Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I made fandom_wank. Thanks to Seema for the link.

I didn’t read it all, but one answer I can provide is that I think Te is great. Give the gift of fic!

Cool mac link of the day: Perversion Tracker reviews the really bad Mac software that never sees the light of day on VersionTracker.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to writing…the email appears in your box. You thought everyone had forgotten the 50,000 words of dreck you wrote in November, didn’t you? The lazy days, the desperate weekend catch-up sessions, the wretched last 2,000 words you wrote on the night of the 30th when you discovered that your word counter and NaNoWriMo’s didn’t agree…yes, they’ve all come back to haunt you. It’s time for NaNoEdMo - it’s time to edit that albatross into a sleek, fashionable penguin (paying special attention to the repulsive imagery of chapter four).

Don’t think you’ll get away just because didn’t finish your NaNoNovel, or even worse, didn’t start. According to the EdMo FAQ, any pre-existing draft of a novel qualifies for a national edit. Even fan-fiction is allowed. All you need is 50,000 words of dreck, more or less, and 50 hours of your time in March. Start planning now with the Pre-EdMo Tips. Check out Holly Lisle’s article on one-pass manuscript revision to make your first NaNoEdMo your last.

This comes at a bad time for me. After the exhaustion of NaNoWriMo, I took December off, then did some last-minute Trek writing in January for the ASC Awards year deadline. This month I’ve been on vacation from fanfic, slowly working myself up for more original fic. I have a stack of books on metallurgy I’ve been reading for one short story (which was supposed to be about genetics, not alloys) - I was so into The Nature of Metals by Bruce A. Rogers (1964) that I almost missed my T stop tonight. I certainly don’t want to stop writing both that story and the other I started this month in order to go back and edit dreck, but I’ll never get anywhere by starting novels. At some point, you have to finish them.

There goes another month…

Cool image of the day: a hotrod iBook

So I want to buy a new iMac, I really do, but the issue is: where? Do I order it from the on-line Apple Store? Do I hike over to the Apple retail store at the CambridgeSide Galleria for that hands-on, immediate gratification? Do I support my local reseller? Or is an on-line MacMall, with its rebates and free printers, for me?

For reasons I don’t recall, I joined the Boston Macintosh Users Group, and they also have an on-line store for members. The deals look the same as at MacMall, at least on the new macs. By the way, that free memory thing is a scam - they charge you most of the cost of the memory, but call it an installation fee. How about they send me the free memory, I open the bottom cover, pop it in, and close the cover? I won’t even charge them $40 to do it.

Seema informed me that it’s time for the Awesome Author Award yet again. I’ve entered in the past two years, and I’ll be carrying on the tradition this year as well. My goal last year was not to repeat any entries. I wasn’t sure I could do that again, seeing as I haven’t written any J/C to speak of lately, but when I checked carefully I still had more stories than categories. Here are my lists, including this year:

The only J/C stories I still haven’t entered are Taboo, Like This, Video Meliora Proboque, and A Maquis Holiday. That’s a good start for 2004, I suppose. Two repeats were allowed this year under the contest rules, but I’m not repeating. If I didn’t win last year (I didn’t), I’m never going to win, so no tactical considerations apply. I’d rather put out newer fic that people are less likely to have read and have a few people see it and think (to misquote Monty Python) she’s not dead yet.

People began fleeing Boskone on Sunday around 3 p.m. The snow didn’t start here until Monday morning, and it stopped Monday night. In that brief time, we managed to break all previous snow records, including the Blizzard of ‘78:

National Weather Service Taunton MA

715 AM EST Tue Feb 18 2003

Record 24 hour snowfall and record snowstorm snowfall set at
Boston

As of 7 AM Logan airport in east Boston had measured 27.5 inches of
snowfall. This eclipsed the previous 24 hour snowfall record of 25.4
inches set during the April fools day blizzard of March 31St and
April 1St of 1997.

The total of 27.5 inches also set the record for greatest snowstorm
snowfall total. The previous record was 27.1 inches set February 6th
and 7th 1978.

I haven’t heard whether the winds were high enough to qualify as a blizzard here in Boston, but I understand it passed the bar elsewhere.

It didn’t look like that much snow when I headed out to work this morning. The T was running fine (note past tense), cutting a lovely green figure through the snow - not that my co-workers made much use of it. I found two people who’d been camping out in the office since Sunday, and three others made brief appearances. I wish they’d email me to tell me when a snow day has been declared. I could have used the sleep.

So, about that past tense… Apparently sometime between my departure this morning and my return home, the overhead power lines for the Green Line trolleys succumbed to the excessive snow. We were all tossed off the Green Line at Star Market and put on buses for the rest of the T route. Bussing on the Green Line usually makes the commute faster - even today with the streets looking no cleaner at 8pm than they had at 10am - so no one complained.

Seema got hold of the Boskone program and asked Zendom about tired fanfic writers jumping the shark. I made a distinction between tired writing, with (perhaps) intentionally repetitious themes, and exhausted muses who won’t produce any new ideas no matter how you prod them. Maybe it’s just an issue of whether the author rests when the muse is silent or tries to write anyway.

I only mention it because I needed a title to go with this untitled meme from YCD via Sara G:

Fandoms:

1. Jane Austen
2. X-Files
3. Voyager
4. Buffy The Vampire Slayer
5. Stargate

Pairings I used to love and now thoroughly detest because they’ve been so [expletive deleted] up by both canon and fanon that they are no longer recognizable:

1. JA: Darcy/Elizabeth
2. XF: Mulder/Scully
3. VOY: Janeway/Chakotay
4. BtVS: Xander/Anya
5. SG-1: (not Jossed yet)

Pairings I look at with old affection:

1. JA: Bingley/Jane
2. XF: (there are no other pairings)
3. VOY: Chakotay/7
4. BtVS: Willow/Oz
5. SG-1: (I haven’t actually seen the show yet)

Current pairings I squee over:

1. JA: Charlotte/Colonel Fitzwilliam
2. XF: (I Said, There Are No Other Pairings)
3. VOY: Janeway/Paris
4. BtVS: Buffy/Spike (kick me, I’m a fan)
5. SG-1: Sam/Jack

I tried to post this entry with Archipelago, a Mac blogging interface, but the interface and documentation were too obscure. So the reviews will be typed up the old-fashioned way, through the web interface.

I really ought to know better than to read topical anthologies like Pharaoh Fantastic. The theme was ancient Egypt, and most of the stories took a magical approach to the topic. Some were closer to sci-fi or pulpy adventure, and several were disturbingly irreverent tales of the origins of Judaism and Christianity. Even that was better than the Wicca-style magic of other stories.

The stories I enjoyed were the ones that best recreated the spirit of ancient Egypt. “Succession” by Tanya Huff followed an aging queen in her struggles to save Egypt from the stereotypical Evil Vizier. The prose wasn’t always clear, but the characterization was good. In “The Voice of Authority,” a new Pharaoh becomes acquainted with his powers and duties as a god. “Whatever Was Forgotten” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman recounts thousands of years of the immortal dead, up to the final tomb robbery.

I picked up Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy at some library sale. It’s a typical Rip Van Winkle story, in which an insomniac has himself hypnotized to sleep in 1887 Boston, and doesn’t wake up until the year 2000. A doctor revives him and he discovers a communist paradise. Of course, the doctor has a beautiful daughter and the inevitable happens. All of that is standard for this sort of proto-scifi utopian novel. The interesting bit for me was near the end, when Our Revived Hero repents of his past capitalist sins, and becomes converted to the wonders of communism. The Christian imagery is used, and perhaps abused, by the author, but the conversion is in essence intellectual, making it a fascinating sci-fi theme.

Of course, it’s not called communism in the book. It’s just some rosy socialist view of the future, long before anyone had tried socialism and found it wanting. Looking Backward is only occasionally a novel; most of it is polemic, with Our Hero making naive protests that this workers’ paradise can’t possibly exist and the doctor telling him, “Nothing could be simpler,” and variations on that theme.

It’s easy, after 2000, to mock the doctor’s simple communism; the biggest hole in his logic is the hole in man’s motives. Whenever Our Hero asks why the workers will do their best rather than slack off, or share alike rather than hoard, or be comrades rather than asserting their power over one another, the doctor answers that they will have no incentive to do wrong. He keeps saying exactly that. The absence of selfish or evil motives is assumed. Maybe it was a reasonable assumption in 1887, though I doubt it; it’s certainly glaringly naive after the year 2000.

Robert Charles Wilson’s Darwinia deals with a very different sort of conversion - the Conversion of Europe. Strange lights like a giant aurora borealis fill the sky one night in 1912, and in the morning, Europe is no longer there. In its place is a jungle, and not just any jungle - a jungle with a completely different evolutionary history, where the vertebrates’ spines run up their stomachs, and the poisonous things are very, very poisonous. The population is gone; there’s nothing smarter than a pack animal on the entire continent.

The nickname for the new Europe is Darwinia, a joke, since this miracle is supposed, by most people, to have disproved Darwin. Yes, indeed, species arise out of single stupendous acts of creation. The huge, obvious (if ambiguous) miracle starts a religious revival and raises creation science to scientific respectability. A few of Our Heroes disbelieve the nouveau science, but the novel’s creation-science bashing never gets intolerable.

The reader soon finds Our Heroes on an expedition into deepest, darkest Darwinia, à la the Lewis and Clark expedition. This bothers the surviving Europeans, who don’t like the Wilson Doctrine declaring Darwinia a new world open to any colonists - which is to say, American colonists. The expedition runs into the dangers of the new continent and of the angry partisans, and makes a startling discovery. That’s just the beginning.

Early on there’s an interlude that lets the reader in on what’s really behind the “miracle,” though Our Heroes remain in the dark for quite a while longer. I don’t think I wanted to know that early on, but perhaps the truth was so strange that the author needed to work up to it. I don’t think he filled out his premise quite as far as he could, and his technical details and bad guys were a bit sketchy, but the excellent characterization more than made up for the problems.

I got to hear David Brin speak again today, on privacy. He has a book out about the advantages of openness, The Transparent Society. I thought I’d relate that to why I don’t believe in doing things for the children.

A person should have nothing to hide from children. I believe that anything out there that is bad for children (say, smut, or pre-marital sex) is also bad for adults. I don’t think there’s an age where bad things suddenly become good for you, or even acceptable indulgences for you. Behind every sentiment that such-and-such is bad for children is an unspoken admission that such-and-such is just plain bad.

On the other hand, anything that interests adults is going to interest children to some extent, whereas things aimed specifically at interesting children (such as David Brin’s plans to save fandom with Teen Appeal) go oft awry.

Enough about the children! There were some other good speakers at Boskone - which is not to say that the panels were all that informative, just entertaining. I especially enjoyed Darrell Schweitzer, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Allen Steele. I hope it’s not too fennish of me to say so. I’m not planning on getting into the sf scene - I get more than enough fandom on-line.

By the way, Allen Steele says he wouldn’t want anyone to write fanfic about his works - to do it to him I believe were his words. I arrived at the end of the derivative fic panel, but it sounded like it was all about media fic, not fanfic. I never heard a positive word about fanfic. If you ignore the most active portion of fandom, it’s no surprise that you think fandom is dying out. Hint: it’s only you dying out.

One thing I wish I’d known about was the NESFA Short Story Contest for unpublished authors. I’m hoping not to qualify by the next deadline, but you never know.

This is a late-night update from Boskone. Clam Chowder, the filk guests of honor, were more folky than filky. Fortunately, I also like folk music.

I missed David Brin’s reading, but I did get to hear him lecture the attendees about fen going extinct because they aren’t attracting enough young people. “Look around you,” he said, and I looked around and saw a sea of greasy pony-tails, grey beards, thick glasses and ample waistlines. I’ve never felt so attractive in all my life, and I’ve been to my share of academic conferences.

I’m not saying that to be snarky. I’ve never been to a con before, but in any case I don’t believe in doing things for the children. No one made any efforts to attract me to Boskone - I signed up all on my own. I’ve tried to get involved in NESFA in the past and gotten little response and no encouragement. A group that has a clubhouse that isn’t on the T, gatherings at people’s houses that aren’t on the T, and, until this year, even conventions that weren’t on the T, is aimed at an older, suburban crowd and is going to get one. It’s no use trolling high schools for proto-geeks when the problem with fandom is…fandom.

There are plenty of teens in on-line fandom and a huge sci-fi section when I visit the bookstore, so I don’t buy the doom-and-gloom scenario. The genre of science fiction has a permanent audience in the N’s, one that will never get much larger but will also never shrink, because personality type is more nature than nurture. The cult of science fiction may be dying out, but if that concerns the faithful they might want to start by attracting 30-year-olds and work their way down to teens.

That’s just my two cents.

Cool link of the day: Immigrant by Kyohei Abe, a winner in the .Mac HomePage Creativity contest

If you’re bored in Boston this weekend, you might want to consider SF28, a 24-hour sci-fi movie marathon starting Sunday at noon at the Coolidge Corner theatre. If you can drag yourself away from the contradancing at Boskone, the SF28 movie list looks interesting.