Archive for the 'Miscellaneous' Category

Recommended Books Read in 2007

Constance Ash December 26th, 2007

This list came about because Vaquero asked the members of our e-mail list to send us the titles of books they most liked reading in 2007. This wasn’t a round-up of 2007’s best published books, but rather, whatever the members had read and thought worth recommending to others. Here’s my list, broken into fiction and non-fiction. That all the titles are linked to amazon isn’t because I’m enrolled in their kickback program (I’m not.) Don’t care if you buy from amazon or anyone or at all. But their database is there, and it is convenient for all of us to use.

Fiction

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra is a huge novel — nearly 900 pp., packed with characters, and flashbacks. It never drags, is always interesting; you are always wanting to know what comes next. It’s a policier-detective-mystery-gangster novel, written by an Indian author, all characters Indian, all locations foregrounded in India. It is also, appropriately, considering India’s cultural and political history as the jewel in the British Empire’s crown, a conscious inheritor of the grand English Victorian 3-decker novel, notably, George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

There’s a glossary of names and vocabulary that is as long as a slim modernist novel itself, both necessary and worthwhile for the reader, as well as interesting in itself. As another signal of how good this book is, you wish the author had made the glossary longer, because, as with a Tolstoy novel, after some chapters when you’ve become familiar enough with the characters and the milieu, and you no longer need the glossary, whole new sets of questions are set off in the reader’s mind that call for yet more glossary entries.

This novel is the one of all those I’ve read in the last 5 years perhaps, that I’ve enjoyed the most thoroughly, on the most number of levels, particularly because it throws open windows and doors into unfamiliar worlds, which is what fiction can do better than anything else, particularly if taken in tandem with the food and what makes the people, for whom those worlds are common reality, laugh. There is a lot about food in Sacred Games, and a lot of laughing.

With the exception of the Díaz and Chandra titles, these novels all are what the publishing industry categorizes as genre — sf/f, mysteries, historical. These are shelved by bookstores, and libraries too, in sections separate from each other, as well as safely segregated from the shelves labeled “literature and fiction.” These novels may not appeal, then, to those without a taste for the genres; on the other hand, since 9/11 there are fewer novels published outside of genre that this reader can be bothered with; notably, there’s no stomaching any in the cascade of novels that is currently being published about 9/11, in the competition among our ‘literary novelists’ to own the catastrophe that signaled the end of the world as we knew it.

So, it’s worth noting that the Junot Díaz novel informs us of the Dominican Republic’s cruel history via constant referencing sf/f genre and pop culture, and that Sacred Games was lauded by those who review ’serious’ fiction and literature, because Chandra, like Díaz, has a prior reputation as a ‘literary’ author with ‘critical acclaim.’

Another point of interest is that hardly anyone sent in fiction titles. However, two others did include The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as well as Vaquero and myself, and another list member recommended Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. Perhaps genre fiction is more highly regarded, and of greater interest to the general reading public than some might believe.
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What Works on an Author Website?

David Louis Edelman December 19th, 2007

I’m currently in the process of reworking my Infoquake website to conform with the new cover design, and creating a MultiReal website to match. I feel like the Infoquake website design hasn’t held up particularly well as I’ve made changes and additions to it. The new one will be much snazzier, I promise you.

But at the moment, I’m more concerned about the content of the sites than their visual presentation. And so I’m evaluating lots of author websites to see just what works and what doesn’t.

Today I was poking around the website for Brandon Sanderson, author of Elantris and Mistborn. Careers in the science fiction and fantasy world don’t start much better than Brandon’s. You may have heard recently that he’s been hired to finish off Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, which is kind of the fantasy novelist equivalent of being asked to pinch hit for Mickey Mantle in the bottom of the ninth. I started digging through Brandon’s website and discovered a massive amount of chapter annotations for his debut novel Elantris. Go ahead, poke around yourself — these annotations are detailed. Obviously a lot of thought went into this.

So my question today is this: what do you find useful on an author’s website? I think we can all agree that excerpts help, and at the very least, having a blog doesn’t hurt. But what about the rest? Do you read additional material like chapter annotations, deleted scenes, and first drafts? Do you actually refer to online glossaries and the like? Does this stuff make you more likely to buy the author’s work? (And when you do buy her work, do you appreciate having lots of links to bookstores that carry it?)

If possible, name an author website that’s directly influenced you to buy that author’s work, and why.

Spinner Racks

Madeleine Robins December 7th, 2007

Tom Doherty’s blog on the vanishing mass market paperback should be required reading for anyone who is serious about writing genre fiction (or fiction generally, or anything generally, actually). Disclaimer: Tom is the Publisher and President of Tor Books, and I was his assistant for nearly five years. Tom knows mass market publishing better than just about anyone, and more to the point, he is passionate about publishing and books. Not book-shaped salable widgets, not product, but books.

For years Tom has talked about the diminishment of the mass market in places like supermarkets and drug stores. We used to swap stories about the allure of the spinner racks. When I was a teenager and we’d moved out of New York City and into rural Massachusetts, the drug store was my life line to genre fiction. The local libraries didn’t have much by way of SF or fantasy–lots of historical fiction, Regencies, romances of every stripe, but SF and fantasy were still a sort of untouchable literary caste. But in the drugstore there were spinner racks, and every month I’d go (I got so I knew when the stock would be refreshed, and show up that afternoon) and pick up as many new paperbacks as my allowance would permit (in the days when books were fifty cents to a dollar and a quarter you could actually do that). I encountered Suzette Haden Elgin, Damon Knight, Philip K. Dick, Donald Barr, Robert Silverberg, Terry Carr’s wonderful Years’ Best anthologies, as well as Asimov and Heinlein and Herbert and other Usual Suspects. I found writers I would not necessarily notice today because of the sheer volume of SF and fantasy books that are out there. When there are four genre books a month on the racks it’s easier to buy all four; I didn’t worry about whether a book was my kind of SF because I was so happy to have any SF at all. I was forced by circumstance to read whatever there was, and I was the richer for it.

I love bookstores. I loved bookstores when I was a teenager but even then I bought differently at Barnes and Noble or B. Dalton than I did at the drugstore. I’d encounter a new writer at the drugstore, and after that seek that writer’s work at the bookstore. The books from the spinner racks were the doorway drug that led to the harder stuff. Nowadays when I buy a book it’s most likely on a recommendation from a friend, or it’s by a writer I already know, or something I’ve seen reviewed. What I don’t get too often is surprises, that great feeling of opening a book with no idea of what I’d get. Of course some of it was lousy, but a lot of it was at least entertaining, and some of it was really good.

How do you find new books? Do you get any surprises? I think Tom’s right, that the demise of the spinner rack has a lot of impact on my career, on the sorts of people who might once have picked up a book of mine from the spinner rack but now don’t get a chance to do so. There are other ways to get in touch with potential readers (this blog, after all, is one of them). But that surprise is rarer and rarer, and I, for one, don’t know how to replace it.

Why don’t we love science fiction?

Constance Ash December 2nd, 2007

It’s a little early for us here in NYC to be in the Deep Freeze, but here it is. Plus maybe a half inch of snow, which fell sometime this a.m. before we got up; now the weather’s undecided as to whether it shall snow more or — something.

Nice that the larder is so nicely and well stocked.

Cabin fever shall certainly ensue any moment now. I’m kind of like dogs this way. The need to Go Out builds and builds until it becomes unbearable.

Morever, this is the weekend the U.S. and Brit book review sections are doing “Christmas gift roundups.” Feh. I want Real Reviews of Real New Books! Not roundups about books I’ve already read about. Feh2. Especially on a shut-in day. Feh3.

Ah, the London Times comes through with an article about Science Fiction that is occasioned by the publication of a new edition of Brian Aldiss’s A Science Fiction Omnibus, “a fat collection of classic stories. In the 1960s.” Surely we’ve all read that one? I did, anyway.

There is much of interest in this long article. Here’s a sample:

“The truth is,� Aldiss has written, “that we are at last living in an SF scenario.� A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers – it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant. I disagree. In such a climate, it is the conventionally literary that is threatened, and SF comes into its own as the most hardcore realism.

There’s a great deal in this article that I personally do not agree with, but it is worth reading, maybe just because of that!

Love, C.

“I Mal,” by Nathan Fillion

Constance Ash November 30th, 2007

A friend on Live Journal, French Teacher, pointed the way to this USA Today article, that includes Fillion’s piece from Serenity Found:

“Excerpted with permission from Serenity Found: More Unauthorized Essays on Joss Whedon’s Firefly Universe edited by Jane Espenson (Benbella, $17.95).

French Teacher suggests checking it quickly as USA Today tends to roll in new material constantly.

Go here.

Dang, I wish the link buttons here would get functioning again! So I didn’t have to manually key in the html (lazy moi). And the image buttons.

Kate and some others wrote about having a job they love, which is writing. Here Fillion writes of having a job he loved with his whole being, being Mal.

Love, C.

Whedon On WGA Strike (2)

Constance Ash November 26th, 2007

Joss Whedon answers the New York Times, who try to characterize striking writers as latte-sipping dandies.

http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/11/25/joss-whedon-on-the-wga-strike/

[ The easiest tactic is for people to paint writers as namby pamby arty scarfy posers, because it’s what most people think even when we’re not striking. Writing is largely not considered work. Art in general is not considered work. Work is a thing you physically labor at, or at the very least, hate. Art is fun. (And Hollywood writers are overpaid, scarf-wearing dainties.) It’s an easy argument to make. And a hard one to dispute. ]

There is much more, and it is all wise.

Love, C.

Whedon Returns, With Dushko, With “Dollhouse”

Constance Ash November 1st, 2007

[ Whedon's new Fox series, called Dollhouse, stars Miss Eliza Dushku, best known as Faith to you Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans. And this show isn't just a pilot. It's already been given a seven-episode commitment by Fox. Woo!

Here's how Fox describes the series:

Echo (Eliza Dushku) [is] a young woman who is literally everybody’s fantasy. She is one of a group of men and women who can be imprinted with personality packages, including memories, skills, language—even muscle memory—for different assignments. The assignments can be romantic, adventurous, outlandish, uplifting, sexual and/or very illegal. When not imprinted with a personality package, Echo and the others are basically mind-wiped, living like children in a futuristic dorm/lab dubbed the Dollhouse, with no memory of their assignments—or of much else. The show revolves around the childlike Echo’s burgeoning self-awareness, and her desire to know who she was before, a desire that begins to seep into her various imprinted personalities and puts her in danger both in the field and in the closely monitored confines of the Dollhouse.

So, how did Dollhouse come about? When will it start, given the impending strike? And what are the chances a few Buffy alums might make it onto the show? To find out, read on for my exclusive one-on-one Q&As with creator and executive producer Joss Whedon and star and producer Eliza Dushku. (Pinch me.) You honestly won’t believe how fast this all happened, or where the idea first began! ]

Far more here, including the Q&A with Whedon.

http://www.eonline.com/gossip/kristin/detail/index.jsp?uuid=972f7d73-e0a2-43ea-abad-0abf6afba1f3&sid=fd-hot3-txt

The discussion about Dollhouse on Feminist SF - The Blog has raised some issues.

http://blogs.feministsf.net/

For example, this, written by Ide Cyan:

[ "Even creepier is the fact that these “childlike� characters, mind-wiped and “imprinted� to be anyone’s fantasy, obviously do not have the ability to consent to these jobs, thus turning any sexual assignments into rape." ]

Myself, I’ve always myself a bad taste re what has looked like Whedon’s predeliction for girly sex-bots and other perfect and perfectly compliant female forms, as they recurred more often than seemed seemly on Buffy, and he included one in Serenity.

Love, C.

Community

Lois Tilton October 14th, 2007

It was just over twenty years ago, as a newly-published author, that I joined the Science Fiction Writers of America. It wasn’t a difficult decision. Aside from a vague hope of discovering the Secret Pro Parties, I wasn’t thinking: What can SFWA do for me? Even less was I thinking, then: What can I do for SFWA?

Instead, I thought that I was honored and privileged to become part of the community of science fiction authors. My community.

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Show Don’t Tell But Don’t Show Too Much

Madeleine Robins August 3rd, 2007

This morning’s while-I-was-thinking-of-something-else revelation: reading is a collaborative experience. Writing is done in the expectation of this collaboration, which is one of the things that makes it difficult (aside from the invention, the research, the craft). Movies are prescriptive: they show you what they mean. The best movies, in my humble, leave a little bit to our imagination, don’t spell everything out, make you work. The best books do too, but even there, you are using the author’s words to create a movie in your head. It’s a collaboration. That means the writer has to be careful not to put up blocks to collaboration; the writer has to allow the reader some leeway for her own imagination.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’m mid-way through a really interesting book, but keep stumbling over the details. Many of the details are delightful, but sometimes there’s just too many of them. It’s not worldbuilding, or at least not otherworld-building; the book takes place in the present, in our world. But I’m told every garment every character is wearing, and their fabric composition; I’m told about every tic and shiver, to the point that I can’t tell which of these tics and shivers are meaningful in terms of character reaction and which are just there. If I were workshopping this book, I’d tell the author that he’s so caught up in the movie in his head that he’s not leaving space for me to make that movie my own.

ETA: I appear to have posted this before I was actually done composing. My bad.

Depp lights up ‘Dark Shadows’

Constance Ash July 30th, 2007

How ’bout that — Depp gonna bite hisself some Barnabas of Dark Shadows.

 I probably got to Dark Shadows waaaay too late to find the charms, that I have been reliably assured are found there, but I failed to find any single one, the few times I’ve poked a toe there.

 But surely I am a minority re that, soze herez the newz, if you’all hadn’t heard.

 (I miss me my fish, my splendid, locally fresh caught, wild — not farmed fatty flabby fish fed on bio-engineered corn etc. — grilled to perfection, served with all that one would like with such fish, including the company of brilliant conversationlists in at least 6 languages, including 2 Créoles — and now, instead, I’m moving office in dirty, smucky air ….)

 Love, C.

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