Saturday, July 31, 2004

The ADHD helmet

Well, this looks like it could be a true boon. ADHD is something I've been dealing with pretty much my entire life. And while I was able to benefit from the late Motke Pomerantz' Perceptual Therapy, there are very few qualified practitioners of the system. A device that's certainly within the price range of any school or educational facility, which geneuinely helps with ADHD (unlike prevalent medicinal methods, but that's a rant for another time), could be a tremendous help to people with ADHD, and their families.

I hope it pans out, and I hope it's brought over here. Also, the concept of moving objects on a computer screen with one's mind, through an oversized bike helmet is just soooo cooool.

Link via Engadget.

Thursday, July 29, 2004

Rapid fire film reviews

Saw some movies recently, have some opinions.

The Punisher: Over an hour and a half of boredom, followed by 15 minutes of what looked like an actual Punisher movie. Use of Ennis' first Punisher arc is moronic as it only works if "The Punisher" is a known quantity, not in an origin story.

Van Helsing: Lowered expectations are a boon for anyone coming to watch this movie. It ranks highly on the unintentionally comedy scale. It's also better than Underworld. Of course, watching paint dry is better than Underworld.

Hellboy: Ron Perleman was terrific. The design was excellent. The plot and pretty much everything else kinda sucked. Still, it was better than Punisher, which in turn was better than Van Helsing.

Love Actually: Taken as a christmass movie, which plays by christmass movie rules, this movie was excellent. One just has to suspend anything even vaguely resembling disbelief. The Billy Mack storyline was outstanding.

Shrek 2: Well, this one didn't need disclaimers and qualifiers. It was good, it was smart, it was funny. Jennifer Saunders was absolutely fabulous. Feel Good Movie of the year.

The Hunting of the President: Scary look at what Hillary Clinton famously called "A vast right wing conspiracy" to take down Bill Clinton. David Brock was probably the most revealing interviewee, as the former Republican attack dog who recently wrote The Republican Noise Machine : Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy certainly has the inside scoop.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Yet another brilliant script from Charlie Kaufman, coupled with an excellent performance by Jim Carrey equals an excellent film, which is true science fiction. Thought provoking, rich in ideas, and genuinely moving. Supporting cast was also very good. Still doesn't take the title of Best Kaufman Movie from Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and not as good as Being John Malkovich. Still very good.

Monday, July 26, 2004

Folks, I present to you, the new star of Fantasy

Christopher Paolini. In his own words.

The kid should probably be forgiven, as he has been made a con-star in his teens, and is a child millionaire, and you KNOW that kind of thing fucks you up. But still. Ugh.

I won't even get into the fact that the Paolini sees Terry frickin' Brooks as a major inspiration, and that some reviews have lambasted his book, Eragon, for just the kind of lack of originality which has always plagued Brooks' work.

Link via Nick Mamatas.

Saturday, July 24, 2004

Eisner Award Winners announced

The winners of the Eisner Award for excellence in comics were announced last night. In a reversal of the last couple of years, this was a bad year to be a new writer, or even a relatively new writer.

Gaiman won for Best Short Story (Death, from Endless Nights) and Best Anthology. I can live with those.

Moore won Best Writer. While Moore clearly IS the best writer in comics, Maybe EVER, Ed Brubaker and Brian Michael Bendis - who were both nominated - clearly had the better year in 2003. Of Moore's output, only Smax (which wasn't even nominated for Best Limited Series) and Promethea are truly superior work. Brubaker did amazing work on Sleeper, Gotham Central, and Catwoman. And Bendis had really good stuff in Powers, Alias, Daredevil, and Ultimate Spider-Man.

100 Bullets won Best Ongoing Series beating Alias' brilliant swan song and a superior year on Gotham Central.

Kyle Baker's Plastic Man inexplicably won Best New Series - a category where it was simply the weakest book nominated. Sleeper is miles better, Losers, Invincible, and The Walking dead are better, and El Cazador is a little better.

Fables, Sleeper, Alias, Lucifer, and Powers didn't win anything.

At least Formerly Known as the Justice League won best humor. And Gotham Central won Best Serialized story for Half a Life.

See all the winners and nominees and tell me what you think.

Great Gaiman related news

Sorry for the light postings as of late. Work, deadlines, the usual. In any case, news are coming in from the San Diego ComiCon, and they sound GOOD.

Mike Carey, writer of the superb Lucifer, is adapting Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere for Vertigo, and Glenn Fabry is on art duties. Great team.

And apparently, Neil Gaiman announced that the long rumored Death: The High Cost Of Living movie is going to happen, produced by New Line.

Discuss.

Thursday, July 15, 2004

New Israeli publisher announced!

Rani Graf is one of my best friends. A true prince, and a man of excellent taste (as demonstrated by the fact that he almost invariably likes the books I select for publication.)

And now his excellent taste will have a true outlet and test, as he just announced (link in Hebrew) Graf Publishing, a small press publishing house that will publish both sf&f and mainstream titles.

I'm doubly, nay, trebly, biased in favor of this endeavor. Rani is a friend, he has hired me to translate books for his new company (I've already done one, and I'm nearing completion on a second), and he's using some of my best friends and and favorite co-workers as the translators and translation editor for the new publishing house. But I'd certainly be excited to hear about any new publisher with this lineup of planned books.

His announced lineup is very exciting:
The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson. (my review, in Hebrew, is available here.
Transformation by Carol Berg
The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
The Year of Our War by Steph Swainston
Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey. (my review, in Hebrew, is available here.
Nylon Angel by Marianne De Pierres
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
The Translator by John Crowley
253 by Geoff Ryman

Most of these books are genre books, and Fortress of Solitude, 253, and The Translator are non-genre books by genre authors. It's an interesting and ecclectic mix, and the only common denominator here is intelligence, and that's a common denominator I can get behind.

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Simon Illyan lives, and he's Mexican!

Ok, so Mexico's Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha doesn't have a memory chip in his head like Simon Illyan, Barrayar's security chief in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels, but he DOES have a "non-removable microchip" in his arm, that allows him to be located at all times, and gives him access to a crime database. That's just unbelievably creepy, and serves as more proof that we live in a science fictional world.

Link via Boing Boing

My new hero!

My new hero is this guy called Mike, of 419eater.com, who's scamming some of the biggest spam scammers around into sending him money and funny pictures of themselves. This is just priceless.

Link via Kevin Drum, who usually serves as one of the best analysts of all things related to American politics.

Monday, July 12, 2004

Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir considering LOTR translation reissue

Well, this has been a long time coming.

On the KZBD blog (in Hebrew), the publisher reports it is it is considering publishing a new edition of the first LOTR Hebrew translation, done by Ruth Livnit, to exist side by side with the current translation. This by request of the Israeli Tolkien Society.

While the blogs reports is clearly biased in favor of the new translation (officially, an edited version of the original translation), the public announcement is a very good sign. The original translation was the one I read as a child, and while it is certainly not perfect (some thing the Tolkien Society readily admits), it does a far better job of conveying Tolkien's language than Emanuel Lottem's edited version does.

As a translator, I expect translation editors to respect my decisions, and to make changes only when they are truly needed. As a translation editor, this is what I try to do. I feel that Dr. Lottem, Israel's premier SF translator, and the man responsible for the brilliant Hebrew translation of Dune, did not do this when editing Livnit's translation of LOTR. The result was a translation that, while correcting many actual errors in the text, is poorer than the first translation.

I no longer have my copies of the original translation. Being a proselytizer for books, rather than a collector, I probably lent them to someone, and never got them back. I am very happy about possibly having the option of buying new ones.

Saturday, July 10, 2004

Mieville

Matthew Cheney, over at Mumpsimus, considers China Mieville apropos Adam Lipkin's review of Mieville's new novel, Iron Council.

It's an interesting essay, certainly more interesting than Lipkin's vitriolic review (which is far more vitriolic regarding Mieville's fans than towards the man himself). While I can certainly understand the frustration both writers express with CM's novels, I find that the very density of his books, and what may seem like opaqueness, is a part of their strengh. While every writer needs a good editor, I don't think Mieville needs to be reigned in.

I don't feel CM is the savious of Fantasy literature, as I believe it was well on the way to salvation before Perdido Street Station was published. I do believe he is the single most important voice in Fantasy right now, and a writer whose originality, imagination and plotting are, occasionally staggering. Mieville is a "big thinker", in a mode seen far more often in SF than in Fantasy. I've been saying for several years now that the scales of quality and originality in speculative fiction have been tipping towards Fantasy. I believe PSS tipped those scales, bringing a certain finality to a shift created by books by Martin, Kay, Swanwick, Gentle, Powers, and Gaiman among others.

CM's books are flawed, no doubt. Getting through the prologue of Perdido Street Station is hard work, and the first 150 pages or so of The Scar are certainly slow going. But by the time one is finished reading these books, the flaws are, if not erased, certainly diminished by the grandeur and scope of the story one has just read.

I've given lectures in conventions here in Israel for the past few years, about genre history, trends, sub-genres and so forth. And Perdido Street Station has come up repeatedly as an important road marker in genre literature. This is why readers forgive Mieville's flaws (while hoping he grows out of them. Iron Council, one should recall, is only his fourth novel). His books are simply too good, too overwhelming, to let these flaws stand in the way of our appreciation of them.

Wednesday, July 07, 2004

You know what I want?

I want the 2005 Endless Nights Calendar. A look at the back cover, courtesy of Gaiman's blog, should make the reason clear. It's gorgeous. I even put it on my Amazon wishlist...

Monday, July 05, 2004

Well, waddaya know...

Turns out superhack Kevin J. Anderson is a hack in any format. Randy Lander (one of my favorite reviewers) seems surprised that "novelist Kevin Anderson has managed to create one of the most generic by-the-numbers formula space opera stories I've ever read". Guess he hasn't read many of KJA's novels, then.

When KJA writes completely original material, he seems to be ok (judging from reviews), but when he's put on any kind of licensed product, he produces formula, formula, and nothing but formula, and while certainly readable - if one doesn't care so much about the characters of the license, which is a problem, as people who care about the characters are pretty much the target audience - it is usually completely uninspired. This is, after all, the man responsible for those Dune prequels, and for books in just about every possible license you can think of.

It's not impossible to create decent (or, at least, competent) novels based on licensed material. Timothy Zahn and Peter David have done it on numerous occasions. But labeling a superhack, whose career is pretty much built on license after license, "a novelist", and expecting something decent from said hack as a result seems a bit silly.

Sunday, July 04, 2004

The Jury on way to cancellation

It's getting to the point where I have to wonder why a serious TV creator would even bother setting up shop on Fox. It seems that no show of quality and originality can survive on Fox for more than a handful of episodes. First it was Firefly, then Wonderfalls, and now The Jury.

It seems as though the folks of Fox take a look at the reviews and shitcan anything that gets anything resembling a glowing review or two. And if it's unusual, original, and particularly well written, they cancel it midseason.

Saturday, July 03, 2004

Genre films and the Oscar

"'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' lost the year before to 'Gladiator' because we live in an alternate universe, and all the mainstream universes wherein CTHD did win need *something* to distinguish themselves from ours."

This lovely quote comes from Mike Chary at the All-New-Howling-Curmudgeons, who lists 35 years of genre films that didn't win the Oscar, and all the films they lost to.

Locus Award winners

The Locus awards were announced the other day, and while I'm sad to say I haven't read most of the winners (busy, busy year), I can report on the results:

SF NOVEL Ilium, Dan Simmons (Subterranean; Eos)
Extremely well reviewed novel which I assume Opus will be publishing soon.

FANTASY NOVEL Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold (Eos)
Wonderful novel, significantly better than Bujold's previous novel in the same world, Curse of Chalion.

FIRST NOVEL Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow (Tor)
Noted blogger, writer, and thinker about stuff Cory Doctorow's first novel is available for free download in a multitude of formats in his website, but still sells decently at Amazon. I'm actually quite intrigued about it, as the reviews have been excellent.

YOUNG ADULT NOVEL The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins)
Haven't read this one yet, as I'm slower to get to TP's children's books, but it looks excellent, and I love the Nac Mac Feegle.

NOVELLA "The Cookie Monster??, Vernor Vinge (Analog Oct 2003)
Me not read. Vinge good.

NOVELETTE "A Study in Emeralds", Neil Gaiman (Shadows Over Baker Street)
We now begin the Gaiman portion of our show, with a win from a book of Holmes vs. Lovecraftian monsters. Sounds like fun.

SHORT STORY "Closing Time", Neil Gaiman (McSweeney?s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales)
Super-literary quarterly mag McSweeney's gave the editing reigns to Michael Chabon for an issue, and Gaiman's second win of the evening comes from the result, a massive books of adventure stories from the likes of Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Nick Hornby and Harlan Ellison. Oh, and Gaiman.

COLLECTION Changing Planes, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt)
After years of being relatively quiet, Le Guin has been back for the last couple of years, writing terrific stories. This is her latest collection, hence, it won.

ANTHOLOGY The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin's)
The Dozois annual collection is a staple of quality, and my personal favorite of the Year's Best.

NONFICTION/ART The Sandman: Endless Nights, Neil Gaiman, et al. (Vertigo)
In Gaiman's third and last win of the evening, the definition of "NonFiction/Art" was stretched to the max to accomodate this mostly excellent collection of stories in Graphic form. Or in other words, Comcics. It ain't non fiction, and The Neil didn't do the art, but what the heck.

EDITOR Gardner Dozois
Probably his last win (in an amazing streak), as he recently stepped down as editor of Asimov's.

MAGAZINE The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Is editor Gordon Van Gelder going to take over as Editor of the year next year? He deserves it.

BOOK PUBLISHER Tor
Another win, another Locus award. And they always deserve it.

ARTIST Michael Whelan
This is Whelan's 24th win, to go along with his 11 Chelseys and 15 Hugos.