Steam Engine Time 07.pdf

Steam Engine Time

Everything you wanted to know about

SHORT STORIES

ALAN GARNER

HOWARD WALDROP

BOOK AWARDS

HARRY POTTER

Matthew Davis

Ditmar (Dick Jenssen)

Bruce Gillespie

David J. Lake

Robert Mapson

Gillian Polack

David L. Russell

Ray Wood

and many others

Issue 7 October 2007

Steam Engine Time 7

If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is

only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were,

how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam

engines, until comes steam-engine time.

— Charles Fort, Lo! , quoted in Westfahl, Science Fiction Quotations , Yale UP, 2005, p. 286

STEAM ENGINE TIME No. 7, October 2007

is edited and published by Bruce Gillespie, 5 Howard Street, Greensborough VIC 3088, Australia (gandc@mira.net)

and Janine Stinson, PO Box 248, Eastlake, MI 49626-0248, USA (tropicsf@earthlink.net). Members fwa.

First edition is in .PDF file format from http://efanzines.com, or enquire from either of our email addresses.

In future, the print edition will only be available by negotiation with the editors (see pp. 6–8). All other readers should

(a) tell the editors that they wish to become Downloaders, i.e. be notified by email when each issue appears;

and (b) download each issue in .PDF format from efanzines.com.

Printed by Copy Place, Basement, 415 Bourke Street, Melbourne VIC 3000.

Illustrations

Ditmar (Dick Jenssen) (front cover); David Russell (p. 3).

Photographs

Covers of various books and magazines discussed in this issue; plus photos by Cath Ortlieb (p. 7);

Helena Binns (pp. 20, 23); New York Review of Science Fiction (p. 38).

A big thank you

The print editions of Steam Engine Time s 6 and 7 have been made possible

by a very generous donation by Thomas Bull, Melbourne.

THIS ISSUE’S COVER

3 Fair combat

Ditmar (Dick Jenssen)

30 HOWARD WALDROP:

The music of the spheres is Frankie Lymon

Matthew Davis

4 GUEST EDITORIAL:

Book Awards

Ray Wood

33 Waldrop: Three short story collections: contents

34 LETTERS OF COMMENT

6 EDITORIAL:

The state of the fanzine editor

Bruce Gillespie

Cy Chauvin

Joseph Nicholas

David J. Lake

Yvonne Rousseau

Remy Lechevalier

Tim Marion

Darrell Schweitzer

Ben Indick

Jeff Hamill

Greg Pickersgill

Steve Jeffery

Greg Benford

John Baxter

John Purcell

E. B. Frohvet

Martin Morse Wooster

and many more

ALAN GARNER’S CAREER

8 Inner stars: The novels of Alan Garner

Bruce Gillespie

11 ‘turning, tapping, knapping, shaping, twisting, rubbing and

making’:

The novels of Alan Garner since Red Shift

Robert Mapson

THE ICEBERG SYMPOSIUM

15 Imagination and science fiction

Ray Wood

35 ARTICLE OF COMMENT:

Why I don’t like Harry Potter

by David J. Lake

20 The appeal of the short story

Gillian Polack

25 Back to the short story

Bruce Gillespie

28 Enjoy a good short story

Bruce Gillespie

This issue’s cover:

Fair combat

Once in a while I find myself pulling down an old and much-read SF work— novel or collection — in

order to relive the feeling of the initial experience. Call it nostalgia, or, probably more appropriately,

the reversion of an ever-aging and inefficient mind towards the remembrance of halcyon days. And

every so often what I read stirs me to create an image. So it is with this issue’s cover illustration. The

stories were from collections by Poul Anderson, Eric Frank Russell and, especially, Henry Kuttner. I

say especially because of these three authors he (or rather, he and C. L. Moore in collaboration) is (or

rather are) by far the best. Recent collections of Kuttner and Moore may be found in The Last Mimzy by

Kuttner (from DelRey), Two-Handed Engine by Kuttner and Moore (from the SF Book Club) and Major

Ingredients by Russell (from NESFA Press). There may be a recent Anderson collection, but I don’t

know of it.

These authors, presumably to cater to John Campbell’s insistence that aliens are almost always

beaten by (read are ‘inferior to’) Earthmen, wrote a number of stories in which rigid other-world

societies were brought to their knees by the quick-wittedness of humans — the galactic tricksters —

and by a reliance on exposing the dangers of having closed minds. Russell excelled in such stories.

When I first read these stories, oh so many years ago, I delighted in the humour that was a prime,

necessary, hallmark of these tales. They are still, even now, very amusing, but rather unreal, despite

their insistence on the power of the Earthlings’ logic. For they set up a basic situation that is usually a

straw man, and run with it and the humans’ ‘logic’, to a desired end, which could at almost any plot

moment have been thwarted by the aliens’ use of commonsense. Nonetheless, as I say, these stories are

marvellously entertaining provided they are approached as fantasies.

The cover is an attempt to portray the basic situation of power technology (alien group A) being

thwarted by poor technology and trickery (alien group B). So we have two alien cultures in the

illustration — one which is essentially at a comic-book level of science, the other at a much more

advanced and sophisticated level. But, true to the fairytales, it is the apparently weaker group that is

triumphing over the apparently stronger. Oh, did I forget to mention that many of the stories I have

referred to seem to be wish-fulfillments in which the school bully is trounced by the wimp? Perhaps

this is why I liked the yarns so much then. And still do...

And if you are as much of a Kuttner fan as I am, and if you a lover of books, of beautifully produced

books, and if you have money to spare or have but slight regard for money, you may be interested in

the special edition of Two-Handed Engine from Centipede Press (at US$225) (http://

www.centipedepress.com/). The Kuttner/Moore collaboration was responsible for what I consider to

be the finest short SF work I have read — ‘Vintage Season’ — and the finest SF novel — Fury . You'll

find the first in Two-Handed Engine , together with Clash By Night , which is the prequel to Fury .

— Ditmar (Dick Jenssen)

Guest editorial

Book awards

Ray Wood

Jan Stinson, co-editor of Steam

Engine Time , has kindly given up her

editorial space this issue to make

way for the Guest Editorial by Ray

Wood.

Making awards to books seems odd to

me. Consider the Nobel Prize for

Literature, which you’d expect to be

superbly judged.

There are so many awards for writing

these days that winning them has

become something like little boy

scouts collecting rows of badges on

their sleeves.

Only the other day I checked the

author’s biog in a Minette Walters

book I was reading. 1 And I found that

her first novel, The Ice House , won the

John Creasy Award; her second, The

Sculptress , won the Edgar Allan Poe

Award; and her third, The Scold’s

Bridle , won the CWA Gold Dagger

Award. I couldn’t help wondering,

How many bloody awards are there for

the mystery genre?

And then a few days later I read

Elliot Perlman’s author biog, 2 which

told me that he’d won:

Jorge Luis Borges

James Joyce

Bertolt Brecht

D. H. Lawrence

Anton Chekhov

Vladimir Nabokov

Joseph Conrad

George Orwell

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Marcel Proust

Maksim Gorky

August Strindberg

Graham Greene

Leo Tolstoy

Thomas Hardy

Mark Twain

Henrik Ibsen

H. G. Wells

Henry James

Virginia Woolf

Emile Zola

Ray Wood used to post emails on

Eidolist, but no longer does so. He

admits to little more autobio-

graphical detail that that he is a

retired academic who still lives in the

city in which he taught for many

years: Quorn, South Australia, which

is situated north of the Iron Triangle,

at the head of Spencer Gulf, South

Australia.

Ray’s Guest Editorial is followed by

an actual Editorial, by Bruce

Gillespie.

the Age Book of the Year Award, the

Betty Trask Award (UK) and the

Fellowship of Australian Writers

Book of the Year Award for his

novel, Three Dollars . His second

book, The Reasons I Won’t Be

Coming , won the Steele Rudd

Award for the best Australian short

story collection.

I think most would agree that that list

includes some of the twentieth cen-

tury’s finest writers. However, not one

of them was awarded the Nobel Prize.

It’s easy, too, to make another list of

twenty writers who did win it, but who

most people have never heard of.

How can you miss out giving the

prize to writers like Tolstoy, Joyce,

Proust and Woolf? (The Nobel has

been awarded since 1901, and there

were ten chances to give it to Tolstoy

— and Mark Twain, too. They both

died in 1910.)

It’s awarded for a writer’s lifetime

achievement, yet so many of the best

writers still didn’t win it, despite its

judges having all those years to reach

a mature decision. If you can’t judge a

writer’s lifetime output any better than

the Nobel’s judges, what chance do

you have of judging books accurately

in the same year that they’re pub-

lished? Yet that’s how most book

awards are made.

Not one but three awards for just the

one book! And how many readers

would know the parameters of all

those seven awards? They’d be no

more than meaningless names to most.

Soon there’ll be so many awards in

the world that no writer will have a

book published without getting one.

Surely awards amount to little else

but a marketing exercise for writers,

agents and publishers? Well, there

may not be too much wrong with that,

if readers know that that’s all they are.

But I imagine that most of them don’t.

Great writing is seldom recognised as

great for quite a time after it’s pub-

lished. As Hemingway says: 3

Almost no new classics resemble

other previous classics.

It’s usual that great writing is seldom

judged to be anything much when it

first appears, because it so often breaks

new ground. And critics, reviewers

and awards judges rarely see that it’s

great until many years later on. The

figure sometimes quoted for how long

it takes to arrive at a mature judgment

of writers’ work is fifty years after

they’ve died. I think it was Stendhal

who once dismissed critics tearing one

of his books to pieces by saying that

it’d be a classic fifty years after his

death. And it was. And it did take that

long, too.

So what hope do judges of book

awards have of getting it right, when

they’re judging books published as

recently as during the last twelve

months?

Barbara Hambly has been a high

school teacher, a model, a waitress,

a technical editor, a professional

graduate student, an all-night clerk

in a liquor store and a karate

instructor.

Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

(1986)

they’ve even sacrificed the usual kinds

of human society to the society of cats.

Awards are part of the hype, too. As

soon as a book wins an award, what do

you see on the front covers of all its

writer’s books? Something like this:

‘By the Hugo Award-winning author

Harq al-Ada’. It’s usually worded in

such a way that you think this book is

the one that won the Hugo, though

those words now appear on every one

of his books. Worse, how often do pub-

lishers capitalise on al-Ada’s award by

hastily issuing his juvenilia and

ephemera that they’d originally

rejected?

If you have more than one set of

awards within a genre, and each set

gives its awards to different books,

that in itself makes the whole thing a

joke. At the least it suggests that a hun-

dred sets of awards might come up

with a hundred different winners.

To have both a Hugo and a Nebula

for SF has long seemed a problem to

me. Now I do know that their judges

are different, but when different

judges choose different winners, you

end up with awards for judges instead

of for books.

You might criticise my list of great

writers who never won the Nobel

Prize on the grounds that Alfred

Nobel’s will 5 stipulates that it go to

Mr L’Amour enjoyed a wide

variety of jobs, including seaman,

lumberjack, elephant handler, skin-

ner of dead cattle, assessment

miner, and officer on a tank

destroyer during World War II. He

also circled the world on a freighter,

sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was

shipwrecked in the West Indies and

stranded in the Mojave Desert.

Louis L’Amour, Passin’ Through

(1985)

Does anyone else see this plethora of

awards as one reason why people turn

away from reading?

Consider the extreme hype on the

covers of books.

To start with, look at their jacket

screamers. Publishers seem to share a

standard dictionary of adjectives for

them. It includes: chilling, classic, com-

pelling, enchanting, enthralling, epic,

explosive, gripping, heart-stopping,

heart-wrenching, irresistible, monu-

mental, nerve-shattering, powerful,

provocative, scorching, searing, shat-

tering, sizzling, soaring, spell-binding,

stunning, sweeping, terrifying, time-

less, towering, turbulent and unput-

downable. All books published are, in

other words, superlative.

It also seems that many writers,

after their first books, become

‘acclaimed’, at least on the covers of

their second ones.

And look at how books are so often

‘the greatest’ since, say, Catch-22 , The

Dice Man , The Day of the Jackal , Gone

with the Wind , One Flew over the

Cuckoo’s Nest or Lolita . Those are some

of the titles that are publishers’ favour-

ites for such comparisons. And certain

writers themselves become touch-

stones. Frances Gordon’s 1994

vampire book, Blood Ritual , is ‘in the

great tradition of Anne Rice’. 4

Even authors’ biogs on jackets come

across as a kind of hype:

Sharleen Cooper Cohen worked as

a story editor, a model, a swimming

instructor and a secretary . . . she

also ran an interior design company

for many years with designs

appearing in many national

magazines.

Clearly the more varied and exotic the

professions, the greater a book this

guarantees.

Authors seem to favour a minimum

l i s t o f f o u r j o b s ( o r d o p u b l i s h e r s i n v e n t

them?) that show physical, intellec-

tual, artistic and business prowess.

Apparently you must be an al-

rounder to be a writer. And these lists

almost always include a job that shows

they have mixed with common people.

Notice ‘cinema usherette’, ‘clerk at a

liquor store’ and ‘swimming instruc-

tor’? The ideal list for men seems to

include: lumberjack (aka timber feller),

merchant seaman, dishwasher, jour-

nalist, and sleeping rough in a park

while completing a PhD.

Barbara Hambly’s ‘karate instruc-

tor’ might deter critics from being

negative about her books, and perhaps

Louis L’Amour’s ‘elephant handler’

means he was secretly guying the

whole idea of author biogs as a big pile

of shit.

One more curiosity about biogs is

the considerable number that end up

with something like this: ‘she lives in

Iram in the state of Butua with nine

cats’. It’s usually said in such a way

that it puts cats on a par with hus-

bands, wives and lovers. I presume

we’re meant to see this as a mark of

distinction in writers. Here are people

so dedicated to writing books that

the person who shall have pro-

duced in the field of literature the

most distinguished work of an

idealistic tendency; . . .

So you might say that on these

grounds you can understand why the

Nobel’s judges wouldn’t have consid-

ered writers like James Joyce or D. H.

Lawrence, because the sexual content

of their books was shocking, at least

during their lifetimes. But again, this

says more about the judges and the

mores of their times than it does about

great and especially ‘idealistic’

literature.

When readers see books constantly

hyped in the above ways, yet find that

after all far too many of them are just

the usual ho-hum stuff, who can blame

them for being turned off reading?

Have you heard this before?

. . . she has been variously, a teacher,

puppet maker, Opera House guide,

publisher’s rep, journalist, broad-

caster, coffee-packer, cinema usher-

ette, traveller, nervous wreck and

letter-writer.

Penelope Rowe, Unacceptable

Behaviour (1992)

my son, be admonished: of making

many books there is no end; . . .

That was said three thousand years

ago by the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. 6

But how few books were there that long

ago? John Man says: 7

Sharleen Cooper Cohen,

Love, Sex & Money (1988)

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