This was going to be a list of 'non-work' stuff, but those lines have blurred quite a bit.
Science fiction
Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. We did two issues, with me settling into my new role of editor-rumored-to-be-at-large. Editing #293 (Chinese SFF) was mostly the work of Polina Levontin and guest editors Yen Ooi and Regina Kanyu Wang, and #294 (SFF and Class) mostly that of Polina and guest editor Nick Hubble.
To check these out, become a BSFA member. (Some 2019-2020 issues are also now available to download open access).
On my flying pink sofa, I zoomed around to some conferences and things. At the LSFRC conference on Activism and Resistance I gave a paper called 'Abolish Money': the text is here. And Francis Gene-Rowe and Avery Delany and I gave two versions of a panel about games, frames and flames: one at Eastercon and one at the SFRA conference. My bit was called 'Liliputopia' and was about post-scarcity and being small (like Ant-man is, sometimes): slides and notes here.
ConSpire was an online mini-convention collaboration between the BSFA and the Science Fiction Foundation; sessions are on the Vector YouTube.
I reviewed Kim Stanley Robinson's climate change novelThe Ministry for the Future, TWIIIIICCCCEEE. Once for Aargh with some emphasis on violence, once for STIR magazine, with some emphasis on political economy.
Didn’t read much new fiction in 2016. Two bookend books, Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself (Gollancz, late 2015) and Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (Tor, early 2017), both come recommended.
I did also really like Yoon Ha Lee’s debut Ninefox Gambit (Solaris, actually 2016). Ninefox Gambit can be enjoyed as a highly accomplished military space opera. There are points of comparison with Ann Leckie, Iain M. Banks, Frank Herbert. It ticks all the boxes vis-à-vis exciting set-pieces, gee-whizz worldbuilding, political intrigue, tension and conflict, sly little twists, and so on.
Thing is, Lee has also arrayed all those ticked little boxes into a strange sigil, a strange sigil of abhorrent and enthralling eldritch leakages. There are points of comparison with, say, Angela Carter. This impression of potent excess may have something to do with gaming, since Lee’s novel is absolutely saturated with the the aesthetics and the logic of gaming. Ninefox Gambit is packed with vivacious, suggestively intermeshing lore, in the game design sense. Lee’s best incidents gratify like superrare drops. Lee’s sorcerous space conceits – ever enchantingly-baptised, ever partly-occulted – don’t seem to be bothered whether or not I favour them with my suspended disbelief, or with my genre-savvy negative capability. No, all they ask is that I affix them to the edges of my imagination, like new green leaves unfurling on a tech tree, or like bizarre buffs or badass armor upgrades.
The novel's particular form of violence, the way things fly apart in it, suggests games. Even the form of solidity the novel accomplishes often feels like that of games. The critic Carl Freedman suggests that one characteristic of SF is its ‘cognition effect.’ Freedman’s idea is roughly that, as a genre, SF’s solidity is implicated in a kind of rationalist rigor and constancy, which gets supported by a rhetoric of technoscientific plausibility. But I wonder if the equivalent, for Ninefox Gambit, is less about immersive plausibility than immersive playability.
More generally, I wonder: might playability function as a kind of rationality? And if so, how might the rising influence of gaming on genre fiction impact on the complex but enduring distinction between science fiction and fantasy? Perhaps Ninefox Gambit captures a watershed moment.
Pondering such questions takes me to one piece of required reading in SF-related criticism in 2016, Jonathan McCalmont’s ‘Nothing Beside Remains: A History of the New Weird’. If you’re a current Interzone reader you’re familiar with what he can do: in this article, which appeared in the second issue of Big Echo: Critical SF, he does it to the New Weird, fantasy, SF, reason, radicalism and reform, political commitment, and the US and the UK, all supported by deft archival work.
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s New Weird anthology features prominently in this history. And in 2016 a new VanderMeer omnibus came crashing through the omnibus-sized hole in the door where the letterbox used to be. The Big Book of Science Fiction (Vintage Books) costs twenty quid new. For a project on this scale, choices about how to construct the object itself, the codex, can be high risk and high stakes. Word is Ann herself katana-sliced millions of sheets of paper to optimum thinness while Jeff haphazardly waved the leaf-blower. But kudos to Stephanie Moss and whoever else was involved in making these 750,000 words readable.
The VanderMeers are “less concerned about making sure to include certain authors” than they are “about trying to give accurate overviews of certain eras, impulses, and movements” (xxix). There is a global outlook, with a pragmatic focus on the USSR and Latin America. The introduction is substantial and useful, with heartening idiosyncracies. It is standing squarely inside Anglophone writing, but en pointe, VanderMeerkattishly peeping over the horizon.
I did wonder if perhaps a few subject specialists could be scouted for the second edition? And there are also gestures toward literary modernism, and speaking selfishly, I would have loved an anthology in which those gestures were a bit more vigorous and flappy. But I can fully appreciate the presiding spirit of mild progress and gentle correctives.
"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone /
Stand in the desert . . ."
The Big Book of SF aims to discard an unhelpful distinction between genre and mainstream literary fiction, yet it makes a point of preserving a distinction between SF and fantasy. Why? The reason that the Big Book invokes – roughly, SF is about the future – definitely has some legs. (Actually, it probably has steadier legs than ‘cognition effect’). One leg (tentacular) is encased in spacesuit polymers; the other (cloven-hoofed) slips into its mithril chausse, chausse, poleyn, etc., and the VanderMeers wield these fantastic trousers deftly. Besides, editors must impose some arbitrary constraints, and there’s a strong hint of a Big Book of Fantasy in the offing ...
Still, I felt there was something faintly unresolved about all this … until I read Jonathan’s New Weird article, plus a post by Ethan Robinson to which it links. That made me wonder: perhaps a monumental retrospective like the Big Book is unlikely to break down the SF/fantasy distinction, precisely because that would spoil the fun for all the billions of contemporary sfantasy authors (?), who need the the SF/fantasy distinction to have something to heroically break down in a sort of pseudo-radical transgression. It is like actually murdering the villain in a cartoon show: who do you overcome next episode?
But perhaps more to the point, the stories that are here translated into English for the first time are stonkers, certainly the best short speculative fiction I’ve read this year (sorry, alive writers). Yefim Zozulya’s proto-dystopian (?) tale ‘The Doom of Principal City’ and Silvina Ocampo’s ‘The Waves’ are my pick of the bunch. Jacques Barbéri ... Burroughs-ish, Ligotti-ish, Clive Barker-ish?
I thought Karl Hans Strobl’s ‘The Triumph of Mechanics’ is the only one whose interest is perhaps primarily merely as a fragment of a larger history? – but even that one has its moments: an opera singer digs in her cleavage and draws forth a robotic rabbit, from whose dugs dangle nine robot rabbit kits, then screams operatically, so there.
2016 may also be a watershed year for the penetration of AI into cultural production. The Twitterbots whose imbrications I have most enjoyed are @dreamhaver, @magicrealismbot, @speculativecash, @fantasticvocab, and maybe also Sarah Nyberg and Nora Reed’s troll-baiting honeybots (e.g. @arguetron).
Two noteworthy short films, both available online [UPDATE: can't find Skies?], that feel SFnal by virtue of their makers: In the Robot Skies was shot entirely through autonomous camera drones; Sunspringwas written by a LSTM recurrent neural network fed on SF screenplays. Sunspring felt hampered by strict fidelity to a narrow constraint (unlike In the Robot Skies). Why not shift the constraint just a little bit, and let humans write the stage directions (aka ‘action’)? But it is a fascinating thing, not least for how it reveals SF’s obsession with epistemology, with what is knowable, and how, and why. The film’s dialogue, for all its fragmenting, splicing, garden pathing grammars, keeps coming back to trust, belief, knowledge, understanding. The other big theme is sex.
Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit involves calendrical magic. But let’s end with a jolly Christmas hex on calendars themselves, which entice us into impugning something called ‘2016’ for what we ourselves have wrought.
I began this blog about three years ago, with a great and sluggardly reluctance, having received quite a few petitions signed by the entire science fiction and fantasy community urging me so to do.
Each of these countless petitions, which were annoying, and one of which I actually had to go to the Post Office to collect, thinking it to be something else and becoming disappointed when it was not, although the Post Office is not far, beseeched me, never mobilizing less than what I guess you'd call like the total syncretic ingenuity and imagination of the entire science fiction and fantasy community, although mobilizing said totality with each successive petition in some new configuration with unique emergent properties, to go onto Blogger or Wordpress, or onto Tumblr if need be, in order that I might occasionally put up some reviews of SF and fantasy, as well as put up some stray thoughts connected with my SF and fantasy Creative Writing PhD, whose commencement at Northumbria University at around that time was a commencement which, from what I could gather from these several petitions and the grapevines throwing themselves bodily at my window, the entire science fiction and fantasy community, including many of its dead, and some people who were just literally made up, both fiercely brooded upon individually, and also tumulted over frequently in public, and each petition signed by said entire community moreover entreated me to put up a little thingy on the side with links to other blogs, so.
OK but that's not all. Superadded to this general siege of opinion, I had started to feel that those closest to me would sometimes, in a real casual way, slip into conversation a chance remark, not obviously aimed at me, which intimated that to hide one's l33t under a bushel might itself be construed as vanity, and that in a way wouldn't you say that, like, the most ostentatious blog you can have as a white middle class western cis man is no blog at all -- the eyes flick anxiously to mine, linger an unsettling instant, flick away. I caved. My caving is all around you. In the end it was probably the dramatis personae itself that did it: what was reiterated strategum by strategum, however laughable the local strategic design, was this bald provocation: if so many millions of entities, living, dead, exotic, imaginary, could draw together under this one bloggenic banner, if Alex Dally MacFarlane, Alice Tarbuck, and Aliette de Bodard, if Amal El-Mohtar, Amy Sterling Casil, and Ann Leckie, if Anna MacFarlane, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, and Brad R. Torgersen, if Carol Emshwiller, Catherynne M. Valente, and China Miéville, if Christina Scholz, Chuck Tingle, and Connie Willis, if Elizabeth Jones, George O. Smith, and George RR Martin, if Gillian Anderson, Harlan Ellison, and Jack Vance, if Jim Butcher, John C. Wright, and John Scalzi, if Jonah Sutton-Morse, Joseph Tomaras, and Kate Paulk, if Kathy Acker, Kevin J. Anderson, and Kim Stanley Robinson, if Kir Bulychev, Lois McMaster Bujold, and L. Ron Hubbard, if Larry Correia, Laura J. Mixon, and Lavie Tidhar, if Margaret Cavendish, N.K. Jemisin, and Nalo Hopkinson, if Naomi Novik, Nick Mamatas, and Paul Weimer, if R.A. Lafferty, Renay, and Robert Heinlein, if Robert Jordan, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and Saladin Ahmed, if Sarah Hoyt, Sofia Samatar, and Sophie Mayer, if Steven Gould, Tricia Sullivan, and Vox Day, if countless others, could all make cause together to beg this one blog of me, if even Alice Bradley Sheldon and James Tiptree Jnr. could set aside their differences to ask this one thing, why then could I not set my false modesty aside, look into my historically-determined and socially-constructed heart, and blog?
But now the PhD is kinda done, so ... well, this will probably go a bit dormant now. A volcano puffing out the odd mothball. Or if I do keep it going more energetically, it may have to broaden a bit thematically: if I add poetry, games, teaching and politics and economics stuff to the SFF stuff, it might limp nimbly onward. But there are already technically places for that (Sad Press, Sad Press Games, Academia.edu, Wokesgiving, Economic Humanities), so we'll see!
Anyways. Not one to tout my own Norns, but here are my three publications in 2016:
Excerpts from a novel-in-progress:
Big Echo SF, 'Cat, I Must Work!' -- also a standalone novelette. Equivalent Exchange just kicked off their short fiction highlights series with it. It has been suggested that, had this story not been published in 2016, the Leave vote would have squeaked a narrow victory in the UK Brexist referendum in June, a squeak of uncertain economic consequences (although certainly cataclysmic economic consequences for the UK). Some critics have even argued that without this story, there would be ongoing further intensifications and normalizations of racism and xenophobia, some quite serious stirrings of a neo-fascist state, as well as some probably insurmountable difficulties cast into the heart of the Labour party, a party which thankfully -- because I did write this story -- is now finally for the first time in decades offering a viable parliamentary-democratic alternative to the catastrophic dogmatisms of the cult of neoliberalism. Also republished an as an ebook.
The Long+Short, 'Froggy Goes Piggy' -- also a standalone short story. This was part of Nesta's series of short fiction exploring collective intelligence, and may well have been discussed at an event at FutureFest 2016 (I couldn't go!). Momentum Bristol has also picked it up for its 'Satire' section, which is maybe a better label than SF, idk. (See also Economy Hub papers, btw). One of the things I'm quite proud of, in this story, is how it contributed decisively to a complete reworking of energy policies globally, a drastic drop in carbon emissions, and the slowing of global warming; a climatologist was explaining to me on Twitter the other day that this year, temperatures in the Arctic would now be 20 degrees higher than normal, had I not written this story.
A short story:
'It's OK To Say If You Went Back In Time To Kill Baby Hitler', online at Big Echo and collected in Up and Coming, ed. SL Huang and Kurt Hunt, an anthology of John W. Campbell Award-eligible authors. I read the whole thing at BristolCon Fringe and there will be a podcast of that available in due course. One of the tiny things I am happy about is how this prevented the presidency of Donald Trump, while also setting the USA on a slow but secure trajectory to non-imperialist intersectional socialism. I shudder when I think back to those days when it seemed like the choice was between Clinton and neoliberalism and nothing, unless you count Trump and probably-weirdly-neoliberal neo-fascism as an option.
Although 'The Internet of Things Your Mother Never Told You' appears in Twelve Tomorrows 2016, it was actually published in 2015; besides which, it is possible with principal component analysis to reduce the number of futures in the volume to just three. I'm not a mathematician.
Wokesgiving -- also relevant to Christmas, obv. I'm interested in gathering any links relevant to the form of the Family Political Falling Out, please make suggestions!
Nominate for the BSFA Awards (deadline 1 January) -- I feel like my reading hasn't been v. extensive this year, so if you have some good tips for short SFF especially over the next few days, let me know.
Thursday, November 3, 2016
I have started a little blog for my series of workshops on poetry, play, & technology. Links mostly. Maybe some video clips one day. Contribute to the Ambershadow Ambler.
& Sad Press, the small poetry press that I co-edit, is fully glimpsable and skittering at the edge of everything extant, with recent titles by Tom Jenks, Karl M.V. Waugh, Sally Shakti Willow and Joe Evans, and a list for 2016/2017 which includes Anne-Laure Coxam, R.K., Eley Williams, Timothy Thornton, Jonathan Ferguson, Sarah Hayden, Emilia Weber, Andy Emitt, and Adam Roberts.
2) Voting for the Sputnik Awards is still open. Shortlisted: Jim Butcher, The Cinder Spires (Roc); Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Hodder & Stoughton); Berit Ellingsen, Not Dark Yet (Two Dollar Radio); N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (Orbit); Emma Newman, Planetfall (Roc); Peter Newman, The Vagrant (Harper Voyager); Naomi Novik, Uprooted (Del Rey); Nnedi Okorafor, The Book of Phoenix (Hodder & Stoughton); Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself (Gollancz); Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora (Orbit); Neal Stephenson, Seveneves (William Morrow); Fran Wilde, Updraft (Tor Books). If the UK can vote to leave the EU without knowing what it is or whether we're actually in it, you're probably OK to cast a battle-ballot in the Sputniks. I wrote an editorial in the current Interzoneto talk a bit about the Sputniks and other new awards.
3) SFRA & CRSF conferences were fun. My papers, "Marvellous Moneys & Financial Familiars" and "The Dystopglyn Glyns," are online at Academia.edu. The first one was basically a primer on controversies in the ontology of money, then a few selections from the Economics in SFF project. The second was an attempt at thinking about some of the huge everyday topics and tools of SF Studies (utopia, the future, diegetic prototyping, SF vs. fantasy, Suvin's cognitive estrangement).
4) It is not long since the last flake of the Smurfette fake tat I won for losing Laser Tag washed off my shoulder. Though I think she may have enlisted as a Pokemon. Meanwhile, wouldn't Ghostbusters make an intriguing location-based AR game? Especially if it was genuinely terrifying. A bit Five Nights at Freddy's maybe.
5) If anyone has material they would be willing to contribute to the Economics in SFF project, I'd love to take a look. Here's a formal-ish CfP, but if in doubt, just get in touch.
6) Are you organising a conference or something similar in 2017? Maybe you should get in touch too. There's something I want to talk to you about.
8) Those science fiction conferences. So, there was really far too much great stuff at SFRA & CRSF to attempt even an attempt at a report, but I want to pick out three moments almost at random. One was the long feared and in the event totally gratifying and stimulating collision of contemporary experimental poetry with SFF in the Stephen Mooney panel. A second was Sarah Lohmann's paper on feminist utopias, science, and chaos/complexity. Before I heard that paper and let it sink in a little, I would have said that the problem with utopia-as-CAS is that the transformations of CASs are by definition unpredictable: too open, too flexible, too fickle, and incapable of cherishing and protecting anything worthy of the name utopian. The just-maybe-brilliant insight that suddenly makes me, in a really good way, way less sure, was the focus on science work as a CAS. A society organised according to edge-of-chaos utopian science feels like a very different proposition to a society organised as edge-of-chaos utopia. A third was Joan Haran's keynote, an attentive exploration of points where SFF and activism touch (swirling around WisCon, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Octavia's Brood, and possibilities for genomics SF research activisms).
12) Fredric Jameson in 1982: "For the apparent realism, or representationality, of SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us 'images' of the future—whatever such images might mean for a reader who will necessarily predecease their 'materialization'—but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization." The sort of thing I'm trying to return to and perhaps gently productively disagree with in that triptych of talks at Northumbria Summer Speakers / Fantasies of Contemporary Culture / CRSF.
"Visionary fiction" is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born.
[...]
Many of the contributors to Octavia's Brood had never written fiction before, let alone science fiction. When we approached folks, most were hesitant to commit, feeling like they weren't qualified. But overwhelmingly, they all came back a few weeks later, enthusiastically, with incredible ideas and some with dozens of pages already written. Because all organizing is science fiction, we are dreaming new worlds every time we think about the changes we want to make in the world. The writers in this collection just needed a little space, and perhaps permission to immerse themselves fully in their visionary selves.
PRIZES. One piece of news speeds its vast shadow into all crannies of all affairs current and upcoming: that is, the inaugural Sputnik Awards have arrived, and that means there's a shortlist here and the chance to vote here. (For the full effect, make sure you name your ballot and leave an e-mail address). Some general chitchat about it over at File 770. Results announced in October.
I was a VICE vox pop on boat naming. Here's the long version, which starts to maybe touch on democracy, and has a little bit about Iain M. Banks in it. (There are some very interesting banks in Banks's novels, by the way. Mostly of the "slope" kind rather than the financial kind. Maybe one to add to the names series one day). I want to be in VICE constantly.
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BIDDING IS OPEN in Con or Bust's annual auction. Funds raised go to support people of colour to attend conventions.
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I finally took that stupid quiz. Griffindor.
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CONFERENCES ETC. I thoroughly and meticulously enjoyed the Fantasies of Contemporary Culture in Cardiff, and presented something there titled "There Is No Cognitive Estrangement." Always the drama Jo. Should actually have been "We're Running Low On Cognitive Estrangement Must Remember That The Next Time I Pop Out." I got to share a panel with Kanta Dihal, whose paper "'This is Not Science Fiction': Communicating Science through Fantasy" touched on Flatland, Flatterland, and The Science of Discworld among others, and David Mellor, whose paper "Fallen Robots" explored cybersecurity and subjectivity via the android imagination (on the android imagination, more in a sec). And I totally missed the last train.
I've also been wistcontemplating some of Wiscon on Twitter, and especially Sofia Samatar's timeline. And there's going to be a special issue of the journal Foundation on science fiction and theatre (which I hope I will get round to submitting to. Always the drama Jo). Deadline for that's February, which appropriately enough, IS SET IN THE FUTURE. Registration has now opened for Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities in Glasgow on 4 July as well (clashes with Fantistika sadly). And it's CRSFSFRA in about a month, where I am going to give two papers, neither candid, and then immediately fall into a trance. Come! And I went to Brett Scott / Stir to Action's Alternative Finance workshop (Storify here), and happened to write some science fiction while I was there, which I hope to share soon. Right now it's called "Froggy Goes Piggy" but I think it might become "Zippety Doo-Da, Zippety Data."
And here is ASUS's demo video for Zenbo, a sort of lovable tablet on wheels:
Yussus ASUS! While android aesthetics clearly has a strong working grasp of cute -- these designers are adept at skating safely across the phenomenology of homuncular companionship without getting sucked into its many uncanny valleys concealed by wicker-mesh and jungle foliage -- the atmosphere of uncanniness here is holy fucking shit intense.
The closest I can come to describing the feel of this video is the certainly pointedly and perhaps therapeutically tedious pastoral scene in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, the onethat follows the self-enclosed tragedy of Act One, crossed with the semi-successful attempts of late 90s British quasi-comedy like Blue Jam to synthesize the rhythmic sensibilities of drone music into its quasi-comic timing.
What to make, for instance, of the super-emphatic enunciation that mom, pop, and grandpops use? Is it a deliberate decision, or did it just happen? The strange peppy briskness reminds me of Chris Goode et al.'s fascinating verbatim theatre piece Monkey Bars, in which the adult actors tasked with appropriating and elevating the words of children so often find themselves overcome by an ambient paedomorphic curse, mysteriously unable to access their adult voices, stuck between innocence and experience. Likewise in the ASUS vid, it's as if everyone lived under the ritual prohibition of some Lil Lacanian Name-of-the-Kiddo. As if Zenbo and everything connected with him were secretly organized around the desires of the child -- though perhaps only in the sense that the Holocaust of Roberto Benigni's It's A Beautiful Life is organized around the desires of the child? -- and yet we cannot quite admit this without breaking the spell.
Or is it extrapolative futurism: is the idea that the pollution of our social world by voice-recognition interfaces and synthesized speech will soon nudge all our voices into this crisp, singsong barking? Of course that tone is also an awkward invocation of deafness and dementia, and more generally, of age, illness, disability, isolation, depression, and death. It's easy to laugh at the infomercial gizmos that are introduced with an unconvincing demonstration of everyday inconvenience accompanied by hyperbolic frustration -- and I LOVE ANY PARODY OF THAT, IT GETS ME EVERY TIME -- but it is potentially ableist to write off some of those products as self-evidently useless (and also, ambigously, potentially ableist to be euphemistically marketing them at Everyman). Maybe in the follow-up vid Zenbo will scoot around a hospice. As is, the grandpa is -- like the upleaping father of Kafka's tale -- preternaturally hale, bursting out of the frailness assigned to him by the story.
Everybody is also retired, insofar as the video plays strongly on the theme utopian automation. The robot Zenbo emancipates Claire Lancaster from a half-lit claustrophobic nightmare of impossible and conflicting labour demands, but we never see exactly and specifically what Zenbo does. Well, of course not! ASUS don't know, and don't think they're supposed to know, what Zenbo exactly and specifically does. ASUS are in the business of creating a niche and a few fragments of techno-social practices to fill that niche with, with the not-implausible hope of tempting third party developers and early adopter ingenuity to fill in the details later. Zenbo is first and foremost a tablet.
Meanwhile, the name Zenbo echoes zenbu: by way of doing nothing, Zenbo does everything."Hey Zenbo, turn the lights on!" Zenbo is the light of the world. Zenbo is a chibi messiah, whose arrival heralds a -- more Disney's (and Cory Doctorow's) Magic Kingdom than the Kingdom of Heaven -- uncanny world of labours shrunk to piffling puzzles. It's soccer, it's dressing up time, it's memorization games, and the big annual event is a family portrait ("but somehow, we always pull through in the end"). Even the labour of preparing a feast is reducible to a two step recipe and five minutes in a microwave. The palaver around the family photo-shoot, the introductory jazz, the worn old books, the retro-patriarchy of our protagonist's pre-Zenbo slatternly stresses, all betray the video's retro-futurism. (Come back Target Women, we need you!) Eric Lancaster, the sort-of-breadwinner, is described as a "Father, writer, and slacker." We don't even see him writing, just editing (with a quota of two pages): probably he skim-writes, infusing the outputs of algorithmic storytellers with that human touch for big cheques. A bit like how he gets Zenbo to tell stories to his daughter.
Weirdly, there's a paradoxical feeling of scarcity. It feels post-apocalyptic, except instead of a dwindling supply of candle-stubs and tuna-cans, there is a dwindling supply of incident, grotesquely distended across eleven minutes.
A video like this is a useful provocation to the discourse swirling around design fiction and diegetic prototyping. Is design fiction about provoking the future? Does design fiction really create the socio- bit of a socio-technological novum, and drag the tech kicking and screaming into reality behind it? Is design fiction really -- or solely -- a way of testing things out cheaply? Is design fiction really about testing and expanding the limits of the imagination? Well, maybe. But I'm more interested in the relationship of design fiction texts to genres such as the legal contract, the financial instrument, and the sovereign promulgation. "I have placed my Zenbo in the clouds. It is a sign of my covenant with you and all this earth." Might design fiction sometimes work, paradoxically, not despite its lack of imagination, but because of it? Might not a brutal and ostentatious celebration of imaginative mediocrity also prove an excellent instrument for provoking the future into a desired formation? In the ASUS video, for instance, we might decipher an insistence that the bar to this future is low, so low that you (yes even you, parent, pioneer/early adopter, and Slacker) can probably find some way to feed off it. The point is not to say, "Behold the bold idea!" so the money flows toward it. The point is to say, "Look how much money is already bound up in, and bound toward, this idea, without it even being bold."The point is not to innovate gracefully, to extrapolate cunningly, and to strenuously exercise the imagination against the inertia of everyday existence: it is to withhold the imagination, to say, this fragment of future is so inevitable that it does not even depend on innovation, vision, or imagination.
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What would it be like to Tinder swipe-left on a Zenbo?
Would ubiquitous Zenbos change the nature of faces?
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#ZombieEconomy Lisa Prugl we live in Gramscian moment - 'the old is dying and the new is not yet born' - neoliberalism is dead
— Johnna Montgomerie (@j_montgomerie) June 1, 2016
NEOLIBERALISM IS SO LAST HEGEMONY. IMF says so. This makes me really uneasy. Your friendly reminder that domination (or capital or whatever) is as it were cunning; it reinvents itself, occupies new discourses. In recent years the condemnation of austerity, of course, has put the left into a rather weird alignment with many voices in mainstream neoclassical economics. So if you're a leftist or radical or progressive or something even better, now might be a good time to think about what's coming next.
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ALL OF WHICH REMINDS ME. It was Towel Day recently, celebrating the life and work of Douglas Adams, work which I think has held up really pretty astonishingly well. I put up this HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN CORRESPONDENCE. [Fill in clickbait.]
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PLUS. There was a lot of controversy this month and some seriously inspiring oratory to do with a panel in which Captain America says, "I'm with her!" (or something like that. To do check). Abigail Nussbaum and Martin McGrath share different thought-provoking and well-supported perspectives about it. Kate Elliott's sort-of related tweets about pacing, patience, & inevitable climb down (& expectation thereof) were interesting. But I gotta say they're among the exceptions: a lot of what I stumbled across just seemed to be a tragicomedy of fans ramblingly over-rationalizing their dismay at having a very simple pleasure threatened? Because you see Captain America is good and is actually not a HYDRA agent, so.
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AND. Paul Cornell launched his novel Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?and I caught a snippet at BristolCon fringe (he read alongside Martyn Waites AKA Tania Carver. See Cheryl Morgan's blog). One thing I really enjoyed about the Sherlock excerpt was a very contemporary-feeling little twist on the venerable fantasy trope of collective beliefs, fears, dreams, wishes or memories taking on reality. In Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?, the ghost of Holmes is a looping composite that can accommodate slightly contradictory versions of the detective. ('Skyping Ze Executive Producer on Xmas Eve' could be another for Kraftwerk Kristmas album btw). (From earlier: 'Names in SFF #13: Benedict Cumberbatch.') (Also: guest post at Peter Sutton's blog).
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On a more personal note Morticia will be sitting her grade-four quail-egg ocarina exam on Tuesday so keep us in your prayers, and your tusks ever-jutting should our faction fall.
Writing, Narrative, SFF Studies, SFF Poetics Today, Tomorrow - a talk on near future sf (direct link) Story Sludge Redux - link to a Galen Strawson article, plus an attack on stories Marxist Science Fiction - "... while science fiction studies has got comfortable with the idea that science fiction doesn't predict the future, the study of future-predicting practices has started investigating the ways in which they are science fiction ..." What is a spoiler?
Also, how would you ever know how long it took you to write a book?
Poor Mike Glyer must by now be realising it would have been easier to do a regular round-up of everything that isn't about Hugos / Rabid Puppies / Red Puppies etc.! Here are a scattering of SFF-ish links etc. on the theme of not-that.
Finally some robots I can actually identify with (spoiler they fall over, they are human, the machines may do everything better than us but they will never fall over as good as us, yes they can they are human).
Games: Fiasco on Tabletop. (Video. Had a freaky moment when I remembered who Wil Wheaton was / what he looked like the last time I saw him (doing an exam at Starfleet Academy shouting at some guy with a weird hand because the race of weird hand people like it when you shout at them)).
Sad Duppies / Rabid Duppies Podcast (Catapult): Episode 16: Alice Sola Kim & Dolan Morgan. Hosted by Jaime Alyse. "And it's not that I started writing like this book, but more that it got stuck in my head. Like my thoughts started to sound a little bit like the narrator of the audiobook, which I was listening to at like 1.5 speed to move through it more quickly [...]"
I added a note / placekeeper thing about Invocation to Academia.edu. (Fwiw, Amazon are now very guarded about Kindle content updating, although I'm not sure it's always been / will always be that way (there's a risk of losing notes & highlights, you see)).
M. Harold Page series defending "traditional" high fantasy, dangling Strossblog lengths of discussion thread. Some interesting stuff here, although (having not read it all yet), it seems oddly thin on obvious (*) stuff like gender politics, and like how fantasy races (or species, you could say) relate contemporary identity politics more generally?
Meanwhile, next door in the gaming world, there's been discussion a-plenty. Here's a little more: Daniel Starkey on the tabletop RPG Ehdrigor. "Ehdrigohr starts from the base assumption that there are no colonizers. There are also no dwarves, orcs, elves, or gnomes. It's a world populated by nine nations of humans, inspired primarily by Native cultures and mythologies. They've learned to coexist with spirits and natural forces around them, but must also contend with monstrous creatures called 'Shivers' that emerge at night from dark places inside the Earth [...]."
OK, re that: three mini-theses on epic fantasy and race:
(1) It is the white supremacists, not the allegorists, who control the border with Fairy. It is difficult or impossible to "address race issues" by transposing them to the struggles of these fantastical beings, these tailor-made myths, transformed and enchanted figures and emblems, insofar as it is precisely the transposition to myth which always militates on behalf of racial domination.
(2) Fairy is definitively, constitutively oblique, and so is the systemic. Maybe they name the same thing. Invoking the systemic is starting to look as childish as invoking the mischief of fairies.
(3) Fantasy tries to honour the power of true names as a way of forgetting about the power of true slurs.
OKAY YOU'VE HAD YOUR TIME OFF FROM PUPPIES. GET BACK TO PUPPIES.
It may be a little while before I get back to any serious blogging (I am spending November to February sharpening my face). But in the meanwhile:
1) I have a longish review of Peter F. Hamilton's Geordie procedural space opera Great North Road in Foundation #118. Haven't seen that issue yet but it's a large & interesting contents page.
(BTW meant to say in review that it says on the stargate stop on Market Street that the last stargate is 11:28 but actually the last one is 10:54. Don't stand there in the rain).
2) I've written a novelette tie-in for the alt history near future cyberpunk board game Tokyo Yakuza. It's not out just yet, but you can follow Godan Takami on Twitter for news of the series: I think I'm about #27ish or so. (And there will be other short fiction before long. Working title, "Actually, It's About Ethics In Grand Juryism.")
3) Look at Darius Kazemi's semi-random scratching OCR appeasement bot! Reverse OCR.
4) Have you noticed that Nina Allan is posting story-by-story responses to The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women ed. Alex Daly MacFarlane? Twitter has weaned itself off Jonathan McCalmont so fingers crossed for the ascendancy of "the long tweet" over at Ruthless Culture. & Amal El-Mohtar has started a weekly review of short fiction, Rich and Strange. So yeah, we can't all blog at once, can we?
5) And by now there is more than enough nonsense on this blog already to keep you pickled in nonsense at least until I return. E.g.:
Waaay too long review of Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema. The last bits try to make a connection between a certain kind of idealised copyright and the reputation currency Whuffie from Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom.
& OK it's still not quite finished, but long review of my namesake Jo Walton's Among Others,which ruminates on immersiveness, words & worlds.
Underappreciated Authors: a short piece sort-of-in-defence-of continuing to underappreciate them.
Storytelling & Sludge. I think progressive & radical stories are harder to tell than conservative & reactionary ones. (& it's easy to convince ourselves we're telling them when we're not).
Kicking Asphalt & Taking Names: some thoughts on urban fantasy, names, & Tom Pollock's Parva "Pen" Khan. (w/ links to other blog posts about names in SFF).
Thoughts lightly touching algorithmic curation, & what it's like following thousands of people on Twitter: Why I Am So Uncool, by me Nietzsche.
Also a thought experiment about crowdfunding, online collaboration, and the future of the book. (Imagine the "spine" as an n-dimensional virtual object, the "binding" as an intricate system of nested pledges of finance, labour and consumption ...)
A wee thought occasioned by the rise of Glass & other wearables. Always lurking, always performing: is there an equivalent in SF literature (or any culture) of .@?
Other:
I am still trying to work out, for myself at least, this: what is money? Old blog post about imagining money without numbers, among other things.
Marta & the Demons -- a novelette about getting out at the top. I guess it's design fiction? Designtopic YA? Currently Kindle only, 99p only. Stars & advice gratefully swallowed.
I've expanded an enormous review of Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema (with some notes on Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom too). A bit rough in parts, but I think basically done. It talks about copyright, YA fiction, utopia, design fiction, reputation currencies, etc.
Also:
A review of the massive anthology Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, ed. David G. Hartwell & Patrick Nielson Hayden, which first appeared in Interzone.
"Storytelling & Sludge." Post prompted by an apology for blue science fiction. I'm trying to capture my sense that, okay, yeah, revolutionary stories are harder to tell than reactionary ones. [UPDATE: Elsewhere: Tom Pollock on nice kicks, Rjurik Davidson on writers' often uncritical love affair with their own unconscious].
"With Augmented Reality You'll Always Know When No REALLY Means Yes," by Tim Maughan. "Weakness analysis — having trouble finding chinks in her armour? Our powerful face and body analysis software will scan your target and compare her attributes to a constantly updated top ten of celebrity hotties, identifying areas where she likely feels inadequate. Make her feel a million dollars instead by complimenting her in the ways she’s desperate to hear." See also: "Collision Detection."
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An intriguing request from Karen Lord about her novel The Best of All Possible Worlds. "What I am wondering is whether certain parts of my book are being overlooked by readers and reviewers who are not well-versed in postcolonial and Caribbean literature. I’m referring to two chapters: ‘Bacchanal’ and ‘The Master’s House’. [...] I’d be so grateful if an academic or reviewer in Caribbean and postcolonial literature could examine, assess and critique the book in general and those two chapters in particular from a position of expert knowledge. My job is to write the stuff, not explain it, and my policy is to rarely react to reviews, so I can’t guarantee any kind of ‘you’ve got it’ endorsement. I simply want to see a discussion started in an area that I feel is significant but has been barely mentioned as yet."
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Tony Ballantyne's"If Only ... A Taste of Your Own Medicine" (Nature / Concatenation, PDF) is a seething quirky one-page parable. "'Magic?' said Sacha, her eyes suddenly shining. “You mean there’s really such a thing?' 'Of course not. But I can’t explain to you how it’s really done because you’re not allowed science any more.'"
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Greg Egan'sThe Arrows of Time is hitting a shelflike direction near you. "In between the timelike and spacelike directions are those traced out by light; these are known as lightlike or null directions." Try out his worldbuilding notes, in which there is no distinction between timelike and spacelike.
Plus: spot the deliberate physics mistake!
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“Memorably described by Charles Stross as the 'fictional agitprop arm of the Technocratic movement,' science fiction has tended to do incredibly well in periods of hubristic cultural expansion when the boundaries of possibility somehow appear both endless and within easy reach. Despite this proven track record when it comes to frontier spirit and two-fisted optimism, science fiction has also displayed a remarkable capacity for re-invention that has seen it resonate in periods of intense cultural retrenchment when all thoughts naturally turn to the moral difficulties of empire and what it means to live in a culture that has definitely passed its prime.” Jonathan McCalmont'sFuture Interrupted column #1. Originally in Interzone.
Edinburgh fowk: the 17th of December is Syndicate 10: Subsong, the last Syndicate of the year, & perhaps even the last. Why not come along (Facebook)? Advanced poetry, the possibility of scattered robot parts, even a Syngularity.
Interzone 248 is out, including my review of Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy, ed. Jonathan Strahan, plus a friendly and interesting review of Invocation -- a fantasy book I wrote, 11.5% of the print run of which I now always wear in this specially 3D-printed diadem-cum-rack -- by Peter Loftus. The issue also includes fiction by Carole Johnstone, James Van Pelt, Greg Kurzawail, Ken Altabef, Sean McMullen; John Howard interviewing Christopher Priest; Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted column; David Langford's news and tidbits; and loads of book, film and DVD/Blu Ray reviews.
Andy Hedgecock editorialises:
"In times of social uncertainty and psychological hazard readers
need new ideas, new ways of making sense of their world. There’s
an appetite for prophecy and truthful exploration of the mess we’re
making, politically, ecologically and economically."
Phonebloks: modular phones that snap together as easily as Lego. You could have really big "phones," right? Phones that weren't really phones? Looks like some sort of nebulous new computing revolution waiting to happen. It's mostly just a concept right now: they want a day of crowdsourced clamor at the end of October. Whose side are you on? The future's side? Is that it?
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Precarity is in the news (BBC)! In a way, bizarrely, so is science fiction. Tim Maughan's low key and completely on-point new #Pretpunk tale "Zero Hours" (Medium) is definitely worth a read. See also Future Londoners (Nesta).
It would be misleading to call this story "dystopian" or "chilling plausible," it's just straight plausible, really. But it does make me want to come up with a utopian B-side. (Spoilers, sort of). Is the bad stuff the story depicts -- the obvious one being untrained, dispirited, gratuitously sad and lonely and knackered retail staff travelling illegally to work to give bad customer service, nick stuff and snitch on each other -- is that inevitable within its basic, you know, techno-social set-up? Or is some of it down to bad gamification? In what ways has this retail sector been mis-gamified, under-gamified? See also: ten tales of gamification.
Bruce Sterling notes the arrest of a school pupil who uploaded his virtual massacre to YouTube. "Augmented Reality: American teenager arrested for using augmented gun app" (Wired). See how the ad implies that this augmented reality game is so addictive, even when you become a real soldier in a real firefight you're still just gonna wanna keep playing!
Is the solution here that law enforcement officers get some app of their own, so they only need to arrest the kid in augmented reality, which in underlying reality corresponds to this completely prudent but completely sensitive and discreet tête-à-tête? Hmm. Some action structures may have no corresponding game structures; they would be ungamifiable. More on that later, maybe.
Strange Horizons fund drive. Achievement unlocked! I really think one of the bonus levels should be Strange Horizons getting a Hex or two just to noodle around the sky, perhaps with a tiny "Strange Horizons" banner attached. It wouldn't be visible from the ground but it would be visible from other Hexes and pretty soon just about everything will be other Hexes.
Gamified, hypothecated tax. Imagine tax worked a bit like the Strange Horizons fund drive. Citizens and companies pay as much tax as they like (or in another scenario, must pay a certain level, but distribute it how they like) into various funds. Get to this level to build a new hospital ward, get to this level to equip it for dialysis, etc. One interesting aspect of this set-up is the potential for a kind of out-in-the-open corruption. If the top is tier is something everyone desperately wants, they give tacit consent to the intermediary tiers. "If we raise $100,000,000, mayor gets a sweet ass yacht and a maybe bunch of them Hexes. If we raise $200,000,000, we'll keep the ambulances on the roads and a bunch more Hexes."
Britain's 50 new radicals (mostly companies and other organisations): a list by Nesta.
Earth's selfie. "Our pick of the best space-related imagery includes the birth of a star that will one day be 100 times the mass of the sun, lava flows from the largest volcano in the solar system, a picture of Earth from 1.44bn kilometres away and plans for the next Mars rover" (The Guardian).
"Scientists used to scan the skies for messages from alien civilisations. Now they go looking for their ruins." Distant Ruins (Aeon). See also Lavie Tidhar's comments.
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Chris Lough ponders Red Dead Redemption and whether people who have grown up as gamers have a different sense of what counts as legitimate narrative. "To see others protesting this ending left me wondering—very much in a thinking-out-loud way—if the very concept of narrative, or cause and effect, is simply broken in maturing gamers who have spent their lives absorbing narrative as it is constructed through games." Does the End of Red Dead Redemption Underscore How Fractured Game Narratives Are? (Tor.com)
Monica Valentinelli expresses her number one wish for the SF&F community, which happens to be a mentorship program. "To varying degrees, I feel what’s happening today in the science fiction and fantasy genre is the same thing that has happened before. [...] It’s 'You haven’t been around long enough to understand how changes are implemented' versus 'You’ve been around so long you aren’t willing to change.'"
Joseph Tomaras looks at genre as a function of market segmentation of the ontologies of fiction. "The ontologies of fantasy cluster around the thesis that 'all things that can be imagined are possible.' This is quite distinct from the thesis of horror ontologies, for which things are not as potentialities but as actualities, independent of their being known or even imagined."
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay on Anglocentrism. "These planetary imaginings are set at the dawn of European colonialism. Is it such a coincidence? Note that Clute’s insistence on the Western view systematically evades any narrative history which may highlight the role of colonial imagination in the origins of the fantastic, in spite of the fact that science fiction and fantasy critics have, before him, often noticed the close ways in which the representations of the colonized Other informs and influences the development of science fiction themes and tropes—that science fiction is a genre of systematic Othering in the Anglo-American world."
Recentering Science Fiction and the Fantastic: What would a non-Anglocentric understanding of science fiction and fantasy look like? (Strange Horizons).
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"[...] the world view that underpins hard sf conforms structurally to the world view that underpins right wing ideologies. It is a narrowly prescribed world where obedience to the laws is essential for survival, far outweighing in importance the individual needs and desires of any of the inhabitants of that world. It tends to be conservative: if the law of nature is a universal limitation on any action, revolution or even gradual change must be resisted. And it is a set-up in which great men are fated to emerge as leaders because they know best, and the masses should bend to their will for the good of all." A reprint of "Hard Right" by Paul Kincaid, his follow-up post, and another post on Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations."
Ian Sales has a hard think about hard science fiction, authoritarianism, and whether that classic example of the hardness of Golden Age science fiction, "The Cold Equations," really counts as hard science fiction. "Hard sf generally [...] presents dilemmas predicated on fixed natural limits, and then finds solutions using human ingenuity [...] Certainly a lot of hard sf is right-wing, especially the near-future variant. But that’s a characteristic brought to it by the writers, not something innate to the subgenre."
One quick suggestion: perhaps it's not that hard science fiction is inherently right wing, but that right wing politics are an example of hard science fiction? The slippage between conformity with nature and conformity with society is nowhere more pronounced than in right wing mythology. The obvious example is the conviction that markets arise spontaneously from human nature, like anchovies from sea foam in Athenaeus's account, or bookworms from codices blown with certain southerly or westerly winds according to Vitruvius's view. Insofar as the peculiar compound of economic laissez faire and social conservativism is hard science fiction, it is hard science fiction which fits pretty well with Kincaid's analysis -- but as an example of the subgenre, not as its model or its teleology. (I'm not sure I really mean this. Anchovies? Teleology?)
Another quick thought: where is the reader in all this? Star Trek seemed like pretty hard science fiction to me, till I got my PhD in Oscillating Variable Quantum Neutrino Inversions. Do different levels of readerly expertise matter? Do they matter in different ways in the 1950s and in the 2010s, when readers can connect online form a provisional public, sharing expertise, contending and assessing the rigour of a story?
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Me: reading Twenty-First Century Science Fiction anthology ed. Hartwell & Hayden. Saw Sharpe, Seventh Seal, Argo. Syndicate featured Ian Davidson, Sandra Alland, s i n k and Steve Willey. Lotta Hix Eros admin, deadlines in flux (not Mike's cat Flux & not Jimmy & Rachel's dog Flux. Leave them alone). Submitted abstract to Stage the Future: "Rhinopotamuses in the Blooper-Verbatim Utopias of Chris Goode" (title subject to increase). Beckettcrit proofing. FTL: answered every distress call, unlocked "No Redshirts Here" & uninstalled. Lent a helping poet to nick-e melville's Dole Kind at Forest+ & Goodnight Press's Caesura at Artisan: nick-e, Sam, Will Rowe, Steven Fowler, Tom Jenks, Rob Mackenzie, Hal Duncan. Will read at the new Newport music & poetry festival this Friday. Rumbled undercover in Londres & en route to Arundel to mangle hymns & epithalamiumise postmodern Glenmorangie detective. Have YP railcard ha ha ha ha ha. No Spacebook yet eek.
