Tag Results: Chatter
News
By Adam Roberts | March 27, 2008
Categories: Chitchat
A couple of brief items, foremost among them: Darren Turpin, known to some by the spritely monker Ariel, is the man who made this website. He did a fine job, too, as you can see by looking around. More, he has maintained it expertly since creating it despite my periodic attempts at smashing it up from within, and has been a friend of mine for years now: one of the most grounded, wise, good-humoured and expert men I know. The news that Orbit have finally given him gainful employment really is of the 'couldn't happen to a nicer guy' variety. It'll mean I'll need to find a new webmaster, but that's a small price to pay: congratulations, Darren, and good luck.
Other News: a couple of people have asked me whether I'll be doing a round-up review of the Clarke 08 shortlist, as has been my habit for a few years now. I'd gladly do this, but my usual place (infinity plus) has come to the end of its natural span. I talked a couple of other venues but they either didn't want me or didn't reply, so I may be spared the labour of writing the round-up this year. (I daresay I could jot some thoughts down on one of my blogs. Of course nobody reads my blogs, but that might actually be a liberating factor when it comes to the writing).
Overall it's not a shortlist about which I can say me gusto: not, although this has been the complaint of some others, on account of the proportion of 'mainstream lit' titles it features, for I don't see anything wrong in that, but because it's all rather samey. All of these books are historically-proximate alt-historical or near-future thrillers/adventure stories. Tom Hunter, the award administrator, has described the list as a 'map' of the contemporary SF scene, but if it is it's like one of those gag-maps you used to be able to buy: 'map of the world from the point of view of a Bostonite' which is two-thirds Cape Cod with other elements squashed to the horizon; or 'map of the world from the point of view of a Chelsea resident' which is 75% Sloane Square and the King's Road, with 'the north' running along the top border and nothing else there. (This sort of thing, in fact).
Or maybe Hunter is correct, and this list does indeed represent the state of SF today, rather than, say, just representing the taste of a judging panel who all happen to like reading alt-now/near-future thrillery adventure stories. But that would be a slightly depressing thing: a symptom of a genre shrinking and dessicating from the fullest scope of its imaginative possibility into a subset of airport thrillerdom. The best books on the list are probably the Baxter and the Morgan, but none of the titles here embody the mind-stretching, the sense-of-wonder, the conceptual metaphoricity and poetic, imagistic penetration of the SF that first made me fall in love with the genre. (An exception to this last judgment might be made for the Raw Shark Texts; but I found a deadening literalism to the way that novel handled its core metaphor, indebted to but lacking the sparkle of The Phantom Tollbooth; and I thought the Jaws-intertext was clunkily treated). Again, apart (to some extent) from the Baxter, they're all rather straightforward texts. Irony is not their idiom. They are books that if they are serious (about dystopia, the situation of the world today etc) are strenuously serious, and that if they are intertextual are ponderously rather than playfully intertextual. Naturally this, and that last point especially, is a statement of personal taste, not a broader aesthetic judgment: lots of people, inside and outside the genre, dislike ironic art. They prefer to know where they stand.
Finally: I learn today that my story 'Petrolpunk' has been bought by Nick Gevers for the Solaris steampunk collection Extraordinary Engines. Hurrah! The buzz surrounding this collection has been very good, and I'm chuffed to be on board. The fact that I said nice things about Nick in my previous post is an entirely unrelated matter; although my understanding is that he is indeed a tall, powerfully-built stallion of a man with an IQ in the thousands.
Blogging
By Adam Roberts | June 11, 2007
Categories: Blogging
As a coda to my catch-up posts, and a prelude to some proper Book-and-Story-related posting over the coming months, I thought I'd say a little something about my blogging. There are two things to say here.
One is that I continue to contribute to the group-blog The Valve. If you go there right now you'll see a post about Sir Isumbras, crossing the ford, that has a little to say about Millais' spendid picture (above) and more to say about a medieval poem on the same subject. Though it sometimes gets a little crispy in the comments threads, The Valve is a first-rate and top-of-the-notch organ for a wide range of interesting posts. Here's what I do: about once a week--this last term, on account of my timetabling, it tended to be the Thursday or Friday of the week; over this summer it'll probably be earlier in the week--I'll put up a post on anything that takes my fancy, usually literary.
Now, in addition to that blog, I started three personal blogs sometime last year. You can see them over there on the right, listed in the sidebar as 'Other Roberts blogs' above the blogroll.
In the beginning I kept all three of these secret, not because there's anything particularly private in any of them, but because I was intrigued by the idea of something so very well hidden (perfectly unlocatable in the first month or so) in such very plain sight (visible to anybody in the entire world, provided only they were online and knew where to look ...) For about a month these blogs were invisible even to Argus-eyed google. Fine. Then little bits and pieces of them started--how, I know not--to show up on certain kinds of google search. Then various people found them, linked to them even. Nobody reads them, of course, and why should they? But that doesn't bother me: the long near-unbroken string of 'no comments' subtitles has a pure, unsullied look to me, and being unread stops me getting self-conscious about what I write. But the time has probably past when there's any merit in keeping them secret anymore. So, such as they are, here they be:
Europrogocontestovision is a blog of pretentious apothegms, vatic statements, general prog-ness and occasional, but not very well-written, poetry. Good for a writer to have an outlet for all that sort of stuff, I feel, and this is mine. It is updated daily.
Rambling Ad Rumpo is me rambling on, online-diary style. I trust the name of it doesn't need explaining to anybody. This blog is updated, give or take, weekly.
Punkadiddle is a blog of bits and pieces and orts and scraps of writing, writing-related stuff and some pictures. It is updated if and when. Which is not all that often, in fact.
So, the picture at the top there: three figures on the horse (a big pompously-dressed one, an alarmed-looking smaller one, and a tiny one clinging on just-about). The horse is the internet itself. The three figures are my blogs. The visual analogy is strained. The horse is too big. The ford looks shallow enough to walk across without needing a brobdingnagian horse to carry you anyway.
And that is probably enough about blogging for now.
Welcome Back
By Adam Roberts | May 25, 2007
Categories: Chitchat
A long haitus, almost half a year. Part of this was standard downtime, when there was little to report; part of it, on the contrary, was me being too busy with various other stuff to find the time to update the site. Now, however, the estimable Ariel has redesigned the creaky old homepage, ported it over to Wordpress and set everything up to go. From here on in updates will be easier for me to handle, and therefore more frequent. Promise.
Meanwhile why not go add your ha'pennorth of beautiful English to a group-translate of Mallarmé? Feel free.