Fast Forward 2, from intrepid editor Lou Anders, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Philip K. Dick Award. Unless I’m miscounting, this is only the second third time a fiction anthology has been shortlisted (the other two being Leviathan Three in 2002 and Constance Ash’s Not of Woman Born in 1999). Kudos!
[edited for historical accuracy. Sorry Constance!]
A particularly painful form of insomnia occurs when the subject, finally fallen asleep after a long and restless night, wakes himself with his own snores.
1. Hot fast Neptunes. Either it’s Pelops’ tell-all autobiography, or Systemic’s top exoplanet story of the year. (Seen at james_nicoll‘s LJ.)
2. Zack Handlen has started reviewing the original (i.e. actual) Star Trek series at the AV Club; he starts (reasonably, I think) slightly out of order with a review of the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Among many things about this episode that are a little off (the old-style uniforms from the first pilot; the absence of Bones and Uhura; Kirk’s middle initial; the fact that they travel through the navigational hazard, not around it; etc.), it suddenly occurred to me the last time I watched it that the title is wrong. Other men had gone there before, cosmographically and in plot-situation, sometime in the 21st century (which now looks like a rather optimistic estimate for human exploration of the galactic rim). (After the Pelops reference above, “galactic rim” looks somehow salacious, but let it go.)
3. Over at the Blog Gate, Scott Oden asks how noble we want our Orcs to be? Just noble enough to refrain from the “galactic rim” joke, I’d say.
There are actually no Wallace Stevens references, this time (I should have used the above title last week) but, anyway, my latest Blog Gate post is up. It’s about episodic novels or, as everyone else on the planet calls them, fix-ups.
I don’t actually say so anywhere in the Blog Gate post, but the reason why this is on my mind is that I’m in the last throes of an episodic novel, the sequel to the upcoming Blood of Ambrose, and I’m flipping out about it, a little. In part, the Blog Gate post is an attempt to talk myself down. It must have worked because my face keeps smashing into the keyboard, an infallible sign of relaxation.
I was passing by the Preditors and Editors poll to vote for someone else (seriously: Flint & Freer’s Slow Train to Arcturus), when I thought to check something and… it turns out one of my stories, “The Red Worm’s Way,” has been nominated (along with all the stories in Return of the Sword). (I still have an earlier version of the story up at my egomaniacal shrine to myself website.) It’s the story that caused Fabien Lyraud to describe Morlock as a “hybride reussi de Conan et de Sherlock Holmes” (which confirmed me in my opinion that FL is a critical genius).
This is probably the time to mention that my flashfic “The Gordian Stone” was picked for Every Day Fiction’s Best of 2008 anthology. There’s some talk that the anthology actually operates as a cure for both SAD and sunburn; other people are saying that enough copies purchased could actually save the world economy and bring about a new golden age. It may not work, of course, but if we don’t try then we’ll never know.
It looks like F&SF is switching to a bimonthly schedule. (According to Ansible.) Hard to see this as a good thing. (I’m not knocking the decision, which seems like a reasonable response to intense economic pressures. I’m just saying.)
2008: a big year for the good and the bad in my life. Which I guess is how I like it, on unbalance, so set me up another one, bartender.
The voice on this one isn’t much, but I like the imagery.
Or maybe that’s the other way around.
Happy New Year to all of you.
1. My last Blog Gate post of the year is up, part of what is turning into a running conversation with Judith Berman about fantasy and realism. (Here’s her latest post responding in part to my post last week.)
2. Will the universe end in a Big Rip, a Big Crunch–or will it bounce?
3. Enjoy the year’s end and beginning. Not order in that necessarily.
I’m not a huge fan of media tie-in fiction as a rule, but I’m not biased against it. In particular, I think gaming fiction gives someone a chance to explore an imaginary world independent from any interest in the gameplay itself. (I’ve enjoyed all the Felix and Gotrek stories I’ve read, for instance, but I’ve never played Warhammer.)
In my far-off youth, when home video invariably meant switching on the old CRT unit, waiting for it to warm up and hoping the weather didn’t interfere too much with reception, it wasn’t always easy or even possible to see the program of one’s choice. Novelizations were a kind of substitute, and my first exposure to media tie-ins was Blish’s series of Star Trek adaptations. I never reread these anymore, but I did recently look again at his “original novel” Spock Must Die!, the first drop in the unending deluge of Star Trek novels.
It’s been out of print for almost ten years and, though I’m something of a Blish fan, I’m not here to say that’s a tragedy. In Spock Must Die!, the author of A Case of Conscience, “A Style in Treason” and Black Easter allows himself the tedious luxury of villains who are Very Very Bad Nogoodniks. When a transporter adapted for tachyon-transmission accidentally duplicates Spock it is a given that one is Good (the original) and the other is Bad (which naturally involves being pro-Klingon, anti-Federation). Guest supporting villains from the Klingon Empire (Kor, from the original Klingon episode “Mongols in Space! “Errand of Mercy”, and Koloth from “Drop the Basket of Furries on Shatner Again” “The Trouble with Tribbles”) are smacked down in a rather small-minded way at the story’s too-neat end. I’m not a fan of the later Star Trek tendency to show that peace between warring nations can be achieved by holding hands and smiling a lot, because I don’t think it can, but Blish’s total smashing victory for the Federation violates one of the original series’ basic premises, and not in a good way.
On the other hand, there are things in the book that make it worth reading. Blish gets the characters involved in interesting conversations, such as McCoy’s and Scotty’s discussion at the novel’s opening about what happens to you when you go into a transporter beam. Blish throws in more science than you would normally expect in a Trek episode, too (e.g. tachyons, and stereoisomerism in amino acids: clearly Blish, a regular F&SF contributor, had been profiting from Asimov’s monthly science column). And he plausibly introduces one of his personal obsessions: the quasilanguage which Joyce invented for Finnegans Wake. Uhura uses it as a message-code, for reasons that seem reasonable in the context of the story but probably aren’t.
This all makes for a strange construction, where some parts are paper-thin and cartoony and the others seem to belong to something more substantial and serious. It’s not worth bending heaven and earth to get a copy, but if one comes into your hands it might be worth giving a look.
Another media tie-in from around the same time that I read only recently is The Prisoner (yes, that one) by Thomas Disch (yes, that one). I read about it first in a piece by David Soyka (see his Blog Gate post with some links here).
I can recommend The Prisoner a little more strongly than Spock Must Die!. Only I’m not sure I can tell you much more about it than that. I’m not even sure that the hero of this novel is the same person as the hero of the TV series: he seems to be, and he seems to think he is, but there are some indications that this may be part of an elaborate scheme by the people who run the Village. One of whom is him. Or is he? It’s the sort of book where I found myself scribbling in the margin “6 x 7 = 42. Sig?”
If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like. Much of the dialogue practically speaks itself aloud in Patrick McGoohan’s mannered ironic tones, especially in the brilliantly austere first scene. The book is not a novelization of any episode (though it contains references to several), but an intelligently written independent story set in the Village (or a Village). Not a good introduction to the Prisoner series, but an absorbing read for anyone who’s watched the show through a couple times.
Here’s hoping you’re having a good Christmas/Hannukah/Newtonmass/Thursday. It’s been a pretty good Christmas so far here in the Great Black Swamp. Our new cats, Lewis and Clark, are seen here discovering the holiday, unheard of before by the feline species (as far as they know).
