Just The Caffeine Talking

Mr. Diggs Goes to the Movies

I don't normally say "Squee!" about upcoming movies. As an adult my most frequent emotion upon leaving the theater has been disappointment, which means that about the highest pitch of enthusiasm I can work up for something I haven't seen yet is "guardedly optimistic."

Well, I'll confess to being as guardedly optimistic as a fourteen-year-old girl in line for a rock concert about one upcoming movie: Sam Raimi's Oz: the Great and Powerful.

According to the description here, it's the story of how two-bit showman Oscar Diggs accidentally voyages to Oz and uses his flim-flam skills to thwart the Wicked Witches and bring stability to the land.

I've been waiting for someone to tell this story since I first read Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz when I was about eight years old! Sure, Raimi probably won't make Diggs an intrepid Secret Service agent sent by President Hayes to thwart the schemes of Bismarck and the Tsar. One can't have everything. But the images look good and it seems blessedly free of "darker and edgier" nonsense.

The movie's scheduled to come out next spring. Until then: a guardedly optimistic "Squee!"

Readercon After-Action Report

This past weekend I was a participant at the 23rd annual Readercon convention in Burlington, Massachusetts. As always, I had a great time. The con (-vention) committee did their usual superb job of keeping everything running smoothly. These are fans who do this for fun, and yet manage to do a better job than many professional event managers. If you ever want to put on a large event, get a bunch of science fiction fans to run it.

Friday was my big day. I was on two panels. The first concerned "anthropology for writers" but basically turned into a world-building tutorial. Harold Torger Vedeler kept the audience laughing by using John Norman's "Gor" books as examples of how not to do it.

After that I did a reading. I had originally said I'd read my unpublished short story "Rene Descartes and the Cross of Blood" but after doing a run-through I wasn't sure I could get through the whole story in my time slot. Since I didn't want to read an old piece, I decided that if one is going to read just part of something, give them part of a novel instead of a short story. So I read the beginning of my work-in-progress, Corsair.

Short break, and then "my" panel: a discussion of "Have We Lost the Future?" based on a suggestion I submitted back when the convention was soliciting program ideas. The issue was whether science fiction has turned away from trying to envision the future (my data based on past years' Hugo nominees suggests yes), and why. I was the moderator, but the panel were very insightful and entertaining. We batted around ideas but of course didn't "settle" the question. Con panels never settle things, any more than conversations between barbershop patrons settle anything.

Rounding out the evening was a group reading by the mighty Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop. Being a collection of professionals, we brought the reading in exactly on schedule: eight stories in an hour. Because of the limited time I read "Makeover" rather than "Parsifal," as originally planned.

Friday finished up with the annual "Meet the Prose" party, in which participants have sheets of stickers bearing sentences from their published work. Con members can collect lines from their favorite writers, assemble them into some kind of William Burroughs fiction, wear them instead of tattoos, or (as at least one attendee did) post them above the urinals in the men's room.

Saturday I woke at my usual time, which meant I was severely sleep-deprived. I breakfasted with hard-SF master Allen Steele, attended a couple of morning panels, and bought more books. Then I moderated a panel based on a blog post of mine, on "Unexamined Assumptions in SF." I learned that people's ideas differ about which assumptions are unexamined, and that the very act of discussing unexamined assumptions tends to reveal your own unexamined assumptions.

Saturday night Diane Kelly and I dined with friends at the hotel restaurant -- which has undergone a startling transformation. In previous years it was fairly ordinary "hotel food" but now it's a genuinely excellent restaurant. I actually look forward to dining there at future Readercons. Diane headed back home while I spent the rest of the evening in some interesting conversations. For the first time in years I didn't attend the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Contest. Just not in the mood, somehow. I very unwisely stayed up to read one of my new books, so that for a second night in a row I got about three hours' sleep.

Sunday I breakfasted, then attended a very interesting panel on the origins of creativity. (Short summary: Kipling had it right, there is no "right way" to write.) After a final pass through the dealer room and a round of goodbyes, I left.

The Haul: How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, by Mike Brown (nonfiction about how Pluto got demoted to dwarf planet); The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, by Barry Hughart (an omnibus edition of his three Chinoiserie fantasy novels); The Bible Repairman and Other Stories, by Tim Powers; Songs of the Dying Earth, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (stories by divers authors set in Jack Vance's far-future fantasy world); The Apocalypse Codex, by Charles Stross; Redshirts, by John Scalzi; and The Mongoliad, Book One, by Neal Stephenson and a whole passel of coauthors.

Bilbowulf

I recently made a minor literary discovery, which has been made by others before me, but is still interesting.

A little context: a few weeks back I bought a copy of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf -- the one that was a New York Times bestseller back in 2000. It's a good read and very interesting to anyone fascinated by language as I am.

The book has the original Old English text on the left and Heaney's translation on the right, and it's surprising how much of the Old English one can puzzle out. Note that I'm not talking about "old" English like that of Chaucer or Shakespeare. This is Anglo-Saxon, with passages like:

Hwaet we Gar-Dena in gear-danum/Theod cyninga thrym gefrunon . . .

And yet one can work some of it out, with Heaney's translation to give hints.

None of which has anything to do with my discovery. No, that came in the final section of the poem, after Beowulf has killed Grendel and Grendel's Mother.* After he has become king of the Geats and ruled his people for fifty winters, Beowulf faces a new foe: a dragon. The dragon starts ravaging Beowulf's kingdom after a robbery. Here, I'll let Heaney tell the story (line breaks removed because they're a pain in the neck):

 . . . a dragon on the prowl from the steep vaults of a stone-roofed barrow where he guarded a hoard; there was a hidden passage, unknown to men, but someone managed to enter by it and interfere with the heathen trove. He had handled and removed a gem-studdend goblet; it gained him nothing, though with a thief's wiles he had outwitted the sleeping dragon; that drove him into rage, as the people of that country would soon discover.

Sound familiar? Anybody? That's right: it's the chapter in The Hobbit telling of Bilbo's visit to the lair of Smaug.

No, I'm not saying Tolkein "stole" the incident. Obviously he tossed it in as a tip of the hat to the unknown author of a work he devoted his academic career to studying. So when the upcoming film of The Hobbit comes out, you can look very clever indeed by leaning over to your seat-mate and saying airily, "Beowulf did it first."

*What a loser Grendel is: a big monster and he's still living in his Mom's basement.

Read About Readercon

Just as I do most summers, I'm going to be a participant at this year's Readercon. If you don't know what Readercon is, and you're interested in science fiction or fantasy literature, then you're missing what is simply the best annual meeting of its kind.

This year they're working me hard on Friday, then I can slack off. Here's my schedule:

FRIDAY, JULY 13

3:00 p.m.:  Anthropology For Writers

James L. Cambias, Christopher M. Cevasco, Amanda Downum, Francesca Forrest, John H. Stevens (leader), Harold Torger Vedeler. In a 2011 blog post, Farah Mendlesohn wrote, "'Worldbuilding' as we understand it, has its roots in traditions that described the world in monolithic ways: folklore studies, anthropology, archeology, all began with an interest in describing discrete groups of people and for that they needed people to be discrete." This panel will discuss the historical and present-day merging and mingling of real-world cultures, and advise writers on building less monolithic and more plausible fictional ones.

5:00 p.m.: Reading "Rene Descartes and the Cross of Blood"

The world's first and only alchemical film noir short story!

 7:00 p.m.:  Have We Lost the Future?

James L. Cambias (leader), Paul Park, Steven Popkes, Harold Torger Vedeler, Jo Walton. Where science fiction once looked to the future as the setting for speculation, nowadays the focus seems to be on alternate pasts, fantasy worlds, or consciously "retro" futures. We're no longer showing the way to what things might be like. We discuss whether this is connected to the general fear of decline and decay in the English-language world -- or has science fiction simply run out of ideas?

8:00 p.m.: Group Reading by the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop

Heather Albano, James L. Cambias, F. Brett Cox, Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, Steven Popkes, Kenneth Schneyer, Sarah Smith. The members of the oldest extant professional writers group in New England give brief readings from their works. (I plan to read "Parsifal (Prix Fixe)."

SATURDAY, JULY 14 (Vive la France!)

12:00 noon: Unexamined Assumptions in SF

James L. Cambias (leader), Mikki Kendall, Anil Menon, Kenneth Schneyer, Darrell Schweitzer. In a 2011 blog post, James Cambias complained of "[convention] attendees and panelists dusting off old, unexamined assumptions" in SF. For much of its history, SF developed a set of unexamined assumptions that became default conventions of the genre. 21st-century SF has made some notable efforts to roast these chestnuts, but it has its own set of assumptions, which this panel will mercilessly dissect and offer alternatives to.