Is It Just Me...

Or has Blogger been exceptionally cranky these last few days?

I've tried to get into it a number of times this week, and gotten various error messages a lot of the time. I'm going to pretend that this has prevented me from posting several long, fascinating essays that would have changed life as we know it.

Our Never-Ending Vigil for David Itzkoff Continues

Benjamin Rosenbaum reports that Itzkoff is again reviewing SF, though the article has not yet turned up at the Times online. (Rosenbaum surmises, and I expect he's right, that the piece will appear in this weekend's Book Review.)

But, rest assured, when it does finally appear in some form we can read, that we will immediately make fun of it here. This is our pledge to you the reader. Can those other blogs say as much?

What Are The Great SF Novels of the 1990s?

I just posted a (very slightly different version of) this on rec.arts.sf.written, but it might spark some responses here, as well, so here it goes). Following RASFW standard, "SF" refers to "Speculative Fiction" and covers Science Fiction, Fantasy and most anything else with a speculative element.

Our previous installments, as seen in Google Groups:
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s

For those who came in late, I'm an Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club, and we've been doing a multi-year series of some great books of SF/Fantasy. We started in 2003 (our 50th Anniversary year) with 8 books from the '50s, and have continued, eight books for each decade, in the years since then. 2007 will be the year for the '90s.

I'll be reading for this series (or just looking over books I read not all that long ago, this time) over the summer, so now is when I'm gathering suggestions.

As usual, I'm hoping this will spark some general discussion (as well as giving me some datapoints), so I don't want to constrain things too much, but here are some of the considerations I'll have to take into account with the final list:

• I only have eight books to cover the whole decade.
• I want to choose books that club members are at least somewhat likely to buy.
• Books already in the club in another edition (or, probably, books that were in print in the last year or two) won't end up on my final list.
• All eight will be single books (novels, collections or anthologies) -- the SFBC does a lot of omnibuses, but not in this series.
• I'm trying not to repeat authors if at all possible, to give a fuller picture of the field.
• I'm not specifically choosing books to exemplify movements and trends in the field, but it would be great if it works out that way -- but, conversely, I won't be doing more than a book or two in any given area.
• I have no objection to using something that's part of a series, but a book needs to make sense on its own outside the context of the series.
• I'm generally looking for books published between 1990 and 1999, but I've bent that rule several times in the past, so books from 1989, 2000 or thereabouts aren't necessarily disqualified (but they should have a really good reason to be on the list).

The earlier books in the series are:

Year One (2003): The 1950s
1 The Door Into Summer, Robert A. Heinlein
2 The Space Merchants, Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth
3 The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke
4 Three Hearts and Three Lions, Poul Anderson
5 City, Clifford D. Simak
6 Under Pressure, Frank Herbert
7 The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov
8 The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

Year Two (2004): The 1960s
9 To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
10 Norstrilia, Cordwainer Smith
11 The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
12 The Dream Master, Roger Zelazny
13 Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
14 A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
15 The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
16 Rite of Passage, Alexei Panshin

Year Three (2005): The 1970s
17 Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
18 Gloriana, Michael Moorcock
19 The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
20 Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree, Jr.
21 Wild Seed, Octavia E. Butler
22 The Snow Queen, Joan D. Vinge
23 The Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
24 Deathbird Stories. Harlan Ellison

Year Four (2006): The 1980s
25 Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
26 The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers
27 Blood Music, Greg Bear
28 Mythago Wood, Robert Holdstock
29 Courtship Rite, Donald Kingsbury
30 Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
31 Schismatrix Plus, Bruce Sterling
32 Startide Rising, David Brin

So, what are the best books of the 1990s?

Reading Into the Past: Week of 6/4

I'm rolling high numbers these days: this week I got a 13, which sends me back to the books I read this week in 1993:

• W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (6/3)
  Even though I wasn't an English schoolboy when I read it, it was still pretty entertaining. And the idea of "memorable history" (i.e., only the history you actually remember) was quite accurate and done well. You probably have to be a bit of an Anglophile to enjoy it, but that's about all.
• Michael Moorcock, Wizardry and Wild Romance (6/5)
  A collection of his essays about fantasy, including "Epic Pooh," his extended attack on Tolkien (which anyone interested in fantasy should read, even if you don't agree with him). The other sections haven't stuck with me, particularly, but Moorcock is never frightened of having an opinion, and that makes books like this bracing, entertaining, and useful for examining one's own settled prejudices.
• Graham Chapman, A Liar's Autobiography (6/8)
  It also had nearly a half-dozen co-authors for various sections and parts, as I recall. It's funny and breezy, but doesn't cover Chapman's life all that well -- but, then, the title doesn't lead you to expect that to begin with, anyway. (Chapman is one of the guys from Monty Python, but surely I don't have to tell that to anyone reading this blog, right?)

And that actually runs over the week in question. I didn't read all that much just then, since I was a bit busy: I'd gotten married on May 22, and The (New) Wife and I flew out to London early on the 23rd and spent a week there and a week in Edinburgh. We got back to Lodi, New Jersey (where we'd just gotten an apartment), as I recall, on Sunday, June 6th. So I'd finished Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics on the 20th, and then nothing until the Sellar/Yeatman book. (All three of the books above, incidentally, were ones I bought while in the UK.)

But, to make up for that short list, I'll try to dig out from my notebook for subsequent months as many of the books I bought in the UK as I can remember. (In those pre-Internet days, getting books from another country was difficult, if not impossible, so book-shopping was one of my major honeymoon activities.)

• Kim "Howard" Johnson, Life Before and After Monty Python (6/12)
  I'm not 100% sure I bought this in the UK, but I might have done. (Bonus UK grammar for added verisimilitude) The short version of this book is: all those guys did things that paid a lot better after the TV series, but, in most cases, weren't as artistically successful. (If I can use "artistically successful" to describe a series of silly-shop sketches.) Pleasant reading for people who care about this sort of thing, and I did.
• Frank Miller, Sin City (6/13)
  This was on sale at the Forbidden Planet in London, so I bought it. I gave up on the subsequent series, since they were all the same essential story, with Miller's neuroses more and more on display, but this one was good pulpy fun. If it had been a one-off, it would have been one of the comics highlights of the decade.
• Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides (6/14)
  Another book I got cheap at Forbidden Planet. Not my very favorite Tim Powers novel, but it has pirates in it, and it's better than 99% of the fantasy out there.
• Terry Pratchett, The Carpet People (6/15)
  Very minor, very early Pratchett -- so minor and so early that he was embarrassed enough to spruce it up a bit for republication. It's very slight and mild, but probably worth reading for those who have read everything else by Pratchett.
• P.G. Wodehouse, Much Obliged, Jeeves (6/16)
  This was the one Jeeves book that wasn't in print in the US, so I made a point of tracking it down when I was in the UK. Yes, they're that good. A man who is tired of Wodehouse is tired of life.
• Alina Reyes, The Butcher (6/17)
  A novella-in-paperback-book-form, with a tarty all-foil cover, translated from something (probably the French), and all kinds of "this is not just a smutty book, this is real transgressive literature" signs all over it. It was a decent smutty book.
• Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings (6/18)
  I don't remember at all what stories are in this one.
• Greg Egan, Quarantine (6/22)
  This is before Egan was published in the States, though the buzz was going on in skfify circles. So I had to get a copy of Quarantine when I was in the UK and read it for myself. And, yes, it really was that good, and that surprising, then. Oh, were we ever so young?
• Brian Aldiss, Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith's (6/30)
  His bookselling and otherwise book-related memoir. I am a sucker for the non-fiction of fiction writers, and even more a sucker for well-written books about books. I probably should re-read this some time.
• Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (7/8)
  I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I understood it. And that was a long time ago, so I couldn't tell you now anything at all about it.

And I think that was it. The interesting thing is that I can't find the book I know I was reading on the plane (and finished sometime later) anywhere in the notebook -- that was The Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson, an absolutely amazing history book about a short period of time in the early 19th century when, the author explains, everything changed and the seeds of the modern world were sown.

Nitpickery Is Killing Science Fiction

No links; I bet you folks will know what I'm reacting to. And, if not, I want to make vast sweeping generalizations anyway, so being tied down to specifics will only hurt the cause.

There are now a number of communities and groups -- I belong to several of them myself -- which seem to exist for the sole purpose of tearing apart any new SF work. No matter what it is, there's sure to be something wrong with it.

If there's the slightest bit of detail that possibly contradicts any relatively accepted scientific model, the science-nerds will sneer and point.

If all of the characters are indistinguishable from contemporary white Americans, the diversity geeks will titter into their hands.

If some of the characters are clearly not contemporary white Americans, but the author is, those same diversity geeks will reach for their long knives. (And also start babbling in post-Lacanian doubletalk; I can't say which is worse.)

If any aspect of the political, economic, or social set-up of the world does not fit with the confirmed irrational prejudices of the reader (who can be anything from a frothing libertarian to a bomb-tossing Marxist), long screeds will be written and distributed.

If the plot has the slightest bit of ambiguity to it, or if the author shows any signs of having read mainstream fiction more modern than Dumas (pere), the mouth-breathing I'm-just-spending-my-beer-money contingent will hoot about how incomprehensible and "lit'rary" it is.

No matter what the work is, there's going to be something desperately, horribly wrong with it, and the group that thinks so will scream their anger to the skies. And so we all get the feeling that SF is in the doldrums, that there's nothing good being done, and that nothing good can be done. We even begin to feel a bit Spinradish, as if SF either died long ago or needs to be shot in the head immediately for our own good.

If you're one of the people doing this, you are helping to kill SF. Cut it the hell out. If you really think everything sucks, get out of my genre and go piss on mysteries or romances for a while.

I'm serious. Don't make me come back there....

One Mystery Semi-Solved

I had a weird comment recently -- it didn't look like spam, but it wasn't entirely coherent, either, and it had nothing to do with the post it was attached to.

It was on this post, and it read:

Bah this is Lee thompson and i wish to hell everyone would see this is JUST ROLEPLAY but no everyone wants to know about sex, well F*** all the dirty horible sad lived gits who want to judge me, I am proud of who I am and if you wanna complain to me do it in person to nuhanoonan@yahoo.co.uk as you all just pissing me off now

Apparently, this is spillover from a flamewar on a Gorean message board (yes, all of the Superior Gorean Males spend their time arguing with each other over the internet, just like all the other sad lonely men who can't get dates). I have no idea why "Lee thompson" posted his cri de cour here rather than there, but I have to assume confusion like that is just par for the course when you're a Gorean.

Shameless SFBC Promotion

For anyone who might not be reading the official SFBC blog:

We're hosting a chat with Naomi Novik (author of His Majesty's Dragon and two sequels to date, which we collected into a really cool-looking 3-in-1) on the SFBC blog from June 7th to June 21st, so, if you have any questions for her, wander over there and leave them as comments in this post.

We're doing this chat on the blog in part so that anyone can participate (you don't need to be a member of the club), and in part because we don't have anything better in our technological arsenal, since our website is creaky and ancient (its design is probably two years old at this point, though an update will be coming later in the year).

So, come on over, tell all your friends -- that kind of thing. If this works out well, we'll probably do more chats, which would be fun.

Happy Birthday to Me!

(Soundtrack by Cracker, of course.)

Since blogs, particularly this one, are the height of self-indulgence, I'll pad my post count with a brief shout-out to myself.

Hey! It's been one more year and I'm still not dead! Go, me! I am now 37, which is a singularly unimpressive age -- I'm not young any more, but not nearly old enough even for an early mid-life crisis. Still, it beats the alternative.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 5/28

I'm running very late this week, since I'm not even rolling the dice until Tuesday night. So, without further ado, here are the books I was reading this week in 1992:

• Gary Gygax, The Anubis Murders (5/21)
  This book is not very good. Fourteen years ago, I probably would have gone much, much further. But the pain has subsided, and I, thankfully, don't remember all of the details.
  
• Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America (5/22)
  I remember that it was an interesting book, that I could only agree with about half of it, and that Bork generally hated everything about modern society. Bork also writes great, precise sentences, and he's one of those writers who can be very entertaining about things he hates (as long as it's not something the reader particularly loves, of course).
  
• Daniel M. Pinkwater, Fish Whistle (5/22)
  A collection of essays that were originally NPR commentaries, mostly about Pinkwater's life and ruminations. Pinkwater was the greatest YA writer of the '70s and '80s, and I don't care who disagrees with me. I wish he wrote more; he's a national treasure.
  
• David G. Hartwell, Christmas Stars (5/25)
  An anthology of SF stories about Christmas. As I recall, it was noticeably better than I'd expected -- we even did it in the club.
  
• Lawrence Block, A Walk Among the Tombstones (5/25)
  One of the middle "Matt Scudder" novels, which was new at the time. This isn't my favorite era of the series -- they turned more into thrillers than mysteries for a while there, and I'm not a fan of thrillers -- but the Scudder books remain among the very best hard-boiled novels ever written.
  
• Tom Mason, editor, The Three Stooges: The Knuckleheads Return! (5/25)
  No memory at all. I have a suspicion that this was a collection of comics, which would make it very weird.
  
• William Lutz, Doublespeak (5/27)
  A non-fiction book about the various circumlocutions used by business and government to hide what they're actually doing. Lutz has made a bit of a career out of these, but I believe this one was the first and best. It's a good book to read if you want to write (or just think) clearly about the real world.
  

I do seem to read books randomly, bouncing from genre to genre blithely, when I have my druthers. (And that's made the last few months a bit weird for me, since I'm exclusively reading for WFA and SFBC.)

Today's WFA Reading: 6/3

On the lighter side, I got one book for WFA consideration today, two days after the deadline. (I'm not planning to be a hard-ass about the deadline, since it wouldn't serve any useful purpose, and I'm an old softy anyway.)

But, luckily, none of that matters, since this is the UK edition of a book I already have on the pile in its US edition.

Reader Request

This evening, after I got the boys into bed, I wandered down into the basement and fired up this old steam-powered Mac, to see what's going on in the outside world. Waiting for me was one new e-mail, a comment on a post on this very blog.

I won't quote the message in full, but the commenter (calling itself "Yoli," and posting anonymously) asked in a heartfelt way if I would please delete that blog post, because "[a]ll you're managing to do is stomp on her self-esteem." Well, far be it for any American to damage the self-esteem of anyone else, yes? I mean, self-esteem is guaranteed in the Constitution, right? (It must be here somewhere, he said, rummaging around...)

Yoli did trigger one of my manias -- the current cult of "self-esteem" -- about which I can be guaranteed to curse and rant at length until everyone else has fled in boredom. But I can calm down -- I will calm down -- and I won't hold that against Yoli. Let's just look at the post and see what the problem is. Maybe I was intemperate and rude. Maybe some edits are in order.

(I was going to go off on a hopefully-humorous rant here, about how it's not anything on the home page of Antick Musings, and how I'm damned if I can find that comment. Then I'd whine about how low my traffic is to begin with, and how the audience for an ancient blog post of mine is approximately one eyeball per year, so it's not worth worrying about. But I looked at the e-mail again, and saw it had a link to the original post, which I'd never noticed before. So consider that whole embarrassing Emily Litella moment as read. It's amazing the things you can avoid noticing if you try hard enough.)

The post in question is The Most Clueless Fanficcer, and my opinion on that subject has not changed in the slightest. So I had to work out what to say, and how to say it in the clearest, starkest way possible.

I had to hang up some laundry, so I used that time to compose my next few paragraphs in my head -- and oh! they were doozies. I ran through all of the nasty things I'd say about that very silly person, and how the Internet really is public, and how one needs to behave like a responsible adult in public, and not make a fool and an ass of oneself by being amazingly hypocritical -- I was really working myself up, and probably mumbling under my breath something awful -- and, well, I just couldn't sustain that level of dudgeon. When I sat back down I was beginning to feel the slightest bit hypocritical myself, so I just couldn't go through with it.

But I won't remove the original post, either -- in fact, you might notice that I'm actually calling further attention to it by linking to it from here (though I'm also burying all context in this long and exceptionally rambling post, so I doubt more than two or three people are even reading at this point). I don't believe in trying to alter the past to avoid consequences (well, I would if I could actually travel into the past to really change things, but merely altering records isn't the same thing), and I don't intend to alter or remove posts on this blog unless I accidentally say things that are supposed to be secret or do something else radically out of character.

So, Yoli: this post is for you, if you're actually reading Antick Musings and that comment wasn't just a drive-by in some campaign to rehabilitate the good name of Shadow-of-the-Wolf. (And, assuming you're not actually the same person, that means someone silly enough to call itself -- oh, hell, herself, let's be brutally honest and admit that fanficcer is clearly a very young woman -- Shadow-of-the-Wolf also is a good enough person to have one friend well worth having.) I won't do what you ask, and Shadow-of-the-Wolf will have to deal with her own "self-esteem issues." I'll just say that esteem, whether from one's self or from others, must be earned and must be based on real worth. Esteem cannot be given. Good luck.

Incoming Comics: 6/2

Another big haul, though not quite so huge as last month's. Still, some good stuff here:

• Castle Waiting by Linda Medley
  the big, big book, which looks wonderful
• The Fate of the Artist by Eddie Campbell, which I've been reading about for a couple of weeks now (and was probably sitting in my hold box that entire time)
• A Treasury of Victorian Murder, Vol. 8: The Case of Madeleine Smith by Rick Geary
• Bizarro World edited by no one obviously credited
• Samurai Executioner Vol. 10: A Couple of Jitte by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima
• Dork Tower #33 by John Kovalic
• Teen Titans Go! #31 by a bunch of guys
• Sonic X #9 by whoever
• Sonic the Hedgehog #162 by the usual suspects
  those last three are for Thing 1, as usual
• Disney Presents Carl Barks' Greatest DuckTales, Vol. 1 by Carl Barks
• Fantastic Four: Clobberin' Time by a bunch of people
• Avatar, Vol. 2 by whoever
  and those three are for the pile of books to give to Thing 1 on special occasions

Doughnut Day!

It's a little late now, but Blogger was acting up at lunchtime when I tried to post this then.

Today was one of the most wonderful holidays ever thought up by man -- the incredible Doughnut Day!

And the celebrations couldn't be simpler -- just walk into your local Krispy Kreme, say "I'd like a free doughnut, please" and chow down!

I'm just sorry the rain kept me from getting to a KK today; I'm not having a good year with Free Days so far. But I know there will be more free stuff as the year goes on, and I am determined to get my fair share.

Quote of the Week

"There is nothing more tragic in life than the utter impossibility of changing what you have done."
-- John Galsworthy

Movie Log: Mom and Dad Save the World

Into every life a little utter frivolity must fall, and this was my dose last night. I'd caught about five minutes of this movie a week or two ago, while waiting for the forecast on the Weather Channel in the morning, and decided to Netflix it (since I wasn't sure if I'd ever watched it all the way through).

It's a fairly dumb movie, and quite a silly movie, but it's always entertaining. It also stars Jeffrey Jones, and I have a soft spot for movies that star people like Jeffrey Jones (who usually play "Angry Neighbor," or "Mean Cop," or most often "Principal Nastyface"). There just aren't enough movies with heroic roles for usually-villainous character actors, to my mind. Jon Lovitz is perfectly cast as the hammy, not-quite-as-stupid-as-the-rest-of-the-planet-but-still-pretty-stupid Emperor Tod. And of course Teri Garr, the "mom" of the title, is cute, funny and adorable as ever. (But it is a bit sad to see her in Frumpy Mom mode after watching her Hot Patootie act just a little while ago in Young Frankenstein. Yes, there are twenty years between the two movies, but Teri Garr is an eternal cutie.)

But the most fun thing about this movie is seeing that old Flash Gordon plot get the dumb treatment. It was pretty dumb to begin with, so it only makes more sense when we learn that, in this version, all of the inhabitants of the planet Spengo are dumb as a box of hair.

Mom and Dave Save the World has no depth whatsoever, but it's a very entertaining SF comedy that never devolves into a parody -- of itself, or of anything else. And that's both rare and admirable.