Where Worlds Collide

An old friend, Howard Miller, has passed away from respiratory failure after being admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia.

Howard lived on Long Island, New York, but in a very real sense he actually resided in Cyberspace. He was severely physically disabled from a very young age, being both deaf and blind. But he could use a computer via a braille reader, and literally spent his entire waking life online. He maintained a large number of long-distance friendships with people from all over the world, most of whom he had never met in person. I was privileged to be one of them.

I first ran into Howard online about ten years ago on CompuServe. He was one of the existing players in an ongoing Fantasy PBeM I’d just joined on the RPGAMES forum. Although that game folded shortly after I joined, I was sufficiently impressed by his writing and imagination to recruit him into my own game on the same forum, playing two different characters for several years. He was a founding member of the Dreamlyrics community. Although he later dropped out of that forum, he maintained email correspondences with many past and present members. The last email I received from him was just a few days before he was taken ill for the last time.

Despite his severe disabilities, Howard always had a sharp intellect. He might occasionally have been annoying, but his wit and humour always shone through. His short life was an example of overcoming severe adversity. He’s touched the hearts and minds of many.

There’s a nice tribute to him from Robert J Sawyer, and further tributes on the Deepspace Forum.

‘Heroes never die, they sail forever’

I’ve never paid much attention to the customer reviews on Amazon.com. When something’s filled with typos and bad spellings, it’s difficult to take the reviewer seriously. Charlie Stross has trawled though some of worst, and come up with some hilarious takes of classic works of literature.

To give a flavour, here’s some wingnut on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude.

At best, Marquez reveals an egalitarian attitude that seems to pervade the Americas south of the Rio Grande (no wonder those countries are in constant economic trouble). Marquez should study supply side economics as described by Milton Friedman, another Nobel Prize winner, in order to give his book better balance.”

Others cover such classics as 1984, Brave New World and A Tale of Two Cities

Reading the Observer’s so-called 25 best novels, I’m reminded how I’ve always though that the modern literary novel is as much a genre as so-called ‘Genre Fiction’ like SF, Romance, Crime or Thrillers. Ken Hite seems to agree.

I really wish I could remember where I read the following immensely insightful piece of criticism:

The modern novel is merely a narrow subgenre of the Gothic.

It’s true, ennit? The 20th century novelist (paradigmatically, say, Updike) writes only about the emotional lives of his characters, and such conflict as there is is in their inability to adequately or fully or (and here’s what Updike has in common with Radcliffe) authentically feel or express those emotions. That’s the Gothic conflict — Authentic Love Thwarted — and usually presented in about as tedious a fashion as you can imagine. Modern novels even symbolize the various blocks and obstacles and expressions of emotion in baldly obvious emblems, just like the Gothics with their storms and dungeons.

If it’s genre, it must have tropes. Ken Hite has already identified an important one, about the primacy of the characters emotional lives. Other tropes must be that the story must be set in the present day or the recent past, and the characters and situations must be as mundane as possible. There must be little or no action, otherwise people might start calling it a Thriller, and we can’t have that….

Se we get 400 pages of beautifully-written prose about the central character contemplating his or her navel. Or semi-autobiographical stories of the protagonist growing up in some complete dump (which may be a third-world slum or may be Birmingham in the 1970s). Or, worst of the lot, tiresome stories about college lecturers having mid-life crises starting affairs.

I’m convinced that the artificial divide between ‘high art’ represented by the Serious Literary Novel and ‘popular culture’ represented by ‘trashy genre fiction’ is and has always been nonsense, and there are good and bad in all genres. While I read relatively little modern mainstream fiction, what little I have read doesn’t give me any impression that the actual writing is any better than a lot of SF I’ve read.

Comes from Chadders

Well, I reasoned that there is a social bias in the media to portray the vampire as being “cool”. Previously, the vampire was definitely depicted in the media as an evil monster, think Nosferatu and Dracula, to name but two. Now look at the current state of the media, vampire’s have come out of the monster-closet and are now successful business people, coordinating efforts rather than ripping some young virgin’s throat out (although, this can still be an option). Think Underworld, Angel, Blade, UltraViolet, The Lost Boys, Interview with the vampire, the list goes on and on. All these shows / films are pretty much about one thing, vampires being cool.

I also reasoned that maybe there’s a controlling influence behind all this. Maybe, we’re being prepared by entities to accept vampires as cool entities, as opposed to blood-sucking monsters. In the same way that there are conspiracy theories floating around about the existence of shape-shifting lizards controlling our destinies, again which we are being prepared to accept with shows like V, maybe vampires are an alternative and opposing force. Behind the scenes, who knows, maybe there is a battle between vampires and other forces for our attention and respect.

I blame Mark Rein blob Hagen myself. Maybe he’s just an agent of the blood-sucking monster Dick Cheney.

Remember the science fiction of half a century ago? With all those Art Deco monorails and aircars? Those stories were set in the times we ought to be living in today. Where did that future go?

Japan, it seems.

OK, so it’s not actually a monorail, but the styling is pure Flash Gordon. I can see this appearing on a Traveller planet as the shuttle between the starport and the city.

Notice that dirty great flange on the font end. Surely this is the ultimate solution to level crossing accidents, straight out of the “Think of it as evolution in action” school of design. Don’t get your ground car in front of that thing….

Charles Stross, author of the excellent Accelerando, has been wading into the sea of crap genre fiction.

We used to know what horror was about — it was about Killer Whelks menacing a quiet English seaside town, from which a strong-jawed but quiet fellow and a not-totally-pathetic female lead might eventually hope to escape with the aid of a stout two-by-four and a lot of whelkish squelching after trials, tribulations, and gruesome scenes of seafood-induced cannibalism.

I’m sure I read that book when I was about twelve. But, as Charlie points out, the stuff being ground out now is far, far worse, endless sagas of dodgy vampire-porn with dubious fundamentalist overtones.

He also has strong words on the current state of American SF, which doesn’t even seem to be approaching the Sturgeon Number.

Our field’s strongest energies are going into tiredly re-hashing the US Civil War, the Second World War, the War of the Triple Alliance, and the Russian Revolution. And they’re not even Doing It in spaaaaaaace. Well, some of them are: if I see one more novel about the US Marine Corps in the Thirty Seventh Century (with interstellar amphibious assault ships and a different name) I swear I’ll up and join the Foreign Legion. Folks, the past is another country, and you can’t get a visa. Ditto the future: they speak a different language and they get capitalism and the war on terror and the divine right of kings confused because they slept through history class.

Just about all the good SF I’ve read in the past few years has been British (or more specifically Scottish), from writers like Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod and Stross himself. He correctly points out that the so called ‘British Invasion’ isn’t just because we currently have a crop of good authors, but that American SF seems to have lost it’s way, and is content to churn out the increasingly formulaic. Has America lost faith in the future? Or is it just Sturgeon’s Law cutting in?

Not quite as bad as last week’s episode, but still has the feel of a ‘filler’, with the only special effect being the CGI ’scribble’, possibly the wierdest monster I’ve seen. They’re clearly saving the budget for the final two-parter that I’m not going to get to see

There’s a gross and unforgivable error with the trains in the background. At the beginning we clearly saw a pair of Central Trains class 170s. But the episode is supposed to be set in 2012, and as everyone should know, Central Trains is due to be abolished next year. The presence of a First Great Western HST and a Wales and Borders 158 probably gives away the fact that it was filmed in Cardiff even though it was set in Essex. D’oh!

Oh, Crap.

Americans, don’t bother wasting valuable electrons downloading tonight’s episode.

There’s a theory that, in order to maintain the karmic balance, for everything that’s really good, something else has to really suck.

If the recent two-parter “The Impossible Planet”/”The Satan Pit” was one of the best, showing what the classic Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker years might have been like given a budget, then “Love and Monsters” is that episode that restores the balance.

It’s so bad I very nearly switched off halfway through. If I’d wanted to sit through a cheesy soap opera I’d watch rubbish like Neighbours. Most of the episode is a lame joke at the expense of Dr Who fans. The Doctor himself is reduced to a very minor cameo role. Peter Kay (who I personally cannot stand at the best of times) is smugly irritating as the stupid villain. He’s in the Jar Jar Binks league.

I really, really hope this stinker is a one-off, and doesn’t represent the moment when the whole thing jumps the shark.

Making Light and their commenters put the boot in to the awful hack thrillers of Dan Brown.

I’ve managed to avoid them myself, even though half my work colleagues seem to be reading him, even when I tell them they ought to be reading Neal Stephenson instead. One of them is even amused when a Google search on “Illuminati” brought back this page of mine.

Why do his books sell so well if they’re so terrible? There are a number of theories, such as the ones suggested by SF author John M Ford:

[Ursula] LeGuin noted some time back that people will buy bestsellers (and go to hit movies) because they can participate, through the Law of Contagion, in the money involved. Film is the most expensive art form we have, which is one reason it’s taken so seriously.

And there’s also the Book Everybody is Reading factor, which is like the Movie (or, if you live in New York, Broadway Show) Everybody is Seeing. It’s easy to get left out of the conversation if you don’t get the references. (Note that there’s at least one book annotating the references, so you can both not read the novel and pretend you know more about it than people who have. Which leaves you both about even.)

Or maybe it’s because Dan Brown’s cliché-ridden pabulum is sold in supermarkets, so is readily available to the types that don’t darken the doors of a proper bookshop, filled with a such a bewildering array of titles that it means they have to make actual decisions about what to read.

The same thing happens with music. As in this quote from a review of the new album by The Darkness:

This album does not come close to the quality release of the last Journey album, Generations.

It almost unfair to compare this CD to bast array of recent good hard rock releases that come through my door. For an album that many people can find in their local supermarket, this is no doubt one of the best rock releases of the year.

So I think people should be reading Neal Stephenson and Gene Wolfe rather than Dan Brown, and be listening to Opeth and Porcupine Tree rather than Franz Ferdinand or Coldplay. Does this make me a snob? Or just someone who ignores media hype?

Scott is propagating a book meme: bold the books in this list you’ve read.

The list seems to come from the Guardian’s Geek Novels poll; it’s not really any sort of definitive canon of science fiction or anything else. Three books by Neil Stephenson? I’ve not only bolded but added a few words about the ones I’ve read.

1. The HitchHiker�s Guide to the Galaxy � Douglas Adams

Not only that, I’ve read all five of the trilogy, despite the fact that the last two really aren’t very good.

2. Nineteen Eighty-Four � George Orwell
3. Brave New World � Aldous Huxley
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? � Philip K Dick

I read the book before seeing Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner”. While it’s still a classic film, there’s so much more to the book.

5. Neuromancer � William Gibson

One of the greatest opening lines in all fiction, which sets the tone for the book. One of the few SF books ever written that had a significant impact on the real world. Gibson invented the concept of ‘Cyberspace’ before such a thing existed in reality. If the book hadn’t been written, you probably would not be reading this blog post.

6. Dune � Frank Herbert

I remember getting into a great argument in the CompuServe SFLIT form with one of the Sysops, who insisted that Dune was a truly terrible book because it wasn’t sufficiently character driven. She didn’t seem to be able to understand the concept of a book where the setting itself was a central character, and she seemed to think I was an idiot.

On the other hand, the boring sequels are best avoided. The fourth, God Awful of Dune, is the worst.

7. I, Robot � Isaac Asimov

No, I haven’t seen the film, which I’m told is horrible, and does to Asimov’s work what Paul Verhoeven did to Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”. Except the latter richly deserves it.

8. Foundation � Isaac Asimov

I remember enjoying this one at a formative age, then trying to reread it several years later, and finding it rather dated. Such is the fate of much of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of SF. It’s not even Asimov’s best writing (I think the later “The End of Eternity” is his finest work) Still better than the contrived and flatulent sequels he pumped out in the 1980s, which ruin the memory of the original.

9. The Colour of Magic � Terry Pratchett

This is actually a book I’d recommend you don’t read unless you’re a fantasy fan; you won’t get the jokes, and it makes a very poor introduction to the Pratchett’s never-ending Discworld series. Start with “Guards! Guards!”, “Wyrd Sisters” or “Mort” instead.

10. Microserfs � Douglas Coupland
11. Snow Crash � Neal Stephenson

Probably the greatest first chapter in the history of SF, and it’s all about pizza delivery, of all things. Nothing in the rest of the book can top that first chapter, although it tries hard.

12. Watchmen � Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
13. Cryptonomicon � Neal Stephenson

When Stephenson reached the point where he was two successful to edit, the result being a bloated collossus that’s at least 200 pages longer than it needs to be. His more recent baroque trilogy is even longer, but seems to contain less obvious filler.

14. Consider Phlebas � Iain M Banks

What struck me about this book is now RPG-like a lot of it was. The early sections read like a Traveller game with a particularly sadistic GM. When Banks wrote the book he intended to write something literally unfilmable, with scenes so totally over the top that no special effects budget could put them on screen. Nowadays, CGI technology has reached the point that the biggest problem would be the typically Banksian downer ending.

15. Stranger in a Strange Land � Robert Heinlein
16. The Man in the High Castle � Philip K Dick

I love alternate histories. A lot of ’serious’ books seem to focus on the change point; in contrast, classic AH novels extrapolate things forward to come up with what might have been. This, along with Keith Roberts’ “Pavane” are the standard by which others are judged.

17. American Gods � Neil Gaiman

I found this one moderately entertaining, but no more. It’s had some very mixed reviews; I’ve heard it accused of gross sexism, and crude anti-Americanism (I don’t really get the latter argument)

18. The Diamond Age � Neal Stephenson

It’s considered by many that writing fiction set 50-100 years in the future is the hardest type of science fiction to write, and I tend to agree, but Stephenson manages it better than most.

19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy � Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham