Futurismic

Wednesday 30th April sees the presentation ceremony for this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel published in 2007. Never short on controversy, this year’s shortlist has generated plenty of discussion and debate - no less for the novels that are missing from it than for those that are present.

It’s Futurismic’s great privilege to feature this round-up review of the Clarke Award shortlist by noted science fiction novelist, critic and academic Adam Roberts. So settle down with a good big cup of coffee, let Professor Roberts walk you through the shortlist … and then place your bets on the winner in the comments!

The Shortlist:

• Stephen Baxter, The H-Bomb Girl (Faber 2007)
• Matthew De Abaitua, The Red Men (Octopus 2007)
• Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army (Faber 2007)
• Stephen Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (Canongate 2007)
• Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel (2007)
• Richard Morgan, Black Man (Gollancz, 2007)

There’s been a deal of pother about this year’s Clarke shortlist, more even than this often-controversial event usually generates. Surprise at the omission of a number of highly regarded titles - we might mention, say, McDonald’s Brasyl and Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union - fuelled bloggish mutterings about hidden agendas, panderings to Evil Mainstream Lit and a desire to generate Turner Award-style notoriety rather than simply to choose last year’s best SF novel.

The muttering boiled down to a sense that the Clarke judges were liable to corrupt the nation’s youth and ought all to drink hemlock without ado. The question, though. is a simple one: do these six titles constitute a list of the best sf novels published in the UK last year? Continue reading “The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist 2008 - a Round-up Review”

Related posts

• The end of science fiction? (6)
• Reassessing the mundane - James Patrick Kelly on Mundane SF (2)
• Is science fiction still a distinct genre? (2)
• “The Decaying Corpse of Genre Ficiton” (2)
• Yet more free fiction (0)

Think what you will about literary manifestos, there’s no denying that the Mundane SF movement provoked a reaction among the sf community.

The original Mundane Manifesto, written by Geoff Ryman, has been lost to the digital abyss of the interwebs, but many others have built on his initial ideas, and the Mundane SF blog keeps up a regular barrage of thought-provoking posts designed to make the reader reassess the purpose of science fiction writing.

Over at Asimov’s, James Patrick Kelly takes a look at the thus-far short history of the sub-genre, and concludes:

“… I have written some stories that fit the MundaneSF prescription and some that do not. I find myself in sympathy with their arguments when I recall my intentions as I wrote those particular stories that pass their test. It is difficult to write about futures that could actually come to pass, and not only are most of the tropes they decry unlikely, but some are in dire need of an aesthetic makeover. And yet, since so many of my best known—and favorite—stories are clearly not Mundane, I can’t in conscience declare myself for the movement.

But I am listening to what they say.”

Futurismic, by definition, has a certain sympathy with the thinking of the Mundanistas - as do I on a personal level. But I still love wide-screen space operas and well-written far-future interplanetary stories - sub-genres that the Mundane movement would see relegated to the status of pulpish wish-fulfillment and fantasy.

As Futurismic readers, I assume you all enjoy reading stories that fit the Mundane template. But do you agree that those which don’t fir the template are failing to use the full potential of science fiction as a vehicle for ideas? Should fiction have any purpose beyond entertainment?

Related posts

• The end of science fiction? (6)
• The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist 2008 - a Round-up Review (3)
• Playing games with time (1)
• Is science fiction still a distinct genre? (2)
• Christopher East - Defining Futurismic Fiction (3)

Doris Lessing was unable to attend the ceremony where she was to be awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, but her editor delivered a speech on her behalf, which The Guardian has published in full (and is well worth the time to read). [Image from Wikipedia]

Nicholas Carr highlights the following passage, among others:

“What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?” “

Mrs Lessing is hardly the first to raise this argument (or something similar), but her current position in the spotlight means that it once again becomes the topic du jour of bookish folk.

I think it’s reasonable of me to assume that Futurismic’s readership is fairly bookish, but it is also plain that they engage closely with the web as well. So what do you think of Lessing’s speech? I think we can all agree that the internet is a revolution, but is it the sort of revolution that burns the fields behind it?

Related posts

• Your five-year internet fast starts now, courtesy of Elton John (4)
• Wolfram’s Magnum Opus Online (1)
• With Knol, Google enters the knowledge market (0)
• WIRED autopsies crowdsourcing experiment (0)
• Wikipedia Colored By Editor’s Reputation (1)

Via a number of places (though I saw it at Posthuman Blues first) comes a post at Mondolithic Studios which asks (rhetorically) whether science fiction is still a distinct genre. To quote:

I think what confuses some people is the fact that Science Fiction isn’t really a distinct genre unto itself anymore. It’s mutated into dozens of sub-genres and movements, liberally exchanged genetic material with Fantasy and social satirism and burrowed into the internet in the form of hundreds of thousands of scifi and fantasy-oriented blogs, galleries, fanzines, vlogs, podcasts and short story webzines.

Given that you read Futurismic (which is a paying market for fiction, and will continue to be one just as soon as we can get the site aesthetics fixed up so as to present the stories the way they deserve), it’s an easy to assume that you’re in alignment with that opinion. But maybe not - what do you think? Is there still a definable body to science fiction, or is it more of a conceptual bundle that various forms of entertainment partake of in varying degrees? [Image by Hiro Sheridan]

Related posts

• The end of science fiction? (6)
• The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist 2008 - a Round-up Review (3)
• Reassessing the mundane - James Patrick Kelly on Mundane SF (2)
• REAL CITY by Carrie Vaughn (8)
• R.P.M. by Chris Nakashima-Brown (7)

Ruth Franklin’s review of Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” starts off with a statement calculated to raise the ire of speculative fiction readers:

Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.

Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a delightful response that begins:

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly… but who?

The illustration accompanying this entry is cropped from the original drawn by bellatrys inspired by the LeGuin piece. There’s already a chapbook (pdf link).

Overall, Franklin’s review is not as dismissive as the opening sentence implies, but instead reflects what I think of as a profound ignorance of thoughtful, entertaining work being done in genre fiction. Her ignorance is captured best in the inverse of a complement she pays to Chabon’s book, calling it “a ‘what if?’ story for adults.” For adults — as if anything published in genre fiction is written for children. Why do you think the literary establishment is so ignorant of genre? [mefi]

Related posts

• The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist 2008 - a Round-up Review (3)
• Is science fiction still a distinct genre? (2)
• Wired interviews the VanderMeers, gives away chapbook (1)
• UC-Santa Cruz to put novelist Robert Heinlein’s archive online (0)
• The Future of Book Recommendations (3)

David Louis Edelman asks a big question over at the author group-blog Deep Genre - when will science fiction end? In his own words: “I’m not asking this from a commercial standpoint so much as from an epistemological standpoint. Will there always be new science fiction? Or will the genre just wither up at some point and go away?” What do you think? Are we so immunised to the exponential curve of technological change that fiction based in extrapolated futures will cease to have any effect on us other than, perhaps, nostalgia?

Related posts

• The game of consequences (4)
• The future is … expensive (1)
• The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist 2008 - a Round-up Review (3)
• Reassessing the mundane - James Patrick Kelly on Mundane SF (2)
• Is science fiction still a distinct genre? (2)

Next time someone tells you to go to hell, save yourself the inconvenience of an eternity of torment - check into Second Life, where a recreation of Lucifer’s domain as envisaged by Dante can be explored from the comfort of your favourite computer chair.

Related posts

• Thought-controlled avatars for Second Life (0)
• The banks are shutting down! (3)
• Second Life not actually crawling with terrorists after all - who knew? (1)
• Second Life enabling better US-Islam relations? (3)
• Psychology researchers inadvertently enable Second Life spam-bots? (1)