The history, it's crushing me

Brace yourselves: this post contains footnotes and a graph!

I may be a little bit slow, but I'd like to talk today about NPR's Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books, which was announced on August 11. This was a popularity contest: first, they asked readers to nominate their favourite science fiction and fantasy books. Then, with the help of a panel of three experts, they narrowed the list of nominees to a few hundred books. Finally, they asked people to vote.

I'm just going to get this out of the way before I go any further: there are a lot of really great books on that list. You could do worse than use that list to guide your science fiction and fantasy reading. Of course, I think you could do a lot better, but that basically just means it's a list on the internet, right?

Here are four things I could complain about, but which I'm going to (mostly) skip. 1: The gender balance isn't good -- by my count, only 15 of the 100 entries were written by women. 2: Is Jules Verne really the only non-English, non-American writer on the list? 3: Why do we always group science fiction and fantasy together on lists like this? 4: The decision to allow series to count as one entry, while perhaps practical, has produced some bizarre results. Do all 14 books of The Vorkosigan Saga deserve to sit at #58? What about the 33 books of The Xanth Series at #99?

Instead of talking about all that stuff, I'd like to focus on the thing that I first noticed: the science fiction portion of the list seems to be dominated by older books, whereas the fantasy portion is full of newer stuff. I checked my gut feeling by finding the year of first publication for each of the entries in the list. I tried to include every book in a series written by the original author (1), and I split them up into fantasy and science fiction as best I could (2).

I ended up with 276 books, 177 of them fantasy and the remaining 99 science fiction. Here's a graph (I know! A graph!) showing the number of books published per decade since the 1920s (3) in each category:

See what I mean? Only 10 of the science fiction novels on the list were written in the last decade (that's roughly 10%), whereas 74 of the fantasy novels (that's 42%) were written since 2000. The most popular decade for science fiction novels in this list was the 1990s, although it's interesting to note that if you exclude sequels, the most popular decade for science fiction becomes the 1960s. Even excluding sequels, the 2000s remain the most popular decade for fantasy in this list.

I suppose this probably isn't surprising, although it does make a little sad. We do seem to be in a bit of a heyday for fantasy (4), and we do seem to constantly hear about science fiction sales being in decline. I could spend a while speculating on the reasons why older science fiction books dominated this survey -- aging readership? A decline in visibility on bookstore shelves? A more demanding audience? -- but I'm not sure how useful that would be. 

It is interesting to ponder, though, whether this is a result of a decline in the accessibility of science fiction to the average reader. That's certainly something I worry about, and it's perhaps suggestive that two of the five original (non-sequel) science fiction novels in the list that were written post-2000 are quite mainstream (The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger).

Instead of teeth-gnashing, though, I want to try making a suggestion: next time you're nominating or voting for a list like this, when you're reminding yourself to think of female writers and writers from places other than England and America, give a bit of though to novels that were written in the last decade. And if you're planning to collate a list like this, why not restrict it to novels written after 1990? Because we all know that Fahrenheit 451 and Stranger in a Strange Land are worth reading by now, right?

What would you put in your post-1990 Top 10?

I'm pretty sure I'll be back here soon -- by my reckoning, the 2011 Hugo Award winners are due to be announced in about 7 hours!
 
(1) That means none of the Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson Dune books, no Brandon Sanderson Wheel of Time, no Eoin Colfer Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and none of the various Foundation spin-offs.

(2) We could probably argue the toss on a few of these. Where I didn't know, or wasn't sure, I tried to use the Wikipedia entry for a book (or series) as a guide.

(3) There were five books in the list published prior to 1920, all of the science fiction. The first was Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in 1818.

(4) It's worth nothing here that young adult books -- Twilight, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, His Dark Materials -- were specifically excluded from this survey. It's just a guess, and maybe a pessimistic one, but if they'd been included I suspect they would have been more likely to nudge SF books out of the top hundred, rather than fantasy ones.

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, by Daniel Solis

Last time I said I was going to talk about something a little bit different: a story-telling game by Daniel Solis called Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I'm just going to jump to the end and tell you now why I want to talk about: because it's really, really lovely.

There are other reasons why I think it is worth discussing here. For a start, I really like playing games, and I'm sure that preparing plots and characters for them has an impact on the way I write. The connection between Do and writing stories is particularly strong -- 'story-telling game' is a very accurate descriptor. I'm also hoping I can introduce Do to people who might not ordinarily hear about something like this. But really, I just want to talk about it because it's lovely.

Let me start with a picture I totally stole from Daniel Solis' website:

Why am I showing it to you? I'm showing it to you because the whole book looks like this. Beautiful illustrations of flying Pilgrims and letters falling from the sky and giant fish towing entire planets. The art totally captures the happily meddlesome whimsy that I love so much about this game. It's just an absolute joy to flip through.

So what's the premise? In all of the worlds floating in the sky, whenever people find themselves in trouble that they just can't sort out, they write a letter. Maybe they hide the letter somewhere secret, or tie it to a shooting star, or give it to a passing sparrow, but somehow it finds its way to the Flying Temple at the centre of the universe. These letters are given to young monks-in-training, leaving the Temple on their big coming-of-age pilgrimage.

The Pilgrims fly out into the worlds, and try to solve all of these problems. Thing is, Pilgrims are always getting into trouble. They can't help it; it's in their nature to drop out of the sky and starting messing around with things. With the best of intentions, of course, but we all know where that leads! Sometimes they resolve the situation to everyone's satisfaction (the game calls this a parades ending), sometimes they're run out of town by the angry villagers (a pitchforks ending). No matter what, they try to leave each world a better place.

See what I mean? The premise of Do just makes me want to hug it.

To play Do, you start with a Letter (the book includes sixteen to get you going). This Letter describes the problem your Pilgrims are trying to solve, at least as it's seen by the letter-writer. It comes with a list of ten to thirty goal words; if you manage to include all of them in the story you write, you get a parades ending. If you don't manage to use them all by the end of the game, it's pitchforks for you.

Each turn, you draw stones from a bag to tell you whether you can write a sentence about your Pilgrim helping someone, or about getting herself out of trouble. The other players at the table might also get a chance to describe your Pilgrim getting herself into trouble. The stones you draw also tell you whether you're able to include one of the goal words from the Letter in your sentence. Once one player collects eight or more stones, the game ends. That's basically it -- the rules aren't complicated, and they certainly aren't competitive. This is a collaborative experience.

Each player creates their own Pilgrim. Pilgrims have two names, like Pilgrim Bouncing Trumpet or Pilgrim Purple Abacus. The first describes how your Pilgrim gets into trouble (Pilgrim Bouncing Trumpet gets in trouble by being over-enthusiastic), and the second how your Pilgrim helps people (Pilgrim Bouncing Trumpet helps by rallying the people to action). As you respond to Letters, your Pilgrim will grow, changing either the way she gets into trouble, or the way she helps people. Eventually, she'll make a decision about her Destiny: does she stay in the world, or return to the Temple as a full-fledged monk?

Underneath all of this loveliness, I think it's fair to say that Do is actually a really great tool for teaching people about writing stories. Obviously you're not going produce wonderful pieces of polished prose playing Do, but there's a lot of great stuff here about coming-of-age stories, about character growth, about the inventive interpretation of a premise to create an engaging story. It seems to me like exactly the sort of game you'd want to be playing with your kids. Or, really, with anyone who can sit still long enough!

There's so much more I could say -- Do, for example, was a real success of the patronage funding model, raising a surprising amount of money from fans (like me) to pay for its publication. One of the results of that process was The Book of Letters, which is a supplement consisting of a whole bundle (a sack, you might say) of Letters written by the people who backed the game during its funding drive. It's a great little resource, and I expect that you'll see Letters written by fans popping up all over the internet.

In fact, I think I might try my hand at writing one right now.

Hugos: it's all over but the shouting

Just a quick update today. The voting deadline for this year's Hugo Awards was yesterday. The hard reading work is done; now we wait until August 20th to find out who won. Over on his livejournal, Nicholas Whyte has gone to the trouble of collecting together the voting intentions of a whole bunch of bloggers (myself included). I recommend popping over to take a look; it's pretty interesting. Most of the categories have clear front-runners, and they're generally the ones I picked. I wonder if they'll go on to win?

I'm going to take advantage of Nicholas' work to read up on some of the lists that differed wildly from my own. That should be a fun exercise. 

I'm also reminded that although I've spoken separately about each of the Best Novel nominees I read, I haven't discussed them together. My final vote was: 1) The Dervish House, 2) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 3) Feed, 4) No Award. I did read Cryoburn, but I didn't get to Blackout/All Clear before the voting deadline. With that caveat, my feeling is that The Dervish House and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms were clearly superior to the other nominees. I'd be happy if either of those books won.

And if you're interested, at least at the time of writing the vast majority of the nominees in the shorter fiction categories (Novella, Novelette, Short Story) are available online, so you can still have a read and see what you think.

With any luck I'll be back later this week, with something a little different. I'm planning to talk about Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, a storytelling game by Daniel Solis. Here's a sneak peak: I think it's cool!

I am powerless to resist your marketing-fu (also: Zoo City)

Why no post last week? Thank you for asking! The boring reason is that I was flat out busy, but the marginally more interesting reason was that I was reading outside the genre. I did briefly consider putting together a post about the ways in which The Plague [1947] by Albert Camus is a science fiction novel. I think you could make a fairly convincing argument, but I'm not sure if there's anything to be learned from it. Maybe I'll keep that one in my back pocket for later.

I was reading the Popular Penguins version of The Plague. This series has really plain covers, and is printed on low-quality paper, but the books are very cheap (by Australian standards). That got me thinking about marketing. I do about half of my book shopping online, and half in bookstores (high five, Minotaur in Melbourne, and Galaxy Bookshop in Sydney!). Mostly I go looking for particular things, but I do sometimes browse, in the interests of broadening my horizons a little. So what makes me grab a book off the bookshelf, and what tips me over into buying it?

For a start, I am completely powerless to resist picking up a book with a Stephan Martiniere cover. I don't always buy it (in fact, sometimes I think to myself "oh-ho-ho no, you're not going to trick me so easily!"), but I'm sure I read somewhere that the odds of a book purchase increase dramatically if the book is lifted off the shelf.

Once I've picked it up, though, I'm really not sure what tips me over into the purchase. I basically ignore cover quotes, unless they're written by somebody whose work I really (really) like. And honestly, blurbs rarely make a book sound good. A lot of the time they make it sound like a collection of badly glommed-together cliches.

Which brings me, I suppose, to gimmicks. I've recently picked up a few books published by Angry Robot Books: Zoo City [2010] by Lauren Beukes, Servant of the Underworld [2010], and Harbinger of the Storm [2011], both by Aliette de Bodard. I've noticed they have this little box on the top right of their back covers, entitled "FILE UNDER". It lists the genre (Zoo City: urban fantasy, Servant of the Underworld and Harbinger of the Storm: fantasy), and four little dot points about things in the book. It's hard to explain, so I'll just provide the lists for the two books: 

Servant of the Underworld: Aztec mystery, locked room, human sacrifice, the dead walk! 

Harbinger of the Storm: Aztec mystery, nation in chaos, magical overlord, flesh-eating demons! 

Zoo City: gangster shamen, symbiotic familiars, teen star missing, everything breaks.

I'm very willing to concede that I'm a total sucker, but I think this is marketing genius. Any one of those phrases would probably make me think "hey, that sounds kind of cool". Put four of them in a list like that, and I just have to know how the author is going to make them fit together. Even when, if I think about it objectively, the phrases mostly seem pretty cheesy ("everything breaks"?!). It wouldn't particularly surprise me if lots of readers of science fiction and fantasy responded the same way; I think we're often quite susceptible to the cool-sounding hook.

We'll see how I go, but I may come back and say a few words about Zoo City, which I finished off a few weeks ago. It's been getting a lot of good press -- for a start, it won the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The short version of my review is this: if you like urban fantasy, even just a bit, you should read it. It's got all the things you like in that (sub-)genre, including a tough, smart protagonist with an excellent name. The setting -- largely, the slums of South Africa -- is engagingly different, and Beukes' crisp, somewhat journalistic writing style lends the whole thing an air of believability that urban fantasy often lacks. This doesn't read like a television show or movie, it reads like real life.

Strangely, the "FILE UNDER" list for Zoo City differs between my copy of the book and the Angry Robot website. On the website, it reads: black magic noir, pale crocodile, spirit guardians, lost stars. Having now read the book, I actually like that list better, although it does perhaps seem a little more genre-heavy than the one that appeared in print. "Pale crocodile", while completely appropriate, is a particularly interesting choice. I'd love to speak to the person who picked that one, and ask her why.

Woah, woah, we're half way there

Remember January? Everything was a different shape then. My terribly short career as a geophysicist was just coming to an end, and I lived in a different city to the one I live in now. Crazy times. It's totally fair enough, then, if you've forgotten that I posted in January about wanting to read more novel-length genre fiction written by women. I had noticed, you see, that my bookshelves were completely dominated by men, and I couldn't think of any good reason why that should be the case.

I've no idea what caused that gender imbalance in my reading, which I suppose means that unconscious bias was a very real possibility. So, I figured that maybe if I made an effort to hunt out genre fiction written by women I could train myself out of a bad habit. The year is half over now, and I thought it might be interesting to reflect on how that's all worked out so far.

Here's the short version: great!

The longer version is a bit trickier. In fact, I've been trying for a little while to work out what to say in this post that isn't just a statement of the screamingly obvious. The task (summarise my feelings on the genre fiction written by women that I read this year) sort of invites me to make generalisations ("genre fiction written by women is like this…" or "genre fiction written by women differs from genre fiction written by men in these ways…").

But the books written by women I've read this year include hard SF, sociological SF, a time travel comedy, high fantasy, urban fantasy, space opera, and a zombie thriller. All sorts of stuff. Just about the only generalisation I feel I can make is that the instance of female protagonists is higher than you'd find in a random sampling of genre fiction I've read over the last few years. That's not a particularly insightful observation, though, and anyway I think we can all agree that more female protagonists can only be a good thing.

I feel like everything I (should?) need to say is contained in the following: I've read thirteen novels this year. One was kind of crappy, three were solidly average, and I really enjoyed the remaining nine. Ten of them were written by women. Three of them -- To Say Nothing of the Dog [1997] by Connie Willis, Slow River [1995] by Nicola Griffith, and The Dervish House [2010] by Ian McDonald -- were fantastic, and I'd recommend them enthusiastically even to people who don't typically read SF.

Has this exercise changed my reading (and purchasing) habits? I suppose time will tell, but I suspect (and hope) the answer is a resounding yes. If nothing else, two authors have been added to my automatic-purchase list: Elizabeth Bear and N. K. Jemisin. I'm very keen to read more by Nicola Griffith, Lauren Beukes and Nancy Kress. And soon I'm going to have to make a difficult decision: do I read Justina Robson's Natural History [2003] or Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang [1992] next?

So there you have it. If there's a lesson in my experience so far this year, it's that there's a lot of great genre fiction being written by women, and we should all be reading and talking about it. And surely that's as obvious as something that's very obvious indeed.

On the other hand...

Last time, I was talking about my love for stories that are dense with ideas. I said, amongst other things, this:

There is joy in a tightly focussed story, which explores a small number (one?) of characters, or a situation, or a single idea in depth. But those aren't the stories that make me want to rush out and write.

And that immediately made me think of Cosmicomics [1965, 1968 in English] by Italo Calvino. It's a book of short stories, each based around a single piece of science, and I think they're the very definition of charming. They may not make me want to write, but they do make me want to hug myself happily and smile at strangers.

If you've never read Cosmicomics, I really think you should.

You, ma'am, are an inspiration

Sometimes I get this itchy, unsettled feeling. I have trouble sleeping, and I find it difficult to focus on any task that requires my full attention (in other words: I suck at my job for a little while). This is a sure-fire sign that I've been neglecting my imagination, and I need to make something, as soon as possible. Playing around with Lego helps, but something more substantial -- a comic or a story -- is much better.

I also sometimes get this feeling when I'm reading. Particular books bring it on. It's happening right now, with Chill [2010] by Elizabeth Bear. Which isn't a big surprise; I got the feeling when I was reading Dust [2007], the previous book in the series, too. This time, though, I've been thinking about what it is specifically that Chill is doing that inspires me to want to make something.

Maybe you haven't read Chill, so here are some other books that did the same thing for me, in the hope that you'll be familiar with one or two of them: The Dervish House [2010] by Ian McDonald, The Scar [2002] by China Mieville, Singularity Sky [2003] by Charles Stross, The Diamond Age [1995] by Neal Stephenson, and METAtropolis [2008] edited by John Scalzi, with stories by Scalzi, Jay Lake, Elizabeth Bear, Karl Schroeder and Tobias Buckell.

I think it might be density of ideas. Reading each of those books (well, I listened to METAtropolis) I felt like I was running to keep up with a huge array of concepts, or characters, and all of their implications and connections and complex interactions. I like that feeling. It's a sort of breathless excitement, like the whole edifice requires my focussed attention, otherwise it will rush ahead without me and I'll stop understanding what's happening. Or maybe it isn't that, maybe it's that those books are so crammed full of ideas that I want to chase after every one of them, even when the narrative is driving me in a particular direction.

There is joy in a tightly focussed story, which explores a small number (one?) of characters, or a situation, or a single idea in depth. But those aren't the stories that make me want to rush out and write. I wonder if this sort of idea-dense writing is a carefully cultivated style for those writers, or if it just seems natural to them to throw so much stuff in? How hard is it to keep everything under control? I remember the first Ian McDonald novel I read, Necroville [1994], just left me confused, and no other book by Charles Stross has excited me quite the same way as Singularity Sky did (although I've liked a number of them a lot).

So have you read any of the books in my little list up there? Can you see connections that I've completely missed? And (this is my favourite question) can you recommend books that you think might give me this feeling again?