Today we were captivated by Arthur Ganson’s Kinetic Sculpture, which features mechanical art involving complex gears, apparatuses, and delicately shaped steel wire all working in tandem to accomplish a task. Some of these tasks are minor, such as the undulation of a bed of rice, and graze the very edge of steampunk, taking that design aesthetic and toning it down into something more muted. Some of these tasks look terribly complex and would fit easily within a steampunk universe, notably so with this chair that walks itself across a landscape.
These two machines only scratch the surface of the artist’s entire installation. You can see Ganson’s full range of videos and machines here.
This is kind of follow-up post to “Gulp or sip,” and like that post it arises from a conversation with a friend. (A different friend. I have a lot of friends who like to read.) This friend said that if she was getting bored with something in a book she’d skip ahead until it got interesting. “How do you know?” I asked. “I skim,” she replied. “If there’s a boring action sequence, or a boring sex scene, I’ll skim until we get back to something interesting.” To clarify—she doesn’t read all the words. She stops reading and just casts her eyes over the text, speed reading occasional phrases until she has missed the bit she doesn’t like. It’s as if she’s re-reading and she decides to skip a thread she didn’t enjoy, except without having ever read it in the first place. Or it’s like the way you might look for a particular bit on a page to quote without getting sucked in to reading the whole thing, except without having read it before. It’s not like the way you can keep reading in your sleep and suddenly realise you didn’t take in the last few pages. It’s a deliberate action—the way in a non-fiction book you might decide to not read a chapter that covers a topic you don’t need. Except, of course, that she does it with fiction, and not to a clearly marked end point, but to where the text gets interesting again.
I never do this. I’ve never even thought of it. It seems really weird to me.
So what I want to know is, do other people do this?
Welcome to the Malazan Re-read of the Fallen! Every post will start off with a summary of events, followed by reaction and commentary by your hosts Bill and Amanda (with Amanda, new to the series, going first), and finally comments from Tor.com readers. In this article, we’ll cover Chapters 18 and 19 of Gardens of the Moon (GotM). Other chapters are here.
Before we get into this week’s summary and commentary, two quick announcements:
One: Amanda is currently on holiday and so is joining us for the first chapter only. (Though I’m sure she’s thinking of all of us, not to mention the impending doom, death, and destruction, while sitting on a beach somewhere. No really, I’m sure she is...)
Two: For those who may have missed it in our last discussion thread, Steven Erikson has graciously made an appearance—despite feeling under the weather—and had a lot to say regarding his writing process. It’s, as one would expect, well worth the read and goes a long way toward explaining why these books are so ripe for re-reading and in-depth discussion. We’ll pause a few moments while you head back to last week’s and peek behind the curtain of Steven’s story-crafting...
Thanks Steven!
On September 8, 1966, Star Trek premiered with “The Man Trap,” that classic tale of lonely salt vampires and the crewmen who love them. In celebration, check out Eugene Myers and Torie Atkinson’s inaugural post in the Star Trek rewatch, where I learned that “The Man Trap” was actually the sixth episode filmed. Thank goodness Star Trek went better than that other awesome show set in space and denied its intended pilot by the network!
Arthur C. Clarke’s great strength as a writer was the way his vision merged the poetic and the scientific. His great weakness was that he was too nice—he always had a terrible time envisaging conflict, which gave him a hard time with plot.
I know something about Imperial Earth (1975) that most of you don’t, except theoretically. It was once a new book. It’s obvious really, everything was new once. People bought shiny copies of The Fellowship of the Ring in the fifties and waited for the other volumes to come out. But I remember Imperial Earth being new, because I bought the paperback from one of those rotating wire racks of books they used to have in newsagents in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and everybody smoked and you could buy a new Arthur C. Clarke paperback and a quarter of Cadbury`s mini eggs and still have change from a pound. I vividly remember taking both the book and the eggs up into the park and sitting on a bench in watery sunlight reading the book and eating the eggs until book and eggs were finished. I still have the book, and I can still taste the eggs when I read it, which must make that one of the best value for money pounds I ever spent. It was the Easter holidays of 1977 and I was twelve. I thought Imperial Earth was one of the best books Clarke had ever written.
[Read more: It isn’t really a classic, but I like it anyway]
I had a surreal moment at my bookstore day-job recently: a regular customer whom I am accustomed to recommending urban fantasy books and various and sundry SF came in to shop. She was looking for Carrie Vaughn things, and I suggested to her a few anthologies with Vaughn short stories, because the customer already had all of her books.
She said to me, “Oh, I don’t buy those. I don’t like short stuff.”
I was baffled. Visibly, I imagine, because she gave me an odd look. I couldn’t help but argue back that no, really, she was missing out on so much! She did not agree. I probably shouldn’t argue with customers about their reading preferences, but… really? I had finally met one of those people that writers and publishers bemoan—the ones who won’t buy short fiction. How many more of them are there, I wonder? I always hear that the short story is dying and the anthology is an unsalable format, but I can’t quite believe it.
Certainly, our store in the past year has seen a huge uptick in sales of anthologies in the SFF section. I know for a fact that we’ve been sent more of them from our suppliers: in the first year I worked at this bookstore, I had to special-order every single anthology I wanted. We didn’t receive more than one or two. (I work for a Waldenbooks, and so our stock is pre-decided by the Borders buyers.)
He’s old this time. A hospital gown sags over his gaunt frame. IV wires stream from his arms, plugging him into a thousand machines. I could tear them out one by one.
I ask, “Do you know who I am?”
He rolls his head back and forth, trying to see. His eyes are pale with cataracts, roosting in nests of wrinkles. He gestures me closer, skin thin to the point of translucence, veins tunneling below.
Recognition strikes. “You’re that boy I hurt. . . . All grown up. . . .”
If all were lost and I found myself red-thonged and rifle-bound as the giant Zardozian head of Stanley Kubrick roiled over the ruined horizon, I would chase it forever till the end of the earth. Kubrick’s films offer a stunning portrait of isolation and spiritual angst few others manage to achieve with such edge and elegance. Grounded in both the pulverant physicality of the little moments while also speaking to our loftiest concepts is a rare achievement, but one Kubrick manages in each of his films beautifully. As a storyteller watching his films, I feel like a dusty, cod-eyed ape triumphantly railing my newfound bone weapon against a backdrop of something far bigger than I could ever conceive... and my heart is warmed greatly by it.
Illustration by Greg Ruth
From Greg Ruth’s 52 Weeks project—offering a drawing and a few words once a week, every week. Follow him on Twitter and check out his Etsy store.
In my post on Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir, Ursula asked:
Jo, how do you find these things?
Browsing a bookstore only goes so far. I’m curious as to what your book-choosing techniques are, as mine seem to be evolving into “what has Jo written about?”
My immediate answer was that I find things in exactly the same way Ursula does—my friends talk about them. In the case of this book that’s exactly what happened, a friend read it and discussed it, I checked if the library had it, they did, I read it. I love libraries. There’s literally no cost to trying things out. If somebody mentions an interesting book online, I immediately open a tab to the Grande Bibliotheque and check if they have it. But however I get hold of it, my number one way of finding out that books exist remains word of mouth — especially for weird books.
If you’re like me, you enjoy a good zombie story (forty-four of them if you can manage it). So I’m always on the lookout for the latest zombie bonanza.
Ladies and gentlemen, the mother lode.
The undisputed master of the zombie anthology is none other than John Joseph Adams. In 2008, The Living Dead swept the industry. Publisher’s Weekly named it one of the Best Books of the Year, and Barnes & Noble.com called it “The best collection of zombie fiction ever.”
Note: This review originally appeared on Tor.com on April 18th of this year and concludes our Poul Anderson tribute. You can find all of the appreciations gathered here.
Poul Anderson was the first science fiction writer I read once I’d discovered science fiction was a genre. (This was because I was starting in alphabetical order.) I have been fond of his work for decades, and I sometimes think that it’s possible to define all of SF as variations on themes from Poul Anderson. The High Crusade (1960) is a short novel, and it’s funny and clever and it works. It’s a quick read, which is good because it’s the kind of book it’s hard to put down.
I always think of it as being in the same category as Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen or Lest Darkness Fall, though it’s not really like that at all. The premise of The High Crusade is that in 1345, just as Sir Roger de Coverley is getting ready to go to France to fight for the king, an alien spaceship lands in a little Lincolnshire village. The medieval army quickly overruns the spaceship and eventually the alien empire, by a mixture of bluff, combining medieval and futuristic tech, fast talk, and deceit, as you would, really. It may not be plausible, but it’s fun, and anyway it’s more plausible than you might imagine. There’s a scene for instance when they use alien bombs in a wooden trebuchet that naturally doesn’t show up on radar.
NOTE: Re-posted here for curious eyes is Leigh Butler's spoiler-full review of The Gathering Storm. We're working on smoothing out the original post so everyone can read the 3000+ comments. The discussion continues here.
Happy drop date, WOT fans!
Today marks the official U.S. release of the long-awaited twelfth novel in the Wheel of Time series, The Gathering Storm—the finest merchandise this side of the river Jordan, on sale today! Come on down, heh heh.
But you probably knew that. About time, eh?
Consequently, as promised, I have here my second and infinitely more spoiler-laden review of the book. This will also, coincidentally, provide you with a place on Tor.com to discuss your own spoilery thoughts and reactions to The Gathering Storm, because we love you and we want you to be happy.
So have at, but remember: please confine all spoilers for the new book to this post. There are many readers out there who for whatever reason are not able to obtain and read the novel on the day of release, so out of courtesy to them, please keep the spoilers concentrated in one easily-avoidable spot, mmkay? Thanks, y’all are rockalicious.
Also, this is obvious, but just for the record: There are GIANT, MASSIVE, BOOK-DESTROYING SPOILERS for The Gathering Storm under the cut. And you can bet that whatever I don’t spoil in the post, will get spoiled in the comments. Read at your own risk.
For what it’s worth, I strongly advise WOT readers to avoid this post until they have read the book. I know some of y’all have low willpower on this score, but I’m seriously telling you that you will miss out if you ruin the ending (and the middle, and all the other parts) for yourself before reading the actual book. Also, since I’m not going to be explicating the details of every last event I bring up, if you haven’t read the book first, some of the things I’m going to say may not make sense to you anyway, which is yet another reason to wait.
As someone with a terminal allergy to spoilers before the fact, that’s just my opinion, of course, and I ain’t your mama, but presumably you’re here because you semi-care about my opinions, so there you have one.
So, there’s all that. For those of you looking for a totally spoiler-free and yet also somehow-massively-verbose review of The Gathering Storm, go here. Honor to serve and alla that.
And now, having gotten all warnings, caveats, and stern remonstrances out of the way, click though to get to the meat. IF YOU DARE.
There’s this custom in anime, which TV Tropes calls the “Beach Episode” or “Onsen Episode.” Usually it involves the characters doing something fun and fluffy like putting on bikinis and frolicking, and happens right before or after seriously heavy stuff goes down in the plot. For most anime, this is limited to battling sand crabs. For Cowboy Bebop, it means fighting an alien. This is the lesson behind “Toys in the Attic,” which is both Aerosmith’s third album and a slang term for “crazy” that shows up in Pink Floyd’s The Wall. In space, no one can hear you procrastinate. Don’t leave things in the fridge.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade in the pages of Astounding magazine (later to be known as Analog that very year). In celebration, Baen Books is releasing an anniversary paperback edition on Tuesday, September 7th, with appreciations from some of science fiction’s greatest names.
Tor.com will be posting these appreciations throughout Monday and Tuesday of this week, courtesy of Baen Books. These appreciations originally appeared at WebScription, where you can also sample the first few chapters of The High Crusade.
My God, has it really been fifty years? I’m looking right now at the July 1960 issue of the magazine we all had known and loved as Astounding Science Fiction, which just a few months before had renamed itself, bewilderingly, Analog Science Fact & Fiction, and there is a sly-looking guy on the cover wearing medieval armor, and a bunch of axe-wielding Viking types stand behind him, and, vaguely visible in the background, are the silvery snouts of what surely had to be spaceships, standing upright, balancing on their vanes as spaceships were meant to do. And in bold white-on-black letters at the bottom are the words, “THE HIGH CRUSADE By Poul Anderson.”
And the July 1960 issue—no matter how many times I do the math, it comes out to be fifty years old. I have trouble believing that. It seems like just yesterday, or, let us say, the day before yesterday, that I picked up that issue in John W. Campbell’s editorial office.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade in the pages of Astounding magazine (later to be known as Analog that very year). In celebration, Baen Books is releasing an anniversary paperback edition on Tuesday, September 7th, with appreciations from some of science fiction’s greatest names.
Tor.com will be posting these appreciations throughout Monday and Tuesday of this week, courtesy of Baen Books. These appreciations originally appeared at WebScription, where you can also sample the first few chapters of The High Crusade.
I bought the Astounding (it was in the process of changing its name to Analog, so both names are on the cover) with the first installment of The High Crusade on the newsstand. I didn’t have a subscription to the magazine; I’d read a couple issues, but nothing in them had really blown me away.
I was a working-class fourteen-year-old. I loved SF, but cost was a real factor in my decisions.
The cover of a knight standing in front of a forest of spaceships got my initial fifty cents. I read the installment and immediately subscribed to the magazine. I didn’t care whether it was called Astounding or Analog: if it occasionally ran stories like The High Crusade, it was worth my money.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade in the pages of Astounding magazine (later to be known as Analog that very year). In celebration, Baen Books is releasing an anniversary paperback edition on Tuesday, September 7th, with appreciations from some of science fiction’s greatest names.
Tor.com will be posting these appreciations throughout Monday and Tuesday of this week, courtesy of Baen Books. These appreciations originally appeared at WebScription, where you can also sample the first few chapters of The High Crusade.
At the age of eleven or twelve, I picked up a book by Poul Anderson called The High Crusade. I was already a fan, having worked my way through a shelf-full of science fiction anthologies, best-of-the-year compilations from the 1950s at my local Navy base library in Kodiak, Alaska. Nearly all the anthologies contained stories by Poul.
But “The High Crusade” was something else again—a lively, sharp-witted reversal of science fiction stereotypes, as well as a magnificent adventure, full of larger-than-life characters.
This week in the Lord of the Rings re-read, we consider “The Land of Shadow,” Chapter 2 of book VI of The Return of the King. The usual comments and spoilers after the jump.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade in the pages of Astounding magazine (later to be known as Analog that very year). In celebration, Baen Books is releasing an anniversary paperback edition on Tuesday, September 7th, with appreciations from some of science fiction’s greatest names.
Tor.com will be posting these appreciations throughout Monday and Tuesday of this week, courtesy of Baen Books. These appreciations originally appeared at WebScription, where you can also sample the first few chapters of The High Crusade.
Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade may have had a greater impact on my development as a writer than any other book I ever read. I first ran across the novel as a teenager. By then, I’d already developed an interest in history and had become a science fiction fan—but I hadn’t seen any connection between the two. It was The High Crusade that first showed me how mixing history and speculative fiction could produce a fascinating result. Not long thereafter, I read L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, and my education was complete. (I’m sure my high school teachers would have disputed that conclusion, but what did they know?)
Over in the bizzaro world of literary fiction, Gary Shteyngart is kind of a big deal. With praises from academic circles and The New Yorker, the idea of him secretly being a science fiction author doesn’t spring to mind. So, did this guy really just write one of the best Science Fiction books of the year? You better believe it. And I think he was channeling Alfred Bester the whole time.
The Gathering Storm ebook cover by Todd Lockwood by Irene Gallo
Out of Print For Decades, The Dune Encyclopedia Surfaces Online by Stubby the Rocket
Announcing the 2010 Hugo Award Winners! by Management Services
