SF Diplomat

Sure... blame the marketing. Again with the SF magazines.

About 10 days ago I responded to some of the talk that's been going around about "saving the big three" or, saving the SF short fiction magazines.  Since then, the debate has rumbled on with a number of learned men (and SF writers) weighing in on how to arrest the free-falling sales figures of these magazines.  However, what has struck me as interesting is the extent to which a lot of the debate has focussed almost exclusively on the form rather than the place the magazines have in our culture.

The Author is Dead : Long live John Scalzi

Martin McGrath has an interesting piece up about the politics of John Scalzi's Green Soldier trilogy (namely Old Man's War and the two books that follow it).  He also links to Nicholas Whyte having to deal with detailed responses to his political analysis by none other than the author himself.  I haven't read Old Man's War and have no intension of doing so, having little stomach for war stories, but I was struck by the similarities between Whyte's run in with Scalzi and my run in with fans of George Martin when I, like Whyte, accused the author of being right wing.

Writers You'll Buy Sight Unseen

Normally I don't do memes but SFSignal started a quite nice one.

Which authors do I buy without hesitation and without bothering to check reviews?

           

Stephen Baxter - Not so much his YA stuff but I'll buy pretty much anything he puts out that's hard SF.  I've also got into the habit of requesting his historical fiction for review.  I also think that, were that possibility dry up, I'd still buy the final book in the series.  Baxter's original XeeLee sequence is what made me want to study the philosophy of science at grad school (I initially signed up to study Aristotle) and he's arguably one of the people responsible for how I see SF and how I see the world.

Charlie Stross - Probably the only author that I systematically pre-order from the US.  I adore the wide range of ideas that he's capable of engaging with and I absolutely love the way that he does technobabble.  There's a section in The Atrocity Archives when a philosopher explains what it is she's working on and while it's utter nonsense, it sounds exactly the way philosophers sound when they talk about their work.  I adore Stross's work and I think he's a very very clever man.

Neal Stephenson - Doesn't write that many books but that suits me fine as I'm still working my way through the Barroque Cycle.  I know that he can't do endings and I know he has a terrible tendency to shelve his plot and go off on some mad tangent exploring an idea but I adore those tangents.  I'm all about the tangents whether it's the bit in The Confusion where they spend a dozen pages talking about how early stock-markets worked or the bit in Cryptonomicon when the family come up with a weird system for equitably dividing up a dead relative's furniture.

Terry Pratchett - I still happily buy up every Discworld novel that comes out, in hardback.  Over the years I've become increasingly disillusioned with Pratchett as a person, in particular I thought Thud! was an absolutely shameless and horrid attempt to flog a book and a boardgame in time for Xmas.  I've also heard loads of stories about how much of a prick he can be but I still adore the irreverent intelligence of the Discworld novels and the way that Discworld society is shown to be subtly changing as the world essentially goes through the enlightenment.

Interestingly, these are all authors I tend to be quite harsh about, so if you read this site you might well think that I fucking hate Charlie Stross and Stephen Baxter but in truth I'm like the kid who pulls the cute girl's pigtails... I hold them up to impossibly high standards and then moan and bitch when they don't live up to them.  A touch passive aggressive perhaps but in both cases I know what the authors are capable of and I want them to produce books systematically at that level.  In a way, it's a tribute to them that I absolutely refuse to pull any of my punches when I review or think about them.

What do People Read For?

During a recent late night discussion with The Sheep,  the idea was raised that I tend not to engage emotionally with art and that the form of engagement I favour instead is a rather uncommon one.  Indeed, my dislike of fantasy may very well boil down to the fact that I am incapable of using a fantasy novel in the way that it is intended.  I was puzzled by this idea and thought I would take it to the blogosphere to see whether a) anyone else has a similar experience to me and b) what the ramifications of this might be.

Getting People to Talk About Short Fiction

       

As is reported pretty much everywhere, Warren Ellis and Cory Doctorow have been comparing notes about the state of the short fiction magazine market and wondering what can be done to reverse its long history of decline.

Let us consider what I am calling The Doctorow Plan :

If I were running the mags, I'd pick a bunch of sfnal bloggers and offer them advance looks at the mag, get them to vote on a favorite story to blog and put it online the week before the issue hits the stands. I'd podcast a second story, and run excerpts from the remaining stories in podcast. I'd get Evo Terra to interview the author of a third story for The Dragon Page. I'd make every issue of every magazine into an event that thousands of people talked about, sending them to the bookstores to demand copies -- and I'd offer commissions, bonuses, and recognition to bloggers who sold super-cheap-ass subscriptions to the print editions.

Sure it's lot of work, and a huge shift in the way the mags do business. But hell, how many more years' worth of 13 percent declines can the magazines hack?

As an "SFnal Blogger" I can see a few problems with the plan.

Doris Lessing wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Apparently Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Lessing is only the 11th Woman to pick up the prize and she did this despite having spent a large chunk of her career not only actually writing SF but doing so completely openly unlike the likes of Margaret Atwood.  Indeed, the award citation even praised her "visionary power".  Today is a good day for genre.

REVIEW - Manga : The Complete Guide by Jason Thompson (2007)

 Manga is one of the most aggressively expanding areas of the genre landscape.  For a long time the translated comics with weird titles and a fondness for young girls were a niche apart from the rest of genre; a closed world whose wonders were only ever available to the initiated and occasionally hinted at through the closely linked but ultimately different world of Anime films.  Indeed, despite a seemingly ever-expanding array of western publishers acquiring a vested interest in manga reaching a wider audience, manga has long struggled with getting a toe-hold in the mainstream.  Everybody knows about manga but while millions flock to see studio Ghbli films, few people can list more than one of two manga titles.  This problem is largely due to a lack of an accessible critical standpoint from which to write about manga without sliding into apologia and cultural relativism.  However, Manga : The Complete Guide’s Jason Thompson seems to have cracked the problem, producing a book that opens up the world of manga without feeling the need to apologise and explain away its eccentricities.

REVIEW - Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw at the National Theatre

I’m not what you’d call a big fan of the theatre.  As I child I was marched to a couple of pantos and in the intervening years I’ve seen a few musicals and, most recently, the long-running and ever so slightly creaky but fun adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black.  So I’m not exactly Kenneth Tynan.  However, a few weeks ago, while searching for something different to do, we stumbled across talk of a new play at the National Theatre.  It purported to deal with religious fanaticism, nationalism and the end of the feudal era.  Given that it didn’t involve puppets singing about porn and shagging, I thought it sounded like fun but it has taken until now to get my hands on the tickets.

For my first piece of “proper theatre”, I could not have chosen better than Marianne Elliott’s staging of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.  Full of ideas, drama, action and spectacle, the play is beautifully staged and left me ever so slightly in love with the theatre.

Manga Publishers demand more UK shelfspace

An interesting story in The Bookseller by Caroline Horn. (Via GalleyCat and Ariel)

Apparently, UK sales of Manga are growing at a remarkable rate but the major retailers are adopting a wait and see policy.  Well... I say "major retailers" but I mean Waterstones and Borders as that's pretty much all we have left ever since the competition commission incomprehensibly allowed Waterstones to buy up both Dillons and Ottakars.

So why is this news?

Female Writers and SF - Why should I care?

In recent months, the ambient noise of discontent provoked by the under-representation of women in SF magazines and award listings has risen from a low murmur so a sound not unlike someone clearing their throat in a room full of geese.  These kinds of discussions have sprung up all over the place and generally involve female SF fans venting their anger while male SF fans look at the stats and tut.  Indeed, you'll note that while I've spoken out about racial and sexual inclusiveness in the past, I've never really ventured forth into the world of SF's sexual politics.

Well... I've decided to put an end to this and my tutting.