Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

Yes, I did buy an HP desktop, to answer the previous commenter (why do you ask?); I’ve been happy with HP products for several updates now, thefts and cracked cases aside.

Today I bought a new network adapter (which, the Linksys product, looks like a fat flash drive rather than the cabled box with a little antenna) and successfully connected to the internet. Et cetera, Windows updates and Norton antivirus activation, et cetera.

Then I started installing real software. I use three components of Microsoft Office virtually every day — Access, Excel, and Word, in approximate descending order of use — and have upgraded versions of Office at every opportunity. I haven’t purchased a fresh install of Office since I can’t remember. This means I purchase upgrade versions to load on top of previous installs, or, with new computers, to install on top of qualifying products, typically Microsoft Works, which usually comes pre-installed.

This time, trying to install Office 2007 didn’t work, first because it didn’t recognize the pre-installed MS Works. So, I tried Office 2003. Same issue. Tried Office 2000. (I’ve done this before, having to install old versions of Office and then cascading upgrades.) Office 2000 worked. Install complete. So, then back to Office 2007, which now installed on top of Office 2000. Fine.

Except that it wouldn’t ‘activate’, because MS keeps track of how many computers you’ve installed their software on. I’d installed Office 2007 not only on my now hobbled laptop, but I’d also loaned the s/w to my partner’s two boys, one in high school, one at university, who’d installed the s/w on *their* laptops. What is the limit? I ended up phoning MS help, who informed me (in a typically Indian accent) that the limit was one desktop, one laptop. Hmm, well, I seemed to have already violated that rule; but I told the MS help person that I’d just uninstalled it from one of the laptops (my partner had just phoned his older boy and had him uninstall Office on his laptop — he’s about to migrate to Mac). I had thought MS had some magical database that keeps track of installs and uninstalls, but I’m not so sure now that the MS help person said OK! to my story, and read to me a lengthy activation code which, finally, activated the install of Office 2007.

So… so far, so good. Now I’m copying data files. (I notice how difficult new PCs make it to see, in Windows Explorer, your C drive. They want to hide it beneath layers of personal Documents.) Next task: transfering Outlook mailbox files and activating the pop3 mailbox on the new PC. That, probably not until tomorrow…

January is the busiest month, what with end-of-the-year summaries and whatnot, including my own small contribution to Locus Magazine’s February issue, a tabulation of short fiction sources in comparison to previous years, which however small always takes longer to put together than I expect…

Currently I’m dealing with computer difficulties. The new laptop I bought just 10 months ago (after my previous working machine was stolen from a hotel room in Key West) has become broken at the left hinge; opening and closing the screen lid results in alarming creaking noises and more alarming splits of the screen casing along the outside edge. I’ve contact Hewlett Packard and, since I’m within the 1-year warranty, they are happy to fix it, but that entails shipping the machine to them and waiting a week or so for them to repair and return….

Meanwhile, I’ve been meaning to replace my household desktop PC anyway…and so, today, I bought a new desktop machine, with a cool 22 inch flatscreen monitor, in order to transition my files and day to day email transactions to it, while I ship off the laptop for repair. Currently, alas, the Linksys wireless network adapter (a little box with an antenna, to connect to the wifi network in my house) from my old desktop PC does not work with the new one, which of course comes with Windows Vista. Online searches for updated drivers have proved unfruitful. Perhaps I need to buy a new adapter…

Meanwhile, I’m gathering data for an annual update to the Locus Index to SF Awards, a tad behind my usual schedule. But it’s in work. I’ll also be trimming the cover image pane to this blog, real soon now…

…as usual. Finally caught up with Nova Swing and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union; both excellent. Saw the film No Country for Old Men, and in this case I had not read the novel (though I will soon), and am just as glad I had not, since the film surprises in its development in several ways, and ends in a decidedly un-Hollywood , obviously literary, fashion. Is it better to read the book before seeing the film? Reading the book before can make the film, however excellent, seem rather predictable (as with Atonement); reading it afterwards unavoidably colors the reader’s impression of the characters and, of course, removes some of the suspense of the plot development. Perhaps there is no single preferred policy…

So I did see the film Atonement today, and my quick appraisal is that it’s the film adaptation that’s closest to its literary source that I’ve ever seen (with an honorable exception to the long-ago TV series Brideshead Revisited — which was a 10 or 12 hour miniseries) — scene for scene, plot point for plot point, narrative structure intact, it follows the book exactly, even unto the metafictional postscript that reveals that the story we’ve seen thus far is — well, that would be telling, in case you haven’t read the book. It’s admirable, in a sense, that a Hollywood production would not shave off the rough edges and prettify the story into a conventional romance; at the same time, I can understand that NYT review that implied, basically, that if you’ve read the very fine novel upon which the film is based, there’s really nothing new to be found in the film version, no rethinking or restructuring for the sake of the dramatic medium. Yes, the acting is very good, and especially in the first half, the extended hot day in the countryside when the misunderstandings and ‘crimes’ take place, there are situations that, without the extensive psychological backstory that the novel provides, would be difficult to ‘explain’, that instead are conveyed by the actors’ facial expressions and the film editing — the scene where Robbie writes various versions of his apology letter comes to mind. At the same time, there are bits that are rushed, subtleties overlooked, an occasional subtlety from the text belabored for the sake of the film audience. These are all quibbles. If you haven’t read the book, it’s still a very fine film — I can’t see *not* recommending the film on the basis that it’s too close to the book — but if you have read the book, come to see what is basically just a very fine dramatic translation of it.

I’ve been reading through more books lately than is usual for me, though I’ve been more faithful about updating the thumbnail images along the right edge of these posts than I’ve been actually commenting about what I’ve read. I’ll try to remedy that here.

First, I just finished Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which I have to say is one of the best literary novels I’ve read in many years, and the best, or at least most expansive, of the four McEwan novels I’ve read recently (the others being Amsterdam, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach), confirming McEwan as my favorite current literary writer — the non-genre writer I would most quickly buy and read a new book by. I made a point of reading Atonement, which has been on my shelf unread since it came out in 2002, before seeing the high-profile Oscar-bait film just opening today in LA and NY, since I always prefer reading the source before seeing the adaptation. The reviews suggest the film is worthy as well; the most negative review, in NYT, suggests that the film so closely follows the book as to be a pointless exercise; well, I can live with that. I’ll try to see the film this weekend.

Of recent SF, I was quite happy with Gene Wolfe’s Pirate Freedom (Tor), which is getting mixed reactions among the cognoscenti. At first glance only incidentally fantasy, concerning a young modern-day priest who, upon leaving his Cuban monastery, finds himself transported back in time to an era when pirate ships reigned in the Caribbean, the book does in fact focus on the practices and lore of pirates and buccanners, in impressive detail — I never knew precisely what “careen” means, and I didn’t realize where Tortuga was until I followed along in this book with Google Maps — with special attention to the ‘reality’ of pirate life compared to its fictional depictions, as the narrator contrasts his experience with the movies he’s seen (obviously, Pirates of the Caribbean, and others). Nevertheless, there *is* a substantial fantasy element to the closure of the book, as a time-loop of sorts closes; more to the point, perhaps, is Wolfe’s intent with this book, by placing his monastery in Cuba which is still but perhaps not soon controlled by communists, to contrast the religious life with the free-spirited, anarchic pirate life. There’s a lot of meat here for Wolfe aficionados.

There’s been a trend in recent years for hard SF writers to veer into thriller territory — Bear and Benford have done this, and so has Paul McAuley, while writers such as Richard Morgan seem to have started there. McAuley’s Cowboy Angels (Gollancz; no US edition scheduled) is exhilarating but exhausting. The premise is great — the discovery of a ‘Turing Gate’ has provided access to an infinite number of alternate Americas, giving the administration in the home world the ability to launch military expeditions into these alternate ‘sheaves’ so as to *impose* freedom upon them. Is there an obvious political commentary here? Of course. The plot is fiendishly involved and clever, as retired agent Adam Stone is summoned to investigate a mysterious series of murders by another former agent all targeting the same woman, Eileen Barrie, in a variety of alternate timelines. What is his motive? The investigation leads to a vast conspiracy within the parent organization, with a great deal of spy vs. spy trickery and violence. The violence is so extreme and casual that I zoned out by the end of nearly 400 pages, and had stopped caring how the book worked out one way or the other. Perhaps the thriller genre operates on different protocols; but I didn’t care.

Yet, comparable passages of extreme violence did not undermine, for me, Richard Morgan’s Black Man, US title Thirteen, which concerns ‘variants’ of human beings called ‘thirteens’, genetically modified to recapture the brutal aggression of primitive humans. The plot concerns one of the thirteens, who have been politically exiled to Mars, who’s escaped back to Earth while cannibalistically feeding on his ship’s crew, and a mercenary thirteen on Earth hired by authorities to track the renegade down. It’s a thriller plot about a serial killer, but with a lot of thoughtful dialogue about evolutionary roles and some pointed depiction of future US political divisions — as in McAuley’s book, this one portrays a British writer’s notion of US sociopolitical trends, here in its depiction of “Jesusland”… Despite its length (and I generally feel than any book exceeding 300 pages or so is too long), I found the book engaging and substantive; its emotional range is greater than McAuley’s, and its thesis, if not as clever as McAuley’s, is deeper.

More comments on other books soon.

There’s a new direct-to-DVD SF film called The Man from Earth that’s currently in heavy rotation on the agency-supplied banner ads that run on Locus Online — e.g. on the Links Portal page. The DVD is only $17 or so from Amazon, so I ordered a copy and watched it the other night.

The script is reputedly the last written by Jerome Bixby, who’s most famous for the short story “It’s a Good Life” and Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone adaptation thereof. Bixby also wrote or co-wrote several Star Trek TOS scripts, notably “Mirror, Mirror” and “Requiem for Methuselah”.

To quick-cut to my take on the film: it’s a decent little film, best seen as a play that happens to have been filmed — it’s a lot of talk, and mostly set inside a single room — and the SFnal premise is identical to the secret-immortal theme of that TOS episode “Requiem for Methuselah”.

That premise is revealed in the first few minutes of this film, so I hardly need spoiler warnings to give it away. The film opens as a college professor named John Oldman (!) is packing to leave his rural house (it’s filmed at a house on the backside of Vasquez Rocks, a distinctive formation in the hills north of L.A. that has been used for any number of western and skiffy films and TV shows over the years, among them Star Trek episodes “Arena” and “The Alternative Factor”), intending to “move on” from his 10-year stint at a local college, where it’s been noticed he’s hardly aged a day since he first arrived. As he packs, a carload of his friends from the college arrive to see him off. These include some familiar acting faces: John Billingsley, Dr. Phlox from the ST series Enterprise; an aged William Katt, from series The Greatest American Hero back in the early ’80s; and most effectively, Ellen Crawford, a familiar character actress from any number of TV shows over the decades.

His friends wonder exactly *why* he’s moving on, and so John, at first hypothetically, then seriously, outs himself as a Cro-Magnon who’s survived for 14,000 years, living various lives and moving on as time has required. His friends can hardly believe him, but as John relates details of his past lives in impressive detail, his friends become convinced enough to be personally affected — the anthropologist played by Tony Todd challenging his thesis; Biblical literalist Edith (Ellen Crawford) profoundly offended by his most startling claim of a role he played in history.

Their reaction to his claims plays out over the almost hour and a half of the film, with surprising developments about that startling claim, and a relationship John has to one of his challengers.

But it’s all talk — don’t come to this expecting a typical SF film with special effects. As a play, it’s talky in the way a Rod Serling script is talky, and mostly effective in exploring its theme, not that any experienced SF reader will be surprised by any of the talk here — just as with the characters who are friends of John, the theme is explored in an entirely naive way, as if encountered for the first time. Directorially, the actors play their characters distinctively but not always in a realistic manner; John Billingsley’s character burbles and Tony Todd’s utters profundities too quickly, as if the pace of the film is rushed to come in at a reasonable time. Of the lot, Ellen Crawford is most effective as a character whose world-view is profoundly challenged by John’s revelations.

The DVD includes several special features, about the making of the film and about Jerome Bixby, though oddly, the latter makes a point of the Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror” but doesn’t mention at all “Requiem for Methuselah”, the story whose theme prefigures the film’s. There are also not one but two commentaries, including one with executive producer Emerson Bixby and SF critic and Locus Online contributor Gary Westfahl. But to listen to them requires watching the entire film over again, with the film playing in the background and hearing the commentators in the foreground for an hour and a half, and I confess that there’s never been any film, no matter how much my favorite, that I’ve sat through to listen to a commentary. I would imagine that Westfahl, who’s pretty expert about Star Trek himself and whose Biographical Encyclopedia of SF Film has this entry for Jerome Bixby with a mention at the end about this film, must have acknowledged the similarity to that Star Trek episode, but I can’t say I’ve verified it.

In summary: An interesting, play-like film about a familiar SF idea, worth an hour and a half of your time especially if you’re familiar with Bixby’s work and don’t come to this expecting the razzle-dazzle of Hollywood sci-fi special effects.

That in the new Microsoft Office suite, which is obsessively security-conscious, you can avoid the extra click or three that’s required when opening Excel or Access files containing macros, asking you to confirm that you trust the contents of the file, by clicking on the “Open the Trust Center” link and designating the *directory* where the xls or mdb file is located is always to be trusted.

It may seem like a little thing, but any reduction of extra clicks while performing routine tasks is a valuable tip worth passing on. I won’t explain how this tidbit of knowledge came to me during the convention.

I should note that my earlier comment about the apparent limitation of WFC members to a single program item was apparently misinformation — something someone mentioned to me, and which seemed plausible, but which David Hartwell (see comment to earlier post) has corrected.

I also failed to mention another positive quality about the convention hotel: delivered every morning outside your door was The New York Times, even on Sunday! — rather than the mere USA Today (which has no weekend editions), as in virtually every other convention hotel I can remember…

John Douglas replied to an earlier post about my chatting with a guy at World Fantasy Con named Al Robertson about classic films that would change my life. I didn’t say what they were, but I’m happy to do so now — a list of films by co-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger:

- I Know Where I’m Going
- The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp
- A Matter of Life & Death
- Black Narcissus
- The Red Shoes
- Peeping Tom (Powell only, the English ‘Psycho’ only *more disturbing*)

A couple of these titles are familiar, but I’ve never seen any of them…

A few final notes…

The convention outdid previous WFC’s with a heavy-duty blue duffel bag (more than a mere tote-bag), given away to members when checking in, containing the usual random selection of freebie books (this year including Margo Lanagan’s nominated Red Spikes and Michael Moorcock’s revised Wizardry & Wild Romance in some bags) — plus a box of cookies and a bottle of the local Saratoga Springs sparkling water. The bag was perfect for carrying home books, bought or freebied, though in retrospect I should have padded my own bag and checked it, rather than carrying it onto the flight…

The convention seemed very well-run, with no problems or complaints that I was aware of, and with programming that ran very efficiently. It was, though, commented that the programming was a bit thin — no more than two panels at any one time, and constrained by a WFC rule, which I’d been previously unaware of, that no member, no matter how famous, could appear on more than one program item during the course of the convention. Given the number of prominent writers and editors and fans in attendance, this meant that some program items omitted obvious participants, when those participants had already been booked for some other program item…

The hotel was nice enough, as discussed in previous posts, but had its shortcomings — no place to buy food or drink other than the pricey hotel restaurant; no gift shop. The rooms were furnished with tables that were too high, and chairs that at best were too low, for comfortable working on a laptop computer. (I actually asked the front desk for a better chair, that could be raised high enough to work at the table in the room, and was told nothing was available.) Guests wheeling their bags in from the parking lot were faced with dragging them up stair steps to reach the reception desk — there was a service ramp, but it was well-hidden.

The wifi was free — ! — but was flaky, occasionally dropping out for minutes or longer before reappearing. (Just like home, actually, but that’s another topic.)

Despite these quibbles, it was a big, successful convention, the largest World Fantasy Con ever, with over 1100 members, and, speaking personally, the combination of programming, art show and dealers room, external location providing nearby shops and restaurants, and personal interactions with other members, made it, actually, one of the best conventions I’ve ever attended. With intriguing opportunities to follow up.

I was sipping coffee and eating an extravagent almond croissant this morning at Mrs. London’s down the street from the conference center when I realized we’d all gained an extra hour overnight with the shift back to standard time. So with my extra hour I fired up the rental car and drove around downtown and the area around the city center, sightseeing; past enormous mansions just north of downtown, through the campus of Skidmore College, then back around to Congress Park (site of several of the original ‘springs’), then east past the Saratoga Race Course, and further on around Saratoga Lake, which is quite sizeable, and back into downtown from the south.

The convention was still busy, but wrapping up. I walked through the dealers room one more time, picking up just one more item, then chatting with various people, including Eos editor Diana Gill, before returning to my room to change for the awards banquet. (As it happened, most people on the banquet ticket waiting list got in, due to no-shows, and Diana had invited me to sit at one of the two Eos tables. So I lucked out.)

The banquet food was better than average, and the ceremony one of the best I’ve ever attended, partly due to toastmaster Guy Gavriel Kay’s introductory speech, which began seriously with the recognition of the late Robert Jordan and the tension that exists between ‘serious’ fiction and popular ‘commercial’ fiction (both sides are right; we need both, Kay said), then turned humorous with an extended “world fantasy fairy tale” that punned on virtually every nominee name and title on this year’s ballot, capped by Gary Wolfe, standing up to read an apparently spontaneous critique of said fairy tale…

The awards were efficiently presented by Jo Fletcher and Rodger Turner (rather than David Hartwell and John Douglas, as in past years I’ve attended), and were well-received, with a general feeling that almost every category (for once) got it right — Gary Wolfe for his criticism, Ellen Asher for her work at the SF Book Club, Shaun Tan for his amazing art book The Arrival, M. Rickert twice over — Rickert revealed that until a couple years ago, she’d lived in Saratoga Springs, so returning here for the con to receive this affirmation of her work was especially meaningful — and so on. Life Achievement winner Betty Ballantine gave a rousing cry for attendees to help children learn to read (so we don’t end up with another Bush), and Sharyn November’s reading of the acceptance by Diana Wynne Jones (the only winner, along with anthology co-editor Terri Windling, not in attendance) was anything but anticlimactic — a long, funny letter detailing her history with various editors and agents and her plans for her future career.

As usual with the World Fantasy Con, many attendees check out on Sunday — indeed, have already checked out and are poised to leap for the airport as soon as, if not before, the awards are done. Those staying over hang out in the lobby and bar, form the usual loose groups for dinner, then reconvene in the bar until retreating to their rooms in exhaustion. I had dinner with Mark Rich, Martha Borchardt, David Levine, and Beth Gwinn; hung out in the bar talking with Charles Vess and Rome Quezada and Melissa Snodgrass and Ian Tregillis, then came back to my room to update the site and pack. I’m up first thing in the morning for the long flight (3 hour layover at Dulles) back to LA.