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.

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.

John Joseph Adams, editor of several highly acclaimed anthologies and long-time assistant editor for F&SF announces he will be editing a new online magazine.  (And there was much rejoicing.) It’s called Lightspeed, and will be published online by Prime.  Andrea Kail will be editing the non-fiction portion.  Fantasy Magazine, Prime’s other online venue, has been doing wonderful things, so I’m looking forward to seeing what John and Andrea do with this.

Crack Cocaine?

Last night while watching TV I saw yet another advertisement for those 5-Hour Energy Drinks.  At first they had touted them as all natural, an alternative to coffee.  But we had caught on to them.  The 5-hour energy drinks contain caffeine, and weren’t the all-natural, healthy product they were purported to be.

So they came up with a new commercial.  This one listed the ingredients.  “5-Hour Energy has about as much caffeine as a cup of coffee, but it comes without the crash!”  Whoopee!

We are then shown a heart-monitor-like line rising and falling (but not crashing!) wave like.  (What exactly is this measuring?).  And then the announcer states — very quickly, mind you — “Still concerned?”

Concerned?  About what?  Ok, now I am.

What exactly does this product contain (or are people assuming it contains) that I need to be concerned about?  What type of consumer feedback has forced you to address the concerns that random people watching late-night television have about your product?

Seriously, if commercial is telling me I needn’t be concerned about a product, I think I need to be concerned.

On my way last night to my writers group I was stopped by a group of young, orthodox Jews who asked me if I was Jewish.  Knowing by the etrog and lulav they carried that if I’d answer in the affirmative I’d be asked to pray as part of the holiday of Sukkot.  Well, I’m not presently in the business of denying who I am, even if I’m not quite comfortable with everything that mainstream Judaism proclaims, so I said, “Yes,” and soon after was given a kipa (a yarmulke) and a palm frond and a citron fruit and a little pocket prayer folio.  The young men proceeded to prompt me in the prayer, but more than a half-decade of Hebrew School and many a Friday-night Shabbats with my family, and lots of High Holidays in between made me somewhat adept at the first 9/10ths of the prayer.  The young Hasidim leaned back and smiled smugly at each other.  “Have you done this before?”

“When I was a boy,” I responded.

Then came the Hebrew.  I’m not sure what prompted them to think I was suddenly fluent.  Maybe it was my mad praying skills.  But soon I was drowning in Hebrew phrases.  I shrugged and said “What?” way too many times.  He held out a tin cup with a slot.  “Tzedakah?”  Oh, I knew that one.  Charity/Righteousness.  I had no idea what charity this was going to, but they were surrounding me.  So I opened up my wallet and stuffed my last $2 inside the cup.

Then more Hebrew.  Several more whats.  “Moshiach Now,” he said.  Moshiach = Messiah, I knew.  Messiah Now?  He handed me a card.  On it was a picture of the late Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, a rabbi from Brooklyn who was so righteous, his followers believe, that he is the Messiah the Jews have been waiting for.  (Never mind that he died eleven years ago.) Then, I was handed a card as the Hasidic boys chased down an Israeli tourist and his girlfriend and tried to get them to pray too.

I looked at the card.  On the back it said, “Moshiach’s Address.”  The Messiah’s address.  There was a postal address and website.  Messiahs have come a long way.

I found all this rather amusing, but my serious side kept poking my jocular side in the ribs.  The Jews didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah because, well, the world was still pretty shitty after he came, and the Messiah’s supposed to herald a Messianic age of happiness and light and all that utopian crap the religions use as carrots to keep people under control.  Then along comes this particular sect of Lubavitch Hasidim who proclaim that their dead hero is the Messiah.

Not that I believe in any of this crap.  Mostly, I participate in religious experiences because I attempt to connect with a higher part of myself that I pretty much ignore in my mundane, day-to-day existence.  Any decently intelligent kid realizes around puberty or so that if he was born into any other faith, he’d probably be a practicing Catholic, or Hindu, or Muslim, or Buddhist, and that to say any one faith is more correct than any other amounts to nothing more than rooting for a favorite sports team.

It just seems really hypocritical to me to reject Jesus and proclaim the Rebbe a divine messenger, when really all you are doing is re-enacting the same story from your own point of view.  I think they thought that if I held a palm frond and citrus fruit in my hands and said a prayer I don’t think I understood that somehow their dead hero would make the world into paradise.  All in all it seems kind of crazy to me.

Jonathan Safran Foer said in an interview (paraphrased), “I’m not trying to rewrite history.  I just want to tell the events of 9/11 the way I see it, not the way others framed it for me.”

I feel very much the same way.  Politicians, anchormen, journalists, bloggers — they all try to tell me what 9/11 was.  And I always call bullshit because it’s obvious that most of them were not there, that they watched it unfold on TV and constructed a story, oftentimes bordering on mythical, to fit their interpretation of the events.  Here’s how I experienced it:

My office was in the process of a move from Reade street & Broadway right across from City Hall to just above Houston Street, also on Broadway.  I went directly to the Houston street office to meet the Verizon phone guy who was there to set up DSL.  I had my guitar with me, as I had a lesson that evening right after work.  But I never got to the office.  When I got out of the subway I looked down a side street at downtown and noticed white smoke.  I thought perhaps a local building was on fire, just a few blocks away.  But by the time I got to Broadway, I saw several people huddling on the street and watching the burning building.  Then, with the open avenues, I saw.  It was the Twin Towers.

“A small plane hit the World Trade Center,” someone told me.

“An accident?” I said.

“Yeah, an accident.”

But my thoughts were otherwise, especially since in ‘93 terrorists tried to blow up the towers.

Then someone else said, “No, it was a cargo plane.  727.  My friend just told me.”

There were a lot of rumors flying.  But an accident or not, no one said.

I tried to use my cell phone, but it kept saying, “All circuits are busy.”  That made me nervous more than the smoke or the crowds of people.  What did cell phones have to do with a burning building?  I walked into a hardware store where they were playing the news on the TV.  “Jetliner crashed into the World Trade Center” read the headline.   The proprietors didn’t know anything more than what was being said on the streets.  Neither did the anchormen.

By this point, people started to pause on the street.  There was this strange sense that something was wrong.  You could see it in people’s eyes.  The fear.  I decided to go back to the office downtown.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe I should have just gone home, waited for the news to tell me what happened.  I don’t know what led me to the downtown office, but I had a sense that I had to be there.

The number six subway line was pretty empty.  I sat next to a black woman named Angela, in her late forties.  She looked scared, and we spoke as the train slowly rumbled underground.  “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Not much,” I said.  “A plane hit the World Trade Center.”

“Do you think it was…intentional?”

I could sense the hesitancy in her voice.  “It’s very possible,” I said.

“We don’t want to prejudge,” she said.  “But it might be, you know…”

She didn’t want to voice it.  Didn’t want to be the first to cast a stone.  “Terrorism?” I said.

She nodded.

“Could be,” I said.  “Lots of people want to kill us.”

“Arabs, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“But not all of them want to harm us.  And anyway, we don’t want to prejudge, do we?”  I had no idea then how right she was, how our entire nation prejudged another Arab nation and led to a war which we are still fighting, where more than a million people have died.  Think about that: one million people.

“No, you’re right,” I said.

My stop approached.  “I’ll pray for you, Matthew.”

“I’ll pray for you too,” I said.

I may have been on the last train to run that day.  The subways had been closed.  When I got out of the subway, there were hundreds of people crowding Chambers Street.  I got a close look at the World Trade Center.  I had walked down Chambers Street a thousand times on my way to work, and I had remarked only weeks before that the World Trade Center was like our generation’s Great Pyramids, colossal structures that would survive the ages.  I looked up and saw it burning, metal shards hanging like a fist that had punched through metal.  I might have seen people, but I looked away.  I could not bear to see them burn.

“Goddamn Arab mother fuckers!” some tall guy shouts in front of me.  “Fucking sand-nigger faggot mother fuckers!”

And with his words I realized what Angela and I were trying to avoid, the blind hatred and rage and fear.  Little did I know how the president would use that emotion to manipulate the entire country into a frenzy of war and suspicion.

When I got to work, a small office, my boss said, “Don’t worry.  It’s only World War Three.”  I thought his humor was disgusting.  By now the second plane had hit.  It was obvious it was no accident.  I tried calling my sister, who also worked in the city.  No one could get a call through.  Finally, after twenty long minutes of dithering, my ineffectual boss says, “You can all go home.”  Thanks, boss.

I walked with the young receptionist girl, Jessica.  I told her we should take Church Street, in case they tried to bomb City Hall and the Federal buildings.  Fear was running high, and so anything seemed like a target now.  I had my guitar on my back, and we were walking down Church Street with a thousand other people because the subways were closed.  I passed pockets of language.  Spanish, German, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese.  Little groups huddled together over radios or portable TVs or just talking with each other to see what the fuck was going on.  And everyone had this slow creep north.  Then the screams.

“Oh my God!”

We turned to see the one hundred and thirteen storey tower begin crumbling to the ground.  We were five, maybe six blocks away.  This thing is falling, people start screaming, running.  It so goddamn close. Jessica turns to me and says, “What do we do?”

I paused for an instant.  Was she relying on me?  “We run!”

We take off, my guitar bouncing off my back.  Jessica beside me.  And then everyone is screaming and running as this great big cloud of dust is coming down behind us, and you hear the thing pancaking, boom!-boom!-boom!, as each floor gives.  I can see how the conspiracy theorists thought it was a controlled demolition.  It sounded like explosions.  But let me tell you this thing was not under any sort of control.  On the curb there’s this obese, middle-aged woman who falls and can’t get up.  “Help me!” she screams.  “Help me up!”  Four men try and lift her from the ground to no avail.  Her ankle might be broken.  I feel terrible and scared, but I keep moving with the crowd.  Fear is pushing us forward.

You know all those movies you see where people are running for your lives.  It’s easy to eat popcorn and candy and feel your heart pump with fear, but that’s not — cannot ever be the same as experiencing it first hand; it can not ever be conveyed in words.  For those who think you “experienced” 9/11 because you watched it on TV, think again.

The screams chill me to the bone and I look back at the falling building and think two things:  1) people are dying right now, and 2) I am going to die any second now when that stuff falls on me.  And then my mind went away.  When you think you are going to die, instinct takes over.  I’m not sure what happened, but I have little memory of the next several minutes.  I’m pretty sure I was so afraid that to remember would mean recalling the fear.  So my mind protects me by blacking those minutes out.  I’ve had a few cases of extreme anxiety since then, and I can only attribute it to the memories of those minutes trying to resurface.

My next memory is reaching Canal street, my mouth utterly dry and sour with fear.  By then people have slowed their run to a brisk walk.  Behind us is this growing cloud.  I realized that, at least for now, I would live.  But that many people just died behind me.  I looked at Jessica.  She stared back at me terrified, and I wondered if I looked the same to her. Pale, frightened, helpless.

Then we walked.  We walked north.  Everyone walked north.  More than a million people swimming upstream.  I saw jet fighters fly overhead.  At first I was excited.  I cheered them on.  But then I thought, What the fuck can they do now?  The damage has been done.

We were walking to Jessica’s friend’s office when the second tower fell.  We were between streets and didn’t see it collapse, but some assholes ran to witness it like it was a fucking fireworks show.  “C’mon!” one guy shouted to his buddy, laughing.  “We’re going to miss it!”

We got to her friend’s office.  My mouth was dry, and they gave me water.  My body shook from all the adrenaline. The coworkers seemed unusually calm.  I guess they didn’t just run for their lives.  I borrowed their phone.  After dialing at least twenty times I got through to my father’s office.  “He’s in a meeting,” his receptionist said.  “Can I take a message?”

“Get him the fuck out of the meeting!”  I guess had hadn’t heard yet.

Then I spoke to my dad.  Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I was hoping he’d make it all better.  But there was nothing he, nor anyone could do.  Not even jet fighters.  The events had happened.  There was no erasing them now.

I walked home up Park Avenue South.  I saw a tall black man in an army uniform walking determinedly up the street with a US flag draped over his shoulders.  He was photographed and became, briefly, one of the famous images of that day.

By the time I got home several hours later, I had several messages from relatives asking me if I was okay.  I tried to donate blood, but there wasn’t much need, the hospitals said.

I slept over my sister’s house in the Village that night.  We both didn’t want to be alone.  We watched the same footage of the tower collapsing a hundred times, flicking to different channels to see if they had any news.  We started to get sick of it — the same terrible collapse, over and over, like Clockwork Orange. I had seen it with my own eyes.  Watching it on TV made it seem like it was just a movie.  I felt like I was being brainwashed, watching the horror repeated, so we turned off the news and watched a comedy.  It might seem silly, or even grotesque to you that we watched a comedy that night, but both of us were so shook up by the events of the day that it was the only way we knew how to cool off.  Later that night I got a call from a college girlfriend who I hadn’t spoken to in ages.  She had tracked down where I was to see if I was all right.  She told me the price of gas in Texas jumped to $20 a gallon.

It just seemed so absurd to me then (and now) that all those thousands of miles away, they would be just as terrified as me.  More afraid, it seemed, than people were here.  And it seemed that, in the days and weeks that followed, people from all over the country tried to tell me how I should feel about that day.  Bush getting on top of the debris with his bullhorn.  His “big moment.”  (I disliked him even then.)  Right away, I saw and felt the manipulation, actually feared the sudden appearance of US flags everywhere, from every building, storefront, automobile, even subway cars.  Flags, that seemed to me, to represent a new kind of militarism.   And I couldn’t help but think of the rise of Nazi power in Germany.  A flag ostensibly based on national pride but with a subtext of superiority, of rage, and of vengeance.  Not the flag that I knew.

This was exactly what Angela, the woman on the subway, had warned me about.  Not to prejudge, not to fall into that easy place of hatred and rage.  But it was too late.  The US populace was not intelligent or introspective enough to see how their fear and anger was being manipulated by the media and politicians, and so we were whipped into a fearful frenzy, passing Orwellian laws that reduced and curtailed civil rights, going to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq under false pretenses, starting a “War on Terror” with no clear enemy and no objective end, and basically, as a corollary, fucking up the economy for generations to come.  So, yeah, I’m angry when I see someone try to co-opt the events of that day, as if they were present, as if they experienced the towers falling first hand and therefore can comment on it as if it affected them personally.  But they weren’t, and couldn’t be, and unless they were there and saw it with their own eyes I think they should just shut the fuck up and listen.  Because I’m not the only one with a story.

I feel it every year and from what I understand most other people feel it too.  The strange change of body and mind the comes over you when the seasons change, when the leaves start to drop from the trees.  I believe it comes from sixteen or more years of school, the mad rush to the department stores and school supply stores, and the hope that this year, with new friends, new teachers, will be much better than the last.  That routine created a pattern on my mind.  But I think there also is a genetic component.  My cat, for example, has been nothing but a sleepy lump this entire summer, but now she is active and eating voraciously.  I wonder if she is preparing herself for the winter, fattening herself up for the cold months when mice are hard to come by.  Of course, she is eating cat food, not mice, but her body warns her regardless.  Is this same mechanism happening in me?  Is my body trying to prepare myself for winter?  Am I coerced into working hard now and feeling excited about it based on some ancient genetic script written into my genes?  All I know is that whenever I smell the cool air with the hints of fall, a feeling comes over me that seems, well, old.

My story “The Girl in the Basement” is now up at Apex Magazine.

It’s alongside stories by the talented Ekaterina Sedia and Keffy R.M. Kehrli (both of whom appear in past issues of Sybil’s Garage).

Here’s an intro:

“The girl lived in the basement where the air was cool and damp and quiet. Company was coming over tonight, her mother had said, so the girl had better make sure her room was spotless. She gave the girl a dull knife to scrape the gobs of candle wax from the dresser and night stand, and she took it back after. She brought down the vacuum so the girl could suck the dust and dead bugs from the lampshades and corners. And she gave the girl a bucket of soapy water to scrub the dirt from the walls and floor. No matter how often the girl cleaned, there always seemed to be more dust. And the bed had to be made too, the corners creased like ironed shirts, and the four pillows propped in alternating colors against the headboard. The girl didn’t need to be reminded. Mother was always this fastidious when they were having company.”

Okay, admittedly there are few photos of wicked plants in these shots, but I did go to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens on Sunday and came home with a rash on my neck presumably from brushing against something mildly poisonous.  Marked with plaques all over the large gardens were so called “wicked plants,” plants that are poisonous, hallucinogenic, or highly addictive.  In the greenhouse they had a very large jimson weed plant, which is also known as datura, which, for some strange reason, has been used as a recreational drug.  However, the Erowid vault warns, “the overwhelming majority of those who describe to us their use of Datura (and to a lesser extent, Belladonna, Brugmansia and Brunfelsia) find their experiences extremely mentally and physically unpleasant and not infrequently physically dangerous.”  What better reason to try smoking something?

Here are some photos I took of the day.

I forgot to mention that a few weeks back I sold a reprint of my story “The Girl in the Basement” to Apex Magazine.  The story first appeared in Hatter Bones. It should be out in September, which is, holy cow, tomorrow.  Where did the summer go?

Went and saw Inglourious Basterds yesterday.  Thought I’d be put off by the “Let’s go kill some Nazis, yee ha!” attitude that the commercial promised.  Not that I have anything against killing Nazis, but the trope is kind of tiresome.  Plus I was afraid Tarantino would make light of the whole situation.  You know, turn the slaughter of 10 million or so people into Kill Bill Vaudeville.  But the film won me over in the end.

It wasn’t the silly 70s-esque voice-over intro of Nazi killer Stiglitz or the Brooklyn baseball kid whom the Nazis call the Bear Jew.  It was the tension.  Every single fucking scene in this movie is loaded with tension, a Sword of Damocles hanging over every word.  And yet, nearly every scene is just two people talking.  Each smile, gesture, off-hand phrase is loaded with multiple subtexts.  You know it’s Tarantino, so you know it could get bloody at any moment.  But which moment, that is the mystery, and the suspense, and what kept me on the edge of my seat the whole way through.  I think I need to watch this film again to learn a lesson on the art of tension building.

I didn’t think it was flawless, of course.  In particular, Pitt’s character was just a bit too affected for my tastes.  And there are some silly things that happen in the denouement.  (Seriously, the Führer in your theater and you have no one guarding the lobby?)  Yeah, the end was dark, and it left me feeling like I needed to bathe several times to get the gore out of my brain.  But I think this movie is worth watching again.

Went to see a children’s play called Clownsville last night in Tribeca.  About an office drone who falls asleep and wakes up in an Oz-like realm called, yep, Clownsville.  Ostensibly about pencil-pusher Thomas who’s forgotten his childhood dreams, it also taught the Law of Attraction in Sesame Street-like edu-musicals, i.e. what you send out is what you get back, as you sow, so shall you reap, etc., illustrated by singing call and response with the audience.  I first thought I had walked in on Romper Room, but the music got to me, and the kids, damn they could sing, and they could act too, and well I walked in there with a frown and, yeah, it turned upside down.

After two weeks of hard work I’m happy to present the new Senses Five Press website.  I wanted to incorporate the entire site into Wordpress, and I believe I have succeeded.  However, it’s still a work-in-progress, and not all of the links & pages from before will be working correctly.  (In particular, most of the online fiction and story samples need to be imported).  I’ll do my best to fix the broken links in a timely manner.  In the meantime, have a look around and let me know what you think.

And if you are viewing this from one of my many crossposts/rss feeds, you can check out the site here.

I remember going to see the original Tron with my family.  Every Saturday, the nerdy little me had gone to a private computer class with a bunch of other geeky kids to program on Commodore PETs and shoot paperclips at each other.  Imagine my delight when along comes the movie Tron, in which a computer hacker enters into the digital world to battle in-game enemies and befriend binary digits named Bit.  And the graphics!  To my eight-year old eyes, they were the best I had ever seen.

And now, 27 years later, Disney has made a sequel.  And the nine-year old geek in me is having a nerdgasm.  Here’s the trailer:

Last night my girlfriend and I went to see Cirque du Soleil inside the Prudential Center of Newark, New Jersey.  Having been a veteran taker of the PATH, it was not all that hard to get to from Manhattan, and I felt that little unexpected surprise when sunlight suddenly smacked me in the face and I remembered that, yes, this train does sometimes run above ground.  We arrived early and had time to kill, so we walked around the stadium.  But there’s not much to see there.  As far as I could tell, there was one open restaurant, a remade building surrounded on all sides (and down the avenue) with burnt-out brick husks.  It just testifies to the nature of the neighborhood that no one wanted to own a store next to a bustling sports stadium, where the audience is pretty much captive.  Newark is not known for its welcome streets.

So we hugged the stadium and walked to the opposite end, where several patrons were congregating, and sat.  My girlfriend took out my camera and began snapping pictures of us together.  One of the ushers comes out of the building and offers to take our picture.   Another woman comes up from behind and says, “There are no cameras in the building.”

“But I came right from work,” I said as my girlfriend nudged me in the arm to just shut up.

“Put it in your car,” the usher says.

“I took the train from Manhattan.  I have no car.”

“Well, I’ll have to ask my boss.”

Uh oh, the dreaded boss!

We then imagined scenarios in our minds: checking my bag with security only to find items missing when it’s returned to me with no explanation of how that could of happened (and no recompense for losses).  Or maybe pretending to put the camera in our “car” and coming back.  A thousand other scenarios played out in our heads.  It seemed silly, and so I was determined to go in anyway, camera in bag.  After all, every human being these days is equipped with a camera on their phone, and they certainly weren’t asking people to leave their phones behind.

We moved to another entrance, far away from the usher  who warned us.  Suburban people crowded by this entrance.  How did I know they weren’t from the city?  The clothes.  It’s always the clothes.  Out from the door comes an overeager usher feeling empowered in his role and issues the same warning: no cameras.  You will be searched.  No food or drink.  I looked at my bottled water, unfinished.  It would have to go.  My girlfriend grew nervous.  “Give me your camera,” she said.  “I’ll hide it in my bra.”

But I was adamant.  The stupidity of denying camera photography but not camera phones really irked me.  The reason, of course, was obvious once I thought about it.  Flash photography would be dangerous to the acrobats.  One poorly placed flash of light could blind a pour soul right when he needed to see.  And then, splat.

But of course no one stated that.  That would have assumed the audience was both intelligent and courteous.  Instead, it was simply sated: No cameras.  And the implication: You can’t be trusted, so we will treat you like criminals.  And, you know, I had come right from work and I had no car to put my camera in, and, really, it wasn’t like I was carrying a gun, and if someone told me not to take a picture, then I simply wouldn’t take a goddamn picture.  So I put my camera in its usual spot inside my bag, under wiry headphones, suntan lotion, hand sanitizer, dozens of pens and pencils, usb keys, and the like.  My thought was any man would not want to rifle through my bag once he saw all the things inside.  It’s like rifling inside a stranger’s bathroom cabinet, in a way.  Gross.

An usher came out.  He looked like Biggie Smalls, only bigger.  “We will be searching you.  Men to the left.  Women to the right.”

A woman behind me said, “This is starting to feel too retro, like we’re children.”

I agreed, as we were ushered in.  I felt, disconcertedly, like I was walking into a gas chamber.  The sense of foreboding was ominous.  Is this how it always is here? I asked myself.  I took off my sunglasses.  I opened my bag zippers.  I had nothing to hide.  The best place to hide things, after all, is in plain sight.

I was scanned by a hand-held metal detector.  No beeps or squeals.  Phase 1, check.  Then off to the bag searcher.  I walked right up, bag open.  Here I am.  He looked through the large pouch.  Ikigami manga and Swamp Thing by Alan Moore.  Then into the small pouch.  My heart started beating frantically.  But no, I knew I would best him.  He moved his hand over the zipper.  He dug in.  He tossed the contents to the left, to the right, and then once more.  But there was a lot, and my instincts were right.  What man wants to stick his hand in someone else’s junk, especially junk with lotions?  He handed it back to me.

I was in!

The entrance was a huge vaulted chamber with banners hanging down from the lofty ceilings.  My first instinct was to take a picture.  Heh.  And I almost took it out.  Almost, before the high of sneaking in such contraband faded and I remembered what a stupid, foolish thing that would have been.  But just for an instant, I debated it.

As for the show itself, well, I wasn’t very impressed with Allegria.  To me, the opening was dull, and the connecting acts of two fatuous clowns did nothing for me.  I did enjoy the winter scene where the character is blown by a blizzard and a million tiny pieces of tissue paper were blown out over the audience.  With the lighting and the tumbling paper, it really resembled snow.  Quite a cool effect.  And the contortionists and the acrobatics were all well done.  I don’t fault them for the mediocre show.  But, and I hate to say this, I saw an acrobatic show at a place called Streb in Williamsburg performed by 16-year olds who did a better job both acrobatically and at entertaining the audience than these seasoned professionals.  This show really could have used some spicing up.

And, you know, I saw dozens of camera flashes, even after a soft-spoken girl at the show’s opening implored us not to take pictures with a flash camera for safety reasons.  I guess the audience wasn’t courteous or intelligent after all.  There were girls taking group photos in the hallway after the show.  I wondered were they hid their camera.

Not to mention getting charged $4 for nature’s most abundant substance after being told I couldn’t bring my own in. (Water, that is).

This is not to say I won’t see Cirque du Soleil again.  I’ve heard recent shows are more entertaining (Allegria, I believe is almost two decades old).  But I won’t be going back to the Prudential Center any time soon.  I didn’t like being treated like meat, nor the total lack of anything to do outside the stadium.  Though, I did snap several really cool pictures of the Newark train station with my contraband camera.

From Readercon 20 (2009)

Right now I’m still severely depleted from Readercon, so an in-depth review of my time there will be forthcoming.  In the meantime, here are some photos from the con.  It really was a wonderful time, and I think perhaps my favorite Readercon to date.  It was so great to see everyone and just be surrounded by such creativity.  I know I will be inspired for a long time to come.

The photos.

2008 Shirley Jackson Awards Winners

The 2008 Shirley Jackson Awards winners were announced on Sunday, July 12th 2009, at Readercon 20, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts. Congratulations to all winners.

Last year’s winners can be found here.

NOVEL

Winner:

THE SHADOW YEAR, Jeffrey Ford
(William Morrow)

Finalists:

• Alive in Necropolis, Doug Dorst (Riverhead Hardcover)
• The Man on the Ceiling, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem (Wizards of the Coast Discoveries)
• Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory (Del Rey)
• The Resurrectionist, Jack O’Connell (Algonquin Books)
• Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Knopf Books for Young Readers)

NOVELLA

Winner:

DISQUIET, Julia Leigh
(Penguin/Hamish Hamilton)

Finalists:

• “Dormitory,” Yoko Ogawa (The Diving Pool, Picador)
• Living With the Dead, Darrell Schweitzer (PS Publishing)
• The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, Stephen Graham Jones (Chiasmus Press)
• “N,”, Stephen King (Just After Sunset, Scribner)

NOVELETTE

Winner:

“PRIDE AND PROMETHEUS,” John Kessel
(The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)

Finalists:

• “Hunger Moon,” Deborah Noyes (The Ghosts of Kerfol, Candlewick Press)
• “The Lagerstatte,” Laird Barron (The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Ballantine Books/Del Rey)
• “Penguins of the Apocalypse,” William Browning Spencer (Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy, Subterranean Press)
• The Situation, Jeff VanderMeer (PS Publishing)

SHORT STORY

Winner:

“THE PILE,” Michael Bishop
(Subterranean Online, Winter 2008)

Finalists:

• “68° 07’ 15″N, 31° 36’ 44″W,” Conrad Williams (Fast Ships, Black Sails, Night Shade Books)
• “The Dinner Party,” Joshua Ferris (The New Yorker, August 11, 2008)
• “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account,” M. Rickert (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2008)
• “The Inner City,” Karen Heuler (Cemetery Dance #58, 2008)
• “Intertropical Convergence Zone,” Nadia Bulkin (ChiZine, Issue 37, 2008)

COLLECTION

Winner:

THE DIVING POOL, Yoko Ogawa
(Picador)

Finalists:

• A Better Angel, Chris Adrian (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
• Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser (Knopf)
• The Girl on the Fridge, Etgar Keret (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
• Just After Sunset, Stephen King (Scribner)
• Wild Nights!, Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)

ANTHOLOGY

Winner:

THE NEW UNCANNY, Edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page
(Comma Press)

Finalists:

• Bound for Evil, edited by Tom English (Dead Letter Press)
• Exotic Gothic 2: New Tales of Taboo, edited by Danel Olson (Ash-Tree Press)
• Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Night Shade Books)
• Shades of Darkness, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden (Ash-Tree Press)

Darin Bradley reports that Farrago’s Wainscot, Issue 11 is now live, featuring fiction by Paul Abbamondi, Forrest Aguirre, Autumn Canter, Edward Morris, Mari Ness, and Angie Smibert. Issue 11 also features poetry by Lee Stern, Amy Riddle, William Doreski, and Mark DeCarteret—as well as an experimental wordform by Mike Keith.

I have always been a fan of Farrago’s, and not only because they have published my work twice, but because they continually push the limit in terms of content and style.  It is my belief that very soon now, Farrago’s Wainscot will start to win all sorts of awards for its fiction.

I recently received my contributor copy of the Hatter Bones anthology, edited by Paul Jessup.  Chock full of creepy, cutting edge fiction, I devoured the book in two days.

Paul Jessup asked, in his guidelines, for “contemporary, strange, broken things” and “stories made from bird bones, broken bits, cobbled together out of things spoken in the rain.”  What resulted from that prompt was my short story, “The Girl in the Basement,” told in brief vignettes about a girl who spends her life locked in a basement by her parents.  It is one of my favorites, and I’m glad it has seen print in such a fine publication.

And what a great Table of Contents to be on too!  I’m alongside such talents as Matt Cheney, Darin C. Bradley, Ekaterina Sedia, Cat Rambo, Jason Sizemore, Lavie Tidhar, Forrest Aguirre, Becca De La Rosa, and lots more.  Many of the stories are dark, unforgettable things that punch you in the gut without remorse.  Some are science fiction, some are horror, some are fantasy, and many are in that interstitial place where a lot of excellent new fiction is taking place.

And I’d be remiss to not mention the artwork.  Artist Jesse Lindsay does a fabulous job illustrating each story.  (Click on Hatter Bones and then “The Girl in the Basement” to see the artwork for my story).

So check out Hatter Bones from ENE press and let me know what you think!

After an E.C. Myers‘ recommendation, I went to see Moon last night with my girlfriend.  We were warned by the ticket seller to get to the theater early because the director, Duncan Jones (supposedly David Bowie’s son, according to one source) would be there to introduce the film and answer questions afterward.  We fattened up beforehand at Katz’s Delicatessen, where I had a pastrami sandwich that could have felled a buffalo.  Then we crept into the subterranean cinema of the Landmark Sunshine theater.

Moon begins with a commercial for “green” energy.  A compound called Helium-3 has solved all the world’s energy problems.  The only caveat, it’s on the dark side of the moon.  Enter Sam Bell, a lonesome astronaut who minds the Lunar Industries mining facility all by himself.  Well, not entirely.  He’s accompanied by the boxy robot, Guerty, whose prime directive is to make sure Sam is safe and sane at all costs.  The facility mostly runs itself.  In this future, robots pretty much tend to everything, so Sam is there merely to fix things when they break, and to send off an occasional sample of He3 back to Earth in a launch tube reminiscent of submarine torpedoes.  Sam’s three year stint is almost up, and he wants nothing more than to go home to see his wife and toddler girl.  But the direct satellite link is down, and so Sam must communicate with Earth via a series of intermediary links.  The sense of isolation is palpable, especially when Sam’s usual pastimes, building a model, tending to his plants, watching old televisions shows, fail to salve his loneliness.  Things begin to get creepy when he starts seeing things: things that most certainly shouldn’t be there.

I won’t spoil the film by giving too much more away.  Let’s just say that the film is entirely science fictional.  There’s no supernaturalism here.  Moon takes a lot from earlier films, notably Outland, Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey and yes Blade Runner.  But it uses their themes in a unique way.  Several times I was pleasantly surprised by the subversion of standard science fictional tropes.  Our expectations are played with.  The end result is a positive riff on humanity.

As director Duncan Jones said afterward in a short Q&A, science fiction makes the humanity stand out in stark contrast with its surroundings.  This is a film, first and foremost, about characters, which in my humble opinion, is what makes the best science fiction.  Duncan said, closing the Q&A, “This may be somewhat cheeky of me, but if you all can tell your friends about this film.  We had near-zero advertizing budget and this thing will succeed or fail because of you.”  I for one would like to see more science fiction films like these.  Do yourself a favor and go out and see Moon at your earliest opportunity.