Ambrose & Elsewhere

Sorry I’ve been so long getting back to people. My internet access got knocked out by the weather (apparently) and I wasn’t able to log on for 36 hours.

However, I did get a lot of proofreading done, so it wasn’t for nothing.

My Blog Gate post for the week is up. It’s a predictable rant about the Grauniad‘s list of sf/f novels that “everyone must read”.

Executive summary: “What about Binky ‘Bosco’ Sorenson? Greatest science fiction writer who ever lived. Knew nothing about science or fiction, but I read something of his when I was thirteen, so everyone ought to bow down before him. No, Nurse Ratchet, I do not feel like a nap.”

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I dreamed I was in the back seat of a car driving north along the Mississippi. It was late afternoon. I remember looking eastward and seeing the broad water glare suddenly with fiery light and there was a roar unlike thunder. The sky was clear, but marked with something like jet contrails. It happened again and again: the light and the earth-shaking noise.

“Are those meteors?” I asked finally.

There was an embarrassed silence. Everyone else seemed to know what was going on, and no one else seemed to think it unusual.

“I guess so,” someone up front said finally.

Someone beside me suggested that we leave the car and go down by the river’s edge. The theory seemed to be that the river bluffs would give shelter from the meteor impacts. It sounded pretty naive.

Nobody else said anything. The meteors continued to fall.

We were deep in the city now, still going north. It was strangely empty.

We passed an intersection where a woman stood, an infant in her arms, next to a stalled car. A cop in a Ramsey County sheriff’s uniform was walking indifferently away from her toward his own vehicle, talking on his radio. I met the woman’s gaze as we passed; her eyes were darkly ringed, despairing.

“Shouldn’t we go back and give that woman a ride?” I asked.

Nobody else said anything. The meteors continued to fall. We drove on north through the gathering dark.

I have no idea how many words I produced in this weekend’s writing binge, but I took the last step tonight on This Crooked Way (the sequel to Blood of Ambrose). I’ll have to read through it a couple times to catch typos and blunders, but it should be on its crooked way soon.

Which is great, since it’s over three weeks past its due date. So this is more of a confession than a boast.

Last night, my daughter and I were watching the CBS show Criminal Minds–which, I guess, was our first mistake. It may be the weakest of the successful shows in the procedural crime genre–often the plot hinges on profiling (a psychic power for people with no psychic power), and there is a definite tendency in some episodes toward torture porn. On the other hand, it has a couple of the more interestingly geeky characters on mainstream TV (e.g. Garcia and Reed). There was a great episode a year or two ago when Reed and Hotchner were stuck in a cell with a serial killer who seemed intent on provoking a violent confrontation, and Hotchner (for various plausible reasons) seemed to welcome the opportunity. Reed saved the situation by talking with brilliant semi-relevance until help arrived. It was priceless, especially the last exchange between Reed and the killer. Garcia probably needs no words of praise from me; even as I speak, people are setting up geeky cults about her. If not, I want to know why not.

Still, last night’s episode was so deeply vile that I probably won’t be watching the show again.

The plot involved a family abducting a couple of girls whom they intended to train as a mate for their 10 year old boy, after murdering the girls’ parents. The big reveal (stone obvious from the start, like many of the Awful Secrets on this show) was that the mother of the family had been abducted the same way when she was a child. The family had been doing this (abducting girls and murdering their parents), generation after generation, for at least a century. Also, it was just part of a network of families doing the same thing. A group of families, travelling from place to place, engaged in stealing, murder and child abduction.

Do you see where this is going?

Yes, the murdering kidnappers turned out to be Romani. Not just isolated Romani criminals, but part of a whole Romani subculture that preys on the wealth and the lives of us saintly, law-abiding non-Romani. Any non-murdering non-thieving Romani were depicted by Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Film.

It was hideous: an hour of commercial television devoted to a blood-libel against a cultural minority, all for the sacred purpose of selling cars and soap and pimple-cream and whatever else CBS was advertising that night.

This is how CBS celebrated the first full day in office of President Barack Obama. I suppose Plan B was a miniseries remake of Birth of a Nation or a colorized version of Triumph of the Will.

Extra bonus dumbness: the scriptwriter thought the Romani speak Rumanian. I kid you not. I guess they don’t have an internet connection, or books, or shreds of human decency in the dark hole where this script had its loathesome birth.

I apologize for the unpleasant tone of this entry: this isn’t the sort of issue I’d normally address on this blog. But, in a quick glance around the interwebs this AM, it looked like no one was talking about this. And I think that someone should be.

I dashed off some ideas about the perennial bone-of-snarkation, definitions of sf/f genres, and posted them at the Blog Gate.

In other BG news, Howard Jones reports that Black Gate 13 has gone to press.

This guy misspells Poe’s middle name, but I like the narration and the low-tech animation.

King’s last speech.

1. -2° (F) at the moment outside–up from a low of -8°. Feels almost like home. My son, a sun-belter by temperament despite his Minnesota roots, hates the guts out of days like this, but I’m kind of enjoying the cold snap.

2. In honor of Patrick McGoohan, my son and I watched “The Girl Who Was Death,” maybe the best of all the Prisoner episodes. AMC, the guys who are producing the new Prisoner, are (trying to atone for their sins by) kindly offering the entire series online in streaming video. (The AMC linked snaffled from Chris’s Invincible Super-blog.)

3. I’m not saying it’s cause and effect, but, you know. I join SFWA. and within a few months–BAM! New rules for the Nebula that actually make sense. I’m not saying there’s any causal effect. Because there isn’t any: I didn’t contribute to the discussion and was as surprised as anyone by the announcement. I’m just saying… nothing, apparently.

Patrick McGoohan has made his final escape, it seems.

My latest post at the Blog Gate is up. It’s about urban fantasy which has been a frequent topic in the blogosphere of late and which I had about half an idea about.