A Postcard From London

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Hi, all! I'm in Edinburgh now, that beautiful city, and subsequently too busy hurrying off to museums and pubs and above all the Royal Mile to do a decently long post. So what you get is a postcard from London.

Above: Yours truly (right) together with the indisputably great M. John Harrison. Mike, as his friends and acquaintances call him, is the author of (among a great many other worthy works) the Viriconium books which a quarter-century ago revolutionized fantasy. Not that anybody noticed back then. Except, possibly, me. I remember reading "The Lamia and Lord Cromis" and thinking: This changes eveything.

And so it did. Eventually. Today, Mike Harrison is acknowledged as the originator and ancestral influence of the New Weird. He has followers and acolytes. But if we'd all had any sense, way back when, he'd've been simply the first among equals.

Oh well. A great opportunity almost wasted -- but then, at almost the last moment, recognized and taken. Better this way than not, eh?

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Pleasant News, Terrifying News

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Good news first. I've just learned that The Dragons of Babel has received an Alex Award. The Alex Awards are given by the American Library Association for the 10 best adult books that appeal to teen audiences.

The list of recipients is:

City of Thieves (Viking) by David Benioff
The Dragons of Babel (Tor) by Michael Swanwick
Finding Nouf (Houghton) by Zoë Ferraris
The Good Thief (Dial) by Hannah Tinti
Just After Sunset: Stories (Scribner) by Stephen King
Mudbound (Algonquin Bks.) by Hillary Jordan
Over and Under (Thomas Dunne Bks.) by Todd Tucker
The Oxford Project (Welcome Bks.) by Stephen G. Bloom, photographed by Peter Feldstein,
Sharp Teeth (Harper) by Toby Barlow
Three Girls and Their Brother (Crown) by Theresa Rebeck

Never heard of the award? Neither had I. But it's one of the many, many ALA Youth Media Awards, and librarians are on the side of the angels. Not the wimpy little angels that Newagers hang around their necks and corporations use to sell you stuff you don't need, but the real angels. The ones with swords of fire that defend us from the likes of John Ashcroft and safeguard not only our liberties but our literature. So I'm particularly pleased to have their approval.

At the very top of the list of awards, incidentally, is the coveted Newbery Medal. This year's winner is is The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman who is, I cannot resist mentioning, a friend. Congratulations, Neil!

So there are many reasons to be happy today. But also, alas ...


Another reason to despair

It's just been reported that Realms of Fantasy is folding. This is terrible news. It was the largest and glossiest fantasy magazine in existence and the only magazine solely devoted to fantasy in the US (I exclude here semiprozines and webzines) and I enjoyed it immensely.

Even worse, all the genre magazines are in trouble. Serious trouble. RoF could very well be only the first to topple.

Ironically enough, there's a healthy audience for all the genre magazines. Their difficulties have been created by a distribution system that simply doesn't put them out in front of people who'd like to buy an occasional copy, and thus they're being supported by a dwindling number of subscribers.

The magazines are the center of the genres of fantasy and science fiction, and the crucible in which literary innovation is forged. So ... as sincerely and gently as I can, let me urge you to do your part to keep them alive. If you already subscribe to one or more, please keep renewing. If you don't, please consider the possibility.

The Big Three surviving magazines in the States are:


The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction -- which recently went bi-monthly, a move traditionally held to be a cry for help.

Asimov's Science Fiction

Analog

End of editorial. Thanks for listening.

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An Extremely Short Post

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I'm typing this on my palmtop in the cafe in the British Library. The British Library! So this will be short. There's a lot more London than time in front of me.

Just now strolled through the Sir John Ritblat Gallery, which houses such items as the Magna Carta, a Gutenberg Bible, and the notebooks of such literary luminaries Ted Hughes, Samuel Johnson, and Virginia Woolf -- as well as one single precious volume of the Scribbledehobbledehoydenii.

Which I promptly carried back out with me.

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Remembering Mike Ford

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I'm packing for London, Edinburgh, and York, so I almost missed blogging today. Luckily, what I have to blog is short and sweet.

It's a memory of the astonishingly and effortlessly witty John M. Ford, known to all his friends as Mike. Years ago, I ran across him at a science fiction event, where they'd given us those little stick-on name tags beginning:

HELLO. MY NAME IS . . .

and under it, he'd written:

INIGO MONTOYEZ
YOU KILLED MY FATHER
PREPARE TO DIE

Which was just so damned typical of him. I really miss the guy.


And if you're going to be in London a week from Wednesday. . .

I'll be appearing at the British Science Fiction Association meeting in the Antelope Tavern in Belgravia. Meeting notice here. Why not drop by and say hi? I'm not like most of the people you meet.

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Waking Janet

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After the funeral, after the tears, after the wake . . . months after all that, there's a secondary service, a kind of writer's wake that must be performed for those who made their living by the pen.

Last Monday, Gardner Dozois, Susan Casper, and I drove to Lincoln Park, New Jersey, to sort through Janet Kagan's papers and decide which were to be sent to the Jack Williamson Collection at Eastern New Mexico University, and which were to be unceremoniously dumped.

It was a long day of hard work, quiet reminiscence, and small discoveries. Janet liked to present herself as something of a dilettante, somebody who wrote for fun the fun of it (that certainly was true! nobody enjoyed writing as much as Janet did), a writer who simply dashed off her stories and novels. Going through her files, I could see that this last was simply not so. Janet was an organized and disciplined writer. She had endless files of newspaper clippings and magazine articles organized by topic: Mycology, Future Crime, Alternative Marriages, Gold Rushes, Rock & Roll, McCarthy Era, Status Symbols, Rich People, Storytelling, Pluto, Stupid Things People Say, Food Production, Emergent Cultures, Epidemic Diseases . . . "Was there anything Janet wasn't interested in?" I asked.

Smiling and half chuckling, Ricky said, "No."

Her manuscripts were located in four sets of files. One set at her desk were those she was working on at the time she died. Another set were completed. A third were either incomplete or finished but unsatisfactory to her. And there was a set of files labeled Accreting, These were files with a story title at the top, and anywhere from a few to an enormous lot of clippings. Some of these had sheets of notes toward the intended story. Others had only the clippings. All of these stories evanesced into nothing at Janet's death.

What remained? Everything. "Janet never threw away a scrap of paper in her life," Gardner said wearily as the day wore down. And while this was an exaggeration, ENMU certainly has a lot of treasure to shift through:

• Two unpublished novels, Safety Claws (a YA) and Sable and Glory (aka Blogits).
  
• The novel-in-progress Janet was working on when she died, Who Do You Think You Are -- Molly Bly? This looked to me to be mostly finished.
  
• The Art Lover, a screenplay which Ricky tells me she probably wrote in college
• Two porn scripts -- betcha didn't know about these, did you? -- written under the pseudonym (I kid you not) of "Merry Seaman," Up the Greeks, which was filmed as Mount of Venus because Janet was so innocent as not to know her title suggested a gay orientation, and S.N.A.T.C.H (Sexual Needs and Therapeutic Copulation Haven). They were written at a time when porn flicks had plots, you see. Both screenplays had been through a house fire and so were stored in plastic bags, their edges appropriately scorched with hell-fire.
• Enormous files of correspondence with fans -- Janet was generously open-hearted with her readers -- marked Flounder
• Unpublished short fiction. Her friends had thought she wasn't writing anymore, but she was. Apparently, though, she'd lost the confidence to send it out.
• Scraps of paper with flitting thoughts written on them, such as: "Kagan's Rules of Editing 5. Make the author spend at least 3 to 4 weeks writing the prologue -- emphasize that the style shall be literary and arty. Do not print the prologue."
• Correspondence with other writers and friends.
• E-mail correspondence with the above.
• A letter from Samuel R. Delany, accompanying his reconstruction of the original mundane story lurking within Theodore Sturgeon's "Hurricane Trio."
• 3 x 5 cards stuck in books she was reading, with notes of felicitous turns of phrase or ideas.
• An e-mail detailing the horror of working for the Star Trek franchisers ("creeps" she called them) with a tid-bit of literary history I hadn't known: "Back in the mid-eighties, my friend Mike Ford wrote a Star Trek musical. Yeah, he's still got the music for it around somewhere. And he had signed a contract to write an ST novel --- so he wrote the first all-singing, all-dancing ST novel --- HOW MUCH FOR JUST THE PLANET? Would they let him do a tape of the songs? They would not. In fact, they very nearly didn't publish the novel because it was too weird for ST but, in the end, to make their publishing schedule (I think) they made him make some truly odd changes & then went with it. I guess, in a way, they were right --- Mike got death threats for that book."
• A file of correspondence with me, including a photo of me holding my newborn son, Sean. Good God, but I had a lot of hair then! I made Alan Moore look like a lounge lizard.
  

Keep in mind here that we mostly didn't read the papers. We'd riff through a file, see it was only clippings, and dump it. Grab another folder, see it was correspondence, and shove it in a crate for the Williamson Collection. Every now and then we came across something that would make our eyes bulge. "Send it to New Mexico -- that'll startle 'em!"

So I'm guessing there are a lot of goodies to be found. The folks at ENMU are in for a treat.

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Belatedly . . .

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I was digging through one of the myriad mounds of paper in my office just now and I came across a scribbled piece of light verse -- all right, all right! doggerel -- which I'd penned in praise of (the quite brilliant) A Child's Garden of Grammar and then . . . well, dropped into the dread Pile.  Abandoned to the fickle currents of fate.  Which have just tossed it up again upon our distant and sterile shore.

I'd have posted this when the Great Man died, had I been able to find it.  Nevertheless, here it is:

en homage

To explicate grammar well

In verse, one must be smart as hell, 

Lucid, slippery as a fish,

More witty than mere words can tell --

In short, one must be Thomas Disch.

Rest in peace, Tom.  I only met you three or four times, and I'm not at all sure you were ever able to distinguish me from Adam.  But I am one of your very many distant and devoted friends.

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Edgar Allan Freaking POE!

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January 19 is Edgar Allan Poe's 200th birthday. Happy Birthday, Eddie! In honor of which the Free Library of Philadelphis is hosting several events, including tomorrow's debate as to whether his grave should be robbed and his remains defiled in order to have his bones raped away from Baltimore, where they're quietly buried, and interred here in Philadelphia, where he briefly lived. A tough call, obviously.

Last week, I went with Kyle Cassidy and Trillian Stars to the Poe special exhibit in the FLoP (unfortunate acronym!) rare books collection. Gregory Frost, who's written Poe-related fiction was unfortunately unable to join us.

But what a great display -- provided only that you're moved by books, pamphlets, and letters. There was a copy of the chapbook Tamerlane and Other Poems by "A Bostonian," not only Poe's first published work but one of the rarest and most collectable pieces of American printing. There was one of only two surviving copies of the April 13, 1844 New York Sun, with Poe's fraudulent account of Monck Mason's astonishing crossing of the Atlantic in an unbelievable 75 hours on the steerable airship Victoria, a hoax which may well be considered ancestral to science fiction. And of course -- as anybody who knows anything about the FLoP's rare book department knows -- there was the stuffed body of Charles Dickens's raven Grip, which directly inspired Poe to write "The Raven."

Kyle blogged about the event (scroll down and you'll find it). And afterwards we three met Tom Purdom for lunch and as pleasant a conversation as one might wish for. It's one of Tom's conceits that civilization exists so that people might live in cities and have intellectual conversations, and doggone if the man isn't (as usual) right.

Above: Me with the statue of Johannes Fust in the rare book department. There's a companion statue there of Gutenberg, who is famed for inventing moveable type. But -- true trivia here -- he never published the Gutenberg Bible. He got the pages printed before going broke, and it was Fust who bound and sold them.

Why did I want this picture badly enough to ask Kyle Cassidy to snap it? Because in Jack Faust the title character implies that Fust was his father. It was only after the book was published that I learned that the historical Fust was confused with the mountebank Faust when the stew of stories and lies arose that eventually became the legend of Faustus.

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