Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

I see David Gerrold had a problem with the “door Nazi” (as we both described her) at the Hugo Losers’ party in Boston too — read his 9/22 entry (I can’t seem to find the permalink) to the end — and in fairness and gratitude I should also mention that Vince Docherty, chairman of the ’05 convention that hosted the party, and also an old friend of mine, tracked me down at the Locus table the next day to apologize for the incident, and explain about the crowded room and the clueless door guard. Apology accepted, no big deal; next year in Glasgow.

Hot and dry here in SoCal the past couple days. The Santa Anas have begun. Red flag warnings for fire danger.

Big day at the bookstore today, with three much-anticipated volumes going on sale: Stephen King’s final Dark Tower novel; Neal Stephenson’s final “Baroque Cycle” volume, The System of the World; and the 11th volume of Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events”, The Grim Grotto. I bought 2 of them, hoping that the publisher of the 3rd will send me a review copy, as they did of the previous volume…

Actually, the book I was most excitied to find today was the one I found by chance (having overlooked its entry on the forthcoming books list): Geoff Ryman’s Air, a new novel by one of my favorite authors, and a novel that has been frustratingly delayed since its announcement some… 2 years? ago. (Apparently there was a final rewrite that took place after its initial announcement.) The book is subtitled “Or, Have Not Have” and is based on a 2001 story, “Have Not Have” that was a Sturgeon Award finalist, that placed 12th on the Locus Poll that year, and that was reprinted in Dozois’s 19th annual anthology. Which I mention to justify my text-unread recommendation. In fact, I will be so helpful as to post this handy link so you can order a copy yourself…

Yesterday Yeong and I visited the UCLA Hammer Museum, aka the Armand Hammer museum, a compact facility on Wilshire Blvd in Westwood Village just off the UCLA campus. It opened over 10 years ago yet is one of those local places in one’s hometown I’d never been to. It’s not large, but has an impressive permanent collection of 19th and early 20th century paintings, including an iconic Rembrandt of a man with a black hat, and a famous painting of George Washington (or at least, one that looked very much like the famous painting we’ve all seen). There was also a special exhibition of prints by Albrecht Dürer, which if the website hasn’t changed you can see a few of here — elaborate, detailed, fantastic visions that struck me as obvious precursors to the work of Ian Miller…

In the evening we watched “Going My Way”, one of those multi-Oscar winning pictures that neither of us had ever seen; sweet, sentimental, utterly predictable. Still, we’ll have to rent its sequel, “The Bells of St. Mary’s”, next.

The daily email Publishers Lunch supplied a link today to a Telegraph article about publishers who mislead readers about what awards a book or its author has won. As an awards follower, the subject has long been one of my pet peeves. In SF, an especially annoying example is a claim about “Nebula award nominee” that turns out, upon investigation, to be indicative of nothing more than a single recommendation/nomination by one of the author’s peers in the elaborate multi-staged Nebula nomination process–not, as one might suppose, a claim about having reached a final ballot.

We watched Sorry, Wrong Number last night, the 1948 movie starring Barbara Stanwyck (rented via Netflix), one of those movies I’d heard about so often that I had a firm impression of what it was about (and what the ending was) without ever actually having seen it. Seeing it confirmed my second-hand impressions, but also suggested to me that this was a story that would never be released today with the same ending. A remake by today’s Hollywood would demand that Barbara struggle from her bed, stand at her window, and scream at the night watchman in order to save herself; it’s hard to imagine any recent Hollywood pic with the sort of inevitable tragic ending as the original film…

Ah, another letter writer today, responding to John Shirley’s social roundable, simply declines to believe my statement yesterday that Shirley invited a broad range of writers to participate but that the several of those on the ‘right’ whom he invited declined. We are accused of ‘systematically silenc[ing]‘ voices of dissent. Sigh. It’s always useful to keep in mind that most people who bother to write letters are those who have some sort of complaint; they are not representative of the entire readership. However, though I’m not planning to actively pursue this, I will state for the record that I would be happy to consider a similar roundtable from the ‘other side’, if anyone would care to submit something, or even suggest names of spokesmen they would approve of (which none of the letter writers has); and I would be happy to post letters by anyone who cares to debate the substance of the roundtable, rather than dismissing it as ‘left-wing views’ and evidence of the liberal media, blah blah blah. Anyone?

John Shirley’s social-future roundtable has brought a handful of email responses, some of them coherent, the recurrent theme the observation that all of those interviewed are on what we call in the US the ‘left’. (Who are mistaken in their worldviews, etc.) John has assured me–even before he completed the piece–that he had invited numerous other writers, including several ‘right-wing’ writers, to participate, but all of them refused. So it goes.

John Shirley’s roundtable interview on the social future brought a spike to views of the website over the weekend, peaking at 15K unique viewers on Sunday alone; typical viewers on a weekday is 7K, and for a Sunday 4K. Links from Boing Boing, slashdot, and Bruce Sterling’s blog no doubt helped.

Upcoming is a review of “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” from Lawrence Person and Howard Waldrop. And Lawrence’s update on his “Donnie Darko” review, now that the director’s version is out.

Ah, got around to connecting, er, unconnecting, the wireless connection, er, link, between my new laptop and the wireless router I acquired 2 weeks ago. It was a matter of reading the instructions (!) and pressing the button on the laptop that looks like a microphone surrounded by double parens, a button I had previously not noticed (!!).

Now I can carry my laptop all about the house and grounds, upstairs, downstairs, to the tennis court, the pond, the rooftop observatory, and stay connected, downloading my thousands of spams, surfing the web, and ftp’ing updates to the website. (If I had a tennis court, pond, or observatory, of course. It’s the principle that counts.)

To make up for attending Noreascon without my partner Yeong, I spent Sunday with him doing his favorite passtime: shopping, in this case for a particular household gizmo that he’s lusted after for some time, which gizmos are fortunately nowhere near as expensive as they were just a year ago.

We happen to live in an area replete with electronics stores — Fry’s, Best Buy, Comp USA, Circuit City, Good Guys, and a high-end place called Magnolia — so we learned a lot by visiting each, asking slightly different naive questions each time as if we hadn’t already been to the other stores, then balancing the options and our budget and making a decision. Then we came home and ordered it online. From Amazon.* For a better price than any of the stores offered, though in point of fact all the physical stores were out of stock of this particular model aside for an occasional floor model.

I realize we’ve done this now several times–spent a day, or several days over a period of weeks, driving around the city shopping, and ended up buying online for less. Still, the point is you can’t omit the in-person experience. You have to see what you’re going to get, make a decision about what’s acceptable, which is difficult to do by simple online browsing. Amazon is great if you already know what you’re looking for, but it can’t replace serendipitous browsing in a physical bookstore.

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*Which, as you no doubt already know, provides Locus Online a modest commission for every item ordered through the links we provide, e.g. Amazon, at no additional cost to yourself.

When I was 12 and 14 and 17, in the golden age of discovering wonder and discovering new writers to provide it, I would fixate on each new writer and seek out all their books I could find and read them in relatively short order; I suspect this is a pattern not uncommon among new readers of SF even today. And so I read a dozen books by Asimov in the 1969-70 timeframe; more than a dozen by Bradbury in the same era (I remember a trip to Printer’s Ink in a suburban Chicago mall and buying every Bradbury paperback I did not already have); a double dozen by Clarke then too. (Ironically, since I’m not generally a genre movie fan, the first book by Asimov I read was Fantastic Voyage, and the first book by Clarke, 2001.) Heinlein came a bit later, with more than 2 dozen read in the ’71-’73 era. [I keep lists.] And I discovered Robert Silverberg, who showed me what seemed at the time an expanded, more literary and mature, genre; I read 50 of his books (only a few of them anthologies) from 1970-1973.

Along about 1973, via A Change of Hobbit bookstore in Westwood and the then-mimeographed Locus, I became aware of the active SF community, what books were being published each year, what was happening ‘now’. I started buying new hardcovers (Rendezvous with Rama; Time Enough for Love) and paying attention to current Hugo and Nebula ballots. I can recall what was on those 1973 ballots more accurately than I can recall those ballots from last year.

Now, things have become reversed. My decade-plus stint reviewing short fiction for Locus cost me the ability to keep up on current novels, even those on the H/N ballots, even those by my favorite writers. With that stint now past, and despite the challenges and difficulties of a personal relationship with someone who’s not sympathetic with the idea of reading books at all, I’m starting to catch up on things I’ve missed — in a manner resembling the early pattern of author-focused reading. And so, here I am having read Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage the week before Worldcon, and subsequently pulling his books from the past decade off my shelves to read next. Guardian, on the plane flight home. The two Forever novels next; I hope to finally settle my confusion over which of them was a sequel to The Forever War and which wasn’t. Yes, I’m embarrassed to admit to not having read so many important books of the past decade and a half. I wish there was more time.