Views from Medina Road

I’m in Orlando, attending this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, at the conference’s new permanent site in Orlando, at the Marriott just north of the airport. It’s been overcast, even a bit rainy, the whole time I’ve been here, a stark contrast to the typically sunny, albeit hot and humid, weather the same time of year in Ft. Lauderdale, the location of the conference until two years ago.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Race and the Fantastic”, and it’s played out in the identities of the guests of honor — Nalo Hopkinson, Laurence Yep, Takayuki Tatsumi. (Perennial special guest Brian Aldiss is emeritus this year, not in attendance.) The theme hadn’t sunk in for me until today’s Author Guest of Honor speech by Nalo Hopkinson, who spoke about science fiction and fantasy as a vehicle for addressing the social iniquities brought about by racism, which sounds dry, but the speech wasn’t — most of it consisted of Nalo ‘channeling’ an alien observer who was confused by various Earth phrases concerning racism and culture, and offering various proposed (hilarious, ironic, bitterly funny) translations. The speech got a standing ovation, is will be worth looking up if and when it’s posted or published.

As always with ICFA, the conference is bound by the hotel grounds, with people gathering in the lobby, or bar, or out by the pool, with nowhere else much to go within walking distance. Last night, after arriving at the hotel around 5pm (2pm west coast time), I checked email and worked the magazine listing for the site for a while in my room, before I was ready to eat dinner, at 8 or so, then wandered down to the casual restaurant by the bar, where I was joined by Brett Cox and his wife Jeanne Beckwith; we talked about awards juroring and Facebook and Lost, among other things, over salads and salmon. Later there was an Opening Reception for all attendees, and I said hi to Liza and Amelia (the Locus Magazine contingent) and (or maybe it was in the lobby or elevator) Gary Wolfe and Russell Letson.

The main program at ICFA consists, of course, of graduate students reading academic papers about.., well, about the fantastic in the arts, which most of the time means in literature, but sometimes means in movies and TV and even video games. There are also readings by the 30 or 40 attending authors, and the guest of honor lunches; a book sales room, and a silent auction. I ducked in and out of these throughout the day, in between updating the website and taking a nap (still on West Coast time, staying up too late in the evenings).

After dinner — at Capital Grille, a high-end steak house, with Liza and Amelia and Gary and Russell and Graham, and Peter Straub and Ellen Klages — there was a late evening panel back at the con about writers and research, with Peter and Ellen, and Nalo and Stephen Donaldson and Andy Duncan and others, which discussed Google and using the web to contact specialists. Then I hung out in the bar, at a table with Jim and John and Ted, and eventually Brett and Kij and Jebediah (Berry, whom I met earlier in the day for the first time), talking about awards procedures and Jim Gunn’s contacts with famous writers over the decades — some while John (Kessel) was working with him. Lots of stories, about Gordy Dickson, and Ted Sturgeon, and of course Harlan.

Tomorrow Amelia Beamer reads from her new novel The Loving Dead, which seems to be attracting quite the buzz; and Takayuki Tatsumi speaks at lunch.

Quick check-in — I will be attending next week’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, one of my favorite annual events which unfortunately I missed last year, in Orlando, and perhaps will see some of you there.

Meanwhile, there are some changes upcoming in the structure of the website, because Blogger, with which we host the various blogs (News, Reviews, Perspectives, etc.), has decided to discontinue FTP publishing. That means that until now we have used Blogger to compose and publish posts and have them uploaded directly to the locusmag.com domain, which is done via FTP uploads just as manual updates to the site are done. After May 1st (they’ve extended the original deadline), Blogger will only support blogs on their own site, though they have released a procedure whereby independent sites can redirect via subdomains to the blogs at Blogger. This means that… instead of seeing the News blog at www.locusmag.com/News/, you may see it at news.locusmag.com. At least that’s the plan, from what I understand, thus far.

More as these things develop.

..It makes national news, apparently. Every five years or so we here in Southern California get a series of storms, one after another, day after day, for a week, that dumps as much precipitation as is usual for most entire years. The last time was 2005; five or six years before that, I recall, I had to prop up a leaning tree in my backyard to keep it from uprooting itself from the mushy ground and falling over into my pool.

This time, though I’m living in a house now on a hillside, there’s no such immediate danger, though I am experiencing leaky skylights and window frames. For all that people still complain about weather forecasters, it was cool, earlier this evening, to listen to the TV news and hear the weatherman talk about an especially strong thunderstorm in the Agoura Hills/Calabasas area, and to expect hail in Woodland Hills in about eight minutes. Sure enough, ten minutes later I heard the pelting of hail on the roof.

Several projects and tasks are underway here at Locus Online HQ, including the imminent update of the Locus Index to SF Awards (this weekend, tentatively), and a new section on the website focusing on a ‘book of the week’ derived from my more-or-less weekly New Books listings. Then, in another week or two, the online ballot for this year’s Locus Poll and Survey, which I’m thinking to reformat somewhat from the drop-down menu style of past years, should be posted.

Meanwhile, aside from the website, I’ve set aside catching up on reading important 2009 novels (Bacigalupi, Robinson, VanderMeer, Miéville, et al, eagerly awaited) to put in my duty as nominator or judge for a couple annual SF awards, which I expect to occupy the next two or three weeks, and which I probably shouldn’t say anything more about. Then I’ll get back to those novels, and to expanding the SF Awards site with some of those long-anticipated expansions.

As the year comes to a close and my plans for semi-detailed reading notes get lost in holiday busyness, let me try a relatively quick summary of reactions to several recent books, just to close out this activity for 2009.

What with December busyness, it took me nearly three weeks to get through Stephen King’s Under the Dome, but then it was nearly 1100 pages. King rates as something of a guilty pleasure among my reading priorities; fast, easy, engaging reading, more substantive than bestselling competitors if not substantive enough by genre standards to always rank among any year’s SF, fantasy, or horror best. While I’ve bought every major King volume over the years, I only seem to get around to reading every third book or so. (I did read last year’s Duma Key, and liked that just fine too.) Under the Dome has a genuine, if familiar, SF premise at its core, and it exhibits King’s tendency to focus plots on commonplace, undereducated, even venal characters, but taking these as givens the book excels in depicting an intricate, inseparable web of plot developments and character interactions that result from the simple premise of the book — the mysterious ‘dome’ (actually not as spherical as the cover image depicts or the title suggests) that encapsulates a small Maine town. It resembles Lost, the TV series, in the way that various characters, each with their backstory, responds to a crisis. And would itself serve as the basis for a comparably suspenseful TV series.

More briefly, or I’ll never finish:

Cory Doctorow’s Makers exhibits the author’s usual breezy cleverness and charm, and the first half is fascinating in suggesting how technology will render current markets and business models obsolete. But when this premise runs its course, and subject of the book becomes… theme parks! Theme parks commemorating the good old days of the “maker” technology, which, rather implausibly, become wildly popular, and the entire second half of the book is about two theme park franchises trying to undercut each other, yawn. Still, the style is breezy and the characters smart and wise-cracky; it’s fun as the same small cast of characters come and go, part and reunite, usually living together and often sleeping together, like some sort of Heinleinian extended family.

Iain M. Bank’s Transition is a recomplicated tale about mysterious manipulators of alternate universes and the agents they hire to do their bidding. It’s not an original premise, but what’s original here is the treatment, the kaleidoscope view of intersecting characters and timelines and story threads, that takes most of the book to piece together. Highlights are various set pieces and mini-essays, such as one on torture techniques, on Adrian’s tastes for various drugs, on solipsism; and scenes with Lady Bisquitine, a character out of an Alfred Bester novel.

Nancy Kress’ Steal Across the Sky is by comparison a relatively conventional SF novel with a familiar seeming premise — aliens have come to Earth and recruited various humans for missions on other planets for some mysterious purpose that involves the aliens ‘atoning’ for some past sin. The book shifts from planetary adventure in its first third to a sociological study in its middle and a chase thriller toward the end, but a fascinating premise emerges that develops to an abruptly affecting conclusion.

I liked Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood better than some genre critics, who quibble over the author’s old-fashioned SF sensibilities (the cutesy product names, e.g. AnooYoo Spa, etc.), and perhaps the lack of substantive background explaining the near-future catastrophe (though a similar lack didn’t seem to hurt the acceptance in SF of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road). As an apocalyptic tale of how ‘little people’ react to a survive a catastrophe they don’t understand, it’s substantial and involving, worth reading even if its SF bona fides are spotty.

My favorite SF novel that I’ve read so far from 2009 is Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock, another book in which the mechanism that transforms now into a degraded future — here, a 22nd century in which the world economy has collapsed and in the US a religious “Dominion” certifies churches and restricts knowledge of the past — isn’t the focus, compared to the story of individuals living in this future. The story follows the title character and his friend as they are forced to leave their small midwestern town, are drafted into war, emerge into political prominence, and pursue individual passions — for science, for making movies(!). The book has impressive scope and thematic depth, of special interest for its focus on science vs religious faith (or control), and the way scientific truths, once suppressed, quickly become regarded as fantasy, or myths, or heresy.

And since finishing King, I just read Greg Bear’s latest thriller, Mariposa, whose timely plot elements include the collapse of Dubai and the tottering US economy. It’s a slick, engaging story that takes a while to piece together (somewhat as in Banks’ novel), with a couple sf premises in the mix — an experimental treatment (Mariposa) for post-traumatic stress disorder that has post-human side effects, and the emergence of successors to computers called ‘competers’ with the potential to control what humans cannot. The book is more thriller than SF — the consequences of those sf premises are implied more than explored — but it’s tightly written (especially compared to King!) and quite effective.

Earlier this month, on the way home from World Fantasy Con, we stopped in the town of Ben Lomond, in the mountains south of San Jose and just north of Santa Cruz, to visit Marina Fitch and Mark Budz, old friends. We walked through downtown Santa Cruz to have dinner and visit a couple bookshops — including Logos Books & Records — the likes of which have vanished in big cities like Los Angeles, where I live.

At Logos (which reminded me of Sam Weller’s Bookstore in Salt Lake City, which I visit every time I’m there for a software engineering convention, with its mix of new and used books and its basement floor where the SF section is located) I bought, almost at random, as a souvenir, a small hardback book by H. G. Wells, called The Croquet Player. For $5.

It was a title I’d never heard of, copyright 1937, but then I knew that Wells had published many works in his latter years that have never gained the reputation of his earlier works — The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, etc etc — that so prefigured and defined the genre of ‘science fiction’.

“The Croquet Player” is a slim volume of 98 pages, a novella at best, that according to Bill Contento’s Locus Index, was first published in 1936 in London, and rarely reprinted since then. (The volume I purchased is apparently the first US edition, though without dust jacket.)

The story’s narrator, in the first of four sections, describes himself as something of a dandy, with “soft hands and an ineffective will”. He then meets a stranger who tells him of strange circumstances in Cainsmarsh. At the midpoint of the story, it seems we’re reading Wells’ version of an HP Lovecraft tale — a rural community haunted by an otherworldly presence, or infestation. But as the tale continues, it develops that this presence is subjective, an effect due to the awareness of the vastness of time revealed by modern science — an effect so disconcerting that our narrator cannot comprehend its significance. He is content, as the story closes, to dismiss it entirely, to return to his passtime of playing croquet.

It’s a surprisingly postmodern story (and not, in the end, strictly SF or fantasy at all). But what I find most curious is that this tale has been completely forgotten. It’s an example, as with other authors we might think of, of how an author’s early works have outlasted the later, supposedly more mature ones.

Addendum: here, via Google, is Time Magazine’s March 1st, 1937 review of the book.

I attended several panels on Saturday at WFC in San Jose, including the standard “best books of the year” panel at which, in previous years, Charles Brown has distributed an early draft version of the Locus Recommended Reading List (limited to fantasy titles) as a basis for discussion. This year’s panel included Liza Groen Trombi as the Locus representative and was moderated by Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of io9; also participating were Justin Ackroyd, Jo Fletcher, and Tom Whitmore. Newitz (who I had the chance later in the afternoon to meet, and put a face to a member of the io9 team) posted her account of the panel with lists compiled by most of the participants of their favorite titles, though missing from that account are the answers to the first question posed of the panel: if they could name just one title to recommend, what would it be? Jo Fletcher singled out Robert Holdstock’s Avilion (sequel to Mythago Wood); Justin Ackroyd, Jack O’Connell’s The Resurrectionist; Newitz herself, Jacqueling Carey’s Santa Olivia; Liza Trombi, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream; and Tom Whitmore, NESFA’s John Bellairs compilation Magic Mirrors, because it includes a previously unpublished sequel to an early Bellairs work.

Earlier I caught part of a panel on “the role of religion in contemporary fantasy” in part to hear guest-of-honor Zoran Zivkovic, whom I had never seen before. He speaks English very well, though with a pronounced accent that requires some attention, and his responses to questions posed to the panel were usually anecdotal, with humorous points. Also on the panel was Robert Silverberg, with his familiar wry observations on becoming Pope (increasingly less likely, as time passes) and how much religious opinion varies when solicited from, for example, Connie Willis, Ralph Vicinanza, or Tim Powers…

Other panels included one on homosexual characters in fiction. Has society reached a stage where such characters are past notice? Answer: no. (The panelists included Malinda Lo, author of just-published Ash, a lesbian version of Cinderella [just reviewed in the NYT Book Review -- see blinks]; Nancy Jane Moore; Doselle Young.) GoH Jeff VanderMeer moderated a panel on “what we read for fun”, with Michael Swanwick, Zoran Zivkovic again, Garth Nix, and Richard Lupoff. Swanwick said even fun reading can’t be dumb, and rhapsodized about Roger Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand. Zivkovic described how at his age (he’s 61) he needs to choose his reading carefully, and mentioned favorite titles (I hope I got this right) The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek, and, later, Jose Saramago’s Blindness. VanderMeer described an unlikely source of fun, A Dictionary of Non-Scientific Names of Freshwater Crayfishes, Nix recommended Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (especially older editions), and Lupoff discussed books by sincere lunatics, books by people who really believe in hollow earths, or martian civilizations. Later he mentioned how unexpectedly hilarious Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow turned out to be, past the first 100 pages or so.

The convention’s dealers room was modestly sized but remarkable for consisting almost entirely of book dealers, with only three or four jewelry tables among them. The art show was astonishingly small; no doubt there was some good reason why, that I didn’t hear. As much as the scheduled events, of course, the lobby bar/lounge, and the 20th floor party suites, were the center of activity throughout the weekend. Saturday night’s party sponsors included Gordon Van Gelder, pouring wine and assorted spirits to celebrate F&SF‘s 60th anniversary, and Orbit Books (or perhaps the author herself), celebrating the publication of Gail Carriger’s Soulless, a Victorian era urban fantasy, complete with tea service, cucumber sandwiches, mince pies, and numerous other English treats.

The banquet was steeply-priced, $75 per ticket, but the food was good and the event ran like clockwork, finishing both the meal and the award presentations in under two hours.

Overall it was a good convention — interesting panels, nice hotel, opportunities to catch up with old friends, have some fruitful business discussions, and meet new people.

Just a quick note for the moment — home tonight from World Fantasy Con, following a visit Sunday night with friends near Santa Cruz, and a drive home today via the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’ll do one more post summarizing some interesting panels at the con (though note the io9 ‘blink’ posted this evening, about the notable books of the year panel) and some of the interesting parties at the con…

This year’s World Fantasy Convention is in San Jose, California, the heart of the ‘Silicon Valley’ at the south end of the bay below San Francisco to the northwest and Oakland (Locus HQ) to the northeast. It’s in the same hotel, the Fairmont San Jose, that served as the main hotel for the 2002 World SF Convention, an event I remember fondly since that is where I won a Hugo Award…

I drove here from Los Angeles yesterday, a 350-mile drive typically taking 6 hours or so with a lunch stop, though I took a bit longer with a scenic detour through Ojai and along routes 33 and 166 before joining the 101 freeway for the second half of the trip. The weather was and is perfect, sunny and clear and mild, welcome I think for those who traveled from the east through the storm-clogged airports in Denver and Dallas/Ft. Worth.

The hotel is large and stately, and memorable for the huge square bar lounge on the lobby floor, which is of course where everyone mingles, and where I wandered through after checking into my room and checking in with the convention registration for my badge and usual (for WFC) big bag o’ free books. The top floor, 20th, hosts the Con Suite and most of the parties. Thursday night there were two: a big Jeff VanderMeer book launch party, for Finch and Booklife and anthology Last Drink Bird Head, that included the announcement of the winners of the first annual Last Drink Bird Head awards (whose winners were… K. Tempest Bradford, Rina Weisman, Susan Straub, John Clute, and Charles Tan, with a special award to (and hereafter named for) Neil Clarke), and an Aussie party with the sizeable contingent of con members from Australia — Jonathan Strahan, Justin Ackroyd, Garth Nix, Sean Williams, and others — serving wine and other refreshments. At some point during the latter there was a surprise birthday cake for Locus editor-in-chief Liza Groen Trombi, which I missed, probably because I lingered in the VanderMeer party to try one of their cocktails made with absinthe, which I never tried before…

Though San Jose as an urban area doesn’t have a lot to recommend it — Silicon Valley wealth isn’t obvious; it’s mostly a suburban sprawl — the area right around the convention hotel is pleasant and filled with interesting places to walk, including the nearby convention center, tech museum, and a current Star Trek exhibit. The streets behind the hotel are filled with cafes and restaurants. Thursday evening I strolled down the street with Ted Chiang and Barbara Webb for dinner at the local E&O Trading Company, which specializes in Asian-inspired small plates. Earlier this evening, Friday, there was an off-site party hosted by Orbit Books a couple blocks away at the Loft Bar and Bistro, with an open bar and hors d’oeuvres and an introduction by publishing director Tim Holman of numerous attending authors, including Gail Carriger and Brent Weeks and Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Kim Stanley Robinson — a couple of those per just-inked new deals for future books. As that event wound down, a bunch of us, in the usual ad hoc manner of convention dinner runs, trolled the nearby streets for a spot to eat in relative haste, considering the 8pm start of the traditional Friday evening mass-author autograph party. So there were Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Ellen Datlow, Scott Edelman, Anna Tambour, Jenny Blackford, and others, ending up at a fast food Indian cafe, where we ate various varieties of curry and salads…

This morning was a meeting of the Locus Foundation, a significant meeting since it dealt with issues of the Foundation and the magazine and its financial prospects, to a level of detail never before revealed at such meetings. Membership of the foundation is expanding; a couple new members were there, and a couple more candidates were seriously discussed — part of the requirements for a nonprofit organization being that at least half the board membership are ‘noninterested’ parties, i.e. those without any direct financial interest in the magazine. There were also potential expansions of the foundation’s purview, which will be formally announced in due course, if and when.

Programming is deliberately light at World Fantasy cons, with no more than two panel discussions at any one time, and no one except the official guests of honor permitted to serve on more than a single panel over the course of the weekend. There was a panel this afternoon about the newly released Library of America two-volume American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub; Straub was there, and Gary Wolfe, S.T. Joshi, Tim Powers, and Brian Evenson, discussing the usual issues of how and why the selections for the book were made, how many other important but now obscure authors remain to be captured, and the prospects for similar LoA books (Best American Science Fiction, perhaps?). Following that panel a LoA-sponsored release party for the book was held up on the 20th floor, with wine and snacks though no LoA representatives to host; I chatted with Peter and Brian and Gary.

After dinner I strolled through the mass autograph session, worked a bit in my room, then toured the late evening 20th floor parties, including Tor’s and Locus’s, the latter ostensibly a ‘new authors’ party though it featured a brief tribute to Charles Brown at midnight.

Which is to say, the final piece of the 2009 Locus Online redesign project is complete: the application of the new site layout template to the News Blog, which was first set up back in January before the redesign of the rest of the site commenced.

I have in mind some summary lists via include files in the right pane, but I didn’t want to hold up the template update for those. Such lists will be enhancements, eventually.

In other news, I’ll be departing tomorrow morning for San Jose, to attend this year’s World Fantasy Con. More updates from there.

Very quick note: In posting breaking news ‘blinks’ about the deaths of Don Punchantz and Dean Ellis (since Locus HQ probably won’t post official obits until Monday), I couldn’t help but seek out images of what to me are iconic covers for certain SF classics — which is to say, theirs were the covers on the editions of those books I first acquired myself, in the late 1960s, and however many editions may have followed, and despite my acquaintance with actual first editions of those titles, those covers have remained for me the essential images of those books. (I even scanned my copy of that Bantam edition of The Martian Chronicles, since the images I found via Google Images looked too shabby). Life is subjective.