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As 2011 draws to a close, it’s time for our annual roundup of SF/F consumed during the year. For this week’s Mind Meld we turned to our ever expanding coterie of SF Signal irregular for their answers. We asked them this question:

Here’s what they said…

I’m hoping to still read a few good SF/F books before the year ends, but I’ve had a remarkably good year for books so I’m going to focus on those. Here, in the order I read them, are the books I enjoyed and recommend:

• The Fallen Blade – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
• Eutopia - David Nickle
• The Dragon’s Path – Daniel Abraham
• O.4/Human.4 – Mike Lancaster
• Trouble and Her Friends – Melissa Scott
• Element Zero – James Knapp
• Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Ransom Riggs
• The Declaration – Gemma Mallory
• This Perfect Day – Ira Levin
• City of Dreams & Nightmare – Ian Whates
• River Kings’ Road – Liane Merciel
• Tankborn - Karen Sandler
• Germline - T. C. McCarthy
• After the Golden Age – Carrie Vaughan
• Debris - Jo Anderton
• Postmortal - Drew Magary
• Legend - Marie Lu
• The Emperor’s Knife – Mazarkis Williams
• All Men of Genius – Lev A. C. Rosen
• Touch of Power – Maria Snyder
• When She Woke – Hilary Jordan
• Shatter Me – Tahereh Mafi

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November is National Writing Month, the month of Nanowrimo. In celebration, this week’s question involves Nanowrimo and other writing exercises:

Here are the answers from this week’s panelists:

NaNoWriMo makes you stop thinking about writing and start writing. The act of writing regularly and under every kind of condition (inspired, bored, happy, cranky) is what produces good writing in the end. Practise, practise, practise. Trial and error. Imitate the classics, then deviate from the norm. Every kind of cliché comes down to the same thing: keep writing until it stops being awful.

Then, when you’re comfortable with how and what you write, push yourself in another area so it goes back to being awful and work your way out of it once more. And don’t forget to learn to edit.

Find your own challenge. The same one might not work every time. Try a new one. Less letting people tell you how to write and more getting people to tell you how you have written.

The end.

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For the most part, we here at SF Signal focus on the stories in SF and Fantasy. But what about the people behind the stories? Surely there are some interesting biographies and memoirs worth reading? To find out, we asked our panelists this question:

Here’s what they said…

I’d recommend starting with Fred Pohl’s history of the Futurians. It demonstrates that the Golden Age of SF started with a horde of geeky awkward fanboys. I’d also recommend Heinlein’s memoir as well, because of his insights about Alice Dalgliesh and John W. Campbell. After that, I’m afraid that most of us are pretty boring people.

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Science Fiction is better known for technology, sense of wonder, and alien landscapes than fully recognized characters. Some SF that emphasizes character does so without engaging in those core elements of SF.

Here’s what our participants had to say:

Human nature is fairly unchanging and relatively easy to predict. For instance, people were acting like idiots several thousand years ago, and will no doubt continue to do so into the unforeseeable future. This is a good thing, because people doing stupid things is the essence of conflict and drama. Conflict and drama make for good stories.

Technology, on the other hand, is a fickle mistress. Video did not kill the radio star. We have no flying cars or personal jet packs. The space race (for Americans, at least) died.

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Lately, a number of mainstream authors have dipped their toes into the seas of genre. From Lev Grossman to Justin Cronin, mainstream authors are learning the rewards and challenges of writing SF, Fantasy and Horror. But many more authors could, and there are many favorite mainstream authors who haven’t tread into genre that would do well to try their hand in our corner of the reading and writing world.

Genres are marketing categories defined by publishers. Fiction writers have never sat comfortably within them, particularly not the best and most talented writers, who are always keen to try their hand at new kinds of story. Lev Grossman, Justin Cronin, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, Will Self, Iain Banks, David Mitchell and many more are not mainstream writers dipping their toes in genre. They are writers, writing stories, and sometimes using genre as a tool along the way. The best writers use genre, but don’t allow themselves to be trapped by it.

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Authors do a lot of reading for their profession, and often are the best ambassadors for books of all stripes. In this world of fragmented media, book recommendations via word of mouth from authors are worth their weight in gold.

Here are their answers:

The last book I read that converted me to an advocate for the author and all his works was Raising Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory. Despite being a “zombie” novel, this book is by turns touching, hilarious, thoughtful, exciting, philosophical, silly. All of it borders on genius. Set in an alternate reality where the occurrences in Night Of The Living Dead were real and that film was actually a documentary, we trace the growth of a foundling baby who, it turns out, is a zombie, but unlike any undead came before. His story takes us through his childhood and adolescence with a sensitive yet deft hand, toward adulthood and rebellion and finally a kind of martyrdom. Truly an amazing and wonderful book. It takes all the conventions of the zombie genre and turns them on their head, breaks them down and shuffles them about, allowing us to see the subject matter and tropes of the genre in a whole new way.

Like he did with demonic possession before in Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory has crafted in Raising Stony Mayhall a novel that transcends genre and approaches universal themes and questions about the human condition with a mastery of storyform that leaves this author breathless and a little – okay, a lot – jealous.

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Sidekicks. No heroine or hero is complete without Hero Support, the sidekick. So we asked this week’s panelists:

Here are their answers…

In comic books: Robin.

In detective stories: Watson.

In science fiction: R. Daneel Olivaw.

In fantasy: Samwise Gamgee.

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This week’s Mind Meld question was suggested by James K. Thanks, James!

We asked our panelists this question:

Here’s what they said…

I’d have to say Neil Gaiman and Rod Serling.

Neil Gaiman because he brings a texture and richness without it ever seeming forced or contrived, and his characters are quirky without becoming caricatures. (Perhaps like an acrobat he only makes it look easy and there’s a huge amount of time and conscious technique behind the façade, but damn, he does it well.) And the late Rod Serling because he was such a prolific writer and so able to look at the most mundane situations and see the fantastic.

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It’s difficult for writers to get their hands around the idea of the Singularity, be it the Vernor Vinge version or just what happens to society once limitations on scarcity are removed. So the question for the panelists this week is:

Here are their answers…

(Note: This is Part Two of our discussion of our question. Don’t forget to read Part One…)

I don’t think this is an issue confined solely to Post Scarcity or Post Singularity novels. It’s not even confined to SF. There are plenty of unfeasibly rich characters in realist or historical novels, say, just as there are characters who don’t fear death. What motivates them?

The answer to that question speaks to the very meat of our existence, something much more interesting than just following the money.

I pondered this issue (as many writers have) while developing my Geodesica series. It’s set in a deep-space post-human future, one in which humanity has speciated into several quite distinct forms, each of them still regarding themselves as “human”. Given the vast expense of interstellar travel, the highly diffuse nature of interstellar empires and other significant barriers to cultural overlap (and given also that this was intended to be a space opera, with all the splodey goodness that implies) what were my characters going to fight over?

The only thing I could think of was the very idea of being human. None of my characters were so removed from the reader that they felt truly alien, not quite, so it stood to reason that they might regard their common origins as a matter of some importance–that they, specifically, were properly human and therefore best qualified to decide what was best for all humanity.

This ownership of racial identity, warranted or otherwise, seems to me to be the one thing that we might fight over when we (in theory) have everything else at our fingertips. It’s certainly something we’ll fight over in the real world with distressing frequency.

When the characters of Geodesica aren’t squabbling over such lofty stuff, though, they’re worried about interpersonal relationships. Love in other words. Money can’t buy it, and it’s stronger than death (we’re told), so it’s been a prime story generator for about as long as we’ve been telling stories. I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon. We’ll know we’re heading into truly post-human territory when we stop worrying about all the other humans, or even just one of them, and what they think of us in return.

That’s the time, I think, when all stories will end.

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It’s difficult for writers to get their hands around the idea of the Singularity, be it the Vernor Vinge version or just what happens to society once limitations on scarcity are removed. So the question for the panelists this week is:

Here are their answers…

For me, science fiction was always, in one way or other, a literature of immortality. Since Frankenstein, SF authors seem to be concerned with life extension and/or recreation (cloning is ok, since you you able to download your mind to a younger version of yourself and thus extend your lifetime). Of course not all SF masterworks have this theme as its main focal point (but take Dune, for instance, and the war for the *geriatric* spice – in an universe running scarce of many resources, people are more than willing to kill each other for a drug that grants longevity to its users).

In a Post-Scarcity and a Post-Singularity scenario, the search for immortality is the next step. If humankind didn’t attain it yet, it surely will, and it’s doing all it can to reach eternal life or the next best thing. Accelerando, by Charles Stross, is one of the best examples of this century.

What can you give to a man/woman/transgender who has everything? More lifetime so that he/she/everyone can do more of whatever they want to do.

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In Dan Simmons’ novel Flashback. he posits a ‘bookstore’ where flashback users go to experience reading their favorite novels for the first time again. That sounded like an interesting question to ask this week’s panelists.

Here’s what they said…

There are books that I re-read just because I love them so much and to refresh my memory, such as the Chronicles of Narnia. But books I would like to read again for the first time would be ones with such suspense and thrills that re-reading them just wouldn’t be the same. The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins would be on top of that list. The dystopian world was a dark and depressing backdrop, but the intensity of the Hunger Games and Collins’ characters are so rich and vivid that I was completely swallowed up in the story.

I would also love to read for the first time Bob Mayer’s Area 51 series written under the pseudonym Robert Doherty. The Area 51 series was an original science fiction, cleverly linking to Earth’s past and were written like watching an action film.

I also wish I could go back and read all of the (earlier numbered) Star Trek: The Next Generation novels again for the first time. Reading those as a teenager was really what got me hooked on science fiction, and it would be great to relive that wonder and excitement.

And I have to mention one of my earliest childhood memories of reading science fiction: The Girl with the Silver Eyes, by Willo Davis Roberts. The girl could move things with her mind, and as a kid this fascinated me. I don’t remember a lot of what I’ve read over the years, so it says something that the visuals from this book stuck with me. I guess most of what I’d choose to read again for the first time would be books that have sentimental attachments. I’d love to read those stories again with the same wide-eyed wonder I had back then, as opposed to a more jaded and critical view I’d have today.

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Fantasy Maps have been showing up in novels since the days of Tolkien. They are so omnipresent that the late Diana Wynne Jones excoriated the inclusion of maps in her classic deconstruction of fantasy, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. And yet, there is a power that cannot be denied by the presence of a map in a work of fantasy. Just ask Dora the explorer.

So the question for the panelists this week is:

Here’s what they said…

I can’t say I have a favorite map. That would be like choosing a favorite pet, or a favorite tea, or a favorite hill. Maps are as indulgent and delicious as the stories themselves, if done right.

Going for a straight-forward map, Michael Stackpole’s map for The DragonCrown Cycle is perfect: it gives me a quick reference for the dozens of warring territories and political alliances. Maps can be ubiquitous in fantasy, but it’s nice to see them actually be useful.

But I have to be honest: the maps for Tolkien’s works are my favorites, ever. Enough detail to follow the characters, enough blanks for a young, bored mind to populate with all sorts of wonders and evils. Their style is also beautiful, and I wish more maps would be made with an eye for mood and aesthetic. The map commissioned by Peter Orullian is absolutely lovely. More, please!

The maps I want to see? Meta-maps. M. John Harrison’s Viriconium lends itself to the idea of maps as artifacts and voices in the story, not just static additions. In Hal Duncan’s Vellum, the map is never shown, but it takes such center stage that he might as well have drawn it. Even in Harry Potter, the Marauder’s Map was a fun, brilliant little thing.

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This week’s Mind Meld topic was suggested by Mark Nuhfe. Thanks Mark!

I have two boys in that age group–a 10-year-old and an 11-year-old. The younger one went through a Harry Potter binge at 9, where he read the whole series…then started right back on book 1 and read them again. During the second read-through, I decided it might be wise to find him some fantasy read-alikes I dug through my older daughter’s library (which is where he got the HP books) and pulled out the Artemis Fowl books, which did the trick. Then he read the Percy Jackson series from his brother’s shelves. After that, I went to bookstores to see what was new and recommended in fantasy middle-grade. His favorite two series from those picks were The Ranger’s Apprentice and The Last Apprentice. So, my recommendations then, would be:

• Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, starting with Artemis Fowl
• Percy Jackson & the Olympians by Rick Riordan, starting with The Lightning Thief
• The Last Apprentice by John Delaney, starting with The Spook’s Apprentice
• The Ranger’s Apprentice by John Flanagan, starting with The Ruins of Gorlan

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If there is one thing fantastika has a-plenty, this thing is called the Saga. Unrestrained by the so-called “reality” that plagues mainstream literature, SF, Fantasy, and Horror genres have told us since time immemorial stories that span large swathes of space and time, creating in the best cases new epic legends – or at the very least giving us readers (or spectators, in the case of film or TV series) unforgettable moments of joy and fun. So we asked this week’s panelists:

Here’s what they said…

“Of all time” is a difficult qualifier because my tastes are constantly changing.

Still, here’s a brief list of series that I want to mention:

Empire Trilogy by Janny Wurts and Raymond E. Feist: I really consider this Wurts’s writing more than Feist’s, and she subverts the D&D-esque setting the latter established in the Riftwar Saga by fleshing out the details of her non-European culture. The politics is a precursor to many modern epic fantasies like The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire, and reading about a blatantly Asian-influenced culture was more than welcome. (Also, if you’re familiar with the Collectible Card Game and RPG Legend of the Five Rings, these novels immediately capture the flavor of that world.)

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Reboots of old material are all the rage. There is something primal in bringing something beloved in the past back to life. It’s certainly common enough in movies, but what if books were given the same treatment? Are there book series that might flourish if they were rebooted?

Our question for this week’s fearless panelists:

Here’s what they said…

By and large, I don’t wish so much for reboots or resurrections–I have lovely memories of many series (and not-so-fond memories of others which started off well, and dragged on for far too long), and I’m always happy to revisit familiar haunts; but my personal preference is geared more towards new ideas and new series.

That said… I confess I’ve always wanted some tinkering to happen with Zelazny’s Amber series, which is a particular favorite of mine. I love the idea of Earth as a shadow cast by the true worlds, and the weaving of Celtic and Arthurian myths that Zelazny pulled off–but as someone who doesn’t live in America, I’ve always been slightly put off by the very American focus of the Earth scenes, and the generally Western bent of the series. Those are still great books; but I do find myself wondering if the same base idea couldn’t be re-used in a non-Western setting: specifically, if we had Amber and the Courts of Chaos as expressions of Yin and Yang, and the Amberite royal family incarnating a collection of archetypes from Asian mythology and folklore: for instance, Kongming, China’s finest strategist, could most certainly hold his own against Benedict; and Houyi, the Divine Archer, known for slaughtering various beasts (including nine sun-gods!) would make a fitting counterpart to Julian and his great hunting hounds. Also, an Asian family would come with very different dynamic than the original Amber (a lot of which was focused on a Western family with an absent father).

I’m pretty sure it would all be lots of fun.

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Being a U.S. based blog we tend to focus on things American and/or British. But there’s a whole wide world of SF out there that we don’t normally cover. This week we reached out to the international community and asked this question:

Bearing in mind I’m actually an international SFF author myself, so I’m on the outside looking outside …

I will qualify by saying that these are just a few of the many for who I have a high regard. However, for the sake of expediency I will only mention a few novelists and apologise in advance for my Australian bias. Nalo Hopkinson, Tansy Rayner Roberts, William Gibson, Trent Jamieson, Margo Lanagan, Alison Goodman, Maxine McArthur, Sean Williams, Kim Westwood, Cory Daniells, Richard Harland, and Stephen Dedman.

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Big Dumb Objects. Large scale science fiction things that themselves are a character or at least a tangible and inescapable feature of the novel or story. They are part of the fabric of science fiction ranging from E.E. Doc Smith to Peter F Hamilton. So the question for the panelists this week is:

Here’s what they said…

I don’t like the classic BDO’s: the Ringworld from Ringworld and the Rama from Rendezvous With Rama. It may have something to do with the fact that I thought the stories were dull, but I just found them, well, too dumb. Some people found the objects, they wandered around a little bit, then they gave up and left. Not much sense of wonder for me I’m afraid.

The BDO’s that actually generate that required sense of wonder for me are a bit more intelligent. I particularily like stuff from Iain M. Banks Culture universe, like the layered world from Matter or the Culture Orbitals (although I’m not sure they really qualify as BDO’s because they have a very clever mind at their core?)

My favourite BDO however is not fiction at all, despite featuring heavily in Science Fiction: it’s the Universe. Our Universe. It’s a big object and it’s mostly empty, and therefore dumb, inert, silent. It’s mysterious, we’ve spend lifetimes trying to figure it out and will spend lifetimes more. And yet amidst the emptiness we’ve found fantastic things: nebula, super nova, glorious looking galaxies. It’s endless. It’s amazing. We’re living in a BDO!

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Steampunk. It keeps going and going and going… So we asked this week’s panelists:

Here’s what they said…

To answer this question requires some context, and an understanding of my position: I have documented and studied Steampunk, but I don’t write it that often and I don’t self-identify as a steampunk. This is by way of saying, my view is an overview from outside looking in, and trying to get at the whole of it…

Much of what we see about Steampunk is in the form of received ideas–someone reads something about it and then blogs, or they’ve read a couple of books, and maybe not the best ones, and they’ve got a sense of what the subgenre is and isn’t from a small sample. It’s an easy target because the term itself may conjure up for some escapism and perhaps a false romanticism for a bygone age. But Steampunk is more complicated than that. One of its precursors, H.G. Wells, was a socialist and wrote anti-Imperial novels and socially aware novels as well. Another precursor, Michael Moorcock, wrote his Nomads of the Air series specifically as a comment on the ills of Empire. Jumping forward to the creation of the term by K.W. Jeter in 1987, you have Jeter’s own Infernal Devices, which satirizes and comments on the Victorian era right there at the start–it isn’t a lovesong to Victoriana.

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In a recent Mind Meld (Are Golden Age Writers Worth It For New SF Readers?) one of our respondents asked this in their response, “How the hell is sf from today going to stay relevant long enough to get published?” We thought that was an excellent question! So we’re slightly rephrasing it and asking this:

Here’s what they said…

If by relevant we mean matching up technology to the actual, then let’s all quit and write regency romance. Because we’re going to lose the game of prediction. It’s all changing too fast. But then, so what? SF writers sometimes get kudos for foreshadowing big tech advances, but for me that’s kind of like congratulating a cook for finding a diamond ring in a sack of flour. It’s very nice, but hardly the point. The point in SF is the story, and stories are about people and yes, ideas, but those ideas are interesting whether the hardware turns out to be this way or that. I just read a story by Joe Halderman (In Year’s Best SF 16) about post traumatic stress disorder on a distant planet. The medical aspects were a gloss but believable enough. The human factor–the story–was riveting. That’s why I’m giving the So What answer to staying relevant. I admit that it’s a tricky environment to write in. Some stories will be so dead wrong on technology that it’ll bump readers out of the story. But aside from a little bad luck choosing a premise, I’m not much worried about relevance. Dune was written over 40 years ago. Still a good read, because it’s about people, politics, religion–things that aren’t so influenced by tech. Obviously my preference for stories of characterization is showing here. When I read some hard SF authors I find myself bored by the excruciating science extrapolations. These guys need to be right, or at least relevant. And over the long haul I think they’re going to lose that game.

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An overwhelming number of fantasy and science fiction novels borrow from the same Western European cultural tropes, images and ideas. From the Hobbit to A Game of Thrones, a lot of novels and stories do not look beyond some overused cultures and civilizations as inspirations or even settings.

Our question for this week’s fearless panelists:

Here’s what they said…

Almost all of them are under-used and almost none of them are utterly ignored. And there are reasons for both of those things to be true. Most fantasy and science fiction is less in conversation with real history and culture than it is with other fantasy and science fiction literature, so there winds up being a feedback loop in which fantasy is about faux-medieval quasi-Europe because it’s all in the shadow of Tolkien (rather than because of some particular virtue of faux-medieval quasi-Europe). And at the same time, genre writers try new things and reach for the unfamiliar in a way that encourages experimentation with non-standard cultures. Barry Hughart’s The Bridge of Birds, Ian McDonald’s River of Gods, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, Aliette de Bodard’s Obsidian and Blood books, and Who Fears Death? by Nnedi Okorafor all come to mind. All of them are bringing something to the table that broadens that conversation within the genre, but none of them have yet brought that so much into the mainstream that their settings have become standard.

If I got to pick what cultures and civilizations got more stage time in our genres, I’d like to see more of India, especially in the era of the East India Company. I think having a fantasy set in a similar place and time would open up some really interesting possibilities. I’d also like to see more use of eastern Europe and Russia of the kind that Ekaterina Sedilla and Catherynne Valente have been doing.

More than particular civilizations and cultures, though, I’d be very interested in seeing more stories set in contexts of poverty. Class is the third rail of American culture, and when I see what noir does with rural poverty in something like Winter’s Bone, it makes me interested in seeing something similar in other genres.

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