Ambrose & Elsewhere

This talk by Neal Stephenson has been all over the place recently; I think I saw it last at the Pyr blog. I finally watched it and was glad I did, even though I find the video player sort of inconvenient.

Video and some genre-maundering behind the cut.

1. What in the name of Apicius and Lucullus is a “summer crushed tomato” and why is Bertolli so sure it’ll sound appetizing? It sounds more like a nightmare about castration anxiety. Which leads to my next item…

2. Wanted is a truly awful movie. For years I’ve had a simple rule in movie-going: if the undoubtedly beautiful and talented Ms. Jolie is in a movie it will be terrible, so I don’t see it. (True, this rule would have kept me from seeing Girl, Interrupted or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which I both liked, but I also have a rule against the consistent application of rules.) Wanted, unfortunately, was no exception: a bloody mess. It’s not that there were no good things in it. It was a pleasure, for instance, to see Morgan Freeman execute a harsh parody of the “Magic Negro” role he is so often stuck with. In fact, the whole cast was very good, and the direction was quite skillful. But there’s only so much anyone can do with a movie whose message is, “If your penis feels small, get a very large gun and shoot many people for no clear reason.”

John O’Neill reports that Black Gate 12 has shipped. I was travelling a couple weeks ago when the issue preview posted on the website, but I was remiss not to note it here when I got back. I particularly like Chuck Lukacs’ portrait of Morlock and Fasra. Morlock somehow looks like someone who thinks much more than he speaks, whereas Fasra looks like she’ll say any damn thing that suits her. The seductively spidery art for John Fultz’s story is also very nice; Mark Evans is the artist for that one.

Here’s a robot piano accompanying a human player on an electric cello. Somehow that sounds like America to me.

I was working on a salvage ship among Saturn’s moons.

Sharks in Space! etc.

Apologies for my silence here, lately. There were complications of a pretty harsh sort toward the end of the Italy trip, then the journey home, then jetlag, then my deadline for Blood of Ambrose, more or less jumbled up on top of each other.

Now, at least, I’m home, typing on my beloved but ailing eMac. The jetlag is fading–and I miss it a little, because it’s one of the few things (apart from some sort of narcotic) which enable me to sleep eight hours a night. However, like a narcotic, it has tendency to screw with the clarity of my speech and thought, so I’m probably better off without it. Probably.

Also, I just sent the final text of Blood of Ambrose off to my editor. As synchronicity would have it, Thelonious Monk’s version of “Nice Work If You Can Get It” was playing on iTunes as I hit the “send” button. (But maybe “Don’t Quit Your Day-Job” is the phrase I should be keeping in mind.)

And now off for a celebratory chili dog.

We went down to Pompeii and Naples this weekend.‭ ‬

What I Did On My Summer Non-Vacation, Part MDXCCIV

Okay, now it can be told (since my brilliant agent Mike Kabongo, a.k.a. onyxhawke, already has): I’ve signed a deal with Pyr Books for a Morlock novel, Blood of Ambrose, which is due out Spring 2009.

That makes for a quick deadline. So, as you can imagine, when I’m not taking pictures of tremendous feat or floating face down in Tiber-sized streams of Chinotto Neri, I’m busy revising the final text of the Morlock novel, working steadily on the sequel and trying to do some dreaming and drafting on the second sequel.

This wasn’t how I thought I’d be spending the next year or so–but that’s not a complaint. You know the Weird Al song, “Everything You Know Is Wrong”? It can be a great feeling to realize you were completely mistaken about something.

I just wanted to post something here to let people know I wasn’t floating face down in the Tiber. Things are going well, but my internet connections remain chancy and tend to be available during the day when I’m busy running around doing other stuff. Then there’s the colorful side-events, like the other night when I was busy tapping out an e-mail while sitting on a bench in the Villa Borghese. A guy sat down next to me and asked me for a cigarette; I told him I didn’t smoke and took no more notice of him until I saw that he was taking his clothes off. I’m not sure whether he was signalling to me that he considered the bench his bed or whether he was preparing to pay me the Ultimate Compliment, but either way it seemed like getting the hell out of there was Plan A. So I’m afraid my signoff for that email may have been a little abrupt…

Anyway, the two things.

1. Chinotto Neri is one of the best soft-drinks in the annals of softdrinking. I have no idea what it is made from; some derivative of smack, it would seem. I’ve refrained from mainlining the stuff only because I have no taste-buds in my arm. (Anymore.) Its only serious rival, in my view, is the Vernor’s of my youth. The Vernor’s of today is a pallid thing, which one can drink without feeling the slightest burning sensation. In ancient days a bottle of Vernor’s would raise your core temperature five degrees and, if it were a hot day, you’d have to be rushed to the hospital. Chinotto Neri is totally different, but if I keep I keep slamming the stuff down I may end up in some sort of treatment facility, if not actually a hospital.

2. Lou Anders, intrepid editor at Pyr, is teaming up with Jonathan Strahan to produce a massive sword-and-sorcery anthology on the magnitude of the already-iconic New Space Opera. Lou blogs about it here, and Jonathan Strahan here. So it looks like big things are in store for fans of the genre. Big things [he repeated, as if the phrase were freighted with some hidden meaning, glistening with dark mystery like a dewy bottle of Chinotto Neri straight out of the fridge].

Sorry I’ve been so silent lately. I made it to Rome, as the picture below should reveal… provided I can get LiveJournal to display it. (The LiveJournal interface seems a bit glitchy on my Linux-flavor of Firefox.)

I kept seeing people around town taking pictures of themselves in heroic poses in front of the Colosseum and other monuments, but I didn’t see the point unless I could do something funny. And somehow the images of these fragmentary feet (from the monumental statue of Constantine I in the Capitoline Museums) peering over my shoulder struck me as kind of amusing. (There’s another one here, for those who can’t get enough of this sort of thing.)

Alternate titles for this entry:

“Vootshtaps! Vootshtaps!”

“Smells like feet in here.”

“Kickin’ Out the Toe-Jams!”

etc.