writer. screenwriter. learning person. loves being human.
I told Nicola earlier that I was doing a post about the Hugos.
She said, Oh, another award we’ll never get.
Later I told her that I had annoyed someone today.
She said, Oh, another person who wants to throw you in a cupboard and then hit the cupboard with a hammer.
And then later she said, Oh, let’s have another beer.
Is it any wonder that I love her?
Congratulations to all the winners of the 2009 Hugo Awards (announced last night), with a special shout-out to our friends Cheryl Morgan (Best Fan Writer) and Ellen Datlow (Best Editor Short Form). Huzzahs all around!
Nicola and I will be in Olympia (WA) on October 24 for SciFiFest at the Olympia Timberland Library. It sounds like a great deal of fun and we’re delighted to be part of it.
Check it out:
October 24, 5:30-9:00 PM
5:30 — Readings by Nicola and Kelley
6:30 — Seattle SciFi Museum curator Jacob MacMurray (who also designed Nicola’s utterly gorgeous memoir) will present a video of interview clips from famous SF authors.
7:30 — BlöödHag takes the stage and plays our ears off. And then they emcee an SF fashion show! Prizes will include Most Steampunk, Best Star Trek impersonator, Most Robotic, and more. Come dressed to win, kids. How often in your life can you get both a concert and a fashion prize from the world’s most science-fictionally literate heavy-metal rock band?
Please mark your calendars and join us!
I haven’t done a Jukebox post recently because right now I’m not listening to my own collection — I’m listening to the music from cities around the world.
CitySounds is a brilliant cool (simple, elegant) music site featuring music uploaded by people in selected cities to SoundCloud, or new music produced by people in those cities using the SoundCloud API.
Much of the world seems to be into electronica/house, but I just heard a lovely acoustic guitar/vocal track from Paris and, from Amsterdam, Isaac Hayes (happy!) — so I certainly haven’t heard it all. And I want to.
Come join me at CitySounds. I might be in Tokyo or London or LA…
Enjoy your day.
Here are the results of the Choose Your Own Apocalypse game that was part of Josh Levin’s American Apocalypse series over at Slate.com this week. Along with the overall results, you find demographic breakdowns and popular scenario groupings. What we chose (and who “we” are) make fascinating reading.
All 144 scenarios are ranked here in order of popularity, and the Slate crew has also created a “social network” of scenario relationships which is incredibly interesting to me — for example, if you chose Gay Marriage as one of your top 5 US Killers, you may also believe that Obama as God, Cloning, Voluntary Human Extinction, Decadence (natch!) and, weirdly, Bottled Water will also be the downfalls of our society.
I loved this series, and I’d love to see more online journalism take this interactive, multimedia approach to reporting on issues in ways that help readers build a three-dimensional understanding of them. Hyperlinks are great — yay for the internets — but without a focused and professional mind behind the curtain to frame the context, organize the linked information, and create opportunities for interactive access that are both interesting and revelatory, links are just more ways to become lost or overloaded. Thanks, Josh Levin. Great stuff.
The Science Fiction Message Board’s Author Central forum has begun an “Author August post-a-thon extravaganza.” Here’s the scoop from Author Central:
From SF’s earliest days to the latest hot new talent, this 4th annual event has as wide-ranging a list of writers as anyone could wish to see. Every day during August a different author will be spotlighted in their own thread in our Author Central forum. We encourage all to visit on that day and post photographs, reminiscences, cover scans, links to appropriate sites, reviews, and other reactions. With 31 days and 31 authors there’s a chance to share what you know as well as learn new things, so come and join in the fun!
I’m jazzed to be included and hope that you’ll join me on August 15. Nicola will be featured on August 20. But don’t wait for us — go on over now and reminisce about favorite writers or learn about writers who are new to you.
Thanks to the Science Fiction Message Board for a great idea.
2009 Author August
8/1 — Alfred Bester
8/2 — William Tenn (Phillip Klass)
8/3 — Gene Wolfe
8/4 — E.T.A. Hoffman
8/5 — Norman Spinrad
8/6 — Lucy Sussex
8/7 — Robert J. Sawyer
8/8 — Phillip Reeve
8/9 — Ian McDonald
8/10 — Ken MacLeod
8/11 — Dan Simmons
8/12 — S.M. Stirling
8/13 — Sean McMullen
8/14 — James Blish
8/15 — Kelley Eskridge
8/16 — Octavia Butler
8/17 — Charles Stross
8/18 — Colin Kapp
8/19 — Fritz Leiber
8/20 — Nicola Griffith
8/21 — Hal Clement
8/22 — J.G. Ballard
8/23 — Alison Sinclair
8/24 — E.C. Tubb
8/25 — Neal Asher
8/26 — Karl Schroeder
8/27 — Jack L. Chalker
8/28 — John Varley
8/29 — Alan Dean Foster
8/30 — David J. Williams
8/31 — Kurd Lasswitz
This week I heard a piece on NPR about Giving Anonymously, a nonprofit organization that allows anyone to make an anonymous gift to someone you know who is in need but may be too proud to accept your gift in person.
You provide GA the recipient’s mailing address and your credit card number. They contact the person and then send them a check; and ask them to call a toll-free number to leave a voicemail message to verify receipt. They then send you an mp3 of the call so you know your gift is complete. You can hear the NPR piece on the Giving Anonymously website, including some of the messages from people who bought food, medicine for their children, the stuff of daily life.
GA was started by a Washington couple whose neighbor helped them pay their rent one month. They wanted to facilitate individual giving — to family, friends, neighbors — without the sometimes relationship-straining awkwardness that can happen face-to-face, when personal pride and cultural notions collide with need and the very real human desire to help.
I don’t know what it’s like for you, but I grew up with the notion that we solved our own problems and didn’t ask for help. Admitting need was admitting vulnerability; and we were vulnerable enough without admitting it. I still have trouble asking for help sometimes, and even more trouble accepting it gracefully: I often feel the need to rebalance the scales. Nicola points out to me often that people give because they want to: not to feel superior to me, but to feel connected with me, and to feel as though they’ve made my life a little easier. I understand that: when I help, that’s exactly why I do it. So why is it so much harder to receive than it is to give?
I’m fine: I have wonderful family and friends and neighbors who will help me when I need it, whether it’s a home repair or a hot meal or a gift of money. But if you know someone in need who doesn’t have that support, or doesn’t know how to accept it, then here’s a way you can give that demands no tipping of the scales between you. They’ll never know who loved them enough to help them: they’ll just know that someone does.
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
And it’s not just about being able to write a check. It’s being able to touch somebody’s life.
— Oprah Winfrey
Yesterday I pointed you to the Slate.com series on the end of the world US (yes, I do know the difference, but the strikeout thingie doesn’t show up that well in post titles, and I couldn’t resist the REM reference).
Within a half hour of posting yesterday, I found my way to this video. And maybe I’m naive, but I believe that connecting with each other — all of us, every single person on the planet, even if only for a moment — is what can save us from apocalypse. I think President Obama believes this too; and it heartens me — a good word, hearten — that he reads letters, that he responds, that he makes space in his day for our stories and not just The Big News from the Big World.
And seriously, there’s a job I could love — Director of Correspondence. That combination of communication and story and process and management, moving from the big picture of who needs to know what right down to the level of an individual American’s story. Another big what if?
Enjoy your day. And if you’ve got something to say, write the President a letter.
(PS — Happy birthday, Mr. President. I hope you have some fun today.)
Over at Slate.com, Josh Levin is running the week-long series “How is America going to end?”
This kind of thing is internet crack to science fiction writers, screenwriters, readers and moviegoers; survivalists; and those who are convinced that God Will Punish America For (giving rights to bad people, legalizing abortion and flag-burning and medical mar-i-joo-ana, putting a black man in the white house, fill in your own blank). And it’s also mighty sobering. I bet your average Roman didn’t seriously consider the dissolution of empire until it was breaking down his front door, and I don’t either — not because I lack imagination, but because most of my bandwidth is taken up with daily priorities and interactions with family and friends and my interior creative life.
But people who are not me are thinking about these things, and I’m going to follow them on their journey this week. Want to come along? Start with Levin’s introduction/overview — lots of interesting links — and then move on to a discussion with four futurists about their theories.
And be sure to play Choose Your Own Apocalypse! Scroll over the icons on the Apocalypse Board to see your options, and find more complete descriptions of each choice in this single-page list).
Let me know what you think.
I went wandering through the internet a few days ago and found these quotes, and was moved to put them together into a little story.
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
(Vaclav Havel, Dale Carnegie and Raymond Williams)
I have a complicated relationship with hope and her sisters — power, will, fortune, privilege, guts, blind dumb stubbornness. I struggle with the difference between “being realistic” and quivering on the track with my eyes closed while the train comes roaring through, because frankly the difference isn’t always so apparent to me. And here’s the thing: sometimes what passes for hope in this world isn’t so different from that quivering helplessness either. It’s not always easy to know whether to stand or step aside or actually leap and grapple.
But I do know that I like today’s little story: it’s not about being helpless or willfully blind; and I never want to be convinced by despair.