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Tag Archives: Terry Bisson

Reprint: Mars

17 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Arthur C Clarke, Ben Bova, C.S. Lewis, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Elisabeth Malartre, George Griffiths, Giovanni Schiaparelli, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, H.G. Wells, Ian McDonald, Ian Watson, John W. Campbell, Kim Stanley Robinson, Paul McAuley, Percival Lowell, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Z. Gallun, Roger Zelazny, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Terry Bisson

Another Cognitive Mapping column. This one, which discusses one of science fiction’s great objects of desire, appeared in Vector 214, November-December 2000: Continue reading →

Counterfactuals

26 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in history of ideas, science fiction

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Jo Walton, Katherine Burdekin, Keith Roberts, Owen Hatherley, Richard J. Evans, Terry Bisson, Ward Moore

Last week, in the Guardian Review, Owen Hatherley wrote this review of Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History by Richard J Evans. It was an interesting review that attacked much of what Evans had said in his book. But Hatherley seemed to go along with Evans in assuming that counterfactuals (and alternate histories, the two were discussed without discrimination) were inherently conservative.

I had to disagree. I wrote the following letter to the Guardian, but since there seems to be no letter column in this week’s Guardian Review, I include it here (note, I kept this short for a better chance of being published, but I could have written on this subject at far, far greater length).

Sir,

In repeating the claim by Richard J. Evans that counterfactuals are inherently, and indeed always, conservative, Owen Hatherley (President Gore? Prime Minister Portillo?, 19 April) is simply wrong.

Yes, many are conservative, but not by any means all of them. Of American counterfactuals concerning the Civil War, for instance, Ward Moore’s classic Bring The Jubilee examines the social and economic devastation wrought by a Southern victory, while Terry Bisson’s Fire On The Mountain presents a utopian state brought about by John Brown’s victory at Harper’s Ferry. Neither could possibly be considered conservative.

As for British counterfactuals about Hitler winning the Second World War, Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night is a powerful condemnation of the Nazi regime, while both Keith Roberts, in ‘Weinachtsabend’, and Jo Walton, in Farthing, present devastating critiques of British willingness to work with the Nazis.

In fact many of the most important works of counterfactual fiction are deliberately and specifically critiques of conservative positions, and are usually meant satirically as attacks upon current contemporary conservatism.

Sincerely,

Reprint: Clouds

08 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Arthur Conan Doyle, Fred Hoyle, H.G. Wells, Jack McDevitt, James Tiptree Jr, Terry Bisson

Time, I think, for another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. I’m doing them in alphabetical rather than chronological order, in case you haven’t noticed, and this one first appeared in Vector 197, January-February 1998. Continue reading →

Reprint: Alternate History

07 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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A.J.P. Taylor, Bruce Sterling, G.K. Chesterton, G.M. Trevelyan, Harold Nicolson, Harry Harrison, Harry Turtledove, Hilaire Belloc, Hilary Bailey, J.C. Squire, Keith Roberts, Kingsley Amis, L. Sprague De Camp, Len Deighton, Lisa Tuttle, MacKinlay Kantor, Martin Cruz Smith, Philip K. Dick, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Harris, Stephen Baxter, Terry Bisson, Vladimir Nabokov, Ward Moore, William Gibson, William L. Shirer, Winston Churchill

Someone asked for more of my Cognitive Mapping columns, so here’s another one. In fact, this is the first one I wrote. It appeared in Vector 186 (December 1995). To be honest, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term ‘alternate history’, one cannot help feeling that grammatically it ought to be ‘alternative’, but usage means we are stuck with it. As a sub-genre, however, it is one of my favourites. Continue reading →

Reprint: How to Change the World

08 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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A.J.P. Taylor, David McCullough, G.M. Trevelyan, Harry Turtledove, Hilary Bailey, J.C. Squire, James M. McPherson, John Keegan, Keith Roberts, Kim Stanley Robinson, MacKinley Kantor, Paul J. McAuley, Philip K. Dick, Robert Cowley, Terry Bisson, Ward Moore, William L. Shirer, Winston Churchill

A few days ago I said I was going to do something further on Hard SF to follow up on my posts of a few days ago. Well, I’m several hundred words into it, but it looks like it might end up being longer than originally imagined, so it might be another few days before it appears. So I started casting around for another reprint to appear here and happened upon this essay about alternate history. It is clearly something I wrote, but I have no memory of writing it, I have no idea who I might have written it for, and I have no record of whether it was actually published anywhere. Continue reading →

Infinity Plus Two

10 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Brian Stableford, Charles Stross, Eric Brown, John Clute, Keith Brooke, Lucius Shepard, Michael Moorcock, Nick Gevers, Paul J. McAuley, Paul Park, Stephen Baxter, Terry Bisson, Vonda McIntyre

And we start with Infinity Plus Two edited by Keith Brooke and Nick Gevers with a (somewhat perfunctory) introduction by John Clute (PS Publishing 2003).

There are many arcane reasons for the particular selection of stories that appear in a reprint anthology. They might represent some measure of ‘best’, they might represent some specific theme, they might be stories rescued from obscurity, they might simply display the individual taste of the editor(s). What they usually do not do is represent the taste of the contributors. But that is the premise of the Infinity Plus anthologies. A bunch of regular contributors to the infinity plus website have been asked to choose one of their stories for the anthology. The result is decidedly curious. There are stories here that are clearly long-time favourites – Vonda McIntyre’s ‘The Genius Freaks’ was first published 30 years ago, in the glory days of Damon Knight’s Orbit series, while Lucius Shepard’s ‘The Arcevoalo’ is nearly 20 years old and I refuse to believe it hasn’t been collected before now. Other contributors, however, seem to have gone pretty much for their most recent story, or for something from relatively small circulation sources. The variation in quality, therefore, is marked.

Paul Park’s ‘Untitled 4’, for instance (first published in Fence in 2000), is a confused and confusing mishmash of ideas in which a writer imprisoned by a peculiar form of totalitarian state edits a couple of stories by the student who betrayed him, and in them finds an account of the real crime he committed. If this is what he has chosen to represent him, one can only assume he hasn’t been producing much of real rigour lately. Adam Roberts, on the other hand, probably doesn’t have that much in the way of short fiction, but this still feels like a poor representation of his work. In an alternate Victorian England where the lands discovered by Lemuel Gulliver were real and Liliputians are used as slaves, a story that starts off being about slavery and industrial exploitation, turns into a story about guilt and betrayal, and ends up as a straightforward tale of invasion, without satisfactorily tying together or concluding any of these strands. Michael Moorcock probably does think that ‘Cheering for the Rockets’ is a good representation of his work, since it brings back Jerry Cornelius and others from the familiar repertory company, though what they do doesn’t actually make much sense and Moorcock seems to believe that using the name Jerry is all that is required in the way of characterisation.

But if these are the weaker stories, there are others which are much stronger. Stephen Baxter, indulging yet again his recent obsession with the mammoth, is not quite at his best with ‘Behold Now Behemoth’: the story of the possible survival of a mammoth as a family pet in Cornwall really needs a better resolution than it is given, but it deals interestingly with a subject that is actually becoming a little too familiar. Much the same can be said of Brian Stableford’s ‘Emptiness’, which takes him back to the theme of vampirism. This is a small-scale piece about a poor, poorly-educated woman in a run-down inner city who, for a few weeks, adopts a vampire baby. It is beautifully observed, but again feels like the story simply ends rather than being resolved.

Both Charles Stross, in ‘Bear Trap’, and Eric Brown, in ‘Dark Calvary’, offer stories that are bursting with ideas and with life. Perhaps too much so, it is hard to keep track of all the novelties that fizz and sparkle in the Stross story, so that in the end you’re not entirely sure whether everything ties together or not. While Brown’s tale of fevered religiosity in a fevered jungle setting builds to an horrific climax that still feels rather a let-down after all the invention that has gone before.

It also does Brown’s stories no favours to place it immediately before Terry Bisson’s ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, which takes the same idea of crucifiction and makes it both funnier and crueller, and more politically telling; and only two stories after ‘Dark Calvary’ is ‘The Arcevoalo’, written by Lucius Shepard when he was capturing the sweaty, foetid, garish romance of the jungle with almost ridiculous ease. These two stories together bring the collection to a powerful, vibrant conclusion.

Though I have to say that perhaps the best story gathered here is ‘The Rift’ by Paul J. McAuley, which is also set in the Amazon jungle, where a disparate (not to say disfunctional) group of climbers are descending a strange canyon where, in an inversion of Conan Doyle’s Lost World, they meet their ancestors. Here is one story that really does know how to resolve itself, even if it does so, appropriately enough, with a cliffhanger.

First published at Livejournal, 30 July 2003.

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