Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

It is hot, here in my suburban Los Angeles neighborhood; the newspaper today said a record has been set for 100+ [Fahrenheit] temperatures at the Pierce College weather station, the nearest to my Woodland Hills address, for the 16th day in a row, and that was yesterday. Today surely extended the record; it is after 8 p.m. as I write and my local temp is still 95F.

Not that this has anything to do with global warming, of course.

Update 9p.m. — according to this local report, today’s Woodland Hills temp hit 116 degrees F.

It was merely a premonition that led me to check the Asimov’s site earlier this week to see if by chance James Patrick Kelly’s column incorporating the e-mail interview he did with me a while back had made it online (in advance of print publication) yet. It had, so I blinked it. I believe this is the first interview I’ve ever done, not counting a couple times I’ve answered e-mail questionnaries about the site from seemingly legitimate academic sources.

Checking my daily log, I see that I e-mailed by answers to Jim Kelly’s list of questions on May 18th. It was barely a couple days later when he returned e-mail with a draft of his column, recasting a few of my responses as interpolated text, but not cutting anything substantial. Of course I noticed that I’d not really answered his fundamental question — why do they (the webmasters) do it? He suggests egoboo, which I suppose is a small part of it, though it’s not like I’m any more sought after on the convention participant circuit than I was back in my short fiction reviewing days (which is to say, once every year or two, from a local con I wouldn’t have thought to attend otherwise, at most), nor have I felt any other impact on my personal life, which might as well be set in the Northwest Territories, for all that I have personal contact with anyone in the field in between conventions 3 or 4 times a year. It’s nice that the website brings in a bit of revenue, enough to cover costs and books, but that’s a long way from covering mortgage or gas or any other actual living expenses, in stark contrast to Locus Magazine’s situation, and so that can hardly be considered a primary motivation.

The real reason, I suppose, borders on the evangelical; it’s my way of propagating my belief in the power of the literary blend of science and art. Which is to say, justifying an anti-social tendency dating from age 12, that golden age. Somewhere in there; it depends on your perspective. The real real reason, of course, is that I happened, as much by chance as anything, to acquire the responsibility of portraying Locus on the web, without any particular qualifications for doing so. Apparently I’m doing an adequate job, though I’d be the first to imagine a list of things the Locus website might be doing better.

I’ll try to get back to updating this blog more regularly; if I let personal distractions interfere, that would be letting them win. (To say nothing of the terrorists.)

Obviously, since the site keeps getting updated. I try to focus this blog on commentary about the SF field, current books, etc., as opposed to issues pertaining only to my personal life, which can’t interest anyone, but which has interfered lately with such matters. I intend that the situation will change, one way or another, soon. I’ve even read a couple books recently.

Two reviews that in the end are favorable yet that begin by pandering to cliche. (I know this is Dave Langford’s domain, but these are longer quotes that those he usually runs.)

Newsweek reviews Keith Donohue’s The Stolen Child:

In the event this is a deal breaker, you should know right off the bat that “The Stolen Child,” by Keith Donohue, belongs to the genre known as fantasy, and that its pages are populated by hobgoblins and changelings. Fantasy is often dismissed as a necessary evil to get kids to take their medicine — i.e., learn values — or as a soft blanket for 40-year-old virgins. But as the success of “The Time Traveler’s Wife” attests, fantasy can serve a nobler function. By replacing the sordidness of the everyday with magic, writers can approach the philosophers’ stone with questions about history, identity and (why not?) the meaning of life.

In the LA Times, a review of the Tsunami Relief Anthology Elemental, edited by Steven Savile and Alethea Kontis:

SUFFERIN’ saurians of Saturn!!! Can reading still be just plain fun? The way it was when judging a book (or a comic or a pulp magazine) by its cover (square-jawed hero in the grip of revolting Thing blazing away with his fearsomely foreshortened Antimatter Gun) was the rule to follow?

The virulent science-fiction and fantasy bug seems to infect most reader-kids somewhere around age 12. Once the jolt of pure story-spinning hits the preteen bloodstream, it is goodbye to chores, homework, even television. Although there is no known cure for SFitis, most of those affected appear to go into remission a few years later, thanks to copious doses of cultural elitism administered in high school. Others, either oblivious or more independent, stay fans of the genre for the rest of their days. To their delight, the sci-fi universe is continually expanding — there’s now the option of warping into parallel universes on the Net.

Given the announcement of this year’s John W. Campbell Memorial Award finalists, and recalling the occasional consternation over fantasy winners of the Hugo Award (I get a couple three e-mail queries a year asking me to explain this), it occurs to me that I don’t think the Campbell Award is sufficiently recognized as possibly the truest bluest *science fiction* award of any of the major awards. Or at least, any of the major American awards — the Arthur C. Clarke Award stays pretty tightly on an SF focus, but is limited to book published in that country, whereas the Campbell (at least lately) seems open to anything published in the English language. (Oddly, even the British SF Association Award isn’t constrained to SF; it nominated Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and awarded Gaiman’s Coraline). It helps that the Campbell Award is juried, and so less swayed by popular trends, and the jurors include the likes of Gregory Benford, a defender of the SF net.

Sorry I haven’t written more here lately; as always, busy busy. I will mention that I was flattered to have been e-mail interviewed in the past week by James Patrick Kelly for an upcoming “On the Net” column in Asimov’s, and judging from the draft he sent me, have been Quoted At Length.

Ads: HarperCollins has kindly purchased no less than three ad spaces on the site this month — the homepage banner (at the top), a sidebar banner also on the homepage, and a flash banner ad (with the sound of a scraping sword) on five additional pages, including the Links Portal. Please show your support for HarperCollins and for Locus Online by clicking on the ads now and again — obviously, you’re not committing to buy anything just by browsing their webpages.

Poll: Locus Online ran an ‘all-time poetry’ poll alongside the formal Locus Poll this year, and voting for both ended April 15th. I have yet to tally up the results of the poetry poll, but will do so soon. (Curiously, no one has queried me about when the results will be released.) The response was of course far short of the response to the annual Locus Poll — just 61 e-mail submissions — so I’m not entirely sure the results will be meaningful. We’ll see.

Blog: It was slightly disconcerting to chat with three or four folks — real writers whose names you would recognize — over the Nebula Awards Weekend who alluded (one in print) to reading this blog (!). I tend to write as if my readership here consists of 6 or 8 folks with too much time on their hands, 2 of whom are myself a few weeks and months later. Thinking that it might be otherwise makes me self-conscious not so much about what I write here, as about how often I post; I’ve noted myself that an ideal blog should be updated every day. It’s not that I don’t have things to write about; the challenge is finding the time to do so, coherently.

Photos: OK, so I’m not a great photographer (Hi Chris!), at least not when jostling among 15 others (who *are* all these people?) trying to snap pix of the latest set of awards winners, who are quickly distracted, with a basic digital camera that blurs half the shots I do take. Tonight I replaced my own pic of the Nebula winners, which I hope did not embarrass the Locus name-brand too much, with a better photo taken by the magazine executive editor Liza Groen Trombi. Apologies to anyone who deserves them.

It was a long, but well-run and very entertaining ceremony, with Connie Willis toastmastering, and Harlan Ellison capping the evening with a rambling but impassioned speech about honor and character and putting aside pettiness (which did not preclude him from citing what he sees as deficiencies in SFWA). I’m not quite the first to get the results posted, but perhaps the first to get a photo of the winners posted, however marginal the photo may be. (Perhaps Liza can supply me with a better one; her digital camera is way cooler than mine.)

It’s the first double-Nebula win since Connie did it in 1993, and only the 9th time overall. Greg Bear did it in the same two categories in 1984; Roger Zelazny in those categories in 1966.

I am in Tempe, Arizona, tonight, for the Nebula Awards weekend, after having been earlier this week at a professional conference in Salt Lake City (a coincident sequence of events that my partner at home is very unhappy about…)

Salt Lake City is a clean, uncrowded, rather Stepfordesque city that features a fabulous convention center that could easily host a Worldcon, if only some local group could/would support a bid, and a fabulous used/rare books dealer (just a couple blocks away, from the convention center and my hotel), Sam Weller’s, where I managed to spend a couple hours browsing the stacks, and picked up a select few first edition paperbacks by Pohl and Tenn and Delany that I didn’t already have. (Their stock is more generous than I’d remembered — with newly released books mixed among the used backlog — but I am fastidious enough to be willing to buy only very tight, clean copies of used books, price less important than condition. Which I found by Pohl and Tenn and Delany, and Harness and Asimov and couple others.)

I flew home on the company dime on Thursday, then drove myself to Tempe earlier today, Friday, much as I did a year and half ago when the World Fantasy Con was staged at this very hotel, the Tempe Mission Palms. As at that con, there was a mass autograph party this evening — and I brought books to sign — by Kelly, Margo, Eileen, and Connie, none of whom I’d ever obtained signatures from before (not even Connie!) — after which I hooked up with a dinner group including Liza Groen from Locus, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Gavin Grant & Kelly Link. (Liza clued me in on a breaking deal with a certain popular SF writer who’s doing a new column for Locus magazine/online — more about that anon.)

After dinner, back at the hotel, there was a “Nebula nominee and honoree reception” (sponsored by Dark Horse Comics and Tor Books) that included the awarding of pins to all the Nebula nominees, and then evolved into a roast of sorts of incipient Grand Master Harlan Ellison by the weekend’s toastmaster Connie Willis, with members of the audience spontaneously arising to tell variously complimentary or derisive anecdotes about the man — including Joe Haldeman, Jane Jewell, Ginjer Buchanan, Daryl Mallet, and Peter David — an amazing show, one that matches the Silverberg/Ellison co-roast I witnessed many years ago at a Westercon in LA. There were several people video-taping and snapping pix, so you can expect to see more about this on the web soon.

The votes have been tallied, the rule-offenders deleted, and the finalists determined… though I’m going to wait just another day or two to see if any lingering paper ballots trickle in to Locus HQ in Oakland before declaring the finalists final, and posting them on the site. Expect something by Sunday, or Monday at the latest.

Every week I scan the online bestseller lists (for the weekly Bestsellers page on Locus Online) and more and more I can’t help noticing how many books, based on their brief descriptions on such lists, seem to have some fantasy component, even though their nominal genre is ‘romance’ or ‘thriller’. This is especially apparent on the USA Today list, which ranks all books by sales in the preceding week regardless of format or subject matter (thus allowing a lot of mass market paperbacks to rank that go unnoticed on lists from other sources).

Thus, for example, from this past week’s USA Today list, some titles and the USAT descriptions–

#12, Dark Demon by Christine Feehan, Jove — Romance: Female vampire slayer is seduced by her enemy

#26, Bump in the Night, by J. D. Robb, Mary Blayney, Mary Kay McComas, Ruth Ryan Langan, Jove — Four stories about the paranormal

#35, Master of Wolves, by Angela Knight, Berkley Sensation — Romance: Werewolf meets the lovely Faith Weston

#85, The Mask of Atreus, by A.J. Hartley, Berkley — Unholy grail has terrible powers

#87, Tomb of the Golden Bird, by Elizabeth Peters, William Morrow — Amelia Peabody finds she must protect her family from the sinister forces

#111, Warsworn, by Elizabeth Vaughan, Tor — Paranormal romance: Powerful healer pays the consquences after swearing an oath of loyalty to a Warlord

#118, The Serpent on the Crown, Elizabeth Peters, Avon — Amelia Peabody must untangle the mystery of an ancient relic that carries a curse

#130, Labyrinth, by Kate Mosse, Putnam — Thriller: Two women born centuries apart are linked by a common destiny

… not to mention various seemingly historical novels about the Knights Templar, the king of Camelot, novels about secret religious histories, and the like.

There seems to be this entire parallel universe of fantasy publishing by authors and publishers who often have no connection with what we regard as the fantasy and SF genre, a universe where fantasy themes are being taken more and more for granted in genres that traditionally haven’t embodied them. On a related note, I recall reading recently that the ‘paranormal romance’ genre generates several hundred, perhaps on the order of 1000, original titles each year. Locus Magazine, as far as I can tell, lists such books when it sees them, and they are partly why publishing numbers that Locus reports continue to inflate year after year, but I’m wondering if we shouldn’t acknowledge that there’s a fundamental distinction between us and them, and let them be, and stop trying to ‘take credit’ for them in our statistics and tallies. For Locus Online, I’m letting go; I did include Dates from Hell on this past week’s chart, but a while back I made a decision to stop compiling J.D. Robb novels on my bestseller lists any more. And none of the examples listed above.