Where Worlds Collide

Making Light quotes the whole of Patrick’s introduction to the anthology New Magics, which wrestles with the perennial question, what is fantasy? This quote tells us why the genre cannot be defined simply by what it’s not:

Here’s another: fantasy is tales of things that never were and never could be. That hardly narrows things down at all. Along with fantasy, it scoops up folktales, fairy tales, allegories, utopias, and loosely imagined historical novels. Admittedly, many of those do have a strong family resemblance to fantasy literature. Unfortunately, the definition also takes in 95% of the dramas ever written, 96% of the political memoirs, 97% of the spy novels, 98% of the real-estate brochures, 99% of the comics, 99.5% of the operas, and a great many bad novels that were supposed to be realistic, only their authors got things wrong.

I suppose it’s almost impossible to define a rigid definition of what is and isn’t fantasy; just about any such definition will end up excluding at least one major work that’s definitely within the genre. It’s even harder trying to decide where to draw the line between fantasy and science fiction (especially when some mainstream critics use the two terms interchangably). Is Dune SF or fantasy? What about Star Wars? It’s got magic, knights and princesses in it!

But does it really matter?

This meme appeared on Ken Macloed’s blog, although it doesn’t seem to have spread very far, at least through the sections of the blogosphere I read. It appears to be a mutation of the earlier music meme.

1. How many books to you own
Never tried counting them all, but adding up all the SF novels, railway books and RPG rulebooks probably comes up with a figure in the high hundreds. Don’t think it’s in four figures yet.

2. Last book read
Neil Stevenson’s Quicksilver I’m about halfway through so far.

3. Last book purchased
Blue Pullman, by Kevin Robertson, purchased yesterday at the DEMU showcase.

4. Name five books that mean a lot to you

The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe.
An epic in the true sense of the world. I can’t think of any other fantasy or science fiction work that rivals this for atmosphere; it’s been a big influence on my own RPG worldbuilding.

Pebble in the Sky, Isaac Asimov.
Asimov’s first novel, not his best work by any means. Probably very dated now, like so much ‘golden age’ SF. The reason I’m listing it is because it’s the book that first got me hooked on SF, borrowed from the school library when I was about 14.

Red for Danger, L T C Rolt.
Tom Rolt’s history of railway accidents. Rolt avoids the tabloid-style lurid descriptions, and concentrates the technical aspects. He shows how the worlds railways are a safe means of travel today because of the lessons learned from the past.

Diesels in the Duchy, John A M Vaughan
An odd choice for “Books That Changed My Life”. When I returned to railway modelling in the mid 80s, I was looking for a suitable prototype to follow; John Vaughan’s wonderful photographs of class 37s, 50s, and Westerns in the beautiful Cornish scenery made that choice for me; the end result was several Cornish holidays doing ‘research’, and far too many N gauge locomotives.

The Bible.
Read the whole thing, and discover how the random verses the fundies love to quote often mean something quite different when read in their proper context.

5. Five people to tag
Since I didn’t wait to be tagged, anyone not on this list who wants to pick up the meme shouldn’t need to wait either! I’m still going to pass on the baton anyway, to Carl Cravens (responded), Ken Hite, Patrick Crozier (responded), Ginger Stampley (responded), and of course, Scott

Anyone else think the character called “The Editor” was an OTT parody of Michael Grade, the man responsible for cancelling Dr Who back in the 80s?

Time for another meme. This one comes via Perverse Access Memory:

List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over.

Since this blog covers multiple interests that are beyond the ken of “mundanes”, I’ll try and include one from each of them.

1. Depot layouts: A model railway consisting of a traction maintenance depot, with loads of locomotives, but no coaches or freight wagons. Sorry, but I’m interested in trains, not just locomotives on their own. At one point, for diesel and electric era modelling at any rate, depot layouts had become as bad a cliche as those endless GWR branch termini (half of which were of Ashburton)
2. Morrissey and The Smiths: A good candidate for the most overrated singer of all time. If this self-obsessed bore was really as good as his fanboys claim he is, he’d have sold a lot more records than he did. At least Roger Waters had some music to back up his miserablist lyrics.
3. The entire superhero genre: Comics, films, RPGs, the lot. I find the common tropes of the genre so inherently ridiculous I’m unable to suspend disbelief enough to care about the characters or the stories. If people started developing incredible superhuman powers, why do they adopt silly codenames, wear brightly-coloured Spandex costumes with their underpants over their trousers, and Fight Crime! And silliest of all, why do they always have to have secret mundane identities? And why does the presence of vast numbers of superpowered beings have no significant effect on history or culture?
4. Dice Pools: As used in Storyteller, and the horrid Deadlands. I guess the idea behind dice pools in RPG game mechanics was to create a level playing field between those who could do basic arithmetic in their heads, and those who are functionally innumerate. The problem with too many dice pool mechanics is that the designers themselves don’t seem to understand the probability curves of their own systems, which for me can lead to some very unsatisfactory gaming. When I keep rolling critical failures, I’d actually like to know whether I’m just being unlucky, or whether I’m attempting things my character doesn’t have the skill level for. Or whether the probability curve is so opaque that the GM doesn’t know what target numbers to set.
5. Football: If I go to the pub at lunchtime with work colleagues, most of the time they spend the entire lunch hour talking about bloody football. I’m sure the number of sad obsessives amongst football fandom exceed the total number of roleplayers, railway modellers and prog-rock fans. And when was the last time serious drunken violence erupted at a model railway exhibition or an RPG convention?

And now I’m supposed to pass the meme on. I’d like to nominate Amadán, except his blog is in limbo. Or Steve “Electric Nose” Jones, but he doesn’t do memes. But I can nominate Scott, Silkenray, and Carl Cravens.

I loved the first two of Miéville’s baroque steampunk fantasies, “Perdito Street Station” and “The Scar“. Set in a phantasmagorical mix of steam-age technology, D&D magic and cyberpunk attitude, they managed to breath new life into some old cliches, and produce something that was far more than the sum of the parts.

The third novel in this setting, “Iron Council” tells the story of the construction of a transcontinental railway, who’s striking construction crew rebelled and struck out on their own across the wilderness, laying down rails in front of the construction train and taking them up again behind. But despite some nice touches, such as the golem magic, I found this book something of a disappointment compared to it’s predecessors.

With the action switching between the city of New Crozubon and the rebels in the wilderness, and between present-day and flashback, the whole thing seemed to lack the focus of his two earlier works. This time, Miéville’s politics is far more heavy-handed and comes over very preachy. Being shown what’s wrong with unrestrained robber-baron capitalism is one thing, but sometimes it felt like being beaten over the head with a hammer-and-sickle. The biggest flaw of all was the weak characterisation, so bad that I found I didn’t care what happened to several of the leading characters by the end of the book.

While the book isn’t a total failure, Miéville is capable of far better than this.

Joe Gordon, who until recently was an employee of Waterstone’s bookshop in Edinburgh, has been sacked for blogging. British SF Writer Charlie Stross knows Joe well, and has some comments on the subject:

For starters, Joe is an extremely knowledgable specialist bookseller. He’s an SF fan. Not just an SF fan, but a reasonably personable bookselling SF fan with an encyclopaedic grasp of the field and an enthusiasm for it that was infectious — it was difficult to walk into that shop and walk out again without having spent far too much money. His buying recommendations spread throughout the company (and outside it, as a regular reviewer writing for the online SF lit crit field), to an extent such that one editor of my acquaintance knew him by name as one of the key people to target if you wanted a new SF book launch in the UK to go down well. People trusted his opinions, people inside his company. The combination of specialist knowledge with enthusiasm isn’t something you can buy: if you’re running a business you just have to hope you can grab it when you see it. For a fellow occupying a relatively humble niche — no manager, he — Joe was disproportionately influential.

For seconds … over the past few years Waterstones has plotted a precarious path through the turbulent waters of corporate retail. Most recently, the company was taken over by HMV, another large retail media chain. About six to eight months ago a new manager arrived at Joe’s branch, and reading between the lines it appears that there was an immediate negative reaction: perhaps calling it a clash of corporate cultures wouldn’t be excessive. Joe was banished from the front desk to the stock room, a grubby windowless basement from which he had no exposure to customers. The previously thriving program of author readings and signings mysteriously vanished. Shelf space devoted to SF and fantasy — Joe’s speciality — receded into the shadowy depths of the store and shortened, shedding titles and variety (which, for a genre where sales are largely midlist driven and readers are browsers, is the kiss of death). And finally, Joe was accused of gross misconduct by his manager on the basis of a trawl through his online journal.

The story has now made it into the national media. If Joe was sacked from ‘bringing the company into disrepute’, then his pointy-haired idiot of a boss has brought the company into far more disrepute than one blog ever could.

This sort of behaviour makes me most unwilling to patronise this corporation; unfortunately almost all the larger book shops in my area are theirs. Unless Waterstones somehow sees sense, all my future book purchases are going to be online.

The Gline reviews a “Sci-Fi Musical” called The Apple

The Apple had me laughing hysterically all the way through. It’s a love letter to the stylistic excess of that time, only it’s been penned by illiterates with terrible handwriting. It’s an awful movie, to be sure, but it’s never boring, if only because they find something absolutely stupefying to point the camera at in every second of film. And as bad as the movie is, it actually manages to point its satire in the right direction and even feels weirdly timely—that is, when it’s not burning your eyes out with some of the most horrific production design since the Star Wars Holiday Special. Shock Cinema described it as “Can’t Stop the Music meets Logan’s Run”, two other Seventies artifacts guaranteed to clear the room in seconds.

Sounds like it has all the makings of a cult classic.

Covering some similar ground to The Test of Time, this post by Paul De Angelis on Blogcritics has some interesting thoughts on why the divide between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture is slowly breaking down.

Craig Seligman once remarked on “…the weakening force of critical opinion in the face of ever-expanding mass interests and tastes”. But this change was more than the result of an expanding middle class or more prevalent media. It was spurred on by the rise of the HIFs — Hardcore Intelligent Fans — who accomplished two important things:

1) They championed traditionally disparaged genres (like science fiction) and media (like comic books), claiming them as worthy of analysis and serious critique. Academia had failed badly in this respect. For years these things were shunned, and now the universities, instead of being in the vanguard, are trying to play catch-up. But courses on pop culture are like listening to senior citizens use contemporary slang: it sounds clumsy, forced, and slightly embarrassing.

2) HIFs also managed to find alternative ways of getting their ideas out there, sidestepping professional venues by producing fanzines and holding conventions. Though fanzines had problems with distribution, that’s been alleviated by their replacement, the internet.

Not that the litsnobs and classical music snobs will concede defeat easily. There are still people that insist that “composed music in the European classical tradition” is inherently superior to all other forms of music, just as there are those that insist that any work of fiction that does not conform to the narrow tropes of the genre known as “serious literature” is worthless trash.

I’m not arguing that worthless trash doesn’t exist; nobody has yet repealed Sturgeon’s Law. But I’m sure for every SF novel or thriller that’s formulaic drivel, there’s also a “seriously literary novel” that’s pretentious drivel. (or even formulaic pretentious drivel). And for every vacuous pop song that’s forgotten in six months, there’s an equal proportion of unlistenable classical compositions that have been performed precisely once.

Today In Alternate History. This one is going straight onto the blogroll! Some examples:

in 1245, two devout young men of European descent honor Allah by creating a powered aircraft. They name it the Wings of Gabriel; the maiden flight lasts a mere 2 minutes, but is hailed as a great advance by scientists throughout Islam.

and…

in 1990, Fascists are swept from power in Italy, and Germany sends troops in. The overburdened Nazis, besieged on every front, will lose power by the fall, but not without hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Not only, but also…

in 1992, filmmaker Oliver Stone releases JBR, in which he attempts to give credence to People’s Attorney Presley’s arguments that Comrade President Rosenberg was killed by a conspiracy rather than a lone counter-revolutionary. The film is a huge success, prompting the Communist Party to call for its banning.

So, the dire predictions that the Academy would never give the best film award to something made by a fat bloke from New Zealand whose main audience is ‘engineers called Dave’ turned out to be wrong. Still, had anything else won the ‘best film’, the Oscars would have ended up with roughly the same credibility as the Mercury Music Prize.

It’s the first time a fantasy or science-fiction film has won the Best Film award. 2001, A Clockwork Orange, ET and Star Wars all managed to get nominated, but never won anything but consolation prizes like ‘best special effects’. It’s a belated recognition that these genres are now part of the cinematic mainstream. It’s a contrast to the world of books where sadly SF is still confined to the ghetto.

You don’t want to see the alternative timeline, where they gave the award to ‘Seabiscuit’. Those Los Angeles Nerd Riots were a terrible thing.