hard deadlines

The Great White Ebook Shark, a new online review site, just ran an excerpt and analysis of my short story (Nothing But) Flowers. I was thrilled to be in the company of folks like Peter Watts, Kelly Link, and David Nickle (not to mention Joseph Conrad) and the reviewer finds much to like in the story, calling the author "a craftsman of no small talent."

Not familiar with the inspiration for the story? It's a Talking Heads song, and you can watch David Byrne performing it live. You can read the story here on the site, or download in various formats from ManyBooks.net.

As of today, (Nothing But) Flowers has been viewed at least 9,000 times, which says something very powerful about Creative Commons licensing.

Full disclosure: The reviewer sent a draft before publication as a courtesy. I did not comment on anything they wrote.

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) just posted the final list for this year's Nebula® Award, and it's a fantastic field. Check it out on the SFWA site.

If you're looking for good sf to read, look no further (there are handy links to some great online stories!). Congrats to all the finalists!

Editorial note: SFWA is the organization of science fiction and fantasy writers, artists, and related professionals. The Nebula® is a yearly award voted on by members.

Science fiction author William Tenn (real name Philip Klass) died today at the age of 89, according to a note posted on his Web page. While not widely known outside the field, within sf he was highly respected for his dark, penetrating satire, much of it written in the Golden Age of 1940-60. In 1999, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) named him an Author Emeritus.

I have always liked Tenn's stories — my curiosity was first hooked by "Down Among the Dead Men," a grim little tale about reanimated corpses used as soldiers in a space war. I was very much looking forward to seeing him at the 2004 Worldcon in Boston, but that was the weekend my mother passed away.

Scott Edelman has a remembrance and link to a radio interview on WNYC. Tangent Online has an interview. Blogger Matthew Cheney has a nice piece on Tenn's fiction.

You can read about Tenn on Wikipedia. Tenn's collected fiction and nonfiction has been reprinted by the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA) Press. Here's a link to Amazon.

My thoughts are with his family and friends.

This is not a review of James Cameron's Avatar. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that "Workers Leaving a Factory" is now showing at your local multiplex: the sticks have been moved, the torch has been passed, pick your metaphor, this is a game-changer for science fiction film. I saw it last night with my 10-year-old, and we were both totally engrossed for the entire 2:30 runtime.

The major tropes will be familiar to any Cameron fan: nature vs. technology, machines amplifying humans, love and death, big friendly weapons, image and reality, corporate greed, powerful women, re-inventing the "car" chase, exploring alien ecosystems, foregrounding bizarre mores (think of the Terminator learning to talk SoCal slang or Jack navigating the social world of the Titanic).

But at the same time, the approach is so audacious — if you see it in 3D, you will believe you are on another planet — that every other sf film will now feel like a 1960s Star Trek episode with a cyclorama and styrofoam rocks. The wholly CGI world of the fictional planet Pandora is immersive, persuasive, and so deeply actualized that the historical advantage of print sf writers (imagination is better than you can afford to make it look onscreen) is dead.

Most importantly, Avatar has a deep moral center. Anyone repulsed by the glib situational handiness of Aliens 3 or Terminator Salvation will recognize the genuine article here. The surface may be simple — it almost has to be, doesn't it, as a popular film — but the tendrils lead directly, insistently to the roots of the perpetual philosophy. While recognizing the ambiguity and conflictedness of human choice — sipping coffee while delivering death from above — Cameron pushes past to find a ground for ethical action in a post-mystical monism rooted in biochemistry (and not the half-assed handwave given to the Force). What if we truly behaved as if everything was connected?

Those who want to read the film as an allegory about America and Middle East (or the Cherokee nation) will not have to strain. But there are deft moves that subvert and add complexity. The Pandorans are not simply "the natives" up against the military-industrial complex; they are deeply us, America, situated where and when we are at this moment in our history. Without spoilers, this can clearly be read as a film about 9/11.

Also, without spoilers, I will say that those frame-by-framers who are familiar with the playground horses of the Apocalypse from T-2 will have a dark, dark chuckle.

Full disclosure: Anyone who thinks that was a Russian water tentacle, raise your hand.

The media ecosystem continued to digest the story of Canadian sf writer Peter Watts's border macedown and arrest last week, with some new spikes of blog activity, and much discussion on threads across multiple sites.

Watts posted a request for a possible witness to contact his legal team. According to Watts, one of the commenters on his site indicated that they saw the event.

The major media pickup yesterday was the political blog Crooks and Liars, which featured the Watts story front page (Until the ongoing craziness in DC pushed it below the fold).

The Facebook group, Against the arrest and beating of Peter Watts, was up to 1,293 members and dozens of posts. There's a bit of trolling/flaming, but also some reasonable dialogue, and a couple of heavy hitters like Kathryn Cramer and David Brin weighing in.

The blogosphere continues to bubble, with a Google search now returning over 6K hits. There's too much good stuff to keep up with and read through it all, but you can click almost anywhere in the search results and you'll find people in thoughtful and passionate discussion.

PZ Myers post at Pharyngula has sparked an active discussion thread. Noted sf author Michael Swanwick has an eloquent post on his blog, Flogging Babel, which focuses on the tail-end of the incident, where police dumped Watts across the bridge in Canada without his coat. Do-Ming Lum has a good wrap at Luminosis.

And supporter Chris Knall put up a information/donations site FreeTheSquid.org, which provides a quick way of locating the PayPal and snail mail donation options. (Watts's pal David Nickle gave the site a shout-out in a post yesterday, so you know it's legit.)

And I'll say it again — if you haven't read Watt's work, you can go check it out on his site, where there's a Big Friendly Button to make donations. As soon as I got my paycheck on Tuesday, I sent what I could, Hope you'll consider doing the same.

Full disclosure: Peter is a friend and colleague.

Serbian novelist Milorad Pavic died recently at 80, the New York Times reported today. Pavic was a brilliant writer who pushed the boundaries of the book, most famously in his Dictionary of the Khazars, a fictional encyclopedia which anticipated many of the themes of hypertext fiction.

Pavic's work was a great source of personal inspiration to me. He was a great writer and a literary visionary.

Resources:
Khazars.com Pavic's web site
Pavic's Wikipedia entry

The story of Canadian sf writer Peter Watt's macedown and arrest last week continues to percolate through the media ecosystem.

Quill & Quire has a good wrapup. Since Watts has done work on a couple of games, Kombo.com pegged it to the upcoming title, Crysis 2. The L Magazine weighs in on the tenuous reality of foreign nationals living in our "beautiful, angry nation." The Winnipeg Free Press ran it in print and online. The HuffPo thread has picked up a few comments; nothing you won't have seen elsewhere if you've been obsessively browsing.

Over in the blogosphere, 2,000 new posts since yesterday. Great wrap at Master of the Hounds, one of the huge number of LiveJournal sites on the case. Dog Blog has a great line, "Maybe the guards thought the references to genetically modified fishmen, posthuman zombies and vampire starship captains were some sort of sophisticated code." (Heh heh. I can only imagine the poor guy assigned to read through his notebook. If you're unfamiliar with Watts's work, that's just the tip of the iceberg...)

Hullabaloo properly points out that "The police state atmosphere in this country has been with us for a very long time, particularly for racial and ethnic minorities." (Hat tip JH for the link) And Daniel Holzmann goes a step further, problematizing the sf community's reaction: "[W]e live in a country with a history of maintaining a system of white privilege, and part of how that system is maintained is that white people speak up when oppression encroaches our privilege, but allow silence to be the voice of complicity when oppression is oppressing people in order to maintain our privilege. When living under an oppressive system, one can actively or passively support it; but one can only oppose it actively."

Update: PZ Myers just weighed in this morning at Pharyngula "When we cross the border, we should be expected to comply with the law…but we should not be required to cower and cringe, nor should we accept any demand of the guys with guns without question."

Update 2: TimesHerald files FOIA request for video. Hat tip nacks42.

Update 3: The LA Times picks it up.

Full disclosure: Peter is a friend and colleague.