I’ve already posted this to the BASFA list, but I’ve just been sent a web site so I thought I’d put it here too.
7:30pm on Tue., June 3, Rabbi Ari Cartun will present a talk and lead a discussion among BSG fans, at Congregation Etz Chayim, 4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto. (For those from the South Bay, Alma is the same as Central Expressway.)
All are welcome to come discuss the “theology” of Battlestar Galactica, and its perspective on the opposition between Polytheism and Monotheism.
Via the excellent Biology in Science Fiction blog (which you really should be reading yourself, it is great), I discover the wonderful world of Genpets. They have to be the next big thing in kids’ toys. This is from their marketing brochure:
The entire Genpetsâ„¢ line-up pulls its basis from a natural stage of evolution in the market. Our idea ties together the best of packaging with the best of products. Dolls and robotic toys quickly become tiresome, while traditional pets require a high level of upkeep. Genpetsâ„¢ however, learn and adapt. They are living pets, but better, modified to be as reliable, dependable and efficient as any other technology we use in our busy lives.
Yep, that’s right. Mass-produced, bio-engineered pets. They even come in a range of personality profiles so that you can pick one that is best suited to your kid.
Getting suspicious yet? OK, I’ll put you out of your misery. The information you are looking for his here. I’m just sorry it has taken me so long to find this. It really deserved a Hugo nomination, but we are way too late. Still, the artist is Canadian. Montreal folks – listen up please – I want Adam Brandejs (and hopefully the Genpets exhibit) at Anticipation. See to it, please.
The excellent Mr. Zivkovic has a brand new (WordPress-based) blog. You can find it here.
There are plenty of things that can cause a convention committee to lie awake at night worrying, but one you never think about because it is too awful to contemplate is having your main Guest of Honor drop dead the day before the con starts. Much sympathy therefore to the family and friends of Robert Asprin, who died yesterday of a massive heart attack, and to the committee of MarCon, whose convention he was due to grace over the weekend.
I’m not a great expert on Asprin’s work, but Kevin got his start in fandom as the founder and President of the MythAdventures Fan Club. Kevin is also a GoH at MarCon this year, and was looking forward to seeing Bob for the first time in years. And indeed Asprin’s career seemed to be taking off again after years in the doldrums. It is all very sad indeed.
And for the con committee it gets worse, because as Kevin explains, two of their other guests were Jody Lyn Nye, who has been co-writing books with Bob, and editor Bill Fawcett, who was Bob’s business manager. Understandably both of them have more important things to be doing right now than attending a convention.
At times like this there is not much you can do except try to make lemonade from the lemons that life has thrown you. Presumably there are a lot of Robert Asprin fans at Marcon. Hopefully they can show true fannish resourcefulness and come up with something that will pay tribute to Bob in a totally awesome way. I have every confidence in them.
Update: idiot spelling mistake fixed – thanks Chaz
Thank goodness we are not in Denver now. Science fiction conventions tend to attract all sorts of odd people, and there are some fairly crazy folks in town at the moment. Yes, the Libertarian Party convention has just started. And one of the guest speakers is “Richard Hoagland—an author who argues that NASA is covering up evidence of dead civilizations found with their probes”. It is good to know that the guardians of Freedom are out there protecting our right to know about alien civilizations, and at least one Libertarian candidate is raising Hoagland’s concerns in his campaigns, though sadly such issues don’t appear to be going down well at the polls:
Latham read my expression: I was wincing. “You’ll meet him,” Latham said. “He’s not a kook. He talks about this as a secrecy issue, in a relatable way.”
“No matter how he talks about it,” I said, “can’t the two parties use it to marginalize him? I mean, how is it playing.”
“It’s playing pretty well!” Latham thought about it. “The polls aren’t great, though. We just got the first one in from the district and we’ve got… zero percent. I was hoping to start off better than that.”
More here, for those of you who find such things amusing. (Thanks Alex!)
It seems to be a good day for amusing comment threads at The Guardian. The latest blog entry to turn up in my feeds was this one, which is about their coverage of the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. Sadly the first comment has now been deleted by Guardian staff, which is a shame because it was a rather funny rant about the commenter’s opinion that no one wants to listen to a bunch of luvvies talking to each other. In The Guardian’s defense I should note that the comment did include at least one reference to copulation so it probably wasn’t deleted for being uncomplimentary about the literati.
Anyway, this encouraged me to pop over to the Hay Festival web site to see what I could find. Two things were immediately obvious. Firstly, no one involved with the Festival is aware that the European Cup hasn’t been called the European Cup since 1991. And secondly, the next time someone complains that a convention web site is doing a poor job of presenting the program online I shall point them at Hay’s web site so they can see how badly it can be done if you try hard enough.
I did, however, look through the entire brochure. After all, Hay isn’t that far away. If there was a train station there I could pop over for the day (but there isn’t). And indeed they have appearances by Michael Wood, Ben Goldacre and Karen Armstrong that I might find interesting. On the spec-fic side there’s not so much. It seems that Hay is quite happy to talk about fantastical things if they are in books for children, in movies, or even in opera, but in books for adults, oh dear me no. (Well, except for Mr. Rushdie of course, but we mustn’t accuse him of writing anything fantastical, even if his new book has just been reviewed by John Clute and sounds really rather interesting.)
But never fear, science fiction fans, the people who run Hay know that you exist, and this year they have put on a program item just for you! They have got the man who does the voice of the Daleks to come and run a Doctor Who trivia quiz. Isn’t that thrilling!?
It is now a well established theory of popular journalism that the best way to get lots of eye tracks for your web site is to get someone to write something manifestly stupid, and hopefully offensive, and then sit back and wait for the flame war to develop. I’ve been busy running economic models all morning, but the helpful Will Plant has pointed me at the latest exercise of this type over at The Guardian.
The basic plot is as follows: because some male persons have said unkind things about JK Rowling, this is proof positive that the literary world is dominated by Evil Male Critics who will stop at nothing in their tireless quest to put down everything ever written by women in the history of the universe, Evah! You can guess how the comment thread goes. This is, I’m afraid, one of those articles that will be quoted again and again when men want to prove what pathetic, selfish idiots feminists are.
On the plus side, it has given people the opportunity to mention a whole raft of wonderful women writers who might not otherwise have got their names in front of the great book-reading public. If it leads to a few book sales down the road that will be a good thing. I’m sure there are more names that could be dropped, if you fancy popping over there and can stomach the pile of righteous outrage in the comments.
What I can’t understand, though, is that there are people who are surprised at the description of the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies as a “big burning vagina”. Isn’t it obvious?
Today’s online reading turned up what sounded like one of the coolest pieces of software in a very long time. Microsoft has come up with something called WorldWide Telescope, which basically hooks you in to a vast collection of astronomical databases and allows you to browse the night sky in much the same way as Google Earth allows you to browse our planet. The introductory videos on the site talk a lot about creating stories, and it is clear that, at least as far as the astronomy community is concerned, one of the major purposes of this is to get kids doing astronomy from their PCs and making their own multi-media presentations based on their explorations. That’s seriously cool.
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This is a post for those of you lucky enough to still be in California rather than exiled to a cold and rainy place on the far side of the Atlantic. Various emails have arrived this morning with details of forthcoming events, so I thought I should list them. Here goes (below the fold):
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The Daily Telegraph has allowed Andrew McKie to write a long article about the Clarke Awards (and more generally about science fiction). It is magnificent. Go read.
In which Damien G Walter finds an actual controversy to write about, albeit a rather old one. Still, it is a good excuse to promote some good writers, so I shouldn’t complain.
Just in case you thought it was safe to go back into the SFWA after the recent election results, Jayme Lynn Blaschke has the low-down on the latest piece of in-fighting.
Last night Kevin and I attended the SF in SF reading in San Francisco. Patricia McKillip was, as you might expect, wonderful. She read another chapter from her work in progress (which I gather she also read different extracts from at World Fantasy and ICFA). It sounds like quite a departure for her, being set in a world that is more 18th Century than medieval. I’m looking forward to it.
What I was looking forward to, however, was hearing her partner, David Lunde, read his poetry. Science fiction poets are a rare breed, and despite having known David for some time I’d not seen much of his work. I’m delighted to say that he was very good indeed. Of course as a two-time Rhysling winner he should be, but you never quite know whether you are going to agree with the experts. This time I’m happy to say I do.
Podcasts of the readings will be on the SF in SF web site once Rick Kleffel gets the links to me. The May reading will feature John Shirley. More details as and when I get them.
Thanks to Peter Wong I have just added Jason Stoddard to my feeds list. This post about how the SF community might present itself in a more positive light is generating a lot of comment, and I’m looking forward to part 2.
Via Neil I found this excellent article on fantasy by Mark Chadbourn, in The Telegraph, no less!
Further evidence that we live in the future – an anti-immigration blogger is suggesting that the US would be much better off employing robots rather than Mexicans. See The Economist for some suggestions as to why this might not be a good idea.
I joked last year about the possibility of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider creating baby black holes that would grow and Eat Us All!!! And of course other people thought about that too. Now Rick Kleffel tells me that some guys from Hawai’i are suing CERN because they are convinced we are all doomed unless the LHC is stopped. It has been in a science fiction book, but must be real, right? Anyway, Rick’s podcast is here. It has Rudy Rucker describing the beginning of the end of the world in it too.
The annoying thing is that I have a vague memory an SF book in which Earth was destroyed by an escaped black hole. I’m sure i reviewed it. But I can’t remember which book it was. Can anyone help?
Update: See here for a whole pile of background on the lawsuit story (thanks George!) and here for Bad Astronomy’s (equally dismissive) take on the issue (thanks Zemanta).
The short version of the story is that Kevin and I are adopting a little boy. The long version is a little more complicated.
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Magazines like Writer’s Digest make their living off advising budding authors on how to make money. They are people who set themselves up as experts in the writing industry. Today they put out an article on “popular fiction” that purports to advise readers what is currently “hot” in genre. And they don’t just rely on their own knowledge. They talk to experts in the field. Jane Johnson, for example, certainly knows what sells. But they also talked to someone called Crawford Kilian who apparently wrote a book called Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Some of his advice includes the following:
Kilian notes the rise of traditional (hard) science-fiction writers like Neil Gaiman
I do hope that’s a typo. (And to be fair he did mention Rudy Rucker as well.)
My first event at ICFA today has been a panel on “technoculture”. The panel was made up of academics, and being academics they spent quite a bit of time discussing whether or not the word should be hyphenated. That’s not actually as daft as it sounds.
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