Black Gate

This is a strange book about a strange event in a strange time. In the summer of 1835, the first successful penny paper in New York published a series of articles documenting an extraordinary series of discoveries by the most famous astronomer in the world, John Herschel (son of the even-more-famous William Herschel). With the aid of a new optical technology and the pristinely clear skies over the Cape of Good Hope, Herschel had discovered life and, indeed, civilization on the moon.

The reason why these discoveries never came up in the recent 40th-anniversary celebrations of the Apollo moon landing is, of course, the moon landings were faked by the people who would later forge Obama’s birth certificate the truth is out there pyramids were built by Atlantean space aliens from SPA-A-A-ACE they didn’t really happen. The editor of the New York Sun, Richard Adams Locke, needed money. The publisher of the Sun, Benjamin Day, wanted to increase circulation–and wasn’t averse to money either. Day paid Locke to write a series of articles about the supposed “discoveries” of Herschel. Day never admitted that he knew the stories were false, but Locke eventually confessed both that he wrote them (they were originally published anonymously), and that they were false. By the time of his confession, everyone knew this, but when the articles first appeared it seems as if almost everyone took them at face value.

It was the golden age of hoaxes. The world and people’s understanding of it were being transformed by new science and technology. The penny paper, a primitive medium to our way of thinking, allowed information (or misinformation) to spread wide and sink deep into the awareness of an urban population. People were excited by the possibilities of the new world they were entering, threatened by its dangers, and eager on both counts to learn whatever they could about it.

[Hic, haec, hoax: beyond the jump.]

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Courtesy of The New York Times comes this report of  Comic-Con at the San Diego Convention Center. Here’s a picture of some of the attendees.  This is why I’ve never been to a con.

Internet kerfuffles almost inevitably become incestuous loops of recursion and fail–and, if not, they’re hardly any fun at all. But John Scalzi’s response to Adam Roberts’ complaint about this year’s Hugo slate at least led me to do one thing: I ordered Roberts’ Gradisil, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time.

The rest of my reaction is sort of a-plague-on-both-your-houses-ish. I cannot take seriously complaints about a shortlist from people who could have participated in shaping it but did not. This is not an original observation: it was made by a number of people on Roberts’ blog, on Scalzi’s blog and elsewhere. And when it arises, someone always replies, “Oh, I’ve heard that before.” As if that were some kind of answer. You have heard it before because it is true. No one listens to people who sing the blues without paying their dues.

[Meta-kvetchery abounds beyond the jump.]

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It seems that the deterioration of the American public library is worse than I had at first feared. At least if I am to use the Beverly Hills Public Library as an example. (Beverly Hills isn’t exactly the best example of any trend in North America, being a bizarre entity that I think J. G. Ballard invented for one of his novels, but in terms of civic decline I think I’m on safe ground using it.)

I recently posted about my discovery that a coffee shop—with fudge included, for some reason known only to “Kelly”—had mysteriously arisen inside the BHPL. I tried to satisfy myself with the knowledge that the library would at least strive to keep the coffee and fudge behind the glass doors of Kelly’s Staining Bean Juice and Contaminating Sugar Sludge, away from the precious volumes of books and helping to keep at bay the armies of paper-munching insects that might like to snack on old copies of Gormenghast.

However, on my last visit to the library, I made some disturbing discoveries. I hadn’t received the full story about the Kelly’s invasion.

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Who was the greatest American fantasist of the 20th century? People will have their own notions about this (as opposed to the greatest British fantasist of the 20th century, where most lists will begin with Tolkien). Personally, I think Fritz Leiber is several of the century’s greatest fantasists, and other obvious candidates would include Robert E. Howard, Kuttner and Moore, Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Ursula Le Guin. John Crowley has his advocates; no doubt there are others. One name I always think of in this connection is Roger Zelazny.

Zelazny was not a perfect writer. He was an avowed risk-taker, and some of his experiments didn’t come off. Others, which may have read well when they were first written, haven’t aged gracefully. His motto was “Trust your demon,” and demons aren’t always trustworthy. But Zelazny’s method (put less theologically: writers should be prepared to junk their outlines and follow whatever wild hairs present themselves) does tend to take the reader interesting places. Almost no one had heard of Zelazny before 1962. A few years later he was an acknowledged giant in the sf/f field. By end of the decade people were saying he was on the skids. De gustibus non disputandum. In my view (and many others) few fantasists will ever reach the heights Zelazny achieved in his later period.

In any case, his historical importance is beyond dispute, and when an sf/f author of historical importance needs an archival collection, you have but to wait politely and eventually NESFA Press will produce something stunning on the order of “The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny”. (Volume One and Two are the subject of this review; Volumes Three and Four are now out; Volumes Five and Six are slated for release later this year).

[Showers of sparky details beyond the jump.]

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I’ve been traveling the past week-plus, from the Arabian desert to the hallucinatory green of the currently rain-sodden mid-Atlantic, north to Readercon outside of Boston (where I stood bareheaded in the rain!!), and then back again to Philadelphia. Among the many joys and oddities of return: the drivers in these cities are so calm and polite, and so observant of the traffic rules that I feel at peace on that crowded femoral artery of Philadelphia, the Schuylkill Expressway.* Which just goes to show the power of relativity.

Readercon is one of my favorite cons. It’s a small convention with programming pretty much only about books, and the dealers’ room (or crack den, as my friend Vickie calls it) sells no t-shirts or other tchotchkes, only books and magazines. One of my panels was about re-reading the classics, a poor choice by Programming since my reading history is lamentably patchy. Somehow (I think all I said was that Shakespeare was hard to read for speakers of present-day English) I seemed to become the person who thought the classics were all irrelevant. It’d be more accurate to say that I think the classics are valuable if not always relevant.

One interchange was about Homer, and how great the Odyssey was, and how much of the whole history of literature the Odyssey had influenced, and how Joyce’s Ulysses contained the whole of human experience (this last from critic and fellow panelist Michael Dirda). …

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