story that started the modern flying saucer craze, Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting, was of more or less wing-shaped flying objects, which he described as moving like saucers skipped across water. Somehow that got garbled to “flying saucers,” perhaps because of the images from the pulps, and the hare was off and running. The whole mythos that has evolved since then is a mixture of misidentification, disinformation, urban legend, rumour, lies, hoaxes, honest mistakes, and so on, and it has interacted with SF all along. It would be interesting to trace these interactions and the mutual feedback between SF and UFO reports.
But having said that, the image of a silvery disc levitating above the landscape is immensely resonant, like the dreams we have of flying, and I suspect this is what gives the UFO mythos its power to fascinate.
Banks, Burns, Doctorow, Clarke, Stevenson (R.L. not Neal), Robson, Robinson: each in a sentence please.
Iain Banks is my oldest friend, and one of the very few writers who can do both SF and literary fiction equally well, or indeed at all. Rabbie Burns is an eruption of free-thinking, folk tradition, love, sex, and sheer poetry against a Kirk that tried to smother them all under a wet blanket of guilt. Cory Doctorow is a professional agitator who writes science fiction in his copious spare time (at least twenty minutes a day), and a dangerous man who should be watched. Arthur C. Clarke is unfashionable and underrated today but some of his work will be read hundreds of years from now, and he was second only to Asimov among the few public intellectuals SF has produced. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote (among many other things) adventure stories of great psychological subtlety and insight. Justina Robson is a friend, so I can’t be objective, but I find her a writer of astonishing range, power, and variety. Kim Stanley Robinson—well, there’s the objectivity problem again—is one of the most serious SF writers, in the sense that he really means it: he isn’t just playing with cool ideas but putting something on the line.
What is lablit? What does it mean to “work the wet end” of something?
Lablit is fiction about scientists—not necessarily or even usually science fiction, but fiction that has scientists as central characters and shows realistically what scientific work is like. I don’t know where I got “work the wet end”from, but I meant practical lab or medical work as opposed to administration. I guess it could be applied to literature as well.
Publishing being the dry end?
You said that, not me.
Would you describe
Night Sessions
as a police procedural or an ecclesiastical thriller?
Both. It’s a police procedural set in a possible future in which religion has been officially marginalised, and religious terrorism suddenly pops up from an unexpected quarter. But perhaps not so unexpected if you know your Scottish ecclesiastical history!
How come so many UK leftists are Trots?
Short answer: because Trotskyists in Britain moved fast on the CP’s crisis in the 1950s, and moved with the times in the 1960s.
Long answer: in the 1960s in a lot of countries semimass currents arose to the left of the official Communist Parties. In some countries, including the United States and West Germany, most of the radicals who wanted to be revolutionaries became some kind of Maoists. In others, including the UK and France, much the same kind of people became Trotskyists. I think part of the explanation goes back to the 1950s, and especially the aftermath of 1956 and the Soviet intervention in Hungary.
The crisis of the Communist Party of Great Britain gave rise to a very serious opposition around a magazine called
The New Reasoner,
involving academics and people with real labour movement roots, which became what’s now called the Old New Left. Some of these people were very open to Trotsky’s arguments, and none of them were interested in adopting a new personality cult or clinging to the
But having said that, the image of a silvery disc levitating above the landscape is immensely resonant, like the dreams we have of flying, and I suspect this is what gives the UFO mythos its power to fascinate.
Banks, Burns, Doctorow, Clarke, Stevenson (R.L. not Neal), Robson, Robinson: each in a sentence please.
Iain Banks is my oldest friend, and one of the very few writers who can do both SF and literary fiction equally well, or indeed at all. Rabbie Burns is an eruption of free-thinking, folk tradition, love, sex, and sheer poetry against a Kirk that tried to smother them all under a wet blanket of guilt. Cory Doctorow is a professional agitator who writes science fiction in his copious spare time (at least twenty minutes a day), and a dangerous man who should be watched. Arthur C. Clarke is unfashionable and underrated today but some of his work will be read hundreds of years from now, and he was second only to Asimov among the few public intellectuals SF has produced. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote (among many other things) adventure stories of great psychological subtlety and insight. Justina Robson is a friend, so I can’t be objective, but I find her a writer of astonishing range, power, and variety. Kim Stanley Robinson—well, there’s the objectivity problem again—is one of the most serious SF writers, in the sense that he really means it: he isn’t just playing with cool ideas but putting something on the line.
What is lablit? What does it mean to “work the wet end” of something?
Lablit is fiction about scientists—not necessarily or even usually science fiction, but fiction that has scientists as central characters and shows realistically what scientific work is like. I don’t know where I got “work the wet end”from, but I meant practical lab or medical work as opposed to administration. I guess it could be applied to literature as well.
Publishing being the dry end?
You said that, not me.
Would you describe
Night Sessions
as a police procedural or an ecclesiastical thriller?
Both. It’s a police procedural set in a possible future in which religion has been officially marginalised, and religious terrorism suddenly pops up from an unexpected quarter. But perhaps not so unexpected if you know your Scottish ecclesiastical history!
How come so many UK leftists are Trots?
Short answer: because Trotskyists in Britain moved fast on the CP’s crisis in the 1950s, and moved with the times in the 1960s.
Long answer: in the 1960s in a lot of countries semimass currents arose to the left of the official Communist Parties. In some countries, including the United States and West Germany, most of the radicals who wanted to be revolutionaries became some kind of Maoists. In others, including the UK and France, much the same kind of people became Trotskyists. I think part of the explanation goes back to the 1950s, and especially the aftermath of 1956 and the Soviet intervention in Hungary.
The crisis of the Communist Party of Great Britain gave rise to a very serious opposition around a magazine called
The New Reasoner,
involving academics and people with real labour movement roots, which became what’s now called the Old New Left. Some of these people were very open to Trotsky’s arguments, and none of them were interested in adopting a new personality cult or clinging to the
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