Feels Like Monday

My wife took yesterday off so we could stay up late to watch the election returns. We fell asleep fairly early anyway, but did wake up for Obama’s rally speech.

I want to spend just a second or two describing how I feel before moving on to the more mundane SF stuff.

I remember Kennedy’s election and the mood throughout the country at the time. I remember the Moon landing in ’69 and the mood throughout both the country and the world. I remember the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the similar feelings that prevailed.

I can’t exactly describe those feelings without using words that have been done to death already: hope, belief in the future, limitless possibilities once again stretching out before us. What I can say is that I felt those same feelings upon learning of Obama’s election.

Like waking from a nightmare to find yourself snug and safe in a warm bed with the sudden realization that it was just a nightmare. Like you and your SO getting over that argument and remembering that your love for each other is more important than any other petty consideration. Like realizing that you are still alive and that tomorrow really IS a brand new day.

Like believing once again that we might actually be going someplace, might be doing good things and that we can once again look at ourselves in the mirror and smile at what we see.

***

Skiffytube’s rating has gone up – way up. Now they’ll chart the traffic at HQ, show everyone that their audience numbers are down and use it to drive the stake even further into their SF content. A couple of marginal movies and a Doctor Who extravaganze later in the week are really responsible for the rise in rating.

Just finished David Edelman’s Multireal for the Ray Gun Revival review. My review of the first volume of his Jump 225 trilogy – Infoquake – will be appearing in this month’s RGR offering – due out any day now.

I’m now back to reading Niven and Lerner’s Juggler of Worlds, which I’ll be writing up for SFReview and possible others. Next on the agenda will be Dreaming Again, Jack Dann’s Australian SF anthology. The one that has the last Chandler story to be published in it.

Then – who knows. We’ll see what comes in and what gets offered.

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Where’s Skiffy Tube Going?

 

As you can see above, Skiffy Tube’s SFPR has risen above 10% again. Does this presage a resurgance of their interest in real science fiction fare?

No. It’s just one of those statistical anamoly thingies.

What is surprising is that they managed to do it with two days in their schedule entirely devoid of ANY SF content whatsoever.

They’re testing us. They’re watching those viewership numbers and comparing non-SF days to SF days and, of course, with shows that pander to idiocy, they’re going to get a higher marketshare on the non-SF days.

SF is HARD. You have to THINK about stuff when you watch it. Which means it’s never going to be popular…

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BIG NEWS! (For me, anyways)

I was originally going to start off with a bit of personal news, but what you see up there knocked that story off the front page. 

Skiffy Tube DROPS SF CONTENT BELOW 10%!

If there were any justice in the world, that headline would knock the economic woes off the front page of every paper in the country.

Fortunately for me, I get to be the one to break the news. 

In one weeks time there are 168 hours available for a broadcaster to fill with content.  Ten percent of that would be just a few minutes shy of 17 hours.  I don’t know about you, but 17 hours of television is about as much as I watch in a week. It would still constitute the bulk of three or four days worth for the average person.  And yet, Sci Fi can’t even give us that.

It won’t be long now before they change their name and the fact that there used to be a channel exclusively devoted to science fiction will have become a thing of the past.  Guess I’ll have to spend more time hanging out with the ‘geeky young guys’…

My personal news is a bit more personal.  A few months ago, Fred Kiesche III – college friend and book reviewer extraordinaire, (and blogger for Texas Best Grok) announced that he was a featured character in one of David Drake’s forthcoming novels.

Naturally I was jealous.  Green with envy.  Apoplectic.  Which I told Fred at the time.

Well, now I don’t have to be so jealous.  I got my mention - not as a character, but as one of the people who helped get Chandler’s last unpublished story into print.

And Matt, the book review editor at Ray Gun Revival (who I’ve started writing for) just sent me along a copy!

It’s Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again if you’re interested.

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LOST Not FOUND

I’m probably committing sacrilege with every word in this post, but sticking my finger in the eye of conventional wisdom seems to be a ‘thing’ with me.

Skiffy Tube has begun its long anticipated re-run of the JJ Abrams wonder show LOST and I accidentally got drawn in to watching it.

I was not drawn in by the wonderousness of the show, nor was I captivated by the splendiferous acting of the ensemble cast.  My experience was more like that of the extra who got sucked in to the turbine.

In other words, it literally sucked.  And then it splashed bloody little fleshy pieces all over the landscape.

What initially attracted me was an incessant rising and falling jet engine whine.  The TV was running in the other room (I rarely watch the bloody thing) and somehow it managed to find itself set to Skiffy Tube.  I was finally annoyed enough to leave the keyboard.  Once I realized that I had a chance to watch LOST from the beginning, I decided to leave it on and settled in to watch the first few episodes to see what all the moaning was about.

First I’ll say this.  How the Sci Fi Channel expects to keep an audience with 4+ minutes of commercials between a scant ten minutes of program is way beyond my powers of intellectual analysis.  First they turn off their core audience, then they blatantly ignore their new audience’s complete lack of attention span.  WTF?  Even I had trouble remembering what I was watching. 

This kind of thing only makes sense if you assume that the SICs real plan is to run the channel into the ground. If I were an investor, I’d hire one of those forensic accountants and have him do some forensicing. This might be one of those Zero Mostel ‘Producers’ deals…

Anyway, to get back to LOST.  Maybe I have just too damned much experience with movies, television shows and literature, but I found the whole thing A: boring, B: easily anticipated and C: stupid.

I will not be hanging on the edge of my seat to find out what happens next because I already know: the stereotyped characters will fulfill their roles as competent young doctor, snivelling coward, blonde bimbo, creepy guy, jolly fat man, cute young kid and such.  They’ll all do stupid, non-sensical, panicky things, fights will break out when the action slows down and the fright moments will be telegraphed from ten miles away.

That this is what passes for a blockbuster television show from the creative genius savior of television drama reminds me, sadly, of the fact that television audiences get what they deserve and what they can handle.  Which these days appears to be – not much.

Just a few examples from the first couple of episodes to illustrate my point:

The doctor, the Felon and the Drug Addict make their way the jet’s cockpit to retrieve the transceiver.  There they discover the Pilot still alive and are menaced by the GIANT SHADOW.  The Pilot, who could barely move, the one who’s been unconscious for 16 hours, STICKS HIS HEAD OUT THE BROKEN COCKPIT WINDOW and is, of course, immediately sucked out to oblivion, accompanied by screams and raining blood.

Don’t be embarrassed.  Raise your hand if this took you by surprise.  I knew the moment the pilot gasped his first fright-take gasp that he was a goner, and the moment I saw the broken cockpit window I knew he was gonna get sucked out of it. Double cliche. Boring.

THEN, everyone runs away from the comparative safety of the fuselage interior.  Riiiiiiight.  Call me a snivelling coward, but.  When there is a giant shadow-thing lurking in the jungle and you’re inside a cave, stay in the cave.  There was no compelling reason for the characters to leave. Sheer idiocy.  Boring.

Later, the Muslim manages to repair the transceiver and there is much anxiety over a fading battery.  Maybe this was some kind of oblique commentary on the  bankruptcy of Muslim extremism or something, but I think it was just poor writing.  If you can repair a transceiver, you can remove the battery or disconnect the leads.  When the battery is disconnected, the little demons inside can’t get out. Dumb. Boring.

The battery thing put the capper on this show for me. If the survivors are that stupid, there’s no point in rescuing them.  And no point in continuing to watch this poor excuse of a fantasy thriller.

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True Conservatives are REALLY SCREWED

I hate the way the (biased) press and the pundits, not to mention the rabidly-blind partisans, twist the buzz words and get people to accept their new definitions through repeated vocal hammer blows to the temple.  Dems hardly dare use the word ‘liberal’ anymore because of its (incorrect) associations in the minds of a lot of the public.  Reps aren’t too fond of always be lumped in with the religious right either.

It got me thinking about the non-political usages of the words conservative and liberal.

Common parlance takes conservative to essentially mean – maintenance of the status quo.  Of course Republicans would have you believe it means ‘fiscal responsibility’ or ‘small government’ or even, in some cases, ‘traditional family values’, but in essence and in Websters it stands for the preservation of what’s happening now and/or a return to what was ‘good enough for grandpa’.  Change is bad, therefore we MUST fear it.

Liberal, to most people, means something like “empty-headed-animal-food-trough-wiper” (if I can borrow from Monty Python).  Tree-huggers, do-gooders, people who would allow pedophiles to run rampant in our streets because you really should look at both sides of an issue.  In other words, clueless idiocy.

What Websters says liberal really means is – Willing To Embrace Change.  Reform. Try new things, examine other options.

I can’t think of any other time in history when the original definitions of those two words – conservative and liberal – weren’t the perfect words to use in describing the two team’s running for office.

McCain/Palin: what else are they advocating except ‘stay the course’ and ‘turn the ship around so we can head back to the previous century”?  

They’ve got that fear of change element going on too: things may be bad economically (not that we’ll admit it) but they’ll get worse!  Terrorists will be living next door if we leave Iraq! Your child might read a library book (omg!) that will turn him or her into a homosexual!

Obama/Biden: Change. Change. Change. Change. Change.  Hey – a campaign funded by the people, not the special interests (OMG – change!) Talk BEFORE saber rattling (OMG – change!) Remember the Constitution. (OMG – BIG change!)

There are plenty of other people who write about these kinds of things a lot better than I can, but what I find truly ironic about the whole situation is that true conservatives – those who hew to the original definition and meaning of both the word and the politics – are well and truly screwed this election. On the one hand you’ve got Palin: A WOMAN!  OMFG!  CHANGE! and on the other you’ve got Obama: A BLACK MAN! OMbejeebusFG! CHANGE!

No matter how you slice it, Conservatives will be voting for CHANGE this year.  Hey, it’s a step in the left direction…

***

One day late on the update to Skiffy Tube’s SF Purity Rating.  I almost missed this unprecedented rise in SFnalness. Slightly more than 40%.  Why, that’s really close to FIFTY percent.  Which is like, half.

Wow.

Don’t get too excited though. This temporary increase is only due to incessant airings of Tales From The Darkside (16 episodes on Monday – yeesh!) 8 hours of Doctor Who today (I know, not such a bad thing) and 10 hours of Star Gate franchises tomorrow.

Sarah Palin is presumably Sarah 24/7. If you take a LIBERAL approach to her belief systems, you could reasonably argue that the broadcast in her head is SF, which means that no matter what it does, Skiffy Tube will NEVER equal Palin’s SFPR.  Even if they showed TDTESS 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year (which would be an improvement), they’re still gonna break for commercials, and I don’t think Palin ever does.

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Now It Is Clear

that the one sure way to up your traffic with a blog is to stick XXX in the title.

As I suspected, the fascination with SFnal BDSM imagery has not faded with time. 

I guess I’ll have to do some kind of weekly feature: Feast your eyes on this week’s PROBED BY ALIENS retro cover…

Lots of livejournal coverage of that one.  Makes me wonder a bit about who I’m hanging out with.

***

File 770 posted my outrage over twisted history.  Mike makes a distinction between ‘sci fi fanzine’ and ‘fandom’s fanzines’.  Considering my small rant about sci fi below, I guess Mike’s right. 

***

Skiffytube has dropped back down in the SF purity ratings game this week.  Not even a full third of the programming is remotely science fiction.  This was accomplihsed by removing all SF content from the channel for an entire day this week.

It’s probably a test.

***

In line with skiffy tube the channel, we now have the skiffy language police. Alistair Reynolds says “So here’s a suggestion. We get over the sci-fi thing. We can still keep talking about SF and science fiction, but we should give up the knee-jerk sense of insult whenever the sci-fi label is applied to what we do.”

Wrong.  This attitude is so dreadfully Neville Chamberlain.  Earlier in the piece Alistair said “To the average person in the street, sci-fi is what we do. It’s what copy-editors will always insist on putting into newspaper articles, even if the original author used the terms SF or science fiction. And guess what, I’m a sci-fi writer. I write sci-fi books. They get shelved in the sci-fi section.”

To them it’s what we do. And to the current administration, what they do at Guantanamo Bay isn’t torture. It’s ‘intensive interrogation’.

SF - SCIENCE FICTION – is about words and language as much as it is about anything else. Any political hack will tell you that once you start letting the other side create the definitions, you’ve lost.

It may be a lost cause – it certainly seems that way – but I’d much prefer to go down fighting than to tuck tail and run.

Maintaining the distinction may actually work in the long run.  Every day I get news feeds from google. One covers the keyword Sci Fi, the other the keyword Science Fiction. The Sci Fi feed produces links to stories that are almost universally crap: ECW discussions, bad anime, clueless ramblings about what star someone hopes to get an autograph from, paranormal television show reviews, self-published novels seeking a reader.   The Science Fiction feed produces links to reviews of real SF literature, commentary about conventions, fanzine reviews, new technologies, serious discussion and some frivolity. (The SF feed gets stories from the San Francisco Chronicle…)

It is clear from two plus years of google newreader feeds that Sci Fi is the great unwashed public’s name of choice for vaguely spacey CRAP. So let them keep it and use it. Let it spread. Because as popular terms spread, they water down and generalize, and I wouldn’t be at all upset if Sci Fi becomes a generalized word for CRAP.

THOSE people who use the word Sci Fi use it to describe all kinds of things that we know aren’t really Science Fiction.  As far as we’re concerned, the word is already synonymous with crap. Give it a few years and everyone will know that it’s synonymous with crap. It won’t be too much longer before THEY will have done the work for us, and there will be a true distinction between Sci Fi (crap) and Science Fiction (that literature thing).

Skiffy Tube is already educating a generation to believe that Sci Fi is profressional wrestling and ghost hunting. Which are decidedly NOT science fiction.  So let’s encourage them to use the word Sci Fi as a stand-in for excrement. Soon, very soon, when we say Science Fiction, they’ll know we’re not talking about Sci Fi.  I live for the day when someone stubs their toe or hits their thumb instead of the nail and shouts out in pain and agony – “OH SCI FI!”

(Apologies to Bill the Sci Fi guy who uses the phrase to suck in unsuspecting wrestling fans and then exposes them to Science Fiction.)

***  

Here’s a guy who gets EVERYTHING wrong.  From Ansible:  ”From a local-paper story celebrating Garry Jon Simpson’s feat of publishing his sf novel through the ‘author-funded’ Athena Press: ‘I enjoy writing science fiction as you don’t have to do a lot of research for it.’ (Winsford Guardian, 21 August) [SHS]“

Now read it again with my edits: “From a local-paper story celebrating Garry Jon Simpson’s feat of publishing his sci fi novel through the ‘author-funded’ Athena Press: ‘I enjoy writing sci fi as you don’t have to do a lot of research for it.”

See?  Now it actually makes sense and you don’t feel so embarrassed for Garry Jon anymore, do you?

***

Nader coments on the ‘death of science fiction’ here.  I have unformulated objections to his contentions and intend to ramble on about them, probably later on today.

I will say one thing.  I sure hope it’s sci fi that’s dead and not science fiction.

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Pulp Comic Fairy Tale Chapter 9

Chapter 9 opens with this provocative shot from Galaxy.  You can see the whole thing, minus the final chapter (should be done today or tomorrow – just in time for weekend fun), here.

Notice the ticker at the top?  Skiffy Tube’s lineup is still a day late and an SF or two short, while TDTESSTWTOMD is one day closer…

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A. Bertram Chandler

*Above you will see the first incarnation of my ‘Nightline-esque’ reminder that we are STILL being held hostage by the eldritch horrors commonly referred to as Network Programmers.  Of the cable television variety.  Next to that, you’ll notice the countdown to TDTESSTWTOMD. For those coming late or not paying attention, that is the acronym for The Day The Earth Stood Still To Watch The Original Movie Day – which is December 10th, 2008.  I want everyone and anyone who might walk into the theater to see the remake to have already seen the original so that we can all form an unbiased opinion of the two as they relate to each other.  Clicking the link will take you to the page for that activity – where you can watch the original (over and over and over and over again – like I do).*

I had occassion yesterday to update some of the pages on the Rimworlds website, the personal page that started out as a home for my Rim Worlds/A. Bertram Chandler concordance project and has since grown to include The Classic Science Fiction Channel, Pulp magazine checklist and anything else I can cram in there.

I’ve obviously been paying attention to the ‘graying of fandom’/'old sf vs new sf’/similarly themed discussions floating around and as I was adding a couple of new items to the ‘Buy A. Bertram Chandler’ section I was struck by a couple of thoughts.

First, Chandler resides in the ‘old SF category; he unfortunately passed away in 1984, his 100th birthday is fast approaching (2012) and his works are becoming scarcer, although by no means are they completely absent.

Why he has faded remains a mystery to me, one that is probably equal parts fanboy blindness and publishing peculiarity; neither he nor any critic ever claimed literary pretensions for his works, but on the other hand he was a staple at DAW books and regularly appeared in the top magazines of the day.

His stories are what that they are: quaint adventures of an archetypical science fiction hero (John Grimes) – the man who always managed to get himself into deep yogurt, and always managed to come up smelling of roses and clutching the Shaara Crown jewels.

With HUGE tomes and ENDLESS series being all the rage these days in SF publishing, it’s a wonder that someone doesn’t do a little creative editing, retitle some of his works and bring out the Grimes series again.  The hype would be fun:

An Epic Space Opera Series!

Three Decades in the Making!

THREE MASSIVE DOORSTOP VOLUMES!

Featuring Science Fiction’s ORIGINAL Horatio Hornblower of Space!

When you consider that:

Chandler wrote some 20 novels (albeit 60′s/70′s/80′s 140 pagers) and 32 shorts dealing with John Grimes, 9 other novels and 30 other shorts dealing with alternate characters, other history or parallel universe versions of the Rim Worlds – you’ve got quite a canon!

In many respects, it seems like Chandler was writing for our time, rather than his own (not surprising if you consider how much he played around with time travel, alternate realities and world-as-myth). He’d fit right in: an on-going series that could count on a steady readership, long pieces for the book trade, short pieces for the e-zines and self-promotion, stories that play around in other parts of the universe…

I’ll note that SFBC did a series of omnibi editions which are mostly still available in the used book trade and that Baen Books offers all of the Grimes stories (with two exceptions that I can see – the recently published Grimes and the Gaijin Daimyo – Dreaming Again – Jack Dann and Doggy in the Window, a short that appeared in Amazing Stories) in three e-book packages, compiled in a manner that reflects the three phases of Grimes’ career – officer in the Federation Survey Service, wandering, self-employed ship captain and citizen of the Rim Worlds Confederacy.  All of the current sources for Chandler’s material can be found here. 

Baen Books might want to think about offering a donwload pack of the rest of the Rim Worlds stories – there’s the Derek Calver tales (2 novels), the Empress Irene stories (3 novels – and they tie in to a Grimes novel), several other novels including The Deep Reaches of Space, Bring Back Yesterday, Frontier of the Dark – the novel based on a short story that Harlan Ellison called one of the best things he’s ever read – and a whole mess of shorts, including a Retro Hugo nominee – Giant Killer and one of the most anthologized short stories ever written – The Cage.

Me, I’d hype the space opera and continuing series aspects, hire some rabid fanboy (like me) to write a page or two of connecting material, combine three or four of the existing novels into one big tome, give them all new cover art, stick a new penname on the cover, maybe Whitley Dunstan (Chandler used both) and stick them out on the shelves.  Devoid of any connection to ‘old science fiction’, I bet they’d sell just dandy, thank you.

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Skiffy Tube: Weekly Update

Just to make things perfectly clear -

 

For the week of August 15 thru August 21, Skiffy Tube’s Science Fiction Purity Percentage is -

31.8%

This represents a drop in science fiction content from the previous week.

Notably, this coming Tuesday’s line up manages to achieve more than 50% SF Purity (15 hours for a single day) – 62.5% to be precise – but the SICs make up for it on Wednesday by dropping that back down to 16.7% (4 hours).

Remember, if you want to see 100% Science Fiction Purity in Programming, visit The Classic Science Fiction Channel!  Included in our line up are these two fine SF films – one for old fogies and one for young snots -

 

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Brought to You by the Letter ‘J’ (and Pulp Comic Story Update)

I’ve radically changed the presentation of the chapters so far.  You can still use the old link to get to the new version, or you can go here.  The only thing I’m not totally happy with in this version is I had to lose the comic book style font in the text (in order to get things to fit nicely).

Just as a quick throw-away:  this coming week on Skiffy Tube(TM), 11.something percent of programming is devoted to shows that start with the letter ‘J’.

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