Views from Medina Road

Perhaps I should post more frequent, shorter posts. So let me do this, briefly, late in the evening before I retire: the best story I’ve read in the past month is, catching up a bit since it’s a story published a year and a half ago, nearly, Elizabeth Hand’s “The Far Shore”, first published in the October/November 2009 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It is to Jean Sibelius’ “The Swan of Tuonela” what Black Swan is to Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”. And, if I were pitching it to a Hollywood executive, I would say, “The Far Shore” is, well, about a recluse in the woods, but it’s like Black Swan with a happy ending! Sorta ;)

I’m old enough to be a bit tardy adapting to these newfangled technologies, but not so old as to dismiss them completely.

I got a Kindle for Kristmas, and I have three comments about using it.

1) It’s annoying not to be able to synch the viewing area to the page number of the physical book. What page am I on? This is apparently a common complaint, and while I can understand some of the technical difficulties in implementing the mapping, I would think this could be worked.

2) I am reading on my Kindle Jared Diamond’s GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL, a physical book I’ve meant to finish for years now. Aside from the page number issue, I have to note that *most* of the figures and table in the physical book do not translate into the Kindle version.

3) My major aesthetic complaint about Kindle is that it reduces every book into the same kind of display. Physical books have character; they use different fonts, line spacing, margin decorations, and so on, and all of those disappear in Kindle. Reading on a Kindle is like reading manuscripts — rather bare, and basic. It does lose something.

Meanwhile Facebook — I created a page there in 2007, and have since then received 30 or 40 friends requests, despite not having filled out anything on my Facebook page. This past weekend I decided to come up to speed. I posted a face pic, have been spending time adding favorites music and books and so on, and have responded, or at least considered, the many friend requests that I’ve received. I haven’t entirely figured it all out. I’m not sure why I get so many friend requests from folks I’ve never even heard of, and I’m reluctant to accept friend requests from people I know of, but not actually know (i.e., if I saw them at a science fiction convention, I would have to introduce myself). I suspect there is a sort of competition among people to accumulate as many friends as possible, and perhaps that explains some of those requests.

BTW I loved the Facebook movie — The Social Network. Despite being unlikeable and dishonorable in various ways, the Mark Zuckerberg character was a guy who was really smart and completely unapologetic about it, and I admired that. Something about it recalled my own self at that age, and friends I had, and the decisions we made and paths we’ve taken since then.

I managed to post something every day, or for every day, of my 10-day Hawaii trip, which is ironic considering one is usually busier during a vacation than during routine life at home, and I sometimes go for weeks between posts here at home. I had this notion during the trip that I might keep the momentum going, somehow, and try to post something on this blog every day, just as I post something on the Locus Online site every day. But the flip side of this relationships is, of course, that one has more to talk about on a vacation than while at home, and once back at home last weekend, I didn’t have anything particularly novel to post about, right away.

OTOH, I could comment about Locus’ new electronic editions and subscription options, though as it’s turned out Locus HQ has managed to set this up and get it running largely without my intervention. It will be interesting to see, over the longer run, how this affects Locus’ subscription rates.

Meanwhile, Locus, and I, are working toward the February issue of the magazine, with summaries of the year in publishing. This weekend I’ll be finishing my annual task of tallying and profiling trends in short fiction publication, and I may also update my Roundtable blog post of several months ago about my online tallies of novels, breaking down totals between sf and fantasy, stand-alones and series books…

Off the ship, taxi to the airport, where we learn United has had to ‘downsize’ the airplane for our scheduled flight back to L.A. today, and need 60 passengers to give up their seats. We discuss staying over another day, for the cost of a $400 credit against future United flights, and decide against. Fortunately we checked in early.

Wifi is free in the airport, for the price of watching a 30 second video commercial. Email and web works, but not for some reason my FTP app, which hangs. Managed to use web-based FTP, which is tedious to to use, to upload a minimal update today, for the January Toc. There’ll be catching up, posting updated indexes and directories and whatnot, tomorrow once I’m back home and up to speed.

UPDATE 8 HOURS LATER — Of the four of us traveling, one did not make the cut for the reduced flight. So we all took the offer of a $400 voucher and a flight later in the day — a red-eye flight leaving at 9:20 pm and arriving in LA at 4:45 am — and so have spent another day on Oahu. We rented another car (our fifth in 10 days, an Infiniti G25, and by far the best of the five), drove over the hills on the 61 to see the view, then up the middle of the island to visit the Dole pineapple plantation. Dinner at Sam Choy’s, then back to the airport to await our flight.

Today on Kauai – we took the rental car, a red Mustang convertible, for a final spin, down the coast to the beach an Poipu, before returning it around noon. The cruise ship left port at 2p.m., as we were eating lunch, spinning again in the harbor before heading out into the ocean. The ship went north and then west to pass along the rugged northwest coast of Kauai, the Na Pali Coast, where the rugged hills plunge from 4000 feet down into the surf, cut by narrow valleys famed for their use in Hollywood films — here, the Hawaii ambassador spoke to the assembled passengers on deck over the loudspeaker, is the valley used in the Jurassic Park films; here is where Harrison Ford and Anne Heche landed in Six Days Seven Nights. Along the way, I posted Lois Tilton’s latest column; and this evening as I type, when it’s already New Year’s Day 2011 in New York City, I’ve just posted the initial January ads on the site. Tomorrow we disembark and fly home, and my post for tomorrow (the January issue TOC) is dependent on wifi access in the Honolulu airport.

Today, the north shore of Kaua’i (which I’ve realized does not precisely rhyme with Hawai’i). We drove to the end of the road — I think it’s charming, in some sense, that except for the Big Island, one cannot drive all the way around any of Oahu, Maui, or Kauai — past which are the film locations for various Hollywood pictures. The cruise ship will navigate along the north shore of the island, after our departure from Nawiliwili Bay here near Lihui tomorrow afternoon at 2p.m., to give first one side of the ship, then the other side, an offshore view of that famous landscape. We would have seen more of it today, had the cloud layer not been so low. Since Kauai’s north shore gets lots of precipitation, I suspect the days when its spectacular landscape is clearly visible are relatively few.

This evening, a lu’au, on an industrial scale — larger than the one we attended a few years ago in Lahaina, on Maui. Perhaps 700 people in a huge warehouse sized open-air structure. The show followed the buffet food, with nothing to begin that explained why we might be eating sweet potatoes and pork — or macaroni salad. The show itself was impressive, with dancing and fire baton-twirling, though the story it told, about a young couple separated by the expansionist ambitions of a tribal elder, but who are eventually reunited on the newly discovered and settled islands of Hawai’i, was as much Hollywood as history.

It’s a story actually as representative of the expansionist urge of the human race as any, including the central future history of science fiction, the expansion into space. Except that their voyages into an unknown sea were probably more daring and dangerous than the 20th century’s carefully calculated, risk-averse missions into space and back.

A late highlight of yesterday was the visibility of the Kilauea lava flow from the ship, at night, as the cruise ship headed from Hilo around the south end of the island toward Kona. Though the lava isn’t currently flowing into the sea, the lava field is still clearly visible from a distance of several miles, at night, where it looked like nothing so much as the southern California wildfires, burning in constellations of hotspots over the hillsides from afar.

Today we took a submarine tour of the depths of Kailua Bay at Kona, on the west shore of the Big Island of Hawaii. Which is to say, down to just past 100 feet, to see the coral beds, assorted small fish, and a couple odd shipwrecks. It was interesting enough, not spectacular, though according to the ride operators the experience earned us admission into some sort of 100 plus club.

Not much else here today; we didn’t buy an excursion or even rent a car. We strolled the shops, bought t-shirts and gifts for folks back home. Tomorrow is an island I’ve never visited before.

If this is Tuesday, we must be in Hilo, on the east side of the Big Island of Hawaii, along apparently with President Obama, judging from the Air Force One-appearing 747 sitting at the Hilo International Airport today.

Again, I avoided the pricey cruise-arranged excursions and rented my own car. We drove south to Volcano National Park, where the Kilauea Caldera is now mostly blocked off due to poor air conditions from the continual venting of volcanic gases. You can still drive from there down to the coast, as Charles Brown and I did in 2000 when I was first here, traveling over the desolate landscape made of up lava flows from just the past 20 or 30 years.

If tomorrow’s Wednesday, we’ll be in Kona.

This is my third visit to Maui, and each time I’ve been here, I’ve driven up to the top of Haleakala and had dinner at Mama’s Fish House.

On this trip I’ve caught a bit of a cold and so I’m ‘relaxing’ in my cabin (and updating the site) while the boys are out snorkling. Digital edition rates are forthcoming.

Today is overcast even in the morning, here at the port in Kahului. Most passengers are off ship on various excursions. Tonight we sail for the big island, Hilo.

Drove a bit Saturday morning around the southeast end of Oahu, through the high-end district east of Waikiki and then along the rugged coast, where there was more surf along a couple beaches there than there’d been a couple days before at Waimea. The boys watched the Lakers game from a Waikiki bar. We regrouped at 3, dropped off the rental car, and boarded our Norwegian Cruise ship at Pier 2. At 7 pm the ship eased away from the pier, did a slow 180 twirl, and then moved out into the ocean, heading south and then eastward…

This morning, docked in Kahului.

No Magazine/Website Monitor Listing this week, by the way.