Aetheric Ephemera: Life is a Rubber Rope Edition

1) Jay Lake got some unwelcome news. His cancer decided to be a total dick and latch onto his liver, despite some aggressive chemo. Please send him your support and keep him in your thoughts. It's always a tough fight, and his just got tougher. But he and his family are made of stern, loving stuff, and a lot of us are sending him any good vibes we can muster.

Fuck cancer.

2) Visions of the fantastical year 2000, from the year 1910. (via Jay Lake). Where's MY phono-projector?

3) In other news, roasted drone is the latest taste treat.

4) An interview with Paul Di Filippo about several subjects near to my heart: Readercon, Samuel Delany, and music.

5) Mr. Di Filippo is a big fan of Jules Verne. Here are some good online resources to find out more about this underappreciated grand-père of SF.

Apex anew!

So, my blog post for Apex last month was just posted. Comments are encouraged.

Having just re-read it, I find myself wanting to explore this idea in more depth after some of the panels and conversations I engaged in at Readercon this past weekend. I will be writing more about that over the next week or so.

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.

New FOG column!

My peculiar take on Readercon. Read, enjoy, pass it on.

I wrote it in two hours, while my daughter has been napping. Thankfully a morning of play tuckered her out. As I hit "publish," I half-expected her to suddenly wake up. But Morpheus has been kind enough to sit with her for me.

I like this one a lot.

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.

A Few Brief Meta-thoughts on Readercon

We've taken a break for a couple of hours and after a dinner of Guinness and carefully-selected bar food (including an astonishingly fresh salad of genuine mixed greens), we went back to our room to assess book finds, tomorrow's schedule, and our aching feet.

I am going to post more about the con specifically tonight, but something struck me this afternoon that I want to get down: a lot of the panels this year have spent more time questioning the topic, specifically the definition of the central term, than actually discussing the topic. That struck me strongly when Barry Malzberg, on a panel about unpleasantness in fiction, wanted to know if they were making it into a genre or something. He seemed quite displeased with a discussion of unpleasantness as a concept. And much of the conversation about the topic got bounced back to Peter Straub (who had some great comments on the idea of writing in an unhappy vein) and related to questions of genre. And I thought "so, when will they actually talk about the presence and tropes of unpleasantness in fiction?"

This happened even more forcefully in a panel on anarchy in speculative fiction earlier in the day. Two of the participants were so completely stuck on an idealized, overdetermined idea of anarchism that they spent the panel denigrating it and fighting almost any attempt to discuss it. I give a lot of credit to the panel leader for trying to keep people on-topic, and to Graham Sleight for consistently returning to the topic, the presence of the idea in speculative fiction, with actual books recommendations. And while at times the other participants came back to the general purpose of the panel, they would quickly go off on a tangent and go back to beating the dead horse of their very myopic definition of the term.

I saw this to some extent yesterday as well, although in the first panel I thought that John Clute and Michael Dirda did a fantastic job of critiquing and exploring the idea of interstitial fiction. But they were not just questioning or deriding the idea; they engaged it, and they contextualized it both as a term and as a literary strategy. They were neither dismissive or eliding; they took the notion seriously and tackled it head-on. I think that first panel has been the best I have attended thus far, because you learned something about the idea and its usage in literary production and you came away with a lot of thoughts to ponder.

I think this is a good topic for my next Apex post.

I also wanted to say that the readings I have attended thus far have been stellar. Liz Hand read the beginning to her new Cass Neary novel Available Dark last night, and it was creepy and compelling. Around lunchtime today Robert Shearman (Shirley Jackson Award nominee) gave a delightful and funny reading of a new story. I went to this reading based solely on his hilarious performance on the Bookaholics panel last night,and was not disappointed. I have not read any of his work, but this reading made me want to find his books immediately. Sadly, none were to be found in the Bookshop.

I want to read some of his plays also, because I think I could glean a lot from his sense of pacing and timing.