Babel Clash

This is my last post, thanks guys, for having me - it’s been a great pleasure. And thank you to everyone who responded to my ramblings; it wouldn’t have worked otherwise, and I have enjoyed it tremendously.

And now I have a novel to finish, so it’s back to the bunker for me.

cheers!

Al R

It is time, once again, to thank our current author guest and pass the torch on to someone new.  Thank you, Alastair, for all of your brilliant posts and excellent conversations.  Do you have anything you’d like to say to wrap up your time with us?

Tomorrow, we’ll hear from Danielle Trussoni, author of Angelology.

And the following week, Paul Hoffman will join us.  His book, Left Hand of God, goes on sale June 15.

Welcome, Danielle & Paul!

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from a reader who had this to say:

“Speaking as an Asian and as an avid reader, it feels to me that the East is underrepresented in modern science-fiction given current trends in China and India.

Recent works attempt to make mention of Asian locale/character(s) but it feels peremptory and the core set of characters and plot are still almost always Western/caucasian. Granted, you have writers like Paolo Bacigalupi that do the reverse but they’re still in the minority.”

The reader then went on to say:

“I think it’s interesting because SF is very popular in Asia (authors like yourself, China Mieville, and Iain Banks are very popular in places like Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan) but Asians don’t see much of themselves in the books they read.”

That’s a pretty interesting, if depressing point. I’m sure we can all name SF books set in Asia or with Asians as the main characters, but there evidently aren’t enough of them from this reader’s viewpoint, and I’ve no reason to doubt that the reaction is anything but sincere. My initial reaction was to point to the Asian figures in some of my own works, but when I got down to it, I realised that there were only one or two that could be considered central characters. And even then, while they might have names that indicated Asian ancestry, for the most part they were living in highly technological, borderline posthuman societies light-years from Asia itself - which I guess is what the reader meant when they talked about a “peremptory” use of Asian characters/themes.

As it happens, I don’t think I’ve ever heard from a Japanese reader, but I’ve had heard from some Malaysians, and I know that Singaporeans like their SF - there’s an amazingly well-stocked bookstore right on Orchard Road, with a great SF section. I’ve also heard from readers in India now and then. So it shouldn’t really be a surprise that there is a huge reading constituency located in Asia and the Far East. But are these readers getting the SF they’d like, and are they seeing themselves depicted in it, and if not, why not?

I’ll confess, I was fairly secure in my convictions until the Racefail debate shook things up and made me take a hard look at my own fiction and its shortcomings with regard to race and gender. Since I’m now writing a trilogy of books beginning in Africa, with a largely African cast (although Chinese and Indian characters loom large as well, and there’s a fair amount of inter-marrigage) it’s not really surprising that I’ve been thinking about issues of representation and the treatment of the other within SF, and my own SF specifically.

Not just that, of course - the whole “optimism versus pessimism” thing has been pretty foremost in my thoughts as well - but I’d be an idiot if I wasn’t thinking about Racefail on some level, however superficially.

So let’s hear about under representation in SF, and (without getting into the specific grievances of the debate itself) what people thought about Racefail in terms of its likely influence on the field. We shouldn’t expect change overnight - fiction takes years to produce, just as collections and anthologies take years to compile and publish - so there’ll inevitably be a lag between cause and effect. Still - in five or ten years, can we look forward to a genre that is significantly more global and representative than is presently the case, or are things doomed to slump back to where they were before Racefail? And is there a part of the world, and its people and culture, that you’d like to see more of in your SF?

Al R

This week I got the excellent news that my short story “The Fixation” has been nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. I’m pleased with that, obviously, but it got me thinking about my relationship with alt.hist and why I don’t think I’m really capable of writing what I would regard as a pure, unsullied example of the form. It also gets to the heart of my deep ambivalence towards “secondary world” fantasy of the Middle Earth ilk.

Until CENTURY RAIN, I’d never written anything that came close to alt.hist, and I didn’t really have any plans to do so either. Then I read two books that opened my eyes to the possibility of the form, and I found myself thinking about it more and more. One was Christopher Priest’s remarkable THE SEPARATION, and the other was Keith Roberts’s PAVANE, which I had not read until then. Neither of these elegant, literary books is a piece of orthodox genre alternate-history, most especially not the Priest, but they were my passport into an engagement with the form. I think until then the only other recognised alt.hist novel that I had read was Harry Harrison’s A TRANSATLANTIC TUNNEL, HURRAH, which I encountered in my teens.

On paper, the idea of doing a noirish alt.hist novel set in Paris, against the backdrop of a nineteen fifties in which WW2 played out differently, was straightforward enough. But the problem for me was that I couldn’t bring myself to write that kind of book, without grounding it in some kind of science-fictional connection to our own timeline. There had to be some tangible connection, a roadmap between here and there, rather than some arbitrary branching point in history. I didn’t want to do a time-travel book, either. So CR ended up being something else: a purely SFnal novel, set in the future - our future - but which embeds elements of alternate history.

I’ve since written a few other things which are kinda alt.hist. There are the two Cardiff stories - “Signal to Noise” and “Cardiff Afterlife” - both deal with alternate versions of Cardiff budding off from our own. There’s “The Receivers”, set during a nineteen thirties in which the Great War never ended. There’s “The Six Directions of Space”, set in a future dominated by the descendants of a globe-spanning Mongol empire created by Genghis Khan. And there’s also the Sidewise story, “The Fixation” about two parallel archaeological teams working on the restoration of the Antikythera Mechanism. Although it now only exists in Finnish, my recollection is that “Pandora’s Box” also toyed with bunched alternate histories, this time from the perspective of colonists in a future solar system, encountering alien intelligence for the first time.

What all these stories have in common is that there’s crosstalk, communication - intentional or otherwise - between the alternate history universe, and ours. Without that fictional bleedover, I can’t seem to get any emotional engagement with the idea. And if I can’t do that, there’s not much hope of me finishing a story. In fact, in the stories mentioned, the bleedover is so intrinsic to the construction that it couldn’t be removed without leaving a twitching narrative carcass - it pretty much is the story.

Don’t ask me why this is the case. Maybe I just can’t let go of that “hard SF” sensibility enough to write a dead-on, pure-form alt.hist. There’s got to be that logical connection between our world and the fictional one, or else the whole thing feels sterile, overly-abstract.

It’s the same with pure SF. I can accept science and technology so advanced and/or weird that they feel like magic, in the Clarkean sense. But I must have that conviction that there is a path, however improbable, between the fictional world and the here and now. Which is why I doubt that I could ever write a fantasy novel in the Tolkien mode.

But then, who knows? Ten years ago I’d have been surprised to have written any kind of alternate history…

Al R

Just a quickie from me as I’ve had a long day at the keyboard, and I’d like to run with one final topic which I’ll start over the weekend, but some of the discussion on the “pain barrier” post got me thinking about reading protocols as they relate to genre.

I grew up reading SF, of course, but by the time I was in my late teens I’d (thankfully) broadened my reading to encompass a bit more than just spaceships and robots. A lot of it was the kind of stuff you tend to read in the sixth form - Orwell, Solzhenitzyn and so on (yes, I had to go on wikipedia to spell Solzhenitzyn). Then I won a short story competition and in the process I found that some “university professor” had read my piece and likened it to Malcolm Bradbury, which was enough of a spur to have me going off and reading Bradbury’s stuff, which then naturally led into David Lodge. (As an aside, I mentioned the Bradbury thing in one interview and it was dutifully corrected to “Ray Bradbury”, because that’s obviously who I meant). The net result of all this was that, by the time I went to university, I liked to think I had a pretty varied literary background - it wasn’t all “sci-fi”, there were proper grown-up serious books in there as well, and for a few years I kept up with the Booker shortlist crowd as well.

For whatever reason, though, I never read any crime - not until much later. And strangely, none of that “wider reading”  had equipped me with the necessary mental toolkit to cope with a modern American crime novel. It was an Elmore Leonard, I think - I may have read Silence of the Lambs first, but that’s not really a crime novel.

The thing about the Leonard that threw me was the sheer number of characters and interrelations between those characters that I was being asked to process and hold in my head within about the first three pages. I remember really struggling with it, constantly having to go back and re-read, trying to get the complex web of connection to snap into some kind of focus. Who were the good guys? Who were the bad guys? Who were the same guys, just being referred to by different names?

That, for me, was a fundamental case of coming to a book with the wrong reading protocols. I read the EL, and some more crime stuff, and gradually I realised that, in the hands of a good crime novelist, you don’t have to keep track of all this stuff from page one. Trust the writer. What you need to know, they’ll gently assist you with. You may have to keep track of a complex plot but you can let it assemble gradually, like a juggler starting with two skittles and building up to three, four, and so on. Good crime writers are expert at dropping mnemonic aides into the story, so subtly that you won’t necessarily spot it happening.

What I’m wondering, though, is whether my disorientation more or less mimics the reaction of readers coming to SF/F for the first time. When we, as experienced readers, hit a piece of new terminology or jargon early on in a story or a book, we don’t start turning the pages in a panicked frenzy or assume that there’s some glaring hole in our own worldview. We don’t even try and fill that blank immediately. We trust in the unfolding process, that if we continue with the story the unfamiliar thing will either be explained in context, or will turn out not to be vital anyway. It’s not a roadblock, it’s half the pleasure of reading SF in the first place.

Still, it’s probably not that easy if you’ve just opened your first SF novel - hey, you liked the shiny cover - and you’re being hit by a blizzard of weirdness from the first paragraph.

Anyone had any similar experiences of toolkit failure, when jumping into a new genre? Are there certain paired genres that enable the transition from one to the other to be smoother than it might otherwise be?

Al R (still not really getting the hang of this “just a quickie thing”)

Consider this a sidebar to the colonisation discussion, rather than a new topic in its own right.

Setting aside the ethical issues involved in colonisation, do we still believe that we, as a species, are ever going to get beyond our own solar system?

One of the main points of the Mundane Manifesto was that interstellar travel is unlikely - not just for us, but for any aliens elsewhere in the galaxy.

The Mundanes helpfully didn’t tell us what kind of timescale they were applying here, whether they meant “unlikely” in the next hundred or thousand years, or unlikely over the entire span of a species or civilisation’s existence - what could, in principle, be millions, even billions of years, given the lifetimes of solar type stars. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that they meant “ever”.

Even if we rule out FTL travel (though I don’t believe physics has completely settled the matter, nor will it any time soon - see, for instance, some of the weirder speculation around the possible existence of braneworlds and sterile neutrinos), and even if we assume that engineering/energy constraints will always make near-light travel prohibitively difficult, did the Mundanes have a point anyway?

Once upon a time - and really not all that long ago - it all seemed so simple. We’d build our rockets, go into space, and plant flags. Then we’d go there en masse, as a species - not just exploring, not just bringing back a few soil samples, but establishing ourselves as a permanent presence. Colonising, in other words. But nowadays … the problem with colonising is that, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a bit, well, colonial. The very idea reeks of a certain empire mindset, a desire to export our values and impose them elsewhere - even if it’s only on barren rocks. Isn’t that just a bit twentieth century these days? We’re over all that stuff, aren’t we? After all, we don’t talk about colonising Antartica, or building cities under the sea any more. Exploration, yes - but not necessarily going to spend the rest of our lives there.

Clarke's classic 1951 novel of Martian exploration and colonisation

Let’s forget, for the moment, the notion that there might be other sentient beings out there. Let’s even forget, for now, the possibility of advanced animal life. There might be life of some kind out there, even in our own solar system, but we’ll assume that it’s fairly “primitive” - although get me with my multicellular chauvinism. Still, it’s life that might, conceivably, evolve to become more complex in time - even if we’re talking billions of years down the line. Could we even begin to colonise a world where there was already an established ecosystem, without having some effect - possibly catastrophic - on the native organisms? Or would the appropriate response be to say, tough luck, that’s natural selection in action - if you couldn’t get your act together and evolve beyond slime, don’t blame us for having central nervous systems and the means to export our DNA wherever we like?

Take Mars, for instance. I’d love to see people on Mars in my lifetime, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. It would be even cooler to see a permanent human presence, there or on the Moon. But would it change things if we discovered Martian organisms - fossil or living? Even if they were dead, could we ever be sure there were not living - or dormant - organisms somewhere we hadn’t looked? Could we be sure that we were not taking terrestrial organisms with us, and thereby running the risk of cross-contamination? No amount of sterilisation is ever going to be totally effective, and if we’ve learned one thing in the last decade, it’s that certain micro-organisms are incredibly hardy. Granted, the damage may have already been done … but that’s a pretty lame excuse for not thinking the issues through as and when we go there with people.

If Mars is a thorny issue (and much the same could presumably be said about Europa, Enceladus, Titan, and so on) the dilemma would be magnified a thousandfold if we ever discovered an Earthlike extrasolar planet. How would we even begin to explore somewhere that already had a complex, established ecosystem - much like our own world a couple of billion years ago? And what about settling it? How could we do that while maintaining complete biological isolation?

Maybe by the time we have the means to cross interstellar space, that’ll be the least of our worries. Maybe we just won’t give a damn, or we’ll be content to let our super-intelligent robot avatars do the exploring and colonising on our behalf.

What do you think? Issue or non-issue? Should we be making plans to export the human species across the galaxy, or just content ourselves with Earth, while relying on robots and telescopes to gather all the information we could ever need?

Thanks to Terry for suggesting this topic. I look forward to your responses; I’m sure there’s a lot we can get into.

Al R

Apologies for not managing a post yesterday; I spent most of it going up and down the Jungfrau mountain (as you do) and by the time I got back it was time to pack for this morning’s early departure. I’m back in the UK now and feeling rather sorry for myself since I was enjoying Switzerland rather a lot.

I think we’re sort of done with optimism/pessimism for the time being, so it’s time for a new topic. But, since my brain is more than a little addled by travel and general weariness (I never, ever sleep well before any kind of early start) I think we’ll keep it simple and go with a mini-topic today.

Is it me, or are your favorite SF novels (or novels for that matter, we’re splendidly open-minded here) generally speaking the ones that you found the least easy to get on with at the beginning? You know what I mean: those books that you ram your head against for some unspecified period of time before something clicks and it all makes sense, and - gosh, wow - it’s the best thing ever? That’s how it is for me, anyway - some of the time. Not always.

And does the corollary apply? Are those books that invite you in with a warm welcome the ones you come back to? Or are they like those records that sound great the first time you play them, but wear thin with repeated listens?

I can think of three good examples right off. Samuel R Delany’s NOVA was a book I kept trying to read in my early teens, but each time I couldn’t get more than a couple of chapters in. It was something about the style, something about the unfamiliarity of the proto-cyberpunk space opera setting (erm…. this isn’t like Asimov or Clarke, my brain decided, therefore it must be wrong), but I kept grinding to a halt and giving up.  I don’t know what had me coming back, but at some point I broke through the pain barrier, and suddenly it was great, all the way to the end. And having undergone that process, I now have great difficulty articulating what the original difficulty was. It’s as if the act of reading a difficult book rewires the brain to eliminate any conceptual obstacles that might have been there to begin with.

Some while later, I went through the same thing with Gene Wolfe’s THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, and also Bruce Sterling’s SCHISMATRIX. Along with NOVA these must count as some of my most important personal touchstones when it comes to SF and what I want out of it. In each case the book clanged against my preconceptions of what SF could and should do, and in each case I came out the other side with a better appreciation for the form and a renewed sense of its possibilities. And in each case I felt that there was no going back; what was acceptable or good beforehand was not necessarily going to cut it now.

Bruce Pennington's gorgeous cover art still defines the way I see Severian's world.

Which is a roundabout way of asking: have any of you had the same experience? Are there books that you found unapproachable or difficult, but with which you perservered and eventually came to think of as your favorites, or at least important touchstones in your relationship with the field?

Are there books, considered well within the field, that you still keep bouncing off? Are there generally well-regarded books that you’ve bashed your head against, finished, and still don’t rate?

Mainly I’m interested in hearing about books you like, though.

Al R

The Giger museum is pretty good if lacking in any context on the man and his work - maybe that’s the point, though. You’re left none the wiser as to where all this stuff came from. I was aware of his work on the ELP and Blondie covers, but had no idea that the basic Giger “style” was pretty much in place by the late sixties/early seventies. Needless to say, lots of Alien-related stuff in the museum, including the film on a continuous loop (as far as I could tell; I only caught the end sequence), and many models as well. The attention to detail in the museum is good; even the flooring is embossed with Giger-patterns. We noted that someone had been swapping lots of the captions around, though.

I didn’t buy a t-shirt - disappointing selection.

Outside the Giger museum

The interior of the Giger bar opposite the museum. Just the ticket for a relaxing, nightmare-free drink.

Cool seats in the Giger bar. Feel like a space captain.

Later, as a bonus, we found a permanent exhibit of Patrick Woodruffe artwork at the adjoining castle in Gruyere - an amazing installation of light-boxes viewed by ascending a spiral staircase threading its way up one of the towers.

That’s it for today; tomorrow we’ll either pick up the optimism/pessmism thing or maybe try another topic.

Al R

As mentioned, I’m off to HR Giger musuem tomorrow (well, that’s the plan, anyway). Giger is of course most well known for the designs he did for Ridley Scott’s Alien, and since that’s a fairly dark film by any measure, that got me thinking about the ways in which our view of the future as dark and dystopian has been shaped by the SF cinema of the last thirty-odd years. The crew of the Nostromo don’t just have to deal with the intruding Alien, they also have to deal with an evil corporation wanting to exploit the Alien for its own nefarious purposes. Big bad corporations were almost a given in the SF of the subsequent decade, whether it’s Cyberdyne/Skynet in the Terminator films, Weyland-Yutani in the aliens sequence, the Tyrell Corporation in Bladerunner or Omni Consumer Products in Robocop.

Also, whenever we got a glimpse of Earth in these films, it was always an incredibly grim view of the future. I remember coming out of the cinema having seen Robocop for the first time and thinking: if that’s the world we’re headed for, I might as well top myself now. Incredibly, the trope of a crappy Earth ruled by big bad corporations lasted right through the nineties into the noughties - see Moon, for instance, or even Avatar. Some of the concept artwork for Avatar’s version of Earth looks like it could have been lifted directly from Bladerunner.

That got me thinking about optimism in SF, because might be there be a sense that these films are in some way exercising a kind of stranglehold on the imagination, locking us - or at least the people who get to make other films - into a default mindset that says the future cannot possibly be better than the present?

I suppose one might make honorable exceptions for I, Robot and Minority Report, among recent films that haven’t portrayed a completely bleak and miserable future. I forget the plot of MR (I don’t think I ever understood it anyway) but even I, Robot has a naughty corporation, doesn’t it?

Any counter-examples? Big SF films of the last thirty years, set in the near-ish future (so, no Star Trek or Star Wars) that have bucked the trend?

Anyway, if all is well I shall report back from Gigerland tomorrow. And I may even have a t-shirt to prove it.

Al R