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

 

Quote from: Lidija on 29-01-2011, 14:12:18
tekst je infantilno naivan, sa linkom i bez njega.

S obzirom da je u pitanju covek zbog koga su promenili nacin dodeljivanja Nebule..

Taman da je u pitanju i Jehova lično. 

rejectamentalist manifesto

China Miéville's waste books

Pre 10ak dana poceo je crta i pise webcomic London intrusion.

Posted by Niall Harrison

2 February 2011

Theodora Goss on mythpunk, addressing two aspects of the discussion I'd been thinking about: who's doing the writing, and how what's being written differs from New Weird.

    Is it a useful designation? I think it is, actually. It does seem to be describing what a particular group of writers is doing at the moment. There's something to writing identified as Mythpunk that does make it distinctive. It's fantasy – not dark fantasy, not urban fantasy, not whatever it is people are doing now that involves vampires. Fantasy proper, but with stylistic experimentation. It's Virginia Woolf with fairies and gryphons and blemmyae. With all sorts of strange but wonderful monsters. It doesn't have the darkness of New Weird and is not indebted to Lovecraft. It's not really slipstream, because rather than making you uncomfortable it says, "Here are the monsters, get comfortable with them." It is political because it presents a world where social conventions don't apply, where to be different is to be normal, and to be ordinary is to be odd. It embraces beauty and strangeness as normal conditions. And it is definitely not interstitial, because as soon as you say something is Mythpunk it is no longer between things, it is a thing.

    It started in the small presses because larger presses did not want to take a chance on something so different. Fairy tale retellings – those it could handle. But these were fairy tale retellings with a difference. However, the more Mythpunk is out there, the more not-different it becomes, so you can say, "This is like Orphan's Tales."

    I also see in it a richness, an almost overflowing of inventiveness and language. In that way, it is like New Weird, which was also rich and overflowing.

    Do we really need all these labels, all these punks? We probably don't need them. But because of them, certain writers and works are talked about. So they enable us to have conversations we did not have before. They allow us to notice writers we might have overlooked. And they allow those writers to speak and say, "This is what I am. Or am not."

The Edge Of Reason
February 2, 2011 — Martin
The Edge Of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass (Tor, 2009)
Reviewed by Martin Lewis

Imagine if Richard Dawkins was not only American but retarded. Imagine he taught himself to read using the work of illiterate megasellers like James Patterson and Tess Gerritsen. Imagine he further fleshed out his understanding of human nature on a diet of romance novels and misery memoirs. Finally, imagine he stayed up one night getting drunk and watching piss poor police procedurals before having the sudden brainwave of re-writing American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Imagine all that and you have imagined Melinda Snodgrass's dire The Edge Of Reason and thus saved yourself the pain of actually reading it.

Our hero, Richard Oortz, is an East Coast blueblood concert pianist turned New Mexican policeman with a Terrible Secret. You might think this sounds unlikely and you would be right. He is also an extraordinarily good-looking bisexual gymnast whose DNA, unlike most of the rest of humanity, contains no magic. This last is of paramount importance because, counter-intuitively, it allows him to wield a magic sword that will save the world.

The idiotic plot revolves around the rather large co-incidence that the Devil also happens to live in Alberquerque (apparently this is because "it is a place where science and magic rub close".) In a mind blowing twist, He is actually the good guy since he represents rationality and Oortz must unite with him to overthrow the tyranny of God. What follows is tosh to the nth degree, Snodgrass has somehow managed to harness the worst of the blockbuster thriller and paranormal romance genres. And if the plot is bad – lacking sense, structure and interest – then the writing is even worse. To take an example:

Lean Cuisine hefted light in the hand as if the contents of the package were as cardboard as the box. Richard hooked open the crisper drawer of the refrigerator with the tow of his shoe. Fresh bok choy, peppers and ginger flashed color and guilt at him. He would cook. (p82)

The rest of the prose is equally cloth-eared and over-wrought and the dialogue reads like the work of Elizabots. It was solely because of professional obligation that I read all the way to the end, only to be rewarded with a limp, open-ended conclusion that paves the way for equally appalling sequels.

The book's jacket bizarrely claims that it is as controversial as The Golden Compass or The Illuminatus! Trilogy, possibly the only time those two books have been mentioned in the same sentence. The Golden Compass was controversial (in the US) because it was marketed at kids and suggested that organised religion wasn't that great. The Illuminatus! Trilogy was controversial because it was an insane counter-culture conspiracy theory fuckfest. The Edge Of Reason is supposedly controversial because of the whole theological inversion thing but this is only going to shock you if you have parachuted in from the 19th Century (as Oortz appears to have done.) In fact, the only thing controversial about the book is that it ever made it into print from a major publisher like Tor.

This review originally appeared in Vector #258.

Mislim da mu se bas, bas nije dopalo.

A sa druge strane Atlantika:

BANTAM BOOKS AND DYNAMITE ANNOUNCE COMIC ADAPTATION OF GEORGE R.R. MARTIN'S A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE

NEW YORK, NY – February 2, 2011 – Bantam Books, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, announced today the acquisition of the comic book and graphic novel rights to the worldwide bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin. The series will be illustrated by Tommy Patterson and adapted by Daniel Abraham, the award-winning and bestselling author of The Long Price Quartet. The first issue of the monthly comic—which will be published by Dynamite Entertainment—is planned to release in late spring 2011, with compilations of the comics in graphic novel form to follow under the Bantam imprint. With the television adaptation of A Game of Thrones scheduled to air on HBO starting in April 2011, the comics and graphic novels will further expand the Song of Ice and Fire series into a new medium, creating opportunities for readers old and new to immerse themselves in this bestselling world.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN sold his first story in 1971 and hasn't stopped. As a writer-producer, he worked on The Twilight Zone, Beauty and the Beast, and various feature films and pilots that were never made. In the mid-90s he returned to prose and began work on A Song of Ice and Fire. He has been in the Seven Kingdoms ever since. He lives with the lovely Parris.

DANIEL ABRAHAM is the author of ten books and more than thirty short stories. He has been nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy awards, and won the International Horror Guild Award. He has written the graphic novel adaptations of George R. R. Martin's novel Fevre Dream and novella "Skin Trade," and original scripts for Wild Cards: The Hard Call. He also writes as MLN Hanover and James S. A. Corey. He lives with his family in the American southwest.

Artist TOMMY PATTERSON'S credits include Farscape for Boom! Studios, the movie adaptation The Warriors for Dynamite Entertainment, and Tales From Wonderland the White Knight, Red Rose and Stingers from Zenescope Entertainment. He has a BS in Stu

divota jedna, bar za mene, ja sam verovatno jedini humanoid koji nije overio te pesmuljke leda & vatre...

Nisi.

Hmm, kao neko ko ih je poodavno, delimicno, overio i sad ceka da Martin umre ili zavrsi da bi nastavio, preporucio bih vam prvu novelu iz tog sveta, Hedge Knight. Tu jako lepo moze da se vidi o cemu se, u stvari, kod Martina radi.

Nego, Melkore, nikako da iskopam taj tvoj post za Axis, a baš me zanima elaboracija pozitivnih strana tog romana. (mene je totalno razočarao, ali totalno... )

Zauzvrat, nudim (malko kilavu, garant) elaboraciju drske tvrdnje da mi je Robert J. Sawyer post infantilan.

Mea culpa, nisam toliko napisao koliko sam pricao sa zakkom i Milosem. Ali, evo sta sam napisao:

QuotePosle odusevljenja Spinom, Axisu sam pristupio opreznije, posto mi je najavljeno da je slabiji i da komotno mogu da prodjem i bez njega. Naravno da nisam poslusao dobronamerne savete (opsesivni kompletista kakav jesam) i, moram reci, drago mi je zbog toga.

Axis je drugaciji roman od Spina. Odlican balans karakterizacije i fantastike je i dalje tu, ali na drugi nacin. Dok je u Spinu Sf bio pozadina, ovde je mnogo integralniji u razvoju likova i to se vidi od prvog poglavlja. Ljudi su i dalje u fokusu i to uveliko pomaze da roman ne postane samo platforma za iznosenje Teze - koja je jako zanimljiva i zavodljiva ali sama ne bi opravdala postojanje celog romana.

Sto se kontinuiteta tice Axis pocinje 30-ak godina po okoncanju Spina i efektivno se samo jedan lik ponovo pojavljuje. Razmere dogadjanja su lokalnije i samo naizgled manje bitne za covecanstvo. Takvim pristupom Axis vara ocekivanje citaoca posle Spina, Wilson mudro spusta loptu i postize, iako ne Evro-, efektivan go.

U proceni Axisa trebalo bi imati u vidu da je to druga knjiga trilogije. Taj podatak nisam imao kada sam se latio citanja (ili sam ga zaboravio). Ne da je krucijalno bitan posto se Axis cak moze citati i kao stand-alone ili kao par uz Spin, ali mislim da ce svoje pravo mesto naci tek kada se sagleda i treca knjiga koja ce se zvati Vortex

.

E sad, uz ovu vremensku perspektivu, slazem se da jeste slabiji roman od Spina, i da me flavour prisecanja vuce na '80, dok Spin ima svoje mesto u novom milenijumu. Ali i dalje ne mislim da je to los roman.

Sto se Sawyera tice, daj, da se zabavljamo. Ionako nisam ni nameravao da ga ikada citam 

Annual Analysis of the Locus Recommended Short Story List

Now that Locus Magazine has published its recommended reading list for 2010, I can once again dig into my spreadsheets and take a look at how this year's data reflects on the state of short stories. I've been monitoring the list's short fiction category for a few years now and have always found the results interesting.


Some Quick Facts:

    * Number of short stories on  the list: 68, up from 61
    * Number of publications represented: 27, down from 29
    * Number of publications with 2 or more stories on the list: 14 (52%), up from 12 (41%)
    * Number of stories from online magazines: 36 (52.9%), up from 18 (27.9%)
    * Number of online magazines represented: 9 (33.3%), up from 6 (20.7%)
    * Number of stories from print magazines: 12 (17.6%), down from 16 (26.2%)
    * Number of print magazines represented: 4 (14.8%), down from 6 (20.7%)
    * Number of stories from anthologies/collections/chapbooks: 20 (29.4%), down from 28 (45.9%)
    * Number of anthologies/collections/chapbooks represented: 14 (51.8%), down from 17 (58.6%)
    * Online magazines represented: Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Subterranean, Tor.com, Fantasy, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Shareable.
    * Print magazines represented: Asimov's, F&SF, Black Gate, and Albedo One
    * Anthology/Collections/Chapbooks represented: Is Anybody Out There?, Sprawl, Zombies vs. Unicorns, Swords & Dark Magic, What I Didn't See and Other Stories, Sourdough and Other Stories, Stories, Gateways, Wings of Fire, Full Moon City, The Beastly Bride, Temporary Culture, The Man with Knives, Songs of Love and Death, and Masked.
    * There is a two-way tie for publications with the most recommended short stories. One online magazine (Clarkesworld) and one print magazine (Asimov's). These two magazines were two of four tied for first last year.

Final Standings:

7 - Asimov's (+2)
7 - Clarkesworld (+2)
6 - Lightspeed (new)
5 - Tor.com (+4)
5 - Fantasy Magazine (+2)
4 - Strange Horizons (-1)
3 - Subterranean (+1)
3 - Apex (+3)
3 - F&SF (-1)
3 - Is Anybody Out There?
3 - Sprawl
2 - Zombies vs. Unicorns
2 - Wings of Fire
2 - Shareable
1 - 13 other markets

Observations:

    * This is the first year that there have been more stories selected from online venues than from books or print magazines.
    * Although the number of stories on the list increased by 111%, growth within the categories was not proportional. Online magazines increased their total by 212%, but anthologies/collections/chapbooks and print magazines respectively declined to 71% and 75% of last year's figures.
    * Anthologies/Collections/Chapbooks spent the last four years at the top. This is their first decline since 2005.
    * Overall, print magazines continue to decline as a presence on the list. Three years ago, Asimov's (alone) represented 25% of the entire list. That's more than all of this (or last) year's print magazines combined.
    * Notable publications absent in the short story category: Analog, Realms of Fantasy, and Interzone.
    * 38 stories are by women, giving them the majority. 20 of those stories were in online magazines. 12 stories were in print magazines. 18 in anthology/collection/chapbooks. (30 for men, 16 online magazines, 12 print magazines, 2 in a/c/c).

Detailed analysis by Neil Clarke.

Eh, Melkore, kad kažeš "posto se Axis cak moze citati i kao stand-alone ili kao par uz Spin", meni to znači kao da si mi rekao da je Axis mogao da napiše i neko drugi, a ne Vilson. Hoću reći, drugi roman u trilogiji je ipak nastavak prvog romana u trilogiji, pa ne mogu da procenjujem koliko je taj roman zapravo vredan u striktno stand-alone smislu. Ali dobro, okej, priznajem, to sad već zadire duboko u domen ukusa i očekivanja, pa je zato i skroz subjektivno, a moguće i da sam preterano zahtevna po pitanju serijala. Recimo, sad posle Axisa nisam više sigurna vredi li mi uopšte overavati Vortex, dok sam posle Spina jedva čekala nastavak; rekla bih da za serijale imam samo onoliko rispekta (ili strpljenja) koliko ga zasluži poslednji pročitani roman.

Dalje, za Sawyera; naravno da ja poštujem staru gardu, nema tu zbora, ali taj pasivno distopični svetonazor (van svoje striktno kreativne svrhe, naravno) ne nailazi na nešto mnogo razumevanja kod mene, priznajem. Naravno da je postojalo doba (neposredno posle ww2, a na Balkanu i par dekada duže, sve dok je bar četvrtina stanovništva ne samo preživljavala nego i iznosila na plećima dobar deo državne proizvodnje, bez savremenih blagodeti tipa 'lektrike, vodovoda i kanalizacije) kad je takav svetonazor donekle i bio ubedljiv po svojim 'profesi of d dum" linijama, ali ni tad me nije sasvim kupio, priznajem. Daleko bilo da tvrdim da Sawyer nije u pravu – neka bude da SF ima ulogu Vikiliksa – ali ne bih išla toliko daleko da danas u žanru vidim alatku kojom se razotkrivaju naučni defekti, a još sam manje raspoložena da te defekte generalizujem u svrhe distopičnih teorija zavera. Nije slučajno da i sam Sawyer nudi primere iz rane faze žanra, kad je futurizam po pravilu bio pesimističan, i da koristi tek par savremenih uradaka, kao recimo The Windup Girl, u kontekstu u kom ja tu knjigu uopšte nisam doživela – u tehnofobičnom kontekstu. Mene futurizam TWG fascinira i ja ga uopšte ne doživljavam kao subverzivan, bar ne samo zato što se fokusira na zloupotrebe. U čovekovoj je prirodi da za svaku alatku izmisli više načina zloupotrebe nego upotrebe, i što je alatka sofisticiranija, to više "štete" može da napravi, ali to meni zaista nije dovoljan razlog da se čovek blatantno prikloni tehnofobiji. Izgleda meni da Sawyer živi u ideji da tehnološka evolucija mora biti kontrolisana, umivena i dezinfikovana, kao da ona putuje nekim paralelnim putem od čovekovog, i to doživljavam kao zaista detinjastu viziju nekakvog "dizajniranog" razvoja, koji mi izgleda daleko više kao "teroristički akt" nad samom prirodom, nego što mi je to TWG futurizam. Naravno da je u prirodi čoveka da "radi na sebi", da se "unapredi" po sopstvenim merilima, bilo da sebi uklanja defekte ili da se kozmetički približava sopstvenom idealu lepote, i naravno da će određeni procenat tih napora biti procenjen kao "zloupotreba", gledano iz nekih drugih sistema vrednosti. Ali, čovek se nalazi ovde gde jeste upravo zbog tih zloupotreba jednako koliko i upotreba, tako da je pomalo besmisleno tvrditi da je išta zapravo "sprečeno", zbog postojanja knjige kao što je Orvelova 1984; pre će biti da su bile u egzistenciji i daleko mračnije opcije, ali nisu održale upravo zbog evolucije koju bi cenjeni Sawyer tako rado da kontroliše. Tako da tu vidim jedan mali paradoks koji me oduvek fascinirao, kad su tehnofobične opcije bile u pitanju – recimo, ima dosta velikana iz tog "distopično futurističnog" miljea koji i danas slove kao humanisti (Klark, recimo), dok ih ja intimno nalazim kao poprilične mizantrope, koji su o čoveku imali duboko negativno mišljenje. I ne ulazim ja sad u raspravu po pitanju generalnih teorija, neka bude da negde u kosmosu ima trilijun intelektualnih entiteta i nek su svi redom na emptom stepenu superiornosti nad čovekom, ali to ne menja činjenicu da pouzdano znam da je "čovek" ipak tu obrao kajmak, i obire ga i dalje, to upravo u borbi sa vrlo opasnim neprijateljem – samim sobom. I nekako mi žao ljudi koji su bili živi svedoci upravo najekspanzivnijem delu civilizacijskog razvitka i pri tom ostali dovoljno mizantropi da sa najviše prečage upravo tog & takvog uspeha ne vide koliko su daleko bačeni horizonti realma. A ne kažem sad da je Sawyerov svetonazor jedini tehnofobski front kojeg sam svesna, daleko bilo... tu mi, recimo, upada i stimpank i njemu slični fentezi pravci, u kojima nalazim širok tehnofobski dijapazon. Mislim da je nekim ljudima jednostavno preteško da suoče džagernat tehnološke erupcije, pa nalaze utočište u vrsti eskapizma koju primarno nalazim infantilnom, mada ujedno i vrlo zabavnom. 

No dobro, da ne davim, o tome bi se dalo raspravljati do sudnjeg dana u podne, veruj mi.     

Is speculative fiction poised to break into the literary canon?

The Booker prize judges have yet to acknowledge the flowering of British SF and fantasy. Will 2011 be a breakthrough year?

    * Damien G Walter
    * guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 February 2011 11.53 GMT

Speculative fiction has produced many great works of literature. Even a partial list of SF's canonical works could fill many blogposts. It would be difficult to talk seriously about the last century of literature without considering HG Wells, or George Orwell, or JG Ballard at the very least. And of the writers working today, how many owe something to the works of Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K Dick? In fact, the number of SF authors being retrospectively rolled in to the literary canon seems to grow exponentially year on year.

But new works of speculative fiction rarely receive the critical recognition accorded to their literary cousins, a fact most evident in the major literary awards, not least the Man Booker prize. In the last decade, British SF has been through a period of intense creativity and brilliance. From Neil Gaiman's seminal urban fantasy American Gods (2001), Light (2002) M John Harrison's meditation on psychosis and quantum states and Gwyneth Jones's Life (2004), through Air by Geoff Ryman (2005), Accelerando by Charlie Stross (2005), Brasyl by Ian McDonald (2007) and culminating with The City and the City by China Miéville (2009) British SF has led the world in originality and excellence. Whether any one of these books would have swayed the Booker judges is an open question, but the fact that only one significant work of SF from this extraordinary decade (Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) was even longlisted suggests a systematic problem in the Booker's treatment of speculative fiction.

Over the same period, the fashion of literary fiction writers borrowing ideas from SF has continued. Putting aside concerns that novels such as Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go lag more than two decades behind in their treatment of cloning and genetics, for the Booker judges to consider SF ideas when recycled by literary authors, but to ignore the source of those ideas, only highlights the narrowness of the award's perspective.

As the Booker prize opens for nominations, accepting digital submissions for the first time, will this also be the year that worthy works of SF receive serious consideration from the Booker judges? The issue has been increasingly discussed in recent Booker seasons, leading this year to an entirely unsatisfactory statement on the subject from the Booker judges, and a literary smackdown between China Miéville and John Mullan at the Cheltenham festival, from which Miéville emerged victorious.

But which works of speculative fiction might challenge the Booker judges' perceptions of the genre? Already available for consideration is The Silent Land by Graham Joyce. A previous winner of The World Fantasy award, Joyce has been stalking the boundary between literary and fantastic fiction for some years. His latest novel is an emotionally shattering exploration of the human need for love, focused through the lens of a contemporary ghost story. Jo Walton is also a World Fantasy award winner. Her new novel, Among Others, is as much a story about fantasy as a work of fantasy, and is already gathering the kind of awestruck praise that marks a breakout hit from an established but underappreciated author. And China Miéville must surely have a chance of consideration this year. Miéville's mission to reform SF continues in 2011 with Embassytown, which promises to be a weird revision of the space opera genre. But will actual aliens and spaceships be a wormhole too far for the Booker judges?

Kad smo već kod Elisona, da pomenemo i kako je njegov A Boy And His Dog našao udomljenje i u grafičkoj noveli. Evo DeNardovog rivjua:



I first read Harlan Ellison's brilliant short story "A Boy and His Dog" many years ago. When I recently happened upon a graphic novel adaptation of not only that story, but two other stories that round out the saga of said boy and dog, I think I experienced what could only be referred to as glee. It was manly glee, but glee nonetheless. Even better: this particular graphic novel is more than it first appears. This 2003 reprint - for which Ellison has provided additional introductory material and flavor text in the form of quotes from the telepathic dog named Blood - has both graphic adaptations and the original stories on which they are based. Talk about easy purchase decisions.

Vic and Blood is made up of two stories ("Eggsucker" and "A Boy and His Dog") and an excerpt (titled "Run, Spot" Run") from the (still) upcoming book (Blood's a Rover) that is meant to tell the complete story of Vic of Blood. For those wondering about Ellison's anti-sequel rule, his introduction explains that 1969's "A Boy and His Dog" is part of a larger novel that he has been writing for over 30 years. The story is finished, but the last, longest part is written as a screenplay with no current plans for production. With the year 2007 only hours away, there is still no indication of when Blood's a Rover will be officially completed. Until then, Vic and Blood will have to suffice.

A word about reading order: Ellison recommends reading each original story before its corresponding graphic novel adaptation, so that's what I did even though, oddly, each story is printed after the visual adaptation. I suspect this is to lead the graphics novel fan to written prose as opposed to my situation of book-lover reading the adaptations. I second Ellison's recommendation: read the original stories first.

"Eggsucker" takes place before the events of Ellison's classic "A Boy and his Dog". It recounts an early adventure in the lives of Vic and Blood. It also provides a good introduction to the gritty, post-apocalyptic setting for all the stories. Sometime after World War IV, population has dwindled considerably and people are living day to day scrounging for the most valuable resource of all: food. But ammunition is valuable, too, and when Vic finds some booze, he enters into a food trade with a gang who has little respect for Vic's short-tempered, four-legged partner. Blood, you see, has the power of telepathy and can communicate directly (and only) to Vic. Vic and Blood are solo rovers in search of food while avoiding roverpak gangs and mutated people called screamers. The adventure quotient here is tamer than later adventures but still nicely done.

Ellison's Nebula-winning story "A Boy and His Dog" is the anchor of this book and still stands out as the superior work. Vic, now a very horny teenager, meets a girl named Quilla June Holmes who initially masquerades as a boy to safely walk amongst the horny male rovers. She is from the "downunder" (underground) city of Topeka, where residents try to assume a normal life decades after the world was demolished to ruins and savagery. Vic's emotions for Quilla put him and Blood at risk. To overcome the challenges of the ensuing adventures, Blood must once again show that he is the smarter of the two and Vic goes to somewhat scary lengths to show just how loyal he is. This story best exemplifies Vic's and Blood's literary role switch of the man and beast. The ending has to be one of science fiction's best.

"Run, Spot, Run" takes place immediately after the draw-dropping ending of the previous story. Headed for the unknown west once again, Vic and Blood encounter the rival Fellini roverpack. While attempting escape they run into a horde of nasty creatures. Being an excerpt, I expected "Run, Spot, Run" to be an unresolved cliffhanger. I was pleasantly surprised that the ending could simultaneously be considered both a cliffhanger and a tidy resolution, albeit one of high import.

The visual versions of the stories are quite faithful to the original material - to the point of being a cut-and-paste job of the original text. This is fine as it helps to translate the feel that Ellison successfully creates in the original material. Naturally, the graphic adaptations are going to be abbreviated. Reading the original stories beforehand helps quite a bit in this regard. Corben's art is suitably dark, though his drawing style does not exactly suit my particular tastes. His all-too-scant pencil illustrations presented in the original material do much more to match the mood of Ellison's stories and better show his skill.

Taken as a whole, Vic and Blood is a must-read for anyone who is a fan of "A Boy and His Dog" and a should-read for anyone else. Ellison's prose is as spry and engaging as ever and also what one would expect from an author who is considered master of the short form. Simply put: the stories do not disappoint. And Ellison's introduction provides some background trivia behind the stories and the 1975 movie adaptation starring Don Johnson and Jason Robards. I also note that the book's overall production value is high and would make a fine addition to the library of any sf fan.

A zdravog balansa poradi, evo i kako je Džoana Ras rivjuisala film:




A Boy and his Dog
The final solution

by Joanna Russ
from Jump Cut, no. 12-13, 1976, pp. 14-17
Reprinted from Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 1:1, Fall 1975


The Denver area is full of male feminists. Two of them, both science-fiction writers, urged me to see A BOY AND HIS DOG, the feature-length film made from Harlan Ellison's science-fiction story of the same name. Both men are friends of mine, and Harlan Ellison is a friend of mine also; yet must I proclaim publicly right here that sending a woman to see A BOY AND HIS DOG is like sending a Jew to a movie that glorifies Dachau; you need not be a feminist to loathe this film. I don't know whether Ellison supervised the making of the film or whether he approves of it, so this review will deal entirely with the film and not with Ellison's story. (1) Kate Millett called Norman Mailer's An American Dream a novel about how to kill your wife and live happily ever after; A BOY AND HIS DOG is about how to feed your girl friend to your dog and live happily ever after.

This film is in the direct line of descent of hundreds of Hollywood movies in which a designing and dangerous woman tries to part loyal male buddies. BOY has essentially the same ending as CASABLANCA, although in the latter film getting rid of the woman is romantically glossed over—i.e., she is renounced, not chopped into dog food. Samuel Delany, an excellent science fiction writer and critic, has invented the word "homosexist" to describe films like BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, in which the woman is a dim tagalong, brought in to placate the audience, which might be expected to grow uneasy at a film in which the main emotional entanglements between men and women are either secondary or rejected. (2)

In this sense, BOY is a homosexist film. It is not a homosexual film—I want to make that clear. If there are constant jokes made about the "fuzzy butt" of the telepathic dog, Blood, and if the dog is pictured as immensely appealing, this is not because the dog rouses erotic feelings in either Vic (the hero) or anybody else; it is because he doesn't, and it is therefore safe to love him. BOY is affectionate towards the dog, who is asexual. It is the woman, Quilla June, corrupt, dangerous, but powerfully attractive, that the film finds evil and menacing. Stories in which the world's evil is attributed to women or women's sexual attractiveness are hardly new in western culture, and there are times you'd swear BOY was a remake of SAMSON AGONISTES or even the story of the Garden of Eden, although the garden here (a world devastated by World War Three) is a pretty bleak and minimal one.

Stories which portray a noble, talented, or sympathetic man done in by an evil temptress depend heavily on the plausibility of the temptress, and it's here that BOY falls down—it's a good film until the utter impossibility of Quilla June, Vic's girlfriend, destroys it. Among other good things the movie has a splendid performance by the dog—pieced together by the director, one assumes, but at times one wonders; the dog's a better actor than many human ones. And the film has that rare science fiction virtue one might call Not Shoving Your Nose In It. Remember those films in which somebody says,

"My God, Sheila. Don't you realize what this means? Those unknown monsters which devoured a little girl and killed old Grandpa Perkins are the mutated ants caused by radiation from the bomb tests held three years ago in the Arizona desert."

Well, nobody in BOY ever talks like this. The film does not painfully belabor the obvious but gives you the science fiction background and details you need quickly, dramatically, and above all, obliquely. But you buy the considerable virtues of the movie by having to endure (once again) a story whose main point is that women are no damned good and men are better off without us, even when it means killing us.

Vic, the boy, survives (with the help of his telepathic dog, Blood) in a ruined, sterile, war-devastated America in which rape and murder are commonplaces. He attempts to rape Quilla June, only to be unexpectedly trapped by love. She tempts him down to the underground world of "Topeka,"(3) a 1905-ish midwestern smalltown world like a Ray Bradbury story gone totalitarian, and he finds himself a prisoner. Quilla sets him free, wishing him to kill the leaders of this ghastly place, but the leaders' robot executioner is all but unkillable (although Vic manages to short out one of them, there are plenty more in the warehouse) and the lovers flee above ground. A wounded, weakened Blood, waiting above ground for Vic, has waited too long: Vic is forced to choose between Blood's life and Quilla June's, and he chooses his real friend, the dog.

From the above synopsis (if you hadn't seen the film) you might guess that both societies are intolerable, that both characters are driven, and that any course of action taken by anybody will, of necessity, be tragic. This is not the case. For example, the film presents the judicial executions in "Topeka" as horrifying, while casual murders above ground are a grim sort of fun—Vic's and Quilla's reactions give the audience its cue in both cases. The murders are also paced differently and shown differently. A key line in the film—Vic shouts that he wants to go back to the dirt above ground so that he can feel clean—characterizes her form of Hell as infinitely worse than his. He is a loser below ground and a winner above ground, but the film translates this difference into a moral difference between the two societies. (I might add that the line itself is television-ghastly. Vic has been carefully created as someone who would not give a damn about feeling morally clean and to whom such a self-conscious fatuity as the line would be impossible.)

Above all, Vic and Blood are lovable and good, and Quilla June is manipulative and bad, so Vic's final choice is a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, the foregoneness of the conclusion destroys its drama. Since feeding your girlfriend to your dog is neither suspenseful nor tragic—it's necessary and she deserves nothing better—the end dwindles to a sour joke, exactly as the audience took it. It isn't hard to see in this film another repetition of the common American idea that if only men could get away from civilization (i.e. women) and civilization's troublesome insistence that one actually interact with others, life (men's lives) would be much better. Even though Vic's life, after Quilla, will be lived in a bleak and ruined world, he will be free; BOY is surprisingly like Huckleberry Finn, with Blood as the undemanding and loving companion who isn't quite human, like Nigger Jim. The movie, however, goes farther than Twain did; civilization ("Topeka") is totally corrupt. And woman is not simply avoided but wiped out, a necessity if man (who has now seen through her bitchery and is no longer a slave to his gonads) is to go off with his real friend, the dog.

BOY presents its woman as corrupt and produced by a corrupt society; only by murdering her can man avoid her dangerous fascinations. A sexless relationship is better, "love" is rotten, and Vic's becoming disillusioned with "love" and returning to his old friend (the dog) is the plot of the film. Quilla June is therefore an important character, and the film's judgment of her is the linchpin of the plot.

Quilla June at first looks like a brave woman. By coming above ground she risks death, not to mention rape. She is also surprisingly competent; she knows how to shoot. However, we soon find that her escapade is neither patriotic nor curious but fueled by greedy ambition, for the elders of "Topeka" have sent her up with the promise of reward. Later she braves the rulers of "Topeka" (including her own father) by freeing Vic, but this action is not undertaken because she likes him or repents of having trapped him; instead, she wishes him to kill—for her—the "Committee" which rules this underground society. Why she can't do this herself is something of a puzzle, for she apparently knows how to shoot and guns are available, but perhaps the film wants to characterize her as simultaneously dangerous and helpless. She has persuaded other teenagers to rebel against the rulers of "Topeka," an accomplishment which you might think would show her as something of a political mastermind, but no, they are all boys—there are no girls in Quilla's rebellion—so it is probable that she has seduced them into submission, as she did Vic. She is no Joan of Arc (or even Evita Peron), but only Mata Hari. The government of "Topeka" is viciously conformist, but no credit accrues to Quilla for wanting to destroy such a set-up; for what she really wants, as she makes plain to Vic, is to replace those currently in power with herself. The film simultaneously presents her as enormously dangerous and powerful (because of her sexuality) and totally helpless (although she must know about the robot executioner, all she does is scream for Vic to protect her, though earlier she was daring enough to bash in heads). Back on the surface (in her wedding dress, a good touch) she reveals that she is not only helpless but stupid; she whines unpleasantly and "manages" Vic badly—and this is fatal, because he is now her only protector.

According to Samuel Delany,(4) a literary characterization proceeds by means of three kinds of actions: gratuitous, purposeful, and habitual, and well-written characters perform all three. (This classification certainly applies to realistic fiction, and I suspect it applies to all fiction, however stylized.) Sexist literature produces two kinds of female characters, both imperfect: the Heroine, whose actions are all gratuitious, (5) and the Villainess, whose actions are all purposeful. Neither performs habitual actions.

Now Quilla June perfectly fits this formula for a Villainess—she is all calculation. She has no habits, and what a difference it would make if she did—bit her fingernails, for example. or wince uncontrollably whenever her dreadful Daddy comes too close! But aside from a few clumsy betrayals of hatred, Quilla never does anything spontaneously (that is, gratuitously) any more than she does anything out of habit; she is all outside, all mask, and the few revelations of her feelings are simply revelations that Quilla is hateful. The inner life that makes Blood and Vic so lovable is withheld from Quilla June; she is a grotesque enormity, a totally manipulative Bitch. We are shown that she is "ambitious," but it's hard to know what ambition is supposed to mean here (it seems to be only another word for hate) since what she wants is neither flattery, glory, nor self-importance, but only revenge.

In addition to repeating the theme of Love Between Buddies, the film strongly resembles those 1950s films in which the Good Girl is bait, used to bind the Bad Boy to the Conformist System—except that the 1950s films I'm thinking of are on the side of the System (of which the Good Girl is an artifact), and this film most emphatically is not. Clearly, BOY intends to attack the Conformist System (a remarkably nasty one in this film); judgment is pronounced upon it by Vic, and its representative. Quilla June, is destroyed by him.

What is odd is that Quilla June, far from representing "Topeka," is in fact trying to destroy it, and that "Topeka," far from being hurt by Quilla June's death, is protected by it. One might begin to suspect that "Topeka" has an interest in having Quilla destroyed and that far from being its representative, she is its scapegoat—expendable, unnecessary, but useful at times for containing the rage of punks like Vic.

That is, thinking you are attacking society when you condemn or ravage the hypothetical Nice Girl Next Door is the exact equivalent of thinking that stealing from the local supermarket makes you a Communist.

The Nice Girl Next Door, although she is often perceived as the most protected and most valuable citizen in a sexist society, is neither. She isn't even really in the society at all. She's a figurine, a possession. a commercial product, something the film recognizes at one point when it shows a long line of girls in bridal dresses (same uniform, different faces) waiting in a hospital corridor to be led in and "married" to Vic. ("Topeka" is taking semen samples from him as he lies wired to a machine that stimulates his brain in order to induce orgasm; each girl in turn stands under a horseshoe of flowers in her white gown, a minister solemnly reads the marriage service, the machine is turned on, and the resulting semen is neatly labeled, presumably with the name of the "wife.") The Nice Girl is socially powerless, useful at best for the minor policing of teenage boys, useful as a reward or a "responsibility" but hardly a citizen in her own right—after all, the major policing in a sexist society is done by others, overwhelmingly by adult males. When Vic destroys Quilla he is destroying a victim, a quasi-slave, a piece of useful property. He is certainly not harming "Topeka." And the film does not present Quilla's destruction as Quilla's tragedy; on the contrary, it is she who is the real menace; it is she who must be punished.

This is scapegoating.

The movie hates "Topeka," but it executes Quilla June. Are the two identical? To think they are is comparable to the theories which maintained that the only flaw in antebellum Southern slavery was the wretched character and corrupting influence of the slaves themselves. This logic is a form of Philip Wylie's Momism, in which women are "society" and a man escapes from "society" and its obligations by avoiding women; the usual American form of this illusion is the concept of marriage as a trap into which men are tricked by women. But if society is really constituted by other men (as "Topeka" certainly seems to be), then no escape is possible; avoiding women leaves a man just as open to intimidation by other men, i.e., by "society." BOY avoids the problem of society-as-other-men by splitting the world into two: in underground "Topeka" there are relatively free women (that is, young people and members of the lower classes are oppressed regardless of sex), while above ground women are prostitutes, drudges, or rape victims, and hence powerless.

The real ruler of "Topeka" is clearly Quilla's daddy, but the fight with him is never joined at all. Indeed, the film doesn't even seem interested in him. This is especially odd since the role (a very brief one) is played by Jason Robards. Jr., and you'd think that out of sheer dramatic expediency the movie would give him more to do. I might add that the rulers of the underground society are presented as quite straightforwardly cynical and callous. which seems to me a bad mistake; "Topeka," in its enforced imitation of Kansas 1905 (or a.daydream thereof) is a mind-bendingly surreal place. I don't believe the leaders would be exempt from the general craziness; quite the contrary (1984, q.v.). This aspect of "Topeka" is well conveyed in the film, for example, by the white face makeup and the misty, purplish sky—so close that it gives you instant claustrophobia.

It is nonsense to insist that the real danger in a tyrannical, self-hating, hypocritical, piously horrible society is pretty, scheming, little girls. The Nice Girl looks like the most sacred and the most privileged citizen of this ghastly commonality, but in reality her rights (as opposed to the rights of her owners) are nonexistent.      In D. W. Griffith's ORPHANS OF THE STORM, for example, to lay a finger on Lillian Gish looks like a desecration, but she is far from being society or even a citizen of it; she has been invented, constructed, meant, put there in the film either to be raped or saved from rape—what other purpose can there possibly be for her unhuman helplessness and childishness? The Victorian gentlemen who so assiduously protected their daughters' maiden purity were not hypocrites when they visited whorehouses stocked with 12-year-old girls; they were simply acting on the identical assumption about the high value of maiden purity. In such a setup, pretty girls are about as much privileged citizens as a diamond ring is a privileged citizen. Like money or jewels, women are counters for use in business or warfare between men.

Punk loners (who are much more part of "society" than Vic is part of "Topeka" in BOY) can go on terrifying or killing waitresses or cheerleaders forever under the impression that they're heroically attacking society; this is what happens in both BOY and THE WILD ONES, a movie whose anger (and evasions) thrilled a whole generation.

Confusing Nelson Rockefeller with his car is a useful delusion to inculcate in punks; this way they attack the car instead of the man. After all, if the punks ever found out the car was only a possession, there might be real trouble. But as long as movies assume that the use of women to bind men to respectability is an instinct or a scheme by women (who must act through men in order to attain any power or safety), and not a circumstance set up by powerful men, rebels can expend their emotion on reincarnations of the Bitch Goddess forever.

The war between fathers and sons is as chronic a conflict in patriarchy as the war between classes (that is, between upperclass and lowerclass men), though not nearly as revolutionary in its potential. In both conflicts women are useful scapegoats, blamable and punishable for everything. After all, Son will eventually make it to the state of Father and will have his own Daughter/Wife he can own ("protect") from other Fathers, a Daughter he can give to another Son as payment for containing the status quo. Son can be counted on to punish Daughter if Daughter gets out of hand. Thus a real alliance between Daughter and Son is made eternally impossible, and luckily so, for such an alliance would be almost as dangerous for patriarchy as one between Daughter and Mother. Between classes, scapegoats are even more useful: Lowerclass Man is not going to make it at all, i.e., he will never replace Upperclass Man; so using Lower/Upperclass Woman as scapegoat both distracts him from the real situation and bribes hire to endure it.

The evils of female sexuality and the obligatory punishment of its carriers is the grand, eternally useful scapegoat of Western patriarchy. It is the one topic on which Fathers and Sons, Upperclass Men and Lowerclass Men can heartily agree. And they can agree (and collude) while enjoying the comforting illusion that they are engaged in dangerous, revolutionary activities. I believe the makers of BOY really thought they were violating a sacred taboo when they fed Quilla June to Blood, but there is certainly no such taboo extant now in fiction or film.

In fact, I doubt there ever was one. For quite a while 20th century literature and films have specialized in exploitation, self-aggrandizement, and violence directed against women; writers who use such devices can congratulate themselves on being daring while taking almost no risks. This violence didn't start with FRENZY, either; Griffith could show Lillian Gish in various threatening situations time after time, Gloria Swanson could be carried half-naked out of the surf (this in 1919), and DeMille could elevate orgy to a shlock art. How much freedom had any of them to violate real taboos—for example, to attack free enterprise? The sacredness of the Nice Girl is important only when it gives one group of Sons or Fathers a reason to wallop another; otherwise nobody cares. The one taboo is highly ambivalent and strongly titillating (the treatment of Mom in American movies, with its mingling of exploitation, adulation, and venom, is an even plainer case), but the second taboo is absolute.

Naked ladies in bathtubs or rape (a subject surprisingly present in late 19th century European theater) don't get you into trouble with the censors, certainly not persistently. If you are Mae West and you try to demystify sex, removing both pruriency and sentimentality from the subject, you get into trouble with the Hays Office. If you are Charlie Chaplin, you end up in much worse trouble, and not with the Hays Office, either.

If you look carefully at the structural (though not sexual) position of Blood in the triangle dog-boy-girl, you find that he is really Vic's other woman. in fact, Vic's wife. Blood, presented as a better person than Quilla June, nonetheless controls his relationship with Vic through identical manipulativeness of the traditional feminine sort: he is by far the more dependent, he is smaller, he cannot handle firearms, and he depends on Vic for food. Suavely dignified as the dog is, his pretensions are always at (very comic) odds with his behavior. He's a mooch, a coaxer, a charmer, a wheedler, a jealous sulk, a self-dramatizer who gets his way by ostentatiously parading his wounded feelings. He even fulfills the common American wifely function (remember Maggie and Jiggs?) of trying to make Vic cultured. In short, he acts very like a wife, even to the traditional parallel that when Blood wants something, like going Over the Hill, and Vic doesn't, Blood has to do without. It might be objected that Blood works for his keep as a sort of assistant to Vic, but then so do wives; child care, shopping, cooking, and cleaning are hardly female hobbies. One example of the film's virulent misogyny is the presentation of Quilla June as strictly a luxury article. Another evidence of loading the deck (very striking, too) is the scene in with Quilla calls Blood "cute"—the audience roars with scorn, but of course the talking dog is cute, and this cuteness is precisely what the audience has been relishing all evening. Moreover, Blood's will and Tic's will usually run in the same channels; pets (which is what the dog is, even if he can speak) are less demanding and more loyal than human friends. I suspect the reason the film does not present a friendship between Vic and Quilla is not only that throwing over your girlfriend for a boy would suggest homosexuality, but also that a friendship between two men could not possibly be as harmonious as one between a boy and a dog.

If Quilla June is seen as evil by the film, I suspect the main reason is because she's not Vic's dog. The horrid surprise waiting for the lover of this silky, pettable creature is that she has her own will, that it is not at all like his, and that sex, gives her power over him. Her dependency is a parody of the dog's, it ought to render her loyal and unthreatening, and yet it only makes her scheming and deceptive. (That dependency makes women devious is a state of affairs patriarchy has been complaining about for centuries.)

There are extraordinarily good moments in this film, like Vic's stupid-sly grin when he's told that he's about to act out the ultimate punk sexual fantasy, or the echo of fairytale in Vic's staying underground "too long" because of the wicked enchantress, just as if "Topeka" were Elf Hill. But I can no longer buy fine moments at the price of colluding in my own murder.

A reader might object at this point that Quilla June is not all women but only one, and that a film which presents her as a bitch who deserves to be killed is not attacking all women but only one. My answer to this is threefold: first, the film replicates a pattern that is very common in Western culture, if not elsewhere; second, the film shows nothing of Quilla except her sexual power and her bitchiness; third, the film doesn't present any alternative to Quilla. Who else is there? The dirty, worn-out drudges we see topside? The faceless prostitute glimpsed in one scene? Miss Ms. (what a name'), that older Quilla? The sad, obedient schoolgirls of "Topeka," totally controlled by their parents? Many Hollywood films used to present us with two alternatives: a woman could be a Bitch or she could be the June Allysonian Nice Girl. I suppose it's an advance of sorts to stop holding out the June Allyson type as an ideal, but all BOY does is combine the two and insist that the Nice Girl is the Bitch.

Early in BOY Vic finds a woman raped and murdered by a roverpack and comments on what a waste the murder was; she might've been good for a few more times. But by the end of the film the only logical attitude he (or we) can adopt—the whole film has been devoted to proving this point—is that Vic was wrong: the only good woman is a dead woman and the only way a man can have sex with a woman safely is to kill her afterwards. This morality is the morality of King Shahriyar, and while The Thousand and One Nights presents this morality as insane, BOY presents it as exemplary, perhaps even heroic.(6)

Here is a conversation a friend of mine had recently with a 12-year-old, omnivorous reader:

He asked her what books she liked to read.

"Oh, you know, books about people," was the not very clear answer.

He asked her if she read any books with women as the central characters.

"Oh," she said with scorn, "I don't read books about women."(7) And no wonder. Perhaps some day she'll stop reading books, as I may stop going to the movies.

I'm going to pull a flip-flop on the makers of A BOY AND HIS DOG. I'm going to send them to see a marvelously entertaining, absolutely profound, great science fiction film that's just come out. I am especially going to recommend it to Harlan Ellison, the author of the story on which A BOY AND HIS DOG is based (he is a Jew, as I am), and director of A BOY AND HIS DOG (who is, I believe, Black).

The movie is called THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, and it's about this great hero and chucklesome charmer called Adolf Hitler who had the perfect solution to all the ills of society.

He murdered you, boys.

Notes

1. The story is, to my mind, somewhat different from the film; no one in the story is totally sympathetic or totally evil, and in particular the events surrounding the two main cnaracters' escape from the story's underground society—he's an intruder and she's a native, but both are misfits—are such as to preclude choosing one character as morally better than another. The story's point seems to be that both the societies, above ground and under ground, are rotten. Furthemore, the story is told from the male character's point of view, a technique that admits both his relative ignorance of the other people in the tale-and-his natural bias in favor of himself. Films do not have a narrator, and what is seen through the subjective point of view in the story becomes the objective truth of the film.

2. Samuel Delany, in correspondence, April 20. 1975.

3. Named so by the inhabitants. It appears to be located somewhere under the Pacific slope, which is now desert.

4. In "Women and Science Fiction: A Symposium," in Khatru, Nos. 3 and 4 (Spring 1975). The symposium will be published as a booklet by Mirage Press sometime in 1976.

5. A good example of the gratuitous Heroine is the help and comfort accorded the two male characters by the lady of BUTCH CASSIDY. Pauline Kael has made sufficient comment on her supposed motivations: spinsterhood, boredom, and being "at the bottom of the heap as a pioneer schoolteacher out West.

6. Shahriyar's attitude is possessive, due to the wound given his sens of propriety (adultery); Vic's attitude is self defense. This may represent some kind of progres but hardly the conscious kind.

7. Samuel Delaney again, in Women and Science Fiction: A Symposium. He is one of the few male feminists I know who truly deserves the name, and he is a first-rate theoretical critic. His new novel Triton! (New York: Bantam, 1976) deals with male sexism, women as an oppressed class, and a genuinely nonsexist society.

    "But this [historical critical] view only traces a single thread through what is essentially a tapestry of aesthetic productions. The line, of course, tries to connect the high points. Frequently enough, these high points are , in reality, connected. But just as frequently they are connected more strongly to other works and situations totally off this line. Historical artistic progress only exists through the perspective lent by hindsight."
    - Samuel R. Delany,
    The Jewel-Hinged Jaw

    "Theft is an integral function of a healthy literature."
    - Ursula K. LeGuin, The Language of the Night

In hindsight, I wish I was a better journalist.

Last summer I attended Readercon 21, which is one of the best fantastika conventions in the U.S. It focuses on the heart of the wider genre, literature, and is a small con in size but enormous in intensity. That focus is what makes it both an intimate and mind-expanding experience. Because of the focus on the written word, there are often panels and discussions on genre, and also alternatives to genre. Some panels have focused on denoting or explicating new genres, while others take genre(s) apart. It was at one such panel that I was introduced to an idea that I found both quite refreshing and a tad perplexing: interstitiality. Sadly, I did not practice assiduous notation of the proceedings, but the ideas discussed about interstitial fiction were compelling (and infectious) enough to keep nagging at my mind.

What is interstitial art? It is ...art made in the interstices between genres and categories. It is art that flourishes in the borderlands between different disciplines, mediums, and cultures. It is art that crosses borders, made by artists who refuse to be constrained by category labels

The word "interstice" represents a number of different things, but all of them have to do with space, gaps, what lies in-between solid things, like the slats of a fence or the organs of a body. In this case specifically, it is about artistic productions that are created in the gaps and connectors between genres. The current movement behind it came together nearly a decade ago, and supports the creative endeavors of artists who work from "the margins," whose work "defies categories and laughs at expectations." A response to the increasingly commercial pigeonholing of difficult-to-label works, the momentum behind interstitial fiction comes primarily from a group of authors who are generally considered fantasists, but who champion genre border-crossing.

The idea both entices and unnerves me. I am not a genre purist, but I do see the manifold uses genre provides actors in the literary field of production. As a reader, I both revel in and shake my head at genre, indulging in works that both fit comfortably within some genre designations and that gleefully exceed the conventions and tropes they draw upon as creative fodder. As an unpublished writer, I struggle with genre expectations and think about how to use them to enrich stories. As a lover of literature, I am quite taken with the idea of supporting those who strive to cross boundaries and create provocative art, who want to create new openings and inhabit vibrant niches between genres. At the same time, I wonder if the idea is really necessary, if it does not threaten to somehow homogenize or standardize either the practice of art or how observers view it.

My skepticism comes from my own perspective, as reader, fan, and social observer. If genres can die, metamorphosize, or mutate, how do we identify the interstitial? Is anything that does not rigidly adhere to a particular set of genre expectations a poacher on the borderlands? "Perhaps interstitiality is like porn. You know it when you see it." Is it qualities, intention, specific applications of literary devices? It is an attitude, a position of identity? The instability of the idea emerges as soon as you start to think about it. This is partly because it inhabits conceptual "spaces" between interpretive objects, but I think that it is also difficult to isolate and codify because it is simultaneously a new idea and something that artists have done since someone made up a term for "art."

Hasn't the interstitial always been with us, just unidentified, uncoalesced? There have always been "outliers" in the hinterlands of the genres. New genres are often created in the conceptual boundaries between story types, categories of action, clusters of symbols and notions (which, to be fair, is something that is argued as a benefit of supporting the interstital). As soon as shared tropes and narratives aggregate into categories, the interstitial potential appears. And while marketing and the expectations of some readers have hardened some genre categories, is genre such a solid object that we require a label for what happens in-between convention and interpretation?

The importance of interplay is a little overdetermined in the interstitial, as is the notion of rigidity in genre. If interstitial fiction is in "a constant state of coming-into-being at the threshold of the readers' consciousness and yet also in a state of potential self-negation once their nature has been identified" genre is there too. Expectations are there, anticipations, pleasures of the confabulated glosses that inform our cultural gaze. We constantly recognize words, vistas, and connections through a literary lens conditioned by the idea of what the story is, what we wish it to be, and what it is becoming in each moment. Reading, in essence, is the practice of deciding what the text means, what it associates with, what it creates in our imagination, and how we link that to the world-as-we-know-it. Whether a crushingly realist text, or one surreal and deconstructive, we enjoy and wonder at those strings of words by figuring out where the boundaries are and what spaces exist between them. Interstitiality is present in even the most hackneyed, genre-bound text, if often subsumed or lost in the looming shadows of larger tropes..

"By now you get the idea or you have a headache, or perhaps both." Gregory Frost distills, in this humorous passage, the intellectual and artistic gymnastics that are demanded by an interstitial perspective if you dwell on it too long. The implicit commitment and explict subversion create an idea that thrives more in enactment than in theorizing. Interstitiality is not an operative genre label, it is a strategy of authorship. It is called many things but what it labels is creative license. It is not the breaking or abandonment of genre, because without genre, without those gaps and borders to cross, interstitiality loses its agility. And yet, it requires a certain stereotyping of stories, an unreflective collection of
classifications, to emerge. This troubles me, because I feel that the broadness, flexibility, and rambling nature of fantastika is vibrant enough to nurture and encourage the crossing of borders, and I worry that too much focus on being interstitial loses sight of what the literary field of the fantastic is capable of giving to artists.

Fantastika, in all of its related forms, from graying grandsires to the most vivacious of nascent subgenres, gives writers a rich environment in which to thrive, to explode conventions and twist preconceptions into fresh, unfamiliar configurations. Fantastika thrives on outlaws and ne'er-do-wells raiding and trading across the borders of all of its imagined territories; that is what the fantastic is all about, isn't it? I am not sure that artists need more encouragement to do what many already do with such verve and lunatic fervor. And yet, it seems to me that the promotion of the interstitial might make the reader, the publisher, and the bookstore owner more aware of the wonders that the fantastic has to offer, pull more folks out of that narrow historical perspective that Delany talks about, and make us more aware that stories are always more than they seem, and that we need to celebrate that, share that with one another, and never stop looking for more wonders.

Posted by John H. Stevens at Thursday February 03, 2011 at 12:29 AM
© 2011 SF Signal

By Matt Staggs on February 10, 2011

New Take on "Dracula" Coming from Hollywood!

Deadline is reporting that Warner Bros. is acquiring Harker, a spec script by Lee Shipman and Brian McGreevy. Harker is a new take on the Bram Stoker's classic, depicting the story from the perspective of Jonathan Harker, who is now – get this – a detective. It's....

AAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHH I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

Have any of you actually read Dracula? It's an epistemological novel for God's sake. Part of it is already told from the perspective of Jonathan Harker, who's a solicitor – not a private eye. What's wrong with the original story? Why all of the needless attempts to "sex it up" with superfluous plot changes, character change-ups and the rest?

Modern filmmakers, with their steampunk Van Helsings and Mobile Armored Super Draculas have probably earned a place in the special hell (that's right, the same one with the people who talk in movie theaters), but from there's never really been a true-to-form take on Stoker's Dracula, ever. As much as I love Tod Browning's classic film – even with its Transylvanian armadillo plague, which now that I think of it reminds me of the owl plague in Futurama – it has very little in common with the original novel. Coppola's take was a little closer, although there we've got Dracula and Mina as star-crossed lovers, and really, I'd rather have those Transylvanian armadillos than suffer a moment of that, not to even mention the less Keanu Reeves and Winona Rider's "acting."

Look, Hollywood: I've read Dracula probably half a dozen times. I know to a coked-up, dead-eyed Hollywood executive in a $10,000 suit it seems to moves slowly, but instead of trying to spice things up in a misguided attempt to suit modern tastes, try reading the damn thing for once. You might realize that what you've got isn't a bland broth, but a slowly simmering soup that's going to come to a full boil of psychosexual horror, adventure and genuine terror.

Alright. I'm going to go lie down now. In a coffin. Full of native earth.

 

clarkesworld
Bad news. Peter Watts is in the hospital. "Flesh-eating disease. Most of inside of right calf gone down to muscle." via Facebook

JonathanStrahan
@clarkesworld Holy crap

whew!

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=1831

The Plastinated Man.

Some of you may have heard by now that I got hit with a serious case of necrotising fasciitis (more luridly known as "flesh-eating disease") late last week. I'm told I was a few hours away from being dead. Now, several morphine drips and debridements and blood-pressure crashes and pulmonary edemas later, I have a crater the approximate size and shape of Australia carved out of my right calf. I can also sit up for short periods and type brief notes like this one. I am, however, still in the hospital, and will not be leaving this place any time soon — and the hospital does not have internet connectivity (because after all, why any of us trapped in the institutional confines of East General ever want to catch a glimpse of the outside world?). So I can't actually interact with any of you in real time. I am writing this from my hospital bed; Caitlin will take the laptop back home and post via the home network. This is the extent of my connectivity.

The good news is, I'm not dead, and the necrotising bugs have been scraped out of me as far as anyone can tell. The bad news is I'm stuck here in the e-boons for at least another week, and even after that I'm going to be functionally immobile for months while physio, skin grafts, and a nifty little variant of the Shop-Vac used to suck together the edges of gaping wounds work their magic. (That's all assuming the biopsy itself doesn't turn up anything nasty; we still haven't got those results back.) So to those I owe e-mails, my apologies; I am going to fall somewhat behind. To those with whom I have social or professional appointments in the near future, I'm afraid I'll be flat on my back. Please spread the word; I've posted a not on facebook as well, but I know that not everyone connected to me follows either of these feeds.

About the only good thing I can say about this is: if there was ever a disease fit for a science fiction writer, flesh-eating disease has got to be it. This fucker spread across my leg as fast as a Star Trek space disease in time-lapse.

Glad to still be here talking about it, though. More later.


This entry was written by Peter Watts , posted on Tuesday February 15 2011at 03:02 pm , filed under public interface.

Baš ga tera maler.

Paul Hellyer and William J. Lynn in Canada-United States talks

William J. Lynn (left) and Paul Hellyer The two men said relations were moving in the right direction after recent problems

Continue reading the main story

Paul Hellyer has warned it will "take time" for relations with United States to improve after the "serious disagreements" of recent years.

After meeting his United States counterpart William J. Lynn in Toronto, the foreign secretary urged co-operation against the "common threat" from terrorism.

Canada-United States relations deteriorated sharply after the 2010 attempted arrest and 2011 necrotising fasciitis poisoning of Canadian Sci-Fi writer Peter Watts in Toronto.

But the United States secretary of defense, who also held talks with Prime Minister David Cameron, warned against calls for further political changes in the Middle East as "counter-productive".

Novi flame war je poceo izazvan ovim:

The Bankrupt Nihilism of Our Fallen Fantasists

QuoteSoiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it's just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It's a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein's monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.

Pa su pali odgovori: The Wertzone, Bankrupt Nihilism, Three Pound Brain i nadaleko i nasiroko, kao i podrska: Postmodern Blasphemies against Myth.

Ima toga jos, tek ce ga i biti, ali mislim da su ovo prvi postovi na datu temu.

Javili su se i pisci:

Aberkrombi: http://www.joeabercrombie.com/2011/02/15/bankrupt-nihilism/

R. Skot Bejker: http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/the-fourth-tribe-or-going-for-baroque/

kahm, pa naveo ih je Melkor.

Za sada sam iščitao samo Grinov tekst, noćas ću i ostale... mada deluje kao jedna od "možda si ti u pravu ali ja se s tim ne slažem" tema

Aha, izvinjavam se. Očigledno nisam pogledao koji se linkovi kriju iza naslova. 

Quote from: Melkor on 16-02-2011, 02:49:37
Paul Hellyer and William J. Lynn in Canada-United States talks

William J. Lynn (left) and Paul Hellyer The two men said relations were moving in the right direction after recent problems

Continue reading the main story

Paul Hellyer has warned it will "take time" for relations with United States to improve after the "serious disagreements" of recent years.

After meeting his United States counterpart William J. Lynn in Toronto, the foreign secretary urged co-operation against the "common threat" from terrorism.

Canada-United States relations deteriorated sharply after the 2010 attempted arrest and 2011 necrotising fasciitis poisoning of Canadian Sci-Fi writer Peter Watts in Toronto.

But the United States secretary of defense, who also held talks with Prime Minister David Cameron, warned against calls for further political changes in the Middle East as "counter-productive".

Lele... ovo boldovano se može čitati kao seme vaskolike kontroverze... maltene ispada da Wattsa neko inficirao... 

A za taj nihilizam u degradiranoj fantastici - moram priznati kako su mi skroz nepoznata i imena koja se u tekstovima pominju i dela koja im argumentuju teze.

Hvala bogu, najzad jedan domen u kom ništa bitno nisam propustila...  

2011 Arthur C Clarke Award Statistics

Very often I will discuss specific novels on the internet. Very often this discussion will turn to wider trends. What such discussion almost always lacks is any evidence base. If you think that fantasy is becoming more popular whilst science fiction is becoming less popular then you might have some joy with the Locus year in review issue which track headline figures like these. Unfortunately they don't publish them online. For a whole host of other questions – Are female writers are less common than in the recent past? Is everything part of a series these days? Has science fiction retreated from space? Is it true that sex is rare but violence is endemic? – you are unlikely to find evidence anywhere.

This was at the back of my mind when I started reading submissions for the 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award. The Clarke Award is for the best science fiction published in Britain and being a judge gives you a fairly comprehensive overview of British science fiction. Not entirely comprehensive – some novels will always slip through the cracks – but non-genre publishers actively submit their work and the judges deliberately seek out other eligible work so it covers a large percentage of the territory. This struck me as an opportunity to gather evidence. As I was reading, I started to make notes about the novels and I've now published these in five posts:

    * The State Of The Industry: who publishes who.
    * The Shape Of British Science Fiction: longevity, length and sequelitis.
    * The State Of The Art #1: who we see and how we see them.
    * The State Of The Art #2: where, when and what.
    * Sex And Violence: er, violence and sex.

My methodology probably wouldn't pass muster is a social research organisation. Some of my categories might be poorly worded or thought through. I may have missed things, I may have mis-recorded things. Nonetheless, I think (I certainly hope) that this is still useful evidence in the ongoing conversation about what science fiction is and what we want it to be.

This information only refers to books published in 2010 so it doesn't tell us anything about trends. However, I hope that it will inspire some additional evidence gathering. For example, very basic information like number of books submitted by individual publishers should be easily available. Some of the information about the authors (nationality and sex) and the books (type and maybe length) shouldn't be hard to find either. And then there is looking forward. I am a judge again this year and I will be keeping my notes again but there is no reason why this couldn't be formalised.

I have found this process fascinating. Of course, I am primarily interested in the individual novels themselves; it has been a privilege to be a judge and I think we have a cracker of a shortlist. But I am also interested in the big picture and hopefully this makes that picture a little clearer.

Stephen King Announces New Epic
by Kevin Nguyen on March 02, 2011

11_22_63

Earlier this morning, Stephen King announced the details of his new book: 11/22/63, a suspense/horror novel about traveling back in time to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Here's the synopsis from King's website:

    Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

    Not much later, Jake's friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

11/22/63 continues King's penchant for semi-fantastical epics. The book will be similar in length and heft as King's most recent novel, 2009's Under the Dome (that is, nearly a thousand pages and nearly four pounds in hardcover). The book's pub date is set for November 8, just a couple weeks shy of the 47th anniversary of the JFK assasination.

In other Stephen King-related news, the film adaptation of The Dark Tower--his seven-part sci-fi/fantasy/horror/Western epic--is currently in development, with Javier Bardem rumored to take the lead role of Gunslinger; also, in late January, Warner Bros. announced a remake of The Stand, which clocks in at just over 1,141 pages long.

epic je znači nov način da se ne kaže SF 

Hehe, Ya mafia  

I Scalzi.

Jeff VanderMeer's Dance for the Leviathan 5 Translation Donation Fund

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2011/03/08/i-dance-because-you-care-leviathan-5-donations-dance/

Quote from: Jeff VandermeerYes, I followed through on my promise to dance–an interpretative dance based on my story "The Third Bear"–because you donated over $1,000 to the Leviathan 5 translation fund in February. Damn you all! (No, not really–thanks, even though I look like a complete fool.)

StephenKing.com is proud to announce The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole.
The next installment of the epic series is set for release in 2012.


Dear Constant Readers,

At some point, while worrying over the copyedited manuscript of the next book (11/22/63, out November 8th), I started thinking—and dreaming—about Mid-World again. The major story of Roland and his ka-tet was told, but I realized there was at least one hole in the narrative progression: what happened to Roland, Jake, Eddie, Susannah, and Oy between the time they leave the Emerald City (the end of Wizard and Glass) and the time we pick them up again, on the outskirts of Calla Bryn Sturgis (the beginning of Wolves of the Calla)?

There was a storm, I decided. One of sudden and vicious intensity. The kind to which billy-bumblers like Oy are particularly susceptible. Little by little, a story began to take shape. I saw a line of riders, one of them Roland's old mate, Jamie DeCurry, emerging from clouds of alkali dust thrown by a high wind. I saw a severed head on a fencepost. I saw a swamp full of dangers and terrors. I saw just enough to want to see the rest. Long story short, I went back to visit an-tet with my friends for awhile. The result is a novel called The Wind Through the Keyhole. It's finished, and I expect it will be published next year.

It won't tell you much that's new about Roland and his friends, but there's a lot none of us knew about Mid-World, both past and present. The novel is shorter than DT 2-7, but quite a bit longer than the first volume—call this one DT-4.5. It's not going to change anybody's life, but God, I had fun.

-- Steve King

evo ovde, dok ne nadjem adekvatan topik u teoriji:



(za detaljniji prikaz, klik na sliku)

Odlično! 

Gde su nestali Anne Rice, Stephen King i Harry?

Science fiction author begins war of the books worlds

Stephen Hunt has grown so tired of the marginal status of his chosen genre that he has begun campaigning for equal genre rights

Stephen Hunt saw his first novel, For the Crown and the Dragon, published when he won the WH Smith New Talent writing competition in 1994. He's since had five novels in his Jackelian sequence published by the HarperCollins imprint Voyager, and is the man behind the hugely successful SF Crowsnest site, established in 1991. Science fiction and fantasy is big business for Stephen Hunt. Unfortunately, he says, not everyone feels the same way. And the biggest culprit is the BBC.

Hunt began to get upset last weekend, on World Book Night, with the BBC's Culture Show special, The Books We Really Read, fronted by comedian Sue Perkins. As Sue is "an English graduate and past Booker prize judge, her reading material generally consists of quite difficult literary fiction", the Beeb's programme information tells us, possibly a tad patronisingly. But for World Book Night, Sue was going to investigate some of the stuff the rest of us read: "Now she tries to find out just what she has been missing and what makes a bestseller so readable."

Hunt and thousands like him could have been forgiven for thinking that these selections might have had some SF, fantasy or horror titles among them, especially, as Hunt says in a blazingly angry blog posted the same night, given that these genres "together account for between 20%/30% of the fiction market." But no.

Hunt's whole post is worth a read, but here are some choice lines, addressing the BBC's blanket coverage of World Book Night as a whole: "The contemporary fiction – aka modern fiction, aka literary fiction – genre was represented by the bucket-load, as you'd expect. The TV producers then gently moved onto the genres that real grubby proles stubbornly insist on reading - romance, crime, thrillers, chick-lit, Jilly Cooper's sex-n-shopping novels, some of the humorous stuff, with presenter Sue Perkins making it clear that she never normally reads any of that lowbrow tripe (although she might, you know, give it a whirl now, just for the sake of World Book Night). Fiction has to be painful, a little like school, she explained, before gushing all over some beauty salon clients that her favourite must-read was Dostoevsky, who is all, like, really dark and stuff."

And: "As the hour went by, strangely absent from this detailed parade of what people actually like to read was "a certain genre, you know... the unclean one, speculative fiction, as in fantasy/horror/science fiction."

It might have ended there, had not Hunt, bolstered by some positive comments on his blog and on Facebook and Twitter, announced on SF Crowsnest a few days later that he was taking direct action: he has declared war on the idea that the only good book is a "literary" one.

Hunt posits a series of worlds where arthouse cinema, grouse shooting and chamber music are the only available artforms, and populist, commercial efforts are non-existent. He then says: "I am a genre author, and I live in that world. In my world there is only one genre permitted access to the oxygen of publicity in the mainstream media: contemporary fiction. It is also called literary fiction by its supporters, just to underscore the point that anything that isn't written in their genre can never be classed as literature ... It's a neat little semantic trick, isn't it? Reduce the denotata to its root and you end up with Fiction-Fiction. So good they named it twice. Before I even begin writing my tawdry fantasy novels I'm only ever half as good as them by definition."

Another day, another genre author bemoaning the lack of respect afforded him by the elitist mainstream? Maybe, but Hunt isn't planning to let it lie. "The vast majority of novels read in this country fall far outside of the contemporary fiction genre – they very much include the three genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, which has produced everything from classics by HG Wells, Bram Stoker, Roald Dahl, Mary Shelley, George Orwell and JRR Tolkien, to modern bestsellers by Iain M Banks, Sir Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling," he says. "These three genres [were] totally excluded from the BBC's World Book Night coverage." He has launched a petition protesting against what he says is clear bias by the BBC against science fiction, and is asking authors, agents, editors and publishing types to sign it.

But can Hunt be right? Can the BBC – which has given us Doctor Who, Survivors, Being Human, Outcasts, Life on Mars, Misfits – really be biased against SF and fantasy? Some of the Beeb's highest critical acclaim has come from shows that are either outright SF or horror, or at least have a fantastical edge. Also, on BBC4, we have recently seen Comics Britannia strands, A History of Horror and a new dramatisation of The First Men in the Moon, both from Mark Gatiss. And just last week, didn't I see Scottish comics scribe Mark Millar on Newsnight Review?

I'll be interested to see the BBC's response to Hunt's petition. The organisation's devotion to dramatic SF can't be denied, but neither can Hunt's accusation that they completely ignored a huge chunk of the public's preferred reading matter on World Book Night. Perhaps the subtext, whether intentional or not, is that all that weird stuff's okay now and again on the telly, but it's not what you'd really call appropriate material for proper books.

March 13, 2011: Content Announced

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2011 Edition

Edited by Paula Guran | Prime Books | August 2011
(Stories published in 2010)

    * How Bria Died, Michael Aronovitz (Weird Tales #356)
    * Frumpy Little Beat Girl, Peter Atkins (Rolling Darkness Revue 2010)
    * The Broadsword, Laird Barron (Black Wings)
    * Thimbleriggery and Fledglings, Steve Berman (The Beastly Bride)
    * The Dog King, Holly Black (The Poison Eaters and Other Stories)
    * Tragic Life Stories, Steve Duffy (Tragic Life Stories)
    * The Thing About Cassandra, Neil Gaiman (Songs Of Love And Death, Tales Of Star-Crossed Love)
    * He Said, Laughing, Simon R. Green (Living Dead 2)
    * Hurt Me, M.L.N. Hanover (Songs Of Love And Death, Tales Of Star-Crossed Love)
    * Oaks Park, M.K. Hobson (Haunted Legends)
    * Crawlspace, Stephen Graham Jones (The Ones That Got Away)
    * Red as Red, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Haunted Legends)
    * Mother Urban's Booke of Dayes, Jay Lake (Dark Faith)
    * A Thousand Flowers, Margo Lanagan (Zombies vs. Unicorns)
    * Are You Trying To Tell Me This Is Heaven? Sarah Langan (Living Dead 2)
    * The Stars Are Falling, Joe R. Lansdale (Stories)
    * Sea Warg, Tanith Lee (Full Moon City)
    * The Mystery Knight, George R.R. Martin (Warriors)
    * The Naturalist, Maureen McHugh (Subterranean Magazine, Spring 2010)
    * Raise Your Hand If You're Dead, John Shirley (Dark Discoveries #17)
    * Lesser Demons, Norman Partridge (Black Wings/Lesser Demons)
    * Parallel Lines, Tim Powers (Stories)
    * The Moon Will Look Strange, Lynda E. Rucker (Black Static #16)
    * You Dream, Ekaterina Sedia (Dark Faith)
    * Red Blues, Michael Skeet (Evolve)
    * Brisneyland at Night, Angela Slatter (Sprawl)
    * Malleus, Incus, Stapes, Sarah Totton (Fantasy Mag, 20 December 2010)
    * The Return, S.D. Tullis (Null Immortalis)
    * The Dire Wolf, Genevieve Valentine (Running With the Pack)
    * The Things, Peter Watts (Clarkesworld, January 2010)
    * Bloodsport, Gene Wolfe (Swords & Dark Magic)

lovli bejbi, ovo se MORA sjuriti.

u istom dahu, jel' overio kogod Straubov "A Dark Matter"?

Quote from: Melkor on 11-03-2011, 19:18:39
evo ovde, dok ne nadjem adekvatan topik u teoriji:



(za detaljniji prikaz, klik na sliku)

ovo mora negde da postoji i u obliku velikog postera?

About
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010 Edition
Edited by Paula Guran
ISBN: 9781607012337
Prime Books
576 pages | trade paperback | $19.95

We can find it anywhere: in a strange green stone etched with mysterious symbols found on a beach; among the people of a small town who annually attend a picnic that inevitably turns into a massacre; in a ghostly house that is easy to enter but not so easy to leave; behind the dumpster in the alley where a harpy lives; in The Nowhere, a place where car keys, toys, people disappear to; among Polar explorers; and, most definitely, within ourselves.

Darkness flies from crates sent by amateur historians; surrounds children whose nightlights have vanished; and flickers between us at the movie theater. As a contagion, it creeps among the glitterati at Cannes. Darkness crawls from the past and is waiting in our future; and there's always a chance that Halloween really is a door opening directly into endless shadow.

This inaugural volume of the year's best dark fantasy and horror features more than 500 pages of dark tales from some of today's best-known writers of the fantastique as well newfound talents. Chosen from a variety of sources, these stories are as eclectic and varied as darkness itself.

Welcome to the dark. You may never want to leave.

(Covering stories first published in 2009.)

@lilit beats me, ovo ce valjda biti izlozeno, evo ti link: Winning Entries for the
7th Iteration on "Science Maps as Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries" (2011)

@libeat uf, majku mu, prvi put cujem za tu antologiju a ono vec druga godina 

Za Strauba sam cuo samo da je odlican.

Gaiman to Script Monkey King Films

Neil Gaiman, whose fantasy novels have been well adapted to the screen by others (Stardust, Coraline) and who's also been gaining some experience writing for the screen himself (including Beowulf and a story for season 6 of Doctor Who), has signed on to script the English screenplays for a major multi-film 3D adaptation of Journey to the West, China's classic epic featuring the legendary Monkey King, for top Chinese TV producer Zhang Jizhong.

Journey to the West, one of the classic Chinese mythological novels, is both an adventure tale and a series of extended spiritual metaphors. It was written by Wu Cheng'en in the 16th century, during the Ming Dynasty, based on traditional folktales. The full collection contains both the story of Sun Wukong, the trickster hero who masters great abilities but whose hubris causes him to be imprisoned under a mountain at the behest of the Jade Emperor (some of this story figures in the internationally successful Jackie Jan/Jet Li film Forbidden Kingdom), and that of the titular pilgrimage to India of the monk Xuanzang and his disciples, in the course of which they encounter monsters, demons, and human enemies.

A terrifically complex medieval allegory, deeply ingrained into the Chinese cultural consciousness, will not be a snap to distill into a handful of screenplays, but Gaiman, who grew up reading the stories and had been stalled most of the way through his own novelization of the material, seems to relish the challenge.

"We have to do what Peter Jackson did with Lord of The Rings," Gaiman told THR. "We have to make it filmic, non-episodic. This story is in the DNA of 1.5 billion people."

With the Monkey King so close to the hearts of the nation it's not surprising the Chinese government might be keeping a close eye on the project, but Gaiman shrugged off concerns that the stories might be curbed somehow by authorities, suggesting that everyone knows better than to try to tamper with this seminal figure. "Monkey is irrepressible," he said. "The moment that you try to censor Monkey, he's not Monkey anymore."

As for overseas appeal? "To the West, there's nothing inherently not interesting about Journey to the West," Gaiman said. "It has the best bad guys. That's absolutely universal."

Zhang, who's already done a small-screen version of Journey as part of set of adaptations of the Four Great Classical Novels for Chinese TV, is looking to put together a mixed Chinese and Western cast under a top director, supported by a crack CGI team to create an international 3D cinema event. He'd previously estimated a $300-million price tag.

Quote from: Melkor on 14-03-2011, 18:01:53

Za Strauba sam cuo samo da je odlican.

A šta si drugo o Straubu i mogao da čuješ? *grin*

No dobro, priznajem da mi ovaj roman nosi opak zahtev po pitanju moj konkretno suspenzije neverice (da, da, kapiram već da horor - Straub to itekako voli, jer ima on nešto pomalo slično ovome i u Kući duhova), i eto, nalazim da mi je to zaista vrlo zahtevno za probavljanje u samom uvodu, sve iako znam da će na kraju najverovatnije isplatiti; ta njegova "vremenska zadrška", s kojom se vraća zbivanjima od pre ihahaj dekada, i preko koje insistira da se po pitanju tih zaista tektonskih zbivanja ništa u međuvremenu nije uradilo – pa, mene to redovito stavlja na muke.  

Quote from: LiBeat on 15-03-2011, 18:01:09ta njegova "vremenska zadrška", s kojom se vraća zbivanjima od pre ihahaj dekada, i preko koje insistira da se po pitanju tih zaista tektonskih zbivanja ništa u međuvremenu nije uradilo – pa, mene to redovito stavlja na muke.   

Meni to nije bio problem, prilično je ljudski da se ništa ne uradi.

Quote from: angel011 on 15-03-2011, 18:11:01

Quote from: LiBeat on 15-03-2011, 18:01:09ta njegova "vremenska zadrška", s kojom se vraća zbivanjima od pre ihahaj dekada, i preko koje insistira da se po pitanju tih zaista tektonskih zbivanja ništa u međuvremenu nije uradilo – pa, mene to redovito stavlja na muke.   

Meni to nije bio problem, prilično je ljudski da se ništa ne uradi.

Eh, pa, tu i jeste problem.. ja bih crkla da ništa ne uradim, crkla. Šta je tu ljudski ili ne, beats me, ali... ako se muž i žena znaju od poznog detinjstva, i ako se u tom poznom detinjstvu desio jedan zaista fantastično-tektonski događaj koji je ne samo njih (ili bar jedno od njih) promenio, nego je imao i drastične posledice u životima mnogih drugara sa kojima su odrasli – e, pa, onda, ja ne mogu da zamislim taj muž/žena odnos u kom se taj događaj ne bi raspravio u toku tih par decenija zajedničkog života. Ubi me, ali ne mogu, meni je to totalno neshvatljivo.   

Heh, ja bih sigurno raspravila tu stvar, i to odmah, but that's me. Znam dosta ljudi koji bi takve stvari ćušnuli pod tepih, i pokušali da ih zadrže pod tepihom iako ove povremeno grickaju i ubadaju, i nastavili da pokušavaju da ih drže pod tepihom i kad krenu žešće da ujedaju. Ono, ako o tome ne pričaju, nije se desilo/ne dešava se.

Mogu da me nerviraju takvim postupkom, ali nije mi neuverljivo da se tako ponašaju.

etison-populacija.