Boring books filling SFF section in Waterstones
In The Fiction Front on December 22, 2009 at 12:12 am
I just took a stride through the SFF section of my local Waterstones. I do this regularly but I don’t tarry as long I used to, there are rarely enough new additions to hold my attention for more than a moment. For many reasons the books I really want to read often aren’t to be found there.
What I did find today were a group of late teen / early twenty something kids hanging around the stacks. Three boys all of the Trenchcoat Brigade (one sporting a very fancy leopard dyed three stripe mohican), and a girl who had obviously read more than a few Lenore comics. IE…standard issue emo-goth-indie-metal-geeks. No surprise finding them looking at the SFF books. The weird, speculative and fantastic has always attracted the kids who make a space for themselves outside the mainstream in one guise or another, the Alt. kids.
(Hence the mission of the upcoming Alt.Fiction festival ((Derby, June 2010)) to stage a literature festival that appeals to all those Alt. people outside the mainstream who love books.)
When I was an Alt. kid, I loved SFF because it was as weird as I was. It was written by nutty Oxbridge academics, or insane Californian hippies, or bearded kaos wizards. I had little if anything in common with these people save our shared passion for the fantastic. Which was really the point. The fantastic took me to places I could never go, through the minds of people I could never be. Those people weren’t writing for me, or even for people like me, they were writing for reasons all their own and I was just tagging along for the ride.
Thinking about the Alt. kids today I wonder if they are getting the same experience from that section of the bookshop as I did. It could well be that I’m turning into a grumpy old man who thinks the kids of today are missing the point. But to be honest, I don’t think so. Today it feels like the Alt. kids are a demographic that the genre is dedicated to attracting, rather than one it accidentally picked up on the way to a more interesting destination. If was an Alt. kid now I don’t think the SFF genre would be all that interesting to me, if only because anything trying that hard to suck up to the twenty something me would have instantly lost my trust.
Whatever the demographic for the fantastic is the last things we should do is cater to it, or we stop being fantastic at all.
ebook, town of the living dead, wellingborough
In Random Strangeness on December 19, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Waiting alone at a dark, midlands train station and typing this post to keep circulation going through my fingers and and because the light from my phone seems to be the only illumination. The battery is running low though and I don’t want to know what happens around here when the lights go off…
…if you don’t hear from me again the assume the people of Wellingborough have done for me. If someone could gather together all of my unfinished stories and give them a posthumous publication that would be great.
Assuming I make it back to civilisation eventualy, I am starting to covet an e-reader. The problem is that none of the current models seem to have established a real foothold and I’m not confident that whatever I buy won’t be defunct by next year. Anyone have any buying advice?
Bill Shakespeare, Mordred
In Writing Journal on December 16, 2009 at 2:12 am
What do you do when you realise that you are the villain of the piece? It’s often said that the worst (or best) villains firmly believe themselves to be the greatest heroes. It’s an absolute truth that nothing empowers us to acts of pure evil better than a complete conviction in our own rightness. Perhaps this is why villains are so much more interesting than heroes, because heroes are just villains who haven’t been caught out yet. Shakespeare understood this. Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Shylock. The line between heroism and villainy in Shakespeare is so narrow that with the slightest slip can laeve you standing on the wrong side.
Life, I think, is more like Shakespeare than we care to admit.
(I gave the speech from Hamlet that provides the title of this post for my LAMDA Gold Medal Acting exam some years ago. The best thing about Shakespeare is how little I understood him at sixteen, and how little I understand him at thirty two but in a completely different way)
My personal favourite literary villain is Mordred, of the Arthurian saga. The illegitimate son of Arthur and his half sister Morgause. He is an absolute archetype of villainy – a bastard son driven to the worst of crimes by the terrible pride and arrogance bred in him by his mother. But it would take so little to cast Mordred as a heroic figure, a mothers son fighting against the implicit evil of men as personified by his brutal father. I might write that story one day, if I can bring myself to confront that character for long enough to finish it.
And in other news…
Thrin wants to know what is wrong with literally worshipping pagan gods?
The Alt.Fiction festival gets with the Twitter thing. Go follow them.
