Chrononautic Log: art

September 11, 2006

Fascinating (if you’re fascinated by this sort of thing) discussion of the future of massively multiplayer online gaming over at someplaced called F13.net.

Raph: Yeah, NPCs in a game like WoW clearly deserve the name quest dispensers . . .

Yoru: Whereas NPCs in pen and paper games are kind of central . . .

Raph: Yeah, in WoW, they’re quest dispensers except they’re shaped like meat. Rather than shaped like a terminal.

(Courtesy of Bruce Sterling.)

Also of interest: “Do Levels Suck?” by Raph Koster (the “Raph” in the exchange above, and author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design), which among other things does a pretty good job of convincing me I’ve had most of the fun in World of Warcraft that I’m ever going to have.

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Update: See also “What are the lessons of MMORPGs today?” For instance:

• You never, ever, ever change jobs. If you want to, you probably need to die.
• There is always a demand for couriers and assassins.
• Killing is the only real way to gain people’s admiration.
• If you don’t keep up with the Joneses, you will never see them again. In fact, if you don’t keep up with your friends, you will never see them again either.

As Raph says, it may seem like a joke, but it’s actually a lament.

Comments (6)

September 3, 2006

. . . not necessarily in that order.

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Update (Sun. 9/3) Y’all who posted your original comments in indisputably public places, if any of you would prefer not to have any more attention drawn to them, I can take those down too.

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Just so y’all know, I’m on Central European Time and I’ll be going to sleep in short order, so while, as previously noted, I’m happy to take quotes down at the original poster’s request, this will probably not happen instantly.

Update (Sat. 9/2): Okay, it’s 12:30AM CET (3:30PM Pacific time); I really am going to sleep now. (Don’t be surprised if I don’t have time tomorrow to read every flame you leave this [North American] evening. But I’ll do my best.)

A quick roundup of some of the discussion arising from the recent unpleasantness, divided into three categories:

• Typical
• Depressing
• Encouraging

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Updated: Fixed internal links, added second post from Bear.

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Updated: Added context at Ms. Datlow’s request.

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Updated: Removed Beth Bernobich quote at her request, and added a pointer to the good work she and Jim Hines are doing at bellwether_talk.

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Updated: Removed Raymond E. Feist quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed William Sanders quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed Vera Nazarian quote at her request.

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Updated: Removed Jane Yolen quote at her request.

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Updated: Added link from Shalanna Collins quote to her comments below.

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Updated: Removed Jack Skillingstead quote at his request.

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Updated: Removed Harry Turtledove quote at his request.

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Note: I’ve made public, here, excerpts from several posts from what is technically a private newsgroup, albeit one open to hundreds if not thousands of readers. I didn’t do this lightly. If anyone I’ve quoted would prefer not to stand behind those words in public I will be happy to remove them. Likewise, if my quotation misrepresents what you said, I apologize, and will be happy to fix it if you let me know.

Those of you who think something should be done about this may be interested to know that my access to the SFWA forums has been suspended.

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Typical:

• William Sanders:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Shalanna Collins:

  I think I know what a "GROPE" would look like, and I didn't SEE any naughty patting, touching, squeezing (oops, invoking the Journey song there for a moment.) Nevertheless, a very contrite apology was publicly posted all over the net. ... This was just a momentary tweak, not assault or murder or what-have-you, for goodness' sake. I don't condone sexism or hassling women/men by touching them, but seriously, this isn't some big ponderous Sin.

  (Ellison forums, 2006/08/31)

  Ed.: Ms. Collins doesn’t condone sexism or hassling women/men by touching them — except, apparently, when it’s perpetrated by a famous author. She also seems to be somewhat confused about the meaning of “contrite,” and possibly “apology.”

  Update: Ms. Collins has commented here.

Depressing:

• Beth Bernobich

  Text removed at original poster’s request. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought Beth approved, at all, of what Harlan did, and I’m sorry I gave that impression. I simply found one parenthetical remark she made to be deeply depressing. Beth is on the side of the angels, as you can see at the bellwether_talk LJ community she and Jim Hines have set up to discuss the problem of sexism in the SF community.

• Raymond E. Feist

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Vera Nazarian

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Ellen Datlow (Updated)

  I was offline for a day or two after the con and then when I got back I discovered this whole brouhaha over Harlan's baby schtick -and that's what it was. A schtick of Harlan acting like a baby. Thus, he went up to the mike when Connie called him up -- he put the mike (a round one) into his mouth, swallowing it like a lollipop, Connie took it gently out of his mouth and wiped it off. He gurgled -- like a baby -- and then grabbed her breast like a baby and she smacked his hand off. A few seconds later she kissed him.... Cmon people. Please put this into perspective. It was NOT sexual assault. It was a joke/schtick gone a bit over the top. I was not offended as a woman watching this. I thought it was silly (but yes, I admit I personally thought the schtick funny). I also know that Connie and Harlan have a history of ribbing each other. I've seen it in the past. So please keep the incident in context and calm down.

  (Ellison forums, 2006/08/30)

  Ed.: Ellen, you grew up with these people. You’ve had time to get used to the way they behave and come to terms with it. We haven’t. And I don’t think we should have to.

• Jack Skillingstead:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

Encouraging:

• Ed Champion:

  It’s one thing to goof around at a party — when the people know the other people involved and a little bit of this kind of nonsense sometimes occurs.

  But when a woman goes up on stage and cannot be respected as a writer, particularly a writer who’s as great as Connie Willis, when she must be groped and demeaned as a sex object in front of an audience, then the time has come to re-evaluate the merits of the organization that hosts the awards ceremony, as well as the has-been "legends" who go up to claim and present awards.

  (“Harlan Ellison: The Norman Mailer of Speculative Fiction,” 2006/08/28)

• Gavin Grant:

  Worldcon: sorry, the eejit has put you on the spot and a public statement is needed.

  What’s up with these dirty old men? They’re taking all the fun out of being in the genre and not inspiring anyone with anything but horror and the urge to vomit and throw out their books.

  (“Harlan Ellison: eejit,” 2006/08/28)

• Alan DeNiro:

  It makes me wonder — how must a woman just entering the field feel about this? Younger female readers? What could they possibly think about this? Could they possiblly think anything good about SF/F? As a field? A community?

  (“Down the Rabbit Hole,” 2006/08/28)

• Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

  Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis on stage at the Hugos wasn't funny and it wasn't okay. ... [T]he basic message of Ellison's tit-grab is this: "Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. ... You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will."

  It's not okay. It's not funny. It wasn't a blow against bourgeois pieties or political correctness. It was just pathetic and nasty and sad and most of us didn't want to watch it. It's another thing that's going to stop.

  (“LAcon IV,” 2006/08/28)

• Ben Rosenbaum:

  Here's the context: it seems that a lot of men — particularly, to hear women my age tell it, older, powerful men — in science fiction feel like women's bodies are fair game. Whether it's for a gag, a thrill, or a "sit down and shut the fuck up, bitch", this kind of thing goes on beyond the Hugo stage. A lot.

  As it does in the wider world. A friend of mine who attended the Hugos had just been tit-grabbed by a stranger riding by on a bicycle in the street outside the Hugos the night before. Just for a minute of fun, because she was a woman, he brought her to tears of rage. For her, you grabbing Connie — and Connie's first horrified reaction before she covered beautifully and went on with the show — was the same damn thing, and the message was: you're not safe anywhere.

  . . . Mind, I'm not worried about Connie. For one thing, Connie's no victim, and for another, that's between you and her.

  No, I'm talking about the atmosphere in science fiction. We applauded a sexual assault at the Hugos, and now the web is full of folks saying "what's the big deal? get over it". I don't think I need to tell you that that is fucked up.

  Ed.: At time of press, Mr. Rosenbaum’s open letter has as yet gone unanswered except by one Mr. Goldberg, whose plaintive “What more do you guys want?” is undermined by his less than perceptive “Harlan has apologized profusely.”

  (“What I Told Harlan Ellison,” 2006/08/28)

• Elizabeth Bear:

  It's not just the tit-grab. It's also poking Rachel in the stomach uninvited.

  When I say "This is so not okay," I mean the pattern of treating women as if their personal space is not sovereign.

  Rachel and Connie are both strong women, and more than capable of standing up to Harlan. They get to decide how they want to respond to a given incident directed at them. (And both seem to have.) But I think, as a community, we need to say "This type of behavior is beyond the pale and will not be tolerated."

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/29)

• Zoë Selengut:

  ...for fuck's sake, this is not just another "being a jerk" incident. ... It's a whole universe away from mere snottiness, drama-queenage, or provocative whatever. This is disgustingly sexist behavior, and it is not okay to class rank sexism under the jerk umbrella, as if it's something we'd all do if we lacked social graces and let our id take control. Being a rude and abrasive person is one thing, and treating women's bodies like public property is another.... It drives me nuts to see this classed in the same category as other amusing Ellison anecdotes (I admit, I do find a lot of them amusing, or did.) It's not. the same. thing.

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/29)

• Jane Yolen:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Susan Marie Groppi:

  I think a lot of people might be misunderstanding the outrage here — it's not just about what happened to Connie at the Hugos. It's about what's been happening to women in this community for a long time now. Pretty much every woman I know has a story of being on the wrong end of exactly that kind of inappropriate behavior. Taken individually, each incident is just a thing you brush off and move past, in the aggregate they add up to a big goddamn mess.

  (LiveJournal comment, 2006/08/30)

• Harry Turtledove:

  Text removed at original poster’s request.

• Meghan McCarron:

  And will this be the only time we talk about behaviors like this? And will we just talk about the most visible, shocking examples, or will we dig down into why their is an environment in our genre and at our conventions where this seems acceptable? ... I've seen variations of 'dirty old man' thrown around a lot in these discussions, but when those dirty old men are gone, I'm not exactly confident that women in the genre will no longer be treated in ways designed to make them feel like objects.

  (“On Harlangate, briefly,” 2006/08/31)

• Elizabeth Bear:

  What we are witnessing is the dying convulsion of a certain kind of privilege. And as in any case where somebody is having an unfair advantage taken away, many of the ones who have come to rely on that advantage are pretty upset about it, and are going to be bitter about lost dominance.

  It may take about a hundred years to change society. But no matter how angry many of us are that men will still attempt to assert social and sexual dominance over women in a crude and obvious fashion, the fact of the matter is that a sea-change is underway. And every time somebody says "Hey, that is not okay," and other people back him or her up, we get a little closer to equality.

  (“What we are witnessing,” 2006/09/01)

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For my own part: This is just not cool. It’s not “not cool if” (as in, not cool if Connie wasn't in on the gag); it’s not “not cool because” (as in, not cool because Harlan has a history of bad behavior); it’s just fundamentally not cool.

And the fact that so many people have rushed to defend it, or minimize it, or attack the people who’ve called bullshit on it, says more about the unreconstructed state of our field than the original incident.

And that is what’s gotta change.

Comments (195)

August 30, 2006

William Gibson:

Readers, recently, ask: What are these things “really” like?

Well, really, you the reader are expected to do a bit of imagining on your own; you see black marks on white paper, interpret them, and form an image. Part of the writer’s task is in judging whether you’re being given too much information or too little. As a reader of sf, I often felt I was being given too little, and that the writer probably wasn’t bothering to form that detailed an image in her own mind. Part of my initial urge to write sf grew out of a frustration with that, leading to what Bruce Sterling (I believe) deemed “the hyperspecificity of the cyberpunk style.”

Comments (0)

In no particular order (but numbered, since I’m tired of bullets):

1. This old post of John Clute’s. Keywords: uncanny, marvelous.
2. Ben et. al. Keywords: Irrealist, fantastic, joke, label, magical stuff.
3. Matt Cheney, in the YA slapfest. Keywords: ghetto, groupthink, Frankenstein, secret (superior) history.
4. Hal Duncan, in the same slapfest. Keywords: plot, meaning, “central metaphoric conceit.”
5. Hal again. Keywords: aesthetic form, commercial formula, arbitrary.

Comments (3)

So, I know that quite a few of my readers know a hell of a lot more about YA than I do, having, e.g., written a bunch of it, and certainly having read a bunch of it. (I’ve only read maybe half a dozen YA books in the last half a dozen years, not counting Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket.) So — educate me? Please? Three questions:

1. What one* YA novel should I read, as an example of what you like about what’s currently going on in the genre?
2. What one* popular YA novel do you think I shouldn’t read, on account of it being way overrated?
3. What lessons should somebody writing about/for not-so-young adults take away from what’s going on in YA now?

P.S. Contemporary genre YA, please, not Twain or Salinger.

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* Yes, I know it’s unfair. In a pinch, something like “the Midnighters trilogy” can pass for one book. “All the Weetzie Bat books” can’t. (And “anything by so-and-so” is not all that helpful.)

Comments (15)

August 27, 2006

I figure right now, when everybody down in Anaheim is still riding high, is as good a time as any to ask . . .

Comments (5)

August 24, 2006

Spread it around:

Girls and Science: Call for Proposals

The Feminist Press, in collaboration with The National Science Foundation, is exploring new ways to get girls and young women interested in science. While there are many library resources featuring biographies of women scientists that are suitable for school reports, these are rarely the books that girls seek out themselves to read for pleasure. What would a book, or series of books, about science that girls really want to read look like? That is the question we want to answer.

You’ll find several requests for specific proposals at our website. One calls for scientific detective stories based on the life, research, and discoveries of real women scientists. Another calls for stories featuring real young women—aspiring gymnasts, ice skaters, actors, dancers--using a knowledge of science to help them become really good at what they do. A third recognizes how popular Manga and graphic novels are with girls, and asks for imaginative new collaborations between Manga writers and artists to create adventures about girls who use real science to accomplish their goals. If any of these three book ideas interest you, please check out our website (www.feministpress.org) for more information about deadline and how to submit proposals.

But we do not want to limit our exploration. If you are a writer and have an idea for a book or series of books that is guaranteed to get girls excited about science, we want to hear from you. You may want to create a girl detective series featuring a set of friends—from geeks to sports nuts to mechanical geniuses—each with a knowledge of science that helps in solving crimes. You may want to create a story about a shy girl who goes on field trips with her favorite aunt, a forensic anthropologist, and helps to solve problems as she learns to think like a Dr. Bones. You may want to tell the story of a young science fiction writer who needs to study different fields of science in order to create her adventures. Whatever your vision, if you can write like a dream and can create works that are guaranteed to instill a curiosity about science in girls and young women, send us your proposals. We want to hear from you.

All proposals will be reviewed. Several proposals will be offered standard contracts.

Publisher: The Feminist Press at City University of New York as part of a National Science Foundation grant. (see feministpress.org)

Deadline: October 31, 2006

Format: Proposals should describe the project, the plot, characters, and length. No more than ten pages please.

How to submit: Electronic submission (word doc) to fhowe@gc.cuny.edu with the subject line "Girls and Science." Please include in the body of your email your address, phone number, email address and a short bio. Please also attach a brief sample of your writing (about five pages), and a resume that includes information about publications.

(Via Cocktail Party Physics.)

Comments (0)

August 18, 2006

I recently discovered this amazing comic called Copper, by Kazu Kibuishi. It’s a little bit Studio Ghibli, a little bit Little Nemo in Slumberland, a little bit Subconscious Comics. (Check out, for instance, “Blue,” “Bubbles,” or “Jump Station.”)

Figure 1. Copper always looks on the bright side. Fred often doesn’t.

Seeing something like Copper reminds me that, much as I like reading and writing, they’re not the killer app for every kind of storytelling. And while drawing a comic this beautiful looks like a hell of a lot of work, it looks like fun, too.

Comments (12)

July 24, 2006

Via William Gibson, Neomarxisme, a fascinating English-language blog about contemporary Japan. Some brief samples:

Politics:

Last Friday night, I saw a tiny left-wing demonstration in Shibuya, but the thing about people power is that the cast and crew actually show their faces, walk the walk as they talk the talk. And there were handicap people! And women! These ultra-nationalists hide behind machines, like Darth Vader. They could all be remote-controlled from some central base in Yamanashi, and we would never know.

Sorry to keep writing about the yakuza and the right-wing, but I keep running into them week after week. I guess I should just cower in fear like a good boy. God didn't make right-wing soundtrucks so we would question their impact on the political process. Unlike the rest of the world, trucks in Japan run on wa, not gasoline, so it is quite rude to be too inquisitive about the internal combustion process.

— Right-Wing Parad(is)e

Pop culture:

One of the key presuppositions of this blog is, "For the last five years, Japanese mainstream pop culture has gotten progressively more boring and less stimulating," to which many answer:

1. Yes! The innovation and spark of the 90s is gone!
2. No! Your head is stuck in the past and you are missing the stunning glory of today!
3. No! You are deluded and have no idea what is actually going on!
4. No! You are looking in the wrong fields. Culture is not just music and street fashion!
5. No! You are a hater!

Every month or so, I start toying with ideas 2-5 and ask my Japanese friends to fill me in on everything I am missing. They never come up with much of anything: they either shrug in resigned apathy or call me later on my cellphone to announce that they are so bored with things that they don’t leave the house and I have been talking to thin air the entire time.

— Now I Understand Why Contemporary Japanese Pop Culture is at a Nadir

Politics, pop culture, and porn:

Even during the “Sex Boom” of the 80s, female university students still held a strong position in the collective libido, but now they were on late-night TV, bouncing around in bikinis and skimpy outfits. Following soon after that, the Onyanko Club lowered the bar by shifting desires to average-looking high school girls singing suggestive songs. A decade later in the mid-90s, the enjokousai (compensated dating) boom revealed to the public that old men would pay a lot of cash to have sex with middle school girls.

Sociologists and critics have proffered a lot of explanations over the years for the falling age of Japanese men’s sexual preferences, most notably that rising educational opportunities for women increased their intellectual maturity above the level desired by most Japanese men. In order to procure mental inferiors, men had to keep slinking down the food chain. . . .

So, now we have arrived upon the symbol of our own post-post-modern era — Saaya Irie — the busty twelve year-old slowly becoming a household name.

. . . The appreciation of most porn in Japan essentially comes from a type of misogyny — a belief in a cosmic order that determines women to be objects formed for the sole mission of male pleasure. The same graying bigwigs who prevented the birth control pill from gaining legal status in Japan for thirty years are the ones who would gnaw off an arm before any government body takes away their rights to paid sex and dirty videos. The powers-that-be would have no tiff with Saaya Irie.

— What to do about Saaya Irie?

Well worth checking out, whether you’re a Japanophile (I’m looking at you, Barzak!), an ex-Japanophile, or just an armchair cultural anthropologist.

Comments (0)

July 22, 2006

Please go out and write brilliant stories and win a metric truckload of awards. Not because you need to or even because you want to; just do it for me, okay?

Not like it’ll stop the professional jackasses from dissing you. But, of the professional jackasses, maybe it’ll make the ones who take those Lucite blocks and Lovecraft heads and shiny rocketships seriously shut up and go away.

Comments (8)

July 21, 2006

You laughed at the guidelines!

You swooned over the cover art!

You trembled at the Table of Contents!

You chortled over the index!

Now TWENTY EPICS itself can be yours!

Figure 1. You need this book.

Available direct from the printer, via Amazon, and even, so we hear, at your local bookstore. (If your local bookstore is one particular bookstore in Connecticut, anyway, or so we hear, though frankly we’re a little bit confused about this.) (Update: And it's New Jersey anyway. Sorry, all those little New England states look alike to this California boy.)

Now, on to the party! First, my beautiful and brilliant co-editor Dr. G has a few words to say over at her place.

Next, to whet your appetite, several of our fabulous authors have each written a bit about their stories and where those stories came from:

• Christopher Barzak, “The Creation of Birds”
• Paul Berger, “The Muse of Empires Lost”
• Alan DeNiro, “Have You Any Wool”
• Marcus Ewert, “Choose Your Own Epic Adventure”
• Jon Hansen, “The Book of Ant”
• Mary Robinette Kowal, “Bound Man”
• Yoon Ha Lee, “Hopscotch”
• Meghan McCarron, “The Rider”
• Sandra McDonald, “Life Sentence”
• Rachel McGonagill, “The End of the Road for Hybeth and Grinar”
• Jack Mierzwa, “A Short History of the Miraculous Flight to Punt”
• Tim Pratt, “Cup and Table”
• Benjamin Rosenbaum, “A Siege of Cranes”
• David Schwartz, “Five Hundred and Forty Doors”
• Zoe Selengut, “Smitten”

And some other partygoers have chimed in:

• Avi Bar Ze’ev
• Hannah
• Haddayr Copley-Woods
• Chris Gerrib
• Jed Hartman
• Matt Kressel
• Lauren McLaughlin
• Karen Meisner
• Mary Anne Mohanraj
• Jackie M.
• E.C. Myers
• Kyle N.
• Sarah P.
• Robert Burke Richardson
• John Scalzi
• Heather Shaw
• James Trimarco
• Greg van Eekhout
• Rob “aphrael” West (also here)

The offer of free beer still stands, by the way.

Further updates from across the Internet throughout the day, if I can sneak out between meetings.

Comments (15)

July 17, 2006

I think it’s a shame that Sleater-Kinney are breaking up, too, but, um, do we have to read it as a symbol of the death of feminism?

Comments (0)

July 12, 2006

TWENTY EPICS Internet launch party tomorrow! That’s tomorrow, this Thursday, Bastille Eve, July 13th. There will be party favors and also free beer.* You don’t even have to read the book to attend! Just let people know it’s available (direct, via Amazon, and, one hopes and presumes, via the fine corporate behemoths at Ingram Book Group): Forty-seven cubic inches of story by twenty of the best writers in the business, complete with maps, an index, and a gorgeous cover. Spread the word, and drop me a comment here so I can link back to you.

Figure 1. All this and free beer!

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* The offer of free beer is for real, but you’ll have to come to Switzerland to get it. Or catch me next time I’m in the States.

Comments (20)

I’m getting a little tired of hearing that nothing happens in mainstream fiction. I just drive-by posted this at Bear’s aesthetics discussion, but . . . well, I’ll let somebody else take it.

McKee

Nothing happens in the real world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day! There’s genocide and war and corruption! Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love! People lose it, for Christ’s sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know much about life! And why the fuck are you taking up my precious two hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!

— Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation

My buddy Andy’s imitation of this is better, but you get the idea.

All kinds of things happen in mainstream fiction. All kinds of things happen in real life. And if you write genre fiction without knowing that, you’re going to write genre fiction in which nothing happens except what proceeds directly from your genre conceit. It may sell. It may even win an award or two. But it’s going to bore me just as much as the lit-fic you haven’t read bores you.

Comments (2)

July 7, 2006

If you haven’t read Flytrap #5 yet, you should.

Comments (1)

July 5, 2006

Mr. Schwartz has a very thought-provoking post about possible fundamental differences between the short story and the novel. Go read it.

(And then go buy that Ditty Bops album!)

Comments (3)

June 23, 2006

(Also, another good argument against the Best Dramatic Presentation award.)

[Leigh] Brackett was awarded a Hugo posthumously for her work on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back in 1981.  . . . What is agreed on by all is that George Lucas asked Brackett to write the screenplay for Empire based on his story outline.  . . . However, the exact relationship between Brackett's draft script and the revised shooting script is not agreed on at all.  . . . According to [one] scenario, Lucas’s assignment of credit to Brackett was a mere courtesy or homage (or, less charitably, an attempt to improve Empire’s critical reception by associating it with a well-respected screenwriter). Support for this view comes from Stephen Haffner, owner of the press that printed Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, who has read Brackett’s script, and claims that — outside Lucas’ storyline — nothing of Brackett’s personal contributions to the script survives into the finished movie.

Brackett’s screenplay has never been published. According to Haffner, it can be read at the library of the Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico, but may not be copied or borrowed off-site. [Emphasis added.]

(From Wikipedia.)

Comments (7)

June 10, 2006

Speculation should not be a separable part of a composite system.

Speculation should not be identifiable as earth, air, fire, or water, nor as earth, fire, water, metal or wood.

Speculation should not be irreducible by chemical reaction.

Speculation should not be organized into periodic tables.

Speculation should not have isotopes.

Speculation should not be made up of leptons and hadrons.

Speculation should not be heavy or light.

Speculation should not be produced through supernova nucleosynthesis.

Speculation should not be the short-lived product of a high-energy collision, detectable only by its aftereffects.

Speculation should not be contained within sets, classes, or collections.

Speculation should not be a feature, nor a habitat, nor a base, nor a basis, nor a circumstance, nor a situation, nor the be-all and end-all.

Speculation should not be the thing that is ours that we are in.

Speculation should not be the thing that we are in when we are out of what is ours.

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Update: Added extra quotation marks.

Comments (38)

June 9, 2006

I may be an idealist, but I believe if we’re constantly holding something like this up to the light, maybe we can break it down a little, and make room for a greater variety of fiction by a greater variety of people writing about a greater variety of characters and there will be more good books and also world peace.

— Meghan McCarron

Comments (1)

June 3, 2006

Kelly Link says what I’ve been trying to say for a year or two now, only much better, ’cause she is, after all, Kelly Link.

The only thing you have to offer an editor, and readers, is you. Your voice. Stories and characters and narrative twists that only you are strange enough to want to write. Take risks. Some of you are in critique circles that have been going for quite some time. You know each other well enough to have built trust. And it takes trust to show a workshop the kind of ambitious work I'd like to see. Take chances. Write stories whose characters and the endings surprise even you.

All y’all (and y’all know who all y’all are), listen up!

(Courtesy of Charles Coleman Finlay, via Greg.)

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Update: It occurs to me that maybe next time I join a writing group I maybe should think less about being a nice guy and more about getting everyone in the group to do better work. Be warned.

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Via Gwenda, Liza Palmer explains why Spider-Men 1 & 2 and Batman Begins were better than X3. She doesn’t use the word realiness, but that’s what she’s talking about.

And I know this is the delicate line these summer blockbusters, as do all makers of fiction, have to tread. How far and how unrealistic do you go? And yes, we’re talking about X-Men, but the beauty of Batman Begins and the Spiderman movies is that throughout the unrealistic actions and events, the characters stay real and human. The dialogue, while, yes they’re talking about Green Goblins and people with oddly recurring alliterative names (Peter Parker, Scott Summers, Warren Worthington III . . .) they speak like normal people would. But, there's a line . . . and X-Men couldn’t stay on the right side of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. I loved every mutant, Golden Gate Bridge moving, Hugh Jackman shirtless moment of it. But, just kind of a heads up — if you end your movie with “Way to go, Furball.” And you’re not Han Solo — I think there's been a misstep somewhere.

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June 2, 2006

This came up in the aftermath to the Strange Horizons Tea Party, and it looks like Hannah’s now using it as a critical term of art, so:

• Realiness is to realism what truthiness is to truth. Only realiness is a good thing.
• Realiness is what’s left after you suspend all the disbelief you’re supposed to suspend.
• Realiness is what makes Air (or Have Not Have) more plausible than The World is Flat, even though Air is science fiction (arguably, even, fantasy) and The World is Flat is alleged not to be fiction of any kind.

Make sense? Like, I accept that a thirty-story lizard is attacking the city, but I don’t accept that the “greatest investigative reporter of all time” can be this dumb. Yes, Godzilla is just as implausible — well, almost as implausible — as Buck Williams, but Godzilla is a speculative element and Buck Williams is just not a believable character. Godzilla lacks realism, but Buck Williams lacks realiness.

Better definitions? Better examples? Anyone remember what we were actually talking about when it came up?

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May 17, 2006

Well, we’ve almost made it. The book is proofread, the cover is done, the introduction is written, and I’ve just uploaded all the files to the printer. Assuming nothing goes sideways when they actually try to print the things, we should have the first actual paper copies in our hands by — well, I was hoping the end of this week, but it turns out that Print “On Demand” means Print “In 3-5 Business Days,” so: by the start of WisCon, anyway.

The bad news is that this doesn’t give us time to actually get the book into distribution by Memorial Day weekend, unless we want to trust that everything’s going to print just perfectly first time. Which might happen, but I don’t want to count on it. (If I had to bet on something going wrong, I’d bet on the maps coming out all pixilated. Which I could probably fix if I had to, but I’m hoping I won’t have to.)

That being the case, while we plan to have a handful of advance reader copies at WisCon, and to start getting the book out to reviewers shortly thereafter, we’ve decided to push the official release date back to the first of July — sooner if we can manage it, but we want to make sure quality doesn't suffer.

(And then I will never edit another anthology again.)

(No, this time I mean it.)

(No, really.)

(No! Enough with the robots!)

---

P.S. The web site is updated, though, and that’s the important thing! I plan to add expanded pages for the two books soon — don’t want to lose all those juicy author bios — but this should keep people busy for a while.

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The highlight of my first WisCon was seeing John Kessel’s daughter crown Matt Ruff with the Tiptree tiara. I told Susan, I think it was, I’m gonna get me one of those. Or words to that effect. And I went off and in less than six months — lightning speed! — ripped out a little story called “Planet of the Amazon Women,” which I then sold to Strange Horizons.

It didn’t win me a tiara, of course. But! Today Elizabeth Bear points me to that very Matt Ruff’s web site, whereon he has posted the Tiptree long list.

Which is getting pretty close for a first try, I think.

Thanks again to Jed and Susan at SH for some fantastic editing, and to the Fairwood writers’ group for some fantastic workshopping.

---

P.S. Also, congratulate Meghan McCarron, if you haven’t already, for making the list with the hilarious and touching “Close to You.” To which, take note, there will be a kind-of-sort-of prequel in Twenty Epics.

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May 12, 2006

Via Ben: Take a story or blog entry you wrote, or a few paragraphs thereof. Pop it through as many Google Translate round trips as you feel like. Feel free to de-translate words that get marooned, if you know the language. Clean it up. You may change paragraphing, punctuation, and parts of speech (tense, case, person, and number) and add (but not subtract) the words “the”, “a”, “an”, “is”, “and”, “it”, “of”, “in”, “for”, “but”, and “or”.

She is thin. The muscle, she is dark.

As for her, and her, there it is, with Moussa.

In the short khimar, the black hair that you spoke of, is the single stage of the thing. which is removed. (At the point where that bends, considerably; and she, from the light.)

Write it.

It meets, but for the boy, together. The curtain is complete.

That is the car, but me, my thing is not closed. The screen whose two (because of the thing) is small, is almost with someone. Because it is to be many, or it is not; a thing that for a new one was made.

The air is my student.

“Her, with me” – but it is for the rear section of the saddlebag on which is it written. And my position? A hiding place, and my accent. It is measurement: of the lava, of the smell of the spice, of being rough; for that, it did not know a method.

I taste of the foreign country and of my danger. For that, it was excited; think of that, that but a little spoke, to her.

Using the product of European culture -- the shoes, and the history, which you write -- because of me; it is the structure of the sincerity which is specification.

That is a large number.

The fact that it is, and that it loves, that -- together from the history of an early stage: For the woman, it is inferior.

But punishment, now? For loving the person?

That is good; it starts in that.

That acceptance is the substituting; it is the possibility that remains. (From the profile, perhaps; but that is not writing.) And there is Hippolyta.

But, however, there is a woman, because of the place. Approximately? It was that, perhaps. But it was from the place. And someone has deceived.

Night dream: track, truck and person.

Always, that it does not, is meet; and to those, it is, and securely. This is young, but that it estimated one (but for the students) — do I make it foolish? From evening, following it to an emergency, that it looks at it all: shed either one, it comes.

Returning, it is on her. For it is in the rear section, and it ignites with the lower part.

But, first, sleep. I go out, that is the finger which I lead. And I move the ram liquor of the wife. But for the fact that it is I, it is all heads; and that, feel you have remembered.

The girl is this thought that we want to have learned. Her craving is the prospect that it is suitable from another bed, and mine, for I am in the position of satisfaction. I go, out of time.

It is the shout. Or you laugh.

And that, I do not know.

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May 10, 2006

Elizabeth Bear has a nice post about what it means for a book to be broken.

So, a book can be"broken" in a lot of ways, but what it boils down to is that the narrative machine does not function. Not that it has dings on it, not that it grinds a little, but it just doesn't work. Examples are when the writer has to resort to TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) character actions or Deus Ex Machina to resolve plotlines. When characters must behave in an out of character fashion to make the book come together in the end. When the pacing is off, or the thematic resonances are set up badly or in a confusing fashion, so the sonar-image of a satisfying theme does not emerge from the echoes. When there is no click, at the ending, when it falls into place.

When you hold the book in your head, give it a spin on a fingertip, and you can see it wobble because the center of gravity is off somehow. (And I have no shit seen a wobble so big the book crashed and went bouncing across the room fixed by adding three paragraphs to the end. I am not kidding.)

This is a tricky tricky thing, by the way, because so much of it is subjective, and readers project a good deal of themselves into the narrative machine of a novel. They do, in other words, some of the heavy lifting. A reader who clicks with the inner squiddy nature of a book can patch a hell of a lot that's wrong simply by bringing his experience in to oil the gears and spackle over the gaps, to mesh with the machine.

But yeah, what I mean when I say broken is something deeper and more basic than a dent on the fender.

Crucial to note is that among other things, for a book to be broken means the book might be fixable. Of course, that’s only helpful if you’re the author and the book isn’t published yet, but still.

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May 9, 2006

Inspired by Ben’s discovery of a Chinese bootleg of his story “Embracing-the-New,” and his machine translation of it back into English, I ran a few paragraphs of “Planet of the Amazon Women” through a few Google translators, looking for found poetry.

Of that, the best I found is probably the English-Korean-English:

In the unreality which is born with the thing together each one and with the thing the together different person define my thing with the real thing history of my oneself to under justice it was incorrect together with Hippolyta, Hippolyta. That was attempting the fact that the presumed engine talks to me, it is.

That it passes from some feeling and is not fraud. We lead and untranslatable the picture of remembering and imagining we see a past. . . .

But the most amusing, considering the story, has to be finding the word “anomaly,” after translation into Arabic and then back into English, transmuted to “homosexuality.”

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May 2, 2006

“The world of ideas doesn’t really need another grad student hauling the brains of dead Marxists around in his suicase.”

— Andrew O’Hehir

(The best story I’ve heard this year, of course, is this one:

“. . . And this one is called New Saturn.”
“What happened to the old Saturn?”
“Nobody knows,” he states solemly. “Even I don’t know.”

From Karen’s son Jeremiah.)

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May 1, 2006

If I was running Fictionwise, and I wanted to make it difficult (but not strictly impossible, ’cause that would be cheating) for readers to browse their SF section, I’m not sure I could improve on what they’ve got.

(Also, a warning to anyone contemplating being as stupid as me: if I wanted to make an ebook format more painful to use than Adobe Secure Reader 7, that format would have to somehow pull out the reader’s fingernails with hot tongs. Would someone explain to me what the point of downloading a file is if you have to connect to the internet every time I want to read it? No? Talk about DRM that punishes the legitimate purchaser . . .)

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April 28, 2006

Amazon is identifying Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s Rainbows End as a “Zones of Thought” book; that is, a book set in the same universe as A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Given the book’s description, this seems unlikely (unless, say, the protagonists are all being simulated somewhere in the High Beyond or the Low Transcend). Anyone got the straight dope?

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April 26, 2006

So, a while back a friend of mine wanted to know if there was a way he could get ahold of my stuff without having to try to track down these out-of-print zines and whatnot, and I had some fun putting together a little “Unauthorized Complete Works” for him in InDesign. It came to a bit over 60,000 words; throw in the Irrational Histories (memo to self: write some more of those at some point) and maybe a hitherto-unpublished novelette or two, and that’s enough for a book.

But it occurred to me as I was doing it that just because I could put together enough words for a book didn’t mean that it would be a good idea to actually do that. I think about the kind of things I was thinking about when Susan and I were arranging the Twenty Epics TOC — pace, weight, ambience — and it just doesn't feel like there’s enough variety yet in what I’ve written.

Then there was this Crooked Timber piece about Wikipedia, prejudice against, one example of which was an aside in John Clute’s overall, highly positive review of Dora Goss’ In the Forest of Forgetting. (I quote slightly more of it than CT did, because I’m more interested in what Clute has to say about fiction than it what he has to say about Wikipedia.)

The first problem [that we need to address “before we can return to praise”] is not Goss’ alone. It is something that may derive from the tendency of mutants to emit blog gas, for the net culture they live in has no internal or external censors, no captaining of the unsorted untested wikipedian utterances of the gawping soul, no place for the buck to stop. So mutants tend to publish too much.

Now, whether Clute’s right or not (and I think there is an argument to be made that not all of us are at our best in the single-author collection mode, and also that selecting the best from a larger body of work may have advantages over including the entirety of a smaller body of work, whether or not one wants, like Clute, to blame ‘the net culture’), all this got me thinking: what makes a good single-author collection?

Clearly it helps to be brilliant. But if you look at, say, Stranger Things Happen, it’s not just that Kelly’s written a bunch of really excellent stories; she also does a lot of different, interesting things with voice and tone, and I think that makes a difference.

It doesn’t help, in trying to figure this out, that I’m not really a fan of short fiction, as a form, and I haven’t read hardly any of the recent collections that everyone says are so brilliant. But I used to read a lot of them, back in the dizzay (I think I read everything Larry Niven published in the 1970s), and there have been a few over the years that have made the list of favorite books (Stranger Things Happen, Globalhead, Burning Chrome come straight to mind) as well as a few that I keep around because enough of the stories in them are absolutely indispensible (generally retrospectives, like The Best Short Stories of JG Ballard or The Collected Stories of Greg Bear).

If you’re only going to read one story at a time, then mere brilliance is enough. But what does it take to make a collection that you can read cover to cover?

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Something that occurred to me during the latest fanfic kerfluffle:

All novels written for love are fanfic. The ones we call original are fanfic for the unrealized universe of works that exist only in the writer’s head.

What’s important to remember is that, as the writer, you are those works’ only fan, and it’s the non-fans, the readers of your actual novel, that your work needs to appeal to.

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April 20, 2006

I’ve told the authors, but some of the rest of you are probably curious, too. So here’s an excerpt from the letter I sent them:

Some of you may have heard the rumor that Wheatland Press, our publishing partner for Twenty Epics, has run into financial trouble and had to cut back on pretty much all their projects other than the Polyphony anthology series. This rumor is true. Unfortunately there was an email mixup, and Susan and I didn’t hear about this as soon as Wheatland intended to tell us about it, so we’ve had to scramble a bit to make other arrangements.

After talking to a couple of other possible partners, we’ve decided that the simplest option, and the one that offers the best chance of still meeting our original goal of having the book out by the end of May, is just to publish it ourselves, directly. This shouldn’t have any noticeable effect on the book's availability or quality.

The main downside is that the book manufacturing service we’ve decided to go with (Lulu) doesn't offer a full range of print sizes, and we’ve had to reformat the book for a 6"x9" size rather than the 5.5"x8.5" it was originally designed for — this has eaten up some valuable time . . .

Plus there’s been the whole moving-to-Switzerland thing. :)

So, to make a long story short, that’s done now, and while the end-of-May schedule is a little tight, we still ought to be able to make it.

We’ve got a manuscript, and we’ve got a cover painting (pix soon). So we ought at least to have advance reader copies available at WisCon. An honest-to-goodness first edition if I can manage it, but that at the very least. If anyone has a really strong desire to proofread, now would be a good time to raise your hand. :)

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Shoot for the stars, and if you hit the moon, well, shit, you’re on the fucking moon.

— Kameron Hurley

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April 17, 2006

The first night I stayed in my new place, I fell asleep trying to remember a book that was never written. I’d lived with that book once, waking and sleeping, for the better part of four years; between my eighteenth birthday and my twentieth wrote nearly thirty thousand words of it. Then some time later a different idea took hold of my imagination, and for more than a decade that was, more or less, that.

I don’t know what brought that unwritten book to mind. Some unlikely combination of sounds, scents, flavors; rain-wet spring air through the open window, the feel of a thin foam mattress on a hard floor. Probably I’ll never know.

But: ten computers and several versions of Word later, I still have the files. So last night I pulled them up, curious what this Moles kid might have written that could have made such an impression on me. Was there anything more than potential there? Was the book any good? Was he any good?

Well, he was no Meghan McCarron. He didn’t have much sense of character—his protagonist was a middle-class Everyman (Everyboy, really); his other characters could mostly be summed up in a word or two: the Girl, the Antihero, the Rival, the Father Figure, the Other Girl. His dialogue was occasionally good, occasionally over the top, often banal. His plots took a few twists and turns, but they were complications, not reversals. He had trouble with pacing, trouble figuring out which parts of a scene were unnecessary, where exposition was needed and where it could be dispensed with.

But he also had a flair for description, when there was an image worth describing; the beginnings of an individual style, built on a rhythm of short phrases and simple adjectives. He had an ear for made-up languages and specialized vocabularies. His invented mythology took the 80s’ medieval preoccupations and complicated them with 90s concerns like modernization, ethnic cleansing, religious apocalypse, cutting up and reassembling familiar tropes in ways that wouldn’t be completely foreign to readers of Steph Swainston or Jeff VanderMeer. His fight scenes weren’t half bad.

If I ran into him in a workshop, what would I say? You’ve got potential, kid—certainly. I could give him some advice on where to cut, how to decide which scenes to write and which to skip over. I could suggest that he dispense with some of the more florid ‘legends’ and ‘ancient texts’. I could point him to some useful reference books.

The deeper flaws, though—mainly they’re just the natural consequence of being a well-traveled but sheltered and introverted nineteen, having your talent outstrip your experience, knowing more about history and mythology than about how the world works and how people think and behave. I look back and I think my instinct—that if I’d finished that book when I was twenty, I could have sold it, but that it’s just as well that I didn’t—is the right one. The better part of a decade passed between when I stopped working on it and when I finished and sold my first short story, and I don’t think any of those years were wasted.

On the other hand, there are things about that Moles kid’s writing that I miss: the broad canvas, the obsessive worldbuilding, the reaching after high tragedy. The lack of pretension, and the un-self-consciousness of his imagination.

I have to put that unfinished book down again, now; I’ve got other things to do. But maybe when those things are done I’ll pick it up again. It would be a gift, of sorts; an homage, even. There are a handful of writers without whose influence I couldn’t have become the writer I am today, and that kid is one of them.

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April 6, 2006

Shortly afterwards the conversation turned upon Hegel, and I maintained that his writings were mostly nonsense; or, at any rate, that there were many passages in them where the author wrote the words, and it was left to the reader to find a meaning for them.

— Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy

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If Futurama, Dune and Battlestar Galactica had a quick screw somewhere in the aisles of your local Wal-Mart, their mutant love child might be something like John Aegard and Kat Ayer’s new comic, Greeter. The complete Issue 0, “In Vitro Mobilization,” is on line at Greeter Comics.

Johnzo’s a crazy-talented writer and Kat Ayer’s a damn good artist; I can’t wait for Issue 1.

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March 29, 2006

From the Onion:

Science-Fiction Novel Posits Future Where Characters Are Hastily Sketched

OREGON CITY, OR — Science-fiction author Morgan Richards announced Monday completion of his long-awaited novel, Zeppelins Of Phobos. The swashbuckling tale of the battle for control of the solar system depicts a terrifying future filled with virtually indistinguishable characters who only communicate through stilted and shallow dialogue. “I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of the two-dimensional, almost caricatured human race spreading to nearby planets,” said Richards in the April/May issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. “I wanted to capture the sense of adventure, lust, and peril that these characters would feel, along with their utter lack of social context or emotional complexity.” Richards said the very nature of his characters demanded that they live in the unlikely, unrealistic, and overly cinematic society he painstakingly details in the book.

I could link to the piece, but since I’ve already quoted the whole thing, instead I’ll link to “It's Funny How What You're Saying Relates To My Novel.”

(P.S. Morgan Richards, eh? Dare I suspect that someone doesn’t share Hannah’s liking for Richard Morgan?)

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March 26, 2006

Hannah linkdumps one Miss Snark, as quoted by someone who I don’t know who it is on account of only having an LJ handle to go by: “Failure isn’t trying and not achieving. Failure is not trying. Failure is letting your fear rule your actions. Suck it up. Wasting your talent is not ok.”

Hannah’s reaction: “Who gets to decide what’s a waste of a talent, and why do they care?”

Which was pretty much mine, too. Only I’m short one X chromosome, so it came out sort of like Hey, I’ll waste whatever I m——f—— well please!

But: then I got to thinking.

And it occurred to me that I have seen, and been irritated with, something more or less like what Miss S seems to be talking about — for instance, sending good work to a bad ’zine — all y’all zinesters: not one of yours; one of the bad ones — because you’re afraid it’ll get rejected by the people you’d secretly like to publish it. Or thinking: My life as a writer will be complete if I learn to write stories (or books) at least as good as the worst stories (or books) that get published, and one of them sells. That’s a waste I can’t support.

But, again, note:

A sin of commission is a positive act contrary to some prohibitory precept; a sin of omission is a failure to do what is commanded. A sin of omission, however, requires a positive act whereby one wills to omit the fulfilling of a precept, or at least wills something incompatible with its fulfillment.

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February 22, 2006

Yes, it’s actual Islamic Amazons, among the Marsh Arabs, documented by Wilfred Thesiger four decades before I wrote “Planet of the Amazon Women.” Dammit.

In other news, I’ve sent my passport off to the consulate in Atlanta and should get it back today or tomorrow, with all appropriate stamps and attached paperwork. So maybe this Switzerland thing will actually happen.

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February 13, 2006

I’d put off talking about this till I’d actually seen the contracts; but now I have seen them, and anyway Greg already spilled the beans: “Planet of the Amazon Women” will be in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection. (As will several other fine stories, or anyway stories people tell me are fine stories.) Thanks to the folks at Strange Horizons and to everyone that helped me with this one.

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January 19, 2006

I was talking to someone about Roger Elwood, some time in the last few weeks, only I couldn’t remember his name. Elwood . . .

. . . is best known for the bizarre episode in which he flooded the SF market in 1972-1975 with carelessly edited theme anthologies.

Prior to that time, anthologies and collections were very popular with readers, and were considered by the publishing industry to be a surer bet than novels. Roger Elwood ended that, singlehandedly breaking the story collection / anthology market. It has never wholly recovered. He squandered industry credibility accumulated over decades by better anthologists, and wrecked the readers’ faith in collections. . . .

By the time Roger Elwood was finished, you couldn't have sold an SF anthology into the North American market if it were priced at ten cents and made out of Godiva chocolate.

Wikipedia has the scoop. With graphs and everything.

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January 10, 2006

I don’t know how I’m going to manage this and WisCon (and I am going to manage this and WisCon) but I’ve just accepted an invitation to attend Rio Hondo 2006, June 11-June 18.

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January 6, 2006

Now that everyone’s exhausted the subject, I come across this post Scott Eric Kaufman put up a couple of weeks ago, which among other things, as it happens, captures my initial reading of the ideologically suspect Skull Island natives:

. . . what you have is a highly-specialized society which has 1) impressively come to inhabit this island from whereabouts unknown, 2) built tremendous walls to protect the rest of the world from the island’s occupants and 3) descended into a state of mere substinence because their duty as stewards has prevented their culture from evolving. Maybe I’m not the one to comment on the representation of an evolutionary arms race, since I’m inclined to strip it of its cultural implications and say “that’s what happens in an evolutionary arms race,” but the fact that I’m already churning this information through such lofty cognitive devices indicates that the film does what any respectable film should:

It presents you with grist your mill can’t easily refine.

He has some other interesting things to say, too, about the ideologies of the film and the ideologies its viewers bring to it; his commenters have some equally interesting responses (e.g. Jodi Dean: “There is a weird way where the film implicates us in justifying or excusing Jackson’s use of the Kong story.”), and Kaufman has some interesting replies (the part about “meta-cringing,” I could particularly relate to.)

Those of you who were bored by the film will probably find the discussion equally boring, but those of you that weren’t, have a look.

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