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
Some of you brave souls who’ve taken on the NanoWriMo challenge this year are struggling with your daily wordcount targets… at least, you are if my Twitter feed is to be believed!
I know where you’re coming from: that intimidating blank screen, the panoply of possibility, the agony of indecision… not to mention the constant self-editing. All of these are major factors in me not having a writing career that makes John Scalzi look like a hobbyist[1].
But help is at hand! The Lifehacker team have discovered the ultimate anti-procrastination app for writers, the aptly named Write or Die:
Set a word count and time you want to write for. Then, set how you want the app to “remind” you if you stop writing—”Gentle” pops up a text box, “Normal” plays a harsh sound file, and “Kamikaze” mode slowly deletes back from your stopping point until you get back to it.
Kamikaze mode sounds thoroughly evil, but I’ll bet it gets you hitting your targets pretty fast. Then there’s just the editing to do…
[ 1 – It must be pointed out that laziness and lack of talent are also major players; even more major than the others, perhaps. ]
Matthew “The Mumpsimus” Cheney is guest-blogging over at Colleen Lindsay’s site, and he’s decided to do a post entitled “If Only I’d Known: Writing Advice to my Younger Self“. In sharp contrast to the gung-ho you-can-do-it teach-yourself-to-write books, however, he advocates making sure you write for the right reasons:
Publication can be fun, but I don’t think a healthy psyche finds it much more than that. If you haven’t been able to find balance and contentment in your life, publishing won’t help you, and, if anything, it may hurt.
It’s an interesting piece, written with Cheney’s characteristic honesty and heartily recommended for any writerly types in the audience – published or otherwise.
Stephen Fry’s latest blessay on words and their use is splendid, and it also includes a point relevant to the emerging Panopticon:
CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch.
If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials.
For if CCTV was called … I don’t know …. something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow “One nation under scunt” to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than “One nation under CCTV”. “Damn, I was scunted as I walked home,” “they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside,” “Britain is the most scunted country in the world” …
I for one will immediately adopt this usage (and the equally compelling “SS” or “Surveillance System” Fry goes on to suggest).
It’s a profound point: meaning matters, but so do the shape and nature of the words themselves.
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?