Digging though our old VHS tapes in an attempt to salvage whatever there is of significance before everything completely deteriorates, I came across a segment from Eyewitness News back in either 1980 or 1981. I make that guess as to the date because, based on my weight, my beard, and the blue windbreaker I’m wearing in this piece about volunteers planting daffodils in Central Park, those seem to be the only possible years. Others who have better knowledge of when the particular talking heads you’re about to see were anchoring the local news in New York might be able to pin it down more specifically, but that’s as close as I can get. So the me you’re about to see is either 25 or 26.

Please forgive the picture deterioration of the first few seconds, as it quickly clears up—but after 27 years or so on VHS, I guess I’m lucky that it exists at all. For those of you who do dive in, you’ll see me as the guy using the auger, first in close-up from 1:19 through 1:24, and then in the background from 1:27 through 1:39.

As you can see, my love of daffodils has always been there, enough that I’d volunteer to help plant 20,000 bulbs. Little did I know that I’d someday be heading for that goal on my own property. (more…)

Algis Budrys, or Ajay as he was known to his friends, passed away earlier today. His father was the head of the Lithuanian government in exile, so when Ajay came with him to the U.S. in 1936 at the age of five, he received an early education in seeing the world with outsider eyes. That sense of the alien helped him well in his future writing career. Ajay went on to write many classic novels, notably Who?, Rogue Moon, and Michaelmas.

But he was also a teacher, and that was his role when I first met him in the flesh, as opposed to on the page. It was 1979, and I was a student attending the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop. (My other teachers were Robin Scott Wilson, Carol Emshwiller, Thomas Disch, Damon Knight, and Kate Wilhelm.) Before Ajay decided that Writers of the Future was the preferred path, he had been a strong proponent of the Clarion workshopping method, and he was a wonderful teacher.

But aside from having an excellent understanding of how to build a story, he also helped provide one of the more memorable incidents of my six weeks in East Lansing. (more…)

I had a dream this morning in which I was wandering an unidentified convention, though it had to be a Worldcon somewhere due to the size of the crowds. I passed a room in which people were glued to a marathon of episodes from the Swamp Thing TV show, and then came upon the con suite, which contained lots of neon and included its own pizza oven.

I began to snap pictures of the attendees there. Most of them where unfamiliar faces, but I was being a completist about it. When I went to photograph at the table at which Connie Willis sat, I heard a disconcerting popping sound, and looked at my camera, only to see that the flash was sticking out like the bouncing head from a sprung jack-in-the-box. Oh, great, I thought, the con is just beginning, and here I am without a working camera.

Then, from out of nowhere, who should pop up but Bob Howe, who proceeds to pull out many small tools (it looks to me as if he travels with a lock-picking kit), examine the camera, and tell me exactly what to do to fix it.

What I’d like to know is—just when and why did my subconscious decide that was its symbol of competency?

As I was admiring a turtle wallowing in the mud this evening, and while mulching the bamboo, and then as I walked the boundaries of our acreage, it occurred to me that Irene and I have just celebrated four years here in West Virginia. So for no other reason other than that it amused me to do so, I put together a pie chart to visualize what percentage of my life has been spent in each of the four states I’ve called home.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and spent the first thirty years of my life in various apartment buildings and brownstones. But once I moved away from that borough, each jump has taken me to a more rural location. Even though I now live on eight acres, with neighbors barely visible, it occurs to me that I’m very much the same person I was as a child living on Ocean Parkway.

When I attended summer camp as a kid, and we’d visit Marine Park, I would always sneak away as the sides were chosen for whatever was the sport of the day. I’d find a tree worthy of climbing, and sit up there as high as I could in the dappled sunlight for hours—often with a battered paperback—until it was time to go and my camp counselors wandered the park frantically shouting my name. The joy I feel today in this park I’ve built myself is not so very different from what I felt back then, happy as I sat at peace in my pretend woods.

I don’t fool myself into thinking that I’ll remain here for the rest of my life. I’m sure there’ll be more moves to come. But until I’m forced to go, I’ll enjoy watching the size of the West Virginia wedge of that pie chart increase.

I just received my programming schedule for Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention, which will be held August 6-10 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. This is just a preliminary list, as the con committee stll has to finalize the timing of autographings, readings, and kaffeeklatches.

For now, though, this is where you’ll be able to find me:

Friday, August 8 at 10:00 a.m.: SF Magazine Publication and Market Share

Saturday, August 9 at 10:00 a.m.: A Tribute to Jack Williamson

I also be taking part in an event called “Strolling With The Stars,” though the date of my participation hasn’t yet been decided. Here’s how the organizers have described it:

To encourage a healthier, more active environment at Denvention 3 we are scheduling a 9AM walk every morning. We’ll leave from under the Big Blue Bear at the Colorado Convention Center, and we’ll stroll for a leisurely mile through downtown Denver. Each day’s walk will be led by a Famous Author, Artist, Editor or Scientist who will not only lead the walk but will interact with the participants. Join luminaries like Frank Wu, David Brin, Jay Lake, Ellen Datlow, John Picacio, Lou Anders, Paul Cornell, Scott Edelman, Mary Robinette Kowal and Stephen H. Segal for a gentle, friendly stroll to get the day started on an upbeat note.

I look forward to seeing you all in two months in the Mile-High City!

I stayed up much too late last night, and for that I blame Cory Doctorow. I parked myself on the couch yesterday evening with the partial first draft of a new short story and a copy of Cory’s new novel, Little Brother. I figured I’d read a chapter of the book as a way of unwinding before setting it aside and diving back into my story. But I found that once I started the novel I could not stop.

I’ve probably read every word of Cory’s which has ever seen print, going all the way back to “Craphound,” his first professionally published short story, which I bought for the March 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age magazine. (Has it really been ten years?) I enjoy his work, and knew that I’d get to Little Brother eventually, but I wanted to read it while it was still fresh to market, so I shoved it to the top of my to-be-read-next list. The buzz surrounding the novel about wronged kids taking on the Department of Homeland Security made it sound as if this book had taken a great leap forward from Cory’s other works, as if it was not just a good book, but a great book, one of those novels that demanded to be read.

So I started reading it, figuring I dip my toes briefly in his story and then get on with what I’d really planned to do that evening, my own writing. But once in, I couldn’t get out. The story was compelling, funny, tense, heart-rending, and a real page-turner, all those often-used adjectives, but as I read on, as I was dragged on, I knew it was more than that. It’s also an important book, and my skin occasionally tingled during certain passages as that realization coursed through me. Accuse me of having drunk the Doctorow Kool-Aid if you will, but I honestly believe that when it comes time for people of the future to figure out who we were and what we went through during these crazy times at the beginning of the 21st Century, Little Brother will help them puzzle it out. (more…)

GalleyCat reports that the Library of America’s collection of Philip K. Dick novels—Four Novels of the 1960s, which was published last year and contained The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ubik—was that project’s fastest-selling title ever.

The story even provided sales details, which I don’t often see revealed in stories like this:

Marketing manager Brian McCarthy was happy to oblige, informing me that the Library had shipped 23,750 copies of Four Novels of the 1960s—the better part of two complete print runs—and that returns were a “staggeringly low” 5 percent. By way of comparison, the Library’s last major foray into science fiction and fantasy, the H.P. Lovecraft Tales published in 2005, sold 11,860 copies (with a similar return rate) in its first year (with gross sales-to-date now standing at 26,000-plus).

I wasn’t one of those purchasers, as I’d already read all of Dick during my teen years, when I’d gorged on all of SF’s past masters. But I’m pleased to see that the interest is there.

I wish we could somehow determine how many people who bought the book were already SF readers and/or Philip K. Dick fans, and how many picked it up as just the latest installment in their education in the American literary canon. Impossible, of course, so there’s no way we’ll ever know.

I just booked my plane tickets for this year’s Readercon. I haven’t missed one since the very first, back in 1987. (Funny thing—I’d always remembered Readercon I as having taken place in 1986, but after an online search, and based on Evelyn Leeper’s write-up of the first gathering, it seems to have instead been 1987, proving my memory wrong.)

Why have I been so consistent? A review of the possible panel descriptions for the con’s upcoming 19th installment, just announced by the organizers, will explain. Unlike the panels at many other conventions, which often have broad and vague starting points, leading to discussions in which participants can spend the first half just figuring out what they’re actually supposed to be talking about, Readercon panels are different, beginning with sharply focused mandates which lead to lively discussions that tend to cover new ground.

Here’s one example of a panel description from this year’s list of possibilities:

You Say Plagiarism, I Say “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Prolific romance novelist Cassie Edwards recently lost her publishing contract when it was discovered that most of the background passages about her Native American settings (and one passage about ferrets) had been lifted nearly verbatim from a variety of sources. But as Jonathan Lethem wrote recently in Harper’s, “appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act.” Lethem argues that the arts exist not only in a market economy but a gift economy like the open-source software movement, and that creative borrowing is an essential part of that economy. (Indeed, he borrowed the above quote and the economic insight, along with almost everything else in the essay.) Is borrowing as ubiquitous and important as Lethem claims, or has he overstated the case? It seems to us that it’s called “plagiarism” only when it’s done badly—Edwards got caught because the borrowed passages stood out so clumsily. But where exactly do you draw the line between good and bad theft (in both senses of the words)?

If you check the complete list at the link above, I’m sure you’ll want to book your hotel and air today.

Here’s a look at some of what you may have missed last year.

The most recent issue of Publishers Weekly ran an interview with Lucius Shepard, published in conjunction with that writer’s upcoming best-of collection from Subterranean Press. For some reason, this sparked a memory of an entry in Mike Ashley’s The Illustrated Book of Science Fiction Lists, which was put out by Virgin Books back in 1982.

One of the lists in that book was from Algis Budrys, and titled “10 Most Promising New Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers.” I’d remembered that Shepard had been on that list, but I was drawing a blank as to the identities of the other nine writers. So I pulled down the book from the shelf and found the full list of the 10 writers whom Ajay thought showed the most promise 26 years ago. They were:

1. Paul Preuss
2. Parke Godwin
3. Arsen Darnay
4. Michael Swanwick
5. Somtow Sucharitkul
6. Victor Besaw
7. Lucius Shepard
8. Madeline Robins
9. Robert L. Forward
10. Robert Frazier

Wrote Budrys at the time: “‘New’ means people to whom John Varley is a Grand Old Man, which means that most names won’t mean much in Britain yet, but I would advise any reader to keep an eye open for stories by all of the following. They won’t be disappointed.” He added: “Besaw is a retired schoolteacher who has just begun to have his science-fantasy novels published. The rest are, in the main, young and upcoming.” (more…)

When I first heard that F. Paul Wilson was going to write three YA novels about Repairman Jack, his popular fixer of the unusual, my initial reaction was a cross between “Huh?” And “What the—?”

If Paul was up for sharing Jack’s back story, I knew that I’d show up to read about it, for I’ve long enjoyed the character, but I always figured that when the time came, he’d interpolate that information into one of his novels for grownups, and let us look back at the early days from the perspective of adulthood. It didn’t seem to me that just because a book was going to be about Jack as a kid that it should necessarily be marketed as a book for kids, in a YA format. After all, if the age of a protagonist determined a book’s format and marketing, would that mean that a book about Jack as an old man (though he’s unlikely to survive that long) should be written for and targeted at the elderly, and only be made available in large-print editions?

So as you can see, I was wary. I knew that once this YA incarnation was published, I would read it, but I assumed I’d be … let’s just say … confused by it. I’d grown used to the tone used in the dozen or so Repairman Jack novels I’d already read. I was unsure how I’d feel about that voice being, for lack of a better word, simplified. (more…)