The Light Of Other Picocons

This year's Picocon was a little disappointing. It was still a good day, but it wasn't as memorable as Picocons past. The biggest disappointment was the illness-induced absence of Gwyneth Jones. I've been aware of her as an author for a while, without having read any of her work; what I didn't realise until recently (reading Adam Roberts' Science Fiction) was that she's also written a lot of SF criticism, and by the sounds of it fairly interesting criticism. I was looking forward to hearing her talk.

As a result, one of the best things about the con (aside from the utterly unexpected victory of Andrew, Liz, Geneva, Tom and myself in the quiz, which appeared mostly to be due to (a) our wide-ranging knowledge of made-up obscenities, and (b) Liz' knowledge of Rentaghost) was picking up a copy of Jones' Deconstructing The Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality. This collection of essays and reviews is, so far, as thought-provoking and insightful as I could have hoped. One quote in particular has stuck in my head:

Mainstream reviewers - and others who ought to know better - often speak of sf as being unintelligible to those who are 'unable to suspend disbelief' (this is one of the politest things mainstream reviewers say about sf). But what is needed is not a suspension of disbelief, it is an active process of translation.

'An active process of translation'. The phrase sticks in my head, partly I think because it's one of the quotes Adam Roberts provides in his book, but mostly because I had almost the same thought with reference to M John Harrison's Light. Harrison is a magnificent writer: In his hands, the vocabulary of science becomes poetic, beautiful. Light is a magnificent book: ambitious in concept, and executed with a painstaking attention to detail. You can tell that some writers work with a mind to the chapter, or the paragraph, or the sentence. Harrison writes with every word. Nothing is wasted; every word matters. This makes Light a demanding read on occasion, but ultimately a rewarding one.

It is a novel, though, that is so obviously steeped in the traditions and history of sf - so thoroughly and comprehensively a genre book - that I genuinely wonder if it would make sense to a reader coming to it cold. Not necessarily in terms of plot (heck, I'm still working out exactly what the ending means myself) but simply in terms of the conceptual architecture. Light makes no apologies for its nature. It just expects you to cope.