m. c. de marco

Hi. I’m back. And I’m picking up right where I was, in the middle of Decision Two: Avoid Boxes At All Cost.

Time of day is the other big quirk by which writers trap themselves. I’ve known writers who need to write first thing or they won’t “get into it.” I’ve known writers who can only write at night when the world is quiet. I’ve known writers who can only write when their routine chores are completed and they feel they now “have time.”

Often these writers got into these habits for all the best reasons in the world, but eventually what started as a good thing became a trap. I decided that no time would be my time. The reverse of this is that, for me, all time can be writing time.

Once I threw privacy, equipment, and time of day out the window, it was a much simpler matter to avoid all those other interesting writerly quirks.

[Read more...]

Tor author and friend of Tor.com Tobias Buckell is in the hospital with a heart issue. He’s been keeping everyone aprised of his situation via his blog and his Twitter feed, since the hospital he’s at has a good WiFi connection (after all, you can take the man out of the internet, but you can’t take the internet out of the man!).

Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery, Toby!

Among Joel Priddy’s finest creations are the charming mad scientists December and Elias, who feature in his always-excellent “Sweetie ‘n Me“ shorts. Tor.com is pleased to bring you its second all-new story featuring this charming couple and some very creative science. For more from D&E, please see our story “An Inordinate Fondness For Sweetie ‘n Me“, check out the Sweetie ’n Me section of Joel's blog, or pick up AdHouse Book's Project Romantic anthology for four more stories.

Copyright 2008 Joel Priddy.

Some links of interest for your lovely Thursday morning.

Why I Copyfight - Cory Doctorow tells you why copyright reform is important.

Is Science Fiction Dying? - Has science made SF obsolete? New Scientist explores this question, and gets authors Margaret Atwood, Stephen Baxter, William Gibson, Ursula K. Leguin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Nick Sagan to respond.

Thoughts on Social Networking - A look at social networking and the future of book publishing.

The Spirit trailer - As you probably know, Frank Miller is directing this Will Eisner classic. A new short trailer is up, via SF wire.

CBLDF auctions - The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, an organization that works towards protecting comic book creators’ first amendment rights, is auctioning even more amazing stuff. Check it out.

Time-lapse painting of Voltron - by Robert Burden. Via Cartoon Brew.

A look inside the making of Wall-E - Rotten Tomatoes got the chance to tour Pixar in September, and has reported back. 96,000 storyboards? Wow.

A Call for Questions - DC Comics executive editor Dan DiDio is taking your questions. Fire away! Via Newsarama.

[Image by Flickr user gadl, CC-licensed for commercial use.]

Strangely I haven’t been keeping up with the Coraline movie. Strange because I love the book and I love stop-motion animation—you’d think I’d be all over it. Perhaps I’m afraid they’ll screw it up. (Love Nightmare. James the Giant Peach... I tried to like it. I really did try.) When I started watching this trailer I began to get a little cranky that it wasn’t dark and McKean-y enough but somewhere around 0:43ss they had me sold. Completely.

Update: Check out the total jealousy inducing press swag. (via Drawn, who also have secret passwords to behind-the-scene clips.)

We love Mr. Jonathan Coulton here at Tor.com. There's really no way to overstate this: if we could elect an official bard, I'm pretty sure he'd win in a landslide (even though he's already Contributing Troubadour at Popular Science). More than a few of our posts have been composed while rocking out Coulton-style, not to mention the fact that Cory Doctorow used lyrics from “The Future Soon” as the title for one of the very first Tor.com original stories. If you're not already obsessed with his geek anthems (especially those about zombies, monkeys, mad scientists, crazy cyborgs, robot roommates, NPR and, well, fancy pants) then you need to check him out immediately; fans of nerd culture, hilarity, and incredibly clever songwriting will thank me.

Coulton licenses all of his work through Creative Commons, so there are a ton of great videos available online (a word to the wise, though: the machinima video for “First of May” is totally, totally NSFW. Unless you work at Tor.com). Which brings us to the good news: as part of the 2008 Creative Commons fundraising campaign, Coulton is offering his fans a chance to get the super deluxe bonus edition of his new greatest hits album and support an excellent cause. Here’s the deal, according to his site:

Between now and the end of the year a $50 donation gets you a 1 Gb USB thumb drive with all 20 songs and the artwork, plus all the source tracks for all the songs. All the source tracks? Yes. It took me about a million hours, thank you very much. So if you’ve ever wanted to do some kind of kooky remix or mashup, or if you’ve ever just wanted to take these songs apart and see how they work, this would be just the thing for you.

It’s a fantastic selection of über-catchy songs, all of which will be stuck in your head until the end of time—and you will like it, and beg for more...beg, I say! So go check it out.

NASA announced today that it has successfully tested a “deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.” In the last month, dozens of images have gone back and forth between the Jet Propulsion Lab in California and the Epoxi spacecraft, about 20 million miles away. 20 million miles. My wireless blinks out on particularly windy days, nevermind solar flares and spacedust, but NASA has worked out a neat protocol called “Disruption-Tolerant Networking” (DTN). Unlike the Earth Internet, which is a series of tubes, DTN utilizes a series of nodes that know to keep information until it can be safely passed along to the next node—“store and forward,” the article says, so your ship can go behind a moon or an asteroid or could pass between nodes and your data would still get through. In the tests, these nodes were actually all on the ground at JPL, but the idea is that “Mars landers, orbiters and ground mission-operations centers” could all act as nodes for DTN communications. The lag time is between three and a half and twenty minutes, but when you think about it, that’s not bad for e-mailing Mars.

[Image of adorable little data packet and mommy-node by Flickr user helixblue, licenced under Creative Commons and lol’d by me.]

Why?

[More questions, but no real answers.]

Dr. Malcolm warned us, but we didn’t listen...

The New York Times reports that a scientific team at Pennsylvania State University, headed by Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller, believes DNA sequencing machines have made it possible to fully sequence—and even recreate, in flesh and blood—the wooly mammoth, “for as little as $10 million.”

It turns out that hair from a mammoth is a much better source of DNA than bones because the DNA contained within is purer (instead of mashed up into tiny pieces), and the keratin around the hair is able to seal out any troublesome bacteria.

So what would they do with that DNA, once it’s all sequenced? And why would it cost $10 million? Unfortunately, you can’t just create the cells from scratch. But you can find the genetically closest modern relative—in this case, an African elephant—and

modify the genome of an elephant’s cell at the 400,000 or more sites necessary to make it resemble a mammoth’s genome. The cell could be converted into an embryo and brought to term by an elephant....

Hrm. This is starting to sound familiar...

Dr. Schuster says that museums would be an absolute “goldmine” of animal DNA that has been preserved in hooves and feathers.

But why stop there? Sequencing of the complete Neanderthal genome is nearly complete. If a mammoth could be successfully resurrected, it’s possible that the same could be done to recreate a Neanderthal. The scientists are confident that with the advances today there are no technical obstacles...

But before you get worried about poking around the human genome, Dr. George Church of Harvard’s Medical School says that

The workaround would be to modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee, which is some 98 percent similar to that of people. The chimp’s genome would be progressively modified until close enough to that of Neanderthals, and the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.

Ah, thank goodness. Much less creepy, don’t you think?

[Photo of “The One and Only Stuffed Mammoth in the World” taken by Flickr user tanapon, and CC-licensed for commercial use.]

Via SciFi Wire, we get this craptacular bit of (hopefully inaccurate) Hollywood rumor-mongering:

Twentieth Century Fox is gearing up to continue its X-Men franchise with a younger set of mutants, Variety reported. The studio has tapped Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz to write X-Men: First Class. He’d also been offered a chance to direct the film, but declined. Schwartz, the creator and executive producer of The CW’s teen soap hit as well as Fox’s youth-centric The O.C. and NBC’s Chuck, is expected to inject a next-gen sensibility into the superhero series, which has collectively earned $1.2 billion worldwide.

Really? Let’s put aside the fact that the First Class title—at least in the Marvel Universe—is about just that: the first class of Xavier’s X-Men. You know: Iceman, Beast, Cyclops, Marvel Girl/Jean Grey, and Angel, characters that are already present in the movies. Let’s put that aside for the sake of, ah, artistic license.

But the idea of putting the luminary in charge of such vapid Tiger-Beat-fodder (yeah, I have no idea if that’s still an extant teen publication, so sue me, I’m getting old) as Gossip Girl and The O.C. (Chuck may well be an exception—I haven’t watched it, but I’ve read good things) smacks of shark-jumping, demographic-baiting, and the ever-destructive hand of some over-zealous marketing drone.

Oh, Bryan Singer, why did you abandon the magnificent Danger Room you created for a half-assed Fortress of Solitude, leaving us in the hands of Brett “let’s-blow-shit-up-with-mutant-powers” Ratner? Won’t you come back, once you’re done fooling around with Tom Cruise (yeah, I did it again. I just really like that song)?

Hi, my name is Megan, and I am a huge Trekkie. I like Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, don’t get me wrong, but I’ll always have a soft spot for the original series; I love the melodrama, the broad humor and the shameless ’60s color palette.

J.J. Abrams has just hit me in that soft spot. With a car.

The Star Trek movie, due out in May 2009, had one trailer in theaters ages ago—it’s a lot of mysterious shots of welding and an overlay of actual space-related soundbites. (“Godspeed, John Glenn.”) At the end, the camera pulls away and you see “U.S.S. ENTERPRISE” on the distinctive hull. I’ll admit I got chills, even though the trailer didn’t show anything. More of teaser, really.

Yesterday, a real trailer was released, and I watched it today in horror. It opens with a red car going very fast through some desert. This sequence takes long enough for me to make a Warp Drive crack and a “compensating for something” crack, and then, as the car goes off the biggest mothering cliff I’ve ever seen, it’s revealed that the driver is a twelve-year-old Anakin Sk—I mean, James Tiberius Kirk.

[I’ve got a bad feeling about this… Read on to see why.]

For some time now, people have decried the decline of science fiction and the science fiction magazine in particular. They would always point to the declining newsstands sales and subscription numbers of the larger science fiction magazines. Then people would talk about a science fiction magazine that had a circulation of 300,000 with an estimated readership of more than 1,000,000. People would declare, “It can be done! You can have a science fiction magazine with a lot of readers!”

The caveat? The magazine, Science Fiction World (SFW), is Chinese. I don’t know that you can compare the English-language genre market (with the largest circulation being that of Analog at roughly 23,000) to that of China. My initial feeling was that you had a market of a lot of people (more than 1,000,000,000; yes I could say “billion,” I just like typing all those zeroes) and not much by way of outlet for those with science fiction interest, i.e., no imported/translated/home-grown books/movies/games/etc.

[I hear you shouting; I know I’m wrong, read on...]

In the beginning were the words, Gaiman’s words. And lo, those words inspired three Neil Gaiman admirers to tackle the daunting task of fashioning a book which both praised and analyzed those words. And thus was Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman, born.

Kind of a highfalutin’ way to describe the creation process for our
book, but it has the virtue of being succinct. The real story is a bit
more complicated.

That tale begins in the months following the issue of the updated
version of my 2001 book The Stephen King Universe (now titled The Complete Stephen King Universe—catchy, huh?), a book upon which I had collaborated with my colleagues Christopher Golden and Stanley Wiater. My memories of the hard work and stress and anxiety required to put that project together had faded to the point that I was actually thinking of embarking on a similar project, but what? What would be interesting to work on, and stand a chance of selling decently? What, what?

Then, my daughter Leigh remarked one evening that she was going to
reread Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, a book she had read a couple of times already. It was a Eureka! moment if there ever was one.

The plan came together almost immediately. I’d try to pitch a book on the guy who revolutionized comics with his creation of The Sandman, and who had gone on to storm the literary world with such popular works as American Gods, The Wolves in the Walls, and yes, Coraline.

Sometimes I’m blinded by my own brilliance.

How to proceed? Well, I know when I need help, and when I need help, I call my pal, Chris Golden, author of myriad books like ... well,
trust me, they’re too myriad to name—it’s a lot. Chris, who had also
forgotten how hard it was to finish the King book, and agreed to come onboard as co-author. From there, I crafted a proposal, which Chris forwarded to our extremely wise and compassionate future editor on the book, Marc Resnick (who would have been referred to here as “the dim-witted and know nothing editor” had he foolishly rejected the book).

After Marc accepted the proposal, it was all laughs from there,
right?

Wrong, but more on that in a future installment, where I’ll detail the trials and travails of writing about a guy as prolific as Gaiman, and the trouble we had arranging an interview with the man himself,
who, despite being one of the most accommodating people on the face of the planet, also has to be one of the most traveled.

NEXT: We begin work, and acquire a strange traveling companion from Vermont.

What. The. Hell...WENN is reporting that a new poll of the greatest TV Action Heroes was just released. The top five?

1. MacGyver

2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

3. Jack Bauer (24)

4. Sydney Bristow (Alias)

5. Magnum P.I.

First off, it’s good to see two women in the top five (apparently, Xena also made the top ten, but so far I’ve been unable to track down the full list). And you know what? I’m not really sure why Magnum’s up there, but any guy who’s man enough to pull off that Freddie Mercury ’stache and short shorts through the late 80s deserves kudos in my book.

But what’s going on with the top two? Buffy is the Slayer, chosen to defend the world against all the Forces of Darkness, invested with powers originating from pure demonic essence which endow her with superhuman speed, agility, and endurance. Plus, she’s got great hair. MacGyver, on the other hand, engages in occasional scuffles with random bad guys with the use of his trusty Swiss Army Knife and an array of relatively impressive D.I.Y. skills. Come on! You might as well pit Kali the Destroyer against Encyclopedia Brown. There’s no contest!

[Below the fold: Buffy Saves the World; MacGyver makes a laser out of a chewing gum wrapper and old Pez.]

Prequels be damned, Star Wars is one of the most important landmarks of 20th century science fiction. Not only has it inspired generations of fans (whose enthusiasm knows no bounds), but it has become part of the mainstream consciousness the world over and influenced cinematic, literary, and (evidently) architectural and artistic history.

Artist John Powers has written a fascinating essay called “Star Wars: A New Heap, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Death Star.” Complete with visuals, it explores how the aesthetics of Star Wars was informed by everything from abstract expressionism to modern machinery. He calls the Death Star (and its eventual destruction) “an essential work of minimalism...[and] a turning point for modernism.”

Even if you’re not an art critic, I recommend you page through just for the visual comparisons. They’re striking in and of themselves.

Late 60s NASA aeronautical design, corporate office furniture, and Vietnam-era politics are all woven into the great Star Wars fabric.

Powers also touches on the designs of the other SFnal epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which Lucas was indebted (not just artistically or thematically—many members of his team had worked on that film). You’ll never look at the U.N. building the same way again.

He concludes by speculating on the future:

For the first time in fifty-five hundred years of building cities, more of humanity now lives in them than in rural settlements. In the coming years there will be countless master plans for new mega-cities in Africa, Asia, and South America. We can only hope that these plans will be drawn by disciples of Jane Jacobs, students of Robert Morris, admirers of Robert Smithson, and fans of Star Wars.

I hope so, too.

John Joseph Adams is the man with the kick ass book trailers! It is so easy, and yes, fun, to make zombies kitschy, but John’s trailer for The Living Dead definitely makes brain-eating hordes both scary and meaningful. To celebrate the trailer, John has released five more stories from the anthology for free download.

“In Beauty, Like the Night” by Norman Partridge
“Malthusian’s Zombie” by Jeffrey Ford
“Sparks Fly Upward” by Lisa Morton
“Followed” by Will McIntosh
“Passion Play” by Nancy Holder

(Speaking of kick ass trailers, John’s effective video for his ecological SF anthology Seeds of Change is below the fold. Advertising worth watching.)

[Watch the trailer.]

It is one of the strangest stories we have heard of. It concerns one of the great mysteries of creation, life and death. Beware. Perhaps it will offend you. It may even terrify you. Not many films in the whole world have had a greater impact. But I advise you not to take it very seriously.

So says the man in the tuxedo who introduces Frankenstein, the movie within a movie at the beginning of Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, a Spanish movie from 1973. Made in the last years of the Franco era, the plot concerns a young girl, Ana, who lives in a remote town in Spain at the end of the Spanish civil war. After seeing Frankenstein, goaded by her sister, Ana comes to believe that the actual Frankenstein monster lives in an abandoned building outside of town—the same building where a fugitive happens to take refuge. Thus do the girl’s imaginative world and the world of her country’s politics get woven together, until the game of what is real and what is not matters much less than what the filmmaker is able to do by blending the two together.

[Read more...]

In 1988, C.J. Cherryh published her best book so far, Cyteen. I’m not the only person to think it’s wonderful (though I may be the only person who has had to ration re-reads and who thinks it’s the second best book in the world) as it won the Hugo. If you’re not claustrophobic and you like SF, I commend it to your attention.

Cyteen is about cloning, slavery, psychology and psychogenesis— mind cloning. It’s set on the planet Cyteen in the twenty-fifth century, in Cherryh’s Union-Alliance universe. Ariane Emory is an incredibly powerful politician and a genius scientist. She’s murdered—it says this on the back cover, and the first time I read it I spent the entire first part of the book longing for someone, anyone, to murder her. I’d have killed her myself. Then they clone her and attempt to get her personality back. The genius of the book is how it manages to get your sympathy for this incredibly unsympathetic person, and what makes it totally fascinating is the society, on the one hand so utopian, on the other, so awful.

I’m planning to re-read all the Union-Alliance books in internal chronological order and write about them here, in preparation for the direct Cyteen sequel, Regenesis, which is due out on January 6th. I did not just re-read Cyteen in advance of this sensible plan. I just happened to look at the Regenesis Amazon page (to check that I still had to wait until January for it) and saw that they have some actual information about the book. In Regenesis, apparently, we will discover once and for all who killed Ariane Emory!

Of course I want to know. But before anyone gets the chance to know for sure, I want to rehearse the possibilities one last time. Many of these suggestions are not mine but come from conversations I have had about Cyteen in the last twenty years, many of them on rec.arts.sf.written.

[Spoilers, lovely spoilers, but incredibly tedious if you haven’t read the book.]

The Chesley Awards are peer art and illustration awards given out annually by the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists. The awards are named after Chesley Bonestell, the late astronomy artist. This year’s winners were announced at IlluxCon. Congrats to all the winners!

Award for Artistic Achievement
Michael Wm. Kaluta

Best Cover Illustration – Hardback Book
Donato Giancola, “The Outback Stars”
(by Sandra McDonald, Tor)

Best Cover Illustration – Paperback Book
Donato Giancola, “Crystal Dragon”
(by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Ace)

Best Cover Illustration – Magazine
Cory and Catska Ench, Fantasy & Science Fiction, 3/07

Best Interior Illustration
James Gurney, “Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara”
(by James Gurney, Andrews McMeel)

Best Gaming Related Illustration
Donato Giancola, “Vanguard: Saga of Heroes”
(Sigil Games Online)

Best Product Illustration
Todd Lockwood, “War of Angels”
(poster for Bullseye Tattoo)

Best Monochrome – Unpublished
Donato Giancola, “Season of Change”

Best Color Work – Unpublished
Donato Giancola, “Red Sonja”

Best Three Dimensional Art
Vincent Villafranca, “Conscious Entity and Its Maker”

Best Art Director
Irene Gallo, Tor Books

Seen above: Michael Kaluta, Donato Giancola, and Todd Lockwood

(The title refers to something I said in my earlier post on writing series.)

These days, I’m lucky enough to be a full-time writer. That means that when I wake up in the morning, I have no other paying job competing for my attention. However, when I started writing, that wasn’t the case. When I look back, I see that habits and skills I cultivated at the beginning of my career continue to shape how I write today.

I started seriously applying myself to writing fiction immediately after I finished graduate school. By “seriously” I mean that, instead of noodling along on a story, finishing it or not as the mood struck me, I set out to complete what I started, to polish it to the best of my ability, and to send out the finished story.

Until then, I’d given my graduate work my first priority. However, practically on the day I handed the final revised chapter of my dissertation to my adviser, I resolved that before life filled all the time that had gone into writing and researching The Persephone Myth in D.H. Lawrence, I was going to slot in fiction writing.

I did, too, even as I worked several part-time jobs, searched for a full-time post, and dealt with the usual demands of daily life. Then and there, I made three decisions. Although I’ve adapted them as my life has changed, these basic choices remain the keynotes of my writing habits to this day.

[The decisions, behind the cut.]