Chrononautic Log: art

September 11, 2006

Fascinating (if you’re fascinated by this sort of thing) discussion of the future of massively multiplayer online gaming over at someplaced called F13.net.

Raph: Yeah, NPCs in a game like WoW clearly deserve the name quest dispensers . . .

Yoru: Whereas NPCs in pen and paper games are kind of central . . .

Raph: Yeah, in WoW, they’re quest dispensers except they’re shaped like meat. Rather than shaped like a terminal.

(Courtesy of Bruce Sterling.)

Also of interest: “Do Levels Suck?” by Raph Koster (the “Raph” in the exchange above, and author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design), which among other things does a pretty good job of convincing me I’ve had most of the fun in World of Warcraft that I’m ever going to have.

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Update: See also “What are the lessons of MMORPGs today?” For instance:

• You never, ever, ever change jobs. If you want to, you probably need to die.
• There is always a demand for couriers and assassins.
• Killing is the only real way to gain people’s admiration.
• If you don’t keep up with the Joneses, you will never see them again. In fact, if you don’t keep up with your friends, you will never see them again either.

As Raph says, it may seem like a joke, but it’s actually a lament.

Comments (6)

September 3, 2006

. . . not necessarily in that order.

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Update (Sun. 9/3) Y’all who posted your original comments in indisputably public places, if any of you would prefer not to have any more attention drawn to them, I can take those down too.

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Just so y’all know, I’m on Central European Time and I’ll be going to sleep in short order, so while, as previously noted, I’m happy to take quotes down at the original poster’s request, this will probably not happen instantly.

Update (Sat. 9/2): Okay, it’s 12:30AM CET (3:30PM Pacific time); I really am going to sleep now. (Don’t be surprised if I don’t have time tomorrow to read every flame you leave this [North American] evening. But I’ll do my best.)

A quick roundup of some of the discussion arising from the recent unpleasantness, divided into three categories:

• Typical
• Depressing
• Encouraging

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Updated: Fixed internal links, added second post from Bear.

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Updated: Added context at Ms. Datlow’s request.

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Updated: Removed Beth Bernobich quote at her request, and added a pointer to the good work she and Jim Hines are doing at bellwether_talk.

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Updated: Removed Raymond E. Feist quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed William Sanders quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed Vera Nazarian quote at her request.

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Updated: Removed Jane Yolen quote at her request.

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Updated: Added link from Shalanna Collins quote to her comments below.

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Updated: Removed Jack Skillingstead quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed Harry Turtledove quote at his request.

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Note: I’ve made public, here, excerpts from several posts from what is technically a private newsgroup, albeit one open to hundreds if not thousands of readers. I didn’t do this lightly. If anyone I’ve quoted would prefer not to stand behind those words in public I will be happy to remove them. Likewise, if my quotation misrepresents what you said, I apologize, and will be happy to fix it if you let me know.

Those of you who think something should be done about this may be interested to know that my access to the SFWA forums has been suspended.

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Typical:

• William Sanders:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Shalanna Collins:

  I think I know what a "GROPE" would look like, and I didn't SEE any naughty patting, touching, squeezing (oops, invoking the Journey song there for a moment.) Nevertheless, a very contrite apology was publicly posted all over the net. ... This was just a momentary tweak, not assault or murder or what-have-you, for goodness' sake. I don't condone sexism or hassling women/men by touching them, but seriously, this isn't some big ponderous Sin.

  (Ellison forums, 2006/08/31)

  Ed.: Ms. Collins doesn’t condone sexism or hassling women/men by touching them — except, apparently, when it’s perpetrated by a famous author. She also seems to be somewhat confused about the meaning of “contrite,” and possibly “apology.”

  Update: Ms. Collins has commented here.

Depressing:

• Beth Bernobich

  Text removed at original poster’s request. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought Beth approved, at all, of what Harlan did, and I’m sorry I gave that impression. I simply found one parenthetical remark she made to be deeply depressing. Beth is on the side of the angels, as you can see at the bellwether_talk LJ community she and Jim Hines have set up to discuss the problem of sexism in the SF community.

• Raymond E. Feist

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Vera Nazarian

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Ellen Datlow (Updated)

  I was offline for a day or two after the con and then when I got back I discovered this whole brouhaha over Harlan's baby schtick -and that's what it was. A schtick of Harlan acting like a baby. Thus, he went up to the mike when Connie called him up -- he put the mike (a round one) into his mouth, swallowing it like a lollipop, Connie took it gently out of his mouth and wiped it off. He gurgled -- like a baby -- and then grabbed her breast like a baby and she smacked his hand off. A few seconds later she kissed him.... Cmon people. Please put this into perspective. It was NOT sexual assault. It was a joke/schtick gone a bit over the top. I was not offended as a woman watching this. I thought it was silly (but yes, I admit I personally thought the schtick funny). I also know that Connie and Harlan have a history of ribbing each other. I've seen it in the past. So please keep the incident in context and calm down.

  (Ellison forums, 2006/08/30)

  Ed.: Ellen, you grew up with these people. You’ve had time to get used to the way they behave and come to terms with it. We haven’t. And I don’t think we should have to.

• Jack Skillingstead:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

Encouraging:

• Ed Champion:

  It’s one thing to goof around at a party — when the people know the other people involved and a little bit of this kind of nonsense sometimes occurs.

  But when a woman goes up on stage and cannot be respected as a writer, particularly a writer who’s as great as Connie Willis, when she must be groped and demeaned as a sex object in front of an audience, then the time has come to re-evaluate the merits of the organization that hosts the awards ceremony, as well as the has-been "legends" who go up to claim and present awards.

  (“Harlan Ellison: The Norman Mailer of Speculative Fiction,” 2006/08/28)

• Gavin Grant:

  Worldcon: sorry, the eejit has put you on the spot and a public statement is needed.

  What’s up with these dirty old men? They’re taking all the fun out of being in the genre and not inspiring anyone with anything but horror and the urge to vomit and throw out their books.

  (“Harlan Ellison: eejit,” 2006/08/28)

• Alan DeNiro:

  It makes me wonder — how must a woman just entering the field feel about this? Younger female readers? What could they possibly think about this? Could they possiblly think anything good about SF/F? As a field? A community?

  (“Down the Rabbit Hole,” 2006/08/28)

• Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

  Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis on stage at the Hugos wasn't funny and it wasn't okay. ... [T]he basic message of Ellison's tit-grab is this: "Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. ... You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will."

  It's not okay. It's not funny. It wasn't a blow against bourgeois pieties or political correctness. It was just pathetic and nasty and sad and most of us didn't want to watch it. It's another thing that's going to stop.

  (“LAcon IV,” 2006/08/28)

• Ben Rosenbaum:

  Here's the context: it seems that a lot of men — particularly, to hear women my age tell it, older, powerful men — in science fiction feel like women's bodies are fair game. Whether it's for a gag, a thrill, or a "sit down and shut the fuck up, bitch", this kind of thing goes on beyond the Hugo stage. A lot.

  As it does in the wider world. A friend of mine who attended the Hugos had just been tit-grabbed by a stranger riding by on a bicycle in the street outside the Hugos the night before. Just for a minute of fun, because she was a woman, he brought her to tears of rage. For her, you grabbing Connie — and Connie's first horrified reaction before she covered beautifully and went on with the show — was the same damn thing, and the message was: you're not safe anywhere.

  . . . Mind, I'm not worried about Connie. For one thing, Connie's no victim, and for another, that's between you and her.

  No, I'm talking about the atmosphere in science fiction. We applauded a sexual assault at the Hugos, and now the web is full of folks saying "what's the big deal? get over it". I don't think I need to tell you that that is fucked up.

  Ed.: At time of press, Mr. Rosenbaum’s open letter has as yet gone unanswered except by one Mr. Goldberg, whose plaintive “What more do you guys want?” is undermined by his less than perceptive “Harlan has apologized profusely.”

  (“What I Told Harlan Ellison,” 2006/08/28)

• Elizabeth Bear:

  It's not just the tit-grab. It's also poking Rachel in the stomach uninvited.

  When I say "This is so not okay," I mean the pattern of treating women as if their personal space is not sovereign.

  Rachel and Connie are both strong women, and more than capable of standing up to Harlan. They get to decide how they want to respond to a given incident directed at them. (And both seem to have.) But I think, as a community, we need to say "This type of behavior is beyond the pale and will not be tolerated."

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/29)

• Zoë Selengut:

  ...for fuck's sake, this is not just another "being a jerk" incident. ... It's a whole universe away from mere snottiness, drama-queenage, or provocative whatever. This is disgustingly sexist behavior, and it is not okay to class rank sexism under the jerk umbrella, as if it's something we'd all do if we lacked social graces and let our id take control. Being a rude and abrasive person is one thing, and treating women's bodies like public property is another.... It drives me nuts to see this classed in the same category as other amusing Ellison anecdotes (I admit, I do find a lot of them amusing, or did.) It's not. the same. thing.

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/29)

• Jane Yolen:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Susan Marie Groppi:

  I think a lot of people might be misunderstanding the outrage here — it's not just about what happened to Connie at the Hugos. It's about what's been happening to women in this community for a long time now. Pretty much every woman I know has a story of being on the wrong end of exactly that kind of inappropriate behavior. Taken individually, each incident is just a thing you brush off and move past, in the aggregate they add up to a big goddamn mess.

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/30)

• Harry Turtledove:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Meghan McCarron:

  And will this be the only time we talk about behaviors like this? And will we just talk about the most visible, shocking examples, or will we dig down into why their is an environment in our genre and at our conventions where this seems acceptable? ... I've seen variations of 'dirty old man' thrown around a lot in these discussions, but when those dirty old men are gone, I'm not exactly confident that women in the genre will no longer be treated in ways designed to make them feel like objects.

  (“On Harlangate, briefly,” 2006/08/31)

• Elizabeth Bear:

  What we are witnessing is the dying convulsion of a certain kind of privilege. And as in any case where somebody is having an unfair advantage taken away, many of the ones who have come to rely on that advantage are pretty upset about it, and are going to be bitter about lost dominance.

  It may take about a hundred years to change society. But no matter how angry many of us are that men will still attempt to assert social and sexual dominance over women in a crude and obvious fashion, the fact of the matter is that a sea-change is underway. And every time somebody says "Hey, that is not okay," and other people back him or her up, we get a little closer to equality.

  (“What we are witnessing,” 2006/09/01)

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For my own part: This is just not cool. It’s not “not cool if” (as in, not cool if Connie wasn't in on the gag); it’s not “not cool because” (as in, not cool because Harlan has a history of bad behavior); it’s just fundamentally not cool.

And the fact that so many people have rushed to defend it, or minimize it, or attack the people who’ve called bullshit on it, says more about the unreconstructed state of our field than the original incident.

And that is what’s gotta change.

Comments (195)

August 30, 2006

William Gibson:

Readers, recently, ask: What are these things “really” like?

Well, really, you the reader are expected to do a bit of imagining on your own; you see black marks on white paper, interpret them, and form an image. Part of the writer’s task is in judging whether you’re being given too much information or too little. As a reader of sf, I often felt I was being given too little, and that the writer probably wasn’t bothering to form that detailed an image in her own mind. Part of my initial urge to write sf grew out of a frustration with that, leading to what Bruce Sterling (I believe) deemed “the hyperspecificity of the cyberpunk style.”

Comments (0)

In no particular order (but numbered, since I’m tired of bullets):

1. This old post of John Clute’s. Keywords: uncanny, marvelous.
2. Ben et. al. Keywords: Irrealist, fantastic, joke, label, magical stuff.
3. Matt Cheney, in the YA slapfest. Keywords: ghetto, groupthink, Frankenstein, secret (superior) history.
4. Hal Duncan, in the same slapfest. Keywords: plot, meaning, “central metaphoric conceit.”
5. Hal again. Keywords: aesthetic form, commercial formula, arbitrary.

Comments (3)

So, I know that quite a few of my readers know a hell of a lot more about YA than I do, having, e.g., written a bunch of it, and certainly having read a bunch of it. (I’ve only read maybe half a dozen YA books in the last half a dozen years, not counting Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket.) So — educate me? Please? Three questions:

1. What one* YA novel should I read, as an example of what you like about what’s currently going on in the genre?
2. What one* popular YA novel do you think I shouldn’t read, on account of it being way overrated?
3. What lessons should somebody writing about/for not-so-young adults take away from what’s going on in YA now?

P.S. Contemporary genre YA, please, not Twain or Salinger.

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* Yes, I know it’s unfair. In a pinch, something like “the Midnighters trilogy” can pass for one book. “All the Weetzie Bat books” can’t. (And “anything by so-and-so” is not all that helpful.)

Comments (15)

August 27, 2006

I figure right now, when everybody down in Anaheim is still riding high, is as good a time as any to ask . . .

Comments (5)

August 24, 2006

Spread it around:

Girls and Science: Call for Proposals

The Feminist Press, in collaboration with The National Science Foundation, is exploring new ways to get girls and young women interested in science. While there are many library resources featuring biographies of women scientists that are suitable for school reports, these are rarely the books that girls seek out themselves to read for pleasure. What would a book, or series of books, about science that girls really want to read look like? That is the question we want to answer.

You’ll find several requests for specific proposals at our website. One calls for scientific detective stories based on the life, research, and discoveries of real women scientists. Another calls for stories featuring real young women—aspiring gymnasts, ice skaters, actors, dancers--using a knowledge of science to help them become really good at what they do. A third recognizes how popular Manga and graphic novels are with girls, and asks for imaginative new collaborations between Manga writers and artists to create adventures about girls who use real science to accomplish their goals. If any of these three book ideas interest you, please check out our website (www.feministpress.org) for more information about deadline and how to submit proposals.

But we do not want to limit our exploration. If you are a writer and have an idea for a book or series of books that is guaranteed to get girls excited about science, we want to hear from you. You may want to create a girl detective series featuring a set of friends—from geeks to sports nuts to mechanical geniuses—each with a knowledge of science that helps in solving crimes. You may want to create a story about a shy girl who goes on field trips with her favorite aunt, a forensic anthropologist, and helps to solve problems as she learns to think like a Dr. Bones. You may want to tell the story of a young science fiction writer who needs to study different fields of science in order to create her adventures. Whatever your vision, if you can write like a dream and can create works that are guaranteed to instill a curiosity about science in girls and young women, send us your proposals. We want to hear from you.

All proposals will be reviewed. Several proposals will be offered standard contracts.

Publisher: The Feminist Press at City University of New York as part of a National Science Foundation grant. (see feministpress.org)

Deadline: October 31, 2006

Format: Proposals should describe the project, the plot, characters, and length. No more than ten pages please.

How to submit: Electronic submission (word doc) to fhowe@gc.cuny.edu with the subject line "Girls and Science." Please include in the body of your email your address, phone number, email address and a short bio. Please also attach a brief sample of your writing (about five pages), and a resume that includes information about publications.

(Via Cocktail Party Physics.)

Comments (0)

August 18, 2006

I recently discovered this amazing comic called Copper, by Kazu Kibuishi. It’s a little bit Studio Ghibli, a little bit Little Nemo in Slumberland, a little bit Subconscious Comics. (Check out, for instance, “Blue,” “Bubbles,” or “Jump Station.”)

Figure 1. Copper always looks on the bright side. Fred often doesn’t.

Seeing something like Copper reminds me that, much as I like reading and writing, they’re not the killer app for every kind of storytelling. And while drawing a comic this beautiful looks like a hell of a lot of work, it looks like fun, too.

Comments (12)

July 24, 2006

Via William Gibson, Neomarxisme, a fascinating English-language blog about contemporary Japan. Some brief samples:

Politics:

Last Friday night, I saw a tiny left-wing demonstration in Shibuya, but the thing about people power is that the cast and crew actually show their faces, walk the walk as they talk the talk. And there were handicap people! And women! These ultra-nationalists hide behind machines, like Darth Vader. They could all be remote-controlled from some central base in Yamanashi, and we would never know.

Sorry to keep writing about the yakuza and the right-wing, but I keep running into them week after week. I guess I should just cower in fear like a good boy. God didn't make right-wing soundtrucks so we would question their impact on the political process. Unlike the rest of the world, trucks in Japan run on wa, not gasoline, so it is quite rude to be too inquisitive about the internal combustion process.

— Right-Wing Parad(is)e

Pop culture:

One of the key presuppositions of this blog is, "For the last five years, Japanese mainstream pop culture has gotten progressively more boring and less stimulating," to which many answer:

1. Yes! The innovation and spark of the 90s is gone!
2. No! Your head is stuck in the past and you are missing the stunning glory of today!
3. No! You are deluded and have no idea what is actually going on!
4. No! You are looking in the wrong fields. Culture is not just music and street fashion!
5. No! You are a hater!

Every month or so, I start toying with ideas 2-5 and ask my Japanese friends to fill me in on everything I am missing. They never come up with much of anything: they either shrug in resigned apathy or call me later on my cellphone to announce that they are so bored with things that they don’t leave the house and I have been talking to thin air the entire time.

— Now I Understand Why Contemporary Japanese Pop Culture is at a Nadir

Politics, pop culture, and porn:

Even during the “Sex Boom” of the 80s, female university students still held a strong position in the collective libido, but now they were on late-night TV, bouncing around in bikinis and skimpy outfits. Following soon after that, the Onyanko Club lowered the bar by shifting desires to average-looking high school girls singing suggestive songs. A decade later in the mid-90s, the enjokousai (compensated dating) boom revealed to the public that old men would pay a lot of cash to have sex with middle school girls.

Sociologists and critics have proffered a lot of explanations over the years for the falling age of Japanese men’s sexual preferences, most notably that rising educational opportunities for women increased their intellectual maturity above the level desired by most Japanese men. In order to procure mental inferiors, men had to keep slinking down the food chain. . . .

So, now we have arrived upon the symbol of our own post-post-modern era — Saaya Irie — the busty twelve year-old slowly becoming a household name.

. . . The appreciation of most porn in Japan essentially comes from a type of misogyny — a belief in a cosmic order that determines women to be objects formed for the sole mission of male pleasure. The same graying bigwigs who prevented the birth control pill from gaining legal status in Japan for thirty years are the ones who would gnaw off an arm before any government body takes away their rights to paid sex and dirty videos. The powers-that-be would have no tiff with Saaya Irie.

— What to do about Saaya Irie?

Well worth checking out, whether you’re a Japanophile (I’m looking at you, Barzak!), an ex-Japanophile, or just an armchair cultural anthropologist.

Comments (0)

July 22, 2006

Please go out and write brilliant stories and win a metric truckload of awards. Not because you need to or even because you want to; just do it for me, okay?

Not like it’ll stop the professional jackasses from dissing you. But, of the professional jackasses, maybe it’ll make the ones who take those Lucite blocks and Lovecraft heads and shiny rocketships seriously shut up and go away.

Comments (8)

July 21, 2006

You laughed at the guidelines!

You swooned over the cover art!

You trembled at the Table of Contents!

You chortled over the index!

Now TWENTY EPICS itself can be yours!

Figure 1. You need this book.

Available direct from the printer, via Amazon, and even, so we hear, at your local bookstore. (If your local bookstore is one particular bookstore in Connecticut, anyway, or so we hear, though frankly we’re a little bit confused about this.) (Update: And it's New Jersey anyway. Sorry, all those little New England states look alike to this California boy.)

Now, on to the party! First, my beautiful and brilliant co-editor Dr. G has a few words to say over at her place.

Next, to whet your appetite, several of our fabulous authors have each written a bit about their stories and where those stories came from:

• Christopher Barzak, “The Creation of Birds”
• Paul Berger, “The Muse of Empires Lost”
• Alan DeNiro, “Have You Any Wool”
• Marcus Ewert, “Choose Your Own Epic Adventure”
• Jon Hansen, “The Book of Ant”
• Mary Robinette Kowal, “Bound Man”
• Yoon Ha Lee, “Hopscotch”
• Meghan McCarron, “The Rider”
• Sandra McDonald, “Life Sentence”
• Rachel McGonagill, “The End of the Road for Hybeth and Grinar”
• Jack Mierzwa, “A Short History of the Miraculous Flight to Punt”
• Tim Pratt, “Cup and Table”
• Benjamin Rosenbaum, “A Siege of Cranes”
• David Schwartz, “Five Hundred and Forty Doors”
• Zoe Selengut, “Smitten”

And some other partygoers have chimed in:

• Avi Bar Ze’ev
• Hannah
• Haddayr Copley-Woods
• Chris Gerrib
• Jed Hartman
• Matt Kressel
• Lauren McLaughlin
• Karen Meisner
• Mary Anne Mohanraj
• Jackie M.
• E.C. Myers
• Kyle N.
• Sarah P.
• Robert Burke Richardson
• John Scalzi
• Heather Shaw
• James Trimarco
• Greg van Eekhout
• Rob “aphrael” West (also here)

The offer of free beer still stands, by the way.

Further updates from across the Internet throughout the day, if I can sneak out between meetings.

Comments (15)

July 17, 2006

I think it’s a shame that Sleater-Kinney are breaking up, too, but, um, do we have to read it as a symbol of the death of feminism?

Comments (0)

July 12, 2006

TWENTY EPICS Internet launch party tomorrow! That’s tomorrow, this Thursday, Bastille Eve, July 13th. There will be party favors and also free beer.* You don’t even have to read the book to attend! Just let people know it’s available (direct, via Amazon, and, one hopes and presumes, via the fine corporate behemoths at Ingram Book Group): Forty-seven cubic inches of story by twenty of the best writers in the business, complete with maps, an index, and a gorgeous cover. Spread the word, and drop me a comment here so I can link back to you.

Figure 1. All this and free beer!

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* The offer of free beer is for real, but you’ll have to come to Switzerland to get it. Or catch me next time I’m in the States.

Comments (20)

I’m getting a little tired of hearing that nothing happens in mainstream fiction. I just drive-by posted this at Bear’s aesthetics discussion, but . . . well, I’ll let somebody else take it.

McKee

Nothing happens in the real world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day! There’s genocide and war and corruption! Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love! People lose it, for Christ’s sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know much about life! And why the fuck are you taking up my precious two hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!

— Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation

My buddy Andy’s imitation of this is better, but you get the idea.

All kinds of things happen in mainstream fiction. All kinds of things happen in real life. And if you write genre fiction without knowing that, you’re going to write genre fiction in which nothing happens except what proceeds directly from your genre conceit. It may sell. It may even win an award or two. But it’s going to bore me just as much as the lit-fic you haven’t read bores you.

Comments (2)

July 7, 2006

If you haven’t read Flytrap #5 yet, you should.

Comments (1)

July 5, 2006

Mr. Schwartz has a very thought-provoking post about possible fundamental differences between the short story and the novel. Go read it.

(And then go buy that Ditty Bops album!)

Comments (3)

June 23, 2006

(Also, another good argument against the Best Dramatic Presentation award.)

[Leigh] Brackett was awarded a Hugo posthumously for her work on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back in 1981.  . . . What is agreed on by all is that George Lucas asked Brackett to write the screenplay for Empire based on his story outline.  . . . However, the exact relationship between Brackett's draft script and the revised shooting script is not agreed on at all.  . . . According to [one] scenario, Lucas’s assignment of credit to Brackett was a mere courtesy or homage (or, less charitably, an attempt to improve Empire’s critical reception by associating it with a well-respected screenwriter). Support for this view comes from Stephen Haffner, owner of the press that printed Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, who has read Brackett’s script, and claims that — outside Lucas’ storyline — nothing of Brackett’s personal contributions to the script survives into the finished movie.

Brackett’s screenplay has never been published. According to Haffner, it can be read at the library of the Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico, but may not be copied or borrowed off-site. [Emphasis added.]

(From Wikipedia.)

Comments (7)

June 10, 2006

Speculation should not be a separable part of a composite system.

Speculation should not be identifiable as earth, air, fire, or water, nor as earth, fire, water, metal or wood.

Speculation should not be irreducible by chemical reaction.

Speculation should not be organized into periodic tables.

Speculation should not have isotopes.

Speculation should not be made up of leptons and hadrons.

Speculation should not be heavy or light.

Speculation should not be produced through supernova nucleosynthesis.

Speculation should not be the short-lived product of a high-energy collision, detectable only by its aftereffects.

Speculation should not be contained within sets, classes, or collections.

Speculation should not be a feature, nor a habitat, nor a base, nor a basis, nor a circumstance, nor a situation, nor the be-all and end-all.

Speculation should not be the thing that is ours that we are in.

Speculation should not be the thing that we are in when we are out of what is ours.

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Update: Added extra quotation marks.

Comments (38)

June 9, 2006

I may be an idealist, but I believe if we’re constantly holding something like this up to the light, maybe we can break it down a little, and make room for a greater variety of fiction by a greater variety of people writing about a greater variety of characters and there will be more good books and also world peace.

— Meghan McCarron

Comments (1)

June 3, 2006

Kelly Link says what I’ve been trying to say for a year or two now, only much better, ’cause she is, after all, Kelly Link.

The only thing you have to offer an editor, and readers, is you. Your voice. Stories and characters and narrative twists that only you are strange enough to want to write. Take risks. Some of you are in critique circles that have been going for quite some time. You know each other well enough to have built trust. And it takes trust to show a workshop the kind of ambitious work I'd like to see. Take chances. Write stories whose characters and the endings surprise even you.

All y’all (and y’all know who all y’all are), listen up!

(Courtesy of Charles Coleman Finlay, via Greg.)

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Update: It occurs to me that maybe next time I join a writing group I maybe should think less about being a nice guy and more about getting everyone in the group to do better work. Be warned.

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Via Gwenda, Liza Palmer explains why Spider-Men 1 & 2 and Batman Begins were better than X3. She doesn’t use the word realiness, but that’s what she’s talking about.

And I know this is the delicate line these summer blockbusters, as do all makers of fiction, have to tread. How far and how unrealistic do you go? And yes, we’re talking about X-Men, but the beauty of Batman Begins and the Spiderman movies is that throughout the unrealistic actions and events, the characters stay real and human. The dialogue, while, yes they’re talking about Green Goblins and people with oddly recurring alliterative names (Peter Parker, Scott Summers, Warren Worthington III . . .) they speak like normal people would. But, there's a line . . . and X-Men couldn’t stay on the right side of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. I loved every mutant, Golden Gate Bridge moving, Hugh Jackman shirtless moment of it. But, just kind of a heads up — if you end your movie with “Way to go, Furball.” And you’re not Han Solo — I think there's been a misstep somewhere.

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June 2, 2006

This came up in the aftermath to the Strange Horizons Tea Party, and it looks like Hannah’s now using it as a critical term of art, so:

• Realiness is to realism what truthiness is to truth. Only realiness is a good thing.
• Realiness is what’s left after you suspend all the disbelief you’re supposed to suspend.
• Realiness is what makes Air (or Have Not Have) more plausible than The World is Flat, even though Air is science fiction (arguably, even, fantasy) and The World is Flat is alleged not to be fiction of any kind.

Make sense? Like, I accept that a thirty-story lizard is attacking the city, but I don’t accept that the “greatest investigative reporter of all time” can be this dumb. Yes, Godzilla is just as implausible — well, almost as implausible — as Buck Williams, but Godzilla is a speculative element and Buck Williams is just not a believable character. Godzilla lacks realism, but Buck Williams lacks realiness.

Better definitions? Better examples? Anyone remember what we were actually talking about when it came up?

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May 17, 2006

Well, we’ve almost made it. The book is proofread, the cover is done, the introduction is written, and I’ve just uploaded all the files to the printer. Assuming nothing goes sideways when they actually try to print the things, we should have the first actual paper copies in our hands by — well, I was hoping the end of this week, but it turns out that Print “On Demand” means Print “In 3-5 Business Days,” so: by the start of WisCon, anyway.

The bad news is that this doesn’t give us time to actually get the book into distribution by Memorial Day weekend, unless we want to trust that everything’s going to print just perfectly first time. Which might happen, but I don’t want to count on it. (If I had to bet on something going wrong, I’d bet on the maps coming out all pixilated. Which I could probably fix if I had to, but I’m hoping I won’t have to.)

That being the case, while we plan to have a handful of advance reader copies at WisCon, and to start getting the book out to reviewers shortly thereafter, we’ve decided to push the official release date back to the first of July — sooner if we can manage it, but we want to make sure quality doesn't suffer.

(And then I will never edit another anthology again.)

(No, this time I mean it.)

(No, really.)

(No! Enough with the robots!)

---

P.S. The web site is updated, though, and that’s the important thing! I plan to add expanded pages for the two books soon — don’t want to lose all those juicy author bios — but this should keep people busy for a while.

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The highlight of my first WisCon was seeing John Kessel’s daughter crown Matt Ruff with the Tiptree tiara. I told Susan, I think it was, I’m gonna get me one of those. Or words to that effect. And I went off and in less than six months — lightning speed! — ripped out a little story called “Planet of the Amazon Women,” which I then sold to Strange Horizons.

It didn’t win me a tiara, of course. But! Today Elizabeth Bear points me to that very Matt Ruff’s web site, whereon he has posted the Tiptree long list.

Which is getting pretty close for a first try, I think.

Thanks again to Jed and Susan at SH for some fantastic editing, and to the Fairwood writers’ group for some fantastic workshopping.

---

P.S. Also, congratulate Meghan McCarron, if you haven’t already, for making the list with the hilarious and touching “Close to You.” To which, take note, there will be a kind-of-sort-of prequel in Twenty Epics.

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May 12, 2006

Via Ben: Take a story or blog entry you wrote, or a few paragraphs thereof. Pop it through as many Google Translate round trips as you feel like. Feel free to de-translate words that get marooned, if you know the language. Clean it up. You may change paragraphing, punctuation, and parts of speech (tense, case, person, and number) and add (but not subtract) the words “the”, “a”, “an”, “is”, “and”, “it”, “of”, “in”, “for”, “but”, and “or”.

She is thin. The muscle, she is dark.

As for her, and her, there it is, with Moussa.

In the short khimar, the black hair that you spoke of, is the single stage of the thing. which is removed. (At the point where that bends, considerably; and she, from the light.)

Write it.

It meets, but for the boy, together. The curtain is complete.

That is the car, but me, my thing is not closed. The screen whose two (because of the thing) is small, is almost with someone. Because it is to be many, or it is not; a thing that for a new one was made.

The air is my student.

“Her, with me” – but it is for the rear section of the saddlebag on which is it written. And my position? A hiding place, and my accent. It is measurement: of the lava, of the smell of the spice, of being rough; for that, it did not know a method.

I taste of the foreign country and of my danger. For that, it was excited; think of that, that but a little spoke, to her.

Using the product of European culture -- the shoes, and the history, which you write -- because of me; it is the structure of the sincerity which is specification.

That is a large number.

The fact that it is, and that it loves, that -- together from the history of an early stage: For the woman, it is inferior.

But punishment, now? For loving the person?

That is good; it starts in that.

That acceptance is the substituting; it is the possibility that remains. (From the profile, perhaps; but that is not writing.) And there is Hippolyta.

But, however, there is a woman, because of the place. Approximately? It was that, perhaps. But it was from the place. And someone has deceived.

Night dream: track, truck and person.

Always, that it does not, is meet; and to those, it is, and securely. This is young, but that it estimated one (but for the students) — do I make it foolish? From evening, following it to an emergency, that it looks at it all: shed either one, it comes.

Returning, it is on her. For it is in the rear section, and it ignites with the lower part.

But, first, sleep. I go out, that is the finger which I lead. And I move the ram liquor of the wife. But for the fact that it is I, it is all heads; and that, feel you have remembered.

The girl is this thought that we want to have learned. Her craving is the prospect that it is suitable from another bed, and mine, for I am in the position of satisfaction. I go, out of time.

It is the shout. Or you laugh.

And that, I do not know.

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May 10, 2006

Elizabeth Bear has a nice post about what it means for a book to be broken.

So, a book can be"broken" in a lot of ways, but what it boils down to is that the narrative machine does not function. Not that it has dings on it, not that it grinds a little, but it just doesn't work. Examples are when the writer has to resort to TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) character actions or Deus Ex Machina to resolve plotlines. When characters must behave in an out of character fashion to make the book come together in the end. When the pacing is off, or the thematic resonances are set up badly or in a confusing fashion, so the sonar-image of a satisfying theme does not emerge from the echoes. When there is no click, at the ending, when it falls into place.

When you hold the book in your head, give it a spin on a fingertip, and you can see it wobble because the center of gravity is off somehow. (And I have no shit seen a wobble so big the book crashed and went bouncing across the room fixed by adding three paragraphs to the end. I am not kidding.)

This is a tricky tricky thing, by the way, because so much of it is subjective, and readers project a good deal of themselves into the narrative machine of a novel. They do, in other words, some of the heavy lifting. A reader who clicks with the inner squiddy nature of a book can patch a hell of a lot that's wrong simply by bringing his experience in to oil the gears and spackle over the gaps, to mesh with the machine.

But yeah, what I mean when I say broken is something deeper and more basic than a dent on the fender.

Crucial to note is that among other things, for a book to be broken means the book might be fixable. Of course, that’s only helpful if you’re the author and the book isn’t published yet, but still.

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May 9, 2006

Inspired by Ben’s discovery of a Chinese bootleg of his story “Embracing-the-New,” and his machine translation of it back into English, I ran a few paragraphs of “Planet of the Amazon Women” through a few Google translators, looking for found poetry.

Of that, the best I found is probably the English-Korean-English:

In the unreality which is born with the thing together each one and with the thing the together different person define my thing with the real thing history of my oneself to under justice it was incorrect together with Hippolyta, Hippolyta. That was attempting the fact that the presumed engine talks to me, it is.

That it passes from some feeling and is not fraud. We lead and untranslatable the picture of remembering and imagining we see a past. . . .

But the most amusing, considering the story, has to be finding the word “anomaly,” after translation into Arabic and then back into English, transmuted to “homosexuality.”

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May 2, 2006

“The world of ideas doesn’t really need another grad student hauling the brains of dead Marxists around in his suicase.”

— Andrew O’Hehir

(The best story I’ve heard this year, of course, is this one:

“. . . And this one is called New Saturn.”
“What happened to the old Saturn?”
“Nobody knows,” he states solemly. “Even I don’t know.”

From Karen’s son Jeremiah.)

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May 1, 2006

If I was running Fictionwise, and I wanted to make it difficult (but not strictly impossible, ’cause that would be cheating) for readers to browse their SF section, I’m not sure I could improve on what they’ve got.

(Also, a warning to anyone contemplating being as stupid as me: if I wanted to make an ebook format more painful to use than Adobe Secure Reader 7, that format would have to somehow pull out the reader’s fingernails with hot tongs. Would someone explain to me what the point of downloading a file is if you have to connect to the internet every time I want to read it? No? Talk about DRM that punishes the legitimate purchaser . . .)

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April 28, 2006

Amazon is identifying Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s Rainbows End as a “Zones of Thought” book; that is, a book set in the same universe as A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Given the book’s description, this seems unlikely (unless, say, the protagonists are all being simulated somewhere in the High Beyond or the Low Transcend). Anyone got the straight dope?

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April 26, 2006

So, a while back a friend of mine wanted to know if there was a way he could get ahold of my stuff without having to try to track down these out-of-print zines and whatnot, and I had some fun putting together a little “Unauthorized Complete Works” for him in InDesign. It came to a bit over 60,000 words; throw in the Irrational Histories (memo to self: write some more of those at some point) and maybe a hitherto-unpublished novelette or two, and that’s enough for a book.

But it occurred to me as I was doing it that just because I could put together enough words for a book didn’t mean that it would be a good idea to actually do that. I think about the kind of things I was thinking about when Susan and I were arranging the Twenty Epics TOC — pace, weight, ambience — and it just doesn't feel like there’s enough variety yet in what I’ve written.

Then there was this Crooked Timber piece about Wikipedia, prejudice against, one example of which was an aside in John Clute’s overall, highly positive review of Dora Goss’ In the Forest of Forgetting. (I quote slightly more of it than CT did, because I’m more interested in what Clute has to say about fiction than it what he has to say about Wikipedia.)

The first problem [that we need to address “before we can return to praise”] is not Goss’ alone. It is something that may derive from the tendency of mutants to emit blog gas, for the net culture they live in has no internal or external censors, no captaining of the unsorted untested wikipedian utterances of the gawping soul, no place for the buck to stop. So mutants tend to publish too much.

Now, whether Clute’s right or not (and I think there is an argument to be made that not all of us are at our best in the single-author collection mode, and also that selecting the best from a larger body of work may have advantages over including the entirety of a smaller body of work, whether or not one wants, like Clute, to blame ‘the net culture’), all this got me thinking: what makes a good single-author collection?

Clearly it helps to be brilliant. But if you look at, say, Stranger Things Happen, it’s not just that Kelly’s written a bunch of really excellent stories; she also does a lot of different, interesting things with voice and tone, and I think that makes a difference.

It doesn’t help, in trying to figure this out, that I’m not really a fan of short fiction, as a form, and I haven’t read hardly any of the recent collections that everyone says are so brilliant. But I used to read a lot of them, back in the dizzay (I think I read everything Larry Niven published in the 1970s), and there have been a few over the years that have made the list of favorite books (Stranger Things Happen, Globalhead, Burning Chrome come straight to mind) as well as a few that I keep around because enough of the stories in them are absolutely indispensible (generally retrospectives, like The Best Short Stories of JG Ballard or The Collected Stories of Greg Bear).

If you’re only going to read one story at a time, then mere brilliance is enough. But what does it take to make a collection that you can read cover to cover?

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Something that occurred to me during the latest fanfic kerfluffle:

All novels written for love are fanfic. The ones we call original are fanfic for the unrealized universe of works that exist only in the writer’s head.

What’s important to remember is that, as the writer, you are those works’ only fan, and it’s the non-fans, the readers of your actual novel, that your work needs to appeal to.

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April 20, 2006

I’ve told the authors, but some of the rest of you are probably curious, too. So here’s an excerpt from the letter I sent them:

Some of you may have heard the rumor that Wheatland Press, our publishing partner for Twenty Epics, has run into financial trouble and had to cut back on pretty much all their projects other than the Polyphony anthology series. This rumor is true. Unfortunately there was an email mixup, and Susan and I didn’t hear about this as soon as Wheatland intended to tell us about it, so we’ve had to scramble a bit to make other arrangements.

After talking to a couple of other possible partners, we’ve decided that the simplest option, and the one that offers the best chance of still meeting our original goal of having the book out by the end of May, is just to publish it ourselves, directly. This shouldn’t have any noticeable effect on the book's availability or quality.

The main downside is that the book manufacturing service we’ve decided to go with (Lulu) doesn't offer a full range of print sizes, and we’ve had to reformat the book for a 6"x9" size rather than the 5.5"x8.5" it was originally designed for — this has eaten up some valuable time . . .

Plus there’s been the whole moving-to-Switzerland thing. :)

So, to make a long story short, that’s done now, and while the end-of-May schedule is a little tight, we still ought to be able to make it.

We’ve got a manuscript, and we’ve got a cover painting (pix soon). So we ought at least to have advance reader copies available at WisCon. An honest-to-goodness first edition if I can manage it, but that at the very least. If anyone has a really strong desire to proofread, now would be a good time to raise your hand. :)

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Shoot for the stars, and if you hit the moon, well, shit, you’re on the fucking moon.

— Kameron Hurley

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April 17, 2006

The first night I stayed in my new place, I fell asleep trying to remember a book that was never written. I’d lived with that book once, waking and sleeping, for the better part of four years; between my eighteenth birthday and my twentieth wrote nearly thirty thousand words of it. Then some time later a different idea took hold of my imagination, and for more than a decade that was, more or less, that.

I don’t know what brought that unwritten book to mind. Some unlikely combination of sounds, scents, flavors; rain-wet spring air through the open window, the feel of a thin foam mattress on a hard floor. Probably I’ll never know.

But: ten computers and several versions of Word later, I still have the files. So last night I pulled them up, curious what this Moles kid might have written that could have made such an impression on me. Was there anything more than potential there? Was the book any good? Was he any good?

Well, he was no Meghan McCarron. He didn’t have much sense of character—his protagonist was a middle-class Everyman (Everyboy, really); his other characters could mostly be summed up in a word or two: the Girl, the Antihero, the Rival, the Father Figure, the Other Girl. His dialogue was occasionally good, occasionally over the top, often banal. His plots took a few twists and turns, but they were complications, not reversals. He had trouble with pacing, trouble figuring out which parts of a scene were unnecessary, where exposition was needed and where it could be dispensed with.

But he also had a flair for description, when there was an image worth describing; the beginnings of an individual style, built on a rhythm of short phrases and simple adjectives. He had an ear for made-up languages and specialized vocabularies. His invented mythology took the 80s’ medieval preoccupations and complicated them with 90s concerns like modernization, ethnic cleansing, religious apocalypse, cutting up and reassembling familiar tropes in ways that wouldn’t be completely foreign to readers of Steph Swainston or Jeff VanderMeer. His fight scenes weren’t half bad.

If I ran into him in a workshop, what would I say? You’ve got potential, kid—certainly. I could give him some advice on where to cut, how to decide which scenes to write and which to skip over. I could suggest that he dispense with some of the more florid ‘legends’ and ‘ancient texts’. I could point him to some useful reference books.

The deeper flaws, though—mainly they’re just the natural consequence of being a well-traveled but sheltered and introverted nineteen, having your talent outstrip your experience, knowing more about history and mythology than about how the world works and how people think and behave. I look back and I think my instinct—that if I’d finished that book when I was twenty, I could have sold it, but that it’s just as well that I didn’t—is the right one. The better part of a decade passed between when I stopped working on it and when I finished and sold my first short story, and I don’t think any of those years were wasted.

On the other hand, there are things about that Moles kid’s writing that I miss: the broad canvas, the obsessive worldbuilding, the reaching after high tragedy. The lack of pretension, and the un-self-consciousness of his imagination.

I have to put that unfinished book down again, now; I’ve got other things to do. But maybe when those things are done I’ll pick it up again. It would be a gift, of sorts; an homage, even. There are a handful of writers without whose influence I couldn’t have become the writer I am today, and that kid is one of them.

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April 6, 2006

Shortly afterwards the conversation turned upon Hegel, and I maintained that his writings were mostly nonsense; or, at any rate, that there were many passages in them where the author wrote the words, and it was left to the reader to find a meaning for them.

— Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy

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If Futurama, Dune and Battlestar Galactica had a quick screw somewhere in the aisles of your local Wal-Mart, their mutant love child might be something like John Aegard and Kat Ayer’s new comic, Greeter. The complete Issue 0, “In Vitro Mobilization,” is on line at Greeter Comics.

Johnzo’s a crazy-talented writer and Kat Ayer’s a damn good artist; I can’t wait for Issue 1.

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March 29, 2006

From the Onion:

Science-Fiction Novel Posits Future Where Characters Are Hastily Sketched

OREGON CITY, OR — Science-fiction author Morgan Richards announced Monday completion of his long-awaited novel, Zeppelins Of Phobos. The swashbuckling tale of the battle for control of the solar system depicts a terrifying future filled with virtually indistinguishable characters who only communicate through stilted and shallow dialogue. “I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of the two-dimensional, almost caricatured human race spreading to nearby planets,” said Richards in the April/May issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. “I wanted to capture the sense of adventure, lust, and peril that these characters would feel, along with their utter lack of social context or emotional complexity.” Richards said the very nature of his characters demanded that they live in the unlikely, unrealistic, and overly cinematic society he painstakingly details in the book.

I could link to the piece, but since I’ve already quoted the whole thing, instead I’ll link to “It's Funny How What You're Saying Relates To My Novel.”

(P.S. Morgan Richards, eh? Dare I suspect that someone doesn’t share Hannah’s liking for Richard Morgan?)

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March 26, 2006

Hannah linkdumps one Miss Snark, as quoted by someone who I don’t know who it is on account of only having an LJ handle to go by: “Failure isn’t trying and not achieving. Failure is not trying. Failure is letting your fear rule your actions. Suck it up. Wasting your talent is not ok.”

Hannah’s reaction: “Who gets to decide what’s a waste of a talent, and why do they care?”

Which was pretty much mine, too. Only I’m short one X chromosome, so it came out sort of like Hey, I’ll waste whatever I m——f—— well please!

But: then I got to thinking.

And it occurred to me that I have seen, and been irritated with, something more or less like what Miss S seems to be talking about — for instance, sending good work to a bad ’zine — all y’all zinesters: not one of yours; one of the bad ones — because you’re afraid it’ll get rejected by the people you’d secretly like to publish it. Or thinking: My life as a writer will be complete if I learn to write stories (or books) at least as good as the worst stories (or books) that get published, and one of them sells. That’s a waste I can’t support.

But, again, note:

A sin of commission is a positive act contrary to some prohibitory precept; a sin of omission is a failure to do what is commanded. A sin of omission, however, requires a positive act whereby one wills to omit the fulfilling of a precept, or at least wills something incompatible with its fulfillment.

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February 22, 2006

Yes, it’s actual Islamic Amazons, among the Marsh Arabs, documented by Wilfred Thesiger four decades before I wrote “Planet of the Amazon Women.” Dammit.

In other news, I’ve sent my passport off to the consulate in Atlanta and should get it back today or tomorrow, with all appropriate stamps and attached paperwork. So maybe this Switzerland thing will actually happen.

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February 13, 2006

I’d put off talking about this till I’d actually seen the contracts; but now I have seen them, and anyway Greg already spilled the beans: “Planet of the Amazon Women” will be in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection. (As will several other fine stories, or anyway stories people tell me are fine stories.) Thanks to the folks at Strange Horizons and to everyone that helped me with this one.

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January 19, 2006

I was talking to someone about Roger Elwood, some time in the last few weeks, only I couldn’t remember his name. Elwood . . .

. . . is best known for the bizarre episode in which he flooded the SF market in 1972-1975 with carelessly edited theme anthologies.

Prior to that time, anthologies and collections were very popular with readers, and were considered by the publishing industry to be a surer bet than novels. Roger Elwood ended that, singlehandedly breaking the story collection / anthology market. It has never wholly recovered. He squandered industry credibility accumulated over decades by better anthologists, and wrecked the readers’ faith in collections. . . .

By the time Roger Elwood was finished, you couldn't have sold an SF anthology into the North American market if it were priced at ten cents and made out of Godiva chocolate.

Wikipedia has the scoop. With graphs and everything.

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January 10, 2006

I don’t know how I’m going to manage this and WisCon (and I am going to manage this and WisCon) but I’ve just accepted an invitation to attend Rio Hondo 2006, June 11-June 18.

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January 6, 2006

Now that everyone’s exhausted the subject, I come across this post Scott Eric Kaufman put up a couple of weeks ago, which among other things, as it happens, captures my initial reading of the ideologically suspect Skull Island natives:

. . . what you have is a highly-specialized society which has 1) impressively come to inhabit this island from whereabouts unknown, 2) built tremendous walls to protect the rest of the world from the island’s occupants and 3) descended into a state of mere substinence because their duty as stewards has prevented their culture from evolving. Maybe I’m not the one to comment on the representation of an evolutionary arms race, since I’m inclined to strip it of its cultural implications and say “that’s what happens in an evolutionary arms race,” but the fact that I’m already churning this information through such lofty cognitive devices indicates that the film does what any respectable film should:

It presents you with grist your mill can’t easily refine.

He has some other interesting things to say, too, about the ideologies of the film and the ideologies its viewers bring to it; his commenters have some equally interesting responses (e.g. Jodi Dean: “There is a weird way where the film implicates us in justifying or excusing Jackson’s use of the Kong story.”), and Kaufman has some interesting replies (the part about “meta-cringing,” I could particularly relate to.)

Those of you who were bored by the film will probably find the discussion equally boring, but those of you that weren’t, have a look.

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Lawrence M. Schoen’s “The Sky’s The Limit,” from ASZAS, has made the preliminary Nebula ballot!

(First person to properly cast that in the Damon-Runyon-speak of Schoen’s narrator gets a prize . . . I’m not sure what prize, though.)

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December 23, 2005

My appreciation of Lucius Shepard’s “A Walk in the Garden” is up, over at Mr. Schwartz’s ED SF Project.

For those of you who prefer something less wordy, my original ‘appreciation’ is here.

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December 19, 2005

Mad talented writer Victoria Garcia (“Anthropology,” “Wally’s Porn,” etc.) has posted* a thoughtful and sensible essay, cleverly rooted in TESL training, on the best way — or anyway a promising way — to critique writers with relatively low skill levels.

When I was very young, I used to subscribe to the Harlan Ellison notion that the obviously untalented needed to be discouraged, and with flourish. Now, a decade and a half later, that approach has lost its appeal. I am a much kinder, less rabid sort of person. Also, I have become less convinced that I am a sacred, unique snowflake of special, unique specialness. Simply put, I do not have the capacity to be that kind of a prick anymore.

But what then, you ask. Well, you’ll have to read on. Suffice to say that being a prick is less work and probably, for many people, more fun. However, it doesn’t really help anybody, and it’s still being a prick.

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* Posted some time back, that is — hey, V, you knew I’d discover your lj eventually, didn’t you? How’d the retreat go?

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Roger Ebert, on Memoirs of a Geisha: “I know, a geisha is not technically a prostitute. Here is a useful rule: Anyone who is ‘not technically a prostitute’ is a prostitute.”

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December 16, 2005

Gregory Benford vs. Darrel Schweitzer.

Scott Lynch.

John Scalzi.

(Okay, maybe there’s an implied comment.)

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December 7, 2005

I finally figured out what all this genre argument reminds me of.

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December 6, 2005

A little while ago I started describing myself politically as a “tax-and-spend libertarian.” Now I think I need an elevator pitch for my artistic and philosophical positions. Taking the odd internet quiz only goes so far.

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December 2, 2005

In other words, as long as I’m in trouble I may as well compound it.

So, mostly I find these discussions of genre categories either amusing or dull, depending on how cleverly the people doing the discussing write. They never, ever settle a damn thing, not even the particular rhetorical points that get made during the discussion. But that’s okay. Sometimes, by side effect, something interesting comes out of the discussion anyway. There’s a point where for me the crosses over into annoying, though, and that’s the point at which someone says, as a statement of fact, that “science fiction is just a kind of fantasy.”

When you unpack that, it’s really quite a nasty rhetorical move — unintentionally nasty, maybe, but nasty nonetheless. Not only does it say the question’s settled and you should all shut up, but it says it in a deliberately belittling way. It’s an imperialistic move, an annexation of territory and a denial of self-determination. It’s hard to see what good purpose such a statement could serve. The implication that there is no distinction worth making is clearly false, given that the discussion is happening at all — whether you find the distinction worth making is one thing, but other people clearly do, because they’re making it.

It’s probably just a backlash against the generations of Analog types whining about fantasy’s infection of the science fiction section, but that doesn’t make it any more attractive.

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December 1, 2005

Any system of definitions that rolls it all into one big undifferentiated ball o’ fantasy will have to explain why there’s no point in distinguishing the worldviews of, say, “Seventy-Two Letters” and Bone Dance.

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Side note: Ben, now would be a good time for you to post a long screed on your “sources of reader pleasure” theory of genre distinctions.

Shorter Sarah Monette:

Characters and cultures (and authors) interact differently with a world that is predicated on technology from a world which is predicated on magic. . . . Science fiction is about human beings’ relationship with technology, with the machines we build. . . . Fantasy, on the other hand . . . There’s a terribly weird way . . . in which fantasy is always Marxist, because it refuses the alienation between the worker and his work caused by the advent of machines. Wizards’ power is not displaced into technology; it remains in their bodies, in their minds.

Shorter Ted Chiang:

[F]or me, a useful way to understand the difference between SF and fantasy is to consider the difference between science and magic. . . . I submit that what distinguishes magic from science — even imaginary science — is the role of consciousness. Magic has a subjective component — the intention, desire, or willpower of the practitioner — that is explicitly excluded from scientific experimentation. . . . So why would some phenomena depend on a practitioner's will or desire? Because, in fantasy, the universe distinguishes between persons and mechanisms. . . . Before industrialization, it was easier to believe that we lived in a universe that recognized persons. . . . Once conscious intention was removed from the creation of devices, inventions could spread so rapidly that you could see society change within a single lifetime.

Longer but still shorter Jeff Vandermeer and his Evil Monkey:

[Po-mo Thomas Kuhn riff about subjectivity of science] . . . [Ted is] comparing what is done in the real world with science to what is done in the fictional world with magic. Because, as I keep saying, magic doesn’t exist in the real world. So why doesn’t he compare what’s done with science in the fictional world to what's done with magic in the fictional world? . . . [H]e's mostly talking about certain forms of heroic fantasy. . . . Which leaves out surrealism, magic realism, urban fantasy, and all kinds of other things that don’t dominate the best-seller lists but that do constitute the core of the really cool cross-genre stuff being done. . . . Does science fiction really concern itself with progress? I think it assumes progress many times. It assumes it, but it doesn't engage in the implications of it. Which may be one reason I think of science fiction and fantasy as being more or less interchangeable.

Exactly the same length Elizabeth Bear:

[O]n the difference between fantasy and science fiction. I still say there isn’t one.

Bear, you win a prize: You’re the first science fiction writer I’ve heard say that, whereas fantasy writers (Moorcock, Miéville, Jeff . . .) seem to say it all the time. (I know it’s inaccurate to pigeonhole you as a science fiction writer or pigeonhole Jeff as a fantasy writer, but I hope you’ll both know what I mean.)

It’s really easy to find exceptions, shelves full, to any strict definition of the line between fantasy and SF. I’m not going to try to make one here. Instead I’m going to point you at an essay called “Mark Twain” by Gordon Atkinson, aka Real Live Preacher. (Also here.)

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Update: Oops. Fixed link to Jeff’s blog.

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November 29, 2005

Pursuant to this discussion at Meghan’s (“Deja vu all over again”) and this discussion at Justine’s (“Nothing changes”): here is, not a list of my ten favorite novels, but rather, a list of a dozen or so books that are among the ones that first come to mind when I start thinking about what might go on a list of my ten favorite novels. Books that I go back to again and again, that I’ve read at least half a dozen times each over the last ten years; the kind of books, in one respect or another, that I’d like to write. (In particular, note that, though I do think they’re all damned good books, I’m not saying they’re necessarily dozen best books I’ve ever read. It would be easy to come up with another list of a dozen books that I think are as good but which, for whatever reason, haven’t had the same long-lasting effect on me.)

• Banks, The Player of Games
• Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford
• Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• Gibson, Neuromancer
• Høeg, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow) aka Smilla’s Sense of Snow)
• Le Carré, The Honorable Schoolboy
• Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
• McHugh, China Mountain Zhang
• Miéville, The Scar
• Ondaatje, The English Patient
• Williams, Metropolitan / City on Fire
• Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun

Now, the first thing you’ll note about this list is that all the books on it are thoughtful, quirky, stand-alone thrillers with strong settings and distinctive characters and a clear authorial voice. (Except for the couple of them that aren’t thrillers).

No.

The first thing you’ll note about this list is that the ratio of Y to X chromosomes is very nearly one to one. What’s up with that?

The conversations at Meghan’s and Justine’s were mostly about editorial bias. I like to think that’s something I’m relatively free of — but of course I would say that, wouldn’t I? And among the stories I have published / am publishing, a fair proportion of my favorites are by women — but of course I would say that, too, wouldn’t I?

Still — I think part of being a good editor must be the ability to recognize a story that’s a superior story of its type, even if that type doesn’t happen to be a favorite of yours. And so even if it were true (which I’m far from convinced it is) that women strongly tended to write certain sorts of stories and men strongly tended to write certain other sorts of stories, then an editor committed to presenting a diverse collection of stories should feel confident that picking the “best” stories in the slush pile ought to lead to, or at least not lead away from, having a diverse collection of authors.

But. I still find that list a bit disturbing. Is it that not as many books like those are written by women? Is it simply, as Alan put it, that there “aren’t more things being written that I like?” Do I just like the wrong kind of books?

Or is it — most disturbing possibility — that there are a whole bunch of books out there like that, written by women, that I haven’t read, that I’ve been subconsciously assuming are not like that, because they’re written by women?

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Fair warning: If anyone should try to use this post as a jumping-off point for complaints about how all those books by women that are supposed to be so good are boring and overrated, to that person no mercy will be shown. Not my point at all. Be told.

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November 15, 2005

Dave Schwartz has had a brilliant idea: the ED SF Project.

By my count there are 320+ stories archived at the site. I’m willing to bet that there are that many SF writers/critics/fans/what have you who have some sort of presence on the web. So I’m thinking, let's all of us write an appreciation of one of the stories.

It doesn’t need to be something long — it could be a few paragraphs, or it could be in-depth; it could be a critical analysis or just a reaction to the story. Just something that focuses on the fiction and shows how much impact the site has had. Remember, this is an appreciation. A celebration. Pick a story you love, or discover a new one by reading through the archives. Discover for yourself just what we’re losing. Then let’s give it the best sendoff possible.

Go read about it. Then sign up. Then do it.

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November 12, 2005

I wrote this 1400-word Borges-lite story last month that I’d like criticized before I inflict it on editors. Anyone got time to savage a helpless ficcion?

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The one about selling a novelette and retiring, I mean.

Still — a disappointment, but not exactly a surprise. SCIFI.COM’s brief statement says it all, really:

As SCIFI.COM gears up to expand with exciting new ventures utilizing the newest technology . . .

The goal of a statement like this, from a PR point of view, is to make you feel like you’re going to get something cool to make up for what you’re losing. The fact that exciting new ventures utilizing the newest technology have zero relevance to SCI FICTION just goes to show, I think, what an odd bird it always was over there.

(And look! Now the old guard can go back to pretending there are no professional online markets, and stop having to say “except for Ellen.”)

All y’ll who had stories up there, I hope you’ll keep an eye on the archives and put them up somewhere if the Channel takes ’em down. Ellen published some fine work there and it’d be a shame to have to go dig it up out of the Wayback Machine all the time.

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Update: It just occurred to me: First Susan’s blog, now SCI FICTION. It’s a sad week for teh intarwebs.

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November 10, 2005

Publisher’s Publishers Weekly review of Tim’s book: Overwhelmingly negative.

Publisher’s Publishers Weekly review of that other book: Overwhelmingly positive.

Draw your own conclusions.

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Update: Fixed punctuation of PW. I do know better. But it’d be easier to remember if the official punctuation actually made sense. (Contrast: Woman’s Daily, Women’s Daily, Women Daily.)

I need a mental image of the magazine that would really go with the title. Something where publishers would be the content rather than the source or the audience. Publisher pin-ups? Publisher road-tests?

And, for the record, that mispunctuation was in my capacity as a writer, not as a blogger. As a blogger, I just get my facts wrong.

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So the circus has left town. I’ve said all my goodbyes and I’m camping out in the abandoned shell of the Governor’s Club, wondering whether I should try to make it to 4:30 and the reopening of the bar, or head back to my room for a nap. Oh, the suspense! This is the excitement of which great postings are made. But before I resolve this cliffhanger, let’s pretend to do a con report.

The story about the rabbit is true. Also the story about the fairy porn in the pocket program. Also the story about the dragon porn — can you call it porn if it’s so bad you can’t tell if it was actually supposed to be erotic? — the dragon porn in the big New York publisher’s sample book. (Hey-o!) The story about the amazingly bad story written in haste by a posse of mostly-drunk authors outside the GC on Friday night, that one’s unfortunately true as well. (If I’ve left anyone off the copyright list, y’all don’t let them escape, y’hear? Let me know.)

More importantly, though, the TWENTY EPICS reading went off without a hitch. Unless you count my choice of author pictures for the poster.

Figure 1. The infamous promotional poster. We probably didn’t need a poster in the first place, but I couldn’t help it — I’m a desktop publishing junkie.

I suggested to Meghan that I could swap the pictures out before I put the poster up here, but she thought it would be better if I were to post it as-is, and then she and Alan and Dave could vilify me. Go nuts, kids!

We occupied a corner of the first floor overflow lounge, Sunday morning, and played to a packed house, if by “house” you mean “the circle in which people could sit comfortably around that corner and hear people read.” Dave and Meghan read the beginnings of their stories and Alan read a series of excerpts from his, and everybody seemed to have a good time, even those audience members who hadn’t realized they were going to be read at when they sat down.

The rest of the con wasn’t bad, either. If you weren’t there, we missed you; if you were there, I’m probably missing you already. ’nough said?

All right. The bar opens in ten minutes, and my battery’s running low. I’m sure the usual suspects (over on the left, there, if you’re reading this on my front page) will have more news.

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Update: Added link to JJA’s discussion of the dragon porn excerpt and corrected spelling of “Hey-o.”

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November 2, 2005

Thoughts spurred by Meghan’s thoughts on National Novel Writing Month:

I had a small epiphany this weekend. I wrote about three-fourths of a story in one sitting, over a couple of hours, and could have finished it then and there if I hadn’t been heading off to see Good Night and Good Luck. Contrast with yesterday night when I spent forty-five minutes on two sentences in my novel and ended up scratching them out.

The epiphany was realizing that it’s not that I can’t write quickly —

— it’s that I can’t quickly write anything I actually care about.

And it’s not that the stuff I don’t care about is bad. Maybe a third, maybe half of my small body of published work falls into that category — stories that have been well received and that I’m now rather fond of. They just don’t mean as much to me as the other stories, the ones that took months to write after bubbling up from the broth of ideas that had been simmering for years on the mental back burner.

Okay, I’ll ’fess up. I know I’m supposed to love all my children equally, but I don’t. Here’s the list:

• Easy stories:
  • Long Past Midnight
  • Fetch
  • The Memory of Water
  • The Ideas
• In-between stories:
  • Irrational Histories*
• Hard stories:
  • On the Night
  • Theo’s Girl
  • The Third Party
  • Planet of the Amazon Women

*The Irrational Histories are a special case. They’re easy enough to plot, but insanely research-intensive. So on a minutes/word basis they’re probably somewhere in the middle.

So what’s the pattern?

The easy stories are mostly shorter than the hard stories — “The Memory of Water” is novelette-length, and “On the Night” is a short, but otherwise the easies are all shorts and the hards are all novelettes. The easy stories all have more or less realistic, contemporary settings — some of them are more historical and some of them are more fantastic, but still, familiar enough that I didn’t have to worry about what things looked like or whether the worldbuilding made sense. Meanwhile the hard stories are set, two of them, in a late-medieval, early-modern fantasy world that might pass for alternate history if you squint but is mostly made up out of whole cloth, and the other two each on their own far-distant worlds in their own far-distant futures. Lots of worldbuilding, lots of thought about exactly how things look and feel and smell, lots of careful description to make sure it all gets across to the reader. The protagonists in the easy stories are everypeople: Blue-collar utility worker, primate researcher, German army officer, failed writer. The characters in the hard stories have complex back stories, arcs that don’t necessarily start or end within the framework of the story: actor turned rebel, diffident scholar turned government official, disillusioned career soldier far from home, economics professor and undercover revolutionary cadre in love with aristocratic mathematical genius, Russian Muslim ballet dancer and causality researcher. The plots in the easy stories are intimate and almost entirely personal; the plots in the hard stories are personal to the characters but also political, moral, philosophical.

So is it really novels I’m having trouble with, or is it the novels I want to write?

And is there a point in writing a novel, even a good novel, just to have written a novel?

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October 21, 2005

Forster and Benioff are able craftsmen who apparently thought it might be interesting to seal themselves into a narrative box with no way out. Sorry about that, guys — I hope it was a growth experience.

— Andrew O’Hehir, reviewing “Stay” for Salon

On a side note: A week or two ago I was thinking of getting some T-shirts printed up that would read NO ONE WANTS YOUR IDEA.

Naturally I am now, on two or three different fronts, stuck for ideas.

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October 16, 2005

Despite all my bitching, I managed to install MySQL and MediaWiki on my laptop this afternoon. I’ve just spent a happy seven hours transcribing scribbled notes and unwritten thoughts into my own personal Wikipedia.

Well, six hours. The first hour I spent fiddling with the color scheme.

Figure 1. No obsession is complete without a logo.

I think I can confidently say that this is the first time advancements in computers have actually gotten me something that I wanted before it was invented. (If last week’s video iPod announcement had included making it as easy to rip DVDs and play video as iTunes makes it to rip CDs and play audio, that would have been number two. But it didn’t, and anyway I never wanted that this bad.) Since college, if not earlier, I’ve been daydreaming about being able to collect and cross-reference all my character notes and story fragments and plot ideas and settings — I think I even spent an afternoon trying to cobble together a Hypercard stack for it, some time in the early 1990s. Now I’ve actually got it.

I know you don’t understand how momentous this is. That’s okay. This isn’t about you.

Figure 1. China Miéville says he’s in it for the bestiary. I’m in it for the gazetteer.

One hopes that in the long run this will be a productivity tool. In the mean time, it at least gives me something to do, excavating this box full of notebooks, on long and uninspiring winter evenings.

(And some day, when I’m implausibly successful — and also dead — future scholars and writers of tie-ins will thank me!)

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October 14, 2005

Portraits of elementary particles, by Jan-Henrik Andersen. The collections of quarks are a bit dull and educational, but I do like the photon and the up quark and some of the other “solo” portraits. More on Mr. Andersen’s site, too.

Figure 1. Supersymmetrical W boson.

(Via Cosmic Variance, who got it from BoingBoing.)

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I’m not sure I actually want to read it, but how can you resist the premise?

It is impossible that the stupendous events which followed the disastrous invasion of the earth by the Martians should go without record, and circumstances having placed the facts at my dispoal, I deem it a duty, both to posterity, and to those who were witnesses of and participants in the avenging counterstroke that the earth dealt back at its ruthless enemy in the heavens, to write down the story in a connected form . . .

Figure 1. VENGEANCE AT LAST UPON THE PITILESS MARTIANS.
“As we got near them a terrible scene unfolded itself. Two of the Martians were stretched headless upon the ground. Three others had suffered horrible injuries, and only one remained apparently unhurt . . .”

(Some incredibly thoughtful gentleman — who is shortly going to wish he had more bandwidth — has helpfully scanned both the original 1898 New York World serial and the 1947 reprint. With illustrations!)

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October 13, 2005

In comments tangential to this post on Meghan’s LiveJournal, various theories of “hard fantasy” are proposed:

Tim Pratt: I always thought “hard fantasy” just meant fantasy that was emotionally realistic and had a well-developed setting. So no vague rolling fields of elfland or great destined earth-altering one-true-love. Fantasy where things are messy and Fate doesn't take care of everything.

Meghan: Hard SF has a much more specific program about grounding SF in “real” science. So, just hearing the phrase “hard fantasy,” I think of that same “rigor,” i.e. grounding the fantastic in actual folklore traditions and not riffing off other writers and creating a genre echo chamber.

Also Meghan: [Or] perhaps “hard fantasy’s” rigor is more about writing the fantastic in settings that humanity would actually inhabit — with pain, with class, with ugly people — as opposed to a boring (and ideologically problematic) ye-old-golden-middle-ages.

Niall Harrison: I think of Ted Chiang — i.e. treating fantastic premises with the rigour charateristic of hard sf.

So what would bad hard fantasy be? What would be the equivalent of the quintissential hard-SF clunker that not even an Analog reader could love? I think I’ve seen it in Meghan’s first version, stories of the middle-class American family inherits Scottish lakeside castle — little girl dreams of horses — water-horse drowns little girl variety. But what’s the “rigorous premises” version? The “emotionally realistic” version?

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Update: Jeez — sorry, Niall! Too much time in the economic history section of Waterstone’s.

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October 12, 2005

So: Trying to put together a guerilla Twenty Epics reading for World Fantasy. Problem: Venue. Ideas, so far:

• Michelangelo’s coffee shop: Advantages: No friction with hotel or with concom. Disadvantages: No alcohol. Might need permission.
• Hotel room: Advantages: Easy to do. Disadvantages: Crowded, less convenient for audience, could generate noise complaints.
• Second-floor conference room hijacking: Advantages: Convenient for audience. Disadvantages: Could collide with official programming.
• Party coup d’etat: Advantages: Cheeky, beer-friendly. Disadvantages: Staging an event in the middle of someone else’s event always confusing. Don’t know if there are any good target parties.
• Hotel lobby invasion: Advantages: Cheeky, public. Disadvantages: Hotel might get irritated if we start handing out free beer.

Other thoughts?

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October 11, 2005

Chiwetel Ejiofor is the man. Let’s get that out of the way up front. I’ve got nothing against Daniel Craig, but if Sony/MGM had any balls, Chewy would be the next James Bond.

As for the rest —

Things blur together. Clearly it is pure coincidence that the outfit Annabella Lwin was wearing, Saturday night at the Paramount, was no more than a strap and a shade of blue removed from the inexplicably tattered outfit Summer Glau was wearing all through Serenity. A strap, a shade of blue, and a pair of boots. Coincidence. Clearly it was only to be expected that Mark Mothersbaugh and the Casale brothers would embrace, extend, and accelerate any fragments of science-fictionality that might happen to be rattling around your subconscious. Clearly, going from the movie theatre, to Telegraph Avenue, to an Art Deco monument filled with exotic spuds of all ages, colors, shapes and sizes — following two hours of space cowboys and exploding spaceships with a comforting dip into familiar countercultural strangeness, that with the raucous but innocent carnality of Bow Wow Wow and that with the full-on, space-age, Technicolor, punk-rock superluminality of Devo — was asking to have my brain scrambled. And yet.

I don’t think at this point I can emotionally respond to Serenity in a way that doesn’t treat it as just one color of paint in the Pollock canvas that was this Saturday, especially since Sunday was red wine and California sunshine and mad conversation with Susan and Matt, and yesterday was hangover and not quite enough sleep and flying from summer into what on the California coast would easily pass for winter.

So what you get is the cold, clinical, intellectual reaction . . . which could best be described as a cartoon monkey in surgical scrubs with SCRIPT DOCTOR stenciled on his chest and the voice of Steve Buscemi, swinging from branch to branch through the tangled thickets of the plot, saying things like “Could we get a little romantic tension over here?” and “Listen, kid, make me care about the leads, then we’ll talk about this guy who’s only got six lines . . .”

What is Inner Script Monkey is trying to tell us? Well — Serenity was clearly a movie for the fans. It’s a high-mag zoom on overlapping segments of plot and character arc, high enough that some of the segments are optically flat, and all of them have their endpoints cropped out of the frame. It’s not that the plot wasn’t entirely comprehensible, but as a story, it was frustrating. It would have made a great season-ending two-part TV episode, but as a stand-alone film? Flat.

It’s easy to see what Inner Script Monkey would do, if there’d never been a TV show. Keep the prologue, cut the doctor and the crazy girl out of the opening sequences on the ship and the Wild West planet, make the fight scene in the bar the first time they meet the crew (making the captain’s choice to take them on contrast all the more sharply with his “I stick my neck out for no one” ethos). Show the crushes the doctor and the engineer have on one another instead of telling. Give some snappy Bogey-and-Bacall (or at least Ford-and-Fisher) scenes to the captain and the high-class tart. Give the village people more than one scene and the Oracle old black guy some more lines. Give us enough Union Alliance territory to make it clear why they’re worth fighting against, maybe a flashback or so to make it clear what the Confederates Independents went through. Give the crazy girl a costume change and a pair of shoes. You get the idea. There’s lots of ways to do it.

Script Monkey also would have had the schoolteacher in the dream sequence and the kids she was teaching, crazy girl included, sound like an actual schoolteacher and actual kids. He would have had the mad scientist sound like a sane scientist. And he would have either cut the folksy dialect or made the characters who spoke it speak it more consistently. But Script Monkey’s picky that way.

Seriously — I wanted to like it more than I did, which is a hundred and eighty from what I expected going in. I think most of the credit for that goes to the actors, not just Chewy Ejiofor, but the guy who played that one bad guy in Jade Empire, and the guy from A Mighty Wind and Best in Show, and the guy who had the cameo as the cult leader on Strangers with Candy, and the Baldwin brother who’s not actually a Baldwin brother, and the girl who’s done a bunch of TV that I haven’t seen, and the lady who probably deserves better than the work she’s got, and the girl who has really good hair, and the girl who could probably act well enough if she wasn’t being asked to play an anime character. They all tried like hell to sell it.

I don’t regret the cost of the ticket, by any means, but I do kind of regret not getting to see the movie it could have been.*

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* About that other movie, the one I didn’t actually get to see — just one question. If the Reavers are angry all the time, how do they keep their ships working? “Killing rage!! Arrrrgh! Must! Fix! Fusion! Reactor! Arrrrgh!”

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October 6, 2005

Steve Cook, in a Valve Crooked Timber comment thread on the latest crackpot Shakespeare authorship ideas:

I’m fully aware of some of the peculiarities of early modern authorship, and I’m certainly willing to accept the ideas that Shakespeare stole rather quite a lot of his drama and that many of his plays were more collaborative than most people make them out to be. Indeed, given the way that seventeenth century drama worked and given the publication history of the First Folio, it seems quite possible that that’s the case. What I’m not willing to do is accept on faith that, say, Cyrus Vance wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark and didn’t fess up to it because it was seen as unbecoming for a Secretary of State to write about a two-fisted archaeologist. George Lucas spends all of his time in Northern California and attested work of the Skywalkerian is really bad, whereas Vance is a globetrotter who fought in World War II.

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October 5, 2005

. . . but I’m cautiously optimistic about the Halo movie. Alex Garland is a very good writer, for one thing (go read The Tesseract if you don’t believe me — I’ll wait); and for another, it seems like Microsoft is really interested in protecting the value of the franchise, and not just out to make a quick buck. Latest news is that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh have signed on as executive producers and WETA’s signed on to do the effects — so at least the monsters probably won’t suck.

The worldbuilding in the Halo games is as good as any I’ve seen in a video game, and better than the worldbuilding in a lot of SF novels — in some ways I think it’s as close as the US gets to answering the UK’s New Space Opera. (The plot doesn’t have as much to recommend it, but, hey, Alex Garland.) It’d be nice if some of that could make it on to the big screen.

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October 3, 2005

I am planning to see Serenity at some point, and might even have gone yesterday if the weather hadn’t been so stay-on-the-couch crappy. But. From the Box Office Prophets’ Monday-morning quarterback team:

The marketing campaign for Serenity has cleverly focused upon that grass roots idea of confidence. They feel you might not know the characters in this franchise yet, but if you take the opportunity to do so, you will fall in love with them.

This is nearly the perfect encapsulation of the line everyone has taken with me on Firefly, and Buffy, and for that matter — though less consciously — Seinfeld. Not to mention lots of books whose titles I am ashamed even to mention. Not to mention a couple of acquaintances’ unfinished manuscripts. And here’s what I want to know:

Why doesn’t it work on me?

It’s not that I don’t like character-driven fiction. I fuckin’ venerate character-driven fiction. But why isn’t character alone enough to get my attention? Or keep it?

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September 28, 2005

I think we’ve now had several definitive takes on the “gods powered by belief” idea. For a while it was an okay solution to the “So I want to write a contemporary story about Athena or Yahweh or Hanuman or some other god with a penchant for direct and obvious interference in human affairs, but first I have to explain the lack of such direct and obvious interference in the near past” problem, but it’s run its course now; it’s up there on the trope shelf next to the ray guns, humanoid AIs, collectible artifacts and color-coded orders of chivalry and magic. Any new ideas? What else have we got?

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Substitute reader for player, author for developer, book for game, trope for mechanic, and so on — and keep one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button — and the “genre addiction / genre life cycle” musings here explain a lot. For instance:

What we see here is the consolidation of game designs tropes over the life cycle of the genre. Early examples within a genre tend to have a wildly diverse spectrum of game mechanics tropes that appeal to a broader spectrum of players readers. As the genre matures, the game mechanics tropes become more standardized and the needs of the genre addicts more homogenized. As the market segment consolidates and standardizes, the majority of the players readers are well served. They get more polished games books that have greater depth. Who could argue that a tightly polished game book like Warcraft A Game of Thrones is a bad thing?

. . . [However, when] you recycle the same standardized game mechanics tropes, you put players readers at severe risk of burnout on a genre. There are only so many FPS epic fantasies many people can play read before they don’t want to play read them any more. This is less of a problem for the super hardcore players readers. However, it is a substantial problem for the less hardcore players readers.

As the less hardcore players readers burn out on the game mechanics tropes of their favorite genres, they too are at risk of leaving the game reading market. The result is a steady erosion of the genre’s population.

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At least, as reported by his fellow Foolscap guests of honor. Scroll down to the 1:20PM entry, Foolscap, and work your way down.

(Now I’m almost sorry I didn’t go. Sorta.)

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I’m kinda bogged down with this apartment stuff, but in the mean time, go read this interview Chris Nakashima-Brown did with Bruce Sterling, about J.G. Ballard. Not only is it full of Ballardian neo- post-existentialist goodness, it’s Sterling, so it’s full of snappy one-liners like this one:

Well, science fiction’s a form of popular culture. But if you’d look at most science-fiction practitioners, they basically come across like a Nashville hat act. They’re hicks.

Truer words . . . myself included, naturally.

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September 5, 2005

1. To readers of Analog’s Blog’s Eye View who came here expecting science fiction. It’s been a science-fictional couple of weeks, but not in a way that’s conducive to talking about science fiction, if you know what I mean. For SF-related blogging, check out the Art and Infernokrusher archives.
2. To CascadiaCon attendees, for not putting in more than an evanescent apparition Saturday evening. It’s been a crazy summer, and I needed the long weekend to unwind. Next year in Anaheim!

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August 29, 2005

Oops, sorry, wrong Grimm. But clobberin’ is what the reviews have mostly been doing to Terry Gilliam’s new movie. Non-reviewer Jamie Zawinski, who was apparently driven bugfuck crazy by the Grimm experience, tells us that “Van Helsing was a far, far better movie,” and it’s not as though he’d somehow been fooled byVan Helsing.

Anyway, having sat through Van Helsing myself, not to mention such explosive summer blockbusters* as The Matrix Reloaded and Star Wars: Episode III, I didn’t think Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm was nearly that bad. It wasn’t even as bad as The Village. In several places, yes, it was in-a-bad-way Hollywoody, and yes, some of the fairy-tale logic was illogical in a merely illogical way (as opposed to a fairy-tale way), but the performances weren’t at all bad and there were some truly Gilliam moments. (The Gingerbread Man scene alone was worth the price of admission. Matinee admission, anyway.)

If you go in hoping for Grimm to be to fantasy what Twelve Monkeys was to time travel, well, yeah, you’ll be disappointed. On the other hand, if you go in as if it was just another committee-written summer movie, you may be pleasantly surprised.

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P.S.: Gwenda’s description of the film as “a terror of mediocrity” is not exactly undeserved. However, one could do a lot worse with one’s moviegoing dollar, this summer, than mediocrity.

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* I guess “explosive blockbuster” is kind of redundant, being as a blockbuster is a kind of bomb. Hey — bomb, Hollywood. Think about that.

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August 26, 2005

Seeing matters arriving at this unpromising situation, Bunyip Bluegum interposed by saying, “Rather than allow this happy occasion to be marred by unseemly recriminations, let us, while admitting that our admirable friend, Sam, may have unwittingly disturbed the composure of our admirable friend, Bill, at the expense of our admirable Puddin’s gravy, let us, I say, by the simple act of extending the hand of friendship, dispel in an instant these gathering clouds of disruption. In the words of the poem —

   ‘Then let the fist of Friendship
      Be kept for Friendship’s foes.
   Ne’er let that hand in anger land
      On Friendship’s holy nose.’”

— Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding

In honor of Australian fiction, I’ve changed the icon for this weblog’s Art category from this abstract ornament thingy —

— to this noble Puddin’.

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August 25, 2005

Hey, Why Aren’t More Australian Things Being Written That I Like?

Hey, why aren’t more Australian things being written that I like? That is to say, I used to read a lot more cool stuff by Australians, but now I don’t. What is up with that? The decline of Australian things that I like has its roots in Australian societal changes that include the increase in things that I don’t like. I also think that there used to be a lot more interesting stuff by Australians out there, but now there isn’t. In fact a lot of my Australian friends and colleagues have told me this, and I happen to agree. I did happen to read a couple of Australian stories recently that I liked, and they were pretty good. But those were the exceptions. Why is this? Australian stories used to be adventures but now they’re too adventurous. They are confusing and I don’t like that! Sturgeon’s Law still applies but it also applies to the 10% of Australian stuff that isn’t crap. So needless to say there’s more Australian crap. Look, just start publishing more good Australian stories that I like if you want to save the genre in Australia. I just know that there are other people who like what I like. (Young Australian readers in particular like what I like; it was what I liked at that age.) Clearly, something needs to be done about this to protect Australian publishing venues that have remained unchanged since the 1940s. You know, the good old days.

(I’m just kidding! Apologies to Alan. And to Justine. And to Australia!)

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August 18, 2005

From the first of Stephany Aulenback’s questions to Kelly Link:

Diane Wakowski thinks that to work against your will is evidence of bourgeois neurosis.

A-ha!

I’m not lazy. I just refuse to succumb to bourgeois neurosis.

This bit of Kelly’s answer, by the way, is also reassuring:

And every time I come back to the story, I start again at the beginning and rework the story down to the place where I have to start writing new stuff. Writing new stuff is very satisfying, but I put it off as long as I can.

(Interview via Gwenda.)

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August 15, 2005

I’ve already spent a disproportionate amount of wordage on this question of self-indulgence (disproportionate, that is, to how much I actually care), over at Mr. Cheney’s Mumpsimus; but for you folks whose first-pass impulse is to interpret it in terms of reviewer distaste for originality: What do you think of the Turkey City critical term “Card Tricks in the Dark”?

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August 13, 2005

You get a chance to see “Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus,” you take it. You get a chance to see it when Jim White’s in town to talk about the film and play some tunes, so much the better.

(Also, anyone tell me if Harry Crews is worth reading? As a storyteller, in this thing, he was really something else.)

Comments (3)

August 11, 2005

Things I learned on the way to Scotland:

• JFK is the worst airport.
• Changing clothes in an airplane toilet takes longer than you think. But it sure beats the alternative.
• St. Pancras Station is always under construction.
• Shane Warne is one hell of a bowler. (His new hair plugs look pretty good, too.)
• On the train, when you close your eyes for a short nap, and wake up in love with the girl pushing the coffee trolley, it’s ’cause you’re jet-lagged.

Things I learned in Scotland:

• It’s not just London that at 5:30 in the morning looks like the set of 28 Days Later. (I blame the tower blocks.)
• Best UK con custom e-var: Free drinks for every panelist in the Green Room before each panel. We need to import this one, guys.
• Irn-Bru tastes better than you’d think.
• Scotch doesn’t kill germs. Tequila kills germs. (Thanks, Gwenda!)
• You can get away with bringing overheads to a panel, if they’re good overheads.
• It’s still possible to have a good panel about slipstream, even if infernokrusher only comes up once or twice. (Thanks, Hal!)
• I should have listened to everybody who told me to read Paul Park’s A Princess of Roumania.
• Ben and I, in combination, are too loud. (Yeah, I know I should have known this one already.)
• Christopher Rowe really is a genius.

Things I learned on the way back from Scotland:

• JFK is the worst airport.
• However, it has the nicest immigration officers.
• And the beer’s not bad, either.

But:

• WisCon is still the Best Con.

Comments (14)

July 27, 2005

Unbelted occupants
Are not able to resist
The tremendous forces of impact by holding tight
Or bracing themselves. Their impact
With the vehicle interior
Has all the energy they had
Just before the collision.

— Volkswagen AG, “Unbelted Occupants,” as quoted by Michael Bérubé

As Bérubé says:

It is a compelling piece of work. I want particularly to draw your attention to the reiteration and personalization of “impact,” as the impact is no longer that of “tremendous forces” but of the “occupants” themselves, and the way this process is repeated in line six, where we find that their impact “has all the energy they had.” That abrupt modulation into the past tense is, I think, understated and powerful. We need not say any more about why these occupants are now spoken of only in terms of the energy they have lost.

(Alert readers may also recall Christopher Rowe’s magisterial “Our Prize Patrol Will Find You, No Matter Where You Are,” from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 9.)

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July 26, 2005

Presenting The Old Negro Space Program: The Shocking But False Story of America’s Blackstronauts.

Way funnier than it has any right to be — especially if you’ve seen too much Ken Burns.

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Update: This seems vaguely related, somehow. Pandagon on Intelligent Design:

You do know what evidence is, don’t you? It’s that stuff that convicts the B-list celebrities on Law & Order. Think about that . . . but on a big, global scale.

You see, one thing has nothing to do with the other — whether or not there was ever water on Mars has no bearing on if the entire planet flooded several thousand years ago. It’s not like Noah built an intergalactic starship and bumped his ass to Mars to dump off the extra water, all the while bringing the pure power of funk to benighted Martians.

And if he did, I have to rethink this whole atheist thing, because that’s sweet.

(Via Cosmic Variance, which by the way y’ should all read if you’re into sciencey stuff.)

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July 25, 2005

update (25 July 2005): The new one is out — and you (except for those of you who don’t) continue to disappoint me! Is it not passing brave to be a nominee, and ride in triumph through Tempe? Get nominatin’!

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There’s a new Nebula Awards Report out — sorry, Nebula Awards® Report, I mean. Through April 30th. Live on sfwa.org.

And you — you know who I mean — you haven’t been doing your job, getting out there and co-nominating the stuff I’ve nominated. Or even reading it, maybe. Some of it’s right on the bubble! Come on, folks.

Remember, Making These Awards Mean Something Begins With You.

P.S. Anyone remember what the - and ? and % mean, exactly? (They really ought to have a key on there, the way they do on the printed version.)

P.P.S. I keep thinking I ought to be able to come up with some sort of play on N.A.R. and D.A.R. So far, no dice. Anyone?

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Update: And I just filed, like, four more nominations. So pthfbbbbbbbbt.

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Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels say: “The meaning of a text is simply identical to the author’s intended meaning.” John Holbo says:

An ashtray did my spirit seal;
I rode no human shoes;
She seemed a vase that could not feel
The tent of earthly news.
No anthill has she now, no horse;
She neither knits nor toasts.
Rolled round in earth’s bejeweléd course,
With frogs, and blots, and ghosts.

When someone else uses a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.

Comments (3)

July 22, 2005

Can’t remember now where this turned up, but you filmies out there might dig this interview with David Thomson. Some interesting and paradoxical discussion in there about how the studio system, B-movies, all that, might have been better set up than what we’ve got now to produce good films.

Back when a studio was making, say, 50 films a year, a lot of those films got made in a fairly routine way: They were vehicles for one star or another. And the hope was that they were being made by people who knew their job very well. Everybody said at the time, “Well, you’ve got to keep on schedule, keep on budget.” But you look back at it now and you see that if people did [keep on budget], there was room for producing very interesting things. The trouble now in many ways is that every film is a one-off venture, made with intense examination, intense monetary ambition. Because there are a lot of people making every film now for whom it is the thing — the one thing they’re doing — and it’s got to be a huge success.

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July 19, 2005

When [literary theory] doesn’t work, well, that’s when it looks more like a bunch of people dressing up banal or insane propositions in ornate and/or ungainly and/or neologistic language. That’s when you get people like Baudrillard saying, “by the orbital establishment of a system of control like peaceful coexistence, all terrestrial microsystems are satellized and lose their autonomy,” at which point you should decide to move away from the guy who’s clearly been in the coffee shop too long and has been slipping absinthe into his espresso since noon.

— Michael Bérubé

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July 18, 2005

Infernokrusher, meet Space Squid. (It’s worth it just for the drawings.)

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The stuff the movie tried to do, it generally did pretty well. But it didn’t try to do enough stuff.

Also: I hope Nokia didn’t pay very much for that product placement.

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July 17, 2005

¶ A typically moral and conscientious Englishman finds it exceedingly difficult to keep morals out of art talk; he finds himself inclined to think, e.g. that R ought to have a bow more or less semi-circular and of a diameter about half the height of the stem, & a strongly outstanding tail; that an R with a very large bow and hardly any tail at all is wrong. But such moral notions as the word ‘ought’ implies, & such words as ‘right’ & ‘wrong’ — taken as having a moral connotation — are obviously absurd in such a discussion, and we should be ready to admit that any old shape will do to make a letter with. Nevertheless, special circumstances demand special treatment, and as a ‘confirmed drunkard’ may be well advised to ‘take the pledge’ and deck himself out with blue ribands, so, seeing the whirl of eccentricity into which modern advertising is driving us, it seems good and reasonable to return to some idea of normality, without denying ourselves the pleasure and amusement of designing all sorts of fancy letters whenever the occasion for such arises. Moreover, it seems clear that as a firm and hearty belief in Christian marriage enables one not only to make the best jokes about it but even to break the rules with greater assurance (just as a man who knows his road can occasionally jump off it, whereas a man who does not know his road can only be on it by accident), so a good clear training in the making of normal letters will enable a man to indulge more efficiently in fancy and impudence. . . . ¶ The kind of figure 2 shown in fig. 19, or the r’s in fig. 20, with violently contrasted thick & thin forms & enormous blobs might be amusing to meet if they were the unaided efforts of some sportive letter designer. But having become common forms they are about as dull as ‘Robots’ would be if they all had red noses.

— Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography, 1936

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July 14, 2005

Richard Rorty has often suggested that we treat Derrida’s work as a new kind of writing, a form of commentary on philosophy that owes something stylistically to Heidegger and to the experiments of literary modernism. Twenty years ago, when he made that claim to a bunch of graduate students at Virginia, he deeply offended those among them who regarded Derrida as being the bearer of some Revealed Truth. But I think it’s a decent enough way of thinking about Derrida’s strange prose. And I remain as mystified by the people who think that Derrida must be publicly repudiated if literary criticism is to be considered legitimate as by the people who once believed that Derrida had descended from the poststructuralist mountaintop with the tablets.

— Michael Bérubé

Talking of those “maybe I should just go to grad school” moments, I wish there was some way I could go back to school and study literature under Bérubé, philosophy under John Holbo, and economics under Brad deLong. Oh, and maybe physics under Brian Greene or Lee Smolin. And biology under Zombie Stephen Jay Gould.

All at the same time.

Comments (6)

July 10, 2005

I should get a bumper sticker that says that. In Braille.

Anyway: a brilliant piece of Borgesiana, first brought to my attention on Hanzi Smatter (a web site dedicated to savage mockery of the misuse of Chinese and Japanese characters, kind of the flip side of Engrish.com): The Tianshu of Xu Bing, a.k.a. A Book from the Sky:

Figure 1. I think it says “To Serve Man.”

a piece of art consisting of thousands of faux “characters” that are made up of various elements of Chinese characters, but don't actually exist as part of the written language. Xu apparently created wooden block type for the characters by hand, and printed them is a manner suggesting ancient religious texts.

— David Stone

Comments (3)

July 6, 2005

You wouldn’t think that something as straightforward as swords-&-sorcery could be made to sound as involuted and self-referential as hard SF, but the New Edge will prove you wrong. (Via Jonathan Strahan.)

Don’t get me wrong — I like a good swordfight, I dare say, better than the next guy (unless the next guy is Greg’s Aunt Helen). I even think they’re right about the difference between swords-&-sorcery and heroic fantasy — albeit in the sense, and with about as much relevance, as a Renaissance philologist would have been right about the difference between Norman French and Anglo-Saxon.

But oy.

Those who come to the New Edge looking for parody or mocking irony must look elsewhere. Sword and sorcery has been down and out for so long that it has often survived in a bastardized form by parodying itself . . . “One of the main problems with High Fantasy is that it has become a sort of post-Tolkien monocrop where a good deal reads and looks the same.” . . . “Modern s.f. fans mock fans of Golden Age s.f. for seeking Sense of Wonder as if it were some phantom grail for fools. . . . [A]ll sense of wonder has been sucked out of the books because there is no experience of Exploration, of the discovery and unveiling of new and mysterious places and circumstances. Couple this anemic deficiency with an absence of headlong, driven, vital storytelling, and you have a prescription for a moribund genre.”

It may sound strange when read from a space as snarky as this one’s become over the last few weeks, but I’m coming to realize that the one thing that really pisses me off is contempt.

These writers . . . were working writers. . . . They were trying to please the same sort of audience who gathered at the foot of ancient storytellers, not the young poet who lurked on the edges of the campfire, sneering at the story.

O-kay. Well, all I know is that tegeus-Cromis, who “imagined himself a better poet than swordsman,” could take Conan any day of the week.

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Update: Nathan Meyer has made some comments that I think are worth addressing. I’m going to cheat, and address them up here. (Of course Dave and Nick have chimed in since then, but I’ll just have to deal with that.

So, Nathan:

I appreciate your not wanting to start a brawl. I don’t want to start one either. If I sound didactic it’s because I’ve heard all this half a dozen times over the last few years. (Read Alan’s generic version for the standard form.) Usually it’s somebody with a different axe to grind — hard SF, say. But it’s the same straw-man arguments every time. Sweeping denunciations of whole swaths of the genre. Blame, cast wholesale on MFA programs and lit-fic imitators. Vague accusations aimed at an unexamined “political correctness.” The assumption that this is all the fault of bad editing and bad reviewing and what the readers really want is what I want — which is what I used to read when I was a kid. (Or they would, if only they were in possession of all the facts.) I get tired of hearing it, and that makes me testy.

The Edgies complain that there’s not much 30s-to-50s style swords-&-sorcery being published these days. Fair enough. They complain that they don’t like most of the fantasy that is published. Fair enough to that, too — it doesn’t do much for me, either.

But when they stop talking about what they want to see more of and start talking about what they want to see less of, I want them to show their work. When they say that what the brick-thick fantasy novel reader needs is a “high-octane” dose of old-fashioned s-&-s, I want to know what makes them think so many other people want the same thing they want. When they say that what survives of swords-&-sorcery is mostly self-parody, I want them to name names. (Steven Brust? I sure wouldn’t say it to his face.) When they say that what’s “shackled” fantasy is the attempt to please some shadowy “literary set,” I want them to make a case. (Who? What kind of shackles? Which literary set?) When they talk about high fantasy having become a “post-Tolkien monocrop,” I want them to explain why the differences between Cherryh, Jordan, Martin, Walton and Wolfe aren’t worth taking notice of. When they say that modern SF fans have nothing but contempt for a sense of wonder, I again want to know who they’re talking about, because I don’t know anybody in the SF world who professes contempt for it, and the people who (for whatever reason) use the silly spelling are some of the most old-school I know.

High fantasy is its own animal. God knows it’s not without flaws — I haven’t read it regularly myself for at least ten years, and I don’t think I’ve read a series that I was really happy with since I was too young to know better. But modern high fantasy isn’t Tolkien clones, any more than Banana Republic sells clones of Jermyn Street and Savile Row. It started out that way, maybe (Iron Crown trilogy, anybody?). But it’s been around for thirty years now, give or take, and can trace its pedigree through Moorcock and Leiber to Howard to Burroughs to Kipling as surely as through Feist and Eddings to Brooks to Tolkien. (If you could cut all the teenage dramedy and gratuitous travel out of Jordan, you might actually have a pretty good swords-&-sorcery novel, with all the exploration and unveiling of mysteries that the Edgies could ask for.) Not to mention all kinds of other influences, from Heyer to Fraser to Clavell.

And whatever high fantasy’s faults — no question that there are many — the one thing they can’t be laid on is trying to impress the literati.

As an SF writer, I surely went through this phase where I worried about what They thought of me — the literary They, the academic They, the art-snob They. (You’ll find plenty of evidence of that right here on this weblog, if you slog through the “Art” archives.) And you know what I found out? I found out they were totally cool with it. Good writing is good writing, and good writers recognize good writing. The SF world is full of MFAs and the “mainstream” literary world is full of genre fans. Yeah, the “sneering poet” is probably still out there somewhere, but I haven’t met him. What you’re a lot more likely to get is the poet who listens appreciatively to the storyteller and then goes home to incorporate the old-school riffs into his avant-garde improv. The sneering poet just isn’t a player.

The sneering barbarian, unfortunately, seems to be alive and well.

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So, if I were to pose as a chess player, I’d have to also admit to being the worst chess player in human history. But this piece by John Holbo, arguing for the poetic beauty of Anderssen & Kiezeritzky’s Immortal Game, a poetic beauty that

cannot plausibly be explained with talk about “the complexity of language,” or “language-use,” or “language-games,” or “linguistic elements drawing attention to their own linguisticality,” or “free-play of signifiers”

does, I think, bear thinking about. Even if I can’t read the “poem” myself, and have to depend on Holbo’s exegesis of it.

* Also, the excerpts from Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense were enough to get me to add it to my Amazon (.co.uk, since it’s out of print in the US) wishlist. Everybody says I should read Nabokov; well, maybe this will be the gateway drug. I find irresistible the temptation to steal, and make use of for SF, the techniques that Nabokov uses to make Luzhin’s chess-obsessed worldview accessible to those who are unable to sense, as Luzhin senses, the “exquisite, invisible chess forces . . . in their original purity.”

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July 1, 2005

Alan DeNiro has posted the ultimate “death of the genre” meta-screed. From now on, everybody just incorporate it by reference, ’kay? No need to write new ones.

Hey, why aren’t more things being written that I like? That is to say, I used to read a lot more cool stuff, but now I don’t. What is up with that? The decline of things that I like has its roots in societal changes that include the increase in things that I don’t like. I also think that there used to be a lot more interesting stuff out there, but now there isn’t.

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June 30, 2005

Oh, no, not again.

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P.S. Extra points for the first person to correctly explain what’s wrong with the phrase “intrinsically interesting.” Update: And the prize goes to Dave Schwartz.

Comments (30)

June 28, 2005

Mr. Westerfeld makes an interesting observation:

Yeah, well, the inspiration of a new story is exciting. But if you wind up not finishing ninety percent of what you start, guess what happens. After a few years you’ll have written 100 beginnings, 40 middles, and only 10 endings. Which means you’ll be great at writing beginnings, only so-so at middles, and you’ll suck at endings. Which means you will almost certainly keep faltering between the middle and the end of every story, which means you’ll keep giving up and not finishing . . . Rinse, repeat.

This is a compelling argument. This would explain why my laptop has a Writing folder with over two hundred Word documents in it, some of them almost old enough to drive, not one of which is the completed manuscript of a novel.

Also, I recently read somewhere someone (Update: Justine reminds me that it was Justine) quoting Ted as saying that he started writing his stories by writing the ending. Which, whether or not it’s true, is a good story. (And would go some way toward explaining “Story of Your Life”.)

I’d like to drop everything and take Scott’s advice, but unfortunately I have bills to pay. So instead I give you the following newly-written endings to unfinished but not-yet-forgotten stories.

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Disorder under Heaven
ca. 1988

The Englishman arranged everything: passports, plane tickets, police reports. He offered Ethan money, a job, a new suit of clothes. Ethan declined everything except a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. Uncle Goro was waiting at the airport.

Ethan went back to the desert. He kept the two pieces of his heart on a cheap steel chain that he found at a thrift shop in Bakersfield.

He never saw Colleen again.

THE END

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Princes of the Sun
ca. 1993

He’d thought of flinging the book from the top of the cliffs into the ocean, or tearing the pages from it and burning them, one by one. But the tide was out, and there wasn’t enough driftwood to make a fire. So in the end he just left the book there, let it fall to the packed sand face-down, with its cover open and its pages crumpled beneath it.

At the top of the cliffs Sand looked back, thinking to see the book lying there on the beach, the water perhaps beginning to lap at it now. But he had climbed too far, and the book was invisible, one more anonymous lump among the piles of drying seaweed.

“So much for you, then,” he told himself; and he turned away and went into the trees.

When he came to the bowshot-wide clear-cut of what had once been the Queen’s Highway and was now no one’s, Sand found a fallen log on the shady side and sat down on it, where he would be in clear sight of the road; and he waited.

As the ghost had said: There would be someone along in a little while.

There always was.

THE END

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In the Light of Eternity
ca. 1997

“Goodbye,” said Felix.

In an instant, the bore pinched shut, the ring of light shrinking quickly down through the Planck scale, leaving only a last, short-lived bubble of exotic particles to mark its disappearance into the quantum foam.

The ghosts, through MESSENGER’s eyes, turned their attention outward. The Milky Way was on fire, the stars of Sagittarius dim through a haze of violet and ultraviolet and gamma, where the leading edge of the Arkystasia’s relativistic attack crossed the heliopause. Inward, the sun was visibly fading, its light shifted clear into the red by whatever futile defense the Crusaders were preparing.

Earth was a dimming blue star.

— We saved everything we could, said Felix’s ghost.

— We saved nothing, said Zheng’s.

The ghost of Yibaihua seemed to look from one to the other, and to Santander’s ghost, who was silent. Then it said:

— You saved enough.

Lights began to flare, here and there in the haze, like match-heads in a fire: comets, asteroids, ships, stations, there was no telling. MESSENGER’s senses began to fail, one by one, or to shut themselves down, in a vain attempt at self-preservation.

In darkness, the ghosts drew together, and waited to die.

— Hello, Felix’s ghost said. — Was that supposed to happen?

— I’m not sure, said Zheng’s ghost. — Maybe we missed something.

— We must have, said Felix’s.

— What is it? Yibaihua’s ghost asked.

— I don’t know, said Santander’s. — Let’s go and find out.

THE END

Comments (10)

June 19, 2005

So, a flurry of “manuscript” pages would arrive, buzzing with brilliant, but often disconnected passages, interspersed with what Hunter would himself call “gibberish” (on certain days) and previously rejected material, just to see if we were awake. “Stand back,” the first line would inevitably say, announcing the arrival of twenty-three or twenty-five or forty pages to follow in the fax machine. Soon there were phone calls from Deborah Fuller or Shelby Sadler or Nicole Meyer or another of his stalwart assistants. We always spoke of “pages,” as in “How many pages will we get tonight?” “We need more pages than that.” “Can you get those pages marked up and back to Hunter?” Pages were the coin of the realm; moving pages was our mission.

— Robert Love, Columbia Journalism Review

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June 18, 2005

And I’m abusing mine, to post something here where it’ll stand out rather than contributing to the conversation — where I’d feel compelled to closely read everything before I post, respond substantively to each substantive point, and type like hell in hopes of getting a word in edgewise before Ben posts another pithy two-page screed that forces me to rethink everything. Instead I will merely remark that:

• I fixed the bitch thing. (My anti-spam software is slow and stupid and, like the rest of my blog, at least two years behind the state of the art. I hate configuring software too much to do anything about that.)
• Nothing the Cabal has posted makes me feel particularly defensive.
• I think the criticism that we (for some fairly wide-ranging definition of us, from which feel free to exclude yourself if you’d otherwise be offended) ought to be writing more far-out stuff and fewer me-too stories is well taken.
• I think Dave Schwartz’s suggestion that the Cabal should apply that same critical eye to their own criticism also bears thinking about. (Meghan, as usual, says it well: “Why don’t you get angry about it? You are making me angry with your lack of anger.”) These are questions a lot of us ask ourselves, or have asked ourselves, somewhere in these early years of our careers, and they’re perfectly valid questions. What they aren’t, is a New Voice in Genre Criticism.
• I think most of the rest of the sentiments expressed over there — the Nebula process is screwed; too much SF is inward-directed and self-referential; SF-ness is defined by fan reaction, not subject matter — sound like places I’ve already been and things I’ve already done. (As Alan said: the unquestioned dichotomy btwn. “mainstream” and “genre” . . . and Atwood . . . aaaahhhhh, head hurts.)
• I waver between charitably assuming that the Cabalists are ignorant of the ongoing conversations around these questions (as ignorant as I was, say, five years ago) and charitably assuming that they are aware of those conversations and sooner or later will find something new to add to them.
• The best way to get attention as an SF critic, cf. Matt Cheney, is to say interesting things.
• I think the names are silly. The Cabalists themselves are on record as saying the names are silly.
• I think there’s something extra-silly — if, like Susan, I was in the middle of an annoying disseration chapter, I might say tedious, instead —, in a way that I’m not sure is intentional, about making earnest, concerned, serious posts about the State of the Field and the Meaning of the Genre under frivolous assumed names.
• So I don’t feel inclined to take the Cabal very seriously, and I don’t have any qualms about responding in a frivolous way.
• Viz., the betting pool.
• Viz., offering a prize for guessing a Clarion class rather than, say, prizes for guessing the identities of individual members.
• Viz., not holding any of this against them if, as, and when their true identities become known.
• If I didn’t think the SF world needed to have more fun, I wouldn’t be Infernokrushing.

Oh, and I’ll try and update the front-page betting records tomorrow, or Monday lunchtime at the latest.

Ben, Alan, one of you go post something about the Author and the Work, or about public and private audiences, or whatever, and let’s go talk about that there. (Hell, repost your comments from the DC thread.)

Remember, flippant is the new ironic.

Comments (27)

June 16, 2005

. . . or at least till after the Hugo/Campbell deadline, but I just ran across it and, given the amount of pressure exerted in the SF world over the last few years to venerate Mr. Harrison, I was delighted to find no less a quasi-authority than Cheap Truth At The Age Of One expressing thoughts so similar to mine.

The Floating Gods by M. John Harrison. Timescape, $2.50. This book is called In Viriconium in Britain, but was stupidly retitled for American release, presumably because Timescape believes we are boneheads. It’s the third book in a sword-and-sorcery trilogy that includes The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings.

It’s clear that a different but allied form of decadence [different from, and allied to, that of Jack Vance’s Lyonesse] has struck Across the Water. Its trademark is not perversion, but exhaustion. The Pastel City rejoiced in such sprightly characters as Tomb, “the nastiest dwarf that ever hacked the hands off a priest,” whose rotten malevolence was a welcome relief from Harrison’s sometimes stifling meditations on spiritual decline.

The Floating Gods has no such characters. It is set in a city smothered under a nebulous Plague Zone. Possibly Harrison has spent too much time in Brixton. Despair seems to have been printed across his eyeballs in letters of fire. The Floating Gods is a relentless exercise in total, stifling futility; it is one long, gray, debilitating dream.

Harrison’s extraordinary talent merely crams the reader’s head more firmly into the bucket. It is impossible to read this book without considering suicide. It is painful to read; painful even to think about. Let’s hope to God something happens soon to cheer him up.

No sign of that, alas. Though I’ve heard Mr. Harrison claim that people who find his work depressing just don’t get the joke.

---

God, I ♥ the email. Only in this day and age could one generation’s pseudo-zinester criticism manqué find the bar to finding and citing the previous generation’s rants so profoundly lowered. In fact, someone should start a Cheap Truth blog, in persona as “Vincent Omniveritas”, in the manner of Pepys and Caesar. Crush and burn the artificial categories of “past” and “future”!

Comments (0)

And further convince me that we’ve tapped into something that’s not only seriously funny but hilariously serious:

It seems almost banal for me to say — as if it’s news to anyone — that there’s something of a tendency for put-upon geeks to revel in revenge fantasies of intricate detail, imagining sublime immolations and sledgehammers upon skulls . . .

But that’s not infernokrusher, to my mind; infernokrusher doesn’t give a shit about such petty rationales as revenge. Infernokrusher takes that little posturing puerile ego in its black trenchcoat out behind the bike sheds, gives him a cigarette and says, settle down, pumpkin. It’s no fun blowing stuff up if you do it out of anger.

No. Infernokrusher finds that sorta psychological self-abusing and self-excusing wish-fulfillment wank just . . . well, dull.

— Hal Duncan, “Why Do I Infernokrush?”

(H)al, I think you’ve just posted either the introduction to, or the lead-off essay for, the first issue of Burn Ward: Dispatches from the Infernokrusher Frontier.

Comments (1)

June 14, 2005

Okay, this weekend I’m writing an irrational history featuring Alien Space Bats.

Poor writing is often criticized for its lack of plausibility. These attacks are usually phrased in terms of the need for “Alien Space Bats” or ASBs as the motive force behind the change. For example, “Well, Alien Space Bats could land the German army in Wales.” The use of the term Alien Space Bats has been expanded to include handwaving difficulties in order to get to an interesting discussion.

(Wikipedia, soc.history.what-if.)

Figure 1. Alien space bat in captivity.

In fact, I might make ASBs a regular feature.

Comments (9)

June 7, 2005

. . . well, lots of people, really. Off the top of my head: David Peoples, Greg Bear, and especially Gene Wolfe. Plotting this time travel crap is hard.

Comments (11)

June 5, 2005

Comments (8)

June 4, 2005

“AD 1937” is up over at Irrational Histories. If anyone wants to fund an epic 60-episode retro-space-adventure TV series using this as the back story, call me!

Figure 1. De Havilland D.H. 88 similar to that flown by Eric “Dusty” Blair during the Spanish Civil War.

Comments (0)

Update: Added Alan and Susan.

---

So, at some point the Flickr police may decide that I am actually a photographer and not, say, a plagiarist or a graphic designer or an illustrator or a pornographer, but in the interests of instant gratification (mine, that is):

Figure 1. Alan DeNiro: Island of sanity in an ocean of madness

Figure 1. Susan Marie Groppi knows more than you do

Figure 1. Benjamin Rosenbaum rocks the house with “99 Luftballons”

Figure 1. Christopher Rowe in a Landscape Between Drinks

Figure 1. David Schwartz (with someone else’s drink)

Figure 1. After the music. From left to right: Susan, Matt, David, Darja, Meghan, Ben, Alan

Figure 1. Meghan McCarron reads from “Close to You”

Figure 1. Susan and Matt imitating, respectively, Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock

Click, as they say, to enlarge. More to come as I have time to suck them from the camera. I tried to get as many Twenty Epics authors as I could, but I failed to photograph the mysterious and elusive Yoon Ha Lee. (Which is too bad, because on at least one of the occasions I missed she was wearing a gorgeous outfit.) I will have to get quicker on the digital-camera draw.

[wiscon]

Comments (4)

Due to a packing error, it looks as though I’ll be carrying my laptop back to Seattle in its natural state; so it occurs to me that I ought to get this into the Google caches and the Wayback Machine before I go, for posterity.

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Update: Added slogan, courtesy of Mike Ford.

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Notes toward an Infernokrusher manifesto

Slipstream, ultimately, is just a wussy term. We should be drawing names less from wishy-washy words (slip, stream) and more from monster trucks (krusher, inferno).

— Meghan McCarron

Literary excellence through superior horsepower.

— John M. Ford

Catch phrases

• Explosion is the new transgression. Demolition is the new deconstruction. — Benjamin Rosenbaum
• How far is the distance between infernos and krushing? — an Infernokrusher koan by Dora Goss
• Instead of “Well, where are we slipping? Are we beaver-like dam builders, or just clumsy waders?” we can now ask “Are we glad things are on fire? Do we like to Krush?” — Meghan McCarron
• More than the death of the Reader, Infernokrusher prizes the sudden, violent dismemberment of the Reader
• Monster truck fiction — ‘soft infernokrusher’ — rolls across genre boundaries . . . and krushes them
• Infernokrusher fiction explodes stagnant genre conventions, e.g., that it’s not okay to have all your characters run over by a monster truck in what would seem to be the middle of the story
• Infernokrusher is a violently anti-materialist movement, regardless of the materials involved
• While other attitudes to art yearn to communicate truths, to move people, to challenge, or to entertain, infernokrusher art wants to blow stuff up
• It is important to note that an infernokrusher sensibility does not require literal infernos or crushing
• Core Infernokrusher fiction would never forget to fill up the tank. — Karen Meisner

Redefinitions, subgenres, philosophemes

• slipstream -> proto-infernokrusher fiction
• slipstream : infernokrusher :: uniformitarianism : catastrophism
• Elemental truth in infernokrusher fiction: Nature crushes stuff too
• Religious truth in infernokrusher fiction: God likes to blow stuff up
• Innocence in infernokrusher fiction: e.g., eight year olds natural krushers
• The ultimate ambition of infernokrusher art is to blow up the world
• Heretical spinoff: slow infernokrusher fiction
• Important subgenre or trope in feminist infernokrusher fiction: blowing up Barbie
• Infernokrusher critiquing involves burning manuscripts and melting them to slag (the more positive reviews are more explosive)
• Resolved: Hot pink — color of infernokrushing

Pieces, presses, publications, organizations

• Ignitrix: (1) a goth, feminist Infernokrusher ’zine (2) sobriquet applied to Meghan McCarron as coiner of the term “infernokrusher”
• Thrown Down A Well Still Burning: a moody, “soft infernokrusher’ poetry ’zine
• Burning Hammer Review: Academic “soft infernokrusher” journal, probably from the University of Pittsburgh
• Burn Ward: Dispatches From The Infernokrusher Frontier: an anthology of Infernokrusher criticism
• Monster Truck Press
• Twelve Ton Press
• Megaton Press
• Swan Inferno!!!!!: the canonical Infernokrusher Ballet
• Blowtorch!: the canonical Infernokrusher Broadway musical
• Hammer and Napalm: Infernokrusher eating club at Princeton
• McSweeney’s #27 — the Infernokrusher Issue: comes soaked in gasoline, with a match

Deviations and faux-infernokrusher tropes:

• infernoes/krushing only as metaphor
• infernoes/krushing as resolution rather than violent irruption — trappings, but lacks sensibility

The infernokrusher coat of arms

• Monster truck, in flagrante, rampant
• Motto: Da ogne bocca dirompea co’ denti un peccatore

The first Infernokrusher poem

I blew up the plums
that were in the icebox
and which you were probably saving for breakfast
forgive me
I like fire

— Dora Goss

[wiscon]

Comments (67)

June 3, 2005

It was only a matter of time before someone rammed Infernokrusher into the Mundane SF movement, but Hal Duncan has done it with exceptional style and grace:

The Mundanes say:

That interstellar travel remains unlikely. Warp drives, worm holes, and other forms of faster-than-light magic are wish fulfillment fantasies rather than serious speculation about a possible future.

We of the Infernokrusher Movement say:

We laugh maniacally in the face of serious speculation. We will have warp drives . . . on our MONSTER TRUCKS! We will have worm holes . . . and bullet holes, and drill holes, and holes punched through the very fabric of the spacetime continuum by the giant fist of MECHAGODZILLA! These are not wish fulfillment fantasies. These are metaphors for the destruction that is an integral part of every possible future.

And more importantly, they’re fun.

This Is What We’re Saying.™

Because Infernokrusher is all about the fun.

Comments (4)

Whatever it is, this Tower is an easy target for a riled drunk, but not an actual problem in modern American literary fiction any more than it’s an actual entity.

— Christian Bauman (Via Gwenda)

Comments (3)

June 2, 2005

Karen Meisner is the winner! (I’ll put it in the mail this weekend, Karen.)

I could swear I posted this from Madison, but I must have spaced on hitting the “Save” button: I will send, at no cost to the recipient, my surplus* copy of Justine Larbalestier’s excellent The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction to the first person who promises to use its power only for good.

* I can really only read one copy at a time. And now I have a signed one.

Comments (6)

The critics’ word on “Amazon Women” is starting to come in.

• SH boards — I particularly like “Anonymous’” comments on the story’s second half
• Tangent Online review (by Lois Tilton)
• LitHaven post (by Simon Owens — thanks!)

Comments (0)

June 1, 2005

The inimitable Mr. D.S. provides the quintessential and definitive chronicle of this year’s PlausFab-Wisconsin.

[wiscon]

Comments (0)

May 28, 2005

Susan and I are pleased to announce the table of contents for Twenty Epics.

Comments (0)

May 25, 2005

. . . buried as it was by the e-piracy dust-up: both Part One and Part Two of “Planet of the Amazon Women” are now on line, just in time for WisCon.

Comments (1)

May 24, 2005

If it’s Tuesday, it must be time to bring up Margaret Atwood.

Okay, normally, I wouldn’t want to bring up Margaret Atwood twice in the same month, but this little Valve piece, “The Canadian SF ‘Canon’ and the Vexing Case of Margaret Atwood,” by Miriam Jones, says some kind of interesting things along the way.

Atwood’s plot relies too much on the actions of individuals. This was no doubt her intent: to create characters who are impelled to disrupt the mass consensus under which they live. However, in credible contemporary science fiction — as distinguished from space opera or adventure stories — the world is neither saved, nor destroyed, by isolated hero(ine)s or mad scientists. In this novel, not only do individual actions have irreversible global consequences, but individual actions in a social vacuum. It is more a solipsistic hallucination than a call to action, no matter how many books about the ecology Atwood recommends on the McClelland and Steward Website.

Ah, those hallmarks of the mainstream, the isolated hero(ine) and mad scientist. Where would we be without them?

(Fight amongst yourselves.)

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Update: Replaced link to Valve version with link to Ms. Jones’ blog version, on account of the Valve discussion on the article having apparently degenerated into an argument over who’s misquoted Stanislaw Lem and who’s insulted the memory of Philip K. Dick.

Comments (0)

May 23, 2005

Wow. I thought I knew Lucas couldn’t write, but apparently I had no idea. I don’t think I’ve ever seen or read anything so relentlessly, brutally, avoidably stupid.

And the fight scenes were lame.

Comments (14)

May 18, 2005

You have stolen the spot in the Locus Awards finals that was rightfully ours!

Comments (3)

May 17, 2005

Excellent article on Ender’s Game by John Kessel. Ethical philosophy isn’t something I’m all that interested in (though I do sometimes find it entertaining) — I always have trouble figuring out the axioms people are arguing from. But Kessel’s analysis of what Card does in that book, and how, is brilliant.

(Updated nowhere in particular — or everywhere — since I kept changing my mind about what I wanted to say.)

Essay questions (choose one, or set your own):

• Compare Ender as constructed in Kessel’s assertion that Ender “is the murderer as scapegoat. The genocide as savior. Hitler as Christ the redeemer” with the theology proposed in Borges’ “Three Versions of Judas”. Who is more moral, Kessel’s Ender or Borges’ Judas? Whose sacrifice is greater?
• Resolved: That Ender’s Game, published in 1985, is in fact the last 1950s SF novel. Discuss. Card justifies many otherwise questionable scenes with the premise that Ender is the only hope for the survival of the human race, the possessor of a unique and genetically determined combination of temperament and abilities. Trace the development of this theme in SF from the Gernsback era to the present. Would it play in Peoria today?
• Kessel argues that “the methods of evasion that I have delineated in the text, and their congruency with the psychology of adolescence, offer an explanation for the novel’s deep and broad popularity.” What do you think of this assessment? What other popular or classic SF works might it apply to? If Kessel’s argument is correct, what does that say about SF and SF fans? What about other genres?

Comments (5)

May 16, 2005

Part One of “Planet of the Amazon Women” is live on Strange Horizons. I had the idea for this one a long time ago, but it took me ten or a dozen years to become the sort of person who could write it. I’m pretty happy with the result. Expect a lot more in this universe, if all goes well.

Comments (0)

May 10, 2005

Wow. I love* experimental fiction, and yet this is so not what I love about it:

Never mind that this is precisely what most experimental fiction is attempting to accomplish: to draw attention away from the immediate “content” a novel or story is expected to contain, like a vessel its liquid, and to focus some of the reader’s attention on the vessel itself — better yet, to demonstrate that content only exists according to the shape of the container, the latter, after all, contributing the “art” to the art of fiction. More than anything else, experimental fiction works to remind the reader that fiction can be artful in this way, that it is more than a way to pass the time or give one’s emotional receptors a little exercise.

(Daniel Green, via Scott Esposito, via Chris Rowe, via Gwenda Bond — God, I love the Web! )

I read this, and — after I filter out the contempt for emotion and the contempt for the passing of time — two things come to mind.

1. I heard this jazz vocal piece once on the radio, probably from the 60s or 70s. It was, and was called (as far as I could tell), and was about, and had the refrain, “Four Beats with Five.” Either the vocals were in 5/4 and the instrumental music was in 4/4, or the other way around. The lyrics consisted, literally, of extended grandstanding about how difficult this was and how cool the singer and musicians and composer were for doing it.

2. Quoth Hitchiker’s:

   “So what you’re saying is that I write poetry because underneath my mean callous heartless exterior I really just want to be loved,” he said. He paused. “Is that right?”

   Ford laughed a nervous laugh. “Well I mean yes,” he said, “don’t we all, deep down, you know . . . er . . .”

   The Vogon stood up.

   “No, well you’re completely wrong,” he said, “I just write poetry to throw my mean callous heartless exterior into sharp relief.”

There is a point of view that says that the highest form of art is art that is not about anything — irreducible art — art for its own sake — Walter Pater — condition of music — all that.

I’m okay with that. I don’t necessarily feel that way myself, but I don’t have a problem with it. Just —

Lose the damn lyrics.

Don’t pretend to have both form and content when all you’ve got is form.

I know Mr. Green isn’t arguing for writing without content. But he does seem to be arguing that the point of experimental fiction is to elevate content above form form above content. [Thanks, Ted!]

I don’t think that’s true at all. But I suppose it’s entirely possible that this is exactly what, as Mr. Green says, most experimental fiction is attempting to accomplish.

If that’s true, I think it’s not art. I think it’s, at best, an amusing technical exercise.

Its logical end point is the equivalent, in fiction, of “Four Beats With Five’; of music meant, as they say in the Berkeley composition department, “to be seen and not heard.” Fiction written not for readers but for writers and critics.

Which would be a cryin’ shame. Because there’s no reason on God’s green earth why form and content have to work at cross-purposes, except that writers — experimental writers who sacrifice content for form, and bestselling hacks who sacrifice form for content, alike — have educated readers to think that way.

The purpose of a work of fiction is not to demonstrate lyrical or technical virtuosity. Nor is it to acquaint the reader with a series of bald but made-up facts. Nor even to involve the reader in an imaginary emotional landscape.

The purpose of a work of fiction is to engage all the reader’s faculties — not just the heart or the head or the eyes, but all of them, or at any rate as many of them as possible — in order to do something, some nebulous third thing — to (paraphrasing Eco) generate interpretations, to (paraphrasing Kundera) discover what only fiction can discover.

What, exactly, that thing is, depends on the work, and the writer, and the reader. But I think it takes form and content to get there. If it doesn’t, then don’t just do a half-assed job on the other one — get rid of it.

And if you’re going to have both, then it’s stupid to pit them against each other.

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* (plenty of)

Comments (8)

I’m trying to be good and talk about the Strange Horizons speculative poetry symposium, Part One and Part Two, over there rather than over here. Please join, since I know a lot of you know more about this stuff than I do. (Don’t make me use my blog, man.)

Comments (1)

May 4, 2005

1. Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams (non-fiction)
2. A Walk on the Wild Side, Nelson Algren
3. I See By My Outfit, Peter S. Beagle (non-fiction)
4. Copenhagen, Michael Frayn
5. Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
6. Looking for History, Anna Guillermoprieto (non-fiction)
7. “The Demons Tormenting Untersturmführer Hans Otto Graebner,” Robert Girardi
8. Dispatches, Michael Herr (non-fiction)
9. The History of Bombing and Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist (non-fiction)
10. The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard
11. “Shore Leave,” Tom Waits
12. Pontius Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, Ann Wroe (non-fiction)

Comments (3)

May 3, 2005

When, exactly, did “slipstream” stop meaning

a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility [Bruce Sterling, Catscan 5]

and start meaning stories that

feel a bit like magical realism . . . [that] make the familiar strange — by taking a familiar context and disturbing it with SFnal / fantastical intrusions [Rich Horton, quoted in Asimov’s]

?

’Cause that seems to be what it means now. And it’s not cutting it for me.

Comments (84)

April 30, 2005

• Portland was wet.
• Chicago is smaller in real life. Or seems that way. Maybe because it’s so flat.
• Christopher Rowe’s mime version of this and this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all year.
• I thought I hated the 70s mainly for aesthetic but basically progressive reasons. Apparently I was wrong: hating the 70s is code for hating feminism. (Okay, I’m exaggerating. But.)
• Belated capsule review of Steamboy: Otomo may be twice the animator that Miyazaki is, but he’s quite a bit less than half the storyteller. (Still better than Oshii, though.)

Oh, and:

• Twenty Epics is going to be a good book.

Comments (22)

April 20, 2005

Seán Harnett is wrong in absolving Tolkien of all blame (influentially-speaking, historically-speaking) for the modern Brick-Thick Fantasy Novel. He’s certainly wrong in describing classic heroic fantasy as “more truly a reflection of the times in which we lived” than “stories of divorcees and martinis and quiet, stately dysfunction,” unless perhaps he spent the glory years of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser running guns in Indochina, or hunting Mau-Mau for bounty in British Kenya. He doesn’t seem to understand that there is a market for slow immersive worldbuilding as well as for the “short, sharp shocks” of pulp and the shallow secondary creations that he says he prefers. And anyone who complains that China Miéville is being “squeezed off the shelves” by David Eddings is not writing from, como se dicen, the reality-based community.

But he may not be wrong in shifting some of the blame for the Brick-Thick Fantasy Novel to the Anti-Inkling himself, Michael Moorcock.

Comments (4)

April 16, 2005

In these remote pages it is written that the good books are divided into those:

1. sold in Foyle’s
2. slightly foxed
3. in revised editions
4. non-fictional
5. disturbing
6. unpublished
7. mass-market
8. included in this classification
9. with ugly covers
10. unread
11. written in distinctive and poetic styles
12. et cetera
13. recently thrown across the room
14. that, in magazine reviews, are indistinguishable from one another

Comments (6)

April 14, 2005

Taxes are done, cold’s on the mend, no more excuses. By May 15th, via Jenn:

1. Finish revising “Finisterra” for F&SF.
2. Write a pirate story to read at WisCon.
3. Post at least two “Irrational Histories.“

After all, it’s not like I don’t have to get this stuff done anyway.

Comments (1)

April 6, 2005

 . . . whoever he his. The man himself (via Amardeep Singh quoting Saul Bellow quoting Grillet):

Fifty years of disease, the death notice signed many times over by the serious essayists . . . yet nothing has managed to knock [character] off the pedestal on which the 19th century had placed it. It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same phony majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism.

Somebody talking about the man on Bookforum:

In a book of critical essays, For a New Novel (1963), and by the example of his own now canonical novels The Voyeur (1955), Jealousy (1957), and In the Labyrinth (1959), Robbe-Grillet pointed the way toward a fiction that eschewed psychological motivation in favor of pure, almost analytical description of physical reality. [Emphasis added.]

Now who does that sound like? Well, I don’t have anyone in particular in mind, to tell you the truth, but somebody should find ’em and put ’em in a jar with Robbe-Grillet and shake it to make ’em fight.

Comments (2)

April 1, 2005

Seems unaccountably to have been left off of Mr. Vedfamner’s list.

(In all seriousness, that’s a damned funny list, at least for anyone who pays attention to this stuff. I only wish I’d thought to mock up a cover for ASYBAS.)

Comments (1)

March 29, 2005

Probably y’all saw this already, but Tim Pratt’s The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl has the coolest cover.

I read this one in early manuscript and I’m really looking forward to seeing the real thing. (Even if he didn’t make any of the changes I suggested.)

Just seeing Tim’s name in that woodblock Western font sends the theme to “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” whistling through my ears. Between Rangergirl and “Hart and Boot”, Tim’s well on his way to becoming Mr. Alternative Western. I may have to jump on that bandwagon one of these days.

Comments (1)

March 27, 2005

Press release here.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think this is a hell of a ballot. I’m actually going to have to think about some of my votes this time.

Comments (3)

March 26, 2005

And as she says, the Cramer/Hartwell household should know. (Anyhow, the email I got said till next Saturday, and it’s Saturday. It’s been Saturday in England for more than seventeen hours.) So, without further ado: Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes’” has made the final ballot for the 2005 Hugo Awards. Naturally I would like everyone to buy the book, but for the benefit of those Hugo voters who can’t be bothered (not that — cough — I would know anything about that), the story is up in HTML and PDF at the All-Star Stories site.

Oh, and, um, it looks like I’ll be on the not-a-Hugo segment of the ballot. So I’ll see you in Glasgow.

I take full responsibility for this leak.

Comments (17)

March 22, 2005

Update: The actual Spinrad article is up on the Asimov’s site. (Thanks to Matt Cheney for the link; see also Matt’s comments there.)

On first skim, I actually think Spinrad’s right about the difference between science fiction and fantasy; I just don’t think it has the kind of world-shattering importance that he ascribes to it.

Oh, and on a side note, I’d love to see the Stable Strategies press kit that he describes, or something like it, if anyone’s got one.

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So, it’s agreed that SF is dead, or anyway on its last legs. But the diagnoses of the cause of death, and the prescriptions for how to revivify the corpse, couldn’t be much farther apart, or even much less related to one another:

Matt Cheney, “The Old Equations,” Strange Horizons:

Instead of encouraging writers who have a sense of the history and substance of genre SF to experiment with form, language, and even the basic meaning of fiction, [today’s SF markets give] the message (most loudly through rejection slips) that to write science fiction means to write as if nothing but the gadgets had changed since John Campbell’s heyday at Astounding in the 1940s. Consequently, the very writers who could revitalize SF and make it a less moribund genre go off and do other things and find audiences that actually appreciate their creativity.

Shorter Norman Spinrad, via Paul Melko:

SF is the visionary literature, the only literature that requires the reader to “create belief.” This is opposed to fantasy where no suspension of disbelief is required; fantasy is clearly not meant to model the real world, so the reader can breeze through places where it doesn’t. . . . SFWA . . . allowing the SF in its name to mean Science Fiction and Fantasy: a portent of doom to the genre!

All about form? Or all about content? Who’s right? I’m inclined to think they’re both wrong, but maybe it’s all three of us. Thoughts?

Comments (81)

March 21, 2005

Er, I probably wasn’t supposed to say anything about that till Saturday and the official announcement, so I’ve pulled it for now. Those of you who already know what I’m talking about, feel free to congratulate you-know-who, though.

Comments (6)

...on account of someone else is already doing it. (And Jonathan Strahan uses ASZAS as a point of reference for it. I can’t help but be amused. Or perhaps bemused.)

Let me know if it’s any good, ’kay? I like giant monsters as much as the next guy.

(Speaking of which, the next Irrational History should be up on “schedule” tomorrow. Without giving anything away, it has something to do with this post from John Holbo.)

Comments (5)

March 11, 2005

While we’re on the subject of the demise of SF: Following this note

As to our criteria for considering something a good pick for younger readers, well, I doubt I can reduce it to a formula. I tend to do a lot of channelling my inner 15-year-old; I know very well that there are stories (and subjects) that interest that person and stories that bore him to tears, but I'm not sure I can sum up the distinction in a few sentences. It’s not just a matter of young protagonists or “coming of age” narratives; there are stories we picked which feature neither. I do think younger readers are as a rule more interested in stories that tell them interesting and empowering things about how the world works, which is one of SF’s specialties overall, and less interested in stories that sensitively probe the confusions and ambivalances of people in middle age. Judith Berman had some pointed things to say about this in her 2001 essay Science Fiction Without the Future, a piece that made me want to stand up and cheer.

from Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Electrolite, in re the selections he and Jane Yolen made for The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens I just read (reread? parts seem familiar, parts un-) the Berman essay in question. And I found this bit particularly interesting:

Cowan’s sonde-ballon seems emblematic of millennial sf: in a trend presaged by steampunk, the archaic and the antique are replacing the techno-futuristic as the source of the very coolest things. Our more primitive past — in this case industrial and polluting rather than pastoral — has become, in Levi-Strauss’s words, good to think.

One suspects this phenomenon is connected to the fashion for new furniture with “distressed” finishes, and the practice of naming subdivisions after the pastoral landscapes they have replaced — Pine Woods, Mill Creek, Sunny Meadows. Things that are genuinely old are disappearing from everyday American experience. This loss of roots is part of the millennial alienation of many Americans, who feel adrift in a sea of images and information devoid of meaning. The primitive certainties of the past, represented by the sonde-ballon, might seem to be the only vehicle sufficiently authentic to navigate the millennial Mindscape.

The essay is largely devoted to an exploration of this phenomenon, or rather of a related super-phenomenon (hyper-phenomenon?), namely, the undeniable preoccupation of contemporary SF with nostalgia. (For a characteristic and, I would say, particularly egregious example of which see last year’s “Off on a Starship” by William Barton.) The connection, or suspicion of a connection, between that phenomenon and the general experience of “millennial alienation” gets only that one paragraph. What Berman goes on to talk about, mostly, is the need for SF to stop obsessing over its past, stare the present in the eye and imagine the future of that present. She concludes:

We can’t imagine the future if we can’t even look at the present. To connect with a wider, growing, more youthful audience, sf has to grapple with millennial horrors and alienation, with the rootlessness and ferment and absurdity, and, yes, with the millennial fear of the future, in ways other than to say, “I wish things weren’t like this. I liked it better in the past.” Without a vital link to the ever-changing Zeitgeist, sf will become a closed system where recycling subject matter and theme is all that’s possible. And science fiction right now seems to be not only losing its connection to and its interest in the Zeitgeist, but becoming antagonistic to it. Of course that brings with it declining relevance to anyone outside the narrowing circle.

It’s a fair cop. But I’d like to go back to that connection Berman mentions, take it one step further.

Science fiction’s traditional core obsession is with the idea of social change driven by technological advancement over time. A lot of us in the SF world tend to take that as a given — even as an eternal verity. But it isn’t — for most of the world today technological change is spacelike, not timelike (advanced technology comes to Africa not from the future, but from the US or Europe; to the US not from the future but — increasingly — from Asia and, for some reason, Finland); for most of human history, technological change has been so slow as to be imperceptible. The idea of Progress began with the Enlightenment and (even if little-p progress has kept going) was over, as a Big Idea, by the end of the “short 20th century” in the 90s, if not by the late 60s.

Isn’t it possible — likely, even — that science fiction’s traditional forward-looking orientation is as much a product of the forward-looking Zeitgeist in which it originated as nostalgic SF is a reaction to a Zeitgeist of millenial alienation? That science fiction used to imagine the future because society used to imagine the future, and not the other way around?

That the future, as Nathan Horn said, is just a fantasyland we can’t stop believing in?

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P.S. And yes, Nick, I know that this is just “the base of capitalist relations heavily informs the superstructure of culture.”

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One thing that people don’t understand, and resent, is that you don’t have to read everything with close attention if it strikes you as bad.

— Gardner Dozois

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I’m delighted to discover that Jim Cambias’ “The Eckener Alternative”, from ASZAS, will be in The Year’s Best SF 10, edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. Go Jim!

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March 8, 2005

For once. This fortnight, in “AD 1696 (Old Style) (AD 1697),” we turn to the History of Science. Complete, in this case, with clockwork automata and Automatic Eggs. Available for your perusal at Irrational Histories.

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March 7, 2005

To the eighteen other Zeppelin authors: I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings by singling out Ben’s story in my Hugo post last week. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t love your story or that I didn’t think it was deserving of an award.

Apropos of that, in a discussion on editorial favoritism, award recommendations, and courtesy over at Jenn’s journal, the inestimable Mr. Hartman writes:

In some sense there’s no reason that an editor’s list of their favorite stories should be any more important than a reviewer’s, or your best friend’s, or your own.

So why is it, do you (y’all) think?

The whole awards business has me a little bit at a loss.

On the one hand, it’s easy to see how it could go wrong (and, presumably, has been going wrong).

On the other hand, I’m more likely to nominate and/or vote for stories that I’ve read than stories that I haven’t; of the writers who haven’t already had my attention for years, I’m more likely to read stories by people I know than those by people I don’t; and of stories by people I know, I’m most likely to read the ones they’re particularly fond of, or the ones that’ve already gotten some attention. (If other people think the same way, that probably creates some statistically significant patterns in, for instance, Nebula nominations.)

So, as far as promoting my own stuff goes — since the idea of self-promotion makes me uncomfortable and the idea of getting an undeserved award is distinctly unattractive — I generally limit myself to “By the way, in case you missed it, I wrote this, and you might want to read it if you haven’t.”

But then the other kind of story I’m more likely to read (and so more likely to nominate, vote for, etc.) is one where everyone I know is slapping me with it and saying “READ THIS!” I don’t have any trouble doing that in person, and I suppose I don’t even really have trouble, say, mentioning something here when I’ve just read it.

I did find myself very uncomfortable, though, when I made that Hugo post, with posting my own “year’s best” list. Partly because it would expose how shallow and scattered my reading is these days, I admit, but mostly because it seemed like it would be cruel to all the people I know who did perfectly good work that either I didn’t read or wasn’t to my taste.

Maybe the discomfort with editors listing their favorite stories is related. If nothing else, if I edited something, I shouldn’t have either of those excuses not to reccommend it.

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March 2, 2005

It’s called “Sunshine,” and it’s about the sun. It’s written by Alex Garland. There’s a mission called Icarus 2 that is taking a bomb to the sun to try and reignite a section of it. The bomb is the size of Vancouver and it’s been built in space. There’s been an earlier mission, Icarus 1, which has failed. And what’s happened to it is a mystery. There’s a religious element to the film — the sun is God, really.

— Danny Boyle in Salon.

I’m sure the SF community will — what’s the Tom Stoppard phrase? — open their flies and patronize all over it (cf. zombie community, 28 Days Later) — but what the hell. I like Garland and Boyle.

There’s something going on here that I can’t quite put my finger on. First Soderbergh’s Solaris, then Michael Chabon being interviewed in Locus, telling us he’s working on a balls-out alternate history novel called The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Now this. Maybe SF is in the middle of getting the kind of respectability it’s always whined about not having.

Not that it’ll be appreciated. One man’s ghetto is another man’s “safe space.” Sometimes the’re the same man.

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Interesting musing by Gary Westfahl over at Locus on the similarities between Heinlein and Dick, as writers. (As someone who’s just finishing outlining the hell out of his novel-to-be, I take exception to some of the remarks he makes in regard to Dan Simmons, but even the points I object to are interesting ones.)

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March 1, 2005

I shouldn’t play favorites, but nonetheless I’d like to put in a particular plea for Ben Rosenbaum’s novelette “Biographical notes to ‘A discourse on the nature of causality, with air-planes’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum”, from ASZAS. There are plenty of other good stories in there, too, so if you’ve got a favorite, by all means nominate it.

I also hear that there were some fine stories published last year that were not edited by me:

• Emerald City’s Hugo recommendations page
• Locus magazine’s 2004 recommended reading list
• Some good stories Matt “Mumpsimus” Cheney read last year

And if those don’t do it for you:

• Mark Kelly’s meta-list of 2004 best-book lists.

Many of these are now available on-line somewhere, if you missed them the first time around. So no excuses. Remember, Making These Awards Mean Something Begins With You.

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P.S. For those of you keeping score at home, my own eligible works are the short stories “Five Irrational Histories”, in Rabid Transit: Petting Zoo (Velocity Press, May 2004), and “The Ideas”, in Flytrap (Tropism Press, May 2004 — also being reprinted in two parts in Norwescon’s latest progress report and convention program, by the way), and the novelette “The Third Party”, in Asimov’s (September 2004). I’m not as excited about them as I am on the stuff I’m working on now, but they’re not bad.

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There’s nothing more tiresome than a Kelly Link imitation story. What Kelly does, what others have done that follow the tradition she follows, is extraordinarily artful, because it’s so difficult. I think there may be a general feeling out there that it’s easy to write like KL, because I see so many people attempting it, but it's not easy and imitations of her work fall flatter than post Godzilla Tokyo.

— Lucius Shepard [probably]

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If I’m actually going to get anywhere on this novel, I think the histories had better officially go to a biweekly schedule.

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February 24, 2005

The latest history, for your perusal.

On the one hand, it seems like writing one of these shouldn’t take four hours. On the other hand, maybe if I did this more often it wouldn’t take four hours.

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I’ve just heard from the inestimable Mr. Hartman that Strange Horizons will be running my novelette “Planet of the Amazon Women”, probably some time this summer. Thanks a million to everyone who helped me out with this one, and especially to the fine folks at the Fairwood writers’ group.

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February 17, 2005

Am I a bad person if I give up reading a story — a published story, that is; I’m not talking about reading subs as an editor — after the first paragraph, because I can’t read the text for the subtext, because the subtext is shouting

I AM A SCIENCE FICTION STORY!

NOT ONLY THAT, I AM A “HARD” SCIENCE FICTION STORY — BY WHICH I MEAN ONLY THAT I WILL CHEERFULLY VIOLATE P.O.V. TO POUND INTO YOUR HEAD EVERY DETAIL OF EVERY GADGET, NO MATTER HOW BORING THAT GADGET IS, OR HOW DISTRACTING SAID POUNDING IS FROM WHATEVER ELSE IS SUPPOSED TO BE GOING ON, NOT THAT I ACTUALLY HAVE ANYTHING INTERESTING TO SAY ABOUT SCIENCE.

IF YOU’RE NOT READING ME WITH A COMPLETE SET OF 1940S HUGO GERNSBACK READING PROTOCOLS, THEN NUTS TO YOU, YOU WEAK-MINDED HUMANIST PINKO LIBERAL!

Am I wrong in red-lining stories that make it look like the author hasn’t read anything outside the genre since Huck Finn in high school, and that even then they didn’t pay attention? Or has the minimal set of professional fiction writers’ tools still not expanded at all beyond grammar and punctuation in the last three centuries?

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If I could pick one of my personality flaws to eradicate (others of you who know me might choose others), it would be this one: When I fall behind on something, my natural reaction is to avoid thinking about it, let alone doing anything about it, and so fall even further behind. Case in point: it’s time to admit there won’t be an Irrational History this week. I’ll try to make it up to you.

Meanwhile, you can read this Iain Banks interview on Salon.

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February 15, 2005

(No, not Downing Street. — Okay, I’ve been watching too much Ian Richardson the last couple of days to even think of that.)

No, just wanted to mention that All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories made SF Site’s Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2004: Editors’ Choice, tying Zoran Zivkovic’s The Fourth Circle for the #10 spot. Not bad company to be in, at all.

Further proof that our authors rock.

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February 8, 2005

“Showa 20 (AD 1945)” is up over at Irrational Histories. It’s a little long, but (I think) it’s not too bad.

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February 7, 2005

To the five and one-third of you who have been breathlessly awaiting the first all-new installment in the Irrational Histories series: Please exhale. I did mean to have it up today (of course), but I planned badly. I intended to get it done at the Fairwood marathon on Saturday; but I didn’t realize that writing these is, in one important respect, the polar opposite of writing most of my other stuff — it can only be done while surfing the web. (Or possibly in a good library, but that would take too long.)

I did get the bones of the piece wired together this weekend, but now I have to flesh them with facts — or, as we here at the Institute for Applied Chrononautics like to call them, “facts.” I didn’t have time (or “time”) to do that yesterday, so: this evening.

“Showa 20.” Stay tuned.

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February 4, 2005

I can’t believe the NYT obituary for Ossie Davis doesn’t mention his fine work in Bubba Ho-Tep.

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February 2, 2005

For those of you who missed this exchange in the comments on “A Note To Writers”:

JON HANSEN: You’re just letting the subs pile up? How come?

Delayed due to the illness, or have you already lost the thrill of slushdiving?

ME: Couple of reasons. Since Susan and I are collaborating at long distance, reading the MSS as they come in would involve a lot of photocopying and extra mail costs, whereas if we wait till the end of the submission period I can just take a few days off, fill the trunk up with envelopes and drive down to California. Plus, it’s just easier to spend a couple of days going through the whole stack than to spend a few hours on it every week.

But in general, as an editor, I think it’ll be better to wait till all the stories are in and then judge them on an equal footing. And as a writer, I want to discourage rejectomancy — particularly of the “I haven’t heard anything, but Bob’s already got a rejection notice — they must like my story!” variety.

It’d be different if I was running a magazine — then it’d be rolling acceptances and rejections, and worry about fitting the acceptances into the publication schedule later.

(Still, at some point soon I’ll have to start at least opening envelopes and noting down names and titles and word counts, or the bookkeeping is going to get out of hand. At which point I’ll start posting slush reports like I did for ASZAS.)

Anyhow, if you haven’t submitted yet, do not despair. You’ve still got more than six weeks.

And I’d like to again point out that — so long as it’s epic — we will happily consider, in any genre or no genre, plays, poetry, sheet music (with accompanying audio), scripts, storyboards, box scores (with accompanying commentary) architectural drawings, recipes, assembly instructions, creative nonfiction, and anything else that stands a fair chance of reproducing well in black-and-white at 300dpi on cheap paper.

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February 1, 2005

“AD 1848”, the last of the original five Irrational Histories, is up. There are more hazards to international auxiliary languages than are dreamt of in Suzette Haden Elgin’s sociolingustics . . .

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David Levine spotted Sherwood Smith’s very nice review of All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories over at SF Site:

For many more than I, blimps — zeppelins — evoke science fiction of the 30s: death rays, evil Nazi scientists, manly two-fisted heroes, all of them racing about a landscape done in Art Deco, until World War II ended both the zeps and that golden, curiously innocent, age of heroic fantasy.

Several of the stories in All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories try to recapture that spirit, and a couple spoof it. The rest of the stories range in amazing variety, tone, and idea. The two shared elements are zeppelins in some form, and strong writing. Some are idea stories, some character, many are both. And what zeps! At least two stories feature live ones. Flying cities, balloons that attract ghosts, pirate airships — the breadth of vision represented by these authors completely disproves the idea that one-idea anthologies don’t work. This one takes off and soars.

Go team!

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This rant on undergraduate papers has much more application to fiction than it has any right to.

(Courtesy of Making Light. And no, this isn’t a comment on the quality of submissions to Twenty Epics — we haven’t opened any of those yet. It might be a comment on the quality of submissions to All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, but, if you submitted to us and you’re reading this, not to yours, naturally. :))

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January 28, 2005

I’m pleased to announce that All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories made the Locus Magazine 2004 Recommended Reading List. Whee! And Rich Horton gives us a very nice review. Ben Rosenbaum’s wonderful “Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum” is also called out on the Recommended list — go Ben!

(Oh, and, yeah, “The Third Party” and “Five Irrational Histories” made the list, too. As did a lot of other stuff that I was not involved with but that I can personally testify is very good.)

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January 24, 2005

I read Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue back in . . . mmm . . . not sure, high school maybe, maybe earlier; I would have been in sixth or seventh grade when it came out. (But maybe later, because some of my memories of reading it imply that I must have had more exposure to lingustics than I think I would have had back then, even in a house with a linguistics major in it.)

I found it depressing — well, no surprise there, it’s a dystopia, and a pretty nasty one at that. And also frustrating. Frustrating because the Linguists of the book (the capital L denotes linguists working with the State Department’s Alien Relations program, raised from birth to be native speakers of alien languages), the male ones anyway, were bad linguists. Case in point: There’s a scene where a non-Linguist who’s married into one of the Linguist families starts to say “See here—”, only to be cut off by the head of the clan, who pompously forces him to modify it to the allegedly more literal, and therefore more correct, “Perceive this.” You can’t even call that prescriptivist. Even as a shibboleth, it’s just plain wrong. Even if these guys are really only glorified interpreters (and the Linguists must maintain secret knowledge of linguistics to some extent, or the oppressed women of the Linguist families would have had a good deal of trouble inventing Láadan), they seem to be shockingly ignorant of both etymology and metaphor. (“Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?” “A component, like a capacitor?”)

But anyway. Through a series of clicks that would be tedious to relate and that I can no longer completely retrace, today I came across Ms. Elgin’s web site, which is full of interesting ideas — even if on some questions, like Sapir-Whorf, we don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye. Have a look.

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The fourth Irrational Histories installment, the Mayan one, is up. I read this one for my uncle’s poetry group down in Santa Ysabel back in December.

Next week will be the last of the original five from Rabid Transit. Guess I’d better get speculatin’.

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January 20, 2005

Several months ago the SFWA told me they couldn’t link to my personal site because it was not “clearly identifiable as a personal author page.” I’ve never been quite sure what that was supposed to mean, but, regardless, has now been updated and should, hopefully, be a little less confusing, and not just to SFWA. (Among other things it now includes the last ten entries from this journal, so maybe the half of my relatives that haven’t been able to find it will, now . . .)

Also it’s now in CVS, which I know means nothing to y’all but makes me feel secure and fuzzy.

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. . . it looks like “The Third Party” is going to be reprinted in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction: 22nd Annual Collection. (Now I really need to do something about that novel . . .)

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December 13, 2004

Figure 1. The first step is to admit you have a problem.

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December 6, 2004

If y’all aren’t reading Will Shetterly’s weblog, you should be. He’s had a string of good writercraft posts lately:

• Characterization
• Challenges, obstacles, and sights
• Fakelore and folklore
• Overediting; beginnings

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Update:

• The Honorable Hack

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December 2, 2004

Long, long rewrite request from the fine folks at Strange Horizons for “Planet of the Amazon Women”. Some things I already knew (or should have known), but a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have thought of. And they get what I was trying to do. I knew I sent it to the right shop.

No word yet from F&SF on “Finisterra” after two weeks. Rejectomantic analysis says this is a good sign. Still, if I haven’t heard in another couple of weeks, I’ll drop them a note.

Had another anxiety attack about the first part of the novel and ordered eighty dollars worth of used books on strikebreaking and urban insurrections from Powell’s to compensate. God help me, I might have to start drawing maps.

Got seven days to write a holiday story for the writers’ group. Was hoping to get a kind of Tom Waits meets Joseph Conrad thing going, but at this point I’ll settle for getting it done. Opening line: Charlie Marlow steps off the gangplank of the Ticonderoga onto a pier lit by gaslamps and Chinese lanterns, under a sky the color of coal-dust.

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November 30, 2004

Cheryl Morgan reviews ASZAS in the Hugo-Award-winning Emerald City:

What really impressed me about the anthology was the consistent quality of all the stories. Only half of the authors were known to me before reading the book, but all of the contributions are good.

. . . Quite literally, a feast for the imagination. And a worthy salute to that most glorious of flying machines, the Zeppelin.

Our authors are so cool.

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November 29, 2004

With apologies to Marx —

“Resolved: That the American poetry industry presents to short speculative fiction a picture of the latter’s future.”

Discuss.

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November 19, 2004

If you’re going to ditch something to make room for the necessary exhibition of invention, it’s far better to ditch plot than the customary SF victim, characterization.

—Bruce Sterling

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November 8, 2004

Ditto Mr. Notley: Thank you, Pixar, for this welcome distraction in our time of need.

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November 5, 2004

Now in HTML.

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October 28, 2004

The new All-Star Stories site is up, with nearly accurate biographical information on each of the authors in All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories. Also on the site are the guidelines for Twenty Epics which, I have the honor and pleasure to announce, Susan Marie Groppi of Strange Horizons will be co-editing. (The guidelines are only available in PDF form right now, but if I have time during the joyful madness that is the World Fantasy Convention, I’ll try to get some HTML up, too.)

Unless disaster has struck, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories has been on sale all day in the WFC dealers’ room. Buy a copy and stop by the launch party tomorrow night — 10 p.m., suite 2069 — to get it signed.

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October 25, 2004

That’s all there is to say, really.

Except, you can change that.

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October 18, 2004

Since Greg asks:

Hotspur: I’d rather be a kitten and cry mew
than one of these same-meter ballet-mongers.
I’d rather hear a brazen canstick turned,
or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree—
and that would set my teeth nothing on edge,
nothing so much as mincing poetry.
’Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.

—Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I

(I’m being lazy, I know.)

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October 15, 2004

I stopped reading Clancy after the appallingly bad Debt of Honor, which left me

1. amazed that anyone could write a thriller about Japan that was even dumber than Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, and
2. certain that if Clancy was this wrong on a subject I did know, he was probably just as wrong on many of the subjects I didn’t know.

(And that doesn’t even address the quality of the writing.)

But, regardless—and taking it as a given that there are no irredeemable genres, only irredeemable books—this seems like the sort of thing that could fuel a really classy technothriller.

It was a problem all the ground forces suffered. Some units outran the range of high-bandwidth communications relays. Downloads took hours. Software locked up. And the enemy was sometimes difficult to see in the first place. As the marines’ own “lessons learned” report puts it, “The [First Marine] Division found the enemy by running into them, much as forces have done since the beginning of warfare.” Describing the army’s battle at Objective Peach, John Gordon, another senior researcher at Rand and also a retired army officer, put it this way: “That’s the way it was done in 1944.”

. . . Once the invasion began, breakdowns quickly became the norm. For the movement of lots of data—such as satellite or spy-plane images—between high-level commanders and units in the field, the military employed a microwave-based communications system originally envisioned for war in Europe. This system relied on antenna relays carried by certain units in the advancing convoy. Critically, these relays—sometimes called “Ma Bell for the army”—needed to be stationary to function. Units had to be within a line of sight to pass information to one another. But in practice, the convoys were moving too fast, and too far, for the system to work. Perversely, in three cases, U.S. vehicles were actually attacked while they stopped to receive intelligence data on enemy positions. “A lot of the guys said, ‘Enough of this shit,’ and turned it off,” says Perry, flicking his wrist as if clicking off a radio. “‘We can’t afford to wait for this.’”

In science fiction we call this AM/FM—“distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of ‘Actual Machines’ from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of ‘Fucking Magic.’” Do any of the technothriller writers do this? Or are technical difficulties something that only happens to the Bad Guys?

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October 13, 2004

Courtesy of the lovely and talented Ms. Lara Wells:

Fig. 1. The cover.

Later this week I’ll be updating the book site. Don’t let that stop you from pre-ordering now!

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September 30, 2004

I wasn’t going to see the movie anyway. But I did like this bit of criticism, as criticism.

The Forgotten purports to be about loss and grief, but putting aside the dubious agenda and motivations of the Sky-Hurlers we seem to end up with a movie with a curious message: Never Heal, Never Let Go. 5,999,999,999 times out of six billion that’s gonna be the wrong way to respond to the death of a loved one, but The Forgotten manages to dig out that one curious case where remaining forever trapped in your grief turns out to be the way to get your son back. Good for her, but it doesn’t really offer too much to the rest of us.

A lot of works end up with similar curious messages. How many of them are conscious? How many of the wrong messages have you accidentally put in your own work? Hmm. What does your therapist think of that?

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September 27, 2004

Interesting interview with Tony Wolf, “fighting styles designer” for the Lord of the Rings films, over at Sword Forum. If you’re into that sort of thing. (It’s a couple of years old, so you may have seen it already.)

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September 26, 2004

“Kill Bill”, vols. 1 & 2

• I don’t insist on realistic dialogue. I do insist on dialogue that doesn’t make me want to switch to one of the DVD’s foreign audio tracks.
• If Uma Thurman’s character is “more than proficient in the exquisite art of the samurai sword,” I’m Miyamoto f——in’ Musashi. Maybe if you’re going to mix Chinese and Japanese martial arts, you should have some Japanese on your fight choreography team?
• It’s been twenty-odd years since Pris’ freaky writhing kicking spinning death scene in “Blade Runner,” but Daryl Hannah hasn’t lost her touch.
• David Carradine can act. Who knew?

“Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence”

• Speaking of Daryl Hannah — You might have thought we dodged a bullet when we invented the Internet instead of the Nexus 6, but guess what: we’re gonna get those Philip K. Dick / Isaac Asimov futures anyway, courtesy of Japan’s obsession with robots, dolls, puppets and simulacra. Be warned.
• CG is a pretty good solution to cel animation’s static background problem, but haven’t these guys heard of non-photo-realistic rendering?
• Japanese masculinity has got to work through some serious issues with the female body. Hoo boy. This film takes “radical deconstruction” to new heights of literalized metaphor.

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September 24, 2004

John Burdett’s Bangkok 8 is not the best book I’ve read since Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow.*

It is, just at this moment, just for a little while, the only book I’ve read since Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.

* Also known as Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

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September 22, 2004

More than eighteen tablespoons of solid paper! That’s how much book you’re gonna get when All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories hits your shelves. That’s 48¢ a cubic inch — 38¢ a cubic inch (or 88¢ a tablespoon — that’s cheaper than saffron!) if you order direct from Wheatland Press.* How can you beat that?

*Plus shipping, handling, and applicable taxes.

Kevin J. Anderson calls it “The year’s best collection of zeppelin stories!” — and he wrote the novelization for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, so you know he knows whereof he speaks. Twenty authors. Four hundred pages. Dozens, nay, hundreds of zeppelins. All for one low price.

All of this is to say that the text and layout are finalized, the cover painting is dry, and some time in the next week we should have the final files to the printers.

And then I am going to get so smashed.

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September 17, 2004

Pretty good crits from the Fairwood crew last night for “Planet of the Amazon Women”. Only one objection to the misleading title, and only one reader (professing to be, or admitting to be) completely confused. Some folks felt misdirected by the early ambiguity, deceived; it’s not important enough to be worth alienating those readers, so I may tone it down a bit, make it look a little less deliberate. Got corrections on some of my Chinese. (Much appreciated; wouldn’t want to embarrass Wang Laoshi. This gimmick of mine of dropping cultures is trickier than Gibson’s gimmick of dropping brand names, I think.) Couple of motifs that either need to mean more or get dropped. Couple of good suggestions on how to bring back in some stuff that gets dropped mid-story. Comparisons to Stross and Miéville; thought that was pretty astute, those two being probably the strongest recent influences on my ideas of what’s possible in SF fabula, if not syuzhet.

And — I can’t say I’m surprised — they totally caught me on my failure to adequately figure out what the protagonist was trying to do, how it was supposed to be accomplished — and, for that matter (though no one actually said this), whether it succeeded or failed.

(In many respects this story is some sort of fantasy masquerading as some sort of science fiction. What I need to figure out is whether that’s what I want, and if it is, how convincing the masquerade has to be.)

All in all, a pretty good session. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with a story that’s less obviously flawed.

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August 25, 2004

Andrew O’Hehir noted that “the Dogme movement is best described as a system for making imitation Ingmar Bergman films.” The authors of the Mundane Manifesto cite Neuromancer and 1984 as influences; but what they’ve got reads, to me, like a system for writing imitation Kim Stanley Robinson novels.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that — even if I’m not a Robinson fan myself. Still . . . I can’t help but hear in the Manifesto a distorted echo of SF’s chronic mainstream envy. What makes this list of SF’s chronic “Stupidities” the right one — why twelve Stupidities, and not eleven or thirteen?

The Mundanes recognize this much themselves; the last entry in the list is “Continue at will.” But why not take it farther? Why not eliminate some of the other SF motifs that they explicitly embrace, like nano and VR — surely no less abused than parallel worlds or English-speaking aliens? Why not take it as far as mainstream’s New Puritans did, and shed “all improbable or unknowable speculation about the past or the future”?

Maybe it’s a matter of timing — maybe it’s that it comes at a point when I’ve just decided that, in my own writing, it’s time to try, for a while, SF without constraints. But in the end what the Mundane Manifesto mostly comes across as, to me, is a little amusing, and a little sad.

Still, some of them, undoubtedly, will eventually realize that writing the kind of honest, thoughtful, thought-provoking SF they want to write has much less to do with what they write about than they think it does.

In the mean time, I wish them luck.

(Via Notes from Coode Street.)

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August 16, 2004

“Sci-fi.” When I’m not writing some other kind of speculative fiction, that’s what I write.

And don’t misunderstand me — I do mean . If someone tells me I write “skiffy”, I won’t argue, but I sure don’t think of it that way.

I think it’s about time we reclaimed rhymes-with-hi-fi. Am I alone on the barricades here?

Maybe I’ll cafe-press myself up a SCI-FI PRIDE T-shirt for my next convention.

---

Update: Okay, forget it. It looks like my problem with this is just a symptom of my other problems with the quote SF community unquote. I’ll shut up.

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August 15, 2004

Guess I’m not going to be the last person in the English-speaking world to read Iron Council after all.

I’ve still got the UK version on order, ’cause that’s the kind of sick fetishist that I am, but I broke down and bought the US edition Friday afternoon, since I’d decided Thursday I was going on a 36-hour writing retreat and knew I wasn’t going to be able to get away with no reading that whole time.

As you’d expect, I blew through it in about four sittings. (And yes, I did get a good bit of writing done, too, so shut your mouth.) Council didn’t have the urgency of The Scar, but it was an easier read than either Scar or Perdido — the writing in Council is probably better, line by line. Still, Mieville’s at his most interesting when he’s indulging his penchant for baroquely overwritten description, and too many of Council’s settings are too open and spare to let him really go over the top. And when he has a good opening for that sort of thing, like the Council’s two — two! — crossings of the cacotopic stain, he doesn’t always take it.

Figure 1. Not the Iron Council.

I’m torn. On the one hand, I found the world of Perdido Street Station so fucked-up and depressing I’ve never been tempted to reread it, as impressive and memorable as it was. On the other hand, now that Iron Council (which is much more involved than The Scar with the things that made Perdido what it was, enough that I’m nearly tempted to reread the earlier book just to catch all the references I’d half forgotten) has offered that hopeless world some hope, it’s also drawn a lot of its poison.

I’d say The Scar is probably still my favorite. It’s a glorious mess, but Iron Council, though less messy, is also less glorious.

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August 10, 2004

I notice this Asimov’s is available at Fictionwise through September ($3.99, $3.39 for members), for those of you who like e-books. Also, the cover:

Figure 1. Asimov’s, “September” 2004.
Note the large spaceship in the foreground.

I can’t help but take a kind of demented pride in the fact that my story is probably the one the cover’s most applicable to. (I say “demented” because I’m pretty sure the covers and stories generally have nothing intentional to do with one another.)

Plus, it’s got my name on it.

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August 9, 2004

The September issue of Asimov’s is on the stands, with my name on the cover and everything. (When you get to the line of dialogue that has the word sure in it twice, substitute sir for one of them. Which, I leave up to you, but there is a right answer and a wrong one.)

This story, “The Third Party”, is my first pro print magazine sale, and it’s an interesting experience, reading this story this way. It’s meant to be the first part of a novel, a novel I spent half of last year outlining and then set aside. Two or three people saw the outline. The main feedback I got was, “What’s with the monks?” I think that in not talking about the rest of it they were being kind.

Reading it this way, presented differently (Asimov’s really needs to go to two columns, or else budget for more paper), with some time and distance, it’s easier to put myself into the shoes of someone reading it for the first time, whether here in Asimov’s or as some of the opening chapters of a novel. Easier to read it not in terms of what I had intended to write next, but in terms of what possibilities arise from this beginning.

Easier to see that the novel I write could be much more interesting than the one I would have written from last year’s outline.

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The nice thing about the auteur approach to filmmaking is that it gives you someone to blame.

So, let me start by saying I’m one of the eleven people in the English-speaking world who hasn’t seen “The Sixth Sense” — and boy, am I glad I haven’t, because if I had (and if it was really any good) I would have been even more disappointed by “The Village” than I was. Also, if I had gone to see it, M. Night Shmalyan might have gotten some of my money, and that is something that is never going to happen again.1

I won’t give you any spoilers — but don’t worry, if you do see this film (which course of action I am, obviously, recommending against) it will spoil itself for you. You’ll have the film’s central “revelation” figured out by the time the first monster comes knocking at the door, and after that it won’t matter how good Mr. Night S. is with camera angles and whooshy noises and snuffly noises. You will feel absolutely no fear, because after that you will know that the film is on rails.2

In due course and a series of clumsy flashbacks, the alleged reversal will be presented to you and to the protagonist. (The protagonist’s reaction, by the way, is entirely implausible: think about the way it’s revealed, then ask yourself exactly what the protagonist’s terror is in response to — how does the protagonist even understand what’s being shown?) You will be disturbed — when you look at your watch and see how much of the movie is left to run.

By the time Mr. Night S. presents his attempt at a second reversal, you will have no trust in him, as a director, to do anything interesting, so your only reaction will be to look again at your watch and sigh regretfully, knowing that at least another fifteen minutes of your time will be wasted explaining this and tying it up.

Eventually, in a way that does not so much wrap up the film’s implausibilities (which in a better-plotted film one might be able to over look, but which in this one produce a disbelief too heavy to suspend) as parade them, the film will end.

And you will be left to ponder the real mysteries of “The Village”:

• Why did so many good actors sign up for such a bad script?
• Why were their performances so wooden?3
• What justifies the reputation Mr. Night S. has gotten as a writer/director?

And, most curiously:

• When was the last time a film left you feeling this badly ripped off?

If you figure it out, let me know.

---

1 No, I didn’t see “Signs” either. The reviews weren’t that great, and anyway Mel Gibson makes me break out in a rash.

2 Yes, there’s a subplot, which does have a twist in it that’s merely foreshadowed rather than telegraphed. Someone will undoubtedly claim that this subplot is the main plot and that, therefore, the film is not on rails To that I say: Feh. It’s not interesting or complex enough to be the main plot. (A role reversal is not a plot reversal, Mr. Night S.) In a film of this type — if it’s not good enough to transcend its type — the “plot” is just the process of answering the question: “What the hell is going on?” And that, as I’ve said, you’ll know long before Mr. Night S. decides to hit you over the head with it.

3 The one exception is Adrien Brody, who gives us the film’s one really interesting character. Unfortunately, that character is completely wasted on this plot. As for Hurt, Weaver, Phoenix et al. — they just leave me expecting to cringe the next several times I hear the word “coyote”. I know the dialogue was stilted. The dialogue in “Ride With The Devil” was stilted, too, but that didn’t stop Tobey Maguire.

Comments (16)

August 6, 2004

Remember when burritos were small enough to eat?

So now that the anthology is nearly off the ground (proof / advance reading copies should be coming back from the printers any day now; final cover art in a few weeks and then it’ll all be over bar the shouting) I have, predictably, gone insane and decided I want to do another one.

Not All-Star Robot Adventure Stories. That’s still a definite possbility, but ASRAS would pay real money. (pause, while half the audience realizes this new idea will not pay real money, and leaves the room) So the robots have to wait, while the Zeppelins pay themselves off. (You can speed up this process by pre-ordering!). Meanwhile, a different idea, as follows.

First, you should all go buy Rabid Transit: Petting Zoo and read “How to Write an Epic Fantasy” by David Lomax.

Done?

No?

I’ll wait . . .

Okay; you can read it later, if you insist.

Here’s the idea:

All-Star Stories Presents: Twenty Epics

The problem: Epic fantasy takes too long. It takes too long to read, it takes too long to write. The industry has too many incentives to make the author write the same book over and over again, piling up the foreshadowing, wearing out characters’ boots, to no good purpose except to give the reader more time to spend in the author’s fantasy world.

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, if you’ve got the time. But for the busy reader/writer on the go, I think we need an alternative, and that’s where Twenty Epics comes in.

Twenty Epics would be, to the traditional epic, what the false pasts created for the replicants in Blade Runner are to real human experience. Each of the twenty would create in the reader the same kind of emotional and aesthetic experience one has on finishing, say, Titus Groan, or the original Earthsea books, or the Fantasy Masterworks collection of the Viriconium stories, or Orlando — or, for that matter, War and Peace or Lonesome Dove. (All of these are a little short already by modern epic standards, I admit — I’m going for sublimity here, not exhaustion.) But they’d do it without making the reader or the writer sit through ten books and ten years.

Now, I know what I’m getting into. If I just advertise for twenty condensed epics at, oh, say $50 a pop, I know what I’m going to get: A lot of gaming-module backgrounds and poorly written plot synopses crammed with unpronounceable names. I can cope with that (the Editor’s name is a tower of strength), but what I’m looking for is something different, and harder to define — a Silmarillion with sophistication, a “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” with narrative drive. The closest examples I can think of are the aforementioned David Lomax story, and some of the stories in Angelica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial.

Oh, and maybe this piece my friend Jon wrote in college, excerpts from the marketing literature produced by the estate of one “G.L.L.L. Kerpim”. (Beautiful stuff, pure vitriol. “Lo! The Fire-Sheep are closing in! Use the Jewel-Sword-Ring!”)

Beyond that, I think we’re back to Herodotus.

Am I the only one who would read this?

Help me pin this down.

Comments (23)

August 3, 2004

Does anyone know why this didn’t end up in this?

Comments (3)

July 28, 2004

I don’t know how posting this has slipped my mind, but a few days ago pre-ordering opened up for All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories.

Figure 1. All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories. Now available for pre-order.

Right now we’re just putting together proof copies to send out for blurbs, and finalizing the cover art; we’ll be sending out review copies in late September, and the real books won’t be ready till World Fantasy, but you can still order yours now, and avoid the rush!

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July 20, 2004

bricolesque, n. or adj. [From bricolage + picaresque.] Fiction combining the worst aspects of bricolage construction with the worst aspects of picaresque narrative. “At worst, [realism] will devolve into the worst sort of bricolesque Keystone Kontinuity Kops Kaper, as kludge after kludge is applied — and kludges to the kludges — just to maintain superficial consistency, even at the cost of all possible literary interest.”

eschatonnage, n. [From eschaton + tonnage.] The metaphorical weight of impending apocalypse. “Pretending a kludge can support so much top-heavy ‘If this be Ragnarok’ eschatonnage is an attitude best maintained ironically, since literature should make a point of being in some way admirable, or at least self-aware of its limitations.”

Coinage by, and usages from, John Holbo, “Crisis on Infantile Earths, or, If it’s Tuesday, it must be Ragnarok!” (16 July 2004) The rest of the post is good, too. (Albeit very long.)

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July 18, 2004

A new game, independently discovered by waxy.org and Justine Larbalestier:

Here's a fun game... First, look up the most popular and critically-acclaimed books, movies, and music on Amazon. Click on "Customer Reviews," and sort them by "Lowest Rating First." Hilarity ensues! It's the Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game! [waxy.org]

Or, as Ms. Larbalestier calls it, "The Amazon.Com Method of Rage Maintenance".

(Meta-post: I met Ms. Larbalestier at WisCon. I just read her The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, and I've been meaning all week to write her a note about it. [Five stars, by the way.] And yet I got the link to her journal from waxy.org, whoever they are, and that link from Ars Technica. Ars Technica is a collaborative tech blog that dates from before there were blogs. I've been reading it for years, even though I'm no longer really in the target audience. Damn, but the world is getting small.)

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July 15, 2004

Hannah Wolf Bowen nails several of my issues with the de Lint School:

I've been reading the Green Man anthology. I'm almost exactly halfway done. And — it's interesting. This book is letting me pinpoint exactly why I'm lukewarm about lot of fiction about nature, and fiction about artists, and this whole mythic fantasy idea.

The stories have all been fine examples of the form. (The poems, too, as far as I can tell, but I'm not a poetry person, so I won't be commenting on those.) Solid plots. Pretty good characters. Some really excellent writing. And the ones that I'm most interested in — the Kathe Koja, the Jeffrey Ford, the Emma Bull — are in the second half of the book, and so are some other big names and the Nebula story, so I may feel very differently after reading those.

They're fine. They're good-enough. And they feel to me a little phoned-in, because they're too — not simple, because a simple story can be tremendously powerful. Surface-y, I guess. Warm and fuzzy. A little self-congratulatory. It's not just this book; it's a lot of books and a lot of stories. It's why I can't read Charles de Lint anymore even though I love and admire his older writing and even though he was one of the reasons that I seriously considered applying to Clarion West this year.

The book has all these stories about this idea of a green man and about nature. But — they're all focused on the same couple of ways to approach nature. Nature as refuge. Nature as a wonderful, loving place that, even when it's exacting revenge, is entirely just, rewarding the good and the brave. Nature as fairyland, but not the scary sort of fairies. The Tanith Lee story may be the exception, if you cross your eyes and squint real hard. Not exception enough to make me love it, but to be fair, I've never been a huge fan of Lee's writing, so that may be my fault more than the story's.

Same thing happens with a lot of the 'mythic' stuff that I've read on other subjects. Celia and I sometimes wonder why there aren't any magic lawyers, say, or plumbers — why is always painters and singers? (eBear recommends the wonderfully-titled "Stealing the Elf-King's Roses"; I just haven't been able to get my hands on a copy yet.) It has this feel that puts me off. A little too pleased with itself. A little too conscious of what it's doing. A little too certain that it's seeing what others overlook.

The trouble is, it can focus on that one thing to the exclusion of everything else, and then it ends up feeling thin and not so much insightful as differently blind. And I'm knee-jerking so hard on this Green Man book because to me, this picture of nature as good and just and welcoming is as much a misunderstanding as a picture of nature as a horrible place or a worthless one would be. Because nature has a sort of justice, but it's a brutal sort. Because it strikes me as disrespectful not to recognize that this is a place that can kill you, if you aren't careful. Because these celebrations of wild places seem to be intent on making them tame.

This is why these days I like Mythago Wood more than War for the Oaks and King Rat (Mieville, not Clavell) more than Neverwhere. Not that there's anything wrong with a little wish-fulfillment, but too much is bad for my digestion.

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