I’m here to talk to you about the benefits of writers’ nights, open mics and literary soirees. Um. As you have seen. In the title. Of this blog.
“What brought this on, Claire?” you ask.
Why, thanks for your interest! I’ll tell ya!
Tomorrow night, my buddy Patty Templeton (one of the mighty slushers and bloggers for Black Gate) is hosting a small private “Fiction Fun Time Potluck ” at her place. I’m very excited. I will dress up, maybe even wear lipstick! There will probably be candlelight and a lot of giggling. And WORDS! Glorious words — from the mouths of aspiring novelists and struggling upstart writers: each of us, manuscripts in hand, getting a moment in the spotlight. My favorite thing ever!
Wikipedia (it being Wikipedia, all normal cautions apply) has the definition of a salon (literary, that is, not hirsute) thus:
Patty "La Marquise" Templeton, our beautiful and educated Patroness.La Salonniere Élisabeth, Comtesse Greffulhe, by Laszlo
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation… Carried on until quite recently, in urban settings, among like-minded people…
…Some scintillating circles formed in the smaller courts which resembled salons, often galvanized by the presence of a beautiful and educated patroness…
I’m not sure how much refinement there’ll be (we all cuss like sailors and flirt like courtesans. But I’ll betcha good working-class wages they didn’t do things all that different in 18th century Paris and Venice), however, I do know we’ll come away with a thorough knowledge of monsters, robots, murderers, gods and maybe even faeries.
My excitement for tomorrow’s revelries got me thinking about events similar to these I’ve attended or invented over the last few years.
In the mail this week is the latest Interzone. The fiction features a novella by Nina Allan, “The Silver Wand,” and stories by Tim Lees (“Crosstown Traffic”), Chris Butler (“Tell Me Everything”), and Ray Clule (“Tethered to the Cold and the Dying”).
The magazine is the print home for David Lanford’s “Ansible Link,” a miscellany of genre news. I found this item from the regularly featured “As Others See Us” department particularly humorous:
Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone-themed novel Never Let Me Go can’t be sf even though he says it is, because he’s respectable. To clarify: “It isn’t science fiction–indeed its procedures are the very reverse of generic, for there is no analogy at work in the text, which instead labours (sic) to produce its iterative naturalism as a kind of sub-set or derivation of our own.” (Guardian)
That certainly clears things up.
Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Nine – “The Six Gates”
“The Six Gates” was the ninth installment of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu and Company. The story was first published in Collier’s on October 23, 1915 and was later expanded to comprise Chapters 27-30 of the second Fu-Manchu novel, The Devil Doctor first published in the UK in 1916 by Cassell and in the US by McBride & Nast under the variant title, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
The story opens, like many early Rohmer tales, with the unexpected arrival of a late night visitor. In this instance, Smith and Petrie are preparing for the raid on the Gables when Aziz, Karamaneh’s brother, turns up at Petrie’s door. While initially skeptical of trusting him, both men are quickly won over by the young man’s tale of how Karamaneh was abducted by Fu-Manchu’s minions shortly after he and his sister returned home to Cairo; how Karamaneh was rendered amnesiac by a drug administered by Dr. Fu-Manchu; and how Aziz followed their trail from Cairo to Rangoon to London in his desperate quest to free his sister from slavery. Smith and Petrie leave Aziz in police custody as they join Inspector Weymouth for the police raid on the Gables.
Smith and Petrie foolishly separate from the Scotland Yard men and encounter Karamaneh in the house. She warns them that they are walking into a trap, but Smith disregards her warning and he and Petrie step right into a trapdoor hidden behind a curtain. They recover consciousness to find Dr. Fu-Manchu gloating over their blundering incompetence. He mocks them for being inferior to children who learn from experience to fear fire lest they be burned a second time. Presently coming to the point, Fu-Manchu explains that Smith is to be tortured with the Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom while Petrie, his devoted friend, is provided with a samurai sword to end Smith’s sufferings if he dares.
I share a lot of books with my kids. I have two sons, ages 15 and 13, and an 11-year-old daughter. As you can imagine, they have a wide range of tastes. It’s uncommon for two to enjoy the same book (or series), and virtually unheard of for all three to agree. They couldn’t even agree on Harry Potter – my youngest two enjoyed the books, but my oldest turned up his nose.
The solitary exception is Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle. All three have devoured every book in the series, and all three have been clamoring for more.
For years. The first novel, Eragon, famously completed when when Paolini was only 19, was released in 2002. My oldest, Tim, read it first, and immediately started asking me when the next one was coming out.
Eldest arrived in 2005, and by then Tim’s brother Drew had read the first one. Within two weeks of Eldest‘s publication date, both of them were asking me to check Amazon.con for news of the third. Brisingr landed in 2008, and by then (of course) my daughter had leaped enthusiastically on the bandwagon.
It’s now been almost three years that I’ve put up with endless questions about the arrival of the fourth book (the most recent was last Saturday. Man, these kids do not give up). So it was with considerable relief that I saw news articles this week about the fourth and final volume, Inheritance, scheduled for release by Knopf Books on November 8, 2011. Thank. God. I thought I was going to be pestered about this book until retirement.
You’re on your own for a plot summary, or any further details. I’m already tired of hearing about this book, and I first heard about it yesterday. Read all about it on Paolini’s website Alagaesia.com, or better yet ask a nearby teenager. They’re sure to have all the details.
Oh, gosh! I’ve been reading Naomi Novik’sTemeraire books. My buddy (and dread Goblin Queen) Jessica Wick has been telling me I should read them for ages. And then the most fair and perilous Patty Templeton chimed in. And then my cool co-worker Janelle “I’m totally surviving the Zombie Apocalypse” McHugh started harping about them too, and I finally got a clue.
So I was all like, “FINE! I will read your 19th Century Dragons-as-Aerial-Calvalry in the year ‘O6 book, and I will see if it’s REALLY as good as all y’all are saying it is.”
Oh, it is. It is. Sea battles! Sea Serpents! Terrible storms! Travels to China! To Prussia! Blockades! Border patrols! Abolitionists and Assassins and fire-breathing Kazilik dragons, oh my!
I ordered His Majesty’s Dragon through Amazon.com and then I sort of ate it. And then I wheedled Patty (who works at a library to which I have no card) into checking out the next three books (Throne of Jade, Black Powder War and Empire of Ivory) for me (the latter of which I’m currently on). Last week, in anticipation of running out, I batted my not terribly impressive eyelashes at Janelle (who happened to be going to the library that day) and asked if she might, just might, be willing to check out Victory of Eagles for me.
In the meantime, I ordered them all for our bookstore, so that I can hand-sell them to unsuspecting customers in search of something bright and new and rambunctiously scrumptious in Fantasy. They’re sitting on my Employee Recommendation Shelf, right beside James Enge’s The Wolf Age, Terry Pratchett’s Nation, and Robin McKinley’s Sunshine. So they’re in good company!
Now, I’ve actually read (and watched) Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, and also I love Susanna Clarke’s work, so I knew whereof Stephen King spoke when he wrote:
“Is it hard to imagine a cross between Susanna Clarke, of Norrell and Strange fame, and the late Patrick O’Brian? Not if you’ve read this wonderful, arresting novel.”
Only, see, I liked these books even better than Master and Commander, coz there were actually WOMEN in the pages. Female dragons as well as pilots — and boy, does that disturb our doughty protagonist Will Laurence! Before he got accidentally bonded to his Imperial Dragon Temeraire, he was just your ordinary, average (awesome) naval captain, with all that being British, a guy, and a naval captain in the 19th century implies. His time with the Aerial Corps, but most especially with Temeraire, works on him, until by the fourth book in, Laurence thinks and acts in ways that surprise even himself. It’s wonderful!
But really. I’m not here to write an in-depth review. I’m just here to alert you. You can be stubborn like me and wait a year or three before taking my advice and reading these books. YOUR LOSS THOUGH!
io9 has an interview with the author of the Gor novels, John Norman — a.k.a. John Lange, PhD and professor of philosophy at Queens College CUNY. Who knew?
Lange responds at length on Nietzsche:
In Nietzsche, the expression is ‘Übermensch’, which might be translated variously. A common translation today would be ‘Overman’. It might also be understood as a higher person, a superior person, an ideal as to what a human being might be, a comprehensible ideal toward which a human being might aspire, and such.
I confess I’ve never read any of the Gor books, although I’m certainly aware of their notorious sexy-time reputation. And, even putting that aside, the interviewer’s statement that “people frequently describe Gor as a Nietzschean society” doesn’t entice me to read them anytime soon since Nietzsche is so clearly misunderstood in popular culture. Yet while I disagree slightly with Lange’s interpretation of the Ubermensch (the reason why “The word is always used in the singular, never as though there could be more than one,” is not because there can only be one Highlander, but because Nietzsche realized the transformation was an individual experience, not a collective one, similar to the Buddhist idea of enlightenment), I think he provides a fine explanation of Friedrich’s world-view, which had nothing to do with master races and rippling pecs but rather with internal epiphanies and ideals.
Sword-and-sorcery has always been a perfect vehicle for existentialist themes. Here’s hoping, to paraphrase the interviewer, that Nietzsche becomes more popular not only among young philosophers and post-modern theorists but among fantasy writers as well. Just with fewer whips and chains.
Ryan Harvey is at it again in the Black Gate L.A. offices, his collection of vintage zoot suits making the reception area look like a rainbow of color from the 30s. Having no desire to see him try on another while our two receptionists cheer him on, I decided to take my recently received VIP passes to the premiere of Sucker Punch at Mann’s Chinese Theatre [BG membership has its privileges] and exited to the observation deck. Jeff Dee introduces us to Ice Toads
L.A. is a funny place, bright, beautiful, and hiding a pasty underbelly that’s only seen if you know where to look. It’s nothing like Indiana, my place of birth, where poverty isn’t hidden behind a veil of Botox and palm trees.
I’d just returned from the Hoosier state, my little town surrounded by corn fields and meth labs, but no matter what, it’s there I can truly feel comfortable. Seated in the house where I was raised on the banks of the Tippecanoe, I found myself surrounded by friends I’ve had for thirty-five years, and the reason we’re still friends is and will always be role-playing.
In 1960, only 34 years after the launch of Amazing Stories, the first true science fiction magazine, fan Earl Kemp mailed a set of questions to 108 SF writers, editors, artists and fans. 71 responded, including Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Hugo Gernsback, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Silverberg, John W. Campbell, Horace Gold, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and many others. The questions were:
1) Do you feel that magazine science fiction is dead?
2) Do you feel that any single person, action, incident, etc., is responsible for the present situation? If not, what is responsible?
3) What can we do to correct it?
4) Should we look to the original paperback as a point of salvation?
5) What additional remarks, pertinent to the study, would you like to contribute?
Kemp published the results in his one-shot fanzine SaFari Annual #1 in 1960. Only 125 copies were printed, and it instantly became a collector’s item. A candid dialog on the flaws and fate of the genre between most of its brightest lights, Who Killed Science Fiction? achieved near-legendary status in the SF community, and SaFari Annual #1 won a Hugo Award in 1961 based on that sole issue.
My fellow Canadian William Shatner turns 80 today.
For much of my life I watched him, in his role as Captain Kirk, help program Americans to accept Canadians as their leaders. Made things a lot easier when I moved to the U.S. in 1987 to finish my Ph.D, let me tell you. Not to mention numerous D&D games, in which elves (and anything else with pointed ears) immediately referred to me as “Captain.”
It did not, unfortunately, make picking up girls easier. For which I blame fellow Canadians Dan Aykroyd, Mike Meyers, and especially Jim Carrey. Doofus.
Anyway, back to Shatner. The Great One was born on March 22, 1931, in Montreal, Quebec. He had a starring role in Roger Corman’s 1962 film The Intruder and numerous appearances in film and television, including the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” and “Cold Hands, Warm Heart” for The Outer Limits. In 1964 he guest-starred with Leonard Nimoy in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode “The Project Strigas Affair.” I’m serious — check it out. Shatner plays a pest exterminator, and Nimoy a sinister-looking assistant Balkan diplomat. It’s sort of like watching the Trek episode “A Piece of the Action,” if you’re drunk enough.
From 1966 to 1969 Shatner was cast as James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, in the role that defined his career, and made things easier for a generation of Canadians living in the U.S. He reprised the role in Star Trek: The Animated Series from 1973 to 1974, and in seven Star Trek feature films between 1979 to 1994. He was a lead in the popular Boston Legal, currently stars in the CBS comedy $#*! My Dad Says, and has a cameo in the upcoming Horrorween.
Happy Birthday, William Shatner! You are a god among men.
Peter Jackon Proves that The Hobbit Is Actually Shooting
Only a short post today, following up on John Fultz’s report on the final progress toward the two-part film adaptation of The Hobbit:
Principal photography is officially underway! Footage is occurring. Right now, in New Zealand, a crew is shooting the much delayed and hazard-prone project, under The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.
Better yet, we have proof that it is occurring: these two photos (second beneath the cut), initially posted to Peter Jackson’s Facebook page, of the director on a fully-dressed Bag End set, prepared and lit for the cameras.
It’s strange to think how much time has passed since that thrilling day in October 1999, when Variety and The Hollywood Reporter contained a two-page spread to announce that photography had started on the three Lord of the Rings films in New Zealand. The spread was a gorgeous Alan Howe painting of a Nazgûl perched on a hill over the Shire with the original logo design for the film. (I still have that older design on an edition of the novel I purchased soon after shooting began, just to have my first “merchandize” of the production). I cut out the ad and had it on my wall for ten years.
Oh, gosh! I’ve been reading Naomi Novik’s 
io9 has 
Only a short post today, following up on