Here’s a conversation I had recently with a female relative of mine, who for her own good shall remain anonymous.

Anonymous Relative: David! Why haven’t you written a story about me? I’m always telling you to write a story and put me in it, and you never do it!
Me: No, I guess not.
AR: Well, why not?
Me: I don’t know. Do you think you’d make a good character?
AR: Yes!
Me: You know, good characters in fiction are usually complex and conflicted. Do you think that you’re complex and conflicted?
AR: Yes!
Me: Well, what kind of character would you be? I mean, say you had to describe yourself. Give me ten adjectives.
AR: I have ADD.
Me: Okay, that’s not really an adjective, but I’ll take it.
AR: Um, I’m flighty. I hate school. I always say exactly what I think.
Me: Okay, how about some positive qualities.
AR: Huh?
Me: I mean, what’s good about you? Everything you’ve listed so far is something negative.
AR: I said that I always say exactly what I think. That’s something good.
Me: Um … I guess it could be.
AR: And I’m a good friend.
Me: In what way are you a good friend?
AR: Well, like, if I want to say something bad about one of my friends, I wait until they’re not around, so they won’t get their feelings hurt.
Me: Wait, so you say bad things about your friends, but only behind their backs?
AR: Yeah … I also help people with their problems.
Me: Like what problems?
AR: Well, like I help my friend [redacted].
Me: And what are her problems?
AR: That she’s a total whore.
Me: Um … and how do you help her with that?
AR: I tell her to stop being such a whore.

“Heidi Dalibor was arrested after she failed to return the books Angels and Demons and White Oleander last year. “I said, what could they possibly do? They can’t arrest me for this… I was wrong,” Dalibor said. Full story Be afraid, Binkley. Be very afraid. Though come to think of it, I guess I’m sort of in favor of arresting anyone who reads a Dan Brown book.

Yesterday I picked up a copy of John Joseph Adams’ new anthology Seeds of Change (“Nine science fiction writers envision moments when our world could be reborn”), which includes original stories by Tobias S. Buckell, Ken MacLeod, Jay Lake, Blake Charlton, Jeremiah Tolbert, and others. I got a nod on the acknowledgments page, where JJA writes: “Many thanks to … The NYC Geek Posse — consisting of Christopher M. Cevasco, Douglas E. Cohen, David Barr Kirtley, Andrea Kail, and Rob Bland, among others (i.e., the NYCGP Auxiliary) — for giving me an excuse to come out of my editorial cave once in a while.” There’s also now a Seeds of Change website, which includes a nifty trailer by Jack Kincaid as well as free samples of the book’s contents.

A lot of time was spent at the Alpha workshop sharing funny internet videos. The best of these that I saw (thanks to Joshua Cole) was Brad Neely’s George Washington music video. This lyrical sampling should give you a fair idea of the tone of the song: Here comes George, in control. Women dug his snuff and his gallant stroll. Ate opponents’ brains and invented cocaine. He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming. You have been warned.

Early in the week we did a writing exercise in which we attempted to compose the worst possible first sentence. One of these entries, written in the purple prose of a bad romance novel, contained the phrase “marble Adonis,” which became a running joke at the workshop. (We also established, based on the popularity of various students’ contributions, that the ideal opening line for this group was: “Having a zombie penguin pound a stake through your forehead isn’t as much fun as it sounds.”) At the group reading at Barnes & Noble, I read my story “Red Road,” which seemed to go over extremely well. (The audience burst into spontaneous cheers during my dramatic rendition of Francis’ climactic soliloquy.) The story describes Francis thusly: “It was true what mice said — Francis, with his thick tawny fur and large, imposing ears, was the tallest and most handsome mouse in all of Kingsburrow.” Some students then got it into their heads that Francis was the mousely equivalent of a “marble Adonis,” and they started referring to him as the “marble Adonimouse,” which inspired Lara Donnelly’s illustration (below), which I think is my first-ever piece of a fan art.

Like many writers, I spend a lot of time daydreaming, so I’m often pretty oblivious to my surroundings. At the first couple meals in the cafeteria, I grabbed a few bananas to take back to my room to snack on. I then lost count of how many bananas I’d actually collected, and where exactly I’d deposited them, and I ended up with way too many bananas — to the extent that my room acquired the distinctively cloying odor of browning bananas, and I started joking that I was having nightmares in which I was being chased down and smothered by sinister ambulatory bananas. I kept snacking on my stash of bananas throughout the week. Toward the end of the workshop, one of the students, Devon Wong, asked me, “Hey, have you noticed any bananas appearing in your suite?” I replied, “Huh?” Devon said, “Because all week, as a joke, we’ve been planting bananas in your suite — on the counter, on the desk in your bedroom — every time you step out, and we’ve been waiting for you to say something, but you never have, so we weren’t sure whether you were psyching us out or whether you could have really not noticed.” I said, “No, I hadn’t noticed. But come on, I had a ton of bananas in there already, so it’s not like I would really notice a few more.” To which Devon replied, “Yeah, but we’ve planted a lot more than just a few. I put five in there, and other people have been doing it too.” I said, “Wow. No, I guess I’ve just been eating them all. But thanks for getting those for me.”

Devon also seems to have started up a not-entirely-serious fan club for me over on Facebook. This fan club describes itself as: “The official DBK fan group on facebook. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, especially not DBK. DBK is one of the newest and freshest voices in sf/f. His work combines madness, whimsy, heart, and often talking animals, and other things that talk when they really have no right at all to be talking. Members of this group know the exploits of King Francis, we worship at the altar of Cat, and those of us with our virginity intact fear dragons.”

Today was certainly better than yesterday, but also contained its share of headaches. The hotel room alarm clock didn’t go off, the automatic wake-up call never arrived, and the hotel’s ISP booted my laptop at around 5:00 a.m., killing the online alarm clock I had running. Fortunately I just happened to wake up in time, though really there turned out not to be any rush, since today’s flight was delayed too. I was also irritated to note that the food I carefully packed away has been fraternizing with the other contents of my luggage. Blurgh.

Anyway, I’m back in New York now.

Ah, the convenience of modern air travel. Today I attempted to fly from Pittsburgh to New York, but only made it as far as Philadelphia. My trip so far has included: 1 hour spent sitting on the runway prior to takeoff; upon discovering that my flight to New York had been cancelled, 1 hour spent waiting to talk to a gate agent, only to be told that I needed to be standing in a different line; 2 hours spent standing in the correct line, where I was given a new ticket and a piece of paper that was clearly designed to trick you into thinking that it’s a hotel voucher when in fact the airline is not giving you jack; 1 hour spent standing in line to check into the hotel — along with all the other suckers brandishing their worthless pseudo-vouchers.

More tomorrow!

Hellboy II was fun. I have only vague recollections of the first one, which I recall being surprisingly interesting but ultimately sort of a letdown. I was expecting this one to have awesome visuals but to not make much sense and to get annoying by the third act. And the visuals were indeed awesome, but I actually thought the script was pretty good. The elf prince stole the show for me. The movie did eventually devolve into formula and illogic, but the ending was briskly paced enough that I didn’t get too restless. Based on the credits, it looked as if the creator of the graphic novel worked on the movie, which is something I wish happened more often. (When I saw the trailer for Wanted, I thought: There’s no way in hell I’m watching this movie. Then it said, “Based on the graphic novel,” and I thought: Hmm. Well, maybe I’ll give it a chance — though I still haven’t. But it’s been really striking to me how much stronger the writing is in most modern graphic novels compared to most new original screenplays.)

I still vividly remember the weird sense of dislocation I experienced the first time I discovered that Dr. Seuss had been a political cartoonist during World War II and had drawn all these pictures of Hitler. In my head, Dr. Seuss and Hitler just occupied two completely separate planes, and it was really jarring to see the two combined. I had another moment like that again yesterday, when I opened up my latest issue of Hi-Fructose magazine and discovered that Dr. Seuss was really into … taxidermy? Apparently Dr. Seuss liked to create hunting trophy-style mounted heads of fanciful animals. These creations were stitched together from actual animal parts (that Seuss acquired from his father, a warden at a local zoo) and then painted to look like Dr. Seuss cartoons come to life (and then, subsequently, death). You can see some of these on the Dr. Seuss website.

My buddy Chris Cevasco, an author and also the editor of Paradox magazine, was just quoted in this L.A. Times article about historical novelist Karen Essex.

Essex’s historical novels join a field increasingly filled with female writers rehabilitating female characters, such as Ashley Crownover’s Wealtheow: Her Telling of Beowulf and Susan Fraser King’s Lady MacBeth, noted Christopher M. Cevasco, editor and publisher of the historical-fiction-focused Paradox magazine.

“Female figures in history have tended to be viewed as extremes, either the virtuous extreme or the dastardly extreme,” Cevasco said. “They almost tend not to be described as real people. I think Karen succeeds in making her characters come alive as women rather than as caricatures.”

I came across this blog entry by Dave Rust, who’s been hosting a midnight “Bedtime Stories” event at Convergence, where he’s been playing stories from Escape Pod, PodCastle, and Pseudopod (including my short story “The Skull-Faced Boy”). I can’t say I’ve ever heard of an event like this before — sort of a “virtual reading,” no author required. It’s an interesting experiment.

The same blog also contains this behind-the-scenes tidbit about the Golden Compass movie, courtesy of one of the animators who worked on the film: “Now, for those who thought the film ended abruptly or didn’t match the book very well, Vin told us that originally the film did include the final three chapters of the book and followed it very closely. The studio made the decision to have the film re-edited by an action movie editor to ‘speed it up.’ They also cut out the final three chapters because test audiences felt it was ‘too downbeat.’ 50 minutes were cut out of the film and many scenes got shuffled around creating continuity errors and plot holes that were not in the original picture. The hope of most the people in the production is to see a Director’s Cut of the film come out on DVD which restores the original ending and puts things back in their proper order.”

Speaking of Pseudopod, my short story “The Disciple,” which appeared on the podcast last year, looks set to be reprinted soon. “The Disciple” appeared back in 2002 in a first-rate Lovecraftian anthology titled Dead But Dreaming. This was my first anthology appearance. Unfortunately, Dead But Dreaming fell victim to the infamous “anthology curse” that plagued my early book appearances. For what was supposed to be my first-ever anthology appearance, the publisher paid me for the story (quite well, in fact), but due to a production error they neglected to actually include my story in the book. For Dead But Dreaming, my story made it into the book, but the publisher went out of business the week the book was released and only 75 copies were ever printed. I was offered a chance to buy some of them, but I declined, since I already had other publications and some of the other authors in the book didn’t, so I figured I’d be nice and give those other authors first crack at the books, which were quickly snapped up. I’ve been kicking myself for this ever since, as those rare copies quickly started selling on eBay for upwards of $300. So I guess the moral of the story is: Always buy books with my stories in them. Or something like that. For my next anthology appearance, my story made it into the book and the publisher printed thousands of copies — but most of those were promptly obliterated in a freak warehouse fire. It was around that time that I started to wonder whether the universe had some objection to me appearing in anthologies. Fortunately, subsequent projects have gone off without a hitch. Anyway, back to Dead But Dreaming. A new edition of the book looks set to be printed by Miskatonic River Press. One of the editors states in this forum post, “We hope to release in the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more information.”

Yesterday some friends and I were browsing the shelves at Barnes & Noble in Union Square. I came across a copy of Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, and I read aloud the funny poem contained therein about tensor calculus. A passing physics PhD student stopped to listen, and the two of us got to chatting, and before he departed I ended up selling him on picking up a James Morrow novel. I wish I got commissions on stuff like that.

You always hear that in an average year most Americans don’t read a single book. That’s so outside my experience that I have immense difficulty even imagining it, but every once in a while you come face to face with a situation that makes you realize that, yes, that terribly sad statistic is probably true.

A guy in his fifties with a thick accent — sounded like Russian — came up to me and said, “What order are these books?” I replied, “Um, well, they’re alphabetical by author’s last name.” He gave me a look of total, blank incomprehension. I said, “What book are you looking for?,” and he held up a scrap of paper on which was scrawled, Eden Close, Anita Shreve. We were standing right next to the S books, so I said, “Yeah, if they have it, it should be right over here,” and I started scanning the shelves. The guy said, “This is S.” “Yup,” I replied, and continued scanning. He said again, “This is S,” to which I replied, “Yeah, S.” He said, “But the name is ‘Anita.'” I said, “Right, but see, it’s by last name.” “Oh!” he said finally. “Last name!” “Right,” I said, locating the book. “Here you go.” “Thank you!” he said, and went on his way.

So okay, that guy really didn’t know his way around a bookstore, but whatever. He seemed like a nice guy, he wasn’t from around here, etc. But the next person who came up to me, not fifteen minutes later, was 100% American. A teenage girl. She said, “Hey, do you if these books are like, in any kind of order?” I said, “Yeah, alphabetical by author’s last name.” She gave me a look of utter horror and said, “Oh my God, you have got to be kidding me.” (I was not, in fact, kidding her.) I said, “What book are you looking for?” She glanced at a scrap of paper in her hand and said, “Um … ‘The Lovely Bones.'” I said, “Yeah, it’s Alice Sebold. They do have it here. We were actually just looking at it.” She exclaimed, “Really?,” as if I had just done an incredible magic trick. So we fixed her up with the book. Later, I was talking to my friend, and I said, “I still can’t get over how freaked out that girl was when I told her that novels are arranged by author. What was she expecting? And what could be simpler than that?” My friend said, “She probably didn’t realize that you need to know the author’s name to find a book.” “Oh,” I said, “That makes sense. But still, how hard is it to go to the information desk and give them the title and let them find the book for you,” to which my friend replied, “She probably doesn’t know that there is an information desk,” and I realized that, oh geez, he’s probably right.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Is this humanity’s future? Almost certainly yes.