SF Diplomat

You May Have Missed... Links 01/09/08

No, it is not quite the future... yet.  However, seeing as I am out pretty much all of tomorrow and it is quiet at the moment, I thought I would share a weekend's worth of links with you now.

• The Daily Graun has an interesting piece by Jeremy Kay about the secretive downwards trend in Box Office receipts.  He points out that the focus upon how much a film makes is a neat way of deflecting attention away from the decreasing ticket sales.  Hmm.

• Abigail Nussbaum reviews the September/October 2008 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  Totally agree about the non-fiction sections of the magazine.  This is one of the reasons why I tend to prefer Interzone to the American digests.

EDIT : And, as Ms. Liz points out in the comments, Shepherd has responded somewhat forcefully to Abigail's review. 

• Deathray Magazine, about which I have written a few times, has shifted from 13 issues a year to 4 a year.  Oh dear.  I think it was too much of one thing, not enough of the other.  I stopped reading it ages ago as I simply can't take those dreadful bum-licking features that mass media sci-fi mags feel obliged to churn out.  Still... a loss as at its best it was better than SFX (which I recently heard someone amusingly describe as being like Heat)

• The Book Blogger Appreciation Week Awards are accepting nominations over at My Friend Amy.  What's more interesting is the mix of categories and the fact that children's literature and YA got categories straight off the bat while SF, fantasy and horror are all lumped together in one category that was added later after people complained in the comments.  Are SF blogs in a ghetto even among litblogs?  I would vote but I have everyone... especially myself.

Are Suvudu Trying to Manage Public Perceptions?

I recently noticed this post over at Suvudu, Random House's underperforming SF Blog.

The point of polls such as Pat's is to measure public opinion among his readers.  By inciting Suvudu readers to "get the vote out", Suvudu appear to be trying to stuff the ballot boxes so as to exaggerate their popularity among the readers of Pat's Fantasy Hotlist.

This is exactly the same thing that the Conservative Party tried to do last month when they sent out an email inciting their supporters to vote for David Cameron in a local newspaper's opinion poll asking whether or not people thought he would make a good leader.

Why would they want to do this?

Suvudu is a professional megablog.  It is funded by Random House and so it is not competing with the likes of me but rather with Gawker Media's io9 and Tor.com.  However, compared to both of those sites, Suvudu is really struggling to have much of an impact with its blend of author puff-pieces and book-related news items.  At this point, a poll suggesting that they are well loved by the readers of the actually well loved Pat's Fantasy Hotlist would doubtless carry a bit of weight with the bosses at the next departmental meeting.

What a strange thing to do.

You May Have Missed... Links 29/08/08

"Les Bourgeois... c'est comme les cochons!  Plus ca devient vieux, plus ca devient bete!  Les Bourgeois... c'est comme les cochons!  Plus ca devient vieux, plus ca devient..."

• Joe Sherry at Adventures in Reading batters his head against the World Fantasy Award nominated short story "The Church on the Island" by Simon Kurt Unsworth.  What is the story about?  answers on a postcard please.

• Richard Larson at Strange Horizons reviews the Ellen Datlow edited Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  Personally, I think Ms. Datlow should send Mr. Truesdale a big bunch of flowers as I think his ill-founded criticism of the inclusion of Lanagan's "The Goosle" has managed to make this the most discussed anthology of the year.

• Steve Biodrowski at Cinefantastique Online reviews Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm and compares it with the classic Ken Russell film version (and yes, that is a giant snake wrestling Jesus while Centurions rape a load of nuns... why do you ask?).

• A new peer-reviewed SF journal has been rolled out by Liverpool University Press called Science Fiction Film and Television.  Seems like it has a nice blend of criticism, review and meta-reviewing too.  Oooooh.

EDIT : Nearly forgot...

• Michael Peterson at The House Next Door gives us an interesting examination of the direction and imagery in Neon Genesis Evangelion.  Now that, is visual criticism.

Playing The Man Not The Ball : On Reviewing Book Covers

 I awoke this morning to find this beauty waiting for me in my feed reader.  It is a Tor.com review of the cover of Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible (2008), an addition to the steadily growing subgenre of superhero stories presented in book rather than comic form.  Don't worry, I don't get it either.

The review itself is by Pablo Defendini, who is himself a designer and it is well-written and doubtless interests the people who are interested in that kind of thing.

The piece caused me to realise that whether it is in the shape of cover porn, direct discussion or even award handicapping, this type of content is becoming ever more common and that makes me somewhat... uncomfortable. I shall try to articulate why I think this is a dangerous trend:

At its best this type of content is lazy and ethically questionable.  At its worst, it is out and out advertising.

'Cover Porn' is this type of content at its most harmless.  Born of a sense of obligation towards the publishers that send them free books, a growing number of bloggers will post pictures of the covers as an acknowledgement of the gift as well as a bit of easy content.

I can entirely empathise with this attitude.  I have written before about how easy it is to feel obligated to review the stuff that you are sent.  I can also sympathise with the need for some quick and easy content.  Not every post can be a 2000 word examination of a book.  However, will I have a great deal of sympathy for the decision to put up cover porn, I do think that it is ethically questionable.

The last week or so has seen an argument fizz around mainstream litblogs over the role of advertising and one of the positions argued for is that it does not matter whether or not people actually click on the ads, the publishers pay for eye-balls and that is what a banner gives them, even if the adverts do not necessarily result in direct sales.

By putting up pictures of book covers on your site, you are giving the publishers eyeballs.  If you even go that further step and give away free copies of books then you are going even further to raise awareness of products.  You are not commenting on these books, you are advertising.  You have crossed the line between editorial and stepped into the world of sales and PR.

As a critic, I am not a part of the publishing business.  I have a relationship with different parts of the business (chiefly that of being a consumer) but it is not my role to boost sales or to convince you to part with your money.  In fact, it wouldn't bother me if nobody bought a single thing I reviewed positively on this site or in any of the other organs I write for.  My role is to engage as fully as I can with the subject material of the books.  As Clute puts it in Look at the Evidence (1995), the critic's task is...

"That of unmasking the being of the book; re-creating that being, freeing the book from the author of the book and from the beehive cloister of the affinity group; and, in the end, granting a privilege.  The author's true privilege is to be misunderstood [...] and the critic's true function is to make misunderstanding into a door of perception." [page 7]

Now, not everyone considers themselves a critic.  A lot of people wear too many hats to fit into a single role or they are content being fans, However, if you have a blog or you post to SF forums or contribute anything at all to the wider genre community then chances are that you are aware that you are sharing an opinion about SF or commenting on it.  As such you have to consider the credibility and the authenticity of what you say.

If that is the case then you have to ask every time you post, are you doing for free what a viral marketing agency might possibly pay you for?

Discussions of book covers and posting book covers are examples of raising awareness about a product without actually commenting upon, evaluating or criticising the actual product itself.  You're playing the man and not the ball by taking about the advertising instead of the product itself.

Now, not everyone is going to agree with this and you have to set your own ethical standards for yourselves but I would encourage you to think about the extent to which your voice and the content of your sites are yours as opposed to that of the people who send you free stuff.

You May Have Missed... Links 28/08/08

Last Night's BSFA meeting was an interesting affair. I was not exactly won over by Gwyneth Jones' reading, partly due to the material and partly due to the fact that I don't actually like being read to but as the interview wore on I couldn't help but warm to her if only for the fact that she kept saying "I was brought up by cyberpunks". A full write up will be jealously kept to the next issue of Fruitless Recursion though. Sorry world.

• io9 have an interesting clip of Neal Stephenson talking about the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. I'll be interested to see how this plays out in the book as Husserl, Leibniz and Godel's attempt to re-animate metaphysics are all examples of spectacularly ornate intellectual cul-de-sacs.

• Karen Burnham at Sprial Galaxy Reviewing Laboratory begins a review of P. G. Wodehouse's The Man With Two Left Feet before suggesting that Connie Willis is some kind of latter-day Wodehouse. All hail Spode!

• The Vault of Horror has part III of their interesting on-going history of Horror on TV. A subject close to my heart as once upon a time I wrote a piece about the top 10 greatest works of British TV Horror for Videovista.

• Pat's Fantasy Hotlist has a poll up about what people think about Suvudu.com, Random House's Megasite. At the moment the biggest block is people who aren't paying attention with the second biggest comprised of people who like it, but this group are outnumbered by the people who dislike it to varying degrees. I have to admit, out of the three professional megasites, Suvudu.com is, for my money, by far the weakest. Tor.com is propped up by Jo Walton but io9, seems to generate the most interesting stuff. Yes that stuff is counterbalanced by hollow-skulled commercialism and astonishing crassness as well as a tendency to talk about "sci-fi" but I think they have a higher hit rate with me than either of the other two. Interestingly though, all three are, at best, a beat behind the SF scene in general and tend to do a bad job of interacting with the scene at large.
  

You May Have Missed... Links 27/08/08

It has been a weirdly quiet day on the blogs. No discussions, no arguments, no particularly interesting memes, nobody's bellowing at each other or question each other's honesty, morality or sexual proclivities. Is this some kind of late-summer malaise?

• The Politics of the Penis - John Branney at the Daily Graun blogs about Hollywood's aversion to full-frontal male nudity (warning: there is a photo of *that scene* from Caligula so NSFW quite possibly).

• SF Scope has an announcement that the next Worldcon will have a best comic award and, in true Hugo fashion, they've called it Best Graphic Story as opposed to Best Graphic Novel or Best Comic. Given that Neil Gaiman is a special guest at the next Worldcon, I reckon that raises the probability of him winning it to about 0.97.

• James Bloomer at Big Dumb Object regales us with tales of Tobias S. Buckell's Sly Mongoose. Am I the only person who can't help but think of this guy whenever Buckell's name is mentioned?

• The mind of John DeNardo at SF Signal boggles over the list of the most frequently requested out of print books. He should boggle more as She is The Darkness is actually volume seven of Glen Cook's Black Company books. I know this because the actual second book in the series is Shadows Linger, for my money one of the finest works of fantasy ever written.

Peter's Mad Thoughts : Pissing in a Water Filter

People who have been reading this blog for a while will know that I adore alternative comedy.  One of my favourite series was Lee & Herring's Fist of Fun.

One of that series' enduring characters was Peter who gave lifestyle tips from the point of view of a homeless and possibly mad person.  In the book accompanying the series, Peter had a page for his "mad thoughts".  These are the ideas for things that pop into your mind but which are so unutterably horrific you would never act on them.

Recently I purchased a water filter as the water in my building is undrinkable sludge.  Ever since that plastic jug has taken over the shelf in my fridge door I have been struggling with the urge to piss into it to see whether or not it would make it taste like normal water.

I have no intention of doing that.  It would be gross, but I am horrifically, morbidly curious.  I've even googled in the hopes of finding out whether anyone has actually tried it and while there are a lot of curious people out there, nobody wants to admit to having carried out the experiment themselves.

So... has anyone out there given in to the siren's call of Brita-filtered urine?  Or is this doomed to remain one of history's great unsolved mysteries?

REVIEW - Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

I have just finished my somewhat discursive piece about Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II.

I definitely enjoyed watching it but it is a film that is beautiful at first and ugly later as the entire film is overshadowed by a multicultural response to The Lord of the Rings than simply never materialises.  If del Toro ever gets to make Hellboy III I suspect that the two films will be amazing together but we're unlikely to see that happen much before 2015.

However, the film did do something I thought was impossible: it made me quite excited about the idea of the film versions of The Hobbit.

You May Have Missed... Links 26/08/08

Despite all my pain I am still just a rat in a cage. Today I must take huge numbers of graphic novels to the post office, finish an epic review of Hellboy II, do some marking and all of this before tomorrow's BSFA monthly meeting featuring Gwyneth Jones.

• Max Cairnduff reviews Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia at Pechorin's Journal (I wouldn't be surprised if this popped up on the Clarke shortlist).
  

• Nader Elhefnawy reviews both Scott Bakker's Neuropath and Peter Watts' Blindsight at Strange Horizons, because the two books should definitely be considered together. Personally I think there's a deeper article to be written about why SF seems to chafe somewhat at the notion of a meaningless universe in which sentience is an illusion.

• Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray brings talk of a TV series about non-evil but tragically beautiful vampires. I say stake them, cut off their heads and burn their bodies ...and that's just the writers.
  

• George Orwell has a blog. Meaning that some bright sparks have started transposing the material from his diaries onto a blog with a 70 year delay.

• Scalzi drives the economic navel-gazing of the SF blogosphere ever onwards while Ron at Galleycat perceives a growing sense of existential angst overcoming the people that are hoping to make money by putting stuff online.

You May Have Missed... Links 25/08/08

No links over the weekend. The blogosphere news-cycle invariably winds down over the weekend as nobody writes and nobody reads and I think it's wisest to reflect this fact rather than go down the Rolling News path of trying to make "nobody's saying anything" seem interesting.

• Randy Nakamura at Design Observer gives us a designer's eye view of Steampunk as a school of interior design and his view seems quite close to my own -- whimsy driven by nostalgia and produced by "mediocre hobbyists with great publicists".

• Ian Sales has an interesting bit about whether SF is too wedded to its own past. I think this is a function of the demographic thing again, my knowledge of SF prior to about 1995 is practically nill. And I don't care who knows it.

• Jim C. Hines tries to confront his own prejudices against wookie-books (or media tie-ins to give them their proper titles) and winds up examining the nature of art and what makes it praiseworthy.

• Graham Sleight continues his Locus-based rampage through old SF by considering the works of Philip Jose Farmer.

• The Daily Mail blames Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the decline of the Church of England. Makes a change from immigrants and gypsies I suppose.

• Steve Biodrowski at Cinefantastique Online reviews Alexandre Aja's new film Mirrors and gives a less than glowing overview of a director who was once seen as being the next big thing.