In praise of Doctor Zhivago

On NPR, Ursula K. Le Guin recommends Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. I second that, as if she (or, for that matter, the Nobel committee) needed a second.

I know that Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are responsible for a number of recent acclaimed English translations of classic Russian novels, but have there been more recent English translations of Zhivago than the 1958 edition that so many millions of us are familiar with?

And yes, I'm fond of the David Lean movie, too. As a friend pointed out when we saw it on the big screen in Chapel Hill, N.C. (during the 25th anniversary re-release in 1990): If you must look at 40-foot-high close-ups of an actor and actress, you could do a lot worse than Omar Sharif and Julie Christie circa 1965.

Questions? Talk to the monkey

The fine fiction writer Michael Martone, who did a stint as chair of creative writing while I was a graduate student at the University of Alabama, once explained to me that administration, especially higher-ed administration, is all about the distribution of monkeys.

"You sit at your desk," Michael said, "and someone walks in the door with a monkey. That person's goal is to hand you her monkey. Your goal is to make sure that she not only leaves with that same monkey, but takes one of your monkeys with her when she goes. You want to go home at the end of the day with no net gain of monkeys."

I thought of this when I read that the new chairman of a business school in Uttar Pradesh is Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god:

"When we were looking for a chairman for our institution, we scanned many big names in the field of technology and management. Ultimately, we settled for Lord Hanuman, as none was bigger than him."

Alabama news from Alabama

According to the AP, the other members of the country group Alabama (a.k.a. "Group Alabama Inc.") have filed suit against their fourth member, drummer Mark Herndon, charging he was overpaid.

In high school, when Barry Johnson, Scott Frye and I considered Alabama to be the McDonald's of country music, we thought all the members were overpaid. But I'm more kindly disposed toward them these days, considering the state of country radio in the 21st century.

I'd like to see the new Alabama statues in Fort Payne, too.

Magic for Beginners: 21st-Century Fantasy, Spring 2008

Here I am with the students in my spring 2008 seminar in the University of Alabama's Honors College. Left to right: Erica Mihelin, Casey Sloan, Crystal Ellis, Susan De Leon (in cap), me, Renee Rivas (in Beijing Lantern Festival T-shirt), Courtney Watts, Jessica Trevino (in orange), Kalen Berry (in back), Amy Jensen, Janessa Hogans (in back), Laura Bass (in front, with hands on knees), Ellie Killian, Laurie Skelton and Jessie Foster.

"Romantic Moment" by Tony Hoagland

Carol Pinchefsky alerts us to this fine 2004 poem from Speakeasy, reprinted in the Utne Reader.

Better luck next year, kids

Buddy Moore points out this recent events calendar in coastal North Carolina. Scroll down to the May 1-2 event at Roanoke Bible College:

Spring Musical -- "There is a Hope"
(The theme this year is not appropriate for children.)

"The Waveries"

I'm always delighted when science fiction crops up in conversation with non-sf folks. Sometimes someone other than me even brings it up!

Case in point: At last week's book-group meeting, Bob Doyle (our astronomer) argued that many of the social changes advocated by Michael Lerner in his best seller The Left Hand of God: Healing America's Political and Spiritual Crisis will be imposed not by individual moral choices but of necessity by the disappearance of cheap petroleum. That prompted Keith Schlegel (one of our several English-department folks) to recall a classic Fredric Brown story, "The Waveries" -- the one about energy-eating aliens whose grazing habits have Luddite effects on human civilization.

That's the second "Waveries" reference I've heard in as many months. Joe Haldeman invoked it in his introduction of Vernor Vinge at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in March. Joe said talk of the looming Singularity sometimes makes him long for the slowed-down society depicted in Brown's story.

Originally published in the January 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, "The Waveries" is included in the excellent collection From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown, published in 2000 by the invaluable NESFA Press.

Isaac Asimov included it years ago in his anthology Isaac Asimov
Presents The Great SF Stories 7 (DAW, 1982), but advised skepticism in his introduction:

I want to dissent on the thesis because I'm a technophile (that is, I love advancing technology) and don't think that walking backward is the route to a Golden Age.

I just want to refer to one small passage in the story where Pete Mulvaney says that the air in New York City is "better than Atlantic City, without gasoline fumes" because the automobiles are gone. The next question from George Bailey is, "Enough horses to go around yet?" and the answer is "Almost."

Well, I've passed the horses at Central Park that pull the buggies, two or three of them, and I have to hold my breath every time. They stink of sweat and manure. That's two or three. Fill the city enough to take care of even the "last million people" the story speaks of and everyone will long for gas fumes again. Particularly in the summer when there will be no air conditioning (something Fred, writing in 1945, says nothing about).

Enjoy the story, but keep your perspective, that's all.

Yes, one of the story's main characters is named George Bailey, also the name of James Stewart's character in Frank Capra's movie It's a Wonderful Life, released nearly two years after Brown's story was published. Coincidence?

Michael T. Walker

For years Sydney and I had season tickets to the productions of the University of Alabama Department of Theatre and Dance, and one of the actors we most admired was the perennial scene-stealer Michael T. Walker, a comic dynamo who sometimes suggested a cross between Nathan Lane and Ricky Gervais. Sydney just found Walker's website, and I'm pleased to see he's doing well, most recently as Edna in the national tour of Hairspray. If you get the chance to see Michael T. Walker perform, go. He's value.

My favorite headline in years

Other news organs worldwide reported on a bit of climate-change research in Oxfordshire, but only the BBC rose to the headline-writing occasion.

Thanks to John Latta for passing this along.

"You're thinking of Aldo Kelrast, aren't you?"

While I'm on the topic of unintentionally funny comics, Jack Roberts passes along this handy list of "The 5 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Comic Strips." Seeing "Dick Tracy" on the list is more sad than funny.

"So! They laugh at my boner, will they?!"

Tony Brock has introduced me to the Superdickery website, which started out compiling instances of Superman acting like a jerk, but has blossomed into compiling all sorts of problematic and/or unintentionally funny comics covers and pages, mostly from DC. A few of my favorites:

"So! They laugh at my boner, will they?!"

"It's important that I live the next 24 hours as a black woman!"

"Without my power ring I'm super-powerless -- except from the waist down!"

"I couldn't sit down all night, after what that robot did to me!"

I must confess, however, that I was a regular reader of Giant-Size Man-Thing without once realizing the implications of the title.

The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

I was pleased to receive in Tuesday's mail my contributor copies of The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy, edited by Mike Ashley, a trade paperback published in the U.S. by Running Press and in the U.K. by Robinson. The first story in the book is my 2001 Starlight 3 story "Senator Bilbo."

In his introduction, Ashley defines "extreme fantasy" as "those stories that took a basic idea, whether simple or complicated, and developed it to some extreme, beyond what the reader might normally expect. ... In all of the stories, the authors have taken a fantastic idea -- and I mean fantastic in both its senses -- and then seen how far they can push it."

Ashley also writes in the introduction, "I have presented the stories in sequence from the least to the most extreme, so your imagination can expand as you work through the book." And the first words of his headnotes to my story are: "We begin our journey in what ought to be the relative safety of the Shire."

I'm delighted to be in the book, which includes some of my favorite stories -- Ted Chiang's "Tower of Babylon," Jeffrey Ford's "Boatman's Holiday," Michael Swanwick's "Radio Waves" -- as well as a number I look forward to reading. Authors include Orson Scott Card, R.A. Lafferty, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Moorcock, Howard Waldrop, Liz Williams, etc. ... and William Hope Hodgson, with a story written 96 years ago.

The Shirley Jackson Awards

I'm surprised but delighted that my Eclipse One story "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse" is one of the inaugural nominees for the Shirley Jackson Awards.

Also on the ballot, I'm pleased to see, is the Jack Dann-Gardner Dozois anthology Wizards, which includes my story "A Diorama of the Infernal Regions; or, The Devil's Ninth Question."

Congratulations to all the nominees.

When my in-laws win the lottery ...

... which I'm sure they'll do any week now, and when they split the proceeds with Sydney and me, as they long have promised, I'll immediately order a Tesla Roadster.

The battery weighs a thousand pounds, more than a third of the total weight of the car.

Saving humanity through science and sanity

National Defense magazine reports on the advice that science fiction writers, notably Larry Niven, are offering the Department of Homeland Security these days.

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

“Do you know how politically incorrect you are?” [Jerry] Pournelle asked.

“I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work,” Niven replied.

Apparently the Homeland Security establishment at this conference soon got a taste of what it's like to attend a panel at a science-fiction convention.

The 45-minute panel discussion quickly deteriorated as federal, local and state homeland security officials, and at least one congressional aid, attempted to ask questions, which were largely ignored.

Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space.

David Brin, keeping on the topic of empowering citizens with mobile phone technology, delivered a self-described “rant” on the lack of funds being spent to support citizen reservists to back up the military, homeland security officials and first responders in times of crisis.

“It is impossible for you to succeed without us!” he shouted at the assembled officials, while banging his fist on the table and at one point jumping off his chair to wave a mobile phone in their faces.

My people, my people.

The Living Dead

My 2004 story "Zora and the Zombie," which is about Zombies pre-George Romero (and with a capital Z), will be reprinted later this year in The Living Dead, edited by John Joseph Adams for Night Shade Books. The table of contents includes Kelly Link's "Some Zombie Contingency Plans," Dale Bailey's "Death and Suffrage" (which inspired the Masters of Horror episode Homecoming), Joe Hill's "Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead" (about a romance that blossoms in Pittsburgh during the filming of Dawn of the Dead) and Scott Edelman's recent Stoker Award nominee "Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man," plus stories by Sherman Alexie, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Harlan Ellison, Jeffrey Ford, Neil Gaiman, Laurell K. Hamilton, Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, Dan Simmons, Michael Swanwick, etc. I'm honored.

Hard to beat this lineup

"Chronicling Mars" is the theme of this year's Eaton Science Fiction Conference, May 16-18 at the University of California, Riverside. A partial list of speakers includes Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Ray Bradbury, David Brin, David G. Hartwell, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl and Kim Stanley Robinson.

"Why Superman Will Always Suck"

Anthony Burch marshals the arguments at the Bam!Kapow! website.

Mark Hughes Cobb begs to differ: "Supes' vulnerability is in his LEARNED humanity. He could have stayed the cold, aloof Kryptonian, but he chose to make himself a target by caring for humanity."

Thanks to David Lowe for passing this along.

A truthful typo

I was pleased that many versions of the AP's first-day story on Olympic-torch protests in San Francisco said the "parade rout" had been changed. It's in the second sentence.

The In Vitro Meat Consortium

David Lowe passed along this fine blog entry, by New York Times reporter Andrew C. Revkin, on the scientific, economic and ethical issues of laboratory-grown meat.

Whereupon Andy Rindsberg, bless him, pointed out that the ambitions of the In Vitro Meat Consortium are to create Chicken Little, as depicted in Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952):

Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America. Every hour you could drink from your canteen and take a salt tablet. Every two hours you could take five minutes. At sunset you turned in your coveralls and went to dinner -- more slices from Chicken Little -- and then you were on your own.

In that seventh sentence, note the alarming pronoun "who" -- a pronoun the In Vitro Meat Consortium presumably tries to avoid.