Stromata Blog

A “Golden Age” of Fantasy?

Like you, I pretty much gave up on “High Fantasy” after dozing through the tenth or twentieth Tolkien knock-off. Similarly to their earlier cognates, the medieval romances, these books grew longer and drearier every year.

But perhaps the genre isn’t doomed. At least, Orson Scott Card, no mean judge, thinks not. Au contraire, he avers, “the creative energy of speculative fiction has been migrating from sci-fi to fantasy”. He has some particular commendations:

Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy is new but complete, so there’s no waiting to get the end of the story. The motley cast of talented misfits is trying to bring down a thousand-year empire (try to avoid thinking “reich”), but the heroes discover to their dismay that, bad as the empire was, it was holding back something even worse.

Or if you want to get in on the ground floor, look at Sanderson’s newest hardcover, Warbreaker — a whole new magic system, with graustarkian intrigue at the highest level.

Patrick Rothfuss creates a fascinating bildungsroman with his The Name of the Wind. It is extravagantly a “tale told in an inn” — each volume in the series is one night’s storytelling by a hero who insists he has retired from the business.

Lamentation, by Ken Scholes, begins with what looks like a nuclear explosion that destroys an entire city. Only one survivor walked away — a mechanical man named Isaak. He has no memory of what caused the explosion, but in the turmoil after the destruction, he becomes an observer and a participant in all the politics and warfare and magic. He begins to discover the secret behind all the magic — including his own existence.

These are merely some of the most recent. Once you realize how much excellent literature is scattered between the reefs of vampire novels in the sci-fi and fantasy section of the bookstore, you’ll enjoy prowling through the backlist.

Well, I can’t say whether these encomia are well deserved. I do, however, stand in awe of OSC’s ability to absorb vast numbers of words. What these volumes, and most of those that he recommends from the “backlist”, have in common is length. I wonder how many of them need all those words to tell their stories.

J. R. R. Tolkien had a reason – or two reasons – for taking three volumes to tell The Lord of the Rings. First, he didn’t care much whether it pleased anyone but himself. Second, he had spent his entire life “sub-creating” Middle Earth. He knew all about its lands and seas and cities and peoples, along with their myths, legends and history. What he wrote down, abundant as it was, was just a fraction of what was in his mind.

Is the same true of any contemporary trilogist? The longer the tale, the greater the proportion that runs the risk of being mere generic padding: the same old highways and inns and mountains and villages and wizards and maidens and battles that one has seen a score of times before. Will an enterprising publisher offer talented young writers this deal? Turn in a complete story 256 pages long, and we’ll double your royalties. The idea would be to distill rather than dilute. I’d like to see what Messrs. Sanderson and Rothfuss and Scholes could do under that regimen.

Bits and Pieces from Westercon

Westercon, the movable west-of-El-Paso-east-of-the-Pacific regional, no longer draws a couple of thousand fans on Independence Day weekend, but a lot of the attendees (about 700 this year) are people I know, and in programming, parties and SF gossip it remains in the convention Big Leagues.

Tempe is very hot and not as dry as advertised. The convention venue, the Mission Palms (to be the site of the North American Discworldcon over Labor Day weekend), offsets the heat with ferocious air conditioning. It is located in the middle of a restaurant-dense downtown area. On the night of the Fourth, the pool deck offered a splendid view of Tempe’s forty-minute fireworks show.

To start with unhappy news, I learned that Khen Moore, a Southern fan best known for his incredible art collection, died a few days ago. He had been ill for a long time, suffering the effects, sadly, of inveterate alcoholism. While I didn’t know him well, we had a few pleasant chats, and he thoughtfully pointed out to me where I could buy a print of an Alan Clark painting that he had commissioned and I had admired. It’s not clear yet whether he left a will and made arrangements for the disposition of his paintings. If he didn’t, I’m much afraid that Tennessee probate costs will lead to distress sales and the effective loss of a number of excellent pieces of art. (Let that be a warning to all of you who keep putting off will making till the Greek calends.)

Worldcon bidding has not emerged from its lull. Reno, unopposed for 2011, threw a couple of nights of reasonably good parties. Chicago, unopposed for 2012, had a bid table but no party. Texas will announce a 2013 bid at Anticipation; the city is a secret (at least from me). I predict San Antonio, which was a delightful site in 1997. Also on the verge of announcement is a British bid for 2014, reportedly for the London dockyards (overbuilt for the 2012 Olympics and therefore cheap). San Diego has made noises about 2015, though I’ve heard nothing new for several months and am told that there is local skepticism. Japanese fans have politely informed reliable sources that they’d like to bid again in 2017 and establish a once-a-decade tradition à la Australia.

And that’s it. No year has more than one likely bid, and the out-years are not promising. I’d bet a great deal that Los Angeles will pounce on 2016, or on 2015 if San Diego looks shaky. If anyone in Boston is currently enthusiastic about campaigning for any year, he, she or it is keeping very quiet. Philadelphia is equally mute. Balto-Wash will surely bid someday. Alas, the local fans seem to be waiting for the D.C. city council to give the go-ahead for a hotel adjoining the new convention center. Cargo cults will have their prayers answered more quickly.

There are moments when I muse that we ought to give up selecting cities and vote instead for con committees, leaving it up the winner to come up with a place. I look forward to the epic battle of Yalow vs. Standlee.

Westercon bidding is tame, too. Glenn Glazer’s San Jose bid won unopposed for 2011, and Seattle has announced for 2012. If chosen, it will use either the Marriott or the Hilton at SeaTac airport.

Those looking for a contest may have to be content with the NASFiC. Raleigh has been running all alone to host the North American regional in 2010, when the Worldcon will be held in Australia. Since the filing deadline has passed, it ought to be a shoo-in, but late word is that next year’s Westercon (Pasadena) is launching a write-in bid to add the NASFiC to its banner. If the effort is serious, it will be interesting. Having good friends on both bidcomms, I am going to declare my strict neutrality and tell no one (maybe not even myself) how I vote.

I’d have more to say about the program – one of my retirement resolutions is to attend panels rather than simply look at them in the program book and intend to show up – but I found myself preoccupied with finishing my Hugo reading. (The voting deadline was Friday night, so, if you didn’t cast your ballot, it’s too late now and you have no right to curse the idiots who picked the winners.) For various reasons, I’d put this task off. Hence, I absorbed in a short time what some subset of fandom thinks were the best works of 2008.

This concentrated reading left one particularly strong impression: Our contemporary writers are fascinated by bold new ideas but not too interested in making them into genuine stories. I’ll single out one especially blatant example, Robert Reed’s Best Novella nominee “Truth”. The concept is fine: a lone time traveler who, wanting to destroy Western civilization, arranges to be captured shortly after 9/11, pretends to be one soldier in an army invading from the future, and tricks his too-clever interrogators into taking the counterproductive actions that will bring about his goal. In precis, it sounds like a great story, and a sufficiency of nominators must have seen its potential. In fact, however, we are never told how the saboteur carried out his mission, and its unraveling is heavier on atmospherics than ratiocination. In the end, the tale remains potential rather than realized. It is not alone among the nominees.

One program item that I will mention is the panel on “Did Shakespeare Write Shakespeare?”, where Rick Foss found himself moderating between two anti-Stratfordians. Since one of them was Eric Flint, the session was basically a monologue. Mr. Flint, who doesn’t pretend to be a deep student of the “authorship question”, declared his support for the fatuous idea that a whole bunch of playwrights used “William Shakespeare” as a handy pseudonym. (Yeah, if I wrote Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, I’d let some angel take the credit, too.) His “decisive” argument against Shakespeare of Stratford’s having been the sole author (making allowances for occasional collaboration, as with Fletcher on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen and with Middleton on Pericles) was that “he retired permanently to Stratford in 1604” – a “fact” about which his certainty was unshakeable, even though there’s not a shred of reason to believe it. For the rest, he expounded some of the standard anti-Stratfordian delusions, e. g., that Venus and Adonis is exceptionally learned and that the Stratford Man made his money as a “grain trader”. To give credit where it’s due, he also had the good sense to knock down some of his own side’s stale chestnuts; as an author himself, he knows that Shakespeare didn’t have to visit Italy in order to use it as a setting.

Oh, I mustn’t overlook a personal milestone. At the Westercon business meeting, I spoke on the prevailing side on a motion. That hasn’t occurred at any business meeting at any convention (including the mock business meeting at the Colorado Springs SMOFCon) since 1986.

To conclude, it was an enjoyable Westercon, arguably the most satisfactory in several years. My hope is that this, the oldest of continuous science fiction conventions after the Worldcon itself, is now on an upswing.

On Dune and Headland Sinks the Fire

Compuserve, on whose forums so many fannish flame wars were fought out, is no more. Truly, the Cretaceous Era of the Internet has ended.

Hugo Bound

With commendable celerity, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention (Anticipation, Montreal, August 6–10, 2009) has announced the Hugo Award nominees. The total number of nominating ballots, 799, well exceeded last year’s surprising and disappointing 483. Except for the anomalously high Nippon 2007 total, the turnout was the best we’ve seen in years. Here is what the fiction categories look like:

Best Novel (639 Ballots Cast)

Anathem by Neal Stephenson
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

I’ve read and commented on Anathem. The other nominees look like an interesting lot. Of course, “interesting” and “Hugo worthy” aren’t necessarily synonymous. Judging purely by “heard on the street”, I’d rank Saturn’s Children as the favorite. Not only does Charlie Stross have a devoted following, but the premise (robots trying to carry on the traditions of extinct humanity) is fascinating on its face. All of the other nominated authors have followings, too, but their books have aspects that weaken their Hugo prospects: Anathem may be too weighed down by philosophical musings. The Graveyard Book is fantasy, and children’s fantasy, too (which didn’t stop Harry Potter, but is a definite handicap). Little Brother is heavily political. Zoe’s Tale builds on wildly implausible premises.

Best Novella (337 Ballots Cast)

‘‘The Erdmann Nexus’’ by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)
‘‘The Political Prisoner’’ by Charles Coleman Finlay (F&SF Aug 2008)
‘‘The Tear’’ by Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)
‘‘True Names’’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum & Cory Doctorow (Fast Forward 2)
‘‘Truth’’ by Robert Reed (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)

Best Novelette (373 Ballots Cast)

‘‘Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders’’ by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s Jan 2008)
‘‘The Gambler’’ by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2)
‘‘Pride and Prometheus’’ by John Kessel (F&SF Jan 2008)
‘‘The Ray-Gun: A Love Story’’ by James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
‘‘Shoggoths in Bloom’’ by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s Mar 2008)

Best Short Story (448 Ballots Cast)

‘‘26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’’ by Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Jul 2008)
‘‘Article of Faith’’ by Mike Resnick (Baen’s Universe Oct 2008)
‘‘Evil Robot Monkey’’ by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2)
‘‘Exhalation’’ by Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
‘‘From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled’’ by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Feb 2008)

I haven’t read enough of the short fiction nominees to say anything even tentatively about their merits. One striking point is the continued steady inroad of anthologies into territory once dominated by the traditional print magazines. This year the mags have nine of 15 nominations. Last year it was 11. Way back in 2000, every single one came from Asimov’s, F&SF or Analog, save for an interloper from the semi-prozine Interzone. We are decidedly in a golden age of SF anthologies, though I can’t figure out why.

OTOH, the golden age of SF on the Web still still awaits: Just one nominee this year appeared in an on-line publication. In some recent years, there have been as many as two. If the preferences of Hugo nominators are any indicator, ink and paper remain the media of the future.

Further down the ballot, the experimental Best Graphic Story category drew 212 nominating ballots, the least of any except Best Fan Artist. Such a show of interest doesn’t encourage me to think that this is a good addition to a set of awards that is already generally regarded as overcrowded. On the positive side, I am delighted that my old friend Phil Foglio and his wife Kaja gained a nomination for Girl Genius 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones.

Best Fan Writer has reverted to the mean after the two-year Scalzi Incursion: Chris Garcia, John Hertz, Dave Langford, Cheryl Morgan and Steven H Silver. Ironically, a collection of Scalzi fan (or at least miscellaneous) writing, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008, is a nominee for Best Related Book.

Mr. Scalzi is also involved with one of the odder candidates: an audiobook anthology called “METAtropolis” that is competing for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Either it’s truly terrific, or 2008 was a really weak year for movies (or both, which is how I would bet).

The deadline for voting hasn’t been announced yet. On past form, it will be in early July.

Philip José Farmer, R.I.P.

Philip José Farmer died last Wednesday at age 91. Others are better suited to memorialize him. My only contribution is a literary-historical footnote.

As every obituary will tell you, Farmer’s first published work was “The Lovers” (Startling Stories, August 1952), which is famous as the first story centering on sex to appear in a reputable science fiction magazine. What most fans think they know about the story’s history is epitomized in this typical account:

Now travel back in time to the early 1950s. A young new writer, struggling to support his family by working overtime in a steel mill, submits his first piece of science fiction to Astounding. John W. Campbell doesn't want it. The writer sends the story to H. L. Gold at Galaxy, but the manuscript is again returned. The story is just too mature for a genre marketed toward adolescent males: “there is no sex in science fiction”. Disgruntled, the writer resigns to try one last time and submits the story to Sam Mines at Startling Stories. This time comes a different response. Mines, sensing he has a winner, albeit a controversial one, buys the story and publishes it in his August 1952 issue. The story is The Lovers, and the unknown author bears the strangely exotic sounding name of Philip José Farmer.

So much for the legend. The author himself presented the history in a fanzine article just a few months after “The Lovers” appeared (“Lovers and Otherwise”, Fantastic Worlds #3, Spring 1953).

First of all, the nearly penniless young hopeful didn’t waste postage on submitting to Astounding. John W. Campbell’s guidelines for authors flatly barred sexual themes, ostensibly to avoid offending readers, more likely to avoid offending their parents (and maybe also out of fear that, if some members of the Astounding stable were allowed to write about sex, they would write about nothing else). Confident that this was a story that would at last sell (after his first dozen had been sent back), Farmer sought out the highest paying market that might take it:

Anyway, not having an agent, and getting my information about rates for words, reprint rights, etc., from Writer’s Digest, I decided that Galaxy would be a wonderful place to send it. Mr. Gold [H. L. Gold (1914–1996), the founder and editor of Galaxy] had announced, I believe, that a great deal of freedom would be allowed to writers in his magazine. A close and eager reading of Galaxy from its inception had convinced me of that.

Besides, Galaxy paid three cents a word, competitive with Astounding. The next most lucrative market was Startling Stories, which had also declared its enthusiasm for shattering taboos but would pay only 1.7 cents per word to the iconoclasts. So “The Lovers” went off to Galaxy and came back – but not because “there is no sex in science fiction”. Rather,

Mr. Gold admitted that my story had a good idea, but [wrote] that he couldn’t accept it in its present form and live with himself. Whatever my attitude toward minorities might be, the story was dangerous. It, in effect, justified discrimination because minorities might, if they ever achieved domination, become dictatorial. . . . The present fact was that the minorities were under direct or latent attack. And he wouldn’t care to add fuel to that blaze.

The “minorities” so gingerly referred to were Jews. The story’s protagonist hails from future France that has been taken over by a sect that strictly follows the Old Testament’s dictates against sexual sins, with a particular aversion to onanism. Farmer was shocked at the suggestion that anyone could read an antisemitic subtext into that setting. He was a self-conscious liberal at a time when liberals had no truck with anti-Jewish sentiments. (Times change.)

The story went next to Startling. Sam Mines bought it, yet not without qualms similar to Gold’s. His letter of acceptance asked for changes in three areas. Two were story telling issues that gave the author no special trouble. Then –

(3) And tying the theology of the future to the ancient Hebrews seemed strained, unlikely and capable of offending the more tolerant, who would resent being linked with suppressive totalitarianism. The story wouldn’t suffer in the slightest if the theology were a mythical one, with a mythical god instead of Javeh. My effect would be the same – might even be better – since it would sound more like the future and less like the past. I could even base it upon the new gods – Einstein, Freud, Edison, Jung, etc.

Somehow, Farmer didn’t see Einstein et al. as plausible forebears of a puritanical cult. His frantic response dissuaded Mines from the proposed surgery.

“The Lovers” was a stunning popular success. Copies of the August 1952 Startling quickly became rarities, and Farmer won the 1953 Hugo Award for “Most Promising New Writer”. He went on to a half century-long career as one of the giants of SF.

So far as I know, only Messrs. Gold and Mines ever saw any hint of bigotry in his debut story. The moral, I think, is that a discerning editorial eye may discern more than is there.

Addendum: For a different angle on PJF, take a look at the obituary in his home town newspaper.

Help with the Best Graphic Novel Hugo

This year’s World Science Fiction Convention is experimenting with a Hugo Award for Best Graphic Novel (as in story-with-pictures, not sex-and-violence). An amendment to the WSFS Constitution making it a permanent category passed its first reading last year. Presumably it will be adopted if this year’s voters show sufficient interest in making nominations.

To say that my knowledge of this byway of science fiction is feeble would be a gross overstatement. Luckily, my nephew Bryan knows all about it, so I asked him for worthy candidates. Here is his list, which I transmit in his unedited words:

• Runaways: Dead End Kids by Joss Whedon – The Runaways has been an interesting story from the beginning (a group of super-human orphans band together after their criminal parents are all killed), but Joss Whedon expertly weaves these characters through their minor roles in the Marvel superhero universe during the troubling era of the super-human registration act enacted by the United States. Fantastic characters.
• Joker by Brian Azzarello – I’m not sure this makes the “sci-fi” cut as it’s a Batman story (and Bruce Wayne is quite sans super powers), but Azzarello has easily written one of the best novels of 2008 in his portrait of the Joker through the eyes of some no-name criminal who befriends the madman.
• Y: The Last Man, Vol. 10: Whys and Wherefores by Brian Vaughan – I don’t think they released a graphic novel that incorporated all 10 volumes, and this is the only one of the 10 that was released in 2008, but it’s a more than worthy series. The story follows a young man named Yorick, who discovers one day that he is the last male on earth. He begins on a quest to find his lost girlfriend, but gets distracted along the way as society begins to unravel at the mystery and pain of the loss of every other man. Really a unique story if I’ve ever heard one and a great read as well coming from Brian Vaughan.
• Civil War by Mark Millar – I know it's more of a collection, but I think it might still count for 2008. The Marvel Comics universe is torn in two as superheroes and villains alike divide into camps both for and against the superhero registration act passed by Congress. It might seem strange coming from Marvel superheroes, but this is a great political series about the rights to privacy versus the need to keep everyone safe no matter what the cost.  And all because one measly supervillain blew up most of a city killing hundreds... Who knew comics could be so relevant?

Those look rather interesting. Who woulda thunk comic books had come so far?

Kudos for Murray Leinster

June 27, 2009, will be celebrated as Will F. Jenkins Day in the Commonwealth of Virginia. In case that name means nothing to you, Mr. Jenkins (1896-1975) was better known as Murray Leinster, one of the best writers of the pulp era. He wrote at least 56 novels and 1,500 or so short stories and articles, plus several hundred movie, radio and television scripts. He was the first writer to conceive parallel universes (“Sidewise in Time”, 1934), the Internet (“A Logic Named Joe”, 1946 – two years before Al Gore was born!) and machine translation of languages (“First Contact”, 1945). He published mysteries, westerns, romances and mainstream stories (in H. L. Mencken’s The Smart Set, no less) besides science fiction. Most of his work was in the pre-Hugo era, but he won the Best Novelette award in 1956 (for “Exploration Team”, 1955) and a Best Novelette Retro-Hugo for “First Contact” (awarded in 1996). He was the Author Guest of Honor at Discon I, the 21st World Science Fiction Convention (1963).

As June 27th is the date of neither his birth nor his death, I presume that it was chosen to coincide with Midwestcon. Maybe the Cincinnati Fantasy Group could be awarded a few thousand dollars of ARRA (pronounced “error”) “stimulus” funds to pay for a really grandiose party in his honor.

I Have No Hugo Ideas, and I Must Vote!

The deadline for Hugo Award nominations is shockingly early this year: midnight (PST) February 28th. Hence, I feel ill-prepared to vote, notwithstanding that, for a change, I’ve read several eligible novels. (Short fiction is hopeless, as usual.) FWIW, here they are, alphabetically by author, with comments of varying cogency:

■ Combining politics with future history (and more than a shred of outright fantasy) is Sins of the Assassin, the middle volume of Robert Ferrigno’s trilogy set in a near-future America dominated by Islam. Prayers for the Assassin led off with a not-too-far-fetched scenario, in which the Moslem religion spread from celebrity culture to most of the United States (the South, Utah and Las Vegas being conspicuous holdouts).

Of course, since Mr. Ferrigno is a thriller writer and true to the conventions of his genre, he also had to create an archvillain whose fantastical manipulations drive the plot. In Sins, the thriller is more to the forefront than in its predecessor. Most of the action takes place outside the Islamic Republic, in the “Bible Belt”, a fractured state that shows, I think, what a regime distilled from fundamentalist Christianity might look like in reality (ramshackle and semi-libertarian), as opposed to secularists’ self-induced nightmares. The threats confronting the hero are stranger than in the opening volume and his escapes more astonishing. At the end, he has uncovered the secret of a super-weapon, while the Islamic Republic has fallen into the hands of a clique even less rational than its former “moderate” rulers. The climax of volume three will star, I foresee, a suicide bomber of truly massive ambitions. (See “A Return to Islamic America – And a Visit to Its Rival” for my earlier comments on this book.)

■ Marsbound by Joe Haldeman is a distinctly Heinleinesque variation on the popular theme of settling our neighboring planet. For a few pages, it is so Heinleinesque as to call up memories of Podkayne of Mars: The narrator is an adolescent girl discontented with her family, particularly her brilliant, irresponsible younger brother. She does not, happily, develop into a reprise of the least successful Heinlein heroine, and not just because she shrugs off her virginity early on. She learns and grows. At the beginning, she is bound for Mars. At the end, she is Marsbound in a different sense. In between, she discovers the Red Planet’s dangerous secrets and saves mankind from destruction. If the Hugo nominators have any yearning for “old-fashioned” SF brought up to date, this book will get one of their nods. It will definitely be on my ballot.

■ The facile take on Terry Pratchett’s Nation would be that it is about loss, forgetfulness, survival and hope, and to relate its themes to its author’s personal tragedies, except that it would then sound solemn and preachy, which it is not. Any profundity emerges unforcedly from a brisk tale of two youngsters stranded in the wake of multiple global and personal catastrophes. Each is a lone survivor: Mau (a boy caught in between souls) of a tsunami that wiped out his tiny Polynesian clan (the “Nation” of the title), Ermintrude (an upper class Victorian girl who loathes her given name) of a mutiny and shipwreck. (“Polynesian” and “Victorian” are approximations. The world of the story is not precisely our own.)

To keep their lives going and cope with various helpful and unhelpful personages who show up at their island refuge, this naive pair must inter alia learn each other’s languages, milk pigs, practice death, argue with silent gods and noisy ghosts, rediscover the secret of the Nation's “god anchors”, repel a flotilla of cannibals, and make peace with the British Empire. The odds and gods are overwhelmingly against them, but ingenuity, perseverance and a peculiar kind of nonbelieving faith bring them through to a suitable, if not conventionally happy, ending.

While not set in Discworld (for plot reasons that are obvious in retrospect), Nation fits the Pratchett template: a rather farcical background, a quip-infused text, and a narrative as carefully crafted as in any dead-serious novel. Humor is never an excuse for sloppy writing. There may, sadly, be few more books from the prolific Pratchett pen. This one, happily, maintains the very high standards of its predecessors.

■ Readers with no interest in how Platonic philosophy relates to the “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics may not fully appreciate Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and will certainly wish that the characters talked less. The first 50 or 100 pages are slow going (nothing unusual for a thick Stephenson book); after that, even the non-philosophical may be captivated.

Anathem’s world is not, but is very like, our own. The most conspicuous difference is that philosophy, mathematics and the pure sciences are sharply separated from the “practical” world. Their savants dwell in secluded “maths”, from which they emerge to mingle with layfolk for only ten days out of each one, ten, hundred or thousand years, depending on the math’s particular discipline. This arrangement has been stable for millennia. In Anathem, the separation breaks down, as abstract concepts become palpable in the world of senses. Compared to some of the author’s previous works, this one is straightforward. The plot builds to a comprehensible resolution that derives logically from the philosophical discourse. The opening segment’s strange jargon, peculiar social arrangements, odd dialogues and slow story progression should be endured for the sake of what is to come. To my mind, this is the best Stephenson since The Diamond Age.

■ Though I doubt (indeed, more than doubt) it was the author’s intention, The Man With the Iron Heart would be a strong contender for “Right-Wing Novel of the Year” if such an award existed (and I do not advocate establishing one). Harry Turtledove, our most prolific chronicler of “alternate history”, imagines that the dying Hitlerite regime lived on as a post-war resistance movement. Historically, its plans along that line were dashed by Nazi infighting and ineptitude. To alter the course of history, the competent, ruthless Reinhard Heydrich is allowed to survive his real-world assassination (May 1942) and set up a well-organized underground network to conduct guerrilla operations against the Allied occupation.

The parallels to the American liberation of Iraq and its aftermath are explicit. At one point, Rep. Fortney Stark’s loathsome quip that American troops were being sent to Iraq “to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement” is put into the mouth of a Republican Congressman, speaking of President Truman and Germany. The controversy is a mirror image of our world’s: Isolationist right-wingers want to withdraw from a seeming quagmire; Harry Truman and other liberal Democrats are determined to win.

If the novel were just an inversion of the Iraq debate as it stood about a year ago, it would be a thought-provoking squib and nothing more. What sustains its 500-plus pages is the careful detail of thrust and counter-thrust. In Germany, Heydrich’s “werewolves” devise new ways to disconcert the Allies, and a diverse group of American and Soviet intelligence officers try to come up with counter-measures. On the home front, an Indiana housewife’s grief at her son’s death touches off a powerful anti-war movement. In each case, while the Iraqi turmoil was the inspiration, the development is true to the period. The Nazi holdouts are not a copy of Al-Qa’eda in Iraq. Their tactics, and the Allied responses, are plausible as a sequel to World War II. Similarly, Diana McGraw is not the demented Cindy Sheehan. She is an earnest Hoosier of the 1940’s, with the virtues and faults of that species. Her story is, in a way, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with a more cynical (or realistic) appreciation of the consequences of the politics of good intentions.

One cautionary note for those readers who (like me) regret the passing of the era when Norman Mailer had to euphemize the obscenities in The Naked and the Dead: The principal characters in this book are toughened soldiers, for whom “f— you” is as commonplace as Caroline Kennedy’s “you know”. (The Midwestern heroine, by contrast, thinks that “darn” is pretty strong language.) The dialogue is as awash in vulgarity as, well, a middle school playground. On the redeeming side, the obscenities, especially those employed by the Russians, are unfamiliar and interesting. If we can’t go back to mid-century Puritanism, the next best thing is imaginative foulness.

■ After the Downfall is another Turtledove opus. (Well, he writes about two a week, so how can one not read a couple a year?) Like The Man with the Iron Heart, it begins at the end of World War II, this time featuring a Wehrmacht officer magically catapulted out of the ruins of Berlin into a parallel universe. The setting seems, at first, like a reification of the Hitlerite world view: tall, blonde warriors presided over by a living goddess subjugating swarthy, primitive dwarves. Of course, that isn’t the way it really is, and the gap separating Captain Hasso Pemsel’s assumptions from reality is perhaps made a little too evident a little too early. The book would be more challenging if the hero were more of a diehard Nazi in the Heydrich vein. As matters stand, it’s a pleasant, fast moving story that will win no awards but is definitely worth the reader’s bheer money.

■ Gene Wolfe’s An Evil Guest is partly a show biz novel redolent of Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve, partly an homage to H. P. Lovecraft, partly a super-scientific thriller. A century or so in the future, a soi disant wizard, who may simply be adept at manipulating otherworldly physics, metamorphosizes never-was actress Cassie Casey into the most desirable woman in the world. Pygmalion falls in love with his Galatea. So does the world’s richest man. The ensuing intrigues waft the heroine about the world to her destiny in sunken R’lyeh while revealing that the universe is a strange amalgam of illusions. “Many worlds” is a popular hook for SF these days. Gene Wolfe puts them all into our own universe.

Now I must sign off and start desperately reading for next year.

Further reading: NESFA 2008 Hugo Recommendations

The Educational Value of SF Conventions

At Capricon, the Reno in 2011 bid party was serving wines from the Basque region of Spain. I didn’t even know that there were any Basque wines, and my first assumption was that a penny pinching party organizer had found some real cheap bottles at Binny’s.

But, no. I was informed that western Nevada is the center of Basque immigration to the United States. The University of Nevada’s Reno campus has the country’s only Basque Studies program, and there are Basque restaurants in the city. We shall hope that there is not also a local chapter of the ETA.

News from the Chicago Bid

Ten years ago, I predicted that the adoption of the “no-zone” system for Worldcon bidding would eliminate contested races: Bids would camp on a year, and it would be easier for potential rivals to choose another than go to the effort and expense of a contest. Some ill-natured folks might think that my thesis was undermined by the contests for 2003, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and (until recently) 2011. But any true scientist knows that data are malleable. Having cleared away those anomalies, we can now look forward to a good chance of unopposed bids for 2011 (Reno), 2012 (Chicago), 2013 (somewhere in Texas), 2014 (somewhere in Europe) and perhaps 2015 (San Diego). Take that, ye doubters!

The absence of competition doesn’t necessarily mean an absence of news. The Chicago in 2012 bid committee, which for my sins I serve as treasurer, met this weekend at Capricon. Most of the discussion centered on the usual uninteresting matters of bidding strategy, but there was some new information about the unresolved issue of the convention venue.

The last three Chicago Worldcons were at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, which, according to no less an authority than Mike Resnick, is the best facility on the planet for a World Science Fiction Convention. It isn’t, however, the city’s only possibility. This time around, a consortium of the Hilton Chicago (the original “Conrad Hilton”) and the Palmer House Hilton have made a strong pitch, even providing several dozen chocolate chip cookies, imprinted with the bid’s logo, for our Friday night party. Together the two Hiltons have over 3,000 rooms. The Hilton Chicago, which would be the main facility, has its own convention center. Both hotels are elegant to the point of being lavish and have recently been refurbished. Their main drawback is that they are two-thirds of a mile apart. Their main advantage is that another group has expressed interest in the Hyatt for Labor Day weekend 2012 and will be making a decision within a very few months. The odds are that it will go elsewhere, but we can’t be sure. If the Hyatt is preempted for Labor Day, it won’t be available, as a practical matter, for an earlier weekend in August. That is a busy season for the Chicago hotel industry, and room rates would be unaffordable by fannish standards.

A third alternative is the Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, with its surrounding hotels. This is the site of the annual Chicago Comic-Con and has more than enough space and sleeping rooms for the Worldcon. What it lacks is the ambiance of downtown Chicago. Unless we can get spectacularly cheap room rates, I’d regard this as a non-starter.

In other news, I’m told that the nascent Texas bid expects to pick a site fairly soon and announce it at Anticipation. The 2014 European bid is likewise moving along, with Glasgow and London the leading contenders. Apparently, there has been enough overbuilding in the Docklands to make a third Loncon (the last was in 1965) conceivable.

It should be noted that the Seattle in 2011 committee hasn’t gone dormant. Its leading members would like to try again. So there could be a contested election in, say, 2015. Oh, well, another outlier to be scrubbed from the data.