You can hear my voice on the latest episode of the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast, talking about Arkad's World and various digressions. Listen here.
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You can hear my voice on the latest episode of the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast, talking about Arkad's World and various digressions. Listen here.
Posted at 08:53 PM in Books, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)
I spent last weekend at the Arisia science fiction convention in the heart of Boston. My chief amusement at conventions is the panels. I don't like "filk" singing much, I can rent my own videos, and I don't wear costumes (other than my "professional SF writer" outfit). I keep intending to spend more time in the game room but I never remember to do it. So it's panels, both as a participant and as part of the audience.
At SF cons you'll see lots of panels about the history of science fiction and fantasy, panels on how to write good, panels about the businesses of writing and publishing, panels about specific authors — and, lately, panels about race and gender in science fiction.
But you won't see much about social status. A few "worldbuilding" discussions may touch on how to use the social class structure of the Middle Ages in your fantasy settings, but that's about it. Nobody talks about the role of social status in science fiction and fantasy, nor about their place in our society's status pyramid.
Science fiction emerged as a recognizable genre (and gave birth to the original "fandom") in the pulp magazine era. Amazing Stories began in 1926, and Astounding in 1930, so let's pick 1930 as our start date. What status did science fiction have?
It was trash. Read any memoir by SF authors or fans who grew up before 1960 or so: every one of them includes at least one confrontation with a parent or a teacher or even an employer about "Why are you wasting your time reading that garbage?"
Now, some of that was due to the often clunky writing, but a lot of other awful writing was published in the early 20th century which didn't get condemned as garbage out of hand. I think the "lowbrow" reputation of SF came from who read it rather than how it was written.
Science fiction in the pulp era wasn't aimed at the educated segments of society. It took thirty years and the arrival of nuclear weapons and space travel for SF to make it into the "highbrow" markets, and it's still scarce there. No, the target market for the original SF magazines was blue-collar or lower-middle-class young men. The same young men who mailed off for Charles Atlas's "dynamic tension" system for building muscles, or correspondence courses in radio repair.
I get the impression that the early SF writers were a step up, socially, from their readers. Most of them had at least a couple of years of college, though they tended to have engineering, scientific, or business degrees rather than studying the liberal arts. None of them went to Harvard or Yale. America's elites didn't do science fiction in those days.
(Digression: even today, Harvard is startlingly under-represented in the science fiction field, with only Michael Crichton and William Burroughs to its credit. Interestingly, Radcliffe College — before its final merger into Harvard — had a considerably better track record than its sibling school, boasting Margaret Atwood, Ursula LeGuin, and Anne McCaffrey, though all of them graduated after World War Two. End digression.)
Science Fiction moved a couple of steps up the social scale as a result of the Second World War. When those Harvard and Yale grads running the government are suddenly interested in rocketships and atomic bombs, it's harder to look down on the non-Harvard people writing about them. Not impossible, but harder. This new respectability included the ultimate "middlebrow" accolade: a science fiction anthology in the Random House "Library of America" series. (See my review beginning here.) Science fiction stories began appearing in the mass-market "slick" magazines like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post.
There was still a whiff of the gutter about the field, though. For every respectable-looking hardcover from Gnome Press or Doubleday, there were a dozen SF paperbacks with lurid covers and easily-mocked titles. The fact that SF fans of that era could easily go haring off after weirdness like the "Shaver Mystery" or Dianetics didn't help.
The postwar era also saw a rapid growth in SF fandom. Tom Wolfe devoted much of his journalistic career to studying a phenomenon he noticed in the 1960s: the post-World War Two prosperity in America was so huge, and so widespread across the social spectrum, that every social class could indulge in hobbies and subcultures on a scale which only the wealthy had been able to manage a generation earlier. Custom car fans and teenage surfers and Appalachian amateur car racers could turn their obscure hobbies into major cultural phenomena.
Science fiction fandom followed suit. The lower-middle-class SF fans could now afford to travel halfway across the country for conventions, as a regular event rather than a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence. Fans could publish monthly zines, and construct costumes which would outdo anything at one of Louis XIV's masquerade balls.
The academy began to discover SF in the 1960s, as more SF readers went to college. Academic scholars had to fight for elbow room with SF's own internal apparatus of critics and historians, but academia could offer something that the fanzine and Locus reviewers couldn't: status. In such an affluent society, mere wealth was no longer the sole marker for social status. Academic prestige began to have equal, or even greater value.
And then . . . Boom! Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s science fiction began it slow takeover of visual media. The first big SF movie hit wasn't Star Wars — it was Planet of the Apes (1968). That SF movie spawned four sequels and a short-lived TV series, and made more money during its initial run than the other famous science fiction film of 1968, Kubrick's 2001 (though 2001 surpassed it later on). Star Wars merely cemented space adventure as the big money movie genre for a generation.
Meanwhile, a bunch of nerds in the Bay Area and Washington State were about to change everything. We'll pick up there next time.
Posted at 09:53 PM in Books, Film, Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)
On Friday, January 18, I'll be doing two appearances to promote the release of Arkad's World. At 4:00 p.m. I'll be at Annie's Book Stop in Worcester, doing a reading and signing copies. Once that's done I'll scurry eastward to Boston, where I'll be a participant at the Arisia 2019 convention all weekend. Come out and join the fun!
Posted at 08:35 PM in Books, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
If you're planning to come see me at Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge, I'm afraid tonight's event has been postponed due to a schedule conflict. When we set a new date I'll announce it here.
But if you're desperate to see me in person, I will be at the Arisia convention all weekend, at the Boston Park Plaza hotel. Stop by and say hi!
Posted at 07:34 AM in Books, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
Think steam-powered spaceships are just a "steampunk" retro-fantasy notion? Think again. According to an article in Cosmos Magazine online, engineers are developing a steam-powered robotic asteroid hopper, intended for use in space resource harvesting. You can read the details here.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel would approve.
Posted at 12:01 PM in Science | Permalink | Comments (0)
Marshal Zeringue has a fun 'blog with a neat premise: he asks writers what they're reading. To celebrate the launch of Arkad's World, he asked me to contribute an entry. You can see what I'm reading here.
And if you're in Amherst, Massachusetts, tomorrow evening, please stop by Amherst Books for the Arkad's World launch party! There will be reading, signing . . . and cake!*
I'll be doing a lot of bookstore appearances this week, so blogging may be a bit spotty. Please bear with me.
*No lie.
Posted at 01:09 PM in Books, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)
With the recent cold snap in New England I've been burning a lot of firewood. For several years now I've been cutting and splitting my own wood (it's cheaper than joining a health club for exercise), and I've learned quite a bit about firewood. Birch burns like plutonium, beetles will eat all the pine before winter arrives so don't waste your time on it, and oak smells like ketchup when you split it.
One particular thing I've noticed is that fork sections, where a trunk separates into two big limbs, are a pain and a half to cut, and are infuriatingly difficult to split. You wind up with irregularly-shaped pieces which are a bother to stack properly. It's tempting to just leave them on the forest floor to rot. But I don't do that.
Because another thing I've noticed is that those fork sections, being full of strong, high-density wood, make the best fuel. They burn long and give off lots of heat.
Metaphor alert!
Posted at 11:09 PM in Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)
I got my degree in history, and when I got to historical movies, I'm the one indignantly whispering to my seatmate about errors. Though actually I'm pretty charitable: I understand that movies do have budgets and physical limitations. If you're making a World War II movie and can't scrounge up enough M-1 Garand rifles for all the extras playing American soldiers, I won't be upset if some guy in the background is carrying a British or even a German rifle of the period. (But I will be ticked off if he's got an M-16.)
In fact, the thing that moviemakers get wrong which bugs me the most isn't the physical details, it's the attitudes. One of my perennial complaints about historical fiction is how often the main characters have modern opinions and mindsets. In C.S. Forester's wonderful Captain Hornblower series, it does occasionally strain belief how frequently Captain Hornblower displays mid-20th century ideas about early-19th century issues. One reason I utterly love Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series is precisely because his characters have unashamedly Regency-era views. Captain Aubrey in particular is very much a man of his time, even something of a reactionary, but he's still obviously a good man and a great character.
Why is this a problem? Why can't I just enjoy the costumes and quit nitpicking?
I think my objection to Getting History Wrong has the same root as the objections some others express about writers or moviemakers "appropriating" non-American cultures: the past, like other countries, is not just a stage set or a collection of costumes to play with. The past — again, like other countries — was inhabited by real people, as smart and as moral as ourselves (if not more so).
Making fun of our ancestors for not being clever enough to be born after 1980, or not being enlightened enough to read BuzzFeed, is more than just disrespectful. It's stupid. Having an iPhone doesn't change your essential humanity, so you can learn a lot from Marcus Aurelius, Gautama Buddha, or Hernan Cortez. Understand them on their own terms, just as you should try to understand people from other cultures in the present.
After all, you'll be history yourself, someday.
Posted at 01:12 PM in Books, Film | Permalink | Comments (1)
This is the Big Idea. Now you know.
Posted at 08:15 AM in Books, Weblogs, Writing | Permalink | Comments (0)
I made the traditional New Orleans dinner for New Year's Day: Hoppin' John (=black-eyed peas and rice), Brown Cabbage, and sausage. It came out very well: the Hoppin' John was wonderfully rich, thanks to the goodness of a smoked pork hock, while the sausage was a pretty decent facsimile of andouille (as decent as one can expect from a company in Wisconsin).
The black-eyed peas trace back to the Roman custom of eating lentils; the legend is that you'll get a gold coin during the year for each one you eat. It makes more sense for the coin-shaped lentils than the basically bean-shaped black-eyed peas. There's also a tradition that the cabbage leaves symbolize money, but I don't know how far back that goes. Sausage, I suspect, is simply something that goes well with both beans and cabbage.
Anyway, hope everyone had as good a dinner as I did. Happy New Year!
Posted at 08:08 PM in Food | Permalink | Comments (0)
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