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Three recent examples of grotesque misuse of the language.
First, from the DAW anthology Misspelled, two separate examples of the phrase "Think x? Well, you've got another think coming!" being misrendered: "Think x? Well, you've got another thing coming!". Don't know if the authors or the copyeditor are responsible. But it's just stupid, and represents a near total inability to follow the idiomatic logic ... this particular screwup has been very common lately, seems to me.
Second, from Eric Reynolds and Adam Nakama's anthology Desolate Places, but actually originally from Farah Mendlesohn's 2007 anthology Glorifying Terrorism, is Davin Ireland's "Engaging the Idrl". The story mentions a 40,000 square kilometer parking space, which, it claims, dwarfs anything ever on Earth by "several thousand orders of magnitude". So, apparently, the largest parking space in the history of Earth was 40,000 km divided by 10 to the 3000th* power. That is, 4 times 10 to the negative 2996 power kilometers, or 4 times 10 to the negative 2993 power meters, or, lets just say, several thousand orders of magnitude less than the Planck limit. (Which is, I believe, about 10 to the negative 36 meters). Obviously Ireland meant "several thousand times as large as anything on Earth". Why not say that, then, instead of trying to pretend you know what the phrase "order of magnitude" means? (And besides Ireland, three editors missed this error.)
("Engaging the Idrl" has another serious problem. It sets up a potentially intriguing mystery -- why did an unknown race create a huge city that resembles New York City on another planet? -- and then simply forgets about that mystery. It has another problem, too, one I figured would be endemic to Glorifying Terrorism** -- a thudding message not well buttressed by the actual story. But that's another issue.)
Finally, from the generally quite enjoyable movie Iron Man. In one passage, Tony Stark's AI assistant complains to him that it's not ready for some particular action -- it has "several terabytes of calculations to complete". Surely it meant something like teraflops -- floating point operations per second. Though even that is wrong -- that's a rate, not an absolute number, so he should have said "lots of operations to complete" or something. But terabytes is simply wrong -- it's just a measure of memory.
I will say, of the three things I've mentioned, that I do, in general, recommend Iron Man, but not either of the anthologies. Desolate Places in particular was a disappointment -- Reynolds's previous anthologies have been on balance quite interesting, but this book for the most part just didn't work.
*3000 being, I would think, the absolute minimum number that could qualify as "several thousand".
**Indeed, it seems to me that most reviews of Glorifying Terrorism have acknowledged that it contains a mixture of pretty good stories, and weak stories overwhelmed by the need to get across a MESSAGE. Which is what I would have expected. Granted, I haven't read the book, so I can't say for sure that's true.
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As many know -- from having ordered the book at Amazon and not having received it yet, alas -- my first anthology of the Best Space Opera stories of the year -- in that case for 2006 -- has been long delayed. I still hope it will appear soon, but it has been rather frustrating in that it hasn't appeared.
We had decided to do a second volume, for stories from 2007, and I had chosen the contents. But what with the delays of the first volume, and basically the publisher feeling a bit overextended, we've had to cancel this second book. I'm a bit down about that -- I tihnk it was going to be an excellent book. And, too, some of the stories in this volume I purposely held back from reprinting in my Best SF book because they seemed appropriate for the Space Opera book. I won't say which they are -- and I certainly won't say which stories from the other book would have been displaced! -- for one thing, decisions at this level are very close things, and the stories just short of the cut are basically as good as the stories that make it -- but I will mention that at least David Moles's Hugo nominee, "Finisterra", would have made my SF book (assuming he approved).
Anyway, here's the planned TOC for the SPACE OPERA 2008 volume ... noting by the way that the authors hadn't been contacted about this, and some may have refused permission ...:
SPACE OPERA:
David Moles, "Finisterra" (F&SF, December)
John Scalzi, "Pluto Tells All" (Subterranean, Spring)
Richard A. Lovett, "The Sands of Titan", (Analog, 6/07)
Ken MacLeod, "Who's Afraid of Wolf 359" (The New Space Opera)
Charles Stross, "Trunk and Disorderly" (Asimov's, January)
Gareth L. Powell, "Six Lights Off Green Scar" (Infinity Plus)
Jayme Lynn Blaschke, "The Final Voyage of La Riaza" (Interzone, June)
C. W. Johnson, "Icarus Beach" (Analog, December)
Robert Reed, "The Caldera of Good Fortune" (Asimov's, Oct/Nov)
Jay Lake, "The Fly and Die Ticket", (Subterranean, Fall)
Dan Simmons, "Muse of Fire" (The New Space Opera)
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Quite a while ago, on a whim, I put the French diptych JEAN DE FLORETTE/MANON DES SOURCES on our Netflix queue, towards the bottom. And forgot about it. After some months, they migrated to the top and showed up. And I was busy and not in the mood and let them sit on top of the DVD player for a while, until Mary Ann insisted we watch them. And she was right.
The movies are actually remakes of a pair of movies with the same titles made by the somewhat notable director Marcel Pagnol in the '50s, just pre nouvelle vague. Pagnol turned those into a novel in the mid '60s. And these two films were made by Claude Berri in the mid 80s. By all accounts they are the preferred version of the story.
The first movie stars Gerard Depardieu as the title character, a hunchback, a city man, a tax collector, who comes to rural Provence, just post WWI, to be a farmer after inheriting property from his uncle. What he doesn't know is that the uncle was actually killed (by mistake) by Cesar Soubeyran (Yves Montand), who wanted to buy the land because of its spring, which could provide water for the carnations his nephew, and only remaining family member, Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) wants to grow. In fury over their failure to obtain this land, Cesar and Ugolin have blocked the source of the spring with concrete.
Jean, along with his opera singer wife Aimee (played by Depardieu's then wife Elisabeth), and their young daughter Manon, make a brave try at farming success. But the lack of water, coupled with the hostility of the local villagers, always suspicious of city folk, dooms them. Finally, Jean is killed trying to dynamite his way to a well.
While this all seems depressing -- and in then end is quite tragic -- the actual movie is often quite funny. Montand is exceptional as Cesar, and so is Depardieu as Jean. Jean is quite a character -- intelligent, absurdly optimistic, a very good man. Auteuil also does well in the difficult role of a basically bad (and ugly) man who really has the desire to be good, to make friends, but is foiled by his uncle's plotting and his own greed.
The second movie, MANON DES SOURCES, called MANON OF THE SPRING in English, begins several years later. Cesar and Ugolin are running a successful business growing carnations on the land they bought cheaply from Jean's widow. Manon is now grown, and is living with a local couple, perhaps gypsies (?) who squatted on their land but who Jean befriended in the first movie. She knows that Cesar and Ugolin blocked their spring, because she witnessed them digging up the concrete plug as she and her mother were leaving their land. Manon is now played by the quite beautiful Emmanuelle Beart -- this was her first major role but she has gone on to have quite a career in the French cinema.
In revenge against Cesar and Ugolin, Manon blocks the source to the water for the entire village. Meanwhile, Ugolin has fallen desperately in love with Manon. Manon, however, his more interested in the handsome young teacher just come to the village. The stress on the village from losing their water leads to a general confession of the mistreatment of Jean, and Cesar and Ugolin are accused of having blocked Jean's spring. The teacher convinces Manon to remove her block, just as a procession is organized to beg for a miracle ...
Everything then unspools neatly. Ugolin declares his love for Manon, is rejected ... and his reaction leads to ... well, I'm already well past spoiler country, so let's end there. Suffice to to say the in nearly Shakespearean fashion, the plot is tied up, with a (quite guessable) shocking revelation at the end, and with the good guys rewarded and the bad guy punished.
As all that suggests, the movies are really somewhat old-fashioned, at least in plot. But it all works, quite beautifully. The acting is exceptional, the direction fine, and both movies are just absorbing and enjoyable.
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Summary: Say ..., 2007 Say... had a bit of a hiccup and skipped 2006, but was back with a longish issue in 2007, subtitled "what's the combination?". They were back to saddle-stitched production, cardboard covers, but I have no problem with that ... it's the words that count. As ever, Christopher Rowe and Gwenda Bond edited the fiction, and Alan de Niro the poetry. There were 11 stories, one a very short novelette, two short-shorts, almost 50,000 words of fiction. (There were also two poems.) Stories I particularly liked included Sonya Taaffe's "Nutmeg and Limestone", a very subtly told story of a man remembering his ex-wife, but more particularly, one of his ex-wife's college roommates, a picture of whom had caught the attention of his rather odd friend. What's going on behind this is not ever told explicitly, but we slowly figure it out -- or I think I did! Anyway, I liked it. Also, a fine Kyle Murchison Booth story from Sarah Monette, "The Bone Key", in which Kyle's tortured family history catches up with him. Good stuff too from Cat Rambo and Marguerite Craft. 8 of 11 stories were by women, 78%, and I rather tentatively put 2 in the SF category, 18%.
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Summary: Space and Time, 2007 Space and Time has been around for something like 40 years now. The first 99 issues were mostly edited by and all published by Gordon Linzner. Linzner is now listed as Editor Emeritus, with Hildy Silverman as Editor-in-Chief and Gerard Houarner as Fiction Editor (which post he held for the last few Linzner issues, as I recall). I saw one of the two 2007 issues, the one dated Spring, and numbered -- ta da! -- 100. For a semipro magazine to reach 100 issues is pretty impressive, and Linzner deserved praise for that. That praise given, I have to admit I've not been impressed with the several issues of Space and Time I've seen over the past few years, and the same goes for this issue. Too many stories are, to my mind, unfinished -- OK ideas that aren't worked out satisfactorily in some cases, in other cases just poorly written stories. I will say that this issue is quite generously proportioned (as usual for Space and Time). There are 20 new stories (2 very short novelettes and 18 short stories, 3 of them short-shorts) for about 75,000 words of new fiction. There are also two stories reprinted from #99 (due to production problems in that issue) and quite a few poems. Of the stories, my favorites were P. D. Cacek's "The Way to a Man's Heart", and amusing piece about a health nut who gets an unexpected comeuppance; and "Brutal Rituals", by Katherine Woodbury, about a new king upset by the ritual he is expected to enact: raping a priestess to ensure his kingdom's fertility. 12 of 20 new stories were by women (I believe): 60%. And 2 of 20 were SF by my count, 10%.
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Summary: Thrilling Wonder Stories, 2007 I have to apologize about this summary -- I read the first issue of this revival with some enjoyment, took no real notes, and now I cannot put my hands on my copy. (If you saw what passes for my library and my office, you wouldn't be surprised!) But I'll do what I can from memory. I was excited to hear of this. I thought the idea pretty neat -- a modern day pulp, in essence. And it worked out fairly well. No great stories, but some fun stuff, and pretty squarely in the SF Adventure tradition. There were 6 new stories, 2 novelettes, the rest short stories (one a short-short), about 40,000 words. There were also a few reprints, most from Thrilling Wonder itself in the 50s (including a not previously reprinted Asimov story -- talk about a rarity! -- not very good mind you, but still worth the read), and one more recent one, from Analog in the 90s. I don't remember much about the stories, but while none were great, I enjoyed a few of them. Contance Cooper's "Tomb of the Tyrant Emperor", Michael Kandel's "Enlightenment", and R. Neube's "Love Seat" stick with me as perhaps the best. All the stories qualify as SF, and 1 of the 6 (16%) was by a woman.
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Books Considered: The Sharing Knife: Legacy, by Lois McMaster Bujold; The Last Colony, by John Scalzi; When the Tide Rises, by David Drake Time to catch up on some novel reading. I finally got around to the second part of Lois McMaster Bujold's Sharing Knife -- I believe this is a diptych, and that this book close the diptych. That said, I am fairly sure there will be sequels ... the ending certainly suggest that. The first book told of the meeting and marriage of Dag, a Lakewalker, and Fawn, a farmer girl. In the culture portrayed in the books, Lakewalkers are a nomadic people who keep themselves strictly separate. They are descended from aristocratic magicians who overreached and created a dangerous plague of "blights": magical intelligences that can sort of "hatch" and then take over the minds of people and animals, and in the process drain large areas of life. The Lakewalkers, partly in guilt over their ancestors' error, partly of necessity, travel around finding these menaces and killing them -- which can only be done with a "sharing knife", created from the bones of a dead Lakewalker. The farmer people are ordinary people, who were peasants (perhaps serfs) at the time of the magicians' rule, and now live fairly conventional lives. The two groups are mutually fairly ignorant of each other, and quite suspicious. Dag encountered Fawn while she was running away from home, pregnant, after the young man who impregnated her dumped her. Fawn unknowingly is running into danger from a newly awakened "blight bogle", or malice, and as things work out she ends up helping Dag kill the bogle, losing her child in the process -- but somehow her child's death ends up "charging" an new "sharing knife" -- perhaps. Dag and she fall in love, and marry, against the rules of both societies. The first book ends with their marriage, and their limited accommodation with Fawn's people. The second book, subtitled Legacy, naturally involves trying to come to an accommodation with Dag's people. His people are a mixture of sympathetic types who can be won over, stupid prejudiced types who won't allow themselves to warm to a farmer girl, and two people who aren't, I think, intended to be portrayed as evil, but who come off that way: Dag's mother (with whom he has never got along) and his brother. The story concerns Dag and Fawn living for awhile in a Lakewalker camp, winning over some people, dealing with another even more dangerous malice, with a new twist that Fawn helps unravel, and then dealing with a quite vicious attempt by Dag's family to have their marriage, basically, annulled. In so doing they (as it seemed to me) stoop to lying and other quite villainous actions. The resolution, however, is quite logical, and ultimately right -- as it is a step in addressing the more serious problems in this society. (That is, the history and present effects of the separation of Lakewalkers and farmers.) I only hope that in future volumes Dag's mother and brother get their comeuppance. Incidentally, in the first book I thought the world Bujold created was wholly a secondary world. But in this volume there are some clues, both geographical and zoological, that suggested to me that the story might actually be set in North America. Perhaps, even, a far future North America, isolated from the other continents (perhaps because of the menace of the bogles). I may be way off base about this, but that's a notion I had while reading the book. The Last Colony is a nominee for the Hugo this year. It's John Scalzi's third book in his Old Man's War series -- and he intends it to close the series, and indeed it does finish the narrative arc well, answering the questions raised in the earlier books and coming to an satisfying and surprising conclusion. And it's pretty enjoyable, though I wouldn't say it's worthy of the Hugo. As the story opens, John Perry and Jane Sagan, now married and returned to normal human bodies, are living on a quiet colonial world, as local ombudsman and police chief respectively. But they get an offer from the Colonial Defense Forces and the Colonial Union -- to lead a new colony, an experimental colony. Unlike previous colonies, with colonists recruited entirely from Earth's poorer countries, this one will be composed of people from 10 well established human colony planets. This seems likely to be a political mess, dealing with 10 different groups with different goals. Not to mention the potential dangers on the planet (which turn out to include an unexpected intelligent species). But ... that's hardly even the least of Perry and Sagan's problems. Revealing any of the twists -- and there are several -- might be unfair, so I won't. But Scalzi is concerned with helping to show us the real place of humanity in this very hostile universe, the real motivations of the Colonial Union (humanity's space based government), and a potential (however slim) for something like peace between the various alien species. Given the starting point, the ending point of the book is hard to see -- and to be honest I think the plot developments, while interesting and clever, are a bit farfetched. (Suffice it to say that Scalzi manages to make the extermination of humanity the most likely future.) Anyway, it's a fun book, and a pretty thoughtful one, though there's a bit of deck stacking going on here and there. It's certainly not a humanity uber alles book. I thought the characterization a bit thin -- most everyone talks just about the same. And though Jane is a major character and is present almost throughout the book, somehow she almost doesn't seem to be there, and her relationship with John, that I thought worked well in the other books, comes off as almost an afterthought. Bottom line: good, not great, but quite well done in the sense of fairly resolving the series. David Drake's When the Tide Rises is the latest in his series about Daniel Leary and Adele Mundy, members of the Royal Cinnabar Navy in a far future. The RCN is a space navy, so their adventures are interplanetary adventures. But, as Drake openly acknowledges, the series resembles to a great extent Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series. Partly by clear design (Leary is an Aubrey figure, and Mundy a Maturin figure, sort of), and partly by using the same model (the life history of the British Admiral Cochran). It must be said however that Leary and Mundy are to a much great extent what might be called pulp heroes: supernaturally good at what they do, not just "very good" (and sometimes lucky) as with Aubrey and Maturin. This newest story is much of a piece with the previous ones, which is to say it's fairly light-hearted fun. Leary and Mundy and their ship are sent to star system that has rebelled against the Alliance, which is Cinnabar's Napoleonic-analogue enemy. They are supposed to try to reinforce the rebellion to keep the ALliance distracted -- particularly as they seem about to be able to take over a critical planet that controls a crucial jump nexus. Leary runs into some difficulty dealing with the fractious and corrupt local rulers of the rebelling systems, and indeed is betrayed by them, but manages to maneuver them into helping the RCN almost despite themselves ... well, you know how it goes. Some neat space battle action, some clever political maneuvering, and some advancements in the personal stories of the two, in this case most particularly in Mundy's story. If you've been reading this series, this is as good as the others, basically -- enjoyable stuff, nothing earthshattering.
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In recent years I have felt that the Hugo ballots have been better than the Nebula ballots. And I admit, with the recent announcements of the Nebula shortlist and Hugo ballot my kneejerk reaction was to think the same was true again. Once again, to emphasize, my issue with the Nebula ballot being mainly the good stories left off, not that the stories on the ballot are terribly bad. (Same with the Hugo, really, with one or two exceptions in each case.) But the other day -- well, just yesterday, as I was enjoying myself preparing for my colonoscopy (insert all the jokes you want right here!), I was musing on a head to head Hugo/Nebula ballot comparison. And I came to the conclusion that, with the exception of one category (novelette) the ballots are very comparable in quality -- and indeed the Nebula ballot is better by a bit in the novella category. One thing that facilitated this comparison is that the Nebulas this year have a very high proportion of stories from 2007 on the shortlist. Anyway, category by category: Best Novel BOTH:
The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
HUGO:
Brasyl by Ian McDonald
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
The Last Colony by John Scalzi
Halting State by Charles Stross
NEBULA:
Odyssey - McDevitt, Jack
The Accidental Time Machine - Haldeman, Joe
The New Moon's Arms - Hopkinson, Nalo
Ragamuffin - Buckell, Tobias The best novel of the year made both ballots, so that's a good thing. I sort of paired the other ones off: Odyssey with Rollback -- both slightish books by perennial nominees -- edge, probably to Odyssey, the Nebula nominee. The Accidental Time Machine with The Last Colony -- again, both a little on the slight side. I am actually in the middle of The Last Colony now, and enjoying it -- depending on how it finishes, I might well rank it ahead of the Haldeman, but not by much. Ragamuffin with Brasyl -- both definite SF novels with settings derived from the Caribbean or South America to some extent. Brasyl is the better of the two (and indeed it's the second best novel on either list of those I've read) but Ragamuffin is darn fine. And finally, I haven't yet read either Halting State or The New Moon's Arms, but both have been generally praised in reviews. On balance -- pretty close to a push. Perhaps a slight edge to the Hugo ballot for having Brasyl, but then again perhaps we want to demerit the Hugo ballot for having Rollback. Best Novella BOTH:
"Fountains of Age" by Nancy Kress
"Stars Seen Through Stone" by Lucius Shepard
"Memorare" by Gene Wolfe
HUGO:
"Recovering Apollo 8" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
"All Seated on the Ground" by Connie Willis
NEBULA:
Kiosk - Sterling, Bruce
Awakening - Berman, Judith
The Helper and His Hero - Hughes, Matt As three of these stories, including my favorite ("Memorare") are on both ballots, we only need to compare the unique ones. I really wasn't that impressed with either the Rusch or Willis story on the Hugo ballot, and to my mind all three of the Nebula unique stories are better than the two Hugo unique stories. So, I'd say this ballot is definitely better on the Nebula side. Best Novelette BOTH:
"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang
HUGO:
"The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics" by Daniel
Abraham
"Dark Integers" by Greg Egan
"Glory" by Greg Egan
"Finisterra" by David Moles
NEBULA:
The Fiddler of Bayou Teche - Sherman, Delia
Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter - Ryman, Geoff
The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs Of North Park After the Change
- Johnson, Kij
Safeguard - Kress, Nancy
The Children's Crusade - Bailey, Robin Wayne
Child, Maiden, Mother, Crone - Bramlett, Terry In this case the honors go pretty clearly to the Hugo ballot. The best story on the Nebula ballot (besides Chiang's) is the Ryman -- a very good story, but also a 2006 story, so you can't blame the Hugo voters for not including it: they did, on last year's ballot. The rest of the Nebula list includes mostly pretty decent stories (as mentioned, the one I really didn't that much like was the Bailey), but the rest of the Hugo list is absolutely outstanding. It comes pretty close to actually representing the best 5 novelettes of the year. (Replace "Glory" with Kelly Link's "Light" and I'd endorse such a statement, though there are 2 or 3 more novelettes also deserving.) Thus, the novelette ballot on the Hugo side is, to my taste, much the superior one.
Best Short Story
BOTH:
None
HUGO:
"Last Contact" by Stephen Baxter
"Tideline" by Elizabeth Bear
"Who's Afraid of Wolf 359?" by Ken MacLeod
"Distant Replay" by Mike Resnick
"A Small Room in Koboldtown" by Michael Swanwick
NEBULA:
Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse - Duncan, Andy
Titanium Mike Saves the Day - Levine, David D.
Captive Girl - Pelland, Jennifer
Always - Fowler, Karen Joy
Pride - Turzillo, Mary
The Story of Love - Nazarian, Vera In this case there are no stories common to both ballots. The thing is, neither ballot thrills me, but neither is full of awful stories either. I'm reprinting one from each: "Who's Afraid of Wolf 359?" on the Hugo ballot, and "Always" on the Nebula ballot. So those will get my votes. (Well, I don't vote for the Nebulas, but you take my point.) Beyond that, I think the ballots are pretty comparable -- a set of generally fine stories that bother me only in that I had several stories last year that I thought still better (most notably Ken MacLeod's "Jesus Christ, Reanimator" and Holly Phillips's "Three Days of Rain"). Bottom line, both ballots taken as a whole (and not considering the additional categories) I have to rank the two ballots as pretty close, within the margin of statistical error (if you will).
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