When did Drew Barrymore become smart?

So I'm watching the Daily Show, and Drew Barrymore is on, talking about her new movie... a documentary about voting? What? How did this happen?

Drew Barrymore used to be this silly person who made every kind of mistake in the book. She married Tom Green for god's sake. And that was her SECOND marriage. When she was producing Charlie's Angels, every entertainment rag was screaming that it was a bloated, over budgeted, collosal failure. Than it came out, and made huge stacks of cash. She then produced Donnie Darko, one of the best and most original films of the last few years. Now she's doing documentaries and teaching young people about the importance of voting. Is this like a comicbook thing? Was she zapped by gamma rays?

I mean, I'm glad it happened. I certainly like the new Drew better than the old Drew. I guess I'm just puzzled.

NFL Fantasy - week one

Well, since I shared thoughts about the draft, and my expectations of having a great season, it's only fair to report how said expectations are currently blowing up in my face...

My first week ended with a crushing 96-55 defeat, in which only one of my players played up to expectations. This was bad, but not horrible, as I have a young team, which should improve over the course of the season.

But then, on Monday Night Football, my best receiver, rock-solid Steve Smith, broke his freaking leg. Is my season sunk? No. But things do not look good right now.

Geffen award nominations

Ok, this is a much belated report, as the nominees have been known for over a week. But it's still noteworthy.

This year's list of nominees was completely and utterly dominated by Opus SF&F Editor Assaf Asheri, who had four out of five books in each of the novel categories, and two stories in the original short fiction category. That's beyond impressive, imo. And the nominees are:

Best Translated Fantasy Book:
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling (Yediot Achronot books)
The Sarantine Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay (Opus Press)
The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials 2) By Philip Pullman (Opus Press)
The Monarchies of God 2-4: The Heretic Kings, The Iron Wars, The Second Empire By Paul Kearney (Opus Press)
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman (Opus Press)

A terrific list, but I will play favorites. Much as I like Gaiman, his collection is woefully uneven, and the rest is clearly a rung beneath the Kay series, which I absolutely love. Still, a very nice list.

Best Translated SF Book
Dangerous Vision edited by Harlan Ellison (Opus Press)
Warchild by Karin Lowachee (Opus Press)
Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang (Opus Press)
Book of the New Sun 1-2: The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe (Opus Press)
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (Modan Publishing)

Assaf Asheri took three huge risks this year, with a massive anthology that's decades old, the first half of a massively difficult to translate epic series, and a collection of stories by a virtual unknown. The success of these three in amazingly pleasing, as the anthology is the super-classic Dangerous Visions, which may well be the single most significant original anthology in the history of SF; the collection is by the young genius Chiang, and the epic series is the absolutely awesome Book of the New Sun. These were ambitious choices, dangerous choices. Each presented its own difficulties. And all three gambles paid off. I love The Eyre Affair, and think it is one of the most enjoyable novels, well, ever. But the courage and brilliance embodied in these three choices NEED to be rewarded. I urge everyone attending Icon, in three short weeks, to get a hold of them and read them. After you read them, I won't HAVE to tell you to vote for them.

Best Original Short Story:
Fast Internet by Nir Yaniv and Yael Sivan
Dragon Review by Rami Shalhevet
The Soul of the Mountain by Assaf Asheri
Letitbe by Assaf Asheri
kanekshein astableished, please enteir nevowk passvord by Shachar Or

I haven't read all of the nominated stories, and several of the nominees are friends, so I won't play favorites and recommend anything here. I will note the fact that Assaf Asheri published two new stories this year, and both received nominations. This truly is Assaf's year, and for the talent and courage he displayed this year, I truly hope he comes to the podium twice, and get to watch con GoH Guy Gavriel Kay (who will be presenting the Best Original Short Story winner) step up to receive the third award.

Next year, I fully expect and hope to kick Assaf's ass in the Geffen, but this was his year, and he deserves recognition for it.

Hugo winners

Hugo winners were just announced at the Noreascon 4 live blog, and all you early birds (who care about the award) can benefit from the fact that I'm having trouble falling asleep...

The nominees were.

And the winners are:
Best Novel:
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
Well, I haven't read Illium, but I can already predict protestations that Simmons was robbed. Personally, I loved Paladin of Souls. Plus, I'm publishing Bujold, so I'm happy.

Best Novella:
"The Cookie Monster" by Vernor Vinge
Of course, they voted fot the one I haven't read yet. Oh well. I really liked Baker's "The Empress of Mars" and Williams' "The Green Leopard Plague", but oh well.

Best Novelette:
"Legions in Time" by Michael Swanwick
Brilliant story, which beat out brilliant stories by James Patrick Kelly and Jeffry Ford. This was a tremendous category this year.

Best Short Story:
"A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman
Yes, it probably won because it's The Neil. But I really liked it, and I wasn't in love with any of its competitors, so I have no complaints.

Best Professional Editor:
Gardner Dozois
Least surprising win EVER, as Dozois recently retired. Well, I hope he has room for one more Best Editor Hugo to go along with the 20 thousand he's already won. Had Dozois not retired, I think Gordon Van Gelder would have won.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Ok, that was actually even less surprising than Dozois' win.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:
Gollum's Acceptance Speech at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards
WTF? The hell? Buffy's finale, Chosen, should have won this. Or one of the Firefly eps. This was a funny thing to nominate, but the joke isn't funny anymore.

Best Semi-Prozine:
Locus
Same as, well, every other year.

Best Fanzine:
Emerald City, Cheryl Morgan, ed.
Yay! I love Emerald City. Way to go, Cheryl!

Best Fan Writer:
David Langford
As usual...

You can see the rest of the winners here. And check out the live blog, as it will probably have pictures and a more detailed report. And I'll add more links when I wake up.

Super creepy Japanese alarm doll

Every gadget fan out there is deadly jealous of the Japanese. They have all the cool gadgets first, and there's stuff they have that no one else has. However, there are some Japanese gadgets one hopes will never leave Japan, such as this creepy/cute doll, that talks and nags until you wake up.

Link via Engadget.

Casting in Narnia

You can see the current cast here, but I have to say I think Tilda Swinton is an inspired choice for the white witch.

Link via the invaluable The Beat.

Kiln People and Guilty Pleasures

Two new books out in my series for Modan, just in time for the coming holidays, and for Icon, of course.

So it's time for an infomercial:

The first is David Brin's Kiln People. It's a somewhat whimsical pseudo hard SF detective novel about a world where people can clone themselves onto disposable "golems", which expire after 24 hours, and whose memories can be uploaded. Great speculation about a world where human life can be quite expendable, if it's the life of a golem. It's a novel I really like, and I was quite dissapointed when it lost to Robert Sawyer's Hominids at last year's Hugo awards (although, really, Mieville's The Scar should have won).

The second, which just came out, is Laurell K. Hamilton's Guilty Pleasures. It's the first book in Hamilton's best selling Anita Blake series, and I hope we see some of that sales success with the book here in Israel. It's a heady mix of vampires, action, sex, violence, and alternate history. It has a terrific lead character, and is pure, but not brainless, fun.

The new forum

Got me a new forum system. Feel free to register and post. Try to stick to the sub-forum topics. It's mostly an experiment at this stage. I did it because my new host uses Fantastico, which enabled me to install the BB script in about 3 minutes. But I do hope a nice little posting community can form. Hopefully with a mixture of Israeli and international

Formatting C:

It's never fun to have to do it. But while I've lost many links, and my latest rss feeds (fortunately, I recently sent an opml file of all my feeds to a friend, so I could get back on track quickly), and a bunch of software that's it's been a bitch to install.

But it's nice to start over. And I got a new, much bigger, hard drive. So I suddenly have oodles of room. And even the whole hosting fiasco resulted in my getting what looks like a better host. Not every cloud in life has a silver lining, no matter what they tell you when you're small. But some do, and if they don't, get some silver spray and paint the damn lining silver.

It's good to have a blog again...

Well, the downtime was fiercer than I expected. And I ended up switching hosts. I'm now with QualityHostOnline, which I hope will live up to their name. Whew.

Planet of the Apes as a TZ episode

This is freaking awesome. Planet of the Apes fan-edited as a Twilight Zone episode. With Rod Sterling commentary at the beginning and the end. Really, really well done.

You can also download it as a torrent.

Link via Boing Boing.

Virtual mobile girlfriend

Hey, it's like a tamagotchi, only degrading to women, sexist, and will cost the user lots, and lots of money, as the virtual girlfriend is nicer to you if you buy (actually buy, with actual money) virtual flowers and gifts. Yuck.

Link via Boing Boing.

If you can see this post...

You probably don't live in Israel. Seems that Israeli ISP's, or at least, Internet Zahav, my ISP, take a little longer to update name server changes. So when I update blogger, I'm updating the new site, but I can, at this time, only view the old site. I should have known this would happen, as something similar happened the last time I moved. It's a bit silly, but such is life.

Any Israeli who sees this message, please comment. I may not be able to see it (if your ISP updates faster than mine), but blogger will let me know. Thanks.

My NFL fantasy team

Well, the draft was done, and when I looked at my team, this is what I found:

QB: Byron Leftwich and Rex Grossman. Two very young starting QBs with great potential. Byron is my starter, and I have great hopes for him. He can run, he can throw, he's the total package. Just needs a little maturity.

RB: LaDainian Tomlinson, Kevin Jones, and Tyron Wheatly. LT is a superstud player, and may be the best player in the his position today. Kevin Jones is a super-promising rookie. Wheatly is the nominal starter in Oakland, and if he wins the position outright, may actually be put in my lineup at some point. Otherwise, he's injury insurance.

WR: Steve Smith, Peter Warrick, Reggie Wayne, Justin Gage, and Darnerien McCants. Smith is easily the star of the position for me, and is very solid. Everybody else is a gamble of some sort. This is probably my weakest position. But if Gage and/or McCants pan out, it could be quite solid.

TE: Boo Williams. He had a great finish to the season last year, and if he keeps it up, he'll be one of the few tight ends who actually contribute to fantasy teams.

Kicker: Ryan Longwell. Stabilty, thy name is Ryan. Accurate, strong kicker, on a team that always produces a decent amount of offense. I'm good here.

Defense: Baltimore Ravens. Elite, scary ass defense. With the best defensive player in the universe, Ray Lewis.

All in all, I think I did well.

Possible uptime problems

I've made a change in my hosting setup which may cause some downtime on the site. I haven't actually left ucvhost, just got a different hosting package, which will give me more for less money. I've been with them for a couple of years, and the NT junior package I originally signed up for improved greatly, but when I renewed it, I got the same old, same old. So I waited untill the old package was about to expire again, and got the NT startup, which gives me all the space I need (which isn't much) for less money, plus ASP, which wasn't included in the package way back when.

This requiered a name server change, and the update should take place sometime in the next 72 hours. The changeover may lead to temporary downtime.

40 hours to Fantasy NFL draft

Continuing on the sports theme, only 40 hours remain until my fantasy league holds its annual draft. As the reigning champ (and champ in 2 of the 3 years of the league's existence), I'm more than a little stressed. I'm usually a great drafter (as I prepare like mad), but a poor trader (as I tend to have the unfortunate tendency of falling in love with my team), so a good draft is essential for a good fantasy season. I'm drafting second, so I have a pretty good chance of getting the player I want to build around.

I'll probably be spending most of the weekend completing my draft prep. Lots of last minute research to do (though I've been spending some time researching for the last few weeks.)

I'll post the results of the draft (not the whole thing, just my team) when it's completed. Wish me luck.

Mavs trading for Dampier?

Erick Dampier is a big, strong, center. He's had career highs in rebounds and blocks last year. He looks like just the thing the Dallas Mavericks need to get over their playoffs woes.

Eduardo Najera is an undersized forward who isn't very fast, isn't very athletic, and isn't a very good shot.

A proposed multi-player trade which is, essentially, Dampier for Najera is the dumbest thing Dallas can do right now.

Why? Because Dampier is a career underachiever. He only seems to play well in contract years. Najera, on the other hand, is a career overachiever. He's the kind of guy who does more with less. And he actually plays defense. He actually CARES about defense, a mindset which is unbelievably rare in Big D. After letting go of Steve Nash, the heart and soul of the Dallas offense, the smartest player on the team, and the key to almost everything they do, trading Najera for a guy even my beloved (but congenitally stupid) Knicks decided not to sign, in order to re-sign Vin freakin' Baker, is a stupid, stupid move. Dampier has never won in the NBA. Nash and Najera are winners, and almost more importantly, they're fighters.

I've loved Dallas ever since Mark Cuban took over. He's a wonderful owner, with brains, money, and a great attitude (he's also a pretty good, if infrequent, blogger). But Cuban needs to shift gears, and get some more brains and toughness in his team. He's had the talent to win for a few years now, and he'll have the talent to win after this trade. He just won't have a motor to drive his shiny, shiny car.

Lions of Al-Rassan Hebrew edition launch

This is short notice, I know. I should have posted this two days ago. But if you're in Tel Aviv this evening, around 8PM, why not drop by at the Kidmat Eden bookstore, on Dizengoff 91. Kidmat and Opus Press are doing a launch party for the Hebrew edition of Lions of Al-Rassan.

I'm very happy to see this book come out. When I was at Opus, I started publishing Kay's work with the Fionavar Tapestry and Tigana. Since I've left, Opus have published The Sarantine Mosaic, and now Lions of Al Rassan. This is a wonderful novel, translated by Yael Achmon, who's one of my favorite translators and best friends, and translation-edited by the incomparable Hamutal Levin. When you start something somewhere, and then leave, it's great to see others pick up where you left off, and do it so admirably.

King James

I love LeBron James' game. I think he's a great kid, and a great talent. I also think that apart from about 3 great minutes in the Greece game, he's been terrible in the olympics and in the prep games.

I also like DC comics. The company and its imprints make many comics I like.

I'm not so crazy about DC making a comicbook about James, as part of a promotion for his new Powerade drink. I think anyone who believes this will get new readers for other comics is probably smoking something rather potent. But I guess what really bothers me about this is that, right now, 'bron is mostly a marketing star. Shouldn't an athlete, you know, actually accomplish something before he has his own drink, shoe, comicbook?

Dick

Michel Basilieres wrote an article about how much he doesn't like Philip K. Dick. Mumpsimus' Matthew Cheney takes the article apart in a manner which is both entertaining and provides more food for thought regarding Dick than Basilieres' original article did. Read them both.

I do have one quibble with the original article which Cheney does not address. Basilieres writes:

Of course, literary critics in France know little if anything of American science fiction, so Dick was never mentioned in any of the reviews. Instead, Carrère tells us, his novel was compared to Kafka.

I don't know if Basilieres is interpreting Carrère when he says this, but Dick is both popular and respected in France, and has been since before Hollywood started making movies based on his work. Tim Powers has said that on the cover of his (excellent) Philip K. Dick winning novel The Anubis Gates, Dick's name got bigger billing than his own, and the result was terrific sales, far outstripping those of any of Powers' other novels.

Solar powered

Back in the day, Heinlein predicted that space exploration will be speaheaded by commercial companies. He hadn't planned on the cold war's effects, though, and in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, space was a state run affair.

Now, however, it seems that RAH's predictions weren't as far off as they seemed. Earlier in the year, SpaceShipOne became the first manned privately owned craft to reach space. And in a few months, the privately owned Cosmos 1 will become the first solar sail space ship to leave the earth. We do, indeed, live in interesting times.

Link via Cheryl's Musings.

What if?

I've never been a big fan of the "What If?" concept, Marvel's comics covering paths not taken. But the small lineup of new What Ifs announced at WizardCon is something I can certainly get behind.

The one I'm absolutely gonna buy is "What if Jessica Jones had joined the Avengers?" by Bendis and Gaydos. This sounds like a book no fan of Bendis' Alias can live without.

"What if Karen Page had lived?" by Bendis, Smith, and Maleev is intriguing. Smith is the writer who killed Page off in his crappy Daredevil arc, and act Bendis characterized as "drive by writing", as Smith killed a central and then got off the book, without dealing with the repercussions for the remaining characters.

"Wha' huh?" will be a humor collection of What Ifs from Bendis, Millar, Ennis, Wade, Kirkman, and others. Ennis, Bendis and Kirkman are all quite good at bringing the funny, so this should be fun.

"What if Magneto had formed the X-Men with Professor X?" by Claremont is a book I wouldn't have much interest in, but Cully Hamner is doing the art, so it'll certainly be visually impressive.

"What if General Ross had become the Hulk?" is a Hulk What If? by Peter David, and that's enough to grab my interest. Andrea Divito on art is an added bonus.

"What if Aunt May had died instead of Uncle Ben?" is a case of a topic I'm completely uninterested in... but it's written by Ed Brubaker and Cameron Stewart is doing the art. Bru is one of my top five favorite writers of the last few years, and Stewart is terrific, so this may also get my money.

"What If Victor Von Doom had become the Thing?" is the one I'm probably least interested in. Karl Kesel has a great rep, but I don't remember ever reading anything he did, and the premise just doesn't do anything for me.

Bendis talks about his books and the whole concept here.

John Perry Barlow interview

John Perry Barlow is the founder of EFF, which I have long deemed an extremely important organization, and an organization which is much more aware of the nature of the future we're living in than the goverment bodies and corporations it often takes on. In this interview for Reason Online, he talks about politics, the law, copyright, and other topics. I don't agree with him on everything (his negation of intellectual property is certainly something I have a problem with, though my own views on the matter aren't as rigid as they used to be), but it's a fascinating read nonetheless.

Link via Boing Boing.

Biological basis for Autism

Anyone who's ever known a person who is on the Autism spectrum knows that people who suffer from Autism think differently. Now, for the first time, brain researchers have found a biological difference in the brain activities of people with High-Functioning Autism and those of people who are not on the Autism spectrum. It's a hugely important first step to curing the surrently incurable.

Link via Cheryl's Musings.

I've always loved Eric Idle...

And here he is, proving to be the most relevant of the surviving Pythons, with a little song called The FCC Song. You can find the lyrics here.

Link via the General.

More good comics news for Israelis

A couple of years ago, I decided to start reading comics again. I told myself that I'll somehow make up for the money spent and the time spent reading books that aren't on my ever-large read-for-work pile by making it pay down the road. Frankly, even I barely believed it. I've pitched comics series to both the publishers I worked for as editor, but neither bit.

And now, for the second time in the last few months, I can announce the fruits of my quest to become a comics maven, as the good folks at Comikaza announce the upcoming hebrew publication of the first issue of Ultimate Spider-Man, translated by yours truly.

I'm very happy to be involved in this endeavor. As readers of the Hebrew segments of the site already know, I'm a big fan of Bendis' work, and I feel that Ultimate Spider-Man has been the best Spidey series in the last few years, as well as the best series set in Marvel's Ultimate Universe. And it's nice to see that crazy plans can come to fruition.

World Fantasy Award nominees announced

Haven't had a chance to read most of them, but the first thing that struck me was this: Apparently, you CAN have a genre awards ballot without a single thing by Neil Gaiman. Not that nominations for Gaiman really bother me, as I'm a pretty big Gaiman fan, but it was getting a bit much.

In any case, the nominees in selected categories are:
NOVEL
The Etched City, K. J. Bishop (Prime Books)
Fudoki, Kij Johnson (Tor)
The Light Ages, Ian R. MacLeod (Ace)
Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton (Tor)
Veniss Underground, Jeff VanderMeer (Prime Books)

The Etched City is one of the books I've been reading for a while. Fascinating, strange book. Veniss Underground and The Light Ages are books I very much want to read.

NOVELLA
"A Crowd of Bone", Greer Gilman (Trampoline: An Anthology Small Beer Press)
"Dancing Men", Glen Hirshberg (The Dark Tor)
"The Empire of Ice Cream", Jeffrey Ford (Sci Fiction 02.26.03)
"Exorcising Angels", Simon Clark & Tim Lebbon (Exorcising Angels Earthling Publications)
"The Hortlak", Kelly Link (The Dark Tor)

I'll be reading "The Empire of Ice Cream" soon, as I'm reading all the Hugo nominated short fiction (I hope to post an opinion before the announcement.) But more importantly, there's a new Kelly Link story I need to read. Maybe I should get The Dark. Kelly Link is good. Kelly Link is very good. Kelly Link is, in some strange way, the new Howard Waldrop, in that her stories are uniquely her own, uniquely original, and absolutely brilliant.

SHORT FICTION
"Ancestor Money", Maureen F. McHugh (Sci Fiction 10.01.03)
Circle of Cats, Charles de Lint (Viking)
"Don Ysidro", Bruce Holland Rogers (Polyphony 3 Wheatland)
"Gus Dreams of Biting the Mailman", Alex Irvine (Trampoline Small Beer Press)
"O One", Chris Roberson (Live Without a Net Roc)

Ok, how the hell did I miss the publication of Circle of Cats? A "picture book" for children by Charles de Lint and Charles Vess, set in the world of de Lint's Newford. Also, interesting to see a story with words and pictures nominated for this award. As some of you will recall, they changed the rules of the award to disallow comics after Gaiman's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" won in 1991. Interestingly, Charles Vess was the artist then as well. Without reading any of these, I'm rooting for the cats. Also, I want this book.

ANTHOLOGY
The Dark: New Ghost Stories, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Tor)
Gathering the Bones, Jack Dann, Ramsey Campbell & Dennis Etchison, eds. (Voyager Australia; Voyager UK; Tor US)
Strange Tales, Rosalie Parker, ed. (Tartarus Press)
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, Jeff VanderMeer & Mark Roberts, eds. (Night Shade Books)
Trampoline: An Anthology, Kelly Link, ed. (Small Beer Press)

An anthology with a Kelly Link story, and anthology edited by Link, and a fictional guide to fictional illnesses. A bunch of goodness here, it seems. Note that most of these are small press books. Small Beer and Nightshade are doing great work these days.

COLLECTION
Bibliomancy, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
Ghosts of Yesterday, Jack Cady (Night Shade Books)
GRRM: A RRetrospective, George R. R. Martin (Subterranean Press)
More Tomorrow & Other Stories, Michael Marshall Smith (Earthling Publications)
The Two Sams, Glen Hirshberg (Carroll & Graf)

It's GRRM's world, and the rest of the nominees are living in it. Of course, the RRetrospective is large enough for several people to live in... Also, most of the nominees here too are small press books, which says something about the quality of small presses these days (PS publishing and Subterranian are also outstanding), something about the unwillingess of big publishers to publish collections and anthologies, and probably something about the snobbery of the World Fantasy Awards.

A complete list of the nominees can be found at Locus, of course.

Another calendar

Remember how much I wanted the Endless Calendar? Well, I want this one more. A calendar with retellings of the legend of Gawain and the Green Knight, with short-short stories by the likes of Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Graham Joyce, and Chaz Brenchley (who isn't as famous as those other guys, but is a heck of a writer, and a great guy). And art by a bunch of people I'm sure I'd know if I knew any british artists.

I've always loved the legend. It's probably my favorite bit of Arthuriana, and it's a wonderful vehicle for reinterpretations. In fact, I don't just want this. At some point between now and January, I'm getting this.

Link via Neil Gaiman.

About the new blogroll

If you look to the right, under the archive links, you'll find my new blogroll. Yup, I finally got myself one.

The blogs I chose are those in which I usually read every post, even if it's not about something I'm normally interested in.

Making Light is Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog. I put it in the SF and writing category because those are topics on which TNH, an editor at Tor and a published writer, is an expert. But she also covers other topics, usually brilliantly. She has a magnificent community of comment posters, as well, so always be sure to check those out.

Cheryl Morgan's Emerald City is your source for news about sf books, writing, critique, and cons. Be sure to read her monthly online magazine of the same name as well. Excellent reviews, though I often disagree with her.

Neil Gaiman's Journal is Neil Gaiman's blog.

Kathryn Cramer is David Hartwell's wife and collaborator on Year's Best SF and Fantasy anthologies. She's also a writer and editor. This blog could have easily gone in the politics, as she writes a great deal about that as well.

Charlie's Diary is Charlie Stross' diary, which deals with SF, Tech, and politics.

Nick Mamatas is a writer and critic who's Livejournal is highly entertaining, and occasionally deals very interestingly in genre related stuff.

The Write Hemisphere links to new articles, reviews and short stories online. Very informative.

The Mumpsimus is one of the best literary blogs around. Deals mostly with genre. Very worth reading.

Engadget is gadget porn. News, pics, commentary and links regarding new tech.

Boing Boing is a collaborative blog covering many, many topics. It's one of the best and most active blogs on the net.

die puny humans is Warren Ellis' so-called "research blog." It's really Ellis posting about whatever he thinks of.

Movies in Fifteen Minutes features Cleolinda Jones' wonderful film parodies. So funny, she got a book contract.

Electrolite is Tor senior editor (and husband of Teresa Nielsen Hayden) Patrick Nielsen Hayden's blog, dealing with politics, sf, and many other things. There's a great overlap in the commenting community with TNH's blog, so be sure to read the comments here as well.

ADDTooFlat is a general comics blog, with mostly commentary, and some reviews.

Cognitive Dissonance is Johanna Draper Carlson's blog, featuring comics reviews, commentary, and the weekly Chick Check, counting the female creators on books by Marvel and DC.

Howling Curmudgeons is a collaborative comics blog with news, links, discussions and reviews.

Peter David's blog deals with Peter David, his work, life, and politics.

Peiratikos is yet another collaborative comics blog, featuring thoughtful commentary and reviews.

Eschaton is the very best source for American political news with a liberal bias.

Daily Kos is a collaborative liberal/progressive/democratic political blog, which covers the coming elections very heavily. Do we have anything like this in Israel? I'd love to know.

Respectful of Otters is a personal political blog, with highly intelligent commentary.

Jesus' General is a satirical political blog. It's the blog of a fictional, insane, rabidly right-wing guy, and the letter he writes (and actually sends) to political figures.

Talking Points Memo is one of the best political commentary sites, with a moderately liberal bias.

Sisyphus Shrugged is a personal political blog, with insightful, often biting commentary. Yes, it has a liberal bias.

Hullabaloo is... well, every thing I said about Sisyphus Shrugged applies here too.

Political Animal is a blog/column/commentary thingie from former blogger turned online columnist (the difference? He get's paid) Kevin Drum.

Body and Soul: See Hullabaloo and Sisyphus Shrugged.

Roni Gelbfish's blog is easilly my favorite Israeli blog, featuring commentary, quick book reviews, and Gelbfish's poetry.

kinnblog.com is the news blog of the vasr Kinneret/Zmora-Bitan/Dvir consortium. Literary news from Israel and beyond.

Distractions is Dotan Dimet's blog, which deals with genre, tech, and other topics.

So that's my blogroll. Other blogs will surely be added to it as time goes on.

Review: Transformation by Carol Berg

There's no better time to review a book than right after one finishes translating it. The book is etched in one's brain, and unless the book is odious, one tends to be positive towards it, and more prone to pointing out its merits than its flaws.

That's how I came up with a mostly positive review of the Wheel of Time series, for instance. Unless the translation experience is truly horrific (in which case, I won't write a review, as I don't publish negative reviews of books published by my colleagues in the Israeli SF market, regardless of whether or not I translated them), this rule has been quite firm.

But even without the rose tinted glasses of the post-translation afterglow, I'm pretty sure I would have really liked TRANSFORMATION, which is that rare beast: a highly original high fantasy novel.

The plot combines a coming of age story with a very interesting take on the Campbellian hero's journey, in which the hero is far from being a young innocent who discovers his own glory, but a former hero turned slave who must rediscover himself for another's glory.

The books strongest point by far is its characters, an ensemble cast of nobles, slaves, and magicians, highlighted by one of the finest characters I've encountered in this genre, the book's co-protagonist, Prince Aleksander Zha Denischkar. Aleksander is the protagonist of the coming of age part of the tale, an arrogant, cruel, vainglorious young man who is, much like an ogre or an onion, not bereft of layers. But those layers are only peeled at great duress, and Aleksander's tranformation is the main motor that drives the story.

The co-protagonist and narrator, longtime slave Seyonne, isn't as interesting. He's a do-gooder who was basically forced to become a complex person through 16 years of bondage. I'll admit I have a slight bias against Seyonne for two reasons: He whines a great deal, especially during the first half of the novel, which is quite understadable under the circumstances, but it's just something I hate translating. And he obsesses about clothing to an unreasonable degree. I understand that Berg wanted to convey a sense of the world her characters inhabit, and clothing is a part of that, but I just can't imagine a slave who hates his masters noting, or even caring about, every item of clothing they wear. But Seyonne grew on me, and by the end of the book, I was quite fond of him. Good thing, too, as he is the main character in the books' two sequels. Yup, there are sequels, which eventually form a trilogy, but TRANSFORMATION stands very well on its own two feet. I tells a complete story.

The plot has many twists and turns, and won't benefit very much from a summation. I say that it is a story of the demons withing people, both metaphorical and very real ones. It's also a story about love, and betrayel, and politics, and culture. And it is, maybe more than anything, a story about change.

It's highly recommended to fans of high fantasy, epic fantasy, and books with strong characterization of all genres.

Some new series on US tv

I really wanted to like The 4400. It has a killer premise - 4400 people who vanished during the last 50 odd years are returned from the heavens by a big ass ball of energy, and at least some of them seem to have powers of some kind. With such a premise, you can do most anything. X-Files type detective work, Comics-Superhero inspired stories. And the creators seem to want to do just that. And it's been a good while since a genre show came along with this kind of potential. Even the late, lamented Wonderfalls and Firefly, which were both a million times better than this, didn't have such wonderful potential for a variety of great stories.

The cast is able, the show looks good, and the basic idea is terrific. But the writing, the writing... The dialogue is stunted, the (many, many sub-)plots are predictable and, for the most part, annoying. A third of the way through the third episode, I said the seven deadly words (I Just Don't Care About These People) and stopped watching.

However, outside the confines of genre television (and away from network television), there is good news to be found. I found two shows I really, really like.

Entourage is an HBO show, which is pretty much an automatic guarantee of quality these days. It's a comedy about Hollywood, featuring a young rising star and his buddies from home. And it's based on Mark Wahlberg's real life entourage. There are so many ways this show could suck. It could have gone for easy laughs. It could have been needlessly vicious. It could have been, well, stupid. But it isn't, and it's all about the writing. It's clever, well cast, and just fun. It also feels REAL. I got the sense that young Hollywood stars and their pals actually live like this. And Jessica Alba's guest appearance in the second episode convinced me that she could pull of her recently announced role as Sue Storm in the Fantastic Four movie.

I checked out Rescue Me for one reason - Dennis Leary. I've been a fan of his work since a friend got me to listen to No Cure For Cancer, and I was sorry I never got to watch his cancelled cop show The Job. The premise here was really dangerous territory - New York firemen in a post 9/11 world. Even with Leary onboard, the potential for cheese was scary. But the show is nearly cheese free. It certainly doesn't portray the firemen as heroic men of steel. Instead, the heroes are flawed. Hell, for these guys, "flawed" is something to aspire to. These are seriously messed up people. And you know what? After watching dozens of your friends and co-workers die, and after failing to save people you were supposed to rescue, you WOULD be fucked up. It's also a funny show, and you could even make the case that it's a genre show, as Leary's character, Tommy Gavin, sees dead people. Though it is probably likelier that Gavin is just seriously disturbed (as if the constant drinking, spying on the ex-wife, and general all-purpose ANGER weren't indications enough.) Rescue Me is broadcast on FX, which used to be the Buffy Reruns Channel, and then turned around and produced The Shield. It's the best new show of the year, as far as I'm concerned. Also, the second episode featured Dean Winters as Tommy's brother. And it seems like the Dean Winters I used to watch on Oz, not the neutered version from Law and Order - SVU.

Mentioning Dean Winters reminds me that there only a couple of episodes of The Jury are left in the can, and no news since filming stopped a month ago, things don't look good for one of the best shows on TV, now relegated to the TV hell known as Friday.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Sweet

Cool, looks like I can post from my new nokia 6600's wap browser.

Huh. Guess Stan Lee knew what he was talking about...

German toddler has the strentgh of an adult, says the New England Journal of Medicine. Apparently, he's a mutant. German Superman? Isn't that just a little bit creepy? Somebody start building Sentinels or something!

Link via Warren Ellis.

Rejection

Another link to TNH's excellent blog Making Light, this time covering a subject that's been a bit of a hot topic on Israeli SF forums as of late - stories and books that have been rejected for publication, and the (evil, nefarious, and dastardly) reasons for said rejections.

Dear rejected and dejected authors, please read this. Read this through. The writer is an editor at Tor, and someone who knows more about publishing than you do. Heck, she knows a lot more about publishing than I do, and I've been a pro editor for over six years.

Link via Neil Gaiman, btw.

Well, it turns out I was one of them...

One of the people who underestimated the Pistons, that is. I called it Pistons in six, they won in five, and they could (and should) have won it in four.

Game five was a rout, plain and simple, and really, so was this whole series. And it's not because the lake show is old, and slow, and injured, it's because the Pistons are a TEAM, in the very best meaning of the word. They played together, and they won together, and my hat's off to them.

And the scary part is, they're young, and they have a talented 18 year old 7 footer they didn't even use in this series, except as the fat lady singing, when he played in garbage time in game 5.

Earlier in the season, in the Walla American Sports forum, someone asked why the pistons didn't draft Melo. I answered "Prince". Many people mocked the decision to draft Darko, because Melo would be such an upgrade in Small Forward. And you know what? On offense, he would be, but on D, Tayshaun was the series MVP, as far as I'm concenred. What a player, what a team.

Well, it turns out I was one of them...

One of the people who underestimated the Pistons, that is. I called it Pistons in six, they won in five, and they could (and should) have won it in four.

Game five was a rout, plain and simple, and really, so was this whole series. And it's not because the lake show is old, and slow, and injured, it's because the Pistons are a TEAM, in the very best meaning of the word. They played together, and they won together, and my hat's off to them.

And the scary part is, they're young, and they have a talented 18 year old 7 footer they didn't even use in this series, except as the fat lady singing, when he played in garbage time in game 5.

Earlier in the season, in the Walla American Sports forum, someone asked why the pistons didn't draft Melo. I answered "Prince". Many people mocked the decision to draft Darko, because Melo would be such an upgrade in Small Forward. And you know what? On offense, he would be, but on D, Tayshaun was the series MVP, as far as I'm concenred. What a player, what a team.

What if LOTR was written by someone else...

A bunch of people try their hand at writing Lord of the Rings as other authors would have, and the results are often hilarious.

Link via Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who challenges the readers to guess some of the would be writers.

Ralph Wiley dead at 52

Ralph Wiley was one of my favorite writers. I haven't read any of his books, but his collumns on ESPN's Page 2 have always been excellent. His writing was provocative, intelligent, funny. He ALWAYS knew what he was writing about. He never settled for delivering sports writers' cliches. He challenged conventional thinking. He wrote about sports, and he wrote about culture, and he wrote about being a black man in America. He had an astounding wealth of knowledge, a clarity of voice.

I surfed to Page 2 tonight to find out what Wiley (who predicted Pistons in Six) and Bill Simmons thought about The Pistons being up 3-1. Instead, I read Simmons and others'
appreciations of Wiley.

I've never met Ralph Wiley. I'll miss him.

SF Museum website goes live

At a glance, it looks terrific. Link via Boing Boing.

Bradbury pissed about Farenheit 9/11

What can I say? I have tremendous respect for Ray Bradbury as an author. But his rant about Moore is just silly.

Squiddy award winners announced

The Squiddies are voted on by users of the rec.arts.comics.* newsgroups. These are the second oldest awards in Comics, as they've been awarded for 19 yeares now. Winners aren't surprising, though I was particularly happy to see Lucifer get Best Ongoing Series and Gotham Central get Best Comics Short Story (for issue #11). The JLA/Avengers multiple wins were dissapointing, but predictable.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Trailer

Still sick, obviously, but thought you should see this.

Status report

Have come back from weekend away with a nasty flu-type-thingie and a fever. Will post when better.

The NBA finals

I think the Pistons are gonna win.

That's right. The Pistons. The team which may have the worst offense of any team in the playoffs, is going to win the championship against the vaunted, and highly favored, Lakers.

I'm not just saying that because I hate the Lakers (though I do, and wishful thinking probably plays a part here. I'm saying that because the Pistons have the height, the muscle, and the heart, to beat the Lakers.

Let's break it down.

Center:
Shaq v. Big Ben
Unstoppable force versus the immovable object. The greatest offensive center of all time (though maybe a step slower than he used to be) against the best defensive center in the league. Shaq is bigger and probably stronger, but he's used to having a large intimidation factor on his side. And he's never played a series against someone like Wallace, who's got no quit in him, and who will absolutely refuse to be intimidated. You gotta give the advantage to Shaq, but not by as much as you may think.

PF
Malone v. Sheed
Sheed is a step or two behind Duncan and Garnett, who Malone generally did a good job against in the two previous series. But Sheed is Detroit's 3rd of 4th option, and right now, he's a better player on both offense and defense. Advantage: Pistons.

SF
George v. Prince
This isn't even a match up. Seriously, Prince needs to kill George and leave his body to rot in the desert. He's better on every single facet of the game. He just needs to bring it. This is the finals, and I think he will. (huge) Advantage: Pistons.

SG
Kobe v. Rip
Rip Hamilton has really come of age as a superstar in the league in these playoffs. Can he defend Kobe? No, he can't. But he will make him work on defense, as he runs through screens like the energizer bunny. Advantage: Lakers.

PG
Payton v. Billups
This is the matchup that will decide the series, imo. Payton is so far from his prime, he can't see it anymore, and Chauncy is exactly the kind of PG who gives the lakers fits. I believe Billups massacres Payton, and decides the series. Advantage: Pistons.

Bench
Not even a match. Fish, Fox, and Rush would get zero burn in the Pistons rotation. The Pistons bench has height (and fouls to spare), and will be a deciding factor here. Advantage: Pistons.

Coaching
Well, this is a toss up. On one hand, we have the coach with the most rings, ever. Who's never coached a team that didn't have the best player in the world, or at least two of the top five. On the other hand, we have the consumate coach and teacher. I'm gonna go with Larry Brown.

Prediction: Pistons in six.

Why Dark Establishment

It occurs to me that any new readers of this blog may wonder where the blog's name comes from.

It all started over five years ago, when I was fairly new at my job as SF&F editor at Opus Press. Opus had been publishing genre fiction for several years at the time, but has concentrated most of its efforts on generic fantasy, such as Wheel of Time and DragonLance. Fandom tended to lump it with some other small publishers as purveyors as, well, crap. At the same time, I was serving my first year as a member of the board of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy, which was about to hold its biggest con to date, Icon 99. Many people in online fandom did not see the need for the society, or felt it did not provide nearly enough content and activities for them to join.

As the first official representative of both the SF publishing establishment, and the society to join the IOL SF forum (which was then the biggest SF forum in Israel, and still is, though IOL.co.il is dead, and it's the Ort SF forum now), I was lambasted, attacked, insulted, and generally perceived to be the enemy. I was, to them, The Dark Establishment. The person at whom they could finally vent all the frustration and anger they had about the state of SF in Israel.

Now, five and half years later, most of the people who attacked me are society members, and one of them is the current society chairman. Books published by Opus Press have won a large majority of the Geffen awards, awarded by fandom to the best SF and Fantasy novels of the year. I no longer work at Opus, and no longer serve on the board of the society. But the name Dark Establishment has stuck, and some people still refer to me as such. I've been using it as a nick in forums for years, and when I was looking for a name for my website, a friend suggested I just call it "The Dark Establishment." When I changed format, and made my little blog in English into the centerpiece of the site, while making the old Hebrew site into an archive of sorts, I saw no need to change a name I've grown quite fond of.

And well, that's the story.

Some of the scariest sounds in the world

Ever called your computer's tech support asking about your hard drive, and gotten the question "what sounds does it make?" Yes, dying hard drives make several distinct sounds, and you can hear examples of all of them on Hitachi Global Storage Technologies's support site.

Link via Engadget.

Well, that was short...

Bydion 2004 is over. I think I may have gotten too used to two and three day conventions, because this one was way too short. On the other hand, considering how tired I and con-manager Yael were by the end of it, it may not be such a terrible thing.

The morning started off rather terribly, as I was called and informed that Gayle Harven will not be attending. This was rather distressing, as she was the anchor of one of our major events - the World Building panel. I should hasten to add that this was NOT her fault. No one called her to confirm, and she didn't even know the con was today...

After a few phone calls, I managed to secure Gili Bar Hillel as her replacement. This turned to be an a pretty good idea, as I'll elaborate later. After some more arrangements, Tammy and I set off for the con.

At the con, Tammy entered Nir Yaniv's "Mean Tricks for New Writers" workshop, which she mostly enjoyed, while I missed Gili's lecture (to a full room) on "There and Back Again in Children's Fantasy" in favor of Coffee.

Next up for Tammy was Ilan Eshkoli's lecture on "Nonsense and Intelligent Nonsense in the works of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett." She reports that Ilan was well prepared, erudite, and amusing as always. I headed off to the "World Building" panel, hosted by Noa Menhaim and featuring Assaf Asheri, Dr. Emmanuel Lottem, and Gili. This was an excellent panel, as Gili and Emanuel sparred over the very existence of dos and don'ts in World Building, with Noa asking excellent questions and Assaf providing quite a bit of insight from an author's perspective.

Following that, I went to lunch and managed to miss lectures by Itamar Paran and Ayelet Aloni, both of which I really wanted to attend.

After that was my own lecture on Slipstream and the borders of SF&F. This was a difficult topic, as Slipstream is defined by being Not SF while looking LIKE SF. But it was a fun lecture, and after I managed to get off the topic of what is and what isn't Slipstream, and why, and on to the topic of Slipstream's impact on modern fantastic fiction, it also covered some meaningful ground. As I always do, I hyped Swanwick's Iron Dragon's Daughter and Mieville's Perdido Street Station as prime examples of the positive impact slipstream's rule breaking can have.

That was followed by general milling about, talking to people, and hanging with Paul Kearney while he signed people's books.

Next up was the day's grand finale - the Guest Author Lecture. I got to talk a bit about why we had this con, and then introduces Kearney, as well as Yael and ISSFF chairman Erez Avramovitch, who both spoke briefly.

Kearney's speech was excellent, very honest, and moving at times. He isn't the experienced showman Orson Scott Card proved to be in last year's Icon, but he spoke very honestly and eloquently about the process of becoming a writer, and the writing of his novels. For me, it was easily the highlight of the con.

Bydion was not a very well attended con, as it was held on a working day. However, it was always busy, and certainly well attended enough to show that quite a few people care enough about books and reading to show up at a con with no screenings, no games, no extracurricular activities. And the number of people that attended allowed everyone who wanted to a chance to converse with Paul Kearney, who turned to be a lovely man, friendly, intelligent, enthusiastic, and genuinely happy to be there. Having a guest of his talent and personality was a huge boost to my own enjoyment of the convention.

I think Bydion 2004 was a qualified success, but only qualified due to the less than perfect attendance. People seemed to enjoy it, and I know I did. Erez Avramovitch said on stage that we will have a second one next year, and I'm already looking forward to it.

Another Bydion Reminder

In just a few hours, Bydion 2004, the first ever ISSFF con devoted solely to books and writing, is set to begin. I'll be talking about stuff that looks like SF&F, but ISN'T, stuff that may not look like SF&F to some, but IS. And how both types impact the genre. Some lecture buzzwords: Slipstream, Sterling, Mieville. Be there, as I've been moved to the (LARGE) auditorium, and I'll feel very lonely in a mostly empty room.

Oh, and Gilly Bar Hillel, Gayle Hareven, Dr. Ilana Gomel, Ayelet Aloni, and several other great speakers will be there. Trust me.

And yeah, we happen to have an author Guest of Honor - Ireland's own Paul Kearney.

If you're not there, you hate books. And reading. And little children.

Artist arrested for... having art supplies?

I'm going to follow Warren Ellis' example and just paste the whole thing:

FBI ABDUCTS ARTIST, SEIZES ART

Feds Unable to Distinguish Art from Bioterrorism
Grieving Artist Denied Access to Deceased Wife's Body
DEFENSE FUND ESTABLISHED - HELP URGENTLY NEEDED

Steve Kurtz was already suffering from one tragedy when he called 911 early in the morning to tell them his wife had suffered a cardiac arrest and died in her sleep. The police arrived and, cranked up on the rhetoric of the "War on Terror," decided Kurtz's art supplies were actually bioterrorism weapons.

Thus began an Orwellian stream of events in which FBI agents abducted Kurtz without charges, sealed off his entire block, and confiscated his computers, manuscripts, art supplies... and even his wife's body.

Like the case of Brandon Mayfield, the Muslim lawyer from Portland imprisoned for two weeks on the flimsiest of false evidence, Kurtz's case amply demonstrates the dangers posed by the USA PATRIOT Act coupled with government-nurtured terrorism hysteria.

Kurtz's case is ongoing, and, on top of everything else, Kurtz is facing a mountain of legal fees. Donations to his legal defense can be made at http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/

FEAR RUN AMOK

Steve Kurtz is Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the State University of New York's University at Buffalo, and a member of the internationally-acclaimed Critical Art Ensemble.

Kurtz's wife, Hope Kurtz, died in her sleep of cardiac arrest in the early morning hours of May 11. Police arrived, became suspicious of Kurtz's art supplies and called the FBI.

Within hours, FBI agents had "detained" Kurtz as a suspected bioterrorist and cordoned off the entire block around his house. (Kurtz walked away the next day on the advice of a lawyer, his "detention" having proved to be illegal.) Over the next few days, dozens of agents in hazmat suits, from a number of law enforcement agencies, sifted through Kurtz's work, analyzing it on-site and impounding computers, manuscripts, books, equipment, and even his wife's body for further analysis. Meanwhile, the Buffalo Health Department condemned his house as a health risk.

Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble, makes art which addresses the politics of biotechnology. "Free Range Grains," CAE's latest project, included a mobile DNA extraction laboratory for testing food products for possible transgenic contamination. It was this equipment which triggered the Kafkaesque chain of events.

FBI field and laboratory tests have shown that Kurtz's equipment was not used for any illegal purpose. In fact, it is not even _possible_ to use this equipment for the production or weaponization of dangerous germs. Furthermore, any person in the US may legally obtain and possess such equipment.

"Today, there is no legal way to stop huge corporations from putting genetically altered material in our food," said Defense Fund spokeswoman Carla Mendes. "Yet owning the equipment required to test for the presence of 'Frankenfood' will get you accused of 'terrorism.' You can be illegally detained by shadowy government agents, lose access to your home, work, and belongings, and find that your recently deceased spouse's body has been taken away for 'analysis.'"

Though Kurtz has finally been able to return to his home and recover his wife's body, the FBI has still not returned any of his equipment, computers or manuscripts, nor given any indication of when they will. The case remains open.

HELP URGENTLY NEEDED

A small fortune has already been spent on lawyers for Kurtz and other Critical Art Ensemble members. A defense fund has been established at http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/ to help defray the legal costs which
will continue to mount so long as the investigation continues. Donations
go directly to the legal defense of Kurtz and other Critical Art Ensemble
members. Should the funds raised exceed the cost of the legal defense, any
remaining money will be used to help other artists in need.

To make a donation, please visit http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/

For more information on the Critical Art Ensemble, please visit http://www.critical-art.net/

Articles about the case:
http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/news-WKBW-2.html
http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/news-WKBW.html

On advice of counsel, Steve Kurtz is unable to answer questions regarding his case. Please direct questions or comments to Carla Mendes .

This is just scary.

Another Rhodes pic

Tammy and I, in Rhodes' Diagoras airport, going home. 

Bydion 2004 - a reminder

This is just a reminder that Bydion 2004 is a little over a day away. Come one, come all.

Fave Rhodes pic

My favorite of the pics I took during our recent vacation in Rhodes. 

Hitler won?

Howard Waldrop is one of my favorite authors of all time. He writes a weekly column for Infinite Matrix, and in his latest entry, lists some of the oh so many books and stories in which Hitler won. I knew there were alternate histories in which the nazi won. I just didn't know there were so many.

DC Comics TPBs in Hebrew

Eilat was fun and relaxing, though the infinite bus rides there and back were neither.

I see an official announcement has been made regarding the Hebrew translation of several DC comics tpbs to Hebrew by Mahrwood Press, a publisher which has previously specialized in religious literature for the Orthodox Jewish market.

I've been contacted as a possible translator for some of the books in the series, and I really hope the books do well, as this is something I've tried to convince both my current employers at Modan and my previous employers at Opus to do.

Going to Eilat

In a few hours, I'll be getting on the bus to Eilat, for what will hopefully be a fun, relaxing weekend. I'll be back on Sunday. If anyone has an urgent need to reach me, email me at dcanoch at yahoo dot com, which I'll be checking on my cellphone.

Kinneret-Zmora-Dvir blog

Kinneret-Zmora-Dvir, Israel's biggest publishing house, has a new blog, with literary news and house-specific news. The content seems excellent, and this looks like a new addition to my already heavy blog reading load.

Good comments about bad advice

Teresa Nielsen Hayden picks apart some particularly bad advice about cover letters and manuscripts. Be advised, her comments definitely DO apply to Israeli submissions as well.

Wiley v. Simmons

Ralph Wiley and Bill Simmons, my two favorite sports writers on the planet, square off in an epic blog conversation about the NBA playoffs, tv, Spike Lee, and a whole bunch of other topics. Even if you don't like the NBA, you should check it out for the writing.

Bram Stoker winner and Nebula nominee in Hebrew

Bruce Holland Rogers' creepy, award winning short-short story "The Dead Boy at Your Window" has been translated to Hebrew and published in Bli Panika. Check it out.

Abu Ghraib

Seymour Hersh has been covering this topic ever since it broke, and now gives a comprehensive report of why and how the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison came to pass. Wow. A story that actually makes the CIA sound like the GOOD GUYS. Scary.

In any case, if you want the full report, and not just the shortened version you'll get in most media outlets in Israel and elsewhere, read this.

This would make Heinlein's day

Special corrspondent Lavie Tidhar brings this little newsbite to my attention. SpaceShipOne becomes the first ever privately built rocket to reach the edge of space.

Stephenson's Quicksilver wins Clarke award

Dark Establishment's British correspondent (he doesn't know that's what he is, but I'm sure he won't mind) Lavie Tidhar writes to report that Neal Stephenson's huge historical novel Quicksilver has won the Arthur C. Clarke award. Locus confirms.

Geek = Cool

I've never had any interest in watching The O.C. Now, thanks to this review (which also doubles as the article equivalent of the geek pride parade), and thanks to the incomparable Bill Simmons' review of the season finale on ESPN's Page 2 (which doubles as a bashing of every season of Friends except the first one), it looks like I may well give it a shot.

Hugo nominated story in Hebrew

Gromit, editor of the excellent Hebrew SF webzine Bli Panika (Don't Panic), points out that David D. Levine's "The Tale of the Golden Eagle" has been translated into Hebrew and published in Bli Panika.

Best Ellis idea EVER

Warren Ellis is a brilliant comics writer, creator of The Authority, Planetary, Transmetropolitan, and others. However, in the last few years, he's developed a nasty habit of starting mini series and taking forever to finish them, while constantly starting OTHER mini series. That's why this is such a great idea. Series that are MEANT to only have first issues. Excellent!

Hugo-Nominated Fiction: 2004

Almost all of the works nominated in the short fiction categories are online, and someone already took the time to gather up all the links and put them on one page, like I used to do. I hope to read as many of these as I can before Worldcon, even though I'm not voting this year (I AM voting next year, of course, as I'm going to the con), and I'll give my opinions when I've got some.

English

Well, I've made the Blog into the main page. It's easier to update, and add links and so on, and I'm lazy...

The blog will remain in English. News will be reported here, in English. Reviews will go on the old site, and will remain in Hebrew, for now. I'll link to any new review here. Quickie reviews may appear here, and will also be in English. It's simpler for me, and I hope no one will gripe about having to read a short review in English.

That's it. Thanks to everyone who kept checking the site when it was updated once a year. I hope to reward your steadfastness with new and interesting content.

Nostalgia

If you were a kid in the eighties, and had a computer, it is quite likely that you will LOVE this. Link via Rich Johnston

Update

Well, it's been an age since I last updated. I suck.

The site is due for a major revamp soon (including, yes, some new content and reviews). By soon, I mean "when I find the time and energy". But the blog is coming back to life. Right now.

First, a plug for the first ever Bidyon, a one day con which will have no screenings. That's right, no movies, no tv episodes. Just people talking about books, including Northern Irish author Paul Kearney, who will also sign some books. Since it's a stage to speak on, I'll be there as well, talking about Slipstream and the borders of SF. I'll probably sneak in a reference or five to New Weird, and explain why Michael Crichton ISN'T an SF writer, whereas Connie Willis IS. Should be fun.