Today was Ascension Day, which is a public holiday in Germany. And because the weather was fine, we took the opportunity to drive up to the North Sea coast near Wilhelmshaven.
There’ll be some photos tomorrow, but for today I have a video for you, namely a new book trailer for Muse & Crisis.
You can see it below the cut. And don’t forget that you can watch all my book trailers at any time at the videos page. Continue reading
I’m a bit tired today, so here are two quick links instead of a full post:
First of all, I am interviewed by fantasy and horror author Ty Johnston at his blog today. Of all the interviews I’ve done so far, this one was my favourite, so come on over and say hello.
Jeff Vandermeer has an interesting post about entry points into fiction.
This is how we dispose of politicians in Lower Saxony: David McAllister, minister president of Lower Saxony (in case anybody is wondering about the name, McAllister’s parents are Scottish), and much of his cabinet went for a ride in a dragon boat on the lake known as the Zwischenahner Meer today. The boat capsized, dumping Mr McAllister and his cabinet into the lake.
This is how they dispose of politicians in Bavaria: Also today, the secretary of the interior of Bavaria, one Joachim Herrmann, was supposed to officially start construction work on a new road, when a dedger capsized with Mr Herrmann still inside.
Luckily, no one was hurt during the boating accident in Lower Saxony, while the Bavarian secretary got off with a sprained ankle and some scratches.
It was supposed to be just a relegation match between Hertha BSC Berlin and Fortuna Düsseldorf about which club gets to play in the first Bundesliga next year, of little interest to anybody who is not a fan of either club. Though one of my fifth graders was positively electrified today, since he happens to be a Fortuna Düsseldorf fan for reasons unknown. In the end, however, it was the craziest football match of the year, which had to be interrupted twice – the first time, because fans threw lit flares onto the pitch, and the second time, because Düsseldorf fans invaded the pitch two minutes before the referee ended the match and refused to leave until chased off by players and the police, prompting a twenty minute interruption. I ended up seeing the final three minutes (plus twenty minute interruption) on TV, when I switched over, because Psych was just so bad.
In the end, Fortuna Düsseldorf ascended to the first Bundesliga, though considering how chaotic the match was I would probably have broken it off and either declared Berlin the winner (since most of the troublemakers were Düsseldorf fans), ordered a repeat match in an empty stadium or disqualified ‘em both and promoted whoever was next in line.
Honestly, why do we even allow flares in football stadiums twenty-seven years after the Bradford City stadium fire? As for pitch invasions, the prevalence of those in Britain in the 1970s were a large part of the reason why the high steel fences were erected in British stadiums, which eventually caused the high death toll during the Hillsborough disaster. It’s also the memory of these disasters that makes me furious to see football fans behaving like jackasses today. I don’t want to see more people hurt in stadium disasters, because some fans can’t behave themselves. Plus, there are plenty of kids and teenagers in the audience, since the most fervent football fans are usually boys between 10 and 18.
And now for some genre and writing links:
At Booklife Now, Robert Jackson Bennett wonders about urban fantasy, genre definitions and genre boundaries.
Jay Lake has a great post about worldbuilding, technology and why doors shouldn’t slam on spaceships.
Jay Lake also points out this fascinating article on Rosemary’s Baby as a commentary on unease with feminism and the changing roles of women in the US in the late 1960s. The article also draws an interesting link to little known B-horror-films of the mid 1970s such as It lives and The Brood, both of which are pregnancy horror/monster baby flicks. I guess The Omen also fits in with this (though Damian was adopted, as far as I recall) and probably the vastly underrated The Fury as well.
Though personally, I’ve always found Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives a lot more horrifying in that respect than Rosemary’s Baby, probably because I really dislike the “evil child” trope and have always disliked it. Besides, when I first saw most of those films after private television finally brought them to our screens in the late 1980s, I was a teenager and more inclined to sympathize with the monster child than with the parents. But between those two and The Boys from Brazil (hapless women find themselves giving birth to and raising Hitler clones), I think it is safe to assume that Ira Levin had issues with women, pregnancy and feminism.
By the way, I’ve always found it striking how easy it would be to rewrite Rosemary’s Baby as a modern paranormal romance, since it basically has a very similar plot. Coincidentally, this also shows how much speculative fiction has changed in the past forty years, both with regard to the portrayal of women (Rosemary is everybody’s plaything) and the portrayal of the supernatural (sex with a demon was horror in 1968 and hot in 2012).
This year, Germans are experiencing the fairly unusual constellation that Mother’s Day (May 13) and Father’s Day (a.k.a. Ascension Day, which is on May 17) take place in the same week.
Now I’ve never been a big fan of Mother’s Day, because it reduces women only to motherhood and totally ignores all those women who aren’t mothers. If you want to celebrate women’s contributions to society – which I’m all for – why not do so on March 8, i.e. International Women’s Day?
As for Father’s Day, in Germany it has become little more than an excuse for young men (many of whom don’t even have children) to go out and get drunk. If it’s really supposed to be Father’s Day, shouldn’t those fathers be spending some time with their families? And why do they have to co-opt a religious holiday for Father’s Day?
Finally, if you really want to celebrate your parents, wouldn’t it be much better to be there for them on the other 364 days of the year rather than give them an overprized flower bouquet or an ugly tie on one day of the year?
However, today a discussion at school very sharply brought it home to me how celebrating Mother’s and Father’s Day excludes kids living in non-traditional families. Continue reading
Over at the Pegasus Pulp blog, I offer my take on the current discussion whether e-books will kill off genre fiction.
USA Today has a surprisingly good article about Fifty Shades of Grey and its implications for sexuality in America.
After the Bundeliga championship, Borussia Dortmund also won the German cup tonight, beating Bayern Munich 5:2. For our American friends, we’re talking about soccer here.
German actor Günther Kaufmann died yesterday aged only 64. Internationally, Kaufmann is best known for his parts in several of Rainer Werner Fassbinder films, but he was also a familiar face in German television and on the stage. Günther Kaufmann was probably the only person who appeared both in a Fassbinder film and I’m a celebrity, get me out of here! His last film was the comedy Türkisch für Anfänger (Turkish for Beginners). Günther Kaufmann lived in Bremen for a while, played at the local theatre and was involved in a bonafide stage scandal, when he appeared nude in Johann Kresnik’s play Die zehn Gebote (The Ten Commandments) and had simulated sex on stage – all in a church.
The Walking Dead had its somewhat belated German TV premiere tonight. I’m not a zombie fan, so I wasn’t interested enough to seek the show out. But since I had to stay up fairly late anyway to pick up my Mom from a dinner party in the city centre, I thought I’d give the show a try.
The verdict: Derivative and grimdark at its worst.
This applies only to the TV show BTW and not necessarily to the comic book it is based on.
Spoilers behind the cut: Continue reading
The King of Elfland’s Second Cousin weighs in on the current debate on the impending death of genre due to the rise of e-books that was kicked off by Charles Stross. I think anybody who believes that e-books will destroy the concept of genre should take a look at self-publisher fora like the Kindleboards to see that indie writers are even more wedded to the concepts and tropes of genre in many cases than traditional publishing ever was.
Lynn Viehl discusses inspiration and worldbuilding at Paperback Writer.
At his blog, Jay Lake wonders whether speculative fiction needs evil overlord type characters like Sauron and Voldemort or whether stories about morally ambiguous characters in conflict but with no clear-cut villains can be just as successful.
IMO the question isn’t whether books without clear-cut villains and with morally ambiguous characters in conflict can be successful, because they already are and have been for a long time now. For example, many romance novels do not have a villain in the traditional sense, though they have plenty of romantic rivals and other antagonists such as disapproving family members. And yet romance is the most successful genre of popular fiction. And even SFF can be enjoyable and successful without a clear “evil overlord” character. The problem is that some writers interpreted “shades of grey” as “Let’s give the reader a whole cast of equally loathsome characters and a world so unpleasant it would be improved if the Daleks invaded and killed everyone”.
While on the subject of shades of grey, at the Observer, James Bridle looks at the fanfiction origins of Fifty Shades of Grey and wonders whether the fanfiction community isn’t a fertile mining ground for new writers with established fan bases just waiting to be exploited by commercial publishers. Because obviously no one ever thought of that before (Hint: Trying to monetize fanfiction is usually a bad idea, particularly if attempted by someone not a member of the fanfic community) and because E.L. James is the first fanfiction author ever to make the transition to commercial publishing, since Cassandra Clare, Naomi Novik, Kelly Meding, Jane Seville and many others obviously don’t exist. Yup, it’s a majorly clueless article about fanfiction from the POV of the traditional mainstream media.
Meanwhile, Fifty Shades of Grey has been taken off the library shelves in one county in Florida for being “too pornographic”. Of course, this extremely negative and judgmental attitude towards sexuality in parts of the US is what has made a fairly unremarkable piece of erotic fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off like Fifty Shades of Grey so popular in the first place.
The nominations for the British Fantasy Awards have been announced. And after narrowly missing the Booker shortlist, British writer Jane Rogers has won the Arthur C. Clarke award for The Testament of Jessie Lamb. Considering how much controversy there was about the Clarke award earlier this year, this choice seems largely uncontroversial. After all, even Christopher Priest liked The Testament of Jessie Lamb.
Maurice Sendak, writer of Where the Wild Things Are and other popular children’s books, died aged 83. Unlike many others, I never read Where the Wild Things Are as a child and only encountered the book in the hands of my then little nephew who loved it so much that I bought him a Wild Thing action figure one year.
Vidal Sassoon, the hairstylist who invented the geometric cuts so popular in the 1960s, also died at age 84. The Guardian has a gallery of classic Sassoon hairstyles. Personally, I’ve never been a huge fan of the short Sassoon bobs and the non-hairstyle which Mia Farrow wears in Rosemary’s Baby (credited to Sassoon in the dialogue) must be one of the least flattering styles ever invented. Nonetheless, a lot of women obviously felt differently.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to comment on this Sunday’s elections in Schleswig-Holstein, France, Greece and Serbia – I just needed a post title.
Meanwhile, it seems we are still discussing the same topics we were discussing last week:
At Making Light, Abi Sutherland responds to Elizabeth Bear’s column in Clarkesworld about too much darkness and grimness in speculative fiction. The Bear column is linked in this post, by the way.
Charles Stross also briefly refers to the posts by Elizabeth Bear and Abi Sutherland before launching into a discussion whether the rise of e-books and the related change in sales channels and purchasing habits will spell the death of the concept of genre in general and the science fiction genre in particular. There is an annoying overuse of “curate” and “curation” (two words that should only ever be used in connection with museums, not blogs and bookstores) in the currently trendy usage, but otherwise his point is very interesting.
Though indie writers are often more wedded to narrow genre boundaries and stereotypical covers than the most traditional of the traditional publishers. On the Kindleboards, you constantly see posters ripping into perfectly good covers, because “they don’t accurately reflect the genre and no one will buy it”, you see beautiful and unique covers in signatures replaced by generic stock photo based covers that look like everything else out there or you see posters advising other posters that they should stick to a single genre or at least use different pen names for different genres. Now I obviously don’t take that advice, but it is still depressing to see how many indie writers try to squeeze themselves into smaller boxes than traditional publishing would ever demand from them.
Some writing advice from the masters: The Wall Street Journal has an article by John Irving on foreshadowing and writing endings.
More writing advice from the masters: The blog Dominus Lumiere reprints William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
The design magazine Print has an interesting article about romance novel cover design. Though I have to say that the examples shown in the article are exactly the sort of romance covers that drive me up the wall – ahistorical models in ahistorical clothing.
Print also has a good article on science fiction design and why the best SF design is largely a thing of the past.
As mentioned before, we went on a daytrip to the historical town of Celle on May 1st. For more information on why I have a troubled relationship with Celle, read the previous post.
Nonetheless, Celle is a lovely town, as evidenced by the photos under the cut: Continue reading
On May 1, which is a public holiday in Germany, we went on a daytrip to Celle, a town some 140 kilometres southeast of Bremen.
I hadn’t been in Celle for more than twenty years now, ever since in schooltrip there in 9th grade. That long ago schooltrip to Celle was truly a schooltrip from hell. None of our class really wanted to go to Celle – the teacher picked the destination because “he wanted to get to know us” and because it was nearby. Continue reading
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