Black Gate

Over at Locus Online, Lois Tilton reviews short fiction so I don’t have to.

Of particular interest this week is that in addition to the wide range of print and on-line magazines, she takes at look at Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, a collection of hard SF with the sort of authors you’d expect, e.g., Stephen Baxter, Peter Watts, and Karl Schroeder.  

Looks interesting.

There’s an interesting discussion (69 comments the last time I looked!) over at Torque Control about book reviewing.  The whole thing got started when Niall Harrison responded to a blog post by Jason Sanford titled “Why we write literary reviews.“ Jason posts a follow up on “Why It’s Worth Expressing Opinions on Literature.”

On the heels of Mark Twain’s best seller, we now also have this memoir from Anne Rubenstein Dick, third wife of five of the only science fiction writer so far to gain literary legitimacy for inclusion in the Library of America series.  Originally self-published, The Search for Philip K. Dick has been re-edited by Tachyon Press; it covers the five years of Rubenstein’s “courtship” and marriage to one very weird guy during what might be called his “mellow years” in the early 1960s, also the time when he wrote his Hugo award winning (and only award winning) novel,  Man in the High Castle. According to Anne, “I’m not saying he wasn’t a very nice person too; he was. He just had a very dark shadow.”

The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

This was Ray Bradbury, quoted in Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell, in observing that the “seashells” he had made up for people to listen pressed against their ear had actually been invented with the transistor radio (a very, very, very primitive iPod, for you youngsters).  Ray’s point was that the seashells transported people into artificial environments that imperiled human interaction.

This quote appears on the back of my Ballentine Books 1962 paperback edition of Fahrenheit 451 (purchased when I was in sixth grade for the enormous sum of 50 cents).  As you should know, the novel is an indictment of a media-obsessed dystopia that burns books so people aren’t exposed to disturbing ideas and can be kept “happy” with mindless entertainment.  This was written in the early 1950s, and while Bradbury may not have had the details right (and that’s never been his interest), he certainly anticipated our Internet Age (which Ray has described as a “waste of time”).

While the transistor radio may have been the first step, the real giant leap in which we’ve beomce technological islands unto ourselves was the invention of the portable cassette player, the  Sony Walkman, in 1979. With the transistor radio, you listened to what someone was playing for you, usually for the purpose of selling you something. With this clunky piece of machinery, you could choose what you wanted to listen to, wherever you wanted to listen to it. Not quite as passive as today’s MP3 player as you actually had to load into it a a cassette tape, the contents of which you may actually have put some effort into creating as your own personal playlist, without the assistance of a computerized “genius” that’s supposed to know your tastes for you.

The Walkman officially no longer roams the Earth. Sony has announced that production has shut down. Another era has passed.  Alas, Bradbury’s vision of a witless America hasn’t.

Last week I was in Seattle and Portland, where I made pilgrimages to venues possible interest to readers here.  One was Powell’s Books, which claims to be the largest independent bookstore of both used and new books in the nation.  It’s an amazing place, with floors of books in a range of almost every conceivable category that would put any Barnes and Noble “superbookstore” to shame even in its heyday.  Needless to say, the science fiction and fantasy aisle alone is something you could easily browse for an hour or two.

Though I could easily have gone nuts in stuffing a shopping basket, I managed to restrict my purchases to a single used copy of Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (I resisted the urge to also get the mammoth Against the Day because, well, as much as I’m interested, I don’t have the time to commit to 1104 pages of one-stop reading; the audio version comprises 42 CDs for 54 hours of listening) and a gift vegan cookbook for my daughter.  One thing that helped keep my book jones in check was that Powell’s isn’t inexpensive. As much as I’d like to contribute to the physical presence of the bookstore, even one that I’m not likely to visit frequently, the fact is that other than maybe some featured bestsellers, I could get just about anything new or used less expensively at that other big bookstore you may have heard of that exists only virtually.  And when you buy a lot of books like I do (and probably you do), many of which spend extended periods on the “to read” shelf, keeping cost of acquisition down becomes an important buying decision.

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