Black Gate

So a lot of people are on the edge of their seats because Apple is introducing a new iPhone model next week, and some people have fuzzy pictures supposedly leaked from China that purportedly show that the new model will have a matte black case. I can hardly contain my excitement. I’m cynical enough to think that Apple itself might be leaking the sneak peeks as a way to generate buzz about what sounds to me as just some feature improvements so people will want to stand in line for two weeks at the wireless store until the new model is available and they can belong to the technical elite for a couple of days or so.

All of which reminds me of a recent short story by Bruce Sterling, “Black Swan” in the March-April 2009 (Issue 221) of Interzone. The protagonist is an Italian blogger-journalist (sounds a little like Sterling himself in some respects) who gets insider tips on new technologies from a mysterious source who is so secretive he can’t be Googled. There’s a lot of techno-speak and the plot hinges on the notion that the 1980s (when, perhaps not coincidentally, Sterling and his fellow cyberpunks first started making names for themselves) was a critical historical point from which multiple realities branched. The story also features Nicholas Sarkozy (yes, the president of France) and his actress-singer wife (yes, that wife).

Fun stuff and much more interesting than the gloss on the iPhone.

I’m looking forward to China Miéville’s new novel, The City and the City. In the meantime, here’s an interview I did with him just as his star was ascending.

Given all the discussion of late about reboots, I wonder why no one has ever thought to revisit this classic.  Forbidden Planet was my Star Wars when I was in fifth grade. In the New York metro area, Channel 9 had a  feature called “Million Dollar Movie” that used to play a particular movie ever day throughout the week in the early evening.  Forbidden Planet was a regular staple, and whenever it was in rotation, I was there in front of the TV (which, to give you an idea of how old I am, displayed only black and white).

One of the things that was particularly cool about this flick  is that it opened up a window to the nomenclature of Freudian repression and Shakespeare, all dressed up in space adventure.  My guess is that a reboot would probably ruin it; for every Star Trek or Batman there’s A War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise…

I’m not saying I want to see a remake, but given the limited imagination of much commercial filmdom, I wonder why no has considered it.

A few posts ago, I asked if, given current economic and political conditions, the next thematic trend in SF and fantasy will be a return to woeful tales of doom and disaster. Sure enough, lately I’m coming across signs that the zeitgeist might be finding a warm place in Cold War era end-of-the-world narratives.

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal there’s a short review of Genesis by Bernard Beckett.  Yeah, I know, the title is cringe-inducing, but it actually fits (both the title and the author’s surname), at least according to writer Jeffrey Trachetenberg’s description:

…survivors in a world destroyed by nuclear and biological weapons are forced to re-think what makes the human species special…the issue of machine self awareness emerges as pivotal.

Not exactly original, but, then again, “nothing is new under the sun” as Ecclesiastes noted back in antiquity and, as Trachetenberg notes, revisiting this time honored trope is in part a result of “deep-rooted international concerns about such issues as global warming and the 9/11 attacks.”

…

Read More Read More

While public health officials and the vice president fear for the worst, I haven’t started wearing a face mask. If there’s anything that looks to me like something out of a sci-fi movie, it’s people going about their daily business with those things on. Can designer face masks be far behind, maybe just the sort of thing to stimulate consumer spending and get the economy going again?

In any event, Steve Carper has devised a particularly ironic solution to the problem in A Kiss is Just a Kiss, which is a sample of his tales collected in Tyrannosaur Faire. You can buy his book here as either a downloadable PDF or good-old fashioned print. The collection includes Steve’s “Pity the Poor Dybbuk,” which first appeared in Black Gate’s second issue, back in the Summer of 2001, when everyone was breathing easier.

Courtesy of Locus comes this link to James Lovegrove’s Review of the cover — not the book itself — of PS Publishing’s reissue complete with original artwork (hence the review) of Ray Bradbury’s 1966 short story collection S is for Space, a sequel of sort to R is for Rocket, which also featured a cover by Joe Mugnaini. Lovegrove says that a first edition copy is a rare find. It just so happens that I have one. My parents weren’t book people, but my neighbors across the street were. Mr. Heinholdt worked for The New York Herald (for you youngsters out there, that was a fairly reputable newspaper in its day) and Mrs. Heinholdt (further note for you youngsters: in those days, kids had no idea that adults had first names) worked at this marvelous used book store of cavernous dimensions infused with the smell of old paper stored for way too long where for hours I’d thumb through poorly filed carboard boxes of Astounding magazines from the 1940s  stuffed in tight spaces beneath groaning bookshelves. Knowing of my enthusiasm for Bradbury and science fiction, for Christmas of 1966, Mr. and Mrs. Heinholdt gave me a hardcover of S is for Space. I thought it was the first hardcover of a “real adult” book of literature  I was ever to own.

But it would seem my memory is faulty. It wasn’t a “real  adult” book, after all. Lovegrove notes that the book was aimed at what today is called the young adult market.  And, sure enough, there are cover flap blurbs from the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books and a notation that the book is recommended in the H.W. Wilson Standard Catalog for High School Libraries.

Sigh. Another childhood illusion shattered.  Funny thing is, I was flipping through the stories, and for the most part they strike me as stronger — as well they should, this is, after all, Bradbury in his prime — than his latest We’ll Always Have Paris that I recently reviewed. Even from my adult perspective.

I don’t know if I’d assign Bradbury to a high school audience, these days. I don’t think they’d get it. Too many anachronisms. Can the iPod and Facebook generation relate much to boys who thrill to the night carnival?

Oh, in case you were going to ask, no, my copy is not for sale, whatever it may be worth as a first edition in very good condition. Some things you just can’t put a price on.

A brief and imprecise history of 20th century SF (with a bit of fantasy) into the 21st:

Back in the so-called Golden Age, it was about rocket ships and blasters and the possibility of an atomic bomb.
Possibilities became reality, and post World War II writers were obsessed with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Along came the sixties and the New Wave and rather than celebrate technology, feared its dehumanizing potential; mind altering drugs were okay, though. Then it got kind of boring, Tolkien was rediscovered by middle school kids and the fat fantasies started to take off. The cyberpunks depicted technology as neither good nor bad, just something that humans could use for good or bad and was, like it or not, a fact of reality. Then along came things like slipstream, New Weird, New Space Opera (meanwhile, the old space opera and golden agers were light speeding about the galaxy all this while people were accusing the genre of becoming too literary for its britches), Interstitial Fiction and what have you.

So what’s next? Tales of economic doom and environmental disaster? (But wait, wasn’t J.G. Ballard doing that a long time ago?)