peter young’s listopia

Via the Guardian Book Blogs (and coth), we have a consideration of life as being stranger than science fiction and how SF tackles real life better than mainstream/realist literature. My point of view is mostly sympatico with Damien Walter's, but I have a problem with what seems to lie at the core of his argument:

"Realist fiction's unquestioning acceptance of modern life makes it difficult for the contemporary literary novel to find anything resembling the truth when it tackles issues of poverty, race, gender, politics, society or philosophy."

This suggests to me someone who is simply not widely read enough in contemporary literary novels on the issues he includes. I can name any number of novels that get close enough to "the truth" of their subject without any difficulty at all, although of course the measure of their success is just as subjective as it always has been for science fiction.

The Bookseller magazine has just announced the 2006 winner of the Diagram Prize, awarded annually since 1978 for the Oddest Book Title.

The winner: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
The runner-up:  Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan.
Other contenders this year were How Green were the Nazis? and Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence.

More on the prize here, but here's a list of all the previous winners (of which my favourite is The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories):
1978: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
1979: The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution
1980: The Joy of Chickens
1981: Last Chance at Love - Terminal Romances
1982: Population and Other Problems
1983: The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling
1984: The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today
1985: Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts
1986: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality
1988: Versailles: The View from Sweden
1989: How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art
1990: Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual
1992: How to Avoid Huge Ships
1993: American Bottom Archaeology
1994: Highlights in the History of Concrete
1995: Reusing Old Graves
1996: Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers
1997: The Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition
1998: Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw
1999: Weeds in a Changing World
2000: Designing High Performance Stiffened Structures
2001: Butterworth's Corporate Manslaughter Service
2002: Living with Crazy Buttocks
2003: The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories
2004: Bombproof Your Horse
2005: People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It