Back to the Futura

Yesterday, I went down to an old-fashioned physical book shop to buy the latest and last Iain Banks novel, The Quarry. Banks himself died last week from cancer, at 59: a massive loss to contemporary fiction. Ironically, he'd almost finished The Quarry before getting the diagnosis – ironically because one of the central protagonists is dying of cancer, and takes the opportunity to deliver some ripely expressive diatribes on the subject of those he's leaving behind.

When I took the book to the counter, the assistant remarked on the oddness of the cover:

Which was interesting because the day before, at the Futura Science Fiction convention (attended so poorly that a standard-issue police box would have suited us fine, never mind a TARDIS), one of the panels mentioned a book shop which deliberately obscured all its stock's covers with a paper bag on which a summary was hand-written. The thinking behind it is that cover design is a marketing tool which encourages ever-tighter genre descriptors and alienates potential readers. I'm in total agreement: much cover art is derivative and/or terrible, and it is alienating. There's a lot to be said for the old uniform Penguins.

Sometimes there are interesting experiments: I collect Jane Austen editions, and use them in my teaching about 'popular' and 'high' art. I show the students these copies and some other Austen editions, from too far away to read the names and titles, and invite them to guess what kind of novel is inside.

Then we talk about genre, marketing and how our reading are shaped by these kinds of expectations: the 'adult' cover art for children's novels also get an airing. It's a fun class and one which gets students talking about reading as a social and economic activity, as cultural capital and social positioning. At Saturday's convention, we were given several free books which looked like typical SF novels. One of them was described on the back as 'military SF': a sub-genre of which I've heard but never wanted to read. To me, military SF evokes Heinlein's neo-fascism and the kinds of terrible 'find planet-meet aliens-kill them all' stuff beloved of America's most imperialist phase, rather than Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. So you see, genre and cover art can repel as much as it can attract. 

But back to Banks. The quick chat with the bookshop assistant formed a kind of sad little coda (for me: she didn't appear to know who he was and I didn't want to break the bad news) for the weekend. The Futura event (I couldn't resist an SF conference named after a typeface) was overshadowed by Iain's death - for me as a reader but more painfully for the writers gathered. They'd lost their brightest star, and in the case of Ken MacLeod, a very close and longstanding friend. I didn't want to dig around in his grief during the kaffeeklatsch session (buying a convention ticket does include access to a man's grief), but he spoke very movingly and amusingly about their long association during his reading and presentation. Banks reciprocated: he makes a point of praising MacLeod's unpublished poetry in his last interview. We got the sense that the late 1970s was great for them: before Scotland's industrial destruction at the hands of Thatcher, Banks and MacLeod were bright, educated, hip young literary gunslingers. Active on the hard left, fond of a drink, full of the Scottish virtues of socialism (MacLeod described their politics as 'Socialism within, Anarchy without', which seems pretty seductive to me), contempt for the cosmopolitan and determined to put all this into their work, they seemed to have had a ball. Banks had three SF novels rejected before deciding to write a 'mimsy mainstream Hampstead novel' as MacLeod put it, and he worried that it was a betrayal of all he stood for. No need to worry: The Wasp Factory was hailed and condemned in equal measure as a nasty piece of outsider tyro viciousness. 

The convention itself was enjoyable, though it did feel a little like the last months of the airborne party Douglas Adams wrote about in The Restaurant At The End of the Universe: all the ingredients were there but the audience was slightly lacking. Literally: despite the publicity's exhortations to sign up for the various elements as numbers were limited, the total turnout was in the 30s at most. So I felt a little sorry for the authors (Ken MacLeod, Ian MacLeod (no relation) and Adam Roberts, plus several others of whom I hadn't previously heard because I don't read many graphic novels, or what Pratchett affectionately calls Big Comics). They are eminent and popular authors, and here they were in a cavernous space talking to tiny numbers of people: 5 of us in the Banks kaffeeklatsch. The day before, Adam Roberts (who writes cerebral SF and is a Professor of 19th Century literature and culture) gave a TEDx talk in Parliament to 1000 people. Yet here he was, discussing Kant and reading from his new novel, in which a cow mournfully (spoiler: and unsuccessfully) tries to persuade the man with the bolt gun that cows should be Turing Tested before meeting their ends in the abattoir. Roberts is interested in culture's representations of animals and aliens as (perhaps necessarily) anthropomorphised devices to talk about ourselves: the truly alien couldn't be comprehended. He read the piece in an Ermintrude voice, and I mentioned philosopher Peter Singer's article Heavy Petting, in which he suggests that bestiality really isn't so bad in comparison to just killing animals for fun and food. It's a provocative and enjoyable piece. 

Apart from the author stuff, I went to a panel which discussed whether SF is 'mainstream', which was very enjoyable. There's no answer of course: SF is certainly on prime-time TV, elements of SF surface in other popular genres, and literary fiction sometimes appropriates SF themes and tropes. Yet what is the mainstream? Is it critical approval? Canonical acceptance (I set books on academic courses: am I one of the 'them' who approves or disapproves?) Sales? What's so great about being mainstream anyway? Is anything mainstream in an era of targeted marketing and ever tinier sub-genres? Certainly there's an element of any genre's readership which defiantly rejects being popular – very reminiscent of my other hobby, record-collecting. Some people would rather their favourite music was never heard by the 'sheeple', which I think is a moronic attitude. I mostly listen to music that isn't popular, but I regret it: I'd rather my favourite singers and authors made a living than starved to death in a garret to increase my cool quotient amongst a tiny band of obscurantists. 

I also bought a couple of books and was given a couple more. Who could resist a pulp-homage zombie attack novel set at a Star Trek convention? Not me, especially not for a shiny £1. I also bought a book in which a man in search of a fabled lost Carry On film finds himself joining a shadowy underground army of resistance fighters. Can't remember the title, but it sounds promising. 

And I won a raffle prize - at 37, I'm no longer a loser in life's lottery! A copy of Ian MacLeod's Wake Up And Dream in a slipcase, signed in a limited edition of 100. It's very beautiful and I'll cherish it, though I really don't like the wider culture of limited edition things. I spent quite a lot of money buying the only copy of his The Summer Isles I could find, which was also highly limited, signed etc etc. Very lovely, but I wish an edition was freely available to potential readers who don't have money. The same goes for beautiful William Morris work, De Morgan tiles, or the new collection of James Joyce work in progress, Finn's Hotel: copies range from €350 to €2500. Beautiful things, whether they're books, wine, hand-knitted jerseys or paintings are expensive and slow to make, but when the objects become fetishes, they offend my democratic instincts, especially when they're valued solely for their rarity rather than their intrinsic cultural value. 

Of course this was also an opportunity. These three writers are amongst my very favourite contemporary authors and we had the chance to chat to them without any pressure or time constraints. I bagged them all as future guest speakers at the university too: we're trying to strengthen our cultural activity and these authors can contribute strongly to the sense that there's intellectual life here. A larger event wouldn't have afforded these possibilities, yet I was acutely aware of the social boundaries slightly blurred by the  accidentally-intimate scale of the proceedings. We turned up for the quiz which was meant to round off the evening: it didn't happen, and probably 12 people stayed in the bar. My little group of academics. Some non-academic fans. The authors. I didn't feel comfortable joining the authors' group because it felt intrusive, especially as we'd spent the entire day talking to them about their craft, the process, their ideas, Iain Banks and so on. And yet the other fans had no such compunction and enfolded the authors into their circle. Perhaps it was the financial relationship which inserted the awkwardness: we'd paid for their time during the day's events, so I felt quite strongly that stepping into their social space was presumptuous, as though it communicated a sense of 'I've paid £25, so I have the right to engage in drinking banter with you whether you like it or not. '. This, by the way, is why I oppose student fees so much: a customer/provider relationship is alienating. It erects social and intellectual barriers between what should be a unitary group of truth-seekers. 

So there I was, slightly absurdly drinking 4 yards away from the main attraction of the day, studiously keeping myself to myself. I can't speak for my colleagues of course, let alone the authors and the fans so I have no idea how they perceived the social situation but I was well aware of the absurdity. Perhaps I'm just too middle-class and repressed for ordinary social interaction. Mark Corrigan's spirit is most definitely hovering above me as I type this. Perhaps that's why I read SF: the classic loser's choice of reading – or it used to be until the nerds took over the levers of popular culture, to the bewilderment of people like my parents who spent my teenage years trying to ban SF from the house. 

OK, I should stop now: this is a rambling and random collection of thoughts. Futura: fun. Great to meet and talk to interesting, thoughtful and talented authors. A social minefield though. And now it's time to go to the launch of a history of The Hegemon. Which includes photographs taken by, well, me!

Tuesday afternoon book news

Afternoon everybody. Hope you're enjoying the new improved Plashing Vole schedule (i.e. once a day rather than four times). I am. It's keeping my blood pressure down.

The book drought seems to be over: I've been buying a lot of second-hand stuff recently. The plan is to read them one day and then bequeath them to whichever resentful and unwilling relations answer the door to the courier the day after I die. What they do then with several lorry-loads of Marxist literary criticism, science fiction, experimental Welsh poetry and several generations' worth of children's fiction is entirely up to them. Mind you, given the rate of environmental destruction, my library will provide useful sustenance and shelter for our amphibian descendants.

In this week's pile is Robin Llywelyn's Seren Wen ar Gefndir Gwyn (White Star on a White Background) and From Empty Harbour to White Ocean, first released as O'r Harbwr Gwag i'r Cefnfor Gwyn. I've read White Star in English, and thought it was about time to get to grips with the original. Llywelyn is one of those authors massively disadvantaged by the English publishing industry's indifference to literature in other languages. Llywelyn is a massively talented experimental author whose work crosses generic and stylistic boundaries. He is, as far as any literary author goes, 'important'. (And if you get a taste for the hip young gunslingers of Welsh literature, go for Wiliam Owen Roberts too: mindblowingly good. His Y Pla is available in English as Pestilence though nothing else has been translated, damn it.

I've been catching up on Llywelyn because it's in the back of my mind to write something on Welsh literature (in both languages) and science fiction. Or more accurately, the lack of it. Llewelyn touches on fantasy themes and techniques occasionally, but there's not much SF by Welsh authors, in Welsh, or set in Wales. It's quite different in Scotland: there are lots of authors, my favourites being Iain M Banks and Ken MacLeod. They aren't just Scottish SF writers: Scotland has a future in their work. I'm only just starting to think about why Scotland and Wales differ. Both have small bourgeois classes and large working classes. Both are post-industrial economies and landscapes. Both have experience of being colonised and being colonialists. So you'd think there was space for Welsh authors to consider common SF tropes like imperialism, conquest, post-oil life, the end of Big Industry, environmentalism and so on. But it doesn't seem to have happened. One line of thought I'm playing with is that language is at the heart of it. Scots Gaelic is virtually dead and may as well be dead in the daily lives of its population outside a few small islands. So its authors don't have the lovely ghost of Gaelic culture seductively haunting them: one thing Scottish SF largely doesn't do is engage with Scottish mythology. Instead, Scotland starts either with the Union or with industrialism. In Wales, even non-Welsh speakers have learned it in school, see it on signs everywhere they go and hear Welsh spoken every day (in the North and West) and fairly frequently elsewhere. Welsh mythology is more available, and therefore perhaps fantasy is more attractive as a genre: the Mabinogion is always there to be plundered.

Language has another effect. Scottish SF writers have the world's English-language markets available to them. Dare I say it? Scottish culture isn't so different from post-industrial life around the Western World. Throw in an accent, a deep-friend Mars Bar, Walter Scott, respect for education and a tinge of nationalism and you've got a story replete with local colour without frightening the mass readership. For a Welsh-language author, you've got a very small readership. That leads to subsidy from various state bodies, most of whom don't like genre fiction. So you have to be a bit more self-consciously 'literary' and pay more attention to things an English readership largely doesn't care about, such as the fate of minority languages. There should be room for SF here (what are Cymdeithas yr Iaith if not a local affiliate of the Rebel Alliance fighting Eric Pickles' Evil Empire?), but it largely hasn't happened, with the exception of Islwyn Ffowc Elis. And of course hard SF depends on hard science, which is conducted and discussed in English. Translation from Welsh is expensive and English publishers don't give a damn, so the odds are stacked against Welsh SF. Anyway, this is all very random preliminary rambling: your thoughts welcome.

What else? Well, I've been buying more histories of the Communist Party of Great Britain. I don't really know why other than a homegrown version of Ostalgie. Many of them were rigid, authoritarian and humourless apologists for mass murder… and yet before it became a self-perpetuating and irrelevant cult more concerned with its own bureaucracy than fomenting a much-needed revolution, the Party represented a political idealism largely dissipated in our own age. Certainly other leftwing parties are an unpleasant stew of Stalinism and sexism: the SWP has recently attacked its own members as 'creeping feminists', which doesn't sound very progressive to me.

I've also launched into John Niven's scabrous, offensive and enormously funny satire The Second Coming, in which Jesus returns with the message 'be nice', only to discover that the only way to propagate it is to appear on a TV talent show. The only problem is, Jesus likes Slint, Mogwai, Pavement and Nirvana (and keeps telling people that 'God loves fags', to their enormous annoyance), while the show wants Billy Joel covers. Niven's targets are perhaps too wide: I'm not sure raging against Christian, Muslims and a thinly-disguised Simon Cowell isn't too scattergun, but it's an entertaining read. After that, it's time for Jakob Arjouni's near-future post-September 11th novel Chez Max, and George Saunders' short story collection Civilwarland in Bad Decline, which sounds like Ballard played for laughs.

So far this week I've taught Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now and introduced Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. Only two of the students had finished the Trollope (it is around 850 pages long) but we had a good introductory session on it. I don't usually teach such canonical texts but I have to admit that I'm enjoying reading and teaching them very much. Perhaps they're so unfashionable that they're no longer canonical and I'm on the radical, transgressive cutting edge by bringing them back in to the classroom! Paradise Lost tomorrow. The poem, not the dodgy 90s goth band. Though now I've mentioned them, I may as well play you a bit:

Intruding on private grief…

My usual two hours of shouting abuse at the radio edition of the Daily Mail (a.k.a the Today programme) reached a peak this morning when the producers decided that Disney's purchase of Lucasfilms and decision to flog a horse so dead that its carcass forms the major ingredient of tinned dog food by promising an endless succession of lazy Star Wars sequels merited more coverage than the Coalition's determination to replace our planet-destroying arsenal of nuclear weapons with even bigger nuclear weapons. You know, the nuclear weapons that kept us out of all wars since 1945. As long as you don't count Northern Ireland. Or Suez. Or the decolonisation wars. Or the Malvinas/Falklands conflict. And the Gulf War. And Gulf War 2. Oh, and Afghanistan. Plus the bombing of Libya.

But that's beside the point. I could understand if the Disney takeover merited a mention in the business news headlines, but there's no way that a faded commodity deserves the attention it's getting. I would propose that Disney is the Empire, except that George Lucas's cynical outfit hardly fits the role of heroic upstarts, unless you think doing violence to people's childhood memories in exchange for billions of dollars is a subversive act.

I should admit from the start however that I have not a scintilla of emotional attachment to Star Wars. Unlike most of my friends, I'd never heard of it until I went to university. I guess school chums must have had the toys but I don't recall any discussion of them. My first proper exposure to Star Wars was accompanying friends to a cinema in Rhyl (quite painful enough) in the depths of a freezing winter to sit in a smell cinema and endure the first of the 'prequel' movies. I was bored beyond tears and found the graphics reminiscent of Civilization II, the computer game which filled my supposed study time. Even without being familiar with the original movies, I could tell that this was jaded hack work and as we emerged from the foetid swamp of late adolescent bodies, my friends had the look of veterans who'd seen their comrades die in the trenches for nothing. Their childhoods had been sullied, their faith in Hollywood destroyed. Mine not so much - my parents virtually never took us to the cinema. We queued for ET until my dad got bored, so I only saw that in chunks if I happened to catch it on TV. Cinema was somewhere I went on other people's birthday treats. Particularly horrific are my memories of Howard the Duck - awful, but notable for the first topless scene I'd ever witnessed, albeit a topless duck - and whatever that Michael Jackson film was called. Moon-something?

I should confess too that I'm a (critical) Star Trek fan, particularly of the original series. It's essentially a liberal (though not reliably so) retelling of the exploration of the American West with a side-salad of Cold War politics: early episodes of the show explicitly supported the Vietnam War, while later ones became anti-imperialist. Until we got to the execrably Next Generation, Liberal Interventionism In Space with a slathering of New Age bullshit in the shape of Ship's Counsellors and all that bullshit. It's not enough to Explore: you've got to Emote. Christ. For me, the original Star Trek used familiar plots to explore current political and social concerns in interesting ways. I'd also like to draw the jury's attention to my enjoyment of Space: 1999, a surprisingly gritty European SF drama, to the camp pleasures of Buck Rogers, and above all to the original Battlestar Galactica, which depending on who you're listening to, is either Wagon Train in space, or Virgil's Aeneid in space, which is both ambitious and impressive. I haven't seen the 'rebooted' Battlestar, but I gather that it has 'boldly gone' into the realms of political commentary - especially about the Iraq war - which is exactly what good science fiction does.

Since that awful day in Rhyl, I've caught most of the major scenes of the original films, though I've not seen a single cel of the other prequels, nor would I ever want to. Star Wars: A New Hope dramatised exactly Walter Benjamin's theory of the reproducibility of art in the mechanical age, and Jean Baudrillard's concept of multiple-order simulation. The 'original' Star Wars re-enacted the American myths of the war of independence as a way to recoup that nation's fantasy that it is the eternal underdog battling for truth, justice and freedom ('the American Way'). The Vietnam War, the Cold War and the Watergate saga, plus the United States' enthusiastic support for every fascist state in South America, Africa and Asia were making a few Americans wonder about whether they'd lost their way after 200 years.  In fact, some of them felt a bit like this:



So Star Wars isn't, for me, a joyful celebration of America's natural rebellion: it's a deeply conservative appropriation of liberal values for the purpose of making an Empire feel better about itself. The real rebels - and perhaps you could read Star Wars in its context like this - are the North Vietnamese.

So Disney's plans to treat Star Wars as yet another commodity to be ground at is both unsurprising and not particularly interesting. In Baudrillardian terms, each film is a more faded photocopy of the original, each one trying more desperately to capture the essence and passion of the original, and each one fated to be less and less artistically successful. No doubt rabid fans will turn up in droves, and the publicists will hail each film as a 'reboot', but the concept has long since moved from the category of art to commodity, if there is indeed any separation between them in a capitalist economy (thinking of you, Damien Hirst). I doubt the new films will even have the political significance of the first Star Wars films.

You Star Wars fans can regain your dignity quite easily. Just refuse to acknowledge the existence of the  new films. Behave as though George Lucas is dead to you. He's a greedy old man who cares only for the green. He is, in fact, Han Solo without the redemption, or even Jabba the Hut. He's encased your culture in carbonite (is this right?) and he's sold the corpse to the Emperor - and he's not sorry.

Cherish your childhood memories and seek out pastures new.

You're all just jealous of my jetpack

I had a good rant the other day about science fiction and generic boundaries. I'm not going to reopen that debate - but it reminded me of two lovely Tom Gauld cartoons from the Guardian. I tried to buy the first one, but someone else had snapped it up. I did get hold of the second one though: it hangs in my office, next to the 'Horrid Children in Literature' strip.

Eat your heart out, JG Ballard…

Here's a time-lapse video of the space shuttle Endeavour making the two-day trip 12 miles from an airport in LA to its final resting place in the California Science Center.



It's poignant, and deeply sad, though I can't help feeling that the music and the photography does most of the work for us. JG Ballard's evocations of an exhausted near-future world in which a few connoisseurs and obsessives go mad in the tumbleweed-strewn abandoned launching pads they see as symbols of existential anomie were fundamental to my teenage years. Surrounded by political cynicism, crumbling infrastructures and above all a planet which we are consciously driving towards ruin, I felt I'd missed out on the Age of Optimism.

I grew up: I learned that the Space Race was a costly, military-driven diversion into extra-terrestrial willy-waving, sucking in billions of dollars while the poor starved in every superpower country. I learned that the Shuttle was a beautiful white elephant, its lack of ambition summarised in its unadventurous name ('shuttle': may as well call it a taxi). I mourned the loss of Star Trek's innocence as it moved into The Next Generation, harbinger of Liberal Interventionism as its crew rampaged through the galaxy enforcing neocolonialism reassured by the presence of a bloody Ship's Counsellor with her big puppy eyes. Alien and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf presented an alternative, less idealistic version of space, as a hostile, proletarian hell in which boredom is only occasionally relieved by existential terror.

I began to understand that the exploration of space is a myth designed to distract us from our problems here and now. We're never going to other solar systems: perhaps our machines will, but the distances are too vast and the purposes too far. I still read an awful lot of SF, but in a sadder and wiser fashion, and perhaps I read sadder, wiser SF too. I don't believe in space 'races', or 'conquering' space, or any other militarist or technocratic metaphors.

And yet, I'll miss the shuttle. Useless, expensive, unreliable, unsafe but beautiful in a way that the superior Russian rockets aren't. Retiring something called Endeavour really is symbolic, even for us cynics. I would like to have been there, to have walked every step of the way. It was clearly a semi-religious experience, judging by the crowds who lined the route to see this battered, behemoth negotiate suburban streets, passing homes and strip joints and parks, stop-lights and no-parking signs, utterly out of place down here on earth. We all respect the bloodied, unbowed veteran as it's reduced from heroism to attraction: Endeavour is just such an artefact, Moby Dick turned into a heap of blubber and bone.

The end of Endeavour is the end of our space-childhood. Despite being a miserable compromise, its beauty and promise persuaded us – for a while – that we were nobler, better than we really are. But now it's time to put such childish things away and become adults; start to clear up the trash, to engage with the boring but necessary tasks required to pull ourselves out of the mire; to stop acting like the universe owes us a living. Endeavour, Enterprise and Discovery are where they belong - children's toys put aside until some younger, fresher generation finds the energy and leisure to play with them again.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the… genre

A genre’s landscape should be littered with used tropes half-visible through their own smoke & surrounded by salvage artists with welding sets, otherwise it isn’t a genre at all. 

says M John Harrison. He goes on to discuss the supposed death of science fiction and fantasy - a claim made every three weeks, as far as I can tell. Which genres aren't permanently dead or in the ambulance? It's a matter of perspective. From where I'm standing, romantic fiction is dead, killed off by celebrity journalism, porn culture or exhaustion, but I'm sure on close inspection you'd find signs of re-birth: different sexualities and new formations, for instance. Look at Fifty Shades of Grey: its melding of the worse features of romance with the limpest emulation of BDSM porn will no doubt inspire a generation of cynical hacks, and maybe even some genuinely exploratory writing. Science fiction certainly isn't dead: from the corpse of the previous generation spawns the maggots of the next - every genre sprouts sub-genres. Perhaps the term 'science fiction' should be retired, however - we have the New Weird, Speculative Fiction, Steampunk, Alternative History, Alternative Futures, Cyberpunk, Space Opera, Hard SF and many others. Saying you're an SF fan is like saying you like music - tantamount to announcing that you're an ignorant know-nothing bum who likes a tune you can whistle. I'm guessing the same applies to all literary genres. 

However, what does happen to popular fiction sub-genres is exactly the same as what happens to any sub-group: appropriation. Once punk music emerged from the gutters, every major label told its house bands to grow mohicans and add naughty words to their songs. Result: punk was dead the day it hit Top of the Pops and mohican wigs appeared in Camden Market for the tourists. Away from the media gaze, real punk bands sneered and worked on whatever came next. I'd say the same thing has happened with SF: once almost every Hollywood movie is an adaptation (Watchmen, Green Lantern, X-Men), a disaster movie (War of the Worlds, Cloverfield) or any other vaguely sciencey presentation, it becomes just another popcorn kernel to momentarily distract the mainstream before going back into hibernation for a few decades - like the Western before it. Which is a shame, because most genres respond to the cultural needs of the climates in which they exist. But as I say, it's a matter of perspective. Out there in school playgrounds, comic stores and - above all - the internet, new texts and new variations on genres are arising, and what we think of as the defining characteristics of the genre are scorned as hopelessly outdated by those in the know. 

Paul Kincaid, whom M John Harrison references, thinks that inadequate boundary policing is at issue: SF is fading into literary fiction, he thinks. I think: brilliant. They'll revive each other. Literary fiction is a weird and indistinct genre, if it is one at all, and it's too often the preserve of authors who think they can see past all those proles busy tweeting each other rude jokes, whereas SF has been variously the preserve of techno-fascists, techno-determinists, techno-utopians, militarists, and a whole host of others who could do with some literary skills and perspectives. Besides, Kincaid is probably just looking in the wrong place: no doubt the borders between SF and porn, SF and romance, SF and poetry, SF and travel and all the other genres are being over-run. See, I'm slipping into imperialistic language: it's a common problem with genre discussions, especially the traditionally masculine ones: men are so concerned with purity, resistance, autonomy. 

Let's abandon the idea of genres as distinct territories and consider them as tendencies or characteristics instead. That way, we can focus on the genuinely creative work instead. Returning temporarily to the border metaphor, it's my feeling that the work which exists on the borders with other genres is the interesting stuff. A text situated right in the middle of a generic expanse, equally distanced from all other genres, is likely to be boring and over-familiar. There are exceptions, of course: Die Hard is a masterpiece because it's a summation of it's genre's best aspects - the same goes for lots of Westerns. But at the same time, it's the weird stuff around the edges that is often more interesting in a cultural and literary sense: the revisionist Westerns, for example, which evoke a sense not that the Western is a dying genre (though it was) but that the ideological underpinnings of the classic Western were rotting - and had perhaps always been rotten. 

Kincaid knows this. As he says: 

Within any art form there are individuals or movements that attempt to push the boundaries in various ways. They are concerned with seeing what new can be done, what more can be done with the form. Often, though not always, they are initially viewed with dismay or disdain by aficionados of the art, though in retrospect they are generally viewed as being the innovators who mark an important developmental stage in the history of the form.

What Kincaid and Harrison have discerned is not the exhaustion of science fiction as a genre, but the exhaustion of the institutions which foster and propagate science fiction: publishers content to promote the profitably familiar. It's the same in music: Classic FM is the epitome of the embalmer's art because it only plays music which has been on adverts, or sounds indistinguishable from what's been on adverts. In the process, it's cheapened the genuinely interesting music is does scatter amongst the dross: Vaughan Williams, for instance, who has been transformed from spiky iconoclast into twinkly English Grandfather. 

But I don't despair. Where there's a Classic FM or a mainstream SF publisher, there's a Radio 3 and a range of pirate stations. By the time Jeff Noon, Cory Doctorow and China Miéville attract major-label imitators, they'll be doing something else, and a new generation will be distributing supposedly un-popular work underground. Some publishers and some readers are conservative - but enough aren't, and literary movements operate on a timescale long enough to bring about gradual change. 

So don't stress about genre. It's only partly in the hands of the author, the publisher, the bookseller and the jacket artist. It's also in your hands. If you think Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go or certain Jeanette Winterson is in or near SF - read it like that and ignore their self-serving denials. Don't just browse the SF shelf - you'll find weirdness and science and far-flung settings and fear of/fascination with technology and social change in plenty of other places. Genre's like that: it shapes your expectations but your generic expectations dictate your readings. Take this sentence from Pride and Prejudice:

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

I used to ask my students to write down the tone of voice they imagined seemed appropriate. Then I'd ask one person to read it romantically, one to read it sarcastically, and one to read it 'neutrally'. The way in which you read that one sentence determines the meaning of the rest of the novel to you - and it will differ to the meanings acquired by the person next to you. For me, it drips with satire: my Austen is the one who disguises horror at the encroaching dangers of Regency womanhood with sharp, sharp humour. Her women face social abysses: only a few survive. But it's equally easy to read the texts as lovely sparkling romances in which nice intelligent demure girls are rewarded with the right man by being good judges of character. 

I haven't picked Jane Austen as a random example. Amongst my extensive collection, I have editions repackaged as 'chick-lit' (pastel handwriting, dresses, pink) and Austen mash-ups, including two Austen-porn novels and two Austen/Zombies and Austen/Sea-Monsters novels, plus P D James's Death Comes to Pemberley, which is far more offensive and disgusting than either Pride and Prejudice with Zombies or Jane Austen: Hidden Lusts. Most of these novels aroused utter fury amongst the Janeites because they're resistant both to generic miscegenation and any tinkering with their heroine's work (weird, really: Victorian Shakespearians liked tacking happy endings onto his tragedies without concern for purity). Both PPwZ and JA:HL have tried to do something bold, and they've done it with some panache and charm. Both authors also know how Austen's dialogue and plotting work: you have to understand the wiring before you put up the Christmas light. PD James, on the other hand, grafts a murder mystery on to Jane Austen without giving a second's thought to Austen's interests or literary style: James appears to think that it's easy, and drops massive clanger after massive clanger. The genre-mashers, on the other hand, have taken the key elements of different genres and welded them together to considerable effect. 

Take your chainsaw to your genre of choice and weld it to something else until you can't tell which bit originated where. 

Goodbye, Barbara

Having moaned a bit about the slightly reductive definitions of science fiction at the Putting the Science into Fiction (#scificmanc) conference last week, I remembered that I have the original drawing of this cartoon on my wall. It's by Tom Gauld, and was published in the Guardian Review a couple of years ago. I keep meaning to use it as a conversation starter in my lectures.

One of the things that really annoys me is literary fiction authors assuming that genre fiction is easy, and demonstrating their ignorance. But I won't name names today. Instead, I'll just say that David Peace is almost the only one who can do it. He transforms any genre he touches. Read his books. 

Scificmanc! The Revenge!

I thought I should record for posterity (joke, I'm not that pompous) my impressions from the Putting the Science into Fiction conference I attended at Manchester University on Wednesday. Apart from discovering that quite a few of my blog-readers/Twitter followers believed me to be female, something I'm about to comprehensively disprove by the Power of Nerdism.

Firstly, I was stunned by the size and quality of the crowd. Apart from several of my favourite authors (Scottish Trotskyist-libertarian Ken MacLeod, Geoff Ryman, Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley), there were so many astonishing  scientists, casually mentioning the satellite telescopes they had in space right now. Of the authors I didn't know, I'm definitely going to buy some books by Justina Robson and Craig Pay, a very cheerful man considering he writes what the Guardian called 'harrowing' fiction.

The day was broken into three sections. The first covered the process of collaboration between authors and scientist for a book, When It Changed. It was a fascinating insight into the joys - but also the difficulties - of working together. Amongst the technical points, the Research Assessment Framework's inability to cope with creative work, which hardly encourages scientists to engage, and the prevalence of Non-Disclosure Agreements, which spread fear amongst those inclined to collaborate.

The second section covered science in film and TV. Although the panellists were interesting and often amusing, I thought this discussion was the weakest of the lot. We all felt that science deserved more and better coverage, but there was a distinct element of Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con as assorted contributors bemoaned the inaccuracy of TV science. I couldn't help feeling that the non-scientific viewer is a happier creature: free to suspend disbelief and use her imagination without feeling that fiction has to be utterly authentic. When the discussion turned to complaining that rockets don't go 'whoosh' in space, I thought we'd fallen down the rabbit-hole.

What was largely absent was a cultural studies element: while all the contributors were learned, wise, witty and likeable, there was little recognition - apart from the authors - that science is itself a fictional narrative, albeit it one with a closer grasp of reality than most. Postmodern literary criticism leaped on quantum physics' uncertainty principle with gusto to insist that all narratives are perspectives rather than truths, yet participants were rather reluctant to accept that science itself is paradigmatic: it processes perception according to cultural values.

The most successful strand was that involving the creative writers. Most of them were former scientists or at least holders of science degrees, and believed that science in literature should be at least extrapolated from what we currently believe to be possible. I'm largely in agreement, but do worry that this cuts us off from a huge imaginative landscape. Star Trek's failure to obey relativity was mentioned - time appears to run at the same pace on board the Enterprise as it does on Earth, whereas Einstein proved that the crew should return to what seems to them like Earth's future - but I tend to feel that this misses the point. To me, science fiction explores the consequences of scientific, political and cultural change: it extrapolates from our current fears. That's why I like Ken MacLeod's work: he wants to know how the future economy works, how technological change will alter working lives and therefore proletarian politics. If we're going to restrict SF to 'real' science, it's going to be bloody boring. Essentially, the only plot remaining is: 'stay on earth - wreck the environment - kill off the poor - everybody dies'. (I had a lively chat on Twitter about my gloomy attitude: I'm still right). Compellingly gloomy of course, but not everyone's cup of tea. Although I mostly read 'hard' SF (scientifically plausible), I fear an SF culture in which anyone who takes an imaginative leap gets a visit from the Plausibility Police.

The discussion turned to The Big Bang Theory (shockingly, Doctor Who was only mentioned at the very end of the day, in passing). The panellists thought that it's brilliant because everything Sheldon says in his rants is scientifically accurate. Big win for science, they felt. Imagine if it was made in Britain, they asked. What rubbish it would be. Look, they said: millions or ordinary Americans watching scientists in the slot formerly occupied by Two and a Half Men or some other lowest-common denominator tripe.

Oh dear. This is utter bollocks. While the scientists are loving Sheldon's defence of string theory, the rest of the world is drinking in a show which encourages us to view scientists as loveably dysfunctional nerds with borderline mental health problems and an inability to relate to ordinary people's emotions. This is not progressive or in any way a win for science. BBT is lowest-common denominator TV, with a few in-jokes for the nerd crowd thrown in because they're the ones on the bulletin boards. (If it was made in Britain, it would be emotionally darker and we'd see a lot more grant applications on screen. Rather than reach for the most obvious - and telegraphed zinger - I suspect a British version would be slower, possibly darker and less reliant on lazy stereotypes. Unless it was on E4. I always feel disappointed by BBT: it could be so much better. I share several shirts with Sheldon Cooper. Perhaps even some personality traits. But it feels like a massive missed opportunity).

The problem with this passionate debate is that it missed something important. If scientists and critics spend their lives complaining about inaccuracy in the science that is on screen, we forget the urgent and political duty to complain about the exclusion of the science that isn't on screen. In particular, American popular culture absolutely refuses to deal with climate change, reproduction or stem cell research (except for last night's South Park, which had Christopher Reeve becoming a super villain by noisily sucking the blood from aborted foetuses).

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Hollywood doesn't lead, it follows. While we're congratulating ourselves every time Sheldon says something funny about Hubble, American TV is either ignoring or ridiculing climate science. Feel like a win, does it?

One of the most interesting literary points raised wasn't followed up. MacLeod mentioned Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia, which he categorised (rightly, I think) as literary fiction employing SF tropes metaphorically. 'Literary fiction metaphorizes; science fiction literalizes', he said. I didn't get a chance to pick up on this, and nobody else chose to. I think it's a fascinating statement to make, especially for an SF author. Actually, I should stop saying 'SF: MacLeod's work is often 'speculative fiction', because it extends current concerns into the  future without necessarily concerning itself with gadgets. I think he's half right. Bad science fiction is horribly literal. All that post-apocalyptic gun-nut fantasy nonsense like The Survivalist or the drearier space-operas (Heinlein: you're a fascist dick). But good science fiction/speculative fiction is literary fiction, because it draws on the complexity and richness of human culture to imagine alternative pasts, presents and futures.

Similarly there's a divide between bad literary fiction, which often hijacks genre fiction like SF without any respect for its conventions or concerns, and good literary fiction, which also participates in the roiling debates about how and why we've got to this cultural point. A literary fiction which crudely metaphorizes science, music or anything else is failed fiction. Done well, on the other hand, literary fiction such as Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go raises serious questions and doubts about our cultural dispositions - just like good SF.

The final section was the least interesting: a debate about whether to form a Science Club to purvey advice to TV and film producers, as they have in the US. Some participants thought there might be some money in it, others saw it as a pressure group for the Professor Frinks ('in series 4, episode 3, 12 minutes in, the aero-gel used to cushion the atomic blast was pink, whereas in reality it's grey. Worst. Episode. Ever. Explain please') of this world. So I went to the pub with Ben and then for Korean.

Overall, a fascinating day, and I'm very pleased I went. If it happens again? More cultural perspectives, more politics, less nitpicking and more female authors: I'd recommend Gwyneth Jones (as always). Met lots of lovely people and got wet. Just like most of my visits to Manchester.

Awaydays!

For once, I'm not sitting in front of my laptop in my office. I'm sitting in front of my laptop in a Mancunian lecture theatre, eager for this Putting the Science in Fiction conference to start (hashtag #scificmanc). It is, quite frankly, my idea of heaven. Scientists from all fields, film and TV authors and theorists, literary critics and several of my favourite SF/speculative fiction authors. Amongst them, Paul J. McAuley, who amongst others wrote Fairyland, Ken MacLeod, former scientist and author of Scottish Trotskyist science fiction (what's not to like?) and Alastair Reynolds, whose Revelation Space trilogy I really enjoyed. I really need to get MacLeod on to my curriculum. I'm toying with adding some of his work, plus Shopping and Fucking and Jerusalem to my literature and class module. What do you reckon?

Who would I have invited in addition? Jeff Noon, obviously (local, brilliant) and Gwyneth Jones, who for my money is still the best speculative fiction author out there - try Kairos for a bit of creative destabilisation.

Good job there's nothing else going on in the world… apart from Rupert Murdoch at the Leveson Inquiry. Which I won't surreptitiously be following at all. Oh no.

What I won't be doing is any marking whatsoever.

Wow. I'm the least geeky person in the room. Apart from the surprisingly numerous female contingent

Borne aloft on dragons' wings

Sad to say, Anne McCaffrey died today. At least, it might be sad - everybody's got to go, and she was 85. But her passing is another reminder of my misspent teenage years. Misspent, that is, in reading everything I could get my hands on. Without any quality control, I just consumed everything I could. Fantasy infuriated my parents: their devotion to Catholicism was apparently a different matter entirely and not up for critical discussion. I guess a period of indiscriminate reading is a form of training: learning tastes, identifying elements to which we respond emotionally, learning what writing works and what doesn't.

Anne McCaffrey's novels were a staple of my teens. The Dragonrider series was set in a colonised planet on which de-technologised (it's a word now, OK?) humans existed in a kind of symbiosis with dragons: unlike our own cultural landscape, Pern's dragons are the good guys and the humans often weak, flawed and small-minded. There was also some kind of cyclical catastrophe involving a nearby planet, the details of which both escape me and evoke a familiar feeling of tedium. McCaffrey's death is a reminder of how much I've changed. At the time, everything she wrote meant a lot to me, and for that I'm grateful. Her work provided comfort, expanded my imaginative and emotional range, offered alternatives to my humdrum daily life. But like Tolkien's work, I find them unreadable now. I tried recently: the characterisation is paper-thin (ho ho), the dialogue unbearably stilted and the plots weak and repetitive. But I don't resent those years reading such work. I learned from them, and I used those books in ways that 'high' literature might not have suited. We have complex relationships with culture. What's supposedly 'good for you' might not be what you need or are ready for. We tell our students that meaning is created by the reader, not by the author: anyone can derive something good from something bad. Obviously Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown are glaring exception, but it's generally true.

More specifically related to McCaffrey, her work represented an interesting strand in contemporary literature. Like all science fiction and fantasy, it was only superficially about imaginary planets. In reality, what she explored was the pressures facing us in the here and now. By depicting the struggles of a complex, anti-exploitative but primitive society, one which retained a spirituality and environmental consciousness which some claim we've lost, she posited alternative, more harmonious ways to live, often with a vaguely Celtic tinge. I'm more of a fan of hard-left political speculative fiction of the Ken McLeods et al, or the eco-feminism of Tepper, but there's a space for the hippy utopianism of McCaffrey and Spinrad - and decent female authors are still too rare in SF and fantasy.

I've got reservations about McCaffrey's work, but without her, our imaginations would be poorer. At least, mine would be.

Gibbering with expectation.

Amongst the facts you may have gleaned about me are my love for science fiction and Marxism. So imagine my delight at the arrival in the post of Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville.

SF has many political variants, though my personal sense is that the rightwing version is fading away with the end of communism as a bogeyman. In the Cold War period, conservative SF projected Aliens as threatening Communists, and the application of massive military superiority was the solution to all situations. Early Star Trek tilted this way (Klingons were particularly Asiatic, for instance), though Vietnam brought about a decisive change of view. Robert Heinlein was a particularly unpleasant neofascist: the film version of Starship Troopers gleefully satirises his approach. Blasting everything out of the sky if it contradicted the small-town values of an imaginary America was rather commonplace: I'd even suggest that Back To The Future's construction of an idyllic 50s and the utopian and dystopian presents and futures betray a politicial consciousness which is at least liberal.

But there were plenty of lefty and hippy SF writers of the time: Spinrad extended the counterculture across the galaxy, for example. Ursula K LeGuin took the toys out of the boys' hands in her feminist fantasy and SF. Sheri S. Tepper produced serious and rather wonderful eco-feminist SF, while I think that Gwyneth Jones is one of the best writers in any genre, and she primarily writes liberal-left feminist novels about the near future of the UK. It goes back further of course: H. G. Wells was a radical and prominent Fabian socialist, and even Lionel Britton, the working-class modernist, wrote science fiction plays. Adam Roberts's novels tackle technology and society in a quietly leftish fashion, while Ken MacLeod's novels have covered everything from future economies to the War On Terror from an anarcho-Trotskyist Scottish perspective.

I haven't had a chance to peruse Red Planets yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Marxist and neomarxist theory should have a lot to say about the economic and social formations predicted by technological and political change. Class formations and permutations, the extension of hegemony online (despite the carnivalesque resistance offered by groups like LulzSec) and the economic injustices perpetuated by discredited but not defenestrated capitalist élites will all become more, not less, relevant as we move into an era of triumphant, guiltless and naked class warfare. If you don't think that moving jobs, pollution, (reduced) wages and environmental destruction to the browner continents is an act of class warfare in which you and I are on the wrong side, then you're a moron.

Episode 923, in which I buy the most boring books in the world

A good haul of paper with marks on them today. A couple of Paul McAuley SF novels (400 Billion Stars and Red Dust), Gwyneth Jones's Life because I thought I had everything she's written until I found this, Roots of Desire, Marion Roach's cultural history of red hair (for my Anne of Green Gables work) and the big prize of the day: the first two volumes of Michael Drayton's Complete Works. Drayton's the author of Poly-Olbion, a topographical and mythological tour of England and Wales in Alexandrine verse. It's the most interesting boring (and massive) poem ever written. Or do I mean the most boring interesting poem? I don't know.

Anyway, there's another even geekier book on its way: Cheney's Handbook of Dates for Students of History. Not the exciting dates, just a list of special days (such as Lammas) and charts so you can work out the right dates taking into account changes in how we reckon such things. Never again will I be stuck on the Roman/Gregorian problem, or unable to explain the significance of Michaelmas!

No time for love, Dr. Jones?

Dr Jones is a friend of mine - he's read and seen more culture than anyone on earth, but most of all, he loves SF.

I think I've found his dream woman:

Yet more books

An odd lot in today - Anne Lister's diaries (good for teaching Victorian culture), Emma Smith's thesis on masculinity in Welsh men's writing (her chapter on Lewis Jones is very similar to mine, unfortunately, though the others aren't so there's hope yet) and - for fun - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF. I'm not sure why I keep buying this stuff: between BP and the ongoing and unthinking poisoning of every place and organism on the planet, I could just read the newspapers.

Meanwhile, off the soap box

I'm trying to write several lectures (cultural studies, modernity, medieval literature) for this week's classes. I'm also reading some good books: academic Adam Roberts' crime and quantum physics thought experiment (in space) Stone, and a book Sarah spotted on the OUP sale site and bought for me out of sheer amusement.

It's Jane Collier's 1753 satire An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, a satirical riposte to the flood of etiquette books directing women to remain demure, emotionally sensitive and obedient. Collier's short book advises women on how to nag, torture and deprive men, children, friends and servants while appearing to be demure etc. etc. etc. What isn't quite clear is whether she feels women have ceased to be decorous, or whether these rules are repressive and deserving of challenge - but that's how satire works. Either way, it's very funny.

Homage or theft?

Fans of Blade Runner (based on the short story 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale') may recall that the evil Androids are the Nexus-6 model. Google's new phone is the Nexus One, running the Android OS. Philip K Dick's estate is suing, while Google claim it's pure coincidence…

Their corporate motto ('Don't Be Evil') has been quietly redefined to allow censorship so that they can operate in China (along with Apple and every other US company), but associating themselves with killer robots is a bit much. No doubt some geek at headquarters thought that the name was a witty homage to Dick - why not admit it and laugh off the lawsuit?

Is anyone a fan of Phil's work? I must admit to being frequently baffled by the devotion of his fans. Some of his books are stunning - I particularly admire The Man In The High Castle, but others are gibberish or junk churned out for the money.

SF corner

I've just finished reading Paul McAuley's Gardens of the Sun. It's science fiction. No! Come back! It's a mix of hard SF (i.e. heavily oriented towards science), space opera and politics, which suits me perfectly. Good science fiction does one thing well: it explores the connotations and consequences of our current conditions through extension and supposition. It is always about us, now, though often disguised as space adventures, the future, or whatever.


Gardens of the Sun is part of the wave which explores the political possibilities of astronomy, environmentalism and climate change, genetic modification, of human modification (including extreme longevity), and of the very shallow commitment to democracy currently present in most of the world. It's a bit like Ken MacLeod's work: committedly left-libertarian (not me, I'm left-authoritarian, as you'll discover when I'm in charge and you're out in the fields picking my organic lettuces).

Now I'm on to Tom Holland's Millennium, an exploration of the rather interesting tenth century in Europe. The opening chapters are bold and provocative, though I'm deeply unimpressed by Holland's maps. He can't resist stamping 'England' across Wales, despite Wales being a patchwork of independent states at this point, united (and divided) by blood ties and a shared language. Ignoramus.

Enter the nerdzone

Cynical Ben didn't like the first episode of the two-part finale to David Tennant's tenancy of Doctor Who, objecting to the two-part set-up, amongst other things I can't be bothered to go and check.

I do like the scope achieved by taking the time and (relative dimensions in) space to explore the nuances. Ben's a short story fan though, so I understand his point. However, I did enjoy these episodes. Yes, the first one was preparatory, but they both worked. I agree with Ben that Russell T. Davies has probably run out of steam, but he, and Tennant, deserved their indulgent, emotion-wringing farewell.

The last episode was backed with nods to the canon, flashbacks to previous episodes, and constant references to Hamlet, a play which has exerted considerable influence on this incarnation of the Doctor, faced as he has so often been by difficult choices - and in which Tennant has been performing to great acclaim recently.

I've enjoyed Davies's nerdy but passionate take on Who - but Stephen Moffat's got the dramatic skills needed to keep each episode gripping: he wrote my favourite one of all, Blink. The future's bright. Though so is the past, given that a time machine is involved.

Licence fee: vindicated.

Yes, but what books?

I know, you're clamouring to discover. Well, the day before, I received Reimer's A Simple Little Tale, another anthology of Anne of Green Gables critical essays, as well as Wodehouse's Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves and Much Obliged, Jeeves, because Roderick Spode (Oswald Mosley) appears in them.

Yesterday, I added too many. I gorged. My eyes are bigger than my brain. I added Opened Ground, a collection of Heaney poems, Paul McAuley's Gardens of the Sun and Pasquale's Angel, because I like intelligent hard SF and steampunk, Brian Aldiss's classic Non-Stop, Margaret Atwood's essays on debt, Payback, Heaney's translation of Henryson's medieval Scots classic The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables, Tom Furniss's Reading Poetry, 4 maps of Wales and the Welsh/Shropshire border, and Spivak's translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology, because I've never read it in English.

Oh dear. I think I'm going to be sick. Greedy boy.

Here's Atwood talking to us about the recession:

Swindon, come in Swindon

At the moment, British SF is the best in the world: M John Harrison, Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod, China Miéville and loads of others are writing future/science fiction which examines the state of the world and humanity in fascinating, mindblowing ways: SF has always been a more profound genre than the literary pages allow. I'm interested in the hard-science and political versions, which is why I love MacLeod's work so much - many of his books represent an anarchist-Trotskyist Scottish galactic civilisation. What's not to love?

The Guardian has a piece on this theme today.

(Post title is from Eddy Izzard's riff on the British space expedition).