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freckles_and_doubtMy morning was made by the Cyclone press release, which apparently felt the need to reassure the public that their spanky new Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) was not designed to feed on corpses. Or, presumably, the flesh of the living. I love this because it's such an affirmation of the pervasiveness of science fiction, particularly in that ridiculously cyberpunkian sense in which the future, increasingly, is now. Critics wibble on about how sf is tacky, unintelligent drivel, but in the meantime it has firmly colonised our mental processes and in fact provides a necessary vocabulary for processing our responses to the future. Particularly our fear of the future and its potentially lethal technologies - you present the current human population with a robot designed to scavenge for wood chips, they will immediately imagine it feeding on flesh. (Well, didn't you?). On some subliminal level, it's all Mary Shelley's fault.
Of course, now I have a desire to write a bleak, post-apocalpytic sf story in which EATRs roam the blasted landscape, a glitch in their programming having caused them to shift from vegetable matter to corpses, and then to hunt down the terrified packs of live humans hiding in the rubble. But I don't need to. Someone will. In a thirty-year-old back issue of an sf magazine, someone probably already has.
A bit of a jump from flesh-eating robots to Random Ginormous Fantasy Epic Month, but discipline must be maintained. Today: James Blaylock, whose Balumnia books (The Stone Giant, The Elfin Ship, The Disappearing Dwarf) technically qualify as epic fantasy in the sense that they offer a three-volume series involving Elves, magic, quests and plots by evil dwarves. Within this framework, however, the stories operate as almost a parody of high fantasy's heroic quest and magical realm. I think they owe something of a debt to Tolkien's Hobbit in following the somewhat reluctant adventures of a hapless, domestic hero; they are peopled with wonderful, memorable eccentrics and a rather wayward and wandering plot design. To say that the books are "whimsical" and "charming" is a cop-out - it doesn't really give you a sense of their off-beatness, their apparently inconsequential construction of meaning, the underlying seriousness of their comic moments. A lot of Blaylock's other novels are more magical realism than fantasy, and that fabulous, dreamlike, accepting tone is very much present.
In a nutshell: quests, adventures, cheese-making. Steampunk tech, mad science, strange biology. Offbeat elves in flying ships, eccentrics in submarines. Heroes named Jonathan Bing, Theophilus Escargot and Professor Artemis Wurzle. Poets, pies, dogs, evil dwarves, magical marbles, transdimensional paperweights, goblins with flaming heads. Oddness. In a good way.
Of course, now I have a desire to write a bleak, post-apocalpytic sf story in which EATRs roam the blasted landscape, a glitch in their programming having caused them to shift from vegetable matter to corpses, and then to hunt down the terrified packs of live humans hiding in the rubble. But I don't need to. Someone will. In a thirty-year-old back issue of an sf magazine, someone probably already has.
A bit of a jump from flesh-eating robots to Random Ginormous Fantasy Epic Month, but discipline must be maintained. Today: James Blaylock, whose Balumnia books (The Stone Giant, The Elfin Ship, The Disappearing Dwarf) technically qualify as epic fantasy in the sense that they offer a three-volume series involving Elves, magic, quests and plots by evil dwarves. Within this framework, however, the stories operate as almost a parody of high fantasy's heroic quest and magical realm. I think they owe something of a debt to Tolkien's Hobbit in following the somewhat reluctant adventures of a hapless, domestic hero; they are peopled with wonderful, memorable eccentrics and a rather wayward and wandering plot design. To say that the books are "whimsical" and "charming" is a cop-out - it doesn't really give you a sense of their off-beatness, their apparently inconsequential construction of meaning, the underlying seriousness of their comic moments. A lot of Blaylock's other novels are more magical realism than fantasy, and that fabulous, dreamlike, accepting tone is very much present. In a nutshell: quests, adventures, cheese-making. Steampunk tech, mad science, strange biology. Offbeat elves in flying ships, eccentrics in submarines. Heroes named Jonathan Bing, Theophilus Escargot and Professor Artemis Wurzle. Poets, pies, dogs, evil dwarves, magical marbles, transdimensional paperweights, goblins with flaming heads. Oddness. In a good way.
