pornokitsch

DGLA x Choices

There are only a few days to go in this year's David Gemmell Legend Award voting. If you're interested in taking part, now's the time to strike. The difference between the DGLA's perspective on fantasy and my own is pronounced, which makes me a little distrustful of their shortlist each year.

It starts with the very structure of the award. Popular voting for awards is flawed; there's a fundamental problem with the elision of "best" with "most popular". The more voters, the more difficult it is to enforce any sort of consistent judging criteria. The more accurate the voting mechanic and the broader the voting pool, the more the results will simply reflect sales. (I'm also slightly scandalized by any award with typos in its shortlist or the wrong dates on its list of submission criteria. This is ruthlessly petty, but if you're aspiring to represent the "best" shouldn't this sort of thing matter?)

As a result, the David Gemmell Legend Award represents the fantasy that sells and not the the fantasy that should sell. It is a round of applause for the status quo rather than an exhortation to improve. And what does the shortlist say about the genre right now?* Without going into the detail, it is packed with well-crafted escapist entertainment. The unappreciated straight white male ubermensch inside me feels well-coddled. There are also deeply pernicious depictions of race and gender. Women are objects of romance, rape and resentment. The Chosen is invariably a white male; the evil Other is some sort of non-white or non-European analogue. 

The Wisdom of Our Crowd

The question of book blogger "independence" is raised frequently and, although the ensuing debate seldom varies, the question does deserve to surface occasionally. 

"Independence" is an individual attribute - an ethical position best left to each individual site, feed or Livejournal owner. Do bloggers have a duty to provide objective reviews? Do bloggers have a duty to repay publishers? Do bloggers have a duty to encourage authors? Do bloggers have a "duty" at all? Each blogger can wrestle (or ignore) these questions as they see fit. We've got our own answers, but they only apply to us. 

A collective attribute, however, is intelligence. Two reviews from highly-regarded platforms (The New York Times and Slate) recently prompted a collective backlash from the fantasy blogging Community-with-a-C. They had the opportunity to say something that our team found not just offensive, but wrong. Or, less politely, "stupid".

In contrast, are we - the genre book blogging Community - any smarter?

"Do Not Go Looking for Christians" by missoularedhead

After a couple of days of being flattered to be asked, a couple of days panicking that I had nothing to say, an a couple of days trying to figure out how to bow out gracefully, here’s my contribution to the Rome series, in which I talk about something I know and why it drives me crazy when movies and books get it wrong.  Yeah, I’m going there. I’m gonna talk about one of those things you don’t discuss at cocktail parties.  Oh yes, you know what it is… religion.

Remember back to when we were kiddies, and got introduced to the Greek and Roman gods. Remember how much FUN they were?  How dysfunctional? Of course, we got the sanitized version; no good letting the kiddies read about incest, violence, and lots and lots of premarital sex!  And we learned that the Roman gods were, if not exact, a damned fine replica of the Greek gods, only with longer names.  And then Jesus came along, and everything changed.

Romans in Spaaaaace! by Ian Sales

Isaac Asimov’s trilogy of Foundation (1942 - 1944), Foundation and Empire (1945) and Second Foundation (1948 - 1949) was famously inspired by Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 - 1789). There are, however, no Romans in Asimov’s fix-up epic, only a galactic empire populated by cigar-chomping 1940s New Yorkers. While this empire does indeed fall, it holds the seeds of a new empire hidden within it. This is intended to shorten the period of barbarism which must “necessarily” follow a collapse. 

It was, perhaps, the grand sweep of imperial history which attracted Asimov more than the actual events which led to Rome’s collapse. After all, Foundation and its sequels follow their historical model only in the loosest sense. Certainly, it’s a curiously inept re-imagining -- there was nothing inevitable about the Dark Ages; nor were they in fact “dark”. And Rome may have considered herself the height of civilisation at the time, but she was by no means the only civilisation.

Genre Bingo

We've made references to "genre bingo" in the past. This isn't some sort of sarcastic construction. Far from it - "genre bingo" is a real game, invented in 1917 and most famously played by Ambrose Bierce and Arthur Machen whilst on their annual holiday cruise.

In case you'd like to take part in the fun as well, we've reproduced a set of genre bingo cards that you can use at home. 

The Literature of Ideas; or, please stop laughing at me

One of the many revelations that came out of the SFX Weekender was the ubiquity of science fiction being defined as the "literature of ideas". 

I can understand the temptation - and seeing how widely used the phrase has become, clearly I'm not the only one. Being "the literature of ideas" gives science fiction the authority of science. Or broadening it out - it gives speculative fiction permission to speculate. Yours is the fiction of the kitchen sink, ours is the literature of the future. Your fiction cares only about petty, worldly things - Booker Prizes and the New York Times Book Review. Our fiction is concerned with more lofty matters - the future of the human race, or the farthest reaches of the imagination.

There is a triumphant poetry in its very use: "The Literature of Ideas."

This is, of course, complete bullshit.

PAT MILLS' EPIC FAIL; or, why don't the wimminfolk read funnybooks?

Disturbing news for the comics industry from Newsarama: "comics and graphic novel sales are down 22.91% compared [with] January 2010."  Although the SFX Weekender's Saturday panel "Beyond the US: the wider world of comics" was ostensibly devoted to a discussion about "what's going on outside of the big US comics publishers," the conversation inevitably turned internal.  Why are US and UK audiences so devoted to US superhero franchises?  What's wrong with the comics industry in the UK that readers don't seem interested in the higher-concept stuff? 

We're fortunate to have our guest editor Den Patrick on tap for the inside scoop.  Den confronted these issues and more alongside the other panel members - Tony Lee, Bryan Talbot and Pat Mills - so I'm going to leave the afterword to him.

Mostly.

The issue of female readers reared its ugly head a number of times during the discussion. Why aren't there more comics written by women, drawn by women and read by women? What is the deal with girls, yo?

Well, Pat Mills has a thought.  Publishers won't publish stuff women want to read!  You see, he knows a woman who wrote a comic for women, "kind of a British Sex and the City," which hasn't been able to find a publisher.  But it's awesome!  It's all about these "women who are a couple of steps down from a hooker.  Not hookers, but close." 

Station Identification

"Critics occupy a central function in the establishment of a literary canon, and they are important in counteracting the spurious impressiveness of mere popular appeal. But the key is not the mere expression of a judgment upon a given author or work, but a judgment informed by an exhaustive knowledge of the field and - that most intangible and indefinable of qualities - a keen critical sense that distinguishes the superficial from the profound, the meretricious from the sincere, and the obvious from the complex."
    -- ST Joshi, The Evolution of the Weird Tale.

One of the things we don't do at Pornokitsch is indulge in a lot of masturbatory blogging-on-blogging naval-gazing. That's an editorial decision we made a long time ago: we write about the things we want to write about and very, very rarely does that include public introspection.

But, if you'll excuse me a brief moment of pompous indulgence, if you were to ask us what we're about? The first answer, of course, is "having fun". And the second, more trepidatious response? I'd like to think it'd be something along the lines of Mr Joshi's words above. We genuinely, irrepressibly, often-humiliatingly love genre fiction, and, as a reflection of that love, occasionally do our best to provide a wee bit of critical rigour.

(Basically, we snark because we care. And ST Joshi says that's ok.)

Guest Post: NaNoWriMo by Den Patrick

[Editor's note: We're very pleased to have a guest post from Den Patrick, whose writing, lettering and editorial work can be found in Weaponizer, the upcoming DECONSTRUCTED and every issue of the Transformers Comic.]

This year marks five years since I was tempted by the NaNoWriMo malarkey.

I was in the unique position of being unemployed, with just enough money to keep me in Merlot and chips whilst attempting my magnum opus. My mornings were spent bashing out three thousand words (on average), and my afternoons were spent looking for a new job. The fact that these activities were placed in this order tells you a lot about how I felt at the time.

However, my novel dreams were soon to meet a sticky end, in as much that I bagged some seasonal work at Waterstones Piccadilly. Oh, the irony. A bookstore stopping me from writing my novel. And of course there was a social life that needed feeding. And life’s little luxuries, like TV, and weekends. You understand.

A Game of Relevance

The most recent volume of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire was published in 2005.

Since then, Joe Abercrombie has given readers his entire First Law trilogy... as well as two other excellent, epic fantasies. Starting two years after Martin began his series, KJ Parker has published three fantasy trilogies, two stand-alones and a novella. For that matter, all three of China Mieville's Bas-Lag books came in the gap between the third and fourth books in Martin's series. 

Also worth noting? David Eddings, Robert Jordan and Stephen Donaldson have all published new fantasy books more recently than 2005, and I'm pretty sure at least one of them is dead.

I'm blatantly cherry-picking the best facts. Of course there have been a lot of prolific, shitty authors since 2005, as well as great writers that aren't exactly rushing to market. I'm not kvetching about the delay of Dance of Dragons, I'm realizing that I no longer care.