LA Times Festival of Books moves, embraces profit model

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, one of the largest annual book fairs in the United States, has decided move to USC after spending its first 15 years at UCLA.

“[T]he newspaper expressed a desire to increase profits from the event,” according to the UCLA Office of Media Relations press release. “This year, UCLA provided $176,000 in services and funding to help stage the festival.”

“This April [2010] at UCLA, approximately 140,000 spectators and 400 authors attended the event,” according to an article about the move in the UCLA Daily Bruin.

Edited to add a link to the Los Angeles Times article, which is dated September 23.

A Collection of Links

Huffington Post has launched a new Books section, with a lead-off column by section editor Amy Hertz, prompting discussion in the science fiction community by Adrienne Martini at Locus Rountable and Niall Harrison at Torque Control.

Charles Stross on “Why I hate Star Trek.” Scripts using “tech the tech” confirm my worst fears about how Star Trek: The Next Generation was written. Stross says, “It's the antithesis of everything I enjoy in an SF novel” and he’s just getting started.

A pair of interesting articles online from the Los Angeles Times:

            The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard. Amusingly, the review dances around the title of the memorable Ballard story about Ronald Reagan, an utterly caustic and painfully prescient little masterpiece. Ballard is sadly underappreciated here in America. This collection is essential for any science fiction aficionado.
      Surprised author Tim Powers finds himself setting sail with “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Apparently the next movie in the Pirates series will be based, at least in part, on Powers’ novel On Stranger Tides (Ace, 1987). The article, by Geoff Boucher, now includes a correction and acknowledgement to yours truly, SF Strangelove, for his one line description of Powers’ novel Declare (William Morrow, 2001).


     Edit:

     At Sci Fi Wire, John Clute weighs in with a review of The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard: 
     "(H)is genius could almost be defined as a kind of preternatural alertness . . . Ballard seemed almost superhumanly awake to the flavor of the disaster of the world . . . Ballard is the great poet of the belatedness of the uncanny . . . The world is amnesia . . . "
     The nonpareil critic of science fiction, Clute has found a subject to match his wit.