Blasphemous Geometries returns, ready to bask in your merciless indifference.
This month Jonathan McCalmont has been thinking about that perennial discussion that is mathematically certain to arise in any situation where three or more sf fans or critics are gathered – how do we define science fiction? Jonathan has decided that we should stop trying. Continue reading How to define a genre … and why not to bother
Welcome back to Blasphemous Geometries – science fiction criticism that goes where sex ed. teachers fear to tread.
This month Jonathan McCalmont looks at the entanglement of science fiction with Young Adult literature, and wonders whether YA is the latest victim of science fiction’s aggressive expansionist tendencies. Continue reading A virus with space-shoes – SF, YA and all that
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:
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
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?
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?
.jpg){kind=link}