Michael Swanwick, one of my favorite Science Fiction and Fantasy writers, has a new (new = like, since August) and regularly updated blog, Flogging Babel, to promote his upcoming book (The Dragons of Babel). He’s also set up a one-entry blog for a long essay of his decrying the inappropriate use of the term “Fix-Up“.
I got those three links one from the other, starting out from a post in Neil Gaiman’s blog.
M. John Harrison on writing Fantasy:
Hi, I got your book. You ask me how to make it different.
Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research. As a reader I’m not interested in a “fully worked out” world. I’m not interested in “self consistency”…
When I read fantasy, I read for the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know. I want the taste of the writer’s mind, I want to feel I’m walking about in the edges of the individual personality. I don’t want to read a story misrepresented from some other culture’s folklore, or a story in which mainstream ideology of the last fifty years is presented as myth. Go read Clive Barker. Go read Kenneth Patchen, who was reportedly an unlikeable man but who could write you a fantasy in a couple of lines. Or put “The Gates of Eden” on repeat.
Go away & write me a fantasy like that. Wait twenty years before you start. Write it out of some emotion of yours you never understood, or some decision you made you’re not sure if you regret; but never once name that emotion or let me see the decision. I want what’s underneath.
A fine rant from Peter Watts on how politicians’ disdain for science shows how dismally disconnection from reality most policy makers really are:
In other words, both Law and Economics are human artifacts. They’re like Gibsonian cyberspace, a consensual hallucination that only works because everybody agrees to stay inside the playground. They’re Klingon Summer Camp, they’re Dungeons and Dragons for geeks with MBAs: beautifully arcane, deeply developed, honed and crafted by decades of game play. But they’re arbitrary. Lo, the DM changes The Law, tweaks interest rates: watch all the PCs dance to the rules of the new edition!
Try that in the real world, though. Try repealing photosynthesis or gravity and see where it gets you. Anyone who talks about The Economy as though it reflects any fundamental aspect of the real world is an idiot.
So, why is it always suits? Why so few scientists in politics? Why isn’t the real world governed by those practiced in studying the real world, instead of geeks who can’t admit that Klingons don’t actually exist?I think it’s because science is nasty. It is a methodology that recognizes the prejudices and blind spots of its practitioners, and it is designed to take those weaknesses into account and use them to its own ends. It drags us kicking and screaming to unpleasant truths we’d rather not recognize, it’s the only approach that is designed to be self-correcting
Peter Watts, All elected officials must speak fluent Klingon
Ah, deadlines. I thrive on them, but abuse them mercilessly. Case in point:
BTW, I mostly post links elsewhere now; see the sidebar for feeds.