The script's to bed, a bit of time available, so a book review this week. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth, to have the standing post on the blog be a slag of another writer, so this quick recommend. Charles Stross has a nice little essay up discussing Sci Fi and what's going on. Seeing as I just finally met Cory Doctorow face to face and felt the immense heat coming from his brain, the theme seems appropriate.
Soon, you will all bow to the power of my Neo-Pulp. Warren's last issue of Planetary has inspired.
42 comments:
I'm not sure which stunned my brain more, Stross' essay, or the Moorcock one he linked to.
It was the Moorcock essay (Starship Stormtroopers) that got me thinking, though. I've been an (on and off) avid SF reader since elementary school. Lots of my early reading was the 50's, juvenile Heinlein material, and much like it. I think I wound up reading "Starship Troopers" about the same time I discovered C. M. Kornbluth's "March of the Morons." Go figure.
Since then, what fiction I've written that could be stuffed into the "SF" cubbyhole has been a radical rejection of the Eisenhower Authoritarian politics of that genre and era decried by Moorcock (who wrote that essay back in 1977, almost thirty years ago). It's a pity that I've never truly applied myself to finishing a publishable project, as that same rejection of authoritarianism is a strong underlying theme in a lot of what can be called successful SF today, both in print and in other media. Look at the contemporary writers Stross cites (Stephenson, Scalzi, Sterling, et al). For the visual media, "Battlestar Galactica" and "Firefly" come to mind. In the former, the last vestiges of humanity are fleeing a enemy out to do them harm "for their own good" (as witnessed in the comments a post or so ago), and in the latter the protagonists are a collection of rebels (for various reasons) led by a captain who is far too aware of his own fallibility to be passed off as one of the paternal leaders of authoritarian-era SF.
Naturally, any examination of where SF is headed has to take into account those examples of the genre that are succeeding right now. What anybody advocating a "return to the basics" misses is that those earlier works are either totally stale (the residue of the Technocrat movement) or are rejected out of hand by the current market (the aforementioned paternal authoritarianism). What people like Heinlein and even (spit) Rand never figured out was that the notion of an enlightened claque of qualified rulers steering us to a golden future has been dead at least since the Old Testament, never mind the rise and fall of Technocracy, and what we all know after the past six years or so, if we didn't know before, was that the bastard, sons of bitches in power are never to be trusted, even if they're the bastard sons of bitches that we put there.
For SF to survive and maybe expand its market share, it's perhaps not necessary for every author to let their politically-radical rebel freak flag fly -- but do examine the politics of what's currently succeeding. Just sayin' ...
In my perfect world, politicians would be subject to the same level of oversight as, say, artificial intelligences were in William Gibson's sprawl trilogy: always watched, never trusted to operate alone, and going through their entire lives (or careers) with an electromagnetic (or actual) shotgun wired to their heads.
Yes, if only there were some way of disapproving and replacing politicians who took actions with which one disagreed. Perhaps a sort of organized public choice process might work....
Stross's essay reminds me of something that Bruce Sterling (under a pseudonym) wrote twenty-ump years ago:
SF and Rock Videos
" It is little wonder that rock videos, like Napoleon, have pulled SF's crown from the gutter and placed it on their own heads. Movement, excitement, color, reckless visionary drive: you will find these in abundance in the work of video directors raised from birth on SF. Consequently they are producing not only excellent SF but SF often better than that in the written media.
Consider a work like Culture Club's KARMA CHAMELEON, an irresistable alternate history where 19th century blacks and whites frolic together under the benevolent aegis of transvestite Rastafarianism. As social statement, this blows away the pallid efforts of modern SF's white-bread legions of feminists and libertarians.
...
The graying of SF has left it with a cadre of established writers who are rightfully reaping the harvest of years of dedication. But we must not be misled into thinking this a sign of robust health. It is to a great extent the result of a cultural power vacuum created by the abject collapse of straight literature. Unless SF acts now to recapture its sparkle, we may expect a crippling long-term drain of future writers. Today's young visionaries will ignore SF's inbred tail-chasing for the wide-open spaces of video."
(The rest of Sterling's SF-establishment-razzing zines:
http://www.chriswaltrip.com/sterling/cheap.html)
... wherein an anonymous poster illustrates the necessity of balancing snark and sensibility. Touche.
NEO-PULP!
Tell me more!
You have my attention sir.
I act proffessionally. Did i mention that?
Never had a chance to be on the Frequency, But...
My rule is generally that science is involved in it some how, either in the plot or in the background. And it has to have something that is not around today. Some form of future tech, otherwise it is just general fiction.
Which is where many people will hate me, I don't consider 'Someone comes to town, Someone leaves town; Sci-fi. It is modern fantasy it isn't even funny. If you cut out the bit about wifi, then it would be fantasy. I point out reasons why I feel that way, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone.
What's stunning is the K.K. Rusch essay that Stross was writing in response to. Her basic message seems to be: "We can only go forward by moving backward."
Has that philosophy ever worked, anywhere, for anyone? In some sense, yes -- I'm thinking of how we go back to certain creative wells (e.g., Jungian archetypes) for inspiration. But the most successful books/movies/plays drawing from the collective unconscious always, in some way, serve to advance their respective genres.
I can name any zillions of books/movies that adhered strictly to, say, the Hero's Journey .. and flat-out sucked anyway.
Rusch is a talented writer and she knows the genre. That's what makes her take all the more baffling.
And yes, that Moorcock essay is flat-out amazing, a lucid assessment of where the genre stood then (and pretty much stands now).
I admit to being hopelessly un-cool and un-hip, but what does "slag" mean these days? I've never heard it used as a verb, and as a noun it meant the waste rock from a mining operation.
I've had a dream of writing some neo-pulp with equal parts Eastern Master (using actual material drawn from Tibetan Buddhism), Swords and Gunplay, and a post-post-modern sensibility. We'll see if it ever happens.
Speaking of Planetary, and this question comes out of the fact that it came out less frequently than I got laid in high school and college, but can someone explain to what the fuck happened there in the end so that he killed the remaining two of the four so easily?
Much obliged mates.
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