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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Hustvedt and Tiptree

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James Tiptree Jr, Julie Phillips, Robert Silverberg, Siri Hustvedt, Ursula K. Le Guin

I put Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World down late last year. I was enjoying it, but I was overloaded with other things I had to do and reading for pleasure came rather low on the pecking order. This morning I picked it up again; still too much else to do, but what the hell. And practically the first thing I read is a passage about James Tiptree.

She outlines the basic story we all know: how no-one met Tiptree, how Silverberg said the work was ineluctably masculine, the appearance of Raccoona Sheldon, etc. Then we come to this bit:

What interested her was not simply substituting a man’s name for a woman’s. That was boring. No, she pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: ‘Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.’

Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. ‘When you take on a male persona, something happens.’

When I asked what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled, ‘You get to be the father.’

… She told me that in 1987 Tiptree shot her husband and then killed herself. Mother said Sheldon couldn’t live without her man — not her husband, obviously, but the man inside her — and she believed that’s why she exploded into violence.

Two things struck me about this passage.

First, although this analysis of Tiptree’s suicide doesn’t conform to the story in Julie Phillips’s biography, doesn’t take into account the husband’s illness or her own, or mention that this was all a decade after her identity was revealed, yet there is something that rings true about it. Le Guin was right that there was something in Tiptree’s writing that Raccoona Sheldon’s lacked, and after Tiptree’s identity was revealed, Tiptree’s writing lacked it also. To my mind, ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’, ‘The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats’ and Raccoona Sheldon’s ‘The Screwfly Solution’, which came out around the time of the revelation, were the last really significant things she wrote. The stories that came later, and all of the novels, were distinctly minor affairs when compared to the work that appeared when Tiptree was safely behind her mask.

The Encyclopedia says that the revelation killed Tiptree. That’s not strictly true, it didn’t even stop her writing; but it stopped her being Tiptree, and that took something out of the writing. And for that, Hustvedt’s point about getting to ‘be the father’, works as well as any. It may not be that she couldn’t live without the man inside her, though she certainly went into decline without him; but it is surely the case that she couldn’t write to that high and wonderful standard without him.

The second thing is that Hustvedt’s novel tells of a woman artist who calls herself Harry, and whose work is exhibited as by a succession of male front men. All the time I was reading this far I was asking myself: does she know about Tiptree. It seems to me that there is a lot of James Tiptree in Harry.

Well, now it seems I have my answer.

Reprint: The Golden Transcendence

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Isaac Asimov, John C. Wright, Olaf Stapledon, Roger Corman, Ursula K. Le Guin

Given the furore about the latest Hugo list, I thought I would post here my one and only review of a book by John C. Wright. The review appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction 188, April 2004.

Borderlands

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Andrew Crumey, Ann Leckie, Brian McHale, Christopher Priest, David Hebblethwaite, Hugh Howie, Hugo Gernsback, Ian Sales, J.M. Sidorova, James Joyce, John Scalzi, Karen Joy Fowler, Kate Atkinson, Keith Ridgway, Laurence Sterne, Marcel Theroux, nina allan, Paul McAuley, Ruth Ozeki, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Pynchon, Tom McCarthy, Tom Robbins, Tony Ballantyne, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson

It never goes away, does it? It’s two years now since I put into words (or, perhaps more precisely, into a word), some of my enduring dissatisfactions with science fiction. The word was ‘exhaustion’. And the debate I generated then still rumbles on. It takes other forms, of course, but at heart Nina Allan, in this excellent blog post, in turn referencing this excellent blog post by David Hebblethwaite, is making much the same point: science fiction is losing interest in the new.

Reprint: Meet The President

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Garry Kilworth, Ursula K. Le Guin, Zadie Smith

This is the column I wrote about Zadie Smith’s short story from the New Yorker. The column first appeared in Vector 273, Autumn 2013.

Reprint: A Doubled Life

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Alice B. Sheldon, Barry Malzberg, David Gerrold, Harlan Ellison, James Tiptree Jr, Jeffrey D. Smith, Joanna Russ, Julie Phillips, Mary Hastings Bradley, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Raccoona Sheldon, Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips was one of the finest literary biographies it has been my pleasure to read. Naturally, Interzone decided it should be appreciated with a double review, so Maureen Kincaid Speller and I agreed to split the job between us. First published in Interzone 205, August 2006, Maureen’s review concentrated on the life, while mine concentrated on the career (though there were inevitable overlaps). You can read Maureen’s review here at Paperknife, while mine follows the cut.

Elsewhere

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Arthur C. Clarke Award, Charles Stross, Jan Morris, Ursula K. Le Guin

The old and long defunct Vector website has now been archived, which means that a number of pieces are now accessible again. The whole gives a fascinating glimpse of the sf world a decade ago, and there are some good essays and reviews there. There also happen to be a few of my pieces, as follows:

Founded on the Shambles – an essay about Ursula Le Guin’s wonderful story, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, that is also the direct precursor of my recent ‘In Short’ columns.

Hav by Jan Morris – a review of an extraordinary fantasy.

Accelerando by Charles Stross – a review of what is possibly one of the key texts of early 21st century sf.

Twenty Years After – a piece about the first 20 years of the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Reprint: Conformity

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Bruce Sterling, Dean Ing, E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Hand, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Ian Watson, Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, John Brunner, Margaret Atwood, Michael Marshall Smith, R.A. Lafferty, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Thomas Jefferson, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Woody Allen

Here is another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one first appeared in Vector 205 (May-June 1999).

Analysis

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Christopher Priest, Connie Willis, David Hartwell, James Morrow, John Banville, John Clute, Kathryn Cramer, Kathryn Morrow, Pamela Zoline, Simon R. Green, Tom Godwin, Tony Daniel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vernor Vinge, Wyn Wachhorst, Yevgeny Zamiatin

I had always planned to end my run of daily posts on this blog on my birthday, but illness meant shifting it a day earlier.

I had a couple of things in mind when I started this exercise back at the beginning of August. The first and simplest reason was that I have, over the years, produced an awful lot of material that has only ever appeared in print media. So I thought it would be useful, for my purposes as much as anything, to start putting in online. It’s a start only. I’ve now put online a reasonable if random selection of reviews, articles, columns and interviews that have appeared in Vector, New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, various fanzines and convention publications over the last 14 years. It’s not everything from that period by any means, and I’ll periodically put up others over the next weeks and months, I just don’t intend to do it on such an intensive basis. As for earlier material: I’d like to do the same for that, but in those cases it will require scanning or retyping the pieces, and at the moment I have far too many other things on my mind.

The second reason was to revitalise the blog. I’ve never been systematic in putting pieces up here. At times, months can pass between posts. My intentions for the blog have always been low-key, but I had never intended such neglect. So I thought this would give me a regular pattern of posting for a while, with other reprintings waiting in the wings to sustain a more regular presence. And that worked, rather better than expected. Regular traffic on the blog has increased (a side effect, but welcome), and it has also inspired more original pieces from me than I think I’ve managed in any similar period for a long time.

So far, so good, therefore. But then …

Reprint: Starlight 2

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Angelica Gorodischer, Carter Scholz, David Langford, Ellen Kushner, Esther M. Friesner, Geoffrey Landis, Jonathan Lethem, M. Shayne Bell, Martha Soukup, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Raphael Carter, Robert Charles Wilson, Susanna Clarke, Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin

I thought at the time, and still think, that Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s Starlight  was one of those anthology series, like Universe or New Dimensions, that the genre truly needs. Unfortunately, it lasted only three issues, which is our loss. This was one of the first reviews I did for The New York Review of Science Fiction. It appeared in issue 126, February 1999.