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.)
Intrepid editor Lou Anders has just put up a new Morlock story, “Fire and Sleet”, which explains what happened to the phoenix after “A Book of Silences”. It also contains helpful hints on keeping people from reading your mind while you play poker, avoiding fiery death in the claws of immortal predators, etc. News you can use!
Part 2 of my non-awaited discussion of the novels nominated Nebula is now up at the Blog Gate. It contains my first conflict of interest! Not to be missed!
Word on the street is that Amazon and Barnes and Noble online have Blood of Ambrose in stock (with brick-and-mortar stores to follow shortly). Used copies are running $17.00 more expensive than new copies at Amazon–I have no idea what that’s about. Used bookstores trying to snare a few bucks from injudicious collectors, possibly.
My author copies came yesterday, and it was much just like that scene in Back to the Future where George McFly (2.0) receives the copies of his first novel. Except we have fewer but cooler kids than the McFly household, and my spouse wasn’t there, and Biff was not being so much a character as he usually is, and I’m somewhat less suave but also less greasy than Crispin Glover… Well, maybe it wasn’t just like that scene.
It was unspeakably cool, though: the book itself is a beautiful thing, between Dominic Harman’s great cover and the design and the typography. (Fritz Leiber should have had it this good.) I’ve heard good things about the story, but the source is a little biased, so take that with a grain of salt.
