The Geek Mom Blog, hosted over on Wired’s website, has an interesting piece about Steampunk music. What caught my eye however, was this statement: “When a band selects “steampunk” on that drop-down box, what does that say? And what can a listener expect to hear? Anything really. Rap, rock, folk, trance- I’ve sampled quite a few tracks in this new genre.” In my own explorations with Geek Music, that’s very true: there’s a lot of variety out there.

To start off, let’s turn to John Anealio, who’s released his latest song, Steampunk Girl, recently. It’s an anomaly in this list, because it takes place in the modern day: it’s not so much a steampunk song than it is something abou the fandom that surrounds the genre. It’s a fun song that has a bit of a different sound for John, filled with bold guitar riffs.

Tom Slatter is a guy who’s been working with Geek Music for a number of years now, and has thrown his efforts wholeheartedly into Steampunk music. This year, he’s doing a song a week, and from the looks of things, it’s going to be a year with a lot of steampunk music. Mother’s Been Talking To Ghosts Again is a really fun song that he’s just released. You can see the rest of his music over on his Bandcamp page.

This is a bit of a cheat, but I think it fits nicely. Analyse was the song used in the end credits of Christopher Nolan’s fantastic (slightly steampunkish) movie, The Prestige. I’ve always felt that the movie fits within the genre nicely, using light touches in a period drama. The song has a typical Thom York quality to it as well, which also lends itself atmospherically to the genre.

This is a fun one, and mainly due to the fantastic steampunk themed music video that the band put together for it. It’s dark, moody, and all around fantastic. Genre-wise, I’m not entirely sure where this sort of song fits: it’s not quite rock, not quite alternative, but that’s sort of where Steampunk fits, isn’t it?

This is a fun song that really feels like something that the Drop Kick Murphys would release. Hard rocking, with a steampunk fixture in all the media that I’ve seen / read: goggles.

Remember how the GeekMom blog said something about getting a little of everything? This group seems to be the leader when it comes to Steampunk music, Abney Park, mixing in a blend of industrial rock with gears. This video is a particularly good taste of not only the band’s music, but their style when it comes to rocking out.

This isn’t so much for a song, but for the effort that this group is putting together. I heard about these guys a while ago, and it looks like something of a steampunk indie-folk rock opera, somewhat along the lines of what Anais Mitchell did with her album Hadestown. Steampunked Civil War soldiers? I’m all ears.

This is by no means a comprehensive list: there’s a couple of other bands out there. Who did I miss, and what are your favorites?

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As I was digging through my book shelf for The January Dancer I ran across S. Andrew Swann’s Prophets: Apotheosis Book One. I remember really liking this one (John did, too) and so a quandary presented itself. Which to read? Luckily both series are now at three books each so there’s a lot of Space Opera goodness I can read back to back (to back). I’m going to read both series, probably one after the other, but I’m throwing it open to you, the SF Signal reader, which one should I read first?

If you’ve read either or both, leave a comment and tell me your thoughts about these books!

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The HUGE table of contents follows…

1. 1901: Barry Pain — “The Undying Thing”
2. 1902: W.W. Jacobs — “The Monkey’s Paw”
3. 1903: H.G. Wells — “The Valley of the Spiders”
4. 1904: Arthur Machen — “The White People”
5. 1905: R. Murray Gilchrist — “The Lover’s Ordeal “
6. 1906: Edward Lucas White — “House of the Nightmare”
7. 1907: Algernon Blackwood — “The Willows”
8. 1908: Perceval Landon — “Thurnley Abbey”
9. 1909: Violet Hunt — “The Coach”
10. 1910: Wm Hope Hodgson — “The Whistling Room”
11. 1911: M.R. James — “Casting the Runes”
12. 1912: E.F. Benson — “Caterpillars”
13. 1913: Aleister Crowley — “The Testament of Magdelan Blair”
14. 1914: M.P. Shiel — “The Place of Pain”
15. 1915: Hanns Heinz Ewers — “The Spider”
16. 1916: Lord Dunsany — “Thirteen at Table”
17. 1917: Frederick Stuart Greene — “The Black Pool”
18. 1918: H. De Vere Stacpoole — “The Middle Bedroom”
19. 1919: Ulric Daubeny — “The Sumach”
20. 1920: Maurice Level — “In the Light of the Red Lamp”
21. 1921: Vincent O’Sullivan — “Master of Fallen Years”
22. 1922: Walter de la Mare — “Seaton’s Aunt”
23. 1923: George Allen England — “The Thing From—”Outside” “
24. 1924: C.M. Eddy, Jr. — “The Loved Dead”
25. 1925: John Metcalfe — “The Smoking Leg”
26. 1926: H.P. Lovecraft — “The Outsider”
27. 1927: Donald Wandrei — “The Red Brain”
28. 1928: H.R. Wakefield — “The Red Lodge”
29. 1929: Eleanor Scott — “Celui-La”
30. 1930: Rosalie Muspratt — “Spirit of Stonhenge”
31. 1931: Henry S. Whitehead — “Cassius”
32. 1932: David H. Keller — “The Thing in the Cellar”
33. 1933: C.L. Moore — “Shambleau”
34. 1934: L.A. Lewis — “The Tower of Moab”
35. 1935: Clark Ashton Smith — “The Dark Eidolon”
36. 1936: Thorp McCluskey — “The Crawling Horror”
37. 1937: Howard Wandrei — “The Eerie Mr Murphy”
38. 1938: Robert E. Howard — “Pigeons from Hell”
39. 1939: Robert Barbour Johnson — “Far Below”
40. 1940: John Collier — “Evening Primrose”
41. 1941: C.M. Kornbluth — “The Words of Guru”
42. 1942: Jane Rice — “The Idol of the Flies”
43. 1943: Anthony Boucher — “They Bite”
44. 1944: Ray Bradbury — “The Jar”
45. 1945: August Derleth — “Carousel”
46. 1946: Manly Wade Wellman — “Shonokin Town”
47. 1947: Theodore Sturgeon — “Bianca’s Hands”
48. 1948: Shirley Jackson — “The Lottery”
49. 1949: Nigel Kneale — “The Pond”
50. 1950: Richard Matheson — “Born of Man & Woman”
51. 1951: Russell Kirk — “Uncle Isiah”
52. 1952: Eric Frank Russell — “I Am Nothing”
53. 1953: Robert Sheckley — “The Altar”
54. 1954: Everil Worrell — “Call Not Their Names”
55. 1955: Robert Aickman — “Ringing the Changes”
56. 1956: Richard Wilson — “Lonely Road”
57. 1957: Clifford Simak — “Founding Father”
58. 1958: Robert Bloch — “That Hell-Bound Train”
59. 1959: Charles Beaumont — “The Howling Man”
60. 1960: Fredric Brown — “The House”
61. 1961: Ray Russell — “Sardonicus”
62. 1962: Carl Jacobi — “The Aquarium”
63. 1963: Robert Arthur — “The Mirror of Cagliostro”
64. 1964: Charles Birkin — “A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts”
65. 1965: Jean Ray — “The Shadowy Street”
66. 1966: Arthur Porges — “The Mirror”
67. 1967: Norman Spinrad — “Carcinoma Angels”
68. 1968: Anna Hunger — “Come”
69. 1969: Steffan Aletti — “The Last Work of Pietro Apono”
70. 1970: David A. Riley — “The Lurkers in the Abyss”
71. 1971: Dorothy K. Haynes — “The Derelict Track”
72. 1972: Gary Brandner — “The Price of a Demon”
73. 1973: Eddy C. Bertin — “Like Two White Spiders”
74. 1974: Karl Edward Wagner — “Sticks”
75. 1975: David Drake — “The Barrow Troll”
76. 1976: Dennis Etchison — “It Only Comes Out at Night”
77. 1977: Barry N. Malzberg — “The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady”
78. 1978: Michael Bishop — “Within the Walls of Tyre”
79. 1979: Ramsey Campbell — “Mackintosh Willy”
80. 1980: Michael Shea — “The Autopsy”
81. 1981: Stephen King — “The Reach”
82. 1982: Fritz Leiber — “Horrible Imagings”
83. 1983: David Schow — “One for the Horrors”
84. 1984: Bob Leman — “The Unhappy Pilgrimage of Clifford M.”
85. 1985: Michael Reaves — “The Night People”
86. 1986: Tim Powers — “Night Moves”
87. 1987: Ian Watson — “Evil Water”
88. 1988: Joe R. Lansdale — “The Night They Missed the Horror Show”
89. 1989: Joel Lane — “The Earth Wire”
90. 1990: Elizabeth Massie — “Stephen”
91. 1991: Thomas Ligotti — “The Glamour”
92. 1992: Poppy Z. Brite — “Calcutta Lord of Nerves”
93. 1993: Lucy Taylor — “The Family Underwater”
94. 1994: Jack Ketchum — “The Box”
95. 1995: Terry Lamsley — “The Toddler”
96. 1996: Caitlín R. Kiernan — “Tears Seven Times Salt”
97. 1997: Stephen Laws — “The Crawl”
98. 1998: Brian Hodge — “As Above, So Below”
99. 1999: Glen Hirshberg — “Mr. Dark’s Carnival”
100. 2000: Tim Lebbon — “Reconstructing Amy”

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[via The Retroist]

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Interviews and Profiles

• Chuck Wendig interviews Martha Wells.
• Book Banter interviews Justin Golenbock.
• Far Beyond Reality interviews Bradley Beaulieu and Stephen Gaskell.
• John Scalzi’s The Big Idea: Matt Ruff.
• [SFFWRTCHT] A Chat With Author & Editor David Lee Summers.
• Suvudu (Matt Staggs) interviews Adrian Bejan.
• Suvudu (Fictional Frontiers) interviews Joe Schreiber (podcast).
• Far Beyond Reality interviews Bradley Beaulieu and Stephen Gaskell.
• If You’re Just Joining Us (Jon Armstrong) interviews Paul Goat Allen (podcast).

News

• Strange Chemistry signs Jonathan L. Howard.
• Coming in 2013 from Orbit: The Shambling Guide to NYC by Mur Lafferty.
• The Magicians show, based on Lev Grossman’s book, was not greenlit.
• ChiZine signs distribution deal with HarperCollinsCanada.
• Author Kevin J. Anderson to write novelization of Rush’s upcoming Clockwork Angels album.
• Space: 1999 to time-travel 100 years: ITV Studios America, HDFilms developing 2099 reboot.
• NASA Unveils Future Aircraft Designs: Stunning Models (PHOTOS).
• For every 10 new followers @NightShadeBooks gets in the next 18 hrs, we’ll donate a book to a Bay Area public library.

Events

• Eaton Collection curator emeritus George Slusser will discuss the work of scifi pioneer J.H. Rosny aîné on Feb. 23 from 3:15 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Special Collections & Archives on the fourth of the Rivera Library at UCR.

Articles

• Kristine Kathryn Rusch on The Business Rusch: Writers, Venture Capitalists, & Barnum. Oh, My.
• Tansy Rayner Roberts on Fabulous Graphic Novels For People Who Hate Superheroes.
• Jay Lake on Rewriting to editorial response.
• The Night Bazaar (Stina Leicht) on Another World, Another Time, In the Age of Wonder.
• Futurismic (Brenda Cooper) on New Economies.
• Paizo Blog (Erik Mona) on Paizo Publishing’s 10th Anniversary Retrospective—Year 1 (2002).
• Salon.com America’s forgotten Buddhist superhero.
• Missions Unknown (Scott A. Cupp) on Forgotten Book: The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde, 2011.
• Walyou lists 10 Comics Villains We Love To Hate.
• SKX lists on 10 Classic Haunted House Movies.
• Space.com on NASA’s 10 Greatest Science Missions.

Art

• Three playful Star Wars posters to help elevate your midichlorians.
• The Movie Comedy Poster Art of Frank Frazetta. [via Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine]
• 25 Amazing Spiderman Fanart And Concept Art.
• @CoolVibe: “The Last Knight Standing” by Christoph Peters Von Sperling.
• @CoolVibe: “Witch Hunter” by Alex Stratulat.

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• The Scale of the Universe (Spoiler: Planck Length!)
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SF SIGNAL: Hi Myke, thanks for taking a couple of moments to speak with us! The first question that I’ve got is: why military fantasy, over something like Military Science Fiction or superpowers?

Myke Cole: Two reasons, really. The first is that my experience is in the military and that I have been a die-hard traditional fantasy fan (though I also love SF) since my earliest days. It’s a neat combination of the two old axioms “write what you know” and “write what you’d want to read.”

The second reason is that military SF has been, frankly, done to death, as have traditional superhero stories (though more in comics than novels). To the best of my knowledge (and I certainly could be wrong), a modern (and truly modern, by which I mean counterinsurgent focused) military tale blended with high fantasy monsters and magic hasn’t been done as a mass-market novel. I wanted to see if I could push the envelope a little bit.

SFS: Oscar Britton finds himself in a bit of an impossible situation: forfeit his rights because of a power that he didn’t ask for, or turn himself in to an organization in the morally gray area.

MC: As so many of us do, especially when you’re committing to military service. People don’t seem to realize that the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) requires us to forfeit many of the rights we would die to defend. Members of the military do not enjoy rights to free speech and free association the way civilians do. We don’t even have an automatic right to civilian trial, and military courts can do a lot more to us for a lot more reasons. “At the Commander’s Discretion,” and “Conduct Unbecoming,” are 2 general terms in the UCMJ that give senior members broad disciplinary powers.

You accept that when you go in. And if you don’t agree with the mission you’re assigned? Too bad, so sad. The military MUST be an instrument of policy and not a creator. When that happens you get military dictatorship.

Oscar’s situation is that central conflict (which I think is part and parcel of the military experience) and extrapolates it into a universe shaken by the existence of magic.

SFS: How does that work when you’re in a contractor position, though? Presumably, most of the skills are similar, but what about the overall goals and status of the employees?

MC: There was this weird window just after 9/11 when contractors were given license to do much of the same work we now reserve for civil-servants and uniformed personnel. I think the public’s fear of terrorist attack drove them to accept a level of mercenary activity that they later recoiled from once we’d gone a few years without another 9/11. That mandate was then withdrawn, and you see a LOT less mercenaries these days (at least in US ops). It was during that odd window that I did my contracting work. I basically operated in almost all ways like a government agent. When I finally made the transition to actual government service (employed directly by the federal government) just before my 3rd tour in Iraq, I felt almost no change at all.

I tried to treat the Great Reawakening (the event the introduces magic into the modern world) as producing the same degree of general terror that 9/11 did. Hence, the public is once again allowing mercenaries to do, well, pretty much everything the army does.

SFS: You’re a former military contractor who worked overseas, and are now serving as a member of the Coast Guard: how did this impact the direction that you took Control Point in?

MC: It is the bedrock of Control Point. The vocabulary, the characters, the settings, the equipment, everything is touched and influenced by my career working in and around the military. Even my personal sense of discipline, urgency and my ability to embrace misery (which led to me getting a book deal) is largely a product of that experience.

SFS: Something that I found particularly striking was the treatment of fellow native contractors in the Source by US defense contractors. How much of this story draws on the real situations and attitudes on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan by real contractors or service personnel?

MC: Our relationship with the Iraqis was the biggest dichotomy in our mission there. On the one hand, we were supposed to be building bonds (winning hearts and minds) and protecting them from the depredations of al-Qa’ida and the Sadrist militias. On the other hand, there was tremendous pressure not to trust them, because you never knew when one of them was secretly an insurgent. I actually just did a guest blog post on this very topic. You can read it here.

If you’re seeing some of that crazy contradiction in Control Point, then that means (I think), that I got it right.

SFS: Something that I’ve read recently in COIN circles is the contradiction inherent for the soldiers on the ground, especially in light of the scandal with the Marines in Afghanistan: it’s okay to shoot them, but not to piss on a corpse? Do you think that the dynamic would change drastically if faced with a non human – fantasy or alien – race?

MC: Absolutely. In real life, we understand that our enemies, no matter how much we hate them, are still human. In the world of Shadow Ops, there is a range of opinions regarding Source Indig. Some officers believe that the indig are sentient beings and therefore require as much attention as is given under COIN doctrine to “human terrain” anywhere else. Others see them simply as stupid monsters and feel no obligation to treat them any different than they would dogs or rats. I really hope that dichotomy is coming across on the page, I find it fascinating to explore those issues in a fantasy setting.

SFS: Another interesting point that I caught was when a native contractor is beaten when his customs aren’t understood. How vital is the role of communications in wartime situations, amongst military personnel and locals?

MC: In Clauswitzian War (old school war), it’s not that important. In Post-Clauswitzian War (counterinsurgency, the kinds of wars we fight these days) it’s CRITICAL. The watchword in every unit in Iraq and Afghanistan is “Human Terrain.” Mao Tse-Tung, one of the grandfathers of modern insurgent warfare put it best in his treatise Guerilla War. “The insurgent is the fish and the people are the sea. So long as the sea is hospitable to the fish, you will never catch them all.”

SFS: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been ongoing for the better part of a decade now: do you think that they will begin to impact the speculative fiction fields in the near future? How so?

MC: I think they already have impacted the genre extensively, but it’s a lot more subtle than the direct story I’m telling in the Shadow Ops series. When you add in the global financial crisis, these are dark times we’re living in. There’s a lot of talk of a “dark fantasy” genre that is taking a bleaker look at the fantasy tropes we know and love from Tolkien, Brooks and Jordan. Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch, Peter V. Brett, Sam Sykes and others are known for writing stories that tip their hat to the knights and sorcerers of our favorite fantasy stories, but are looking much more closely at their warts. I think this is a direct reaction to our darker outlook in a post-9/11 world.

I also think it’s a good thing. Characters that breath and bleed, that RESONATE, are far more compelling for me than misty faeries that yank swords out of rocks. Just because something is magical, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t also be BELIEVABLE.

SFS: More specifically, what do you think the military science fiction (and now fantasy) worlds hold for readers?

MC: I also did a blog post on this topic, which you can read here. The basic thesis is that a real divide has arisen in society between the military and civilian population. This runs counter to our goal of a military that SERVES the civilian policy makers, rather than an organ of policy itself (as it is in Egypt). That division also makes military members (and stories about them) exotic and exciting. I think people respond to that. Warfighting also provides instant crises, the kind of which are at the core of most great stories.

SFS: A very cool aspect of the book is that my home state of Vermont is prominently featured. Why did you choose Vermont?

MC: I guess I was something of a trial, because my parents sent me away to boarding school in Putney, VT (right near Brattleboro). I was only there for a year, but the state made a really strong (positive) impression on me, especially during my agricultural work (I ran on a maple sugaring team, drove draft horses and worked on a diary farm that was attached to the school). I never forgot the state, and when I was trying to craft Britton’s character as a guy who was disconnected from a sense of home, I immediately hit on “Black guy having to grow up in Vermont.” I wanted Britton to be . . . cut adrift, so that he could connect more solidly to the army (and thus hurt more dramatically when he loses his place there). I figured that having him grow up in Vermont would exacerbate that more than having him grow up in New York City, or DC. It helped that I already knew something about the state from having lived there. Britton was raised in Shelburne (Route 7 even has a role in the story), went to South Burlington High School and was stationed at the Air National Guard base there. The 158th is a real unit. I didn’t make it up.

SFS: Have you heard from any of the people who work with those units about the book?

MC: Not so far. Really nervous to hear their reactions.

SFS: Something that I thought was very interesting was that the main character was different from the typical fantasy grind, and that’s reflected on the cover, which I’ve seen praise from a couple of corners for. What was behind this?

MC: I assume you’re referring to Britton being black? I’m thrilled that I’m helping to break barriers, but I’d be lying if I said that was my intention. Britton came to my mind, fully formed, as an African-American guy growing up in Vermont as I stated above. It was more his sense of dislocation that I was interested in. Once the character was lodged in my mind, he was . . . like a real person: formed. Alive. He WAS black. That was a fact on the ground and it wasn’t going to change. A few people tried to get me to change that, and I got really pissed off at the suggestion. It felt like someone coming to me and saying, “Hey, your brother, I think you should force him to get a sex-change operation.” I have to admit I was prepared to fight like a wild-dog if the publisher tried to portray him differently on the cover, but they didn’t even blink.

SFS: What’s next for you? Shadow Ops is the first of a series, yes?

MC: Yup. Two more books to come. The 2nd, Fortress Frontier, is written and turned into the publisher (waiting for comments from my editor). The 3rd, Breach Zone is a pile of notes that I really ought to get around to organizing. I’m excited for Fortress Frontier. Not only does it continue to tell the story of all the characters you got to know in Control Point, but it gives a fairly in-depth look at the magic-using military arm of the army of the Republic of India. Exploring how foreign militaries use magic was always a goal for the Shadow Ops series, and I’m psyched to finally get to do that.

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I’m happy to see that. It’s alogical match-up and GGG is a wonderful podcast that deserves more exposure. Congrats to John and David!

Their brand new podcast features a great interview with William Gibson. Go give it a listen.

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“Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.” – David Foster Wallace

“I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own.” – David Foster Wallace

This week I am going to rove far afield from the meadows and wastelands of fantastika, just for a little while. I am going to conduct a border raid into the realm of Literature which, of course, fantastika is allied to but often kept separate from by boundary disputes and ideological conflicts.

Last week Salon’s Laura Miller wrote about “the purpose of reading stories” in a piece that connected Puritanism, the Protestant Work Ethic, and the perceived need for there to be  “instructional or inspirational messages” in fiction. Miller’s point seemed to be that we, as children and adults, have gotten away from reading as something entertaining, an enjoyable pursuit without moral or inspirational baggage.  “[A]ll of these attitudes — and the standardized tests that Stone and Nichols complain about — boil down to the belief that reading can only be the means to an end, whether that end is moral betterment or worldly success.” When I first read it over the weekend, I thought that she had a point, although I disagreed with a lot of her reasoning.

Then I came across a quotation that is getting some renewed attention, a mission statement for fiction from David Foster Wallace. Richard Kadrey posted it on his Tumblr, and it has been reposted and disseminated from there. In it, Wallace makes an assertion that fiction should, essentially, do some of the things that Miller complains about. It ends in this version by stating that…

“In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

But this quotation, as compelling as it is, doesn’t really exemplify the most important aspect of Wallace’s point. It’s too cut-and-dried, almost too forgiving. It is part of a more critical, and sometimes contradictory, discussion by Wallace about not just the nature of fiction, but its function and dynamic within the (primarily American) literary imagination. The quotation is taken from a longer interview he gave several years before his death; you can see snippets of the interview here. There is a transcript of the interview at the Dalkey Press Archive, and when this quotation is situated within that longer interview, it gives us more insight into the power and ambivalence of the reading and writing process.

Wallace is not just saying that there is bad fiction and good fiction, but that there are particular cultural and discursive trends that effect not just the production and reception of literature but that dilute fiction’s potential to connect us and give pleasure, which in his formulation is both respite from and secondary experience of suffering and loneliness. On the surface this seems like the sort of either/or construction that Laura Miller proposes in her discussion about the purpose of fiction, but a comparison shows important differences. Miller’s embedded conceit is incorrect; every story does have a moral or message, even if that moral is “I don’t believe in morals” or that message is “Have stupid fun.” To say that reading is “an end in itself” is to say “I read because I like deciphering symbols.” To say that “[l]ike any art, it can teach or motivate, but it doesn’t have to, and it’s often better when it doesn’t” is to assume that there is art bereft of message or cultural influence. All fictions project a message and speculate on the nature of life and the world; it does not boil down to one or the other.

I highlight this because I found the contrast between her formulation and Wallace’s to be enlightening. Fiction is often discussed in such dualities: real or fantastic, serious or light, mainstream or fringe, pure or interstitial. But these are very often false dichotomies, perhaps useful to begin making distinctions and establishing terms for discussion, but a poor foundation for a strong argument. The initial quotation from Wallace seems to rest on a similar dichotomy: there is dark/bad fiction and enlightening/good fiction, and we need to inject more light into the darkness. But that is only one component of his point; his argument is that fiction is a very human thing to create and experience, and that how fictions are made and interpreted are conditioned by the world of voices and influences around us, filtered through the inescapable fact that we are “marooned” in our own skulls. Human beings shape the world through fiction, both in the writing and reading of it; we try to access what others see, think, feel, and suffer through fiction, because sometimes that is the only way to create connections of understanding between us.

We often talk about fiction in terms that simplify it  We reify base distinctions  that become the foundation for literary discussions, particularly on the internet (and often on convention panels too, with their constraints of time), where the goal of discourse is usually to make one obvious point. What Wallace intended to show is precisely not that. He is arguing that we frequently ignore the complex conditions that influence the production and reception of literature. What often makes fiction compelling are its paradoxes and ambiguities, not mechanical precision or archetypes. “Bad fiction” is not just dark or overtly mimetic; it erases complications and flattens experience. Tension and shading are what make fiction resonate, and what constitutes those qualities changes over time. Tricks of narrative that may have seemed avant-garde decades ago are now rote, so writers must experiment and readers must be adventurous.

Certainly Wallace’s ideas are lofty, and difficult to achieve. Wallace himself points out that there are contradictions in his ideas that his own fiction often does not bridge. But that again returns to his central contention: that fiction is not just a textual delivery system for either edification or pleasure but a tangle of meanings that the writer and reader struggle to understand. When those tangles are smoothed out, we may find some pleasure in the resulting story, but we are also missing a lot of other potential rewards. The question of what “pleasure” is in this context and what it does for us is one that Wallace tries to address in his interview. If we read to escape, what are we fleeing from? If we read for some sense of personal satisfaction, what are trying to satisfy in fiction that we do not get elsewhere in our lives?

Fiction that not only challenges but dismantles convention has the potential to answer those questions. As Robert Lipsky noted in his book on Wallace: “‘experimental and avant-garde stuff can capture and talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings,’ Wallace said, ‘ in a way that conventional realistic stuff can’t.’” Conventions in general, while useful as starting points, do not produce fiction that gets to our loneliness and gives us the chance to, perhaps in an illusory fashion, see through another’s eyes and feel with their skin. And isn’t this the purpose of reading, to experience something else?

This is as true for fantastic fiction as for any other genre or category of literature. Fantasika can be as anaesthetizing as any of the more mainstream fiction that Wallace discusses. The question is: do we read to be distracted, assuaged, lulled? Do we read for a quick, visceral thrill or terrifying shock? Do we read to experience a feeling again or to recapture something we feel we lack? Sure, these are all part of reading, but when this is all that reading is about, we are selling fiction, and ourselves, short. By the same token, reading just for some sense of abstract edification can leave us feeling detached. “Good fiction,” regardless of genre, is a mutual effort on the part of the writer and the reader to bridge the gaps between each other. When both take that opportunity, that chance, the gifts that reading can give us begin to emerge.

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*There it is.*

*Gosh, $2.50. But*…*I can’t wait! *

I recall thinking that, when I sighted Farmer in the Sky for sale in the big Post Exchange in Tokyo.

It was 1953, and less than 300 miles away, the Korean War was raging. Our father was a senior staff officer for General McArthur and often worked weekends and came home late at night. We had less time with him, and though our mother compensated, that’s not the same kind of fun.

So we read a lot. My brother Jim and I had already read Rocket Ship Galileo (published in 1947), Space Cadet (1948) and Red Planet (1949) from our school library. These early Heinlein books were the first science fiction we’d ever seen, since we grew up in deeply rural southern Alabama. SF opened horizons beyond those we already had discovered, living in occupied Japan.

We were fans, even if we didn’t even know it yet, so of course we couldn’t wait for the school to acquire Farmer. We pooled our money and bought the book, our first hardcover acquisition. It cost $2.50, a full five weeks’ worth of both our allowances, ran 216 pages and carried the great illustrations by Clifford Geary that made the Heinlein “juveniles” so visually memorable. A bargain, never regretted.

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In episode 106 of the SF Signal Podcast, Patrick Hester sits down to chat with author Jennifer Pelland!

• Machine by Jennifer Pelland (Apex Publications)
• Unwelcome Bodies by Jennifer Pelland (Apex Publications)

From Jennifer Pellend’s Website:

Jennifer Pelland lives outside Boston with an Andy, three cats, an impractical amount of books, and an ever-growing collection of belly dance gear and radio theater scripts. She’s garnered two Nebula nominations, and many of her short stories were collected in Unwelcome Bodies, put out by Apex in 2008. They will be releasing her debut novel, Machine, later this year. Jennifer is represented by Seth Fishman of the Gernert Co.

Links:

• Jennifer Pelland (author’s website)
• Jennifer (on Facebook)
• Jennifer (on Twitter)

© 2011 SFSignal.com
Featuring original music by John Anealio

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3. The SF Signal Podcast (Episode 042): Interview with E.E. Knight

As longtime supporters of the Shared Worlds SF/F Teen Writing Camp at Wofford College, we’re thrilled to see them launch this years camp and associated fund drive.

Check out this awesome Shared Worlds Critter Map!

Here’s the coolest part: Click a creature — read a story. If you like it, donate.

You’ll find fiction by Tobias Buckell, Amal El-Mohtar, Eugie Foster, Neil Gaiman, Lev Grossman, N.K. Jemisin, Karen Lord, Karin Lowachee, Michael Moorcock, Patrick Rothfuss, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Johanna Sinisalo, Lavie Tidhar, Scott Westerfeld, Gene Wolfe and many, many more.

Press release and pertinent links follow…

TOP AUTHORS CONTRIBUTE TO THE SHARED WORLDS CRITTER MAP

Shared Worlds SF/Fantasy Teen Writing Camp Launches 2012 Registration and Donation Drive

Shared Worlds Critter Map

Neil Gaiman, Lev Grossman, Scott Westerfeld, and thirty-seven more of the most imaginative writers from around the world have contributed to Shared Worlds’ “Critter Map,” a webpage of fantastical beasts. Their whimsical descriptions of imaginary creatures created by pop artist Jeremy Zerfoss are in support of the Shared Worlds registration and fund drive for 2012. Every summer up to 50 teen writers come to Shared Worlds SF/F Teen Writing Camp at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, from as far away Japan to participate in this unique camp. This year, registrants include teens from all parts of the United States as well as Germany and Indonesia. Wofford College provides a structured, supervised environment in which the students can excel and demonstrate their creativity.

At Shared Worlds, the students form teams in classrooms to build entire fantasy or science fictional worlds in the first week and then write stories in those worlds the second week. Top professional writers are on hand to provide feedback and to conduct workshops. The guest writers for the 2012 include New York Times bestsellers Julianna Baggott, Naomi Novik, and Tobias Buckell as well as Prix Award Winner Karin Lowachee and Hugo Award winner Ann VanderMeer. The teens also get to attend author readings, take fieldtrips to bookstores, and create videos about their imaginary worlds. Shared Worlds also publishes an annual book of the students’ writing.

“For many of our students, Shared Worlds is a transformational experience,” said the camp’s assistant director, fantasy writer Jeff VanderMeer. ”They not only learn more about writing, they also get to have fun solving problems in in the world-building groups, and they form what will probably turn out to be life-long friendships with like-minded teens.”

The “Critter Map” is the cornerstone of a donation drive intended to ensure that attending the Shared Worlds Teen Writing Camp can be a possibility for all registered students, no matter what their financial need. Monies will join contributions from donors like Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman and major support from Amazon.com.

The contributors to the “Critter Map” range from such icons as Michael Moorcock and Gene Wolfe to exciting new authors like Viivi Hyvönen and Kirsten Imani Kasai. Filmmaker and writer Gregory Norman Bossert has created the Critter Map website, and Therese Goulding served as editor for the contributions.

Additional Links:

• Critter Map stories alphabetically by author
• Shared Worlds Website
• Donation Page
• Registration Page

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1. Shared Worlds Teen Writing Camp: 2010 Registration Now Open
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Fiction:

• “Bear in Contradicting Landscape” by David J. Schwartz
• “My Body, Her Canvas” by A.C. Wise

Classic Revisited:

• “Useless Things” by Maureen McHugh

Poetry:

• “Caverns of Science” by Carrie Vaughn

Nonfiction:

• “Editorial: Blood on Vellum” by Lynne M. Thomas
• “No Mortals Allowed” by Alex Bledsoe
• “Interview with Maureen McHugh” by Maggie Slater

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1. TOC: Apex Magazine #32 (January 2012)
2. TOC: Apex Magazine #30 (November 2011)
3. TOC: Apex Magazine #31 (December 2011)

About the film:

In the last moments of World War II, a secret Nazi space program evaded destruction by fleeing to the Dark Side of the Moon. During 70 years of utter secrecy, the Nazis construct a gigantic space fortress with a massive armada of flying saucers.

When American astronaut James Washington (Christopher Kirby) puts down his Lunar Lander a bit too close to the secret Nazi base, the Moon Führer (Udo Kier) decides the glorious moment of retaking the Earth has arrived sooner than expected. Washington claims the mission is just a publicity stunt for the President of the United States (Stephanie Paul), but what else could the man be but a scout for the imminent attack by Earth forces? The Fourth Reich must act!

Two Nazi officers, ruthless Klaus Adler (Götz Otto) and idealistic Renate Richter (Julia Dietze), travel to Earth to prepare the invasion. In the end when the Moon Nazi UFO armada darkens the skies, ready to strike at the unprepared Earth, every man, woman and nation alike, must re-evaluate their priorities

Here’s the official trailer for Iron Sky…

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Entrants in the The Necropolis Kindle Fire Giveaway may receive one of the following przies:

• 1ST PRIZE (1): AMAZON KINDLE FIRE – With Amazon’s amazing full-color Kindle Fire e-reader, surf the web, read books, watch movies, music, games, apps and more!
• 2ND PRIZE (2): AMAZON KINDLE – Two second prize winners will receive Amazon’s original Kindle, the world’s best-selling e-reader!
• 3RD PRIZE (4): $40 AMAZON GIFT CARDS – Four third-prized winners will receive $40 Amazon gift cards: buy books, movies, clothing–anything you want!

The giveaway ends March 18, 2012 and you may enter as many times as you like. Check out The Necropolis Kindle Fire Giveaway website for details on how to enter.

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• Gollancz interviews Kit Berry.
• The Fuctional Nerds interviews Chuck Wendig and Daniel Polansky (podcast).
• Rick Novy interviews Nancy Fulda.
• Galactic Suburbia Podcast Episode 53.
• I Should Be Writing interviews Jeff VanderMeer (podcast).
• Wired/Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy interviews William Gibson (podcast).
• Omnivoracious (Jeff VanderMeer) interviews Ayize Jama-Everett.
• Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy interviews William Gibson.
• Submit questions for Anne Rice – she’s promoting her book The Wolf Gift at Google on February 24.

News

• SF Author Michael Burstein Considers Congress.
• Lemony Snicket to Return in 4-Book Series.
• Wonder Women! Documentary Examines History Of Female Superheroes.
• Alien Life May Not Survive on Planets With Uranus-Like Tilts.
• New galaxy caught in close encounter.
• A Martian meteorite, an incredibly rare object, has been given to science to help unravel the Red Planet’s secrets.
• Weightless Books will now sell digital edition of Locus Magazine.
• Now posted: StarShipSofa No #224.
• SFX 219 On Sale Now.
• Amazon.com Kindle Store eBook Deal: The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick: $3.99.

Events

• SF in SF reading series – February Events with K.W. Jeter, Rudy Rucker and Jay Lake.
• Paul Di Filippo will be guest of honor at Italcon 38 in May.

Articles

• The King of Elfland’s Second Cousin on The Aesthetics, Structure, and Themes of Noir Speculative Fiction.
• Lavie Tidhar on Epic Fantasy – The Twitter Panel.
• Rachelle Gardner on To Champion Worthwhile Books.
• Janice Hardy on You Must Be This Long to Ride This Genre: What to Do When Your Novel’s Too Short.
• Juliette Wade on Deep Worldbuilding and POV Scene Preparation: an in-depth example.
• Shimmer Five Authors + Five Questions : Typical.
• Inkpunks (John Remy) on Voices of Insecurity.
• Juliette Wade on Deep Worldbuilding and POV Scene Preparation: an in-depth example.
• John Scalzi on on Lessons from the Success of Chronicle.
• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on The science fiction effect. [via Paul Di Filippo]
• Boing Boing on Fantasy Maps.
• Black Gate (Scott Taylor) on Art of Dungeon Maps.
• Charlie Jane Anders on Bear McCreary reveals the physics behind your favorite science fiction theme tunes.
• Flickering Myth (Trevor Hogg) on The Making of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1.
• Willliam King on Create Your Own Kindle EBook, Step by Step, With Pictures.
• Sci-Fi Fan Letter (Jessica Strider) reviews Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel.
• Funcational Nerds (Paul Weimer) reviews Lady Lazarus by Michele Lang.
• Topless Robot lists 9 Rock Songs from the 1960s About Superheroes. [via Look At This]
• Kirkus Book Reviews on New & Notable Books for Children: February 2012.
• ShortList Magazine lists The 15 Greatest Star Wars Scenes.
• David Brin lists The Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales.

Art

• concept ships: Spaceships of EVE viewer.
• Adventures in Science Fiction Cover Art: Rocket, Field, Figure Part I.
• Judging Books by Their Covers: U.S. Vs. U.K..
• @Shadowness: “Crash” by Majora28.
• @CoolVibe: “Attack” by Yiheng He.
• @CoolVibe: “Gold Man” by Flávio dos Santos.
• @CoolVibe: “Concept Art: Seven Media” by Flávio dos Santos.
• @Artist’s Site: Lambertback by Brandon Bird. (Great one for Highlander fans)

More Fun Stuff

• Author D&D trailer.
• Another Awesome Robot T-Shirt.

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Michaele Jordan‘s novel, Blade Light, is a charming traditional fantasy that was serialized in Jim Baen’s Universe and is now available as an ebook at Amazon or at iBooks. Her newest novel, Mirror Maze, is available now.

The other day we were hanging out with some friends, and my husband (who-bless his heart-is insanely proud of me) boasted to the gang that since I was a member of SFWA now, I was eligible to nominate for the Nebulas.

“Ooh, that’s cool,” gushed one of my friends who (like me) is a great admirer of Neal Stephenson. “Are you going to nominate Reamde?”

“Don’t be silly,” snorted another. “She can’t nominate Reamde; it’s not SF.”

A minor argument ensued. No hard feelings resulted, but neither was the disagreement resolved. In fact, they are probably still at the coffee shop, arguing. (My husband and I went home).

Is Reamde SF?

While taking care to include no spoilers, I can tell you that much of the story focuses on a fictional on-line role playing game. The game is, as far as I can tell, slightly in advance of anything that currently exists (not because real world money changes hands through this game, since that is already possible) but other than that it is set in the real world. So most would probably argue that Reamde is not SF. It is a high-tech thriller. Certainly, it is not included in the SFWA recommended-reading-for-nebula-nomination list.

If high-tech thrillers qualified as SF, most James Bond movies would be SF. And they’re not. Are they? Perhaps they do not qualify because they are not perceived as being in advance of modern technology, especially with allowances made for secret research. But very few of us are so scientifically literate that we could invariably distinguish between state of the art, and very near future technology. And what if the science is, or turns out, to be wrong?

But if slight technical advances are not sufficient to qualify a work as SF, then just how far out in the future or far away from earth does the work have to go before it counts as SF? Surprise! That’s a rhetorical question. I don’t know. And I’m not going to speculate. I only asked to set up the next question: why do we care? Reamde is an excellent book. Nominations aside, that should be enough

And yet, somehow, it isn’t. My friend suggested I nominate it because they loved the book and wanted it included in the canon. One reviewer plaintively remarked that they wished Stephenson would go back to writing SF. Many fans view reading books that are not SF/F as disloyal. There are blogs that cruise the internet in search of slights against SF and then launch spectacular tantrums whenever they think they have found one. Outsiders don’t respect SF, I am assured. We are treated as inferior.

Really? Where? I have an extensive mundane life. I attend a synagogue where I am not looked down on for writing SF/F; I am looked down on for writing fiction. If I wanted respect, I should have become a rabbi. My Christian mother-in-law agrees in spirit; she reads nothing but biographies of brave women who found strength in their faith. I do business daily with people who are only borderline literate and have never read any book voluntarily.

I do know several serious literary snobs. They are all fans. I count on them to alert me to SF/F outside the normal channels. Yet every month there is another argument on Facebook about those mean literary types looking down on us. And if we have enemies, we must defend our borders.

We live in a very genre conscious culture. Everything has to have a label, a quick, easy marketing ID. I am not criticizing. We need labels because we live in a morass of information, which cannot be used, or even comfortably tolerated, without organization. But we do not like being labeled. Firstly, we always worry (rightly or wrongly) that the label is pejorative in the mouth of an outsider. Secondly, we invariably find the label too restrictive.

So we jump the boundaries. In publishing, it is now called genre crossing. Having reduced our literary world to vampire novels, romances, westerns and noir, we find that we cannot live within such narrow definitions, and we rebel with vampire westerns and noir romances. Urban fantasy started out as a cross genre of mainstream and fantasy (and romance). So can we say the SF/F boundary is sacred? Wherever it is?

I should be triumphantly assembling my conclusion now. But I am stumped. Instead I invite you, the readers of SF Signal-yourselves a major voice of fandom-to tell me: do we have boundaries? And if so, what are they?

Meanwhile, maybe I will nominate Reamde. Just to mess with you.

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Here’s the description:

On the island of Cercia, the gods are dead, killed by their followers and replaced with the study of magic. Magicians are forbidden to leave their homeland. Laws bind these men that prevent them from casting spells on the living—whether to harm or to heal.

Quentin, a young nobleman, challenges these laws out of love for his wife. His best friend, Asahel, defies authority at his side, unaware that the search for this lost magic will bring them both to the edge of reason, threatening their very souls. The Universal Mirror shows how far two men are willing to go for the sake of knowledge and what they will destroy to obtain it.

Trailer follows…

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One of the joys of reading science fiction is the chance to visit faraway worlds. This week at the Kirkus Reviews blog, I take a look at some of the Cool Worlds in Science Fiction.

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A lot of recent science fiction appears to take place on Earth, and only a minority of space-based science fiction taking place outside the solar system. Novels and stories involving travel to the stars and interstellar travel seems to be out-of-date or out-of-fashion, and even Hard SF treatments of interstellar travel seem as realistic as Star Wars.

We asked this week’s panelists:

Here’s what they said…

I think that like everything else, fads in science fiction run in cycles, and lately there’s been a big ol’ dystopian wave going on. But it’s not as if deep space science fiction, or SF featuring far-flung space civilizations isn’t still being written. Charlie Stross, Iain Banks, Dan Simmons, Greg Bear, Chris Moriarty, C.J. Cherryh–heck, I’ve written a couple of books dealing with far-flung space travel myself.

If you were to nudge the focus of the question over to whether near-future and near-earth SF has been getting more *awards* attention lately, I think you’d be more accurate.

But there are fads in criticism the same as everything else.

The Many Worlds Hypothesis

So in the current edition of SF Signal’s Mind Meld we are asked to consider whether FTL travel, space empires, crashing suns and the like are no longer better than the intellectual property of a certain Hollywood franchise or two. I mean, you have that pesky Einstein fellow and his laws. You have all that distance. You have the possibility that we’ll drown ourselves, choke ourselves, blow ourselves up, starve ourselves or (insert your favorite apocalyptic scenario HERE) ourselves.

Well, maybe. Maybe we’re not good enough or smart enough or tough enough to survive the next (5) (10) (50) (100) (500) (1,000) (take your pick) years. Maybe the universe is working against us when it comes to visiting other stars. So how can we get around that?

First, we can be optimistic. While it is currently pretty popular (or trendy) for science fiction to be more pessimistic than optimistic, I think these things go in cycles. The Cold War led to a lot of science fiction where the world ended in fire. The long slow grinding of the 1970′s led to dystopian cyberpunk. The threat of climate change led to a new variation on the nuclear apocalypse. But in between the down cycles we had cycles where science fiction had optimism. It might have been overshadowed by the last down cycle, but they were there. So, let’s assume that the human race survives. Where next?

Well, we could build an empire (so to speak) here in the Solar System and “play” in that with our fiction. With eight (nine) planets and countless moons, asteroids and comets, there is plenty of real estate and story possibilities around. Look at the McAndrew stories of the late Charles Sheffield, the Grand Tour series of Ben Bova, the classic book The Planet Strappers by Ramond Z. Gallun (available free at your various sites such as Project Gutenberg or Manybooks), Paul McAuley’s recent duo of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun or John Varley’s classic Eight Worlds books and stories such as The Ophiuchi Hotline and Picnic on Nearside. Mining colonies on Mercury, balloon cities in the atmosphere of Venus, O’Neil colonies around Earth and the Moon, terraformers (or not) on Mars, miners in the Belt, gas miners and robots around Jupiter, surfers of the rings of Saturn…all the way out to the cometary halo, where we can have Freeman Dyson’s genetically-altered trees and humans living in bio-suits such as those found in the works of John Varley and Spider Robinson.

Not enough? It should be, but let’s make the Big Leap.

Even if we can’t do faster-than-light travel, if we can’t get around Einstein, or jump via a collapser (Joe Haldeman), or find a stargate (television or numerous books or webcomics) or warp space (television and more)…you could set stories using the slowboats. Both Sheffield and Varley had epic journeys not quite to the next stars. Charles Stross did the same in his Accelerandro stories. Bussard Interstellar Ramjets, multi-generation colony ships, laser-boosted sailships crewed by the Habermen or the Scanners or even downloaded intelligences. Take the era of Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey where the speed of communication equals the speed of travel, find a way of extending lifespans through artificial means of playing with Einstein and see what you can come up with. Some can find vast time-and-space spanning success within these limits (see the earlier works of Alastair Reynolds as a fantastic example).

Or…let’s play with physics. We can go the classic route. Hurtling worlds. The Galactic Patrol. Superdreadnoughts tearing up the ether. Scintillating lenses and steely-eyed heroes and heroines. I revisit “Doc” Smith, Edmund “World-Wrecker” Hamilton and others every few years. The stories creak, the science is obsolete, but those guys could chew up the scenery, errr, the universe.

Or we can take a more rigid approach. Find a way around Einstein. Keep it consistent. Bring it to the fore, or keep it in the background. How about…different physics (Greg Egan’s Clockwork Rocket)? Zones of different physics in the galaxy (Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and its prequel/sequel)? Plain old FTL all the way across (Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, even the cinema of Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica).

The play’s the thing. FTL, the Galactic Patrol, galactic empires (rising or falling) and the like are no more or less relevant today than they ever were. It’s up to the storyteller, the writer, the screen writer, the director, the game designer to make it something we want to experience.

The state of the genre may reflect the state of the world. There are a number of reasons why stories about interstellar travel are low in English-written SF currently. (I can’t speak to other SF.) The defunding of NASA’s manned spaceflight program, health concerns over the effects of radiation on astronauts beyond low Earth orbit, and pervasive feelings of uncertainty about the economic and ecological future do not offer much in the way of hope for space travel as we have previously envisioned it at the moment. Quantum physics rather than astrophysics seems to be a preferred means of exploration at the moment, investigating multiverses rather than space.

However, commercial space travel is becoming more viable, with tourism as a driving force rather than science or defense. As we further our knowledge of space and manned flight, it might be that the type of story we’re likely to tell changes: commercial empires rather than military ones, with the drive to find Risa more a motivation than that for expansion.

That said, interstellar SF hasn’t disappeared. I’m highly anticipating Garth Nix’s A Confusion of Princes, a foray into space empire. Although I have yet to read it, Beth Revis’ Across the Universe, a story of a generation ship, has made a big splash in YA. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Diving the Wreck, City of Ruins, and Boneyards look at space from a far-future perspective, delving the wreckage of forgotten civilizations. Elizabeth Bear recently concluded a trilogy about a generation ship (Dust, Chill, Grail.) Sarah Creasy’s Song of Scarabaeus looks at terraforming out of control. While near-future SF is popular right now, the vast expanse of space hasn’t lost its appeal.

Science fiction has always been a mirror of our own world, a way to explore the extremes of behavior, environments, or politics. Grand space opera can draw human politics, warfare, interactions, and ideologies on a vast canvas — such explorations are perfectly valid. Clinging to a detail that “faster-than-light travel doesn’t exist” is really missing the point of galactic epics. Science fiction isn’t *about* how a space drive works!

Interstellar travel has definitely turned out to be harder than we thought it would. For one thing, everything about space travel is a bit harder than the optimists thought in the 1950’s. If there’s one thing that building the International Space Station taught us, it’s that building things in space is hard. Even space suits are difficult and unwieldy. So without some kind of major economic incentive–some Lex Luthor-style knock-out monopolistic “we own all the water & you’ll pay us whatever we ask for to get it” kind of pay-off–then neither a near-FTL drive nor a generation spaceship looks to be in the works.

These days I’ve found the uploaded brains futures to be a little more convincing. I’m thinking particularly of the post-human futures of Greg Egan and Charles Stross. In Diaspora and Schild’s Ladder, Egan’s post-humans are just about all digital (especially after the surface of the Earth gets scorched by a nearby neutron star collision in Diaspora), and similar characters exist in Charles Stross’ Accelerando series. At that point you can send very small spaceships out into the vasty deeps of interstellar space. You don’t have to have any provisions for life support, just enough dedicated computer space. The residents can keep themselves entertained in VRs or go into sleep-mode for the duration. Upon reaching their destination, they can activate nanobots to use the local resources to make whatever else they need. By the time there’s sufficient interstellar architecture in Schild’s Ladder, you can just beam all your personal information to your destination at lightspeed, and be downloaded an re-instantiated on the far side. Nice and fast, no fuss, no muss.

Both of these authors look at things in terms of information instead of physical matter. Trade exists, but instead of shipping around huge masses of Stuff, there’s trade of information, designs, and ideas. Given the way our world is trending now, that makes a certain amount of sense. It doesn’t seem terribly conducive to galactic empires and system-spanning wars–Egan assumes that an entire galaxy will have enough resources that people won’t really have much reason to fight over them, and armies have a lot of Stuff to schlep around–but this kind of framework still allows plenty of interesting far-future space stories to be told.

It’s interesting how quickly SF writers have been abandoning interstellar stories. I think part of what we’re seeing is an exodus from SF for the land of fantasy. So there are just fewer SF novels and therefore fewer galactic empires. But it’s not the whole story. I’m feeling resistant to reading (or writing) stories of FTL travel, because of the lack of realism you mention. Time was when we could enjoy more technologically simplistic adventure stories, but for me the thrill is gone. Enter Alastair Reynolds, Ian Banks and others who do the interstellar technology at a level that is satisfying if not downright astonishing. So it definitely can be done. One needs to posit at least a Type III (Kardashev scale) civilization to do it. Imagining that sort of advanced society is quite challenging for most authors. I gave it a shot with The Entire and The Rose. But lacking a PhD in astronomy, it took a lot of work and creative handwaving. If one is mostly interested in stories about people, it leaves the writer of interstellar dramas with the dilemma of how much of the story is working out the tech and when that becomes a burden to the reader.

That said, I still wonder where the galactic stories are. There may be a more interesting “state of the genre” issue involved. Are we really, I have to ask myself, demanding more sophisticated stories?

Look at what we’re reading in fantasy! The most popular offerings are not especially subtle or demanding. So. If we lump together the trend of more fantasy/less SF; and more solar system-based SF/fewer galaxy-wide civilizations, I wonder if we are going through a phase of retrenchment. If we are feeling battered by seemingly intractable economic and global problems so that, perhaps unconsciously, we’re ready for stories closer to home. In science fiction, we’re leaning toward stories that show us we’ve cleaned up our backyard (before moving down the block.) Or those novels in which Mars is our second chance to get it right–but it’s still in the neighborhood. Therefore, I think we are entering a timid period in SF, one in which our uncertainty and guilt have even spawned a whole movement for more “mundane” SF. I understand. I feel some of that, too. But I’m also hoping it’s a temporary trend and that this state of the genre is just a small blip in the span of our literature.

No, I don’t think interstellar travel, space empires, etc. are at best science fantasy any more than they ever were. Or, putting it the other way, they haven’t become any less likely, in the recent past. They’ve always been the stuff of fantasy. That didn’t used to be a problem.

The thing that *has* changed, I think, is the requirement that science fiction be somehow rigorous to be taken seriously. When I look back at the classic science fiction that I grew up with, a lot of it didn’t pass the sniff test. Larry Niven had teleportation, giant alien cat warriors, and human’s eugenically bred for their luck. Arthur Clarke had God turning out the stars. Herbert had giant freaking worms digging through a desert rich in psychoactive space fuel. Unsophisticated as I was, I didn’t see anything wrong with that. Still don’t.

I see two things happening with the genre. The first is that it’s becoming the primary idiom of pop culture. The second is that, in response to that, there is a narrower and narrower definition of “real” science fiction which uses terms like “science fantasy” to exclude work which isn’t somehow pure enough. I think that there’s a real risk of science fiction going the way of jazz music and poetry in which it becomes a more and more sophisticated, narrow, and inaccessible form dedicated to meeting the standards of a smaller and smaller elite. But I also think the consequences if that does happen are pretty minor, because the market for accessible science fantasies like The Demolished Man or Dread Empire’s Fall or the Vorkosigan Saga appears to still be wide open.

Interesting question at a time when our country downsized NASA and left space exploration to private enterprise and the Russians we once feared. Personally, I believe it’s clear FTL is just a pipedream at this point and very fantastical, although it’s a trope which is certainly fun for readers and writers. Space empires? Given recent discoveries of an Earth-like planet at Kepler 22b and similarity of some of our neighboring planet’s moons to Earth, I wouldn’t want to rule out the existence of alien species capable of having galactic empires, science, and technology we have never heard of. Right now, yes, they are just fictional, but the possibility, to me, is not.

I remember Gene Roddenberry describing how the Navy sent experts to the set to find out how the Enterprise’s sliding doors worked. They wanted that technology for ships and subs. Unfortunately, it was done by men sliding the doors behind the scenes. But the point is, the desire to create such doors was inspired by the stories.

It was interesting to me to see io9’s recent call for writers to break rules again, such as using FTL. I have argued that given the nihilistic nature of so much of culture and writing today, hopeful stories are trending again and a return to the Golden Age type larger-than-life heroes where good triumphs over evil may soon be in vogue. I think people want to be inspired and space opera is a subgenre which tends to do that very well. Which of us as boys didn’t dream of being Buck Rogers or Superman or some other hero from the stories of our youth? I know women who dreamed of being Wilma Deering or Supergirl. And I think as a result, interstellar travel will continue to be of interest. After all, fighting each other is a reminder how conflicted our world is. But bringing the world together to fight an alien menace is far more inspiring and gives us hope we can come together when it counts as humanity for a common cause. It also inspires in us the desire to be heroes/heroines and rise above our circumstances to change the world for the better. Generally, human beings tend to look at anything strange or different as threatening so alien space empires discovered via interstellar travel (by us or by them) provide possibilities for threats from the strange which are hard to resist in creative minds—not just of writers but also of readers. I think they will continue to be fodder for stories and movies for a long time to come. And as such, they inspire us to dream and with dreaming comes a desire to make dreams reality. In the same way, people will desire to travel to the stars both for discovery and for glory.

As long as science fiction can continue to inspire such dreams and goals, I think the genre is in plenty healthy shape.

Well, here’s the sad truth of it: all science fiction is fantasy. In fact, all fiction is fantasy…because it’s made-up.

Okay. I got that out of my system. Now to answer your question…

Somewhere along the way, the definition science fiction got narrower and narrower and narrower until it became this tiny sliver of what it had been in the past. I have a calendar from Asgard Press with old pulp covers on it, and all the covers depict unbelievable things—bug-eyed monsters, ray guns, interstellar travel. This month’s image features a woman in a tight metal uniform using a laser pistol as she carries an unconscious man to her spaceship. The cover is from 1950. What’s fantasy about this (besides her spacesuit)? Well, back then, no woman would carry a man. Women weren’t in charge of anything. Women didn’t rescue their men with guns while the poor guy was unconscious… And lookie. I haven’t even gotten to the science yet.

So what I’m seeing isn’t the rise of science fantasy. What I’m seeing is science fiction returning to its roots. The rise of space opera (thank heavens!) has led to more readers, because readers like adventure, good storytelling, great settings, and even better character—not accurate science. Accurate science is a spice, a bonus, not the point of the piece. That said, the new space opera and the new interstellar sf has much more accurate science than the old interstellar sf.

Here’s my opinion: the folks who whine that the new space opera and all the successful interstellar sf is “science fantasy” can talk in snarky labels all they want. What it doesn’t hide is the fact that interstellar adventure and good storytelling gets more readers than that narrow stuff which passed for sf ten years ago. If we don’t want readers, we can go back to that. I personally like the direction the genre is heading — at light speed.

Maybe we’re passing through the bottom of a valley in the sine wave function, so to speak, because we don’t see as many Hard SF stories in outer space as other subgenres of science fiction. This kind of thing has been known to happen – it did in the 1980s and 1990s, after the Cyberpunk Movement got all SF shook up: suddenly everything was cyberpunk or tried so hard to follow the cyberpunk guidelines that the average reader could very well feel she wasn’t having anything else in her daily SFnal dietary requirements. (Of course every other subgenre known to human fandom was still being produced, but who was publicizing it?)

Today, almost thirty years after the cyberpunks, we have a much more divided genre. That’s amazing, because of the sheer size of the subgenres we have now. Consider steampunk, for instance: inside steampunk (which itself is an offspring of cyberpunk) we now have clockpunk and dieselpunk as well (and probably even more – I’m consulting right now Jeff VanderMeer and S.J. Chambers’s The Steampunk Bible, and there are many more, though some of them, like *mannerspunk*, seem to be nothing more than a good joke, on the other hand authors like Gail Carriger have already spread the word about this subsubgenre (?) as well, so who can tell? I’m for them all.

As for the Hard SF matter, that’s another question. I don’t think interstellar travel and similar tropes can be considered Science Fantasy today. *They just are not being seen in the big picture*, at least in most of the stories at this particular point in time. To mention two excellent novels published in 2011 that couldn’t be more different from each other, Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief and Kameron Hurley’s God’s War – the first abides by hard science (physics, mathematics); the second follows a story that is a well-tempered mix of several tropes (far future, military SF, biopunk) that are not constrained by today’s science, but by good, old extrapolation. But this is not something new: the gap between Rajaniemi and Hurley is pretty much the same as the gap between Verne and Wells – and that’s good.

In response to the first part of the question, for me, the answer is no, and it depends on how I define science fiction for myself.

The question implies that the technologies that would make interstellar travel, space empires, et cetera are likely to be found impossible. Being impossible they must therefore be considered science fantasy as opposed to science fiction. However, I take a simple definition for myself: “science fiction in the literature that describes the impact of technological change on society.” That definition does not touch on whether or not the technologies are possible. As Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Lots of science fiction stories in the 1930s and 1940s dealt with scientific postulations that seemed impossible, and yet those stories are no less science fiction. Those postulations dealt primarily with how a change in technology would affect society.

As to what this says about the state of the genre, that requires a more lengthy response.

Does a lot of recent science fiction take place on Earth? I read a fair amount of short fiction published but I barely scrape the surface on the novels so I can’t say one way or the other. Such a premise is always based on the perception of the reader. Readers who don’t enjoy interstellar travel and space empires won’t see them because they aren’t looking for them. The reverse is true, of course, as well. I read only two new science fiction novels in 2011, one of which (11/22/63 by Stephen King) took place on Earth, the other (Firebird by Jack McDevitt) roamed the galaxy. My experience on novels, therefore, is 50-50.

And what of short fiction? There I can speak with a little more authority, although having only read about 120 pieces of short fiction in 2011, I’m still vastly behind the curve for the entirety of what was published. Catherine Schaffer’s “An Interstellar Incident” (Analog, Jan/Feb 2012) assumes a kind of galactic empire. “In Which Faster-Than-Light Travel Solves All of Our Problems” by Chris Stabback (Clarkesworld, Dec 2011) is about a lonely interstellar pilot. “The Sighted Watchmaker” by Vylar Kaftan (Lightspeed, Dec 2011) takes the entire universe as its scope. “The People of Pele” by Ken Liu (Asimov’s, February 2012) deals with interstellar travel and the effects of relativity and time dilation on people. Also by Ken Liu, “Five Elements of the Heart Mind” (Lightspeed, January 2012) follows a survivor of an interstellar starship to a long lost colony.

True, these are a sampling and it is easy to select a sample that makes your case, but these are stories appearing in recent magazines, and not just the old-guard magazines but the newer ones as well.

Suppose, however, that such a trend exists, that writers are writing more science fiction that takes place on Earth or in the solar system. Why? I can think of several reasons:

• First, there is the simple reaction against all of those galaxy-spanning stories that for many people on the fringes of the genre, provide the cliche for everything that is science fiction. This kind of trend is by no means new. After World War II, stories of post-apocalyptic disasters were rampant. They were extremely popular at first, but gradually grew less and less popular as the market was flooded with them and the tide subsided. Then, too, Isaac Asimov used to take heat for writing stories that spanned the galaxy and purposely put out a collection of stories that stayed much closer to home. The name of that collection: Earth Is Room Enough.
• Second, writers no longer see new avenues to explore in deep space and so why waste stories postulating how space travel will impact our society when there are lots of other technologies brewing that can and will have a more immediate impact. We therefore see lots of stories about information technology, a subset of which are stories about immortality through computers, or the development of real AI (for instance, Robert J. Sawyer’s recent WWW series). We also see lots of stories about how humanity’s technology has effected Earth’s climate and the impact that might have on society.
• Third, science fiction is maturing as a literature and in doing so, it is focusing ever more narrowly on the human condition in relation to technology, with the emphasis on human condition. This would make galaxy-spanning stories less likely candidates when stories closer to home might be more illustrative. It becomes harder to tell a story in a galaxy far, far, away when that same story can be told right here. That said, there are exceptions to this. Kij Johnson’s “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” (Asimov’s, Nov 2011) takes place on some distant world, but is clearly focused and centered on the human condition there.

That said, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of interstellar, galactic empire stories. They may be yesterday’s news at the moment, but they are the stories that helped shape the genre and writers will be trying to emulate and improve upon them for decades to come.

I think they always were science fantasy, unless you know something about Einstein’s equations that you’re not telling the rest of humanity.

The question seems to be: is that a good thing or a bad thing? And the answer is that it depends upon the quality of the story. Our canon would be considerably the poorer if Ray Bradbury hadn’t written The Martian Chronicles because there’s no oxygen on Mars, or Isaac Asimov had forgone the Foundation Trilogy because he knew we could zip between the planets the way we do between cities.

There’s a place for hard science, and a place for science fantasy; the only thing there’s no place for is poor writing, and that’s the key to why every type of story can still find a home as long as it’s told with some grace and skill. As someone who, as a reader and as a writer, has always considered the characters more important than the science, I have no problem with this at all.

The whole idea of space travel is in serious danger of becoming “just soooo 20th century” in the public imagination. Ideas can become associated with a particular era, as airships have become associated with the 1920s for us; after the Hindenburg accident, airship travel became inconceivable, and the further it recedes in time the less viable it becomes as a current or future technology. Apollo was a 1960s thing, and our ideas about space travel have become all wrapped up in the issues of the time–the cold war, civil rights, and nuclear brinkmanship. The idea that going back to the moon might be relevant for our *current* social and global situation is getting harder and harder to credit.

In other words, it’s not just interstellar travel–it’s space in general that’s going out of fashion. And once it’s out of fashion–once it’s irrevocably associated with the 20th century in the public mind–it will be very hard for it to ever come back. There is a cost barrier to making it relevant to the ordinary person; this barrier is 100% the fault of NASA and the giant and bloated aerospace companies it has supported for the past forty years. A chink has appeared in their armor recently, in the form of the company SpaceX, but it remains to be seen whether SpaceX will be successful.

It doesn’t help that the visions of interstellar travel that are presented on TV and in movies are entirely fantastical and physically impossible. Star Trek TNG succeeded in making space travel look dull, torpedoing an adventure and exploration premise with stories about personnel problems in an idealized office environment. Stargate annihilated space entirely in favor of travel-as-telephone-call. With these images relentlessly pushing down any realistic cultural picture of what interstellar travel might be like (one-way, arduous, extremely slow, but with the payoff of entire worlds at the other end), how can we expect a new generation of writers to extend and celebrate this subject?

It has always been science fantasy, even in days of yore. If we stick to the science we know, interstellar travel is barely possible to a few nearby stars, and a galactic empire spanning them a logistical impossibility. A few people have tried relativistic “space empires.” Poul Anderson, Alan Steele, Dan Hatch. Given a faster-than-light mode of transport, then much becomes possible; but at the current state of the art, FTL is itself a fantasy. (Maybe. Unless you’re a Swiss neutrino headed for la dolce vita.) But typically we have either subspace (as Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict series) or wormholes, Alderson Points (Niven and Pournelle), gateways (Lois Bujold in her Miles Vorkosigan series) or Krasnarov tubes (which I have used in my Spiral Arm series.) For some of these there are fuzzy edge scientific speculation, but it’s science that borders on fantasy.

Furthermore, any galactic empire worth its salt would by nature be so far future-ward that we would be in the position of an ancient Sumerian trying to write about life in present day New York City. Even were Gilgamesh vouchsafed a vision of Manhattan in 2012, how on earth could he possibly describe it? He didn’t even know what a chariot was. He didn’t have a word for velocity. He might (barely) recognize New York City as something like his own pueblo back in good ol’ Sumeria, but nothing about it would be comprehensible.

Fortunately, SF is not tasked with the responsibility of committing journalism on the future. Interstellar galactic empires are not really about interstellar galactic empires, are they? Gilgamesh might not know what airplanes or cell phones are, but he would recognize love and jealousy, bravery and greed, desperation and complacency. He might value these differently than we do; but he would recognize human nature. And that’s what we look for in our space operas. Stories about people set against a grand and variegated backdrop. Interstellar settings have the sheer sweep of canvas and scope for adventure that we can no longer get from Darkest Africa or Trips to Mars. We already know there are no Lost Roman Cities, no bone chess Martian hives. Any story with those settings would need to be remorselessly realistic. We already know what’s there. We can write gripping stories, sure; but that are not the same kind of stories we once got from City at World’s End or Foundation and Empire.

Meanwhile, our physical retreat from space was presaged by our literary retreat from space. Interest has waned. Computers and genetic engineering are the hot speculative sciences these days. They have generated splendid stories; but not the same kind of stories.

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Related posts:

1. MIND MELD: What Book Introduced You to Science Fiction?
2. MIND MELD: Our Fondest Memories of Science Fiction
3. MIND MELD: How Important is Plausible Science In Science Fiction?

Also, be sure to check out the excerpt on Tor from Saladin Ahmed’s debut novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon.

And thanks again to Annie!

Written

• @Brain Harvest: “The New Phone” by David Erik Nelson and Fritz Swanson
• @Daily Science Fiction: “Visiting Planet Earth” by Eric Brown
• @Daily Science Fiction: “The Long Con” by Megan R. Engelhardt
• @Lightspeed: “Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring” by Brooke Bolander
• @Lightspeed: “War 3.01″ by Keith Brooke
• @Quantum Muse: “Duex Cerveau” by Michele Dutcher
• Weird Fiction Review – A Michael Cisco Troika: Selections from Unpublished Novels
• @Author’s Site: “Spirit Guides” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Written – Serialized

• @Strange Horizons: “Aftermath (Part 1 of 2)” by Joy Kennedy-O’Neill
• @Author’s Site: “A Sudden Outbreak of Magic: Chapter Seven” by Michael Jasper

Audio

• Beam Me Up #299 – “Universe Reef” and “Life Plus 70″
• @Podcastle: “Lavanya and Deepika” by Shveta Thakrar
• Radio Drama Revival #264 – Thwack That Dirigible!
• @Toasted Cake: “The Occupation of the Architect” by Jason Heller

Audio – Serialized

• @Author’s Site: “THE ALL-PRO Episode #15″ by Scott Sigler

eBooks

• @Smashwords:
  • “The Chamber” by Brett Talley (SF Horror Short Story)
  • “Rider” by Joyce Chng (YA Fantasy Novella)
• @Amazon:
  • A Death of Honor by Joe Clifford Faust (Classic SF Mystery Novel)
    
  • Astronauts and Heretics by Thomas Marcinko (SF Collection – free through Thursday, Feb 9th)
  • “In the Mirror” by Robin Lythgoe (Fantasy Short Story)
  • Nine-Tenths by Meira Pentermann (SF Novel)
  • Shadowbloom (Rhyme of the Willow) by The Sullivan Brothers (Fantasy Novel)
  • “The 19 Dragons” by SM Reine (Steampunk Novella)
  • The Darkening Dream by Andy Gavin (Dark Fantasy Novel)
  • The Storm Glass by Fred Limberg (SF Adventure Novel)
• @Weightless Books (MOBI and EPUB formats):
  • Lightspeed Magazine Ebook Sampler

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Related posts:

1. Free Fiction for 1/18/2012
2. Free Fiction for 1/25/2012
3. Free Fiction for 1/28/2012