Progress Report

Progress is being made on collecting a solid data set for the story-classification project. The recent switch from SciFi.com to SyFy.com has completely hosed the amazing archives that had been living there, but Google cache links came to the rescue. Here's what I've got in the main three categories so far: all of these stories are available online. I'm also willing to consider new categories or different splits, but with the provision that I have to be able to collect ~100 story data sets for each category that I examine--even with a movement as widespread as New Weird (which I wouldn't be able to use anyway, since I'm limiting the categories to stuff that's clearly science fiction) I'm not sure there are 100 short stories fitting the bill out there online. Still, thanks for all the suggestions and links! Keep them coming and I'll keep you posted!

The stories below have not been thoroughly vetted yet: some may be too long, or not properly sf. Let me know if I've made any gross mis-inclusions. Also, if you trip across *any* short stories online that fit these categories, (core sf, correct time period, under 10,000 words) please shoot me a link. With so few Golden Age & New Wave stories out there, it looks like I may be suffering through a lot of OCR for science.

Golden Age (1934-1955)
(17 stories)

Anderson, 1953, Security

Bester, 1953, Star Light, Star Bright

Boucher, 1943, They Bite

Brackett, 1940, Martian Quest

Brackett, 1941, Interplantary Reporter

Clarke, 1946, Rescue party

Heinlein, 1939, Life Line

Leinster, 1946, A Logic Named Joe

Matheson, 1954, Dance of the Dead

Miller, 1955, The Hoofer,

Padgett (Kuttner/Moore), 1945, Line to Tomorrow

Simak, 1955, Project Mastodon

Van Vogt, 1946, Child of the Gods

Smith, 1952, Scanners Live in Vain

Tenn, 1954, Party of the Two Parts

Weinbaum, 1934, Martian Odyssey

Wellman, 1941, Devil's Asteroid

New Wave (1964-1980)
(19 stories)

Aldiss, 1969, Supertoys Last All Summer Long

Blish, 1966, How Beautiful With Banners

Delany, 1967, Aye and Gmorrah

Disch, 1964, Minnesota Gothic

Disch, 1964, Descending

Effinger, 1973, New New York New Orleans

Effinger, 1976, Contentment Satistication, Cheer...

Harrison, 1970, By the Falls

Lafferty, 1965, Slow Tuesday Night

Malzberg, 1969, The Market in Aliens

Pohl, 1967, The Day the Martians Came

Russ, 1972, When it Changed

Saberhagen, 1967, Mr. Jester

Smith, 1967, Under Old Earth

Spinrad, 1967, Carcinoma Angels

Tiptree, 1973, The Women Men Don't See

Tiptree, 1969, Beam Us Home

Wilhelm, 1967, Baby You Were Great

Zebrowski, 1970, The Water Sculptor

Zelazny, 1967, Auto-da-Fe

Post-Cyberpunk (1990-Present)
(34 stories)

Asher, 2003, Watchcrab

Bacigalupi, 2005, People of Sand and Slag

Baxter, 2000, The Gravity Mine

Baxter, 2008, Last Contact

Bear, 2007, Tideline

Brin, 2000, Reality Check

Brotherton, 2009, The Point

Burstein, 2003, Paying it Forward

Chiang, 2008, Exhalation

Daniel, 1995, Life on the Moon

Doctorow, 2007, Printcrime

Egan, 2000, Only Connect

Gaiman, 2007, How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Goonan, 1995, The String

Gregory, 2005, Second Person Present Tense

Jones, 2007, The Tomb Wife

Kowal, 2008, Evil Robot Monkey

Kress, 2005, My Mother, Dancing

Landis, 1991, Walk on the Sun

Levine, 2005, Tk'Tk'Tk

Levine, 2007, Titanium Mike Saves the Day

McLeod, 2007, Who's Afraid of Wolf 359?

McDevitt, 2005, Henry James, This One's For You

Reed. 2007. The Hoplite

Resnick, 2000, Elephants on Neptune

Resnick, 2003, Robots Don't Cry

Resnick, 2008, Article of Faith

Reynolds, 1997, Spy in Europa

Rucker, 2006, The Third Bomb

Sawyer, 1998, The Hand You're Dealt

Scalzi, 2008, After the Coup

Swanwick, 2001, The Dog Said Bow-Wow

Swanwick, 2008, From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled

Utley, 1996, A Silurian Tale

Help Needed!

Hi Everyone! I'm calling on the hive mind of awesomeness out there to help me with my next ICFA paper. I've got an idea for a combination of two of my favorite things: science fiction and pattern recognition algorithms.

Here's the idea: I feed a whole bunch of science fiction short stories into a pattern recognition algorithm and then see if it can correctly identify the era of origin for a bunch of other short stories. The three eras I have in mind are the "Golden Age" (1934-1955), the "New Wave" (1964-1980) and "Post-Cyberpunk" (1990-present). The question is, after I train the algorithm on a whole bunch of core sf texts from each of these identifiable eras, would it then be able to correctly place, say, "All You Zombies" as being Golden Age? I've had good luck using this technique to distinguish non-fiction articles from short stories (92% accuracy), and I'd like to expand the approach.

So here's what I need help with: first off, please attack my premises! How legitimate are these categories? How reasonable are the cut-off dates? Do you think that this sort of classification will be too hard or too easy for a poor little computer program? Are there more interesting questions I could be asking using this sort of technique? Contrariwise, is this approach too reductive?

Next up, I need help tracking down about 100 short stories for each time period. Ideally the stories would be purely sf, no slipstream or other fuzzy genre stories (trying to eliminate variables for the poor little algorithm). They would also be less than 10,000 words long and available in full text online (for ease of data collection).

I've already got some initial ideas of course:

Golden Age

• Asimov Robot stories
• Heinlein's Future History stories
• Bradbury's Martian Chronicles
• Stanley Weinbaum's "Martian Odyssey"
• Stories like those found in "Adventures in Time and Space"
• "Cold Equations"
  

New Wave

• Philip K. Dick
• James Tiptree Jr.
• Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions
• Barrington J. Bayley
• Philip Jose Farmer

Post-Cyberpunk (probably will need another name for this era)

• Cory Doctorow
• Charles Stross
• Ted Chiang
• Stephen Baxter

Hopefully that gives you a flavor of what I'm looking for? There's no guarantee that this will work, or even that it will produce an interesting ICFA paper (I'm also kicking around an idea for an XKCD-based paper, for instance). It's early days. But I'd like to give it a try, especially now that my super-sekrit intensive-data-collection reader response theory project is on hold.

Thanks in advance for all comments and suggestions!

Reviews, Mind Melds, and WorldCon [Three Things Make a Post]

Today I have a new review up at SFSignal, this one is for Zoran Živković's The Bridge. It's a flat-out surrealist novel, and as I say in my "Bottom Line:"

I have no idea what to think about this collection of stories (but I've written 760 words about it anyway)

Also, make sure not to miss the International-flavored Mind Melds at SFSignal! The first one was up last Wednesday, the second one will be up July 1, and we'll have a third up the week after that. I've been working hard at sending out invites and putting together all the responses. It's been wonderful to work with and hear from writers, translators, and fans from all over the world. It's been a ton more work than your average Mind Meld, but I'm really proud of how it is coming out.

Before I go, let me pass along this information about WorldCon:

There will indeed be a writers' workshop at Anticipation 2009, Worldcon in Montreal this August.

Entry fee is $20 plus $2.58 in taxes, Canadian. This cost is to defray costs of the workshop. You pay the fee when you're notified that you have a slot and not before. Instructions will be emailed to entrants directly.

There are a limited number of slots available and right now, it's one slot per customer, no multiple submissions.

Maximum length is 10,000 words, including any synopsis of the rest of a novel, novella, etc. Shorter lengths, including flash, are fine, even encouraged, but only one story.

Genre: science fiction, fantasy, horror, the usual for a Worldcon
Type: short story or novel excerpt
Language: English or French
We will also consider entries for critique of non-fiction critical essays on the subject of genre, same length requirements.

The entries will be distributed in advance so the window to get space in the workshop won't be open for very long.

Please link to this post or repost the information, even if you're not going to Worldcon this year. Someone on your f-list might be going and might have a story to be critiqued. Official details will be forthcoming on the website and other avenues of communication.

Oz Whiston
Creative Writing Track

Let me draw your attention to: We will also consider entries for critique of non-fiction critical essays on the subject of genre... How often do critics and scholars get to workshop their own work? Ideally, book reviews can be well crafted essays with just as much elegance and readability as any short story. I think this is a great opportunity, and I know that several crit/Masterclass folks will be in Montreal around that time. What better chance to meet up and catch up again?

A Link and Some News

First, the link. I've got a review up at SFSignal of Jay Lake's Green. Go and read! I think you'll like the book and I hope you'll like the review. I'm also continuing my experiment in full disclosure of how a book gets to the top of my to-read pile... or my experiment in shameless name dropping. Either way.

But now the news! As of Monday I will be returning to the ranks of the fully employed. This is a real job, and I will really be working at Johnson Space Center (although not for NASA, for one of their contractors) which is nine kinds of awesome. I'm really excited about working with this group, and I can't wait to get started.

However, this is going to have all kinds of implications. You may have noticed that after a long dry spell (during which I was taking 4 graduate level electrical engineering classes and continuing to do work for SFSignal and Strange Horizons) I've finally been getting reviews posted both here and elsewhere. However, now with my 40+ hour/week commitment elsewhere, that will probably slow down again. Also, next semester I will most likely be taking 2 graduate classes (at night) along with my full-time job; things will likely grind to an almost-complete-halt (again) at that point. It will be worth it, however: if I go that route, I'll only delay finishing my MSEE by one semester, and I'd be done next spring. Over time I'll find a balance between all these different things (and eventually I won't be taking graduate classes anymore), so we'll see how things develop.

Some things are going to have to just get dropped. Unfortunately, one of them is the super-sekrit research project that I had told people about at various times. It was going to have to do with labor-intensive data collection and reader response theory. Because last winter was full of family emergency, and last semester was full of class work and editing work, and now this summer will be full of real full-time work, there's no way I'll be able to do the paperwork and data collection for this. Someday I hope to revive the idea, but I'm afraid for now it is not to be. Still, getting a full-time job, in this economy, working for the manned space flight program, is 100% worth it.

Old-School Xenophobia

[Before I get started on this I'd like to point your attention to an article of mine that Strange Horizons published this week. In complete contrast to this review, it does some theorizing about contemporary literature that features superheroes.]

House on the Borderland is the sort of thing that people called 'fantasy' before Tolkein came along; i.e., it’s supernatural horror. It's really rather shocking by today's standards: xenophobic only just begins to describe it. I'd heard some things about William Hope Hogson being quite influential over the years, but now I'm hoping that applies more to his story The Night Land, which is currently being mentioned in the context of Greg Bear's City at the End of Time. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend Borderland, but I am planning to continue on to Night Land before too long.

Value judgements aside, what is this book? In the framing narrative, two gents go out fishing to a remote and mysterious (i.e., they haven't been able to find it on any map since) part of Ireland. One day they follow a stream down until they find a massive crater. Sitting on a precipice jutting into the crater are the ruins of a large stone house. The gentlemen investigate the ruins and find the remains of a hand-written book there. They return to their camp and start to read.

The narrative is from the POV of the last owner of that house. He had moved there for the solitude, and had no companions other than his sister and dog. The dog, BTW, is much more interesting and has much more agency than the sister, to give you some feel for the pre-feminist times. Then lots of odd things start to happen. First, the guy has a vivid nightmare. Then a chasm opens up next to the house. Then the house comes under attack for a few nights by pig-men from that nightmare. There's some very vivid writing as the (unnamed) narrator sets up defences against the pig-men siege. After the pig-men seem to permanently retreat (for no adequately explained reason), he goes to investigate the chasm. It begins to flood while he's down there, and he's saved only by his dog. He also manages to save the dog in return, which made me happy.

In an odd choice, there is next some kind of romance with some kind of supernatural female described, but only from 'damaged' portions of the book, so we only get snippets of the narrative. These make no sense at all. Then, the guy is flung forward in time, forced to watch as the world decays, freezes, and falls into the sun. He then goes on an interstellar journey of sorts (ala Stapledon later), possibly sees some things that connect to his first dream, and meets the woman referenced in the romance segments. Unfortunately they can't stay together, and he is flung back to the present day. Then the book more or less trails off.

So what you've got is a lot of plot segments that don't dovetail particularly neatly, and some absolutely shocking xenophobia. Take the pig-men: they're portrayed as 100% menacing and violent. The man doesn't seek to communicate with them or to understand anything about them. They just set about trying to kill one another. Likewise, contrast the time-travel bits with Stapledon: when Stapledonian narrators undertake such a journey, they learn all about humanity, and aliens, and the fate of the universe. Here no such enlightenment comes to the narrator. Here, nothing is ever explained: the chasm, the dreams, the things that are physically real and those that aren’t. Basically, everything that is unknown is scary, with the sole exception of the exotic love-affair that is only sketchily described. And there’s no attempt to make it less scary by seeking to figure it out. At the end, when we return to the framing narrative, even the readers of the man's tale don't quite seem to know what to make of it. I suspect that I’m applying the wrong reading protocols to this book, but I can’t think of any protocol that would make it good from a modern perspective. Probably the horror readers of the day enjoyed it rather more.

There is some strong writing here when Hogson hits his stride, but honestly I wouldn't recommend it to today’s readers. I'll be interested to see if his other two major titles (Night Land and Ghost Pirates) hold up better over time. But that's me! Sorting through the influential classics of the field so you don't have to!

{In a note of contrast, consider my review of Bram Stoker's Dracula, which is about 20 years older. It really drew me in, and seems to hold up much better, especially in terms of style. Although it has its own feminist issues to deal with.}

Catching Up on Links

As it happens, I've got a review in the fourth issue of Fruitless Recursion. This one covers Starboard Wine by Samuel Delany, and I'm very proud of the way the review turned out.

While I'm at it, I think I neglected to mention my last review in Strange Horizons. In that one I'm paired with Richard Larson to offer two views on Xiaolu Guo's UFO in Her Eyes.

Dracula: Classic Lit AND Fun to Read

[Posted on the 112th anniversary of its publication.]

It's always fun coming to these 'classic' tales; you never know quite what you're going to get. Is it going to appeal, or will it be one of those books that's important, but not fun? Something like Dracula could easily fall into the latter category. Certainly not every book that has spawned so many imitators and innovators is itself a gem. Yet I was happily surprised by Bram Stoker's original. Any book that has you yelling at the characters 'When will you people learn to pay attention to the color text!' (if you'll pardon my inner RPG-er showing) is an involving book that is well worth the read.

Another fact about reading classics is that you're never coming to them fresh. Does anyone picking up Frankenstein these days find themselves shocked --shocked!-- that it involves creating a living being out of dead people? Probably not. So I knew that Dracula is a vampire, a very old and powerful one. I knew that the Harkers would be involved, as well as Van Helsing. I knew some of the rules of vampirism as they've come to be popularized. I didn't know much else, so I was still surprise-able. For instance, I largely assumed that any character whose name I didn't recognize, such as Lucy Westenra or Dr. Seward, was going to be toast by the end of the book. For all I knew, it was possible that Mina Harker and Dr. Van Helsing would be the only survivors, hence their appearances in subsequent movies/books/comics/etc. Not true, as it turns out.

The book itself is a bit unconventional (coming as it did before the conventions). It is purely epistolary, being told solely through diary entries, letters, and newspaper clippings. It is also charmingly unrestrained by genre conventions. It takes turns as pure horror (Jonathan Harker’s hair-raising experiences in Count Dracula’s homeland), domestic drama (Lucy Westenra writes to Mina soon-to-be-Harker about deciding which of her suitors to marry), medical drama (her suitors, joined by Dr. Van Helsing, band together to try to figure out why she is wasting away), mystery (as the band of adventurers track Dracula down to his London hide outs) and ticking-time-bomb thriller (as they race to prevent him from returning to his base of power).

Stoker does some great things here. For one, the more we find out about Dracula's powers, the less we see him on stage. By the end we know of him only by his movements and his psychic link with Mina. He's only onstage as a real character during Jonathan's stay at the castle, where we don't yet know the full range of his powers. This makes him both mysterious and more sinister. On the other hand, after all the build-up, the actual victory over the Evil is pretty anti-climactic. It's a very tactical endeavour to get to the right place at the right time in order to not have to face Dracula at his full strength. And only one of the menfolk die in the doing, although I'll leave the gentleman's identity safe from spoilage. It’s rather different from Dracula's end in various movies.

I think the book is strongest when it partakes most of the horror genre. The tale of Jonathan’s trip to Castle Dracula is truly harrowing, and I think that the tale of the ship that brings Dracula to England (of which we learn via the Captain’s log and later newspaper reporting) would make an incredible film all of its own. Certainly it is in these scenes that Stoker’s imagery is most vivid. Lucy’s romantic dilemmas drag on a bit in comparison. I also admire the way Stoker uses the epistolary form to really punch up his occasional (and occasionally literal) cliff-hangers. Although if you really want to make yourself giggle, try picturing Hugh Jackman delivering various of the elderly Dutch Dr. Van Helsing’s lectures. I dare you. But in the final analysis, Dracula is a good and fun read, not just an influential one.

Preaching Against Preachiness

Do you remember that Bob Dylan song that came out a few years ago? The chorus ended with the line: “I used to care… but things have changed.” If you can hum that tune, you’re probably not the target audience for Little Brother. Reading it feels a bit like being preached to by a very earnest friend. Perhaps they just found God. Perhaps they just found politics. Perhaps you even agree with them. But being shaken by the lapels while they try to convince you Just! How! Important! This! Is! does grate. I began to really grok that Dylan song when, a couple of years after graduating from college, I stopped reading The Nation. I mostly agreed with what they said, mostly it wasn’t news to me, and I mostly grew weary of their vaguely accusatory proselytizing.

The topic of Doctorow’s story is privacy, government intrusions thereon, and ways to use tech to preserve your rights. It makes the point (with which I completely agree) that government security, especially the kind of theatre associated with taking off our shoes in airports, doesn't make us any safer. Nor does locking up suspicious persons in secret jails far away from the normal justice system.

Which is what happens to our hero, Marcus. He's a pretty harmless hacker kid, ditching school to play games with his friends. Unfortunately, he's out and about when a terrorist attack takes out the Oakland Bay Bridge. He and his friends get rounded up by Homeland Security. They're interrogated, and eventually freed (after their parents have spent days thinking they may have been killed). All except for Marcus' best friend Daryl. He was wounded when he was taken into custody, and never released. Marcus has no idea if he's alive or dead.

We get excellent depictions of the physical and psychological approaches that interrogators use to break down subjects, and we see them being used on innocent American citizens. We also see how this sort of unilateral power is an invitation to abuse: because Marcus holds out a little too long demanding a lawyer and his rights as an American, he's detained and messed with just a little bit longer. He also gets an extra label as someone to be observed and tracked after release, and he's instructed never to tell anyone what happened.

All this turns Marcus into a full-fledged radical. He mobilizes all his hardware, software and internet savvy to start messing with the security state. We get lectures on RFID tracking, seminars on encryption, explication of routing routines, and master classes in other software and social hacks used to get around security. The point is made, repeatedly, that security systems are a joke that don't make anyone safer but do allow the government to abuse its citizens. To which I say Amen! However, an additional message seems to be that if you aren't running ParanoidLinux on a box that you built yourself, flicking through all your neighbors' wi-fi connections to disguise where your packets are coming from and using PGP on all your exterior communications, you're a sheeple who deserves what's coming to you.

This a book for teenagers, and understandably adults don't come off very well. There are only four who are at all sympathetic: Marcus' Mom who is British and thinks all this is terribly uncivilized, one particular social studies teacher who actually teaches civil liberties and allows free classroom discussion and eventually is fired and investigated, a Turkish coffee shop owner who starts allowing only cash transactions so that the government can't track them (he's had enough of government abuse in his homeland) and the crusading investigative reporter who is crucial in the success of Marcus' campaign. All the other adults are either abusive figures of government power or sheeple like Marcus' Dad who spouts off all the pro-government straw-man arguments.

As I am now pushing 30, and have only once built a computer from scratch and that with lots of help from a friend, this book is not aimed at me. I probably would have appreciated it more between the ages of 17 and 22 when I too CARED passionately about all this stuff, subscribed to the Nation, went to Green Party meetings, and got into gleeful arguments with people who didn't agree with me. So for all the kids out there going through that phase now, this will be both a great read and a great resource.

So other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Well, it's a bit mixed. Marcus' rise to power as leader of a local hacker collective seemed a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, the teenage character portrayals seemed spot on. I was especially fond of the geek-girl girlfriend who acquires Marcus; she reminded me quite a bit of myself at that age. A quibble: while the cast of characters is as admirably racially mixed as you would expect of a half-way realistic book set in San Francisco, everyone here is middle class or above. There's certainly nothing here to empower poor folks. In fact, the actual resolution only comes about because the investigative reporter was a college friend of Marcus' mother--not the sort of contact working class people tend to have. One of Marcus' friends may come from a poor family, but he's such a computer genius that he's been working for a software design house since he was twelve--also not a typical option for the poor.

Overall, there's a lot to like here, but I was continually put off by the heavy-handedness of it all. On the one hand I felt like Doctorow was preaching to the choir, as I agree with his political stances and vote accordingly. But on the other hand I felt like I was being repeatedly castigated for being non-133t. So while I suspect that this book will go over very well with its intended audience, at 29 that audience no longer includes me.

Full disclosure (both as an experiment and as a result of the discussion at Torque Control): I met Cory once at a Strange Horizons party at WorldCon in 2004 (before I was really a reviewer). He was quite nice and we chatted briefly about Disneyland. He signed my copy of Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, which I enjoyed. I also strongly agree with his stances on Creative Commons, copyright law, and DRM. However, I don’t read Boing Boing, and I didn’t enjoy Eastern Standard Tribe as much as I’d hoped I would. Thus while I own his book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, his work hadn’t floated back up to the top of my to-read pile until this Hugo nomination.

Fen of Color United!

Why? Because diversity of experience and diversity of thought make for a more interesting future for everyone.

And because all these authors are awesome (just a sampling!), and wrote things that I would never have thought of otherwise.

There's a big live journal celebration going on today, go take a look!

New Review Up

Just a quick note to mention that I've reviewed Ken Scholes' debut novel: Lamentation over at SFSignal. Quick version: this is a good fantasy novel and very readable, but he hits some cliches pretty hard. Still, I'm interested to see if he's setting those cliches up to be undermined in later books in the series, so I think I'll be sticking around for this one.