Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

…of the homepage. Expanding it again, width-wise. If it’s good enough for CNN and Slate, not to mention SciFi.com, it’s good enough for Locus Online. Not to mention the extra advertising spots the new layout provides (e.g. a square spot underneath the latest issue block). Look for it soon, possibly sometime this coming weekend.

It’s quite incidental to the film, but I find it significant as an example of typical, or atypical, Hollywood film-making: late in this new George Clooney legal-thriller (which was excellent), we see a car bomb go off from the point of view of the two tough guys who planted it, on a hillside maybe half mile from the explosion. We see the *light* of the explosion a split second before we *hear* the explosion — just as would happen in real life, though most people wouldn’t realize it. It’s the sort of thing Hollywood films usually ‘correct’ for, to avoid raising questions in ordinary audiences’ minds; but this time they didn’t. Maybe they just didn’t think of it.

Meanwhile, planning my trip to World Fantasy Con. I’ll be arriving the weekend before in the Boston area, and plan to drive across Massachussetts and nearby states, time permitting, to stop in Albany Tuesday evening and arrive in Saratoga Springs on Wednesday evening, to check in. (Thanks to a tip from Jonathan Strahan, I made my hotel reservation like, sevent months ago; I’m in the main hotel, even have an ‘executive suite’.) My con schedule is wide-open; I’m not on the program. Look forward to seeing faithful readers there.

Trying to be more diligent in recent months about keeping up with important books, including books that have won awards and that I’d not previously read, I got around to Ben Bova’s Titan, winner of this year’s John W. Campbell Memorial Award, last week. Bova is a writer I sampled a few times back early in my reading career, about the time he was beginning to write ‘big’ adult novels — Millennium, Colony — as well as items like The Starcrossed, a fictional account of the development of the infamous Canadian TV series for which Harlan Ellison wrote the pilot, dutifully novelized by Edward Bryant under the original title Phoenix Without Ashes, and which Harlan subsequently disowned… but I’m drifting off-topic. Point is, Bova struck me as a competent, reliable SF writer, but not one I felt compelled to keep up with. So many books, so little time. One moves on. Anne McCaffrey was another writer I followed for a while in the same manner…

So now after 20 years or so I’ve read another Ben Bova novel, and I can’t say I feel I’ve missed anything. My reaction to Titan is that it’s bloated and contrived. It’s about a cylindrical habitat in orbit of Saturn, full of refugees from oppressive religious societies back on Earth, which sends a probe down to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, to search for life there. The probe promptly malfunctions and refuses to upload its data to the habitat. Meanwhile, there are political intrigues aboard the habitat, as the current leader schemes to retain his power, and a rival candidate for his re-election takes up the habitat’s Zero Population Growth policy as her campaign issue. By ‘bloated’ I mean that the narrative constantly repeats issues already established; this is a book you might easily set aside for 3 weeks, then pick up again, and the next chapter would recount everything already established, sometimes but not always from a different character’s perspective. (It’s the Platonic opposite of the precise narratives of writers like Gene Wolfe, who never repeat anything.) By ‘contrived’ I mean that the issues that drive the narrative are simplistic or hinge on false dilemmas — e.g., if women start having babies in spite of the ZPG policy, scientific research aboard the habitat will be doomed! (Yes, that’s what they say…)

I did track down a couple reviews (Adam Roberts’ recent review for Strange Horizons nails it in excruiating detail), though I didn’t see any of them note the odd resemblances — I’m not sure they’re intentional enough to call them allusions — to 2001: A Space Odyssey. To wit: a robot (the probe on Titan) takes seemingly independent action in response to apparent conflict in its primary commands; parts aboard the ship seem to malfunction but when replaced check out perfectly; weird things happen when the moons of Saturn [Jupiter in the film version of 2001, but it was Saturn in the book] line up; and at the very end [slight spoiler here] of the book, something triggers a signal into deep space…

Nevertheless, if Bova’s novel isn’t literary or cutting edge by any means, it does strike me that it’s a sort of ‘meat and potatoes’ science fiction that presumably attracts steady readers, book after book, by exploring basic SF themes in a way that doesn’t require the reader’s knowledge of sophisticated genre tropes to understand…

And my impression of recent winners of the Campbell Award… is that winners are being selected as much on the basis of their bona fides as writers of true blue hard science fiction, as on the qualities of any particular book; and by the same token, are as much career awards as they are awards to individual novels.

And then I read… William Gibson’s Spook Country, a polar opposite to Bova’s novel in many ways. Gibson is sophisticated and is cutting edge and is and precise — and concise… The novel is a designer thriller; Gibson is a writer of surfaces and images, but also of convoluted and complex scenarios that don’t play off formula notions of good guys and bad guys, and even though the entire book boils down to a mystery about a certain shipping container (those big box containers that ride ocean-going cargo ships and are then transferred onto railroad flat cars), it’s the details and filigrees that make it fascinating and vibrant. That it’s set in the present day — well, 2006 — makes it all the more compelling and realistic, if perhaps in a secret-history sort of way.

And that I happened to visit Vancouver just a few months ago, and drove around the city just enough to apprecite Gibson’s descriptions of those docking gantries, and the bridges, and the island and the suspension bridge and the looming mountains to the north, made it an especially interesting read for me. (Not to mention the very specific sites early in the book along Sunset Boulevard, in my home town…)

Enough for now; I should be catching up on e-mail, and writing book listing descriptions…

Having read Matheson’s I Am Legend, as discussed previous post, and fond of patterns and linkages and serendipidous discoveries of which book I *could* read next (especially, it seems, when it confounds thought-out plans of what I *should* be reading), and perhaps also in reaction to the rather challenging effort of reading (for review in Locus Magazine) the VanderMeer/VanderMeer-edited Best American Fantasy anthology the past couple weeks, I discovered additional 1950s novels that inspired classics films and which I had never read and which I had copies of on my shelves… (Reader, always assure your nonreading friends that you will get around to reading all your books someday). And so I then read Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers — which I’d never read despite having seen three of the four film adaptations — and then back to Matheson for The Incredible Shrinking Man. (Confounding the pattern in one dimension if not another, I also read the book version of David Gerrold’s The Martian Child, since that too is the basis for an upcoming film this fall.)

Quick reactions: I couldn’t help but notice similarities between Matheson’s protagonists. Both highly emotional, given to rages of frustration and self-deprecation, both frank (if not explicit, given the times) in acknowledging their frustrated needs for female companionship (the theme is expressed passingly in The Omega Man). Especially with Shrinking Man — the character’s emotionality is just another way in which I can only imagine Isaac Asimov, if he read the book, must have rolled his eyes; the scientific plausibility, and the main character’s emotional response, are both light years away from the Asimov approach.

And so then… I discovered I had this pint-sized paperback edition of an early Finney collection, The Third Level, on my shelves. (Reader…) And so I’m now about half way through that. The surprising recurrent theme here is — the longing for the simpler past. Expressed in stories written in the early ’50s, for the era of 1894! Some things, perhaps, never change.

First, a recommendation for a very limited release arthouse film called The Nines (IMDB entry), which opened Labor Day Weekend in LA and NY only, but got front-page reviews in both cities’ major newspapers and so attracted my attention. It’s a three-part film, directed and written by John August (who wrote the somewhat similarly structured 1999 film Go), starring Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy (in extraordinary performances) in three inter-related stories about actors, screenwriters, and video-game designers whose lives tell or include the stories of the other stories, with a conclusion (of sorts) that amounts to the film being the most metaphysically religious SF film since 2001 — sorta, in a way; I don’t want to oversell it. It’s opening in Austin the end of this month, and I’ve alerted Locus Online‘s crack reviewing team Howard & Lawrence, but whether they get around to seeing it, or liking it, or actually submitting a review, I have no way of guaranteeing.

Second, I endorse the current release The Bourne Ultimatum, a dazzling spy thriller, one of those films that as you’re seeing it impresses you as being surely the best film of its type ever released, even if afterward you can’t quite piece together all the plot threads. (But at the time, every scene seems perfectly clear…)

And third, just today I saw David Cronenberg’s latest film, Eastern Promises, starring Viggo Mortensen (who also starred in Cronenberg’s previous film, The History of Violence) and Naomi Watts, in a complex and subtle (one or two excruciatingly violent scenes aside, including the much-discussed 4-minute knife fight in a Russian bath house with Viggo in the nude) drama about the Russian mafia in London and the hospital mid-wife who delivers the baby of one of its victims. The coolest part of seeing the film was seeing it at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood — a state-of-the-art multiplex with ushers, assigned seating, and *no commercials*, built around the famous Cinerama Dome — which seems to have become the prestige theater for new releases in LA. To wit– the lobby today had a display of costumes and props from the film, including Naomi’s motorcycle outfit and 3 versions of the prop diary whose translation is a key plot point.

Fourth, I was perusing the upcoming film schedule and noticed the Will Smith version of I Am Legend — whose trailer I’ve already seen at least once — based on a book I hadn’t read, and whose previous film versions I hadn’t seen. So… Did I have a copy of the book? Why, yes I did — a 1979 Berkley paperback, in fact, sitting on my shelves all these years, unread. So when I should have been reading other things this past week, or catching up on e-mail and posting updates the site, I read through Richard Matheson’s short novel, and finally understood what the title means. And then I Netflixed The Omega Man, the Charlton Heston “cult film” (according to various descriptions) based on the novel, from 1971, and watched that. I can only report the extraordinary lack of fidelity between the film and source novel (not that I was surprised), though the scenes at the beginning of Charlton screeching his cars through a deserted downtown LA were cool. After that, the film was unbearably cheesey, especially the the music, vaguely militaristic and recognizably pre-disco, overlaid at random, it seemed, regardless of the dramatic significance of any particular scene. About the white makeup and black hoods of the ‘family’, nothing need be said…

Except that I was impressed by Matheson’s original novel — which explicitly calls victims of the plague vampires, and goes to a considerable extent to rationalize the idea of vampires, the historical plagues that might be attributed to them, in scientific terms. Of course, none of that was evident in the 1971 film. I wonder what the Will Smith version will do…

Rambling as I watch the Emmys. But I should wrap up; there seems to be some breaking news…

I’m generally pleased with the results of the Hugo Awards. (As it turned out, the results were out on the web before I could even check my e-mail, very early last Saturday morning.) Especially for Robert Reed, an exceptional and under-recognized author, in spite of his prolificity, for a story that happened to be my favorite in the category anyway. I did manage to finish reading not only all the Hugo nominated novels before the results were announced, but also all the stories in the short fiction categories, the last few of which I only read last week. Reed was my favorite novella; and McDonald my favorite novelette (though Ryman was close). I’m afraid I also liked Reed in the short story category, though I liked Tim Pratt’s story a lot too and am pleased to see him snatch the award from the obvious favorite Neil Gaiman (whose story I also liked). It was a decent ballot this year; the only fiction nomination that made my furrow my eyebrow being Mike Resnick’s novelette, which struck as a completely competent story that could have appeared in a 1950s issue of Galaxy Magazine. (Really, was there anything in it that couldn’t have been written 50 years ago?)

I’m gathering from a couple email tipsters that the Hugo boffins have submitted an amendment to establish the Best Website category as a permanent one, subject to some sort of constraint that eligible sites must archive contents in their original forms, so that voters can fairly judge the website etc etc. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out…

It’s been HOT here in Southern California, especially in my neck of the woods, that is Woodland Hills, which had the honor of being singled out in an article last week in the Los Angeles Times about micro-climates, how the temperature can be 75 F along the coast at Malibu, and fully 40 degrees higher (yes, that would be 115 F) just 12 miles north in… Woodland Hills. (But it’s — really, it is — a dry heat.)

I have updates to the website for the September issue of Locus Magazine ready to post, having compiled them over the past couple hours, and now wouldn’t you know it, the site itself seems to be down, as is http://www.hostingsupport.com/ (where I file complaints) and http://www.cihost.com/ itself, which also means I can’t download any e-mail (the last incoming was an hour ago).

Hopefully that will clear up soon — if my calculations are correct, the Hugo Awards will be announced very early in the morning on Saturday, my time, and I’m planning to post them as soon as I can find them, or anyone sends them to me.

Also, September banner ads on the homepage are ready to post. Blogger, host of this blog, is entirely separate and working just fine, enabling me to write this post…. If the problem with locusmag.com clears up soon enough, I may delete it…

Update 7:30 local time: connection issues cleared; new issue pages posted….

Still here; obviously. When I don’t *have* to work on something, my attention slides back and forth; I can go for two months reading obsessively (as I did in June and July) without working on long-term projects, to months being focused every day on long-term projects, and letting reading slide. This blog is like that. There are periods I think I should post something every day, however short — the ideal blog habit, I’ve previously acknowledged — to periods where other activities capture my attention day after day and the blog is merely incidental. Which it is, actually, I suppose.

But to catch up, for anyone checking in:

Liked Stardust a lot. Sad it did poorly at the box office — a lesson in Hollywood economics, that it all depends on the publicity. The film is charming and well-written in the sense that the multiple plot-threads merge together in an intelligible, almost inevitable fashion; there are no arbitrary plot elisions, as in so many Hollywood films where they assume the audience simply won’t notice, amidst the dazzle of special effects. Of course the source material by Neil Gaiman is surely the foundation of the film’s excellence.

The Invasion was OK. Gary Westfahl’s review made the essential points about the film’s currency to contemporary social concerns — the threat to privacy, the impact on international conflicts. I wish it had followed through with that — why *are* all those wars preferable to the *apparent* loss of personal freedom. (Is it only paranoia that personal freedom is lost to the pods? If not, where’s the evidence?) More superficially, this film, unlike the first and second versions (I never saw the third), has a formula Hollywood happy ending. All is restored; the nightmare was just a dream.

I started it a year ago but only just finished it last week– Julie Phillips’ James Tiptree bio, a fascinating account of an unusual, exceptional life. I didn’t know that about David Gerrold. Part way through I paused to reread “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” — whose first scene I remembered vividly, from first reading it 30 years ago, but the rest of which, aside from the general theme, seemed fresh — and was astounded how closely episodes from the author’s life were recast as fiction. There’s more of that going on than readers generally realize, I suspect.

Projects underway, and reading. I’m part-way through Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim; if I can get through it, despite the tiny tiny print, by next week, I will have read all of the Hugo Award best novel nominees before the winner is announced, something I haven’t managed in years and years and years.

Finally, my partner and I met Charles Brown and Amelia Beamer the other night for dinner, at Parkway Grill in Pasadena; they are down in SoCal this weekend for the annual Writers of the Future awards ceremonies, held this time in Pasadena at the Sheraton. (I attended the WotF event once, some years ago, and took photos and posted the news on the site, but I seem to have fallen off their invite list.) Charles was in good spirits, Amelia wise and patient; we drank Argentinian red wine and talked about books and movies and Dianetics and the purpose of art.

None of us are in Japan, you’ll realize. I’ve pinged a few folks who do plan to be at Worldcon in Yokohama, but to the first contact who can email me the Hugo Winners when they are announced, I’d be happy to award some prize. A free subscription to Locus Online, perhaps, not to mention fame and fortune.

Yes, I read the new Harry Potter. I preordered it from Amazon, and Saturday afternoon at 3pm as I tore open the box I wondered about the collectibility of unopened Harry Potter Amazon boxes. I read about three hours Saturday, another three Sunday, and so on, finishing on Tuesday. About the same pace as Elizabeth Hand, who told me she bought the book Friday midnight and finished by Saturday noon, with a 2-hour nap along the way; it’s just that I never have 10 or 12 hours uninterrupted reading time.

Enjoyed it very much, thumbs up. What’s most remarkable — anticipated by the flashbacks into Voldemort’s past in the previous book — are the revelatory back histories of two of the *other* major characters in the series, revealing how a character we thought completely good had his failings, and a character we thought completely bad might be understood to be redeemed after all. It all seems quite inevitable, in retrospect; it makes sense of the earlier books, and you can’t help but respect Rowling’s skill in laying out the puzzle pieces all along while saving the key pieces until last.

No, I’m not at Comic Con this weekend (it’s in San Diego, 2+ hours down the coast from me), though two Locus Magazine representatives are — Kirsten Gong-Wong and Amelia Beamer. If you’re going, seek them out in the dealers’ room — they have a table, or are sharing a table with the folks from Asimov’s/Analog magazines — and say hi, or buy a subscription.

Here’s an odd case — I got a letter in the mail yesterday, an actual physical piece of paper with type on it and a pen-signed signature at the bottom. And no reference to an e-mail address or website!

Well, actually, that’s not why it’s odd. It’s odd because the writer is “shocked” to discover that he has found his name in the online version of the Locus Index to Science Fiction, attributing to him two pieces published in a small-press ‘zine in the early ’90s, and he is afraid these references in an online “computer database” will leave him open to “identity theft”, which he has already been victim to, as a result of which he is “desperately” trying to remove all mentions of his name on the Internet.

And he insists that his name be removed from the website.

So I Googled his name, and sure enough found it on another 8 or 10 websites, including Amazon, as a result of similar “literary indiscretions” (as he puts it) in various journals and anthologies. I wonder if he is contacting all those sites too.

I suppose I should write him a (snail mail) response, but needless to say, Locus has no intention of deleting references in our Index to the contents of published journals and magazines. (Even I were the compiler of the Locus Index of Science Fiction, which I’m not.)

On a similar note, on my trip last month I picked up Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur (Doubleday) in an airport bookshop. It was suitable airplane reading. It’s subtitled “how today’s internet is killing our culture”, and the general theme is that the interactivity of “Web 2.0″, with amateur bloggers and Wikipedia posters, is undermining the concept of truth in our culture, which he says is supposed to be determined by “experts”, academic or otherwise. To a small extent, he has a case: the popularity of free content on the web is, in fact, robbing traditional print newspapers of their circulation base. Book reviews in papers, for example, are shrinking. But the tone of the book is unrelieved alarm: oh my goodness, it’s the fall of Western civilization. This is not a book that cites the comparative errors rates of Wikipedia vs. Britannica. He resorts to anecdotes about folks addicted to Internet gambling, to implicitly condemn everything electronic. Sigh. I was surprised, in the week or two since, to see the book getting serious review coverage — The New York Times, even. There is always someone. Or two.