Asking the Wrong Questions

A new Geoff Ryman novel! Nearly twenty years after his last one, I think we can be forgiven for having assumed that this impossible-to-pin-down author—winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for Air , originator of the Mundane SF manifesto, creator of one of the first hypertext novels with 253 , and one of the darkest Wizard of Oz retelling with Was , the man who was once synonymous with The Child Garden 's lesbian polar bears—had said all he wanted to say. And yet what's most striking, when one starts to read HIM , is how much of a piece it feels with 2006's The King's Last Song . Like that novel, it is a lightly-fantasized, fictionalized retelling of the life of a major historical figure. It's as if no time at all had passed between the two novels—though perhaps the delay can be accounted for by the difference in subject matter, which might have made Western publishers hesitant. This time around, Ryman's focus is not a major figure in Cambodian history, but Chri...

Following a similar experiment a couple of years ago, the folks at Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine offered a copy of their most recent issue to anyone willing to blog about it, and, after taking a look at the issue's table of contents, I happily took them up on their offer. With stories by Geoff Ryman, Stephen King, M. Rickert, Robert Reed and several others, this seemed like a not-to-be-missed entry in the magazine's history, and I was looking forward to writing an exuberant piece about some top-notch short fiction. Sadly, the further I got into the October/November issue, the less I found to be excited about. The big names have turned up, to be sure, but only one of them has delivered on the level I'd expected. Last time I wrote about a F&SF giveaway issue, I complained about the magazine's nonfiction content, and specifically its datedness. What was the point, I asked, of reviewing Ian McDonald's River of Gods months after it had been nominated ...

Ellen Kushner conveys a message from Geoff Ryman in which he offers his thoughts about the reasons for the gender imbalance on this year's Hugo ballot : SF is driven by an underlying dream, and part of that dream is profoundly hostile to domesticity, which is traditionally assigned to women. It is hostile to staying at home on Earth. It dreams, Peter Pan-like, of magic flights to a Neverneverland in the stars, full of pirates and mermaids and Indians. It is largely a land of and for Boys. Women love it too, perhaps because they also want to escape domesticity. These days women's place in fantasy is not as Wendy. Women get to be guys now. They have a place in the SF dream, most usually toting guns or swords. I guess it's fun for women to shoot people , and men certainly feel more at home with women who act like the rest of their buddies. I would say that the dream is hostile to the traditional place of women's power: home. Home is what you escape and Mother is who you h...

Once again, the novelette shortlist is the first to become fully available online (still missing: Robert Charles Wilson's novella "Julian: A Christmas Story" and Neil Gaiman's short story "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"). 2007 will be the fourth year that I've reviewed the Hugo and Nebula nominees (I posted my thoughts at Readerville before this blog came into being), and this year's novelette shortlist is the strongest batch of nominees I've read in a while. There's only one story I'd lop off the list, and--miracle of miracles--I also find myself at a bit of a loss trying to pick the best story of the bunch. After the infuriatingly mediocre Nebula ballot, this is a welcome and refreshing change. The sole turkey on the novelette shortlist is, surprise surprise, Mike Resnick's "All the Things You Are." For a Resnick story, however, this one is quite passable. The first half of it is even engaging--set some time in the fut...

My review of Geoff Ryman's latest novel, The King's Last Song , appears in today's Strange Horizons . SH's reviews editor, Niall Harrison, is also the new co-editor of the British Science Fiction Association's critical journal, Vector , and along with fellow editor Geneva Melzack has recently launched Torque Control , a Vector blog which is well-worth a bookmark. Today he posts an edited version of a conversation he and I had after I turned in my review of The King's Last Song , which I think makes an interesting accompaniment to my review, and also to Niall's review of the novel, which will hopefully be appearing on an online venue near you sometime in the near future.

Niall Harrison reports that Geoff Ryman's Air: Or, Have Not Have , AKA one of the finest SF novels published in recent years, has won the Arthur C. Clarke award. This is the book's third major award--it's already swept the Tiptree and the BSFA, with the Nebula yet to come (a sad confluence of events kept it off the Hugo ballot).

There isn't an official online announcement yet, but the shortlist was announced yesterday and is already floating around the net : Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro Learning the World by Ken MacLeod Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynold Air by Geoff Ryman Accelerando by Charles Stross Banner of Souls by Liz Williams I've only read two of the nominated books (although I'm looking forward to learning more about the other four nominees when Adam Roberts writes his yearly Clarke roundup for Infinity Plus ), so feel free to discount my opinion, but Air . Air all the way. Whether or not it wins, however, I think the fact that Ryman's superb novel has made it on the Clarke, BSFA, and (in all likelihood) Nebula shortlists should be an occasion for a bit of soul-searching on the part of last year's Hugo voters. It is nothing short of embarrassing that they should have ignored this remarkable work as they did. The nomination I'm more interested in, however, is Ishigu...

The following is a translated, reduced, and slightly reshaped extract from "Dogme 2005: Geoff Ryman and the Mundane SF Manifesto", an article I recently contributed to The Tenth Dimension , the Israeli SFF Society's quarterly. A large portion of the original article was concerned with introducing the reader to Ryman's new movement, which I assume online readers would already be familiar with (but if not: here is the manifesto and an Infinity Plus interview with Ryman in which discusses Mundane SF. Here are a few reactions to the manifesto and movement). Also removed is some discussion of the books and television series mentioned in the extract. Ryman's stated goal--encouraging readers and writers to think of the Earth as a precious and limited resource, not to be squandered in the vain hope of an easily available replacement--is hard to object to, and yet there's something about the manifesto's wording and ideology that is troubling. What to ma...