Marginalia
Jun. 23rd, 2004 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescentThere's a fun essay by Matthew Cheney, aka The Mumpsimus, in this month's Internet Review of SF (registration required, but it's free). Well, I think it's fun, but then, I would: it's all about what SF is (a genre? A style? Something else?) and how, or whether, you should define or describe it, and how written SF does and should differ from media SF. All things that are right up my street. :) (Update - Ariel's more commercial take on the matter is also interesting.)
If that really doesn't appeal, though, in the same issue there's also a short article/expanded reading list covering Feminist SF. I really have to go and read some of those origin novels at some point; as with so much else, I'm not doing too badly with current examples, but I don't have enough knowledge to keep me out of trouble when I try to actually discuss the area as a whole. That said, half the time I'm inclined to think that the Tiptree Award definition of 'fiction that explores or expands our understanding of gender' is a more useful marker, if only because everyone can be clear on what it means. To date I'm not sure that I've encountered two people with the same definition of feminism, let alone the same definition of feminist SF, and that can make dialogue...tricky. Anyway: I know I have several people knowledgeable about this area on my friendslist, so if they could chime in at this point and give me suggestions as to which books I should be prioritising - criticism, I suspect, may be as usefull as novels - I'd be much obliged.
(Musical interlude: I love this Badly Drawn Boy album, even if it does have what sounds like a children's choir singing backing vocals on not one but two tracks. Not quite as good as About A Boy, I think, but not far off. And hey, that album's one of my top three favourite film soundtracks, so it's some stiff competition. (The others, if you're interested, are probably the ones for Good Will Hunting (Eliot Smith. 'nuff said) and Almost Famous (even the fake song is good!). Although, note to self: must buy the soundtracks for Vanilla Sky and 24 Hour Party People.))
This evening I finally got around to reading 'The Voluntary State' by Christopher Rowe; I liked it a lot. It's set in a dystopian, near-ish future version of Tennessee that's controlled by a rogue AI. This ain't your daddy's post-singularity story, though; Rowe's voluntary state has the requisite grubby biotech-cybertech mashups alright, but the backdrop is deep south gothic with splashes of surrealism. I thought the ending was just a touch on the incoherent side but hey, the rest of it is real damn fine - and it's not every story that brings you anthropomorphised bluegrass math. Go read.
If that really doesn't appeal, though, in the same issue there's also a short article/expanded reading list covering Feminist SF. I really have to go and read some of those origin novels at some point; as with so much else, I'm not doing too badly with current examples, but I don't have enough knowledge to keep me out of trouble when I try to actually discuss the area as a whole. That said, half the time I'm inclined to think that the Tiptree Award definition of 'fiction that explores or expands our understanding of gender' is a more useful marker, if only because everyone can be clear on what it means. To date I'm not sure that I've encountered two people with the same definition of feminism, let alone the same definition of feminist SF, and that can make dialogue...tricky. Anyway: I know I have several people knowledgeable about this area on my friendslist, so if they could chime in at this point and give me suggestions as to which books I should be prioritising - criticism, I suspect, may be as usefull as novels - I'd be much obliged.
(Musical interlude: I love this Badly Drawn Boy album, even if it does have what sounds like a children's choir singing backing vocals on not one but two tracks. Not quite as good as About A Boy, I think, but not far off. And hey, that album's one of my top three favourite film soundtracks, so it's some stiff competition. (The others, if you're interested, are probably the ones for Good Will Hunting (Eliot Smith. 'nuff said) and Almost Famous (even the fake song is good!). Although, note to self: must buy the soundtracks for Vanilla Sky and 24 Hour Party People.))
This evening I finally got around to reading 'The Voluntary State' by Christopher Rowe; I liked it a lot. It's set in a dystopian, near-ish future version of Tennessee that's controlled by a rogue AI. This ain't your daddy's post-singularity story, though; Rowe's voluntary state has the requisite grubby biotech-cybertech mashups alright, but the backdrop is deep south gothic with splashes of surrealism. I thought the ending was just a touch on the incoherent side but hey, the rest of it is real damn fine - and it's not every story that brings you anthropomorphised bluegrass math. Go read.
