The conversation about MovieTok reviews has to do with more than expertise. It has to do with the way media companies have succeeded in outsourcing their perception management
Image by Ron Lach on Pexels
Remember when everyone was excited for BookTok? At least publishers were; a wave of free publicity is always welcome, even when its credibility is marred by blatant conflicts of interest and performative consumption. And yet, there are undeniable redeeming qualities to a movement that spreads the love of the written word before millions of consumers of digital orality eager to find the exact subgenre of fiction that will match their microniche tastes. Doesn't the news complain all the time that books don't get enough respect? When was the last time your teenager browsed Zoetrope, or Lapham's Quarterly, or The Times Literary Supplement? At least in principle, we should celebrate any trend that raises mass literacy, as long as we can pretend not to notice the branded tote bags and sponsored segments.
The controversy around TikTok reviews has recently shifted venues. Last week, The New York Times published a piece on rising TikTok celebrities who comment on movies yet eschew the traditional label of critics. The author, Reggie Ugwu, doesn't explain how he picked which content creators to showcase. The selection comes off as mixed: some of the quoted reviewers routinely make posts that abound in hyperbolic praise, are happy to stay at the most superficial level of analysis, rely excessively on listicles to fill up space, recoil against the use of sophisticated layers of meaning, and prioritize the immediate sensations of the watching experience to the point that it often seems like they're not judging and rating the films but judging and rating their response to them. To the extent that film criticism is its own art form, and therefore TikTokers are, in a sense, making art (not so much a descendant of the Lindsay Ellis school of video essays, more properly an offshoot of knee-jerk reaction culture), MovieTok operates as an extreme version of an Expressionist movement, more interested in communicating the creator's feeling than in referring to the object that caused the feeling. This refusal to engage with the tough elements of narrative imposes a self-inflicted handicap on their possible contributions to film discourse, even if we count only the videos that aren't obviously ads.
Fortunately, bad habits are not universal across MovieTok. As deep as movie studios have put their hands inside this yummy cookie jar, other creators mentioned in the same article are clearly able to speak about media with the same perceptiveness, thoughtfulness, insight, subtlety, and sharpness that you'd demand from any professional critic. The short video format inevitably leads to rhetorical shortcuts, but there is quality to be found there. So Pajiba's response to Ugwu is unfairly reductive with its blanket verdict that "MovieTok Creators Are Corrupt." Even allowing for Sturgeon's Law, there is competent commentary to be found in every space and format. However, Ugwu doesn't paint a realistic picture of the issue either. Consider this baffling comparison he makes (quick, drink a cup of coffee so you can do the appropriate spit take):
"MovieTok creators are not the first in the history of film criticism to rebel against their elders. In the 1950s, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and other writers of the journal Cahiers du Cinéma disavowed the nationalism of mainstream French criticism."
I strongly suspect I'm at no risk of being called snobbish if I point out that "Highest Grossing Movie per Sport" and "2023 Movies that Need MORE Excitement" (whatever that means) don't quite match the areas where Cahiers du Cinéma prefers to set its focus. To give you a quick glimpse at the way the venerable French magazine talks about media: It finds the eponymous train network in The Underground Railroad "a glimmer of hope and a bottomless pit, phantasmagoria and nightmare;" it describes Stranger Things season 4 as "at the same time a continuation and an eternal return," where "the subversive potential of horror is undermined in favor of a binary prism;" chastises the latest Indiana Jones as "a saga that had already in its previous entry made fun of its aging hero," who is "apparently cursed to see his death endlessly postponed;" upon reviewing Oppenheimer, it identifies a fitting resonance in the origin of the word blockbuster as the name of a weapon capable of leveling city blocks, and thus a parallel between deadly radioactive sequelae and our current plague of film sequelitis; and in Barbie it finds that "the rigidity, emptiness and asepsis of the toys appear as hypostases of American Puritanism" and, even more damningly, "the didacticism of empowerment acts as an equally stifling discursive counterweight that prohibits any possibility of an event."
Patrick Sproull and Matt Goldberg have written more measured responses than Pajiba's,
and several of the arguments they present coincide with my own stance.
On one of my more cynical days, I'd daresay that TikTokers' reluctance
to call themselves critics comes from a decidedly uncritical approach to
films. The once wholesome "let people enjoy things" meme became so
poisonous a weapon against any form of media criticism that its creator
had to kill it. There truly is a serious problem going on in film criticism, but MovieTok is not that problem. If you'll allow me a brief moment of bragging, Nerds of a Feather
itself is proof that knowledgeable, eloquent and fun reviewers exist outside of
professional publications. So I'm not going to try to build the full, reasoned case for more respect for independent
reviewers, because we've proved our worth more than enough. What interests me here is not to counter the narrative that MovieTok is any sort of threat to traditional critics. There's no monopoly on good criticism (or bad; both "serious" and "informal" media can commit crimes of embarrassing cluelessness). As for conflicts of interest, TikTokers are more open about them than alarmists allege. What I want to point out is the underlying malaise of which MovieTok is only a symptom.
A portion of fandom has mutated into a curious cultish devotion, one that doesn't only swear eternal obedience to its idols, but in exchange demands eternal obedience from them, unaware that those idols still hold the reins of the relationship, and that the favors they grant are actually an insult to the followers. The crisis of movie discourse mirrors the ongoing crisis of moviemaking: after the Snyderbros and the Fandom Menace discovered how easy it was to bully studios into risk-avoidance, we've reached a volatile state where fans and executives know exactly which buttons to push on each other. Meanwhile, in the age of ChatGPT, art is in growing danger of being standardized and converted to automated formulas. Studios figured out they can get away with insulting viewers' intelligence with mediocre sameness, empty nostalgia and pointless pandering, because fans refuse to see themselves as more than consumers. The result is that the few works that still try to make sincere art from within the Hollywood machine, such as The Last Jedi or The Matrix Resurrections, are received with undeserved hostility.
TikTok is not the enemy. Anti-intellectualism is the enemy, and the internet gives it countless chances to spread and put down roots. What critics can do to counter it is what they're already doing: speak as honestly as they can and give audiences the tools of discernment that enrich the viewing experience. And what moviegoers can do is what art has been trying to tell them all this time: Be more curious. Have more empathy. Don't be afraid of difficult ideas. And above all, don't let someone else, like an obscenely wealthy movie studio, decide what you feed to your mind.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
Correction: An earlier version of this article mentioned James Somerton as one of the film reviewers worth listening to. After his extensive history of plagiarism was known, he has been removed from this article.
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein By Farah Mendlesohn proves to be an essential volume of genre criticism about one of the giants of the field.
Heinlein was among the earliest science fiction I tried to read, when my age was barely in double digits, back in the early 1980’s. After my introduction to science fiction, I took to reading my 7 year older brother’s works. The cover with a guy seated with a kilt, surrounded by beautiful women--well, it attracted me quite frankly, and so the first Heinlein I tried to read was not one of his juveniles, not his short fiction, but rather, Time Enough for Love. I didn’t quite understand all of it, even as the premise on the back cover of that edition was completely wrong (Lazarus Long does NOT become his own ancestor!). It took me a couple of years to try again with Heinlein, going to his short stories first, and then as his work got reissued in the late 80’s, his novels. I also read my first piece of real genre criticism, Alexei Panshin’s Heinlein in Dimension, which covered his work until the late 60’s. I wondered if anyone had done similar criticism of Heinlein’s work after that (I Will Fear No Evil and subsequent books) but found nothing. Once I had finished reading Heinlein, I had let him lay fallow for a long time, with a couple of audiobooks re-reads as my only exposure to him. I had mostly moved on.
And so now years later, my interest in Heinlein reawakened with scholarship and thought about the man and his work, to point, the latest work of Heinlein scholarship, Farah Mendlesohn The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein. The title itself is a play on the Heinlein story “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”. The book was crowdsourced to its publication, and a list of supporters is at the back of the book.
The question is in this day and age if there is a place for Heinlein criticism, even given the supporters who backed the book. Has the field moved on from him so much that his worth is not worth discussing? The author very clearly thinks otherwise and lays out her arguments in the book.
The book opens up with a short biography of Heinlein, which for me extended and fleshed out the story of Heinlein I had gotten from Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction². For the first time, the pieces I had, from Heinlein himself, from that book and others are now fused together to give me a better view of the man and his story. How his life influenced his fiction is very meticulously laid down¹. I personally learned a fair amount of about Heinlein's life. This biography provides a solid grounding for the reader in Heinlein's life story and prepares the reader for the rest of the book.
The real meat of the book, though, comes in the subsequent chapters. The author handles her analysis of Heinlein’s work by theme. Heinlein’s Narrative Arc, Technique, Rhetoric, Racism and more are the framework for her to explore Heinlein’s oeuvre multiple times from multiple points of view. There is even a chapter on Heinlein’s relationship with cats, and I did not quite realize the scope of cats in Heinlein’s fiction before reading this book. This does mean that a single work of Heinlein's, like Farnham’s Freehold, for instance, is discussed in detail in the chapter best suited to it, and elsewhere in the book at all. This thematic approach allows the author to discuss the writer’s oeuvre as a holistic whole with each section, rather than rabbit-holing down the stories and novels in succession. I found the index at the back of the book helpful, and the text itself signposts when the author intends to discuss a book in greater depth elsewhere in the work.
The author provides a nuanced and well argued point of view (and giving credit in footnotes where appropriate to people who have influenced her thinking on particular matters) and the book has made me reevaluate significant aspects of Heinlein’s work and his oeuvre for myself. In a world where Heinlein’s work has become a touchstone of divisiveness, Mendlesohn lays out what she thinks of it all, the good, the bad, the nuanced, and the ugly in Heinlein’s work.
As she says herself in the preface:
“The purpose of this book is to tease out what I find fascinating about Heinlein, good, bad and reprehensible, and to understand his work as a close-to-fifty-year-long argument with himself and those he admired.”
I maintain that Mendelsohn has accomplished this in spades. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein is the most detailed and comprehensive look at the man and his work that exists today. Sometimes that detail goes a tad long on length, but any genre reader or critic who wants to grapple with Heinlein’s work would stand very well to read Farah’s work. Just like the aforementioned Heinlein in Dimension, this is a crucial piece of Heinlein scholarship that also makes the case that reading Heinlein can be and still is worthwhile. That’s no mean feat.
¹ The book is meticulously footnoted as well. Some of them are rather funny and I found reading all of them worthwhile.
² Dey Street Books, 2018.
³ The full list is Biography, Heinlein's Narrative Arc, Technique, Rhetoric, Heinlein and Civic Society, Heinlein and the Civic Revolution, Racism, Anti-Racism and the Construction of Civic Society, The Right Ordering of Self, Heinlein's Gendered Self and the Epilogue, The Cat Who Walked Through Genres (itself a play on The Cat Who Walked Through Walls). There are also appendices.
---
The Math
Baseline Assessment: 8/10
Bonuses: +1 for meticulous analysis in a well reasoned point of view.
+1 for being cogent enough to persuade a skeptical reader like me about some aspects of Heinlein's work.
Penalties: -1 for maybe just a little too much overwhelming detail.
Nerd Coefficient: 9/10: very high quality/standout in its category. Very nearly a 10.
Reference: Mendlesohn, Farah, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, Unbound, 2019]
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
This is Part 2 of the epic Blogtable: "Cyberpunks on the State of Science Fiction, Then and Now." For those who are just jumping on, please read Part 1 first--it includes an introduction, bios of our four participants, my question on whether SF is in "crisis" today, and whether that crisis mirrors and responses to the question I posed from Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo. Today we feature cyberpunk pioneers Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan, responding to the same question--as well as to the other participants.
The Question Redux
At
the USC symposium on cyberpunk, Rudy Rucker recalled how cyberpunk
emerged in reaction to the prevalent "arena rock" quality of science
fiction in the 1970s--its emphasis on spectacle, elitism and tired,
endlessly-rehashed tropes. Fans of the era, Rucker suggested, were
comfortable "wallowing in their castles and space navy bullshit."
Cyberpunk aimed to transgress, disturb and upend these conventions and
expectations.
Arguably we stand in a similar position today. Bruce Sterling,
speaking on the same panel as Rucker, argued that science fiction lacks a
"rhetoric of the 22nd century" analogous to the rhetoric of the 21st
that served as the pulse of 20th century science fiction. Similarly, the
critic Paul Kincaid has framed the problem as one of "exhaustion"--a
loss of faith in the idea that the future is knowable, and consequent
retreat to formal explorations, the old "castles and space navies"
tropes, and the comforting simplicity of nostalgia (including for
cyberpunk).
As Sterling and Kincaid both note, few practitioners seem to be
looking forward and engaging in rigorous speculation on the future. Yet
even in this environment, there are voices within the community loudly
complaining that science fiction is too challenging, too
intellectual--essentially that it is not "arena rock" enough.
So my question is: what would it take, in today's environment, to
restart the kind of transgressive thinking that fueled cyberpunk? What
lessons can writers, critics and fans draw from the 1970s and 1980s, and
what should they specifically ignore about that context? What does
science fiction need to do, or be, or try to do or be, to break out of
its current inertia?
Bruce Sterling
I don't think it's "transgressive thinking" that solves your alleged problem there. Actually science fiction doesn't have "inertia" now. It's not stuck in place, it's crumbling, disintegrating, like print media and book retail in general in most parts of the world.
Rigorous speculation isn't in fashion now because science isn't in fashion. You're not gonna get a lot of "science" fiction when science is on the back foot in mass culture. People like product-development now, they don't much like science -- they like "technology," by which they mostly mean commercialized digital technology.
It's like you're asking guys in ham radio circles: how can ham radio be really transgressive and cutting-edge? It sorta can, but who would notice, and why would ham radio be a platform from which you would wanna do that? Science fiction in the days of Gernsback was very closely allied to ham radio. Ham radio is still around as a medium.
This isn't a counsel of despair or anything -- if you look at, say, the Hugo Awards, you can see that the people in science fiction are not old-fashioned people, they're neck deep in echo-chamber social-media flame war, just like everybody else. Plus, there are genre emanations like Game of Thrones that are colossal, just global-scale phenomena. Star Wars is like an international holiday now.
You've got to be in trans-media to do that, it's got to be book plus TV plus movie plus collectibles plus social media fandom, but it's not a dead or inert means of expression, it's just that current media structures are quite weird. Why Harry Potter as a titanic world enterprise when writers can no longer afford to live in London?
It's always better to have novel, intelligent ideas than "transgressive" ideas. If you're "transgressing" all the time, you always have to be getting into somebody's face. You misbehave, sure, but you're letting the straights set the standards for what you can do. That always ends up looking corny in the long run.
A few specific responses to points Rudy made yesterday:
Fast forward to 2015. Has the publishing category of SF become as plastic and bogus as it was in 1979? Time for another revolution! Is the SF industry being run by tiny cartel of greedy multinational corporations and book distributors? Is 99% of the attention and money going to 1% of the writers? Are the Nebulas and the Hugos complete bullshit?
Well, no--the situation's not like 1979 any more than it is like 1959 or 1939. The entire economy's run by tiny cartels now, it's not just publishing that was cornered by ultra-rich elites.
It's true that the mid list has dwindled and more money and attention goes to fewer science-fiction creatives, but that's also true of movies, nonfiction books, acting, pop music, all kinds of pursuits. Even heads of corporations have a one percent of ultra-wealthy moguls towering over them. I dunno why, but it's clearly something broad and systemic, it's not about some personal injustice done to some particular writer somewhere.
I would also argue that popular writing kinda needs a lot of dross available. Popular writing needs room for badness. You don't get great writing without a lot of just, writing. When I look at a bookstore rack and it's all junk I feel a sense of relief: it's like the swimming pool still has water in it.
So where does this leave the ambitious, literary, independently-minded young author of the genre formerly known as SF?
It leaves them messed up and in a global Depression, but I would definitely hang out with young people if I was a young writer now. I'd be spending huge effort looking for my own generational voices and I'd try hard to make them famous. I'd be looking for conspiratorial cliques who understand that the fix is in and aren't willing to pretend otherwise.
Awards aren't much use. They're like placebo pills, really. If you believe they matter then they matter. It might be argued that awards give writers in writers organizations some reason to participate in writers organizations.
Just in passing--[The G] mentioned the rhetorical question of whether the SF publishing niche needs more badly written, middlebrow space operas and thrillers populated by emotional ciphers. Do billionaires need more tax breaks? Does the media run too many articles about art? Is TV news too liberal? Is the right wing being oppressed? Is science taken too seriously by congress? Is global warming a hoax?
Enjoy yourself there, I hope that feels better...
Pat Cadigan
Returning to G's original question:
What would it take, in today's environment, to restart the kind of transgressive thinking that fuelled cyberpunk? What lessons can writers, critics and fans draw from the 1970s and 1980s, and what should they specifically ignore about that context? What does science fiction need to do, or be, or try to do or be, to break out of its current inertia?
I was actually supposed to answer this days or weeks ago. But then, I was supposed to be at the conference where Henry Jenkins and Bruce and Rudy and others talked about cyberpunk, except I was still having chemotherapy and couldn't travel. So it goes.
Chemo is a month in the past; it wasn't as hard on me as it is on many other cancer patients and I'm feeling better, but I don't have the energy to write a survey of the genre over the last thirty years. My perspective on science fiction in general and cyberpunk in particular is different. Being a cyberpunk didn't mean my experience was less sexist than it would have been otherwise. I had people trying to pick fights with me over this or that thing they'd read that Bruce Sterling had said somewhere, over whether I actually was good enough to be in the august company of the "real" cyberpunks or had I just been included because I knew them, and even over whether women could write science fiction at all.
It was never as straightforward for me as it was for the guys. Before I could engage in a discussion of cyberpunk's qualities/merits/whatever, I had to deal with the whole gender thing. And not because I wanted to.
The gender thing always got in the way. People would talk to Bruce and Rudy and Paul and the other guys about cyberpunk. Then they'd turn to me and ask what it was like to be a woman in a male-dominated field. My standard answer became, "Well, for one thing, I have to answer this question all the time."
This is one of the very few times I've been asked a straight question about cyberpunk. However, in order to provide some background to my career/personal history, I have to bring it up. So it goes.
And after that, I'm not sure where to begin.
We're not going to see cyberpunk as everyone remembers it now because we're living in the cyberpunk future we were writing about thirty years ago. In introducing the question, G said:
Bruce Sterling, speaking on the same panel as Rucker, argued that science fiction lacks a "rhetoric of the 22nd century" analogous to the rhetoric of the 21st that served as the pulse of 20th century science fiction. Similarly, the critic Paul Kincaid has framed the problem as one of "exhaustion"--a loss of faith in the idea that the future is knowable, and consequent retreat to formal explorations, the old "castles and space navies" tropes, and the comforting simplicity of nostalgia (including for cyberpunk).
Well, of course SF doesn't have a rhetoric of the 22nd century. It hasn't even been a a whole two decades since the 21st century began. And it began with the nasty surprise of 9/11, which affected everyone, not just the US, because it's the cyberpunk future–we're all networked up. It affected airport security everywhere, permanently. How can you have an idea about the 22nd century when you're still trying to figure out the 21st?
Cyberpunk was–to me–the impact of technology on people, who would then have an impact on technology, which would then...you see where I'm going.
Take communications and surveillance. The two have become inextricable. If you use the internet, you open yourself up to surveillance. Tweet about something you're doing and everyone knows where you are. Maybe nobody's actually surveilling you in particular but it doesn't matter. It's like being in the background of a photo. It wasn't intended to be a photo of you in particular...but it is.
I can't think of a more cyberpunk situation. Personally, I'm not done dealing with that kind of thing in my work. I'm still writing what I've always written. Call it cyberpunk or don't call it cyberpunk but I'm writing about it. It doesn't read like stuff written in 1985 because it isn't 1985 any more and I'm twice the age I was back then. How old is too old to be a punk? And what are you after that?
"Transgressive"?
I've been transgressive my whole life, not because I wanted to get in someone's face but because there was always someone objecting to my being who I was in whatever context: e.g., a cyberpunk; a woman in a male-dominated field. Hell, in high school, I was the only girl in my physics class. That was 1970. I spent the first half of the school year just defending myself–and the teacher was the biggest jerk of all.
I don't know. You guys, talking about writing "arena rock" science fiction. Do you have any idea that there's more going on than just "Do I choose arena rock sf or what?" Have you heard of diversity? Does the word just make your eyes glaze over while visions of "political correctness" dance in your head?
That's the thing about cyberpunk. It was transgressive and bolshy and rude and different but the one thing it wasn't: ethnically diverse, at least in terms of the writers. The best we could do was to widen the focus of Ameri-centric sf.
And son of gun, just as more diverse writers have begun to enter the field, a bunch of good old white guys figured out how to game the Hugo Award, in the name of restoring science fiction to its "former glory" as the pulpy stuff for people who want to read about white men in space.
Yeah, yeah, everybody's going to say awards don't mean anything. Maybe not. But when a bunch of xenophobic reactionaries figure out how to steal an award ballot--and not just any award but the one that's most well-known--I think that means something.
If we want to stay alive, we have to stop thinking in terms of imposing labels on this or that from our own perspective and adjust our vision so that we can see what is happening...whether it's happening to us in particular or not.
That was cyberpunk's great strength--it wasn't just concerned with science fiction. It was holistic--it was SFand music and technology and art and cultures other than our own. It wasn't comfort food, it didn't indulge, and it didn't pander–it asked the hard questions and it talked about things that made people uncomfortable––not just for the sake of making people uncomfortable but because these were things we cared about.
I don't know what anyone else is going to do but that's what I'll be doing for whatever time I have left. And somewhere, someone will be taking issue with it.
Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
***
POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and 'nerds of a
feather, flock together' founder/administrator.
Welcome to a special edition of Blogtable! Normally, a prompt is issued by a regular contributor to nerds of a feather, flock together, which is then answered by three guest bloggers in turn. However, this time we have four esteemed guests, each of whom was gracious enough to lend their time and energy to this project. And what guests they are! Please join us in welcoming:
Rudy Rucker
Photo by Sylvia Rucker
Rucker's novel Software (1982) is considered by many to be the first cyberpunk novel ever published (as well as the first in which a mind is downloaded into a robot body). Both it and sequel Wetware (1988) won the Philip K. Dick Award. The full Ware Tetralogy is available free via creative commons license, or as a trade paperback
with a nifty introduction by fellow cyberpunk innovator William Gibson. (Get the paperback, though--it's well worth it.) Rucker has published 17 additional novels and 5 short story collections, many of which feature his signature "transrealist" approach to science fiction writing. He is also a prolific writer of non-fiction--you can check out his Collected Essays, including "Transrealism" and "What is Cyberpunk," at his website. Rucker's latest book is his hefty Journals: 1990 - 2014, a tome which in some ways anticipates Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle as a transrealist work of self-reinvention.
Paul Di Filippo
Photo by Rudy Rucker
In addition to contributing the excellent short story "Stone Lives" to Mirrorshades (the essential anthology of early cyberpunk), Di Filippo is author or co-author of 13 novels and 15 short story collections, including the highly influential Steampunk Trilogy. He is also a prolific reviewer and essayist--where, this humble blogger suggests, Di Filippo sets an impossibly high bar for the rest of us wannabes. (I mean, come on.)
Bruce Sterling
Photo by Rudy Rucker
Sterling has been called the "unofficial spokesperson" of cyberpunk and "Chairman Bruce" for his role in the emergence of the style. He edited the fanzine, Cheap Truth, that served as the ideological center of the nascent movement, edited Mirrorshades and has authored a number of critically-acclaimed and influential novels (including the excellent Islands in the Net and Schismatrix Plus). Sterling has worked as a journalist, teacher, activist and speaker, and is involved in multiple projects investigating the intersection of art, design, technology and social interaction.
Pat Cadigan
Photo by Christopher J. Fowler
Cadigan is author of the seminalcyberpunk/postcyberpunk novels Mindplayers (1987), Fools (1992) and Tea from an Empty Cup (1998), which are collected in this fantastic omnibus--as well as the equally good Synners (1991) and Dervish Is Digital (2000). She is a two-time winner of the prestigious Clarke Award (for Synners and Fools), and in 2013 won a Hugo for the novelette "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi" (Edge of Infinity). Cadigan is also a prolific writer of short fiction, and one of the authors who--many years ago--convinced a certain blogger that science fiction could work as serious literature. [See also: my recent review of Mindplayers.]
Background
This special edition of Blogtable was inspired by a recent symposium hosted by the University of Southern California, which both Vance and I attended. "Visions and Voices: Cyberpunk - Past and Future" was, in a word, fascinating--and featured enough material to build a year's worth of Blogtables (check out the videos to see what I mean). But it was the first panel, featuring cyberpunk pioneers Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling, that really blew my mind. So much so that I spent about 10 minutes composing a question about how and to what degree one might compare the state of the field of science fiction today to what the cyberpunks rebelled against.
Unfortunately, time ran out before I could ask it. Thankfully both Rudy and Bruce agreed to answer my question via email--only by that point, the idea had grown in my mind. I needed to turn this into the next episode of Blogtable--the biggest and boldest yet. Enter Paul and Pat, each of whom enthusiastically agreed to participate. Frankly, I'm still amazed that everyone said yes. And humbled, because these are four people whose work I've admired for a long, long time.
Because this Blogtable is so big, however, we're going to split it into two parts. Today we are posting the question and the responses by Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo. Tomorrow, we'll repost the question alongside the responses by Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan.
But enough about all that...to the question!
EPISODE V: In which The G attempts to draw a tenuous historical parallel...
At the USC symposium on cyberpunk, Rudy Rucker recalled how cyberpunk emerged in reaction to the prevalent "arena rock" quality of science fiction in the 1970s--its emphasis on spectacle, elitism and tired, endlessly-rehashed tropes. Fans of the era, Rucker suggested, were comfortable "wallowing in their castles and space navy bullshit." Cyberpunk aimed to transgress, disturb and upend these conventions and expectations.
Arguably we stand in a similar position today. Bruce Sterling, speaking on the same panel as Rucker, argued that science fiction lacks a "rhetoric of the 22nd century" analogous to the rhetoric of the 21st that served as the pulse of 20th century science fiction. Similarly, the critic Paul Kincaid has framed the problem as one of "exhaustion"--a loss of faith in the idea that the future is knowable, and consequent retreat to formal explorations, the old "castles and space navies" tropes, and the comforting simplicity of nostalgia (including for cyberpunk).
As Sterling and Kincaid both note, few practitioners seem to be looking forward and engaging in rigorous speculation on the future. Yet even in this environment, there are voices within the community loudly complaining that science fiction is too challenging, too intellectual--essentially that it is not "arena rock" enough.
So my question is: what would it take, in today's environment, to restart the kind of transgressive thinking that fueled cyberpunk? What lessons can writers, critics and fans draw from the 1970s and 1980s, and what should they specifically ignore about that context? What does science fiction need to do, or be, or try to do or be, to break out of its current inertia?
Rudy Rucker
That’s very much a multipart question, G man. So I’ll give a multipart answer, breaking it into sections with italicized headers.
1. Why SF?
When I’m talking aloud I get loose and I say things that I wouldn’t write in an essay. So it’s amusing to hear that on the USC Cyperpunk panel in 2015 I spoke of “castle and space-navy bullshit” as being kinds of SF that I don’t enjoy.
My point was that I prefer to see SF that’s about ordinary kinds of people, as opposed to being about aristocrats, power elites, military officers, or police. To this end, I often use my so-called transreal approach of basing my characters on myself, my friends, or people I casually know. It’s a way of making the SF real, and not veering off into the writing about generic kinds of characters. Above all, I don’t want to base my characters on characters in movies, TV show, or other books I’ve read. I want them to be real people in a SFictionally doctored world. I want them to be transreal.
I like the idea that SF acts as a funhouse mirror to show us what our current lives are really like. And there’s the persistent wishful hope that SF might raise people’s awareness and somehow change the world. Like, during the long years when the US was under the yoke and lash of the Bush-Cheney administration, I made a point of writing novels in which the US President was a stupid and evil man—I had Dick Too Dibbs in Hylozoic, and Joe Doakes in Mathematicians in Love. I was doing my part for political change—as surely as if I’d been handing out leaflets door to door. It almost goes without saying, by the way, that a transreal book is intrinsically antiestablishment. The goals of individuals are forever antithetical to the goals of power elites.
2. The Birth of Cyberpunk.
Jumping back to the birth of cyberpunk—it’s not like it was a considered and well-thought-out campaign. In 1980 my biggest beef with the SF scene was that my books weren’t getting much attention. I’d hoped to find a home in the SF world, and I had a feeling I wasn’t welcome there. And now in 2015, thirty-five books later, I have much the same feeling about SF!
My 1980 malaise about SF mirrored the fact that, in the wider world, the system was bent on grinding me into dust. I’d barely escaped being sent off to die in Viet Nam. I was unable to get a secure academic job. Our nation’s leaders hated me. I’d fled reality for SF, and I wasn’t welcome in SF—so then what? Then I was lucky enough to meet some people who were writing like me.
I’ve sometimes compared cyberpunk to Beat literature. The Beats had Jack Kerouac as their angelic voice and Allen Ginsberg as their agitator. We had William Gibson for our star. He’s a sheerly wonderful writer—a master of language, aphorism, imagery, characterization, and attitude. And we had the manic, motor-mouthed, confrontational Bruce Sterling for our advocate.
I met Allen Ginsberg in person around 1981, and I asked him how it was that the Beats had gotten so much press. His answer: “Fine writing.” We cyberpunks were very focused on being good writers. We wanted to write avant garde, high-lit books that used the tropes of SF, with the added factor that our books had a rebellious, anti-establishment quality—the punk thing. And, of course, we dealt with the uneasy fusion between humans and machines. The cyber thing.
3. Trad SF and Crypto-SF.
Fast forward to 2015. Has the publishing category of SF become as plastic and bogus as it was in 1979? Time for another revolution! Is the SF industry being run by tiny cartel of greedy multinational corporations and book distributors? Is 99% of the attention and money going to 1% of the writers? Are the Nebulas and the Hugos complete bullshit?
Could be, seekers, could be.
Just in passing—you mentioned the rhetorical question of whether the SF publishing niche needs more badly written, middlebrow space operas and thrillers populated by emotional ciphers. Do billionaires need more tax breaks? Does the media run too many articles about art? Is TV news too liberal? Is the right wing being oppressed? Is science taken too seriously by congress? Is global warming a hoax?
No, no, the majority of the books being published under the science fiction label really are quite dull and generic these days. The other day I was looking at the SF rack in an airport shop. Yeecchh. It really is like the late 70s.
But, unlike the old days, that’s not the whole story. If you’re a regular reader of, say, the New York Times Book Review, you will have noticed that a lot of recent mainstream novels have SF elements in their plots. I’d guess that fully a third of all new mainstream novels are crypto-SF.
Of course the tame mainstream critics never use the SF label when enthusing over these new books. The works are visionary, speculative, powerfully imagined, and magical—but they’re not science fiction. Couldn’t possibly be. The New York Times doesn’t review SF.
4. Breaking In and Dropping Out.
So where does this leave the ambitious, literary, independently-minded young author of the genre formerly known as SF? Well, even now, the SF publishing system does grant newer writers with a certain novelty credit. Nobody ever knows what’s going to sell, and they have to hedge their bets. So you do have a possibility of selling a non-traditional, transreal, politically subversive novel. Your novel, launched in the usual blaze of no publicity and no reviews, will probably bomb. Maybe you can sell a second, but not a third. And then what?
Maybe, if you’re enough of a shapeshifter, you can knuckle under, bloat up, and dumb down. Or maybe you can manage a YA book. Or maybe you can sell into the mainstream market—although, if you have a track record as an SF writer, the mainstreamers will be loath to consider you. You’re tainted. Potentially subliterate.
So then you might go hat in hand to a series of small publishers, abasing yourself in the hope of no advance, a shitty cover, an ugly font, no ads, five free author copies, and potentially iffy royalty payments! (Just rhetoric here—I really do love my small press friends.)
Or maybe you get into self-publishing . That’s where I’ve been at for my last two novels. It’s not bad. A little like being under house arrest. If you put in seven or eight painful months of trial and error, you can figure out how to create legit-seeming PDF interiors and covers for print-on-demand paperbacks. Plus you’ll make ebooks for the Kindle and other readers. And you can sell your paperbacks and ebooks via Amazon and maybe via the one or two pipsqueak alternate venues that still happen to exist. If you do all this yourself, it doesn’t cost you anything—although you do need to get access to some software along the lines of InDesign, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Sigil and Calibre.
A plus is that, as a self-pubber, if you’re pushy and high-profile enough, you can run a Kickstarter to score the equivalent of a cash advance for publishing your book. Really when you crowd-source and offer rewards, you’re doing advance sales of a collector’s edition. You’re likely to score more money this way than you’d get from a small press, and maybe even more than you’d get from an SF industry house.
5. Reforming SF.
But these are the perhaps too gloomy musings of an old man. What about the dream of writing a style of SF that changes the genre and gets noticed by the wider world? Okay, that’s possible.
Certainly it helps if you can band together with a couple of other writers. Starting an online ezine is a good way to do this. In my opinion, online ezines should be free—especially if you want a lot of people to read them. Forget about nickel-and-diming your initial readers, if you can get a groundswell of interest going, then you’ll be making money at the back end of the process, that is, when you start selling books or Kindle singles or commercial stories.
I had a little experience with this in publishing and editing my ezine Flurb from 2006 to 2012. You can read all thirteen fab issues free online. It was fun for me to be in touch with other writers. Shout-outs to: Adam Callaway, Brendan Byrne, Eileen Gunn, Cory Doctorow, James Worrad, Kek, Emily Skaftun, Leslie What, A. S. Salinas, Wongoon Cha, Mac Tonnies, Rudy Ch. Garcia, Bruce Sterling, Charlie Jane Anders, Madeline Ashby, Bef, Jon Armstrong, Paul Di Filippo, John Shirley, Seth Kallan Deitch, Anna Tambour, Howard Hendrix, Cody Goodfellow, Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Stross, Martin Hayes, Alex Hardison, Ian Watson, Christopher Shay, Charles Platt, Lavie Tidhar, Th. Metzger, Kathe Koja, Carter Scholz, Michael Blumlein, Tamara Vining, Danny Rubin, Annalee Newitz, Marc Laidlaw, Richard Kadrey, Ernest Hogan, Terry Bisson, Doug Lain, Brian Landis and all the other deviants involved.
Flurb did get some notice—we were getting hundreds of thousands of hits. It was art, and it was interesting, but did we change the face of SF? Hard to say. It’s not clear that our lumbering multinational commercial publishers ever look at anything but spreadsheets. A cultural democracy in action, with every consumer-dollar a vote. And just look how wonderfully democracy does in selecting the very cream of the crop to serve as our representatives in the Congress!
Another angle for changing SF from within is to start writing about a set of ideas that haven’t really been touched upon yet. That’s a true and hardcore kind of SF endeavor. It’s not easy. You have to get yourself to look at the present day world with new eyes—as if you’re a Martian. You pretty much want to forget about all the SF plots and futurist-type prognostications. In the same sense that your characters shouldn’t mirror characters in existing works, your ideas shouldn’t mirror futurist ideas that you might read in magazines.
A good rule of thumb here is that if most people believe something—then it’s wrong. Consider: a hundred years ago, the human race pretty much didn’t know jack shit about science or modern technology. A hundred years from now, just about every single bit of tech that we’re using today is going to be gone.What’s going to replace it? Anything you want. Make up the weirdest shit you can think of. Be optimistic. Why not a new force of nature? Why not aliens from the subdimensions? Why not telepathy with every single object that you see?
Pile on the bullshit and keep a straight face. As the immortal David Lee Roth said, “It’s not who wins or loses—it’s how good you look.” If you and your friends can make your books fun and quirky, then maybe the soggy, stodgy SF ship of state will change its course.
6. Abandoning SF.
Or maybe at this point it’s impossible to change the commercial genre known as SF. In 2015, there’s an alternate path. What if you sidestep the SF publishing niche, and shoot for mainstream publishing from the start?
It could be that the whole SF publishing industry is on its way out—or down. There will still be some great science-fiction books, yes, but they’ll be called something else. Transreal, visionary, speculative—like that. And the hidebound old trad SF label might really be fated to descend into subliterature. Maybe in ten years nobody will even consider publishing a good SF novel under the old SF rubric. Maybe the old category has been eaten by parasitic Martian blimps with electric news-crawl letters on their sides, or by institutional politics left and right, or, more simply, by cultural dynamics and the processes of media change.
It’s a bit sad. For me, it’s like I grew up in a nice small town—cue the silo-fulla-corn nostalgia routine—and I go back thirty years later and it’s all strip malls, and the city core is stone cold dead. As the Pretenders put it in My City Was Gone: “Ay, oh, where did you go, Ohio?”
The big loss for us mad-scientist, freakazoid, pinpoint-pupil SF nut-cases is that the mainstream market is harder to break into than SF publishing. Here in the nest it’s kinda okay for us to write funny. Me, back at the very start I was so daunted by the whole Brahmin Mandarin New Yorker vibe that I never tried selling into that market at all. I liked the idea of being an SF writer. I liked the image of being a rock and roll musician instead of an orchestra violinist.
But…if the orchestras are trying playing rock and roll, however ineptly, why not try for a gig with them? If you keep your soul, you’ll still be writing SF. Maybe better than before. Educating the squares. Showing them where it’s at.
Many paths, many futures.
Write on.
7. Further Reading.
In the DIY punk tradition, I self-published my Collected Essays as an ebook in 2012, and in the fuck-it hacker tradition, I also made the essays available for free. Relative to the topics I’ve touched on here, you might check out “What is Cyberpunk,” “Cyberpunk Lives, ” “New Futures in SF,” and/or “The Great Awakening."
Paul Di Filippo
In that video referenced in the introduction to our discussion, Rudy remarks that it's awfully hard to be the speaker who has to follow the jaw-droppingly articulate and idea-overflowing Bruce Sterling. Of course, the same might be said for following Messr. Rucker himself, as I am feeling now. Rudy lays down a brilliant, accurate history of the past thirty years of SF (my God, where did those decades go?!?), and then projects a myriad fascinating future vectors for this narrative and thematic mode to pursue. There is nothing I see to contradict in his presentation, or deficiencies to repair, so I will have to content myself with riffing off certain things he's said, then maybe adding a new slant or two.
First, let me structure my reply this way, in two parts. In my personal life and in my observations about the world, I oscillate between two contradictory viewpoints, whose synthesis might be that both are simultaneously true. So I will look at SF from each of these POVs separately.
First, "'Twas ever thus." (And here I'm going to cite Robert Crumb's great illo of Mr. Natural atop a grinning tractor as he proclaims this truth.)
People and their cultures are eternal. (At least until we start installing permanent changes in the human genome.) The same old ways of being have persisted forever, since hominids emerged. The same set of desires and responses, the same kinds of love and hate, the same issues of art and religion and politics. "They heard the call and they wrote it on the wall, before there was even any Hollywood," as Steely Dan opined about cave art. This moment in time, this fix we are in, has happened before, many times, and will happen again. Nothing to worry about. Hang loose.
Rudy gets at this a little bit by comparing cyberpunks to the Beats. What the Beats faced circa 1948, we faced circa 1984 (nice Orwellian synchronicity with those two dates). So the process of reinvigoration of any genre is perpetual, and nothing special for this moment. This is something of the Buddhist View of Science Fiction.
But another constant to consider is Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is shit. There is no way we can turn a marketing genre around to some kind of utopian state of brilliant perfection. By default, the great bulk of stuff is, has been, and always will be trivial trash. There are indeed Silver and Golden Ages, when the ratio of shit to diamonds shifts a bit in favor of gems. Rudy and I and the other cyberpunks were lucky enough to experience one of those moments, as were the New Wave folks, as were the Campbellian Revolution folks, as were the Gernsbackians, and so forth. Golden Ages are hard or impossible to predict or manufacture.
But I'd like to address Rudy's use of the word "elitist." I know he's using it to mean narratives wherein upper classes receive all the attention of the storyline. But art itself is ineluctably elitist. If art means anything, it means a spectrum of quality, difficulty, impact and performance. The ten percent of genius that Sturgeon's Law alludes to. Unless we have sieves for genius, we will always be swamped with shit.
I guess this observation brings me to my other, antithetical viewpoint that I cherish on alternate days of the week.
This era is unique and full of special challenges and opportunities.
Rudy does a magnificent job of addressing this viewpoint. He speaks of self-publishing, slipping under the radar of mainstream, creating ezines, etc. I would also mention the great resource of the internet allowing writers to research and communicate beyond anything that has gone before. Imagine how the cyberpunk movement was conducted with paper fanzines! But he does not mention a few of the factors that are making the life of the SF writer so difficult. How to tackle these trends and issues is not something I have an easy answer to.
First is the very lack of gatekeepers and healthy elitist attitudes. The internet has "disintermediated" the hell out of a system that worked, in however flawed and biased a way, to produce the incredible canon of SF that we all cherish. It took Frank Herbert over twenty rejections to get Dune published. Would Herbert's career have taken off better if he had self-pubbed it with no hassle? Maybe, maybe not (see below). The self-publishing movement, however valid and worthy in some cases, has also opened up the floodgates to a tsunami of crap. Amateurs ruin everything, I'm sorry. When asked if writing workshops discouraged fledgling writers, Flannery O'Connor said, "Not enough." It's just Gresham's Law as applied to SF: bad fiction drives out the good. When presented by Amazon with a hundred new ebooks, 90% of which are shit, and one of which is Rudy's and nine others of which are good stuff too, guess what the odds are of a random reader buying Rudy's book, or one of the other nine?
Whenever I hear that the field discourages Group X from entering or being heard, my immediate response is to say, "Great! Our work is partly done. Now if we could only discourage Groups A, B, C and Z as well!" (Let Z stand for white male conservative writers if you will.) The barriers to getting published should be high enough to discourage dilettantes and the talentless, regardless of any other classification they belong to. Do you know the story of the fellow who approached the Zen monastery and asked to be enrolled as a student? The Zen Master told him, "No, sorry, full up," then shut the door in his face. The student-to-be then camped bareheaded and without food or water outside the gates for three days, in rain and heat, till he fell over unconscious. Only then did the Master take him in as his acolyte. Why can't this be our template, instead of handing out "participation awards" to every Tom, Dick and Harriet who can string some two-syllable words together into a cliched story?
Another trend we are facing is the fragmentation of the audience into niches, otherwise known as the "There Can Never Be Another Beatles" problem. We could produce another whole cyberpunk-like set of genius writers, and they would go unheard, due to the immense variety of subgenres and entertainment activities available to the audience. Take a figure like George R. R. Martin, famous and best-selling enough to appear in Entertainment Weekly magazine. There are fans who have certainly never sampled him and never will. Same goes for Stephen King. The chances of producing another figure with the stature and influence of a Robert Heinlein are correspondingly reduced.
Another matter is the sheer weight of genre history. If we date SF back to Jules Verne (rather than Mary Shelley, who, while brilliant and a real forerunner, left no real school of imitators), then SF originated in 1851, with Verne's "A Voyage in a Balloon." Consequently, we now have over 150 years of literature on our backs. It's all available too, thanks to digitized books and the internet market for second-hand physical books. There's no excuse for not knowing your chosen past. It would be like trying to be a dancer and never knowing Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham. We can't reinvent the wheel, we have to put new spins on old tropes. Every now and then, a really fresh idea pops up. The Singularity was probably one such, which explains why it was glommed-onto so enthusiastically. But otherwise, every time we want to write about one of Rudy's "Power Chords," the educated, savvy SF writer (as opposed to some unschooled amateur or idiot savant) is forced to face what Hemingway saw as his own major challenge: "to beat some dead man at his own game." It's hard work.
All of these things would be immensely discouraging, save for one ineluctable truth: great SF somehow continues to be written! When I read a new book by Rudy, or Hannu Rajaniemi or Nick Harkaway or M. John Harrison or China Mieville or Karen Joy Fowler, then my faith in our ability to produce relevant, touching, tragic, funny, hip, truly speculative SF is reaffirmed. I study them and try to take direction and excitement from them, and improve my own work. That's the eternal process all true artists throughout time have employed.
It's like the old urban legend about the scientist who proved bumblebees are aerodynamically unable to fly. You just have to point to a bumblebee to disprove him!
Let's all try to be the best bumblebees possible, and sting the asses of complacency, sloth, ineptness and narrow-minded lack of real visions!
[To be continued.]
***
POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and 'nerds of a
feather, flock together' founder/administrator.
Welcome to Perspectives, the yin to Blogtable's yang! Here's how it works: three regular 'nerds of a feather, flock together' contributors all read an editoral, opinion piece or critical essay written by an external blogger, critic, journalist or creative person. The lead discussant summarizes the main arguments. Then the three discussants respond directly to the prompt (and not to each other, as in Blogtable). The idea is to capture a range of opinion--contrasting, complementary or just qualitatively different--to important or provocative ideas. Do not expect all three respondents to feel or react the same way. In our first episode, the discussants will parse Jonathan McCalmont's blog post series at Ruthless Culture (links provided below), in which he compares the launch issues of the kickstarter-funded Uncanny Magazine, edited by Apex Magazine veterans Lynne and Michael Damien Thomas, and Vice Media's new online science fiction magazine, Terraform. These should, I think, be essential reading--whether you agree with the main thrust or not--and, as such, should serve as a launching pad for broader critical discussions about the current direction of short science fiction and fantasy literature. So, after a brief summary of McCalmont’s arguments, three of us will each provide our reactions. This episode's discussants:
The G
The G is founder and co-editor of 'nerds of a feather, flock together', which covers SF/F and crime fiction, comics, cult films and video games. He moonlights as an academic.
Dean
Dean is the author of the 3024AD series of science fiction stories.
You can read his other ramblings and musings on a variety of topics
(mostly writing) on his blog. When not holed up in his office tweeting obnoxiouslywriting, he can be found watching or playing sports, or in his natural habitat of a bookstore.
Charles
Charles is a writer, reader, reviewer and recent addition to the nerds of a feather team. Check out his latest fiction, "Handful of Spring," published by Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.
Episode 1: Reactions to Jonathan McCalmont's Comparison of the First Issues of Terraform and Uncanny Magazines
Those invested in (or at least aware of) discourses internal to fandom will recall that Uncanny launched to great excitement, while Terraform mostly drew attention for claiming in its mission statement that there really wasn't much short-form science fiction available online and wasn't it great that someone was finally doing this! Unsurprisingly, this demonstrably false claim upset a number of people involved in, well, writing, publishing and reading science fiction online.
One might thus logically conclude that Uncanny would be the more promising of the two new ventures. McCalmont, however, sees Uncanny as a very "safe" (i.e. risk-averse) outlet--a new market, to be sure, but an "insider" venture publishing the same exact kinds of form-driven, "awards-seeking" stories--by the same small circle of writers--you would find in a randomly selected issue of Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons or Apex. This, he argues, is no accident, but is instead a function of Uncanny's position within the social economy of fandom:
Increasingly dominated by a suite of free online publications, the genre short fiction scene is becoming a literary niche in which readers are entirely optional. As with academic publishing, many of the institutions supporting genre short fiction are less interested in reaching an audience than they are in providing the rungs for a vast aspirational ladder.
That aspirational ladder, he suggests, begins with publication in a pro-paying market before scaling up to inclusion in one of the many “Year’s Best” anthologies before peaking with Hugo and Nebula awards. Put more firmly in the Bourdieusian vocabulary McCalmont uses to frame his argument, Uncanny could be said to utilize social capital (i.e. networks) in order to produce cultural capital (i.e. prestige) for social actors who already possess institutional advantages within fandom--with results that, while polished in terms of craft, are predictable, stale and contrived. Provocatively, he further asserts that the online pro-paying markets have largely abandoned “traditional” idea-driven science fiction in favor of “over-written sentence fragments about magical people experiencing emotions.”
McCalmont’s critique of Uncanny #1 thus feels like a corollary to the “exhaustion” thesis laid out by Paul Kincaid in his 2012 piece “The Widening Gyre” (and further fleshed out in part 1 and part 2 of our epic interview), but with the finger of blame pointed directly at fandom’s internal social hierarchies.
In contrast, McCalmont sees the Vice-owned Terraform as a more progressive market--due, in no small part, to the fact that it is an outsider venture with little or no interest in fandom as a social field, and which is furthermore subject to the kinds of economic capital constraints that necessitate audience-building:
As part of a non-fiction website with no real ties to genre culture, Terraform’s future viability appears to depend less upon reaching a genre audience than upon the editors’ ability to convince an existing non-fiction audience to cross the aisle and start reading fiction. Uncanny’s future may be dependent upon convincing aspiring authors that donations will help them to secure a seat at the cool kids’ table but Terraform’s future seems to lie in page views, click-throughs and convincing the manufacturers of drones and 3D printing devices that people are actually reading science fiction stories.
And:
Engagement with the world has been built into Terraform at a structural level as every story contains tags related to its subject matter meaning that you can read a story about drones and then click through to all of the articles about drones that Motherboard have published over the years. This easily overlooked design decision instantly makes everything that Terraform publishes seem relevant and connected to the real world. I know that some random piece of SEO shouldn’t grab my attention but a tiny detail like connecting stories to real-world events and ideas shows a willingness to engage and make moves that genre culture stopped making around the collapse of the pulps. Also interesting is that people are actually commenting on the stories! Most short fiction is received by reverential (or more likely indifferent) silence but Paul Ford’s story about Uber has people not only applauding the story but also talking about the story in terms of their own thoughts and experiences!"
This divergence of organizational approaches, McCalmont argues, has produced diametrically opposed trajectories for the two magazines:
Genre culture routinely lionises work that ‘breaks down genre boundaries’ without ever bothering to understand why genre boundaries existed in the first place. Genre boundaries were not for writers but for readers; they were a way of telling people what to expect when they picked up a book or magazine. Having read five Terraform stories, I know exactly what to expect the next time I stop by their website but after reading the first issue of Uncanny the only thing I expect from them in future is forgettable non-fiction and fiction that uses the same literary techniques as stories that have recently been winning awards. The editors of Terraform have the courage to set a creative agenda whereas the editors of Uncanny seem content to follow an ever-expanding field and rely on their social contacts to give them prominence."
McCalmont ultimately concludes that:
...compared to the manicured lawns and exquisite tea services of Uncanny, Terraform feels a bit like a frontier town; wild and woolly but still not quite finished. However, while Terraform’s stories may be full of tricks that don’t quite work and ideas that don’t quite join up, this roughness doesn’t so much detract from the stories as add to them by giving them a sense of urgency, as though the contributors were seeing things on the news and rushing to turn them into short stories before the news cycle ended.
The G
I guess I should start off by saying that I don’t share Jonathan’s negative opinion of the kind of stories published in Uncanny #1, which one could probably refer to, in more value-neutral terms, as “speculative neo-magic realism.” That is to say, stories that occupy the interstitial spaces between mimetic, science and fantasy fiction, and which are generally marked both by self-consciously “poetic” prose and frequent use of literalized metaphors as the primary narrative device. I found this kind of stuff really exciting a few years ago, back when I started reading Clarkesworld and Lightspeed regularly, while several stories that featured on my Hugo ballot last year--Claire Humphrey’s "Your Figure will Assume Beautiful Outlines" and Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s “Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade," for example--are the kind of thing Jonathan might dismiss as "over-written sentence fragments about magical people experiencing emotions." So different strokes for different folks and all that.
Even so, as someone deeply invested in science fiction and fantasy literature, the convergence on this style among the online pro-paying markets--a convergence Jonathan sees symbolized in Uncanny’s first issue--bothers me. And it does so for a number of reasons:
Because, by nature, science fiction and fantasy should offer limitless imaginative possibilities. Thus any convergence insofar as approach is concerned represents a narrowing of the genre’s potential to do the exact things that make it special.
Because convergence both reflects, reinforces and reproduces consensus on what a “professional” story “should” look like, and the kinds of stories a pro-paying market "should" publish in order to look “authentic."
Because consensus leads overworked and underpaid editors and slush readers to identify stories according to the emerging model of “authenticity”--consciously or unconsciously.
Because this organizational isomorphism sends a message to submitting authors, inevitably backed by experience with the slush pile, that there are formulas to be adhered to and not transgressed.
Because adherence to formulas inevitably leads to the preponderance and eventual hegemony of form-driven content.
My concerns are not, strictly speaking, *about* Uncanny the magazine. Judged solely on its own merits, I thought the first issue was solid if unspectacular. But even if I’d felt as strongly negative about it as Jonathan, I wouldn’t judge the whole venture based on the first issue--I’ve seen too many rough pilot episodes for good TV shows to do that. Besides, the emergence of any new and viable pro-paying market, regardless of how it launches, is arguably a good thing for the overall ecosystem. Hopefully in time the need to “stand out” in a crowded field will provide incentives for Uncanny to forge an identity distinct from its competitors.
Nevertheless, I do see Uncanny #1 as a missed opportunity of sorts--a lost chance to widen the band of what the online pro-paying markets are currently publishing, and in the process add something new and vital to the overall conversation. In that sense I do very much agree with Jonathan that Terraform, to date at least, represents the more dynamic and exciting venture. Genre needs more outlets that eschew formulas, or at least try new ones. More to the point, it needs more outlets that don’t give a shit about conventions or consensuses. Terraform can do this because, as Jonathan notes, it isn’t linked to the institutions of fandom or its internal social hierarchies.
Zeitgeisty
Yet Terraform also has its limitations--serious ones at that too. Capping stories at 2,000 words, for one, makes no sense to me. And though I welcome experimentation with voice and narrative structure in fiction, several stories--Bruce Sterling’s “The Brain Dump,” for example--center on conceits that fall on the wrong side of the line dividing "zeitgeisty" and "gimmicky." That's the downside of Terraform's clickbait economic strategy--an approach that can get old really fast.
Luckily for both ventures, a first issue really is analogous to a pilot episode. Nothing is set in stone, and there’s plenty of time to adjust trajectories in order to provide the pro-paying short fiction space with the most dynamic new markets possible. I do hope that’s where both end up.
Dean We review damn near anything here on this blog- comics, movies, book, video games, pretty much anything, ya know, nerdy. We also have a whole mess of people who review, and lord knows I don't agree with all of them all the time (except Vance, from whom I am pretty sure I was separated at birth). So opinions are far, far from universal, particularly on artistic works.
One trend I have seen (I am speaking beyond this blog) is the refusal to write negative reviews. "Who am I to judge?" is sort of the general statement that is made, which is true, to an extent. But that is sort of the point, isn't it? I could go on for hours about the present trend of never, ever judging anything, but let's focus on artistic works for now.
I get a ton of review requests for my Adventures in Indie Publishing column, and most of them I decline because, frankly, most self-published books are terrible on every level. The cover, the writing, the story, the editing. I choose not review them, generally, for two reasons:
Space and time are limited, and the point of AiIP is to highlight the good self/indie works
I haven't made it past the first few pages before giving up due to the above deficiencies
So I certainly understand the hesitancy to negatively review books, but if you aren't willing to say "this was bad and I did not enjoy it", what standard is there for the works that you DO enjoy? And, let's say, you enjoyed a book, but there were several problems with it, would you not point those out? Of course you would. The first go 'round of 3024 was poorly edited, and that was pointed out in reviews. This was perfectly fair, and made me aware of where the failings were (I say 'were' as I got a new editor. Check references, kids). And I can tell you that my book was a far sight better than a lot of what I have seen. So if something is good, say it, and if not, hell, say that, too. If the author can't take it, they are in the wrong game.
Then there is the other side of the coin. Recently, there were a couple links tweeted out from the NF Twitter account, to Ruthless Culture, reviewing the new short fiction markets Uncanny and Terraform (the latter of which I went on my own rant about). I found the tone of McCalmont’s reviews to be somewhat 'cynically pretentious'. I actually agree with most of his points (particularly about genre, which is a rant unto itself), but found the tone to be unnecessarily superior.
That is, until I went back and readthe post contrasting the two publications, making good points about both, while also being somewhat condescending along the way.
Is that what criticism has come to? That it has to come from a place of smug superiority? If you bash 50 Shades of Grey or Twilight, unadulterated pieces of garbage of every single level, it's met with "well, at least they read". And perhaps that's the reason people don't want to leave a one-star review. That, and the author might stalk you beat you with a wine bottle.
One of the main reasons I accepted the invitation to write for this site is the scale we use. One to ten, instead of five (seriously, the five-star system is TERRIBLE). Ones and tens are pretty rare, and it allows for a poor work to have redeeming qualities, and a great work to have flaws pointed out.
Isn't that the point of criticism?
Charles
After reading the reviews, I think the discourse used is skewed. It assumes that there are two sides (the Uncanny Side and the Terraform Side) and that they are at odds. But I don't think anyone on the "Uncanny Side" of the argument has a problem with Terraform existing in the way that the reviews seem to have a problem with Uncanny existing. I don't even think there are sides. I think that some people took issue with how the mission statement of Terraform was worded. When it was cleared up, and Terraform did recognize that it had erred and changed, it was done. I haven't seen anyone complaining about the caliber of the stories. Indeed, I've seen the fiction applauded. Especially with Terraform paying twenty cents a word. That seems to be what most people are talking about now. Not that there weren't some hiccups, but I think people (including those writers who criticized that mission statement) are glad that Terraform is here. The thing is, people are generally glad Uncanny is here, too. The reviews seemed to imply that people don't actually want the stories that Uncanny publishes, that those stories don't appeal to "casual" readers and that the stories Terraform publishes do. Or that having sites like Apex, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and others makes Uncanny unnecessary. Except what these publications are united in is bringing a very diverse range of stories to the public. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror in many flavors. It might make knowing what you’ll get in each issue difficult, but that’s part of the appeal, that you never quite know what you’ll be exposed to, and that is a powerful and useful. That's why Uncanny was successfully funded. The reviews seemed to imply that Uncanny only got its money because of Kickstarter trickery, but why would it be easier to believe that than that readers are hungry for the sorts of stories that Uncanny and other magazines put out? Why is it easier to believe that near-future science fiction will bring more people into spec fiction than fantasy or horror?
Because I can agree that the methodology of Terraform is interesting, and might indeed bring in new people. But I cannot agree that science fiction is the only way to push boundaries. I think boundaries are being pushed now. After all, in my mind the point of science fiction was never to show us how to have better stuff. It wasn't really to make science better. It was to try and make humanity better, to try and imagine how we can step into new frontiers. And fantasy can do that as well. Horror can do that as well. I don't see an abundance of very good publications, even if there is some overlap, as a bad thing. Because it's not like the stories Terraform is publishing would not be published otherwise. The writers they've published are not unknowns. They are not genre outsiders. If you compare them to, say, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination or Lightspeed, you'll see some similarities in their recent releases, some overlap.
The reviews, really, seem a way to complain about the stories that are "winning awards" right now, as if there is no diversity in the genre. And as if those award-winning stories are all the same and are making it so that every other kind of story is no longer published or valued. And that's just not the case. There is great diversity in the genre, which I think is a good thing. I like more than just science fiction, more than just fantasy. I like light comedies and dark, brooding tragedies. I like stories with aliens, stories with magic, stories with airships or superheroes or some combination of all of the above. And that's why I try to read as widely as possible. Including Terraform. Including Uncanny. Including a dozen or so other publications. It's a great time to be a reader. And there is room enough for everyone, and best of luck to them all. What the genre needs is more places paying writers and publishing good stories.
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POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and 'nerds of a
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with a nifty introduction by fellow cyberpunk innovator William Gibson. (Get the paperback, though--it's well worth it.) Rucker has published 17 additional novels and 5 short story collections, many of which feature his signature "transrealist" approach to science fiction writing. He is also a prolific writer of non-fiction--you can check out his Collected Essays, including "Transrealism" and "What is Cyberpunk," at his website. Rucker's latest book is his hefty 
, a tome which in some ways anticipates Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle as a transrealist work of self-reinvention.
(the essential anthology of early cyberpunk), Di Filippo is author or co-author of 13 novels and 15 short story collections, including the highly influential 
. He is also a prolific reviewer and essayist--where, this humble blogger suggests, Di Filippo sets an impossibly high bar for the rest of us wannabes. (I mean, 
and 
). Sterling has worked as a journalist, teacher, activist and speaker, and is involved in 
--as well as the equally good 
(1991) and 
(2000). She is a two-time winner of the prestigious Clarke Award (for Synners and Fools), and in 2013 won a Hugo for the novelette "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi" (
). Cadigan is also a prolific writer of short fiction, and one of the authors who--many years ago--convinced a certain blogger that science fiction could work as serious literature. [See also: my recent review of 
, and Joe Doakes in 
. I was doing my part for political change—as surely as if I’d been handing out leaflets door to door. It almost goes without saying, by the way, that a transreal book is intrinsically antiestablishment. The goals of individuals are forever antithetical to the goals of power elites.
published. Would Herbert's career have taken off better if he had self-pubbed it with no hassle? Maybe, maybe not (see below). The self-publishing movement, however valid and worthy in some cases, has also opened up the floodgates to a tsunami of crap. Amateurs ruin everything, I'm sorry. When asked if writing workshops discouraged fledgling writers, Flannery O'Connor said, "Not enough." It's just 
