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Whatever else you may have heard about Brokeback Mountain, the just-[limited]-released film directed by Ang Lee, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, and based on a [novelette-length] story by Annie Proulx, with a script by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana — OK, the ‘gay cowboy movie’ — let me pass on to you (while endorsing all the superlative reviews) that it is the most faithful screen adaptation of a literary work that I’ve ever seen. Virtually every scene, almost every line of dialogue, from the original story is up there on the screen. This is all to the good. The story, in 30 pages, followed the relationship of two men over two decades, necessarily compressing time and eliding many years. The screenwriters have interpolated, very well, those missing passages, while preserving every ounce of original intent, and without in the slightest way giving in to Hollywood-ization; they don’t simplify situations to pander to popular prejudices, they don’t alter the story’s ending to a feel-good finale.

And unlike the more typical film adaptation of a novel, this film doesn’t have to leave out huge chunks of the original. It’s a demonstration of the principle that a novelette or novella length story, not a novel, is best suited for faithful adaption to a 2+ hour film.

My previous standard in this regard was the 1981 TV miniseries Brideshead Revisited, (a 350 page novel dramatized in 12 hours of film), which I saw first and read later, the result being that my reading of the original novel by Evelyn Waugh struck me as flat, like a summary, lacking the emotional expression and nuance of the dramatization. Of course I realize that had I been familiar with the novel first, my reaction would almost certainly have been different, favoring the original literary version. It was for this reason that on Saturday, having already purchased tickets online for Brokeback Mountain that evening, I sat down with Proulx’s book Close Range and read the story “Brokeback Mountain”. I wanted to give the literary original the advantage, and no, I didn’t worry that I would ‘spoil’ my experience of the film; my opinion is that only the most superficial, formulaic stories are ruined by knowing the endings, while any story of lasting value is only deepened by revisits in whatever medium. In this case I think I was well-rewarded; while the original story is brilliant in many ways — in its minimalist expressionism, in its depiction of a circumstance that is both startling and inevitable, and true — the film dramatization visualizes where the story describes; expresses where the story tells. It’s a rare case of a film expanding on, rather than diminishing, its literary source.

Meanwhile, my home DSL connection has been dicey all weekend, which is why certain book and magazine listings are still not posted…

Anyone heard anything about this year’s Wooden Rocket Awards (www.woodenrocket.com/)? Voting opening back in September, supposedly, but there’s no indication of when voting was to have closed, much less results. I spent a couple minutes poking around on their website looking for an email address, and not finding one (website sin #7, if I recall the numbering). I’m wondering not because I’m especially concerned whether I won again (Locus Online won the ‘print to website’ category the first two years of the WR awards), but because it’s the end of the year and I’m starting to compile awards data from the past year in order to update the Locus Index to SF Awards. Which, I’m thinking about planning to resolve, I will try to figure out how to update more frequently than once yearly. (It’s easy to post individual pages without the links between the various indices; more effort each time to update all the indices and links.)

Update 16 Dec: an e-mail reply from Stephen Hunt (who just sold three fantasy novels, beginning with The Court of the Air, in auction to HarperCollins Voyager, for five figures!) assures me that counting is underway, and an announcement of winners should be due around January 1st.

Cheryl Morgan mentioned a while back that

November now being over, I can happily report that for the first time ever Emerald City has averaged over 2000 unique visitors per day.

Now of course there are few things more fraudulent that web site statistics, and in the case of unique vists a major problem is knowing how many of them are real people and how many are software bots of various sorts…

I was checking my own stats the other day, in response to an advertising query, and was pleased to see that Locus Online has been attracting some 50,000 visitors per week… anywhere from 8 to 11 thousand unique visitors per day. (See for yourself.) This is up from 20,000 visitors per week only a year or so ago.

My point is not to upstage Cheryl, but to echo her realization that these statistics are of dubious significance. What is a ‘visitor’? How many of them are bots, as opposed to real people who might buy stuff? I’ve always found the difference between ‘visits’ and ‘unique visitors’ perplexing, since the latter is always higher, sometimes by a significant fraction. How can there be more visitors than visits? (As best as I’ve been able to determine, it’s because a ‘visit’ is defined as some series of requests from the site lasting a certain overall minimum time, and some ‘visitors’ might take a stab at the site then quickly disappear, thus not counting as a ‘visit’. But I’ve never gotten an answer on this score from my hosting service.)

In any case, I’m happy to be able to claim that Locus Online attracts several times more visitors (per week) than there are subscribers to Locus Magazine (per month). Now if only all my visitors would send me a buck a month…

David Williams writes,

Instead of creating a new Hugo for editors, why not do the decent thing and create separate Hugos for SF and fantasy? Each year’s award administrators could have the power to designate which novels are SF and which fantasy; their decisions could provide many hours of wholesome entertainment for all of us.

Interesting idea, and a plausible suggestion, at least for novels — a Hugo for Best SF Novel, and one for Best Fantasy Novel — though I can’t help but think the Hugo smofs have thought of this already and rejected the idea, perhaps if only so as not to increase the number of categories, ever a dreaded possibility.

Meanwhile, via Gwenda Bond, I found this response to my previous post about the fact that four of the last five Hugos for best novel have gone to fantasy novels. Wondering if I should or should not have been surprised by this factoid, and setting aside any subjective discussions about the relative strengths of SF vs fantasy writing in recent years, I went and checked the full shortlists for the past five years, and found…

In 2005, there were two fantasy and three SF nominees; fantasy won. [For purposes of this survey I'm counting China Miéville's books as fantasy.]

In 2004, there was one fantasy and four SF nominees; fantasy won.

In 2003, there was one fantasy (China) and four SF nominees; SF won.

In 2002, there were three fantasy and three SF nominees; fantasy won.

In 2001, there were two fantasy and three SF nominees; fantasy won.

As for this year, 2005, what might be the potential Hugo nominees? Glancing through this year’s directory of novels, I spot fantasy candidates by Bujold, Butler, Ford, Gaiman, Martin, and Park. And potential SF candidates by Marusek, Morgan, Robinson, Scalzi, Simmons, Stross, and Wilson. Though despite many years of following and compiling awards, I wouldn’t think to guess what the actual nominees might be, let alone the winner.

I got an email from Gregory Benford the other day, referring his new website(s), and commenting about the current state of the Hugo Awards and SF fandom in general as indicated by the fact four of the last five Hugo Awards for novel have gone… to fantasy novels.

I hadn’t realized that. I haven’t seen it pointed out anywhere. Four of five? That would be the fourth Harry Potter novel… then American Gods… then Paladin of Souls last year… and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell this year. The one SF winner during this period was Robert J. Sawyer’s Hominids which, while a respectable enough book, hardly represents any kind of cutting edge SF.

I remember some hullabaloo over the Harry Potter nomination and win, but that was partly due to its being a YA novel, IIRC. I haven’t seen anyone remark on this string of more recent fantasy wins, much less express any kind of consternation about it. Should SF partisans be concerned? What might their leading candidates be for next year..? Hmm…

But that doesn’t mean — my previous post doesn’t mean — that future features won’t contain lists and statistics. Just that the next one won’t. My very own background project (long-time readers will know what I mean) will include all sorts of statistics and lists and rankings and whatnot. Even if they’re not entirely the point. Any year now.

I may or may not show up at LosCon, LA’s annual local convention, this weekend; that it’s held each year over Thanksgiving weekend, when many sociable people have family things to do instead, is the reason I’ve not attended in many many years. (The first time I did attend, way back in the ’80s, I witnessed a memorable on-stage mutual roast between Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg.)

Now, I’m pre-baking a dish for tomorrow’s feast. And listening to the new Philip Glass CD (Symph. #6). I’ll download tonight’s episode of Lost and watch it later. Today I received a big box of books from Amazon UK… my quarterly or so order, supported by website visitor orders via my online link… and will list received books in due time. Behind as always. Happy Thanksgiving.

Have seen some varied reaction around the web to the latest Locus Online feature, Gary Westfahl’s essay about compiling quotations. I will say that I’m pretty sure the *next* feature, unlike his and the previous one, will contain no lists, no statistics.

I’ve become distracted in the past week or so by a background project, which is why I’m a bit late posting a couple Monitor pages. Hope to catch up this weekend.

A few days ago I created a 2006 subdirectory for the website — in which to place the cover image of the January ’06 issue of F&SF, for the magazines page posted earlier this week. And today I added the first 2006 event to the author events pages (for a reading by Rob Sawyer, who likes to plan ahead). Time flies. As someone who grew up in the ’70s, this is the deep future.

It might seem suspiciously coincidental to have posted three announcements just today about 2006 writers workshops, but in fact all three e-mails/press releases arrived in the past week.

Magazine subscribers note that rates rise January 1st. Renew now. Or subscribe, for the first time!

Within the next couple days I will be posting Gary Westfahl’s essay about the process of assembling his SF Quotations book. And in December I have planned reviews of King Kong and of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And maybe more.

Oh, and today’s LA Times has an op-ed, Fiction into fact into fiction, about a forthcoming Lost tie-in novel, purportedly written by a Flight 815 passenger who did not survive, and which manuscript is found in the wreckage during an episode to be broadcast next Spring. The writer, David L. Ulin, book editor of the Times, is deeply cynical about this blurring of fact and fiction, citing Bradbury’s interactive soap operas in Fahrenheit 451. Chill, I say; I think the idea’s pretty cool.

I’ve come down with the flu bug that seems to be going around, which means that my past couple days have consisted mostly of sleeping interrupted by brief periods of wakefulness, during which I try to read or check email before growing sleepy again…

Re: my previous post, this recent John Scalzi post illustrates the point much more vividly than I did; you’d almost think I’d read his post (which I hadn’t) or he’d read mine (which I doubt). What were those time-stamps again?

Via iTunes we here on Medina Road are now caught up completely with both Desperate Housewives and Lost. I have to admit DH isn’t quite as compelling this season, in that there’s no overarching plot to unify the various character threads, as there was with the mystery that drove season one. The emerging issue this season seems to be how long the Evil Pharmicist will keep getting away with things. And those closing narrations are getting a bit perfunctory. Lost, with last night’s episode (that recapped the first 48 days of the survivors from the tail section, over on the other side of the island), maintains a considerable dramatic edge, even if revelations about the central mystery of the island and the ‘Others’ are increasingly scant. Was last night’s ‘Nathan’ a clue (there was a suspicious Nathan in the first season, IIRC), or just a clever bit of misdirection?

Today’s mystery is why a book came in the mail packaged as a free enrollment bonus from a book club that I didn’t enroll in… a book that I already bought and read a year ago, so even if I had enrolled in that club and forgotten about it, I wouldn’t have selected that book as my freebie. Hmm.

There’s considerable consternation in the SF blogosphere and among members of a newsgroup I subscribe to about the demise of Sci Fiction. The aspect that fascinates me is what happens to defunct websites. Ellen’s earlier sites Event Horizon and Omni Online eventually vanished; what will happen to her section of SciFi.com? Presumably the corporate entity that runs the cable TV channel will be around a while, so at least the domain will be around a while, but still.

Some have pointed out the existence of internet archival sites, e.g. the Wayback Machine. I’ve found old content of Locus Online there occasionally, but some people report that the coverage is spotty and the site difficult to use.

I can’t help but think of the consequences of various apocalyptic scenarios, the plague, the war, the collapse of the biosphere, leaving us all huddled in pre-industrial hovels. In such cases moldering paper magazines and books might still be found. But the electronic infrastructure will have vanished into the aether. I suppose in such cases, that will be the least of our worries.