INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 (2 page)

JIM STEEL

It is often said that the difference between a reviewer and a critic is that you read the first before you come to the book, and the second afterwards. The Book Zone reviews books and its first responsibility is to you, dear reader. It has to be honest, obviously, but it must also amuse and inform. None of you reads every single book that we review; not every book will be to your taste. But we try to make every review worth reading. And – believe it or not – while a negative review can be highly entertaining, I always try to match reviewers with books that they will enjoy or, at least, be able to write about from an informed perspective.

The speculative fiction market is changing in all sorts of ways and in many respects we are returning to a pre-Gernsback state of affairs. Mainstream writers are no longer afraid to dabble in genre. This is something that has been building since the cinema blockbuster explosion of the seventies threw the nodes into the mainstream, and it is to be welcomed with open arms. We do, however, still need to distinguish between the writers who have an intrinsic grasp of the form and those who view the genre merely as an allegorical prop. The very nature of publishing is changing as well, with self-publishers and even major publishers releasing some books only in an electronic format. The ease of production has resulted in some very feeble writing coming before us, but there are grains to be found in the mountain of chaff. We would be negligent if we ignored them entirely.

It is also vital that we remember that SF is not merely the playground of white male Anglophone writers. There is no gender imbalance among readers and writers (if anything, female readers outnumber males), so there shouldn’t be one in reviews. The fact that there is a dichotomy is something that has been explored in greater depth in other venues and it is a problem that involves constant vigilance on my part. I don’t always succeed but it is something that I am always aware of. Generally we can only review the books we get sent, but why do we have to chase publishers to get review copies for female writers more than those for male?

I am also attempting to look outside of the Anglo-American tradition. For a genre that supposedly spans the universe, it seems strange that so many of us restrict our reading to material that comes from such a small region.
Science Fiction World
is China’s
Interzone
and a decade ago it had an estimated readership of a million. Those readers weren’t reading occidental reprints. African SF is increasingly appearing before us, both in English and in translation. And Arabic SF, as Amal El-Mohtar recently pointed out, is now a thing. All of these people, and more, are bringing their own traditions and perspectives to SF and it is all the richer for it.

We haven’t the room to review every book that we’re sent, but one thing’s certain: if we don’t have it then we won’t be reviewing it. If you’re a writer or publisher then you could do a lot worse than send your book to us at the editorial address.

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

Loncon 3
, the 2014 World SF Convention held in London’s ExCeL centre, was the largest ever Worldcon in terms of registrations sold (10,833) and the second largest for its actual attendance figure of 7,951. With cunning forethought, the huge bleak spaces of the main ExCeL halls used were broken up into a fascinating maze of exhibits, dealer tables and art displays on an upper level, with catering, special-interest tents, a library area and much else in the extensive ‘Fan Village’ below. This all worked rather well, and – unusually for a British worldcon – the real ale didn’t run out. The usual awards were presented…

Hugos.
Novel: Ann Leckie,
Ancillary Justice
, which had already swept the Clarke, Nebula and others. Novella: Charles Stross, ‘Equoid’ (Tor.com 9/13). Novelette: Mary Robinette Kowal, ‘The Lady Astronaut of Mars’, (
Rip-Off!
2012; this audiobook version deemed ineligible in 2013; maryrobinettekowal.com 2/13). Short: John Chu, ‘The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere’ (Tor.com 2/13). Dramatic, Long:
Gravity
. Dramatic, Short:
Game of Thrones
, ‘The Rains of Castamere’. Related Work: Kameron Hurley, ‘We Have Always Fought’ (
A Dribble of Ink
5/13). Graphic Story: Randall Munroe, ‘Time’ (xkcd.com). Pro Editor, Long: Ginjer Buchanan. Pro Editor, Short: Ellen Datlow. Pro Artist: Julie Dillon. Semiprozine:
Lightspeed
. Fanzine:
A Dribble of Ink
. Fancast:
SF Signal Podcast
. Fan Writer: Kameron Hurley. Fan Artist: Sarah Webb. John W. Campbell Award: Sofia Samatar.

Robert Silverberg
greeted me at Loncon with a cheering word: ‘Everyone who won a Hugo before me is now dead.’

As Others See Us.
The Jabberwocky music festival, scheduled simultaneously in the vast Loncon 3 venue, was cancelled. A fan site explained: ‘The ExCeL Centre is not a known music space. Not only is it kind of a pain in the arse to get to, but nobody wants to see Nils Frahm in a sparsely populated, untested conference centre with a fucking science-fiction convention next door.’ •
The Guardian
’s friendlier coverage scored highly on the sf journalism bingo card with ‘World Science Fiction Convention 2014 beams into London / Nowt so queer as filk as Loncon at the ExCel centre allies sci-fi and fantasy…’

Retro Hugos
for 1938 work. Novel: T.H. White,
The Sword in the Stone
. Novella: John W. Campbell as Don A Stuart, ‘Who Goes There?’ (
Astounding
8/38). Novelette: Clifford D. Simak, ‘Rule 18’ (
Astounding
7/38). Short: Arthur C. Clarke, ‘How We Went to Mars’ (
Amateur Science Stories
3/38). Dramatic:
The War of the Worlds
(radio). Editor: John W. Campbell. Pro Artist: Virgil Finlay. Fanzine:
Imagination!
Fan Writer: Ray Bradbury.

Future Worldcons.
Next year is Spokane (sasquan.org); in the 2016 site selection at Loncon, a Beijing bid – China’s first attempt – lost by a huge margin to Kansas City (midamericon2.org). 2017 bids are Helsinki and Japan; 2018, New Orleans and San José; 2019, Dublin unopposed; 2020, New Zealand.

Nnedi Okorafor
, on the Afrofuturism panel at Detcon, ‘gave an example of how our community has much to learn on such questions, informing us that she had been asked, “You've got Anansi in your book. Did you get that from
American Gods
?”’ (
Nice Distinctions
)

The Weakest Link.
Host: ‘Which Irvine Welsh novel features a monologue by a tapeworm?’ Contestant: ‘
Wuthering Heights
.’ (ITV
The Chase
) • Host: ‘It lives in a hutch. Bugs Bunny is one of them.’ Contestant: ‘An owl?’ (Heart FM, Glasgow)

Life Achievement Awards.
Chesley (art): Jim Burns, who’d thought it was safe to go to a party rather than the Chesleys presentation because he wasn’t on the ballot. • First Fandom Hall of Fame: John Clute; posthumous, John Carnell and Walter H. Gillings. • World Fantasy: Ellen Datlow, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

Albus Dumbledore
headed the
Times Educational Supplement
poll for UK teachers’ favourite role model. (
Independent
)

Terry Pratchett
sadly cancelled a public appearance: ‘I […] have been able to write for much longer than any of us ever thought possible, but now The Embuggerance is finally catching up with me, along with other age-related ailments.’ (
Guardian
)

Tove Jansson
of Moomintroll fame appears on a new two-Euro coin from the Mint of Finland, marking her birth centenary in August.

Kim Newman
announced: ‘So I’ll be letting my Horror Writers Association membership expire.’ This in response to the HWA vote to allow self-published works as an active membership qualification, provided they earn $2,000 within two years of publication. Various concerned commentators say SFWA [must never/urgently needs to] follow suit.

Still More Awards.
Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery: Mildred Clingerman. • Mythopoeic (fantasy) novel categories. Adult: Helene Wecker,
The Golem and the Jinni
. Children: Holly Black,
Doll Bones
. • Prometheus (libertarian) novel award (tie): Cory Doctorow,
Homeland
; Ramez Naam,
Nexus
. • Sidewise (alt-history) novel award (tie): D.J. Taylor,
The Windsor Faction
; Bryce Zabel,
Surrounded by Enemies: What If Kennedy Survived Dallas?
.

Diana Wynne Jones
’s 80th birthday on 16 August was marked by an animated ‘Google doodle’ themed for
Howl’s Moving Castle
.

Thog’s Masterclass.
Palaeometeorology Dept.
‘It was a gorgeous day, with gossamer clouds strung out like dinosaur bones across the blue sky.’ (Mark Edwards,
The Magpies
, 2013) •
Talking Dirty Dept.
‘The boy tilted back his head to scream at the sky and words erupted from the hole in his face like sewage from a burst pipe.’ (Tom Ward, ‘A Departure’, 2013) •
Dept of Neat Tricks.
‘I had barely time to secrete myself before he turned. Luckily, the wall beside me was irregular with protuberances, and I was able to pack myself into one of them.’ (Hugh B Cave, ‘The Door of Doom’, January 1932
Strange Tales
) • ‘Masters hoisted his beef with two hands, took a bite, and looked at me through hunched shoulders as he chewed.’ (Michael Harvey,
The Chicago Way
, 2007) • ‘She looked back at Marnes, saw him frowning at her beneath his moustache.’ (Hugh Howey,
Wool
, 2011) • ‘A hand took his, pressed it firmly, looked him straight in the eye.’ (Neil Gaiman,
American Gods
, 2001)

R.I.P.

Margot Adler
(1946–2014), US radio journalist and author whose books include the nonfiction
Vampires Are Us
(2014), died on 28 July aged 68.

Thomas Berger
(1924–2014), US author best known for the quasi-Western
Little Big Man
(1964), several of whose novels explored sf themes – from cryonics in
Vital Parts
(1960) to androids in
Adventures of the Artificial Woman
(2004) – died on 13 July. He was 89.

John Blundall
(1937–2014), UK artist and puppeteer who created several characters for Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation shows – most famously Lady Penelope’s butler/chauffeur Parker – died on 18 August aged 77.

Neil Craig
, proprietor since the early 1980s of Glasgow’s sf books and comics shop Futureshock, died unexpectedly on 29 June; he was 59.

J.T. Edson
(1928–2014), UK author famed for Westerns, who also wrote the Tarzan-inspired Bunduki sf series opening with
Bunduki
(1975), died on 17 July aged 86.

Curt Gentry
(1931–2014), US author whose disaster novel
The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California
(1968) drops Los Angeles and most of California into the sea, died on 10 July aged 83.

C.J. Henderson
(1951–2013), US author whose work included horror, urban fantasy – the Teddy London series opening with
The Things That Are Not There
(1992) – and comics, died on 4 July aged 62.

Chapman Pincher
(1914–2014), UK journalist and author whose works include the sf
Not with a Bang
(1965) and some borderline-fantastic novels, died on 5 August; he was 100.

Ana María Matute
(1925–2014), distinguished Spanish author whose novels often contained fantasy/supernatural elements, died on 25 June aged 88. Her many awards include the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honour.

Walter Dean Myers
(1937–2014), US author whose popular YA stories (two were Newbery Honor Books) include the sf
Brainstorm
(1977), died on 1 July aged 76.

Lawrence P. Santoro
, US horror author and podcast host whose story collection is
Drink for the Thirst to Come
(2011), died on 25 July aged 71.

Jan Shepheard
(1935–2014), UK designer and art editor for various comics including
Valiant
,
2000
AD
(where she created the Judge Dredd title logo) from its 1977 launch and
Starlord
, died on 27 June.

Jory Sherman
(1932–2014), US author of many Westerns and the seven-book ‘Chill’ psychic-investigator series beginning with
Satan’s Seed
(1978), died on 28 June; he was 81.

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

Doctor Johnson’s Awesome Mix Tape

As the late American writer David Foster Wallace once pointed out, we are existentially alone on the planet. Trapped inside two and a bit pounds of skull, I cannot feel what you are feeling and you cannot know what I am thinking. Books, at their best, are a bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness for it is only by immersing ourselves in the words and thoughts of others that we can escape the cramped confines of our own bedraggled self. If we take Foster Wallace at his word and assume that art should aim to break down the barriers between stranded subjectivities then we need to think about how you are going to relate to me and I to you.

In a recent article published in
The New Yorker
magazine, Rebecca Meads describes how calling a piece of work ‘relatable’ has emerged as the highest piece of critical praise that this particular cultural moment can bestow. At first glance, calling something relatable seems to be little more than an ugly way of calling it accessible but relatability is actually a much narrower concept. To call a work accessible is to say that neither its style nor its content constitute much of a barrier when it comes to getting to grips with what a work is really trying to say. Relatability, on the other hand, tends to be a quality that accrues to characters whose experiences are so similar to those of the audience that literally everyone can find themselves in what a work is trying to describe. Meads refers to relatability as a scourge on Western culture, an aesthetic designed to ensure that audiences need neither stretch their empathic muscles nor make an imaginative leap. For Meads, making a work relatable means sticking it in a blender, pulping the difficulty and serving it up for an audience so intellectually toothless that they prefer to ingest their culture through a straw. As someone who enjoys the challenge of unflinchingly difficult books and films, my first instinct is to agree with Meads but science fiction is something of a special case: a genre prone to setting its stories on alien planets filled with alien characters does need to worry about how it can grant its readers access to an author’s headspace. This is a column about two works of science fiction that, despite being radically different use similar storytelling techniques to make the inhuman seem relatable.

Already being touted as the surprise box-office sensation of the summer by people who are evidently unaware of advertising, James Gunn’s
Guardians of the Galaxy
is the first Marvel Studios film to focus exclusively on events with no connection to Earth. Genre fans might not perceive this as much of a barrier to entry but it is worth remembering that, up until quite recently, works like Christopher Nolan’s
Batman
trilogy and Matthew Vaughn’s
X-Men: First Class
worked incredibly hard to implant their superheroes in gritty realistic worlds lest their audience find the thought of spandex-clad vigilantes with magical powers just a little bit too silly. This is a very real concern for studio executives as Martin Campbell’s
Green Lantern
was ripped to shreds for attempting to combine standard super-heroics with po-faced space opera.

Guardians of the Galaxy
opens with one of the most nakedly manipulative sequences in recent cinematic history as a small child is forced to bid a reluctant farewell to his dying mother. Reminiscent of those TV adverts encouraging us to give money to sick kiddies and adorable puppies, the scene is intended to make us feel pity before using that pity to drag us off to an alien landscape filled with strange planets and exotic aliens whose names describe what it is they do for a living: The Collector, The Broker, Ronan The Accuser, Graham The Mid-Level Manager In A Regional Office Supplies Company. You know…the type of stupid clunky shit that genre fiction stopped doing a generation ago.

Having used a dead parent to manipulate the audience into caring about its blandly human point-of-view character, the film still faces a tough climb up the north face of Mount Exposition. Clearly concerned that his audience might black out at the seventeenth line of dialogue beginning “As you know…” Gunn uses a combination of manipulative sentimentality, impossibly broad humour and old-fashioned values like family and friendship to keep his story relatable. The film’s main protagonist even carries around an old Walkman containing a mix tape of his mother’s favourite songs and while the rights to those 1970s disco tunes must have cost Marvel an arm and a leg, the trans-generational nostalgia they kick up does serve to ease the audience into the kind of dense, pompous and irksome setting that might otherwise have sent them running from the cinema.

A million miles and a billion dollars away from the heavy-handed manipulations of
Guardians
is one of the finest science fiction novels of 2013. Already familiar to genre audiences thanks to his Clarke Award-nominated
Far North
, Marcel Theroux’s fifth novel
Strange Bodies
begins with a man unexpectedly turning up at an ex-girlfriend’s home. What makes this arrival unexpected is the fact that the man is supposed to have died in a road traffic accident and while all of his mannerisms and memories point to the fact that he is the person he claims to be, he looks entirely different. How can a man be both alive and dead as well as both himself and someone else? Theroux answers this question by using science fictional conceits to examine the nature of the self as well as our ideas about life, death and personal identity.

Reading
Strange Bodies
means learning to navigate a maze of framing devices; one chapter is presented as a diary entry, the next takes the form of a psychiatrist’s notes, then we move on to a letter before slinking back to a diary entry from what might be an entirely different timeframe. Each of these devices provides a very different view of the book’s protagonist and encourages us to wonder whether these fractious snapshots might not actually be of different people. Theroux eventually explains what is going on by invoking the kind of gonzo science and quasi-mystical politics that you’d expect from a secret history of the Soviet Union but as challenging as the book’s understanding of the self may be, Theroux has already laid the groundwork by using his framing devices to coax us into asking questions to which he has all the answers. By asking his readers to meet him half way, Theroux ensures that the journey seems much shorter and the small imaginative leap he leaves us with is made just that little bit easier by the introduction of a major literary figure.

Our guide to the world of Theroux’s novel is the 18th Century poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Doctor Samuel Johnson. His appearance in 21st Century London is designed to both provoke questions about the nature of the self (‘is it really Doctor Johnson?’) and get us used to looking at the world through science fictional goggles. Theroux’s Johnson expresses horror at the type of things that middle-class Londoners keep in their kitchens and wonder at the idea of restaurants that serve nothing but cheese and tomato on flat bread. Warm and incredibly funny, these fish-out-of-water moments detach us from the present and prepare us for thinking about the novel’s hypothetical future. A time from which the contemporary reader and protagonist are just as disconnected as Johnson is from ours.

Despite their differences,
Guardians of the Galaxy
and
Strange Bodies
share that quintessentially science fictional need to guide their audiences away from their mundane existence and towards worlds that are strikingly different from their own. However, while Theroux’s Pizza-loving Johnson may well be nothing more than a sophisticated version of Gunn’s disco-loving protagonist, it is worth paying attention to the reasons why these writers want to usher across the bridge of human loneliness in the first place: Theroux uses Johnson as a means of encouraging us to ask questions about life, death and who we are as people while Gunn wants us to be aware of some stuff that’ll help us to make sense of the next
Avengers
movie. Just because science fiction shares a set of common techniques, it doesn’t mean that all science fiction is equally worthy of your time.