Will William Shatner be jealous if I tell the world how much I totally love Adam West right now?

The StarShipSofa podcast is honored to present a reading of “Vinegar Peace“…a SF story written by Michael Bishop for his son Jamie Bishop who died two years ago at the Virginia Tech shooting. The story originally app;eared in the July 2008 issue of Asimov’s..

Michael Bishop says:

I wrote “Vinegar Peace” — in August of 2007 — because I had to. Our 35-year-old son, Jamie, died on the morning of April 16, 2007, as one of thirty-two victims of a disturbed shooter on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Jamie, an accomplished digital artist who did lovely covers for four or five of my books, was holding forth in Room 2007 of Norris Hall in his German class more than two hours after his eventual murderer had slain two students in a dormitory on another part of campus. The administration failed to issue a warning — a warning that might well have saved many lives — in a timely fashion. However, some of its members secured their own offices and notified their own family members of this initial event; and so the worst school shooting in the history of the United States claimed our son, four other faculty members (including a man, Dr Librescu, who had survived the Holocaust and who held a table against his classroom door until all own students could escape), four of Jamie’s students, and twenty-one other young people in Norris Hall, not to mention the first two victims in West Ambler-Johnston dorm. Another twenty-eight students were wounded by bullets or injured leaping from upper-story windows. Some of these young people will live with their injuries the rest of their lives.

All of the administrators, with the exception of a woman who later died of a stroke or a heart attack (a death that my wife and I can’t help but attribute partially to the stress of living with the mistakes of the President and the other Policy Group members), remain in their positions. So much for accountability, and so much for justice.

In any case, “Vinegar Peace” grew from this disaster and from a grief that I can’t imagine ever laying totally aside. Jeri and I mourn Jamie’s loss every day in some private way, and we think continually of all the other parents and loved ones of the slain and injured who will carry a similar burden with them until they die. We think, too, of the parents and loved ones of the dead and wounded from the United States’s optional war in Iraq, who long for their dead and who pray for their injured with an intensity not a whit different from our own. How ironic that our son died on American soil. How sad the wasted potential and disfigured lives resulting from violence everywhere. And forgive me the inadequacy of these remarks. Clearly, I wrote a story because I could not address either my outrage or my grief in any other way.

– Mike Bishop

Congratulations to Ian R. MacLeod, whoseSong of Time won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

See also: Past Winners.

[via Science Fiction Awards Watch]

• Interviews & Profiles:
  • The latest Odyssey podcast features Allen Steele talking about world building.
  • Mur Lafferty podcast-interviews John Kessel. [via Charles Tan]
  • @Bitten by Books: Jim Butcher.
  • @Walker of Worlds: Tony Ballantyne.
• Free Fiction [courtesy of QuasarDragon]
  • Issue #5 of Concept Sci-Fi is out with fiction by Dylan Fox, Lawrence Buentello, and Jonathan Lowe.
  • Audio Fiction:@Dunesteef: “Aqualung” by S.C. Hayden.
• Vintage Photo: John W. Campbell, Forest J. Ackerman and Sam Moskowitz. Cool.
• Want some free books? SF author Andy Remic says: “Biohell for the Speccy is available this Friday 1st May from my website www.andyremic.com. It’s a free download, and the first person to send me the solution and password gets a copy of my first five books, whilst the next three runners up get a copy of my latest novel Biohell, published by Solaris Books.”
• Where Charlie Stross gets his ideas…
• J.C. Hutchins’ 7th Son trilogy has been optioned by Warner Bros.
• VanderBits:
  • Jeff VanderMeer reviews Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel, a robot steampunk book. Very cool…
  • Jeff also shows us the making of Finch, his latest novel, from idea stage to finished product.
• Niall Harrison takes a detailed look at The Arthur C. Clarke Award nominees.
• Apex Magazine goes on hiatus.
• SFWA has announced the results of this year’s officer elections.
• Here’s an artsy take on Darth Vader and the Death Star. [via Super Punch]
• A nice gallery of The ray guns of Edison Giacattoli.
• Some great artwork to be viewed at SciFi Scanner’s cool gallery of Horror Comics Horror Movies.
• Entertainment Weekly‘s Pop Watch looks at “The Great Sci-Fi Divide” and asks Why don’t we want science fiction on TV?
• 6 Degrees of Shatner: The latest William Shatner Priceline commercial features Robert Pine, the actor who played Erik Estrada’s boss on CHips and father of Chris Pine, the new Kirk in the upcoming Star Trek reboot film. The only thing missing is Kevin Bacon.
• Real Science: Meet GRB 090423, The Furthest Object Ever. It’s 2.5 septillion meters away.
• List:
  • @SCI FI Wire: 15 Sci-Fi Milestones.
  • @io9: A Dozen Science-Fiction Drinking Games

Where would Fantasy be without gods to bicker, argue, and meddle with the fate of mortals? We asked the following of this week’s panelists, who responded with less bickering and meddling.

“No religious component at all” is an unlikely option, to my mind. Religion is, among other things, a way to explain the world around you, to render it comprehensible, and that’s a pretty fundamental human need. We see evidence of numinous explanations going back to the origins of writing and before; the purely mechanistic view of the universe is a fairly recent intellectual development. And — not to go off onto a tangent — but in certain senses, fantasy may be incompatible with a purely mechanistic cosmos. At that point everything’s science, not magic, no matter what costume you dress it up in, and magic is almost always a component of fantasy.

So let’s presume you’re going to have god(s). Which route is best? One of the advantages of polytheism is that it creates some flexibility. The Romans did this with conquered peoples; they assimilated local gods into their own pantheon, often by tagging them as aspects of whichever Roman deity they looked the most like. (Sure, that’s just . . . uh . . . Jupiter, by a different name!) Multiplicity allows for diversity, mutability, the representation of many different concepts and even contradictory perspectives. A single god is more totalizing, and also more abstract; he/she/it/whatever isn’t the god of anything, but rather the god of everything. Which has its own flexibility — there’s nothing in the cosmos your all-encompassing Creator doesn’t cover — but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that spawns some particular theological minefields, especially with regard to theodicy (aka “the problem of evil”).

From a writerly perspective, though, there’s one special appeal to having a pantheon, and that’s its narrative potential. Whether it’s weirdly symbolic tales of anthropomorphic forces, or the soap-opera dramatics of the Greek pantheon, you can make up lots of stories about the gods in conflict and cooperation. Monotheism isn’t story-less — the scriptures are full of stories — but those are all about humans interacting with God; polytheism gets to have those, plus a whole separate set about the gods interacting with each other. And you can stack the deck to suit your purposes, too, creating a situation or highlighting a theme that works with the story you’re going to tell.

Watch out how far you let your polytheism go, though — or you’ll end up like the Romans, with so many gods they start being assigned to things like door hinges.

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In this blatant promo for the Star Trek 1-6 DVD Box Set, several Trek cast members talk about Trek stradom. And body parts.

[via SciFi Now]

More book trailers for your amusement…

Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell

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Nebula Awards weekend also saw another set of awards being given away: Analog Science Fiction and Fact‘s AnLab Awards and the Asimov’s Readers’ Awards: Here are the winners:

The winners of Analog’s Analytical Laboratory (AnLab) Awards are:

• Best Novella: “Tenbrook of Mars” by Dean McLaughlin (July-August)
• Best Novelette: “The Man in the Mirror” by Geoffrey A. Landis (January-February)
• Best Short Story: “Starship Down” by Tracy Canfield (October)
• Best Fact Article: “The World’s Simplest Fusion Reactor” by Tom Ligon (January-February)
• Best Cover: April 2008 by Scott Grimando

The winners of Asimov’s Readers’ Awards are:

• Best Novella: “The Room of Lost Souls” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (April-May)
• Best Novelette: “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner (February)
• Best Short Story: “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson (July)
• Best Poem: “Deaths on Other Planets” by Joanne Merriam (April-May)
• Best Cover Artist (tie): Tomasz Maronski (March)
• Best Cover Artist (tie): John Picacio (September)

Congratulations to all the winners and nominees!

See also:

Analog Analytical Laboratory Winners By Year.

Asimov’s Reader Poll Winners By Year.

The finalists for the 35th Annual Origins Awards have been announced, here are the fiction nominees:

• Hungerblade by Robin D Laws (Red Juggernaut Inc.)
• Infernal Sorceress by Gary Gygax (Paizo Publishing)
• The Killing Ground by Graham McNeill (Black Library)
• The Pirate King by R.A. Salvatore (Wizards of the Coast)
• Worlds of Dungeons & Dragons Volume 2, edited by James Lowder & Mike O’Sullivan (Devil’s Due)

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that our own Kevin Brusky, proprietor of APE Games, was nominated in the “Children’s, Family, and Party Games” category for his game duck! duck! Go!, the only game I know of where you can pit Pirate Ducks against Ninja Ducks, the way God intended. Congrats, Kevin!

• The Art of Penguin Science Fiction.
• Interviews & Profiles:
  • At Locus Online, Graham Joyce interview excerpts. [via Charles Tan]
  • At Tor, Lou Anders interviews Matthew Sturges, author of Midwinter.
  • Lou Anders, meanwhile, dishes on his picks for a SF/F Reading List for the 2000s.
  • @h+ Magazine: Singularity 101 with Vernor Vinge [via Futurismic]
  • @January Magazine: Margaret Atwood
  • @B&N: Jim Butcher talks with about the latest installment in his fantastical Dresden Files series.
  • @The Nebula Awards: Nina Kiriki Hoffman. [via Bibliophile Stalker]
  • @RobertHood: Kaaron Warren (Slights)
• Free Fiction [courtesy of QuasarDragon]:
  • @Tor.com: “TVA Baby” by Terry Bisson.
  • @Manybooks: “Devil Crystals of Arret” by Hal K. Wells (1931).
  • @Kat and Mouse: Part Seventeen of “Easy Money” by Abner Senires.
  • Chapters One and Two of The Time Idiot by A. R. Yngve are now online
  • Audio Fiction:
    • @PodCastle: “Komodo” by Tim Pratt read by Cat Rambo.
    • @Escape Pod: “Semi-Autonamous or ‘For Whom The Warranty Tolls’” by Jim Kling, read by Rachel Swirsky.
    • @Cthulhu: “The Festival” by H. P. Lovecraft, read by Kirk Warrington.
    • Episode 21 of Contagious by Scott Sigler is now available.
    • @LibriVox:
      • The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, read by Nicodemus and Madera.
      • The Thing from the Lake by Eleanor M. Ingram, read by Roger Melin.
• Hal Duncan On Prologues.[via Bibliophile Stalker]
• Jeff VanderMeer on Spectacular Characters in Flawed Novels.
• At B&N Review, Paul DiFilippo looks at a batch of new comics: Freakangels, Volume 1 by Warren Ellis, Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan, and more.
• Bioware has since apologized for saying that homosexuality does not exist in the Star Wars universe. Maybe the proof was in these Star Wars promo pics?
• Small Beer Press is having a $1 Warehouse Clearance Sale.
• PS Publishing’s Recent acquisitions include fiction by Carol Emshwiller, Christopher Golden, Lavie Tidhar, Catherynne M. Valente, Terry Dowling, Chris Beckett, Robert Reed, Matt Hughes, Mike Resnick, and more.
• A short tine ago, on a blog far away, Heather Massey launched a nice Star Wars Romance Retrospective, with Part I: Han & Leia. And then she wrote a piece on The Rise of the Subversive Heroines. Busy one, that Heather…
• Tim Mcburnie shares some of the nice looking artwork for a fantasy comic.
• John Picacio loves San Antonio.
• Matt Staggs tells us you can test drive Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition for free!
• Web Comic Wondermark takes on reading.
• Real Science:
  • “Astronomers have discovered an unexpected cache of spiral galaxies that appear to have formed recently, long after the period early in the history of the universe that most galaxies were thought to have been created.”
  • How do you make antimatter?
• Lists:
  • @io9: The Top 10 Greatest Mentally Ill Superheroes. Is that Cocoa Puffs bird a superhero? Because he would totally be on that list.
  • Discover Magazine lists 5 Summer Cinema Sci-Fi Future Favorites. No, Hannah Montana is not on this list.
  • @SciFi Scanner: 5 Fun Facts About Wolverine You Won’t Learn From His Movie.
  • @FirstShowing.net, J.J. Abrams Lists His 5 Favorite Films for Rotten Tomatoes. They’re all his. I kid! Or, do I…?

• The Star Trek hype train rams the station next week and Vince Horiuchi of The Salt Lake Tribune laments the lack of good movies made from TV shows. While Trek has had a lot of clunkers, I don’t think you can Wrath of Khan wasn’t good. Still, if you’re looking for original IP, Vince, wait for Cameron’s Avatar.
• It seems that Paramount has already bought into their own hype as they have already given the go ahead for a sequel to Abrams’ Star Trek. I can imagine a new Star Trek on TV if the movie does gangbusters, which puts an interesting spin on the Vince Horiuchi article above, but also means no new IP on TV.
• Buddy TV compares (spoilers!) the Heroes season finale with Whedon’s Dollhouse. Seeing what happened in the finale, I’m glad I haven’t been watching. And to think, season 4 is coming.
• I’ve been waiting for the current best show on Sci Fi to return: Eureka. Well, it will air starting July 10th and it will take over Galactica‘s old timeslot, Fridays at 10/9pm. The new Warehouse 13 will take over Eureka‘s old slot on Tuesday. I’ll watch both, since the seem to have similar comedic vibes, but I’m not expecting much from 13.
• Tonight LOST returns (damn you one week breaks!) with a brand spanking new episode. To celebrate, why not let TV Guide count down the 5 biggest “Thumps!” of this season. Too bad you don’t get to see how creepily awesome Ben Linus is.
• Bonus Youtube! Disney characters explain copyright [H/T A Distant Soil]:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Tell us which cover you like best and why. Go!

Books shown here:

• Berserker Lord by David Farland (Artist: Kekai Kotaki)
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin. (Artist: Cliff Nielsen)
• The Revolution Business: Book Five of the Merchant Princes by Charles Stross (Artist: Paul Youll)

NOTE: Click on the book images or title links to see bigger, better versions…

[7/10/09 Note The title of Berserker Lord has changed to Chaosbound]

This is why Walter Bishop the most entertaining (in an insane, non sequitur way) character on TV. If you remember the Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy bits on Saturday Night Live, you know where this is going. Add some Walter from Fringe and you have the insane ramblings of a mad man.

Enjoy!

REVIEW SUMMARY: Fun, piecemeal excursions into what it might be like after you die.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Forty thought-experiments about what happens in the afterlife.

MY REVIEW:

PROS: Interesting and imaginative speculations, sometimes with added life lessons; Short, contained chapters make it the perfect carry-along book to consume in life’s in-between moments (like waiting in line).

CONS: Does not lend itself well to long reading sessions.

BOTTOM LINE: Eagleman’s philosophical musings will keep your own mind speculating long after the short chapters have ended.

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• @Manybooks.net: The February 1930 issue of Astounding Stories of Super-Science.
• Thoughtcrime Experiments, edited by Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson, a brand new Creative Commons-licensed anthology of 9 SF and fantasy stories and 5 works of art. [via Tor]
• @Fantasy Magazine: “Garkain” by Samantha Henderson.
• @Strange Horizons: “Lily Glass” by Veronica Schanoes.
• @Hub: “My Dad’s Idea” by Llinos Cathryn Thomas.
• @Afterburn SF:
  • “Milk-Toothed” By C. L. Rossman.
  • “Family Tree” by Michelle Scott.
• @Audio Fiction:
  • @Pseudopod: “Old Ways” by Dan Dworkin, read by Jenna Sharpe.
  • @Escape Pod: “Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal, read by Stephen Eley.
  • @Maria Lectrix: Chapter 10 of The Ultimate Weapon by John W. Campbell, Jr., read by Maureen O’Brien.
  • @The Classic Tales Podcast: The conclusion of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe, read by B. J. Harrison.
  • @Beam Me Up: “The Colors Twelve” by Shaun Saunders and “Best Laid Plans” by Crystalwizard, read by Paul Cole.
  • @LibriVox:
    • Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground by Baron Ludvig Holberg, read by Alan Winterrowd
    • “The Stars, My Brothers” by Edmond Hamilton, read by Gregg Margarite. [via SF Signal]
    • Short Science Fiction Collection Vol. 013 with stories by Lou Tabakow, Nathaniel Gordon, Benjamin Ferris, Basil Wells, Ben Bova, J. F. Bone, Arnold Castle, Henry Slesar, Dean Ing, and Roger Kuykendall.
    • Short Science Fiction Collection Vol. 014 with stories by Robert J. Martine, G.C. Edmondson, Charles E. Fritch, Allan Howard, H. Beam Piper, J.F. Bone, Charles Leonard Harness and Theodore Lockhard Thomas, Jack Douglas, C.C. Beck, and Damon Knight.
• Fan fiction is alive and well, as evidenced by stories inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan series, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea Trilogy, Philip Pillman’s His Dark Materials, Gene Brewer’s K-PAX, Forgotten Realms, and Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies.

The finalists for the 2009 Locus Award have been announced:

• Matter, Iain M. Banks (Orbit UK) [See SF Signal reviews]
• City at the End of Time, Greg Bear (Gollancz, Del Rey)
• Marsbound, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
• Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow) [See SF Signal's review]
• Saturn’s Children, Charles Stross (Orbit, Ace)

Read the rest of this entry

• Interviews & Profiles:
  • @SciFi Scanner: Battle for Terra Director Aristomenis Tsirbas.
  • @Sci-Fi Fan Letter: Robert J. Sawyer.
  • @Bibliophile Stalker: Paul Graham Raven.
  • @SCI FI Wire: Leonard Nimoy on why he came back to Star Trek.
• Any young adult fiction haters out there should read John Scalzi’s take on YA fiction.
• Bruce Sterling is taking over the reigns of the Cool Tools blog. [via Boing Boing Gadgets]
• Cover Pr0n at Pyr-o-mania: The Silver Skull by Mark Chadbourn.
• Scott D. Parker is now blogging about science fiction & fantasy at SF Safari. Welcome to the SF blogosphere, Scott!
• Matthew Cheney is attracted to horror stories.
• Grasping for the Wind asks blog reviewers What is your reviewing process?
• Cool Tech: G.E. breakthrough puts 100 DVDs on a single disc.
• Amazon gobbles up iPhone e-book reader app Stanza.
• See? This is the blasphemy that happens when people get their sick, sick hands on a copy of Photoshop: a picture of Kirk making out with Leia. That’s so wrong. (And also a little hot.) [via Great White Snark]
• Lists:
  • @SciFi Watch: Five Terms That Science Fiction Coined.
  • Some genre classics make the Listverse list of Top 10 Classic Midnight Movies.
  • @Topless Robot: The 5 Best (and 5 Worst) Red Dwarf Episodes.
  • @Fan Cinema Today: 5 Must-See Short Star Wars Fan Films.
  • Hecklerspray lists Top 20 Sci-Fi Movie Villains. With video!

Sad news via SF Site…

Author Tom Deitz has passed away.

Deitz was the author of the Soulsmith Trilogy (Soulsmith, Dreambuilder, and Wordwright) and also Windmaster’s Bane, Fireshaper’s Doom, Darkthunder’s Way, Sunshaker’s War, Stoneskin’s Revenge, and The Gryphon King. Deitz contributed to the fanzine Aphelion in the 1970s and to APA MOTiVE in the 1990s.

See also:

Wikipedia page

Suite 101 article on Tom Deitz

Tom Deitz page at Random House

Here’s a pre-muttonchops Isaac Asimov explaining his now-famous Three Laws of Robotics.

Memesis Virtualis proprietor Frank Dudley recently asked me to participate in a meme he has going: What are your recent sf/f book recommendations?

Check out my response at Memesis Virtualis.