Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

World Fantasy implementation

The maze of the Town & Country Resort became rather charming after two or three days; lots of byways to explore, lots of private places to hang out; lots of gathering places to check out.

On Friday morning I attended the Locus Foundation Board Meeting, which discussed many urgent and/or timely topics, though none of which concerned me or the website directly, at least not right away.

The spread of the resort had its downside; the feeling of a certain lack of focus, some attendees complaining how hard it was to track down folk who they knew were there (just like a Worldcon!)

I attended quite a few panels: on evil characters; on The Odyssey; on the sea — the con’s theme was “Sailing the Seas of Imagination” — this panel’s premise being, is the sea to fantasy as space is to SF? With many fascinating pro and con perspectives from David Brin, Michael Cassutt, David D. Levine, Rachel Swirsky, and Courtney Schafer. The most attended was probably the Connie and Neil show, with Connie Willis and Neil Gaiman chatting before an audience of 500 and asking each other the questions that usually they do not tolerate being asked from fans — beginning with, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’.

Saturday: A Founders of Steampunk panel, with KW Jeter, Jim Blaylock, and Tim Powers, revealing their secrets, such as a comprehensive nonfiction guide to London by one Henry Mayhew that provided them all with grist for stories and novels, and the fact that, indirectly, Roger Elwood’s request for 10 novels about King Arthur throughout the ages triggered some of the earliest steampunk novels — of which, Jeter’s INFERNAL DEVICES and Blaylock’s HOMUNCULUS are still considered the two core texts.

Also: the requisite “Year in Fantasy” panel, with Jonathan Strahan, Ellen Datlow, Paula Guran, David G. Hartwell, and Jo Fletcher. THE HEROES; AMONG OTHERS; AKITA WITCH; THE SILENT LAND; [they were mixing late 2010 with early 2011 titles]; Tananarive Due, LIsa Goldstein, LOW TOWN; Steven Erikson; of course SNUFF and A DANCE WITH DRAGONS; collections by Beagle and Ryman and Powers and Kiernan and Lanagan and McHugh and Dozois; and they kept reading titles until the hour ended and the next panel’s participants pushed them out.

At the art show I bid — something I rarely do — on three works by a graphic artist named Carolyn Nicita and won two of them — the best piece having been outbid me by a member of the art show committee who’d been there to top mine as the bidding closed Saturday evening, while I was away at dinner…

The awards banquet today featured mediocre food but a relatively sparkling awards event, even though only one of the winners, and one of the lifetime achievement winners, was in attendance. Connie Willis was toastmaster, and spoke on the theme of asking con official David G. Hartwell what she should speak about and for how long — exploring various suggestions, continually returning to her fascination with the UK TV series Primeval and avoiding award show fails (like the very recent National Book Awards clusterfuck — her term), high seas Titanic anecdotes, and guest of honor revelations.. It went on far longer than her stated time-limit of 5-7 minutes, but of course no one minded; it was hilarious. I sat at a table with Scott Edelman, who recorded the whole thing and should be providing a link to a YouTube video shortly.

The weather was spectacular, sunny and in the low 80s F, with several comments about the poor folks back east or in Denver who were suffering snow.

The drive home was slower than the drive down on Thursday…

World Fantasy arrival

I sat home this morning, finishing a periodicals post, and watching the online traffic maps, until the route seemed clear for an unencumbered drive, which as I expected didn’t appear until somewhat after noon; the difficulty is driving through the vast expanse of LA city, on I405 or I5, which experience rush hour traffic slowdowns much of the morning and then again in the afternoon beginning by 4pm or so. The best case from my area in northwest LA, through the city to San Diego, is two hours; today it took about two hours 15 minutes, what with traffic slowdowns over the Sepulveda pass and then again entering SD on the 805..

The Town and Country resort, site of this year’s convention, is a maze of hotel structures, cabanas, pools, parking structures, and alleyways, which requires the handy map they give you at check-in to navigate. I parked my car and checked in, wandered over to registration, found the dealers room, and oriented myself just in time to attend the opening ceremonies, conducted by Toastmaster [not mistress] Connie Willis, who introduced the several guests of honor — Parke Godwin, Sheila McCarthy, artist Ruth Sanderson, and last but not least, that promising upcoming young writer by the name of, what was it, oh, Neil Gaiman…. who all stood up for brief, or very brief, words of acknowledgement….

After which was a presentation, which I ducked into and out of over the course of an hour plus, by the San Diego Zoo, that prominent local attraction, with two or three zoo officials not just promoting their site, but displaying *live animals* for the edification of the audience — including an armadillo, an owl, an anteater, and a porcupine, of those I saw…

Later I hooked up with the Locus worker-bees and contributors — Kirsten and her daughter Teddy, Beth Gwinn, Fran, and Karen Burnham + Curtis + 2-month-old-baby-boy Gavin — for dinner in one of the onsite restaurants. Then back to my room to check email and plan tomorrow’s post — Lois Tilton’s latest column, which you’ll see tomorrow morning.

Today’s travel music: Peter Gabriel’s New Blood CD, with impressive, substantially different versions (orchestral) of many of his best songs from “Rhythm of the Heat” to “Mercy Street”; REM’s latest album, which continues to grow on me; and the new Coldplay, which hasn’t, yet.

World Fantasy prelude

I’ll be driving down to San Diego tomorrow afternoon to attend World Fantasy Con, a somewhat foreshortened trip, arriving late, leaving early (Sunday after the banquet), compared to last year’s trip to Columbus OH, mostly due to dayjob work priorities. (And I’m taking my work laptop with me to check in and keep up.) I’ll be attending a Locus Foundation meeting Friday morning, but otherwise … my schedule is completely open.

Beth Gwinn stopped by last week and has stayed with us on and off, with a weekend interlude to Sacramento to visit relatives; she left today for San Diego.

I have a telescope on my balcony and we’ve been watching Jupiter’s moons for a couple weeks now. Their positions change noticeably after only an hour or two. Tonight: three on the right, spread out; one on the left, close.

A couple plugs: liked The Ides of March. Also liked, guardedly, Drive, which I would have liked better had there been fewer abrupt, violent scenes, along the lines of such scenes in the Godfather movies. Like the soundtrack though – by Cliff Martinez, who also just did Contagion.

Also, in the art-house department: a de facto gay film called Weekend, which effectively shows how quickly, vibrantly, yet sadly, a chance hookup can lead to a weekend romance that leads to an inevitable breakup due to circumstances. I always read closing credits, and from this film discovered a singer named John Grant — not the SF writer — whose album Queen of Denmark is quite nice, with a curious song about Sigourney Weaver and a lovely earworm song called “Where Dreams Go To Die”.

Somehow I seem to be seeing more movies lately than reading books. This was never my intention. I did recently finish a nonfiction by Jesse Bering and am part way through the new Richard Dawkins; will report on them soon.

R.E.M. Lines

I’ve written, indulgently, about R.E.M. before, so instead of doing that again I’ll just list some of my favorite songs and lyrics… not quite in chronological order; with my favorites being toward the end.

Fall on Me
    a way to talk around the problem

Texarkana
    twenty thousand miles to an oasis

Orange Crush
    we are agents of the free

I Remember California
    at the edge of the continent

E-Bow the Letter
    aluminum, tastes like fear

Losing My Religion
    that was just a dream

Sweetness Follows
    it’s these little things, they can pull you under

Eleventh Track
    hold him, and keep him strong

Leaving New York
    it’s easier to leave than to be left behind

Saturn Return
    you climb into your rocketship

Fretless
    don’t talk to me about being alone

Walk Unafraid
    i’ll be clumsy instead

Bang and Blame
    you let go on me

Diminished
    does she know i sing?

The Lifting
    once you had a dream of oceans and sunken cities

Leave
    to leave it, believe it, leave it all behind

Find the River
    all of this is coming your way

October Country: Amazon.com

Amazon.com has re-instated its California affiliates, as of a week ago. Thank you very much. Purchases through links to Amazon.com from Locus Online again credit me with a small commission. I use these accumulated credits mostly to buy books to list and profile on the site — since, unlike Locus Magazine, I do not get freebie books for the asking from publishers (since all I can offer are listings, not potential reviews). Alas, the three months since June during which Amazon decommissioned California affiliates are unrecoverable.

Other October topics will follow.

Book Notes: Sex at Dawn; God, No!

Some notes on two recent nonfiction books…

I’ve followed Dan Savage — the most popular sex columnist in the country, and sponsor of the It Gets Better movement for LGBT youth — intermittently for years, and recently noticed his endorsement for a nonfiction books called Sex at Dawn, by ones Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, which purportedly supported many of the theses that Dan has promoted in his sex advice column over the years — principally, the difficulty of monogamy and the reasons thereof.

Now, as I suspect many ardent readers do, I have bought and continue to purchase many more books than I actually have time to read. Evolutionary psychology, and sex, being two of my principle interests, I had in fact bought a copy of Sex at Dawn last year when it came out in hardcover. So, triggered by the Dan Savage reference, I picked it up and read it.

The book is a fascinating reinterpretation of the standard evolutionary psychological explanation for the difference between the sexes — to wit, that females are more choosy than males in whom to have sex with; that males are jealous of female sexual infidelity in order to protect their paternity investment; that nevertheless both sexes will take opportunities to ‘cheat’ if the odds favor an advantage in genetic promotion. And, it challenges the cultural and sociological premise that monogamy is inherent in the human species.

Their re-interpretation is based on the claim that for most of human history — the hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture changed everything — humans lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes, that the concept of one father per child was not understood (thus undermining the premise of paternal investment), and that casual sex, for a variety of reasons, was common. Numerous lines of evidence are described, including many analogies to bonoboes (based on body size, group size, anatomical propotions, etc), and to the practices of primitive hunter-gatherer tribes still in existence today.

Agriculture changed everything because suddenly property had to be kept track of, and so the hunter-gatherer tribes split into core family groups, forcing the sexual proclivities bred by of hundreds of thousands of years of group existence to be channeled into new narrow partitions.

I found the book fascinating, primarily because its willingness to reeaxamine assumptions is like the essence of science fiction.

Two other points: even if their thesis is valid, it of course does not speak to how people should live their lives today. Yes, it explains why monogamy is difficult, and so on, but no one today lives in the pre-agricultural world of small social groups. There is a whole ‘nother book there, perhaps.

Also, I don’t have the impression that this book has much impact or gravitas; in part because the authors have no track record, in part because the blurbs on the cover are mostly from pop figures, and in part because I can’t find any evidence that their revolutionary speculation has reverberated anywhere…

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Briefly second: Penn Jillette’s God, No!, subtitled “Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales”. I am myself an atheist and am fascinated by the general question of why people believe what they do (it ties to my interest in science fiction, which is about exploring one’s concept of the world, overcoming parochial and childhood influences, just as science fiction scenarios celebrate conceptual breakthroughs). And I’m a casual fan of Penn & Teller, having seen their Las Vegas show, if not their TV series.

The book is structured around Jillette’s recasting of the Ten Commandments. I found myself skimming it. The content consists of many personal anecdotes, about Siegfried and Roy, Jillette’s unsuccessful venture into an early ’70s San Francisco gay bathhouse, and many others, always gleefully vulgar and profane. They ramble. And ramble. And are only peripherally about the Ten Commandments, or atheism, or anything except Penn Jillette. It’s amusing for a while, , but I found myself thinking about all those other unread books in my stack….and moved on.

The Most Beautiful Music in the World

is — excepting certain obvious choices, from Tchaikovsky, or Mahler, or Beethoven — a sequence of three tracks from a CD called “Preisner’s Music”, a compilation of works by the Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner, best known as a film composer, for Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy (Red, Blue, and White), and the same director’s earlier Decalogue sequence of ten one-hour films (based on the Ten Commandments). Preisner’s later film scores included The Double Life of Veronique, At Play in the Fields of the Lord (one of my favorites), and Damage, all in the early ’90s.

A non-film score work, “Requiem for My Friend” — a tribute to Kieślowski after his death — was excerpted in this year’s Terrence Malick film The Tree of Life.

The Preisner’s Music CD compiles tracks from his earlier, best-known, film scores*. But it also includes a sequence of three tracks from different sources that nevertheless fit together beautifully, the first from a film score (Quartet in 4 Movements), the second and third from a mysterious, apparently never completed or otherwise-released composition called “Egyptian Opera”. All three involve a soprano — perhaps a boy soprano, I’m not sure — that lend them an ethereal, other-worldly quality. They are called “Dawn”, “Labyrinth”, and “Sky”, in order. Over the 15 years since this CD was released, I have returned to them, these three tracks in particular, again and again, when in a contemplative mood — often, in fact, in my car as I’ve driven to the airport about to leave on another convention trip….

I wish Preisner were better known, and I wish “Egyptian Opera” was a work that had been finished and that I could acquire, though despite repeated Google searches over the years, and Preisner’s own website [which tonight I see has been substantially redesigned since last time I checked], I’ve never been able to learn anything much about it.

Doing a Google search just now, I have discovered the miracle of YouTube: here are those three pieces: Dawn, Labyrinth, and Sky. Listen to them in order.

And here’s the piece used in The Tree of LifeLacrimosa.

*Correction: the “Preisner’s Music” CD is not compilation of previously released tracks, but rather the recording of a concert performance of Preisner’s music, in an underground church in Wieliczka, in Poland. Thus the performances of works, such as “Egyptian Opera”, that had never otherwise been recorded. I should have remembered this.

Contagion

Brief plug for the movie Contagion, an intelligent medical-thriller about a plague the quickly breaks out worldwide, killing a quarter of those infected. I was impressed by the Slate dialogue between Arthur Allen and Carl Zimmer, and advance articles that described the lengths director Steven Soderbergh went to instill scientific authenticity. The film tends towards a documentary style rather than a overtly dramatic end-of-the-world thriller style; I appreciated the focus on the *process* of analyzing the infection – to an extent it reminded me of The Andromeda Strain, with a similar focus on scientists as heroes (!). I was affected by the dramatic structure which begins the film with “Day 2″ and ends the film with “Day 1″, revealing — to the audience but not to the characters — the ultimate source of the contagion. And the music by Cliff Martinez is my kind of film music (though apparently not yet available on CD).

Renovation Wrap-up

As far as I could tell the convention was a success; no major snafus in programming, no difficulties with the facilities. Three impressions linger. First, the bizarre discontinuity of the convention crowd with the casino setting, as mentioned previous post. One aspect of this disparity was that there was no central bar, as at many conventions, for folks to gather in the evening, especially professionals and hangers on looking to congregate and network. The only bars in the Atlantis were in the casino area, and none of the con members seemed to hang out there. Second, the dominance of steampunk fashion and accouterments. For all that someone on one of the panels declared steampunk passe because it was subject of a major article in the New York Times, it was highly in evidence at Renovation — men and women in period garb, a big display of steampunk paraphernalia in the main hall (alongside a throne from The Game of Thrones, a favorite photo opportunity). Third, since I’ve attended smaller cons the past few years but not a Worldcon since Denver in ’08, the distinctive fan crowd, whose demographic characteristics I will not detail but which you can readily imagine.

Particular panels or events I attended included an ‘academic’ panel by ones Ryan Nichols and Justin Lynn, two guys from CSU Fullerton moonlighting from their majors to do a quantitative analysis of texts of stories from several best-of-year anthologies in order to determine the difference, if there is one, between science fiction and fantasy. The results they showed were supposedly statistically significant — in terms of p-values vs null hypotheses, which actually I am somewhat familiar with — though at a glance the bar charts, of the frequency of various clusters of terms in ‘sf’ texts vs ‘fantasy’ texts, looked remarkably similar. More interesting were their suggestions of how such data might be used — to evaluate the saleability of manuscript submissions, for instance — which led to rousing audience objections and comments, from Cory Doctorow and many others.

More typical panels I attended included ones on consciousness, with Nancy Kress moderating effectively as always; one of past and future of SF, with Gary Wolfe and Farah Mendlesohn and others, discussing mainly foreign authors. (Interesting points: Dan Brown opened the doors for the acceptance of mainstream/pop novels with fantastic themes; and, the current popularity of loooong fantasy novels diminishes their chances of translation into other languages, simply due to the expense of the translation.)

I heard Tim Powers’ guest of honor speech, laden with effective anecdotes (his teenage conflation of HP Lovecraft with Simon & Garfunkel; his neighbors’ lightening rod that attracted unreliable ghosts), and which was significant for his explicit disavowal of fantasy as bogus — yes, that’s what he writes, but he doesn’t *really* believe in ghosts; fantasy teases the supernatural circuitry left us by evolution to explain the unknown.

Saturday morning I was part of a panel on web vs print magazines, effectively moderated by Michael Ward, with Stephen Segal, Gordon Van Gelder, Jed Hartman, and Lee Harris. We talked all around the various aspects of the topic, and I think I managed to discuss the workings of Locus magazine vs online without sounding too incoherent.

After that I attended a “Killer Bs” panel with Greg Bear, David Brin, and Gregory Benford, doing their usual shtick — serious discussion mixed with playful banter, verging on BS — and here came the most bizarre moment of my Renovation experience (or of any recent convention experience). The three were discussing their ‘second’ Foundation trilogy, the three novels they wrote with the approval of the Asimov estate, and at one point Benford said, And you know who I based my version of Hari Seldon on?

And he pointed straight at me — in crowd of two or three hundred people.

Mark Kelly, he said, the online Locus editor, who’s right there.

I was wearing a bright gold polo shirt, so he had easily spotted me. Everyone turned to look. I held up my hand and waved, demurely. Perhaps Greg was serious (I’ve known him, in a casual five-minute chat fashion at various conventions, for 15 or 20 years now), or perhaps he was invoking the make-it-up-as-you-go-along free-spiritedness of the panel…

Anyway.

The serious points of their discussion were fascinating and worth noting — the way Asimov himself kept arguing with his writing of a decade before, for his entire career; trying to get more Democrats to read science fiction; the way NASA has done exactly was the advisory committee said they should do — get out of the way of private business investing in space. And it was Greg Bear’s 60th birthday.

On Sunday there was a presentation by Kim Stanley Robinson about one of his passions, the Sierra mountains, an extended slide show with personal discussion of the geology, of the sunsets and the water and the rocks and flowers and people, and asides about how this has shown up in his fiction, including of course the three Mars novels.

There was also a panel about the enduring appeal of Robert A. Heinlein, with Harry Turtledove and surprise Hugo loser William H. Patterson…

The Hugos on Saturday evening were dominated by the shtick of Jay Lake (currently bald, due to chemotherapy) and Ken Scholes, which was intermittently amusing. The ceremony was efficiently presented, but was prolonged early on by Dave Kyle’s Big Heart Award presentation, and later by the clips of the dramatic presentation nominees, in two categories. (I realize that Hugo ceremonies show clips of all the dramatic presentation nominees because they *can*, but I have always somewhat resented this resultant dominance of those categories in the overall ceremony compared to the four principal fiction categories…. it’s not as if they read excerpts from the fiction nominees.) It was nice to see Sheila Williams and Lou Anders, frequent nominees in the past, win their first Hugos; the surprise win for me was something called Chicks Dig Time Lords, about women who love Doctor Who, which beat out Patterson’s Heinlein biography in the best ‘related work’ category.

Which reminds me that the Worldcon business meeting (here’s a link) apparently passed changes to the ‘semiprozine’ category that will rule out Locus Magazine and three of the other five current nominees, if I understand this correctly, from future consideration – depending on ratification at next year’s Worldcon. Since I have no horse in this race, websites having been dismissed from category consideration years ago (if not distinct ‘semiprozines’, they are to be considered indirectly via the ‘best editor’ or perhaps the ‘related work’ categories, not that this has ever happened), I note this only in passing.

My drive home was uneventful. I took the interstates, I80 through Donner pass (a route I’ve never before driven) and west to Sacramento, then I5 all the way down into LA; partly to avoid the speed-trap risk of driving through small towns on route 395. (I also considered a route down through Nevada, via Tonopah, but dismissed this as likely to take too much time, considering promises to keep etc.) Ironically, the interstate trip took just as long as the earlier trip. Reno is west of Los Angeles (think about it, then look it up). The interstate return trip was faster, but longer — driving west to Sacramento, then southeast down the 5, was 515 miles, vs the 452 miles from LA up the 395 to Reno via Carson City. I like long car trips; someday I’ll drive those roads through Nevada, and someday I’ll drive across the country on blue highways.

Renovation

I am indeed at this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Reno — after having missed the past two years’ Worldcons — though I am not going to try to blog about what I do at the con every day, as I have for many past conventions. Just a few comments for now.

I drove here, to Reno, from Los Angeles, a 450 mile trip through mostly very scenic countryside, along the eastern Sierra Nevada, past Mt Whitney and Mammoth Lakes and Mono Lake. I was stalled for 1/2 hour by a freeway wreck on Route 14, all lanes stopped for 45 minutes, got caught in a prototypical small town speed trap in Lee Vining (despite my scrupulous attention to such matters) — I was let off with a warning about speed, but a ticket for not having a front license plate — and passed a huge brush fire south of Carson City, before entering the elongated suburban sprawl of Carson City on its way up to Reno. In a sad sense all American cities seem to be the same, these days of the early 21st century; all populated by the same national chains of fast food restaurants and retail outlets.

The convention facility is huge, the main hall containing the dealers’ room, art show, and fan lounge, the size of an airplane hangar. The Atlantis Hotel adjacent to it is a tad bizarre, a full-blown Nevada casino, with a smoke-filled room of slot machines and gambling tables on the main floor — you can’t enter or exit the hotel without passing through this noxious zone — populated by the usual sad assembly of committed gamblers, smoking their cigarettes and drinking their drinks and pushing their quarters into their slot machines (even at 7:30 this morning, when I was looking for breakfast). That crowd and the convention crowd are like two contemporaneous cities occupying the same space…

I was on two panels today, one about the ‘necessity of reviewers’, whose main attraction was panelist Lev Grossman, and one about the past and future of Locus, which drew a crowd of about two dozen. (I’m on one more panel Saturday, about online vs print magazines.)

I dipped in to several other panels/presentations, as usual. The dealers’ room is admirably dominated by book dealers. The art show has a spectacular corner of artworks owned by a private collector, featuring Richard Powers and Kelly Freas and Paul Lehr and Chesley Bonestell and many others, worth seeing, though the main show of artworks for sale is of course nowhere near as impressive.

And it’s hot here, in the 90s during the day. But cooling off at night.