The Mumpsimus

I recently had the pleasure of seeing the 1961 Russian film of War and Peace, directed (and starring) Sergei Bondarchuk, who seems to have been Russia's answer to Orson Welles. It's a breathtaking film -- one of the most expensive ever made -- covering four DVDs plus a bonus disc of background material, including silent films of Leo Tolstoy himself wandering around as an old man. The battle scenes are particularly amazing, making those in Spartacus seen small, though in some ways it's hard for us today, used to computer-generated scenes of thousands of people (or aliens or orcs), to fully comprehend the scope of Bondarchuk's achievement -- choreographing whole armies of people and horses, explosions and hand-to-hand combat. The film is not just great with the war scenes, though. Peace gets its due, and many of the quieter moments between only a few characters are subtle, nuanced, and skilfully acted.

It all made me think about The Lord of the Rings, since I had onl…

Updates have been slow here for a few months, as my life has been busy and I haven't been reading nearly as much SF as I would like. However, there should be fairly frequent updates, at least for the next few weeks.

First off, there are now comments on this site. I went back and forth as to whether I wanted them, but have decided that one of the things I like most about weblogs is that comments allow discussion to develop. Of course, people have to find the weblog and decide it's an interesting place to visit for that to happen, but we'll see. If I try to keep updating with some frequency, maybe this little corner of cyberspace will get noticed by one or two people.

There are a few good things out there which deserve your attention and not much comment from me:

Emerald City is up to their 100th issue, and it's got plenty of good pieces by folks like John Clute and Ken MacLeod. I went to read the Clute piece, then found myself reading just about everything. Lots o…

This past summer, Lucius Shepard published a story at SciFiction, "A Walk in the Garden", which takes place in an Iraq occupied by American soldiers, soldiers not too different from the ones currently there except that they are well-equipped with state-of-the-art armor that offers them every convenience of the wired world, as well as protection against every imaginable form of attack. (Quite a contrast to the soldiers who really are in Iraq and don't have the armor they need.) Shepard's soldiers end up going to a mountain where a blast from a new type of bomb has ripped a hole in the quantum fabric of the universe and created a portal to a world based on some Muslim beliefs about hell and paradise. Their trip becomes one of carnage and suffering, with plenty of scenes which would fit well into the screenplay for a hundred-million-dollar summer blockbuster starring the current governor of California. To maintain a bit of self-respect, apparently, Shepard has inclu…

This morning I had my classes listen to a program on New Hampshire Public Radio which discussed Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451. One of the guests on the show was James Patrick Kelly, the best science fiction writer in New Hampshire and one of the best in the world. My students demanded that I call in to the show, and so I did, even though I didn't really have any sort of question ready. Inevitably, I was the first caller on the air, and was rather surprised to suddenly find myself needing to say something, so my question (asking what the perfect audience for the book might be) was hardly brilliant. I was just glad I didn't completely embarrass myself. (The students also demanded that I say hi to Jim to prove that I actually know him. Thankfully, he said hi back, so now my students think I'm Well Connected.)

Most of the discussion on the show wasn't quite at the level I'd hoped it would reach, but it was 9 o'clock in the morning and host Laur…

The announcement that J.M. Coetzee has won the Nobel Prize for Literature is welcome news -- Coetzee is a brilliant, challenging writer, certainly one of the best alive -- and the response to his most recent book, Elizabeth Costello (due to be released in the U.S. October 16), which is sort of a collection of essays disguised as a novel with occasional elements of memoir, shows that the SF field is not the only one challenged and hampered by genre boundaries.

Though, because it hasn't yet been released, I haven't read all of Elizabeth Costello yet, three parts of it have been available for a few years: two chapters of the book The Lives of Animals are included in Elizabeth Costello as well as an essay/story, "What is Realism", part of which has been excerpted by The Guardian. I have read all of these, and look forward to reading the full book.

I thought about the SF world when I read Adam Mars-Jones's review for The Observer of Elizabeth Costello, a review title…

Dave Truesdale stirred up a bit of trouble with his TangentOnline editorial titled "Idiocy from the SFnal Left", which caused a remarkable discussion on the Tangent newsgroup -- a discussion where some excellent ideas and conversation is crowded amidst hostility, short tempers, bruised egos, petulance, bile, apologies, misunderstanding, mis-statements, and brilliance.

The strangest result of the discussion was Truesdale's announcing that, because of it, he was ending Tangent. That would be a great disaster for the SF field, as no-one else, that I know of, works so hard to notice and review SF short fiction. I expect the discussion was the proverbial straw breaking the camel's back, since Truesdale has been under many pressures recently, and Tangent has not been easy to keep going. No matter what the cause, though, Tangent's demise would be a horribly sad one.

What I want to discuss here, though, is the editorial itself, and some of the discussion around it. T…

I've long had ambivalent feelings about SF poetry, primarily because so much of it that I read in Asimov's and a few other places seemed awful, completely unaware of the last century or so of poetic innovations, debates, and techniques. If the "poem" wasn't a prosey joke, it was a half-baked story idea with broken lines.

More than the quality, though, I wondered about the need. Mainstream poetry has not succumbed to the deadening of imagination which so much mainstream fiction has succumbed to. A book like Verse & Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics is, in its own way, a collection of SF poems, many written by Big Names in poetry. They had no need to label their poems as anything other than poems.

I still think most of the best SF poetry is happening in the literary journals and is not written by writers who would ever associate themselves with a literary ghetto other than the ghetto of poetry, but there are also some good poems being written by…

Recently, I picked up a copy of The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction, 8th Series, edited by Anthony Boucher, which contains a story I've long wanted to read, "The Wait" by Kit Reed, a remarkable writer who deserves to be better known.

"The Wait" is, I believe, Reed's first published story. It appeared in the April, 1958 issue of F&SF, when Reed was about 26 years old.

Any writer, regardless of age, would be proud to call this story their first published. The command of tone and pacing is nearly perfect, with the story unfolding one strange revelation after another. Just when you think you understand the world Reed has created -- one which reminded me of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" -- she complicates the situation and brings in a depth of detail extraordinary in a story of about 16 pages. The characters are not rounded and complex, but rather serve as types in the way many of Flannery O'Connor's characters serve as ty…

There's an old law amongst writers of speculative fiction: the best writing has speculative or fantastic elements which, if removed, would ruin the story. You will frequently see writers say that if a tale is merely set in an SF universe, it is not a good story, because it could be mainstream ("realistic") writing, and is only posing as SF.

While I have great respect for the many people who believe this, I disagree, because such an idea gives in to the concept of the mainstream, contemporary, "realistic" story as the basis of all fiction, and much as I like much mainstream writing, I don't want to give it so much power over the imagination.

Certainly, writers have written stories which are not particularly interesting or compelling, and some of these stories suffer from having the only SF element be the setting (usually, the setting is not well realized or original, merely a few mentions of spaceships and nanotech machines). Stories which don't work s…