Okay, evil is good. Evil I can work with.
You want it in the form of a plague or something more insidious?
Michael
From: Tom Purdom
To: Michael Swanwick
Date: October 30, 2012
How about a storm that catches millions by surprise and destroys the core of modern civilization because it turns out to be just as bad as the news media said it would be?
Tom
From: Michael Swanwick
To: Tom Purdom
Date: October 30, 2012
You’re on! I’ll plant it as a tropical storm in the Caribbean six days ago and bring it ashore at Atlantic City in a couple of hours.
Michael
p.s. My thanks. You know how much I enjoy doing something flashy.
From: Tom Purdom
To: Michael Swanwick
Date: October 30, 2012
You see why I lurk in the background in these pictures, pondering the suggestions I will offer.
Tom
From: Michael Swanwick
To: Tom Purdom
Date: October 30, 2012
We Rule From The Shadows. Shanti.
Michael
Photos: A Memory of Light Launch Party, TOR Books
Harriet McDougal and the Tor Books staff, launch party for Robert Jordan’s A Memory of Light, January 2013
Tom Doherty, Bob Gleason, and Harriet McDougal
The Cake of Time, from the A Memory of Light launch party
Call for Papers: Science Fiction: The Interdisciplinary Genre
Featuring Robert J. Sawyer;
McMaster University, September 13–15, 2013
On the occasion of Robert J. Sawyer’s donation of his archive to Mills Memorial Library, the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University is hosting an international conference entitled “Science Fiction: The Interdisciplinary Genre,” a meeting of academics, writers, professionals, amateurs, and fans, focusing on Canadian Science Fiction in general and Sawyer’s work in particular.
While the core of the event will be academic papers, we will also feature authors, editors, booksellers, librarians, commentators, and, of course, readers. Special guests are Robert J. Sawyer (author), John Robert Colombo (specialist of Canadian literature), Julie E. Czerneda (author), David G. Hartwell (editor, Tor), Élisabeth Vonarburg (author), Robert Charles Wilson (author), and Chris Szego of Bakka Phoenix Books.
The multimodal or interdisciplinary approach to the creation, reception, and study of the sf genre has been a salient characteristic from Hugo Gernsback’s initial conceiving of the term “scientifiction” in 1926. Later, literary theorists such as Darko Suvin insisted on the particular knowledge, competency, and frame of mind required in order to decipher the genre’s figurative meaning: sf, according to Suvin,
is an educational literature . . . irreversibly shaped by the pathos of preaching the good word of human curiosity, fear, and hope. . . . It demands from the author and reader, teacher and critic, not merely specialized, quantified positivistic knowledge (scientia) but a social imagination whose quality of wisdom (sapienta) testifies to the maturity of his critical and creative thought. (40)
Indeed, Sawyer’s work has garnered the attention of both the literary and scientific communities for its technical accuracy presented through speculative imagination, appealing to both the rational imperative and the sense of wonder inherent in the union of science and fiction. While Sawyer’s stated mandate is foremost to “intrigue,” and not strictly to “educate,” he insists that “[r]esearch is the heart and soul of modern SF writing; scientists are handing us gigantic ideas and mind-boggling stuff” on which to base stories. Through rigorous research initiatives, Sawyer has cultivated and contributed valuably to knowledge in various fields and his expertise is highly sought-after in both popular culture and official circles. For example, he explains that when he was writing “Frameshift, I thought I didn’t know enough genetics, so I dived in to learn all about it . . . and ended up on Rivera Live on CNBC talking about the Human Genome Project and advising Canada’s Federal Department of Justice about it.” Sawyer’s work and that of other thinkers and writers, past, present, and future, have the power, “with words, [to] reach across time, even after death, to influence people.” Human knowledge thus becomes increasingly accessible thanks to the various media through which it is approached and transmitted. Diverse perspectives on knowledge serve to shed new light on traditional thinking and sf clearly represents radically different perspectives:
Multidisciplinary studies are the future: one of the reasons I write so much about the burgeoning science of consciousness . . . is that it is so multidisciplinary: neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, AI researchers, anesthesiologists, quantum physicists, philosophers, and even some of us lowly science-fiction writers have made important contributions.
It is in the spirit of an interdisciplinarity approach to science, fiction and science fiction that we invite thinkers of varying descriptions to propose talks aimed at enriching the discussion. While the conference is focused on Canadian sf and especially the literary work of Robert J. Sawyer, papers may address the broader issues at stake, notably the scientific and ethical ramifications at the core of the fictional intrigues: machines matching human capabilities (or the singularity), synthetic biology, etc. We would also welcome panel proposals should you feel inclined to organize your talk and those of willing collaborators under a single topic.
The principle language of the event will be English, though we would like to explore the possibility of running certain panels in French, according to the needs of presenters and interest of other participants. Please indicate if you are a native speaker of French or sufficiently fluent and whether or not you would prefer to give your talk in French or if you are in a position to attend talks and panel discussions in French.
Please send proposals (of 300 words max.) by March 31st, 2013 to both C. Annette Grisé
We will also endeavor to publish a volume of selected articles, ideally within the year following the event.
Works Cited
Deforest, Roger. “Robert J. Sawyer Confronts Our Damn Life Clocks in Rollback.” Hard SF, 3 April 2007.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Holiday Parties, New York, December 2012/January 2013
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Pete Lutjens & David G. Hartwell at Tor Books
Kevin J. Maroney & Ellen Datlow chez Nielsen Hayden
Stacy Hill, Alex Cameron, Loren Brantley & Audrey Steuerwald at Tor Books
Ellen Datlow, Shawna McCarthy, and PNH chez Nielsen Hayden, New Year’s Day
The Tor Books holiday party, December 2012
Screed (letters of comment)
Darrell Schweitzer, Philadelphia
I very much enjoyed Graham Andrews’s article on Poe and Corman, but I am disappointed to see him perpetuating a misconception that keeps cropping up: that the film The Haunted Palace is “a faithful rendition of the Lovecraft novella,” i.e., “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” This can only stem from not having read the Lovecraft original recently enough. The Lovecraft story is about a naïve young chap who gets involved in occult antiquarianism right out of high school and resurrects his long-dead sorcerer ancestor Joseph Curwen from his “essential saltes.” It so happens that Curwen, who was noted as preternaturally youthful in his own time (eighteenth century) before he was killed by a lynch mob, is a dead ringer for Ward. Young Charlie keeps his eldritch house guest a secret for a time, while the two of them work together on occult researches. Curwen (who needs blood and is sort of a vampire in his resurrected state) seeks to resume some horrendous agenda left over from the 1770s. Soon, judging him too “squeamish” to be of further use, Curwen murders Ward and walls up the corpse in the young man’s bedroom. Curwen gets in touch with two of hi
s former colleagues who are still alive. They resume their nastiness, which involves the invocation of Yog-Sothoth. People begin to notice that “Charles Ward” is behaving strangely, speaks in an archaic fashion, and seems ignorant of commonplace details of modern life. He is placed in a madhouse. Meanwhile, Dr. Willett, the kindly family physician who is the protagonist of this story, discovers the body of the real Ward, figures out what is going on, confronts the person he now knows to be the resurrected Curwen in his cell, and destroys him by magic in a spectacular dissolution scene.
That doesn’t sound much like the Corman film, does it? The key difference is that Corman’s film is about possession. A considerably more mature Charles Dexter Ward (Vincent Price) is possessed by the spirit of his ancestor. The film ends with Ward very much alive but with the clear implication that the evil spirit of Joseph Curwen has gotten the upper hand. It’s thematically significant that the Lovecraft story is about a chemical (or alchemical) resurrection and impersonation, not spirit possession. While Lovecraft was willing to write about mind-transferrence through time in “The Shadow Out of Time,” he was too much of a materialist to accept the idea of “spirit” or “soul” at all. In Lovecraft, the only possible afterlife came from reanimated grave dust.
Very likely, the change was made in the Corman film because possession is a lot easier (and cheaper) to film. The actual plot of the Lovecraft story was more or less followed in the second film version, The Resurrected (1992) although that film makes profound errors in other areas, notably by turning Dr. Willett into a Sam Spade clone and Charles Ward into a rather nasty, yuppie chemist. No one has yet made a faithful version of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Certainly Corman didn’t, whatever merits The Haunted Palace may have.
Ends of Eras
A pair of landmark events in the fantasy field have been drawing my attention back to themselves over the last month, so I thought I’d write about them here.
Lynn Willis died a week ago as I write this, midway through January. His is not a name well-enough known in the prose f&sf field, or even in his home field of hobby gaming, but he was a major figure behind the scenes. He started off in the 1970s as a wargame designer for Metagaming Concepts. Metagaming, though small and short-lived, had a disproportionate influence on the field, with a number of innovative games in inventive formats. Willis’s games there—Godsfire and the mini-games Holy War and Olympia—didn’t have the splash of Steve Jackson’s Ogre or The Fantasy Trip, but they were all clever and memorable.
Willis then published Lord of the Middle Sea for Chaosium, almost certainly the first wargame to revolve around anthropogenic climate change—though it was caused by nuclear war rather than carbon dioxide poisoning. The game itself was good, but the map, of a United States reduced to ridges and archipelagos by melting icecaps, left a horrified footprint on my mid-teenage brain. (You can see it at the BoardgameGeek,
After that, Willis worked almost exclusively for Chaosium for the next 20 years. He took their first great roleplaying game, Runequest, and streamlined the mechanics into a game called Basic Role-Playing. The BRP system was less of a standalone game than framework around which more complex games could be built. In 1982, Chaosium released a pack of settings for BRP called Worlds of Wonder; the superhero game in the pack, Superworld, was well-received enough to be spun off into separate publication, its most famous players were the Santa Fe sf writers community, whose campaign became the basis of the Wild Cards shared universe. Willis also worked on the RPG adaptations of Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Robert Aspirin’s Thieves’ World, as well as contributing to many of the early Runequest projects.
But Willis’s most lasting contribution was the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Sandy Peterson built this monumental game with Willis around the BRP framework, and Willis then supervised the vast body of Cthulhu spinoffs—dozens of adventures, sourcebooks, and supplemental materials. As noted in issue 291, Lisa Padol is working on an essay about the history of Cthulhu gaming, so I will defer to her expertise. But I’ll add this.
Among the “supplemental materials” for the game was the Cthulhu Library, a long-running series of collections of prose books on Lovecraftian themes—mostly fiction by Lovecraft and his circle (e.g., the “mythos fiction” of Howard and Bloch), his admirers and imitators, and his influences (e.g., Chambers and Dunsany), but also nonfiction either about the stories or about Lovecraft’s background and interests. In a recent episode of the “Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff” podcast (specifically,
All that said, to paraphrase Robin Laws, thanks to Chaosium, “the Cthulhu anthology” has become a viable publishing model. In 1980, Lovecraft was known as an important writer within the horror field, and somewhat less well-known in the broader fantasy field; by 2000, HPL had become a cultural touchstone. And Willis’s game, and books, were in there, early and big.
As a personal note, Willis was an editor on my late brother Tim’s The Book of Dyzan, a collection of Theosophical documents published as part of the Cthulhu library. I don’t believe I ever met Willis myself; he was not a frequent attendee of conventions, even in the early days of Chaosium (when I was attending Gencon, then and now the backbone convention of the RPG community), but his death leaves a hole in my life.
Unless you’re one of those people who skip straight to the editorial, you probably noticed that we have several photos this issue from Tor Books’s celebration of the publication of A Memory of Light, the final novel in Robert Jordan’s astonishingly successful fantasy series The Wheel of Time.
Tor Books have been exceptionally kind to NYRSF over the years, as a constant advertiser (see the ad on page 2) and host, allowing us the use of their conference room for our weekly magazine meetings for 15 years now. Everyone at Tor has always been unfailingly friendly and helpful to us. As such, it has made me, as an individual, happy to watch them bring this vast project to a graceful end. Hard not to get swept up in the celebration.
I myself have never read The Wheel of Time, not through any particular fault of its own—by the time it began in 1990, I had already reached the point where I was not starting any fantasy series until they were completed. (I’ve bent or broken that rule occasionally, but I’m generally pretty happy with it.) I have many friends for whom this is a cause for celebration (including a married couple I know who, literally, started dating because they were both Jordan fans). I can’t do a better job of describing the place this work has in the field than Guy Gavriel Kay did in his 2007 World Fantasy Convention toastmaster speech, so I would recommend going and reading that:
So, two major stories ended. We cannot step into the same genre twice. But still it flows.
—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors
NYRSF January 2013 Issue 293 Page 8