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This is the
99th issue (and first online issue) of Derogatory Reference, written,
edited, and published by Arthur D. Hlavaty.
I do not believe that
Son of a Bush plotted 9/11 as a trick to clamp down on dissent. I
do not believe that those around him who are smart enough to think
of it did so. I find it extremely likely that the Bush administration
did not pay as much attention to the dangers of terrorist attack as
the Clinton administration had. This suggests that perhaps the Republicans
were mistaken, and helping your rich friends steal even more is a
bigger distraction from the proper duties of government than getting
your knob polished. (Of course, they obviously need a lot of help;
Enron stole millions if not billions just in California and still
went broke.) I now look forward to a replay of the Watergate scenario,
in which the attempts to cover up exacerbate the administration's
problems. Going, "Boogie! Boogie! Boogie!" about the threat
of another attack is an excellent start.
Turning to something worse
than the government: Microsoft announced in court that its software
is so bad that revealing how it works would endanger national security.
As Dave Barry says, I Am Not Making This Up.
In a frighteningly unprecedented
display of both sociability and travel, I took part in three sf gatherings
in three different states in consecutive weeks this March.
*Lunacon*
Synecdoche is the rhetorical device in which the part symbolizes the
whole: Bernadette told Lunacon programming she'd be happy to appear
on a panel any time except Saturday afternoon, when she would be teaching
a writing class. They scheduled her panel for the middle of her class
time.
On Friday evening, I attempted
to attend the panel on How Not to Have a Fan Feud, which turned into
How Not to Have a Panel, largely because two of the listed participants,
having told programming that they would not attend the con, were not
there. But there are always competent people at these things. I repaired
to the Con Suite, where Alexis and Lee Gilliland were handling things
at least as well as could be expected, given that the food that had
been promised for hours earlier had not yet arrived. Jean Elizabeth
Krevor was running the Green Room in a friendly and efficient manner.
(Harlan Ellison is right about "Let me help.")
I had already been assigned
to the panel Bernadette (or as the pocket program said, "Bernette")
was on, and I told the audience that I would attempt to channel her,
so if I said anything more interesting than usual, they would know
why. It was a good panel, including _Analog_ editor Stan Schmidt (I
recommend _Which Way to the Future?_, a new Tor collection of his
editorials) and Darrell Schweitzer, from whom I learned that the last
200 pages of a large book add virtually nothing to printing costs,
a datum that suggests much about current lavishly detailed and richly
peopled fantasy series and/or Extruded Fantasy Product (a distinction
I am not competent to draw).
The next two panels blur
together in my mind, as they shared one room and several participants:
"We Are Women, Hear Us Roar" with Esther Friesner and Jean
Krevor, was followed by "Creating a Science-Fictional Religion,"
with Kage Baker, and both were fun. I am not sure whether Tamora Pierce
was on one or both (the pocket program says neither), but I knew I
was going to like her when she spoke of telling a respectable potential
employer that she had taught a course in "History of" Witchcraft.
(I do not recall whether she made quotation marks with her fingers
or conveyed them through tone of voice.)
I have since learned more
about her. There's a charming _Locus_ interview in which she discusses
setting out to write about "girls kicking butt," an area
that is as yet insufficiently explored, Xena notwithstanding. And
one advantage of procrastinating on the writing of this is that I
can mention that Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Weblog pointed me to the
fan fiction site (fanfiction.net), which collects writing set in the
worlds of other print fiction. Tamora Pierce's stories are the fourth
most popular source of such fanfic (after Harry Potter, Lord of the
Rings, and Animorphs). I do not know precisely what this means, but
obviously she's doing _something_ right. (By the way, I love the whole
idea. Just as there are those who transgress against the rules forbidding
playing with their food, so some of us play with our reading. A world
in which people write erotica with the background and characters of
George Orwell's _1984_ is a more interesting one than I had suspected.)
There were other pleasures:
Old friend J. Katherine Rossner stayed with us over the weekend and
visited the con. I had a substantial chat with Eric Raymond for the
first time in many years. We discussed sex, science fiction, and computers
and did not discuss the main area in which we disagree. (I distrust
equalizers, whether they come from Karl Marx or Samuel Colt.) I was
immoralized on film for the Fan Gallery. (The AutoCorrect attempted
to change that.)
*ICFA*
The main thing wrong with the 2002 ICFA was that Bernadette couldn't
be there. Her uneven health and (as ever) crowded schedule meant that
she could either attend the conference or write the paper she had
promised to deliver, but not both. She chose the latter, and I read
her paper (on Ramsey Campbell) for her. Fortunately, my co-husband,
Kevin Maroney, was also able to be present.
One of those who missed
Bernadette was Peter Straub. Though he is not otherwise fannish, he
and we live in adjoining cities and see each other once a year, 1000
miles from home. Bernadette has written extensively about his work,
and he shares my high opinion of those writings.
There were many more of
the usual crew, such as Fiona Kelleghan (whose sf criticism and appearance
in a bathing suit-both excellent-were noted in the _Washington Post_).
There were new friends there,
too. Kevin and I had lunch with Ted Chiang, whose remarkable short
stories and novellas are about to be published in a single volume
by Tor (_Stories of Your Life and Others_). I also met China Miéville,
whose _Perdido Street Station_ has been praised by many people whose
opinions I value. If I didn't have advanced Reader's Block, I probably
would have read it by now. He's a big guy with a shaven head and (as
Kevin put it) a spiral-bound ear, but I didn't notice anything _unusual_
about his appearance. (Bernadette read and enjoyed his King Rat around
the time it came out in the US, and that was about when she started
getting pet rats, of which we now have four. Coincidence or conspiracy:
You decide.) China and I do not have the same political views, he
understated (I am tempted to regress to the words of my childhood
and call him "Red China"), but I enjoyed meeting him.
Before the Conference I
realized something: I have an Inner Self that could be called Mr.
T-not the guy from the A-Team, but short for Tourette). I don't actually
have the affliction, but I often find myself wanting to utter really
offensive remarks. (Sufferers from the syndrome don't restrict themselves
to the words you can't say on television; they'll also want to make
ethnic slurs and announce that the plane they are on is being hijacked.)
We were preceded in the hotel by a group from VicePorterhouseCowpers
(or whatever-the accounting firm that can't write its own name in
a straight line), and I really wanted to break in to their meeting
and yell, "Do you get down on your knees in gratitude that it
wasn't one of _your_ companies that got caught?" Later, at the
Critical Theory Roundtable, where you could bleed to death from all
the cutting-edge theory, I kept wanting to scream, "Eternal objective
literary values!"
At the first Thursday session,
I attended a panel on Batman, composed of Joe Sanders, Joe Sutliff
Sanders, and Craig Jacobsen. (You mean your name _isn't_ Joe Sanders?
Isn't that confusing?) Most informative; the Caped Crusader has been
through many changes.
That was followed by a panel
on the history of the ICFA and the IAFA, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
There was a printed handout summarizing that history, which got almost
all of it right, except that this year's Special Guest, Molly Gloss,
was referred to as "Molly Bloom" (_long_ Guest of Honor
speech).
Actually, the GoH speech
was by Joan Aiken, whose selection represented the Conference's theme
of Children's Fantasy, and it was a mesmerizing account of some of
the dreams at the heart of her work. One of her books, the delightful
_The Cockatrice Boys_, was given away to one and all at the luncheon.
We had earlier learned that someone at her publisher had confused
"cartons" and "cases," and so 9,600 copies of
the book had been delivered to an unsuspecting Bill Senior, but that
had been rectified.
After lunch, there was a
session on Jorge Luis Borges, one of my heroes. In a paper on "The
Aleph," the speaker mentioned that the Aleph, that single place
at which the entire universe can be focused, could be seen as a foretelling
of the Internet. (As could "The Library of Babel.") He also
mentioned perhaps my favorite line from the master: "The genius
was not in the poetry, but in the reasons the poetry should be considered
admirable." There's a lot of that going around, even more than
in Borges's day. (Perhaps by now there is a second-order version:
"The genius was not in the criticism, but in the reasons the
criticism should be considered admirable.")
The next session I saw was
on children's fantasy, and the paper I enjoyed most was Farah Mendlesohn's,
on how the children in Diana Wynne Jones's stories acquire agency,
a term which refers to that essential step to adulthood where the
child learns to use power, with the awareness that there will be consequences.
("Memo to my younger readers:" Jon Carroll once said, "You
will hate Consequences.")
The next morning I attended
a session on Philip K. Dick. I enjoyed Tony Wolk's discussion of the
mind-body problem in _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ and Alex
Irvine's ingenious suggestion that some elements of Dick's work come
from the San Francisco poets he hung out with in the Fifties, but
I was surprised that the paper I liked the most was Emily Bick's discussion
of Dick, G.K. Chesterton, and Bret Easton Ellis. I'm afraid I share
the vulgar prejudice that _American Psycho_ is the sort of book that
gives homicidal pornography a bad name, and I've never liked _A Scanner
Darkly_. But after some introductory French culture about Barthes's
theory of fashion, we got a fascinating discussion of the fiction
of disinformation situations, where all the evidence can lead the
protagonist (and thus the reader) in at least two opposite directions.
Chesterton's _The Man Who Was Thursday_ is of course a classic of
that approach; that element is one of the strengths of _A Scanner
Darkly_; and apparently Ellis's _Glamorama_ fits into that category
as well.
I had to miss the after-lunch
presentation by Scholar GoH Rod McGillis so I could prepare to deliver
Bernadette's paper. Apparently, one of the themes was Post-Colonial
Theory. That makes sense: Having been children, we are all post-colonial.
Bernadette's paper deals with Campbell's use of autobiographical material
in his fantastic fiction and sets the stage for next year's ICFA,
when Campbell will be the GoH.
The next morning, there
was a panel on feminist sf, including Bill Clemente's paper on James
Tiptree jr., which not only discussed her excellent novels and stories,
but also brought back a few memories for me. Back in the mid-Seventies,
I was just getting into fanzine fandom. One editor, Jeff Smith, was
corresponding with the mysterious Tiptree, who interacted only via
the Post Office, and whose gender was not then known. I thought "he"
was a fascinating person, who wrote things like (in answer to an anguished
complaint that the Moon Landing was boring and commercialized), "That's
like getting indignant because water doesn't burn and shit doesn't
taste good. I mean, what did you _expect_?"
Smith did a large special
issue of his zine _Khatru_, in which a number of sf writers postally
discussed feminism. Tiptree was one of them, and most of the feminists
present found enough ineluctable masculinity in "his" words
to suggest that the discussion would go better without "him."
The climax, as it were, came when Tiptree made a reference to "Arthur
'Jiggling-Nuts' Clarke." Another participant accused Tiptree
of gay bashing, and she replied that she knew nothing of Clarke's
sexual orientation, and wouldn't have made an issue of it if she had,
but she was replying to Clarke's suggestion that women's breasts would
jiggle provocatively in free fall by pointing out that men have bouncy
bits too. So it was a woman disguised as a man accused of gay bashing
because she believed her target's effort to sound as sexist as a real
het male. Truly a drag comedy worthy of Shakespeare.
The panel on feminist sf
was followed by a session on current British sf. Last year NYRSF published
an article suggesting that science fiction is getting middle-aged:
stodgy and nostalgic. Paul Kincaid wrote to suggest that perhaps this
was true only of American sf, that as the US and Russia were once
supposed to, British and American sf converged, then passed each other,
so it's the British writing that is now expansive and optimistic.
The panel seems to think that there's a lot of exciting new British
sf coming out.
I'd like to recommend one
example here. I had the good fortune to read John Meaney's _Paradox_,
a book set in a fantasy-like monarchy, but one where the magic is
rigorously worked-out mathematics and logic. I particularly enjoyed
it because it harked back to the Asimov approach, where the protagonist
triumphs by figuring out the world around him, rather than by adventuring
or beating people up. I recommend it wholeheartedly; it hasn't been
published in the US yet, but I hope it will be soon.
And then came the concluding
banquet, which Kevin and I had the pleasure of attending with Donna
Ross Hooley and her husband, Steve. This year Donna had once again
given a paper on Permanent Special Guest Brian W. Aldiss. She has
done so many of those that the Conference should make her the Permanent
Special Guest Scholar. The ones I've heard were excellent, but there's
usually something I want to see even more when she is presenting her
paper, and this year was no exception.
One of the ways in which
Kevin is not a mere normal person is that he can hang spoons from
his nose, and he taught Donna how to do so. It was that kind of banquet,
as indicated by the presentation of the Robert A. Collins Award. Bill
Senior and Chip Sullivan have been serving the Conference far beyond
the call of duty (not to mention sanity) for many years now. There
is an award for that sort of thing, and there was some question as
to which of these eminently deserving gentlemen was to get it this
year. It wound up being given to both, with an allegedly humorous
statement in the second presentation that the other person wasn't
_really_ getting it.
The second presentation
was long and detailed. Given that people wanted to get to the Saturday
evening party and were wondering if the organization was actually
taking back an award it had given, it seemed at the time as if we
might be getting a speech the length of Molly Bloom's. We had much
time to find flaws in the speech, and many people did.
But let's not end on that
note. It was a great gathering, offering knowledge and companionship,
as usual.
Minicon
Historical Background: I wanted to get on the Internet in 1977, when
it didn't exist yet. There being no blogs yet, I did a _zine_, which
I had to type on paper, copy, and mail out. (This is the 99th issue
of it.) I then found what would evolve into newsgroups and Live Journals.
(Do not believe the Young-Web Creationists who say that the Net created
those ex nihilo, printing out fake fossils of earlier forms.) They
were called amateur press associations, or _apas_ for short, and despite
the primitive crudities of typing on paper and mailing them to someone
who would put them together in a big lump and mail them back, I enjoyed
them.
For years I was in a dozen
or more at any given time, and I'm still in five of the surviving
ones. One that was important to me for quite a while was MINNEAPA,
centered in (you guessed it!) Minneapolis. I believe I was told about
it by Carol Kennedy, whom I'd been sending my zine to for a while.
I was in it from the late 70s to the mid-80s. Also in it were some
people you may have heard of, such as fantasy writers Pamela Dean,
Stephen Brust, Emma Bull, and Will Shetterly, as well as Bruce Schneier,
the cryptography maven. In 1982 we were joined by a woman named Geri
Sullivan. Then as now, I sent this zine promiscuously to anyone who
indicated what I could interpret as interest, and when Geri did so,
I showed her mine. It was the first zine she had ever received. She
now publishes _Idea_, maybe the best fanzine in the world, with beautiful
mimeography (which is not an oxymoron) and fascinating writing. I
think it's a clear case of _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_, but this
argument fails to convince some.
(Perhaps the best article
I ever read in _Idea_ was a wrenching memoir by Kathy Routliffe. I
had never met her before, but I sent her a zine, as I had Geri, and
we corresponded.)
Anyway, all this history
made me even happier to be chosen as Minicon's Fan Guest of Honor,
and offered me a chance to see all these and more old friends, some
of whom I hadn't seen in twenty years, and some I'd never met. Further
pleasure came from being joined for the con by Bernadette and Kevin.
(The concom wanted them there; perhaps part of my attraction as Fan
GoH was that, like the Christian God, I would be three in one.)
Michael von Maltzen was
in charge of programming, and he and I exchanged e-mails a reasonable
time before the con. Sharon Kahn, another old MINNEAPA friend I'd
never seen face to face, came up with useful suggestions. The last
time I was a Fan GoH (Westercon 1989), the concom had given me a choice
of writing a speech or being interviewed by a panel. You will be shocked
to learn that I took the option requiring less effort and preparation.
I suggested the same approach this time. I assumed there would be
about four or five panelists. The one I suggested was Jo Walton, whose
delightful posts on rasff and other newsgroups had led to her selection
as Fan GoH last year.
There turned out to be a
problem with that. I'd volunteered Jo without telling her, and worse,
when I was e-mailed the tentative program, I saw that she was to be
the only one on the interviewing panel. To further complicate things,
her family was in the process of moving to Canada from the UK and
pretty much incommunicado, but I was finally able to get in touch
with her by e-mail and make clear that I would be willing to recruit
other panelists so as not to put the whole interviewing task on her.
She indicated a willingness to go it alone.
We arrived on Thursday,
and shortly after we had checked in to the hotel, we ran into Jo,
with her son Sasha and her husband Emmet O'Brien. We went to an excellent
Chinese restaurant with them and another old friend from rasff, Tom
Womack. I also encountered Steve Brust, who said he remembered me
from MINNEAPA and had enjoyed my zines.
The con assigned us not
one but two liaisons, my old friend Carol Kennedy and my new friend
Susan Levy Haskell, who did a marvelous job of making the con pleasant
for us and minimizing our difficulties, but were helped by the way
the concom made the con pleasant for everyone and minimized everyone's
difficulties.
The next day, the concom
had made luncheon reservations for us at Aquavit, an elegant place
a few blocks away. As we were gathering a group, including Carol,
Rachael Lininger, Pam Dean, and David Dyer-Bennet, I noticed the name
of another previously unmet MINNEAPA friend, Eileen Lufkin, and invited
her to join us. She proved to be not only good company, but also a
useful native guide. Much of downtown Minneapolis has walkways between
the buildings, or as Bernadette calls them, Habitrails. Eileen led
us back to the hotel without going outside.
And then the con officially
began. One of the pleasures I was looking forward to was the sound
of my own voice. There are about a dozen things I'm not afraid of,
and public speaking is one of them. (Private speaking is not.) I had
offered to be on lots and lots of programming, and they took me up
on it. So I went to moderate the first panel, on Creating Gods.
As Brian Aldiss would say,
Hubris was immediately clobbered by Nemesis. An hour later, I said,
"Stop me before I moderate again." The Discordian Panel
was later, but this had all the chaos you could want, including more
talking over each other than an Altman movie. But as the Minicon Moderators'
Guide (which I should have read _before_) reminds us, it's only an
hour, and no one got killed. Actually, it was just that the panel,
lacking proper leadership, went off in two directions: Fantasy writers
Lyda Morehouse and Katya Reimann talked about deities in their worlds,
while Richard Tatge and I talked about alternative religions in this
one. Like me, Richard is a Sixties person. I believe I was the one
who quoted a Stephen Gaskin line that describes us: "I experimented
with drugs in the Sixties, but I didn't exhale."
I was in the audience for
the following panel, which discussed the rift in Minneapolis fandom
over Minicon's decision of a few years ago not to try to be all things
to all people. I don't want to get into a fraught topic that I don't
know much about, but let me just say what I did notice: The current
Minicon attracts lots of nice, interesting people. It's even drawing
newcomers. Two I enjoyed meeting--Shweta Narayan and Zack Weinberg,
who flew in from Berkeley--further enlivened things by dressing in
clown/jester garb.
Later that evening, I encountered
old friend Jon Singer, and finally got around to telling him the circumstances
of our first meeting: It was many years ago, and a Fannish Personage
was displeased with my writing. (We have long since made peace.) He
informed me that I should crawl on my knees to Jon Singer, to be instructed
in how to do fan writing right. I met Jon shortly after that, and
liked him anyway.
The following morning Neil
Belsky brought us an excellent pizza. Bernadette then discoursed,
brilliantly, as usual, on Charles Williams, in a small upstairs program
room.
Then came the Trickster
panel, with a chance to talk about Coyote and other heroes, and more
important, a chance to see Eleanor Arnason again. I mentioned that
there were people at the con I hadn't seen in twenty years. I hadn't
seen Eleanor since 1964, when we both graduated from Swarthmore. I
had read her books, such as the delightful _To the Resurrection Station_,
and we've had a chance to correspond. In any event, the panel was
enjoyable, and afterwards we got to compare notes on the good old
days. It seems that we disagreed about Swarthmore--I loved it; she
didn't--though we agreed that it was an elitist refuge from Real Life.
My only complaint was that they ejected me, by a process of graduation.
But they _told_ me to eat from the trees of knowledge.
[One thing I love about
Swarthmore is that the school has given up its football team. When
I was there, merely having a bad team was enough, but the sports thing
has gotten out of hand. The book to read on this subject is _The Game
of Life_, by James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen. Essentially, it
says that the one group that most closely lives down to the affirmative-action
stereotype (don't belong there, don't learn, don't even mix with the
others to give them a Diversity Experience) is Jocks--excuse me, I
mean Athletic-Americans. (Alumni spawn are not too far behind.) Even
badminton scholarships help jockify the place.]
Somewhere in the general
confusion was dinner, and I am not sure whether that was the one where
we enjoyed hanging out with Neil Rest, or the one where we enjoyed
hanging out with Jeanne Mealy. I don't think it was the one where
we enjoyed hanging out with Kathy Routliffe and her husband, Bob Berlien.
I should write more things down when I'm going to do a con report.
(If you were there, but are not mentioned in this report, that's why,
and I apologize. Beth Friedman. Mary Kay and Jordin Kare. Vicki Rosenzweig.
And more.)
After that, Elise Matthesen
moderated the Alternate Sexual Lifestyles panel, with the Valentine's
Castle Three. Bernadette mentioned that the last such panel she had
attended was entirely devoted to gay & bi, but Elise did not make
the opposite error. She invited a male couple to join us. Excellent
panel.
The absolute highlight of
the con for me was the Fan GoH interview. Jo was awesome at it. Those
remarkable on-screen and in-person communications skills translated
into excellent interviewing. It was fun for us, and I believe it was
fun for the audience.
The following morning, Bernadette
and Carol talked about Lies Your English Teacher Told You. Kevin and
Bernadette then joined Jon Singer, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Jo
Walton for the indescribable but fascinating [*] panel.
We stayed over Sunday night.
I got to meet GoHs Emma Bull and Will Shetterly after the con. The
next day Minneapolis reminded us that it was Minneapolis by having
a snowstorm. That didn't delay our flight too badly.
It was great. I was registered
by Karen Cooper at the beginning of the con, and expected to have
more chance to talk with her, but it didn't turn out that way, and
there were only brief chats with Geri Sullivan, Joyce Scrivner, and
Dan Goodman, among others. I didn't get to see Bruce Schneier, Nate
Bucklin, and Joel Rosenberg at all.
But mostly the con was wonderful.
The only serious flaw was the one it shared with the Sixties and my
Swarthmore years: It ended.___
I still don't have an
actual full-time job, but I'm getting a reasonable amount of proofreading
and copy-editing work. I'm also doing more writing for reference books.
I have an essay on Robert Silverberg in the forthcoming _Supernatural
Fiction Writers_. The subject of that piece commented on a previous
zine of mine in FAPA, saying that he'd never before seen William Gaddis
and Marion Zimmer Bradley in the same sentence. In that spirit, let
me just list the people I wrote up for a Sixties Encyclopedia: John
Barth, Hugh Hefner, Tim Leary, Dwight Macdonald, and Mario Puzo.
My computer's screen croaked.
Kevin installed a new one, and I realized how bad it had gotten before
it croaked. I'm glad I didn't get around to writing that screed denouncing
gray, hard-to-read Web sites.___
Sometime around age 50,
you begin to notice that every year is a Year of the Jackpot. This
year we've already lost a whole bunch of interesting and/or talented
and/or nice people, such as Bruce Pelz, Chuck Jones, Nancy Rapp, Dave
Van Ronk, Robert Nozick, Waylon Jennings, Martha Beck, Billy Wilder,
Stephen Jay Gould, and the amazing photosurrealist Abdul Mati Klarwein
(if you saw a great Ballantine book cover in the 70s, it was Klarwein),
not to mention three excellent sf writers--R.A. Lafferty, Damon Knight,
and George Alec Effinger.
I always said the best description
of Lafferty's writing is what W.C. Fields said about sex: There may
be some things better, and there may be some things worse, but there
is nothing exactly like it. Knight did one of those Thomas Kuhn revolutions
(from radical to obvious in his own lifetime) with the idea that sf
was neither a pulpish subliterature that was beneath criticism nor
a slannish superliterature that was above it. Effinger had horrible
health problems and never lived up to the dread Great Potential, but
wrote some marvelous stuff.
In memory, here are a
few quotes:
Effinger: So okay, Brad
and the Nine of Handbags you know. The Corvette is the Chariot. Great
Shape Barbie is Strength, and the Barbie game is the Wheel of Fortune--"Solo
in the Spotlight"
Jennings: There's one in every crowd, for crying out loud, why was
it always turning out to be me? (OK, so Billy Joe Shaver wrote it,
and Waylon just sang it.)
Knight (from a plot summary): Franchard, who is telepathic and clairvoyant,
then has Joyce, who knows nothing about anything, tortured to extract
unspecified information from him.
Lafferty: There is a secret society of seven men that controls the
finances of the world. This is known to everyone, but the details
are not known. There are those who believe it would be better if one
of the seven were a financier.
Van Ronk: My mucous membranes are just a memory. Sometimes I think
this stuff is bad for me.
Wilder: Nobody's perfect.
Some Books You Really
Want to Know About
Jasper Fforde, The Eyre
Affair. This one is just plain fun, set in a World as Myth where history
was determined by great works of literature, and is subject to retroactive
change. I'm actually glad that there will be sequels.
Noelle Howey, Dress Codes.
Charming memoir of having a father who always thought he should have
been a woman, and finally did something about it.Damien Broderick,
Transcension. One of the best imaginations in sf finds a form to match.
Charlaine Harris, Dead
until Dark and Living Dead in Dallas. The Southern Vampire series.
(Redneck would be the wrong word for several reasons.) Delightful
books in which a telepathic waitress and a vampire team up to fight
crime and such down in the bayous, in a future where vampires are
kinda accepted.
--Arthur D. Hlavaty
hlavaty@panix.com Church
of the SuperGenius In Wile E. We Trust e-zine available on request.
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