A Beagle-O-Rama

Cat Eldridge of Green Man Review pointed me to his "What's New" page today, which collects a lot of Peter S. Beagle-related news. I'll try to boil it all down, but you can just click through for the full deal (and, of course, all of the other new reviews and whatnot at Green Man).

Beagle is publishing more books this year than the first decade of his career (I think) --

• Strange Roads, a collection from DreamHaven Books
• We Never Talk About My Brother, a collection from Tachyon
• I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, a Young Adult novel from Conlan
• Summerlong, a novel from Conlan

On top of all that, Green Man is doing four podcasts of Beagle reading his stories over the course of the year -- they will appear quarterly -- and the first one, "The Stickball Witch" is now available in mp3 form.

2008 is shaping up to be an excellent year for Beagle fans. But what if you don't like Beagles?

Well, then, what do you think about terriers?



Update: See first comment, below, for yet more Beagle publication news and some corrections.

Department of Retarded Software Companies

My laptop doesn't have Word on it, so I wrote two reviews in Microsoft Works this afternoon (while at the in-laws for Easter festivities) and then e-mailed them to my home computer.

Microsoft Word here is utterly befuddled by them, and has no "Microsoft Works" option to open them with. This is a simpler file format, from the same company, for a program with exactly the same functionality. What idiot forgot to make them compatible with each other?

BSFA Awards Announced

This is a big weekend for awards, what with the Hugo nominations and the PK Dick winners, and we're not done yet...

The British SF Awards have just been presented at the big annual UK convention, Eastercon. (This year's Eastercon is Orbital 2008.)

According to Locus, this year's winners are:

• Novel: Brasyl by Ian McDonald
• Short Fiction: "Lighting Out" by Ken MacLeod
• Artwork: "Cracked World" (the cover of disLocations, ed. by Ian Whates) by Andy Bigwood
• Best Novel of 1958: Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss (this is a special category celebrating the BSFA's 50th anniversary)

I really do need to read Brasyl now, don't I?

Philip K. Dick Award Winner

This year's Philip K. Dick Award was presented at Norwescon to M. John Harrison's Nova Swing.

There was also a "Special Citation" given to From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, by the interestingly named Minister Faust.

[via SF Awards Watch]

Telling Fairy Tails

I'm slacking off -- my "Manga Friday" column at ComicMix this week covers just two books -- the first two volumes of Fairy Tail, the new series by Rave Master creator Hiro Mashima.

With any luck, I'll be reading and writing reviews this weekend to lay in some content for next week. Conventions (like Lunacon last weekend) can be fun, but they take up a lot of time that could be used for more productive activities.

Hugo Nominations!

It's an interesting list this year -- and I don't mean that in the Chinese-curse sense, but that the nominators have rallied behind some things cynical Andy Wheeler would not have expected. Further thoughts and sarcasm will be embedded after each category below...


Best Novel

• The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, Fourth Estate)
• Brasyl by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
• Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor; Analog Oct. 2006-Jan/Feb. 2007)
• The Last Colony by John Scalzi (Tor)
• Halting State by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)

I've actually read four of these -- everything but Brasyl. It would be really interesting to see Chabon win, but I suspect it will be Stross or Scalzi. (And I'd be happy with any of those three.)

Best Novella

• "Fountains of Age" by Nancy Kress (Asimov's July 2007)
• "Recovering Apollo 8" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov's Feb. 2007)
• "Stars Seen Through Stone" by Lucius Shepard (F&SF July 2007)
• "All Seated on the Ground" by Connie Willis (Asimov's Dec. 2007; Subterranean Press)
• "Memorare" by Gene Wolfe (F&SF April 2007)

Haven't read a single one of them. (This is the time of year when I'd usually be frantically reading Year's Bests for the old job, but not this year.) I predict...Rusch will win. Why? Why not?

Best Novelette

• "The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics" by Daniel Abraham (Logorrhea ed. by John Klima, Bantam)
• "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang (F&SF Sept. 2007)
• "Dark Integers" by Greg Egan (Asimov's Oct./Nov. 2007)
• "Glory" by Greg Egan (The New Space Opera, ed. by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, HarperCollins/Eos)
• "Finisterra" by David Moles (F&SF Dec. 2007)

Two Greg Egan stories! It's like 1995 all over again! I've only read "Glory," which I don't remember well. I'm going to guess that Chiang will take it.

Best Short Story

• "Last Contact" by Stephen Baxter (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, ed. by George Mann, Solaris Books)
• "Tideline" by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov's June 2007)
• "Who's Afraid of Wolf 359?" by Ken MacLeod (The New Space Opera, ed. by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, HarperCollins/Eos)
• "Distant Replay" by Mike Resnick (Asimov's April/May 2007)
• "A Small Room in Koboldtown" by Michael Swanwick (Asimov's April/May 2007; The Dog Said Bow-Wow, Tachyon Publications)

In this category, I've read a whopping two stories. I think I'm pulling for Bear here, because she deserves a rocketship of her own. But the Swanwick story was quite good.

Best Related Book

• The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Glyer; appendix by David Bratman (Kent State University Press)
• Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium by Barry Malzberg (Baen)
• Emshwiller: Infinity x Two by Luis Ortiz, intro. by Carol Emshwiller, fwd. by Alex Eisenstien (Nonstop)
• Brave New Words: the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jeff Prucher (Oxford University Press)
• The Arrival by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic)

The Arrival and Breakfast in the Ruins are both killer in their own ways, and Brave New Words seems quite impressive, though I've only just started poking through it. Under my usual expectations for this category -- the book by or about the oldest fan-favorite always wins -- I'm going to assume the Emshwiller retrospective will take it.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

• Enchanted Written by Bill Kelly, Directed by Kevin Lima (Walt Disney Pictures)
• The Golden Compass Written by Chris Weitz, Based on the novel by Philip Pullman, Directed by Chris Weitz (New Line Cinema)
• Heroes, Season 1, Created by Tim Kring (NBC Universal Television and Tailwind Productions Written by Tim Kring, Jeph Loeb, Bryan Fuller, Michael Green, Natalie Chaidez, Jesse Alexander, Adam Armus, Aron Eli Coleite, Joe Pokaski, Christopher Zatta, Chuck Kim, Directed by David Semel, Allan Arkush, Greg Beeman, Ernest R. Dickerson, Paul Shapiro, Donna Deitch, Paul A. Edwards, John Badham, Terrence O'Hara, Jeannot Szwarc, Roxann Dawson, Kevin Bray, Adam Kane
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Written by Michael Goldenberg, Based on the novel by J.K. Rowling, Directed by David Yates (Warner Bros. Pictures)
• Stardust Written by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman, Directed by Matthew Vaughn (Paramount Pictures)

How does one choose among four movies and one season of a TV show? This category has a serious apples-and-oranges problem this year. (Of course, I don't like the "dramatic" categories in the first place, so I'm not unbiased.) I haven't seen Heroes, so I can't judge it. I suspect Stardust, which was flawed in ways extremely sentimental people (for which read: Americans) will love, will carry the day.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

• Battlestar Galactica "Razor" written by Michael Taylor, directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá and Wayne Rose (Sci Fi Channel) (televised version, not DVD)
• Dr. Who "Blink" written by Stephen Moffat, directed by Hettie Macdonald (BBC)
• Dr. Who "Human Nature" / "Family of Blood" written by Paul Cornell, directed by Charles Palmer (BBC)
• Star Trek New Voyages "World Enough and Time" written by Michael Reaves & Marc Scott Zicree, directed by Marc Scott Zicree (Cawley Entertainment Co. and The Magic Time Co.)
• Torchwood "Captain Jack Harkness" written by Catherine Tregenna, directed by Ashley Way (BBC Wales)

Oh look! It's "Worlds Enough and Time" again! The Hugos have no required "professional" status, so I'll only be mildly dismissive of it as the exceptionally fannish, backwards-looking thing that it is. I haven't seen any of these, and don't ever intend to. I'll expect Torchwood to take it, if only because it's the first show to come to fandom pre-slashed.

Best Professional Editor, Short Form

• Ellen Datlow (The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin's), Coyote Road (Viking), Inferno (Tor))
• Stanley Schmidt (Analog)
• Jonathan Strahan (The New Space Opera (Eos/HarperCollins), The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 1 (Night Shade), Eclipse One (Night Shade))
• Gordon Van Gelder (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
• Sheila Williams (Asimov's Science Fiction)

As I said last year, if the voters look at the list of nominated stories in the above categories, Sheila Williams is the obvious winner. However, this category seems to be ruled by a complicated calculus of time-in-saddle and how much a particular person is "due," so I suspect Schmidt may finally win this year. In any case, it's nice to see Strahan representing fresh blood in this category.

Best Professional Editor, Long Form

• Lou Anders (Pyr)
• Ginjer Buchanan (Ace/Roc)
• David G. Hartwell (Senior Editor, Tor/Forge)
• Beth Meacham (Tor)
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor)

I think this category is being used by Hugo voters to work down the list of "people who should have gotten one a while ago, but didn't" -- at least, I hope that's the case, and that it's not going to settle down to going to the same one or two people ad infinitum like Best Artist and the old Best Editor did. In that case, it's either Buchanan or Meacham, and both are equally deserving. (Actually, they're all equally deserving, but I doubt Anders will get it this year, since Hugo voters have been horribly conservative in the Editor categories.)

But I will note that the last chance for Ellen Asher to win a Hugo has quietly slipped by the wayside. Bad form, Hugo voters.

Best Professional Artist

• Bob Eggleton (Covers: To Outlive Eternity and Other Stories (Baen), Ivory (Pyr), & The Taint and Other Stories (Subterranean))
• Phil Foglio (Covers: Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures, Vol. 2 (Meisha Merlin), What's New (Dragon Magazine Aug. 2007), Girl Genius Vol. 6-Agatha Heterodyne & the Golden Trilobite (Airship Entertainment))
• John Harris (Covers: Spindrift (Ace), Horizons (Tor), The Last Colony (Tor))
• Stephan Martiniere (Covers: Brasyl (Pyr), Mainspring (Tor), Dragons of Babel (Tor))
• John Picacio (Covers: Fast Forward 2 (Pyr), Time's Child (HarperCollins/Eos), A Thousand Deaths (Golden Gryphon))
• Shaun Tan

The information above makes it look like the artists are being nominated for those specific works, which may be confusing to voters. But this is a reenergized and interesting category for the first time in ages -- who would have expected Foglio again? Or Shaun Tan? I'll be rooting for Tan, but all of these guys are worthy.

Best Semiprozine

• Ansible edited by David Langford
• Helix edited by William Sanders and Lawrence Watt-Evans
• Interzone edited by Andy Cox
• Locus edited by Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong, & Liza Groen Trombi
• The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by Kathryn Cramer, Kristine Dikeman, David Hartwell & Kevin J. Maroney

One e-mail newsletter, one web fictionzine, one print fictionzine, one print newszine, and one print criticalzine. Congratulations! The widest category in the Hugos has managed to cover every possible iteration. And Locus will once again win the award for Best Locus.

Best Fanzine

• Argentus edited by Steven H Silver
• Challenger edited by Guy Lillian III
• Drink Tank edited by Chris Garcia
• File 770 edited by Mike Glyer
• PLOKTA edited by Alison Scott, Steve Davies, & Mike Scott

The fifty people who still read fanzines will vote in ways that I can't predict. Maybe Steve Silver will finally win?

Best Fan Writer

• Chris Garcia
• David Langford
• Cheryl Morgan
• John Scalzi
• Steven H Silver

Langford is always funny, and is a treasure of the SF world. But can't we let someone else -- any of these other deserving people -- win this time?

Best Fan Artist

• Brad Foster
• Teddy Harvia
• Sue Mason
• Steve Stiles
• Taral Wayne

Is it my imagination, or is this category always basically identical? And, if so, how come I can't remember who usually wins?

After a bit of research, I now believe that, since Frank Wu is now a "dirty pro," Teddy Harvia will start winning this category again.

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer (Not a Hugo, But an Incredible Facsimile of One)

• Joe Abercrombie (2nd year of eligibility)
• Jon Armstrong (1st year of eligibility)
• David Anthony Durham (1st year of eligibility)
• David Louis Edelman (2nd year of eligibility)
• Mary Robinette Kowal (2nd year of eligibility)
• Scott Lynch (2nd year of eligibility)

The quirk here is that only SFF publications count, so an established novelist like Durham is competing with people brand-new to publishing. (Not that he'd get any edge in wooing Campbell voters simply because he wrote some historical novels, but it's an interesting distinction I hadn't noticed before.)

I still think this is Lynch's category to lose, but Abercrombie could surprise me -- as could Edelman, especially if all of the "I only like science fiction" crowd take up his banner. Kowal is a short-fiction writer, and those only win this category when they're immediate superstars bestriding the field. And Armstrong only has one interesting novel from a smaller press to his name, so it's a bit surprising to see him here.

Those are your Hugo nominees for 2008; if you're a member of Denvention 3, now is the time to start reading/watching so that you can vote. (I'm currently not a member, though I realized just this week that I'll finishing up a business trip in Anaheim the day Worldcon starts, so it would be cheaper than I expected. Anyone want to tell me any good reasons to go to Denver?)

Quote of the Week, Webcomics Edition

"Bork is the sound Swedes make when they have anal."
- Renee Engstrom, Anders Loves Maria #122

(Caution: link is not at all safe for work.)

Since content has been light this week, here's a random list of other webcomics I'm enjoying lately:

• American Elf -- James Kochalka draws himself as an elf (sort of; he has buck teeth and pointy ears) and does a daily slice-of-life diary comic. It's usually very mundane, focused on specific moments in his life.
• Basic Instructions -- Scott Adams was discussing this a few months back, so I expect it's pretty well known. In four panels, most days of the week, Scott Meyer has wordy, acted-out, tongue-in-cheek examples of how to do, and not to do, various things. I think he either uses clip art or uses very extensive cut-and-paste, since the art is decent but the same poses are reused constantly.
• Dinosaur Comics -- Designed to explode the heads of the people who complain about Dilbert's drawing style, Dinosaur has the same six lame clip-art panels every single day...with new dialogue. But it's surprisingly smart and funny, with a wider scope of topics than any other comic I've seen.
• F-Minus -- Probably the best of the post-Far Side surreal strips; it's usually one wide panel in the standard comics size, has a more mainstream art style than usual for the type, and its own point of view.
• The Fart Party -- Julia Wertz is a mid-20s cartoonist who drinks too much, has dead-end jobs, and hangs out with cartoonists. Fart Party is a bit like a self-conscious, Millennial-generation version of Hate!, only it's all (more or less) true.
• Garfield minus Garfield -- Someone (or, more likely these days, several someones) carefully Photoshop Garfield out of the Garfield comic, leaving only Jon Arbuckle and his pathetic life. Bizarrely funny, and occasionally even unexpectedly poignant.
• Girls With Slingshots -- A classy, smart traditional gag-a-day strip that tells an ongoing story, only on the web. It's also has a female point of view, which is very rare in any sphere of cartooning. In a better world, this would be in three thousand papers every morning.
• Hark! A Vagrant -- This is not, strictly speaking, a webcomic; it's Kate Beaton's LiveJournal. But she posts strips there irregularly (often in a big burst) -- both funny and unlikely history strips and vignettes based on her own life. Start with the epic post "Twenty History Comics."
• Real Life Comics -- One of the better "my life, only in cartoony, gag-a-day form" strips, with four nice, big, colorful panels most days.
• Sheldon -- Just a classic style newspaper strip done really well, with a cast including a boy billionaire, his grandfather, and a talking duck.
• Sinfest -- Probably the only ongoing strip that's primarily about religion, Sinfest manages to have a great, very illustrative style and a sly sense of humor. The devil and Jesus are major recurring characters, but cartoonist Tatsuya Ishida isn't on the side of either of them (though he does have a slight bias towards his Buddha character). I imagine Sinfest probably does offend some people, but it shouldn't do so for anyone with both brain and wit.
• Shortpacked! -- It's a strip about people who work in a store that bears no resemblance to Toys 'R Us, and only occasionally descends into massive neepery about Transformers. Quite a lot of it is character-based humor, and even the "isn't this media thing silly"" jokes are usually quite funny.
• Where I Vent My Spleen -- A British cartoonist does mostly short strips based (very loosely, I hope) on his own life. He's got a very expressive, cartoony style -- I see hints of Bill Plympton in it, sometimes -- and his characters are also exceptionally distinctive. (This is probably unsafe for most workplaces as well.)

And some comics I would love more if they were (still?) regularly published:

• Alien Loves Predator -- An honest-to-god fumetti strip, with real continuity, that's quite funny a lot of the time. Too bad the creator is too busy to spend much time on it recently.
• Ghastly's Ghastly Comic -- The epitome of the extremely funny, extremely non-work-safe strip. It's over now, but, in its day, Ghastly was the place to learn about the latest perversion (whether you wanted to or not) and laugh at it.
• My Elves Are Different -- Clip-art strips about the SF world; this was updated regularly about timely topics through most of 2007, but it looks like the cartoonist has lost interest in it.
• Spamusement -- As the tag-line says, "poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!" Some of these are incredibly funny, and even the poorly-drawn part is wonderful in context. There's some kind of problem with the site right now, so it might be dead for good -- but, if you can get in, there's a huge list of very funny cartoons

And that's what I've got; I tried to avoid the ones that everyone already knows (PvP, xkcd, Wondermark), and newspaper comics that I read on the web (my mind loves petty distinctions), but I'm sure there are a couple dozen more, equally good.

Two Unrelated Things

1) The Onion's print edition for this week (I can't find the story on their website) has an unexpectedly heartbreaking fake story: "Daddy Put in Bye-Bye Box." (It's on page 3, if you live in one of the five cities that get a print Onion.)

Update: It's on the site now.

2) There are still times, like this morning, when I'm reading a SF novel and really enjoying it, and I shift into thinking about how I'll write the descriptive copy for it for the club. Then I remember that I don't do that anymore.

Shakespeare: The World As Stage by Bill Bryson

Sigh of relief 1: Bryson is back in peak form after the self-indulgent The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

Sigh of relief 2: Bryson, being an intelligent, reasonable man, has no truck with any conspiracy theories regarding the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage is part of a series of short biographies of famous dead people, by famous live people, edited by James Atlas and published by HarperCollins. This template works pretty well for ol' Willy S., since -- as Bryson points out in his first chapter -- we don't actually know all that much about his life. (So all of those longer biographies are filled with speculation and theorizing.)

Bryson's book is just shy of 200 pages, and feels neither rushed nor stretched. And that will make this blog post pretty short, because otherwise I'll be summarizing his summary of Shakespeare's life, which is too much like George Carlin's "taking your stuff on vacation" routine for my taste.

Bryson is an energetic and appealing writer, and a good explainer. As far as I can tell, he's very reliable on Shakespeare. So, if you are in the market for a short biography of anybody, this is a decent choice.

Arthur C. Clarke, R.I.P.

The BBC reports that Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. It's a sad thing, but, given his health problems, it's amazing that he survived, and thrived, for so long. I guess Sri Lanka has a lot going for it.

Rest In Peace, Sir Arthur. You deserve it.

News Presented Without Comment

Bertelsmann may be selling its entire Direct Group; Morgan Stanley is trying to broker the sale of US holdings already.

Some may remember that Bertelsmann bought half of the book portion of the US business from Time Warner last year, and laid off 400 people in Pennsylvania and 280 in New York. Forbes, at the time, estimated the sale cost Bertelsmann a sum in "the lower hundreds of millions of US dollars."

A Link and a Digression

First, a small dance of happiness, because Ask Moxie really liked Cynthia Cooper's book Extraordinary Circumstances (which some of you may remember I'm the marketing manager for). Even better, she's a mom in New York who noticed and identified with the woman's story at the heart of Circumstances, which is something that hasn't really come out in the reviews and coverage so far.

(Second, I think I now have a new blog to read.)

And the digression: I see that Moxie's 2-year-old is obsessed with Goodnight Moon. My older son, Thing 1, was similarly obsessed for several years. In fact, for at least a one-year period, I had to read him Goodnight Moon last every night. (At that point, I was reading five books to him every night, thinking that I could make him into a reader by pure volume of prose.)

Goodnight Moon is cute. It's sweet. But there's not all that much to it, so it can get monotonous. So I started reading it in funny voices (which Thing 1 sometimes allowed, and sometimes not). And then I realized I had the thing memorized, so I read it blindfolded for a while. That wasn't enough, so I finally started reading it backwards, which Thing 1 loved. ("Everywhere noises goodnight. Air goodnight. Stars goodnight. Hush whispering lady old the to goodnight.")

And then I got to the point where I had it memorized backwards, so I did it blindfolded that way.

Sometimes, when reading books to kids, you have to do silly things just to keep yourself entertained. (With Thing 2, it's mostly adding the word "official" -- from One Monster After Another -- to almost every noun in a Mercer Mayer book until the boy complains.) Kids like repetition, yes -- but you still have to throw them a curveball now and then, because the rest of life is never going to pitch straight to them. And besides, as Daffy said, it's fun!

Meme by Request, #1

Nadine asked:

Well, i'd like to have explained exactly why NJ pizza is different/inferior to NY pizza, which some of NY-native friends keep telling me..

I don't see any substantial difference between NY and NJ pizza, honestly. To be more precise, the differences between different pizzerias swamp any differences between the two states (even if we're taking "NY" to be just New York City). It's all pretty much thinnish crust rather than deep-dish as the standard (though varying in how thin that is), with a mildly spiced tomato sauce (usually without large chunks of tomato) under cheese.

I mean, Chicago-style is very different. And those things they make in California aren't even really pizza. But the Philly-NJ-NY-CT swath has pretty much a consistent definition of pizza, with individual variations in particular shops.

Pizza shops in that area are usually at least OK -- which means locals can sometimes get really attached to what's only mediocre pizza -- but there are some really good ones. I tend to think that towns with at least two or three competing pizza places get the best, since even the slavish locals can try different places.

(For example, there are at least five pizza places within five minutes driving of where I live. Two of them are quite good, in different ways, and another one used to be wonderful -- and might still be -- but it was very greasy, so I haven't been back in a long time. Another place is a mediocre joint that caters to high school kids with a quick lunch hour. And the bottom-end pizza place when I moved in closed soon after that.)

Another Musical Meme

Here's the meme I threatened promised earlier today, which I found via Keith R.A. DeCandido:

Name your top 10 most played bands/artists on iTunes/FM/music player, etc., then answer the questions.

Hm. As far as I can tell, there's no simple way to count up all of the playcounts of all of a band's individual songs to create one number, so this will have to be the bands that have the highest-ranked songs. That strikes me as unscientific, but I guess it's the best I can do.

1. Fountains of Wayne
2. R.E.M.
3. Modest Mouse
4. Harvey Danger
5. The Judybats
6. They Might Be Giants
7. Aimee Mann
8. U2
9. Camper Van Beethoven
10. Elvis Costello

1. What was the very first song you heard by 6? (They Might Be Giants)

"Don't Let's Start," when they showed up on MTV very late at night soon before their first album was released. (Back in the days when MTV not only played music, and not only played good music, but actually managed to get out in front of things now and then.)

2. What is your favorite album of 2? (R.E.M.)

Reconstruction of the Fables is probably more consistently strong, but I come back to Lifes Rich Pageant more often.

3. What is your favorite lyric that 5 has sung? (The Judybats)

"And I want to be good/but good is being simple/simple is forgetting/I simply can't forget." from "Being Simple"

4. How many times have you seen 4 live? (Harvey Danger)

Never; I haven't seen anyone live in years. I have children.

5. What is your favorite song by 7? (Aimee Mann)

Usually, "It's Not." Except when it's "The Moth."

6. What is a good memory you have involving the music of 10? (Elvis Costello)

Just this evening, on the way home from Red Lobster (where we went to celebrate Thing 1's birthday today), myself and the two boys were singing along to "Peace, Love & Understanding."

Also, "I Want You" played a significant part in my love life at one time, but I can't explain any further...

7. Is there a song of 3 that makes you sad? (Modest Mouse)

Strangely enough, for a band where my favorite songs are called things like "March Into the Sea" and "Satin in a Coffin," nothing of theirs makes me sad.

8. What is your favorite lyric that 2 has sung? (R.E.M.)

All my favorite R.E.M. lyrics make no sense at all, but here's something in between -- not quite one of my absolute favorites, but lovely and actually intelligible:

At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend
I don't care if you're not here with me
'Cause it's so much easier to handle
All my problems if I'm too far out to sea
But something better happen soon
Or it's gonna be too late to bring you back
Don't go back to Rockville
Waste another year

From "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville," of course.

9. How did you get into 3? (Modest Mouse)

I think I just bought a copy of Good News For People Who Like Bad News (cheaply) after hearing "Float On" once or twice, and reading reviews that made it sound like my kind of thing.

10. What was the first song you heard by 1? (Fountains of Wayne)

Probably "Radiation Vibe;" I think that was the first single.

11. What is your favorite song by 4? (Harvey Danger)

"Cream and Bastards Rise," with occasional detours to "Pike St./Park Slope".

12. How many times have you seen 9 live? (Camper Van Beethoven)

Never -- mostly because they broke up before I really got into them. (Plus the whole not-going-to-concerts thing.)

13. What is a good memory you have involving 2? (R.E.M.)

I had a gigantic Chronic Town poster in college -- sure, I was about five years late, but it was as quickly as I could get to college...

14. Is there a song of 8 that makes you sad? (U2)

"All I Want Is You" makes me melancholy, which is not exactly the same thing.

15. What is your favorite album of 5? (The Judybats)

I'll say Pain Makes You Beautiful.

16. What is your favorite lyric that 3 has sung? (Modest Mouse)

You were laying on the carpet
like you're satin in a coffin.
You said, "Do you believe what you're sayin'?"
Yeah right now, but not that often.
Are you dead or are you sleepin'?
Are you dead or are you sleepin'?
Are you dead or are you sleepin'?
God, I sure hope you are dead.

From "Satin in a Coffin."

17. What is your favorite song of 1? (Fountains of Wayne)

Favorite up-tempo song: "Bright Future in Sales." Favorite quiet song: "Prom Theme." Both subject to change without notice.

18. What is your favorite song of 10? (Elvis Costello)

The demo version of "Riot Act" from the Rhino reissue of Get Happy!!

19. How many times have you seen 8 live? (U2)

The repeated questions are getting tiresome. Never.

20. What is your favorite album of 1? (Fountains of Wayne)

Welcome Interstate Managers is the most consistently to my tastes.

21. What is a great memory you have considering 9? (Camper Van Beethoven)

Nothing comes to mind, I'm afraid.

22. What was the first song you heard by 8? (U2)

I'm sure it was "I Will Follow," but I can't remember when that would have been.

23. What is your favorite cover by 2? (R.E.M.)

"Draggin' the Line," from one of the Austin Powers movies, is a lot of fun, but their take on Richard & Linda Thompson's "Wall of Death" is possibly even better than the original.


Man, why do I do these things? This was longer than I expected, and I have the sinking feeling that I did a very similar version, if not exactly the same thing, at least once before.

Belated Clarke Award Nominees Post

Did I forget to do this last week? I think I did...

Well, the bickering has already begun, and, once you see the traditionally odd shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (which I sometimes think is designed to be given to the person least likely to know about it, care about it, or be willing to accept it), you'll understand why.

(Or at least part of why; the other part is that fandom is about bickering.)

Anyway, the nominees for this year do not include Ian McDonald's Brasyl (which, I suppose, means it's too much like regular science fiction), but does include:

• The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua - Snow Books
• The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter - Faber & Faber
• The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall - Faber & Faber
• The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall - Canongate
• The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod - Orbit
• Black Man by Richard Morgan - Gollancz

The only one of those I've read is Black Man (published in the US as Thirteen), which did not overly impress me. I have Execution Channel on the stack, but haven't yet had a mood sunny enough that I needed that book to cut through it. From a quick glance at Amazon UK, the books I wasn't previously familiar with seem to be equally gloomy.

Is the UK determined to reclaim its mantle (from wherever Peter Watts is standing right now) as the home of the most depressive SF on earth, or is something else going on here?