Raritania

Guest Blog Post: Alchemy of Scrawl

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:55:00 +0000

My guest post for the blog Alchemy of Scrawl is up. You can check it out here.

New in Print . . . (Paris in the Twenty-First Century and Other Stories)
2/1/12
New in Print . . . (Guardians)
1/19/12
Blog Talk Radio Interview
1/16/12
Literary R & R Reviews Surviving the Spike
1/14/12
Indie Snippets
12/20/11
Surviving the Spike: A Sample
12/1/11
Call for Reviews of Independent SF
11/22/11
A Call for Guest Bloggers
11/22/11
Interview With Maria Violante
11/19/11
The Indie Publishing Scene: Book Review Blogs
11/19/11
My New Goodreads Page
11/17/11
On Publishing
10/30/11
My New Facebook Page
10/20/11
New in Print . . . (After the New Wave: Science Fiction Since 1980)
8/21/11
New in Print . . . (Surviving the Spike)
8/7/11

Review: The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:51:00 +0000

New York: Ace, 1983, pp. 387.

Along with K.W. Jeter and James Blaylock, Tim Powers has been hailed as a founder of the steampunk genre, principally because of The Anubis Gates.1 In this novel Literature Professor Brendan Doyle is recruited by tycoon J. Cochran Darrow to accompany his party on a trip back in time to 1810, which journey immerses Doyle in not just one, but several, deadly conspiracies colliding with one another.

The characters are mostly one-dimensional--and protagonist Doyle rather forgettable--but together they certainly comprise a large and colorful cast, with Doyle's blandness working by letting him play the "straight man" to the dark and at times grotesque weirdness all around him. Powers's recreation of Regency-era London is rich, lively and engaging (though the more briefly treated Greek and Egyptian settings are less striking, and readers led to expect a world created by an anachronistic steam-based technology by the "steampunk" label will be let down).

Additionally, the novel is densely (and at times head-spinningly) plotted, and once the exposition is through, swiftly paced, with Powers sending his characters leaping through innumerable plot twists with an astonishing lightness of foot. Predictably, the storytelling gets diffuse (with the occasional marring of the flow by a stumble in the often thick description not helpful), and not every plot thread concludes as satisfactorily as might be hoped, but the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and Powers succeeds in tying it all up novel's end.

Nearly three decades on, in the midst of a steampunk boom, the book cannot appear as groundbreaking as it did in 1983, but for all its weaknesses it remains such a strange, wild and colorful ride to be well worth the read.

1. Jeter is credited with coining the term in an April 1987 letter to Locus magazine. Jeter enjoys this status because of Morlock Night (1979) and Infernal Devices (1987), Blaylock because of the Ignacio Narbondo/Langdon St. Ives stories (comprised of a trilogy of novels--1984's The Digging Leviathan, 1986's Homunculus and 1988's Lord Kelvin's Machine--and the associated short fiction, much of it recently gathered together in the 2008 omnibus The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives).

A History of the Spy Story, Part II: The Life of a Genre

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:49:00 +0000

Today historians of the spy story commonly identify either Rudyard Kipling's Kim or Erskine Childers' Riddle of the Sands as the first modern spy novel. Of course, it might be argued that Kim is essentially a picaresque which traces the early part of a spy's career, and Riddle a sailing story which involves espionage. However, it was not long before writers started to produce works more fully focused on this theme, and in the process established the rough boundaries of the field – its core themes, concerns and plot formulas - as well as the range of viewpoints within which subsequent authors generally worked.

William Le Queux went beyond his early forays into this area as a writer of invasion stories in Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England (1909) offered a collection of loosely connected stories centering on German schemes against England (notable for their use of the theft of technical secrets as a basis for a spy story), and Edward Phillips Oppenheim did the same, notably in the book for which he is best remembered today, The Great Impersonation (1920), an early treatment of the idea of the deep-cover mole. John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) offered the perennial theme of an innocent man forced to go on the run by villains whom he must take on nearly single-handed to clear his name and save the day (and gave the spy genre its first major series' character in Richard Hannay). H.C. "Sapper" McNeil's Bulldog Drummond (1920) presented a hugely influential proto-James Bond in its titular protagonist.

Meanwhile, Joseph Conrad was already treating espionage as a subject of serious drama, and offering a more critical take on the game itself in The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911). Stories of seedy little men playing seedy little games which destroy human lives, they dealt with terrorism and counterrorism, agent provocateurs and false flag attacks - as well as how the game looks from the standpoint of a double agent, and a foretaste of later stories of depravity on the part of the forces of order. W. Somerset Maugham brought irony and humor to the genre in Ashenden (1928), as well as a strong sense of espionage as a matter of tedious routine, a consciousness of the scale and organization of modern intelligence operations, and a memorable spymaster in "R" (a generation before Ian Fleming gave us "M").

In the next decade Eric Ambler stood the conventions of Oppenheim, Buchan and company on their head - and offered a leftish view of them - in novels like The Dark Frontier (1936), as well as Background to Danger (1937), Cause for Alarm (1938) and A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939). The Dark Frontier was an outright parody of the genre's conventions (which offered a protagonist who doesn't remember his true identity and instead thinks he's a legendary super-operative long before The Bourne Identity, as well as an early tale about keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of "rogue" states), while the outsiders pulled into the game in novels like Background to Danger do not give a heroic account of themselves in the manner of Buchan's Richard Hannay, but are simply ordinary people fighting for their lives. Graham Greene, getting his start in the genre at roughly the same time, took a similar course in books like This Gun for Hire (1936), which depicted an operative who turns on villainous employers after they betray him. The stories of Ambler and Greene are also noteworthy for their depiction of the threat as coming not from foreigners or domestic radicals (e.g. Communists and anarchists), but from within "our" Establishment (like British business interests happy to do business with Fascists in Background to Danger and Cause for Alarm, or industrialists who welcome - and even provoke - war for the profits it will bring them in This Gun for Hire) – and heroism located not in "our" people, but those normally regarded as villains (like Ambler's Soviet superspy Andreas P. Zaleshoff).

Looking on this list of works it may seem there was little for later writers to add after 1940, beyond the genre's obvious adaptation to changes in international politics (the outbreak of World War II, or the Cold War), technology (like jet travel, communications satellites, and computers) and attitudes toward race, gender and sex (one way in which Drummond was not like Bond), the adoption of "difficult," Modernist storytelling techniques (which touched every genre over the course of the twentieth century) and the tendency of books to lengthen (a matter of trends in the publishing industry as a whole). Nonetheless, the genre evolved over subsequent decades in three notable ways.

The first is the changing nature of the protagonists. In the early novels mentioned above (the idiosyncratic works of Conrad aside) the heroes were typically men with public-school educations, independent incomes and servants; gentlemen-sportsmen at home in London clubs and on rural estates. They often led lives of leisure, having inherited wealth (like Everard Dominey in The Great Impersonation, Sapper's Drummond, and the unnamed protagonist of Geoffrey Household's 1939 Rogue Male), or already accumulated it (like Buchan's Hannay, who at the start of The Thirty-Nine Steps has already made his fortune in southern Africa before coming to Britain). Such jobs as they did hold were typically of the kind to which the upper-class commonly gravitated, and which were likely to allow a lengthy leave (like Childers' Carruthers in The Riddle of the Sands, a Foreign Office official able to take a month off just to go sail and shoot in the Baltic – or for that matter, Ambler heroes like Coffin for Dimitrios's Charles Latimer). They tended to have conservative outlooks, and adhered to the political and social orthodoxies of their day, including a simplistic nationalism. And they typically entered the adventure on their own initiative, often after a chance meeting, with a restlessness and taste for adventure a crucial factor in their decision (these last treated most blatantly in Drummond's case).

Later protagonists were less likely to be such examples of upper-class gentility, as with the unnamed hero of Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File (1961) and its sequels, and Adam Hall's Quiller, who pointedly tells the reader that "We are not gentlemen" as he watches a member of the opposition burn to death in a car after deciding not to save him in The Berlin Memorandum (1966).1 Not only were they more likely to be ambivalent about the game, but they were often cynical about nationalism and political ideology. This was not only the case when they were outsiders unfortunate enough to get mixed up in the business, like journalist Thomas Fowler's association with Alden Pyle in Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955), but also when they were professional intelligence operatives, like John Le Carre characters like Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963). At times, this went as far as outright hostility or disdain toward the Establishment, with not only leftist but rightist writers as well expressing such sentiments (as in William Haggard's idiosyncratic Colonel Russell novels). Additionally, the professionals increasingly squeezed out plucky amateurs like Bulldog Drummond, certainly where series characters are concerned. (Still, the older-style sensibility did not completely disappear, much of it surviving in later characters like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan.)

The second is a growing recognition of, and response to, what might usefully be termed the "tiny rivet" problem. As Maugham put it in Ashenden,

Being no more than a tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine . . . [his protagonist] never had the advantage of seeing a completed action. He was concerned with the beginning or the end of it, perhaps, or with some incident in the middle, but what his own doings led to he had seldom a chance of discovering. It was as unsatisfactory as those modern novels that give you a number of unrelated episodes and expect you by piecing them together to construct in your mind a connected narrative.

In that novel Maugham worked within the framework he described to give us a protagonist who does not see completed actions (the drama in his heroes' adventures typically supplied by other events and factors), but this was a rarity, and other writers dealt with it in two different ways.

One group simply ignored or worked around the fact, with heroes fortuitously having fuller participation – for instance, because some unlikely circumstances have forced them to operate on their own (as in the stories by Buchan and Ambler mentioned above). The other group devoted increasing attention to the "vast and complicated machine," describing its operations at length – both bureaucratic, and technological. Ian Fleming's novels, for instance, presented James Bond as part of a vast organization, and made the reader quite conscious of the fact in novels like Moonraker (1955) and Thunderball (1961) (even as his membership in the special double-o section placed him in the kinds of exceptional positions noted above). Other, later authors went further, not concentrating their narrative on one character, or a few characters, but rather using a large number of viewpoint characters to show as well as tell about more aspects of the machine's functioning – so that the plot is really the heart of the story, and the national security state the real protagonist, with the ostensible characters really just "rivets" inside of it. (At most, one of those characters might be recognizable as a protagonist because he occupies a place within the machine that lets him have a fuller view of the picture than the others.)

Frederick Forsyth was a crucial developer of the latter approach, with novels like his classic The Day of the Jackal (1971), in which the titular assassin begins and ends the story as a cipher, and the opposition is not so much Claude Lebel (who is not introduced until halfway into the story), but the French security state over which Lebel exercises exceptional powers for a brief spell. Seven years later Forsyth repeated the approach, on an even larger canvas, in The Devil's Alternative (1978), as did Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre's The Fifth Horseman (1980). However, Tom Clancy may be said to epitomize this "epic" approach to the tale of international security crisis, his hero Ryan (first introduced in 1984's The Hunt for Red October) tellingly not a field operative but an intelligence analyst, who in the sequels occupied positions of successively greater responsibility - all the way up to the presidency itself by the end of Debt of Honor (1994).

The third is a late but significant Americanization of the genre from the 1970s. Certainly there were some Americans who met with a measure of success writing in the genre before then, like Edward Aarons, author of the Sam Durrell novels, Donald Hamilton, who penned the Matt Helm series, and Richard Condon with the classic The Manchurian Candidate (1959), but nearly all of the important innovators in this area pre-1970, all of the writers remembered and being read today, are British. In his 1972 history of the crime story, Mortal Consequences, Julian Symons speculated that this was due to

the prevailing air of sophisticated coolness about ends and means. Certainly the Americans . . . have never been able to treat the existence of spies threatening or betraying their security with anything but the most narrowly nationalistic seriousness.2

There seems something to this analysis, especially as the American writers who made a splash at this time, like Robert Ludlum in The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971) and The Matarese Circle (1979), Trevanian in The Eiger Sanction (1972), James Grady in Six Days of the Condor (1973) and Charles McCarry in The Miernik Dossier and The Tears of Autumn (1975), offered more varied and nuanced views of such matters. There is no question that many American writers came to enjoy vast commercial success (as Ludlum and Clancy did), and while it would be difficult to point to an American with the status of a Greene or a Le Carre, for instance, there was something more like parity in the status of later American and British writers in the field.

All three of these changes had clearly become manifest by the end of the 1970s, by which time the spy genre was starting to look a bit worn-out again. Considering the fact I am once more reminded of John Barnes argument in the essay "Reading for the Undead" that genres tend to follow a three-generation life cycle, with the first generation discovering something new, a second generation finding an established field and going on to develop its still unexploited potentials (a process likely to be guided by a critical reassessment of previous work) – and the third less concerned with innovation than "doing it well" as it turns into

something like an inside joke (as with much of live theatre), a treasured family story (as with opera or jazz), or a set of exercises in which to display virtuosity (as with ballet and with much of orchestral music).

It is easy to fall into the trap of fitting facts to theories. Still, the spy story (much like the mystery and science fiction) does seem to me to have traveled something like this course, with writers like Childers, Le Queux and Oppenheim being first-generation early innovators, and Ambler and Greene early second-generation authors bringing new ideas (political as well as aesthetic) and greater skill to a genre that was already threatening to grow stale prior to their appearance.

In the third generation, clearly underway by the 1970s, there seemed a greater tendency to look back, evident in such things as the genre having become so over-the-top that parody went unrecognized – as happened with Trevanian's Jonathan Hemlock novels and Shibumi (1979), which were almost universally read as straight thrillers by critics and general audiences alike (much to that author's frustration). There is also the increased prominence of stories set in World War II (and other earlier periods) in the output of new authors like Robert Ludlum and Ken Follett, and the resurrection of James Bond by John Gardner and Gildrose Publications in 1981 with License Renewed.3

It seems that generic boundaries get fuzzy at this stage of the life cycle, and this tendency was evident in the life of the spy story as well, increasingly hybridized with elements from other genres providing the principal interest – as with Craig Thomas "espionage adventures" like Firefox (1978), the military techno-thrillers of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan books, Dale Brown's Day of the Cheetah (1989) or Payne Harrison's Storming Intrepid (1989), and the Dirk Pitt novels of Clive Cussler, like Raise the Titanic! (1976) and Deep Six (1984), which combined espionage and military action with historical mystery and maritime adventure (in a way, coming back full circle to Childers).

Besides events inside the genre, it seems that world events supported such a turn. The tendency to look back can be seen as at least partly a reflection of the cultural mood of the 1970s – a sense of national decline (as the end of the post-war boom, the energy crisis, and the decline of colonial powers like Britain and France largely played itself out), and of ambivalence about present-day politics (in reaction to Vietnam, Watergate and the like) made earlier periods where claims to national greatness were more credible and clear-cut "good guys" and "bad guys" easier to identify more attractive.4 World War II happened to meet both needs.

It is worth remembering, too, that the spy story arose in an era of profound international tension, over which the danger of systemic, great power war constantly hovered – and great ideological tension, as nineteenth century liberal society faced challenges from left and right. The advent of détente, and the partial waning of Cold War tensions that went with it, may have made it appear somewhat less compelling as subject matter for some, and earlier conflicts commensurately more attractive. There is no question that the end of the Cold War took a great deal of the remaining steam out of the genre. (To put it bluntly, industrial espionage, terrorism, international crime, rogue states and the faint possibility of Western conflict with Russia or China were no substitute for the Soviets.) Spy novels continued to be written afterward, by new authors – like Charles Cumming, Henry Porter, Barry Eisler and Daniel Silva - as well as the older writers so established as to be nearly immune to such fluctuations in the market - like Forsyth, Clancy and Le Carre (all still publishing). However, their book sales and overall cultural impact tended to be less impressive than formerly (though Clancy still managed to be one of the top-selling authors of the '90s), and noteworthy innovation scarcer, and the tendency to look backward growing only more pronounced.5 In the 2000s the most successful stories of international intrigue were more likely to be concerned with historical-religious-Masonic mysteries in the manner of Dan Brown's Robert Langdon novels (or Matthew Reilly's Jack West novels) than conventional political intrigue. I see little sign that the genre is going to stage some comeback, but, to use John Barnes's term, its "afterlife" is at the least a presence in the cultural landscape.

NOTES
1. Fleming's Bond can be thought of as halfway between these and a later generation of action heroes. Like the older style of protagonist, he went to Eton, enjoys an independent income and has a housekeeper looking after his apartment. However, he is also a long-serving professional intelligence operative in the British Secret Service (and one with a "license to kill" at that), flouts Victorian mores in his attitudes toward gambling and sex, and is not unknown to express ambivalence about his profession and the ends it serves.
2. Symons attributes this difference to the United States' "direct involvement in various wars." This is unconvincing, however, as Britain was more lengthily and completely involved in both of the World Wars than the United States (and suffered far more in them by any measure); far closer to the "front-line" in the Cold War; and in the decades after 1945, involved in dozens of conflicts as it disengaged from its empire, not all of them small in scale (as with the Malaysian Emergency). Rather, the context in which they fought those wars would seem relevant. The spy genre appeared in Britain during a period of concern about the country's decline relative to other, rising powers (like Germany), fears which became realities as the century progressed. The 1970s, when the change arrived for American spy fiction, saw the arrival of a comparable mood in the United States (amid the Vietnam War, the end of the Bretton Woods economic order, the oil crisis and other such challenges). One might conclude from this that the genre flourishes in a period when the pious simplicities of jingoism and national exceptionalism are shown up, and public opinion reckons with life's more complex realities.
3. Ludlum's first book, The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971), used an incident in World War II as a frame for a story of the rise of the Nazis in the '20s, and the The Rhinemann Exchange (1974) was wholly set during World War II, as was a significant part of The Gemini Contenders (1976), and the opening of The Holcroft Covenant (1978), which had for its theme the post-war legacy of the Third Reich. Ken Follett made his name as a thriller writer with a World War II story, The Eye of the Needle (1978), as did Jack Higgins with the spies-and-commandos story The Eagle Has Landed (1975). Frederick Forsyth's first two thrillers, The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File (1973), were both set in the early 1960s, during past periods of political crisis. By and large, the major works of the 1950s and 1960s did not make such use of earlier periods.
4. Certainly some British writers compensated for Britain's diminution by emphasizing the country's "special relationship" with the United States, as Fleming did in novels like 1953's Casino Royale (where the combination of American cash and British skill defeated Le Chiffre), and as others have continued to do down to the present. However, by the 1960s and 1970s many writers were taking a more ironic view, like Le Carre in The Looking Glass War (1965), A Small Town in Germany (1968), and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), and Joseph Hone in The Private Sector (1971) – in all of which books, the inability or unwillingness of British officials to adapt to their country's decline was a prominent theme.
5. One of Le Carre's best-received post-Cold War novels, 1995's The Tailor of Panama, was a homage to Greene's Our Man in Havana (1958). Another example of this is the decision of the publishers of the post-Fleming James Bond novels to return 007 to the 1960s, as happened in Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care (2008). A number of authors have also combined such homages with elements of science fiction and fantasy, like Charles Stross in his "Bob Howard" novels and stories, and Tim Powers in Declare (2001).

A History of the Spy Story, Part I: The Birth of a Genre
2/1/12
Thoughts on W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden
1/11/12
Reflections on the Jason Bourne Series
10/27/11
From Screen to Page: Reading Ian Fleming
10/16/11
The Life of a Literary Genre: Considering The Mystery
10/3/11
Reflections on the Dirk Pitt Series
2/10/11
The End of James Bond?
8/28/10

A History of the Spy Story, Part I: The Birth of a Genre

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:10:00 +0000

Offering a history of the spy genre is famously difficult, in part because of the genre's porous boundaries. As Donald McCormick and Katy Fletcher note in Spy Fiction: A Connoisseur's Guide, the term "'spy story' is in itself a misnomer" because it is used as a blanket label not only for the activities of spies in all their forms, but also counter-spies, government functionaries employing spies,

agents . . . hired killers, planters of misinformation, or sometimes even . . . that unassuming little man at the corner shop who operates a kind of letter-box for agents.

Additionally, it is possible to consider any adventure story or war story involving a bit of intelligence gathering or intriguing a spy story of sorts, so that those looking for a beginning often point to Odysseus's scouting of the Trojan lines in Homer's Illiad (making the spy story as old as literature).

Nonetheless, the spy story as we know it has two characteristics which set it apart. One is that it centers on the spy and his activities in that capacity. The other is that it engages with contemporary, real-life politics, rather than those of a historically distant setting (like James Fenimore Cooper's 1821 Revolutionary War novel The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, often described as the first English-language spy novel), or a wholly fictional one (like Ruritania, in Anthony Hope's 1894 The Prisoner of Zenda). Such fiction is largely a product of the twentieth century, during which it emerged from the intersection of two genres which emerged in the decades prior to it.

The first is the is the tale of crime and detection, a product of Romanticism's fascination with the marginalized and the extreme, and the advent of modern police forces and urban life as we know it. This genre, of course, was flourishing by the late nineteenth century, when Arthur Conan Doyle presented Sherlock Holmes to the world in A Study in Scarlet (1887).

The second is the story of contemporary politics, the new popularity of which is likely traceable to the fact that, as Jan Bloch put it in his 1899 classic The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations,

both military and political affairs have ceased to be high mysteries accessible only to the few. General military service, the spread of education, and wide publicity have made the elements of the polities of states accessible to all.

In the century after the French Revolution, Europe's once politically passive subjects had increasingly become conscripts and reservists in their nations' armed forces. They were increasingly readers as well as a result of national education systems and the wider availability and lower cost of books and newspapers, while telegraphs made news more immediate, and photography provided unprecedented illustration of that coverage. Already by the time of the Crimean War (1854-1855), public opinion was playing something like its contemporary role in foreign policy, and the trend continued through the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), "the first great war in which really large numbers of literate men fought as common soldiers," as Theodore Ropp observed in War and the Modern World. And of course, they were increasingly voters as democratization spread and deepened.

Accordingly, there was not just an audience for writing on these subjects, but a premium on appealing to public opinion, at home and abroad (public opinion in foreign countries also an increasing factor in policy calculations). Fiction was one component of such writing, with the invasion story genre launched by tales like George Chesney's "The Battle of Dorking" a particularly important aspect of it. There was an obvious place for spies in these scenarios, and from fairly early on they depicted foreign agents entering a targeted country to steal secrets, commit acts of sabotage or lie low until the shooting started before joining in the fight. Nonetheless, the espionage tended to be only a small part of the story, and the spies rarely even constituted proper characters. In 1882's How John Bull Lost London, for instance, it is French soldiers infiltrated into the country as tourists who capture the British end of the tunnel linking Dover to the continent, facilitating the arrival of their comrades. The French waiter working in England, who is really part of an invading force, became a cliché.

The convergence between the two genres was already evident in the Sherlock Holmes stories, notably in 1894's "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty," in which Holmes is enlisted to track down a missing copy of a secret Anglo-Italian naval treaty, which the protagonists were anxious might find its way into the hands of the Russian and French ambassadors. This proved only the first of Holmes' forays into such affairs, and Arthur Conan Doyle far from the only writer to take such an interest. Edward Phillips Oppenheim attained a notable success in 1898's The Mysterious Mr. Sabin, the titular figure in which was a French operative – a would-be "Richelieu of his days" - working against England. William Le Queux's The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) prominently featured a foreign spy in the plot, the villainous "Count Von Beilstein," a cosmopolitan adventurer who was arrested in Russia for his criminal behavior (forging Russian notes and using these to acquire twenty thousand pounds' worth of gems), and became a Russian agent to regain his freedom.

Nonetheless, reflecting the then-prevailing tendency to view the spy's trade as "ungentlemanly," spies were predominantly foreign villains (or if they were countrymen, traitors), with the role of the usually amateur protagonist most often the frustration of their plans (as in the stories discussed above). Cooper-like stories in which a spy was the hero only began to appear after the turn of the century with books like Max Pemberton's Pro Patria (1901), Rudyard Kipling's India-set adventure Kim (1901) and Erskine Childers' Riddle of the Sands (1903).

The novels of Pemberton and Childers depict Britons who stumble upon mysterious foreign doings - in Pemberton's case, a secret French plan to build a Channel tunnel, in Childers', the adventures of a pair of Britons sailing the Frisian coast who have stumbled upon mysterious doings in the area. Probing into these they learn of German preparations to use the area as a staging ground for an invasion of Britain. In Kipling's novel the titular protagonist, an Anglo-Irish orphan, gets caught up in the Great Game between Britain and Russia. Today historians of the genre commonly identify either Kim or Riddle as the first modern spy novel.

Thoughts on W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden
1/11/12
Reflections on the Jason Bourne Series
10/27/11
From Screen to Page: Reading Ian Fleming
10/16/11
The Life of a Literary Genre: Considering The Mystery
10/3/11
Reflections on the Dirk Pitt Series
2/10/11
The End of James Bond?
8/28/10

February 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:02:00 +0000

Guest Blog Post: Alchemy of Scrawl
2/10/12
A History of the Spy Story, Part II: The Life of a Genre
2/6/12
A History of the Spy Story, Part I: The Birth of a Genre
2/1/12
New in Print . . . (Paris in the Twenty-First Century and Other Stories)
2/1/12

New in Print . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

My short fiction collection, Paris in the Twenty-First Century. Now available in both trade paperback and e-book formats, it presents ten previously unpublished stories set in the Surviving the Spike universe.

Three of the stories – the novella "Tales From the Singularity" (the original basis for my novel Surviving the Spike), the titular novella "Paris in the Twenty-First Century" and the novelette "Crossroads" – are also available for sale as separate e-books.

New in Print . . . (Guardians)
1/19/12
Blog Talk Radio Interview
1/16/12
Literary R & R Reviews Surviving the Spike
1/14/12
Indie Snippets
12/20/11
Surviving the Spike: A Sample
12/1/11
Call for Reviews of Independent SF
11/22/11
A Call for Guest Bloggers
11/22/11
Interview With Maria Violante
11/19/11
The Indie Publishing Scene: Book Review Blogs
11/19/11
My New Goodreads Page
11/17/11
On Publishing
10/30/11
My New Facebook Page
10/20/11
New in Print . . . (After the New Wave: Science Fiction Since 1980)
8/21/11
New in Print . . . (Surviving the Spike)
8/7/11

New in Print . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:24:00 +0000

My novel Guardians, which is available in both trade paperback and e-book editions.

You can sample the first chapter here.

Blog Talk Radio Interview
1/16/12
Literary R & R Reviews Surviving the Spike
1/12/12
Indie Snippets
12/20/11
Surviving the Spike: A Sample
12/1/11
Call for Reviews of Independent SF
11/22/11
A Call for Guest Bloggers
11/22/11
Interview With Maria Violante
11/19/11
The Indie Publishing Scene: Book Review Blogs
11/19/11
My New Goodreads Page
11/17/11
On Publishing
10/30/11
My New Facebook Page
10/20/11
New in Print . . . (After the New Wave: Science Fiction Since 1980)
8/21/11
New in Print . . . (Surviving the Spike)
8/7/11

Guardians (Chapter 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:23:00 +0000

April 1987
Bucharest, Socialist Republic of Romania
Nick looked out the porthole-like helicopter window. Below him the valley of Baia Mare gave way to the Gutai Mountains, peaks rising mile-high in the darkness around them.

He returned his attention to the bus-style passenger cabin of the aircraft and saw Candito checking his watch.

They didn't have much time left before sun-up, and Candito wasn't happy about the fact. It really was best they finish the job under cover of darkness.

Still, they were doing well to be there at all.

It was only a few hours earlier that Candito woke Nick up with a knock on his door.

Candito was wearing his sunglasses then, same as now.

"The Soviets have lost a prototype of a new aircraft they've been working on, up in Maramures County," Candito said, speaking English with a pronounced Hispanic accent that reminded Nick of some of the guys who'd worked with him back in Central America. "Probably never intended for it to end up there, couldn't help its crashing on this side of the border."

"And this involves me because . . ."

"You've got an 'in' with the government here," he said. "We want them to help us take it."

For the last three years Nick had been living in Bucharest, playing the part of an American businessman exporting Romanian agricultural products to the West, which let him get close to officials in the regime.

The idea was to keep tabs on how things were going inside the dictatorship, and to provide an unofficial line of communication between Bucharest and D.C., with an eye to giving the Soviets the maximum of trouble they could get from this direction.

But getting the Romanians to help them steal a Soviet prototype crashed on their territory seemed like a bit much, and after getting dressed and riding off with Candito Nick told him so.

We're prepared to be generous, Candito said.

Nick phoned up the Minister of Defense, who was up that night, and then went downstairs with Candito to meet his little entourage in the car – the nerdish Elliott; Stockwell, who looked like an uptight G-Man out of Central Casting; and Ermey, who reminded Nick of his high school shop teacher.

Stockwell, who was behind the wheel, drove them through the dark streets to the Minister's house.

Candito asked Nick if he knew Romanian.

Well, obviously.

Good, because none of us do.

Great, Nick thought. He'd have to do the talking.

But what was he supposed to say?

Candito talked about debt forgiveness, oil sales on favorable terms, even technology transfers.

It sounded to Nick like a bit much just for a chance to look at a broken piece of junk (the thing hadn't flown right, after all), but he nodded and went along with it. And so they went, Nick pleading their case with the Minister over a cup of black Turkish coffee.

The Minister nodded, and left the room, to make some phone calls he said. When he came back into the room he told them that a car would be taking them to Otopeni International Airport. There they boarded a Romanian Air Force Ilyushin turboprop transport that was older than everyone in the group except Ermey and flew north to Baia Mare, the seat of the county containing the crash site. At the airport outside the city they met up with Colonel Agafitei of the Romanian Land Forces, who had a pair of Mil mi-8 helicopters and a platoon of soldiers under his command.

Nick, Felix and his staff got into the colonel's helicopter, while the other carried most of the troops accompanying them. They'd take possession of the site and move out the cargo if they could, or if they couldn't, start making the arrangements for getting it away and out of the country.

"We should be coming up on the site now," Agafitei told them just after the crack of dawn.

Nick spotted the gash the crash made in the greenery covering the base of the mountain, picked out the silvery-skinned, ovoid shape that damaged the foliage on its way down. What he took to be its front end looked like it was partially buried in the ground, perhaps after coming down on its nose.

They continued closing with it, enabling Nick to make out more of the details – or more properly, the absence of details. He couldn't see any windows in its body, or any other features, and even after borrowing Agafitei's binoculars he still couldn't. Of course, it might have been the early morning light, or the angle at which he was seeing the crashed aircraft. Maybe it had just landed upside down.

Still, it really didn't look much like any plane he'd ever seen, Soviet or otherwise. More like drawings of UFOs. It occurred to Nick that maybe the Soviets were working on something big, and that was why Candito and his party had been authorized to offer the Romanians so much for their cooperation. But he was no aerospace expert, and other details arrested his attention: several shapes on the ground, people who'd gathered around it. Hikers who'd just stumbled onto the scene? No, that was too much to hope for, the way they were moving.

Soldiers.

"They are not ours," Agafitei said.

And not regular soldiers. Nick thought of special forces types.

Spetsnaz, infiltrated into the country from over the border? It certainly seemed possible.

"Those aren't ours either," Agafitei added, pointing to the helicopters coming in from the east – Soviet airspace.

Nick started counting and stopped at a dozen. This was a battalion, maybe more, making a very large, very deliberate incursion.

"Reinforcements?" Candito asked, clearly grasping at straws.

The colonel hesitated. "They won't arrive in time. Not in the needed numbers."

Nick wasn't sure about their failing to arrive in time, but he knew there was no doubting him about the numbers. If the Romanian Air Force's MiGs challenged those helicopters, they'd have their heads handed to them in the short, inglorious war certain to follow when the Soviet Air Force came for payback. And there was nothing they could do about it.

Candito's frustration was evident on his face, but he didn't argue.

Nick started identifying particular types as the helicopters closed with them. Most of them were Mi-8 transports like the one they were flying in, likely ferrying in troops. Some of the aircraft looked like those transports but bristled with weaponry. He took them for Mi-24 attack helicopters – the kind the Soviet army was using in Afghanistan.

There were also some positively giant helicopters bringing up the rear. He recognized them from television footage he'd seen of the clean-up operations at Chernobyl the previous year as Mi-26s.

Nick knew they were the biggest helicopter ever put into production, a behemoth massing four times as much as the aircraft they were flying in, and capable of hauling twenty tons of cargo in a single flight. Capable of carrying away the helicopter he was flying in easily.

If any helicopter could remove the wreck, it was that one.

"Should we bug out?" Nick asked.

"No," Candito said, and they stayed, hovering near the crash site.

The thought that the Soviet helicopters would take a shot at them crossed Nick's mind, but the Soviets didn't so much as try to shoo them away. (If they'd even radioed them to warn them off, no one told Agafitei or Candito about it.) Maybe their orders were to take no aggressive action, or even to make no contact, unless they were threatened, and the Romanians weren't up for anything that futile.

The Soviets didn't care what the passengers of these helicopters saw, just that they didn't interfere.

Maybe they didn't know there were American operatives on this helicopter, what the Romanian government had agreed to.

Maybe they did know, and the Romanians would suffer retaliation for it later on.

Frustrated as Candito clearly was, surprise wasn't one of the emotions Nick was registering. "You expected something like this," he said.

"I knew we were in a race," Candito allowed. "I didn't know we were so far behind."

Or maybe he'd just hoped they weren't, Nick thought.

Several of the Soviet helicopters landed, disgorging troops, and the squad fast became a company. Overhead a pair of Mi-24s hovered, their wing stubs heavy with rocket pods and missiles.

One of the big Mi-26s descended toward the crash site, other helicopters moving out of the way so that it could move into a hovering position over the silver ovoid. Capacious as the big helicopters were, he didn't think they were big enough to hold the craft he saw inside its cabin, and so they weren't even going to try. Instead the soldiers on the ground slung the craft underneath the giant helicopter. They moved clear of the scene and the Mi-26 lifted it clear of the ground, then high into the air. Other aircraft landed, the soldiers boarding them and flying up into the air with them, their birds following the big Mi-26 east in the early morning light.

"Well, what now?" Nick asked.

"We go in and see what's left," Candito said, sounding like he had a mouth full of gravel.

The Soviets didn't leave them a thing as far as Nick could tell. But he didn't notice them picking up broken bits, just pulling away the body of that craft from the hole.

It seemed odd that they wouldn't bother to be more thorough. After all, Nick's team was operating under a real time pressure because they were far from home, and from help; but this was the Soviets' backyard. They could do what they liked without rushing.

But then maybe there was nothing to pick up, which seemed awfully strange to Nick. How was it possible that a plane could come down like that and stay completely in one piece?

Nick thought again of the odd look of the aircraft. Now that he thought about it, it seemed very odd that the Soviets would have been flying a prototype out here, very far from any of their aircraft design centers and test ranges. And Candito's behavior increasingly struck him as very odd.

Nick looked at the others who'd flown in with Candito, saw Elliott holding a small handheld device. He'd called Ermey over, who was bending down to take a soil sample.

He walked up to them and took a better look at the device in Elliott's hand. It appeared to be a Geiger counter, a device for measuring radiation. He figured that was why Ermey was taking his samples.

That wasn't a standard part of investigating a crash site, was it? Nick wondered what might have been radioactive on the plane. Nuclear weapons? Surely the Soviets wouldn't load live warheads into a prototype? He'd heard about attempts to build a nuclear-powered plane a long time ago, but he didn't have any idea if one of those could actually work, or if anyone was trying to build one now.

He looked back in Candito's direction, saw him saying something to the colonel that Nick didn't quite hear, after which he ordered everyone back to the aircraft.

Candito walked over to him. "We're going back," he said.

"Empty-handed," Nick said. "That wasn't some Soviet prototype, was it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Our friends are making nice now, but I'll still be here when you leave. At the very least I'll need a better cover story than the one you've given me. Especially after the crazy promises you made me give them about what we'd do for the craft."

Candito took off his sunglasses, looked him straight in the eye.

"You want me to confirm some suspicion of yours, is that it?" he asked. "Why don't you tell me what it is you think I should have told you?"

"The Russians didn't build that thing they just flew off with. And I'm guessing, neither did we." Somehow he didn't think this expedition was about keeping a crashed American prototype away from Soviet intelligence, either.

The look Candito gave him was all the confirmation Nick needed.

"Are we done here?" Candito asked.

"Yeah, we're done," Nick said.

"Good." That was the last word Candito said as they got back in the helicopter and flew back to Baia Mare, then got into the Ilyushin to fly back to the capital.

Writers Write About Writerly Advice

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:48:00 +0000

Aspiring writers face many hardships as they learn their craft and try to break into the business. One of them is the bad advice inflicted on them by all and sundry, from casual acquaintances to authors of "how-to" books and articles swathed in the mantle of Authority. Perhaps worst of all are the lists of meaningless "do"s and "don't"s that inhibit and confuse instead of help.

On his blog Earth and Other Unlikely Worlds Paul McAuley (a real writer, unlike most of those so free with their advice) points to two pieces in which writers respond to some of those classic commandments.

Charlie Jane Anders - whom you might remember as not only a contributor to the ever-useful web site io9, but the author of the short story "The Fermi Paradox is Our Business Model" (collected last year in Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011, a review of which you can find here, and available at Tor.com) - presents "10 Writing 'Rules' We Wish More Science Fiction Writers Would Break." (I particularly like her answers to numbers one and three – "No third-person omniscient," and "Avoid infodumps" – as I've long felt that infodumps get a bad rap, and that the preference for narrower viewpoints is often a matter of sheer snobbery.)

Meanwhile, at Nihilistic Kid's Journal, Nick Mamatas offers "Ten Bits of Advice Writers Should Stop Giving Aspiring Writers." (I especially like his succinct two-word response to the old truism, "Show Don't Tell.")

In the end, it all boils down to the fact that there's usually more than one way to succeed – just as there's always more than one way to fail.

"Chuck Versus The Goodbye"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:03:00 +0000

I first started watching Chuck mainly because it was on before Heroes, and wasn't sure what to make of it at first. For one thing, the blend of atompunk spy games with post-cyberpunk technology didn't quite gel for me. (The Intersect seemed an especially hokey gimmick.) For another, the villains were bland and derivative. (Fulcrum is no S.P.E.C.T.R.E.)

But the Buymore was great, an interesting contrast with the secret agent doings in which Chuck got caught up – and Morgan and Lester and Jeff and Big Mike and the rest were the source of much of the fun from the first. There was also the writers' handling of Chuck's geekiness, and geek culture more generally, which unusually for American TV did not come off as a caricature in the mind of a schoolyard bully (unlike one Chuck Lorre sitcom I can think of), and which they also managed to cleverly work into many a plot. These two elements turned out to be just the things to breathe new life into the half-century old game of parodying James Bondian espionage, helping to produce some memorable gags and set pieces – and at the show's best, episodes like "Chuck Versus Tom Sawyer."

Alas, Chuck peaked early. As the show's main character became more self-assured, more at home in this element – as he went from Nerd Herder-in-over-his-head to genuine superspy - we lost the fish-out-of-water aspect of the story that was initially a source of much of the comedy. Bringing the other characters in on the craziness didn't compensate for it, the repetition producing diminishing returns, while also dispensing with much of the comic tension created by Chuck's keeping so much of his life secret from friends and family. And as the story of Chuck and Sara shifted from "angsty tale of a guy hopelessly in love with unattainable fantasy girl" to mundane boyfriend-girlfriend stuff one might see discussed with a therapist on a daytime talk show, this too lost interest. (To paraphrase George Costanza, "Relationship Chuck" was less entertaining than "Independent Chuck.")

Of course, such changes were inevitable (it's inconceivable that Chuck could have gone on reacting to things in exactly the same way, and TV show romances which just spin their wheels get tiresome fast), but along with them went much of what made the show distinctive and appealing. Meanwhile, really clever mixes of its diverse elements became rarer – the espionage and the BuyMore comedy and the geekiness happening alongside one another rather than coming together in a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Still, the show managed to be entertaining enough to keep me coming back, all the way through its five season run, which ends with the pair of episodes airing tonight.

Let's hope they make for a fitting finale.

Thoughts on "Brigadoom"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:45:00 +0000

Watching the fourth season Sanctuary episode "Fugue," I was again struck by the tradition of "musical episodes" in recent television series, especially those in the science fiction and fantasy genres.

This is usually discussed as having begun with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Once More, With Feeling" – but as has been the case with many a genre trope, Lexx did it first, with "Brigadoom." And pulled off a very tough act.

It is worth mentioning here that when the show started airing on the Sci-Fi Channel back in 2000 (with a handful of episodes plucked out of the second series, without regard to the show's development, or the season's story arc), I wasn't impressed with what I saw. Lexx was certainly . . . different. I was intrigued by some of the characters and concepts, but the episodes themselves didn't amount to much. When I saw the commercial for a musical episode, I was skeptical.

But that didn't last, and neither did my earlier skepticism about the show. "Brigadoom" (cowritten by show creator Paul Donovan, and the late Lex Gigeroff) didn't simply have a few of the lines sung instead of spoken (the way Fringe's "Brown Betty" did, for instance), but instead offered a full-blown musical which dramatized the back story of a central character, and presented a turning point in the season's story arc (which was itself a whopper, the title of its final episode, "End of the Universe," not being overstatement).1 It helped, too, that the songs were memorable.

As the show's own writers have said in various interviews (mine included), the quality of the show varied wildly from one episode to another. "Brigadoom" was the show at its very best, which was great, and it has since been a fan favorite.

Alas, the achievement of cast and crew here has been overlooked in the general tendency to ignore or put down the show, which has been extreme, even compared with other TV space operas, toward which critics and audiences (hardcore fans aside) are famously ungenerous. Still, those writing about such episodes should remember that early moment in the history of television science fiction characters suddenly breaking out into song.

1. It is worth noting that this wasn't Lexx's first musical moment. The second part of the four-part miniseries that comprises series one, "Supernova" (which aired two years before "Brigadoom") also contains a brief but striking musical interlude.

On the Eureka Paradigm

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:41:00 +0000

Popular expectations regarding technological progress in areas from artificial intelligence to fusion, from cloning to space, have commonly been overblown. The response on the part of many is simply to regard futurists' predictions with irony, but this has never seemed a useful position to me. The reality is that we can hardly avoid making guesses about what's to come, given that we are so often obliged to think in the long-term, and to plan, especially where science and technology are concerned. Guessing poorly can have serious implications for public policy (some of which I recently touched on in my Space Review article, "Space War and Futurehype Revisited"). Consequently, instead of irresponsible dismissal of the whole enterprise of prediction, the appropriate response is to try and get better at making predictions, and at responding to predictions appropriately. (Even if the best we can hope for is to get things somewhat closer to right somewhat more often, or simply better-position ourselves to cope with the inevitable surprises, this seems to me well worth our while.)

That said, the number of pitfalls in the way of those studying such issues is staggering. Today it is almost impossible to point to any discussion of public issues which is not carried on in a fog of misinformation, and disinformation spread by vested interests and ideologues. The situation is even worse when expert knowledge is crucial (as in virtually any discussion into which science enters), and the uncertainties are large (as when one makes guesses about things that haven't happened yet, exactly the issue here), because of how much more difficult it becomes for even informed observers to make their own judgments. (Think, for instance, of how Creationists succeeded in manufacturing a "debate" over "intelligent design.")

However, this falls far short of exhausting the list, and I would argue that one big stumbling block has been a deeply flawed "folk perception" of science and technology shaped, in large part, by media produced for (and often by) people without expertise in this area. Consider, for instance, what we get in so much pop science journalism. News items about developments in science and technology, just like news items about anything else, are typically intended to be brief and punchy and accessible (read: attention-grabbing and entertaining). Breathless stories about exciting new possibilities fit these criteria far better than critical, nuanced pieces attentive to the obstacles in the way of realizing those possibilities. (Indeed, many of them make it sound as if the possibility is already a reality, as does the questionable title of this otherwise useful piece: "Quantum Keys Let Submarines Talk Securely.")

Such stories skew perceptions, and the press's lack of a memory worsens matters. After telling readers and viewers about the thrilling innovation that just might change all our lives (with the "might" sometimes in the small print), there is generally no proper follow-up; the story just fades away even as the impression it created remains. The failures lapse into obscurity, while successes are likely to get so loudly trumpeted that it can seem as if the latter are all that exist.

These attitudes may be reinforced by the endless repetition of the claim that we live in an era of unprecedentedly rapid technological progress, making historical precedents irrelevant, and implying the imminent bursting of all the old boundaries. The most extreme version of this may be Raymond Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns," which like thought on the technological Singularity in general, seems to be enjoying increased mainstream attention (as in this Time magazine piece from last year). They are reinforced, too, by a tendency to identify "technology" with "information technology" (which goes as far as Google's news aggregator compiling, under the heading of technology, numerous items that are not about technology as such, but rather the financial fortunes of IT firms). This has the effect of making the state-of-the-art in consumer electronics is taken for the yardstick of technological progress, a perception which can be very misleading given that other areas (like food and energy production, medicine and transport) have seen much slower change. Certainly there are many observers attempting to offer correctives, like Robert J. Gordon, Jonathan Huebner, Bob Seidensticker and Michael Lind, but their arguments seem to have had little traction with Apple brand-worshipping consumers who believe that their new cell phone is the telos of human history.

Still, for all its flaws, it has to be admitted that pop science journalism is far less influential than fiction, and especially television and movies, which appear to play far and away the biggest role in shaping the popular image of science. Last year a poll taken in Australia found that TV and movies were the primary source of information about science for three-quarters of those surveyed, a pattern likely typical for other developed countries. One likely consequence of this is our habituation to the thought of technologies that are only imaginary, with "hard," technologically-oriented, extrapolative science fiction set in the near future likely having the strongest impact on our thought as "rumors of the future" (as suggested by scholar Charles E. Gannon's study Rumors of War and Infernal Machines).

Additionally, science fiction routinely dramatizes the processes of science and engineering, and in the process propagates a particular view of them. The realities of science and engineering as specialized, collaborative, often slow-moving activities, participants in which often cope with multiple, knotty problems at once, some of which may be theoretical in nature; as dependent on massive amounts of organization, equipment and money controlled by people who are not scientists (indeed, often are scientific illiterates), and so susceptible to the vagaries of economics, business, politics and even personal whim; as under even the best circumstances subject to fits and starts, to dead ends and flashes-in-the-pan, with projects to develop new technologies often concluding in nearly useless prototypes, on the drawing board, or even at the concept stage; are given short shrift.

As an example of what we are much more likely to see, consider the Syfy Channel show Eureka, which centers on an imaginary town in the Pacific Northwest inhabited by a large portion of the United States' scientific elite. Eureka makes some concessions to reality in its depiction of the Global Dynamics corporation running the town, and the involvement of Pentagon functionaries in the affairs of its researchers. However, this is superficial stuff, the episodes mostly playing like twenty-first century "Edisonades," with geniuses equally adept at fields as diverse as astrophysics and molecular biology flitting from one project to the next, many of them undertaken singlehandedly in their garages; casually tinkering with toys as exotic as androids and faster-than-light drives; and during the inevitable crisis, inventing on-the-spot solutions to staggeringly complex problems that somehow always work.

Taken together, all this leaves most people imagining science as nerd-magic, and picturing R & D as a matter of omnicompetent nerd-magicians pulling solutions out of thin air – so that if a problem does need solving all we have to do is get the nerds on it and, voila, it's solved. (And if the nerd-magicians don't work quickly enough, we just have to hector them until they do, the way Sheriff Jack Carter, like many another rugged sci-fi hero, hectors the science types for a fix when there's trouble.) It also leaves audiences thinking that, to use William Gibson's phrasing, "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed" in the literal sense of thinking that every gadget one has ever heard of must be out there, somewhere.

In short, it has them believing in the "Eureka Paradigm" of scientific and technological R& D.

Of course, there are lots of reasons why fiction still depicts science and technology in this way, long after such depictions have lost any credibility they may once have had. A fairly good one is that this simplistic approach is a better fit with dramatic requirements, easier to turn into a compact, intelligible, accessible story in which we get to focus on a few characters as interesting things happen – and to be fair, the point is to entertain, not inform. Yet, it is an appalling basis for actual consideration of how research actually proceeds, and we take such images seriously at our cost.

A Primer on the Technological Singularity
10/31/11
Why I Can't Stand The Big Bang Theory
2/1/11
The Syfy Channel: Year One
7/20/10

New and Noteworthy (Manga Industry Report, BSFA Nomination)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:59:00 +0000

In today's edition:

* From io9's Jason Thompson, an admirably comprehensive and informative article about the challenges facing the manga publishing industry in today's market, and how it might meet them.

* The British Science Fiction Association has released the shortlist for its 2011 awards. (The longlist can be found here.)

Review: Deep Six, by Clive Cussler

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:49:00 +0000

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984, pp. 432.

Clive Cussler's Deep Six (1984) can be thought of as something of a transitional work for the author, occupying a space in between his early, tightly focused, short novels like Raise the Titanic (1976), Vixen 03 (1978) and Night Probe (1981), and the later, sprawling, epic action-adventures which began with Cyclops (1986).

Even though I usually read right through Cussler's books after picking them up (back when I did read them), I started this one a few times before making much headway in it. This had much to do with Cussler's handling of the book's two main plot threads – the first, an investigation of a marine disaster in the northern Pacific, and the second, the mystery following the disappearance of the presidential yacht (with the President, Vice-President, Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate all aboard). The first mystery engages Pitt and his friends from NUMA exclusively for the first third of the book or so. They only become involved with the second mystery in the book's middle, and play only a minor role in that investigation until the last third of the story, when the two threads finally converge.

Filling the gap in between is a great deal of inside-the-Beltway intriguing among officials of the National Security Council and the Secret Service – which at times left me with the impression that I'd put down Cussler's book and picked up one by Tom Clancy instead. As is usual with such thrillers, Cussler's portrait of D.C. struck me as simplistic and inauthentic, devoid as it is of the sausage factory-like quality of real-life politics. His is a Washington without lobbyists and political action-committees and revolving doors between industry and government, where politicians who take campaign contributions from shady special interests are "bad apples" and the "power elite" is described as "elected," so that it seems almost a civics class textbook version of governance. The foreign politics are equally lacking in nuance, down to the foreign villains (which are, as one might expect, one-dimensional clichés that occasionally verge on racism). Indeed, the Soviet strategy comes off as astonishingly clumsy, in stark counterpoint to the tactical and technological genius the KGB and its partners display in executing the scheme.

In short, others have done this stuff before and after and in many cases better, and it is poor compensation for what is missing in the earlier parts of the story, where in their limited appearances Pitt and company do not do much more than contribute to a couple of underwater searches (the second of them treated rather briefly), and engage in some mostly stationary detective work. We are more than halfway through the story before Pitt has his first brushes with the bad guys, and it is some time after that before he gets up to his usual antics. The result is a story that gets better as it goes along, with the last third providing exactly the kind of thing for which Cussler's readers come to his books, especially in the action-packed finale full of over-the-top heroics, flashy military hardware and creative anachronism as the clock ticks down to disaster – but getting there is occasionally a slog.

Mad Men: A Second Look

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:01:00 +0000

I recently finished watching the first three seasons of Mad Men.

The second viewing confirmed many of my first impressions, but I have come away with some new thoughts as well.

Where the acclaim is concerned (the show won its fourth Emmy for Best Drama in a row last year), it would seem critics are responding not only to the aesthetic-nostalgic appeal of the show's recreation of a more glamorous-seeming era; or its iconoclastic portrayal of the early 1960s, (the echoes of Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool and Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road not groundless, but greatly exaggerated); or even its giving the audience the guilty pleasure of vicarious indulgence in un-p.c. behavior while still feeling superior to it.

The truth is that almost everything about the show is a perfect fit with highbrow critics' views on what constitutes Good Drama – the slow pace and the heavy use of indirectness and implication (e.g. subtext) to drop a massive freight of irony on the heads of its mostly unlikeable characters might seem like liabilities to many a viewer a plus in their book. The upper-middle class social setting, and the premise's allowing for a great deal of writing about writing, media about media, the positioning of identity, domestic life and suburban dissatisfaction as central themes, are likewise much in line with their tastes. And the association of show creator Matthew Weiner with the last cable drama to win such heaping (over)praise, The Sopranos (which worked in a not dissimilar manner), only helps.

All this makes the show not just a triumph of style over substance, but a reminder that pandering to the snobbery of the upmarket review pages (and the viewers who mindlessly follow their lead) can pay real dividends.

Mad Men: My Two Cents
7/31/10

Bestsellers in 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:13:00 +0000

The various publications which track book sales have, of course, compiled and published their lists of 2011's biggest sellers by this point. Here is USA Today's list of the hundred biggest sellers.

As it happened, apart from perennial mega-sellers Stephen King and Dean Koontz, and George R.R. Martin and Sookie Stackhouse (whose books are not only part of a long-running series, but enjoying greater attention because of HBO shows based on them), speculative fiction is represented predominantly by young adult authors, particularly Rick Riordan (who has an amazing seven books in the top one hundred) and Suzanne Collins (whose three Hunger Games trilogy books are numbers two, five and seven on the list, with the first book running behind only Kathryn Stockett's The Help).

This came as something of a surprise – not because of what was absent (genre fiction commands only a limited part of the market), but because of what was so strongly present. As you might have guessed, I haven't paid much attention to the YA market, despite the praises sung of it by many a genre observer. (The last one I read was Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which I found a bit of a letdown given the honors showered upon it, and in comparison with Doctorow's previous work.) To be frank, it seemed to me as if genre insiders were grasping at straws in the cause for optimism about science fiction's future they found in it; that a major reason so many major authors were turning to it was the chance to publish short books; and that even here science fiction was running a distant second to such fantasy successes as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter saga, or Stephanie Meyers' Twilight. And at any rate, it seemed that Japanese manga and anime writers did a much better job with young adult stories than their American counterparts. (As far as I'm concerned, Buffy the Vampire Slayer can't hold a candle to anime's many high school-age action heroes – and while we are on the subject, such things as the cliffhanger in the middle of Firefly's two-hour pilot only makes the unacknowledged debts Jess Whedon owes to Japanese comics and animation that much clearer. I will also add that I wasn't in the least surprised about the comparisons between Collins' books and Koushon Takami's Battle Royale - of which I was reminded by the description of the story's premise even before running across the rip-off charges.)

Consequently, I was only dimly aware of The Hunger Games phenomenon until a few weeks ago - just as I hadn't heard about Twilight until a month before the premiere of the first movie in the series. Still, even if it seems that more was happening here than I appreciated when making my assessments about the state of the genre these past several years, its meaning seems more ambiguous given the scarcity of other science fiction on the list.

New and Noteworthy (Cora Buhlert, "Why I Hate Albert Brooks")
1/12/12
2011 Round-Up, Part II: Reflections on the Year That Was
1/2/12
On the New York Times Bestseller List . . .
10/8/10

Coming This Year: Genre Movies in 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:25:00 +0000

After a relatively quiet couple of years where the superhero movie genre has been concerned, they will be prominent again in the summer of 2012 with the release of reboots of Spiderman, the first movie in the aspiring Avengers mega-franchise, and Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises – and one might add, Men in Black III. (Arriving at other times, and with less grandiose expectations, there will also be Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance in February, and a new crack at the Judge Dredd franchise, Dredd, in September.)

Given this schedule the superhero movie seems poised to set movieland on fire again - though I wonder if a hard crash isn't also a possibility. Certainly I've enjoyed the genre, but the truth is that the current wave of them has been ongoing for over a decade now, rather longer than any comparable trend I can think of, and to me it has come to feel something like a financial bubble, overinflated and bound to pop sometime. (I wonder, too, about the coming crop of films. The Spiderman reboot has come along way too soon, especially given how good the first two films of Sam Raimi's trilogy were. I was impressed with The Dark Knight, but the third film in the franchise has tended to not go well for superhero movies, artistically speaking.)

The end of this year will see the release of Bond 23 (titled Skyfall, and currently shooting). Given the producers' continuation in the direction established by Casino Royale I suspect I'll have my usual gripes when I get around to seeing it, but that audiences and critics on the whole will be kinder, and the film gross a half billion-plus at the box office. Bond will be joined by a number of other, familiar fictional spies at theaters this year, including Jason Bourne in The Bourne Legacy (based on Eric Van Lustbader's continuation of Robert Ludlum's series, and about which I will likely have similar gripes), and Bryan Mills comes back in Taken 2, while the '80s-style action movie sends another ripple down to our time in the form of The Expendables 2.

There will be other sequels to recent hits (like the Clash of the Titans' sequel Wrath of the Titans, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Resident Evil: Retribution and the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2), prequels to well-known properties (The Hobbit, and in a looser sense, Prometheus) and remakes (like Total Recall and, appallingly, Red Dawn). There will be 3-D reissues of '90s-era blockbusters like Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace and Titanic. (Disney's Beauty and the Beast is already in theaters now.) There will be . . .

In short, there will be much, much, much more of what we've already been getting, so much so that I feel exhausted just having gone over the list. Still, Hollywood will bring a few other well-known genre novels to the screen. John Carter (based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels about that character) is hitting the big screen in March, but there will also be big-screen versions of newer works, like The Hunger Games (also a March release), Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (June), and World War Z (December), as well as a movie based on the old Battleship game, creatively titled Battleship, which I guess is about all they were able to take from it. There might even be a movie or two that are actually not based on something else (like Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity). The result is that this year will have plenty of big "events" (with such films as The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit and the end of the Twilight saga - enough, I suspect to quiet those observers who obsessed over weak ticket sales at the box office during 2011) and perhaps a fair amount of lightweight fun too, but few real surprises – the status quo restored to the satisfaction of all those but viewers demanding originality and other such commercially irrelevant qualities in their cinematic entertainment.

2011 Round-Up, Part II: Reflections on the Year That Was
1/2/12
Reflections on the Jason Bourne Series
10/27/11
A Fragment on Indie Film
10/18/11
From Screen to Page: Reading Ian Fleming
10/3/11
The 2011 Summer Movie Season
9/14/11
"Was 2010 the Worst Year for Movies Ever?"
1/7/11
2010 in Review
1/3/11
Give the Superheroes a Rest?
9/14/10
The End of James Bond?
8/28/10

SOPA Blackout Protest

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:23:00 +0000

I found out about the protest against SOPA (H.R. Bill 3261, innocuously named the "Stop Online Piracy Act") too late to participate properly. So I'm posting this message to indicate my solidarity with the protestors - and offering this link to blackout participant Wikipedia's FAQ on the subject.

Until tomorrow, please regard this site as also blacked out.

This blog will resume its normal operations then.

Blog Talk Radio Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:40:00 +0000

I went on Alchemy of Scrawl's Blog Talk Radio show today. You can check out the interview here.

Literary R & R Reviews Surviving the Spike
1/14/12
Indie Snippets
12/20/11
Surviving the Spike: A Sample
12/1/11
Call for Reviews of Independent SF
11/22/11
A Call for Guest Bloggers
11/22/11
Interview With Maria Violante
11/19/11
The Indie Publishing Scene: Book Review Blogs
11/19/11
My New Goodreads Page
11/17/11
On Publishing
10/30/11
My New Facebook Page
10/20/11
New in Print . . . (After the New Wave: Science Fiction Since 1980)
8/21/11
New in Print . . . (Surviving the Spike)
8/7/11

Literary R & R Reviews Surviving the Spike

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 21:20:00 +0000

The blog Literary R & R recently reviewed my novel Surviving the Spike. You can check out the review here - and sample the novel itself, here.

Indie Snippets
12/20/11
Surviving the Spike: A Sample
12/1/11
Call for Reviews of Independent SF
11/22/11
A Call for Guest Bloggers
11/22/11
Interview With Maria Violante
11/19/11
The Indie Publishing Scene: Book Review Blogs
11/19/11
My New Goodreads Page
11/17/11
On Publishing
10/30/11
My New Facebook Page
10/20/11
New in Print . . . (After the New Wave: Science Fiction Since 1980)
8/21/11
New in Print . . . (Surviving the Spike)
8/7/11

New Review: Scarecrow Returns, by Matthew Reilly

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:17:00 +0000

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012, pp. 368.

Matthew Reilly's Scarecrow Returns (published last year in his native Australia as Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves) opens with a burst of action as a mysterious "Army of Thieves" captures a Russian island in the Arctic Sea – one which happens to be home to a secret Cold War-era research installation, and the site of a Soviet superweapon now in play. This event marks the beginning of a global crisis as seen by the American and Russian crisis response teams. As luck would have it, Marine Recon Captain Shane Scofield, and his longtime friend and comrade-in-arms "Mother," are with an equipment-testing team nearby – and virtually all that the American government can call on to save the day.

This book is Reilly's first Shane Scofield novel since Scarecrow (2003), almost eight years earlier, and naturally I was looking forward to it. Nonetheless, some aspects of the premise initially worried me.1 For one thing, it suggested that the globe-trotting and mystery-solving I had enjoyed in Scarecrow and the Jack West trilogy had been abandoned in a return to the more static adventures with which Reilly began his career, like Ice Station (1998) and Area 7 (2001). I'd enjoyed those books, but felt he'd since superseded them (Reilly himself has referred to them as the work of Reilly 1.0), and wasn't sure how much more juice he could extract from the older concept he'd already executed several times. Additionally, two decades after the Cold War's end the idea of a Soviet superweapon would seem to have passed its "sell-by" date – much as has long become the case with villains left over from the Third Reich. I also wasn't sure what to make of the "Army of Thieves" who comprised the villains, these seeming to be an especially senseless bunch in comparison with Reilly's previous bad guys, whose agendas, however horrific, at least had a recognizable rationale.

Fortunately, the book exceeded my expectations in all these areas. Like the books of "Reilly 1.0," Scarecrow Returns is a three-way collision between teams of special-forces soldiers at a high-tech facility in a remote, hostile landscape, but Reilly manages to keep the material fresh, and the plot and action unfold with a smoothness that reflects his now lengthy experience in telling this kind of tale. The battles are as readable as any Reilly has written (at least, when read with the aid of the numerous illustrations), while being as grand in scale and over-the-top as readers have come to expect – which is to say, unequaled by any writer working similar territory today. Reilly's particular variant on the trope of the "left-over Soviet superweapon now on the loose" is a good one, and his villain is in line with his predecessors, at least, when we get behind the mask. The novel also benefits from a number of new touches, ranging from a scene-stealing combat robot named Bertie, to a French vendetta against our hero – and a few memorable plot twists (which I won't spoil here). Additionally, cartoonish as Reilly's characters are, they are nonetheless a bit fuller and more nuanced here, and their personalities do have a bearing on the tale.

That is not to say that everything is perfect. Readers demanding meticulous treatment of the technical detail will be irritated by such things as Reilly's depiction of a KH-12 satellite as a signals intelligence platform (its function is in fact optical imaging), and his repeated reference to an SS-23 as an intermediate range ballistic missile (when its 500 kilometer range actually makes it a short-range ballistic missile) – details that could have easily been corrected without requiring the slightest changes to the story. There is an incident in one of the battles (in the "Stadium") where the editing appeared to falter. (It seemed to me that Reilly wrote "trench" when he should have written "walkway" – though I'm less than a hundred percent certain of this, as those of you familiar with his action sequences can understand.) Such nit-picks aside, Reilly's use of his over-the-top plot to explore very real geopolitical issues struck me as less clever this time around, the rationale behind the action comparatively muddled, especially when compared with the almost psychic perceptiveness of the villain. (The fact that the weapon's activation frankly seems unlikely to leave any "winners" on the planet is only one of the reasons for this.)

Still, on the whole it's a satisfying read if you're up for this kind of adventure, and fans of previous books are likely to find it well worth their time. However, given the extent to which events in the previous novels bear on the story in Scarecrow Returns, readers new to the series might want to check out the previous installments (Ice Station, Area 7, and Scarecrow) first.

1. I use the original publication dates here, rather than the dates of their release in North America, my edition excepted.

Review: Matthew Reilly's Jack West Trilogy: Seven Deadly Wonders, The Six Sacred Stones, The Five Greatest Warriors.
8/20/10

On Blog Talk Radio . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:46:00 +0000

Indie writer Coral Russell, whose blog Alchemy of Scrawl has become a valuable tool for independent authors seeking to promote their work, also has a Blog Talk Radio show where they get to promote their work.

I will be on the show Monday, January 16, at 10:30 AM Mountain Standard Time, to discuss my novel Surviving the Spike (which you can preview here).

Lex Gigeroff, 1962-2011

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:58:00 +0000

As many of you already know, Lex Gigeroff, best known as one of the three principal writers on Lexx (as well as a sometime actor on that show, in such memorable roles as Barnabas K. Huffington), died last month, on December 24, at the age of forty-nine.

I had only one exchange with Mr. Gigeroff, when I interviewed him for my retrospective on that series back in 2007, but I found him friendly, witty and helpful, as he has generally been to those who knew him, and there is no question that he will be missed.

As might be expected, social media is one avenue through which these sentiments are being expressed: there is now a Lex Gigeroff Memorial page on Facebook (the page, and the memorial event it mentions, came to my attention only after they passed), as well as a tribute video on YouTube, which fans and well-wishers can check out.

New and Noteworthy (Cora Buhlert, "Why I Hate Albert Brooks")

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:54:00 +0000

In today's edition:

* An interesting post by Cora Buhlert, discussing several topics, including how the Singularity fell out of fashion, and her thoughts on the popularity of YA dystopia. (Interestingly, she finds the latter to be a specifically American phenomenon, reflective of the upbringing of American adolescents, whom she compares to their German counterparts.)

* For those who haven't seen it before, here's Wayne Sheldrake's "Why I Hate Albert Brooks" (originally published in the August 2008 Writer's Digest), which offers a much-needed corrective on that subject I've mentioned here before: the gross overabundance of movies about writers, almost all of which trot out the same stupid (and mostly baseless) clichés about "the writing life." (Frankly, I'm astonished that such films are so common – after all, they're written by writers, exactly the people who should know better – and that pieces criticizing them aren't much more common – given that many of them not only know better, but like Sheldrake, must be irked by the falsity of what they see.)

New and Noteworthy (Charlie's Diary, Syfy Programming)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:51:00 +0000

In today's edition, a couple of items from the past few weeks:

* A number of interesting posts over at Charlie's Diary, including a string of guest posts by cyberpunk great Rudy Rucker (starting with a piece on mind-uploading, the theme of his classic 1982 novel Software), Charles Stross's offer of another "Rule 34 moment" (in a recent news story on the deliberate hiring of psychopaths by financial firms), and more recently, Charles Stross's own predictions for 2032.

* An update from Airlock Alpha's Michael Hinman on what the Syfy Channel's recent executive hires say about its direction. (You guessed it – more reality television. At this point, I shouldn't even bother saying what I think of that, if only because I've run out of new ways to say it, and at any rate, the comments already appended to this post make the point.)