Galactic Suburbia #19: the Greco-Roman issue
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While Alisa is away, Alex & Tansy play… in ANCIENT GREECE! We talk awards, the end of publishing as we know it, stressful feminist debates, Vonda McIntyre, Twitter fiction, Stargate, and whether there’s enough Greek & Roman mythology in modern fantasy.
News
Tansy wins WSFA Small Press Award for Siren Beat;
Last Drink Bird Head Award Winners;
John Joseph Adams takes over from Cat Rambo & Sean Wallace as editor of Fantasy Magazine;
Realms of Fantasy dies: from Shawna McCarthy, and the publisher;
Wiscon committee disappoints through inaction (also here); and then finally moves to disinvite Elizabeth Moon as GoH (warning, many of the comments on that one are pretty awful to wade through); also here and here;
Paul Collins on how the ebook revolution isn’t working so well ;
Cat Valente on tedium, evil, and why the term ‘PC’ is only used these days to hurt and silence people;
Peter M Ball explaining how white male privilege uses requests for civility to silence the legitimate anger of others;
on Vonda McIntyre’s “Dreamsnake”, a controversial Hugo winning novel from 1979 which has been out of print for 10 years; and an interview with Vonda McIntyre about the book.
What have we been reading/listening to?
Tansy: Death Most Definite, Trent Jamieson; Blameless, Gail Carriger, Bleed by Peter M Ball, “Twittering the Universe” by Mari Ness, Shine & “Clockwork Fairies” by Cat Rambo, Tor.com.
Alex: Silver Screen, Justina Robson; Sprawl; Deep Navigation, Alastair Reynolds; The Beginning Place, Ursula le Guin; abandoned Gwyneth Jones’ Escape Plans; listening to The 5th Race, ep 1 (Stargate SG1 fan podcast).
Pet Subject
Classical mythology in modern fantasy. Can it still work? Do you have to get it ‘right’?
Book mentioned:
The Firebrand, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Medea, Cassandra, Electra by Kerry Greenwood
Olympic Games, Leslie What
Dan Simmons’ Ilium and Olympos
Gods Behaving Badly, Marie Phillips
Troy, Simon Brown
Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad and Jeanette Winterson’s Weight, also David Malouf’s Ransom – along the same lines as Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin
Robert Holdstock’s Celtika, Iron Grail, Broken Kings
Further consideration of the 32
Yesterday I blogged about this list of 32 recommended SF novels. I mentioned at the time I wasn’t sure how much store to set by the compiler. Last night, as I considered the list further, I realised there are some serious flaws.
Firstly, the things I think are good about the list:
- There were a few books, and some authors, I hadn’t heard of. They might actually be crap, but it’s cool to have new people suggested – and not to have lists dominated by the same old people. Now, perhaps I’m just not entirely up with my SF classics, and these are all people I ‘should’ have heard of – but I don’t, so it works for me.
- It covers a good range of time – from Mary Shelley through Jules Verne and HG Wells, up to Cory Doctorow and Richard Morgan. It’s useful to see the history of SF reflected in a list like this, and presumably shows the compiler has a good understanding of the range of SF over time.
- There’s a variety in types of SF. That is, you’ve got your loony Douglas Adams, the slightly farcical Michael Crichton’s Timeline, through to the more serious, epic-like works such as those of Frank Herbert and Robert Heinlein, as well the cyperpunk of William Gibson. It’s good to see this range reflected, too – because SF is no monolithic structure.
However, there are obviously some problems with the list. Now, this just may reflect the compiler’s reading taste, but it’s still interesting – I hope – to offer a critique.
- Firstly, I’m not sure all of the works mentioned count as SF. Animal Farm, basically. Not convinced.
- By my count, only Lois Lowry and Mary Shelley rate a mention to represent female publishing. What happened to Ursula le Guin, and Left Hand of Darkness? Perhaps the compiler hasn’t read it, but if they claim to be making a somewhat-authoritative list, she’s a fairly glaring omission. Octavia Butler (of whom I’ve only read short stories), Nancy Kress… I could go on. It’s the main thing I’ve got a beef about, actually.
- One, by my count, young-adult book (the Lowry, which again I haven’t read). Now, perhaps again this reflects the compiler’s reading habits – came to SF as an adult? – but there are some truly awesome YA scifi books out there. Madeline l’Engels’ Wrinkle in Time, for starters… and a lot more I won’t bother to list.
- Clarke’s 2001 only rates a little mention at the end??
- There shouldn’t be more than one book by any one author, I think. Fair enough to say “this is representative of the author, see also…” but I think that padding the list with multiple entires from one author is laziness, or the compiler isn’t as well-read as it might seem… or they really wanted it to be 32 books in the list and didn’t think anything else rated.
- Finally, as a list of recommendations, it bugs me a little that it’s got only quotes from Amazon (and Wikipedia). Does this mean the compiler hasn’t actually read them, or doesn’t trust their writing/reviewing skills, or thinks people want something more ‘objective’ than a more personal opinion would seem?
Anyway, those are my thoughts. I will still try to read some of the things of the list, despite my reservations about the list as a whole – because even given those, there are still some books that I know are good and interesting, and this has in some ways simply jogged my memory, as well as giving me some others to consider.
The Jane Austen Book Club
I am not, generally, a fluffy movie kind of gal. However, I agreed to go see this movie with two of my very good friends (I realised the other day that I’ve known them for 10 and 11 years! Amazing!) at the Moonlight Cinema. Sadly, Al had to pull out at the last minute, so it was just K and me: right up the front, with blanket and very tasty food, and a bottle of moscato.
Overall, I must admit to enjoying the movie: five women get together to read the six Austens, through various means and for various purposes. A bloke joins them as well, for the obvious reason – getting into the pants of one of them, although it was more refined than that.
A couple of things occurred to me, which I thought I’d share here – mild spoilage:
1. The bloke is a sci-fi buff, and has never read any ‘classics’: in fact, the bloke first meets up with the woman for whom he joins he bookclub, he’s at a scifi con (SwanCon! woohoo!). One of the funnier moments of the movie comes when he first turns up with all six books in one: in case they’re sequels. This is such a classic scifi idea; it makes perfect sense to me. It’s also very interesting to see that this scifi buff is perfectly capable of reading, understanding, and communicating ideas about ‘great literature.’ There’s also an interesting sideline in him convincing the woman to read scifi, at first Ursula le Guin. She refuses for a long time, before he shames her into reading them and she, of course, loves it.
2. Singleness is a huge issue. One of the women is middle-aged-ish, and another is going through a divorce; one is in a troubled marriage, one is a lesbian with fairly tempestuous relationships, and the other has been married six times (currently divorced). So how to deal with being single, and what this means for a woman, is explored a bit (although not great depth). This is not my issue, and as far as I was concerned this was simply part of the movie. The interesting part, I realised, was that there was no mention of Grigg’s singleness. He was in his mid-thirties, at least, and single, but this was never an issue. Not once. Because it’s ok for men to be bachelors, but women are spinsters – bachelorettes just don’t cut it.
3. The last thing to mention is the conclusion. I quite liked the end – I am totally fine with happy endings, even sappy endings, sometimes. The thing that bugged me here was the scripting! It was appalling! There were so many other possible ways of communicating the same idea – even I could have written something better! Anyway… grrr. Nearly spoiled a good movie.
Farthing Magazine: a rant
As in far-thing, not an old coin.
As part of Last Short Story, we’re obviously trying to cover all the paying markets. At the start of the year in particular, we had to buy any copy we wanted because very few people knew about the crazy idea and review copies were few and and far between (and always warmly welcomed). Now, things are getting a bit easier, and we’ve got a few more review copies coming in (generally warmly welcomed, with only a very quiet groan of: ‘what, more?’).
One of the magazines I volunteered to buy was Farthing Magazine. I thought it looked cool – they have a great quote from Ursula le Guin on the site! – and some interesting-sounding stories. I eventually managed to pay by Paypal, which was a bit of a saga in itself, and then… nothing.
That was June.
They definitely took my money – can’t even remember how much now. I’ve sent a number of emails to the editor’s contact email address. There is no way postage from the UK should take 4 months. Is there?
I’d love to hear from anyone who’s received Farthing – so that I know it can be done, and to know whether it’s something I should bother with chasing up. I really don’t want to just put zeros in its columns, on our little LSS spreadsheet…
The Left Hand of Darkness
I have, of course, heard about this book by Ursula Le Guin – it’s up there as a seminal work, really, of early scifi especially. I think it counts as spec fic more than scifi per se, but that’s a bit beside the point. I bought it last weekend and read it over the week.
I have a friend who is a big scifi fan who read the Wizard of Earthsea series and was incredibly disappointed – actually, I think he only read the first one and didn’t bother with the others. I may have mentioned this before; to me, Le Guin and some of those other early writers are doing line sketches, whereas a lot of the stuff coming out these days is oil colours – whether they’re consciously thinking about it or not, I think they’re heavily movie-influenced, and writing for a grander and more detailed vision than the earlier writers. Now, I’m perfectly ready to be wrong about that, but it sounds good.
The Left Hand of Darkness is named for a poem of the planet Gethen, where it’s set – light is the left hand of darkness, darkness the right hand of light. Very yin and yang, which is what the whole thing is about, really: the natives of Gethen are ambisexual, that is they are neither man nor woman, or perhaps both, for most of the month, and then come into ‘kemmer’ for a few days – their sex is then decided by the others around them who are also coming into kemmer.
This way of looking at gender was really interesting, but I’ve got to say I wasn’t entirely sure what Le Guin was aiming to do. Her narrator for most of the book was male (from off-world), and he referred to all of the Gethenians as ‘he’. The only times they were described as female were almost derogatory or insulting, which I was really surprised and disappointed by. Now, maybe this is because they were a fairly non-aggressive race, so this was a male reaction to pacificism, but still, it was a bit uncomfortable to read.
Nonetheless, I actually did like the story. It was a poignant story, and she certainly doesn’t spare her characters. It hints at a much grander story – of the Ekumen, the not-governing body bringing 83 worlds together… the Hain, who seeded all of those world with humans… but the story itself, on Gethen, is also very personal and immediate. I think I liked it.
Mentoring Yr9s in literature
I volunteered/agreed to help out with the enhancement programme at school for Yr9 students; they get to choose a book, and then have to do a presentation on the themes/messages to the other students in the programme. Each kid gets paried with a mentor to help them think through the issues. I took on four, because I had already read two of the books; this has gone down to three, because the girl who chose Wuthering Heights has gone on holiadys early… for which I am grateful, since it’s a while since I read it and I don’t really feel like reading it again (hate every single character, although I quite like the book itself).
I read Saint of Dragons, by Jason Hightman, yesterday. It was in the 4-9 year old section at Borders, which I don’t really get – it’s a good 300-odd pages, and in some parts a bit dark; it certainly wouldn’t be read by even a standard 9 year old by themselves, I would have thought. Anyway. It wasn’t too bad; interesting ideas – about a boy who turns out to be the descendant of St George, who has to join his father in hunting dragons down. I was a bit disappointed, though, because the ideas weren’t completely carried through with, and some of the writing was pretty simplistic. I think I’ll try and get the boy to think about the issue of heroism – who is a hero? What makes someone not a hero? – because that is pretty big throughout the book… and could have been more so, had Hightman explored it more.
Before that one, I read The Sea, by John Banville. Winner of the Booker Prize this year, making it only the second winner I have ever read (the first was Life of Pi, which I did enjoy). It is not the sort of book I would have chosen to read, and it will be interesting to see what my mentoree thought of it. I quite liked it, in an odd sort of way… the style sometimes got a bit annoying, always going back and forth in time – the present stuff written in the present tense, which is pretty unusual, but generally intriguing. It’s about a man whose wife has recently died revisiting the site of childhood holidays, reliving the traumas and joys, in an effort to get away from his grief. I did like it, I think.
The other book is The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham, which is the other book that I had previously read. I love Wyndham; I think he embodies speculative fiction, as opposed to science fiction, exceptionally well. His ideas are so cool, and he writes in such an unembellished way; I think this is very much a product of the pre-blockbuster time, pre-Star Wars basically. He wasn’t writing for film. HG Wells, Ursula Le Guin, Andre Norton – I think they’re in the same category. I really like all of them, their sparse detail; I have described Wells and Le Guin in particular as drawing pencil sketches, as opposed to the full-on oils of, say, Simon Green or Julian May or, dare I say it, Robert Jordan. It’s interesting: I read Le Guin and some Norton early on in my scifi reading – Wyndham too, actually – so I enjoy it. One friend in particular, who has really only read more recent scifi/fantasy, really couldn’t get into Le Guin. Anyway – The Chrysalids – excellent book. Deviations… the cleverest part, I think, is how he lists the things people see as deviations, and includes things that we, the readers, know are not deviations. Sigh. I must re-read Day of the Triffids.
Randomly Yours, Alex 