When I was in my teens the shadow of Margaret Thatcher lay, like some fell spirit, across the United Kingdom, inciting its youth to anger and seeming to rob the nation of optimism as dole queues grew and coal mines closed. Or so it seemed to me, on the other side of the world.

That anger, and its accompanying frustration, inspired a lot of great music, some of the best coming from Matt Johnson’s The The. I never would have expected, with Thatcher and her government safely consigned to history, that Johnson’s lyrics would come to seem more relevant today, than possibly ever before.

What inspired this? Well, I was reading a news article on the newly re-elected Australian government’s determination to get all of those lazy, slacker disabled people into a job and off their disability pensions, when the lyrics to an old The The song from 1989, “The Beaten Generation“, began to echo through my mind. I wonder if, as they cast their eyes to the skylines of this once proud nation, the government can sense the fear and the hatred growing in the hearts of its population?

Some terms just don’t translate. I’ve struggled, not particularly diligently I admit, to explain to my beloved what an ‘anorak’ is and what it means. This useful page does the job much better than I.

My need to explain this grew out of my ongoing consideration of Rob Gerrand’s new anthology of Australian science fiction. I’ve put a lot of thought into considering the structure of the book, what it is about and what it appears to be about, SF scholarship in Australia, whig histories and many, many other things.

As I diligently worried away at these questions I began to wonder why? Why was I bothering? Who actually cared. I know I care whether an anthology is intelligently assembled, and that it makes some kind of argument. But who else does? Does anyone really care about the intrinsic integrity of a description of sf history, or am I alone?

And the word ‘anorak’ whispered itself in my ear. Only an anorak would care about the minutiae of sf history. Only an anorak would care about the argument made by an anthology. In fact, only an anorak would care about much of the central arguments about SF itself. What I’m coming to terms with – and this is a big thing that I need to work on am struggling with articulating – is that those of us who are fascinated with science fiction and who are committed to helping the centre hold, to defining things and to arguing about the central importance of some kind of core sf are wrong. The centre did not hold. No one really cares about that. The task we should be attempting is to describe the literary diaspora that is happening in the wake of sf’s centre failing to hold. It’s harder, but probably more important (I think), and almost certainly more rewarding. Of course, I may be wrong, or change my mind next week.

As to the Gerrand book: I looked at it for days, thinking over and over ‘who is this for’? It’s big, it’s serious looking, it’s a little pricey, and it’s mostly filled with writers you’ve never heard of. Who would want such a thing? And then the penny dropped: librarians. It appears to be a book for librarians to buy and feel good about. Maybe some anoraks too, but mostly librarians. And is it good? Well, I hope to provide a detailed answer to that in a book review, but I basically think it’s ok. It desperately need interstitial material to give it context, and the story selection is idiosyncratic, but it’s ok. I will say, though, that I can’t imagine a non-sf reader liking it. The book opens with a handful of stories – including an awful Norma Hemming piece – that are so dated and conceptually bland that might only appeal to the most hardened of anorak’s.

Six weeks ago I went out and bought the then new, and still reasonably current, R.E.M album Around the Sun. After a fairly brief listen I posted, fairly hastily, my views on their efforts. Well, this evening I went over to Mark Kelly’s blog where he discusses the album. Setting aside the fact that he liked the album better than I did (or do), reading his post made me realise that I hadn’t clearly articulated one of the things I’d meant to. Mark notes that I responded to the lack of a drummer, which is true. What I should have made clear, and didn’t, was that what I was noting was Berry’s absence as part of their overall creative endeavour, rather than simply as a tub-thumper. The band is on record that Berry made a major contribution to their songwriting and played an important role in the studio, as well as playing. The big change in R.E.M’s sound is that the melody and structure which he’d been credited with providing is now gone. We have the fabulous, formless darkness. Sometimes this works wonderfully well – as in “Daysleeper” and a few others – but I find myself harking back to the last real R.E.M. album, New Adventures in HiFi, which remains superior (to me) to anything they’ve attempted since.

If you’re in Australia this mini website contains good news. I note that they’ve used the Disney dub for Kiki, so I assume they’ll do the same for the rest.

…the sound you can hear is one head being beaten, slowly, against a wall. sigh.