SF Diplomat

New Digs

I have started up a film-centric critblog at ruthlessculture.com. It's a slow blog so the posts will be  occasional rather than regular and there will be less SF but, for those interested, I shall be posting links there to any future pieces I might write.

Stepping Off The Treadmill

Regular readers will have noticed that my enthusiasm levels have been dipping of late.  My tone has turned increasingly sour, my reviews increasingly half-hearted and my general output sluggish at best.  I have been fighting it for a while, but clearly SFDiplomat has run its course and it is time to move on.

I am going to leave the site up for others to read and refer to but it will cease to be a living document.

My reason for this is that I no longer enjoy blogging about SF.  My relationship with blogging has been an awkward one for a while as I do think that the medium brings out the worst in me.  Aside from bringing the confrontational and argumentative elements of my personality to the fore, it also plays in to my fondness for objectively quantified measures of success.  The same personality traits that once hurtled me through academia, now push me to post more and more frequently about subjects that only half interest me.

My best criticism comes from me picking my targets with considerable care and taking my time when formulating an opinion, but the nature of blogging means that there is pressure to turn reviews around quickly and to review the latest products as quickly as possible.  I do not think that this is a hospitable atmosphere for my best work.  In fact, I do not think that it is the best atmosphere for anyone to produce their best work.

My plan is to continue producing work for the venues I am currently associated with (new issue of Fruitless Recursion coming as soon as someone submits their revised draft... ahem) but to otherwise step back from the online SF scene.  However, I am currently thinking about my next online venture but it will most likely not reflect my interest in SF and it would output at a much more sedate pace.

Thank you all for reading and contributing through comments and links and so on.  It's been a fun few years :-)

Birthday Over

It was my Birthday on Sunday.  I was, and indeed am, 32.  It was a good birthday by my standards and thanks to all who sent me warm thoughts :-)

I am not that big on birthdays, or any socially mandated celebrate-able event; birthdays, weddings, Christmas, New Year's... you name it, I'm alienated by it.  The part of me that will always be an angry, frustrated and unhappy 16 year-old sees it as a form of conformism.  It is a totally unacceptable compromising of one's individuality to acknowledge social events that you are supposed to be happy about.  I don't think I ever said that I had 'too many principles' to celebrate Xmas but it would not have been at all out of character for me between the ages of about 14 and 20.

By and large this has improved somewhat as I have 'grown the fuck up', but I still feel very uncomfortable being a member of a 'society' or 'community'.  I am, psychologically speaking, a child of Thatcher in that I am happiest when I am with a bunch of individuals and I am at my most miserable when I am having to fit in.  Seriously, there's a picture of me aged 15 and about to head off to my oldest brother's wedding and you would think that someone had just shot my dog.

For someone who would, deep down, be a lot happier if birthdays just went away, I think it was a good day.  I got some nice presents, I had a very nice dinner and I spent much of the afternoon sorting loose change and uncovering, to my horror, that I had over £200 of it sitting in a cupboard.  That's something worth celebrating!

Shayol's Pandora - I is in German!

Gott im Himmel!

I have been translated into German!

Yesterday morning I received in the post a copy of the third issue of Pandora, a rather impressive German language periodical dealing with SF and Fantasy.  If you sprechen sie  the lingo you can buy a copy of it HERE from the Shayol website.

The zine is edited by Hannes Riffel and Jakob Schmidt and it contains short fiction as well as articles and my review of Peter Watts' Blindsight (translated by Sara Riffel)

Hats off to Hannes and Jakob as the zine itself is really fantastic to look at.  It has great art as well as a clear, uncluttered and yet stylish lay-out and the content seems good too.  I get the impression that they only do one issue a year but I'm very impressed with what I've seen.  I don't think my work has ever looked better or been in more august company.

I wonder if this publication model would work in English?

A Pledge on Short Fiction

It's been a while since I last read a work of SF that I really enjoyed.  Egan's Incandescence had flashes of brilliance obscured by a disastrous central theme and Harkaway's The Gone-Away World has prose to die for but is a clear 200 pages too long.

As you can probably tell from reviews like this, my frustration is starting to show as book after book feels stunted and inadequate.  I recently tried changing tack by taking on Morgan's The Steel Remains but the result was a reaction that combined THIS with THIS. 

I've decided to switch to short fiction for a while.  Every time I read short fiction I say that I should read more of it and so I intend to do so and I think that making it an avenue for my critical output will encourage me to follow up on that pledge.  It's also getting a bit dull putting the boot into established authors who should be doing better.  Hopefully by reviewing short fiction I shall get the chance to discover some new authors who are more deserving of critical coverage.

I have one more novel-length review pledged and but other than that, you will not see me review another SF novel before the new year.  There may be decent books that appear between now and then but they will have to wait.

So Sayeth Jonathan

Christmas for Republicans?

Last election, the Republicans famously went on and on about 9/11 and how only they could save America from the terrorists (despite the fact that 9/11 happened on their watch and the fact that they spent billions bombing the shit out of Afghanistan with little to show for it).  I wonder whether the 'issue free zone' will extend to terrorism or will the power of nightmares again prove to be a gift in the quest to return the Republicans to the Whitehouse?

(With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore)


Tis September 11 and all through the house,
Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.
The banners are hung on the cave walls with care,
In the hope that bin Laden soon will be here.

The Children are nestled with guns and C4,
With visions of houris; some 30 or more!
Omar with his beard, and I with my daughter,
Have settled our souls for a year's worth of slaughter.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window, I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
A Toyota pick-up... The Master of Fear!

A beard of snow white and a new RPG
I knew in a moment that it must be he.
He spoke of McCain victory, vital to our plan,
No terrorist Kingpin, he is but a man.

"Now Sarah!  Now Johnny! All Republican!
On Tax cuts!  On Jesus!  On Halliburton!
Destroy those Democrats!  Push them to the wall!
If they realise I'm made up, our regimes will fall!"

Does My Arse Look Fascistic in This?

[Pic From Here]

Yesterday I made some comments about the Republican National Convention and I was greeted this morning with a splendid rant from Robert Bee from New Jersey (whose SF criticism has been published in many places including IROSF and NYRSF) :

You are truly an idiot, Jonathan.  McCain and Palin did not say the "world's problem was homosexuals getting married."  That fact that smug liberals like yourself simplify the views of people who disagree with you is one of the things that makes you liberals such a despicable group of people.  Furthermore, the real fascists are liberals like yourself who accuse anyone who disagrees with a pc position of being a fascist.  If you're typical of liberals, then I have no respect for left-wing positions, and I sincerely hope you liberals lose the next few elections, and don't have a chance to run anything for, say, thirty years.



I particularly enjoyed the use of quotation marks around "world's problem was homosexuals getting married" as if to make it look like I actually said those words.  Firstly, it's barely literate (there should be an 'only' or 'greatest' in there somewhere) and secondly it beautifully illustrates the misdirection and dishonesty coming out of US conservatism at the moment. 

America and much of the rest of the world are facing a global recession, the Americans economy lost 650,000 jobs last year (while needing 150,000 more jobs a month to keep up with population expansion) and what gets the biggest cheers at the RNC?  No to abortion!  No to gay marriage!  Yes to the values of small towns despite the fact that our party's economic policies have made life harder and harder for people living in those towns, the fact that many millions of Americans neither grew up in small towns nor live in small towns and the fact that small towns invariably represent a wide array of different opinions and ways of seeing the world!

If the convention speeches were an articulation of what the McCain campaign sees as the most pressing issues facing America then one thing is clear, for the Republicans, this election is not about issues.

At this point, the Conservative movement is a Zombie, a shambling husk without brain or thought.  The foreign policies of the Neoconservatives have not only failed to unite the country (as predicted by Leo Strauss) but they've also made the world a far more dangerous place than it once was.  Meanwhile the domestic policies of the traditional Conservatives have resulted in an economic climate that has just brought about one of the largest nationalisations in history.  Even culturally, the Conservative movement has utterly failed as women across America continue having abortions and gay people (while still second class citizens) enjoy levels of social acceptance and visibility that would have been impossible when the modern Conservative movement took power 30-odd years ago.

So they are now reliant upon banging a drum for causes that energise the grass roots and which get discussed by a tame, toothless and un-critical media (Vonnegut used to say that TV was like the lead pipes that drove the Romans mad, I disagree it's just 24 Hour News Channels).  They appeal to the worst in people's natures; the selfishness, the small-mindedness, the vindictive, the ignorant, the lazy, the hate-filled.

I called Palin's speech fascistic because it was fascistic.  It drew on entirely fictitious nationalistic conceptions of the real America being that in small towns, it lambasted the enemy within thereby creating scapegoats and it did all of this under the pretence of American exceptionalism so as to obscure the real issues and the real problems facing the country.  It's clear cut if you ask me, though I appreciate the attempt to invoke "political correctness" (which is always a sign of base stupidity) and to say that actually it's the people criticising the nationalistic, scape-goat summoning authoritarians who are the real fascists.  I'd laugh if I didn't know that such arguments weren't common-place in American politics at the moment.

Is this Plagiarism... or Worse?

This morning I noticed a rather strange hit on the site.  Someone googled this:

The film’s setting and period are far from accidental.  Aside from the cosmetic topicality of a Spanish film about the civil war emerging at a time when Spain is going through a process of self-examination regarding the goings on during the civil war and Franco’s regime

This pointed them directly at my review of Pan's Labyrinth.


So I wonder, what could prompt someone to search for a paragraph from a film review.  Did they read the paragraph in my review and think it was so unique that it could not have come from me or did someone maybe stick it in their essay prompting someone to smell a rat and run a search?  or was someone so impressed by the phrase that they noted it down on their exercise book?  Perhaps they were someone's last words smeared on a wall only to be discovered by an over-worked murder Police?  Perhaps a dangerous psychotic has decided to hunt down and murder anyone who uses that phrase?

What a strange world we live in. 

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?

Alternate Revenue Sources (or should that be Sauces?)

I saw a phone box advert the other day for this rather strange piece of branding.  Apparently the veteran film critic Barry Norman has launched his own brand of pickles.

Given that I kicked off some discussion recently about the sustainability of online SF reviewing, I thought that maybe we should take a leaf out of Barry's book and launch our own lines of products.

In the end I opted for an over-poweringly pungent and acerbic salad dressing, which I felt perfectly captured my reviewing style but I could also have gone for my own brand of Pixy Stix (dry, sour and terrible for you).

What kind of product best embodies your approach to reviewing?