by Eric Flint
And as always we include another installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and Bananaslug & Stoney do their bit to let the world at large know what's in the current issue of Jim Baen's Universe.
News items in the February 1, 2007 episode include:
An artificial intelligence programmer has just released a computer version of the strategy board game Death Stacks which was invented by the host of The Future And You, Stephen Euin Cobb. No word yet if the programmer intends to enter his heuristic software to compete in the—so far, human-dominated—Annual Death Stacks Tournament which is only a few months away and will be held at the Marriott Executive Hotel in Charlotte NC as part of the SF&F convention ConCarolinas. The curious may download this freely available, and freely improvable, Death Stacks computer game, as well as its C# source code. (However, as of this writing, the program will only run under Microsoft .Net 2.0).
During 2007 your host is scheduled to visit with the fans at RavenCon in Richmond VA (April 20-22, 2007) ConCarolinas in Charlotte NC (June 1-3, 2007) LibertyCon in Chattanooga TN (July 27-29, 2007) and DragonCon in Atlanta GA (August 31-September 3, 2007).
All the cons are great fun, but I have a special fondness for ConCarolinas. Maybe because it's where I get to award tournament trophies, or because it was the first con to put me on the bill, or maybe it's just because the Klingons of Dark Star Quadrant are mysteriously convinced that I can karaoke.
If you do spot me at one of these conventions, however, try not to be too shocked by my new appearance. On January 3, 2007, for the first time in my life, I shaved my head. I still have my mustache, goatee and eyebrows, but that's about all.
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And if the current episode's ideas and opinion are not enough, check out the previous month's episode of The Future And You which contains Kim Stanley Robinson, David B. Coe, Jay Lake, Sarah A. Hoyt, Catherine Asaro, and John R. Douglas (editor for scifipedia) discussing all the following:
Is our world already changing too fast for our cultural headlights? And in the future will those who don't benefit from The Singularity at its very beginning be forever left behind? (author and anthologist) discusses this as well as Wikipedia, Google and global warming.
Do large segments of the American population have various vested interests in not looking at the future's potential dangers? John R. Douglas (an editor for scifipedia) believes that Americans would rather be happy consumers than listen to the scary predictions from scientists. He also says that too many business people plan for the future only as far as their company's next quarter, and not one second farther. He also suggests that the first immortal is already alive, and his name is Bill Gates.
Is the internet killing used bookstores? Sarah A. Hoyt (author and voracious reader) was surprised to discover long after she changed her book buying habits that others had simultaneously changed theirs.
Does POD publishing (Print-on-demand) have a future? And are there times when it makes sense to use it now? (author and former president of SFWA) uses concrete examples from two of her friends. She also talks of eBooks and electronic rights.
Professional grade digital photography: David B. Coe (author and nature photographer) says the advantages are legion and the future is here now.
Is our civilization in a time crunch? Have we reached a crisis point in history? Or has every generation seen themselves this way? Kim Stanley Robinson talks of this as well as nanotechnology and his doubts about The Singularity and artificial intelligence.
And, as always, another installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and the official segment from Jim Baen's Universe in which Bananaslug & Stoney take us inside the greatest online science fiction and fantasy magazine in the world.
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This podcast about the future is at http://www.thefutureandyou.com.
Commentary February 2007
Written by Barry N. Malzberg
Here is the third incarnation of this column of commentary; there were eight in Pulphouse in the early 90's and then a couple in Ellen Datlow's online Event Horizon in 1998. Now my little traveling whore's cubicle—Salinger's phrase from Seymour: An Introduction has come to uneasy perch in this venue. Still on the run and full of fun! or perhaps I mean Lord Weary's Castle.
Long before my Pulphouse adventure, I had abandoned most belief in the effectiveness of continued commentary on science fiction. (Frank Rich in the New York Times, for instance, seems to have had little effect upon the Iraq adventure beyond collecting slurs from the Administration and this is our government's obsessive collective adventure being anatomized in the New York Times.) It is such a marginalized field now, almost as marginalized as it was in the forties, and so few of us care about the issues it raises or fails to raise. Those of us who do really care of course, but I would measure my effect in changing science fiction as writer or commentator over these 40 years as nil. "Criticism in music has, I have decided, absolutely no function whatsoever and changes nothing" Deryk Cooke wrote a long time ago and he was likely to have known. I have come to approximately the same position vis a vis science fiction.
Still, eternity beckons—for some of us a whole lot sooner than we might like, for others unfortunately not soon enough—and in the vast, diminishing light I cannot resist the lure or even the urgency of commentary or perhaps this is another way of saying nothing left to lose. One thousand words at a time, I will cautiously engrave my own handwriting on the wall, remembering that this time it is not you but I who have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
So, then, and as John Cheever wrote, "To begin at the beginning", I evoke John Updike's New Yorker review 25 years ago of that massive David Hartwell anthology. "Science fiction," Updike wrote and I paraphrase at some distance and I hope fairly, that science fiction could never be a first rate, a significant literature, because it necessarily works at a double remove from reality. What we call realism or satire, historical or contemporary fiction, is at a single remove. It recreates the real, posits other versions of the shared or historical reality. But science fiction imposes upon that reality extrapolation. Adultery on Venus, Marry Me A Romance with auto-erotic, programmed devices. Not Rabbits but Martians running. Not a month of Sundays but a scrimble of Thursdays. The displacement bespeaks an essential frivolity or fatuity; great science fiction writers can circumvent or disguise, but they cannot dispel those qualities. Even the most rigorous science fiction (like Updike I will pass here on the allied but quite different issue of fantasy) is then incapable of true gravitas.
Is it true? Hesitantly, on a convention panel some years ago, I endorsed the essential point; like Meg Ryan's dead horse on the road leading to her 40th birthday, it simply lay there, it would not go away. The other panelists reacted with the anger we all know so well (and which in other circumstances I have expressed myself): the real scam, the real fatuity is the mainstream itself, its limitation, its denial of the awful light of possibility. Realistic fiction as scrim between its audience and the implications of the material. Not hard to make that argument, and Jonathan Lethem did so with particular eloquence. I used to do the same, still am capable. Science fiction forever! The true quill, the arc of human (and inhuman) possibility. Updike's angst, adultery and swimming pools for the euchred middle class; Godwin's "The Cold Equations" for the tough-minded.
But there is a problem here and post-Campbellian science fiction (which I would deem that published after about 1960, Campbell himself essentially outlived his own editorial credibility, his magazine outlived its centrality and become under Campbell's later editorship marginalized) has increasingly enacted that problem over the succeeding half century. Inexorably arcane, the contents of the science fiction magazines and original anthologies and so many of its novels forced readers to cross rickety and casually engineered bridges. Science fiction in the 1970's, like classical music composition in the 1920's, was ever more insular, ever more separated from its audience. Much of it became so spe
cialized that it seemed to have been written in a kind of code. Compare any volume of the annual Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction from the 1960's to the Gardner Dozois Year's Best of the 1980's/1990's and this argument becomes clear.
Updike's conclusion was based upon his reading of an anthology compiled in 1980 and consisting largely of work from mid-century . . . a time when science fiction, in the process of evolution and in the penumbra of a couple of Golden Ages, had not reached the age of Stross, Macauley, Baxter or Egan. His point—that science fiction was for intrinsic reasons always to be an ersatz secondary form—has even more resonance in 2007.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps it was always meant to be a specialized form of literature; perhaps like chamber music it was never intended for a wide audience (and only became debased, Raymond Palmer-style, when it was). But the grim commercial imperatives of the new millennium have left little room for marginalized work of any kind. "We began in the fan press and tiny-circulation books in the mid-1930's" a friend wrote me, "and 70 years later, it looks as if we're going to end there too."
It was Steam-Engine time in the 1940's, we found ourselves soon enough in a science fiction world . . . and perhaps a science fiction world makes science fiction itself obsolescent; makes it one of those childish things which that world must put aside.
But what a magnificent instrument it was! Oh, the fun we had! Ah, Arcadia! Alas all thinking! Oh, we happy few in the land of Thunder and Roses.
Barry N. Malzberg
24 January 2007
THE END
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