http://sfwriter.com/2009/07/my-readercon-programming.html

I'll be attending Readercon 20, July 9-12, 2009, near Boston. Here's the programming I'll be on:

Friday 11:00 AM, Vineyard: Reading (60 min.) from his recently published novel WWW: Wake.

Friday 5:00 PM, Room 458: Kaffeeklatsch.

Saturday 10:00 AM, Salon F: Autographing.

Saturday 12:00 Noon, VT: Federations Group Reading (60 min.) John Joseph Adams (host) with K. Tempest Bradford, Robert J. Sawyer, Allen Steele, Catherynne M. Valente, Genevieve Valentine: Readings from the original and reprint anthology (cover blurb: "Vast. Epic. Interstellar.") edited by Adams and published by Prime Books in January.

Saturday 1:00 PM, Salon E: Panel: Novels of Advocacy vs. Novels of Recognition. Paolo Bacigalupi, John Clute, Ken Houghton, Barry N. Malzberg, Robert J. Sawyer (Leader), Graham Sleight: At the keynote Thursday night panel at Readercon 18, our panelists stumbled upon a useful taxonomic distinction: novels that advocate for a particular future (a la Heinlein) versus novels that merely attempt to recognize and describe a possible one (a la Gibson). There was some debate as to just how strongly the field was moving from the former to the latter, and if there was such a trend, its relationship to others (optimism vs. pessimism, far futures vs. near futures, etc.) One of the panelists, Graham Sleight, has recently renewed the discussion online. We'll explore the numerous possible directions raised by Sleight and others.

Saturday 3:00 PM, Salon E: Panel: Is Darwinism Too Good For SF? Jeff Hecht (Leader), Caitlin R. Kiernan, Anil Menon, James Morrow, Steven Popkes, Robert J. Sawyer: This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

http://www.universalhub.com/node/26202

Michael Femia read about some guy who visited every single London Tube stop, so he set out to re-create the feat here. He reports on his 12-hour adventure on Friday. And he posts a photo from every single stop, save one. First person to figure out which one gets an autographed copy of his station checklist.

http://www.universalhub.com/node/26201

One of the more charming parts of July Fourth in Boston is when a troop of Redcoats fail to collapse in the heat in their woolen uniforms re-take a set of steps on the site of City Hall Plaza. They've been doing it for years, and, amazingly, no Minutemen ever show up to confront them. 16WadeSt watched them advance up the stairs this weekend.

Copyright 16WadeSt. Posted in the Universal Hub Flickr pool.

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Clipped straight from the official e-mail:

Readercon 20 Participant Schedule:
Mike Allen

Friday 12:00 Noon, Suite 930: Talk / Discussion (60 min.)
Poetry and Science Fiction. Mike Allen and Michael Bishop
Over the years, sf and poetry have intersected in myriad ways; the two art forms have significant ties, even when the poetry itself isn't SF. We'll discuss their joint history, from the pages of Planet Stories to Robert A. Heinlein's Rhysling; from the Nobel Prize-winning space epic "Aniara" to Judith Merrill's best of the year anthologies to the poet narrator of Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes"; from D.M. Thomas and the Eight Hands Gang to Asimov's Science Fiction to the rise of Strange Horizons and Goblin Fruit.

Friday 2:00 PM, VT: Group Reading
Mythic Delirium / Goblin Fruit Group Reading (60 min,.) Mike Allen, Amal-El Mohtar, and Jessica Paige Wick (co-hosts) with Leah Bobet, M. M. Buckner, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Catherynne M. Valente, Joselle Vanderhooft et al.
Joint reading from Mythic Delirium, the biannual magazine of speculative poetry edited by Allen (which just published its tenth anniversary issue), and Goblin Fruit, the quarterly online zine of fantastical poetry edited by El-Mohtar and Wick (whose Summer 2009 issue is due out now).

Friday 6:00 PM, RI: Workshop (60 min.)
Speculative Poetry Workshop. Mike Allen with participation by Leah Bobet, Michael A. Burstein, Vylar Kaftan, Ernest Lilley
What is speculative poetry? How do you write it, why would you want to, and which editors will buy it? Come prepared to write on the fly.

Saturday 11:00 AM, Salon A: Panel
The Killers Inside Us. Mike Allen, Nick Antosca, Elizabeth Hand (L), Barry B. Longyear, Paul Tremblay
[Greatest Hit from Readercon 11.] There is no obvious division between normality and horrific psychopathology (a thought that occurred to us long before Littleton [Columbine], by the way). How have writers exploited this fact? What's it like to read a text that reminds you that you exist on a continuum with the monster?

Saturday 2:00 PM, VT: Group Reading
Clockwork Phoenix 2 Group Reading (60 min.) Mike Allen (host) with Saladin Ahmed, Leah Bobet, Mary Robinette Kowal, Barbara Krasnoff, Catherynne M. Valente
Readings from the second volume of the annual non-theme anthology (subtitled More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness) edited by Allen and just published by Norilana Books.

Saturday 3:00 PM, Salon A: Event
The Rhysling Award Poetry Slan. Mike Allen (MC) with Michael Bishop, Leah Bobet, Lila Garrott, Greer Gilman, Ernest Lilley, Darrell Schweitzer, Sonya Taaffe, Catherynne M. Valente
(A "poetry slan," to be confused with "poetry slam," is a poetry reading by sf folks, of course.) Climaxed by the presentation of this year's Rhysling Awards.

Sunday 1:00 PM, RI: Workshop (60 min.)
How to Give an Effective Reading. Mary Robinette Kowal with participation by Robin Abrahams, Mike Allen, Nick Antosca, Inanna Arthen, Daniel P. Dern, Laurel Anne Hill, Shariann Lewitt, Sarah Smith
You may be a good writer, but reading aloud is a separate skill. Learn to make your words sound as great out loud as they do on the page. Using both demonstration and audience participation, we will explore voicing, narration and pacing.

I am a sloth. That's all the excuse I have.

I did, in fact, take my trusty legal pad out to the park on Friday, and managed to fill half a page -- maybe 300 words or so. I haven't, however, brought myself to pull the pad out of my bag and type those words into my manuscript. I really wish I could at least put a name to this whatever-it-is throwing up these mental roadblocks.

So how are you doing?

Home from a lovely housefilk in Columbus with the addition of a traveling Kathy Mar. Lots of good music and conversation and folks I don't get to see often enough. I left early, during dinner time, due to feeling kind of dizzy and therefore wanting to take the two hour or so drive home earlier rather than later. Holiday traffic was slower than normal for a Sunday but all in all not too bad at all. More later, food and rest now :).

See ya.

http://josephmallozzi.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/july-5-2009-montreal-vs-vancouver/

http://josephmallozzi.wordpress.com/?p=5353

I just got back from a run around Fresh Pond. Along the way, there was a new bench. Someone had left some (fake, I think) flowers on it. I suppose it must have been installed in memory of someone, but I didn't see a plaque or a name. What there was was a single yellow post-it. On it was written, "To Captain and Teneille, I understand your pain. Babe."

I wonder what the story is.

http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/2009/07/don-lemon-al-sharpton-and-medias.html

I just saw Don Lemon defending CNN's coverage of Michael Jackson, in response to Al Sharpton's criticism that the media have been much more negative in their reporting of Jackson's death than they were in coverage of Elvis and Frank Sinatra's passing.

Lemon's response that the media covered controversial aspects of Elvis and Sinatra may be be true, but they were more along the lines of footnotes to the lives of the great singers, rather than the questions about Jackson's life that have been trumpeted in just about every report I've seen about him. The fact is that we do not yet know if drugs caused his death - the autopsy report has not yet come in - and Jackson was acquitted of child molestation charges in his 2005 trial. Sharpton is right that these issues are receiving undue attention.

More important, the media should not be in the business of defending itself against criticism of its coverage. We look to the media for news and information, not self-righteous defense of what it chooses to cover. If Sharpton has a critique of the media's coverage of Michael Jackson's life and death, and CNN wants to report that critique, fine. But we don't need to see Don Lemon then say, hey, I don't know if Sharpton was talking about CNN or other media, but CNN has been reporting just fine about Michael Jackson.

In short, the media should report on the world, not report on its reporting, and certainly not give us report cards on its reporting.

raecarson and I are going to Readercon 20 in Boston next weekend. My schedule looks like this:

Saturday 10:00 AM, Salon E: Panel

History and Fictional History. Christopher M. Cevasco, Suzy McKee
Charnas, David Anthony Durham, C. C. Finlay (L), M. K. Hobson, Howard
Waldrop
** Leader (Participant / Moderator) **

[Greatest Hit from Readercon 9.] Certain things in fiction are, by
convention and for good reason, not strictly realistic-dialogue, for
instance, is a highly edited version of real speech. We ask: is history
one of these things? When we devise a fictional history (either an
alternate past or a history of the future), can and should it represent
the way history really works (choose your own theory), or is doing so
antithetical to good fiction? Isn't, for instance, the dramatic structure
we look for in most novels absent from real history?

Saturday 12:00 Noon, ME/ CT: Talk / Discussion (60 min.)

The Genre Roots of the Mainstream Tradition in American Fiction. C. C.
Finlay with discussion by Michael A. Burstein, Helen Collins, F. Brett
Cox, Debra Doyle, Chris Nakashima-Brown

The plots of Charles Brockden Brown, America's first novelist, frequently
hinged on scientific speculation. Washington Irving and Nathaniel
Hawthorne employed fantasy elements, Edgar Allen Poe invented a range of
genre tropes, and James Fenimore Cooper introduced the series character-a
staple of modern genre fiction. In the last century, some of F. Scott
Fitzgerald's earliest works depend on fantastic elements. Mainstream
American writers, in fact, have regularly created fiction that would now
be considered part of the speculative genre. Finlay will argue that genre
elements are not isolated in a separate branch of the American literary
tradition, but are instead at the heart of it.

Saturday 2:00 PM, ME/ CT: Panel

I Spy, I Fear, I Wonder: Espionage Fiction and the Fantastic. Don
D'Ammassa, C. C. Finlay (M), James D. Macdonald, Chris Nakashima-Brown,
John Shirley
** (Non-Participant) Moderator **

In his afterword to The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross makes a bold
pair of assertions: Len Deighton was a horror writer (because "all cold-
war era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear
annihilation") while Lovecraft wrote spy thrillers (with their "obsessive
collection of secret information"). In fact, Stross argues that the
primary difference between the two genres is that the threat of the
"uncontrollable universe" in horror fiction "verges on the overwhelming,"
while spy fiction "allows us to believe for a while that the little people
can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over" it. This
is only one example of the confluence of the espionage novel with the
genres of the fantastic; the two are blended in various ways in Neal
Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Tim Powers' Declare, William Gibson's Spook
County, and, in the media, the Bond movies and The Prisoner. We'll survey
the best of espionage fiction as it reads to lovers of the fantastic. Are
there branches of the fantastic other than horror to which the spy novel
has a special affinity or relationship?

Sunday 10:00 AM, Vineyard: Kaffeeklatsch

Sunday 12:00 Noon, ME/ CT: Discussion (60 min.)

Mainstream and Genre. Amelia Beamer, C. C. Finlay, Gary K. Wolfe with F.
Brett Cox, Ken Houghton, Eric M. Van
** Leader (Participant / Moderator) **

The (independently conceived) presentations by Finlay and Beamer & Wolfe
raise so many interesting questions about the relationship of the
mainstream to genre fiction that we thought we'd toss them together with
our attendees for an hour of spirited discussion. What relationship did
the postwar boomlet of slipstream fiction have to the long history of the
fantastic identified by Finlay? Was there any relationship between the
exile of the fantastic from the mainstream in the early 50s and the
contemporaneous ascendancy of well-defined and exclusive genres? When the
mainstream and genre began cohabiting again (in the UK in the 60s during
The New Wave, or recently in the US with the likes of Michael Chabon and
Jonathan Lethem), can this be fruitfully viewed as a return to the
earliest tradition, or is it best viewed as the marriage of two now
thoroughly estranged parties?

Sunday 1:00 PM, VT: Group Reading

Beneath Ceaseless Skies Group Reading (60 min.) Scott H. Andrews (host)
with Saladin Ahmed, S. C. Butler, Michael DeLuca, C. C. Finlay

Readings from the semimonthly online zine of literary adventure fantasy
edited by Andrews.

Sunday 2:30 PM, NH / MA: Reading (30 min.)

from The Demon Redcoat.

I'm bringing raecarson with me to the BCS reading. "The Crystal Stair" was at least 90% her work, even though both our names were on it, and it'll be the first chance for the two of us to do a reading together. We'll have to figure out how we're going to do that on our way to Boston.

And also, holy cow, I have a lot of preparation yet to do! I better get working.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

http://www.locusmag.com/

Bookseller: Chris Beckett's collection The Turing Test won the 2009 Edge Hill Short Story Prize; Edge Hill University announcement

http://www.locusmag.com/

July Internet Review of SF features Gary Westfahl, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Lois Tilton, Niall Harrison, and others

http://www.locusmag.com/

The Agony Column interviews China Miéville

http://www.locusmag.com/

BSC's Summer 6-pack features recommendations of novels to read this summer

http://www.locusmag.com/

YouTube: Authors@Google: Nisi Shawl

http://www.locusmag.com/

NY Times: James Frey and co-writer Jobie Hughes have sold YA series about aliens teenagers who hide on Earth

http://www.locusmag.com/

Macworld: Neuromancer at 25

http://www.locusmag.com/

July Quantum Muse has stories by Sho Ray, Steven Saus, Helen Henley, Jennavier Gilbert, and others

http://www.locusmag.com/

Beneath Ceaseless Skies has stories by Caroline M. Yoachim and James Lecky and audio fiction by Richard Parks

http://www.universalhub.com/node/26200

What species of tree is so hardy it can grow in this most barren and desolate of landscapes, two or three stories up the front of City Hall? Can mountain goats be far behind?

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I upgraded AIM. It sent out an e-mail telling people I didn't have their AIM names. I apologize if you got one.

http://www.apexbookcompany.com/blog/2009/07/win-a-copy-of-open-your-eyes/

http://www.apexbookcompany.com/?p=1081

Artist Dominic has posted a contest on his blog PALADIN FREELANCE for a copy of Paul Jessup’s surrealist space opera OPEN YOUR EYES. Rules for contest entry are online here!

Praise for OPEN YOUR EYES:

“Open Your Eyes is surrealistic space opera in the tradition of New Wave experimentalism, echoing the fantastic imagery of Samuel R. Delany and the angst-ridden identity paranoia of Philip K. Dick, all bound together in a distinctly modern vision of a post-technological future bereft of a human core. Jessup’s bone spaceships and resurrecting crews tumble into the core of a mystery which is consuming the very hearts of suns. Go along for the ride, and open your eyes.”
—Jay Lake, author of Escapement and Green

“With unique imagination at work, Open Your Eyes bombards the reader with stunning imagery, from living spaceships to mechanical butterflies.”
—Ekaterina Sedia, author of Alchemy of Stone and The Secret History of Moscow

“In Jessup’s supernova-bright novella, his first stand-alone publication, pregnant space voyager Ekhi is rescued from her ailing vessel by the crew of a scavenger ship. Their captain, mysterious, doll-like cyborg Itsasu, mourns her husband’s death, and has been yearning to bring him back to life with the “Ortzadar engine” her ship is secretly carrying. She reluctantly allows Ekhi to join her crew, but keeps her under strict supervision. The other crew members struggle with various personal issues brought sharply into perspective by a sudden alien invasion and the discovery that the ship’s AI is playing a deadly game of its own. Jessup describes his surrealistic space opera vision with bleak, elegant prose and a dash of black humor.”
Publishers Weekly (April 2009)

I'm calling the week a success, though I can't actually say for sure that I put my hour in on Thursday because I forgot to look at the clock. I finished polishing up a story and sent it off that day, plus did a little more tweaking on the old novel chapter, so I'm assuming it was at least an hour and therefore a success.

Other hours verified and a little extra time put in over the past two days, but not as much as I'd hoped. The math story (well, it isn't really a math story, but there are math elements to it, as well as physics, chemistry, aliens that aren't really aliens, and me making a bit of mockery of the worst job I ever had) had its second half chopped off and rewritten, which is still a work in progress. I think it might fit the antho I was rewriting it for better this way, but I'm still not sure how it ends. It went from 7k down to 4k and is now back up around 6k, so will probably wind up settling out around 7.5 over the next day or two for this draft, then trimming back a bit in revisions. Also had a hint of an idea for a further potential short, but that's going to have to simmer on the back burner for a while.

Looks like I won't be starting right in on the novel this week, but hopefully by Friday I'll have the shorts finished up and be ready. I'll put in a little more work on the mathish story tonight (working title, which will likely change: Alien Spaces) once I finish up some other projects. And one of these days I'm going to fulfill a promise I made to a Clarion West littermate and write that story about a little girl picking posies for Grandma.

Grandma should probably be very afraid.

Speaking of afraid, I think it's time for me to sign off because there is a very creepy UPS ad that keeps staring at me from the sidebar of my screen--a cardboard man who occasionally swings his legs like he's waiting for something, and the caption says "We do more than shipping." Is it just me, or does that sound like a threat? And why is he sitting so protectively on that body-sized box? Don't get me wrong, I love the creep factor; I'm just thinking that was probably not the image they were going for.

So, it occurred to me: my friends list is chock-full of both musically literate people and curmudgeons -- sometimes both at once.

So here's my question: is it possible to dislike Aaron Copeland music?

I mean, I can totally see liking other stuff better -- but is it possible to just not like it at all?