Archives for October 2010

The TV adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s brilliant and shocking graphic novel series The Walking Dead premieres tonight! And it’s available through iTunes! Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy just interviewed Kirkman, and we’ll be including that interview, along with our reactions to tonight’s program, in Episode 25.

John Joseph Adams just announced that he’ll be editing Fantasy magazine starting in March.

Here’s Ray Bradbury and Hugh Hefner discussing Fahrenheit 451 (which was serialized in Playboy). Hefner also mentions this interesting bit about Charles Beaumont, which I wasn’t aware of:

The first original story to appear in Playboy was by Charles Beaumont and it was called “Black Country,” and it was about a black musician, and a year after that he brought us a science fiction story that Esquire had rejected because of its controversy … the title of it was “The Crooked Man,” and it was the story of a future society in which gay was the way of things and heterosexual was the aberration, and was persecuted, and in the 1950s that was a very controversial notion, believe me … And I was very proud to have published it, and Charles Beaumont had a long and illustrious — until his untimely death — connection to us, and for his contribution, along with the many things Ray himself brought to us, I am forever grateful.

The lecture Dialogue of Reason: Science and Faith in the Black Community begins with Richard Dawkins explaining his T-shirt reading We Are All Africans. He notes that our ancestors emerged from Africa only about 100,000 years ago — no time at all to an evolutionary biologist. He goes on to note that:

If you look at the molecules of modern human races they are astonishingly uniform, and such variation as there is is mostly within Africa, so that suggests that the deepest divides of cousinship in our species are within Africa. The whole of the rest of the world is a very, very recent branch off the human species. If you look at the amount of variation within the human species genetically, it’s extremely low; we are a very, very uniform species, compared to other species, even chimpanzees. It’s been said that if you take two chimpanzees from the same forest in Africa, they’re likely to be more different from each other genetically than any two humans in the world.

Wow! Check out this amazing photo by Poras Chaudhary: Colorful India. It’s a crowd in India watching a wrestling match at a local fair and is apparently not a collage.

Here’s another work that I’m really glad to see is now available on audio: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. This is the scariest book I’ve ever read, in spite of the fact that nothing overtly “horrific” happens in it. In fact, the book apparently scared the author so much that he wrote it in one mad rush and then refused to ever look at it again. It also made China Mieville’s Top 10 list, and he remarks, “I went for Stigmata because I remember how I felt when I put it down. Hollow and beaten. I kept thinking: ‘That’s it. It’s finished. Literature has been finished.'”

The story is that in the future colonists are living on Mars, and Mars is soul-crushingly boring. The colonists escape by taking a drug called Can-D, which allows you to play with Barbie-like dolls and believe that you’re actually living the life of the doll instead of your own life. Unfortunately there’s never enough Can-D to go around. Then the explorer Palmer Eldritch returns from deep space, bearing a new and improved drug, Chew-Z. But is this really Palmer Eldritch, or some sort of alien? Those who take his drug even once find that they’ve embarked on an acid trip that will never end; every time you think it’s over, you encounter someone who bears the three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch — the glass eyes, the metal teeth, the robotic hand. And no matter how many shifting realities you tumble through, one thing remains constant: in all of them, Palmer Eldritch is God.

This image, which I really like, has popped up in a few different places as a screenshot from Dungeon Siege 3. I can’t find any indication of who the artist is. Anyone know?

Just in time for Halloween, Lightspeed magazine has released “A Taste of Starlight” by John R. Fultz, about an interstellar voyage gone horribly, horribly wrong. The site warns: “The following story contains mature content, including violent and graphic imagery that some readers may find disturbing.” Believe me, they’re not kidding.

Very depressing but not entirely unexpected: Realms of Fantasy magazine is shutting down. You can read goodbye statements from publisher Warren Lapine and editors Shawna McCarthy and Doug Cohen.

For years now two of the series I’ve most wanted to get on audio were Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and China Mieville’s Bas-Lag books, and I’ve bugged Audible repeatedly to make them available. Well, I recently checked again, and the four volumes of Book of the New Sun are now online, as well as the first of the Bas-Lag books, Perdido Street Station. (Hopefully The Scar, which is by far my favorite of the three, will follow soon.)

Weird dream I just had:

I was walking down a city street and somehow also reading a rant someone had posted online about how one of their favorite things had been cancelled while stupid crap like Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy was still going. As I walked, I noticed that this person had even paid to have the rant engraved on the pavestones of the street where I was walking, with one letter on each hexagonal tile, which I thought was uncalled for. We were on our way to interview an eminent scientist, and in my dream we were interviewing him in person rather than over the phone, and there were three of us. At the university I was talking to one of this scientist’s grad students, who warned me that the guy was extremely arrogant, and that you had to say exactly the right intellectual and flattering things to him or he would blow you off. John was just initiating a normal, friendly conversation with the guy, and I hurried to warn him that the guy was a jerk, but it was already too late. The scientist was saying that he could maybe spare two minutes and John was saying we really needed at least thirty, and then the scientist announced that actually he couldn’t even spare two, and he retired to his office. John then realized that as we’d entered the building a book had fallen out of his bag, and the scientist had helped him pick it up and had glanced at the cover, and it was a book about fishing, and this must have further contributed to the guy’s judgment that we were intellectual lightweights, which wasn’t fair because it wasn’t even John’s book and there was some random reason why it was in his bag. By this time John wasn’t John anymore, but an innocent-looking guy with a round face and curly red hair.

My friends were in favor of just heading home, but I was angry and I knocked on the door of the scientist’s office and explained that my friends had driven here all the way from Philadelphia, and I’d driven all the way from New York, and surely he could spare thirty minutes. He insisted that he couldn’t, and closed the door. We went through several rounds of me pounding on his door and him shutting it in my face. Finally I was so angry that I went into his lab and just started sweeping experiments off the tables and onto the floor, where they shattered, and I was grabbing up everything and tossing it over my shoulder, destroying what I knew to be millions of dollars worth of equipment and samples and world-changing scientific advances. Then I went back to the office and marched in and announced, “I’m glad you like spending time in your office so much, because your lab’s not looking so hot!”

But then I realized I was in the wrong room, and that I’d walked into David Hartwell’s office. I apologized for intruding, and remarked that I needed to go find the right office so I could give that scientist a piece of my mind, and David Hartwell said, “No, you’ll do no such thing. Just let me take care of this. I’ve been through this before,” and he opened a drawer in his desk and took out a folder, which contained letters and photos. The letters were from George R. R. Martin, and began, “Dear [blank], it was great having you at the workshop.” My friends and I started filling in our names, which would prove that we’d been at a writing workshop and therefore couldn’t have been the ones to trash the lab. There were also class photos and photos of students milling about that we were supposed to photoshop our faces into. I said that this alibi wouldn’t work, because obviously the scientist would know it was me, because I’d just been shouting at him, and David Hartwell explained that actually what we would need to do was use the letters and photos to project ourselves through into a parallel universe where we actually had been at the workshop, that that was the only way to escape punishment.

And then I woke up.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy will be interviewing Charles Yu, author of the new novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and the short story collection Third Class Superhero. He was chosen as one of the top five writers under thirty-five by the National Book Foundation. If anyone has any questions they’d like us to ask him, feel free to suggest them.

The Center for Inquiry just posted video of last week’s Sam Harris lecture. In his new book The Moral Landscape, Harris (known as one of the “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheist movement) attempts to refute Hume on whether reason can speak to ethical principles. At the very start of the video you can see me standing in line: