The Monthly Cycle

(Let's try posting this a third time!)

It's that time of the month again. The time for Dave Langford to illuminate the field of science fiction with Issue #242 of Ansible.

And, as always, it is interesting to see how those outside look at the field:

Arthur C. Clarke gets short shrift in Crunch Time: How Everyday Life is Killing the Future (2007) by Mike Hanley and Adrian Monck. 'Here in spades is the incurable optimism of the science fiction writer,' they write, and then quote 'Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Technology', including 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' Our reporter John Bark wonders whether Professor Monck (Head of the Faculty of Journalism and Publishing at City University, London) teaches his students that 'Any sufficiently famous Science Fiction writer is indistinguishable from any other.'

Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods is not sf, because: 'I hate science fiction. But good writers about science, such as Jim Crace and Margaret Atwood, are great. They take on science because it's crucial to our world, and they use language to give energy to ideas. Others just borrow from science and it ends up like the emperor's new clothes, with no understanding of the material. But you shouldn't fake it because science is too important, it's the basis for our lives. I expect a lot more science in fiction because science is so rich.' (New Scientist, 25 August) What is so particularly non-sciencefictional about this science novel? From The Bookseller: 'Billie Crusoe flees an authoritarian society in the company of a highly evolved robot of the species Robo sapiens, to join the perilous voyage to a new Blue Planet, a pristine place of apparently infinite possibilities. [...] Another part of the book is set in Wreck City, a no-go zone peopled by outcasts and casualties post 3-War, a conflict which has ravaged the world.' Winterson explains: 'This part of the book is far from fantasy [...] Everything in that part of the book has been written about scientifically already, it's very near.' [MKS via CB] Her next book will be equally unsciencefictional: 'It's called Robot Love and it's for kids. A girl builds a multi-gendered robot, which then kills her parents because it sees them mistreat her, so they both go on the run. I'm fascinated by artificial intelligence and where it will lead. These robots couldn't build anything as bad as us -- so why would they keep us?' [YH] What sf author could have imagined such novel concepts?