Cheltenham Festival panel report type thing

[usuallyhats]

This weekend I went to a couple of SF related events in the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. I took notes in both of them and have typed them up for anyone who is interested in that sort of thing. Hopefully they make sense and I have not dreadfully misrepresented anyone's views or anything. All the bits in [square brackets] are my comments, everything else is my notes, transformed as far as possible into actual sentences. More or less.

The first event, on Saturday lunchtime, was China Miéville and John Mullan talking about SF versus literary fiction, in the context of the Booker prize.

Panel is spinning off from Kim Stanley Robinson's article on SF and the Booker (which seems to be behind a paywall; here is a Guardian article about it and John Mullan's comments in reply to it. Both speakers spoke for about ten minutes each, then they debated briefly, then called for questions from the audience.

General notes: I thought Miéville came off far better; he was thoughtful, funny and articulate whereas Mullan seemed a little dismissive, but I may be biased. The audience seemed to be equally women and men, but largely white. Miéville always said "SF"; Mullan always said "scifi".

China Miéville: defined scope of panel as discussing literary fiction versus "genre" fiction in general and the nature of the Booker in particular. Not trying to invert traditional snobbery and say that SF is better than literary fiction.
A few self recriminations first: - is this to do with externalised self hatred amongst geeks? [he doesn't think so]
- Mentioned Sturgeon's Law (and that it doesn't just apply to SF!)
- 1973: Gravity's Rainbow up for the Nebula, which it lost to Rendezvous with Rama. Is this a moment where SF rejected the opportunity to open up and become more experimental?
SF books listed for the Booker disclaim their genre.
The Booker doesn't just ignore SF: small press, experimental fiction etc also miss out
Quoted someone who suggested that their are prizes for other genres; the Booker is a prize for the genre of literary fiction
He likes generic protocols - "litfic" has them as much as any other genre
What does "literary" mean? Suggested definitions: connected with literature, "quality fiction". Both of these include SF so is it a genre in itself? If it admitted that it was just another genre that would be ok, but it sets up idea of mainstream, realistic literature vs. genre fiction, especially fantastical fiction (crime has a different relationship with the mainstream).
Is SF self isolated? Possibly, in some cases, but not overall.
This is not a recent issue; in Adam Bede Eliot says it's harder to draw a lion than a griffin. Is this the moment where the genres split?
What are the differences between litfic and SF? Setting. Litfic purports to be about the real world - but what does this mean?
Sentential craft - SF comes from the pulp tradition but that's not all there is to it.
There is an ideology surrounding what constitutes "real" literature which suggests that the reader should recognise something rather than being creatively estranged. Different tastes, not a right and a wrong way to do things! [he emphasised this a lot throughout]
Very successful marketing campaign to market litfic as Literature, not genre - he gave the example of Ghosh winning the Arthur C. Clarke award but this not being mentioned anywhere on the novel in question. Campaign necessary because litfic is entering crisis: he described it as incredibly sclerotic and not in good shape at the moment.
He wants the Booker to admit that litfic is a genre or to become more inclusive.

John Mullan: Disagrees that litfic is going down the pan (he judged the Booker in 2009 and listed the books on the shortlist as evidence). Not defending the Booker in particular but the idea of litfic. [I've written down "easily dismissed as foolish category" but I am not entirely sure what I meant by that.] He claimed that quotes are by their nature incendiary and that he read lots of sci-fi as a teenager.
Trying to say that SF has become a special addiction on particular readers (citing separate sections in bookshops). The boarders have become firmer (he mentioned JG Ballard as the last author who wrote SF that non-SF readers would read). But litifc filches from SF (and other genres).
Why do litfic authors borrow SF elements? [he didn't attempt to answer this question]
Publishers don't send SF for the Booker. [of course not, they send what they think will win.]
He feels certain genres do fall short in terms of quality, that litfic is defined as "not genre fiction" and that the satisfactions of genre fic are to do with formulae. [I think this is a little reductive; it's not necessarily true]
Brings up the fact that Never Let Me Go was up for the Arthur C. Clarke award but didn't win. Suggests that it's not SF because it defines itself as being about "England. The 1990s." and doesn't address the broader "why?"s that SF fans want to know about. He claimed that it was brilliant because it misses out what an SF novel with a similar premise would do. [!!!!!]

China Miéville: not suggesting that we get rid of distinctions: different genres have different aesthetic specificities (though the boundaries will always be blurry). The problem is that the horizontal distinctions are mapped onto vertical ones.
Don't compare best of one field with worst of another. Eg The Fifth Head of Cerberus deals well enough with issues of colonialism, identity and so on for a fair fight with Coetzee etc.

John Mullan: admits that if this is true he's missing out, because he's read Coetzee but not Wolfe.
Defines SF as rigorously following through on a given premise and suggests that SF and fantasy require constant explanations to work [not necessarily, I don't think: exploring the world is part of the fun and explanation done well shouldn't be noticeable]

China Miéville: these are all issues that SF wrestles with. Litfic tickles a certain set of protocols in the same way that SF does.
Suggests that Herculean fascination with the weird makes SF readers more open minded [I think this can be true but is sadly not always the case - plenty of blind spots!], points out that Ian Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd were first picked up by SF, and suggests comparing Stand On Zanzibar with early Booker winners [I think he said the Booker specifically, but I'm not sure.]
SF readers read for the ideas and sometimes but not always have to ignore the prose! He mentioned M. John Harrison, Delaney and Wolfe as examples of authors where this isn't the case.

Audience: Restrictions of SF are similar but different to those of litfic - working within limits of formula vs working within limits of reality.

John Mullan: the satisfaction of genre fic is in the formula. He won't reread a Ruth Rendell, however good, unless it's been long enough that he's forgotten the plot.

China Miéville: genre protocols are to do with plot, litfic protocols are thematic [and some other things I didn't manage to write down]. They're both as formulaic as the other.

Audience: points out the massive variety within genre formulas

China Miéville: The difference in specificity is between recognition and estrangement. (Beckett (mentioned earlier by Mullan) not technically lit fic due to strangeness!) Books described as "wise" tend to focus on recognition, but this is not necessarily more noble than estrangement.

John Mullan: in litfic the writing is the point. What it's "about" is beside the point.

Audience: mentioned the social embarrassment factor for adults "still" reading fantasy.

China Miéville: Yep. (Eg crossover fic with different covers.) Why? Again, he feels this is the result of a successful marketing campaign. SF is doing the same things within the pulp tradition that the Surrealists, for example, did: making strange. Mistake to assume that readers believe it all!

John Mullan: it's the job of SF enthusiasts to overcome the fact that SF is exciting to teenagers but then they find something else that's about "grown up" stuff. Natural to reject what you like as an adolescent and they need to be persuaded back.

Audience: explanatory nature of SF is a feature not a bug. Can be done well in the way that, for example, character can be done well.

John Mullan: explanation is part of the game. He believes that being able to do character is a rarer gift to be valued in a different way.

China Miéville: Character overrated as telos of literature. Ballard was great due to his lack of interest in character.

The second event was on Sunday afternoon; it involved China Miéville, Michael Moorcock, Iain M. Banks and Gwyneth Jones discussing the British SF tradition. Annoyingly I can't remember the moderator's name, so I shall just have to call her "Moderator".

Moderator: What is British SF?

China Miéville: wonders how useful it is to talk about national trends. (Quite useful!) Certain specificities to the younger generation (in their 40s, 30s, 20s) due to the shoulders they're standing on. Sense [?] of default politics. Form. Pulp tradition versus modernism.

M: Asked Michael Moorcock to comment on the roots of this.

Michael Moorcock: The idea of the professional SF writer is probably an American thing; in England there is a tradition of turning to SF if it's the best way to get the idea across eg Wells, Rex Warner, Orwell.

M: Asked Iain M. Banks about writing in SF versus writing in the mainstream.

Iain M. Banks: finds his ideas are either one thing or the other, usually. SF is a very good tradition to be part of! British SF feels quantitatively different from US SF.

M: Is it British just because it's written by British writers?

Gwyneth Jones: when she was first hailed as an SF author she was told that British SF is suffused with regret for the death of empire, but that's not what she's interested in! She looks at utopias: how the good state works, what goes wrong, what are the variants.

M: Does it emerge from different cultures?

CM: We have a social democratic tradition. Empire looms heavy.

GJ: added that she became more interested in the idea of empire later on.

CM: It's not necessarily what writers are consciously doing (he is always interested in what's in his books that he didn't realise he was putting in), more context, particularly in the 50s-70s. Notion of fractured, imperfect utopia, social totality. Sociological SF. US SF is conflicted: there's a very strong left wing tradition and a strong right wing libertarian tradition. UK SF i melancholy, shares default social assumptions.

MM: Europeans think in terms of community, US in terms of the individual.

M: What is the place of the individual in SF?

IMB: US: the emphasis is on an exemplary (usually male) human. Whiff of the frontier about it. UK: more collegiate, wistful, semi-thoughtful. He relates this to the UK going into WWII as a major power and emerging wrecked and bankrupt.

CM: How far does this dovetail with literary form? Mentions New Worlds [and something else that I didn't write down] in the 60s: sense of experimentation with language, the avant garde. Wonders if the UK SF scene was more open to this than the US one? (Delaney being one of the exceptions.) Experimental fiction in the British tradition falls under SF.

MM: Americans were attracted to writing that sort of thing for New Worlds [which he edited] because there was an audience in the UK but no market in the US. He personally likes 40s-50s pulp fiction and was not particularly interested in raising the level of SF, they all thought the literary novel was crap and wanted a substitute to engage in other issues.

M: brings up catastrophe fiction and suggests the UK SF is more interested ion the aftermath.

GJ: feels that US SF suffers in this respect because they haven't been threatened with invasion, and that it focuses on a single figure who has all the powers and will rebuild the next world from the ashes of the old.

IMB: is not hugely interested in catastrophe stories.

MM: New Worlds era - all thought SF was fundamentally nostalgic. The English form of catastrophe fiction is "tea and chocolate biscuits" (according to Ballard, possibly). Ballard reversed this. The best US catastrophe fiction comes from Southern writers: the legacy of the Civil War, the experience of defeat. Tendency for catastrophe fiction to focus on nostalgia and not much else.

[There was a bit about Octavia Butler here, but I can't make much sense of my notes and I think I've attributed it to the wrong person anyway, so I shall move on.]

CM: nostalgic strand to dystopic fiction: supposedly a warning, but comes off as a yearning. The UK has a generalised cultural death drive - social guilt, the empire again. Jane Gaskell novel - self hating critique of empire.

M: Does "British" SF encompass all of Britain? Or should it be subdivided further?

IMB: lots of Scottish SF around, but this is probably a coincidence. He considers himself a writer who is Scottish, but he feels he is foremost a writer in English. His sense of Britishness is being eroded a lot at the moment: Scotland is more left wing.

Audience question: did the panel feel that British apocalyptic tradition came with a sense that it had all happened before?

CM: a sort of cyclical long durée? Refers to M John Harrison's "The Pastel City".

GJ and MM talked about the spooky feeling that we may be alone in the universe.

A: commented that no-one had mentioned reds under the bed versus a fear of fascism eg the Federation in Blake's 7, then asked a question about one of MM's books.

MM: [answered the question, mentioning that he was not really promoting the character in question's actions] Felt that Heinlein was promoting the notion of rugged individualism.

A: What is the significance of the Eastern European SF tradition?

GJ: curious, because it was extremely popular until the Soviet collapse, at which point all the SF writers were out of a job! SF was code for "we are not the state".

Q: mentions The City and The City and asks CM for his views on the question.

CM: is a great admirer of Eastern European SF, but finds it hard to imagine it having a systemic impact. Suggests that it strongly influences some individuals, such as M. John Harrison. Considers the allegories of Eastern European SF elegant because they're so opaque - they become self contained fables.

A: asks the panel to talk about recent SF and where it's going. (IMB: [cheerfully] Fuck knows!) Are we in a golden age? Is the field narrowing? There are even fewer female writers of SF now than 10-15 years ago.

GJ: the British boom has reached its peak and stopped/stagnated. The lack of woman is a phenomenon of the times, also a financial phenomenon. Traditional tastes are reasserting themselves. She came in through US feminist SF and the New Wave, who were writing in a very interesting way. Using the mechanisms of SF to tell feminist fables was very enticing, but that phase has passed.

IMB: how can we know where SF as a whole is going? It depends on individual writers.

[At this point my pen ran out. I soldiered on regardless and went over the indentations as soon as I could, but my notes from this point on are even less complete and even more inaccurate than they have heretofore been.]

CM: Schools of SF must be seen historically. Lots of writers from non-SF backgrounds (eg David Mitchell) riffing off generic conventions in a different way. He likes to think about traditions in terms of counter traditions. Mentions various female SF authors (including Jane Gaskell, Christine Brooke-Rose and some else) who could've become formative. That they didn't is to do with (among other things) sexism/misogyny, definitely. They were/are probably more interesting in terms of gender than the mainstream.

A: SF's first wave was post-Industrial Revolution. Do the panel think that countries in for example the Far East will see a similar wave, and will we in the West recognise it?

GJ: felt it would manifest more in games, films etc than in print. [either IMB or MM suggested adding comics to this list; she agreed.]

CM: more interest is even now being paid to global SF. [He mentioned some authors whose names I couldn't write down due to the above mentioned ink issues.] We will see more, we will misunderstand it and enjoy it and reinterpret it.

A: With the rise of globalisation, is a greater homogeneity in SF approaching?

MM: hopes so!

CM: will always be a countervailing trend towards specificity, eg he thinks of himself as a London writer as much as/more than an English one.

GJ: Need for something to focus on. Nine billion people is too big a group! Smaller communities will still be important.