Marginalia

[coalescent]

Today's assortment:

A meme via andrewducker: look at my icons and tell me which, if any, you like best, and why.

A fascinating post by Matthew Cheney on teaching Neal Gaiman's American Gods to High School students.

A somewhat melancholy article in the Independent, on the effects of writing for posterity but publishing for now.

A charming story (less than 500 words) by Stuart Carter called 'Tell Stephen Baxter Not To Worry'. On a slightly more surreal Baxter-related note, see this comic.

Angel news: S5 DVDs are due in february. When I saw this, I was terribly worried. I don't want Spike on the cover of the DVDs of my show, dammit! Fortunately the UK edition is much better.

An interview with Tony Ballantyne at Infinity Plus. The followup to Recusion will be Capacity, and after that Divergence. And speaking of followups, Amazon claim to already have a cover for No Present Like Time by Steph Swainston. It's not a patch on the cover for The Year of Our War, though.

There's something niggling at me, in the back of my head, inspired variously by Geneva's review of Cloud Atlas, my disagreement with the same, Jonathan Strahan's post about what those who write about sf should be doing, Jeff Noon's phrase 'post-futurism' and swisstone's writing on Vurt (also here). But I haven't quite worked out what it is that I want to say, yet.

A full list of Guests of Honour for Concussion, the 2006 Eastercon.

Note to self--at some point, read these stories: Life In Stone by Tim Pratt; 'Is You/Is You Ain't' by Michael Canfield; 'Anda's Game' by Cory Doctorow; the last month or so of SCIFICTION. Oh, and there's going to be a dead-tree SCIFICTION anthology. Woohoo!

Mind you, it's reached that point in the year when I have to go into reading triage: when I admit I'm not going to get through everything I would like to get through by the end of the year. Currently, I absolutely want to get through Swiftly by Adam Roberts, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, The Wizard by Gene Wolfe, Air by Geoff Ryman, Set This House In Order by Matt Ruff, City of Pearl by Karen Traviss, Empire by Niall Ferguson, Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, the second issue of PostScripts, the July (all-american special issue) of F&SF, and the Different Worlds anthology. But it's not going to happen, is it?

Comments

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

There is rightness and wrongness in what Strahan writes. I agree that there's reward in looking af the sf diaspora into the mainstream, and the way in which this manifests itself. Where I think he's wrong, and badly wrong, is in the notion that this should supersede the study of sf history, or of the study of sf as a separate field. Frankly, I can't see study of the one can proceed without study of the other. One cannot understand the sf diaspora without understanding sf's history. To eliminate the origins of the diaspora, and look only at its effects, means that study will never rise above the naive. As Cicero rightly said, "If you do not know where you come from, you will always be a child."

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I may be misreading his post, but my impression was that he was talking about priorities, not absolutes. As in, sure, the history of sf is important, but too many people are studying that, and too few studying what's going on right now.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

That's not what he says, though: "those of us who are fascinated with science fiction and who are committed to helping the centre hold, to defining things and to arguing about the central importance of some kind of core sf are wrong ... The task we should be attempting is to describe the literary diaspora ..." That's pretty clearly saying that you shouldn't do the former, you should do the latter.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I see your point--basically, I agree with you that we need to look inward and outward--but I'm still not convinced Strahan meant anything stronger. I mean, on one level, for instance, his point about not trying to define a 'core sf' is obviously true; there just isn't such a thing, so it would be a counterproductive activity.

Maybe I should go and ask him. :)