From my Facebook profile:

That seems pretty good. I’ll take that.

At least, I think it’s pretty good. Is #25 Best Dinner Companion a good ranking? Compared to how many people? I don’t get it.

And as far as I know no one has ranked me a “good kisser.” What’s up with that? Oh well, I guess we can’t all be this guy.

The past few days I’ve been obsessively keeping tabs on the search term “Robert Asprin” on Google blog search. (Which means I’ve now read the gag “He will be mythed” a whole lot of times.) Since I was a kid, it’s been a mystery to me why my favorite author suddenly stopped writing. Back then there was no internet, so there was really no way for me to find out any information about something like that. Once they got around to inventing the internet, I was able to turn up a few details — there were vague reports of writer’s block, personal problems, and disputes with the IRS. I guess I always figured that Asprin would get back to writing someday, so I didn’t obsess over it, but now that he’s gone I suddenly feel much more strongly a need to know what happened.

If you haven’t read the Myth series, the basic premise is that there’s a good-natured young magician’s apprentice named Skeeve who gets teamed up with a tough, cynical, fast-talking demon named Aahz, and the two of them keep getting into huge messes, but they always manage to scrape by, though not without the aid of an ever-growing cast of oddball allies. With Aahz as a manager/promoter, Skeeve eventually acquires a completely unearned reputation as the greatest magician anywhere, which only gets him into yet more trouble. That’s basically the arc of the first six books.

Then things change. In Book 7, M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link, Skeeve starts acting like a jerk, and his friendship with Aahz disintegrates. (Even Gleep, Skeeve’s lovable pet dragon, is suddenly revealed to be vaguely sinister and actually kind of a dick.) In Book 8, Skeeve develops a drinking problem. In Book 10, Skeeve has sex (his first time) during an alcohol-fueled blackout. As a kid, I was aghast at these events, but Asprin had stated in his introduction to Book 7 that he wanted Skeeve to grow and develop, so it was possible for me to rationalize these events as part of an arc from which Skeeve would emerge older and wiser but still recognizably himself. Alas, no new Myth books came out for over a decade, which essentially ended the series for me. (In my mind, the series still ends with Book 8, which is pretty good despite being a departure from the earlier books.)

I just came across this remembrance of Robert Asprin that was posted by his ex-wife, Lynn Abbey. This piece really startled me, and it gives me a whole new and awfully depressing perspective on Skeeve’s downward spiral of alcohol problems and personal estrangement, and it makes those problems seem like less a part of a carefully planned-out character arc and more an act of personal need or desperation on the part of the author. Makes me sad. I don’t think that as a kid I ever really imagined authors as having lives in that kind of a way. Abbey’s piece also casts something of a melancholy pall over my heretofore lighthearted memories of the character Aahz — hard-drinking, miserly, and often reckless. (Aahz: “You got anything in this dump to drink?” Skeeve: “We have water.” Aahz: “I said something to drink, not wash in.” Skeeve: “Oh, yessir!” And later: Skeeve: “Will this [alcohol] give you back your powers?” Aahz: “No, but it might make me feel better.”)

It was also somewhat weird for me to randomly come across this blog entry, which reveals that the character Edvik (the cabbie on the dimension Perv who becomes Skeeve’s ally), a character I remember vividly from my childhood, is based on actual person Edd Vick, who won a charity auction to appear as a character in the book.

One last observation about the Myth books that occurred to me during my recent reread. In Book 2, Myth Conceptions, Aahz has bluffed his way into getting Skeeve hired as a court magician. Skeeve has been reluctant, but Aahz has promised that court magicians are just kept around for show and that no one will expect Skeeve to actually do anything. But Aahz is wrong. Skeeve soon learns that the kingdom is hiring a magician as a last-ditch effort to halt a massive invading army (a parody of the Roman army, right down to their supreme commander, “Big Julie”). This seems like a suicide mission, and Skeeve is all for taking the money and running, but Aahz, very uncharacteristically, disagrees. It turns out that there’s one thing that Aahz values above his own skin, and that’s magic itself. Aahz explains that while magicians may often squabble among themselves, that each of them owes a responsibility to magic — to see to it that magical knowledge is valued and disseminated. Aahz explains that, for better or worse, he and Skeeve have found themselves in the position of being the public face of magic, and that now it’s up to the two of them to win with magic or die trying. This may have simply been a plot device to explain why Aahz and Skeeve couldn’t just run away, but it seemed to me as I read it — having spent some years in the community of fantasy writers — that if you take that scene and replace the word “magic” with “fantasy” and the word “magicians” with “fantasy writers,” it all still holds true. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into it, but that’s how the scene struck me at the time, and that’s how it still strikes me.

YouTube Video: How to Introduce Your Atheist Partner to Your Evangelical Parents

This video isn’t really all that funny, but I still got a smile out of seeing that a video like this exists at all.

Today is Towel Day.

Robert Asprin died yesterday, suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 61. Asprin’s work was a major part of my childhood, and when I was in grade school he was my absolute idol. I read all his books multiple times, many of them dozens of times, and my earliest (and so far last) serious attempt at a novel — when I was about 12 — was a Robert Asprin pastiche. As I’ve mentioned here before, in the days before the internet Asprin’s essays on how he developed his Myth and Thieves’ World series were among the few glimpses I ever got into the world of a working writer, and I studied those essays religiously. I gather that Asprin had been away from the writing world for a while, but had recently returned, and I’d figured I’d get to chance to meet him sooner or later. Damn it.

From my Bio page: “When I was in first grade, my best friend handed me a book and said, ‘You’ve got to read this.’ The book was Myth Conceptions by Robert Asprin (Book 2 in his Myth series). As class began, I glanced at the opening line, which went: ‘Of all the various unpleasant ways to be aroused from a sound sleep, one of the worst is the noise of a dragon and a unicorn playing tag.’ I was captivated. The teacher yelled at me several times to put the book away, and finally threatened to confiscate it, so I had to wait the entire school day before I could run home and finish the book.”

I recently re-read my old collection of Myth books. I no longer find them to be the pinnacle of Western civilization the way I did when I was in grade school, but the books do have their virtues — instantly engaging, fast-paced, and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. There are also some sections of the later books that I still find pretty moving, such as Aahz on parenthood in Little Myth Marker or Skeeve learning about Aahz’s past in Myth-Nomers and Im-Perv-ections. The thing that really struck me on this reread that I’d never consciously noticed before is how resolutely the books are on the side of the misfits and outcasts. When I was a kid I just thought the heroes were all really cool, but as an adult I’m a lot more aware of how marginalized and mistrusted they are by the wider world, and how they find acceptance within their own tight-knit band.

When I was in grade school, my class divided into four tables in the lunchroom: The cool boys table, the cool girls table, the uncool girls table, and the uncool boys table. You can probably guess where I sat. Anyway, one day a new student named Sergio joined our class. His family had just moved from Mexico, and he spoke virtually no English. The first day at lunch he went and sat by himself. I tried to convince the kids at my table that we should invite him to sit with us. They were aghast at the thought that they would be seen as even more uncool if they associated with the weird foreign kid, but I was resolute, and finally they relented. I went over and invited Sergio to come join us, and you could just see on his face how happy and relieved he was. He eventually became my best friend for several years until his family moved back to Mexico. Reaching out to Sergio is one of the events in my life that I look back on and am really proud of. In the Myth books, over and over again characters who appear to be weird and different turn out to be people who’ll make great friends and allies if you’ll just give them a chance. Rereading the Myth books this past year, I thought of Sergio in the lunchroom, and I wondered how much my response to that situation had been conditioned by my favorite books at the time. It’s hard to say, but personally I think those books played a major role, which is about the best compliment to a literary work that I can think to give.

Chris McKitterick is soliciting input on authors who need to be added to the list “A Basic Science Fiction Library” put out by the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas (see here and here).

I just put in a good word for William Sleator. I’ve been really surprised at how little notice Sleator seems to get within sf circles, I guess because his books are shelved as young adult, but man, he’s a phenomenal writer. Some of his novels, such as Interstellar Pig, Singularity, The Green Futures of Tycho, and The Duplicate are among the best books I’ve ever read — in or out of science fiction, in or out of young adult. These books are fast-paced and have great ideas and well-drawn characters.

Okay, in case you couldn’t tell, I’m maybe just a little bit addicted to my new scanner. My latest spree of scanner-mania? Adding a few photos to my website’s bio page.

<-- Will grow up to enjoy scanning things.

 

When I woke up this morning, I could hear a strange noise coming from somewhere nearby.

It sounded like someone was shooting baskets, but there are no hoops around here. I spent an hour waking up, checking email, checking the news online, and the whole time there was this sort of thumping sound. What was it? I wondered. Garbage men? Crews doing yardwork? Finally I got curious and paced around the house to locate the source of the noise.

Which is when I discovered a robin redbreast repeatedly hurling himself against the sliding glass door that opens onto the back patio.

Near the door there’s a three-foot-tall potted tree, and this bird would fly up to the peak of the tree, then leap toward the living room, then bounce off the glass and flutter to the ground. He would peck at the glass a few times, then jump back up onto the tree and repeat the process. And he had been at this for at least an hour already. I couldn’t believe it.

For a while I just stood there, transfixed with a sort of weird fascination. It’s not every day that you get to see a robin redbreast so close and so obviously off his gourd.

Finally it occurred to me that he might injure himself by repeatedly bouncing off the glass, so I opened the door and shooed him away.

… and as soon as my back was turned, he started right up again.

I wondered what was going through this bird’s mind. Why did he want to get into my house so badly? I was half-tempted to let him in, just to see what he would do next, but then I thought he might be one of those rabid and/or zombie birds — judging by his behavior — so I decided maybe I shouldn’t. I was also tempted to feed him, since I felt like he ought to get something for his trouble, but I was afraid that would only encourage him.

I decided that the most diplomatic way to handle the situation would be to just close the blinds. Surely then, I thought, he would give up on the idea of getting through the glass. So I closed the blinds.

And the bird kept right on bouncing off the window.

Then I thought: Maybe he’s not trying to get through the glass after all. Maybe he’s trying to mate with his reflection? I don’t know.

Anyway, he was starting to seriously scuff the window, so I went outside and yelled and waved a lacrosse stick at him. He retreated to the branch of a tree up the hillside.

And as soon as I went inside, he went right back to hurling himself against the window.

I went outside and chased him off again. I threw rocks in his general direction until he fled from view. Then I went in and took a shower.

I just got out of the shower and he’s back AGAIN. What the hell?

You always hear these stories about people who, after a loved one dies, take in some stray animal that shows up at the house, and these people think that somehow the animal is their reincarnated loved one. I always thought that was silly, but watching the bizarre behavior of this bird makes me more sympathetic toward those people. If I had a loved one who had recently died and who had lived at this house, and then this weird bird shows up trying desperately so to get inside, well … it would be eerie.

Update: A quick Google search resolves this mystery.

I recently got a note from Edmund R. Schubert, editor of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, letting me know that my story “Red Road” will be appearing in the magazine this summer, in an issue that will also feature a cover story by Peter S. Beagle (author of the The Last Unicorn, an old favorite of mine in both its novel and animated film incarnations, and one of the earliest books/movies I can remember reading/watching).

Speaking of Peter S. Beagle, I see that the long-awaited PodCastle fantasy fiction podcast has finally launched (from the folks who brought you the Escape Pod and Pseudopod podcasts, both of which have featured my fiction in the past), and that the first episode is Peter S. Beagle’s story “Come Lady Death.”

The anthology The Dragon Done It, which includes my short story “The Black Bird,” is now available. “Best-selling authors Eric Flint and Mike Resnick present a generous selection of stories from the intersection of mystery and magic by popular writers Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, David Drake, Harry Turtledove, Esther M. Freisner, and more, including brand-new novelettes by Flint and Resnick themselves. The Dragon Done It is an exciting cross-genre volume that both mystery fans and fantasy fans will enjoy.” This is the first time that one of my stories has appeared in a hardcover book.

Fantastic Reviews Interviews Paolo Bacigalupi

Here’s a new interview with Paolo Bacigalupi, and like every interview I’ve seen with him this one is profoundly thoughtful and interesting. Here’s a section that really struck a chord with me, because it’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about too:

Fantastic Reviews (FR): We had a whole category like that, the Heinlein and the Norton, science fiction written for teenagers, which they just don’t publish any more.

Paolo Bacigalupi (PB): Not just for teenagers, but for boys. [My wife, a teacher] has a lot of Newbery Award-winning books – The House on Mango Street is an amazing, wonderful book; it just doesn’t work for boys, though. Boys want adventure, they want to go out and do shit, you know?

It strikes me that there’s sort of a trend right now to say that good children’s literature is not adventure literature. Almost by default that means that good children’s literature is not literature that’s well-geared for boys. So at that point, boys who are already predisposed to fuck themselves up when they’re at school then have one less reason to engage with learning. It’s horrifying enough to watch the way my wife has had to deal with boys in her classes. These are bright boys, but they’ve got very little to grab onto. They can only read Ender’s Game once, and that’s it. What else are they going to do after that? You can throw them a Starman Jones, you can throw them a Citizen of the Galaxy, but those are dated and they’re getting more dated.

That’s something I think about. What would it be like to write boys’ stories, really honest boys’ stories that are designed to help boys actually get engaged with reading again, instead of thinking that’s a girl activity, which is where it feels like things are going. I find that deeply troubling, so that’s something I’ve been thinking about, what would a YA boys’ story or a juvenile boys’ story look like these days?

It’s interesting, because if you think of something like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, at the very end, the main character who has grown up and become a young man by the end of it, his triumphant moment is beating up the bully who was troubling him back on Earth. He gets back to the soda fountain and he beats up the bully, and that’s the cathartic success at the very end. I don’t think those endings are even allowed; I don’t think you can do that now. And that strikes me as an expression that certain qualities of boy-ness are no longer allowed. That alpha-male ape behavior is not OK any more. We’re going to put you guys, you little boys, in a certain role that says: don’t do anything dangerous, don’t do anything crazy, by all means don’t get in any fights, and don’t think that there is any alpha-male stuff going on, even though it is because that’s how your brain has been hard-wired for the last million years. Suppress your nature instead of channeling your nature.

For a number of years now I’ve helped out with Alpha, a summer fantasy & science fiction writing workshop for younger writers. Graduates of the workshop were very well-represented among the winners of this year’s Dell Magazines Award for undergraduate science fiction. Congrats to Seth Dickinson, Rebekah White, Sarah Miller, and Emily Tersoff for placing stories in the contest.

By the way, the application deadline for this summer’s Alpha workshop is March 1st, so there’s still time to apply.

I can’t help but be struck by how much of a difference Alpha (and the internet in general) has made for new writers. During my freshman year of college, I placed first in this contest. At that time I had been writing and submitting fiction for years and had never met or even corresponded with anyone who was serious about writing fantasy & science fiction. I actually didn’t even know anyone who was serious about reading fantasy & science fiction. After I got the call telling me I’d won, I strolled down to the frozen pond behind my dorm to play pick-up hockey. My best friend at college was there, and I told him I’d won this contest, and he was kind of like, “Um, that’s cool,” and that was the extent of my plaudits. These days, all the Alpha students (even the ones who attended during different years and have never met) keep in touch and congratulate each other.

I sometimes wonder if people who grew up with the internet can really appreciate how profoundly it used to suck, pre-internet, to be even the slightest bit noncomformist or to have interests that were even the tiniest bit esoteric. Before the internet, my only glimpse into the world of fantasy & science fiction writers was through coming across the very rare author’s introduction that would discuss the writer’s life. These were: An introduction by Isaac Asimov — which appeared in several of his robot novels — in which he discussed the history of robots in science fiction and also how he came up with his Three Laws of Robotics; Robert Asprin’s introduction to his novel Myth Inc Link, in which he discussed the origins of his Myth series, as well as his appendix to the first Thieves World anthology, in which he discussed how he came up with the concept of a shared-world anthology; and the introduction to Larry Niven’s The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton (in which Niven discusses the history of science fiction/mystery stories), and also some of his essays on writing that were included in his N-Space collection. And that was it.

I probably read each of those introductions more than a hundred times. They were all I had … until one day when I discovered, in my high school library, a few massive hardcover tomes that contained a few pages of autobiographical / bibliographical / critical notes on a variety of authors. I photocopied all the entries about science fiction writers — which took forever — and slowly began to assemble a filing-cabinet full of these articles at home, so that I could peruse them at will. Today, of course, you could probably spend a solid year online doing nothing but reading interviews with and reviews of fantasy & science fiction writers and still have barely scratched the surface.

Anyway, yay for the internet, and again, yay for everyone who placed stories in this year’s Dell Magazines Award.

I just got word that my short story “Red Road” will be appearing on Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.

“Red Road” is an animal quest fantasy / political allegory … with a twist. Think Lord of the Rings meets Animal Farm. Thanks to John Joseph Adams for inadvertently inspiring me to write this story. (He recommended a book to me, but cautioned that the book contained talking animals. I said, “No, that’s cool. I like talking animals.” Then later I thought: Hey, yeah, I do like talking animals … and yet I’ve never written about talking animals. I should write a story that has some talking animals. Then my mind flashed back to a joke I made involving talking animal stories years ago at the CSSF writing workshop, and I thought: You know what, I’m going to turn that joke into a story. It’s so crazy, it just might work. “Red Road” is the result.)

My Grandfather, Roger Barr, was profiled in this month’s UUSS newsletter (Unitarian Universalist Society of Sacramento). Here’s a sample:

“To many of us he is legendary. Roger Barr, this month’s UUSSer, is truly an amazing man. After all, how many people start snowboarding when they’re 80 years old? Roger did, and he hiked from Yosemite Valley to the top of Mt. Whitney (43 days of solo hiking) to celebrate his 80th birthday. When he was 55, he did the same hike in only seven days, 35 miles per day. His 85th birthday celebration was hiking all 200+ miles of the Lake Tahoe Rim Trail. One summer, after his 80th year, he climbed the 10,000+ ft. Pyramid Peak 25 times!! This writer went on one of those climbs and decided at the end that she would rather be shot than try it again! Some of us in the congregation have talked about getting T-shirts stating, “I survived a hike with Roger Barr.” Clair Urness once likened a hike to some mountain top with Roger to The Bataan Death March! No, no, we all really do enjoy being with Roger on an outdoor adventure. He knows so much about the mountains, the topography, the flora, and fauna; and he definitely knows how to survive in the wilderness. Roger can regale you with his fascinating adventure stories like falling through the ice in a mountain lake, or being eyeball to eyeball with a bear (while naked!), or crossing paths with a cougar, or ending up in a snow-created tree well upside down with cross country skis—still attached—across the hole, or snow camping in blizzards, and near misses of falling off cliffs. Among Roger’s outdoor activities are backpacking, skiing (downhill, cross country, and snowboarding), rock climbing, windsurfing, trout fishing, and camping. He has traveled extensively over the North American continent, Costa Rica to Alaska, pursuing those interests. There’s no one who loves, knows, and appreciates the Sierra Mountains more than Roger; they’re his G.O.D. (Great Out Doors).

This entire physical prowess is surely enough to make Roger an amazing man, but his intellect is as keen as his outdoor IQ. He reads avidly and can expound on ideas from science to literature, making a conversation with Roger thought-provoking and intriguing. He says he has had a lifetime interest in natural history, all the arts, classical music, sculpture, painting, and language. Several times he has offered Adult Education classes at UUSS on heady subjects. Roger says that membership at UUSS enhances his life socially, intellectually, and spiritually. It’s definitely a two-way street because UUSS has been greatly enhanced by Roger’s presence.

Roger and his wife of over 63 years, Ruth, have been UUs since 1949 when they joined the UU church in Berkeley, where Roger was a student. They had both been brought up in more conventional religions that they decided weren’t right for them. They liked the motto of the Berkeley church, “Deed not Creed;” and when the minister there told them he thought the church was just what they were looking for, they decided to join. They are among the longest-term members of UUSS, active in our congregation for over 50 years.”

Earlier I linked to this Wall Street Journal article about David Gemmell. I thought the article was interesting, particularly the part about fantasy literature inspiring acts of real-life heroism. I did feel that the article featured some pretty gratuitous right-wing editorializing, which I guess isn’t surprising now that I see that the writer, John J. Miller, works for The National Review, but I let it slide. Though the more I think about it, the more bothered I am by this statement:

“Whereas antiwar films flop at the box office, those that celebrate military heroism, such as last year’s ‘300,’ ring up sales. If Hollywood wants to find a new book-based, war-filled fantasy franchise that repeats the success of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ — and avoids the disaster of ‘The Golden Compass’ — it may want to look to Gemmell for inspiration.”

Of course, there are a lot of assumptions packed into this paragraph that I might take issue with, but the thing that really keeps bugging me is: In what sense is The Golden Compass an “antiwar” movie? (Or, at any rate, insufficiently celebratory of the martial?) I mean, the story gets rolling with the Gyptians blowing away a few Gobblers. Then the movie introduces Iorek Byrnison, a bear who has devoted his whole life to glorious battle, and who redeems himself by kicking the crap out of an evil bear-warrior, thereby saving the day. Then at the end a whole army of witches flies in and kicks the crap out of an army of bad guys and their wolves. So it seems to me that The Golden Compass glorifies military heroism to about the same degree that the Narnia movie or The Lord of the Rings movies do.

So, has this article writer just not seen The Golden Compass? Is it just that The Golden Compass is viewed as anti-Christian, and therefore by association Liberal, and therefore by association antiwar, regardless of the film’s actual contents? Or am I missing something here?

There are a bunch of videos on YouTube now of a recent incident in which LAPD riot police were called in to disperse USC students at a block party that apparently got rather spectacularly out of hand.

Since I’m not on campus much these days, I don’t know anything more about this than is apparent from the video, so at this point my only comment is: Man, I’m glad I don’t live on that street anymore.

Are you in a publishing office and you’re totally bewildered about why 15-year-old boys don’t read fiction books? Well, your prayers have been answered, in the form of this young man, who possesses a charming English accent and also a striking inability to focus his attention for more than five seconds, who’s here to provide a from-the-trenches report on this urgent issue, in a bold piece of investigative journalism entitled: Fiction books suck, including harry potter.

Okay, I admit it’s a bit incoherent at times. For example, how does he know that all the fiction books being published these days suck if he’s only read one in the past four years? And does he really want more books based on real life when his real life apparently consists of posting tirades about his English homework on YouTube? And yeah, maybe it’s true that he’s just venting his personal feelings about a subject that he knows nothing about (in which case maybe he has a bright future ahead of him reviewing horror or science fiction for The New York Times). Still, I have to say that I’m with this kid on some of this stuff. Like when authors “bog us down with all this description … ‘while translucent golden light filled the landscape.'” Yeah, I hate that crap too. Also, I agree that it really wouldn’t be a bad idea if more authors would stop wasting our time and would just go ahead and kill someone on page one.