The giveaway is over. The winners are: Carraka Blogicious Andrew Parsons All of you have an email or message of some sort from me asking for your address (you know, so I can send you the book). Congrats!
…with faster-than-light capability, without all the time paradoxes and other realistic nonsense that eventually ruined the fantasy of the science fiction pulps; if I had that, where would I go? I would head to every star that could sustain life, each with a reasonable habitable zone where planets might arise, or where we know planets already exist. Why? To answer, once and for all, the age old question: are we alone in the universe? Because, hey, if you’ve got an FTL ship and you don’t have to worry about time dilation, fuel (a problem for current propulsion models), and so on; if you’ve got that, then why not head out on a 30 second trip to Alpha Centauri and see a binary star close up for the first time ever, looking for that one little planet that might very well put truth to the words of countless science fiction authors who have proposed life around our binary cousin and in the universe (trinary, if you want to get darn specific)? Why not see the check every potentially habitable rock for signs of intelligent life and come back with an answer, laying to rest Fermi’s Paradox and establishing into law (or modifying) Drake’s equation? That sounds like a fantastic way to spend a few days in an FTL spaceship to me. What about you? So, if you had a spaceship with faster-than-light capability, minus all the negatives typically associated with a realistic vision of FTL, where would you go and why?
Over at Genreville (on the Publisher Weekly’s blog), Josh Jasper asks a very intriguing question: Perhaps the future really belongs to people who’re hungry for it, not the ones who take it for granted. Does western culture take the future for granted these days, whereas rising cultures don’t? I think this really depends on who you talk to. Scientists, by and large, would likely take the future very seriously, and many geeks and technology-oriented individuals consistently display their love of the present and the future of the industry (in technology, of course, thinking about the future in logical terms is quite impossible, since the industry is shifting so rapidly that one can’t be expected to keep up). But scientists, geeks, and technology-oriented people are not the majority of the population in the West. They’re a minority; a fairly vocal minority (at least it seems so in the 21st century), but a minority nonetheless. Most of America (and other Western countries, I would assume) is fairly introverted, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. Most of us have to be, particularly now in this difficult recession. The future of things like space travel (kind of a thing of the past, really) holds no weight in a culture struggling to keep jobs, find jobs, pay bills, survive, and be happy (whatever that might entail). I think the issue here isn’t that we take the future for granted, but that most of us (obviously not myself) see no value in much of what Jasper is talking about. Yes, it has value. Absolutely. I would be a lying scumbag if I said that the future of space travel (near future) has no value, or that people aren’t excited about the futures of medical technology. The problem seems to be that, in the west, so much of our daily lives don’t feel as though they are influenced by the things that used to be the future or by what will eventually be our future. We don’t make an A to B connection between, say, the guy who predicted the cell phone in a science fiction novel or movie to the product itself. We benefit, most certainly, but the connection is not made explicit in our daily lives. This is a particular problem with space travel, as mentioned earlier, because as much as space travel is wonderful and has taught us so much about the universe, our planet, and even ourselves and our fellow critters, most people down on the ground and outside of the scientific and technology-oriented communities don’t see the benefit. And, countries that are now getting into the technology world seem more excited because, in that initial boom, it is exciting. When the Internet first started exploding in households, that was a big deal in the United States. Same with the car, the cell phone, and so on. But normality eventually reduces that to, well, normality. We take for granted such things because the value decreases with the increase of acceptance in culture. How does this translate into written science fiction (something Jasper brings up as clear separation between the West–who seems more focused on near future dystopia and far future impossibilities–and the non-West–with a focus on the excitement of the technological revolution)? Well, you could argue that all the problems I’ve discussed above have led to a public disinterest in that excitement. Space travel isn’t exciting to most. It’s mundane at best, and worthless at the worst (I disagree, but that’s me, and I’m not in that community of naysayers and for-granted-takers). The technological revolution is, in a way, over for us, and thinking about a future where we’re doing basically what has already been done, just on a grander scale, isn’t necessarily appealing or exciting. The future is, perhaps, mundane in the West for those who fail to see its value in their daily lives (not because they’re stupid, but because we have done a piss poor job of instilling that love and excitement one needs to make light of the present). So, certainly we take the future for granted (I’m intentionally conflating the future and the present here). In some ways, that’s a bad thing. How do we get that back into our culture and our science fiction (it’s there, just marginalized)? I don’t know. I’m not sure we can, at least not on the scale that would make for meaningful change. The inevitable future of cultural consciousness, at least as I see it, is that every country eventually reaches the point of mundanity about the future. For now, the non-West is booming with excitement because, well, to finally get your own space ship in space or to do all these new, futuristic technological wonders that you’ve yet to do (even though others have) is exciting. Wouldn’t it be exciting if tomorrow was the first time the United States put a man into space, or that someone had thought of the idea in a book and it was the first time for us, ever? Of course! But that’s not us. We’ve done it already, and the future/present isn’t offering something tangible for the masses to demonstrate that there’s still something to be that excited about. But, enough about what I think. What about you?
Most of you are probably well aware of the fact that the healthcare reform bill passed and has been officially signed by President Obama. I am both very happy about this, and also very nervous. There are some understandable questions about the bill, and while I would like to pretend that critics, including myself, actually understand what the bill will do on the wide-scale, such a thought is really nothing more than an illusion. Very few probably know how the bill operates on the wide-scale, and I’m hesitant to listen to people who have spent the last year plus misinforming the public about the bill in an effort to scare them into opposing it. That said, I do hope that, on a wide-scale, the bill functions well enough, with little need for significant revision. I’m nervous because it’s an enormous undertaking and something that, obviously, is remarkably contentious in this country. We’ll see what the year looks like when everything is in place. For the record, if it isn’t already clear, I have always been for healthcare reform, but on a much grander scale. I honestly think we should have kept the public option on the original bill, but at least this is a step in the right direction. Now, for my resolution, which is only indirectly related to the healthcare bill: I’ve noticed over the last few months that I have been consuming an abnormal amount of garbage in the form of soda and related things. So, as an experiment, I am going to cut out all soda consumption from my diet for 30 days, starting today. I’ll be cutting out other junk foods as well (namely candy bars, though I will splurged once in a while). Part of this is because I have been eating too much crap; part of this is because I want to see what happens to my body. If I have a heart attack, you’ll all be the second to know (since I’ll be the first). Wish me luck!
A friend and I were having a discussion about The Famished Road by Ben Okri, a Nigerian novel with particularly obvious fantastic elements, and he thought that by labeling the novel as fantasy, I was being reductive. I’ll try to recollect much of the discussion here, but I’m sure I’ll leave out some salient point that I can’t remember. Okri’s novel is about a young boy who is, in certain African religious traditions, a spirit child who has decided to finally live in the real world, rather than be born, die, and return to the spirit world. However, this boy never fully separates from the spirit realm into the real world, the result of which is that he can see and is influenced by all manner of spirit creatures (from ghosts to really strange humanoid beings to manifestations of nature’s spirits). For me, this is very clearly a fantasy. The elements are all there. As far as I know, the novel does not posit that the boy is delusional, but takes very seriously the fact that he is a spirit child. In saying it’s fantasy, however, I’m not at all saying that it isn’t something else too. My friend, however, thinks that the label somehow leaves out those other elements (and he did, at one point, cite things like politics, etc. as part of what gets left out of the fantasy label). For me, however, the label “fantasy” encompasses a wide range of fantastic literatures and can include all manner of plot elements, whether they be political or romantic. Fantasy isn’t reductive, for me, because when we say “this is fantasy,” we’re not saying that the novel is only about dragons or spirits or the fantastic, just that an element, or the prime component, of that novel allows it to fit within the fantasy genre. I see fantasy as a very wide and open genre, stretching from literary to pulpy, Tolkien-esque to urban, etc. So, I’m going to ask you. Do you think that labeling things as fantasy is reductive? Could the same argument be made about science fiction, romance, mystery, etc.? Let me know in the comments!
What exactly is so stealth about standalone fantasy novels set in the same world? Am I missing some crucial point, or am I the only one who thinks that if you take a few minutes to do your homework or are an attentive reader, it would be obvious that a bunch of standalone novels are all set in the same world? And if it’s not obvious, then wouldn’t it seem clear that one of three things is happening: 1) the author never intended for there to be additional novels in that world, and, so, came up with a connection to make things interesting; 2) the author had ideas to do such a thing, but never to that level; 3) there was prompting for the connecting factors to come about? The author of the post linked above talks about Terry Pratchett as a good, high-profile example. The problem? Of all the people you could point to, Pratchett is the least “stealth” about his worldbuilding for anyone who writes standalone fantasy novels. Why? Because none of his novels are de facto standalones when they have the enormous Discworld title printed on the cover. You know right from the start that this book is in Discworld. No stealth about it. There’s no secret moment where you can go “oh, yeah, that’s another part of Discworld and I totally didn’t know.” His books are clearly labeled as part of the same world. The rest of the examples seem to suffer from the same problem. Shouldn’t it be obvious that if the worlds have the same names, then they are the same worlds, and thus no longer being sneaky about it? And if the names aren’t obvious, how exactly does that make the worldbuilding stealthy? The author is still building a world, and very obviously so, populated with characters and cultures. The only thing that seems to support the term is that some years down the line, books you didn’t think were linked suddenly are. But that’s not a new thing in fantasy. That’s been happening for standalone novels and series for decades (maybe even the better part of the last 100 years). Half the time it’s not even a stealth technique; that would imply intention from the start of a particular set of independent novels. Readers like to have this fantasy that all writers have a grand plan in their heads, but the truth of the matter is that most writers don’t (not in the sense that we’re talking about here). Some writers write a standalone book, find out it worked out well, and are prompted by their publisher to write another one, maybe as a sequel or as a new addition to the world, or decide to write another one for the thrill of it. Some writers have a little bit of the plan in mind, but didn’t expect, twenty years down the line, that they’d be writing the one book that put all the pieces together. Few writers have that enormous plan already set up (though some undoubtedly do). So, I reiterate: what exactly is stealth about all of this?
