I never actually received a schedule from Philcon, but this information turned up on the website today:
The "Eye Of Argon" Reading
Friday 11:59 PM
Crystal Ballroom Three
Oz Fontecchio (mod), Marvin Kaye, Joan Slonczewski, Gregory Frost, Susan de Guardiola, Phil Kahn
Panelists and the audience compete in dramatic readings of the reputedly WORST genre story ever written. A Philcon classic!
I'm not clear on whether this will be the standard model (we just read until we crack up) or Mike & Hildy & I's new-and-improved version with the voting off the island and the acting out. I suspect the former but will push for the latter. It won't be the same without Mike and Hildy, though! But ooh, I'm on a panel with Marvin Kaye, co-author of my favorite unfinished
Basic Costume Shapes & What You Can Do With Them
Saturday 1:00 PM
Plaza V (Five)
Lisa Ashton (mod), Vicki Warren, Susan de Guardiola, Patricia Wake, Carol Salemi
(i.e. T-tunic, circle skirt, cloaks, etc.) Many wonderful costumes start with a basic garment shape, that can then be transformed. If you are new to sewing itself, these shapes offer the benefit of an easy shape, no pattern, and very few seams, as well potential for embellishment, What are the basics and how do you go about using them?
Since I need to leave the con around 1:00 to get to my gig in Gettysburg, I'm not sure I'm actually going to be at this panel. The others should do a great job without me if that's how it works out.
Other than these panels, I expect to be at the S.J. Tucker concert at 9pm Friday and otherwise spend most of Friday afternoon/evening and Saturday morning working in program operations, which will be by far the best place to find me, though not necessarily the best place to have a chat. When I return to the con on Sunday I'll be floating around being semi-social with whoever's left and hopefully taking in at least one Cory Doctorow panel.
I've liked pretty much everything I've read of John Scalzi's, so I was fairly certain I was safe in picking Fuzzy Nation
And I'm delighted to say that it's wonderful. I laughed, I cried, I loved it with a great happy skiffy love. It's not a work of deep literature, but it's fabulous escapist fun, and how much SF outside the specifically humor-oriented stuff can you truly say that about nowadays? Scalzi joyfully captures the spirit of old-fashioned science fiction, complete with present-day problems which one would really hope would be resolved by the far future: pitch-perfect little jabs at the patriarchal assumptions inherent in assigning human gender to small fuzzy aliens. And he even keeps the science non-laughable.
The story: on the faraway planet Zara XXIII, disbarred lawyer Jack Holloway and his dog Carl are contractors searching for valuable minerals, particularly the rare and thus fashionable "sunstones". Jack's brash manner and habit of training Carl to set off explosives haven't made him a lot of friends at ZaraCorp. He's still trying to smooth things out with his former girlfriend Isabel, the company biologist, who's moved on to dating a ZaraCorp lawyer, Mark Sullivan, when he makes a double discovery: an enormous sunstone strike, enough to make him wealthy for life, and the aforementioned small fuzzy aliens, who seem to be a lot more intelligent than one would expect from something that looks like a bipedal cat. Developing the sunstone strike would trash the habitat of the fuzzy clan, and ZaraCorp's entire tenancy of the planet would be challenged if it proved to be inhabited by an intelligent species. This little problem, of course, does not further endear Holloway to the corporate honchos on site, nor does Isabel's advocacy for the species. Will Jack get rich? Save the fuzzys or betray them? Get Isabel back? Turn out to be a good guy after all, or just as much of an asshole as he appears? Trust me, you want to find out.
Read for yourself:
Although most of my reading falls in the fantasy & science fiction category, I love a good thriller, and Rick Mofina writes very effective ones. I'm coming in to the middle of his Jack Gannon series with the second book, The Panic Zone
Buffalo journalist Jack Gannon, newly employed by the World Press Alliance (an Associated Press-style news wire service), is sent to Brazil to see what he can find out about a bombing that killed two WPA journalists. A woman is thrown clear of a Wyoming car crash that kills her husband and her child -- or did the latter survive? These events are not unrelated, though it takes lots of pages and patient unraveling of a deliciously complicated international plot involving a renegade CIA scientist and secret research on weaponizing hemmorhagic fevers like Ebola, which really doesn't need any help to be terrifying, to find this out. It's a fun, suspense-filled ride with plenty of cheap emotional hits involving bereaved parents, a few gory deaths, and some rather science fictional nanotech. Perfect vacation reading, in other words. Mofina doesn't write deep, but he does write lovely plot tangles, and builds suspense so well that he makes you forget for the duration that you know it's going to all be solved in the nick of time.
Recommended for anyone who likes a good, light thriller. Read for yourself:
(This post contains spoilers for the previous Otherworld book, Waking the Witch, and reveals that this book doesn't really finish its story.)
Kelley Armstrong has a new book, and thus I have new blog post. Spell Bound
It's hard to think what word to apply to Catherine Coulter's The Valcourt Heiress
Everyone my age and up remembers yellow ribbons. We learned the song "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree"
There was also a 1971 article in the New York Post by Pete Hamill telling the returning-convict story, which the Post has kindly republished here. I never knew about that article before today, but the song was one of my childhood favorites even before the hostage crisis. I love songs that tell a story, and this one is so simple yet so moving that it still makes me tear up.
Nowadays, the yellow ribbons have been reduced to those little magnetic stick-on things attached to cars, lost among a rainbow of other symbolic ribbons and now associated with supporting military men and women deployed overseas. It had never before occurred to me to wonder about the yellow ribbon's history; I just assumed it started with the song. That turns out to be wrong. Very wrong. And now I can document just how wrong it is.
But before I get to my own little contribution to the historiography of the yellow ribbon, some background:
I took a meander through some of the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a friend recently after seeing the amazing Alexander McQueen exhibit and somehow found myself in the gallery of Spanish art from 1500-1700. There I came across a pair of rather peculiar feet attached to a relief of John the Baptist (left; click to enlarge). While I'm all in favor of prehensile toes -- during my misspent youth, I taught myself to solve a "Rubik's Pyramid"
Continue reading "The Terrifying Toes of John the Baptist" »
One of my two Lunacon purchases was The Night Children
The setting is the Castertown MegaMall, clearly a fictional take on the Mall of the Americas and, like its real-life model, a tourist destination in its own right featuring not merely stores but a miniature amusement park inside it. Castertown was dying after all its manufacturing industries collapsed -- does this sound familiar? -- and was essentially bought by the megacorporation Zozzco, run by the reclusive Amos Zozz (who has more than a little in common with "Oz the Great and Powerful" -- a nonmagical wizard behind the curtain) and his daughter Isabella, who quieted any protests by essentially hiring the entire town.
The New York Times has created a slideshow of 102 best in breed champions from the Westminster Dog Show, which takes place in New York City every winter. Aside from being an astonishing lesson in the possible genetic variety within a species, this also offers the chance for amateurs to take a look at the dogs and offer their own opinions. This isn't quite up there with the Super Bowl or the NCAA brackets, but some of the dogs have great possibilities. I'm not going to link to the picture of each winner, but you can see the whole slideshow here. (Left: a dog. No, really, it's a dog. Seriously.)
Here are my selections.
I picked up Phyllis Carol Agins' Suisan
It's competently written, and it started out interestingly enough, working from the dwarfs' point of view, with them being distinctly faerie-like (webbed feet!) and each having his own special expertise in their mingled mining and magic. This part is fascinating.
Then it got, well, icky.
Spoilers ahead!
I only just tripped over Bruce Hampton's frontier history tome Children of Grace: The Nez Perce War of 1877
Yes, back to Kelley Armstrong yet again. I pre-ordered this book a number of months ago when it was announced and had more or less forgotten about it by the time it finally turned up in the mail.
Counterfeit Magic
That’s the ongoing series background.
Way back when I first started really reading the Dame Frevisse medieval murder mysteries by Margaret Frazer, I managed to collect fifteen out of the seventeen with relative ease, the more recent ones still in print and most of the older ones available online for typical used-paperback prices of $1-$5 each. But there were two spectacular exceptions: The Outlaw's Tale (#3) and The Murderer's Tale
Well, I've just finished scaring myself to death watching Supervolcano
Basically, it's a piece of near-future disaster science fiction in which the science is, unfortunately, not at all fictional.
Halloween is pretty much a busman's holiday for me, since I dress up funny all the time. But I hopped up to Boston this past weekend for a bit of costumed dancing Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at, respectively, the Commonwealth Vintage Dancers' Black Cat Speakeasy and Mostly Waltz Boston's Halloween afternoon dance.
Saturday night at the Speakeasy I decided to get into the spirit of historical fancy dress and thus wore the green tango dress and gloves that I made/dyed to surprise S.J. Tucker with a tango at her performance of "Alligator in the House" at Lunacon a few years ago. It was comfortable and easy to dance in and very much in the fancy dress mode: a dress and gloves of the appropriate color and a stuffed animal accessory. That's me at left, with my alligator.
I'm starting to think I need a separate category just for Kelley Armstrong books, since I seem to post about them ridiculously often. The latest entry in her [Women of the] Otherworld series is Waking the Witch
The big plus with Waking the Witch is that it's got a simple concept: hotshot young witch coming of age and wanting to prove herself to her over-protective guardians by solving a murder mystery on her own. Needless to say, the situation is more complicated than it appears, and she turns out to need a little more help than she thinks, and she learns the expected sort of adult lessons. Given a good writer, it's a fairly foolproof concept. Having a single focus character and writing in the first person is also a huge help; Savannah simply tells her own story, filling in background details as needed via meditations on her rocky early life, which helps a lot with the complex-backstory problem.
The mystery is a typically convoluted puzzle, there's a workable love interest, the ending is not a pat "happily ever after" one, and Savannah is convincingly voiced, though not nearly as funny as she has been in previous novels now that she's the lead character instead of serving as plot device and teenage comic relief. Waking the Witch is not up with the top books in the series, but it's one of the solid middle group. Given the twenty-one-year-old heroine, it's also a good bridge into the series for a younger reader.
One warning: this is the first book in a mini-trilogy within the series and as such it ends on a setup for the next book that could be described as a cliffhanger. I wasn't as annoyed by this as I usually am because the novel itself is a complete story with a proper wrap-up. The final couple of sentences feel more like a "coming next week" sort of preview than a true cliffhanger ending. I'm curious about what happens next but not frustrated at having to wait.
Read for yourself:
Jim Russell, Republican Congressional candidate in New York State (NY-18) feels that a modernized version of Othello is "deliberately designed to exploit the critical period of sexual imprinting in their target audiences of white pre-adolescent girls and adolescent young women" as part of a media plot to "deliberately popularize miscegenation in films directed toward adolescents and pre-adolescents." ("The Western Contribution to World History," Occidental Quarterly*, 2001/2002.)
Um...what?
I haven't seen the movie in question
Othello is a wonderful play that I haven't seen enough productions of, but somehow I never thought of it as a tract promoting interracial relationships. I'm not certain it's condemning them, either; some of the characters certainly are against Othello and Desdemona's marriage on explicitly racial grounds ("an old black ram is tupping your white ewe") but Othello and Desdemona are the victims of evil and are never portrayed as anything other than tragically credulous and somewhat dim. Given when it was written, that's actually pretty good. But a nefarious plot to promote "miscegenation" via modernized settings of Shakespeare (since, you know, no one ever remakes
I. Don't. Think. So.
(Courtesy of The Albany Project -- see their post for more excerpts featuring racism and anti-Semitism.)
Edited 9/22/10 to add:
Salon has more on this. School integraton might make kids gay!
*The Occidental Quarterly concerns itself with white oppression by "the Negroes, Hispanics, Asians, Indians, feminists, labor unions, corporate plunderers, Jews, Muslims, illegal aliens, socialists, pornographers, “free-traders,” environmentalist fanatics, animal-loving lunatics, the education cabal, the “disabled,” the professional “poor,” atheists, “humanist” clerics, crooked law enforcers, government bureaucrats, venal politicians, activist judges, and the myriad other enemies, traitors and bleeding-heart weaklings that today run what used to be “our” country."
I picked up Lin Anderson's Final Cut
I planned the second phase of my Stratford visit as a three-part nostalgia tour of shows I saw as a child or teenager. The first of these was Evita. (Left: Chilina Kennedy in the title role with Juan Chioran in the background; click images to enlarge.)
My first Evita was the original Broadway production, with Mandy Patinkin singing the role of Che, when I was around twelve or thirteen. I loved the show, bought the LP -- yes, an actual record, and I probably still have it -- and listened to it until I'd memorized the entire first act. (I learned that whole opening Latin prayer-song phonetically without having the faintest idea what it meant.) I developed a crush on Patinkin-as-Che, the memory of which was enough to lure me to a somewhat dubious production of The Tempest a couple of years ago just for the chance to hear that voice in person again.
This sort of intense teenage imprinting on a particular production makes seeing a different one very problematic. That first production was so definitive and my memory of the musical numbers so thorough that I suspected I was going to really resist enjoying anything short of an exact recreation of it.
So why bother? Well, I really do love the soundtrack (or at least the first half of it; more about that below.) And one of my favorite Stratford actors, Juan Chioran (whose performance in Dracula: A Chamber Musical I've been rhapsodizing about for over a decade), was singing Perón. And I've been reading up a bit lately on Argentina's Dirty War, which made me rather thoughtful about how odd it must have been for a politically aware audience member during the show's original run, which coincided almost perfectly with the Dirty War.
Continue reading "Evita (Stratford Shakespeare Festival, 8/4/10)" »
Well, I thought I was only going to have to read four novels this week, since I'd already read and loved Palimpsest, but there must have been a tie in the nominations for Best Novel. There are six nominees, so I have five to go. Oops.
First up is Robert Sawyer's WWW: Wake (Ace 2009, serialized in Analog 2008-2009; Ace editor Ginjer Buchanan(?), Analog editor Stanley Schmidt)
It's not a particular secret that I am exceedingly fond of Catherynne Valente's novels -- the Orphan's Tales duology (Tiptree and Mythopoeic Award winners), Palimpsest (a current Hugo nominee), and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making being four of the finest fantasy books I've read in the last decade. So I decided to take a fast trip into the city last night to hear her read as part of the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series along with M.K. Hobson, whose first novel, The Native Star
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