Or, as the media would put it:
SNOWPOCALYPSE 2010!
It’s been coming down for a couple of hours. I’ll put up some pics this evening.
Updated: Some pics.
Snow! In Austin!
February 23rd, 2010Hitler Finds Out About Epic Beard Man’s Fight (NSFW)
February 21st, 2010The subject of Epic Beard Man came up at the Saturday Dining Conspiracy. So, if you haven’t seen it already, here’s the original (NSFW) Epic Beard Man fight:
(And here’s the full sound version and transcript (again, NSFW).)
And here is, almost inevitably, Hitler’s reaction to Epic Beard Man’s fight. (Linked because the aspect ratio is too large for the WordPress theme.)
Wait, did I just link a video that combined a new viral Internet meme with yet another viral Internet meme?
Yes. Yes I did.
I think you’ll just have to come to grips with the possibility that I am, in fact, just plain evil.
Amber Lamps.
Happy Ash Wednesday
February 17th, 2010For those of you who observe same.
In celebration, here’s a link to T. S. Eliot’s poem of the same name. There’s a great stillness in that poem,
I actually like it better than “The Waste Land” (which requires a level of polyglot competence in ancient Latin and Greek (which I doubt I shall ever attain) to fully enjoy), though perhaps not as much as “The Hollow Men” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.
The Wolfman: A Review (and Alternatives)
February 15th, 2010Howard Waldrop and I’s review of The Wolfman has finally been published over at Locus Online. As you can tell from the review, we were, ahem, not enthusiastic.
That brings up the question: if you have a hankering for some hairy, gut-ripping werewolf goodness, what should you watch?
Director of Independence Day to film Isaac Asimov’s Foundation as a “3D epic”
February 13th, 2010Slashdot tells us that Roland Emmerich, the towering cinematic genius* who brought us such classic films* as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, is going to be filming Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series as a “3D Epic.”
My thoughts:
- Man, those 3D scenes where Hari Seldon writes the complex equations of Psychohistory on a blackboard are going to be awesome.
- It’s been a long time since I’ve read them, but I seem to remember exactly one space battle in the first three Foundation book…and I don’t think any shots were actually fired, since the Foundation guys had pre-“hacked” the software they sold the bad guys. (Though that scene probably predates the first computer-related use of the term “hacking.”) This would not seem to play to Mr. Emmerich’s strengths in Big Things That Explode Real Good.
- If we’re really lucky, they’ll get Patrick Stewart to play Hari Seldon. More likely: Will Smith.
* Warning: Content may be 95% sarcasm by weight.
What Should I Read in 2010?
February 8th, 2010In the Before Time, the Long Long Ago (i.e., before I started this blog), I would ask The Vast Wisdom of Usenet (i.e. rec.arts.sf.written) what books I should read this year. Now that I have the blog, I’m posting the question here.
Below are 100 books (or a more, counting multiple titles by a single author) of fiction I’m considering reading in 2010. With a few exceptions (like forthcoming books), they’re all books I already own in first editions. Most likely I’ll get to considerably less than 100. The first few are books I’ll probably get to (or have already read), whereas the rest are a little vaguer (and in alphabetical order by author). That’s where you come in. Tell me which of the books below I should or shouldn’t read, and why. If a book’s not on the list, it’s probably because I’ve already read it, or have no interest in it, won’t get to it this year, etc., so save your electrons instead of suggesting alternates (there are plenty of other places for that). And if I list Book #2 in a linear series, rest assured I’ve already read Book #1.
I don’t promise I’ll read all the highest rated works, but those most highly praised are considerably more likely to be added to the reading stack, which is what’s happened the previous years I’ve done this.
- Gene Wolfe: The Sorceror’s House
- John Scalzi: The God Engines
- Joe R. Lansdale: Vanilla Ride
- China Mieville: King Rat
- Steven R. Boyett: Elegy Beach
- Joe Hill: 20th Century Ghosts
- Philip K. Dick: Collected Stories Volume II or Radio Free Albemuth
- Michael Moorcock:The War Hound and the World’s Pain or The Final Programme
- Greg Egan: Crystal Nights
- Peter Ackroyd: Hawksmoor
- J. G. Ballard: Crystal World
- Iain Banks: Against a Dark Background or Matter
- John Barnes: Kaleidoscope Century or Mother of Storms
- Stephen Baxter: Traces or Mayflower II
- Peter S. Beagle: A Fine and Private Place
- Greg Bear: The City at the End of Time
- Poppy Z. Brite: Plastic Jesus
- Tobias Buckell: Sly Mongoose
- Octavia Butler: Fledgeling
- Jack Cady: The Night We Buried Road Dog
- Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
- John Christopher: No Blade of Grass
- Susanna Clarke: Ladies of Grace Adieu
- Hal Clement: Iceworld
- Avram Davidson: The Adventures of Dr. Esterhauzy or Limekiller
- L. Sprague de Camp: A Gun for Dinosaur
- Bradley Denton: Laughin’ Boy
- Paul Di Filippo: Lost Pages or Fractal Paisleys
- George Alec Effinger: What Entropy Means to Me
- Harlan Ellison: Deathbird Stories
- John M. Ford: The Dragon Waiting
- Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things or The Graveyard Book
- John Gardner: Freddy’s Book or The Wreckage of Agathon
- Ray Garton: Night Life or Nids
- Jane Gaskell: The Serpent
- Joe Haldeman: The Accidental Time Machine
- Peter F. Hamilton: Mindstar Rising
- Robert E. Howard: Conan the Barbarian
- Nalo Hopkinson: Brown Girl in the Ring or The Salt Roads
- Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle or The Lottery
- M. R. James: More Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary
- K. W. Jeter: Noir or Dark Seeker
- Ha Jin: Waiting
- James Patrick Kelly: Strange But Not a Stranger
- Stephen King: Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass or The Colorado Kid
- Russell Kirk: The Surly Sullen Bell (and yes, I’ve read the 2 Arkham House collections)
- Henry Kuttner and/or C. L. Moore: Mutant, Fury, Black God’s Shadow or No Boundaries
- R. A. Lafferty: Archipelago or The 13th Voyage of Sinbad
- Fritz Leiber: Night’s Black Agents
- Stanislaw Lem: Solaris
- Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn
- Thomas Ligotti: Grimscribe, Noctuary, or The Shadow at the Bottom of the World
- Ian MacLeod: Breathmoss and Other Exhalations
- Ken MacLeod: Giant Lizards from Another Star or The Execution Channel
- Gregory Maguire: Wicked
- Barry Malzberg: Hervoit’s World
- Richard Matheson: Duel or What Dreams May Come
- Ian MacDonald: River of Gods
- Maureen McHugh: Mission Child or Nekropolis
- Sean McMullen: The Miocene Arrow
- Larry McMurtry: Lonesome Dove
- Ward Moore: Bring the Jubilee
- Pat Murphy: The Falling Woman
- John Myers Myers: Silverlock
- William F. Nolan: Things Beyond Midnight or Wild Galaxy
- Naomi Novik: Throne of Jade
- Patrick O’Leary: Other Voices, Other Rooms
- Chad Oliver: The Shores of Another Sea or The Winds of Time
- Susan Palwick: The Fate of Mice
- H. Beam Piper: Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen
- Tim Powers: Three Days to Never or Pilot Light
- Alastair Reynolds: Redemption Ark
- Rudy Rucker: Master of Time & Space or The Secret of Life or White Light
- Matt Ruff: Fool on the Hill
- Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children
- Joanna Russ: The Female Man
- Karl Schroeder: Permanence or Lady of Mazes
- David J. Schow: Crypt Orchids
- Michael Shaara: The Herald or The Killer Angels
- Michael Shea: A Quest for Simbilis
- Lucius Shepard: Floater or Aztechs or Viator
- Lewis Shiner: The Edges of Things or Black and White
- Dan Simmons: The Terror or Hard as Nails
- Robert Sladek: Roderick
- Neal Stephenson: Zodiac or The Big U
- Charles Stross: The Fuller Memorandum (forthcoming)
- Theodore Sturgeon: Microcosmic God: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon Volume 2
- Steph Swainston: The Year of Our War
- Thomas Burnett Swann: The Day of the Minotaur
- Karl Edward Wagner: Darkness Weaves
- Howard Waldrop: The Moone World (forthcoming)
- Manly Wade Wellman: The Sleuth Patrol, The Last Mammoth or Fastest on the River
- Martha Wells: The Element of Fire
- John Whitbourne: To Build Jerusalem or Binscomb Tales
- Liz Williams: The Demon and the City
- Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn: Star Bridge
- Connie Willis: To Say Nothing of the Dog
- Jack Vance: Star King, The Languages of Pao, or Ports of Call
- Roger Zelazny: Wilderness or DonnerJack
J. D. Salinger, RIP
January 31st, 2010Reclusive author J. D. Salinger dead at 91. (I don’t usually link to The New York Times, for a variety of reasons, but they’ve got a pretty hefty obit on him.) I started this essay the day he died, but it’s taken me a few days to get down my thoughts.
Salinger was a talented writer who wrote one novel that annoyed the living shit out of me. I hated The Catcher in the Rye, and more specifically, hated Holden Caulfield with a livid and unrestrained passion. Never before has a single fictional character so infuriated me. “Oh woe is me, let me whine about my miserable, privileged, upper class New York City life.” He’s a phony who hates phonies. Got it. Doesn’t mean I want to spend some 180 pages living inside that fucking asshole’s head. True, I read it far too late (mid 20s) to be grabbed by the teen angst angle, but I suspected I would have longed to punch him until he got over himself even in my teens.
So, more than a decade after I read Catcher in the Rye, some of my friends started getting into Anime, one of them being Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which references Salinger out the yin yang, especially the story “The Laughing Man.” (I think that link is to some Hungarian pirate site, if the moral implications of stealing a few pennies from his estate that way rather than by buying a cheap used paperback worries you.) And you know what? That’s a pretty swell story.
Over the next few years, I read all the stories in Nine Stories, and several others are pretty good as well. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is probably the one most people have read, and justifiably so. “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor” is a bit obvious, but it works. The protagonist of “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is just as big a phony as Holden Caulfield, but knows he’s a phony, which makes all the difference in the world.
And then you read something like “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” (“I was a nice girl, wasn’t I?” No, no you weren’t.) and you realize that Salinger probably not only hated Holden Caulfield more than I did, but probably more than anyone else ever could.
In a way, his reclusive existence after Catcher is like the Great American Success Story, Misanthrope’s Version: Write the Great American Novel, build an estate way the hell out in the sticks, live off the royalties the remainder of your life and say “Fuck you” to the rest of the world. (I could have done without the Wacky Religion of the Week myself, but hey, it wasn’t my life.) He didn’t owe nobody nuthin’, and didn’t care what anyone else thought. Good for him.
I never got around to reading his other published books, sparse though their number was. Now that he’s dead, I wouldn’t be surprised to see his heirs start raking in the dough for getting all his unpublished and uncollected work into print just as fast as the checks can clear. Maybe he has a novel in that safe that won’t annoy the hell out of me.
And speaking of GitS:SAC, someone posted this nifty animated Laughing Man logo on the Fark thread about Salinger’s death, so I’m going to put it here:
New Lame Excuse Books Catalog Now Available
January 29th, 2010Just sent out to regular customers last night, with lots of tasty first editions by Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, Joe R. Lansdale, Stephen King, etc. Email me at lperson1@austin.rr.com if you would like to receive a copy.
And of course, there’s the main webpage, but I haven’t updated it with the new titles yet.
A Mind Meld on Who Should Be the Next Nebula Grand Master
January 27th, 2010As opposed to John Joseph Adams, who suggested Gene Wolfe, John Klima, who thought it should go to Gene Wolfe, and Jess Nevins, who said “Hey, how about Gene Wolfe?”
There were also a few other choices bandied about…
World War II: Now With Giant Mechanical Spider
January 25th, 2010Embrace the anachronism arachnoid mechanism.
Postscript: And as long as we’re linking to films about big-ass mechanical things attacking people, check this out.