Science Fiction, Politics and an Apology to Václav Havel

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Cora

Yesterday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died aged 69, mourned by collective mass crying in his own country and largely unlamented elsewhere. We can only hope that this will improve the situation of the people of North Korea.

There’s been another death of world political importance in the past two days, one that was mourned worldwide, for for playwright, dissident and former Czech president Václav Havel died aged 75.

Like Christa Wolf, the East German writer who died a few weeks ago, hearing Václav Havel’s name always triggered a mental apology inside me. Because he was another writer whom I’d been angry at – though far briefer than at Ms. Wolf – for the completely wrong reason. Continue reading →

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Snow 2011

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Cora

Today we had the first snow of the winter. That is, we had some snow on Friday and Saturday as well, but it melted as soon as it hit the ground. Today, however, the snow actually reached the ground and turned the landscape white, even though it only lasted for a few hours.

For visual proof, here are some photos behind the cut: Continue reading →

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A Surfeit of Salmon – and some links

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Cora

There are two things we’ve really had enough of this December. One is storms and rain. Here in Northern Germany, December is always a stormy month. I don’t even put any outdoors Christmas decorations up anymore, because in past years there would always be one or two storms in December to tear them down again and send me scrambling all over the garden to pick up plastic Christmas balls. This year is particularly nasty, though. It basically hasn’t stopped raining and storming for three weeks now.

The other thing we really have enough of is smoked salmon. Since my Dad is still working part-time, even though he crossed the pension age threshold years ago – take that Richard David Precht – my parents still get Christmas presents from my Dad’s business partners, though not nearly as much as in the glory days of the early 1980s. And next to perennially popular gifts such as calendars, packages of smoked salmon are one of the most common corporate Christmas presents. I’m not sure why smoked salmon is so popular. Okay, so smoked salmon used to be something of a luxury, but it hasn’t been in a long time now. Besides, it doesn’t keep that long and can be really messy, if the plastic packaging is damaged. Perhaps companies just switched to smoked salmon, because wine and hard liquor, which used to be very common in the 1980s, are no longer politically correct.

At any rate, my parents always have a lot of smoked salmon in December. This year, they got even more than usual, because a week or so after the first (expected) package of smoked salmon showed up, an unexpected package appeared as well. And those packages are huge. And since my parents can’t eat it all on their own – especially considering my mother doesn’t even like smoked salmon – I always get a generous share. Which is fine by me, because I happen to like smoked salmon. Nonetheless, I have been eating the stuff almost every day for the past week or so and I won’t be sad when the last of it is gone.

And now for some links:

At Genreality, Ken Scholes goes into the differences between writing novels and short fiction in response to a currently raging discussion I blogged about here.

Jay Lake has a post on the advantages and challenges of writing sequels.

Kathleen Valentine posts a few accounts of St Nicholas Day traditions practiced by the descendants of German settlers in Pennsylvania. I found these fascinating, particularly since I recognize the echoes of some German and Dutch customs such as our own “Nikolauslaufen” (explained here) and the Dutch Zwarte Piet characters in these accounts.

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Two December Deaths

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Cora

Yesterday, one of my favourite German actors, Walter Giller, died aged 84.

I first encountered Walter Giller in the TV comedy show Locker vom Hocker in the late 1970s. Later I saw the young Walter Giller in many a harmless comedy or romance from the 1950s. He also starred in one of my favourite German films of all time, Rosen für den Staatsanwalt (Roses for the Prosecutor) from 1959. And unlike the various romantic comedies, Rosen für den Staatsanwalt was nightmare fodder at the age of 13 (a particularly lurid one it was, too, about being chased by the machine gun wielding father of a classmate who just happened to be a prosecutor) and a hard hitting satire at the age of 20. Besides, it’s just a wonderful film at any age.

Walter Giller was happily married for more than fifty years to another star of German postwar cinema, Nadja Tiller. Separately, they appeared in two of the finest German films of the 1950s, namely in Rosen für den Staatsanwalt (Walter Giller) and Das Mädchen Rosemarie (Nadja Tiller). If you only wanted to watch two German films in your life, these two would be excellent choices. In later years, they usually appeared together. Their last film was Dinosaurier (Dinosaurs) from 2009, a neat comedy about senior citizens stealing back the money they were scammed out of by a greedy banker which stars several stars of German postwar cinema.

Only a week or so ago, I read an article about Walter Giller and Nadja Tiller in one of my Mom’s gossip magazines. The article was about the failing health of Nadja Tiller, but in the end he was the one who died first.

At the supermarket today, I actually considered buying a tin of Scho-Ka-Kola, the chocolate that initiates the events in Rosen für den Staatsanwalt, in honour of Walter Giller.
But I don’t like Scho-Ka-Kola, so in rememberance of Walter Giller, here is the opening of Rosen für den Staatsanwalt (Roses for the Prosecutor) from 1959.

There has also been another death today, that has gained more international attention, but means less to me personally: British writer and critic Christopher Hitchens died aged 62 of complications of oesophagal cancer.

Pre-internet, public intellectuals were usually only known in their own country, so I didn’t know of Hitchens until I got on the internet. I think I first came across Christopher Hitchens shortly after September 11, 2001, when he added to the cacophony of anti-muslim and pro-war voices at the time, which did not exactly leave a good first impression, though he did seem more articulate than the usual anti-muslim screacher at the time. He sounded so American that I was surprised to find he was actually British. In later years, I mainly knew him as a very outspoken atheist in the Richard Dawkins vein, which meant that he got plenty of arseholish comments once he got cancer.

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Short Stories versus Novels

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Cora

Writer Richard Parks shares his thoughts on the short stories versus novels issue, based on a panel at the 2002 World Fantasy Con. Jay Lake responds here.

I agree with Richard Parks and Jay Lake that it’s useless for a writer to try to “break in” via short stories, if he or she actually hates writing short stories and would much rather be writing novels. Never mind that short fiction as an entry path mainly exists in the science fiction and fantasy genre and to some degree in literary fiction, because those genres actually have a vibrant short fiction scene. However, if you’re writing in a genre that has maybe one or two short fiction markets at most, entrance pathways will most likely be different. For example, the time honoured way for romance writers to break into the business used to be via writing category romances for Harlequin/Mills and Boon or similar, long defunct lines such as Loveswept or Signet Regency.

I also agree that short stories and novels are different beasts, yet I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the skill sets needed to write either form are radically different. It’s rather that many of the craft aspects are the same, though the focus is different, e.g. a short story will necessarily place much less importance on worldbuilding than a novel. On the other hand, short stories are far better suited to experimentation than full length novels.

I’m one of those people who can write both and indeed Pegasus Pulp is almost entirely stocked with my backlist short fiction. Nonetheless, the longer lengths, i.e. anything from novelette on up, come more naturally to me than flash fiction. One thing I have noticed since I started indie publishing is that I’m not just writing more short fiction, I’m also enjoying it more. Because previously, I would always interrogate every idea for a short story that popped into my head with “Is this viable? Can I sell this anywhere?” And if the answer was “no”, I’d forget the short story and focus on the novel instead. Now, however, I know that even if a story does not find a market, I can still self-publish it, short stories have suddenly become viable again. More importantly, they have suddenly become exciting again.

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Stormy December Linkdump

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Cora

At SF Signal, Daniel Abraham has written a letter from genre to mainstream. Quite amusing, even if it does read like a letter from a stalkerish ex-boyfriend.

On a related note, at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books there is an interesting post about why fans of paranormal romance are that much more enthusiastic and fanatic than fans of contemporary romance. Thanks to Estara for the link.

Though I’m not sure that I buy the thesis that paranormal fans are more enthusiastic and engaged, because science fiction and fantasy have a more active fandom culture and are used to banding together against those who would disparage their favoured genre. Because the overlaps between SFF fandom and paranormal romance readers isn’t all that big – indeed, SFF fandom does its utmost to pretend that paranormal romance and urban fantasy don’t exist. Besides, no genre is more disparaged than romance.

At the Book View Café, Deborah J. Ross has a great post on villains, evil and the other. Some very good observations there, including that the old view of vampires as unambiguous monsters is linked to othering.

At Inkpunks, Andrew Romine talks about Star Trek and how silly it is that writers, particularly SFF writers, are afraid of repetition. Again, he’s got a point there. It’s not just that Star Trek is formulaic as hell (I’ve been recently rewatching the original series, the only Star Trek I can still watch), but also that characters are far more important than plots. Think about what it is that makes me love one police procedural show on TV, but immediately change the channel at another, even though the actual cases and mysteries are very similar, it always comes down to the characters. If I love the characters, I’ll watch the show. If I don’t, it doesn’t matter how good your mystery is.

USA Today has an interesting interview with Lilith Saintcrow. Found via Jay Lake.

The linguistics blog Language Log is trying to push a new word: Assholocracy.

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Misfits Series 3, Episode 4

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Cora

So far I’ve enjoyed every episode of Misfits, some more than others. This is really the first episode I didn’t like. In fact, I held off watching it for several days, because the “Next time” trailer at the end of last week’s episode looked so god-awful and I strongly expected that I would hate it. In the end, I didn’t hate it quite as much as I feared I would, but I certainly didn’t like it nor will I be rewatching it anytime soon. And it’s not really necessary to ever rewatch this episode either, because nothing, absolutely nothing that happens has any impact on the ongoing storyline.

This episode of Misfits combines two of my least favourite tropes ever, parallel universes and Nazis.

Warning: There will be spoilers below the cut. Continue reading →

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And yet another plagiarism case

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Cora

Yet another plagiarism case has popped up, this time concerning uncanny similarities between Lenore Hart’s 2011 novel The Raven’s Bride and Cothburn O’Neal’s 1956 novel The Very Young Mrs. Poe. Both novels deal with Virginia Clemm, cousin and teenaged bride of Edgar Allan Poe.

The blog The World of Edgar Allan Poe broke the story and also offers examples here.

Suspense writer Jeremy Duns, whom we already know from the Q.R. Markham plagiarism affair, weighs in here with further examples and quotes from a apologia by Ms. Hart.

The Guardian also reports on the case and on Ms. Hart’s explanations that she and Cothburn O’Neal both used the same sources. This sort of thing can indeed happen to writers of historical fiction. For example, I based the garrotting scene in El Carnicero on an eye witness account of a garrotting by American journalist Richard Ford in his Gatherings from Spain. Some time later, I read the 1951 novel Goya oder Der arge Weg der Erkenntnis (English title: This is the Hour) by German historical novelist Lion Feuchtwanger and came across a very familiar garrotting scene. Yes, it turned out that Feuchtwanger had used the same eye witness account as source material (not surprising, since there aren’t a whole lot of eye witness accounts of garrottings and even fewer in English). However, there is a difference here, because I did not copy Richard Ford’s account verbatim and neither did Feuchtwanger. Because even if two writers of historical fiction copy verbatim from the same source independently from each other, it’s still plagiarism.

Alas, her publisher seems to accept Ms. Hart’s explanations, because they are standing by her according to this New York Times report.

Meanwhile, arch-plagiarist Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg has a new job as the EU adviser on internet freedom of all things. Now Guttenberg or rather his ghostwriter certainly knows how to use the Internet to write doctoral dissertations.

However, let’s not forget that Guttenberg also promoted a highly controversial bill regarding the federally mandated blocking of websites. Supposedly, the blocks were only intended to target child porn websites (Mr zu Guttenberg’s wife is an anti-child-porn activist), but internet activists suspected that child porn was just a way of getting public approval for the bill (for who could argue against initiatives against child porn?) and that the real target were torrent websites and in the long run any website disliked by the German government. So making someone who pushed and backed what was essentially an internet censorship bill the EU advisor on internet freedom would be pretty rich, even if he wasn’t a plagiarist. Particularly since Guttenberg accused everybody opposed to the bill of defending child porn back in the day.

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My stand on KDP Select

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Cora

I’ve got a post over at the Pegasus Pulp blog about the whole KDP Select thing and my stand on it. Come on over and read it.

In other links, Jay Lake has an interesting post about the challenges of setting description facing science fiction and fantasy writers in an age of photorealistic CGI special effects.

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Two Quick Links for an Advent Sunday

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Cora

Good news: Two more of the missing Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s have been found, namely episode 3 of the first Doctor story Galaxy Four, a story which was completely lost except for a brief clip, and episode 2 of the second Doctor story The Underwater Menace, of which there are now two surviving episodes.

Many classic BBC programs, including more than 100 individual Doctor Who episodes, were lost to an archive cleansing spree in the 1970s, so it’s good to see that some episodes are still popping up in forgotten archives and collections. I actually found some film rolls with lost BBC programs in a closet at the university and facilitated their safe return to the BBC archives. Alas, it was documentaries and educational programming not something cool like Doctor Who or Top of the Pops.

USA Today has a nice interview with Marjorie M. Liu.

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