Via saycestsay, the inspired opening sequence of Watchmen is now online:

http://www.businessinsider.com/watchmen-opening-credits-are-on-the-internet-forever-now-clip-2009-3

Awesome movie, btw. I didn’t think it could be done, but they totally nailed it.

Breaking news: Warren Lapine has purchased Realms of Fantasy from Sovereign Media and intends to have the magazine up and running again shortly. More at SfScope.

Recent Alpha student Rachel Sobel’s short story “The Loyalty of Birds” is out now in the March issue of Clarkesworld magazine.

Alpha alums once again rocked this year’s Dell Magazines Award. Congrats to Sarah Miller, who placed first runner-up, and to Jeanette Westwood, Elena Gleason, and Lara Donnelly, who all received honorable mentions. By the way, the deadline for this summer’s Alpha workshop is coming up soon, so get those applications in ASAP.

Here are two interesting thought experiments I came across on Wikipedia:

Newcomb’s Paradox
A person is playing a game operated by the Predictor, an entity somehow presented as being exceptionally skilled at predicting people’s actions … The Predictor can be presented as a psychic, as a superintelligent alien, as a deity, etc. … The player of the game is presented with two opaque boxes, labeled A and B. The player is permitted to take the contents of both boxes, or just of box B … Box A contains $1,000. The contents of box B, however, are determined as follows: At some point before the start of the game, the Predictor makes a prediction as to whether the player of the game will take just box B, or both boxes. If the Predictor predicts that both boxes will be taken, then box B will contain nothing. If the Predictor predicts that only box B will be taken, then box B will contain $1,000,000. By the time the game begins, and the player is called upon to choose which boxes to take, the prediction has already been made, and the contents of box B have already been determined. That is, box B contains either $0 or $1,000,000 before the game begins, and once the game begins even the Predictor is powerless to change the contents of the boxes. Before the game begins, the player is aware of all the rules of the game … The only information withheld from the player is what prediction the Predictor made, and thus what the contents of box B are.

Kavka’s Toxin
An eccentric billionaire places before you a vial of toxin that, if you drink it, will make you painfully ill for a day, but will not threaten your life or have any lasting effects. The billionaire will pay you one million dollars tomorrow morning if, at midnight tonight, you intend to drink the toxin tomorrow afternoon. He emphasizes that you need not drink the toxin to receive the money; in fact, the money will already be in your bank account hours before the time for drinking it arrives, if you succeed. All you have to do is … intend at midnight tonight to drink the stuff tomorrow afternoon. You are perfectly free to change your mind after receiving the money and not drink the toxin.

So on a recent Saturday afternoon I was doing my daily walk downtown when I noticed that someone had left their keys sitting on a window ledge. I have enormous sympathy for people who walk off and forget things, as doing so is one of my major pastimes. I sat down on the ledge and examined the keys. The key ring contained a car key, a car locker/unlocker thingy, a miniature purple flip-flop, a miniature wooden manta ray, and various store bar-code cards — Border’s, a vitamin store, a dress store. It occurred to me that maybe I could walk over to Border’s — which was only a block away — and have them scan the card and find out who the keys belonged to. But I didn’t want to move the keys in case their owner came back for them. I waited around for fifteen minutes or so and nobody showed up to claim the keys, so I decided to pop over to Border’s and give it a shot. The girl at the desk seemed kind of annoyed and said they couldn’t get any information off the card. I couldn’t understand why she seemed annoyed. She said, “There’s nothing we can do. You’ll have to turn them in somewhere.” I said, “Like where?” She shrugged and said, “The police?” I said, “Okay.”

I walked back to the ledge where I’d found the keys and sat there, trying to decide what to do. I noticed that the wooden manta ray had an unfamiliar word carved on its underside. Now I can’t remember what the word was. It sounded sort of like “oblivio.” Very mysterious. Key owner Cthulhu cultist? I wondered. I sat around for another fifteen minutes or so. Finally a middle-aged guy and his wife walked by, and the guy said, “So you found those keys too?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “I was thinking, we could take them over to Border’s and … ” I shook my head and said, “Nah, I just tried that.” He said, “Oh,” shrugged, and wandered off. I started to wonder if the keys had been sitting here all day, and if all day people had been taking them over to Border’s, getting nowhere, and then putting the keys back where they’d found them, which might explain the annoyed tone of the Border’s girl. I was loathe to just leave the keys there. If I did, how long would the keys just keep going back and forth to Border’s? And might not they fall into the hands of one of the many sketchy characters downtown? And what if their owner had no idea where to look for them?

It occurred to me that there was a city hall/police station building just a few blocks away. I could walk over there and see what they said. I waited around a few more minutes, then did that. I walked through the main doors of city hall and … there was no one at the front desk. I figured they must’ve just stepped out for a minute. I waited around for ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. I located a board that indicated the public desk for the police department was on the ground floor, so I wandered around the ground floor. The place was absolutely deserted. The council chamber was empty, the door to the police station was locked. I wandered upstairs, but encountered only locked doors. I heard no one. What the hell? Had there been a bomb threat? Chemical weapon attack? I was getting frustrated. It was seeming more and more likely that the key owner would return looking for her (I presume) keys while I was wandering around this empty building. I started wishing I’d just left the keys where I’d found them. Then it occurred to me that the public library was adjacent to city hall, and that they might know what to do. I walked back out the front doors and into the plaza. Then I decided that before continuing this wild goose chase I might as well use the public restroom in the lobby. So I turned around and tried the door … and it was locked. Weird. I tried the door next to it. Also locked. And the one next to that. Also locked. Only one of the four doors was unlocked, the one I’d used on the way in. It suddenly struck me that someone had neglected to lock that door, and that I probably really wasn’t supposed to be in City Hall on a Saturday to begin with. I wondered if there was all sorts of security cam footage of me wandering around in the city council chambers, etc. Whoops.

I circled the building and encountered another entrance — for the police department public desk. The door was locked, but there was a phone. I eyed the surveillance camera pointed at me. Oh, what the hell. I’d already spent over an hour on this. I picked up the phone and said, “Hi. I found someone’s keys on a bench near here, and I was wondering if you guys have like a lost and found or some…” The voice on the phone said curtly, “Name?” “Um…” I said. Headlines flashed through my mind: LOCAL DUMBASS ARRESTED FOR KEY THEFT AND CITY HALL TRESPASSING. “Um…” I said. Come on, I thought. They’re not going to arrest you. And even if they do, think of what an awesome blog post it would make. So: “David Kirtley,” I said. “K-I-R-T-L-E-Y.” “Phone number?” said the voice. I supplied it, then proceeded to describe how I’d found the keys. “You’re at the red phone?” said the voice. “Uh … yeah,” I said. The voice said, “We’re sending over a car.” “Um … great,” I said, and hung up.

Some minutes later a car pulled up and a uniformed officer got out. I gave him the keys and explained where I’d found them. He said he’d try walking around the area pushing the unlock door button and see if he could locate the car. If he had the car, he could run its plates and find out who the car belonged to. He thanked me and drove off. So I still don’t know if they keys ever got back to their rightful owner, or why the hell someone had a manta ray keychain ornament with the word “oblivio” (or whatever) carved on it.

Tor.com is sponsoring a zombie photo caption contest. The winner receives a copy of the zombie anthology The Living Dead (which includes my story “The Skull-Faced Boy”) as well as a copy of the zombie-themed team-based shooter Left 4 Dead.

With the sad demise of Realms of Fantasy, I keep thinking about an experience I had several years ago. I was invited to lead a book discussion on The Hobbit down at the local library for one of the those national get-kids-to-read campaigns. (The event was called “Make Reading a Hobbit.” Hey, don’t blame me. I didn’t come up with it.) I figured I’d be pretty well prepared for this event, seeing as I’m a fantasy writer, I’ve read The Hobbit maybe ten times, read The Lord of the Rings, watched all 7,000 hours of special features on the Peter Jackson extended edition Lord of the Rings DVDs, read Tolkien: Author of the Century and The Inklings, etc. Well, there were these two middle school girls in the audience, and I quickly got the sinking feeling that I was in over my head. These girls had read The Silmarillion. They’d read all ten (?) volumes of The History of Middle-Earth. They were writing their own Tolkien fan poetry … in Elvish. I managed to hold my own, and we had a really stellar discussion about free will / good and evil / race and class in Tolkien. Afterward, people wanted to know who I was, so I showed off some copies of Realms of Fantasy in which I appeared (and which I just happened to have brought with me). One of the parents asked, “What kind of magazine is this?” and I said, “It’s a fantasy magazine. You know, they publish fantasy short stories, and they have reviews of fantasy books and movies, and fantasy art, and articles about folklore, and stuff like that.” These two girls perused the pages, their eyes wide, and one of them exclaimed, “Wow! I never knew there were magazines like this! Mom, can we get this? Please?” That was really cool to see, and now I wish that somehow over the past fifteen years more readers like that could have come across copies of Realms of Fantasy, but unfortunately various factors have conspired to make it very difficult for young readers to discover that short fiction magazines even exist, which is really a shame.

There’s now a save Realms of Fantasy Facebook group.

Now that the Realms of Fantasy website is being shut down, the community that formed around the message boards there is reconstituting itself over at Friends of Fantasy. If you were involved with the old boards (or even if you weren’t), think about dropping by and saying hi.

(Edited to add: As of March 10, 2009, the magazine has a new publisher. Check out the new Realms of Fantasy magazine website.)

Realms of Fantasy magazine will cease publication after the April 2009 issue. I’ve been reading the magazine since the first issue, which came out when I was in high school. After a decade of trying, I finally managed to sell them a story in 2002. This was a huge thrill and a major milestone for me. I remember holding my contributor’s copy and thinking, “Ten years ago I was reading a Roger Zelazny Amber story in this magazine, and now there’s my name on the cover.” It was also a huge thrill to have my story illustrated in full color by a professional artist. I had the two-page spread printed up as a giant poster and framed. I was lucky enough to have a total of five stories published in the magazine, including a recent streak of three acceptances in a row. If you look at my bibliography, you can see just how big a role Realms of Fantasy played in getting me into print these past few years, including making possible my appearance in Rich Horton’s Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008. Realms of Fantasy was particularly open to newer writers, and published early work by some of the most exciting up-and-coming writers today, such as Tim Pratt, Carrie Vaughn, Christopher Barzak, and Greg Van Eekhout. There was a definite camaraderie among the newer writers who appeared together in its pages. I feel like I’m good friends with folks like Richard Parks, Josh Rountree, Trent Hergenrader, and Eugie Foster even though we’ve never met. The Realms of Fantasy message board has also been a lively place. I’m extremely grateful to everyone who helped make Realms of Fantasy possible over the years. I think assistant editor Doug Cohen is due a huge amount of credit for the tremendous level of effort he’s devoted to the magazine, both in seeking out and developing upcoming writers, and in reading through and analyzing every story the magazine has ever published. Realms of Fantasy’s passing is a tremendous loss to the field, particularly for upcoming writers, and I feel really bad for people like Aliette de Bodard and T. L. Morganfield who had placed stories with the magazine and may not see those stories in print. Be extra nice to those folks. I’m grateful to have been involved with Realms of Fantasy, and will miss it terribly.

I just did a double-take when I read this:

“If convicted of the charges against him, Madoff, 70, could spend up to 20 years in prison and face a $5 million fine.”

Twenty years? For stealing fifty billion dollars? Is that a typo?

By a cruel coincidence, here’s someone else who’s facing twenty years in prison:

“The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has signed on as a special consultant to the defense of Christopher Handley, an Iowa collector who faces up to 20 years in prison for possession of manga.”

So stealing fifty billion dollars is about as bad as reading a comic book about teenagers having sex? WTF?

Here’s some nice praise for Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008 (which includes my story “Save Me Plz”) from Sacramento Book Review: Groundbreaking Collection of Fantasy Stories This collection of 19 of the best tales from 2007, collected by acclaimed reviewer Rich Horton, is a pleasing set of non-traditional fantasy stories. Avoiding the tropes, Horton has collected stories of wonder and myth that elucidate and delight. No two are the same, and each is both full of adventure and deeply philosophical. Of particular interest are Daniel Abraham’s “The Cambist and Lord Iron,” Ian R. Macleod’s “The Master Miller’s Tale,” “The Teashop” by Zoran Zivkovic, and “Save Me Plz” by David Barr Kirtley. Fantasy readers looking for genre-breaking stories that contain old themes in new guises will find this collection a real treasure.

Here’s a piece titled No Such Thing as Aliens. It’s a scene from my short story “Blastweed” (previously “P-NZ4” — my “acid-rave sci-fi punk-funk lit” story).
 

 

San Francisco artist looks to replace lost eyeball with webcam “A one-eyed San Francisco artist wants to replace her missing eye with a Web cam – and tech experts say it’s possible. Vlach, who lost her eye in a 2005 car accident, wears a realistic acrylic prosthesis, but she’s issued a challenge to engineers on her blog: build an ‘eye cam’ for her prosthesis that can dilate with changes of light and allow her to blink to control its zoom, focus, and on/off switch. ‘There have been all sorts of cyborgs in science fiction for a long time, and I’m sort of a sci-fi geek,’ said Vlach, 35. ‘With the advancement of technology, I thought, “Why not?”‘ The eye cam could allow her to record her entire life or even shoot a reality TV show from her eye’s perspective. Vlach said she will let inspiration strike once she has the device.”

So the news broke today that HBO has given the greenlight to produce a pilot episode for a Game of Thrones TV series, based on the epic fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin. This is one of my very favorite book series, so of course right now I’m really, really … terrified. Terrified that a) the pilot will suck, and totally not do justice to the books, or, worse, b) that the pilot will be the most awesome thing ever, which will of course ensure the show’s immediate cancellation. “But why would they cancel a fantasy/science fiction TV series just because it was good?” you might ask, if you were extremely young and naive. Well, there’s actually quite a simple explanation. You see, the Knights Templar were not actually wiped out by the Church, as the history books claim, but were in fact merely driven underground, and later reconstituted themselves as a secret cabal who swore a blood oath that they would do anything in their power to see to it that any good fantasy or science fiction TV show would get canceled as soon as possible. Man, I hate those guys.

Anyway, I also think it’s kind of funny that Game of Thrones is actually being produced, when you consider a bit of history. You see, following the demise of the Beauty and the Beast TV show, on which GRRM worked as a writer, he spent many years in Hollywood developing ideas and writing scripts, none of which were ever made. Finally, fed up with this, and fed up with the fact that studio execs were always telling him that his ideas would be too expensive to film — too many sets, too many characters — he returned to writing novels, where you can have as many “sets” and characters as you want, and he purposely set out to take advantage of the freedom of prose fiction to write something huge and epic, something with dozens of locations and hundreds of characters. So what does Hollywood do then? Why, they want to produce that one, of course.

Publishers Weekly lists the John Joseph Adams anthology The Living Dead (which includes my story “The Skull-Faced Boy”) as one of the Best Books of the Year. “This superb reprint anthology runs the gamut of zombie stories, with entries by a plethora of renowned and outstanding authors from all sides of the genre.”

Mailbag time. In this post I mentioned the book I Am 8-Bit: Art Inspired by Classic Videogames of the ’80s. The author of that book, Jon M. Gibson, writes:

Hey David. Glad you dig the book! We’re putting out an even bigger volume early next year, so stay tuned! Lots of great art that you haven’t seen yet!

Cool. So if you’re one of the folks here (and there were quite a few) who expressed an interest in I Am 8-Bit, keep an eye out for the follow-up as well.

In response to my recent post about naming children after fictional characters, writer buddy Mike Canfield writes:

I don’t know about books, but I was on a bus a few years ago and witnessed parents trying to get the attention of their toddler son “Anakin.” Well, it’s better than “Boba,” I guess.

Yeah, or Dooku. Nobody should be named Dooku … not even Dooku.

Although Tobias S. Buckell brings up an interesting point:

But isn’t naming a kid Anakin much like naming a kid Adolf? I mean, strictly speaking?

I don’t know. What do people think? Is there something a little off about naming your kid Anakin, considering that his namesake, Anakin Skywalker, went on to become Darth Vader, a character who deployed WMD and wiped out an entire planet’s worth of innocent civilians?

I like this staff recommendation card for Roger Zelazny’s The Great Book of Amber from Kepler’s bookstore in Palo Alto:

And okay, yeah, I’ve considered it too.

I remember one time I actually came across an Amber internet message board where several teenagers had posted and said that their parents had named them after Amber characters. And of course there are a number of kids named after George R. R. Martin characters. I wonder how often this sort of thing happens, and what books have inspired the most kids’ names. It seems like the ultimate compliment for an author to receive — far more so than any award or review or whatever.