|
|
Teaching SoullessThe Steampunk Scholar reflects on teaching Gail Carriger's novel: Ultimately, the majority of students thoroughly enjoyed the experience of comparing and contrasting Dracula and Soulless. There was one particularly outspoken naysayer, but he admitted disliking the text because Alexia reminded him of a former flame, which gave us the chance to discuss how a text "reads" us, even as we are reading it. One male student related his embarrassment at reading it on the bus: being an Albertan male with what appears to be fully chick-lit was a challenge, though he was quick to add, not deterrent enough to keep from reading to see what happened next. This allowed us to do a cover comparison, which is also an excellent study. We talked about how the original cover plays off the design of the Marie Antoinette film's marketing; we discussed how covers play into audience expectations, and construct a horizon of expectation, which many remarked Carriger subverts. While they expected "a sappy romance," they were surprised to find adventure, mystery, and comedy.
The Sins of the Travel WriterRushthatspeaks has a superb write-up of Jan Morris' Last Letters From Hav: 'Jan Morris' has, in this book, in her exquisitely careful sendup of exactly how not to deal with the aftermath of WWII, given the most beautiful demonstration I can possibly imagine of what it would be to ignore the political responsibilities of the travel writer. For in Hav there lives a man who is wanted by Israel, for war crimes. A friend of hers says that the reward is huge; she interviews the man; his guilt is indisputable. Does she consider reporting his existence and where he lives to the relevant authorities? Does she, hell! And the Nazi, at the end of her interview with him, suggests that her friend was a collaborator with the Vichy government, that he sold out members of the Resistance. Does she look into it? Of course not. Because she is a travel writer and therefore to her this is all theatrical pageantry, is the subtext. She's the observer so none of it is any of her business. And how amazingly well-calibrated the racism of the way she will reveal, or not reveal information: this is a book in which she calls the British Agent in Hav by a pseudonym, despite the fact that he has not asked for anonymity, but gives the full address and telephone number of a Muslim leader who has told her in so many words that he is under threat of assassination. She insists that there must be an artistic connection between the indigenous Havian culture and that of Wales, on extremely flimsy evidence-- both 'Jan Morris' and Jan Morris are Welsh. Morris, of course, returned to Hav a few years ago; see Matthew Cheney's review of the collected Hav in these pages (and Abigail Nussbaum's take at Infinity Plus).
The Awards Race ContinuesMartin Lewis handicaps the Best Novel shortlists for the BSFA and the Kitschies. Nicholas Whyte compares the Amazon, Goodreads and Librarything rankings of the BSFA Novel nominees.
Revisiting StoriesA couple of SH authors, revisiting stories first published in these pages: Hal Duncan reads his story, "Styx Water and a Sippy Cup." Grady Hendrix regrets his story, "The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu": I wrote “Guiyu” in English with Cantonese inflection and phrasing, and overall that worked out better than I had hoped; I’m happy with the writing in the story. What I’m deeply unhappy with is the politics. In the story, the trash pickers of Guiyu work for local Chinese companies who exploit them to the hilt in order to squeeze every cent from their labor. The big bosses are one part factory owner, one part gangster, which I think is accurate. But I left the issue there, and that’s where I failed. It’s like I wrote a story about Dahomey and Oyo slave traders competing to sell their enemies into slavery at Porto Novo on Africa’s West Coast and I ended the story before those slaves were exported overseas.
Time Still WrinkledIn the New York Times, Pamela Paul revisits Madeleine L'Engle's classic and considers how it helped to break ground: In 1962, when “A Wrinkle in Time,” after 26 rejections, was acquired by John Farrar at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, science fiction by women and aimed at female readers was a rarity. The genre was thought to be down-market and not up to the standards of children’s literature — the stuff of pulp and comic books for errant schoolboys. Even today, girls and grown women are not generally fans. Half of 18- to 24-year-old men say that science fiction is their favorite type of book, compared with only one-fourth of young women, according to a 2010 study by the Codex Group, a consulting firm to the publishing industry. And while a sizable portion of men continue to read science fiction throughout their lives, women don’t. Thirty-two percent of adult male book buyers are science-fiction fans compared with only 12 percent of women. When Joanna Russ, one of the few successful female science-fiction writers, died last year, her obituary in The New York Times referred to her as a writer who helped “deliver science fiction into the hands of the most alien creatures the genre had yet seen — women.” (Although I'm a little sceptical of those numbers, I have to say.)
Changes for the Fiction DepartmentWe're looking to bring new fiction editors into the Strange Horizons team. This might not be much of a surprise, after our announcement in December that Karen Meisner was leaving the fiction department. What might be a surprise, though, is that we're not just looking for someone to fill Karen's old spot. I'm also leaving the Strange Horizons fiction department. This decision has been a long time coming, and I've been hesitating over it for months. I've been a fiction editor here for over a decade, and it's been a really important part of my life. Stepping down from the fiction department is the right decision for me, though, and now is the right time. I'm not going away entirely -- I'll be staying around in an advisory role for the magazine, and I'll be actively involved in the process of selecting new fiction editors. Our goal is to put together a strong and fabulous editorial team that will continue to publish groundbreaking fiction from all over the speculative fiction spectrum -- and represent all of the voices in our community. We've already started speaking to a few promising candidates, but we're interested in hearing from applicants who we might not have already considered, so we invite anyone who's interested in what we're doing at Strange Horizons to consider applying for a position as a fiction editor. (Full details about the application process available here.) This is a big transition that we're going through, and as a result we're going to have to ask you for a little bit of extra patience -- because we're working through this change in the editorial team, we're going to need another couple of weeks before we can open to fiction submissions. Everyone here at Strange Horizons has confidence that we're going to find a great new editorial team, and that we'll continue to be the magazine you know and love. Thank you for staying with us through these big changes.
Why Does SF Hate Ordinary People?Martin McGrath asks, with reference to James Lovegrove's Redlaw, Adam Roberts' By Light Alone, and Ahmed Khaled Towfik's Utopia: Perhaps, then, science fiction is just doing what it has always done in reflecting its times. It may be that all we can hope for from the science fiction of the early twenty-first century are ever more brutal restatings of science fiction’s response to modern capitalism’s first wild rush to disaster at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries. The poor Morlocks, always rising from their subterranean lairs to smash the comfort and civility of the world created by the effete Eloi, may be doomed to return in ever more graphic orgies of destruction, becoming ever more monstrous in their habits while appearing less human, less capable of self-expression than even Wells imagined. The mass of humanity, visible only as the sludge that lubricates the vast machines in Lang’s Metropolis might smash the engines of their oppression but they will never become their masters. Some excellent discussion in the comments, too.
The Deep Still BurnsNathaniel Katz revisits Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, and finds it all comes down to the ideas: Despite all that, though, Vinge’s characters, and even his plots, are well overshadowed by his ideas. The excellence of each and every one of his humanoid and alien creations comes from their reactions and actions in their extraordinary and inventive situations, and the joys of his flashy plotting come from the way that it interacts with his cosmos. So, once just about all’s explained and understood, or at least as much as it ever will be in the novel’s pages (or ever could be by our Slow Zone minds?), a bit of the excitement leaves the affair, and the broad strokes of the novel’s ending aren’t too surprising, even if the particulars might be. Tied into that is the fact that we only get to viscerally feel the aspects of the climax that take place on the Tines world, a shame because it’s in terms of the larger galaxy that the unexpected aspects of the ending really hit. But, for all that, the ending’s still a damn fine one, a shade disappointing only for being merely very good at the end of such an exquisite work. Matt Hilliard considers the novel's villain: Except Vinge takes boring Lord Steel and throughout the novel puts him in situations that force him to play against type. Lord Steel wants nothing more out of life than to be the boring Bad Guy, but the only way he can harness the power of offworld technology for world domination is by convincing a young human boy he’s actually a good guy. Rather than twirling his metaphorical mustache, he has to endure hugs and act as a surrogate parent for both the human boy and a young Tine. Worst of all, he has to do this under the gaze of his feared master, Flenser…kind of. If Flenser was really present, he’d be in charge and Steel would be comfortable in the familiar role of chief minion, but Flenser is only kind of present. Trapped by traditionalist enemies before the novel began, Flenser took the radical step of breaking his six member pack into three pairs that were forced into three other packs. Avoiding detection, one of these packs, originally a schoolteacher named Tyrathect, returned to Flenser’s stronghold as the starship crashed. But the others did not survive, which means Lord Steel is still in charge, struggling to play the part of gentle father figure while someone who is two thirds schoolteacher and one third history’s greatest monster watches and critiques his performance.
Hugo RecommendationsGeorge RR Martin recommends some novels for the Hugo: Leviathan Wakes, Heaven's Shadow, The Wise Man's Fear, The Heroes, The Magician King, The Dragon's Path, and 11/22/63. For a bit of variety, the Dreamwidth community "Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge" is collecting recommendations of work by creators of colour that is Hugo-eligible.
This Week ...In our last issue of the month, we have Tracy Canfield's story "The Chastisement of Your Peace", and Erik Amundsen's poem, "Ariel"; John Clute takes a look at the Kessel/Kelly anthology Kafkaesque and the Kafkaesque new novel by Matt Ruff in his latest Scores, and the reviews department kicks off the week with Andy Sawyer's take on Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge, with reviews of books by Hari Kunzru and Anne Sheldon to come.
|
