SF outsider beats big names to £5,000 award

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/06/sf-outsider-edge-hill-award

Chris Beckett sees off Ali Smith and Anne Enright to take the Edge Hill short story prize with The Turing Test

Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 July 2009 11.24 BST

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Edge Hill short story prize winner Chris Beckett. Photograph: Colin McPherson

A social work lecturer with a sideline in science fiction writing has triumphed over some of the country's best known literary authors, including Booker winner Anne Enright and Whitbread winner Ali Smith, to take the Edge Hill short story prize.

Chris Beckett, who lectures at Anglia Ruskin university, was named winner of the £5,000 award on Saturday night for his collection The Turing Test, 14 stories featuring, among other things, alien planets, genetic manipulation and robots. Beckett said this morning that he was "still pinching [him]self" at the win.

"It was a very big surprise," he said. "Anne Enright won the Booker – two of the other authors [Shena Mackay and Smith] were shortlisted – so I thought I was very small fish compared to them ... I also thought that being a science fiction writer could count against me: a lot of people don't like it, or look at it in some way as less than literary fiction. It's a little blow for the genre, as well as for me – it might persuade a few people that maybe it's worth looking at."

Judge James Walton, chair of Radio 4's The Write Stuff, said that Beckett's win was "a bit of a surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand". But once the judging process started, pitting Enright's Yesterday's Weather, Mackay's The Atmospheric Railway, Smith's The First Person and Other Stories and Gerard Donovan's Country of the Grand against The Turing Test, it soon became clear that Beckett's entry had been the most enjoyable – and impressive – read.

"One by one we admitted it," said Walton. "It was Beckett who seemed to us to have written the most imaginative and endlessly inventive stories, fizzing with ideas and complete with strong characters and big contemporary themes. We also appreciated the sheer zest of his storytelling and the obvious pleasure he had taken in creating his fiction."

The win is especially poignant for Beckett, as his publisher, the tiny Elastic Press, is in the process of winding up. He's hoping the win will mean a larger publisher might be interested in his writing. "At the moment you have to be in the know to hear about my books, and I'm hoping that will change," he said. His agent, he added, was "already on the case".

Beckett joins a list of previous winners for the Edge Hill prize – the only UK award for a short story collection by a single author – including Colm Toibin and Claire Keegan. He said the win would give him the time to concentrate more on his writing – the author of two novels, he's currently in the middle of a new story collection. "Recently I thought I should perhaps sit down and write non-science fiction, but actually I don't want to. I like the robots and the bits and pieces – they make it more fun," he said. "It strikes me that most kinds of fiction is about making up characters and plots, so why not make up the world as well – go the whole hog?"

Beckett won £5,000 and a specially commissioned painting by Liverpool artist Pete Clarke, also taking the £1,000 readers' prize. Enright won the second prize of £1,000 for Yesterday's Weather.

Insights Into 2001

My insights into 2001 after yet another recent viewing?  
Here are my notes, from my journal:

Up until "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite", the third section, 2001 is a procedural mystery.  All of the film is about the presence of the Trickster Other in our perception of reality, as represented by the plain, abstract monolithic black block.  That's the unknown presence we sense all the time, call it God, call it ETI, call it the Unknown.  Does its deception, then, lead to rebirth?

Syzygy is alluded to and shown several times.  Alignments are significant coincidences -- is Clarke meaning synchroniciy is a sign?  That alignments hint at hidden order behind or inside the chaos?  Seems so.

2010 is the rest of 2001's mystery plot, where it is solved.

Bowman's experiences through the infinite are shamanic.  He is torn apart and experiences space-time shifts, only to live another very compressed life as a guest, then he is reborn as Star Child.

2010 does not deal with this Star Child, oddly; only Dave Bowman's ghostly presence makes itself known.  And they suspect him of trickery, note, even as he proves trustworthy in a Zen way.  "Something wonderful," he keeps saying, with a reassuring and beatific smile.

The birth of a new star from Jupiter's mass is what he means.

Bowman IMAGINES the Regency hotel suite outside his pod in order to cope with the shattering experience of going beyond the infinite, what ever that means.  It is another abstract, the subjective human equivalent  of the objective black monolith.  He then imagines himself outside the pod, in his space suit, in the hotel room.  Next he imagines himself alone and living in those rooms, eating, and when he drops the glass it is a literal shattered illusion, a concrete correlative, and he looks up to see himself dying in the bed, where he imagines the monolith and a new start.

And once he's aging and dying in bed, we're back to the iconic breathing.  The breath of life.

From the bed, his last act is to reach for the monolith -- reach for the unknown, as he and mankind have always been doing -- and the embryo appears.  It is noteworthy that it appears ON THE BED; he gives birth to his own new beginning.

We're then back at the moon's orbit and the Star Child sees Earth.  It is a homecoming, exactly as in the Odyssey.  He was lost and found a way home, finally.  

We are all thus placed in one man's imagination -- the infinite loop is closed.

We imagine reality, which imagines us right back as we endlessly try to solve the mystery of the unknown.  Brilliant movie, and so elegant.

As Clarke once said, it's all there, very simply laid out, and people overcomplicate it.  He's right, but they overcomplicate it because it's so mythical.  

We are no further from the beginning of Kubrick's 2001 than the distance Moon Watcher throws the killing bone, to our shame.  That beautiful myth that could easily have become reality -- that was in fact already planned when 2001 came out in 1969, same year we landed on the moon for the first time -- but we squandered it the same as we squandered the good will 9/11 brought us, through greed, hate, and small-mindedness.  

At least we had a brief, shining moment of optimism and vision, if only once.

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Mothers' Day is About Stopping War

Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation - 1870


Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Periodicals Then, Now, and Then Again

A much wider range of much better and more varied content is, essentially, what we want from periodicals as they move into the new electronic world.

To be avoided is the way too many genre publications homogenize into a single tone, with narrow parameters of taste and style, due to single editors dominating for decades.

Quality becomes harder to sift from chaff as quantity and other factors change established methods and filters. Used to suffice if the ms looked pro. Now it is within everyone's grasp to format properly, check spelling, and so on. Used to be prior publication in semipro zines meant a lot more than it does now, when so many pub their own ish.

Editors now must be all the more alert to the cutting edge while knowing in detail most if not all the history of the genre.

Doing all that on top of editing and sifting slush is a murderous burden. To lighten it, we may turn to rotating or guest editors, even though this solution prompts the problem of producing a consistent product to keep readers' interests.

Seems an impossible mix, doesn't it? Maybe each issue will have to stand alone, more like an anthology. Or maybe subscribers will be able to choose content for themselves rather than rely on an editor's tastes. Perhaps picking among sample openings and allowing subscribers, say, ten choices per month from the loosely categorized pools of content will solve this problem.

Television is an alternative model, with readers choosing one story here, another there, from an array of publications.

No matter what model shakes out as a new industry standard on Kindle or Online, definitely look for more series characters like Sherlock Holmes and more continuing serials like Dickens published. These are how reader loyalty will be encouraged. It only makes sense, once you get past value-added gimmicks. Remember hypertext? Links are taken for granted now and no big draw. Gimmicks will come and go, but a good story well told, and a familiar character that pulls you back, are perennials.

The goal for new periodicals, then, is to become a sole source for something with continued popularity. Think: Dresden Files Emag and so on. This requires editors to develop the skill set not seen since Victorian days. They will want to cultivate a wide variety of writers so they can spot new enthusiasms and trends, new favorites and new popularities. They will also need to keep an eye out for great longer works that can easily be offered in exciting chunks that will guarantee continued interest between installments. Each segment will have to be exciting itself, too. And they’ll have to find appealing characters, as in the Pulp era. New versions of The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Tarzan.

That’s why I mentioned The Dresden Files, one of today’s hottest repeat characters in genre fiction. And yes, Harry Potter comes to mind, too, as the perfect kind of book to have formed the foundation of a new kind of periodical, although it would have been doled out in smaller dollops and stretched over a longer period.

Any thoughts about what you’d want to see as the next phase for periodicals?

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Ridicule As Statecraft

The right has gone so far into Crazy it's not even funny anymore.

Although mocking them IS funny, yes. What would comedians do without them?

Ridicule, by the way, is what I recommended way back in in the late 1970s as the best way to deal with so-called terrorist groups. See, terrorism is the last-ditch effort of a politically powerless group to gain serious attention, right? That is what they crave, to be taken seriously, to have their cause or concerns addressed by the big fellas in a sober, serious way. They can't rattle sabers the way big nations do, and they can't go to war or threaten nuclear annihilation, so they turn to crime, specifically murder in the form of explosions, hostage taking, and the occasional mass shooting.

Same as Al Capone in the 1930s trying to make an impression on Bugsy Seigel.

So my epiphany was: MOCK them. Make pitiless fun of them. Ridicule them and their pathetic tiny concerns until NO one takes them seriously. At which point you make them an offer: Play nice and we'll stop belittling you and drop the satire offensive. Grow up and act civilized, period, or stay in Time Out.

And you know what? That will work. It'll work a shitload better than any amount of torture, war, or idiocy will. By taking the fear and mystique away, they have nothing left. Make them look small and insignificant.

And there is even historical precedent, by the way. Oh yes. Look up how the Caliphs and Emperors used Satire and Satirists to write plays and poems and songs marginalizing their enemies and keeping them laughable so that no one ever flocked to their causes. It was a standard piece of statecraft 2000 years ago in Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, Byzantium, and so on.

We can and should bring it back in a fully conscious way.

Make Al Qaeda a laughingstock of bumbling idiots, not a cartoon villain only super-Bush can possibly vanquish.

And yes, that's what was really going on. Dicks like Cheney were puffing and bloating their own sad C-student Yale flunky loser reputations by pretending to fight a dragon of their own devising.

Talk about self satire.

Talk about counterproductive, too.

A small group of criminals blew up some buildings. We should have gone after them with law enforcement, and belittled them as desperate stupid nothings over-reaching their station. We should have brushed them off like gnats, instead of giving them attention and making them appear important enough to go to war over. Instead, we react as if they are a sovereign state and pretend to go to war with them, even though they are not a sovereign state and in fact have no real country, etc. And just like other wars against abstracts, such as the one on drugs, it's both indefinable and unwinnable. (Which suits the arms dealers and other endless looters just fine, of course.)

And so we handed them every terrorist's wet dream, to be taken not only seriously, but so seriously that it actually changed their target in drastic ways, and has in fact ended up nearly bankrupting us both financially and morally.

Thanks, Dick.

A real man, an adult, would have brushed it off as a mugging, severe, yes, but ultimately just a criminal act of no consequence to the strength and integrity of our state. We should have built again, ASAP, on the WTC site, rather than leave it as a gaping scar of shame all these years. We should have continued with business-as-usual, to show the world that no two-bit gang of thugs can bring us to our knees.

Instead, what do you do, Dick? You throw a fit, squander the world's goodwill, start a gang war to appease your threatened little ego, institute wiretapping, kidnaping, torture, and a gulag of secret prisons, plus assassination, and in the process jeopardize everything USA ever stood for. Infantile.

We need to go back to being an adult nation with grown-up concerns and mature, considered responses. It will work a lot better than being a fear-driven paranoid panic-stricken infant lashing out at shadows and thrashing in its crib tangled in its blanket of self-induced fears as it wails for its Big Oil bottle and fills its diaper with prejudice, bigotry, and racism.

You listening, GOP? Right wingerss? You are, right now, the most easily ridiculed bunch of buffoons and bozos anyone can think of, a joke without a punch line, a lame duck of a political heritage, a feeble spark of imagined glories that led irrevocably to failure after failure, a howling hollow shell of an echo chamber where lunatics cry and whine and moan and bellow gibberish all day every day. You cannot be taken seriously, and only were because of the harm you did.

You met the enemy and became the enemy in one moronic stumble.

So keep up the geek act, if it amuses you.

The rest of us have grown-up things to say and do.

WTF?

Still hopeful, but Obama's refusal to reinstitute a rule of law by prosecuting Bush / Cheney crimes is a major misstep, not because the scum deserve punishment, (revenge is beside the point with those revolting morons), but for the good of the country, in order to demonstrate once again, symbolically and strongly, that no one, not even the President, is above the law. Unless and until we do that, we have lost the rule of law and that makes us much less than what we once were.

And what disturbed me most about this was Obama's statement that the CIA torturers, (he didn't mention military ones, or civilian ones such as shrinks and MDs), did what they did "in good faith". Well, I'm sorry, but that's the equivalent of saying "They were just following orders," and that in and of itself is a gaffe insensitive and historically ignorant enough to be worthy of W himself. What is going on? Was the surge of hope Obama was elected on just another bait-and-switch manipulation of our sucker bets all along? Should we be singing, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss -- won't get fooled again?"

Another disturbing thing he did was strengthen the legal defenses for the Bush-era wiretapping. WTF, to coin a phrase?

The people who mandated Oh Yes We Can Obama for Change had damned well better start kicking his ass and taking names and making damned sure he complies with the People's wishes.

///

UPDATE / RETHINK -

Given the legal ramifications and political exigencies surrounding and permeating all this, I can now see why we want to proceed in a deliberate manner, with full process and due diligence.

We want any investigation and subsequent prosecution to stick. We want it thorough and genuine, not a political whitewash. This means going forward at a deliberate pace without panic or prejudice. We do not want to see a few fall guys thrown to the wolves so the majority can escape unscathed. Look how many ex-Nazis still operate at high levels in the French government. If we rush to judgement we may well fail to scour ourselves clean of this neo con scum infection.

A Review of The Gentling Box by Lisa Mannetti

The Gentling Box by Lisa Manetti
Dark Hart Press, 2008
310pp, ISBN: 978-0-9787318-9-2

Just finished first novel The Gentling Box by Lisa Manetti and wanted to let you know that I was bowled over.

It's a superb story full of unflinching observation, telling details, and breath-taking turns of events, written beautifully with a masterful control of material, pacing, and story structure.

It is set among the Gypsies in Hungary and Romania at the turn of the last century, a time of change, portent, and dark magic. Imre, a horse trader; his wife Mimi, whom he loves so dearly; their daughter Lenore; his friend Constantine; and others among the nomads have their lives changed irrevocably by the dark magic of Mimi's mother, Anyeta, whose dying wish is to see her daughter one last time. A talisman must also be passed on, a kind of Hand of Glory or Monkey's Paw that carries its own kind of twisted temptation for everyone involved. We see curses, lust for power, corruption, ghosts, possession, self-sacrifice, and redemption portrayed with felicity and conviction. It is a remarkable series of portraits presented in a compelling sequence of well-wrought scenes.

The magic in it is as real as horse sweat and ashes, and the reality described as magical as any wild dream. What an accomplishment, to mix such stuff so well and to tell such a brutal tale so beautifully, with such delicacy of feeling and such empathy. There is real life in it, and the unblinking way Manetti portrays it all is greatly to be admired in an era when so many choose to avert their gazes, or to lie, in order to lessen the sting or to avoid offending prudes. This book tells the blunt truth and therein lies it's great power.

One of the best books I've read in a long time, The Gentling Box is strongly recommended.

That it is Lisa Manetti's first published novel bodes well for her career and for us, her readers. And more good news: she is working on a book about deaths on Mt. Everest. Our wait, to gauge by this work, will be well worthwhile.

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