m. c. de marco

Via del.icio.us sf: Steampunk, an anthology by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, came out from Tachyon Publications in June. This month there’s an interview with the editors in Genre Chicks, which includes Jeff’s handy definition of steampunk:

Really classic steampunk is about a few things: the rise of the inventor or scientist as hero, the use of retro-technology (think, alternate history: technologies, like airships, that once seemed poised to be dominant), and then the introduction of irony to the idea of scientist as hero, in showing how unquestioning use of technology leads to disaster.

The Fix has an epilogue to “The End of Science Fiction” by Nader Elhefnawy, in which he makes some interesting connections between economics and scientific progress (the mother of science fictional content):

The “end of science” to which I referred is connected with this, certainly at its technological end. As economist Joseph Schumpeter (one of the earliest proponents of the long cycle theory) wrote, “an apparent absence of novel propositions of the first magnitude [is] part of the familiar pattern of any depression.”

As previously promised, the second part of The End of Science Fiction by Nader Elhefnawy, concerning the poor business prospects of the genre, went up at The Fix on September 15th. First of all, you should watch your word counts:

Back in the days when the pulps controlled the market, books rarely got much beyond 60,000 words, as Robert Bee noted in an article on the subject in the April issue of IROSF. However, a well-known literary agent (who deals in science fiction, among other things) confirmed what a lot of people have long suspected when he briefly included in his site’s guidelines a flat statement that works in that range were unsalable.

Via deli.cio.us: in his blog entry of new, post-Singularity ideas, Rudy Rucker describes a variant of the Alderson disk. Here’s his even bigger Big Dumb Object:

What if Earth were an endless flat plane, and you could walk (or fly your electric glider) forever in a straight line and never come back to where you started?

I found the The Well-Bitten Hand via The End of Science Fiction, linked by SF Diplomat. Both articles put a stake through science fiction, a genre whose time has, apparently, gone. “The Well-Bitten Hand” discusses the shambling undead corpse of sci-fi, ten years dead by John Barnes’ account, as part of the general mortality of genres. He eulogizes:

And it is a genre that flourished among mostly English-speaking, mostly middle-class, mostly Caucasian readers from the late 20’s to the early 90’s of the last century — in other words, for about seventy years.

Being the heirs of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, we then strapped the dearly departed to a steel table in our laboratory, wired it up to the lightning rod, and waited for a storm to fill the genre with eerie, unnatural life. Our monster shambles on to this very day.

Via del.icio.us sf: an old essay by Michael Wong surveys Brain Bugs, the bum memes of Star Trek and science fiction in general.

Surely no one would be stupid enough to watch the Kobayashi Maru combat simulation in ST2 and conclude that exploding consoles are the principal cause of death for bridge personnel, would they?

Via SFScope: an open anthology, Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams, will pay 5 cents per word up to 5,000 words.

Prime Books expects to publish it in May 2009. He describes the anthology thus: “From Star Trek to Star Wars, from Dune to Foundation, science fiction has a rich history of exploring the idea of vast intergalactic societies, and the challenges facing those living in or trying to manage such societies. The stories in Federations will continue that tradition.