Andrew Trembley understands my true role in the universe.

With my computers all being busy running models, I took to opportunity to spend the day in San Jose. Of course I had an ulterior motive. Neil Gaiman was doing a couple of readings there today. I caught the noon one, after which I had lunch with Neil and various other folks and chatted about books and stuff.

As usual, Neil did a fabulous job of entertaining the audience, and I was favorably impressed by the fact that the guy from SJSU hosting the event knew Neil’s work quite well and was therefore able to ask intelligent questions. Indeed, over lunch he even mentioned having read Anne Murphy’s blog where she had talked about looking after Neil at cons. (And yes, we did have sushi for lunch.)

Lots of interesting stuff was said, not all of which I can remember, but here’s one snippet that impressed me. Neil’s Beowulf film is being made using a motion capture technique. It is a system that was first used on Polar Express. Neil commented that the first version of the system had a few problems because the eyes of the characters just didn’t look realistic. (Being Neil he described them as looking like dead babies.) The current version, however, has a nifty new feature. The actors now wear small electrodes above and below each eye. These capture the actual movement of their eyes, resulting in much more realistic eye movement when the characters are rendered.

Neil did another reading this evening, and is probably still signing books as I type (11:30pm). But I had to head back into downtown as Kevin and I had an evening engagement at the Fairmont. The Convention & Visitors’ Bureau had invited a bunch of local SF&F convention runners to a reception to try to encourage us to run more cons in the city. Yes, seriously, they did. I’ll leave it to Kevin to get into details (he’s heading off to bed now and has just offered this). I”l just say that it is indeed nice to be wanted, and no, you cannot have enough sushi.

Amongst the bevy of very nice people I met for the first time at Worldcon was Michael Rowley, the recently appointed SF buyer at Waterstones. Michael has just posted his top ten SF&F books of the year to the company web site. It includes The Man from the Diogenes Club and Nova Swing. (And Air but, as Michael admits, that’s a cheat.) I feel a lot more confident about Waterstones knowing that someone like Michael is involved.

In answer to an inquiry in comments to another post, the current status of #134 is as follows. I have finished writing it. It needs to be proof-read, and I need to turn it into HTML. Hopefully it will be online this week, though I confess to giving priority to other aspects of my life. I’m also a little hampered by the fact that both my laptops have been hammering away running economic models all weekend – a task that should have been done by the dead desktop.
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The report of Worldcon that appears under my name in Locus contains a story about Paula Guran throwing books during a panel. I did not write that part of the report, and if you look carefully at the byline of the article it says clearly that parts of the report were written by Locus staff. Paula wrote a rather amusing blog entry about the whole thing point out that the book throwing incident did not actually happen, but of course, given the way the blogopshere works, I’m starting to see reports that I told lies in my report and that Paula is angry with me. I suppose given the level of crap being spread over the past month that I can’t expect anything different, and that I must expect people to believe such stories. I doesn’t make it any more enjoyable. Yet another example as to why I shall never, ever write anything about the SF&F industry.

It is the custom for conventions to send members who don’t attend their copies of the souvenir book. However, as this is a post-con activity, to be done when people have recovered from their exhaustion, it often takes ages, or doesn’t happen at all. I was surprised to see that this year’s World Fantasy Con got their souvenir book to me within a week. But I was astounded to see that they send me the entire freebie book package, complete with super-checkable book bag. Obviously I have a few of the books, and there are others that I don’t have much interest in, but there was also a copy of Cat Valente’s In The Night Garden, which was a wonderful surprise. Thank you, whoever was responsible. (And thank you to the UPS girl who is smaller than me and had to carry the box.)

Note to Lou: I would have put Keith Brook’s Genetopia on the recycle table, thereby ruining your record, but only because I already have two copies and I want other people to be able to read such a good book.

When I stayed with John Clute on my way out to California he was very pleased to have been asked by The Guardian to write a full-length review of the new M. John Harrison novel, Nova Swing. Not a Jon Courtenay-Grimwood column-style brief look, but a whole proper review. One that even turns up in the Guardian Books RSS feed, which Jon’s column never did.

What is officially known as an “event” is in fact a crosshatching of realities (the waves of black and white cats that at dawn and dusk flood the interstices between worlds are vividly reminiscent of Escher’s drawings of black and white birds swapping colours as they change worlds). For the exiled humans of Saudade, the taste of Tefahuchi in their midst is soul catnip.

The fruit of his labors is now online, and a fine job it is too (as always). However, I couldn’t help but notice the repeated mention of something called the “Tefahuchi Tract”. It would not have surprised me to discover that Mike had changed the spelling of the place on a whim to confuse people, but a quick check of Gary Wolfe’s review in Locus reveals the original “Kefahuchi Tract”. I know that Clute is far too precise to make a mistake like that, so I can only conclude that he’s yet another victim of the Grauniad spelling disease. -sigh-

Update: And here’s the Independent review by Roz Kaveney, as per Mike’s comment below.

More evidence of commendable efficiency in the World Fantasy Con arena. Progress report #1 for next year’s convention has turned up. The Guests of Honor will be Carol Emshwiller, Kim Newman and Lisa Tuttle. Master of Ceremonies is Guy Gavriel Kay. More details from the web site.

Hot off the phone from Gigi (although I note that the convention web site has been commendably efficient this year), here are the World Fantasy Award Winners:

Novel: Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (Harvill; Knopf);

Novella: Joe Hill, Voluntary Committal (Subterranean Press);

Short Fiction: George Saunders, “CommComm” (The New Yorker, 08/01, 2005);

Anthology: The Fair Folk ed. Marvin Kaye (Science Fiction Book Club);

Collection: Bruce Holland Rogers, The Keyhole Opera (Wheatland Press);

Artist: James Jean;

Special Award, Professional: Sean Wallace (for Prime Books);

Special Award, Non-Professional: David Howe and Stephen Walker (for Telos Books);

Lifetime Achievement: Stephen Fabian & John Crowley.

World Fantasy Con is now in full swing and last night the International Horror Guild Awards were presented. You can see the full results here. Huge congratulations to Joe Hill and Peter Crowther for some well deserved wins. Most of the other stuff I know little about.

Kevin has just saved $500 on his hotel bill for the Yokohama Worldcon by booking direct with the hotel. We both hate doing this sort of thing, because conventions need to make their room blocks, but Kevin did inform the Nippon 2007 committee about this and give them a chance to do something. What appears to be happening is that the travel agent the convention is using is convinced that Worldcon members won’t be smart enough to book direct and therefore they can charge above the hotel’s rates. I guess they’ll be proved wrong, then. For details of how Kevin made his booking, see here.

Yes, you know it, Nova Swing is almost here. I’ve seen the proof at Clute’s. And just to prove the point, I have email from Forbidden Planet in London telling me that M. John Harrison will be doing a signing there on Thursday November 9th at 7:00pm. Mind you, they have listed him as “celebrated fantasy artist M. John Harrison”, so goodness only knows what they are expecting. Here’s hoping some actual readers go along to keep him company.

Update: 6:00-7:00pm as per Mike’s comment below.

One thing that Kevin and I both pounced on with glee at Tower Records was a DVD set of the first season of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. This is pure nostalgia, of course. My excuse is that I was only about 9 years old when I had a crush on Captain Crane. But we watched the pilot episode last night (it was never actually aired, so it was the one thing that would be guaranteed new to us). A few things were obvious. Firstly science fiction TV has come a very long way in forty years. Second, people were remarkably blasé about letting off nuclear bombs back then. Third, the bad guy looked remarkably like The Hood. And finally, with a bit of work on the script and a lot of work on the effects it could probably be turned into a decent piece of modern TV.

Did you know that the Seaview had a secret base near Santa Barbara? I didn’t. We do now.

Just in case anyone was wondering, the final issue of Emerald City is looking like being late. I have a whole bunch of material waiting to go, but I have yet to receive one of the books for which the issue is waiting. It is apparently in the mail to me, so I won’t be too late, but I don’t want to have to do yet another issue so I’m hanging fire for a few more days.

Update: Book safely arrived, and only 250 or so pages.

Fans of the immortal (or possibly undead) Jeff Lint will be delighted to hear that Raw Dog Screaming Press is publishing a collection of the most important academic essays about Lint’s work. And Your Point Is? promises to be the most talked about collection of SF criticism published in this millennium and in this galaxy, mainly because Lint’s estate has committed millions of dollars to a marketing campaign than involves creating thousands of fake blogs by supposed teenage fans of Lint’s work. Rumors that Steve Aylett has been asked to dress in a variety of cute anime costumes in order to provide “author photos” for these fake blogs are already being hotly denied. Nick Mamatas and John Scalzi have both claimed that Aylett is one of their pseudonyms. For more details on this publishing event of the last 13 billion years, see Jeff Ford.