Science Fiction

The End of Science Fiction

I’ve seen various theories put forward as to when the first science fiction stories were written. Depending on your definition of science fiction — and that exact definition can be quite contentious, especially on this blog — the first proper science fiction tale might be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (c. 1610) or maybe Lucian of Samosata’s A True Story (c. the 2nd century AD). Personally, I’d argue that you need to have the scientific method before … Read more

On DeepGenre: The End of Science Fiction

I’ve just written a long essay on the DeepGenre blog about how long the genre of science fiction is destined to last and whether we might see the end of it anytime soon. Read “The End of Science Fiction” and post your comments there. Some excerpts: Here’s something I’ve noticed about futuristic science fiction stories: the characters in them never tell futuristic science fiction stories. Think about it. Can you think of a single example … Read more

Readercon 18 Report

I’ll admit that I’m fairly new to the science fiction con circuit, but having been to Readercon twice now, I have no hesitation crowning it my favorite. The panels are generally high-minded and intellectually stimulating; the guest list is always first-rate; and best of all, there isn’t a single dork with a Klingon outfit or a lightsaber to be found.

Of course, the flip side is that once the bar closes at 12:30 pm, there’s pretty much nothing to do but go back to your room and sleep. Peter Watts, Jenny Rappaport, and I tried to find a party after last call on Saturday, only to get accosted by a very angry woman asking “us people” to keep the noise down. When we did find the one open party in the hotel, security arrived two minutes later to shut it down.

Highlights of my weekend include:

  • Getting to ogle Mary Robinette Kowal‘s steampunk laptop (as recently featured on Boing Boing) and listening to plenty of stories about her beaver. And how did I thank her for being one of the coolest people on Earth? By going into an unstoppable coughing fit during her panel on techniques for reading aloud and having to duck out of the room.
  • David Louis Edelman and Scott Edelman at Readercon 18Sharing many a beer, many a story, and many a laugh with George Mann and Christian Dunn of Solaris Books. The fact that George and Christian accepted my SF short story “Mathralon” for publication in their forthcoming second Solaris Anthology of Science Fiction helped my mood quite a bit too. I introduced George and Christian to Mary Robinette Kowal, which may have been a mistake, because the rest of the con they kept making obscure comments about clockwork monkeys.
  • Continuing to confound the world by appearing at the same con with Scott Edelman (see photo to the right) and insisting that we’re not related.
  • Sharing a panel on alternative points-of-view in fiction with (among others) Peter Watts (of Blindsight fame) and gossiping about the biz with him and Jenny Rappaport over beers until closing time. Turns out Peter is just a fabulously nice guy with a very wry sense of humor and a big ol’ Canadian accent.
  • Gabbing over meals and beers with Matthew Jarpe, author of the David Hartwell-edited debut novel Radio Freefall, and listening to his humorous reading from same.
  • Breakfasting with the divine Elizabeth Bear not once, but twice. I will even forgive her for accidentally calling me “Scott” during one conversation.
  • Discussing J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin, among other things, with Realms of Fantasy slushmaster and all-around nice guy Doug Cohen.
  • Watching fellow Pyr author Kay Kenyon promote the hell out of her new novel, Bright of the Sky, through readings, panels, talks, fliers, signings, ads, and who knows what else. I also got a chance to share drinks and a ride back to Logan Airport with Kay and fellow Seattle-area author Louise Marley.

    Read more

My Readercon Schedule

This weekend, I’ll be at Readercon 18 in Burlington, Massachusetts. Readercon’s kind of special for me, since last year’s Readercon was my first exposure to the SF con scene. (Read my recap of Readercon 17.) Last year, I headed off to Readercon knowing literally one person two people in the SF field: my editor, Lou Anders and my copy editor, Deanna Hoak. This year, I can look at the programming schedule and see all kinds … Read more

Introductory Science Fiction Books for Literary Readers

In my post a while back about bad Infoquake reviews, I mentioned how I’ve given William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Frank Herbert’s Dune to a few friends as a way to introduce them to quality science fiction, only to hear later that these friends didn’t care for them. Some of the commenters in the aforementioned blog article didn’t care much for Neuromancer or Dune either.

So my question today is: what are some quality SF books you can hand off to literate non-SF readers as an introduction to the genre?

Let’s say your readers in question are already discerning connoisseurs of quality literature. They’re not typically readers of so-called pulp novels or airport thrillers. They would think nothing of bundling down with a Philip Roth or a Don DeLillo or a Barbara Kingsolver or something that The New York Times Book Review would approve of. They know who Michiko Kakutani is, and they were reading Cormac McCarthy years before Oprah ever heard of him. But as soon as you mention the words “science fiction,” they picture Klingons with light sabers jumping off spaceships with big-breasted ninja assassins in tow and bug-eyed monsters in hot pursuit while a supernova goes off in the background.

What do you hand to these people to convince them that there’s a lot of intelligent literary science fiction that’s worth reading? (I’m just going to stick to science fiction here — however loosely defined that term is — and maybe we can talk about fantasy another time.) I should emphasize that inclusion on either my do/do not lists are not indicators of the quality of the books themselves.

My main criteria for inclusion is that the book has to generally be filed in the “Science Fiction” section of your local bookstore. Which means no George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges, or Italo Calvino, however much we believe their works should be filed in our camp. We’ve got to tempt these people into the rows with the Dragonlance books and the life-size cutout of Darth Vader, folks.

(Yes, people have posted a zillion “great works in science fiction” on the web… but I haven’t seen many that specifically focus on the quote-unquote literary. Perhaps it’s pointless and elitist to call these people quote-unquote literary readers. But you all know who I’m talking about. Come up with a better name if you want.)

Some of my nominees:

  • Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. This book’s strong right-wing bent might turn some people totally off science fiction. But it’s hard to argue that this is a tremendously thoughtful book. It might also open some people’s eyes to the fact that the science fiction you see in the movies has very little resemblance to the science fiction you see on the bookshelves.
  • Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin. Some SF types were turned off by this Hugo Award winner because it was too hoity-toity and thinky-thinky. But for literary types, the languid pace and abundance of Big Ideas makes for a good read.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Hey, science fiction can do feminism too! And not just feminism, but pangenderism and transgenderism and everything else genderismic. In fact, Le Guin and many others like her tackle these issues with much more daring than many of their non-SF contemporaries.
  • Ian McDonald’s River of Gods. So immersed is this novel in Indian culture and so masterful is Mr. McDonald’s prose that it’s hard to imagine anyone putting down this book as one of little substance.
  • John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. Yes, there are space cadets and bug-eyed aliens in this one, and the covers wouldn’t necessarily inspire much confidence for the non-SF reader. But there’s also plenty of humor, sex, politics, and social commentary crammed in there, enough to convince many an SF skeptic.
  • Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001. Hoity-toity artsy types are likely to give this book a fair shot because of the Stanley Kubrick film. Which, in case you were wondering, is one of the greatest films ever made (though a little difficult to follow unless you’ve read the book).
  • William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Hardly science fictional at all, but Gibson is such a master stylist and such a keen thinker on matters of business and technology that reading this book just might suck you into his more futuristic stuff.
  • Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. The intellectual heft of this book isn’t quite so apparent at first blush, and the spider people might roll some eyeballs. But the man can write, and his discussions of individuality-versus-groupthink are both powerful and subtle.

Some great books that, on careful reflection, are probably not great books to give to a non-SF reader right out of the gate:

Read more

Penguicon 5.0 Wrapup

For me, the defining moment of the Penguicon science-fiction-and-open-source-software convention this past weekend came on Saturday night in the bar. Nick Sagan and I wandered in already fairly blitzed from boozing in another bar, and were quickly joined by Tobias Buckell and his wife Emily. People started streaming in. And at one point, I found myself sitting halfway between a) Charles Stross talking about the socioeconomic policy failures of the John Major administration, and b) John Scalzi and Elizabeth Bear talking about Rob Sawyer in taffeta.

So there’s Penguicon in a nutshell, from my perspective: one part serious business, two parts goofy SFnal fun.

The programming seemed slanted towards the science fiction side of things, with relatively little in the way of crossover. There were panels on Explaining PostgreSQL and panels on Pirates, Ninja, Jedi, and Dwarves, but not a huge amount of mashup between the two. Luckily most of the SF authors on hand were technogeeks themselves (e.g. Charles Stross and Karl Schroeder) or at least pseudo-technogeeks (e.g. me).

Jay Maynard, the Tron GuyBut the folks wandering the halls seemed to lean heavily towards the SF fanboy (and fangirl) sphere. You had the Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like a Character from Tron (pictured to the right), the Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like Zorro, the Chubby Guy Who Filks Like a Zen Master, the Not-at-All-Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like a Jedi, and the Attack of the Thousand Chubby Women Showing Enormous (And Occasionally Inappropriate) Amounts of Cleavage. As for the technogeeks, occasionally you’d see some scrawny, bespectacled soul with a Linux advocacy t-shirt huddled over his laptop in the corner.

Of the half-dozen cons I’ve been to in this past year, Penguicon certainly seemed to be one of the most organized. The ops booth was clearly marked and continuously staffed, and the programming went off pretty much where and when the program book said it would. If there were glitches — and Programming Wrangler Matt Arnold assured me there were some of those — they were largely invisible to me. It definitely helped that the Troy Hilton was very accommodating. Penguicon seems to have taken up pretty much the whole place, and a number of rooms at overflow hotels as well. Which means that just about all of the programming took place in one long, curving hallway, with the room parties and the con suites one quick flight of stairs away. The only obvious snafu I could see was the fact that there were loud anime movies screening right next door to quiet discussions about Technological Singularities, and the panelists would have to speak up to be heard.

Among the folks I got to spend a lot of time with were John Scalzi and his wife Krissy, the former of whom is about to embark on a 492-city tour for his new novel The Last Colony; Tobias Buckell and his wife Emily, the former of whom is on Locus’s shortlist for Best First Novel; and Nick Sagan, screenwriter, SF trilogy novelist, and just fabulously and terrifically nice guy.

Read more

The Works of Kurt Vonnegut

Since I’m thinking about the late, great Kurt Vonnegut, I decided to do a short summary of his works here, along with my take on them and my star ranking of each. Vonnegut graded his own books in the course of his collection Palm Sunday, and I’ve included those rankings here too. Keep in mind that it’s been many years since I’ve read some of these books, so my remembrances of a few might be a bit off.

Player Piano (1952) — 3 1/2 stars (Vonnegut’s own grade: B)
A relatively straightforward satire of a dystopian future about mechanization and its effects on blue-collar workers a la Huxley’s Brave New World. Vonnegut was still finding his voice here, so you’ll find relatively little of his trademark humor or authorial noodling. Some of the symbolism is a bit clunky and obvious. Yet his deep and abiding humanism still shines through every page.

Kurt Vonnegut's 'The Sirens of Titan'The Sirens of Titan (1959) — 4 1/2 stars (Vonnegut’s own grade: A)
The classic space-faring science fiction story as written by Salvador Dali and Lenny Bruce after smoking lots of weed. Vonnegut comes out after a seven-year hiatus swinging with a fully developed voice. The cosmic speculation here about the purpose(lessness) of human existence is both cynical and mindblowing.

Mother Night (1961) — 5 stars (Vonnegut’s own grade: A)
An angry and morally biting story about a Nazi turncoat on death row in Israel post-World War II. This is perhaps the most conventional of all Vonnegut’s novels, and one of his most heartbreaking. The moral, as spelled out in the author’s own preface: “We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.” Don’t miss the Nick Nolte film adaptation either.

Canary in a Cathouse (1961) — See Welcome to the Monkey House below.

Cat’s Cradle (1963) — 5 stars (Vonnegut’s own grade: A+)
The novel pits the cold and brutal scientific worldview of Dr. Felix Hoenikker against the ludicrous made-up religion of Bokononism. The adherents of Bokononism engage in silly rituals, speak gibberish to one another, hold contradictory beliefs about God, and have lots of sex. On a purely metaphysical level, the Bokononists are dead wrong about how the universe works; and yet Hoenikker’s scientific truths bring the world nothing but misery and apocalypse.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) — 4 stars (Vonnegut’s own grade: A)
Vonnegut’s ode to community and civic responsibility, and how they can go horribly awry. A comic American novel about an eccentric philanthropist and the lawyer who tries to bring about his downfall in the tradition of Sinclair Lewis. I believe this is the novel that introduces Vonnegut’s fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) — 5 stars (Vonnegut’s own grade: A+)
Vonnegut writes about Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran and witness to the firebombing of Dresden (as Vonnegut himself was). Like the Bokononists, Billy’s defense against the horrors of the world is to retreat into insanity. He decides that he’s “come unstuck in time” and become the plaything of a fantastic race of aliens who experience their lives by dipping in and out of time at their leisure. The film adaptation is… eh.

Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) — 5 stars (Vonnegut’s own grade: B-)
The seminal collection of KV short stories, repackaging almost all of the stories from Canary in a Cathouse and adding lots more. Includes classics such as “Harrison Bergeron,” “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” and the title story. Alternately hysterical, wistful, psychedelic, and just plain groovy. Yes, there are a couple of clunkers here, but the magic shines through.

Read more

So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

The news of Kurt Vonnegut’s death today hits me particularly hard. For me, Vonnegut was the novelist. He was perhaps the first “adult” novelist I read seriously, the first novelist I fell in love with, and undoubtedly the novelist who got me through high school. I’m sure there are millions of people out there who can say the same thing.

I’ve read just about everything Vonnegut ever published, including his obscure drama Between Time and Timbuktu and his experimental children’s book Sun Moon Star (with Ivan Chermayeff). I’ve probably read Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle at least a dozen times each. I own Philip Jose Farmer’s convincing Vonnegut ventriloquism act Venus on the Half-Shell, penned under the name Kilgore Trout. I brought Timequake with me on my first honeymoon. Just about the only book of Vonnegut’s I never got around to buying was his last collection of essays, A Man Without a Country (though I do own some of his other late output, including Bagombo Snuff Box and God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian).

Kurt VonnegutMy first exposure to Vonnegut was through his seminal collection of short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House. I was probably around 13 or 14. Up to that point, my reading had consisted mostly of straightforward, unironic science fiction and fantasy: J.R.R. Tolkien, Piers Anthony, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov. My other recent obsession at that time was Douglas Adams, who strove all his life to achieve Vonnegutdom with mixed (albeit funnier) results.

Then my sister brought Welcome to the Monkey House home and it quickly swept through the whole family. I was stunned. I’d never read anything like these stories. Cynical, yet wondrous; funny, yet deadly serious; childish, yet crammed full of adult insight.

In short order, I discovered that we had a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five in the home library, and devoured that in one late-night insomniacal sitting. My sister also owned copies of Cat’s Cradle and Player Piano, which I quickly appropriated and wore to pieces. After that I went on a buying spree of mass-market Vonnegut paperbacks until I had bought and read all the Vonnegut I could get my hands on in those pre-eBay days. I remember eagerly passing Bluebeard and Palm Sunday back and forth to friends in high school.

Vonnegut’s lessons are the lessons that I think all teenagers should be required to absorb. They’re the lessons that saved me from completely withdrawing into my shell or going Columbine on my classmates.

These are, I think, the main lessons of Vonnegut’s work:

  • Adults take many things too seriously.
  • We all get buffeted around by powerful forces we don’t understand.
  • Religion, art, politics, and careers are largely full of shit.
  • Just because something is full of shit doesn’t mean it can’t be wonderful or useful.
  • Be nice to each other. We’re all trying the best we can.

Read more