Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia is very nice, a wise narrative by a young girl witnessing a war going on in part over her ownership. The time and setting are that of Vergil’s Aeneid, and the book is fantasy only to the extent that Vergil himself appears to young Lavinia in dreams, and Lavinia and other family members experience visions or prophecies, though there are no explicit appearances by any Greek (or Roman) gods or goddesses. The narrative is informed by rueful meditations on the ways of men and of women, as the conflicts that erupt seem the result of the male tendency to look for reasons to fight — to prove their worth, to validate their virtue. A paragraph that struck me as key is “Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.”

Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army is an interesting counterpoint to Le Guin’s novel; the book won the Tiptree Award presumably for its consideration of potential for violence, when necessary, by women. The book is strongly-written both in the psychological portraits of its characters, especially the narrator, a woman who flees her husband and an oppressive post-global warming authoritarian British government (which forces women to be fitted with countraceptive devices) for a rumored Carhullan farm run by women, and the charismatic leader of that farm, Jackie Nixon; and for the vivid descriptions of rural Lake District countryside — I started keeping a list of terms I only vaguely recognized or had no idea what they meant: bield, brant, swale, withers, spelk, foss. I’ll look them up. There’s no strong speculative element to the book; the most striking aspect of the novel is the way it doesn’t fulfill the implications and payoff of its title until virtually the last page.

I was unimpressed by Jeannette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, even without being familiar with the author’s apparently contentious regard for genre SF. The opening of the book depicts a near future in which the planet’s ecology is about the collapse and people are preoccupied with various kinds of genetic enhancements. There are intelligent robots, automated dress shops, and pollution alarms — a whole compendium of scifi cliches. And people react to the discovery of Planet Blue — which, the first line of the book informs us, weighs a ‘yatto-gram’ — a promising new world except for its occupation by dinosaurs. Perhaps I was put off when I Googled ‘yatto-gram’ and the first result was a discussion of how Winterson apparently misspells the word yottagram (and it happens more than once); similarly, the book strikes me as that of a mainstream writer employing the gimmickry of SF without taking it the least bit seriously — except as allegory, in the manner of those old Twilight Zone scripts that didn’t bother to justify how asteroids had atmospheres or astronauts could be back on Earth without realizing it. More to the point…. The Stone Gods does move on, with a section set on Easter Island as the island’s last tree is cut down, and the book’s overly obvious moral is that humankind is doomed to destroy its environment. Oh, and Planet Blue is actually Orbus is actually Planet White, or something, though whether there’s a time loop involved, or cyclic history, or mere allegory, I didn’t pay close enough attention to figure out.

Finally Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End is very pleasant, though I wasn’t as tickled, by the promised metafictional mix of authors and characters and how fans take the latter over from the former, as I’d expected to be. Two-thirds of the way through the book, the narrator wonder if there isn’t a mystery here that she should solve– but, er, which one? Several unanswered questions have arisen, about a strange woman on the beach, about the relationship of the narrator’s godmother, the mystery writer Addison Early, to the narrator’s father, and so on; none is compelling, though all are mildly interesting. The book is fascinating and comfy, in a low-key way.

Next time — I had a chance to view a DVD screener of the upcoming documentary about Harlan Ellison, and was prompted to read the limited edition of his The City on the Edge of Forever, with the complete script and a couple outlines and Harlan’s lengthy defense of the historical record. I’ll comment on that, though Gary Westfahl will be doing the formal review of the Ellison documentary. And beyond that: I’ll be reviewing, in more ways than one, the DVD release of ’60s TV series The Invaders.

Still sorting my extraneous books, that is. I have fewer ‘junk’ books than I thought — self-published tomes of dubious literary merit. I like the suggestion from C.E. Petit about books for soldiers, and will send some that-a-way.

Some quick takes on recent reading (see thumbnails at right): John Scalzi’s books are fun, easy reads, very much what I’ve been thinking of as basic ‘meat and potatoes’ SF, the kind of books that readers not versed in the genre can pick up and enjoy. Not serious attempts to imagine a far future; there are plot points in the latest book that key off wireless devices and version tracking, very 2008ish.

I similarly enjoy Jack McDevitt, but cringed more than once at Cauldron, apparently the concluding volume in his sequence about the Academy, a future in which humankind is losing interest in interstellar space travel, despite various mysteries. Half the book is spent inventing a better space drive, since the one established in earlier books doesn’t allow the plot the reach the galactic center; once acquired, the better space drive allows voyagers to tie up, more or less, loose ends from previous books involving chindis and omega clouds; but their adventures key off, no kidding, a giant snake and an eyeball in a cloud. Mm, OK, I guess.

Thumbs up along with everyone else to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, which I don’t need to describe. I will note that, re posts I’ve seen about finding the book in stores, that I did in fact *look* for the book in YA sections of Barnes & Noble and Borders, 3 times in the week after its publication date of April 29th, and still couldn’t find it; I did finally see it in stores this week, 2 or 3 copies spine-out, rather than face-out, in the YA section (not in the SF section). Given the buzz — and the fact that it is a very good, and timely, book, I’d expected more — big stacks on the front table at Borders, like.

More on Le Guin and Winterson next time. Reading next: Sarah Hall, Karen Joy Fowler.

It’s been a busy couple weeks, so busy I haven’t had a chance to mention that I flew to Huntsville AL for three days this past week (to train newbee software engineers in the right and proper processes for doing their jobs). I’ve been to Huntsville probably a dozen times over the past 20 years, though this latest trip was my first visit there since 2000, I think.

Meanwhile at home I’ve been consolidating the past year’s new books into the general collection on my library shelves, and trying to think what to do with the now several hundred review copies of books that I don’t care to keep that have accumulated in a couple closets over the past 5 years. Suggestions welcome. I’m sure my problem is dwarfed by that of actual book reviewers; as editor of the website I get only a smattering of books for review each month, but the rule of thumb is that such freebies that come in the mail are rarely books I’d otherwise pay for, or actually want to read. Many are proofs or ARCs (advance reading copies), which I would replace with actual published editions in the event I did want to read and keep them. Many are self-published, in some sense or another.

The duplicates and paperback reprints of books I otherwise already own I can deal with: I have friends I can pass them on to. The books from reputable publishers (Tor, DAW, Del Rey, et al) that I’m just not interested in myself I can similarly offer to such friends without endorsements. More problematic are those self-published and obscure small press items that I would have to be stuck on a desert island with before I’d be inclined to try to read. I can’t bring myself to simply *throw them away*. But I can’t in any honesty pass them on to friends as worth their time, either. So what, then? Anyone reading have this problem? Or a solution?

– Update Monday evening:
Thanks for the suggestions, but my quandary is those self-published books I’m not sure I would wish on anyone, not soldiers, not prisoners. Some are books I’ve dutifully listed on the site; a bunch are books sent to me when I was a judge for a certain SF award a couple years ago, and those I did read portions of, and many are really just awful. Land fill? Insulation?

First, the spam attack problem was solved the morning after I reported it to our hosting service, CI Host; it’s called ‘spoofing’, as several readers advised me, and the boffins at CI Host had some method (something about a ‘PTR record’) of preventing the effects of the incursion.

Second, the Locus Poll votes have been processed and databased and scrubbed for egregious voting sins (people– we tell you this every year, but if you vote for the *same item* five times in the same category, you have violated our voting rules and we will *throw out* your entire ballot) and tabulated and scored and ranked. The results are known. As we’ve done for two or three years now, we have posted a list of ‘finalists’, i.e. the top five ranking items in each category, as an enticement to attend the actual Locus Awards event in Seattle and learn who the actual winners are, before they appear in print in Locus Magazine (or are posted online here).

I’ve watched the ballots come in and have done several incremental tabulations of results, but I’m nevertheless impressed by the final results: the sets of five finalists in each category are, it seems to me, solid indicators of the year’s best books and stories, and are at least as impressive and substantial (maybe moreso in some categories) as the Hugo finalists, in those categories that correspond. If you’ve read nothing all year, you could do far worse than using these finalists as reading guides. Actually, there are a couple three categories where I need to do that myself.

Today I’ve been inundated by 2000+ emails in my inbox (meaning that the Outlook junk e-mail filter didn’t filter them) all with subjects along the lines of ‘delivery status (failure)’ and ‘mail system error – returned’ and ‘undelivered mail return to sender’, all with email attachments which *appear* to be spam emails sent from *my* email address, i.e. online@locusmag.com, and returned by spam filters at their target addresses. Is this some new form of phishing, perhaps, or has my email address been hijacked, or identity thieved, by actual spammers? I’ve queried my hosting service and not heard back yet. At a minimum, it makes finding legitimate emails in my inbox much more difficult. Anyone know about this?

Last few Locus Poll ballots are trickling in — some paper ballots that have to be transcribed by the office staff into the online form — but I expect that we will be able to post ‘Locus Award finalists’, as we’ve done in previous years, within the next week sometime.

As if an abreaction to something in the Florida water or food wasn’t enough, I managed to catch upon my return from ICFA the rumored ’2-week flu’ which entails cold symptoms for that amount of time, nothing debilitating but an interference nonetheless. April 1st has come and gone, with no outraged letters in response to our (originally ICFA-inspired!) tomfoolery. Meanwhile Locus Poll ballots are pouring in, with the deadline tomorrow. I’ve read a few books and seen a couple interesting DVDs which I’ve been meaning to comment on here, and will try to do so soon. Stay tuned.

A brief but enthusiastic shout-out for the film Into the Wild, which I just caught up with on DVD via Netflix; a beautiful, complex film about a young misfit’s obsession with living off the land in Alaska, and by extension, about the ways in which people decide to lead their lives. (In this case, I had *not* read the book, by the way.) Had I seen it earlier I would have been disappointed not to see this among the films named Best Picture Oscar nominees — certainly a more substantial and rewarding film than that too-clever bit of fluff Juno. (Though my enjoyment of Atonement was actually diminished somewhat by just having read the book, I did think the remaining three best film nominees, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Michael Clayton, were all very fine and deserving nominees.)

Just finished posting interview excerpts from the March issue. Isn’t Charles Stross looking more and more like Gene Wolfe? And isn’t that a cute cover design for Saturn’s Children?

In addition to the grad student paper presentations and the author readings, the conference program also features panels, in the manner of more typical SF conventions, on particular topics. Friday morning I attended one about World War II and SF, moderated by Gary K. Wolfe, with panelists Kathleen Ann Goonan (whose WWII novel In War Times I just read last week), Joe Haldeman, Andy Duncan, Ellen Klages, and Eileen Gunn, plus Brian Aldiss and Rusty Hevelin from the audience, all telling fascinating stories about their own or their father’s experiences in the war, and peripherally some of the problems in turning real life experiences, which tend toward anecdotes with punchlines, into believable fictional drama.

The luncheon banquet featured what must be one of the most memorable guest scholar presentations in ICFA history, Roger Luckhurst on “Contemporary Photography and the Technological Sublime”, asking, “Can There Be a Science Fiction Photography?” After some theoretical forwarding — about found genres, such as alien abduction stories, he went on to present a series of photographs by various contemporary and not-so-contemporary photographers that present unusual subjects in ways that bring new perspectives on real or contrived subjects in ways that variously echo the powers of science fiction — Bernd and Hilla Becher, of industrial architecture, those forgotten gas tanks and cooling towers and mineheads that people don’t see; Andreas Gursky, whose vast prints depict strange patterned landscapes that aren’t what you first think they are; Edward Burtynsky, a series of “Before the Flood” photos of the dismantling of various Chinese villages to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, photos that look post-apocalyptic; and others. Luckhurst made the point that the current digital revolution has affected photography, with the possibilities of digital manipulation, far more profoundly than it has publishing.

A late Friday evening panel moderated by James Morrow was on “Global Fantastique”, with David G. Hartwell, Brian Aldiss, Kathryn Morrow, Stefan Ekman, and Javier Martinez, addressing issues of SF in translation, and the different pleasures to be experienced by SF from different cultures. Ironically, it’s often noticed that American SF publishing seldom looks outside to works translated from other languages, but the Ekman noted that the same is true in Europe — the French don’t translate the Germans much, and vice versa, and so on to many other combinations of languages and cultures. Hartwell cited someone’s definition of good SF (in contrast to ‘literature’) as that which retains its power in summary or in translation.

Saturday morning was a panel about Cyberpunk and Beyond, with John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly (promoting their anthology Rewired), Ted Chiang, and Ellen Datlow (plus Kevin Maroney, Eileen Gunn, and others from the audience) discussing what has happened since cyberpunk, is there any equivalent movement currently, and how Neuromancer, seminal as it was, is less impressive the more you know about certain other books and stories that had been previously published and which Gibson read — contemporaneous works by Haruki Murakami, for instance. They also discussed how, in a way, the “mundane SF” movement is similar to cyberpunk or “radical hard SF” — they both want to re-examine premises and take them more seriously.

Later I listened to readings by James Morrow (a forthcoming short novel called Shambling Towards Hiroshima) and Guy Gavriel Kay (Ysabel), and hung out by the pool for a while chatting with Ted Chiang and Deanna Hoak.

At 7 was the reception for the final event of the conference, the awards banquet, which began at 8: the usual buffet dinner, typically the longest portion of the evening, with a salad bar, three kinds of risottos, and some sort of little pork sandwiches, plus desert, following by the relatively brief awards presentations. This year they included Sheila Williams presenting the Dell Awards for stories written by undergraduates, the Lord Ruthven Society awards for works about vampires, two ICFA awards for essays, one by a grad student, the other — now named in honor of Jamie Bishop — for best non-English language essay, and finally (after president Farah Mendlesohn made a special announcement of the BSFA Best Novel of 1958 award to Non-Stop by the attending Brian Aldiss), the last two awards presented by Gary K. Wolfe: the Crawford Award to (as previously announced) Christopher Barzak’s One for Sorrow, and the scholarship award to Roger Luckhurst.

After that–a *post*-banquet reception, at first derailed by reports of rain outside by the pool, later rebooted by updates that the rain had passed. Though the cabana bar was closed for the night, people bought their drinks in the bar and trickled out to chat in the dark by the pool and pond (which, at least one person reported, an alligator lurks).

The past few days have been hectic, what with preparing for and traveling to Orlando for this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ICFA, which this year has relocated from its previous 20-some-year venue at a hotel at the corner of the airport in Ft. Lauderdale. The new venue is a big Marriott at the corner of the airport in Orlando. But it’s a big, more modern hotel than the facility in Ft. Lauderdale, and there are a bunch of restaurants within walking distance, which wasn’t true in Ft L, even if they are all chains.

Of course the principal event of recent days was the death of Arthur C. Clarke, which I first heard about on NPR while driving home from work on Tuesday afternoon. As it turned out the news was only an hour or two old, but by the time I stopped at the market and got home, there were 8 or 10 emails alerting me of the news, more than one of which rather irately wondered why Locus had dropped the ball and not yet posted anything. Well, I am sorry; as I’ve described here in this blog on numerous occasions, my current East Coast red pen authoritarian employer blocks most non-work websites, not to mention personal email, and I had no way of learning the news let alone updating the site during the work day. I wish it were otherwise, but there’s no way to support a staff to run the website, and this part-time, some-time support is the best we can do.

My impression is that there’s been greater notice of Clarke’s death in the general press than for any other SF author ever, including Heinlein and Asimov, who did not have the high profile Clarke gained through his involvement with the film 2001. Dozens of others have written tributes and appreciations about Clarke, so I will not attempt another, except for a couple personal notes. Of the ‘big three’, Asimov Clarke Heinlein, Clarke was my favorite, the one I’ve reread the most often. 2001 was the formative experience of my life: I was 11 or 12 when I was turned on first by “Lost in Space” and then by “Star Trek”, but the quantum leap between those two was dwarfed by the majesty of 2001 and 2001 the book — I *read* the book before I saw the movie, and so I knew, I’ve always known, exactly what the film was supposed to depict, and I’ve always seen the wordless, abstract ending of the film as a cinematic illustration of the sort of transcendence that can barely be expressed in words (though that was of course a recurring theme of Clarke’s fiction), rather than some invitation to drug-addled mysticism. I think 2001 remains in some sense the only SF film, the only SF film that both takes on a big serious theme and has the discipline and artistic integrity to do it right in its depiction of the mechanics of spacecraft and space flight, and in developing the consequences of its central premise, in contrast the countless examples of ‘SF’ films since then that to some extent pander to the naive expectations of the unsophisticated audience. (Swoosh! goes the Enterprise, in every one of its incarnations.) Of course I am drifting; the film is as much Kubrick’s as Clarke’s; but the film has always represented for me the seriousness and non-religious, in the conventional “it’s all about me” sense of the major Western religions, cosmic philosophy that underlies so much of Clarke’s fiction…

So, then, a solid hour Tuesday evening compiling an obituary/summary of Clarke’s career to post on the site. Then weekly bestsellers, another hour and a half; then packing for the trip; then up early for the drive to LAX and the 5 hours flight (fortunately nonstop) to Orlando. (I should mention that more impressive than my hasty online obit is the fact that the Locus Magazine staff put together a complete obituary for the April issue, swapping out a couple pages already sent to the printers, and had updates to them, including a revised cover from Arnie Fenner, for the final issue by Wednesday morning.) The flight was uneventful. I read half a John Varley novel which was, coincidentally, about flying into Orlando. I arrived about 4:30 p.m. local time, checked in, and on my way down to find registration and see about dinner, stumbled over an electric cart in the hallway outside another room on my floor with a name tag affixed to the front reading “Charles N. Brown”. So I knocked on the door and said hello to Charles and to Liza, and subsequently joined them for dinner, along with Ellen and Eileen and John, at a high-end seafood restaurant miles and miles away from the hotel (close to that mouse place, I think), where we ate oysters and stone crab and key lime shrimp and wahoo and drank 5 bottles of wine among the 6 of us (over a 3 hour period). It was great, though it rather blew my food budget for the weekend, and I’ve resolved to eat more modestly from now on.

The conference actually began Wednesday afternoon, though I didn’t see any of it until today, Thursday. As always, the bulk of the program consists of grad students reading papers about various aspect of fantasy — this year’s theme is “The Fantastic in the Sublime” — along with readings by attending authors. There are buffet lunches on Thursday and Friday, and a buffet awards banquet on Saturday evening. Today’s luncheon featured a Guest of Honor speech by Guest of Honor Vernor Vinge. If Vernor Vinge is not the first person you might think of as headlining a fantasy conference, he nevertheless gave a speech supporting his role, first claiming that SF, along with peripheral genres like magical realism, is a part of fantasy, and then discussing various ‘meta-scary’ things, that is things that are scary to writers of fantasy. These included the demise of books, first as printed objects, then as textual bodies that have fixed associations to particular authors — just as where we started, in the age of the Odyssey and Iliad, when stories were passed on and amended by tale tellers.

Tonight’s dinner was more modest, a salad and quesadilla in the casual hotel restaurant with Chris Barzak, then drinks and chatting with people hanging out in the bar, as usual. The hotel has a lovely indoor/outdoor pool, and a gazebo situated by a pond, but it’s actually been rather cool the past couple days, in contrast to the typical mugginess of Ft. Lauderdale, and most people are staying indoors. We’re far enough north to experience a different weather pattern, I’ve been informed.

More tomorrow.

On another topic, I’m quite jazzed by the recent episodes of Lost, which not only have had key revelations about the central mysteries of the show in virtually every new episode, but which, in its flash-forward revelations of what happens at the *end* of the series, rather brilliantly indicates that the writers/producers *do* have an over-arching story in mind, an end goal, and are not just making it up as they go along, as some naysayers would suggest.

Last night’s episode ended with the announcer predicting the reappearance next week of a character we never expected to see again…. I think this is easy; it’s Michael, Walt’s father — just because the actor’s name, Harold Perrineau, has been appearing in the opening credits all season. (Yes, I’m a credits geek. I sit through the end credits of every movie I see in theaters, too.)