The Eternal Cover Art Debate

In this week's Publishers Weekly were three successive right-page ads for the new Orbit SF/Fantasy line (launching in September), showing off their covers. Now, I'd seen a few of these covers before, and I knew Orbit was going in this direction, but this was the first time the art look for the whole line had been made public (I think).

I don't think anyone will mind if I post my scans of those ads here -- but, if anyone out there from Hachette/Orbit does mind, please e-mail me, and I'll take them down. This should be considered promotion and buzz-building, I think, but I don't own this stuff, and will defer to those who do.

Anyway, on to the scans. (I believe that, if you click on them, you'll get the larger versions.) My opinions on cover art are pretty well known by now, so I'll refrain from any commentary. But I think you can imagine what I'd say...

The End of National Poetry Month

I started National Poetry Month by posting my favorite short poem, A.E. Housman's "Terrence, This Is Stupid Stuff," so it's only fitting that I end the month by posting part of my favorite long poem.

I don't know what the reputation of William Carlos Williams's Paterson is in the wider world, and I don't much care. I discovered it in college, in a 20th Century poetry course, and it hit me like a thunderbolt. It's an epic, but not an epic of a man -- it's the story of a city, of a people, told in the big American voice of the modern age. It's one of the very few works of poetry that I come back to again and again -- and not just because it's about my part of the world.

Here's the "Preface" from Book I of Paterson. If it intrigues you at all, go buy the book -- I may be biased, but I think this is as good as 20th century poetry gets. (And I hope the f-ing hard spaces I've coded in by hand twice to get the lines to start in the right places actually stay this time.)

Paterson: Book I

Preface

"Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?"

To make a start,
out of particulars
and make them general, rolling
up the sum, by defective means--
Sniffing the trees,
just another dog
among a lot of dogs. What
else is there? and to do?
The rest have run out--
after the rabbits.
Only the lame stands--on
three legs. Scratch front and back.
Deceive and eat. Dig
a musty bone

For the beginning is assuredly the end--since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.

Yet there is
no return: rolling up out of chaos,
a nine months' wonder, the city
the man, an identity--it can't be
otherwise--an
interpenetration, both ways. Rolling
up! obverse, reverse;
the drunk the sober; the illustrious
the gross; one. In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing.

(The multiple seed,
packed tight with detail, soured,
is lost in the flux and the mind,
distracted, floats off in the same
scum)

Rolling up, rolling up heavy with
numbers.
It is the ignorant sun
rising in the slot of
hollow suns risen, so that never in this
world will a man live well in his body
save dying--and not know himself
dying; yet that is
the design. Renews himself
thereby, in addition and subtraction,
walking up and down.

and the craft,
subverted by thought, rolling up, let
him beware lest he turn to no more than
the writing of stale poems . . .

Minds like beds always made up,
(more stony than a shore)
unwilling or unable.

Rolling in, top up,
under, thrust and recoil, a great clatter:
lifted as air, boated, multicolored, a
wash of seas --
from mathematics to particulars--
divided as the dew,
floating mists, to be rained down and
regathered into a river that flows
and encircles:

shells and animacules
generally and so to man,

to Paterson.


Oh, maybe just a few more snippets:

--Say it, no ideas but in things--
nothing but the black faces of the house
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident--
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained--
secret--into the body of the light!

The preceding quote and the following one are both from the beginning of Book I, "The Delineaments of the Giants."

A man like a city and a woman like a flower
--who are in love. Two women. Three women.
Innumerable women, each like a flower.

But
only one man--like a city.

In Which I Apologize for Something I Didn't Get Around to Doing

I don't know if other bloggers do this, but I keep various things unread in Bloglines, thinking that I'll want to respond to them eventually. (I have a reference to Brandon Sanderson's "Hey, why don't all of you chaps buy the really expensive version of my books instead?!" essay still hanging around, waiting for me to put my thoughts into a form that wouldn't piss off everyone who read it.) Sometimes I even create a dummy draft post here to remind myself.

Well, a bit more than "sometimes," actually. At the moment, I have thirty-two draft posts. Eight are in some process of being written -- some more than others; "I Am Not Calvin Trillin's Son-in-Law" is basically sitting there empty waiting for me to have the time and inclination -- two are awaiting the proper day, six are potential "Quotes of the Week," and the remaining sixteen are publishable immediately. Most of those are reprints of rec.arts.sf.written posts, stored up for slow days, but three or four are things I've been too chicken smart to post so far.

Anyway, for a while I had a empty draft called "Aesthetics of Fantasy, My Foot," in which I was going to demolish Jonathan McCalmont's two-part essay. (My draft was empty, though, because I'd only skimmed the first part quickly, and hadn't really looked at the second part at all.) McCalmont struck me as a self-centered, windy, deliberately obnoxious curmudgeon who wrote over-ornate sentences and wasn't nearly as clear a thinker as he thought he was.

(Can you see where I'm going with this? It took me a while to get it myself...)

Eventually the Clue Stick descended heavily on my head and I realized McCalmont was exactly the same sort of blogger as I was, and that was what annoyed me. (A similar realization hit me about William Lexner, previously -- though I think Lexner really is trying to be incredibly obnoxious, while people like me and McCalmont just come off that way sometimes.)

So I've moved McCalmont into the mental category of "curmudgeons who occasionally annoy me but who I want to take seriously," joining such excellent company as Barry Malzberg and Norman Spinrad (mostly for his book reviews, which I don't read as often as I should these days). That doesn't mean that I won't post a "look at this stupid thing someone said" essay about any of them -- that seems, for better or worse, to be a lot of what I do here -- but I hope it means that I'll take the idea seriously first...and only then reject it out of hand.

I want to apologize to Mr. McCalmont for what I didn't do; I would have done it in bad faith, and I'm glad I didn't. (But, if I ever get time to seriously study that essay, I expect I'll find some things I violently disagree with.)

I wrote this earlier this morning, and let it sit a few hours, to make sure I wasn't still being an obnoxious twerp, and then I came across McCalmont's long post from Saturday night about kinds of reviews and the standards that should be in place. And I not only agree with it, it makes me want to read more of his criticism. So maybe he's not even as obnoxious as I am -- that wouldn't be difficult.

Is It Worth Going to TuckerCon?

When I planned my convention attendance for this year, I knew that my company would not spring to send me to Japan for Nippon 2007 -- and that's smart of them, since I'd have no business to conduct there and I expect I'd be about the biggest dumb, clumsy gaijin you can imagine. (Yes, I kind of want to go, but, unless I win the lottery, it's not happening.)

So, instead, I decided to go to the NASFiC, what I usually call the Emergency Backup Worldcon. It's in St. Louis this year and seems to be more-or-less the local con (Archon), blown up slightly. But then I heard all kinds of less-than-good stories about TuckerCon, particularly non-standard hotel credit-card-charging practices. And so I've fallen back into indecision.

Have any of you folks out there made TuckerCon plans yet? It this going to be a decent-sized NASFiC (the only one I've been to was Conucopia in Anaheim in 1999, which felt more like a large region than a small Worldcon), or just Archon 31 with a few extra program items bolted onto it?

And, if I don't go to TuckerCon, should I go somewhere else instead? (Maybe Capclave or Balticon?) If I'm adding a con, I'd prefer it to be something driveable.

Decision, decisions.

Update, 4/30: Now I'm thinking I might go to the Locus Awards instead; I've never been to Seattle (much less the SF Museum), and a SFBC book is actually nominated this year, so I have a good excuse. Anyone know what kind of s shin-dig the SFM and Locus usually throw?

Mythologizing the Past

A lot of otherwise very intelligent people often forget that the origins of science fiction as a genre are in the mucky pulp swamp of Hugo Gernsback's fiction for engineers. SF was never primarily a genre of the startling and new; it was always adventure stories with Kewl Science Stuff in it.

We forget our past at our own peril.

Movie Log: The Queen

The Wife and I put on our best pearls and sat down with our corgis Wednesday night to watch The Queen, and, at the risk of someone hitting me, I will say that we were amused.

Perhaps I should mention my individual biases, first. I think public displays of emotion, particular manufactured ones and most particularly overwrought "grief" over celebrities one has never met, are the besetting evil of the modern day, and that Diana's death was the nadir of that loathsome practice. I also always thought Diana was a pretty enough young woman, though clearly quite dim, who was just lucky enough to be an outgoing person married into a family of introverts -- I've never understood her cultish following.

So I spent most of the movie on Queen Elizabeth's "side," and finding the "mourners" to be ridiculously overwrought and borderline hysterical (as I did the first time around). Maybe I'm weird or old-fashioned, but I didn't think there was anything extraordinary about the Queen's idea that grief is a private matter for the family.

The movie itself is quite good of its type (the history-based character drama), and Mirren absolutely disappears into the role; I forgot it was her several times while watching. Everyone else in it is quite good, too, though I have to admit I didn't recognize any of them except James Cromwell as a very crotchety Prince Phillip. The family dynamics are very believable and interesting, particularly the passive-aggressive Prince Charles, who seems to be trying to surreptitiously better his own position with the public without doing anything overt.

But this is really a movie about the Queen and the PM, so we bounce back and forth between them. It's a pretty conventional story -- they come to understand each other better, and move towards each other's positions -- but it's handled well, and Mirren's performance is amazing. She's in well over half of the shots in the movie; it's very much her film.

(Now I'd like to see a movie about the UK press barons, who cynical Mr. Hornswoggler expects manipulated and exploited public emotion not only to sell a lot of papers (which is their job), but to draw attention away from the fact that it was a flock of paparazzi who helped cause the car-crash in the first place.)

This is probably not a movie for royalty-haters, or those who believe in big weepy public displays of emotion. But, for those of us who are decent, upstanding people, it's well worth the two hours or so.

Context Is For the Weak

You folks know that noted Internet fan/gadfly/personality James Nicoll is a freelance reader for the SFBC, right? Well, in my in-box this morning, as part of a much longer document about something I'm not going to explain, was this gem:

I protest the deprimatization of the DC Universe – if gorillas and monkeys were good enough for Julius Schwartz, they should be good enough for us!

Another Sign of the (Literary) Apocalypse

The Orion Group in the UK (under Malcolm Edwards, whom I'd always regarded as one of the Enlightened Ones of publishing, since he's an old SF hand) is editing down classics to make them easier to read.

One quote (about Edwards):

He admitted that he had never read Middlemarch and had tried but failed to get through Moby Dick several times, while a colleague owned up to skipping Vanity Fair.

OK, I am officially not going to consider British educations as superior to my own anymore, since I've read all three of those books, and loved two of them. I even read Moby Dick for pleasure during the second half of my senior year of college, since I suddenly realized that I wasn't going to get it assigned anywhere. (And I'll accept that Middlemarch has its virtues, even if I found it difficult at best to discern them.)

The launch titles of the Compact Editions (the first of 50-100 titles, if these folks get their way) are Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Moby Dick and Wives and Daughters, all coming in June. The second batch -- Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo, North and South and The Portrait of a Lady -- follow in September.

Let's see: I've read at least seven of those (assuming North and South is the Elizabeth Gaskell novel, and not the John Jakes one), which makes me some kind of literary whiz-kid, I guess. Actually, I'm amazed to think that anyone feels the need to read even one Elizabeth Gaskell novel in this day and age -- let alone two of them -- but it takes all kinds to make a world. She must be more popular in the UK than over here, I guess.

And perhaps I'm being too harsh on this series; if they concentrated entirely on Henry James novels, and edited them down to a page or less, they would perform a valuable service to the world. (Have I mentioned my favorite literary joke in this context? James was such an unrepentant Anglophile that it's only fitting that his career can be divided into three phases: James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender.)

But, all of my attacks on that old loser aside, this project just looks silly: who wants to read half of David Copperfield? If the point of reading classics is to have the enjoyment of them, then you've missed that. And if the point of reading classics is to recognize references to them and feel smarter, than a good "Cliff's Notes" would be much better than reading an edited half of the book.

This is just too bizarre for words.

[via Editors Unleashed]

Incoming Books, week of 4/29

No, I haven't been forgetting to list books that came in; there just haven't been any for a few weeks (and that's getting me antsy -- yes, I have probably a thousand or more older books that I haven't read, but I still want new stuff coming in regularly...it's a sickness, I tell you).

But this week, there were a few:

• Boomsday by Christopher Buckley
  
• Path of the Assassin, Vol. 6: Life's Greatest Difficulty by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima
  Just for the record, I'm now three volumes behind on reading this series. I'm going to pretend it's all part of a Cunning Plan to read a lot of them in order to make keeping track of the complicated plots and counter-plots easier...
  
• Crying Freeman, Vol. 1 by Kazuo Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami
  I've been meaning to try this series for at least a couple of years -- this time, since, during the aborted late '80s manga boom, I also kept thinking I'd want to try it -- since I've liked Koike's historical series (most famously Lone Wolf and Cub) and Ikegami's art was quite good on Mai the Psychic Girl (the only thing of his I've seen).
  
• Alias the Cat by Kim Deitch
  I've read the first two-thirds of this as individual comics issues, and I'm really looking forward to sitting down with the whole thing. Deitch is one of the geniuses of modern comics, and he doesn't get the attention he deserves.

The Great Mundane SF Novels!

This was not my idea -- I was commenting on my elves are different -- but I had to copy 'n' paste my comment here, so it will count as a post:

Hm, no one's said Dune yet. (No, an ordinary dune.)

And who can forget those great Heinlein juveniles!
Ship Galileo
Cadet
Blue-Green Planet
Farmer on the Ground
Between Parts of The Same Planet
The Stones That Stay in the Same Place
Sustainable Development Jones
The Locally Grown Beast
Tunnel in the Bering Sea
Time for the Next Town Over
Citizen of a Sensible Local Council
Have Appropriate Working Tools, Will Walk Within City Limits
Aeroplane Troopers
Podkayne of Toronto

She's an Academic...Not a Clearly Insane Person

Locus Online has posted a very long screed by someone named Marleen Barr, in which she seems to be saying that Cho Seung-Hui's murderous rampage at Virginia Tech last week was some sort of transgressive strike at the patriarchal, hegemonic Republican culture of the area on behalf of science fiction and The Other.

(Yeah, really.)

Her second, less controversial point is that the murders shouldn't stop the teaching of genre fiction at universities in the USA. (I think. She's not very clear, even for an academic.)

Sample sentences, only slightly less coherent than the whole:

Even if Duesseldorf is rather devoid of Jews, it is also devoid of cows.

The typical Tech faculty member and administrator looks like a clone of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld — or Karen Hughes.

I believe that he carefully studied the Virginia Tech class schedule with an eye toward finding foreign-associated professors who would be concurrently teaching in close proximately.

Hence, in addition to choosing Hilscher because she too looks like an alien, I think that Cho Seung-Hui picked a female to be his first victim in order to make a statement about how Tech responds to that which is Other in relation to white male patriarchy.

Cho Seung-Hui, who prepared for his role as mass murder by doing body building exercises, turned himself into the symbol of the alien foreign born immigrant Other in relation to America who succeeded in America beyond all reasonable expectation: Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Livestock are housed behind the Duck Pond. Will the sheep look up?

I know that to this day genre fiction haters are alive and well and living in the Virginia Tech English department.

This is the point where I normally would rant and holler and attack Ms. Barr's argument. Unfortunately, she has no argument, just a very perverse point of view utterly untethered to reality. Ms. Barr, you desperately need the help of mental health professionals; I hope you get it, and soon.

I did get the impression that if the dead had been more representative of the local "almost monolithic white population," she would not have been nearly as unhappy.

(And, for someone who calls herself a feminist, she has the odd habit of calling women by their first names and men by their full or last names.)

And now every single possible point of view has hijacked this horrible event for its own outside purposes. They should all be ashamed, though of course they won't be.

But, most of all, I'm appalled that Locus Online would post such a bizarre, incoherent essay. It's doubly exploitative to do so: it exploits the real horror at VT, and exploits a woman who is clearly delusional.

And if she's at all representative of the people teaching university students about genre fiction in this country, then it's long past time to get SF back into the gutters, where it belongs. Some kind of help is the kind of help we all can do without.

Update, 4/25: I didn't mention the fact that Barr's letter was also a thinly-veiled advertisement for her novel Oy, Pioneer, since that was just tacky, rather than insane. But she's now apparently burning up the PR wires for Pioneer, leading to this Gawker article.

Final Update, 4/29: Locus has published several comments on Ms. Barr's letter, and the "final" one (their term) by Dr. Carl Glover sums up the whole thing nicely. I won't attempt to paraphrase it, but he answers each of Ms. Barr's specious and self-serving points, and refutes them all. I'm still not sure why Locus published Ms. Barr's letter in the first place, though.

Ruminations on the "Old Man's War"-iverse

I've been reading John Scalzi's new novel The Last Colony this week [meaning "last week" -- Ed.], and thinking an awful lot (too much, I expect) about the background. I hope no one takes this as an attack -- I only worry this much about books I'm really enjoying -- but I'm sure, in the inevitable Internet fashion, that someone will misread me.

(This is why my post "Things That Annoy Me About Darkover" is still sitting in limbo months after I wrote it; I might post it someday, but I can't say when.)

Anyway, I wrote this list of questions about the universe of Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony, mostly when I was only about a third of the way into the book. After finishing it, I went back through the list and added further thoughts (or answers) in bold italics. I tried to avoid spoilers for Colony, but if you're particularly sensitive to the things, go read something else. Also, if your opinions regarding "worldbuilding" at all resemble those of a Mr. Harrison of West London, you'll wonder why anyone would care if the background of a novel makes sense, and so this is probably not worth your time.

Oh, and, again: I question because I love. Really.

1. I'm not sure if it's important or not that all of the planets seem to float randomly in space, unconnected to anything else. We never hear about the other bodies in those systems, and only rarely the names of their suns. Yes, habitable worlds will likely come only one to a system (where we find them at all), but surely the rest of those systems will have something of interest or use? Scalzi's space-travel system sometimes feels like a subway: it zips from one planet to another, with no reference to the intervening space. Is this a bug or a feature?
   I think this is just an indication of the story Scalzi wants to tell: it's about people on planets. (And maybe also is part of the Classic-SF flavor.)
2. Similarly, in a galaxy this crowded, why is everyone so ridiculously focused on planets? There are plenty of other places to live, and, once you're already in space, they can be cheaper to make habitable, easier to hide, and at least as defensible.
   Somewhat answered by a character in the story, but, again, I think it's also that this is an old-fashioned kind of skiffy future.
3. I am dumbfounded that there's even the possibility of "wildcat colonies." Surely there aren't any empty habitable worlds? The existence of those worlds implies, very strongly, that some part of The Accepted Explanation -- the galaxy is full of alien races, all competing with each other for basically the same planets, all basically at the same technological level, all essentially agreeing to fight in the same ways, some of whom must be gaining territory and some of whom must be losing it, all of whom operate as separate entities rather than forming Uplift-esque families -- is wrong. In a galaxy like the one this is supposed to be, every inhabitable planet would necessarily be inhabited now, have been inhabited for probably geological spans of time, and many of them would bear the marks of repeated acts of genocide by successive successfully invading races. The apparent plenitude of empty planets is really weird; if they're common, then the competition for them shouldn't be as strong.
   Asked and answered, from a different angle. I don't quite buy it, though. The multi-race civilization just doesn't feel as old, complex and alien as I'd expect; a galaxy this full should have been through every possible permutation of empire/federation/anarchy several times by now, and some of the races would be old enough to have lived through a few cycles of that.
4. Unless (he thought, adding a conspiratorial note) no one has bothered to survey for habitable planets for some long period of time (since they already know where everything is), and the old survey is wrong, either by mistake or malice.
   Not quite the explanation Scalzi went for.
5. Scalzi seems to be writing a kinder, gentler version of a Stephen Baxter universe, and I can't quite figure our why it would be kinder or gentler. It seems like there needs to be a reason why the struggle isn't much nastier and bloodier than it appears to be.
   Partially asked and answered, but...not to be overly bloody-minded about it, but there just isn't as much genocide in this universe as there should be.
6. According to p.57 of Last Colony, there have been a lot of human colonies launched in the last twenty-five years. Who used to live on those worlds? Are the human Colonial Defense Forces really that good? Have they wiped out some alien race we're not told about? Or were all of those planets really empty? (And does that mean the other nearby races also have been colonizing a similar number of planets?)
   Asked and answered, later in the book.
7. Oh, and, if there's any explanation as to why no alien race conquered Earth, slaughtered us all, and turned our home into their own colony some time in the last forty thousand years, I missed it. Again, in a galaxy this crowded and competitive, every inhabitable planet has got to be on the table.
   Answered by implication, later in the book.
8. There's also the question of how big a planet is, which is often a problem in adventure SF. These planets don't feel all that big -- it's possible that's because they're only thinly populated, or populated in just a few spots, and they're expected to fill up over the next few centuries. It's never explicitly stated, but I imagine that one of the reasons to have as many colonies as possible is so that some of them can be lost to invading aliens without seriously damaging the human race. Or, possibly, the colonies are there to hold space before another race can grab it. (Which inevitably leads back to the question of why these empty planets are there to be grabbed.) But Scalzi explicitly says in Last Colony that new colonies only take about ten million people before they're more-or-less closed, and ten million people is tiny for a planet. (I'm writing this in a city that has that many people in it.)
   Never comes up; these planets do all feel quite small, and the newer colonies are tiny.
9. This might just be me making up my own backstory, but the way this all makes sense to me is if there was recently (up to a final collapse four or five hundred years ago, say), a very powerful race holding a big piece of the galaxy and forbidding any of its rivals to interfere in its sphere of influence. If they took a long time to decay and wither from within (on the order of tens of thousands of years), that would allow Earth (and maybe other local intelligent races) to rise up on their own worlds and head out into space just in time for the big land rush we see in these books. But the timing, even if something like that was the case, would have to be awfully convenient.
   I shouldn't comment about what the explanations are, but I've probably been thinking too much along David Brin lines.
10. On p.89, it's implicit that there are enough empty worlds in this local area that searching them all would be non-trivial. (Actually, given how easy space travel is in this series, I'd guess there must be either an astounding number of empty, habitable planets -- which is contrary to what we're explicitly told -- or that the characters are ignoring how easy it would be to search through a limited number of planets.)
11. My, the Colonial Union has an unlikely stranglehold over all means of inter-personal communications, even for times of war. It's like there's no equivalent of the telephone in this society; even if the government censors all official communication (or especially if they do), there are going to be massive rumor mills and samizdat channels.
12. And how is this government organized, anyway? Is there some vestige of democracy behind it? (I wouldn't expect more than one party, given the CU's control of all media.) We do see a society that runs far too efficiently to be a realistic single-party state. (And, given that Certain Folks claim this series is horribly right-wing, militaristic, and Heinleinian, I find it amusing that a very strong case can be made that the CU is a Stalinist dictatorship that actually works according to plan.)
13. Oh, one last thing: how big is this section of the galaxy, which has over four hundred intelligent races, each with a number of colony planets? (Earth alone has seventeen, for example.) Add in all of the empty worlds, and...what kind of size are we talking about, here? Is this a small region with a lot of habitable planets, or a huge piece of the galaxy with inhabitable worlds much farther apart?

Last Colony does answer some of those questions, though not directly. I think I was asking the wrong questions about this universe, and Scalzi has said that he's not going to come back here quickly (if ever), so this was more pointless than most of my posts...

In Which I Am Proud Of My Older Son's Good Taste In Music

I don't obsess about my kids much here -- which is odd, really, since I obsess about everything else -- so I hope you'll indulge me for once. I'd made a new mix CD this spring, mostly for Thing 1 (he has a CD boom-box in his room, and is more focused on music than his brother -- or his mother, most of the time). The Wife also appreciates it if I make new music available for the boys, so that she's not listening to the same thing over and over again as she drives them all over creation in the car.

So, anyway, at bedtime tonight, I asked Thing 1 what his favorite song on the new CD was. (Well, I knew his most favorite: that's the opening song, "Kaze ni Naru" by Ayano Tsuji, which is the closing credits theme from The Cat Returns -- he went happy-nuts when he found out I had that song, and was thrilled when I said I'd make a CD around that song for him.) But the song he liked second best was "Demolition" by The Kinks, a really kick-ass tune from their prime years (the record right before they fell over into self-parody the first time, actually). I put that one on the CD half-hoping he wouldn't hate it, but mostly because I love it, and wanted something really good in the middle of a disc I was pretty sure I'd be hearing a lot.

My older son may be weird, but I think he has the glimmerings of good taste. (As much of it as I can expect from a nine-year-old, at least.)

Oh, hell, let me waste some space here by listing the complete line-up of the CD I called "2007 [Thing 1] Birthday" (most of my previous mix CDs were tied to trips to Hershey Park, and so were titled things like "Hershey Mix 2005," so I was keeping up the naming convention).

1. Ayano Tsuji/Kaze ni Naru
2. Cracker/The Good Life
3. Thomas Dolby/Hyperactive!
4. Adam and the Ants/Antmusic
5. Duran Duran/Wild Boys
6. The Daddy Warhols/Boys Better
7. Talking Heads/Once in a Lifetime
8. Elvis Costello/The Imposter
9. Chris Mars/Popular Creeps
10. Guadalcanal Diary/Litany (Life Goes On)
11. Midnight Oil/The Dead Heart
12. Jason & the Scorchers/Take Me Home, Country Roads
13. Richard Thompson/I Ain't Going to Drag My Feet No More
14. Jimi Hendrix Experience/All Along the Watchtower
15. The Kinks/Demolition
16. The Pogues/South Australia
17. Los Lobos/La Bamba
18. Modest Mouse/Float On
19. Ramones/I Don't Wanna Grow Up
20. Faith No More/Epic
21. Fountains of Wayne/Better Things

(Oh, the other song he's crazy about right now, from a Fountains of Wayne compilation CD I made for The Wife -- and which I didn't really intend for her to play with the boys around, honestly -- is "Maureen," which is not something I would have played for him on purpose, though, luckily, so far the matter of the song is flying over his head...)

Quote of the Week

"Science fiction, for all its trappings, its talk of 'new horizons' and 'new approaches' and 'thinking things through from the beginning' and 'new literary excitement,' is a very conservative form of literature. It is probably more conservative than westerns, mysteries, or gothics, let alone that most reactionary of all literatures, pornography. Most of its writers and editors are genuinely troubled by innovative styles or concepts at the outset, because they have a deep stake by the time they have achieved any position in the field in not appearing crazy. This was certainly true in 1969 when the field was still a minor if marginally respectable genre. It is more true yet at the beginning of the eighties when it has becomes, for a concatenation of factors, perhaps the most predictably profitable part of the publishing subdivisions of many conglomerates and when licensing of Star Trek or the Lucas properties is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The conservative nature of science fiction today is no longer an intimation, not even a standard. It is a necessity."
- Barry N. Malzberg, "L'Etat c'est moi," in The Engines of the Night, 1980

Facial Tattoos and Social Change

Originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 10/8/03, about the full facial tattoo in The Stars My Destination not being shocking today (or believable that it would be immediately shocking to others).

Now that kind of thing is a "problem" that used to bother me a lot, but which I have changed my mind about recently. I think there's a logical fallacy there: that since we in 2003 think tattooing is no big deal, that people in an invented future society would necessarily think tattooing is no big deal, and so any other attitudes are "wrong." That's not necessarily the case -- societies change in various ways, and go back and forth on all sorts of issues over time.

Admittedly, there is a kind of story in which the social attitudes of everyone in AD2500 is precisely the same as in the author's home town in the year he wrote the story -- and that, I agree, should be pointed out and called a defect (whether the story was written fifty years ago or yesterday). But I don't think The Stars, My Destination fits that category; the world is a solidly invented one and not merely 1955 with the serial numbers filed off.

Jack Vance, of course, is the canonical example of wildly differing social structures done well, but lots of SF writers have tried -- and succeeded, to various degrees -- to evoke different societies and people. So I don't think "these particular future people have different attitudes to we Usenet denizens today" is enough to claim a defect.

Things I'm Smug About Today

1) I know that the title of Jim Butcher's new novel is White Night. (No "K".) I can easily remember this because each of the "Dresden Files" books have two-word titles, and the two words always have the same number of letters. (I'm also smug because I read it a few months ago, and it kicks ass, but that's not the main point here...)

2) I know the difference between "prone" and "supine." (They are, roughly speaking, opposites, and the way to remember the difference is: "supine" means one is lying on one's spine.)

3) "Antepenultimate" is the coolest word in the universe. And every time a writer uses it correctly, an editor gets his wings.

Just Read: Working Stiff by Grant Stoddard

I've hit another "I don't want to read fiction" patch, and just spent about half an hour poking through my bookshelves looking for something to read next. (Not good enough but close: New Grub Street by George Gissing and Shadows of Blue & Gray by Ambrose Bierce.) The feeling was even worse Sunday night, so I chose something very frivolous to read.

This thing, in fact: Working Stiff by Grant Stoddard.

I picked it up as a bound galley from a giveaway shelf at work (and which is going back to that same shelf tomorrow). Stoddard was a young Englishman in 1998 (he's thus only a slightly older one now) when he moved to New York to be with his then-girlfriend and decided he wanted to stay here. He doesn't seem to have had much in the way of skills or aptitude (or desire, or motivation) for anything in particular, and eventually drifted into being a sex guinea pig columnist for Nerve.

There's a fair bit of deviant sex in the middle of the book, but the beginning is the usual "my life and hard times" crap, in which Stoddard explains who he is and how he got there (in a manner that made this reader just wish he'd get to the smutty stuff or at least do anything interesting and non-cliched). The sex stuff trails off near the end, too, as Stoddard tries to assess The Meaning of His Life.

So, yes, it is the standard sex worker memoir, only from the point of view of a guy who wrote a on-line column for three years, instead of being a dominatrix or porn star or something more obviously sex-worker-ish. It's only mildly lame, but I wish I'd been in a mood to read something more substantial two days ago. (Once I start a book for pleasure, I pretty much always finish it; I have managed to develop strategies to partially read books for work, but they don't really apply to something I'm reading ostensibly for my own enjoyment.)

And it is a memoir, not a collection of columns or anything else; I gather the actual sex stories are more detailed in the Nerve columns (which seem to all still be available online for free, unlike the book, which costs money and is only available on that old-fashioned paper stuff), but I haven't followed them. So only read this if you want the true story of one English lad's sexual awakening in (very) downtown Gotham.

Movie Log: Caddyshack

I'd never actually seen Caddyshack before; I guess I spent all my early '80s dumb-comedy time with Meatballs and Ghostbusters. (And this was an R-rated movie that came out when I was 11, so I couldn't officially see it for a while...and I have to admit, I had very little interest in golf then, or even now, which kept me away from it as well.)

But I'm watching a lot of old dumb comedies now, and catching up on the ones I missed. (I hope to catch up on serious movies eventually, but I haven't been in the mood to watch anything depressing alone recently -- and "serious" usually means "depressing," when it comes to movies.)

This is basically a generic shortish movie in the semi-serious Breaking Away mold, with a bunch of comedy subplots (Bill Murry as the gopher-hunting groundskeeper, Rodney Dangerfield as the rich jerk who might buy the country club, and so on) hanging loosely from various points, and (incidentally) providing most of the interest. In the time-honored comedy movie tradition, it apparently started off being a semi-straight golf movie with supporting roles for a bunch of funny people, and those actors ran away with the movie, since they were much more interesting on a minute-to-minute basis than the ostensible plot.

I suspect it's funnier seen in a crowd than alone, but it was pleasant enough by itself. It does feel very '80s to me, though, and not just in a "look at how young those people were" way. (And, if I were actually a feminist -- I'm not, though Vassar tried its damndest to make me one -- I'd comment on the very few roles for women here, including the one "hot slut" who manages to be the love sex interest for two of our main characters, sleeping with both of them to ensure that R-rating.)

I'll end with two things that puzzled me:

1. Where is this movie supposed to be set? I might have missed some dialogue placing it -- and it's not that important anyway -- but I'd like to know. It seems to be in some generic suburbia that isn't near New York, but nothing more specific than that.
2. And why does the hero's girlfriend have a thick Irish accent? Is she supposed to be straight off the boat? Was that a joke of some kind?

Movie Log: Meet the Robinsons

The boys were finally back to health and the streets cleared of floods on Saturday, so we went out to see the movie we'd planned on seeing two weeks ago: Meet the Robinsons.

It's not as good as it could be, but it's much better than the last Disney CGI effort, Chicken Little (which had a few good jokes and a nice look, but otherwise was a mess). It lost a bit of momentum when we saw it, since the picture cut out twice (and, the second time, the sound cut out too and the house lights came on for about five minutes). Come to think of it, I should also mention that we saw it in 3-D, because the boys love that, though I find it distracting and confusing. (I wear glasses, and my eyes are not of equal weakness, so 3-D often doesn't quite work for me. The more "3-D" this movie got, the more it hurt my eyes, which should be taken into account.)

Given all that, I liked Meet the Robinsons quite a bit, and probably would have liked it much better under perfect conditions. It's not a Pixar-level family movie, but, on the other hand, neither was Cars. (Robinsons is better than Cars, though it's close: the obvious message in Robinsons is beaten in with a somewhat larger sledgehammer, but the incidental humor in Robinsons is much more organic...and funny...than that in Cars.)

Speaking of that obvious message...I can't remember the last time the moral of a movie was underlined by actual fireworks. (And I am not kidding. Ouch.) I know that scene was supposed to be over-the-top, and therefore funny, but it was just painful and obvious in its "look at us, we've got a Good Message in this here movie, just like all those Christian talking vegetables do"-ness. If the message had actually been integrated into the movie, rather than sitting on top of it like an egg floating on a sea of breakfast-sausage grease, Robinsons could have been the best animated film since The Incredibles. OK, one other thing -- the Robinson family is very big, and introduced very quickly, and (even with the joke about that afterward) it doesn't quite work.

Even given those two failings, it's a very funny movie (both visually and verbally), with wonderful characters and a gorgeous look. (If William Joyce wanted to storyboard and production-design one animated movie a year, I'd be perfectly happy; his style lends itself very well to modern CGI.)

Let's see, what else? Oh, yes -- it's a time-travel movie, so certain expectations are set up. Anyone at all familiar with time-travel stories will see a certain plot twist coming a good half-an-hour before its revealed, but one does have to grant that this is a movie for kids. And the movie plays fair with the twist, so I'm not complaining about it: just pointing out how smart and savvy I am.

All in all, this is one of the better animated movies of recent years, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again on DVD eventually. (And, if I know my kids, seeing it again and again and again...)

Just Read: The Last Colony by John Scalzi

I have a longish post -- which I'm not sure if I'm going to publish -- called "Ruminations on the 'Old Man's War'-iverse," where I poke at the background details that have been bugging me since Old Man's War. (I seem to do this a lot; I have another unpublished post about Darkover, and there's one thing about Kage Baker's Company series I'm trying to put into the right words. I have the kind of mind that likes to have everything tied up in neat little packages, so when books I like have details I can't quite believe in, it's like a rash I have to keep scratching.)

Anyway, leaving my bizarre idiosyncrasies out of it, this is another swell adventure novel from Scalzi, ending the loose trilogy of Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades. This is the one with the big revelations about the universe (my other post, if I ever publish it, is my attempt to avoid spoilering them while obsessing about some of the same issues), and quite a big finish.

I still think Ghost Brigades is the best of the three by a slim margin, but this is the kind of adventure novel that SF needs more of -- intelligent and fun, accessible and dealing with interesting skiffy questions. (Oh, and it's written in first person, which I usually like.)

It also was published less than a week ago, so all I should say about the plot is that John Perry is our narrator again (as in Old Man), and that he and Jane Sagan are tapped to lead a new colony...and then stuff happens.

I Talk Like Dis, Y'Hear?

Apparently, Jersey has not managed to completely ruin the pure English I learned in my cradle. Another meme, of course:

What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net

Northern. Whether you have the world famous Inland North accent of the Great Lakes area, or the radio-friendly sound of upstate NY and western New England, your accent is what used to set the standard for American English pronunciation (not much anymore now that the Inland North sounds like it does).

Take this quiz now - it's easy!

We're going to start with "cot" and "caught." When you say those words do they sound the same or different?

Different Same Same, no wait I mean different, maybe, a little bit different...

Just Read: Gods and Pawns by Kage Baker

I have now read four books by Baker in the last three months, and am finally caught up (if you don't count Rude Mechanicals...and I'm not, really, because I expect it'll turn up in a bigger collection in a couple of years).

Damn is she prolific these days. She's only been writing for about a decade, and, even with a hiccup while jumping between publishers in the middle, she's still managed to publish an eight-book series (plus two related collections of short fiction), another novel, and two other books of short stories.

Now, don't get the idea that I'm complaining, he said, oddly quoting Al Capone, I like it when authors I like are prolific. It's just some of them can write nearly as fast as I can read...

This is the second official "Company" story collection (after Black Projects, White Knights, but also after The Children of the Company, which is a fix-up of previously published stories with a little bit of new connective tissue), and it collects seven stories -- two of them original to this collection. They're mostly sidebars to the main storyline, as far as I can tell (since the main storyline has a lot of semi-separate threads to it), but the novella "Welcome To Olympus, Mr. Hearst" is pretty important to the big ending in The Sons of Heaven.

As usual with Baker, some of these stories are quite long -- three of the seven are novellas, one of which ("The Angel in the Darkness") was even published as a separate book. If you like lots of short stories that you can get through quickly, Baker is not your writer.

Nobody should start reading the Company books here, but, if you've read the others and are waiting for Sons of Heaven, this is a great way to pass some time.

The Meme History of Genre

Even if John Klima didn't do my last meme, I still owe him a good dozen-or-so, and thus I'll do one of his. I tried not to look at his list before doing mine, but I'll go back afterward and see where we agree.

Instructions: Starting with 1890, list one book from each decade that you think represents the genre and the way it's moved from then to now.

I tried to pick the most influential and important book I could think of from each decade, rather than the one I liked the best, but that wasn't part of John's instructions; if this does attain meme status, I could see people doing it either way.

Decade	Year	Title	Author
1890s	1898	The War of the Worlds	H.G. Wells
1900s	1908	The House on the Borderland	William Hope Hodgson
1910s	1912	A Princess of Mars	Edgar Rice Burroughs
1920s	1928	"The Call of Cthulhu"	H.P. Lovecraft
1930s	1932	Brave New World	Aldous Huxley
1940s	1948	Nineteen Eighty-Four	George Orwell
1950s	1950	The Martian Chronicles	Ray Bradbury
1960s	1961	Stranger in a Strange Land	Robert A. Heinlein
1970s	1973	Rendezvous With Rama	Arthur C. Clarke
1980s	1985	Neuromancer	William Gibson
1990s	1996	Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone	J.K. Rowling
2000s	2001	Perdido Street Station	China Mieville

(I will note that I used the Ultimate Science Fiction Timeline to refresh my memory of what was when, and to keep from forgetting everything.)

I seem to have created an almost entirely science fictional list; that wasn't my intention, but it's the way things looked to me while I was doing the list. (I'm sure some of these would be different if I did it again tomorrow, though.)

Checking John's list, I see that we agreed on The House on the Borderlands and Neuromancer, but not otherwise. That's about par for the course.

Movie Log: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex *But Were Afraid To Ask

For whatever reason, the late '60s and early '70s were the heyday of ridiculously long movie titles...like "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex *But Were Afraid To Ask", a minor early Woody Allen film that I somehow managed to miss watching when I was twelve (when I would have really appreciated it). I'm sort of vaguely wandering through the early movies of Allen these days, so I watched it last night.

It's also a great example of one of Hollywood's more endearing bits of folly: the idea that, simply because something (in this case, a book) was very successful in one medium it must be turned into a movie, which will then be even more successful. This works for things which have stories (particularly fiction), but tends to break down with objects such as...well, such as a popular question-and-answer book about sex, which is what this movie was very, very loosely based on.

Everything comprises seven separate vignettes (each around ten minutes long), all loosely inspired by a chapter title from the book. I'll warn anyone thinking about watching this that the first vignette, which features Woody Allen (also the director and writer) as a medieval Fool and Vanessa Redgrave as the randy Queen he's trying to get it on with, is by far the worst piece of the movie -- it's dull, unfunny, goes on too long, and is so dimly lit it's hard to see what's happening at times. The movie does get better from there.

In fact, the other six pieces are pretty good -- they're variable, but they're all funny at least in places, and the movie recovers the ground it lost in those boring first ten minutes. Gene Wilder has a great turn as a doctor who falls in love with a sheep, and the last section (with Tony Randall as the head of the crew inside a man's brain as he goes on a dinner-date and then has sex) is inventive and wonderful. But it's all so very '60s: this is the squinting look towards the sun of a culture that had tried to ignore sex for a good generation or more. (And still gets things wrong -- the "What is sodomy?" section is actually about bestiality, which is not at all the same thing.)

So, for someone my age, it's like looking at a time capsule of what my parents' generation thought sex was. And thinking of it that way is really creepy. Ew. Sorry I mentioned that.

Quote of the Week

"John W. Campbell, who must have thought about this too in his time, put it this way to one of the writers in the forties: 'People who read science fiction are crazy. We all know about that. And science fiction writers are even crazier. But when you talk about science fiction editors, well--'

A long Campbellian sigh.

Silence."
- Barry N. Malzberg, "Grandson of the True and the Terrible," in The Engines of the Night

I Guess I'll Take That As a Compliment...

John Klima has declined to do every single stupid meme I do -- and who can blame him? -- but he does say that he and I "look like starting linemen for SF's pro football team." (I can't fault that, either.)

So, who else would be on the SF pro football team? Do we have a good running back? Does anyone have the arm for quarterback? Anyone know how to punt? (I'm pretty sure Tom Doherty would be our Bill Parcells.)

OK, The Internet Is Now Officially Full

Because even the freakin' Sherrif of Nottingham has a blog.

A Thought Experiment

Let's say that you are the cynical and secretive human interstellar government of a few hundred years hence. (Not too much of a stretch, yes?) You're not actively evil, but you're perfectly willing to do nasty things (or, though inaction, allow nasty things to happen). You're also in a state of war, and have been for some time.

What you need to do now is to plan a secret colony. For some handwave-y reason, hollowed-out asteroids, other kinds of space-based habitats, or anything involving non-Earthlike worlds is out. It has to be a shirtsleeve, dirt-farming colony, as God and Robert A. Heinlein intended.

Now, for good and sufficient reasons, you need to equip this colony with a lower tech level than they're used to. You can either pick an 1850 level, or a 1970 level. Other than pure "screw with the colonists" reasons, can you think of a reason not to pick the 1970 level? (They'd be, as far as I can see, of about equal difficulty, since all of the items in each package would have to be created from scratch in either case.)

A Puzzler

So, if your governor -- a guy you've never liked and didn't vote for, and who has a sense of personal entitlement larger than his personal fortune -- is seriously injured in a car-wreck in large part because he didn't wear a seatbelt and because he had the car's emergency lights on "to keep on his schedule" (against state law), are you required to feel sorry for the guy?

Just asking...

Update: According to news reports, that governor's car was going 91 in a 65 zone, so I'm now even less inclined to feel sorry for him.

You Keep Saying That. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

Yes, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said "There are no second acts in American lives." Yes, blowhards like to trot this out to deny it when talking about some media darling who is making a comeback. But they're all idiots, since that's not what Fitzgerald was talking about. Despite all of the misquotations, he did not say "second chances," and he did not mean "second chances."

An "act" is a theatrical conceit, and Fitzgerald was referring to the typical three-act play. American lives, in the Fitzgeraldian conception, have a first act (the set-up) and a third act (the climax), but they rush from one directly to the other without the usual building of tension and complexity in the middle. In other words, America is a land of smash hits and smash failures, one after another, without pause -- exactly what the people who quote that line to refute it are trying to say in their own stupid ways.

So cut it out.

A Meme, A Meme, I Do Confess 't

Liz Williams was doing it, so it's clearly our end of the alphabet's turn...

What do you think about Ouija boards? That random nerve twitches can be quite entertaining the certain types of people.

Your favorite TV shows? I only seem to watch TV these days with the kids, so probably Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy is starting to grow on me, too -- maybe I have a secret fondness for animated shows with long titles?

What’s on your mouse pad? At work, I use at SFBC mouse pad, just because. At home, I'm using one from some now-defunct groceries-over-the-Internet company (name now forgotten), because it was free, and because it still works fine.

Favorite board game: Scotland Yard, though I haven't played it in ages. I like Stratego, too, which I also haven't played in forever.

Favorite magazine: I guess The New York Review of Science Fiction, unless I can choose something now-defunct, like Spy from about 1989-1993 or Movieline in the early to mid-90s.

Favorite smells: {sings} "These are a few of my many smells, won't you come and smell me..." Pass.

Worst feeling in the world: That something horrible has happened to your wife or kids. (I'm a worrier, so I get this one a lot.)

Best feeling in the world: I've never felt that good, so I wouldn't know.

Favorite soundtrack: Akira.

What is the first thing you think when you wake in the morning: What I need to get accomplished at work that day.

Roller coaster - scary or exciting? Fun. Not scary, unless something goes very wrong. But not really "exciting," either. A good roller coaster is relaxing.

How many rings before you answer the phone? If The Wife has had the phone last (meaning that it's in some very unlikely place), I won't find it before it goes to the machine. If I put it back in the cradle where it belongs, then probably two rings. But it's not for me, anyway.

Future daughter’s name: Megan Elin.

Future son’s name: The one we didn't use for Thing 2 (The Wife talked me out of it) was Graham.

Favorite foods: Yes. Basically, anything a doctor has ever said was bad to eat.

Chocolate or vanilla? Chocolate chunks in vanilla.

Do you like to drive? Yes.

Do you sleep with a stuffed animal? Despite Thing 2's attempts, no. (His bed is piled full of them, and he occasionally gives me one at bedtime to keep me company at night.)

This is where I trot out my usual comment about the ages of people who take meme polls. What am I, a fourteen-year-old cheerleader?

Storms - cool or scary? Annoying, particularly when they drop eight inches of water on your head. They're only "scary" if you're under the age of twelve, and only "cool" if the roof over your head isn't your responsibility to fix if a tree falls on it.

What type was your first car: A deeply uncool metallic green 1998 Ford Windstar. It became "mine" about a year ago; I still drive it.

If you could meet one person dead or alive - who would it be? The live one. What do you think: I'm stupid?

Favorite alcoholic drink: Whiskey sour, these days.

What is your zodiac sign? Do not make me come over there and slap you.

Who is your favorite poet? Robert Browning

Do you eat the stems of broccoli? I try not to eat any part of broccoli, if I can avoid it. If I'm setting a good example for the boys, I'll eat the whole thing.

If you could have any job you wanted, what would it be? Something not unlike what I do now, only with much more money, power, and dancing girls. No, strike that. I'd like to be a robber baron, please.

If you could dye your hair any color, what would it be? The one that strikes people who write quizzes like this dumb.

Have you ever been in love? Yes.

What is on your walls in your room? In this room right here, four bookcases, a cork-board, various other important papers attached with tape, and a "Speed Limit: C" sign. At home, there really isn't a "my" room. I'm a grown-up.

Is the glass half empty or half full? I don't have a glass. My Snapple bottle from lunch is completely empty. Does that help?

What is your favorite Snapple? What a segue...plain.

Favorite movie(s): Love, Actually; Much Ado About Nothing; Gregory's Girl; The Dead; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Are you a lefty, righty, or ambidextrous? Right handed.

Do you type with your fingers on the proper keys? I don't even know which are the proper keys.

What’s under your bed? The floor. (The boys, through jumping on the bed, broke the frame and have done serious damage to the box spring as well.)

What is your favorite number? e. It's irrational like pi, but doesn't get the publicity.

Favorite sport to watch: Baseball, I guess, though I haven't watched a game since the kids were born.

Say one nice thing about the person who sent this to you: No one sent it to me; I grabbed it on my own. But I quite liked her novel Snake Agent.

Person you sent this to who is most likely to respond: John Klima is the one most likely to pick up memes from me, I think. I'm not officially sending it to anybody.

Person you sent this to least likely to respond: See above.

Favorite quote: "Now when I was a boy, my Daddy sat me on his knee, and he told me, he told me many things, and he said, 'Son, there's a lot of things in this world that you're gonna have no use for. And when you get blue, and you've lost all your dreams, there's nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!'" (Tom Waits, Lucky Day)

In Case There Was Any Doubt...

How evil are you?

The Gods of Transportation Hate Me

It's beginning to look like I'll need to sacrifice some kind of small animal to the spirits of motorized conveyance, so any suggestions as to what animals, rituals, and/or deities would be most efficacious will be greatly appreciated.

Let me give you a thumbnail sketch of My Day of Transportation Woe:

You may have heard that we got a little bit of rain in these parts yesterday, so, when I went out to wait for a bus this morning, I determined not to be my usual picky self -- no, I would take the first bus that came by, even if that was a local, since my usual express would be sure to be delayed if not missing entirely. I did get on a local, after only waiting at the stop for about ten minutes. The bus made its usual poky way, and I got to reading. Sometime later, a passenger paying better attention jumped up and asked the driver why he was traveling west on Route 46, when New York was to our east. The driver's answer: oops, he'd forgotten what route he was driving.

We made it into the city with only minor delays after we got ourselves correctly oriented. (That is: pointed east.) I narrowly missed another Transport Disaster when I dashed onto the NRQW platform at Times Square to find trains on both sides...but I took a second to realize that they were a N and a Q, both expresses. So I waited for an R, and arrived safely, and only about half-an-hour late, at my building.

Where the elevators weren't working. And the emergency back-up passenger elevator in the back of the building was also not working. I fought my way into the second freight-car load and got up to my floor, where a colleague muttered darkly about not being able to get out to the company's main offices on Long Island...and I remembered that I had meetings in that office that very afternoon!

Soon it was noon, and time to leave for the train to beautiful, bucolic Garden City. Strangely, we got a roomy and pleasant taxi almost immediately. Almost as if Someone was toying with me...

The train ride out was uneventful, and the meetings had events, but not any worth mentioning here.

Then it was three o'clock. The last meeting had just ended. We thought the train was at 3:06. We rushed through the rain to the platform! And then waited a few minutes before checking our train schedules and learning that, while there are quite commonly trains at six minutes past the hour, the next train at that time of day was at 3:41. Dejection set in.

But wait! I exclaimed. We can take the bus on Franklin Avenue to the Mineola station! The trains from that station are swift and true, and one need not change trains at Jamaica (of cursed name)! So we tramped back to the other side of the building, to wait for a bus.

And wait.

And wait.

And then tramp back to the train platform, just in time for the aforementioned 3:41, after the only bus to come into sight had the fateful words "NOT IN SERVICE" emblazoned in fiery orange on its forecastle.

We took the train. We changed at Jamaica. The train was just late enough that I had no chance to catch my usual bus at 4:45. (When I reached the Port Authority Bus Terminal, large signs informed me to expect 30-minute delays. But, through long and painful experience, I have learned that this means that all previous buses have left on time -- they will not be delayed -- but that your bus might well take quite some time to arrive.) As it was, I got on the next bus -- another local, a fateful local, leaving only a few minutes after its scheduled 5:10 departure.

We made good time...until we broke down at about 5:40 on the side of Route 46. (Remember Route 46? It's a song about Route 46.) The bus garage promised to send out a new bus and a tow truck. Other buses were instructed to stop and pick up we sad passengers.

Did those buses stop? No, they did not -- they went whizzing by for the next hour.

Did the tow truck arrive? Actually, it did, but it couldn't tow the bus with us on it, so that didn't help much.

Did the replacement bus arrive? Not for more than an hour. So we sad passengers dragged ourselves onto the replacement bus, and continued on our way. Nearly everyone got off in the town of Wayne, and the few of us left gathered at the front of the bus in anticipation of getting home.

Did I mention the rain before? It rained yesterday. It rained a lot. I live in a town called Pompton Lakes, which has three rivers flowing through it. Flowing with all sorts of bends and curves. Oh, and there's this big lake -- couldn't guess from the name, could you? -- which also tends to fill up when there's water about, which, as I said, was the case yesterday. So water levels were rising in all sorts of odd parts of my town...including up to a major bridge leading from Pompton Lake into the mighty Pequannock River. I usually get off my bus right after it passes over that bridge. Usually.

So I saw a huge line of traffic backed up, and I realized, being not completely stupid, that my bridge must be closed to vehicular traffic. This is fine, I said to the driver, I'll get off here.

So I did. I walked along the road -- much faster than the two lines of bumper-to-bumper cars, I'm happy to say, crossed the road, and tried to walk in through an alternate route. (This would be another, smaller bridge, which I could see had some water in front of it but was clear itself.) So I trudged through about four inches of water in the middle of a side road, got up onto the bridge, and saw...about two feet of water in the middle of the road, going up at least two streets. And I turned around again, walked back through the water, back up to the main road, and continued along (still well ahead of my bus, though).

I made it to the bridge, when a loudly amplified voice told me it was closed to pedestrian traffic. I tried to reason with the friendly policeman, making note of my slim build and light-hearted demeanor, and claiming I could flit across the bridge with barely a touch of my doe-like foot.

He did not agree, and made dark references to his handcuffs. He gestured towards a PSE&G truck, with airy references to gas lines under the bridge, and the amount of paperwork he would have to fill out if I managed to blow myself, and the bridge, up. I pleaded, pointing out that my home was only about three block -- three dry blocks, in that direction (I pointed). He stood firm.

We finally agreed that I would re-join the line of traffic (remember the line of traffic? imagine it oozing by, very slowly, during this whole section) by getting on a bus and seeing where the detour would take me.

That bus, just coming up to the intersection before the bridge, was, by an odd twist of fate, my bus -- not the one I had been on previously (which was still a quarter of a mile back, in the oozing traffic), but my usual bus, the one filled with the bosom companions of my youth (or, at least, a bunch of people I know well enough to nod at now and then). I quickly joined them, and we swapped tales of woe -- their bus had left on time at 4:45, but had been trapped by rising waters on Route 23, and had spent the last two and a half hours (it was now nearly 8) going little more than five miles.

Well, the detour wasn't all that bad -- I got onto the bus just as it got to the final merge, so it was much less oozy at that point -- and the detour followed pretty much the path I'd expected, into the middle of my town. At least a mile, maybe two, past my house. And the bus wasn't going backwards. So, those of us whose stops had been bypassed got off, and trudged backwards.

I finally got home -- the one who walked back the furthest -- at about 8:30, only three hours later than usual. (After leaving a meeting at 3:00, mind you.)

And that's why I think I need to slaughter a goat to appease ol' Poseidon (or whomever). How was your day?

Ordering to the Net

Originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 4/6/07. It made more sense in context, but I think it's still amusing and/or informative on its own:

When computerized chain-store ordering started, in the early '90s, the problem was "ordering to the net." Say Joe Schlabotnik's first novel was A Is For Atomic; Big-Ass Chain Store took 50,000 copies, and sold 35,000 -- the sell-through was 70%.

Aha! says the ordering computer at BACS, we sold 35,000 the last time, so I will order 35,000 of Schlabotnik's new opus, B Is For Blaster. This time, the sell-through is slightly higher, and BACS sells 25,000 copies.

Next year, along comes C Is For Crashing Suns, and BACS takes 25,000. The year after, D Is For (Planetary) Destruction only gets 17,000 copies in. And they decide not even to order E Is For Ethnocide.

That's "ordering to the net" -- getting in just as many copies as were sold of the previous book. (This is how I've heard several SFWAns claim it operated, but I frankly can't believe major businesses would be that dumb for very long -- at worst, this kind of ordering only affected the middle and bottom of the list.)

Nowadays, that's not what's happening. There may be still writers whose careers were killed by that (if they're really slow, and have been goat ranching for the past fifteen years), but not many.

Nowadays, bookstore chains can easily look up the sales of previous books (particularly previous books in the same series) by any given author. And, if those sales are lowish to begin with, and falling from book to book (as does happen), the chain is certainly not going to order the new book in higher quantities, and possibly might not want it at all.

I won't say that most writing careers hit a death spiral at some point, but...it's a pretty common effect in publishing. There are plenty of writers who plateau at a comfortable level, but there are also some whose numbers go down steadily. (And a glorious few whose numbers are going up...may they be blessed in the name of Bookscan.)

A Silly Question

Does anyone else, when sending a blog post out into the ether by pushing that orange "Publish" button, mentally append "...and be damned!" nearly every time?

Because I do...

Just Read: Breakfast in the Ruins by Barry N. Malzberg

Careful readers might have noticed that I've been reading this book for the past few days.

Breakfast in the Ruins is an odd portmanteau, similar in its structure -- reprinting an old book with new stuff added on -- to Gene Wolfe's Castle of Days, a book otherwise completely unlike Breakfast (don't know why I mentioned it, actually). The first half of Breakfast is a reprint (with new introduction and afterwords) of Malzberg's "screw you guys, I'm going home" book The Engines of the Night from 1982. That part was the source of all of my various quotes and posts from earlier in the week, and is the more interesting part of Breakfast. The main part of Malzberg's SF career was from roughly 1965 to 1975, and Engines is a deeply sour look at the SF world in those days. (Which were already past in 1980; interestingly, Malzberg seems to believe both that it was a horrible, soul-destroying thing to be a SF writer in those days and that things were only getting worse. This is, the astute follower of the genre will have already realized, the quintessential Malzberg attitude: everything is always worse than you think, but it was even worse back in the day, and it's getting worse by the minute right now.)

The second half of Breakfast is in three sections:

• "Meditations," which are general essays on SF and culture, mostly from Pulphouse in the early '90s -- some of these are good and some are not-so-good, but they are all separate essays, not chapters of anything larger
  
• "Writers and Other Culprits," essays on various writers and editors, mostly from convention program books, NESFA Press introductions, and similar venues -- also exceptionally miscellaneous, and mostly in the hagiographic mode (all dead writers were geniuses, and are now unjustly ignored)
  
• "Ruthven Agonistes," a story plus fore- and afterwords about SF writer Henry Martin Ruthven, the protagonist of "Corridors," the story at the end of the original Engines

The original Engines (which is only otherwise available as a used book) is one of the great books about SF, in all of its glory and hideousness. It's invaluable for an understanding of the New Wave, even though I don't think Malzberg uses that term, and he's too obsessed with his own situation to even provide a thumbnail history of those times. (It doesn't matter: his obsession illuminates those times better than any more dispassionate history could have.) Malzberg, oddly, spends more time talking about the Fifties (his Golden Age of SF-reading, of course) than his own career, but I think that's because other people's failures were bad enough -- his own would be unbearable. As Malzberg says in the new introduction to this volume, "This is a work about losing and losers, conceived and executed in that mode." He explicitly means that genre SF is a crucible of losers, but we also have to remember that Engines is very much Malzberg's Fox-and-the-grapes moment. For those who hold to the pure Campbellian ideal of SF (battered and out-of-date as it is), Engines will be a book to make you gnash your teeth and hurl heavy objects around the room.

I have my doubts that the field was ever monolithically the way Malzberg depicts it; the descriptions of the sex-book field of the early '60s I've seen are, at worst, only slightly more soul-destroying than the way Malzberg saw the SF paperback mills of the early '70s, and I really doubt SF was that bad most of the time. Both areas did seem to be open to writers whose skills were perhaps not all they should have been -- I haven't read much of Malzberg's early fiction, so I really can't say if he fits into this category-- and either provided a trial under fire to better those skills (like such folks as Silverberg, Ellison, Westlake, and Lawrence Block) or a way to earn some money for a while before getting out of the business. Malzberg does seem to have been extraordinarily unlucky in his successes -- he won the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award with a book (Beyond Apollo) that would have appalled Campbell (and did appall a large swath of the field), and got a steady job at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency when that, apparently, was the worst possible thing for his writing and his vision of his writing career. He also seems to have gotten the opportunity to write too many novels too quickly, none of which were much of a hit with the general SF audience.

Engines deservedly belongs on the short shelf of essential books about SF by working SF writers -- with The Issue at Hand, Trillion Year Spree, and In Search of Wonder. It's substantially less positive and nastier than any of those -- but, again, it is written by Barry Malzberg, and some things just come with the territory.

The new half of this book is more problematic: it's an accumulation of piecework that does not hang together to form any shape (either on its own or in conjunction with Engines), it's more than a little repetitious, and it's clear that Malzberg disengaged from a lot of the field between Engines and now. (And, on top of that, a good half of the "new" stuff is over a decade old -- so it doesn't depict the field as it is today.)

The best parts of the new stuff are the fragments of autobiography Malzberg gives us here and there, particularly an essay on his work at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. These pieces help to explain why Malzberg is who he is, particularly the horrors of the SMLA fee desk. Malzberg's day job, most of the past forty years, was there, and his job essentially was conning lots of would-be writers out of a few bucks each through upbeat pseudo-criticism about their generally lousy work. That half of the SMLA of Malzberg's day bears some resemblance to the worst vanity publishers of today, except, with SMLA, you didn't even get published at the end of it.

For those of us with a penchant for alternate history, it's interesting to speculate about a Malzberg who didn't go to New York, didn't get caught up in SMLA and the SF world -- would he have finally written a mainstream novel that could be published, round about 1970 or so? Could he have fulfilled his original dreams and become the next Philip Roth? That's the kind of story someone like Malzberg might write...well, not too much like Malzberg, since it would depict an alternate world with more happiness than our own, something Malzberg does not seem to believe in.

So the second half of Breakfast is not as strong as the first; that was inevitable, given the book's history, and Malzberg's career. But having The Engines of the Night back in print is still something to be happy about (a mild, it'll-probably-all-turn-out-horribly, Barry Malzberg kind of happiness), and the rest of this book is at worst along the lines of DVD extras and at the best very illuminating. As I said in one of my other posts about this book, I expect it to be a strong contender for the "Best Related Book" Hugo next year, and it's an important book for historians of the field -- particularly pessimistic ones.

Reports From Far Foreign Shores

It would be petty and churlish of me to complain that the latest Dave Itzkoff "Across the Universe" column in The New York Times Book Review only reviews little-known books from presses that don't do much SFF; this issue of the Book Review is devoted to fiction in translation -- always of minor appeal in the self-obsessed USA -- and so Itzkoff's column reviews five books originally written in languages that are not English.

(But I will wonder about the Book Review wandering into theme-issue territory; isn't that more the work of the Wizards and FHMs of this world? What next, the bikini babes of the deconstructionists?)

Anyway, Itzkoff manfully dug up some not-completely irrelevant books (Straight To Darkness, edited by Asamatsu Ken, from Japan; Babylon Babies by Maurice G. Dantec, from France; A Game of Perfection by Elisabeth Vonarburg, from Francophone Canada; Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko and Valdimir Vasiliev, from Russia; and Seven Touches of Music, by Zoran Zivkovic, from Serbia) and said plausible things about them. I could wish that he reviewed books of wider interest to the field (and to the wider world), but this was a directed result to begin with, so that was not possible.

I haven't read, or even seen, any of these books, so I can't comment on his critical judgments. (Though the Japanese books looks interesting to me.) He doesn't say anything that looks clearly wrong-headed, as he has done at times in the past. So this is about what you would hope for in a SF column from a major metropolitan newspaper: it covers a few books decently, and doesn't leave a mess on the floor.

If Itzkoff's columns were generally like this one, I'd have to stop making fun of him; I'm not sure if that would be a good or bad outcome. (It would be less entertaining for me, though probably better for the world and SF in general -- but I of course esteem myself more highly than I do the world.)

Please Slap Me If I Am In Imminent Danger of Turning into Dave Sim, But...

I really, really cannot stand the line of argument that goes "you cannot possibly care about this sufficiently, since you are not screaming with anger and outrage as I am. My position is thus more important than yours, because I care more deeply."

Such people need to be given whatever chemical treatment is necessary to allow them to view life dispassionately again.

And this isn't about Imus, honestly...

A Thought

If genre magazines spent less time analyzing the gender of their wanna-bes, and more time trying to connect with readers, perhaps there would still be a SFF magazine with a circulation above twenty-five thousand.

Locus Poll Rapidly Closing

I've just voted myself, because I realized the deadline is this weekend. So those of you with opinions on what's good in SF and Fantasy -- I name no names, please note -- and who do not want to spend $50 to participate in a similar fannish exercise, should participate here. As far as I can tell, Locus does give a damn about your voice. (Whoever "you" are.)

They even have convenient little drop-down menus, listing nearly everything one could want to vote for (I found one or two things in most categories that I needed to add myself, though, so a judicious poke through one's previous year of reading might be in order for those wanting to be really sure they voted for the best stuff). I note with shock and amazement that their lists are so complete that even I am included, in the "Best Editor -- Pro or Fan" category (though James Minz is not; I encourage you to add him, as I did).

If you read SFF, and want to encourage people to read what you think is the good stuff, go vote. If not, please stop whining.

Quote of the Week

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

A Modest Proposal

Since it's obvious that "those bastards" at the Hugo Awards can never be taken seriously until they reach exact gender equity, there is clearly only one thing to do:

We must demand that all nominations and votes for men (or productions created mostly by men) are discarded until women have won as many Hugo Awards as men have. No, strike that. Since women are clearly and obviously superior beings, until women have won twice as many Hugo Awards as men have. It's too late to fix the ballot for Nippon 2007, so we'll have to demand that the Hugos not be awarded at all this year. It's much better that way. We simply can't allow any more Hugos to go to men until this shocking situation is remedied.

Starting with the next nomination cycle, for the 2008 Hugos, only women and women-created productions can be eligible for the Hugos. Any votes for men, even really sensitive and nice guys who have won Tiptree Awards and have otherwise proved themselves, must be discarded. This shall continue until women have won the necessary number of Hugos, and the universe has been put into its rightful balance.

After that, "those bastards" will have to be closely watched, to be sure they don't backslide into their evil patriarchal ways of letting people vote for the things they liked best. We propose that, in every category, there shall be six nominees -- the top three female nominees, and the top three male nominees. It may also be necessary for votes for females to be weighed more heavily in the final round, if women do not win the awards in the correct numbers. Remember: there can be no excuse for letting men win awards!

This may seem heavy-handed, but, if the people who actually spend the time to nominate and vote for an award won't do things The Right Way, then those who know better will have to do it for them. We are sure that, eventually, they will come to love Big Sister.

Note: before replying, here or elsewhere, please read this.

All Malzberg! All the Time!

The opening of the essay, "On Engines Again," now available in Breakfast in the Ruins, originally written in 1992:

This exchange outside the student/faculty cafeteria at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, 7/22/89:

Bruce Sterling: Fifty years old and still writing! That would be horrible! When I'm fifty I hope I won't be still writing and involved in all this shit. I'd rather be dead than that pathetic.

Barry N. Malzberg: Oh, come on, Bruce. I'm fifty years old, well, I'll be fifty on Monday and I'm still writing or at least trying to write and I'm not pathetic.

Bruce Sterling: Oh, Barry, you're pathetic all right. You just haven't accepted it yet.

Footnote 1: Bruce Sterling was born April 14, 1954, which means Saturday is his 53rd birthday.

Footnote 2: "A Plain Tale from Our Hills," a new Bruce Sterling story available free online at Subterranean.

Pathetic or not pathetic? Discuss.

Signs of the Apocalypse, # 3792

Someone in a red squirrel costume rapping Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud."

No, I am not joking....

Malzberg's Top Ten SF Stories

I can't stop quoting Barry Malzberg!

This list is from 1980, and I wouldn't entire agree with it myself (even for stories before that date), but it's a strong list, so I figured I'd post it. Malzberg's version, in the essay "The Cutting Edge" in The Engines of the Night (and then reprinted in the new expanded version, Breakfast in the Ruins), also has his explanations.

1. "Vintage Season" by C.L. Moore
2. "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" by James Tiptree, Jr.
3. "Particle Theory" by Edward Bryant
4. "The Terminal Beach" by J.G. Ballard
5. "Private Eye" by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore
6. "Sundance" by Robert Silverberg
7. "Anachron" by Damon Knight
8. "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" by Alfred Bester
9. "Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester
10. "E For Effort" by T.L. Sherred

I'd have picked "The Man Who Walked Home" as my Tiptree story, though I imagine most people would have ignored me and Malzberg in favor of "Houston, Houston, Do You Read" (or possibly "The Women Men Don't See").

But I completely agree with Malzberg on "Fondly Fahrenheit;" he quotes Silverberg as calling it the single finest short story ever to come from science fiction, and I'd even go further: it's one of the very best stories ever written by an American, period.

I won't do my own list now, but, after mulling it over for a while on the bus, I think my list would have Walter Jon Williams's "Dinosaurs," Bruce Sterling's "We See Things Differently," and Greg Egan's "Learning To Be Me." (And maybe David Marusek's "We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy." And maybe Ted Chiang's "Hell Is the Absence of God." But I'd really have to poke through books to jog my memory of stories from before 1990, before doing a list, to be fair.)

Killed by Science Fiction

I'm still reading Malzberg's Breakfast in the Ruins, and will keep sharing interesting bits until you all are sick of it. Here's the opening of a 1980 essay called "Mark Clifton: 1906-1963"

Kuttner died of a heart attack in his sleep, Kornbluth died of either a massive cerebral hemorrhage or a heart attack (depending upon whose version you accept), Clifton has has a bad heart for a long time. It drove him out of industry and undid him at a relative young age. But I think that the death certificated of all three should have listed science fiction under cause of death. H. Beam Piper, our only suicide, blew out his brains with a shotgun in the fall of 1964, but it did not appear to be the field itself that had done it to him: the sudden death of his agent, monies tied up, depression, a big gun collection. Kuttner, Kornbluth, and Clifton took it straight.

Cause of death: science fiction. You bet, Mark.

Anyone else killed by science fiction since then?

Meanwhile, in the category of "got the hell out of Dodge, denied ever living there, and died old," is Kurt Vonnegut, who died last night, after a fall, at the age of 84. He was a massive international bestseller and the voice of a generation, but never a SFWA Grand Master. I guess we showed him...

More New Wavery from Malzberg

Malzberg also made up a list of writers who did not appear in Campbell's Analog from 1960 through his final issue in December 1971:

• J.G. Ballard
• Brian W. Aldiss
• Ursula K. Le Guin
• Samuel R. Delany
• Joanna Russ
• Larry Niven
• Michael Moorcock
• R.A. Lafferty
• George Alec Effinger
• Gardner Dozois
• A.J. Budrys
• Terry Carr
• Kate Wilhelm
• Geroge Zebrowski
• Theodore Sturgeon
• Philip K. Dick
• Pamela Sargent
• Robert Sheckley
• Robert Zelazny

Now, why did the New Wave happen, again?

What I've Been Talking About

Right now I'm reading Barry Malzberg's Breakfast in the Ruins, a much-updated and expanded version of his 1980 kiss-slap to science fiction, The Engines of the Night -- which, by the way, is fascinating and will likely be the best non-fiction book on SF published this year and a shoo-in as a Best Related Book Hugo nominee -- and finding much to think about.

For example, related to the chats we had here and at rec.arts.sf.written about the New Wave, here's Malzberg, from his 1980 essay, "The Fifties," on the end of that decade and the beginning of the next, in the aftermath of the 1958 breakup of American News Service:

John W. Campbell at Astounding had wandered from Dianetics to the Hieronymus Machine to the finagle factor and was just beginning to topple into Norman Dean's Drive, meanwhile running stories by a few writers functioning under innumerable pseudonyms, with virtually the same plot, conception, characters, and outcome. Only Rich Raphael (who was gone by 1965) seemed to be able to break into and sell interesting work to ASF in those years; Campbell had no other new writers of any visible promise.

An unhappy, airless time. An end of time for many. So emphatically hopeless that when science fiction began to pick up once more in the mid-sixties, first with the British New Worlds and then with the fusion of new writers, new approaches in the barbarous colonies themselves, a new audience was unaware of what had been accomplished in the fifties and talked of the field's "new literary merit," "new relevance," "new excitement," "new standards of contemporaneity" as if nothing innovative has occurred before Ballard or Silverberg.

If you were interested in my post on the New Wave, you really should read this book. If you're interested in the history of SF at all, you probably should read this book. (Though I warn you: Malzberg calls it "a work about losing and losers, conceived and executed in that mode." Those of you for whom SF is the glorious handmaiden of Technology Triumphant, surging boldly on into the Uncharted Nether Regions, will probably not like his tone.)

Your "Only In New York" Story for the Day

A seventy-something couple is retiring to Arizona, but didn't want to put their cats in the cargo hold of a plane for the trip out. And, being typical New Yorkers, they don't drive, either. So, what to do?

Take a cab.

Just read: Money in the Bank by P.G. Wodehouse

I was in the mood for something frivolous yesterday (since rumors of my employer's takeover had been flying for a week, with no official announcements), so I went to check on my unread Wodehouses. I had four of them, all minor (The Coming of Bill, anyone?), so I picked this one, since it was from 1942 -- Wodehouse's prime period.

And it's just about what you'd expect: a pleasant, completely entertaining but lightweight romantic comedy about impostors and jewel thieves, semi-amnesiac lords posing as butlers and raw-foods health faddists, all leading up to the proverbial happy ending.

There are still probably two dozen Wodehouse books I've never read, and I'm sure I'll need each one of them as I get to them. He provided mankind a great service, and I don't think he was ever adequately thanked.

As Evelyn Waugh said, "Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."

Well, exactly. And this isn't even one of the really good ones.

What Are the Great SF Novels of the...Oh, Crap! I'm Out of Decades!

In rec.arts.sf.written, on 3/1/07, I posted the following, as part of my annual tradition of getting the good people there to do my homework for me:

I've already posted this on the SFBC blog, but, since I've asked you folks about essentially the same issue the last few years, I thought I'd also post it here. It's only just barely on topic, for which I apologize.

As you may or may not know, the SFBC has been doing a 50th Anniversary Collection for the past five years -- we started in 2003 (the 50th anniversary of the club's founding in 1953) with a series of eight great books of the 1950s, and have had series each year since then to cover the decades following.

Well, we're running out of history now, since in 2007 we're doing books from the 1990s, and it's a little early to do the best books of the 2000s in 2008. So the series either needs to end or do something different.

And that's what I wanted to ask you folks about -- what different thing could we do? (Note that suggestions that a reasonable number of people might buy with their own money will be preferred -- yes, it would be nice to have the eight-volume definitive collection of Great SF Poetry, but the SFBC is a commercial enterprise and needs to be able to sell books to continue operations.)

We've thought about going backwards, and doing a series of the great SF books of the '40s -- or maybe just eight books from the period before 1950 (probably only going back to Verne and/or Wells). But I'm sure there are other possibilities.

All suggestions will be considered, though ones along the lines of my Great SF Poetry example may be mocked...

One person suggested an eight-volume collection of the great SF stories:

The budget really wouldn't reach to eight original books (or one, for that matter) -- so, if we did another year, it would need to be of books that already exist.

Good idea, though.

Another person suggested "first use of an idea anthologies":

A series of eight anthologies would be pretty much guaranteed to fail, unfortunately. And, as with Mike's idea, I think it would require creating all-new anthologies, which would be quite expensive. (I might be misunderstanding Dan's suggestion, though.)

One of the ideas we had a few years back for "what to do after the '90s" was a series of the great anthologies of the history of the field -- Adventures in Time and Space, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, stuff like that. But, again, we'd prefer not to be fired over the sales of the series.

Another comment about collections and/or anthologies mentioned that I was "religious" about novels in the first five series of the collection:

Wasn't that religious, actually -- the '50s series has City, the '70s has Her Smoke Rose Up Forever and Deathbird Stories, and the '80s has Schismatrix Plus, which is a novel plus stories.

It's just that, as I've said many times, I have a preference for books that people will actually buy.

And, if we do a series in 2008, we'll need an idea that can generate eight books...although, if we do ten more books, that would bring the grand total up to fifty, which is a nice round (and appropriate) number.

Several suggestions from one person: first a series of "the Best of {insert major current author}":

I'd love for someone to do that, but I'm afraid the club couldn't afford to do it on bookclub sales. Subterranean seems to be working their way into that niche, though -- they did the Vance book, and one on Connie Willis is coming up this year. (Not to mention the giant George R.R. Martin collection a few years back.)

Second, a continuation of the Hugo Winners anthologies:

Well, we missed the last trade-published volume or two in the club anyway (because they had stopped selling decently for us). So this is pretty unlikely. Again, if a trade publisher can't make it profitable, there would be even less money in it for the club.

Third, the books that almost made it into the earlier series:

That's one possibility, but we'd need to think of a better name than "the also-rans," which is how I keep thinking of this. Good idea, though.

Someone else asked about translated SF, which he thought would sell badly:

I'm afraid that's true. We tried to sell Solaris when the movie was out, and even that didn't help.

(For the inevitable follow-up: it doesn't matter how bad a movie made from an existing book is; it always increases the sales of that book. Ask me someday how we sold Starship Troopers and The Postman in the late '90s.)

Great SF of the 19th Century, someone asked?

Could work, but I think we'd want to do the first half of the 20th century first -- otherwise, it would look a bit weird to jump from 2000 right back to Frankenstein.

(And most of those books probably wouldn't sell all that well, since they're all Public Domain and available in many forms already.)

Back to anthologies. Someone thought that doing a whole series of them might be economically unwise for us:

If we did one of those two [Adventures in Time and Space and/or A Treasury of Great Science Fiction], preferably a year after doing any similar book, sales would only be on the low end of medium, yes.

For us, at least, anthologies are a very tough sell right now -- and historical reprint anthologies aren't as popular as they used to be. (I suspect this is because the audience for those books already has them, and newer readers aren't particularly interested in reading a pile of sixty-year-old stories all at once.)

The same person asked about the problems of the rights to old anthologies:

Realistically speaking, if the rights for an anthology are not still assembled in one place by someone, it's no longer publishable in that form. It's vastly easier to just hire a new editor and start from scratch.

And that was pretty much my contributions to that thread. Anyone here have any brilliant ideas? (I must warn you that we're 99% convinced to end the whole thing with the 90s series, which we're half through right now.)

The Current Upheaval

Some of you may have heard that one of the co-owners of my employer has sold out to the other co-owner; it became public today. We are apparently going to be merged with BMG Columbia House, and we'll find out later today what that means. (I may or may not be able to talk about it.)

If you remember just about a year ago, when Time Warner sold off its book-publishing group to Hachette, I posted to explain that wasn't me that time. Well, this time it is.

Update, later: Well, we had a meeting to meet the new CEO, who looks like a media guy rather than "a suit," and who went out of his way to talk about how much he reads. We won't have a corporate name for a few weeks, since this all happened so quickly, but I think this is going to be no worse than our other recent mergers and upheavals.

Movie Log: Children of Men

So The Wife and I saw Children of Men on Friday night. The short version: it's a very impressive movie, but it has huge holes as science fiction and as a plan old story.

I'll grant "Britain stands alone" as premise (or, more likely, as propaganda), and even wave off the fact that, after twenty years, nobody in the world seems to have any idea why no children have been born. (I'll also note that this is set in a slightly alternate world where no human ova -- fertilized or not -- have been successfully kept alive outside a human body.) Swallow, swallow, swallow. I'm doing my best: I'm trying to swallow everything this movie throws at me.

Massive numbers of refugees, kept in cages at tube stations? (OK, I don't get it, but swallow again.) Said refugees gathered up onto buses to go to Heinlein-esque Coventries, unless they're pulled off those buses to be put back into cages at different tube stations? I'll accept random brutality, and the general All Police Are Fascist Bastards feeling, but the system needs to make a little sense. Two sets of ubercompetent violence experts who just can't quite manage to get things done in the end? Minor characters who disappear and reappear to fit plot needs? ("Oh, hi! You were crouching in that arch, waiting for me, the whole time? As if this was our plan, even though we can't communicate? Great!") Sorry, now I'm choking.

I'm being too negative, right? Let's talk about this as a movie -- those two amazing long shots (one near the middle of the movie, one almost at the end), when a single camera follows the action, without cuts, for a good five minutes one time and probably at least ten the second time. Those are mesmerizing once you realize what's happening. And all of the performances are good; the script is clean and brutal, with a number of excellent, cutting lines ("Show Syd the fugee face. Sad fugee face."), and only one or two moments of windy pontificating (the speech about "the sound of the playgrounds fading"); and it's generally a great looking movie (yes, it's another "Twenty years from now, it will be next Tuesday" future, but they've got a worldwide societal collapse to explain that).

But all that can't hide the fact that Children of Men is shamelessly manipulative and silly, with plot points happening precisely and very conveniently to hit the screenwriter's Big Messages. And, even then, they chickened out on the ending -- there's a perfect moment of existential despair that would have been just the right ending, but then the movie goes on a bit longer.

All in all, it's well worth seeing as a movie, but turn off the SF-reading side of your brain when you do (to save it the inevitable damage from rough handling). And it would be a travesty if this wins the Hugo.

Just Read: He by Florence King

I read this mostly on Friday (appropriately, as I was writing my post about how men think about sex), and enjoyed it, but I doubt anyone reading this will ever pick this book up.

I'm a Florence King fan, as I think I've mentioned -- I started with her great With Charity Toward None (a wonderful history of misanthropy) over a decade ago, and have been wandering through the rest of her books ever since. King is one of the world's great curmudgeons, and her most typical books are the ones she wrote in the '80s and '90s. If what I say here interests anyone, find either Charity or The Florence King Reader (a great overview of her work, from St. Martin's around 1997 or so).

This one dates from 1978, and is a bit different than her later work; it's partially King's sexual autobiography and partially her look at the various types of men in her world at the time of writing. The big difference, I think, from her later stuff, is that this one dates from the days before King went through menopause. I get the feeling she always disliked most women, and this book clearly shows that she didn't like men all that much, either. So I believe that, once the one thing she wanted from men was no longer important to her, she could easily turn against the whole human race. (Not that there's anything wrong with that; I'm a curmudgeon myself.)

King was born, I deduce from internal evidence, about 1935, and the early chapters are about her upbringing (mostly by her Southern grandmother and a black maid of the same age and outlook) and about her college years. (She was, by her own accounts, tremendously hot to trot, but had to spend a long time working through the Byzantine '50s social code to even figure out what it was she wanted. This chapter is particularly good on what was allowed while dating then -- the short form, for those of us from later generations, is a hell of a lot more than we've been led to expect, but only in very specific ways at very specific times.)

After that, she spends most of the book anatomizing the different types of men she sees in the mid-'70s (not a good time for any Americans, I'm afraid), and quoting a lot of forgettable popular novels of the previous thirty years for their attitudes on men and women. The review of the literature is the weakest part of the book; aside from James Jones and one or two others, nobody reads any of those writers anymore, so refuting them (or just holding them up to opprobrium) is now pointless.

I should warn contemporary audiences that King is not a feminist, though she herself points out that she always lived alone and supported herself. She's a conservative (of the "every change since I was born has been a bad one" type) and was associated with the magazine National Review, but she doesn't have the stereotyped views of any side.

And I'll have to give her the last word, about her own Southern upbringing: "No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street."

Movie Log: Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades is the third movie based on the classic Kazuo Koike-Goseki Kojima manga series (I've seen the first two recently). It's more samurai action with an existential overlay, and I liked this one much better than the second.

The Peckinpah-ish streams of blood are toned down in this one, which is good -- they might be realistic, but they don't look realistic. And the scenery and cinematography are stunning this time out.

Again, I don't feel like looking up which manga stories this was based on, but there's at least one that I remember (where Ogami Itto and his baby-cart face down an army of gunmen and archers at the end), and this movie, like the others, seems to have been adapted by Koike directly from his scripts.

I'm no expert on samurai movies, so it's easily possible that there are better ones than these. But these are pretty good, and should be of interest to anyone who's read the collections. I do intend to watch the last three myself, if that means anything.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 4/1

This time our magic number is ten, and here are the books I was reading at the end of March 1997:

• Linda Obst, Hello, He Lied (3/24)
  One of those Hollywood memoirs that proliferated in the mid-90s (with the rise of the independent production companies, I bet). Obst may have written a more famous book before this one (or I may be thinking of someone else), but this is the one I read. It has not stuck in the mind, but I still like that title.
• Brian Aldiss, Remembrance Day (3/26)
  A contemporary novel, I believe -- and I think there was some terrorism in it. I wonder how it compares to this year's new novel, HARM?
• Les Daniels, DC Comics (3/26)
  A big fat coffee table book with lots of comic panels blown up a bit too large. I believe Daniels did a Marvel book first, which was a hit, and so I was looking at this follow-up for the SFBC. I can't remember if we offered it or not, or much about the book itself.
• The Alien Life of Wayne Barlowe (3/26)
  Another art book from the man behind Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials and the much later Barlowe's Guide to Fantasy. He always had a naturalist's eye, which made him a great painter of aliens and other interesting creatures -- I believe this book was loosely themed around those strengths. I haven't seen anything from Barlowe in ages; I wonder what he's doing these days?
• John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke, The Mask (3/27)
  First comics series about the character; one of the movies was probably coming up at this point (I am too lazy to investigate right now), and I was thinking about them for the club. Decent early-'90s over-energetic comics, but I doubt they've aged well.
• John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke, The Mask Returns (3/27)
  See above.
• Masamune Shirow, Appleseed Book One: The Promethean Challenge (3/27)
  I imagine I was reading this for the SFBC as well. I recall mostly liking it --the characterization was pretty good, and Shirow has an art style that's interesting, if a bit busy -- but I've never been a big giant-robot fan, so I didn't seek out any more of the series.
• Walter Jon Williams, Days of Atonement (3/28)
  I finally caught up to this novel a few years late; It was published around 1990. This is probably Williams's least skiffy novel, being a near-future police procedural, and I enjoyed it, as I've liked all of his novels.
• James White, Final Diagnosis (3/29)
  It's not actually the last "Sector General" novel -- there was one more, a few years later -- though it sounds like it should be. I wish there were more books like these: fun but not flyweight, serious but not dour, adventurous but not violent.
  
• Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love (3/31)
  First of two novels in an ugly brown-paper Modern Library edition; I'm afraid all I remember is that they're about upper-crusty English types in the middle of the last century, and that I was supposed to figure out a lot of scandalous real-life details, since it's a roman a clef. (Mitford was one of a slew of daughters from an aristocratic family, and they all keep popping up in the oddest places in 20th century English history -- one married Oswald Mosely, and one ended up writing The American Way of Death.) I felt as if I needed to read five or six good history books to properly appreciate this novel, so a lot of it just went past me.
• Scott Adams, Casual Day Has Gone Too Far (3/31)
  A Dilbert collection. 'Nuff said.
• Nancy Mitford, Love In a Cold Climate (4/2)
  The other novel in that ugly Modern Library omnibus, which I think was a sequel to Pursuit, and left me equally cold.

I seem to be writing these up during the week, and saving them to post on Saturdays (when I don't have time to sit down at the computer, usually). Perhaps I should shift my weeks to accommodate that? (Of course, if I did, then I'd suddenly start posting these at completely different times, for whatever reasons.)

Just Read: The Unbinding by Walter Kirn

This is a short novel, originally serialized on Slate and written while it was being published. I've read Kirn's earlier novels Thumbsucker and Up In the Air (though I avoided his last novel, Mission To America, about a bunch of Mormon missionaries), and I loved this cover -- and the book was very short, always a good thing -- so I gave him another try.

It's something of a noble failure, since it doesn't quite work the way it should. There are great sentences, paragraphs and even chapters, but the whole thing fizzles a bit by the end.

It feels slightly SFnal, though it's set in the present day -- it's told entirely in electronic communications (blog posts, tape-recorded reports, intercepts, and so on) from three points of view. Two of them are to become a fairly conventional boy-girl couple, but the third is a federal agent surveilling both of them for some ill-defined purposes.

(The whole book is about surveillance and electronically mediated communication, in somewhat superficial and not clearly thought-out ways.)

The back cover copy focuses the story on one of the viewpoint characters, a young man who works for a company that's something like OnStar, though covering one's entire life. He and the surveillance guy (who calls himself "Rob,"practically announcing it as an alias) have interesting stories, and could have used a bit more space. The young woman in the middle, unfortunately, gets squeezed out of the book by them, and never really develops -- she stays "the love interest" even in her own side of the story.

Again, this doesn't quite come together, but it's interesting. One can clearly gather than Kirn does not like the Patriot Act. (Does anyone in the literary world?) It might be worth reading for people interested in the ideas, but I'm not completely sure it's worth paying for -- especially when it's still available on Slate for free.

A Comparison

I was reading The New York Times Book Review this morning, and I came across this "Crime" column by Marilyn Stasio, in which she reviews four books.

And that got me thinking.

Now, this is completely unfair -- I admit that freely -- but Stasio has had two columns (the other was in the March 11th issue) since Dave Itzkoff's last "Across the Universe" column (also in the March 11th issue). And Stasio (each column half the length of that epic Itzkoff exploration into SETI) has managed to thoughtfully review 11 books in roughly the same space as Itzkoff took to review...well, none.

So, here's my question: is there any chance we can trade? I have no reason to believe Ms. Stasio knows anything about SF, but that doesn't seem to be a NYTBR requirement to begin with. And she certainly knows how to review books, which would be a nice change.

A Meme I Will Make No Comment On

Andrew -- [adjective]: Sexually stunning 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Overpraising

Sometimes you see a quote that makes you go "hm." Today, it's The Onion's A/V Club on Patrick Rothfuss's debut novel, The Name of the Wind:

The Name of the Wind is quite simply the best fantasy novel of the past 10 years, although attaching a genre qualification threatens to damn it with faint praise. Say instead that The Name of the Wind is one of the best stories told in any medium in a decade..

Um. Now, I really like Rothfuss's book -- I read it in galleys, and bought it as a Main Selection for the SFBC, and wrote here that I thought it was "it's a major debut fantasy novel, and a joy to read." So it's not like I don't think this book is really really good or anything -- it is, and I want a lot of people to read it. Let me underline that: it's one of the best debut fantasy novels I've read, and one of the better fantasy books of this year.

But "quite simply the best fantasy novel of the past 10 years?" Better than Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, than The Lies of Locke Lamora, than Anansi Boys, than The Years of Rice and Salt, than Perdido Street Station and The Scar, than The Wizard Knight, than "His Dark Materials," than Declare, than a dozen Terry Pratchett novels and nearly as many by Patricia A. McKillip, than Perfect Circle and Mockingbird, than Vellum, than the "Bartimaeus Trilogy?"

Really?

Some praise is just too over-the-top, and it sounds silly. This, I think, is one of those cases. But, still, read The Name of the Wind. It might not be the greatest novel ever written by the hand of man, but it's still awfully damn good. (I'm just hoping this doesn't turn into another one of those Strange Horizons vs. The Lies of Locke Lamora cases.)

If There's One Thing You Can Say About Mankind, There's Nothing Kind About Man

I saved this post from the Bookslut blog from yesterday, because I wanted to respond to it, but I was afraid I'd do the same thing I think Jessa Crispin is doing in that post: viscerally, and vehemently, reacting to something instead of thinking about it.

It's a day later, so maybe I can untangle it now.

Crispin is responding primarily to this Nerve article about a new novel, The Average American Male by Chad Kultgen. (Please note: this is a novel. Its main character has no name, but that does not mean that he is Kultgen, or that the novel is a record of real activities or anyone's actual thoughts. Fiction is not fact.) Her post really is a drive-by, so I feel guilty writing this long post in reaction to her, but I think hers will be a common reaction, particularly among educated, feminist women, so maybe I'm not really hunting a grape with an elephant gun.

I don't think Crispin has read The Average American Male. I'll admit I haven't, and I don't know if I particularly want to -- oh, sure, I do sometimes like books with a lot of sex in them, but Average sounds dull, tawdry, and repetitious, which aren't things I generally look for in a novel. So my reactions will be, as I assume Crispin's were, based on the review and what Kultgen says about it in the Nerve article. In other words, I'm no expert on Average...but neither was Crispin.
On the other hand, I am an American male, which Crispin isn't. And I think she's both conflating Kultgen with his character, and taking Kultgen's statements about men as evidence of his own personal feelings and desires. To put it more bluntly, she's forgetting that Average is a novel and assuming that Kultgen is untypical.

According to that article, and to Amazon, Average is a first-person "lad lit" novel about an unnamed young man in LA who likes to have a lot of sex but doesn't really understand women -- and, apparently, doesn't want to understand women. The plot seems pretty straightforward: a dude bounces between two girls, and eventually ends up with the "better" one (so this is a gender-swapped version of Bridget Jones's Diary, and of about a million romances). Oh, and this guy thinks about sex all the time, and dreams up pornographic scenarios involving just about every woman he sees. (Apparently -- and this would be the fictional part -- he also has sex with a lot of these random women.)

There seem to be two issues that some people...OK, mostly women.. have with this book: 1) that this guy thinks about sex all of the time, which is unrealistic, and 2) that his relationships with women are shallow.

To deal with #2 first: now, I haven't read the book, but it seems like that is the premise of the novel. Perhaps I'm missing something, but that's more of an observation than a criticism, like "Gosh, that Sun sure does give off a lot of light" or "Gee, this water certainly is wet."

On to #1. Crispin writes, about Kultgen (not the main character in his novel):

He's not all testosteroned out, beating his chest about his need for anal sex and blow jobs from multiple women a day. He's just scribbled on the wall and realized when mommy (or Oprah) gets home, she'll be disappointed in him. We should start a collection for his therapy bills now, get a head start.

Again, she seems to have entirely conflated the nameless protagonist and the author. (I'll admit that Kultgen doesn't help: he's in puppyish-new-writer mode in the Nerve article, ready to talk about the book as if it were the pure expression of his real life. He'll get burned by the press soon enough, and learn to emphasize that he's writing novels, not sociology.)

Crispin doesn't engage with Kultgen's thesis: that men think about sex all the time, and that has nothing to do with specific women, or their own childhoods, or anything external. It's how men are. Crispin assumes that this can't possibly be true without even pausing to consider it. But she's wrong; that is what men -- particularly young men -- are like.

Now, I can't speak for all men at all times, and I'm sure there are some men (old, dead, gay, or just sadly deficient) who don't think about women in sexual ways far too often, but...yeah, the snippets on Amazon and in the article seem reasonable to me.

The main character of Average may be a little extreme, perhaps somewhat exaggerated for effect, and he's clearly still in his 20s (men gain some ability to think about other things for whole minutes at a time somewhere between 30 and 35), but I have had streams of consciousness not unlike that, many times.

For example: while walking to work this morning, I saw an attractive woman yawning widely, and thought about blowjobs. (That's the highly sanitized version of my thought process, and I won't explain any further.) Men are nodding right now. Women perhaps are confused.

I suspect part of the problem is that a novel has to be written in words, and real stream of consciousness is largely non-verbal (at least mine is). A man doesn't think "I'd really like to fuck her. Wonder what she tastes like?" and so on; he imagines that he's already doing it, or fantasizes about how something would feel, or works through a sequence of events in his head. Putting that into words perhaps makes it seem worse than it actually is...or maybe women just think that it would be horrible, since they don't realize the other half of the population really does think like that a lot of the time.

So women, the answer is yes: men do think about sex, about having sex with random people (specifically "women they find attractive" in the case of most heterosexual men) all of the time. Men who find you attractive think about having sex with you. You'd probably be appalled if you knew some of the things they'd thought.

But then, wouldn't we all be appalled if we really knew what was in other people's heads?

(Side note: this is why some straight men are uneasy around gay men -- those guys think they know what the gay men are thinking, and they don't like it at all. Those kind of men are also usually the ones who think they're far more attractive then they actually are.)

Now that I've written all this crap, it feels horribly obvious. Don't women already know this? How can you live around men and not realize the way we think?

Obsessing Again

Off and on yesterday, I wrote a long post, but forgot to actually post it before turning off my home computer last night.

And so now I'm trying to decide what to do with it. It's way too long, and probably pointless. On the other hand, I did spend too much time writing and thinking about it to just trash it. But, on the third hand, it's about something potentially embarrassing. On the fourth hand...

Oh, what the hell. It'll be up next.

Quote of the Week

"Conservative men are crazy to start with, so they can relax and be secure in the knowledge that things cannot possibly get any worse. The liberal man, however, is merely neurotic, so he knows full well that something more is looming out there if he is not careful."
- Florence King, from He: An Irreverent Look at the American Male

Just Read: Lemons Never Lie by Richard Stark

I've been reading a lot of Westlake recently -- Adios, Scheherezade under his own name, then I Know a Trick Worth Two of That as Samuel Holt and now this one as Richard Stark. Stark's books are mostly the "Parker" crime novels, but this is a sidebar novel, in a slightly less gritty style (but only slightly) about another criminal, Alan Grofield.

Grofield is an acquaintance of Parker's, so there clearly is a Stark-iverse (sorry; I put everything in comic-book terms; it's a sickness). I understand that there are several Grofield novels, but this is the first one I've read. (And I have no idea where this fits in Grofield continuity -- it probably slots in after some specific Parker book, too, and I don't know which that is.)

Lemons is about Grofield going to do a job, finding out the guy organizing that job is a few crates shy of a full load, and trying to get out. Being that this is a Richard Stark book, things are not that easy.

This was originally published in 1971; I got it in the new Hard Case Crime edition, which is snazzy and pulp-y as it should be (kudos to Charles Ardai for all those great Hard Case books). I still prefer trade paperbacks to mass-markets, but books like this can almost convince me otherwise.

Fanboys Spring Eternal

The best thing I've read today: if the Globe Theater had an Internet message board.

A sample:

Ugh, you think the Julius Caesar continuity is bad? Falstaff fucking disappears between the second part of of Henry IV and the start of Henry V! It's like WS forgot all about him!

I Am So Smart! I Am So Smart! S-M-R-T!

In my office this morning, Ellen Asher (my boss and Queen of All SF) were talking about a particular novel published by Tor, and speculating about that book's editor.

(We have seen a bound galley of this book, but the editor wasn't credited there. This could be significant -- Tor credits editors, but only if they want to be credited, and then editors must be credited in all of their books -- or not, since the whole point of galleys is that they're full of errors.)

After much thought, roving through our mental lists of the myriad Tor editors (sub-species On-Staff and Consulting), we both thought it would be one specific editor...and we were right.

Just read: Mouse Tales by David Koenig

This is an unauthorized history of and look behind the scenes at Disneyland; it's obvious Koenig has done a lot of research (both in books and from interviewing a lot of former and current Disney employees) and that Koenig has a lot of affection for Disneyland.

I've only been to Disneyland once (last summer, sneaking away from Worldcon), so I'm certainly no expert on it. But a behind-the-scenes look at any big amusement park (or other business strongly focused on keeping the customers happy) is interesting simply because interesting things happen to people in places like that, and Koenig does dig out a lot of good stories.

(I note that some people claim that Koenig is either peddling deliberate falsehoods or has been hoodwinked by hoaxers. Obviously, these people are ignoring the events backed up by legal records, since as the deaths, accidents and other mishaps, and also that they are unaware of the things that young energetic people will get up to when working together in a high-energy situation. Sure, I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of the stories in here are apocryphal, but I expect that things like them did happen.)

I'm quite interested in books about things that don't work out according to plan -- whether they're physical-failure books like Petroski's To Engineer Is Human or why-do-people-act-like-that books like Underhill's Why We Buy. And this is very much in that vein; Disneyland has been engineered and designed over the years, to eliminate all randomness or error...but, where you have people, you'll have the unexpected. So this book is of interest to more than just people who grew up in Southern California and went to Disneyland all the time -- though I do expect they'll love it, and were probably the first audience (it's published by a very small, SoCal press).

Movie Log: Possession

The Wife and I watched Possession a couple of nights ago; I wanted to see it because I'd read the Booker Prize-winning novel it was based on some time ago (back in the mid-90s, I think, a couple of years after it won).

My memory of the book is very hazy, but I'm pretty sure there was a lot more to it, and especially a lot more of the 19th century plotline. (Of course, a 500-page book has vastly more room for such things than a two-hour movie.)

Possession is a very watchable movie, though I kept expecting Aaron Eckhart to turn into a bastard, since practically every other part he's had over the past decade has been That Bastard. (He never does, if anyone else has that same problem.) We've got two plotlines in this movie -- Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow in the modern day as English lit scholars tracking down 19th century secrets, and Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle as the 19th century originals whose secrets we learn about.

Possession is that oddest of things: a movie for people who like to read a lot. Many of the "dramatic" scenes are of Eckhart and Paltrow reading at each other, or at least begin and end that way. Besides the fact that the 19th century folks are poets (since that doesn't actually come into the plot much), the story is driven by people poking through archives, reading old letters, and doing close readings. It's practically an Oxbridge recruitment film.

It was promoted as a romance, which makes sense: it's about two love stories a century and a half apart. But neither plot is a genre romance in the Hollywood sense; the movie does stay close enough to the book to ensure that. So it's a good movie for people who like books, and don't mind a decent love story, but can't stand "romance." (Like me, for instance.)

Image Meme

I got this one from Poppy Z. Brite.

Plug your answers into Google Image Search and post the first image that comes up.

(I added captions to the ones that might be opaque.)

1. Your age on your next birthday.


2. Your favorite color:


3. Your middle name:

"Colin"

4. The last meal you ate:


5. Your bad habit:

"obsessing"

6. Your favorite fruit or vegetable:


7. Your favorite animal:

"pet rock"

8. The town you live in:


9. The name of your pet or last pet:


10. Your SO or best friend's nickname:

"la contessa"

12. Your crush's name:

"no such thing"

13. Your occupation:

"editor"

14. Your birth city:

"albany"

15. Your favorite song:

"it's not"
(Yes, there is no #11. I'm not sure if that's deliberate or not.)

Just Read: The Push Man and Other Stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

This was the first collection of Tatsumi's stories to be published in the US (aside from a smaller collection, nearly twenty years ago, of stories re-translated from Spanish and published by a Spanish publisher), and the first in the Drawn & Quarterly series. I came to it after reading Abandon the Old in Tokyo, the second D&Q book, last year.

This book covers Tatsumi's best stories from 1969, as Abandon did for 1970, and the stories are are generally shorter and a little less assured than those in Abandon were. This is still excellent, serious, adult work -- different from anything else I've seen from the manga world -- but it's clear Tatsumi was still finding his way at this point.

I think I'd recommend starting here rather than with Abandon, since this book would seem more impressive read first -- and then Abandon will be even better than that. If you read the kind of people published by D&Q, Fantagraphics, and that crowd -- preferably the folks who aren't completely obsessed with their own mixed-up lives -- you'll probably be amazed that Tatsumi was doing many of the same things (and doing them well) thirty-five years ago on the other side of the world.

And now I can hardly wait until September, when presumably D&Q will bring out the collection of stories from 1971...

My Son, Vince Lombardi

The scene: Thing 2 is coming out of kindergarten today, several kids back in the line, with a stern look on his face.

Thing 2: I was last!
Grandma: No you weren't; you were fifth.
Thing 2: I wasn't first!

I have no idea where he gets it from, but my younger son is fiercely competitive.

National Poetry Month Meme

I see from Keith DeCandido that this is National Poetry Month. To mark the occasion, he posted one of his favorite poems, which I think is a fine idea. (He's planning to keep doing it every Sunday this month, but I'm not committing to any more than one.)

So here's one of my favorites (I had big chunks of it memorized at one point), "Terrence, This Is Stupid Stuff" by A.E. Housman

‘Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now.
To hear such tunes as killed the cow!
Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad!
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad!"

Why, if 'tis dancing you would be,
There's brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I've lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
--I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

Movie Log: What's Up, Tiger Lilly?

I'm posting about this almost entirely out of a mania of completism (the "almost" is because I also have a mania about posting regularly); I saw What's Up, Tiger Lilly? again last week, about twenty years after I saw it the first time.

And -- you know what? -- I didn't find it as funny as I did when I was in high school. I also now have serious doubts that the Japanese spy movie that Woody Allen dubbed over to make this film wasn't planned as a comedy to begin with -- some of the actors are clearly mugging.

But it's such a puffball of a movie that it's not worth seriously talking about -- it is what it is, and it's very much a '60s artifact, and I found it still mildly enjoyable.

Just in Case Anyone Thinks I'm Purely Virtual...

I was recently spotted in the wild.

Hugo Awards Meme

Picked up from The Slush God:

If you nominated for the Hugos this year, copy this list and bold the selections that you actually nominated. Underline selections that you've read/seen (or tried to read/view and gave up on, etc.) but didn't nominate. If you've passionately dislike one of the selections, italicize it (in addition to underlining it). If you like, add a pick of your own to each category that you feel should have made it, by placing it in [brackets] at the end of each category list.

Novel:

• Eifelheim by Michael Flynn
• His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik
• Glasshouse by Charles Stross
• Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
• Blindsight by Peter Watts
• [Farthing by Jo Walton]

Novella:

• "The Walls of the Universe" by Paul Melko
• "A Billion Eves" by Robert Reed
• "Inclination" by William Shunn
• "Lord Weary's Empire" by Michael Swanwick
• "Julian: A Christmas Story" by Robert Charles Wilson
• ["Missile Gap" by Charles Stross]
  

Novelette:

• "Yellow Card Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi
• "Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth" by Michael F. Flynn
• "The Djinn's Wife" by Ian McDonald
• "All the Things You Are" by Mike Resnick
• "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" by Geoff Ryman
• ["Incarnation Day" by Walter Jon Williams]

Short Story:

• "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" by Neil Gaiman
• "Kin" by Bruce McAllister
• "Impossible Dreams" by Timothy Pratt
• "Eight Episodes" by Robert Reed
• "The House Beyond Your Sky" by Benjamin Rosenbaum
• ["Expedition, With Recipes" by Joe Haldeman]
  

Related Book:

• About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews by Samuel R. Delany
• Heinlein's Children: The Juveniles by Joseph T. Major
• James Tiptree, Jr. : The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips
• Cover Story: The Art of John Picacio by John Picacio
• Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches edited by Mike Resnick and Joe Siclari
• [Kiddology by Tom Kidd]
  

Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:

• Children of Men
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
• The Prestige (after the deadline)
  
• A Scanner Darkly
• V for Vendetta
• [Stranger Than Fiction -- which I also I saw after the deadline]

Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

• Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded"
• Doctor Who, "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday"
• Doctor Who, "Girl in the Fireplace"
• Doctor Who, "School Reunion"
• Stargate SG-1, "200"
• [no pick]
  

Editor, Long Form:

• Lou Anders
  
• James Patrick Baen
• Ginjer Buchanan
• David G. Hartwell
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden
• [James Minz]
  

Editor, Short Form:

• Gardner Dozois
• David G. Hartwell
• Stanley Schmidt
• Gordon Van Gelder
• Sheila Williams
• [Marvin Kaye -- if I had a sixth vote]

Professional Artist:

• Bob Eggleton
• Donato Giancola
• Stephan Martiniere
• John Jude Palencar
• John Picacio
• [Julie Bell]

Semiprozine:

• Ansible
• Interzone
• Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
• Locus
• The New York Review of Science Fiction
• [no pick]
  

Fanzine:

• Banana Wings
• Challenger
• The Drink Tank
• Plokta
• Science-Fiction Five-Yearly
• [no pick]
  

Fan Writer:

• Chris Garcia
• John Hertz
• Dave Langford
• John Scalzi
• Steven H. Silver
• [James Nicoll]
  

Fan Artist:

• Brad W. Foster
• Teddy Harvia
• Sue Mason
• Steve Stiles
• Frank Wu
• [no pick]
  

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer:

• Scott Lynch
• Sarah Monette
• Naomi Novik
• Brandon Sanderson
• Lawrence M. Schoen
• [Justine Larbalestier]

I didn't put anything in italics for various reasons...which I don't think need to be explained.

Read in March

Instead of doing an "Also Read in March" post, I've decided to do one listing everything, with links to the ones I've talked about already and a line or two about the books that didn't get their own posts. This appeals to my excessively tidy mind, so I expect it's what I'll do in future as well.

• Darby Conley, Get Fuzzy: Scrum Bums (3/1)
  The latest collection of the strip cartoon. Conley constructs some absolutely appalling puns -- and I do mean "constructs," he makes them into little shaggy-dog stories like Fredric Brown or Asimov -- which still manage to make me laugh. I also enjoy his character-based comedy. And I really like having books of strip cartoons around to dip into.
• John Scalzi, The Android's Dream (3/2)
• Ivan Brunetti, editor, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories (3/3)
  See my epic post comparing this to the 2006 edition of The Best American Comics, if I ever manage to finish it.
• Gardner Dozois, editor, The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (3/4)
  It's the big annual, and I read it after Hartwell's somewhat smaller annual and Strahan's all-novellas annual (also smaller, but not by as much), so all of the 2006 stories are smearing together in my head into one uber-anthology. As I recall, Dozois's book has a few things that annoyed me (which I won't mention in public) and some stories I loved (Reynolds's "Signal to Noise" and "Nightingale," Williams's "Incarnation Day"), which is par for the course for a book like this. I still think any one serious about SF should read this every year, even if you don't read any other short fiction.
• various writers and artists, Hellboy: The Black Wedding (3/5)
  I haven't seen the animated version of Hellboy -- hell, I still haven't seen the movie -- and this underwhelmed me. It's OK, but it's like a fourth-generation Xerox; I don't expect I'll be back for the next one.
• Richard Sala, The Grave Robber's Daughter (3/6)
  Another creepy story from Sala, this time about a town taken over by teenagers and killer clowns.
• Mike Richardson & Rick Geary, Cravan (3/7)
  The life story of someone who disappeared; Cravan is an interesting early 20th century art-world figure, and he may have become the reclusive writer B. Traven. (Richardson mentions the possibility, but says that there's no way to prove or disprove it at this point.) I love Geary's art, and this is much like Geary's solo work, being concerned with odd historical minutiae (though not a murder case, as is usual for Geary solo). I have no idea what the audience was expected to be for this book; I suspect it got published because Richardson owns Dark Horse, but passion is no bad thing in publishing.
  
• Richard K. Morgan, Thirteen (3/8)
  Just published in the UK as Black Man, and not published here yet.
  
• Charles Burns, Big Baby (3/9)
  Continuing the unified complete Burns reprinting project at Fantagraphics; I had these stories all somewhere or another (mostly in comics-size form), but it's good to have them between two covers and on a shelf. I also like the Big Baby stories better than El Borbah; the kid is a more interesting character, and allows for more subtlety in storytelling.
  
• Karen Traviss, Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice (3/11)
  I've taken a vow not to talk about Star Wars books in public for about six months. Mouth zipped.
• Kage Baker, The Machine's Child (3/12)
  A perfectly enjoyable entry in the "Company" series, which I've been enjoying (and trying to get SFBC members to read, with little luck) for nearly a decade now. (But see below.)
  
• Brian Michael Bendis, Fortune and Glory (3/14)
  Boy writer goes to Hollywood and does not get a movie made. It's the same old story, but Bendis knows that, which makes it OK. I can see why he doesn't draw anymore, though; the rubber-hose arms are a bit distracting, and his art chops aren't up the level of his writing in general.
  
• Kage Baker, The Sons of Heaven (3/15)
  The big ending of the Company series. Boy howdy, does this one move. In retrospect, a lot of the middle books in this series dithered around -- or, at least, it now looks like dithering once you see what Baker can do when she slams her plot accelerator into the firewall. It's not published yet, so no details -- but, damn, this is a hell of a lot of fun. I think even people who haven't read the series up to now could jump on here and enjoy the ride.
  
• Robert Sullivan, How Not to Get Rich (3/19)
• Donald E. Westlake, Adios, Scheherazade (3/20)
• Victoria Geng, Love Trouble Is My Business (3/21)
• Mark L. Van Name, One Jump Ahead (3/25)
  A first novel of SFnal adventure about what I keep thinking of as a boy and his tank, though he's about a hundred and fifty years old (with a lot of living packed into those years, only bits of which do we learn about) and it's a space-capable assault vehicle. The book is slightly to this side of what I'd call military SF -- a territory I'd like to see more books occupy -- and it was very enjoyable.
  
• John Sladek, The Lunatics of Terra (3/27)
• G.B. Trudeau, Heckuva Job, Bushie! (3/28)
  The latest Doonesbury collection; I have a nearly-complete collection (I think I'm just missing the rare book about the TV special), and I've been reading it since about 1982. Trudeau isn't always on (he's had whole years that don't go much of anywhere), but he's been quite good lately, and he's one of the very best political cartoonists of our era. (You can tell that in large part by seeing how many politicians absolutely loathe him.)
  
• Samuel Holt, I Know a Trick Worth Two of That (3/29)
  Second in the pseudonymous mystery series by Donald E. Westlake from the mid-'80s; Holt is the out-of-work actor first-person sleuth of the series. This is slightly cozy for my taste, and isn't Westlake in either funny or serious mode (but instead splitting the difference with a light adventure tone, which I think is a bit wishy-washy for him). Not his best stuff, but worth reading for completest like me.
  
• Terry Pratchett with Stephen Briggs and illustrated by Paul Kidby, Ankh-Morport Post Office Handbook: Discworld Diary 2007 (3/30)
  Some of the Discworld diaries have more text than others; last year's Discworld Almanak was loaded with odd bits and articles, while this one (perhaps a product of exhaustion after last year?) is just a yearly desk diary with cute fake facts on each week's page and a short section up front with the history and legends of the post office. I suppose there may still be people who use a desk diary, and this could be useful to them, but the main audience is, of course, Discworld fans. And those will be slightly disappointed with the slimness of this year's entry, I guess, though the little here is funnier than the lot in the Almanack was.
  

And that was what I read in March, minus a couple of things for work that I didn't finish (mostly on purpose -- I read pieces of books for the SFBC quite regularly, but don't like to publicly have opinions about things I haven't read all of...or admit what those books were, for that matter).