Aetheric Ephemera: Praise to all Journeys Edition

1) Today is an auspicious day for fantastika: two major book releases have occurred: Cat Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making,and John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation. Cat's is a printed version of her online serial, and Scalzi's is a reboot of the beloved H. Beam Piper saga. Both sound like titles well worth reading. Only one has its own power ballad, however. Perhaps that will be remedied anon!

It is also Mr. Scalzi's birthday. Go wish him well!

EDIT: As my guest below points out, one can find a most wondrous song on the Fairyland trailer:

I can also attest that it make toddlers squeal and ask to see it multiple times. I really should have known that Cat and S. J. Tucker were on it.

2) This looks like a useful collection of EPub tools.

3) The problem with artificial light (free registration required). I guess when we become cyborgs, fungi hybrids, or the Singularity occurs this will be less of a problem.

4) Speaking of fungi hybrids, here is your WTF moment for the day.

A little ephemera and a bit of vociferation

1) My new column at SFSignal turned out well, and has gotten some good comments. I really did try to be lighter, but Foucault got in the mix.

2) My first review for the gentlefolk at Functional Nerds is up, covering Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot. Which I liked enough that I will try to read Moon Over Soho when I can. They're fun and have good writing, not wooden and rote like the Dresden books nor squick-inducing like Laurell Hamilton. I'm hoping the second book improves on Aaronovitch's strengths, particularly his flair for good characters and his capacity for deftly presenting a scene with concision (although I thought that fell away in towards the end of the novel).

3) I've read a number of posts and opinions on these here interwebs that have put more gears spinning and clurichauns dancing in my head. Paul Jessup has been writing about epic fantasy on his blog and we have had a few twitter and email exchanges about the subject. These were set off by Daniel Abraham's discussion over at Orbit. Paul is curious about the need for war to often be the instigation for a given epic's plot arc, and he makes some compelling observations about the idea of what an epic can be.

I have talked about the idea of epic fantasy before, but Paul's hypothesis brings up some fresh issues for debate. I have maintained that power is a big part of the epic fantasy, and that the assumption is that "epic fantasy" is about world-shaking conflicts and consequences. As Paul pointed out (and I mentioned as well), the way that the word "epic" if often applied in the genre does not reflect its roots or even many of the classic works that stand as exemplars of the term. The word "epic" is often used, honestly, more in a Hollywood way, to denote huge, overwhelming, vast, sweeping, and thus has more to do with the effect of war movies than the literary echoes of the word. It is also an adjectival modifier that accentuates the significance or awesomeness of a work, or casts it in the mold of a conventional large-scale secondary world saga.

Epics can be much more than that, especially if they hearken back to the idea not of the quest, but of the journey. There is a point where the vast epic becomes comfortable, and lacks the emotional power of a classical epic. The potential for poetry gets lost in the blood and intrigue; the potential for magic is lost, as magic becomes a weapon or a rationalized system, instead of moments of wonder. There are not only depths that epics can plumb, but stories of different sorts of bravery and cunning, dealing with foes that are just villains, but the we recognize from our own travels through life.

Aetheric Ephemera: The Edifice of the Self Edition

No blogging this past week because I have been writing my ass off elsewhere:

1) My new Apex blog post, which did not get much attention, although my editor loved it. I like the idea of the Paradox Continuum as a metaphor for how fantastika is looked at as a genre with both adoration and scorn. I hope to write more about it in the future.

2) I get my lit dork on in my latest SF Signal column. Hal Duncan responded with some good observations and pointed me to his work on the subject, which is intriguing and productive (I also liked this piece by him quite a lot). I'm going to explore the novum idea more in next week's column and see if I can either wring some utility out of it for fantasy or figure out more of its problems.

3) I also posted a long review of Jeff VanderMeer's Monstrous Creatures. I highly recommend the book for its combination of insight and evocative observations.

4) I have a few things in process. I just submitted a guest blog to Bryan Thomas Schmidt which should be up on Monday. I am finishing a review that should be up at Functional Nerds in the next several days, and reading two more books for review. And I added another thousand words to what is becoming a novella. Little fox child has a bigger story to tell than I thought!

5) In other news, Diana Wynne Jones has died. If anyone demonstrates the effect of children's fantastika on creative folk, it is her. Many writers fondly remember escaping into her books. I never thought of her as an influence, but as more people talk about her work her effect on the collective imagination is obvious. It underscores for me the importance of good children's literature for our own children.

Aetheric Ephemera: I Love Everything Edition

1) I have a new column up at SFSignal. It's about why I adore made-up stuff. I conclude that:

"It is a love that constantly reminds us that we are given all of the world, and always in exile, but that we can choose to engage nothing, to not sit at the table and just listen to our hearts beat, but to open them again and again, and gain sustenance, joy, and maybe even a few glimmers of wisdom from taking that leap of imagination into what isn't, but we wish could be."

2) I am going to guide the discussion of this month's Apex Book Club. We'll be talking about The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar. I'll have more specifics and a link once I am on a computer that does not arbitrarily shut down the web browser. But I suggest that folks are interested check out the free story at the book link, and also take a gander at The World SF Blog. There may be a quiz at some point. Just sayin'.

3) Over at Grasping for the Wind there's a guest post entitled "Science Fiction is Ridiculous," by David Goodberg. The title is pointedly provocative; what he discusses is how to distinguish SF beyond the idea of technological speculation, of how to separate SF from being just a thriller or drama with a tweaked setting. His thesis is that SF should be "ridiculous" and "extreme," a "new twist on the familiar." But it's difficult to see the distinction he is making because of the brevity of his discussion.

As an example he uses the film My Dinner with Andre, if it "actually took place on a distant planet and all characters were robots." But this is a straw-man argument: if that film had those elements, wouldn't the story be different? Why would those elements be there? It's true that the completely arbitrary addition of SF trappings is ludicrous, but it's unclear what his idea of ridiculous is implicated with the idea that "Science Fiction is a statement. It's a satire." What is the satirical statement being made, and what is being ridiculed in the process? I'm not sure that this notion opens up SF and moves it beyond the narrow idea of Orson Scott Card's that he invokes at the start (which seems truncated from a somewhat different idea that others quote).

In fact, it seems pulled down by Card's distinction, whether using the real/unreal comparison or the more precise idea of how rules work within the broader genres. While SF often utilizes speculative/extrapolative science based on current knowledge, unreal things can certainly happen. We know very little about alien biology, but people generally do not disallow SF about aliens from the canon because none currently exist. The rules distinction works a little better until you realize that some SF works to bend and sometimes break the rules in speculative fashion, while some fantasies have very specific rules (see Blake Charlton's invocation of "hard fantasy"). Both genres are fantastic, as all literature is, no matter how hard it strives to represent reality. The differences are often in the tropes, conventions, intentions, and types of knowledge used to give them a foundation. I like the initial idea of exploring what might be ridiculous in SF, but it needs more unpacking.

Angles of Vision

A quick post as I work and take little breaks to flesh out the new SFSignal column:

My new post is up at Apex. I did tack back towards a response to the whole morality argument (which is not really about morality, methinks). I tried to write something critical, but thoughtful, and I think it works.

As several friends have noted, ::headdesk:: inducing opinions bout fantastic literature continue to proliferate. Steve Davidson over at Grasping for the Wind discusses "Why I Don't Like Fantasy," and concludes:

"Where I see Science Fiction as pointing the way forwards to possible (better) futures, I see Fantasy as the true escapist literature. Escapist in the sense of not being willing to engage in the here and now. Hiding in more pleasant make-believe worlds rather than looking for solutions."

While I appreciate that he (unlike Grin and "Theo") makes it clear that this is a personal opinion, and not some attempt to impose his own perspective on others, this summation really bugged the shit out of me. Not because there is no truth to it, but because it once again paints an enormous range of creative endeavors with one sullying hue. As several commenters pointed out, SF is also fantastic literature, and all fictions are just that, fictions. Some aspire to more realism, or naturalism, or try to follow certain rules more closely, but at the end of the day they are all fantasies, and quite honestly, all of them provide some form of distraction from the world around us. They may teach us things, and may try to ground the story in "the real world," but all of them are figments of our imagination.

What really grinds my gears is this sudden wave of people jumping on fantastic literature for being either socially deviant or decadent, or being too "unreal." There seems to be a need to either impose rules upon fantasy or argue that it's, essentially, too imaginative. Both perspectives imply that there is some flaw or deficiency in "fantasy" as a category that opens it up to corruption or excessive fancifulness. Because exercising creativity is dangerous, leading to moral decline and diverting mystification.

In both indictments, there is a poverty of evidence and an extravagance of oversimplification. These broad indictments rely on generalized hyperbole and stereotypification of the genre category. And they seem to stem, moreso from the morality argument, from an anxiety or concern about the potential boundlessness of vision in fantasy fiction. as if getting too far away from "reality" unmoors the reader from it. There is a disquiet about the power of imagination, as if the reading of a book will result in contamination or some sort of perverse enchantment that takes the reader away from the real and the moral.

Again, I think the arguments of folks like Grin and "Theo" are much worse, but both arguments also rile me because they think that this enticing malignancy is not just within fantasy, but an effect of society that fantasy helps us fall prey to with its alluring excesses. Is fantasy literature really that powerful, that it can send souls spinning away from the physical and social actualities that the reader is part of as a human being? Is it really simultaneously a blasphemous attraction and an inseparable reflection of society?

The truth is, there is not an "it." The breadth and variety (and definitional instability) of fantastic literature makes such a reduction dubious. What writers intend, what they produce, and how it is received cannot be handily condensed like that, unless you consciously ignore the vastness (in several senses of the word) of the field. Reduction is only possible with the most egregious abstraction of the idea of fantasy from the teeming literatures associated with it. That condensation not only unhelpful, it is unwise.

Aetheric Ephemera: Read, Write, Outta Sight Edition

1) It's Banned Books Week, y'all. Make sure you read something that some idjit has tried to get removed from the shelves of the local library.

2) Jo Walton introduces us to The Suck Fairy, one of the meanest little fey to come down the pike.

3) Paolo Bacogalupi is "one incredibly determined motherfucker." Best point: a writer must have "the willingness to accept failure and not let it stop you, and to not let that define you."

4) My new Forces of Geek column is up. It's about writing!

Aetheric Ephemera: Festschrift for Molten Intellects Edition

1) An engaging, pointed interview with China Mieville. I found it to not only be a very provocative interview, but a meaty laying-out of how one writer sees their fiction, as both vocation and production. I'm particularly struck by the notion of the irreducibility of one's worldview in writing, and his contention that storytelling is not some wondrous impulse or healing force, but just something that we do, that may not always be a good thing.

I found this useful to ponder as I work on my next Forces of Geek column and my next Apex blog; the former is entitled "Fiction and Friction" and discusses the inherent value and problems of participatory versus directed narratives, inspired in part by some of Paul Jessup's recent posts on his blog. The latter piece doesn't have a title yet but is an attempt to tackle the varieties of realism that seem to be popping up (often horribly mutated or cliched) in recent fantasy.

2) I was quite saddened to hear that MadCon will be Harlan Ellison's last convention, and that he is apparently in very poor health. I would love to be able to go and just thank him for a lifetime of inspiration and instigation. His work has influenced me as a writer and critical thinker (yes, warts and all!) over the years, and few short stories mean so much to me as "Repent, Harlequin, said the Ticktockman."

3) Via Patrick Rothfuss, a website showcasing (and selling, by the look of it) antique maps. Lovely little cultural artifacts, aren't they? I often wonder what kind of mind it took to produce these kinds of geographically-imaginative schema.

4) io9 does the hard work and comes up with a list of "The Chosen Research Areas of Mad Scientists, 1810-2010." A good basis for a submission to the Annals of Improbable Research, perhaps?

5) I have finally gone back to finish Lud-in-the-Mist after leaving it sadly unloved

Aetheric Ephemera: Gilded Robots of Clockwork Tyranny Edition

1) Jay Lake is cancer-free. Suck it, cancer!

2) Via the aforementioned wordwright: "The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated." A reasoned piece that points out how irrational a lot of the exuberance is over the end of books. Certainly this trend will develop, but all of these people who seem eager to watch the book disappear are being pretty premature in their mocking eulogies for the printed word. In this vein, Paul Jessup reminds us of other trends that were supposed to transform/eliminate the book

3) At the same time, the market fluctuations, driven by the specific changes in the trade and larger shifts in national and global economies, have created a glut of books. While this article is from the UK (and the photos are a pretty egregious example of what's going on), there is no doubt that there is a contraction going on, and used bookstores are at the end of the chain. I can testify that this dynamic is alive and well in our local market, where we daily get large loads of books, so many that we can be extremely picky about what we buy, particularly as people now just leave books behind rather than lug them back home. It's strange, and a bit unsettling, even as it means that we have better books to sell and this attracts more patrons to our store.

4) A literary critic reflects on bad reviews and the writer/critic dynamic.

5) Welcome to the family, Kosmoceratops!

6) In other news, I just finished reading Swords & Dark Magic, and I'll post a review on the weekend. In brief: I liked a lot of it, but I am still not sure there was a large amount of "new" in this sword & sorcery. A few standout stories, several enjoyable tales, and a couple of meh entries. I'm working on my Apex blog entry and a couple of these stories will feature in it.

Aetheric Ephemera: Coded Conundrum Consonance Edition

1) Jess Nevins finds some fascinating portrayals of robots in the 1920s. I think Robot Madam is the best.

2) Apex Magazine's editor fantastique Catherynne Valente has announced that the November issue will focus on stories and poetry from Muslim and Arab perspectives. "It will show how Islam is as much a part of the human experience as any other faith or story system that writers of the fantastic draw from," she says. The focus is in response to Elizabeth Moon's recent diatribe about 9/11 and the Muslim cultural center being planned in Manhattan.

3) Charlie Stross discusses why he will never, ever write high fantasy. I completely agree with the problems he sees with doctrinaire fantasy, but I think that makes it a ripe target for messing with, for making new stories that push against the monarchical model and still make compelling, exciting tales. And I can't guess why his alt-history proposal might not be interesting in 2002.

4) Christopher Monckton is an incredible idjit.

5) A Devastator is no substitute for narrative process: Paul Jessup lays out an argument for video games having an effect on our apprehension of narrativity itself. I find the argument compelling, but I don't think it's all about the way narrative works. Why do we engage it in this way, and what factors (cultural, social, political-economic, aesthetic) condition how these participatory narratives are used? This sent me diving into the syllabus for my fandoms class, to look at a few things I had in the archive about fantasy and displacement.

6) A hilarious chapbook for charity, based on one of the strangest pieces of geek art in recent memory. I downloaded it and made a small donation, and so far it's a lot of fun!

Aetheric Ephemera: Words Fall From Electric Skies Edition

1) I have only very recently started listening to podcasts (yeah yeah, me am Philistine blah blah blah), and the latest one from SF Signal is both enjoyable and a bit thought-provoking to hear. I just wish these things came with a transcription. . . .

2) I also really liked the new one from Jonathan Strahan's Notes from Coode Street, a long chat with Gary K. Wolfe that ranges all over the SF landscape.

3) This is one of the best (and chronologically extended) bibiliographies on fantastic criticism I've seen. I love that it starts with Kepler. . . .

4) Ancient astronomy. REALLY ancient.

5) We're threatening the sky! Great, what's next? Trashing up Mars?

6) An NYT article on the transformation of bookselling. Sobering, but whether it means The Death of the Book, or just the next stage in its life, is hard to say.

Aetheric Ephemera: Maudlin Graces and Crazy Pixel Demons Edition

1) At least he admits that he missed "I hunger, coward!"

2) I'm thinking about realism at the moment, partly as a reaction to having just written about postmodernism, but also because I am finishing up Swords and Dark Magic (which I will post a review of when I finish it) and pondering how fantasy writers deploy certain sorts of realism, or specters of realism, to create effects of suspension of disbelief and emotional resonance in their work. This essay by Clark Ashton Smith gave me some food for thought.

3) Margaret Atwood admits that she writes "speculative fiction." MWAHAHAHA!!!! I am amused by the admission, and by how she contextualizes it. I was pointed to this via the September 2010 edition of Ansible, which just won a British Fantasy Award. Tip o' the hat to Mr. DeNardo at SFSignal for highlighting Ansible.

4) Jaym Gates has a brief, provocative call-to-apocalyptic-arms up at the Apex blog. I responded, and the more I think about it, the more I believe that the apparent paucity of such writing is because we are so close to danger, and would rather have stories of unlikely or displaced apocalypse than ones that directly echo what is happening now. I think there is rich material for stories here, but will people want to write it?

Aetheric Ephemera: Sturdier Than a Kalamazoo Mudwhomper Edition

1) At last, the greatest scientific question of modern times is solved! Although, who the hell made the chicken?!?!? Or did it just pop up as some form of avian spontaneous evolution?

2) So, can I build an ansible? Please? I promise not to use it to summon an alien invasion force, or V'Ger.

3) Paul di Fillipo reviews a lost Verne novel, The Castle in Transylvania. This is a great column for those who think that Verne just wrote " ham-handed adventure novels for juveniles." I wish my French was better so that I could read his original words. (via SFSignal)

4) A striking discovery of early Christian illuminated manuscripts in Ethiopia, which pushes not just Christian history, but the history of bookmaking back much further in time. Beautiful pieces of art and some fascinating history.

5) Sticky rice makes bulldozers sad. No, really. I have to look around and see if anyone has done significant work on the history of food-based building materials. Some great ideas for detail in stories. . . .

Aetheric Ephemera: The Dizzying Contours of Life Edition

1) Cornell University's New Student Reading Project is presenting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? this year. It'll be interesting to follow the conversation and how they frame it; lines such as "Technology giveth, and Technology taketh away" don't seem to really encompass what Dick was doing in the novel.

2) Harvey Pekar died. Not unexpected, but I found myself pausing and considering his art, in all of its rancor, truth, and unruliness. I learned from him that art can, and sometimes should, be plain, ugly, and rough, and that doing it to mirror the texture of life creates a peculiar power in one's work that can bring the viewer to a deeper understanding of how life works. I did not start reading Pekar until the early-90s, and he helped lead me away from mainstream comics into darker, but often more profound terrain. Onion A.V. Club has a nice reflection on his work here.

3) Listen to some Tinariwen, willya? Don't let the slow start fool you. This is very rich music that sometimes sneaks up on you.

4) SF Signal is having a fun contest. I've already started doing research for my submission. Yeah, you read that right. . . .

5) Some thoughts on a new economic direction from Bill McKibben. He tosses around the term "community" pretty lightly, but his thoughts on local meeting places are useful for thinking more concretely about ways to rework the system.

6) io9 talks about Samuel R. Delany's new novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and links to the Boston review's excerpt of the novel. This is going to be quite a work of art. His reading at Readercon was disquieting and compelling at the same time. I think it will be a rewarding, if sometimes painfully honest and open, read.

Aetheric Ephemera: The Quest Fulfilled Edition

1) Matthew Cheney on one of the most important and fun aspects of attending Readercon: The Book Haul. I will detail my own haul soon. It was quite a bargain-land this time around, so much so that I wonder how the full-price dealers made out.

I heard that there was near-record attendance this year, around 840 people or so. I could not stay for the talkback session but I hope there was a lot of praise given to the committee, because I thought they put on a great con this year.

2) A great piece from Publisher's Weekly on the longevity and influence of Lovecraft. I was pleased to discover that there is a B&N collection of all of his fiction, among other alluring titles, and my Goodreads queue will be tinged with antediluvian corruption shortly.

3) A long reflection on Mel Brooks from one of my fellow contributors at Forces of Geek. It echoes a number of my own thoughts on the genius and absurdity of his calculated comic chicanery.

4) A brief historical discourse on full-time SF novelists from Robert Silverberg (responding to Robert Sawyer). Has there ever been a time when we have had a cadre of writers who just wrote in the genre and were financially successful? I think the possibility arises occassionally, but most writers will never be able to achieve that ideal. (via SFSignal)

5) Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn from Twilight. Heh. (swiped from my friend Michelle D. Sonnier)

6) This year's Shirley Jackson Award Winners were announced at Readercon yesterday. Congratulations to all of the winners, especially Robert Shearman, whom I met this past weekend at the Con and who gave a fantastic reading of one of his stories from the nominated collection.

Aetheric Ephemera: Another Step And Yet Another Edition

1) Aaaaand we're back! Let's start with some intriguing news: after a century of waiting, we will finally get to read Mark Twain's complete autobiography. The Independent has a pithy story on it. While some of it has been used by biographers and some bits were published by Twain to make ends meet in his final years, this will be the entire manuscript, which should prove very illuminating given how his views on many things (such as American imperialism) changed towards the end of his life.

2) There's a critique of the Nebula Award-winning The Windup Girl over at SFSignal. It's very spoilery so don't read it if that upsets you. Karen Burnham pins down some things about the book that weaken it for her. I think one of those has a lot of merit, which specifically relates to the ending and how the characters work. I agree less with her other critiques: that knowledge of Thailand might be necessary to understand the problems it has in the novel and that perhaps focusing on the events previous to this book (the Contraction, a great catastrophe triggered by the oil running out) would make the point more sharply. I was pleased that Bacigalupi focused on the Expansion, which has plenty of problems of its own, and even given recent events in Thailand, what happens in the novel felt different, not a product of Thailand as much as larger economic and material conditions in the world.

I like seeing these sorts of pieces, and the discussions they spawn. While I think some of the critique misses the mark, I appreciate that she chose this popular and well-received book for more scrutiny. I thought that the book was one of the best I read last year, and what I found disquieting was the deus ex machina that appeared near the end and tied up the book too neatly. After the struggles and complexities Bacigalupi presents, it was a bit unsettling to have a rather pat ending. Despite those complaints, I think it is a book that everyone should read and ponder.

3) My friend Michelle D. Sonnier writes about some recent yammering over Neil Gaiman. Speaking a library. And donating his speaking fee, which did not come from the library, to charity. This angered some people. Apparently he was even referred to as a "douche" and castigated for the temerity of his visit. I mean, for the love of Willy Pete people, what the hell?!?!?

I said a bit about my take on it over at Chelle's blog, but to build on what she discussed: why do artists consistently get shafted in American culture? Why is it OK for a movie star to make eleventy-billion dollars per movie, or for Sarah Effin' Palin to collect (for her own personal gain) monstrous speaker's fees to spout bullshit, but when a writer gives a talk and doesn't even take the money for himself, a hue & cry is raised? What is it that gets people so upset?

This extends past a single incident. Think about the Great E-Book Kerfuffle, where people dumped on the authors for wanting fair compensation for their efforts. People went to Amazon and left 1-star reviews of books they had not read, because a certain publishing house had printed the author's book, or an author has spoken up about the issue. People went onto the Kindle community and caterwauled about greedy writers and the unfairness of being asked to pay more than the artificially-depressed prices Amazon had created to leverage the market. A lot of readers were quite put-out that authors wanted to make a living at their work, and considered them charlatans for asking to be paid for months or years of creative labor.

There's more to the E-Book issue than that, but the furor over artists asking for compensation that is a fraction of movie stars or political demagogues is strange and unsettling. I really wonder what it is that upsets people?

Aetheric Ephemera: Ruminations and Hortations Edition

1) First off, my new column at Forces of Geek is up. It peripherally invokes my obsessions with genre and the Great E-Book Kerfuffle, but tries to move on from that as well. Go. Read. Comment. Enjoy!

2) Jason Sanford has a rant about science fiction around the world that is worth taking a look at. I agree with his points in large part, although a few commenters have pointed out that there is more to the article he decries (written by Norman Spinrad) than a poor knowledge of world SF. But, as Jason notes, why in the name of the Eleven Horny Hells of Glaverdoon would someone write about SF around the world and not take five minutes to google basic information that would not make them look myopic?

People are already responding; Charles A. Tan has a thoughtful response that is more forgiving of Spinrad than Jason's. I think Charles gets to some of the frustration that Jason is asserting (and that I felt too, on first reading the piece) when he says that "[t]he problem with picking just one paradigm is that it’s reductionist." Spinrad really can't get to the multiplicity and (sorry if this sounds too postmodern) hybridity of identity in the contemporary world. The structure of his argument makes some solid points, such as the problem of colonialism in so much Anglophone SF, but it falters because it has to assign a single identity to an author, in a time when many authors cannot be pigeonholed in that manner. There's a struggle for some notion of authenticity in Spinrad's piece that is problematic because it reproduces an Anglophone notion of purity of identity and singularity of origin.

And it does not help that Spinrad's piece reads as rather disjointed and clunky. It's long and it rambles, makes some points that need more discussion than they get, and has a rather patronizing tone to it.

Hmmm. . . I feel a longer blog post about this is necessary, especially after having read The Windup Girl and The City & The City recently, and thinking about a remark N.K. Jemisin made on Twitter the other day about people trying to "Butler" her (i.e. turn her into the next Octavia Butler).

3) There's a lot of crap on Wikipedia, but while doing a bit of research on Alice Bailey, I found a very well-done article on the idea of the New World Order. It is a far better piece than the Bailey entry, with a ton of footnotes and some good analysis. The Bailey piece has extensive footnotes, but not much analysis. The NWO piece, however, was informative for a short-story that is on the backburner, and I will return to it later.

4) In the "Things That Would Make an Awesome Novel" Department comes an article from the Fortean Times about Robin Hood and possible links to the Knights Templar. I don't think this kind of angle has been played up in the Hood mythology, but it could create some compelling tensions and philosophical/religious discussions as part of the legend. A few commenters have poked a hole or two in the author's ideas, but I'm curious now to get ahold of the book and at least see where the ideas (and any evidence) come from.

OK, back to other writing!

Aetheric Ephemera: Scattershot Kaleidoscope Edition

1) It's funny, in that stomach-churning way, to hear how authors are being deluged with e-mail from readers complaining about the Great E-Book Kerfuffle. Fortunately, Cherie Priest tells us just how powerful authors are in the system. Hint: less powerful than Jeff Bezos or John Sargent. Authors have creative control, and input in some business aspects, but the publisher is the one making the big decisions. Might that change in the future? I wonder what the next stage for e-books will be after this situation is resolved. I have some thoughts, but I think I will save them for an actual blog post.

2) Despite what seems to me to be an obvious misrecognition of what's going on, people also continue to chide authors for chiding Amazon. Jay Lake wrote an open letter to Kindle users today, and some folks responded in unkind fashion to it. I always wonder what people are really worried about when they decide to upbraid someone who does not have a lot of power in a situation, but a lot at stake. The most annoying thing I have read so far have been those moments where readers dismiss authors entirely as easily substituted.

As an aspiring author I bristle at that, but when I look at the market, it is easy to see why some people would feel this way. Some people just go for genre, while others go for series or thematic books (such as Magic the Gathering novels). The author's artistry is secondary to their demands for a certain type of story or narrativity. I see it all too often as a bookseller. Almost as bad is the author as generic brand, from people buying every James Patterson co-author to someone asking me how "kerouac" a certain book was.

3) This is a great gallery of dinosaur illustrations that demonstrate the evolution of our understanding regarding their appearance. The progression is fascinating, to the point where the last illustration is a bit unsettling to me, having grown up with the gray, armadillo-skinned sorts of dinos. The science behind the identification of their colors is pretty cool as well.

4) Warren Ellis talks about his kit. No, not THAT kind of kit! I am referring of course to the stuff he uses to help him write. I too am a big fan of the notebook and pen. We carry cheap journals at the bookstore and one of those can be easily filled with ideas, although my fervent scribbling sometimes becomes hard to decipher later. I find the MP3 player to be handy when not writing at home also. I'm happy to hear that other writers still get results from lo-tek. . . .

5) The 2009 Locus Recommended Reading List is out, and there's a lot to admire here. But boy is it an expensive list! That awesome Jack Vance book Wild Thyme and Green Magic alone is going for at least $50 and is already OOP. The (sadly) late Kage Baker's The Empress of Mars retails at $60. Ack!

I have read 3.75 books on this list, and only a few of the shorter works. I am soooooo behind. But there are a lot of works on here I really want to read, and, in the case of The City and the City, finish reading. Hopefully by then Boneshaker will be back in the library for me to snag. I have some catching up to do. . . .

Aetheric Ephemera: In Dubious Battle Edition

So, welcome to my new links post! Aetheric Ephemera is where I point you to some items of interest on These Our Intarwebs, with scintillating comments to provide you with insight and delight. Ready?

1) Folks should go read Charles Tan's take on the Great E-Book Kerfuffle. He makes some points that many others have not, points worthy of thought and debate. Also, take a look around. He is a prince among link-conjurers and has loads of info on SF. It is easy to get lost poking around his blog, but sooooo much fun!

2) Kage Baker has died. I never met her, and have only read a bit of her work, but she sounds like a great person and was admired by many in the field. And I hate, hate, hate the fact that cancer took her. It's really exhausting to watch people get cut down by this stupid condition. It happens far too often. . . .

3) SFSignal has a cool ebook giveaway from Bookview Cafe. DARE you enter?

4) The Cleveland Plain Dealer had a great interview with Bill Watterson today. What was great about it was Watterson's utter lack of pretension. He made something that people loved and were mad for, but lays all of the hullabaloo squarely at their feet. "[T]he work takes on a life of its own. . . " and it is obvious that while he enjoyed creating Calvin & Hobbes he does not lose sleep wondering why they became so popular or if he made the right decision to stop. I really admire that.

I leave you, dear reader, with this one final link. PLEASE, if you ever try this libation, READ THE WARNING LABEL!