As part of the Guardian’s SF weekend, Iain M Banks says that the genre is not for dabblers.
‘The point is that science fiction is a dialogue, a process. All writing is, in a sense; a writer will read something – perhaps something quite famous, even a classic – and think “But what if it had been done this way instead . . . ?” And, standing on the shoulders of that particular giant, write something initially similar but developmentally different, so that the field evolves and further twists and turns are added to how stories are told as well as to the expectations and the knowledge of pre-existing literary patterns readers bring to those stories. Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what’s been done, what’s been superseded, what’s so much part of the furniture it’s practically part of the fabric now, what’s become no more than a joke . . . and so on. It’s just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research. In a literature so concerned with social as well as technical innovation, with the effects of change – incremental as well as abrupt – on individual humans and humanity as whole, this is a grievous, fundamentally hubristic mistake to commit.’
James Fenton has been to see Jez Butterfield’s Jerusalem and reviewed it for the New York Review of Books.
‘When the English reach for an image of the quintessential England it is almost always to the countryside that we turn—to the villages or small towns rather than the cities, to the parish churches rather than the cathedrals, to the woods and fields rather than the great urban vistas. If we were to stretch out for an obvious musical example of Britishness, it would be to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstancemarches—military music for an imperial parade. If we wanted to express Englishness, on the other hand, it would be to Frederick Delius, Vaughan Williams, or other idyllic composers from the English folk revival, music that reeks of rural life as it seemed around the time of the Great War—“cowpat music” as it is known to its detractors: “Brigg Fair,” The Lark Ascending, A Shropshire Lad.
But here at the Music Box Theater is that rural life displayed in its least alluring aspect, a slum full of dropouts and drug addicts, an antisocial neck of the woods, at war with the values of an encroaching housing development, which will in turn destroy the countryside that underpins the national myth.’
Clive Aslet reviews John Goodall’s magnum opus on the history of the castle in Britain.
‘It would be wrong to compare Goodall to Simon Jenkins’s 1,000 Best Churches, because his work is a monument of scholarship rather than a guidebook, but they have this in common: both building types rather fell out of vogue, as far as the visiting public was concerned, with the rise of the country house. People preferred spending a day at a furnished property, with grounds and a good tea, rather than an archaeological site. Goodall has now kissed the subject awake. Majestic in scale and sumptuously produced, it is an authority that scholars will consult for generations.’
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