As I said here, I got Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire for Christmas, and I have now finished reading it. Since most of what I have to say will be negative, I should start by mentioning what’s good about it. The author has a master’s in classical Armenian studies and a PhD in Byzantine and comparative history, and she puts that academic background to good use; the book’s Teixcalaanli empire is clearly based on Byzantium, and she says the novel is “in many respects a fictional version of her postdoctoral research on Byzantine imperialism on the frontier to Armenia in the 11th century, particularly the annexation of the Kingdom of Ani.” If you know anything about the subject, it’s fun to see the echoes, some of which are linguistic (see below). The central character, Mahit Dzmare, a new ambassador from Lsel who has long been absorbed in Teixcalaanli literature and culture, is very convincingly torn between her Stationer patriotism and her desire to be absorbed completely into the imperial culture — I’m sure many provincial visitors to Constantinople felt the same way. And there are nice science-fictional touches like cloudhooks and infofiches. I can see why sf readers enjoyed it.
I should also, in fairness, point out that I have an inherent bias against space operas that expect you to thrill to the glorious grandeur of empires and emperors (though I enjoyed them as a wee lad); I especially dislike the trope of the Old Wise Emperor who is needed to preserve peace, law, order, and such good things. I’m a pacifist anarchist, which means I don’t actually want emperors blown up, but I don’t want them to exist and I bristle when they’re glorified. I also am sick and tired of trilogies and other series; why can’t people just write a self-contained novel without leaving plot ends dangling for inevitable sequels? On all that, YMMV, and I am not a dispassionate critic. But I stand by what follows.
I was eager to read this book because it got rave reviews (here’s one, if you want to get an idea of the plot); it has a blurb by Ann Leckie, whose Ancillary Justice, as I said here, is the best science fiction I’ve read in years; and it won this year’s Hugo Award for best novel — certainly not a guarantee of quality (being voted on by fans), but usually promising at least a good read. And yet this is a terrible novel.
It didn’t need to be. It’s got interesting characters, a good setting, and what could be a powerful plot. But Martine has no idea how to write. The book reads like a cross between self-published fan fiction and an adolescent’s diary. All the emotions are adolescent ones, there is endless repetition, and every page is speckled with multiple words in italics — hell, some sentences have multiple italics (“There aren’t planets to live on in our sector, only planets and asteroids to mine”). Absolutely nobody behaves professionally; the author seems to have taken her ideas of how people with power act and talk from genre fiction, and she has clearly never met an ambassador or anyone who moves in diplomatic circles. (My father was an attache in various embassies, so I know something about it.) Everyone speaks in a kind of sub-Princess Bride banter, everything is “relatable,” and Mahit is a classic Mary Sue to whom people say things like “I keep underestimating you” and “What a prize you are.” Here are some quotes scribbled down at random, when I couldn’t take it any more: “had to clamp down on the urge to giggle inappropriately”; “she didn’t know what to do with how much she felt, all at once”; “Mahit kept weeping, even when she wanted to talk.”
I hope nobody thinks I want sf to be full of manly men who feel no emotions; it’s great to have protagonists who have feelings, and I like the fact that most of the characters here are women. But they are overwhelmed with their feelings all the time, and it’s just too much. I wish Martine had had the chance to learn how to write the way people used to, getting their lousy stories ripped to shreds by editors or friends who are writers (or by fellow participants in workshops); if she’d been forced to ditch the italics and endless navel-gazing and tighten things up in general (the book is way too long), she could have become a fine writer like Leckie. Alas, now that she’s won a Hugo and general acclaim, she likely never will. And that Hugo is evidence that genre fans don’t demand much from their fiction beyond genre satisfactions. (There are also misspellings like “pretentions” and solecisms like “like” for “as” and redundancies like “a four-line quatrain” that a copyeditor should have caught, but of course nobody uses copyeditors any more.)
But I don’t want to end on a down note. The book is very enjoyable from a linguistic point of view; the Teixcalaanli language is reminiscent of Nahuatl (e.g., huitzilahuitlim is from Nahuatl huītzilin ‘hummingbird’; there is an appendix “on the pronunciation and writing system of the Texicalaanli language”), and the Stationer language owes so much to Armenian that Martine says in the final appendix “If one wishes to pronounce Stationer words one’s own self, and has only Earth languages to go by, a good guide would be the pronunciation of Modern Eastern Armenian.” For example, a sector of space is called Barjravand, which is defined as “(High) Plateau”; that’s clearly Armenian barjrawand, derived from barjr ‘high’ (a good old IE word). At one point she writes: “There were a lot of kinds of birds in Teixcalaanli, and one word for ‘bird’ in Stationer. There’d been more once.” This is all tremendous fun, and it provided me with some enjoyment as I suffered. If you can get past the bad writing, you can enjoy it too.
I don’t think we’ll see eye to eye on that, but this is why I categorically don’t read science fiction (OK, maybe there’s 1% of it I could read, that’s a quibble, and Victorian SF is OK too). Too much bad writing in a genre that glorifies the clever idea above all; and worse, where the clever ideas are what scientists think is clever.
Another thing: sometimes it’s really hard to write without italics, when prosody is crucial. I try it sometimes, even when italics are an option, and it’s tough. And yet good writers have managed without. So well and so invisibly, that I can’t answer the question, how do really good writers get around conveying prosody, while avoiding italics (and fancy punctuation)?
Arkady is a she!
As I said throughout.
>> As I said throughout.
I just meant I was very surprised..
It’s a pen name — her real name is AnnaLinden Weller.
Wow. Totally disagree. I do agree that there’s a little too much “Gee, aren’t you amazing?” going on, but as for the “adolescence” of the emotions and all… that’s the point. She IS young, and what is more incredibly vulnerable like an adolescent because of her malfunction, which is messing with her emotional and endocrine systems. She’s not actually suited to be an ambassador, because she’s not been chosen to be an “ambassador” in the sense your father and his colleagues are. (I also think the fact that ambassadors have no staff other than the liaison assigned them is a bit implausible.) She was sent because and to be a Teixcalaanli fangirl.
I don’t think the Wise Old Emperor trope is at all in effect. He does the “right thing” at the end, but even that is horrible, and his attempt at immortality is in no uncertain terms monstrous.
I bristle at “And that Hugo is evidence that genre fans don’t demand much from their fiction beyond genre satisfactions.” Not that the Hugos or Clarks or any awards are the be-all and end-all of genre writing, but at least in recent years, there’s been tremendous attention to newer, more challenging work (like Leckie’s) from newer, more diverse voices, with concommitant pushback (lots of it).
at least in recent years, there’s been tremendous attention to newer, more challenging work (like Leckie’s) from newer, more diverse voices, with concommitant pushback (lots of it).
Yes, there has, which is why my hopes were raised. I respect your opinion, which is far more widely shared than mine, but I stand by mine.
Your remark about her use of italics put me in mind of the perennial soap-opera comic strip Mary Worth, in which characters frequently utter banal statements with bolded words, to signify the depth of their feelings.
I regret to confess that I am a daily reader of Mary Worth, because all human life is there.
For other fans of Mary Worth, here is a cinema verité realization.
My friend Arkady, I only ask of you one thing — don’t speak beautifully.
Whoever did that Mary Worth adaptation is my friend, forever.
This kind of bolding was used in comic books of all genres for a long time, even in Mad.
I really try to keep prosodic italicization to a minimum in my writing (both my fiction and my scientific writing). This is a challenge, but like anything that forces a writer to go back, take stock, and calibrate the flow of their prose, it can be a useful editing tool.
@hat
From your description, I thought the author might be Armenian and you a closet Armenophobe. But the names AnnaLinden and Weller do not have a strong Armenian vibe (unless Anahit > AnnaLinden).
I’m sorry…
I also am sick and tired of trilogies and other series
THIS. SO MUCH OF THIS.
I don’t mind series of novels a la Discworld or The Laundry Files that are connected through a shared universe of characters. But the way every goddamn sci-fi and fantasy book needs to be a fucking trilogy or pentalogy just completely turns me off.
but at least in recent years, there’s been tremendous attention to newer, more challenging work
And that is good. But – and I want you to listen very carefully here – new and challenging does not necessarily mean good.
@bulbul
This is probably due to market or competitive pressure, similar to the “Publish or Perish” ethic in academic work, where however of course new and challenging always means good????. Do you think the mandatory production of (-ogies of) “doorstoppers” leads to poorer quality work than the previous system of serial publication of longer works in magazines?
If “Three Little Pigs” would be written today (or if Peter Jackson would be asked to film it), it would be a trilogy:
HOUSE OF STRAW
HOUSE OF STICKS
HOUSE OF BRICKS
That sounds like quite a good set of titles for a series of thrillers or something. I expect it’s been done…
A great idea ! Since the plot is rather simple, it would not be spoiled by fleshing out the film with pointy-eared alien porkers and conlangs. A spinoff for Henry Green fans would have
Straw
Sticks
Bricks
That may be what Jen had in mind.
From your description, I thought the author might be Armenian and you a closet Armenophobe.
WTF?
@hat
I believe Armenians may have a certain nostalgia for their former Byzantine masters and (more or less) co-religionists.
All well and good, but I don’t appreciate the Armenophobe thing.
That was silly of me. I think i was imagining Kim Kardashian speaking in the emphatic way you disparaged????.
That may be what Jen had in mind.
I suspect I was really thinking about House of Cards. It might be the wrong way round for thrillers (which I don’t know much about) – you might want to bring down the person in the house of bricks first, and work up to the most precarious position.
PlasticPaddy,
Do you think the mandatory production of (-ogies of) “doorstoppers” leads to poorer quality work than the previous system of serial publication of longer works in magazines?
What you got there, chief, is one of them false dichotomies.
If “Three Little Pigs” would be written today
I believe the Kolobok has more stages:
Escape from Grandpa
Escape from Grandma
Escape from the Hare
Escape from the Wolf
Escape from the Bear
Grand Finale with the Fox
P.S. The Kolobok is a Russian counterpart to the Wee Bannock.
@ Y:
Too much bad writing in a genre that glorifies the clever idea above all; and worse, where the clever ideas are what scientists think is clever.
The vast majority of science fiction readers and writers are not scientists, so I’m not quite sure what this sideswipe against the latter is doing here. Then again, you admit to reading little or none of it, so I’ll take it as a generic exercise in “I don’t really know anything about X, but I’m going to pontificate about it anyway.”
@ PlasticPaddy:
This is probably due to market or competitive pressure, similar to the “Publish or Perish” ethic in academic work, where however of course new and challenging always means good????.
But why this change only in the last few decades? “Publish or perish” has been the rule for professional writers (i.e., those who had to support themselves by writing) for centuries. And it’s rather different from the academic idea, where the point is that people nominally employed as educators are also expected to publish regularly.
I’m tempted to speculate that it might be a combination of the increasing appeal of franchises and the ease of marketing them and increasing authorial ambition.
The first might include the success of Star Trek and Star Wars, which created a viable market for “more of the same world”, which is probably always a bit easier to market; the 1980s saw the appearance of “shared-world” anthologies (and series of novels) and roleplaying-game novels, where even though the authors might differ, the world — and often the characters — are the same.
The second aspect might be authors coming to think that coherent, multi-volume narratives are more ambitious and artistically satisfying and prestigious than individual novels or loosely connected series (a bar possibly set by The Lord of the Rings, even if that was really a single large novel cut up into three parts). This can even take over what might have started as an unplanned series; bulbul mentions Charles Stross’s Laundry series, which seems to have shifted from the single-novel unrelated stories towards building a more coherent, multi-volume epic conclusion.
(There is perhaps a third possibility, which is that computers might make it easier to write coherent, multi-volume stories, because you can keep notes and do searches more easily; e.g., “Wait, did Lord Mal already tell the Constable about his plans in the second volume?”)
Kim Kardashian
She did more to help Armenia during the recent Karabakh war than anyone else in America despite having very little personal connection with Armenia (only her father is Armenian American, she grew up with her Irish American mother).
Didn’t expect this of her.
I always like it when people turn out to be better than my opinion of them.
I always like it when people turn out to be better than my opinion of them.
Me too.
I can’t recall where I saw someone say, `Who knew, before Tolkien, that children like backstories?’ They’re a way to extract energy from the vacuum, and they seems to be the engine behind a major support network for the fantasy/scifi industry.
tangential? : R A Lafferty, Nine Hundred Grandmothers
Ms. Kardashian has also managed to leverage her clout as a celebrity to induce the President to carry out some of his more admirable exercises of clemency toward those treated overharshly by the criminal justice system. The Lord worketh in mysterious ways, but we ought to be grateful for the results and mindful that any sort or condition of person can end up being an instrument of justice and mercy.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/06/politics/alice-marie-johnson-commuted-sentence/index.html
No series in my childhood (if we define USSR as “childhood”). Sherlock Holmes stories, and Moomins stories by Tove Jansson. That is all. Both are great.
Accordingly I spent my whole childhood dreaming of this, series. The idea to make a film 400 series long, to continue the plot in next books was an obvious revolutionary idea that no one ever realized, because they all are idiots – one of many such ideas.
When the USSR fell and I discovered that many authors do such things and that there are even sci-fi series and cartoons, I was more than happy. I have never seen Peter Jackson LotR (not because I don’t want to), but I’m absolutely happy that finally someone revolted agains this nonsense that all films must be 2 hours long.
I’m with Frank on this. The “adolescent” vibe is surely in character. (This is actually testable, as we’ll see when the sequel comes out.)
The novel is not up to Leckie standards, but that leaves quite a margin for it to be good enough to be going on with. I also regard “good writing” as a welcome extra in science fiction, in the sense that science fiction can be excellent qua science fiction without being at all mistakable for Great Literature. (Exhibit A: Isaac Asimov.)
Though trilogies are Not All The Same, as various people have rightly said, the grotesquely-padded sort is indeed a curse of modern science fiction. Still, it’s noticeable that with the major offenders even the individual volumes are overstuffed eight-hundred-pagers. The problem is more deep-seated than the mere number of volumes. I think one can be most justifiably cross when the multivolume work in question deliberately leaves the major plot threads unresolved, so that you get to page 750 of 800 and realise with a sinking feeling that the author has left no room to resolve anything by the end of the book. At this point, you can reasonably feel that you’ve been sold a pup.
A series is a very different matter. There is satisfactory closure at the end of each volume, and it wouldn’t mar your enjoyment of the existing works if the author decided never to continue; your feeling if they do decide to write another is just pleasure at there being more to enjoy – perhaps with some apprehension about whether they can maintain the standard. (I feel like this about Martha Wells’ excellent Murderbot series.)
PS Italics are fine. Until English orthography finds a better way of noting meaningful suprasegmental features, I’m going to keep right on using them. You copyeditors are just plain mean.
The “adolescent” vibe is surely in character.
Adolescents are not made ambassadors. Not even in the Far Future. And I’m sorry, someone who’s 26 is not an adolescent unless they refuse to grow up, in which case see above about ambassadors.
I also regard “good writing” as a welcome extra in science fiction
See above with regard to genre fans and genre satisfactions. When I was a science fiction fan (as opposed to someone who appreciates good sf) I felt the same way.
someone who’s 26 is not an adolescent unless they refuse to grow up
I hold to the proper Roman view of these matters. You’re not grown up until you’re forty (at which point you become a Veteran.) We Elders should not have unrealistic expectations of the Young (their respect and obedience are enough.)
I find myself warming to proper Roman views. But a lot of them were Republicans, right ?
Not only ancient Rome… I remember reading someone observe that, in modern Western Culture, adolescence becomes ever longer, and that nowadays behaving like a responsible adult and having found one’s place jn life is something that isn’t really expected (socially / culturally, not legally) from people who haven’t reached their mid-30s. That chimed with my experiences.
All well and good, but those people are not made ambassadors. Also, I doubt life on a hardscrabble mining station is conducive to delayed adolescence. It’s pure authorial whimsy.
But a lot of them were Republicans, right ?
They did have a bit of a reputation for creating desolation and calling it peace (an early example of Fake News.)
“Murderbot ” – I am pleased that I’m not the only idiot who read Ann Leckie and the Murderbot:)
We are many. And we shall prevail.
Murderbot
I enjoyed All Systems Red a lot; it didn’t have any pretensions and carried the reader along with zip and panache. I probably won’t read any of the sequels, though.
There is DEFINITELY something to be said vis a vis the modern sf penchant for “doorstopper” novels that are part of hernia-inducing series. I’m actually a fan of many of them (I read so fast, they’re “more bang for the buck”), but many others do not need to be so, and really shouldn’t be. From what I understand, it’s in large part a publisher thing; series sell better. And the trilogy was enshrined as “the” form for fantasy, in particular, by Tolkien and everyone just still goes along with that.
I’m almost certain Dzit isn’t 26 in Earth years, but I can’t tell you where it actually says that.
Re: Murderbot.
I admit to being a fan. The idea of an AI who doesn’t particularly want to become a ‘real boy’ is smart and interesting, and more relatable than one might think.
Re: A Memory Called Empire
OK, but not great, IMO. A lot of SF appeals to an adolescent sensibility, and it can, indeed, get tiresome.
You might like Charlie Stross’s latest novel, Dead Lies Dreaming. Set in the Laundry Files universe, but not part of the long narrative. It’s the Stross version of the Peter Pan story. Very unDisneyfied.
I didn’t find the emo aspects that off-putting but that may be because of recent overindulgence in YA fiction. For me the virtues of the novel overcame the impetuous youthfulness of the prose. I look forward to the testable hypothesis as David says, of the next installment.
Game of Thrones mostly cured me of reading any in-progress series. Byzantine empire recast into space empire by an actual scholar was too much to resist, though.
One weird thing is that Hugo and Nebula ceased to nominate male authors:/
0 male winners since 2016 (one transgender), 0 male Hugo nominees this year, 1 male Nebula nominee this year.
P.S. when Ann Leckie won both awards I decided to read female winners and nominees specifically, because I do not know many female sci-fi authors. Actually, the genre – her novel is not a “space opera” but looked like one when I was choosing it – and the cover image also contributed. It looked like a sort of things I usually do not read:)
Same logic with Murderbot: I normally do not read such things.
And obviously now this approach does not work, because it is girls-only awards:)
Peter Erwin:
The vast majority of science fiction readers and writers are not scientists, so I’m not quite sure what this sideswipe against the latter is doing here. Then again, you admit to reading little or none of it, so I’ll take it as a generic exercise in “I don’t really know anything about X, but I’m going to pontificate about it anyway.”
OK, “scientists” was sloppy. Maybe “people finding soulful inspiration in science”? What I meant was, discoveries in physics, or biology, or even linguistics, are interesting, but I invariably find them weak foundations for interesting fantasy. I find that the utility of whatever differentness SF authors have contrived runs out pretty quickly, and then they are up against the same challenges of writing literature based in this familiar world. At worst, they ignore this and think the clever differentness will save them the need of writing well; at best, the writing is fine, but is dragged down by the contrived background.
As to how much I’ve read, I tried to like SF. I liked some of it when I was a kid — H.G. Wells, Pulps, Asimov. I knew a lot of SF fans in college, so I read some classics, I read some that were just lying around, I read some that were recommended. I disliked nearly all of them, and eventually I gave up. If I happen to open some SF at random now, I am usually instantly reminded why I don’t like the genre. That’s OK. I have other things to read.
If Ancillary Justice is not “space opera,” then the term has no meaning except as a derisive epithet.
I am willing to read SF novels by female authors, but only if there are no topless muscular men on the cover.
Brett, it is.I was simply wrong here – but what I expected when opening the book is a specific subjenre, one with empires, emperors, uniforms (all of this is abundant in the novel), while the cover image suggested Battlestar Galactica.
“I am willing to read SF novels by female authors, but only if there are no topless muscular men on the cover.”
No, there is: “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space! on the cover.
Ann Leckie new novel’s female protagonist also blushes when talking to a certain female who is “fetching” by definition of a male character who likes a third gender person, operating a mech made by aliens who change their gender and pronouns which surprises the female protagonist.
Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!
But does it have ponies?
i very much agree with @hat’s crankiness about the push for trilogies, though i do adore a lot of long-form narratives (in recent SF, i think n.k. jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy sets a mark that not much else reaches). but i disagree about both martine and leckie, which probably makes it a matter of differing tastes.
i always like a potboiler with good social history, whether the setting’s historical (lauren belfer’s City of Light), contemporary (anything by larry mitchell, though they’re now barely even set in the recent past), or purely devised (tamsyn muir’s Gideon the Ninth, which deserves a better blurb than the one @drasvi quoted) – so i enjoyed A Memory Called Empire quite a lot. it could’ve used a copyeditor, for certain, and a good hands-on editor editor would’ve made it better, but not much i’ve read published this century has shown signs of having either…
and as much as i enjoyed the Ancillary books, i think leckie’s extremely overrated. with that trilogy, all the hubbub about radchaai non-gendered language mostly showed that reviewers didn’t just not know from existing languages (mandarin? kiswahili? bueller?) but they hadn’t read much SF. delany’s tour de force of disorienting/re-orienting pronoun magic in Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand* actually does what folks seemed to think leckie did – and it came out in 1984. and by me, Provenance had about enough meat on its bones to be an excellent short story – but i react to inherited wealth and position the way @hat does to emperors (but with less pacifism, i must admit).
but i have to say that i didn’t find martine to be glorifying the teixcalaanli empire or emperor. i thought she did an adept job of writing a protagonist who does, and of showing how mahit’s adoration is and isn’t shaken by her experiences in different contexts (and how her attachment to the empire as institution is and isn’t the same as her cultural assimilation, and is and isn’t different from her lsel patriotism). and the slow backs and forths of the different characters’ relationships to the empire – mahit’s, but also the natives of the capital – are part of what i’m excited to see developed in the next book.
* part of a projected diptych – but The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities remains unpublished, so perhaps it can be forgiven…
But does it have ponies?
alas, no! but there are all kinds of critters made of re-animated skeletons, if that’s any consolation…
The idea of an AI who doesn’t particularly want to become a ‘real boy’
Or, indeed, a real girl. Especially in the latest instalment, Martha Wells sneakily subverts expectations with this (a teenage character straight-out declares that she sees Murderbot as a mother figure. Mind you, one of her other mothers is pretty badass too.)
i think leckie’s extremely overrated. with that trilogy
To be clear, I think the trilogy went downhill, precisely because she felt forced to go full space opera, with the fate of the universe resting on our plucky heroes. I have no patience for that crap. What I loved was the first book, with much of the action concentrated on one fully realized planet with its history and various classes and societies. That’s literature. “How can we save the universe?” is childish bullshit.
My gold standard for space-based sf is the Strugatsky brothers, who are always adult and treat their readers as adults, and who focus on local situations and moral dilemmas rather than the Universe and pluck saving the day.
but i have to say that i didn’t find martine to be glorifying the teixcalaanli empire or emperor. i thought she did an adept job of writing a protagonist who does
My point is not that Martine herself worships empires; I presume she doesn’t, and I expect she will problematize Mahit’s ingrained subaltern feelings in the sequels I will never read. My point is that books about universe-spanning empires and their glorious glory are inherently pro-empire in the same way that movies about war are inherently pro-war; no matter how much you emphasize the downside, the message is “look at the glory!” The readers of such books are not there to see a debunking, they’re there to revel in the banners and the storm troopers (so to speak) — Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. I’m there for the human entanglements and (hopefully) the good writing, not for the tinsel.
i react to inherited wealth and position the way @hat does to emperors
Oh, I feel the same way about inherited wealth and position, but sf historically hasn’t lionized that as much (it lionized engineers, scientists, Boy Scout types, etc.).
It just occurred to me to check the Fanfare section of MetaFilter to see if there was a thread on the book, and there is. As I expected, pretty much everybody loved loved loved it, but this comment resonated so much with my own reactions I thought I’d copy it here:
Has anybody read The Traitor Baru Cormorant? (The Kindle edition is only $2.99 on Amazon at the moment.)
“The author has a really bizarre idea of how embassies work. What kind of embassy has no staff?”
I also have a vague idea how embassies worked in 11th century, if this was the inspiration. An account of Syrian church delegaion in 17th century Moscow begins with a complaint that they were forced to behave like saints (never joke and keep serious faces) because Muscovite spies would tell everythign to the tsar – and concluded with an appeal to God to save them from this terror.
Looked at its description in WP.
Oh, my.
Wallenrodyzm in hard fantasy.
Definitely not going to read.
only if there are no topless muscular men on the cover
Please do remember that (a) authors have zero influence over the cover art unless they have a very long history with the publisher or it is a very small publisher, and (b) cover artists are generally given an amount of time barely sufficient to read the back-cover blurb, never mind the whole book. The infamous case of the first Ballantine (authorized U.S. paperback) editions of Tolkien (images here) are particularly egregious: Ballantine was in such a hurry that the artist knew absolutely nothing about the books.
i react to inherited wealth and position the way @hat does to emperors
Most of the time it’s much the same thing: emperors do occasionally arise from poverty, but even if they haven’t inherited the Petal Throne, they generally have a fair amount of i. w. ≈ p. already. I myself am perfectly okay with i. w. as long as it was earned fairly, which naturally limits its extent.
@LH: I looked at the goodreads reviews for the book (lots of spoilers), and it seems to be a book people either love or hate. I find the premise interesting, but I’m not currently planning to put another fantasy book on my reading list.
Thanks! I guess I’ll skip it.
only if there are no topless muscular men on the cover
That “topless” convention does not transfer to men, dear. One sees pecs all the time. On book covers men should be bottomless. I mean they should have butts, of course, but … oh well, never mind.
What kind of embassy has no staff?
Actually, I recall getting a Burkina Faso visa in London from a single Honorary Consul who did that sort of thing part time, his day job (as it were) being a West African import-export business. I think I made his day. It was the fastest visa processing I have ever experienced (though the Burkina embassy in Ghana were also very good.)
It seems quite plausible that the relationship of Lsel to the Empire might not be too different from that of Burkina to the UK (or even more so.)
Bear in mind that nobody is supposed to know that Lsel is of any importance at all.
“[Men] should have butts…”
This is the kind of high-level intellectual discussion that keeps me returning to chez Hat.
“…be bottomless. I mean they should have butts…”
I recalled how my friend (as a teenager) was translating “that the topless towers be burnt”…
“[Men] should have butts…”
I think this comes under the rubric of inalienable human rights, and I would hope that no Hatter would dispute it. There is no place for pygophobia in this day and age.
The Hattery is always open to Buttery.
I thought we took a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to morphology—grammatical and anatomical. It would be more accurate to avoid a normative statement and say that “no exceptions to male butt-having have so far been observed.”
I’m sorry, one has to draw the line somewhere. Buttless males are ungrammatical. Ill-formed, in fact.
Buttful. Bottomful. Arseful…
(I wrote only one word originally, but the spam filter…)
@Hat : Has anybody read ‘The Traitor Baru Cormorant’?
I haven’t, but my son recommends it…
The Arseful Dodger.
I read The Traitor Baru Cormorant and liked it a lot. It was the first in a series but, unfortunately, I found the sequel unreadable.
Asshat!
Well, there is a Russian chastushka that has a word similar to arseful. But it was about “lasses”. They were said to have other positive qualities too…
I’ve never get the critizism of SF novels based on the novel being too unlike the real thing. The whole point of SF is that it’s unlike the real thing. In fact, I was put off of reading “A memory called empire” precisely becaues reviews emphasized that it was based on the author’s indepth knowledge of real life empires. The Ann Leckie trilogy was great despite being loosely based on the Roman empire, not because of it. If you want to write about realistic ambassadors, why make it an SF novel at all?
Some classic SF has characters without any personality at all. I’m not sure if that’s worse or better than emotional heroines (or stoic heroes).
I read Gideon the 9th and found it to be quite entertaining as a fantasy book, but confusing in the beginning as I expected SF.
Buttless males are ungrammatical. Ill-formed, in fact.
All humans have glutei maximi (short of surgery), but not all have butts, much less BUTTS. By the same token, all female humans have mammary glands (modulo ditto), but not all have boobs.
There is a considerable amount of science fiction which has all the excellences for which prizes are awarded for non-genre novels. Hat seems to have progressed/devolved to the point where he no longer appreciates any other kind, and good luck to him: he’s got no shortage of choices left to him, after all.
I think this is orthogonal to the questions of what makes science fiction, science fiction; and of what makes science fiction, great science fiction qua science fiction. Again, I think Isaac Asimov is a good reference point for what I mean by great science fiction, on a quite separate axis from any distinctively literary merit. At his very best, he’s a great science fiction writer because he can take a particular idea (which need not in fact be scientifically plausible or even possible) and run with it, playing “what if” and drawing out the consequences satisfactorily in human terms without cheating (I’d nominate The End of Eternity or The Gods Themselves as his best in this regard.) On the other hand science fiction can be good because it’s just very good fiction set in a fairly stock science-fiction universe (Lois McMaster Bujold, say.) Happily, these virtues are by no means mutually incompatible, of course. (Babel-17!)
But either way, good science fiction has to be respectful of the genre (satire is also a kind of respect in this context.) This is why Margaret Atwood is incapable of writing even mediocre science fiction, as she herself evidently realises, in her denigration of “science fiction”; she has no feeling at all for what science fiction actually is, and in fact produces allegory, which she miscalls “speculative fiction.” She has no real interest in how her imaginary worlds could actually work, with the result that her creations are humanly impossible. The imaginary world is merely a means to an end: telling us what to think. That is irritating even when what she wants us to think is actually quite true (viz: that women are all too often exploited and treated as not fully human, and that that’s very wrong indeed.)
I would contrast Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I would unhesitatingly claim as proper science fiction: Orwell is fascinated by the detail of how his dystopia functions (see, for example, his loving description of Newspeak in the appendix, which is almost Tolkien-like.) He earns the right to tell us what to think through his imaginary creation.
I’ve tried to bite my tongue, but I can’t restrain myself: I think very highly of Philip K Dick – Ubik, Martian Timeslip, Clans of the Alphane Moons, Dr Bloodmoney, Do Androids…?
Cf Borges? Gogol? Discuss?
(I’m about halfway through Gideon the Ninth, a purchase encouraged by rozele’s entirely accurate assessment: in fact, I think eldritch ponies would be right at home therein.)
If Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is not (brilliant) science fiction, the term has no meaning …
I’m never quite sure quite what I think about Philip K Dick – a reaction which I am sure would have delighted him. The work of his I read most recently was Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which is a superb example of whatever it is that it’s an example of. (Certainly science fiction, whatever else.)
The last time I was willing to give someone a chance to recommend SF to me, I explained to whoever I was talking to what was disappointing me, they said, “oh, you want something like literature” — I thought to myself, is good writing a subgenre of SF? — “you want to read Philip K. Dick.” I chose Through a Glass, Darkly, which according to the cover, Dick himself called, “the only masterpiece I will have ever written”. I figured, that’s as good as it gets, and I read it. It was readable. It wasn’t awful, just a bit annoying. It made me think the author was full of himself and couldn’t help but inject it into the book. But anyway, it was OK, just I wouldn’t bother with it of my own accord.
BTW, I liked, and still like Lem’s The Futurological Congress, and Frank Robinson’s The Power. The first is funny, the second is hard-boiled. I also like unpretentious pulp stories from way back about bug-eyed monsters. Clean dirty fun.
“Gideon the 9th” The realistic thing about it is the cover image:)))))
@Moa, when I read the sequel, I found that I underestimated her seriously. Can’t say the same about Ann Leckie.
“BTW, I liked, and still like Lem’s The Futurological Congress,”
Y, is it known in your country? I read it when I was 5 and that was a Heroic Feat. I already knew that sci-fi is cool (seriously:)), and I found a magazine with it and understood that it is sci-fi. But for a child who still reads slowly, for whom every book was mostly mystery reading how the strangest author I know is hallucinating within hallucination was…
Yet in my country it is not the most famous piece by Lem. Mildly speaking.
@Y:
I don’t think I’d recommend Dick to literary types as a gateway drug to SF, myself. If I was trying to establish that my low science-fiction habit was actually quite respectable really (a game I am now happily too old to be concerned with) I’d probably point people at Ursula Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr, Samuel Delany, Gene Wolfe … possibly John Crowley, though he irritates me for reasons which I can’t quite explain.
But then, why should it be respectable? That way lies Progressive Rock, and all its horrors. And academic professors of jazz.
“Like ‘The Saturday Evening Post’, [‘science fiction’] means what we point to when we say it.” —Damon Knight
“Science fiction is what I say it is.” —the other JWC
And many other fine definitions.
When I listened to Bach in Moscow Conservatory (where else – they have an organ) I found all those faces quite annoying as well. Bach rocks, faces didn’t. It was a lesser problem, though. What was worse is: I understood why keeping silence (even though it was not easy), but could they have put there couches or beds? WHY chairs?
There are some couches in the lobby, but that time I would rather be walking, or preferably running.
(As you can guess, I was a fan of classical music as a kid. As you can also guess, I never needed to explain why any of this is respectable – it is a normal combination for Russia)
“Like ‘The Saturday Evening Post’, [‘science fiction’] means what we point to when we say it.”
A wooden post in the Saturday evening
I want to thank the focus group and announce my sesquilogy featuring androids with rounded personalities and butts.
drasvi: I was introduced to Lem in the United States, in English translation. That was while I was in college. I still have the book, in the same cheap paperback, with all the pages now loose from the dried glue-binding.
Hat seems to have progressed/devolved to the point where he no longer appreciates any other kind
Not so! As I said above, I liked All Systems Red a lot. But it has to be good quick efficient fun or well-written, genuinely thoughtful literature; betwixt-and-between doesn’t work for me.
I’d probably point people at Ursula Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr, Samuel Delany, Gene Wolfe
Same here, plus the Strugatskys of course.
I was once on a science fiction presentation (aka seminar). The author considered the possibility that pre-inflation universe had metric signature (-,-,-,-). In layman terms, time was exactly like space. And then in a process resembling quantum transition (or maybe it was quantum transition) time became time and the rest is history.
Unusual universe? Check
Not a shred of proof? Check
Titillating? You betcha.
Strugatskys
I was wandering, how you pluralize them:) “Strugatkies” would match both the pattern diary-diaries and Russian plural strugatskie with -e [-je] after a vowel.
When prog rock is ridiculous or naff (as is often the case), it still may be sort of charming in its guileless goofiness. Plus you’ve wasted 40-45 minutes max. One cannot say the same for an 800-page tome of bad genre prose which is rather alarmingly billed as a first installment in an X-logy. There are certainly records I listened to when I was 14 that I now have, I think, well-grounded critical reasons (after decades of deeper immersion in all sorts of music I hadn’t yet heard at 14) for not thinking particularly highly of, but I’m often willing to give them another chance for old times’ sake. Whereas my attitude toward essentially all of the SF I consumed at that age is that life is far too short to waste any of it on giving any of that stuff another chance. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
Perhaps it’s an idiosyncrasy of mine, or maybe it’s something about different artforms, but I feel like I can often find fairly unimpressive (50th percentile at best) hack/journeyman musical performance a decidedly preferable alternative to silence yet I cannot find 50th-percentile hack/journeyman genre prose a preferable alternative to not reading at all.
Trilogies? Genre fiction? You got it easy, kid.
David E.: But then, why should it be respectable? That way lies Progressive Rock, and all its horrors. And academic professors of jazz.
Incidentally, a review by Roy Søbstad of Thomas Falla Eriksen’s graphic sci-fi trilogy Enki, posted this Friday by the online comic magazine Empirix. Opening words:
I like these timely coincidences.
That reminds me, along with my Bah on written-words SF, Bah on superhero comics, which are a genre of SF comics and are prone to similar ills.
“If Thomas Falla Eriksen’s sci-fi trilogy were music, it would be a triple conceptual progrock album from 1973.”
Ooh, burn.
(It’s the “1973” which really twists the knife …)
@Y:
personally, i wouldn’t recommend phildick in general, but especially not as an exemplar of literary sf. the little i’ve found satisfying in what i’ve read of him has all been in the tiny trickle that slips in around the edges of his devoted and vigilant quest to write High Literature. but plenty of folks do enjoy him…
i agree with DE & hat about delany, tiptree, the strugatskae, and (especially later) le guin as better examples – i haven’t read (that) wolfe or (that) crowley.
and i want to agree with DE’s “sf is sf” comment, but point (as always) to delany. he takes (and i tend to agree with) the position that sf is very specifically not literature, on the level of its discursive workings and structures. one of his more straightforward examples is sentences that can appear in either literature or sf, but require a radically different reading to make sense, depending on which kind of text includes them. e.g.: “Her world exploded.” it’s not about respecting the genre in the sense of tropes, ideas, or details; it’s about writing work that is legible through specific reading strategies. which is why to me some atwood is sf despite her protestations of literariness – some of it i like (The Handmaid’s Tale) and some i hate (The Heart Goes Last) – but no orwell is.
books about universe-spanning empires and their glorious glory are inherently pro-empire in the same way that movies about war are inherently pro-war; no matter how much you emphasize the downside, the message is “look at the glory!”
i think this is often how such books function, but far from inevitable or inherent. i don’t think intent has much to do with it, but some of what makes the difference is in the writing – to me, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and the related short story Omegahelm are a great examples of writing set in universe- (or at least galaxy-)spanning empires at their peak of glory that would be hard to get a pro-empire message from. i think the context of the reading is more decisive, though. if i’d read A Memory Called Empire in the 80s, i think i’d agree more with @hat about it; reading it last summer in a crumbling imperial metropole, what jumped out was the shakiness of Teixcalaanli power, not the glory.
I’m there for the human entanglements and (hopefully) the good writing, not for the tinsel
this, absolutely!
i apologize for the lack of butts and prog rock in this post.
i hope the sidelong reference to uncle aleister can serve as a passing invocation of both.
“I expect she will problematize Mahit’s ingrained subaltern feelings in the sequels I will never read”
This book already does that — it’s one of the central points of the whole story.
I feel like I can often find fairly unimpressive (50th percentile at best) hack/journeyman musical performance a decidedly preferable alternative to silence
I agree. Even mediocre prog rock still requires a lot of technical skill that I, as an amateur musician, can appreciate. I may not like a lot of 1970s Yes as music qua music but I could never play drums at that level, and it is still fun to listen to Bruford or even White. Bad writing usually doesn’t have that “but how did she do that?” quality.
Writing even a very bad novel is an achievement well beyond my own powers, at any rate.
I don’t think novel-writing is as easy as one might suppose.
This book already does that — it’s one of the central points of the whole story.
Yes, of course; I didn’t express myself clearly, but at the moment I’m too lazy to figure out more precisely what I meant and express it better.
Me: Incidentally, a review by Roy Søbstad of Thomas Falla Eriksen’s graphic sci-fi trilogy Enki, […]
I thought I added a link to the review.
I should say that the review takes a more positive turn, along JWB’s and Vanya’s views on prog rock. Since this is a graphic novel in the tradition of Moebius (and Enki Bilal, a reference missed by the reviewer), there’s a lot to enjoy on the technical side. Long and confusing stories with beautiful, disturbing drawings is a genre of its own.
Sorry for the rambling multi-part comment…
“There were a lot of kinds of birds in Teixcalaanli, and one word for ‘bird’ in Stationer. There’d been more once.”
Previously on LH.
No series in my childhood (if we define USSR as “childhood”). Sherlock Holmes stories, and Moomins stories by Tove Jansson. That is all. Both are great.
Sherlock Holmes (and to a lesser extent also the Moomins) is a different (sub)genre: a collection of short stories about the same protagonists. I’m not sure it’s really a series when you can put the parts into a different order and expect it to make about as much sense, if any, in terms of being a coherent plot. The cartoon version of this is Nu Pogodi [or, for the non-Russians in the audience, Tom & Jerry].
(IIRC there are some “series” that are kind of like that except at the end of each part there is a sentence to the effect of “this reminds me of the time when X…” and the story of X follows. This does at least fix the order of parts, if nothing else, but still might not necessarily qualify.)
Other Soviet or available-in-USSR series that come to my mind include Karlsson on the Roof (short but definitely a series), Crocodile Gena, Prostokvashino (short by 1991, but definitely a series), Alisa/Girl from the Future (extensive, but the books are about as connected as the Moomins – i.e. not very – except in some mini-series that might postdate 1991), Elektronik, and of course Wizard of the Emerald City.
However, I do admit that offhand I can’t think of any Soviet cases of a series where the plot actually continues from one book to the next (as opposed to the next book starting off where the previous book ended, or shortly after, but otherwise making its own plot threads). I suppose Seventeen Moments of Spring might qualify as a film version. (I’ve never watched Seventeen Moments of Spring.)
That said, it’s perfectly possible that I’m missing something obvious; after all, I didn’t grow up in the USSR (I was born in an independent Russia, a week and a half after the final dissolution of the Soviet Union).
Though trilogies are Not All The Same, as various people have rightly said, the grotesquely-padded sort is indeed a curse of modern science fiction. Still, it’s noticeable that with the major offenders even the individual volumes are overstuffed eight-hundred-pagers. The problem is more deep-seated than the mere number of volumes. I think one can be most justifiably cross when the multivolume work in question deliberately leaves the major plot threads unresolved, so that you get to page 750 of 800 and realise with a sinking feeling that the author has left no room to resolve anything by the end of the book. At this point, you can reasonably feel that you’ve been sold a pup.
Of course at those levels you’re right back at the Tolkien problem: even if you believe that your excellent novel idea works best as a single novel of 2400 pages, you probably have to publish it as a trilogy of 800 pages each (or perhaps a quadrilogy of 600 pages each as the case may be), because, with all due respect, approximately nobody is going to buy a 2400-page book, and for that matter I suspect few publishers have the equipment to print one either.
I suppose these days there is also the John McCrae option: just put the darn thing on the web, chapter by chapter, and hope that your readers put enough money into your Patreon. I’m not sure to what extent this is a sensible strategy, but it sure seems to have worked for John McCrae.
At his very best, he’s a great science fiction writer because he can take a particular idea (which need not in fact be scientifically plausible or even possible) and run with it, playing “what if” and drawing out the consequences satisfactorily in human terms without cheating
This is indeed a good way to make a good story, but it might not be necessarily be limited to science fiction (though it probably works best there).
Many of the best (…in my opinion, at least) alternate history works started that way [then again, alternate history probably counts as a subgenre of science fiction]; so did many of the best fanfics (there’s a reason I like Harry Is A Dragon, And That’s Okay so much, and from what I’ve heard, it’s not just me).
BTW, I liked, and still like Lem’s The Futurological Congress
I’m a bit of a fan of Lem myself, but The Futurological Congress is one of the few Lem stories I didn’t like; it was so confusing that after only a few pages I had entirely no idea what the triangular heck was going on, and the rest of it didn’t get any clearer. Few stories I’ve read had made me quite as confused as that.
(…I think the fifth Hitchhiker’s Guide book came close, but other than that I can’t recall any specific names offhand. Admittedly, I suspect that in some of those cases this is merely because some kind of subconscious response excised those names from my memory.)
Writing even a very bad novel is an achievement well beyond my own powers, at any rate.
I don’t think novel-writing is as easy as one might suppose.
I’m not particularly confident of my own ability of writing a novel, even a very bad one, either (despite, or possibly because of, regularly hanging around in a chat full of people who casually write many thousands of words of their stories per week).
I suppose if I really try I could probably write something that kind of looks a little bit like a novel; it would not be so much a very bad novel as a text that is very bad at being a novel – but still far better at being a novel than, say, a grocery shopping list would have been.
(Now that I think about it, some of my Language Hat comments probably came close – this one not necessarily excluded.)
On some forums/platforms, there is an option to read all comments of a poster (if he somehow attracted your interest) in chronological order – day by day, year after year.
Certainly makes for interesting reading even if it’s not a novel.
I came here to write that Soviet Russian literature produced at least one overlong serialized novel “Tempestuous stream”, but it happened to be a single novel. Stierlitziana is a collection of largerly independent novels, but it probably helps to know what main protagonist did in previously published ones (I didn’t read any of them). Here’s a quote from aforelinked page [GT with a few personal touches]:
The reader must love the writer, ask him for an autograph and actively buy his artistic creations. Writers don’t write bad books. If the book is published, then it is good. And we don’t publish bad books, because nobody needs them. Literary criticism must protect the writer from the readers. It happens that some reader will become so unruffled that he begins to dislike this or that writer who creates artistic canvases of prose, poetry and drama. The critic must make the reader love any printed word.
I didn’t express myself clearly, but at the moment I’m too lazy to figure out more precisely what I meant and express it better.
There really should be a single word for this feeling. I’d certainly get a lot of use out of it.
Whatever
Bravo! If “whatever” is a touch too snarky just add a ????
I call it impudence. “I care so little for what you think, that I can’t be bothered to make clear what I think.”
People act like that on blogs, they think it’s cute and winning. I wonder if they would have the temerity to do it in one-on-one conversations. They would do it at most once with me.
I’m right here, you know.
You didn’t address that to me in private. Allowances can be made for nice guys. Recently in a telco about technical matters someone opposing my views laid that “I don’t really know what I’m trying to say but I’ll oppose you anyway” on me. Since he is ignorant as they come, I said: “if you don’t know what you want to say, you’re wasting my time by saying it.” That shut him up.
That’s an example of what I meant by “they would do it at most once with me”. Fortiter in modo is my motto. The res take care of themselves.
@ rozele, re PKD: When William Gibson invented cyberspace, he defined it as a consensual hallucination. What interests me about Dick is his concern that reality is another such consensual hallucination – to the extent that even one’s self may be such a thing. I agree that he’s a clumsy writer, but I think for example that Timothy Archer, Martian Timeslip, (insert long list) are very moving. Delaney, in Dhalgren for ex, seems to me to have similar concerns. In an earlier post I suggested comparison with Gogol, not because I think Gogol wrote scifi, but because Noc for ex is a lot like one of Dick’s more lighthearted romps through fractured reality.
@jack morava: I think Gibson described cyberspace as a consensual, collective hallucination. Dick’s questionable realities often seem to lack the collective aspect, pushing them more into the realm of solipsism. (See also here for where John Cowan and I seemed to disagree somewhat as to whether a shared dream has more reality than a strictly individual one.)
@J1M:
i think most overlong current fiction would be just fine if it were published as a serial, and wish that there were more ways for writers to do that effectively. extended-form comics are thriving online in that mode (Dicebox and Vattu are two i’ve been following), and the current ‘golden age of television’ is really a flourishing of long-form film released in a serial format (as opposed to the core television form, the indefinite-length series).
@jm @Brett:
i think i’d have to read more dick to have an opinion on the collectiveness of his realities. but at the time i read what i’ve read, i was also reading robert anton wilson’s novels, whose “reality is what you can get away with” slogan is likely an uncredited source of gibson’s definition*. i found RAW the more enjoyable of the two probably because he’s more interested in the consensual part (and how to change that consensus), as well as having a sense of humor.
I feel like I can often find fairly unimpressive (50th percentile at best) hack/journeyman musical performance a decidedly preferable alternative to silence ||| Bad writing usually doesn’t have that “but how did she do that?” quality.
i think the literary equivalent to that, for me, is enjoying writing on the level of the sentence or paragraph but disliking it on the level of the chapter or book. hilary mantel has always been like that for me, so I’ve never gotten past Eight Months on Ghazzah Street and Wolf Hall.**
** maybe part of that is the thing about glorification of imperial pomp. i think Wolf Hall leans pro-aristocracy, while The Other Boleyn Girl leans decidedly anti-.
PKD lacked RAW’s sense of humor and playfulness, agreed, but RAW for that very reason lacked PKD’s ability to evoke unease-or-terror about what might be Really Going On once the illusions were stripped away.
ability to evoke unease-or-terror about what might be Really Going On once the illusions were stripped away.
Descartes was the first big illusion-stripteaser of modern times. His influence was not of his own making, of course. He merely tapped general discontent and uncertainty. Not unlike Trump, except that Renée was more into books.
D. didn’t have a dog either.
i think Wolf Hall leans pro-aristocracy
I don’t (it’s basically pro-Cromwell, who was no aristocrat though he used the aristocracy to advance his own goals), but if it’s heads on pikes you want, you should read A Place of Greater Safety.
But it has to be good quick efficient fun or well-written, genuinely thoughtful literature; betwixt-and-between doesn’t work for me.
Of course that’s not exhaustive; another category that works for me, perhaps the quintessential sf category, is the idea-based novel where the idea is so compelling that it doesn’t need fancy language or characterization to triumph (which is not to say that it can get away with terrible writing and no characterization). A recent example of that is Blindsight
, by Peter Watts, which has stuck in my head ever since I read it as only the best sf does. Talk about a chilling view of the universe!
“Yes, of course; I didn’t express myself clearly, but at the moment I’m too lazy to figure out more precisely what I meant and express it better.”
Fair enough!
I guess it would make more sense if I changed it to “she will further problematize Mahit’s ingrained subaltern feelings.”
@January First-of-May, I rather spoke about my own childhood – I can’t speak about USSR as a whole.
What I need to explain is my hunger for this, and why I felt that “violence”, “stereotype”, “dumb pressure” act in the direction of putting a river into water tanks or cans, while the “obvious”, “natural” and “revolutionary” thing is letting the river flow freely. I mix up several related things.
– stand alone pieces.
– “Star Trek” as opposed to continuous flow. *
– Tolkien wrote an ocean. *
As I need to explain, why I felt so, I can be subjective and I do not need USSR to represent the extreme, just be close to this end of the range. Warhammer 40k produced several hundreds of novels within a few years:) It is breathtaking. It did not exist in LH’s childhood, but I see why his perspective is different.
Now I will comment on your exmaples.
—
Star Trek and Tolkien deserve a comment, but here they just illustrate “different reaction to pressure” and “different way to be free of limitations”.
Warhammer 40k produced several hundreds of novels within a few years
Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!!!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/CiaphasCain
and of course Wizard of the Emerald City.
I should have mentioned this one:( It does qualify. It was one of my first “large” books. I liked it. For a while I kept drawing emeralds*. Novels do not continue each other, though. The second book begins with the main villain : an extraordinary and cunning mind, industriousness, determination, remarkable willpower, courage and willingness to take risks.” (Wikipedia). I learned palissandre “rosewood”, and mahogany (red wood in Russian). He was a carpenter. I wanted to see him conquer the world, hot to see all his diligent labour go to shit because he ran out of weed!
It is a Russian version of Oz. Wikipedia says, it is known better than the original in China, Germany and some Arab countries. The author translated the Wonderful Wizard of Oz as an exircise, but “changed some events and added new adventures”. Many years later he wrote continuations.
It was the best awailable entertainment, but apart of several images from the first book, it did not affect me much. Rowling must be better.
—
*Then I read (or listened to?) the Hobbit and drew piles of gold, piles of gold, gems and swords and piles of gold. That was what dwarves liked;/ But then it were Les Enfants du capitaine Grant and grootzeil, marszeil, bramzeil, bovenbramzeil.
I think I’ve mentioned it before, there is an alternative portrayal of its author – Alexander Volkov as a Russian nationalist forced to live under hated Bolshevik rule while pretending to be a loyal Communist. (his bio does suggest that such views would be natural for his milieu).
Magic Land in the story is the old imperial Russia, a beautiful country taken over by usurpers using magic and tricks to mislead the population (Communist propaganda).
Industrious carpenter Urfin Joos who became dictator is personification of the Communist party.
As befits a provincial Russian nationalist who grew up in the late empire, Volkov apparently perceived Bolshevik takeover of Russia as a conspiracy by international Jewry, hence the name Urfin Joos – clearly based on English “Orphan Jews”.
Well, there was also the Bull’s Hour, by Efremov.
A spaceship with a crew mostly comprising beautiful naked women – from the future were humans regain common sense – is dispatched to a planet suffering from totalitarian nightmare (with casualities).
Efremov is one of the few SF writers who were seriously investigated (by KGB!) under suspicion of spying for aliens.
The greatest honor, I’d say.
“you get to page 750 of 800 and realise with a sinking feeling that the author has left no room to resolve anything by the end of the book”
David Foster, “The Glade Within the Grove”: “I have made a bad blue with narrative pace, as no way am I going to finish now.” The narrator dies, and the book suddenly ends, 20 pages later.
The book feels like a lengthy introduction to the real story, which the narrator never gets to tell. But this is deliberate. Through various asides and comments throughout the book, and the educated reader’s knowledge of the traditions it draws from, he has already given us a rough idea of what’s going to happen. It’s appropriate that the details remain a mystery, not witnessed by the uninitiated.
Well, there was also the Bull’s Hour, by Efremov.
A spaceship with a crew mostly comprising beautiful naked women – from the future were humans regain common sense – is dispatched to a planet suffering from totalitarian nightmare (with casualities).
I’ve had an old paperback of that for years — I guess I should read it!
the Bull’s Hour
Tangentially related:
Ushi-no-Toki-Mairi (Japanese: 丑の時参り, lit. “ox-hour shrine-visit”) or ushi no koku mairi (丑の刻参り)[2] refers to a prescribed method of laying a curse upon a target that is traditional to Japan, so-called because it is conducted during the hours of the Ox (between 1 and 3 AM). The practitioner—typically a scorned woman[3][4]—while dressed in white and crowning herself with an iron ring set with three lit candles upright, hammers nails into a sacred tree (神木, shinboku) of the Shinto shrine. In the modern-day common conception, the nails are driven through a straw effigy[a] of the victim, impaled upon the tree behind it.[4][5] The ritual must be repeated seven days running, after which the curse is believed to succeed, causing death to the target,[6] but being witnessed in the act is thought to nullify the spell.[7] The Kifune Shrine in Kyoto is famously associated with the ritual.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushi_no_toki_mairi
So Efremov was a spy for the Planet of Naked Women. As job titles go, it’s a real ice-breaker at parties.
When a simple cover story is elevated to cover art.
But that what I would love to do for Sentinelese. It is a dream job. A head of Sentinelese intellegence.
If you succeed in establishing contact them, it is unnecessary to inform the world.
They do have a lot to catch up with, so I’m not surprised…
A BFG in one hand, a BFS in the other!!!
(Always bring a gun to a knifefight.)
The great Ibáñez the Greatest occasionally has a main character point out that the adventure is over but there are still a few pages left to fill.
(Hilarity continues.)
There’s a more recently attested case in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife series, conceived as a single overarching story that was from the beginning too long to print at once. The initial plan was for two books, which ended up becoming four volumes.
The Sharing Knife would have been better as two books than four, and I’m not sure that it wouldn’t have been even better as just one. Lois McMaster Bujold often writes too much for my taste, but on the other hand, she does often have a good feeling for how to structure her series. For example, The Curse of Chalion is probably a hundred pages longer than it needs to be near the end, but Paladin of Souls does not drag in the same way, in spite of the events of the latter volume being a relatively minor adjunct to those of the former. She also correctly keeps Lord Chancellor Cazaril,* the main character of The Curse of Chalion, off the stage in the sequel, because his presence might be too powerful for Paladin of Souls‘s more contained narrative.
* Cazaril’s dopey scene where he fails to realize that he is going to be promoted to a high-level governmental position is among the elements that I think could have been excised in their entirety from The Curse of Chalion.
I had the same feeling about À la recherche du temps perdu (“Proust originally intended it to fill three volumes, and I can’t help but think he should have stuck to that intention”).
You might like Charlie Stross’s latest novel, Dead Lies Dreaming.
To which I am indented for the observation that now that Disney has taken over Twentieth Century Fox, the Queen from Aliens is now technically a Disney Princess.
I checked lists of Hugo and Nebula nominees again. Again it is women-only (except agender Chelsea L. Polk and not including transgender Charlie Jane Anders this time).
Why?
Because women write a lot of good sf?
Because women write a lot of good sf?
I mean, yes, but surely not only women? Or is there some kind of philosophical viewpoint difference somewhere that actually makes women’s sf better?
A nomination list consisting of 95% women (note: I have no idea how long the nomination list actually is; it’s possible that “all but one” is far less than 95%) is almost as suspicious (perhaps even more so) as one consisting of 95% men. Logically I would have expected roughly 50% either; maybe 40% or 60%, at a stretch perhaps 30% or 70%, but surely not 95% or even 90%.
(In retrospect, it could also mean that men are pressured to write in different (sub)genres that aren’t covered by Hugo and/or Nebula [EDIT: and/or not write at all but do something more productive, such as sports, military service, or a full-time job], and/or that women are pressured to write in (sub)genres that are so covered. This also probably wouldn’t be a good thing.)
EDIT 2:
such as sports, military service, or a full-time job
On further thought, this is probably the answer: a lot of men who could have written good sf do not do so because they’re too busy working (at some non-sf-related job) to earn money for their family. (Meanwhile, women are far less often working, so they can write instead.)
It’s debatable whether that’s a good thing, but it’s not quite as intrinsically bad as it looked like at first glance.
Funny how nobody (except the occasional disgruntled woman) raised an eyebrow back when the nominees were all men.
When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked “When will there be enough women on the Supreme Court)?” she said “When there are nine.” She added: “People are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”
The answer is pretty simple (and depressing).
Reading (and buying) of books is in terminal decline.
The only demographic category of readers which is not falling (and perhaps even growing) are women.
And women surprisingly read mostly books written by other women.
And so female authors came to dominate all genres from SF and fantasy to thrillers and detective fiction.
I am not even going to mention erotica and pornography which these days hardly has any male authors.
According to the Biological Determination Theory Women (here and henceforth capitalization is used to indicate theoretical Objects as opposed to real people) grok people while Men are good with machines. The only literature Men are capable of writing well are manuals for assembilng furniture.
So that’s why manuals for assembling furniture seem written to be read by machines and not people!
@do
For some definition of well, i.e.,
A piece can be mounted upside down, back to front etc., the manual assumes the technician, i.e., me will do it the right way automatically and never have to unscrew and unbolt later on;
Some assembly steps are considered by the manual author to be too trivial to document. This is often incorrect;
Sometimes a genius decides to put the assembly steps or corresponding pictures (if any) in the wrong sequence This is arguably not an error and the person who does something wrong because of this is arguably too inexperienced or stupid to do the assembly;
Parts not supplied as part of the item bought may not be identified as such in the manual. This is again arguably not a problem, but it may seem like one after one searches a long time or is faced with an unstable build which has to be disassembled before obtaining a part needed to make it stable.
There is a classic thriller where a linguist working for a spy has to build a vehicle called “bobik” from a repair (I agree this is not the same as an assembly) manual.
Perhaps what is needed is more female nominees for genre-fiction awards with conventionally masculine pen names like “Arkady,” to create a superficial illusion of greater balance? Of course, you may need to have greater than average (for an Anglophone reader) familiarity with Russian naming conventions before the “masculine” vibe of “Arkady” is obvious.
That’s because Men were mistakenly assigned to writing belles-lettres as well and the furnature assembly instructions were written only by Men not capable of writing anything. Now that the novels are written by Women, writing-worthy Men can direct their efforts to their proper outlet and the quality of the manuals should greatly improve. As you see, the Theory generates testable predictions. Aslo, assembling furniture might be automated if someone first figures out how to assemble the robot.
Of course, you may need to have greater than average (for an Anglophone reader) familiarity with Russian naming conventions before the “masculine” vibe of “Arkady” is obvious.
Её звали Никита
(Which is to say, “She was called Nikita”. Apparently just “Nikita” in English.)
I wonder if the number of male writers is actually in decline for a different reason: fragile masculinity.
See, the Theory tells Men that they have to be better than Women in everything they do. But in half of the traditionally male pursuits, women have now shown they can excel there, too. That means such things as literature, poetry or science are now Officially For Girls, and Men are no longer allowed to go there; Men, the updated Theory says, have to be Cavemen.
(This theory about the Theory is not original to me, I saw it spelled out in greater detail maybe 10 years ago.)
For a variety of historical reasons, this is worst in the US and helped give us Trump.
Perhaps what is needed is more female nominees for genre-fiction awards with conventionally masculine pen names like “Arkady,” to create a superficial illusion of greater balance?
A young aspiring male author wants to write science fiction. One morning he puts on make up* and high heels and goes to meet his publisher’s agent (sorry, don’t know the english word for it), a confident middle-aged lesbian Zina, interoducing himself as “Elizabeth”. Zina falls in love with “Elizabeth” from the first sight! Which is unsurpriusing: she is so confident, after all.
—
My (female) friend took exams (university entrance exams) for girls when she was 19. One of those girls (she befriended her, so I met her in person) is almost 2 meters tall, has black hair, prominent chin and is a pageant winner. My friend is blonde, 20 cm shorter, her nose and chin are small, and there is nothing similar about them. I asked “how?”
“Ah, just put more make up, and make sure it is terribly vulgar. Then they can’t tell one girl from another, no matter how different they are. Strange, but a fact. And hair, everyone can dye it”
How what? I think there’s something missing from your story, and I can’t guess what.
But yes. With enough makeup everyone can be made to look the same.
@drasvi
If all you have to do is show an ID with a blurry photo, this can work (not just for women, and without makeup). But if you have to forge a signature, this is more difficult. Especially if the exam supervisor feels he/she has seen you present for the same or another exam (this could explain the makeup) ????.
@January First-of-May: Blame the French for the girl named Nikita. The original 1990 film was French, entitled La Femme Nikita. For international releases, sometimes it kept that title; sometimes it was just Nikita. It was not a great film, certainly not Luc Besson’s best work, but it was gripping and became a cult hit. The movie was remade twice in different countries under different names (the American Point of No Return with Bridget Fonda is the best version of the story, although it is still no more than pretty good), and it was remade again as a cable television series (produced in Canada, as many intermediate-budget action shows were at the time) starting in 1997. The show kept the original name, La Femme Nikita, to cash in on the film’s reputation. I watched it occasionally, and it was fine but not great. It made Nikita into a much more likeable character (who was, unlike in all other versions, even innocent of the original murder that got her tangled up with the government agents in the first place). While the show was on, it was better known that the original French film, but after it ended, it quickly sank back into obscurity, while the film’s cult status remained.
How what? I think there’s something missing from your story, and I can’t guess what.
There was nothing missing; drasvi’s friend took the university entrance exam for the other girl, who looked very different. (In other words, how did they think she was the same girl?)
@brett
Titre original : Nikita
Titre américain : La Femme Nikita
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_(film)
There was nothing missing; drasvi’s friend took the university entrance exam for the other girl, who looked very different. (In other words, how did they think she was the same girl?)
I got that eventually, but it was really quite confusing for what felt like a long time (…probably about twenty seconds).
I think I originally either misread it as her taking exams with the other girl(s), or assumed that she was the examiner. It was (almost) immediately clear that the omitted question was something to the effect of “how could they possibly have been mistaken for each other?”, but it took me a while to figure out the relevance.
Men don’t read assembly manuals. They hit the parts with large bones and say “ug” until they fit together.
Homer, Tolstoy, and Joyce were all fired from IKEA, for obvious reasons.
Verner von Heidenstam, on the other hand, rose through the ranks with admirable doggedness. (He named the Sankt Göran nightstand.)
FWIW in high-end “regular” non-genre American literature, last year’s Pulitzer-Prize nominees in the literary categories seem to have been majority male (12-9, giving full credit to both sexes for nominated books with male/female co-author teams) with the year before that having been majority female (11-7). I did the math quickly so the numbers might be imprecise, but the range is right. Pulitzers are more likely to be late-career achievements, of course, so maybe the “pipeline” of potential future winners has a more skewed ratio.
Oh. It would all have been clear with intonation; instead of “{took exams} for girls”, I read “took {exams for girls}” as opposed to exams for boys. I actually wanted to ask why the university entrance exams were gender-segregated, and then simply forgot.
Anyway, people’s height when they stand doesn’t correlate very reliably with their height when they sit.
I think there’s something missing from your story, and I can’t guess what.
@David Marjanović, my freind counts as “tall” here, but she is not 19* cm. And neither girl is particularly fat. Otherwise they are as different as two white-skinned girls only can be. Of course, it is possible that the professor and other people who see her papers won’t even look at the photo. But she reasonably expected that they are unlikely to notice anything, and it was her expectation that surpised me. She did not do it for “girls who look similar” she did it for any girls, and it worked.
@PlasticPaddy, 20 years ago it was one more source of income for students. To take part in an election, a party must collect signatures from hundreds thousands people. They came to universities and hired a few boys and girls. Then they took them to a house in countryside, and students were signing for several days in a row. They were not allowed to have mobile phones with them.
Now we are a √(-4²)–party system (as oppposed to Soviet one-party system), I think they don’t practice this anymore and simply print the signatures. They can afford this.
Oh. “Exams for girls”.
To quote IUM (here):
Говорят, что когда Абелю, приехавшему в немецкий университет и не очень понимавшему по-немецки, долго объясняли, какие ему предстоят экзамены, он напряженно слушал, потом что-то понял и в ужасе перебил: “Нет, господин профессор, никаких экзаменов, только математика”.
(But I think they are confusing Abel with someone)
Perhaps with Cain. (Alas, the quip doesn’t work in Russian.)
Well, there was that story about New Caledonian crows, Betty and Abel.
The idea was that the researchers prepare for them a cylinder and a bucket inside the cylinder and food inside the bucket, and a collection of straight wires and hooked wires. The smart crows take the hook and extract the food. The smart researchers take a laptop a publish a paper.
The male crow (Abel) took the hook and flew away. The female crow (Betty) took the straight wire, made a hook and extracted the food, which the researchers did not expect. Since then it has always been she who extracted food (except once, when Abel did it with a straight wire using brute force).
When I was retelling it in Russian I said Авель.
Men don’t read assembly manuals. They hit the parts with large bones and say “ug” until they fit together.
Using brute force, as I said.
Someone should have made this joke already (I imagine it performed by Marx bros.):
Student: Are you doctor?
Professor (holds PhD) : Yes
Student begins to strip.
Professor: What are you doing?
Student: Class schedule says, today is preliminary exam.
I have no idea how long the nomination list actually is;
2000-2014
Hugo, male nominees : female nominees (winner’s gender) — Nebula, m : f (w)
3 : 2 (♂️) — 4 : 2 (♀️)
3 : 2 (♀️) — 3 : 3 (♂️)
4 : 2 (♂️) — 5 : 3 (♀️)
5 : 0 (♂️) — 4 : 2 (♂️)
4 : 1 (♀️) — 1 : 5 (♀️)
4 : 1 (♀️) — 5 : 1 (♀️)
5 : 0 (♂️) — 5 : 1 (♂️)
4 : 1 (♂️) — 4 : 2 (♂️)
5 : 0 (♂️) — 4 : 1 (♂️)
5 : 0 (♂️) — 5 : 1 (♀️)
4 : 2 (♂️) — 4 : 2 (♂️)
1 : 4 (♀️) — 1 : 5 (♀️)
3 : 2 (♀️) — 2 : 4 (♀️)
3 : 2 (♂️) — 2 : 4 (♂️)
4 : 2 (♀️) — 2 : 6 (♀️)
Then it is more complicated, because there are some unusual participants:
a chinese author (a translated novel is already an exceptional situation)
a pair “chinese author and the translator”
a m-to-f transgender
a person who refuses to tell свой gender.
Well, let
???? be the joint nomination of Cixin Liu and Ken Liu.
???????? be Cixin Liu
⚧️ be male-to female transgender participant.
???? be the participant who won’t tell свой gender.
2015:
2 : 2 : ???? (????) — 3 : 2 : ???????? (♂️)
2016:
2 : 3 : – : – (♀️) — 3 : 4 : – (♀️)
1 : 3 : ???? : ⚧️ (♀️) — 1 : 3 : ⚧️ (⚧️)
3 : 3 : – : – (♀️) — 1 : 6 : – (♀️)
1 : 5 : – : – (♀️) — 1 : 4 : ???? (♀️)
0 : 5 : – : ⚧️ (♀️) — 1 : 5 : – (♀️)
2021:
0 : 6 — 0 : 5 : ????
Maybe I should count the transgender writer together with women. Or maybe not. I do not know.
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu are both men. It is just a really unique even: a novel in translation nominated by the World Science Fiction Convention.
Interestingly, Wikipedia emphasizes: “Although translated works are eligible for the Hugo Awards (both when originally published and again upon translation into English), Cixin Liu’s 2015 winner The Three-Body Problem and 2017 nominee Death’s End are the only novels for which both the author and the translator (Ken Liu) were officially recognized during the awards process”
But they do not emphasize that
– it is the second time ever when a novel in translation is nominated
– it is the first time it won
– Ken Liu is a writer who won Hugos for short stories of his own… Anyway, they now recognize Rita Barisse, who translated a novel in 1963, so maybe they will now recognize any translators?
If they ever going to nomenate a novel in tranlsation again.
@languagehat, the question is “why?”.
It is very interesting, irrespectively of the reason and our views. It is just curiousity. Let us do not let our idology suppress our curiousity. This is why I expressed it with one word.
If you need my ideological position, it is simple: when girls study “philology” and boys study “hard sciences” (like here) just for the same reason why “boys play football” and “girls wear make up”, it means that a limitation imposed on minds of both, and both are made dumb in some way. Girls (I mean, say, software engeneers…) ask me to change light bulbs. It is what boys do.
The distribution is different in different countries. Here doctors and teachers are usually female, elsewhere it si not like that. Let’s limit our gender to dress, but not professions, maybe.
Besides, I know a girl who felt that people exactly “pushed/expected’ her to study humanities. It was not she who felt that her interest in “hard” science and engineering is un-feminine, it were not even others, but she was still expected to follow a path she did not like.
I do not consider writing sci-fi a “privilege”, but I want a world that does not impose limits on our thinking. Men-only and female-only science fiction are equally bad from this perspective.
And yes, in the first version of my post I asked this question: why before that science fiction was mostly male.
Then I deleted it and left just “why?”.
Actually, I have been asking this question for most of my life, just not about science fiction. For science fiction it only occured to me now – and… does it mean that asking questions is wrong?
I still do not know the answer. But I know one very powerful factor – globally, in countries like, say Saudi Arabia too – that makes women more visible now. The Internet.
does it mean that asking questions is wrong?
Of course not — questions are how we discover things. Long live questions!
How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb…?
2
None. That’s a hardware problem, dude!
Note: Even the new and less picky version of Aximet will jib if I link everything that might need it. Dr. Google is your friend.
Arkady is a she!
In the Worlds of If, of course “Arkady” is the name of a female author. Consider Arkady Darell (a pseudonym-lite for her birth name, Arcadia Darell), who by the way writes and even thinks exactly like that when she’s fourteen. Nevertheless she manages to become a successful novelist, biographer, and memoirist, which is no small accomplishment in a post-Imperial galaxy with 25 million inhabited planets. She also, from the external perspective, manages to be one of the first teenage-girl heroes in an SF novel written by a man.
The vast majority of science fiction readers and writers are not scientists
True. But of those writers with Ph.D.’s in the sciences, far more write sf than anything else (or so I believe).
“I don’t really know anything about X, but I’m going to pontificate about it anyway.”
An attitude I dub Wallaceism (rhymes with solecism, for me if not for you).
But why this change only in the last few decades?
The move to longer works is easily explained: publishers think readers will be cheated if they have to pay US$25 or so for a 131-page book. But -logies are nothing new. The four Lensman books, published in parts in the Usual Way, Pooh, are a generational saga, and they were written in the early 1950s; they don’t stand alone, and Doc Smith knew it. I say “four” because Triplanetary was rewritten into the Lensman universe (much like The Hobbit, in fact) and First Lensman was inserted in order to link them up. The result is total spoileration of the original tetralogy and its special structure, which is that at the end of each book the Big Bads have been defeated, and at the beginning of the last three books we find that the Big Bad is only a puppet of the Bigger Bad. (“When can a man know he is not a puppet? How can a man know he is not a puppet?” –Arkady’s father)
Now no one could claim that the Lensman books are anything but dreck by the standards of what I refuse to call literature, as if it weren’t all literature. I lent the tetralogy to my (former) Other Significant Other, who usually enjoys sf however degenerate, and her most positive judgment was “immature.” But for sensawunda they have always been unmatched, though nowadays it might be supplemented by wondering “How did he get this dreck published?”
You’re not grown up until you’re forty
The Latin sequence of male youths was infans (0-7), puer (7-14), adulescens (14-21), iuvenis (20-40), senex (anyone older). Unlike the other terms, infans and adulescens are epicene, with the grammatical gender determined by the natural gender of the referent.
at which point you become a Veteran
Note that in AmE veteran means ‘ex-serviceperson’ (a clumsy phrase!), even if your service consisted of two years in front of a military computer. By the same token, the only way to be a veteran and still in the service is to enlist for a second hitch that is non-consecutive with the first.
We are many. And we shall prevail.
Of course. But let us not forget, in our overweening Balliolity, that Truth, poor girl, was nobody’s daughter: she took off her clothes and jumped into the water.
Game of Thrones mostly cured me
I was cured of The Wheel of Time by reading the first part of the first book, and realizing that nothing but further weariness awaited me. I didn’t get even that far with GoT. And I like the author: Song for Lya (both the collection and the title story) is brilliant. In any case, Martin is not the American Tolkien: he is the very large bearded goyish Harlan Ellison. Neither of them is anyone’s bitch.
But does it have ponies?
I don’t think you can write YA books with even animal copulation, never mind bestiality. Yet.
who focus on local situations and moral dilemmas rather than the Universe and pluck saving the day
Indeed. “[L. Sprague] De Camp has never destroyed a galaxy and has only rarely and excusably rescued the human race.” –R.A.H. Nevertheless I have no doubt that Bujold is right to say that SF stories are fantasies of political action, just as romances are fantasies of love and detective stories are fantasies of justice.
movies about war are inherently pro-war
Do you really think that The Forever War (granted, not a movie yet) and Catch-22 are inherently pro-war? Note that both of them were written by veterans (sensu americano).
Actually, I recall getting a Burkina Faso visa in London from a single Honorary Consul who did that sort of thing part time
Certainly equalled and perhaps exceeded by Sir and friherr James Spens (he was knighted twice), a canny Scot who was at the same time the British ambassador to Gustav II Adolf and the Swedish ambassador to the Court of St. James. Contrary to the divine imprecation, he seems to have served both masters loyally and well. (Gustav needed and had many Scots mercenaries in his pursuit of the Corpus Evangelicorum Protestantorum.)
The Hattery is always open to Buttery.
If I suffered from the furor etymologicus that infests so many persons outside the charmed circle, I would instantly conclude that butt and butter (in the sense ‘cow cheese’, not ‘one who butts’) were related, perhaps with reference to Last Tango in Paris.
If you want to write about realistic ambassadors, why make it an SF novel at all?
Consider Heinlein’s Star Beast. The Boy Hero, setting out to save his alien pet, winds up Ambassador Extraordinary from the Federation to a dangerous and initially hostile empire. This is done at this insistence (not to say blackmail) of his Smart Girlfriend, even after it is explained to her that it is the Boy Hero who is the pet. Of course the Hero will have a staff, unlike Sir James. Indeed, Mr. Kiku (for the Federation) and Dr. Ftaeml (for the Empire) are the true heroes of the book, and both of them are diplomats of a quite realistic kind; Heinlein knew perfectly well what he was doing. However, there is a moment when Mr. Kiku asks the Smart Girlfriend why she does not want to be the Ambassador, but he gets no reply.
a fairly stock science-fiction universe
I think the uterine replicator (which is absolutely essential to her romance/SF novels) pushes her background past “stock”. Bujold knows it, too. Here is a former ship’s captain of the most Americanized of planets who has become a member of the nobility on a techno-retarded world populated by the descendants of Russian, British, French, and slightly crazy Greek settlers:
I thought to myself, is good writing a subgenre of SF?
John (Wood) Campbell, the “other JWC” above and the Founding Editor of American SF As We Know It, used to stretch out his arms and say “This end is the Big Bang, this end is the end of the universe, and SF covers all that.” Then he brought his hands very close together, and said “And this is ‘literature’.” (Or perhaps it was someone else.) But per contra see Le Guin, Virginia Woolf, and Mrs. Brown.
reading how the strangest author I know is hallucinating within hallucination was
See Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers”, in which everyone is hallucinating the same thing, but when given an anti-hallucinogen it turns out that they see twelve different things….
Your mileage may, of course, vary.
Mine does. But then again, in matters of taste I am the Boy Who Never Grew Up, and who still hates olives and beer.
Writing even a very bad novel is an achievement well beyond my own powers, at any rate.
I managed to do so, and even (in a fit of daring) submitted it for a prize offered by my English department which it did not win. Its subject matter makes it radically unpublishable.
. I’m not sure to what extent this is a sensible strategy, but it sure seems to have worked for John McCrae.
Oddly, it seems to have failed for Stephen King when he tried it (long after he was famous); the parts were withdrawn and the whole work published conventionally. Perhaps his mistake was not to offer subscriptions for the next N parts, where N > 1.
Воры в законе?
It is in fact explained in-universe as being from the Russian “thief” (and “Count” from the kindred profession of “accountant.”)
I’ve heard somewhere that Bujold wasn’t actually aware that it meant “thief” in Russian when she originally came up with the word, but when she found out (possibly after publishing the first book(s) where it appeared) she decided to go with that.
[EDIT: fixed gender reference; for some reason I forgot that Lois was a female name. [EDIT 2: found some unfixed places and fixed them too.] I have the opposite problem with Keith Laumer.]
I’m not sure if it’s canon or not – also heard it somewhere, probably a different somewhere – that the “kosigan” part of “Vorkosigan” is supposed to represent, and/or originate from, the Russian surname Kosygin.
Quite right: Alexei Kosygin was much in the U.S. news at the time. Both the official and the fan translations of the Matter of Barrayar use the prefix “For-” instead, as “Vor-” would be not just ironic but Way Too Ironic.
I was always amused by the title of Cossack general – Ataman.
Aside from Cossack usage, the word generally means bandit chief.
And they originally were exactly that.
atama
Altaic proved.
This is so good it really ought to become true retroactively.
Is ataman a chimera? The usual etymology is that it is equivalent to hetman used farther west in the Ukraine, but hetman is transparently Germanic “head man.” In contrast, the first element of ataman resembles that of atabeg, in the which the ata– is taken to be from Turkic (or perhaps proto-World), meaning “father.” (The -beg—modern Turkish bey—appears to be of unclear origin, however.) Some online sources do indeed suggest a Turkic origin for at least part of ataman, and so it looks to me like ataman could be partially a mashup of ata– and hetman.
The first vowel would have to be specifically English, though. You can’t get there from German Hauptmann “military rank of captain”. In a lot of dialects you get various shades of o, but not e, and there’s no source for umlaut.
Hetman:
*facepalm* OHG houbit. There it is. I guess the /b/ blocked umlaut farther south, or perhaps it was removed from the singular so it could mark the plural (after all, the plural Häupter can’t be terribly old anyway).
Is the recent novel by Kuang (scandalously excluded from competition for Hugo in China) with a somewhat Hattic title good and as Hattic as the title suggests?
(a silly question)
What happened with the Chengdu Worldcon was a tragedy. This (third?) Glasgow Worldcon is the first time I was eligible to nominate.
Is the recent novel by Kuang (scandalously excluded from competition for Hugo in China) with a somewhat Hattic title good and as Hattic as the title suggests?
I’ve wondered that myself!
Strongly recommended to me by Younger Son, who is generally reliable in such matters.
I’ve actually ordered a copy, but not read it yet. (I was also moved to buy it as a fuck-you to the pusillanimous appeasers organising the Hugo, so I will be satisfied with my purchase even if it turns out not to be my thing.)
Do report back when you’ve read it.
“pusillanimous appeasers organising the Hugo”
Do you even understand what the Hugo Awards are? I am a WSFS Member. That means I get to nominate. The people who organize the con have nothing to do with me, unless I want to volunteer. The WSFS and the Hugos are completely separate.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon-in-the-news.html
“The important thing to note is that the “worldcon” is *not a permanent organization. It’s more like a virus that latches onto an SF convention, infects it with worldcon-itis, runs the Hugo awards and the WSFS business meeting, then selects a new convention to parasitize the year after next.
No worldcon binds the hands of the next worldcon, it just passes the baton over in the expectation that the next baton-holder will continue the process rather than, say, selling the baton off to be turned into matchsticks.
This process worked more or less fine for eighty years, until it ran into Chengdu.”
Read Charlie’s post before commenting further about the Hugos.
The people who organize the con have nothing to do with me, unless I want to volunteer.
Which is why DE talked about the people who organize the con and not about you.
Kuang’s novel is very imaginative, has impressive imagery and she does a nice job world building. The whole conceit around generating power from the gaps in translation is enjoyable and an interesting metaphor for cultural appropriation. It’s an entertaining read with memorable characters. Your overall mileage may vary depending how annoyed you are by a narrative where every straight white male is obviously and predictably iredeemably evil. While objectively one can certainly say that turnabout is fair play, and maybe even a useful corrective, it does make the story telling a bit formulaic and robs the anti-imperialist message of some of its subtlety.
Personally, and this may be my failing, I also find Chinese-based complaints about European imperialism far less compelling than I do African, South Asian or Western Hemisphere grievances. China is, after all, itself a fairly nasty imperial power today and was even in the 19th century. Just a weaker one than its rivals.
Your overall mileage may vary depending how annoyed you are by a narrative where every straight white male is obviously and predictably iredeemably evil.
Aha. That would annoy me considerably, not because I am a straight white male but because I dislike that kind of storytelling.
N K Jemisin’s The City We Became series is a bit like that, though the second volume dials it back a bit. (I think that it was actually improved by her circumstances compelling her to make it a two-book series instead of the planned trilogy: I dare say that not a few trilogies might have benefited similarly.)
Africa was not short of nasty polities of its own before the European invasions. For example, although the Ashanti are an impressive people with a stirring history of resistance to the Brits and you can easily see why so many Black Americans attempt to appropriate their fascinating culture, they were not what you might call ideal neighbours. (Ask any northern Ghanaian.) And the Ashanti are actually a pretty benign example.
Obviously none of this justifies the European invasions, or a fortiori the pre-Scramble European slaving (which itself fostered nasty local regimes, as the most suitable for supplying unwilling victims to the Europeans.)
And I don’t think that the PRC leadership’s incessant playing of the victim card to distract from its own crimes should blind us to just how repellently the European powers treated the Empire in the nineteenth century and beyond. It’s a foul tale.
Quite so. It’s a shame that it’s virtually impossible to discuss any of this in today’s identity-besotted age, where everyone wants Good vs. Bad.
The position of the Chinese revolutionaries of 1911 was (at least for many of them) that China had already been under foreign (Manchu) imperial rule for several centuries. I’m sure they managed to somehow reconcile that complaint with complaints about what other foreigners had done during the period of the Manchu Yoke. I imagine that in present-day India some of the more Hindutva types are willing to say forthrightly that the Brits were no worse than the Mughals, but maybe there’s no parallel to that among current Chinese-nationalist types.
I’ve heard several right-wing Hindus opine that the Moguls were definitely worse than the British.
as one would expect, since the brownshorts owe at least as much to european integral nationalism – including its axiomatic anti-muslim stance – as to any subcontinental political lineage. (and i’ve heard it argued that their conception of hinduism similarly owes more to european christian notions of religion than to the mindbogglingly multifarious constellation of actually existing vernacular practices that have gotten piled together under that label)
“Animism” even more so.
I think “Shintoism” owes its genesis to a similar Procrustean effort to fit everything into modern European categories.
I’m not sure who the alternative Greek dude to Procrustes would be that might be more analogous, but in terms of the various repackagings and reconceptualizations of Shinto, you largely had modernizing indigenous elites trying to work with and/or work around imported modern European categories, but doing so in pursuit of their own not-necessarily-very-Westernized ends.
I don’t think animism was ever claimed to be a single religion, just a category like theism.
I think I read in something about The Invention of Tradition that the effort to make Shintoism fit came from the inside: Meiji reformers looking at medieval Europe, seeing the enormous motivation the (respective) One True Church was sometimes able to provide, and deciding they wanted some of that for their own country. For example, they invented a marriage ritual – up to then, supposedly, marriage had been just another contract in Japan, a matter of economy instead of ecumene.
The story of the systematic development of State Shinto is quite interesting. I believe the authoritative work is still Shinto and the State, 1868–1988, by Helen Hardacre. I think I must have been put onto Hardacre’s book by Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix.
Do report back when you’ve read [Babel]
I’m about two-thirds of the way through, but honestly not sure if I can bear to finish it.
It’s an anticolonialist tract masquerading as a fantasy novel.
As I’ve said before, I greatly dislike being preached at it in a novel even when I agree with the sermon (as is pretty much the case here), but what is really hard to take is how clumsy the preaching is. If you don’t happen to notice the constant examples of Evil Brits acting Evilly in the action, there are copious footnotes to point out how Evil they are, in case you were too stupid to see for yourself.
The author has a tin ear for dialogue. All the characters talk like 21st century Americans except for the Evil Brits, who talk like Victorian melodrama villains (the action is set in the 1830s.) The characters are cardboard cutouts.
The linguistic stuff is extraordinarily ill-informed. The author name-drops various figures from the heroic age of historical linguistics but seems never to have read any (entirely typical example: she informs us in one of her footnotes that the English word “night” is derived from Latin “nox.”)
I think the only reason for the linguistic stuff is so that Cultural Appropriation can be added to the charge sheet against the Evil Brits.
The novel is full of that sort of historical novel stuff that goes “there’s a young feller called Bill Shakespear in the top flat. Always scribbling something and talking about the theatre. Don’t know if he’ll ever amount to much.”
I apologise to N K Jemisin for comparing The City We Became to this. Jemisin knows her craft and is a real novelist. There may not be any nice white heterosexual males in that series but the other characters are interesting and the plot is not painting by numbers.
Tl;dr: I don’t like it.
(Don’t know why the organisers of the con thought it might offend the PRC authorities, at least based on what I’ve read so far. Much of it is about Evil Brits plotting against the virtuous Qing empire for the evulz and for neoliberalism, which I would have thought would be a pretty acceptable line to take.)
I’m about two-thirds of the way through, but honestly not sure if I can bear to finish it.
It’s an anticolonialist tract masquerading as a fantasy novel.
Say no more! It is clearly the kind of thing I Do Not Like, and I thank you for sparing me.
Finished it …
We do eventually get a token Good White Man, the safely proletarian Abel Goodfellow (yes, really.)
She really means her subtitle, “the necessity of violence”, incidentally. Always good to be lectured on such matters by privileged Americans. If only Kwame Nkrumah had taken note!
I have to say that this is the kind of work that gets rave reviews for reasons quite unconnected with any actual literary merit.
It occurs to me that the con organisers may have been more afraid of offending the Sad Puppy Tendency than the PRC regime. While I am all in favour of offending such people, I think this sort of thing is unlikely to actually help.
“Don’t know why the organisers…”
I read the links from WP (81st_World_Science_Fiction_Convention#Ballot_controversy). Apparently, Westerners marked everything dealing with China or Chinese people. I wonder if it is possible that Chinese comrades misinterpreted these marks.
Cf. from Dave McCarthy’s email: “The chairs and the administrators will review the items we’ve highlighted in research friday evening if we have enough time after the ballot review. otherwise we’ll be looking at it on Saturday (China time, of course, so we’re about 13 hours ahead of you).“
Kuang’s grandfather fought with Chiang Kai-Shek, FWIW.
(I will so not read that book.)
@drasvi:
Cockup is generally a more likely explanation than conspiracy. You may very well be right.
@Y:
Maybe that’s it. Hereditary guilt.
I guess I’m missing some English subtlety which helps native speakers to determine whether “with” in “fought with” stands for “same side” or “against” here:)
It is ambiguous. My bad. WP: “Her maternal grandfather fought for Chiang Kai-shek.”
I don’t suppose that in itself is enough for the CCP to not like your writings, is it?
I imagine being Chinese-American is enough ln itself to make you politically suspect Because American.
And although the CCP likes paranoid ethnonationalism fine, they are likely to be uneasy about novels featuring uprisings against the government, even if it’s a nasty colonialist foreign government (the latter part of the book features some episodes of the British Army killing unarmed British civilians, which I dare say might fall into Does This Remind You Of Anything territory.)
Apparently Kuang has criticised the CCP in the past (good for her.) I expect that would do it.
And the lead character is (somewhat coyly) implied to be gay. which may be significant too.
@drasvi: In idiomatic (American) English, fought with to mean “fought against” is used only for comparable opponents. “The Army of the Potomac fought with the Army of Northern Virginia for four years,” is fine, but the subject of, “He fought with the Kwangtung Army,” has to be Japanese, not Chinese. “Her maternal grandfather fought with Chiang Kai-shek,” means either the grandfather served under the Nationalists, or he and the generalissimo got into a brawl.
That’s a good explanation — better than I could have provided.
Me in 2021:
I have since learned that it… is in German: Graf really is from the Greek; the first Grafen were bureaucrats of vile birth whose jobs quickly became hereditary, getting them confused with nobility. Maybe a need to fill in dux : comes :: Herzog : ?? was also felt.
@DE, I think communists are generally supportive of revolutions….
There are two issues here: censorship proper and transparency.
Of course everyone speaks about censorship, but the nomination process has so serious issues with transparency that we don’t even know what role censorship played in this story (if it played some role):(
As far as I can understand, someone Dave McCarty may know something but won’t tell it, someone Diane Lacey does not really know anything but is willing to share, and Westerners are not sure who are Chinese organisers.
@Brett, LH, thanks!
I thought about such a possibility, but was not sure.
I read it in Y’s comment as “against” (because Russian “fight with” means this) and I guessed that it means “on the side of” because otherwise I don’t think Y would mention that fact.
In Russian it is the usual way of saying “against”. Using “fought with” in the sense “together” is possible if you add “together”.
And back to Hugo, the problem with “censorship” seems to be that in World Science Fiction Society the word “World” means “world”.
I understand that Hugo is English (WP Hugo Award for Best Novel even says “published in, or translated to, English”) and is not even freindly to translations (commercial book market? I recently decided to take a look what new is happening on Russian self-publishing sites and learned that the “new” thing is that Russian internet is full of advertisments of a certain site which allows writers earn money for their books. The site looks horrible: I’m sure people publish decent novels there, but they are extremely difficult to find).
But it is changing, so there is a question of where it is heading.
And the “world” consists of countries with censorship who fight with each other.
Yes, the tradition of calling basically English-language or US-only things “World” is an old and stupid one. But it’s hard to know how to change it…
@LH, whatever it was initially, now they do have a choice.
In 2007 it was Japan, in 2015 a translated novel won, and asI can see in China lists of 10 nominees (the very lists that caused the scandal) contain entries in Chinese.
Also the enthusiasm of those Westerners who were enthusiastic about China was not so silly. The fuckup was not necessary, science fiction that criticises China or its Party is a rare thing and it’s unclear why it happened.
I’ve just realised that Babel was reminding me (to its detriment) of a greatly superior artistic work in which Evil Brits dominate The World by magical/cultural means: the greatly-to-be-praised anime TV series Read or Die, in which the most powerful and feared organisation in the world is the British Library and it makes total sense in context.
It also has an an extremely engaging and debonair Brit Villain: the devotion he inspires in his slightly-less-evil-but-evil-enough-to-be-going-on-with sidekick (who goes by the impeccably correct Brit name of “Wendy”) is completely believable.
I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.