Loving the Alien returns after a brief hiatus, and Mac Tonnies takes the time to wonder why literary science fiction has never embraced the UFO as a conceptual alpha or omega point. Continue reading UFOs and Science Fiction
Tag Archives: literature
William Gibson (and others) on the future of science fiction
The reluctant but charming crown prince of cyberpunk William Gibson got asked to write a piece for New Scientist on the future of science fiction.
The Future of Science Fiction? We’re living in it. Those “Future History” charts in the back of every Robert A Heinlein paperback, when I was about 14, had the early 21st century tagged as the “Crazy Years”. He had an American theocratic dictatorship happening about then. I hope we miss that one.
Amen. Go read the whole thing; it looks to be part of a “Sci-Fi Special” at New Scientist, including pieces from Stephen Baxter, Ursula K Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood and Nick Sagan.
Interestingly enough, Ms Atwood mentions that she knew a young man whose opinion she asked “was sci-fi fan because he said he liked Oryx & Crake“. Y’know, that novel she swore blind wasn’t science fiction. 😉
How to Dismantle the Wall Between an Author and Their Work
This month in Blasphemous Geometries: has the intentional fallacy had its day as a critical tool? Should we roll back the stone from the tomb of The Author?
Jonathan McCalmont suggests that genre fiction fan-writers and critics should cautiously embrace biographical criticism, and examine books and other works in the context of their creator’s mindset.
Continue reading How to Dismantle the Wall Between an Author and Their Work
Near-future sf is not impossible, says Gareth L Powell
Gareth L Powell has decided to refute Charlie Stross’s recent claim that near-future science fiction is impossible to write. As a quick recap, Charlie said:
We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.
Gareth sees that as shrinking away from the challenge:
I don’t see SF as a dry, intellectual game of prediction. I don’t feel the need to be proven right by posterity. If the immediate economic future looks a little uncertain, I’ll fudge a little. I’ll make my best guess and hope for the best. I’ll write a story about people.
After all, this kind of uncertainty is hardly new. Science fiction writers in the 1980s had to consider the fact that the futuristic stories they were writing could be rendered obsolete at any moment by a full-scale global nuclear war – but they kept on writing. They made some basic assumptions and they went for it.
For instance, William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the early Eighties, at the height of the Cold War, when the superpowers were on the brink of a holocaust, and as far as he knew, he could have been vapourised before finishing the novel, but he finished it anyway.
I’m going to side with Gareth on this one – after all, we publish near-future stories here at Futurismic, and no other type!
But what about you lot? Do you find the plausibility of the predictions in a piece of near-future science fiction as important as the plot and the characters?
Bruce Sterling interviewed at Nebula Awards website
Regular readers (including, embarrassingly enough, The Man Himself) will be aware of my status as a card-carrying Bruce Sterling fan-boy, but as it’s a fandom I know many Futurismic readers share I feel I can more than justify linking to a recent interview with Sterling conducted by David de Beer at the Nebula Awards website.
As usual, you get both sides of the Sterling coin: the lengthy and discursive answers:
The Commercial vs the Artistic in writing – is there a genuine difference between these two philosophies or are they artifical attributes? Are they in opposition, and if so, can they meet?
Well, I hang out a lot in countries where the creatives write in minority languages, and really, that’s just not an issue for them. They know what American commercial writing looks like, but they themselves don’t HAVE any “commerce.” There aren’t enough potential readers to establish a market.
What they DO commonly have is “political writing,” the kind of stuff that gets your fingertips broken by the secret police. So: take a guy like recent Nobel-Prize winner Orhan Pamuk — super-popular worldwide, a real old-school deep-thinking artsy literatus, and the crazy-fascist wing of the Turkish secret police are trying hard to kill him. Now that guy is a writer’s writer. He’s got all those supposed oppositions stuffed into one refugee valise. You know, fretting about a commercial sell-out is the least of Orhan’s problems.
Furthermore, it’s dead obvious that the writing problems that matter in America now are political rather than “commercial” or “artistic”. America’s suffering a Civil Cold War. Or at least, they were until the Right’s culture-warriors started losing it.
And the short sharp punches-in-the-nose:
Electronic vs Print publishing – any thoughts on the matter?
You should talk to my colleagues in newspapers. If you can find any newspapers left.
Go read – even if you’re not a fan of his fiction, Sterling keeps an ear to the ground of reality better than any sf writer of his generation, and that alone makes him worth paying attention to.