Category Archives: nonfiction

nonfiction

There is an untapped audience for SF magazines

February 20, 2012 – 1:00 pm

There is an large untapped audience for more popular SF magazines.

There are millions of people who already read SF novels, and who watch SF based film and television. Even more people also read SF flavoured comics, play SF inspired computer games, listen to music and look at art that could have stepped from the pages of an SF story. Whatever it is SF gives people: challenging ideas, original thinking, mythic storytelling, entertainment or sheer untold weirdness, people want it and they want it in their millions. This is an untapped audience which exists as part of the mainstream in our society and wants more material to consume.

SF magazines could be selling more issues, to more people. SF short stories are anideal way to give people contained bursts of the most intense and original SF. It is fiction that fits in the small gaps of time that permeate modern living and provide a complete experience. Films and novels are lifestyle products. They are cultural events which demand the attention of their audience. Why do SF magazines not demand the same attention?

I do not think that there are any SF magazines at the moment interested in that sort of attention. Is it because at present SF magazines are deliberately niche publications? Maybe. It keeps the costs down and the expectations low. When success happens it is good, and when lack of sales force the magazine to close then no one is too disappointed.

To actually get people reading SF magazines beyond the present small circulation there need to be new magazines which adopt different tactics. These new SF magazines must demand the readers attention, just as films, books and other SF in the mainstream demand attention. But how?

An successful SF magazine must be a container for radical and entertaining ideas. Ideas able to inspire and enthuse thousands of people, just as the genres original magazines inspired thousands of people their day. Stories that could provoke controversy and discussion on important questions our society faces, and the futures we face.

Tomorrow’s SF magazines must make the short story a prestigious and financially attractive form for talented writers to write for. The stories must not appear to be the work of amateurs. They must not be written as second rate alternatives to making a TV show or film. They must be written in the full belief that short fiction can tell unique stories in unique ways that no other medium can manage, or not written at all.

Tomorrow’s SF magazines also need to be beautifully designed and efficiently distributed. At the moment SF magazines are at best a couple of years behind contemporary magazine design. They all look dated. This is not helping them attract new readers, and it is not helping people read the stories inside. Tomorrow’s SF magazines should be winning important design awards. Tomorrow’s SF magazines should also be on the leading edge of digital distribution so they are readable by anyone around the globe.

And holding together the best ideas, the best writing and the best design, the SF magazine of tomorrow must have a strong identity. Each magazine requires it’s own unique high concept. SF magazines can not continue to face the question: What is an SF magazine? With the answer, a magazine with SF in it. Each new SF magazine must have as strong and relevant concept today as the original SF magazines had in their day.

I think that having popular and widely read SF magazines is important. To me the health of all genre fiction depends on it. Short SF is often seen as the crucible of new ideas in genre fiction, and I think that it can be. However it can only serve this purpose if these stories are being disseminated to a wide audience. Without successful SF magazines the pace of progress in genre fiction slows, and we risk becoming irrelevant and fixated on old ideas and forms; losing readers in a vicious cycle of boredom and nostalgia. To survive in tomorrow’s markets, SF magazines must grow into the imaginations of new readers who will help enrich all genre fiction with new stories to tell and new worlds to imagine.

*

This article was first published August 18th 2010 on Damien G. Walter’s blog. It gathred a lot of comments. Today I am reposting the essay because I read the first issue of Arc. This magazine forfulls some, if not most, of the critera I set forth. As Arc has sound backing from the people at New Scientist behind it I hope that this magazine will survive beyond the difficult early editions.

You can buy the Kindle edition of ‘Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins’ from Amazon. Follow them on twitter.

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nonfiction review

Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island.

December 26, 2011 – 7:10 pm


The whole of Africa is in turmoil., refugees from the continent are fleeing to anywhere they can force a landing. In their millions.

In England the trickle of refugees looking for a home, for safety, becomes a flood. Soon the South of England is overrun Towns succumb to mob rule, pitched battles are fought over houses. The refugees gather together a government, an army and soon the Afrims are in negotiations with the British Government. Compromise is reached, promises are made. And broken.

And through these chaotic days, as extremists vie for control, as violence flares and society collapses, one man tells his story.

Alan Whitman has lost his job, his home, his family, everything. He is a desperate man…

This is a curious book. The edition that I read is a revised edition of a book first published in 1972. Fugue for a Darkening Island posses a curious atemporality because while the book has been revised to make Christopher Priest’s intended neutrality more explicit the general attitude and details of the society depicted haven’t. The cover copy refers to the book as being a “classic catastrophe novel” and I read it as part of the same tradition that books by John Wyndham, although harder and generally of a less conservative and hopeful character. And while it is less cosey than other catastrophe novels there’s still some restraint that slows the books down so that actually the book becomes boring.

Not badly written or unreadable, just boring.

There are violent set pieces and scenes of domestic breakdown caused by both the crisis and Alan Whitman’s own emotional immaturity, and taken individually these scenes do excite and hold interest. Like I said, this isn’t a badly written book. But there’s a lot of bumbling around the south of England and all the standard problems found in a catastrophe are all present. We are shown there is a genuine lack of shelter (except the book does, for a short while, turn into a typical British camping holiday), security, and a place to go for a pint and read the newspaper. However this is a two hundred page novel and I’m quite sure that if this was compressed into a novella of half its length with all the fat and faffing cut I might not have drifted off into periods of profound boredom.

One final problem is that the novels end is fatally obvious and very Daily Mail. But Fugue for a Darkening Island is curious and I’m not sure if this is a deliberate dissonant effect intended by Christopher Priest. Not sure because while Fugue for a Darkening Island demonstrates a complex attitude towards extreme immigration issues, with Alan Whiteman being a tolerant liberal at the start of the novel, by the end of the novel we are left with a text that demonstrates Africans are always cruel savages and that white Anglo-Saxon little Englanders are decent people.

All I’m going to say is white people rape and kill women too.

So there’s Fugue for a Darkening Island. It’s a problematic book and I haven’t even begun to explore the issues raised by this being a revised edition of a forty year old book. That might be an issue not worth starting as unwrapping the past from the present is a notoriously difficult task and in a book like Fugue for a Darkening Island is rife with double arguments that leave us with no firm answers. Maybe all I can say on this issue is that I think I’d rather have read the text unrevised from the original 1972 edition.

This is a boring, yet curious, book. A dull catastrophe that in places seems close to the way thing are or would be, and in other places seems like the rantings found in the Daily Express/Mail letters page. Not bad, but also not good.

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nonfiction ramblings

All the Possible Routes

December 26, 2011 – 9:01 am

I am turning into my Dad.

My memories of trips to the mythic north to visit Grandparents during the festive season follow a consistent pattern. In the morning we blasted up the M1 and across the M62 to get to Rochdale before lunch time. Meals and small talk took up the afternoon until we had to leave for the return south. Our stay often only equalled the time spent travelling. The return route never exactly retracted our original tracks along the M62 and M1. We’d drive along the M62 until we reached Barnsley and then drove over the moors to Huddersfield. When asked why my Dad does this he only replies it makes the journey more interesting. I suspect that like me he cannot stand to retrace his steps too often.

The hundreds of times I’ve travelled through these places as a passenger has given me a virtual knowledge of these towns. One day I’ll stop in Huddersfield to find out what it’s like. I suspect I’ll be disappointed.

Last weekend I met my girlfriend’s parents for the first time. I made jokes to friends about the risk of being buried in a Warwickshire field, but in the end it turned out fine. There was a meal, slightly tense, but aren’t meetings like that always a little bit? There were two Sundays that weekend, not one. With Sunday #1 involving a wander along bucolic county lanes covered in mist and lit by the weak winter sun. On Sunday #2 Jen showed me her village. It scared me with its event horizon of restaurants and the existence of a village auction house.

I wasn’t disappointed. Mostly because of the deli and second-hand bookshop.

Leaving on Monday afternoon I decided not to follow the motorway corridor that me and Jen took on Saturday. That’d be rammed with rush hour traffic and it’d be boring. Instead I consulted Jen’s Dad for advice on alternative routes, bringing him the vague idea that following the Coventry orbital in my silver Fiesta might prove more interesting. The great God Google was consulted for directions. Directions were printed. They proved illegible in the dark but useful to consult in a petrol station. After goodbyes I disappeared back to Leicester with a kiss from Jen as I left her behind for nine days. The journey was only bearable because I got to throw my car around dark country roads while getting mildly lost and using my initiative until all the possible routes converged on the M69 as the final leg to get home. Driving is only worthwhile when it illuminates new places, otherwise it becomes a chore I’d rather avoid by catching a bus so I can read.

I am only turning into my Dad by repeating his behaviours.

Next time: what a small car filled with books is like to handle while driving up hill in heavy traffic.

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nonfiction review

Snow Country

February 18, 2011 – 7:13 pm

“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signal stop.”

– Opening Paragraph

In Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata we are presented with the story of Shimamura’s escape from Tokyo and his family. He escapes his responsibilities by travelling to a snow covered spa town in the mountains of western Japan. Over the duration of Shimamura’s first visit to the town he has an affair with a local geisha, Komako, who is looking for love and another life. However, Shimamura is also attracted to Yoko, the maid he first saw on the train as he arrived at the town. Shimamura and Komako’s lives and desires are incompatible, and their relationship is destined to fail. From the time that Shimamura returns to the town for a second visit in the autumn they both know this. They still fight it.

The language that Kawabata uses has often been described as haiku like in form. This is an accurate description. What we read here is a series of brief scenes presented in slight but carefully composed images. A style of storytelling which leaves the meaning in the crisp shadows cast by the words given.

Overall this short novel is a fine example of the virtues of brevity. It left me with a feeling the edges of mono no aware. Snow Country is not a book for a reader seeking a neat escape. As the novel closes, Shimamura, Komako and Yoko have been irreversibly changed. How have they changed? We don’t know every detail. We are left only with an ambiguous and open ending. The only knowledge we have is that we have reached the end of the novel’s 121 pages and that we have to close the book even the story is unresolved and closure hasn’t been achieved.

Note: I have employed Western name ordering in this review. The correct order for Yasunari Kawabata’s name is Kawabata Yasunari. Kawabata is the family name.

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nonfiction

On Hotel Street

January 14, 2011 – 3:00 pm

An anonymous purple coach filled with EDL supporters drives pasts me. It is sandwiched between four police motorcycles: two at the front and two at the back. The protesters inside are banging on the windows and whooping as the coach slows at the line of police officers twenty meters away from me. They start to get off the bus. One of the youths in a black hooded sweater is taken aside and searched. As I watch this I am approached myself. “Can you tell me what you are doing sir?”

The voice belongs to a police constable, dressed tactically and ready for a riot. He is much taller than me. He looks down at me. I decide that it would be a good idea to cooperate.

“I’m taking notes,” I say.

“Could you tell me what for?”

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nonfiction quick thought

The Evolution of Beautiful Science Fiction

December 19, 2010 – 4:47 pm

(I strongly object to the idea that Science Fiction has to be about science. In that regard it is the worst named genre ever. But undoubtedly some of it IS about science…)

– Damien G. Walter “To be true, Science Fiction must be beautiful”

Over on his blog, Damien G. Walter has written a short piece about beauty in science, mathematics and fiction (with a focus on Science Fiction). I agree with Damien’s argument that where prose fiction is at its most beautiful is when it interrogates the internal human experience. When fiction, under whatever label, takes the plunge and dives deep into inner space.

However, I want to talk a little about the statement quoted above, within the parentheses. Science Fiction is not the end of all fiction. No form of fiction is the final word. What evolved from one label (Scientific Romance) into another (Science Fiction) will evolve into other forms with a different labels. Maybe it is time to accept and understand that as a whole genre Science Fiction is just a step on this evolutionary path which will continue until all human language dies out.

(There is at the heart of Science Fiction I think a very American and extremely mid-twentieth century set of attitudes which is becoming a distant memory, even for Americans.)

Does that mean that Science Fiction is dying? Not exactly. At least not in an obvious and visible way. But at some point in the future it will be extinct. Nothing lives forever; everything dies. This is only natural and it causes less suffering to accept the transient nature of all things. Science Fiction is just a stage in the evolution of fiction that was born in 1926 and has, for a literary genre, had a long and relatively stable life. I do not want to be a cheerleader for the death of the Science Fiction label, but something better adapted to its environment and more beautiful will emerge to replace it and its institutions. Just as the literary fiction of the 19th, and the early and mid 20th centuries have been usurped by new fictions with new labels

Of course, on a personal level I would be very disappointed if in a thousand years, or even one hundred years, we were still reading something we’d easily recognize as Science Fiction.

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nonfiction ramblings

Musical Story Modelling

December 14, 2010 – 4:06 pm


My major operating metaphors about fiction are all about making equivalences between music and stories. For instance in my general scheme of thinking, short stories are singles and short story magazines are compilation albums.

There is a spectrum of different kinds of singles which has at one end pop music and pulp fiction. This the realm of the two and a half minute single with a strict adherence to traditional song structures and of squids in space with plot and conflict at the heart of every scene. It isn’t the smartest music out there, but it is made to be danced to while pissed. Here we are all about the chorus and surface story, and what that makes the audience feel in their heart.
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brain dump nonfiction research

Time and Time Again, Extracts From a J.G. Ballard Interview

October 21, 2010 – 11:02 pm


On Sunday 17th of October David Pringle posted an interview with J.G. Ballard to the J.G. Ballard mailing list that he had transcribed from a zine published forty years ago. The extracts I post here are taken from this transcription of Jim Goddard’s interview with J.G. Ballard conducted in November 1970 and published in “Cypher” no.3 December 1970.

Thanks to David Pringle for transcribing this interview, and of course to Jim Goddard for conducting the original interview.

I have been thinking about many issues covered in the interview and it is clear to me that the same arguments and discussions reoccur within SF time and time again. The questions and answers are always the same. We need to move on.

Goddard: What is your opinion of world SF today? And what new directions do you foresee it taking during the next 20 or 30 years to ensure survival?

Ballard: _Everything is science fiction!_ I think the future for it is tremendously exciting, but there are dangers. At present science fiction is almost the only form of fiction which is thriving — the social novel, for example, is attracting fewer and fewer readers — and for the obvious reason that social relationships are no longer as important as the individual’s relationship with the technological and fictional landscape of the late 20th century. _However_, in spite of its increasing readership all over the world, it seems to me that science fiction is in danger of losing its direction and sense of purpose — it may easily become a “closed” fiction similar to the western, with a fixed set of conventions and scope of reference. It is most important that the younger writers continue the good work done in the past ten years or so. To survive during the next 20 or 30 years? SF must go on being _relevant_, making sense of people’s lives and imaginations. In practical terms — American SF of the 1930-1960 period is now dead and buried, but it is important to go on stamping the earth down on the coffin — there are still too many people eager to jerk the corpse out of its grave and deck it in electric flowers.

[..]

Goddard: What do you think the role of the writer should be today? I say this generally, and not with particular reference to SF.
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nonfiction ramblings

What I Read During the Everybody’s Reading Festival

October 10, 2010 – 11:54 pm


Last week, during the Leicester Everybody’s Reading festival, I started to read “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte. I suspect this might be considered a slightly unusual choice of book for someone like me to be reading, as I am a young male who isn’t formally studying English.

My reasons for reading “Jane Eyre” are simple. The first reason is that I haven’t read it before and I am curious. This should be reason enough to pick a book to read. I do have a second reason, and this is to do with the how I approach what I read and how I let my reading affect my writing.

Understand that I believe that what you read affects what you write. If I was to read only science fiction (my native literary ghetto) then the narrative techniques and acquired experiences would be limited to those techniques and described experience found in science fiction. Yes, a wide range of techniques and stories are found within science fiction, but there are limits. Just as there are limits to what is considered romance fiction, crime fiction and literary fiction in all its many wonderful variations. To get better as a writer I have to read widely and without major prejudice towards style or content.

(Of course it helps that a book is good, but that’s a different discussion.)

What I do is read one book for fun and then read something that I would not normally read. Often this means I read a science fiction novel and then something you would expect to find on an English undergraduate course. There is a pretty neat side effect that forcing myself to read widely means I discover a lot of books which I end up enjoying I wouldn’t have encountered if I’d stuck to safe choices. Without deliberately making this effort I would not have read and enjoyed works authors like: Doris Lessing, Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf or Ernest Hemingway.

Without reading widely and attempting to close as many gaps in my own personal reading, I would be ignorant of so many ideas and techniques found in literature, and would probably still be writing thinly disguised homages to William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”. Reading widely has given me a deeper understanding of that book, Gibson’s style and has given me the confidence to explore the whole world of literature in both my reading and writing. My own authorial voice is no longer limited to a narrow range of influences, but is instead informed by everything from Asimov to Woolf.

So I am reading “Jane Eyre” because I want to try reading different books. It may not be a typical book for someone like me to read but I am only on page one-hundred and I think it’s great. Will it change the way I write? I doubt it will directly, but it is not hurting me to read Charlotte Bronte tell a story with beautifully chosen words.

- Will

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nonfiction

Plastic Futures

July 5, 2010 – 8:23 pm

Everything ages, and I hope that we can all accept that. Science Fiction is not immune to this. Indeed, it easily falls afoul of time easily by depicting futures which never come to pass and could never have happened. Even when we acknowledge the dictum that SF is always about the present this problem is not wholly solved. We can consider it side-stepped, and made to go away until some future reader looks back without any of the information it was assumed the reader possessed when the story was first written.

If we accept that all science fiction will overtime become more impenetrable to new readers we have to ask how can we deal with this? Yes, we can ignore the problem and carry on telling stories without caring about how legible they are in the future, or we can start to think about how our fictional futures might age and use this to form an understanding of how these stories work. I think that as a first step we can divide our science fictions into two broad categories: the plastic and the organic futures.

(Now this isn’t meant to be a value judgement on the quality of different types of SF; more a comment on the longevity and how the enjoyment of a story will be spread out over time. Please don’t shoot me!)

Organic futures are science fictions which are eclipsed by the real world soon after publication. They are not necessarily predictive, although they may be, but the quality that may best be assigned to them is that they are perceptive. They are intense reads about futures which fall apart five, ten years after publication. Our memories of these stories and the principle enjoyment we gain from them is rooted in their freshness and originality. However overtime these stories become less accessible and enjoyably to new readers. I would argue that the classic works of John Brunner such as: ‘Stand on Zanzibar’ and ‘The Shockwave Rider’ would typify this category. Another writer who works in this spectrum I would suggest is Charles Stross.

Plastic futures are the stories disconnected from the present. They are as enjoyable on the day of publication as they are a generation later. They have long half-lives1. A consequence of this is that they can possess less of an emotional resonance than more organic stories, but the effect that they have is longer lasting as the concepts and themes which these stories tackle are broader than more organic stories. My suggestion for a writers who’s work appears in this category would be Issac Asimov and Iain M. Banks.

Of course there are stories which are neither wholly plastic or organic. 1984 is one example of a novel which has, I think, lost none of its relevance since its 1948 publication.

I discuss this topic because I think that it is a worthwhile way to analyse science fiction. Asking if a proposed future is organic or plastic looks at our relationship with science fiction stories. Do we want futures that last forever, or do we want violent bursts of the future for five minutes?

1 I was tempted to use a radioactive metaphor originally, but I like plastic more. To elaborate, organic futures are like uranium which is energetic and gives off radiation freely until it decays into lead, and plastic futures are like gold and stable and hard to tarnish.

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