Busytown: Holiday reading lust
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As mentioned elsewhere, I'm planning to re-read Angela Carter's The Passion of the New Eve. Put that in a pidgeon hole and smoke it. Whoops, we're back to wild game.
Oooh, nice choice. It's been about 15 years since I read that (*pause for a minor freakout*), so I'd love to know how it holds up.
Mind you pretty much all Angela Carter has held up outstandingly for me.
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I believe someone upthread mentioned a visit by Pratchett to NZ in the early 90s; this was probably related to DisContinuity, a convention up in Auckland in 92, which I attended as a callow youth specifically to meet the man in question.
Pratchett came for a con hosted at Canterbury Uni in the early nineties. My memory is quite vague but I'd peg it as 94, after I graduated but before I had children. I might well be wrong.
The genre conversation is giving me Work-Headache, please stop it.
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Could it be that People of Sci-Fi are hostile to literary fiction and read books only if they are labelled as part of the Sci-Fi genre?
Like every other ridiculously broad generalisation replete with Collective Nouns, I'm sure you can find plenty who will neatly fit into the box. I could also cite an acquaintance of exquisite "literary" taste who, twenty years ago, dismissed my recommendation of an impressive début by a young Kiwi novelist New Zealand writer with Oh, I'm a little old for ghost stories.
For the record, that was Elizabeth Knox's After Z-Hour.
(And, FWIW, my holy trinity isn't Asimov, Heinlein and Gene Roddenberry but Austen, Trollope and Evelyn Waugh. If I'm that hostile to "literary fiction", I'm either the best liar ever or remarkably easy to fool.)
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FWIW = not very much. I was asking why Banks writes under two names and suggesting a possible reason. The fact of you being broadly read does not answer that question or negate that suggestion.
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Other possible reasons: the space aliens told him so; his sf publisher has a strange fetish for initials; he himself has a strange fetish for initials but the first publisher rode herd pretty hard; etc. etc.
I mean really. It's a bit of nonsense which doesn't explain the problem Banks actually has, viz. he doesn't sell very well in the US*. Sure there's the sad gits who never got over the New Wave and all that, but they are not the kind of people who'd buy Banks' books anyway to be honest.
* Why even Use of Weapons and Player of Games never managed to win a Hugo.
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Wut? The really important question is Banks' American sales? If only you had mentioned it earlier.
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I mean really. It's a bit of nonsense which doesn't explain the problem Banks actually has, viz. he doesn't sell very well in the US*
Keir: I'd be hard pressed to see any evidence that his last three "mainstream" novels sold particularly well anywhere. The Business, Dead Air and The Steep Approach to Garbadale were awful -- self indulgent garbage that read more like Garth George in full-on hector mode than decent prose fiction. (The one thing George Bush should be hung for is crimes against human culture, given the number of unreadable novels, unwatchable films and television works, shitty non-poems and preachy plays he inspired.)
Other possible reasons: the space aliens told him so; his sf publisher has a strange fetish for initials; he himself has a strange fetish for initials but the first publisher rode herd pretty hard; etc. etc.
Actually, it's no secret that Banks' publisher wasn't terribly keen to publish The Wasp Factory with the initial (which would have been the least of my problems if it had crossed my desk, but never mind), and would have been totally chuffed if the great white hope of the British novel had gone slumming under a pseudonym. Instead, he brought back the initial, Macmillan got over it, everyone went away happy.
So sorry, Paul, but the needy insecure People of Science Fiction (right next door to Mystery-ville, but if you hit Porno Town you've gone too far) escape the rap. This time.
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Oh, I quite liked Dead Air and The Business, personally. I didn't think either was very preachy.
But classically that's Banks' problem. On the one hand he's one of the most important sf authors alive, and basically one of the few sf authors who isn't a waste of ink, but on the other he doesn't sell in America. MacLeod does, as does Stross, so it can't merely be anti-lefty-scot prejudice. And it would be interesting to work out what's going on.
(I wouldn't necessarily expect to sell his mainstream novels in America, any more than I'd expect Kelman or Owen to be big sellers there.)
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MacLeod does, as does Stross, so it can't merely be anti-lefty-scot prejudice. And it would be interesting to work out what's going on.
Ken McLeod and Charlie Stross are both published in the United States by Tor Books, who are specialist genre publishers who have been getting the basics right for nearly thirty years -- publish good books inside and out, know your fluid and fickle market and sell your arse off. (It also doesn't hurt that Tor founder Tom Doherty has been publishing SF/fantasy for a very long time and is highly regarded in the field.)
Ian M. Banks, on the other hand, is handled by Orbit. Quite a substantial list, but their US imprint is only three years old and if my memory serves is not in the ideal position financially or organisationally to be aggressively building up Banks' profile and sales. Not saying the recession hasn't hit the whole publishing industry hard, but as far as I'm aware Tor is holding on better than most.
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I wandered away from Fiction into the Fantasy section for the first time ever and borrowed a Pratchett. So many of you enjoy him greatly and my three sons loved him. For various reasons I have a lot of time to read right now so I tried. I picked 'Hogfather' because I had heard of it, started it with some enjoyment and liked the character of Susan. Some of the humour was funny even to an old fuddy duddy like me and there was some pithy one liners. I've just given up, however - the Death character for rats was just a bit too much and there's too much dialogue. Conclusion: it's not my genre, it seems to contain (don't hit me, please!) a masculine sense of humour and I'm just too old to venture into the fantasy genre.
My thoughts on genre: books in Sci Fi and Fantasy sections are geared to certain reader expectations. I instinctively see them as of lesser artistic worth than literary fiction (a section in Dymocks in Newmarket!). I'm not a snob!! I loved the Twilight books and I'm fanatical about Coronation Street. -
One of the really good things about scifi & fantasy is - there are NO reader expectations except good storytelling in whatever form, memorable characters, and maybe a new slant on the world as it was, is, or might be? Any world?
I'm not sure, at all, about 'masculine' sense of humour - I find TP's humour deeply compassionate altho' v. fond of puns and wordplay-
but no worries! I hit very few things and almost never, people!Cecelia - some of the very best writing done today is *not* in litfic and I read of a lot of all genres. And, I really dont like Coro, and loathed the 'Twilight' series (only read 2 until the passive as in boneless 'heroine' turned me off 'em forever. I'm definitely not target readership - but one of my nieces definitely is, and she gulped the same 2, and spat them out and left 'em in their pukedom.)
Again, it's a matter of 'each to their own.' You wont change my mind about Meyers or Coro, and I clearly cant change your mind about Terry Pratchett. Kai te pai.
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Coro is very very funny at times but I'm well aware of its dastardly soap opera logic and the dreadful liberties they take with characters. No matter, I just love it. I don't care what other people think of it and have an immediate affinity with other Coro fans. It's a genre in which I accept the conventions and see through them but enjoy it all the same.
It was the same with Twilight (which I read before all the fuss because of a Time magazine article). It had putrid underlying messages and values but Meyer was so good at writing about a teenage girl's first sexual love (repressed) I thought and something kept me reading them avidly - a certain flow!
I accept the limitations of the above. And if we talk of quality - has a sci fi or fantasy novel ever won the accolades of more general fiction like the Booker prize or Pullitzer prize?
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Ken McLeod and Charlie Stross are both published in the United States by Tor Books, who are specialist genre publishers who have been getting the basics right for nearly thirty years -- publish good books inside and out, know your fluid and fickle market and sell your arse off. (It also doesn't hurt that Tor founder Tom Doherty has been publishing SF/fantasy for a very long time and is highly regarded in the field.)
Stross' sf is published by Ace in the US, and was a runaway success with Ace first. It's his later fantasy series Merchant Princes that's published by Tor. And it's more than just that --- MacLeod wins US awards, as does Stross, and it can't entirely be that Banks is unknown to the con-going fen that hand out the awards.
No sf/f novel has ever won a Booker. (Depending how you reckon some magical realist works, but.) Several sf/f novels have been short listed tho'. And, of course, at least one sf author's won the Nobel. But that doesn't prove much of anything, given that no litfic novel has ever won a Hugo or a Golden Dagger.
In fact it proves too much because one can quite clearly show that there were sf/f novels that should have won but didn't, and there's a rather suspicious pattern about the sf/f novels that turn up in these contexts. They are generally by slumming litfic authors and not fan-authors, which rather makes me suspect a wee bit of bias.
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I find quite a few Booker nominees pushing boundaries - Salman Rushdie doesnt write fantasy?
Spare me!
I am - and always have been, long before and ever since, public attention descended on my hapless nob- an unabashed scific/scifan/fantasy reader - and writer.
I love that widespread humanistic field. -
... one can quite clearly show that there were sf/f novels that should have won but didn't...
Pray tell, how might one show such a thing?
They are generally by slumming litfic authors and not fan-authors, which rather makes me suspect a wee bit of bias.
Perhaps they are by good writers, writers who have readers rather than fans.
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Perhaps they are by good writers, writers who have readers rather than fans.
But I am by any measure, a fan of Jane Austen. I read at least one, and usually two or three or four, of her books every year. I get the movie adaptations on DVD. I read criticism. One Fringe show that I am planning to go to this year is Jane Austen's music (soprano and pianist singing songs from the collection at Chawton). I think it is entirely possible to be a fan of a literary writer.
Unless you wish to argue that the divine Jane is not a good writer. In which case you will have Craig may have words with you.
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Unless you wish to argue that the divine Jane is not a good writer. In which case you will have Craig may have words with you.
Don't fuck with the Janeites -- they eat Trekkies for afternoon tea.
Stross' sf is published by Ace in the US, and was a runaway success with Ace first.
You're quite right, and I stand corrected and ashamed. But I'd say my basic point still stands: Ace is going to celebrate sixty years of uninterrupted publication in 1012, and for all the trash I've talked about Penguin over the Ihimaera FUBAR, Penguin US deserves credit for not living down to expectation and closing Ace when it acquired its parent company in 1996.
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Writers don't have fans, fans have writers.
What I mean by fan-author is author-out-of-organised fandom, tho' of course I shouldn't be too doctrinaire about that because Lessing certainly engaged in fanac [0] and I certainly shouldn't contradict anyone about their own fannish-ness.
As to sf novels that ought have won, I shall just wave at Le Guin, Dick, Delany, Haldeman, Russ and so forth; all very very good writers and completely ignored by the literary establishment [1] at the time. The fact that these days you can't knock over a cup of coffee in an English Department common room without scalding someone working on some form of sf criticism is really quite revealing.
[0] Heh. I'm just being childish now amn't I?
[1] Where by literary establishment I mean the kind of chap who show up in As Others See Us.
(And to Craig, don't worry, I always get confused about who publishes what of Stross', esp. here in NZ; I think I've read books of his from all three of the mentioned publishers, which is why I started paying attention!)
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The fact that these days you can't knock over a cup of coffee in an English Department common room without scalding someone working on some form of sf criticism is really quite revealing.
So it was you? You owe me a sweater and a bottle of Bactine. Otherwise, well said. Good to see the Russ-love there.
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(And to Craig, don't worry, I always get confused about who publishes what of Stross', esp. here in NZ; I think I've read books of his from all three of the mentioned publishers, which is why I started paying attention!)
I have enough problems keeping track of who owns what, and who is still in business. Even with outfits like Orbit, the "home office" and it's subsidiaries in the US and Australia don't have identical lists for all kinds of reasons.
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Austen certainly has fans. Perhaps that was a false dichotomy.
However, beyond the obvious fact of their fans thinking them really good, why should the Literary Establishment give awards to SF authors? SF culture exists outside literary culture. It has its own canon, its own conventions and its own community, which is inward-looking. Why then should it be resentful of being ignored by the literary world?
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Paul Litterick -
"SF culture exists outside literary culture."
You are doubtless trying to be provocative but - that is the most fuckwitted - as in stupid- comment I've read from a supposed aesthete for many years.
Just where do you propose to pop Nadine Gortimer in your weirdo canon?
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Because the Booker claims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or Eire; if it merely rewards the best novel (not-sf) it should change the claims it makes.
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the literary establishment exists outside sf culture
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Don't fuck with the Janeites -- they eat Trekkies for afternoon tea.
Hmmm.... maybe that's why I find myself gnawing on my fingers around 3.30pm each day. 'Though if I had to choose, it would be Jane every time.
A Maggot by John Fowles, anyone? SF or literary? I would say both, but then I happily do both. 'Though not Iain M Banks, which I find tedious. However I have enjoyed many of Iain Banks' novels.
But SF culture might exist outside of literary culture, because some of SF culture is weird. Much as I enjoy Star Trek (one excellent weekend, in company with dear friends, we watched the first five Star Trek movies on video, and then on Sunday evening, we went to see Star Trek VI on the big screen... we were the only people in the theatre who got the Kobayashi Maru joke), I have never, ever dressed in a costume, or gone to a convention, 'though I do admit to having played 500 with ST:TNG cards. I can understand why some writers want to distance themselves from the wilder shores of SF. But rejecting it entirely seems ungrateful to me. I'm sure that The Handmaid's Tale played better just because people were already sensitized to the idea of alternate future realities. And I (somewhat vaguely) recall a story of Islander's, in which whales were working on a subsonic (?) wave that could be used against whalers (or perhaps human beings in general), if necessary. Those flights of imagination are possible because of science fiction (NB: I'm well aware that Islander does not reject SF).
(Edited to fix my grammar... exits quietly with chagrined look)
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