A linkdump instead of an announcement

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Cora

I had planned to announce my latest e-book today, but Amazon is slow in putting the pages up, so that announcement will have to wait for tomorrow.

So instead of an e-book announcement, here is a linkdump:

I noted my dissatisfaction with the results of the National Public Radio Best Science Fiction and Fantasy poll before. It seems that I am not the only one unhappy with that poll (and even the longlist was seriously skewed towards certain subgenres, while almost completely omitting others). Nancy Jane Moore offers this list of 243 science fiction novels, suggested by the readers of the Book View Café. And at Dreamwidth, someone named eruthros has also called for nominations for an alternative list, though this one will include not just books and short stories, but also films, TV shows, comics and fanfiction.

Angry Robot Books introduces the pretty cool Worldbuilder project.

The 2011 longlist for the German Book Award (Deutscher Buchpreis), which is supposed to be the German language equivalent to the Booker Prize or Prix Goncourt, was announced yesterday. The longlist is a mix of established writers and debut authors. In general, the German book award has a decent track record of getting little known authors and unusual works on the long- and even on the shortlist (last year’s shortlist even included an SF novel of sorts), but winners tend to be very conventional fare, usually family sagas involving either the Third Reich or Communist East Germany or ideally both (the German Book Award judges love family sagas) or examinations of the lives of self-involved urban thirtysomethings, who are inevitably revealed to be shallow and selfish by the narrative, because they don’t want children and eat Vietnamese food* and don’t worry about the implications of terrorism all the time. Last year’s winner, a novel about the immigrant experience by a young Swiss writer, was actually one of the outliers.

Over at the Pegasus Pulp blog, you can also read how German TV almost discovered indie publishing.

*No, I have no idea what’s wrong with eating Vietnamese food either. As far I remember the excerpt of a shortlisted work I read several years ago, the problem was that Vietnamese food was considered normal, which it well should be after more than thirty years of immigration from Vietnam.

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Some trends in the SFF genre that I don’t enjoy at all

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Cora

Library Journal has an extensive article on new trends and new books in fantasy and science fiction.

The article actually does a good job of highlighting new work both in established subgenres as well as new developments. But it is marred by the smug insinuation that urban fantasy, steampunk and zombies are fading in popularity and were only a transient fad anyway, supported with quotes from various editors, which may well be taken out of context, so I won’t pass judgment on them. Though it is telling that of the four editors quoted, two work for houses that barely feature in my personal library at all. Continue reading →

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More August Search Term Weirdness

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Cora

August seems to be the month for weird searches, because I got some more really strange search strings in the past few days.

For example, someone apparently typed “wanking outdoors to passers by” into a search engine and landed at my blog. I have no idea why, since I am not in the top twenty results for that search term. Never mind that “wanking outdoors to passers-by” sounds like the sort of thing that can get you arrested real quickly.

Here is another gem that showed up among my searches: “can i be pregnant by a supernatural way?” First of all, it’s either “Can I be pregnant in a supernatural way?” or “Can I be pregnant by a supernatural being?” The answer in either case is no, by the way. That sort of thing only happens in the Bible or in certain bad SF films or TV shows.

This one, finally, was just puzzling: “phil ivey wsop 2011”. My first reaction was, “Who the fuck is Phil Ivey and what has he got to do with my blog?” A bit of googling revealed that WSOP stands for World Series of Poker, Phil Ivey is a professional poker player, who is boycotting the event this year to protest against an online poker site not paying out winnings to its customers. Which is a nice show of solidarity by Mr Ivey. I still have no idea what any of this has to do with my blog, though, especially since I don’t like poker and consider it somewhere behind snooker, cricket and curling in terms of excitement.

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Secret Menus and more on Charlotte Roche

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Cora

Chuck Wendig offers the secret menu of writing advice.

This is a great post, though I wonder whether secret menus in restaurants are primarily a US thing. Because I don’t know of any secret menus at German restaurants. That is, if a particular dish used to be on the menu and no longer is, many restaurants will still make it for you, if you ask for it and if they have the ingredients at hand. For example, in the restaurant where my cousin used to work as a chef, there was a particular sandwich that had been on the menu ages ago and that they would still make on request.

Still, secret menus in the US sense are a strange concept. I suppose they are intended to foster customer loyalty by making customers feel like part of a secret club, the ones who are in the know. But how useful is that idea when everybody knows the secret code. Even I know about the Animal Style burgers at In ‘n Out and I have never even set foot inside the chain.

***

A few days ago, I complained about the ubiquity of TV show host/interviewer turned confessional sex writer Charlotte Roche in the German media.

Now literary critic Dennis Scheck offers a fabulous take-down of Ms. Roche’s latest oeuvre in this clip from the arts and culture TV program Kulturzeit. Hilarious and oh so true.

Scheck is my favourite of all the literary critics that sometimes hold forth with their ponderings on German TV. And the best thing about him is that he is genre friendly and also recommends genre fiction and even graphic novels on his show.

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A new sales venue, emotional writing, plagiarism, women in epic fantasy and awesome feminist cartoons

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Cora

First of all, I have an announcement: Pegasus Pulp e-books are now available at OmniLit/AllRomance ebooks.

If you need one of the more exotic e-book formats (Palm, Microsoft Reader, Rocket) or are an international reader who wants to avoid the two dollar Amazon surcharge, you may want to look at OmniLit/AllRomance.

Damien Walter has a great post on emotions and writing.

As Smart Bitches, Trashy Books points out, romantic suspense and paranormal romance writer Cynthia Eden has been plagiarized. A fanfic writer calling themselves Misconception76 has taken the words of Cynthia Eden’s novel Deadly Heat, turned it into a piece of Twilight fanfiction by changing the names of the characters to Edward and Bella and posted the whole thing on fanfic.net. However, the self-policing of the fanfiction community seems to have worked, because the story has been taken down.

Juliet McKenna has a great post on the representation of women in epic fantasy at Bad Reputation, a feminist pop culture blog.

Bad Reputation also offers lots of more good stuff, including this appreciation of She-Ra, Princess of Power, He-Man’s much cooler sister.

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Linkdump for a Wet Weekend

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Cora

There are new posts over at the Pegasus Pulp and ABC Buhlert blogs, so today’s a linkdump day for this blog: Continue reading →

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The British riots and their reflection in contemporary British pop culture

Posted on August 14, 2011 by Cora

Slate has an article on the British riots (well, English, since there was no rioting in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), with a headline claiming that British writers and filmmakers had foreseen the social gap that would eventually break open so violently.

It’s a longish article and mostly a general overview of the riots. Only two paragraphs are actually about what the headline promises, namely how writers and filmmakers had tackled the social problems in contemporary Britain before they became too big and too violent to ignore. Behind the cut are the two paragraphs in question: Continue reading →

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Searchterm Weirdness August Edition

Posted on August 13, 2011 by Cora

Looking through the terms people typed into their favourite search engine to get here is always a fascinating glimpse into other people’s brains.

For example, I always had the sneaking suspicion that many people subscribe to HBO not so much because of the high quality of the programming offered there (because frankly, the quality isn’t all that hot), but mainly because HBO shows have sex scenes and quite a few of them. And as if to prove my point, I regularly get search strings like “what are HBO shows with good sex”, which lead the googlers to this post, which is one of the most popular on this site, because it attracts a lot of random porn googlers.

Talking of porn googler, someone landed at the same post by typing “american girl sexbad” into a search engine, “sexbad” as one word. I’m not even sure what this person was looking for. Confirmation that American women are bad in bed? In that case, I can’t help, because I have never slept with an American woman. Of course, it’s also possible that the googler was one of those creepy men’s rights types, who believe that American women are all spoiled and way too feminist and slutty and divorce happy, therefore American women should be boycotted in favour of women from abroad. Good for American women I say. Though part of me would love to see what happens when those creepy men’s rights types meet German or Dutch or Scandinavian women who are a lot less tolerant of sexist bullshit than many Americans.

Almost as fun as the porn googlers are people who misspell the words they type into Google. Of course, it is perfectly possible to mistype a word. It happened to me plenty of times. And some mistypings clearly indicate dyslexia. However, when the same word and the same search string is misspelled again and again, you start to wonder.

For example, today someone typed “is pliagerism a big issue in universitie” into a search engine and landed on one of my plagiarism posts. I don’t mean to sound judgmental, but if you’re attending university, maybe you should know how to spell “plagiarism” and “university”, even if you have no clue why plagiarism is wrong. On the other hand, if whoever misspelled that particular search string ever tries to plagiarize a term paper, catching him or her won’t be much of an issue. Just look for the bits that are spelled correctly.

As for other misspelled search terms, I had three visitors to this website misspell “prejudice” as “preduice” in the past few days. This might actually be due to dyslexia, but I still find it odd that all three visitors who mistyped “prejudice” were looking for information about class prejudice – pardon, preduice – in the Guardian.

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A Poll with Predictable Results

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Cora

National Public Radio has released its publicly voted upon list of the 100 best SF and fantasy novels.

Very unsurprisingly, the list is heavily weighed towards “the classics” (Lord of the Rings at No. 1, Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy at No. 2) and books that are often assigned at schools (1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451). I suspect that the school factor also pushed Ender’s Game to No. 3, because it really isn’t that good. There’s also a strong bias towards classic golden age SF and post 1970 epic fantasy. A Song of Ice and Fire, Wheel of Time, Shannara, Thomas Covenant, the Belgariad, Mistborn, even Terry Goodkind’s series which no one admits to reading are all there.

There are also some total WTF choices. I mean, Patrick Rothfuss at No. 18? I know a lot of people like his books, but how did he get in the top 20? And The Silmarillon at No. 46? I thought only die-hard Lord of the Rings fans read that one and even for die-hard fans it’s tough going. And World War Z by Max Brooks? Yes, I know that the zombie apocalypse is a hot trend and World War Z is one of the better examples of the genre. But is this really the 54th best SFF book of all time? The Thawn trilogy, a media tie-in, albeit a rather good one, made it onto the longlist, let alone the shortlist? Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera made it into the top 100, but the Dresden Files did not? And Small Gods is one of the less memorable Pratchetts IMO. Besides, no Samuel Delany? No Alfred Bester? No Thomas Pynchon? No Tim Powers? No Joanna Russ?

The longlist was rather biased in itself, because it omitted all YA fantasy and SF, i.e. no Harry Potter, no Narnia, no Twilight, no Hunger Games, no Dark Materials, no Hobbit. There was also hardly any urban fantasy on the longlist, as I already reported here, and what little there was (Kim Harrison, Neil Gaiman and Charles de Lint) largely did not make it into the top 100. I think the closest thing to urban fantasy in the top 100 are Neverwhere and American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

The percentage of women and writers of colour is also depressingly low. There are 15 books by women in the top 100 and zero books by writers of colour as far as I can tell. Of course, there only were two writers of colour on the longlist to start with (three guesses who), but there was a fair amount of women.

To be fair, I voted for 3 women (only one of whom made the top 100) as opposed to 7 men, but that was largely because the books by women on the longlist were not necessarily favourites of mine, though I voted for at least one of them to support a whole subgenre rather than because I absolutely loved that particular author. Besides, several of my male choices didn’t make it either. Coincidentally, I deliberately did not vote for Lord of the Rings, because I knew it didn’t need my help and I’d rather save my vote for a book that does. I did vote for two of the top ten books, but both of those book were genuine mindchangers and mindblowers for me.

Cheryl Morgan weighs in on the poll results, mostly focusing on the low percentage of female writers.

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Best Book Trailer Ever – and a Pulp Plug

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Cora

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books post the best book trailer ever. The trailer was made by historical romance writer Tessa Dare for Maya Banks’ new series of Scotland set historical romances and features Barbies, GI Joes, the Red Skull, My Little Pony and various other toys in the starring roles.

I actually found the Barbie and GI Joe reenactments of the trilogy less anachronistic than the actual covers, which feature very modern looking models and the women in very modern looking lingerie. Which is kind of depressing, if you think about it.

And now a plug: The Pulp Magazine Project is the online presence of what promises to be an open access digital archive dedicated to preserving the pulp magazines of the late 19th and early 20th century. This appears to be the pulp magazine equivalent to the Stanford Dime Novel and Story Paper Collection, which has a great website as well.

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