pornokitsch

Joe Abercrombie x Fantasy

Joe Abercrombie contemplates his place in the new "sword & sorcery" wave. This is an absolute must-read, especially if, like me, you're fascinated by the new Golden Age in fantasy writing. 

Flowerpunk Reading List

This list is also mirrored on Amazon - dive right in after the jump. Please leave a comment or grab me on Twitter with any additions.

Steampunk x Flowerpunk

A new genre idea hits the shelf and - within a few best-selling years - the vampires and elves sneak in. This seems to happen during the life cycle of almost every geeky sub-genre. 

For steampunk, this is particularly insidious - and confusing.

Fantastic alternate histories have existed for a while, but the core premise of steampunk isn't a mystical one - it is a technological one. Steam technology is the backbone of steampunk - the revolutionary, imaginative resource that shakes up the system. Steampunk is an exaggerated analogue of the real world upheaval that came with the industrial era.

Once a single elf raises his pointy-eared head, everything starts to get muddy. Adding magic adds another resource - in fact, it adds another system of resources. For the sake of clarity, this isn't steampunk. It is something else entirely.

The Decade's Top Sellers (Skip to the Geeks)

The Bookseller has put out the UK's 100 bestselling writers of the past 10 years, drawn from Nielsen BookScan data.

I've taken the liberty of scouring out all the boring mainstream fiction, and here are the representatives from sf/f fiction:

1. JK Rowling (27.5m copies, £215m, 210 ISBNs)

6. Terry Pratchett (8.6m copies, £64m, 304 ISBNs)

21. Philip Pullman (5.3m copies, £34m, 168 ISBNs)

23. J.R.R. Tolkien (4.9m copies, £47m, 235 ISBNs)

25. Stephenie Meyer (4.6m copies, £27m, 58 ISBNs)

30. Stephen King (4.2m copies, £31m, 372 ISBNs)

66. Dean Koontz (2.5m copies, £15m, 176 ISBNs)

92. Eoin Colfer (1.8m copies, £12m, 94 ISBNs)

Thoughts after the jump.

Best of 2009: The Year that Wasn't

Just going off the statistics, my collection contains a third fewer books printed in 2009 than in either 2008 or 2007. There wasn't less fiction published - nor did I read any less - but my urge to collect and preserve was much lower this year.

What happened? 

Speculating shamelessly, I think there are a few factors involved:

Grimpunk: What went wrong?

The heritage of the science fiction story - in the tradition of Asimov, Campbell, Harrison, etc - is based on the 'great leap forward'. Imagine one technological shift or one burst of genius, and then wildly extrapolate the results. 

Asimov's robots are a perfect example - one massive assumption (innovation in robotics - BOOM!) and then thousands of pages of follow-through. Asimov's work on robots deserves special note because he didn't stop at the 'ain't it cool' stage, but also diligently worked out the social, political and personal ramifications of the new technology.

Another good example - albeit on a smaller scale - is Stephen King's "The Jaunt". This short story is about the invention of teleportation technology (BOOM!). It details the moment of genius, the immediate roll-out and the social ramifications of instantaneous travel. 

This thinking dominated science fiction for decades (and still exists) - the science fiction world is composed of genius innovation and the social repercussions of its existence.

The grimpunk differs from traditional science fiction at this, the most fundamental level. In a grimpunk future, the world is projected forward, but without the initial evolution in technology.  

There are two different, equally depressing, possible reasons:

1) The innovation never happened (and never will). Scientifically, what we've got now is all we'll ever get, except maybe some minor tweaking. Fundamental shifts in technology (cold fusion, FTL travel, nanotech, cybernetics, artificial intelligence) aren't happening. The spaceships of the future are the spaceships we have already, just with more mileage on them.

This is fundamentally hopeless - as it implies humanity has reached the end of its capability to grow. There are no further transformational flashes of genius. 

2) The innovation happened, but the system crushed it. Grimpunk worlds invariably reference huge bureaucracies (government and corporate) with well-entrenched positions and selfish motivations to quash progress. FTL drives are sitting in a crate somewhere. The funding got pulled at the last minute. The oil companies wouldn't let it happen. The scientist with the genius intellect was pulled off the project used to make new potato chip tubes instead.

This is a different sort of despair. Individual humans still have the capacity for creative thought... it just doesn't matter.

Top 10: Speculative Fiction

A challenge from the intellectually-intimidating OF Blog (and spotted at the home of The Mad Hatter):

What are 10 speculative fiction (the definition of which is left up to you, of course) would you say are among the best ever?

'Speculative fiction' is a wonderfully silly term, essentially meaning 'science fiction discussed in a context where people are afraid they'll be overheard'. I've tried to interpret it more seriously - essentially 'stories that use fictional settings as the means to exploring greater themes or issues'. That's still pretty meaningless, but it helps.

I can't do this in order - and I'm sure I'll change my mind as soon as I hit 'Publish Now' - but here are 10 fairly-impressive books for your consideration:

Remakes

I wondered about Gus Van Sant's decision to remake Psycho shot-for-shot.  In theory, one remakes a movie with the belief that one can improve upon it.  Remaking something like Psycho, widely considered a cinematic classic of the first order, leaves everyone associated with the project a little dimmer by association.

There's more room to argue that remaking a cult classic can actually improve upon the source material.  Cult movies are, virtually by definition, flawed but resonant films that never found mainstream audiences, but have become revered by a smallish and rabidly devoted fanbase.  Without having done any research into the question whatsoever, I suspect that the majority of these cult movies have had much longer and more robust lives than their contemporary mainstream brethren, which may have made (a lot) more money but have gone on to relative obscurity. 

I understand, in principle, remaking a movie like The Clash of the Titans.  It did actually make quite a bit of money upon relase, becoming (fun fact!) the 11th highest-grossing film of 1981.  It features the amazing stop-motion animation of Pornokitsch Hero Ray Harryhausen - wonderful for those of us who grew up on a diet of stop-motion classics like 1933's King Kong -  but unable to compete with the computer-generated wizardry of the Star Wars trilogy or Raiders of the Lost Arc, released within a few years of Titans.  And, to be fair, Titans suffers from a bit of bloat:  too many characters, including  the dead-eyed Harry Hamlin as Perseus and the pretty but blank Judi Bowker as Andromeda.  Dull stretches make the film seem longer than its 118 minutes, and even the film's sense of its own overweaning importance make it faintly ridiculous, despite the wonderful Burgess Meredith's best efforts to lighten things up a bit.

(Bonus fun fact!  The sushi restaurant in Monsters, Inc., is named Harryhausen's.)

Pornokitsch Explained

The $64,000 question, of course, is why we’d name our geek culture blog “Pornokitsch.”  Well, I’m an academic, and thus my favorite thing to do on rainy days and Mondays is pull things apart and talk about them.  So let’s talk about Pornokitsch.

Grimpunk: An Introduction

Grimpunk is a particular style of science fiction that shows the future as neither progressed nor regressed, but just as more of the same. By nature, grimpunk is neither optimistic, nor pessimistic, instead, it stays as starkly realistic as possible.

Grimpunk fits into an interesting niche between two more popular forms of science fiction: 'cosmic' science fiction and regressive science fantasy.