Chrononautic Log

September 30, 2004

I wasn’t going to see the movie anyway. But I did like this bit of criticism, as criticism.

The Forgotten purports to be about loss and grief, but putting aside the dubious agenda and motivations of the Sky-Hurlers we seem to end up with a movie with a curious message: Never Heal, Never Let Go. 5,999,999,999 times out of six billion that’s gonna be the wrong way to respond to the death of a loved one, but The Forgotten manages to dig out that one curious case where remaining forever trapped in your grief turns out to be the way to get your son back. Good for her, but it doesn’t really offer too much to the rest of us.

A lot of works end up with similar curious messages. How many of them are conscious? How many of the wrong messages have you accidentally put in your own work? Hmm. What does your therapist think of that?

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September 28, 2004

Nick Mamatas, in his characteristic, inimitable manner, shreds a Washington Post article on self-publishing.

Here’s another bit of almost good advice: “Hiring an editor isn’t a bad idea; you can post ads on Craiglist.com, Copyeditor.com or local job boards (ask for references, and try out prospects with a few pages first).” Ah yes, you know what kind of editors hang out on craigslist? Me. The first thing I tell folks is that I charge a penny a word. The second thing is not to self-publish. I’ve found that there are very few people willing to pay $800-$1000 for a manuscript dripping with a red ink and an editorial letter that boils down to “Shred this and start over, but in English.”

Ah, what a sweet, sweet dream. I could work a week every other month and still make more than my day job pays me now.

 . . . I’ll leave aside, for now, the massive difference between editing as it actually exists and editing as the average craigslister conceives of it, which involves “checking for typos.” Or, to speak the native language of CL, “typo's.” That ' isn't an apostrophe, it’s a glottal click.

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September 27, 2004

Interesting interview with Tony Wolf, “fighting styles designer” for the Lord of the Rings films, over at Sword Forum. If you’re into that sort of thing. (It’s a couple of years old, so you may have seen it already.)

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September 26, 2004

“Kill Bill”, vols. 1 & 2

• I don’t insist on realistic dialogue. I do insist on dialogue that doesn’t make me want to switch to one of the DVD’s foreign audio tracks.
• If Uma Thurman’s character is “more than proficient in the exquisite art of the samurai sword,” I’m Miyamoto f——in’ Musashi. Maybe if you’re going to mix Chinese and Japanese martial arts, you should have some Japanese on your fight choreography team?
• It’s been twenty-odd years since Pris’ freaky writhing kicking spinning death scene in “Blade Runner,” but Daryl Hannah hasn’t lost her touch.
• David Carradine can act. Who knew?

“Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence”

• Speaking of Daryl Hannah — You might have thought we dodged a bullet when we invented the Internet instead of the Nexus 6, but guess what: we’re gonna get those Philip K. Dick / Isaac Asimov futures anyway, courtesy of Japan’s obsession with robots, dolls, puppets and simulacra. Be warned.
• CG is a pretty good solution to cel animation’s static background problem, but haven’t these guys heard of non-photo-realistic rendering?
• Japanese masculinity has got to work through some serious issues with the female body. Hoo boy. This film takes “radical deconstruction” to new heights of literalized metaphor.

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September 24, 2004

The Three-Toed Sloth pinpoints something that’s been gnawing at me at least since A Deepness in the Sky. The topic: “libertarian capitalism”.

On the one hand, the sanctity of private property and private contracts is held to be a matter of inalienable natural right, guaranteed by the fundamental facts of morality, if not a basic part of Objective Reality; capitalism is the Right Thing to Do. On the other hand, much effort is devoted to arguing that unfettered laissez-faire capitalism is also the economic system which will produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number, indeed for all, if only people would just see it. Natural right therefore coincides exactly with personal interest. A clearer example of wishful thinking could hardly be asked for.

 . . . Now, if the empirical track-record of what are conventionally called free markets is decidedly mixed, there are three courses of action open to the libertarian. (1) Embrace the natural-liberty argument wholeheartedly, and say that we should adopt laissez-faire even when it hurts us, because it’s the right thing to do. Unsurprisingly, moral austerity in defense of liberty finds few takers, though it has some. (2) Argue that the empirical track-record of alternative economic arrangements is actually no better than that of free markets (that, e.g., every instance of market failure is at least matched by an instance of “government failure”), so that’s a wash, and accordingly we should go with the market solution, since that respects natural liberty. (3) Argue that, appearances to the contrary, free markets really are optimal. This option, unlike the other two, is incompatible with intellectual honesty; it is also by the far the most popular, perhaps because it can be well-paid.

(Ob. disclaimer: By linking this quotation with A Deepness in the Sky I do not intend to accuse Dr. Vinge of lacking intellectual honesty. I do think, however, that his discussion of economic relations among Qeng Ho under Emergent occupation did not sufficiently consider transaction costs.)

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John Burdett’s Bangkok 8 is not the best book I’ve read since Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow.*

It is, just at this moment, just for a little while, the only book I’ve read since Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.

* Also known as Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

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September 22, 2004

Today marks, among other things, the eighteen-month anniversary of this little conversation.

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More than eighteen tablespoons of solid paper! That’s how much book you’re gonna get when All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories hits your shelves. That’s 48¢ a cubic inch — 38¢ a cubic inch (or 88¢ a tablespoon — that’s cheaper than saffron!) if you order direct from Wheatland Press.* How can you beat that?

*Plus shipping, handling, and applicable taxes.

Kevin J. Anderson calls it “The year’s best collection of zeppelin stories!” — and he wrote the novelization for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, so you know he knows whereof he speaks. Twenty authors. Four hundred pages. Dozens, nay, hundreds of zeppelins. All for one low price.

All of this is to say that the text and layout are finalized, the cover painting is dry, and some time in the next week we should have the final files to the printers.

And then I am going to get so smashed.

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September 18, 2004

Q: You’re an expert on Henry Kissinger. Is there someone who . . .

A: I’m an expert on the side of Henry Kissinger that lied like most people breathed.

Q: Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration?

A: Oh, believe me, I pray for one (clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward). Wouldn’t it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn’t believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, [that] you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that’s moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There’s no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They’re like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe.

 . . . But these guys, do you realize how much better off we would be if they really were cynical, and they really were lying about it, because, yes, behind the invasion would be something real, like support for Israel or oil. But it’s not! It’s not about oil. It’s about utopia. I guess you could call it idealism. But it’s idealism that’s dead wrong. It’s like one of the far-right Christian credos. It’s a faith-based policy. Only it wasn’t a religious faith. It was the faith that democracy would flourish.

Q:So you don’t think that this is some Machiavellian, cynical, manipulative . . .

A: I used to pray it was! We’d be in better shape.

—Seymour Hersh interview, Salon, 18 Sep. 2004

I’ve been watching “The Fog of War” again — picked up a used copy of the DVD at Scarecrow. And I’ve been thinking. I don’t suppose there’s any way we can get Robert McNamara back?

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Update: Nice quote from Juan Cole:

I have a sinking feeling that the American public may like Bush’s cynical misuse of Wilsonian idealism precisely because it covers the embarrassment of their having gone to war, killed perhaps 25,000 people, and made a perfect mess of the Persian Gulf region, all out of a kind of paranoia fed by dirty tricks and bad intelligence. And, maybe they have to vote for Bush to cover the embarrassment of having elected him in the first place.

How deep a hole are they going to dig themselves in order to get out of the bright sunlight of so much embarrassment?

It would explain a lot.

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September 17, 2004

Pretty good crits from the Fairwood crew last night for “Planet of the Amazon Women”. Only one objection to the misleading title, and only one reader (professing to be, or admitting to be) completely confused. Some folks felt misdirected by the early ambiguity, deceived; it’s not important enough to be worth alienating those readers, so I may tone it down a bit, make it look a little less deliberate. Got corrections on some of my Chinese. (Much appreciated; wouldn’t want to embarrass Wang Laoshi. This gimmick of mine of dropping cultures is trickier than Gibson’s gimmick of dropping brand names, I think.) Couple of motifs that either need to mean more or get dropped. Couple of good suggestions on how to bring back in some stuff that gets dropped mid-story. Comparisons to Stross and Miéville; thought that was pretty astute, those two being probably the strongest recent influences on my ideas of what’s possible in SF fabula, if not syuzhet.

And — I can’t say I’m surprised — they totally caught me on my failure to adequately figure out what the protagonist was trying to do, how it was supposed to be accomplished — and, for that matter (though no one actually said this), whether it succeeded or failed.

(In many respects this story is some sort of fantasy masquerading as some sort of science fiction. What I need to figure out is whether that’s what I want, and if it is, how convincing the masquerade has to be.)

All in all, a pretty good session. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with a story that’s less obviously flawed.

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September 16, 2004

Why do we have to go to the UK for this? Why isn’t it headline news across the US?

Don’t answer that.

Civilian control of the military. Gotta love it.

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September 15, 2004

I should have posted ten days ago about my week in NoCal, but I didn’t, and now it’s all a big blur. But let’s try:

• Shout-out to all my homies at the Locus party.
• Don’t see King Arthur unless you’re, like, a serious Clive Owen fan. (And even then, don’t pay full price.) Also: that guy from Horatio Hornblower should actually play Lancelot some time, instead of just some guy named Lancelot. He’d be good.
• Hero proves
  1. that Jet Li is The Man
  2. that Maggie Chung is a serious contender for The Woman, and
  3. that I’m bored with wire-fighting now.
• San Jose’s ethnic and economic diversity make Seattle look like Omaha. —No, like a middle-class white suburb of Omaha.
• I may have to get a new freezer, so I can justify ordering It’s Its by the case. Unless somebody can tell me where to get them up here.

Now, what happened after that?

Finished revising “Finisterra” and sent it off to Ms. Datlow. (I think I’ve reached some new Zen state in my writing career, because the fact that “Finisterra” is the first thing I’ve submitted since “Five Irrational Histories” last November — and that was invitational — doesn’t embarrass me in the slightest.)

Finished a first draft of “Planet of the Amazon Women” in time to have the Fairwood Writers’ Group look at it for tomorrow evening. That one I expect to be in the ether to Strange Horizons by the end of the month.

Finished proofreading the anthology. So did Jay. So did Kathy Oltion. Hooray for blue pencils and folded-down corners. Guess what I’ll be spending this weekend doing.

Got an initial version of the new Cascade Kendo Kai web site up and runnng, including registering a domain, setting up a hosting provider, the whole twenty-seven shaku.

Helped put on a kendo demo at the Eastside Nihon Matsuri. Got to see the Relnick-senseis’ Katori Shinto Ryu kenjutsu, always a treat. (Also got to see Shorinji Kempo in action and confirmed to myself that if I ever have time, while I’m still in Seattle, to squeeze in another martial art in addition to kendo, short-story-do, novel-do and anthology-do, these guys are it.)

Spent too much time surfing the web while waiting for stuff to compile and deploy.

Saw Stephen Fry’s “Bright Young Things” last night, it reaching this part of the world at long fucking last, and enjoyed it immensely. (I could probably pick holes in it if I wanted to, but I don’t. If it seems at all like the sort of thing you might like, see it. Then let’s talk about it, maybe over some absinthe.) Stephen Campbell Moore definitely gets the prize for Aspiring Writer It Would Be The Most Cool To Be As Cool As, beating out, well . . . hmm. I can’t think of any particularly good films about writers ’ve seen lately.

Had weird dreams all last night about partying hard in the blogosphere. (Dream-Wonkette — who looked kind of like the younger, plumper Janeane Garofalo of “Reality Bites”, and not very much like Ana Marie Cox — was miffed when I told her I didn’t enjoy her blog as much after I found out she was paid to do it.) Probably a result of the previous two items.

Got not enough sleep and ate not enough green vegetables.

As I said, further bulletins, etc.

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