Ambrose & Elsewhere

Jane Jewell reports on SFFNet that Sterling E. Lanier has died.

She doesn’t give a source for the report, so one can hope that the rumor has been greatly exaggerated.

Back in the 1970s I was extremely fond of the Brigadier Ffellowes stories–a few were still appearing in F&SF when I was a teenager. I should see if I can track down copies of the ones I don’t have (nearly all of them) and reread them. Hiero’s Journey was a good (and old-fashioned even when it was published) book of the Hey-the-Apocalypse-happened-and-things-are-pretty-cool type. I was not so crazy about the sequel, Unforsaken Hiero. There were rumors of a third Hiero novel, which we will never see now, I guess.

[edit: Further circumstantial details with an obituary here.]

[further edit (4/3/07): Fred Saberhagen has died also . I decided not to make a new post about this, although I’m a fan of 2 or 3 of his long-running series, because people who actually knew him and whose voices carry farther than mine does were already mourning him. Also because I felt that the blog was starting to sound like an old man querulously reading the obituaries. “Eh. Binky ‘Bronco’ Sorensen died. That bastard owed me three bucks!” etc.]

[And Beverly Sills is dead as well. That’s three, so they can stop now, right?]

Book blurbs lie all the time, as we know. Every fantasy novel published in the 70s and 80s was the natural heir of The Lord of the Rings; every sprawling brawling historical epic published in the 40s and 50s was the new Gone with the Wind; every new writer is an amalgam of a few writers who happen to be stylish and is New! And Improved! on top of that.

But the most wounding lie a book-blurb ever told me is still being told to people all across the western world and is destroying the reputation of the first classic of western civilization even as I type. More blathering, and eventually some comments on a newish translation of the _Posthomerica_, behind the cut.

Someone associated with a newspaper (Adele Geras at the Guardian website) finally says some reasonable stuff about bookblogs and newspaper book critics.

[In the blogosphere y]ou can write as much as you like and you are completely and utterly independent. Publishers and PR people can’t put any pressure on you. If you feel like it, you can ignore Don DeLillo and write instead about the latest SF or the latest chick-lit or the latest women’s erotica, or even about sword and sorcery for adults. You are free.

It’s like crazy talk: sword and sorcery for adults. Actually, to get crazier, this started me wondering what kind of s&s novel Don DeLillo would write.

But here she really nails the rather bogus credentials issue:

“But why should we believe the blogger?” comes the cry. “Who are they and how are they qualified to tell us what to read?” The answer is: you should believe them and trust them in exactly the same way you would a critic in a newspaper or literary journal. There will be some you admire and some you think are stupid. Some bloggers write well and some badly and so do some literary critics.

The most interesting thing about this reviewers-vs-bookbloggers flaplet (which has mostly sounded to me like the Titanic whining about icebergs as it bubbles out of sight) has been that some critics seem to view themselves as something other than people who write about stuff and whose assertions rest on the evidence and argument they bring in support of their positions. If so, maybe the flaplet will rouze these Laputan critics to the consensus reality that surrounds them.

[The link to AG’s post viffled from John Scalzi at the Ficlets blog.]

My friend Shawn Wilbur, an intellectual historian and a mainstay of the libertarian left, has been putting volumes of the 19th century progressive paper Liberty online in PDF form. Here’s the archive so far and here’s Shawn’s post on the state and future of the project.

This is fascinating material and the pages are full of sharp, thoughtful, combative, often witty writing, e.g. (from the first issue), “Formerly the price of Liberty was eternal vigilance, but now it can be had for fifty cents a year.”

It’s not as if the paper is an oracle to show us the way out of our current cultural and political impasse: it’s dogged by many rather regressive 19th C. ideas. For instance, the issue for 10/14/1881 devoted some front page space to deriding the idea of women’s suffrage (here’s a PDF link to that issue), an idea whose time was overdue even then.

But the archive is already a rich resource for an often-neglected stream of American intellectual history and promises to become richer still as Shawn adds more content, text versions (more readable than PDFs and searchable) etc.

I like the quiet moxie with which they state their purpose in the first issue (PDF link).

LIBERTY enters the field of journalism to speak for herself because she finds no one willing to speak for her. She hears no voice that always champions her; she knows no pen that always writes in her defence; she sees no hand that is always lifted to avenge her wrongs or vindicate her rights. Many claim to speak in her name, but few really understand her. Still fewer have the courage and opportunity to fight for her. Her battle, then, is her own to wage and win. She accepts it fearlessly, and with a determined spirit.

Her foe, Authority, takes many shapes, but, broadly speaking, her enemies divide themselves into three classes: first, those who abhor her both as a means and as an end of progress, opposing her openly, avowedly, sincerely, consistently, universally; second, those who profess to believe in her as a means of progress, but who accept her only so far as they think she will serve their own selfish interests, denying her and her blessings to the rest of the world; third, those who distrust her as a means of progress, believing in her only as an end to be obtained by first trampling upon, violating and outraging her. These three phases of opposition to Liberty are met in almost every sphere of thought and human activity.

Fortunately, these words were written long ago and have no relevance to our modern world today with its hybrid cars and adjustable-interest loans and stuff.

I got some cool stuff for Father’s Day, but at the risk of sounding soppy here are some recentish photos of the two best gifts I ever got (Nicholas on the left, Jessika on the right).

They obliged me tonight by going to the new Fantastic Four movie, which they both proclaimed (on leaving) as one of the worst movies ever made. I mentioned the first FF movie from a couple years ago, and they grumpily allowed that maybe that was a little worse. My standards must be slipping: I thought this one was okay. But it does have a lot of strikes against it: two-count-em-two fake deaths (or is it three, or maybe even four?), lots of boilerplate superhero emo (Oh, How My Powers Set Me Apart From Others), the pain of watching Jessica Alba almost master the actorly discipline of a third expression, etc.

Jessika (my daughter, not the somewhat gifted thespian) slew me at one point in the movie. (I don’t think the following bit is spoilerish, but it does refer to stuff in the plot, so…) The intrepid Ms. Storm had snuck her way into the secret prison where the Surfer was being tortured by the government (some well-intentioned but ham-handed social content here) and was asking the Surfer why he was intent on destroying the world. The Surfer explained he was operating at the behest of his “master.” Sue naturally asks, “Who is your master?” And at that point Jessika leans over and whispers to me, “Mister Snoogles!” Her comment briefly disrupted the ritual solemnity appropriate to watching a movie of this magnitude and thematic heft and FX budget.

Nick, who almost never talks during movies, said afterward that the FF universe was “full of hypocrisy” because there were so many parts that contradicted each other. (The Surfer’s “energy,” for instance, introduced “molecular changes” in some people, not in others, quite arbitrarily.) I’d never heard a world-building critique like that before, and it struck me as pretty shrewd. Writers who tolerate these convenient inconsistencies are making their world untrustworthy, like a shifty politician who can’t keep his story straight.

_____

On the meme front, I thought I’d post this same sentence in my journal.

“If there are one or more people on your friends list who make your world a better place just because they exist, and whom you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.”

I was bemusedly watching the trailer for the new live-action Underdog movie (seen at a post by Paul di Filippo on the Inferior Four group blog) and wondering whether a live-action Underdog movie is really needed at this moment in history (no conclusions on that), when I noticed that the background music was the same fakey-excited choral audiojunk that seems to be the background for every action movie trailer lately. (See the last 30 seconds of the Ghost Rider trailer for a recent example.)

I’m sure the producers of Underdog were using the music ironically because, as we know, every mode of human expression other than irony died in that terrible moment when Barney first mouthed the words “I LOVE you!” But it especially annoyed me because the old Underdog cartoon show had the greatest theme-music of any cartoon superhero.

If the producers had used some updated version of this it would have been at once more original and more nostalgic and it still would have been ironic (since everything must be, nowadays).

“That choral action audiojunk should be banned,” I muttered. So I put it on the list of things I think must be stopped.

Other items:

Use of the word epicenter as an emphatic form of center. In my view, no one has a reason to use epicenter if they’re not talking about seismology and if they do they should be fined in some ironic and suitably postmodern manner.

Movies that feature penguins. There may have been a time when movies about penguins could be justified; I won’t dispute that. But I think we have enough now, maybe even a few too many.

Strunk and White.

Spam. I’m not talking about the e-mail byproduct; I mean the meat byproduct. And it’s not because I’m worried about the endangered spambeeste. The sooner they’re gone the better: I’m tired of shovelling their droppings off my lawn or being awakened before sunrise by their bizarre mating calls. No, it’s spam itself I object to.

I would explain why spam is at the epicentric penguin, as it were, of my (cue the choir) hate trailer. But I’m pretty sure you’ve stopped reading by now, anyway.

This is sort of how I write.

Not bad enough to make me resolve to stop watching the show, but not that great.

Some snarkage and spoilage behind the cut.

Some kind words about “A Book of Silences” from Sherwood Smith (sartorias) in her review of Black Gate 10 at Tangent Online.

Leaving Morlock and myself out of it, I thought it was a pretty strong issue also. Tangent‘s purview doesn’t include nonfiction features, but it’s worth noting: John O’Neill’s editorial was a serious look at the pulps, who tried to warn us about “the very real dangers of even short-range space exploration. Things like Venusian swamp worms, Martian plague, and the Red Death of Saturn.” News you can use, indeed. And this issue’s “Java Joint,” founded on a basic human truth that I utterly reject, was especially hilarious.

I thoroughly enjoyed Rich Horton’s article on magazines of the 1970s. I was stunned to discover that Leiber’s “Rime Isle” was serialized in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy, a magazine whose existence I had completely forgotten; I thought, for some reason, the serial had run in Vertex. Nothing really hinges on this, but “Rime Isle,” although far from the best Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, is important to me as one of the small handful of these tales I read on their original magazine appearance in the mid-late 1970s. My recollection seems to have mashed together several of these large-format short-lived prozines into one, sort of like Nomad and Tan Ru. I’m still sure that I read the serial, but not, obviously, in Vertex. It’s weird how memory can mutate first hand experience into something that never really happened. Anyway, nostalgia (and its disruptions) aside, this is an interesting survey of the genre market at a time of transition.

The reviews (of games and books) were also very beefy and satisfying.

It looks like the prophesied cash cow, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, might not yield much in the way of milk.