(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.

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?

[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.

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.

[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.

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

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

No?

Re: Geoff Ryman

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, you have. Sorry. At this age it takes a while for the memory to perculate.

Re: Geoff Ryman

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Good, saves me looking through LJ to see if it was here. For the benefits of anyone else I would sum it up as 'utter shite', 'so bad it is hard to believe it is the same author as 253 and The Child Garden', 'so bad it will slightly taint your perception of his better work' and even 'so bad I forgot I was reading a Geoff Ryman novel and started to think I was reading a Cory Doctorow one' [that sounds like hyperbole but it isn't].

[Also for the benefit of anyone else, I think Cory Doctorow is a REALLY bad writer]

[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!)

Re: Geoff Ryman

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Or mine, even.

[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.

Re: Geoff Ryman

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

Yes, if I understand you correctly, Catherine W is beyond our ken. She had tea with Geoff before the library moved in. She went with Chris-who-shall-not-be-named briefly and then a bus driver after graduating and there my knowledge ends. Perhaps she will surface as an MP at some point at which point I can sell my 'She had tea with Geoff Ryman!' stories to the press.

Hey, come on, recent BP 'revelations' are not a million miles away.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

There are altogether too many SF stories about Lesbian Totalitarians. Buoyed up by reading Breakfast In The Ruins, the updated version of Barry Malzberg's Engines of the Night (the best 'my life and SF leading onto my thoughts on SF' stylee book in existence), I have ordered various collections of short stories, since Barry is big on 'author x is best in short form'. One of said authors is James Tiptree Jr. who has at least one Lesbian Totalitarian stories in it. Perhaps there should be a monthly magazine of them on the lines of IASFM
'Alice Sheldon's Lesbian Totalitarian Story Magazine' or something.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I just googled and found it, and was about to send it to two or three people who should read it when I realised that this was solipstic madness, especially given the current uncertainties to my future.

Still, I know what I shall be rereading this weekend in between Other Things.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

O fuck, there goes my credit card limit.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was clear, and I was bemused. I had always thought of Geoff Ryman as one of those authors that only I knew about and loved.

Re: Geoff Ryman

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Yes, probably the most inconsequential 'revelations' of all time.

[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.)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

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

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Hurray! One day then we might all get to read it!

I have to write 5 minutes of standup for Monday and then a poem for a poetry slam evening (with improv instrumental accompaniment!) for Wendesday. I'm starting with the type of writing that my concentration span can accommodate, and hopefully working my way up from there...