I’ve wondered for a long time exactly what it is that SF editors do for a living. I mean, I know what it is that they basically do, but there are a lot of questions I had about how they do their jobs. An interviewer for Clarkeworld Magazine recently corralled a bunch of them and grilled them for a while. The interview is interesting.
Im pretty sure that nobody reads this thing anymore. I sure wouldn’t, but if you are, you may have noticed that a lot of content is missing. I went through the thing and deleted some articles that I did not think fit in with the purpose of the blog. The funny thing is, the blog still really has no purpose. Anyway, I’ll probably keep this place and use it as a basic bull-shit board for SF issues, and family stuff, but I am working on something new and big and (hopefully) important. I’m not going to tip my hat just yet, because the new place is still in the process of being set up, and I’d like to have some content on it before I get going, but Ill be sure to announce its existence when its ready.
For anyone who cares, Hugo nominations are now open!
Time for the 2008 yearly wrap up. Having had this blog for almost two years, I still cannot find a good use for it. This year I seriously contemplated using it to review SF movies and TV, but never got off my ass and did it. However, I will be shortly reviewing the entirety of BSG and Lost again, as I get ready for the January launch for both series, and I have recently acquired disk one of The Prisoner and the entire first season of The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Oh! And my new favorite, The U.S. version of Life on Mars will be starting up soon. Maybe Ill give it a go.
This year for the book review blog was great. I actually got a number of new books read, and I think I’m finally at a point where I can write them quickly and they don’t suck. Yes, I know. It took long enough. I just did a review of the book Dune which I am really proud of. I stayed away from my usual clinical style and just went with it and I think it turned out really nicely. But other than that I am finally getting comfortable working with all these literary concepts which I have ignored up until now. This year I think I posted 129 reviews, and I have 5 in the can, two I am working on, and five graphic novels I will probably get posted before the end of the year. That is a total of 141 reviews for the year. A lot for me, but I changed my plan of opening a separate review site for short stories and instead have begun to add important and award winning stories to the main list. According to my new search page, I have 14 up now (ten new in 2008), and an additional 8 novelettes (6 new in 2008), so all-in-all I have been cranking them out. And as much as I love reading old SF and finding new stories, I am getting a bit crispy around the edges. I will probably scale back to one novel and one short story per week for the reviews. My goal will still be to review the best of the best (or at least, everything that I personally love). Adding the short stories to the list, I now have about 2000 items to get to before I die. Gentlemen! Start your engines! The good news is that everyone on my mom’s side of the family, which is where most of my genetics came from, live to be in their 90’s, and never really get old-people crazy until the end. So…I got that going for me.
Thanks to the diligence of my dear brother, the website is shaping up nicely. I have already introduced some substantial chages to the search features, and more will come. There are a ton of behind-the-scenes features that the average user will never see, but I have some humdingers coming up in the next month or so. Some people have told me how much they love the search engine. I still have a lot of work to do to get it all right, but when I do, and when I get a lot of reviews done, I have hopes that it will be one of the best “what should I read next?” type databases available on the internet. Someone even mentioned to me that they want to submit it for fan-effort Hugo (giggle!!!) How cool would a Hugo be in my office? Plus, I might even put up advertising then. Oh, come on and let a crazy man dream!!!
Family was great in 2008, but the money…She go away. We wanted to add a floor to our home this year. Now we are wondering how we are going to put our 3 and 6 year olds through college. Everyone keeps telling me that you cannot blame a president for how the economy goes. Screw that. Bush and his ‘visers done screwed the pooch here. I cannot wait until January 20th. I wish I could be there to watch him walk away. The great crime is that he still has no idea just how evil he really is, and no matter what people tell him, Im sure he never will. I have also spit out the bite of hopefulness I took from Obama’s apple. I think that he will be better, but he’s got a lot of things to do. As long as he can fix this mortgate crisis, I will call him a success. My suggestion is to take some bail-out money and do two things: First, pay down some mortgates, with more money going to those who are in real trouble. Second, back the remaining mortgates with the FDIC in exchange for rates going to 3% o 4% flat. In my opinon that will do two things. First, it will give money to the banks that need it in a way such that some better good is done with it than just giving it to them. Second, it will free up quite a bit of income that otherwise would have gone into the hole of decreasing realty. This whole goddam crisis is about faith in the system. If people have free cash to spend or save, then confidence will return. As it is everyone’s mortgage rate is increasing, which takes money away from floating the consumer economy. This will fix that. And to those of you who say that we need change so that the future is “sustainable,” I say fuck you, not only because the overuse of that word bothers the hell out of me, but also because the only way we get change at this point is to take it in the pooper first, and nodoby is really ready for that. The extent of change in this situation should be re-regulation, which Bush and his ‘visers totally screwed-up, and balancing the books of the middle class. That is the only way we are going to get through this and maintain our lifestyles, and our economy. Pure and simple. OK. Rant over.
Next year looks like it may be pretty good. If my company makes it through this next depression, then I should get a promotion. My level of experience jumed quite a bit this year, and so did my job satisfaction. I will stay there for as long as I can, but the pay is a bit low for my level of experience. We’ll see.
So that’s it for ‘08, the year I wish that wasn’t. Hope yours was better. And if you are an old friend coming by because I just posted this, hop by T(A)U too and say hello!
Is it “memo” with e, like a backwards e-mail? Or it refers to the memory funcition of passes along knowledge. Although this computer is my ancillary brain, I suppose I can buy that. These things seem to be dominating blogs these days. This is my first, and since I still cannot figure out how to run a SF book review site, a SF forum and a SF blog, maybe this will be a good way to figure it all out. Anywho, here goes:
This one’s called “All About Books” and I picked it up from Bill at From a Sci-Fi Standpoing; apparently this one has been passed around like a castrati at a Gothic kegger, meaning that I’m probably the last person to do this one. Here it is.
Hardback or trade paperback or mass market paperback?
Hardbacks for sure, even if I have have to go to a SFBC copy because the true first edition was a pb original. There is just something about a hardback that appeals to me.
Bookmark or dog-ear?
I wont buy a used hb if it has dog ears. No matter what.
Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random?
I’m anal in my alphabetization. I currently have five or six new books to work in, and it really bothers me that I have not gotten to them yet.
Keep, throw away or sell?
I usually keep book around until I have decided whether or not I will ever read them again. If I won’t, I sell them for credit at my favorite local used-book store, Beer’s Books in Sacramento. Rarely will I give them away. I think that people should buy their own books. I used to give books as gifts, but I got tired of the plain stares I got when I asked the people I gave them to questions about the book later. They never read them, IOW. Plus, I’m a tightwad.
Keep dust jacket or toss it?
There is a special place in Hell for people who throw away dust jackets. I fully intend to ask God to let my wife out of it for throwing away a few dust jackets I had sitting on top of the bookshelf a few years ago.
Last book you bought?
Don A. Stuart’s (pseudonym for the legendary John W. Campbell) A New Dawn collection. Truly a great body of work.
Last book someone bought for you?
Last year for my birthday someone gave me a $50 gift card for Borders. I bought a bunch of books with that. Before that? I can’t remember for sure, but my boss buys me books all the time for professional development, and I read most of them. The last one was a treatise on insurance coverage law.
What are some of the books on your to-buy list?
Looking on my Amazon Wish List, I see the following: Four Ursula K. Le Guin books (The Birthday of the World, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, and Four Ways to Forgiveness), The Millennium, by Upton Sinclair, Aniara, An Epic SF Poem, by Harry Martinson, Kalki and Messiah, both by Gore Vidal, Fitzpatrick’s War, by Theodore Judson, The Atrocity Exhibition, by J.G. Ballard, and at least three pages of others. All of these (and everything on my list) is SF. I have been collecting SF by authors who you would never have suspected of writing SF before, as you can clearly tell.
Collection (short stories, same author) or anthology (short stories, different author)?
Again, Dangerous Visions, for sure. I collect these things as I go along, and I have read most of the major ones already. I want to read some more of the Orbit series, edited by Damon Knight. Three of the books I mentioned above by Le Guin are collections.
Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, or the velvety embrace of Death?
A bullet in the head, please.
Morning reading, afternoon reading, or nighttime reading?
On the weekends I’m a nooner. Other than that, after I wrestle the tots off to bed.
The books you need to go with other books on your shelves?
I’ll get to it when I get to it. I prefer to buy books based on my more immediate wants and desires.
Do you read anywhere and anytime you can or do you have a set reading time and/or place?
I used to get a lot done on the crapper. Now I read in bed.
Do you have seasonal reading habits?
Who came up with this question?
Do you read one book at a time or do you have two or more books going at once?
I am currently in the middle of nine books, all in various states of completion. I keep notes of everything I want to note in my reviews/essays, and I have a life-long habit of reading multiple books at one time, so I’m good at keeping them all straight in my head.
What are your pet peeves about the way people treat books?
The lemming-like mentality of crowding around the “hottest new thing,” 99% of the time of which is usually the same re-tread crappola.
Name one book you surprised yourself by liking
The Martian General’s Daughter, by Theodore Judson. I got it as a freebie in the mail. I wound up adding a new favorite author to my list.
How often do you read a book and not review it on your blog? What are your reasons for not blogging about a book?
About 18 percent of the time, looking at my records for this year and last (the only years I have been reviewing them).
Well, its pretty obvious that this place may not have a place in my life, given that I run two other sites. I’m still not sure what this place should be for. I wanted to do some sort of book collecting thing, but there just is not too much to say about that that has not been already said on other blogs, and to tell the truth, I’m not so motivated for that anyway. So….I guess Ill just continue with family stuff for now. I’m not even sure my family looks here, but whatever. That can be fixed.
The little daughter’s birthday party was last Saturday, the 24th. We had planned on doing bagels, coffee and champagne from 10 to noon outside, but for some strange reason it rained here. That never happens, so we had 16 adults and 14 kiddos stuffed into our 890 square foot house. I hate crowds usually, but I really had fun. I met the parents of a lot of my kid’s friends, and my best friend Mark and another guy I really like, Jonas came too. I also met a guy I wish I had made more effort to talk to. Mark, I think. Sylvia told me after the party that his ears really pricked up when I was talking about my book review page with my brother and Mark, and she saw him looking at my book collection. I think that there just might be a real-life fan in my midst! God, wouldnt that be cool. I love Mark to death, but he is a literary snob, and if its anything but Gibson, he just laughs. The fool.
Anyway, the kids had a blast. Binks turned 3 the week before. She got over tired and started whining and crying before the party was over, but that was fine. Everyone got over-sugared, but that was fine too. A good time was had by all.
A co-worker of mine had some extra tickets through a friend of his for the annual Monster Jam in Sacramento last Saturday. He invited me and my son to go with him and his buddy who bought the tickets. I have not been to one of these things since I was a yout in VA (where incidentally they called it a “Monster Truck and Tractor Pull, because they had souped-up tractors pulling things), but I had a hell of a good time. We saw the monster truck called Undertaker, and like five or six others, along with a bunch of regular 4×4’s racing, and some bikes doing some pretty amazing jumps.
Except for my friend, who is 1/2 Japanese, my son, who is 1/2 Filipino, and the odd Mexican or two, it was a sea of white trash. For those of you who are from the Sacramento area, it was like all of North Sac and Rio Linda emptied into Arco Arena for the evening. Ive never seen so many mullets in my entire life. And when I say mullets, I mean the kind like they had on that old show, The Mullets. Everywhere I turned I saw a racing jacket advertising auto parts that was like two sizes too small, platinum blond hair that had not been cut in years, and dirty little kids running around like mad-people. It was just a few steps away from freak show.
And boy-oh-boy, were they selling America. They had the Air Force honor guard there, a Hummer with the faces of Iraqi war dead painted on it, a 30′ American flag and cranked up Lee Greenwood. The best part was the guy sitting in front of me with the pierced C-spine and the half-naked (HOT!) girlfriend, who halfway through God Bless the USA raised his hand in a Ronnie James Dio salute and screamed at the top of his lungs,”I love my flag, man!!!”
But the best part of the show was the way my son reacted to it. He was as excited as I have ever seen him. He was jumping up and down, pumping his fists in the air, screaming for joy and waiving his Undertaker flag wide and proud. The next day he told me that he dreamed of Undertaker the night before, and “it was cool!” I think I’m going to go to this again next year. It was noisy, it stank, and it was NOT my typical crowd, but the boy and I had a great time. He usually shies away from crowds and loud noise, but this was definately something not to be missed for him.
OK, I’m gonna go ahead and call it for 2007. I started seriously writing and posting book reviews exactly one year ago today, with S.M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire, posted on Dunenovels (for want of anyplace better) on 12/27/2006. Since then reviewing books has become a complete obsession for me. I was always a voracious reader, but this year I decided to try to do something fun with my pastime that was new. I really hope that you agree.
In the last year I have gotten some very nice compliments from readers. I have also gotten some excellent feedback from authors whom I love. Charles Stross told me that he liked my review of Missile Gap, but left it at that. David Marusek told me that I was the only reviewer to hit on one of the major themes in his book Counting Heads, which was the loneliness in a technologically advanced society. One of the reasons I started doing these things in the first place was because I was inspired by David Itzkoff’s review of the same book, so that really got my blood pumping! I even corresponded with James Gunn regarding my review of The Listeners. He was very complimentary, and even pointed out that I omitted discussion of one important literary device he used, which was the way the interpersonal communication in each chapter corresponded with and reflected the way the aliens were communicating with us. I made the decision to omit that part because 1) of length; and, 2) because I was afraid I couldn’t do the issue justice. I promised him I would rewrite the thing soon, and I’m now very nervous about sending him my review of The Joy Makers. I’ve posted that review, but maybe I will think about it a little bit more before I send it to him.
This last calendar year I read well over 100 genre novels. I have posted reviews of 95 of them, and have three more written and subject to proofing, ready to go up on the main reviews site, for a one-year total of 98 reviews. My goal for year one was 100, so that ain’t bad, is it? Some books that I read (mainly new ones) I thought just were too awful to even bother writing about. There were at least fifteen of those, but probably more like seventeen. There was one book I did not bother finishing, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was as I sit here today. Something by Tanith Lee, but I just cannot remember the title. Anyway, other than that I’m not going to name names, so please don’t ask. I also read books that I meant to write reviews of, such as Allen Steele’s Coyote trilogy, which is about interstellar colonization, but just did not get to them. Now so much time has passed that I’m sure I will have to re-read them to do any justice. I don’t even know where my notes are any longer. By the way, I would have given each book three stars.
So as rewarding and gratifying to me this whole thing has been, I hope most of all that you get something out of reading the reviews. I think when I started this my main purpose was to get conversations going about books that I loved. Unfortunately I tend to love books that have been relegated to the dust heap of time, or niche novels that nobody has ever heard of. For Christ’s sake I got all excited this year about two Chad Oliver collections I was given. Has anyone but me even heard of Chad Oliver? I’m pretty sure I’m not ever going to get much conversation about his books, which is one reason I consider all the time reviewing newer books. Also, I can actually sell the newer reviews, so there’s that too. There is just a greater chance the genre readers have read a new release, and remember it enough to discuss it. But doing reviews of newer books is much different than the older ones. People tend to get pissed at you if you spoil newer books.
So, thanks to all of you who keep apprised of what I am doing at the book review site. I really appreciate your participation, and thank you very much for your attention. I’m pretty sure I would keep doing this even if I was the only one who ever visited. But you have no idea how nice it is to know that you actually are there and interested.
Occasionally I will see a listing for a book on eBay that says that the book I am considering is “remainder marked.” Ive had a friend ask me lately what that meant, as she had encountered it too on eBay. Basically a remainder in publishing and in the music business is the same thing: Its returned product that the retailer was not able to sell after initial release or after an overzealous printer puts too many copies of a re-release. Here is how it works:
Sometimes publishers overestimate the market for a particular book. Sometimes the publisher will decide to print more than they can reasonably expect retailers to sell and actually anticipate some copies will go unsold. Publishers understand that books, especially hardbacks, have a limited shelf life, and that booksellers only have so much shelf space to display books on. So they allow retailers to return unsold books in bulk. At the point in time that this happens the initial demand has usually died down, so if there are more than a few copies, the publisher acknowledges that they will never be able to sell them in the marketplace, so they make them remainders by marking them and selling them for pennies on the dollar.
How are they marked? Usually in different ways. It used to be that they were marked the same way that unsold albums were marked: By a hold drilled somewhere in the hard cover. These days they usually take an easier approach and draw a thick black line on the bottom of the outside pages. Here is an example of the most typical type of mark:
Someone just aligns the books, turns them all over, and runs down the line with a marker drawing on them all, never picking the marker up. For some reason this guy took a return pass, but thats the way it goes, huh? Ive also seen much more blatant markings, such as one entire edge being painted purple, yellow or black, and Ive seen other marks that are so subtle that you would swear that someone made a mistake and accidentally marked a book. Usually when a publisher is trying to be subtle they will put a small stamp of some figure on the book somewhere, usually never under the covers, but on the spine or the end papers. I have been meaning to send out messages to my list of publishers to ask if they could tell me how they mark remainders, but have not gotten around to doing that yet. I suspect that many will not tell me, especially if they do a subtle mark.
Whenever you purchase a used hardback book, or even a new one, you should be aware to look around for a remainder mark. If a book has one, it is of course worth less on the collector’s market because it is defaced.
Considering that I am an adult, I think I have watched way too many episodes of the Teletubbies. I doubt that there is a person on the planet who has not heard of these sweet little dimwits. Four monochromatic pudge-pots with televisions built into their stomachs, only slightly less annoying than their producer’s next project, Boobah. That one pretty much takes the cake for insipid entertainment. But for anyone save a two to three year old, Teletubbies are up there pretty high on the annoy-o-meter. It was around my hundredth episode (hey, I love my kids, OK?) that I started to really wonder what kind of mind could produce such an educational travesty. I mean, I know that the Tubbies have been subjected to interpretive criticism before. I personally found the US Senate had hearings on the sexual orientation of one of them to be fascinating and penetrating. But those kinds of complaints are just situational; just little nibbles at the truth. I prefer a wholesome chomp whenever I want to dig my fangs into something, and this was no exception.
I ran through some ideas, and put some thought into each one before discarding it. But I got nowhere and in fact found the truth to be quite elusive. In short, I swiftly came to an impasse in my deconstruction of the Teletubbies. But one fateful day I brought the subject up with my brother. At the time I was playing with the idea that the show was a multi-layered expression of naturalism. I mean, on a philosophical level the Tubbies can’t seem to figure out what the heck is going on. For all they know the magic fairies come at night and leave them cool toys that they play with until their inner Gods speak to them through their stomachs. They also seem dedicated to expressing social mores in non-verbal ways so as to inculcate the babes in the audience.
On an an artistic level the thing looks like its shot on a set, but the outside scenes are really well done, and the lighting looks as natural as any I have ever seen. That part is kind of beautiful, like that new iPod advertisement where the people are standing outside on a street on an early summer evening in front of a black tarp.
From a hedonistic perspective, as far as I can tell those little buggers are naked as jaybirds.
But I was getting nowhere. I could not reconcile the Baby-in-the-Sun image, which seemed to me to be more of a zoo keeper than a benevolent and warm God figure. I also couldn’t get my mind around their habitat, which seems to be a submerged saucer, and has a definite industrial feel to it. Then there is the robot, and when I mentioned that, the light shined on my brother’s face. “Dude,” he said to me. “What if this is a SF genre story?” I was a little taken aback at first, not because the idea was shocking, but because that was pretty much what I had been talking around for weeks. “Of course!” I said. So we spent a little while analyzing the imagery in the show.
In a nutshell, here it is. There are four chubby moon-faced morons, Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, La-La and Po, who spend the entire show interacting with each other and simple objects. The four each are of different sizes, signifying different ages, have different body colors, and most importantly, have different facial skin colors from pasty white to mulatto, and one with an East Asian looking skin hue. Every fifteen minutes or so a pinafore-looking radio tower sends out a TV signal that is received by the antenna each Teletubby has on their head, and shown on the TV screen in one of their stomachs. The shorts that they watch together usually show a human child interacting with the world and experiencing some new phenomenon. Sometimes there are African children looking at exotic animals. Then a British kid looking at frogs in his back yard. Or an Aussie kid looking at a car, or something basic like that. When they are not watching shorts, they are playing with simple objects that they find around their home, such as balls, bicycles, doors, and the like. Toys and simple machines only. That is pretty much the show, but there are some setting and background elements that are relevant here.
As I mentioned above the Teletubbies live in an underground saucer of sorts. In their domain they are cared for by a snout-nosed vacuum cleaner/robot that helps them get food (”Tubby-Toast), cleans up after them, and tells them how to do certain things. Each morning the sun rises, of course, but the inside the sun is the visage of the face of a caucasian baby. The baby only giggles, but whenever he does so, it seems to prompt the Teletubbies to action. The Teletubbies live and sleep in the underground saucer, and wake up every day to go out into the world to experience what ever has been left for them by some unknown hand. Moreover, the Tubby’s saucer is in the bottom of a little valley, which the Tubbies never leave. We see nothing outside the inner rim walls. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a glimpse of a ruined Cleveland or Detroit over the rise! The depression itself has a few small trees, lots of flowers, and giant bunnies all over the place.
So from a genre point of view, this show looks post-apocalyptic to me. The Tubbies are GM versions of the various races who have been brought back to life from the preserved corpses of the war dead. Unfortunately the aliens who did this had no adult humans to show them how to raise children, since they obviously came so long after the nuclear deluge, but they do have children’s videos, and they show them to the Teletubbies every fifteen minutes or so during the day as a way of teaching them how to behave like a human should. They concentrate on human baby stories because the Teletubbies themselves are so immature and need the basics first. The saucer is a bunker of sorts set up by the alien overlords, whose avatar watches the Tubbies through the artificial sun. The fact that the thing is shot on an outside set only reinforces the feeling that the world is manufactured, not naturally occurring. The bunker is buried in the Earth to prevent too much radiation exposure during the night. I think that the dim-wittery of even the largest (thus oldest) Teletubby is indicative of the damaging amount of radiation in their post-apocalyptic environment. They basically start out as little morons, like all humans did, and age into bigger morons because of the radiation’s effects on their immature brains. I must admit though, the giant bunnies confuse me a bit. If I let my imagination run wild, I could easily see ordinary rabbits evolving because of massive background radiation into something fierce with lots of bulk, fangs and a bad attitude. Kind of like that drawing in the original GM’s guide from TSR’s game Gamma World. My hypothesis is that the alien overlords took those ferocious creatures and modified them to be docile again. That the Tubbies never approach the bunnies very closely only shows an inherent fear in them, perhaps of still remaining fangs and a wicked case of proximity anxiety. Or, perhaps the bunnies are there to teach the Tubbies to live in harmony with their environment, and thus eliminate the possibility of the Tubbies descendants ever going to war again. Or maybe the Tubbies are being taught animal husbandry skills, for when they mature and grow their molars. I don’t know.
There are obviously some unanswered questions. Are the aliens like the helpful kinds of aliens from the movie A.I. who want nothing more then to bring us back from the dead and understand us? Are the slightly more self-motivated kinds of aliens who want to bring us back and take our genetic material, like the Oankali in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy? Or do they just need an army of soldiers to recapture their home planet from Ming the Merciless? Anyway, I think I’m on to something, but I haven’t found anyone else on the web that agrees with me. Perhaps those seeking the truth will find this in a Google search and witness their beliefs to me by comment.