I’m glad to report (or sorry to report, as the case may be) that Gordon Van Gelder’s operation at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is still the Quickest Draw In The West, when it comes to getting the rejection slips out. From the time I dropped the thing in the corner mailbox to the time my SASE appeared in my home mailbox, six days elapsed. Wow. Time to print the thing out and send it someplace else. (On a related writing note, another short story of mine that’s been stalled-in-progress may have cleared up this morning with the realization that I bungled the story’s beginning. Hopefully that will turn out to be the answer; I’ve been nursing this particular idea for a while but it’s proven stubbornly difficult to get onto paper.)

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It’s probably a sign of something — good or bad, I don’t know — if one can buy a new bookshelf unit (62″ tall, 9″ deep, 27″ wide), fill it completely (including one shelf of nothing but mass-market paperbacks placed two-deep), and still have several stacks of books on the floor. Wow. (Although I haven’t finished the whole project yet; there is still another shelf to relocate to the bedroom and fill and another to rearrange and condense, so everything should be off the floor soon. I think.)

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The Bartlett Administration will soon be looking for a new Deputy Communications Director. Rob Lowe has decided to leave The West Wing, in a dispute over money. Here’s hoping that the departure of Sam Seaborn is handled well (not a drawn-out death, like Dr. Greene on ER) and at least explained on the show itself (the exit of Moira Kelly’s incredibly annoying character after the first season of TWW was never explained at all).

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I’ve been listening quite a bit lately to a rather astonishing piece of music: the Violin Concerto (“To the Memory of an Angel”) by Alban Berg. This is the first time in years that I’ve really delved into twelve-tone music. In the past, I have almost always found twelve-tone music to be cold and sterile-sounding, as if the mechanics of twelve-tone composition completely ruled out what, for me, has always been of primary concern in music: the creation and conveyance of emotion. So much twelve-tone music strikes me as academically interesting but artistically barren. Not so with this concerto. Despite its atonal structure, this is as emotional a work as one is ever likely to hear. The emotion is harder to get at; it’s not conveyed with lush melodies and traditional harmonies, but it most definitely is there.

The Concerto was written as a Requiem of sorts for a person Berg knew, and it ended up serving as Berg’s own Requiem in a way: he died before the work was premiered, so he never heard it. Upon listening to it, I was struck by the fact that it is not really a virtuoso showpiece, the way many concertos are (although I doubt any violinist would consider it an easy work). The focus is not on the technique, but rather on the dialogue that takes place between the soloist and the orchestra. Where many young violinists can display their skills in performances of, say, the Brahms Concerto, I can’t imagine any young violinist being able to really play this work convincingly; it requires musicianship — in the expressive sense — that most young virtuosi simply do not as yet possess. This is particularly true toward the work’s conclusion, when the twelve-tone music gives way to a more tonal texture surrounding a chorale that Bach himself had harmonized two hundred years before. (In fact, the Chorale is directly foreshadowed in the work’s tone-row itself, something which I did not realize until I read an analysis of the work in Grout’s History.) The depth of feeling in the concerto’s closing moments is amazingly tragic and heartbreaking. Death seems to inspire the best in so many composers — Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten all wrote amazing Requiems, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 is a Requiem by any other name. Berg’s amazing Violin Concerto certainly belongs in that class.

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So in the last week a director has been announced on the Alien vs. Predator project, and casting rumors abound for something called Superman vs. Batman. Well, as long as we’re apparently launching the “fanboy wish-fulfillment” genre, maybe Rick Berman and George Lucas can get together and finally settle that age-old Internet debate: Could the USS Enterprise blow up the DEATH STAR?

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Also via AICN: a rather sad story about the possibility of artifacts from the remarkable collection of legendary sci-fi collector (and the original source of the term ‘sci-fi’ itself), Forrest J. Ackerman. Ackerman, known also as the Ackermonster, Dr. Acula, or just plain “Forry”, is already getting quite old and has been suffering from ill health recently. I don’t know if I would ever have had the opportunity to tour the Ackermansion; now it looks like I will never have that opportunity. Ackerman is the collector of SF, fantasy and horror memorabilia; his collection is absolutely legendary and it is very sad to think that its days are numbered.

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“Who is ‘The Loneliest Monk’?”

-MTV’s Tabitha Soren in 1992, after an interview with then-candidate Bill Clinton, who had said that he would love to play saxophone with jazz great Thelonius Monk.

:: It’s always funny when journalists and other media personalities inadvertently display their complete ignorance on any given topic. Sometimes you can’t blame them, if they just happen to have stepped afoul of some piece of information that might not necessarily be common knowledge, but still, the effects are quite often hilarious. Take this sentence, from an otherwise unremarkable article about the computers used by film special effects companies:

“Digital Revelations is largely relying on Intel-based computers for the effects on Rendezvous with Rama, a thriller coming out next year in which a group of humans seek revenge on aliens that blow up Italy.”

Now, perhaps Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama isn’t as well-known as it used to be; it is, after all, at least thirty years old (although it is also a SF classic). What’s funny is that this plot description is utterly absurd. The book opens with Venice being destroyed by a meteor impact, which leads to the deployment of an orbital weapons system for the purpose of blowing up any such future threats. The orbital system, though, detects something else entering the Solar System, something alien in nature. The object is code-named “Rama” and a team of astronauts is dispatched to, well, rendezvous with it. That’s it. No aliens blowing things up, no interstellar war. In fact, if memory serves, the actual aliens themselves don’t even appear in the book. This author has clearly never heard of the book and therefore conflates a couple of plot points into something that barely has any resemblance to the novel’s actual storyline.

Thankfully, the record has been set straight by the good folks at AICN.

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The proposals for rebuilding the World Trade Center site released last week were all fairly pedestrian, and none of them really gave much idea of what the finished site would really look like — they were simply white images superimposed on a generic gray simulacrum of Lower Manhattan. Not so with this proposal, which is highly detailed, meticulously thought out, and more than a little megalomaniacal. Maybe this isn’t quite the answer for the WTC site, but the science fiction-futurist in me would love to see something like this built somewhere. (Hey, why not Buffalo? Our current tallest bulding would be one quarter the height of this sucker!)

(Warning: the site linked above is Flash-heavy, and takes a while to load.)

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Go Lance!!!

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Prequels present a number of unique problems in terms of storytelling. To the extent that the events in the original work are dependent on those events to be depicted in the new work, a sense of inevitability can develop as the storyteller works within the constraints of the events that are already known to happen and still tell a story that is somehow fresh and satisfying on its own. This problem is faced most famously by George Lucas as he fills in the blanks behind the original Star Wars trilogy with the new prequel trilogy, but the problems of prequels arise in other places — one such place being the novel I have just finished reading, Local Custom by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. The specific problem herein doesn’t lie so much in whether the story is exciting or involving given that which comes later; what is at issue here is if one should begin the series with the prequels, given that they were not created in that order.

This book is one of two prequels to a series of space opera novels called “The Liaden Universe” (so named because the central planet is a world called Liad). I have found some very positive reviews of these novels — here and here, for example — that make them sound irresistable: a blend of space opera and romance, with wonderful characterizations and exciting action, et cetera. These books have a lengthy publishing history: the original novels were out of print for years, and then they were reissued in trade-paperback format (but apparently those, too, are now out of print). Lee and Miller have now written two prequel novels (of which Local Custom is the first and Scout’s Progress is the second), which were also initially published as a trade-paperback omnibus but are now being issued as separate novels. Then, all of the remaining books in the series (I believe there are seven altogether) will be reissued as well. This reissuing order — in the story’s chronological order, as opposed to the order in which the novels were originally written — presented me with some key problems. It’s not unlike the difficulty faced by someone who has never seen a Star Wars film before: despite the fact that the events of The Phantom Menace happen first, the story really should be entered with A New Hope. The same applies here. I probably should have waited for Conflict of Honors to be issued (it’s due next month). I suspect that I would have found the action of Local Custom more involving had I known the story to which it is leading.

That’s not to say that it is a bad book, because it is not. It is, in fact, quite good — mainly from a standpoint of characterization. The story involves a young scion of an important clan on the planet Liad, Er Thom yos’Galan (the names in this book are a bit of a stumbling point), who is being forced to marry so he can produce the heir which is required by the laws of the clans. The problem is that Er Thom is still in love with an Earth woman with whom he had an affair some years before, Anne Davis. He decides that before he marries, he must see Anne one more time, and so he goes to Earth to do just that — and so discovers that he fathered Anne’s child, Shan.

This is the setup for a “culture clash” story. Er Thom wants Shan to be his heir — in fact, he believes that it is required. Anne only wants to raise her son herself, and not have him stolen by the Liadens. There are intrigues that involve the Liaden concept of honor (called “melant’i” in the novel), and the lengths to which aristocracy must go to save face. Local Custom, then, is basically a romance; those who come to space opera expecting lots of space ships and action will be disappointed. The book’s only action, per se, comes in the last hundred pages. This is not to say that the book is boring, but it did have me wondering for a long time — well over half the book — when the preliminaries would end and when the real story would begin. Additionally, a subplot involving Anne Davis’s status as a scholar of linguistics is only handled in perfunctory fashion, and not really involving. Again, I wonder if this would not have been the case had I read the original series, which apparently deals with Shan’s adventures as an adult, first; the “linguistics” subplot doesn’t seem that important given the relatively few pages devoted to it here, but it seems more important as a seed for future action. I may be wrong here (if you’ve read the original series, don’t tell me so because I want to learn for myself!!) but the effect of this subplot was to feel a bit like the Death Star diagrams in Attack of the Clones. Was that an Easter egg for fans, or a precursor of some major action down the road retrofitted for the prequels? All through the book I had the feeling that I would be better served setting these two prequels aside until after I complete the originals. For this reason above all I am going to wait to read Scout’s Progress until after the rest of the series is out.

The book’s strengths are definitely its characters and their interactions. Lee and Miller (a husband-and-wife writing team) do an excellent job of creating a society in the Liadens that seem like ours on some points but differ wildly on others, particularly with regard to class structure. Most amazingly, they do this without much by way of “infodump” at all; anyone needing a primer on the oft-quoted rule of storytelling, “Show! Don’t tell!”, could do far worse than study what these two have done here. The Liaden concepts of honor, balance and necessity are all fascinating, and I look forward to exploring them more as the other books come out. My only complaint, and it is minor, is in the Liaden words that pepper the story. I’ve never much liked books that have me referring to a glossary on a fairly regular basis. Luckily, Lee and Miller are sufficient to the task of making me overlook that particular problem.

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