Tag Archives: writing

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Bruce Sterling interviewed at Nebula Awards website

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Bruce SterlingRegular 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.

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A new hope? Another call for positive science fiction

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As an antidote to the previous doom-flavoured post, here’s recent Clarion alumni Damien G Walter suggesting that it’s time science fiction started taking a more hopeful and positive look at the future:

But there are no end of reasons to have hope for tomorrow. Biotechnology and genetic research offer fantastic advances in medicine, yet their portrayal in science fiction is typified by the gloom of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. The internet is already democratising many new areas of society, but our political future is still most commonly depicted as one flavour of Big Brother dystopia or another. Environmental or economic collapse might plunge us all headlong into the apocalypic future of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or we might respond to them with intelligence and ingenuity and take the opportunity to find better ways of living. To look at the infinite possibilities of the future and see only darkness is a failure of imagination.

Here, Walter echoes similar calls from Jason Stoddard and Jetse de Vries, and doubtless some others I’ve not noticed (or, just as likely, forgotten about); it definitely appears to be a theme with some of the young turks of science fiction writing. Are we witnessing the first stirrings of a new movement?

And what about the readers? OK, so the writers are bored of dystopic futures, but how many of us would like a little more optimism in our escapism?

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Steampunk musings

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steam_crownAn interesting comment on the popularity of the clanking, clinker-creating subgenre of Science Fiction known as Steampunk:

Whether you’re reading and identifying with Girl Genius or making yourself a pair of functioning telescopic brass goggles, the fact is that when you have to get your hands or brain dirty puzzling out how stuff works, you can’t be blasé about technological miracles — you’re forced to realize what miracles we’ve actually wrought.

This is cheerful stuff, and very much inkeeping with this comment from Cory Doctorow‘s recent book, Little Brother:

“Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.“

We must continue to comprehend and understand our technology, lest we become a slave to it.

[via Beyond the Beyond][image from Angelrays on flickr]

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Writers – remix Rosenbaum’s Ant King and win the book

Benjamin Rosenbaum - The Ant King and Other StoriesVia Kathryn Cramer at Tor comes news that Benjamin Rosenbaum has decided not merely to release his new Small Beer Press collection of short stories, The Ant King and Other Stories, as a free Creative Commons-licensed download, but also to openly invite people to create derivative works for the chance to win a signed copy of the physical book.

Here are the rules:

  1. Create a derivative work of any story in The Ant King and Other Stories
  2. Place it under the same license (you do this just by including a declaration to that effect on the work in its published form)
  3. Post a link to the work (or some kind of recording or representation of the work, like a youtube video if it’s a live performance, or a picture of it if it’s, like, a vase or something) in the comments to this blog entry.
  4. Derivative works can be translations, plays, movies, radio plays, audiobooks, flashmob happenings, horticultural installations, visual artworks, slash fanfic epics, robot operas, sequels, webcomics, ASCII art, text adventure games, roleplaying campaigns, knitting projects, handmade shoes, or anything else you feel like.
  5. On March 3, 2009 (that gives you six months), I will send signed (and extensively doodled-upon) hardcover copies of The Ant King and Other Stories to the creators of the three derivative works that I like the best.
  6. Obviously, other than what’s covered in the CC license, you retain all rights to your works, so if you’ve made, you know, House-Beyond-Your-Sky-themed coasters, you get to sell them or put drinks on them to keep rings off your coffee table or whatever. And if you want to actually sell the rights to reproduce the derivative work commercially, I will in all probability tell you that you can, unless you’re, like, a Hollywood studio. 🙂

Could be quite a fun project, no?

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Why near-future science fiction is difficult

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Here at Futurismic, our fiction guidelines state that we’re looking for near-future science fiction only. There’s no elitism involved – we just like to have a niche to focus on, one that (we hope) fits with our readers as well as it does with the editorial team.

But there is an argument to the effect that, in some ways, near-future science fiction is more challenging to write well than the out-and-out fabrication of, say, space opera. Few would know that better than Jetse de Vries, who has just finished a four and a half year stint as fiction co-editor for Interzone magazine. De Vries has been doing some thinking-out-loud about the problems of near-future sf from the writer’s perspective:

It’s what makes writing near-future SF such a daunting task, and a kind of catch-22 exercise: if it looks too believable it (most probably) won’t happen; if it looks too implausible it might very well happen.

So if you dive into the world of tomorrow, you need to find a balance between not being too conservative in your predicitions, but also not too ‘off-the-wall’, either. For example, back in 1997 the movie “Wag the Dog” satirised the Clinton/Lewinsky affair by fabricating a war to cover up a presidential sex scandal. Nowadays, one would not only wish it was only a sex scandal they were covering up, but — much more importantly — that the war was ‘fabricated’ instead of real.

[snip]

So what’s a poor SF writer to do? Well, dare to make mistakes, try to ride the fine line between extrapolating too straightforwardly or too crazily, and face complexity.

I hear that: the older I get, the more relevant the old aphorism seems to become – the truth really is stranger than fiction.

How do the writers among you approach plausibility in your near-future science fiction stories?