lunes, 18 de noviembre de 2013

#75. Entrevista a William Gibson

Hace tiempo comenté que The Paris Review había liberado su archivo de entrevistas; pero, como de costumbre, luego se me olvidó. Ya en ese momento mencioné dos entrevistas con Gibson y Samuel Delany que habían aparecido en el mismo número.

Quizá alguien no pensara en leerlas entonces, o vio que eran muy largas. Antes de pasar a unos extractos breves de la de Gibson quería comentar que, en su último número, de nuevo las dos entrevistas están dedicadas a gente de mal vivir de esa que nos resulta simpática.

Una es a Dª.Ursula, que desgraciadamente no está accesible gratis (pero es posible que se libere cuando aparezca el próximo número; a ver si esta vez no se me olvida).

La otra es a Emmanuel Carrère, que escribió la biografía de Philip K. Dick Yo estoy vivo y vosotros estáis muertos. Hay algunos párrafos sobre Dick y ciencia-ficción. Carrère debe de ser un optimista nato ya que, aparte de escribir su primera novela en la forma de un párrafo de 300 páginas (no coló), reconoce que la influencia de Nabokov en su escritura fue suplantada por la de Sturgeon, Matheson, o Dick; aunque los críticos no dejaran de imaginar a Kafka porque "siempre hablan de Kafka en cuanto una historia es mínimamente rara".

Cambiar las aliteraciones aquellas de "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins" por un "Eric Sweetscent collapsed his wheel and managed to park in the tiny stall allocated him" (de la primera frase de Aguardando el año pasado, que tengo aquí al lado) porque es "el Dostoevski del siglo XX", eso sí que es optimismo.


David Wallace-Wells (2011). William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211. The Paris Review 197.

It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.
My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio.

(Mi bisabuela perdió una amiga que jamás quiso volver a entrar en su casa tras constatar que se había comprado "un armario lleno de brujas que hablan".)
 
Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steam­punk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying.

What do you think of Neuromancer today?
GIBSON
When I look at Neuromancer I see a Soap Box Derby car. I felt, writing it, like I had two-by-fours and an old bicycle wheel and I’m supposed to build something that will catch a Ferrari. This is not going to fly, I thought. But I tried to do it anyway, and I produced this garage artifact, which, amazingly, is still running to this day.
Even so, I got to the end of it, and I didn’t care what it meant, I didn’t even know if it made any sense as a narrative. I didn’t have this huge feeling of, Wow, I just wrote a novel! I didn’t think it might win an award. I just thought, Phew! Now I can figure out how to write an actual novel.

I was afraid to watch Blade Runner in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better. Later, I noticed that it was a total box-office flop, in first theatrical release. That worried me, too. I thought, Uh-oh. He got it right and ­nobody cares! Over a few years, though, I started to see that in some weird way it was the most influential film of my lifetime, up to that point. It affected the way people dressed, it affected the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started building office buildings that you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had had an astonishingly broad aesthetic impact on the world.

In the postwar era, aside from anxiety over nuclear war, we assumed that we were steering technology. Today, we’re more likely to feel that technology is driving us, driving change, and that it’s out of control. Technology was previously seen as linear and progressive—evolutionary in that way our culture has always preferred to misunderstand Darwin.

lunes, 11 de noviembre de 2013

#74. La puerta al país de las mujeres. Artículo de Shiloh Carroll

Es posible que este artículo no aporte gran cosa a quien haya leído la novela. En todo caso a mí me resultó de interés, aunque hay que reconocer que está empapado de algo que solo puedo llamar "ideología de odio al diferente" y me provoca repugnancia. Claro, el diferente soy yo por tener un cromosoma Y, pero aun así tengo derecho a quejarme cuando me insultan sin ninguna razón.


Shiloh Carroll (2008). Both sides of the gate: Patriarchy in Sherri S. Tepper's The gate to Women's Country. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 19, 25-38.

jueves, 7 de noviembre de 2013

#73. Crítica de ciencia-ficción. Artículo de Jonathan McCalmont

Increíblemente, tengo esta entrada de McCalmont abierta y olvidada en una pestaña del navegador desde hace once meses. Ahí me la he encontrado hoy, y es como que te regalen una bolsa de caramelos.


Jonathan McCalmont (2012). Annoyed with the history of science fiction. Ruthless Culture, 28 de noviembre de 2012.


Lo bueno de este chico es que da igual si estás de acuerdo con él o no. Aunque solo te quedes con frases aisladas, tiene frases aisladas buenísimas.


Even more frustrating is the fact that Heinlein’s influence is not only taken for granted but assumed to be positive.

I would even go so far as to argue that Lem’s approach to info-dumping is so effective and idiosyncratic that it not only forms an integral part of his novels’ literary affect, it also makes his work substantially more complex and interesting than anything written under the purview of show-don’t-tell.

For example, to approach M. John Harrison’s Light armed only with show-don’t-tell is a recipe for disastrous mystification and the mindless parroting of received opinion.

Y sin aislar:

If we simply assume that show-don’t-tell was a linear improvement on the info-dump then it follows that writers like Stephenson and Lem are nothing more than unsophisticated writers who have yet to acquire the skills necessary for Heinleinian narrative immersion. However, if we assume that science fiction is a literary tradition rich enough to create its own literary techniques and that the info-dump might be a literary technique with its own affective payload then experimental info-dumpers such as Lem and Stephenson immediately appear more important and influential.

When William Gibson’s short story “The Gernsback Continuum” positioned cyberpunk in the history of science fiction, he presented cyberpunk as a direct response to golden age SF and not as a development of the techniques and perspectives pioneered by feminist SF. Had genre historians had a better grasp of the techniques that went into creating the cyberpunk aesthetic then chances are that feminist SF would never have been marginalised in the way it undoubtedly was.

The message contained in “About 5,175 Words” is doubtless revolutionary but the revolution never happened. In fact, one could almost say that the notoriety of Delany’s essay has allowed the field to effectively sweep it under the carpet and continue as if nothing happened. Everyone read the essay and heard its clarion call and then promptly went back to wafting hot air through the convention bar whilst congratulating themselves that Delany’s essay had changed everything.

Y, en un dos por uno nunca antes visto, el célebre ensayo de Delany. Es recomendable descargarlo y quedarse con una copia por si acaso, ya que lo he buscado muchas veces "en el gratis total" sin encontrarlo.


Samuel Delany (1978). About 5750 words. En: The jewel-hinged jaw, 1-15. Wesleyan Univ. Press (2009).


Al que no le dé un escalofrío en el momento "The red sun is high. The blue", que abandone este blog inmediatamente.

(Y entonces, que no se compre el libro y que no se lea To read The Dispossessed, crítica de 70 páginas donde Delany dedica cuatro solamente al primer párrafo de Los desposeídos de doña Ursula.)

martes, 5 de noviembre de 2013

#72. Accelerando. Reseña de Félix García

Dentro de lo que es la inevitable "soledad del corredor de fondo" que aqueja a un blog como este, que no busca ser popular -¡típico caso de uvas verdes!- sino solo ir acopiando material al estilo hormiguita, lo cierto es que hace unos meses que me siento mucho menos solo gracias a El almohadón de plumas y Fata Libelli.

Son dos blogs muy recomendables que seguramente ya conoce todo el mundo e inevitablemente irán siendo parasitados desde aquí.

En el caso de El almohadón de plumas, hace unas reseñas muy largas que son bastante habituales en blogs de otros países pero, que yo sepa, nadie lo estaba haciendo en España. De hecho, en España a eso lo llamaríamos quizá "artículo sesudo", aunque yo creo que lo que es es una reseña, simplemente muy larga y que, al hilo de la novela, dispara a donde le apetece, con lo cual puede ser interesante incluso para quien no quiera leer el libro reseñado.

Un ejemplo es la siguiente reseña de Accelerando, de Charles Stross.


Félix García (2013). ACCELERANDO: Ancho de banda y libertad. El Almohadón de Plumas, 24 de marzo de 2013.


Por cierto, la reseña es anterior a la siguiente entrada del blog de Stross, en la cual se pronuncia sobre la obra en términos asombrosamente similares a los de Félix.


Charlie Stross (2013). Crib sheet: Accelerando. Charlie's Diary, 28 de mayo de 2013.

But "Accelerando" as a whole doesn't seem to be coming true, and a good thing too. In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource -- like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster.

"No se me ocurre mejor manera de representar el imperativo categórico capitalista de transformar todo lo existente en beneficio", "al final todo queda consumido por la furia depredadora del Capital", "Nos parece asombroso que alguien pueda haber leído Accelerando como una utopía tecnológica al uso y no darse cuenta de que ésta, la primera gran novela sobre la Singularidad, Vernon Vinge dixit, es, en realidad, una distopía como la copa de un pino".

Como se suele decir, enhorabuena a los agraciados :)