George Scithers, founding editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, has died. Those whose science fiction reading habit started after his tenure there may know little about him (especially since his reputation has been eclipsed by subsequent Asimov’s editors like Shawna McCarthy and Gardner Dozois), but many writers working in the field today remember two particular things about him:
His love of short, 1-2 page pun stories (sometimes called “Feghoots,” after Reginald Bretnor’s “Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot” series of stories, of which Scithers published many).
His use of an army of editorial assistants to personally comment on every rejection and sign his name. So an aspiring writer submitting to Asimov’s wouldn’t just get back a form rejection letter, they’d get back a slightly personalized form rejection letter with a tiny scribbled comment like “Needs work” or “Getting better,” with Scither’s name scrawled at the end.
Strangely, this combination may have done more to encourage new science fiction writers than anyone else of that era. You’d read one of those pun stories and go “That’s terrible! I could write a better story than that!” (And, eventually, you could.) Plus, once you got back your rejection, you’d notice the personalization and go “Ah-ha! A personal rejection slip! I’m getting close! Any day now I’ll sell a story!” Of such small, innocuous frauds were many a notable career launched.
The puns aside, Scither’s wasn’t a bad editor, and he won two Hugos at Asimov’s (to go along with two for editing his fanzine Amra). I never sold anything to him (being all of 17, with a single non-fiction sale to The Space Gamer under my belt, when he left the magazine probably had something to do with that), but he did well enough that the magazine survived, and I made my first fiction sale to Gardner Dozois in 1990.
Perhaps you’ve heard or read me mention how Exterminator City is the worst film ever made. (The preceding sentence has an Amazon link to the DVD, but you should not buy or watch Exterminator City. Trust me.)
But now that I’ve been hearing about it, could After Last Season actually be worse? Well, let’s take a look at the official trailer, shall we?
Wow. 93 minutes of footage to chose from, and that’s what they thought would entice people into theaters? “C’mon, honey, we have to see this! It has people talking about directions, a fake MRI scanner covered in paper, and bad CGI circa 1985! What are we waiting for?’
OK, maybe they just didn’t know how to make a trailer. Maybe some movie reviewers have found it an undiscovered gem.
Maybe not.
“This isn’t just the worst film of the year, this is the worst theatrically released film of the decade” raves Ain’t It Cool News’ movie critic Massawyrm. “I will even go so far as to say that it is the worst theatrically distributed film of the modern era. Terrible lighting and sound is just the beginning of this fetid, painful, epic wonderland of suck. A truly unbelievable experience. It’s almost adorable how hard they try to convince you that an unfinished basement, sheets, cardboard and printer paper is a medical facility of any value. It’s kind of like a kid wearing a towel and a bucket trying to convince you he’s a knight. If you watch this, and I know some of you will, do not, I repeat, do not watch it alone. Get friends. You’ll need them when the movie slips into screensaver mode. And beer. Lots of beer. Trust me. Sober is no way to experience After Last Season.”
“After Last Season is as bad as it looks,” opines Hammer To Nails’ David Lowry, “but its badness is of such a quizzical sort that it transcends mere incompetence. It is formally engaging, because it is so formally incorrect. It is not at all unlike its trailer, in that it primarily consists of a series of choices that seem to have been made entirely arbitrarily, in service of a plot that is buried in non sequitur. To watch the film is to take in the vision of someone with a severe case of disconnection: what is most consistently striking about the film is that the gap between conception and realization is irreparably wide. The most direct example (even moreso than the cardboard MRI scanner) occurs when a character reads a story in the newspaper – and that newspaper is represented by a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper, fresh from the inkjet printer, upon which has been printed the words ‘Morning News.’”
“From a technical standpoint, After Last Season is an abysmal entry,” says Picture Show Pundits’ Nate Zoebl. “It fails not just because of its lack of funds but it fails because [Director Mark] Region lacks any filmmaking ability whatsoever. Sure, apparently the man was able to pose actors, have them recite lines, and keep the cameras running, but I expect more from my movies than the same criteria I have for family vacation videos. Region’s directorial style is, ostensibly, to have no discernible visual sensibility at all. Actors will routinely be cut out from the camera frame or the spatial relations will be completely out of whack, allowing for tremendous space above heads or showing the actor’s complete body except the upper half of the face. Characters will be bunched in one tiny section of the screen, or Region will suddenly cut back and forth between two different shots that conflict from a geographic standpoint; they don’t visually match up. There isn’t a single shot anywhere in After Last Season that couldn’t have been credited to a tripod for complete creative inspiration….the movie is technically inept on every level of filmmaking with a bad script, bad actors, bad pacing, bad direction, bad sets, bad sound coverage, bad ‘special effects,’ and really bad editing. If Region was dreaming of creating a midnight-movie sensation like The Room then he missed the mark. This movie isn’t any fun whatsoever to watch because there’s not enough going on to laugh at. With The Room, every scene had like eight things wrong with it; that film was a 1000 brushstrokes of bad. With After Last Season, it’s the same forehead-smacking flaws repeated ad nausium. There’s no derisive joy to be had here, folks.”
And my favorite theory about the movie, from Nick Nobel at Your Stupid Minds: “My theory is that Mark Region was in group therapy for a mild social or psychological disorder. As part of his treatment, one assignment involved a creative writing project dealing with his disorder in some way. Region wrote a short screenplay and, compared to the others, it wasn’t too shabby. Ego boosted, he expanded it into a feature and spent the next 10 years hounding friends and family for money to produce it….The way the lines are written, again, feels like someone with a social disorder imitating how normal people interact. I’m sure that was part of the assignment as well.”
Need one final bit of evidence? On the film’s official site, the first favorable quote is from a random Amazon customer review, while second is from a random IMDB user review. (Danger, Will Robinson!)
For the record, for those of you I regularly view movies with (you know who you are), do not obtain this movie and inflict it on me. After Exterminator City, I’ve come to realize there are limits to how bad a film I’m willing to sit through. After Last Season sounds like it could very well exceed those limits.
On the other hand, reading about it did accomplish one thing: I think I may now be ready to see The Room…
And just for the sake of reference, here’s the robot swordfight scene from Exterminator City. Remember: This is the best scene in the entire movie.
By now you’ve probably heard that Kage Baker died of a particularly aggressive form of cancer on January 31 of this year. I did not know Baker (I may have said hello in passing one Armadillocon), and thus have no particular insight into her as a person. Her death probably makes The Women of Neil Gwynne’s, the tale of a bordello in the employ of a cabal of Victorian Steampunk inventors, a prohibitive Hugo and Nebula favorite.
Alas, I have the same response to this that I had to Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, another Subterranean novella from her I read last year: Competently executed work that largely failed to engage me. Not everyone can be Tim Powers, but there’s an art to writing mock Victoriana, and Baker just didn’t nail it here. There’s a certain dry English reserve, but nothing from Ben Johnson/Oscar Wilde axis of cutting dry wit that really makes a work of this sort sparkle. Plus it doesn’t help that the real plot doesn’t get started until a third of the way into the book.
I know Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is regarded as a classic, and the version I read (the U.S. first edition) evidently suffers from being “double-translated” (Polish to French to English), but this is still a bit of a dated slog. The characters combine the flat-effect of stereotyped scientists with the foolish incompetence of a horror-movie protagonist. Strangely enough, the only time the book really came alive to me was when all action ceased in favor of a an entire chapter of infodump on the various forms the living ocean created on the surface; it’s a shame Lem decided to spend the majority of the novel on the truly tedious psychological struggles of the deeply uninteresting characters examining the living ocean rather than the ocean itself.
Austin skiffy fans with long memories may remember that I won the Bruce Sterling Rant Off at an Armadillocon lo these many years ago. This means that I am authorized to act as a Low Calorie Bruce Sterling Substitute, should the need arise.
What you may not know is that Bruce Sterling has another evil twin, or at least one Sandeep Gupta, who blatantly plagiarized the text of Bruce’s book The Hacker Crackdown and republished it as Hacking in the Computer World.
And for those that didn’t know it, Bruce released the entire book as literary freeware back in 1994, a copy of which can be found here.
Sayeth Bruce: “This is awesome! I always wanted to be a globally-aware Indian-writing-in-English. Me and Rushdie, man! From now on I’m gonna be ‘Sandeep Gupta’ whenever I please!”
I stopped dealing books on ABE Books eight years ago because it was obvious they wanted to nickle-and-dime dealers to death, as well as force us to sign up for third party re-sale programs that were previously voluntary. Plus the people in charge didn’t strike me as the smartest knives in the toolbox.
Speaking of ABE stupidity, over at SF Signal I noticed this link to an ABE article on the most valuable first editions of Philip K. Dick. Below some boilerplate on Philip K. Dick’s life (generally accurate, but nothing anyone couldn’t have written by skimming Wikipedia or Clute & Nichols) there’s a list of “Top 15 Most Collectible Philip K. Dick titles sold on AbeBooks”. The problem is, anyone with a knowledge of Philip K. Dick first editions who looks at the pictures accompanying those fifteen titles can tell the people who put them up didn’t have a freaking clue, as many don’t match the edition they’re illustrating:
The picture accompanying Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is not the Doubleday first edition of 1968 described, but a later UK edition. An example of the real dust jacket for the first edition (albeit an Ex-Library copy) from my own collection is shown below.
The picture accompanying the listing for a UK Gollancz edition signed by Dick could not have been the edition Dick signed, since it is part of the Gollancz Masterworks editions published about two decades after Dick’s death. FWIW, my copy of the true Putnum first edition is shown below.
The edition of Valis shown in the image is not that of the Kerosina Press lettered hardback edition, but the more recent trade paperback reprint. (I have a copy of the slipcased numbered edition signed by Kim Stanley Robinson, but not one of the lettered copies with the Dick signature tipped in.) A scan of the cover of the Kerosina edition is shown below.
The copy of Dr. Bloodmoney shown is not the Gregg Press hardback described, but the true paperback original (PBO) edition mentioned in passing. (All a scan would show is the usual Gregg Press plain green cloth.)
The copy of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick shown is not one of the 1/100 deluxe editions with Dick’s signature tipped in, but rather the regular unsigned edition (which is also the edition I have).
The picture of Solar Lottery shown is not the Gregg Press (first US hardback) edition described, but the PBO. (Again, all a scan would show is the usual Gregg Press plain green cloth.)
The copy of Confessions of a Crap Artist shown is not the Entwhistle hardback described, but one of the trade paperback editions (I own the hardback first, a scan of which is shown below, but I don’t own the paperback, so I can’t tell from sight whether this is one of the essentially simultaneous first edition in wrappers, or the second printing.)
So, out of fifteen books, seven have the wrong picture. That’s pretty piss-poor for an article on collectible books. Then again, ABE frequently does things in a piss-poor manner. Anyone with any familiarity with Dick first editions would have spotted the discrepancies between the text and pictures right away.
And when I said “generally accurate,” there is a significant error in describing why Dick’s works are so valuable:
Because of his relative obscurity throughout much of his life, most of Dick’s works received modest initial print runs. As a result, signed copies of those titles remain very scarce, making Dick one of the most collectible names in modern science fiction.
No, Dick’s early PBOs had runs in the hundreds of thousands (as did most SF paperbacks of that era), and the print run for Dick’s hardback books from mainstream SF publishers, while modest by the standards of bestsellers, were not any smaller than the runs companies like Doubleday did for their other SF writers. Signed Dick books are particularly valuable because he didn’t go to a lot of conventions or do terribly many signings. Also, many of his works published as paperback originals had later small hardback print runs from either small press or UK publishing houses, but they were not initial print runs, they were later editions for the collector or library markets, and they were done not because Dick was obscure, but because he was quite popular among SF readers.
For more reliable information of Dick first editions, I would direct you to L.W. Currey’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors: A Bibliography of First Printings of Their Fiction and Daniel J. Levack’s PKD: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography.
For the record, of the 15 Dick titles they list, I have the first hardback editions of 12 of them (though not in the signed states that made many of the copies listed in the ABE piece so pricey); I lack Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, the Gregg Press Dr. Bloodmoney and the Rich & Cowen World of Chance, which was the first hardback edition of Solar Lottery. I do, however, have a copy of the Cape first hardback edition of The Penultimate Truth, which is rarer than about half the books on their list…
Updated 3/17/10: At least someone at ABE seems to have been paying attention, as many of the wrong images have now been replaced, and the text I singled out as erroneous has been rewritten.
I’ve been meaning to post about the Dan Simmons signing last Tuesday, but it’s been a busy week.
I hadn’t seen Simmons since he came through to sign at Adventures in Crime and Space for (IIRC) The Crook Factory. At the time I did an interview with him for Nova Express, except that I cleverly left the mini-cassette recorder in voice-activated mode, which meant what did get recorded was fragmentary and essentially useless, and Simmons couldn’t fill in the gaps because he was hospitalized for a while. One of the Great Lost Nova Express Interviews.
The BookPeople signing was reasonably well-attended, with about 35-40 people there (less than for Neal Stephenson or Michael Chabon, but more than for Jonathan Carroll). Fred Duarte and Derek Johnson were the only attendees I recognized.
Simmons read from his new book Black Hills, which features an Indian absorbing the ghost of the newly-slain Custer at the Little Bighorn, and later working on Mt. Rushmore. He said one of the reasons he wrote it because he wanted to explore the Genius Loci of a singe place.
Various bits from the QA session after the reading, quoted from memory and therefore no doubt horribly inaccurate:
On jumping between viewpoint characters: “I don’t like to run down the work of other writers, but I read a book whose title rhymes with The Bablinchi Toad, and the viewpoint jumps around horribly to every single character, even minor ones! A messenger enters the scene, and the writer even jumps into his head!”
He spent two weeks researching which way the World’s Fair carousel wheel rotated to write a scene, only to have one of his blog readers uncover engineering design schematics that showed it rotated both ways.
His next book will be a dystopian novel called Flashback, set in a future where everyone’s prediction of America going to hell (“left-wing and right-wing”) come true, featuring a drug that let’s people relive any portion of their lives for a rate of $1 for 1 minute. He said it will be SF, but not marketed as SF, so as to reach the widest possible audience.
I also have a few signed Simmons first editions over on the Lame Excuse Books page.
John Scalzi The God Engines
Subterranean Press, 2009 (stated; actually not received until 2010)
This novella starts off with a great opening line: “It was time to whip the God.” From there it posits a universe in which humanity’s God has conquered other gods and bound them to servitude, including providing a means of FTL travel. It’s a solid story that moves swiftly, but by the end I thought the setup was a little too simple to be entirely convincing.
Though this is out of print from Subterranean Press (I think the trade is up to third printings now), I still have first printings of both the trade and signed/limited editions for sale via Lame Excuse Books.
So, once again I’m faced with the problem of how to review a Gene Wolfe book. This is much akin to explaining to radio listeners what a great dancer Fred Astaire is: For those who have seen him, such an explanation is unnecessary; for those who haven’t, such an explanation is impossible. (“Aw man, you should have seen that move! It was totally graceful! Trust me…”) I’ve managed (somewhat) the feat before, having reviewed The Knight in The New York Review of Science Fiction.
Such it is with The Sorcerer’s House. I started a standard review, with a standard plot description (educated man just out of prison mysteriously given deed to house he was squatting in), discussed Wolfe’s literary experimentation (the book is told in epistolary format), and generally tried to jump through the usual hoops of a book review. Then after about three paragraphs, I read what I had written, and went “Damn, this is awful! If I had never heard of Gene Wolfe, this review certainly wouldn’t inspire me to pick it up!”
So: You should read The Sorcerer’s House, because it’s very good, it’s tricky, and it’s better than An Evil Guest. It’s got a fox woman, antique dueling pistols, an impossibly old samurai sword, a trapped vampire, werewolves, and a house that just seems to get bigger as it goes along, and, strangely, it all works.
But most of all you should read it because it’s Gene Wolfe.
Oh, it also has a scene where the protagonist tells his newly incarcerated twin brother that he shouldn’t go on about how excellent to food was, since he knows prison food is bad. And then he spends the next page or so describing what he ate.
