Everyone Else Is Doing It

Please note: I was late this week on calculating out Skiffy Tube’s SF Purity Rating for the week and discovered, much to my dismay, that their website program schedule entirely drops a previous month’s info once that month is over.  So I had to start fresh which means that the rating now runs weekly from Thursday to Thursday.

It is at its LOWEST point EVAH!

*** 

I’ve noticed that a lot of the blogs/sites that I follow have been posting things like ‘google page rank’ and ‘most popular posts this week’ kinds of things, so why the heck not?

My Google Page Rank is now a 5 (woo hoo!).  This is most likely due to the massive amount of attention that my Most Popular Post This Week has generated (nearly 1000 unique visits per day for the past 3 24 hour periods woo hoo! woo hoo!).

That entry would, of course, be: Harlan Ellison (obliquely) comments.

This level of traffic will of course not be sustained, but if the past is any indicator, some folks will stick (welcome!), increasing the overall readership over time.

Speaking of Page Rank – here’s a short list of SF oriented sites and their current rankings:

IO9 – 7; SFSignal – 5; File770 – 4; BoingBoing – 8; Scalzi’s Whatever – 5; SFCrowsnest – 5; SFSite – 6; Enter the Octopus – 5.  Several others either do not have a page rank listing or are not indexed.

I’m in pretty good company.

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Recursive Wrist Slap

Yesterday there weren’t any entries.  Not four, not three, not two, not even one measly  little line of an entry. And after a very long string of uninterrupted daily posts.

Listen closely and you can hear the sound of me wrist-slapping myself with one of those 18″ rulers.

Ow. Ow, ow ow!

Sorry about that, especially if for some god-forsaken reason you’ve come to rely on a daily read from me.  I must plead ‘exhaustion’ and the press of “other things going on”.

Mental and physical exhaustion from those ‘other things’.

Physical exhaustion from having refereed and managed a small, single day paintball tournament.

Which brings me to the subject of paintball and its cultural intersection with science fiction.

In case you somehow missed the social phenom of the past two decades, paintball is the ‘sport’ that uses those fancy, expensive compressed air guns to shoot gelatin, dye-filled marbles at other people in order to mark them.

I found this game about 18 months after it was first invented and quickly discovered that it was addictive, I loved to play and – surprise – I happened to be pretty darned good at it.  (If gelatin-fearing aliens ever invade the Earth, have no fear, paint-slinging boy is here!)

I spent a quarter-century becoming heavily involved in just about everything paintball: my game-design background put me in good stead as I introduced a set of rules for competition play that actually made sense (and are still in wide, slightly modified use today all over the world), began my non-fiction writing career, edited a magazine and traveled the world playing, designed product,  coached and managed teams, etc. etc. 

Picked up a bunch of kudos too, like Top 100 Player of All Time (wish I had a plaque for that one), Top 50 Team of All Time, and ‘that &*%$!*%! bastard’.

Now I play the part of ‘retired professional player’, and do some weekend work helping to manage a local field and quasi-coaching the local team.

Which is where I was yesterday, doing a little three-player tournament.  I take great pride in delivering a fairly judged event and making sure that everyone from winners to bottom-dwelling losers have a good time (which can be difficult when the bottom-feeders have PAID for the privilege of getting shot at all day and go home with the added bonus of a kick in the kiester).

The game itself is, unfortunately, vulnerable to players who want to cheat, which raises the temperature for everyone even before the first game is played at an event. Back in the bad old days it didn’t bother us so much – we’d just have a brawl in the woods with the other team and count up black eyes.  But these days we’ve got teens and pre-teens competing under the watchful eye of parents, so that manly solution is not available anymore.

Here’s a pic of the team I’m now coaching playing in a five-player event from a few weeks ago, just to give you some idea of what it looks like:

(That’s the KnIghtmare Saints deployed to their bunkers right after the start of the game. They finished 4th at this event.)

I only go into the background and circumstances here to lead into the fact that over the past couple of years I’ve made an interesting observation.  Science Fiction and Fantasy enjoy a unique relationship with paintball. It’s a one-way relationship.

Lot’s of paintballers are science fiction and fantasy fan, while very few fans are paintballers.  I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it has a lot to do with the generally vicarious nature of being a fan, while most paintballing fans seem to have gotten the bug after they’ve already established their participatory nature.

I find it an interesting relationship, one that I’ve been exploring for a while now and intend to keep on looking at.  There just might be some ‘dirt’ worth mining there.

***

I see from File 770  that Ellison is suing Paramount (again?).  They used his ST:TOS script (City of the Edge of Forever) tobase a novelization on and Harlan hasn’t gotten any royalties.  If I were Paramount, I’d pay the man now – he has a habit of winning these kinds of things.

It actually mystifies me that anyone would fight after a quick background check would tell them that the claim is a valid one.  I’ll jump the gun and say – congrats to Harlan for another win in the fight to protect writer’s interests.

***

IO9.  OH IO9.

I’ve been pretty critical of the site here (not that most of my friends don’t disagree that it well earns the sobriquet of ‘fluff’).  Perhaps that criticism is responsible for my lack of coverage over there: they used to feature some of my entries, but haven’t done so SINCE I’ve been vocal on that score. 

I’m well aware that in the PR game you’re not supposed to bite the hand that feeds you. Right. But.

 I’d also be terribly flattered if it turned out that IO9 thought they were accomplishing something by ignoring me.

I can not, however, ignore them, especially considering this truly non-sensical and ill-considered piece that appeared today about ‘Sir Iguana’, the artist who sells sketches on Ebay.

Are the lives of the editors at IO9 so absolutely bereft of meaning that they must verify their self-justification by putting Ebay artists down?  I mean, in every sense of the cliche – ‘come on!’. How frickin long did it take to come up with that little piece?  Are they actually mining Ebay for things that offend their sensibilities?

These guys publish 20, 30, 40 stories all day long and THIS is the best they can come up with?

Before that story ran my only real criticism of the site was that they were going for fluff and tended to embrace the SKIFFY side of things (as in – more lit, less media); that, and their ‘humor’ never escaped the level of ‘cutesy’.  IO9=Skiffy Fluff.  Big deal and who cares?

NOW, I’ve got reason to dislike them – and a good one.  IOniners – if you’re going to play the critic game, how’s about picking on people your own size?  Right now, all of you guys are looking like a six year old nascent bully burning ants with a magnifying glass. And next comes torturing kittens and puppies.  IO9 is psychopathic, truly and horrifyingly mentally ill.

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What H.E. Said…

Dreams With Sharp Teeth, the Harlan Ellison biopic, is getting a fair amount of attention.  Comic Book Resources interviewed the author/cultural icon, publishing the first part yesterday.

Here’s Ellison’s response, my favorite part of the interview so far:

“I don’t know if I’m answering your question but it becomes very, very clear to me now, at age 74, that with great writers being totally forgotten because they had their fifteen minutes in a very narrow venue and now they’re gone, gone, gone — unread, unknown, subsumed by Paris and Sanjaya and scumroaches in the tabloids… . Nobody reads Clifford Simmak anymore! Colette. Maupassant. Jim Tully. Gerald Kersh. George Carlson. You can go out in the street and ask a hundred people if they know who Isaac Asimov was, and they won’t know that great man any more than they know who Hernando Cortez was or Nikola Tesla. It is a world of increasing stupidity and cultural amnesia, that arrogantly defies the idiotic and the transitory.”

First off, I think there’s a typo in there.  I think what Harlan actually said was “…that arrogantly deifies the idiotic and the transitory.”  Otherwise that statement would be completely contradictory.

Secondly: what Ellison said may just be a recodification of that t-shirted quote from Aristotle about the ‘youth of today’ – but you know what they say about stereotypes and cliches.  Something about smoke’s relationship with fire.

I’m rapidly growing a theory about our cultural evolution in the interwebs/electronic age, that goes something like this: rather than enabling us to expand our horizons, the filtering process allows each individual to tune in on what they want, what they agree with, what confirms their world view. Either idiocy’s call resembles a Siren’s and can’t be ignored, or most people are idiots already, which is why so much crap finds a ready market.

Early on, ‘old men’ were a valuable commodity.  A place at the fire was reserved for them because they had something valuable to contribute: maybe it wasn’t knowledge, but it sure was experience.  They were the repositories for hard-won wisdom.  I’ll bet that the impetuous youths sitting around those fires paid as much attention to those old sages back then as they do now (not at all), but in a subsistence society, failure to heed the old man didn’t get you an ‘I told ya so’ – it got you dead.

Maybe if consequences were more immediate these days I wouldn’t be concerned so much about the future.  I know that overpopulation wouldn’t be that big a deal…

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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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I Was A Fan Before Paul Jessup Was Born

Which probably explains why he wrote this.

I was writing a piece about this generation gap thing and how it was affecting conventions, but Paul trumped that with his cri-de-coeur to the guttersnipes (all apparently eager to display their generational penchant for jumping on bandwagons and shouting ‘me too’, and all while probably having little or no idea what he was talking about; gotta get that E-egoboo, right?).

Let’s conveniently ignore the fact that every ‘old’ generation has lamented the existence of the ‘new’ generation ever since there has been more than one generation.  Let’s get past the hurtful and completely ineffective shouts of “you’re old and slow” and “you’re young and ignorant” and drill right down into the heart of the matter.

Jessup is wrong and Ellison is right.

Ellison isn’t right because he’s old, successful and has three-quarters of a century of experience under his belt.  Jessup isn’t wrong because he’s young, inexperienced and prone to unthinking youthful exuberance.  Not at all.  The merits of this argument rest on logic and not chronology.

Jessup starts his piece by saying he enjoys “reading some of the older books on SF, like Dangerous Visions, cause it talks about how the old guard back in the day welcomed the younger writers and their revolution, and even though they disagreed with them, still read them…”

Right there you know he’s off on the wrong foot – or didn’t read Harlan’s introduction carefully enough. Not surprising since lack of comprehension is one of those charges levelled at youth.  If you look at the TOC of DV, all you’ll see are so-called ‘old guard’ authors.  The old guard was at least half responsible for the new wave once Ellison (and Moorecock in the UK) opened up the door.

Del Rey, Silverberg, Pohl, Farmer, deFord, Bloch, Aldiss, Dick, Niven, Lieber, Anderson, Bunch, Emshwiller, Knight, Sturgeon, Slesar, Sladek, Neville, Lafferty, Ballard, Brunner, Laumer, Spinrad, Spinrad, Zelazny, Delany.

Hoary old goat-bearded men and women all.

That’s ok. Jessup wasn’t born until a decade after DV came out and the fact that it was written by a bunch of old fogies (Ellison and Asimov included) just damns the thing even more, dontchya know.

He then references Ellison’s recent comments in the Toronto Sun and says “I want to know-who are we talking about here?  What, you’re mad that a classroom full of college graduates haven’t read a book of fairy tales?  Oh gosh! Oh noes!  Yet, I bet every one of them could tell you what a Foucault’s Pendulum is.”

Yes. I’m as mad as Ellison is about that because my generation of college students and Ellison’s generation of college students and his father’s generation of college students knew both the fable AND what the pendulum was all about.  They also read Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, knew where Pitcairn Island is and could point it out on a map.  They didn’t publicly express their joy of being ignorant but went to the Library and looked it up so they’d no longer be ignorant.   (I’ll take that bet, btw. I bet that two-thirds or more of them never heard of Foucault and have never seen one knocking over little pins, unless it was on YouTube.)

And, before I forget (which I’m prone to do because, you know, I’m old), Ellison wasn’t attacking Science Fiction or Science Fiction writers with those comments, so much as he was attacking the audience – “So, for a writer, the problem becomes: Do you write at the peak of your abilities and the highest peak of good grammar, using the precise word, and lose half your audience, many of whom will say: ‘What a smartass, using all them big words!’?

“Or do you continue to lower the bar and continue to keep writing down to the level that you think is going to be receivable by your audience?”

- an audience that includes those college students who had no right to be in college, let alone be graduates and, no doubt, are as blissfully ignorant of Science Fiction as they are of fables. 

Jessup then launches into an attack on Ellison’s writing and eventually Ellison’s entire career. This is, of course, a strawman argument because Ellison’s career has nothing whatsoever to do with the comments Ellison made about the current generation. (Other than the fact that Ellison’s success gives him a bully pulpit and gets him more attention from the press than most old fogies receive.)

Like Jessup wanted us to, we’ll ignore the glaring fact that Ellison’s work has remained ‘contemporary’ and has been embraced and sought after by many of ‘this generations’ ground breakers (Babylon 5, Masters of SF, Dream Corridor, adaptations to film and even electronic games), because otherwise we’d have the problem of explaining why someone who remains relevant 50 years after he started writing would say the things he does about the current generation.

Jessup then puts down the ‘new wave’ as mostly irrelevant, while saying this “I appreciate the New Wave, Dangerous Visions, and etc, for paving the way for what I write, but then again, at the same time, they like to toot their horn a little too much.”

Two things about this statement yank my chain. This is biting the hand that’s fed, clothed, housed and nurtured you before you were even walking the planet, have some respect.

And don’t you think it’s just a bit disingenuous to condemn the older generation for doing exactly the same thing you are? Isn’t this the age of electronic self-promotion? Aren’t we all supposed to be enabled and empowered these days?  Or is Jessup  saying that now is the time for a kiddie swim, all the adults out of the pool?

Jessup wants to have this argument with Ellison both ways - the old guard isn’t allowed to defend themselves because they’re the old guard.

But nothing he says can erase the monumental contributions those authors, including Ellison, have made in shaping the genre as it is today.  You can ignore and belittle them as much as you want to, but the hard fact remains that what you are doing today is based, at least in part, on what they did yesterday (and in many cases they will still be doing tomorrow).

No surprise we’re hearing this kind of thing as the gen-gap wars heat up. After half a century or more you get used to listening to irrational exuberance from the kiddies.  Funny thing is, they never seem to realize that all too soon, they’re going to find themselves on the other side of that divide.

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Harlan Ellison (obliquely) Comments

The article you are looking for can be found HERE on the new version of my blog.

Please change your bookmarks and RSS Feeds.

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Whatever Happened to Sense-of-Wonder?

I’m a crotchety old fan.  I’m a curmudgeon.  An old fart.  I happily subscribe to the world view that change is bad and therefore we must fear it.  Nothing good ever comes from change. 

I’m an uber science fiction fan.  I’ve been reading the stuff for four plus decades and, while I can’t hold a candle to Forry Ackerman in the longevity (or even the collection) department, I’m certainly on his side of the generational divide.  I think Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Russell, Chandler, Smith (all three), Brackett, Brunner, Aldis, Anderson, Niven, Pournell, Pohl, Dick, Disch, Dickson, Delaney, Moorcock, Spinrad Kornbluth, Silverberg and yes, even Ellison, are science fiction.  

Alas, I seem to be in the minority.   That’s ok.  Kids never seem to know what’s good for ‘em until they’re old enough to be waving their own old-man stick around.  What gets my goatee are the reasons I’m in the minority.

Old scifi isn’t literary enough.  Old scifi lacks characterization.  Old scifi is, you know, old. 

I’ll defy any whip-snapping guttersnipe to explain to me what ‘not literary enough’ means.  There’s words on the page that make sentences.  Several follow each other in paragraphs.  Eventually they all combine to tell a story.  Does every single paragraph have to appeal to each one of my five senses?  Do I have to keep a copy of the OED handy when I read?  Is a program required to keep track of the characters?  Must I be transported on airy waves of meaningless, time wasting drivel?  Fah.  Take an English class.

And what’s all this crap about characterization? I’m sorry if the younger generation has been so swaddled in sensory overload that it takes a sledgehammer to make even the minutest impression on their creaseless brains, but I shouldn’t have to pay the price.  They’re so out of touch that they can’t even recognize a stereotype anymore.  Stereotypes make it easier to get to the story.  We read for the story – remember?

I don’t need to know whythe bad guy is a bad guy – he’s a bad guy with bad guy motivations who’s gonna do bad guy things.  Scientists will invent neat stuff because they’re scientists.  Engineers will figure out how to solve technological problems because they’re engineers.  Nubile young daughters will fall in love with heroes because they’re nubile young daughters and heroes will win the day for the obvious reason.  What the hell else do you need to know? If you want to spend all your time trying to figure out who is who and why is why – go read a suspense thriller, but stay out of my science fiction.

Old.  Outdated. The world they wrote in no longer exists.  The references aren’t relevant.  Some of them don’t even mention computers (thank god).

To which I say – what the hell happened to your sense of wonder?  Do you mean to sit there and tell me that you’re going to let the lack of specific technological advances put you off a science fiction story?  That you can’t imagine your way around a reference to vacuum tubes or punch cards?  What a sorry bunch of intellectual wimps! 

So what that it didn’t happen that way.  It might have.  If you listen to the latest theories on how the Universe really works, you’d know that there are probably an infinitude of parallel universes.  For really real.  You don’t even have to pretend anymore, not even a little.  Because you know what?  There IS a universe where they went to the Moon using punch cards to plot ballistic trajectories.  There IS a universe where computers are still room-sized behemoths, another where people fly around cities using personal jetpacks, another where Venus is inhabited by intelligent amphibians and still another where the imagination of science fiction fans isn’t straight-jacketed by ‘what really happened’.

Science is now telling you that everything you can possibly imagine - in infinite and endless combination – is really happening somewhere.  The old authors and ancient stories give you a ringside seat into some of those worlds and what do you do?  You stick your sense-of-wonder in a box and retreat into the gray, toneless world of only accepting things you can see. 

Talk about fearing change. 

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