(no subject)

[devi]

I was up marking coursework till nearly 3am last night and now my head is full of wool and my neck feels simultaneously stiff and too wobbly. Today was running up and down stairs chasing more coursework, sending the students out to buy plastic folders and find me the hole punch because surely you're not submitting THAT? It's all in but one now, finally, and for the rest of the evening I am off duty. I am eating bucket pasta and thinking about watching 24 Hour Party People, which always inspires me because it's about a shambolic disorganised mess of a person who through sheer enthusiasm manages to make great stuff happen, almost by accident.

But even despite my adrenalin-filled get-things-done state, I still found myself perched on the edge of the bed half-dressed for half an hour this morning, breathlessly devouring the end of Geoff Ryman's Air. Oh my. I'd only picked it up while packing my bag to see how far I was from the end. I went out to catch the bus still staggered by the brilliance.

More people ought to know about Geoff Ryman. Okay, lots of people seem to have read 253, his book of thumbnail portraits of people on a tube train, but who knows about The Child Garden, the love story of a girl and a polar bear opera-singer in a near-future sub-tropical London? It's full of amazing language and big ideas and is one of the best books I've ever read. Was, his remix of The Wizard of Oz, is also great and very, very dark. Lust is an awkward one, about a scientist who develops the power to manifest anyone he fancies, alive, dead or fictional, but it's still got more crunchy concepts and moments of insight and beauty than any three more processed and pasteurised books you care to mention, and towards the end goes careering off into a gorgeous crazed mystic tangent about what really happens when you die. He writes about time and memories and the random connections between people, the texture of cities and making art and throwing impromptu street parties in the face of death. With balloons.

Excuse my fangirling. I just think he's criminally ignored, though he did win a bunch of awards for Air, which is set in the last village in the world to get online. When I was in Trinity Netsoc we invited him over to give a talk about 253 and online fiction (yes, it was the late nineties, how can you tell?) and a bunch of us committee people got outrageously drunk with him in his B&B while he told the guy who was Secretary to stop wasting his life and go have babies. It sounded as if he felt he'd failed at his life. I think he ought to have people peeling grapes for him, if there was any justice.

Off to the Bristol Comic Expo tomorrow with a bundle of Wasted Epiphanies to thrust upon people. With polar bears in it, yes. I rip off Mr Ryman all the time without meaning to.

Comments

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

Geoff Ryman is - probably - my most favourite author, for various values of favourite (I have about ten values, so there are ten 'most favourite'). The Child Garden is one of those books I insist people read to the extent of buying them copies, and is also one of the maybe five books (Thinks: The Chymical Wedding, The Alexandria Quartet, Invisible Cities being three of them off the top of my head) that I would quote as having had a very immediate and cognate influence on the way that I choose to put words together. I am encouraged by the fact that you also think that Ryman is a great author. I haven't read the other books, but I'm going to make an effort to read them, now.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Hmm, yes, there's an SF Masterworks edition of The Child Garden in Borders at the moment, with a picture of Canary Wharf surrounded by tropical ferns, and I almost bought it so I could give it to some unsuspecting victim. Hmm, maybe I will.

I've bought Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman for two boys now. Though not this one yet, hmm.

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

I wrote that next simultaenously rather in reply, it should be clear.

He also, if you followed him in Interzone, wrote a short story about Lesbian Totalitarians, with 'work camps' for men, on which the comments at the time said, you can get away with that, but no one else could.

I read The Unconquered Country but I recall little other than a thing about counting in 'bunches' which now always pops into the top of my head when I see things about mathematical geniuses.

Geoff Ryman

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

I read first The Warrior Who Carried Life and it instantly entered my Great books, rather than just good books, list and have followed him ever since. He lived in the house on Norham Gardens that used to house the OUFG library when I was an undergraduate, just before I did and just before the OUSFG library was there.

There was a TV show about the writing of Lust which just put me off so much I've never read it. He went to the publishers with 5 ideas and they didn't like any of them, so he picked another out of the air. SEX, with a wish. They said yes. And then involved their editing process so much they underminded what was already a hairline-good idea. Criticizing him to the extent of a 'mixed metaphor' when the original (something like 'he walked like a bag of bones, shaken) was perfect, evocative, and for flips sake he's the writer not your jobbing sub-ed. Get out of his face.

Before celestialweasel says it, 253 was CW's favourite ambitious project of that year which eneded up not bad at all.

I liked (loved) the novella which begins The Child Garden more than the concluding second part, which to me went too much overblown, as is his want in endings.

Should I read Air then?

Re: Geoff Ryman

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

I have presumably already told you what I think of Air several times (on-line, IRL, using my evil-weasel-appear-in-your-dreams-and-slag-things-off device, sign towed behind plane flying overhead, town crier 'Oyez Oyez, Ryman's latest work is' (etc etc)).

Re: Geoff Ryman

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

If you like him doing less overblown, you'll probably like Air. The style is mostly quite spare and restrained, in that beautifully simple way some Japanese novelists write. I do love his crazy over-the-top endings, though. They're like that bit when everyone starts waltzing in the train station in The Fisher King.

I can sort of see where he was coming from with the SEX thing. It's the sort of thing I could imagine saying in desperation if my five other ideas had been rejected and I wanted to write a book, any book. And the book is flawed and a bit of a mess, but it's still got some great stuff in it.

Re: Geoff Ryman

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

I believe Impulse, a 60's SF magazine, was also edited in that house, it is clearly a major SF nexus. I didn't know Ms. W's landlady's relation to the late editor thereof - daughter / wife / sister?
Is Ms. W one of the people who has vanished beyond our ken? Certainly beyond mind.

Re: Geoff Ryman

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

He lived in the house on Norham Gardens that used to house the OUFG library when I was an undergraduate, just before I did and just before the OUSFG library was there.

!!!

[the-elyan.livejournal.com]

Not a Geoff Ryman post, I fear, but indirectly exploring another great storyteller.

Was thinking about you, and meaning to drop you a line. I owe this evening's reading matter to you, in a manner of speaking, as it was the Kindly Ones, and I discovered (and met) Gaiman while getting your rats drawn.

Hope all is well, and to get over to Oxford some time soon. Prob in London Sun, if you're in the Smoke this weekend. And loved your post about magic realism, and real magic.

I appear to be blathering. Apologies ;-)

[the-elyan.livejournal.com]

More prosaically, a guy I used to act with at Nottingham is in 24 Hour Party People. Chap called Enzo Cilenti - no idea who he plays...

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I find it hard to believe you hadn't read any Gaiman till you went to that signing. Seriously? That's cool, though, the knock-on effect I seem to have accidentally had.

[missfrost.livejournal.com]

I read Lust and The Child Garden last summer and loved and raved about both. Thanks for reminding me I wanted to pick up more of his stuff (I have a terrible habit of lapping up everything of a newly liked author in one go, and have tried hard not to do that recently, so now I "forget" who I meant to read more of!)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Rah! It's great to see people coming out of the woodwork and saying they've read him.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

I don't think Geoff Ryman has the patent on polar bears?

In fact, I know he doesn't, because I just went and took it out myself. Who owns the Arctic anyway? They owe me big royalties.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Well, true, but the ripping-off tendency is deeper and sneakier than that. I had written a whole long chapter of The End of Words which was made up of sketches of people on a tube before I realised I was basically writing 253, but not as well.

(BTW, I'm rewriting it again. But that chapter's gone.)

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

though he did win a bunch of awards for Air,

And The Child Garden won the Clarke Award, and "The Unconquered Country" won a World Fantasy Award. (I thought Was had as well, but apparently not.) But yes, he's ace. Are you aware of his recent (by which I mean post-Air) mainstream novel, The King's Last Song? Worth a look.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I am now, thank you! It Shall Be Mine.

[several-bees.livejournal.com]

When I was in Trinity Netsoc we invited him over to give a talk about 253 and online fiction (yes, it was the late nineties, how can you tell?)

Oh dear, I'm reading livejournal at the moment in order to put off finishing the citations for my thesis essay on, er, online fiction. I was hoping to send it in tonight, only a week or so after I was supposed; am I actually ten years too late?

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

It was more the mention of 'Netsoc' that made me write that, actually. A college society whose purpose was to go 'ooh cool' at the brand-new shiny internet. These days it'd be like having - I dunno - a Lampshade Society or maybe a Spoon Society.

We gave away shell accounts, too, and most members didn't have net access at home.

[killalla]

If you guys are going to be heading to Bristol on Saturday, give me a call - I'm catching a train out there in the morning and will be wandering around with some friends.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

We're going down on Friday, but we'll certainly be doing some wandering around and looking at things on Saturday...

I haven't been to Bristol before. The fact that I'm all enthused about this mini-break shows how itchy my feet are.

[cosmolinguist]

Andrew is almost but not quite sufficiently dedicated to go to the Bristol Comics Expo. He's still a bit stricken that he's not going, but then he remembers it's in Bristol... :-) Hope you have a good time.

[shewho.livejournal.com]

a dark version of the wizard of oz, you say? obsessive curiousity piqued!

say hello to bristol for me. can you go to the hatchet and request kate bush in an irritating fashion too? that'd be ace :)

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

Are you onto issue 2 of Wasted Epiphanies? I thought the first one was excellent.

You know that some of the comic shops in this here London have an "amateur press" section? If you post me a bundle of WE, I could almost certainly get it on the shelf in a couple of places.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I have and love 253, Lust, and The Child Garden, and keep meaning to pick up Air, so this post will probably catapult it up to the top of my mental list again. I didn't know The King's Last Song was out (oops), that's going on the list too.

[sshi.livejournal.com]

I read Air recently and was well impressed by it - particularly the effects of the intrusion of networking into a very well-worked out pre-industrial scenario. I had been meaning to look for more of his work, but had gotten distracted, but you've reminded me that I should really do so!