from theoretical, and one that paradoxically shapes our current world, and crucially, to the degree it’s not recognised, constrains how we imagine our futures through an ideological act of foreclosure.
But that’s by the by, and I’ve actually got no intention of discussing all that. Rather, I wanted to segue into something that’s come up in my reading for what I’m working on at the moment - the discussion in Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction of not just a poetics but a politics of science fiction, something that Fredric Jameson draws upon and draws out in a book strictly speaking more central to my concerns - his recent Archaeologies of the Future. (You can get a sense of Suvin’s point of view on the definition of science fiction in this article in The New Humanist). In Metamorphoses, Suvin actually eschews discussion of genre science fiction (though for a reason that isn’t distaste or lack of enthusiasm), but he does appear to want to endow “science” with a certain privilege, which is no doubt related to his own premises as a Marxist critic. He’s very dismissive, therefore, of fantasy as a literary genre in a way that’s not very nuanced. He was writing in 1979, and since then, and particularly in the last decade, we’ve seen science fiction per se almost completely eclipsed by fantasy (and one of the many merits of his work is an attention to the sociology of publishing, consumer taste and literary production). This is a phenomenon one of my favourite sf writers, Michael Moorcock, discussed in Wizardry and Wild Romance, a critical study of epic fantasy first published in 1987 and updated in 2005 (see this review). Moorcock was particularly critical of what he saw as the anti-modernist and reactionary politics of Tolkien and the Tolkien-esque, acerbically characterising this subgenre as “Epic Pooh”.
For Moorcock, and for Suvin and Jameson in different ways, at least in principle, science fiction is a literature which puts the social into question, and particularly in its utopian and dystopian manifestations, can actually empower readers to think critically - and perhaps act - through the light that the creation of a different world sheds on our own. It also helps us see that we in fact live in multiple worlds shaped by different imaginings. The suggestion from Suvin, more than a little unfair, as Moorcock would himself argue with reference to some of his favoured authors such as Mervyn Peake, is that fantasy - by contrast - is some sort of wish-fulfilment and expressive of a desire to escape rather than confront the real. I’m much more on Moorcock’s side of this argument than Suvin’s, but I do wonder if there’s not something significant happening in the rapid decline of science fiction as such which doesn’t signify something sociologically and politically meaningful - not just an inability to imagine society and politics otherwise, but a refusal to do so - which I think plagues us more generally. Which brings me back full circle to the function of imagined futures in inspiring political change.
What’s inspired these reflections (and that’s all they are - I’m basically thinking aloud, so don’t expect anything too polished or definitive in this argument) is coming across - more or less by chance at the Lifeline Bookfest - Distant Suns, an obscure work of Moorcock’s (and one of his rare collaborations with another author - in this case his illustrator Jim Cawthorn who wrote part of the book under the pseudonym of Philip James). Moorcock, like other science fiction authors of the 1950s and 1960s, was astonishingly prolific - because you could only survive as a full time writer in the genre by being so - though his motivation as time went on was usually to support his innovative but financially troubled magazine, New Worlds, rather than himself. Moorcock churned out sword and sorcery, such as the Elric, Corum and Runestaff series, often writing a book in a matter of weeks or months as financial pressures built up. That actually doesn’t detract from their value as adventures aware of their own genre conventions and written with a great sense of irony, and Moorcock, a committed libertarian socialist and pro-feminist (and great friend of the late Andrea Dworkin) rarely wrote a word that wasn’t making a subliminal political and social point.
But, by the end of the 60s, Moorcock had established himself in a different (though overlapping) writerly space. The Jerry Cornelius novels had begun to appear and their strange anti-hero, of indeterminate or shifting gender, race and sexuality, launched his odd open source permeation of popular culture, which continues to this day. Later on in the 70s, the Cornelius Quartet achieved the distinction of having crossed over into “serious” literature (whatever that may mean), with The Condition of Muzak winning the 1977 Guardian Fiction Prize. But, in a distinction Jacques Derrida would have surely enjoyed (if he ever lifted his eyes from the canon long enough), Moorcock’s fiction in all its iterations always refused to fit within the opposition playful/serious, and indeed what’s exemplary about his juvenilia is that it’s capable of being read on several levels - perfect food for thought for the serious (?) geek teenagers who consumed them.
Jerry himself could be enjoyed as a pastiche of James Bond and an anti-hero for the age of Harold Wilson’s “white light of technology” and/or as both a celebration and a deconstruction of the “Swinging Sixties” London that increasingly decayed under his well shod feet as his journeys through the multiverse approached an entropic randomness. His fugue was everyone’s fugue - or rather, fugues. Moorcock himself has - rightly - acknowledged responsibility and apologised for creating Mrs Thatcher (and her later incarnation, Lady Ratchet in the Selwyn Blake Detective Fictions) through imagining (or meeting?) Miss Brunner in The Final Programme. Fortunately Jerry’s sister and sometime lover, Catherine Cornelius, and her friend and sometime lover Una Persson are guarding the time streams, as subsequent manuscripts revealed.
Well, Cathy, sometimes.
The funny thing about Distant Suns, though, is that it was commissioned for a specifically didactic purpose, as Moorcock revealed in the introduction to the 1989 New England Library edition. He was approached in 1968 by the London editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, then part of the group which owned the Times of India, to write a science fiction serial for the rag. The view was that tradition was being opposed to scientific education in the subcontinent, and that a dramatisation of the possibilities of the space age (and the liberation of technology itself from its Cold War prison) would do much to alleviate this. Moorcock enthusiastically agreed, though a later political upheaval in Mumbai and a change in editorial personnel meant that he never received any feedback on what Indian readers thought of the serial. But he clearly had fun in transposing Jerry and Cathy and Frank (and the happily to hand Hindu Professor Hira) into the unfamiliar yet not inapposite setting of a Wellsian faux-Barsoom. It’s a fun read, and a fun intertextual read.
Now, Moorcock himself was hardly an uncritical celebrant of the age of technology that brought all of us (or some of US) the moon landing and a belief, strangely overshadowed by the evidence of Hiroshima and the real threat and consciousness of nuclear destruction which makes the apolitical 50s only one of many myths we have about the post-War era in the West, in science as a solvent for all humankind’s ills. Yet he could see clearly that imagining an alternative future (and obliquely commenting on the same Imperialist motivations that inspired The Raj) was one way of acting on the present. In 2008, the Distant Suns of 1968 are a commentary on the preoccupations of the then present not our present future, with overpopulation and Cold War rivalries being the salient threats rather than, say, the pathologies of globalisation and climate change.
But - what does it say about our far too univocal present that we’re increasingly unable to imagine other worlds, and an other world? That, to me, is both the literary and political/sociological question Distant Suns asks of us in this particular conjuncture.
Out of curiosity, what are your grounds for saying that SF has been eclipsed by fantasy? OK, OK, J.K. Rowling made $gazillions from Harry [spit] Potter (may he be tormented in Hell by Lords of Chaos for all eternity). And Peter Jackson got his well-deserved gold statuette for filming LOTR.
But if you want to find a ‘fantasy’ book these days, you’ll often be directed to the SF section of the bookstore, where volumes with spaceships on the cover seem to outnumber those with elves.
Oh I dunno, maybe you’re right. I haven’t exactly done a statistical survey.
I’m still also grappling with the notion that everything Moorcock wrote was ‘political’ in some way. I’d love to know what the subtext of Elric was. Elric = upper-class Brits = weak, decadent, vicious? Arioch = Margaret Thatcher? Who knows. I just thought it was a ripping yarn at the time.
Time for a true personal anecdote: how Michael Moorcock ruined one guy’s chance to get laid. I was out one night with a mate, many, many years ago. Said mate was chatting to a young lady, and they seemed to be getting on well.
Then the conversation turned to books. What, the young lady enquired of my friend, were his favourite authors?
Lovecraft, he responded, and Moorcock.
The chick stormed off.
My friend really had only himself to blame: he pronounced it Moor … [pause] [grin] … Cock.
Needless to say, I was reduced to helpless laughter.
Paulus the decline of SF has been discussed many times at the blog Making Light, which is run by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden who are both professional SF editors. PNH works for Tor Books which is one of the largest SF publishers in the US.
Mark:
Not bad! In your first paragraph, you jumped from the seemingly esoteric to the immediate and practical. Good luck with your dissertation - when completed, expect either to be rewarded with a highly-paid sinecure at a political think-tank, or, to be pursued by shadowy henchmen of the forces of evil trying to shut you up - so life won’t be boring whatever happens. You are definitely going to have to do something about the title, though, when you go from the compulsory 6 copies [or whatever] and into the paperback version for the general public.
Now, back on topic. Not all science fiction is political - though, for example, Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” surely was: small “c” conservative as a novel, ultra-right-wing meathead propaganda as a film.
IMHO, fantasy and science fiction started travelling together - and sometimes ovelapping - in the 1940s and continued to do so for a few decades then diverged again. Neither “Lord of The Rings” [of the ’30s] nor “Harry Potter” [of the ’90s] have anything to do with science fiction.
India in 1968? Hmmmm. That wouldn’t be just about the time Indians started getting really serious about nuclear research and about space research, would it? No, I’m not suggesting Moorcock was responsible, just that the timing of him being asked to write that serial was interesting.
Surely you mean “parody of ultra-right-wing meathead propaganda”, Graham? Not even subtly parodic.
Heinlein is quite well-known for his ultra-right wing subtexts verging on the Fascist at times, but its been so long since I’ve read him titles slip my mind - I didn’t mind Stranger in a Strange Land though.
Mark, I’m sure your aware of Ursula Le Guin’s work - there was a science fiction novel about, I think, anarchy, and of course she did the cross over into fantasy with The Wizards of Earthsea, a much very undeservedly neglected little trilogy. Your work is fascinating. Hope you get a publisher.(If you don’t already have one.)
Graham, the film version of “Starship Troopers” is very much a satire of “ultra-right wing meathead propaganda.” Much like “Robocop” which Verhoeven directed 10 years earlier.
Mark wrote:
I often wonder whether this phenomenon is largely due to the perceived slowdown in large scientific discoveries. That post-war period where the atom had been split, the sound barrier broken and satellites launched into space must have been incredibly inspiring for SF writers - after all, most (if not all) of those projects required massive government intervention and corporate co-operation on a scale never seen before (i.e. a burgeoning utopia?). Now, after the bleak 1970s and malthusian predictions of a widespread, human created dystopia, those imagined futures look further away than ever. I don’t read fantasy books much (or at all truth be told) but because they hark back to magic and superstition, they offer an escapism that isn’t necessarily tied to scientific progress and are therefore not tainted by it. Scientific progress (although still rapid) becomes ever harder to understand to laymen and threatens to become a mystery religion.
My friend really had only himself to blame: he pronounced it Moor … [pause] [grin] … Cock.
OK, stupid question … isn’t that how it’s supposed to be pronounced? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it any other way.
Like Paulus, I didn’t realise that sf was in a ‘rapid decline’, especially with respect to fantasy. A decline in what sense? Quality? Quantity? Who says ‘we’re increasingly unable to imagine other worlds, and an other world?’ (and speak for yourself!) Certainly the hard sf and space opera segments, which are my main fare, seem to be booming, despite (or perhaps because of) the perhaps-looming Singularity. Speaking of which, see Ken MacLeod for some highly political sf, eg The Star Fraction and sequels.
I quite agree that sf is inherently political — even when not explicitly written as such — in the sense that it imagines (and hopefully makes plausible) other societies. (A lot like the study of history, in that sense.) Fantasy is less so, or at least there’s less variety in the sub-Tolkien part of the genre, it’s all cod-medieval feudalism. I don’t know, I guess I don’t read much fantasy these days, maybe it’s gotten better? Or maybe it’s not fair to compare the low end of the fantasy genre to the high end of the sf genre?
Sounds to me, Mark, as if you might prefer to explain the decline of science-fiction precisely in the terms of its shift away from social imagination into sparkly-cover escapism. I can think of one genre which has been exploding [ahem] in popularity over the last decade or so, with distinctly other-wordly imagination and cutting social criticism: Zombie flicks, baby.
If Ray Bradbury were alive today his characters would be holing up in shopping centres, waiting for apocalypse, instead of rocketing away from it.
…
“Epic Pooh” is a great phrase. I’m stealing it.
What’s piqued my interest lately is the hybridisation of historical fiction with SF with Fantasy via alternate history - which has also emerged as a standalone genre and a trope (with it’s own subtropes like Zeppelins and Nazi Victory Dystopias) in otherwise vanilla SF and Fantasy. The melding and re-imagining the present and the future through the dice-roll of chance and the knotted skein of historical contingency seems to represent another area where the non-teleological conception of history and agency have had a direct impact on SF/Fantasy.
Again, the event horizon of the future seems to encourage a burrowing into the past, this time to twiddle with the knobs and try and get that Mongol-ruled Europe or that Russian colonial presence in Africa you reckon would be really cool.
Don’t start me on steampunk, Leinad. My cubicle-mates are going to start asking why I’m frothing at the mouth and muttering. Cut-price ahistorical reactionary nostalgia, that was done far better by the Western genre, that’s all you need to know about *that*.
Bring back the Austro-Hungarian Empire! But with cool costumes!
Just sayin…
Liam: I want nothing to do with Steampunk. All I care about is getting a three-sided World War between the Aztecs, the Angevin Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with nuke-powered caravels.
As long as it’s got a decent car chase in it, I’m in.
They’re not called cars in this TL, they’re called combustimatons. And they’re powered by refined biomass as large coal deposits were not uncovered in England in the late 18th century thus preventing the rise of the industrial revolution and delaying petroleum science until just recently…
Also, Scarlett Johansson.
So where do you two boys sit on Mieville then? On the one hand, he’s all you profess to despise, on the other he’s one of the few nakedly political fantasy writers - certainly one of a tiny number operating with what I would describe as a class consciousness in his writing?
Patrickg, my hostility to the fantasy genre, like most great enduring hatreds, is based entirely on ignorance. And if it’s OK, I’ll keep it that way.
If you ever feel the need to challenge your prejudice, Liam (you never know… say you meet some really fine lass who won’t “go there” unless you’re wearing a plastic broadsword) then seek out and sample the work of Hugh Cook.
Do any of his titles feature the words “chronicle”?
[checks internet]
Thank you, come again.
Try Girl Genius Kim, it’s where I’m getting my SF fix from these days. As well as other webcomics like Gunnerkrigg Court,
Dresden Codak and a few others. Maybe that’s where sensawunda is found these days, rather than in novels.
Cheers, Zarquon!
“Do any of his titles feature the words “chronicle”?”
*dons tatty old librarian hat from brief stint shelving for holiday money*
Technically, no.
You’re right FDB. Alliterative and self-referential titles are a heinous crime, and in a just world they’d be punished severely by a self-regulating publishing industry.
Janet Evanovich? First against the wall. (Then, second, etc… boom tish)
Leinad - an early (but possibly not the first) alternate history is the late, great Phil Dick’s “Man in the High Castle”. It’s worth a read (or a re-read in my case). And those of you who didn’t much care for Heinlein’s world view in “Starship Troopers” might get a giggle out of Harry Harrison’s parody “Bill the Galactic Hero”.
Liam - fine, don’t read them then.
*huffs*
The titles are awful, and very easily the worst thing about the series. I brought them up here because they kindasorta are an amalgum of fantasy and SF. Various races of varying degrees of sophistication try to deal with the leftover remnants of a vastly superior technology, and mostly fail. Little threads picked up and dropped, lots of philosophy, intersecting yet self-contained storylines… it’s worth a crack.
You’re right, FDB, I’m not being very helpful, or particularly on-topic. Sorry, and sorry Mark.
In my defence, I simply plead distaste for faux-Dark Ages heroic dragon-lit, rather than the genre per se. Smaugallergy? Pernophobia? Eragoversion? Or am I being unfair as Brett says, comparing low-end to high-end?
Heh.
Well, there be dragons in Cook’s books, but they’re mostly opium-addicted wastrels who recite awful poetry to their hapless captives.
You’re thinking of Vogons, not dragons, surely.
There is a similarity to be sure. Only one though. Well, maybe they’re both green too. Anyway, enough derailment.
The idea of “Dreaming Imrryr” is not at all dissimilar to what led John Lydon to later sing “England’s dreaming”; that England’s time had been and gone just like Melnibone’s had. Elric leading the attack on Imrryr celebrates dismantling the British Empire.
I’m not sure if he had anyone in mind to be the real world equivalents of the Purple Towns or - more interestingly - Pan Tang. Or for that matter does Stormbringer in some ways represent the ultimately destructive power that leaders like Mugabe would have to wield to overthrow the children of the empire but would later lead them to ruin and chaos and destruction. He certainly wouldn’t have been thinking of Mugabe in particular, but there were similar leaders at the time; but probably not.
Anyway, that’s my opinion. Entirely unsupported by Arts degrees of any sort.
Thought it’d been done - http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/121800dune.jpg
What I would say, Liam, is that 90% of books, give or take, are total shit.
Genre fictions suffer the slings and arrows of opprobium all the more because
a) literature can be posited as meant to be unenjoyable, like a dose of cod liver oil, it’s good for you. I disagree with that vehemently, but there you go.
b) Genre fans will read anything, the poor bastards are so desperate, and unlike literature, the idea of a “canon” in genre - whilst present - is not one championed by publishing companies themselves, universities, media, book stores etc (with the exception of Gollancz, of course, but they manage to fuck it up with some truly dreadful typographical and printing errors).
The thing that cracks me up as a sidenote is when someone is lucky enough to be championed by the intamellectuals and considered “literature”, writes genre fiction - suddenly it’s up for the booker, everyone’s creaming their pants “ooo! They’re reinventing the genre!!! Hold me!!”.
Meanwhile, those of us who actually toil in the trenches of genre, mining rivers of silty shit for those sparkling gold nuggets, just shake our heads. Reinventing the genre? Please. The critics and the Mann Booker Circle Jerk Community need to not get a hold of themselves and actually study the genre, and its history, before they talk about reinventing it.
You will never see Ian Rankin get a Booker, but Ian McEwan, yessir. Likewise Cormac McArthy is fine for The Road (not a bad book, I might add), but god help us if Rudy Rucker, or William Gibson get a gong. John Banville for his execrable book, but not John Le Carre. Murakami yes, William Browning Spencer no.
I think it’s partly a class thing - proles don’t read Hollinghurst, but they will read Heinlein (shudder)- partly an age thing: it’s fairy tales, or Amazing Stories, essentially, and unless you’re Angela Carter or Salman Rushdie (another shudder), it’s still not cool for a grown up to read fairy tales.
And thus, when someone picks up a fantasy or sci fi, or crime, or whatever, and like most books it’s either shit or very average, it’s the genre’s fault, not the whole edifice.
That’s my two cents anyway.
I agree entirely, patrickg.
(Though Ian McEwan’s The Innocent ought to be in any spy novel genre canon)
great post mark, thaks for the links Zarquon, i ’spcially liked maiking light and might try that tarot game later.
i don’t know whether to discuss the fading of SF or utopias. Ian M. Banks’ “Culture” novels are my fav utopia at the mo. loved Le Guin’s “the disposessed” when younger. But i think that SF has always done dystopias better.
if SF is fading somehwat, and i wasn’t aware of it, i thought that i had got picky and a little set in my ways, i think that one of the culprits may be cyberpunk. don’t get me wrong i love large amounts of it.
there is something so next week about most cyberpunk that when you pick up a book ten or twenty years after it was published the errors are so in your face, it doesn’t seem to age well. eg; the lack of mobile phones in William Gibson’s Neuromancer etc is much more harshly judged (not least by WG himself) than the same lack in AC Clark and S Kubrick’s 2001, which was probably written only 8-10 years earlier. these kinds of errors do not IMHO detract from the greatness of the best of these books, but they do make them less accessable to the next generation of readers.
I’m not sure that fantasy and SF are discrete genres, or perhaps it’s that they have converged. In which genre would you locate Ursula K LeGuin’s works, or Phillip Pullman’s, for example? What brings fantasy and SF together is their relative lack of a grip on, or basis in, empirically observed reality for their settings, plots and actions. Faux antic language used to distinguish fantasy of the swords-and-sorcery school, but this seems to have waned - perhaps J K Rowling’s success has broken that spell. Similarly, SF has largely jettisoned the Tom Clancy-style catalogues of imagined technological marvels it used largely to consist of.
Which of LeGuin’s works, though? Is she crossing over genres, or writing in both genres?
Btw, excellent post, Mark…
The Dispossessed and Earthsea are documentaries.
Sure, and “ansible” is an anagram of “lesbian”.
You can’t go past The Lathe of Heaven, and The Left Hand of Darkness - one of the best books examining gender imho, not at the expense of story or characterisation, but a well-told, simple, elegant story.
I just had to look up Epic Pooh, if only for the magnificent title. Now I’m reminded of other authors.
I blame the boilersuited Presbyterian teachers’ unions.
I know my SF, having grown up with Asimov, Wyndham, Heinlen, Bester, Sheckley, Bradbury, Blish, Norton, Leiber, Simack, Clarke, del Ray, van Vogt, Clement et al.
Then I discovered Eric Frank Russell (still really fucking today), Sturgeon, Philip K Dick, Pohl and Kornbluth, Ellison, Disch, James Tiptree jr, Haldeman, Spinrad, Le Guin, John Christoper, John Wyndham (again, a very underrated writer), Brunner, Zelzany, Ballard et al, and then realised it wasn’t about the tech and alternative worlds themselves but rather about how the humans and others dealt with these environments.
And I agree a lot of cyberpunk has not aged well (interesting how its main champions now set their latest books in right now time or the immediate past) but fuck it it was a great and necessary circuit breaker at the time. And stuff like Sterling’s “Islands In The Net” or Gibson’s “Mona Lisa Overdrive” turned out to be very prescient indeed about what’s going down now in the global geo-political interwebbed military/infotainment environment. Plus, I still say Sterling’s ‘Schismatrix’ is one the greatest doable space operas ever written.
As to the SF/Fantasy crossover, there’s clearly no doubt there will always be a market for ‘The Chronicles of Fidddlefang. Vol 3: Iron Claw Of tGolden Destiny’ - basically professionally written slashfic.
You’ll notice all the major SF/Fantasy franchises these days always have exactly the same narrative arc. An ordinary person just going about their business, just like you or I, suddenly finds he’s (it’s generally a he) the Chosen One in an epic struggle to save everybloodything cf: Star Wars, Lord of The Rings, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Narnia, Golden Compass, Lord Foul’s Crap, etc, etc.
However hard SF/slipstream fiction is making a comeback. Look at the Hugo and Nebula nominees over the past few years.
You’ll notice I have not so far namechecked Peter Hamiltom, Alistar Reynolds or Dan Simmons. That’s because I think I Iain M. Banks pisses all over them without even really noticing they exist. And I’ve just read the Bankster’s new Culture novel, “Matter” which certainly maintains the standard of his universe - and with some sly little back references to his earlier work. Though I can’t help thinking he comes with the names first and works backwards from there. But you’d agree he’s the most orthologously orthographic writer around .
China Meville’s another kettle of killer moths altogether. He’s a damn good writer technically and he comes up with some original monsters but his big points and massive dreams were made first and better by Peake and Dickens.
The best SF/Fantasy books I’ve read lately have been set in the past. Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell” Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Pynchon’s “Against The Day”.
Then there’s Richard Calder’s “Dead Girls” and Jack Womack’s Dryco series, both quite suis generis.
But then again that’s the whole charm and impact of SF/Fantasy isn’t it?. It’s supposed to be a steroid-enhanced rule-busting genre. Like rock ‘n’ roll used to be.
Even though “The Space Merchants/Gravy Planet” or “Tiger, Tiger/The Stars My Destination”, both written about a half a century ago, are based on drop dead killer proven plots and with great characters and strikingly original mise en scènes, they’ll never be able to turn ‘em into mainstream films.
However, Harrison’s “Stainless Steel Rat” series is just sitting there, waiting for the next Joss Wheedon or J._Michael_Straczynski to turn it into a funky and rude 23st century crime caper series. Like Minder meets The Rockford Files in Zero G.
Ahem, fellow junior astralnoughts…
“Eric Frank Russell (still really fucking today)”
should read
“Eric Frank Russell (still really funny fucking today)”
If Eric was alive now, he’d be not a writer but the Head Script Editor on Futurama.
Noramlly I can’t stand it when someone feels welcome to trample upon my time with some mincing correction to a minor typo or grammatical in their previous comment.
But in this case, Nabs, I’m really gratefukl you bothered.
“Eric Frank Russell (still really fucking today)”
Juts couldn’t work out what that was meant ot be.
I’ve never understood why the Stainless Steel Rat never made it to the big screen. I always thought someone like Dennis Quaid would be perfect for the role, though he’s probably too old now.
Nabs, I agree that Iain M. Banks (not to be confused, of course, with Iain Banks, who is the same person) is about the best out there, but it’s a bit harsh to dismiss Reynolds and the others just because he’s a freak. Also how about Charlie Stross and Ken MacLeod? Also, what think you of our own Greg Egan (who I see finally has some new books coming out)?
Read Eric Frank Russell anyway, wbb. I reckon you’ll really like his sardonic, Kafkaesque proto-Phildickian sense of humour applied to twisting around standard 50s SF trophes.
Start with this, a classic naval shaggy dog story updated for interstellar armed forces with a cunning turn of the tale at the end. It’s both timeless and tongue in cheek yet depends on a SF-tech twist for the punchline.
this?- sounds way too pomo for me, naBBer.
In the future, the ability to code html will be genetically coded into us.
But in the meantime, here’s the non-functioning link above, now rendered in all its raw clickable splendour.
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/russell/russell1.html
And don’t get me get started on Russian SF of the 60s and 70s. Some seriously coded messages about fucked up worlds there rendered through set ups that’d make Bulgakov do a double take.
Don’t want to get all earnest on yer drunken arse, nablomov, but is there any SF treating of Clim Ch these days? (Bolt excepted. Haha.) Or does the genre’s fantasy imperative preclude that type of scenario?
An amazing post, Mark. Who let you loose on the world?
I’d be interested in comments on this question in a political/sociological sense. I’ve had a few stray thoughts, no doubt pathetic and mundane. I’ll try to muster them tomorrow perhaps. But to cut to the chase I was heading for Weber’s stahlhartes Gehäuse, especially the notion “that modern capitalism has created a new kind of being”. Hence the need to address the question of the political subject, who we are, what we have become and what we can become without disturbing the social order. Or whether we must change the social order to become what we truly can be. Merleau-Ponty’s social theory, perhaps? And whether the existing order will hold, or whether it has come to a point where Wallerstein’s ‘world system’ is breaking down anyway.
As of Feb 1 Wallerstein himself didn’t seem to know.
In that piece Wallerstein mentioned the alterglobalisation movement, which includes the Zapatistas and all the groups that from time to time gather under the World Social Forum rubric “Another world is possible”. There is dreaming and imagining going on there aplenty, but whether anything there imagined can break out of the cage, Wallerstein himself seems to be saying it’s too early to tell.
But it seems to me that if you truly go down these paths, the thesis itself is in danger of breaking out of it’s cage to become something unmanageable.
There I’ve done it now and I’m not sure it helps.
but is there any SF treating of Clim Ch these days?
Oh yes. Bruce Sterling’s ‘Heavy Weather’ which also includes F5 tornadoes and Straussian population-thinning conspiracies undone by ’smart rope’ and Norman Spinrad’s “Greenhouse Summer’ which gets right into the dirty nitty-gritty geopolitics and breakaway regional tech patches.
Also Kim Stanley (Red, Blue and Green Mars) Robinson’s latest trilogy, “40 Signs of Rain”, “50 Degrees Below” and 60 Days And Counting” confronts the whole climate change, resource starvation issue head on.
Incidentally both Kim and Bruce do consulting work for NASA, DARPA and CIA.
I remember enjoying Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Neveryon series, 8000 days ago, or so. No guarantees at this distance, though.
Post-modern, sexual/identity politik, sword and sorcery series.
In terms of your project Mark, you might like to check out Samuel, (if ya haven’t already), being both nebula prize winning sci-fi writer and literary critic (and an African-American writer)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_R._Delany
And incidentally incidentally WWB, I’ve been in email touch with both of ‘em, who are both seperately planning to be in Melbourne by this Xmas. Apparently whatever Victoria is up to now is ringing quite a few bells abroad. Let me know if you’d like to hoist a few with either of ‘em and have ‘wide-ranging’ discussions. Neither are shy about their love of good wine and beer.
Well, given their interest in global warming, they should have been here this past week … though Adelaide would have been even better.
“Also how about Charlie Stross and Ken MacLeod?”
I was trying to cover them along with John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow et al in my “Look at the Hugo and Nebula nominees over the past few years.” line.
And while I quite enjoy Charlie Stross’s hard SF stuff, his Len Deighton/Ian Fleming meets HP Lovecraft occult spy books are the main reason I keep an eye peeled for his name on the bookstore and cybershelves.
His latest one in that vein, ‘The Jennifer Morgue’, features as a bonus, a hilarious yet quite provocative interview with Transdniester’s Minister of Inward Bound Investment, one aging but still acute Ernst Stavro Blofeld who makes some pointed observations about how James Bond was basically furthering HM Government’s weapons sales in Eastern Europe.
Howard Hughes, James Jesus Angleton (the other one) and Dagon, elder god of the deeps. also make guest appearances.
And our hero, a computer nerd blackmailed a la Harry Palmer into a James Bond role, gets issued by Q Branch with a state of the art tricked out car. A Smart Car.
“And this is the eject button.”
“How can you fit an ejector seat in this?”
“No, when you push it, the whole car ejects.”
“I’ve never understood why the Stainless Steel Rat never made it to the big screen. I always thought someone like Dennis Quaid would be perfect for the role,”
Heath Ledger would have been great as a roguish but basically nice interstellar criminal. And thanks to the miracles of modern CGI technology he still can be.
How many smart and up coming actors do you think are now arranging for full motion capture scans and signing over their after-death rights to their physical copyright to family trusts?
And maybe along the way arranging for judicious software leaks to shit hot funky cool You Tube-discovered Machinima artistes and artisans.
“How many smart and up coming actors do you think are now arranging for full motion capture scans and signing over their after-death rights to their physical copyright to family trusts?
And maybe along the way arranging for judicious software leaks to shit hot funky cool You Tube-discovered Machinima artistes and artisans.”
Great SF idea except James Tiptree Jr (’The Girl Who Was Plugged In’) and William Gibson (’Winter Market’) already explored brilliantly the human consequences of such commercially driven tech in a couple of crystalline short stories.
Well Brian, if yer referencing Parsons and Weber imputing the output of the different social energies that went into refining and hammering the juices of the earth into various kinds of economically and industrial scaffolding if which we can hang various levels of civilistaionn
and then saying things like
“”But it seems to me that if you truly go down these paths, the thesis itself is in danger of breaking out of it’s cage to become something unmanageable.”
..,the you have to read Bruce Sterling’s ‘Schismtrix’, a tough, funny and technically tight story (like a rail gun version of Heinlen’s The Man Who Sold The Moon’) of humans spreading out through the solar system which makes it clear such an exercise will involve major industrial complexes, pragmatic biological management, a deft hand with social, economic and media skills in unnatural environments, the rise of new political factions and a willingness to suck it up and go for it in the face of exploding boundaries and massive technological and so cultural change. Like Victorian-era Earth but played out on the canvas of the whole Solar system.
My favourite quote from Schismatrix still remains:
“Neville Pongpianskul was dead, but it was not polite to refer to the fact. Following Ring Council ritual, Pongpianskul had “faded” leaving behind him a programmed web of speeches, announcements, taped appearances, and random telephone calls. The Neotenics had never bothered to replace him as Warden. It saved a lot of trouble all round.”
Worked for Reagan and late era Russian and Chinese commie leaders. Time to set up all our “leaders” that way. Then we can piss off and get on with terraformimg Mars and turning the Asteroid Belt into another seedy archipelago like the Caribbean.
Per ardua ad astra and then take yer percentage.
But unlike all those transhumanist libertarians, I’m not underestimating it’s gonna take major major social skills to bring together and focus the communities that have to go out there and make it happen.
Which is why libertarians never start or deliver anything bigger than themselves.
Another reason I like Sterling is that, unlike all the Hamiltons, Reynolds, Simmsons and Bears, he recognises that the future will involve a lot of Chinese, Indian, Russian, Turkish. Indo and Latin American names and attitudes.
One sure mark of judging a crap SF authour and/or futurist is how they paint the formal social scenes - from banquets and parties to family rituals and life events. The basics don’t change but the details and protocols are ever shifting.
This was the problem with most Golden Age SF writers. They kept postulating way out there changes in how humans would interact while their tech predictions turned out to often fall well short of our reality now.
Like for example, (with a few exceptions like Pohl & Kornbulth and Bester) it didn’t seem to dawn on most SF writers and futurists that the future would not be commercial-free.
Until they saw Bladerunner. That flick had an amazing and still not fully appreciated impact on how we now go about visualising how we visualise possible futures.
Nabakov [60]:
You are right about “Bladerunner” but don’t forget the pre-StarWars gem “THX-1138″. My recollection of older SF was that quite a few writers had commerce slap-bang right at the core of their stories.
And with wbb [42 et seq]:
Wasn’t it Eric Frank Russell who wrote that quite tasteful story about an expedition to Mars - and back - “Bitter End”?
Glad you mentioned Russian SF. Too often neglected. Any literary buffs or political/social analysts around who would like to comment on its impact on Soviet policy and society?
you go Nabakov. Thanks for the heads up re the new Banks tome, headed for a bookshop as soon as play school is over.
also; vale AC Clarke http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7304004.stm.
Nabs, just to clarify, I used Weber’s original “stahlhartes Gehäuse” (literally steel-hard housing or casement) to remind Mark, because I know he knows, that Talcott Parsons in translating it as “iron cage” changed the metaphor and arguably changed the meaning. The point being that capitalism does not hold us, unchanged, within its cage, it has reshaped us in a fashion more suited to its purposes, if I can personify capitalism for the moment. But later in the comment I riffed off the Parsons concept.
I could also surmise that our quietism is a case of adoption of dominant class values. But the Zygmunt Bauman stuff on fluid personalities in the postmodern era is also relavent.
I don’t claim to know this material in any depth. Mark will certainly find his way through it far more easily than I ever could. I was just trying to lay down a few markers, but also attempting to address the question Mark raised in its political/sociological dimension, not so far undertaken by other commenters.
Brian/Mark,
Unsure if quietism is necessarally basis for the surmise population has adopted class values.(And I’m hopefully makiong this observation from a non-ideologival point of view - ie not from a Socialist point of view necessarily.) I’d wonder if the quietism was rather a manifestation of quiet desperation, rather than adoption of dominant class values. I don’t know the proportion of Australians who followed Howard’s advice and went out and bought shares. Years ago I read a figure of 50%, but assume that also included super funds.But I would surmise there were many, probably older Australians like myself, aware the boom cycle wouldn’t last, so treated his capitalist urgings with suspicion if not contempt. My point being, there’s always a pretty large proportion of society who appear to accept dominant class values, but in fact don’t but don’t express that lack of acceptance. Add to that the 2% or so who would not accept dominant capitalist values because they despise the ideology, and I’d say you might have half the country thinking they’re living in a society they’re actually alienated from for one reason ot another.
Well, speaking of the decline of science fiction … Arthur C. Clarke is dead: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jfE8qUikNEG6MVWqYku2k8BD_RcgD8VG4VI00
Brett -
What, still ?
Doh, missed that! I could have gotten a head start on my period of mourning, by at least 90 minutes.
Yes, churlish of me not to have already remarked that it was a fine post by Mark.
But - I don’t understand why Mark says that. Now, I wouldn’t like to deny that our culture is too univocal but I don’t see that we are becoming increasingly so.
My sense is that the opposite is true and that the cacophanous nature of our culture is one of its defining points compared with many others. I always get the feeling that it is this more than anything else which so gives Culture Warriors the heebie jeebies in the middle of the night.
The two competing innate pulls here are our need to belong to the tribe and to cohere and consolidate around achieved principles and structures. And then there is our urge to dismantle and create, to reject and innovate. Both essential of course when balanced.
I see plenty of evidence that the latter urge is finding lots of room today to keep our society healthy and sufficiently adaptive.
Thanks, folks, I’m glad people liked the post and there’ve been some interesting comments. I’m pretty busy this week but I’m reading the thread and will come back and respond as soon as I get a chance!
Liam, “Epic Pooh” is online:
http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953