Gregory Benford blogs

Science fiction writer Gregory Benford has a new blog called Benford & Rose. His first entry is a discussion with Darrell Schweitzer on "What does the rise of fantasy mean?"

Robert Sheckley, 1928-2005

Robert Sheckley has died. It's a lousy day for genre fiction.

• Here's the Wikipedia entry on Sheckley.


• The SFWA obit


• Sheckley's official homepage.


• A Locus interview excerpt.


• Edward Champion on Sheckley.


• New York Times obituary.


• John Shirley writes about Sheckley. No permalink unfortunately.


• Douglas Lain talks about meeting Sheckley.


• Spurred on by the Sheckley and Williamson deaths, Nick Mamatas has some interesting things to say about art, death and longevity.


• Musician Gary Lucas writes about the Robert Sheckley he knew.


• Ellen Datlow discusses working with Sheckley at her board at Night Shade Books.


• Christopher Priest writes the obituary for the Guardian.

A ramble: Metaxucafe, new blogs and A Fan's Notes

I'm really loving Metaxucafe. Not only does it give me a chance to discuss issues with other bloggers and serve as inspiration to do a better blog, but it alerts me to many other lit bloggers out there and what excellent reading is to be had.
Just now, I came across Golden Rule Jones and a post quote Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes." Go there and read the quote, it's good writing.
Now I have a real jones to dig out my copy of that book and reread it. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Exley's voice. To this day (I read it when I was maybe 21), I still remember little details from the book -- the way he reads the New York Times every Sunday, the definition of the word "apostasy," and Exley describing himself as a young man dressed in the style of Capote in scarf and hat -- although much of the larger details of plot have fallen away. It really was an excellent novel and one I'll have to go back to.

Learning from Nanowrimo

Kelly Armstrong writes about what she learned from NaNoWriMo. A professional writer, Armstrong still said she learned things about her writing process she had never known before or only suspected.
I've only recently found the blog Storytellers Unplugged. It's a joint blog filled with mini-essays by horror and dark fantasy writers like Gary Braunbeck, Douglas Clegg, Brian Keene, Tim Lebbon, Matt Schwarz, Scott Nicholson and many more. It's got a lot of great stuff, especially if you're interested in writing.

Horror writer J.N. Williamson, 1932-2005

Horror writer J.N. Williamson has died.

• Briane Keene memorializes him at his blog.


• Williamson's bibliography.


• Shocklines message board has a thread about Williamson's death.


• Ed Gorman says a few words about Wiliamson on his blog.


• Blogs from Midnight writes about his first professional sale to Williamson.


• A thread on Maurice Broaddus message board


• Maurice Broaddus earlier offered a visit with Williamson and had a chat with him.


• DarkEcho blog obit


• Nick Kaufmann gives an account of meeting Williamson.


• RLK! Spotlight On... J.N. Williamson


• Indy Star obituary.


• Maurice Broaddus talks about Williamson's funeral.


• Lucy Snyder gives some suggested Williamson reading.


• Snyder also prints an appreciation by John Maclay.


• Gary A. Braunbeck writes a tribute.

"Cosmology of the Wider World" by Jeffrey Ford

I just finished Cosmology of the Wider World by Jeffrey Ford. It's terrific.
The book is about a minotaur, Belius, born to human parents. The book starts in the present day, Belius is living in the Wider World, a place only animals have access to. Belius lives in a coral tower where he writes his book, "The Cosmology of the Wider World." But something is missing from his life and he asks his friends for advice. As Belius' problems play out, we get glimpses of his past and how he got to the Wider World.
The book plays off ideas from Dante, "Frankenstein" and mythology, as well as the frailties of any outsider. The story is beautiful, sad, outrageous and just overall wonderful. I can't recommend it enough.
Ford has mentioned in other places that the Cosmology is part of a larger work he has been playing with over the years. In reading the book, one can see how more stories can be told about Belius and his friends. I hope Ford decides to put more of those stories out there.
And by the way, where does Ford come up with these names? He has a genius for naming characters. In this book alone there's Belius, Pezimote, Vashti, Thip, Scarfinati and Nona. He's created character names like Piambo, Cley and Drachton Below (my personal favorite). Even when he takes real names he uses them in weird ways, Antony Cleopatra as a guy. It's just one of the smaller things that makes Ford's work so terrific.
Now I'm waiting for "The Empire of Ice Cream," Ford's latest short story collection, due out next year. I've read most of the stories in the book and I can't wait to reread them, as well as the new story.

Template change

Well, I went and done it. I've changed my blog template and spent a whole morning doing it. I found the template here. I've always liked the three column format and wanted to try it out. What do you all think? Feel free to criticize or make helpful suggestions.
The top left box, called "The Weird", includes a couple of quotes I found quickly. I actually like both of them a lot. And Mieville's idea of weird fiction was one of the reasons I picked the name Weirdwriter. (A name I've never been entirely happy with, but will stick with now that I've had it for a while.) I may change quotes if I find more or better ones.

More great SciFiction appreciations

Three great new appreciations have gone up at the EDSFProject. The first is Bob Urell's take on "A Man of Light" by Jeffrey Ford. "A Man of Light" is one of Ford's more perplexing stories, full of imagery and ideas and less powerfully set on characters. But Urell doesn't delve all that deeply into it. Instead, he offers what he feels reading a Jeffrey Ford story is like. And though I wouldn't have described it the same way, I still think he's right.
The second is Nathan Ballingrud's appreciation of Struwwelpeter by Glenn Hirshberg. It's a perfect combination of two horror writers (and two new bloggers). Ballingrud focuses on the writing, the little details that make the story sing.
The third is Tim Pratt's appreciation of Over Yonder by Lucius Shephard. This is a story I haven't read, but you can always be sure that a Shephard story is worth your while, and Pratt does an excellent job telling you why.
Have you done your part for SciFiction and signed up to do an appreciation of a story? There are still about 150 stories left. There isn't a clunker to be found in the bunch. Pick one out and tell the world how much you liked it. SciFiction is nearly gone and we should be celebrating its existence.

Reading trilogies or standalones

There is an interesting conversation going on in the comments section of Matthew Cheney's review of Princess of Roumania about how some people just can't read trilogies. Cheney points out how he has given up on one after another:

I think I have trouble picking something up, putting it down, and returning to it—once a book is finished, I want to be done with it. I hate partial anything. It annoys me with new books, because if I’m going to invest the time and money in a book, I want it to be a complete experience. Oftentimes, I think publishers and writers are just trying to scam as much money out of readers as they can, and I resent it. (Though I realize it has a long, long history, going back to the earliest days of printing. Venerable tradition never stopped me from resenting anything, alas...)

I have to say I agree with him. Although, I think I'm more afraid of them then resent them. In my teen years, I read plenty of trilogies: Tolkien, Brooks, Wilson, Asimov (though his books don't quite fit Cheney's complaint) and Adams. But now that I'm older and I find less and less reading time, I look askance at these long, multi-volume series.
Right now, I have books from George R.R. Martin, R. Scott Bakker and Kij Johnson, sitting on the shelf being avoided. I feel like reading one ties me in to reading the rest. It took me years to read all of the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series by Tad Williams. It took a shorter amount of time to read through Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Even Jeffrey Ford's Physiognomist Cley novels took me a while. I know there is plenty of enjoyment to be had in these books and there's a lot of fun being held on the line waiting to find out what happens next. But I'm put off, right from the start.
On the other hand, like Cheney, I'm not put off by standalone novels set in the same place. I've read all of China Mieville's Bas-Lag books with any worry, and those are equal in size to any fat fantasy novels you can think of.
This also has me wondering, why do so many authors write such long books these days? All my science fiction and fantasy novels from the '50s and '60s and even into the '70s are short. In fact, I'm reading Jeffrey Ford's "Cosmology of the Wider World" right now and that's about 170 pages, and it's called a novella. Yet, that is about the size of most of Philip K. Dick, A.E. Van Vogt or Fritz Leiber novels (taking three authors at random). What happened in the '80s that made publishers start seeking out the longer and longer novels. I'm not exactly complaining, but it does seem strange to me.
UPDATE: This post at Metaxucafe goes on a little bit about long books (not anything about trilogies really, though the root cause for avoiding both is the same). Despite my worries about reading longer books or trilogies, I can't get behind abridgements. I just don't think you'd be getting the real novel. I've heard of people who read "Moby Dick," skipping the parts about whales. I don't blame them at all. But I can't read that way, and unfortunately that means I haven't finished "Moby Dick," which drives me more crazy than not having read "Ulysses." I see "abridgement" on a book, I think, well I'm not getting the real deal.

New counters

Thanks for all your advice yesterday on the pop-up problem and counter suggestions. I've now gotten ride of webstats4u and put in a MyBlogLog and StatCounter counters. Pretty soon, I'll add MyBlogLog's top 5 links counter as well.
Blogger has been acting kind of funny as well lately. You try to make changes to your template and you have to go through republishing at least two or three times before it takes. I've got a couple of years of posts on this blog, but you wouldn't think that would cause all these error messages. Oh well, it works eventually.
In the next few days, I may be absent from the Internet. I've got a new computer and I've got to set it up and get my Internet connection up and running. With any luck, that won't take too long.

Favorite bookstores

At MetaxuCafe, Bud Parr is asking people to list their favorite bookstores. He gives his favorites and many other people are adding their thoughts to the comments. I've added mine, Books by the Falls, of course, being one of them. Go over there and give your recommendations.

Ad problems

Every time I've stopped by this blog today, I've encountered a pop-up ad. I've written to Blogger support to see why this is happening. If this turns out to be Blogger or Blogspot putting these ads on my page, I may have to consider my options. I really hate pop-up ads, especially ones that claim to be helping you with "Windows registry."
Until that's sorted out, my apologies to anyone encountering pop-up ads when they visit here.

UPDATE: Thanks to Chris in my comments, I've found out that my stats counter is the problem. Here's the
explanation he linked for me:

Scince NedStat basic has been sold pop-up banners appear on the sites featuring the free counter. Many people have reacted in shock and many announced to remove the counter from their websites.
Nedstat has been sold and is now called Webstats4u (yeah, agreed, its a lame name). In the news is that the statistics pages will generate popups on the websites using NedStat.

At this moment I dont see pop-ups appear on my websites but as soon as they begin to appear I will remove all Nedstat Basic counters from all websites I maintain. With pain in my heart as the MOTAS counter registered over 15295461 pageviews up to now.

The reason for the popups is that developement costs money. Sadly they don't mention they just bought all so there wasn't any developement costs to begin with besides a new site lay out.

We want the old NedStat back!

I'll be getting rid of my stats counter immediately. Any suggestions for a new one?

Check out Video WatchBlog

Tim Lucas, editor of Video Watchdog and author of Throat Sprockets and The Book of Renfield, started a new blog a few weeks ago called Video WatchBlog.
You should bookmark it immediately if you're interested in horror and other genre films. He writes fascinating articles on so many things and his knowledge of horror seems to be endless. Take, for instance, his look at Cronenberg's "The Fly" and why certain scenes were deleted. He's also written interesting reviews on Showtime's Masters of Horror series, so far he's done Homecoming, Jenifer, Chocolate, Dreams in the Witch House and Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. And that's only the start. Be sure to check the archives, he's got insights into Italian horror films, the old Superman series and Hitchcock. Well worth your time.

Used book bonanza

I went to my favorite books store this weekend. I wasn't expecting much, as I didn't have a lot of money, but they were having a 50 percent off sale so I picked up a few things:

• The War Against the Rull: All my talk about A.E. Van Vogt recently made me pick up this Pocket Books paperback from 1962. It's one of Van Vogt's books I know nothing about.


• New Dimensions 1: Edited by Robert Silverberg, this was one of the great anthology series during the New Wave era. It has stories by Gardner Dozois, Ursula K. LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, R.A. Lafferty, Barry Malzberg and Thomas Disch. Great stuff. Unfortunately, I got home and realized I had bought the same book in hardcover at the store years earlier.


• The Ninth Galaxy Reader: Edited by Frederik Pohl, this collects "the cream of the short stories from Galaxy Magazine." Among the authors included are R.A. Lafferty, Roger Zelazny, Brian Aldiss, Larry Niven and John Brunner. It only cost me a quarter!


• Doc Savage: The Sargasso Ogre: I've been buying the Doc Savage paperbacks as long as I can remember. I've only read a few and I enjoy them. I try and collect as many of the pulp characters as I can. I have paperbacks that feature the Shadow, the Spider and Operator #5.


• Attack from Atlantis: This Lester Del Rey novel features an atomic submarine battling Atlanteans. "An American atom sub vanishes and plunges the world into a new Cold War crisis. A startling science -fiction adventure as timely as today's headlines" reads the cover. The cover also features someone riding some kind of fish with a submarine lassoed behind it. How could I not pick this one up?


• The Power and the Glory: I read Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair" a year or two ago and loved it. Since then, I've read a few of his short stories. Now I've got this one. I'm excited about it.


• Interfaces: Another science fiction anthology, this one edited by Ursula K. LeGuin. It features authors like Vonda McIntyre, John Crowley, Michael Bishop, Gene Wolfe and James Tiptree Jr.


• Beasts: A novel by John Crowley. I saw it in hardcover and figured I should pick it up. I've had "Little, Big" weighing down a shelf for years now and figured maybe something shorter like this would be a better place to start with Crowley.

It's a pretty good haul I think. If you're interested in the used book store, Books by the Falls now has a Web site. They do auctions online and off. Here's their eBay seller page.
I don't know when I'll get around to reading these books, I've got a ton on the To Be Read file already. I'm currently reading Jeffrey Ford's "Cosmology of the Wider World" and loving it.

Glen Hirshberg on horror and catharsis

Glen Hirshberg has reprinted the introduction to his story Mr. Dark's Carnival on his blog. The post expounds on his love of haunted houses and goes into why he doesn't read or write horror for catharsis. It's a thoughtful post, I'd quote some here, but I'd think you'd get more out of it if you read the whole thing. The story, Mr. Dark's Carnival (sorry, no link), is great, as are Hirshberg's other stories.
I tend to agree with Hirshberg on that subject. The best horror stories don't end with the closing of the covers, they linger in the mind and make you think or just simply haunt you. Think of the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft or Thomas Ligotti: Those stories explicitly leave the reader thinking about a world larger and more dangerous than most people have ever imagined. A scary monster that jumps off the page and says boo! can be fun (god knows I like them), but it's not the best horror can do.

Metaxu Cafe

I've started visiting and have become a member of MetaxuCafe. It's a place for literary bloggers and people who read literary blogs. The front page is set up like Arts & Letters Daily or The Page, except with headlines and comments from literary bloggers. There's a page for all the headlines of the day. Inside, there's a forum to discuss blogging and literature and the meeting of both. It seems like a really good service and I'm trying to get more deeply involved in it.
In other news, I've nearly completed changing my blog roll. I've taken some sites out and added others. If you have questions about why you were placed in one category or another, ask away and I'll try to explain myself. Also, if you want to tell me if the links are more helpful this way, or if you have other suggestions, feel free.

Sequel to A.E. Van Vogt's Null-A books announced

The Slush God led me to his article on a sequel being written to A.E. Van Vogt's Null-A series. I can't understand this interest in writing sequels to books by dead authors. John Gregory Betancourt did it with the Amber books and a sequel to Blade Runner (more of a sequel to the movie though) was written. (Sorry, no link, I can't remember its title or who wrote it.) There was also those prequels to Dune.
I can't understand why any writer would want to do this. For a check, I suppose. Does the writer, John C. Wright, know anything about General Semantics, the inspiration and guiding order behind the Null-A books? The books are a lot of fun whether you buy GS or not. Still, with the inspiration left behind, could the books go on. And really, should they go on without Van Vogt?
I'm a huge fan of Van Vogt. His writing is so weird and original (while certainly being very pulpy). I can't imagine anyone pulling off his kind of writing.
Looking on the bright side of things, maybe this will mean more of Van Vogt's books will be reprinted. You can already pick up the World of Null-A. You can read the first chapter of that book here.

Science Fiction vs Fantasy, science vs. magic and other madness

Ted Chiang looks at "Technology, magic and consciousness" and starts opposing magic vs science. It's quite an odd argument, especially when you are talking about real world science vs. fictional world magic. Jeff Vandermeer and his Evil Monkey are inspired by a locked door and a bottle of vodka to go on an extended discussion of the subject. He finds Chiang's argument unsatisfying. So now, Cheryl Morgan has jumped in and redefines the whole thing. See if you can follow along.

Author ages

I often wonder if other people are as obsessed with author's ages as I am. I've wanted to write fiction since I was, I don't know, 8 or 10. Yet, in college I chose journalism instead and have had a steady career in that. But I've never given up on the dream to write fiction and I've never stopped writing it.
Now, I'm 35 with 12 years of journalism behind me and not a single published short story. Of course, this worries me and makes me think I'm one of those wannabes who whines about writing and never does anything about it. But it's not true, I write constantly, I'm just never happy with it. In the last few years, I've made a more serious effort in improving my fiction and I'm working toward submitting it.
All of this is just preamble to why I'm obsessed with author's ages. I'm constantly trying to find out how old an author was when they published their first short story. Almost down the line, they were 20 to 25 years old. They don't always meet with terrific success at that age, but they've already begun submitting and selling.
Gene Wolfe -- one of the late bloomers as far as publishing goes -- had his first story published in 1965 when he was 34 (according to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) and his first novel in 1970 when he 39. Even with him, I've already missed a deadline!
The thing is, this is all pretty silly. There's no age limit to writing. As long as a writer keeps at it with dedication, there's no limit to the age he can begin. I certainly don't look at someone's age when I'm reading a story. I just worry I've passed my prime, my window of opportunity to be a fiction writer has passed. But that's silly, it's all just some neurosis of mine.
Right?

Nanowrimo at an end

So Nanowrimo has come to a close for everyone. It looks like more than 9,700 people have won this year. I have no idea how many joined, so I really can't say what that means.
Cybele, Morrow Planet and Ruth Nestvold are among the winners. Congratulations to them and everyone else.
Writer Ian McDonald has some thoughts on Nanowrimo:

Depressed by all the eager beavers in the NaNoWriMo horde --but I just know that I tried to crack out that much wordage in a month, it would be excrement --I'd be writing ahead of myself. I need to think and think carefully about who's going where why how and what he or she needs to achieve and develop from it. I know from past experience (even though I write from a detailed synopsis that the book gets sold on) that if I can't see where I'm going --a kind of literary relativity where events ahead are so foreshortened I can't navigate around them) --it results in slack, reactive and indulgent writing. Two pages a day (bit more because I'm playing catch-up, as Henry Kelly used to say on 'Going for Gold') But hats off to those who can, and did.

Actually, I think most of the Nanowrimo novels will have a large portion of excrement in them. But that's not really the point. It's a game, first of all, a rush to the end. Second of all, it's inspiration for writers. That's the way it's working for me. After finishing, I've already started working on a short story and hope to keep working on words every day. I've said this before, but I'm getting fed up with my dilly-dallying instead of writing. If I'm every going to write fiction, and sell it, I have to get serious and I'm getting too old to wait any longer.
And really I should be writing right now. So congratulations to all you winners out there.