Monthly Archives: October 2011

Delany, Too, in The Paris Review

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Continuing our marathon coverage of The Paris Review ‘s summer 2011 issue –there was also an  interview with Samuel Delany. (Remember, it’s always news to somebody.)

Delany begins with an anecdote about his Dad moving to Brooklyn in 1923:

Because Dad wanted to see the skyscrapers, someone told him he should walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Back then, of course, Brooklyn was nowhere near as built-up as it is today, and as he got to the other side, he saw a big cornfield—where Borough Hall is now—an immense cornfield stretching off into the distance. His first thought was, They told me Brooklyn was supposed to be part of New York City. But coming off the bridge here is like walking right back into North Carolina!

In 1993, when Dad was dead and I started to write my story, I realized that was the same time—year and season—that Hart Crane had moved into his new home at 110 Columbia Heights, in Brooklyn. The first thing Crane did was start writing the poem “Atlantis,” which became the final section of his poetic sequence The Bridge. There’s a reference in it to corn and another to fields. It struck me, That’s got to be the same cornfield my dad saw. It’s got to be!

When Crane looked from his window, he must have seen the same corn my dad saw when he crossed the bridge. So that’s what gave me the idea—and the title. Why, I thought, don’t I write a story about the two of them meeting each other on the bridge?

Warning: Gary Farber may have reported this on Facebook months ago. Verification coming in five, four, three, two…

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Atwood on Radio

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Margaret Atwood discussed science fiction with On Point host Tom Ashbrook yesterday, October 12, in a broadcast now available online.

Poet and novelist Margaret Atwood has written some of the most hair-raising, dystopian tales of our time. Of apocalypse, wild social decay, women sent back into virtual slavery. Reality-bending, piercing views of the world and its future.

But in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Oryx and Crake” and more, she never embraced the label “science fiction.” Now Atwood’s going straight at science fiction, with an exploration and celebration of its extraordinary power to shape the way we see and engage the world.

She is promoting her newest book, a collection of essays and five short stories exploring science fiction In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. There’s a nice excerpt on the page that shouldn’t be missed:

In Other Worlds is not a catalogue of science ?ction, a grand theory about it, or a literary history of it. It is not a treatise, it is not de?nitive, it is not exhaustive, it is not canonical. It is not the work of a practising academic or an of?cial guardian of a body of knowledge. Rather it is an exploration of my own lifelong relationship with a literary form, or forms, or subforms, both as reader and as writer.

On the other hand, if you skip the comments on the post you’ll only miss the groundlings brawling over whether it’s “sci-fi” or “sf.” Welcome to science fiction, Margaret.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Amazon Starts SF Line

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Amazon, rapidly becoming a major publisher of paper-and-ink books, now has moved into the sf, fantasy and horror genres with its seventh new imprint, 47North.  

Among its first 15 titles will be a paper edition of The Mongoliad, currently being produced online a chapter at a time as a serial novel designed to be read with a browser, smart phone, or tablet. The writers are Erik Bear, Greg Bear, Joseph Brassey, E. D. deBirmingham, Cooper Moo, Neal Stephenson and Mark Teppo. The book version will be released April 24, 2012.

In The Mongoliad: Book One, it is the spring of 1241. The Mongol takeover of Europe is almost complete. The hordes commanded by the sons of Genghis Khan have swept out of their immense grassy plains and ravaged Russia, Poland, and Hungary… and now seem poised to sweep west to Paris and south to Rome. King and Pope and peasant alike face a bleak future–until a small band of warriors, inheritors of a millennium-old secret tradition, conceive of a desperate plan to kill the Khan of Khans.

Their leader, an elder of the order of warrior monks, will lead his elite group on a perilous journey into the East. They will be guided by an elusive and sharp-witted young woman, who believes the master’s plan is insane. But this small band is the West’s last, best hope to turn back the floodtide of the Mongol Empire.

As you probably already guessed, 47North is the latitude of Seattle, Washington where Amazon was founded.

[Via Michael J. Walsh, John Mansfield and Andrew Porter]

HarperCollins Sponsors Monica Hughes Award

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Monica Hughes

The Canadian Children’s Book Centre has launched the Monica Hughes Award for Canadian children’s literature. Sponsored by HarperCollins Canada, the new award will honor children’s sf and fantasy fiction and comes with a $5,000 cash prize.

Hughes, who passed away in 2003, wrote over thirty-five books and has been called “Canada’s finest writer of science fiction for children” by critic Sarah Ellis in The Horn Book magazine. Her genre work is listed at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

She won many major literary awards including the Governor General’s Award (then known as the Canada Council Prize) for Children’s Literature in 1982 and 1983.

To be eligible for the Monica Hughes Award, a book must be an original work in English, aimed at readers ages eight to 16. The first award will be given in October 2012.

[Thanks to John Mansfield for the story.]

Wooster: Gibson Credits Susan Wood

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By Martin Morse Wooster: This is from an interview with William Gibson in the summer 2011 issue of The Paris Review. Expletive censored by me.

INTERVIEWER: “You wrote your first story for a class, didn’t you?”

GIBSON: “A woman named Susan Wood had come to UBC (the University of British Columbia) as an assistant professor. We were the same age, and I met her while reconnoitering the local science-fiction culture. In my final year she was teaching a science-fiction course. I had become really lazy and I thought, I won’t have to read anything if I take her course. No matter what she assigns, I’ve read all the stuff. I’ll just show up and b*llsh8t brilliantly, and she’ll give me a mark just for doing that. But when I said, ‘Well, you know, we know one another. Do I really have to write a paper for this class?’ She said, ‘No, but I think you should write a short story and give it to me instead.’ I think she saw through whatever cover I had erected over my secret plan to become a science-fiction writer.

“I went ahead and did it, but it was incredibly painful. It was the hardest thing I did in my senior year, writing this little short story. She said, ‘That’s good. You should sell it now.’ And I said, ‘No.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, you should sell it.’ So I went ahead and found the most obscure magazine that paid the least amount of money. It was called Unearth. I submitted it to them, and they bought it and gave me twenty-seven dollars. I felt an enormous sense of relief. At least no one will ever see it, I thought. That was ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose.'”

How many points do I get for finding ’70s fan history in an “Art of Fiction” interview in The Paris Review?

Avatar Meets Disney

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Florida’s two theme park empires are constantly duking it out for supremacy. Universal Studios Orlando landed a solid blow with its Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Ever since people have watched for Disney World’s counter-punch.

Now Disney has announced its Animal Kingdom park will add a section based on the story and imagery of Avatar, the highest-grossing movie of all time. Construction will begin in 2013 and the project will cost about $400m, according to the BBC.

Petréa Mitchell, who keeps an eye on these things, says “Theme park fandom has not generally reacted well to this news.”

Kevin Yee reviews the plan’s pros and cons in-depth in his Miceage column “Pandora-Land”:

The announcement that an Avatar-themed land would be built at Disney’s Animal Kingdom (DAK) [in Florida], with construction starting in 2013, certainly came from out of the blue (pardon the pun). Normally there is chatter before major announcements, if not fleshed-out rumors that have already made the rounds of various message boards. Perhaps because the news was so unexpected, fan reaction has been swift, explosive, and divided.

Let’s sketch the negative reactions first. A number of folks have been dismayed that Disney has gone to an outside mythology for this expansion, rather than building their own. Most attractions in the parks have been based off Disney’s existing film/animation properties, or else designed from scratch by the Imagineers…

On the contrary, the problem isn’t that Avatar is from the “outside” says Mike Thomas in “Avatar a Sad Consolation Prize for Disney”, his opinion piece for the Orlando Sentinel. The problem is that Avatar simply lacks everything a great theme park attraction needs:

Disney built its empire on great characters, great dialogue and great storytelling.

“Avatar” has none of the above.

I saw it once, my daughter saw it twice, and neither of us could name a Na’vi.

We couldn’t even tell you if any of the important ones died in that final battle with the evil white capitalists, even though we both darn near cried when Harry held a fatally wounded Dobby.

Avatar has no memorable heroes, no memorable villains, no memorable lines, no memorable twists, not even a memorable musical riff.

It has nobody that kids yearn to be. No Harry, no Hermione, no Luke Skywalker.

Petréa wasn’t sure I’d think the subject was germane to File 770, but with Orlando bidding for the 2015 Worldcon fans are at least one step closer to visiting the city and having a chance to decide between Hogwarts and Pandora as the place to spend a day.

Turning Off the Tevatron

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Back in the Eighties Bill Higgins — aka Beam Jockey, who works at Fermilab as a radiation safety physicist — helped build the Tevatron, the premiere particle accelerator of its generation. And Bill was there on September 30 when the Tevatron was retired.

Bill is interviewed in BoingBoing’s report about the event:

Ultimately, the Tevatron was simply the victim of the progress of technology. When it opened in 1983, it replaced older, lower-energy accelerators. And, in turn, the Tevatron has been replaced by the Large Hadron Collider, an accelerator capable of pushing particles to even higher energies. Once that happened, it was only a matter of time before the Tevatron felt the budgetary axe….

Bill Higgins: Wistful is a good word to describe the way I felt, as I witnessed the shutdown ceremonies, and joined the crowd at the party—think of it as a wake—afterward…. Right now I work on shielding analysis to support future operation of Fermilab’s multiple accelerators. Over thirty years ago, I was assigned to work on the testing of Tevaron magnets as they came down the production line.

[Thanks to Bill Higgins for the story.]

SF Encyclopedia Releases Beta Text

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The Science Fiction Encyclopedia’s online beta text went live October 10. Which means for the past 48 hours the field’s best-known figures have been reading the entries about themselves and using social media to vent every dissatisfaction, great or small.

Compared to the greats I’m easy to please. “SFE? – File 770’s in it at all? – WHEEEE!”

However, Robert J. Sawyer is understandably disappointed. The SFE entry about him doesn’t seem to have been updated from the 1995 edition. Sawyer wrote in exasperation on Facebook that it doesn’t mention seven of his Hugo-nominated novels, not even Hugo winner Hominids, nor is there a word about Flashforward, which became a TV series.

How representative is Sawyer’s entry of the beta text? How many legacy entries from the second edition still need a major update? Perhaps SFE’s management will comment.

The initial complaints arise mainly from high expectations created by the publicity ahead of the release. SFE’s management chose to call this a beta text, which people reasonably took to mean “practically done.” SFE’s frank estimate that another million words will be written and added before the new edition is finished might have been sufficient warning if someone had clearly said how much of this work must be done on entries already posted. I think many people assumed that would be a million words of brand new articles and expected what has been posted to be finished work.  

The excellence of SFE’s authors and editors insures no one wants to settle for a wiki-style process, but everyone involved expects a lot of response. There is even a form:

If you have feedback of any kind on the SFE, the best way to get in touch is via the email contact form here. This has the advantage of being copied to several of the editors, so whoever’s best placed to answer can do so.

Nobody is being shut out, though a more collegial and explicitly stated willingness to use feedback when it is given would help soften the impression. The SFE blog entries on this point sound defensive – an honest expression of feelings, to be sure. A new tone would help.  

The early rash of complaints may also be blamed on a degree of neglect in “playing the players,” the field’s leading opinion-makers.

Shouldn’t someone have made a list of the sf/f personalities who are the most prominent and adept users of social media and made sure their entries, at least, were up-to-date? I doubt there is another pro who matches Robert J. Sawyer’s energy in publicizing his writing, travel and marketing online. Why risk alienating that guy?  

There won’t be that problem with John Scalzi, another internet giant — his career is summarized in a fully current, detailed entry. There’s also a featured entry about Charlie Brown which should please the Locus staff. Maybe Sawyer’s case was an oversight. No matter the cause, it’s a mistake that’s going to sting for awhile.

However, there’s no denying that the online Science Fiction Encyclopedia is great resource that will be increasingly used and relied upon by fans as it is perfected and expanded.

Howe Quits as Chair of BFS

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David Howe resigned as Chairman of the British Fantasy Society just one week after he helped announce the winners of the British Fantasy Awards at Fantasycon. Howe, the awards administrator, was accused by prominent editor Stephen Jones, among others, with a conflict of interest because he is a partner in Telos, the publisher of two BFA-winning stories and winner of Best Small Press, and also is the domestic partner of Sam Stone, winner of two fiction BFA’s.     

British Fantasy Society President Ramsey Campbell exonerated Howe in a statement informing members of the resignation:

Following the recent public allegations made regarding this year’s British Fantasy Awards, The British Fantasy Society Committee would like to state for the record that it is our firm belief that no corruption or wrongdoing took place during the administration of the British Fantasy Awards, and that in this respect all awards should still stand as presented. We confirm that the summation of the votes cast was performed electronically and once the results were checked they were confirmed and verified by another member of the committee.

Campbell asserts that Howe had no control over awards selection, only stepping in to arrange for the physical awards and ceremony when the original administrator was “unable to continue due to personal issues”:

David did not have any involvement with the nominations, short listing or the voting process, other than with the awards administration (procuring the statuettes, plaques, etc) and we are happy that the voting/counting process was 100% accurate within the scope of the current rules. We therefore completely exonerate David from any wrongdoing in the administration of the 2011 Awards.

Perhaps one with full knowledge of the context can reconcile Campbell’s statement with Howe’s own explanation posted October 5 which I took to be an admission of a role in the voting process:

[There] were 140 valid individuals voting in the Awards (I did have to exclude a couple of voters as they were not BFS Members and had not attended FantasyCon either last year, nor were they listed to attend this year).

So the winners were simply those who those that voted thought were worth voting for. Several of the categories were very close between the votes, with in some cases just one vote separating the winner. I asked Del Lakin-Smith, the BFS Webmaster, who was also looking after the online results forms, to do a double check count and tally to ensure complete transparency in what the members had voted for. The results were as announced.

Campbell promises that the awards procedures will be “addressed going forward to maintain the integrity of the society.”

[Via Ansible Links.]

George Baker (1931-2011)

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George Baker, actor, died Saturday at the age of 80. Genre movies: Curse of the Fly (1965), The Canterville Ghost (1987), Back to the Secret Garden (2001). Genre tv: The Prisoner (1967, as one of the numerous Number Two’s), Doomwatch (1970), Doctor Who (“Full Circle,” 1980), Johnny and the Dead (1995), Randall & Hopkirk [Deceased] (2001). He was apparently Sir Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond, but had to decline as he was under contract to another studio.

[Thanks to Steve Green for the story.]