Happy birthday to Mike Munsil, Liberty Hall founder. Hope it’s a good one!
In other non-related news, here’s some linkage: the other interviews on SF Signal of the contributors of the Apex Book of World SF include French dark fantasy author Mélanie Fazi, horror writer and AR author Kaaron Warren, and Croatian Aleksandar Ziljak (whose story “An Evening in The City Coffeehouse, with Lydia on my mind” is up in the November issue of Apex Magazine).
My con report for Utopiales is up on the World SF news blog (I was not going to produce one, but Lavie nagged me). You can read it here.
Lots of text, but sadly no illustrations–given that the BF and I had managed to forget the camera in the somewhat precipitous departure from Paris. Next time, we’ll do better…
(via Marc Gascoigne and Jennifer Jackson)
I couldn’t stop laughing yesterday. “When the stars are right” indeed…
Er, yes, there will be a Villa Diodati report. That, however, would require full use of my brain, which is still lost somewhere in the boonies…
Instead, I’ll leave you with Lavie Tidhar’s editorial for the World SF blog, which does a tremendous job of articulating how I feel about the quality of stories, and in a much better way than anything I could write.
In other news, Lavie Tidhar’s World SF Blog is moving over to WordPress. So if you want to keep receiving the latest news about World SF (and I’d definitely recommend you to, because it’s chockfull of fascinating overviews of SF in the non-anglophone world), here’s where you should go:
http://worldsf.wordpress.com/
LJ syndication (not entirely sure this is working yet)
Lavie has also posted something I should have thought of earlier: Elisabeth Vonarburg’s planned GOH speech for Worldcon, which is a very interesting overview of her relationship with English. Read it here.
My name is Elisabeth Vonarburg and I don’t speak Klingon.
I do speak English, though, more or less. But just in case, I brought my Faithful Igor, who will translate the less intelligible parts if needs be.
In fact, I love the English language. I loved it first, and learned it much on my own because it was the language of Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen (whom I didn’t know was a Canadian and a Montrealer, at the time, when I was living in France. In that respect, France is not very different from the States : lots of Canadians get lost in the shuffle. Hey, they speak & write in English, don’t they ? More or less.)
Garked from the T-party group list (with thanks to Helen Callaghan):
And a small sample, just to make you wander over:
-Editor extraordinaire Jetse de Vries is running a series of very interesting articles on optimistic SF around the world here, and is also having a number of musings about change in Africa and the Islamic world respectively
-Mary Robinette Kowal over at AMC with an article on The Worst-Dressed Women Warriors in Fantasy. Oh yes. It’s amazing how movie women never ever dress sensibly for the battlefield (you’re left feeling they want to find themselves a husband/lover on the battlefield instead of victory). And don’t get me started on exposed necks and the general lack of helmets…
-Fellow Campbell Nominee Gord Sellar has a fascinating post on SF, culture and translation, taking the example of Korean spec-fic.
When you think about it, it’s a source of endless fascination how the US manages to export its myths, dreams and ways of thinking around the world. There’s a number of tropes (the self-made, uneducated man, the lone hero/maverick, the Frontier Myth) that feel very American to me, and that, as Gord points out, shouldn’t translate well to other cultures (the lack of education would be a killer in France or in Asia).
I think a big part of it is economic factors (France was also exporting a large part of its culture at a time when it was the dominant economic power in Europe): a sort of mimetism, whereby people adhere to US values in the hopes of being as prosperous as the US. Also, of course, a very commercially-driven export, with an infrastructure geared towards selling as many copies worldwide as possible.
Still… Wonder why it’s working so well for the US, in comparison to other countries. Am I missing something else that’s obvious?
Mostly happy stuff:
-Illustration of “Ys” (story in Interzone 222) here, in colour, courtesy of the awesome Mark Pexton
-Came home to my May 2009 Locus, to find, rather to my surprise, a review of “The Lonely Heart” by Rich Horton (in a focus on the Campbell Award Nominees, which had lots of good stuff to say about Felix Gilman’s “Catastrophe” in Weird Tales, Tony Pi’s “Silk and Shadow” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Gord Sellar’s “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands”:
Aliette de Bodard has caught my eye with some strong traditional fantasy tales and some fine work set in an alternate history ruled by the Aztecs”. “The Lonely Heart”, from Black Static for February/March is a different and darker tale (though de Bodard has always shown a great deal of range in both subject matter and tone)…
(the issue also had nice things to say about J. Kathleen Cheney’s “Early Winter, Near Jenli Village” in Fantasy Magazine, which you really should read if you haven’t)
-Also was pointed out to this by Scott H. Andrews: a list of writers in semiprozines to watch out for, in which, hum, I appear a bunch of times… (I second the recommendations for Shweta Narayan and Angela Slatter, BTW. They both write terrific fiction).
In non-selfish self-promoting links, I’ve found a new webcomic to get addicted to: Freakangels by Warren Ellis and Paul Dufield. Set in a post-Apocalyptic, flooded London, this focuses around the Freakangels, a group of people cursed with strange powers. It soon becomes clear that it’s their combined powers that ended the world, and that they’re trying to make amends for it by making Whitechapel into a haven of peace for refugees in a world gone mad. Things would be going swimmingly well, were it not for the twelfth Freakangel–Mark, the one they expelled from their group, and who now plans to kill them one by one… It’s got great character interaction, vivid art and a plot that bites. Not sure where it’s going or how long it’s going to take to get there, but it’s a super nice ride.
(Iain Jackson had a column over at Strange Horizons about the best comics of the year, and I intend to check several others of those out, looks like a good list)
My Top Five Most Used Writing Software:
–Freemind: mindmapping software, great for brainstorming. It’s free and available for PC, Mac and Linux, too.
–Scrivener: awesome novel-writing software for the Mac, although so far I’ve mainly used it for writing detailed synopses. It has lots of nifty features such as index cards, full-screen mode for text processing… Paying, and only available for the Mac.
–Writers’ Café: my index-card tool of choice on Windows, allows a good view of several storylines. There’s all sorts of other stuff, but I haven’t really looked at them. Paying, and cross-platform PC/Mac/Linux.
–Sonar: sub tracking system written by the awesome Simon Haynes. I used to have Duotrope, but since I’m often offline, I rather prefer my information to be where I can access it even with the internet down. Free, available for Windows and Linux. Simon also has novel writing software, ywriter, which is good (just not suited to the way I work, because it’s somewhat overdetailed for my first draft process).
–Dropbox: basically, a versioning system made easy. Dropbox synchronises the contents of your local files with an online repository. It’s great for backups, and also for working on the same folder on several computers (since I own three, and on two different OS, this is rather welcome). Free, available for PC, Mac and Linux.
(for actual writing, I use Word, which I can get on any platform–including computers that aren’t mine. Plus, I tend to receive edits in Word’s Tracking Changes format, so it makes my life easier. I wish Word would stop randomly crashing on huge files, but I guess you can’t have everything)
Any other cool software I should be aware of?
