FutureTense

Glory be!

No longer do I have to spend two hours in the morning cleaning an already clean house, only to find that my children have started, but not finished, an elaborate art project in the middle of the office floor.

With glue. Lots of glue. Bright, white Elmers® glue, in long streamers. A veritable spider’s web of glue.

And glitter. Gleaming, sparkling flakes of gold and red and silver. What ever prompted me to buy glitter in one quart containers? Whole elfin kingdoms have been pillaged of their fairy dust, which now lies in dunes upon the floor. I hope the next residents like glitter, for the cracks between the floor boards are stuffed with it.

A wonderful couple, they drove all night from Fresno, California, having seen our house advertised on the internet. They spent two hours here, only to turn around and drive back.

They’re expecting. Not my busniess to know when, but maybe I don’t have to be so vigilant about excavating each and every last flake of fairy gold. For soon they, too, will have their own master of disaster and deserts of glitter.

Steve Berman at Strange Horizons interviewed Ellen Kushner (2002.11.11).

In what seems like a quick interview, Ellen talks about musicallity in her use of language; working against genre in Swordspoint; changes in the field since Swordspoint first appeared; other, hopefully forthcoming Swordspoint related material…The most interesting, to us, is a brief discussion by Ellen on her use of ballads, modernity vs. tradition , and the tension between what is gained and lost when tradition is left behind.

This is where I would have liked to see Steve, the interviewer, expand in the interview. When you have a real expert on a topic, one they’ve thought deeply about and worked in for years, let them talk about it. Gay sex/future appearances/birth of the “interstitial” genre are topics that have been done elsewhere. No need to go into them here, again, an exploration necessarily limited in scope and meaning because its been done so many times before.

Did I ever say how much I hate rewrites?

I get the first draft all finished–all 98 pages of it. Then, in the middle of the night, a Magpie demon sneaks in and steals all of the good parts.

This morning I opened up the first draft of “Elf Call” to discover piles of brittle, dry leaves where once fountains of imagination danced and sparkled in the sun. I’m going to have to set a ring of moustraps around my desk. A guillotine. That’s what I need. Or maybe a glue trap to catch the buggger, so I can ask it where it’s hidden the wonderful, special parts of this story it stole. And what about all my other stories that it’s ruined?

Tom Doyle’s essay on the relationship between SF and fundamentalist Christian apocalyptic fiction.

Christian SF is the next “new thing” in SF, one of the large underground movements just beginning to emerge into the public eye. There are young, new groups on Yahoo! dedicated to Christian SF, Christian Fantasy, how to write Christian SF, ad infinitum, none of which existed two years ago.

Personally, I find the concept of “Christian SF” to be an oxymoron, much like Christian rock and Christian psychotherapy. I believe there is a place in SF to explore faith, spirituality, and even religion. Some of my favorite book, such as “The Sparrow,” deal with Christianity and Christians. However, “Christian SF” fundamentally limits expression to those principles which support and promote Christianity.

Explore, so long as it is done in the name of G*d.

Imagine anything you want, as long as it conforms to Christian belief.

The idea that SF can–or in this case, must–be limited in order to promote a dogma is one that I find objectionable.

Nominations (down at the bottom of the page) for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer:

• Charles Coleman Finlay (second year of eligibility)
• David D. Levine (first year of eligibility)
• Karin Lowachee (first year of eligibility)
• Wen Spencer (second year of eligibility)
• Ken Wharton (second year of eligibility)

The Hugo Award nominations are here.

Ted Chiang respectfully declined his nomination for the Best Novelette category.

This year’s nominations for the Hugo Awards have been announced, and while I definitely can’t comment about all the nominated works, from what I’ve read it looks like a pretty decent list as recent ones go.

I haven’t read any of the novels, so can offer no comment there.

The novella category: Ian R. MacLeod’s "Breathmoss" (from ASIMOV’S) is a sprawling and lyrical SF tale and well worthy of its nomination. It’s probably the best of the novellas I read from the list, although unfortunately I missed Paul Di Filippo’s A YEAR IN THE LINEAR CITY; Di Filippo is one of my favorite writers, and this book slipped past my radar thanks to its UK-only publication. (As a side note, it’s surprising to me that a book-length novella with no US distribution even made it onto the ballot!) I also didn’t catch Neil Gaiman’s CORALINE, but I did read the rest of the nominees, none of which I would have gone out of my way to recommend. "Bronte’s Egg" by Richard Chwedyk, which recently took the Nebula in this category, involves an artificial life form called the saurs, miniaturized dino-pets that are a fad of this future that has passed its time. I found this one overlong and not terribly engaging. Charles Coleman Finlay’s "The Political Officer" did nothing for me, while Pat Forde’s "In Spirit" is an abitious time travel yarn involving 9/11, that is questionable in terms of its science fictional aspects–and probably drew a lot of votes by pushing the readership’s "grim fascination" buttons by dealing with the topic so head on.

In the novelette category, there are three superior candidates–Gregory Frost’s "Madonna of the Maquiladora," Maureen F. McHugh’s "Presence," and Charles Stross’ "Halo." I missed the others. I’d be psyched to see any of these three win.

The short story category is typically weak, with Jeffrey Ford’s "Creation" clearly the best. The Swanwick nominees here failed to do anything for me, particularly "’Hello,’ Said the Stick," and I suspect Swanwick is now cruising on habitual Worldcon voting the way Mike Resnick has been for years. (I have really enjoyed a lot of Swanwick’s work in the past, as well as his recent "Legions in Time" from a recent ASIMOV’S, but haven’t been overly enamored of his recent Hugo noms.) The most interesting story surrounding this category was the original nomination, and subsequent disqualification, of John F. Flynn’s "A Gift of Verse," a story that appeared at an obscure website called NEXXUS. I read the story, and found it only slightly better than fan fiction, and I’m not the only one to have suspected a voting campaign on this one, considering many SF writers and readers in the know had never heard of the market or the author. Ultimately, the story was stricken from the ballot because it had seen publication elsewhere three years ago, to be replaced by "Lambing Season" by Molly Gloss, a story which didn’t do much for me, but is scads better than the Flynn.

My predictions (all of which likely to be wrong!): Best Novel to Michael Swanwick for BONES OF THE EARTH, Best Novella to Richard Chwedyk for "Bronte’s Egg," Best Novelette to Charles Stross for "Halo," and Best Short Story to Michael Swanwick for "The Little Cat Laughed To See Such Sport." These are winner guesses, not my personal choices. And for the John W. Campbell Award? I’m guessing Charles Coleman Finlay.

A syllabus full of jaw twisting titles such as “Theories of MetaFiction” and “Deligitimation and the Postmodern Sublime,” but it does raise hope that the Internet is good for something other than spam and porn, that it can acutally provide a learning resource to a broad base of people who would otherwise never have had access, allowing discourse to take off in undreamed of directions.

Subversive fat fantasy may appear as generic, run-of-the-mill fat fantasy, but in truth they are night and day. Hackwork muckery pumped out for the cash, which is lifeless and bloated and stinking with the rank decay called “sell-out,” has absolutely nothing to do with GOOD fantastic fiction, and certainly nothing to do with good fat fantasy. This generic Fantasy is, to put not too fine a point upon it, pandering shit. Plain old, run-of-the-mill shit.

But the other…
Gabriel Chouinard’s column is dedicated to exposing the risk-takers working in SF and fantasy.

“An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose,” by B. R. Myers.More than half a century ago popular storytellers like Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham were ranked among the finest novelists of their time, and were considered no less literary, in their own way, than Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be “genre fiction”—at best an excellent “read” or a “page turner,” but never literature with a capital L.

It’s not just SF and fantasy that have suffered from the inbreeding of critic, writer and publisher, self-decalred judge, jury and executioner, who collaborate among themselves at the expense of the reader. The high brows have the same problem.

What was interesting about this particular broadside was the widespread support it received. The arguments against it were largely specious (”We don’t like the way he argues…”) and not particularly strong, in my opinion.