This week's New Scientist is a science fiction special, and so they are running a science fiction "(very) short story" competition.
Stories must be set one hundred years from now, and no more than 350 words in length. Closing date is 15 October 2009. Winning entries will be published in the magazine.
See here for full details.
Friday, 18 September 2009
Friday, 7 August 2009
More of Dave's favourite SF books
I mentioned in my preferences street-level realism, which became such a trademark feature of cyberpunk, but it goes back much further than Gibson and the 80s. In Theodore Sturgeon's collection E Pluribus Unicorn
, the action takes place in low-lit bars, often narrated by a heavy-drinking shiphand or farmhand. This in turn shows the detective-noir origins of the style.
Sturgeon is convincing and compassionate about the dirt-poor – More Than Human
features a character living in what is very much Depression Era rural USA.
What is the opposite of that kind of noir style? An unremitting diet of glossy super-people, maybe? Or Heinlein's all-American high achievers? Or Asimov's somewhat ivory-tower world of scientists and top engineers?
This leads me into the big pictures stuff, the deep future history theme.
It's many years since I read the Foundation
trilogy, but I remember the thrill of another set of potentials that SF could lay out for the human race, a beautiful thought-experiment.
I went on to delight in other tales of future humans. The ur-texts of the whole area are, of course, Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men
and Star Maker
, the first a history of mankind from the time it was written (1930) to the end of humanity on Neptune 10 billion years in the future, and the second a journey taken by an ordinary man of 1937 to the end of time and beyond, in the quest for god, basically, for the ultimate intelligence of the universe, the Starmaker.
In Last And First Men, Stapledon got a lot of his future history so far right, despite the foreword to the recent edition I just read apologizing to the Americans for his prejudices against them. He recognizes and salutes the greatness in America, but his magnificent contempt for human stupidity cannot overlook his correct prediction about the corrosive effects of the 'degenerate religion' of Christian fundamentalism. To anyone with a brain, it is harrowing and perplexing that such a mighty nation, so filled with excellent and exceptional people can nonetheless be led by a cabal of ignorant bigots trading cynically on the stupidity of their oppressed, a malign subculture that illegalises the teaching of proper science in schools, systematically poisoning the minds of its young with category errors that replace science with the most primitive and stupid theology.
The downfall of the First Men (i.e., us) is due to a 2-fold process – a neurological disease, then, much worse in the long term, a degeneration of human intelligence caused by worship of primitive instinctual behaviour, in form of obsession with endless energy-wasting flight. In this phase of breakdown, the worse the energy crisis gets, the more people think they should fly – sounds familiar? The selective upshot of this collapse is rather like what might happen if all the next generation were bred exclusively from Big Brother inmates.
He also got right some kind of nuclear power, but centuries after it happened (Gordelpus!), germ warfare as terribly important and dangerous, the wars over oil, and Nordic supremacy doctrines. But, curiously, instead of happening over 150 years it happened in the next 15...
He got badly wrong the 'Russian character' as impervious to physical possessions and status. Maybe he was still clinging onto some hope for the then-new Soviet regime.
He also got wrong the leap into space taking 200-300 million years, and biotechnology such as could intervene in human development on a similar timescale. He died in 1950, seven years before Sputnik and three before the structure-determination of DNA that led to the revealing of the genetic code in 1961. Computers were in their absolute infancy.
In any case, the name of the game is not correct guessing. This book had a massive influence on me when I first read it at about the age of 14.
Last And First Men is not a novel; it has no plot, and the only character development is that of the human race itself. However, it is beautifully written. Brian Aldiss described it, only a little fulsomely, as a prose poem.
Star Maker is something else again, set on an even bigger scale.
With a kind of fusion of logic and vision, he deals with the gulf between human love and the physical, created cosmos, and the paradoxes of perfection and imperfection in creation.
These are big mystical questions. His standpoint sometimes seems like that of the Gnostics, an ancient group of 'cults' who influenced William Blake, amongst many others, in seeing such a lack of love and compassion in the created universe as to attribute to the creation to an amoral demiurge, a blind force of creativity.
His timescales, on another hand, recall the immense time-spans of the kalpas, the 'days and nights of Brahman' in Hindu cosmology, each 4.32 billion years, in each night of which human consciousness is extinguished.
He ranges over all religious modes, in fact, in his exploration of the Starmaker's creativity. Eventually, the Starmaker makes a universe which teaches him something, but the observer still recoils in horror. From P183, contemplating the most perfect creation:
'I scorned my birthright of ecstasy in that inhuman perfection and yearned back to my lowly cosmos... there to stand shoulder to shoulder with my own half-animal kind against ... the indifferent, the ruthless, the invisible tyrant whose mere thoughts are sentient and tortured worlds.'
Phew! Not love, but contemplation of everything, is its core nature.
At that point, he goes home, a Marxist mystic who has returned from the quest and wants to go no higher into the cosmic mystery, but simply to get on with the practical matters of living a good life.
The nearest attempt in terms of scale I'm aware of since then is Charles Stross's Accelerando
. This follows a family (or two) through changes over a few centuries, a much more realistic timescales from our present state. In Accelerando, the projections into the future are heavily centred on changes in computer power and the post-human software that runs it.
As a read, it's about as good a book with so many big infodumps can be. It has a magnificent scale of ideas, central to which is the transformations of humans and post-human entities by systems of resource allocation.
He posits something like an ideal world – but frames this final human civilization as an 'economic backwater' – but it reads like I'd be delighted to live in it.
This leads us into the themes of posthumanity, utopias and liberation. Something different in the way of superhumanity is offered in Michael Moorcock's The Dancers At The End of Time
. Here we have very jolly post-humans, partying on to the end of the universe, using it all up for fun. This is a vision of Huizinga's homo ludens, mankind at play – a '60s dream that went deeper than most of that era, the idea that technology and repressive culture had done their job, and that humans could look forward to a future of self-actualization without being coerced economically or by force to go to boring work. (What happened to that ideal?)
This great utopia finds its limits (no utopia would be interesting if it was entirely successful!) in the end of the universe (which the protagonists have just used up) as well as in its internal limitations – the most interesting characters get a bit bored with perfect fun. Time-travel is invoked to give the protagonists societies which they can compare to their own, insular culture, and this gives rise to some great scenes, particularly the incursion into Victorian London of the Lat, a bunch of interstellar raiders rather like alien Hells Angels.
Another utopia – Iain M Banks' The State of the Art
– is a novella set in his Culture universe. I could have chosen any of the Culture novels to make this point, but my personal favourite is this early one, because it has a recognizable Earth in it, therefore more 'presence' for me. The Culture is a star-spanning civilization where people live for a few centuries, have enhanced themselves to enjoy sex more and to 'gland' endogenous drugs for recreation. Way to go! But of course, there are problems in its perfection, giving us interesting plots about an advanced civilization colliding with primitive ones, and the individuals who are frustrated by perfection becoming the agents – Special Circumstances – of the Culture's interference in less sophisticated societies.
This is about the imperfections inherent in utopia. The best we can imagine has its limitations, may be a spiritual desert for some people, like the Culture citizen who 'goes native' and stays on earth, only to lose everything and yet be satisfied, fulfilled somehow as he dies in a street brawl.
An examination of some possibilities for political liberation is contained in William S Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night
. It is an alternative history of freedom; 18th century pirate gangs liberate areas of the world from church and state and form free republics. They accept new members who sign up to the Articles:
Of course, the Articles are compromised by the actions of leaders – even though they are of the highest calibre of honesty. The exercise of power corrupts, and the Republics fail; this book is a lament for what might have been.
Naturally, being a Burroughs book, it contains various other levels too – magical rituals, alien diseases and lots of (mostly grotesque and mostly gay) sex, as well as a model of internal liberation based on a deadly pilgrimage through the six Cities of the Red Night, in which variations of the rallying cry Burroughs attributes to Hassan I Sabbah, 'Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted', are played out in thought-experiment societies.
, the action takes place in low-lit bars, often narrated by a heavy-drinking shiphand or farmhand. This in turn shows the detective-noir origins of the style.Sturgeon is convincing and compassionate about the dirt-poor – More Than Human
features a character living in what is very much Depression Era rural USA.What is the opposite of that kind of noir style? An unremitting diet of glossy super-people, maybe? Or Heinlein's all-American high achievers? Or Asimov's somewhat ivory-tower world of scientists and top engineers?
This leads me into the big pictures stuff, the deep future history theme.
It's many years since I read the Foundation
trilogy, but I remember the thrill of another set of potentials that SF could lay out for the human race, a beautiful thought-experiment.I went on to delight in other tales of future humans. The ur-texts of the whole area are, of course, Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men
and Star Maker, the first a history of mankind from the time it was written (1930) to the end of humanity on Neptune 10 billion years in the future, and the second a journey taken by an ordinary man of 1937 to the end of time and beyond, in the quest for god, basically, for the ultimate intelligence of the universe, the Starmaker.In Last And First Men
, Stapledon got a lot of his future history so far right, despite the foreword to the recent edition I just read apologizing to the Americans for his prejudices against them. He recognizes and salutes the greatness in America, but his magnificent contempt for human stupidity cannot overlook his correct prediction about the corrosive effects of the 'degenerate religion' of Christian fundamentalism. To anyone with a brain, it is harrowing and perplexing that such a mighty nation, so filled with excellent and exceptional people can nonetheless be led by a cabal of ignorant bigots trading cynically on the stupidity of their oppressed, a malign subculture that illegalises the teaching of proper science in schools, systematically poisoning the minds of its young with category errors that replace science with the most primitive and stupid theology.The downfall of the First Men (i.e., us) is due to a 2-fold process – a neurological disease, then, much worse in the long term, a degeneration of human intelligence caused by worship of primitive instinctual behaviour, in form of obsession with endless energy-wasting flight. In this phase of breakdown, the worse the energy crisis gets, the more people think they should fly – sounds familiar? The selective upshot of this collapse is rather like what might happen if all the next generation were bred exclusively from Big Brother inmates.
He also got right some kind of nuclear power, but centuries after it happened (Gordelpus!), germ warfare as terribly important and dangerous, the wars over oil, and Nordic supremacy doctrines. But, curiously, instead of happening over 150 years it happened in the next 15...
He got badly wrong the 'Russian character' as impervious to physical possessions and status. Maybe he was still clinging onto some hope for the then-new Soviet regime.
He also got wrong the leap into space taking 200-300 million years, and biotechnology such as could intervene in human development on a similar timescale. He died in 1950, seven years before Sputnik and three before the structure-determination of DNA that led to the revealing of the genetic code in 1961. Computers were in their absolute infancy.
In any case, the name of the game is not correct guessing. This book had a massive influence on me when I first read it at about the age of 14.
Last And First Men
is not a novel; it has no plot, and the only character development is that of the human race itself. However, it is beautifully written. Brian Aldiss described it, only a little fulsomely, as a prose poem.Star Maker
is something else again, set on an even bigger scale.With a kind of fusion of logic and vision, he deals with the gulf between human love and the physical, created cosmos, and the paradoxes of perfection and imperfection in creation.
These are big mystical questions. His standpoint sometimes seems like that of the Gnostics, an ancient group of 'cults' who influenced William Blake, amongst many others, in seeing such a lack of love and compassion in the created universe as to attribute to the creation to an amoral demiurge, a blind force of creativity.
His timescales, on another hand, recall the immense time-spans of the kalpas, the 'days and nights of Brahman' in Hindu cosmology, each 4.32 billion years, in each night of which human consciousness is extinguished.
He ranges over all religious modes, in fact, in his exploration of the Starmaker's creativity. Eventually, the Starmaker makes a universe which teaches him something, but the observer still recoils in horror. From P183, contemplating the most perfect creation:
'I scorned my birthright of ecstasy in that inhuman perfection and yearned back to my lowly cosmos... there to stand shoulder to shoulder with my own half-animal kind against ... the indifferent, the ruthless, the invisible tyrant whose mere thoughts are sentient and tortured worlds.'
Phew! Not love, but contemplation of everything, is its core nature.
At that point, he goes home, a Marxist mystic who has returned from the quest and wants to go no higher into the cosmic mystery, but simply to get on with the practical matters of living a good life.
The nearest attempt in terms of scale I'm aware of since then is Charles Stross's Accelerando
. This follows a family (or two) through changes over a few centuries, a much more realistic timescales from our present state. In Accelerando, the projections into the future are heavily centred on changes in computer power and the post-human software that runs it.As a read, it's about as good a book with so many big infodumps can be. It has a magnificent scale of ideas, central to which is the transformations of humans and post-human entities by systems of resource allocation.
He posits something like an ideal world – but frames this final human civilization as an 'economic backwater' – but it reads like I'd be delighted to live in it.
This leads us into the themes of posthumanity, utopias and liberation. Something different in the way of superhumanity is offered in Michael Moorcock's The Dancers At The End of Time
. Here we have very jolly post-humans, partying on to the end of the universe, using it all up for fun. This is a vision of Huizinga's homo ludens, mankind at play – a '60s dream that went deeper than most of that era, the idea that technology and repressive culture had done their job, and that humans could look forward to a future of self-actualization without being coerced economically or by force to go to boring work. (What happened to that ideal?)This great utopia finds its limits (no utopia would be interesting if it was entirely successful!) in the end of the universe (which the protagonists have just used up) as well as in its internal limitations – the most interesting characters get a bit bored with perfect fun. Time-travel is invoked to give the protagonists societies which they can compare to their own, insular culture, and this gives rise to some great scenes, particularly the incursion into Victorian London of the Lat, a bunch of interstellar raiders rather like alien Hells Angels.
Another utopia – Iain M Banks' The State of the Art
– is a novella set in his Culture universe. I could have chosen any of the Culture novels to make this point, but my personal favourite is this early one, because it has a recognizable Earth in it, therefore more 'presence' for me. The Culture is a star-spanning civilization where people live for a few centuries, have enhanced themselves to enjoy sex more and to 'gland' endogenous drugs for recreation. Way to go! But of course, there are problems in its perfection, giving us interesting plots about an advanced civilization colliding with primitive ones, and the individuals who are frustrated by perfection becoming the agents – Special Circumstances – of the Culture's interference in less sophisticated societies.This is about the imperfections inherent in utopia. The best we can imagine has its limitations, may be a spiritual desert for some people, like the Culture citizen who 'goes native' and stays on earth, only to lose everything and yet be satisfied, fulfilled somehow as he dies in a street brawl.
An examination of some possibilities for political liberation is contained in William S Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night
. It is an alternative history of freedom; 18th century pirate gangs liberate areas of the world from church and state and form free republics. They accept new members who sign up to the Articles:- 'No man may be imprisoned for debt;
- No man may enslave another;
- No man may interfere in any way with the religious beliefs and practices of another;
- No man may be subjected to torture for any reason;
- No man may interfere with the sexual practices of another or force any sexual act on another against his or her will;
- No man may be put to death except for the violation of the Articles.'
Of course, the Articles are compromised by the actions of leaders – even though they are of the highest calibre of honesty. The exercise of power corrupts, and the Republics fail; this book is a lament for what might have been.
Naturally, being a Burroughs book, it contains various other levels too – magical rituals, alien diseases and lots of (mostly grotesque and mostly gay) sex, as well as a model of internal liberation based on a deadly pilgrimage through the six Cities of the Red Night, in which variations of the rallying cry Burroughs attributes to Hassan I Sabbah, 'Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted', are played out in thought-experiment societies.
Thursday, 30 July 2009
favourite SF stories
I'm posting up my 'favourite SF stories' essays. This will be a sprawling set of writings with no overall theme other than sharing my best SF experiences. It's not exhaustive, merely a few starting points.
To pin down most of what I like in SF: plausible weirdness with interesting concepts taking place in a world I can relate to at a gut level. This often takes the form of a kind of punk sensibility.
I think SF is the perfect medium for the exploration of themes of the alien Other, Utopias and Dystopias, superhumanity and the future of what we call humans and, at the more fantastic end, lyrical explorations of magical experiences.
These essays will focus almost exclusively on text SF – most mainstream TV and film SF is not to my taste (with a few notable exceptions like Dr Who, which I may get round to discussing).
In a SF film, I want vivid visual delights and engaging style. Think – for one particular style that resonates down through the years – Blade Runner
and style-derivatives such as Minority Report
– Philip K Dick's dystopias brought to film life. Game style visuals leave me cold – surely the reason game players (I 'fess up to having sworn off this particular intoxicant in order to spend more time on other kinds of fun) put up with such unconvincing detail in the sets and people / entities is down to constraints from the fact that the hardware is running at its limits. Why indulge in such design in films, unless the issue is budget constraints? A particularly flat-looking example of bargain basement CGI is Ultraviolet
, with Milla Jovovitch.
I started my adventures in SF when my Uncle Jeff, the only science-trained member of my family (he worked as a wartime electronic engineer on radar, then on early ICL computers, and apparently built the family a TV set from war surplus, with a 9", round, green screen) gave me a copy, old even then, of Astounding Science Fiction, some time in the late 50s.
I would be delighted if someone could help me track down which one – the only story title I appear to remember (allowing for the instability of memory traces) is 'Well Done, My Good and Faithful Servant'. I've tried Googling the title and also tried to find listings of Astounding's contents, both to no avail. I can't even remember much about the story, but I do remember being taken out of myself into a world of alien intelligences, strange energies and humans framed differently to how I'd ever read before.
That led me over the next few years to reading the Spectrum anthologies, collected by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, Asimov's Foundation trilogy, Blish's A Case Of Conscience
and many other 50s novels I don't recall at the moment.
Taking some of the above themes one at a time, I'll start with the superman / übermensch theme:
Lord of Light
by Roger Zelazny. For those enviable folk who have yet to read this masterpiece, the backstory is that the First arrive on a planet already inhabited by energy beings, take over, breed more humans, make themselves immortal by reincarnating into new bodies at will, develop extraordinary powers by growing close to some technology that represents the Attribute of the god whose identity they each take on, from the Hindu pantheon. Isolating themselves in Heaven, maintain the Hindu religion and withhold this and all but the most basic technology from the rest of the people. Years before, one of the First had sided with the banned Accelerationist tendency in Heavenly politics which taught that the technology should be spread to the people. This one teaches a form of Buddhism as the vehicle for liberation – beautiful use of Buddhist and Hindu poems interwoven with the technology.
'For six days he had offered many kilowatts of prayer, but the static kept him from being heard on high.'
That's an example of what I read SF for – maximum believable weirdness!
There's an exuberance of invention beyond what's needed to drive the plot, and an uplifting conclusion – despite human inventiveness in enslaving each other and devising excuses for it, new ideas (or old ideas in new guises) prevail and liberation comes. Also a sense of the power of ideas over repression in the long term.
Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human is another take on the übermensch theme – a Gestalt mind, but led by a psychopath! This is one of those books I read every few years, it is so perfect.
Wandering from the superman theme to alien superhumanity, one of the great classics is Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land
, in which the superman teaches us a better way of living, a blend of Martian and human. The morality of this book is intriguing, coming from the pen of a writer who in some of his works seemed to favour a kind of militaristic space fascism – here he writes of a sovereign individualism including, amongst other things, a loosening-up of the rigid sexual prejudices of the time (1961). Some of these ideas were no doubt influential a few years later in the freak subculture of the 60s, as well as the word 'grok'.
The Martians in Stranger in a Strange Land are depicted as alien, never human, scarcely recognizable from a human point of view, but nothing like as alien as the ultimate alien story. For pure alienness, the greatest book of all has to be Stanislaw Lem's Solaris
, another book I read every time I forget enough of it to enjoy it again. The Solaris entity is a being on which the humans' most obdurate curiosity shatters on. The atmosphere is created by hinting (can any more be achieved?) at an incomprehensible alienness. The story itself has become a mysterious artefact subject to as many interpretations as the entity it is about. Lem stated that both films, the 1974 Tarkovsky and the 2003 one missed the point of the novel. Of the two films, I recommend the Tarkovsky.
To pin down most of what I like in SF: plausible weirdness with interesting concepts taking place in a world I can relate to at a gut level. This often takes the form of a kind of punk sensibility.
I think SF is the perfect medium for the exploration of themes of the alien Other, Utopias and Dystopias, superhumanity and the future of what we call humans and, at the more fantastic end, lyrical explorations of magical experiences.
These essays will focus almost exclusively on text SF – most mainstream TV and film SF is not to my taste (with a few notable exceptions like Dr Who, which I may get round to discussing).
In a SF film, I want vivid visual delights and engaging style. Think – for one particular style that resonates down through the years – Blade Runner
and style-derivatives such as Minority Report – Philip K Dick's dystopias brought to film life. Game style visuals leave me cold – surely the reason game players (I 'fess up to having sworn off this particular intoxicant in order to spend more time on other kinds of fun) put up with such unconvincing detail in the sets and people / entities is down to constraints from the fact that the hardware is running at its limits. Why indulge in such design in films, unless the issue is budget constraints? A particularly flat-looking example of bargain basement CGI is Ultraviolet, with Milla Jovovitch.I started my adventures in SF when my Uncle Jeff, the only science-trained member of my family (he worked as a wartime electronic engineer on radar, then on early ICL computers, and apparently built the family a TV set from war surplus, with a 9", round, green screen) gave me a copy, old even then, of Astounding Science Fiction, some time in the late 50s.
I would be delighted if someone could help me track down which one – the only story title I appear to remember (allowing for the instability of memory traces) is 'Well Done, My Good and Faithful Servant'. I've tried Googling the title and also tried to find listings of Astounding's contents, both to no avail. I can't even remember much about the story, but I do remember being taken out of myself into a world of alien intelligences, strange energies and humans framed differently to how I'd ever read before.
That led me over the next few years to reading the Spectrum
anthologies, collected by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, Asimov's Foundation trilogy, Blish's A Case Of Conscience and many other 50s novels I don't recall at the moment.Taking some of the above themes one at a time, I'll start with the superman / übermensch theme:
Lord of Light
by Roger Zelazny. For those enviable folk who have yet to read this masterpiece, the backstory is that the First arrive on a planet already inhabited by energy beings, take over, breed more humans, make themselves immortal by reincarnating into new bodies at will, develop extraordinary powers by growing close to some technology that represents the Attribute of the god whose identity they each take on, from the Hindu pantheon. Isolating themselves in Heaven, maintain the Hindu religion and withhold this and all but the most basic technology from the rest of the people. Years before, one of the First had sided with the banned Accelerationist tendency in Heavenly politics which taught that the technology should be spread to the people. This one teaches a form of Buddhism as the vehicle for liberation – beautiful use of Buddhist and Hindu poems interwoven with the technology. 'For six days he had offered many kilowatts of prayer, but the static kept him from being heard on high.'
That's an example of what I read SF for – maximum believable weirdness!
There's an exuberance of invention beyond what's needed to drive the plot, and an uplifting conclusion – despite human inventiveness in enslaving each other and devising excuses for it, new ideas (or old ideas in new guises) prevail and liberation comes. Also a sense of the power of ideas over repression in the long term.
Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human
is another take on the übermensch theme – a Gestalt mind, but led by a psychopath! This is one of those books I read every few years, it is so perfect.Wandering from the superman theme to alien superhumanity, one of the great classics is Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land
, in which the superman teaches us a better way of living, a blend of Martian and human. The morality of this book is intriguing, coming from the pen of a writer who in some of his works seemed to favour a kind of militaristic space fascism – here he writes of a sovereign individualism including, amongst other things, a loosening-up of the rigid sexual prejudices of the time (1961). Some of these ideas were no doubt influential a few years later in the freak subculture of the 60s, as well as the word 'grok'. The Martians in Stranger in a Strange Land
are depicted as alien, never human, scarcely recognizable from a human point of view, but nothing like as alien as the ultimate alien story. For pure alienness, the greatest book of all has to be Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, another book I read every time I forget enough of it to enjoy it again. The Solaris entity is a being on which the humans' most obdurate curiosity shatters on. The atmosphere is created by hinting (can any more be achieved?) at an incomprehensible alienness. The story itself has become a mysterious artefact subject to as many interpretations as the entity it is about. Lem stated that both films, the 1974 Tarkovsky and the 2003 one missed the point of the novel. Of the two films, I recommend the Tarkovsky.
Friday, 26 June 2009
Pantechnicon want non-fiction writers
This from their forum:
We're currently planning our next three issues - for September and December 2009, and March 2010. I've been tasked with co-ordinating non-fiction for the zine, and I'm now looking for additional article writers and interviewers to contribute to Pantechnicon.We're looking for articles of between 1,000 and 5,000 words on any topic related to science fiction, fantasy, horror or cross-genre - in literature, on film or TV, events - anything which you think might be of interest to Pantechnicon readers. Also, we'd like more people willing to interview those who work within the genre, like writers, TV/film actors / producers / directors, etc. From my own point of view I can tell you that interviewing's a very rewarding thing to do. I'd never interviewed anyone until I did my first interview for issue 2 of Pantechnicon (writer Stephen Gallagher). I've done several since, and I love every minute of interviewing. So if you fancy a go at that, we'd like to hear from you too.If you're interested, or just need more information or have a query, please PM me via the forum or email us at the usual submissions address: submissions@pantechnicon.net
Thursday, 28 May 2009
British Fantasy Society competition now open
This competition is open to anyone who has had no more than three pieces of fiction published in paying venues. You don't have to be a member of the British Fantasy Society either, although non-members must pay a £5 admin fee to enter. Nor does the story have to be fantasy - science fiction and horror are equally welcome.
First prize is £50 and publication by the British Fantasy Society. Runner-up prize is £25 and publication by the British Fantasy Society.
Entries should be no more than 5,000 words in length. Deadline is 31 August 2009.
Send all submissions - in standard manuscript format, attached as .doc or .rtf - to shortstorycomp@britishfantasysociety.org. Put "BFS Short Story Competition" as the title of your email.
See here for full competition rules.
First prize is £50 and publication by the British Fantasy Society. Runner-up prize is £25 and publication by the British Fantasy Society.
Entries should be no more than 5,000 words in length. Deadline is 31 August 2009.
Send all submissions - in standard manuscript format, attached as .doc or .rtf - to shortstorycomp@britishfantasysociety.org. Put "BFS Short Story Competition" as the title of your email.
See here for full competition rules.
Friday, 8 May 2009
The Hub magazine competion extended
The Hub magazine announced its short story competition, Bootstrap SF, back in September last year. The original closing date was 14 May 2009. This has now been extended to 14 June 2009.
Bootstrap SF
The British are an unusual combination of heroism and fatalism, humour and malice. Their Science Fiction is unique, blending pragmatism with sarcasm and death with laughter. For the British, Science Fiction is something subtler than the standard utopias and dystopias, something more concerned with exploring the future with a healthy cynicism.
The genre faces stagnation. Fans who discovered SF in the Sixties and Seventies are now actively resisting the very progress that they embraced when they were younger, cutting out new audiences by relentlessly defending stories which have little relevance to newer, younger readers. SF has built a wall around itself, and for it to survive we must break it down.
The competition is only open to UK-resident writers who have not previously made a professional sale (i.e., 5p or more per word).
First prize is £100, and publication in The Hub #100 (August 2009). Twelve runners-up will also be published in The Hub. No further fee will be paid for either. The winner and runners-up will also be published in a paperback anthology.
Stories must be between 5,000 and 10,000 words, and should be sent as attached RTF files to Boostrap.sf(at)hubfiction.com. See here for details on the required layout of manuscripts, and for information on the judges.
Bootstrap SF
The British are an unusual combination of heroism and fatalism, humour and malice. Their Science Fiction is unique, blending pragmatism with sarcasm and death with laughter. For the British, Science Fiction is something subtler than the standard utopias and dystopias, something more concerned with exploring the future with a healthy cynicism.
The genre faces stagnation. Fans who discovered SF in the Sixties and Seventies are now actively resisting the very progress that they embraced when they were younger, cutting out new audiences by relentlessly defending stories which have little relevance to newer, younger readers. SF has built a wall around itself, and for it to survive we must break it down.
The competition is only open to UK-resident writers who have not previously made a professional sale (i.e., 5p or more per word).
First prize is £100, and publication in The Hub #100 (August 2009). Twelve runners-up will also be published in The Hub. No further fee will be paid for either. The winner and runners-up will also be published in a paperback anthology.
Stories must be between 5,000 and 10,000 words, and should be sent as attached RTF files to Boostrap.sf(at)hubfiction.com. See here for details on the required layout of manuscripts, and for information on the judges.
Friday, 10 April 2009
Call for submissions for themed issue of The Future Fire magazine
The Future Fire magazine is looking for submissions for a Feminist Science Fiction themed issue to be published towards the end of this year or beginning of the next. They are looking for "science fiction (or speculative) stories that address issues of gender, sexual identity and sexuality; stories that take the "radical idea that women are human beings" and do something about it; stories that can engage, empower, educate, and inspire men and women alike. And of course stories that challenge our expectations, that avoid cliché, that are beautiful and useful, that are social, political, and speculative cyberfiction."
Indicate in your cover letter that the story is a submission for the Feminist Science Fiction special issue. Stories submitted to the general pile may be considered for the feminist-themed issue, and stories submitted to the theme may be considered for the intervening issues. All submissions should be sent as attachments to fiction(at)futurefire(dot)net. Use the email subject line: TFF submission: Surname, 'Title'.
Payment $20 per story. Stories over 10,000 words are unlikely to be purchased. "Please use a common, easy-to-read font such as Times New Roman, Arial, or Courier, and use no other formatting than italics." Full guidelines are here.
Indicate in your cover letter that the story is a submission for the Feminist Science Fiction special issue. Stories submitted to the general pile may be considered for the feminist-themed issue, and stories submitted to the theme may be considered for the intervening issues. All submissions should be sent as attachments to fiction(at)futurefire(dot)net. Use the email subject line: TFF submission: Surname, 'Title'.
Payment $20 per story. Stories over 10,000 words are unlikely to be purchased. "Please use a common, easy-to-read font such as Times New Roman, Arial, or Courier, and use no other formatting than italics." Full guidelines are here.
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