- Mark Evanier on screeners:
If I send a screenplay to most of these studios, they’ll return it unread with a stern letter — probably written by the guy who writes the threats in the screeners — that they don’t accept unsolicited material. And then they send me unsolicited material…including copies of their screenplays.
- Do you really want those two front teeth for Christmas? Something tells me “a knuckle ring fitted with four of your molars” is just waiting to turn up on a C.S.I.-type show.
- A further lesson in how not to respond to a bad review.
- Well that’s surprising: Kirkus Reviews and Editor & Publisher are closing. [via]
- And finally, Warren Ellis is right: Slingers looks like very, very intriguing.
writing
Lies we tell about the past
Well, just as critical theory, critique, tips into paranoia — finding patterns that don’t exist — collecting can cross that line from being the quest for value into being the quest for the subterranean, impossible artifact that will somehow validate all of your existence … You know, I used to know, I still do know, a lot of [Bob] Dylan collectors, and he’s begun demystifying a lot of the secrets by issuing them himself, but these things used to circulate as talismanic objects. And there was always the myth of the song that was even better, the musician who’d come out of some session and say, “Well, yeah sure, you heard ‘Blind Willie McTell’ because you’ve got a tape of it, but there was another song that he debuted in the studio that day that was never written down and we all begged him to play it again and he never did.” And it’s sort of like, “Well, if that song’s even better than ‘Blind Willie McTell,’ then what about the song that Dylan wrote but didn’t play that day, or what about the song that Dylan never even wrote! That might be the best one!” It’s a path of madness, and certainly I wanted to portray that terrifying descent to some extent.
Mad Men prop master Scott Buckwald:
But again, it’s a TV show, and it portrays advertising executives the way the producer wants them to portray them. I’m sure there are many advertising executives who’d go, “I was nothing like that. I would never chase women around the office,†and “I would never consider having an affair.†So that’s why I said earlier that it’s is a TV show, not a history lesson.
If you want to learn about advertising in 1960, watching Mad Men might be an okay primer. If I had to write a college thesis on 1960 advertising, Mad Men would be a footnote. I would watch it, look at it, get a little bit of flavor from it, and then do my real research.
A historical novel, in other words, is one that requires its author not simply to recall the past, but to study and imagine it, to create a believable world whose mores, customs, settings and technology are as foreign to them as they are to the readers–to worldbuild, in other words. And as in science fiction, worldbuilding in a historical novel reflects as much on the present as it does on the past, in much the same way that costumes in period films tell us more about fashion at the time they were made than at the time they purport to depict (remember Doc Brown in Back to the Future III, sending Marty to 1885 in a pink, tasseled shirt and purple pants because that’s how people dress in Westerns?).
Monday various
- I watched George Romero’s The Crazies this weekend. While it was interesting, I think I like the movie that John Seavey describes more than the one I actually saw:
It’s not a particularly cheerful movie; this is Romero at his most nihilistic, during the Vietnam era, suggesting that maybe insanity is endemic to the human condition and if we really were being driven mad, we might not notice the difference. But it’s also clever, tense, and filled with some haunting and evocative imagery, and it has some good acting from the principals. I recommend it.
Still, I can’t in all honesty not recommend the film. It’s maybe not Romero at his very best or most polished, but it’s never uninteresting.
I wish I could say the same about the trailer for the remake, which looks a lot more like just a generic zombie movie.
- You stay classy, Gore Vidal. [via]
- “Beaten stiff competition”? Oh, I see what you did there, you naughty thing. Who’s the best Bad Sex writer now?
- “Come to New York: your chances of getting killed here have gone down significantly!” [via
- And finally, speaking of New York… [via]
Science fiction vs. fantasy
Ask any writer or fan to define science fiction (or fantasy) — and lord knows, people have asked — you’ll get a lot of contradictory and only sometimes helpful answers. Here are just some that have been sitting around in my saved links for awhile:
“Science fiction writers don’t admit magic, they don’t admit UFOs even, but they accept as given these two magical properties [time travel and travel that exceeds the speed of light, so that, in a sense, even their science fiction is built on fantasy.” Robert J. Sawyer
“Magic gets to break the laws of nature. Science doesn’t. And that goes for science-fiction, too: It might do things that aren’t currently possible, but as soon as it starts breaking the laws of physics it has stepped out of science and into fantasy.” – Mary Robinette Kowal
“The failure mode of science fiction is NOT ‘fantasy,’ it is ‘bad science fiction.'” – John Scalzi
“…the term ‘science fiction’ is a misnomer, that trying to get two enthusiasts to agree on a definition of it leads only to bloody knuckles; that better labels have been devised (Heinlein’s suggestion, ‘speculative fiction,’ is the best, I think), but that we’re stuck with this one; and that it will do us no particular harm if we remember that, like ‘The Saturday Evening Post,’ it means what we point to when we say it.” – Damon Knight
“What can not be defined are genres. You can’t define poetry, the novel, tragedy, pornography, comics… and you cannot define academic criticism either. Now, you can describe all of them in perfectly useful ways. You can describe them so people can recognize them. So that particular provisional job that you have to do can get done. You just can not specify their necessary and sufficient conditions. So there are no root examples, no borderline cases. With different descriptions, different borderlines come into being. I think the genre or at least genre criticism, might take a major step forward if it simply threw out the term ‘definition.’ The term ‘description,’ would do perfectly well. The point is, if someone asks you, ‘How would you “describe” science fiction,’ the proper answer is: ‘For what particular purpose do you want this description?’ This is not the mood in which the question ‘How do you define sf?’ gets asked.” – Samuel R. Delaney
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Meanwhile, Gerry Canavan is co-editing a Special Issue on SF, Fantasy, and Myth for Duke University Press, at least partly on where these definitions overlap and/or contradict one another.
As I’ve noted before, I usually find strict definitions of fantasy and science fiction (or any genre) pretty limiting. I think I most like what Delaney says above.
Wednesday various
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- Your roof is leaking if you think I’m going to start using any of this 1950s hipster slang. [via]
- Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And then, of course, I blew away the other road with my machine gun.Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle wanted to be a poet. [via]
- And finally, M. Rickert on storytelling:
I think that to say every story has already been told is to dismiss the temperament of words, to devalue nuance and meaning. Yes, of course, if stories are summed up into one or two sentence synopsis, then I imagine they all fit into certain categories. But stories are not just a matter of summation; if they were, the summation would be enough to satisfy that need for story. In fact, every word matters. I don’t know why people are so eager to diminish stories. You don’t hear architects bemoaning that every building has already been built. Within each field of creation there is a structure that exists as the foundation of that creation. The opportunity for expansion and artistry lies within that structure and is not diminished by it.