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Email to Locusmag seemed to disappear for about 24 hours, starting Friday morning around 10:30 (Pacific time). The problem didn’t fix itself, like some DSL issues do, so this morning I contacted CI Host, our web hosting service, and got a reply about 3 hours later to the effect that the “var partition” had been cleared, thus restoring e-mail. Period. Not finding this explanation entirely illuminating, I got online and entered into chat with the same technical guy at CI Host who’d responded with the email. I wondered if by any chance my resetting of mis-addressed email to locusmag.com, to divert it into limbo instead of my inbox, had screwed something up, directing hundreds of megs of emails into some buffer, now full. No, LOL. It was just that the var partition was full, the domain didn’t exist in the login database; new system, new database. OIC…well, whatever.

As near as I can tell, the CI Host folks transitioned some function that interprets domains names and/or email addresses from one system to another, and accidentally dropped all the locusmag settings. The effect was to bounce everything sent to *@locusmag.com; the reason I wasn’t able to download email was that there wasn’t any, none of it was being accepted by the host.

So what actually happened to everything sent that 24 hours? Bounced? Well, at least one email that *I* sent Locus HQ Friday afternoon did in fact arrive this afternoon, about 24 hours late. So it must have sat in limbo somewhere–or the server from work (from where I sent it) just kept trying until it got through. Anyway. These things happen, I guess. I should have jumped on the problem sooner, perhaps, but all’s well that…

James Jean, whom I’d previously never heard of, won the World Fantasy Award as Best Artist last month in Austin, Texas, but declined to provide a photo of himself for Locus Magazine’s report of the winners (on page 10 of the December issue; he substituted an artistic representation of himself instead). His website has lots of samples of his art, but what I discovered today is a thumbnail photo of him on the Contributors page of the December issue of Wired, which you might check out in case you’re curious.

The same issue has the last of Bruce Sterling’s published columns for the magazine.

Meanwhile, here at Locus Online HQ, my email service seems to have hiccupped; only 2 new emails since 10:30 this morning, which can’t be right. I’ll hope the problem will fix itself by tomorrow morning, so I don’t have to call them and complain.

I’ve agreed to be a judge for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards, and today my first box of books to consider arrived — 16 books in all, only 1 a hardcover, all the others trade paperbacks. Only 3 are from familiar publishers.

I’ve never been a judge before; the closest I’ve gotten has been, for over a decade now, to be invited to submit short fiction suggestions to the Sturgeon Award committee, suggestions which are then compiled along with others’ suggestions by the administrators and forwarded to the actual judges for their consideration. Not quite the same as being a judge, wherein I, along with four others, are tasked with considering all the eligible candidates, narrowing them down to a list of finalists, and then determining the winner.

The task of being a judge is potentially a huge undertaking, entailing the reading of dozens or hundreds of books, not to mention dickering with the other judges about what should prevail, but I only accepted the offer because of the informal lore I’ve gathered about how such judging actually works. Meaning that, no one actually reads through every candidate, or even a majority of them. Rather, a sort of triage process takes place, rather like ploughing through a slush pile — you *start* every book, read a few pages, and are able to quickly dismiss many right away, perhaps setting aside a few for possible consideration, and actually reading through to the end only a small minority of titles. I’m certainly *hoping* this will be the case, because otherwise the prospect of reading even 16 whole books in the next few weeks would not be plausible, not with other commitments and constraints. In any case, I’ll give it my best.

We saw Casino Royale and I thought it a perfectly enjoyable action-adventure thriller. I’ve not been a James Bond aficionado especially; somewhat as with H.P. Lovecraft, James Bond has been a cultural phenomenon I’ve been aware of my whole life without having been particularly attracted to. The outre gizmos and villains, perhaps, rubbed me the wrong way. The only complete Bond movie I think I’d seen until recently was that one about the space shuttle… Moonraker… way back in 1979.

Yet now, as with HPL, I feel a compulsion to check in, to catch up, to come up to speed. I’ve Netflixed the first couple Bond movies. My reaction to Dr. No is to sense its similarity to original-series Star Trek episodes, complete with its formal dinner with the villain and its papier-mache rock wall underground quarters. And the opening scene of From Russia With Love surely prefigures the mask-disguise shtick of the Mission: Impossible TV series.

As for the current Bond film, I was tickled to hear Daniel Craig recite that recipe for the cocktail he dubs a Vesper, which I’d come across before — 3 parts vodka, 1 part gin, 1/2 part Lillet blanc, twist of lemon. Not bad; I’ve made it. But restaurants seem not to have heard of it.

Little Children benefits from its novelistic origins — it’s cowritten by the author of the source book, and features intermittent arch narration to provide background that would normally be difficult to film. The portrait of several residents of an urban neighborhood surrounding a playground, involving infidelity and the threat of a sex ‘pervert’ (scarily played by Jackie Earle Haley), the film traces several plot threads that, just ten or fifteen minutes from the end, threaten to converge in potentially catastraphic ways. It’s a tribute to the non-Hollywood-esque protocols of the film that they do not resolve in any gratuitous tragedy, or formula happy ending, but a resolution that derives satisfactorily from the motives and circumstancies of the characters. Still, I’m not sure the portrait of the victimized sex offender, who ends up demonized anyway, is entirely fair.

I liked The Fountain better than I thought I would (after one of my reviewers dismissed the opportunity to cover it, on the basis of trailers, as new age hokum); it did make sense and have a story for most of its length. All about three eras of questors of immortality, with Hugh Jackman in the central roles; the parallels between eras were easy enough to follow, metaphorically or metafictionally if not literally. Still it does not add up to much, as far as I could tell; the bottom line, about that quest and the possible need for the acceptance of death, seemed merely vapid. Yet, nice acting, beautiful cinematography and effects, and a compelling score by Clint Mansell — minimalist, dark, compulsive; the sort of thing I like but wouldn’t assume most others would.

I’ve given up — given up on trying to haystack all the mis- and mal-addressed email sent to locusmag.com. It seemed a reasonable thing to do, to skim through it all in order to find the occasional legitimate email sent to Locus but somehow not sent to any valid address, and I’ve done this for several years now, but as it’s increased to 10K such emails a day, taking an hour to skim every two or three days, I’ve decided it’s not worth it. Life is too short. I’ll miss a few. Sorry.

Re: comment to a previous post: of course I realize that the ‘intermediates’ are automated robots. At the same time, I’ve always assumed that a fair fraction of the ‘visits’ to the website each day aren’t people with eyeballs, but just such robots. It’s because I’ve assumed that, that I’m surprised the compilations of active e-mail addresses and comment forms aren’t updated more often than they seem to be. Obviously one of my premises is flawed…

It’s curious to see gibes from Andrew Wheeler about publications who’ve already released ‘best of year’ lists in November, since November isn’t yet the end of the year — what are they thinking? Surely Andrew realizes that reviewers for such publications get advance galleys of virtually everything, and have in fact seen every book worth considering for a best of the year list by October or November. Just as Locus reviewers, for example, are now, in November and December, busy reading books to be published next March or April…

By the same token, I’ve always admired the efficiency of the National Book Award process, which manage to consider eligible books from a given year and announce its winners in… November. Note that two of this year’s winners, Richard Powers’ THE ECHO MAKER and M.T. Anderson’s THE ASTONISHING LIFE OF OCTAVIAN NOTHING, VOLUME I: THE POX PARTY, had official publication dates of October! The books were barely in the stores by the time the awards were announced. The extreme contrast, of course, is the protracted nomination and voting process behind the Nebula Awards, which allows a trophy to go to a book published more than two years previously…

Here’s another odd thing about spam. In recent weeks Locus has gotten a trickle of comment spam — submissions via comment forms on the website, submissions that are full of generic comments (“Great site!”) and reams of URLs. Typically these come in pairs, one via the comment form on the Locus Online ‘contact’ page, and the other via the comment form on the Cory Doctorow essay from Locus Magazine’s September issue.

The odd thing is, these spam are still attacking the *September* Cory essay page, but not the more recent November Cory essay page.

It’s as if the spammers aren’t each trolling the website (or by extension, all websites) for easily accessible email addresses and comments forms. It’s as if some intermediate does such a troll periodically, and passes on the available contact links to a bunch of other spam providers. The interval the former updates means the latter are still using a September comments form and not a November one.

Isn’t that interesting?

Yes, I’ve been remiss about posting here recently, but I will skip the usual excuses this time. My ideal of course is to post something every day, as all good bloggers should, something short and pithy at least, but this would entail a controlled, harmonious existence in which interruptions and distractions are minimized, in which the appearance of balance and fortitude are in fact the situation. I like to imagine this might be true for me, someday, and I solemnly note the many other bloggers who seem to manage their output more consistently than I’ve been able to. I can only plead that the website itself takes priority; this blog is a lagniappe, for the 7 people who read it.

Today’s pithy comment is about spammers. I mentioned a while back, facetiously, about going through the day’s 10,000 spam. It was an exaggeration then; it isn’t now. As domain administrator I still try to skim all the emails addressed *@locusmag.com, in hopes of catching the occasional misspelled or invalidly addressed (locusonline@locusmag.com; locsu@locusmag.com, etc.) email for something worth catching, but I’m on the verge of sending it all automatically to the bit bucket. My title query is to wonder what spammers are thinking when they send thousands of spam a day to obviously nonsensical email addresses — moody@locusmag.com, fuller@locusmag.com, AmbroseXTishahick@locusmag.com, to pick 3 from the spam folder at random. Who do they think would ever see these emails? The number of spam received at legitimate addresses — online, locus, mark, and a couple others @locusmag.com — is a small proportion of the total.

UPDATE to reply to commentator Rick — Hi Rick, but this is Mark, not Charles. See upper right corner. Charles does the magazine, I do the website, and this blog. Thanks for reading!

I caught a ride to the Renaissance this morning with Mary Turzillo, in time to catch most of a 10 a.m. panel about the “Effects of the Web and Online Publishing on Fantasy”, with Rodger Turner and John Klima and Gayle Surrette and Steve Wilson and Catherynne Valente, who talked about various things — fiction on the web, e-books, wikis — but whose main theme I’d perhaps missed at the beginning.
Outside another panel I caught up with Jeff VanderMeer, whose new book I’m 100 pages into, getting a bit of preview into the WF Awards judges panel on Sunday that I’ll miss. Without giving away details, his theme was that there was remarkable consensus among the judges on this year’s winners.

I rendezvoused with Locus Online reviewing team Lawrence Person and Howard Waldrop — the latter whom I’d said hello to once years ago but had never actually talked to face to face — for lunch, which ended up at another nearby Mexican place, Manuel’s (which was better than Serrano’s), where we talked about Texas politics and speed limits and the history of the space race, one of those many topics on which Howard has remarkably detailed knowledge and recall. And he signed my book.

I attended 2 1/4 panels over the remainder of the afternoon. A panel on “The God or the Machine?”, about the boundary between SF and fantasy, featured Ted Chiang (doing his first-ever panel, he’d told me earlier), Walter Jon Williams, Michael Stackpole, Louise Marley, and moderator Janine Young. They debated what the panel was supposed to be about, then offered various perspectives, giving examples of blends (Star Wars, Pern) and distinctions between magic and technology — the former isn’t the latter because technology eventually gets cheaper and is available to the masses (TC); science is testable and repeatable, a discovery of laws of nature, while magic is about altering those laws (WJW); etc. Most memorable bites: WJW cited George RR Martin, “it’s a matter of furniture” (thus Pern “is” fantasy” and Star Wars “is” SF); TC pointed out that if a solution to the story’s problem depends on the spiritual or moral state of the practitioner, then it’s fantasy; WJW describing fantasy, SF, and horror as being about whether the universe is benign, neutral, or malevolent; LM suggesting that the moral state of her surgeon does matter to her, with WJW countering that, in his recent experience, the best surgeons are bastards.

Second panel was about “phantom books”, with Darrell Schweitzer, Gordon Van Gelder, Don Webb, Hal Duncan, and Barbara Roden. They suggested various attractions of the idea of imaginary books (the most famous being of course HPL’s Necronomicon), and cited a remarkable number of examples: Chambers, Borges, Zafron, Cabell, Eco, Lupoff. An audience member pointed out how the actual original religious texts behind the great Abrahamic religions are in some sense imaginary books.

I stayed for only a bit of a third panel, about “forgotten masters” of fantasy, with David G. Hartwell, Paul Park, Jess Nevins, and Victoria Strauss; the room was hot, my schedule constrained. I did a final round of the dealers room, then shuttled back to my hotel to check e-mail — as it happened, news came in of Nelson S. Bond’s death, so I spent half an hour researching that, miscalculating his age [soon corrected], and posting the news on the website — take a nap, and change clothes for the banquet. I got back to the convention hotel about 6:45, in time to mill about with the banquet crowd for a few minutes before the doors were opened and we all went in to find our tables. I was at a satellite HarperCollins table, shared with overflows from another publisher, which meant in practice sitting with Alma Alexander and her husband, and with Steven Erikson and his fellow writer Ian ‘Cam’ Esslemont, who are both writing stories in the former’s “Malazan Empire”.

The banquet food was decent, the toastmaster Bradley Denton excellent, presenting a lively history of Texas’ six flags keyed to introductions of the convention’s guests of honor — Dave Duncan, Robin Hobb, Gary Gianni, Glenn Lord, Glen Cook, and John Jude Palencar. Then followed announcement of the British Fantasy Awards from a month ago, before David Hartwell and John Douglas did their usual presentation of the World Fantasy Award nominees and winners. There were some surprises, perhaps, and in fact Hartwell made a point of mentioning that novel-winner Harukami, whom he’d met, had said he’d read everything by Lovecraft and Howard and followed F&SF faithfully while growing up — i.e., he’s one of us. Then there were photos and parties, but for now it’s late and I need to be up early for my flight home. More details, and probably amendations and format fixes, in the next day or two as time permits.