2016 genre roundup

Originally published in Interzone 268.

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; Sunspring was 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.

Today, Tomorrow

The short talk I gave for the Northumbria Summer Speakers Series is now up on Academia.edu (with the bits I cut out put back in) mostly about science fiction and its relationship with the future. I'm hoping to revisit some of the theoretical material here on the blog, at greater length, if not much greater rigor, before too long.

Elsewhere: MIT Twelve Tommorows 2016 / "We've been trying to elude GHOST HARDWARE, but as Tim Maughan discovers, that's easier said than done" / Dada Data and the Internet of Paternalistic Things.

One of the other speakers at the event was the author Jane Alexander whom you'd better check out right now.

And Rasheedah Phillips, talking at Ferguson is the Future, probably sums up the whole science-fiction-as-acts-provoking-the-future thing way better than where I left it, with design fiction. "The teen mother surviving and not becoming another statistic, and not dropping out of high school, that science fictional story needs to be heard." (Panel 1, beginning at around 30:00).

Earlier: Metafuturism.

New Genre Wednesdays: Metafuturism (FIVE DRONES)

UPDATE: Check out SUPERFLUX Issue 1: editorial by Warren Ellis and drone fictions (not, to be fair, "predictions") by Tim Maughan.

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When will I have a Drone watch that buzzes around my head all day reminding me what time it is + what U2 is up to
— Elif Batuman (@BananaKarenina) September 11, 2014

What is metafuturism?

First, that's "-futurism" not as in futurismo, but as in futurology: sifting the present for traces of the future, just as historians sift the present for traces of the past.

Metafuturism Manifesto

Metafuturism morphs from futurism through the so-called Timidity Turn. It doesn't make predictions about the future. It just makes predictions about predictions about the future.

Metafuturism Sampler Exposure Draft: FIVE DRONES

E.g. I predict Tim Maughan's forthcoming bestiary of drones project may include the following drones:

1. Beats Moth

Autonomous hexacopters with superdirectional mics, the Beats Moth flock is all about providing the perfect tailored soundtrack to your day ... and night! Basically you walk around, and the drones play music that suits whatever it is they think you're doing. At first a novelty and a nuisance, Beats Moths unlocked new funding flows when it became obvious that some spots in the city are, in the long run, just way happier than others. Soon it became all about creating positive associations ... and negative ones! Now the sponsor's commercial jingle, slightly morphed for deniability, and perhaps algorithmically blended into the diffuse circumference of a recent chart hit, gets beamed into the ears pedestrians who are, all else being equal, probably ecstatic. Likewise a competitors' soundscape, stripped to its bare essentials, gets associated with instants of glare, stress, jostle, honk and stink. This is Muzak 2.0, or at least, 1.01. These drones even link up to a facial recognition database and a perpetually seething analysis of who might perv / shyly crush upon / actually fully-fledged fall in love with whom -- and what that falling-in-love should sound like, commercially speaking. Your eyes meet across a crowded room, just as Big Data suspected that they might. If ad priming be the food of love ...

2. MePee

These drones are taking the piss. Small, fleet, minty total-genital-possibility-space floating urinals skirr city centres of a Saturday night, guarding the wheelie bins and alley edges, drifting into the urb-suburban peripheries as dawn approaches scouring the homeward stumbleways. One-off use is extortionate so subscription is recommended. Also you don't have to watch the ads ("You may skip to urination in 10 seconds") and you get a free basic urinalysis with a huge array of paid upgrades: seriously, subscribe. Drones' onboard promotional equipment includes webcams linked to facial recognition software, 4.3V800MA searchlight, and speakers broadcasting helpful reminders of case-law relating to the Public Order Act 1986 and relevant local bylaws. Two main malware threats are both ransomware. The first -- varieties include PissCam Police, Piss2PotIn -- uses basic GC-MS analysis to look for prohibited substances, but a small fee will keep your positive results ex-directory if that's a desirable in your industry (the database of positives is generally used more by employers and insurers than law enforcement). The second form of ransomware, known as Clamp, relies on certain hardware mods, and has a more direct tactic.

3. Pronoun Pterygota

These are pretty self-explanatory. Small, lightweight, originally colour-coded but -- following controversy -- now generally colourless with a ticker (e.g. "they / them"). Pronoun Pterygota slip forward when they decipher a fresh contact in process, and soon retreat to the discreetest dynamic labyrinth of the dronethick air you could wish for; but should you ignore the datum they've provided, they'll swiftly turn as loyal to your fucking eyes as the summer wasp swarm is to its cider. A cheap, flexible, swarm-based pronomial decorum solution. Pronoun Pterygota are a thing.

4. Face Manager Bat

This winged familiar obsesses over your looks so you don't have to! Not only will you never again futz your Cute Meet with a crumb of tuna on your chin or a dead fly in your side-burn: the real benefits roll in when you install a free ambiance and line-of-sight optimisation ap such as TomTom Nano. Swipe your Face Manager Bat in Mirror Mode, apply one of thousands of fun filters like MySpace Angle or Shadow-Dappled Shepherdess, or just manipulate your cheekbones manually by dragging on the touch-mirror, and simply tap the "What My Crush Sees" button. You'll get real time data via Glass or headphones on how to jut your jaw or incline your nape. No known malware, though certain forms of complex love polygons run the risk of falling into feedback loops from which arise processes like arms races or bidding wars for optimally cute angles. You move, your crushes or transitive crushes move in response, so you move again, and so on. Like sunflowers following a time-lapse Big Bang of all the suns in the universe, you will loll and twirl, your bodies perhaps contorted and laced together, tugged by your elegant questing faces into a tangle, and in a few extremely rare cases, your very bones torn apart, and at the edge of your crush's vision, the light extinguished from your brooding, exquisite, enigmatic eyes.

5. Copatrice

It's not exactly clear where these come from, but they keep coming. They do one thing: follow cops around and broadcast what they're doing. The name is weird: maybe the idea is to turn cops to stone by overwhelming them with their own imagery. Following a series of futile countermeasures, cops just stopped looking like cops. Now anybody could be a cop.

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UPDATE: Check out SUPERFLUX Issue 1: editorial by Warren Ellis and drone fictions by Tim Maughan. Looks intense. See also Superflux's The Drone Aviary at the V&A.

Maughan & de Bodard

I don't set much store by — and even before we get into this, keep in mind people like me never reveal whereby we set most of our store — literary prizes, having been lucky enough to get some glimpses up the supply chain of one. If you knew what went into those things ... trophies just look like the glittering swollen skin of spoilt Cthulu cartilege sausage to me now. But these two have just been nominated for the prestigious The Lorraine Concern Blog Free Short Fiction You Actually May Want to Read on Your Damn Screen Award:

Aliette de Bodard, "Immersion" (Clarkesworld)
Tim Maughan, "Limited Edition" (Arc)

It's an award I set a massive estranging retail park by. Tim Maughan's related & also excellent "Paintwork" is also free on Tor.

PS: Actually, I wonder if one reason "Limited Edition" is so eminently online-readable is that it gives you a bit of the experience of flipping to another tab every now and then. Like, "So, the protagonist and his crew were just on their bicy— WHAT ARE YOU FUCKING DOING? YOU WANT TWEETS? YOU WANT TO JUST BROWSE A FEW TWEETS? I'M YOUR FUCKING TWITTER NOW."

Review: Tim Maughan, Paintwork

★★★★★

Three solid and occasionally very smartly-pitched cyberpunk stories, all set in the same near-future universe. “Some old new shit that you ain’t never never never heard before” (Kool Keith).

Like a few other [Goodreads] reviewers I felt “Paintwork” – the first story, about the augmented reality / QR code graffiti artist 3Cube – was the most fully-realised of the three. Its protagonist has some substance, & the tale is efficiently composed; the standard (hard)boiler-plate cyberpunk voice is all about shifting between terse, minimalist grace, and dense, brand-studded and globe-encompassing spikiness (whilst provocatively denying the reality of those shifts: almost like, “What? I had to mention what brand of Korean trainers; it was an indivisible fundamental particle of narrativium. WHAT?”), and “Paintwork” does that well.

But there are also more moments of lyrical wit here – e.g. the toothpaste thumbprint, or the three Adidas stripes unrolling back through time across the arms and legs of generations of dodgy geezers. I remember hearing that the architects of classic cyberpunk used to compete over who could cram the most information into a sentence (true, @Cadigan, @GreatDismal, @Bruces?). Perhaps one of the formal resources cyberpunk also affords is the capacity to play with what *counts* as information. It’s often through the joke, the clinamen, the unaccountable collocation, the pointless, aptly-chosen and never-properly-explained detail, the figure of speech (I liked “red carpet designer arrogance”) or the slightly whimsical and superfluous conceit (like those shelly three-stripes) that cyberpunk’s intelligence really comes squirting out. (Incidentally, it’s probably out of this stuff that the most strollably-cartilaginous ligatures form with quasi-cyberpunks like Murakumi, Pynchon, Aylett).

The last two stories are more closely linked by the appearance of celebrity gamer Leo Kim. There are shades here of Gibson & Swanwick’s “Dogfight” (collected in *Burning Chrome*). “Paparazzi” felt a bit off-balance; after a fairly elaborate set-up, we go in-game, & I expected to be solicited to invest myself in a bit of semi-gratuitous swords & sorcery excitement. Instead the in-game events get summarised (they seem to have been narrative-lite hack & slash anyway), & the story rapidly winds itself up, with a sort of zipping-slurping sound, like a blind you’re trying to get to stay pulled down. Frankly I kinda enjoyed that aspect, but I suspect it would have been more delectable if I’d also just been treated to a smidge of overt quest. (& maybe Claire could thereby have been linked, ever-so-subtly, into the denouement somehow? She's a bit vanishy). It needn’t have been a full bonus level like The Murder of Gonzago is in Hamlet, but having a messenger rush on stage and cry, “I’faith, your psionic myrmidon gains / 12,008 creds, 14,320 XP / & the UnHoly FallHeavily debuff!” maybe goes too far the other way.

That said, it’s also nice Maughan slips in this thin pasta ribbon to soak up the juices of the meatier layers. And possibly he had the rationale of not pre-empting “Havana Augmented,” which *does* rely on in-game events for a lot of its drama.

In “Dogfight,” and books like Iain M. Banks’s *Player of Games* or Orson Scott Card’s *Ender’s Game*, the comparatively immersive games permit the player’s progress to map quite neatly onto the reader’s progress (or jouissance). Of course when the game concludes, there’s the chance it may suddenly seem a Very Bad Idea to have won it (a bit ablest or genocide-y or something, e.g.). But that shifting evaluation still manifests as a reversal, a twist. Whereas in some other stuff – Larry Niven & Steven Barnes’s Dream Park series, maybe? – it’s all a bit more interpenetrating. The gameplay is sporadically and/or selectively immersive. Sometimes the reader may be simultaneously absorbed in in-game desiderata, and also the larger system which incorporates, complicates and even contradicts those desiderata. Quasi-in-game objects may feel like they have dual or complex values. The reader may even get the trippy triple-take, “Whoa, I just forgot that’s not real! Whoa, I just forgot it’s not real that that’s not real!” I felt that “Havana Augmented,” even though it doesn't go on long enough for that stuff to really get going, still belongs more with this second camp.

I’m really not even familiar enough with the clichés about Cuba to judge how well the country is evoked as a locale, but I did detect a slightly hammy ponderousness in some of the dialogue – especially in the early info dump scene with the two state officials. “Josef here will drive you back now” – I’m just not 100% behind that ‘here.’ This story was still my second-favourite though.

So how is writing proper cyberpunk different in 2011/2012 from, say, 1982? For one thing, the archetypal cyberpunk characters – outcasts, hackers, petty criminals, dissenters – have a somewhat conflicted relationship with cool. Corporate money is suspect, but so are hipsters. These characters often realise that mainstream culture routinely looks to the margins to refresh itself, and that the romanticised ideal of the outcast is solidly middle-of-the-road. Conversely, celebrity is not necessarily a symptom of selling out.

Also, the future is closer! QR codes, Google Goggles, Google Streetview, air-typing, face recognition, targeted advertising, augmented reality, reality TV, constructed reality, silent discos, tecchy top-of-the-mountain type kit, LARP, GPS, BCI, AI – this stuff is already here. Some of it has been around for decades. Maughan’s ingenuity is in imagining how tech which is roughly familiar, in a proof-of-principle sense, might be embedded in products, marketing, distribution, access, in the attitudes and culture of users, and in a broader social setting, and how these various lived-in techs might interact together.

To be an eensy bit sloganish: the soft social sf which contradistinguished cyberpunk when cyberpunk was emerging in the 1980s is now how you DO cyberpunk.

PS: OK, cosplay cosmetic surgery aside, we’re not all chockablock with invasive augmentations, but Maughan’s world reaffirms the sense that technology doesn’t have to be inside the body to drastically change the body. Smartphones are enough. Compare Donna Haraway’s old saw about how contact lenses make us cyborgs; eating cooked food makes us cyborgs, etc.

What I really liked across the triptych was the sense of people inhabiting different superimposed worlds, whilst still interacting with each other. You see different phantasmic billboards depending on who holds what data on you, and what they can afford to bid for your attention. You see something different from the person next to you. You might be oblivious to the epic mecha street brawl which that person is witnessing. You might be waiting for the bus at a bus stop, while the person next to you is waiting for the bus at a massive rave. Most of the rest of the presences at her rave might be AI, or people scattered across the globe, or pre-recorded restligeists, or syntheses thereof. I’m very interested in the partial & contested disembodiment implied by populating the shared sensuous landscape with bespoke phantoms, manifestations which may be the unpredictable outcomes of corporate strategies, mass online trends, and also individual user filters and remediations. What might it mean for labour? What might it mean for getting safely from A to B? It’s bad enough getting mowed down every time you try to listen to a bit of Ivor Cutler on your iPod on your way to the Co-op. What might it mean for sex? What might it mean for malicious code? For IT support? Emergency services? Crowd / traffic control? Celebrity? If Maughan keeps writing in this universe, I hope he keeps pushing this kind of line, and is able to discover more & more variety there.

PPS: There are some minor formatting mistakes – stuff like an extra space or inverted commas facing the wrong way. The convention for punctuating direct speech is logical (indeed close to what’s sometimes called the “logical quotation” style) and consistent, but pretty non-standard, & distracting for a nit-picker like me. & yet I can get over those Irish dashes or Jane Austen bunging in “was her reply” inside the same inverted commas as the reply, so maybe I should get over it. I like 3Cube’s offhand reference to “a gushing thousand-word review or a sarcastic hundred and forty-character tweet,” as though he recognises the tweet as a perfectly valid genre, & a well-judged tweet far more important than a TLDR review like this one.

PPPS: Just came across this BBC article about Microsoft's patent for circumambient gaming imagery and Sony's Spex-like VR headset, both still in their respective enclaves of the works.

PPPPS: This is a re-post of a Goodreads review.

Also: economic speculative fiction. Speculative fiction of gamification.