back on the exhausted side of tired.

er. yes. i guess that's all i have to blog about.



oh wait. there's more after all.

this, by Geoff Ryman, had me scratching my head. not because i disagreed with it or wasn't excited by the 'serious' ideas behind the Sinister Mundane Manifesto--in fact, it's sort of not quite almost the kind of thing i tried to do with the work-in-progress i've tentatively called Spooky--but because i find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the culture of writers this sort of speechification portrays. yes, i know i have been and continue to regularly be guilty of the same behavior, but that just makes it worse, dunnit?

even more baffling, despite the correspondence between the SMM and my own perspective of fiction, i couldn't quite find myself on Mr Ryman's side, and the little voice in my head i'd bound and gagged regained consciousness and started knocking its head against the panels--first on the walls, then on the floorboards when the chair it was tied to collapsed from its violence--trying to catch my attention.

and then M. John Harrison said this:

SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artefact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions. While I agree with almost everything that Geoff Ryman and the Mundanes say about SF, I can't join them because I find it impossible to assign different levels of plausibility to acts of the imagination. If you limit yourself on the grounds that faster-than-light travel isn't "realistic," you might as well go whole hog and write only fiction set on the street where you live; if you limit yourself to that, you might as well go whole hog and write nothing but nonfiction; if you limit yourself to that, you might as well go whole hog, admit that writing is not the real world--and can't even successfully represent the real world--and give it up altogether.

I'd be happy to do that, and indeed I've already done all of those things more than once in the last forty years. But if you're going to write SF in the first place, why not lie back, admit it's a farrago, and enjoy it ? I think there's a great deal to be gained from revaluing and enjoying the distinction between the invented and the real. As long as you maintain that, SF's a great genre.

(in an interview by Jeff VanderMeer for Amazon, here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNKU9IKGSQRRMJA)

and suddenly, all was right again in the world.

yes, i know. disgusting how much the internets has had me relying on ventriloquism, ennit?