A few photos from Portmerion in North Wales, well-known as “The Village” from the late-sixites cult TV series “The Prisoner”. It’s a photogenic place when the sun shines.
As an aside, why don’t they make television like The Prisoner any more? Worth noting that, like The Avengers and the work of Gerry Anderson, it didn’t come from the public service BBC, but Lew Grade’s ITV. Can you imagine ITV doing something like that nowadays?
If you’ve ready any of the recent discussions on Google+, forums and elsewhere regarding harrassment at conventions, you will notice things have turned very toxic. It’a a bit like those discussion on the ethics of filesharing, in which positions have become so entrenced that nobody is interested in dialogue leading to mutual enlightenment, but in shouting down anyone that disagrees with them. You only have to look at the hostile reactions to this blog by Sarah Pinborough to see how things have spiralled.
Here’s my take on why the debate about harassment policies at gaming conventions has turned so toxic.
(1) Having a policy covering things like stalking and groping is a good thing provided it’s not too clumsily or vaguely-worded or gives a false impression that such harassment is more widespread than it is.
(2) Censorship of the actual content of games sold, displayed or played at the convention under the guise of a harassment policy is not a good thing.
(3) A lot of sensible and reasonable people are supporting John Scalzi’s initiative to make having a policy regarding (1) the expected standard for anyone running a convention.
(4) There is a small but very loud minority advocating (2), and they’re using misrepresentations, lies, ad-hominems and conclusions drawn more from dogma than evidence to justify this.
(5) The behaviour of (4) has created a backlash again harassment policies of any kind.
(6) In any internet debate it’s always the loudest and shrillest voices that get the most attention.
Does this make sense?
“You’re sexist if you don’t agree with me that the next Dr Who should be a woman” is the geek culture equivalent of “If you prefer metal to hip-hop then you’re a racist”. Is this a variation of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy?
Gareth L Powell and Damien G. Walter have been compling lists of science fiction novels to recomment to friends who don’t read SF.
This is my list. Like Gareth Powell I’m avoiding the “classics” of the genre by the likes of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven or Robert Heinlein in favour of more modern works, on the grounds that they’ve dated quite badly, coming from a time when it was still acceptable for SF novels to contain cardboard cutout characters. And don’t even get me started on Heinlein’s and Niven’s view on sexual politics…
Some of these take place in the ill-defined borderland between science-fiction and fantasy. I find hair-splitting arguments over genre boundaries are never productive, all I’ll say is that this is my list, and they fall under my personal broad definition of SF.
Yes I am aware that I’ve only got one book on the list by a woman; my bookshelf is filled overwhelmingly with the work of men in the way my record collection isn’t. I do need to do something about that, but that’s really a topic for another blog.
Part noir detective story, part alternate history, and part space-opera, most of the action taking place in a version of Paris that isn’t quite our own rather than in outer space. A couple of the central characters reminded me of some musicians I know.
This starts out as if it’s a straight historical story about a medieval mercenary company, with a framing story formed from the correspondence between a present-day translator and her editor. Then things start to get strange, as it’s slowly revealed that things are not what they seem.
No aliens, spaceships or vampires, and set in something resembling the present-day, but with a central concept that does require an SFF-style suspension of disbelief. May not work for everyone, since I do know both SF and non-SF fans who have failed to get their head round this one.
Marketed as fantasy but actually science-fiction, with the science in question being economics with a side order of dynastic politics, and very cleverly inverts a lot of fantasy tropes. Biggest downside is it’s the first volume of a trilogy.
What would your recommendations be?
Dear white male science fiction author who shall remain nameless.
I don’t know if your now-deleted “Call for Civility” on your blog actually was expressing a desire for things to be just like they were in the 1950s when women and minorities knew their place, or whether that was just how it seemed.
But did it not occur to you that phrases like “Rabid jungle cats” used to describe some of your fellow writers who were neither white nor male might seem a teensy bit racist?
Never quite sure when it’s better not to feed the troll, and when the situation is so bad it really needs sunlight and Dettol. Even by the standard of racist, sexist trolls in the bottom half of the internet, Vox Day (or by his real name, Theodore Beale) is a despicable piece of slime. The link doesn’t go to his own site (I’m not giving him traffic), but to that of Amal El-Mohtar, who is campaigning to have him expelled from Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, and contains screenshots of Beale’s offensive screeds.
“Iain always insisted that he brought the same imagination to bear on his mainstream works as he did on his SF, and that conversely he lavished the same craft and care on his SF as he did on his literary fiction. The only difference, he said, was in the setting and scale. He likened writing literary fiction to playing a piano, and writing SF to playing a vast church organ” -Â Ken MacLeod, noting that too many eulogies to Iain Banks downplay half his body of work
Within a few days of losing Jack Vance, another of my all-time favourite authors, Iain Banks, has passed. While he had made it public that he was terminally ill back in March, his death still comes as a shock.
He had feet in two literary camps, writing mainstream fiction as “Iain Banks”, and science-fiction as “Iain M Banks”, possibly the most transparently obvious pseudonym in literary history.
Everything he wrote was larger-than-life. His science-fiction novels are filled with five-mile long starships carrying many millions of people, massive set-piece scenes, baroque cultures and dramatic villains, and ask deep questions about violence, war and what it means to be civilised. I’ll never forget my first introduction his his work, the novel “Consider Phlebas”. The opening chapter reading like a Traveller adventure run a particularly sadistic GM. Then followed a whole series of set-pieces, each more spectacular that the last, ending with the train crash inside a nuclear bunker on the dead planet of an extinct civilisation.
“The Culture”, the galactic civilisation at the heart of much of his SF have become one of the iconic SF settings. It says something about his skill as a writer that he could take a hugely advanced benevolent utopia as his central setting and still use it to tell compelling stories. If you’ve read his SF, then his mainstream novels have a very similar style; the scale isn’t as vast, but the characters, the imagination and plotting are strongly recognisable.
Much as I love his science-fiction work, my two favourites of his have to be two of his “non-M” books, “The Bridge” and “Espedair Street”. The former probably counts as so-called “slipstream”, where elements of speculative fiction enter a supposedly mainstream novel, with much of the narrative taken up with the dreams of a man in an induced coma after a road accident. The latter has to be the best fictional rock biography I know of. I won’t say exactly which band Banks’ creation “Frozen Gold” remind me of most strongly, but it is said that the central character, bassist Daniel Ward was based on Fish.
I still have yet to read his first and most infamous work, “The Wasp Factory”.
It would be fair to say that Jack Vance, who passed away at the age of 96, was one of my all-time favourite authors.
My first introduction his writing was The Anome
Whether it was overt fantasies or space-opera epics, the style was similar, picaresque adventures through exotic cultures, resourceful if sometimes amoral lead characters, and memorably melodramatic villains.
He had a gift with language that set him apart his pulp-SF peers; you only had to read a few lines of his prose to recognise his distinctive style. His books were filled with vivid descriptions, akin to painting pictures with words. He would never introduce a minor character without first giving an impression of what they looked like.
Jack Vance’s name is of course well-known to gamers through Dungeons and Dragons taking inspiration from his 1950 short story collection “The Dying Earth”, with the magic system referred to as “Vancian magic” ever since. There are at least two licenced games based on his work; Pelgrane Press’ “The Dying Earth RPG”, and the GURPS worldbook “Planet of Adventure”. And while my own work-in-progress game isn’t explicitly based on any specific setting of his, it’s still a very strong influence.
I really don’t get this whole Fake Geek Girl thing. I don’t go to SF and comic conventions, only the occasional gaming one, so I may be missing things. Are their really that many pathetically inadequate males who fear the intrusion of women into their “safe spaces”? Or is the whole thing just a meme that’s taken on a life of its own?
