The news this morning brings word of a cruise ship sinking in Antarctic waters, and since Irene and I know what it feels like to be aboard a cruise ship in Antarctic waters, the thought of passengers hearing midnight cries of “Abandon ship!” for real instead of as a drill strikes a little too close.

According to the story in the New York Times:

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — More than 150 passengers and crew took to lifeboats in Antarctic waters on Friday after their cruise ship hit an object and began taking on water through a hole in the hull, Britain’s coast guard said. No injuries were reported.

I’m glad to see that Lindblad’s M.S. Endeavor, which was our home away from home back in January 2005, was involved in the rescue mission rather than being the ship that required evacuation. (more…)

Earlier this year, I published a story in Zencore!—only no one except for me and the editor/publisher knows yet exactly which story that was. Des Lewis wanted readers to encounter the stories inside with no preconceived ideas based on the reputations of the writers, and so he presented the 17 short stories with no bylines attached. A list of authors appeared on the back cover only, in random order, with no clue as to who wrote what.

An announcement will be made marrying the stories to their authors in just a few weeks, but Jetse de Vries decided not to wait, and took a stab at each story’s authorship. (more…)

I just finished the Fall 2007 issue of The Paris Review, a magazine I’ve been reading since high school, and which I’ve been receiving ever since 1979 as part of a lifetime subscription my wife bought me that year for our anniversary. (We’ve now been married thirty-one years. Thank you for asking.)

Irene paid $100 at the time, doing so just a month before the publisher raised the price of lifetime subscriptions tenfold to $1,000. Considering that the individual issue cover price is currently $12, I’d say we came out ahead on the deal, even accounting for inflation. So much so, in fact, that George Plimpton wrote me about twenty years into the sub, asking whether I felt embarrassed about having gotten such a good bargain, and suggesting that I make an additional donation to help support the magazine.

We declined. After all, isn’t that what a lifetime subscription is all about, taking a gamble? And most of the time, the house wins. I’m sure if I’d died a year or two into the sub, I wouldn’t have gotten a refund.

I’ve always enjoyed the Paris Review interviews most of all. There are usually at least two per issue, beginning with E. M. Forster back in 1953. The Fall issue includes an interview with novelist David Grossman. I’ll profess my ignorance here by admitting that I’ve never read him before, so the fascinating things he had to say were completely new to me. (more…)

For a writer, the true question isn’t “Where do you get your ideas?,” but instead, “How do you decide which of the many hundreds of ideas you get is worth pursuing?” If the subconscious is a garden, the issue for me has never been one of fertilizing, but rather of pruning.

For example, when I learned that Jacques Futrelle, the author of the “Thinking Machine” stories I’d loved as a kid (such as the classic “The Problem of Cell 13”), died aboard the Titanic, a story idea immediately came to me. What if Futrelle himself had a detecting adventure onboard similar to those of his creation Prof. Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, and died trying to save the doomed ship? Perhaps the only reason there had been any survivors at all was because of something he did, and he sacrificed his life on behalf of those who made it out alive. I’m sure there’s an intriguing story to be built of that, but other ideas attracted me more, so it will be up to someone else to write.

Then there was the time I learned that Charles Dickens, who’d died before completing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, had once offered to tell Queen Victoria how the series was to end, so she wouldn’t have to live in suspense like a commoner. The incident could very well be apocryphal, and besides, she supposedly refused anyway. But what if she hadn’t rejected Dickens’ gift? When if Queen Victoria was the only person in the world who truly knew how the novel was to end, but kept it to herself? After all, that secret would be one of her most valuable possessions. I once thought of writing the last chapter of Drood as told by Queen Victoria, but soon decided that, too, was a tale best left to someone else.

Well, inspiration just happened again. I was skimming The Portable Obituary, an encyclopedia of celebrity deaths written by Michael Largo, who’d won a Stoker Award for his previous non-fiction book. In it, he shares the fact (which might be widely known, but was new to me) that novelist Albert Camus, author of The Stranger, apparently died in a car crash while carrying in his pocket an unused train ticket to the same destination to which he’d been driving, as if he’d changed his mind at the last minute. I’m sure there’s a story to be mined out of this nugget of information as well, either an existential tale of how Camus had come to change his mind, or an alternate history detailing what that train trip would have been like.

In any event, this recent fact, like those two earlier occurrences, will not be written by me. (Who knows? Perhaps they’ve even already been written by others, and I’m unaware of it.) I have hundreds of other ideas I find far more intriguing. So I offer these to the blogosphere to be fleshed out by anyone who wants them.

It’s a good thing when you look back at old writing and shudder—isn’t it? At least I hope it is, because I’ve been given many opportunities to shudder lately.

More than thirty years ago, back when I was working at Marvel Comics, I created a character called the Scarecrow, who debuted in Dead of Night #11 (August 1975), continued his adventures in Marvel Spotlight #26 (February 1976), and then faded away as the horror explosion imploded, popping up only occasionally thereafter handled by other writers. I haven’t done any work for either Marvel or DC since the early ’80s.

Marvel has recently begun packaging some of my old stories as a minor part of its compilation volumes, and the latest of these is the hardcover book Legion of Monsters, which stars Morbius the Living Vampire, Werewolf by Night, Man-Thing and others on the cover, and relegates the Scarecrow only to the two tales inside. This is the fourth reprint volume I’ve been a part of lately, and they bring about mixed emotions. (more…)

My story “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man, just out in PostScripts 12, has been reviewed—as favorably as one could ever hope for—by Val Grimm at The Fixx:

Although it is uneven, this issue is worth buying and keeping for its most promising stories, two of which, “Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man” by Scott Edelman and “Ghost Technology From The Sun” by Paul Jessup, show thoughtfulness and literary craft that deserve special recognition and remembrance.

The unnamed narrator (I suspect his name is Walter) of “Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man” is a writer doing research who seeks refuge in the rare book vault of a library, which is attacked by zombies. Walled in with his books, he struggles to comprehend what is happening by telling stories, mostly of what he imagines is happening in the world outside the library. His meta-narrative is an exploration of the impulse to write and why telling stories is human. All the vignettes our male Scheherazade formulates to forestall and forget the inevitable involve affection or dedication of one kind or another: bonds between people, or between humans and zombies. Death doesn’t part his husbands and wives in their love or hatred; mothers adore their strange children; priests attend to their flocks; and survivors seek other survivors. The unflinching mayhem of this story is heartrending rather than perverse or disgusting, as life is destroyed and, tattered, continues in unlife. Again and again, our narrator imagines a man on a mountain, who has never heard a whimper of the chaos below, poking in the dirt with a stick and talking to his son, a darkly hopeful image which recalls the torturer’s horse scratching its innocent behind on a tree in W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.”

That’s the first time I’ve ever been favorably compared to W.H. Auden!

Back at the 1999 Philcon, Paul Levinson, who was then the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, approached me and asked if I would act as Toastmaster for the following year’s Nebula Awards ceremony in New York. Ham that I am, I immediately accepted. The video below, the first of five clips available from that night, shows how I repaid Paul for that honor.

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Back in 1993, long before I started working for the Syfy Channel, I was on the SCI FI Channel.

SCI FI Buzz, which was then the Channel’s equivalent of 60 Minutes, did a short feature highlighting me on the occasion of the first anniversary of <em>Science Fiction Age magazine. It was taped at ConFrancisco, the 1993 World Science Fiction Convention in San Francisco, and ran in December of that year.

I don’t know how you’ll feel about watching this, but I wince a little, not just because there’s a little bit more of me, but also because there’s a little bit less.

More, because I was heavier then. Less, because I was trying so hard to present myself as a calm talking head and not bounce around in my chair or talk with my hands that I seem more subdued than my usual bouncy self. I was trying to be too cool about it all. I appear too coy and sedate, and with the quiet manner of speech on display here, I remind myself of Jason Alexander playing George Costanza.

You might feel differently. In fact, I hope you feel differently. But however you feel, the clip is too good a piece of history not to share.

I interviewed Isaac Asimov on November 7, 1972—Election Day—for my high school alternative newspaper, Kong. I found the tape recently and discovered to my horror that in 1975, I recorded over the first 31 minutes of the interview with a second interview with Steve Gerber. All that remains of my Asimov interview are these concluding five minutes.

Please don’t hate me … but you’re free to hate the 19-year-old me who’d reused the tape!

I’m the one who asks the first complete question about the collection The Early Asimov, and it’s Asimov, of course, who answers. The third voice my high school classmate Eric Shalit.