rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

John Clute Tweets:

reading #martinamis's ZONE OF INTEREST, remembered #tomdisch's unfulfilled 1960s ambition to write a play set in Auschwitz based on OUR TOWN

Hahaha man disch was a piece of work

so, reading the cities in flight books one of the first things you come across is the motto *millions now living will never die* and at first i figured that's where tortoise got it for their album title but it turns out that's an old jehovah's witness phrase so who knows where they got it. but then yesterday it came to my attention that david briggs had a record label called spindizzy! which is totally from blish!

http://www.popsike.com/pix/20130819/360720915187.jpg

omg @ that record

on a different note - I have been wondering why/when sci-fi short fiction periodicals began to die out. Seems like the mid-70s...? Did this have something to do with the success of Dune (a phenomenon I have never understood?) Numerous authors/fans/commentators note the genre's transition, largely for the worse in terms of quality but a net positive economically, from an emphasis on short fiction and one-off novels to longer, self-contained series' of novels (everything becoming a trilogy/quadrilogy/googlilogy etc.)? I'm inclined to agree that this was a shift for the worse. My favorite 70s/post-70s guys all still clearly rooted in the demands of short fiction, even after they eventually branched out into series of novels; for the most part I am not really as interested in these sort of insular "I am building a really complex WORLD aren't you blown away" approach to novels as I am in the compact, efficient exploration of a singular concept in a short story, which seems to have been the genre's bread and butter for so long.

cosine

I just don't get why/how this happened exactly. Obviously publishers went where the money was, but what was the catalyst pointing the way (rediscovery of Tolkien in the late 60s? and then sf following suit?)

1-sine^2

i blame the sword of shannara. or star trek books.

it just happened. it's true. the multi-novel series. it's a brand thing. keeps people buying. i mean, people were reading serialized novels for a bazillion years, so, it's certainly not a new thing. even for sci-fi.

on some level, people just like the anticipation of a new installment. i have never been like this. a little bit with t.v. , i guess. Lost killed that in me forever though.

there were serialized novels before then, but they were *always* by guys who came up through the periodicals/magazines (Asimov, Heinlein etc.) Herbert was no stranger to Astounding either. But at some point those magazines died and that training ground became unnecessary, and I'm not sure why that is.

and all those early Star Trek books were by James Blish c'mon now

For a very long time, the process of coming up through the magazines was required before getting access to major publishers of the genre - this required writers to deal with editors, to refine their approaches, etc. To some extent there was an editorial grooming/culling process built into this; guys that became established in the genre in turn worked with up and comers as they graduated into editorial/curatorial positions (Silverberg's a good example of this). I gather that this more true for sci-fi than for fantasy but I'm just guessing. Sterling and Gibson and the other first-wave cyberpunk guys seem like the last major movement that started in short fiction/magazines. After that I don't really understand how new authors get four-book deals for their stupid series', but there sure are a fucking lot of them.

It is a real shame. Some people feel horror has suffered most from novel-mania because it's rare to sustain all the necessary elements over that length. There are lots of classic SF novels but there aren't a whole lot of horror novels that fans, authors and critics can agree on.
Most of those 100 Best book genre surveys focus on novels but for horror that's impossible.

I've never read many pure fantasy short stories and I wonder what they are like. Fairy tales make sense but epic fantasy in short form might be more difficult. Most of the ones I have read are recurring heroic fantasy characters like Conan.

yeah fantasy's roots are in epic poetry, it's a fundamentally different beast from sf imo, it is v much about form and archetypes. sf is more about the central, underlying concept imo.

maybe in the late 70s/early 80s sf moved away from the latter in favor of the former idk, just cuz that was what was selling. writers saw you could make huge $$$ writing some endless epic thing and the only difference between it and fantasy was that there was a spaceship or computers or something. (This does seem to be what Silverberg did with the whole Majipoor thing)

Those fantasy anthologies I posted about upthread, Hartwell's Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder and Douglas Anderson's Tales Before Tolkien are a couple of rainbow bridges---a few duds, but those go with such a range of territory.
Although Gardner Dozois' annual SF anthologies can be uneven as hell, his introductions always include a lot of comments and info (incl links etc) on pro, semi-pro (?), and fan magazines, from far and near. I rarely check any of 'em unless they're online and free (like ones linked upthread), but also good to know that we still have Asimov's, Analog (for those who want it), and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Is that Majipoor stuff any good? Seems to be from his Silverberg lite phase. Recall Disch taking a swipe at it.

I sort of doubt it...? I remember reading some of them in high school and being meh on them even then, when my standards were a bit different/lower. They made him a shitload of money though.

oh look

David Horwich: Do you feel the New Wave achieved its purpose? Did things begin to change after a certain time, or--

Thomas Disch: We accomplished our purpose, and in one ironic way we failed. Science fiction, in our culture, is basically intended for children, or young adults, as they say, and a certain amount of science fiction has to fulfill the emotional and intellectual needs of 13, 14, 15-year olds. If it fails to do that as a genre, then it won't command its place in the marketplace. So, inevitably, the people who invented and wrote for Star Trek or did sword-and-sorcery were catering to that audience, and that audience always renews itself. It's not the same audience -- people grow up to be science fiction age, then they live through their science fiction age, and then they depart science fiction, and a new generation takes their place.

Well, if that's the truth, then writers who aren't by temperament suited to write for that audience aren't going to be welcome or successful in the science fiction field. So, partly, science fiction writers age out of it -- Ursula kind of did -- or they make an accommodation to it, like Silverberg, doing the Majipoor books after he'd done his New Wave stuff. I mean, that was definitely retrogression, and it was done to make money. He was a writer, a professional, and he had to, finally, go where the audience was.

from the same interview:

Other people find new audiences elsewhere in the culture. I did, sort of, although the horror novels are a lateral shift -- it's a different audience, and presumably an older audience, and it's a different cultural audience. The emotional needs you're catering to are different. Also, all of these genres themselves are shifting in terms of the audience over time. Science fiction shrank noticeably after the New Wave. There are fewer magazines to publish stories. The short story was always the way that a new young writer made himself known, and that is now harder to do. I was just at Readercon, in Boston, and you look out at an audience there -- it's shocking how much older it is in general. Of course, Readercon is aimed at the reading audience, rather than the television-viewing audience that seems to be the focus of most SF conventions.

Why don't people call the magazines from the 60s onward "pulps"? What is the real difference?
The print run is certainly lower and generally not distributed widely but they are still magazines that writers submit stories to. It can't just be that they don't use pulp paper anymore or that you can't make a living from it now(it seems that old pulp writers even struggled to do that).

I think it's a real shame that even the biggest titles aren't sold widely.

Yeah, short magazine fiction never has paid very well, with a very few exceptions, but it's always been the way to establish reputations--for those who cut it, in smaller, non-brainwashing doses--and prestigious even for established authors, whose longer works may tend to wander into the tarpits (and/or the bank, of course). But dang, here's one new, old-school-inspired SF novel I want to read, recently reviewed by WSJ's Tom Shippey:

Lock In

By John Scalzi
TOR, 336 pages, $24.99

Comparing the latest novel by John Scalzi with Isaac Asimov's famous "The Caves of Steel" from 60 years ago makes you realize how much modern sci-fi authors have had to raise their game. Both books have detectives trying to solve a murder shaped by human/robot interaction. But ideas of robots have changed beyond recognition, and scenarios now have to be much more complex.

Mr. Scalzi's imagined future is shaped by "the Great Flu," the pandemic often prophesied for our networked world. In some cases, the flu turns into something like meningitis. The next stage is complete paralysis, the sufferers forever "locked in" their own minds.

Technology can help. Once the first lady suffers "lock-in," research money pours into developing neural implants, which the "Hadens" (as they're called, after the first lady) can use to control robot avatars, or "threeps" (derived from "C-3PO"). These give them life in a second body. The same neural implants can be used to merge with "Integrators," Hadens with no physical disabilities but the capacity to receive—for substantial payment—the presence of alien minds. In a phrase, they're human threeps. The capacity for corruption is obvious —think cross-gendering, to start with—and so is the potential for confusion. What is an FBI agent to think when he, or rather his threep, comes on a crime scene where an Integrator appears to have committed a murder? He sits in the blood saying, "I didn't do it," and maybe he didn't. But who, then, was using his body?

In the background are politics and money. Some Hadens see themselves as a new species, while those with only one body claim noisily that Hadens have unfair advantages. The Senate is about to pass a bill removing the Hadens' subsidies. Neural implants draw parasites like computers draw hackers. Mr. Scalzi keeps upping the complexity from one level of grisly opportunism to the next. Every time he does, you feel you should have been able to predict that, but he is always a jump-and-a-half ahead.

Sci-fi has always been, we should remember, a high-information genre that demands and repays reader interaction. If you can't handle words like "polyproprioreception," let alone the concept behind it—well, stick to mainstream. Though that will leave you at the mercy of the future.

Might be interesting to compare with Oliver Sacks' descriptions of his patients in Awakenings.

huh that does sound kind of interesting

altho Scalzi's wiki entries don't really fill me with confidence (I hate Heinlein)

well, hate is maybe too strong - I find him ridiculous

Leery of Scalzi too.

Though that will leave you at the mercy of the future.

also - and granted this is just about the review - this appeal to sf's purported prognostic function strikes me as pretty thickheaded.

Thought he was being a bit tongue-in-cheek.

reading the Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of. Tom Disch has some strange opinions.

Please tell.

first chapter is about American propensity for lionizing liars and hucksters and at the end he goes off on a brief tangent about Tawana Brawley (ok, sure) and then African American studies departments for making claims re: the "blackness" of Egyptians (Cleopatra specifically but also Egyptians more generally). He specifically takes issue with claims that "Greek civilization was either borrowed or stolen from Egypt". Disch was probably better read than I am on classical Greek texts but the latter claim in particular seems pretty uncontroversial - Egypt predated Greek civilization considerably and its pretty clear the Greeks did get all kinds of things from Egypt, Plato and Pythagoras cite studying in Egypt, etc. So why is this such a bone of contention? And a white guy arguing over the definition of who is black/who's not black is immediately specious, bringing it with it all kinds of historical baggage about racial classification and eurocentrism that just make me uncomfortable. Disch clearly thought of himself as a no-bullshit sort of dude, but his appeals to established "facts" here seem to elide certain indisputable historical patterns re: how Egypt was viewed and discussed by Europeans (ie "sure it's in Africa, but those are not black people unlike everyone else in Africa, because black people are SAVAGES"). A white guy complaining about black people claiming Egypt as a historical heritage and source of pride is just not a good look.

i blame dragonlance

and then there's his argument that Poe is the source of all SF... I'm just not convinced. He dismisses Shelley's claim to that title pretty much exclusively on the basis that no one actually reads her for pleasure/the book is not popular (read only by those who read as a matter of "academic curiosity"); and that the monster owes more to mythology/folktales than anything exclusively science fictional. Poe, on the other hand, was a hoaxster, magazine writer, and populist and these are the qualities Disch sees as essential to the birth of the genre. I see his point, but it's not entirely convincing to me, since it has so little to do with the substance/content of what Poe actually wrote (which honestly would never have occurred to me to qualify as SF). Disch posits that writing about hypnotism (the "pseudoscience" of its day) and appealing to popular wish fulfillment notions and the like qualify Poe as the progenitor but this reasoning just seems squishy to me.

Reading this right after Malzberg's "Breakfast in the Ruins" - and I never thought I'd say this about him - I feel like Malzberg's grasp of the genre involved less stridency, less moralizing, and a more humanistic, sympathetic approach to the its failures and foibles. Disch seems to literally despise people with a joy and intensity that Malzberg reserved only for himself (and perhaps certain political figures).

xp

Poe written some science articles too and some have said that they were really onto something at that time.

I've read a bunch of old supernatural stories where there is some dated (I mean nonsensical in retrospect) but interesting attempts to mix in plausible sounding science.

I've only read one or two Disch short stories but one really confused me with what he was trying to do.

big fan of Disch's fiction - Fun With Your New Head, Camp Concentration, and 3334 are all great. The Genocides is impossibly bleak, possibly the most nihilistic thing I've ever read, and I kind of can't recommend it. And then there's Echo Round His Bones which is remarkably inscrutable and bizarre but not particularly good and I can't say I cared a bit about it's explicitly Catholic concerns.

this isn't the first time I've encountered his opinions (he's pretty notorious; he's quite good in one of those PKD docs) but it is the first time I've read any critical essays.

Poe written some science articles too and some have said that they were really onto something at that time.

I've read a bunch of old supernatural stories where there is some dated (I mean nonsensical in retrospect) but interesting attempts to mix in plausible sounding science.

yeah these are both otm re: Poe it just bugs me that what Disch thinks makes him deserve the title of genre patriarch have more to do with his role/position in popular culture than, you know, what he actually wrote. Poe is great, don't get me wrong, but his best stuff (Tell-Tale Heart, Cask of Amontillado, the Black Cat, the Raven, etc.) bear no resemblance to the sf genre that emerged in the 20th century. in my opinion. Maybe he's got tons of science-themed stuff I haven't read yet, but I find it hard to believe that his most significant, foundational work would be things I haven't heard of.

lots of Verne-like voyaging with balloons, etc., in Poe, but I agree he's not any more foundational for SF than other writers

plus Poe is usually considered the main source for detective/mystery fiction -- let's not throw it all on Edgar

I don't know how publishers have resisted putting out a book called Edgar Alan Poems.

I was just looking at my complete Poe book today and I'm shocked how little poems there actually is. I had a strong memory of his poems dwarfing his story output. I'm pretty sure he preferred doing poems.

Ugh now Disch is ranting about political correctness and feminism (so 90s). This book is a series of petty, unfortunate disagreements rooted in disch's own insecurities.

Isn't Disch an expert on poetry? I think Moorcock said The Independent asked him for a list of the best new poets and then complained they didn't recognise any of them.

The Disch story that confused me was "The Asian Shore".

He wrote plenty of poetry himself as "Tom Disch." I've read a bunch of it, it's very good. He also -surprise- wrote a takedown of the poetry world and its petty squabbles. Probably another case of trust him if he likes something but take it with a grain of salt if he doesn't.

Disch seems to really hate large chunks of the sf community based on this book. Or at least he chose to focus on the aspects he finds most objectionable (trekkies, scientologists, feminists, militarists/fascists). This book is depressing.

Yup. He seems to think there is some genetic flaw in the genre that predisposes it to go wrong. Think I used to agree with him but not so much anymore.

some genetic flaw in the genre that predisposes it to go wrong

our fantasies unleashed. what could possibly go wrong?

Oh yeah.

Well, to circle back around, Lem thinks the problem is that in principle the genre has a lot of potential but then writers can't deal with it or live up to it so end up resorting to some debased copy of another genre-either the detective story or the fairy tale.

both detective stories and fairy tales are some archetypal shit and therefore very hard to get away from, but genre fiction is churned out by the boatload and most of it is bound to be debased or mediocre. no surprise there.

Xp:
Just came across this which was kind of interesting, about Disch's blog at the end: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/5/thomas-m-dischs-endzone/

Which led me to this, Delany's book about a Disch story which was just republished, http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-american-shore-by-samuel-r-delany.html?m=1

And then this, which is a review of that Delany book as well as The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, with a lot of stuff about Delany's thought on Le Guin.