What goes around
The story so far: once upon a time sf was a despised genre loved by boys never read by girls, and it was looked down by on everybody with good taste. We would say, Canticle for Leibowitz isn't crap, and then they would say, no, but then it isn't sf. And we would say, what about Gulliver and Thomas More and Lucian of Samosa, lo even unto Plato's Republic and we saw that it was sf and that it was good. Because if we read it, it must be sf and it must be good.
Then Aldiss came unto us and spoke, and said, that's a bit silly really, given they didn't have the idea of science then, but how about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. And we looked and it was good and it was sf, although we didn't like the Branagh movie as much as the James Whale one and some of us had read the book.
And time came and time went, and Gary Westfahl spoke unto us and told us that fans could leave their books to academic libraries and that he was ever so humble, and that Shelley didn't know what she was doing but Gernsback did even if it was pants.
And we looked at sf and we saw it started in 1926 and we saw it was good.
And so to Gresham College, or rather the Royal College of Surgeons, to a half day symposium on Sf as a literary genre - although no one defined genre or literary.
Neal Stephenson was the keynote - after an after dinner style intro with a few odd statements. I missed part of his speech, which seemed fair enough stuff, as I had a sudden attack of tb and had to steal
brisingamen's water to choke to death with. The sum of it was the bifurcated career - some actors like Weaving and Weaver can act smart - and we're all geeks now. He closed with some kind of sense of relief that the post-structuralists never got hold of sf - so I must have blinked throughout the careers of Gibson as topic and Delany as writer.
Andy Sawyer talked about the colesence of sf as a genre under Gernsback, with the proviso that it was done earlier but not in English, and done earlier but not in a magazine, and it was done in a magazine earlier but only as a one-off. As always the First turns out to be the third or fourth.
John Clute finished the first session with a talk on horror, and I fear I lost the thread, in part because he was apparently trying to do battle with working out if he had the right draft, a conversation that seemed to be going on in the room and, as always, with the microphone. I think he needs a lapel mic as desk ones are either hit or rebound from the thumped lectern.
Dr Martin Willis took up the second half, and well, treated us to manifest bollocks. Sf studies has neglected the nineteenth century. I have this rather strong feel that early SFS is full of much of this stuff - Art Evans is editing much now - and indeed early SFS endlessly reviewed editions of nineteenth century sf. Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction hardly get beyond 1900, and there's a book by him on Victorian sf, a good chunk of both Aldiss volumes, Seed's Anticipations, Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction and SF before 1900, Stableford's Scientific Romance in Britain... In fact, as I pored through journals looking for sf crit back in 1990 I really craved some post-1926 stuff. Has Westfahl's championing of 1926 become so canonical?
(The Routledge Companion to SF will make a case for the long history argument, although I still feel as a genre 1926 works as Year Zero.)
Willis also had some odd views of what science is or how it is viewed, and I wondered how Latour and Kuhn would see it. I also wondered where in Frankenstein we are told the creature is animated with electricity' nowhere is my guess. I suspect he also misrepresented
fjm's views.
My old colleague Roger Luckhurst finished the day with the twentieth century, and a distinction of modernity, modernism and modernising, a division I've heard him work through for nearly twenty years now. He was interesting on the James/Wells battles, and the snobbery of the modernist, and the attack on mass culture, but it was the end of a hot afternoon, and he needed to feed into a plenary.
I hope I noticed when I first saw the agenda but what was painfully clear was the papers were by white men. There is no woman anywhere in the world who can speak to sf as a literary genre. Of course, if you turn to the fourteen scholars in the directory on the SF-Hub, only two of them are female. Neither of them is fjm. Someone did raise this as a question - and of course it's Gresham College's screw up not the evidentally embarrassed panelists. Clute made some half-hearted attempt to say the history of sf can be told through texts by women, but I don't really think anyone really has. fjm gave us some figures to question the demographics of the audience. Some one asked what would get men to watch female superheroes; I feel the answer is too obvious to spell out.
I think the interesting drowned out the sound of my chin dropping, but next time I'd like to see Justina Robson as keynote, with fjm, Lucie Armit, brisingamen , Jenny Wolmark, Michelle Reid and Joan Gordon talking. They don't especially even need to talk about feminist sf. But it feel as if a pendulum had swung.
Thanks and apologies to brisingamen for the bottle (you know you mustn't cough but it makes it worse), apologies to anyone trampled on my way out (and I panicked because there were no visible doors in the room) and thanks to James for meeting for coffee before and finding us a pub afterwards. That's seventeen years of this now, give or take a summer. Bloody hell, we're old farts.
Then Aldiss came unto us and spoke, and said, that's a bit silly really, given they didn't have the idea of science then, but how about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. And we looked and it was good and it was sf, although we didn't like the Branagh movie as much as the James Whale one and some of us had read the book.
And time came and time went, and Gary Westfahl spoke unto us and told us that fans could leave their books to academic libraries and that he was ever so humble, and that Shelley didn't know what she was doing but Gernsback did even if it was pants.
And we looked at sf and we saw it started in 1926 and we saw it was good.
And so to Gresham College, or rather the Royal College of Surgeons, to a half day symposium on Sf as a literary genre - although no one defined genre or literary.
Neal Stephenson was the keynote - after an after dinner style intro with a few odd statements. I missed part of his speech, which seemed fair enough stuff, as I had a sudden attack of tb and had to steal
brisingamen's water to choke to death with. The sum of it was the bifurcated career - some actors like Weaving and Weaver can act smart - and we're all geeks now. He closed with some kind of sense of relief that the post-structuralists never got hold of sf - so I must have blinked throughout the careers of Gibson as topic and Delany as writer.
Andy Sawyer talked about the colesence of sf as a genre under Gernsback, with the proviso that it was done earlier but not in English, and done earlier but not in a magazine, and it was done in a magazine earlier but only as a one-off. As always the First turns out to be the third or fourth.
John Clute finished the first session with a talk on horror, and I fear I lost the thread, in part because he was apparently trying to do battle with working out if he had the right draft, a conversation that seemed to be going on in the room and, as always, with the microphone. I think he needs a lapel mic as desk ones are either hit or rebound from the thumped lectern.
Dr Martin Willis took up the second half, and well, treated us to manifest bollocks. Sf studies has neglected the nineteenth century. I have this rather strong feel that early SFS is full of much of this stuff - Art Evans is editing much now - and indeed early SFS endlessly reviewed editions of nineteenth century sf. Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction hardly get beyond 1900, and there's a book by him on Victorian sf, a good chunk of both Aldiss volumes, Seed's Anticipations, Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction and SF before 1900, Stableford's Scientific Romance in Britain... In fact, as I pored through journals looking for sf crit back in 1990 I really craved some post-1926 stuff. Has Westfahl's championing of 1926 become so canonical?
(The Routledge Companion to SF will make a case for the long history argument, although I still feel as a genre 1926 works as Year Zero.)
Willis also had some odd views of what science is or how it is viewed, and I wondered how Latour and Kuhn would see it. I also wondered where in Frankenstein we are told the creature is animated with electricity' nowhere is my guess. I suspect he also misrepresented
fjm's views.
My old colleague Roger Luckhurst finished the day with the twentieth century, and a distinction of modernity, modernism and modernising, a division I've heard him work through for nearly twenty years now. He was interesting on the James/Wells battles, and the snobbery of the modernist, and the attack on mass culture, but it was the end of a hot afternoon, and he needed to feed into a plenary.
I hope I noticed when I first saw the agenda but what was painfully clear was the papers were by white men. There is no woman anywhere in the world who can speak to sf as a literary genre. Of course, if you turn to the fourteen scholars in the directory on the SF-Hub, only two of them are female. Neither of them is fjm. Someone did raise this as a question - and of course it's Gresham College's screw up not the evidentally embarrassed panelists. Clute made some half-hearted attempt to say the history of sf can be told through texts by women, but I don't really think anyone really has. fjm gave us some figures to question the demographics of the audience. Some one asked what would get men to watch female superheroes; I feel the answer is too obvious to spell out.
I think the interesting drowned out the sound of my chin dropping, but next time I'd like to see Justina Robson as keynote, with fjm, Lucie Armit, brisingamen , Jenny Wolmark, Michelle Reid and Joan Gordon talking. They don't especially even need to talk about feminist sf. But it feel as if a pendulum had swung.
Thanks and apologies to brisingamen for the bottle (you know you mustn't cough but it makes it worse), apologies to anyone trampled on my way out (and I panicked because there were no visible doors in the room) and thanks to James for meeting for coffee before and finding us a pub afterwards. That's seventeen years of this now, give or take a summer. Bloody hell, we're old farts.