I’m reposting an email I received from Gisha.com, “an Israeli not-for-profit organization, founded in 2005, whose goal is to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents. Gisha promotes rights guaranteed by international and Israeli law.”  I do so because I feel that in this holiday season it’s important to remember that while we in the West enjoy many comforts, there are still many in this world who suffer unremittingly.  I would have linked to the site but I could not find this article in their archives.  If someone can find it please point me to it.

A few updates this morning:

• For those who haven’t heard, Sybil’s Garage will be opening to submissions for our 7th issue on January 15th.  Guidelines here.
• The World-Fantasy award winning anthology Paper Cities is now only $12 for the holidays.  Get it now.
• Altered Fluid, my writers group, will be appearing on Jim Freund’s Hour of the Wolf on January 16th.  We will be critiquing a story by the talented writer and amateur lepidopterist Paul Berger.
• I’ve been toying with the idea of changing the trim size of Sybil’s Garage from 7″ x 8.5″ to 6″ x 9″.  (The latter size is a common trade paperback size in the U.S.) For issues two through six, we used the “half-legal” size, which I shamelessly borrowed from such great zines as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Electric Velocipede. But there are problems with that .  Most notably, the size is not an industry standard.  The printing costs are higher.  Additionally, I’d like to start selling Sybil’s as a print-on-demand title.  This would allow it to be sold on Amazon and through bookstores via distrubution.  Previously, we only sold Sybil’s at conferences, through the Senses Five website, and at a few local bookstores.  So the pluses are: cheaper printing costs and greater potential distribution.  The negatives?  We will no longer be old-skool “zine” sized.  I’d like to hear opinions from people on this, as I’m not 100% convinced.  (More like 98%).
• I saw Avatar with my girlfriend last night.  We both enjoyed it.  It’s a totally immersive experience.  The world is rich, beautifully rendered, full of life.  Pandora seems like a real place.  Exotic, colorful, a complete biosphere.  The plot is flawed, however.  It’s chock full of stock plotlines and easy stereotypes.  Many characters are no more than cardboard (how odd that in a 3d film the flattest things were the humans themselves).  But the world is so vibrant and alive that I was able to overlook the plot flaws and engross myself in the planet’s wonders.  I’d like to see what a good writer can do with this technology.
• Generally, it is not a good idea to be a hallucinating hipster knocking on my door at 5:30 am on a Sunday morning and claim to live in my apartment.  Additionally, knocking again at 8:00 am and claiming to know  me will not solidify your case.
• Have a happy holiday season.

Christopher Rowe	Andy Duncan

Ellen has posted her photos from the December 16th reading with Christopher Rowe and Andy Duncan.  Can you tell from our faces how much fun we had?

FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series, hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present:

	Andy Duncan, whose new novelette “The Night Cache” will appear from PS Publishing just in time for Christmas, as befits a ghost story, while his revisionist Appalachian folktale “The Dragaman’s Bride” concludes the new Jack Dann-Gardner Dozois anthology The Dragon Book. Duncan is the winner of two World Fantasy Awards and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science-fiction story of the year.
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	Christopher Rowe’s short fiction has been shortlisted for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. A Forgotten Realms novel for Wizards of the Coast is scheduled for Spring 2011, and he is hard at work on a fantasy about maps and megafauna, Sarah Across America.

Wednesday December 16th, 7pm at

KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)
http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org/

Subscribe to our mailing list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kgbfantasticfiction/

Readings are always free.

Please forward to friends at your own discretion.

While browsing Pearl River Market (a Chinese importer) in Chinatown/SOHO yesterday, I came across this banner hanging from the ceiling (click to enlarge):

Underneath a meditative Buddha head is Herbert’s “Litany Against Fear,” which, you know, really does just kind of work as a Buddhist mantra.  Even if Herbert wrote it in the 1960’s and not in the Xin Dynasty.  Even if it was written as fiction.  So what if it’s from a science fiction novel about a future so far from now that humans think Earth is a myth?  I love how it quotes Herbert as if he’s a sage philosopher (well, he was, but probably not in the way this suggests), and I love how it conspicuously leaves out mention of the novel.  Also of strange and interesting synchronicity, I was wearing my “Litany against decaf” t-shirt.  I wonder how many interesting tidbits of religious wisdom over the ages were co-opted from fictional sources.

Here are some things I am grateful for:

Having a wonderful girlfriend.  My family.  My late grandparents and relatives.  My friends.  My cat.  Having a couch.  Living in a great neighborhood.  Living near a supermarket, subway, and coffee shop.  Having mad h4ck0r skilz.  The writing community.  My writers group.  KGB.  My iPhone.  My cousin.  My plant collection.  The fact that my neck hasn’t been acting up lately.  This cup of sencha green tea I am slurping.  Agave nectar.  Barack Obama.  Having all my teeth.  Not needing glasses yet.  My college education.  Public libraries.  Bookstores.  Drake’s apple pies.  Grandma pizza slices.  Fall.  Buddhism.  Music.  Oh, how I am grateful for music.  The smell of lilac.  The smell of mulching leaves.  The smell of old books.  The smell of a slept-in comfy pillow.  Soy milk.  Nag Champa incense.  Alan Moore.  Johannes Gutenberg.  Stephen Hawking.  Robert Lanza.  Cat brushes.  Petting cats.  Purring.  Dreams.  Weird and bizarre dreams that inspire.  Heavy Metal magazine.  Thumb drives.  Thumbs.  Electrons.  Electromagnetism.  Stars.  The night sky.  Telescopes.  Telescoping antennas.  Regular garbage pickup.  My view of the Empire State building from my kitchen.  The fact that, after two years of insanity, I finally have neighbors who aren’t loud.  Gravity.  Hand sanitizer.  Thrift stores.  Beer.  Kielbasa.  Beer.  Retractable roofs.  Beer.  Brita water filters.  USB.  The vitamin industry.  Remote controls.  Windows (the glass kind).  Life.  Living in such an amazing universe.

Thirty-five years ago Frank Drake (of the famous Drake equation) and Carl Sagan (”billions and billions…”) came together and constructed a message to send to the stars.  They encoded it in a binary lattice whose dimensions were prime numbers.  And in the message they encoded a binary counting system, the structure of human DNA, the population of Earth at the time, and several other interesting things.

Well, last week, on the 35th anniversary of that famous message, a scientist named Joe Davis did it again (Part I, Part II). He encoded the DNA base-pair sequences of RuBisCo, the most common protein found on earth, into an audio file on his iPhone, and then interfaced his phone with the same Arecibo telescope used to send the original message and transmitted this “song” to three nearby stars.  Strangely, because the DNA sequence proved difficult to encode in good old-fashioned binary, he used a Mac to speak the base pairs in the following pattern:

• C) space – “I” – space
• T) space – “amthe” – space
• A) space – “knowyourself” – space
• G) space – “riddleoflife” – space

The words are loosely based on the inscription at Delphi, which implores passers by to know themselves.  “Space” here is a timed period of silence.  The resultant audio file was then used to modulate the powerful radio telescope.  No one would “hear” these spoken words.  The resultant signal would simply be a series of fluctuating power levels of a radio signal.

I find this endeavor both amazing and absurd and absolutely artistic.  Amazing, because I’ve always believed that there is life out there in the universe, that the Cosmos is teeming with forms like the bottom of our ocean, so these types of things fill my mind with awe.  Absurd because I cannot imagine any way in which an alien civilization might make sense of this signal.  Not only would they have to understand the biochemistry of the four base pairs of human DNA, cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine, they’d have to understand that collectively they make up a protein, which is responsible for this complex chemical reaction known as photosynthesis.  Consider the reverse, an alien civilization whose biochemistry was based on say silicon instead of carbon, sending along a sequence of some complicated chemical found in most species of its strange planet used to convert volcanic heat into energy.  Without understanding the chemistry involved, it might as well be a string of gibberish.

Which brings me to the last “a”, the artistic.  Here are the (abridged) “lyrics” to the song that was sent into space:

knowyourself amthe riddleoflife amthe I knowyourself I I knowyourself I knowyourself knowyourself knowyourself I knowyourself riddleoflife knowyourself riddleoflife knowyourself I amthe knowyourself knowyourself knowyourself riddleoflife I knowyourself
knowyourself riddleoflife amthe riddleoflife amthe amthe riddleoflife riddleoflife knowyourself amthe amthe I knowyourself knowyourself knowyourself riddleoflife I amthe riddleoflife riddleoflife amthe riddleoflife amthe amthe knowyourself knowyourself knowyourself riddleoflife knowyourself riddleoflife amthe knowyourself I knowyourself knowyourself knowyourself amthe amthe riddleoflife knowyourself I amthe amthe knowyourself amthe amthe knowyourself amthe knowyourself I amthe I I amthe riddleoflife knowyourself riddleoflife amthe knowyourself I I knowyourself knowyourself knowyourself I I knowyourself knowyourself riddleoflife riddleoflife knowyourself amthe knowyourself I amthe riddleoflife knowyourself amthe knowyourself amthe knowyourself amthe amthe riddleoflife riddleoflife I knowyourself riddleoflife I knowyourself amthe amthe I I riddleoflife knowyourself riddleoflife amthe knowyourself knowyourself I amthe I I amthe I knowyourself knowyourself

Now, if that’s not totally creepy and cryptic and cool, I don’t know what is.  Imagine you were a lonely SETI researcher on some alien planet and while tuning your radio across the stars you suddenly hear this creepy message whispering from your speakers?  (Never mind the mammoth translation problem).  Wouldn’t that freak you the hell out?  You might think it was God or some super-advanced civilization or some secret of the Cosmos being directed to you.

And maybe it is, you know, the secret after all, being that most life on this planet is dependent upon RuBisCo, or photosynthesis, so maybe there’s some universal truth encoded in it.  Anyway, I would love to download this track.  Joe Davis should really think about making this into an mp3.

In the shameless self-promotion department, I hope you might check out my story, “The Spaces Between Things,” published in Electric Velocipede 17/18, and consider rec’ing it for a Nebula.  It’s about time travel and fetishes and war without technology and fireflies.  You can read it online here.  And you can recommend it here.

FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series, hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present:

	Sarah Micklem, whose second novel, Wildfire, the sequel to Firethorn has recently been published by Scribner. She is working on the third book in the series.
&
	Alisa Kwitney, whose most recent novels include, writing as Alisa Sheckley, The Better to Hold You and Moonburn, a two-part series about a young woman who contracts lycanthropy from her cheating husband. Her next project is a Vertigo graphic novel about a little old Jewish lady and the angel of death.

Wednesday October 18th, 7pm at

KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)
http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org/

Subscribe to our mailing list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kgbfantasticfiction/

Readings are always free.

Please forward to friends at your own discretion.

I’m starting to realize that the key to personal happiness is learning to let go a little bit.  In earlier parts of my life I tended to be a control freak.  Perhaps that’s why I went into computers, because there was a logic to them, there is no maybe in a computer, only yes or no, on or off.  And by stacking an inordinate amount of these binary routines together, I could construct a predictable life.  But what I didn’t realize then was that as I created more routines to manage the things I previously did by hand, this only required more complex routines to manage them.  It’s a bit like the Godel incompleteness theorem, if you are familiar with that.  Fallacious statements require new statements to “bring them into the fold” so to speak, to contain them, but then a new statement is needed to then bring that newer statement into the fold.  This continues ad infinitum.  There is no end to the logic, except perhaps by ending logic.

So I try now and let go of things a bit, like at work, where I see other hands messing with things I did.  I point and suggest, but I don’t bite my nails and toss and turn nightly worrying about how some schmuck will mess up my finely crafted house of cards.  It’s all ultimately a chaotic system anyway.  We have no real control over what goes on “out there” and we are only capable of controlling our reactions to the world.  I don’t know if that makes any sense whatsoever, but it does to me.

I went to the botanical gardens of Brooklyn yesterday.  It’s easy to put my beliefs in practice there.  Around plants, you can’t have an ego, you can’t assert your correctness or your individuality around a thing that has no sense of self.  It’s easy to let go around plants because that’s what they pretty much do.  They cannot act or cogitate or fuss over how much people like them.  They simply grow, and are content with that.  Of course, we are entirely different forms of being, but I take a lot of solace when I’m around plants.  It seems they have a secret which they are eager to share.  Here are some pics.

While hanging out in the hall at WFC, I bumped into Terry Bisson and excitedly introduced myself.  In a weird way, Terry is responsible for several writer-related things in my life.  In early 2003 I took his class at the New School on writing science fiction, fantasy and horror after deciding I wanted to devote more of my life to writing.  Terry had just taken a leave of absence and so the class was taught by editor Alice Turner.  Through Alice, I was hooked up with my current writers group, Altered Fluid, which formed after taking Terry’s class.  Alice and Terry were also the founders of the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series, of which I am now the co-host with Ellen Datlow.  Plus I also happen to be a huge fan of Terry’s writing.  So it was really cool to run into him in the hallway.  Mercurio Rivera suggested we take a picture for posterity, so here it is:

Sybil’s Garage, the acclaimed speculative fiction magazine, will be opening to submissions for our seventh issue on January 15, 2010.

Guidelines can be found here.

Though I’m strangely called “Michael,” Lois Tilton has good things to say about my story, “The Girl in the Basement,” at the IROSF.

“Child abuse. In a post-apocalyptic world, a girl is kept imprisoned in a basement room by parents who tell her she is allergic to sunlight. The parents prostitute her as a way of feeding themselves, while pretending their actions are all for her own good.

“I’m sorry,” Mother said later, stroking the girl’s hair as the girl lay in bed moaning. “But I’m the one who brought you into this world. I’m the one who gave you life, who keeps you alive.” She kicked the basement floor with her sandal. “Without me, you’re dust.”

While the cruelty in this one has a highly authentic touch, the SFnal element is minimal. It would be easy to imagine finding this story in the news reports today, minus the state of the world outside the basement.”

You can read my story, as well as excellent tales by (World Fantasy Award-winning editor) Ekaterina Sedia and Keffy R.M. Kehrli over at Apex Magazine.

I finished Hal Duncan’s Escape from Hell! last night.  A homeless man, a murderer, a junkie whore, and a gay man wake up on a ferry boat after dying.  But this boat is no dingy, nor a wooden raft with crooked Charon at the helm.  No, they find themselves on a New York-style commuter ferry with other confused passengers, and the city of the dead they are shuffling towards looks an awful lot like a blasted-out Manhattan.  Duncan’s hell is a police state, where cowardly cops inflict pain to escape their own weaknesses, where “Vox” news airs the city’s catastrophes 24/7 from ubiquitous televisions, where waterboarding and rape and electroshock and starvation are all part of daily life.  If you haven’t figured it out already, Duncan’s hell looks a lot like the United States of the past decade.

The four characters, after suffering enormous torment in various ways, all come to the conclusion that they can’t take it anymore, and so stage a revolt against the forces of Hell, searching for the mythical “Key” which will unlock their freedom.  And so they venture through levels of Hell, down into ossified caverns and creature-infested halls to a room where Lucifer’s soul has been kept inches from his body for four thousand years.  It only takes one look for the adventurers to give Lucifer back his body.  Then the fun begins.  They blast themselves out of Hell using a flaming sword.

And the flaming sword is no coincidence.  It’s right out of William Blake.  Like Blake’s evil in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, evil in Duncan’s universe is self-inflicted pain, the self-flagellating confines of a belief system that, for instance, believes homosexuality to be a sin or that sends people to eternal damnation who have committed suicide.  The hero here, as in Blake’s work, is Lucifer, the light-bringer, who did not trick or tempt Eve in the Garden of Eden, Duncan says, but offered her knowledge of the lunacy of God and the hope that thereafter humankind would be free.  Instead of mankind rebelling against this absurdity (in this case, I believe Duncan is alluding to our blind-faith in the absurd tenants of modern faith), we clothed ourselves and hid in shame.  Hell then, Duncan says, is a creation of man, something from our nightmares, and heaven, if such a place exists, is freedom from shame.  God does exist in Duncan’s world, but he’s a crazy, sadistic bastard.

I really enjoyed this one.  My only complaint is that the typesetting was terrible.  I’m not sure if this was because I got my copy free at the World Fantasy Convention, and therefore it was an ARC with typos.  But there were hash-marks between every section, and too many spacing issues to count.  Regardless, it was a fun and quick read, and I highly recommend it.

I’ve just uploaded a bunch of photos I took at World Fantasy.  You can see them here.

Also, here’s a video of the World Fantasy Awards, where they announce Paper Cities as the winner for Best Anthology.  That’s me accepting the award on behalf of Ekaterina Sedia.

Just a few hours ago Paper Cities won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology.  It would have been more than enough just to hear them mention the title in front of hundreds of spectacularly talented people, to be listed along with four other amazing anthologies.  I was and still am completely beside myself because I never expected we’d win (though I wanted to, of course).  I was a nervous wreck up on the podium, I don’t know if I made any sense, but I just wanted to thank Ekaterina Sedia for chancing her fantastic anthology with a newbie publisher, and to all the authors who made the anthology the amazing thing that it is.  This is Ekaterina’s acceptance speech which I read for her:

“I am delighted and humbled to be receiving this award, but I feel that the honor belongs to the writers who contributed their amazing and unsettling visions of urban fantasy and what it can be, and to our publisher, Matt Kressel, who recognized that these stories deserved to be seen. Today, I thank you all for this honor, even though my role was secondary to your talent.

–Ekaterina Sedia”

Arrived at the con in one piece and mostly sane.  I haven’t seen much of San Jose yet, but the city is so environmentally friendly that they have free buses from the train station.  Thankfully my package with Paper Cities and Sybil’s Garage successfully arrived, and Sean Wallace gratefully let me sell them at the Prime Books table.

Some of my personal highlights so far:

• Discussing consciousness and Kurt Godel with Ted Chiang.
• Meeting Terry Bisson for the first time in person.  Terry is the co-founder of KGB along with Alice Turner.  He also used to teach the New School class on science fiction & fantasy writing that introduced me in a roundabout way to my current writers group.  I am also a huge fan of his fiction.
• Seeing only one person cheer in a room of several hundred when the Yankees scored in the World Series Game being played on a giant screen.  It has nothing to do with the fact that we are on the West Coast and 100% to do with the fact that we are at a con.

Up before dawn again.  San Jose is slowly brightening behind me.  Apparently, there are plans to swim today.

I’ve watched all five episodes of Stargate Universe so far.  The show has bad acting, bad characterizations, racist, sexist, & stereotypical characters, and bad writing.  So why the hell am I watching?  Because it has its moments.  Like the scene where they aerobrake against a blue gas giant.  The observation deck is one of the most beautiful science fictional renderings I have yet seen on TV.  And Eli, the bumbling MIT dropout, though I’ve seen a thousand characters like him before, is redeemed by his on-screen schtick and charm.

The show also borrows heavily from Battlestar Galactica (some might say steal).  Both have a British-accented genius of questionable moral character responsible for the fate of everyone on board.   Both have a stoic captain forced to make the hard decisions.  Both are, incidentally, trying to get back to Earth.  And both shows are scored with ethereal and classical music.  And this last fact has pushed me in the direction of liking the show, if only because the music combined with the visuals are striking, so that I care less about the characters and more about where they are going.   Its like Farscape, but without Muppets (which, incidentally, I liked).

But its flaws are myriad.  The pacing is god-awful, which may be a carryover from the other two series, which were so slow moving I never watched them.  The characters all seem like cardboard cutouts to me.  And how do we get to know them?  Through a video-blog Eli is creating as a record of their journey.  Maybe the writers thought this would bring in the high-school demographic, the kind that post their daily gripes to Youtube.  But it’s a cheap way to build character, and mostly ineffective, as half of these characters we see are never shown again on camera in the first five episodes.  How about using some drama to build characters?

And the sexism and racism.  Consider that the only main black character we have seen so far, Ronald Greer, also happens to be a criminal who was first introduced to us from jail (he is also seen stealing food in a later episode).  There are several black characters on the ship, so why does the only one we meet have to be a criminal?  (At one point he says, in Eli’s video blog, that hurtling into the sun would be a great way to die.  “Going out in a blaze of glory.”  Christ almighty, can someone push the cliche button?)  And the heart-throb, Chloe, cries hysterically when her father dies, then inexplicably sleeps with the callow soldier, Matthew Scott. (Wait, they were in a relationship?  That must have been happening while Eli was filming his blog.)  And then, moments later, when Matthew is sent hurtling away from the ship to another planet to die, she cuddles with Eli.  Seriously, you could almost hear her saying, “Hold me, strong man, for I am fragile woman.”  Ugh.  Eli is the mathematical genius.  Chloe is the…sex object?  Christ, how hard would it be to give her character some strength, wit, or intelligence?  She is the senator’s daughter after all.  Instead, she’s the cute one.

Let’s not get started on the captain, who decides, when his crew is in mortal danger, to use a body-swapping device to travel back to Earth, get in a car, drive who knows how far from the military base, to his wife’s house in the suburbs, to tell her he probably won’t be coming home.  It’s supposed to make him human, this moment of weakness, but it made me cringe thinking that this man who everyone is supposed to rely on took a personal day in the middle of a crisis.  Captain Adama he is not.

But I suspect, that in spite of these flaws, I’ll keep watching, perhaps for the stellar vistas, or the music, or to see if they can inspsire another blog post or two.

Rose Fox and Josh Jasper have been hard at work on their website known as Genreville.com, a site under the Publishers Weekly banner about all things spec fic, told from two of the most well-read people in the field.  They’ve also been hard at work interviewing the KGB guests and posting the videos online for all to see.  They’ve uploaded two months of KGB guest interviews so far, and last night’s, I’m told, will be up on Monday.  Do yourselves a favor and check out this really cool blog.

FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series, hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present:

	Michael Cisco, author of International Horror Writers Guild award–winning The Divinity Student, as well as author of The San Veneficio Canon, The Traitor, and The Tyrant.
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	John Langan, whose first novel, House of Windows, was recently published. His collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. His novella, “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky” appears in John Joseph Adams’s By Blood We Live.

Wednesday October 21st, 7pm at

KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)
http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org/

Subscribe to our mailing list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kgbfantasticfiction/

Readings are always free.

Please forward to friends at your own discretion.