Do you really want a bike that reads your mind?

OK, this is a little too much intrusion of science fiction into daily life:  a bike that allegedly shifts in response to your brainwaves (HT: The Infrastructurist).

Now I know why so few people bike: it's just too hard to decide when to jump up or down a cog. Although I'm not sure a mind-reading bike really solves that particular problem, since you still have to decide to shift, though it says it can also remember previous shifts by location, and then shift again at the same place, say downshifting before you hit a hill. No indication if it takes a wind reading before doing so.

This is kind of fun, if creepy, but it's really a solution in search of a problem. If the problem is the intellectual demands of shifting, it should measure muscular effort and cadence, and shift to maintain constant pace and effort. Your mind shouldn't really have much to do with it.

Or it could measure sweat (maintaining an effort that keeps you from getting to the office soaked in sweat) or passerby perception (if someone attractive is watching you, you'd like to be showing some real speed and form). There are lots of possibilities.

Or you can get a fixie, like I have, and just follow its cruel dictates.

Returns to abstraction: science fiction and the real future

In the first chapter his fascinating, to-me-almost-incomprehensible account of infinity, Everything and More, David Foster Wallace talks about levels of abstraction. In order to learn math, you have to move up through levels of abstraction, from physical objects, to numbers, to unknowns, to functions and so forth. If you are unable to manipulate the abstractions, you are unable to go on with math. And, often, even if you do well at math (as I did), you don't really understand it.

The big bucks in our economy come to those who have moved vast numbers of levels up the ladder of abstraction. The person who sells apples makes little, never mind the person who picks them. The person who creates financial instruments that hedge commodity price fluctuations makes a great deal more.

Science fiction is about the future. In the future, anyone who matters will deal with matters so many levels above concrete physical reality that there will be no clear relationship between the two. But that's not that interesting to read about, save in a tight story that is really, in some sense, about that process of abstraction, and what it means, both for the world and for the human soul. But how often can you do that?

Which is why you still see characters repairing physical things, like space drives or time machines, rather than trying desperately to fix a system of busted collateralized debt obligations. Or, even worse, arguing about how to define the problem to be fixed.

This is an interesting problem for fiction, because the people doing the abstracting are still shaved primates, with status hierarchies, anxieties, and flawed bodies that will inevitably stop working. It's that boundary between profit-and-knowledge-creating abstraction and human need that is a fertile ground for our fiction.

The "committed" auteur: Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor

I'm toying with a horror novel set in an abandoned insane asylum. Nothing unusual here, certainly, but I think it might be fun.

Part of the backstory is someone who had himself voluntarily committed to investigate something of what was going on at the asylum while it was functioning, events that play a role in the present.

In the spirit of research, I rented Samuel Fuller's movie Shock Corridor (1963), about a reporter who commits himself to a mental hospital to find out who committed a murder there.

What a terrible movie! Fuller wrote, produced, and directed. Whatever the merits of his direction (hint: minimal), the writing, at least, is wretched: overblown, repetitive, and rambling. It really plays as if he just wrote it once, a few days before filming, and then never read it again, and just handed out the shooting scripts to the bemused and long-suffering actors.

The story is about a man, Johnny Barrett, who goes into an asylum and there becomes mad. Fine. But the first ten minutes or so involve his girlfriend, stripper named Cathy, with the austere face and demeanor of a nun in a particularly restrictive order, who tells him that this is dangerous, and that if he goes in there, he will lose his mind. Then we see her sing and do a woodenly choreographed striptease. The rest of her scenes involve her telling Johnny's editor that Johnny will lose his mind, or telling Johnny on visiting day that he will lose his mind...her scenes take up about a third of the movie, have no connection to anything, and never pay off in any way. Except that he actually does lose his mind. She was right!

About a third of the way into the movie, we finally figure out that Johnny is there to investigate the stabbing of a man named Sloane. Who Sloane was, why he was killed, what the consequences were, who might have wanted to kill him...to Fuller these are tedious irrelevancies.  What he really wants to do is let a few actors rant about modern societal issues, have a moment of clarity where they remember something about the stabbing of Sloane, and then have big breakdown.  This is definitely one of the times where the term "cult" actually means "lame".

In addition to wasting time with Cathy, Fuller sticks in some color sections from failed movie projects, trying to amortize their cost by labeling them as memories or dream sequences. At one point, a character actually remarks how odd it is that his memories are in color, presumably because he knows he's actually B&W. The silliest of these is where a black character remembers being a Brazilian Indian, presumably because those were the darkest-skinned people Fuller had footage of.

As usual, I thought about many different ways this story could go. Obviously figuring out the stabbing would be just the start--why the stabbing happened is the interesting thing. Cathy only makes sense if she has her own game to play, either encouraging madness on the part of her fiance, or facing a threat while Johnny is incarcerated, or finding clues at the strip joint that connect up with Johnny's investigation--clues Johnny rejects. What seems to be irrelevant "thematic" rambling by the various madmen would actually conceal useful information, information Johnny doesn't see because he is obsessed with only one question, that about the stabbing.

So it was useful for me to see, because it gave me a lot of ideas, as failed movies often do. You might want to see it as a sociological document, or as a desperately ridiculous failure, or as an example of what a total farce auteur theory turned out to be. Just don't see it because you think it will be fun to watch.

The thoughtful gaze in book covers

My recent reading has included Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman and P.D. James's The Skull Beneath the Skin (mentioned a few days ago).  I noticed that the book covers had a similar thematic structure:

A woman with an side and upward thoughtful or abstracted gaze, accompanied by some symbolic background, the James from 1987 (though the design is probably from 1983), the Kirstein from 2003. Would anyone use this style for a male character? I think it conveys thoughtfulness, but a bit of distance. This woman is interested in figuring something out and is probably not that easy to get to know.

Just an interesting coincidence, of no real significance.

My crush on Cordelia Gray

Cordelia Gray was a detective PD James wrote about in the 70s and early 80s. James seemed to be experimenting with breaking away from her elegant, self-contained series detective Dalgliesh (though Dalgliesh plays a bit part in the first Cordelia Gray book).

But it never worked out. James wrote two Cordelia Gray books, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, and the much longer The Skull Beneath the Skin. It must have seemed like a good idea, creating a young, spunky woman with a detective agency mostly specializing in lost pets, who gets involved in murder.

James's heart never really seemed to be in it. She discovered that a private eye has few resources for actually solving crimes. Much of the post-murder part of Skull is told from the point of view of cops (anonymous, though extensively described), though Cordelia is eventually the one to figure out who the killer is. James was a professional administrator and bureaucrat, and her heart is with systems. Dalgliesh is a man of system. Cordelia was on her own, and, in the end, I don't think James could come up with plots that worked with that situation.

The stress shows in Skull. All the characters are more schematic than James's usual, despite the length of the book.  It lacks the easy charm of the first Cordelia book, Unsuitable Job.

Plus, Cordelia was kind of Dalgliesh's little sister (though there were hints of a potential romance betweent them). She had the same self-sufficient personality, the same literary education, the same cool attractiveness. James hadn't really traveled very far, and so decided to just go with Dalgliesh, the original model.

Sometimes, as a writer, you try to break free, only to find that your restrictions are also your strengths.

I miss Cordelia, though.  Maybe because I can't work up a crush on the dark-and-literary Dalgliesh, but have no problem doing so for the catlike Cordelia.

The resurgence of Unspiek, Baron Bodissey

One of the startling things to come out of the mass murder in Norway is that a source for the killer's manifestos was a blogger who writes under the name of "Baron Bodissey".

This is insider baseball indeed, akin to naming a housing development Undle Square. "Baron Bodissey" provides the epigraphs to various chapters in the works of Jack Vance, most particularly the Demon Princes novels.  The first two of those, The Star King and The Killing Machine, were particular favorites of mine in my youth. Given the Baron's pompous, elephant-picking-up-a-pea style, he seems an odd choice for someone supposedly providing real political commentary.

But, behind his own light and frothy style, Vance often engaged in fictional mass murder and even genocide--the event that starts the long vengeance of Kirth Gersen in the Demon Princes novels is, after all, the Mount Pleasant Massacre. So perhaps this points a way to seeing the way style can direct the uninformed eye away from content.

Like anyone else, the Baron has a Wikipedia page.

Readercon wrap up

Readercon is my favorite local con...actually, that makes it my favorite con, because I rarely travel to go to conventions that require travel, and staying at the hotel. I have a limited tolerance for fluorescent-lit, over-air-conditioned hotels and meeting rooms. Readercon tends to happen on a beautiful summer weekend, which this one certainly was. That makes staying inside even more difficult.

On Thursday, I was on a panel called How to Write for a Living When You Can't Live Off Your Fiction created by Barbara Krasnoff. Barbara has hosted this panel topic a number of times, and says she gets very different discussions every time. I got to sit next to my friend Elaine Isaak and talked about my marketing copywriting business. It's not an easy subject--there are a lot of possibilities, but most of them demand a degree of hustle and job search that is too stressful for most people.  I know it is sometimes too stressful for me, satisfying though this way of making a living can be.

Then I went to a reading by my friend John Kessel, from a novel he's working on. It is set in the same Lunar world as some of his recent stories, including "Stories for Men". Afterward, John and I had a beer in the bar, which had hired a singer to entertain on what was supposed to be a slow night. John and I yelled at each other over the noise music. Eric Van later joined us. Unfortunately, that was the last time I talked to John during the con, though I saw him several more times.

On Friday I had a reading.  No one showed up.  I should have mentioned that it was my alien sex story, coming out in F&SF.  It's funny, and I was looking forward to performing it.

I had beers and food with my good friends Paul Di Filippo and Deb Newton, as well as John Crowley and Paul Witcover, and several others.  So, you see, I sometimes travel in exalted circles indeed.

Friday night was the Meet the Prose party, an Readercon tradition.  I caught up with several people, including Judith Berman (warning: she has not posted recently, and her site seems to have been taken over by an Italian journalist of the same name).  I didn't see Judith again either.

On Saturday and Sunday I got together a couple of times with Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Geary Gravel, and Rosemary Kirstein.  Ann and Rosemary I got to see at Boskone earlier this year, but Geary I have not seen in a long time.  We all make up a kind of Coalition of the Unappreciated, and so can commiserate with each other without fear.

Saturday night my neighbor Athena Andreadis had me over to dinner with Joan Slonczewski and Anil Menon, both of whom I enjoyed meeting, along with Athena's partner, Peter.

I also got to see Walter H. Hunt, Greg Feeley (whose great blog has not been updated in quite some time), Vandana Singh, and Madeleine Robins.

If I skipped you or forgot your name, please forgive me.

Greece and debt ceilings: the normalization of deviance

Like most other people, I am watching with bewildered apprehension as our fragile economic recovery faces incredible, if hard-for-me-to-understand challenges. Greece threatens to default on its debts, peeling off its rock face and dragging the linked rock climbers of the Eurozone down into the abyss.  All their chock stones have long since slipped out, and their fingers are getting tired....

The Eurozone was set up by people who told everyone they were really smart. I never got what big advantages the Euro was supposed to bring to people, but I'm not a politician. The system was set up with certain rules about debt and spending that were supposed to make it safe. Then they started violating those rules. Nothing bad happened. So they let things slip a bit more.

Meanwhile, here in the US, everyone is playing chicken with the debt limit.  The S&P 500 doesn't seem to even remotely reflect the terrifying possibilities. It seems routine, just another bit of partisan game playing. Stuff like this happens all the time.

This is the result of what Dianne Vaughan, in her book The Challenger Launch Decision, called "normalization of deviance". You get used to violating tedious and annoying safety precautions. Nothing happens, because safety events are rare. So you violate them more, and start ignoring important procedures. Nothing happens for a long time. You relax. This is great. You have a lot more free time than you thought. Stupid rulebooks. What do those guys know?

Then the crisis strikes. Your reactor gets hit by a tsunami. Your shuttle blows up. People lose their jobs, their savings, their support from their government.  We're supposed to be smarter than that. But, of course, we were smarter than that in 2007.  And in 2001. We still bought houses or pets.com.

It's hard for science fiction to catch this kind of thing. SF is about smart people. And smartness is defined as acting on events in such a way that they change in a favorable direction, and then detecting and feeling proud of that change.  If you are a smart individual, what do you do now? Sell all your stocks and make sure you have enough bottled water? Chain yourself to your Representative's desk until he or she helps in a solution? Write a sternly worded blog post?

I live in a science fictional universe, but am not a science fictional hero. I don't know.

My Readercon schedule

As usual, I was insufficiently enthusiastic in my responses to Readercon's complex panel signup process, and only got one panel--on Thursday, tonight, before the convention even starts. The signup has you rate panels by A+, A, B, and I get the impression that a lot of writers who are savvier than me say A+ to everything they have even the slightest interest in. In my initial run through, I was honest...and then forgot to go back and inflate my scores.

And I knew I had to do that. This happened last year too.

Of course, unlike most conventions, where anyone can gas on about almost anything, Readercon panels tend to require actual knowledge if you are not to make a fool of yourself, and waste the audience's time.

My obvious ignorance is not the reason I did not get on any panels!  That is not the explanation! So don't write and tell me so.

Please.

I do have a couple of other events that don't rely on my knowing anything except my name, and what I have written.

If you want to catch me, here is my schedule:

Thursday July 14

8:00 PM    ME    How to Write for a Living When You Can't Live Off Your Fiction. Elaine Isaak, Alexander Jablokov, Barbara Krasnoff (leader), John Edward Lawson, Terry McGarry. You've just been laid off from your staff job, you can't live on the royalties from your fiction writing, and your significant other has taken a cut in pay. How do you pay the rent? Well, you can find freelance work writing articles, white papers, reviews, blogs, and other non-SFnal stuff. Despite today's lean journalistic market, it's still possible to make a living writing, editing, and/or publishing. Let's talk about where and how you can sell yourself as a professional writer, whether blogging can be done for a living, and how else you can use your talent to keep the wolf from the door. Bring whatever ideas, sources, and contacts you have.

Friday July 15

1:30 PM    VT    Reading. Alexander Jablokov. Jablokov reads from The Comfort of Strangers.

This is an alien sex story. Nothing too graphic, but consider your sensibilities before attending.

Saturday July 16

10:00 AM    Vin.    Kaffeeklatsch. David G. Hartwell, Alexander Jablokov.

David has been editor for most of my books. And, surprisingly, after the miserable sales figures for Brain Thief, he still talks to me!  We're actually just at the same time, not together, but there may be some overlap as a result.

Sunday July 17

11:00 AM    E    Autographs. Walter H. Hunt, Alexander Jablokov, Rosemary Kirstein.

I got lucky, and am autographing with two people I know and like.  Because we'll have plenty of time to talk!

12:00 PM    NH    Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop group reading. F. Brett Cox, Elaine Isaak, Alexander Jablokov, Steven Popkes, Kenneth Schneyer. Members of the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop read selections from their work.

This is the spot for short-shorts, which I seldom write.  But I do have one I wrot a long time ago, which I wil have to remember to pull out.

Tough clueless cop: Nesbo's Redbreast

Scandinavian mysteries had been on a roll recently, and so I have read a few. Recently I read a book by the hot-even-by-Scandinavian-standards Jo Nesbo, The Redbreast, with his detective Harry Hole. As the works of Sieg Larssen show, these writers are all courageous enough to grit their teeth and finally admit that they dislike Nazis. Very daring of them.

The Redbreast actually has real Norwegian fascists fighting the Soviets in WWII.  In the modern day, Hole pursues one of those soldiers, as he bumps off a bunch of people in pursuit of...well, there's no reason to tell you, although I guarantee you will find his goal odd.

What's particularly odd, though, is how incompetent Hole and his fellow cops are. After an early scene where he demonstrates his knowledge and deductive skill by describing what someone must have done with a gun, he pretty much goes to sleep and gets whacked around the rest of the novel like a pinball. He never figures anything out, and never really understands anything.

Despite this, it was a fun book to read--a page turner, as they say. So Nesbo has a gift for promising things--he just doesn't have as much of a gift for delivering them.

Now, I don't need my detective to be Sherlock Holmes, but I do think I deserve one with a bit more on the ball than Hole has. Nesbo is also frustrating because he raises issues, like a juicy case of sexual blackmail by a character close to the case, which gets terminated quite unsatisfactorily, at least for me.

It's instructive for me, since I sometimes think about writing a mystery. You can get away with a lot if each individual scene is suspenseful and exciting, even if the scenes, taken together, don't make a tremendous amount of sense.

Book review: Death at the Crossroads

I love reading mystery novels. Someday I would like to write one myself.

There is a handicap. Not only can't I think like a mystery, I never figure out who did it in the books I read. Actually, I seldom even care. Since mystery novels are about restoring the damaged world, you'd think I would.

Maybe it's because I see mystery novels, or at least the kind I like to read, as a way of investigating a world, a milieu, a culture. What is important to me is not the structure of deceit and justice, but the revelation of character and relationship that comes from the impact of the crime. People's world is disrupted, someone digs through their lives, and everyone behaves more dramatically than they perhaps otherwise would. In disrupting the structure of life, the crime reveals more about that structure than any other approach could.

So didn't mind (much) that the samurai detective in Dale Furutani's Death at the Crossroads doesn't really do much detection. Furutani uses the crime, the discovery of the body of an anonymous merchant found at the crossroads with an arrow in his back, as a way of investigating the tensions in early Tokugawa Japan. There are some entertaining characters, clever stratagems, and an underlying sense of growing oppression as the new regime, which will rule Japan for the next two and a half centuries, tightens its grip.  The detective is a ronin, a masterless samurai, who happens on this crime while pursuing a larger mission, trying to find a lost girl. He is alone, his world and structure of loyalties destroyed.

It's light, quick, and deft.  There are two more books after this one, where the ronin pursues his mission, and I will seek them out.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet": David Mitchell's Neal Stephenson novel

Historical novels are a genre, like mysteries and science fiction. They do have some presumptions. Books like War and Peace and Middlemarch are historical novels, deliberately set in an earlier era.  But the differences between these two books are instructive in thinking about the vastly larger genre we have in our era.

W&P deals explicitly with the big events of the day: the invasion of Russia, the defeat of Napoleon. And it has big shot historical figures as actual characters, like Napoleon himself, General Kutuzov, etc. Middlemarch is set in an era with specific social and economic relations, but (as far as I know), deals entirely with invented characters, dealing with intimate personal issues--more properly large social issues as expressed through personal situations.

And, as I suppose must be mentioned, W&P was written by a man, Middlemarch by a woman, though I didn't consciously think of that when I picked them. Boy's historical novels (battles, kings), girl's historical novels (loveless marriages, frustrated ambitions).

In this taxonomy The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is clearly a boy's historical novel: trade, battles, kidnappings, sinister monasteries. I enjoyed it a great deal.

But, while I was reading it, I felt I was reading a Neal Stephenson novel. It had all those Stephenson features: detailed explications of proto-modern phenomena like bookkeeping, mysteriously well-organized cults with ridiculous obsessions, plucky underarmed heroes defeating well-armed forces through pluck and guile. I love Stephenson (aside from that great Long-Now clock weight of a book, Anathem), but had never thought of him having influence on other writers. He seems too idiosyncratic for that.

Stephenson-style historical novels involve a bunch of people in the past trying desperately to figure out how to be us. They mirror our obsessions and our interests within the physical constraints of their environments.

In that sense, Jacob de Zoet is not entirely a Stephenson novel. Many of the characters do, in fact, think about their world the way someone who actually lived in it would.

But the most Stephenson-like aspect of the novel is that weird monastery cult. Mitchell spends an inordinate amount of time on this science-fictional organization. Like all Stephenson cults, both good and evil, it is well-organized, secretive, and obsessed. In this case, it has an organization of captives, and one of captors. No need to go into any more detail than that. It involves elaborate plots, meetings, rugged geographies, betrayals, and illusions within illusions.

All of it is great fun. I lack the faith in organization (or the mental organization, for that matter) to write a Stephenson novel, but I sure do enjoy reading them.

One more Hanna point to take off with

There is a scene in Hanna, which I wrote about yesterday, that is the point where the movie, frightened of its daring, returns to its technical chase-scene roots.  The epicene, workout-suit-clad, Eurotrash henchman who has been pursuing Hanna finally catches up to her and the family who has, unknowingly, been protecting her and, knowingly, nurturing her.

To avoid spoilers I won't say exactly what happens next (surely that that much happens is no surprise at all). But a person from the normal world, our world, the one we actually live in, gets a glimpse into Hanna's world, the "normal" world of the movie, with its operatic intensity. The scene ends almost before it begins, and so seems gratuitous, but I saw the potential of a collision of worldviews, where neither has an obvious advantage: austere dedication versus modern tolerant hedonism, as shown through two engaging characters who have a strong bond with each other.

Ah, well, they didn't do it, so I'm free to.

Our standard killing machine: Hanna

Over the weekend, I caught the movie Hanna with some offspring.  It was the kind of movie I like, in that it had some interesting stuff in it, but really was a complete mess and made absolutely no sense, so I can take the thoughts it stimulated and use them somewhere.

There isn't much to give away about the movie.  Hanna is a teenager being raised somewhere above the Arctic Circle by her father, and taught to kill reindeer and fight with her bare hands. The rest of her knowledge of the world comes from a McGuffey's Reader-like one-volume encyclopedia.  Supposedly this is going to make her able to defend herself in the vicious world outside.

For no good reason, it does. Father and daughter go off separately, and kill many people.  They kill as many people as the supposedly bad character, acted by Cate Blanchett purely with her cheekbones, does, and with as little concern for their humanity.  Hanna treats the helpful people she encounters out in the world purely instrumentally, and abandons them to the violent fate they get for helping her out.  Both father and daughter are soulless, emotionless automatons, with no visible goals.

Still, we follow them, particularly her, because the movie is beautiful and fun to watch, and the action scenes genuinely suspenseful.

At one point Hanna encounters a quirky family of ex-hippie parents, sardonic and sophisticated teenage daughter, and warmly sensitive son. The actors are brilliant, their personalities are vivid, and the movie promises to take off and break through the "targets in a shooting gallery" dynamic with which such movies treat regular people (that is, us)--until it totally feeps out and doesn't.

It was as if the screenwriters discovered humanity by accident, were on the verge of creating meaningful art, and freaked out. It's genuinely odd, but in that oddness is my stimulus.  What is it like to be the human who encounters the martial-arts-trained obsessive who treats me as a disposable piece of stage scenery?

Somewhere in there is an interesting story.

SF's DFW problem

I'm a fan of the work of David Foster Wallace. Not a big fan, mind you. Like any mild DFW fan, I prefer the journalism to the fiction, and the short fiction to the long. True DFW aficionados love Infinite Jest, which has so far defeated me--if you want the truth, I don't find the wheelchair-bound French Canadian terrorists funny, and if they aren't funny, they aren't anything. Broom of the System, on the other hand, I found delightful, but I think true fans find it a lesser work.

I occasionally bring up DFW in discussions with fellow science fiction writers. The usual response is disdain and contempt. Sometimes it is bewildered ignorance: "who?" Occasionally, the situation gets belligerent.

Our field is somewhat parochial, but I have to admit, this startles me.

First of all, to progress, you have to steal from other genres and writing styles. DFW is almost impossible to steal from, but something of that paranoiac self-awareness, where you are fully conscious of your own intestinal peristalsis, would be useful in our field. Infinite self-awareness leads to total inaction, a defining state of post-modernity.

I was with two science fiction writer friends recently, and I talked about DIY sous vide cooking--sealing food in vacuum bags and cooking it in a hot water bath to a precise internal temperature, which gives you perfect medium-rare steak every time (130 degrees F), and then searing it to get a nice brown surface. Their reaction?

As it turns out, they both eat their beef well done, and found the idea terrifying and gross.

Not all SF writers are afraid of literary experimentation, and not all eat their meat cooked to shoe-leather consistency because they fear microbes and other gross living things. But: DFW and medium rare steak. There is some kind of deep connection there.

Is science fiction the well-done steak of literature? No wonder some readers find my productions too...bloody.

Actually, this explains a lot.

Confessions of a late adopter

I'm a science fiction writer, but have an aversion to acquiring new gadgets. I get some of them eventually, but not all of them, and tend to have older, less capable models. To give you an example, a few months ago I left my mp3 player in the locker room at my health club...and somebody turned it in to the front desk.

It might have been the wind-up key on the side that disturbed him.

But I did recently get a last-generation Kindle, mostly for travel. I always haul tons of books around, and the Kindle lets me do that with less weight. Even this latest screen is a bit gray, I think, but I do read it.

So, what have I read? Since getting it for Christmas, I have used my Kindle to read:

Willa Cather's My Antonia

Two Charles Willeford novels: The Woman Chaser and Wild Wives

Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native

Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation

Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

The Cather and the Hardy were free, the Willefords were from a cheap five novel set, Cowen is a popular short. The Batuman is the only real new purchase here.

So, not a life changer or anything. But it makes for a nice portable library. I do foresee carrying more of my reading on this thing, but I am fairly on in my habits, and will be haunting used book stores until they cease to exist.

I actually have something to say about each of these books, but I'll have to save that.

Brief Boskone post mortem

Yeah, I know--Boskone was last weekend, and it's already Thursday, and life has moved on. What can I say? It's been a busy week.

Boskone comes just a month after Arisia, in the same hotel in a windswept, crisply redeveloped area of Boston.  But Boskone is about books, is much smaller, and skews substantially older than Arisia.

I see some old friends reliably every year:  Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Rosemary Kirstein, Gregory Feeley, Paul Di Filippo, Michael Swanwick and Marianne Porter, David Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer, Jeanne Cavelos, Allen Steele, Gavin Grant, Karl Schroeder, Toni Kelner, Kelly Link, Alex Irvine, as well as my regular local colleagues.  I also met a few new people I enjoyed:  Jo Walton, David Anthony Durham, Charlaine Harris, and Margaret Ronald (OK, I actually met her at Arisia, but that was just a month ago).

I was moderator on a panel on Urban Fantasy.  I knew nothing about Urban Fantasy, and so was able to ask a lot of dumb questions without exposing myself. It's probably not the subgenre for me, but I learned something interesting.  One question I asked was: what outside-of-our-genre literary works would someone who likes urban fantasy probably also like?  The one answer everyone agreed to was Dorothy Sayers. I happen to love Dorothy Sayers, so maybe I'm wrong and should give urban fantasy a try.

What do people think of that assessment? Any other works that would qualify as urban fantasy cognates?

Incomprehensible mysteries: The Crimson Rivers

I like watching genre films from other countries. Genre, by definition (my definition, anyway) is "preprocessed", accepting certain conventions that reduce mental overhead, so that attention can be devoted to other things. Culture is another "preprocessing", with accepted conventions. To watch a genre film (and nothing is as genre as a genre movie) from another culture is to trip over obstacles that the intended viewers don't even notice.

The utterly incomprehensible French suspense film, The Crimson Rivers (Les rivières pourpres) (2000) is a good test. It's based on a novel, which means the writer had to throw out a lot. Movies often point up the flaws of their source material (David Lynch's Dune is a good example). I can't tell whether that's true of CR, but it makes no sense whatsoever.  Two rule-breaking jerkwad cops are allegedly mismatched (one played by a younger Vincent Cassel, the ballet director of Black Swan), while actually being pretty much alike. It all takes place at a satirical take-off of a grande école, set in the great scenery of the Alps, where tenured professors seem involved in some impossibly long breeding experiment, a metaphor for self-centered French high culture.

Not worth seeing, unless you really want to see Dominique Sanda as a blind crazed nun in a dungeon.  I'd lost track of her since the half incredible/half ridiculous 1900, but apparently she's been working steadily since. Who knew?

Final point.  Why, when a someone is about to deliberately smash you into oblivion with a giant truck, does he always blow his horn first?

My Boskone schedule

For anyone who wants to hunt me down at this weekend's Boston science ficiton convention, here is where I am scheduled to be:

Friday    6pm      Reading: Alexander Jablokov (0.5 hrs)

I'll probably read a chunk of alternate transportation story that is the cover of Asimov's in a month or so.

Saturday  10am     Autographing

Saturday  1pm      Monsters in the City: Exploring Urban Fantasy

Hey, I'm moderating this!  Only noticed it as I was pasting it in here.  What's a good question to ask these people?

Dana Cameron
Suzy McKee Charnas
Alexander Jablokov        (M)
Toni L. P. Kelner
Margaret Ronald    

Saturday  5pm      Cambridge SF Workshop Flash Readings

I don't quite remember how I got on this.  It's my workshop, but I don't write flash fiction, being too long-winded.  I'll probably read a tiny piece of a story about alien sex.

F. Brett Cox
Elaine Isaak
Alexander Jablokov
James Patrick Kelly
Steven Popkes
Ken Schneyer
Sarah Smith    

Sunday    10am     The Spirit of the Place

Oh, for God's sake, who gets up at 10am on Sunday to go to a panel?  "The spirit of the pillow" would make more sense.  After my 10am signing on Saturday, I will know everyone who catches the worm.

Laird Barron
Charlaine Harris
Alexander Jablokov
Darlene Marshall        (M)
Margaret Ronald    

When scenery is so much a part of the fabric of the story that it almost becomes a character. Stories set in localized areas. What does it add to have such intimate settings?

Sunday    2pm      Kaffeeklatsch

I've never done one of these before.  Come help me!

Walter H. Hunt
Alexander Jablokov