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.

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

I want this edition of crash and a car like this.

So does Jenny.

First US edition: J.G. BALLARD “Crash” | The Citrus Report | Art, Culture, News, Graffiti, Music, Street Art, Clothing, Politics, Reviews

The real ideas of a poem are not those that occur to the poet before he writes his poem, but rather those that appear in his work afterwards, whether by design or by accident. Content stems from form, and not vice versa. Every form produces its own idea, its own vision of the world. Form has meaning; and, what is more, in the realm of art only form possesses meaning. The meaning of the poem does not lie in what the poet wanted to say, but in what the poet actually says. What we think we are saying and what we are really saying are two quite different things.

– Octavio Paz (Alternating Current)

Yesterday I travelled with Jenny up North to visit the Grandparents. If I had had my own way the first day of 2012 would have been spent in bed or on a sofa reading, starting as I mean to go on, but duty impelled me towards Rochdale. The sky never decided what it wanted to be. Blue and grey skies were present in almost equal amounts. As we reached the summit of the M62 I commented that the then rain soaked landscape Jenny saw for the first time was the landscape of my childhood.

Most Christmases or New Years in my life have at some point involved a drive up the M1/M62 to a suburban home on the edge of the Pennines and in earshot of the motorway’s drone. I have traced this path at least one hundred times. When I imagine a fantastic landscape I do not envisage colossal forests or lonely mountains, and I have never had time for extravagant castles. The geography of my childhood is one of boggy grit moors, dead sand dunes covered in heather, and at night a sprawl of orange lights.

And now that I am thinking about this I am drawn to conclude that this is why most fantasy worlds don’t resonate with me. My childhood was spent sitting in the back seat of a car dreaming of stories to describe the vistas I passed.

However I am currently reading The Snow Spider Trilogy by Jenny Nimmo and enjoying it. Part of this, I suspect, is because deep down I have an empathy for the landscape of northern Wales, which isn’t my own landscape but is similar. The lack of resonance with other fantastic geographies, I’d hope, is not because my imagination is necessarily weak but because The Snow Spider aligns better with a basic template of nature I possess. It is more solid as it describes the essence of a familiar place rather than attempting to invent something entirely original. See also Howl’s Moving Castle.

So I am lead to wonder how the imaginary geographies of other people have developed. How do people get the landscapes they dream of?

Describing—that is the last ambition of an absurd thought. Science likewise, having reached the end of its paradoxes, ceases to propound and stops to contemplate and sketch the ever virgin landscape of phenomena. The heart learns thus that the emotion delighting us when we see the world’s aspects comes to us not from its depth but from their diversity. Explanation is useless, but the sensation remains and, with it, the constant attractions of a universe inexhaustible in quantity. The place of the work of art can be understood at this point.

— Camus, A.,p87. The Myth of Sisyphus. Penguin Classics.

For an absurd work of art to be possible, thought in its most lucid form must be involved in it. But at the same time thought must not be apparent except as the regulating intelligence. This paradox can be explained according to the absurd. The work of art is born of the intelligence’s refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal. It is lucid thought that provokes it, but in that very act that thought repudiates itself. It will not yield to the temptation of adding to what is described a deeper meaning that it knows to be illegitimate. The work of art embodies a drama of the intelligence, but it proves this only indirectly. The absurd work requires an artist conscious of these limitations and an art in which the concrete signifies nothing more than itself. It cannot be the end, the meaning, and the consolation of a life. Creating or not creating changes nothing. The absurd creator does not prize his work. He could repudiate it. He does sometimes repudiate it. An Abyssinia suffices for this, as in the case of Rimbaud.

— Camus, A.,pp89, The Myth of Sisyphus. Penguin Classics.

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.

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.

Always on the edge of a surprise storm.