Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
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I don’t know whether William Gillis wrote this little screed about the changing face of science fiction as a response or reaction to Jo Walton’s piece about the reading protocols of the genre, but it certainly serves as an interesting counterpoint to it. I like to read the viewpoints of smart readers coming from outside the loose tribe of fandom, because it enables us to see some of the stories we tell ourselves about the genre’s evolution in a different light:
… the modern age has given rise to a very distinguishable modern clique of SF authors interested in worlds with recognizable causal connections to our world. In a world deprived of anything more than an anemic NASA how we get there matters (or, alternatively, how it diverged). The other hallmark of the internet age is the density of the snarkiness, reference and speed of ideas — if Blade Runner signified the beginning of the shift away from abstraction with advertisements referencing real corporations, today’s authors plaster their prose with injokes. Rather than trying to abstract away, they embrace our inherent ties to the world as it is in order to milk a higher density out of our shared language. The internet has given everyone the sensation of having passing knowledge in every field, and modern SF authors are expected to be versed and deliver on many if not all fronts.
There simply isn’t the patience for limited-focus authors. And while I still heart Delany and Le Guin, I think this is a good thing. Nothing’s worse than sitting through a work full of intellectual spark on one front to find it dead on another. A great mathematics twist matched with a ridiculous carbon copy of the author’s culture transposed upon a ridiculously different environment. A finely constructed anthropological or psychological thesis with cliche and implausibly-portrayed tech.
Perhaps Gillis has hit upon the reason that the enthroned classics of the genre frequently fail to move new readers in the way they moved us when we discovered them… but having typed that out, it feels like a tautology. How about you – did the sf classics from before your time hold up to their reputations, or were they interesting in the way that archaeology is interesting?
There aren’t many business methods worth copying from the record business at the moment, but should book publishers be trying to work more like record labels? Over at the if:book blog, one Bob Stein thinks there’s something to be learned from the days when books had a distinctive look that immediately identified their publisher as well as the author:
I find myself thinking a lot about what i call the “Foyles” model. in the not too recent past Foyles in London shelved books, not alphabetically by subject or genre, but by publisher such that there was the Penguin section and the Bloomsbury section. For a more recent example, video stores usually shelve Criterion titles on their own — precisely because of the power of the brand. From this perspective I see two sorts of physical store plays — one could open a completely new sort of superstore . . . . where publishers, like perfume companies, effectively rent space to show their wares (fulfilling in some cases with actual books but also via POD and online). The second is a publisher branded cafe/store…
It’s not that crazy an idea, really… it’s pretty evident the current book-barn approach isn’t working so well. Perhaps I’m more attracted to the idea through being a genre reader, where publisher trust is stronger and more focussed: I’m statistically more likely to be interested in a book published by Gollancz or Tor than I am one from Penguin or Bloomsbury, for instance.
Visual branding plays a part, too, as pointed out by Joanne McNeill at Tomorrow Museum:
If there were a Tony Wilson of publishing, you bet I would buy every book printed…
Well, yes!
This all ties in rather neatly to Jonathan’s Blasphemous Geometries column from December last year, where he suggested that someone should give science fiction the Criterion Collection treatment. And there’s a new column from Mr McCalmont due later today, as it happens…
How strongly does a book’s publisher influence your likelihood to buy that book, if it’s by an author you’re not familiar with? And what about packaging? I rather liked the look of the Gollancz Future Classics collection, but I know a lot of other folk found them ugly or odd.
Poor old JK Rowling; whatever you may think of the Harry Potter books (I think they make passable doorstops), there’s no denying that her success has brought her into the firing line of a lot of resentful (and less successful) creatives. As reported at TechDirt, Rowling is once again being accused of plaigiarising someone else’s work in order to create Hogwarts et al.
In these trigger-happy times of copyright law, cases like this are bound to come up – though it’s telling that you you have to make it pretty big before anyone will bother suing you. But the long-term implications and precedents are important to writers and other creatives – especially in science fiction and fantasy, which thrive on what has been described as their ongoing conversational nature. In a genre where building on (or dismantling and deconstructing) the ideas of your predecessors is an integral part of the game, a few successful suits of this type could open the gates to a flood of smaller cases; it seems there’s plenty of copyright lawyers who don’t care how spurious a case is provided there’s a chance of a decent fee. Here’s TechDirt‘s Mike Masnick:
The whole thing is pretty silly, of course. The publisher is vehemently denying any copying, and it seems unlikely that any copying did actually happen. However even if you did grant the premise and say that Rowling was “inspired” by some other book, so what? Did it really change the economics of the original book? If anything, this latest claim is just a clear money grab, designed to give new attention to a long-ignored book. No one could claim with a straight face that Rowling’s work took away any value from the other book.
Masnick also links back to an incident from last year that shows that not quite everything Orson Scott Card says is reactionary bigoted claptrap (though this example has some serious sexist undertones); commenting on the Harry Potter Lexicon case, Card pointed out that Rowling’s agressive defence of her own intellectual property hasn’t done her any favours, and that the world of literature is entirely based upon the adoption, adaptation and reuse of other people’s ideas. In defending herself against these latest accusations of plagiarism, she actually weakens the arguments she used to win the Lexicon case. Which all goes to show that copyright justice frequently boils down to a game of who can afford the better legal team… so, no news there, then.
Just to be abundantly clear, here, I’m not trying to claim that copyright law works in a way it doesn’t. The point I’m trying to make is that, as a reviewer, critic and wannabe writer of fiction, I’m well aware of the fact that there are only a few handfuls of basic story plots and character archetypes from which to start writing. The art of fiction is to flesh those essentials out into something new, but equally it’s possible to deconstruct and boil down any story into a simple synopsis that can make it sound remarkably similar to any number of other stories, without there having been any hint of deliberate copying involved in their creation. If we know that as readers and writers, how can we support a legal framework that can so easily exploit these phenomena in the name of financial gain?
In a world so full of entertainment choices that you could probably spend your entire life reading or listening or watching without ever having to repeat yourself, how do you choose what to enjoy next?
Favouring a single genre is one solution, of course, but even that’s a bit tricky nowadays, as pointed out by Jon Evans over at Tor.com. Just reading every science fiction novel published in a year would be quite a challenge if you wanted to hold down a job at the same time.
Evans thinks he’s identified two major coping strategies in our world of entertainment post-scarcity:
In my highly anecdotal experience, people tend to react to this overwhelming cornucopia in one of two ways: either they swear allegiance to one particular subfragment of genre, and deliberately steer clear of all else, or they try to sample a little bit of everything. I call this the buffet effect.
I used to be a specialist. Now I’m a sampler. Fifteen years ago, I felt like I had read most, if not all, of the good SF that had ever been published. Nowadays, I’m not sure that’s even possible; specialists have to focus on smaller subgenres, such as horror, or cyberpunk, or military SF.
As a sampler, I find myself reading one or two of an author’s books—and then moving on. I have read and really liked two Charles Stross novels, for instance, which once upon a time would have meant devouring everything he’s ever written. Instead I’ll have to overcome a certain reluctance to buy another book of his. I want to read them all, don’t get me wrong; but at the same time, I find myself subconsciously thinking of the “Charles Stross” box as already ticked, and wanting instead to try a brand-new dish from the endless buffet.
Interesting; I find myself kind of caught between the two states, personally, in that I go through brief periods of specialisation until I get distracted or derailed by some shiney new discovery, be it an author or style or subgenre; getting a commission to review a new title can provide an unexpected change of direction, too. [image by ginnerobot]
What about you – how do you decide what’s next in your to-be-read (or to-be-watched or listened-to) piles?