• Graham Joyce Interview • Poetry at Conventions • Henry Treece £2.25 ugust/September 1994 • Reviews & Letters The Critical Journal of the BSFA 2 Vector Contents Nuts & Bolts Okay, I promise. I will never set 3 Front Line Oispalches Readers' Letters first lines in bold text again. I'm sorry it 5 A Conversation wilh Graham Jcryce caused confusion for some of you. Ca11eCary Hopefully th ose of you who wrote and 12 Hea,ing from the Ion Engineers Steve Sneyd those of you who suffered in silence 14 "We, O ld as Histo, y Now ... " will prefer the new layout. I've put a lot KV Bailey 17 First Impressions of work into it, and this has caused a Reviews edited by Catie Cary delay in sending out the mailing. I 27 Two Russian SF Novels hope you will think it was worth it. Geoff Cowie 28 Ba1bed Wi,e Kisses Now that I have completed the design, Magazine Reviews edited 1)/ I will hopefully be able to recover lost Mau1een Kincaid Spelle1 32 Paperback G1affili time next issue and get back on RevtelNS edited 1)/ Stephen Payne schedule ... 40 Index to Books Reviewed I'm still working away from home Subscription Info (Hemel Hempstead), and this contin­ Cover Art 1)/ Andrew Cary ues to impact on my time. I have be­ Editor & Hardback Reviews come resigned to continuing to pro­ Calte Ca1y duce the magazine myself, as no-one 224 Soulhway, Park Barn, Guildfo,d, has offered to take this over - but I'd Surrey, GU2 6DN PhOne: 0483 502349 appreciate help from proficient typists.with access to PCs with 3.5" Paperback Reviews Edilor Stephen Payne drives. Any volunteers? 24 Malvern Ad, Stoneygate, Leiceste1, LE2 28H I hope you enjoy this issue, I look Magazine Reviews Editor forward to yo~nts! Maureen Kincaid SpeUer 60 Bournernouth Rd, Fo!kestone. Kent. CTt9 5AZ Edilonal ASSlstanls Alan Johnson, Camilla Fbmeroy Cont,ibutions Good articles are always wanted. All MSS shouk:I be Printed by POC Copyp11nt typed double spaced on one Side of the page. 11 Jeff11es Passage, Guildford. Surrey. GU1 4AP SubmissK>ns may also be accepted as ASCII text files on IBM, Atan ST or Mac 3.5~ discs. Vector IS published b1mon1hly bf the BSFA @1994 Maximum preferred length is 6CX)() words; exceptions All opimons are !hose of the individual contnbuto, and can and will be made. A p,eliminary le t1 e1 is advisable should not be taken necessa,ily to be those of the bu! nol essential. Unsohc11ed MSS cannot be returned edtlor or the BSFA. without an S.O.E. Please note that there Is no payment fo, publication. Members who wish to review books should first write Remember lo the appropriate editor. Check the address label Af!iSIS Gove, Art, lllustra11ons and Fillers are always welcome on your mailing to see if The British Science Ficll()n Association Ud - Com­ you need to renew your pany L1m1ted by guarantee - Company No 921500 - Registered Address - 60 Bournemouth Rd, Folke-­ subscription stone, Kent, CT19 5AZ Front Line Dispatches 3 that book. Sta, Maker contains, In hnea, or circular chart form, three ·Time Scales', which between them engull both the action of Nebula Maker and that of the semmal first book l.Bst and First Men ( 1930) - a narrative which recounts the human Slory th1ough to its termInat10n on Neptune two bilhon years hence. Then following Lasl and Arst Men, and set m its historical frame, came Last Men in London ( 1932), in which a 'Last Man· on Neptune time-travels telepathically 10 experience twentieth century London. Thus, looking at this entire section of S!apledon's work, we find a kind of 'Chinese bol<ing' of future history, achieved through successive and various, but chronologically consistent, narrat1V0S. Stapledon in TM> .. B~ drafting wo1ked all this out In great detail DI means ol t:.V a series of huge coloured master charts, of which tephen Baxler's interesting survey of the !hose In the novels are merest summaries. the ong1- Future Hislory sub-genie (\lector 179) nals are part of the Stapledon archive held 1n the understandably concenllales on 1elalrvely Sydney Jones Library at Lr,.,erJX)OI University. They recent works, though he does mentJOn Wells S 1mpr8SSN8ly exemplify a fu1ure histooan's wor1<shop. In the context ot Christopher Puest's utdismg some­ l th1nk Stephen Baxter's working definiHon of a lh1ng of The Time Machine's framework m The Space 'future history' might be improved by some small Machine. (KW Jeter, 1l's worth adding, d1t10 m amendment to make 11 clear that the lic\Jon is not, as Morlock N,gh(J. Wells, 1t IS true, didn't himself agam he puts it, ·set against a conS1Slent background of cash m on the Elc:11 future world, bul !here IS a nearer­ e..ienls and characters·, but ae1ualty creates that honzon future history scenauo of his creat1on which consistent background against which the characters he did introduce into several separate works. It IS filst perform. That definition, and his article as a whole, delineated m the utopian/dystopian novella 'A Story of contribute usefully to the 'taxonomy' of SF. the Days to Come', collected in his 1899 volume Tales of Space and Time: London of the 22nd Century is 1oofed over, moving platforms provide transport. wind vanes supply power, luxury air craft ply to the pleasure cities of the South. He depicts at greater length an y thanks to John Madracki for reassu. ring identical static culture of uniformity, and then disrupts me that I'm not alone and there are 11 l7j ,evolution and invasion, m his novel When the others who find Red Dwarf increasingly Sleeper wakes, pubhshed lhal same year; and In M unfunny and SF on TV generally disap­ When the Sleeper Awakes. the revised version pub­ pointing. I thought perhaps it was just 1:xx>k-0bsessed lished a decade later. In the mte1Im there appeared, rn old me. I wail with trepidation lor the day when some 1WBlvtt Slories and a Dream (1903). 'A Dream of 1Chot tries to film Neuromancer to, the small screen. Armageddon': a dystopian vIS10n where the action IS Jessica Yates' typtcally Wide-ranging piece on centred, (within that same cuhural framing) on the children's fantasy contained several gems, especially P'ea,su1e city of Capri. The stories Share a cohe,enl when she noted that the adult w12a1ds In Diane lutu,e ambience, technok:>gical and sociological, Duane's A Waard Abroad never seem to get inVONed though plot-wise and cha1acter-wJ.Se each folbNs a with real-world-type d1Saslers bke Auschwitz or separate track - which perhaps only half-qualifies Aberfan. Maybe Americans would find that ·po11ticai­ them as conslituting a fulu,e hislory, if Slephen or somethmg? Baxter's definition is lo be slnelly observed. You yourself, dear editor, show unsuspected A master of the history or future worlds, and at prophetic powers, in assigning my pralS8 of Paul his furthest imaginative reach of that of future um­ Park's The Cuff at Loving Kindness (Reviewers Poll) to verses, was Olaf Stapledon. The posthumousty­ his Coelestis which t've only 1ust read this month and published, incomplete Nebula Maker was actually par l also found admirable. How did you know? (Apolo­ of an ea rly discarded draft lor Siar Maker( 1937). ll g ies! When working through ad ding reviewers fills ou! in more detail what is covered in the pivotal comments to my c hart o f recommended books l thirteenth_chapter ('The Beginning and the End") of accidentally added Norman 's com ment to both 4 Vector books. This in no way affected the result. Oops ! prOOucers (only the names have been changed to Catie) protect the guilty) and have the same attitude ta.vards But you spotted why some of us tend lo come SF, while most SF writers hold TV in such contempt to some books later than first publication: we prefer they can't be bothered to learn the vocabulary of TV. the paperback format. Not only is it usually cheaper, Then there is the budgetary consideration. which means we can buy more with our money: it is Anything not in contemporary dress and setting easier to handle, slip in a pocket. read on a bus or automatically adds 30% to the budget, more if you hold curled up in bed. Ha rdback books are, to my have to make your own sets and costume rather than great alarm, growing bulkier by the month; I find that hi1ing them {even more if you 're doing it on lilm which, p1etentious, wasteful, burdensome and uninviting - until recently and the invention of those lovely video and not just for SF titles either. Do other readers image manipulation t0ys, was de 1igeur). Now, most agree? TV SF is poorly received and has poor audiences Allow a croak voiced Dalek in an Armani suit to feed all these factors into his spreadsheet and his answer will be the go ahead for two more series of real life TM>M, 1\1,Cl.,l,-i..<i• TCJ.Aj~M crime programmes and a rerun of The Best of ft'// be was interested in John Madracki's survey of TV Alright on the Night. SF. having hoed the same furrow myself ten odd TV Of its nature is an intimate medium and our Iyears ago. Almost very complete {what about the society appears incapable of understanding it unless adaptations of various Fay Weldon stories - 'The it is realistic. I'm not talking your average SF idea Cloning of Joanna May' is SF in anyone's book-Alan here, you'll agree.