Abraham Lincoln meets Thomas Covenant

Thanks to the amazing Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin I have now read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address for the first time. It's interesting to reflect that something that's so much a part of American cultural memory - of their rhetorical toolkit - has passed me by as a Brit up to now.

There's some variety in the surviving texts, but this is the one on the Lincoln Memorial. Since it's short enough for students to memorise it, it's short enough to reproduce in full below.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Great, isn't it?

Now, I'm probably not the first person to have read that and then seen echoes of the Address in other writing, such is its influence. I may be the first however to have found Lincoln in US writer's Stephen Donaldson's 70's fantasy series The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

Now, one of the early things I wrote on this blog was on the Covenant Chronicles - suffice to say that I find them interesting (influential, even) while at the same time deeply flawed and in certain respects repulsive. So me and these books have a degree of personal history.

But it was only when reading the Address that I recognised where some of Donaldson's linguistic tics and philosophy might well come from.

Quotes from the Chronicles such as "It is the duty of the living to give meaning to the sacrifices of the dead" and "So that beauty and truth should not pass utterly from the Earth.” are echoes of Lincoln in fantasy masquerade.

It's easy to position the Chronicles as an response to/critique of Tolkien, after the success of the Lord Of The Rings. But what I hadn't appreciated up to this point is how - just like Tolkien, ironically - inescapably American that response is in its mythology and the traditions it draws upon.

That moment when a whole new reading of a book you thought you were familiar with opens up?

That.

Oh - and if you want to read what I wrote about Covenant back in 2011, here it is in a glorious four part essay. I must have had a lot of time on my hands back then.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Hugo nominations update

With around two weeks before Hugo nominations close (see previous post) how am I doing with getting my thoughts together?

With help from a few close friends (who can vote but not nominate because of the way the registration deadlines played out) my ballot has a full set of 5 nominations in only three categories: Best Novel, Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) and Best Fan Writer. 

But we've also got suggestions for a further ten awards - leaving only four vacant. Not bad considering we're not embedded in hardcore fandom, don't read a lot of short fiction the year it comes out and have no way of assessing how good an editor is. :)

I'm sure I'll end up filling up all the slots in Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), as well as adding a few more elsewhere among the way

Ask your Assembly candidates to champion MND

A quick post here to note that next Wednesday, the Motor Neurone Disease Association's campaigns for the Northern Ireland and Wales Assembly campaigns are launching. I've been fairly heavily involved in the preparation for these campaigns. 

And if posts here are a little sparse in the coming weeks it will be because developing a campaign is only half the battle  - you then have to make it happen (or, ideally, help others make it happen with you).

Currently my working life pre-launch is a little like this:

For now, though, here's a teaser for the two campaigns.

Ask your Assembly candidates to champion MND
 
We believe that politicians should understand the impact that MND has on people’s lives. And we know that this message will be loudest if it comes from local people.

That’s why we’re launching two campaigns this Spring:

- Every Breath Counts for this year's Northern Ireland Assembly elections
- MND Won’t Wait campaign for this year’s Welsh Assembly elections 

Take action from March 9 at www.mndassociation.org/everybreath and www.mndassociation.org/mndwontwait

Please take a moment to e-mail your candidates in your constituency to champion MND in the Assembly and in the community. 

Want to do more?

If you have a little more time, you might want to send candidates a personal letter, join in the campaign on social media, and perhaps ask a politician a question if you meet them.

An action guide and resources to do all that and more, as well as our Every Breath Counts and MND Won’t Wait policy briefings, will be available at
www.mndassociation.org/everybreath and www.mndassociation.org/mndwontwait

And if you have any questions about the campaigns, contact Tim Atkinson, Campaigns Manager on tim.atkinson@mndassociation.org or 01543 415121.

Twelve albums that have stuck

From one of those Facebook status update challenges:

Rules : in your status, list 12 albums that have stuck with you in some way. No need to think too long or too hard about it. They don't have to be cool or great albums, they just have to have meant something to you at some time. Then tag some friends whose lists you'd like to see (and remember to tag me too):

In no particular order...

1. Stereolab - Mars Audiac Quintet
2. Portishead - Dummy
3. Love - Forever Changes
4. The Notwist - Shrink
5. Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express
6. Massive Attack - Protection
7. Ulver - Shadows Of The Sun
8. Talking Heads - Remain In Light
9. Alcest - Écailles de Lune
10. Panopticon - Kentucky
11. Various - The Greatest Punk Rock Album In The World ... Ever!
12. cloudDEAD - Ten

Science-fiction as mind bomb

I came across the term 'mind bomb'  in a documentary film last year on the early years of Greenpeace (How To Change The World - highly recommended as a slice of history and as a story in its own right) 

Coined by Greenpeace co-founder Robert Hunter, a mind bomb is an action which captures the public imagination and redefines something - how we view the world, what we think of as being possible or desirable. 

If we must - a mind bomb changes the paradigm.

And it strikes me that one of the things that keep drawing me back to science-fiction after these years is precisely its potential to be a mind bomb, in a way that a lot of other genres can't or won't. That's why when I think about the genre at its best, I do mean SF as a literature of ideas, a concept baked and built-in since Isaac Asimov, since HG Wells - heck, since Mary Shelley.

Of course, storytelling and language matter - and the great books of SF usually combine the two to dazzling effect. But it's possibly the only branch of fiction where you'll find a willingness to tolerate an, ah, idiosyncratic approach to prose stylings in an author (hello, HP Lovecraft, Olaf Stapledon) if the aforementioned author has something to say. 

To pick a more modern example, while I can't speak for the original, in translation Liu Cixin's writing is no stranger to the clunk. But what mindblowing clunk it is!

But then in counterpoint to this we also have the link between intellectual and linguistic ferment. We have the 60's and 70's New Wave to thank for the suggestion that any dislocation or derangement - physical, psycholgical or topographical - any alien experience, really - can be represented in the breakdown and remixing of language itself. 

So while it might forget on occasion, SF is as much a heir to the experimental literary movements of the twentieth century as it is to the pulp tradition.

Pretty high-faluting, huh? But none of this stops SF being fun. And if I were to express a little frustration at the way the subterranean literary debate beneath the Hugo controversy had been conducted, it would with the idea that you can't have both, or that one undermines the other.

Let me put it this way - it's possible to produce perfectly enjoyable work that is just a rearrangement of established SF tropes and conventions - see The Force Awakens. A lot of genre fiction is just that. But just a sprinkling of new ideas, a little bit of forward view - for me that's often what turns good into great.

I'll wrap things up with a list of SF works that are both amazing reads and that have changed the way I think and view the world. It's certainly not a definitive list, as it's been sourced from a brief look of my bookshelves, but hopefully it illustrates my point.

Isaac Asimov - Foundation
John Brunner - Stand On Zanzibar
Octavia Butler - The Parable Of The Sower
Liu Cixin - The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest
Thomas M Disch - Camp Concentration 
Cory Doctorow - Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom
Ken Mcleod - The Star Fraction (and the rest of the Fall Revolution series)
Walter M Miller - A Canticle For Liebowitz
Olaf Stapledon - First And Last Men
Neil Stephenson - Snow Crash
Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather, Schismatrix
Charles Stross - Accelerando
James Tiptree Jr, Stories
Jeff Vandermeer - Annihilation

Please do feel free to add your mind-bombs in the comments section.

Science-fiction needs you! Join me as a Hugo Awards voter

Attention science-fiction and fantasy fans: your genre needs you!

Nominations for the Hugo Awards shortlist are now open until the end of March - open to those who registered by January 31 or voted last year.

My voting information arrived a week ago and I'm looking forward to getting my thoughts together in the coming month. But I'm also hoping you'll join me as a Hugo voter this year by becoming a Worldcon supporting member.

I wanted to offer you a few reasons why you should, like:

Fun! Voting! Power!
Free e-books (sort of)!
Supporting awesome things you like!
Improving the quality of the nominations!
Inoculating the Hugo Awards against block voting!
Enjoy talking about books you love! 

I'll get to all of this later on, along with how you register to and vote. But first, a little background.
 
What are these 'Hugo Awards' of which you speak?

The Hugo's are more or less the premier global award for science-fiction and fantasy. They span everything from novels and short stories through to films, TV, graphic novels, podcasts and fan writing. The awards are voted on by attendees of the annual Worldcon where the award ceremony takes place - that's Midamericon in Kansas City in August this year - plus non-attending supporting members. 

As a supporting member for the first time last year, the Hugo's introduced me to some excellent work. These included eventual Best Novel winner Liu Cixin's The Three Body Problem - the first SF book from China to be so honoured.

'Hard science, hot mess' - Me.  
'Great, but bloody depressing' - Dad. 

And to give you a further flavour, you can see all the winners and nominations from past Hugo years listed here.

Supporting membership and free books (sort of)

Unless you have the means and desire to get to Kansas City, to vote in the Hugo's you want to be a supporting member. In exchange for your upfront payment of £35, which helps to crowdfund Worldcon, you get the right to vote for the awards (and nominate for the shortlist, if you register swifly enough).  

You also - and this is the particularly good bit - receive electronic copies of as much of the shortlisted work as can be made available.

I've included a quick explanation of how the two-stage nominating and voting process works at the end of this post, for the psephologically inclined. But let's emphasise for now that participation in both stages is equally valuable.

So, while the Hugo's are not an outright democracy, supporting memberships mean that anyone around the world who can afford it can have a vote. Last year the electorate reached nearly 6,000 people. It would be great if that increased this time around, both for its own sake and for reasons which will become apparent as we go forward.

Prestige + participation = problems

The prestige of the Hugo Awards means that they have sometimes acted as a proxy battleground for debates and disputes in SF and fantasy. And like any more-or-less participatory process, the Hugo's are also vulnerable to attempts to manipulate the system.

Both issues arose last year, when two relatively small 'Sad Puppy' and 'Rabid Puppy' factions in fandom demonstrated that the Hugo shortlisting process could - all within the rules - be gamed by block voting for slates of nominations. The motivations of the slate organisers varied, and there was certainly a literary debate in there. But it's fair to say there was a lot of personal animosity and politics as well (some of it very problematic).

The whole story has been rehashed over so many times that it's starting to look like week-old leftovers. I don't propose to go over much old ground in this post. If you're new and curious, you could do a lot worse than read Amy Wallace in Wired - Sci-Fi’s Hugo Awards and the Battle for Pop Culture’s Soul to get the gist of it all.

What you really need to know, however, is that although the Puppies' block voting choices dominated a lot of the categories on the shortlist, they were disappointing in terms of quality. At best I found them okay, with some being considerably worse. 

For example, here's my take on the short-fiction nominees. 

In spite of this, the Hugo electorate (which had increased by the voting stage - and now included me) still managed to pick a fairly decent set of eventual winners, almost entirely from non-Puppy choices. But, given the weak shortlist and a high level of online drama accompanying the whole affair, it's hard to see this as anything other than the least worst outcome. 

Participation + positivity = progress

It's not clear at this early stage how much block voting there's going to be this year. But the key issue is that the bug in the nominations exploited in 2015 cannot be fixed until 2017 at earliest, because of due process. 

In such a situation, the wise hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

That means you can help the Hugos work as intended in 2016 by buying a supporting membership and becoming a voter. The larger the electorate, the smaller the influence of any faction, the fairer the outcome. 

So, nominate work you think should be shortlisted, read and vote for what you think should win.

And if you also talk online or with friends about what you've enjoyed reading (or watching, or listening to....), then you're contributing to a sorely-needed positive discourse around the Hugo Awards. I hope you'll join me to do that on this blog, but wherever you do it and whatever your opinions, let's help to keep the Hugo's a friendly conversation about the books and art we love. 

Decisions are notoriously made by those who turn up - maybe this year it's time we did that in numbers and had ourselves a good time in the process. :)

*** 

Informative appendix: how voting works

Voting is a two-stage process. The excellent Hugo Awards website goes into a lot more detail about this, but in general terms here's how it works.

Jan to March: shortlisting - voters nominate works they think should be on the shortlist till the end of March. The five most popular choices in each category then form the shortlist, which based on last year will probably be announced in April.

Nominators need to be members of the current Worldcon by a certain date - this year it's January 31 - or members of the previous or the next Worldcon.

From May - voting on the shortlist - voters read the nominated works and then rank them in order of preference. They can also place some or all works below 'No Award' if they feel some nominations are not worthy of a Hugo. Again, much more detail about how this actually works on the Awards website.

Unlike the nominations phase, voters actually have to be members of the current Worldcon.





August - numbers are crunched and winners announced

Notes from the policy rabbit hole and other January news

Eagle-eyed readers will note that it's been three weeks since any blogging occured here. And after all my good intentions at the start of the year! However, it's not that I've not been writing. 
  
My big work projects at the moment at the Motor Neurone Disease Association are the upcoming Assembly elections in Wales and Northern Ireland. To that end, I've been part-writing, part-curating policy briefings for Assembly members, together with adapting an MP's pocket guide to serve for AM's and MLA's. Oh, and arranging for all the Welsh material to be translated into Welsh!

It's been good fun rediscovering my inner policy wonk - although also a good reminder of why I stopped doing pure policy roles 10 years ago. Writing reports - like undergraduate essays - tends to bring out the completer-finisher / mildly obsessive traits in me to a point that I find slighly uncomfortable. And that means recently my writing energies have been almost entirely diverted to this end.

Nevertheless, I am profoundly grateful for my apprenticeship with the Electoral Commission back in the mists of time for giving me the skills and toolkit to do it when needed. And happily, the reports are now with the designer, having been proof-read and audited to within an inch of their lives. 

You can read previews of both election campaigns here:

Every Breath Counts (Northern Ireland)
MND Won't Wait (Wales) 

And last - but my no means least - did I mention that I'd passed my driving test at the second attempt? :)

That's pretty awesome, actually.

My closing reflection is that sometimes we choose our field of action, sometimes it's chosen for us. January seems to have been one of the latter times. 

But I have got a truck load of stuff done, and that I can be quietly chuffed about.