(1) BELIEVE ‘EM OR NOT? In her November newsletter, Charlie Jane Anders considered the question “Does An Unreliable Narrator Need To Be an Asshole?”

…So how do I write my unintentionally unreliable narrators? I am so glad you asked. (I am pretending you asked, because I am an unreliable essayist.)

You might think the most important thing is to understand the person who is narrating the story, whether in first person or close third person. And seeing how this person’s mind works and how they fail to understand key aspects of their own life. And sure, this is super important, and it’s a pre-requisite of writing a good narrative POV to begin with. If you’re telling a story from a particular person’s perspective, you should absolutely know their preconceptions, including the stuff they tend to overlook. 

But I’d say that’s not actually the most vital part of creating an untrustworthy narrator. Rather, the most important step is to get fully into the heads of the characters who aren’t narrating. Think about it: how do you know what your POV character is failing to see, unless you know what these other characters are aware of and how they see the situation? And why this is important to those other characters? (I’m assuming you’re not doing an omniscient POV, because that’s sadly rare these days — and if the POV isn’t omniscient, then the only other way of looking at the events of your story must come from one of the other characters. There’s no objective truth, just competing perspectives.)

One common technique for insinuating that your narrator is missing something is to sneakily insert information in a way that makes it clear the narrator isn’t noticing it. A lot of tight-third-person narrators do this to great effect: You’ll get pieces of information through the POV character’s perspective, and yet this protagonist will miss it entirely. No shade to that technique — I love it. But this isn’t my favorite way of insinuating that a narrator is a bit out to lunch. Not by a long chalk.

I vastly prefer when one of the other characters in a story says something (or does something) that indicates that they have been viewing the events of the story in a radically different way, and it takes the protagonist or POV character by surprise. I like this better because it gives the other characters more of a life of their own, and because the protagonist themself is forced to grapple with the fact that they’ve been reading things wrong. (Or at least, not reading them the same as their friends.)…

(2) CLARION WEST SEEKS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR. Clarion West will hire the organization’s first Development Director, after receiving a grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust of Vancouver, Washington.

This is a full-time, hybrid position based in Seattle, WA. More information about the position and how to apply can be found here.

This grant will provide the capacity to hire our new development position and to establish the infrastructure for a capital project that will help ensure the long-term sustainability of the Six-Week Workshop — effectively expanding our summer residency program.

Clarion West has no physical location of its own for classrooms, events, and residency programs. Instead, the organization partners with other organizations and universities when offering in-person classes, workshops, and other events. However, these spaces are often not easy to access and prohibitively expensive.

As a long-term solution, the organization seeks to lay the groundwork for a community center serving Pacific Northwest organizations who specialize in supporting writers, literacy, and publishing of underrepresented and marginalized groups. The organization seeks to purchase or renovate a facility that provides free and reduced rate spaces for speculative fiction artists, writers, and those that love their work.

(3) SFPA PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association have until January 31 to vote on the three candidates for President of the organization:

• Brian Garrison
• Miguel O. Mitchell
• Wendy Van Camp

The new term will begin March 1, 2025.

(4) WELL-SEASONED TRIVIA. [Item by Steven French.] The BBC has a long running quiz show known as Richard Osman’s House of Games hosted by ‘quiz giant’ and cozy crime author Richard Osman (of the Thursday Murder Club series) and in which each round features a different kind of quiz game. However, the final round is always ‘Answer Smash’ in which contestants have to ’smash’ the answer to a question into the name of the object pictured below it and earlier this week one of the questions was ‘Which starship captain is played by Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: Next Generation?’ with the picture being of some pale looking seed pods. Trekkies and curry-lovers across the UK all leapt up as one with the answer …!!

(5) ALAFAIR BURKE Q&A. “Encyclopedia Brown Got Alafair Burke Started on Crime Fiction” – so she tells the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

Which books got you hooked on crime fiction?

As a very young reader, I adored Encyclopedia Brown and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.” After I begged my personal literary curator (a.k.a. my librarian mother) for more stories that felt like puzzle-solving, she got me started on Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, which eventually led to Agatha Christie and Mary Higgins Clark. My real obsession began in the late ’80s in college, when I would browse the $1 paperbacks at Powell’s in Portland, Ore. I discovered a slew of smart, gritty female sleuths who began to feel like friends — Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski, Karen Kijewski’s Kat Colorado, Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone. I never dreamed I’d have a row of my own books on those same shelves.

Are there times when being a trained lawyer gets in the way of telling a good story?

In a great legal thriller like “Presumed Innocent,” the technical details are not the star. Instead, Scott Turow’s expertise infuses his characters and the creation of the world itself. In hindsight, I probably used my lawyer brain too much in my debut, because I was insecure trying my hand at a novel. These days, if I find myself writing about the law itself, I ask myself what it adds to character, plot or setting — and then I usually delete it. Wanda Morris is only three books in, and she’s already been compared to Turow and John Grisham for good reason.

The trio of friends at the center of your novel call themselves “The Canceled Crew.” Why was it important that social-media blowback figure in the story?

I’m fascinated by the way we collectively decide that strangers on the internet are either completely perfect or the worst humans ever, based on a few seconds of social media. At a time when the most rewarding books are ones in which the good guys aren’t all good, and bad guys aren’t entirely bad, it’s bizarre that we don’t have more nuance when it comes to characterizing real people whose real lives are affected by the weird sort of fan-fiction that gets crowdsourced online….

(6) THREE ON A MATCH. Hagai Palevsky discusses Jon Chandler’s Dogbo, Lily Vie’s self-published Dogbody, and C A Strike’s Customer Service Eternity in The Comics Journal: “A book report from the Thought Bubble Festival”.

The principle at the heart of Annie Baker’s plays can most easily be described as the “communality born of circumstance.” Most of Baker’s plays are some variation on the following premise: A group of otherwise-unrelated strangers are brought together in a single purgatorial space; slowly, the exterior world melts away. When they leave the room, that whole world dies with them.

Sometimes, as is the case in Infinite Life, they are guests at a health resort; elsewhere, in The Flick and The Antipodes (my personal favorite, which you would know, if you cared about me), they are colleagues. The stage, to Baker, is static, stilted; set-pieces do not change. For the next two hours or so, she seems to tell her viewers, this room is all that exists in the world.

Not coincidentally, this is very much what it feels like to be at a comic convention: seven hours, or thereabouts, in a hall where time, casino-like, slips away, and the two most frequent questions you are asked — if you’re me, at least — are “Hey, how are you doing?” (to which the answer is usually “Who’s to say, man”) and “Is that all you bought so far?” (to which the answer is “No, I got three more bags full, I just put them behind a friend’s table, I have a problem, I know”). 

But, triumphant and physically burdened, I returned from England — the country so joyful that on Christmas of 2003 the #1 song on the charts was Gary Jules’ godawful cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” — with several pounds of books purchased at this year’s Thought Bubble Festival.  I now intend to tell you about three of them. I hope that’s okay with you.

(7) SARGENT Q&A ABOUT ZEBROWSKI. Paul Grondahl interviewed Pamela Sargent about her partner, the late George Zebrowski who died December 20: “Grondahl: George Zebrowski, prolific sci-fi writer, 78” in the Albany (NY) Times-Union.

…“We both thought he’d come home and write again, but his body just gave out,” said Pamela Sargent, his partner since 1964, when they met as freshmen philosophy students at Binghamton University.

 “Even back then, he was very interested in science fiction and wanted to be a writer more than anything else,” Sargent said.

Sargent had gone on a few dates her freshman year with Zebrowski’s dormitory roommate, but when the roommate failed to show up at her dorm for a planned date, Zebrowski showed up instead.

“We’ve been together ever since,” said Sargent, a widely published novelist in fantasy and historical fiction genres.

They have lived together since 1970, but never married. “We decided marriage wasn’t going to change anything,” Sargent said. They did not have children and devoted themselves to scratching out a living as full-time writers.

“It was never easy, and we had penurious years,” she said.

Zebrowski supplemented meager book royalties with freelance writing — essays for Omni magazine, book reviews and a column for Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine. The couple also were paid editors for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association’s Bulletin, a trade publication.

The couple collaborated on four write-for-hire novels in the Star Trek series. “Those were the only books we wrote together because we didn’t want to have personal disputes masked as editorial suggestions,” she said.

“George was meticulous about his prose,” she said. “He hated sloppy prose and if I committed a really wretched sentence, he’d call me out on it.”

Zebrowski wrote in a small study stuffed with books in the front of the house and Sargent’s book-crammed office was in the back. Their spare bedroom in the middle was a reference library with shelves of scientific volumes. They shared the house with a black-and-white black cat named Spencer (after Spencer Tracy).

When finances got especially tight, Zebrowski would sell a rare edition from the couple’s library of more than 5,000 volumes that engulfed a small bungalow they bought in 1996.

“We’ve got walls of books in every room except the bathroom,” Sargent said….

(8) OUT TO LAUNCH. On January 16th there will be a Speculative Fiction Anthology Launch featuring Elizabeth Bear, Chris Campbell, Nick DePasquale, Max Gladstone, Allison Pottern, and Brigitte Winter at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA, with special guest emcee Scott Lynch. RSVP if you’re going.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[By Paul Weimer.]

Born January 2, 1920 — Isaac Asimov. (Died 1992.)

By Paul Weimer: One of my first two SF books bought for me was the Good Doctor’s collection I, Robot (the other, for those wondering, was The Martian Chronicles by Bradbury).  Needless to say, between the two, I was hooked onto science fiction and soon either raiding my brother’s extensive collection, or lobbying to get an adult library card so I could check out “Real” science fiction at the library. Doctor Asimov’s endless source of ideas was half of that equation in getting me started in SF. 

Asimov’s prose was, in fact, about as colorless as one can reasonably get. No one is totally devoid of style, but he was not a prose stylist and I didn’t read him for prose.  (That would be the aforementioned Bradbury. I am firmly convinced that handing me such a pair of authors right off is part of the secret in getting me to read SF of a wide spectrum from the start). 

I could name any number of favorites when it comes to Asimov’s work. The original Foundation? The Gods Themselves? One of his finely crafted short stories like “Nightfall” or “The Last Question“? How to choose? For fiction, I am going to finally land on The End of Eternity, his time patrol/time travel novel. It turned out to be the first time patrol novel that I ever read, and it made a huge impression. One of my recurring non player characters in my roleplaying games, Noys, is named for the primary female character in the book. 

I should not neglect talking about his nonfiction which I consumed readily. Collections of his essays “Asimov on…” from his column in the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. My favorite, and I wore out a couple copies of it, was “Asimov on Numbers”. I would learn about everything from what a Dorothy Sayers novel has to do with factorials, to the tallest mountain on Earth (it is not Mount Everest). I wish these collections were in ebook form, I would buy them.  Used copies of these books as well as all of his non fiction are expensive.  I also enjoyed his nonfiction books on the Bible, and Shakespeare as well. 

And I should plug here, Our Angry Earth, which he co-wrote with Frederik Pohl, in the late 1980’s. He scarily and presciently predicted what would happen, way back then, what would happen if we did not start to engage with the problem of climate change. The pair were, in fact, Cassandras of the first water. 

I am unfortunately aware that he was a broken step, in person.  This pains me.  I still would have liked to meet him. 

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Isaac Asimov’s “The Fourth Homonym” story.

So let’s look at Isaac Asimov’s “The Fourth Homonym” story. His Black Widowers stories of which this is one I think are some of the cleverest bar style stories ever done even if they weren’t set in a bar like Clarke’s White Hart tales.  

These stories which were based on a literary dining club he belonged to known as the Trap Door Spiders.  The Widowers were based on real-life Spiders, some of them well known writers in their own right such as Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, Harlan Ellison and Lester del Rey.

This story was first published thirty-nine years ago in the Puzzles of the Black Widowers collection

There were sixty-six stories over the six Black Widowers volumes that were released. So far only one volume, Banquets of the Black Widowers, has been released as an ePub. And yes, I’ve got a copy on my iPad as they are well worth re-reading.

And now the beginning of this most excellent story…

“Homonyms!” said Nicholas Brant. He was Thomas Trumbull’s guest at the monthly banquet of the Black Widowers. He was rather tall, and had surprisingly prominent bags under his eyes, despite the comparative youthfulness of his appearance otherwise. His face was thin and smooth-shaven, and his brown hair showed, as yet, no signs of gray. “Homonyms,” he said.

“What?” said Mario Gonzalo blankly.

“The words you call ‘sound-alikes.’ The proper name for them is ‘homonyms.’ “

“That so?” said Gonzalo. “How do you spell it?”

Brant spelled it.

Emmanuel Rubin looked at Brant owlishly through the thick lenses of his glasses. He said, “You’ll have to excuse Mario, Mr. Brant. He is a stranger to our language.”

Gonzalo brushed some specks of dust from his jacket sleeve and said, “Manny is corroded with envy because I’ve invented a word game. He knows the words but he lacks any spark of inventiveness, and that kills him.”

“Surely Mr. Rubin does not lack inventiveness,” said Brant, soothingly. “I’ve read some of his books.”

“I rest my case,” said Gonzalo. “Anyway, I’m willing to call my game ‘homonyms’ instead of ‘sound-alikes.’ The thing is to make up some short situation which can be described by two words that are sound-alikes – that are homonyms. I’ll give you an example: If the sky is perfectly clear, it is easy to decide to go on a picnic in the open. If it is raining cats and dogs, it is easy to decide not to go on a picnic. But what if it is cloudy, and the forecast is for possible showers, but there seem to be patches of blue here and there, so you can’t make up your mind about the picnic. What would you call that?”

“A stupid story,” said Trumbull tartly, passing his hand over his crisply waved white hair.

“Come on,” said Gonzalo, “play the game. The answer is two words that sound alike.”

There was a general silence and Gonzalo said, “The answer is ‘whether weather.’ It’s the kind of weather where you wonder whether to go on a picnic or not. ‘Whether weather,’ don’t you get it?”

James Drake stubbed out his cigarette and said, “We get it. The question is, how do we get rid of it?”

Roger Halsted said, in his soft voice, “Pay no attention, Mario. It’s a reasonable parlor game, except that there don’t seem to be many combinations you can use.”

Geoffrey Avalon looked down austerely from his seventy-four-inch height and said, “More than you might think. Suppose you owned a castrated ram that was frisky on clear days and miserable on rainy days. If it were merely cloudy, however, you might wonder whether that ram would be frisky or miserable. That would be ‘whether wether weather.’ “

There came a chorus of outraged What!’s.

Avalon said, ponderously. “The first word is w-h-e-t-h-e-r, meaning if. The last word is w-e-a-t-h-e-r, which refers to atmospheric conditions. The middle word is w-e-t-h-e-r, meaning a castrated ram. Look it up if you don’t believe me.”

“Don’t bother,” said Rubin. “He’s right.”

“I repeat,” growled Trumbull, “this is a stupid game.”

“It doesn’t have to be a game,” said Brant. “Lawyers are but too aware of the ambiguities built into the language, and homonyms can cause trouble.”

The gentle voice of Henry, that waiter for all seasons, made itself heard over the hubbub by some alchemy that worked only for him.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “I regret the necessity of interrupting a warm discussion, but dinner is being served.”

(11) COMICS SECTION.

• Close to Home offers an evergreen excuse.
• Cornered hauls a superhero in front of the judge.
• Dog Eat Doug joins the away team.
• Free Range solves the bedtime problem.
• Loose Parts needs more dino.
• Wannabe gets an upgrade.

(12) INDIGIVERSE CREATOR. “Scott Wilson couldn’t see Aboriginal superheroes in the comics he loved. So he created his own” in ABC News (Australia).

Scott Wilson grew up obsessed with superheroes, but he never saw his own culture in the comic books he’d get lost in.

“When I was a kid, my favourite superhero was Wonder Woman. I’d twist a bath towel into a lasso and pretend it was the Lasso of Truth,” he says.

Scott grew up in Rubibi (Broome), spending his time on country around the Western Australian tourist town.

Spider-Man was the superhero who really captured his imagination, and he identified with the idea of a high school student by day, masked avenger by night.

But like most superheroes, without his mask, Spider-Man is a white man. 

For Scott, it raised a very personal question: Why don’t I ever see myself in these stories?

As he grew up and learned to make his own superheroes, Scott found the answer in creating comics that draw from the world’s oldest living culture, and by sketching its newest figures.

He called it the Indigiverse. In this universe, the superheroes talk in traditional language, and draw their power from the Dreaming. 

And Scott has big plans for his superheroes…

(13) SACCO Q&A. “The Joe Sacco interview: ‘If my work is going to be journalistic, it needs to be representational’” at Scroll.in.

…You have always maintained that what you do is comics. But India is also a country where the “graphic novel” as a format was defined by the publication of a handful of books (Maus, Palestine, Persepolis, etc.) that included your own. What do you think about the romance comics you started with?

That rubbish? That was in Malta. I was young and that sort of fell into my lap because a publisher knew I was interested in drawing and suggested three options: children’s comics, action comics, or romance comics. I chose romance comics because that was so out of my league that I thought it would be kind of humorous. It ended up as a series called Imħabba Vera (“True Love”). I think it was the first [art] comic series in Malta at the time: black and white, 64-pagers, each written and drawn in one month. It was quite an effort to get those out. I burned out on it after six issues. Also, the fact that the publisher wasn’t paying me had something to do with burning out on it.

They were terribly drawn. But what was sort of amusing is that Malta had no history of comics, so I could tackle subjects that would be unacceptable in American comics. Romance comics, but the girl gets pregnant and has to go to Amsterdam to get an abortion. Malta is a Catholic country where abortion isn’t really allowed. So I explored those sorts of issues and no one really raised an eyebrow because I don’t think most people realised. This is not your typical comics fair, because they didn’t read comics. They didn’t really know what comics could do. It was good just to force me to draw, draw, draw.

I wish I could say my drawing improved a lot because of it. I don’t think it did. That took a lot more time.

But you had a robust readership. Are there plans to translate it?
It did well. I can’t remember the figures or whatever, but I know they sold out and they were doing well.

I hope they are not translated. I hope those things are burned at the stake.

That’s what Kafka said about his work.
Well, some things might be good for some academic who wants to understand or dilute whatever impact I’ve ever had. That’s what that stuff’s there for. It’s not good. It’s not probably not worth it. But I don’t know. Maybe one day when people get really obsessed about me…

(14) JURASSIC CROSSWALK. “Biggest trackway of dinosaur footprints found in Oxfordshire quarry” in the Guardian.

Gary Johnson was clearing clay with a digger at the Oxfordshire quarry where he works when he hit an unexpected bump in the limestone surface.

“I thought, it’s just an abnormality in the ground,” he said. “But then it got to another, three metres along, and it was hump again, and then it went another three metres, hump again.”

What Johnson had discovered was part of an enormous dinosaur trackway dating to nearly 166m years ago, when the quarry was a warm, shallow lagoon crisscrossed by the huge creatures….

… Researchers have now unearthed about 200 large footprints at the site, making this the biggest dinosaur trackway ever found in Britain. The tracks are thought to have been made by two types of dinosaur: the herbivorous cetiosaurus, a sauropod that walked on four legs, and the smaller carnivorous megalosaurus.

So far, five separate trackways have been found stretching up to 150 metres in length, and experts from the universities of Oxford and Birmingham believe they could extend much further as only part of the quarry has been excavated….

(15) THE ANCESTORS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature cover story relates to a new technique for analyzing ancient DNA which will inform us as to how ancient civilizations migrated, merged and so forth…

Norse code

The use of genetic ancestry to trace history and probe events of the past is challenging because ancestries in many locations are relatively similar, making it hard to distinguish groups and populations. In this week’s issue, Leo Speidel, Pontus Skoglund and colleagues present a new approach called Twigstats that allows subtle differences in ancestry to be reconstructed in high resolution. The researchers use their technique to examine the genomic history of early medieval Europe. This allowed them to track the expansion of two streams of Scandinavian-related ancestry across the continent, as well a later stream of ancestry expanding into Scandinavia before the Viking Age (around 750–1050). The cover is inspired by the serpentine carvings found on Viking Age runestones and features the Elder Futhark runes for the DNA nucleotides A, T, G and C.

The research paper is open access: “High-resolution genomic history of early medieval Europe”  

(16) THE PRINCESS BRIDE: BEHIND THE CAMERA. “How 3 words completely changed a character” – director Rob Reiner turned a scene from a sprint into a marathon.

When Billy Crystal was about to begin filming his scenes for The Princess Bride, director Rob Reiner decided to completely change the scene by telling him three simple words, “forget the lines.” This not only completely changed the character, but nearly upended the production entirely.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Paul Weimer, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark Roth-Whitworth.]