Mentioning a few recent things

Returning now after a long silence, here are some things I feel compelled to comment on.

Samuel R. Delany to be named SFWA Grand Master
Naming Delany a Grand Master will be a wonderful thing, and a long overdue honor for the author of one of the greatest bodies of work in the science fiction and fantasy genres. As with the previous year (naming Gene Wolfe Grand Master) my first thought is: Why wasn't Delany given this honor many years ago? Delany and Wolfe would both make my list of the top five authors in the genre in the past 50 years. Perhaps next time SFWA can add a woman's name to the predominantly male Grand Master list? (Here is the list.)

Neal Barrett, Jr. (1929-2014)
The under-appreciated and unique work of this author deserves continued attention. See especially the novels Through Darkest America (1987) and The Hereafter Gang (1991). For more information, follow this link to the SF Encyclopedia.

Sofia Samatar wins 2014 Crawford Award
This is an award for first fantasy novel. Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, 2013) is an exceptional first novel and signals the arrival of a first-rate literary voice. This award is well-earned and the novel is highly recommended. (More about the award.)

Links to essays, reviews, book sales

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer.
The Los Angeles Times today published a book review by Chris Barton about Geoff Dyer's new book, an essay on Soviet-era director Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker. (One of the greatest of all science fiction films, according to your humble blog correspondent.) "For all the witty, self-referential asides that can make the book feel like the smartest 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' episode ever written, it's Dyer's emotional tie to Writer's journey and the wish fulfillment of that vocation that stay with you the longest after the lights finally come up." (follow here)

Rob Latham tackles The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, along with a handful of Dick's science fiction novels in an essay at Los Angeles Review of Books. "Rereading Dick’s early novels through the lens of the events recounted in the Exegesis, just as Dick himself eventually did, shows how consistently the themes of thought-control and ambiguous revelation informed his fiction ..." (follow here)

Graham Sleight’s essay on three of Samuel R. Delany's books appeared in the most recent issue of Locus.
"Dhalgren is that rarest of things: a book that, decades on, has not been normalised. So many innovations of style or content in SF become commodities, to be sold at ever lower prices in ever more ways. Many people have learned a great deal from Delany’s work – I’m thinking particularly of William Gibson’s focus on sensations and the surface of things. But Dhalgren is a book without real successors." (follow here)

The Nebula Awards shortlist of nominees for work from 2011 was announced a few days ago. I've read three of the best  novel nominees:
   God’s War by Kameron Hurley (Night Shade)
   Embassytown by China Miéville (Del Rey)
   Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor)
All three are quite strong. God's War is a first novel and while it's the weakest of the three, it's an exceptional first novel. The three nominees that I haven't read look interesting as well.(follow here)

Lavie Tidhar expresses his disappointment in China Miéville's Embassytown. "(I)t is a niggling feeling; it is a sense of regret, and of puzzlement, that afflicts the non-Anglo reader when coming upon Embassytown. Of missed opportunities, of tired acceptance of the sign that says, This Is Not Your Future." (follow here)

Aqueduct Press is offering Rebecca Ore's new novel Time and Robbery on sale until March 1. (follow here)

New York Review Books is offering a 50 percent off sale on some titles, including science fiction novels Inverted World by Christopher Priest and The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. (follow here)

A Gathering of Links

News item: Connie Willis was named the 2011 recipient SFWA Grand Master Award. (follow here)

News item: Gene Wolfe will be celebrated with the Fuller Award, a new Chicago-area literary award, and an evening of entertainment. (follow here)

Samuel R. Delany: "I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing.”
-- From a Paris Review interview. (follow here)

William Gibson: “E. M. Forster’s idea has always stuck with me -- that a writer who’s fully in control of the characters hasn’t even started to do the work. I’ve never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I’m working optimally I’m in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream.”
-- From a Paris Review interview. (follow here)

"He has handed us a map to his own magic doorways." From the New York Times review by Pagan Kennedy of William Gibson’s new book of essays Distrust That Particular Flavor. (follow here)

"At the core of sf lies the experience of science ... The Mars and stars and digital deserts of our best novels are, finally, to be taken as real, as if to say: life isn’t like this, it is this." Gregory Benford on rereading The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998) by Thomas M. Disch (via SanJuanJon). (follow here)

Soviet-era visions of Mars (via BLDGBLOG). (follow here)

"Extra(ordinary) People is my favorite of Russ’s collections, a forceful, beautiful, astounding book that leaves me low on words to compensate for how I respond to it." Brit Mandelo reads Joanna Russ's Extra(ordinary) People (1984). (follow here: part one and part two)

Elizabeth Hand has two novels forthcoming, Available Dark, due February 2012, and Radiant Days, due April 2012. Hand was recently interviewed on The Coode Street Podcast (follow here). Hand writes about six favorite books (follow here).

Jeff VanderMeer's essay on overlooked books from 2011 convinced me to spend cold hard cash for several books that I had managed to miss (follow here).

VanderMeer gives a rundown of the 2011 nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award, in which he calls Maureen F. McHugh's After the Apocalypse "a brilliant book." I'm reading it right now and couldn't agree more. (follow here)

2011 Eaton Conference to honor Ellison and Delany

Authors Harlan Ellison, Nalo Hopkinson, China Miéville, Karen Tei Yamashita, Gregory Benford and Howard V. Hendrix are among the expected participants at the 2011 Eaton Science Fiction Conference, a three-day event intended for authors, scholars and fans, Feb. 11-13, at the Mission Inn and Spa in Riverside, California.

Quoting  from the UC Riverside news release:

“ ‘We’ve attracted almost three times as many scholars than we’ve ever hosted, and there is greater diversity of presenters and topics,’ said Melissa Conway, head of Special Collections & Archives at UCR and co-organizer of the conference. ‘I’m particularly pleased that Harlan Ellison will be coming.’

“ . . . Authors Samuel R. Delany and Harlan Ellison will receive the 2010 and 2011 Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction. . . . Delany and Ellison are two of the most important science fiction writers of the past half-century, said Rob Latham, associate professor of English and co-organizer of the conference.”

Registration is $165 for the entire conference or $75 for a single day. Student admission is $55. The Mission Inn has extended its $120 conference rate to all attendees to Dec. 31. The Eaton Science Fiction Conference is sponsored by the University of California, Riverside.

Related links:
UC Riverside news release
Eaton conference website

Notes on rereading Dhalgren during the Summer of 2010

A guest-post and photo-illustration from Monkeyblake, a simian friend of ours:

Unreal City. Moscow. Set off by a historic heatwave acrid smog from the fires burning across the forests outside the city is seeping into apartments, offices and even the underground  Moscow metro, forcing many Russians to abandon the city. All over Russia, the worst heatwave in memory has blanketed the region in 110 degree or more heat, triggering wildfires, igniting peat bogs in central Russia, and choking Moscow with dense unbreathable smog for days on end. Plumes of smoke have gone as far away as Finland. At the same time, a heatwave has descended on the Eastern Coast and parts of the Great Plains of the United States this August. On the the radio reports of flash floods across Pakistan, thousands killed,  many others swept away and marooned, 600,000 homes destroyed, the worst flooding in 80 years...

"Unreal City," Eliot repeats like a refrain in The Waste Land (1922).  "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many," He quotes Dante in hell: "I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet..." like cars bumper to bumper fleeing New Orleans during Katrina.

Unreal City. Suburban wasteland. Nameless. I live where the heat usually goes above 110 even into the 120s during summer.  This summer is unusually mild. Rarely above 90. I am reading Dhalgren again this summer. I was a boy of 15 the summer it came out, the summer I read it, lured by the image of the giant sun on the cover and the thickness of the paperback that to my 15 year-old-mind meant quality, meant serious, Russian-serious. The paper I remember smelled quite  good, though it has since browned quite badly. The summer of 1975. 

When the book came out cities were not like Bellona, the city that is Dhalgren -- cities were not abandoned, off the grid, emptied of most of their populace... Describing such a place was Science Fiction: Dhalgren, Stalker.

No longer. Unreal cities are no longer rare. When I read the book in ‘75 no American city had been abandoned like New Orleans to disaster and its own fate. Not in living memory anyway. Not like Europe or elsewhere. Abandoned. Ruined. Emptied, the fleeing, the fled.  Some survivors and hold-outs trapped or lost.  Standing on roofs to keep from drowning. Shitting in stadium corners. A hole ripped in the man-made dome. Unreal New Orleans. 

Dhalgren was my first Unreal City. It helped me -- withstand the shocks of the later ones I became exposed to, Dresden, Hiroshima, Detroit. A homeopathic post-apocalyptic gem or germ. A shot in the arm for a 15 year old.

Why am I rereading it now? Harder to answer -- and more personal -- the kind of ruins you see around you at 50. A booster shot maybe. That and Samuel R. Delany was suppose to come and visit where I live to receive a prestigious Science Fiction award. We waited for weeks foolishly hopeful after the award was announced that he just might come. He declined. This place, nameless, too much of a wasteland even for Delany.*

As a genre descended from the Gothic, science fiction has many ruined landscapes to roam around in.  Post-apocalyptic novels are made from them. The gritty winds blasting the streets brownstone tenements of 1984. J.G. Ballard's divine books, The Drought and The Drowned World are alike post-apocalyptic and set in ruins. 

Some are even as beautiful as Dhalgren. Though they have plot. Things they say, mean. Things happen in Dhalgren, sure, but really, Dhalgren feels more like a place than a story. A landscape that is coextensive. Not a narrative, an unfolding. As a place, it is one of the most vivid places in letters you can roam in. Roam like the Kidd. You don't care if things happen or don’t happen, don’t care where you go or don’t go, you are happy to forget yourself for a while, keep reading, keep roaming, all 879 pages and then read again.

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*Though the guy who is getting the same prestigious award, the Eaton, the guy with a big mouth who must scream, is coming (though few I know can reread him, though we try, no longer 15). He hated Dhalgren by the way.