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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!”
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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…

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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]

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!

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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!

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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.
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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.

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/

One thing that has baffled me for many years is the identity of the artist who painted the original covers of the Illuminatus! paperbacks, which were published by Dell in 1975.   The signature, clear as day, reads:  “Carlos Victor“, but I have never encountered any artist of that name in any reference.  Wikipedia credits all the paintings to this mysterious artist.

So let me say it first here:  the identity of Carlos Victor is almost certainly the wonderful painter Carlos Ochagavia!

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At first glance the dark palettes and almost monochrome scenes painted by Lou Feck seem rather low key.  Compared to the startling palettes of his contemporaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you’d think that Feck was either taking a lot of downers or painting with deliberate understatement.  Yet the more I look at his cover paintings, the more I am convinced that Feck was using a masterful and subtle style.

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What a curious thread unraveled from reading the scanned issue of Telepath #1 on eFanzines this weekend. The fanzine, originally published by Arthur Haddon in Dec 1951, provided some tidbits of information about Australia’s first (if short-lived) SF pulp, Thrills Incorporated. This pulp was created by Stanley Horowitz’ Transport Publications following the the success of the weird mystery pulp, Scientific Thriller which appeared in 1948. Thrills Incorporated appeared in March 1950 and lasted for a total of 23 issues, ending in June 1952.

In the pages of Telepath, one of the Sydney Futurian Society fans, Vol Molesworth (1924-1964), interviewed the editor of Thrills Inc which helped to “clear up a number of points that fans in Australia and abroad had been debating.” This may have been a reference to a series of plagiarisations that took place in the first year of Thrills issues. As the editor, Alister Innes, confessed to Molesworth, “In the early issues we were hoodwinked by certain unscrupulous writers who plagiarised American SF stories without our knowledge. As soon as this was pointed out by our readers, we sacked those writers. Our present day policy is to give an author a title and an illustration and get him to write a story around them.”

What a curious way to run a magazine!   On the other hand, there might have been no way for the editors to have known that the stories were plagiarized.   According to Garry Dalrymple (via email), foreign science fiction magazines were treated as contraband in Australia between 1940 and 1950.   As prohibited imports,  issues of SF mags were discovered during routine inspection of the mails, and returned to sender.  This quarantine resulted in a market for locally printed SF pulps of questionable quality.    At that time, said Dalrymple, just about the only new stuff getting through to Sydney (and the Sydney Futurians) were gifts from Forry Ackerman!

On the quality of production that went into those opportunistic Australian SF pulps,  one author put it this way:  “Very often, when the editor (Innes) was running to a tight schedule he would have the artwork already done and hand you a picture, saying ‘Three thousand worlds and a title, old boy, and I do need them by Friday.” One picture he gave me didn’t allow a lot of scope as far as the title was concerned, I thought, so I called it ‘Jet-Bees of Planet J’. He took another look at the picture when I brought in the manuscript, then looked at the title again ‘See what you mean, old boy’. He nodded approval. “Sort of self-propelled by their own farts.’

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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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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.