The World Already IS a Sci-Fi Novel

If you go home, turn on the laptop, the TV – almost anything could be reported. The world has become a science fiction novel, everything's changing so quickly. Science fiction turns out to be the realism of our time, which is very satisfying. ... Depending what we do in next 20 years, it's very hard to be plausible, to say this is what's going to happen. At that point you can't write science fiction, [so] the genre is in a little bit of a crisis, and all the young people are reading fantasy.

Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson (who you will remember wrote a passionate defense of the genre in New Scientist recently) admits in The Guardian that sci-fi writers can't be prophets in the way they could be in the past and asks :

If the world is a science fiction novel then what do you read? What can the literature do for you?

Robinson's new novel is Gallileo's Dream, described by Alison Flood as :

... on the one hand a scrupulously accurate, joyfully affectionate portrait of the life of the first modern scientist, Galileo Galilei; on the other a wild leap through the solar system to the moons of Jupiter and a future civilisation – Robinson set out to pin down time travel.

Fifty Years of The Twilight Zone

I don't know how many of you ever saw or remember The Twilight Zone? I was a really big fan and tried not to miss an episode.

Now CBS' sci-fi series has turned 50, and The New York Times plays tribute. I thought you might enjoy this tale (condensed from the original version) of a mad-keen bookworm, entitled Time Enough at Last. And the moral of the story, according to Dave Itzkoff, is :

...if you live through a nuclear holocaust, you should remember to bring an extra pair of glasses :

Best British Literature ... is Sci-Fi

Alison Flood in today's Guardian reports that award-winning science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson (left) has hit out at the literary establishment, more particularly Booker judges for ignoring science fiction, which he calls

... the best British literature of our time.

Literary fiction he says, usually turns out to be historical novels (and that is certainly true of most of the books on this year's shortlist) :

In his original piece published in New Scientist (and very well worth reading) he says :

... these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is. Thus it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn't read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997. Indeed this year the prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

And he throws down this challenge to the magazine's readers (I reckon its one we could all take up) :

Read science fiction, read historical fiction, make your own judgement, and then talk about it. Try this as a kind of experiment: read 30 writers new to you. It's a big project, but what a lot of good reading would come of it. And New Scientist readers will be quickest of all to see that the literature that best expresses our time, that speaks to our time, is science fiction. How could it be otherwise? Our world is a science fiction. ... This is important, because you need the literature of your time. You can't get the meaning of our life in 2009 from historical fiction, nor from science alone. Novels serve us, and are treasured, because we want meaning, and fiction is where meaning is created. Scientifically minded people could perhaps conceptualise novels as case studies or thought experiments, both finer grained and wider ranging in their approach to meaning than cruder genres such as religion, psychology or common sense. A literary life is an ongoing moral education, a complete geography of the human world.

Incidentally, New Scientist also announced a Sci-Fi flash fiction competition, and nowhere in the rules does it say that it isn't open to international readers - so go for it.

Future Past

I found Rizal Johan's piece Future Past in today's Star very interesting indeed. He reckons that virtual reality:

... is not what was imagined by sci-fi scribes and filmmakers 30 years ago. But the past still holds promise for the future, at least in cinematic terms.

He explains :

... there was a time when such a future only existed in the world of fiction. And more often than not, the future was a sinister world. But it was also exciting because the possibility of such a future could be imagined, dreamed and maybe even realised. Celebrated sci-fi author William Gibson stirred the imagination through a series of novels about the virtual and information world in the 1980s. He is responsible for coming up with the term “cyberspace” and fully explored his vision of the future in his debut novel, Neuromancer in 1984. In the novel, Gibson describes cyberspace as being a “consensual hallucination” and is set in a dystopian future of drug addicted computer hackers, genetic engineering, virtual reality, vicious AIs (artificial intelligence) and overpowering multi-national corporations. ... It was a paranoid world on the brink but you met cyberpunks, rogue military agents, and cybernatically enhanced women running in and out of cyberspace in search for the all important grail of information. Such a world was visually glimpsed slightly earlier in 1982 when the dark and dreary (and now classic) sci-fi film Blade Runner hit cinemas that year. Based on the Philip K. Dick book, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? and directed by the visionary Ridley Scott, the vision of a bleak future, the city and its landscape was perfectly realised in this film.

Althought the emphasis of the piece was largely on the realisation of the vision in films, I am surprised though that the article makes no mention of virtual worlds and more specifically of Second Life which was very much influenced by Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (am grateful to Ted Mahsun for telling me this and putting a copy of the book in my hand) and in so many ways has surpassed Stephenson's vision of what was possible.

Like blogger Crazy Monk I was totally perplexed that Stephenson never wanted to visit the world his imagination helped to create but agree with Wagner James Au (right) here - five very successful novels later, he most probably just moved on.

A Cupful of Air

We Zen wrote to ask me to share this information with you all :

I've started a science fiction and fantasy book club. We're based in Petaling Jaya and we're new as paint, but we're looking for members. This month we're reading Air by Geoff Ryman and we're meeting at a cafe on the second weekend of October to discuss it. Please ask your readers to contact us at speculator speculator @gmail.com or to visit our blog like to know more.

Air: Or, Have Not Have should be a very good read and has won a slew of prizes including the British Science Fiction Association Award and the Arthur C. Clarke, and was shortlisted for several others. Wish you guys all the best and really hope this venture takes off.=

Gaiman wins Hugo

Neil Gaiman has won a Hugo Award for The Graveyard Book it was announced at the fantasy convention Worldcon in Montreal on Sunday night. The novel has already won or been nominated for several other major awards. Patrick Ness heaps praise on the book here ... and yes, I think I have to read it.

More on the Hugos here.

SciFi for Edgehill Prize

iScience-fiction writer Chris Beckett has won The Edge Hill Prize, awarded annually for a single author short story collection by Edge Hill University. Others on the shortlist included Booker winner Anne Enright and Whitbread winner Ali Smith.

You can read an extract from Beckett's collection, The Turing Test here.

Beckett says he was still pinching himself at the win, and added :

I ... thought that being a science fiction writer could count against me: a lot of people don't like it, or look at it in some way as less than literary fiction. It's a little blow for the genre, as well as for me – it might persuade a few people that maybe it's worth looking at.

Judge James Walton said that Beckett's entry had been the most enjoyable and impressive read:

It was Beckett who seemed to us to have written the most imaginative and endlessly inventive stories, fizzing with ideas and complete with strong characters and big contemporary themes. We also appreciated the sheer zest of his storytelling and the obvious pleasure he had taken in creating his fiction.

Tunku Halim Anthologised

Tunku Halim wrote to tell me that his story Biggest Baddest Bomoh is included in the soon-to-be published The Apex Book of World Sci-Fi.

It is an anthology of genre short stories from around the world. Edited by Lavie Tidhar, the book focuses on Asian and European writers, and includes stories from China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Croatia, France, and the Netherlands.

It can be pre-ordered from the website.

Our congrats, Hal!

The Death of a Visionary

Author JG Ballard has died aged 78 after several years of illness. His literary agent of over 25 years Margaret Hanbury called him :

... a giant on the world literary scene for more than 50 years. ... His acute and visionary observation of contemporary life was distilled into a number of brilliant, powerful novels which have been published all over the world and saw Ballard gain cult status.

Best known for his novel Crash and Empire of the Sun (which was based on his childhood in a Japanese prison camp in China) Ballard began writing short stories while stationed in Canada with the RAF, influenced by the science-fiction he first encountered there. In The Times writer Iain Sinclair gives a fascinating insight into his friend's psyche. Describing him as :

... a charming, classic English gentleman with a generous heart, a cynical take on the world and a huge sense of humour ...

He notes that :

Everything that everybody else was bored by or appalled by, he was excited by. ... Living out in Shepperton for so long, he was one of the first to undersand that the psychosis of suburbia was a fascinating thing to pursue. ... He loved the edges of cities: shopping complexes, motorways and airports. He was very taken up with Watford because of its multi-storey car parks. Where other people were terrified by the consumerist culture he saw it as exciting, something he could manipulate, shredding it and making his own world out of it.

In the same paper, Ben Hoyle notes that :

Not many writers are so distinctive and influential that their name becomes an adjective in its own right. J. G. Ballard, who died yesterday morning after a long battle with cancer at the age of 78, was one of them. ... “Ballardian” is defined in theCollins English Dictionary as: “adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (born 1930), the British novelist, or his works (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels and stories, esp dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

Author Martin Amis says of him :

He is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different, disused part of the reader's brain.

There are some touching tributes from readers on the Ballardian website.

Hugo Award nominations

The nominations for this year’s Hugo Award for science fiction have been announced. The award covers several categories, and these are the nominees for best novel :

Anathem by Neal Stephenson
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

You can find links to information about each of the books here.

Variety SF has links to the prize-winning short fiction online, so you can enjoy some excellent writing without having to spend on a book!

Si-Fi and Fantasy Must Reads

Yes, Preeta's right, The Guardian's Sci-fi and Fantasy recommendations (part of that 1,000 books) deserves special mention. (Main page here and then look for the three part list at the side.) Oh yeah, and that bloke Burgess has two titles on it - End of the World News and A Clockwork Orange. Both I highly recommend if you haven't picked them up yet.

Colfer Does Adams

I must confess that I'm a huge Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan. I don't think I've ever mentioned to you that I remember the days when it was a radio programme, well before the book came out. Tuning in to the BBC after lunch was a Sunday ritual, and I remember holding my breath (at least metaphorically) when we were promised the answer "to life, the universe, and everything" which turned out in the next episode, of course, to be ... 42.

The TV series, the films, in my opinion never really cut it. The real delight of the book and its sequels is in

... Adams's mordant voice, and in his torrential flow of comic and science-fictional ideas

as Peter Robins says in the Telegraph's Paper Tiger blog.

One wonders therefore how Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer will fare, comissioned to write a sixth book in the series. Robins reckons :

He's a pro of the sort Adams delightfully wasn't, an extremely skilled constructor of thrilling plots. He's quite capable of turning the universe
inside out, but he wouldn't generally do it for the sake of a one-liner. ... Still, elderly science fiction fans should be careful about heaping scorn on him. His Artemis Fowl children's books - Artemis is an underage master-criminal - are a hoot, and they mix fantasy, SF and humour in a way recognisably descended from Adams's work (they also appear to have outsold him). It's encouraging that he isn't aiming to write "as" Adams, in a Sebastian-Faulks-as-Ian-Fleming sort of way. In fact, I find it very difficult to tell from the publicity so far what I should expect. Perhaps this is a good sign.

Colfer posts a video response on his blog.

Blake Wilson on the NYtimes Paper Tiger blog alerts us to the online adventure game based on the series which you might enjoy playing!

(Sorry, my dears, that I didn't post yesterday. Am having big connection problems at the moment which I hope to get sorted out in the next day or two. Patience!)

Nazri Book Signing

Nazri M. Annuar (better known as Vovin) author of Opera Angkasa will be appearing tomorrow afternoon between 5 and 6 at MPH Mid Valley for a book talk and signing session. (It's part of MPH's local author's month.) Do drop by to support if you are in the vicinity. According to his Facebook ad :

Rumor has it that there will be a flying cats show...

Now I am very confused here and wonder how you train a cat to fly?

An Alternative History of Israel Wins Hugo

Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union has won the prize for best novel at this year's Hugo awards. (It also won for best science fiction novel at this year's Nebula Awards of the Science fiction and Fantasy Writers Association of America).

The novel :

... takes as its premise Franklin Roosevelt's proposition that Alaska, rather than Israel, becomes the homeland for the Jews after the Second World War

writes Alison Flood in the Guardian :

Some bloggers questioned a work of alternate history winning science fiction's most coveted prize, but Chabon told an interviewer in America that science fiction had "porous" boundaries, and that "there is definitely room in it for a work of alternate history".

Incidentally, maybe you can judge a good book by its cover - I bought the novel in hardback because I couldn't let such a pretty edition pass me by. I look forward to reading it!

You can listen to an extract here and browse inside it here.

A Parallel Universe at the Clarkes

In the Telegraph Andrew McKie goes along to the Arthur C Clark Awards, and takes a shot at those who turn their literary noses up at the genre. :

Most people who read fiction do not read any science fiction: or so they will tell you. Yet when I express surprise that they have never read Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World or Frankenstein or A Clockwork Orange, they concede that yes, of course they have read those. The unspoken assumption is that these books have ceased to be science fiction by dint of being, well, good.

This distaste for an entire genre is remarkably common, and clearly strongly embedded in a lot of readers; yet one does not encounter any of the same antipathy towards, for example, crime fiction. All the same, you may find that you have read a lot more science fiction than you think during the past few years.

The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, The Book of Dave by Will Self, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: these are all SF books. The last was shortlisted for the Clarke award in 2006 (won in the end by Geoff Ryman's magnificent Air, a science fiction book that could easily be enjoyed by anyone who doesn't like science fiction) and also for the Man Booker.

and he declares himself :

... on the side of the SF writers and readers; unlike the readers of "literary" fiction they at least understand that the fact that there is a spaceship in a book does not prevent it from being well written.

One author he strongly recommends is last year's winner of the award M John Harrison, whom he describes as one of the best British novelists and says it is a disgrace that he has never been shortlisted for the Man Booker or the Costa. This must, I think, be checked out by this litsnob.

Black Man Renamed

I know many of you would like to know who won this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction in the end ... and sorry it's taken me so long.

The winner was Black Man by Richard Morgan but, it seems, the American publishers to be politically correct decided to change the name to Thirteen for the US edition. As Martin Lewis who reviews the book on the Strange Horizons website points out there is a certain irony about renaming a novel about identity politics in this way.

I thought this account of the Morgan's starting point for the book very interesting :

Not long after the 2004 presidential elections in the United States a map started to do the rounds on the internet. It was a map of Jesusland, a reimaging of the borders of the U.S. predicated on the Red State/Blue State idea that the country was actually two distinct entities: a liberal, progressive one more akin to Canada clustered around the West Coast and the North East; and an intolerant, conservative one in the heartland and the South. It caught Morgan's eye and in Black Man he has made the concept a reality. The map itself is a facile piece of propaganda borne out of understandable frustration at the reelection of George W. Bush, but Morgan uses it as a starting point for an examination of whether there really is a war for civilisation; not the spurious one between the West and Islam so beloved of professional punditry but the far more compelling intrasocietal one between conflicting conceptions of the morally just life ...

It sounds an intelligent and hard hitting novel.

Also worth reading is Adam Whitehead's reviews the book on his blog The Wertzone.

This is Richard Morgan's fifth novel, and you can find out more about him on his website.

Arthur C Clarke Goes Back to the Stars

Sci-fi legend, the visionary Arthur C. Clarke has died at his home in Sri Lanka aged 90 after experiencing breathing problems. He had been battling post-polio syndrome for half a lifetime.

Clarke was the author of more than 100 books, including 33 novels, the most famous of which is 2001: A Space Odyssey; as well as short-story collections and non-fiction.

Gerald Jonas pens his obituary in the New York Times. Worth reading too on his life and work is this Wikipedia entry.

I will link to other tributes to Clarke as they come online.

The Author from Planet Nagy and her Cat

Author Wena Poon emailed me from Hong Kong, where she is doing her Asian tour for her short story collection Lions In Winter, with this news about her latest book :

Cryptic Tonic is the second novel comprising the Biophilia trilogy. The first book, Biophilia, was published in 2005 and also available on Amazon. The trilogy came about one hot summer day when I was lamenting that Hollywood hasn't yet come up with the summer blockbuster action adventure that I really wanted to see (you know, one with a decent plot and really cool characters and non-corny lines), so I decided to write it myself.

At that time, Bush had won for the second term and I really wanted to get off Planet Earth anyway. There appeared to be a dearth of good, new fantasy literature, which explained why adults were reduced to reading Harry Potter.

Figuring that an English major couldn't do any worse than a Hollywood hack, I decided to write a "Narnia for Adults" - a credible, kickass, action adventure story that stars thirtysomethings who normally work in an office and get sucked off to a Narnia-like space opera. Don't we all wish that would happen.

After writing two books, readers started saying it sounded like Miyazaki's anime stories, with animal sidekicks.

So there you have it, Narnia plus Anime, with a bit of Marvel Comics thrown in for good measure. "Biophilia: Guaranteed to be more entertaining than your inflight movie." Please post your reviews and feedback on Amazon, and enjoy.

Now then, if you were an author with a new novel coming out, would you let YOUR cat interview you for your blog?* Wena did, and here's what W found out.

For something a shade more serious, you can also listen to Wena speak on a radio show about Asian women writers needing to escape the Amy Tan stereotypes.

*(I certainly wouldn't ask mine : Chiki, is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and Nisbo is a husband-stealing strumpet.)

Litfic and Sci-Fi ... A Collision of the Planets

The shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke award for science fiction has just been announced and the finalists are:

The Red Men - Matthew de Abaitua
The H-Bomb Girl - Stephen Baxter
The Carhullan Army - Sarah Hall
The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall
The Execution Channel - Ken MacLeod
Black Man- Richard Morgan

Tom Hunter, administrator for the award points to the great diversity of the selection :

Featuring visions as diverse as a dystopian Cumbria and a future Hackney, time-travel adventures in 1960’s Liverpool and an alternate world British Isles in the throes of terrorist attack, through to tech-noir thrillers and a trawl through subconscious worlds where memories fall prey to metaphysical sharks, the Clarke Award has never been so close to home and relevant to the British literary scene.

The line between literary fiction and sci-fi is well and truly blurred by the inclusion of Sarah Hall's dystopian novel. You'll probably remember that it won last year's John Llewellyn Rhys prize.

In the Guardian, Hall says :

Any collapsing of imposed literary boundaries heartens me and the possibility that writers might be freer to exercise imaginative versatility is tremendously exciting.

I've heard so much about The Raw Shark Texts, described by Lindesay Irvine as :

... an exuberant fantasy about a man whose memory is being eaten by a psychic shark ...

and it's on my must read list along with Sarah Hall's. (It also appeared time and again on lists of books of the year in 2007, I recall.)

Stephen Hall says of his novel :

The book has been described as a thriller, a romance, metaphysical adventure, part of the new horror revival, slipstream, fantasy, postmodern psychological mash-up, and science fiction too ... I'm happy with all those descriptions because I've always felt that it isn't a writer's job to tell a reader how to read. If a reader decides my book is science fiction, then it is. That works for me I'm glad it worked for the judges and, who knows, it might even get me one step closer to writing that episode of Doctor Who*...

Of the other titles, Irvine says that they are more mainstream sci-fi :

Matthew de Abuitua's The Red Men follows an uneasy employee of a giant corporation manufacturing androids as part of increasingly authoritarian operations. Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel places an IT man working undercover for the French in a Britain dominated by American power while Richard Morgan has described his novel Black Man as a "detective(ish) novel" looking at the social fallout from genetic engineering.

(* Oh I do love Doctor Who too, and am very proud that I have been a fan since the very first episode back in ... gulp ... 1963! And I can't beleive how glitzy and exciting and funny the more recent episodes are ...)

Iain Banks' Advice

What advice would science fiction novelist Iain Banks give to new writers?

The Three Ps: practice, practice, practice. Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.

And when asked if there's a secret to writing he says:

Some people have just got it and some haven't. Although, I think it can be brought out of some people so it is worthwhile joining writers' groups or studying it. If a creative writing course produces one writer who wouldn't have been a writer otherwise then it's worthwhile. You kind of know if you are a writer or not. The real secret is to do it because you love writing rather than because you love the idea of being a Writer.