Sheila's LiveJournal

If you haven't been watching Sherlock on PBS, you've been missing a very great treat. This is some of the best script writing I've seen on TV in a long time, intelligent and witty. The two stars, Benedict Cumberbatch (Warhorse) and Martin Freeman (The Hobbit) are talented and appealing, and their relationship is at times hilarious and sometimes very moving. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson come alive here as never before.(And Dr Watson isn't just a slightly befuddled side-kick -- although he is that too -- but more and more as the series progresses, a real associate to the genius Holmes.)

It doesn't matter if you've read the original Sherlock Holmes stories, or seen one or more of the movie versions (most of them awful, especially the more recent ones). You can start afresh here with this modern re-telling. And if you've read the originals, you can marvel at how the script writers (with roots in Dr Who) have stayed true to Conan Doyle's work, yet brought something fresh to it.

Unfortunately, we only get three episodes at a time and are now approaching Number Three of Season Two, with a long wait for Season Three. But they're available on DVD -- which is what I'm going out to purchase right now!

Here’s the list of finalists for the 2012 John W. Campbell Memorial Award (in alphabetical order):

 Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Kathleen Ann Goonan, This Shared Dream
Will McIntosh, Soft Apocalypse
China Miéville, Embassytown
 Christopher Priest. The Islanders
Joan Sloncziewski, The Highest Frontier
Michael Swanwick, Dancing With Bears
Lavie Tidhar, Osama
 Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse
Gene Wolfe, Home Fires
Rob  Ziegler, Seed.

The winner will be announced at the Campbell Conference, July 6th. Congratulations to all the finalists! Some wonderful novels in that list.

 It occurs to me that Christians were given a commandment to love our neighbor, and from  what I've learned of other major religions that -- or the Golden Rule -- is at the heart of their teaching too. Why then do so many religious leaders preach hate and fear? Because that's what's behind this dread of letting other people live their lives the way they see fit. Fear of change, the unknown, difference -- Not like us!

"Gay marriage is a threat to straight marriage!" Really? The only "threat" to straight marriage is divorce. And if they're so afraid that Gays are breaking God's commandments (odd, when He supposedly created homosexuals to be what they are, just as he created heterosexuals to be what they are too), then it's God's business to deal with it, if and when He desires. And didn't Jesus say something about not judging? I didn't notice him saying very much about homosexuality, when he had a lot to say about everything else. Perhaps it wasn't important? Perhaps he wasn't afraid?

"Fear not," said the angels, over and over again. And Jesus commanded, "Love one another as I have loved you." How anyone can claim to be a believer in God and ignore the greatest of all commandments beats me.

But then, I was raised to celebrate difference, not be afraid of it.

The editors of James Gunn's new journal, Ad Astra, have invited me to come to the Campbell Conference at the University of Kansas in July to talk about the paper. (Dates are July 5-7.)

Their acceptance of this article gives me renewed enthusiasm for the whole project which, as many of you know, originated in a series of online blogs on myth, memory and metaphor in hard sf. Which one to expand next? Prometheus? The Magus? Apocalypse? The Wild Hunt? (I have at least a dozen.)

(I couldn't resist the alliteration!)

James Gunn's new journal, Ad Astra, has just accepted my article, "Fantastic Journeys of the Mythic Kind." It's a 4000 word section from a longer work-in-progress about the intersection of myth, metaphor and science fiction. This section deals with the Hero's Journey and how it gets used in hard sf. We all know that myth underpins most fantasy, but it's there among the robots and the rocketships too, and my intention is to ferret it out.

Some of you may already be familiar with other parts of this work as they originally appeared as blogs for the SFWA-Nebula site (now gone away) and re-printed here on LiveJournal. I'm currently revising and expanding the work which is really the culmination of nearly thirty years of teaching science fiction on the college level and thinking about these things,

Obviously, I'm very pleased to have the work validated in this fashion.

Announcing the appearance of a new thrilling star: My Great-Grandbaby who arrived on March 1st in Washington State. That's his first publicity photo up there. He weighed in at 8lbs 8 ozs, and was 20 and a half inches long.

Mark this future author's name in your calendars, folks: Tyler Finch Olmstead.

I just returned from a week of sitting around in my pyjamas holding him, and I'm showing withdrawal symptoms already.

Last weekend, I took two grandsons to San Diego to enjoy ConDor. It wasn't their first trip as they went with me last year as well. I like to take the grandbabies to cons -- indoctrinating them with SF and F at an early age, I suppose you'd call it.

Actually, I began years ago when my youngest daughter was about twelve. I went to my first convention, a Westercon in Portland, and dragged her along. Not only did she fall in love with fandom, she eventually married a young man she met at a WorldCon. The two grandsons who are the current convention-goers are their sons. In between, I've taken two other grandsons and two granddaughters, and as they grow up and move away to college the younger ones get their turn. I've been accompanied by grandkids to numerous Westercons and LosCons, a couple of WorldCons, and even one trip to Balticon. In fact, I don't know how I ever managed to bring up children before I discovered fandom and the convention circuit.

But of all of them, ConDor is one of the best. It's small, very well-run, enjoyable and super friendly. They also have an awesome track of children's programming -- hands-on Harry Potter stuff, Pirates. One set of grandkids went on safari around the hotel grounds with a costumed "Hogwarts instructor," learning about the properties of plants they encountered; they're still talking about it!

And it doesn't hurt that ConDor offers a poetry track, so I get to spend time with poet friends such as Sam Henderson, Deborah Kolodji and Kendall Evans. I'll be there again next year. And if you live anywhere near, maybe you should consider it too.

There’ve been a lot of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels published in sf recently. I suppose that’s to be expected, given the harsh news of the times. Most of them follow increasingly predictable paths – the bomb falls, the terrorists take over, the machines take over, viruses run amok, the free world becomes more and more repressive – and so, after a while, they make for ho-hum reading. I’ve seen several of those scenarios in recent year’s Campbell Award hopefuls. But now and again some author surprises us with a new version of how things fall apart. Two years ago, Paolo Bacigalupi won the award for the absorbing tale of how Big Agra might take over the world.

One new novel I just finished, that I think stands out from the crowd while still dealing powerfully with the problem we sense that our civilization is in dire straits, is Will McIntosh’s Soft Apocalypse, published by Nightshade Books. No nuclear fireworks here, or terrorist plots, or annihilation by celestial object, just a little-by-little sliding into a dissolution of the free society we prize today that is all the more believable and terrifying because it is so relentless. We get to follow a group of very likable (though flawed) group of people for ten years in the Southeastern United States as they form a loose tribe of wanderers, trying to stay one step ahead of the collapse of civilization that we  – like these characters – have come to take for granted.

The novel has all the hallmarks of the best science fiction: the future gadgets are there (though as part of the scenery and not too many of them, thank heavens), but the story of real people struggling to maintain real lives is front and center. Birth, death, friendship, love, brutality, starvation, even the role of pets in our lives, all are considered here. And at the end, we find ourselves confronted with a very painful dilemma: What does it mean to be human? And how much are we willing to sacrifice of that “humanity” in order to stay alive?

Highly recommended.

The bigots lost this round. The California appeals court refused to overthrow the judge's decision that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional. Now on to the SCUSA. Keep your fingers crossed they refuse to hear it.

Could we finally be joining the 20th century, let alone the 21st?

If you haven’t read China Miéville before this – or if you enjoy thinking about how languages work and whether or not we have any hope of deciphering alien ones – you owe it to yourself to read Embassytown. His books are not the easiest to read; they demand that you pay attention and think about what he’s proposing. If you’re expecting a mindless story about love among the vampires, or a predictable space opera, or a (yawn) gosh!wow! tour of the galaxy’s shiny Big Objects, you’re going to be surprised. Miéville treats his readers as adults.

Embassytown sits on a corner of Ariekei, a world at the edge of the dangerous “immer” where distances deceive and pilots must seek beacons to avoid catastrophe. A jumping off spot for other voyages, the planet has been colonized by humans (perhaps accidentally because we are introduced to the “Wreck”) but it’s still hostile if you wander too far from the safe breathing space of the human enclave. Ambassadors come in pairs to the planet to act as linguists, trying to communicate with a race whose language is so vastly different from human norms that it takes two specially bred clones speaking as one to make even the slightest advance. It turns out that humans can learn to understand the alien language, but even the Ambassador pairs can’t hope to speak it fluently.

But Miéville gives us more to think about: The language of the Ariekei is not symbolic. They can’t use metaphor and they can’t lie. Other authors have given us aliens who can’t lie, of course, but nobody has worked out the consequences in such rich –  and terrifying – detail. His construction of an alien language is complex and compelling. I found myself putting reading on hold for a few seconds at a time and treating the situation as if it were real. I felt as if I should be taking notes to bring back to my own Guild of Xenolinguists! How on earth could we possibly make any progress given those parameters? But of course, we aren’t on Earth, and being human we’ll give the problem our best try – and our violence and our treachery too.

It’s a great read: fascinating characters, a suspenseful plot, awesome new setting, and a magnificent treatise on the whole problem of alien communication. Read it.