Ambrose & Elsewhere

Everyone knows by know who won the Nebulas so it would be otiose to post a link here. I was disappointed that McDonald’s wonderful Brasyl didn’t win in the novel category, but Le Guin’s Powers is a superb book, doubtless without a doubt.

It was nice to see that Kessel’s “Pride and Prometheus” took the novelette award; it seemed to me the clear winner in that category.

And I didn’t have the nerve to vote in the Norton, because I hadn’t read even one of the nominees. But I was powerfully tempted to vote for Wilce’s Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) on the basis of its radiantly moxie-tronic title alone, so I was glad to see it copped the prize.

Re the organization itself…

I guess I’ve been an SFWA member over half a year, now, and I’m not strongly inclined to renew my membership. SFWA does some great things (e.g. Writer Beware, a powerful force against evil–which may sound ironically bombastic, but which I think is actually true). However, it’s not really clear to me that any benefit is accruing to me, or is likely to accrue to me, for belonging to this group.

The recently adopted vision statement describes SFWA as “the best source for information, education, support and fellowship for authors of science fiction, fantasy and related genres.” And this sort of crystallized my discomfort with the organization. Much of its purpose seems to be founded on what my son and infonauts like him call “friction.” In essence, friction (in this sense) is generated by information limited by gatekeepers. That situation doesn’t really obtain anymore. SFWA is offering to reduce friction (i.e. increase the flow of information) to people who are already drenched in data. It’s an offer that seems resonant with the spinning of rotary telephone dials and the rustle of newspapers–old media, dead and dying media.

What we need in the age of new media is not so much a way past the gatekeepers of information as an authoritative source that helps sort good information from bad information. I’m not convinced that SFWA is poised to become that source.

An example would be SFWA’s own internet presence which is broken–obviously broken. That’s not a complaint: it’s just an observation. (The site is impossible to find information on; it’s awash in broken links; it’s inadequately centralized; it has inputs for print media that don’t exist anymore, like the SFWA Forum–etc.) SFWA officers and staff have been working energetically to set up a new website. That’s not a complaint: it’s praise. Here’s the complaint: people are complaining about the new site–quite vociferously and in a way that’s obviously affecting the morale of the people who are doing what I, in my unsophisticated way, would call “the work.” The site has not yet had its debut, by the way–it’s the whole idea of a new site which has been causing strife.

Also, a good number of members are expressing fear and hostility at the notion that their works may appear on Google Books searches. Since I am preparing to drop several c-notes (hopefully of my university’s money) on professional books that I have only examined through Google Books, this point of view seems to me strangely out of touch. Essentially, this is free advertising for the writer forever: it’s not like they’re offering downloads of material still under copyright. But in this new and threatening world we live in, all forms of e-text are a threat until proven otherwise. Heu mihi.

If I thought that SFWA had bad officers and the solution was an election to throw the bums out, I wouldn’t be discouraged. That sort of thing can happen. But if the membership itself is projecting an aura of apathy, ill-temper and bad judgement, the matter is more problematic.

Also, the “fellowship” element doesn’t seem to me to be remarkable, compared to the experience one might have on LiveJournal or Facebook, for instance. Possibly I should withhold judgement on this until and unless I attend one of the live-and-in-person functions. (Then again, my own liveliness and personability are nothing to write home about, so maybe this isn’t such a great idea.)

HarperStudio is publishing a collection of hitherto uncollected (mostly, I understand, unpublished) works by Twain and, to celebrate, they and the New Yorker‘s BookBench are giving away a free audiobook version read by John Lithgow, at least for a week or so. A video sample below.

1. My Blog Gate post of the week is up, this one a penitential review of two volumes from the NESFA’s Choice series.

2. I’m late for something else.

3. The second item could be appended to almost any communication from me.

This: Pat (of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist) is running a poll to see what he should read next… and at least one title will be pretty Bloody familiar to readers of this journal.

That: Morlock audible at last!

The Other: Geniuses behind Vergil-on-Facebook revealed!

That Again: Sara Harvey interviewed me last week on SFScope but I was so spaced out busy that I forgot to mention it here.

Heliotrope‘s long-awaited Moorcock issue is live. You can read it online or download a PDF free. Looks like fun!

Fred Pohl, at The Way the Future Blogs, has a nice reminiscence of Cyril Kornbluth. Kornbluth has become unfashionable, maybe permanently so, even among the few who still remember his work, but I’ve always liked his stuff. For instance, I think The Syndic is the greatest work of social sf to come out of the Fifties–maybe out of any decade. And the genetics of “The Marching Morons” (see in that story, its predecessor “The Little Black Bag” and the Pohl/Kornbluth collaboration Search the Sky) may be all wrong (and when I say “may be” I mean they are), but the complaint about the dumbing down and coarsening of public life still packs some emotional punch. His best story is the horrifyingly pessimistic but strangely not-unhopeful “Shark Ship”.

I didn’t know (until I saw FP’s blog-post) that CK had worked as first reader for F&SF where he discovered, among other things, Fritz Leiber’s The Silver Eggheads.

Of course, the late sf writer everyone is talking about today is J.G. Ballard–indeed a sad loss. I was not too crazy about his novels (except for Empire of the Sun; and I admit I never even looked at Crash), but I was crazy about his crazy stories–e.g. “The Drowned Giant” or “The Assassination of JFK as a Downhill Race”, etc. The satisfactions aren’t exactly like reading stories–more like reading poetry where the words seem meaningful, but the meaning is just out of reach. Not comfort reads, by any means, but not everything should be.

My Blog Gate post for the week is belatedly up: this one recounts an epic struggle I fought with the Easter Bunny and my own porous memory, and naturally involves Spider-Man.

I have some more cover thoughts (sparked by the discussion below) but no time to transcribe them now, so maybe I’ll try to kick them out this weekend.

Some wiring problems burned out our internet access and made this a more, um, electrifying Easter weekend than we usually see in the Fortress of Engitude.

So I missed most of the stuff relating to #Amazonfail until today. Call me a libtard if you must, but I was annoyed–until I saw that the whole thing was probably Bantown committed for lulz. (Most of those linked words I didn’t know on Friday and, if I’m not mistaken, at least one of them did not yet exist.) Then I was really annoyed, but I’m not actually going to mention that, because it would simply provoke more lulzing from the uncouth. But it does seem to me that Amazon.com should have responded to this challenge in a smarter, more principled manner. Real Amazons would have. Then they would have burned Bantown to its non-existent foundations, whereat the righteous would lulz the lulzter of the righteous.

“So will this be the post that breaks your string of egomaniacally careerist self-references?”

No, sorry. I let too many things pile up while I was struggling against the wires. For instance, I should have mentioned Jon Armstrong’s interview of the oversigned on his “If You’re Just Joining Us…” podcast. It’s packed with shocking revelations, like how to pronounce “Enge”. I was impressed with JA’s skill in creating a pleasing sound environment out of something as unpromising as my voice, too. For instance, in our conversation we talked a little bit about the soundtrack of 2001, and in the finished podcast he snuck in a little sound-quote from Strauss in the background. It’s full of stuff like that.

Robert Thompson reviewed Blood of Ambrose at Fantasy Book Critic and found it to be “a cross between Robert E. Howard, Joe Abercombie, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail with a dash of H.P. Lovecraft and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead sprinkled in. If that sounds a bit weird, well, it is.” I can see that.

The second book, This Crooked Way, will probably strike people as even weirder (since the first one tries to ease the reader into Morlock’s world via the familiar, maybe overfamiliar, Bildungsroman genre) and the second is more of a yes-I’m-an-episodic-novel-what’s-it-to-you sort of episodic novel.

Lou Anders recently posted the cover for This Crooked Way on the Pyr blog, and it’s already in a Pyr-vs.-Pyr cover smackdown.

Now I’d better run off to the grocery store. The Easter Bunny brought lots of electrons and sugar to the Fortress of Engitude, but very little in the way of protein.

Discovery 1: I finally found the time to post this week at Blog Gate; this one is a meandering maundering about reviews (including an understated nastygram from The New Yorker to Lord Dunsany, circa 1926).

Discovery 2: Blood of Ambrose seen in the wild (courtesy of onyxhawke).

Discovery 3: The distance between my front door to my first class (via bike) exactly equals Brandenburg Concerto #2 (via iPod).

[edited to add:]

Discovery 4: This week’s Mind Meld: Forgotten SF/F. Begins exactly right, with a book I thought only I remembered (I knew that I should read Ekaterina Sedia, and now I’m sure of it), and continues even better with a lot of stuff I should track down and find.

Discovery 5: The Done Manifesto. Manifestly true! It changed my life, at least for a few minutes.

My Blog Gate post of the week is up, this one expressing the heretical opinion that adjectives and adverbs are good things.

People who don’t have BG on their feed anymore (possibly to avoid the voxes, the little voxes that spoil the vines) might want to know about the conversation developing over whether people read sf/f anymore. (David Soyka poses the question; Judith Berman has a useful response.)