fractalnavel

recent thread:

me:

Subject: Fwd: Amazon.com Presents the 2005 Hugo Award Winners

 

now this is really passing on junk mail, but some of those stories look really good. who is "charlie stross" ? lots of nominated works, never heard of him. and the book "the algebraist" looks like a lot of fun.

 

craig:

I read about Hugo awards on scifi.com a week or so ago. I agree some of them look very worthy. Lately I haven't had much success with award books and movies. Watched (or rather tried to watch) Shakespeare in Love the other night. Academy award film. Boooring, slow and just a waste of time. I read that Dan Simmons has written a new book. He was an award winner with one of those books with the shrike monster. Man was that a dumb book. I know you liked it but I just couldn't get into it. Although I will say that I picked up on Robert Sawyer and Nancy Kress this way, reading their Hugo award books. Both really good storytellers.

 

me:

"storyteller". that's what simmons lacks, he's not as smooth as others in that regard. there are much worse out there that i still like because the ideas they present are so unique.

 

as far as the hyperion series went, you had to read at least the first two books to make any sense of things. sometimes it was a forced march. there are two more books that may or may not shore up some other shortcomings from the first two, but i haven't read them.

 

i'd have to look at the award winners over the years to see how things have gone. i know up until the 70's they seemed pretty consistently good. but that was just before the current era started, and we've had discussions about that before.

 

i don't really expect to be "wowed" by new ideas in scifi anymore; it seems there's a natural limit to imagination. so other factors come into play, like stories and characterization. but that's not why i read scifi, so i don't have a lot of motivation these days to pick things up.

 

now, for younger folks who have yet to be exposed to the huge array of concepts in the genre, scifi is still a gold mine, better than ever. unfortunately, there are also land mines.

 

craig:

I checked out all the hugo nominees and the winner. Very underwhelming. What's with all the fantasy stuff? I thought Hugo was only scifi? One of those books isn't even scifi, it's a murder mystery. The author just happened to write a non-scifi book and gets nominated for a Hugo. Whats up with that? I guess I'll follow the other awards like Sidewise and Nebula. I remember last year's winners were about as lame. I think scifi.com covered the Sidewise awards which I thoght were pretty good, not the Hugos.

me:

the only one i bothered to check on was that "alebraist" one, and that sounded like fun, but nothing world-shaking.

 

i always felt that some of the best stories in scifi were the odd-length ones that are too short for stand-alone novels, and too long for anthologizing. there is a real wealth of classics in that limbo that you never see because of the publishing difficulties. that's why i used to buy up all the "tor double novels" i could find (two shorter stories that together made up barely a book length publication), there was some really cool stuff in those.

 

even though today's copyright laws have locked down all that stuff for the rest of our lifetimes and beyond, they're not likely to ever make anyone any money because of the issues i mentioned. so, why not provide them on the web ?

 

the other thing i'd like to see is some way of sorting through the pile of trash for the gems. although not foolproof and always contentious, some public rating database along the lines of imdb's would be helpful. i think i've come across some limited rating sites out there, but they're not very helpful. unfortunately, the fractitiousness of the scifi world, although of real benefit in some respects, works against the genre in cases like this.

 

as for the fact that the genre is "science fiction _and_fantasy_", i think it's long past due time when these two sub-genres would benefit from separation. in the early days it made sense for them to be combined, given their small contribution to the totality of literature, but now they've got substantial independent and distinct identities and fan bases. of course, there are always cross-over works, but they are a minority and can go either way, and in no way should keep captive the larger bodies of work.

 

however, that is the status-quo, and always has been, so i guess i'm surprised that you're surprised ;-) 

 

craig:

I always thought that fantasy books had their own set of awards, distinct from scifi awards like Hugo and Nebula. The fantasy genre is my mind is bigger than scifi at the moment. Plenty of hobbit/vampire/Harry Potter books and movies out there. As far as movies are, I think some of them are really good. It seems like fantasy has turned a corner in movies. Instead of being either horror based or child based they've figured out how to hone the best part of fantasy stories and have come up with some really good movies. However on the scifi side of things, there hasn't been a good scifi flick in quite awhile. The last Star Wars film was maybe the only one I can think of. The last Matrix movie was good too. Scifi movies have de-evolved into a vehicle for either horror or action based movies and crappy ones at that. Well I guess this would be a good blog eh?

me:

not to mention the huge influx of anime and other things.

 

i think science fiction is always going to be inherently more difficult to do in any medium.  i think there's stricter constraints.  hell, fantasy worlds create their own, or not, as they please.  so it's going to be easier to do special effects for fantasy.  one also has to consider that scifi has had a concept escalation that has effectively maxed out, and it is as far beyond visualization as it is beyond imagination.  so what you get are "scifi" films that are really pseudo-technological fantasies, which may validly be considered something else entirely.  matrix and starwars are kind of in these camps.

 

as for what "real" scifi movies would be like if we assume the above criteria (which is questionable), it's hard to say.  how do you visualize quantum, nano and cosmological effects ?  you don't, not with any accuracy.  you get things like "what the bleep" and "elegant universe", which were fun, but irrelevant to the realities they discussed.

 

i think stories that are primarily "horror" based, regardless of other trappings, have no place in either scifi or fantasy.  so things like "alien" would be non-scifi.  well, they are and they're not, shades of gray and all.  but such elements would seem to be valid evaluation criteria that would contribute negatively to the overall scifi or fantasy nature of a work.

 

fantasies that are limited to magic, battles and exotic creatures are not at root any different than the original king kong.  their realm is, in the end, much more concrete than advanced science.  the _source_ of the magics, etc., is usually left out, or simply implied with abstract or surreal symbolic effects, which is just fine for magics.

 

perhaps as society becomes more technologically and scientifically sophisticated, approaching the visualizable frontiers, it doesn't matter where the rest of science progresses.  so eventually scifi will be subsumed in conteporary culture, and it will effectively disappear.  space operas like bsg and sg-1 will continue, but those are old ideas, and their value is mostly in the non-science aspects of the productions.  charlie jade is an example of the newer contemporization effect.

 

as for fantasies, they depend on unassailable mysticisms that of course can never be commonplace objective occurences / experiences (what does _that_ say about religions ? ;-)).   the only thing i can think that could work to their detriment may be the discrediting (there's a better word) of superstitions, religions, etc. -  or, at the other extreme, the complete assimilation by one of the competing beliefs (eg, if "intelligent design" displaced all science, etc.).

 

perhaps a mature society will eventually dispense with its fairy tales altogether.  not sure what _any_ kind of fiction would look like in a world like that.  not to fear though, there's no danger of _that_ happening ;-)

 

 

blogging: when the thread is done, i guess.