Chrononautic Log

June 30, 2005

Oh, no, not again.

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P.S. Extra points for the first person to correctly explain what’s wrong with the phrase “intrinsically interesting.” Update: And the prize goes to Dave Schwartz.

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Not all of Hugh Macleod’s cartoons (or his pronunciamentos on the future of marketing) work for me, but this one hits close enough to home to be worth posting.

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June 28, 2005

Mr. Westerfeld makes an interesting observation:

Yeah, well, the inspiration of a new story is exciting. But if you wind up not finishing ninety percent of what you start, guess what happens. After a few years you’ll have written 100 beginnings, 40 middles, and only 10 endings. Which means you’ll be great at writing beginnings, only so-so at middles, and you’ll suck at endings. Which means you will almost certainly keep faltering between the middle and the end of every story, which means you’ll keep giving up and not finishing . . . Rinse, repeat.

This is a compelling argument. This would explain why my laptop has a Writing folder with over two hundred Word documents in it, some of them almost old enough to drive, not one of which is the completed manuscript of a novel.

Also, I recently read somewhere someone (Update: Justine reminds me that it was Justine) quoting Ted as saying that he started writing his stories by writing the ending. Which, whether or not it’s true, is a good story. (And would go some way toward explaining “Story of Your Life”.)

I’d like to drop everything and take Scott’s advice, but unfortunately I have bills to pay. So instead I give you the following newly-written endings to unfinished but not-yet-forgotten stories.

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Disorder under Heaven
ca. 1988

The Englishman arranged everything: passports, plane tickets, police reports. He offered Ethan money, a job, a new suit of clothes. Ethan declined everything except a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. Uncle Goro was waiting at the airport.

Ethan went back to the desert. He kept the two pieces of his heart on a cheap steel chain that he found at a thrift shop in Bakersfield.

He never saw Colleen again.

THE END

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Princes of the Sun
ca. 1993

He’d thought of flinging the book from the top of the cliffs into the ocean, or tearing the pages from it and burning them, one by one. But the tide was out, and there wasn’t enough driftwood to make a fire. So in the end he just left the book there, let it fall to the packed sand face-down, with its cover open and its pages crumpled beneath it.

At the top of the cliffs Sand looked back, thinking to see the book lying there on the beach, the water perhaps beginning to lap at it now. But he had climbed too far, and the book was invisible, one more anonymous lump among the piles of drying seaweed.

“So much for you, then,” he told himself; and he turned away and went into the trees.

When he came to the bowshot-wide clear-cut of what had once been the Queen’s Highway and was now no one’s, Sand found a fallen log on the shady side and sat down on it, where he would be in clear sight of the road; and he waited.

As the ghost had said: There would be someone along in a little while.

There always was.

THE END

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In the Light of Eternity
ca. 1997

“Goodbye,” said Felix.

In an instant, the bore pinched shut, the ring of light shrinking quickly down through the Planck scale, leaving only a last, short-lived bubble of exotic particles to mark its disappearance into the quantum foam.

The ghosts, through MESSENGER’s eyes, turned their attention outward. The Milky Way was on fire, the stars of Sagittarius dim through a haze of violet and ultraviolet and gamma, where the leading edge of the Arkystasia’s relativistic attack crossed the heliopause. Inward, the sun was visibly fading, its light shifted clear into the red by whatever futile defense the Crusaders were preparing.

Earth was a dimming blue star.

— We saved everything we could, said Felix’s ghost.

— We saved nothing, said Zheng’s.

The ghost of Yibaihua seemed to look from one to the other, and to Santander’s ghost, who was silent. Then it said:

— You saved enough.

Lights began to flare, here and there in the haze, like match-heads in a fire: comets, asteroids, ships, stations, there was no telling. MESSENGER’s senses began to fail, one by one, or to shut themselves down, in a vain attempt at self-preservation.

In darkness, the ghosts drew together, and waited to die.

— Hello, Felix’s ghost said. — Was that supposed to happen?

— I’m not sure, said Zheng’s ghost. — Maybe we missed something.

— We must have, said Felix’s.

— What is it? Yibaihua’s ghost asked.

— I don’t know, said Santander’s. — Let’s go and find out.

THE END

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June 24, 2005

As long as the Almighty permits intelligent men, created in His image and likeness, to fight in public and kill each other while the world looks on approvingly, it is not for me to deprive the chicken of the same privilege.

— Abraham Lincoln

I’m sure I read Clifford Geertz’ “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” at some point in college. But isn’t it about time we had a Balinese anthropologist come to Louisiana or Oklahoma or New Mexico for a little ‘writing back to the center?’ In fact, if it ever gets off the ground, how about a Balinese documentary on Gamecock Boxing?

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Here’s what Ellis remembers about the trip from Los Angeles to San Diego: not a goddamn thing. Apparently he got to the airport, boarded one of the San Diego shuttles that left every half-hour, flew for 22 minutes and landed. The first thing he recalls is sitting in a taxi, telling the driver to “get to the fucking stadium. I got to play.” Next thing, he’s sitting in the locker room. 5 p.m. By that point, Ellis had enough experience with LSD to know that it wouldn't be wearing off anytime soon; as a, uh, “precautionary measure,” he took somewhere between four and eight amphetamines and drank some water. He walked to the railing at Jack Murphy Stadium where, each time he played in San Diego, a female acquaintance would bring him a handful of Benzedrine. White Crosses. He took a handful of those and went to the bullpen to warm up.

— Keven McAlester, “Balls Out: How to throw a no-hitter on acid, and other lessons from the career of baseball legend Dock Ellis”, Dallas Observer

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June 22, 2005

The straight dope:

Thursday 9:20am: Arrive Heathrow airport

• Me
• Lots of other people

Thursday 12:55pm: Depart Kings Cross railway station

• Me
• Lots of other people

Thursday 6:42pm: Arrive Glasgow Central railway station

• Me
• Lots of other people

So, I know the con recommends taking a coach from Heathrow to Watford Junction and taking the train from there. I’m sure it’s faster, less of a pain in the ass, etc. But I couldn’t find a site that would actually book and sell me the ticket — Virgin Rail would book me direct from Terminal 3 to Anderston, but wouldn’t actually mail it to the States, while National Rail (the all-companies booking service) would intermittently refuse to even admit there was such a timetable. Whereas Rail Europe (which I ended up using) would admit to the existence of London and Glasgow, but not to anything more local.

So: Heathrow to Paddington to Kings Cross to Edinburgh to Glasgow, at a cost of 90 minutes to my arrival time, and a certain amount of aggravation on both ends, but with service that actually works, and at a savings of $140 (on a first-class ticket) over Virgin and National Rail. Which ought to cover the Heathrow Express and a Zone 1 tube fare, at least.

Friday 2:00pm: Kaffeeklatsch (1.5 hrs)

• Me
• Stanley Schmidt
• Lars-Olov Strandberg
• Robert Vogel

I’m guessing most of the folks who show up will be there to try to figure out what they need to do to sell something to Stan Schmidt. (Hey, maybe I should try to find that out, too. I haven’t even submitted anything to Analog in at least two or three years.)

Saturday 12:00 noon: New Writers & the Campbell

• Jay Lake
• Me
• Chris Roberson
• Stanley Schmidt (M)
• Steph Swainston

What is the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award and what has it meant to these finalists and winners? Learn where these writers started and where they've gone since.

Jay, I love you, man, but if this turns into “How the Hugo Awards Ruined My Life” I’m gonna have to kick your ass. I’m just sayin’.

Also Saturday 12:00 noon: Dealers’ room

• Me
• Lots of actual dealers

I’m supposed to man a table in the dealers’ room for the Science Fiction Foundation, who have kindly agreed to let me pimp my books. Only at the moment I’m cross-scheduled against the Campbell panel. I’ll definitely be manning the table at some point, I’m just not sure when.

Sunday 12:00 noon (tentatively): Hugo rehearsals

• Me
• Lots of people who are not me, many of whom are nominated for actual Hugos rather than pseudo- or quasi-Hugos

Presumably this is my chance to stand in front of a mirror practicing how to say “Fuck — I got a Hugo not-a-Hugo.”

Sunday 6ish: Pre-Hugo reception

• Me
• Lots of people who are not me, many of whom are nominated for actual Hugos rather than pseudo- or quasi-Hugos

And this is my chance to try to make an impression on my fellow nominees as a nervous wreck, rather than as a drunk (see below).

Sunday 8:00pm: Hugo ceremony

• Me
• Lots of people who are not me, many of whom are nominated for actual Hugos rather than pseudo- or quasi-Hugos

Nap time for the rest of you.

Monday 12:00pm (?): Hugo losers’ party

• Me
• Lots of people who are not me, many of whom have just won or lost actual Hugos rather than pseudo- or quasi-Hugos

Hangover city.

Monday 12:00pm: Depart Glasgow Central railway station

• Me
• Lots of other people

Monday 5:42pm: Arrive London Kings Cross railway station

• Me
• Lots of other people

Monday 6:00pm: Drop bags off at Paddington station

• Me
• Lots of other people

Or maybe head straight out to Heathrow and my hotel, depending on whether anyone’s around in London for dinner.

Monday 9:00pm: Check into Radisson Edwardian Heathrow

• Me
• Lots of other people

Last chance to enjoy jet lag.

Tuesday 11:55am: Depart Heathrow airport

• Me
• Lots of other people

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From the horoscope section of The Onion, 26 June 2056 (helpfully back-propagated into 2005):

Zelazny (Sept 7—Oct. 13): Even if you do find their unique combination of style, universal competence, ennui, and raw ambition strangely exhilarating, you’d probably be a lot happier if you stopped keeping company with suicidal types, immortals, and suicidal immortal types.

Sound advice. I’ll try to take it to heart.

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Or until they start arguing about the rules.

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June 21, 2005

John Scalzi has a hilarious post calling the NYT to task for its, as he puts it, “mild heterosexual panic.”

It doesn’t seem likely people would confuse me for being gay anymore, what with the wife and child and rural red-state lifestyle and the Wal-Mart clothes, but if they did, you know what I would think? Good. Here in the US, gay is the new British, which is to say that if people think you're gay, they also think you are smarter, wittier, and more fun to be around than the average guy. Sure, you sodomize other men on occasion, but that’s your business, and we Americans always suspected British men had sodomy as a required subject at Eton. So it’s all the same, really. And in the meantime you always say the perfect thing at the perfect moment. You’re more entertaining than cable! And what could possibly be wrong with that? If people know you're a straight guy, on the other hand, they automatically think you’re a beef-witted social dullard in a Linux shirt hoping to delude some poor woman into accepting a sperm packet or two. In a word: Eeeeeeew.

I actually thought the gaydar article — yes, the filename actually is 19GAYDAR.html, and how much more fabulous than that can you get, really? — was amusing and, generally, positive. But John’s still right. Confuse away.

(The “man date” article, on the other hand, was from another planet. Possibly the same planet — hi, Marie! — where a woman eating alone in a restaurant has to worry she’ll be mistaken for a prostitute.)

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June 19, 2005

So, a flurry of “manuscript” pages would arrive, buzzing with brilliant, but often disconnected passages, interspersed with what Hunter would himself call “gibberish” (on certain days) and previously rejected material, just to see if we were awake. “Stand back,” the first line would inevitably say, announcing the arrival of twenty-three or twenty-five or forty pages to follow in the fax machine. Soon there were phone calls from Deborah Fuller or Shelby Sadler or Nicole Meyer or another of his stalwart assistants. We always spoke of “pages,” as in “How many pages will we get tonight?” “We need more pages than that.” “Can you get those pages marked up and back to Hunter?” Pages were the coin of the realm; moving pages was our mission.

— Robert Love, Columbia Journalism Review

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June 18, 2005

And I’m abusing mine, to post something here where it’ll stand out rather than contributing to the conversation — where I’d feel compelled to closely read everything before I post, respond substantively to each substantive point, and type like hell in hopes of getting a word in edgewise before Ben posts another pithy two-page screed that forces me to rethink everything. Instead I will merely remark that:

• I fixed the bitch thing. (My anti-spam software is slow and stupid and, like the rest of my blog, at least two years behind the state of the art. I hate configuring software too much to do anything about that.)
• Nothing the Cabal has posted makes me feel particularly defensive.
• I think the criticism that we (for some fairly wide-ranging definition of us, from which feel free to exclude yourself if you’d otherwise be offended) ought to be writing more far-out stuff and fewer me-too stories is well taken.
• I think Dave Schwartz’s suggestion that the Cabal should apply that same critical eye to their own criticism also bears thinking about. (Meghan, as usual, says it well: “Why don’t you get angry about it? You are making me angry with your lack of anger.”) These are questions a lot of us ask ourselves, or have asked ourselves, somewhere in these early years of our careers, and they’re perfectly valid questions. What they aren’t, is a New Voice in Genre Criticism.
• I think most of the rest of the sentiments expressed over there — the Nebula process is screwed; too much SF is inward-directed and self-referential; SF-ness is defined by fan reaction, not subject matter — sound like places I’ve already been and things I’ve already done. (As Alan said: the unquestioned dichotomy btwn. “mainstream” and “genre” . . . and Atwood . . . aaaahhhhh, head hurts.)
• I waver between charitably assuming that the Cabalists are ignorant of the ongoing conversations around these questions (as ignorant as I was, say, five years ago) and charitably assuming that they are aware of those conversations and sooner or later will find something new to add to them.
• The best way to get attention as an SF critic, cf. Matt Cheney, is to say interesting things.
• I think the names are silly. The Cabalists themselves are on record as saying the names are silly.
• I think there’s something extra-silly — if, like Susan, I was in the middle of an annoying disseration chapter, I might say tedious, instead —, in a way that I’m not sure is intentional, about making earnest, concerned, serious posts about the State of the Field and the Meaning of the Genre under frivolous assumed names.
• So I don’t feel inclined to take the Cabal very seriously, and I don’t have any qualms about responding in a frivolous way.
• Viz., the betting pool.
• Viz., offering a prize for guessing a Clarion class rather than, say, prizes for guessing the identities of individual members.
• Viz., not holding any of this against them if, as, and when their true identities become known.
• If I didn’t think the SF world needed to have more fun, I wouldn’t be Infernokrushing.

Oh, and I’ll try and update the front-page betting records tomorrow, or Monday lunchtime at the latest.

Ben, Alan, one of you go post something about the Author and the Work, or about public and private audiences, or whatever, and let’s go talk about that there. (Hell, repost your comments from the DC thread.)

Remember, flippant is the new ironic.

Comments (27)

June 16, 2005

. . . or at least till after the Hugo/Campbell deadline, but I just ran across it and, given the amount of pressure exerted in the SF world over the last few years to venerate Mr. Harrison, I was delighted to find no less a quasi-authority than Cheap Truth At The Age Of One expressing thoughts so similar to mine.

The Floating Gods by M. John Harrison. Timescape, $2.50. This book is called In Viriconium in Britain, but was stupidly retitled for American release, presumably because Timescape believes we are boneheads. It’s the third book in a sword-and-sorcery trilogy that includes The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings.

It’s clear that a different but allied form of decadence [different from, and allied to, that of Jack Vance’s Lyonesse] has struck Across the Water. Its trademark is not perversion, but exhaustion. The Pastel City rejoiced in such sprightly characters as Tomb, “the nastiest dwarf that ever hacked the hands off a priest,” whose rotten malevolence was a welcome relief from Harrison’s sometimes stifling meditations on spiritual decline.

The Floating Gods has no such characters. It is set in a city smothered under a nebulous Plague Zone. Possibly Harrison has spent too much time in Brixton. Despair seems to have been printed across his eyeballs in letters of fire. The Floating Gods is a relentless exercise in total, stifling futility; it is one long, gray, debilitating dream.

Harrison’s extraordinary talent merely crams the reader’s head more firmly into the bucket. It is impossible to read this book without considering suicide. It is painful to read; painful even to think about. Let’s hope to God something happens soon to cheer him up.

No sign of that, alas. Though I’ve heard Mr. Harrison claim that people who find his work depressing just don’t get the joke.

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God, I ♥ the email. Only in this day and age could one generation’s pseudo-zinester criticism manqué find the bar to finding and citing the previous generation’s rants so profoundly lowered. In fact, someone should start a Cheap Truth blog, in persona as “Vincent Omniveritas”, in the manner of Pepys and Caesar. Crush and burn the artificial categories of “past” and “future”!

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And further convince me that we’ve tapped into something that’s not only seriously funny but hilariously serious:

It seems almost banal for me to say — as if it’s news to anyone — that there’s something of a tendency for put-upon geeks to revel in revenge fantasies of intricate detail, imagining sublime immolations and sledgehammers upon skulls . . .

But that’s not infernokrusher, to my mind; infernokrusher doesn’t give a shit about such petty rationales as revenge. Infernokrusher takes that little posturing puerile ego in its black trenchcoat out behind the bike sheds, gives him a cigarette and says, settle down, pumpkin. It’s no fun blowing stuff up if you do it out of anger.

No. Infernokrusher finds that sorta psychological self-abusing and self-excusing wish-fulfillment wank just . . . well, dull.

— Hal Duncan, “Why Do I Infernokrush?”

(H)al, I think you’ve just posted either the introduction to, or the lead-off essay for, the first issue of Burn Ward: Dispatches from the Infernokrusher Frontier.

Comments (1)

June 15, 2005

. . . is what I would think we should call ourselves if we were a performance troupe and not just some folks who like to dress up and hit things.

But, anyway, as long as we’re just some folks, ever since Lisa showed me a few tricks at last year’s WFC, I’ve been feeling envious of these friends of mine who are learning how to kill people with their bare hands and not just with a thirty-inch razor blade. And ever since Wiscon I’ve been feeling unusually motivated about all sorts of stuff (though not the damn planetary romance, which is why I was whining about time travel yesterday afternoon — I was working on the gonzo space opera when I shouldn’t have been). So yesterday I finally got around to checking out Shorinji Kempo Seattle, and next week I’ll be starting lessons. Further bulletins as events warrant.

But in the mean time, thanks to Greg and Jenn for agreeing to kick my ass if I didn’t do this.

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Update (15 June ’05): So, I went last night and it was a blast. The people were friendly and patient. The warm-up exercises were challenging without being brutal. The footwork and the actual punching and kicking and stuff were confusing at first, but by the end of practice I think I was starting to get the hang of it. (And an eleven-year-old girl told me I was doing pretty well for a beginner, so it must be true.) I could easily have gone on for another hour.

The hardest thing for me, personally, is probably going to be learning to sit crosslegged without falling over.

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June 14, 2005

Okay, this weekend I’m writing an irrational history featuring Alien Space Bats.

Poor writing is often criticized for its lack of plausibility. These attacks are usually phrased in terms of the need for “Alien Space Bats” or ASBs as the motive force behind the change. For example, “Well, Alien Space Bats could land the German army in Wales.” The use of the term Alien Space Bats has been expanded to include handwaving difficulties in order to get to an interesting discussion.

(Wikipedia, soc.history.what-if.)

Figure 1. Alien space bat in captivity.

In fact, I might make ASBs a regular feature.

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June 13, 2005

I’m not going to bore you with the details of the output from the Amazing Meganame Generator, but I will say that “The Twitchy Aleph” is an all-right band name, in an art-school, collar-and-slacks, nostalgic-for-CBGBs kind of way.

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June 10, 2005

Jamie Zawinski, old-school hacker, nightclub owner, author or co-author of XEmacs and xscreensaver and various versions of Netscape, has finally punted on Linux in favor of MacOS:

Remember last week, when I tried to buy exactly the same audio card that 99.99% of the world owns and convince Linux to be able to play two sounds at once? Yeah, turns out, that was the last straw. I bought an iMac, and now I play my music with iTunes.

This took . . . let me see . . . just about zero effort. Well, I still have to go buy some longer audio cables, but that's it.

I plugged a mouse with three buttons and a wheel into the Mac, and it just worked without me having to read the man page on xorg.conf or anything. Oh frabjous day.

Go ahead and say “I told you so” if it makes you feel better. . . .

Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.

Comments (3)

June 7, 2005

. . . well, lots of people, really. Off the top of my head: David Peoples, Greg Bear, and especially Gene Wolfe. Plotting this time travel crap is hard.

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June 6, 2005

I was hoping these would be ready in time for WisCon so everyone could meet the new, measurably less unhip Me, but no such luck.

Figure 1. The author, hoping he doesn’t have to start reading R. Crumb now

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Update: It’s kind of amusing what the glasses are doing to my self-image — I guess this must be how women feel when they get new haircuts. At the moment I’m sitting in the King County Regional Justice Center (they have wi-fi — whee!) waiting to get called up for jury duty, wearing my new specs and my Black Spot sneakers and my Cold War Supervillain shirt and my blue blazer, in persona as an up-and-coming science fiction writer. (I feel like some sort of intermediate stage between my ordinary self and that woman who showed up for Whitewater jury duty in a Starfleet uniform.) (Google, google . . . aha. “Barbara Adams.”)

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June 5, 2005

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June 4, 2005

“AD 1937” is up over at Irrational Histories. If anyone wants to fund an epic 60-episode retro-space-adventure TV series using this as the back story, call me!

Figure 1. De Havilland D.H. 88 similar to that flown by Eric “Dusty” Blair during the Spanish Civil War.

Comments (0)

Update: Added Alan and Susan.

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So, at some point the Flickr police may decide that I am actually a photographer and not, say, a plagiarist or a graphic designer or an illustrator or a pornographer, but in the interests of instant gratification (mine, that is):

Figure 1. Alan DeNiro: Island of sanity in an ocean of madness

Figure 1. Susan Marie Groppi knows more than you do

Figure 1. Benjamin Rosenbaum rocks the house with “99 Luftballons”

Figure 1. Christopher Rowe in a Landscape Between Drinks

Figure 1. David Schwartz (with someone else’s drink)

Figure 1. After the music. From left to right: Susan, Matt, David, Darja, Meghan, Ben, Alan

Figure 1. Meghan McCarron reads from “Close to You”

Figure 1. Susan and Matt imitating, respectively, Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock

Click, as they say, to enlarge. More to come as I have time to suck them from the camera. I tried to get as many Twenty Epics authors as I could, but I failed to photograph the mysterious and elusive Yoon Ha Lee. (Which is too bad, because on at least one of the occasions I missed she was wearing a gorgeous outfit.) I will have to get quicker on the digital-camera draw.

[wiscon]

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Due to a packing error, it looks as though I’ll be carrying my laptop back to Seattle in its natural state; so it occurs to me that I ought to get this into the Google caches and the Wayback Machine before I go, for posterity.

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Update: Added slogan, courtesy of Mike Ford.

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Notes toward an Infernokrusher manifesto

Slipstream, ultimately, is just a wussy term. We should be drawing names less from wishy-washy words (slip, stream) and more from monster trucks (krusher, inferno).

— Meghan McCarron

Literary excellence through superior horsepower.

— John M. Ford

Catch phrases

• Explosion is the new transgression. Demolition is the new deconstruction. — Benjamin Rosenbaum
• How far is the distance between infernos and krushing? — an Infernokrusher koan by Dora Goss
• Instead of “Well, where are we slipping? Are we beaver-like dam builders, or just clumsy waders?” we can now ask “Are we glad things are on fire? Do we like to Krush?” — Meghan McCarron
• More than the death of the Reader, Infernokrusher prizes the sudden, violent dismemberment of the Reader
• Monster truck fiction — ‘soft infernokrusher’ — rolls across genre boundaries . . . and krushes them
• Infernokrusher fiction explodes stagnant genre conventions, e.g., that it’s not okay to have all your characters run over by a monster truck in what would seem to be the middle of the story
• Infernokrusher is a violently anti-materialist movement, regardless of the materials involved
• While other attitudes to art yearn to communicate truths, to move people, to challenge, or to entertain, infernokrusher art wants to blow stuff up
• It is important to note that an infernokrusher sensibility does not require literal infernos or crushing
• Core Infernokrusher fiction would never forget to fill up the tank. — Karen Meisner

Redefinitions, subgenres, philosophemes

• slipstream -> proto-infernokrusher fiction
• slipstream : infernokrusher :: uniformitarianism : catastrophism
• Elemental truth in infernokrusher fiction: Nature crushes stuff too
• Religious truth in infernokrusher fiction: God likes to blow stuff up
• Innocence in infernokrusher fiction: e.g., eight year olds natural krushers
• The ultimate ambition of infernokrusher art is to blow up the world
• Heretical spinoff: slow infernokrusher fiction
• Important subgenre or trope in feminist infernokrusher fiction: blowing up Barbie
• Infernokrusher critiquing involves burning manuscripts and melting them to slag (the more positive reviews are more explosive)
• Resolved: Hot pink — color of infernokrushing

Pieces, presses, publications, organizations

• Ignitrix: (1) a goth, feminist Infernokrusher ’zine (2) sobriquet applied to Meghan McCarron as coiner of the term “infernokrusher”
• Thrown Down A Well Still Burning: a moody, “soft infernokrusher’ poetry ’zine
• Burning Hammer Review: Academic “soft infernokrusher” journal, probably from the University of Pittsburgh
• Burn Ward: Dispatches From The Infernokrusher Frontier: an anthology of Infernokrusher criticism
• Monster Truck Press
• Twelve Ton Press
• Megaton Press
• Swan Inferno!!!!!: the canonical Infernokrusher Ballet
• Blowtorch!: the canonical Infernokrusher Broadway musical
• Hammer and Napalm: Infernokrusher eating club at Princeton
• McSweeney’s #27 — the Infernokrusher Issue: comes soaked in gasoline, with a match

Deviations and faux-infernokrusher tropes:

• infernoes/krushing only as metaphor
• infernoes/krushing as resolution rather than violent irruption — trappings, but lacks sensibility

The infernokrusher coat of arms

• Monster truck, in flagrante, rampant
• Motto: Da ogne bocca dirompea co’ denti un peccatore

The first Infernokrusher poem

I blew up the plums
that were in the icebox
and which you were probably saving for breakfast
forgive me
I like fire

— Dora Goss

[wiscon]

Comments (67)

June 3, 2005

Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.

Comments (2)

It was only a matter of time before someone rammed Infernokrusher into the Mundane SF movement, but Hal Duncan has done it with exceptional style and grace:

The Mundanes say:

That interstellar travel remains unlikely. Warp drives, worm holes, and other forms of faster-than-light magic are wish fulfillment fantasies rather than serious speculation about a possible future.

We of the Infernokrusher Movement say:

We laugh maniacally in the face of serious speculation. We will have warp drives . . . on our MONSTER TRUCKS! We will have worm holes . . . and bullet holes, and drill holes, and holes punched through the very fabric of the spacetime continuum by the giant fist of MECHAGODZILLA! These are not wish fulfillment fantasies. These are metaphors for the destruction that is an integral part of every possible future.

And more importantly, they’re fun.

This Is What We’re Saying.™

Because Infernokrusher is all about the fun.

Comments (4)

Whatever it is, this Tower is an easy target for a riled drunk, but not an actual problem in modern American literary fiction any more than it’s an actual entity.

— Christian Bauman (Via Gwenda)

Comments (3)

June 2, 2005

Karen Meisner is the winner! (I’ll put it in the mail this weekend, Karen.)

I could swear I posted this from Madison, but I must have spaced on hitting the “Save” button: I will send, at no cost to the recipient, my surplus* copy of Justine Larbalestier’s excellent The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction to the first person who promises to use its power only for good.

* I can really only read one copy at a time. And now I have a signed one.

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The critics’ word on “Amazon Women” is starting to come in.

• SH boards — I particularly like “Anonymous’” comments on the story’s second half
• Tangent Online review (by Lois Tilton)
• LitHaven post (by Simon Owens — thanks!)

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June 1, 2005

At some point my co-workers are going to notice that I’ve been back at work for five hours and all I’ve done is surf the blogosphere trying to prolong my WisCon experience.

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The inimitable Mr. D.S. provides the quintessential and definitive chronicle of this year’s PlausFab-Wisconsin.

[wiscon]

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