The Borderlands petition is now closing in on 150 signatures. Huge thanks to John Picacio, Ellen Datlow, Jeff Ford and John Scalzi (and anyone else who has been sending people here that I have missed). Thanks also to everyone who has signed it. I suspect that the planning people in San Francisco will be gobsmacked.
Hey, and isn’t it nice to see the Internet communication system being used for something positive rather than for whipping up a witch hunt against someone?
As most of you will know, I don’t do memes. However, my good friend John Picacio has tagged me, and because he’s a pal (and he’s just done a favor for my friends at Borderlands Books), I shall carry out the instructions.
So, the book I’m currently reading is Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. I go to page 123 and find the fifth sentence. It reads:
Or Brandin’s, Sandre echoed.
See, the gods of chance know that I don’t do memes either. I shall refrain from tagging anyone, least they end up with a sentence even shorter and less interesting.
Of course, if I were a responsible blogger I’d search through my entire library to find a book with an interesting fifth sentence on page 123, but most of my library is in California, and look what happens when I try the books I have here.
In Jeffrey Ford’s The Shadow Year the fifth sentence on page 123 is, “A terrible drunk.”
In Glenda Larke’s Song of the Shiver Barrens the fifth sentence on page 123 is, “‘Tarran.”
And Richard Morgan’s Black Man does not have five complete sentences on page 123.
I think I had better stop before I inadvertently cause the destruction of the universe.
I’m pleased to see that we’ve got 25 people on the Borderlands cafe petition, but really I’d hoped for rather more. As far as I can see, to date only Kevin and Chris Roberson have mentioned the petition on their own blogs. I know there are a lot of authors out there who have done events at Borderlands, but clearly they don’t read my blog. (And who can blame them.) A bit of help getting the word out would be appreciated.
And if you missed the original post about the petition, you can find it here.
I took myself off to Taunton today, partly because I needed to stock up at Lush, and partly because it appears that even Salman Rushdie isn’t a big enough name for you to be able to buy his books here in Darkest Somerset. So now I have a copy of The Enchantress of Florence. I also have Richard Morgan’s Black Man, because it would be remiss of me not to read a Clarke winner; also Alan Campbell’s Iron Angel (the sequel to Scar Night) and Glenda Larke’s The Song of the Shiver Barrens (part 3 of the Mirage Makers trilogy). That should keep me busy for a while.
As some of you may know, my good friends at Borderlands Books in San Francisco are working on opening a cafe next to their store. In order to do so they need to get planning permission, which is not always a straightforward proposition, city bureaucracies being what they are. So the application needs support. There’s a petition in the store that you can sign, but if you can’t get into San Francisco (and I know that Borderlands has fans all around the world) then you can help out by adding a comment below. And by directing your friends here. So…
We, the undersigned, enjoy visiting Borderlands Books when we are in San Francisco, and would be delighted if they had a cafe adjacent to the store. A cafe would enable the store to enhance its already excellent events program, and cement its reputation as one of the world’s premier independent specialist bookstores.
Cheryl Morgan – Fremont, CA & Somerset, UK
Update: The planning permission hearing is today (June 26th) so I’m closing off comments. I’ll let you know how it goes as soon as I hear from Alan.
After being presumed missing for many years, the Caribbean monk seal has officially been declared extinct. It is, of course, sad when any species becomes extinct, and being large mammals ourselves we tend to feel it more when another large mammal goes. This time, however, we have even more reason to be sorry, because the Caribbean monk seal has a starring role in one of the best fantasy novels of 2007. It has won the Aurora for best novel, and is currently shortlisted for both the Sunburst and Mythopoeic Awards. If you want to know more, you’ll need to read The New Moon’s Arms by Nalo Hopkinson.
I must admit that the Times Literary Supplement isn’t the place I would normally look for an intelligent essay on genre fiction, which is why I had to be pointed to this piece by Locus Online. However, I’m very glad that Mark spotted it, because it is a very good read. After all, it has stuff like this:
Like Japanese soldiers fighting the Second World War long after it ended, some still draw a cordon sanitaire around “literature†to protect it from “genreâ€, regardless of how closely the two commingle.
Heck, it even has a link to Ansible’s web site. None of this will have gone down very well at Granta.
Despite the title of “The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture”, the article doesn’t really discuss fan fic at all. It is actually a review of two books: The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu, which is a history of anti-comics hysteria in 1950s America, and Maps and Legends, a collection of essays by Michael Chabon. Both books sound very interesting. If only I had time to read more…
There’s an essay and long pile of comments on Sarah Monette’s LiveJournal about the character of Susan in the Narina books. I don’t have time to read it all, and can’t remember the books well enough to participate in the discussion, but some of you might be interested to do so.
I do, of course, remember being furious when I read it the first time, and I’ve never forgiven Lewis.
As to “the sin of Eve”, as I recall, there didn’t need to be any particular sin involved. If you read some medieval theologians then women are evil per se. Sorry, no references, my library is in California and teh intrawebs are far too full of misogynist blogs to be of any help.
As I recall, Jeff VanderMeer isn’t a great fan of the Best Related Book category in the Hugos, but I’m still going to thank him for pointing me at an obvious contender for Montreal.
In which Paul Witcover demonstrates the neglected art of writing a book review that will make Cheryl want to go out and buy the book straight away.
Just like everyone else, I have buttons, and if you press enough of them at once I react.
The feminist web site BlogHer is running a series of podcasts called “Letter to My Body” which is designed to inspire self-esteem, realistic body perception and open discussion on body image amongst women. Obviously it talks about being fat and the like, but today’s podcast was with actress and transgender activist, Calpernia Addams. I’m impressed that BlogHer is willing to include a male-to-female transsexual in its campaign – that’s a much more enlightened attitude than certain other feminist organizations have. But the reason that I’m writing this post is that slap in the middle of the interview Calpernia starts talking about this wonderful YA book she’s reading all about body image. Yes, you are right, it is Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. So there you have it: SF and gender in one post. Now I’m going to write to Justine and ask her to pass on the good news.
Oh, and the interview is pretty good too. The BlogHer journalist has a bunch of very on-topic questions. Calpernia kind of muffs the Autogynephilia question, and it sounds like the questions were more pointed than she was expecting, but there’s lots of good stuff in there.
Today’s Independent reviews a biography of Charles Fort.
This one, I think, will amuse a few of my Finnish friends. Via Mike Glyer I discover an article in the LA Times all about Nordic mystery writers.
Part of their appeal is their reverse exoticism: The unrelenting bleakness, the zero tolerance for chuckles and the ferocity of the crimes — the Swedes really go in big for decapitations, scalpings, tattooed torsos floating to the surface, disembowelments — make the books much darker and spookier than glib mafiosi capers from Bologna and Bensonhurst. And the Swedes do not write conventional whodunits; they are obsessed with understanding why people become ax murderers in the first place. Mostly, it’s because something happened to them as children, often involving axes.
Oh dear. That’s going to get me into trouble in Tampere in July.
At Hay today Salman Rushdie reportedly nailed his flag firmly to the mast of speculative fiction. As reported in The Guardian, his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, “is filled with bad faeries, imaginary dragons, ogres, sorcerers, witches, an imaginary queen, hexes, and love potions.” Today at Hay he had to defend his decision to write what many of his audience will have dismissed as fluffy fantasy nonsense.
“We all began as readers with a very fond relationship with the imagination,” Rushdie told interviewer Mariella Frostrup. “But what happens as we grow up is we begin to think of that as childish. I’ve never thought that.”
And what’s more, he has support. John Sutherland apparently loves the book and is pimping it for the Booker, and you can’t get much higher up the British critics tree than him. This is all very promising.
And you know what, the book is eligible for the World Fantasy Award next year. Would I love to see Rushdie at our little convention in San José. You betcha!
Given that this is Rushdie we are talking about, I suspect that his book will be available even here in Darkest Somerset. I shall be looking out for a copy. There may even be a review.
On the cover of this book Jack Dann describes Sean Williams as a “master storyteller”. One way you can tell that’s true is that when you get to the end of a chapter you immediately want to make a start on the next. If I hadn’t had work to do, I’d have read this one in a day. And I want the sequel now.
As with much of the best science fiction, Saturn Returns tells a rollicking good story and asks interesting questions about the future of humanity. Along the way it manages to create an interesting mash-up from influences as diverse as Charles Maturin and Gary Numan. It also reminds me that the Philip K Dick Award generally turns up a really great selection of books. All of the four books on the short list I have read have been really good, and the others all come warmly recommended by various people.
There’s also some gender stuff in the book, but it barely rated a “meh”. That, of course, is much better than diving in and being offensive. Maybe there’ll be more in subsequent books. Sean dear – talk to me.
Not having a lot else to do while eating lunch, I have been gazing idly at the BBC’s reality show from Longleat. As a consequence I now know more than I probably wanted to know about giraffe pregnancies (including the fact that giraffes give birth standing up, dropping the poor babies out on their heads). However, there was also a brief feature on the Longleat library. Lord Bath has more books than I do – more than 40,000 in fact – and some of them are very old. So we got a look at a 15th Century hand-written book of Chaucer stories (specifically “The Knight’s Tale” and “The Clerk’s Tale”). People were not so different from us in those days. They would write their names in their books. And in this particular book was the signature, “Richard of Gloucester”. For the benefit of you not familiar with English history, that would be Richard III before he became king. Nice to know he enjoyed good books.
Although I’m not writing reviews these days, I still take a professional interest in the blurbs that publishers put in books. One thing they often do is run a bunch of quotes from reviewers on the first few pages so that anyone opening the book in a store can get an eyeful of just how well loved the author is. There’s a page like that at the front of the Seam Williams book, Saturn Returns, that I have just started reading. Some of the quotes just have a byline of a newspaper, as the publishers assume that no one will know the names of newspaper staff reviewers. But others are from fellow fiction writers and are of the form “X author of Y”. I was much amused, therefore, to see at the top of the page, “Cheryl Morgan, author of Emerald City.” So, I iz author, as a LOLcat might say. Must put that on my resume.
Book #2 in the Mirage Makers series is the usual good stuff from Glenda Larke, but it is in some ways a very different book to its predecessor. I’ve probably made this point before, but it is worth making again. There’s a lot of cross-over between science fiction and fantasy readers, but not everyone reads for the same thing. When science fiction readers read fantasy what they are often looking for is an experience of something new and different, just like they get from SF. Fantasy often gives them that. But I have seen a number of cases of trilogies (and this seems to be one) where the author does all of the revealing of the world in book #1, and the subsequent books are just more plot set in the same world. If you don’t see the problem with that, consider a mystery trilogy in which the murder is solved in book #1 and books #2 and #3 tell what happened to the characters afterwards. For some people that will be fine, for others, not so much.
Nalo won an Aurora! Yay!!! Bounce, bounce, bounce.
World Fantasy members please note when considering your votes.
Several weeks ago, before my life got plunged into chaos by a panic project at work, David Moles asked me to write about this year’s Tiptree Award. I have finally got around to finishing the article, and you can find it here. Profuse apologies to David for taking so long to produce it.
Although I still have some web sites to finish (and other that could always do with more work), I think I am now all caught up on writing projects, so if anyone wants to suggest some new Challenge Cheryl questions, please go ahead and do so. I shall do my best to try to answer them.