Very psyched today. I just got to Mom & Dad's house in beautiful Hood River Oregon, and learned that I got an advance copy of Matthew Jarpe's Radio Freefall from Matthew in the mail. Thanks Matthew!
Because I'm normally a cheapskate who waits until a book's out in paperback before buying it, I'm used to being the last person to read everything. So I am looking forward to being able to read something before everyone else does. I'm going to try to hurry up and get it read before I make my annual pilgrimage to Powell's in Portland, and spend every last penny Jen will let me spend in the speculative fiction section. This time I have planned ahead, and have a whole list of books that I couldn't afford to buy at ReaderCon, but I'm sure I'll see some stuff that I didn't think of before.
Showing posts with label readercon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label readercon. Show all posts
Friday, July 27, 2007
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Slipped through my fingers
I had a whole post to write about Paul de Filippo's Slipstream Canon, first presented at the ReaderCon panel that I witnessed. But Paul Kincaid already wrote it for me.
Shorter Paul Kincaid: The definition of slipstream is apparently anything kind of wierd that we like. As Kincaid said, everything on this list (at least everything I've read) is an excellent work of fiction and highly worth reading. Fillippo and his fellow panelists have excellent taste in literature.
But in terms of coming up with a definition of a genre, they've just painted the target around wherever the arrows hit. At the panel Graham Sleight went out of his way to say that slipstream fiction is not the same as postmodern fiction (or interstitial, or etc., etc.) But postmodern fiction's glory days were a decade ago, and during that time 90% of this list was claimed by them.
What is the point, really, of coming up with a term for this? Bertrand Russell went out of his way to create a theory of sets that didn't allow for the paradox of "The set of all sets that don't include themselves." (Yes, his theory was later detonated by Godel's incompleteness postulate, but that's a different story). What's the point of coming up with a genre that defines all books that don't fit in a genre?
A genre, let's face it, is a marketing tool. I'm not even talking about the narrow definition of genre (scifi, fantasy, western, mystery, etc.). This is equally true about the broader definition of genre (poetry, fiction, drama, etc.). And having these categories are useful things, up to a point. But when an idea encounters an area where it's no longer useful, well, then...don't use it.
Shorter Paul Kincaid: The definition of slipstream is apparently anything kind of wierd that we like. As Kincaid said, everything on this list (at least everything I've read) is an excellent work of fiction and highly worth reading. Fillippo and his fellow panelists have excellent taste in literature.
But in terms of coming up with a definition of a genre, they've just painted the target around wherever the arrows hit. At the panel Graham Sleight went out of his way to say that slipstream fiction is not the same as postmodern fiction (or interstitial, or etc., etc.) But postmodern fiction's glory days were a decade ago, and during that time 90% of this list was claimed by them.
What is the point, really, of coming up with a term for this? Bertrand Russell went out of his way to create a theory of sets that didn't allow for the paradox of "The set of all sets that don't include themselves." (Yes, his theory was later detonated by Godel's incompleteness postulate, but that's a different story). What's the point of coming up with a genre that defines all books that don't fit in a genre?
A genre, let's face it, is a marketing tool. I'm not even talking about the narrow definition of genre (scifi, fantasy, western, mystery, etc.). This is equally true about the broader definition of genre (poetry, fiction, drama, etc.). And having these categories are useful things, up to a point. But when an idea encounters an area where it's no longer useful, well, then...don't use it.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Keeping down the filthy bloggers
Neth Space mentions what I consider to have been one of the least interesting panels of ReaderCon: "Reviewing in the Blogosphere." Ken wasn't actually there, but I was. I was incredibly frustrated that when they did an introduction of the panelists, only one of them, Kathryn Kramer, actually had a weblog, and that weblog was not devoted to science fiction or reviewing. (There is a first-hand summary of this panel at Fantasy Book Spot.)
I wouldn't expect every panelist on reviewing in the blogosphere to be a blogger. There certainly should be an old pro print reviewer like John Clute defending tradition against the rabble like ourselves. But the split should be at least 50/50. As it was, it was like doing a panel called "What do you think of Brooklyn" which contained nothing but Manhattanites.
Of course, the limitations of blogosphere reviews were discussed at length. Blog reviews are "plot summaries" with a few author opinions thrown in, bloggers write too fast and too sloppy and don't think enough about what they say. And to some degree they have a point. I am not going to spend three or four hours coming up with a blog post.
But then I have already stated that I'm not going to do reviews as such. What I don't think was discussed extensively enough is the limitation of "reviews as such" in the print or the online market.
Reviews, by their very nature, tend to be about whatever came out in the last five minutes. Most reviews out there do not address the larger trends happening within the market of a genre, or compare works that might have come out last year, or ten years ago. Reviews are expected to primarily address the basic question "Should I read this or not?" Not many professional reviews out there really place a work in the larger critical framework. With a blog you can address whatever you want whenever you want, because no one's writing the checks.
And lets face it, a lot of reviews are just as rushed as a blog post can be. Someone gets a review copy of the new, say, Tad Williams doorstop and is expected to read the whole book and write a thoughtful review for, say, one hundred dollars, which is probably a lot in the current market. And they need to do it fast, before it's on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. So assume they are speed readers and can get through the book in ten hours or so, and then spend five hours or so coming up with a good review. That's, what, six dollars an hour? I think McDonalds pays better in most places right now. So can we really expect the person to write like the next TS Eliot?
One of the topics of the debate was whether you got to write more or less words in an online column. John Clute said that he likes the freedom to write as many words as he wanted. Other panelists pointed out that maybe he could only get away with that because he was John Clute, and who was going to tell him he had to keep it under 500 words? The most interesting statement was when another panelist (Gordon van Gelder, I believe), suggested to Clute that in fact everything he does is a blog, because people are going to his columns not to find out "Is the next Charlie Stross any good?" but to find out what Clute's view of the world and scifi market is.
In other words, it might be that what John Clute does, and thinks that other reviewers are all doing, is more like what a good blogger does than what a mediocre reviewer does.
Or to re-apply Sturgeon's law:
Q: Isn't ninety percent of the blogosphere crap?
A: Ninety percent of everything is crap.
I wouldn't expect every panelist on reviewing in the blogosphere to be a blogger. There certainly should be an old pro print reviewer like John Clute defending tradition against the rabble like ourselves. But the split should be at least 50/50. As it was, it was like doing a panel called "What do you think of Brooklyn" which contained nothing but Manhattanites.
Of course, the limitations of blogosphere reviews were discussed at length. Blog reviews are "plot summaries" with a few author opinions thrown in, bloggers write too fast and too sloppy and don't think enough about what they say. And to some degree they have a point. I am not going to spend three or four hours coming up with a blog post.
But then I have already stated that I'm not going to do reviews as such. What I don't think was discussed extensively enough is the limitation of "reviews as such" in the print or the online market.
Reviews, by their very nature, tend to be about whatever came out in the last five minutes. Most reviews out there do not address the larger trends happening within the market of a genre, or compare works that might have come out last year, or ten years ago. Reviews are expected to primarily address the basic question "Should I read this or not?" Not many professional reviews out there really place a work in the larger critical framework. With a blog you can address whatever you want whenever you want, because no one's writing the checks.
And lets face it, a lot of reviews are just as rushed as a blog post can be. Someone gets a review copy of the new, say, Tad Williams doorstop and is expected to read the whole book and write a thoughtful review for, say, one hundred dollars, which is probably a lot in the current market. And they need to do it fast, before it's on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. So assume they are speed readers and can get through the book in ten hours or so, and then spend five hours or so coming up with a good review. That's, what, six dollars an hour? I think McDonalds pays better in most places right now. So can we really expect the person to write like the next TS Eliot?
One of the topics of the debate was whether you got to write more or less words in an online column. John Clute said that he likes the freedom to write as many words as he wanted. Other panelists pointed out that maybe he could only get away with that because he was John Clute, and who was going to tell him he had to keep it under 500 words? The most interesting statement was when another panelist (Gordon van Gelder, I believe), suggested to Clute that in fact everything he does is a blog, because people are going to his columns not to find out "Is the next Charlie Stross any good?" but to find out what Clute's view of the world and scifi market is.
In other words, it might be that what John Clute does, and thinks that other reviewers are all doing, is more like what a good blogger does than what a mediocre reviewer does.
Or to re-apply Sturgeon's law:
Q: Isn't ninety percent of the blogosphere crap?
A: Ninety percent of everything is crap.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
What's your RealYear(tm)?
Thursday night at ReaderCon was an open night, open to anyone who might have wandered in who might be interested. As it happened, it looked like it was mostly old-timers, people who had been coming since the first conference. They had a panel that night about something called the "real year" of a science fiction story. This idea was originated by John Clute back in 1991, or, according to his claim at the panel, 1977.
The idea of a "real year" of a science fiction story is the year in modern times that the story most clearly references back to. So the real year of any "Doc" Smith story would be 1927, the real year of most Heinlein stories would be 1957, and the real year of Neuromancer would be 1982. Depending on the writer, the real year was either the year they wrote the story, the year they first stumbled on a copy of Amazing! or the year they first got laid.
But what I couldn't get out of my head is the ad you keep seeing everywhere in the Net nowadays that asks "What's your RealAge?" It always says something like "Susan: chronological age 57, RealAge 42." Apparently, everyone they've looked at has a RealAge that is a lot younger than their real age. I keep wanting to see an ad that says "Charlie Parker: chronological age 35, RealAge 67 and dead." But I guess that wouldn't sell many cosmetics or whatever they're trying to push.
It's not surprising that Clute came up with the real year concept as part of a push to topple some of the old scifi behemoths that ruled the roost back then. Clearly the implication of the real year is that you'd like it as close to right now as possible. After all, who's going to be interested in something where the real year is already 20 years out of date? If Clute did first come up with the idea in the late '70s then he'd be looking at the real years of people like Harlan Ellison. But then Ellison hates TV, and anyone who's read "Jeffty is Five" knows his real year was the year before the glass tit was invented.
But science fiction writers, like everyone else, get old. My RealYear (sadly) is not when I first got laid, but when I formed my first complete hypothesis about what it means to be human, at about age 14. That old idea is buried now under decades of deepening understanding, but the foundation's still down there somewhere. It is informed by quarter arcade games, Van Halen I, twenty-sided dice, twenty-nine cent hamburgers and the bright green Lucida type on an Apple II+ CRT. But to Gen-Yers that time is as archaic now as the hippie '60s was to me in high school.
I can see the ad: "Jim Stewart: Novel finished: 2007. Set in: 6000 AD. RealYear: 1983."
So where do I sign up to get a new RealYear(tm)? I don't know how old Charlie Stross is, but I'll take his. I just read Glass House, and no one is going to look at that and say the guy is stuck in the '80s.
But then maybe that's been done. Maybe enough people have written a novel set five minutes in the future. Can I set my RealYear back to when Ray Bradbury wrote "R is for Rocket," which contained this, upon the launching of the first rocket to the moon (which hadn't happened yet when he wrote the story):
Looking in the acknowledgements, that would be 1953. Maybe he's a cranky old wingnut now, but the story belongs to all of us (and Orson Scott Card can't have the meaning of "Ender's Game" back either). I'll take it.
"Ray Bradbury, story finished: 1953, RealYear: infinity."
The idea of a "real year" of a science fiction story is the year in modern times that the story most clearly references back to. So the real year of any "Doc" Smith story would be 1927, the real year of most Heinlein stories would be 1957, and the real year of Neuromancer would be 1982. Depending on the writer, the real year was either the year they wrote the story, the year they first stumbled on a copy of Amazing! or the year they first got laid.
But what I couldn't get out of my head is the ad you keep seeing everywhere in the Net nowadays that asks "What's your RealAge?" It always says something like "Susan: chronological age 57, RealAge 42." Apparently, everyone they've looked at has a RealAge that is a lot younger than their real age. I keep wanting to see an ad that says "Charlie Parker: chronological age 35, RealAge 67 and dead." But I guess that wouldn't sell many cosmetics or whatever they're trying to push.
It's not surprising that Clute came up with the real year concept as part of a push to topple some of the old scifi behemoths that ruled the roost back then. Clearly the implication of the real year is that you'd like it as close to right now as possible. After all, who's going to be interested in something where the real year is already 20 years out of date? If Clute did first come up with the idea in the late '70s then he'd be looking at the real years of people like Harlan Ellison. But then Ellison hates TV, and anyone who's read "Jeffty is Five" knows his real year was the year before the glass tit was invented.
But science fiction writers, like everyone else, get old. My RealYear (sadly) is not when I first got laid, but when I formed my first complete hypothesis about what it means to be human, at about age 14. That old idea is buried now under decades of deepening understanding, but the foundation's still down there somewhere. It is informed by quarter arcade games, Van Halen I, twenty-sided dice, twenty-nine cent hamburgers and the bright green Lucida type on an Apple II+ CRT. But to Gen-Yers that time is as archaic now as the hippie '60s was to me in high school.
I can see the ad: "Jim Stewart: Novel finished: 2007. Set in: 6000 AD. RealYear: 1983."
So where do I sign up to get a new RealYear(tm)? I don't know how old Charlie Stross is, but I'll take his. I just read Glass House, and no one is going to look at that and say the guy is stuck in the '80s.
But then maybe that's been done. Maybe enough people have written a novel set five minutes in the future. Can I set my RealYear back to when Ray Bradbury wrote "R is for Rocket," which contained this, upon the launching of the first rocket to the moon (which hadn't happened yet when he wrote the story):
Tonight, he thought, even if we fail with this first, we'll send a second and a third ship and move on out to all the planets and later, all the stars. We'll just keep going until the big words like immortal and forever take on meaning. Big words, yes, that's what we want. Continuity. Since our tongues first moved inour mouhts we've asked, What does it all mean? ...Man will go on, as space goes on, forever. Individuals will die as always, but our history will reach as far as we'll ever need to see into the future, and with the knowledge of our survival for all time to come, we'll know security and thus the answer we've always searched for. Giveted with life, the least we can do is preserved and pass on the gift to infinity. That's a goal worth shooting for.
Looking in the acknowledgements, that would be 1953. Maybe he's a cranky old wingnut now, but the story belongs to all of us (and Orson Scott Card can't have the meaning of "Ender's Game" back either). I'll take it.
"Ray Bradbury, story finished: 1953, RealYear: infinity."
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Off to ReaderCon
So tomorrow I'm going to get on a 10am Chinatown bus to go to ReaderCon. Thanks to Peter for giving me a place to sleep!
I admit I don't know that much about the authors. I kind of feel like Jackie Harvey's Outside Scoop when I look at the readers. I have never heard of Lucius Shepard, but he has some wicked-ass cover art. I've actually heard of Karen Joy Fowler, but I didn't know that she was a speculative fiction author. Yeah, I know, that's lame.
Anyway, I don't know what the connectivity issues are going to be. I'm going to take my laptop, and hope that they have wi-fi there. If not, maybe I'll try to find a Starbucks. But if I don't post again until Sunday night, that's why.
I admit I don't know that much about the authors. I kind of feel like Jackie Harvey's Outside Scoop when I look at the readers. I have never heard of Lucius Shepard, but he has some wicked-ass cover art. I've actually heard of Karen Joy Fowler, but I didn't know that she was a speculative fiction author. Yeah, I know, that's lame.
Anyway, I don't know what the connectivity issues are going to be. I'm going to take my laptop, and hope that they have wi-fi there. If not, maybe I'll try to find a Starbucks. But if I don't post again until Sunday night, that's why.
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