more miscellany

[pantryslut]

1.

Stage one in the Apricot Management Program: I made cobbler last night. I used up a whole bag of apricots!

And it was divine. I like cobbler topping a lot, it turns out. I did the extra-rustic version and didn't roll it out nor cut it, just dropped spoonfuls (OK, fingerfuls) of dough right onto the fruit and then baked.

Now I am dreaming of roast lamb, mustard, and apricots. This would also be a nice combination with pork, no? I may have to do it twice. And that should take care of the season, give or take a galette or two.


2.

This morning I have been reading about mundane SF. I'm sure I've heard of this before, but today I went, "oh! This is what I write (when I write SF at all). Who knew I had a movement and a manifesto and a blog and everything?" I feel so behind the times, and yet flattered.

I have to agree with its critics, though, that a) it's a stunningly dull name for a movement, b) it wrongly emphasizes the predictive arm of SF, which is just bollocks, and c) there's nothing exactly wrong with "the other stuff," either; I just don't like writing it. Or reading it, much, these days. But that's another story, to be titled, "So what the heck are you reading these days, Lori?" Right now, my answer to that question consists of "mumble mumble mumble please don't make me confess how little genre lit I consume these days, kthxbye."

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

From what Geoff Ryman was saying at Boreal, it sounded like the underlying motivation for mundane SF is more disliking seeing ideas that have become standard SF furniture, like hyperspace and the Singularity and so on, used without thinking, or by people getting their notions from books written by people getting their notions from books written by people who come up with original ideas rather than going and looking at the world and doing original things themselves, rather than any distaste for the specific ideas of hyperspace et al. Which seems reasonable to me as a position, but not one I want to take, because the wet injured baby* in this situation is the possibility of works that do constructive creative things with SF as a mature genre [ cf. Hyperion ] and that's a direction that appeals to me more than writing everything with an overriding priority of transparency to readers outside the genre; having to start from point A every time limits how many steps you can take, and if there already exists a readership familiar with the steps that get you from A to B to C and so on, it seems that it can also be worthwhile to explore what you get at K and L and M.

*What you are left with when you throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

The reason I was a bit surprised this morning is because I actually totally concur and have been bitching under my breath for years about exactly the unthinking use of FTL, the dewy-eyed "we should be getting off the planet now! And writing stories to inspire it! It's the only way the human race will survive" sentiments, the uncritical fascination with the Singularity. And then, look! I'm not alone!

I don't write with any emphasis of transparency to readers outside the genre (which, btw, is kind of a red herring here -- nothing in the mundane sf manifesto seems to me to imply that [part of] their project is to be transparent to readers outside the genre). Nor do I cater to genre readers. I just write what works for the story.

However, one of the things I have noticed about my own reading (see above, mumble mumble) is that I have less and less patience for genre tropes and language. For example, I bounced off Laurie Marks earlier this year because I just couldn't take the tone of the first few pages of Fire Logic. Now, this is certainly no comment on Marks! And I hope to come back to her books later. I was actually alarmed at my inability to read her. But there it is.

It seems that I am less interested these days in L,K,M than I am with other things.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I actually totally concur and have been bitching under my breath for years about exactly the unthinking use of FTL, the dewy-eyed "we should be getting off the planet now! And writing stories to inspire it! It's the only way the human race will survive" sentiments, the uncritical fascination with the Singularity. And then, look! I'm not alone!

Uncritical and unthinking and dewy-eyed seem full of potential to be problematic to me whatever the tropes, and if this strand of debate has people thinking more about them that seems a net win whatever they are actually writing about.

I don't write with any emphasis of transparency to readers outside the genre (which, btw, is kind of a red herring here -- nothing in the mundane sf manifesto seems to me to imply that [part of] their project is to be transparent to readers outside the genre).

I may be conflating unduly here, IIRC that particular issue came up most strongly when John Scalzi did a piece about writing SF his mother-in-law could parse, which I am (possibly mis)remembering as being fairly closely in response to the initial burst of debate about the mundane manifesto.

Nor do I cater to genre readers. I just write what works for the story.

Sure, and likewise, I hope; I suspect though that there are some kinds of stories that are inherently easier to make transparent to non-genre readers than others, some just by virtue of distance from contemporary reality, and I have a feeling the stories I'm drawn to tell are more likely to be the latter.

It seems that I am less interested these days in L,K,M than I am with other things.

Fair enough, and de gustibus non est disputandum. Fwiw, I think what draws me to that sort of thing is the attraction of finding meaningful, interesting, or useful perspectives on the contemporary human condition from outside that you just can't get to from within; in the way that for example Ian McDonald's Sacrifice of Fools manages to say intelligent and sympathetic things about Northern Ireland that are impossible to do in mimetic fiction by essentially doing Alien Nation in Belfast.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Fwiw, I think what draws me to that sort of thing is the attraction of finding meaningful, interesting, or useful perspectives on the contemporary human condition from outside that you just can't get to from within; in the way that for example Ian McDonald's Sacrifice of Fools manages to say intelligent and sympathetic things about Northern Ireland that are impossible to do in mimetic fiction by essentially doing Alien Nation in Belfast.

I'm attracted to that, too, for sure.

[genderfur.livejournal.com]

and if there already exists a readership familiar with the steps that get you from A to B to C and so on, it seems that it can also be worthwhile to explore what you get at K and L and M.

This is exactly my complaint about the first Matrix movie. (I didn't see any others.) Because it *looked* and *acted* like science fiction, I expected it to *be* science fiction when in fact it was more of a action-movie set against a science-fantastical background.

I mean, it took a whole *movie* for those characters to figure out that they were part of someone's computer program? I've read whole books that *started* at that point, and actually got to explore interesting ideas on the topic.

(That plus the bad dialog worthy of the worst of the Star Trek episodes, which nobody else in the theater seemed to see the humor in -- I left that theater very puzzled indeed and more convinced than ever that I'm a major outsider in my larger culture.)

[slfisher.livejournal.com]

(weeping)

I don't get apricots this year because of ill-time freezes.