My friend Rob is co-producing an independent film called The Arrangement. There’ll be a staged reading of it tomorrow night in Manhattan. (Basically they perform the script as if it were a play in order to see how it all works with the actors and to see how it goes over with an audience before they start principal photography.) Anyone who’s in the neighborhood should feel free to stop by. Here’s the poster:
Archives for June 2008
My Colorized Version of Nick Greenwood’s “Red Road” Illustration
Just for fun I decided to see if I could colorize Nick Greenwood’s spectacular illustration for my short story “Red Road.” I’d never done this before, and wasn’t even sure I’d be able to. I futzed around a bit with Paint Shop Pro, and quickly discovered that the lasso + adjust RGB functions make it surprisingly easy to colorize a black & white image, and that this renders surprisingly good results. Here’s how it’s turning out so far:
Illustration For My Short Story “Red Road”
WOW! Check out this superb illustration by Nick Greenwood for my short story “Red Road.” The story (and illustration) will be appearing very soon in Issue 9 of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. (To get the full effect of the art you really need to see the super high-res version.)
If you’re just tuning in, “Red Road” is an animal quest fantasy / political allegory (think Lord of the Rings meets Animal Farm). I recently posted a short essay about the process of writing this story.
The Living Dead Anthology at Amazon.com
I notice there’s now a page up at Amazon.com for the anthology The Living Dead (which will contain my short story “The Skull-Faced Boy”). The page also includes this preliminary cover art (at least, I hope it’s preliminary, since John Joseph Adams’ name is spelled wrong):
Recent Science Articles
Here are some interesting science articles I came across recently. This one is funny in an also-makes-me-want-to-cry sort of way. It relates the profound loneliness experienced by members of Congress who are scientifically literate:
“Problems arise not just in obviously science-related issues, but also, as Mr. Holt put it, in ‘those countless issues, and it really is countless, that have scientific and technological components but the issues are not seen as science issues.’
He cited the debates over electronic voting machines that caused problems ‘that would be obvious to any computer scientist but went right past some people here in Congress.’
Mr. Foster mentioned the debates over electronic border fences, which he said lacked ‘fundamental concepts of what radar can or cannot do.’
What is needed is not more advanced degrees, the physicists said (they all have Ph.D.’s), but a capacity to take the long view, what Mr. Ehlers called the scientists’ ability to see from the pre-Cambrian era to the space age.
But sometimes, he said, the problem is just old-fashioned ignorance. Several times he has found himself ‘rushing to the floor’ to head off colleagues ready to eliminate financing for endeavors whose importance they did not understand.
Once it was game theory. The person seeking the cut did not seem to realize that game theory had to do with interactions in economics, behavior and other social sciences, not sports, Mr. Ehlers recounted.
Then there was the time he rose to defend A.T.M. research against a colleague who thought it should be left to the banking industry. In this case the initials stood for asynchronous transfer mode, a protocol for fiber-optic data transfer.”
There’s also this article, about a controversial cosmologist who suggests that the universe is at its most basic level made out of math. But amidst all the speculation about quantum mechanics, relativity, the Schrodinger equation, infinite parallel universes, and the idea that time is just an illusion, the thing that really blew my mind was this:
“A friend gave me a book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by the physicist Richard Feynman. It was all about picking locks and picking up women. It had nothing to do with physics, but it struck me how between the lines it said loud and clear, ‘I love physics!’ I couldn’t understand how this could be the same boring stuff from high school. It really piqued my curiosity.
Q: So then you changed your major?
Umm, no. You don’t pay for college in Sweden, so I was able to do this kind of scam where I enrolled in a different university to do physics without telling them I was already in college for economics.
Q: You were in two colleges at the same time?
Yeah. You can see I was confused. It got complicated at times. I would have exams in both places on the same day, and I’d have to bike really fast between them.”
That’s right. In Sweden, not only do you not have to bankrupt your parents or burden yourself with decades of debt (or both) just to get an education, it’s actually possible to get two free educations.
That reminds me of a guy I met at SC who was trying to start up a literary society and who was kind of a character. (He had flasks of liquor stashed all over campus so he would never run out.) This guy had been born in Sweden but had lived most of his life in the U.S. When it came time to go to college, he decided to return to Sweden and partake of the free education. When he was just about to graduate, and had already been accepted to grad school in the U.S., the Swedish government came to him and said, “Whoops, we made a mistake. Actually you don’t qualify for free college after all because you’ve spent so little time living in Sweden, so we’re going to need you to go ahead and pay for that college education after all.” This guy was like, “Sure, I’ll send you a check,” and then he hopped on a plane to U.S. So he ended up getting a free education after all, except now I guess he can never go back to Sweden.
Former Bush Administration Lawyer Compares Administration to “Sith Lords”
Did everyone catch the last episode of The Daily Show? The guest was David Iglesias, an evangelical Christian and dedicated Republican who was fired from the Justice Department for refusing to go along with the Bush administration’s insane scheme to destroy its political opponents by throwing them in prison on fabricated corruption charges. I particularly enjoyed this exchange:
Jon Stewart: Is the greatest disappointment for you that you were a guy who believed in what they were doing, and probably still believes in the political end of it … do you feel betrayed, in that sense?
David Iglesias: Yeah, and to use a Star Wars image … I thought I was working with the Jedi knights, and I was working for the Sith lords.
[Audience cheers]
Jon Stewart: I want to tell you something … for the audience for this show you could not have used a better example … I will see you at Comic-Con 2009.
John Joseph Adams Announces “Brave New Worlds,” an Anthology of Dystopian Fiction
My buddy John Joseph Adams, editor of the highly-acclaimed Wastelands anthology, just announced his newest project — Brave New Worlds, a reprint anthology of dystopian fiction. If you know of or have written a story that you’d like to see considered for the anthology, add the title to the database as explained here. (Note that this is a reprint anthology, so only previously-published work is being considered.) |
Tobias S. Buckell to Write Halo Novel
I just saw that my good buddy Tobias S. Buckell got a gig writing the next Halo novel. I don’t know exactly how well those books sell, but I suspect that it has to be measured by the cubic crapload. Toby, whose futuristic fiction combines kickass action and adventure with cutting-edge speculation and research, is an inspired choice to pen a Halo novel. Very exciting.
Hopefully some significant fraction of the vast legion of Halo players will pick up Toby’s Halo novel and then from there find their way over to his other fiction and to other science fiction generally. When I was an adolescent, my interest in fantasy literature was nurtured by TSR’s Dragonlance novels, which were perfect for me at that age and which I first came to through the associated video games, so I know firsthand that this sort of videogame -> media fiction -> standalone fiction migration does happen.
“Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” Exhibit at the Met
The Met is currently hosting an exhibit titled Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy in which they’re showing off superhero costumes that were used in filming movies as well as haute couture items that were inspired by superhero costumes. The exhibit book features an essay by Michael Chabon. It all looks like a lot of fun. As part of the exhibit, this Sunday there’ll be a day-long program of lectures and panels with titles such as “E Pluribus Unitard: Notes toward a Theory of Superhero Costuming,” “The Boys in the Hoods: The Costumed Vigilante as Urban Dandy,” and “The Gods of Greece, Rome, and Egypt Still Exist — Only Today They Wear Spandex and Capes!” I’ll likely be attending.
And how’s this for irony? “Please note that visitors in costume will not be admitted to the Museum.” |
Reader Reactions to My Short Story “The Skull-Faced Boy”
Pseudopod listeners are beginning to post responses to my story “The Skull-Faced Boy.” See here and here.
Overall I think the feedback is pretty positive. Deflective writes: “This story is everything Pseudopod! A classic scenario with a twist. An action-driven plot with a hint of meaning. Just right for audio. Well-performed audio at that.” Sylvan calls the piece “a fascinating story that takes the zombie genre to new places,” and M. says it’s “some of the best listening I’ve done in a while.”
Chivalrybean writes: “The whole smart zombie aspect was brilliant. Not done before as far as the extent that my zombie experiences reach. Commanzomdos [commando zombies]. How cool is that?”
Many listeners seem to think that the story could or should be longer, either because they think some aspect of it is underdeveloped (boo) or because they think the setup is just really neat (yay). For example, Clinton Trucks notes, “This is the first Pseudopod offering that I thought could be expanded to novel length without suffering a dilution of its central idea.”
One thing I’ve noticed in writing workshops is that people will often say of a short story “This should be a novel” or “I wanted to see more of x,” and I almost always disagree. (Not just about my own stories, but with stories in general.) Part of it I’m sure is just taste. I know that I tend more than most people to prefer stories that are short and to the point and that always feel like they’re going somewhere. I also think it’s natural if you basically enjoy a story to feel that you want more of it … but that doesn’t necessarily mean that if you actually got more of it you’d be happier. I think there’s a lot to be said for leaving the reader wanting more. It certainly seems to me that it’s preferable to err in that direction than to err on the side of boring the reader. (There are also practical limits to how long you can make a piece that you’re hoping to sell to a magazine.) Still, given the number of listeners so far who seem to want more, more, more, it’s certainly something I’ll be thinking about vis-a-vis future stories.
Finally, I also came across a nice mention of “The Skull-Faced Boy” on this amusing blog post about zombies:
Erick Wujcik, Creator of the Amber RPG, Died Last Week
I just saw that Erick Wujcik died last week, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 57. Wujcik created the Amber diceless roleplaying game, which is based on my favorite series, Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. The published material for the game consists of two manuals, Amber and Shadow Knight, and a related fanzine called Amberzine. The game itself is revolutionary — a diceless pen & paper RPG that emphasizes acting and improvisation over maps and stats — but even if you have no interest in gaming the books are well worth reading just for their close textual analysis of Zelazny’s saga as well as for the thoughtful meditations on the art of storytelling. The books also contain portraits of all the major characters in the Amber universe, which greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the series and also made it a heck of a lot easier to keep everyone straight. I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours poring over those gamebooks. They’re always floating around my living space, and I often thumb through them just to scan the illustrations or to peruse the little excerpts from Zelazny’s work. I never met Wujcik, but I did write him some fan letters — I think the only fan letters I ever wrote — and he was nice enough to write me back with personal, full-page responses, and he even included some of the artwork from the then-unreleased (and agonizingly long-delayed) Shadow Knight. There were supposed to be other Amber DRPG supplements — I remember talk about books dealing in more detail with the Courts of Chaos and/or Rebma and/or the environs of Amber. After so many years I wasn’t exactly holding my breath, but I did sort of hope someday to see Wujcik write more about Amber, and it’s sad to think now that that’ll never be, especially coming as it does just weeks after the death of Robert Asprin, who held a similarly exalted place in my youthful pantheon. At least with writers the work is always there, and you can open a book and hear the author’s voice. If you ever come across Wujcik’s Amber gamebooks — especially if you’re a fan of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber — read them. They look like this:
My Short Story “The Skull-Faced Boy” Now Available on the Pseudopod Podcast
My short story “The Skull-Faced Boy” is now available as a free podcast from Pseudopod. As with the last story I had up there, “The Disciple,” they did a really nice job on the production, with Ralph Walters of the Frequency of Fear podcast performing the story. And remember to keep an eye out for “The Skull-Faced Boy” later this year in the Night Shade Books anthology The Living Dead (which will also feature stories by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, and many other well-known writers).
My Short Story “Lest We Forget” Spotted in a German Bookstore
My parents are living in Germany right now, and my mom just stumbled across a copy of the New Line 6 English textbook that contains my story “Lest We Forget.” Here’s a photo she just sent me of the book in its natural habitat:
“Lest We Forget” won the Dell Magazines Award for undergraduate science fiction, and subsequently appeared on the Asimov’s magazine website, where a German textbook publishing company saw it. They emailed me and said, “We’d like to reprint this story in our textbook. How much do we need to pay you for that?” I was a teenager and had absolutely no clue what the going rate might be for a textbook reprint, let alone a textbook reprint in Germany. After much rumination, I decided to ask for $1000, which I thought was probably way too much, but I really had no idea, and I figured we could always negotiate. I was a little afraid though that they would come back and say, “$1000! Sind Sie verruckt? We were thinking more like $50. Whoa, just forget the whole thing.” But actually they said okay and sent me $1000 and a few copies of the textbook. So that was all well and good, though I did sometimes wonder over the succeeding years why they’d been willing to pay so much for a short story reprint. Just how many copies of this textbook were they printing anyway?
When I set up statcounter to track visitors to my website, almost immediately I had a visitor from Germany who’d found my site by googling “lest we forget david kirtley.” I thought, “Hey, neat. Someone from Germany actually came across the story I published in that textbook all those years ago. What are the odds?” Well, apparently the odds weren’t all that astronomical, because in the next 24 hours I had two more visitors from Germany who’d found my site in the exact same way. And this has continued ever since, with three or four visitors to my website from Germany every day. My story is just a few pages in the middle of the book, so geez, there must be a hell of a lot of copies of that thing floating around Germany to account for all the internet traffic. The book is even common enough for my parents to randomly stumble across it. So I guess maybe $1000 wasn’t so out of line after all. Now I sort of wonder what would’ve happened if I’d asked for $5,000? Oh well, as long as tons of German students are reading my story I’m happy.
Mini-Essay on How I Wrote My Short Story “Red Road”
My short story “Red Road” will be appearing in the next issue of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, which should be out around the end of the month. I’ve been asked to put together a little “behind the scenes” essay about how I wrote the story. Here’s the illustration for the story followed by my essay:
As we were departing Lunacon, my friend John Joseph Adams recommended a book to me, but cautioned me that the book contained talking animals, as if that might put me off. I replied automatically, “No, that’s cool. I like talking animals.” Later I thought back on that and realized that, hey, yeah, I do like talking animals, and yet I’d never published a story that contained any talking animals. I started thinking it might be fun to write a story about some talking animals, but only if I could come up with some new angle — something sufficiently skewed and offbeat.
A few days later I remembered a conversation I’d had years ago with some of the other students at James Gunn’s writing workshop at the University of Kansas. In that conversation I’d made a joke along the lines of, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if someone wrote an animal quest fantasy in which … ?” Remembering that, I suddenly thought, “Hey, that’s not bad.” I had just come off a white-hot streak of writing successes, and I was in the mood for a challenge, such as taking a joke situation and trying to develop it into a narrative that contained as much emotional depth and thematic significance as I could manage.
One other inspirational moment I remember: I had read a news article about a left-wing intellectual type who had recently been knighted in the UK. All this guy’s left-wing intellectual friends had chided him for accepting the honor and had pointed out that monarchy and titles and all that were basically against everything that this guy stood for, and the guy was kind of like, “Yeah, I know, I know. But come on, I’m a knight now. How cool is that? How could I say no?” I kept thinking about that, and kept wondering what I might do in that situation, since I could easily sympathize with both sides.
I had a blast writing this story. It was enormous fun to be able to go back and write my own old-school fantasy complete with heroes and monsters and talking animals and a quest, just like the kind I read so many of when I was a kid, and I felt inspired to sneak in an unusually high number of sly allusions and little in-jokes. My interest in politics and culture tends to show through no matter what I write, so I think the story also contains a lot of hidden depth. I also think I managed to bump my sentence-level writing up a notch with this piece.
I wrote the story during a summer in which I was living in a small apartment in South Central L.A. It was too hot for me to go out much during the day and too dangerous for me to venture out much at night, so I spent day after day alone in that apartment and got completely absorbed (probably too much so) in the fictional reality of the story. The moment at which I became really excited about the piece and knew for sure that I was going to go ahead and write it all down was when I dreamt up the sequence in which Francis battles the owl. But when it came time to write that scene, I just didn’t know how Francis could possibly stand a chance. I paced around and around, swinging an imaginary sword. In the corner of the room, looming over me, I pictured a gigantic and sinister owl (the sweltering heat probably contributed to the near-hallucinatory intensity of this vision), and I would stare up at that monstrous owl and think, “Crap, how the hell am I going to kill this bleeping thing?”
I was really happy with how that part turned out. In fact, after I wrote that scene I couldn’t restrain myself from sending out a bulletin to all my Facebook friends announcing, “I just wrote the best sword-wielding mouse versus owl fight scene you’ll read all year!” Writing isn’t all fun and games though, of course. For whatever reason I had a hell of a time describing the throne room. I worked for an entire day — eight hours or so — on that one stupid little paragraph, though that time included many hours spent online perusing photos of various real-world throne rooms. I also found it challenging to work out exactly how the climactic scene was going to go down (even though that scene was something I’d planned from the beginning and was in fact the genesis of the whole piece). I spent several days wrestling with the logistics of the thing until I finally hit upon the image of a spooky, mist-shrouded landscape, which instantly felt right and which immediately solved a lot of my problems.
I had a great deal of fun writing this story, and I really felt as though I were living through the events as I was writing them. I hope that some of that same experience comes through for people when they read it.
The Ultimate Horror: Monkeys + Robots
Last week’s installment of NPR’s Talk of the Nation “Science Friday” podcast featured a segment about how researchers have implanted sensors into the brains of monkeys that allow those monkeys to control a robotic arm just by thinking about it. Sounds pretty neat, right? But don’t these researchers see the danger?
Fortunately during the call-in portion of the show Ryan from Madison, Wisconsin was on the scene to alert everyone to the potential horror that these hubristic scientists are set to unleash upon us all.
Ryan states: “I know I’m not the only one who’s concerned about robots taking over the world, and now there’s going to be an unholy alliance with the monkeys controlling them? This is how they get back at us for doing what we’ve done to the rain forests. I just don’t think this is a great idea. Monkeys controlling robots? I mean, come on.”
Oh man, he’s right. This has to be stopped. Monkeys and robots, truly a chilling combination. Write your member of Congress … before it’s too late.