May 10, 2005

Flickering role models

The Women of ST:OS (link from Plep).

(And, who knew there was a "Groovy Sixties Women" webring?)

May 05, 2005

Jessica Alba to play Elizabeth Bennet

Planning to read my book this evening instead of blogs — a novel idea — but had to pass on this tidbit: there is apparently to be a Jane Austen action figure, though if it is at all realistic I suppose we are to understand "action" loosely. She comes, one hears, with a quill pen, a tiny copy of P&P, and a writing desk, and will debut this summer (news from AustenBlog via Emily Friedman on C18-L, who wonders if this mightn't be a sign of the apocalypse).

And here is a lovely group-authored mash-up of, I kid you not, Austen and The Terminator:

The tall and handsomely dressed figure of Mr. Terminus stood a moment with an expression of resolution upon his features, as does a man contemplating a plunge from a precipice, or perhaps a proposal of marriage (the two carrying nearly equal terror to most). Then he began to relate the most astonishing tale Patience had ever heard.

"As you know, Miss Patience," he began, "I am, to a great degree, a machine; my exterior, and some portions of my interior, are made as are those of Mr. Connor and yourself, but the greater part is metal and other materials, some of which you would recognize, and others of which you and even the wise men of your universities would know nothing at all."

And there is a movie, Pride and Extreme Prejudice: "The CIA and the KGB both pursue a former operative (Brian Dennehy) who seemingly has become unstable."

Finally, there was a wonderful satiric book cover I saw some years ago, but it doesn't seem to be on the net, though I did find someone's description:

"My favorite take on PRIDE AND PREJUDICE sequels was the parody cover illustration for (the non-existent) PRIDE AND EXTREME PREJUDICE, showing an elegantly-dressed 18th-century lady holding a smoking gun--a new Bennet sister 'Dirty Harriet' who tells Lady Catherine 'I have no objection, your ladyship, to your proceeding, since, by so doing, you shall render my afternoon quite agreeable.'"

Perhaps it is the apocalypse.

Things I will post about soon, I promise

I am three-quarters of the way through Nalo Hopkinson's wonderful The Salt Roads. Read an excerpt, then get the book. A rich, peaty book, full of colours and smells. Hopkinson's writing is full-bodied/full of bodies/full of the body.

Recently finished The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-first Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois and have been meaning to blog about it before I forget it. Also want to say a few words about Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists, which I read some time back (Nalo Hopkinson has a memorable story here, "Shift": identity, interracial dating, parent/child relationships, and Caliban's sister).

And saw Stage Beauty and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and have been meaning to comment.

Until then:

— Paul Di Filippo, Emerald City, and Jayme Lynn Blaschke on The Salt Roads
— Inside Liguria: The Old Salt Roads
— Route du Sel — Salt Road — Lou camin salié
— Salt Roads in Thailand
— Via Salarium — The Salt Trail of Turkey

— Interview with Stage Beauty Writer, Jeffrey Hatcher
— Samuel Pepys's diary entry on Edward Kynaston
— Stage Beauties: Stars of the Edwardian Stage

Ned Kynaston in 1660.

April 15, 2005

Apocalypse soon ... keep radios handy

SFSignal links to a Guardian story about possible end-of-the-world scenarios (was it a slow news day?), and adds various sf texts about each one. The Website at the End of the Universe coincidentally (or... is is?) has its own series of apocalyptic links. I say, bring it on! I am very soon going to have to order the books for my summer course, "The Apocalypse in Text and Film."

In more cheerful news, the CBC will next month feature a series on sf. Here is the whole story from SF Canada:

Weekdays from May 16 through May 27 CBC Radio's Between the Covers will feature a special series of short speculative fiction, hosted and curated by Nalo Hopkinson. The series, entitled "Six Impossible Things," will include fiction by Marcie Tentchoff, Penn Kemp, Nancy Kilpatrick, Pam MacLean, Wade Bell, Terence M. Green, Nalo Hopkinson, Phyllis Gotlieb, Rhea Rose-Fleming, Sandra Kasturi, Dora Knez, Edward Willett, Ashok Mathur, Dan Rubin, Larissa Lai, Wilma Kenny, Yves Meynard, Nega Mezlekia, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Ven Begamudre. You'll have two opportunities to hear the work — weekday afternoons in the second half hour of the RoundUp (2:30 p.m.) and weeknights on Between The Covers at 10:40 p.m.

Here is Nalo's blog.

April 14, 2005

Hugo Nominees Online

Free 2005 Hugo Nominees Online: links to available texts, from SFSignal.

April 10, 2005

SF

This one makes me itchy; I'm scared to read it too closely: Science Fiction/Fantasy Authors of Various Faiths: a list of sf authors, great and small, categorized by religion. No category for "no, thanks, I already ate" (from BoingBoing).

What I don't want for Xmas: 46-volume edition of Robert Heinlein's works.

Suzette Suzette Haden Elgin, author of the foundational Native Tongue series, has a series of sobering posts on marketing, sales, the decline of feminist sf, and how a publisher won't take an excellent new novel of hers unless she agrees to publish it under another name. Words fail me.

Farah Mendlesohn posts about Orientalism in sf.

Compelling review of Alex Shakar's The Savage Girl at The Pinocchio Theory. I am thinking of doing a course on sf and shopping, and this sounds perfect. No, really, think about it: Gibson's Pattern Recognition, Tricia Sullivan's Maul, this one ... it would be great!

Two new Canadian sf television series: Charlie Jade, debuting this month, and Ice Planet, slated to air in 2006 (via The Website at the End of the Universe).

Three links from SFSignal: first, 62 Quotations about Science Fiction from Bartleby¹; second, Classic SF Covers; finally, links to SF Lists from the The Speculative Literature Foundation. Some useful lists, like Recommended Children's SF and Fantasy and Recommended Reading List from Hypatia's Hoard for Back to Sex Toys of the Future, but the categorizations seem a little strange: why is the Alternative Sexualities in Fantasy and SF Booklist in a different section than the Lambda Sci-Fi Recommended Reading List of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender themed SF? But perhaps I'm being picky; anyway, there is some good stuff here.

And finally, the final scene from Seven, acted out by stuffed animals. The choice of the Kevin Spacey toy is inspired (via Bibi).

¹ A "somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction." Susan Sontag, The Pornographic Imagination (1967).

April 06, 2005

SF Hub

This is exciting: the University of Liverpool is going online on April 12 with the SF Hub, "the world's first website dedicated to science fiction research," according to The Guardian. Which may be an exaggeration but still (link from Brutal Woman). The University has an excellent collection of sf material, including archives of material on Brian Aldiss, John Brunner, Colin Greenland, Eric Frank Russell (the first British writer to receive a Hugo), Olaf Stapledon, John Wyndham, and Vivian Beynon Harris, Wyndham's brother, as well as material from The Science Fiction Foundation. The (still incomplete) new site promises that their

advanced search tools will enable you to find the resources you need amongst the extensive collections of books, journals, fiction magazines, fanzines, journal articles and archives at Liverpool University.

Which doesn't, come to think of it, necessarily mean that much of substance will be available online. There are, however, some interesting images, such as the one above, to whet the appetite.

Ah, Triffids. Perhaps I read about them at a too-tender age; that may explain why I seem to kill so many houseplants.

April 04, 2005

Cornucopia of SF

Natural Magick (Magiae naturalis) by John Baptist Porta. Transcribed from 1658 English Edition, Printed for Thomas Young and Samual Speed, at the Three Pigeons, and at the Angel in St Paul's Church-yard: "Wherein are searched out the causes of things which produce wonderful effects." From housekeeping to Alchemy (via Bibi).

Chile: An Alleged Non-Human Caught On Film from Scott Corrales, Institute of Hispanic Ufology (via BoingBoing). Pretty damn persuasive.

Exegesis: Philip K. Dick's unpublished writing online (via growabrain).

EarthCore, apparently the world's first podcast-only novel, "a cross between episodic modern-action fare like 24 and classic sci-fi movies like Predator and Starship Troopers." Starship Troopers?? (also via BoingBoing).

Blind Shrike, a novel by Richard Kadrey, can be downloaded under a Creative Commons licence (again with the BoingBoing).

Horror Masters. Lots of classics available for download; I used some of them for my Writing by Women class. Caveat: files will not print. But lots of stuff unavailable elsewhere.

On a similar theme: "Ladies of the Darkness: Trows, Rusalki, Vampires, and White Ladies of Literature and Folklore" by Lezlie Kinyon, Internet Review of Science Fiction (registration required).

The Periodic Table of Comic Books (via Life in the Present).

Basil Gogos, who gave the Creature from the Black Lagoon, left, his beautiful glow (also via Life in the Present).

Nominations for the Bram Stoker Awards at Locus Online. Hey, Shaun of the Dead is up for best screenplay. As is Dawn of the Dead; what a conundrum. Maybe Hellboy will sneak up the middle.

File under, there was a time this would have made me happy: a second X-Files film may be in the offing.

But Sin City sounds good.

Or just download Nosferatu. You know you want to (also from Bibi).

In other film news: Disney takes up the white man's burden (heads up from Nalo Hopkinson):

ROSEAU, Dominica (AP) — The tourism minister on Tuesday defended plans for an upcoming Disney movie expected to portray Dominica’s Carib Indians as cannibals, calling the film a work of fiction that could bring economic benefits to the poor island. ... Tourism Minister Charles Savarin called the criticism unwarranted. "Nobody is saying that (the film) is an accurate historical report of what happened in Dominica," Savarin said in a statement broadcast by private Kairi FM radio. "We have to get beyond our history and not continue trying to live in the past." (from Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink).

Loads of sf links from Locus Online (thanks, Matthew) and Listology.

April 02, 2005

SF links

Lou Anders interviews China Miéville for The Believer (link from Emerald City). I agree with what Miéville says about "aesthetic sadism": "being sadistic and wilfully unpleasant to your characters." Think Tanith Lee, Michelle Sagara. Of course, some feel that Miéville himself crosses this line, but I don't feel he does, for the simple reason that he doesn't seem to enjoy it any more than we do.

Matthew Cheney reviews Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr. and The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1 edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith, at The SF Site.

Nalo Hopkinson's newest novel, Mammalian Diving Reflex, ready to survive outside the womb.

Cool sf art links from The Website at the end of the Universe.

Cory Doctorow plugs The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens.

In case you haven't seen the list yet: Hugo and Campbell Awards Nominations at Locus Online.

This should have been posted yesterday: Paradise Lost: A Next Wave of Year's Best Anthologies Planned by Ferje Vedfamner. I am particularly looking forward to The Year's Best Interstitial Ficciones (edited by a large committee of sixty or seventy writers).

March 28, 2005

Bring it on!

Directed by Roger Corman; screenplay by Robert Towne, who later wrote Chinatown; public domain; available online: what's not to love? (thanks to one man for the link).

Maybe I'll show it to my students this summer.

March 26, 2005

SF lists

Awhile ago I noted China Miéville's list of fifty sf novels for socialists. Since he doesn't "know any longer what socialism is," waggish recently posted a list of sf novels for liberals. Not to be outdone, the fellows at SFSignal posted a series of lists, among them "SF for Imperialists" and sf for people who "want Arthur to rule" (links from Matthew Cheney).

March 25, 2005

SF imperatives

Read an extract from Neil Gaiman’s forthcoming Anansi Boys (via Emerald City).

Listen to Sheri Tepper interview on NPR (via Letters from Grad School).

Preorder Tesseracts Nine.

Write a bestseller (via s1ngularity::criticism).

Avoid the theatre but go to the cinema.

Talk to aliens (also via s1ngularity::criticism).

Google in Klingon (via lifehacker).

March 06, 2005

Geoff Ryman rules.

I have posted on Ryman before; in fact, I began this blog by referring to him, and have posted on him now and then since .

He is in a class by himself.

I just finished Air and have not enjoyed a book that much in ages. I was caught in the dilemma of not wanting to put it down, but not wanting it to end, either.

The main character is a village "fashion expert" in Kizuldah, Karzistan, named Chung Mae. She lives in a small mountain village described as the last place on earth to go on-line, just before a new technology, "Air," is introduced globally. With Air, once one is imprinted one can communicate and access information, well, out of the air. Now, I didn't know whether or not Karzistan actually existed (it doesn't), nor whether the ethnic group referred to, the Eloi, did either (they don't). It's too perfect a nod to Well's Time Machine, so I suppose I shouldn't have had to ask. (Ryman has said that Karzistan is modeled on Khazakstan.)

He is an original writer. And the novel is wonderfully funny: the relationships, the by-plays and squabbles between the characters, the clear-sighted way Mae assesses others. I didn't even mind — much — that she is a redeemer figure. Ryman manages to make even that new. This is an odd, marvellous book: it begins with the quotidian exotica of Mae's life as the local "fashion expert," but by the end it feels like — but isn't — magic realism. In that sense, it echoes the movement in his 253, particularly the ending, though in Air the shift into, well, an altered state, is more gradual.

This is "mundane" sf — "of the world." In an interview, Ryman said:

I think we've been fooling ourselves for a while. I think we need to face up to the loss of oil and the immense impact that will have. Climate change, overpop, yeah, need to be faced with tough challenges. Then we can move on to the life that will grow out of how we adapt, despite loss. That's a tale of overcoming, new solutions, and a renewed sense of wonder about truly new ideas.

In the end I find it difficult to share his optimism, but it is exhilarating to try.

I haven't read all the other books on the shortlist for the Philip K. Dick Award, but I can't imagine that two books this powerful could have come out in the same year.

March 05, 2005

SF things

Ming The Merciless Visual Gallery (via Life in the Present). I had a friend who used to dress up as Ming the Merciless every chance he got. He was actually a very sweet fellow. I think he just liked the beard. This page is part of a discussion about Filipina-American poet Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn (b. 1949) and her poem "Ming the Merciless" on the OUP's Modern American Poetry site. Hagedorn also edited Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Penguin, 1993).

Isabella at Magnificent Octopus has a wonderful post about things sf, including an extended discussion of Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) (available online).

Matthew Cheney and Gwenda Bond both point to a discussion at Night Shade Books called the Resurgence of the Small Press Zine in sf/f publishing. Cheney offers some thoughts on the complications of commercial publishing.

Joe Gordon, the man who was fired from Waterstone's in Edinburgh for blogging, is now writing the official blog for his new employer, Forbidden Planet (heads up from Emerald City, where there is also an interesting post about reviewers).

March 03, 2005

Our winter break

is next week; it is later than most universities', designed to coincide with March Break in the public schools. Convenient for those with children, but such a late break makes for a very long winter term and a rather abrupt finish to classes. I am counting the minutes; my back is still bad and I just want to sleep. Oh, and mark papers, of course (in case any of my students are reading). Had a massage yesterday, which felt lovely while it was going on. But it loosened up all those clenched muscles that were holding me together and now I am a real mess.

Off to bed. Reading Geoff Ryman's Air — wonderful! — but think I will fall asleep. Tylonel 3s, eh?

(Air is up for a Philip K. Dick Award. Here's an interview with Ryman by Kit Reed.)

(The JinkerBoy thinks the solution to back problems is cushions and more cushions. He was tossing them at me all morning until his father finally got him out the door. I heard him howling from the garage: "I wanna stay and help Mummy!" I had better go and sleep so that I am ready for his help when he gets home.)

March 02, 2005

SF art

Some things never change.

Two from Boing Boing: sculpture of Geiger's Alien on EBay, made from scrap metal. The same artists have also done Predator and others.

And be sure to check out Tales of Futures Past: gajillion images of imagined retro-futures.

February 27, 2005

SF news & views

Nalo Hopkinson's blog is at a new address, in case you were wondering where she was.

Adam Roberts has posted his assessment of the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist for 2005. He compares this year's crop with the nominees for the BSFA Award, and finds that the Clarke list this year tends towards the populist, even the middlebrow. Roberts is such a smart reviewer and has the most apt turns of phrase: "Knowledge," in Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, is "pathologically metastasising" and in Iron Council China Miéville writes "a compacted prose that works with a thesaurus-density of signifiers to build, layer on layer, a distinct and often atmospheric effect." I have come to trust his judgement, even when I don't fully agree.

Matthew Cheney writes on clubbiness in (sf) bookblogging. (Disclaimer: Adam Roberts and I are sporadic email correspondents.)

There is a blog called Mundane-SF that started last Nov. They have a manifesto that concludes "That the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet," and a list of "stupidities" which includes "Aliens: especially those aliens who act like feudal Japanese/American Indians/Tibetan Buddhists/Nazis." Hear hear! Though I am glad that they recognize the 'harmless fun that these and all the other Stupidities have brought to millions of people."

Superheros: don't quit your day jobs (from Long story; short pier).

In the "this will be news to some" dept.: Reading sf makes you a better Christian (via BoingBoing).

Addendum:

M Valdemar: A blog about horror and the death of contemporaneity (via Plep).

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction: created by the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections (via Life in the Present). Very attractive site; great images.

Sources of The LotR, including _The Ring of the Niblung, Beowulf, The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison, &etc. (via Catalogue Blog).

February 25, 2005

Things to look at

Lowry Educational Site (from Plep). About artist Laurence Stephen Lowry, from Manchester. Interested in industrial scenes; painted Swansea, which is how I heard of him.

Battlestar Gallactica: Episode 1 online (link from Metafilter).

And the best for last: Romance Novels under the covers (via BoingBoing). My pick: Lord of the Tube Socks.

February 23, 2005

Farah Mendlesohn

gave a fascinating talk at our campus earlier today to a small but select group, as they say. I had originally thought that her project on children's sf was peripheral to my own interests, and in terms of the texts she is studying, it is. But her approach and her methodology are so interesting, and she is such an engaged and lively speaker, that I was completely captivated by what she had to say and can report with certainty that I will be looking out for the book to appear in 2006.

Farah was very complimentary about our sf collection at the Ward Chipman Library, and found some useful materials, she said. After the talk, we went out to lunch with a former student of mine, now doing graduate work on sf at another institution but home for the winter break. Thai food and excellent conversation; a wonderful day. Anyone who has the opportunity to see Farah during the rest of her sojourn here — she will be in Acadia, N.S., umm, Florida, and half a dozen other places — anyway, do see her if you have the chance.

And visit her blog, her project blog, and her questionaire.

Both from Erich Fuchs, Journey to the Moon (1969). For more mod views of the future, click on picture.

February 21, 2005

Children's SF

Farah Mendlesohn is coming to UNBSJ this Wednesday to see our sf collection, and she will be giving an informal roundtable on children's lit, sf, Buffy, and whatever else comes up. Anyone in the area, come to Ward Chipman Library 232 at 12:30. Admission free; refreshments to be served. It's sure to be a good conversation. Farah is doing an interesting project about children's sf. And don't forget to take her survey of the childhood reading habits of sf readers.

I made posters using a picture from a science book for children published in 1959 from Dreams of Space: space art in children's books 1950's to 1970's, to which I linked some time back. An amazing site: so many space stations, and rockets, and Martian colonies. A good, old-fashioned future.

February 20, 2005

SF

At Fantastic Metropolis: China Miéville's fifty sf novels for socialists (link from BoingBoing). I love Miéville. But Ayn Rand? I'd rather know some enemies from a distance. And anyway, her stuff is hardly sf. But lots of excellent suggestions here, many of them 19th- or early 20th-century.

There has been a flurry of posting about the inclusion of two sf stories in the upcoming Best American Short Stories edited by Michael Chabon: Kelly Link's "Stone Animals" and Tim Pratt's "Hart & Boot."

An interview with Iain Banks at Salon (link from Emerald City). He speculates about the less than overwhelming reception of his non-sf novels in the U.S. The fact that he can't do a book tour there — he cut up his passport and sent it to Tony Blair in protest over the involvement of the U.K. in Iraq — can't help. He discusses whether or not U.K. sf is "anti-American," and confesses the similarity between the wise-cracking Dwellers in The Algebraist and the A.I.s in the Culture novels. I really enjoyed the Dwellers, but they did feel like old friends.

February 12, 2005

Cats and sf

Last night at dinner Farah made the claim that sf people (readers and writers both, I suppose) are disproportionately cat people. I don't know how one would go about testing that theory, except annecdotally — perhaps there is a grant there for someone — but it seemed to hold true around the table. So here I offer my credentials as an sf reader. With other interests:

Sally and Furio. Used with permission. Schrödinger's Cat jokes optional.

A little late for Friday cat-blogging, but it's probably still Friday somewhere. Unless it's already Sunday. (Maybe I should switch to fantasy.) Speaking of which, Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw (Tor 2003) came up over the shrimp fried rice. Now normally you couldn't pay me enough to read a book about dragons, but this one sounds interesting: apparently it's about a culture that literally embodies Victorian ideas of social Darwinism. "It's a novel of manners in which all the characters are dragons and eat each other," according to one site. The first chapter is posted online.

February 11, 2005

Just got home

Greg and Farah

from Fredericton, where I had dinner with Farah Mendlesohn, who is swinging through New Brunswick on a research trip gathering material for her next book, on children's sf, as well as four of our graduate students, including Greg Bechtel, who writes urban fantasy and who organized the gathering, and Brecken Hancock, who is writing a dissertation on Canadian women's sf.

It was a good evening, and well worth the long drive through the snow to spend time in such excellent company. Farah's level of activity is insprirational; she organizes more conferences in a year than I attend.

She has posted a questionaire on the early reading habits of sf readers; she was only expecting to collect fifty responses but now has, as of last count, 699. Lets add to those numbers, people! As she says, it would be so much easier to do the math for an even thousand.

Brecken

(I think my pulling out my camera disconcerted everyone. I tried to explain about blogger trophies. Ah well.)

February 06, 2005

Couple of sf links

Suzette Haden Elgin has a number of posts about science fiction poetry, and Matthew Cheney offers his picks for sf poems of the year.

Locus's Best of the Best Short Stories of 2005 (at Notes from Coode Street).

Matthew Cheney on the difficulty of picking the best fantasy story of all time, an addendum to the annual Locus survey.

"And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon" by Paul Di Filippo — one of my favs — at SciFi.com. About "blebs" — composite gadgets made by the spontaneous merging of smart household objects.

Letter from Sri Lanka: Arthur C. Clarke on the tsunami's aftermath and the roles of science fiction and technology in predicting future disasters, in Wired (link from BoingBoing).

January 28, 2005

The performing arts

Garrick as Richard III [inside a gourd??]

Bibi points towards a guided tour of music halls, part of a larger site about performance in the U.K. called PeoplePlay UK: Theatre History Online. Nice pages on Restoration and c18th theatre: lots of graphics and goodies.

Too much of a yawn? Perhaps you'd like to check out buffology: "Every Buffy character, episode, cast member, writer and director and every word of every show, in a searchable database" (via BoingBoing).

WWW Virtual Library: Theatre and Drama.

Theatre History on the Web.

International Theatre Resources from Artslynx.

Kabuki for Everyone.

Ford's Theatre.

Thai Elephant Orchestra (from Mirabilis).

January 27, 2005

Blow 'em up real good!

He's the last man on Earth. And he needs a drink.

I need to be thinking this term, off and on, about the summer course I will be teaching next July. It will be speculative fiction, but it can take any shape. I have always taught it with some sort of overarching theme: "Loving the Alien," "Gender in Space," or "Gender and Sexuality." This time I was thinking of going with single-sex societies. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland; Phillip Wylie's The Disappearance, which is back in print (here's the edition I have); Sheri Tepper's Gate to Women's Country; Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast Chronicles. But since it will be a summer course, and hence more concentrated, I can't really assign the same amount of reading as during the regular term and so I was hoping to fit in several films. Trouble is, can't think of any films based on my prospective theme. Maybe going back to some version of "Loving the Alien" would be more fruitful: hey, then I could show Alien (as you see, it's not necessarily really loving the alien, but more an exploration of how different writers try to create non-humans).

Later: Was thinking about this further and have more or less decided to go with the apocalypse (now there's a catch-phrase: relax, sit back, and go with the apocalypse). One of my favourite themes, as regular readers may know. I could use some of my same-sex societies — both Tepper and Charnas write about post-disaster cultures — and there are gazillion films: so many that I'm sure I can avoid Kevin Costner. Plus there's a cool a graphic novel series. There seems to be a sub-genre of same-sex societies within post-apocalyptic narratives; I wonder why? Is shaking up the heteronormative status quo that apocalyptic a concept? Is losing "the opposite sex" the most dreadful marker of loss and change that we can think of?

Possible cheery texts and films:

The Last Man by Mary Shelley.
John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951), and the film (1962).
On The Beach: Nevil Shute's 1957 novel, and the 1959 film based on it.
A Boy and His Dog — Harlan Ellison's story and the 1975 film .
The Children of Men by P.D. James. Too bad Greybeard by Brian Aldiss seems to be out of print; they would work well together.
The Omega Man. A classic.
Luc Besson, La Dernier Combat (Fr, 1983)
Night of the Comet for some comic relief.

There is a ton of stuff; I think I will try to have pairs: either filmed versions of written texts, or at least texts and films that work closely together.

There are some RPGs too; don't know much about that but depending upon who signs up for the course, that could be worked in...

I'm multitasking as I write this. The remake of The Dawn of the Dead is on PPV. And I'll tell you one thing: I miss those nice, slow Romero zombies. None of whom were under ten.

Okay. That was tense.

January 26, 2005

Bits and pieces

"You know you're living in 2005 when you accidentally enter your password on the microwave." And nineteen more (via Old Schooler).

New York Times Link Generator gives you weblog-safe links, and there is a bookmarklet (via Bibi).

More webby-introspection: Disturbing Auctions. I wish I'd had the Tartan Doll for the Robbie Burns night party I went to on Saturday (also via Bibi).

Akbar and Jeff are real! (from BoingBoing).

Lip balm for the literati. Choose from ShakeSpearmint, Brontë Berry, Alcott Apricot, or PoeMegranate (from the Catalogue Blog). Come on, they're not even trying! Steinbeck Grape. Milton Pippin, Granny Smith, and Golden Delicious. You could base a whole line on Jeanette Winterson alone.

Drawings of aliens by children (via Life in the Present).

Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women: group blog which highlights cool (and some not-so-cool: Rhinoplasty glasses?) gadgets.

A collection of recent comments and posts on writing by hand, at Moleskinerie. Which led to a couple of interesting sites: Future of the Book and Visiting the Well.

Ballads & Broadsides and Last Words (also via Life in the Present). Madame de Pompadour's were apparently, "Wait a second." Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635) got a little cranky: "All right, then, I'll say it, Dante makes me sick." My favourite is Civil War General John Sedgwick (1813-1864): "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist--."

January 21, 2005

Fun with words

Hobbit paleontologists from the wonderfully named Improbable Research (via Krista).

This works on so many levels. All it needs are a few ex-wives (from G Zombie).

What's your Scrabble score? (via CatalogueAnnie).

January 20, 2005

SF

Farah Mendlesohn is doing a survey for a book on children and science fiction. She blogs at The Inter-Galactic Playground.

Benjamin Rosenbaum has released his amazing story, "Start the Clock," under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. What a fascinating idea (via BoingBoing). I hope he, or someone, traces any offshoots.

"I'll be a postfeminist in a postpatriarchy, or, Can We Really Imagine Life after Feminism?" by Lisa Yaszek. Part of this essay discusses sf as it relates to "postfeminism":

[F]for feminist authors, SF’s insistence on historical mutability and utopian possibility provides an ideal narrative vehicle through which to posit and explore the always necessary and political question, “what comes after patriarchy?”

(link from Mark Woods).

StarTrek R.I.P.? Not in our hearts (link from The Website at the End of the Universe).

The people have spoken

and the consensus seems to be that any problems with slow loading are coming from the right column, specifically from graphics from other servers. So, I have minimized those; I will not continue the experiment of hiding graphics in the centre column; and in honour of that last, I give you this (saved in a smaller file than usual), as token of my sincere thanks:

Bonus links:

Zardoz: "Beyond 1984, Beyond 2001, Beyond Love, Beyond Death."
Listen to this, and then go here for more.
Zardoz Online.
A review which begins with the understated question, "Is there anyone with as varied a career, film-quality-wise, as Sean Connery?"
Zardoz NotWax with Teflon.

January 15, 2005

Blog about quilts. And robots.

And then off to bed.

Quilts, Counterpanes & Throws. Check out the 18thc quilts (via Plep).

Robot quilts by Kathy Weaver (via BoingBoing).

Robot Gallery: "This exhibit room features photographs of toy robots
and other images of robots from ephemeral sources."

January 12, 2005

SF stuff

There is a series of posts — a "mini-seminar," in fact — over at Crooked Timber about China Mieville's Iron Council: essays by John Holbo, Belle Waring, Matthew Cheney of The Mumpsimus, Henry Farrell, Miriam Burstein a.k.a. The Little Professor, John Quiggin, and the man himself. Of course, I can read none of it because I haven't been able to get to the novel yet.

Matthew Cheney also has a thoughtful post on "Genre Transcending" at his own blog. Which I did read.

Giornale Nuovo features UK artist Paul Noble's "monumental eight-year project—the meticulous depiction of a fictional city called Nobson Newtown. Noble is a master draughtsman, whose wall-sized drawings offer aerial perspectives over a fantastical cityscape."

The P.K. Dick Bookshelf, with over 1,200 book covers (from Plep).

History of Robots in the Victorian Era (via Rashoman).

Steampunk: Victorian Adventurers in a Past that Wasn't!.

Comic Book Bondage Covers from the Golden age of comics (also via Rashoman).

January 08, 2005

Alien Loves Predator

Ttwo thumbs up from Shatnerian:

Preston is a Predator. Abe is an Alien. Together, they're roommates searching weed, love, and a decent apartment in New York City. They also attend Yankees games, for whom Jesus Christ was recently drafted.

It's the funniest web comic I've read in a long time.

I think we have all had an Alien roommate at one time or another. I know I have.

Update (10/1/05): Link fixed. Doh!

January 05, 2005

SF linkage

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database: "on online index to over 60,000 historical and critical items about science fiction, fantasy and horror" (via The playful antiquarian).

Matthew Cheney lists various nominations now open, including the Hugo and the Nebula, and offers a rich post on short stories he enjoyed in 2004.

Gwyneth Jones has a blog, which I did not know. And Farah Mendlesohn recently started one.

"Consensus Building," a short story by Tom Doyle, has been posted at Futurismic. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing describes it as "a mean-spirited story about naked ambition, greed and the fungibility of computer-assisted memory," which just about sums it up. He goes on to say, "It's a great 10 minute read, perfect for the Web." Yes, it is that, but I'm not sure there is much new here: it's sort of Total Recall meets Disclosure.

And to end, something that isn't really fiction except technically, from Bookninja (01/04/05; scroll down):

In the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?

Should When this future be is realized, writing and printing on paper will be the radical, avant-garde acts. Back to the days of the underground press, or coterie publishing. Or both.

January 01, 2005

This is so cool!

Free science fiction calendar for 2005 from Captain Xerox at The Website at the End of the Universe. With Ace Doubles covers as illustrations. I hate to post the same illustration as Boing Boing, where I got the link, but this is one of my favourite covers, for obvious reasons.

December 15, 2004

More chickens

Two more for the pile:

Read an excerpt of Joe Haldeman's Guardian in Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists and quite liked it so thought I'd look for the book, though perhaps I should have done some research as Publisher's Weekly called it an "odd and unsatisfying pastiche." But others liked it. I don't think I've ever read a novel by Haldeman before. I'll let you know.

Also picked up The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks, which will be just what the doctor ordered I have no doubt. The reviews are mixed, but even "merely very good" Banks is quite a ride.

And as I have finished one class and practically finished another, I might even start reading some time soon.

December 12, 2004

Nalo Hopkinson

has posted a Christmas story, "in the spirit of the season," as she says, called "A Young Candy Daughter." If you enjoy it, she asks that you consider making a donation to hurricane relief in the Caribbean (there is a link beneath the story).

It's a lovely story, though it made me hungry. No Caribbean food here in SJ, that I know of.

December 11, 2004

SF links

The trailer for the forthcoming Spielberg film starring Tom Cruise, War of the Worlds, is now online. Trailer sites: IFILM, Apple (via Boing Boing). Well at least no-one would mistake it for a newscast. Though why, when a director wants to demonstrate the worst sort of destruction of the innocent they have to go and blow up the same tired old Norman Rockwell suburb, is beyond me.

Etexts available of The Book of Were-Wolves (1865) by Sabine Baring-Gould and The Lair of the White Worm (1911) by Bram Stoker (via Plep):

Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) was a Vicar in the Church of England in Devon, an archaeologist, folklorist, historian and a prolific author. Baring-Gould was also a bit eccentric. He reputedly taught classes with a pet bat on his shoulder. He is best known for writing the hymn 'Onward Christian Soldiers'.

This book is one of the most cited references about werewolves. The Book of the Were-Wolf takes a rationalistic approach to the subject.

The book starts off with a straightforward academic review of the literature of shape-shifting; however, starting with Chapter XI, the narrative takes a strange turn into sensationalistic 'true crime' case-studies of cannibals, grave desecrators, and blood fetishists, which have a tenuous connection with lycanthropy. This includes an extended treatment of the case of Giles de Rais, the notorious associate of Joan of Arc, who was convicted and executed for necrosadistic crimes.

So hop on over.

As for Stoker's novel, don't forget the Ken Russell film of 1988, featuring a smooth-cheeked Hugh Grant. Other etexts here and here.

Speaking of Stoker, watched Van Helsing on tv the other night. It sucked lemons.

Dreams of Space: Space Art in Children's Books 1883-1974 (via Maud).

Monstrous: An online encyclopaedia of monsters (via Plep).

Nice link from Gerald Lucas, to Dante’s Inferno Illustrated by Sandow Birk:

Dante's original vision was audacious for its time, in essence a re-figuring of the Biblical Canon — a contoured retelling of Dante's journey through the afterlife. The Divine Comedy was at once a spiritual document and a political treatise on how humanity fails the spiritual test and how redemption through universal love creates a new political structures here on earth in this life.

It is in this tradition that we embark on an audacity of our own — publishing a re-translation of Dante's seminal work into the images and street language of today.

Set in Los Angeles.

The Minotaur

As we scrambled down the rocky path we came
across the Minotaur, the legendary monster of Crete.

(Canto XII, 11-12)

Two recent posts on Crooked Timber about Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I am now more than ever eager to read over the holidays.

Life In The Present leads to The Little Red Riding Hood Project, "a text and image archive containing sixteen English versions of the fairy tale."

And if these aren't enough links for you, check out Matt Cheney's.

November 29, 2004

More groovy covers

Note the blurb: "He defied the 25th century with a woman who was NOT HIS WIFE—and a WIFE who was NOT A WOMAN." Though I'd bet it's not as promising as it sounds. Philip Jose Farmer was an interesting figure: a bone fide sf writer, but a big name in early sf erotica, too.

Images from Sleaze Science Fiction Covers, part of Vintage Paperbacks & Digests. What a blast from the past! I recognized several of the Frank Frazetta covers because my dad was a real Conan fan (link from Boing Boing).

November 28, 2004

Delany interview

wood s lot links to an brief interview with Samuel Delany by Stefen Styrsky for the Lambda Literary Foundation in which Delany discusses the intersection between his race, his sexuality, and his writing.

November 27, 2004

SF links

Noosphere, a French SF site. John Holbo gives the low-down. En Français, bien sur, mais il y'a beaucoups des images.

More from Holbo: a thoughtful post on education, sf, and learning to read from comic books. He links to Matt Cheney's post on teaching Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I learnt to read from comics. And my dad read them after I was through. He was so disappointed the day I spent my allowance on a romance instead of a superhero comic, that I never did it again. And today I am an sf-reading feminist with a doctorate in English. So it worked out well.

Matt Cheney points towards some speculative poets, and offers seasonal shopping tips. And be sure to read his post, "Artsy, Shallow Lesbian Erotica that's Not from the '50s!," about some sophisticationally-challenged responses to "Time's Swell" by Victoria Somogyi and Kathleen Chamberlain. An atmospheric story, written before the two authors had met in person.

Call for submissions: So Fey: Queer Faery Fiction (Haworth Press), featuring gay, lesbian, bi and trans-themed stories (via FutureTense).

And, since Buy Nothing Day is over, here are some links to kitschy toys, sf and otherwise, from web zen's cool holiday shopping guide.

Well I'm back

An interesting evening: a reading and the ballet. I generally have to work hard to convince myself to go out again once I am home, and after a long week it was difficult to go back into the cold and leave a warm house, a pre-schooler getting ready for his bath, and a soft bed. But I did, and am glad.

Beth Powning reads well. I haven't read The Hatbox Letters but from the two excerpts I heard, it is, at least in part, an intensely nuanced exploration of loss and loneliness. In other words, although I recognize the artistry, I doubt I will read it any time soon.

There is an interesting congruence between Powning's novel —

When Kate Harding, recently widowed, receives nine antique hatboxes — family letters, diaries, and memorabilia — from Hartford, Connecticut, she finds herself drawn back to the childhood summers she spent in Shepton, her grandparents’ Connecticut house.

and the ballet, Les Portes Tournantes, in which there are also documents from the past in the form of "a mysterious black book."

It appears that this evening was my time for dabbling: first a reading from a book I likely won't read, and then the first ballet I've seen in well over a decade. The first Act failed to draw me in, though the second did, despite my reservations about the narrative as some sort of wish-fulfilment story for children of divorced parents, and my discomfort with the theme of two mothers who leave their children. Boy children. (Wonder what my little sprout is doing? Is he upset that I went out? Why am I here watching a narrative about abandonment since to do so required me to temporarily abandon my son? And of course, when I got home I found that he had had a fine evening with his father, played for ages, and went easily to sleep. So.)

One thing I found interesting about the performance was the consistent focus on other forms of artistic production: one character is a painter, and paintings are a significant part of the set. Another is a musician; a "string quartet" dances their performance with their instruments. The artist's mother, danced by the magnificent Evelina Sushko, was a pianist who accompanied silent films in Cambellton, N.B. Textual documents — the mother's unmailed letters — are central. And of course the ballet itself is based upon Jacques Savoie's 1985 novel.

But much of this is still dabbling. The fact of the matter is that I could not bring myself to care very much for any of these characters, Powning's or the dancers' (with the exception of Sushko's solo in which she gives up her infant son. Yeah, there's a theme here). I was irritated with Powning's widowed Kate; she seemed so solipsistic, so bogged down — or even luxuriating in — in the minutia of her existence. (Big caveat: yes I know I only heard two small sections.) Jaded? Cold? Tired? Insensitive? Overwhelmed? In denial??? You be the judge.

Turned on the ignition in the car afterward and was blasted with some screaming metal on the campus radio, flipped to the "Golden Oldies" station but it was even more maudlin than usual, so settled on the CBC. And caught the tail end of the last in this year's Massey Lecture series, A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright:

Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life.

The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?

In A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

Finally, some perspective. There will be no readings, no ballet, after the apocalypse. But on the plus side: no critics, either.

Globe and Mail review of the ballet.
Part one of the Massey Lectures is available on audio.
A Short History of Progress available from Anansi Press.
Interview with Ronald Wright. And another.
Wright's novels, A Scientific Romance and Henderson's Spear.
Civilization is a Pyramid Scheme: The Maya's ruined temples reveal a frightening message for us all, says archaeologist Ronald Wright (originally published in the Globe & Mail 08/05/2000).

November 16, 2004

More pulpy goodness

Followup on a recent post: here is Pulp Fiction Paperback Covers: "Warning...you are entering a politically-incorrect zone...if this bothers you, TURN BACK NOW!" (link from Plep). Lots of sf.

November 15, 2004

This caught my eye

for some reason:

Michael's Sketchy & Sci-Fi Book Covers (link from Plep).

October 27, 2004

Follow-ups

Via Boing Boing: Pitcairn men accused of rape convicted but not yet serving time (registration required).

If any former sf students are reading this, get out your wallets. RE/Search will publish JG Ballard Quotes: Does The Future Have A Future? (also via Boing Boing).

Map of Dante's Inferno (via Plep).

Real Women Project: bronze sculptures the same size as Barbie but a lot more expensive (via Plep).

October 26, 2004

Book exhibits

Plep highlights a series of wonderful virtual exhibits on the Monash University Library site (Australia): sf magazines and comics, yellowbacks (popular books from the second half of the 19th century, simply bound in boards, with highly-coloured graphics on the covers), and English Literature to 1800, including Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda: to which is added Monsieur Corneille's Pompey & Horace, tragedies, with several other translations out of French. (London : Printed by J.M. for H. Herringman, at the sign of the Blew Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange, 1667).

October 21, 2004

Stephenson v. Gibson

Weird and wired Slashdot interview with Neal Stephenson. Be sure to read at least as far as his epic encounters with William Gibson. Link from Bookninja, Boing Boing, and Maud. And scads of others, no doubt. But really, it's worth a read. On publishing:

Publishing is a very ancient and crafty industry that existed and flourished before the idea of copyright even existed. When copyright came into existence, the publishing industry dealt with it and moved on. My suspicion is that everything that's been going on lately will amount to a sort of fire drill that will force publishing to scurry around and make some new arrangements so that they can get back to making money for themselves and for authors.

October 03, 2004

Wierd SF

Still working on grant proposal, and trying to put together what I'm going to say about The Man of Feeling tomorrow, but what the hey:

Where's my atomic-powered car? (from Plep).

"If all stories were written like science fiction stories" by Mark Rosenfelder (via FutureTense).

Did you ... or are you just 'special'? (from Shatnerian).

Team America: World Police: according to Boing Boing, " it may be the single best crappy movie you'll see all year."

Elmo art (via web zen).

October 01, 2004

SF stuff

The other Miriam makes me want to get at China Miéville's Iron Council (Bonus quote from Miéville: "But [Iron Council is] not 'really about' the Iraq War. If I want to talk about that, I'll just fucking talk about it."), and

she points to some controversy over Carroll.

Ed points towards a review which calls Neal Stephenson an educated person's Stephen King, and

bemoans the imminent television serialization of Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea series.

Geoff Ryman's Air is out; it's based on his short story, "Have Not Have," which I liked a lot (heads up from s1ngularity::criticism).

Opera based on Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale opened in Toronto last week (link from Nalo Hopkinson). The review is extemely positive but I can't help thinking of The Simpsons episode in which Marge played Blanche in a musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Scientists reviewing sf (link from Boing Boing).

September 29, 2004

Not with a whimper

What is the appeal of post-apocalyptic visions? (via Boing Boing). Part of it must be the comfort one takes in imagining that at least someone would have survived, else who is taking the pictures? Though the end of Natural Born Killers should have cured us of that one. Maybe it is the appeal of being able to go places previously restricted or difficult to access, the backrooms, basements and byways; maybe it is the carnivalesque appeal of living in the New York Public Library. No doubt shopping has a lot to do with it (even if it's at Tesco's):

"What are they doing? Why do they come here [to the mall]?"
"Some kind of instinct, memory, what they used to do; this was an important place in their lives." (Dawn of the Dead).

(Surely I'm not the only one who has shopping dreams? Welcome to advanced monopoly capitalism: my father, a retired welder, has factory dreams. Me, I'm in the mall, often at a chi-chi make-up counter. So much like my waking life.

Never dreamt about post-apocalyptic malls, though.)

Apocalypse on the web:
Apocalyptic Dreaming: "The Web provides the largest possible audience imaginable, and it seems only right to use the chance to widen our discussions about the end of the world."

Reading the apocalypse:
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic science fiction: a useful guide with books divided into various categories like "WW III," "Pandemic," and "Astronomic impact."
EmptyWorld: "Apocalyptic and End of the World Fiction, Film and TV"
The Ultimate Survivalist Bookstore (at Australian Survivalist Online)
Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Novels (a difficult quiz)

Watching the apocalypse:
Survivors: Series One on DVD. Graham Nelson on what makes cult tv.
New pay-tv series ReGenesis starts Oct. 24, part of "a general paranoia" in the new season of Canadian TV, according to the Globe and Mail.

Playing apocalypse:
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: "Post-holocaust games, like other post-apocalyptic literature, are often compelling"
Post-apocalyptic media

September 21, 2004

Resistance is futile; you will be cute.

Two Borg stories, neither of which I would have blogged alone, but ... well it's just eerie, that's all.

Even sweeter than those little Borg babies in the fishtanks: the Borg assimilate My Little Pony (via Boing Boing).

And, another reason to be an atheist (via Wierdwriter).

September 16, 2004

ghoj

I take precious moments away from preparing my tenure file to pass on this: radio and television network Deutsche Welle added Klingon to the over thirty languages on its site. Learn about Klingon culture and rituals, or take the Klingon Quiz.

"The dialogue of cultures does not end at the edge of our solar system," according to Deutsche Welle director Erik Bettermann.

My favourite bit is the sales pitch:

Germany is a country located in sector 001 of the planet Earth. Its traditions, stunning landscape and international flair make it an attractive holiday destination for Klingons and other extraterrestrial life forms.

(from Boing Boing).

September 13, 2004

SF stuff

A few things:

Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton all discuss the future in "Global to Local: The Social Future" in Locus. Doctorow focuses on copyright, Sterling thinks that North America is no longer calling the shots, and all lament the loss of the environment (linked by Boing Boing and Kairosnews).

Brian at Weirdwriter links to an online version of a China Miéville story, "An End to Hunger." Brian calls the story "slight," though I like it, as far as it goes. The ending cops out a little.

Gerald Lucas posts about the premature announcement of the death of sf. He rehearses J.G. Ballard's contention that only sf has the vocabulary to describe the "post-humanist" world and concludes, "Sf might be over in the sense that it can be distinguished from fiction and non-fiction."

Lucas also posts a list of various definitions of sf, from the idealistic to the pragmatic.

Suzy McKee Charnas, whose blog I just discovered, reports from Noreascon 4: "numinous sf," women writing, and more.

Giornale Nuovo gives us a series of beautiful 17th-century engravings of dragons and other fanciful beasts.

September 07, 2004

SF stuff

Gerald Lucas points towards this week's Guardian special issue on SF.

Nalo Hopkinson: did she or didn't she? She did!

Matt Cheney has been busy at WorldCon, but he found the time to post the results of the Hugos and the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards.

Cory Doctorow posts photos from WorldCon.

Kip Manley meditates on James Tiptree Jr.’s "The Women Men Don't See."

Suzette Haden Elgin has an interesting, and ongoing, series of posts on writing about telepathy.

Ellen Klages's "The Green Glass Sea" is online at Strange Horizons (via Boing Boing).

Call for submission of your entertaining horror story that takes place in a boneyard or is somehow related to a cemetery for a print anthology titled Potter's Field (via FutureTense).

And from Fenland: a 17th-century ghost story.

August 27, 2004

SF stuff

Scientists choose their favourite sf authors (from Maud).

Matthew Cheney strongly recommends Light by M. John Harrison.

Tara and Willow together 4ever (from ms.musings).

Jill gets annoyed with fembots.

Very creepy; very beautiful. And as Maud would say, categorization is a conundrum. (from Boing Boing).

August 21, 2004

Richard Morgan's Broken Angels

Well I suppose I shouldn't be blogging about this book yet since I haven't even taken it out of the bag, but I bought it in a rush. Classes start very soon and I want to get in another novel or two before I have to put it all aside until December. Despite one or two reservations (the hardwired-military-killing-machine-with-a-heart-of-gold is somewhat of a cliche, n'est pas? and, that scene with the dog was well beyond anything I wanted in my head, thanks a lot for nothing), I enjoyed the first in the series, so I beetled out and got this second one despite the odd warning.

August 12, 2004

Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon

I am enjoying this book, despite the wince-making violence. The hero, Takeshi Kovacs, is Raymond Chandler and Mack Bolan's lovechild transported to the 26th century. I'm having trouble putting it/him down and attending to my course prep.

Why do I enjoy such macho fare, you may ask? Who knows: no doubt I suffer from as much false consciousness as the next person. There are some tough, martial babes here, but also lots of gynocide and kinky sex, in the fine tradition of ... well, just about anyone you could name. So as is so often the case, my cerebral cortex is tut-tutting while my brain stem is having a really good time. That is not to say that the novel is "merely" entertaining: the writing is effective and the world creation is generally persuasive, with many hints of backstory left undeveloped.¹ And while one critic incredulously bemoans Morgan's apparent dislike of "the ultra-wealthy," in my view this is a point in his favour. (Morgan is not the first sf writer from the UK to be criticized by North-Americans for overt social criticism, or "pessimism," as it is euphemistically termed. But it's a funny old half-empty world, isn't it?).

And anyway, what's so pessimistic about a future where the mind can be digitalized and decanted into different bodies? Yeah, yeah, Morgan does it in full awareness of the inequality with which such technology would be implemented, unlike some of the others who have used similar scenarios, but the fact remains that our hero — our "sleeve" (Morgan's term for bodies) — while not an obnoxious rich person himself, still manages to partake of this sexy technology. I am finding this having-the-cake-and-eating-it-too less irritating than in other, more self-conscious cases.

Oh, and Morgan teaches English. Or at least he did; I can't find him listed on the University of Strathclyde site. If that's not inspiring I don't know what is.

¹ A second Kovacs book, Broken Angels (2003), is already out in paperback, and a third novel, Market Forces (2004), not part of this series, is out in hardcover.

July 17, 2004

Catching up

Written in Leeds, 14 July 2004

On jet lag

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, despite my complaints, was a good read and had some interesting things to say, in particular, about jet lag. Cayce, the main character (who gets to travel first class and to sleep in one of those little pods that I can only drool over in high-end magazines), says that when you travel by plane you are going at such speeds that you leave your soul behind, stretched out behind you by the thinnest of umbilical cords.¹. Evocative, but not quite how I feel; if I had a soul, and if I thought it was somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, at least I could take comfort that it was on its way, like a wayward suitcase. I have the hollowed-out feeling of having lost something without the confidence that it will return. Or that it will return in the same shape without burst zippers or having been plundered in some lost luggage room.

Gibson also helpfully informs the reader that "Jacques Cousteau said that jet lag was his favorite drug" (12). I have been trying to adopt this cheery perspective but when I repeated it to a fellow conference attendee she responded that Cousteau must have been into downers.

If only jetlag were that simple. And consistent.

I hasten to add here that I am not complaining and that I realize how infuriating it would be if I were. I'm just trying to describe an experience.

A cacophony of voices all around, scraps of which stay with me and roll through my head. Naomi, a Japanese woman I met in London, and her precisely inflected English. Half a dozen Scottish voices, friends of my cousin, and here at this conference: David, Al, Stuart, Charles, Stephen. A PhD student here at Leeds whom I had tentatively identified as Canadian but then who moved south, and west, with each word she spoke. Karin, a German woman I spoke with for a long time yesterday. And the quiet relief of Elspeth's voice, Elspeth from Saskatoon. Who would have thought it was such work to speak and listen to one's own language? Especially when the rest of the world so thoughtfully learns it in order to save us the trouble of really having to make an effort?

There have also been moments of excitement, of consciousness of stretching, of disappearing boundaries, and strange impulses to transparency. And moments of happy recognition: the skies; the hedgerows; hell, the paving stones. I never feel so North American as when I am here, but I know this place, from my own visits but also refracted through my parents' stories of the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s. I suppose in some ways I know it better than they, as they don't — can't, or won't — understand it now.

But back to the original subject: perhaps Cayce is right, after all: the cord which attaches me to the Jinker Boy is stretched painfully (for me if not for him: his dad reports he is happy and busy; his nonna reports he is eating and sleeping well, is quiet and good. But quiet isn't good!). Me, I am noticing all strollers, all babies, all toys and children's clothes in store windows, all playgrounds. And I won't be going home for another ten days. What was I thinking?

¹ Adam Roberts notes that this conceit is not original to Gibson.

Excerpt from a telephone conversation with the Jinker Boy, 13/7/04:

JB [in background]: I talka Mummy! I talka Mummy! [thumping noise]
Me: Hi, baby!
JB: Mummy! Ottopus!
Me: Did you go to the Aquarium?
JB: No! Piderman!
Me: [beat] Oh! You played Spiderman with Daddy?
JB: An Beaderbarka!
Me: [beat] Peter Parker?
JB: Beaderbarka an Piderman!
Me: [beat] You saw the movie Spiderman?
JB: Yiss! Daw Piderman Daddy!
Me: Daddy took you to see Spiderman?²
JB: Yiss! Ottopus!
Me: [beat] Wasn't it scary? Weren't there bad guys?
JB: No! Good guys!
Me: Can I talk to Daddy, honey?
JB: No!

² You, the little sweetie who was frightened at Shrek 2?

On going to Haworth on July 14, 2004:

The conference organizers arranged a trip to the village of Haworth, which is about an hour from Leeds. A busload set off, many of us making snide, self-conscious comments to each other about the silliness of such literary pilgrimages. And Haworth is very commercial, with a Villette Coffee House where I had a rather hard bun and a cup of tea (just like the food at Lowood!), and the Ye Olde Brontë Tea Rooms. And there were some howlers at the Brontë Parsonage Museum itself, like the careful preservation of some doodles on the nursery wall even though the adjacent plaque admits that none of the Brontës had done them. But I was brought up short when I came to the kitchen, saw papers and a tiny book on the narrow table, and read that Emily Brontë had worked at learning German while baking the bread. And again: upstairs in a display case there is a tiny, white embroidered bonnet, made by a friend in anticipation of Charlotte's baby, a baby that was never born because Charlotte, the last of the Brontë siblings, died while only three months pregnant at the age of thirty-nine. Downstairs there is a temporary exhibit of artifacts from Emily and Charlotte's time in Brussels, with letters from Charlotte to M. Héger that were too painful to dwell on. And though some of us were decrying the mild weather and the lushness of the countryside, if one squints away from the souvenir shops and the flower boxes, one can almost imagine what it might have been like in that small stone village in the 1850s. Then, to make the day perfect, as we walked back to the bus the clouds gathered and lowered, and the wind picked up.

Okay, but I didn't kiss the ground.

Haworth webcam: enjoy literary history while in your underwear.

Leeds webcam: no muss, no fuss!

July 05, 2004

Gilman

Some great links about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and nineteenth-century women writers in general at wood s lot.

Here is my student's site from the sf course last fall.

July 02, 2004

SF stuff

New original sf on Futurismic: "The Tiresias Project" by Ruth Nestvold. Gender: nature or nurture? I could see using this in both sf and gender studies courses.

Just came across "The Arthur C. Clarke Shortlist 2004: a review feature" by Adam Roberts, which horrifies me for the simple reason that he is so spot-on about the books on the list that I have read, that he is no doubt correct about Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, for which I just paid full price (in hard cover). The pleasure of knowing that at least one other person was not impressed with Pattern Recognition does not make up for my chagrin. On the plus side, I will definitely seek out Tricia Sullivan's Maul. (Thanks for the link, Adam.)

Mark Cheney points towards more on-line fiction, and recommends, in particular, "Women are Ugly" by Eliot Fintushel.

Nalo Hopkinson posts about the recently formed Speculative Literature Foundation and their first fiction award.

And from Liz at misbehaving.net: Women in Refrigerators:

This is a list I made when it occurred to me that it's not that healthy to be a female character in comics. I'm curious to find out if this list seems somewhat disproportionate, and if so, what it means, really.

These are superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator. I know I missed a bunch. Some have been revived, even improved — although the question remains as to why they were thrown in the wood chipper in the first place.

Why, indeed? And be sure to check out the comments from the respondents.

June 29, 2004

Vaginas dentata

Recent post at Cup of Chicha:Slowly approaching the technology needed for stepford whores. What is it with these hyper-realistic sex dolls? Whatever happened to the good old imagination? When I was a girl, we never had hyper-realistic sex dolls. We made do with two-dimensional photographs of David Cassidy stuck with peeling scotch-tape to the walls above our beds. Sometimes in black and white! And we were glad to have them, too.

But I digress. Was thinking about girl-robots (and don't you love that identity-theft commercial?) and trying to come up with a list. Robots, not creatures or undead or any other of the myriad non-human and therefore eminently killable forms that women can take in popular representations.

Metropolis (1927).¹
Barbarella (1968) (wasn't she sort of a robot? She looked like one.)
The Stepford Wives (1975), and redux (2004).
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).
And, wow, Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980). With Julie Kavner and Sharon Gless!
Blade Runner (1982).
Cherry 2000 (1987).
Cyborg (1989).
Frankenhooker (1990). I know, technically not a robot...
Eve of Destruction (1991).
Cyborg 2 (1993): Jack Palance and Angelina Jolie, together at last!
The otherwise forgettable Alien Resurrection (1997) with the inimitable Winona Ryder as a very convincing android.
Austin Powers (1997).
S1m0ne (2002). I know, I know; she's not a physical robot.
And who can forget the amazing forced-fellating-of-the-bomb scene in Terminator 3 (2003)?

But we mustn't blame Ah-nold. This headline says it all: "Engineering Students Invent Female Robot, Penis Reattachment Machine."

Androids and Robots in the Movies.
Robots On Film (a big list).
Here is a list of female robots on television, from The Bionic Woman to the Buffybot.

And its not just homo sapiens: Robotic female birds confuse males: "At the end of the display, some males—mystified by the lack of further interest—would simply jump on the crouching female and try to mate" (more).

Turning to art:

How to Draw Manga: Giant Robots, including female robots, because "not all mecha are macho!"
Robobabes on the Babes in Space site.
And don't forget HR. Giger.

But female robots are not just for a good time. Soon, they will be changing our bedpans. Well, maybe not everyone's bedpans: Valerie, a Domestic Android sells for US$59,000.

But don't despair. Women are taking back the robots:

"Robots and Girls — A Promising Alliance": science education and girls.
Badass Robot of the Month: Blackarachnia.
Women who collect robots.
Quiz: What Robot Girl Are You?.

¹ And see "The Nature of the Female Cyborg: Evidence of Will in the Mechanical Woman" by Francesca Myman.

June 27, 2004

Getting about

Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia, 1600–1843 (via Plep).

Visit 18th-century Italy at three Getty exhibitions.

Transportation Inventions & Events of the Enlightenment Period.

Hudson's Bay Company Digital Collection.

Digital maps of Scotland, 1560-1892.

South Sea Bubble Playing Cards, 1720.

Outlaws and Highwaymen.

Fantastic Voyages Quiz: "Over the years, many authors have written stories of journeys to the Moon. But which were really possible?"

June 26, 2004

Tiptree publications

Matthew Cheney writes:

Tachyon Publications will be reprinting Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, a collection of the best stories of James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), for whom the Tiptree Award was named. (Tachyon is also publishing The James Tiptree Award Anthology.) The book is due out in the late fall/early winter. A contents listing for the previous edition is here.

This is wonderful news. Cheney goes on to note that many of Tiptree's stories are difficult to find, and mentions on-line editions of "The Women Men don't See," and "The Screwfly Solution."¹ I have taught the former story in sf classes, but had not even read the latter until seeing Cheney's link. He wrote a long and thoughtful post about it last March, in which he attributed the flaws in the story — and there are some — to the pitfalls of writing commercial sf. He concludes, however, that the story's virtues overcome its failings, and I agree.

It is a difficult story to read: humanity is hit with pockets of gynocidal madness, in which men brutally kill women and girls. Cheney writes that there is no deus ex machina, but I would argue that in a paradoxical way, there is: it seems that aliens have caused the madness in an effort to depopulate the earth prior to taking it over. So there is no hope for the species, whereas until this point it was always possible that the madness would end (previous periods of comparable violence are noted in passing, for example the witch hunts). But even though the story leaves us facing the end of humanity, at least the horror was not caused by something within us as a species. A little while ago I wrote about various explantions, in sf, of humanity's self-destructive behaviour. This from a scientific report in Tiptree's story:

A potential difficulty for our species has always been implicit in the close linkage between the behavioural expression of aggression/predation and sexual reproduction in the male. This close linkage involves (a) many of the same neuromuscular pathways which are utilized both in predatory and sexual pursuit, grasping, mounting, etc., and (b) similar states of adrenergic arousal which are activated in both.

But then she side-steps. This story is the most fascinating example I have found of a woman writer using sf tropes to mask a painful and frightening argument. After all, this is presumably the first time these aliens have come. Which means that earlier incidences of gynocide, not to mention the constant, everyday violence, occurred — occur — without help.

¹ Found one other Tiptree story on-line: "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats"

Bloggers elsewhere

Maud Newton has a story in Swink that gets under the skin.

Liz Lawley writes about the problems, and the possibilities, of blog research.

Nalo Hopkinson notes a review of her edited anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy. I will order this for the UNBSJ library. And check out all her other books.

Update (28/6/04):

This isn't literally "elsewhere," but here is a short piece by the Rake (via Tingle Alley).

June 23, 2004

Misc. links

[click for larger view]

"Young Feminists Take on the Family," the newest edition of webjournal The Scholar & Feminist Online published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, came out today (via Feministing).

The June issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction is also posted. Highlights: "Feminist SF: Futures for Humankind" by Cynthia Ward, "Science Fiction and the Paradox of Genre" by Matthew Cheney, and an interview about SETI (registration required; free until the end of the month).

SETI@Home has released new client software (via Slashdot). No gui interface for the Mac OS yet, though.

Space Art Through the Ages, including the graphic, above (via Plep). I suspect that some of these artists might be bemused by their company.

American Needlework in the 18th Century and Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate in Colonial America, both at the Met (via Plep).

Kelly Culture: reconstructing Ned Kelly (also via Plep): of particular interest to readers of The True History of the Kelly Gang (mentioned here, here, and here).

Stuff found in used books (via Bookslut; also noted by Household Opera).

"There was a reek of semen that quickened the blood."

Vintage J.G. Ballard on the great modern painters in a Guardian interview with Jeannette Baxter in which he discusses art, politics, and the unlikelihood of middle-class rebellion (link from Emma at Maud Newton).

June 18, 2004

Probability Moon

Just finished reading Nancy Kress's Probability Moon (2000) and quite enjoyed it. I almost put it aside because I found the writing uninspired and the characters flat, but kept reading because if I hadn't it would have been the second book in a row that I put aside, which is way too out of character. So, I read on, skimming the overly technical bits (um, something about probability), and enjoying the central idea of a culture in which individuals suffer physical pain, in the form of headaches, when there is not consensus ("shared reality"). Interestingly, while there is of course no war or other forms of institutionalized violence,¹ there is still exploitation; it is quite an acquisitive, trade-based culture, with clear social and economic classes.

It was a refreshing read after the dead end of Oryx and Crake; in Kress's novels humans have reached the stars, spread out from the failing Earth (that, at least, is a constant), and met alien races. More Star Trek than On the Beach. And sometimes you need that.

I will read the sequels, Probability Sun (2001) and Probability Space (2002), though I will look for them in (my uni's excellent sf/f) library.

Links:

Kress's homepage
An interview, and another, and another, and another, and another, and yet another, and for some variety, a speech.
A bibliography, and another.
A to-do list

¹ There is an important exception but I can't tell you what it is, in case you read it.

June 15, 2004

Various follow-ups

More LotR pastiches. Some of these are really clever. At Making Light.

Women voting: from a UK perspective. Check out the suffrage board game! (via misbehaving).

A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step: blogging Ulysses (via Edward Champion). This guy is gonna get sued.

On comics: two posts from Edward Champion: Comics as Literature — Some Starting Points and Someone Cuts Through the Swath. Next, manga is encroaching on US bestseller lists. And, Weirdwriter thinks much the same as I do about comics, but argues the point better. Finally, talk about Art! Isadora Duncan, eat your heart out.

June 14, 2004

SF, not sci-fi

Mark Cheney links to an interesting discussion at Norman Geras' blog about terminology: sf or sci-fi? And if the latter, how is it pronounced ("sigh-fie" or "skiffy") and what does it mean? Myself, I'm a little schizoid about it: if I'm talking to a non-reader I might say "sci-fi" in order to be plain, though I prefer the term "sf" because it is more inclusive. Mind you, I've grown into that; some years back a PhD student from Australia was visiting Toronto as part of her research and she and I met up. I was having dinner at the home of her host and used the term "sci-fi." My new colleague's mother, who was also there, immediately said, "She said 'sci-fi.' Why won't you let me say it?" Some blushing and blustering, and then we all had coffee.

More recently, the amazing la gringa complemented me on my "skiffy" interests, and I didn't clue that she probably meant "colourful, sometimes entertaining, junk," to quote The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (via Graham Sleight via Norman). For some reason I thought "skiffy" had something to do with squirrels (squirrels+Skippy). Anyway, a complement is a complement.

Other sf news:

Edwardians on the moon: The Apollo Prophecies by Kahn & Selesnick (from the ever-wonderful Giornale Nuovo; also noted by the equally wonderful Matthew Cheney). Amazing installation photography which uses "the narrative techniques of Italian fresco cycles of the early Renaissance."

Cory Doctorow writes that Ian McDonald's new "Bollywoodpunk" novel, River of Gods, is brilliant. And new, from the sounds of it. That's good enough for me.

June 12, 2004

SF museum

Seattle's SF Museum is online (via Boing Boing).

But despite the spate of articles claiming that this is the first sf museum in the world, there are things going on elsewhere:

Museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys in Yverdon, Switzerland.

Last year there was a travelling exhibition in Germany.

science + fiction at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm (exhibition site).

Then there is the Virtual CD-ROM Museum of Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy, "the Ft. Knox of Science Fiction."

None of which is to say that I wouldn't go to Seattle in a heartbeat.

June 11, 2004

Linked links

Three book links:

Altered Books: the site of the International Society of Altered Book Artists (via moleskinerie).

Pop-up and Movable Books, part of the University of Delaware Library's "world of the child" collection (via Plep).

Fancy limited edition of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver , list price $ 200.00. But as they say at the Literary Salon, while it's tempting, think of all the not-so-fancy books you could buy with that money!

Segue into SF links:

China Miéville's next novel, Iron Council, due out July 27, takes us, according to the editors, "back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon—this time, decades later." (Thanks to The Agony Column). Miéville is also one of the authors represented in the anthology Cities: The Very Best of Fantasy Comes to Town, out this past April.

The Academic Buffy Bibliography (via wood s lot).

Segue into dead languages:

"Yoda speaks like Anglo-Saxon" (courtesy of Mirabilis).

Blogging in Latin (via Household Opera).

(Clever how I did that, wasn't it?)

June 10, 2004

Oryx and Crake II

Finished reading Oryx and Crake last night (first mentioned (here).

Atwood took a risk, writing in the voice of Jimmy/Snowman, the PR hack/last man on earth whose story it is. She can juggle voices with ease, as she did in Alias Grace, but since she is juggling in that novel there is space for the poetry of Grace's imagination, in contrast to her conscious voice which offers a stricter kind of beauty in its limitation. In Oryx and Crake there is the one voice, though it changes as the character's name and situation change, and Snowman's narrative offers its own hallucinatory poetry. (Was just talking to a colleague about Atwood; he said that he found her refusal to allow the reader to sympathize with her characters, offputting. That is something I like about her, I replied: her lack of sentiment.)

Picky caveats to get out of the way: Atwood's neologisms ("wolvog" for a wolf/dog hybrid, for example, or "AnooYoo" as the name of a company that offers rejuvenation products) are frequently jarring, even awkward. Atwood may hate Madison Ave. with the rest of us, but surely she can't deny that they are good at what they do.

More importantly, the resolution of the plot relies too much on the actions of individuals. This was no doubt Atwood's intent: to create characters who are impelled to disrupt the mass consensus under which they live. Nevertheless, that is not how things work, no matter what the Biography channel would have us believe. This needn't stop even the most resolute historical materialist from enjoying the novel, however, and not just because of its indictment of global capitalism. As Lorrie Moore wrote in The New Yorker:

a dystopian novel is not intended as a literal forecast, or even necessarily as a logical extension of our current world. It is simply, and not so simply, a bad dream of our present time, an exquisitely designed horror show in which things are changed from what we do know to a dream version of what we don’t.

Atwood presents such a (pick one) i) bleak ii) clear-sighted vision of the near future in order to ask some basic questions about humanity's right to continued existence. In my sf classes we often discuss dystopian novels that posit a clear argument for just what is wrong with us, as a species. Octavia Butler in the Xenogenesis series argues that it is the combination of intelligence and hierarchy that lead to our self-destruction; Sheri Tepper, in The Gate to Woman's Country and elsewhere, seems to argue it is — to be blunt — testosterone. And so on. This novel could be added to the list, though I don't know that Atwood's explanation for humanity's implosion could be summed up quite so succinctly. Hierarchy and sexual possessiveness, however, are on the list, not to mention a heavy dose of Victor Frankenstein-style hubris, updated with the theme of genetic modification.

The character of Oryx is puzzling. Sold by her parents when young, she worked in the sex trade for most of her life. A beautiful, enigmatic stereotype, or a critique of Jimmy's voyeurism and desire to control her? I would argue the latter — after all, while Oryx seems naive, she makes her own choices and is not dissuaded from them — though Atwood straddles the line.

I think that I will have to read this again, but upon first glance it doesn't seem as strong as her best work (I would include Alias Grace here). It falls down as science fiction — it is more a parable with science-fictional trappings, for, as John Clute points out, Atwood's vision of technological and cultural trends is both static and retro. In a strange twist Oryx and Crake is speculative fiction that is possibly less appealing to the usual readers of the genre, than to a more general audience. But still very much worth reading.

List 'o links:

Atwood on how she is not writing science fiction.
John Clute agrees that no, she's really not writing science fiction, at least not as it's been written since 1970.
Linda Richards loves it and compares Atwood's writing to cilantro.
Joan Smith of The Observer concludes, "In the end, Oryx and Crake is a parable, an imaginative text for the anti-globalisation movement that does not quite work as a novel."
Gazillion other reviews
Slashdot discussion.
Video of Atwood reading from Oryx and Crake.
Interview with Atwood (May 2003).
The Atwood Society's Bibliography of Margaret Atwood.
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Update (11/6/04): Since I posted this I have been trying to articulate just what I found unconvincing about the novel, and I think it is the disjunction between the breadth of the wider action (decimation of entire human population) and the limited scope of the characters: the only characters that are at all individuated are the title characters, the narrator, the narrator's parents, and Crake's stepfather. So not only do individual actions have irreversible global consequences, but individual actions in isolation.

Unless the whole narrative is some solipsistic hallucination.

(?)

June 09, 2004

The Lammys

The Lambda Awards for 2003 have been announced, and the winner in the Science Fiction/Fantasy /Horror category is Helen Sandler (ed.) for Necrologue: The Diva Book of the Dead and the Undead (Diva).

Links:

An extract from one of the stories in the collection, "When the car slammed into me" by Charlotte Cooper.
A review, and another.
Interview with Helen Sandler (08 January 2003).
The Locus Index to SF Awards: The Lambda.
Lambda Sci-Fi Recommended Reading List.
Alternative Sexualities in Fantasy and SF Booklist.

June 08, 2004

SF/tech stuff

Pics of the "friends and family" premiere of the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle (via Boing Boing).

The Science Fiction Research Association's annual conference wound up yesterday. Here is the programme as a PDF document. I was most honoured to have been selected to win the 2004 Mary Kay Bray Award, and only wish that I could have been in Skokie to receive it.

In a few days: Black to the Future: A Black Science Fiction Festival in Seattle from June 11-13, 2004 (via The Mumpsimus, via Mark Sarvas).

Just ended: The Slayage Conference on BtVS (via ms.musings).

Apple Airport Express: US$129/"Coming Soon" in Canada (also via Boing Boing).

The Kitchen of the Future (from Netwoman).

MP3 interviews with Philip K Dick (still another from Boing Boing).

Matthew Cheney on the various "Best of" collections for the past year.

"Shibuya no Love": short fiction by Hannu Rajaniemi, at Futurismic.

Help save the Clarion science fiction writers' workshop (last one today I promise from Boing Boing).

The short list for the Sunburst Award, an annual prize for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic now in its fourth year, has been announced (via Locus):

Blind Lake, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
The Bone House, Luanne Armstrong (New Star Books)
Initiation, Virginia Frances Schwartz (Fitzhenry & Whiteside)
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood (McClelland and Stewart)
A Place So Foreign and 8 More, Cory Doctorow (Four Walls Eight Windows)

(Be sure to check out how the Sunburst logo was developed: follow design origins. Makes ya proud.)

May 27, 2004

Bodies and food

Three related links from Boing Boing:

1. Pamela Sargent's SciFi.com review of Kit Reed's latest sf novel, Thinner Than Thou, a "compassionate satire" of "eating disorders, obsessions with physical perfection, televangelists, religions in which salvation is based on material success in this world, and hypocrites of all kinds."

2. "The Way We Eat Now" by Craig Lambert (Harvard Magazine): "Ancient bodies collide with modern technology to produce a flabby, disease-ridden populace."

3. Day-jobs for Superheros.

May 25, 2004

Little rubber role models

Vernica Downey points towards the awe-inspiring Librarian Action Figure (see also Barista and her funky shades). Following the various links, I came upon the fabulous Monster Women: the buxom batwoman, pictured here, and five of her friends. If I had a wish list, these would be on it.

May 23, 2004

SF stuff

I have never understood the fixation of many Star Trek fans with William Shatner. Sure, then he was Captain Kirk. But now? And just when you think it must finally all be over, you hear this (from Slashdot).

Still on the theme of obsolescence: Alan Lattimore writes,

Steve Carper, a regular in the TangentOnline newsgroups, notices this is the first year none of the Nebula awards® went to print magazines.

Just went to see Shrek II with my significant others this afternoon. It was a lot of fun, more for us adults, though, than for the Jinker boy. I suppose three is a tad young, but I also thought that the movie was more geared to adults; the much-touted double layer of humour was there, but I thought the adult half of the equation was privileged. After all, we buy the tickets (and DVDs, and books, and etc.). Then again, I'm an adult — it says so on my driver's license — so the children's humour was over my head, perhaps. But see it; Antonio Banderas (pictured. Well, you know what I mean) and Jennifer Saunders are particularly good.

May 19, 2004

SF stuff

Neal Stephenson has won the Arthur C. Clarke award for Quicksilver (Guardian piece here, including the shortlist and various links. Via Maud and Beatrice).

Quicksilver is part of Stephenson's Baroque cycle; the second installment, The Confusion, recently came out in hardcover, and the third, The System of the World, is due in September, at which time Quicksilver is expected in paperback (according to my local bookshop). I haven't read it yet; apart from the obvious economic benefits of waiting for the softcover edition, I am reluctant to start a series that I will have to wait so long to finish. On the other hand, everybody's reading it, and it might be just the ticket for the trip to the UK I'm taking in July...

Matthew Cheney has a good post about "the entertainment value of destroying a city." No, just because I plan to watch Die Hardest (at least, on video), doesn't mean I really want things to blow up. Well, not so many things.

John Joseph Adams, slush reader for Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, has just started a blog called THE SLUSH GOD Speaketh... (via Wierdwriter).

"Harry Potter and Left Behind are more alike than you might think" ( Slate, via Beatrice, which has some other interesting links).

May 16, 2004

Reading Miéville and Gibson

Finished China Miéville's The Scar some days ago. He is marvellous at world-construction; in a sense, the plot does not even matter, which is ironic given that his plots are very much his focus. No happy ending, but not tragic either, unlike Perdido Street Station (okay, okay, the problem was resolved but the fate of one of the characters was practically unbearable). Miéville's younger than I am, so I look forward to many years of reading his rich and convoluted novels and watching his writing mature. He's wonderful now, so what could lie ahead?

Before I had even finished The Scar I began William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, out not so long ago in paperback. A compulsive read. The protagonist, Cayce, is a "cool detector"; she is preternaturally attuned to logos, brands, and fashion, and works as a freelancer by evaluating marketing strategies for new products. The novel does a marvellous job eviscerating the mechanisms by which advertisers win hearts and minds. I enjoyed reading it, and I appreciate Gibson's particular talents. I recommend it. But all that being said, I am left — as I usually am with Gibson — with some nagging complaints.

Some years back a friend of mine said dismissively that he could easily tell which parts of The Difference Engine were written by Gibson, and which by Bruce Sterling, as Gibson was a far superior writer. Gibson is generally celebrated for his writing, but I have always felt that he frequently slides into overwriting, and this novel is no exception. Further, there is a certain clubbishness that is part of Gibson's popular appeal; his novels and stories give the impression of being closed texts that the reader cannot interpret without bringing some knowledge of [fill in cool subject here: the web; Prada; Tokyo department stores; post-Soviet Moscow, whatever]. Whether or not they are indeed closed is immaterial — though someone of my parents' generation would find them unreadable — but the impression they create, in readers, that they themselves are in the know about [fill in cool subject here], is gold for Gibson.

Another disconcerting element of this novel — this novel that I enjoyed immensely — is that it partakes of, hell it luxuriates in, what it criticizes: our heroine literally has phobic reactions to logos (Tommy Hilfiger is mentioned specifically as a simulacrum of a simulacrum of a simulacrum — heh heh, I own no Tommy our reader thinks, in self-congratulation), but throughout the entire narrative she lives the high life herself, at the expense of a creepy corporate Ubermensch so that she herself remains relatively untainted, and is as obsessed with material goods as the Donatella Versace-clone evil bitch she is up against. She removes all logos from her clothes with a little pair of nail scissors, but she does this with startling frequency. She shops, in other words, and her rarified criteria for acceptable material goods do not undercut consumer culture; rather, they set an even higher bar. Any nouveau riche cretin can buy Armani, but only someone with a honed aesthetic sense can transcend branding and aspire to the transhistorical chic of Cayce. Which, of course, is not transhistorical at all.

My final complaint about this novel — this novel that I enjoyed immensely, I reiterate — is the degeneration of the Ubercool heroine into a beleaguered damsel with the requisite probably–happy ending. And I don't think this reaction is just because I read it immediately after The Scar. It has "movie" written all over it. But, no part for Keanu Reeves.

May 13, 2004

This won't be coming to Saint John

but it's worth a mention: Robot Stories, an independent science fiction film, described by Entertainment Insiders as "the kind of science fiction sophisticated audiences crave and deserve." Hey, that would be me! (Thanks to Lisa Marie Coppoletta at Blog Sisters for the info.).

May 12, 2004

Can you stack 'em?

Pericat points towards — but only to mock! — a new design idea from Berlin called the Loftcube. But I kinda like 'em. Coming soon to a story near you.

Literary notes

Many of the texts up for Hugo award this years are available on-line (via Boing Boing).

Comic book artist Dame Darcy is working on a "darkly elegant" graphic version of Jane Eyre (from Maud).

Edward Champion posts a series of epistolary links.

Book of the best novellas of 2004 due out in June (via Notes from Coode Street).

Everyone is talking about Michel Thaler's The Train from Nowhere, a novel written entirely without verbs. That is not a typo.

The Laughter Lover, the oldest surviving joke book in the world, was compiled in the fourth or fifth century CE (from Beautiful Stuff).

May 10, 2004

James Tiptree, Jr.

Tild Dallelie has an informative post about Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.) at Blog Sisters (cross-posted to her own blog).

May 08, 2004

The Scar by China Miéville

I have begun to luxuriate in The Scar, a treat I have been promising myself for some months (nine months, to be exact!). I try to avoid reviews if I know that I am going to read a book, but some always slip by. Rick Kleffel writes that

[Miéville]'s able to hand the reader just the right pieces of the puzzle, to ensure that the picture that's built up is bigger than the reader can quite contain, and bigger than the novel itself.

This is true for me. (And it's an accessible way of putting a larger point; so often my students are frustrated and turn off when they feel overwhelmed by a text. I think that I will try to address this head-on, next class.)

One reviewer called it a baroque and picaresque odyssey, and that seems apt. The aquatic city, Armada, is an exhilarating creation, combining elements of rum, sodomy and the lash and the library in Eco's Name of the Rose with various futuristic flourishes; I have included the cover from the UK edition here, because it is a more realistic evocation of the setting.

The heroine is a tough, competent babe. (All heroines written by men seem to be some version of this genus; do male writers ever write girly-girls? As protagonists, I mean. Can't think of many.)

Then there is the interesting question of which genre(s) Miéville writes.

Not too far in so will write more later.

SciFi Audio has clips from a reading, an interview, and good links.

The Complete Review gives it a B+.

BookSense interview.

Galactium.com reviews.

Official Pan Macmillan page.

Put down the pen!

Matthew Cheney links to a comprehensive list of sf cliches, similar, on a grander scale, to the list I came across the other day from Strange Horizons (sorry; forgotten where I found the link). Cheney comments that serious stories based on these various cliches would make an interesting anthology. Adam Roberts is already on it: he plans "to write a short story for every sub-genre and premise that SF has made famous; to assemble a collection in which [he] can try [his] hand at all the hackneyed old conventions." His list is much shorter, however, so I guess he won't be covering all the hackneyed old conventions. Always room for more.

May 07, 2004

SF links

2004 Aurora Award Nomination Form (link from Boing Boing. With helpful list of Cory Doctorow's eligible works.)

Get your fetish on at Women wearing spacesuits (from Futurismic).

Singularity.net plugs Adam Roberts' The Snow and offers and excerpt (Not yet out. See my posts on Roberts' Stone and Salt).

Toby Green's top 10 utopias and dystopias. What? No Charnas? (from Stephany Aulenback).

From the creative geniuses who brought us The Excorcist, here is The Shining. In 30 seconds. Re-enacted by bunnies. (Thanks, Ratboy).

UK Trekker/interior decorator auctioning off ST flat on EBay for a starting price of $1,000,000 (Boing Boing).

April 30, 2004

SF links

New documentary, Earthlings Ugly Bags of Mostly Water [or diet Cola, in my case], about Klingon language and culture stars Michael Dorn. Via Slashdot.

Salon begins biweekly reviews of new science fiction and fantasy books. From Isabella, who says "Quick, get me a copy of this book," of Bruce Sterling's The Zenith Angle.

April 28, 2004

Jules Verne exhibit

Exhibition of the work of Jules Verne — "the most translated author in the world, surpassing even Shakespeare" — in Geneva, a year ahead of the centuary (Via The Elegant Variation).

SF mash ups

A photoshopping contest: mash up two or more sf television shows or movies. Some of these are pretty funny. Via Boing Boing.

April 25, 2004

Bad news for Orson Scott Card

In a post to FeministSF, Petra Mayerhofer links to an article about successful parthenogenesis in mice. She includes a list of sf novels which treat parthenogenesis:

The Y Chromosome by Leona Gom
Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
The Demeter Flower by Rochelle Singer
A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Mizora by Mary E. Lane
The Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearhart
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Wingwomen of Hera by Sandi Hall

I would add Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast series: Walk to the End of the World (1974), Motherlines (1978), The Furies (1994), and The Conqueror's Child (1999).

And note to Charnas: the Japanese researchers did it without the use of horses.

Update (6:16pm): Lee Anne Phillips adds the following, via FeministSF (sorry, I'm not going to add links!):

Katherine V. Forrest, Daughters of a Coral Dawn & Daughters of an Amber Noon
Jane Fletcher, The World Celaeno Chose
Jean Stewart's Isis Series
Donna J. Young, Retreat: As It Was!
Merrill Mushroom, Daughters of Khaton
James Tiptree (Alice Sheldon), "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"

Update (7:38pm): Pat Mathews adds the following, via FeministSF (sorry, I'm not going to add links!):

Rainbow Cadenza, by L. Neil Schulman

Politics and art and sf

Against his better judgement, Kip Manley weighs in on the politics and art debate with a post subtitled "Why I Don't Trust Aesthetes." He includes a link to a horrifying story about an interview Donna Minkowitz did with Orson Scott Card, and makes some excellent points about choosing whether or not to read sf, specifically, on political grounds:

... science fiction is largely a fiction of setting: the bulk of the iceberg that’s unseen, underwater, is the act of world-building, and in that act, politics is paramount. (One is building a polis, after all.) (Oh, hey, look! World-building again!) —Therefore, it’s all-too-appropriate to keep in mind an author’s politics when considering their science fiction: an author who, say, considers homosexuality to be an aberration, is un- (or perhaps less) likely to build a world that would appeal to a reader who does not. There’s an assumption clash: one of his fundamental, foundational bedrocks is abhorrent to me, and vice-versa.

... I’ll allow as how there’s frequently large gaps in the jerry-rigged polis left as exercises for the reader: one can hardly describe every kitchen sink, after all; one must make assumptions, and count on the reader doing likewise (which among other reasons is why fan fiction [and slash fiction] is so popular in science fiction). But that’s precisely why when those assumptions suddenly clash, it’s unsettling, even violently dissonant ...

(And he goes on to quote one of my favourite writers. Read the whole post.)

Of course some sf writers reproduce the here and now in the if and when, while some mainstream writers create a strange new world in the suburbs. But Kip is correct; the particular characteristics of sf add a twist to the whole question. If I list the writers whose heads I don't mind living in for extended periods, they are often fellow travellers of one stripe or another, because in sf they are the ones asking some of the "what ifs?" that I interest me as well, even if, as is often the case, I didn't realize it before picking up the book.

Let's go back to Matthew Cheney's post of ten days ago, in which he argues not only that there are aspects of sf which make the politics of the author particularly significant, but that sf, broadly defined, is the main locus of political imaginings in literature:

It seems to me that books such as The Grapes of Wrath are anomalies in the history of fiction, and that the majority of political art — political art that lasts more than a few weeks, that is — has utilized imagination and fantasy to explore truths which lie beneath the surface of the morning paper's headlines.

Which opens the door to a discussion of definition of the genre. Another discussion; not this one.

April 21, 2004

SF news

From More Notes from Coode Street: it was recently announced that David Pringle is leaving Interzone after 22 years, and now we hear that Gardner Dozois is stepping down as editor of Asimov's after 19 years in order to pursue his own writing. I, for one, though I'm sure I'm not alone, selfishly hope he keeps editing the Year's Best anthologies. Read Matthew Cheney's consideration of Dozois' tenure.

April 19, 2004

Jules Verne

stamps from 1955 to 2004. Check them out; they're beautiful. The early ones are so atomic.

From Plep.

April 18, 2004

Supernatural Fiction

Tartarus Press is putting together a Supernatural Fiction Database.

From Weirdwriter via Gambols and Frolics.

Nebulas

Locus Online has a list of the Nebula Awards winners for 2003. The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon won best novel, and Neil Gaiman's lovely Coraline won for best novella.

Cory Doctorow, who was nominated for Best Novelette but didn't win (Jeffrey Ford did) offers his acceptance speech "for alternate historians."

April 14, 2004

Today's sf links

1. Oodles of definitions of sf, via The Mumpsimus, one of several interesting links on offer. I like Darko Suvin's definition:

[...] SF is ... a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.

2. The Male Malaise. Speculation about the long-term untenability of the Y chromosome (125,000 years long-term). Ends with references to various female utopias and some good links. Via ms. musings.

3. And finally, extending the Easter festivities just a few more days, we have a 30 second version of The Exorcist re-enacted by bunnies. Via Alas, a Blog. Which seems to be indulging in a lot of levity of late.

Addendum (7:51): 4. Wonderful zombie parody at Yankee Pot Roast.

April 13, 2004

Off my list

Well now I don't have to feel guilty for never reading Ender's Game: Orson Scott Card authors homophobic diatribe between novels. Via Alas, a Blog.

Update (15/4/04): Bookslut gets misty-eyed about Orson Scott Card. She writes, "His politics and his books are separate." I don't see how they could be, and in the one book of his I have read, they weren't (see comments). But I love Bookslut and will certainly not stop reading her, despite a slight lack of rigour in this single instance.

Alternate histories

Except for steampunk, which I quite like, I don't read alternate histories on purpose. By that, I mean that I stumble into them sometimes in collections or magazines, but I don't knowingly buy them. I'm not sure why; I have the — no doubt false — impression that they are all written by aficionados of various wars, notably the American Civil War and WWII, and are read by people who also have shelves of Times-Life collections of books on those same wars. So I read with interest a post at Pedantry, suggestively titled "Alternate Universe SF as a form of Intellectual Masturbation," which points towards an article by Tristram Hunt in the Guardian which claims, in essence, that alternate histories push a right-wing agenda. At this point, I congratulated myself for having avoided them so assiduously. But the Pedantry post goes on to skewer Hunt and to maintain that alternate history can in fact present "the possibility of a different world," which, according to the writer, is what sf should be about. At issue here are various theories of history: the remarkably resilient "great man" theory, the Whiggish notion of progress, and different flavours of historical materialism. It makes a certain kind of sense that if one subscribes to any of the latter, changing this or that in the timeline would not, in the final analysis, mean a whole lot. The writer of the post does not argue with this, but does write,

That's the thing about future-oriented SF and alternate universe SF: Both explicitly require some kind of theory of history. Professor Hunt is simply wrong to see an inherently conservative agenda in alternate universe fiction. Whether set in the future or in some parallel timeline, we need to speculate about the prospect of a different world, and SF has been and can continue to be instrumental to this. There is nothing about AUSF that is inherently reactionary.

So rather than giving me a reason to go and read alternate history, the writer has usefully articulated the problem with a lot of sf more broadly.

And you have to love a post which includes the sentence, "Marxism is like UNIX. Those who don't understand it are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

As to why I like steampunk, I'm not sure. I am extremely critical of popular historical novels in a way that I am not of other popular writing, and have developed a real aversion to the Anne Perry version of the nineteenth century. It is extremely cheeky to use times past as a mere backdrop. Steampunk, on the other hand, takes a position analogous to that of an historian; it presents speculation: an argument rather than a representation. To an extent it is fantasy; it is not for a moment suggesting that if only such-and-such had happened, then look how different things would have been. It is a meditation on the past, firmly and respectfully rooted in the present, in full knowledge, even in celebration of, the blinkers we of necessity must wear when looking back.

Update (15/4/04): Alan Lattimore takes the "intellecual" out of the equation in his nicely scathing post on alternate histories.

Nebulas

On-line chat at Asimov's:

Meet Our Nebula Nominees
April 13 @9 PM EST [10 PM AST]
James Van Pelt, Eleanor Arnason, John Kessel, Kage Baker, Molly Gloss and Ian R. McLeod will be on hand for this chat about their nominations

(From Maud via Kitabkhana).

The Seattle Times has a preview of the Nebulas, which is to start Thursday. Events open to the public. (Via MoorishGirl).

April 11, 2004

Proofers wanted

Boing Boing links to Distributed Proofreaders, who organize proof-reading of public domain books for Project Gutenberg. On April 6th Distributed Proofreaders posted it's 4,000th ebook, Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras by Jules Verne (en française).

April 10, 2004

Hugos

The Hugo nominees for 2003 have been posted. Via Boing Boing.

Addendum (12/4/04): Matthew Cheney's take on the Hugos: "most of the ... categories seem to be incredibly dull representations of a year that was not in fact dull." Read more.

April 07, 2004

Gabriela Mistral

(1889-1957)

This via the always-interesting wood s lot: Ursula LeGuin translated a selection of the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, the only Latin American woman to have won the Nobel Prize for literature (in 1945). Mark Woods posts the following poem, one of several of which LeGuin includes both versions on her site, and I have reproduced it here because, well, it's been my reality too, for the last three years:

Song of Death

Old Woman Census-taker,
Death the Trickster,
when you’re going along,
don’t you meet my baby.

Sniffing at newborns,
smelling for the milk,
find salt, find cornmeal,
don’t find my milk.

Anti-Mother of the world,
People-Collector --
on the beaches and byways,
don’t meet that child.

The name he was baptized,
that flower he grows with,
forget it, Rememberer.
Lose it, Death.

Let wind and salt and sand
drive you crazy, mix you up
so you can’t tell
East from West,

or mother from child,
like fish in the sea.
And on the day, at the hour,
find only me.

from Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, Trans. Ursula LeGuin (2003)

April 01, 2004

April Fools

MoorishGirl links to a story at Locus Online about a new, mandatory National Book Club, linked to the Patriot Act (Nothing like Canada Reads!). Click on the other stories, which are even better: "Hugo Awards Renamed" to shut out Connie Willis, and "Heinlein, Dick, Bradbury and Others To Become Imaginary", which begins,

The Science Fiction Writers of America's Nomenclature Committee has issued its long-awaited final report on the status of obsolete science fiction — stories overtaken by current events. Many in and outside of SFWA have come to question whether texts originally written in the '40s, '50s and '60s but set in the '80s, '90s and '00s ought still to be considered SF. ... The Committee is recommending that a new genre be created for all science fiction formerly set in the future, to be called Imaginary Fiction, or IF. If this recommendation is approved, all science fiction set prior to 2005 will re-genred as IF.

Re-genred. Yeah, I like that.

March 31, 2004

Tiptree Award, 2003

The winner of the James Tiptree, Jr., Award — "an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender" — for 2003 is Matt Ruff for Set This House In Order: A Romance Of Souls.

News from the FEMINISTSF listserv.

March 27, 2004

Wonder women

Posted by George H. Williams: "From Catherine Rodriguez, who organized the SHARP panels at this year's ASECS, I learned that eighteenth-century authors Fanny Burney and Hannah More made appearances in Wonder Woman comics as 'wonder women of history.'"

I would LOVE to see those issues.

Cross-posted to writingwomen.

March 23, 2004

Back to normal

Zombies Push Jesus from Top of North American Box Office.

(Link from I Know What I Know.)

Famed throughout the Alpha Quadrent

The alert (or extremely bored) among my readers may have noted the new blurb from Qov added to the kudos for this site (only some of which are taken out of context) at the bottom of the sidebar. Qov has a Klingon-language blog called bo logh, and she commented on my daring posting of my Klingon haiku. I'm so glad she did; not only did she translate the poems into Klingon, but she translated them back into English (check out the comments to my original post). She then contacted me to tell me that she was writing an entry on the poems for her own blog, which she posted earlier today. (It is very disconcerting to see phrases such as "bo logh Ho'mo' Miriam Jones, «chongqu'!» maq 'ej loS bommeyDaj ngo' 'agh.") She thoughtfully sent me an English translation of her post, which I include below the fold.

This whole exchange has been fascinating. And in at least one case — I much prefer "writhing" to "rustling" in the first poem — the exercise has improved on the originals. I had always admired the dedication of those who learnt Klingon, but I now have a new level of appreciation of it as a language — albeit a synthetic one — with its own structures. (Here is a previous entry from Languagehat on the subject. In English.)

From Qov's email of 17 March, 2004:

Because Miriam Jones admires bo logh, she proclaims it "so cool" and displays her four old poems. While considering Klingon ideas, she uses English to compose the poems. If you count the sound groups in the song lines, there are five sound groups in the first line, seven sound groups in the second line and five sound groups again in the third line. If that system is followed, it's called Haiku. Customarily Haiku considers animals, vegetation or the forest world. This system was devised in Japan.

Miriam Jones seems slightly ashamed of her poems but I'm glad she dared to reveal them.

(targhs mating, in English)

As a Klingon would apparently like Miriam Jones poems, and as the task is easy, I translated them.

(targhs mating, in Klingon)

For Haiku, a whole world has to take form because of a few words. The next poem definitely succeeds. It made me laugh, too.

(mosquito netting, In English)

I hope my translation succeeds, too.

(mosquito netting, In Klingon)

Usually if someone admires Klingon, they are a scientist or a programmer. But as I started to read Miriam Jones journal I realized that she is an English teacher. She reads eighteenth century manuscripts. She didn't seem to be a technician. Perhaps she likes bo logh purely because she understands the task of learning a language? It's a rare situation. But suddenly I saw it. She reads Heinlein. She enjoys science stories and uses them for her lessons. She has a poet's spirit and a scientist's mind, too.

Addendum to this last: I was perusing Qov's site — though it's all Klingon to me — when I noticed the word "Mormon" sticking out like a smooth forehead. Followed the links, and sure enough, there are various people out there translating the Book of Mormon into Klingon. Not sure what Qov had to say about that, but file it under, "unexpected sub-groups in fandom."

Addendum (1:59pm): Found the Book of Mormon, the Tao Te Ching, and the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe, all in Klingon.

March 18, 2004

Literary links

Maud Newton links to John Leary's very funny "The Seven Basic Plots."

More on education in Georgia (see previous entry): an attempt to ban Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Good gravy, these three would be so far down my list... Link from MoorishGirl.

Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber links to "the homepage of the imaginary horror writer Garth Marenghi." Many gems like, "In total, he has written countless blood-curdling novels." Here is a quote from one of them, Slicer:

In a hazy cloud of blood-dumb pain, McGregor felt the blade work its way forwards, through the knot of his adam's apple and on towards the base of the chin. Then, slowly, it began to turn skywards. Och, no, he thought before the end, not ma brain... not ma brain... anything but ma brain...please don't slice ma brain... no, no... not the brain...och, no...

[The spousal unit is reading over my shoulder. "Good writing," is his comment. Of course, he is a sociologist.]

So, be sure to check out Garth Marenghi, a "writer at the peak of his own particular capabilities."

March 16, 2004

Why didn't we think of that?

This from the redoubtable Maud Newton:

Yesterday [former academic] Paul Cavanagh won the U.K.'s Lit Idol contest — a sort of American Idol for writers — and will be represented by the Curtis Brown literary agency in negotiations for a publishing contract. The first chapter of his manuscript is available online.

Newton also links to a.k.a., a site listing "over 11,500 author pseudonyms, aliases, nicknames, working names, legal names, pen names, maiden names, and more." SF writers are well-represented on the list of writers with ten or more pseudonyms.

March 15, 2004

The Red Planet; publishing as quest; Heinlein

Via Maud Newton: Kim Stanley Robinson discusses the appeal of Mars, in the NYTimes,

and Viggo Mortensen publishes avant-garde books at Perceval Press. The name, according to Mortensen, is a reference to

Parsifal, the knight of the Arthurian legend who found the Castle of the Grail and saved the Fisher King.

On his way to achieve knighthood at King Arthur's Court, he and his knights choose to find their own paths. "If there was a trail," says Mortensen, "they wouldn't take it. They had to make their own ways. I wanted to provide that opportunity for artists."

Robert Heinlein's first novel, For Us, The Living, "lost and found," is now published "with terrible cover art," according to Jessa Crispin at Bookslut.

March 14, 2004

LotR forever

This just in from Kieran Healy: there is to be a LotR musical. Write to Crooked Timber with your suggestions for songs. My offering: Frodo to Gollum: "I don't know how to club him."

SF in the OED

Continuing in the tradition so lovingly described by Simon Winchester in The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything, the OED has called for volunteers to help amass citations for sf terms. Here is the website for the project, and here is an interesting graph indicating the dates of the origins of sf terms: notice the bump in critical terminology in the 1980s and 90s. Fandom came into its own in the 1950s and has stayed influential.

Jesse Sheidlower in the OED Newsletter writes that sf is an excellent candidate for this sort of web-based initiantive because,

The vocabulary is largely self-contained; SF terms tend to occur in SF and nowhere else, while, say, political language can be found anywhere and everywhere. The fans are particularly committed, often have linguistic interests, and are computer literate.

I would be interested to see if, and how often, sf terms have migrated into general use. I'm thinking of the influence of sf on technology, and would imagine a parallel dynamic in words themselves? For example, "morph," which Mark Lieberman notes has been traced to Mark Bourne's story "Being Human" (1993), is in wider use now.

Story from Language Log via Languagehat.

March 13, 2004

File under "this is so cool!"

A recent post at languagehat points to two blogs in Klingon, bo logh and jIqel's Journal.

Perhaps I should post some of the Klingon haiku I wrote (in English, I'm afraid) back in my slasher days. Perhaps after I get tenure. Or lose my job, whichever comes first. Of course, coming out as the worst sort of geek could speed that latter process.

Oh, what the hell!

The targs are mating,
I hear them rustling nearby
in the autumn leaves.

The suns burn my back
as I bury my enemy;
He shouldn't have laughed.

The springtime landscape
reminds me of your body:
I want to plow it.

Under mosquito netting
we lay, exhausted. My love,
don't eat the insects.

March 12, 2004

Hi, Hir, Hirs, Hirself

An interesting conversation begun at long story; short pier and picked up at languagehat and Tenser, said the Tensor about non-gender-specific pronouns (or the need for them. Or not) in English. Various references to the pioneering work of sf writers in addressing the issue, such as Iain M. Banks, Ursula LeGuin, and Samuel Delany. Like many of the commentators, I have become quite comfortable with "they," as in, "Everyone should bring their texts to class" rather than "his or her books," but while this usage is more and more accepted, it is not yet universal, despite its extensive pedigree back to the fourteenth century. One of the commentators at languagehat points to a fascinating site called Jane Austen and other famous authors violate what everyone learned in their English class which has a useful section on the singular "they"/"their"/"them"/"themselves" construction. And who dare argue with Shakespeare

There's not a man I meet but doth salute me,
As if I were their well-acquainted friend.
(Comedy of Errors IV.3)

or the King James Bible?¹

Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. (Philippians 2:3)

¹ Almost half finished Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Very readable, though subtlety is sometimes sacrificed for the sake of the narrative. A little before my period, though, so I am not the best judge.

13/3/04: typo corrected. Sorry, languagehat.

March 09, 2004

There can only be one. No, wait...

Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?

Born in 1963 [um, yeah, '63, that's right, '63], you are possibly the original colossal death robot, being one of the patriarchs of the current crop, and definitely an advocate of old-skool enemy-bashing. Why use a clumsy particle weapon when you can create supernovas just by flexing your arms? Your one minor weakness is that you are entirely dominated by some kid with a remote contol — still, don't let it get you down. You can sink a nuclear submarine with jazz music.

Thanks to weez for the link. Weez, who also claims to be Gigantor. We will have to settle this. In Tokyo, at dawn.

Adam Roberts' Salt

5/3/04/9:41pm

Awhile ago I posted about Adam Roberts' novel Stone. I have finally gotten around to reading another, Salt (2000), his first novel.

These would be wonderful texts to teach: subtle, yet with clear meaning that can be unpacked. The protagonist in Stone is a sociopath in a future where crime and mental illness are rare enough to be practically non-existent. In Salt, Roberts examines war. Several groups of colonists travel to a desert planet, one of which, the Alsists, is anarchic and another of which, the Senaarians, is a capitalist military patriarchy. These two groups are in conflict before they even reach their destination, and the aggression escalates in a way reminiscent of nothing so much as Swift's Big-endians and Little-endians, though there is no Gulliver to separate their warring fleets. The narrative is almost evenly split between two characters, Petja, a technician from among the anarchists who rotates into diplomatic duty at a crucial juncture, and Barlei, the Captain and later President of the Senaarians. Even when describing things as apparently uncontroversial as the differing technologies with which each group deals with the chlorine in the atmosphere, neither side can be civil:

[Barlei:] We would take a person, and sedate them, and under surgical conditions we would remove much of their sinuses and fill the space with a carefully grown filter .... [masks] were symbolic of our incapacity; they squashed against our faces ... Of course, the Alsists mocked our new technology .... Their propaganda satirized us: whenever the visuals were set in Senaar the people always had runny noses ... (41–42)

[Petja:] Our solution to the chlorine problem was a mini-mask. (43)

Initially, Petja seems infinitely more reasonable while Barlei is insufferable: a self-justifying, murderous prig. He unwittingly betrays himself and his beloved Senaar with every word, as when he disingenuously pretends not to understand economics while justifying Senaarian reliance on underpaid immigrant labour. He exemplifies, with his barely suppressed passion for his lieutenant, "the young, the beautiful, jean-Pierre" (221), the homoeroticism implicit in all–male institutions. Don't ask, don't tell even yourself. His description of aerial warfare is classic:

And so you press home the inevitability of the situation: that is one definition of war I suppose. You pull up toward the rear of one of the enemy, the acceleration weighing you against the back of your pilot's seat; and you fell the beautiful click as the weapons fix themselves, and the spiritual roar of them firing. Twin spires of light reaching through the darkness towards the blot of darkness, hidden in darkness, that is the enemy. Perhaps you close your eyes in prayer.

And there is light. And a tumbling of wreckage, falling to the endless levels of Salt below. (198)

The delicate balance between the elevated discourse of hysterical militarism, and sexual double-entendre, is masterful.

Barai would seem to be a straw man, but while he never becomes any more sympathetic (although he does become pathetic when jean-Pierre is killed in combat), Petja also looses the reader's sympathy, even before he discovers his enthusiasm for killing in the Alsist resistance. At one significant juncture he demonstrates an utter inability to empathize with others, and while this could be mistaken for a critique of solipsism in anarchists, his own people frequently disdain him for his "rigidist" tendencies. Anarchism, then, is not at fault, though it is, finally, unable to withstand the concerted onslaught of military capitalism. Petja is, however, more interesting, if less amusing than his counterpart: his language is concise yet poetic, and his descriptions of the stark salt landscape are sublime in an inhuman, disassociated way.

From the minimalist map at the front of the book, surely a comment on the rococo excesses of Tolkien and his imitators, to the actual numbers of combatants, scale is foregrounded. These are small communities, with small populations, and yet they waste themselves in war. It is a compact book, economically divided between the two narrators. It is about a bare desert world with only two significant bodies of water. Form follows function.

Both Petja and Barei discuss "purity," though for Petja it is, at least initially, a stern, political standard of self-sufficient behaviour, while for Barjei it is tied to jingoism, nationalism, and a military ideal as exemplified by the manly, blushing jean-Pierre. Petja, too, comes to regard his time fighting and killing as somehow pure, only to be "diminished" and "greyed" by social contact (218). Both sides also come to similar conclusions about war, despite their disparate ways of framing it: Barai says,

This war has been the savour in our meat. Without it, life would have been the dull round of planting and reaping, of giving in marriage and giving birth, of growing and dying." (220)

[Petja:] Textualising these memories has had one curious effect. I have recalled the time before we made war. It has made me realise how war becomes a simple way of living, how it seems to provide all that a human needs as material and spiritual membrane, wrapped tightly around them, It is the reason to go on living; it is what to do, how to do it; it is how to arrange the priorities; it is the end of the day and the beginning of wisdom; it is the left hand and the right hand.

So for one character, war is a way to be with other men, while to the other is becomes the centrepiece of an arid philosophy. Not that they would seem to disagree. Roberts gives the last words, significantly, to a female character. And then, he undercuts even that.

This might be an effective novel for my gender and sf course: there are two societies with two very different sets of roles and expectations for women; there is the whole jean-Pierre hagiography (I see him in a static shot by Leni Riefenstahl, with the camera below him looking up, the light behind him); there is sexual violence ... for a novel with few women characters, it would be remarkably useful in the course.

Roberts on Roberts:

It seems to me, then, that Salt is a novel about depression, about a psychological state that finds its correlative in the bleak landscape of the world, about a killing division of affective commitment. But I could be wrong about that.

I think I'm on safer ground when I mention the political and ideological issues that the book rehearses; questions of political affiliation, of the negotiations between cultural and personal difference, of the relationship to (patriarchal) authority and of the limits of control. That the book is also a self-conscious exercise in intertextuality is, I hope, equally clear: it draws on Herbert's Dune and on Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed as well as Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister and the poetry of Robert Browning. I hope, in saying this, that I am only saying what is obvious from the novel itself. It remains the bleakest of my books, but I continue to find an austere and strangely uplifting beauty in certain aspects of bleakness, so I say this with no suggestion of apology.

No apology needed. A compelling book, and recognized as such by its nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke award.

February 27, 2004

Some sf links

Maybe you should all just go on over to Maud Newton. Here are some more gonzo links:

1. "Paoli du Flippi's" hilarious take on writers who write "speculative fiction" and disdain sf, featuring our national treasure, Margaret Atwood.

2. Jeff Osbourne's "Excerpts from NPR Fan Fiction."¹ Maud also notes an interesting article about slash in that post.

3. A site devoted to scientific inventions introduced in sf texts.

¹ NPR=National Public Radio, the U.S. rough equivalent to CBC radio.

February 25, 2004

Women's SF

Stumbled across this list on an old post at More Like This WebLog: Gwyneth Jones's list of top ten women's sf (go to the link for her explanations)—

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm
Up the Walls of the World, James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)
The Female Man, Joanna Russ
Cyteen, CJ Cherryh
Grass, Sheri Tepper
Synners, Pat Cadigan
Sarah Canary, Karen Joy Fowler
Light Music, Kathleen Ann Goonan
Natural History, Justina Robson

Let's just say, I haven't read all ten. This summer. (repeat as necessay)

More writes, "I'd gone with Gibbon's Decline and Fall instead of Grass for the Tepper, because of the comedy." Myself, I'd stick with Grass. And I'd put on some Rebecca Ore, maybe Slow Funeral (not sf, really, I know, unless "s" means "speculative.")

February 23, 2004

Running over a fly with a tank

Update on the Asimov's pornogate debacle, via Bookslut: Asimov's responds.

February 21, 2004

Stephenson

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber links to an excellent post by Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted about Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver which concludes, "Quicksilver, like Foucault, travels farther and tries harder to give us a way of representing the early modern European world that doesn’t just make into a toddler version of our own times." (Students of English 3204: apparently Newton is a character. Early modern geeks.) It's been out for awhile I know, but it's beyond a door-stopper, it's a breadbox of a book, and I'm in good company, it would seem, for not having finished it yet. That's what summers are for, correct? Though I have better get a move on as the next book in the cycle has already been published, and the third volume, modestly titled The System of the World, is due out in Sept.¹

Stephenson is a writer to follow. His earlier novels — Zodiac, Snow Crash, which brought him widespread attention, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (and if I hadn't already been a fan, that subtitle would have won me over) — were inventive, funny, and clear-sighted, and with Cryptonomicon he broadened his ambition and began producing REALLY IMPORTANT works.

He has a couple of other texts out there I haven't read: The Big U,² an early novel about American college life, and In the Beginning...Was the Command Line, a non-fiction text about personal computing (before he switched to the side of the angels³), intended for Wired but not published there. He has also published, as Stephen Bury, The Cobweb and Interface, both recommended (by me at least; there seems to be no mention of them on Stephenson's site).

He has a very groovy-looking site, and a wiki called Metaweb, built around Quicksilver but intended to expand and become a way of organizing information.

And here is a brief interview in Wired that contextualizes his last several novels.

¹ Filed under "Verbosity" on Stephenson's site: "As must be obvious, I am not an adherent of the Cult of Brevity. Personally, I am delighted to read extremely long books, or series of books, as long as they hold my interest. To me it seems self-evident that the Cult of Brevity is grievously mistaken, and am not inclined to dispute it here."

² Filed under "Juvenilia" on Stephenson's site: "The Big U is, in many respects, a juvenile work, and should be understood as such. Zodiac: the eco-thriller is somewhat more mature but still quite obviously the work of a young man with a lot of spare time on his hands. I don't cringe so much at Snow Crash and most of my later work."

³ The same: "In the Beginning was the Command Line is now badly obsolete and probably needs a thorough revision. For the last couple of years I have been a Mac OS X user almost exclusively."

Update (24/2/04—12:06): Here, via thinking with my fingers, is a link to the complete text of Stephenson's In the Beginning...Was the Command Line, on HarperCollin's Cryptonomicon site.

February 19, 2004

The Red Planet; the Apple IIc

Two meditations on Mars at the wonderfully redesigned long story; short pier.

William Gibson owes it all to Apple (link from Maud Newton).

February 17, 2004

Introducing...

Three former students who blogged for my sf class last term have not only kept up their blogs, but recently refurbished them. If you would like to see what three of UNBSJ's best and brightest are up to, check out (in alphabetical order) A Ratboy's Notebook, blogging it, and Zhengshu's New Book (brand new; Consumption of Cacti contains previous posts).

Bar codes and SF

From jill/text: links to a page where you can make your own barcode, part of a barcode art site. Check out the Bar Code Ophra.

Some SF links: Maud Newton links to an if-I-hadn't-read-it-on-the-internet-I-would-never-have-believed-it story about complaints that Asimov's sturdy old warhorse is a porn mag.

In the same post she points to a newly-minted blog, Tenser, said the Tensor (ref. Alfred Bester; no, I haven't read it either) that focuses on "Languages and Linguistics, Japanese and Japanese Animation, Science and Science Fiction, Comedy and Comic Books."

And la gringa dishes the dirt on those annoying sf fans.

February 15, 2004

Time keeps on slippin

A recent post from Chuck Tryon about the birthday of his elderly aunt really resonates for me. Both my grandmothers died in the 1990s, one at the age of 99 and one at 100. They both lived in the UK so I didn't see them very often, but I regret that I didn't find out more from them when I did have the chance. Most of what I know about them is filtered through my parents, which is only a fraction of the picture I'm sure. I don't want to make the same mistake with my parents, who are getting on themselves, but I often find that they don't want to talk about the past too much. Or at least, they only want to remember what they want to remember. And more than once I have asked about something significant that they themselves told me, and recently, and they have no recollection. Quicksand.

And then I think, isn't this some sort of Proustian hubris on my part? I have all-too-frequent proof that I can't even remember, or I misremember, events from my own life, so isn't it a fool's errand to run after my parents and grandparents? Don't we just have to accept that most of the sand falls outside the hourglass? One can try and keep journals or somesuch, but in my experience, one writes the least when things are most eventful. And blogging — the kind of blogging I am doing, anyway, as distinct from the more personal sort — is a way of capturing some types of things, but I don't know how helpful all my Barbie posts are going to be, if I ever look back here in an attempt to reconstruct my own past.

It's a Zeitgeist thing: Memento, that new comedy, 50 First Dates (with Adam Sandler! I can't even imagine one). I'm almost finished the 20th annual collection of the Year's Best Science Fiction edited by by Gardner Dozois (review forthcoming; watch this space), and it strikes me — and no doubt this says something about the demographics of successful sf writers — that a disproportionate number of the stories are about Alzheimer's. More on this soon.

February 11, 2004

LeGuin; Foucault

Two links from the inestimable Maud Newton:

First, from The Guardian, an online discussion with Ursula LeGuin in which she briefly touches on the Harry Potter books: "good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited." Of course, she mainly discusses her own work, but it's hard to resist dishing the dirt.

Second, a review, by Ed Halter in the Voice, of two new books which take exception to the Foucaldian notion of homosexuality as an invention of the nineteenth century, which ends with the evocative question,

Does the modern gay man or lesbian have that much in common with Hellenic boy-lovers, French libertines, or ancient Chinese scholars who carried on openly bisexual affairs? Ironically, because of their deep complexity, [Louis] Crompton's portraits [in Homosexuality and Civilization] could equally suggest that the only shared factors persisting across millennia are indeed acts and desires, not identities.

Addendum (5:09pm): Jessa Crispin at Bookslut also mentions the LeGuin piece.

February 09, 2004

Latest overdue reviews

Ellen Brinks, Gothic Masculinity: effeminacy and the supernatural in English and German Romanticism (Bucknell, 2003), and

Peter K. Garrett, Gothic Reflections: narrative force in nineteenth-century fiction (Cornell, 2003).

February 08, 2004

What if LotR had been written by Jane Austen?

Here is a hilarious site, via Austen-tatious, where are gathered various spoofs of LotR channelled through the likes of Coleridge ("In Khazad-dûm did evil fall / And stately Aragorn despair"), the Beowulf poet ("A great shadow descended / Horrific winged creature with wicked rider"), John Donne ("Goe and catch a falling Ring / Get with child the Elven Queen,"), Robert Burns ("Wee timid, hungry, half-grown hobbit, / Living in hole like ony rabbit,"), John Keats ("O what can ail thee, Frodo lad, / Alone and palely loitering?"), and scads of others. Here is a taste:

e. e. cummings
by Hunter Green

precious) downward
my) the heat rises
O) the mountain rises

like a mouth the earth
swallows
greedily

a finger without its hand
a body without its soul
an evil without its power

bright sun on us both)
remembering(
bobbing forth and back)
my birthday(
he was greedy like the earth)
one life begins(
one life ends)
river like a mouth, cold, hot
ring like a mouth, devouring
consumed i must consume

(Sméagol?)

the ring (O
and the body (my
are consumed (precious

Helen Fielding was mentioned twice, much to my delighted surprise, but of course it wasn't Helen, sister of Henry, but that other Helen Fielding.

Most of the writers who are pastiched here are male, which I suppose is hardly surprising. Some of our students are (were?) thinking of putting on a public debate to discuss the proposition that the LotR is a misogynist text. Hope it goes forward.

February 07, 2004

Jameson on Gibson

And here, via the chutry experiment, is Fredric Jameson's take on William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, published in the New Left Review. Read it, you Gibson groupies. I like the way he compares Gibson to Bruce Sterling.

2003 Nebula Nominees

This from the FeministSF listserve: the 2003 Preliminary Nebula Ballot has been announced, with links to stories and excerpts from the novels. This year I have actually read quite a few of the nominees, particularly from among the stories and novellas.

(Any former students of English 3722 reading this: "Potter of Bones" by Eleanor Arnason is one of the nominees.)

February 06, 2004

A couple of book links

Two links via Maud Newton:

Pop-up and Movable Books from the University of North Texas: A collection of fabulous old books.

(Do you like pop-up books? I do, and Little Bump loves them. And he is finally at an age when he can restrain himself from ripping them to shreds. He particularly loves Jan Pieñkowski's Monster Pops. Last summer I bought him a copy of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz illustrated by Robert Sabuda, but that's still on the high shelf.

Second link: Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe is out, both on paper and electronically. This is the second novel Doctorow has released both ways; his first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) is also available on-line and from fine bookstores everywhere. Doctorow writes,

[H]ere is the book as a non-physical artifact. A file. A bunch of text, slithery bits that can cross the world in an instant, using the Internet, a tool designed to copy things very quickly from one place to another; and using personal computers, tools designed to slice, dice and rearrange collections of bits. These tools demand that their users copy and slice and dice — rip, mix and burn! — and that's what I'm hoping you will do with this.

What does this mean, though, alongside the safety of the fixed book version? Though I suppose one could slice and dice that as well.

February 04, 2004

Arthur C. Clarke award

The Bookslut has alerted us that the nominees for this year's Arthur C. Clarke award have been announced. She writes, "The one thing these books have in common? Painfully bad cover art." She's right. Haven't read any of them yet, of course. Perhaps next summer.

February 01, 2004

SFF: the state of the union

Two posts at s1ngularity::criticism worth a look (two recent posts, I mean. s1ngularity::criticism is always worth a look): one by Gabe Chouinard, "Does Size Matter," on the doorstoppers that are sold as sff these days, and "Lonely in a Dark House," by Alan Lattimore, on what he characterizes as a shrinking back from real radicalism within the field.

January 28, 2004

Brave Nude World

I always tell my students to to define their criteria when they are critiquing or reviewing a text. Well here, via Ed via Maud Newton, is a site that is very clear on the definition of a noteworthy sf text: one that includes positive portrayals of nudism. Examples:

[Philip Jose] Farmer's first Riverworld novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, begins promisingly enough, from a nudist point of view: Most of the approximately 35 billion people who ever lived on Earth are mysteriously resurrected along the banks of a 10-million mile river on a distant planet, and no one has any clothes.

and

... [Piers] Anthony's [work] cannot be taken very seriously as good writing or even good science fiction.... Nevertheless, the books of his "Adept" series deserve passing mention, since they are among the few in which we have a society where complete nudity is the rule ...

January 27, 2004

Atwood; the arts; sf

This past Saturday (24/1/04) the Globe and Mail printed an excerpt from Margaret Atwood's "Scientific Romancing," the 2004 Kesterton Lecture, delivered Jan. 22 at the Carleton U School of Journalism. (Here is a copy).

She talks about the relationship of art and science, the function of fiction and fantasy and their expression of human desires and fears —

What do we want? Here's a partial list: We want the purse that will always be filled with gold. We want the Fountain of Youth. We want to fly. We want the table that will cover itself with delicious food whenever we say the word, and that will clean up afterwards

— and her own speculative fiction, and ends on a note that is worth sounding again and again:

An educational system that teaches us only about our tools — the How To of them, their creation, their maintenance — and not about their function as facilitators of our desires, is, in essence, no more than a school of toaster repair. You can be the best toaster repair person in the world, but you will cease to have a job if toast is no longer a desirable food item on the human breakfast menu. "The arts" — as we've come to term them — are not a frill. They are the heart of the matter, because they are about our hearts, and our technological inventiveness is generated by our emotions, not by our minds. A society without the arts would have broken its mirror and cut out its heart. It would no longer be what we now recognize as human.

I like her reference to "the arts"; it is — or has become — a marginalizing term. Or perhaps it is just the way people tend to say it, with a twitch of the lip, or with that same layer of token respect that is paid to other hoary old traditions more honoured in the breach.

The Globe illustrated the piece with a still from the climactic scene in Victor's lab in Frankenstein (1931).

Cultural vocabulary

I'm teaching Frankenstein to my intro. class this week. Today I mentioned that Victor Frankenstein is immediately repulsed as soon as the creature moves, particularly when he sees its “dull and yellow” eyes. He does not have even a fleeting moment's elation after virtually years of obsessive work. I made a comparison with the classic film: blank looks. You know: "It's alive!" They laughed, more at their professor bug-eyed and yelling, than in recognition.

The incident reminded me of the last time I taught "Ozymandias" and, in an effort to find common ground, mentioned that the poem reminded me of Charlton Heston falling to his knees when he sees the Statue of Liberty, at the end of The Planet of the Apes, and howling, "Noooo!" Again blank looks. Didn't I mean Mark Wahlberg?

At least I didn't fall to my knees.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert....Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

[Charlton Heston, actor, Republican, and past president of the NRA. Look on his works and despair.]

January 12, 2004

Review published

Mentioned some time ago, and then a little later, that I was working on a review of Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser (Greenwood Press, 2002), for the SFRA Review (#266, Oct–Dec. 2003). Received it in the mail today, and was so delighted with myself that I promptly posted it to my homepage (welcome > vitae > reviews).

It is a very useful book, albeit at times maddening.

Addendum: here is a direct link.

January 09, 2004

In the "Oh My God!" category

William Shatner is at it again, apparently in the hope that people have short memories.

But we don't.

January 04, 2004

Crop circles

Stumbled across this amazing site run by two crop circlemakers from the UK: people who go out and make those sometimes elaborate crop circles attributed to UFOs:

It is a beautifully designed site, and the writing is thoughtful: read the essay on whether cropcircles are art.

January 03, 2004

Chindi

Finished Jack McDevitt's Chindi (begun here). Won't be reading any more of his; the science was interesting, but not enough to hold this artsy reader's attention, and I liked the idea of a huge alien ship that travelled for millions of years and collected artifacts from different worlds. But the characters left me cold, and there was too much wish–fulfillment for my taste—not that I don’t like some wish–fulfillment narratives, but I don’t like them when they pretend to be something else.

And I was ticked by the mention of the “Canadian Alps” in the epilogue.

Didn’t turn out to have much of an “Xmas reading binge” after all, and term is starting in two days. Oh well, I can look forward to a summer reading binge.

December 28, 2003

Jack McDevitt's Chindi

A couple of chapters into Jack McDevitt's Chindi (I have inadvertently begun in the middle of a series: The Engines of God and Deepsix precede it, and there is a sequel, Omega). Locus liked it, which is often good enough for me. It is not the sort of thing I have been reading much of lately: good old–fashioned hard sf with cardboard characters having stereotypical relationships—starting with the protagonist, Captain Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins [!]—but with an interesting enough premise that I haven't minded too much, at least so far. Hutch is going after a possible alien radio transmission. The Philadelphia Inquirer, according to the back cover, called it "an exciting tale of alien archaeology." How could I not read it?

Had begun Sheri Tepper's The Visitor (see here for an earlier post on Tepper), but it rapidly felt claustrophobic: some sort of Cinderella scenario with a beleaguered little girl and a wicked stepmother. And organ theft! Wasn't in the mood.

December 26, 2003

T3

Two of my students wrote very good reviews of Terminator 3 for the sf class. They disagreed neatly on the issue of whether the treatment of women in the film was empowering or demeaning. I was looking forward to seeing the film myself, and ordered it on PPV the other evening. Too quickly, as it turned out; I inadvertently ordered it in French. Now my understanding of spoken French is pretty rudimentary, but I thought since it was an action film and I had heard that the Governor had half a dozen lines at most, I would give it a go. Well, he did have half a dozen lines, but other characters had many more and as the credits rolled I was left confused about the fate of the planet. What did not need translation, however, was the way the formerly icy evil Terminator turned into a snarling metallic hellcat in her last scene, nor the way that Arnold finally vanquished her by ramming an explosive into her mouth with a vehemence that would have been rude in hard porn.

Claire Danes had it right the first time, even though she backtracked, when she brought up the virgin/whore dichotomy in an interview or two.

December 20, 2003

28 Days Later

Recently watched 28 Days Later on Pay Per View. Several times disturbed Sally dog by suddenly lurching forward on the sofa, jumping, or twitching. And sometimes by sitting forward because of interest in the images on the screen, which doesn't happen nearly so often.

SPOILERS: Here is a review by the prolific Cynthia Fuchs with which I would by and large agree; here is another perceptive review from Blogcritics.com, except for its red–baiting. I haven't posted links to all the reviews that claim that Danny Boyle rips off George Romero's Night of the Living Dead etc. A distinction needs to be made, I think, between working within a tradition and ripping it off, between homage and plagiarism. Especially with sf, horror, and thrillers. I mean, how many different ways could the zombies– overrunning– the– world scenario be played out, anyway? How many different ways could survivors react? Why is looting stores a cliche? (I know that's what I'd do). Anyway, this film is set in the UK, so the characters get giddy in a supermarket, not a gun shop or a mall. Bottom line: this film brings a lot of originality to the mix. As Boyle himself says, "nothing can stand on its own anymore — there is always some reference point."

From the opening scenes of a chimpanzee strapped down like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, it is clear that Boyle, of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting fame (and The Beach, but let’s not talk about that), is self–consciously working in a tradition. Indeed, he is quite candid about his influences and said in an interview that casting Selena as a black woman was a deliberate choice, in keeping with the tradition of Romero and the Omega Man; that it was an aesthetic rather than a political choice. There is no reason to believe him disingenuous here, as he is hardly backward about his politics. It seems to me that despite what Boyle says, however, race is an issue. Specifically, that racism in the UK is part of what drives the apocalypse. How else to read the proposed gang-rape of Selena, who is black? How else to explain that the only black soldier in the unit is also the only infected soldier, kept in a courtyard with a chain around his neck for purposes of “military intelligence” (ie. to see how long he takes to starve. The Major makes the scientists at the Cambridge lab seem like PETA.) And how else to read this soldier’s ultimate role in the altercation with the soldiers? That final shot of him, triumphant and tortured, in the doorway of the country house?

The acting is strong. Cillian Murphy is effective as Jim, the bicycle–courier–turned–amateur–commando—though one reviewer calls him “some kind of skinny, dead-eyed ninja, as if a member of Radiohead had had his DNA spliced to Sho Kosugi's—and Naomie Harris is wonderfully nuanced in her role of sf–amazon–with–a–soft–heart in the tradition of Linda Hamilton and Sigorney Weaver. Brendan Gleeson is strong as Frank, burly cab–driver and protective father (And nothing like Ernest Borgnine’s cabby in Escape From New York, though presumably Frank’s occupation is one of many nods).

Despite costing only eight million dollars, the sets, effects, and cinematography are all excellent. Shooting digitally worked well with the mood and subject.

Apparently there are three alternate endings on the DVD. There was one on PPV, shown with no notice after the credits, with the cryptic inter-title, “What if?” Bleaker than the chosen ending, but perhaps, after all, more in keeping with the rest of the film.

Bloopers: surely a research lab working on something so potentially lethal would have more security in place than one hapless scientist. Is it at all likely that the victim of a virus could display full blown symptoms within 10–20 seconds of initial contact? Is it likely that a virus could be immediately transferable from other species to humans? And what happened to all the animals? This is England, after all. Where were all the homicidal persians and slavering spaniels? And why were our intrepid band initially surviving on Maltesers and Pepsi, in London? Surely there were neighbourhood Tescos to raid? And would such a complete media blackout of the quarantined UK been possible? I point these things out not to be pernickety, but to demonstrate that yes, I noticed them. But so what? Zombie movies are horror movies, not sf, and horror does not require the same level of explanation. As one viewer apparently said of Escape From New York, “Stupid but my kind of stupid.” And more importantly, the reader/viewer/critic, to be fair, needs to judge the text/film/etc. within its own stated parameters. This film is a visual treat, a mood piece, a social commentary, a morality tale, a cautionary tale, a catharsis: not Isaac Asimov. In fact, the Lord of the Flies feel to the second half pushes the genre elements entirely to the back burner.

For your apocalyptic viewing pleasure at this joyous time of the year:
Steve Sekely and Freddie Francis, dir. The Day of the Triffids From the novel by John Wyndham (UK, 1962)
George Romero, dir. Night of the Living Dead (USA, 1968)
Boris Sagal, dir. The Omega Man (USA, 1971)
George Romero, dir. The Crazies (USA, 1973)
George Romero, dir. Dawn of the Dead (USA/Italy, 1978)
John Carpenter, dir. Escape From New York (USA/UK, 1981)
Luc Besson, dir. La Dernier Combat (Fr, 1983)
Thom Eberhardt, dir. Night of the Comet (USA, 1984)
Geoff Murphy, dir. The Quiet Earth (NZ, 1985)
George Romero, dir. Day of the Dead (USA, 1985)
Terry Gilliam, dir. Twelve Monkeys (USA, 1995)
Danny Boyle, dir. 28 Days Later (UK, 2002)

December 19, 2003

Once More, with Hobbits!

BtVS and LotR fans (you know who you are), you MUST check out this brilliant parody of a parody (how metafictional is that?), Once More with Hobbits. They promise audio sometime soon; be still, my heart.

[Thanks to WHEDONesque for the link.]

December 17, 2003

Denizens of the Buffyverse

Andrea, Jesse, Christie, and probably the rest of you too: just discovered a blog on all things Whedon; it's an open blog with lots of links. Link on the right.

December 11, 2003

Ryman's 253

Re. the previous quick mention of Geoff Ryman: his story in the collection, “Have Not Have,” is linked to a novel, Air, not yet released. And attentive readers—you know who you are—may remember an abortive attempt to read Ryman’s Was last summer; abortive not because it wasn’t good, but because it was too good. You may want to check out his strangely moving interactive "novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars and a crash," 253. Some like it, some don't; some are aghast that it was later published in print, while Ryman himself acknowledges the difficulties of reading and writing a novel online. I first read it in print and find the original web version quite a different experience: less sober, somehow. The only problem I find with projects like this (are there many?) is that I have the compulsive fear that I am missing something. Perhaps I should learn to read "like a sociologist" and not "like an English person": a reference to an ongoing debate Joe and I have; he thinks I am a plodder who cedes control because I read from page one through to the end, in order, while I think he is feckless and wilful for flipping through books and reading as the spirit—of Horkheimer? Adorno? Which is the spirit that sociologists recognize?— moves him.

Read until you drop

Picking up on the previous entry about the nineteenth volume of Gardner's Dozois's series, The Year's Best Science Fiction (2001): finished it a few days back. It seemed to get stronger the further I got into it. Canadian Geoff Ryman—and if you haven’t read anything of his yet, you should—explores one of the last bastions of the pre–information age. Robert Reed’s “Raven Dream” is sad and evocative; Carolyn Ives Gilman’s “The Real Thing” is one of the most disturbing in the collection, despite being light and comic, because it postulates a future that is already here, where useful information costs a prohibitive premium because

[t]rue memes are actually at a competitive disadvantage.... [b]ecause ... the world doesn’t work in a memorable or interesting way. That's why fiction is so much more satisfying than truth: it caters to our brains, and what they want. Reality needs to be productized in order to be convincing. (418)

The excellent Maureen McHugh’s “Interview: On Any Give Day” is inventive—it reproduces a “National Public Internet” documentary about disaffected youth preyed upon by unnaturally youthful rejuvenated boomers. Jim Grimsley’s “Into the Greenwood” is a sad and creepy tale of inter-species abuse. Brenda W. Clough’s “May Be Some Time” is really fun: scientists in the future retrieve and rejuvenate the gangrenous, dying body of Titus Oates, the member of Robert Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition who walked off into a blizzard in order to give the rest of the group a chance.

Lot’s of “fish out of water” scenarios, but well done, with a deft feeling for an Edwardian of Oates’s class and inclinations: “In all his wide travels, he had never heard such red-blooded invective from the lips of a female. A hard–bitten cavalry trooper could say no better. [Titus was t]orn between admiration and horror” (558). Apparently this is the beginning of a novel; something to watch for.

British writers are well–represented in the collection: eight out of twenty-six stories. Charles Stross’s Sterlingesque future where the free flow of information is the worst threat to capitalism is only marred by a cheesy S&M subplot. Alastair Reynolds continues building the intriguing world of the Cojoiners in “Glacial.” Ian MacLeod, whose “New Light on the Drake Equation” I mentioned previously, creates a fascinating world in “Isabel of the Fall,” a far–future, high–tech, society with a strangely medieval culture, wasted on a story of two grotesquely tortured women (shades of Catherine of Alexandria, et al.).

Nevertheless, I don’t know if he has written more of this world, but if so, I hope I come across it. At least, as long as it isn’t full of yet more inventive ways for women to die. Simon Ings’s “Russian Vine,” Paul Mcauley’s “The Two Dicks,” Chris Beckett’s “Marcher,” and Ken MacLeod’s “The Human Front” all share a characteristic bleak view and a refreshing take–no–prisoners approach to non–British readers.

December 10, 2003

I'll post this, then crash

Something more on the recent discussion of Ballard's Crash and the question of why it was even on an sf course. One of my students just posted impressions of the novel:

I didn't even see the world of Crash as Earth, or even the possible future Earth, but instead "a Counter-Earth", sort of a Twighlight Zonesque concept. I know, I watch too much television. The World Ballard is depicting, initially seemed to me, like a doppelganger world, with negating duplicates of everyone on the existing Earth.

Of course the writer is not arguing literally that Ballard has written an alternate universe narrative, but I'm wondering if one couldn't justify categorizing the novel as sf based solely on its tone?

December 05, 2003

Crash test dummy

Two weeks ago I had my sf class read J.G. Ballard's Crash. (For anyone unfamiliar with the novel, here is the blurb from the back cover:

In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a 'TV scientist' turned 'nightmare angel of the highways,' experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

A little overblown, but you get the idea.)

This is the second class I have asked to read this novel, and while the previous one uniformly disliked it, they did so with none of the vehemence of the current group (see here, here and here [26/11/03:9am]). Of course they are two different groups of people, but I wonder if asking this year’s bunch to blog might have increased their comfort levels with me, and each other, and allowed them to be more forthright.

One aspect of the whole discussion has given me real pause: two students told me that the novel had made them extremely uncomfortable due to events in their own pasts. I had not considered this possibility with this particular text; certainly it’s full of graphic descriptions of sex and physical injuries, but the sex is consensual and the injuries are from car crashes: it lacks the sort of coercion, abuse of power, or interpersonal violence that would have automatically impelled me to issue a content warning. Actually, I have only once ever put something on a course that I thought warranted such a warning: I showed Boys Don’t Cry last year in my intro. to gender studies class, because the subject was important enough to override considerations of comfort (here is the official page from Fox, which manages not to mention that Brandon Teena was transgendered). I put Crash on this year’s course as part of a section on technology interfacing with sexuality (we also read William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” and Candas Jane Dorsey’s “(Learning About) Machine Sex”), but while it is an early example of the treatment of this theme, because of the reactions this year I doubt I will assign the whole novel again. Perhaps just an excerpt; there is one published in the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition that I have, that would work.

Anyway, apart from anything else, I realized that I don’t want to read it again, so how can I teach it?

The whole discussion was an interesting exercise, however. The students questioned whether it is sf at all, and I have to agree that it is only in the broadest sense. It seems to be set at the time of the writing (pub. 1971), but it is strangely prophetic in its evocation of a world where individuals are disassociated from any sense of community by the impersonality of their surroundings; to whatever extent that was true thirty years ago, it must be even more so now. And even though that last may be arguable, the novel is prescient in terms of sf trends.

One of my students wrote a somewhat more appreciative blog entry than most of his classmates, and I think it’s worth quoting at length:

Seeing the reaction of the class towards James Ballard's Crash, I felt inclined to say a few things about it that I think I left unsaid. When we were on our break i was explaining to Krystal how i had felt about this novel. I told her about when I had visited England when i was about 13 and my parents and I were at the Piccadilly train station and somehow i got seperated from my parents and I ended up getting up close to the actual platform of the tracks, eventually the train had come and it whizzed by me and it just caught me offguard. It didn't scare me neither did it fascinate me, for me those 30 seconds of the train whizzing by me with all the lights, sounds and wind will always be a memory. This is how I felt about Crash. The whole novel seemed to me as just a plethora of sexual images. To the point where I had just become numb. And this is where I maybe understood where Ballard was coming from. Media in the contemporary world seems to forcefeed society with images of violence and sex and more imporatantly death, to the point where we take it for granted. In my opinion technology has amost numbed us to these aspects of society. We watch violence and death on the news and it does not seem to affect us anymore. The abundance of sex and our continued interactions in everything that we come in contact whether it's advertisements, movies, sitcoms whatever, we take sex and it's societal implications for granted. Maybe Ballard believes that we shouldn't.

To an extent, I had to justify choosing the novel, and that made me think about it beyond the obvious human/technological interface idea. It is, above all, a novel of ideas. A concept novel. I think that Ballard had this neato idea about people who got off on car crashes as emblems of what he saw as dangerous social and cultural trends, but instead of writing a story, as one of my students wished on his Crash webpage, he sat down and wrote a whole novel. I have to say it: that sort of unremitting focus in spite of all other considerations: it’s such a guy thing. But that being said, and as I remarked to my students, they may have hated it but I doubt that they will forget having read it. They may forget characters or incidents, but they won’t forget the queasy feeling they had as they read it, or the central linkage of sex, twisted metal, and wounds. And how long do they think they would have remembered, in comparison, an earnest editorial, say, on over-dependence on technology? And really, how else can we measure the success of a piece of writing but by the strength of its impact? One of my students wrote :

There's a saying I've heard once or thrice that every personal library should have one book that can offend anybody. Well, now my library has such a book, and it's name is Crash.... it's staying in my library as that book that can offend anyone. A trophy, if you will, to a literary war-wound received during my university days.

It is a fascinating novel; it must be practically unique in being so full of sex, from cover to cover, yet in utterly failing to titillate. It is the most unsexy dirty book that one can imagine, and that can hardly be unintentional in a writer of Ballard’s talent. (That is one reason why the Cronenberg film is so irritating: it could not, by virtue of being a visual medium, never mind the beautiful actors, achieve the almost ascetic quality that the novel has. Perversely ascetic—degradedly and begrimedly ascetic—or do I mean passionless? Or just enervated?). No-one in it to like, or sympathize with. Or, to even understand. Ballard makes us feel the same disassociation, the same anomie, as his characters. I suspect that that is the real reason for the strong reactions from many readers, myself included.

I can’t help thinking that Ballard must have had in mind the old comparison between being compelled by something, and not being able to look away from an accident. “You know. It was like a car crash; I couldn’t look away.”

November 27, 2003

Genre

Students of 3722: Here is a link to a post by The Little Professor on the rich potential in the interrelationship between genre fiction and more self–consciously literary texts, and with a link to a very good post on the same subject, with more of an sf slant, on Crooked Timber.

November 23, 2003

Yes, I'm marking your papers, but

I thought this would be of interest to my students in ENGL3722:

Two things that turned up when I googled "Oankali" (the alien race from Octavia Butler's Dawn). One: they are being used in a role–playing–game (Jesse, are you reading?); and two: a sculptor named Gisele Perrault has made a sculpture called "Oankali":

(And some of you thought the Oankali were creepy!)

For a larger picture, click here:

November 22, 2003

Reading in the cracks

Reading the nineteenth volume of Gardner's Dozois's series, The Year's Best Science Fiction, the year being 2001. (Mentioned the series previously. Here is a short review, and a longer, of this volume).

Not reading very quickly, given the pile of marking I'm slowly moving through—thought I'd be canny and ask for essays early in order to avoid the December rush, but now I have essays from three classes all handed in within a few days of each other—and the most recent (or is the same?) cold. So when I say I'm reading something, I mean, well, to be blunt, that I am reading it on the toilet. Not sure if that affects my critical judgement, but there you are.

No stories yet that jump up and down shouting, "put me in your next sf course kit!", but I'm only a little more than half–way through. And there are many, many good stories: Eleanor Arnason's "Moby Quilt," and Dan Simmons's "On K2 with Kanakaredes" stand out. There are a couple of others that are less compelling: Ian R. MacLeod's "New Light on the Drake Equation" is too steeped in self–reflexive nostalgia about the "golden age" of sf for my taste, and Michael Swanwick's "The Dog said Bow–wow," while inventive and deftly written, is one of those cute caper stories with two charming but law–breaking n'er–do–wells as protagonists (one of whom is, to his credit, a dog).

Anyway, back to marking. And not, I promise, on the toilet.

November 17, 2003

Varley; SF erotica

ENGL3722 students: Here is a review of John Varley's new novel, Red Thunder which ends with the line, "To quote from another piece of hackwork: 'He's dead, Jim'." Even a more measured review says, "Red Thunder isn't a deep book." Another says, "ignore the famous name, and enjoy the tale for what it is, a fine, flawed, nostalgic remake of a childhood classic [ie. Heinlein]." And here is a link to an extremely positive review which would make any sane reader run a light year: "In this soaring final chapter, Varley lauds the unconquerable human spirit of exploration. But it's just frosting on the rich cake of practical, visionary, comic adventure he's already supplied in full."

And, there is a new collection of SF erotica called The Bachelor Machine by M. Christian that sounds promising. Here is Cynthia Ward's review for Locus Online.

November 14, 2003

Mondo Barbie

Students of Engl 3722: apropos of our discussion of John Varley's "The Barbie Murders," which led to those disturbing disclosures about how so many of us abused our Barbies when we were wee, here is a page that explains how to safely behead a Barbie.

And here is a link to Mondo Barbie, a collection of stories about Barbies, including Varley's.