Steven Beebe (a prof at Texas State University in San Marcos) has discovered a manuscript by C.S. Lewis in the Bodleian Library. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be a complete version of After Ten Years (which I’m pretty sure would have been my favorite Lewis book if he had finished it) but, interestingly, it does look like part of a projected collaboration with Tolkien on human language.
[Seen at cs_lewis.]
I dreamed the disembodied heads of Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone were fluttering around on cartoony batwings in a town in the Old West, making snide comments to each other and ineffectually trying to do good deeds.
I know that “a dream cometh through the multitude of business” but somehow I don’t think this is what Qoheleth had in mind.
1. Wednesday has drifted away into the Pacific and I can’t even pretend to myself that I’m on time… but nonetheless, this week’s Blog Gate gate post by the oversigned is now up. It’s a longish and incoherent review of the first two volumes of The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny.
2. Synchronicity can happen at any time, so the NYT Magazine is featuring a long puff-piece on Jack Vance this week. I especially liked the photo of an agreeably piratical Vance. I didn’t like some xenophobic balderdash in the text (from Dan Simmons–and Michael Chabon, of all people–not Vance himself) that Vance’s literary reputation has been hampered by the fact that he’s a gringo. Vance’s literary reputation has been hampered by the fact that he writes genre fiction almost exclusively, mostly science fiction and fantasy. (It’s also benefited from that, at least among people who like sf/f, so jeet your seat, be cool and discrete.) But apart from that bit of superfluous whining on behalf of his ostensibly neglected subject, the writer of the piece, Carlo Rotella, has some shrewd things to say about Vance and his fiction.
3. Raymond Chandler, actor. Well, cameonast (which is a word I think I just made up, and sort of wish I hadn’t).
4. Charles Tan interviews intrepid Editorial Director Lou Anders. My favorite part, even more than Lou’s flattering praise of Blood of Ambrose, was this exchange.
What do you think is the biggest advantage of science fiction that the other genres can’t quite emulate?
The ability to slip in and out of literal versus metaphoric truth.
This strikes me as profoundly true. In an imaginary world, everything is there for a reason. The reason may be sheer inertia–the ground is made of soil, because it didn’t occur to the writer to make it anything else. But a shrewd writer doesn’t make those choices via inertia. He makes the ground into an angry vegetable that devours random people at the dark of the twelfth moon. She makes it into a vast expanse of shining incorruptible metal. They make it into something on purpose, to make an impact on the reader. Stuff that in realistic fiction would be corny–instances of the pathetic fallacy–are part of the basic toolkit for shrewd writers of sf/f. The whole world can be a metaphor in imaginative fiction.
Or not. Part of the impact of the metaphor requires the writer to take the material in the imaginary world at face value, as real for the purposes of the story–like a comedian keeping a straight face while telling a joke. I’ll sleep on this and try to figure out if it makes any sense.
It’s practically Wednesday in France by now, but all the same: Happy Bastille Day!
The lyrics of the French national anthem are a little more sinister than “The Star-Spangled Banner”, but the music’s better so it balances out.
“Do you want the war to end on a note of triumph or disaster?”
“Like, either way, man–just so it swings.”
1. An interesting thing from Fred Pohl’s The Way the Future Blogs: Gaia, it seems, is dead. Long live Medea. The only thing that bothered me about it was that FP seemed to have Medea mixed up with Procne (and maybe a touch of Atreus). Sure Medea was savage sometimes, treacherous if it suited her, and a child-murderer a little bit, but she did draw the line at cannibalism. And everyone was impressed by her cooking.
But not to kvetch. Especially given the recent sad news about Charles Brown, we should be grateful Fred Pohl is still around and stirring things up.
2. This is not as funny as R.M. Milholland’s Something Positive strips usually are, but that’s a pretty high standard.
3. Still in a classical vein: Michael Ventrella interviews my epically great agent, Mike Kabongo.
4. (a.) My responses to the questions generated last week by Joe Mallozzi’s book club are now up on Joe’s blog. They are full of incident, adventure, and mordant wit. Well, words, anyway. Words, words, words.
4. (b.) The rebirth of Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing continues… and hopefully will not be threatened by the latest podcast, which contains an interview with the oversigned.
5. No parking Tuesdays, Thursdays, weekdays, or other days.
I rose above inertia today and managed to update my website to indicate, oh, that I had actually published a novel and stuff. I added links to the “Online Fiction” page for the two Morlock stories that went up (a while ago now) on the Pyr Sample Chapters blog. I also added a couple of new pages: one of links to podcasts and interviews featuring the oversigned and another with links to reviews of Blood of Ambrose that I’ve been collecting over the past few months. I’m pretty sure I missed some, so if you know of any it would be great if you could drop me a clue about it (or anything else you think I need a clue about).
Mind you, only the content has been updated; the form is still uglier than sin. And the pages only look their modest best in SeaMonkey, a browser that almost no one uses but which I find handy as a WYSIWYG page editor. (Except that it doesn’t really work anymore, so its handiness is increasingly in doubt.) But hopefully it’s readable, anyway–no gray-on-black text, or anything like that.
I took last week off, for sheer laziness patriotic reasons, but my Blog Gate post for this week is at last up. It’s about Planet Stories reissue of Henry Kuttner’s Robots Have No Tails, but you probably vastened that already.
1. I don’t want you guys to think I’m the clumsiest biker in the world. But I did take another tumble the other day. The thing is, my newish bike has much tighter brakes than the throwaways I’ve been riding for years, and when I brake in a hurry I tend to clamp down with the hysterical grip that was required for significant slowing on my older machines and that causes a certain lack of stability which has, on a couple of occasions, led to road rash.
Sunday was one of those days; I was slowing down for a stop sign, realized belatedly I was going to have to brake a little harder, and that’s when the bleeding started.
One never feels suave at these moments; I got up, dusted myself off, reassured a passing motorist that I was okay, and looked up to see the Dean of Arts and Sciences at my university rushing toward me with a concerned look on his face. Apparently, destiny had decided to strike me to the earth right in front of his house. I convinced him and his wife that I was okay, talked for a few moments about the beneficial impact of terror and suffering on the cardio rate, and eventually pedalled off, reflecting on the cruel vagaries of life.
The thing is, if had been the old Dean I wouldn’t have minded much. We didn’t know each other that well, and I confess that I had no particular thirst for his esteem. The new Dean is a pretty cool guy–knows Latin, of course, as the cooler deans do, studied chemistry as an undergrad, switched to English literature (especially Ben Jonson) in graduate school, has published on a wide range of stuff (including popular culture), has been a very popular teacher (especially for his Shakespeare courses), and has played Sherlock Holmes on occasion in local community theater. None of this would count for much if he were a jerk, but he’s a very funny relatable guy.
Oh well. I didn’t actually bleed on him. Thus I console myself.
2. In other news, the floor is open for Joe Mallozzi’s book club discussion of Blood of Ambrose, possibly the best sword-and-sorcery novel about a fire-immune alcoholic with some obscure form of scoliosis published this year so far.
A happy 4th to those who celebrate it; a great Saturday to all.
Someday we’ll be as good as Ray sang we were, and we’ll let America be America again.
I don’t think I’ve often posted three times in 24 hours–three times in a week has been a lot for me lately. But my narcissism sense of public duty compels me to point out that I’m interviewed in the latest Dragon Page: Cover to Cover podcast. It’s available in a couple formats on their site, and will eventually be on iTunes, although it wasn’t up there the last time I checked. There were some sound issues (at least from my end) and I said “uh” about fifteen thousand times, but I think it was a pretty good conversation.
