Jack Vance, Wandering the Stars

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Jack Vance died the other day at age 96.  He was the most influential  science fiction writer that only those within the field knew about.

Vance wrote a great many books but no "great" books.  With the exception of The Dying Earth and its successors, which took Clark Ashton Smith's vision of Zothique, the last continent on a far-future and dying Earth, and infused it with wit and energy and zest, and then passed that vision on to Gene Wolfe and his Book of the New Sun sequence, it's Vance's oeuvre, rather than its individual components, that is important.

Typically, Vance's heroes were little men caught up in big events.  His sympathies were always with the hoi polloi, and his novels always had the time to pause to take in the opinions of an innkeeper or the crackpot theories of a small businessman.  This is a lot harder to make work than it sounds, and it's one of the reasons why, almost secretly, Vance was so influential.  His fiction taught lessons to aspirant writers that other novels could not.

Jack Vance loved boats, avoided fans, and lived a good long life.  Though physical problems kept him housebound in his last years, a mutual friend told me a year ago that his mind was still clear.  He kept writing later into his old age than all but a very few can manage.

A typical Vancean detail in I forget which novel was that on summer evenings on one particular world, it was the custom to picnic on the grassy hills outside of town and then, lying back on blankets, point to specific stars one had visited and talk about what the people on the planets orbiting them were like.  Tonight, I will go out and do the same:  "See that star?  Jack Vance wrote about the people there.  They never go out in public without a mask and those masks reflect their public prestige.  One day, he said, there came a stranger to that world..."

There will be formal obituaries and the weeping and rending of garments soon.  In the meantime, you can read the Locus Online item here.


Above:  The Maestro.  The story about the people with masks is called "The Moon Moth," and if you haven't read it, you are encouraged to do so.  It's a classic.

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My Undead Story Lives! It Lives!

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I vividly remember getting a royalty check for my story in The Living Dead -- which in itself was notable because most anthologies do not sell enough to earn anything above and beyond the advance -- and being astonished at how large it was.

It turned out that editor John Joseph Adams had found the sweet spot for a theme anthology by a) carefully assembling pretty much all the very best zombie stories written to date and then b) publishing it at exactly the right moment -- just after zombie fiction went mainstream and just before every other editor in the world decided to put together exactly such an anthology and discovered that Adams had beat them to the punch.

Here's the stock blurb:

When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth!

From White Zombie to Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil to World War Z, zombies have invaded popular culture, becoming the monsters that best express the fears and anxieties of the modern west.

Gathering together the best zombie literature of the last three decades from many of today's most renowned authors of fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror, including Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale, The Living Dead covers the broad spectrum of zombie short fiction.              

And many, many others.  This is one big book, with an excellent list of authors.  How excellent?  Excellent enough that I wasn't offended by not making the short list on the cover.  Much.

My own story, "The Dead," was inspired by a series of paintings by an American leftist and came out so well that, figuring that James Joyce wouldn't mind, I gave it the title of what may be the single most famous short story in the English language.

Now the UK publisher Orbit has acquired rights to the anthology and will be issuing a digital edition in the United Kingdom and their export markets (including Australia & New Zealand) one June 13th.

So for e-readers in those countries, the decision whether or not to buy is an easy one:  If you like zombie fiction, you want this book.  But if you don't, I fail to see how you made it this deep into today's blogpost.

Amazon's pre-order page can be found here.


Above:  That's the American cover.  The Brit cover can be found over at Amazon.  And wherever fine UK ebooks are sold.

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Last Chance to Write SF About Self-Driving Cars

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There's one of them up above -- a self-driving car.  Looks deadly normal, doesn't it?  Oh, it has that goofy camera on top, but that's just Google collecting street views for its Earth app. Still, we can confidently expect it to change the world in surprising ways.

I've been thinking about self-driving cars off and on for the past decade, ever since it became obvious that they were about to arrive.  Some things are pretty obvious:  They'll be a godsend for people with a drinking problem.  There'll be an upsurge in fuel consumption and a real traffic problem in places like New York City as, rather than spend forty bucks for a parking garage, people just tell their cars to drive around the block for a couple of hours while they go to see a movie.  And every medium-sized city in America is going to hope to revitalize their downtown shopping districts by building convenient pull-offs in front of the shops where you can get in and out of your car before it's sent to free parking lots in the cheap part of town.

But there are going to be problems, too.  I think that a lot of parents are going to send their children to school in driverless cars.  The default situation in the U. S. is that most parents have to leave for work before their kid leaves for school, and come home after their child does.  Once your car can drive itself, the obvious is to put in a nanny-cam and let your Prius do the driving.

I can't see the police or politicians liking this much -- it feels too much like reckless endangerment.  And I'm pretty sure there are going to be some very creepy people looking to game the situation by luring a child into what only looks like the family car.

To my embarrassment, though, the whole thing hasn't set my imagination aflame.  Once the driverless car becomes common -- and since they're going to be much safer than human-driven cars, I expect that will happen fast -- there are going to be huge social consequences.  Changes as profound as those brought on by personal computers, cell phones, and the Internet.  Some good hard thought and some good crisp writing, and Somebody can get credit for the rest of their life for having predicted them.  Which is a useful thing for a science fiction writer.

I'm not going to do it because my hindbrain apparently just doesn't find the chore interesting.  So it might as well be you.

You'd better move fast, though.  Driverless cars are already on the road and they're going to be an everyday sight soon.   A few years back, a friend told me that he'd test-ridden a driverless car on a closed track with paid drivers in regular cars who would occasionally cut if off or slam on the brake right in front of it.  "How did it feel?" I asked him.

"You'd be amazed," he said, "how little time it took for it to feel perfectly ordinary."

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If We Can't Make Education Better, Shouldn't We Stop Making It Worse?

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There it is, up above, St. Francis Xavier School in Winooski, Vermont.  Yes, I went to Catholic school.  Yes, I have conflicted feelings about that.  Yes, I have stories to tell.  But never did I doubt that everybody involved was doing their best to educate me.

Skip forward fifty years.

Today after half a century's efforts to improve education, we have school accountability.  Which means that every public school is obsessively tested to find out if they're doing better this year than they were a year ago.  If they are, no problem.

And if they aren't?

Well, the good news is that their funding remains the same.  The bad news is that the money which otherwise would have gone to library, sports, music, and books is required to go to motivational speakers to tell the teachers how to bring their students' grades up.

This is bad.  Because it does not work.  In fact, it actively degrades the education children are receiving.

This is not a red thing or a blue thing.  It's not a left thing or a right thing.  And it's certainly not a conspiracy on anybody's part.  It's simply an idea that sounded good once upon a time but which didn't work out in practice.

Let's get rid of it.  We can replace it with a better idea when we come up with one.  But in the meantime, let's just let our teachers teach.

Here endeth the sermon.  Go and sin no more.

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Diving Giraffes

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I'm sure there's an explanation for this.

But I believe we're better off not knowing it.

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Real Dinosaur Art Real Cheap

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I spent a long and pleasant weekend in Virginia for a family wedding.  Now I'm back at the keyboard, weary but typing away.  Since, mirabile dictu, I have no news to pass along today, I thought I'd throw in a second plug for the Walters & Kissinger Etsy sale.

Robert Walters and Tess Kissinger are both paleoartists of renown.  Which is to say that they don't just paint and draw dinosaurs and related subjects, but they do so in close consultation with paleontologists. To paint, let's say, an Sinraptor, Bob will begin by drawing its skeleton.  This drawing goes back to the paleontologist working with the fossils for comment and correction.  This can take several passes.  Then Bob draws an écorché  -- the skeleton covered with muscles, but without the skin.  Back and forth it goes for corrections.  Then he draws the animal covered with skin.  After a last round of consultations, he paints the final version of the dinosaur.

This is why you were never able to afford to buy a museum-grade scientific illustration to hang on your wall.  Those things are labor-intensive, and the people who can create them are not numerous.  Also, more and more the illustrations are being created on the computer.  So the hand-made originals are getting progressively rarer.

All that's background to the fact that Bob and Tess have put up a number of original illustrations -- the final, finished product, not an intermediary step -- for sale at what I consider to be bargain prices.  I owned several major Robert Walters pieces already, but I took advantage of the sale to buy two skulls by Tess Kissinger -- one for Marianne's Dragonstairs Press office, and one as a birthday present for our son Sean.

I'm not sure how long these things are going to be for sale or whether any more items will be added to the shop.  But I do know that the supply is finite.  Right now, there are a dozen of Bob's illos available for prices ranging from $125 to $200, unframed.  There's also a Tess Kissinger Sinraptor skull left unsold.  There were rather a lot of skulls available when the sale began, but people like me leapt upon them with small, glad cries.

You can find the Etsy shop here.


Above:  There resides the Giganotosaurus skull, just beneath the Moebius serigraph.  You'll note that I very carefully bought it before letting you know such things were on sale.

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Friday Morning Zen

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As always, I'm on the road again.  But here's a video to make your Friday morning brighter.  It's the first music video ever made in Earth orbit.  Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield sang a modified cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in the International Space Station and the results are pretty good.

Still.  As an American -- a U.S.A. American, I mean -- it kind of grinches me that Canada beat us to this one.  We used to be top dog when it came to pop culture.

I can just hear Rob Sawyer gloating.

You can read about the accomplishment in more detail here.

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