Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in PK's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, July 4th, 2009
4:48 pm	Against a definition of science fiction 'I hear,' John Clute said, having arrived late at the BSFA/SFF AGM, 'that you gave a masterly 20 minute definition of science fiction.' 'No,' I corrected him, 'I gave a masterly 20 minute anti-definition of science fiction.' Anyway, my talk, which I have now given the title 'Against a definition of science fiction', is now here. Meanwhile the panel I was on before my talk, discussing Niall Harrison's BSFA Survey, can be listened to here. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
10:08 am	If three things make a post 1: The joint-winners of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which I helped judge, have now been announced. 2: I've voted in the Hugos. Have you? The deadline is Friday. 3: It's been an incredibly busy week, but I am intending to put my talk from the BSFA/SFF AGM on line, probably this weekend. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 26th, 2009
9:31 am	Nine from Silver Today the wonderful MKS and I celebrate our 16th wedding anniversary. Where have all those years gone? Time really must fly when you're having fun. And now we're only nine years short of our silver wedding anniversary! But that's for old people!!! (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
9:57 am	Speak Today, Members of Parliament have the chance to choose their next Speaker, this after Michael Martin became the first speaker in 300 years to be forced out of office. Martin was forced to resign because he allowed the police to search an MP's office without a warrant and because his response to the Expenses scandal was slow, clumsy, and inclined to blame everyone except the MPs who perpetrated the scandal. In the light of that, you would expect Parliament to elect a Speaker who is strong, independent minded and determined on reform. Look on the list of candidates, ye mighty, and despair. It comes to something when Ann Widdecombe looks like a good choice. The best bet is probably John Bercow (he wouldn't be my choice, but no really worthy candidate is standing), but he's so unpopular with his own party that there's little chance he'll get the job. Which leaves as the front runners Sir George Young, who is precisely of the country Tory set who were responsible for most of the excesses. He's a safe par of hands, but only if you don't want a brain to be operating those hands, and he is certainly no reformer. Or Margaret Beckett, who did her best to destroy British agriculture when she was the Minister in charge, then went on to be one of the least distinguished Foreign Secretaries in the long and sad history of that office. Beckett will have difficulty maintaining the status quo, let alone initiating anything that resembles reform. So in the last few months we have had bankers earn the opprobrium of the people because of their grossly inflated bonuses in the wake of their drastic mishandling of the very job they are supposedly paid to do. How do they respond: more bonuses. And now MPs earn the opprobrium of the people because of their corrupt exploitation of an ill-designed system, and how do they respond: let's keep things exactly the same. As an exercise in winning back the trust of the voters, I can't say I'm impressed. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 19th, 2009
1:26 pm	Hallelujah Increasingly, it seems that classically trained singers like to show how hip they are by taking on jazz standards or pop hits. And more often than not, they fail. They fail because they don't know how to swing, and they fail because they follow the music so rigidly that they don't notice when the sense or the shape of the words leads the song away from the strict musical pattern. There was a perfect example of this at Canary Wharf just now. As I was crossing Canada Square a choir was singing Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah'. Now the choir was fine, not great but perfectly acceptable, and the man taking the lead had a superb voice. But ... Cohen ends his verses with the word 'you', which is pronounced 'yah' to set up the rhyme with 'Hallelujah'. This guy was singing 'you' with perfect diction every time - and it threw the whole rhythm of the song out. I felt he could read the song perfectly, but he just couldn't hear it. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
11:08 am	Masterclass It’s a week since the SFF Masterclass, and I’m still trying to work out how to write about it. It was one of the most intense and exhilarating experiences I can remember, and I was only one of the tutors. I’ve never taught before, but when you have a bunch of people as engaged and enthusiastic as I met last week I can understand how teaching can become addictive. Certainly, I would now love to teach again. Since I haven’t taught before, I decided to attend the sessions led by my fellow tutors, Adam Roberts and Joan Gordon. And I reckon I came out of the week having learned more than I taught. ( A long description of the week follows ... ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
3:37 pm	This is the age of miracle and wonder I’m still getting used to this. On top of everything else that has made this an extraordinary year, I’ve now been invited to be the Science Fiction Foundation guest at the joint BSFA/SFF AGM on Saturday June 27th. The BSFA guest is Nick Harkaway, which is pretty exciting also. I’m on a panel at the start of the day (10am, a gratifyingly civilised hour), immediately after which I do a talk (a talk?! I know exactly what I want to say, but whether I'm going to get the chance to write it all out or just jot down notes on the train up to the meeting, I can't say. Why is life always so full?) and then it looks like there’ll be another panel later in the day. You’ll certainly be getting your fill of me that day. And because the AGM is the day after our wedding anniversary, I’ll be hotfooting it away from Conway Hall the moment it ends to join MKS in Canterbury. She’ll have been at her conference all day, and I’ll be sneaking in to a drinks reception before we all go down to our favourite restaurant in Canterbury. It seems like the Conference will be paying for Maureen’s dinner, because of all the hard work she’s been doing for them, so this looks like being the cheapest anniversary dinner we’ve ever had. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
8:23 pm	I collect awards (part whatever) It seems like What it is we do when we read science fiction has made another award shortlist, curiously the British Fantasy Award, even though I'm not sure there's really anything about fantasy in the book. I am still struggling to find any way to express the way I feel about this plethora of award nominations. I honestly didn't expect it, I am genuinely surprised and delighted - and everything I do say sounds somehow false even though it isn't. Also on awards, I should mention that I am on the jury for this year's James Tiptree Jr Award, so if you come across any work of science fiction that touches on interesting gender issues, do let me know. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
9:25 am	Mind Meld I am featured in another Mind Meld at SF Signal on What was the last SF/F book that surprised you?. I seem to be the only contributor who hasn't taken the question literally. (Comment on this)
Monday, May 25th, 2009
10:03 am	Blair is the natural successor of Attlee I was born in 1952, which means that, other than vague memories of the tail end of the Macmillan government, I first came to political consciousness during the Wilson government of the 1960s. It was a period that fixed my perspective on the parties. Labour was, for me, forever associated with the liberal impetus behind the reforms Roy Jenkins oversaw (abolition of the death penalty, decriminalising homosexuality, liberalising the abortion laws and so on). And when Heath became prime minister there wasn't a wholesale change in the political order. Margaret Thatcher, of course, changed that; but even so I was genuinely shocked when Tony Blair revealed how authoritarian New Labour was. It seemed, to me, a betrayal of everything I understood Labour to represent. However, my ongoing reading on recent British history is making me realise that the Macmillan-Wilson-Heath era was actually an aberration in political terms. Peter Hennessy's Having It So Good, a rather dense political history of the 1950s, reveals that Macmillan was on the left of the Conservative party (when he was a young man between the wars he was actually considered as a potential Labour minister), and Heath, of course, was Macmillan's protege. So the instincts of the Tory governments from the late-50s to the mid-70s were unusually centrist (Thatcher reversed that trend by taking the party further to the right than, I think, any Tory government before.) But it was starting to read David Kynaston's Austerity Britain, a wonderfully vivid account of the period of the Atlee Government from VE day to the beginning of the 50s, that has made me realise how much of an aberration in Labour terms the Wilson government of the 60s was. I had always bought in to the popular notion that Atlee's defeat of Churchill in 1945 was a shock, but it wasn't. Attlee very cleverly bought in to a popular mood that had been there in the 1930s but really gained impetus during the war. Superficially this was a demand for change, but it was more than that. After the First World War, the war to end wars, there was a similar urge for change, but practically nothing came of it (other than universal adult suffrage), and from the 1930s onwards commentator after commentator was saying that this was because there had been a lack of planning. By the Second World War the call for planning was practically a cacophony: planning in education (the Butler Act), planning in social services (the Beveridge report), planning in housing. Attlee latched on to this, the 1945 Labour manifesto was virtually a rehash of every one of these demands for central planning in every aspect of life. Churchill, an old-fashioned laissez-faire Tory, never understood the demand for planning, and his campaign, based largely on the sentimental point that he had won the war (well, yes he had, but people wanted to put that behind them as quickly as possible), was completely out of step with the mood of the country. Well planning produced a lot of good: the Health Service is the great legacy of that age that I still think few except the most rabid Tories would ever want to change. But it was still exactly the same centralising, controlling urge that characterised the Blair government. It was the control and planning of every aspect of daily life that led the post-war government not only to retain but actually to extend rationing, for instance. And if housing plans led (rather too slowly) to the eradication of slums that slum clearance programmes of the 30s had long since started, they were replaced with buildings (high rises, for example) that fit the clean and simple plans of the planners but had absolutely nothing to do with how people actually wanted to live. I had assumed that Tony Blair represented an aberration in terms of Labour thought, just as I had assumed that Margaret Thatcher represented an aberration in terms of Conservative thought. Now I am realising that the view of both parties that I was brought up on was in fact the aberration. Pity, I still think things were better then. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 17th, 2009
11:02 am	Seven Beauties Just for completeness, following on my remarks about The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr here, here and here, I should point out that my final review is now up at SF Site. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
5:56 pm	Erasure redux I am away from the computer for most of the day and come back to find abuse, perhaps inevitably, creeping into the comments on my Erasure post. So I have deleted the post. I have seen too many discussions on LJ and elsewhere sink into childishness and insults, and I have decided on a zero-tolerance approach. I will continue to raise controversial issues, because I think it is interesting to raise these ideas and test how far they can go. I shall keep the discussion alive as long as the discussion remains sensible, and the moment the abuse starts to creep in the post will be deleted. I will provide no forum for people who cannot argue. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 15th, 2009
8:16 pm	Infirmity Last Friday evening I had a fall. Nothing serious, my foot caught in something and I went full length. A few grazes, a bit of shock, soon mended. Except it wasn't. I must have twisted my ankle more than I realised, because it is still weak, and still painful when I walk (particularly going down stairs). Then my knee (the one I buggered up a full ten years ago) ballooned up. Fortunately that went down again, but I'm still wary about trusting my weight to it. And now I'm beginning to realise that I must have jarred my shoulder pretty badly when I put my arm out to save myself, because the muscles in my shoulder have been like rock for the last week, and that would have contributed to the almost constant headache I've had since then. Ah the joys of getting older. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
12:35 pm	Expenses MKS pointed me towards this article. It is getting really hard to comment on this entire scandal. But you have to wonder: Why did it take longer to get Freedom of Information up and running in Britain than in any other Western country? Why did Members of Parliament repeatedly try to exempt themselves from Freedom of Information? Why did Speaker Michael Martin ignore legal advice to pursue this issue through the High Court? Why did the Fees Office repeatedly miss the deadlines when they were supposed to get the information out? Why did the Fees Office not send the information to MPs to check until several months after it was supposed to have been made public? And given that the Fees Office had indeed sent this raw data to individual MPs several weeks ago, why are so many of them pretending all this is a complete surprise to them? Actually, there is another more pertinent question: given my own personal faith in the British political system, why does none of this come as a shock to me? (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
11:35 am	Review My review of Best American Fantasy 2008 appeared at SF Site, and attracted this comment from Jeff Vandermeer: "the rapidly disintegrating (propagandist) Paul Kincaid chokes on theword “American” and makes a pretty crappy sweatshop joke. Um,Paul–Mexico has its own language. It is called Spanish, and most of the best writers down there, well, they write in it…". Rather graceless, I thought, given that it was a generally very positive review. But I am tempted to point out that I do indeed have problems with the word "American" as used here. First because one of the glories of contemporary publishing in the USA is the wealth of other Americas being represented: Hispanic American, Latin American (not the same thing), Chinese American, Native American - none of which seem to be represented by the "American" in Vandermeer's title. And yes, Jeff, sometimes they do write in another language, but there is such a thing as translation - I'm sure Vandermeer doesn't assume that "American" refers to language, since even in America that language is called "English". But that raises another issue with the title: fantasy is an international literature, it uses tropes and devices that are often identical whether the writer comes from Central Europe or the American Mid-West. Yet the confinement of Vandermeer's title suggests an exceptionalism to American fantasy that is not justified by the (generally very good) anthology that lies under that title. Because I felt that the rest of the book was (generally) very good, I wrapped up these discontents in a (weak) joke at the start of the review - but they are discontents none the less. (28 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 1st, 2009
4:29 pm	This is well worth reading, and not just for the superb pen portraits of the publishers concerned. (Spotted thanks to The Reading Experience.) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
2:07 pm	April Books Slowly getting back on track with my reading for the year. So this month I read: #15 Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer (reviewed for SF Site): if we have to have best of the year anthologies, then they should be as wide ranging, as eclectic, as this. There are too many stories that would not have been my choice for an anthology like this, but at least the variety is entertaining. #16 This Is Not A Game by Walter Jon Williams (reviewed for Vector): an efficient thriller with a rather pleasing conceit - the players of an on-line game putting their skills together to solve a real life murder - this is an entertaining read but not a great book. #17 Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow (reviewed for SF Site): a funny novella that still left me feeling a little uneasy. Morrow's anti-nuclear credentials are all in place, but there's a form of cultural appropriation at the heart of this book that I'm not comfortable with. #18 Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery: I really expected (hoped) to like this book a lot more than I did, but what we end up wth is a sort f superannuated hippy view of America that I thought we'd got beyond twenty years ago. You know you've got problems if a novel is set in the near future yet its most recent cultural reference is from 1974. #19 Half a Crown by Jo Walton: I was hoping for something as tight as Farthing but it comes across as thin, and with the sort of contrived happy ending that I saw coming a mile off and didn't believe for one moment. #20 The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr (reviewed for SF Site): I've already made some posts inspired by my reading of this book, here, here and here. I think this is going to be one of the most important critical works on sf for some time to come, if only because of the way it attempts to make Suvin work for contemporary science fiction. I have fundamental disagreements with the book, mostly because I don't think Csicsery-Ronay goes anywhere near far enough in his reworking of Suvin, but I still think it is an essential work. Cross-posted to 50bookchallenge (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
9:45 am	Locus I don't know whether I'm stalking fjm or she's stalking me, but there we are again on another award shortlist, this time it's the Locus Awards. Congratulations to all, especially to Farah. (Why does it feel like boasting to put up a post saying my book has been shortlisted for an award? It's a most curious sensation.) (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
8:58 am	Marxism and science fiction I am still puzzling my way through my response to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr's The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. It is, I think, a necessary if somewhat belated corrective to the Marxist/Suvinian orthodoxy that is the common academic response to science fiction, in that he eases back on cognitive estrangement and is actually quite radical in his re-evaluation of the novum. But I'm still not sure that he goes far enough. Let's be clear, I have no problem with the Marxist view of science fiction, and I understand why science fiction in particular has an appeal to Marxist theorists. The western myth of science, ever since the days of Francis Bacon, has been that science represents an inevitable advance towards truth and material well-being. This makes it a very good fit with Marxist ideas of historical inevitability. And as a proponent of, and channel for, much of that western myth of science, science fiction seems to match very closely ideals for how fiction should work. My problem is that I'm not sure science (in the public arena if not in the laboratory) matches those ideals any more. Even if you don't know how science works, an awful lot of broad and fuzzily understood notions have leaked over from science into the public arena over the last century, all involving terms like relativity, uncertainty, falsifiability, chaos, which don't exactly inspire one that the inevitable advance towards truth is all that inevitable. As for material well-being, the atomic bomb undermined that comfort of science. Instead, particularly over the last quarter century or so, the quest for truth has tended to shift away from science and back to religion, to the extent that an eminent scientist like Richard Dawkins can seem to spend more of his time talking about religion than he does doing science, while faith schools expand and Intelligent Design is considered a fit addition to the science curriculum. Keeping pace with this, over roughly the same period, since the high-tech high water mark of cyberpunk in the 1980s, science fiction seems to have become increasingly indistinguishable from fantasy. Even some of the most overtly science fictional ideas in the recent literature, the radical transformations of nanotechnology and posthumanity, have a magical air about them. Consider the Marxist future of Iain Banks's Culture, the absence of shortage and the ability to transform oneself however one wishes is pure science fiction, but this allows one character in Matter to manifest himself as a bush, which is pure fairy tale. I have never been entirely convinced by cognitive estrangement or by the novum, and though Csicsery-Ronay's reconfiguration of these is persuasive and appealing, I am not sure that it goes far enough to accommodate the shape science fiction has been taking over recent years. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 20th, 2009
11:31 am	Montreal Thanks to an extraordinary and breathtaking act of generosity, I am going to the Montreal Worldcon after all. I have had an incredibly busy morning, but I am now booked on Air Canada flights arriving on Wednesday 5th August and departing on Tuesday 11th. I have accommodation booked at the Hyatt Regency hotel. And I have registered for the convention (and filled in the programme participant form). I am now exhausted, elated, and looking forward to watching someone else win the Hugo. But at least I'll be there. (5 Comments |Comment on this)