Saturday, 29th of January, 2005

As the PublishAmerica-approved fake Amazon review would probably read, I picked this book up this evening, and I haven’t been able to put it down!
Well, actually I’ve been reading the free downloadble version (pdf | rtf) and have been laughing out loud every minute or two.

The backstory: So there’s this book publisher called PublishAmerica, you see, who claim to be a “traditional book publisher” (see their authorinfo page), as opposed to a vanity publisher. Turns out that they’re really nothing of the sort, but what really enraged a bunch of authors and editors from the SFWA was a statement from PublishAmerica that:

“As a rule of thumb, the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction…. [Science fiction authors] have no clue about what it is to write real-life stories, and how to find them a home.” They are “writers who erroneously believe that SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters.”

They decided to take this as a challenge, and in the words of their press release, “see where PublishAmerica puts its own quality bar; if the publisher really is selective, as the company claims, or if it is a vanity press that will accept almost anything, as publishing professionals assert.”

The result, submitted under the pseudonym Travis Tea, is the most hilariously badly-written yet compulsively-readable, well… travesty that I have ever seen. It’s so marvellously bad that I’m tempted to go buy it for all my friends. As soon as the hoax was revealed, PublishAmerica withdrew their offer to publish, with the following comment: “Upon further review it appears that your work is not ready to be published. There are portions of nonsensical text in the manuscript that were caught by our editing staff as they previewed the text for editing time assessment pending your acceptance of our offer.”

This is hilarious, because although true (of one chapter, anyway), it ignores the fact that every other chapter is riddled with unpublishable horrors too. The book contains every kind of idiocy that book editors have to deal with on a depressingly regular basis, from appallingly bad grammar, egregious typos and mysteriously changing tenses to wrong usages (e.g. “masseuse” for a (male) masseur), overuse of modifiers (especially in reference to direct speech), empty references, characters referred to by the wrong name, and pretty much anything else you can think of. It also has two chapter 12s.
In short, it’s wonderful!

There are plenty of gems throughout, so it’s hard to choose, but here’s a couple. From chapter 4:

He’d killed a man before one time, with his bare hands, and he could do it again, if he put something in his bare hands like a knife or a gun or something that he could kill somebody with.

Or the start of chapter 3:

“As you’ve probably heard Yvonne,â€? began Penelope Urbain. Seriously brushing a gleaming scarlet tress out of her tearful eye “Bruce has come home from the hospital after his accident.â€?
“Yes you must be very happy,� said Yvonne sympathetically. “He was badly hurt in that auto accident.�
“Yes he was badly hurt,� responded Penelope honestly. “But he is home now and I am very happy about that.�

Chapter 7 is a tour de force, but the best passage would take up too much space, so instead I refer you to this sentence:

They were here only for each other and for the memory of a great man who had walked the earth like a rock in the sand.

…and so it goes…

In case you’re wondering, since PublishAmerica changed their mind about publishing it, the book has been self-published through Lulu.com, a free self-publishing service. Oh - and check out the 5-star reviews PublishAmerica’s books are getting over at Amazon! Then check out all the other books the mega-enthusiastic reviewers are reviewing, and marvel at how they all seem to be published by PublishAmerica! Uh…

More links over at MeFi. I strongly recommend you read the book, for guffaw value as well as edjamacational value. I wanna know who wrote it - other than Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who won’t own up to which chapter is hers but does print someone else’s chapter in full…
Edit: Teresa has now ‘fessed up: she wrote Chapter 15. Meanwhile, there’s now a WikiPedia entry with an almost-complete list of contributors.

Tuesday, 18th of January, 2005

This is too good to leave just as a LiveJournal post. I just discovered that Patrick Nielsen Hayden (esteemed sf editor, of Electrolite fame) has an LJ, and on it I found a link to another LJ meme - or so it seemed. First time I skipped over it, I thought it was just a nicely generalised LJ meme, but I guess I wasn’t reading it in context.
So go read one American leftie’s heartfelt response in the aftermath of Bush’s election victory last year. It’s quite beautiful.

Monday, 17th of January, 2005

Via Niall Harrison’s LJ, Coalescent, I found out that noted sf critic Farah Mendlesohn has posted a list of questions for research for a book on children’s sf reading. Her page is at http://sfquestions.blogspot.com/. I emailed my response to sfquestions@gmail.com and you can too!

1. Name
Peter Hollo

2. Current Age
31

3. Country or Countries in which you spent your first eighteen years. (give breakdown if appropriate)
UK - born in Shrewsbury, but when approx 2 moved with my parents back to
Australia - still live here

4. Mother tongue.
English.

The following three questions are *not* for statistical purposes. If you wish to answer them, they provide interesting insights for me or they may not. No truenames will be revealed. Elaborate as you see fit.
5. Sex at birth
Male

6. Sex now.
Male

7. Sexuality.
Heterosexual

8. When did you start reading science fiction?
Seven or eight? I certainly read fantasy first (Blaycock, Tolkien etc) but would’ve read Heinlein juveniles courtesy of my Dad at a young age, and started on Asimov very early…

9. Did you read sf written specifically for children? (ie. age 0-16yrs)
Yes.

10. Name up to five authors of sf for children you liked.
I remember Aidan Chambers’ anthology “Out of Time”, and there was a story by Joan Aiken in there, who I loved but mostly she wasn’t sf.
I enjoyed Madeleine L’Engel (sp?), if she could be called sf…
Robert Westall would’ve been sf…
John Christopher’s Tripods was probably set to read at school and I loved it…
Victor Kelleher wrote a lot of what would more likely be fantasy, but possibly some was sf.

11. Name up to five authors of sf for children you did not like.
I can’t remember any.

12. Name up to five authors of sf for children with the same nationality as the country in which you experienced the bulk of your reading childhood.
Victor Kelleher, originally from New Zealand but lived in Australia for a long time - that’s if he counts as sf at all.

13. If you started reading sf meant for the adult audience before the age of 16, who were your favourite sf writers at that time? (Name up to five).
* Isaac Asimov
* Arthur C Clarke
* John Wyndham
* Robert A Heinlein
* Frank Herbert

14. List up to five qualities that you think you looked for in science fiction when you read it as a child (under 13).
* The “wow” factor - imagination-expansion
I think I was very much into fantasy, as a teenager too, although I had a very logical mind; I probably felt fiction was outside of real-world stuff and thus didn’t look for particular traits in sf as opposed to anything else.

15. List up to five qualities that you think you looked for in science fiction when you read it as a teenager (13 and over).
* The “wow” factor - imagination-expansion
* The scientific speculation
* The puzzle-solving aspect
* Plot
* Romantic/fantastical aspects, ie the “I wish I could be in that world” thing, whether it was to do with girls or cool stuff or whatever…

16. List up to five qualities that you look for in science fiction now.
* The “wow” factor still, up a few notches because, well, I know more about the world and know more sf tropes… (thus Charlie Stross near the top of the list, thus Greg Egan before him)
* Reflection of the real world, and commentary thereon, so I look for politically aware writing as well as:
* Scientific speculation; in both a positive and negative way, so that wilful or unknowing scientific boo-boos will turn me off
* Beautiful, clever, inventive or at least skillful use of language. Asimov is hard to (re-)read these days because he’s at best adequate in his language skills.
* Skill in characterisation and plotting

17. Do you define yourself as a genre reader?
Yes, definitely.

18. What proportion of your reading as a teenager was outside of the genre?
10%? I read a fair bit of adventure stuff, whether boys’-own Hardy Boys stuff or (the good stuff like) Joan Aiken’s Wolves books, and then later I would’ve gotten into Milan Kundera as well as Phil Dick, Ballard and Vonnegut.
Probably most of my non-sf reading at school were set texts.

19. What proportion of your reading as a teenager was non-fiction? (what subjects or genres?)
At least 10%. Mostly popular science, such as John Gribbin, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould and Paul Davies, plus Dennett and Hofstadter (popular science/philosophy/cognitive science). Hofstadter (and to a lesser extent Dennett), and also Gribbin, would’ve introduced me to a lot of sf, from Stanislav Lem’s Cyberiad to Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy among others.
I would have read some (popular) mathematics and linguistics books too.

20. How much of your reading outside of the genre was set by others? (and who were they?)
As mentioned above, English teachers set the large proportion of non-genre reading, from essential stuff like Shakespeare and other drama, to poetry (Keats, Lowell, etc). I was rebellious enough not to even read all of Wuthering Heights or the Scarlet Letter though(!)
In terms of non-fiction though? A lot of it was sought out by me and my parents…

21. Did science fiction influence your political views? In what ways? What books were most important to you?
I think so, although it’s a moot point because my beliefs are entirely in line with my parents’ too, and my Dad introduced me to sf. I was probably influenced politically by a combination of non-fiction and sf reading. I certainly remember when I read E.E. “Doc” Smith (and later Heinlein) as a teenager I was struck by both the fact that it wasn’t “really” science fiction (my hard sf leanings were already coming out) but a kind of fantasy transplanted into an sfnal setting, and that it was also pretty gung-ho and questionable politically.
By the time I came across leftist or left-leaning sf (Greg Egan, and the various British authors of the ’90s and earlier (and later)) my political views were mostly already formed, but I was glad to find a place where scientific rigor and compassion could intermix.

22. Did science fiction influence your religious views? In what ways? What books were most important to you?
Again, my atheism is basically innate, having been brought up without any religious dogma, but sf either helped form my questioning views or fitted comfortably with them.

23. Taking no more than 100 words, describe briefly how you chose books between the ages of 13 and 18, and how those books were acquired (ie libraries, friends, second hand books, new books).
My Dad had (has) a wonderful collection of most Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert, Smith (”Doc” and Cordwainer in fact), some Arthur C Clarke and so on. I remember explicitly when Dad commented to Mum that I was probably old enough to read sf/fantasy at age about 6 or 7…
In addition I borrowed constantly from the local library and the school library. Missing elements such as extra Clarke would’ve arrived via second-hand and new bookstores.
I had a circle of friends also into sf/fantasy, and we did borrow books from each other too. We started reading Pratchett from the start of the Discworld, and I would argue there’s a strong sf element all through his writing too.

Thursday, 13th of January, 2005

Even though I essentially consider myself a fan of hard science fiction, in the end doesn’t it always come down to the imagination and the storytelling? I’d say so, and of course I’m also a big fan of the inimitable Neil Gaiman and others. I should add that I recently finished Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and found it entirely up to the standards implied by its rapturous reviews (and Neil’s relentless promotion of it). I need to review it, but all in all it’s probably all been said already. [D’you like that? Three “alls” and an “already”…] Suffice to say: The writing’s brilliant, I didn’t find any of it dragged, even the war scenes and the Venice bits, the footnotes are awesome, I want more!

Anyway, you’ll note from my subject that I did not come here to talk about that. I came to talk about an extraordinary story I just read by Christopher Rowe. Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing it out in BoingBoing but to be honest everyone’s talking about it as one of the stories of the year. Thus, go read Voluntary State by Christopher Rowe. If you like the kind of gonzo stuff Cory and Charlie Stross are writing (particularly together), the stuff Rudy Rucker’s writing, or… I dunno, good stuff, well you ought to read this. It’s like… it’s like… Nah, I dunno. Good though. Must check out more of this guy - lots of links to online stories via the blog above.

Saturday, 8th of January, 2005

OK, so because all of us clever WordPress users have now installed one or other anti-comment-spam measures, the spammers have switched to a new method: Trackback spam! Because the messages are just text, and come in as a seeming trackback link from another weblog, they don’t get filtered by the comment spam plugins (this is changing…)
Trackbacks, if you don’t know, are a system by which you can leave a notification on someone’s blog post that you have linked to that post from your blog or page.

Very irritating! The first measure I took was to simply shunt ALL trackbacks and pingbacks (a (better) variation on trackback) into my comment moderation queue, so that they never see the light of public day. Unfortunately the spammers either don’t realise this or don’t care, so I just end up with my inbox being flooded by trackback notifications and then have to manually batch-delete them from the queue.
I was hoping that by moderating them, the WPBlacklist plugin would then filter them and delete them against its blacklist (it’s set to check all comments already moderated). However, trackbacks must be marked as trackbacks-not-comments, so it’s not doing so.
The most galling thing is that no clever solution like image-authentication or parsing an English sentence will work with trackbacks: they’re automated…

So I’m fed up. I don’t really care about trackbacks, so until someone comes up with a much better anti-comment-spam solution that also includes trackbacks and pingbacks, I’m closing off all track/pingbacks for all my hosted blogs.
That’s right. None of these blogs will accept trackbacks or pingbacks until further notice:
FourPlay,
Stumblings in the dark,
Utility Fog,
and Angela’s two:
Angelog &
FBi Bridge Sydney Retrospective.

This is clearly not a great solution. The spammers lose because their spams don’t go anywhere - neither the public eye nor my inbox - but I lose because I lose the great functionality of track/pingbacks. So I hope something can be done soon.

Wednesday, 5th of January, 2005

Oh man. Will Eisner’s dead. Aged 87, so he had a good innings, but it’s still sad.

Monday, 3rd of January, 2005

I haven’t written about the tsunami disaster in Asia yet, because, well, what can my blogging about it do? I was at Woodford from just after it happened anyway (playing some great gigs with the “all-new” (well partly-new) FourPlay).
But just a quick note to mention that Google have a link on their front page to a tsunami relief page they’re hosting, with various places you can go to find more information and help in any way you can. It’s pleasing to see the American Jewish World Service there… Well, I don’t know what else to say, so leave it at that for now.

Except… this page is a pretty incredible resource too.
And how cool is Wikipedia? I didn’t know they had pages on current events. This is the one on the tsunami, with some info on how to help, and continuing documentation. It says:

Sydney City council decided to continue with the fireworks shows at 9pm (Family show) and midnight and asked the Oxfam charity to collect donations at various points around the harbour. As a result of this decision, over AUD 1.1 million was raised in just a few hours, far exceeding the amount which could have been donated had the shows been cancelled

I know there are some sites out there that are pledging to match one’s donation dollar-for-dollar up to a certain amount, so I will have to find one of them soon and donate. I have hardly any money at the moment, but everyone needs to contribute what they can - and soon! As we waste time, people are dying.