Scientifiction

to Mr. Scalzi on Itzkoff’s huge NYTBR piece on his work this week. And here’s Scalzi’s response.

I am: Gregory Benford A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist.

(Via Tricia Sullivan.)

Futuristic showers.

I’ve read several science fiction novels lately and actually this sin was only committed 1.5 times in the course of three books. Still, I’ve encountered it enough now that it makes me want to hurl a book across the room, then jump and down while yelling at it.

Here’s the thing: Showers actually work pretty well. Water sprays out onto body, body gets clean (add soap in there somewhere). Do we really believe that there is a far better way that technology will find? I don’t. If showering changes, my guess is it will be for the worse, because of lack of energy or fresh water. And that’s okay, that would be interesting, but any time a character in a science fiction novel is luxuriating in a fancy shower with multiple sprays or a weird door or whatever? It’s just gratuitous window-dressing. And it makes me want to kill.

That is all.

There’s an interesting (if sometimes depressing) conversation going on about who reads science fiction and whether the trappings of the genre itself discourages girls from reading it over in the comments of the Aetiology post I linked to about hot girls supposedly not reading SF. Several women have said they felt that reading SF growing up was something they had to keep quiet.

The stigma from other kids I noticed growing up was just associated with being a reader, period. Being a reader was odd. I never cared, so I read what I wanted, and honestly never felt like a title from a certain genre was any less okay than another in social terms. Was I just oblivious?

At any rate, I’d think that, along with a thousand other things, Harry Potter finally put the nail in this stigma’s coffin. (Not to mention the LOTR movies.) Am I still being oblivious?

Showtime’s Masters of Horror series features an adaptation of "The Screwfly Solution" by Raccoona Sheldon (aka James Tiptree, Jr., aka Alice Sheldon) directed by Joe Dante tonight at 8 p.m.10 p.m. (by our schedule, anyway). You can read the story here. (Thanks, Ginger!)

And what an interesting year it is! Via Locus:

LIFE ACHIEVEMENT  Stephen Fabian and John Crowley

NOVEL  Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami (Harvill; Knopf)

NOVELLA  Voluntary Committal, Joe Hill (Subterranean Press)

SHORT FICTION  "CommComm", George Saunders (The New Yorker 1 Aug 2005)

ANTHOLOGY  The Fair Folk, Marvin Kaye, ed. (SFBC)

COLLECTION  The Keyhole Opera, Bruce Holland Rogers (Wheatland Press)

ARTIST  James Jean

SPECIAL AWARD, PROFESSIONAL  Sean Wallace (for Prime Books)

SPECIAL AWARD, NON-PROFESSIONAL  David Howe & Stephen Walker (for Telos Books)

Judges for this year’s awards were Steve Lockley, Barbara Roden, Victoria Strauss, Jeff VanderMeer, and Andrew Wheeler.

All in all, no way to really argue with any of these even if I was pulling for different horses in some of the races; CommComm was one of my fave stories last year, Kafka on the Shore’s a beautiful novel and Joe Hill rocks. Congratulations, all. And now, let Bittercon resume for those of us not in Austin.

p.s. Scalzi points out the winners are all men this year. I noticed that too and went browsing through the history of winners. I got to 1994 before I found an all-male fiction year, and even so, there were female winners on the anthology editing side. (Note: I was browsing, so I could have missed something.) I figure this is a fluke year in an award with pretty decent gender equity (in recent history, anyway).

I’ve been meaning to subscribe to Fantasy Magazine pretty much since I heard about it, but this finally made me get around to it. See also.

At only 20 bucks per year, it’s a bargain. I look forward to getting our first issue.

Gavin has just put up a scan of a truly remarkable literary artifact — a gushy fan letter that James Tiptree, Jr., wrote to Carol Emshwiller in 1975. (And which Carol* graciously donated to the Tiptree Auction this year.) If you just want readable text, you can find it here. The opening’s a peach:

May a stranger make known how much your book, JOY IN OUR CAUSE has been enjoyed? Weak word, meant to include admired, goggled at, occasionally genuflected to, been rivetted in entrancement by, and, not least, suffered  suicidal inferiority-convictions from.

But before I go on, please—do  not, I beg of you, feel that this letter must be acknowledged, etc. etc.—I should hate to think that I had robbed your time. I’m also a writer of minor sorts and I know what a curse unsolicited communications can be. So just pop this in the round file and  know that the pleasure of expressing pleasure completes the  act. (It does, you know; strange thing this impulse to say, how good, how good.)

At Wiscon, Carol said that the letter was so flattering, she was never able to respond. She put it away, and wasn’t even sure if anyone would be interested when she brought it to Madison. Interested!

*It feels weird and fairly inappropriate to throw around Carol, but after serving on the Fountain Jury together, it’d be far too weird to go with the impersonal Emshwiller.

Where is David’s site? It was there last night. Did some first amendment-hating jerk send a letter to his ISP? Heard from David: It’s just a coincidence; site should be back up later today. Whew.

Alan for PRESIDENT (of SFWA sure, but also, the WORLD).

UPDATED: If you want to see a little taste, tonally at least, of some of the comments David Moles pulled from the private SFWA forums (which are all taken down now, I believe), I’d "suggest" going over to this thread at Asimov’s. Le depressing. No one there is saying that what happened was appropriate, but LOTS of "get over it," "it’s none of our business," "not that big a deal," "those intarweb kids are out of control!" type stuff.