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coalescentTwo more novellas from the wonderful PS Publishing.
Paul Di Fillippo's A Year In The Linear City (now nominated for a Hugo in the Best Novella category) is available as part of the latest four-in-one collection, Cities. The upside of this is that it comes packaged with good novellas by China Mieville and Geoff Ryman; the downside is that you miss out on the gorgeous cover of the PS original.
So if anyone was wondering what to buy me for my birthday, a hardback copy of this would do nicely because A Year In The Linear City is brilliant. It is rich, and complex, and vibrant and lush, and simply more fun than any other story I've read in the past twelve months.
It is many things. It's the story of the steampunk-reminiscent City of the title, bounded on one side by heaven, on the other by hell, and stretching out to infinity between. Di Fillippo's world-building is flawless; the sense of the City as familiar yet different, known yet somehow other is pervasive. But A Year... is also a commentary on SF. The lead character, Diego Patchen, is a writer of Cosmogonic Fiction, exploring his world through his imagination of others. In one standout scene, he visits the driven, demanding, downright Campbellian editor of the pulp magazine Mirror Worlds:
(You can see why I like this story, can't you?)
Of course, the very existence of Di Fillippo's story refutes this stance, for the work is as stylish - or perhaps stylised - as they come, proof that it is possible to do it all. In the end, I think it comes back to the grand imaginative vision that is the Linear City. This is a story to get lost in. To become immersed in.
Adam Roberts' Jupiter, Magnified isn't quite published yet - I picked up a proof copy at Eastercon. In many ways, it is the opposite of A Year.... Where the former is exuberant fantasy, the latter is classic science fiction. Where the one feels wild and untrained, the other is disciplined and focused. Jupiter, Magnified - and indeed much of Roberts' work - has a distinctly structured feel. His stories are clearly constructed, made things. Everything in them happens for a reason; it's the same feeling of neatness and purpose that saturates, for example, M John Harrison's Light.
To date, Roberts has been variously successful in his attempts with this approach. Chalk up Salt and Stone in the plus column, with On and Park Polar in the minus. Thankfully, Jupiter, Magnified falls into the first camp rather than the second. It never excels, but it is a solid, satisfying tale.
As with so many of the best SF stories, the central conceit is simply stated. An image of Jupiter, magnified many times, appears in the Earth's sky, dominating it. The story thereafter is one of reaction; the gas giant looms through the story, omnipresent, but never directly effects any changes. It is explicitly a symbol, in the way that many SF tropes are implicitly symbols, and its importance is in its reflection, in the narrative and in the characters.
Jupiter, Magnified is a character study in a way that A Year In The Linear City simply doesn't have room for; whilst there are solid science fictional concepts at the root of this story, it doesn't have the sheer exuberance of invention of the Di Fillippo work. Worth reading, but only if you're already a fan of Roberts' work.
Paul Di Fillippo's A Year In The Linear City (now nominated for a Hugo in the Best Novella category) is available as part of the latest four-in-one collection, Cities. The upside of this is that it comes packaged with good novellas by China Mieville and Geoff Ryman; the downside is that you miss out on the gorgeous cover of the PS original.
So if anyone was wondering what to buy me for my birthday, a hardback copy of this would do nicely because A Year In The Linear City is brilliant. It is rich, and complex, and vibrant and lush, and simply more fun than any other story I've read in the past twelve months.
It is many things. It's the story of the steampunk-reminiscent City of the title, bounded on one side by heaven, on the other by hell, and stretching out to infinity between. Di Fillippo's world-building is flawless; the sense of the City as familiar yet different, known yet somehow other is pervasive. But A Year... is also a commentary on SF. The lead character, Diego Patchen, is a writer of Cosmogonic Fiction, exploring his world through his imagination of others. In one standout scene, he visits the driven, demanding, downright Campbellian editor of the pulp magazine Mirror Worlds:
"I'm not some tone-deaf oaf like Mallika Prang over at Simulacra, am I? I let you express yourself as you see fit, and I recognise the more elegant turns of your prose. But when it comes down to style versus sense of estrangement, poetry versus ideas, then I have to plump for estrangement and ideas every time. And if a story possesses enough of these, the style just doesn't figure, one way or the other."
(You can see why I like this story, can't you?)
Of course, the very existence of Di Fillippo's story refutes this stance, for the work is as stylish - or perhaps stylised - as they come, proof that it is possible to do it all. In the end, I think it comes back to the grand imaginative vision that is the Linear City. This is a story to get lost in. To become immersed in.
Adam Roberts' Jupiter, Magnified isn't quite published yet - I picked up a proof copy at Eastercon. In many ways, it is the opposite of A Year.... Where the former is exuberant fantasy, the latter is classic science fiction. Where the one feels wild and untrained, the other is disciplined and focused. Jupiter, Magnified - and indeed much of Roberts' work - has a distinctly structured feel. His stories are clearly constructed, made things. Everything in them happens for a reason; it's the same feeling of neatness and purpose that saturates, for example, M John Harrison's Light.
To date, Roberts has been variously successful in his attempts with this approach. Chalk up Salt and Stone in the plus column, with On and Park Polar in the minus. Thankfully, Jupiter, Magnified falls into the first camp rather than the second. It never excels, but it is a solid, satisfying tale.
As with so many of the best SF stories, the central conceit is simply stated. An image of Jupiter, magnified many times, appears in the Earth's sky, dominating it. The story thereafter is one of reaction; the gas giant looms through the story, omnipresent, but never directly effects any changes. It is explicitly a symbol, in the way that many SF tropes are implicitly symbols, and its importance is in its reflection, in the narrative and in the characters.
Jupiter, Magnified is a character study in a way that A Year In The Linear City simply doesn't have room for; whilst there are solid science fictional concepts at the root of this story, it doesn't have the sheer exuberance of invention of the Di Fillippo work. Worth reading, but only if you're already a fan of Roberts' work.
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Ideas vs. Style in SF
Date: 2003-04-26 06:22 am (UTC)I find that ideas are key. If the ideas and concepts of the story are good, I can forgive many lapses in writing quality and style. Heck, I'm a huge Philip K. Dick fan after all!
The problem comes, I find, when the ideas aren't quite up to scratch. When they're interesting, but not ground-breaking. In these cases, if the writing is good I don't mind and can get something out of the book, but if the writing is poor, I find it much harder to appreciate.
Ideally, a piece of writing should have strong ideas as well as being stylistically good. But this is a rarer occurrence than it should be, and while I can appreciate good ideas without the style, as well as style without the good ideas, I sometimes find that bad writing can severely put me off a book with decent but not great ideas.
"And if a story possesses enough of these, the style just doesn't figure, one way or the other."
I guess that's the crux of the matter isn't it? If there're enough ideas and concepts there to sustain a reader. If there aren't enough, then I like to have the style to fall back on, to keep me entertained, but if there are enough, the style matters much less.
Though it's great when a story has both!