With the release of the new Clone Wars movie, we here at SF Signal have looked at the box office results and pondered where the Star Wars franchise goes from here. For this week’s Mind Meld, we turned the future of Star Wars over to our panel of respondents.

Star Wars‘ place in popular culture is doing just fine, thanks. It’s still one of the most popular franchises on the planet, and that’s not likely to change any time soon, and the 1977 release of Star Wars will always be a benchmark in American film history regardless.

This same question came up repeatedly around the turn of the century regarding Star Trek. The notion that people were tired of Trek when there was only one show on the air and the occasional movie is silly when, from 1987-1999, there were one or two shows on the air and a movie every 2-3 years — and the franchise was at its most popular and nobody was sick of it. What hurt Star Trek wasn’t too much Star Trek, but too much Star Trek that wasn’t appealing to people.

Star Wars is hitting the same problem. It’s not that people are tired of Star Wars, it’s that they’re tired of Star Wars that ain’t so hot. The problem The Clone Wars is having is that it’s not something that the world at large is dying to know about. Whatever the flaws of the prequel trilogy — and they were legion — they were also chronicling the background of Darth Vader, one of the greatest menaces of 20th-century fiction. There’s no similar hook in The Clone Wars — not aided by the fact that this conflict has already been covered in novel, comic book, and animated form previously (Genndy Tartovsky’s collection of five-minute shorts was a magnificent piece of work) — and people are also fatigued from the giant black hole of dreadful that was the prequel trilogy.

People are more than happy to keep coming back if they enjoy what they see. The Stargate franchise is an excellent example of that. Stargate SG1 lasted ten years, and now is being continued in very successful direct-to-DVD movies, Stargate Atlantis is now in its fifth season, and a third TV show is in development. Nobody’s talking about franchise fatigue for Stargate, because they’re still producing material that people want to see.

If the new live-action Star Wars series is good and appealing to a large audience, then it will breathe new life. If it continues the downward trend of the live-action films that really goes back to the moment the Ewoks first showed up in Return of the Jedi, then they’ve got problems.

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I recently read Seeds of Change, an anthology edited by John Joseph Adams centered on the theme of technological, scientific, political and/or cultural change. For this week’s Mind Meld, we turned to the anthology’s editor and authors, as well as a host of others, to answer the following question about changing the science fiction field itself:

The answers will shock and amaze! And tickle.

Naturally, as a writer, I would like the audience for sf to be much broader, but for, perhaps, unusual reasons.

In 1959, C.P. Snow gave a famous talk in which he said that science and literature had become two distinct cultures, neither of which spoke to the other. It seems to me that this split has intensified and solidified over the years. The result of this is that science is not well understood by much of the public.

As a society, we need to think about problems and controversies that face us, from the very large problem of war, which never seems to end, to the equally important problem of distribution of medical care, education, and goods. Science, and the technologies which depend on science, are crucial in understanding and dealing with these issues.

I find it ironic that the phrase “like science fiction” is used to describe ideas that seem harebrained, when, in fact, fiction rooted in science is quite the opposite. However, in the public mind, at least in the United States, science fiction seems to have gone from being regarded as an intellectually demanding literature to a literature of the ridiculous and the impossible. This is not, by the way, true in Europe.

Good science fiction unites the two cultures. That doesn’t mean that science fiction has any responsibility to do so, any more than it has to be didactic or dull. Instead, like any other kind of fiction, it must have an emotional impact on the reader, and it should, can, and does entertain with all of the wit, elegance, and depth of any literature.

As for marketing, I don’t mind that science fiction is shelved separately in bookstores, because that helps fans find it, or that the covers scream “science fiction–readers of general fiction, beware!,” but I think it should also be shelved with other literature, clad in covers that bespeak “mainstream,” (you know what I’m talking about, marketing directors), so that it can be discovered by new readers. These new readers might begin to understand that they are immersed in a sea of science, and be encouraged to find out more about what is really going on in the world around them. Science education might thereby gain more respect and more funding in the United States.

And if not, at least many more readers would be able to appreciate and enjoy science fiction.

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The digital revolution has affected all areas of out lives, with some sort of computing device present in just about every gadget imaginable. The world of artistic endeavor has not been immune to the advance of technology, but most people may not realize how technology can affect the production of an artistic work.

We asked the following question of this week’s panel:

Although I almost always produce my artwork in a traditional manner (pencils, paints, brushes, etc.), I create digital files of each piece to archive the work and facilitates its use by publishers. When creating these files, I have no problem manipulating them digitally to improve them. Occasionally, when I have altered a piece digitally and really like the results, I’ll use paint or pencil to alter the painting or drawing to match the file.

Yes, I consider some fully digital pieces of art to be masterpieces, but I’m not concerned with what others of the present and future might think about digital work.

There is something to be said for artwork that is so obviously hand-made that it offers the viewer a sense of the artistic process involved in its creation. This is not common among pieces of digitally produced artwork, but there are many other ways in which a piece of art can be successful.

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In keeping with our worldbuilding theme to help out the creative young minds of the Shared Worlds creative writing program, we asked this week’s esteemed panelists the following question:

Read their answers below…

My own taste as a writer is for a light hand on the worldbuilding. In epic fantasy – where Tolkien and his mighty efforts of detailed world making still loom large – I feel that world can sometimes be emphasised at the expense of the characters, and it’s the characters that chiefly interest me. I like to keep the setting where I think it belongs, in the background. A detailed and convincing background, hopefully, but a background nonetheless, and one that contains relatively little of the fantastic. So it always seems like some kind of magic to me when a writer manages to have their cake and eat it, giving us tastes of the truly weird and wonderful without it getting in the way of people and story.

The best recent example I can think of is from Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora. The city which is the central setting of the book is built around, inside, and on top of a much more ancient city made from glass. This beautiful and mysterious architecture shows through, and contrasts with, the ugly crust of human buildings on top and the often filthy lifestyles of the villains living in them. It’s a wonderfully simple idea, takes minimal time and effort to explain to the reader, requires no map and no glossary, but immediately gives a unique feel to pretty much every location in the book and allows for some great, vivid, descriptive writing. Sunset shining through the elderglass, sparkling on the water of the canals, I can see it now… The city truly becomes a character in its own right, and one with which the people in the novel all have their own relationship.

A fascinating, beautiful, and alien setting created without interrupting the flow of the story? That’s my idea of great worldbuilding.

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This week’s Mind Meld is brought to you in conjunction with the Shared Worlds creative writing program for teens, currently in session at Wofford College. During this program, groups of teens create a ‘shared world’, much like the Wild Cards or Thieves Guild books, then create stories, art and games set in that world. Along the way they learn how to work together to create the world and the assets, and how to solve the problems that come up in a team environment. The first challenge is, of course, building the world, which is the subject of our Mind Meld question this week:

The bulk of my writing is contemporary fantasy, set in the recognizable modern world, but with the addition of magic. As such, traditional worldbuilding doesn’t usually enter into my process. I have to think more about the implications of inserting magic into the

existing world — if people had supernatural powers, what would they do? (“Attempt to use it for personal gain” is the short answer for most of my characters.) How does magic fit into a world of cell phones and the internet and hybrid cars and suspension bridges and mood-altering drugs? Most readers seem to respond well to the wide variety of weird-ass magic I try to pack into my books, and I draw on all sorts of mythologies and magical traditions and psychological pathologies to come up with those forms of magic. And, yeah, I do love writing about pornomancers and foul-rag-and-bone witches and silicon mages and swords that can cut through abstract ideas and people who

can turn into bears….

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There’s plenty of recent controversy in the science fiction field, most of it having nothing to do with books themselves. So let’s put the controversy limelight back where it belongs. We asked a panel of esteemed guests the following question:

Read their answers below…and tell us which ones you think are controversial.

Everybody and their dog is going for Starship Troopers, right? It’s the obvious choice. More controversial than Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which despite its wonderful “Christianity-as-porn” element was universally hailed for its high ideas-per-page ratio. More timeless than The Female Man, which in addition to being stuck in its era is also more of a rant than a story. More *legitimately* controversial than the Harry Potter books, which are only regarded as such by brain-dead bible-thumpers with barely two neurons to rub together. And longer than Godwin’s “Cold Equations” or Sturgeon’s “If all men were brothers would you let one marry your sister”, which aren’t actually novels but which I feel compelled to cite anyway because of the whole “controversial” thing.

But I’m not going to go with the Heinlein. I’m going with Dhalgren, by Samuel Delany. There’s something in that book to piss off almost everyone: the lack of a conventional linear plot; complete disregard for the tying up of any loose ends (or beginnings, or middles); whole swaths of text literally scratched out and written over fer chrissakes; an endless narrative loop with neither beginning nor end. A story that might not even be science fiction, might not even be fantasy, although it contains explicit elements of both. Enough florid verbiage to drop the shuttle out of orbit. And let’s not forget all the explicit gay porn.

A brilliant fucking book, even if I still don’t know what the hell it all means.

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Due to an email snafu on my part, author Matthew Warne Selznick didn’t receive his invitation to this week’s superhero themed Mind Meld post on time. So we’re making it up to him by giving him his own post! As a reminder, the quest is:

As a fan of the amazing Spider-Man since the early seventies, I have to give very high marks to the first two Spider-Man movies. Every film adaptation has to take liberties with the source material, but it’s obvious that Sam Raimi has a special love and respect for the mythos, and that shines through. The first Spider-Man film gets special props for not doing what the second one did: soften the villain with a moment of redemption. Physically, Alfred Molina was the perfect Doc Ock… but Willem Defoe was Norman Osborn through and through.

I don’t want to overlook Spider-Man III, either. Arguably the weakest of the series so far (please no Emo Parker ever, ever again) it nevertheless had perfect casting with Thomas Haden Church as the Sandman.

Not to focus too much on villains, but let’s face it – in every super-hero movie, the villains are almost always a bigger draw than the hero.

Never much of an Iron Man fan, I found the movie to be almost perfect in every way, save the Obadiah Stane plot and that character’s rather, um, “comic book” motivation. Casting, pacing, and visuals were spot-on, though, and if this is any indication of how The Avengers Initiative is going to look in a few years, well, reserve my ticket.

As far as television, many people point quickly to Heroes, which I find boring and predictable. Television has a hard time with super-heroes, having much better luck with cartoons. The Batman animated series was a whole lot of fun and very nice to look at. The original X-Men cartoon was entertaining, especially when they would

adapt classic Claremont plots. I can’t really point to a favorite when it comes to television… but my memory keeps coming back to The Man From Atlantis like a candy bar from childhood. The memory is undoubtedly a lot better tasting than the experience of actually

consuming one today.

Honorable mention: The episode of NUMB3RS starring Will Wheaton as a crass comics collector and Christopher Lloyd as a Jack Kirby / Will Eisner pastiche. Fanboy fun for all!

[Note, bandwidth intensive section after the jump! - Ed.]

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This week’s Mind Meld is the first in what will no doubt turn into a series of posts inspired by John and myself’s trip to ApolloCon. Since we’ve run some ‘heavier’ questions recently, we decided to lighten things up this time and we took the opportunity of the ApolloCon panel ‘What Is Your Superpower?’ to ask the following question:

Best superhero film — Spiderman II.

I’m really stumped on the television front. Overall I think Heroes swung between being very weak to downright awful. There are so many shows that skirt the edges of superheroes — New Amsterdam, Journeyman, Dead Like Me, Life on Mars, Pushing Daisies. I guess I’d have to say that, so far, we haven’t seen a great superhero franchise on television.

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At the risk of starting a flame war – which is not at all my intention – I wanted to address the issue of gender imbalance in genre fiction publishing. I’m not interested in non-constructive finger pointing, but rather a solutions-oriented discussion. So I posed the following questions to this week’s Mind meld panel:

[NOTE: Thanks to my vague questioning abilities, the original version of this question did not make clear that this was about publishing as opposed to character portrayal, so some of the responses below may veer into that interpretation of the original question. The fault is entirely my own and not that of the panelists.]

First, let me establish credentials. I am an American female nearing fifty (that’s a scary thing to write) who is in the cusp generation between the second wave of feminists and Generation X, who were protected by the laws that the second wave initiated. I’ve been groped at work, not hired because I was “too young and pretty,” told I was probably stupid because I was a girl, told I couldn’t participate in sports because I was a girl, and born too late for Title 9 to have any effect on my schooling.

When I became the first female editor of F&SF, I received a LOT of hate mail immediately-because of my gender. One letter said I could not edit because I lacked a penis. I kid you not. I later asked Gardner Dozois about this letter-if there was an editing trick I had somehow missed-and he graphically explained to me how the penis could be helpful in editing, but of course, he was joking. The writer of the letter was not.

Conversely, I have never been invited into an all-female anthology in sf/f. I’m told my writing isn’t perceived as female, whatever that means. I have been invited into all-female anthologies in mystery. Are these things sexist? I’m not sure. I’m not even sure it matters any more, since we have anthologies in all genres from several groups, be they a particular racial group or a particular political group. I don’t sense that the anthologies are done to correct an imbalance, like they used to, or so it seems to me from reading them and from the advertising.

This argument-that there’s a gender imbalance in sf/f publications-has gone on since I entered the field in the early 1980s. When I became editor of F&SF, I thought the argument silly. At the time, women were dominating the awards and slowly taking over the novels. Women published more stories than men at the time. If you split the count by magazine, you’d find that some published more women than others. If you split by anthology, you’d find the same thing. But if you looked overall, you’d see that the numbers belied the argument that women were discriminated against.

Of course, there are the odd holdouts-the you-can’t-edit-without-a-penis folks-and the oblivious. The oblivious, who include the occasional reviewer and the occasional editor, often react badly to “women’s topics” (hearth and home) or emotion. The problem is that it’s obvious when the oblivious leave women out of their reviews/magazines/articles, but not when they leave out men who deal with the same topics. Robert Reed, for example, often deals with hearth and home, and writes beautifully about emotion.

So, in my opinion, the idea that there’s active discrimination in sf/f is just plain silly. It’s been silly since at least 1990, maybe earlier (I’m not as versed in the history of that part of the field). But as long as I’ve been watching the numbers-and the numbers tell all-it seems to me that gender discrimination simply doesn’t exist in sf any more. And I wish we’d stop talking as if it did.

The gender imbalance is self-evident in genre fiction, I’d say, a no-brainer, but if you pull apart the phrase “genre fiction” I think you get to some of the roots of it. I mean, Romance and Chick-Lit are “genre fiction” (with a lot more female writers than male) just as much as SF and Fantasy are. So what we’re really talking about is sfnal/fantastic genre fiction. For my money, the gender imbalance isn’t too surprising here given the pulp roots of the genres; SF/F began as “boy’s own” stories in the early magazines, fans of that fiction became the formative writers, and we’re still living with that legacy. Hell, it’s still a large part of the market and the process, the brand image of SF/F, so much so that any discussion of this issue is bound to spark off a backlash of conservative ire at the attempt to “feminise” the genre(s). I actually see this as going hand-in-hand with a lot of the rhetoric about what’s “real” SF/Fantasy and what’s not. The reactionary response is coming from a (male, of course) sector of the field who see no reason why this genre developed to supply a certain demand should be required to satisfy a contradictory demand.

Genres are specialised literatures, after all. It’s a bit like saying there’s a “sexuality imbalance” in Gay Erotica, more gays published in this genre than straights, so shouldn’t we be trying to correct this by ensuring that the ToC for anthologies of Gay Fiction reflect the actual proportions of sexualities in the world? Whatever the gay:straight ratio is in society at large (say one in four, for the sake of argument) shouldn’t the ToC be made to reflect this? But if three quarters of the stories then reflect straight concerns rather than gay concerns, don’t you just end up with an anthology of fiction rather than an anthology of Gay Fiction? It’s a specious argument, in many ways, but what it boils down to is there’s an extent to which the SF/Fantasy genres can be seen as having emerged as a field of fiction “by boys for boys”. It’s a brand that’s defined itself as male-oriented. To take a devil’s advocate stance, you could say: if there’s a problem with getting your average bloke to actually sit down and read a book, why shouldn’t there be a genre they can depend on to cater to them specifically, a “Bloke-Lit” to balance the “Chick-Lit”?

But there are two aspects to the issue then. One is equality, plain and simple: even if you take the most “masculine” paradigm for what SF/Fantasy is meant to be (and I don’t) there’s no reason that can’t be written by women (other than the possibility that, well, maybe they’re not interested in writing that sort of bollocks). There are male Romance writers. And in SF you had Alice Sheldon writing so “masculinely” as James Tiptree Jr. that Silverberg argued she couldn’t possibly be a woman. In this context, it seems to me you’re really just dealing with a lot of presumptions and prejudice about the capacity of a writer of a certain gender to tell a particular kind of story. I don’t buy the idea that female writers aren’t going to be just as good at writing to that market. If you’re a fashion house with a line of clothes for men — Dior Homme, say — that doesn’t mean all your designers have to be male.

To be honest I don’t know how you deal with that bullshit other than to keep kicking up a fuss about it, try and heighten the awareness required to counteract that ignorance. As a writer you can use interviews to highlight the female writers of the highest quality (Kelly Link, Cat Vallente, Kathy Sedia, Anna Tambour) in order to counteract the tendency for male names to get more limelight. As an editor you can do your best to ensure parity in ToC or in the names you put on the front cover. You can even do all-female issues like John Klima with Electric Velocipede, to make a pointed statement about the available quality of female writers. As a reviewer you can pick up on gender imbalance as and when it’s notable, and the same is true with blogs, journals, forums and the like; just keeping the issue in people’s consciousness is an important part of it. Where it comes to more practical nuts-and-bolts approaches, there are strategies that are actually testable: Do slush-bombs work or are they counter-effective? Does an anonymous submissions process help foster gender parity? I’m not in a position to give the answers to those questions though.

The second part of the issue is, I think, both more abstract and more crucial (in my opinion): the field has long since radically shifted its focus away from that boy’s own pulp mode; with the New Wave, the feminist SF of the 70s, and everything since, the field has broadened its aims and its target audience to the point where it’s really a different creature entirely. I’m not even sure it’s strictly speaking a genre anymore. We partly acknowledge that with the term speculative fiction but I don’t think we’ve gone far enough in recognising the changes; we’re still tied to that brand image. Personally, I’d rebrand the whole fucking field — market it as indie fiction, critique it as strange fiction, try to totally reboot it in people’s imaginations so that we think of it in a way that’s not coloured by that male-orientation. This is, I freely admit, not even remotely practical, and beyond the scope of the specific problem of gender imbalance, but there’s a part of me that thinks — to use a programming metaphor — we need to utterly redefine the system architecture rather than just tinker about with patches and fixes on the legacy code.

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For many of us, one of the main interests of science fiction is it’s use of science as part of the story. There’s nothing quite like reading about a cool idea that is based on current scientific thought and then going back and finding out more. We asked our respondents this question:

There are several reasons for this. The first is that our system of education needs to have a scientific basis. It does not now. It is so dreadful because it was created to ready immigrant children for factory work. Be on time, follow directions, don’t talk, do what we tell you to do. One obvious negative outcome is that we do not begin to teach reading until children are far older than the optimal age for doing so. I taught preschoolers for fifteen years, and all of my four-year-olds could read with comprehension and with joy. Easily. No pain. Same with numeracy. There is no reason why they can’t grasp addition, multiplication, and subtraction by age four, and division by five.

This is because the young child’s brain is extremely plastic is ready to respond to various aspects of the environment at very specific stages of development. But the same thing is true through the early twenties; the entire educational system needs to be revamped in order to afford children the opportunity to contribute in meaningful ways to science, literature, or anything they choose to do.

More research on the brain is needed, and many more studies need to be done in order to fully support this thesis in ways that will make people want to spend their money on education. If you don’t care about children, consider that it is their world in which you will be living when you are old.

And, when you are old, your experience can be much richer if you avail yourself of the continuing plasticity of the brain–particularly if you have a stroke. I’ve lately read My Stroke Of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (Jill Bolte Taylor, Viking), The Brain That Changes Itself (Norman Doidge, Viking), and many other more complex books about neuroplasticity. Although it looks like work, brains can and do change, and recover many skills lost through a traumatic event.

My interest in memory is for many of the same reasons, but also because memory is all we are. I want to understand the source of all this richness. With various memory drugs in the pipeline, we need to understand what their use might mean for society at large, not just for the Alzheimer’s patients who will be the first users. For two concepts about how memory works, read In Search Of Memory by Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize Laureate. For the anti-Kandel view, read In The Places Of Memory by George Johnson. And anything by V. S. Ramachandran. Those are just for starters.

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It’s been just over half a year since we started pestering and prodding various people in and around the science fiction field with our questions. We’ve had quite a bit of fun putting these together for you and we hope you’ve enjoyed them too. And to really find out, this week’s Mind Meld gives you, our loyal readers, the opportunity to answer the following questions:

1. What do you think about the Mind Meld feature in general?
2. What’s been your favorite entry and why?
3. Are there any topics you’d like us to cover?
4. Is there anyone we’ve missed that you would like to see included?

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As a science fiction fan, I’ve often wondered about the fans of yesteryear who read the early works of legendary authors like Silverberg, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, etc., back when they were first published. Did they know that these writers were destined for greatness? Could they have predicted their successful careers? All of which makes me wonder if we can predict the genre stars of tomorrow. In this week’s Mind Meld, we turned to folks who deal with lots of writers on a daily basis, and we asked them:

Read on to see if their answers match yours….

[MIND MELD EXTRA! After these enlightening responses, I've collected the names that received multiple mentions and compiled the un-scientific list of "The Top 18 Genre Authors To Keep an Eye On"...]

Being a science fiction reader, I am, of course, excellent at predicting things. As I sit here in my ornithopter, debating whether to visit the excellent library of microfiche on Mars or to bathe in the pools of Venus, a few names come to mind…Ahadi Benson…Chasina Doyle…Eric Fujishima…

Oh, wait, you want the names of people actually writing now, people whose work we might be able to read and collect before it starts selling for multiple digits on eBay! Well, let’s see. Alan DeNiro immediately comes to mind, not just because his first collection was published by the awesome Small Beer Press, or because he just sold a novel to Juliet Ulman at Bantam, but because he’s one of the best writers in the U.S. today, and one of these days the masses are just going to have to agree with me about that. (Or else they’ll die in the revolution. But you don’t know about the revolution yet…)

I’m betting Meghan McCarron will, in five to ten years, be talked about as a contender for a MacArthur Genius Grant. (She’s a friend of mine, but I think she’s talented enough to overcome this impediment.) I also expect Tempest Bradford will become known not just for her fiction and nonfiction, but for her excellent work as a crusading president of SFWA, bringing the organization to its largest enrollment in history.

Nick Mamatas will probably be frustrated that he’s less known for his marvelous novels and stories than for his week as an American Idol judge, but that’s a kind of fame, so it counts.

More? Let’s see…David Schwartz‘s first novel, Superpowers, is going to bring him a deservedly large audience, but I think he’s the sort of writer who will follow it up with a string of equally strong books and maintain that audience quite well. Holly Phillips gained some good notice for her first few books, but I think when her novel The Engine’s Child is published by Del Rey this fall, she’s likely to be noticed by a deservedly large audience. Paul Jessup is definitely a writer to watch, and I’d bet something valuable (if I had something valuable) that he’ll publish a book in the next five years, and that book will attract real attention. Ursula Pflug has been publishing for a while now, and hasn’t gotten nearly the notice she deserves, but she’s the sort of writer who could suddenly have a breakout hit and cause everyone to label her an overnight success. Neil Williamson is one of those writers whose name always attracts me if it is present in a magazine or anthology, and I’m curious to see what he produces in the next decade — he could, I think, have either a smash hit or develop a cult following. Vandana Singh is a writer whose short fiction I adore. She gained some notice for her recent novella Of Love and Other Monsters, but, honestly, it felt more like an outline than a full piece of fiction to me, so I can’t wait to see her publish a novel as robust as her short stories, because she’s got more talent and vision than just about anybody else out there.

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Two weeks ago we asked several authors for their thoughts on scientific accuracy in science fiction stories. Jay was unable to answer at that time, but sent along his response for all of us to read.

In a word, no. It’s *fiction*, we’re all making it up anyway.

To be a little more specific and less flippant, *any* story is going to fail in the face of expertise. I can write a convincing medical scene for the general reader, but a doctor will call b.s. Likewise astronomy, biology or any other discipline. It all depends on the distance of the reader from the subject matter.

This means one can write about cosmology with a relatively free hand. That’s all esoteric theory anyway. But write about the physics of falling bodies without taking terminal velocity into account and you’re in trouble.

As a matter principle, I always strive for scientific accuracy to the best of my ability. But it’s like the old joke about not being faster than the bear. I don’t have to be accurate, I just have to be more accurate than my readers’ understanding.

[Update - Included Glen Orbik's response.]

Some are flashy. Some are somber. Some knock your socks off and some make you wear argyles. But every book has cover. And every cover has to be created by someone. We contacted several artists this week and asked them the following question about book covers:

Primarily book cover art is designed to sell books. It’s a commercial venture no matter what anyone tells you. Whether it makes nice fine art on its own is beside the fact. That said, some nice fine art has made some terrific covers. For me, I work with the idea of K.I.S.S.-”Keep It Simple Stupid” as a note to self to come up with a bang-on idea by which to sell the book. Of course, in the last decade or more, such an emphasis is on the marketing of the book that, often the artist doesn’t even get to see a book! He or she gets a couple of lines of ideas or quotes from a specific scene. And also, people tell you what colors NOT to use on the cover-usually it’s greens or for some reason, purples-so I am told anyway, there may be other opinions.

I try to keep the work simple as possible so that it has a punch to it. I envision how and where type will be dropped into it and compensate for this. Lately this is essentially giving the “big book” look some people ask for. Alot of SF and Fantasy covers have gone the way of the John Grisham look wherein you’re not even sure what the genre is. It’s a question of what kind of art-it’s a question of whether any art will be at all used on the cover. On Independent publishers that’s less of a question because they cater to a core group of fans who will buy the books of a given writer-signed, good binding and so on. These are the books that will last and be loved and saved. Which is why I like being part of them.

My own work tends to be fairly narrative save for horror which has often a single image that grabs you. Working for the Indie presses, as I do, I am given a free hand with a great deal of what I do. At least two publishers will say happily “Oh, give us a ‘Bob’” meaning some landscape or something with a rocketship in it, which I am only too happy to do. I did a Robert Heinlein like that. It just summed up the title of the book perfectly. I have alot of luck with that and, like in the Subterranean Press Brian Lumley books…it’s some of my best work and when the designer has finished with the type I’m really thrilled with the entire look of it. I did a cover to Philip Jose Farmer’s Venus on the Half Shell. Not only did I like what I did, his fans all wrote me and liked it enough to buy prints, and, Farmer himself, at 90 or thereabouts, is the owner the painting, he liked it so much! That’s when it’s the best.

I respond usually to a mood, or a “feel” of the book in many cases. Something that just sums it up for me, that I, as a fan, would react to in a positive way. I’m all for doing covers that sell books. Publishers like that. I like the challenge to come up with art that will work well with the type and, I view it all as a singular package. That’s sounds terribly “commercial” but as I started…that’s what you get paid to do. And in all, I try and have fun with it and I try to make everyone happy.

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Science fiction presents itself to us through different mediums, most notably through the written and visual. Have you ever wondered who owns it? Lou Anders has, and he submitted the following question:

This is like asking who is driving the food presentation industry, MacDonald’s or the French Laundry. They both work in food, to be sure, and they’re both good at what they do. But what they do is different enough that comparing the two in a general sense is silly.

To speak in wildly oversimplifying terms, written science fiction is about speculation; visual science fiction is about spectacle. The distinction was there from the beginning of science fiction as a visual medium: Georges Méliès’ Le voyage dans la Lune was made not because Méliès’ cared about showing men getting to the moon, but because he cared about showing off his state-of-the-art effects skills. Look at the list of the most successful science fiction films over the last three decades and you’ll understand how much spectacle is privileged over speculation. It doesn’t mean visual SF is doing something wrong; it means it’s doing something fundamentally different than written SF.

Written and visual science fiction have different goals, so to say one is driving the other (or that either is driving both) isn’t accurate. It’s more accurate to say that each influences the other in a more or less indirect way. Visual sf influences written sf (to go to another, different metaphor) very much the way movies are currently influencing Broadway: Popular movies are now being turned into hit Broadway musicals; Popular sf movies, TV show and video games are turned into profitable book series. Written sf influences visual sf very much the way avant-garde musicians influence pop music: Glenn Branca influences Thurston Moore, who influences Frank Black, who influences Liz Phair, who influences Avril Lavinge, who sells trillions of albums and mp3s to bunches of 14-year-old girls who would pepper-spray Glenn Branca if he walked up to them in public.

For his part, Branca might be entirely horrified at the idea that he’s in some small way responsible for Lavinge’s smash #1 hit “Girlfriend.” But on the other hand, it is catchy. It has a nice beat, and you can dance to it, as long as you don’t think about it too hard. And as you can connect Branca to “Girlfriend,” so too can you connect, say, Olaf Stapledon to Heroes. But being connected is not the same as driving the field. That’s more like being in the backseat, shaking your head and saying “you should have taken that left. Now we’re going to have to detour through all this crap.”

Suffice to say written and visual sf will drive themselves, independently, and that’s fine. And when they get hungry, one will pull over at MacDonalds, and one at the French Laundry. But which at which? Well, think: which one has more money? Yes, the irony, it burns.

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Science fiction would be nothing without the science. Who doesn’t like reading about new or interesting ideas inside of a story? But should SF authors know their stuff when it comes to the science behind the stories? To that end, our question this week:

No, science fiction authors don’t have any obligation to be scientifically accurate – up to a point. If we insisted on absolute scientific verisimilitude, then – at a stroke – we’d take out some of the best stories and books the field has produced – Dick, Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith – pretty much the entire “New Wave” and a lot that’s come since. But there have to be limits, and I think (since most written SF does at least give lip-service to scientific accuracy) this is best illustrated in relation to media SF. Star Trek, for all its undoubted faults, always exhibited a basic grasp of the scale and structure of the universe. The writers and producers, despite their reliance on “creatures of pure energy”, the “particle of the week”, and other such hokum, did at least understand that planets went around stars, that stars were an inconveniently long way apart, that the galaxy was composed of billions of such stars, and all the other galaxies were sufficiently far away that they may as well not exist. It was understood that warp drive was a necessary prerequisite for interstellar journeys, whereas impulse drive sufficed for tootling around the solar system. Compare and contrast this creditable stab at realism with the lamentable Space:1999 (which I nonetheless loved with an unbridled passion when I was 9) and there’s little or no sense of the writers having any grasp of the rhetoric of scale. Planets, suns, galaxies, etc, all seem to be essentially interchangeable entities. No known physics could ever account for the speed with with the runaway moon zipped from planet to planet, while remaining close enough to any given planet to facilitate back-and-forth travel by rocket for an entire episode’s duration. Star Trek‘s writers understood that the Enterprise would require inertial dampeners if its crew weren’t to be squashed by the immense accelerations associated with star travel. No such consideration was ever part of the thinking behind Space:1999, in which the entire moon was blasted out of Earth orbit with no repercussions beyond a few broken items of furniture. In my view, Space:1999 is beyond the pale and can’t really be enjoyed on any level except as dreamlike fantasy, filled with science fictional props that nonetheless don’t fit together in any coherent fashion. But the Eagle transporters did look way cool.

There’s a wider point, though, this is this: why would anyone not be sufficiently enthralled and interested in science to want to get it right? Science is an inherently fascinating and rich human enterprise. We would rightly scorn any writer who professed to a disinterest in the facts of history, or psychology. But science is too often seen as some kind of optional intellectual add-on, a bit like having an interest in early music or Swedish cinema.. That’s not to say that all SF should be scrupulously accurate, all-dots-crossed, my slide-rule’s bigger than yours Hard SF – it would be boring if that were the case. But I don’t think the injection of a tiny amount of real-world science has ever hurt a story, and it’s definitely helped some of mine.

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Young Adult fiction is a hot topic at the moment, mostly brought on by John Scalzi’s recent post about YA genre classification. He mentions that some adult readers overlook YA sf/f, but some YA books may be equally enjoyed by even the most discerning adult reader. So we asked some folks:

For what it’s worth, the recommendation at the front of my mind (probably because I just read it) would be Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. And I wasn’t the only one…

Read on to see how our esteemed panel responded. And be sure to offer up your own suggestions!

I think it’s no secret I’m a big fan of Scott Westerfeld’s work, but rather than recommend Scott’s wildly successful Uglies series, which really doesn’t need any more help, let me give a shoutout to one of his other books, Peeps. These days there are more “vampire reboot” sort of books than any one planet actually needs, but what makes Peeps worth the time is both the plot, and the every-other-chapter digressions into parasitology that actually manage to dovetail into the story Scott is telling. It’s clever, it’s exciting, and it’s good, and if you were handed the book without knowing where in the bookstore it was shelved, you wouldn’t know or care that it was YA.

Beyond this, my recommendation for titles is for adult readers to go into the YA section and do what they do in every other section of the bookstore: browse, damn it. Look at the covers and the jacket copy and maybe read a little of the book and just see if the book looks interesting to you. Oddly enough, it works as well in the YA section as it does everywhere else. Alternately, go to the library and ask the YA librarian to suggest some title. Oh, go on, you baby. You won’t be the first adult she’s recommended a YA book to in her life.

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This year’s summer movie slate is full of sequels and remakes of existing properties. As science fiction/fantasy fans we know there is a wealth of written material that deserves to appear on the big screen or on TV. The recent news that Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos is being adapted for the silver screen is welcome, even as we’re sceptical about the final result. Our question this week:

I like Dune as much as the next science fiction fan, but I find it disappointing that Hollywood keeps remaking the same stories instead of tapping into the wealth of science fiction literature. I’m not sure that every story can be easily translated into film, particularly if it features many non-humanoid or posthuman characters. I also think that there is a glut of action thrillers and SF-horror movies. Keeping that in mind, here are a few SF stories that I’d like to see on the big screen:

- I think Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash could make a brilliant movie, if a screenwriter could be found who could pare the plot down to feature film length without eliminating the humor. What makes it enjoyable to me is that the over-the-top characters and settings – the reluctant hero Hiro, who is an excellent swordsman in both the real world and online, the badass teenaged skateboard messenger, the evangelist who wants to take over the world through speaking in tongues, the mafia-run pizza delivery business, the decaying crowded freeways, tacky strip malls and gated ‘burbs covering Southern California, the giant “raft” of refugee boats drifting along the coast – seem almost plausible. And of course there is the appeal of the Metaverse itself, where computer geeks can don an avatar of their own creation and are at the top of the social hierarchy.

- Connie Willis’s time travel novels are among my favorites, so I’d love to see them made into movies. The Doomsday Book would make a moving drama, with its contrast between young historian Kivrin’s experiences in the medieval village beset by plague, and her colleagues fighting the influenza epidemic in future Oxford. The ending is probably not upbeat enough for a commercial SF movie, though. On the other hand, I think Willis’s much lighter time travel comedy of errors, To Say Nothing of the Dog, could be fun light entertainment. I like to imagine it filmed in the style of a Merchant-Ivory production (maybe my fondness for period pieces makes me different from the “average” SF fan, though).

- The theme of environmental destruction in Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is as timely today as it was in the 1970s, as are the issues surrounding the ethics and technical limitations of cloning. While the multigenerational scope of the novel is probably too broad for a single movie, I think that it would work to focus the story on Mark, one of the few “singletons” in the survivalist colony of clones .

- My choice for an outer space flick would be Frederick Pohl’s Gateway. It’s got dangerous exploration of space and unknown worlds, flawed main characters, tense interpersonal relationships in the close quarters of the alien asteroid spaceport and, and, of course it the dramatic ending with the characters’ ships trapped by a black hole. While the novel doesn’t really have a feel-good ending, it could be combined with “Heechee Rendezvous” to provide a happy resolution to the story.

- Finally, my nostalgic entry is Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage. It features a teenaged girl whose coming of age story involves the development of both physical and mental toughness as she fights to survive on an unfamiliar planet. Perhaps it is out of date now, considering it was published 40 years ago, but I include it in my list because it made a big impact on me when I read it as a 13-year-old. It was the first (and one of the few) SF book I read that featured the heroics of a girl, and it will always hold a special place in my heart.

- I was going to also suggest Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, but a search turned up that it’s already in the process of being made into film by Morgan Freeman’s production company. I’m looking forward to it.

I actually think that many SF novels can only be faithfully reproduced as miniseries, rather than 90 minute moves. That doesn’t mean that SF novel-based movies aren’t possible, but that they are necessarily something different than the original. Bladerunner is a great film, but it’s only loosely based on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It’s not just that typical SF stories are sprawling in time and space, but that the speculative part of the speculative fiction is usually cut in favor of action. Personally, I would love to see the SciFi channel produce more original miniseries based on classic SF, rather than filling up their schedule with ghost buster “reality” shows and wrestling, but I’m not holding my breath.

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The lasting impression of a book is often conveyed by its ending, and that impression can be either good or bad. I remember finishing the lengthy Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton and still wishing there was more to read. That’s a great ending! Sadly, I also remember reading Hamilton’s otherwise excellent Night’s Dawn Trilogy and being disappointed by the deus ex machina finale of The Naked God. Great ending? Not so much.

I wasn’t the only one to be bothered by that particular title — as you’ll see when you read the responses we got when we asked people this question:

Note: Some of the answers may be spoilery, so read on…if you dare. And be sure to tell us your own picks!

How do you really define “Best ending”? Is the best ending one in which the narrative relentlessly builds toward, one that’s inevitable and inescapable yet still provides a satisfying denouement? Or would “Best” be better defined by that unexpected twist, that out-of-left-field trump card that comes at the reader unawares, yet in hindsight seems a perfect–yet audacious–resolution to the story? Both are very different types of endings, appropriate to very different types of stories.

For the former, I offer Mary Stewart’s The Wicked Day. Anyone who’s ever come within sniffing distance of the Arthurian legends knows good and well that fate has some nasty business in store for King Arthur and his son Mordred. Yet it’s to Stewart’s credit that the reader feels for both sides in this prototypical dysfunctional family squabble, and even as the narrative follows the traditional course of events in a surprisingly faithful manner the reader hopes against hope that Stewart will pull back at the last instant to offer a less bloody resolution. That she doesn’t makes the tragedy all the more poignant.

For the latter type of ending, consider Ken MacLeod’s Cassini Division. A tour de force of a space opera novel, things go to hell in the proverbial handbasket very, very quickly once all the various subplots come to a head. The fact that the communist protagonists (a clever bit of political commentary on MacLeod’s part, that) seem stripped of their only weapons serves to ramp the tension up to 11. When the rabbit is pulled out of the hat–as it is in spectacular fashion here–I literally leapt to my feet, pumping my fist and shouting “Yes!” I never saw it coming, but instantly recalled all the seemingly throwaway bits of detail and worldbuilding that turned out to be far more significant in retrospect. That the finale was both unexpected and justified is a fine sleight-of-hand on the author’s part.

On the other hand, fingering the worst ending is a much easier task. Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud caps off one of the most wretched, tedious plots in the history of science fiction with the most spectacularly awful pull-it-out-your-ass ending ever. Wandering off to find God is something you’d expect from the lead character in some self-important New Age memoir, not an all-powerful star-devouring cosmic entity. I ask you, would those classic Fantastic Four stories hold up as well if they saved Earth only because Galactus decided to abruptly take up navel-gazing? The fact that the Black Cloud itself is one of the single most brilliant science fictional speculations of all time merely serves to amplify the many literary sins of this truly abysmal “classic” of the genre.

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Judging by the amount of books we receive here at SF Signal (see 2008′s list right here), science fiction publishing in doing quite well. Trying to keep up with the flood of new books by well known authors is hard enough, what if you want to find something new and interesting? How do you find that ‘underrated’ author whose books you have to read? Well, you ask for help! Which is what we did for this week’s Mind Meld.

I would nominate a few authors, first Stanislaw Lem, who I don’t think has had enough exposure in the West, his seminal book Solaris has apparently never had a translation he was happy with. Other works of his, such as His Master’s Voice rank up there with the best the west has had to offer, and offer a fresh perspective to the usual flawed notions of ‘moral and societal advancement through the pursuit scientific knowledge’ that permeates much of the genre. His later works push the boundaries of what constitutes science fiction like nothing else I’ve seen, dispensing with plot and focusing entirely on ideas, in books like One Human Minute, or A Perfect Vacuum, which consist of a series of reviews of non existent books.

Also I would nominate Olaf Stapledon, writing before the genre was truly formed, but with works like Starmaker and Last and First Men had a scope that has rarely been equaled in all the successive years.

These two are both pretty well known I’d guess, but I can’t help thinking more exposure could only be a good thing.

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