Nebula Awards Blog

The Speculative Poetry Scene

2009-10-05T22:58:00-06:00

I was lucky enough to attend two award ceremonies this year related to speculative writing. First, the Nebula Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, where I got to see Harry Harrison receive his Grand Master Award, hear Janis Ian perform a filk version of one of her greatest hits, and lose the award in my category to a wonderful writer whom I’ve long admired.

Second, the Rhysling Award Poetry Reading in Boston, where I got to see young writer-to-watch Amal El-Mohtar learn she had won the award in the “short poem” category for her whimsical and musical poem about Damascus, “Song for an Ancient City.” It’s this second awards ceremony that I want to talk about at length here.

Science fiction poetry, fantastic poetry, speculative poetry, whatever you wish to call it, forms the core of a lively, thriving scene that coexists with genre fiction in many venues.

Let me show you some stills from the poetry scene.

I am the MC of the Rhysling Reading at ReaderCon, where the Science Fiction Poetry Association has announced the Rhysling winners for the past five years. This year, I talked Michael Bishop into reading his poem “For the Lady of a Physicist,” which won the “long poem” Rhysling Award in 1979. Michael delivered a charming preamble in which he explained that though his poem begins with a quote from Stephen Hawking, it’s modeled after Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (the source of that oft-quoted phrase “world enough, and time"). A delighted murmur went through the 80-strong crowd. They knew the poem. The delighted reactions continued as they listened to the clever rhymes contained in his humorous poetic mash-up.

Not long after came Amal and Catherynne M. Valente, who kept the crowd rapt as they stood back to back and read alternating lines of their Rhysling nominated collaborative poem “Damascus Divides the Lovers by Zero, or the City is Never Finished.” A number of new talents and veterans took their turns, with Julia Rios, Caitlyn Paxson, Lila Garrott and others giving standout renditions of beautiful and complex poems, and Darrell Schweitzer amusing with a piece from Asimov’s Science Fiction that was short and off the wall. I’ve given away the ending: Rhysling Award Chairman Drew Morse passed on reading a poem of his own to announce the winners and spring the news on Amal that the members of the SFPA had voted her poem in the short category the winner by a landslide.

The long category went to “Search,” a nostalgic and funny look at the hunt for alien life by multiple Hugo and Nebula winner (and previous Rhysling winner) Geoffrey Landis. And I was pleased as punch that Michael approached me after the reading to tell me how delighted he was by the poetry he’d heard during that hour.

I couldn’t help but feel I’d been party to one of science fiction poetry’s proudest moments. Though that’s hardly been the only one of late. Roll back a year to August ‘08 when Drew, SFPA President Deborah P Kolodji and Treasurer Samantha Henderson went to Ray Bradbury’s birthday bash at Mystery and Imagination Bookstore in Glendale, CA, to present him with the Grand Master Award for achievement in speculative poetry. The meeting is recorded on video. Clearly delighted, Bradbury gives an impromptu speech about how he envied the talented poets he knew in his youth and the consternation he felt when Aldous Huxley informed him he was indeed a poet. Debbie tells Bradbury, “We think you’re a poet, too.” Grinning, Bradbury poses with the trophy, then exclaims, “To hell with the Academy Award!”

The past few years have seen a number of these memorable moments. The first Rhysling Award Reading at ReaderCon, where Joe Haldeman received a standing ovation for his reading of his rhyming double sestina, “Old Twentieth: a century full of years.” The 2008 Eaton Conference at University of California Riverside, in which the entirety of the SFPA’s archive of print publications going back to 1978 was made part of the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Utopian Literature. Debbie’s talk on speculative haiku for the Haiku North America conference in the National Archives of Canada. Heck, even the room party held at ReaderCon by Amal and her co-editor Jessica Wick to launch the newest issue of their poetry zine Goblin Fruit was packed, with just about every personage of note at the con that night stopping in to chat.

The fact is, right now, speculative poetry is alive and well and interesting as hell. Though you might not realize it if you relied solely on the critical writings about sf, these explorations of science fiction, fantasy, horror and stranger themes in verse can be found in most of the same places short fiction is found, whether in print or online. Even occasionally in an anthology or two. Sometimes even a “best of the year” anthology.

It’s a form of writing kept alive by writers and editors who are just as interested in using poetry forms to examine the themes of speculative literature as they are in using prose. Its perpetuation is certainly a labor of love—not too different in its way from the dedication in absence of financial reward that goes into producing a number of the prominent semi-pro publications or even (by SFWA standards) professional short fiction venues. Like those venues, the field of sf poetry has been a proving ground for upcoming talents (the list of Rhysling Award winners yields such names through the years as Susan Palwick, Jeff VanderMeer, Theodora Goss, Tim Pratt, Catherynne M. Valente) and also a place where established veterans like Bishop or Landis or Joe Haldeman or Jane Yolen might turn up to make art that’s a little off the beaten track.

Most of the time, though not always, the poems also function as little narratives or mini-fictions (or in the case of the sf or fantasy haiku, mini-mini-fictions. In fact the folks who write such things have for years been producing the equivalent of the Twitterfic one now finds at Internet hotspots like Thaumatrope.)

There are currents and countercurrents to be found inside this scene. As a not-exactly neutral observer, I might break things down like this. Asimov’s, the monolithic source of the best and highest profile sf poetry through the ‘80s and ‘90s, has been eclipsed as the prime pillar of speculative poetry with the rise of the Web zines, which could shed the limits on length and theme that come with squeezing works into leftover space on the printed page. Strange Horizons, with its collection of co-editors with deep roots in the field, is the inheritor of sf poetry’s mainstream, the poems there following an overall sensibility directly descended from the poetic experimentations in the ‘70s of the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas M. Disch and Brian Aldiss. A newer movement centers around the aforementioned upstart Goblin Fruit, with its focus on fantasy, myth and folktale inspired by Terri Windling and Midori Snyder’s late lamented Journal of the Mythic Arts. (Mind you, it would not be difficult to find individual exceptions to my sweeping generalizations at any of these markets, or, for that matter, poets who publish with frequency in all three places.)

If you’ve made it this far with me, you might be wondering when I’m going to tell you about what science fiction poetry is, or how you write it. Frankly, what it is, you’ve probably deduced by now, and if you want to know how to write it, your best bet is to go to some of these places I’ve mentioned already and start reading (or even to other places, like the decades-old zines Dreams & Nightmares, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry and Star*Line, my own zine Mythic Delirium, Astropoetica, Abyss & Apex, Ideomancer, Sybil’s Garage, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Electric Velocipede ... this list could get ludicrously long if I’m not careful.)

Many essays I’ve read about speculative poetry start with an attempt to explain just what this strange and wonderful chocolate-in-the-peanut-butter style of writing is, with sheepish asides about how little money is involved in writing it. To my mind, that approach wrestles with the obvious and misses out on the fun.

So I wanted to take a different tack, and just let you know that here in the universe of speculative poetry, we’re having a heck of a party, and we’d love for you to join us.

Mike Allen wears many hats, and occasionally they’re purple. He edits a poetry zine, Mythic Delirium, now celebrating its 10th anniversary, and the anthology series Clockwork Phoenix, the first volume of which made the 2008 Locus Recommended Reading List. Obviously, he also writes fiction; stories have appeared in Interzone and Weird Tales, with new ones scheduled this year in Tales of the Talisman, Cabinet des Fées, and the Norilana Books anthology Sky Whales and Other Wonders. He lives in Roanoke, Va. with his wife Anita, a demonic cat, and a comical dog. You can view his website at www.descentintolight.com and read his LiveJournal at http://time-shark.livejournal.com. He also for no apparent reason has accounts with MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

District 9 Review: We Have Met the Alien and He is Us

2009-09-08T13:04:00-06:00

I saw District 9 a week ago, but it took me a while to organize my thoughts about it. As we left the movie theater, a family member asked, “Did you like it?” But like isn’t a word you can apply to a movie such as this. It’s impressive, almost overwhelmingly so, and judging from the reviews and the blogs on this subject, everybody has an opinion about it. The movie-makers did several things right, and a number of important things wrong.

The single most important achievement of the movie is that it upends the usual cliches. This isn’t about innocent aliens (ET) or evil ones (Invasion of the Body-Snatchers). These aliens are neutral, stranded here on our planet with neither good nor bad intentions toward humans. In fact, the movie isn’t about the aliens; it’s about human responses to them. And not heroic responses, either (most of Star Trek). For this reason, the mock documentary approach works well because it makes us see a human xenophobic response to a crisis that isn’t being handled too well. The device of giving us supposedly “real” people reporting on the events serves a second purpose in bypassing the viewer’s defensive disbelief. This is a very old ploy, of course; Mary Shelley opens her fantastical tale of Frankenstein and his monster by an elaborate set-up in which we’re introduced to a thoroughly admirable character, a sea captain engaged on a voyage of discovery in the Arctic. When Frankenstein tells him the story, and he believes, how can we readers not?

It’s not by chance that the story is set in South Africa, a country that in recent memory had a vicious system of apartheid, in which non-whites were denied equality and segregated into their own poverty-stricken areas where disease and crime raged (Soweto being the one the film calls to mind). We are more willing to believe this kind of behavior from South Africa than, say, Switzerland (though that would be an interesting movie). Also, the film subtly hints that all is still not well in this version of South Africa; although the final credits are impressively loaded with names of obvious African origin, none of the principal actors are black. It would have made for a different story if some of those ordering the massacre of the aliens were black – or female.

Apartheid, of course, is what the film is about. Humans have a distressing tendency to sort people into “Us” and “Them.” There is no evidence to suggest that we would abandon this ancient defensive mechanism in the face of alien encounters. And so we may be appalled that the stranded aliens are herded into District 9’s slums, but we aren’t surprised. Even the rise of denigrating terms to describe the aliens (“Prawns”) is realistic. The fate of the character, Wikus, who becomes contaminated with alien DNA is also believable in its context. We don’t have a good record of behaving well to those whose fate, perhaps through no fault of their own, becomes entangled with the enemy. Kill them all and let God sort out his own is a philosophy with deep roots in human history.

So far then, we have a familiar cautionary tale that grows out of the sacred literature of many cultures: Nothing good comes of abusing the stranger at our gates. There are some humorous “in-jokes” – most notably, the bad guys are a pack of criminal Nigerians wielding heavy-duty weapons instead of email scams. (It should go without saying that the majority of Nigeria’s citizens are law-abiding, and they probably feel as insulted by this appearance of their countrymen as villains as good Italians feel watching The Godfather.)

But the film doesn’t hold up as science fiction because of several gaping plot holes. The first of these is the lack of believable explanation for the presence of the alien ship over Johannesburg in the first place. Apparently, the ship’s inhabitants weren’t particularly aiming for Earth when they fell ill. Why orbit here – in a stunning visual that evokes Arthur C. Clarke’s alien visitation in Childhood’s End? Clarke’s aliens came with a purpose. If there was a reason given for District 9‘s aliens’ visit, then I missed it. Another rather unbelievable nod to the SF canon comes when Wikus – who we’ve been asked to believe is slowly evolving into an alien himself – suddenly turns into a cross between the Terminator and something out of Transformers to kill those who are hunting him. In the film’s defense, we could say that many science fiction stories use such fanciful ploys to bring about an ending satisfactory to the hero. But because the transformation isn’t even hinted at earlier, here it seems cartoonish. (In the theater, the audience laughed at this point.)

I can well imagine that humans would find a way to blast their way aboard the ship, but we aren’t told the hole has been repaired by (and why would it be?) the time the father and son alien survivors take off at the end. The father and son are sympathetic characters, played against the usual alien stereotypes, but therein lies another problem. The aliens look weird enough, but their motivation and behavior are all-too human. Wikus even manages to understand their language, though we’re never told how this came about. And so can we, because it’s painfully obvious what all that grunting means; we would have said the same thing under the circumstances. Movies frequently fall into the either/or trap with alien characters. Either they’re inscrutable and we’ll never understand what they want, or they’re so much like us that we understand them too well. The first leads to lazy plotting where anything can happen, however bizarre, and the film doesn’t so much as hazard a guess as to why; the second results in a movie that’s a thinly-disguised allegory about ourselves. Such is the case for District 9. For make no mistake, this movie isn’t about the aliens; it’s about us.

There are other holes in the plot – eating alien flesh as a way of absorbing and utilizing alien DNA is one – but I’m ready to forgive a movie a few flaws if the overall experience is moving or thrilling in some way. District 9 is visually interesting and exciting. Many of the problems that I’ve pointed out slipped past harmlessly while I was viewing it and only occurred to me in retrospect. And apart from the problems I’ve explored here, the story is unfortunately all too believable as a scenario for some future encounter with aliens. We may be seeing ourselves in a dark mirror here. So I can’t say, in answer to my relative’s question, that I liked it. But I did find it thought-provoking.

*With apologies to Walt Kelly’s Pogo.

The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds. To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.

The Fascination of Apocalypse

2009-09-01T22:55:00-06:00

Recently, I had the opportunity to look over photos of the damage done by an earthquake that struck Long Beach in 1933. Toppled church spires, debris spilling over the roads, schools and businesses demolished. There’s something compelling about other people’s horrendous events; the greater the destruction the greater the fascination, just as long as we’re safe. This has been the case at least since the unknown Israelite scribe set down the story of Noah’s Ark in the Old Testament, and we became morbidly hooked on tales of our – sometimes deserved – destruction as a race. But since Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, we’ve had some semblance of scientific underpinning to our nightmare visions. Some of the science fiction field’s best writers – Leigh Brackett , The Long Tomorrow, and Richard Matthieson , I am Legend, come to mind – have given this subject thoughtful if somber consideration.

Sometimes the cause of our projected demise is that fiend of the twentieth century, nuclear destruction, for instance, David Brin’s The Postman. Sometimes it’s a plague: George R. Stewart, Earth Abides, natural or man-made – preferably the latter for dramatic purposes, so the author can play on our sense of guilt. Sometimes, the author chooses not to name the cause but to concentrate on the after-effects of destruction. In any case, we can point to dozens of examples of final-catastrophe novels and short stories.

So if descriptions of apocalypse are so numerous in the field, how are we to make critical distinctions between them? Bigger weapons of mass destruction? Better methods of annihilating humanity? More gruesome descriptions of after-effects? All of those have had their day, and like all novel ideas, at first they are fresh and startling (Nevil Shute , On the Beach), then they become cliche. For me, as for many science fiction readers, there has to be something more.

I have to admit I’ve never been a fan of the recent apocalyptic novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, which received much acclaim. One explanation of this critical enthusiasm, of course, is that mainstream critics, being unfamiliar with the vast body of work already existing in the genre, found McCarthy’s description of humanity’s degradation after some unnamed but horrific apocalyptic event to be fresh meat. I don’t mean to belittle his achievement here in depicting the relationship between the man and his son who travel this particular “Road,” but I believe a science fiction author would have gone on from there to – as Theodore Sturgeon once advised – ask the next question. “And then what?” we want to know. Even the story of Noah’s Ark tells of Noah’s family’s struggles to re-establish human settlements in a post-Flood world.

It’s a legitimate question to ask of an apocalyptic story. What did the survivors do? (There have to be some survivors or else there’s no story, just a gruesome but essentially static picture.) Science fiction readers want to see action on the part of those “left behind” – to co-opt a decidedly non-science fictional title of a book that nevertheless does answer the question about what happened next. The extreme response to this question can be seen in Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, where we follow the survivors of nuclear catastrophe for centuries – all the way to the moment when humans seem on the verge of repeating the disaster. Other novels explore the changes in society that evolve as a result, perhaps also, as Russell Hoban did in Riddley Walker, the extreme changes in language that might occur as a result of the disruption of communication.

Recently, I read one of the classics in this sub-genre that I had managed to miss, Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, first published in 1959. Frank spends little time detailing the exact extent of the nuclear strikes around the globe that bring civilization to its knees. Instead, he’s concerned with the reaction of one of the isolated, remnant populations in attempting to deal with the unthinkable. There’s something reminiscent of “Father Knows Best” here in tone, the characters being a trifle too resourceful at times, and too successful in restoring civility to a hard-scrabble life after the bomb. The tone reflects the prevailing split of the fifties in America: Fear of nuclear holocaust, and a strong belief that the family can conquer anything life throws at it. This philosophy may be a little hard for us in our jaded times to swallow, but as a story it satisfies because it shows the characters doing rather than simply reacting.

It’s not just that science fiction readers tend to like robots and spaceships and aliens – lots of mainstream-minded viewers like Hollywood’s versions of these icons. And I would certainly argue that it has nothing to do with appreciation of literary quality. The difference is that SF readers like what Einstein called “gedanken experimenten.” Genre readers want to take part in the story. We enjoy discussing the problems encountered by the characters as if they were real, and the pros and cons of the solutions proposed. We want to learn from the possible futures we’re introduced to, not just be appalled or chilled. We approach a science fiction story as if it was a thought-experiment. If this goes on, and we ask, Do we really want that? This question is a vital part of our response to science fiction, especially apocalyptic and dystopic literature.

That’s what makes a satisfying piece of science fiction, in my opinion.

Maybe I should check on my earthquake supplies!

Is Africa Ready for Science Fiction?

2009-08-12T22:22:01-06:00

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had some interesting conversations with award-winning Nollywood director Tchidi Chikere about science fiction (Nollywood is Nigeria’s oh-so-popular film industry. The term “Nollywood” is a play on “Hollywood”, much the same way as India’s “Bollywood”).

Chikere has written, produced, and directed over 50 films. He also published a collection of rather chilling short stories titled Strangers in Paradise. The collection includes a novella called “Daughter of the Cave,” which is essentially a fantasy piece. Chikere sought me out after my novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, piqued his interest. Needless to say, I was delighted and honored to hear from him.

During one of our conversations, we discussed my own work and whether it could be translated to film, particularly African film. “Is Africa ready for science fiction?” he asked me. We debated this for a while. Naturally, I believed Africa was ready…ready enough, at least. Notwithstanding my own contentions, Chikere had other ideas.

“I don t think we’re ready in the primary sense of the word,” Chikere said. “We can hide it in other categories like magic realism, allegory, etc, but we’re not ready for pure science fiction.”

“Science fiction films from the West are failures here. Even Star Wars!” he said. “The themes aren’t taken seriously. Science fiction will come here when it is relevant to the people of Africa. Right now, Africans are bothered about issues of bad leadership, the food crisis in East Africa, refugees in the Congo, militants here in Nigeria. Africans are bothered about food, roads, electricity, water wars, famine, etc, not spacecrafts and spaceships. Only stories that explore these everyday realities are considered relevant to us for now.”

Naunihal Singh, a professor of comparative politics specializing in conflict, civil-military relations, and the politics of Sub-Saharan Africa at Notre Dame University (and a fan of speculative fiction), had some similar comments about science fiction in Africa.

“Science-fiction will have to adapt itself to the local market,” Singh said. “I don’t think there’s the sensibility for it right now. I remember seeing the Matrix in a mixed crowd of Ghanaians and Americans, this was in Ghana. Even though the room was dark, and there were some 40 plus people there, I could tell who was from where by their reactions to the movie.

“The Ghanaians just weren’t connecting to it. Bring the Terminator to West Africa, and he’d stop running in a day. He’d sit there and glitch. It’ll be hard to make people afraid of a future where computers take over the world when they can’t manage to keep the computers on their desk running. These are very western stories. On the other hand, classic science fiction, like space exploration stories, would probably work better…assuming it was adapted for the audience. Africans would love to see stories about Africans on a space ship. The idea that Africans might be dominant in the future would resonate so well with nationalism.”

As a writer of African speculative fiction whose work is also published in Africa, I took all this to heart and mind. After really thinking about it, I realize that I fully agree with both Chikere and Singh. And I believe their comments apply to literature, too…probably even more than to film.

Much of my previous work unconsciously tapped into my Nigerian background (along with my American background). It was intuitive. However, when I consider my recent short story in Seeds of Change, “Spider the Artist” (a story where volatile A.I. robot spiders guard oil pipelines in the Niger Delta), this story was different and I felt the difference as I was writing it. I was consciously writing toward an African audience.

In “Spider the Artist”, the focus was not on how the spider-shaped A.I. robots operated or why they decided to break free of human control. The focus was instead on the main character’s life as an abused wife living in the volatile Niger Delta region; on her anxiety over being childless in a culture where barrenness is the worst thing that can happen to a woman; and on her need for love which eventually leads her to befriend a robot. It’s quiet, backdoor science fiction that might better appeal to African audiences.

My forthcoming adult novel, Who Fears Death, is similar in this way. In this novel, there were even moments where my American sensibilities were offended or deeply strained. I’m very interested in moving further in this direction and seeing how things shape up.

Let me stop and state here that there IS a handful of African science fiction out there. There are novels, short stories, and a film or two. This handful is tiny but it exists. However, I didn’t write this essay to tell you about them. They’ll get their due … just not right now. This essay isn’t going to become a bibliography. For now, I just want to bring this issue to the table. Also, I’m aware that I am generalizing when I speak of Africa as a whole. It’s a big super -diverse place. But for the sake of discussing this topic, please allow me to do a bit of generalizing.

In my observation, in Africa, science fiction is still perceived as not being real literature. It is not serious writing. As Chikere said, African audiences don’t feel that science fiction is really concerned with what’s real, what’s present. It’s not tangible. It’s sport. Child’s play. I can see how science fiction can be foreign to many Africans. Technology tends to play a different role on the continent. There is a weird divide and connection between the technologically advanced and the ancient. For example: People will have cells phones in rural villages yet have no plumbing or electricity or one will opt to buy a laptop instead of a desktop computer because a laptop has its own power supply, most useful for when “NEPA takes the lights”.

But there’s another layer to the issue: Colonialism and the colonizers existing attitudes about what is literature and what is not. The foundation of what great literature is in Africa is too often defined by the West and the West still has trouble viewing genre fiction as true literature. This is why I felt it my duty to raise such a stink about the criteria for submitting to The Penguin Prize for African Literature (from Penguin South Africa).

In the criteria, they wrote that they sought “novels of freshness and originality that represent the finest examples of contemporary fiction out of Africa.” Then on the same page, they wrote: “Submissions in the children’s literature, science fiction or fantasy genres will not be considered.”

I can sort of understand the “children’s” literature bit. Sort of. There is plenty of children’s literature that is great literature. But the “no fantasy or science fiction” part? For a prize in AFRICAN literature? All kinds of problems with that.

After expressing my unhappiness to the folks at Penguin SA, I received a response from the publisher:

Dear Nnedi,

Thank you for your email on the criteria for the Penguin Prize for African Writing – we welcome input on the prize criteria and I’m sure we’ll hone them over time with considered feedback such as yours. We certainly did not intend to exclude writing with elements of fantasy or science fiction but rather to avoid the submission of books that will only appeal to a very narrow readership and that can only be marketed in the science fiction and fantasy section of a bookshop and do not have appeal to a broader readership. We will try to clarify this for the next round of the prize, but in the meantime could I encourage you to submit your work despite this stipulation in the criteria?

There you have it folks. Such prizes heavily influence the definition of “great literature” in Africa. All this stipulation will do is further the void between speculative fiction and “real literature”. Imagine how many potential African science fiction or fantasy writers and novels have been effectively excluded, disqualified, and demoralized by this mere stipulation.

Recently, I discussed issues of such gate keeping with New York Times Best-Selling science fiction author Tobias Buckell, who has similar concerns about Caribbean science fiction. “My solution is to write fiction that is more balanced, that will hopefully eventually get more writers to feel free to write a range of story types,” he said. “I want to be so good that eventually they can’t ignore me.”

Agreed.

I think the stage is already set for African science fiction. In my forthcoming YA novel, Akata Witch, there are these…things called “tungwa”. They are glowing balls of flesh that float in the air and explode into tufts of hair and handfuls of teeth. I learned of “tungwa” from my mother. She said her father used to talk about them and that a friend of his friend had seen them. Her father said these things came from outer space, like meteors, and that in the village and forests, children used to find them and bat them around until they burst. Weeeeeeeird. This is just one small example. The stories are there, they don’t need to be imported.

OK, the following are a few samples of African science fiction (yes, I know there are more): Ghanaian author Kojo Laing has a collection of short stories and a novels respectively titled, Big Bishop Roko and the Alter Gangsters and Woman of the Aeroplanes. Congolese author Emmanuel Boundzeki Dongala has a short story called “Jazz and Palm Wine” (the anthology it appears in is also called Jazz and Palm Wine). In South Africa, science fiction is really percolating; The South African literary journal, Chimurenga, recently had an African science fiction themed issue. Film-wise, there is now District 9 (I’ve been excitedly anticipating this film for months). And, if you can find it, check out Les Saignantes by Cameroonian film director Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Lastly, I just have to include the trailer for this Nollywood fantasy film because it cracks me up: Across the Bridge.

In a nutshell, I think getting African audiences to open up to science fiction will take some finesse. True African science fiction, which is different from what Western audiences are used to consuming, needs to be written/filmed and made available first.

I think one will have to deliberately combine the concept of “art as a tool for social commentary and change” and entertainment. The root of the technology, cultural shifts, sentiments, concerns, characters, way of speaking, needs that drive the story must first and foremost be endemically African. Along with the unfamiliar, must come the familiar. And yes, it’ll have to be a gradual ascent. A whisper to a shout. A ghostly woman in the night to a full blown alien invasion in the middle of Imo State that only a frustrated plantain chip seller named Chukwudi can stop. Only then will African audiences be ready. Chikere and I are working on it.

Nnedi Okorafor is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author of Nigerian descent. Her novels include Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the 2008 Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature) and The Shadow Speaker (An NAACP Image Award Nominee). Her forthcoming novels Who Fears Death (from DAW) and Akata Witch (from Penguin) are scheduled for release in 2010. Her Disney Fairies chapter book, Iridessa and the Fire-Bellied Dragon Frog (Disney Press), is scheduled for release in 2010. She holds a PhD in literature and is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University. Visit her online at nnedi.com.

Fantastic Voyages

2009-07-01T00:16:01-06:00

Humans are born with wanderlust; the lure of the long migration out of Africa is in our blood. And I suspect that as soon as boats were invented, our ancestors discovered the thrill of the sea voyage into the unknown. I think of this when I walk my dogs along the bluff in Long Beach and see two great ocean liners, one the Queen Mary that will never go to sea again, and the other a ship of the Carnival Cruise Line that journeys up and down the coasts of Southern California and Mexico with its load of holiday-makers and sightseers. When we are prevented from voyaging in person, by finances or health or circumstance, we have always turned to the next best thing, the tales of other explorers’ adventures. One of the first of these ancient, popular accounts of exploration by sea voyage still moves us today with its images of strangeness and danger: Homer’s Odyssey.

The Venetians made their reputation as formidable explorers of the watery world early on; they were joined by the Norse, the Portugese, the Spanish, and later the English. And we cannot forget the voyages undertaken on faith across an uncharted expanse of Pacific Ocean by the peoples of Micronesia. Nor should we overlook the voyages of trade and exploration of the Chinese fleets during the Ming Empire. An interesting facet of these Chinese voyages is the thousands of non-sailors who were aboard the junks for other purposes than manning the boats or fighting battles once they landed. These people included diplomats and concubines, farmers and animal caretakers (for any colonies that might be settled along the way), mapmakers and scribes, translators, Buddhist priests, and those rich enough to buy the experience of discovery. This wasn’t only an Oriental custom; Francis Drake’s Golden Hind sailed around the globe in the sixteenth century with a number of English nobles and their pages along for the excitement – and possible treasure – and incidentally contributing much-needed funds to the operation. Like the Chinese a century before, Drake provided musicians as well as navigators, and a parson to minister to these sea-faring souls, the tourists, we’d probably call them today.

And here perhaps we have the beginning of that modern trend: the ocean cruise. Whether it’s a brief weekend trip to Mazatlan, or a cruise through Alaska’s Inner Passage or the Caribbean, or the New York to Southampton run on one of the Queen Mary’s younger siblings, or something much longer, today’s passengers – like those on the Chinese junks and Drake’s galleon – expect food, entertainment, enlightenment, medical care, even spiritual counseling. We seem to take our culture with us when we go to sea for all but the briefest voyage. Our behavior on board can change too. Without the pressures and constraints of daily life, cruise ship passengers often exhibit characteristics that may have been suppressed before they took to the wide open spaces of the sea. Excessive eating and drinking are the norm, entertainment, games and other recreations are all part of the journey. Shipboard romances, even illicit ones, are not uncommon. And we know that people unanchored from their home reality often behave in a foreign port in ways they would never dream of at home.

Our planet has been rather thoroughly explored and charted by now, and there are only so many destinations on this planet we can choose , so we’re ready for the next phase, cruising among the stars. We’ve already witnessed the first wave of rich tourists paying large sums of money for the experience of shuttling up to the space station. We’re not quite ready for the next step, the luxury starliners touring space with thousands of ordinary folk aboard. But we have the next best thing, the science fiction tale of what it might be like.

Early examples of the “Tourists in Space” theme that has developed include a number of Jules Verne’s works (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (which might as well be a voyage into outer space), From the Earth to the Moon), and A.E. Van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle. A little later, we find Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero in this category too. One such science fictional voyage (Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001) even has the subtitle “A Space Odyssey.”

From these rousing adventures, it’s a small step to the television series, Star Trek. Large-canvas stories about space and the future – sometimes rather dismissively called “space opera” – fall into two major categories, tales about voyages of discovery, and tales about empire. Star Trek is one of the former, and Star Wars the latter. The Enterprise becomes a world unto itself on its long voyages; romances are not uncommon (although if they involve Captain Kirk, they are destined to end unhappily), and later iterations of the series even have elaborate entertainment features such as the holo-deck on board for the crew to while away the long time between ports-of-call.

To my mind, though, one of the most thought-provoking and imaginative of these future tourists-in-space accounts is Norman Spinrad’s 1983 novel, The Void Captain’s Tale. No priest or parson on the ships of Spinrad’s fictional line, but cruise directors and the entertainment they provide make for a vivid sub-plot. Unshackled from what Spinrad terms the ‘quotidian world,’ the passengers engage in bizarre behaviors and sexual rituals. In fact, the novel describes in some detail the culture of customs and recreation that develops on ships of the Second Starfaring Age. Spinrad continues this exploration through Child of Fortune, published two years later.

Are there any sociological lessons we can draw from these fantastic voyages? Science Fiction has long explored the idea of the generation ships that will be needed for truly long voyages in space , absent the discovery of FTL drives. What Spinrad gives us to think about is the notion that we won’t be just exporting human culture as we know it (or as our descendants will) when we voyage out into deep space. We will be landing on those far away planets with something unexpected and unknown, for our culture will change with and be changed by the trip itself. We may program the computers with our science and our arts, and stock the DNA so we can replicate the flora and fauna of Old Earth that we want to take with us, but no matter how hard we try we won’t be able to control the culture our voyagers land with. ‘New Earth’ won’t be much like ‘Old Earth.’ Customs we can probably not even dream about may have evolved. Certainly new fashions, new cuisine, new laws.

And will the long conversations with the stars on those odysseys bring about new takes on religion and philosophy, requiring new priests, parsons and prophets? I don’t see why not.

World SF

2009-06-02T10:52:00-06:00

World SF is one of those quaint and little-used expressions in modern science fiction. It refers to the publication of SF in non-English languages and SF published outside of the English-language country markets (US/Canada, UK/Australia/NZ/South Africa). For a time, a group calling itself World SF would meet once a year in a various countries, comprising both English and non-English writers, but seemed to have left us little beyond enthusiasm.

The publication of non-English writers remains rare in the English world. There is a handful of anthologies, and occasionally a story appears in one of the magazines. Is there reason to suppose any of this has changed?

There is. Most likely, it was the Internet that acted as a catalyst. Perhaps the prevalent studies of English-as-a-foreign-language throughout the world was another. But what is happening, in small doses yet more and more, is two-fold: that writers for whom English is a second (or even third) language are beginning to utilise it for fiction in order to reach a wider (potentially global) audience; and second, that more translators (amateur and professional) are available for translation into English from a wide variety of languages.

Perhaps the best-known of the second category of writers is the Serbian writer Zoran Živković, many of whose books have been translated into English by Alice Copple-Tošić. Živković’s work won the (American) World Fantasy Award and been published in book form in both the US and UK.

Of the second category, Thai writer (and composer) S.P. Somtow (pen name of Somtow Sucharitkul), is another WFA winner and a winner of science fiction’s John W. Campbell Award (an ironic win, perhaps, considering Campbell’s well-known disposition to believe in the supremacy of Europeans). Writing in English, Somtow now resides in Bangkok, where he is artistic director of the Bangkok Opera House, and remains one of the most well-known of the global SF writers.

Do these two writers symbolise a change? Or are they outliers on a graph, the exception to the rule?

Once, perhaps. But not now. In compiling The Apex Book of World SF, my new anthology of science fiction, fantasy and horror from around the world, I was surprised to discover just how many writers from outside the “Anglo-Saxon world” (as the French call it) are now being published professionally in American and British anthologies and magazines. Dutch writer Jetse de Vries became one of the editors of Interzone, the prestigious British SF magazine, published short stories in English in half-a-dozen places, and currently edits a major SF anthology for British publishers Solaris. Aliette de Bodard – who lives in Paris, speaks French, yet writes in English – had quickly made a name for herself with short fiction and is currently nominated for a – you guessed it – John W. Campbell Award.

From India, Anil Menon and Vandana Singh have been regularly publishing short stories while Ashok Banker’s epic fantasy series based on the Ramayana has been selling all over the world. Israeli writers, for the first time, made their appearance in the long-running Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine (Eyal Teler, Vered Tochterman), and Israeli writer Nir Yaniv became the first Israeli ever to appear in the legendary Weird Tales – recently. The Philippines have become a hotbed of original science fiction and criticism, with Charles Tan becoming a vocal and lucid commentator on the field (not to mention editing the recent Philippines Fiction Sampler and the Nebula Awards Blog), Dean Francis Alfar making an appearance in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, wife Nikki Alfar, and new writer Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, both in Fantasy Magazine – the list goes on. Recent English book deals include those of Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski, new Finnish writer Hannu Rajaniemi and French writer Pierre Pevel. Call it a renaissance.

In the short fiction field, two publications, in particular, have proven important recently in terms of World SF. Clarkesworld and Fantasy are two online publications that have – perhaps surprisingly – featured a higher number of international writers, including the above-mentioned de Vries and de Bodard, Ukranian writer Sergey Gerasimov and others. Print magazine Interzone has always published such stories occasionally and recent Mundane SF issue featured three. And the re-launched Weird Tales set aside one issue for International SF.

So it suddenly seems as if World SF is becoming a little more than an excuse for Western writers to get drunk in different countries on a yearly excursion. And it might be because, for the first time, international writers are doing it for themselves. The Internet has acted as a levelling ground. English has become a de facto global language (to the natural dismay of the French). A new wave? A global movement? Not as such. Though it would be tempting to give it a name and a label, what we see is merely indicative of the changes in the larger world, and in the smaller world of SF by reflection.

And that change, I think, is a very good thing.

Lavie Tidhar is the author of linked-story collection HebrewPunk (2007), novellas An Occupation of Angels (2005), and forthcoming Cloud Permutations (2009) and Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God (2010) and, with Nir Yaniv, short novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009). He also edited anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults (2008) and the forthcoming The Apex Book of World SF (2009). He’s lived on three continents and one island-nation, and currently lives in South East Asia.

Old Man River

2009-05-11T22:41:01-06:00

The Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Rivers that form the western and eastern boundaries of Long Beach have been tamed. Concrete-channeled, laden with trash from careless upstream cities after a rainstorm, they empty into the Pacific like sad puppies let out to relieve themselves, a far cry from the wild beauty of their bigger brethren around the world. Gazing at these subdued California waterways, I find it depressing to remember rivers once played important roles in human history, not the least being as the first interstate highways. The river of my youth, the Thames, provided a highway for English kings and queens traveling between the royal residences at Hampton Court, Westminster and Greenwich.

Beyond their practical aspects, rivers in human imagination have always been powerful symbols. Our blood stream is a river in itself, so it’s no wonder the river’s passage from spring in the mountains to final emptying into the ocean came to be a metaphor for life from birth to death. Rivers appear in the myths and legends of almost every tribe on the planet, the Tigris and the Euphrates that bounded Eden, the Tiber, the Nile,the Danube, the Amazon, the sacred Ganges. Not surprisingly, we find writers as diverse as Thoreau, T.S. Eliot and Mark Twain using rivers as metaphors in their work. And a brief glance at a catalog of science fiction titles seems to indicate an equal fascination in our genre: HATRACK RIVER (Orson Scott Card), GRERAT SKY RIVER (Gregory Benford), “Child of the River” (Paul MacAuley), “The River Styx Runs Upstream” (Dan Simmons), and – of course – Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series.

Considered as metaphor, the source of the river symbolizes birth, and the mouth symbolizes our re-absorption back into the All, the direction of the flow being the natural path of life. So what are we to make of stories about going upriver, against the flow? It might be logical to expect them to carry themes of a return to childhood innocence , but instead they seem to reflect the opposite, the warning Thomas Wolfe gave us: “You can’t go home again.” Return to the womb is neither possible nor to be aspired to, upriver journeys tell us, especially when we realize nations follow the same path from a state of primitive existence to a later, more socialized one that human life follows. “Upriver” comes to symbolize devolution not evolution.

Joseph Conrad’s 19th century novel, HEART OF DARKNESS, where a journey up the Congo from the teeming civilization of the African coast to an earlier, troubling state of humanity in the jungle, reveals the breakdown of Kurtz’s psyche as its result. “Going native” here means much more than wearing Earth-friendly cotton and necklaces of seed pods, or avoiding fast food and pesticides. This novel has become the inspiration for others that have attempted to explore the same theme, the darkness that lies at the heart of “civilized” man. All our pious sophistication and our civilized manners and customs, such novels tell us, are only a thin skin over a raging horror of original, out-of-control appetites and evil intent. Conrad’s narrator, Marlowe, sees little innocence in the well-spring of our dark hearts.

Francis Ford Coppola’s movie version, APOCALYPSE NOW, remains true to this motif; Captain Willard travels deep into the jungle to encounter his own “Kurtz,” a once-admirable man who has “gone native” in all the worst senses of the phrase. The theme of losing the tenuous hold civilization has on humans, and becoming more influenced by amoral (to say the least) circumstances the further upriver one travels, is explored in another movie: THE MOSQUITO COAST, based on Paul Theroux’s novel of the same name. Allie Fox is a genius, a likable man when we first meet him, who conceives the plan to travel upriver deep into the jungle to build an ice house to supply the natives. But “upriver” seduces decent, capable men; they go from being helpers to exploiters, and eventually they go mad. APOCALYPSE NOW adds the somber message that such men must be killed for the common good. All our best stories tend toward myth, and these three versions of the going upriver theme warn us that we have no business feeling superior to those we perceive as less far along on the path than we are. Doing so, we court disaster.

Robert Silverberg’s 1970 novel, DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH, with its references to Conrad’s novel (including the name Kurtz in case we miss the similarities) explores much the same mythic territory. In a story which evokes humanity’s often disastrous colonial past, going upriver on an alien planet doesn’t result in greater innocence or humanity of spirit for the protagonist. Rather, the opposite is true. The main character, Gunderson, violates the belief and customs of the planet’s inhabitants for his own gain because he finds them of lesser value, and in doing so risks his own spiritual integrity. Science fiction is a kind of contemporary mythology, and myths are always didactic, so we shouldn’t be surprised to find lessons along with story in its pages. Silverberg’s novel offers a new perspective on the “going upriver” theme, warning us not to export our questionable values around the galaxy.

I remember in graduate school studying the difference in the European myth of the forest and the American myth of the frontier, and how these referenced the historic situation of the cultures the writers were embedded in. But the journey upriver transcends everybody’s history and expands into our future, a Jungian theme that speaks not of our past but of our soul. As we stand on the brink of the Age of Space, we might do well to study the lessons of these river journey stories.

Blogging from the Nebs

2009-04-26T03:00:00-06:00

This is just a preliminary blog from the UCLA campus. There was a very elegant pre-dinner cocktal party on a balcony overlooking LA. Now we’re starting on the banquet, salad and the main course has been brought out. Many of sf’s brightest stars are here, Nebula nominees Joihn Kessel, Mike Allen, Greg Benford, and too many more to mention by name. Also, Janis Ian,, the Toastrmistress, Jane Espenson who will be accepting the Bradbury Award for Joss Whedon, and lots of others. But I’d better get started eating my sea bass befored the waiter takes it away.

Okay, It’ s 9:30. We’ve finished the desert was a delicious cake within walls of white chocolate. Christine Valada is introducing Janis Ian. We’re on our way. Janis has brought her guitar and is singing a song with sf lyrics to the tune of “At Seventeen.”

Winners - Andre Norton Award - Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) - Ysabeau S. Wilce (Harcourt, Sep08)

Solstice Awards - Kate Wilhelm, A.J. Budrys, and Martin H. Greenberg
SFWA Service Award - Victoria Strauss
Jane Espenson is accepting the Brasdbury for Joss Whedon, and Joss is appearing via some strange technical sci-fi video.
Grand Master Harry Harrison
Author Emerita - M. J. Engh
Script - WALL-E
Short Story - “Trophy Wives” - Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Fellowship Fantastic, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes, DAW Books, Jan08)
Novella - “The Spacetime Pool” - Catherine Asaro (Analog, Mar08)
Novellette - “Pride and Prometheus” - John Kessel (F&SF, Jan08)
Special thanks - Christine Valada
Novel - Powers - Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt, Sep07

That’s it. Janis is thanking us and the lights are coming up. The winners are gathering for photographs.

Thanks for joining me for this experimental blogging. The sea bass was delicious.

-Michael

Authors talk about their Nebula nominated fiction

2009-04-24T00:08:00-06:00

This is one of a series of essays written by the authors of Nebula nominated works and published in the SFWA Bulletin. To view the other essays and biographical notes in pdf format, please click here.

Note: “Baby Doll” appeared in the SFWA European Hall of Fame, and is a Nebula nominee for Best Short Story.

About “Baby Doll” by Johanna Sinisalo

“Baby Doll” is a story about vanishing childhood. But it is
also about vanishing parenthood.

In Finland today an increasing number of families are
run by the children. The kids decide the menus for family
meals, and they also select their own toys, games, tv
shows, and clothes. The parents do not even try to be
authorities; they simply want to keep the family “happy” by
avoiding all conflicts, and so they yield to the most
extravagant demands.

The kids, very aware of their power, use it to gain
access to the titillating world of fake adulthood. Because
the media idols and models themselves keep getting younger
and younger, the borders between the worlds of children and
adults are disappearing. Children are exploited and
marketed to other children, who are exploited in turn,
while the parents pay the bills.

In Finland, it is perfectly natural to see other
family members naked. In sauna baths, complete strangers
sit in the nude, making small talk. Children under the age
of eight or so play naked on the beaches. Because of this
generations-old tradition of not over-sexualizing the
environment, I find it much, much more disturbing to
require a two-year-old girl to wear a top in public.

Johanna Sinisalo Biographical Note

Johanna Sinisalo lives in Tampere, Finland. She has
received the national Atorox Award for the best domestic
sf/f story seven times. She has also written numerous
reviews, articles, comic books, and screenplays, and edited
two anthologies, including The Dedalus Book of Finnish
Fantasy.

Sinisalo’s debut novel, Not Before Sundown a.k.a.
Troll: a Love Story, got the most prestigious literary
award in Finland, the Finlandia Prize, and tied for the
James Tiptree, Jr. Award. She has published three other novels and a story
collection, and is currently working on an sf comedy film
script, Iron Sky.

Catch the Nebula Awards on Twitter

2009-04-23T23:42:00-06:00

Mike Allen (@mythicdelirium) and Mary Robinette Kowal (via @sfwa) will be Twittering at the Nebula Awards (if all goes well) this weekend. Be sure to check out their Twitter updates and this site for the latest news on the Nebula Awards.