Genre as Ossification

Found in the blogosphere today was this piece by Vera Nazarian lamenting the current state of urban fantasy. David Moles is right to point out that Sturgeon’s Law applies. However, I suspect that there is something more going on. Gary Wolfe talked about this at ICFA a few years back. His basic thesis (as I remember it) was that as a particular type of story telling becomes more popular so the stories produced become more predictable and formulaic – more generic, in fact.

There are reasons for this. Firstly if demand for a certain type of fiction increases then that field will attract more writers of lesser talent, some of whom will be more comfortable writing to a formula. But equally for every Vera who craves fiction that is new and exciting and adventurous there will be at least one (I suspect a lot more) reader who prefers something familiar, comfortable and safe. That’s just the way the business works.

This reminds me of a long conversation I had with Kevin yesterday while we were out walking. Basically I was musing about taxonomies of fandom, and the thesis was that the real divides were not between media and and book fans, or between SF fans and fantasy fans, but rather are based on the type of experience individual fans want from their entertainment. I may write something more about this later.

Alright on the (BASFA) Night

As some of you will know, the Bay Area Science Fiction Association does not just approve minutes of previous meetings, it has to approve them as something. So minutes might be approved as “amusing”, or “full of typos”, or “too long for Barbara to read”, or whatever other silly idea catches the members’ imagination. Well this evening we approved the minutes of last week’s meeting as “alright”. Several hamsters suffered as a result.

OK, I admit it, it was my fault. The members, bless them, mostly seemed to think that it was a funny idea. However, it was pointed out to me that it wasn’t really fair to make jokes at the expense of poor Mr. Scalzi when he could not respond. And seeing as how John was kind enough to offer me space in his blog, I have reciprocated by buying him a membership in BASFA. Now he can get his own back on me.

Before anyone else points it out, membership of BASFA is only $5 for life and beyond, so yes, I am cheap. But it is the thought that counts, right?

Also our glorious President, Trey Haddad, has reminded me that it is a club rule that persons may not be pressed into membership. John therefore has the right to decline to join. I shall be contacting him by email to confirm with him one way or the other, and also to determine the date of his birthday so that we can sell him into slavery auction him as our perverse custom dictates.

Some of you may be thinking that it is a rather long way from Ohio to the Bay Area, and that therefore John might not be able to attend any meetings. However, you never know when he might be around. Doubtless he is always welcome at BayCon. And failing all else we can come to him. Another of our perverse traditions is that we always hold a public meeting at Worldcon, and somehow I think John will be in Denver this year. If he (or anyone else) fancies attending I should remind you of the terms of the Numismatic Responsibility Act (detailed here, scroll down). Hopefully hilarity will ensue.

Fannish Enough?

OK, I have finally got around to answering Mike Glyer’s Challenge Cheryl question. To find out what I think it takes to be “fannish enough”, click here.

As usual, more Challenge Cheryl questions are welcome. You can suggest some here.

Fandom: Good and Bad

Yesterday’s Guardian Book Blog had a post about science fiction fandom. What is more, it actually presented fandom in a positive light. This is in stark contrast to The Independent who, you may remember, did the usual thing of sending someone to a convention in order to make fun of it. If only The Guardian could manage to stop its hate campaign against transgender folks I might actually start having a bit of respect for it again.

On the other side of the equation, Annalee Newitz at io9 has this to say:

WorldCon, which focuses more on books and writers than it does on mainstream media, is still as authentic as it gets when it comes to large gatherings of scifi fans.

Now admittedly she was trying to be nice to Worldcon, recognizing that we have an international focus that larger events such as Dragon*Con and ComicCon do not, but I’m amused by the casual assumption that writers and books have nothing to do with mainstream media. I’d like to take that and shove it up the noses of various people in the UK literary establishment. (And I’ll also add it to the list of explanations as to why I am not fannish enough.)

Whatever Next? Me, Apparently

A few days ago John Scalzi emailed me with an offer to provide space on Whatever for myself and the other Best Fan Writer nominees to show our wares to the world. That was extremely kind of him, and I have taken him up on the offer. I know this is very unlikely, but if there are some of you who read this blog but don’t read Whatever, you’ll need a link to see what I said. My post is here.

Small Victories

The last couple of comments on John Scalzi’s post about the Hugo ebook giveaway have been from people who have just bought Supporting Memberships solely so that they could get the books and vote. Here’s hoping that we get a whole bunch more of them. Of course any moment now Kevin is going to email me to tell me that people on SMOFs are demanding that Supporting Members be stripped of their voting rights to stop this sort of thing happening in the future. Can’t have people who are “not part of our community” voting now, can we? I mean, good grief, some of them might be science fiction fans, and that would never do. Thankfully there are way too many sensible people around for these sorts of ideas to have much influence any more.

ICFA Continues

This morning saw a session on “sexualities” that had two trans-related papers, both of which were actually about gender bending and gender acquisition rather than about actual trans people. This was kind of disappointing because one of them was given by an expert on Brazilian SF.

The next session was the traditional panel run by Robin Reid and her Secret Slash Cabal, and it produced three superb papers. Vera Cuntz (my room mate for the con) provided an insightful and amusing paper about twins and incest in Harry Potter which actually made me want to go and read Rowling. Barbara Lucas entertained us all with stories about a goth-based perfume company, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, and the associated fan community. And Eden Lee Lacker provided a masterly critique of the hideously inept FanLib.com project. I suggested that they go off and write a paper about “World Enough and Time” and associated controversies, and I’m looking forward to the result next year.

The Guest Scholar this year is Roger Luckhurst and his splendid speech introduced me to the idea of science fictional photography. This year’s conference is supposedly about “the sublime”, which is a posh was of saying “sensawunda”, and yes of course it is possible to attempt to photograph the sublime. Also these days we have photoshop. If you think this is nonsense, go check out the work of Andreas Gursky.

There are far more sessions available than any one person can attend, so please switch now to Karen Burnham who has an entirely different set of panels to talk about.

Hello Ireland

Yes, it is St. Paddy’s Day once more. The green beer will doubtless be flowing in pubs around the world. Having seen what passes for “Irishness” in Australia and America, I’m rather relieved that St. David’s Day doesn’t get the same treatment. However, not everyone goes in for the Celtic Cuteness thing. John Scalzi does a pretty good job of representing Irish culture. In a similar but related vein, here are a few things he missed.
Continue reading

Busy, Busy, Busy

Work, jet-lag, weekend conference to attend, SF in SF reading, BASFA, off to ICFA. And of that wasn’t enough, there’s the cricket (thank you, Auckland, for helping Jimmy Anderson get match fit), the rugby (Welsh Grand Slam on the way?), and the start of the new Formula 1 season. I need a clone.

Matching Terry

You’ve probably all heard about this by now, but just in case… Terry Pratchett has announced he is making a $1m donation to Alzheimer’s research. Various people in fandom are now suggesting that if we all donated a dollar, or a pound, or whatever, then we could quickly match his donation. Sounds like a good idea to me (and hopefully it will also cheer up Terry). Go ye forth and donate.

Finnish Magic

The ability of my Finnish friends to raise sponsorship money for their conventions continues to astound me. Today Tero reports that this year’s Finncon has received a grant of €5,000 (about $7,500 at today’s ludicrously favorable rates) from government cultural funds. Maybe the Finns just like SF, but I have a sneaking suspicion we could do this in other countries too if only we knew how.

Teddy Awards

Part and parcel of running SFAW is that I have to keep an eye on news reports from around the world. So it was that I discovered that at Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, they have a special set of awards for films with LGBT content. And lo, they are called the Teddy Awards.

I can’t see anything on the web site that explains the origin of the name, and the trophy is in the form of a bear (Berlin has an ongoing relationship with the animal). But I’m going to assume that the awards are named after someone. Yay! Go Teddy!

Two Worlds

It is always interesting to see how one’s efforts are received around the blogosphere. Science Fiction Awards Watch, which Kevin and I launched last year, has been trucking along steadily for some time now. It rarely attracts a lot of attention, but every so often someone mentions it. With professional writers it is generally when we’ve turned up some award that they didn’t know they’d won, which is why today John Scalzi kindly described us as “increasingly-indispensable”. That should be worth a pile of referrals. As for fandom, outrage is often the order of the day. Yesterday, for example, we had the temerity to complain that Hugo voters had been “very unimaginative” in their choice of Best Professional Artist nominees. Oh Noez! Oh Horror! Cue Mike Glyer who has somehow managed to interpret that as us accusing the Hugo voters of corruption. Quite. And when the case comes to court we are going to ask for a dozen cases of genocide, treason, armed robbery and failure to enjoy the right episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be taken into consideration, your honor.

Life Imitates Art

In the second Barmy Cats story (which I hope Chris is going to publish soon) I cracked a joke about Barmy going to the Worldcon fanzine lounge and discovering that all of the fanzines came as podcasts and vidcasts. It appears that day isn’t far off.

How the Other Half Thinks

I’m starting to enjoy io9. Much of what they produce is about movies and the like so not very interesting to me, but every so often I get a glimpse of how that large group of people who consider themselves science fiction fans, but are not members of “fandom” think. Today’s little gem goes like this:

Here’s another one of the amazing “facts” you’ll get from Discover: apparently TRUE science fiction fans don’t like the epithet “scifi” and prefer the abbreviation “SF” (Fact #6). Um, yeah. There are like ten guys with giant beards who have never read anything written past 1960 who care about that distinction. The rest of us just like good writing, and we don’t care if it’s labeled scifi or SF or science fiction or speculative whoozit or floop or Jimmy Jam Jam. Seriously, people, we’re not an oppressed group; we don’t need a special, PC label for our textual preferences, OK?

Beautiful.

More ranting about a rather silly article in Discover magazine here.