SF Signal: June 2008

ApolloCon was loads of fun. The panels I attended were truly interesting. Topics ranged from sf trends, to sf in various media, to YA books to steampunk. Discussions were usually lively and the panelists offered significant contributions. I also attended readings by Rosemary Clement-Moore, whose Prom Dates from Hell series is accurately described as "Nancy Drew meets Kolchak", and Chris Roberson who read from his cool upcoming YA book, Iron Jaw and Hummingbird.

As fun as the panels were, the highlight for me is getting to spend some face-time with so many people. Some I've met before, others I knew only through email, and still others I met for the first time. This personal interaction is one of the benefits of ApolloCon which is relatively small by con standards (400+ attendees vs. thousands at larger conventions). Some of the people I got to hang with included Lou Anders, Allison Baker, Matthew Bey, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Steven Brandt, Steven Brust, Scott Cupp, Alexis Glynn Latner, A. Lee Martinez, J.M. McDermott, Maureen McHugh, John Moore, Lawrence Person, K. Hutson Price, John Picacio, Chris Roberson, Patrice Sarath, Allen Steele, Mikal Trimm and others who I hope won't kill me for neglecting to list them. Discussions ranged across a wide variety of topics but one thing that stands out is their common passion for all things sf and fantasy.

I was mostly able to control my insatiable appetite for books in the dealer's room, though I did walk away from the Edge Books table with two books: Neal Barret, Jr.'s Golden Gryphon collection, Perpetuity Blues, and the shared-world anthology Liavek edited by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull. I also met Allan Kaster, proprietor of the audiobook company Infinivox, who bestowed upon me a review copy of the Mini-Masterpieces of Science Fiction CD. Thanks, Allan!

Other notes and highlights:

Pyr's upcoming lineup looks really, really good. I regret not being able to read some of their past/current titles, particularly InfoQuake, Brasyl, The Blade Itself, and Resnick's Starship series [looks at JP and Tim, who did read these titles.] It's clear to me that Pyr is first and foremost focused on quality - not just in their book selection but also in their production.
I really enjoyed an intimate (and too brief) sit-down discussion with Allen Steele in which he talked about his first meeting with Robert A. Heinlein. Hilarious!
Trolling the con parties with John P., Lou and Jayme was fun. Bathroom cheese is not as bad as it sounds (don't ask).
JP was there for some of the time as well. We captured a few new Mind Meld ideas and even pestered a few folks who graciously agreed to participate in future ones.
The Twitter experiment was a failure. I suppose it's my own fault as I wasn't updating it all that often. I was having too much fun. Sorry, I just don't see the appeal with Twitter.

All in all, a great con and a fun weekend!

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Posted by John DeNardo at Monday June 30, 2008 at 12:58 PM
© 2008 SF Signal

From the YouTube contributor: "The most ridiculous 5 minutes of Moroder's 1984 restoration of Fritz Lang's Metropolis - taken from the Laserdisc release."

Bizarre.

[via Poe TV]

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Posted by John DeNardo at Monday June 30, 2008 at 12:28 AM
© 2008 SF Signal

Eoghann over at Solar Flare wonders whether J.J. Abrams can successfully reboot Star Trek. Sure, Galactica was rebooted successfully, but it didn't have the entrenched fanbase of Trek. Let's say Abrams makes Trek XI into a really good film. Will the Trekies/Trekers embrace it? Can you have a successful reboot if the the fanbase doesn't go along?

Doc Artz fills us in on potential LOST events at the upcoming ComiCon in San Diego. One of these day's I'd like to attend, it seems to have become a big place for TV fall season news.

SF Universe says the Save Jericho site is 'burning up the web' because it has had over 9000 visits in just over two weeks. Now, for a new web site to grab 9000 in two weeks is impressive, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not really a lot. I'd expect the furor to die down and only the die hard fans still clicking on over.

For those of you still keen on Heroes, Tim Kring fills you in on what you can expect for season 3. Nowhere does he mention 'better writing'.

Darth Mojo has some awesome, high-res Voyager eye candy on display over at his blog. I never really liked Voyager, but these stills are impressive, and background worthy.

If you're a writer, what do you do during a writer's strike? If you're Joss Whedon, you write an internet video musical! Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog will debut on July 15th and will star Mal and Doogie Howser. How could you not want to see this? If you're still on the fence, watch the trailer:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

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Posted by JP Frantz at Monday June 30, 2008 at 12:08 AM
© 2008 SF Signal

Interviews:
- ComicMix interviews Max Brooks, author of World War Z.
- Subterranean interviews Jay Lake
- The Dragon Page talks with Laurell K. Hamilton.
- At NPR, Rick Kleffel talks with Paolo Bacigalupi (Pump Six and Other Stories). [via Locus Online]
- The Agony Column interviews Pat Murphy and Carol Emshwiller. [via SFFaudio]
- Locus Online has interview excerpts with Daniel Abraham and Jeffrey Ford.

Free Fiction:
- The new issue of Subterranean has gone online. Free stories will be posted periodiclly. First up: "Chain of Fools" by Jay Lake
- Free audio fiction: PodCastle offers "Spell of the Sparrow" by Jim C. Hines. [via SFFaudio]
- Hairy Green Eyeball has posted the comic Marge's Tubby and the Little Men From Mars. [via QuasarDragon]
- From FeedBooks:
  - "Finis" by Frank Lillie Pollack
  - "Crystallized Thought" by Nat Schachner
  - "Warning from the Stars" by Ron Cocking

Ben Bova says: Writers must write, every day. [via Matt Staggs]

Jonathan Strahan will be editing Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle for Subterranean Press.

At Locus Online, Gary Westfahl reviews Wall·E.

Another cool thing I want but don't need: An Ultraman USB Drive.

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Posted by John DeNardo at Monday June 30, 2008 at 12:02 AM
© 2008 SF Signal

I did, indeed, attend this weekend's ApolloCon, along with our own John D. On Saturday I managed to attend one panel, this one about steampunk. During the discussion, Lawrence Person (who I see is part of the Austin Cabal with Chris Roberson) named a proto-steampunk movie that most people have never seen, let alone even heard of. That movie was the 1958 film, The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. I was intrigued enough to try and track down this movie, which is supposedly in the public domain. Sadly, I have been unable to find the full movie. However, I did find this trailer on YouTube. Yes, the SFX is poor by today's standards, but this was a 1958 foreign film so I'm going to cut it some slack. Now I'd really like to find the full version...

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Posted by JP Frantz at Sunday June 29, 2008 at 1:28 AM
© 2008 SF Signal

Jeffrey Carver is considering the possibility of making his upcoming novel Sunborn available for free download. Let him know what you think!

Free Fiction
- "Monsters" by James Patrick Kelly (1992)
- "The Pyramid of Amirah" by James Patrick Kelly (2002)

Interviews:
- SF Crowsnest interviews Robert J. Sawyer.
- Collider interviews Guillermo del Toro. [via Greg Lindenberg]
- Enter the Octopus interviews Rachel Swirsky.

Robot in the Woods is looking for robot fiction, poetry, essay or artwork for consideration for the first volume of the Robot in the Woods Build-A-Book project.

Recently, John C. Wright posted gave his complete and exhaustive definition of sf using pulp sf covers. Amy Sterling responds with a tongue-in-cheek look at the opposite point of view.

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Posted by John DeNardo at Sunday June 29, 2008 at 1:14 AM
© 2008 SF Signal

Posting will probably be light this weekend since some of us are at ApolloCon. I'm learning some interesting things...like Allen Steele and Chris Roberson are SciFi TV trivia Gods. For example, I hadn't heard of the BBC show Star Cops until Allen mentioned it. Here's a clip from the very first episode:

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Posted by John DeNardo at Saturday June 28, 2008 at 2:01 AM
© 2008 SF Signal

Interview and profiles:
- John Scalzi turns the Whatever mike over to David J. Schwartz, author of Superpowers.
- At Omnivoracious, Jeff VanderMeer profiles Greg Broadmore (Doctor Grordbort's Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory).
- Jennifer interviews Brian Ruckley.

Identity Theft and Other Stories, will be Robert J. Sawyers last collection of short fiction. Sawyer says: "I find short fiction very hard work."

Free Fiction: "Memory" Part 16, by Jayme Lynn Blaschke.

Apparently, Neal Stephenson's next book, Anathem, comes with a CD of "weird" music inspired by the book.

Paul Jessup has a redesigned website. [via Ecstatic Days]

Zap2it lists Top 5 Androids and Robots

Meanwhile, Topless Robot lists The 10 Worst Top-Shelf CG Cartoon Movies Ever Made

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Posted by John DeNardo at Saturday June 28, 2008 at 1:40 AM
© 2008 SF Signal

Tor's latest batch of freebies includes:

Free Book: Battlestar Galactica by Jeffrey A. Carver. (Available in HTML, MobiPocket, and PDF versions.)

This week's Free Wallpaper (They're only available for one week, so don't wait to snag 'em):
- Dave Seeley's cover art for War Machine: A Combat-k Novel by Andy Remic.
- Joe DeVito's logo for Spectrum: Fantastic Art.

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Posted by John DeNardo at Friday June 27, 2008 at 11:55 AM
© 2008 SF Signal

As mentioned previously, I will be going to the Houston ApolloCon convention this weekend, starting today through Sunday. JP will also be making an appearance on Saturday (at least).

Like I did at the Nebula Awards, I will be Twittering the event. (Check for the widget on the home page or browse to the SF Signal Twitter page.) I don't use the Twitter for much else - I might as well us it for this.

So, tune in to see if I can catch Steven Brust eating a sandwich again!

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Posted by John DeNardo at Friday June 27, 2008 at 12:21 AM
© 2008 SF Signal

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Posted by John DeNardo at Friday June 27, 2008 at 12:14 AM
© 2008 SF Signal

Over at SciFi Scanner, John Scalzi asks: What Are the New SciFi Classics?
Free Fiction:
- Fantasy Book Spot has an excerpt of The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod. [via Jay Tomio]
- "The Right Book" by Cory Doctorow, a short story about the next 150 years of book sales that appears in trade magazine The Bookseller. [via Craphound]
- Cory Doctorow reads from Little Brother (part 2).
- At FeedBooks:
  - Planetoid 127 by Edgar Wallace (1927)
  - Out of the Silence by Erle Cox (1919)
  - "The Missing Angel" by Erle Cox (1947)
  - "Star-Begotten" by H.G. Wells (1937)
- Lots more free fiction is listed at QuasarDragon.

Interviews:
- PopMatters interviews Robert Silverberg . [via Locus Online]
- Matt Staggs interviews Beth Adele Long, Lydia Millet, and Nisi Shawl.
- Unreality SF interviews Richard Salter, editor of the forthcoming Doctor Who anthology Short Trips: Transmissions. [via Bowing to the Future]

Joseph Malozzi has his book club picks for July: Cordelia's Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold (sf), The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente (fantasy), and The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns.

Great Idea of the Week: Mindy Klasky has created the totally free Book Groups Wiki, where book groups can enter meeting info and authors can enter information about their availability.

A New Chapter in Bookselling: Social Networking Sites.

Norilana Books is publishing Vera Nazarian's The Duke in His Castle, a "dark, lush, erotic fantasy novella in the vein of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast".

Speaking of whom: Nebula-nominated author Vera Nazarian has been added to the list of sf/f authors who blog.

The nominees for the Janusz A. Zajdel Awards, honoring the most prestigious Polish science fiction, have been announced. (Thanks, Pawel!)

Wired offers a gallery of the Best Robot Love Stories, From Wall-E to Weird Science.

QuasarDragon lists Top Ten Films Available For Free Online (near the bottom of the post).

Regularly Expressing lists 13 Things Learned From Reading Sci-Fi.

The Onion A.V. Club lists A Summer Reading List for Nerds. [via Locus Online]

Several genre titles made Cool Tools' list of Life-Changing Books.

Digital Plague author Jeff Somers lists Top Ten Reasons My Dystopian Vision of The Future Is Better Than Your Dystopian Vision Of The Future.

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Posted by John DeNardo at Friday June 27, 2008 at 12:11 AM
© 2008 SF Signal

For many of us, one of the main interests of science fiction is it's use of science as part of the story. There's nothing quite like reading about a cool idea that is based on current scientific thought and then going back and finding out more. We asked our respondents this question:

Q: There is a lot of scientific research being performed across a wide array of disciplines. So much that it can be difficult to keep up with it all. What current avenue of scientific inquiry do you believe people should be paying attention to, and why?

Kathleen Ann Goonan

Kathleen Ann Goonan is a science fiction writer with several Nebula Award nominated books. Her debut novel, Queen City Jazz was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and her most recent novel, In War Times, was chosen by the American Library Association as Best Science Fiction Novel for their 2008 reading list.

There are several reasons for this. The first is that our system of education needs to have a scientific basis. It does not now. It is so dreadful because it was created to ready immigrant children for factory work. Be on time, follow directions, don't talk, do what we tell you to do. One obvious negative outcome is that we do not begin to teach reading until children are far older than the optimal age for doing so. I taught preschoolers for fifteen years, and all of my four-year-olds could read with comprehension and with joy. Easily. No pain. Same with numeracy. There is no reason why they can't grasp addition, multiplication, and subtraction by age four, and division by five.

This is because the young child's brain is extremely plastic is ready to respond to various aspects of the environment at very specific stages of development. But the same thing is true through the early twenties; the entire educational system needs to be revamped in order to afford children the opportunity to contribute in meaningful ways to science, literature, or anything they choose to do.

More research on the brain is needed, and many more studies need to be done in order to fully support this thesis in ways that will make people want to spend their money on education. If you don't care about children, consider that it is their world in which you will be living when you are old.

And, when you are old, your experience can be much richer if you avail yourself of the continuing plasticity of the brain--particularly if you have a stroke. I've lately read My Stroke Of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (Jill Bolte Taylor, Viking), The Brain That Changes Itself (Norman Doidge, Viking), and many other more complex books about neuroplasticity. Although it looks like work, brains can and do change, and recover many skills lost through a traumatic event.

My interest in memory is for many of the same reasons, but also because memory is all we are. I want to understand the source of all this richness. With various memory drugs in the pipeline, we need to understand what their use might mean for society at large, not just for the Alzheimer's patients who will be the first users. For two concepts about how memory works, read In Search Of Memory by Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize Laureate. For the anti-Kandel view, read In The Places Of Memory by George Johnson. And anything by V. S. Ramachandran. Those are just for starters.