A number of things have happened since I last posted. Let me see..

1. The SF Encyclopedia has continued to accrete updates – several hundred thousand words since we launched. Here, for instance, is the entry on John Christopher updated to reflect his recent death. (And if you’d like to see how you can support us, click here.)

2. Both the SFE and The Unsilent Library (the book of essays on Doctor Who that I edited with Simon Bradshaw and Tony Keen) have been nominated for the BSFA non-fiction award. This is very flattering of course – especially in the former case, since the SFE is not yet complete.

3. Publication of The Doctor’s Monsters has been brought forward, probably to June/July this year. You can preorder it here. In the meantime, sets of proofs are winging their way to me…

4. The new SF Masterworks edition of Budrys’s Rogue Moon has come out, with intro by me. Adam Roberts has done a fascinating introduction to the new Masterworks edition of Dangerous Visions, which also has a terrific cover by Vincent Chong.

5. I will be at Olympus, the UK Eastercon in April this year – at which, among other things, the BSFA Awards will be presented.

6. And, sadly, I won’t be at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts this year, though I very much hope to be back there in 2013.

I think that’s enough for the moment…

I’m very happy to say that I’ll be chairing an event at the British Library on 2nd September. It’s associated with their current “Out of this world” exhibition, and focuses on the work of the great British fantasy author Robert Holdstock, who died in 2009. The official description says:

In his extraordinary books Mythago Wood, Lavondyss and many others, the late Robert Holdstock explored a mythic landscape of this land; using the tools of science fiction and fantasy at timeless depths and earning him acclaim as an heir to Tolkien or Ursula Le Guin. His work will be the starting point for an evening of exploration, discussion and readings with authors Stephen Baxter, Lisa Tuttle, scholar Donald E. Morse (editor of The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock) and other special guests. Chaired by Graham Sleight

What the official description doesn’t say is that I hope we’ll be joined by other guests who’ll add even further to the evening. So if you’re at all interested in Rob’s work, I’d urge you to book now.

ETA: I told you we’d have other guests to add. I’m very pleased that the great Brian Aldiss will be joining us on the panel, and I hope he won’t be the only one…

Perhaps I should explain. In, I think, 2006 or 2007, Farah Mendlesohn very kindly asked me to write a chapter on Joanna Russ’s short fiction for a book she was editing; this became On Joanna Russ (Wesleyan, 2009). At the time, Wesleyan were reprinting a number of Russ’s novels. Via Farah, a request came through. Wesleyan were interested in publishing a Collected Stories of Joanna Russ, but the bibliography seemed a bit complicated. Would I be interested in working with Joanna to sort it out? I would, I said, and began corresponding with Joanna. Over the course of several years and a lot of airmail post, we worked out the contents list, the texts to be used, and the scholarly apparatus. In addition to the published collections, the book would contain about another collection’s worth of unpublished material. (About a quarter of this Joanna referred to as “Ghastlies”, meaning early work she wasn’t that keen on; but most of it was astonishing, like the late hilarious story “Invasion”. Most is not from the sf field but rather from small literary/feminist magazines.) I sent the completed MS off to Wesleyan in late 2008 and waited.

After a long pause, Wesleyan said that they were passing on the book. I understood why – it was a big project (c. 900 pages), Wesleyan are a small company, and they, like everyone else, are under financial constraints. In the last exchange of letters I had with Joanna, she said I was welcome to try to find alternate publishers for the book. Since her death in April, things have been on hold while the legal wheels have turned and executors have been appointed; of course, it’ll ultimately be the decision of the estate and Joanna’s agent how the book is published. Watch this space.

I’m biased, of course, but I think it’s a book of superb stories; doing the work on it so far has been a huge honour, and I really hope it can move off my living-room table soon. The title of this post, by the way, is from a poem by Dorothy Gilbert that appeared in Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions 5; Joanna wanted it to be the epigraph at the front of her Collected Stories. I hope it still will be.

I’ll be over in Boston for Readercon next week. I have a very exciting (if potentially exhausting) schedule as below. Will hope to see some of you there – do come up and say hi!

Friday July 15

12:00 PM F Plausible Miracles and Eucatastrophe. Chesya Burke, John Crowley, John Kessel (leader), James Morrow, Graham Sleight. Mark Twain instructed other writers that “the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.” This rule can be generalized: the more favorable to the characters an unexpected plot turn is, the better it needs to be set up (see the end of James Morrow’s Only Begotten Daughter). But what about eucatastrophe, where the power of a happy ending comes from its unexpectedness? Is the eucatastrophe in fact a form of plausible miracle where the plausibility derives not from things the author has put in the text, but from beliefs the reader already had, perhaps without knowing it? Or is there another explanation?

1:00 PM F Well, We Know Where We’re Going: The Pseudo-Religiosity of Teleological SF. John Crowley, Barry N. Malzberg, James Morrow, Kathryn Morrow, Graham Sleight (leader). The late Charles N. Brown was a great advocate of the idea that science fiction was teleological: even if it didn’t predict the future, it told us the kind of direction our species was heading. Books like Stapledon’s Last and First Men, Clarke’s Childhood’s End, and Greg Bear’s Blood Music are about that kind of ultimate destiny. But are they also offering a kind of pseudo-religious consolation, a final goal without a God watching over it? When readers seek out science fiction that posits or imagines some kind of final destiny for humanity, are they driven by the same yearning for certainty (even uncomfortable or unhappy certainty) that leads many people to religion?

2:00 PM ME The Readercon New Nonfiction Book Club: Evaporating Genres. John Clute, F. Brett Cox (leader), David G. Hartwell, Graham Sleight, Peter Straub. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature, Gary K. Wolfe’s collection of eleven linked essays, was described by reviewer Jonathan McCalmont as “a quietly revolutionary piece of methodological advocacy that urges its readers to open their minds and their hearts to the chaos at the heart of genre.” Wolfe argues that science fiction, fantasy, and horror are by their nature inherently unstable, evolving, merging with each other and with a wide variety of other fictional traditions, until they eventually “evaporate” into new forms, and that such metamorphoses have been especially volatile over the past few decades. But is there really “chaos at the heart of genre”? And is it true, as Wolfe seems to contend, that without this inherent instability genre fiction may be doomed to self-referentiality and eventual ossification?

4:00 PM F SF as Tragedy. John Clute, Samuel R. Delany, Gardner Dozois, Barry N. Malzberg, Graham Sleight (leader). Gardner Dozois’s collection Geodesic Dreams has an epigraph from James Tiptree, Jr.: “Man is an animal whose dreams come true and kill him.” In Dozois and Tiptree, protagonists fail–and often die–because of something inherent in their biological or social makeup (q.v. “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death,” “The Peacemaker,” or “A Kingdom by the Sea”). Where classical ideas of tragedy involve unwise choices, the characters in Tiptree-esque tragic SF ultimately have no choices at all. What other works of speculative fiction do this? How does the science fiction setting accommodate the expansion of the tragic argument? And what makes these bleak stories so appealing?

7:00 PM G Is “The Death of the Author” Dying?. K. Tempest Bradford, Jack M. Haringa, John Kessel, Eugene Mirabelli, Graham Sleight (leader). It’s long been accepted wisdom in literary criticism that the meaning intended by an author is not of prime relevance to the job of reading or interpretation; to think otherwise is to commit the “intentional fallacy.” But today’s authors have bold new technological avenues to tell us what their story is supposed to mean (e.g. Anne Rice’s famous “You’re reading it wrong” pronouncement). Will texts and critical reading necessarily suffer as authors and readers conduct meta-conversations in blogs and on Facebook? Is an author’s blog post telling us how to read their book really different from an introduction or afterword? And what can we learn about the intentional fallacy by observing the authors who say it’s not a fallacy at all?

Saturday July 16

10:00 AM RI The Year in Novels. Graham Sleight, Liza Groen Trombi (leader), Paul Witcover, Gary K. Wolfe. We will discuss the speculative novels published since last Readercon.

1:00 PM ME Mind the Gap. Graham Sleight. What links the Doctor Who story “Frontios,” Schrodinger’s cat, Shirley Jackson’s “The Intoxicated,” and C.P. Snow’s idea of the “Two Cultures”? How is fanfiction like damp-proofing? And what does stage magic owe to Keats? Graham Sleight will attempt to answer these questions while putting forward some ideas about where the fantastic has come from and where it’s going.

5:00 PM F Geoff Ryman Interviewed. Geoff Ryman, Graham Sleight (moderator). Graham Sleight interviews Guest of Honor Geoff Ryman.

My chapter in the book is on religion and fantasy literature and, as you can see from the CUP site, there’s a stellar line-up of other contributors. You can pre-order either the hardback or paperback from Amazon now.

Well, the DVD of The Ark is out, and indeed debuted at No 1 on the UK TV DVD chart: I somehow doubt, however, that this was due to my presence as a talking head on it. Also out are the new SF Masterworks editions of Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine and Priest’s The Prestige, both with introductions by me; and the SF Foundation’s book on Doctor Who, The Unsilent Library, co-edited and with a paper by me.

Meanwhile, I’ve just blogged over at the Locus Roundtable about the National Theatre’s new production of Frankenstein, and a piece about Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos sequence appeared in the February edition of Locus - also online.

And, in other news, the most fascinating (if profane) work of speculative fiction I’ve read recently is the fake tweets of @mayoremanuel : if you missed him before he vanished into a time vortex, or lack the requisite lifelong knowledge of Chicago politics, Bill Shunn has the necessary briefing.