Jay Lake: Writer

[links] Link salad wonders where the week is going

Westward Weird came out yesterday — I have a story therein, “The Temptation of Eustace Prudence McAllen”, first in the doc, which is a nice position. Various of my co-authors have commented on the anthology and their stories, including Seanan McGuire, Dean Wesley Smith, and Steven Saus.

Próba Kwiatów – Jay Lake — A mixed review, in Polish, of the Polish edition of my novel Trial of Flowers.

SF in SF — Just a reminder that this coming Saturday, 2/11, I will be at SF in SF with K.W. Jeter and Rudy Rucker. If you’re in the Bay Area, come on down.

10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy — He’s talking about ad copy, not fiction, but this is still interesting and worthwhile stuff. (Via Curiosity Counts.)

Kill the Local News — Writer Jeremy Tolbert on sensationalism.

Mindful Eating as Food for Thought

Scale of the Universe — Another fun take on the “powers of 10″ meme. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

What did people do: in a Medieval City? — (Via danjite.)

Self-Cloning Seagrass May Be World’s Oldest Living Thing

Mars-bound NASA rover carries coin for camera checkup — This is cool and kind of poetic.

Mapping the Road Ahead for Autonomous Cars

Turing’s Enduring Importance — The path computing has taken wasn’t inevitable. Even today’s machines rely on a seminal insight from the scientist who cracked Nazi Germany’s codes. An interesting article, although I wish in mentioning his suicide it had acknowledged the disgusting way Turing was treated by his own people.

The State of Gay Marriage — Being a handy map to show you where bigotry has triumphed, and where respect for basic human rights is gaining ground.

The Single Most Powerful Quote From California’s Prop 8 Ruling — “Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.” Like opposition to interracial marriage forty years ago, Prop 8 is bigotry, pure and simple, a combination of narrow-minded religious privilege and typically unfounded conservative alarmism. Like opposition to interracial marriage today, forty years from now people will be ashamed to admit in public what they once voted and for and believed.

The Business Case Against Karen Handel — John Scalzi with a very sensible take on the (surprising to me) resignation of Karen Handel from the Susan G. Komen foundation. For my own part, I’ll observe that as usual when the Right tries strong-arm tactics, they only see unfairness when they get caught out.

Planned Parenthood’s Deep Bench — Ta-Nehisi Coates with some interesting thoughts on the fight that Komen picked when they decided to show their true conservative colors.

Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet — Social and political commentary on the funding impetus behind the intellectual fraud of climate change denial.

Jesus versus the GOP — The man from Nazareth would have been appalled by the “Christian” Republican candidates. The only thing I have to say to political Christianists is “Matthew 6:6“.

‘We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World — The declining influence of the US Constitution overseas.

Republicans Finally Realize They’re Helping Obama — Like their counterparts from 16 years before, Republicans took control of the House of Representatives last year filled with revolutionary zeal, assuming that they could leverage their hold over one branch of Congress into sweeping changes in the national agenda. And like their predecessors, they blundered into high-profile confrontations with a Democratic president and suffered prolonged and deep damage in their public standing, with each new defeat slowly leeching the fanatical determination out of them.

Santorum Upsets G.O.P. Race With Three Victories — I really can’t decide who would be the bigger disaster for this country, Senator Frothy Mix or Governor 1%. Our last Republican president set an extremely low bar for destructive incompetence, something the GOP electorate seems to have very conveniently forgotten.

?otd: How was your Tuesday?

2/8/2012
Writing time yesterday: 2.0 hours (Sunspin revisions)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 8.25 (solid)
Weight: 230.8
Currently reading: n/a (between books)

Tags: Books, Cancer, cars, climate, Conventions, Cool, Culture, Food, games, gay, gender, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, reviews, Science, sex, stories, Tech, Trial, Writing

Posted: 6:24 am Wed February 08 2012 | Comments(0) |

[books] Recent reading, a few comments thereon

Scourge of the Betrayer, Jeff Salyards, Night Shade Books, May 2012 [ Powells | BN ]

Night Shade sent me this book to read for blurb. I’m still chewing on how to blurb it, so I figure writing a quick pocket review will help. This is Salyards’ debut novel, and its the first in a series (though I don’t know how many volumes the series is slated to be). It’s quest fantasy, of a sort, narrated by a confused scribe named Arkamondos. He is hired to follow and document the activities of a small band of soldiers on extended foreign assignment, led by one Captain Braylar Killcoin. The book started slowly, and I had some trouble getting into the story, but once it caught for me, it was a lot of fun.

I’ve been trying to figure out why the book didn’t take off well for me. I believe the problem is inherent in the set up. The initial confusion and naiveté of the narrator makes it hard for the novel to come into focus early on. In a sense, Salyards has done his job a little too well — the “what’s going on here?” issues that Arkamondos struggles with become the reader’s struggles as well. The problem with a quest fantasy narrated by someone in ignorance of the point of the quest is that you wind up fairly literally driving to the story.

My other frustration was that I wasn’t expecting this to be a book one of a multivolume story, so I was quite surprised when the manuscript ended without resolution. The story just stopped. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I really want to read the next book.

The Man in the Moone and Other Lunar Fantasies, ed. Faith Pizor and T. Allan Comp, Praeger Publishers, January 1971 [ AbeBooks | BN ]

This is a collection of fiction about voyages to the moon, ranging from 1638 to 1841, with an introduction by Isaac Asimov. I bought it because I was interested in reading some very early science fiction. This is very much in parallel with my project last year to read nineteenth century proto-steampunk, in the original Klingon, as it were.

The oldest of these pieces is written with the very curious diction and spelling of 17th century literature. If you can handle Shakespeare, you can handle this, but there is definitely no skimming here. Other stories range from a fantasy by Edgar Allan Poe to a weird little piece about a steam powered duck. The editors provide an introduction to each selection which gives literary, social and political context, and offer occasional footnotes elucidating obscure points within the text. That’s especially helpful in the case of the older works.

Of course this work was not self-consciously written as either science fiction or fantasy, as neither of those genres existed when the pieces were published. Most of them are social satire, in fact. Still, it’s fascinating to read these premodern visions of how human beings might reach the moon. This is special interest reading, in my opinion. The entertainment value is there, but the going is fairly challenging. On the other hand, I really enjoyed exploring one of the roots of our contemporary genre.

Tags: Books, klog, reviews, Science

Posted: 6:36 am Mon February 06 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad wanders into the weekend

“A Long Walk Home” is on this year’s Locus Poll ballot — In case you liked this Sunspin novelette. You can read it here.

A reader reacts to Visitants, ed. Steve Jones — Including comments on one of my stories.

Not So Wild Review: Schlock Mercenary — I’ve said before that I think Schlock Mercenary is some of the very best long form SF around. This reviewer frames his praise differently, but seems to share my same fundamental opinion. (Via @howardtayler.)

Release the hounds! — Miranda Suri on learning to outline novels. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

I Greet You in the Middle of a Great Career: A Brief History of Blurbs — Heh. (Via @legalnomads.)

How Do We Get There? — Cat Valente asks about the development of post-scarcity societies.

An obsessive history of The Elements of Style and what makes it a cultural treasure. — Even unto being wrong on a number of points of grammar and usage…

Indie Game: The Movie — For those interested in that sort of thing.

Space voyages shouldn’t become politically incorrect

Komen Reverses Decision on Planned Parenthood Funding, Is Still Likely Full of Shit — Komen blatantly, obviously, and deliberately targeted Planned Parenthood. Their board room is still staffed with conservative donors and at least one vocal anti-choice politician. They’re still a conservative political organization masquerading as a feel-goodery for people who just want to help cure cancer.

Komen May Continue to Fund Some Planned Parenthood Grants — A pro-life site accuses Planned Parenthood of being “dishonest thugs”. This coming from the political movement that operates “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” (profound dishonest fake clinics meant to deceive and entrap desperate pregnant women) and actively encourages the murder of doctors (unconditional thuggery)? Project much? Of course you do, you’re conservatives.

Komen backlash: Public turns fury on vice president Karen Handel

The big backlash against bullying women — Sadly, conservative America controls the discourse, and profits politically and culturally from the bullying of women. It’s not going to stop.

Indiana backing away from bill allowing creation “science” into classrooms — Many similar bills are introduced in state legislatures each year and, in cases where their sponsors speak to the press, they tend to reveal a great deal of ignorance regarding both science and the law. In terms of science, they tend to misunderstand the meaning of the term “theory,” think that there are multiple scientific explanations for life’s diversity, or suggest evolution is a theory for life’s origin. The Indiana bill’s sponsor, Dennis Kruse, appears to get all of these wrong. It’s tough getting ahead when you’re flat fucking wrong in terms of both reality and the law, but conservatives will persevere. And they succeed far too often.

Romney’s political success is a mixed blessing for Mormon Church — His presidential candidacy could be a breakthrough ‘JFK moment for Mormons,’ but it could also stir up more negative publicity for the church. I was sympathetic to Romney on the issue of religious criticism until he made it clear he wouldn’t have a Muslim in his cabinet.

Chris Christie and the Nation-State Project — Ta-Nehisi Coates on conservative ignorance of history. Many of the actual people who were beaten and killed “in the streets”–Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, for instance–were attempting to secure the very right which Christie, bizarrely, believes they should have exercised. It’s almost as if he doesn’t know what the Civil Rights movement actually was.

As Romney’s slip-ups show, gaffes nearly unavoidable on modern campaign trail — Nush mostly just babbled. Romney’s gaffes are golden soundbites for his opposition.

?otd: Ink much?

2/4/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (busy with tattoos and Dad time)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 8.0 (solid)
Weight: 229.8
Currently reading: The Man in the Moone, and Other Lunar Fantasies ed. Faith Pizor

Tags: gender, healthcare, Links, Movies, Personal, Politics, Process, Publishing, Religion, reviews, Science, sex, stories, Videos

Posted: 8:05 am Sat February 04 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad enjoyed the reading

A reader reacts to Endurance — I think they liked it.

The Self-Sabotaging Writer — Kameron Hurley on the perils of being a writer. (Via Steve Buchheit.)

What the Nook Means — A new Nook’s on its way. Can it save books?

The Milhous Collection — A meticulously assembled selection of mechanical musical instruments, vintage automobiles and more. (Via danjite.)

Cloud Cover’s Role in Exoplanet Studies

Study measures mammalian growth spurt — It takes 24 million generations for mouse-sized mammals to evolve into elephants — but shrinking back is much faster.

Mind-reading program translates brain activity into words — The research paves the way for brain implants that would translate the thoughts of people who have lost power of speech.

cassiealexander on Rick Santorum, privilege, healthcare, and sick kids — What she says.

The End of Health Insurance Companies — I don’t think I actually believe this piece, but it’s a nice thought.

Inside the heresy files — Interrogation. Surveillance. Ethnic profiling. Censorship. The words come from 21st-century headlines, but they have an ancient pedigree. Cullen Murphy on how the Inquisition ignited the modern police state. (Snurched from Scrivener’s Error.)

McConnell’s Revisionist History: Congress Gave Obama Everything He Wanted! — Can he possibly believe this? McConnell, of all people? More to the point, why does anybody else believe this?

Marsh on Obama: The Party’s Over — Sigh.

Delusions of Obama the Idiot — It’s amazing that the GOP has somehow convinced itself that Obama is some kind of beguiling intellectual lightweight. Once you accept that ideology trumps reality, it’s easy to put faith in any whackdoodle idea that enters one’s head.

Gingrich, Romney, and “Reckoning with the Base”

Romney versus Gingrich slugfest is harbinger of Republican civil war — We can only hope. Meanwhile, I continue to marvel at the Republican base’s vitriolic view of liberals, who are guilty of bringing America such heinous sins as the forty hour work week, paid vacations, child labor laws, clean air and water, and other such violations of our civil rights, all over the strong objections of conservatives.

Welfare Drug Testing Bill Withdrawn After Amended To Include Testing Lawmakers — Don’t worry, it will be back. Oppressing the poor is a club sport for the GOP.

Huh? Mitt claims Newt outspent him in S.C. — Huh. Republicans lying about each other. The candidates and party leadership know it doesn’t matter. The message always trumps facts. The low information voters who make up the GOP base will just nod and follow along like they always do.

The Myth of the American Political Intelligence Gap

?otd: When’s the last time you attended a live reading?

2/1/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (Sunspin revisions)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 (solid)
Weight: 228.8
Currently reading: The Man in the Moone, and Other Lunar Fantasies ed. Faith Pizor

Tags: Books, cars, Cool, ebooks, Endurance, healthcare, Links, music, Personal, Politics, Process, Publishing, Religion, reviews, Science, Videos, Writing

Posted: 6:23 am Wed February 01 2012 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad listens to some REM

A reader reacts to Green — I think they liked it.

A reader reacts to Endurance — I think they liked it.

Gianmaria Franchi on sliding book advances — (Via a mailing list I am on.)

Getting It Wrong — sandratayler on the value of getting it wrong,

How the craziest f#@!ing “theory of everything” got published and promoted

Psychics Say Apollo 16 Astronauts Found Alien Ship — Also, there is an alien base in the trunk of my car. Don’t tell anyone.

New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who’s accountable? — The Navy is testing an autonomous plane that will land on an aircraft carrier. The prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many. What could possibly go wrong?

US plans Mid-East ‘mothership’

Jobs, Jobs and Cars — Krugman on economic geography and Republican idiocy.

GOP Hates Citizens United, Too — Tough cookies, GOP. You wanted this as tool to bash Democrats, you celebrated the SCOTUS decision. Like many of the beds conservatives make, they don’t want to lie in it.

How Newt Gingrich Gets Away with ‘Class Warfare’ and ‘Race Baiting’

The Great Right Hope — The conservatives who hate Mitt Romney the most have it wrong. Why they’d love him in the White House.

What would Mitt Romney’s offshore account filings show? — It’s called ‘tax avoidance’, and just about everyone with Big Money does it. Also, millionaires avoiding paying taxes is completely consistent with Republican principles, so why is anyone complaining?

?otd: Is that you there in the corner?

1/28/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.5 hours (Sunspin revisions)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.75 (solid)
Weight: 226.8
Currently reading: Scourge of the Betrayer by Jeff Salyards

Tags: Books, Culture, Endurance, Green, Iraq, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Publishing, reviews, Science, Tech, weird

Posted: 7:32 am Sat January 28 2012 | Comments(0) |

[books] Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed

A couple of days ago, I finished reading Saladin Ahmed’s debut novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon [ Powells | BN ]. This is Arabian-inspired fantasy, a subgenre that Saladin appears to share almost exclusively with Howard Andrew Jones, and it’s a lot of fun.

The book’s been getting considerable critical buzz, and justly so. What I particularly love about Throne of the Crescent Moon is the degree to which the individual characters are beset by their own flaws and insecurities. Ahmed has not given us Heinleinian Competent Heroes; rather he has given us people who feel very familiar, perhaps even ordinary, even in the midst of having extraordinary skills and powers. Another striking thing about the book is that, rooted in a non-European tradition, both the fantastic tropes and the everyday life portrayed within the narrative have a fresh, lateral feel.

Ahmed’s writing is deft and graceful, and his characters move through a world of real stakes and significant consequences, much to their cost. Combine this with glorious setting and his careful mastery of craft, and you have a lovely fantasy read on your hands.

Tags: Books, klog, reviews

Posted: 6:30 am Fri January 27 2012 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad staggers toward the weekend

A reader reacts to Green

Protocols and The Spectacle of Reading Fantastika

These 24 Books Have Actually Been Published

Academic Competitions – State of Jefferson Academic Scavenger Hunt 2012 – Middle School — Holy Pete, these are tough questions. (Via tillyjane, a/k/a my mom.)

Embracing the Mothers of Invention — Financing the stuff of dreams through Kickstarter. (Thanks to Dad.)

Current social networks may have been present in the earliest modern humans

Global warming felt in gardens — Who are you going to believe? Rush Limbaugh or that lying data?

The Obama Memos — The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency.

Obama: Republicans will struggle to defend record — Or at least they would be if anyone in America was capable of remembering the Bush administration.

Space experts ground Gingrich moon plan — Sigh. I wish we had a visionary who wasn’t also a venal lunatic.

How Newt Gingrich pulled this one off — Somehow—miraculously—the philandering former congressman is at the front of the Republican pack

The three big lies of Newton Leroy Gingrich — (Via David Goldman.)

Gingrich’s Constant Contempt Is His Fatal Political Flaw — It’s also his strength. The politics of resentment have peculiar fascination for conservative voters, and Gingrich plays them as well as Palin or Nixon.

Romney Failed to Disclose Swiss Bank Account Income — I honestly don’t think Romney’s wealth should be an election issue, any more than his religion should, but in in a time when concern about income inequity and Wall Street excesses has become a major sociopolitical flashpoint, how could it not?

?otd: Friday again?

1/27/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.75 hour (Sunspin revisions)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.75 (solid)
Weight: 228.4
Currently reading: Scourge of the Betrayer by Jeff Salyards

Tags: Books, climate, Culture, Green, Links, Personal, Politics, Publishing, reviews, Science

Posted: 6:11 am Fri January 27 2012 | Comments(0) |

[books] The Laundry Files by Charles Stross

I just finished reading my way through The Laundry Files by Charles Stross. This started with me reading the third book in series, The Fuller Memorandum [ Powells | BN ], out of sequence. (See my comments here: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ].) I’ve since caught up with the series, reading book one, The Atrocity Archives [ Powells | BN ] and book two, The Jennifer Morgue [ Powells | BN ], and thanks to Charlie’s generosity, the as-yet-unreleased fourth novel, The Apocalypse Codex [ Powells | BN ].

I have to confess to having been skeptical of the premise of these books when I first heard of them. Boy howdy was I wrong. Stross pulls it off beautifully, this cock-eyed intersection of spy thrillers, IT wankery, civil service drudgery, and eldritch horrors from beyond the boundaries of time and space. These are highly entertaining books, and by the third volume, he’s developed a definite series arc pointing ahead. The fourth volume sustains that arc, and with the its ending lands Bob Howard, your humble narrator, in some seriously uncharted waters that I can’t wait to explore in the next volume or two.

There’s a very strange charm to this series, which I suspect evolves from the unlikely premise as explicated by the goofy insouciance of narrator and protagonist Bob Howard. (Though in truth Angleton might just be my favorite character.) They’re certainly structured and written like spy thrillers or adventure novels, but the sensibility is so very much from the darker corners of fantasy, not to mention outright horror fiction. More to the point, entertaining as hell.

Highly recommended, even if dark stuff isn’t normally your bag.

Tags: Books, klog, reviews

Posted: 6:33 am Wed January 25 2012 | Comments(4) |

[links] Link salad checks in from Michigan

A reader reacts to Mainspring — I think they liked it.

Only Forward — Paul McAuley on writing first drafts and the perils of revising. This. (Thanks to Rick York.)

Ghillie Suit — Art guru James Gurney with an interesting entry, including an IKEA ghillie suit.

Depression Defies the Rush to Find an Evolutionary Upside

Computer Model Replays Europe’s Cultural History — A simple mathematical model of the way cultures spread reproduces some aspects of European history, say complexity scientists. Paging Hari Seldon.

X and Y chromosomes — A beautiful photo of our gender-selective chromosomes. (Via scarlettina.)

Dracula-esque monkey long thought vanished reappears

NASA still not hiding aliens: Triangular ‘UFO’ debunked — Well, darn. Where are they?

Picture of the Day: The Planet Heats Up — More of that pesky, liberally biased data from the reality-based world. More on this from NASA’s Earth Observatory.

Gingrich’s Ex-Wife and the Republicans’ Predicament — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison on Gingrich. If they were voting based on character, they wouldn’t have chosen him in the first place. I’m old enough to remember when the GOP was angrily telling us (about Clinton) that “character counts.” Not so much when it’s your own guys, eh?

?otd: Chilly yet?

1/20/2012
Writing time yesterday: 2.5 hours (revisions to Sunspin)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 8.25 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: The Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross; The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore<

Tags: Books, climate, Cool, Culture, Europe, Funny, healthcare, Links, Mainspring, Personal, Photos, Politics, Process, reviews, Science, Writing

Posted: 8:31 am Fri January 20 2012 | Comments(1) |

[books] Recent reading

I’ve read three books recently that I wanted to take a moment to comment on. Daughter of the Sword by Steve Bein, (Roc, October, 2012), and two Charles Stross books, Saturn’s Children [ Powells | BN ] and The Fuller Memorandum [ Powells | BN ].

Daughter of the Sword was sent to me in bound manuscript form as a candidate for blurb. I really enjoyed it, and provided a pull quote which Roc may or may not be using. It’s a book with an interesting structure, two entwined narratives that contrast significantly. One is the story of a Tokyo cop, the only female detective-sergeant on the force, chasing a strange series of murders, coping with her sister’s disappearance, and battling the institutional sexism of a police force where most women either are meter maids or coffee girls. The other thread skips through Japanese history from the Mongol invasions through WWII, chronicling the story of a set of swords forged by one of the great masters of that art. There are curses and possessions, mixing a very light-handed fantasy element with police procedural and a journey through Japanese culture. Some wonderfully lateral views of a pair of common Western storytelling tropes not so often bound together. This story was a bit off my most usual pleasure reading path, and I’m glad I took it.

Saturn’s Children is billed on the cover as a space opera, but I’m not sure I’d call it that. The conceit at the heart of the book is profound and fascinating — that the human race died out but its intelligent servants have carried on without their masters, for the most part barely noticing the change. Frea, nearly the last of a series of courtesan-androids who are all bereft of purpose in the absence of human lovers, is at first pulled, then pushes herself, through a string of events and conspiracies that provides a set-piece tour of the solar system, from Mercury to Eris. And this book is funny. There are some real howlers of bad puns and jokes, as well as a great deal of more subtle humor. Stross’ tongue is firmly in his cheek even as he covers deadly serious issues of identity, independence and the notion of what it means to be free.

The Fuller Memorandum is not the first Laundry novel, but it’s the first one I read. (Selection was limited the day I walked into the bookstore — normally I begin a series at the beginning.) That being said, it worked just fine as a freestanding book. I’d been a little skeptical of the premise of the Laundry novels, about a secretive arm of the British intelligence community charged with battling the occult and very specifically working to prevent a return of the Elder Gods. Stross pulls it off, beautifully, with his trademark fractally encysting conspiracies and mordant wit. Highly recommended, and now I need to go round up the rest of the Laundry novels.

Tags: Books, klog, reviews

Posted: 6:36 am Mon January 16 2012 | Comments(0) |