Chrononautic Log

February 25, 2005

Lincoln College, my alma step-mater, has put Brasenose* up for sale in order to make “space for a new bar/sauna complex.” You don’t get the Radcliffe Camera, but you do get a nice view of it. Well worth ten million quid, if you ask me.

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*Familiar to some of you Connie Willis readers as one of the two Oxford colleges lucky enough to have their own time machines.

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February 24, 2005

The latest history, for your perusal.

On the one hand, it seems like writing one of these shouldn’t take four hours. On the other hand, maybe if I did this more often it wouldn’t take four hours.

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I’ve just heard from the inestimable Mr. Hartman that Strange Horizons will be running my novelette “Planet of the Amazon Women”, probably some time this summer. Thanks a million to everyone who helped me out with this one, and especially to the fine folks at the Fairwood writers’ group.

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February 23, 2005

Aside from one C on an unsuccessful experiment with an alternative essay structure, I mostly wrote A-quality papers for my high school English classes. The actual grades,, though, were often Ds, since I usually couldn’t be bothered to turn the papers in till two or three weeks after the due date. All of which is to say that I’ve already anticipated all of your calumnies, and I am unmoved.

Still, I do need to get back to doing my job. So tomorrow look for The First Year of the Reign of Ur-Nungal (2574 BC).

(In the mean time, go interrogate some boundaries or something.)

And speaking of high school, my alma mater seems to have decided that my literary accomplishments are worth a write-up in the quarterly alumni magazine, with accompanying photograph. Not having an accompanying photograph, I talked Lara into coming out this weekend and taking a few Snicketesque snapshots. So if any of you didn’t already know what I look like, now you do. (You can even pretend I dress that way all the time, if you like.)

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February 17, 2005

Am I a bad person if I give up reading a story — a published story, that is; I’m not talking about reading subs as an editor — after the first paragraph, because I can’t read the text for the subtext, because the subtext is shouting

I AM A SCIENCE FICTION STORY!

NOT ONLY THAT, I AM A “HARD” SCIENCE FICTION STORY — BY WHICH I MEAN ONLY THAT I WILL CHEERFULLY VIOLATE P.O.V. TO POUND INTO YOUR HEAD EVERY DETAIL OF EVERY GADGET, NO MATTER HOW BORING THAT GADGET IS, OR HOW DISTRACTING SAID POUNDING IS FROM WHATEVER ELSE IS SUPPOSED TO BE GOING ON, NOT THAT I ACTUALLY HAVE ANYTHING INTERESTING TO SAY ABOUT SCIENCE.

IF YOU’RE NOT READING ME WITH A COMPLETE SET OF 1940S HUGO GERNSBACK READING PROTOCOLS, THEN NUTS TO YOU, YOU WEAK-MINDED HUMANIST PINKO LIBERAL!

Am I wrong in red-lining stories that make it look like the author hasn’t read anything outside the genre since Huck Finn in high school, and that even then they didn’t pay attention? Or has the minimal set of professional fiction writers’ tools still not expanded at all beyond grammar and punctuation in the last three centuries?

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If I could pick one of my personality flaws to eradicate (others of you who know me might choose others), it would be this one: When I fall behind on something, my natural reaction is to avoid thinking about it, let alone doing anything about it, and so fall even further behind. Case in point: it’s time to admit there won’t be an Irrational History this week. I’ll try to make it up to you.

Meanwhile, you can read this Iain Banks interview on Salon.

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February 15, 2005

(No, not Downing Street. — Okay, I’ve been watching too much Ian Richardson the last couple of days to even think of that.)

No, just wanted to mention that All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories made SF Site’s Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2004: Editors’ Choice, tying Zoran Zivkovic’s The Fourth Circle for the #10 spot. Not bad company to be in, at all.

Further proof that our authors rock.

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And running late on a couple of things. Further bulletins as events warrant.

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February 8, 2005

“Showa 20 (AD 1945)” is up over at Irrational Histories. It’s a little long, but (I think) it’s not too bad.

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February 7, 2005

To the five and one-third of you who have been breathlessly awaiting the first all-new installment in the Irrational Histories series: Please exhale. I did mean to have it up today (of course), but I planned badly. I intended to get it done at the Fairwood marathon on Saturday; but I didn’t realize that writing these is, in one important respect, the polar opposite of writing most of my other stuff — it can only be done while surfing the web. (Or possibly in a good library, but that would take too long.)

I did get the bones of the piece wired together this weekend, but now I have to flesh them with facts — or, as we here at the Institute for Applied Chrononautics like to call them, “facts.” I didn’t have time (or “time”) to do that yesterday, so: this evening.

“Showa 20.” Stay tuned.

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You’d think somebody would have coined one, if not the Greeks or Romans then some classics-obsessed European educator of the 19th century: “the sin of confusing what you said with what you might have meant to say if you had known in advance that you were going to get in trouble.” It happens a lot, and there should be a word for it.

(Phenomenon itself identified by Nick Mamatas.)

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February 4, 2005

I can’t believe the NYT obituary for Ossie Davis doesn’t mention his fine work in Bubba Ho-Tep.

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February 2, 2005

For those of you who missed this exchange in the comments on “A Note To Writers”:

JON HANSEN: You’re just letting the subs pile up? How come?

Delayed due to the illness, or have you already lost the thrill of slushdiving?

ME: Couple of reasons. Since Susan and I are collaborating at long distance, reading the MSS as they come in would involve a lot of photocopying and extra mail costs, whereas if we wait till the end of the submission period I can just take a few days off, fill the trunk up with envelopes and drive down to California. Plus, it’s just easier to spend a couple of days going through the whole stack than to spend a few hours on it every week.

But in general, as an editor, I think it’ll be better to wait till all the stories are in and then judge them on an equal footing. And as a writer, I want to discourage rejectomancy — particularly of the “I haven’t heard anything, but Bob’s already got a rejection notice — they must like my story!” variety.

It’d be different if I was running a magazine — then it’d be rolling acceptances and rejections, and worry about fitting the acceptances into the publication schedule later.

(Still, at some point soon I’ll have to start at least opening envelopes and noting down names and titles and word counts, or the bookkeeping is going to get out of hand. At which point I’ll start posting slush reports like I did for ASZAS.)

Anyhow, if you haven’t submitted yet, do not despair. You’ve still got more than six weeks.

And I’d like to again point out that — so long as it’s epic — we will happily consider, in any genre or no genre, plays, poetry, sheet music (with accompanying audio), scripts, storyboards, box scores (with accompanying commentary) architectural drawings, recipes, assembly instructions, creative nonfiction, and anything else that stands a fair chance of reproducing well in black-and-white at 300dpi on cheap paper.

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February 1, 2005

Fig. 1. I liked things better before

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“AD 1848”, the last of the original five Irrational Histories, is up. There are more hazards to international auxiliary languages than are dreamt of in Suzette Haden Elgin’s sociolingustics . . .

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David Levine spotted Sherwood Smith’s very nice review of All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories over at SF Site:

For many more than I, blimps — zeppelins — evoke science fiction of the 30s: death rays, evil Nazi scientists, manly two-fisted heroes, all of them racing about a landscape done in Art Deco, until World War II ended both the zeps and that golden, curiously innocent, age of heroic fantasy.

Several of the stories in All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories try to recapture that spirit, and a couple spoof it. The rest of the stories range in amazing variety, tone, and idea. The two shared elements are zeppelins in some form, and strong writing. Some are idea stories, some character, many are both. And what zeps! At least two stories feature live ones. Flying cities, balloons that attract ghosts, pirate airships — the breadth of vision represented by these authors completely disproves the idea that one-idea anthologies don’t work. This one takes off and soars.

Go team!

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This rant on undergraduate papers has much more application to fiction than it has any right to.

(Courtesy of Making Light. And no, this isn’t a comment on the quality of submissions to Twenty Epics — we haven’t opened any of those yet. It might be a comment on the quality of submissions to All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, but, if you submitted to us and you’re reading this, not to yours, naturally. :))

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