Reprint: Violence

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Anthony Burgess, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Harry Turtledove, Iain Banks, Jack Womack, Keith Roberts, Martin Amis, Norman Spinrad, Philip George Chadwick, Piers Anthony, Richard Calder, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ursula K. Le Guin

I’ve nearly finished gathering together all of my Cognitive Mapping columns from Vector. This is the penultimate one, and it first appeared in Vector 193, May-June 1997.

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Reprint: Banks, Holdstock, Kilworth, MacLeod Poems

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Garry Kilworth, Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod, Robert Holdstock

I’ve been meaning to get back to using this blog as a resource where I can keep as much of my writing as possible online, so let’s start with this review of Poems, Peoms & Other Atrocities by Garry Kilworth & Robert Holdstock, and Poems by Iain Banks & Ken MacLeod, which first appeared in Foundation 122, December 2015.

Reprint: Transhumanity

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Arthur C Clarke, Bruce Sterling, Charles Darwin, Christopher Evans, Frederik Pohl, Greg Egan, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, Jack Finney, James Tiptree Jr, John W. Campbell, Martin Caidin, Olaf Stapledon, Robert Silverberg, S Fowler Wright, T.H. Huxley

We’re getting close to the end of the series of Cognitive Mapping columns I wrote for Vector. This one first appeared in Vector 194, July-August 1997.

Reprint: Space

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Arthur C Clarke, Cyrano de Bergerac, Douglas Adams, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Fred Hoyle, H.G. Wells, Hal Clement, Hugo Gernsback, Iain Banks, James Blish, James Tiptree Jr, Johannes Kepler, John W. Campbell, Jules Verne, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson

This is another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. In this instance it first appeared in Vector 190 (November-December 1996).

Reprint: Postmodernism

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Brian McHale, Christine Brook-Rose, Christopher Priest, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Frederic Jameson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Geoffrey Chaucer, Henry James, Iain Banks, James Joyce, John Fowles, Katherine Dunn, Kathy Acker, Kim Newman, Kurt Vonnegut, Laurence Sterne, Miguel de Cervantes, Paul Auster, Richard Jefferies, Robert Coover, Samuel R. Delany, Steve Erickson, Thomas Pynchon, Virginia Woolf, William Gibson, William S. Burroughs, William Vollman

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one appeared in Vector 219, September-October 2001. As with the column on Modernism, my views are likely to have changed somewhat in the interim.

Reprint: John Clute

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Arthur C Clarke, Dave Garnett, David Langford, Edward James, Farah Mendlesohn, Garry Kilworth, Gene Wolfe, George Hay, Iain Banks, John Clute, John Grant, John Radford, Judith Clute, Ken MacLeod, Lisa Tuttle, m john harrison, Mary Gentle, Maurice Goldsmith, Mike Moir, Neil Gaiman, Northrop Frye, Pamela Zoline, Pat Cadigan, Peter Nicholls, Scott Bradfield, Thomas M. Disch, William Gibson

This Appreciation of John Clute was published in the Loncon 3 Programme Book, where he was, of course, Guest of Honour:

Reprint: Gormenghast

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Brian Aldiss, Carter Scholz, Cordwainer Smith, Daniel Defoe, Elizabeth Hand, Greg Egan, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, James Lovegrove, Jorge Luis Borges, Lucius Shepard, Mervyn Peake, Michael Marshall Smith, Robert Silverberg, Steven Millhauser

It is, I promise you, pure coincidence that today’s reprint begins with the same writer featured in the last one, Steven Millhauser. But then, it is time to come to another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one was first published in Vector 213 (September-October 2000).

Reprint: Death

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Alasdair Gray, Bob Shaw, Bram Stoker, Brian Stableford, Colin Greenland, Dante, Greg Egan, Iain Banks, Ian Watson, Jeff Noon, John Bunyan, Lucius Shepard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, M.R. James, Michael Swanwick, Philip Jose Farmer, Rudy Rucker, Russell Hoban, Sheridan Le Fanu, T.S. Eliot, William Gibson

More and more, as I read science fiction, I have become aware that death is the most consistent theme. You could almost say that science fiction is a literature about death. I wrote this Cognitive Mapping piece back in 1997 (it appeared in Vector 195, September-October 1997), I could write a similar column now just using works published since that date. In fact I could write it several times over, so pervasive is the theme. So this is just one aspect of a very much bigger conversation.

Posterity and Obsolescence

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Aphra Behn, Charles Dickens, Charles Eliot, Eugene Sue, F.R. Leavis, H.G. Wells, Harold Bloom, Iain Banks, Ian Sales, Margaret Cavendish, Matthew Arnold, Robert Heinlein, Tom Godwin, Walter Scott, William Shakespeare

Two things have struck me forcibly over the last week. One, at the Iain Banks conference, was the insistence that Banks would still be read 100 years from now. The other, on this blog, was Ian Sales insisting that the nature of hard sf has changed, and so a work like ‘The Cold Equations’ or, by implication, any of its contemporaries, is irrelevant to any current discussion of the form. These are two conflicting views of the same issue: canonisation.

The State of the Culture

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Constant Niewenhuy, David Haddock, David Smith, George Orwell, Greg Pickersgill, Iain Banks, Jim Clarke, Joe Norman, John Clute, John Fowles, Jude Roberts, Ken MacLeod, m john harrison, Martyn Colebrook, Moira Martingale, Nic Clear, Nick Hubble, Robert Duggan, Tony Keen, Ursula K. Le Guin

I spent Wednesday at the one-day symposium on Iain Banks’s Culture novels held at Brunel University.

At least, I spent part of the day there. With the best will in the world, Brunel is not an easy place to get to from Folkestone. I had to get the early morning commuter High Speed train, which meant seeing again all those pasty, blurry-eyed, unsmiling faces I used to see every day. From St Pancras, it’s a straightforward trip on the Metropolitan line to Uxbridge (enlivened by Maureen phoning to say that Kate Keen reported swans on the line), but that was when the fun started. The Brunel website suggests it’s a 15-minute walk to the campus, after walking for five minutes I stopped someone to ask the way only to be told it was at least another 20 minutes and I’d be best advised to catch a bus. I’m glad I did, the route was not actually as straightforward as it seemed, I’m sure I would have missed the right turning. And having reached the campus, later than anticipated, I still had to find the venue. The Antonin Artaud building was all I knew. By chance, it was a student open day and there were plenty of student guides about. So I asked one; blank look, never heard of it. I tried another, another blank look, but this one at least had a list on his clipboard. It’s in Zone D, down that way. I went down that way, and lo, eventually found myself in Zone D, and a board listed Antonin Artaud (it just had to be Artaud, didn’t it?) with an arrow pointing left. Only to find another board with an arrow pointing back the way I’d come. Eventually, after following a peculiar zigzag course that I’m sure was far from optimal, I came upon one of those typical fairly featureless university buildings at the other end of a car park, and there, hidden by the trees, I finally saw the name, Antonin Artaud.