the prodigal blog

I thought that "Self-Organized Criticality" was an SF writers group! Probably in some cool city like Austin or Portland or Minneapolis.

Turns out that it's actually how chaos drives the brain.

HAVE you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.

My desktop teeters on the edge of chaos. Now I understand that's just because it's a giant working model of my brain.

There were some last minute changes. Here's the new schedule...

Readercon 20 Program Participant’s Schedule

C. C. Finlay

Fri. 10:45 PM Salons A & E Meet the Pros(e) Party. Each writer at the party has selected a short, pithy quotation from his or her own work and is armed with a sheet of 30 printed labels, the quote replicated on each. As attendees mingle and meet each pro, they obtain one of his or her labels, collecting them on the wax paper provided. Atheists, agnostics, and the lazy can leave them in the order they acquire them, resulting in one of at least nine billion Random Prose Poems. Those who believe in the reversal of entropy can rearrange them to make a Statement. Wearing labels as apparel is also popular. The total number of possibilities (linguistic and sartorial) is thought to exceed the number of theobromine molecules in a large Trader Joe’s dark chocolate bar multiplied by the number of picoseconds cumulatively spent by the Readercon committee on this convention since its inception.

Sat. 10:00 AM Salon E History and Fictional History. Christopher M. Cevasco, Suzy McKee Charnas, David Anthony Durham, C. C. Finlay (L), M. K. Hobson, Howard Waldrop. [Greatest Hit from Readercon 9.] Certain things in fiction are, by convention and for good reason, not strictly realistic—dialogue, for instance, is a highly edited version of real speech. We ask: is history one of these things? When we devise a fictional history (either an alternate past or a history of the future), can and should it represent the way history really works (choose your own theory), or is doing so antithetical to good fiction? Isn’t, for instance, the dramatic structure we look for in most novels absent from real history?

Sat. 11:00 AM VT C. C. Finlay reads from The Demon Redcoat. (30 min.)

Sat. 12:00 PM ME/ CT The Genre Roots of the Mainstream Tradition in American Fiction. C. C. Finlay with discussion by Michael A. Burstein, Helen Collins, F. Brett Cox, Debra Doyle, Chris Nakashima-Brown. Talk / Discussion (60 min.) The plots of Charles Brockden Brown, America’s first novelist, frequently hinged on scientific speculation. Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne employed fantasy elements, Edgar Allan Poe invented a range of genre tropes, and James Fenimore Cooper introduced the series character—a staple of modern genre fiction. In the last century, some of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s earliest works depend on fantastic elements. Mainstream American writers, in fact, have regularly created fiction that would now be considered part of the speculative genre. Finlay will argue that genre elements are not isolated in a separate branch of the American literary tradition, but are instead at the heart of it.

Sat. 2:00 PM ME/ CT I Spy, I Fear, I Wonder: Espionage Fiction and the Fantastic. Don D’Ammassa, C. C. Finlay (M), James D. Macdonald, Chris Nakashima-Brown, John Shirley. In his afterword to The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross makes a bold pair of assertions: Len Deighton was a horror writer (because “all cold-war era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation”) while Lovecraft wrote spy thrillers (with their “obsessive collection of secret information”). In fact, Stross argues that the primary difference between the two genres is that the threat of the “uncontrollable universe” in horror fiction “verges on the overwhelming,” while spy fiction “allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over” it. This is only one example of the confluence of the espionage novel with the genres of the fantastic; the two are blended in various ways in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Tim Powers’ Declare, William Gibson’s Spook County, and, in the media, the Bond movies and The Prisoner. We’ll survey the best of espionage fiction as it reads to lovers of the fantastic. Are there branches of the fantastic other than horror to which the spy novel has a special affinity or relationship?

Sun. 10:00 AM Vinyard Kaffeeklatsches. C. C. Finlay; Geary Gravel, Rosemary Kirstein, and Ann Tonsor Zeddies.

Sun. 12:00 PM ME/ CT Slipstream in the 1940s? The Growth and Exile of the Fantastic in the Postwar American Short Story. Amelia Beamer and Gary K. Wolfe with discussion by C. C. Finlay, Peter Straub, Gene Wolfe. Talk / Discussion (60 min.) In the introduction to his 2003 anthology McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Michael Chabon complained that the literary short story was effectively taken over in about 1950 by a single genre—”the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” Curious about Chabon’s choice of 1950 as a change point, Beamer and Wolfe set about looking for fantastic elements in short fiction published in mainstream venues from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s. What they found was a revelation: dozens of stories that resonated with the ambiguities of genre and style characteristic of recent “slipstream” or “interstitial” fiction, published in The New Yorker, Colliers, the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, McCalls, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Home Companion, Charm, Town & Country, and Story. They found examples not only from expected authors such as Shirley Jackson, John Collier, and Roald Dahl, but from the likes of Truman Capote, Robert Coates, E.B. White, Conrad Richter, and John Cheever—who later complained that his earlier fantastic tales had been overlooked as he became “ghettoized” as a chronicler of suburban malaise in the 1950s. Beamer and Wolfe will highlight some of these stories, and speculate on exactly what happened in the early 1950s to send them, effectively, into exile. Was it simply a shift in available markets for stories, or a shift in literary tastes on the part of a few key editors, or a symptom of a broader cultural “retreat” from the fantastic?

Sun. 1:00 PM VT Beneath Ceaseless Skies Group Reading (60 min.). Scott H. Andrews (host) with Saladin Ahmed, S. C. Butler, Michael DeLuca, Chris Dikeman, C. C. Finlay, Justin Howe, Margaret Ronald. Readings from the semimonthly online zine of literary adventure fantasy edited by Andrews.

Sun. 2:00 PM ME/ CT Mainstream and Genre. Amelia Beamer, C. C. Finlay, Gary K. Wolfe with F. Brett Cox, Ken Houghton, Robert Killheffer, Barry N. Malzberg, Kathryn Morrow, Eric M. Van. Discussion (60 min.) The (independently conceived) presentations by Finlay and Beamer & Wolfe raise so many interesting questions about the relationship of the mainstream to genre fiction that we thought we’d toss them together with our attendees for an hour of spirited discussion. What relationship did the postwar boomlet of slipstream fiction have to the long history of the fantastic identified by Finlay? Was there any relationship between the exile of the fantastic from the mainstream in the early ‘50s and the contemporaneous ascendancy of well-defined and exclusive genres? When the mainstream and genre began cohabiting again (in the UK in the ‘60s during The New Wave, or recently in the US with the likes of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem), can this be fruitfully viewed as a return to the earliest tradition, or is it best viewed as the marriage of two now thoroughly estranged parties?

Should be a blast! Although raecarson wants to know where I can pencil her in....

raecarson and I are going to Readercon 20 in Boston next weekend. My schedule looks like this:

Saturday 10:00 AM, Salon E: Panel

History and Fictional History. Christopher M. Cevasco, Suzy McKee
Charnas, David Anthony Durham, C. C. Finlay (L), M. K. Hobson, Howard
Waldrop
** Leader (Participant / Moderator) **

[Greatest Hit from Readercon 9.] Certain things in fiction are, by
convention and for good reason, not strictly realistic-dialogue, for
instance, is a highly edited version of real speech. We ask: is history
one of these things? When we devise a fictional history (either an
alternate past or a history of the future), can and should it represent
the way history really works (choose your own theory), or is doing so
antithetical to good fiction? Isn't, for instance, the dramatic structure
we look for in most novels absent from real history?

Saturday 12:00 Noon, ME/ CT: Talk / Discussion (60 min.)

The Genre Roots of the Mainstream Tradition in American Fiction. C. C.
Finlay with discussion by Michael A. Burstein, Helen Collins, F. Brett
Cox, Debra Doyle, Chris Nakashima-Brown

The plots of Charles Brockden Brown, America's first novelist, frequently
hinged on scientific speculation. Washington Irving and Nathaniel
Hawthorne employed fantasy elements, Edgar Allen Poe invented a range of
genre tropes, and James Fenimore Cooper introduced the series character-a
staple of modern genre fiction. In the last century, some of F. Scott
Fitzgerald's earliest works depend on fantastic elements. Mainstream
American writers, in fact, have regularly created fiction that would now
be considered part of the speculative genre. Finlay will argue that genre
elements are not isolated in a separate branch of the American literary
tradition, but are instead at the heart of it.

Saturday 2:00 PM, ME/ CT: Panel

I Spy, I Fear, I Wonder: Espionage Fiction and the Fantastic. Don
D'Ammassa, C. C. Finlay (M), James D. Macdonald, Chris Nakashima-Brown,
John Shirley
** (Non-Participant) Moderator **

In his afterword to The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross makes a bold
pair of assertions: Len Deighton was a horror writer (because "all cold-
war era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear
annihilation") while Lovecraft wrote spy thrillers (with their "obsessive
collection of secret information"). In fact, Stross argues that the
primary difference between the two genres is that the threat of the
"uncontrollable universe" in horror fiction "verges on the overwhelming,"
while spy fiction "allows us to believe for a while that the little people
can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over" it. This
is only one example of the confluence of the espionage novel with the
genres of the fantastic; the two are blended in various ways in Neal
Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Tim Powers' Declare, William Gibson's Spook
County, and, in the media, the Bond movies and The Prisoner. We'll survey
the best of espionage fiction as it reads to lovers of the fantastic. Are
there branches of the fantastic other than horror to which the spy novel
has a special affinity or relationship?

Sunday 10:00 AM, Vineyard: Kaffeeklatsch

Sunday 12:00 Noon, ME/ CT: Discussion (60 min.)

Mainstream and Genre. Amelia Beamer, C. C. Finlay, Gary K. Wolfe with F.
Brett Cox, Ken Houghton, Eric M. Van
** Leader (Participant / Moderator) **

The (independently conceived) presentations by Finlay and Beamer & Wolfe
raise so many interesting questions about the relationship of the
mainstream to genre fiction that we thought we'd toss them together with
our attendees for an hour of spirited discussion. What relationship did
the postwar boomlet of slipstream fiction have to the long history of the
fantastic identified by Finlay? Was there any relationship between the
exile of the fantastic from the mainstream in the early 50s and the
contemporaneous ascendancy of well-defined and exclusive genres? When the
mainstream and genre began cohabiting again (in the UK in the 60s during
The New Wave, or recently in the US with the likes of Michael Chabon and
Jonathan Lethem), can this be fruitfully viewed as a return to the
earliest tradition, or is it best viewed as the marriage of two now
thoroughly estranged parties?

Sunday 1:00 PM, VT: Group Reading

Beneath Ceaseless Skies Group Reading (60 min.) Scott H. Andrews (host)
with Saladin Ahmed, S. C. Butler, Michael DeLuca, C. C. Finlay

Readings from the semimonthly online zine of literary adventure fantasy
edited by Andrews.

Sunday 2:30 PM, NH / MA: Reading (30 min.)

from The Demon Redcoat.

I'm bringing raecarson with me to the BCS reading. "The Crystal Stair" was at least 90% her work, even though both our names were on it, and it'll be the first chance for the two of us to do a reading together. We'll have to figure out how we're going to do that on our way to Boston.

And also, holy cow, I have a lot of preparation yet to do! I better get working.

...sends me links to video clips like this.



She also squees "OMG teh cute!" I know because I was sitting in the same room with her when she emailed it to me.

This announcement is from Gordon Van Gelder's Editorial in the Aug./Sept. issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

The last news item is the most exciting. I don't know why we never tried this before, but F&SF is going to begin hosting a writing workshop.

We're fortunate to have the great Gardner Dozois running the show. I'm sure most of our readers know Gardner already, but just in case, he's the author of dozens of short stories (his most recent F&SF story is “Counterfactual,” which appeared in our June 2006 issue) and he edited Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 1984 to 2004. He also has decades of experience with writing workshops and is widely considered one of the best story doctors in the field.

All F&SF readers should benefit from Gardner's workshop work, because he's going to have the option of selecting stories from the workshop for publication in F&SF. We're currently planning to run Gardner Dozois selections three times a year. (Writers, fret not: I won't be reading the workshop stories myself, so you can still submit your stories to F&SF regardless of what anyone in the workshop makes of the story.)

The workshop will be administered by Lisa Rogers, a former editor for Gollancz and Little, Brown.

Initially, the workshop will be available online only and the site will have a private message board to go with the critiquing.

Until the workshop is firing on all cylinders, we're limiting the membership to 100 people. You can find the membership prices and other information at www.FandSFworkshop.com.

Frankly, I'm very excited about the prospects for this new project and I think all of our readers will benefit from it.

...and they brought out the multimedia to play the Simpsons episode clip where everyone stops fighting to sing "O, Canada!" It was awesome.

(Our smallish office has eight birthdays in July, including the acting provost, who is a Canadian citizen. But mine was the only birthday that is actually today.)



Happy birthday, Canada!

Congratulations to James Alan Gardner! His story "The Ray Gun: A Love Story" won the 2009 Theodore Sturgeon Award.

Via Tobias Buckell and Jason Sanford on Twitter:

Old SFWA website: http://sfwa.org

New SFWA website: http://sfwasite.org

Nebula reform was more important, but this is another step in the right direction. I haven't rejoined SFWA yet, but I'm very happy with what I'm seeing from the outside.

The Locus Awards have just been announced and I see several friends and colleagues on the list this year. A huge congratulations to Paolo for both his awards and to Melko, aka paulmelko, for earning his second award for Singularity's Ring. And congratulations go to Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, and the magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as well.

Here are all the winners:

Science Fiction Novel: Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow)
Fantasy Novel: Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt)
First Novel: Singularity's Ring, Paul Melko (Tor)
Young-Adult Book: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, Bloomsbury)


Novella: "Pretty Monsters", Kelly Link (Pretty Monsters)
Novelette: "Pump Six", Paolo Bacigalupi (Pump Six and Other Stories)
Short Story: "Exhalation", Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)


Anthology: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin's)
Collection: Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books)
Non-Fiction/Art Book: P. Craig Russell, Coraline: The Graphic Novel, Neil Gaiman, adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell (HarperCollins)


Editor: Ellen Datlow
Artist: Michael Whelan
Magazine: F&SF
Publisher: Tor

I Feel Love Is A Stranger - Donna Summer/Annie Lennox - mashup by Copycat, vid by Alpha1999

It was worth being restless just to find this. I don't think that's the late night talkin'.

The book signing tonight at Books & Co. in Dayton was a lot of fun. I'll tell you about Kody and Jessy in a minute. But first you need to know this: Books & Co. has an inventory sale this Saturday, June 27.

All day. Every book. Big discounts.

That includes signed copies of all three Traitor to the Crown books. More importantly, it includes every other book in the store.

If you live anywhere near that part of Ohio and like to read – and if you don’t like to read, how on earth did you end up here? – then go check it out. Visit their website at http://www.booksandco.com/ for details and directions to both stores.

So: the signing.

I may have rushed in at the last minute, thanks to Columbus traffic and the crazy notion that we could grab a quick bite to eat before the event started, but the staff at Books & Co. was super prepared. An organized seating area in the middle of the store, a podium with microphone, an introduction that made me sound way more interesting than I actually am, event posters to sign, a guest book to leave a note in for posterity, a camera for pictures--it was the most orchestrated event that I've been to since, well, since the last time I went to the orchestra. Huge thanks to Sharon and Michael at Books & Co. for giving me the full-on rock star treatment.

Speaking of rock stars—or, at the very least, speaking of rock bands that had one huge hit a dozen years ago and a steady stream of songs in tv and movies ever since—there was a free outdoor concert by Sister Hazel in the mall outside the bookstore at the same time as my event.

Inside, I did my reading, answered some questions (and thank you raecarson for coming prepared with some questions!), talked to people, and then signed a bunch of books. Near the very end, when I was signing stock, a couple of teenage girls wandered by the reading area for about the third time.

This time, the shorter, sassier one stopped, stared at us, and dropped her shoulder as she planted her fist on her hip.

"So," she said. "You're signing books?"

I said, "What else have you got?"

You could feel the Books & Co. people tense up a bit, not sure where this was going.

But the girl's eyes lit up. "You could sign my hoody!"

I said, "Sure, I'll do that. What's your name?"

"Kody, with a K, K-o-d-y," she said, and she peeled off the gray hooded sweatshirt.

While Michael helped me root around the pen box for a sharpie to sign with, the taller girl, who was hanging back quietly until now, leaned in and said, "Make it out to Kody and Jessy."

I said, "No way! One hoody, one name. It's not like you both can wear it."

"No, we totally can!" she insisted. "We're sisters."

"Yeah, we're sisters," Kody said.

"That's okay then," I said. "Can I use swear words when I sign it?"

Both: "YES!"

(Off to the side, I think the Books & Co. people were murmuring No No No.)

So I spread the sleeve out on the table and wrote in big letters:

For Kody and Jessy - Read, dammit! C. C. Finlay

Then they grabbed their hoody and ran off, and that was that.

Sharon, who'd been telling me stories about the time Garrison Keilor signed at the store from 5:00pm to almost 3:00 a.m., or the time Rachel Rae packed the place wall to wall, said, "In all the years we've been doing signings, that's the first time something like that has ever happened."

I felt bad, because it didn't exactly sound like a good thing.

Then Rae came over to me and said, "I'm so going to blog this."

"Not if I blog it first," I said.

"Oh, that's okay, I'll still never let you live it down."

( Here, are some pictures from the event, taken by the staff of Books & Co. )

Thanks to raecarson, stillnotbored, enggirl, lonfiction and Shelly, and Paul Ulrich for coming out to the event to seed the crowd. And thanks to Kody and Jessy for coming into the bookstore to get away from the concert. Now go read, dammit!

The Arizona Daily Sun has an article in today's paper: Sci-fi, fantasy writers descend on Flagstaff. Almost makes it sound like a plague!

But it's not, it's Starry Heaven, Sarah K. Castle (aka kellysarah)'s novel writing workshop based on what we've done the past six years in Ohio at Blue Heaven on Kelleys Island.

It's cool to see someone else take the idea and adapt it. And it sounds like they're having a very productive week in what is probably one of the most beautiful settings in America. Kudos to everyone there.

Thursday, June 25, 7:00-8:00 p.m.
Books & Co.
The Greene Shopping Center
4453 Walnut Street
Beavercreek, OH 45440
Phone: 937-429-2169
http://www.booksandco.com/


Monday, June 29, 5:00-6:30 p.m.
Barnes & Noble - The Ohio State University Book Store
1598 N High St
Columbus, OH 43201-1189
(614) 247-2000

The second event includes Tobias Buckell, New York Times best-selling author of HALO: The Cole Protocol.

I hope to see you there! Feel free to hang out and talk.

The Demon Redcoat, the third and final volume in the Traitor to the Crown series, is released in bookstores nationwide today!

On the history side, it's got John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, British cavalry commander Banastre Tarleton, the famous occultist Countess Cagliostro, the crazy and charismatic Lord Gordon, and King George III. Plus there are major events like the Gordon Riots, where a hundrd thousand angry people thronged the streets of London, and the controversial Waxhaws Massacre. The settings range from the docks of Boston to the Tuilleries Park in Paris to Lansdowne House and the Tower of London. And did I mention America's first great spy, a man I guarantee you've never heard of before this book?

Really, all of this was just too much fun to write.

So if that's the history part of "secret history", what's the rest of the story?

Cornwallis and Washington may be marching toward their final showdown at Yorktown, but Proctor and Deborah have a bigger battle to fight. The Covenant has summoned the demon Balfri, who attempts to possess Proctor and Deborah's newborn baby girl. The quest to stop Balfri carries Proctor to Spain, where he faces the witchcraft of the Basques, to France, where he needs the help of Benjamin Franklin, and to London, where the city is on fire and people are burned alive in the streets. While Deborah tries to hold the demon at bay in America, Proctor joins forces with King George to stop an ancient wizard and a supernatural danger that threatens the independence of both nations.

I'm not exactly an unbiased source, but I think it's the best book of the three.

If you still haven't made up your mind, Greg van Eekhout, aka gregvaneekhout, has generously offered a further inducement to buy The Demon Redcoat:

Hey, Charlie, I have an idea for a reader contest: The first person who buys all three of your books and provides a photo of all three of your books in their possession gets sent a free signed copy of Norse Code.

Norse Code is a contemporary fantasy about a renegade valkyrie and a runaway god who team up to stop the apocalypse. I love this book. I recommend checking it out.

So that's it: the complete trilogy, all three books published in just eight weeks, from April 28 until today. It's seemed even shorter because I just finished writing The Demon Redcoat in January! From the edits to rushing through three sets of galleys to jumping on promotion, I feel like I've hardly had time to catch my breath.

But today it's published.

I guess it's time to dig in and start working seriously on the next book!

My author copies of THE DEMON REDCOAT have arrived.

By now you may know my belief that author copies are just reader copies yearning to be free. A box full of author copies is like a box full of tail-wagging puppies begging for a good home or an armful of kittens looking for a lap fit for purring. Except there's no need to house train them or clean a litter box.

What do you have to do to have one for your very own?

Entertain me.

Finish the limerick started above, or write something else similarly topical, and if I like it, I'll ask for your address and mail you a book. If I'm vastly entertained--i.e., if there are lots of replies--I'll put names in a hat and select the winners at random. Although I guarantee that the best pun I've never seen before will definitely win something.

It seems like a fair exchange. You entertain me, and I'll send you something to entertain you.

THE DEMON REDCOAT takes Proctor and Deborah to dangers and places they've never seen before, from the birth of their first child to demonic possession to the city of London in flames. In the end, they must forge an unexpected alliance to defeat a threat bigger than either Great Britain or America.

To those of you who responded to my call for reviews of A SPELL FOR THE REVOLUTION, don't worry--your books will soon be on the way. Tomorrow morning, if I can get raecarson to help me pack them up tonight.

(In fact, A SPELL FOR THE REVOLUTION can still use more reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. It'd be great to see at least ten Amazon reviews. So if you've read the book already and post your opinion of it today, send me a link and I'll put you on the list.)

And if you think it's easier to write a limerick than a review, well... have at it!

My youngest is taking summer gym to get a headstart on his freshman year of high school. When I picked him up, I asked him what they did this afternoon.

Him: "We played ultimate frisbee--it may be the best game ever."

Me: "Do you know what the second best game is?"

Him: "Ummm...."

Me: "Penultimate frisbee!"

Him (mumbles): "Dear god, I hope it's not genetic."

I got my 9/11 news from television.

I followed the Katrina news with bloggers, mostly on livejournal.

And now I'm getting my Iran Election news--excuse me, #Iranelection news--on Twitter.

I don't think my attention span for news is decreasing....

Tagged by Sue Moe.

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

(in arbitrary order, not ranked)

1. Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs
2. Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
3. Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold
4. The Continental Op, Dashiell Hammett
5. The Ways of White Folks, Langston Hughes
6. The Night Manager, John Le Carre
7. Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith
8. The Long Tomorrow, Leigh Brackett
9. Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies, Tom de Haven
10. Silverlock, John Myers Myers
11. China Mountain Zhang, Maureen McHugh
12. This Way To The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadaeuz Borowski
13. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
14. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
15. Mention My Name In Atlantis, John Jakes

Barrayar is a stand-in for all of Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books. Borowski is here, but Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, which I read at the same time, ought to be paired with it. Leigh Bracket could have just as easily been listed with her Skaith books or Maureen McHugh for Mission Child. Delany's NOVA isn't on the list, which is probably a sign that I need to go reread it. I didn't pick any Patrick O'Brian novels because and can you pick?! But as soon as I say that, I vividly recall The Surgeon's Mate or The Truelove, which are probably my two favorite Aubrey and Maturin novels. And I left off Neal Stephenson -- I'd pick Zodiac for him, although it's not his best book, or maybe The Cobweb, which I still thrust upon people.

And on and on.

So really this is just a mostly random list of fiction that came to mind this evening... and now my fifteen minutes are up!

Tag yourself if you like.

So when I was sleeping in this morning I started dreaming a brand new Veronica Mars episode. The bad guy had tricked Veronica on to a helicopter and handcuffed her to it. He was planning to jump out to safety and let the helicopter crash.

Only Veronica convinced him to land it after he hurt his foot since he wouldn't be able to jump safely. I thought maybe she hurt it herself, but I didn't know because I came into the middle of the episode. Either way, I was so relieved!

But when the helicopter landed, the bad guy's shady-looking co-conspirator was there. He said "I should never have trusted you. If you want to do a job right, you have to do it yourself!" and he stomped over to the helicopter--the blades were spinning slowly--where Veronica was still handcuffed.

Because I was just a viewer, I looked around panicked for somebody to help. That's when I noticed Veronica's stalker watching the whole thing through a hole drilled in a glass block window in a bungalow at the edge of the landing pad. His shadow jumped back from the window and I thought "Yeah! He'll go start fighting the bad guys and it'll give Veronica a chance to get out of the handcuffs and escape!"

Only when he stepped out of the bungalow he said hi. Turned out it was some guy who recognized me. I didn't know where I knew him from, but I acted like we were friends. We were at a vacation site with a series of bungalows and he turned off the television sitting outside on his back patio. I asked him to turn it back on so I could find out what happened to Veronica!

That's when he started telling me that I needed to upgrade my quality of life and buy a hi-def tv. And maybe even get cable. I was hard to convince. I said I hardly ever watch television, just tv series on dvd. It seemed to work well enough for me.

But he was insistent. "I was skeptical too until I finally listened to music in hi-def. You won't believe what kind of difference it makes. Once I heard the twins singing, on the Billy Joel album, it changed my life!"

Which is, mercifully, when I awoke.

There's a review in the Chronicle of Higher Education of Nicholas Ruddick's new book The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction From Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel.

The author offers spirited opinions on the artistic and other merits of different works. Like science fiction, he writes, prehistoric fiction extrapolates from scientific discourse, in this case paleoanthropology. However, "as an aesthetic criterion, plausibility is far more important in both genres than fidelity to science," says the scholar, a professor of English at Saskatchewan's University of Regina.

Continuing the comparisons to SF, Ruddick shorthands prehistoric fiction to "pf" (lower-case, no doubt, because it's easier to type when you're texting your friends about these hot ideas) and traces it to Darwin and contemporary discoveries in 1859, the same year that the first pf story was written by Pierre Botard. Other writers in the tradition include H. G. Wells and Jack London.

The blurbs include one from Gary K. Wolfe, who was impressed by the scholarship and surprised by the conclusions. Has anyone read this? I may have to pick it up.