Science Fiction, the Raymond Chandler and Neil Gaiman Way

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google+, lecture, Neil Gaiman, Passive Guy, Passive Voice, Raymond Chandler, Reading Agency, sci-fi, science fiction, SF, the Guardian, Verge

Raymond’s snooty (but hilarious)…

I have got to find me a sharp one-piece like that.

I love science fiction, but I’m painfully aware of its humble, pulpy origins. Sure, there were early gems, but much of the earlier sci-fi was plagued by ridiculous contraptions, tongue-twisting names and weird physics, as attested by Raymond Chandler in a 1953 letter to his agent, H. N. Swanson.

What really sells this, however, is the wrist computer and the casual namedrop of Google, some 45 years before Larry and Sergey registered the domain…

Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It’s a scream. It is written like this:

“I checked out with K19 on Adabaran III, and stepped out through the crummaliote hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Bryllis ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations.

The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was ice-cold against the rust-colored mountains. The Bryllis shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough.

The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right.

(from the Verge, courtesy of the Passive Voice)

And Neil’s a darling

Mercifully, another great writer (and one of my all-time favorites), Neil Gaiman, is more positive about sci-fi.

In a celebrated speech at the Reading Agency, he had this to say on the matter:

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

You can read an edited version of Neil’s speech on The Guardian – a highly recommended read.

Also, visit Damien Walter for a lively discussion of Neil Gaiman’s quote.

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Musiville, my second children’s book, will be published shortly. When it does, I will only leave a sample of award-winning Runaway Smile online. If you wanted to read it in its entirety for free, you only have a few days to do so!