Black Gate

I just stumbled upon this spin on a subscription plan to support Clarkesworld Magazine, which has been providing its content online for the past three years. For a $10 or more donation, you can become a citizen; although the privileges of citizenship are still being defined, the folks at Clarkesworld suggest it might include discounts on their print publications, as well as the satisfaction of supporting an endeavor that publishes authors such as, in the current January issue, Peter Watts and Megan Arkenberg. Clarkesworld hopes to naturalize 400 citizens out of the 10,000 or so it counts as regular readers to reach its financial goals.

On another note, Torque Control has published the 2009 BSFA (British Science Fiction Association) Awards shortlist. The nominees for short fiction are:

“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster (Interzone 220)
The Push by Dave Hutchinson (Newcon Press)
“Johnnie and Emmie-Lou Get Married” by Kim Lakin-Smith (Interzone 222)
“Vishnu at the Cat Circus” by Ian McDonald (in Cyberabad Days, Gollancz)
“The Beloved Time of Their Lives” [pdf link] by Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia (in The Beloved of My Beloved, Newcon Press)
“The Assistant” by Ian Whates (in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 3, ed. George Mann)

This past week I saw both Avatar and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Now, ordinarily, you might be struck by the special effects of the latter (I particularly like the scene where Tom Waits as the devil unfurls his umbrella and casually steps off a cliff, at which point little white clouds appear to support each of his steps so he doesn’t plummet to the ground), except now it (and maybe everything else) pales in comparison to Avatar, which is as visually stunning as all the hype suggests, assuming  all you expect from going to a movie is a cool light show. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But, for my money, the better movie, even with its flaws is The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  Why?

Because it has a story. Moreover, it celebrates the whole idea of story.

Yeah, sure, Avatar has a story. A simplistic one that’s 1) predictable, 2) done better before (Apocolypse Now, not to mention that movie’s source material, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”),  and 3) largely besides the point since it exists solely to prop up the computer-generated world-building that is virtually (that’s the key word here) indistinguishable from real people. The Imaginarium, with all its fantastic images (e.g., a horse drawn coach which is bigger on the inside than the outside dimensions, as well as a cartoonish fantasy land — i.e., the Imaginarium — entered via a cheap stage mirror), is not trying to persuade you (or trick you) of a convincing depiction of reality, but rather it is trying to convince you just how shaky “real” reality is. The special effects are in the service of the story — which is all about the importance of stories, a theme you might expect from director Terry Gilliam — not the other way around, as you expect from director James Cameron.

While The Imaginarium also tells a familiar story of the deal with the devil, the power and humor of the storytelling (in other words, the humanity of it) makes us want to hear (see) it all over again. It seeks to show us that life is a sometimes dangerous funhouse comprising smoke and mirrors that maybe sometimes we can manage to peer beyond into the depths of our selves; not rely on smoke and mirrors to fool us into an experience primarily concerned with making us forget ourselves for a few hours before we have to leave the movie theater and return to humdrum everyday existence.

Well, entering the year (both in terms of typing the title and having lived to see it) was a little weird to write. The first chapter of The Martian Chronicles is January 1999, which from the vantage point of the middle of the 20th century, when the German V-rockets had landed not on another planet, but London, that seemed about right for when humanity might be “reaching for the stars” as it was called.  The book ends in April 2026 which, with luck, proper diet and exercise, and health care reform I might actually still be alive to see. And which more than likely humankind, assuming it hasn’t blown itself up, will remain earthbound.

So much for the fantasies of the Golden Age of science fiction writers.

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It’s the end of another year which means everybody’s thinking up “best of lists.” Partially, that’s a marketing thing — and it apparently works because I’ve just finished ordering a couple of albums that were on various critics “best of list” that I hadn’t heard. As a DJ for a local radio station, I’m supposed to be up on these things. Also as a DJ, I was supposed to have submitted my own “best of list,” but haven’t. Maybe as the short fiction guy hereabouts, I’m also supposed to come up with a list of top short stories. But, I won’t. I just have a hard time with this exercise. There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve found interesting, but whether that qualifies as “best of” I’m not sure. And, then, whatever I come up with will invariably leave out stuff that I simply didn’t get to, or didn’t even know existed, which doesn’t seem fair.

Worse, as the end of a decade, there’s also these best of the decade lists. Again, this is largely to fill traditionally slow periods in the news cycle, but it is a conversation starter, which can be fun. I’m not going to provide a list (mainly because I just don’t want to spend the time thinking about it; I’d rather catch up on my to-be-read and to-listen pile), but here’s one by Jonathan Strahan that caught my eye. I like to think I’m fairly well-read and stay on top of these things, but of the ten “best of the decade” short fiction collections cited by Strahan, I’ve only actually read two, though I own two others that I never got around to (yet, I hope). At least, I’ve read all these authors, even if I haven’t made it through all the collections. If you haven’t already jumped, here’s Strahan’s list:

1. Beluthahatchie and Other Stories, Andy Duncan (2000)
2. Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002)
3. Black Juice, Margo Lanagan (2005)
4. 20th Century Ghosts, Joe Hill (2005)
5. Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link (2005)
6. The Empire of Ice Cream, Jeffrey Ford (2006)
7. Map of Dreams, M. Rickert (2006)
8. Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigalupi (2008)
9. Oceanic, Greg Egan (2009)
10. Cyberabad Days, Ian McDonald (2009)

Here in Central Virginia, we’re having one of those once in a decade or so storms in which you fill up your bathtubs with water and just hope the electricity stays on. So far it has (or otherwise I wouldn’t be able to post this).

The good news is there’s nothing like a snowstorm as an excuse to catch up on your reading. The bad news is I won’t be getting out any time soon to see this. I’ve never been a James Cameron fan, and I had the as-you-might-expect reservations that the technology (as is frequently the case with sf/fantasy films) would override the storytelling. Evidently, at least according to this review and a few others I’ve read, that isn’t the case.

I guess what’s really weird is this all sounds like a very giant first step into an immersive computer generated “reality” that once upon a time not so very long ago was only in the imagination of the cyberpunks.

Talebones, a so-called semi-prozine published twice a year, is calling it quits with issue #39 , some 14 years from its debut in 1995. Details as to why editor/owner Patrick Swenson is ending publication are scant, other than this terse annnouncement. Featured fiction is by Carrie Vaughn, Cat Rambo, Marie Brennan, John A. Pitts, Aliette de Bodard, Jason D. Wittman, Patricia Russo, Don D’Ammassa, and Keffy R.M. Kehrli, with poetry by Joshua Gage, Ed Gavin, Darrell Schweitzer and G.O. Clark.

Here’s a review of an issue from quite awhile back.