Lovers in the tower: the moon and sun divided, @outshine smiles…

Monday August 3:

[Quote for the Monday] “Democracy is the superior form of government, because it is based on a respect for man as a reasonable being.”

[Source] John F. Kennedy (1917 — 1963) / 35th President of US (1961 — 1963) / Why England Slept.

Tuesday August 4:

A bottom-heavy zooo where songs w/o 6-string guitars convince as much as animal pictures instead of lyrics: dark, groovy, disturbing, gritty.

[#SoundBytes] Heavy Zooo by Beehoover / http://www.beehoover.com/ / Exile on Mainstream Records: http://www.mainstreamrecord… .

Wednesday August 5:

The moon rises, white and full. I stand by the red tomatoes on top of our home and wave. Mom promised to look down.

[Bio] Brenda is a futurist, writer, and tech geek from the Pacific Northwest in the USA. www.brenda-cooper.com.

Thursday August 6:

Paint faces on paper plates, sail them about, make explosive sounds—that’s better special FX than in this movie, and much more entertaining.

[#Spitballs] GI Joe: The Rise of the Cobra / Directed by Stephen Sommers / http://www.hasbro.com/gijoe….

Friday August 7:

[Quote for the Friday] “Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, a good cigar, a good woman—or a bad woman; it depends how much happiness you can handle.”

[Source] George Burns (1896 – 1996) / U.S. comedian and actor / Interview on NBC television.

Saturday August 8:

Professor Jim Burns, retired head of immortalRwe, turned to his teary wife at his hospital bedside, “I should have spent more time at work.”

[Bio] @meika loofs samorzewski no longer writes for humans and lives in Tasmaniahttp://meika.loofs-samorzew… .

Sunday August 9:

At first glance another capes comic, then a cop thriller…and really a story of a superhero breaking under the onset of PTSD. Interesting.

[#ShineComics] ABSOLUTION #1 by Christos Gage (script) and Roberto Viacava (art); Avatar, 2009, $3.99.

More news from World Fantasy hopefully soon (after I’ve caught up, and we had a great DayBreak Magazine reading), but first two news tidbits that fall under the ‘kindred spirits’ category:

• Ann and Jeff VanderMeer announced that their Best American Fantasy series would start, beginning next year, to envelop the complete Americas (North and South America);
• Cheryl Morgan announced (both announcements were done at the ‘fantasy in translation’ panel) that there will be a new set of SF & fantasy awards: Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards (with a new website). Here’s the press release.

This, together with the tireless Charles A. Tan winning one of the inaugural Last Drink Bird Head Awards (the one for International Activism), marks a movement towards more openness to non-Anglophone SF & fantasy (list of winners on Ecstatic Days, with an unexpected picture).

Last Monday I spoke with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman about the Interstitial Arts Foundation and Interfictions 2 (among other things), and Ellen mentioned that they had made a concerted effort to include more international writers, which I welcome and applaud.

Apropos Charles A. Tan: he has interviewed me for the Apex Book of World SF, and the good people of SF Signal have put it up on their site. Check it out!

While you’re at it, also check out the interviews with Melanie Fazi, Aliette de Bodard, Guy Hasson, and more to come! And keep an eye of the World SF News Blog.

And buy a copy of the Apex Book of World SF , of course.

Also, to coincide with that release, Apex Magazine has a special World SF issue this November, guest-edited by Lavie Tidhar.

A torrent of world SF happenings this late October/early November. I hope it’s the beginning of a truly internationally-oriented SF community.

Out of the great nothing, @outshine came without fail…

Monday July 27:

[Quote for the Monday] “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

[Source] John F. Kennedy (1917 — 1963) / 35th President of US (1961 — 1963) / Inaugural address, January 20, 1961.

Tuesday July 28:

Ambitious and complex progressive metal début; too ambitious for the UK, maybe, but Europe will love it. A creative journey at every level.

[#SoundBytes] Evolution: Creatio Ex Nihilio by ENOCHIAN THEORY / http://is.gd/214Wj / Anomalousz Music Recordings – http://is.gd/214YC .

Wednesday July 29:

The surgeon embeds artificial nerves in her prosthetic hand. She can feel a handshake, a fire burning, the color of rain.

[Bio] Carma has been reading/writing science fiction & fantasy for (mumble, mumble) years. Her writing group’s website: breakthruwriting.com .

Thursday July 30:

Paul Giamatti stores his chickpea-shaped soul and later learns it was mislaid or stolen. Less Kaufman than Woody Allen. Funny but uneven.

[#Spitballs] Cold Souls / Directed by Sophie Bartes / http://coldsoulsthemovie.com/.

Friday July 31:

[Quote for the Friday] “Well I know that, wey I figure seh, maybe things get worse for the better?”

[Source] Bob Marley (1945 – 1981) / Jamaican musician, singer, and songwriter.

Saturday August 1:

The cybercat on metal paws stalks cyber-savvy prey. The übermouse’s EMP, though, lets it slip away. A better mouse: the lab’s cause célèbre.

[Bio] Cliff Winnig (@winnig) writes and plays sitar. He has stories in the Cinema Spec & Footprints anthologies.

Sunday August 2:

Five issues of increasingly bloody , incoherent and pointless mayhem that concludes in a Xanatos Pileup meant to set up an Ultimate reboot.

[#ShineComics] ULTIMATUM #1-#5 by Jeph Loeb (script) and David Finch and Danny Miki (art); Marvel, 2009, $3.99 each.

Hot off the press: Alan Beatts — Borderlands Books owner and this World Fantasy’s man in charge of the program — just confirmed that there is a slot available at the World Fantasy Convention for the DayBreak Magazine reading!

Friday night, October 31, in the Crystal Room, at 9 PM: DayBreak Magazine Reading!

Apart from your editor (who won’t be reading…;-), the following DayBreak authors will be there:

• Jeff Soesbe (“The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram”);
• David D. Levine (“horrorhouse”, which will be published at the very same evening);
• Amanda Clark (“The Branding of Shu Mei Fen”: planned for Friday November 27);
• Brenda Cooper (“Riding in Mexico”: planned for Friday February 5);
• Jennifer Lineae (“Arsonist”: planned for Friday April 16);

In the meantime, I will check if the fickle gods of Schiphol tax free have something interesting on offer to bring along…

Living in a world where you’re safe from reality, won’t you take a chance and follow @outshine…

Monday July 20:

[Quote for the Monday] “Peace of mind is not attained by ignoring problems, but by solving them.”

[Source] Raymond Hull (1919 – 1985) / Canadian playwright, screenwriter and lecturer.

Tuesday July 21:

Shoegaze revival – myth or fact? Once you’ve listened to this album of densely beautiful narcotised soundscapes, you won’t care either way.

[#SoundBytes] Three Fact Fader by Engineers – http://www.kscopemusic.com/… / Kscope Records – http://www.kscopemusic.com/.

Wednesday July 22:

An accident, the combine ate the farmer’s arm. An invention, the pharm’s bio-lattice grew him another. Come harvest, the farmer gave thanks.

[Bio] William T. Vandemark chases storms, photographs weather vanes, and writes speculative fiction. http://www.williamtvandemar….

Thursday July 23:

Vampire priest bites abused wife—they kill abuser, wife goes batshit and bites damn near everybody. Almost as cool as Oldboy…and bloodier.

[#Spitballs] Thirst / Directed by Park Chan-wook / http://is.gd/1TUZ3.

Friday July 24:

[Quote for the Friday] “In the best comedy, there’s clearly something wrong, but it’s secret & understated—comedy is the public version of a private darkness.”

[Source, slightly shortened and paraphrased] Paul Theroux (1941 – ) / U.S. writer / My Secret History.

Saturday July 25:

The sun is bright

the air is free

the Martian men

don’t bother me.

The soil is red

the sky is wide

I’m proud to be

a Martian bride.

[Bio] Amanda Davis is a Pittsburgh engineer with a green thumb and a taste for horror movies. She blogs at http://tinyurl.com/ddvpvj .

Sunday July 26:

Every Legionnaire ever in a massive time-swept conflict that unfortunately centers on the silly Superboy-Prime. Noise & fury to no good end.

[#ShineComics] FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF 3 WORLDS #1-5 by Geoff Johns (story), George Perez (art); DC 2008-2009, #3.99 each.

With the Shine anthology—next year’s must-have collection of near-future, optimistic SF—now slated for an April 2010 release, and with exuberant SF as thin on the ground as bankers without bonuses, DayBreak Magazine will alleviate the waiting and fill the gap. Simultaneously quenching your thirst for upbeat stories while also whetting your appetite for the main uplifitng dish, DayBreak Magazine ( http://daybreakmagazine.wordpress.com/ ; http://daybreakmagazine2.wordpress.com/ : you get 2 for the price of one, which is free) will feature a positive, forward-looking story every second Friday until the print Shine anthology is released, or possibly even a bit beyond that date.

The launch is on Friday October 16, on the eve of Diwali, with “The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram” by Jeff Soesbe. The second story will be released on Friday October 30, one the eve of Halloween: “Horrorhouse” by David D. Levine. More to be announced. A new story every two weeks: stories set all over the world, all depicting a future in which you would actually love to live. All for free, and all for your delectation.

Please note that these online stories are different from the ones in the print Shine anthology: It’s just that I liked them so much I’ve decided—after negotiations with the authors—to put them online as a free showcase for upbeat science fiction.

Friday October 16: “The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram”:

It is Diwali in Bangalore, but not everyone is partying as Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram and his colleagues are working overtime to keep certain things from escalating:

• There will be helicopters, wobbling!
• There will be children, rebelling!
• There will be elephants, marauding!
• There will be monkeys, harassing!
• There will be the third eye of Shiva, watching from the sky!
• There will be song!
• There will be dance!
• There will be party!
• There will be the ghost of Dev Kapoor Khan, the Indian Elvis!

Will Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram overcome the increasing madness around him, or will he become mad, himself? Confused? You won’t be, after reading “The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram”, an exuberant tale of a near-future India that puts most Bollywood pictures to shame!

Friday October 30: “Horrorhouse”:

Contrary to popular belief, things will get better in the future, as a change of lifestyle has developed. Not everything is completely rosy, though, as word spreads, like an electronic flash, about a horrorhouse that holds the next generation completely in thrall. Adults not allowed, and the young people who have visited the horrorhouse refuse to talk about it. Ethan Cole—the famed forerunner of the Twitter Revolution—is sent in to investigate…

UPDATE: I’ve added a poll!

UPDATE 2: DayBreak Magazine is getting some love, from SF Scope, Futurismic, Tor.com, 42 Blips and SF Signal, amongst others. And some more love from Big Dumb Object and Charles A. Tan. Keep it coming!

In the distance

Always calling

@outshine

It beckons play

Monday July 13:

[Quote for the Monday] “The Looking back is memory; the looking forward is creation.”

[Source] Elsa Barker (ca. 1869 — 1954) / American novelist and poet / Letters from a Living Dead Man.

Tuesday July 14:

Jagged proggy post-hardcore meets fragile folk-tinged indie somewhere in Glasgow. Looks awful on paper, sounds super on your stereo. Buy it.

[#SoundBytes] The Lamps of Terrahead by El Dog – http://www.eldog.co.uk/ / Lo-Five Records – http://www.lo-five.com/.

Wednesday July 15:

A woman grafts a miniature, nano-engineered breed of fruit trees to people’s skin. Orchards travel the world and seed onto garbage heaps.

[Bio] Alex Dally MacFarlane (http://is.gd/uIUg) wants a cheek-tree. Find her work in LCRW, Electric Velocipede and, soon, Clarkesworld.

Thursday July 16:

Cute little Esther’s rotten with evil and does bad things to mommy and daddy. Sound familiar? By the artiste who directed House of Wax.

[#Spitballs] Orphan / Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra / http://is.gd/1BjY6.

Friday July 17:

[Quote for the Friday] “It is hope that maintains most of mankind.”

[Source] Sophocles (496? – 406 BC) / Greek playwright / Fragments.

Saturday July 18:

For three months, my android’s gone to school for me, dated my girlfriend and done my chores. Nobody’s noticed. Now to make my sister’s.

[Bio] @ficklefiction is actually @fickledeity. Just your average Sri Lankan girl with dreams of changing the world for the better.

Sunday July 19:

The first part of Dick’s original novel, complete, threaded through comic illustrations – a storyboard for readers, though puzzling.

[#ShineComics] DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP #1 (of 24) by Philip K. Dick (novel), Tony Parker (art); BOOM!, 2009, $3.99 .

…is actually mostly done on SF Signal in their Mind Meld topic about “How the Hottest Science Fiction Anthologies Are Created, Part 2” (there are three parts).

In short:

• I’ve worked all weekend to get as many replies out as possible, but almost dropped down from exhaustion somewhere late Sunday night (and apologies again to the author who received a reply that was an incomplete mess that I inadvertently sent before it was finished: I sent out the finished one after that, and went to bed, as I was starting to make crazy mistakes);
• About fifty or so replies still to go out: apologies again but things are very busy on many levels right now. I was home from the day job (which has nothing to do with publishing) very late today, and have important commitments on Thursday and Friday night (again, after the day job). Should get it all wrapped up over the coming weekend, hopefully (no promises: July and August were insane, and September was the same, even when it was supposed to be more quiet);
• Yes, I will be putting some stories that didn’t make it into the *print* version of Shine online, for which I’ll be setting up another site. First one planned — contrary to what I said on the Mind Meld topic — for Friday October 16 (not October 2: original date got pushed forward as I was [am] swamped in other stuff). However, there is a very good reason for exactly Friday October 16;
• Also, while the print version of Shine is full, I am still asking some authors are willing to appear online instead (paid professional rates out of my own pocket), all for more promotion, glory and madness for Shine. So not all outstanding replies will be rejections;

As it is, my intention was to wrap a lot of things up before the SF Signal Mind Meld topic with my contribution was posted (which would have made for a perfect break), but life — in various incarnations — intervened. Not that I’m complaining: my day job is extremely busy while the world at large suffers from the effects of the credit crisis, so in that I am lucky. And the day job has priority, as it pays the bills.

Also, I’ve never had such a crazy summer in my whole life (literally everything seemed to happen at the same time in July and August, and — unexpectedly — in September, as well). But I am catching up — even if not as fast as I would like to — and have more crazy ideas lined up for the future.

So thanks for your patience, and stay tuned!

I have seen @outshine on the edge of dawn, balancing dreams on the end of thorns…

Monday July 6:

[Quote for the Monday] “I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”

[Source] Charlotte Brontë / English novelist (1816 – 1855) / from The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell.

Tuesday July 7:

Cranked amps, bluesy rock, soaring solos, quiet-loud-quiet; pure summertime grunge pop, like the nineties never ended. Kick back, play loud.

[#SoundBytes] FARM by DINOSAUR JR – http://www.dinosaurjr.com/ Play It Again Sam Recordings – http://www.myspace.com/dinosaurjr .

Wednesday July 8:

So brave, so nervous. Both of them. Hand in hand, no gloves and no special suits. An unlocked hatch, a step outside. Truth: Earth survided.

[Bio] Jacques Barcia is a weird fiction writer from Brazil who’s waiting for the climate to change back to normal. www.verbeat.org/blogs/pwt.

Thursday July 9:

Good vs. Evil? Meh. If the Chosen One doesn’t get you with his magic wand, will Bumblebore you to death? Wil Hermione develop chlamydia?

[#Spitballs] Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince / Directed by David Yates / http://is.gd/1sGmU .

Friday July 10:

[Quote for the Friday] “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”

[Source] D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930) / British writer / Studies in Classic American Literature.

Saturday July 11:

They called Bill crazy for downloading his consciousness into a video game, but he wanted to spend more time with his kids.

[Bio] If you can catch Matthew Sanborn Smith early enough in the day, he smells rather nice.http://is.gd/ov1z .

Sunday July 12:

A wonderfully retro effort reflecting 30s-50s Sunday newspaper comics, with the first chapters of fifteen features presented tabloid-sized.

[#ShineComics] WEDNESDAY COMICS #1 [of 12] by diverse hands; DC Comics, 2009, $3.99.

Via a Shine contributor (I’m not saying who. I’m not giving the ToC just yet. There will be a competition about this) I was attended to GreenPunk. I see their blog started last August 19, so it’s still early days. FWIW, my first impressions:

• Their manifesto (or ’statement of purpose’) is a bit too formal (and occasional over-the-top: see point C) for my taste. Caveat: I’m not a fan of manifestos. When Jason Stoddard wrote a manifesto about optimistic SF, I immediately asked him to change it to an open forum; that is, open to questioning and change. Where everybody can contribute and discuss, and is clearly and openly invited to do so. Hence the Optimistic SF Open Platform on the top of this very site.
• I agree with several of the commenters on the io9 topic about GreenPunk: why punk? I’m so tired of -punk added to a movement. Worked with cyberpunk. Got repetitive with steampunk. Got boring with clockpunk. Got completely superfluous with every whateverpunk after that.
• A flog to make sure the horse stays dead: the original punk movement got tired of itself by the early eighties already. Punk is dead, it’s become a product, and proclaiming your movement as ‘GreenPunk’ is about as realistic as the mohawk of the guy pictured below:
• (Yes, you can buy it — for $7.89 to look cool at the next Halloween)
• Finally — this punkhorse resurrects more often than vampires and zombies combined, unfortunately — punk is what beginning musicians produce because they can’t really play their instruments. The moment they do acquire a certain level of musicianship they start to play different music like gothic rock, hardcore and maybe eventually even metal.

Anyway, as mentioned, it’s still very early days for GreenPunk (they’re live less than a month), so time will tell if they are here to stay and produce something interesting (says the guy whose Shine blog is still a month away from its first anniversary. Life on the web is short and fast…;-). As long as they don’t go the way of the SFFEthics-that-became-the-SFFEnthusiasts, whose blog hasn’t posted anything since June 30 (says the guy who hardly posted anything last August. My excuses are a total solar eclipse in China, a WorldCon in Canada, a hacker conference in my home country, preparing for an important new project on the day job and the fact that I had to deliver the Shine MS on August 31. To say that I was extremely busy in August is an understatement: it was totally insane).

BSFA’s Matrix Online (good to see that it’s running again after a short hiatus) has — among many other things — posted an article about Shine by Sissy Pantelis. Check it out, and thanks, Sissy!

To follow up on the “Blueprint for a Better World” post: New Scientist has posted 8 SF stories — edited by Kim Stanlay Robinson — online, calling them sci-fi: the fiction of now.

It’s typical: while I was busy writing up my piece about how the Shine anthology is coming together for SF Signal, I also thought about these 8 flash fiction pieces. I can’t help but think that most of these stories go against the spirit of what New Scientist is trying to do with the “Blueprint for a Better World” series: only Ian McDonald’s “A Little School” is somewhat, very cautiously optimistic, but the rest varies from pessimistic satires to outright apocalyptic (Geoff Ryman’s “2019: The Reality?”, Nicolla Groffith’s “Acid Rain“, Paul McAuley’s “Penance” and Stephen Baxter’s “Kelvin 2.0“). As mentioned, even the satirical pieces (Ian Watson’s “A Virtual Population Crisis“, Justina Robson’s “One Shot” and Ken McLeod’s “Reflective Surfaces” [what's in a name...;-)]) are downbeat in tone.

While I agree that it, more or less, indeed represents a proportional cut-through of the state of current written SF (overwhelmingly downbeat), I can’t help but think that it goes against the spirit of the “Blueprint for a Better World” series.

Which is, I suspect — as I am still catching up with everything, so just read today — summed up New Scientist’s own editorial of the August 22 issue, which I would love to quote ad verbatim, but will have to refrain, and take out the tastiest morsels:

Positive thinking for a cooler world

[...] Show people this video and they will find little motivation not to carry on generating trah and burning oil like there’s no tomorrow. But tell them about the steps their peers are taking to make things better, and they may just follow suit. [...]

[...] Over at the Earth Day Network site, it gets worse. There you can find how many Earths it would take to support your lifestyle if everyone on Earth lived the same way. It’s hard to find any positive messages: a vegan who doesn’t own a car, never flies, takes public transport to work and shares a tiny appartment in a US city would still be told their lifestyle requires 3.3 Earths. It is hard to see what this is going to achieve, other than disillusioning people who are already doing their bit and telling everyone else that it isn’t worth the bother [...]

(Emphasis mine.) This almost exactly echoes the points I made on the “Why I Can’t Write a Near-Future, Optimistic SF Story: the Excuses“  post, especially the Sixth Excuse:

Furthermore, with the amount of cautionary tales going around in SF today, we should be well on our way to paradise, as we’re being told ad nauseam what not to do. Imagining things going wrong is easy; imagining things improving is hard. It’s easier to destroy than create. I’m sick and tired of writers demonstrating five thousand different ways of destroying a house: I long for the rare few that show me how to repair it, or build a better one.

Oh well: New Scientist tries to lead by example. Will SF follow suit? Let a thousand Shines rise…