The Science Fiction Dream
2008; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoICFA Guest of Honor Address 2007 (GEOFF RYMAN IS KNOWN FOR BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN, POWERFULLY ENGAGING, genre-challenging fiction. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice, for The Child Garden (1989) and Air; or, Have Not Have (2005); the former was also given the Campbell Award and the latter the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Canadian Sunburst Award. His interactive novel 253, or Tube Theatre, can be read online at http://www.ryman-novel.com; the print version won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1998. He won a World Fantasy Award for The Unconquered Country in 1986 and was a finalist for the same award for Was (1992), an exploration of gender, race, childhood, and American history through the lens of L. Frank Baums The Wizard of Oz. His novel about Cambodia ancient and modern, The King's Last Song, is currently long-listed for the Impact Award. [Author's note: This is a re-written version of a speech given to the International Conference on the Fine Arts in March, 2007. The speech was given from outline notes. Some passages were not clearly recorded; others were improvised and did not make their points clearly. Finally there were some errors of fact. This is a hopefully more useful version of that speech.] I was in France, and I wanted to buy a jar of Nivea skin cream. (Okay, I'm not just vain, I'm cheap.) I didn't know it, but in France, drugstores are owned by individual laboratories. And the lady behind the counter sort of looked at me and said they didn't have Nivea. Nivea was something called a marque du grand surface. A brand with a Big Surface is not at all the same as a big brand. A big brand might deserve to be big. However a brand with a Big Surface could be stretched very thin to make it so large--which might mean that the really good stuff could be a brand with a small surface, as in this case of a very select and scientific skin cream costing twenty dollars. There is a kind of science fiction that has a Big Surface. It generally is seen on TV or the movies. It's Star Wars or Star Trek. Then there is us, science fiction with a small surface: our sf magazines that sell 13,000 copies an issue, our blogs, our small presses, our erudite critical journals, and our specialist conventions. That kind of sf, the sf that many of us here love, is more or less unknown to most people. That's perhaps why an interviewer at the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education for Adults asked me, So, tell me Geoff, how do you reconcile writing science fiction with teaching literature? I put it to you that Big Surface sf determines not only how we are seen; given its enormously greater audience figures, it is Big Surface sf that performs the function of sf in society. So I'm going to talk about science fiction of the Big Surface. What I'm going to say doesn't necessarily hold for, say, James Tiptree or Samuel Delany or Joanna Russ. I'm going to talk about Battlestar Galactica, as an example of Big Surface sf. I love Battlestar Galactica, but I'll tell you what I love about it: I love the music, all that Arabic-sounding stuff. I love the photography, and I love the special effects, which were not available to anybody twenty years ago. And I love the neat bits, like when they blow up somebody's rocket ship and he's left floating in outer space in his chair watching this huge space battle. I love the acting and some of the writing. I love the character Laura Roslin, as she is written and performed, who shows us what a ruthless, steely, principled, stop-at-nothing, astute, successful, and effective female president of the United States would be like. Most of all I love the moral complexity. Laura Roslin tries to rig an election. She is the first to suggest that they will have to assassinate Admiral Cain. …
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