The Past Through Letters

My living room now holds a literary history of my life. In the past couple of days, I obtained the last few boxes of my possessions, including a box of research that is now readily available online (but which was hiding my clarinet music, which pleases me greatly), several boxes of keepsakes that I am trying to squash into one or two boxes and the remainder of my book collection. When I moved from home, I boxed up the ones I thought I wouldn't need urgently, finding in the end that I had to open a few to find a book (and after all that, my copy of Salem's Lot remains at large). And they are now shelved in my living room.

I dislike getting rid of books. It seems wrong, somehow. Illogically, it feels like they're being abandoned but more than that; it feels like giving up a piece of my past. I deeply regret getting rid of many of my Point Horror and Babysitter Club books when I was trying to feel mature. Such things should be enjoyed in later years!

The books in the Last Boxes are a scattering of some early childhood ones, many teenage books and a number of college texts. It's a strange combination, as expediency and practicality meant that I needed to place the books according to size, not content, genre or, in some cases, authorial order. So To Kill A Mockingbird sits above The Silver Chair, and I can't help but remember the mock trial we had in secondary school and wonder at how I never got the rest of the Narnia books, in spite of my adult self's problems with CS Lewis. A large Star Trek book rests between King's Black House and The Illustrated Library of World Poetry. There are books on writing, fortune telling, forensics, psychology, Egyptology, archaeology, literature, and criminology. There are Point Horror books and one of the most complete collections of Christopher Pike novels anyone may ever see, not to mention the major part of my Stephen King collection.

It seems eclectic and strange and too many different things at once, but it's all brought together by the fact that I own them; that their words and ideas and styles, be they good or bad, opened up my mind to other worlds and other dreams. And some of these books were loved perhaps a little too much, and are worn, or, in one case, in two pieces, but they still deserve a place on the shelf, because they tell part of my story. That makes them more than what they once were.

I am, to the amusement of many, I am sure, a fiction girl. I need a story. I recently commented to Swordsman, in regards to my needing to read webcomics to wake up fully in the morning, that I clearly run on narrative, and I think it's true, not just of me but of all other writers in the world, regardless of what they write. And those old books were some of the formative fuels of my life, and that makes them beautiful, even if I was once so clumsy as to crack the spines.

Stats

So, one of the cool things about blogger is that it lets you know where in the world you're being read. Which I think is a wonderful, fascinating thing, because when you start a new blog, you are fairly sure that only some of your friends read it (those that have the time and when you're in academia, that's not always the biggest number). Keep in mind, it doesn't tell you any details of the people who visit your site aside from where they're from, what browser they use (why I should need that information is beyond me, though I'm sure there's a technical reason for it) and their operating system, and none of that information appears to be linked up. Maybe I should be doing something to make it easier for users on other operating systems to see this? I don't know. The techie stuff fails to interest me, but the countries do, because some of you are reading me from countries where I'm not sure that I know anyone, and that I've certainly never visited. Which is so cool!

So, the point of this post is that it is a shout out to my friends and family that read this (Hi guys) and a shout out to the people I have never met in countries I have never been that have read this. It is an amazing testament to our modern world that you're here! I hope I am managing to entertain you and enabling your procrastination just enough that you can still get work done.

In the meantime, here's the link to the latest Lovecraft Live! Don't forget to go to the main page for some amazing news as well!

Lovecraft

What? Two posts in one day? Well, this is more of a linky one than the other.

A few of us are getting together and creating a series of podcasts of HP Lovecraft's stories. We're up to episode 2 of season 1, which was read by yours truly! So if you are at all interested in the most rambling story of all time, head over to http://hplovecraftlive.podbean.com/ and have a listen to 'The Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson', and, while you're there, have a listen to the other stuff. It's good!

I'll be doing another story later in the season, and will link you on to it when it comes up. In the meantime, we have other amazing readers (mostly gentlemen with marvellous voices) and I hope you enjoy it all.

Now shoo, and go listen to Lovecraft.

CRSF 2012

So, this isn't going to be one of those blogs where I talk about why I haven't updated lately. I'm taking it for granted that you understand that occasionally life gets in the way of blogging and leaving it at that. However in this case, I will make a slight exception to that rule by saying that I've been writing papers, and one of them was presented at the brilliant Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference in Liverpool last month.

 For those of you not in the know, the University of Liverpool is one of the best places in the world to study speculative fiction. Home to Professor David Seed, Andy Sawyer, the journal Foundation and a phenomenal amount of speculative fiction in the library, it is the place I might have gone had I not been in love with Trinity College Dublin. It is also home to a wonderful set of graduate students including Glyn Morgan, Chris Pak, Michelle Yost and David McWilliam, who organised the CRSF conference, bringing together all of us mad researchers in speculative fiction in one place. You can find their post-conference report here: http://currentresearchinspeculativefiction.blogspot.ie/.

With thirteen panels running in four time slots and no time turners available, I clearly didn't make it to everything, much as I would have liked to. The day started with Professor David Seed's keynote speech on narrative frames in early science fiction, which was incredibly interesting and reinforced my belief that one of the most entertaining elements of science fiction is its ability to play with literary forms and techniques. After that I went to my panel on American TV to give my paper on ecocriticism and the disruption of bodily integrity in Fringe. My panel buddies were Eve Bennett and Anna McFarlane, talking about Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Lost respectively. As always when I'm presenting at a conference with such good speakers, I worried that my paper wasn't up to scratch, but it was a really fun panel with lots of conversation afterwards. The only downside was that my panel was simultaneous with one of my friend's, so I didn't get to hear her talk. After that I wandered into the gaming panel to hear Christos Callow discuss morality and philosophy in Fallout: New Vegas and Andrew Ferguson's paper on how glitches and narrative theory in Final Fantasy VI. The afternoon kicked off with a second keynote speech from Professor Fred Botting of Kingstong University London, "More Things: Horror, Materialism and Speculative Realism". Then came the afternoon sessions, starting with the European SF panel, where I learned about Spanish dystopias from Mariano Martin Rodriguez, Italian SF magazines from Giulia Iannuzzi and the potential end of anthropocentrism from Sandra Mänty. I wrapped the afternoon at the Transhuman/AI panel with Hallvard Haug's talk on Mnemotechnics in Charles Stross’ Accelerando, Amy Christmas's paper on augmented intimacies and Caroline Egan's paper on sterility in dystopias. (A special shout out goes to both Caroline and Ruth Doherty, the remainder of the 'Trinity Contingent', as we came to be known. You guys were amazing conference buddies!)

There are of course many other papers that were presented that day, but these were the ones I was fortunate enough to hear, and from the standards that I saw, the rest of the conference was equally brilliant. Outside of panel times, it was a great group to spend time with, and my only regret is that the conference didn't last a few days.

This won't be my only conference this year. I'll be speaking first at the Grant Morrison conference in Trinity in September, then at the Tolkien Forest and the City conference, also in Trinity in September, and at a symposium at the University of Aberdeen in October (for which I don't yet have a link). So it'll be a busy year, but a good one, I think, if CRSF is anything to go by.

Happy International Geek Day/International Towel Day/Glorious 25th May

When I was little, we would eat biscuits with milk and watch Star Trek. My brother and I would act out scenes from The Wrath of Khan. He was always Kirk.

When I was older, I watched The Next Generation. I was told I couldn't like science fiction because I was a girl. I was told I couldn't be good at maths because I was a girl. My classmates gave out to me when I turned up for a school tour in a Star Trek: Generations jumper. They made no sense to me. I knew who I was.

When I was older still, I watched Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Angel, Roswell, Angel and dozens of others. It was a golden age of science fiction and fantasy on television. I joined my local Star Trek club, of which I am still a proud member. I started to write science fiction, to read it more. I discovered Douglas Adams, and would spend hours in bookshops looking at his books, deciding which ones to buy with birthday and holiday money. Every week I would go in, checking to see if any of my favourite authors had a new book out. I never found out when books were due to be published. I didn't want to know. I just wanted to go look at the books and see for myself. Even if I'd known what Douglas Adams was like with deadlines, I would still have looked. I was given a gift of eighty classic science fiction books, twenty of them by Isaac Asimov. It was an education.

When I was in college, I discovered that I could study science fiction. I spent my twenty-first birthday at a Stargate conference in England. It was one of the best weekends of my life. I wrote a thesis on feminism and science fiction, discovering Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Kate Wilhelm, women who had written what I wanted to write. Women who spoke to me, writing back to them, silently thanking them for being there, for their voices. I entered a competition I'd entered a few times before. I found out I'd won while sitting in front of my laptop, writing another story. I wanted to psyche my mother out with the news, but I was too excited.

When I was in graduate school, I kept writing about science fiction. I found conferences where I could go and talk about and listen to things I wanted to know about my genre. I returned to Douglas Adams for my PhD and discovered that the old love of his work was still there. To this day, over eleven years after his death, I still look for the books with his name, with that same small sliver of hope that today there will be a new book by him. I started to game, and found myself around a table laden with dice and story sheets, laughing at something that no one else could understand, because they had not been there.

There's so much I can say. About how many of my oldest friends are geeks. About long conversations into early morning about anything and everything, wandering around the shows and books and films that have made up our cultural heritage. About how there is a joy in knowing that other people love what you love, and that you can argue about it and never fall out. About how you can get a hold of Ursula Le Guin's Hainish novels or Joss Whedon's television shows and films or Neil Gaiman's Sandman or Terry Pratchett's Discworld and find new ways of looking at your world, answers to the questions you couldn't put into words, new questions that had been hovering around, trying to get your attention. About how you can flirt with a guy over the word 'shiny'. About how my friends seem determined to gift me more sonic screwdrivers than I could possibly hope to use, to my joy. About how sometimes when you fly, you fall. About how it is through suffering that we reach out to each other, that we come through it together and are truly one people. About how you can tell a joke and a truth in one sentence. And more, so very much more than that.

So instead I will just say this: I am a geek. I am proud to be a geek. I hold the glorious 25th of May sacred and will be looking for lilac after work. I am a frood who knows where her towel is. It's on the printer next to me.

Live long and prosper, my shiny friends.

Gaming

The year before last (I don't recall the weather), I was informed that I would have to call myself a gamer. I hadn't realised I'd been particularly denying it, largely because I felt I wasn't justified in calling myself one. However, when, at the tender age of late twenties the Christmas present I really really wanted was a Nintendo 3DS, it is definitely time to be allowed to name myself as a gamer (I got it, by the way. Very pink. I love it. 3D Tetris, dude. 3D Tetris.).

So, here I am, gamer girl, by all accounts, but in some ways, I'm a very specific kind of gamer girl. I'm not the biggest fan of first person shooters. I find them a little dull. I prefer point and click, bonus points if there's a puzzle involved somewhere. I've also been known to have an impressive collection of hidden object games, which I know many other gamers would find ridiculously boring, but I always enjoy a quiet evening making fun of some terrible plot as I try to figure out whether they mean a bat as in baseball or a bat as in 'blind as a'. I'm also pretty fond of Heroes of Might and Magic. Right up to the levels I can't beat...

I'm incredibly impatient when it comes to maintenance games. Like Minecraft. I appreciate that it has some very cool elements. I enjoy those videos on Youtube of people making cool things on Minecraft. But I find it so boring. Seriously. I need plot. Even terrible plot will do. At least terrible plots make me laugh. Leave me plotless and you will find me randomly digging all the way down to lava and feeling far too bored to dig back up (this happened when I downloaded a demo for Minecraft).

The worst thing you can do? Play a game where you have to serve customers in a timely manner when you are working in the food industry. I remember playing one of those games years ago, I think it was on Yahoo, and I couldn't understand why I was getting so stressed until I realised it was just like being at work at the bar I was in at the time. I changed to a matching game, and I felt infinitely better. If you're going to game, game away from what you'd do at work. Your blood pressure will thank you for it.

I love platform games. Anyone else out there remember the New Zealand Story on the Atari? Not to mention the first Super Mario Bros on the Gameboy. And since we've mentioned Tetris, I will briefly tell you that if you want to see competition, give myself and my immediate family a Gameboy and Tetris and mention the words 'High Score'. Then step back. We still argue over who had the highest score nearly two decades ago. Good times. Recent holidays have seen us using a very pink Playstation to play quizzes, in which it has been attempted to stop me holding the joypad, since I have the fastest reaction time in the family. Yeah, I don't think so.

I'm also something of a card game fiend, though Immediate Female Ancestor is the true shark in the family. I pick up card games pretty fast and I can get pretty ruthless. I can still see the look of defeat on Swordsman's face when, during a game of Munchkin, I gave him this ultimatum: "I can either help you, or really hurt you". Yeah, I'm that mean. I've also been known, during Fluxx, to play crazy cards just to see what happens.

Child of Chaos suggests that I start blogging our Magic: The Gathering games, after one truly epic battle last year. Child of Chaos plays Forest, I play Plains (I like white better than green). In one game we managed to pick up lands at about the same rate, so we started building up our creatures at about the same rate, and about the same strength; so much so that neither of us wanted to attack the other, until much later in the game, when Child of Chaos, with a few more higher level monsters than I had, decided to attack. So I used a Neck Snap card to kill her best monster. She could still have beaten me, until I used a second Neck Snap. Child of Chaos's face was priceless. I think I would need more details to make this sound as cool as it was...

Funnily enough, the person who told me that I had to call myself a gamer, GameQueen, didn't know most of this. All she knew was that at the time I was gearing up to play a whiskey and chocolate obsessed Technomancer Elf in Shadowrun. Her opinion of me has been reinforced by my currently playing a Malkavian who sleeps in a morgue with her pet morticians in Masquerade (never underestimate the power of playing the crazy girl), and my participation in my first steampunk larp. Spending a few hours as a genius airship designer was far more fun than I'd imagined it would be. Later that day I purchased the Ankh-Morpork board game and discovered that I truly love putting trouble markers into other people's city blocks. I suppose it doesn't take much to make a gamer, but there are so many types of gamers.

Perhaps my favourite gamer moment is the look of pain on Swordsman's face as Child of Chaos and I discussed our Facebook games. It wasn't that we were playing Facebook games that pained him; it was that both of our computers were capable of playing much more complicated games than what we were using them for. It was the wasted capacity that cut him to the bone.

Still, I am of the opinion that when you're tired but not quite ready to go to bed, there can be nothing more relaxing than matching things for a little while until you are ready to go to sleep. The only trick is making sure you stop before it's 3 am...

Funtimes

So I took an hour off this afternoon and got to have one of the most fun recurring experiences in my life. I went to the hairdressers and asked to get most of my hair cut off. They are always alarmed. Apparently, many people don't realise how short is short. I was going for something much longer than the pixie cut I've had before, so I was prepared and delighted to once again be sporting a manageable length of hair that, I've discovered, looks very fetching with a hairband.

I must purchase a wider range of hairbands.

Funtimes continued when I wandered to a bookshop and discovered that they have reprinted Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology. It looks fantastic, but beyond that, it is one of the best anthologies of SF that I have ever read. The stories were published in 1967 and includes Philiop José Farmer's 'Riders of the Purple Wage'. The sequel, Again, Dangerous Visions, features Joanna Russ's 'When It Changed', the precursor to the amazing The Female Man. The sequel doesn't appear to have been reprinted since the 1970s, which is a shame, because I think it has some of the better stories between the two anthologies. I read these when I was in my late teens/early twenties and they shaped my writing by introducing me to the 1970s New Wave. Science fiction, Ellison and his compatriots taught, could be really strange. I still haven't figured out some of the stories. SF could also be witty, funny and extremely subversive. It could be unrecognisable (though I think it was probably a good idea that Ellison warned the reader what they might expect). You guys should definitely take a look at those anthologies, because they are brilliant. And hey, if enough copies of Dangerous Visions sell, they might even reprint Again, Dangerous Visions in its own shiny new cover!

Plugging!

Since this appears to be a blog that won't be going away (coz I'm having fun!), here's some linkage plugging me, my work and other people.

My agents are the Makepeace Towle Literary and they got me onto Ether Books, which allows you to download my fiction onto your iPhone or iPad. I was first published in Interzone after winning the James White Award in 2006. I have a flash fiction in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, which is my first anthology publication and is really, really cool.

My academic publications are two chapters in Battlestar Galactica: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? and a chapter co-written in The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films with Frank Ludlow.

So if I can figure it out, I'll be posting these links permanently on the home page, but for now, enjoy them here!

Oddities

Trusty Companion and I were chatting and this story randomly popped into my mind.

Back in secondary school, I think in 1st year, but at any rate, somewhere before the Junior Cert, a boy from my year (but not from my class) tapped me on the shoulder during one of our breaks and asked me if I ever smiled. At first the blank look I gave him was a mixture of 'Who are you?' and 'Huh?' As he became visibly more agitated by my apparent inability to move my facial muscles, it started being fun. I was genuinely curious as to how long I could maintain it, and how long he would stand there. It didn't last long, but I won, and grinned as he wandered off. By now I have no idea who that boy was, and I can't even picture his face. But the fact that I was later told by one of my classmates that I was always smiling just goes to show how differently people can view the world.

Trusty Companion commented on my inability to remember anything about the boy. I think the surprise erased it. It was the first time I'd ever considered that anyone I didn't know personally would notice my lack of a smile, let alone be sufficiently bothered by it to comment on it to me. I was a tunnel vision kind of kid; unless I knew you, or were in class with you or otherwise had some manner of contact with you, I probably wouldn't notice you. I'm still very much like that. Child of Chaos has often said 'Oh, did you see that person with [cool thing/clothing] just go by us]?' and my answer has typically been 'Huh? Where?' As a writer, I should probably be more observant. As someone who is trying to get to work/college on time, possibly not.

The encounter taught me another lesson that I inadvertently put to use a couple of years back when someone came out with the most inexplicably misogynistic comment I've ever encountered. If somebody is trying to get a reaction out of you, giving them absolutely nothing will frustrate them no end. It simply ends the conversation more effectively than anything else I've encountered. In the case of the inexplicably misogynistic commenter, he looked rather downcast as he tried to explain that demeaning my entire gender for something that was actually a man's policy was supposed to be a joke. I continued to appear both confused and unaffected by his comments, largely, again because of shock.

(For those of you who think I'm giving him a hard time, his response to me following my work's payment policy was 'Women are always causing trouble'. Ah, no. Ignoring the women bit, doing my job is not causing trouble. Expanding it to all women and not just me only intensified my irritation. An appropriate joke there is 'I bet you're a real stickler for the rules, huh?' I would have laughed at that.)

I sometimes wonder if I should have been annoyed at the boy's frustration that I never smiled, but I can't judge it as if he was expecting me to smile. Apparently he'd never spotted me smiling and was confounded by it. He never told me to smile (though I think he did ask me to react during the blank face period) and he was honestly curious. True, he was being a bit of busybody, but most of the teenagers I knew were nothing if not nosy (I include myself in that).

And, in the way that I do sometimes, I wonder if he remembers that incident, if he ever wonders if I smile now. Or did it disappear into the same black hole that the memory of his face fell into?

The Return of the Shiny!

Hello Universe!

Child of Chaos and I have recently moved out of where we were and into a new place. It has, as yet, not been opened to visitors aside from Immediate Female Ancestor and CofC's boyfriend Swordsman (who has proven exceptional at the transportation and lifting of things, so yay him!), but it is feeling of home already. It is called The Library, given our proclivity for bookshelves and books to fill them with.

One of the fun things about living with a friend is that one can be rewatching a season one episode of Fringe (our digital box finds itself already half full after less than three weeks) and be interrupted by Child of Chaos coming in to tell the story of how the hole where a tooth was removed had sealed up. She was very pleased about this, and I was amused by the promise of many non sequiters in the future (not that we hadn't had our share of non sequiters in the last place). The fun thing about living with other people is the unexpected; you never know what funny or odd thing will happen. That said, I'm sure there will be unexpected things from Child of Chaos that will annoy me immensely, and things I do that annoy her, but the balance will always be towards the positive, if the last two years of house sharing are anything to go by. Needless to say, it will also balance heavily towards the nerdy.

While I'm back, I have another little story to tell. I was on the bus back to The Library the other day when I noticed a small girl had started singing enthusiastically on the bus. There wasn't much in the way of tune, but she was clearly having fun. This reminded me of an incident when I much younger. I was on a bus that had broken down and we were waiting for a new bus to come along. I was sitting on the floor in front of my seat, playing with a toy, I think, and I began to sing away to my heart's content. At the end of the song, the other passengers applauded me and I attempted to hide under the seat, much to Immediate Female Ancestor's amusement. When I heard the little girl, I texted IMF to find out what song I had sung, only to discover that it was not the isolated incident I had thought. Apparently, singing on the bus was a regular hobby for me as a child, for which I heartily apologise to the universe. I have never been able to sing well. However, we did narrow it down to two potential songs: Doe, a Deer and The Greatest Love of All. So here are some links for you to enjoy those songs, properly sung: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dpGmAc3kMk and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYzlVDlE72w&ob=av3e.

Also, because it's his birthday and it's generally awesome, here's some Levar Burton talking about science fiction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXLju6cBDwI&feature=player_embedded.

Comments

Just a quick update: Child of Chaos pointed out to me that the comments weren't allowing for anonymous submissions, so I've fixed that. Let the debates begin!

Charity Shops

I have taken to asking my Trusty Companion to give me random ideas to blog about. So today she has suggested I talk about charity shops.

I work surrounded by such shops, and there are any number of others on my route home. Which, I have discovered, is amazing, because there are so many books! And so very cheap! Which does not help my ever exploding bookshelves, but certainly leaves me feeling pleased with myself and my sensible spending. The best thing? Hiding in charity bookshops all over the city are first edition science fiction anthologies that may not be worth much, but are ridiculously awesome to own. You can find pretty little volumes of the classics as well, and if you are stuck doing a course which requires you to read a book you hate (such as certain chicklit was for me), then if you buy them from charity shops, you end up not having spent a tenner on something you hate and hey, you've helped a worthy cause too!

Though I think my best ever purchase from a charity shop was not a book, but rather my little japanese teapot, with three adorable little cups, which added up to less than 3 euro. And I love it completely!

My Trusty Companion tells me that her best buy was a miniature marble teacup and saucer for €2.50. She may have won this one...

Webcomic Link #1

Not sure how much sense this makes without knowing the characters, but I think it's still very pretty:

http://dresdencodak.com/2009/12/16/lantern-season/

Purple Skies

There is a ridiculously pretty colour in the sky right now as the sun sets. There is something incredibly lucky for us about living on a planet where we get beauty just because the planet rotates. And it gets even better, you look online and there are these amazing pictures of way out in space where things are also beautiful and you can sit and look at things so gorgeous they make your mind melt: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA03519. Or you can just look out the window and see clouds and light make something that will never be exactly the same again. This universe totally rocks.

O Genre, Where Art Thou?

This evening (still not wet and miserable, seriously, where is the narrative sense here?), I went to the shops with my housemate Child of Chaos and began to discuss my thesis with her, during the course of which I identified steampunk as a subgenre of science fiction. This led to one of our arguments.

As an aside, it should be noted that Child of Chaos and I argue over genre a lot. It is, after all, a passion for both of us, and we come from different sources (she is a fantasy girl, and I am a science fiction girl). However, while we do spend a lot of time in heated conversation, with loud voices and much interruption, we are capable of arguing without any actual rancour for two reasons. First, we are good friends and we are not going to stop being so over a Doctor Who argument (do not get us started on Doctor Who if you want to talk about anything else that night). Second, we know When To Stop Talking About This Subject and Move On. This is why we never discuss how time travel works in Doctor Who any more.

The advantage of sharing a house with Child of Chaos is that my debating techniques are always kept sharp.

So tonight we argued about whether or not steampunk is science fiction. I say that it is, citing Girl Genius (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/) wherein the main characters are mad inventors/scientists and their various allies and minions (to me, classic science fiction tropes). This led into an argument over whether the Sparks (the mad scientists) were magical or not. Child of Chaos says magical, I say that they're genetic mutations. Child of Chaos calls the monsters magical, I call the monsters genetically engineered (they were made by the Sparks). In the course of this and a later discussion, it became clear that there were two reasons why we couldn't agree (I have a lot of 'two reasons' for things). Firstly, she came from fantasy, and loving steampunk, sees in it fantasy elements first. I, coming from science fiction, and loving steampunk, see the science fiction elements first.

The second difference that became apparent is in how we interpret texts. To Child of Chaos, if there is a genetically engineered dragon/monster in the story, with a scientific basis behind all of their abilities, it is a fantasy story because it looks like fantasy. To me, the scientific basis makes it science fiction that looks like fantasy, but isn't. I need the dragons to be powered by magic, Child of Chaos is content to have them look like dragons (we discovered this is true of fantasy that looks like science fiction). Child of Chaos is willing to have either science or magic absent and call the text science fantasy if need be. I need to have both present to be willing to put forward that term.

My approach to literature is possibly informed by the fact that for most of my childhood, it was accepted that I was to be a scientist and spend my life faffing in labs solving all of the problems of the world (my less than neat approach to labwork revealed this to not be the best idea on the planet). I have a tendency to look for the explanation behind the text, and what the text is built on tends to constitute its reality for me. What it might look like is window dressing, but it doesn't necessarily define it for me. I enjoy window dressing that changes what it looks like but the narrative rules are what's important.

Genre fiction, perhaps more than any other literatures, seems to be capable of generating these kinds of arguments in which, technically, no one is actually wrong or right. It led me to wonder about other subgenres. Child of Chaos and I have established that I consider alternate history to tend towards science fiction, whereas she sees it as historical fiction first, though in the case of alternate history, it really does depend on what text you take. The same could also be said for steampunk (I'll keep coming back to this, because it's in my head today), especially when you come to the differences between what we could call 'high' and 'low' steampunk. High steampunk would be Girl Genius; the science isn't explained entirely and there's enough technobabble that there can be a valid claim to fantasy (my wording probably indicates that no, I don't particularly think that's true but I'll allow for other opinions as long as I get to have my own). Low steampunk would include things like the rather adorable Murdoch Mysteries (http://www.murdochmysteries.com/), a crime show set in nineteenth century Toronto with the 'world's first CSI' as the main character, whose encounters with the early inventors do give it a steampunk feel, while putting it on a par with CSI for spoofing some of the science to make it fit. Though the fact that the show actually features a death ray might move it a few rungs up the steampunk ladder... Nonetheless, Murdoch Mysteries does not feature any actual fantasy elements. It is all based on nineteenth century science, though often a little ambitious in terms of what could have been built at the time (which to me, is one of the core elements of steampunk).

I suppose the difficulty is that all of these subgenres come in under the blanket term speculative fiction, with the next set of terms being science fiction, fantasy and horror, and once everything else is added in, it looks like a convoluted family tree where no one is quite sure what the relationships are, but everyone is definitely from the same bloodline. Which reminds me of Ward Shelley's History of Science Fiction: http://www.wardshelley.com, possibly the most convoluted and accurate image of where science fiction comes from. It also illustrates what I think is one of the most entertaining things about genre fiction; it can take anything from anywhere else, dust if off a little, dress it in a slightly different costume and give us something we haven't quite seen before.

So that's my ramble based on this argument with Child of Chaos. More will follow...

Prologue

It was a wet and miserable day and it was time to finally stop putting off starting a proper blog. (My trusty companion informs me that it is not a wet and miserable day). I thought I could avoid it through the lack of a name, but my trusty companion reminded me that I like shiny things, so The Shiny Nerd was born.

In lieu of a reasonable, thought out post, here is a link to a funny video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZWaWrvJ7nA&feature=g-like&context=G24c935dALTN8veAAFAA