The weblog of WILLIAM GIBSON is always worth checking out every once in a while

"Raphael Aloysius "Ray" Lafferty, the self-described "cranky old man from Tulsa, Oklahoma," is a genius: I state that flatly. He is one of the eminent English-language writers of, at the very least, the twentieth century--yet he remains little known, little read, and much misunderstood and underappreciated. Indeed, much of his oeuvre exists only in very limited print runs of cheap paper chapbooks. As the thoughtful will deduce, the problem is that Lafferty is not an easy writer. That problem is exacerbated by the fact that under superficial consideration he looks easy; were he as obviously complex as, for example, James Joyce (and, of course, were he not "just" an SF&F author), readers and critics would likely have made some effort to look beneath the hood to see what was what; but because his works can, by the careless, be taken for ordinary stuff, his complexities--of both language and meaning--end up dismissed as just nonsensically bad ordinary writing. As a thirsty drinker expecting the taste of a soda pop might well spit out in disgust a mouthful of vintage brut champagne, so might an SF reader expecting typical SF reject vintage Lafferty." from a really good article about R.A.Lafferty at greatsfandf.com

Stories online at scifi.com:

Science Fiction Book Meeting: Every first tuesday at Another Country, Dinner at 8 p.m.

Ten years of free books on the web, whew! Time to drop by!

Talking about books on the web, let's not forget textz.com, the "&" in "copy & paste"

Did you see Trekkies?Do you need a Brent-break? Meet Anne Droidz, the woman taking Brent-breaks on her balconry while starring at the house of the guy who plays Data in "The Next Generation".

Still spinning in heavy rotation on our humble machine

"For over a century, Vogue has been the leading American magazine devoted to the best in fashion, beauty, and lifestyle. Nowhere is this more evident than in the illustrated covers from its first fifty years. The greatest artists and illustrators created some of the century's most celebrated examples of magazine art."

Classic Covers: Vogue

"When the first nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, popular culture was quick to respond... Atomic including a board game that let you bomb Hiroshima and war toys and games appeared shortly after World War II, Nagasaki, and the Atomic Bomb Ring, which was sold for 15¢ and a boxtop from Kix cereal. Kids peered into the plastic to 'See Genuine Atoms Split to Smithereens!' Over six million were distributed between 1947 and 1957." from Nuclear Pop

Here's an excellent example of the possibilities interactive multi-media has to offer: a great little sound-tool with various games inside to mix around called Infinite Wheel (you will need Flash 6 for this.) found at Dublog

Absolutely great pieces from the days when entertainment was dominated by special effects already. found at boingboing.net

"High adventure in space; usually somewhat campy, of the type that used to be serialized at the movies and in the pulp magazines that were popular in the first half of this century. Hallmarks of space opera include encounters with beautiful women and bug-eyed monsters. Flash Gordon is vintage space opera, Star Trek™ is more sophisticated, contemporary space opera. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series is space opera. "

quote from sfsite.com

Brian W. Aldiss identified the folowing key indicators of "Space Opera" (1) Style and Mood staunchly traditional (2) Hitherto unknown places to explore (3) Continuity between Past and Future (4) Tremendous sphere of space/time (5) A pinch of reality inflated with melodrama (6) A seasoning of screwy ideas (7) Heady escapist stuff (8) Charging on with little regard for logic or literacy (9) Often throwing off great images, excitements, aspirations (10) The Earth should be in peril (11) There must be a quest (12) There must be a man to match the mighty hour (13) That man must confront aliens and exotic creatures (14) Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher (15) Blood must run down the palace steps (16) Ships must launch out into the louring dark (17) There must be a woman fairer than the skies (18) There must be a villain darker than a Black Hole (19) All must come right in the end (20) The future in space, seen mistily through the eyes of yesterday

From the foreword of the "Space Opera"-anthology [Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1974]

Recommended Reading: -Anything by E.E.'Doc'Smith -"Galactic Empires" edited by Brian Aldiss -"Space Opera" edited by Brian Aldiss -Frederick Pohl and Jack Wiliamson, "The Starchild Trilogy" -John W.Campbell, "The Black Star passes" - A.E.van Vogt: "Empire of the Atom", "The Wizard of Linn", "Lost:Fifty Suns" - Neil Asher, "Gridlinked"

LINKS: The Spectrum of Space Opera

Science Fiction Book Meeting at the bookshop: Every first tuesday at Another Country, Dinner at 8 p.m.

When the wall came down, West-Berlin ceased to exist and Berlin was in the east again. Lots of people, who got used to the highly sanctioned standard of the cold war's most famous outpost, feel a little left out now.

Schöneberg aint hip anymore and nobody would ever want to go out in Tiergarten or Charlottenburg. Besides the occasional thing in Kreuzberg, the action is in the east now while the old west has faded. Now, some old folks have started to put up revival-events to remember the jolly days of living in a city surrounded by a wall and a mayor tabloid helps them out.

Like with those TV-shows bringing back East-Germany in a nice entertainment-format to forget about the gruesome details: German nostalgia is still a very weird thing.

The day the weblog started we hung around the shop, eating strange frogs covered with chocolate that someone brought from Japan while bitching about the "Internationale Literaturfestival" until it got dark. Later we had a few brews before we put on our vinyl-superhero-suits and flew around the block with to do some good.

Guest-star of the day: Svetlana who used to dance with Jennifer Lopez when they were both touring the US with some musical. Order a preview-copy of her next album and listen to "The Ship". It's incredible! Someone's gotta remix it and make Svetlana the next Dido.

Interesting exihibition of adivasi-art from Hazaribagh in India which was put together by Susanne Gupta, Another Country's expert on anything hot and spicy from India. Details at boell.de.

Darius James revamps his Creative Writing Workshop in Berlin. He also wrote a funny new piece for bookblitz.de called: The Return of Dr. Snakeskin's Home-Video Views: The Hulk (Not!)Check it out!

“All writers are visitors in another land: they can “take only photographs and leave only footprints³, as the Yanks wisely put it, or they can come with prefab condos and multinational media empires and flat rate DSL and terraform the landscape.³

The whole thing unfortunately has to start with the premise that nobody s innocent. No writer can be excused her part in the machinations of an industry that places the essence of what is being offered, the writing, at a lower footing than the attractiveness of the author (see Beryl Bainbridge¹s complaints back in 2001 about the UK scene, specifically re: Zadie Smith). The book industry is a sick place, its rivers clogged with the dull and degenerate droolings of the Hornbys and Selfs and its continental spine broken by the abysmal weight of its Tolkiens and Jane Austens. No sun can penetrate the global smog of market-driven publishing decisions, and no growing cycle ­ that process which, in the past, enabled difficult, demanding works such as Paradise Lost and Tristram Shandy to grow in appreciation and popularity over many, many years, thus surviving oblivion ­ has a chance of establishing itself against the hyper-accelerated appetite of a readership increasingly trained to accept rather than demand. Because every level of the book industry is helplessly mutating; from the writer, through the publishing houses (gaudy colonial outposts of savage media empires) via the outlets (hardly an area which could still be described as “bookselling³) to the Pavlovian readers, conditioned by Harry Potter to behave towards books ­cultural items with which one needs to spend more than 3 and a half minutes to become acquainted ­ as they do towards pop singles (which aren¹t quite what they once were, either). None of which is to say that things used to be better: it¹s indeed unfortunate that Harry Potter, having allegedly (re-)introduced millions of children to the joys of reading and thereby using their minds in a truly interactive fashion, should be rooted in such conservative and, well, old-fashioned traditions of children¹s books (structure based around the school terms, good vs evil, Terminator-like unslayable Dark Lord of Ultimate Evil, etc etc etc). A few modern ideas are precisely what are missing in this whole messed-up landscape.

• New ideas in writing: and the unforgivable Will Self “reinterpreting³

Wilde into drug and porn fantasies does NOT count as “new ideas³, neither do the uncountable, and equally unforgivable Tolkien clones who flood the Fantasy genre. But this is an enormous topic.

• New ideas in marketing books, which must be done, just better than it¹s being done now, perpertated as it is by inarticulate (ever read a press release from Faber & Faber?) Zeitgeist-enslaved intellectual pygmies with the attention span of a 7 year old on a chocolate high and the discerning eyes of a Daily Mail reader.

• New ideas in manufacturing books, as the quality of paperbacks is insanely uneven and the production quality of hardback editions is a bad, expensive joke; but this is a minor quibble.

• New ideas in distributing books; because the stationary bookseller, quaint old beast, is no longer relevant in this new world.

It is a new world; books and the book trade are the victims of a teleportation prank, awakening on a new world, and what is needed now is a colonial science, an exploratory science, rather than the inhuman pragmatism of market forces, to help literature in general and the book form in particular survive in this new environment.

(End of entry no.) 49

by Patrick