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THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN'S GUIDE TO FLYING SAUCERS!

South African Science Fiction goes back a long way, to The Ship that Sailed to Mars (1923) by William M. Timlin, and Jan Rabie's Swart Ster Oor die Karoo (1957). Today even Steve Hofmeyr has tried his hand at the genre, and two Capetonian talents are turning the treadmill of literary fame: Lauren Beukes and Sarah Lotz. Hot on their heels are names such as Karen Jayes, Rachel Zadok and Charlie Human. Our crime writers have begun to rival Scandinavian authors in overseas book sales, and literary pundits are hazarding guesses that SF will be the next big genre out of Mzansi. It's ironic that most |Seffricans have no accurate conception of SF.

Ask what Science Fiction is, and you'll get dozens of answers. American SF doyen Damon Knight once threw up his hands and said: "Science fiction is what we point to when we say it". Reviewers and award juries often cast this wide net over works that do not qualify for the SF label. But we can narrow the definition by eliminating certain misconceptions which are held by the book-buying public.

Firmly lodged in their minds is a vulgar image: a garish pulp mag cover from the thirties. It shows a pneumatic spacewoman in a state of undress, clamped into a 25th-century dentist's chair. Looming over her is a loathsome alien. The slime drips from his quivering pedipalps as he prepares to subject his victim to unimaginable degradations, infinitely prolonged... That's not my SF. That's not Theodore Sturgeon, James Blish, Arthur C. Clarke, Walter M. Miller, Alfred Bester, Kim Stanley Robinson, or Iain M. Banks.

To go with the pulpy image, there's a supposed reader, a boy aged 14 with hairy palms. The lad's reading skills are so basic that he can't tell good writing from bad – and he's blind to irony. He is unaware that his shallow mind is ingesting a laughable plot, wooden characterisation and ridiculous dialogue. "Skiffy" used to be the name for bad Sci-Fi, for which my own term is “scenery, costume & props”. For example, a cowboy hero can be shifted to another planet by substituting a space helmet and a ray gun for his white stetson and Colt .45. The Comanches get rubber tentacles. Clumsy plot, characters and dialogue come along for the ride, and the reader learns nothing new. That's not Mary Shelley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ or James Tiptree Jnr.

Reading SF does not require a Ph.D in rocket science, so don't be intimidated. Skim over references you don't understand. For example, a starship may be propelled by the Alcubierre Drive – but that's only to get your characters into an imaginable situation. Hard SF can be page-turning, as you will find with novels like Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, or Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity. Be patient, even though your expectations may mislead you at first. Don't be like the earnest academic who painstakingly deconstructed a review novel in a dozen pages of Frenchified jargon – not knowing that it was chicklit.

Science Fiction does NOT include fantasy, even though bookshops lump the genres together. If the book has has characters under one metre in height, edged weapons, superhuman powers, zombies, elves, vampires, talking dragons, lycanthropy, magic – and a map on the endpapers, it's fantasy. Urban fantasy populates real places with imaginary beasts, as in the much-lauded Zoo City. All this is completely and utterly impossible. But real SF confines itself to possibilities – actual or anticipated. Yet the reading public demands Harry Potter's woolly wizardry, not Arthur C. Clarke's diamond-sharp science. This is not to deny that fabulation can reach great heights with authors like Swift, Orwell, Kafka, Bradbury, Saramago, Stanislaw Lem and Vonnegut.

There is no SF in literary fiction – realistic novels with so-so sales figures, books which many people think they ought to be reading, but never buy. “Litfic" is a genre with prosaic everyday themes: failed marriage; addiction; adultery; growing up; the unbearable angst of trying to get on with other people. There's a current fashion for humourless, profoundly-depressing allegories, set down in prose so lean, it's anorexic. That's not Greg Bear, John Sladek, H.G. Wells, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, Jules Verne – or South Africa's Jürgen Zimmermann, of hedfulofspidrs fame.

And now we begin to approach what SF really is, in a much narrower sense. For a start, it's the most dreaded black hole in publishing. If a book does well, like Brave New World or 1984, it immediately sheds the genre label. Publishers encourage authors to deny that they produce Sci-Fi, but the related genre suffers no such stigma. Because fantasy addicts seem to be hooked on never-ending Tolkien derivatives.

Let's look at formal definitions, starting with the wisdom of David Cloud, of the Fundamental Baptist Information Service, Port Huron, Minnesota, USA: "Science fiction arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!"

US academic Robert Scholes is less doctrinaire: "...fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way." As we read Lauren Beukes' near-future SF opus Moxyland, or Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner) we tend to ask ourselves: Is this where we're really headed? Many Seffricans were left in a thoughtful mood by the resonances of the local SF movie District Nine.

Here's a down-to-earth definition: "What if?" SF is a thought-experiment, like Einstein's imaginary measuring rods, clocks and trains. It tells a story about humankind's reaction to imagined circumstances. It hinges on SF scholar Darko Suvin's "novum" – the new thing. SF defamiliarises, gives a new perspective on "reality". The important thing is not the novum, but the way individuals and society react to it.

What was the first book to be structured around a novum, taken from the cutting-edge scientific research of the day? My best guess is 20-year-old Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written in 1818 at a time when medical men were galvanising the corpses of executed criminals. Electrodes made dead faces grimace and limbs convulse in a semblance of agitated life. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein used electricity to animate his creation, and Mary's imagination gave the reader much food for thought.

Then came the scientific romances of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Like Shelley, these two writers extrapolated from current science and engineering, and made fascinating tales out of humankind's reaction to the new things. Edgar Rice Burroughs invented the macho character John Carter in the early 1900s and wrote many planetary novels, light on philosophy but heavy on Martians in airships moering each other with swords. Then came the heyday of the pulp mags: crime, horror, pirates, adventure, westerns, space travel. In 1926 Hugo Gernsback launched his "scientifiction" pulp called Amazing Stories. Lurid covers and slapdash prose began to create the long-lasting impression that still bedevils SF.

In 1938, John W. Campbell Jnr took over as editor of Astounding Science Fiction, Which is still thriving in 2013 under the title Analog. In his first year, he published seven struggling unknown writers: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Fritz Lieber, A.E van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon. The Golden Age of SF had begun – the Olympic Games of the imagination. Authors found their nova in hard science plus sociology and psychology. Even theology – in A Case of Conscience James Blish dreamed up a Jesuit, sorely perplexed by a planet of sapient reptilians who lacked good ol' Catholic original sin. Authors studied scientific developments and made near-future extrapolations, like innocent Cleve Cartmill. He was hauled in by heavies from US military intelligence who grilled him to find out who had leaked the secrets in his "uranium bomb" story.

In 1950s New York, Galaxy magazine ruled under editors like Herbert Gold and Frederik Pohl. The New Wave arose during the Sixties in the UK, launching authors such as Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard and Michael Moorcock. Their short stories and novels were experimental, and "softer" with less reliance on hard science. Today, SF has dozens of pigeonholes: hard, soft, military, sociological, space opera, cyberpunk, steampunk, postcyberpunk, feminist, alt. history, new weird. Douglas Adams was a genre on his own. Original SF is truly creative – it makes something which has never existed before, and maybe never will.

Despite a nascent academic interest in SF, the bad smell of pulp lingered, and the great Kurt Vonnegut suffered for his art. He wrote: "I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since (I wrote Player Piano), and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal." Vonnegut made a valid point. Any published SF author can tell of prejudiced, sneering critics who know – before even reading the opus under review – that it's vulgar, sub-literate trash with clumsy dialogue and wooden characters, appreciated only by 14-year-old junior sex maniacs.

The defence against such critics is (Theodore) Sturgeon's Law: Ninety per cent of SF is crap, but so is ninety percent of everything else. Susan Sontag wrote in The Pornographic Imagination that porn and SF are both trying to achieve: "disorientation, and psychic dislocation." She called SF: "a somewhat shady subgenre with a few first-rate books to its credit." One might fairly apply Sontag's assessment to a list of every Litfic novel ever written, in support of Sturgeon.

The victims of ignorant crits huddle in the genre ghetto. To use a political metaphor, they're inside the tent pissing out. They badmouth Litfic, and comb the media for comically ignorant statements which they send to SF encyclopedist Dave Langford's Ansible site, for posting under the headline: "As Others See Us".

But if popular success comes to an SF author... Suddenly she's outside the tent pissing in. The stench of pulp is no longer upon her pages, and people who wouldn't touch a squalid paperback with an alien's pedipalp are lapping up her uber-trendy Speculative Fiction. It's so cool, it's mentholated! These days you may be reading old-fashioned trash without knowing it, in the form of lahnee "SpecFic".

Also pissing in are the practitioners of "Slipstream". These authors use off-the-peg worlds or situations invented by someone else. An outworn postapocalyptic trope imagined in detail during the 1940s is hailed as "achingly beautiful" and original – when dressed up in portentous, steroid-pumped King James-approved prose by Cormac McCarthy.

Slipstreamers of note are Mesdames Jeanette (The Stone Gods)Winterson and Margaret (Oryx and Crake) Atwood. Despite accepting an SF award, Ms Atwood insists that she doesn't write about "talking squids in outer space". As for Hollywood, it adds bells and whistles to slipstream. Avatar is highly original – to anyone who has never read Call me Joe by Poul Anderson, or The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. One theft is plagiarism – two is research!

Now let's throw out some more chaff and get down to the real goodness. I use an acid test for true SF, akin to the “erection of the small dorsal hairs” by which Nabokov recognised great writing. Here's a quote from a well-respected lady who had just experienced a buzz from a good book: “I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part – all the same, I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you – as one does those who reach what one has aimed at."

Virginia Woolf wrote that to the philosopher Olaf Stapledon after grappling with his scientific romance Star Maker; she was elated by the mental perspectives the book had unveiled. What she was feeling was the SF "sense of wonder" – of a new world opening up in the head, a discovery, an expanded view of an intoxicating universe and humankind's place in it. For me, the sense of wonder is what makes a true SF story, and that's the tightest definition of the genre I can find. Nabokov (a scientist who dabbled in SF) said that writers can be storytellers and teachers, but the best are also enchanters. Sturgeon's top 10 per cent of authors can do all of that; entertain, educate – and hold the reader spellbound, caught up in the wonder.

Tom Learmont is a newspaperman by day. His first SF was published in a school magazine in 1954, after teachers had censored the part about a trisexual creature from the planet Ysprot. In later years his Afro-socio-politico-sexual fantasy After the Eclipse (Discobolus 2004) won the Sanlam Literary Award. Light Across Time (Kwela 2011) continues to evoke a sense of wonder in some readers, and a blank expression in others. In the pipeline is the fabulous Radium Tales, which is mainly about drinking Tassenberg in Orange Grove down on Louis Botha Avenue while telling wicked lies.

South African Science Fiction goes back a long way, to The Ship that Sailed to Mars (1923) by William M. Timlin, and Jan Rabie's Swart Ster Oor die Karoo (1957).

Today even Steve Hofmeyr has tried his hand at the genre, and two Capetonian talents are turning the treadmill of literary fame: Lauren Beukes and Sarah Lotz. Hot on their heels are names such as Karen Jayes, Rachel Zadok and Charlie Human.

Our crime writers have begun to rival Scandinavian authors in overseas book sales, and literary pundits are hazarding guesses that SF will be the next big genre out of Mzansi. It's ironic that most |Seffricans have no accurate conception of SF.

Ask what Science Fiction is, and you'll get dozens of answers.

American SF doyen Damon Knight once threw up his hands and said: "Science fiction is what we point to when we say it".

Reviewers and award juries often cast this wide net over works that do not qualify for the SF label. But we can narrow the definition by eliminating certain misconceptions which are held by the book-buying public.

Firmly lodged in their minds is a vulgar image: a garish pulp mag cover from the thirties. It shows a pneumatic spacewoman in a state of undress, clamped into a 25th-century dentist's chair. Looming over her is a loathsome alien. The slime drips from his quivering pedipalps as he prepares to subject his victim to unimaginable degradations, infinitely prolonged . . . That's not my SF.

That's not Theodore Sturgeon, James Blish, Arthur C. Clarke, Walter M. Miller, Alfred Bester, Kim Stanley Robinson, or Iain M. Banks.

To go with the pulpy image, there's a supposed reader, a boy aged 14 with hairy palms. The lad's reading skills are so basic that he can't tell good writing from bad – and he's blind to irony. He is unaware that his shallow mind is ingesting a laughable plot, wooden characterisation and ridiculous dialogue.

"Skiffy" used to be the name for bad Sci-Fi, for which my own term is “scenery, costume & props”.

For example, a cowboy hero can be shifted to another planet by substituting a space helmet and a ray gun for his white stetson and Colt .45. The Comanches get rubber tentacles. Clumsy plot, characters and dialogue come along for the ride, and the reader learns nothing new. That's not Mary Shelley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ or James Tiptree Jnr.

Reading SF does not require a Ph.D in rocket science, so don't be intimidated. Skim over references you don't understand. For example, a starship may be propelled by the Alcubierre Drive – but that's only to get your characters into an imaginable situation.

Hard SF can be page-turning, as you will find with novels like Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, or Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity. Be patient, even though your expectations may mislead you at first.

Don't be like the earnest academic who painstakingly deconstructed a review novel in a dozen pages of Frenchified jargon – not knowing that it was chicklit.

Science Fiction does NOT include fantasy, even though bookshops lump the genres together. If the book has has characters under one metre in height, edged weapons, superhuman powers, zombies, elves, vampires, talking dragons, lycanthropy, magic – and a map on the endpapers, it's fantasy. Urban fantasy populates real places with imaginary beasts, as in the much-lauded Zoo City. All this is completely and utterly impossible. But real SF confines itself to possibilities – actual or anticipated. Yet the reading public demands Harry Potter's woolly wizardry, not Arthur C. Clarke's diamond-sharp science. This is not to deny that fabulation can reach great heights with authors like Swift, Orwell, Kafka, Bradbury, Saramago, Stanislaw Lem and Vonnegut.

There is no SF in literary fiction – realistic novels with so-so sales figures, books which many people think they ought to be reading, but never buy. “Litfic" is a genre with prosaic everyday themes: failed marriage; addiction; adultery; growing up; the unbearable angst of trying to get on with other people. There's a current fashion for humourless, profoundly-depressing allegories, set down in prose so lean, it's anorexic. That's not Greg Bear, John Sladek, H.G. Wells, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, Jules Verne – or South Africa's Jürgen Zimmermann, of hedfulofspidrs fame.

And now we begin to approach what SF really is, in a much narrower sense. For a start, it's the most dreaded black hole in publishing. If a book does well, like Brave New World or 1984, it immediately sheds the genre label. Publishers encourage authors to deny that they produce Sci-Fi, but the related genre suffers no such stigma. Because fantasy addicts seem to be hooked on never-ending Tolkien derivatives.

Let's look at formal definitions, starting with the wisdom of David Cloud, of the Fundamental Baptist Information Service, Port Huron, Minnesota, USA: "Science fiction arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!"

US academic Robert Scholes is less doctrinaire: "...fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way." As we read Lauren Beukes' near-future SF opus Moxyland, or Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner) we tend to ask ourselves: Is this where we're really headed? Many Seffricans were left in a thoughtful mood by the resonances of the local SF movie District Nine.

Here's a down-to-earth definition: "What if?" SF is a thought-experiment, like Einstein's imaginary measuring rods, clocks and trains. It tells a story about humankind's reaction to imagined circumstances. It hinges on SF scholar Darko Suvin's "novum" – the new thing. SF defamiliarises, gives a new perspective on "reality". The important thing is not the novum, but the way individuals and society react to it.

What was the first book to be structured around a novum, taken from the cutting-edge scientific research of the day? My best guess is 20-year-old Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written in 1818 at a time when medical men were galvanising the corpses of executed criminals. Electrodes made dead faces grimace and limbs convulse in a semblance of agitated life. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein used electricity to animate his creation, and Mary's imagination gave the reader much food for thought.

Then came the scientific romances of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Like Shelley, these two writers extrapolated from current science and engineering, and made fascinating tales out of humankind's reaction to the new things. Edgar Rice Burroughs invented the macho character John Carter in the early 1900s and wrote many planetary novels, light on philosophy but heavy on Martians in airships moering each other with swords. Then came the heyday of the pulp mags: crime, horror, pirates, adventure, westerns, space travel. In 1926 Hugo Gernsback launched his "scientifiction" pulp called Amazing Stories. Lurid covers and slapdash prose began to create the long-lasting impression that still bedevils SF.

In 1938, John W. Campbell Jnr took over as editor of Astounding Science Fiction, Which is still thriving in 2013 under the title Analog. In his first year, he published seven struggling unknown writers: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Fritz Lieber, A.E van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon. The Golden Age of SF had begun – the Olympic Games of the imagination. Authors found their nova in hard science plus sociology and psychology. Even theology – in A Case of Conscience James Blish dreamed up a Jesuit, sorely perplexed by a planet of sapient reptilians who lacked good ol' Catholic original sin. Authors studied scientific developments and made near-future extrapolations, like innocent Cleve Cartmill. He was hauled in by heavies from US military intelligence who grilled him to find out who had leaked the secrets in his "uranium bomb" story.

In 1950s New York, Galaxy magazine ruled under editors like Herbert Gold and Frederik Pohl. The New Wave arose during the Sixties in the UK, launching authors such as Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard and Michael Moorcock. Their short stories and novels were experimental, and "softer" with less reliance on hard science. Today, SF has dozens of pigeonholes: hard, soft, military, sociological, space opera, cyberpunk, steampunk, postcyberpunk, feminist, alt. history, new weird. Douglas Adams was a genre on his own. Original SF is truly creative – it makes something which has never existed before, and maybe never will.

Despite a nascent academic interest in SF, the bad smell of pulp lingered, and the great Kurt Vonnegut suffered for his art. He wrote: "I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since (I wrote Player Piano), and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal." Vonnegut made a valid point. Any published SF author can tell of prejudiced, sneering critics who know – before even reading the opus under review – that it's vulgar, sub-literate trash with clumsy dialogue and wooden characters, appreciated only by 14-year-old junior sex maniacs.

The defence against such critics is (Theodore) Sturgeon's Law: Ninety per cent of SF is crap, but so is ninety percent of everything else. Susan Sontag wrote in The Pornographic Imagination that porn and SF are both trying to achieve: "disorientation, and psychic dislocation." She called SF: "a somewhat shady subgenre with a few first-rate books to its credit." One might fairly apply Sontag's assessment to a list of every Litfic novel ever written, in support of Sturgeon.

The victims of ignorant crits huddle in the genre ghetto. To use a political metaphor, they're inside the tent pissing out. They badmouth Litfic, and comb the media for comically ignorant statements which they send to SF encyclopedist Dave Langford's Ansible site, for posting under the headline: "As Others See Us".

But if popular success comes to an SF author... Suddenly she's outside the tent pissing in. The stench of pulp is no longer upon her pages, and people who wouldn't touch a squalid paperback with an alien's pedipalp are lapping up her uber-trendy Speculative Fiction. It's so cool, it's mentholated! These days you may be reading old-fashioned trash without knowing it, in the form of lahnee "SpecFic".

Also pissing in are the practitioners of "Slipstream". These authors use off-the-peg worlds or situations invented by someone else. An outworn postapocalyptic trope imagined in detail during the 1940s is hailed as "achingly beautiful" and original – when dressed up in portentous, steroid-pumped King James-approved prose by Cormac McCarthy.

Slipstreamers of note are Mesdames Jeanette (The Stone Gods)Winterson and Margaret (Oryx and Crake) Atwood. Despite accepting an SF award, Ms Atwood insists that she doesn't write about "talking squids in outer space". As for Hollywood, it adds bells and whistles to slipstream. Avatar is highly original – to anyone who has never read Call me Joe by Poul Anderson, or The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. One theft is plagiarism – two is research!

Now let's throw out some more chaff and get down to the real goodness. I use an acid test for true SF, akin to the “erection of the small dorsal hairs” by which Nabokov recognised great writing. Here's a quote from a well-respected lady who had just experienced a buzz from a good book: “I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part – all the same, I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you – as one does those who reach what one has aimed at."

Virginia Woolf wrote that to the philosopher Olaf Stapledon after grappling with his scientific romance Star Maker; she was elated by the mental perspectives the book had unveiled. What she was feeling was the SF "sense of wonder" – of a new world opening up in the head, a discovery, an expanded view of an intoxicating universe and humankind's place in it. For me, the sense of wonder is what makes a true SF story, and that's the tightest definition of the genre I can find. Nabokov (a scientist who dabbled in SF) said that writers can be storytellers and teachers, but the best are also enchanters. Sturgeon's top 10 per cent of authors can do all of that; entertain, educate – and hold the reader spellbound, caught up in the wonder.

Tom Learmont is a newspaperman by day. His first SF was published in a school magazine in 1954, after teachers had censored the part about a trisexual creature from the planet Ysprot. In later years his Afro-socio-politico-sexual fantasy After the Eclipse (Discobolus 2004) won the Sanlam Literary Award. Light Across Time (Kwela 2011) continues to evoke a sense of wonder in some readers, and a blank expression in others. In the pipeline is the fabulous Radium Tales, which is mainly about drinking Tassenberg in Orange Grove down on Louis Botha Avenue while telling wicked lies.

Tom Learmont explains how to tell real Science Fiction from fong kong space trash in . . .

Tom Learmont explains how to tell real Science Fiction from fong kong space trash in . . .

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