ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

Nesto se razmisljam da bi nam dobro dosao topik koji bi mogli da punimo raznim novostima, prikazima i svim ostalim zanimljivostima na koje nalecemo dok krstarimo netom. Svako od nas ima par sajtova, foruma, blogova koje manje-vise redovno obilazi, ali, bar mene, cesto mrzi da za nesto otvaram novi topik. Takodje, mnogi ne postizu da obidju sve sto ih zanima u toku dana, pa se nadam da cemo ovakvim topikom uspesno premostiti i lenjost i nedostatak vremena.

Naravno, hteo bih da se zahvalim roditeljima, producentima i Mehmetu i novostima iz sveta video igara.

Nego:

Quote from: Amanda Robin on 29-07-2010, 10:01:08
It is Booker Prize season again, and therefore time for wailing and gnashing of teeth around the blogosphere.

First up, if you want to see the long list, it can be found here.

And now the controversy. Last year, you may remember, Kim Stanley Robinson complained about the lack of recognition for his type of novel, and Booker judge John Mullan made a complete ass of himself by saying that the award didn't look at science fiction because SF is, "bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other." Unsurprisingly, a few noses were put out of joint.

Pre par dana China Mieville imao je high noon diskusiju sa Mullanom povodom ovih desavanja koja je Amanda prijavila. Okrsaj se odigrao na Cheltenham Literary Festivalu, pa koga zanima nek progugla malo.

 pa, u skladu sa tvojom zahvalnicom, planiram da zloupotrebljavam ovaj topik isključivo za SF kontroverze... 

A Teachable Moment

Posted by lavietidhar on October 21, 2010

Ok, we're not sure what "a teachable moment" means, exactly, but it's an Americanism and we loves Americanisms. As James Gunn so helpfully pointed out, American science fiction is the base line against which all the other fantastic literatures in languages other than English must be measured.

No, seriously. Apparently it was the idea that Elizabeth Moon could be invited to Wiscon not as a guest-of-honour but to be educated, a little like a child being sent to summer school, and there was a lot of behind-the-scene discussion about it and the other guest-of-honour, Nisi Shawl, talked to Elizabeth Moon, though we're not quite sure about what. Shawl said:

    Part of my reluctance to go into detail stems from the fact that Elizabeth Moon will be calling me again, in about a month, when I hope to have the time to go return to the matter more fully. Note that this "teachable moment" is arranged around my schedule. And that it's taking place before the con.

    I hope that after our second talk Elizabeth Moon will have things to say to the community at large, and apologies to deliver. And that's not just a rhetorical formula I'm mouthing; based on what she has already said to me privately, I really do actually have hope on that score. I really do.



So, very cloak-and-dagger stuff.  Very Dumas, if you like. Moon, of course, has been silent about the matter ever since deleting the 500 comments on her blog. So we don't know what she thinks.

Then there was a big debate over whether Moon's invitation should be withdrawn. Apparently the convention organisers weren't that keen on doing that. In fact, they said:

    Even though we strongly disavow these elements of Ms. Moon's post, we have not rescinded her invitation to be a Guest of Honor, nor do we plan to do so. The WisCon planning committee selected Ms. Moon earlier this year based on her past work and our feeling that she would make a positive contribution to WisCon. After extensive conversation in recent days, and having spoken directly with Ms. Moon on the subject, we continue to believe that her presence will contribute to the Con.



Then there was a lot more stuff and N.K. Jemisin ended up quitting Wiscon in protest:

    On the WisCon concom's mailing list, I was honest with the folks there about my feelings: that bringing a bigot to WisCon as Guest of Honor was counter to the con's feminist mission, not to mention a slap in the face to a whole bunch of people. I advocated for her GoHship to be rescinded because of this — and I also said that if she came to the con, I planned to participate in protest efforts already being discussed among WisCon's former and current attendees (e.g., turning my back on her during her GoH speech, challenging her when she's on panels). For this, I got verbally slapped by several other concom members with accusations of being abusive, unreasonable, too emotional, hysterical, and worse. I got into a particular battle with one woman who, when I pointed out that second-wave feminism was inadequate for dealing with this issue and it should be considered from a third-wave intersectional perspective, proceeded to try and inform me about how much second-wave feminism had done for me, and the poor black, Irish, and American Indian women who are my immediate ancestors.



    Leaving aside the mind-boggling ignorance of statements like this, I was seeing another dynamic at work. All kinds of irrelevant points got brought up during this period: one guy wanted to discuss WisCon's future in light of the advent of the internet (I don't even know), another wanted to revisit the PoC safe space and whether it should exist (yeah, I know), and so on. Basically, WisCon's concom wanted to talk about something, anything, other than the cranky, stinking elephant in the room.

    Then things got quiet for awhile, as the concom exhausted itself and we waited for... something. I wasn't sure what. But when two weeks passed in silence, it seemed clear that the Troika had had plenty of time to hear from the WisCon membership, and was either not going to change its mind or was simply waiting for the member rage to blow over. So, annoyed by this, and still pissed off over the Racism 101 reactions I'd encountered on the concom — I kept thinking, didn't any of these people actually attend any of WisCon's panels? — I sent a note to one of the Troika members with whom I was familiar, and let her know I was quitting in protest. She let me know about the SF3 organization's resolution in favor of rescinding Moon's GoHship... but also let me know that it didn't really mean anything. In point of fact, that resolution had been passed almost two weeks before (nobody bothered to make it public), and nothing had happened since. It was a pretty, but empty, gesture.




And then, today, a notice has been posted on the Wiscon parent site (an organisation called the SF3) that simply said: "SF3 has withdrawn the invitation to Elizabeth Moon to attend WisCon 35 as guest of honor."

So, to be honest, we're not quite sure why she was disinvited – was it because of her statements, or because of public pressure, or because of sunspot activity? Hard to tell.

Meanwhile, Moon's response (ok, we're only inferring that), was on her blog:

    Last night, well after dark, the squirrels were still at it.   This morning, before dawn, the squirrels were at it again.   They beat the early birds out of bed.  They prefer this side of the house when they're in the mood, and although it's sometimes fun to watch them flirting their tails and chasing each other up and down trees and turning somersaults (however many are in the mood at the time)   they make enough noise to be disruptive.  Both vocally and in the noise they make rushing around or falling ka-thump! on the water tank (which, when not full, booms like a big drum) and rustling in the leaves.

    I wish they'd just go on and get it over with.   They won't, of course.  They're going to be leaping, running, chasing and being chased until the last pair finally give up sometime in December.  (Ah.  The first bird just spoke up–a blue jay.  And that pair of squirrels is now silent (or much farther away.   Back to work.)




Quite poignant, really.

Anyway. We really weren't going to comment on this beyond our initial post, but the sad reality is that that single post generated more hits on this site than anything else we've been posting for two years. When we posted about French author Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud recently, do you think anyone read it? When we posted on Islamic steampunk, or a new manifesto for Islamic science fiction, do you think it got the same amount of hits? Or our recent exclusive interview with Indian author Samit Basu?

Which, to me, is the real tragedy. What Moon proved is that there is more interest in the negative comments of a single American writer, than there is in the entire body of work of a mass of international writers. Which is what this blog is about. It's not about Moon, or Gunn, or whether the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) will ever give another woman writer a Grand Master Award (3 out of 27, at the last count).

So, if you come to this post because you wanted to follow the last bit of controversy surrounding Moon – I like MoonGate myself for it, as a name, but you can pick your own! – why not stick around? Check out some of the other hundreds of posts? Try a short story highlight, or an interview, or look at some of our other original content? Check out Arabic science fiction. Or African science fiction. Check out what's happening in the Philippines. Or France. We don't mind which!

Or pick up a copy of The Apex Book of World SF. We're having a sale on. If memory serves, there are a couple of Muslim writers there and, really, you could do worse than check them out. Let's all have a teachable moment! Who knows, it could be fun.

 

mun-bladi-gejt. *grin*

ima tu podosta stvarci koje nadaleko prevazilaze okvire same ove kontroverze i njenih aktera, sa svim njihovim jin & jangom; ovo su skroz gadna vremena u kom cenzura defilira u demokratskoj odori političke korektnosti i nosi sa sobom ceo cakum nov sistem vrednosti.

Cheltenham 2010
October 19, 2010 — Niall

My main complaint about the sf programme at this year's Cheltenham Literary Festival is that I couldn't spare the time and money to go to more of it. As it was, I spent a very pleasant weekend in Cheltenham, staying with friends, and went to three events over two days. All three were worth attending, if only for the pleasure of seeing serious items at a mainstream literary festival take sf seriously. Of course, though it should go without saying that my recollections are likely imperfect, there were also some frustrations.

Most of those came in the first event, China Mieville and John Mullan, in conversation:

    Why is there never any science fiction on the Booker shortlist? Yet why have so many 'literary' novelists, from Atwood to Ishiguro, borrowed their stories from science fiction? Where does sci-fi lie on the literary landscape? What are the issues of perception surrounding this genre and its counterpart 'literary fiction', and how porous are the borders between them?

This was a follow-up to last year's brief fuss on the same topic, and as Mieville emphasised more than once, all credit to Mullan for turning up to defend his remarks. Each man set out their stall for about ten minutes, then there was some back and forth, and then they opened the floor to questions. Mieville's contention was that the Booker prize should do one of two things: either be genuinely open to all types of fiction; or admit that it is concerned with a specific category of fiction, no more or less a category than the many others with which bookshops are stocked. Mullan's reply, stated with increasing firmness as the discussion wore on, was that literary fiction is a category apart, primarily because it eschews formula.

There were, I think, two problems facing the debate, one embedded in the panel description, the other in the panelists. The former was the assumption — pushed at slightly, but never to the extent that I would have hoped for — that a work published outside the category science fiction, and not stocked in the "special room in bookshops" that Mullan talked of, is not science fiction. So Mullan, for instance, mentioned his surprise at being informed that Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, to his mind the greatest English novel of the last ten years, could have been nominated for a science fiction award; and confessed that although his first thought on hearing that it had lost the Arthur C Clarke Award to Ryman's Air was to be intrigued, his second was to assume that it must have lost not because Air was a better novel, but because Never Let Me Go failed to meet the rules of science fiction (specifically, he suggested, in focusing on the characters instead of explaining its world). The assumption buried in there did not go uncommented on — Mieville even dragged out sf's no good/they bellow 'til we're deaf. But, although I wouldn't wish to claim that that attitude towards "outsider" sf doesn't exist, it would have been good to be able to suggest a bit more strongly that Air is indeed a novel very worth Mullan's time; and to be able to emphasise that Ishiguro is far from the only non-category-sf author to be shortlisted for, or to win, a science fiction award; that David Mitchell, Jan Morris, Marcel Theroux and Sarah Hall have all appeared on the Clarke Award shortlist in recent years, and that a couple of years ago Michael Chabon won a Hugo and a Nebula. If, as Mullan contends, the borders have hardened since he was younger, the hardening doesn't seem to be coming from the sf side.

The second problem was related to the first, insofar as it became awkwardly clear that while the discussion was going to be primarily about the absence of category sf from the Booker list, only one of the participants could and would talk fluently about fiction from all over the literary map. Mullan had almost no recent primary experience with category science fiction. His astonishment, for instance, that Mieville could suggest that a science fiction writer — Gene Wolfe, to be specific — might be the equal of JM Coetzee, seemed to be genuine. And it meant that he had no real way to engage with Mieville's suggestion that different categories of fiction might have different, but equally valid, "aesthetic specificities"; and that one of sf's specificities might be estrangement, as compared to literary fiction's preference for recognition. When making his case for the importance of formula to genre it was telling that Mullan pointed over and over again at crime fiction, describing a template detective story. It would have been good to ask: what is the template story of a science fiction novel? The clearest demonstration of Mullan's inability to consider that the characteristics of literary fiction Mieville was pointing at might be, in their way, as much generic markers as anything in a science fiction novel was highlighted by his description of Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe — which he'd read as background for a documentary on first novels — as "a send-up of science fiction", when in fact — with its solipsistic, sadsack narrator obsessed with his relationship with his father — it plays with the conventions of "literary fiction" at least as thoroughly. (And in fact, I'd argue the metaphysics of Yu's novel are constructed — not even subtly! — to articulate, among other things, precisely the sorts of points about literary categorisation that Mieville was trying to make.)

After all that, the second event — an interview of Iain M Banks by the editor of the Guardian Books website, Sarah Crown — was thoroughly refreshing for the unabashed enthusiasm for sf that radiated from Banks. Indeed, the first audience question could have been a plant, so completely did it seem to justify every caricature of literary snobbishness ever constructed by sf fans — the guy actually stood up and asked, in so many words because I wrote them down, "I realise this may provoke a fight, but I have to ask: why does Iain Banks, one of my favourite writers, spend so much time wasting his prodigious talent on science fiction?" — and so fully did Banks seize the opportunity to offer a full-throated and crowd-pleasing endorsement of sf as "the most important genre of the modern age". (It was also rather cheering to hear Banks refer to himself off-handedly as writing "in two genres"...) Surface Detail sounds, in many ways, like Culture business as usual; but Banks did a good job of reminding the audience of how appealing that business can be.

Sunday's event, also ably moderated by Sarah Crown, was probably the one I went into with highest hopes:

    British Science Fiction From H G Wells to John Wyndham, Britain has been home to some of the most groundbreaking and successful classic science fiction writers. Explore past classics and the best of the current crop as authors Iain M Banks, Gwyneth Jones, Michael Moorcock and Guest Director China Miéville discuss this very British tradition.

Inevitably — and not just because three of the four panelists were respondents to the survey! — there was familiar ground covered, but it was covered thoughtfully. So, we had a consideration of how the loss of empire shapes British sf, and the extent to which in some cases it may be an assumed influence, even imposed by expectation rather than springing from within. We had The Politics Question, with the observation that it's not so much that American sf is right-wing and British sf left-wing, but that American sf has both right and left wings, and British sf, generally speaking, has not heard from the right, plus a discussion of how individualistic vs communitarian philosophies work themselves out at the level of narrative. And we had some discussion of how sf has been positioned in relation to mainstream literature, with Michael Moorcock suggesting (not for the first time, I think) that where American sf has a stronger tradition of writers who express their ideas through sf, British sf has a stronger tradition of writers who seek to express science-fictional ideas: that is, more writers for whom science fiction is not an entire career, for whom the idea comes before the form.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the discussion came when it strayed into what-next territory. Nic, braver than I, raised the topic, pointing out that the recent history of British sf has been a self-described golden age, particularly in the resurgence of space opera, but that other developments, such as the reduction in the number of women writers, suggested a narrowing of the field, and asked which the panel felt was the more powerful trend. Gwyneth Jones suggested, in line with recent discussion here, that British space opera, at least, is no longer a growth industry and may be starting to stagnate; and that women writing sf and feminist sf in general may have suffered for being positioned as "the next thing" in a genre that is always hungry for the next thing, rather than more usefully seen as a an evolution. (Mieville, in turn, suggested that it may be worth looking to what he characterised as an "underground tradition" of British sf — involving Katharine Burdekin, Jane Gaskell, and another writer whose name I forget — for a more congenial reception of women.) And speculating on the next thing, the panel suggested that the sf to look for may be that coming from elsewhere — from the Pacific Rim, or Africa — and may not necessarily be prose sf. Or it may be — and this was the point missing from the earlier debate for me, even bearing in mind Moorcock's comments — that more and more interesting fantastical writing is coming from writers positioned outside the current category; Mieville cited Toby Litt, David Mitchell and Helen Oyeyemi as writers to keep an eye on, all picks I'd cheerfully agree with

All good clean fun. Perhaps not all attendees agreed, mind you; as we were leaving the panel discussion, an elderly gentleman behind me was heard to wonder why, oh why, do sf writers always seem to be so interested in navel gazing?

Jel ovo sa Moonovom nastavak onog sranja sa LJa od prosle godine? Da parafraziram: kako se beli muskarci i zene pisci usudjuju da pisu ista izvan svog miljea, kao i zasto nisu feministi, lgbt paladini, manjine, kultovi i sekte etc.

I komentari na vectorovom blogu su vredni paznje, pojavi se tu dosta bitnih ljudi.

A šta je to Munova izjavila? Mislim, iz ovog teksta sam samo skužio da je obirsala neke postove sa bloga, da neće učestvovati u WisConu i to je to. Gde je poetak tragedije? 

Prvo sam pomislio da ima veze sa RaceFail-om '09. Ima, samo u smislu da je ova kontroverza duhovni nastavak proslogodisnje. Sto se ovoga sada tice, ladno su joj na kraju otkazali gostovanje, tj ne gostovanje, trebalo je da bude GoH.

Today the World SF Blog posted an excerpt from a much longer post at Elizabeth Moon's Lj:

QuoteI know–I do not dispute–that many Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could. I do not dispute that there are moderate, even liberal, Muslims, that many Muslims have all the virtues of civilized persons and are admirable in all those ways. I am totally, 100%, appalled at those who want to burn the Koran (which, by the way, I have read in English translation, with the same attention I've given to other holy books) or throw paint on mosques or beat up Muslims. But Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they've had. Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Muslim-defined clothing...but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities. More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting mosques than synagogues–and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism. What I heard, in my area, after 9/11, was not condemnation by local mosques of the attack–but an immediate cry for protection even before anything happened. Our church, and many others (not, obviously all) already had in place a "peace and reconciliation" program that urged us to understand, forgive, pray for, not just innocent Muslims but the attackers themselves. It sponsored a talk by a Muslim from a local mosque–but the talk was all about how wonderful Islam was–totally ignoring the historical roots of Islamic violence.

I can easily imagine how Muslims would react to my excusing the Crusades on the basis of Islamic aggression from 600 to 1000 C.E....(for instance, excusing the building of a church on the site of a mosque in Cordoba after the Reconquista by reminding them of the mosque built on the site of an important early Christian church in Antioch.) So I don't give that lecture to the innocent Muslims I come in contact with. I would appreciate the same courtesy in return (and don't get it.) The same with other points of Islam that I find appalling (especially as a free woman) and totally against those basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution...I feel that I personally (and many others) lean over backwards to put up with these things, to let Muslims believe stuff that unfits them for citizenship, on the grounds of their personal freedom. It would be helpful to have them understand what they're demanding of me and others–how much more they're asking than giving. It would be helpful for them to show more understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship in a non-Muslim country

I zbog toga čitava pomama? Pih.

Po meni, sve je to uvek i bila jedna-te-ista kontroverza, ja njene aspekte razlikujem samo po povodima na kojima se rasplamsaju. RaceFail09 je kontroverza kojom su se svi pozabavili, svako na svoj način, i to meni ima daleko veću težinu od samog blogerskog prepucavanja. Van pomalo preteranih reakcija po pitanju rasizma, mene je više šokiralo koliko je suštinsko nerazumevanje zapravo konstanta u 'computer generated' konverzaciji; hoću reći, i Tereza i Patrik su ipak editori za Tor, pa bi čovek očekivao da će biti bar selektivniji u izboru sagovornika. Ili da će barem više svrnuti pažnju na one artikulisanije sagovornike, ako ništa drugo. Jer neki od takvih komentara jesu imali point, samo što su taj point kasnije udavili silni postovi wannabe pisaca sa T&P radionice.  Recimo, originalni argumenti nisu toliko bili protiv da 'beli pisci' izlaze iz 'svog' miljea, nego su više bili protiv stereotipizacije koju većina takvih 'izlazaka iz svog miljea' nudi. A to ipak nije isto, samo što su dalji sagovornici do besmisla pojednostavili te stavove, pa je kasnije ispala cela frka nekako više iz nesporazuma. E sad, koliko su ti pojednostavljeni stavovi na kraju imali merita, to je druga stvar, ali sigurno ima dosta težine u argumentu da stereotipizacija jeste oblik rasizma, čak i kad dolazi od ljudi koji rasizam ne praktikuju van te i takve 'teorijske' primene, pa je zato i došlo do vređanja na sve strane. Istina da ima razlike da li je stereotipizacija namerna, sa ciljem da izruguje ili karikira, ili je nenamerna, u delima onih pisaca koji pišu isuviše slobodno o miljeu kojeg ne poznaju dovoljno. Editori za Tor možda i mogu da uoče te fine nijanse razlikovanja, ali mislim da je većini ostalih bilo jednostavnije da prosto generalizuju - "drži se miljea iz kog potičeš i basta!" ne podržavam niti jednu krajnost kao naročito ispravnu, ali mislim da obe imaju dosta čvrstih argumenata.

A ovo sa mungejtom mi je drugačije, bar što se nesporazuma tiče; ona je sasvim precizno rekla šta misli, tu nema nikakvih dubioza niti širenja, kao kod Tereze. Priznajem da se intimno slažem sa njenim stavom, pa možda jesam pristrasna, ali stvarno mi se čini da dosta manjina zahteva (i dobija) velike ustupke na bazi civilnih sloboda, a da pri tom sami prave vrlo malo istih. Onda ispada da takve manjine zapravo ne streme ravnopravnom položaju u društvu, nego nekom krajnje povlaštenom, a to uvek pravi dodatne problem kod ostalih, koji se iznenada osećaju kao građani drugog reda. Ali smešne su mi reakcije na njenu izjavu i celu tu aferu: pa šta ako je Heston član & predsednik fetišizacije vatrenog oružja, pa šta ako je Džon Vejn držao top u dvorištu da njime upuca 'jebene komije', pa šta ako su Bejtsova ili Malkovič desničarski bigoti – to je okej, oni su glumci, onim imaju prava da paradiraju lične stavove. Ali sf pisci (koji su u poređenju sa glumcima relativno minorno poznati, pa stoga i manje uticajni) kao da nemaju taj luksuz, ili ga danas imaju daleko manje nego pre. Ne znam da li je to zato što se na literaturu generalno gleda kao na najuticajniji umetnički domen ili je prosto zato što je (posle fenomena Sajentologije) SF viđen kao vrlo uticajan kontrakulturni faktor, ali čini mi se da blogovi SF pisaca ipak imaju više kontroverzi nego što im po pravdi boga spada.   

Quote from: Amanda Robin on 24-10-2010, 11:52:22
ali čini mi se da blogovi SF pisaca ipak imaju više kontroverzi nego što im po pravdi boga spada.   

To moze biti i da sto je bara manja vise se talasa. Ali mislim da nije samo tu problem, vidi izbacivanje Gibsona od strane ekipe filma, to je globalni(ok, anglo-americki, ali maltene mu dodje isto) fenomen, smejali smo se kada su trazili da odenu Davida, ali se plasim da se taj balon nece tek tako izduvati. Kao Makartijev lov na vestice samo iz drugog ugla.

Pa ne slažem se baš za veličinu bare, ali slažem se da je fenomen tipično anglo-američki, samo što je SF također, tako da je po meni to nerazdvojno, bar u ovom kontekstu.

Recimo, kad sam već tamo pomenula glumice, sećam se sasvim slične kontroverze po pitanju filma Monster's Ball, kad je Bassett u scenariju našla stereotip u ponižavajućoj erotizaciji crnkinja i zbog njega odbila ulogu.  Koliko taj njen stav ima merita, ja stvarno ne znam, ali opet, ja nisam živela život u njenim cipelama, tako da i ne mogu znati. Ali ono u šta sam prilično sigurna jeste fakt da je ista ta Bassett glumila u mnogim ulogama koje su me se iskreno dojmile kao sasvim stereotipne, bilo erotski ili otherwise, pa slutim kako je za nju glavna a verovatno i jedina razlika bila u faktu da su te konkretno filmove režirali crnci. Što znači da su u pitanju prvenstveno predrasude, to sa obaju strana. Ali priznajem da ima dosta žanrovskih izleta van autorskog miljea koji jesu malko... pa, recimo dubiozni po pitanju sterotipizacije, a to sigurno ne olakšava situaciju. Sreća da imam tekst koji baš po tom pitanju čeprka, pa ću ti isti serviram u svrhu argumentacije.

Dalje, ne shvatam opasku za Gibsona - nisam u toku, zaista, zadnjih par meseci sam bila totalno van svih aktuelnih 'online' zbivanja... o  čemu se radi?

Quote from: crippled_avenger on 23-10-2010, 03:45:15
News of Gibson's casting triggered an internal backlash at the studio and on the film.

In a highly unusual public rebuke of a former A-list movie star, Warner Bros. has dropped Mel Gibson from the cast of The Hangover Part II.

Gibson, whose anti-Semitic, racist and misogynist rants have made him radioactive in some Hollywood circles, was to have a cameo as a tattoo artist in the sequel to the 2009 hit.

But the stunt casting, which was picked up by the media this week, triggered an internal backlash at the studio and on the film set. And the studio, where Gibson reigned as a major star during the '80s and '90s with such movies as the Lethal Weapon series, decided to go public with a statement that the actor was no longer involved in the project. Gibson's spokesman declined comment.
. . .

Other members of the movie's cast and crew also are said to have opposed Gibson's casting, and insiders said high-level execs at the studio also objected.

Bezveze. Ne slažem se ja sa njegovim stavom, daleko bilo; ali da ga ovako odrađuju i protestvuju protiv njega, baš je sranje. Meni je on bio jedan od omiljenih glumaca

To što je pola nacije htelo spaliti Kuran, to ništa. Ljudima treba žrtveno jagnje; Gibson je izrazio neke stavove sa kojima se, usudio bih se reći, većina Amerike podsvesno slaže, ali mehanizam odbrane je odradio svoje.

Gibson im je trn u oku pošto je u svojim filmovima otvoreno pokazao šta je sistem. Proći će isto kao i Čarli Čaplin, Orson Vels i drugi koji su to radili. To se u Americi ne oprašta.

ah, taj Gibson...

Melkore, reko bi neko da malko meandriraš... 

Dobro sad to, ali ne važi se ovde, pošto se tog Gibsona napada uglavnom kao hipokritu kakav i jeste.

Late to the Debate

I never know what's going on. I didn't hear about Elizabeth Moon's 9/11 post on her blog until yesterday, when, in response, Wiscon withdrew its invitation to her to be next year's Guest of Honor. Then I tracked down and read her original blog entry, plus some of the subsequent controversy.

Mine is not a political blog. Seldom do I comment on political events, partly because I can't imagine why anyone might care what I think. But this is not just a political matter, it is also an SF one. As a former GOH at Wiscon myself, I have a strong opinion on this issue.

Wiscon's purpose is stated on its website: "WisCon is the first and foremost feminist science fiction convention in the world. WisCon encourages discussion, debate and extrapolation of ideas relating to feminism, gender, race and class." But not, apparently, if those views are unpalatable to the committee.

Elizabeth's blog concerned the building of the Islamic community center in NYC, a few blocks from Ground Zero. I am in favor of building this; I think it is guaranteed by the Constitution, and anyway the building will not be in sight of Ground Zero. Elizabeth argued not that building it should be forbidden, but that Muslims themselves should think twice about the place they are building it, and the impression of cooperation that it gives or does not give to others in their adopted country. Again, I do not agree with her. But that's not the point. Her blog entry is quiet in tone, thoughtful in argument. If you haven't read it, I urge you to do so. Then you can make up your own mind about its statements regarding assimilation, citizenship, and tolerance.

The point IS just that -- reading the blog provides a point of departure for discussion about gender, race, and class -- just what Wiscon is supposed to be about. This discussion could have happened at Wiscon, if Elizabeth were going to be there. It would have been stimulating, and everyone could have had a say. Now that will not happen. In addition, the con will be losing the other thing it is supposed to showcase -- successful female writers of speculative fiction.

I think the Wiscon committee has erred in withdrawing its GOH-ship. This is NOT the equivalent to not inviting a raving racist or virulent anti-feminist. Elizabeth is not those things. Wscon should have honored its commitment to her.

Posted by Nancy Kress at 2:07 PM

ali ovo je ipak malko bitnije:

David Brin: AboutSF Wants Help

David Brin: One of the best things to happen in SF and fandom, in recent years is the "AboutSF" project, run by famed author and SF academic James Gunn, at the University of Kansas's "Science Fiction Center." 

See www.AboutSF.com.   

One AboutSF program — the online curriculum on science fiction literature – has been tested at numerous conventions and Worldcons, receiving great praise. The turn-key program will let almost anyone run a fascinating Introduction to SF seminar almost anywhere, from local libraries and schools to cons around the world.

The AboutSF Project could use some help! Volunteers and people with expertise could be invaluable to Jim Gunn's endeavors, strengthening SF fandom and literature. Especially needed are DATABASE experts who could help fix and improve AboutSF's other paramount program... the SPECULATION SPEAKER'S BUREAU.

SpecSpeakers aims to provide an easy, one-stop shopping place to find SF authors, SF scholars and futurists who might be willing to talk to the public about a wide range of topics (especially SF and the future, but also science and related subjects). It could be a library, looking for a local writer willing to talk about her or his latest book. Or a major corporation seeking a keynoter for a big fee. Either way, SF will benefit. So will fandom and civilization!

Experts who might be willing to form an advisory group, and get their coding fingers dirty, for a good cause, should contact Professor Gunn at: jgunn (at) ku.edu or to AboutSF (at) gmail.com.

Jim Gunn adds: Kristen Lillvis, our current coordinator, thinks this would be helpful, particularly if we're able to get an assistant who is skillful in web matters, as we hope to do. So, we'd be grateful for any volunteer help.

At MadCon, an ailing Harlan Ellison will say goodbye
Farewell to the fans
Josh Wimmer on Thursday 09/23/2010, (7) Comments, (21) Likes
Ellison: 'The truth of what's going on here is that I'm dying.'
Ellison: 'The truth of what's going on here is that I'm dying.'
Related Events:

   * MadCon


Fans of fantastic fiction -- or just some of the finest damn writing to be put on paper -- take heed: If you've ever wanted to talk to Harlan Ellison, this weekend's MadCon 2010 is your last chance.

The 76-year-old writer, cultural critic and longtime den mother of the genre he'd prefer you didn't call "science fiction" is the guest of honor at the convention, happening Sept. 24-26 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Ellison is the winner of multiple Hugo, Nebula and Edgar awards and the author of such oftreprinted short stories as "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore," as well as the mind behind the original screenplay for what many consider Star Trek's best episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever." Other scheduled notables at MadCon include writers Gene Wolfe, Peter David and Patrick Rothfuss, and Doctor Who's Sophie Aldred.

Due to his failing health, there had been some doubt about whether Ellison would show up in person or participate in panels, readings and other events by telephone from his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. But at press time he affirmed he was coming. He is also adamant that MadCon will be the final convention he ever attends, in any fashion.

"The truth of what's going on here is that I'm dying," says Ellison, by phone. "I'm like the Wicked Witch of the West -- I'm melting. I began to sense it back in January. By that time, I had agreed to do the convention. And I said, I can make it. I can make it.'"

Besides giving several talks and sitting on panels, Ellison has a book signing with David scheduled for 3 p.m. Friday at Frugal Muse's west-side location. His Sept. 26 event at the Barrymore Theatre is up in the air; check MadCon2010.com for updates.

The legendarily opinionated author says there is no question he will not answer.  (Although he'd prefer not to hear the one about whether he threw a fan down an elevator shaft -- answer: he didn't -- again. "That will follow me to my grave," he mutters.) And he strongly encourages fans to attend.

"This is gonna be the biggest fucking science-fiction convention ever," Ellison says, "because no con has ever had a guest of honor drop dead while performing for the goddamn audience. The only comparison is the death of Patrick Troughton, at a Doctor Who convention. And I don't think he was even onstage."

Never one to hold back, Harlan Ellison shared his thoughts and feelings freely in a 90-minute conversation from his California home, the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars.

On how he knows he's dying

"An old dog senses when it's his time -- dogs have that capacity; nobody doubts that. Nobody. But everybody doubts when you say, 'I'm dying.' They think you're being a Victorian actress. They think you're doing Bernhardt."

On mortality

"I'm not afraid of death, and there is not one iota of suicide in me. All I want to make sure is that when the paper comes out, it says, 'Harlan Ellison died in his sleep.' You're talking to, essentially, a pretty happy guy. No, not 'pretty' happy -- that's television talk. I am inordinately happy. I am wonderfully happy. I am Icarus-flying-to-the-sun happy. I have led a magical life. I have led exactly the life I would wish to lead. I have led the life I guess that everybody in their heart of hearts wants to lead."

On days gone by

"I loved writing. I loved the word. I loved movies, and we had no television when I was a kid, but I loved books, and I read book after book after book after book. Unlike many another writer who was educated and had college, I was on the road at age 13. Not because of anything bad with my family -- it was just, I had a wanderlust. I was like the great writer Jim Tully or Jack London. I stood there at age 10 in Paynesville, Ohio, and I said, 'This is all mine! All I gotta do is go and get it.' And so I started running away. After a while, my mother said, 'I'll pack you sandwiches. Would you like peanut butter-and-jelly?' Sometimes I'd get as far away as Kansas City and wind up working as carny and then wind up in jail, and get sent home. And I'd go back to school and I'd do very well, and then I'd run away again, and I'd run away to way up into Canada and work in a logging camp."

On current projects

"I just finished my last piece, which is an introduction to a book called The Discarded, based on the short story I wrote and then the teleplay I wrote with Josh Olson, the Academy Award nominee for The History of Violence, the film directed by Cronenberg. Josh and I wrote the script and then they did it on Masters of Science Fiction, and that'll be available for sale -- dun-unh, he said, hustling -- at the convention. Josh wrote a little introduction, and then I was going to write a little introduction. Well, I got into it in May, and it took me through August to finish it, and it's 15,000 words. It's the longest piece I've written in a long while, and it's called 'Riding the Rails in Atlantis.' And somehow, somehow or other, the book is all together. And The Discarded is going to be my last book."

On discovering his destiny

"When I was a little kid, and I was going to East High in Cleveland -- my dad had died in '49, and my mom and I were living there -- I cut school one morning and I went to, I think it was Halle Brothers, down in the public terminal, the Cleveland Terminal Tower. And John Steinbeck was on tour, and he was speaking. And I was this little bitty kid clutching my schoolbooks, and I couldn't get through the crowd -- it was deep. John Steinbeck was standing on a little riser, and I crawled through people's feet, and I got to, literally, the feet of John Steinbeck.

"And I listened to him, and then I turned and looked at the faces, and I said, 'Oh. Boy. Now I know what famous is. Now I know what it is to be a mensch.' Because there stood John Steinbeck, who was an ex-prizefighter -- I mean, he looked like a fire plug! He was a tough guy. He worked like I had worked! I had ridden on boxcars, worked on demolition teams, and driving truck, and crops, and all that shit. But I was a little skinny squirt of a thing.

"And it was an epiphany. If I had stood under the Sistine Chapel ceiling, if I had finally reached Petra, a crimson city half as old as time, as they said of it, I would not have been more impressed. And that set the first part of my destiny. I was on the road, and I was doing my job, and my job was to tell stories."

On conventions

"I had withdrawn from conventions, not because I didn't like seeing my friends -- I did. But goddammit, man, when you're up in your 70s, you don't need to keep being trotted out like an old warhorse. Like, they trotted out Lionel Richie on America's Got Talent last night, and I felt sorry for him."

On being nominated for his second Grammy, for Best Spoken Word Album For Children, earlier this year

"I was up against Ed Asner, David Hyde Pierce, Nelson Mandela, another very, very fine reader and a guy named Buck Howdy. And if you're in the audience at MadCon, you can ask me, 'Who did you lose to?' And I'll say, 'Very short story, interesting story.' See, how I lost my first Grammy -- the first time I lost, I lost to Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud doing a Harold Pinter play, and people say, oh, yeah, boy, that's good. I lost! But I was on the royal robe with both feet, and I was dragged a bit by having lost to them.

"But with this one, people say, my god, you were up with Mandela? Who did you lose to? And I say, 'Uh, Buck Howdy.' And they go, 'What?!' [Mumbles.] 'Who? What?' 'Buck. Howdy.' They say, 'Who the fuck is Buck Howdy?'"

On his present appearance

"I weigh 154 now. I look like Gollum. I was great-looking when I was younger -- I was hot. All the pictures of me, they're very hot."

On his unfinished work

"My wife has instructions that the instant I die, she has to burn all the unfinished stories. And there may be a hundred unfinished stories in this house, maybe more than that. There's three quarters of a novel. No, these things are not to be finished by other writers, no matter how good they are. It could be Paul Di Filippo, who is just about the best writer in America, as far as I'm concerned. Or God forbid, James Patterson or Judith Krantz should get a hold of The Man Who Looked for Sweetness, which is sitting up on my desk, and try to finish it, anticipating what Ellison was thinking -- no! Goddammit. If Fred Pohl wants to finish all of C.M. Kornbluth's stories, that's his business. If somebody wants to take the unfinished Edgar Allan Poe story, which has now gone into the public domain, and write an ending that is not as good as Poe would have written, let 'em do whatever they want! But not with my shit, Jack. When I'm gone, that's it. What's down on the paper, it says 'The End,' that's it. 'Cause right now I'm busy writing the end of the longest story I've ever written, which is me."


(... a dotle Ursula sa svojih svežih 81 ima idući mesec u Portlandu promociju i potpisivanje svoje najnovije knjige...   )

Au bre, suzu čovek da pusti...  Ali lepo je da ispada šmeker.

Jebi ga. 
"AM" ("I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream") bila je otkrovenje za šesnaestogodišnjaka koji još nije imao pojma gde mu je dupe a gde glava.
Kasnije sam obožavao njegove uvode u antologijama...

Quote from: Mica Milovanovic on 28-10-2010, 22:47:00
Kasnije sam obožavao njegove uvode u antologijama...

Da, uvodi su mu genijalni!

Ako je izgubio na težini u tolikoj meri...  
Šteta...
A bilo bi svakako u njegovom stilu da ode onako kako je napomenuo u tekstu - " 'This is gonna be the biggest fucking science-fiction convention ever,' Ellison says, 'because no con has ever had a guest of honor drop dead while performing for the goddamn audience.' "  

Gaffe on je patuljast. Nije smršao već se ugojio... 

Quote from: Mica Milovanovic on 29-10-2010, 00:20:20
Gaffe on je patuljast. Nije smršao već se ugojio... 

Znam da je veoma nizak...

No reče:

"On his present appearance:

"I weigh 154 now. I look like Gollum."

Što će reći - sada ima oko 70 i kusur kila.

Poslednji put, kada sam ga video na slikama, snimkama, imao je oko 100 i kusur kila.

Znači da je smršao.

Može biti. Kako li je tek izgledao sa 100 kila???

http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=30610

Notes from New Sodom: The Kerspindle Kerfuffle
Hal Duncan



The Autonomous Archipelago of Åthorland


It was Friday night in the city of Writing when the shit hit the fan. I didn't make it down to the SF Café myself till Saturday afternoon or so, having been off at a gig that Friday night; so when I finally stumbled in, somewhat worse for wear, to grab my daily brunch of coffee and a cigarette over the Twitter Gazette, the kerfuffle was already in full swing.  It's war! people were saying. War! The neighbouring states of Amazonia and Macmilland have gone to war! Even the poor citizens of Åthorland have been dragged into it, much to their chagrin! Chagrined? They were downright pissed, those Åthorlanders. Since there's a rather sizeable contingent of them who hang out at the SF Café, it was hard not to notice their impassioned speeches from their counter stool pulpits, the conversations going on in the booths.
For those of you who don't know, the tiny autonomous archipelago of Åthorland lies off the coast of this fair nation of Art. Just a spattering of craggy islands, it is, each with little more than a stony croft inhabited by a wild-eyed Åthor, with only their herd of kittens for company and inspiration. Each Åthor is a creative anchorite, you see, hoping to scrape a living for themself through their strange cottage industry — which we'll come to in a minute. Most fail to do so, in truth, subsidising their... well... survival with summer-jobs as barnacle polishers or starfish attendants. A few  manage to scrape by without this additional income to bring them up to the breadline. A tiny few — like Good King Stephen, for example, or the renowned Jakie Rowling — make such a success of it that the fame of their wealth spreads around the world; but their coral palaces and caviar-and-cocaine banquets are a far cry from the pitiable poverty of most Åthors, huddling in their stone-built shacks, living off the bacon harvested from their cats, drowning their sorrows in alcohol and (occasionally) the odd hit of of the hard drug they call kudos. Still, they're a hardy people, the Åthors, and downright thrawn in their commitment to the Åthorlandish craft of kitten hair rug design.

This is the primary industry of Åthorland. If the islands of the archipelago can be a little barren, to say the least, what they do have going for them is the wealth of strange shellfish to be gathered from the beaches, or prised from the rocks; for from the ground shells of these crustaceans and molluscs come the myriad of powders with which the kitten-hair yarn spun from their looms can be dyed in every colour imaginable... and then some. It's not perhaps the most practical skill, granted, but it's certainly unique, the way these Åthors seem able to invent wholly new shades — and just when the rest of us least expect it, when we've convinced ourselves that we've seen every shade of blue under the sun, even that one Hume was so bothered about. In and of itself, that would be... a nice feat but not terribly commercial, but it's what they do with all those threads of many colours that's important, weaving them into intricate patterns that make the Persians look like amateurs, every kitten hair rug a weaveworld one can virtually walk in never mind on.

Back in the old days, so it's said, every summer, the Åthors would come over to the mainland in their coracles, and hike from city to city. Arriving in the agora of each, they'd find a corner and spread their exquisite artifices upon the dusty ground, taking a groat or two (or more) from any who wished to tread that kitten-soft fur between their toes, to gaze into the whirling curlicues and lose themselves in the articulation of sensation for half an hour, an hour, a day, a week. Rich lords would act as patrons, buying rugs to furnish their marble floors, relishing the chance to walk on them any time they wished, sometimes appreciating them more each time they did so, sometimes becoming bored with the repeat experience. So it goes.  This was long ago though, and now one doesn't even have to be a rich lord to experience the joy of an Åthorlandish kitten hair rug. In each of the continental principalities or kingdoms within a day or so sailing of Åthorland, a mass weaving industry has emerged. So, in the summer, instead of traveling from market to market, the Åthors cart their wares from manufactory to manufactory, hoping to sell the kitten hair rug they have hand-crafted, thread by thread, as a prototype — or to license its design, to be more accurate, for mass-production.


*

From Prototype to Product

This is where the Kingdom of Macmilland comes in. There are a handful of others, but they're not important here; all you need know is that each of these little sovereign territories stands proud as a Phoenician city-state and every bit as mercantile (and often, yes, every bit as mercenary because of that). To say that kitten hair rugs are Macmilland's major export doesn't do it justice. In each nation — Macmilland, Hachettia or wherever — the weaving industry is nationalised. Trade and Industry, Church and State, all are bound together into a great metropolis of a corporate entity, walled like ancient Jericho, gated like old Jerusalem, ruled over by an oligarchic board of the bourgeois, presided over by some latter-day Melchizedek of a merchant-king.


Faced with the scale of this Behemoth, the average Åthor might be forgiven for feeling a little awed, all too aware that the only real leverage they have is their ownership of an original kitten hair rug. If they're lucky they've recruited a good rug-hustler to tout their new design though, ensure a good deal for it. Even so, sometimes those city-states will try and take advantage of their might. (As the dreaded Disneyóna, for example, is notorious for its cruel "shafting" of unwitting Åthors.  Those "shafts" are pointy.) Largely though, that might is of great benefit to the Åthor. Macmilland doesn't just buy a design, chuck it onto the production line and pump out a bazillion identical copies. All the expertise of a city-sized system is brought to bear, not just the savvy of a cunning vizier but often the creative wisdom of a score of visionary craftsmen. Is this truly the best shade here? Is that knot intentional? You might be surprised at the amount of sheer finishing put into the production of an actual batch of rugs from the original prototype. There are people whose job it is simply to perfect the texture by ascertaining the optimum proportion of breeds in the kitten hair — 80% Persian to 20% Siamese? Or maybe 15% Siamese with a 5% dash of Turkish Angora? And so on.

For the Åthor who manages to sell their first kitten hair rug, it's often a revelation to see so many people spend so many months taking their work from prototype to product. It's kind of a weird experience in a whole host of other ways too — being paid with a six months supply of cat-food and cabbages, for example, (a supply that can all too easily be traded in at the nearest market for a weeks-worth of caviar and cocaine,) having a promise of "some" (entirely unpredictable) further payments, at six month intervals down the line, if and when the rug "earns out" this "advance" (with the naive Åthor often not quite hearing the loud emphasis on the if). We can put these to the side though; I mention them only as a reminder that, after all is signed and sealed, done and dusted, the Åthor will be rowing their coracle home to their island croft, with a copy of the slick finished article under one arm, to a winter they are now better equipped to survive, but not much more of a guaranteed future than that. Meanwhile, Macmilland will be exporting their rugs, sending them out to every rug shop within their legally-contracted domain.
And so, from its humble beginnings as a hand-crafted artefact on a desolate island, the Åthor's kitten hair rug will arrive en masse in the People's Republic of Amazonia. And across Amazonia, in the InstantStuff4U retail outlets that spring up in an instant on every street-corner at the blow of a whistle, (but we'll come to those presently,) the kitten hair rug is stuck up on a shelf, with a price tag slapped on it.


*

The Value of a Kitten Hair Rug

Now, the thing is, there have always been those who don't particularly want to play the rich lord, adorning the floors of their homes with kitten hair rugs. Some of us love that furry feeling betwixt our toasty toes, but for many it's just about admiring the visual pattern. They do really admire that pattern for as long as it takes to admire it fully — a half an hour, an hour, a day, a week — but they don't particularly care for the rugs as home furnishings, not least because one doesn't always have space in one's home for a few thousand rugs. Where a rug collector would hate to lose their most precious specimen, ("It really tied the room together," they might say,) these folks might appreciate a chance to gaze into this or that rug's intricacies again at a later date, but it's not such a big dealio.
This doesn't mean they don't appreciate the Åthor's work, mind. Some will wait in line for hours in front of their nearest rug store, to snap up some new design the very moment it becomes available, if they haven't put an order in for it even before it is available. Sure, there are others who will happily just pop down to the local flea market, pick up a second-hand rug that looks intriguing, and trade it in for another when they're (rather quickly) done with it. But it's not that they're dismissing the rugs by treating them as disposable pleasures. It's just that it's really more the leisure activity they enjoy than the thing in and of itself. It's a little like buying a tankard or two of ale for them: you're buying the beer to drink, and once it's drunk it's gone; you don't particularly want to hang on to the glass; more likely, you just want a refill.

Actually, back in the day, when Åthors would sit in the corner of a market and ask a few groats from passers-by for the chance to enjoy their kitten hair rug, this was the standard metric of value — booze. With rugs pretty much coming in four or five sizes, it's not even hard to calculate: there are the small and extra small ones that you might spend an hour or less on; there are the standard size ones, that really take a day to fully dig — a five to ten hour stint or more; and every so often some crazed Åthor will come up with a monumental epic size rug that's a veritable odyssey of an experience, a rug that you could stand on and gaze into for months. It seemed only obvious, in days of yore, in the era of taverns and bazaars, to convert time into tankards — an hour of rug-time for an hour of drinking-time, a tankard's worth of ale. Keep me in ale for as long you're on the rug, the Åthor would say, and we're trading like for like, your entertainment for mine. A fair exchange, no?

At two groats a tankard, we can even translate that into cold hard cash: one or two groats for a little rug; ten to twenty groats for the standard size. It's really quite simple. Or at least it was.


*

The Happiness That Comes of Haggling

The reality is, of course, that the industrial revolution changed all that. As the merchant-kings of city-states came in, with their manufactories built to mass-produce a plethora of Åthorlandish kitten hair rugs, these canny traders and industrialists saw that just as some were ready to pay more for a truly fresh beer while others would take their beer stale if it halved the price, just as some would pay more for speedy service while others would rather wait and pay less, the different attitude of different customers to kitten hair rugs translated to a different valuation, a different worth.

A cheaper version of the rug could be produced down the line, woven from common-or-garden tabby fur, sold for a mere five groats, and far more would buy this "mass-market" variant. The standard version became, in effect, a luxury commodity, a high-end edition for those willing to pay full cost, whether because they preferred the higher quality or, more likely, because they simply wanted it hot off the loom, the instant it was available. As that demand tailed off, the trade emissaries of Macmilland realised, it was even sensible to gradually discount those high-end rugs over the months following their release, to be flexible with one's prices, sell at whatever the market will bear. It wasn't long before the flea markets selling second-hand rugs had competition from stalls with "bargain bins" full of unused premium-quality kitten hair rugs that cost fifteen groats on their release, now selling for a mere three.

Many an Åthor gives a little meep when they see their work in such stalls, but such is business. Ultimately, the technology has benefited all concerned. The Åthor is able to provide their service — that exquisite experience of immersion in the sensual spectacle that is a finely-crafted kitten hair rug — to nigh on anyone and everyone. Macmilland and their ilk earn a fair cut, on the whole, given that they are, contrary to common opinion, a whole lot more than mere go-betweens. And the customer can toddle down to any number of stores or stalls within reach, and most probably pick up a nice new (or newish) rug that, measured in terms of the hours they'll spend on it, will cost them a damn sight less than if they were to spend that time quaffing ales in their local tavern.

This is the happiness that comes of haggling, and though few realise it, it is the customer who is essentially setting the price, by deciding what to buy and when to buy it.

But this is where Amazonia comes in.

*
The Kerspindle and the Kerfuffle


We could go into all the innovations brought to the system by the transportation revolution out of which Amazonia emerged, but it's a story we all know, surely. We all remember seeing our first ornithopter flutter through the sky. We all remember the little tin whistles floating down on their parachutes. We remember unrolling the leaflets, realising that we simply had to give a toot to summon a salesman — and within seconds! — a salesman who could supply us with any rug in their whole inventory. You want it by tomorrow? We can do that. If you're happy to wait a little longer, we'll even do it for free. Tell you what, we'll even do you a three-for-two deal like the brick-and-morter rug stores are doing. We'll do a better deal. The zealous citizens of the People's Republic of Amazonia — every one of them a salesman ready to spring into action — built their new nation almost overnight by such strategies. Those strategies are, of course, far from altruistic, cannily designed to undercut the existing competition so as to establish and consolidate their own, shall we say, lebensraum; but international politics is a cut-throat business and when the customer gains so much from this sort of ruthless savvy, we tend to have little sympathy for the Principality of Borders, say, who would happily use similar tactics to try and drive their competitors out of business, crush and swallow them, aiming for the nearest thing to a conquest of the world they can get away with under the Treaty of Monopolis.

Anyway, all of that's old hat.  And you probably don't want to hear about the more idiosyncratic features of the new world order born with Amazonia, from an Åthorlandish perspective. Like, say, the arcane art of Amazonomancy, by which Åthors lean out the window of their croft each afternoon to toot their whistle, not to buy rugs themselves, but to scry the complex ornithopter formation flying displays for "signals" of how well their own rug is doing, how sales are going in the Amazonian InstantStuff4U outlets that spring out, whirring and click-clacking, wherever one of those ornithopter lands — on any corner of any street in any city, town or village, pretty much across the world. Amazonomancy is probably the single most important aspect of it all to an Åthor but, well, the neurotic behaviour patterns of obsessive hermits aren't really pertinent. No, there's only really one innovation that matters here, and that's the Kerspindle that caused the big kerfuffle last weekend. And by "kerfuffle" I mean "Cuban Missile Crisis level hostilities between Macmilland and Amazonia." Or, simply speaking, "war."
It all began with tapestries.

Who exactly came up with this new idea, it's hard to say, but the idea itself is simple: some people, (as I say,) are happy to just look at that kitten hair rug design, aren't really bothered about the feel of kitten-fur between the toes, and might actually even prefer to have it somewhere easier to look at — like right in front of their face; so what if we use this crazy new tech that's just been developed to make tapestries instead of rugs? You could take that same basic kitten hair rug design and turn it into something that goes on your wall rather than your floor. If you don't have to make them sturdy enough to be walked on, that makes them a bit cheaper to produce because it cuts out one stage of the finishing process. It makes them a whole lot more delicate, means you need to buy this special doohickey to hang them from, but the tapestries are so thin you can store oodles of them in this doohickey. There are other pros, other cons, but the most important thing for many gadget-oriented rug afficionados is the convenience: if all you want to do is admire the intricacy of the design, the collapsible, portable doohickey can offer that experience anywhere you can find a place to hang it; and new designs are available at the toot of a whistle with Amazonian salesmen waiting at your beck and call.

It's hard not to see the appeal. Those kingdoms and principalities whose industry is based on rug manufacturing and export were a little slow on the uptake, but even they soon realised this was a demand they'd be fools not to supply.
Here's where it gets gnarly though.  With their nationalised retail industry, their merchant airforce aiming for commercial air supremacy, the People's Republic of Amazonia really sees the appeal, because they quickly come up with a neat new strategy. They produce their own brand of doohickey — the Kerspindle — and sell that the same way they sell rugs. (They've always sold a whole lot more than just rugs anyway.) To encourage people to buy their brand of doohickey rather than anyone else's, they strike a deal with the Kingdom of Macmilland and suchlike — who agree to supply them with tapestries that can't be hung on any other type of doohickey. And to close the circle into a feedback loop of positive reinforcement, Amazonia set a price for tapestries that undercuts the high-end, new release rug version of the same design — ten groats, give or take a plinkle, where the average brand-new premium rug is fifteen.

But, wait! Remember how that cheaper "mass-market" version was produced down the line. Remember how this is based, in part, on the idea that some will pay more for a speedy service while others would rather wait if it means they pay less. Doesn't it kind of throw a spanner in the works if you release the ten groat tapestry on the self-same day the rug comes out for fifteen?

Well, that's where the kerfuffle kicks in.

*

A Declaration of War!

So at some point in the preceding weeks, The People's Republic of Amazonia and the Kingdom of Macmilland entered into a trade dispute. The details of this appear to be rather complicated and dull — like all that bollocks that's going on at the start of Phantom Menace, you know? — but it boils down to a basic disagreement, as I understand. The way it stands at the moment, Amazonia buys tapestries from Macmilland for twelve groats or so and sells them to the punter for ten. Yes, they're selling them at a loss.  But it's not that they learned their business strategy from Milo Minderbender, and they're not selling them at a loss out of the goodness of their hearts; they figure more people will buy their Kerspindles if the hot-off-the-loom tapestries are a cushty deal. And when the hot-off-the-loom rugs are fifteen groats, they are.

Only thing is, the Kingdom of Macmilland just heard a big presentation by a delegate from the United States of Apple, suggesting a whole nother approach that's actually a lot like the traditional way of selling rugs: price them high when they're new releases, and drop the price in steps over the subsequent months. Weirdly, Macmilland would get less groats here, but this is what they'd prefer; they want new tapestries to be released at fifteen groats or so, which would mean selling them to Macmilland for ten rather than twelve. And over months, bear in mind, the price would drop until Amazonia could actually be selling those tapestries for as little as six, so those of us punters who don't want to pay through the nose for our pretty little patterns in kitten fur could hang on for a more reasonable deal. Again, Macmilland isn't doing this out of the goodness of their heart; they just think this strategy is more sensible in the long term.

Now, Amazonia and Macmilland just can't see eye-to-eye on this, and in closed meetings, we must imagine, diplomats become a bit less diplomatic than they should be. Eventually Macmilland lays its cards on the table. If Amazonia insist on sticking to the current terms, Macmilland will just have to release the tapestry versions later — like it does with the cheaper "mass-market" rugs. If it didn't, why it might as well just put the "mass-market" rug on sale at the same time and have done with it — and sit back and watch as everybody but a few obsessive collectors bought that Åthor's design in kitten fur at knockdown prices.

At the point when I was trying to get my head around this part of the situation on Saturday afternoon, I figured a little grub might help. Now you can get full table service in the SF Café, a good hairy steak brought right to your table, and the best thing is, the chef in back is psychic, so he'll have it ready for you at the point you actually order it. Fricking awesome, right? But this costs extra because, well, it's an extra service. For folks who're happy to slum it, there's the cheaper option: wander up to the counter and give your order in to Old Mac; wait for him to call out your number when it's done; then go up to collect it. You save money, but it's slower; you don't get that... instant gratification.

Table-service or self-service. Paying more to get treated like a prince among men, or sucking it up to save a few groats cause it's not that big a deal.  Hardly a radical notion, eh?

Only what do I notice when I pick up the menu to see what takes my fancy? Fuck me, if there's not a whole new "no linen" option. With table service, they bring linen napkins, see, not that cheap-ass paper shite. That's not why the table service is more expensive, mind — the terribly burdensome overhead of them having to wash all those cloth napkins — but for some reason the "no linen" option is priced like it is. The chef in back still uses his psychic powers to take your order before you decide. He still has it ready for you at the very point you decide. They still bring it right to your table. But if you go for the "no linen" option it costs pretty much the same as self-service. Fuckin' A, as they say.
– How the hell can you afford to do this? I ask Old Mac when he brings my steak.
– We can't, says Old Mac. We make the bulk of our running costs back on table-service. Self-service racks up more customers because it's more affordable, but it's more affordable because it's a minimal profit per person. The "no linen" option doesn't break even, and since we started offering it, it's undercutting both those parts of the business.
– So why the fuck are you offering it?
– That's what I've been asking myself, says Mac.
At this point I began to see why the Kingdom of Macmilland might want to revise their contract with Amazonia, why they might want to negotiate better terms for tapestries, why they might see only two viable options for themselves: to release high-end rug and tapestry at the same time, and have people pay more for the instant gratification, less if they're willing to wait, regardless of which version they go for; or to wait and release the lower price tapestry when it won't undercut a crucial part of their business, just as they do with the "mass-market" rug.
At this point, however, is pretty much where The People's Independent Republic of Amazonia stormed out of negotiations and declared war.


*
The Blockade versus the Blogosphere

On Friday, without warning, Amazonia closed its borders with Macmilland. In the tiny autonomous archipelago of Åthorland, wild-eyed anchorites leaned out of their windows and tooted their whistles, only for Amazonian ornithopters to swoop low over their crofts and drop bombshells that left them stunned and horrified. Leaflets fluttered down from the skies, catalogues of Amazonia's vast inventory with every Macmilland product — not just tapestries but rugs as well — stricken from them. Not for sale. Not for sale. Not for sale. Nowhere on those leaflets was there an explanation. No Amazonian diplomat held a press conference. The Amazonian premier made no statement. Instead, every Åthor whose kitten fur rug was mass-produced and exported to the world via Macmilland simply found themselves subject to an instant blockade with not a word as to why.

The King of Macmilland was quick off the mark though, summoning the radiovision cameras to relay his speech to all the Åthors who had contracts with Macmilland, laying out what exactly had happened and why. In their stony crofts, Åthors stopped peeling the bacon from their cats and listened in awed silence as the situation was outlined. And then they fired up their aetherotransmitters and began to spread the word. By the time I stumbled into the SF Café on Saturday afternoon, the Twitter Gazette was on fire with the news. Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Scott Westerfield, Charles Stross, John Scalzi — all these Åthors and more spoke out, many at length and all in more hard-nosed detail than this... um... freeform perspective of mine. If you want the full skinny on the ins and outs of it all, I highly recommend you go read them. But it wasn't just those directly affected by the blockade who sprang into action. Even many Åthors who had nothing at all to do with Macmilland made it all too clear that they had utter contempt for Amazonia's action here.

(Strangely all these Åthors seem to have adopted a fanciful conceit that this is to do with ebooks rather than tapestries, perhaps in some misguided attempt to create a sort of... metaphoric illustration, to storyise the blockade and thereby side-step some of the knee-jerk assumptions of loyal Kerspindle users and Amazonia customers as regards the Evil Corporate Weaving Industry, its mercenary exploitation of both artists and consumers, and its obstinate adherence to obsolete media. I can only say I think this ill-judged. Everyone knows, after all, that ebooks cost nothing to produce, that the writer simply hands their manuscript into some corporate lackey called an "editor," who chucks it into an OCR scanner, presses a button and laughs as InstaPublisher 3.0 automatically transforms it into an ebook that can be marked up by infinity percent! Laughs all the way to the bank! Everyone knows that, don't they?)

And so the blogosphere lit up, the aetherotransmitters glowing like beacon fires on the islands of Åthorland, heated by the friction of furious typing. Down in the SF Café, those wild-eyed anchorites were far from alone. Rug afficionados with no professional stake in the blockade, not even on a possibly-maybe-one-day-I'll-sell-my-own-rug level, rallied round to support the artisans they admired. People who, as long-standing customers of the Amazonian ornithopters, had every reason to value the revolution they'd wrought, people who'd bought rugs and tapestries by the fuckload from those InstantStuff4U stalls, threw down the whistles they'd had hanging from their front doors (as part of this rather neat credits-for-referrals scheme,) and smashed them underfoot. The resounding message of the community as a whole? Fuck you, Amazonia! Fuck you!

*

Spitting the Dummy


Here and there, it must be said, a few voices snarled contemptuous dissent. Fuck Macmilland! they growled. They just want to screw me for as much as they can. They want to stop me from getting what I want when I want it. A tapestry costs fuck all to make, and they want to charge the price of a high-end rug? It's just like the mosaic industry, with its fucking crazy-ass evil attitude to craftsmen and consumers alike!

I asked Old Mac what he thought of those voices. They're customers, after all, and isn't the customer always right.
– Man, I work in a café, said Mac. Sometimes the customer is a jumped-up obnoxious prick who thinks the world revolves around them. You can spot them a mile away, the kind of arrogant arsewipe who thinks they're owed table-service just for deigning to bless you with their half-groat custom, the kind of fucker who wouldn't tip if you fed them with a spork and wiped their mean and mealy mouth for them after. Sometimes the customer doesn't know shit about the work that goes into the service they get. Sometimes they care even less.

Now Mac may be something of a curmudgeon, but...

One word that I've seen pop up time and time again over the weekend and the days since — wherever Åthors tried to convince Kerspindle users that Macmilland wasn't just out to ream them for every plinkle they can, wherever those who habitually buy rugs and/or tapestries supported Amazonia's unilateral pre-emptive strike as some sort of underdog's sucker punch aimed to bring down a no-good racketeer, wherever those customers basically refused to listen to detailed breakdowns of the realities of the weaving industry — is entitlement. However the facts and figures fall out, in terms of how much it costs to produce a tapestry versus how much it costs to produce a rug, Old Mac is right about the attitude of some, I think.

You can tell them about the winter spent gathering shells and pounding them into dust, mixing up dyes and spinning kitten fur into yarn, designing and redesigning, trying to come up with... something wonderful. They don't give a fuck. You can tell them about the actual advance most Åthors get of about six months worth of cat-food and cabbages, how really, honestly it's far from caviar-and-cocaine. They don't give a fuck. You can tell them about the weaving company's consultant designers, how they're in the business first and foremost because they love rugs, because they love to discover a new and exciting one, love to work with Åthors — even at the miserable wage most earn — to make it better, the best it can be. They don't give a fuck. You can tell them about those who have to pore over every square millimetre of the revised (and revised and revised) prototype, looking for knots and loose threads that shouldn't be there. They don't give a fuck. You can tell them that even tapestries must go through a whole long process that makes them not actually that much cheaper to produce than rugs, that dropping the little extra step that makes it something you can walk on doesn't save much, not when most of the cost lies in making your woven artifact flame-retardant. They don't give a fuck. You can tell them that the true value of a mass-produced craftswork that functions essentially as a leisure service, providing entertainment, is not a matter of the per unit cost marked up, that a solid ten hours of diversion, maybe more, is surely worth as much in rug form as it is in the form of ale, that a pint an hour at two groats per pint is really quite a good deal. They don't give a fuck. You can tell them that getting an even lower price than that, getting a high-end rug hot off the loom for fifteen groats, is a mark of how customers already benefit from prices bound to demand and open to haggling. They don't give a fuck. You can tell them that their rejection of your pricing strategy is entirely within their rights, that they can just walk away and spend their money elsewhere if they really think that paying more than ten groats for a tapestry is being rooked, that if they do so that very act will contribute to driving down prices by lowering demand.

They don't give a fuck.

Wait a minute.  Back up there. Simply not being able to agree on a fair price is not an option?  They're outraged at the thought of someone not caving to their demands?

It takes a monumental sense of entitlement to desire something so intensely that not being able to have it now renders one furious, and yet to bristle with even greater wrath when asked to stump up a price in line with that desire. This is just spitting the dummy.

There's a little echo of that attitude in the statement that was broadcast over the airwaves from Amazonia the other day. At the time of writing, the blockade is still in place, the kitten hair rugs of every Macmilland-contracted Åthor still unavailable through their service; but posted on a forum, from the desk of some unnamed minion on the "Kerspindle Task Force" — in distinct contrast with the radiovision broadcast from the King of Macmilland himself — a communique was sent out to loyal customers, admitting that eventually they'd have to give in. As others have put it most succinctly: Amazonia blinked. But it was a source of no little amusement in the SF Café that included in this memo was a little rhetorical turn of phrase characterising Macmilland as having "a monopoly" over their own products.
Oh, how we laughed. Some began a campaign against Amazonia's monopoly on the Kerspindle. Some expressed shock that — ye Gods! — Nabisco has a monopoly on Oreos!

– Oh noes! said Elizabeth Bear. I have a monopoly on Elizabeth Bear works too.
Amusing as it is though, it's a telling little sign of one of two things: A) a risible idiocy on the part of the scribe who penned it, some sort of infantile worldview in which it's scurrilously mercenary for someone to...um... have control of their own fucking products, because diddums not getting what diddums wants is just so unfair; or B) a cynical attempt to push that sort of button in the reader, to cast the legally contracted producer of an Åthor's kitten hair rug designs as a ruthless controller preventing the free use of those craftworks (by "monopolising" them) rather than facilitating the free use of those craftworks by fucking making them.
Bear's joke is pointed, skewering the craven elicitation that lurks under that word, the way it panders to — seeks to exploit — an ugly selfishness that might just as easily dismiss the claim of any Åthor to their own work. Go on, it urges. Spit on all the time and toil they put into it. Surrender to that sense of entitlement. Resent that bastard who says they have a right to control what they made themselves, if it's something that you want. They're just a venal miscreant seeking to monopolise it.

Oh noes! The Åthor has a monopoly on their rug!

I have a message for the People's Republic of Amazonia. I have a monopoly on my fingers too; I can do exactly what I want with them. I can offer you my forefinger, on the understanding that you'll sell it for ten groats, or I can walk away from that as a bad deal for me. I can offer you my thumb to sell at fifteen groats now, and my pinkie finger six months down the line, to sell at five. Or not. I can offer you my ring finger to sell at fifteen if it sells right away, but on the understanding that we drop the price in stages as the months go on. You can refuse these offers, of course, but I can make them as I will and be as intransigent as I want in the haggling because, yes, I have a monopoly on my fingers.

Tell you what though, Amazonia: I'll give you one of those fingers right now. I'm keeping all the others to myself at the moment, but giving you one of them right now.

Can you guess which one?

Eto, rant je toliki da nije stao u jedan post...

(A baja Hal makar zbog ovoga artikulisanog rejva definitivno zaslužuje prozno upoznavanje, i to veoma izbliza... )

Lepo sto si podsetila na njega. Ovo mu bese jedan od prvih... izliva inspiracije, ako se ne varam. Pise li on to jos uvek?

O da, itekako je aktivan na bscreview: overi njegov zadnji blog, povodom Booker afere.

Inače, da se pohvalim, dobila sam danas na poklon - Vellum!!! 

Evo, cim prodje sajam. Nikako da se odvazim da na Vellum i Ink, a procitao sam Escape from Hell! koji je, kazu, drugaciji od prethodne 2 i veoma je zabavan.

Strange Horizons Announces New Editor-In-Chief

Susan Marie Groppi, fresh from her World Fantasy Award win, has announced she will be stepping down as editor-in-chief of Strange Horizons effective November 1, 2010. Reviews editor Niall Harrison will take Groppi's place, though Groppi will remain on staff in her capacity as a fiction editor.  Abigail Nussbaum will take over Harrison's old position.

S obzirom da sam pratio i SH i Torque Control nisam siguran koliko mi se, u stvari, dopada ova vest. al' dobro, videcemo kako se situacija razvija. U isto vreme u Vector-u:

The incoming features editor will be known to many of you, and certainly anyone who regularly attends the London Meetings, and I have no doubt that Shana Worthen will do an excellent job. I'm certainly looking forward to reading her first issue.

Pa, biće da je Groppi morala da bira između braka i karijere, a ovo joj dođe pomalo kao kompromis. 

Inače, APEX u Novembru donosi specijalni "Arab/Muslim Issue", pa me zanima da li će se to iole nadovezati na mungejt... Nisam stigla juče da overim, iako sam planirala, ali onako na letimičan pregled, rekla bih da zaista obećava.

Recimo, ovaj uvod u 50 Fatwas for the Virtuous Vampire (Pamela K. Taylor) već mi, sam po sebi, obećava brda i doline kontraverze u stvaranju:

Sheikha Yasmin al-Binawi writes in the first chapter of her book, Culinary Etiquette for the Islamic Undead, "It is commonly believed among the living that the Qur'an forbids all Muslims from eating blood. What the Qur'an actually says, is 'He has forbidden to you only carrion, and blood, and the flesh of swine, and that over which any name other than God's has been invoked; but if one is driven by necessity–neither coveting it nor exceeding his immediate need–no sin shall be upon him: for, behold, God is much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace.' (Chapter 2, The Cow, verse 173) Clearly, as the vampire requires blood for survival, it is completely permissible for him to consume his natural food, so long as he does not become gluttonous, gorging himself and going to extremes. God is indeed most Gracious, His Favor upon us Most Complete!"

Nego, naišla sam pre neki dan na mali gem na Venterella blogu:


MICHAEL A. VENTRELLA: I am pleased to be interviewing two-time Hugo award winning author Allen Steele today! Allen has won numerous awards and nominations for his science fiction stories, novels, and novellas. His novels include ORBITAL DECAY, LUNAR DESCENT, THE JERICHO ITERATION, OCEANSPACE, and the "Coyote" series. Allen is the Guest of Honor at the 2010 Albacon SF convention (which is next weekend as of this posting). I'll be there too (but only as a regular ordinary guest)!


Allen,You're one of the few authors who has been published on another planet. How did that come about?

ALLEN STEELE: A couple of years ago, NASA's Phoenix lander made it to Mars, and aboard it is a DVD containing a library of science fiction stories and artwork about Mars that was compiled by the Planetary Society. Among them is 'Live From The Mars Hotel", my first published story, which was published in Asimov's Science Fiction in 1988. The DVD is intended to be a repository for future Mars colonists, and also a tribute to SF writers and artists who've portrayed Mars since the 1700′s. It's a huge honor to have my work represented in this way. In fact, I wrote a story about this that appeared in Asimov's earlier this year: "The Emperor of Mars", in the June 2010 issue.

Eto. Ja bežala od njegovog Coyote serijala da ga i za dž "skinem", kad tamo - njemu prozni prvenac već odavno na Marsu ... za nepoverovati... 

Folks, Cat Valente is one of my favorite people, and she's a hell of a writer, and her new book The Habitation of the Blessed is very cool, and she's brought audiovisual aids for her Big Idea piece, so I'm just going to step out of the way here and let her tell you all about her book.

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE:

It is indeed true that due to an overabundance of post-graduate education I have managed to write an entire series of novels about an obscure historical hoax, the first of which came out yesterday. It is doubly true that much as I spent the last two years defining, pronouncing, and spelling the word "palimpsest," I will now spend the next three explaining who and what Prester John was, why he is important, and making poor medieval puns. I am comfortable with this fate—but that is not what I'm going to talk about today! The fact is, as a speculative fiction author I used my powers of imagination to see my future as a professorial background-info exposition-bot—Giles in a tight black dress. And I made a handy little video to explain all the historical hilarity that is Prester John and his madcap pwning of the medieval mind.

Now that you're back, what I want to tell you is that this is not a fantasy novel.

This is a science fiction novel.

What? (I imagine you say. I also imagine you with a very fetching smoking jacket and crystal goblet full of morning coffee, gesturing grandly at your computer.) Isn't this a book about a bunch of immortal monsters living in India in 1140 or so, planting cannon-orchards and sheep-trees and messing around with magic stones? Yes, yes it is. And normally I'd give that to you—it does sound a lot like fantasy. It has that familial look. But since genre distinctions are blurring all over the place and even works that would once be called science fiction are often called fantasy due to lack of compelling science, I'm gonna call this one right out of the gate: The Habitation of the Blessed is a science fiction novel. Its concerns are SFnal; its science (mostly) rigorous.

It's a first contact story. I couldn't just let the story lie as it was, with Prester John as a (literal, according to the Marvel Universe) superhero whose awesome Godliness and general fabulosity allowed him to live forever, crush infidels, and land Sexiest Man Alive 1165. He was also less filling, yet tasted great. The fact is, given the story as it is, Prester John is the only human in the place, and he is king despite having no family in the kingdom and no particular reason to be king. That, friends, is a colonial story.

I didn't want to lionize my man PJ—history's done that part. I wanted to tell a story about a man from the West arriving on what is essentially an alien planet, with no one who looks like him, and what he is willing to do to control it, to convert it, to make it like his own land. I wanted to deal with how very much like a natural disaster the arrival of such a person would be, opening up an isolated country to the predations of a burgeoning Europe and a Church hungry for conquest. And I wanted to tell the better part of it all from the point of view of the aliens and monsters who became subsumed into Prester John's missionary zeal, who make up the complicated folklore we mean when we say: "Prester John's Kingdom."

It's a post-scarcity story—or at least a pre-scarcity one. The economics and politics of Pentexore (the name finally given to that kingdom by John Mandeville, the second John and second hilarious liar to lay claim to the narrative) are predicated on a reversal of Aristotle's Physics: where our man in Athens says that you can discern things made from things born by the fact that if one plants a bed, one cannot reasonably expect a bed-tree to arise come spring. (All right, I admit it. I've actually been writing this book since I translated the Physics in undergrad, when I looked up form my Greek and said: but a bed-tree would be so awesome.) Anything planted in the Pentexore ground grows, no matter whether it is made or born: bed-trees and sheep-trees and corpse-trees and jewel-trees.

Between that and the Fountain of Youth, there is no poverty and no death in the Kingdom of Prester John. It is a transhumanist nation isolated from the rest of the world, struggling toward those goals the slow way. How they have learned to live without those constraints is a major concern of the novel—the central mechanism is a lottery held once every two hundred years that determines each creature's profession, relationships, and home for the next pair of centuries, staving off boredom and a good deal of cruelty. The rest is more complicated.

It is a story rooted in science—just not 21st century science. The series takes as a given that every legend and folktale concerning Prester John was true, including the Fountain of Youth, which came into Western myth with this very letter, and the various grotesque monsters which may or may not have been allegories for human failings, but here are given serious considerations as races and cultures with their own deep histories. So too Ptolemaic cosmology is taken wholly seriously, with the Crystalline Spheres a hard fact of the world. How this world changes into and acquired the physics of our own is part of the long game of the series.

But no physical fact of the world is not centered and grounded in the science of the time, which after all was as hard and fast to them as our own rules of the universe are to us—with the sole exception of the middle finger to Aristotle, though of course he was mightily argued with even in his own time. There is no actual magic in Prester John's Kingdom, only the properties of stones and plants that were taken as knowable fact at the time, even to the Fountain of Youth, and tales of the world which were believed as surely as we believe any blogger on holiday in Asia today.

This is my medieval science fiction novel. It's a weird beast with oversized parts and a warped sense of humor. It's a 21st century girl spinning remixes 12th century style. Of course, the legend of Prester John is itself a bizarre combination of modern concerns and ancient methods—essentially, it was Ye Olde Tyme EweTubbe video, hitting the medieval internet. Which was, like, your brother who knew a guy in the next village over. It's the first word in taking a freaky story and just running with it. And in that noble tradition, I'm thrilled to see The Habitation of the Blessed out there in the world.

Da li se neko dokopao ovoga:



Prikaz Garyja Wolfa iz Locusa (nadam se da se nece ljutiti sto ga ovde prenosim)


Offhand, I can think of about four different ways to read Hannu Rajaniemi's rather astonishing debut novel The Quantum Thief, each of them equally valid, each equally inadequate. The first and most obvious is to approach it as Greg Egan-style radical hard SF (or maybe post-radical, since that movement by now is about as middle-aged as its sibling cyberpunk), and Rajaniemi clearly invites such a reading with a storm of barely-contextualized inventions in the first few chapters – a surreal Dilemma Prison run by immortal minds called Archons on behalf of a governing collective called the Sobornost, where prisoners trapped in an infinity of glass cells endlessly battle with millions of copies of themselves; ''warminds'' with ''non-sequential dorsal streams''; weaponized Bose-Einstein condensates called q-dots; Oortian spiderships full of virtual butterflies; spimescapes; tzaddiks; exomemories; utility fogs; gevulots; strangelet bombs and nanomissiles – all with scarcely an appositional phrase, let alone an infodump, in sight. It wouldn't be hard to blame a reader for taking a deep breath a few pages in and concluding that this is going to mean work.

Yet it really isn't, as it turns out. From another angle, The Quantum Thief is a fairly straightforward cat-and-mouse romantic mystery pitting a master thief against a brilliant boy detective in a world so information-drenched that crime would seem to be impossible. (In a way, this also echoes earlier SF mysteries like Bester's The Demolished Man, with ubiquitous information technology replacing the rather wobbly notion of psi powers that was so popular in the '50s). The plot hook is almost pulp: the famous thief Jean le Flambeur is sprung from prison by itinerant spacer Mieli and her wisecracking ship Perhonen, who – after a dizzying setpiece of a quantum space battle with the pursuing Archons – flees with him to Mars for a special assignment commissioned by her mysterious employer. Meanwhile, the boy detective Isidore Beautrelet (he's described as 15 years old, but Rajaniemi gives us to understand these are Martian years), having just solved the murder of a prominent chocolatier (in a nice touch, chocolate is one of Mars's main products), learns that his next case will involve le Flambeur. There is, in other words, as much of Maurice Leblanc as of Greg Egan in this mix, and Rajaniemi signals this early on when le Flambeur (the only one of the three main viewpoint characters to get a first-person voice) mentions that Leblanc's Le Bouchon de Cristal is one of his favorite books, and Isidore Beautrelet himself is borrowed, name and all, directly from Leblanc's youthful detective in The Hollow Needle, a novel which pits Leblanc's own Arséne Lupin against Sherlock Holmes, who also gets a shout-out or two later on.

So there are some tissue-traces of Egan here, to be sure, and of Bester, and of Leblanc. But wait, there's more! There's a fair bit of reality-testing in the manner of Philip K. Dick, as le Flambeur and others are led to question not only their own identities and memories, but even the universal Martian ''exomemory'' that provides the community's consensual reality and history – all of which, in classic paranoid Dickian fashion, may be secretly manipulated by some hidden masters with unknown motives. ''Perhaps the old philosophers were right,'' muses Isidore's newest client, ''and we are living in a simulation, playthings of some transhuman gods.'' For all its intimidating hard science (and you suspect that Rajaniemi, like Egan, knows exactly what he's talking about), the central new technology in the novel is the very Dickian notion of the gevulot, an elaborate system of information nodes which permits people to control their degree of privacy, while feeding information into the city's larger ''exomemory.'' And the Martian colony itself – most of the action is set in a giant moving city called Oubliette, which is involved in a terraforming project – is as politically idealistic as anything in Kim Stanley Robinson. ''We believe in what the Revolution stood for,'' explains one character. ''A human Mars. A place where we recreate Earth without problems. A place where everyone owns their own minds, a place where we belong to ourselves. And that is not possible when someone behind the curtain is pulling our strings.'' This political theme, which also echoes the socioeconomic tensions between the inner and outer solar systems that we see in novels like Paul McAuley's The Quiet War, may be the least developed of the major themes, but comes to play an important role in the backstory which eventually unfolds.

It's clear that Rajaniemi feels he has to get a lot done with this widely anticipated first novel, and for the most part he succeeds brilliantly. While his opening setpieces – the prison itself and the high-tech space battle between Mieli's ship and the pursuing Archons – are spectacular enough, Rajaniemi really hits stride with the peripatetic Martian city of Oubliette, where time is literally currency (Isidore's wealthy client is a ''milliennaire''), where those whose Watches run out must serve time as Quiets, helping run the city's infrastructure, and where privacy is a commodity controlled by an elaborate system of protocols and hierarchies enforced by cop-like ''tzaddiks.'' But Rajaniemi mitigates the alienating effect of his setting by populating his tale with likeable and familiar characters that sometimes approach pop culture archetypes – not only the bandit-roué with a secret past le Flambeur (whose name may also echo a classic Jean-Pierre Melville heist movie), the tough-as-nails adventuress Mieli (so battle-ready she has a fusion reactor embedded in her thigh), and the brilliant young Isidore (whose Holmesian deductions regarding a letter which impossibly appears in his client's secure home are what finally blows the plot open), but also such comic-book figures as the Gentleman, a phantom rescuer who appears at opportune times throughout the story. Rajaniemi is having as much fun with these characters as with his gonzo physics, and by the end of the novel we'd be willing to follow them down any of the several sequel-corridors that Rajaniemi gives himself. For now, he's spectacularly delivered on the promise that this is likely the most important debut SF novel we'll see this year.

A ja ga uporno preskacem iako mi Amazon non-stop nudi... Oh, well, sacekace Novogodisnju posiljku.

Nesto novo: http://www.darkfictionmagazine.co.uk/

Quote from: Mica Milovanovic on 03-11-2010, 20:24:38
Da li se neko dokopao ovoga:

Kao da sam upao u vrtlog...

Pre će biti da si uhvaćen u paukovu mrežu...

Quote from: Mica Milovanovic on 04-11-2010, 15:56:57
Pre će biti da si uhvaćen u paukovu mrežu...

Ma jok, stil mu je ludački...
Bombarduje informacijama i činjenicama koje se nude kao podrazumevajuća. Bez objašnjavanja. Bez odmora. I dah čovek jedva da uzme...

Stvar ukusa. Meni ne smeta ovaj neprestani napor koji moram da ulažem dok se "probijam" kroz tekst (u kome događaji jure sto na sat) kako bih shvatio šta se tu u stvari događa. Ali zato, s vremena na vreme, moram da se odmorim...

Dobro je. Nije me opčinio, ali je veoma dobro.

Đe to ima?

Hvala. Jesi li čitao ovaj roman ili to po pričama...

Upravo čitam.

To se zove sveža informacija...

Kvantum kradljivac je zakuska koju vredi dati najpre kušaču otrova, a Gaff je, metaforikli spiking, po tom pitanju daleko vredniji od mene, ako preživi da nam ispriča kako je bilo. Sadržaj je svakako  obećavajući, ali je ujedno i sasvim opak za debitantski roman... no dobro, neka novija remek-dela su došla upravo u debitantskom pakovanju, tako da...  budimo otvoreni za sve mogućnosti.

S druge strane, proza gospojice Valente zasigurno zaslužuje overavanje, to ne samo zbog njenog hrabrog izbora u pominjanom APEXu, nego i zbog overenih prvih par poglavlja knjige, koji su uslužno stavljeni na njen blog u vidu tizera.

Ali, gospojica Valente se odlučila da tu knjigu ponudi s onom vrsti kičeraj naslovnice zbog koje bi mi zaista bilo krajnje neprijatno da rečenu knjigu poklonim ikome koga stvarno gotivim, tako da joj je to minus u startu, bar kod mene.  

"Gospojica" Valente nit je mala stasom nit je neudata 

nisam ni ja, pa svejedno nemam ništa protiv da me 'gospojicom' vikaš.