(The rule's first-published-in-the-preceding-year, isn't it?)

Hmm. Copyright date at the bottom is 2000, and the book it's currently in given as 2002.

(Interested readers might like to know, incidentally, that A Colder War was to some extent a dry run for my novel The Atrocity Archives, which is elligible -- published first in Spectrum SF in serial form in 2001-2002, but first US publication by Golden Gryphon in 2004. But that's another story, as they say ...)

Look here.

Honestly, the Internet SF Database is endlessly useful.

Is the Atrocity Archive headed for any reasonably mainstream printing? I enjoyed A Colder War quite a lot, and would be interested to see another run at the same topic.

Brad mentioned _Thor Meets Captain America_ which was also very fine. I believe one of the recent Tim Powers books covers the same territory?

The Tim Powers book you are thinking of is Declare, which does for John LeCarre what I tried to do for Len Deighton in The Atrocity Archives, but does it with ever so much more style and grace.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Correspondents

"Although Lovecraft had his share of personal friends, he also engaged in correspondence with an alarmingly large number of people.
...
Rev. David Van Bush (1882-1959)
Lovecraft’s least liked revision client."

Also, doesn't this give the proper interpretration of "Skull & Bones?"

Yale isn't that far from Innsmouth...

---L.

Seconded.

(paraphrased from memory:) "What was it Oppenheimer said? 'I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'"

He nodded. "Pity about Bob becoming Death."

Alex

I read A Colder War, and had to go sit in the sun, and then read frivolous fiction. Lovely isn't quite what came to mind, but well written and affecting, certainly.

It reminds me of Requiem for a dream, but words fail me in attempting to describe the sort of creeping horror[0] that seeps into the back of your brain from both. Both excellent - neither good at late hours, or in dubious mental states.

[0] Or perhaps I'm just having a lovecraftian moment

You may have a point there. Regardless, it was a very good read, possibly the best piece of Lovecraftian fiction since the Master himself. What made it so good, I think, is that the horror had a dual track, with human and monstrous horror quietly walking side-by-side into oblivion. I loved the idea of "the filter."

Alex

"ISFDB is useful to a point. It rarely seems to know of anything after the late 90s."

With my continued admiration for Al von Ruff, let me say in his defense that it's HARD to keep abreast of a thriving SF cosmos, even with multiple assistants.

Working alone, I know that I'm missing a great deal. I try to mention every award-nominated book in our field, for up to a dozen awards, every genre TV show added (and announced as planned for a year in advance), and a reasonable fraction of genre films. I fall farther and farther behind in tracking other countries.

I've had some updates on my Mac for over 10 days, which I've been unable to upload to The Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide only because EarthLink has admitted posting 2 payments from me, and holding 3 online chats with outsourced customer support (one employee admtted under cross-examination that he was in India), and that they've promised 3 times to reactivated the account for dialup which should not have been inactivated. To their good karma, they credited me for a missing half-month service, and then rolled back the reactivation fee. This 3rd time, I'm promised reactivation with "5 to 8 hours."

So internet reality gets in the way, and one's real life does do. Cut ISFDB a break. They provide a useful service, as do I, and those others in the top 10 by Google and yahoo (and now Amazon A4) for "science fiction." Frankly, we ALL bit off more than we can chew.

And hats off to the SFWA too. And Locus Online. And so on...

There's no $$$ in this for us. Unless we charge for "professional editing." heh heh.

Actually, it makes perfect sense to me. Conservative voices attempt to forge a connection between liberals and evil, but the evil we're conflated with is Satanic, and Satan's motives and plans are something humans can understand. So, for example, when R'sh L'mbaugh accuses liberals of promoting homosexuality in the schools, it's a "liberals are Satanists" story at it's core, because of course promoting homosexuality is one of the ways Satan gets more souls to torture in hell, and these motives are essentially human, involving greed and malice.

On the other hand, it's impossible to understand the actions of the NeoConservatives. Judged against ordinary concepts of strategy and outcome, NeoConservative ideas make no sense whatsoever. The results of those ideas are essentially surreal, as is the logic used to sell the silliness to the public. So describing a NeoConservative in Lovecraftian terms is important in two ways. First, it allows us to trump the "liberals are Satanic" story - Cthulhu and his ilk are far more frightening characters than Satan, due to their non-human thought processes - and it allows us to point out the chaotic and bizarre actions of the NeoCons in language they are ill-equipped to defend themselves against.

If the Lovecraftian meme has spread itself widely enough, NeoCons as Great Old Ones could (and should) become the new narrative.

Keith, people would PREFER to believe in [fill in cryptohistory here] than the chaos of contingent history [fill in Alternate History story here]. "Monsterously Incompetant" -- sure, they already run the world, hidden in every bureaucracy. They are the enemy of every thinking woman and man. But we prefer to blame eeeevil than randomness, because if there's eeeevil, then maybe someone will ride up on a white horse [fill in Shadowfax or equivalent] and slay the nexus of eeeevil.

When people demand The Man on the White Horse, market forces bring him into being. If lucky, we get a Washington, a Roosevelt, a Gandhi, a Kemil Ataturk. If unlucky, we get a Hitler, a Mao, a Stalin.

But is it evil to pretend that there's no Monsterously Incompetant" beast within the fire-breathing White House?

Then roughly half the USA is evil. And I'm too much of a patriot to want to admit that. That way lies alienation, anomie, apathy, and/or Civil War. In alphabetical order.

I'm too tired to Google it, but isn't there an upcoming conference on "Muddling Through" in Modern Management Theory?

Thank you for saying that. You've managed to put concise words around a series of vaguely unsettling thoughts I've been having over the past several years.

BTW - all management theory is about muddling through. It's just that some kinds of muddling through work better than others.

You're welcome. Reading the good writers and thinkers on Making Light helps me be clear and sensible. But there are those far greater than I at this. Just after my posting, the new issue ["September 25-October 1, 2004"] of New Scientist came in the snailmail. It's a special issue on "Randomness."

Articles include: "In the Lap of the Gods" by Ian Stewart; "What are the Chances" by Robert Matthews; and "The Jumble Cruncher" by John L. Casti & Cristian Calude.

Ian Stewart concludes with this gem, on topic in our thread, by Alexander Pope, from "Essay on Man":

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood
All partial evil, universal good.

This story is deeply disturbing (read, wonderful), and this sentence is proof. Thank you, Mr. Stross.

I don't agree with this.
I completely understand the appeal of many of the neocon ideas. Tehre's a certain visceral satisfaction to the idea of saying "Fuck propriety-- we're going to go into the Middle East, kick some ass, and show everyone who's boss. Then everything will be better." God knows, I've felt that way many times.

For most people, though, the attraction of the idea more or less ends there, dragged down and crushed by mundane considerations like manpower and logistics and human nature. But it's all too easy to convince yourself that Technology Changes Everything, or that the common people of those countries will welcome us with flowers and open arms, rather than RPG's.

And if you leave out all the messy logistical stuff, the neocon dream makes for wonderful rhetoric, which can sway people to vote for your harebrained schemes, provided they don't think too hard about it.

There's nothing incomprehensible about it, and saying that there is is probably counterproductive. It's that whole "don't insult the people whose votes you need" thing again.

Chad, I think you're right about the visceral appeal of kicking ass. But I want to know how we let people govern us when they can't tell the difference between reality and their hypermasculine power fantasies?

On the subject of NeoCon reasoning, I found this priceless. I wouldn't entirely agree with the author - I find that narratives which insist all political decisions are economic to be a little simplistic - but it does give the first really coherent view I've seen of how NeoCon reasoning has caused us problems in Iraq. All of a sudden so many of those questions along the lines of "Why the hell did Bremer do that?" get put into some kind of context, and the NeoCons look a lot more like self-deluded humans, and less like Great Old Ones.