Vector The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association #261 Autumn 2009 £4.00 Vector 261 - Autumn 2009 Vector 261 The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association Contents The British Science Fiction Association Torque Control 3 Letters 4 President Stephen Baxter The BSFA Awards 5 by Donna Scott Acting Chair Ian Whates Landscapes From a Dream: How the Art of [email protected] David Pelham Captured the Essence of J. G. Treasurer Martin Potts Ballard’s Early Fiction 6 61 Ivy Croft Road, Warton By James Pardey Near Tamworth B79 0JJ A Benign Psychopathology: The Films of J. G. [email protected] Ballard 12 Membership By Jonathan McCalmont Services Peter Wilkinson J. G. Ballard’s CONCRETE: Thoughts on High Rise and Concrete Island 17 39 Glyn Avenue, New Barnet By Lara Buckerton Herts., EN4 9 PJ [email protected] An interview with Membership fees José Carlos Somoza 26 By Ian Watson UK £26p.a., or £18 p. a. (unwaged), or £28 p.a. First Impressions 30 (joint/family memberships) Edited by Kari Sperring Outside UK £32 Progressive Scan: The BSFA was founded in 1958 and is a non-profitmaking Ashes to Ashes, Season 2 48 organisation entirely staffed by unpaid volunteers. Registered in England. Limited by guarantee. Company No. 921500 by Abigail Nussbaum Registered address: 61 Ivy Croft Road, Warton, Near Tamworth, Foundation’s Favourites: B79 0JJ The Voices of Time by J. G. Ballard 50 By Andy Sawyer Website http://www.bsfa.co.uk Resonances #57 52 Orbiter writing groups By Stephen Baxter Postal The New X: Careening 54 Coordinator Gillian Rooke by Graham Sleight Southview, Pilgrims Lane Vector website: http://www.vector-magazine.co.uk Chilham, Kent Editor’s blog: http://vectoreditors.wordpress.com CT4 8AB Online Vector Co-ordinator Terry Jackman Features, Editorial [email protected] and Letters: Niall Harrison Other BSFA publications 73 Sunderland Avenue Focus: The writer’s magazine of the BSFA Oxford OX2 8DT Editor Martin McGrath Book Reviews: Kari Sperring 48 Spooners Drive, Park Street, 19 Uphall Road St Albans, Cambridge AL2 2HL CB1 3HX [email protected] Production: Anna Feruglio Dal Dan Matrix: The news magazine of the BSFA [email protected] Editor Ian Whates [email protected] Published by the BSFA @2008 ISSN 05050448 Printed by PDC Copyprint (Guilford), Middle Unit, 77-83 Walnut Tree All opinions are those of the individual contributors and should not Close, Guilford, Surrey, GU1 4UH necessarily be taken as the views of the BSFA. 2 Autumn 2009 - Vector 261 Torque Control t Worldcon, in Montreal this summer, one of locution, but misplaces agency: the shops are Athe panels I was on was an attempt to discuss actually forced out of business by people choosing “Non-fiction for sf fans”. It threw up a few interesting to shop in the new mall instead. Why people make ideas, and a long list of interesting books. A partial that choice is an interesting question, and one that record of the latter can be found on Karen Burnham’s should be related to Minton’s central arguments; blog [1]; one of the former was the difference in because one of her frustrations is that the changes how the panellists interpreted the topic. Perhaps she documents have occurred without significant not surprisingly, as we went around the table, the public protest – unlike, she argues, similar changes professional fiction writers on the panel – James in US cities over the same period. Cambias, Geoff Ryman, and Kari Sperring – often, Those changes will be familiar to anyone who’s though by no means always, recommended books been living in a UK city over the last twenty years, on history or science: books that would help them to but the synthesis is valuable. Run-down urban fill in the detail of worlds they write. Vince Docherty centres are sold to redevelopment corporations made a point of highlighting the non-fiction that with results that are superficially attractive, but fans reward in the Hugos – that is, fan writing, and exclusionary by design, and largely without the other kinds of non-fiction that get collected in predicted “trickle-down” benefits. Similarly, private the “Best Related Book” category. And since most of investment is increasingly relied on to provide my non-fiction reading comprises writing about sf – new housing, where a parallel desire for security criticism and discussion – that’s what I wanted to fly and prestige leads to a rise in gated communities the flag for. (Minton is good at documenting the pathology of Even when I read outside that niche, I often find the desire for security), and a decline in the desire that I’m drawn to books about situations and subjects for public spaces, to run alongside the decline in that can be read as important to sf. Such a book is their availability. In the most potent chapters of Anna Minton’s Ground Control (Penguin, 2009), the book, Minton explores how policies on crime, subtitled fear and happiness in the twenty-first century. health and urban planning – crucially, not always It’s a summary and analysis of how the cities we live bad ideas, and often not worse than what preceded in have, over the last thirty years or so, been shaped them, but failures nonetheless – concretize beliefs by several complementary threads of government into the physical environment. policy, building on the central argument that in the It’s hard, I’m discovering, to summarize this mid twentieth century cities in the UK were owned invigorating, fascinating, occasionally frustrating by local government on our behalf, and this was (in book without sounding just a touch sensationalist. general) Good, whereas since the early 1980s they To bring this back to sf, then, I was put in mind of have increasingly been owned by investors and Chris Beckett’s latest novel Marcher (Cosmos, 2009; developers for profit, and this is (in general) Bad. although in the wake of his Edge Hill Short Story The book is divided into three sections, based on Prize win, Beckett’s just agreed a two-book deal three earlier reports by Minton, two for the Royal with Grove Atlantic, so if we’re lucky a UK edition Institute of Chartered Surveyors (which became, I may be on its way). Beckett is of course deeply assume, “The City” and “The Home”) and one for concerned with social policy, and never more Demos (“Civil Society”), but is written in a much so than this book, which revises and elaborates more lively, journalistic style than that heritage may the world of “Welfare Man” and related stories suggest. published in Interzone and Asimov’s over the last Minton shifts adroitly from interview and case fifteen years or so: a Britain where something like an study to theoretical context and policy detail; it’s a inversion of the trends Minton describes has taken very readable book, and so far as I can tell thorough, place. Rather than enclaves created by keeping if not always completely balanced. This is clearly by middle-class people in, Marcher’s Britain features design – referring to the redeveloped Spitalfields site enclaves created by institutionalizing the welfare in London as “not a real market” is a more emotive state such that undesirables are corralled into Social way of making the point than describing it as, say, Inclusion Zones. Definitely not our world; but in its “not a traditional market” – but occasionally some attentiveness to the lives of people within the Zones, interestingly rough edges are smoothed over. To it is more incisive than much contemporary British write that local shops are “forced out of business – or at least English – sf about its country of origin. by the new mall”, for instance, is a common enough And, of course, Minton’s book reminded me of 3 Vector 261 - Autumn 2009 Ballard, in particular the Ballard of Running Wild Graham Sleight and Stephen Baxter’s columns, plus (1988) and later books [2]. Lara Buckerton’s essay Ian Watson interviewing Jose Carlos Somoza, plus elsewhere in this issue tackles this side of Ballard’s all the usual reviews, some letters, and a reminder work with not a little flair. We also have two other that the time is nigh to start nominating for this essays on Ballard’s influence – Jonathan McCalmont’s year’s BSFA Awards. Enjoy! rundown of Ballardian film, and David Pelham on the iconic Penguin covers of Ballard’s early books – Endnotes plus Andy Sawyer on The Voices of Time, and Abigail Nussbaum on the second season of Ashes to Ashes [1]<http://spiralgalaxyreviews.blogspot. (which of course starts to deal with the displacements com/2009/08/non-fiction-for-sf-fans.html> and disaffections caused by the redevelopment of [2] Steven Shaviro’s notes on Ballard’s final quartet London’s Docklands, which Minton points to as the are well worth a look: <http://www.shaviro.com/ first example of the changes she documents). Plus Blog/?p=749> Letters Dear Vector, Andy Sawyer replies … How splendid! I haven’t read this one, but it’s certainly Andy Sawyer’s selection of De Bracy’s Drug by a must. I love the fact that if you have the gift of creating Volsted Gridban as a “Foundation’s Favourite” solid objects out of nothing you use it to create lorries and (Vector 260) took me back more than half a century. trailers. No need for bars of gold bullion, diamonds, or the In the mid-1950s Scion’s SF novelettes were sold in first edition of Jane Webb’sThe Mummy!, apparently. newsagents and on market stalls.