I just watched a documentary about the making of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I remember sometime in the mid-70s, I would have been 11 or 12.  My parent’s had gone out for the afternoon.  I pulled out the stereo and dragged it into the middle of the lounge room, and dug out some LPs I wanted to listen to.  Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was one.  I remember the physicality of it.  The stereo sitting, largeish and bulky on the carpeted floor.  The LP sleeves scattered on the floor.  The tone arm of the turntable moving across to place the stylus in the groove of the record.  The label going slowly round at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute.  Picking up the record and turning it over at the end of the each side.  Those were the images of music of my day.  You focussed on the music and you saw the machinery of its reproduction.  That, and the sleeve art.  It may be the innocence of being that age, or that you never focus on anything in quite the same way again, but I don’t think any images provided to accompany music ever added much to the experience.  I loved LPs. I loved the sleeves and jackets.  I loved turntables and the technology of it in a way that I have never loved the mechanics of the digital era, and I guess I’ll always remember that afternoon.  Or the night we played the entire Beatles catalogue all the way through.  Or hundreds of similar experiences.

I must be getting old. Nostalgia is claiming me.

Discussion of media tie-ins continues all over the place. There’s a piece over at Jonathan McAlmont’s SF Diplomat, and he links to more. I don’t typically find that my worldview aligns with SF Diplomat all that much, but I was struck by one point: the underpinning to my own view of tie-ins is that I’m not the market for them.  Without implying that there’s anything inferior or wrong about them (a view I find is usualy rather elitist and tiresome), I’m usually not interested.  I want to read the next thing, something challenging and different.  Tie-ins are inherently a continuation of the known.  I don’t find that interesting.

Now, that view is a product of the reader that I happen to be.  I’ve no criticism at all of the many people who find tie-ins enjoyable and worthwhile.  I should add that very, very occasionally I find something interesting in the tie-in world. John M Ford wrote a very good Star Trek novel, Ed Bryant & Dan Simmons wrote a dynamite Batman novelette, Joe Lansdale’s Hellboy novellete is excellent, as is Howard Waldrop’s Wild Card’s story.  It’s not an absolute.  Tie-ins can be fine, but for the most part I’m focussed elsewhere.

Some scattered thoughts, notes, links etc from around the Interweb:

• Jetse De Vries has resigned from Interzone. I’ve been meeting Jetse at WorldCons for the past handful of years, and I think he’s been doing a terrific job as part of the IZ editorial crew.  We just spoke in Denver so it wasn’t a complete shock, but I am disappointed.  I wish both Jetse and the IZ gang the best, and can’t wait to see what they come up with separately in the coming years.
• Subterranean has a new story up by John Scalzi. I really liked this.  I don’t know if it’s one of the year’s best, but it’s a lot of fun.  BTW, what is it with superheroes? I have a superhero story in Eclipse Two, this is a superhero story, and I just saw two new anthos of superhero stories in Planet Books.  Is it the Marvel movie goldrush biting at a broader cultural level, or something else?
• Eclipse Two just disappointingly lost a story, and I’m debating trying to find another.

Interruptions come.  More….

There’s been some talk around the Blogosphere of late about media tie-in fiction: its merits and demerits, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing and so on. The good folk at SF Signal have added their two cents worth, with an interesting Mind Meld: “How do media tie-in novels affect science fiction?“.

The Mind Meld is well worth checking out and dovetails nicely with a book that I’ve been reading. Just last week I was sent a copy of Hellboy: Oddest Jobs (for which many thanks, Garth!!), and it’s been occupying my thoughts on and off ever since. The book features stories by Joe Lansdale, Garth Nix, China Mieville and others. Frankly, if it was anything other than a media tie-in I would have been aware of it, waiting for it, and would be planning reviews etc etc. Instead it blind-sided me. How did a Hellboy anthology come to have stories in it by a bunch of writers whose work I admire and follow, and how would that work stand up to their own non tie-in work?

Well, I’ve been reading it, and it’s good. The writers I’d expect to excel do: Mieville, Nix, Lansdale, and nothing is less than entertaining. In fact, for the most part, it’s a book I’m happy enough to recommend – it’s certainly better than many of the original anthologies I’ve read this year. But… you knew there was going to be a ‘but’, right? The stories are good, and if you love Hellboy then the book is for you, but the stories for the most part feel creatively ‘thin’. I don’t know how else to explain what I mean. These stories lack the kind of texture and complexity that typifies most of the authors’ non tie-in work. They’re not bad, they’re just well, ‘thin’, which I think makes it less interesting than any of the authors’ other stuff.

This reaction has left me wondering if I’m biassed against tie-in fiction. I haven’t read tie-ins in many, many years — I find the idea of reading a Star Wars or Star Trek novel a fairly excruciating prospect, no matter the writer — and while I’m aware of tie-ins, I typically don’t pay any attention to them. I don’t think such books are a bad thing, or that they in some way damage the way an author writes. I also don’t doubt for a moment that the good tie-in books are perfectly entertaining and fine, and that many of them act as introductions to written SF for readers, I just don’t want to read them. I also feel – and this might link to that idea of ‘thinness’ that I mentioned – that tie-ins have a thing in common with fan fiction: they’re the stories that happen in the corner of the eye of the main story, a distraction from the central event. Any Star Wars story is peripheral to the main films, is a ‘what next?’ kind of thing. I think that’s ok, but it doesn’t seem terribly interesting.