Charles Stross

British science fiction author Charles Stross has published an extraordinary attack on American political culture on his blog, describing it as bereft of mercy and suffering from a taint across every area of public discussion.

Using the examples of the protests of the USA administration about the release from Scottish prison of terrorist Abdelbaset Al Megrahi on compassionate grounds because of his terminal cancer, and the ongoing debate about healthcare reform, Stross attacked the entire American political establishment in a blog entry posted yesterday:

There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years grown as alarmingly as the budget deficit. Nor is it as simple as a left/right thing: no political party has a monopoly on merciless behaviour. Rather, a creeping draconian absolutism has cast its penumbra across the entire arena of public discourse, tainting every debate, poisoning and hardening attitudes across the board.

In a side note, Stross tells members of the far-right British Nationalist Party to just “fuck off right now”, noting there are “some folks I can do without”.

It’s not the first time that Stross has aired his political views in public; just days ago the author wrote a lengthy piece about privacy issues surrounding the United Kingdom’s National DNA Database, describing one of the practices around it as “merely a steaming turd in the punchbowl of the right to privacy”.

Interestingly, sci-fi blog io9 directly questioned Stross in January 2008 on the topic of when science fiction itself becomes a form of political intervention.

Stross answered that fiction is usually used as an entertainment medium; as such, political fiction is “at its best precisely when it doesn’t preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.”

Commentary
Sorry Charles, but I’m going to call bullshit on this one. You’re way out of line with your attacks on American society, which paint all participants in the political process, even the self-sacrificing ones with everyone’s interests at heart, as cynical, cold-hearted and without mercy.

If you spend any time in America or with Americans, I think you’ll find plenty of people who believe that Texas’ record on capital punishment is appalling, that the healthcare system needs to be basically rebuilt from scratch, and even that the Second Amendment should be repealed so that everyone and their dog can’t just go around carrying an Uzi.

Sure, there are a stack of problems with the US political establishment. But there are just as many dedicated and hardworking people who are devoting their lives to fixing those problems, and to have any sort of credibility as a political pundit, you need to acknowledge that. The landslide election of the inspirational figure of Barack Obama – for all his flaws – is the tip of the iceberg consisting of a revolution going on right now in American political thought.

Frankly, your attack on the US political establishment comes across as just the sort of crass and arrogant generalisation and preaching from the pulpit that many accuse Americans of.

I’m an Australian, and I know plenty of great people on both sides of the Atlantic. So let’s get this pissing contest over and just get on with the job of creating great science fiction; maybe even science fiction that will inspire people to think outside the box and make fundamental changes in the way so many human societies desperately need.

Jeez. Looks like I’m not going to be interviewing Charles Stross any time soon!

A new publisher is attempting to acquire British science fiction writer David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo masterpiece, with the intent of splitting it into 19 volumes and re-writing the unpopular ending.

“We are in the process of acquiring world rights for the Chung Kuo series with a view to publishing a ‘director’s cut’ set of editions, but the deal isn’t signed yet. Hopefully, in the next week or two, it will be,” a spokesperson for the Corvus division of UK publisher Atlantic Books (Grove Atlantic) told Keeping the Door by email this week.

“Everything going to plan,” they continued, “we want to recast the series into 19 volumes, beginning with an entirely new prequel, Son of Heaven, in late 2010 and finishing with a completely re-written ending, sometime in 2014.”

The critically acclaimed series — as grand in scale as Frank Herbert’s Dune or Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time – has suffered a problematic publishing history. The final book — The Marriage of the Living Dark — is not broadly available in Australia, for example, and is only available online at premium prices. The series is believed to be out of print.

Fellow UK-based published Quercus had previously bought world rights (excluding France) to Chung Kuo, and had also planned to publish the series in nineteen volumes with a new prequel and a new final volume. According to a statement on the publisher’s site, Quercus was planning to re-launch the series in May 2009, with all of the books to be made available by the end of 2012.

However, the re-launch never happened.

According to the website of Bob Newell, which is pretty much the only authoritative source on what David Wingrove is up to at the moment, Wingrove delivered the cited prequel, When China Comes, to Quercus.

“It’s a 250,000 word five-parter, covering 2047 to 2098, complete with stock market crashes,” Wingrove reportedly wrote.

The author also said he’d begun work on another book, Dawn in Stone City, “a new kind of Chung Kuo novel, based on a single character Ma Ji (Maggie) and set in 2210.”

Commentary
If there is one science fiction series that is desperately crying out to be re-published right now, and that would be guaranteed to sell well if it was re-issued by a major publisher, it’s David Wingrove’s masterful Chung Kuo series.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I consider this author to be one of science fiction’s greatest living masters, and it’s an absolute crime that not only is his greatest work not widely available, but that he’s written at least one book succeeding that work that has not yet been published. I don’t know what happened with Quercus or what exactly Atlantic is planning, but they had better get their collective asses into gear on this one. AT ONCE.

David Wingrove

Like David Zindell‘s A Requiem for Homo Sapiens series, Wingrove’s Chung Kuo was never given the public recognition it so truly deserved, despite being an absolute science fiction masterpiece of the sort of vision that only authors like Frank Herbert can claim to match.

Ironically, Wingrove is often known more by science fiction fans for his work on the Myst books based on one of the best selling (and also critically acclaimed) computer games of all time. However I think it’s safe to say those books pale before Chung Kuo.

For those that don’t know it, Chung Kuo is the epic tale of a future Earth which has been covered coast to coast by one single city; a city dominated by Chinese (Han) culture. The seven emperors of the world, the T’ang, are primarily concerned with keeping things as they have always been; stable, peaceful, controlled.

It’s the ultimate, perfect vision of a unified world; a utopia where any man can rise up through the many level of society and all needs are met. But of course, things aren’t perfect in the world of Chung Kuo, the Middle Kingdom. For human beings must grow and change; it is in their nature to do so. And so Wingrove’s epic series is necessarily a story of conflict on a vast scale, possibly on a vaster scale than any science fiction writer before him has been able to imagine. Conflict on a scale of 36 billion people.

If you haven’t read Chung Kuo yet, I implore you to.

His Dark Materials author Phillip Pullman has come out against new laws announced in the United Kingdom that would see anyone having regular contact with children to be certified by a government authority.

More information about the initiative — dubbed the “Vetting and Barring Scheme” can be found on the site of the UK Government’s Independent Safeguarding Authority.

Pullman appears to have made his views clear in a few different publications. He tells the Open University’s Platform site:

“It’s ridiculous that we have to pay £64 to get a moral certificate from the Government … The default is that you shouldn’t trust people. But all of us — politicians, writers, artists – should work towards a society where the default is that a person can be trusted; that someone’s word of honour means something. But this simply isn’t happening. Society is just moving in the opposite direction.”

Further Pullman comments can be found in a BBC article on the subject.

(via SFWA)

Transition, the next novel from famed British sci-fi master Iain M. Banks, is to be made available as a serialised free podcast (audio download), starting on the scheduled publication date, 3 September 2009.

According to Banks’ publisher, Orbit, there will be twenty four, 15 minute episodes released on iTunes in the US and UK every Thursday and Saturday for 12 weeks, until the entire novel is available. Orbit’s blog on the subject doesn’t mention other countries such as Australia, although it is likely the podcasts will become widely available online shortly after they are released in the US and UK.

Orbit’s blog entry also included this line from Banks himself on the release:

“I had barely caught up with the later half of the Twentieth Century, when here I am being ensnarled by gizmology from the Twenty-First. I am left breathless by the pace of technology.”

Not much information about the book itself is available online, apart from the product description from Orbit parent little, brown:

A world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse, such a world requires a firm hand and a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organisation with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers?

On the Concern’s books are Temudjin Oh, an un-killable assassin who journeys between the peaks of Nepal, a version of Victorian London and the dark palaces of Venice; and a nameless, faceless torturer known only as the Philosopher. And then there’s the renegade Mrs Mulverhill, who recruits rebels to her side; and Patient 8262, hiding out from a dirty past in a forgotten hospital ward. As these vivid, strange and sensuous worlds circle and collide, the implications of turning traitor to the Concern become horribly apparent, and an unstable universe is set on a dizzying course.

Commentary
OK, this is seriously cool. I haven’t read much of Iain M. Banks’ stuff, despite the constant nagging of my friends. However, I am halfway through Use of Weapons at the moment, and enjoying it greatly. It has just the right blend of humanity (on the part of machines) and inhumanity (on the part of real people) to be categorised as cool.

Publishing Transition as a free podcast will sit will with hardcore Banks fans and offer much of the rest of us (including the blind community) an easy way to catch up with his latest book on the train.