a jaunt to THERE and NOW

At Readercon two weekends ago, I was happily munching on my home-made O-nigiri  rice balls, but nobody believed that they I had made them myself.  In fact, it’s pretty easy to make the exact replicas of those tasty treats found in 7-11 stores all over Japan, ii kibun!  But you do need at least two items not usually found in your typical Asian grocery:  rice ball molds, and specialized nori seaweed wrappers with red pull strings.   You will see what these look like in the instructions below.   (Note: you can also mold the triangular rice balls with your hands if you don’t have a mold, and you can use regular nori sheets to wrap them, but they should be eaten immediately.)  These instructions will show you how to make the portable, plastic wrapped rice balls that keep the nori sheets fresh until you eat them…enjoy!

step one:  cook rice and let it cool.  typically I just cook extra rice and leave it tightly covered overnight, then use it the next morning to make rice balls.  you need about 1 to 1.5 cups of cooked rice for each rice ball.  stir about 1 tsp of sesame oil into the rice, fluffing it up a bit.  the oil keeps the rice from sticking to the sides of the mold.   optional:  stir into the rice a small amount of flavoring, like roasted sesame seeds with nori bits and bonito powder.  this just adds a little interest and zest to the rice.

[Read more →]

Gordon van Gelder launched the session by asking the panelists to relate an anecdote about great editing, and Patrick O’Leary started off with a note about David Hartwell.  O’Leary said, “Hartwell grasped the contents of a story I sent him and shook them down to their basic elements, then he tossed them back at me and demanded a rewrite, along the lines of:  Does the main character of this story have to be a monster, a pederast, AND a fire-breathing dragon?  Why not just pick two of those and go with that?”

Brian Francis Slattery pointed out, that even though editors suggestions can often save a bad story, if they get too involved in the writing process, they can edit the story into incoherence.  He cited an example of his own editing in which he so completely rewrote the story that it was both unrecognizable as the author’s style and had, at the same time, become incomprehensible.

Barry Malzberg said that if he had to choose an example, he would cite Horace Gold, “for pulling the Demolished Man out Alfred Bester, which was a great exploit!”

Van Gelder asked, “What about Daniel Keyes and Flowers for Algernon?  Isn’t there a story about Gold asking Keyes to change the ending, and Keyes’ neighbor said to him, if you do that, I’ll go back to my house, get a baseball bat and use it break both your knees!”
[Read more →]

Great fun at this year’s Readercon 2010, which left me with plenty of food for thought!  My stash was nicely replenished with a few dozens books, including some works by Jack Vance, Mack Reynolds and Tim Powers, whose backlist I’ve been catching up on recently.  Speaking of Vance, our friends at StarShipSofa have conducted a fine hour-long interview with him, worthy of a listen.

In the dealer’s room, I have to say that Neil Clarke (of Clarkesworld and Wyrm Publishing) had a terrific rack of cheap books, for which I thank him immensely!  Neil had a signed copy of the rare Fain the Sorcerer by Steve Aylett, who wrote the really strange biography of SF’s mysterious Lint, among other excursions into the bizarre.   Although Neil’s price was really reasonable, it would have cost more than the entire stack of books I purchased at the con… so maybe when I get rich!

Dark Hollow books, along with all their fine supernatural horror selection, had a box of 50 cent paperbacks where I scored copies of Moorcock’s Hollow Lands and Fury by Henry Kuttner.  Thanks kind people!

Also of interest was my conversation with Darrel Schweitzer about my good friend Harry O. Morris.  Darrell said that it was Harry O., in his famous Lovecraftian zine Nyctalops, who discovered both the writer Thomas Ligotti and the artist J.K. Potter.   Although Harry often mentioned various works by Ligotti and Potter in our conversations, he never once bragged about having “discovered” them, in any sense.  So it was really a pleasant surprise to hear those words of recognition from a supernatural horror writer and scholar of Schweitzer’s stature.  Disclosure: I suppose Harry O. “discovered” me too, since my teenage participation in various exquisite corpse poems (with Harry O.) and collages (with Leslie Hall) were published in Nyctalops here and there.   Caveat:  probably “discovery” doesn’t count unless I do something more significant, like publish a novel or painting elsewhere, though, alas…

[Read more →]

Here’s a new resource to augment the Science Fiction Artists Database:  the first version of a mind map about Art Editors who worked for Science Fiction Magazines and Book Publishers.   The clickable version includes sources and links to online references.   If you would like to contribute, see the contact link at the top of the mind map and send us some more info on your favorite Art Editors!

**LINK** Science Fiction Art Editors (mind map) Version 1 [15 May 2010]

From the editorial “Communication Between Minds” by Fred Pohl [Worlds of Tomorrow, Nov 1965]

“Reading Vitus Droscher’s fascinating The Mysterious Senses of Animals (Dutton), when it occurred to us that an experiment Droscher had described could be construed as a proof of telepathy.   The experiments in question were performed by von Holst and Jechorek at the Max Planck Institute.  The subjects were two chickens, connected by a wire and an amplifier that carried a current from the brain of one chicken to the brain of the other, via stereotaxically implanted electrodes.  When the first chicken was exposed to the sight of a dog, the second chicken — completely out of sight and hearing, in another room — fluttered up the wall, squawking in alarm.   Not telepathy?”

[Read more →]

Found an interesting copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Slaves of Sleep at Second Story Books recently.  Kelly Freas painted a knock-out cover for this Lancer Books edition, and I was wondering what other gems by Freas were floating around on some of these old Lancer paperbacks from the 60s.   Although I couldn’t find a complete listing, I did find a smattering of covers, which you can find below the fold.

There’s a decent bibliography of Freas artwork here.  It would be great to find higher resolution scans of the following images, but that’s all I could did up so far.  At least there is a nice big version of Slaves of Sleep on the Internet now, scanned from my copy!  Enjoy!

[Read more →]

Just received a copy of The New Visions, A Collection of Modern Science Fiction Art published in 1981.  I was was surprised and delighted to find one of the 23 artists featured to be Carlos Ochagavia, and to see not only his self-portrait sketch (below), but also his amazing SF Book Club edition cover painting for Niven and Barnes book, Dream Park.

In Ochagavia’s painting (below the fold), what a fantastic and amusingly surreal dragon the anonymous hero is fighting!

[Read more →]

Trouble at China’s largest (okay, the world’s largest) circulation SF magazine, where the editors have united to publish an “Open Letter of protest” against the editor in chief.

Here’s the original:   Open Letter (in Chinese).

I’ve translated the Youth Daily news article below:

“Science Fiction World” turns into a “pseudo-science farce” as editor’s collective seeks to “overthrow the president”

by: Li Fan  (Youth Daily) 2010-3-23

translated by Lex Berman

China’s largest science fiction magazine Science Fiction World, has recently become wracked by infighting. On March 21, the magazine’s entire editorial staff published an open letter on the Internet accusing the publication’s editor-in-chief, Li Chang, of various offenses and seeking his removal from office.  Yesterday, it was learned from relevant channels that the unit in charge of  Science Fiction World (the Sichuan Province Science and Technology Association) has dispatched a team to investigate the sitation.

The open letter claims to be written under the “duress of the last banner that can be raised before Science Fiction World ceases to exist.”  Among the accusations leveled at Li Chang were that after taking office he dropped relations with various authors and instead forced the magazine editors to write the stories themselves; he then demanded that the foreign language editors take on the task of translations into Chinese; and went so far as to make the art editors create the illustrations instead of hiring artists.  Also, for example, he interfered with the advertising to the point of replacing the magazine’s cover with an advertisement for a school.
[Read more →]

Because I never watch television or read magazines,  I am quite slow to notice emerging trends in pop culture.  That is why a had such a shock this weekend when we were driving on a highway ramp towards the airport and a gigantic billboard loomed over me, asking in texting language: “R U Bot or Not?”

[Read more →]

Born in Alabama, the photographer Charles Moore closely followed the civil rights movement with his camera and an open mind.    It’s been said that the photos taken by this former Marine helped shaped the public consciousness of the civil rights movement.   With a keen sense of dramatic moments loaded with iconic significance, Moore laid bare the injustices of his time for all to see.    Moore passed away last week at the age of 79.  Wish we had more like him.  The true definition of the right stuff!

Reading a fascinating conversation between Fred Pohl and Alfred Bester, that took place in Newcastle upon Tyne, 26 June 1978, (published in Rob Jackson’s Inca 5), and was amused by their comments on John Campbell during his Dianetics phase.   Right after that they had a brief exchange on a psychological study of SF writers:

***

Fred Pohl: Some years ago two  psychologists decided they wanted to find out what  science fiction writers were like.  They sent out a  questionnaire to a bunch of science fiction writers  and asked them to answer the sort of questions  you get on psychological testing papers.  How do  you feel about your mother and this and that.  And  from these they prepared a group psychological  profile of science fiction writers.  They compared it  with a similar group profile for some other kind of  writers and for a third group of people.  They  found out that the science fiction writers were in  many ways similar to most human beings! There  were a couple of differences, and one was in what  is called “aggressive” versus “withdrawn”  cyclothymia.

Alfred Bester:  What is cyclothymia?

Fred Pohl: It’s a kind of lunacy.   But the question was not whether you had it, but if you had it which way you  would go.  Withdrawn cyclothymic people are  more or less passive and tend to let things go, and  overlook something that is wrong.  The people who  tend the other way are stubborn and won’t take nothing from nobody, and have their own opinions which you’re not going to change with an axe!  And  science fiction writers were like that – the  stubbornest, most difficult human beings alive!

***

This dialog reminded me of a joke piece that I wrote for CusFussing in 1979 called Science Fiction Brains.  You can see the published illustration for that article above.  I distinctly remember drawing it on a scrap of greenish colored bond paper that I found somebody’s office in Phoenix that summer.   But never before published is a related sketch (complete with characteristic coffee stain), and an explanation of the “lobes of the brain,” which was probably the idea behind the story if the first place.   Somehow the explanation of the lobes got lost in both the inked version of the sketch and the story.  But here it is, for posterity.

Yes, it’s been a strange week!  But thanks to the Mr. Door Tree and his nice posting of Basil Wolverton classics, I think I’ve got my brain back in place.

Having fun preparing for this year’s Boskone Art Show.  Of course it’s crazy to hang my crummy sketches alongside the great artists you will see there, but hey let’s face it, I’m not going to be quitting my day job…so sketching remains a completely fun hobby (thank goodness).  Below are some snapshots taken during the sketching, which I found amusing, especially the one based on a fan cosplay photo related to I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space.

The modern day shaman — the serial start-up entrepreneur — carries around a fascinating collection of baubles and tools. The old school shrunken heads, shark’s teeth, eagle feathers, ointments and herbs are certainly no more fetishistic than today’s gadgets, cables, and protective sleeves.

This fascinating anthropology study belongs to Joi Ito, which I stumbled across by reading up about HTML5 on Hixie’s blog.
go to flickr page

**note, isn’t it kind of cool that we can emulate all the embedded objects related to the photo and then iframe them in Wordpress…!

Compiled from several panels at Arisia 2010, here are some excellent online resources for aspiring writers.   If you have others to recommend, send them along!

online zines:

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/
http://www.ideomancer.com/
http://nossamorte.com/
http://www.electricvelocipede.com/
http://www.shimmerzine.com/

writer’s resources:

http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/
http://ralan.com/
http://www.duotrope.com/