Stan Robinson’s spectacular at New Scientist is a mini-magazine of the 1980s, including a polemic by Stan himself, reviews & futurological speculations by everyone from Ian Watson to Gwyneth Jones, & flash fiction by many of the core authors of Brit SF. There’s even a review of Margaret Atwood. Very satisfying, although I could have done without the illustrations.
Meanwhile, these relics of the Space Age, removed from their reliquaries, perhaps, to effect miraculous cures of the brand new psychic disturbances afflicting celebrities & shadowy oligarchs etc etc. So Ballardian.
Oh, & speaking of the Space Age: get yourself a satnav now. You know it makes sense.
Thank you for the New Scientist link; learning about the correspondence between Virginia Wolff and Olaf Stapledon made my day! But I found the short stories (sorry, Flash Fiction) a bit frustrating… I suppose I don’t go for concept-driven narrative, and it’s the concepts that make real SF.
It would have been nice if they had given the whole issue over to sci fi but maybe I’m just missing Omni magazine. Quite liked the illustrations.
I think Stan let his editorial rhetoric carry him away a little. Plenty of 1997 novels were a great deal better than the Arundati Roy; but they were a great deal better than Signs of Life, too. More importantly, they were more relevant to the prize & its catchment area.
Unless it can do, in addition to everything it already does, everything a mainstream literary novel can do, sf’s strengths lie elsewhere; while its traditional weaknesses render the vast majority of it rubbish by any standards.
I agree wholeheartedly with John Mullan: over the last generation or two, sf has embraced self-referentiality, & can now only be read by its tailored audience. The Booker would have to employ specialised judges to handle insider sf: wouldn’t that then make it just another sf award ?