Where Worlds Collide

Which is where I put random thoughts on things I’ve read which aren’t worth a full-blown blog post, but still worth more than a throwaway link on Twitter.

First, the utter beigeness of The Q Awards. Are Kasabian really the best band in the world? It does make me wonder who actually reads Q nowadays. Is it people in the 30s and 40s who no longer either buy albums or get to gigs, but like to think they’re still in touch with what’s going on in music, and don’t want to be told that they aren’t?

Next, the Guardian Music Blog post on the Japanese genre of “Visual Kei”. It seems to be a combination the worst excesses of 80s fashion disasters set to some utterly derivative power metal. It gets a lot of rotten tomatoes in the comments, some of which come from me. A commenter linked to an interview with an (unnamed) Visual Kei record executive, which lays bare the sordid sausage-factory nature of the entire scene, and how it’s cynically exploitative of both musicans and fans. And I thought the US/UK music industry was bad.

Charlie Stross has always been one of my favourite science-fiction authors, and his blog is always an excellent, thought-provoking read. Recent posts have included outlines of novels he might have written but didn’t and some wise thoughts on the bursting of the higher education bubble. His latest rant is a broadside against the Steampunk genre, which in his opinion is far from “what happens when Goths discover brown”, it is, according to Stross, all about romanticising too many bad things about the past. Like High Fantasy, only even worse, is the conclusion.

Finally, BBC’s Mark Easton is trying to work out why “Olivia” is the most popular girl’s name this year. He has one or two possibly half-baked ideas:

As for Olivia - even digitally re-mastered pictures of Olivia Newton-John wearing “those trousers” in the movie Grease cannot provide an explanation.

I am beginning to wonder whether we are witnessing one of the subconscious side-effects of a Mediterranean diet. All that olive oil and low-fat spread. Could it be that our eating habits are affecting the way we fill out birth certificates?

Now, while I’d love to think they were all named after Mostly Autumn’s new singer, somehow I think Mostly Autumn fans haven’t been breeding at that sort of rate.

Science fiction writer Charlie Stross explains why he hates Star Trek

At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.

He described how the writers would just insert “tech” into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they’d have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.

“It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories,” Moore said. “It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we’d just write ‘tech’ in the script. You know, Picard would say ‘Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.’ I’m serious. If you look at those scripts, you’ll see that.”

Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:

La Forge: “Captain, the tech is overteching.”

Picard: “Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge.”

La Forge: “No, Captain. Captain, I’ve tried to tech the tech, and it won’t work.”

Picard: “Well, then we’re doomed.”

“And then Data pops up and says, ‘Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech … ‘” Moore said. “It’s a rhythm and it’s a structure, and the words are meaningless. It’s not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it.”

Stross compares it with the way he goes about creating written SF.

I start by trying to draw a cognitive map of a culture, and then establish a handful of characters who are products of (and producers of) that culture. The culture in question differs from our own: there will be knowledge or techniques or tools that we don’t have, and these have social effects and the social effects have second order effects — much as integrated circuits are useful and allow the mobile phone industry to exist and to add cheap camera chips to phones: and cheap camera chips in phones lead to happy slapping or sexting and other forms of behaviour that, thirty years ago, would have sounded science fictional. And then I have to work with characters who arise naturally from this culture and take this stuff for granted, and try and think myself inside their heads. Then I start looking for a source of conflict, and work out what cognitive or technological tools my protagonists will likely turn to to deal with it.

Star Trek and its ilk are approaching the dramatic stage from the opposite direction: the situation is irrelevant, it’s background for a story which is all about the interpersonal relationships among the cast. You could strip out the 25th century tech in Star Trek and replace it with 18th century tech — make the Enterprise a man o’war (with a particularly eccentric crew) at large upon the seven seas during the age of sail — without changing the scripts significantly. (The only casualty would be the eyeball candy — big gunpowder explosions be damned, modern audiences want squids in space, with added lasers!)

That’s right on the money for me. But I read an awful lot of written SF, and I’m not a big fan of franchise TV science fiction at all.

The way Charlie Stross writes science fiction produces the sort of science fiction I like to read. The “tech the tech” approach all too often results in the sort of contrived dea-ex-machina endings which will be very familiar to viewers of Russell T Davies’ writing in Dr Who and Torchwood. Look at the ending of “Children of Earth”, for example. Very powerful human drama, yes. Coherent science-fiction, no way.

I remember a quote from a few years back that SF Cinema was a generation behind written SF, and TV was a generation behind that. I also get the impression that most franchise science fiction TV is written by people with no understanding or interest in science, so it’s not surprising we all-too often end up with something that resembles a soap opera with a few SF props as window-dressing.

Fine if you like that sort of thing, but it’s a pity that ‘real SF’ never makes it to the small screen. In order to justify the special effects budgets, they have to hook in an audience far broader than SF fans, and that audience tends to want soap opera.

I’ve even run into that attitude from within the SF world. I remember the sysop of the Compuserve SFLIT forum years ago patronisingly repeating the mantra “If you care about the characters, nothing else matters; if you don’t care about the characters, nothing else matters” when I took exception to her dismissing Frank Herbert’s classic “Dune” in favour of the latest Big Fat Fantasy epic which read too much like an American daytime soap opera for me to stomach.

Phil Masters visits the Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain exhibition at the Science Museum in London, and ponders the associated social history.

The problem for an exhibition like this, I fear, is that it has to deal with the persistent scent of failure that hangs over its subject-matter. The Hi-Tech Britain of which this exhibition speaks meant a motor industry whose management and workforce alike were all too stuck in old ways; it meant Comet airliners which crashed, and lost us that crucial lead to Boeing; it meant shiny new diesel and then electric trains, running on essentially Victorian tracks. There was some brilliance there, but too much of it was necessary ingenuity, improvisation around ingrained habits, bad decisions, and the problems of a country still recovering from its involvement in an expensive war.

Harold Wilson’s “White Heat of Technology” from the sixties now seems terribly, terribly dated, especially when people use imagery from that era decades later. I remember a logo in the 1980s featuring a stylised image of an electric train passing the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. It was meant to promote industry and modernity, but left me with an impression of an organisation stuck two decades in the past. The worst irony was the locomotive, one of the unsuccessful first-generation machines from the 1955 modernisation plan, which turned out to be hopelessly unreliable and destined for the scrapheap after a relatively short life.

Phil concludes that Dan Dare himself wasn’t so much a man of the future as a man of the recent past:

But not only is Dan Dare not flying the spacelanes in our defence, he’s never going to, whatever may happen in space research. We’re unlikely ever to see his sort again, and perhaps a big symptom of Britain’s problems in the 1950s was the idea that the hi-tech future would lie with a square-jawed pilot who wouldn’t have been out of place in the Battle of Britain, backed up by a comedy Yorkshire sidekick and a gruffly paternalistic staff officer.

Read the whole thing.

A web-based bus slogan generator to make your own version of the infamous “atheist buses” you can see in the UK. Unfortunately the full lyrics of Marillion’s “This is the 21st Century” don’t fit.

We’ll start with the rather obvious H.P.Lovecraft version

One for this Saturday’s gig in Lowdham

And finally, the obligatory gamer one:

The final part of the SFX Book Meme, the top third of the list, a higher proportion of which I’ve actually read.

33. China Mieville
Drags fantasy kicking and screaming into the 21st century; and rejects the idea that fantasy worlds have to be pre-industrial; he combines high-fantasy magic with steampunk technology, and throws in a good dollop of horror into the mix, giving something that feels truly exotic. His biggest fault is that he gets a bit preachy at times, which can get annoying if you don’t share his hard-left politics.

32. Raymond E. Feist
Another writer of ‘Extruded Fantasy Product’ - I’ve only read a couple of his books, but they’re so D&D that you can even work out when characters went up levels.

30. Roger Zelazny
The man responsible for the Amber cult. Actually I thought his “Lord of Light” was a better book, although the whole ‘god-like characters who lord it over mere mortals’ genre doesn’t do a lot to me; it’s too munchkiny. I prefer to see such characters as the villians of the story.

27. William Gibson
One of the few science fiction authors who’s writing has changed the real world. Had he not written “Neuromancer”, you might not be reading this.

25. CS Lewis
The first two of his “grownup” SF novels, “Out of the Silent Planet” and “Perelandra” still hold up as theology-based fantasies, although I have to say the final volume, “That Hideous Strength” is rather silly.

24. Diana Wynne Jones
The only book of hers I’ve read is the satirical non-fiction “Tough Guide to Fantasyland”, which parodies all the clichés of Extruded Fantasy Product.

23. John Wyndham
“Triffids!”. I have a feeling I read that at school, which would make him one of the first SF author I ever read.

20. Stephen King
I’ve only read “The Shining”, and liked the way it was deliberately vague as to whether or not the place was really haunted, or whether it was all in the minds of the characters. I really need to read “The Stand”, see as I played in David “Amadán” Edelstein’s online game

19. Ray Bradbury
Not read much of him, but what I have read was good.

18. Arthur C. Clarke
An author I first encountered in an English lesson at school, with the short story “The Nine Billion Names of God” - with one of the most memorable final lines in fiction, Of the writers of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of SF, I think he was the greatest.

17. Robert Jordan
I suppose I have to count him as an author I’ve read, even though I only lasted 150 pages into the first volume of his interminable (and never finished) Extruded Fantasy Product “Wheel of Time” saga.

15. Robert Heinlein
The one and only author who’s caused me to hurl one of his books across the room in disgust. The reason I loved Paul Verhoeven’s film of “Starship Troopers” is that it mercilessly satirised the dreadful politics of that book, and managed to piss off all those noxious right-wing geeks that worship Heinlein in the process.

14. Frank Herbert
“Dune” is an absolute classic every SF fan must read. The sequels are not so good; “God Awful of Dune” is so-called for a very good reason.

13. Peter F. Hamilton
I read the “Reality Dysfunction”, the first of his series that started off as space opera then turned into supernatural horror. Although entertaining, I never got round to reading the rest of the series.

11. Ursula K. LeGuin
“The Dispossessed” and “The Left Hand of Darkness” are two of the best soft-SF novels ever written.

9. HG Wells
I used to work in Woking, a town whose main claim to fame was that the place got trashed in “War of the Worlds”. There’s even a full-sized model of a Martian tripod in the shopping centre. I wish someone would finally make a big-budget film that actually set the story in the 1890s Britain of Wells’ novel rather than insisting on relocating the thing to present-day America.

8. Philip K. Dick
I’m guessing a lot of people know Dick through the Hollywood adaptations like “Blade Runner” and “Total Recall”. But do go and read some the original books; there’s far more in there than can be fitted into a two hour action movie.

7. Iain M. Banks
Anyone else think the opening chapters of the first Culture novel, “Consider Phlebas” reads like a Traveller adventure with a particularly sadistic GM? Banks, more than anyone else, is responsible for reviving the genre of space opera, which had become more or less moribund. Most of his non-SF novels (the non-M ones) are worth reading too.

6. Isaac Asimov
Another author I first encountered at school, with his first novel “Pebble in the Sky”, very much one of his lesser works. Like a lot of “Golden Age” SF, a lot of his 40s and 50s writing is rather dated now. Personally I think “The End of Eternity” is his best book.

5. George R.R. Martin
Many people rave about his “Fire and Ice” saga, but I’m afraid the first volume rather left me cold, and I didn’t go on to read any more. It’s a series allegedly based on the English wars of the roses, but all the characters seem to be lifted straight out of American soap opera. Ugh.

4. Douglas Adams
I thought the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series consisted of two great books, one ok-ish one, and two pretty terrible ones you can tell he didn’t really want to write. The Dirk Gently books were rather better.

3. Neil Gaiman
Only read two-and-a-half books of his, the half being “Good Omens” co-written by Terry Pratchett. The other two were “Neverwhere”, which was the novelisation of the TV script, and American Gods, which has been slated by two bloggers I know as anti-American, and grossly sexist.

2. J.R.R. Tolkien
Difficult to find anything to say about Tolkien that hasn’t already been said, except that he cannot be blamed for the Extruded Fantasy Product that followed in his wake.

1. Terry Pratchett
After nearly 30 books, the most recent Diskworld novels are still far better than anything that far into a series have any right to be. Personally, I don’t care for the Rincewind novels myself, and consider the Witches and Guards books to be my favourites.

Next part of the SFX Book Meme

66. Harry Harrison
Another of those prolific authors of whom I’ve only read a few possibly atypical books - The darkly satirical “Bill the Galactic Hero” is of course the other necessary counter to Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”.

63. Dan Simmons
Only read SF, rather than his horror, but you can still tell he started out as a horror writer. Some genuinely far-out ideas.

59. Stephen Baxter
See #66. Only novel of his I’ve read is the H.G.Wells homage, The Time Ships. Fine Victorian romp, but no idea whether that’s typical of his work or not.

56. C.J. Cherryh
I’ve read quite a lot of her novels over the years; just about everything is pretty solid old-school space opera. If you play Traveller, you’re probably already a Cherryh fan.

52. J.G. Ballard
“Crash”. It’s completely sick. Never read anything else of his.

49. H.P. Lovecraft
Iä! Iä! Squamous and rugose! Technically his work is dark, twisted science-fiction rather than horror, although he’s been hugely influential in the horror genre. Despite his god-awful prose style a lot of his stories are still very powerful; especially the way he didn’t base his horrific entities on any real-world mythology, but made up his own myths.

48. Mervyn Peake
I read the first two Gormenghast books many years ago, but never got round to reading the third. When the BBC adapted it for TV, half the characters reminded me of gamer friends of mine. Not sure what that says.

45. Neal Stephenson
I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him, but I do get the feeling that some of his recent books are too long by a third, and could have done with a more aggressive editor. Favourite is “The Diamond Age”, although nothing much can top that opening chapter from “Snow Crash”.

41. Kurt Vonnegut
The only book I’ve read of his is “Slaughterhouse 5″.

39. Michael Moorcock
I’ve read a lot of his self-confessed trashy throwaway sword-and-sorcery novels, some of which are better than books written over the course of a single weekend have any right to be. I really ought to read some of his more serious ‘literary’ works.

38. David Eddings
The epitome of hack. The sort of interminable and interchangeable fantasy sagas churned out by him and others has been dubbed “Extruded Fantasy Product”.

36. Orson Scott Card
Quite enjoyed “Ender’s Game” and read a couple of other books of his, nothing special.

35. Stephen Donaldson
Angst! Doubt! Self-loathing! Thesaurus Swallowing! Actually, forget the Thomas Covenant sagas, and read “Mordant’s Need” instead, it’s actually quite good.

34. Gene Wolfe
At his best, no author can touch him. I can’t think of any other author whose best work (The Book of the New Sun) I’ve read four times. At his best he can create alien worlds so vivid, he actually takes you there. Sometimes he can be frustrating, in that everything you read is from the viewpoint of his first-person narrator, and when that character has no idea what’s going on, neither should the reader.

Continuing the Book Meme, the bottom third of the list.

100. James Herbert
Oh dear. Juvenile hack horror I read back when I was young and stupid. I suppose he’s not quite as bad as the awful Guy N Smith.

97. Charles Stross
Definitely a current favourite. I first came into contact with Stross’s work through the world of blogging, and since then I’ve been on a major Stross binge over the past 18 months. First one I read was “Accellerando” a couple of years back, and his imagination was so overwhelmingly powerful it gave me a sort of mental vertigo. He’s far more than a one-trick pony; he’s done near-future conspiracy (Halting State), parallel-worlds fantasy (The Merchant Princes series), so-called “New Space Opera” (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise) and surreal black comedy (The Atrocity Archives).

95. Brian W. Aldiss
I’ve found his 60s “new wave” work rather uneven, but his later “Helliconia” trilogy remains one of the best examples of SF worldbuilding I’ve read.

94. Ken MacLeod
I think I’ve read most of what he’s published. I loved his first couple of books, but felt he’d got into a bit of a rut, writing books that were entertaining at the time, but tended repeat the same tropes book after book. And he tends to wear his libertarian-socialist politics on his sleeve at times. But his last two, the first-contact story “Learning the World”, and the very dark near future “Execution Channel”, seem to show him breaking out of that rut.

93. Olaf Stapledon
Only read his two best-known books, “First and Last Men” and “Star Maker”. Chilly, and rather dated. I can’t imagine anyone writing a novel today with no real characters and no dialogue whatsoever.

91. Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Read his Arabesque trilogy plus “Stamping Butterflies”. Intriguing cyberpunky stuff, often quite complexly plotted.

90. Christopher Priest
“Inverted World”. One book that’s given me actual nightmares, which I put down to compellingly good writing.

86. M. John Harrison
Only read “Pastel City”, which for some reason I could never really get into.

84. Kim Stanley Robinson
Only read the Mars Trilogy; entertaining hard-SF read although I wonder how on earth some of the flakier characters managed to get past the sort of psychological tests that would be needed to get on a manned Mars mission.

80. Joe Haldeman
“The Forever War” is the necessary counter to Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”

78. George Orwell
“And they looked from man to pig, and from pig to man….”

75. Julian May
I loved her Pliocene Exiles saga, felt the ‘prequel’ Intervention series was a bit forced, and found her next one (for which I can’t even remember the name) very disappointing. I’m forced to conclude this is a writer who peaked early.

73. Robert Silverberg
I’ve only read a couple of his later works, which I get the impression are a bit more lightweight than his earlier books.

70. Larry Niven
I read a lot of his ‘known space’ novels at an impressionable age. Good scientific and engineering ideas but flawed by embarrasingly wooden characterisation and poor plotting. Good at ideas, not so good at telling stories.

69. Alfred Bester
Read his 50s classics, “Tiger! Tiger!” and “The Demolished Man”, and they’re both good.

67. Jack Vance
Quite possibly my favourite author. I love his mannered prose style, and the way he seems to paint pictures with words. The epitome of ‘soft SF’, concerned with cultures and societies rather than mechanics of how spaceships work; his starships are plot devices to transports the characters to exotic worlds and the baroque cultures that exist there.

The Ministry of Information has picked up the lastest meme doing the rounds, which is to copy SFX Magazine’s list of top science fiction and fantasy authors, list the ones you’ve read, and say a few words on each.

I’ll do this one in several parts, starting with a list of those authors I’ve not actually read, and haven’t really got anything to say about. In most cases I do recognise the name, and one or two are on my ‘to read’ list.

99. Gwyneth Jones
98. Sara Douglass
96. Terry Goodkind
92. Michael Marshall Smith
89. Jonathan Carroll
88. Scott Lynch
87. David Weber
85. Jacqueline Carey
83. Theodore Sturgeon
82. J.V. Jones
81. Joe Abercrombie
79. Simon Clark
77. Samuel R. Delany
76. Charles de Lint
74. Edgar Rice Burroughs
72. Susanna Clarke
71. Stanislaw Lem
68. Katherine Kerr
65. Marion Zimmer Bradley
64. Richard Matheson
62. Elizabeth Haydon
61. Terry Brooks
60. Richard Morgan
58. Jennifer Fallon
57. Mercedes Lackey
55. Harlan Ellison
54. Jasper Fforde
53. Octavia Butler
51. Robert E. Howard
50. Sherri S. Tepper
47. Jules Verne
46. Alastair Reynolds
44. Clive Barker
43. Jim Butcher
42. Tad Williams
40. Trudi Canavan
37. Alan Moore
31. Lois McMaster Bujold
29. Anne McCaffrey
28. Steven Erikson
26. Guy Gavriel Kay
22. Philip Pullman
21. Robin Hobb
16. J.K. Rowling
12. David Gemmell
10. Robert Rankin

There are a couple of them I recognise from quotes - Theodore Sturgeon is known for Sturgeon’s Law, which states that 90% of everything is rubbish, and this applies across all genres, and presumably all media. And Mercedes Lackey gave the famous quote “Clichés are useful shorthand for readers”. I parsed this to read “Don’t bother to read her books, you’ll find them clichéd”.

Coldplay have postponed their world tour for two weeks, citing “production delays”. The Guardian wonders why:

Chris Martin can’t remember the new lyrics? The dancers can’t fit into their leotards? The band are struggling with a new carbon-offsetting mango forest project?

Or perhaps one of the band is pregnant? Or Chris Martin has viral laryngitis, and he knew there were some people out there who would have rejoiced in his fall and who would bury him under the “his voice is permanently shot”? Or maybe a key venue has been double-booked with a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band…

Or maybe it’s more sinister. Perhaps the final date of the tour was rearranged to a date when The Stars Are Right? The last encore of the final date of the tour completes the blasphemous ritual that causes the sunken city of R’lyeh to rise, and releases the tentacled Elder Gods into our dimension. It all makes sense now…

Arthur C Clarke was buried today.

Of the trinity of golden-age science-fiction writers (the other two being Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein), I believe he was the greatest of them all, and it’s his writing that’s stood the test of time the best. His style to me was the very definition of “Hard SF” with completely believable physics and engineering, often centre-stage as important elements of the plot, yet still populated by human characters. And he lived long enough to see many of the technological marvels he wrote about come reality.

One of the greats indeed.