Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

Got an email today from the proprietor of SciFi Watch, a blog by David Halpert, about a post called Nine Science Fiction Blogs You Should Keep Track Of, one of which was Locus Online. The odd thing was that his description explained that most Locus articles were available only to subscribers, behind a password-protected firewall…

I sent him a correction, but I’m curious how anyone could have gotten this impression. Actually, Locus HQ and I have speculated about setting up some sort of system that would allow only subscribers to access full content from Locus Magazine… but it’s never been implemented. An alternative, closer to reality, is to make available full PDF versions of each new issue, for those subscribers who buy such access, either with their print subcriptions or as some sort of electronic-only subscriptions. But that, too, has not been implemented…

So to clarify: the Locus Online website is a constellation of semi-independent sites.

• The nominal Locus Online site domain is run by me, in Los Angeles, effectively isolated by 400 miles from the Locus Magazine offices in Oakland CA; except for what follows, I post everything on the site, maintain databases and posts of new book and magazine listings, pay for film reviews myself, compile author event and conventions listings, and so on and so on, and on.

• In just the past few weeks, a News blog and an Roundtable blog have been created and linked into the Locus Online homepage, and these blogs are run by the Locus Magazine staff, mostly Liza Trombi, who’s posted most of the news items (though I’ve posted 2 or 3 of them myself) and organized most of the Roundtable blog contributions.
• And all along, perhaps even before Locus Online proper debuted in 1997, there’s been Bill Contento’s Locus Index to Science Fiction pages, which are online samples of his comprehensive Locus Index to SF available in its complete form only on CD ROM.
• And there’s my own Locus Index to SF Awards, first posted back in 2000, with a deliberately different design and look from the main Locus Online site, as if it were an independent site, despite its location on the locusmag.com domain. (And which, in recent weeks, I’ve been actively overhauling and updating.)
• And finally then there’s *this* blog, also with a deliberately independent design, though it’s not situated on the the locusmag.com domain proper…

(And we’re not done yet. The Awards Index subsite, aside from regular updates, will be expanded substantially in the coming months.)

I have this idealistic fantasy that, in a calm and contemplative state of living — a state I never quite seem to achieve — I would have time every day to jot down a few insightful comments or pithy remarks about SF or current events or even, on occasional, my personal life.

Obviously this blog has never reached that idealistic state, but let me see if I can quickly record a few such remarks that have accumulated over the past few days.

The new Locus blogs are up and running. There are still a bug or two in the layout — one especially in IE — that I’ll address shortly. I did all the design setup in Blogger; Liza and Jonathan took care of lining up content and contributions.

The Locus Poll is getting off to a slow start, perhaps because initially the header and link were too low on the homepage, over there in the right pane. I moved the link up, and votes picked up, but totals are still noticeably behind the totals in the first week last year, or the year before. I wonder if this is partly a reaction to the debacle over the abrupt rules-change near the end of last year’s voting, but this is only cynical speculation, based on no evidence.

The background work, for which I have stood down from reading, and from posting weekly Monitor listings of new books and magazines (thought I will post monthly highlights from January real soon now), is still underway. So far this involves overhauling the awards index and database, not just updating awards data from the past year, but updating the layout of pages and cleaning up numerous formatting infidelities. Completing the awards db update is still another two or three full days of work away — which means, another week or two in calendar time. After that comes the new enhancements…

Just posted Gary Westfahl’s review of Coraline. I tried to see the movie today, Sunday, but encountered one sold out theater, and tried two others online to find only front row seats were still available at the times I wanted. Happy to see the film is apparently a big success, though after that experience I’m surprised to see the film has ranked only 3rd in this weekend’s box office. Will see it soon, when I can.

Lots of rain here in SoCal this past week. Still have my job (knock wood). Watching the Grammys. Still jazzed about Lost. (I don’t keep up with fan analysis, but since the big white flashes mean a time displacement, is that what happened at the end of Season 2 when they failed to enter those numbers in the computer and…it happened? Has anyone been speculating on what *that* meant? That the whole island had already moved foward or backward in time since the initial crash–..??)

The new News Blog seems to be working out well (i.e., no complaints), and it strikes me as perhaps the most significant development for the website since its debut over ten years ago. At last, the site is not constrained by my own personal schedule (which has in recent years been even more constrained by security restrictions at my dayjob, which prevent my ability to update the site during work hours, i.e. 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. or so, Pacific time), while the Locus Home Office has realized that posting a certain amount of breaking news on the web is necessary to compete with other news sources, and does not necessarily compromise its monopoly on insider news of the SF/F publishing field. (Of course, subscriptions are still down…) Correspondents who send me emails during the day about breaking news might well send such alerts to locus@locusmag.com as well.

And more changes are coming.

I’ve just posted the new index.php version of the Locus Online homepage, with links to a new News blog that can be updated weekdays from the Locus Magazine HQ building that towers over downtown Oakland CA. If you’re reading this and haven’t already checked the homepage, let me know if you see any problems viewing the posts.

This, in work for a couple weeks now, just as scifi.com has converted two of its sites in a single website — http://scifiwire.com/index.php — with a php extension.

I actually deleted the index.html version of the homepage, so that browsers will default to the next available ‘index’ file; but I added an explanation to the ‘page not found’ page in case anyone has bookmarked ‘www.locusmag.com/index.html’.

Hope it all works. More changes are in store.

Substantive posts to the website have been light over the past couple weeks not only because of the holidays, but because what time I’ve had to work the site has been devoted to developing new functionality — principally, to expand news coverage on the site so that the Locus Home Office staff can post breaking news, via a Blogger blog whose rss feed is automatically displayed on the Locus Online homepage, and whose labels will categorize such posts for easy access. Frankly, this is partly to remove me as the potential single-point-failure in updating the website; and partly, a reaction to competition elsewhere on the web. Locus is still the central focal point for news about the SF and fantasy publishing field, and we need to retain that position on the web.

I experimented with blogger feeds about three years ago and wasn’t satisfied with what I found. Moving to Movable Type or something similar was too much of an investment, and Blogger was not quite up to speed. Since then Blogger has improved, notably in its capability to archive posts via dynamic ‘labels’ that generate label-specific archive pages.

We hope to have the new News feed up sometime this next week, and if it works out I anticipate hosting most of the other website content on a series of parallel blogs — for reviews, interviews, monitor listings, and so on — with boxed rss feeds on the homepage. This will save me the manual labor of maintaining annual archive pages, and turn the homepage into a constellation of content boxes, rather like the alternative redesign of the homepage I suggested 6 or 8 months ago…

In response to those reports on Christmas Day of readers apparently being attacked by malware programs when viewing the Locus Online website, I contacted our hosting service, CI Host, about the problem, and they responded quickly, within the hour, to say that our dedicated server had been checked for abnormal processes and files and been found clean.

A couple of the email reports implied it was one (or another) of the banner ads that was responsible, and I suspect this is the case… But this being a long holiday weekend, I have no way of contacting HarperCollins or BBC or GorillaNation to alert them of a potential problem. If reports keep coming in, I’ll pursue this on Monday.

I downloaded and ran the Anti-Malware utility suggested by Making Light, and found my own computer clean.

Meanwhile, however, I have today experienced another odd problem, which I don’t understand in the context of the possible malware problems. All day today, when viewing websites with links to ad servers, the loading of the page in my browser hangs, for minute or more at a time, while waiting for a response to one or another ad server… ads.pno.net or googlesyndication.com or falkag.net or whatever… including my own pages, as I was editing them before posting, to the point I had to comment out ad links on the latest Gary Westfahl review just so I could view the updated page on my C drive as I was formatting it. Could my computer be infected with something that blocks ad servers? Just now, rechecking these, most are better. But not all. And yes of course I’m running standard, updated, antivirus software (on this my main PC, Norton).

–Update next day: whatever the problem was, it was solved by rebooting my cable modem. Never mind.

C.E. Petit makes a useful comment (to the previous post) about the reformatting of the awards nominee index pages — that displaying the em-dash in the title column for any award citation that does not refer to the actual title of a book or story is perhaps misleading; it suggests, as in academic bibliographies, that the previous title still applies, which certainly isn’t the case here. So this is something else I should rethink… Perhaps, where no title is applicable, some version of the category name, or else a description of the purpose of the category or award, in brackets, should appear in this column, avoiding the use of a blank or em-dash altogether. Just as the ‘for’ comments for World Fantasy Award pro and semipro categories should perhaps be in brackets. I will keep thinking about this.

So as indicated previous post, I’ve begun updating, overhauling, and scrubbing the Awards database and index, step by step, beginning with a reformatting of the Nominee Index pages, which I’ve felt were a compromise layout to begin with…

The history of web page layout, in a tiny thumbnail, began with bulleted lists and indents (such as Locus Index to Science Fiction pages still use), advanced to grid layouts using ‘tables’ (with borders usually hidden), such as many websites including Locus Online still use, then moved beyond to spans and floats, such as typical blog templates and actual blogs (e.g. Making Light) use.

With spans and floats you needn’t worry about figuring out a grid layout, you surround blocks of content by div or span tags, with classes pointing to definitions in your style sheet, which include settings to ‘float’ left or right, and let the relative positions of those blocks determine how they land (e.g. left column, center column, etc.) when the page is displayed in a browser.

I didn’t know about floats when I designed the original Nominee Index pages, but after trial design I didn’t want to rely on tables either. Ideally, I thought, the date and title along the left, and the award citations on the right, should be level across the page. To use a single table for an entire page would force all the titles to wrap, on the left, and all the citations to wrap, on the right, to the same dimensions. To use a separate table for each nominee, or title, would put so many tables in one page of html that the browsers I was using, back in 1999 or so, choked. So I avoided tables and used very basic block tags, aligned left and right for titles and citations. Even though that meant the citations began one line down from the end of the title…

So now I’m determined to find current html/style sheet/float settings to overcome that. Floats assigned to divs are really cool but have some restrictions, including the necessity of specifying exact width — so the notion of free floating wraps for every title/citation entry, with the same set of tags, evaporated.

A bigger headache is that not all browsers interpret html, especially the more abstruse stuff like floats, the same way. A couple of times I had a layout refined perfectly in IE, only to discover the page was mincemeat in Firefox. IE, it seems, not only has bugs, but it is less strict in some ways than the other browsers, more forgiving of what might be considered minor html coding sins. So now I have five browsers installed on my home machine — IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera — and have a layout for the Nominee Index that looks good in all of them. Take a look, and let me know if anything looks wonky in *your* browser…

As I indicated in a note to the last New Books page posted on the site, http://www.locusmag.com/2008/Books12_1.html, I’m deliberately scaling back on detailed listings of all new books I see or am sent each week. This is because this task for the website is easily the most time-consuming of any of the website tasks, taking four to five hours at a time, and generally consuming much of the one free day I typically can find each weekend, given personal circumstances. I think it’s a fundamental section of the website, alerting readers to what books have been published in a more timely fashion than the print magazine can possibly do, but it is time-consuming, especially given my posted invitation to include any copies of all new books seen or received — which means including a steady number of books received that can only be described as self-published…

Anyway, the reason for this is to find time to develop and implement the long-planned expansions to the website that either I’ve alluded to, or which the Locus Home Office has desired, for several years now. More the former. I almost hesitate to specify what I mean, since it’s been so long that I’ve indicated such plans without following through… e.g. in the Introduction page to the Locus Awards Index… that I feel it’s become my own private LDV, if you know what I mean. But what I mean is, the extension to the Awards Index that takes all sort of additional factors besides awards into account, to generate a truly comprehensive overview of canonical novels and short stories, laid out on a timeline, ranked overall and by year and decade, sorted by theme, and so on. A superset of the awards data. I’ve been compiling source data for years, played with layout options and ranking schemes, but never brought it all together. I think it will be really cool when all in place — a fundamental resource, more comprehensive and up-to-date than any other such resource online or in print, of the basic, canonical, novels and stories across the history of the SF (and F and H) genres.

The Locus Home Office tasks haven’t lingered quite as long, but they have been discussed in those annual Locus Foundation Board meetings once or twice a year for a couple three years now, and more recently in a visit by Liza Groen Trombi to me in LA last August: a ‘news ticker’ function on the website that would allow the Locus office staff to post breaking news, without my intervention, and a Locus Roundtable opinion blog, with contributors such as … well, such as editors and reviewers for Locus Magazine, without naming or promising names… which would also be linked in to the Locus Online homepage.

So I’ve begun all these tasks, with some downtime on the LHO tasks while waiting for feedback from the staff (who do have a print magazine to put out each month), and for an indefinite duration I plan to not only scale back on the book listings for the website, but more to the point also stand down from all recreational reading during any time I might instead be working on these tasks at the computer. (I might still read a bit while exercycling at the gym.) This may be for a period of months — I’m anticipating at least a couple, maybe three, maybe six.

I reached this decision over a sequence of dinners alone the week before last, during a business trip to Arlington VA, and have begun by applying these ‘if not now, then when?’ resolutions to the Awards Index itself — due for its annual update just about now anyway — and have been for the past week been applying them to a thorough scrubbing of the underlying database code that generates the site, to layout issues I’ve long meant to rework, and to streamlining the HTML coding of the index pages themselves.

More on that, and everything else, as these plans progress.

This past week I wrote a review of the second Best American Fantasy anthology, again edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, for Locus Magazine. It should appear in the January issue, or possibly the February since I was a bit past the nominal deadline for reviews. In any case, it’s a book worth reading for anyone interested in unconventional sorts of fantasy. And it’s nice keeping my hand in writing reviews, even if only once a year or so for the magazine, and informally here in this blog.

I’ve also been working a couple expansions of the Locus website this weekend, which you will hear more about when they are complete and ready for prime time. These involve Paypal buttons for subscribing and other purchases, and one or more blogs for posting breaking news and commentary by various members of the Locus community, which will somehow be embedded in the Locus Online homepage.

With those tasks, and business trips, my recreational reading has fallen a bit behind this past month, but I can certainly plug Ian R. MacLeod’s Song of Time, a near-future novel about an elderly concert pianist who pulls a naked man out of the surf near her Cornwall house. The novel’s examination of the narrator’s life and family nicely dovetails with developing future history at the end of the 21st century, where the new technology of ‘crystals’ that capture dead personalities is key but not the primary focus of the book.

Jack McDevitt’s The Devil’s Eye, his latest novel about archaeologist/antiques dealer Alex Benedict and his assistant Chase Kolpath, is better than last year’s McDevitt novel, though it’s not as cohesive as his best works. It’s about a mysterious message, and bequest, from a famous horror novelist, which leads Alex and Chase to a remote planet where they discover an official conspiracy to hide a vast threat. The novel breaks into three parts, with the central section involving a classic hard SF solution to a detective mystery of the sort that is McDevitt trademark, but the first half of the book is meandering, and the last third, with its too-easy diplomatic interaction with aliens, pallid. And at the end, you have to wonder, why would that horror writer, having stumbled upon such a secret, send a message for help to… an antiques dealer?