Another Entry in the -punk Subgenres List

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Check out the autographed cover flat that my pal Victoria Janssen gave me of her new erotic romance, The Moonlight Mistress. This is the gift that every straight guy secretly wants . . .. naked women with luscious pomegranates.

Over at Locus Online, essayist Adrienne Martini has a short screed decrying the proliferation of subgenres with -punk endings. Well . . . The very-soon-forthcoming book is apparently chock-a-block with sex, werewolves, sex, perverted scientists, and sex. Oh, yeah, and more sex. Which, Vickie proudly informs me, makes it a prime example of Smutpunk.

It's a rich world we live in, innit?

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The Serbian Periodic Table of Science Fiction

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Check this one out! The SF Team has translated The Periodic Table of Science Fiction into Serbian.

Sf Team is an informal group of fans and enthusiasts from Serbia (with members from Bosnia, Croatia and Montenegro) who gather at the sftim.com web portal and forum. In addition to news, book and moviereviews and discussions about science, its sub genres and related genres, they are also publishing their own SF webzine, Vektor. And, with my permission, they've translated my 118-story collection of elemental flash fiction.

Above is a simplified scan of a page grab of the website they built. The actual site is much more colorful. Plus, every single one of the elements has been illustrated. With really lovely, professional-quality illustrations. It's a joy just to browse through it.

In a perfect world, these folks would be getting paid for all their hard work. But at least they can have the satisfaction of a job well done. If I can get the names of the translators and artists, I'll post them in a later blog.

You can see the translation here.

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Flash for Literacy

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I was working so hard on the novel yesterday that I completely lost track of what day it was. So I still have to post my Friday blog. Luckily, I've just received my marching orders from Ann and Jeff Vandermeer to flog the living bejabbers out of their new charity project, Last Call Bird Head.

LCBH is an anthology of over eighty works of identically-titled flash fiction by an equal number of writers, all written so as to justify that selfsame title. All profits go to ProLiteracy which is . . . well, a pro-literacy organization.

I wrote a nice, crisp science fiction tale for the volume. Quite a good story, actually. The other contributors are: Daniel Abraham, Michael Arnzen, Steve Aylett, KJ Bishop, Michael Bishop, Desirina Boskovich, Keith Brooke, Jesse Bullington, Richard Butner, Catherine Cheek, Matthew Cheney, Michael Cisco, Gio Clairval, Alan M. Clark, Brendan Connell, Paul Di Filippo, Stephen R. Donaldson, Rikki Ducornet, Clare Dudman, Hal Duncan, Scott Eagle, Brian Evenson, Eliot Fintushel, Jeffrey Ford, Richard Gehr, Felix Gilman, Jon Courtney Grimwood, Rhys Hughes, Paul Jessup, Antony Johnston, John Kaiine, Henry Kaiser, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Tessa Kum, Ellen Kushner, Jay Lake, Tanith Lee, Stina Leicht, Therese Littleton, Beth Adele Long, Dustin Long, Nick Mamatas, JM McDermott, Sarah Monette, Kari O’Connor, Ben Peek, Holly Phillips, Louis Phillips, Tim Pratt, Cat Rambo, Mark Rich, Bruce Holland Rogers, Nicholas Royle, G Eric Schaller, Ekaterina Sedia, Ramsey Shehadeh, Peter Straub, Victoria Strauss, Mark Swartz, Alan Swirsky, Rachel Swirsky, Sonya Taaffe, Justin Taylor, Steve Rasnic Tem, Jeffrey Thomas, Scott Thomas, John Urbancik, Genevieve Valentine, Kim Westwood, Leslie What, Andrew Steiger White, Conrad Williams, Liz Williams, Neil Williamson, Caleb Wilson, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Wood, Marly Youmans, and Catherine Zeidle.

Did I mention that it's an astonishingly ugly book? Oh, yeah. Look at that cover! There's an equally ugly but stylistically different black-and-white illo on the inside too. And designer John Coulthart placed bobbing bird heads in the corners of the pages, making the whole thing also serve as a flipbook.

Ugly, ugly, ugly. You almost certainly need a copy.

You can get the official word (and order an advance copy if you like) here.


Oh, and by the way . . .

You caught that India's Chandrayaan-1 probe found water on the Moon, right? Everywhere on the Moon. If not, check it out here and here.

Note the fact that water was found in the samples brought back by the Apollo astronauts but written off as Earthly contamination -- becasue everyone knew there was no water on the Moon! This is science as it's practiced in the real world. Stumbling, fallible, but ultimately able to correct its errors.

Oh yeah, and the American Museum of Natural History is displaying the first-ever hand-woven eleven-foot-long piece of brocade from spider silk! New York Times article here. AMNH video here.

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Cookin' With Science

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This is one of those rare weeks when I don't have much news to report. I've been hunkered down writing the novel, and I can't bring myself to feel apologetic about that. So, instead, I thought I'd share a video I just found.

Julia Child . . . cooking superstar, OSS spook, and science popularizer too! Was there nothing this woman couldn't do? Word is, she had a successful marriage too.

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This Glitter(steampunk)atti Life

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The social event of the season was held last Saturday at the Walters & Kissinger studio in Philadelphia, a glittering, whirring, clicking, hissing & clacking neo-Victorian celebration of Tess Kissinger's sixtieth birthday. The event was celebrated by a high tea in the studio gardens and attended by an assembly of artists, writers, paleontologists and museum executives, all (or almost all) in steampunk apparel.

Pictured above: honoree Tess Kissinger and noted beauty Marianne Porter.

Pictured below: Tess's consort and noted exploiter of widows and orphans ("Sir, I have streamlined operations by exploiting the Widows and Orphans Fund!") Robert Walters, and ink-stained-but-stylish scrivener ("Bravo, sir! I shall write an epic celebrating this economic expansion of the Empire! As soon as I have received my stipend, of course.") Michael Swanwick.

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Those Fungi From Yuggoth Remind Me of You . . .

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Look what Marianne found on the Web! Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, which appears to be a Goth boutique perfumery, offers a comprehensive line of Chthulhu Mythos perfumes! Yes, every imaginable scent, from Al Azif to Y'ha-Nthlei, with Shoggoth and R'lyeh thrown in for good measure. Even Darrell Schweitzer was appalled.

One really has to wonder what Nyarlothotep (described in the online catalog as "Brooding, yet electric: the scent of buried secrets, roiling nightmares, the essence of the Crawling Chaos, the Father of Knives and Locusts, the Hunter in the Dark. This is the blackest of ritual incenses charged with flashes of ozone") smells like. And just how Goth do you have to be to wear such a scent?

Click here if you doubt me!

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Remembering Anna Quinsland

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In the mail recently were my contributor's copies of The Mammoth Book of Merlin, edited by Mike Ashley. It includes "The Dragon Line," which is the only work of Arthurian fantasy I know of that's set in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and is one of my personal favorites among my short fiction.

As always happens when "The Dragon Line" is reprinted, I am filled with sadness.

I am saddened because whenever I think of that story, I remember Anna Quinsland. Anna was a friend back in my college days. We were both gonnabe writers then, and it is not false modesty to say that at the time she was a much better writer than I was. Her prose was smooth and convincing and her people recognizably human in a way that my prose and people were not.

Possibly her best story (not quite publishable because like most young writers she hadn't yet worked out the whole plot-and-conflict thing) was told from the viewpoint of Mordred's lover, and it had what was to me at least a new and convincing take on him. Mordred is or was at the time always presented as being villainous simply because he was. Anna looked at the situation from his point of view and realized that Mordred was just like his father, an Idealist. He comes to Camelot as the king's unacknowledged (but everybody knows, of course) bastard. And what does he find? Hypocrisy! Everybody praises Arthur as the embodiment of virtue and Guenevere as the paragon of chastity and Lancelot as the perfect knight. He sees a cuckold and womanizer, a whore, and a jock who's sleeping with his best friend's wife. Small wonder he wants to bring down the whole corrupt regime.

Imagine all that seen through the eyes of a young woman who loves him and can't get him to recognize the inevitable disaster that he's setting in motion. That's the stuff of fiction!

Anna might well have become another Mary Stewart. Or maybe another... well, there's no telling. But life happened to her. She had a brief, unhappy marriage, in the wake of which she joined Army intelligence. Her plan was to save up enough money to get a degree in library science.

One night, coming back from the library, she was attacked from behind and left in a coma. She died a week later.

Many years after that, when I had the skill to do so, I used her Mordred in my own story. I added enough to it to make the story my own. But a little bit of Anna lives in"The Dragon Line." A little bit of her lives every time somebody reads my story. I wish it were more. I wish we could all read the stories that were implicit in her.

God bless and keep you, Anna. I hope you're happier now than we are in your absence.

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