The McWetlog

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has died aged 90: BBC News story and obituary; New York Times; Los Angeles Times. Clarke’s works were sui generis, evoking a sense of wonder without resorting to effusive prose or, frankly, much of a plot. There was not much apart from awe. But such awe.

The decline in science fiction magazines’ circulation has been going on for decades. In the mid-1980s, when I first began reading the magazines, Analog’s circulation was around 150,000, Asimov’s was around 100,000, and F & SF was, I think, somewhere around 60,000. (I’m quoting from memory so these figures are almost certainly off.) In 2006 — twenty years later — not one of them has a circulation north of 30,000. In response, Warren Ellis has issued a cri de cœur that has been picked up by others.

Two posts by blogging SF writers — or, if you prefer, SF-writing bloggers — argue that the magazines are less relevant to the field than they once were: Cory Doctorow says it’s because the buzz is being taken away by their online competition; John Scalzi suggests that their loss of influence can be measured by the number of authors who make it as successful novelists without passing an apprenticeship in short fiction published in the magazines.

I think that the problem can be explained economically, at least in part. Let me take a stab at it.

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Charlie Stross posits that we’re rapidly approaching a future where data storage is so cheap that everything — everything — will be recorded for posterity: “The storage requirement for a video stream and two audio streams, plus GPS location, is only about 10,000 Gb per year — which will cost about £10 by 2017.” Such recordings, he argues, will be “a gold mine for historians” who will “be able to see the ephemera of public life and understand the minutiae of domestic life; information that is usually omitted from the historical record because the recorders at the time deemed it insignificant, but which may be of vital interest in centuries to come.”

In response, Cory Doctorow asks: “Once everyone and everything is recorded forever, what will historians do for a living?”

My answer is: the same thing they’ve always done.

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Gary K. Wolfe, referencing Crichton, has the following to say about Kim Stanley Robinson in his review, in this month’s Locus, of Sixty Days and Counting, third in Robinson’s series of near-future political thrillers dealing with global warming:

[O]ne of his main flaws as a writer of political thrillers is that he’s not nuts.

Put that on the cover of the paperback edition!

(There was a time when I would grab, and read, a new Robinson novel the moment it came out, but I’m about four books behind at the moment. Not faulting Robinson; I’m just so far behind on my reading.)

The geek world is a-twitter with the news that an unfinished work by J. R. R. Tolkien has been completed by his son, Christopher, and will be published next spring.

The book is The Children of Húrin, and we’ve seen the tale before, in broad strokes or in fragments: it’s chapter 21 of The Silmarillion (“Of Túrin Turambar”) and the second chapter of Unfinished Tales (“Narn i Hîn Húrin”). The latter version was fragmentary (though not as fragmentary as some other parts in Unfinished Tales) but it seems that Christopher Tolkien has completed that narrative:

It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father’s long version of the legend of the children of Húrin as an independent work, between its own covers.

I can see why he’s done it. Large portions of the story are complete (see Unfinished Tales) and the story itself is quite powerful: a full-on epic tragedy that is Shakespearean in ambition and operatic in scope. (There are at least half a dozen operas in The Silmarillion alone; Tolkien produced enough material for an entire culture’s mythology.)

Holy poo. After decades at Michigan State, where it moved in 1972, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop is moving to the University of California, San Diego. The Foundation tried keeping it east of the Mississippi, as a counterbalance to Clarion West in Seattle, but they ran out of options.

Kelly Nestruck has seen, and reviewed, the Lord of the Rings musical; he’s got a post that rounds up the opening reviews of this show, which are mixed. (Update: See also the Toronto Star’s point that it may be a critic-proof show.) His take, in a nutshell, is that the problems stem from the play being too ambitious:

There’s no doubt that the show has many problems. They all stem from one large one, though, it seems to me: Too much ambition. Too much of a desire to be innovative both technically and artistically. Too much respect, even reverence, for the source material. I had nowhere near as much fun as I did watching, say, The Producers, but I found elements of this show much more interesting, challenging, and beautiful. And this is coming from someone who is by no means a fan of the books and movies.

The idea of putting the entire 1,000 page Lord of the Rings trilogy onstage in one musical evening is an insane one. And the fact that it worked at all, when it was initially seen as pure folly or the punchline to a joke, is a triumph of sorts.

I’m looking forward to hear what Jennifer thinks about it when she sees it next month.

Thanks to a gift from my brother, we’re working through season one of Battlestar Galactica. Out here in the sticks, where we have two kinds of broadband, our cable company does not carry Space (or a number of other channels), so we haven’t been able to watch this show, which has gotten tremendous buzz around the net. But now we’re seeing it.

We’re quite excited about it; it’s tremendously well done, with lots of moral ambiguities and flawed characters that make the show very interesting, if not necessarily comfortable to watch. Lots of intelligent touches here and there: in the way the spaceships move; in the Cylons’ use of technology; in the handling of religion; in dealing with the gravity of having a twelve-world civilization reduced to fewer than 50,000 people.

This is nothing like the original, which looks embarrassingly juvenile in comparison. We’ve come a long way in two and a half decades of TV science fiction.

Late last week, a copy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Book finally arrived from Amazon; I’d ordered it in late December (that’s “special order” for you). It’s an interesting collection of short pieces on diverse topics — often autobiographical, such as getting excommunicated by the Mormons or dealing with narcolepsy, and often whimsical. It reads, in other words, like a blog before the fact: proof positive that such writings did exist before them thar Internets; they were just in zines and such, and as such harder to find. More to the point, it reads like Teresa’s excellent blog.

The meat of the book, in substance if not in length, is the essay “On Copyediting,” derived from an internal document at Tor Books for their copyeditors. Since my work has, from time to time, included such diverse elements as may be considered copyediting, this was compelling stuff. But, probably because my own copyediting was highly specific and technical, viz., federal statutes and regulations, I wasn’t aware of some of the more general idiosyncracies of the field. Notably, style sheets — I’d never heard of them before in a copyediting context (an article reprinted in a 1994 book is probably not referring to CSS). So much for doing any freelance copyediting. But, Google is my friend: here’s a sample style sheet and, from the SFWA, A Writer’s Guide to Understanding the Copyeditor. Aha. Now, we had those at Justice; they just weren’t individualized, naturally.

Just finished John Barnes’s 1996 fantasy novel, One for the Morning Glory — about which I’d heard good things, so when I saw it at the library I picked it up. Most of the reviews I’ve seen compare it with The Princess Bride, but I think that’s superficial: it’s because both are playful and light in tone, rather than the heavy high-vatic drudgery one expects from epic fantasy. True, this is a fairy tale that does not take itself completely seriously; but, while the tone is light, breezy and immediately engaging, the story itself is not frivolous, and is at times quite dark. It is, as some have commented, the Brothers Grimm at novel length, with the wonderfully subversive proviso that the characters themselves are fully aware that they themselves are in the middle of a Tale, and conduct themselves accordingly. It’s tremendous fun, and worth a read if you can find a copy; unfortunately it appears to be out of print at the moment.

Good new writers should get as much word-of-mouth as possible; Karen Traviss deserves a bit of buzz. She’s been compared (favourably) to Arnason, Cherryh and Le Guin; comparisons aside, if you like complex alien societies and tough moral questions in your SF, grab her stuff immediately — you’ll love it.

Her first two novels, City of Pearl and Crossing the Line, are the first two-thirds of a trilogy that’s ostensibly about first contact (with four separate, and fully fleshed out, alien cultures), but has a lot to say about ethics, conflict, and alterity. (Follow the links for a plot summary; this isn’t a book report.) Everyone, alien and human alike, has their own motivations, worldviews and ethical systems; the interplay between these cultures makes the plot wonderfully complicated and the books awfully fascinating — full of interesting, believeable characters.

The second book does end on a cliff-hanger, but Traviss manages to bring it off, with the result that instead of tossing the book across the room, I’m eagerly awaiting the sequel, The World Before, due out late this year.

In a strange coincidence, Jennifer and I are each reading a short-story collection by Paul Di Filippo at the moment: she’s reading Ribofunk; I’m reading Strange Trades. I’m a few stories into the latter, which has a doozy about underground currency called “Spondulix” that could easily serve as the basis for the next Coen Brothers movie. In addition to writing way-cool stuff, Di Filippo is legendary for his support of, and tendency to publish with, small presses; even so, I’m baffled by the fact that the novel-length version of Spondulix is apparently only available in a 300-copy limited edition. That can’t be it, can it?

Chances are that by now you’ve already seen the extended edition of The Return of the King — even if your name is John Moltz — but here’s my take on it.

The first thing that bears mentioning (as Andrea noted) is just how chaotic putting this film together was — something that’s abundantly clear from the appendices and from the writers’ commentary. Not just in the mad, last-minute rush to get the film completed, but in the changes in the story between principal photography and the final result. They took the footage they had and used it differently — in a different order, say — when the story changed. It looks like ROTK was the most reworked of the three films.

These explain some of the inconsistencies that people like me love to pick over: why Pippin is riding with Gandalf when the old boy rescues Faramir and Co. from the Nazgûl, why Arwen’s and Elrond’s apparel changes from one second to the next in Rivendell, and why the newly added scene with Saruman seems a little unfocused. (Presumably this explains where Aragorn’s horse went at the Morannon.)

All of which speaks to how big a project this was, and how easily they could have ended up over their heads. It’s amazing that it was done; even more that they did it as well as they did.

But if they had gone ahead with their plan for a duel between Aragorn and Sauron — they used some of that footage in the fight with the troll — I would have slain them all. No no no. Thank you for not following through with that foolishness.

The extra footage is the usual mix of the following four types:

1. Essential material that I wish they hadn’t cut. (All the scenes of Frodo and Sam in Mordor that had been cut, for example. Also, the fine scene between Denethor and Faramir.)
2. Important material that helps us make sense of scenes that would otherwise be confusing. (More material on the White Tree, what happens to Gothmog, the Houses of Healing.)
3. Neat material that adds considerably to the movie, but isn’t vital. (I’d put the Mouth of Sauron and the extra footage during the siege in this category.)
4. Superfluous material, the benefits of which are outweighed by the penalty inflicted on the movie’s pace — and on your bladder.

In a change from the previous two films, the extra footage does not just add to the film, it changes it: lines are given in a different order; characters suffer a different fate; events occur at a different time of day.

The end result is a film that is more cohesive than the theatrical version, with some fine moments that deserve not to be missed, but that really, really feels long. At least there are fewer superfluous bits in this one than there were in The Two Towers.

Don’t miss the insane bits. The easter egg is in its usual place, but it’s not what you’d expect: it’s not as high concept as the previous two, but it’s funny as hell. And the actors’ commentary: do not miss the actors’ commentary. Pure chaos.

Via Locus Online, news that Ottawa’s specialty SF bookstore, Basilisk Dreams Books, is going out of business — a victim, they say, of chain bookstores and the Internet.

[O]ver the past year and a half, there has been a significant decline in sales, this is likely to continue and even be exacerbated over the fall and winter months, since the attributable causes are on-going. The large chain bookstores, who appear to be favoured by publishers and distributers in respect to delivery and payments, as well as direct sales through the Internet, have sliced into our business. To maintain our stock of new releases and backlist titles has become an on-going battle, both to secure delivery and to cover our financial commitments.

Unfortunately our Eighth Anniversary Sale did not generate the results we had hoped for. Even prolonging the sale for the whole month of August was equally disappointing. We could not attract sufficient clientele to keep us in business.

Specialty bookstores always complain about the chains and Amazon, but their former customers have other ideas about their lack of success — often it’s something else. Not that I know anything about these guys: when I was in Ottawa I always sort of enjoyed the store — though I found the customer service a little too hands-on — and will be sad to see it gone. Sometimes they had books that were otherwise hard to find, even online, and browsing the physical books is something that Amazon can’t replace. (But they’d never heard of Lucius Shepard or Howard Waldrop!)

Still, out here in the sticks, choosing Amazon over a 1½-hour drive and trying to find parking in the Glebe is kind of a no-brainer, regardless of the 30 per cent discounts.

Shit. How did I miss this? (Richard didn’t.)

The Silmarillion in 1,000 words (via Boing Boing). An excerpt from the tale of Beren and Lúthien:

BEREN: Ooo! Pretty elf lady!
THINGOL: You can have her if you … BRING ME A SHINY!
BEREN: Worth a shot.
LUTHIEN: La la la
MORGOTH: Ooo baby… *zzz*
BEREN: Got your shiny!
MORGOTH: you BASTARD! I stole those fair and square!
CARCHAROTH: Grar.
BEREN: Ow!
THINGOL: Got the shiny?
BEREN: ‘s in my hand.
THINGOL: And?
BEREN: Hand’s not here.
THINGOL: Crap, I really wanted that shiny.

Way funny. Probably funnier if you’ve actually read the book. Really hilarious to see the Oath of Fëanor, in Tolkien’s inestimably archaic style, condensed into “WANT SHINY!”

Gardner Dozois is stepping down as editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction; he’s held that position since 1986, during which time he made Asimov’s the definitive SF magazine. He will apparently be replaced by longtime managing editor Sheila Williams (via Boing Boing).

At the same time, circulations for all SF magazines — Analog and F&SF too — plunged during this period: paid circulation today is less than a third of what it was in the mid-1980s. Whatever forces were at work to put SF magazines’ circulation in decline — I’ve heard one of them was ending the Publisher’s Clearing House subscriptions, which the magazines apparently took at a loss, so they may now actually be more profitable — you have the irony that fewer and fewer people were reading a magazine at its prime.

Apparently Dozois is returning to writing fiction. As a fan of his stuff — check out Strange Days or, for a book about his stuff, Being Gardner Dozois — I can’t be anything but pleased. I just hope he can make a living at it without becoming Howard Waldrop’s roommate.

The man doesn’t even so much as own a computer, so I’m hard pressed to call this a blog, or Howard Waldrop a blogger — you sort of need some kind of net connection to fulfill the links-plus-commentary paradigm. Having said that, any kind of Waldrop is cause for huzzaificatiousness, so off you go. (via Boing Boing)

Here is Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine’s response to a Michigan news channel report that the magazine, sold through a child’s fundraising drive, was full of dirty, dirty material.

And here is the original story. I have never seen an example of contemporary journalism that defamed the profession simply by pretending to be a part of it; its author, Kristi Andersen, is an embarassment to her peers. “The magazine has now been pulled from the list, but 24 Hour News 8 wanted to warn other school districts in case their students had already ordered it.” Oh really. Not a journalist’s job to warn other school districts, missy. Get over yourself.

The CD of the Return of the King soundtrack showed up yesterday, courtesy of a little birthday gift certificage from the brother. (“Because it’s my birthday, and I wants it.”) Howard Shore’s stuff is fun to listen to — your usual movie soundtrack symphonic score with signature themes à la Wagner, only it’s a kindler, gentler Wagner, just like Tolkien, whose own Ring saga is much more humane. (The Silmarillion, on the other hand, is just as brutally operatic.) And if they release a CD of the two-hour, eight-movement symphonic version — as in it’s structured as a symphony, not just played by a symphony orchestra — which had its North American premiere in Montreal last night, I’ll snap that up too.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s demolition of the whiners at RejectionCollection.com is a must read for its inside look at the editorial process — at least at Tor.

It’s not uncommon to find something in Jackson’s films that somehow betters Tolkien’s original, dramatically speaking. Here’s what Brian says about diction in ROTK, film vs. movie:

For what it’s worth, its tone and style is so like the other two movies — whereas the third book is so profoundly different from its predecessors, all stilted and high-tongued — that it’s another testament to Jackson’s abilities that he made it into such a well-rounded unifying piece for the story arc.

I’m re-reading the book now, and it’s all declamation and description, rather than the ordinary dialogue that began the trilogy. (Which, I suspect, reflects how the book was written.)

Think I’m going to need to see it again.

Not satisfied to leave it at this, here are some more thoughts on the film version of The Return of the King that develop from the original post, or that I forgot to include in it.

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Via the Kottke, Stupid Evil Bastard has a list of what not to do during a screening of The Return of the King, original authorship apparently unknown, as it seems to be making the inevitable e-mail rounds. Not that it’s shown up in my inbox; I hate getting e-mail like this. But it’s fine for blogging. (It’s actually pretty good.)

Hopefully I’ve procrastinated enough that most of you interested in this post will already have seen the movie, but if reading my impressions of Peter Jackson’s take on The Return of the King would somehow spoil it for you, read no further.

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I won’t be able to see The Return of the King until tomorrow; I worked today — we’re putting together our Christmas issue early — and it’s snowing a little too much for our liking, so we’re holding off opening night. Reviews from the 12:01 set are already starting to proliferate across the web (never mind the newspapers): Ceejbot, Locust Wind, Making Light, Polytropos.

Correction: The Locust Wind and Polytropos links are not to reviews per se, as Nate himself points out in the comments, but to discussions of what Tolkien would have thought about the films. See the Polytropos ROTK review here.

There is a problem with commenting on a DVD release before listening to the commentaries — your Profound Insights, such as they are, basically parrot (or are answered by) the director’s comments before you even get a chance to hear them.

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Teresa Nielsen Hayden has the definitive post on the “Mary Sue” phenomenon: Mary Sue is an avatar of the author written into a piece of wish-fulfillment fan fiction. In a nutshell, the author interacting with their favourite characters — invariably swooning over or being swooned over by said characters. Not being a reader of fanfic, I’d never heard of this before — though this sounds vaguely familiar from some of the early Star Trek novelizations of the 1970s, especially the New Voyages anthologies. Hilarious to see The Left Hand of Darkness or Bujold’s Vorkosigan series (see comments) proposed as representative of the genre.

These aren’t your daddy’s Cylons (via Boing Boing). Purists who decry the new miniseries’s departure from the original Battlestar Galactica have to realize one important thing. The original Battlestar Galactica sucked so hard it had its own Schwartzchild radius.

If you haven’t had the chance to read Larry Niven’s classic riff on the logistics of Superman’s sex life, here’s your chance: “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” (via Jerry Kindall).

Polytropos is much more coherent than I was in his review of the extended edition of The Two Towers (via Electrolite).

Newsweek gets the jump on breathless Return of the King coverage, with the usual amount of behind-the-scenes movie-making inside baseball, which is all you get because the movie isn’t out yet (via Slate). Entertainment-industry journalism: feh.

So my copy of the four-disc, extended edition DVD of The Two Towers arrived in the mail Wednesday. Bloody fast shipping time for Shawville: Amazon only announced it had shipped two days before. I picked it up from the post office around noon.

Guess what I did Wednesday afternoon? If you guessed that I sat, rapt and slack-jawed, in front of the screen for four hours straight … well, you’d be dead-on.

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