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.”
On the heels of John’s report about Mark Twain’s autobiography comes the news that the $35 760 page first volume of a massive, somewhat disjointed, work is a bestseller.
So in this Kindelized, iPadded and Nooked age of reading trivialized by celebrity tell-it-alls, self-help elevation and political numbwits (though excerpts from the book demonstrate that things were just as bad in Twain’s era as ours, except ours is perhaps a little worse thanks to the Internet and cable TV), Mark Twain’s physical opus is this season’s Christmas holiday hit, surpassing even that of Keith Richards.
Of course, cynic that I am (a cynicism inspired by youthful exposure to Mark Twain), I wonder how many copies will go unread, mere ornaments on a bookshelf, a hip gift idea, especially if that gift has a certain cache as something hard to get.
Somewhere, Twain is finding this immensely amusing.
While other magazines are dying (and then, a la Realms of Fantasy, being resurrected) or publishing irregularly, editor Samuel Montgomery-Blinn is making good on his promise to deliver four issues this year of his newly launched Bull-Spec. Fiction for issue #3 includes the always interesting Lave Tidhar, as well as Katherine Sparrow in addition to Melinda Thielbar and the first professional sales for Denali Hyatt and David Steffen.
My review of the previous issue is here.
You shouldn’t take any bull, just subscribe to it.
The November issue of Apex Magazine has gone to press (can you still use those kind of terms for on-line publication), and edtor Catherynne M. Valente has presented the unusual theme of an Arab/Muslim issue. A reader comment about Pamela K. Taylor’s “50 Fatwas for the Virtuous Vampire” (because it doesn’t matter what part of the world you may be in these days, the undead sucking blood have somehow or another become cultural icons) describes the story as “[b]oth savagely funny and gut-wrenchingly moving.”
In other news, Word Fantasy Award winning editor Susan Marie Groppi is resigning her “in-chief” role at Strange Horizons. Reviews editor Niall Harrison is assuming the post, and is stepping down after five years from the helm as features editor of Vector to take on the job.
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.
Oxford American Magazine is a literary quarterly focusing on Southern culture. A particular favorite of mine is its annual music issue that features articles on both well-known and obscure Southern musicians with an accompanying CD. The current fall issue’s theme is the future, including 11 short stories set somewhere around in 2050. I’m not familiar with these authors, the one exception being Charles Yu whose first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, has been getting some attention.
Salon Futura is a recently launched online non-fiction magazine for essays and reviews about science fiction and fantasy. There
have been several attempts to do this sort of thing, most of which have had short life spans (anyone remember the Internet Review of Science Fiction?), but with Cheryl Morgan on the masthead, whose Emerald City book review blog was up for 12 years, this perhaps might have more staying power. On the other hand, this is a paying market, so if you’re interested in critical discussions of SF/F genre, you might want to consider hitting the donate button. Here’s the short fiction review for the October issue by Karen Burham.
Morgan, by the way, is also the non-fiction editor of 2010 Hugo award winner Clarkesworld magazine. Publisher Neil Clarke (oh, that’s why the magazine is called that) writes about winning the Hugo and other developments here.