Iain M Banks

Just back from seeing him being interviewed by Farah Mendlesohn at Imperial, and us all eating curry afterwards. I can't write about Matter yet, though I don't think it's giving too much away to say that I think it's very good. What he certainly is is a star turn as a speaker. I particularly like his frank acknowledgement that a large part of the fun of science fiction rests on no more than naked wish fulfillment. Banks has no time, he claimed, for the Calvinist view that life is there to be endured. As long as your idea of fun isn't shooting up a school, why not have fun and realize your wishes?
That seems reasonable, though not in my view incompatible with a cheery sort of belief (Chesterton rather than John Knox, perhaps). It was nice to see a writer admit to the one thing that really marks the good work in the genre, and which almost everyone else denies hotly. If sf is going to work, you need to feel the writer thinks he's coming up with really cool stuff (even if he disapproves of it).

Failing terrorism and liberty

A man on the BBC has just described the assault on Glasgow Airport and the car bombs in London as "failed terrorist attacks". Well, we can be grateful that no one has been killed; since my parents are flying from Glasgow (where I grew up) this morning, I'm very glad that worse hasn't happened.
But I'm not sure about "failed". All terrorist attacks succeed at some level, in that they inculcate fear, or merely inconvenience, or – which I think may be the worst of all – encourage damaging restrictions on freedom. And they need only win once. Try again, fail again, fail better can be anybody's maxim.
I had lunch the other day with Farah Mendlesohn, who edited an excellent collection of short stories called Glorifying Terrorism, for which, declaring an interest, I wrote the introduction. Each of the stories attempted to break the law introduced in Britain to prevent anything which "could be interpreted" – and, mind you, by anyone – as glorifying terrorism. This is precisely the sort of damage terrorism leads to and it is, in its own way, as corrosive as the initial attacks themselves.
What will it profit us if we fight off the advocates of the Caliphate and sharia law by introducing legislation which approximates the constraints on liberty they want?
Farah says there are very few copies left. You can get them here.
Damian Thompson, on his Telegraph blog, draws attention to another consequence of terrorism, and the Muslim Council's pre-emptive attempts to (commendably) discourage reprisals, or (moronically and cravenly) avoid issuing the obvious condemnation. That consequence can only be called sheer blithering idiocy.

sf writers advise the usa. In God We Trust.

This story is all over the shop: usa today's version is at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-05-29-deviant-thinkers-security_N.htm?csp=34 I must learn how to do that thing where you write here and it shows up in blue and you just click on it. Anyone know how?

I'm now going to try it to this. Ha! It works. Thank you Farah. Now I know html and shall conquer the world. Mwahahahaha! Thank you to sour grapes (first comment below) who I think is really called alan, but i don't have any globe things with goggles on them on my machine or display. Do you perhaps use some evil Microsoft-style system? Anyway, back to the post, but you can expect future posts to show off with thises and heres all over the place. Ha!

USA Today is news for beginners, of course, though it once described me as one of the best and most famous obituarists in the world. A crowded field, eh? I've written a bit about these advisors at the other blog (click on the right), but they haven't put it up yet. That is the trouble with mediated blogs.
Well. A few additional thoughts, and remember that I'm a conservative; that I take the view that 9/11 did make a difference, and I know whose side I'm on in the war against terror (though it's a bloody stupid way of describing it); that there was a case (though not the case which was presented) for invading Iraq; that the removal of Saddam Hussein was an unequivocally good thing; that George Bush is not a blithering idiot; and that I like Larry Niven and Greg Bear's books well enough, and don't feel the need to throw Jerry Pournelle's stuff across the room all that often.
Remember too that I am a liberal in the British conservative tradition, and think that the defence of individual liberty is more important than catch-all legislation which may or may not (it will not, actually) do anything to reduce terrorist threats; that the right to freedom of speech is well-nigh indivisible (even on race-, sex-, religion- and sexuality-based issues) or else worthless, that I am fervently opposed to ID cards, DNA profiling, and imprisonment without trial; and that I wrote the introduction to a book called Glorifying Terrorism which contains many good stories by top Leftie sf writers and was edited by the nice and clever Farah Mendlesohn who wouldn't agree with me on 99.999 per cent of anything if you paid her.
The first is the point I make over at the Telegraph, but slightly differently. Why restrict it to the physics graduates with the postgraduate degrees? They're the ones to ask about tachyons and building a space station. Or even, at a pinch, what sort of mobile phone masts will do the job well.
But what governments want to know is how people will actually behave. I suspect they wouldn't like the answers that they'd get from Bruce Sterling and Ken MacLeod and Neal Stephenson and William Gibson and Charles Stross and so on, but aren't these the guys that are quoted by newspapers and advising coolhunters and corporations and all that? (Ken MacLeod is now going to email me saying "As if. I could do with the money.")
Well, if Pepsi and Hyundai aren't seeking his advice, or some continental university appointing him professor of the public understanding of the networked future, that's their loss. Don't blame me. Except, of course, that you'd be nuts to take his advice. But you should listen very carefully to his arguments.
The more serious objection to Sigma is that they're volunteers. You should never take advice from a gang of people who've signed up to tell you that you're fundamentally on the right track. You need a group made up of some people who think you've not gone nearly far enough, some who think you're mad, and some who think you may have got it right, but only by accident and for all the wrong reasons, and that disaster looms unless you listen to them.
But only I, in all of this debate, can be counted upon to speak any sense at all. Twas ever thus.