The McWetlog

Jennifer is apparently on a mission to ensure that I own the complete published works of one John Scalzi, blogger, science-fiction writer and putter of bacon on cats. So, for my birthday (this week), she provided me with copies of his latest.

The God Engines is a dark fantasy novella that mixes spaceships and gods in a deeply creepy and original manner. (I don’t want to give too much away; suffice to say that the title is literal.) At only 136 pages, it’s much too brief, and leaves the reader wanting more: the setting and plot could easily handle a quarter-million words. The diction doesn’t quite ring true, and comes across a little stilted; Scalzi doesn’t quite have the knack for this kind of voice. But impressive nonetheless, and it just made the Nebula final ballot this morning. Here’s the first chapter.

Judge Sn Goes Golfing, on the other hand, is pure fun, a short story (the chapbook is all of 32 pages) featuring my favourite character from The Android’s Dream, a profoundly profane and misanthropic alien judge. (I have simple tastes, which include judges who say “fuck” from the bench.) Here’s Scalzi reading a bowdlerized audio version.

The God Engines by John Scalzi

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Judge Sn Goes Golfing by John Scalzi

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Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage — a hidden gem of a young-adult novel that won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1968. A thoughtful book that charts the development of Mia, a girl aboard a city-sized Ship that travels between backwater colony worlds, who is about to embark on her Trial — a month spent trying to survive on one of said colony worlds, whose residents barely tolerate Ship citizens. It holds up well against successors in the same genre, i.e., novels about juveniles that aren’t really juveniles, with young female protagonists, such as John Barnes’s Orbital Resonance, Joe Haldeman’s Starbound, or John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale. Personally, I think it compares favourably to Ender’s Game.

Panshin is a science fiction critic well-known for his work on Heinlein, including a controversial book-length study of Heinlein’s works, Heinlein in Dimension, which won a Hugo. It’s possible to think of Rite of Passage as following in the tradition of Heinlein’s juveniles — it has resonances with many of the Heinlein juveniles I’ve read, particularly Starman Jones — but, as Panshin recounts in his essay, Rite of Passage and Robert Heinlein, Rite of Passage was a reaction to Heinlein, not a pastiche of him.

I wanted to write a science fiction story that would use everything I’d learned about SF storytelling from Robert Heinlein to present a situation of relative power in which I could imagine Heinlein supporting an abuse of strength taken as a matter of right and privilege, but my character, because of the events of the story, would not.

As it turns out, Panshin was reacting to the shift in Heinlein’s attitude that came between Have Spacesuit — Will Travel and Starship Troopers — that latter book having generated more award-winning responses than any other novel in the field (see also Haldeman’s Forever War). The result is a deeply moral book that explicitly rejects Heinlein’s might-makes-right attitude.

You should also read Jo Walton’s entry on Rite of Passage.

Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin

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Any book or movie that achieves popular success is bound to have its detractors and generate a certain amount of hate, especially when its popularity is fuelled mainly by teenage girls. But the hate on for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series is something else. Meyer’s novels have been derided even by fans and writers of the young-adult, romance and vampire genres, with, it seems, special ick reserved for the last book of the series: see, for example, this very bad review by fantasy writer Elizabeth Hand (“Reader, I hurled.”) in the Washington Post.

The best bit of mockery I’ve seen is in the online comic strip Head Trip: see this one and this one.

But recently (no doubt due to the release of the second Twilight film, New Moon), the critique of the Twilight series has gone beyond simply calling it out for its insipidness. LiveJournal user kar3ning compares Bella and Edward to an emotionally or physically abusive relationship (via io9). And Wired’s Underwire blog has the 20 lessons girls learn from Twilight — see, for example, number four: “If a boy tells you to stay away from him because he is dangerous and may even kill you, he must be the love of your life. You should stay with him since he will keep you safe forever.”

Okay, that’s kind of creepy. And while I haven’t read the Twilight series, it does not sound like the kind of thing I’d be interested in reading, even if it didn’t sound relentlessly inane. I’m not into vampire stories, for one thing, and teenage girls and I tend not to share the same tastes. But when people start talking about the kind of messages girls are getting from the books they read, no matter what I think of the books, I start flinching. Because that sounds to me like that old Victorian reflex that says that girls need to be protected from inappropriate reading material — the reflex that, for example, bowdlerized Émile Zola’s novels when they were translated into English in the late 19th century. We are, in other words, in the middle of a latter-day moral panic.

Because, let’s face it: young girls have plenty of other ways to learn how to have a bad relationship.

Enough with the creepy. Let’s get back to the mockery.

Robert J. Sawyer notes the launch of a new science fiction convention in Toronto: SFContario, the first iteration of which will take place November 19 to 21, 2010 at the Ramada Plaza Hotel in downtown Toronto. (I stayed there last month, oddly enough. Avoid the restaurant.)

Toronto has other SF conventions — in particular, Ad Astra, which takes place in early spring. (The next one is scheduled for April 9 to 11, 2010.)

Though I’m a lifelong SF fan, I’ve never actually been to a convention, despite thinking about it really hard every now and then. Will have to rectify that at some point.

A minor kerfluffle about whether or not The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction will be paying the writers for the stories that make it out of their forthcoming writer’s workshop (short answer: yes) reveals something about what has happened to the institution of the science fiction magazine in recent decades.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s response to the news that F&SF is running a writer’s workshop in the first place is that it’s “another step down the road to being a literary magazine oriented primarily to aspiring writers. Which is arguably a direction in which the ‘big three’ science fiction magazines have been going for a while.” That caught my attention: there’s something to that, I think. For one thing, it turns out that the circulation numbers for the “big three” science fiction magazines — Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction and F&SF — are comparable to those of the higher-end literary reviews (e.g., the Paris Review). For another, I think it’s extremely telling that the issue is whether workshop participants will be treated fairly — not whether the stories F&SF get from the workshop will be any good.

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James Bow refers to what he calls the Glorfindel Syndrome, which appears to be what happens when the law of economy of characters is applied to a sprawling epic with a huge dramatis personæ when it’s adapted for the silver screen:

The name is taken from J. R. R. Tolkien’s [elven] character of the same name, who rides out from Rivendell to meet the Hobbits and Aragorn, and takes Frodo back to the Elvish kingdom, facing down the Dark Riders along the way. In Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy, Arwen takes Glorfindel’s role, giving her valuable extra screentime. In the 1970s animated version, Legolas steps up to the plate, for roughly the same reason. Glorfindel is, basically, chopped liver.

During the heyday of the Peter Jackson movies, I actually conceived of a related idea: a Web site protesting the exclusion of Glorfindel from movie adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, replete with foaming invective against the characters that replaced him. (For example, impugning Arwen’s racial purity — she’s only 78.12 per cent Elf!) I never finished it, probably because I couldn’t make it funny enough to make it worthwhile. I also imagined it as a satire of nitpicking fans (the kind who were upset at the omission of Tom Bombadil or “The Scouring of the Shire”); there was too much risk of it being taken literally. So it never came into being.

This thing about George R. R. Martin and some of his fans (i.e., their nasty reaction to the delay in his next book) has generated some interesting blog entries by his fellow writers. Charlie Stross says he’s “slacking” because he went shopping at IKEA. In another one of those entries that will probably end up between hard covers, John Scalzi outlines 10 things to remember about authors — in a nutshell, that authors are human beings with lives and shit that needs dealing with. And Patrick Rothfuss steps up to the plate with this great entry explaining exactly why his sequel to The Name of the Wind isn’t done yet, illustrated with funny cartoons depicting some of the e-mail he’s been getting. (GRRM: “I have received every one of those emails as seen in Pat’s cartoons. Many times over.”)

Rothfuss writes a great, funny blog — I may have to read his book. Fortunately we have a copy.

George R. R. Martin is still trying to finish A Dance with Dragons, the next installment of his Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series. He’s years behind schedule, so it’s hardly surprising that his fans are waiting impatiently; for an author, that’s probably a good sign. What isn’t a good sign is when fans get nasty: some of them have been sending George angry e-mail objecting to his “wasting time” on anything other than working on A Dance with Dragons (e.g., other books, travel, watching football) and — in a manifestation of evil that would have made it into Harlan Ellison’s “Xenogenesis” — worrying to his face that he’s going to “pull a Robert Jordan” and have the bad manners to die before finishing the series.

The sense of entitlement is nauseating; you’ll see a few — thankfully, only a few — examples of it in the comments to John Scalzi’s and Charlie Stross’s posts on the subject. But it’s counterproductive: do you guys honestly think all that anger is going to get that book into your hands faster? Do you think that making him suffer, bread and water, sackcloth and ashes, is going to motivate him to finish?

Of course he’s working on it; he can hardly walk away from it. He wants it finished as much as anyone — more, I suspect. It’s taking longer than he thought it would. Shit happens. Deal.

Uh-oh. Gordon Van Gelder has announced that F&SF — The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction — will switch to a bimonthly schedule in April, with larger issues to make up the difference. F&SF currently publishes 11 issues a year, with one large double issue; subscribers should note that six double issues will still be counted as a year’s subscription. Van Gelder’s rationale for the decision:

We’ve made the change because rising costs — especially postal costs — and the current economy put us in a position where we either had to raise our rates severely or cut back somewhere. Given the state of the economy, I decided a cutback in frequency made the most sense. We’ll lose a little more than 10% of our content this year, but we should be in a great position for the coming years.

If you’ve been following the state of the science fiction magazines, this decision is not surprising in that context. And postal rates have gone through the roof. At least Gordon isn’t trying to put a risibly positive spin on the decision.

Better a bimonthly, double-sized F&SF than none at all. The main advantage to a monthly publishing schedule, I suspect, is newsstand visibility; the science fiction magazines’ newsstand sales have all but dried up in recent years, so that advantage may no longer be operative.

Via Robert J. Sawyer.

Previously: The decline of the science fiction magazine.

Update, 1/6: Announcement on the F&SF blog.

John Scalzi’s aliens are sparsely described and unconvincingly Other (he’s no Larry Niven) and his characters are usually some variation on smartass. But his novels, with exciting plots and witty dialogue (see “some variation on smartass,” above), never fail to entertain. So it is with Zoe’s Tale, which is a retelling of the story of The Last Colony (which missed winning this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel by a whisker) from the point of view of the protagonists’ adopted daughter, Zoë. (Why she loses the umlaut in the book’s title, I have no idea.)

The Last Colony suffered from a couple of plot holes (viz., where did those werewolves go, and how did Zoë get that deus-ex-machina technology?) that Zoe’s Tale fills fulsomely. In fact, it’s impossible to consider Zoe’s Tale absent The Last Colony: it’s very much a mirror image of that novel. The two novels are both case studies in limited first-person narration: neither John Perry, the protagonist of The Last Colony and Zoë’s stepfather, nor Zoë herself in Zoe’s Tale, knows exactly what the other is doing; essentially, these are two books trying to tell the same story. Two blind grabs at the same elephant. The end result is that Zoe’s Tale deals in detail with what The Last Colony mentioned in passing; unfortunately, the converse is also true: the grand plot of The Last Colony is given short shrift in Zoe’s Tale — key points are mentioned briefly, plot twists are telegraphed — and I’m not sure if Zoe’s Tale stands alone as a result.

The tension between the novel’s two ambitions — a retelling of the events of The Last Colony from Zoë’s perspective, and an attempt to explore Zoë’s tragic background and her role as an object of veneration for an entire alien species — is sometimes strained, and I think the latter suffers a little bit at the expense of the former. Despite Scalzi’s breezy and accessible prose and the book’s positioning as a young-adult novel, Zoe’s Tale is an ambitious book. Despite its flaws, it mostly succeeds, in that it’s got lots of good bits in it and is fun to read. Which, in the end, is really what matters, don’t you think?

Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

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Marsbound, Joe Haldeman’s latest novel, starts slowly and intimately: the first quarter of the novel is spent following his young protagonist, Carmen Dula, and her family on a weeks-long trip up a space elevator and thence on their journey to Mars. The second quarter unfolds like a Heinlein juvenile (except for the sex), with Carmen’s struggle to survive on Mars personified by a stern and bureaucratic authority figure with whom she comes into conflict. Once Carmen runs away and stumbles upon a colony of Martians, however, the similarities to, say, Red Planet end. The novel pivots, draws back in scope and dramatically accelerates its pace; years fly by in the same number of pages that described hours, as Carmen returns to Earth orbit with a posse of Martians — who turn out not to be indigenous to Mars and unsure of their own origins — as they try to figure out where they come from. Marsbound finishes as another iteration on a common Haldeman theme: human beings facing the judgment of overwhelmingly powerful aliens. The Martians and other aliens are wonderfully imagined in this otherwise spare novel, whose two halves never quite fuse into a satisfactory whole.

Marsbound by Joe Haldeman

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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.

Continue reading this entry »

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.

Continue reading this entry »

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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