Black Gate

I am sitting at the moment on a beach watching dawn brighten over the mountains in the east, without another human or (barely) anything built by same in sight. There is no electricity here, no landline or cell phone service, nothing that we didn’t bring in ourselves. (And since a 100-year-old alder tree came down in recent weeks near the turnoff from the main (one-lane, gravel) road, we had to hump everything we brought in a fair ways.) Tiny fish are feeding out on the nearly glass-smooth ocean, looking like raindrops, a couple of otters are arguing and splashing on the little islend across the way. A woodpecker has waked up and is rattling in the forest behind me. It’s so quiet I can hear a seagull complaining on a reef two miles away.

A great deal of fantasy takes place in non-technological settings very different from those most who write and consume it live in. I’ve been spending a part of every summer since I was 8 or 9 on this beach, and it serves as a reference when I read or write such fantasy. One thing that is on my mind at the moment is how much work simple things require. Getting a drink of water, for example…. …

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Okay, I’ll admit that in a past indiscretion I went to an adult store (this was in the days before the Internet, when it was the only place you could get such things) and bought an anatomically correct blow up doll.  But, it wasn’t for me. Honestly. It was a joke gift for a bachelor party. Nonetheless, I want to take this opportunity to apologize to my congregation, my constituents and my family for behavior that was actually perfectly innocent, though I realize it could be construed by some as some kind of perverted behavior  by those who haven’t as yet been caught in their own perverted behavior.

At least I didn’t actually use the thing (nor, to my knowledge, did the prospective groom). But, true, I am guilty in the trafficking of plastic pleasure dolls.

What’s this guy’s excuse?
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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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