a jaunt to THERE and NOW

Took a little drive to Pickety Place in N.H., thanks to a gift certificate for lunch from Jesse and Angelica.  Thanks, guys!   This strange business is based on the illustrations of Grandma’s House in the 1948 edition of Little Red Riding Hood, drawn by Elizabeth Orton Jones.   Indeed, the illustrations look just like the actual building and the amazing old tree looming right alongside. [Read more →]

It was at a Boskone panel two years ago that Howard Waldrop and George Zebrowski turned me on to the works of Chad Oliver.  I’m just getting around to reading an old copy of Shadows in the Sun (Ballantine Edition, 1954) which is literally disintegrating page by page as I read it.  What an amazing story this is!  I can certainly see why Zebrowski picked this title for Crown Book’s Classics in Modern Science Fiction series.  The strangely out-of-tune Jefferson Springs, Texas, at first seems to resonate with menace, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Jack Finney’s novel which was being serialized in Collier’s magazine later the same year, Nov - Dec 1954).  But then the story veers into unexpected directions, and though Oliver’s prose is at times poetic, it is always clear and to the point.   For example, here is the protagonist, Paul Ellery, reflecting on the human tendency towards urbanization:

What sane man would prefer to live in the shrieking chaos of a city, stacked in like sardines with his neighbors in the smoke and the dirt and the sweat? What sane man would voluntarily leave the sunshine and the green fields and the quiet companionship of home for a factory and a tenement and the grinding of machinery?

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If, like me, you can’t make it up to Montreal for Worldcon 2009, you can at least graze on the feeds and photostreams.   Enjoy vicariously!

Voyageur, official Anticipation Newsletter

Stross - Krugman dialog [MP3 on Stross blog]  [transcript!]

tweets:

Chris [Drink Tank] Garcia on Twitter

#anticipationsf  #worldcon09 feeds aggregated

some blogs with Worldcon heavy posts:

Irene Gallo [photos]

Lionel Davoust [en francais]

Kate Baker [Sofanaut Podcasts]

Cheryl [Emerald City] Morgan

Amy H. Sturgis [photos on Flickr]

Jenny Rappaport

Kyle Cassidy [photos!]

John [Whatever] Scalzi

yonmei

Cory Doctorow  [Flickr photos]

Pleasantly surprised to discover Indoctrinaire, the first novel by Christopher Priest, a tale of strange foreboding and paranoia, wrapped up in altered states of consciousness and alternate realities.   The protagonist, Dr. Wentik, finds himself forcibly recruited from his scientific research post beneath the South Pole, and whisked away to the Planalto District of Mato Grosso in Brazil.  Both of these places are so far off the beaten track and outside of the ordinary world of human affairs that the novel begins with an eerie sense of dislocation, which is only accelerated into total disorientation as soon as Wentik begins to trek into the strangely deforested zone of Planalto.  His guide, a tight-lipped man named Musgrove, shows signs of mental illness as the story progresses and Wentik finds himself an occupant of “the jail,” under interrogation by an equally opaque antagonist named Astourde.
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How is it that my brother, Po, marooned out in the wilds of the high desert at Canyon Blanco is first one to tell me about the synthetic brain news?    Here I am, wired up to the ears with wireless routers zapping me and servers buzzing underfoot…only a beer cap toss from a major data center…and as far as I knew I had a unique and unreplaceable hunk of gray matter floating in my skull.   Sure it’s a little frayed around the edges, has its foibles, is a beast when it comes to  cold starts on a winter morning, but still–after all it’s been through–it seemed a right decent old brain, as far as I was concerned.  But now we know that these dweebs over at Blue Brain Project have already concocted a rat’s brain, and are madly tuning their skills to create a human brain within ten years.  **BBC Story**

Is it just me, or does that seem like it might not work out according to plan?

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Okay, since you asked, this is a snapshot I found online of Takeshi Ogawa and four Coachella 2008 attendees.   But what I wanted to say is that Ogawa has founded a new website for translators to and from Japanese, 26to50 .   Their mission:

We’re a band of professional translators. Our job is to transcribe 26 alphabetical letters of English into 50 phonetic characters of the Japanese language. Hence our group name was born. This is our venue to promote new writings and new writers, both to our readers and to our publishers. We hope, with the encouragement of our readers, to persuade our publishers to publish our recommendations in Japan. This is our CBGB, or Fillmore in fiction. We sincerely like to introduce new writers and new writings we love to our readers. We’ll do it for free, hoping our publishers like it and decide to publish our recommendations using us as their translators.

It’s been a while since I posted a somewhat sarcastic note about the fine artist, Steele Savage.   Now I feel compelled to follow up those seven images with yet another appreciation, since I really would like to know more about Savage and his career, which as far as I can tell spanned from the 1930s to 1970s.   In this instance, I discovered that what I had assumed to be an amusing bit of fantasy in the cover illustration for John Brunner’s The Long Result, turns out to be the very likeness of the alien who is one of the major characters in the book.   Here is the passage describing the remarkable, Anovel, a Regulan visitor to planet Earth:

“Anovel stood some five feet eight or nine in height, and his resemblance to a horse was remarkable.  He had the same long, rather sad-looking head, and twin nostril-sheaths rose above his eyes to give the effect of a horse’s ears.  His skin was a vivid and beautiful blue, while the mane which ran down the nape of his neck was yellow as a buttercup.”

What a fine rendition of that odd being Savage provided us!  Projecting from the characteristic cloud of faces, in this case a sort of crescent arc that swirls backwards to the left, it is a wonderful picture, indeed.   Without spoiling the story for you, there is also an implication of the “crucial facts,” or kenekito, lurking in the oversized eyes of Anovel.

**Update**  Terrific Photo Spread in Boston Globe - Big Picture

Did SF become irrelevant after the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969?  This panel explored the relationship between the Apollo program and SF, and the ways in which SF did or didn’t live up to its visionary potentials after manned space flight became a reality.  Paul De Fillippo kicked things off by asking to what extent SF inspired the space program?  And to what extent did the eventual breakdown of the manned space program affect SF?

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This panel included Barry Malzberg, Allen Steele, James Morrow, and Rick Wilber.   Rachel Pollack was scheduled to appear, but nobody seemed to know where she was.   By way of introduction, Rick Wilber had prepared some sort of pseudo-clever analogy about the panelists, saying that they were at different places along the timeline.  Wilber said that Allen Steele, having already published 15 novels was someplace near mid-career, and that James Morrow was “settled” into a successful career with a number of major achievements under his belt.  Then Wilber introduced Barry Malzberg, with his long and distinguished career, as “still active in the field…”  Somehow you could sense the fumble on that last note, which provoked Malzberg to pounce into action:

“What a euphemism!” he roared.  “Just say it:  I’m an ancient writer, a washed up writer! Remember when Tom Disch said we’re all just ‘robots wired for sound?’  Well you can just go ahead and say a corpse wired for sound.”

Richard Wilber, recovering, said: “Ok, late career…”

“Autumnal!” said Malzberg.

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It was great to attend my first Readercon.  Like entering a stranger’s house and finding yourself among all of your best friends.   Of course some of them I met for the first time…  like the Crochety Old Fan, Alan, and Kit Reed.  By the way, Kit Reed has a terrific autobiographical sketch, “The Story Until Now,” appearing in the latest issue (July 2009 #251) of  New York Revue of Science Fiction.  Get your hands on a copy, if you can!

The panels were interesting and cerebral.  John Shirley never showed up (who could have predicted it?), but other than that the whole program seemed to go according to plan.  Great to see Andy Gelas in the book shop, and to meet Art Vaughan and John Kuenzig, not to mention being able to pick up a big stack of loot for peanuts.   Stayed tuned for more con reports, coming soon.

Reports:

Egocentrism and Creativity

Novels You Write vs. Novels You Talk About in Bars

Apollo 11 and Science Fiction

This panel, moderated (with immoderate gusto) by James Patrick Kelly, featured Scott Edelman, Eileen Gunn, Gene Wolfe, and Catherynne Valente.  John Shirley was scheduled to participate, but got stuck in San Francisco, where I can picture him flailing savagely around in the airport trying to get on any flight to anywhere!  The premise of the panel was based on Michael Swanwick’s contention that “modesty and a reasonable awareness of one’s limitations have no place in a writing career.”  Yes, that’s the same Swanwick who declared at Readercon one: “With the possible exception of Gene Wolfe, I’m the best writer here today.”  Thus egocentrism…

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This “sample page” appears on Golden Age Comics blog, and makes me wonder if the wolfbane is blooming yet!    The artist, Howard Norstrand, was a prolific inker of horror comics in the 50s.  Thanks, Mr. Door Tree!

Given the opportunity, I just couldn’t resist sending a little micro-chipped token of my affection to my favorite sub-miniaturized phantasm on Mars.  Aloha,  Perky Pat!  How’s the water at Lake Shalbatana?  Thanks to NASA, you too can send a Can-D gram to the red planet!   Don’t be Chew-Z, sign up today!

http://mars9.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname/index.cfm

It is hard for me to imagine, but I am more than forty years old, indeed very close to fifty years!   I know, dear reader, you will be startled to hear such a thing, since all you encounter on my blog are absurdities, and many seemingly juvenile links to old comic books and science fiction artists.   But there is reason encoded behind the screen of disconnected trivia that you find here.   In fact, I am arranging these posts into a secret code; nor would it especially please me to know that you have figured it out…the news is not pretty! These are clues, do with them what you will.   But mind you, time and decades are flashing past like lightning!   Like a cinder snapping out of a burning log in the fireplace, ride this moment like a rocket…

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It’s been raining for a few days here, and I noticed some strange fungus growing on a stump along the Minuteman Bike Path.   Little did I know that two days later it would be erupting into a giant orange patch of alien shrooms!   Yikes.   I don’t remember seeing stuff like this before…

June 10th

June 11th

June 12th

At first, the survey of political systems in Mack Reynolds‘ interstellar spy novel, Planetary Agent X, seems quite whimisical and superficial.  There are planets full of anarchists, and planets crawling with feudalism, nihilism, socialism, and what have you.   There are some playful jabs at democracy, individualism, and even the tyranny of the uninformed voters (a la John Stuart Mill).  The tone is not as playful as Ron Goulart, but definitely not very serious either.   So it came as a pleasant surprise when the protagonist, Ronny Bronston, is given a sarcastic lecture by his handler, the mysterious Tog Lee Chang Chu, on the disasters brought about by “industrial feudalism.”   How strangely familiar!

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