Sara Paul, 1948 - 2026

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Funerals are like tears. They rarely happen one at a time. Marianne and I were in Amherst for a memorial service when we got a phone call from Gene Olmsted to let us know that his wife, Sara Paul, had died. We drove home Monday and attended her funeral Tuesday.

Sara was one of those people who keep the world running. She worked for over thirty years for the Philadelphia School District as a librarian in city schools and "on loan" at Overbrook School for the Blind. Seeing an inadequate number of books for the children there, she translated books by hand into Braille for them. 

In private life, Sara was a passionate fan of science fiction. She was an active member of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and helped run Philcon every year until her health failed her. 

She and Gene threw enormous parties for a hundred people or more, with some of the most eccentric spreads of food I've ever seen at such events.

In brief, she spent her life making things better for people.

Death draws a line beneath the endless rows of figures that are our days. All the numbers are added up, the zeroes fall off, and you're left with the final reckoning: a life well spent, or not. Sara was never rich or famous and I doubt she ever aspired to be either. But she continually improved the lives of the people around her. 

You could do a lot worse. You could hardly do a whit better.

Vaya con Dios, Sara. I hope that Heaven has one hell of a science fiction library. But if it doesn't, I'm sure you'll soon put it to rights.

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A Memorial For Jane Yolen--With Heartfelt Memories And Dancing Bears

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A memorial was held for Jane Yolen in Amherst at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Which was appropriate, given that she wrote over 450 books, most of them for children. Marianne and I were there, along with roughly 200 other of her friends, family which, and colleagues. The event was streamed live online, so thousands more witnessed it along with us.

 

I noticed several people from the science fiction community in attendance—Susan Shwartz, Geri Sullivan, and Esther Friesner among them—and her good friend Bruce Coville was one of the speakers. But most came from her other worlds: children's literature, poetry, and teaching prominent among them. Over the years, I've had to explain to several SF people that while they thought of her as being merely a prominent figure in our world (she was a president of SFWA and won two Nebula Awards), she was a giant elsewhere.

 One thing I learned at the memorial was that Jane had taught her children and grandchildren well. The event was scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. and started on the minute. And her offspring were among the clearest and most articulate public speakers I've ever heard.

 There were heartfelt memories retold, poems read, and music played. I don't think I'll ever again hear "Waltzing With Bears" without misting up.

And then, with a bagpiper leading the way, the family led the way out of the building, between two lines of attendees (we were told this was a Jewish custom--the lines, not the bagpiper) and the formal event was over. I went into the gift shop and bought a copy of Owl Moon, probably Jane's single most famous work, because I wanted something she'd written which had been physically present during the memorial.

 

And what does one do after such an event . . . ? 

 I can't speak for anyone else, but Marianne and I went to a book sale. It was run by the League of Women Voters and we bought two bags of books for a total of ten dollars. I was looking for something by Jane to put in our wee free library, and did. But it was a pristine copy of her collection Sister Emily's Lightship and the association with Jane and Emily Dickinson in Amherst, where Dickinson lived and is buried, roused my possessive instincts. So I'm keeping it.

I'll go to the bookstore and find something else to put in the library.

 

Oh, and . . .

In case you missed it, you can find what Jane Yolen said when I told her I admired how prolific she was here.  

 

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CORDWAINER SMITH!!!

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Less than two hours before the day melts into the past, I've learned that this is Paul Linebarger's birthday. Linebarger was a military expert on psychological warfare. During World War Two, he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations there and became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. A CIA official called him "perhaps the leading practitioner of 'black' and 'gray' propaganda in the Western world."  Linebarger was posthumously inducted as a Distinguished Member of the Psychological Operations Regiment by the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School

But that was just his day job.

In his real life, he was a science fiction writer. And not just anhy science fiction writer, but an inimitable one. He wrote under the name of Cordwainer Smith. And his tales of the Instrumentality of Mankind were... strange, wonderful, gemlike, and inimitable

Not that we didn't try. You could fill a very fat anthology with pastiche stories that failed to capture the essence of Cordwainer Smith's fiction. For a very long time, every ambitious writer there was tried. (Including me. Smith wrote a story called "The Clown of Deadlady Town," and early in my career, I wrote "The Dead Lady of Clown Town. A story that has rightfully never been reprinted. So I am not setting myself above anybody here.)

Our failures were like flowers laid before his grave.

And what, you may well ask, were his stories like? Stange, wonderful, etc., etc. I couldn't do them justice at anything less than book length. 

If you know, you know. If you don't, it may take a little effort to find his stories. But i recommend you do. They're worth it. I recommend you do. Unless the prices are ridiculous. "Fifty fucks for a sixties paperback? Are you nuts?"   In which case, be patient. Hold the fort. You'll find his work eventually.

And you'll love it.

And, okay, yes . . .

Linebarger may possibly have been as nutty as a fruitcake. In 1954, a psychologist dedicated a chapter of The Fifty-Minute Hour to a science fiction writer who believed he was an alien getting instruction from the Dog Star. Which lacks the hard-headedness of his Cold Warrior status and the subtlety of his science fiction. But maybe so.

Whatever the truth may be, his fiction remains one of the wellsprings of science fiction. 

Going To Visit The Locomotive

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Last Sunday, Marianne and Sean and I went to see Big Boy, which has been receiving enormous attention and tremendous crowds at every stop of its coast-to-coast trip.

It would take great verbal labor to do justice to this gorgeous machine. So let's just say big and beautiful.

The locomotive was on display at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and I have to say: Kudos to everyone involved in handling traffic. An enormous number of people showed up to see it. So many, I couldn't help thinking of Don  DiLillo's dictat that "The future belongs to crowds." Yet they kept the flow going smoothly and without complication.

The interesting thing about the crowd was how amiable everybody was. They were all, it seems, in the mood to do something fun and celebrational that was attached to no particular political stance.

Also, and I realize that Philadelphia being a deep-blue union kind of town was a factor here, but it still surprised me... There was not a MAGA hat to be seen. Not one.

And while I was there, I learned . . .

The Big Boy locomotive was built in Schenectady, NY. Like me!

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"Like Getting Attacked By A Swarm Of Bees"

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This is wild. My story, "The Very Pulse of the Machine," (or at least the Love, Death, & Robots adaptation of it) was a triggering influence on the latest album by Glassmouth, a Singapore mathcore and chaotic hardcore group. 

Their music has been described as "unhinged polyrhythmic noise," ranging from “unhinged abrasiveness akin to a freight train plowing through a forest” and “the serenity of a dormant volcano.” (The last two are their own self-characterizations.) Their imprint describes the result as “a jagged, polyrhythmic assault” and “more like getting attacked by a swarm of bees.”

So how on earth did I get involved in this? Shorthand version: They had a vision of the horror of cosmic distances inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and were at work on the album when they saw the anime version of my story and it imploded their vision into an exploration of inner space. "The vast, infinite alien planet was no longer just a setting; it became a mirror for isolation, grief, and the devastating weight of survival,” one of the musicians said.

One, incidentally, that has an upbeat ending, rather than the cold and literal loop the group had originally envisioned.

You can read the entire and involving (for me, at least, and not just because of my peripheral involvement) account here.

And for those of us who enjoy the deep geek . . .

The structure of "The Very Pulse of the Machine" was modeled after Geoff Landis's Hugo Award-winning short story, "A Walk in the Sun." Which just goes to show how complicated the lines of artistic influence can be.

Above: Headline and image copied from IDIOTEQ. I was quite impressed by their article.

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The Universe Box -- New & Notable!

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My latest Tachyon Publications collection of short fiction, The Universe Box, has been included in Locus Magazine's New and Notable listing  for its June 2026 issue.

To which, I can only respond, "Cool beans!"

You can read what they have to say about my and several other books here.

Reviews of the book have been uniformly positive--as they should, in my humble opinion, be. But I won't quote any of them. That would be obnoxious of me and boring to you. Instead, I'll reflect on a rarely-mentioned aspect of a writer's life--reading a review where the reviewer mentions their most and least favorite stories.

That reviewers differ on which is which is only natural. Different people have different tastes. But occasionally, I'll find myself thinking, "That's their favorite? I almost left it out." Or "How could you possibly dislike the single most fun story here?"

Well, "Of taste and scent, no argument," as dear old Avram Davidson used to say. If this were somebody else's collections I'd name titles. But, it being mine, I'll spare you.

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Two Notebooks

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Shown above are two of my notebooks--the Scribbledehobbledehoydenii I call them because I was once young and who wouldn't want to conjure up a word like that? The spiral-bound one is the Wedding Scribbledeobbledehoyden, and the black one is titled Dark Flame, or: Plum Pudding. There are reasons.

I'm just finishing up filling up the one and chanced across the other and was struck by how different they are. The one has a number of impromptu collages in it, including one (below) where I apparently wrote a story in and around it. (pictured below). Is the story any good? I have no idea. The amount of work it would take to decipher my handwriting is significantly more than it would take to simply write another piece of flash fiction for it. It's also jam-filled with loose papers: A menu from the reception of the titular wedding, a postcard from France, some dried leaves (below), a stamped and sealed letter to Michael Bishop that I was about to mail when I learned he had just died. Also throwaways, ephemera, and scribbled notes of no particular import.

The black notebook is much more austere. A few doodles, and a slip of notes or two, but almost entirely scenes from stories I'm working on, lists of things I must write, a wheel of potential novels I must choose one from, diagrams of sections of stories that are giving me trouble. 

Except for my execrable handwriting, they might have been compiled by two completely different writers.

Proof positive that function follows form.

 

 

 

 

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