Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread, 4/12/2015

22522805I listened to an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro over at Wired with the title “Why Are So Many People Snobby About Fantasy Fiction?” After hearing what Ishiguro had to say I decided to check out reviews for his new novel, The Buried Giant, and noticed it was $5.99 in the Kindle version. So of course I bought it.

I’m not sure if I’ll be satisfied. The premise somewhat reminds me of Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Arete, though obviously most of the major elements differ. I don’t know if I’ll get to reading The Buried Giant anytime soon, as I’m behind on various projects relating to my real professional life and will be rather busy for a while. Additionally, I have other books that I’d like to get through, such as Inventing the Individual, a work that I’m pretty sure I’m not going to much like if the first 20% or so is a guide. The author basically asserts a lot of things about the antique past with support from literary references that I’m often not personally deeply knowledgeable about (to be clear, there are factual issues I know about, such as comparisons between Greeks and Romans, where I think the author is basically wrong in eliding important distinctions among these cultures before Christianity). Additionally, the conclusions grate a bit on my priors. I really dislike works of the form, such as “How Love was Invented in 13th Century Provence.” Giving something a label does not something make (i.e., defensible to say love as we understand it). But I am the type of person who reads things he disagrees with, because new arguments are often informative. So I’ll finish it.

In other news, I’ve been using SciReader for a while now and I like it quite a lot. It’s a nice complement to PubChase. For nonacademic readers PubChase is pretty handy for trying to locate copies of PDFs that you can access. If you are a regularly reader of this weblog you should try them out.

One of the major ways I find scientific literature is Twitter (which SciReader has a pretty tight integration with right now). My old rule-of-thumb was that I’d maintain a 10:1 follower-to-follow ratio. I’m nearing 6,000 followers (thanks The New York Times, sort of!), and until recently I kept the follow count to around ~300. The past few days though I’ve been following people who look interesting, and will continue to do so until I hit 600. Mostly I follow individuals who work in genomics and evolution, because when it comes to “big Twitter” those all get re-tweeted anyhow if they are interesting. But I’m curious if readers have particular suggestions for whom I should follow. In particular, data Tweeters like Conrad Hackett, I really appreciate. I’m also curious about scholars in fields like history, philosophy, and economics. Also, please note that I’m looking for Twitter users who actually post somewhat frequently.

Going back to fantasy and science fiction, I have no idea why the haters hate. One of my pet theories is that less intelligent liberal arts majors are not very intellectually curious outside of the prosaic. They’re just not creative types, and don’t have the requisite imagination to process speculative fiction. But that’s probably not generous (in any case, some serious hard science fiction writers, such as Greg Bear and C. J. Cherryh, come out of liberal arts backgrounds), not to mention self-serving. Though I do admit that that a lot of science fiction and fantasy is crap, that’s true of fiction more generally. For some reason the crap sticks to the whole genre. Or genres, as the same disdain is aimed at mysteries or romance novels, neither of which I care for, but neither of which I go out of my way to dismiss since I don’t read them. My identity isn’t bound up in the idea of the Book and Literature.

downloadSpeaking of genre, there’s a whole dust-up about the Hugo Awards. George R. R. Martin has weighed in. I don’t know the details, very well, and honestly I don’t care that much. But it strikes me that science fiction and fantasy is just too big of a world now to have a coherent “community” anymore. That being said, I am interested in this idea that science fiction and fantasy need to broaden their perspectives. A few years ago I read Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon, because the author made the standard identity politics assertions about his ethnicity and class, as if anyone should care. As it happens, Throne of the Crescent Moon is just like standard fantasy set in quasi-European settings, except it uses Islamicate motifs as source material instead of Northern European ones. I don’t mind that personally, and found it somewhat interesting. But, I don’t think Ahmed’s ethnicity or class really mattered at all fundamentally, aside from the fact that as an Arab he decided to draw on his ancestral cultural background to build his world. Ursula K. Le Guin and Judith Tarr for example have both produced works where the setting is genuinely unfamiliar and exotic, not simply a Tolkien-in-brownface-and-turban.

In the end I think we’re probably seeing the end of the Hugo Awards as something relevant (see Dimensions of Science Fiction for a sociological analysis of the science fiction community in the 1960s to 1980s based on survey data) . But, hopefully we’ll also start to see the rise of a genuinely diverse set of voices which aren’t always beholden to the gatekeepers of traditional publishing houses (see Wool). The fact is though that human preferences are probably somewhat baked into the cake of our cognitive hardware, for now, will limit how diversely the flowers will bloom. Stories need to be only moderately counter-intuitive, otherwise readers start to lose the ability to actually track the narrative due to their confusion. This probably limits the range of stories which are widely read.

Posted in Uncategorized

Comments are closed.