Rambling on dolphins

Trained dolphins are being used to search for a secret American submarine. I think it's amazing the things dolphins are being trained to do these days. In southern Iraq, dolphins were used to clear mines.
It all reminds me of a science fiction story by Alexander Jablokov called "A Deeper Sea" (it was also rewritten into a novel, but I didn't read that.) In the story, a Russian scientist learns to communicate and control dolphins. What, at first, he doesn't know is that he's also torturing them. The dolphins are used as soldiers in a global war. It's a good story and made the Year's Best Science Fiction anthology for 1989. Jablokov's last book, "Deep Drive," (which I enjoyed) came out in 1998. His Web site hasn't been updated since then. I wonder what he's been up to.

The Great Mahakali Write-A-Thalon

The Great Mahakali Write-A-Thalon is another novel writing contest. This one asks you to write a 35,000 word novel between 9 a.m. May 14 and 7 p.m. May 16. Considering it takes me the whole 30 days to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, this would be quite a challenge. Unfortunately, I work weekends, so I can't miss the sleep I'd need to in order to participate. Still, sounds exciting, good luck to all those participating.
If this is the kind of thing you're into, there's also Anvil Press's Three Day Novel Writing Competition which takes place on Labor Day weekend.
Ah what some of us will do for a deadline.
UPDATE: The Anvil Press Three Day Novel Writing Competition has apparently come to an end. Ah well. Thanks to Rohit Gupta for the heads up.
ANOTHER UPDATE: All right, maybe that Three Day Novel Writing competition still exists, but it's not easily found. There is this under construction Web site, which may yield something in the near future.

In search of...

Speaking of horror comics, there's something I wonder if any of my readers could help me with. When I was a young teen, in maybe 1981 or so, I bought a comic book at a fair. It was a collection of Polish legends and fairy tales. I remember liking it, but I can remember very little of it. I haven't seen it anywhere in years. The only story I remember had something to do with a king, many rats and a flood. It was in color.
I know it's unlikely, but does this ring any bells for anyone?

EC comics

Apparently, it's been 50 years since William Gaines, publisher of EC Comics, appeared before a Senate committee to defend his horror comics. Richard Corliss discusses the history of EC Comics and their gory fun in this interesting article from Time magazine.
The Comics Journal did a nice issue a while back that had interviews with many of the creators of the EC comics. Unfortunately none of it seems to be online.
The link was found through the DarkEcho newsletter. And I should also mention that DarkEcho now has a blog. It just started, so I'm not sure where she's going with it. But Paula Guran is always interesting, so it's worth keeping an eye on it.

Any tentacled hole will do

Apparently giant squid aren't too choosy about their sexual partners.

Pat Tillman: Human being

This opinion piece shows a side to Pat Tillman that we haven't been getting elsewhere. Using quotes from the memorial service, Tillman is shown as a much more complicated person than the prescribed story would make you think.
Tillman's youngest brother, Rich, wore a rumpled white T-shirt, no jacket, no tie, no collar, and immediately swore into the microphone. He hadn't written anything, he said, and with the starkest honesty, he asked mourners to hold their spiritual bromides.
"Pat isn't with God,'' he said. "He's f -- ing dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's f -- ing dead.''
There's a lot more. It's a good article check it out.
By the time the ceremony ended, after his brother and brother-in-law sipped the Guinness that Garwood poured in Tillman's honor, the funny, thinking, wild, crazy man had come to life. The family's loss, the loss of every soldier's family, seemed more real.

UFOs over Iran

Connecticut man saw a UFO over Iran. Apparently, this is becoming increasingly common in that country. Skeptics say people are seeing the planet Venus filtered through the night sky, while others say it's spy planes.

Alien fish returns

Ah, the return of the snakehead fish. The snakeheads were a big story last year. It's a Chinese fish that eats everything in a pond and then will travel over land to the next pond where it starts eating again. The fish can wipe out ecosystems pretty fast. This year, Maryland is considering banning the fish. Pine Lake in Maryland was drained and cleaned out after a fisherman found a snakehead there last week.

More Godzilla coverage

SFGate.com has a couple of articles on Godzilla and the original print of the movie.
But Godzilla isn't just the bomb -- he's hate and anger, war, the poisoned environment -- in short, he is mankind itself, the destruction wrought by the rage within us, an inner ugliness we can never quite seem to shake.
There's an article on the making of Godzilla and a timeline of Godzilla films and reality that influenced it.

Godzilla's metaphor problem

The New York Times takes a look at the first Godzilla movie -- that is, the Japanese version, sans bad dubbing and Raymond Burr -- on its 50th anniversary. The article looks at Godzilla as a metaphor for the A-bomb and what that really means:

The most peculiar thing about Godzilla as a metaphor for the bomb is the creature's simultaneous status as a legendary beast of Japanese islanders' mythology: surely a more precise representation of the disaster that befell the country at the end of the Second World War would be an agent of destruction from far away, unheard of even in legend, not this native, almost familiar monster. Is Godzilla, then, also on some subterranean level a metaphor for Japan's former imperial ambitions, which finally unleashed the retaliatory fury that leveled its cities?
Maybe. But the the runaway metaphor of [director Ishiro] Honda's Godzilla isn't nearly so easy to pin down. It's more ambiguous, more generalized and perhaps more potent than that. And its significance can be glimpsed only in the Japanese version of the movie, because what Honda's "Godzilla" is most fundamentally about, I think, is a society's desire to claim its deepest tragedies for itself, to assimilate them as elements of its historical identity.

The article says the later films seem to subvert the message by turning Godzilla into a hero. Actually, I think the metaphor was simply dropped. None of Godzilla's sequels have been as serious as that first movie. And "King Kong vs. Godzilla," the film that revived Godzilla's career and was the template for the next 20-odd movies, was intended as a humorous monster bash.
The only Godzilla movie that attempts to be as serious is Shusuke Kaneko's "Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack." But "GMK" seems to be confused as to what it wants to say and its rushed filming schedule shows.
(Thanks to Professor Hex for the link.)

Gardner Dozois leaving Asimov's

I interrupt my absence to point out that editor Gardner Dozois is leaving Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. Dozois has been at the magazine for something like 20 years and has won 14 Best Editor Hugos. He also does the annual Year's Best Science Fiction books.
Dozois' editing has had a profound effect on me. Asimov's was the first science fiction magazine I ever subscribed to and Dozois' introduced me to a wide range of authors and writing. I remember falling in love with Lucius Shepard's writing because of stories like "R&R" that were printed in Asimov's.
Dozois and Ellen Datlow (editor of Omni then, editor of Sci-Fiction now) are the two editors who have had the most influence over my reading. So it's something of a sea change to see Dozois leaving the magazine he's run for all these years.
Dozois has his own statement up at the Asimov's discussion boards.
Dozois leaves to “pursue other projects, including his own writing.” I don't think I've ever read a Dozois story. Well, hopefully that will change now.
(And Matt Cheney at The Mumpsimus does a much better job than I at looking back at Dozois' work at Asimov's. He also says: "At the moment, I can't think of any great magazine editor who has maintained the energy and excitement of their best years." I would just answer that Datlow is doing work today at Sci-Fiction that is just as good as what she did with Omni, and that's saying something.)

Excuses, excuses

If you haven't noticed, things are quiet around these parts. I'm a bit busy making changes and what not, so I'm not going to be posting much in the near future. In a week or so, I should be back on schedule and, I hope, doing things a little differently. We'll see. More later.
In the meantime, check out Professor Hex. He's quickly making me irrelevant.

Nebula Awards announced

Hey, Jeff Ford won a Nebula Award! He won the Best Novelette award for "The Empire of Ice Cream," which is a great story you can read for free online. What are you waiting for, click the link!
Also well worth reading, Karen Joy Fowler's "What I didn't see" which won for best short story. It's also up at Sci-Fiction.

Supernatural Fiction Database

Tartarus Press is creating an online Supernatural Fiction Database. This is exciting stuff. Not only is it a great resource, but it will help me find new authors I'd be interested in. The proprietors suggest their Arthur Machen entry best shows what they are trying to achieve.
(Link found at Gambols and Frolics.)

Jonathan Lethem's Marvel Years

Jonathan Lethem writes about growing up with Marvel comics and specifically his arguments for and against Jack Kirby with his boyhood friends. It's a great read.
Also online, Lethem's story "Super Goat Man", which deals with a failed superhero, among other things.

Yum, trilobite

Trilobites were apparently the snack food of dinosaurs.

Taking the wet out of water

Tyco Fire and Security has invented a new firefighting device, water that isn't wet.
As part of a demonstration, Pelton submerged several items into a tank of Sapphire that was on the Good Morning America set. Books did not get wet. Electronics were not be destroyed. Items that were submerged in the liquid were dried in a matter of seconds, and showed no ill effects according to Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer and other members of the Good Morning America staff who saw items plunged into it.
(Link found at Cylindrical Primate Storage Unit.)

Giant squid fandom stretches across blogosphere

Brokentype writes about everybody's favorite Giant Squid in a nice long essay filled with lots of interesting links. Most of it I've linked to at one time or another, but it's a great essay.
Also, he points to this poster of a giant squid fighting a T-Rex. How cool is that?

New York is full of zombies

David Wellington is writing a novel, Monster Island, about New York taken over by zombies. He's serializing it chapter by chapter on the Web. The first chapter opens with a boat pulling into Manhattan, passing the Statue of Liberty:
I thought maybe, just maybe they were alright, maybe they’d run to Liberty Island for refuge and been safe there and were just waiting for us, waiting for rescue but then I smelled them and I knew. I knew they weren’t alright at all. Give me your tired, your poor, your wretched refuse, my brain repeated over and over, a mantra. I was butchering Emma Lazarus but I couldn’t stop, my brain wouldn’t stop. Give me your huddled masses. Huddled masses yearning to breathe. “Osman! Turn away!”
There are seven chapters up so far.

The ultimate news story

Man bites dog to death in China. Apparently, a drunk man was nipped by a dog. He didn't like it much.
The infuriated inebriate then pounced on the dog and bit it repeatedly until it died.