Quite possibly the finest short story writer the field has produced.

Joanna Russ would get my vote. But Tiptree is definitely up there.

What story is that from? It's been ages since I read her. (Actually, both Tiptree and Russ. Though all I read of Russ was Female Man.)

Both Joanna Russ and Theodore Sturgeon (also arguably the greatest short story author in Science Fiction) are reviewed in the current issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction. For that matter, a stupendous introduction to "The Gulag Archipelago" by Brian Aldiss, so good that I had to read the whole thing out loud to my appreciative wife. Aldiss makes the case that Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn's opening paragraph, and world-building, are akin to a great SF trilogy. If so, "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" [1962] is a great SF-like short story. For that matter, The First Circle [1968] is very much a science fiction novel -- it's about scientists, engineers, and technician building a breakthrough gizmo for a hideously dystopian government, and finding love at the edge of the precipice.

"Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing."

"Our envy of others devours us most of all."

"Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."

"Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig."

Soli, it's not from a story, it's from a letter, quoted by Michael Swanwick in his introduction to the recent best-of collection from Tachyon, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

Russ's The Female Man is of course a crucial text in the history of SF, but her short stories are what really display her range. The collection The Zanzibar Cat (hardcover from Arkham House; paperback from, you may be startled to hear, Baen) is a good place to start. There are probably at least two or three SF stories as good as "Nobody's Home," but I have trouble thinking of what they might be.

The full interview-by-mail from which that Tiptree quotation comes is in Meet Me at Infinity, a terrific posthumous collection of her nonfiction and uncollected fiction. A further sample:

I once worked briefly on a paper, the good old crazy Chicago Sun, where a bloat-eyed scotch-ridden frog from Texas called a feature editor kept a big pair of shears by his bottle. When you handed him your hot and beating prose he eyed it in silence with the reds of his eyes shining over the bags and then took up the shears and cut off the last third, which was where the point was. A learning experience.

Multitasked geekitude.

These links brought to you by the letter Eeeee! and the numbers 9 and 30.

Martha Ivery indicted.

So...am I the only person who doesn't much care for Tiptree?

I say this having read Up the Walls of the World, Brightness Falls From the Air, and Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, and come up with precisely three stories I vaugely liked: "Houston Houston Do You Read?", "The Man Who Walked Home", and the one about the woman who thinks she's a courier rather than a housewife.

Addendum: And I didn't think she was any great craftsman, either, but that could easily be incompatibility of style; I have experienced stories written in a style I enjoy but with content I don't.

I seldom could get into Tiptree's stories either. BUT... She did write "Beam Me Home", one of the best homages to the original Star Trek.

On McSweeney's:

Possible locations for that Far, Far Away galaxy where some war happened Long, Long Ago:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2005/7/6isenberg.html

I don't think I'd say I enjoy her stories, but they make me think, and frequently a turn of phrase or densely packed sentence makes me pause and metaphorically fondle it.

She wrote great letters though, and her quirky penmanship was enough to make me long for a fountain pen, which, when I got it, was a complete and total disaster since cheap fountain pens are not meant for writing on cheap notebook paper. Really, they're not.

No writer works for everyone.

Random aside on the particles: I'm getting seriously mixed messages from the Science - Fiction - God - Truth shirt. Too many ways to combine all those words, and only one of them says what the shirt's creator seems to intend.

Still, I remember a fascinating interview with Tiptree. God, how long ago was that? In 1982? I still think of her almost mystical description of scientific research and how, after the proper 'rites' have been fulfilled by the scientist, Nature eventually is cornered and HAS to field an answer.

I also seem remember from that interview a kind of sadness about Life. So, when she and her husband fulfilled a suicide pact, I wasn't surprised.

To me, the science - fiction god - truth shirt says just two things:

1. I care so little for education that I can't tell a minus sign from an equals sign.

2. Come join us on our rocket ship to a new and better planet hidden behind the hale-bopp comet!

Piscus, I think they put in hyphens where they meant to put an equal sign.

I've finished my project for this year's BFAC.

There are no planets "behind" Hale-Bopp.

It is firmly attached to the crystal sphere which defines the edge of the material world.

I'm one of those people Tiptree's work doesn't work for. But I do recognize tremendous craft in them. I do know why Tiptree doesn't work for me: there's a thing about the way she presents men, as if she thinks they are innately to blame for what's wrong with the world and they can do no beter. I sort of doubt that's what she meant to convey, but that's how it feels to me.

Joanna Russ, however, she's just a diamond, all right, bright and hard and rare.

I'm one of those who thinks Sturgeon is still the best short-story writer SF has produced.

Tip's penmanship? All I got from her was typed postcards with a blue ribbon, with very elegant phrasing, and I cherish the few I have.

Both Russ and Tiptree are great short-story writers -- but Sturgeon was better. Too bad he couldn't write novels (which Russ certainly can -- and polemics, and strong political non-fiction; she's a more broadly effective writer, IMO).

I have not thought hard and long about why this is so, but I am a reader for whom, as life goes on, Sturgeon is not wearing well.

More on this if I have it. FWIW.

A little late to the party, but I think Greg Egan's _Axiomatic_ is possibly the finest non-"best of" short story anthology the field has produced. I know Egan sounds like an eccentric choice next to Tiptree, Cordwainer Smith, Sturgeon, etc, but I think it is deserved.

_Axiomatic_ was stunning and held up perfectly well along side Tiptree's _Her Smoke Rose Up Forever_ and Smith's _The Rediscovery of Man_. I say this as less than a fan of Egan's novels.

Collection. Not anthology.

In general publishing parlance, an anthology is a collection of works by multiple creators. (The Beatles' eccentric use of the term notwithstanding.)

I agree that Axiomatic is a pretty good book.

The Tiptree Awards were presented this weekend. I missed the presentation, as I was not present for the first day of Gaylaxicon, but I can tell you the rest of the con was a great deal of fun, L. M. Bujold is very gracious, and con suites full of chocolate attract quite a crowd.

PNH:
I have not thought hard and long about why this is so, but I am a reader for whom, as life goes on, Sturgeon is not wearing well.

Twenty years ago, I thought Sturgeon was The Best, I couldn't get enough. Then, ten years ago, the Complete Sturgeon series started coming out, and I found that maybe, in fact, I could get enough. After Vol. III, I found that there seemed to be lots of other authors demanding my attention.

I think in my case, I just OD'd.

Lucy Kemnitzer on Tiptree:
there's a thing about the way she presents men, as if she thinks they are innately to blame for what's wrong with the world and they can do no better.

That's funny, that's one of the reasons why she works for me.

David Bilek:
I think Greg Egan's _Axiomatic_ is possibly the finest non-"best of" short story anthology the field has produced.

That book in particular is so good that it saved me from thinking that I could ever write Hard SF. I mean, in the back of my head, I always thought that I could write something up to the standard of, say, a run-of-the-mill Ace Double; but writers like Egan have raised the bar too high for mere mortals.

So I'm now content to be a reader.

Patrick -- I feel kind of like Paul Williams talking about Bob Dylan here, but I'm interested to know which of Sturgeon's stories you'd reconsider. Yes, he has lesser stories. His best, to me, illuminate the human condition as nobody else has. Sui generis, and good enough at that to help me see other people in a way I hadn't before.

The world has indeed moved on. Much of Hemingway is now seen as sexist, much of Kipling has racist tinges that are difficult to get past. But like each of them, Sturgeon expanded the way many of us see the world, and did it without trying to be didactic. And he did it beautifully, with love as the basis (unlike Sheckley's wonderful sarcasm or Tenn's wittiness for contemporary examples). Historically, who compares? Keller and Weinbaum paved the way, but Ted took me much farther, and continues to challenge me as I read the few stories I hadn't read before.

...much of Kipling has racist tinges that are difficult to get past.

Interesting. To me, getting past Kipling's racism is like getting past the fantastic planetary science of "Journey To The Center Of The Earth" or "War of The Worlds." Or, to take a more recent example, getting past the clunky and stupid room-sized voice-interfaced computers in Eric Flint's recent enjoyable compilation of Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations & Other Stories".

To me, the bits in archaic fiction that offend modern sensibilities are part of what make it worth reading, by illuminating the world of the author for me.

Intellectually I know that an "anthology" contains works by more than one author, but I can never seem to get my fingers to believe it.

I reread some Sturgeon recently, and I noticed an annoying tendency for there to be a simultaneous Gary Stu thing going on and very very weird attitudes towards the female characters. Notwithstanding, I still can appreciate some of the stories.

Bob -- well, I just don't know. I mean -- rage against the bad and dumb things done by men: that's okay. Harsh words about patriarchy: I'm all about that. But -- I like men a whole lot, and I think they can do better, just as women can, and though I'm not looking for utopian fiction and I don't demand an uplifting ending, I do like to have the sense that it's worth trying to be good. And I don't think Tiptree's work has that sense at all. It's all sort of despairing, to my eyes. I think.

It's sort of unfair to try to analyze very thoroughly why one bounces off a writer's work, because you end up trying so hard to discover reasons that you run the risk of inventing them.

I know nothing of Ms. (?) Tiptree or her work, but this quote certainly reminded me of one of C.S. Lewis' most famous passages which I take the liberty of quoting in full:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you may talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet if at all only in a nightmare.

All day long we are in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities it is with awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal, Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or ever lasting splendours.

I think Sturgeon in the aggregate can (these days) feel cloying. But individual Sturgeon stories still lift the skin and hair off the top of my skull and blow a strange wind over the exposed brain.

Jane

Bombs are not unusual, after so many years of the IRA -- but a suicide bomber in London? I am selfishly glad that most of my friends no longer live there.

I've seen no reports about a suicide bomber, just bombs. But get used to it. When you drive people to a combination of despair and hatred, you'll find that they'll gladly die to kill you.

So far, the only "Londoner" I've heard from is Cory Doctorow, who is in Michigan at the moment, and is OK.

Okay, we know the drill. Who have you heard from? Who have they heard from. If your from the UK, speak up and say your OK, and relay OKs.

Even if you aren't in the London area -- just as you guys occasionally get confused about how close our cities are to NYC, we get lost in how close you are to Central London. And, when your hearing about explosions and bodies, part of your rational mind stops working correctly.

There is a LiveJournal check-in post here:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/london_070705/2794.html

(from London)

It's worth noting that blowing up bits of London with high explosive is one of the few techniques of political coercion that has been extensively tested over a period of several years and shown not to work.

Kate -- thanks, that answered most of the immediate questions I had.

(50 miles from London) I'm fine, and my relatives in London are all fine. I am quite impressed with how much calmer we are in my office than we were on 9/11.

It's worth noting that blowing up bits of London with high explosive is one of the few techniques of political coercion that has been extensively tested over a period of several years and shown not to work.

What do you mean it doesn't work? Are there any rubbish bins, anywhere on any railway station in London? That's the long-lasting effect of the political pressure caused by terrorism.

(I still think removing the bins was giving in to terror, and therefore shouldn't have happened. What did they think it would achieve -- the IRA would look at it and say, "Oh. The bins have gone. Guess I'm not going to plant any more bombs?")

I am quite impressed with how much calmer we are in my office than we were on 9/11.

It is, of course, a much less devastating attack than 9/11 was. The latest figures are 2 dead and a few hundred injured, which hardly compares even to the earliest lowest estimates of the casualties on 9/11. Plus the emotional effect of destroying one of the world's best known landmarks was quite startling.

The funny thing here, considering the two writers most under discussion, is that Tiptree wrote that letter to me, and I've reread it many times, but when I started reading the opening quote I thought, "Is this Sturgeon?"

I don't know what I think of Sturgeon these days, because the only volume I've read of the Complete Works is the first, which is full of minor work. (I didn't carry on with the series not because of any dissatisfaction with that book, but...just because. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I apparently still believe I will live forever and thus will have time to read the 10,000 books crammed throughout the house.)

I hope I don't have Patrick's response to Sturgeon when I do get around to rereading them, because it always hurts to lose a love (even when it's just a love that turns into like) -- I hope that the fact that his stories seem dated to me when I read them in the 1970s (even the ones that were written in the 1970s) and still thought they were wonderful will work in my favor.

One comment on Tiptree: At WisCon last year there was a panel on things you can reread, and everyone agreed that the one thing they could not reread was "The Screwfly Solution." Lois Bujold said the same thing on a panel at Gaylaxicon this past weekend. What happens in that story is so horrible that people -- especially though not exclusively women -- just can't bear it.

And oddly, it is the piece of hers which I have reread the most often. I return to it again and again. Maybe it's the glass half full -- well, certainly not half, but there are a few drops still in it. I read it to read about the men who struggle to not kill the women they love. You can read it as you can fight, fight, fight, but you're going to lose anyway, or you can read it as you know you're going to lose but you're not going to give in. I go back to it for the glimpses we get of these men who don't want to give in -- though when the scientist husband finally succumbs it's so horrific that even Alli Sheldon couldn't face it directly.

When I first read that was one of three times I can remember that I really was physically affected, blood-roaring-through-ears, by the intensity of a scene. I was reading Stephen King's The Green Mile in bed and hyperventilating so much over the climactic execution scene that my wife woke up and thought I was having a heart attack. And when Therese Raquin sat helplessly watching her stroke-stricken mother-in-law try to explain to her friends that she was a murderer, I couldn't move either -- short of maybe getting outside if the house caught on fire. Just couldn't move until it was over.

So. Let's hear yours.

What do you mean it doesn't work? Are there any rubbish bins, anywhere on any railway station in London?

Yes, lots. They use transparent plastic bags hanging from a sort of waist-high basketball hoop, rather than rigid bins. In any case 1) I don't think the abolition of station rubbish bins was a core aim of the IRA's mainland campaign - 'working' in this context would mean 'forcing a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland' and 2) I was referring not to a group of about 60 semicriminal Irishmen with Semtex but to a group of about 100,000 semicriminal Germans with Heinkel 111s.

What Jane said, about Sturgeon, but also I think there is a way in which sentimentality gets dated. We are different kinds of sentimental now, and Sturgeon's kind, which was practically invisible to me in 1980, sticks in my throat these days.

In the same way, I think, the original sentimentality of Kipling's They has been transformed by time into a more intense creepiness. There aren't any good words for talking about the distance between the writer and the reader, nor for what happens when that changes, but in this specific case, I'm pretty sure there are things Kipling expected his contemporary reader to see sentimentally as well as creepily (the particular hand touching) and which the present reader sees as twice as creepy for the visible and dated sentiment.

When I talk about mode and what makes it different from voice it is largely because mode controls things like degree and angle of sentimentality and degree and angle of joke-sharing.

(Let us sit down in the middle of the ruins and talk about complexities of narrative conventions. Suck air, my friends, this is what we mean by civilization.)

Lucy Kemnitzer: I do know why Tiptree doesn't work for me: there's a thing about the way she presents men, as if she thinks they are innately to blame for what's wrong with the world and they can do no beter.

I am enlightened. I'd never been able to put my finger on why I didn't need to reread her. Her style is beautiful in places, but the essentialism makes me cranky.

Jo wrote: Let us sit down in the middle of the ruins and talk about complexities of narrative conventions. Suck air, my friends, this is what we mean by civilization.

Indeed it is: those of us who aren't living in brand-new subdivisions are living on the ruins of the past, the past that birthed us.

Daniel wrote that the bits of older fiction that offend against modern sensibilities are what make it worth reading. To the extent that that's true, I think he's reading the works in an essentially different mode than their contemporary audiences, and probably different than the authors intended. Authorial intent is a bog full of sinkholes, but I doubt, for example, that Kipling's goal was to show how racist his society was; or, an example from my own reading, that George Eliot was particularly trying to show how much the railroad had changed English society in the 19th century.

"This is what we mean by civilization."

Quite. It's not a condition, it's a job.

Hello, Jeff Smith. Great post.

I'm not ignoring everyone's Sturgeon commentary. I reported my own reaction as a piece of data without analysis. I need to go back to Sturgeon and figure out what's actually going on in my latter-day response to his work.

Daniel Boone said, To me, the bits in archaic fiction that offend modern sensibilities are part of what make it worth reading, by illuminating the world of the author for me.

My daughter, 16, is dsylexic, so we listen to a lot of fiction. At one point during Huck Finn she said, "Oh, mom, it's like time travel, isn't it, hearing how things were different back then. I mean, they were still people, but they sure had different ideas than I do."

Clark's famous dictum ("Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic") also has implications for the assumptions about the world in which we swim. Good fiction makes some of those assumptions visible.

I too had problems with Sturgeon, back in the days when I was discovering more-or-less contemporary genre fiction in the Sixties and Seventies. By now, I can't remember whether I was trying to read his stories or the novels (stories probably, in the magazines of the day), but I just didn't take to him as I did to so many others. The memories are too vague for me to offer any analysis now, but once we get past the 90% of crap he so famously put into his Law (one of the truest Laws ever!), reading is very much a matter of personal taste.

Hmmm, now I find myself trying to decide who the best SF/F short fiction writer is.

Robert Aickman is my favorite. When I read his collections, I find that I can't continue from one story to the next without a long pause; they just hit me really hard. What I can't decide is whether his relatively limited emotional range should count against him in some objective sense. Lafferty would have the same issue, if I liked him more (not that I don't like him, but not as much as Aickman).

Thomas M. Disch and Carol Emshwiller have a wider range, and at their best are as brilliant as Aickman.

Tiptree's best stories are as good as anyone's, but I find her maddeningly uneven. Ditto Russ, although less so, and Gene Wolfe. Sturgeon's clearly of great importance, and I read him with pleasure, but like many others I think his sentimentality keeps him out of the first rank.

Vicki: If you think about how those subdivisions were created and on what, even those of us "living in brand-new subdivisions" are still "living on the ruins of the past", though less visibly.

Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast* touches on this, as, indeed, do Polanski's "Chinatown", Argento's "Inferno", and many other examples.

Sigh. Nasty news from London, especially striking because memories of the city were strongly brought back by the 2012 Olympic announcement just hours earlier.
They say there are ~600,000 Australians living in London at any time (plus tourists). There must be many thousands of ex-Londoners living or visiting here, and with bombs on buses & trains** like the ones so many of us use every day, many are feeling a real connexion with the people there. At the moment the estimate I've heard is around 30 'fatalities', and over a hundred injured.

* Also the name of a well-known city/area in Queensland, Australia.
** Makes me especially angry, 'cos I'm a rabid public transport promoter, and things like Madrid & London (& many examples in Israel) drive people away even more.

I've read neither Tiptree nor Sturgeon -- I'm going to pick up Her Smoke Rose Up Forever and read "Screwfly" because it sounds like my kind of bleak. Can anyone recommend a good Sturgeon collection?

Daniel wrote that the bits of older fiction that offend against modern sensibilities are what make it worth reading. To the extent that that's true, I think he's reading the works in an essentially different mode than their contemporary audiences, and probably different than the authors intended.

I'd dispute this, in the manner of a quibble, because I actually said the offensive bits "are part of what make it worth reading." (Emphasis added.) I'd say I read the old fiction in the same escapist "looking for an adventure story" way that I read modern fiction; and authorial intent bogs bedamned, I'm pretty sure that's what Kipling (for instance) was shooting for. The "learning something about Kipling's world" is for me a bonus, and not fundamentally a different mode of reading.

I claim that Sturgeon does NOT suffer from sentimentality. Rather, he knew and loved rural small-town America of 1900-1950 similarly to the way Robert A. Heinlein knew and loved it. Rather than being trapped in the sentiments of this world, he stripped them away to show the hurricanes of hate and galaxies of love, in a thousand strange flavors, thus stepping from the acutely observed mundane into the universals of the human condition, and beyond.

His mature short stories, as in the most recent volume of the Collected works, are astonishingly well-crafted, with intricate strategies of misdirection, narration, psychology, things unspoken in dialog, and pacing, which unfold with memorable emotional effect. Literature with a capital L, folks. Have we forgotten how to read Sturgeon?

The current issue of NYRoSF also has a fine 1-page review of a reprint edition of Clifford Simak, who loved rural America. Nobody wrote like him, before or since. His work was informed by pround decency, and built carefully to mements of tremendous liberation.

There are other authors whose shortest fiction can do weird things to our central nervous systems: H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Fredric Brown, Vladimir Nabokov, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Samuel R. Delany, R. A. Lafferty, to pick a handful at random, but they were not dedicated to the secrets of the human heart as primarily as Sturgeon. Lovecraft had a pet vocabulary, Dick was distorted by drugs, Brown polished his grenades to pocket-sized, Nabokov knew too much about literature and wanted to play games, Poul Anderson preferred the elbow-room of novels, Vance had more to tell than a story could contain, Delany became entranced by Theory, Lafferty suffered from having had a happy childhood (his dark secret, as he told me in Austin at Nasfic).

Sturgeon had the usual run of finger exercises (the earlier volumes of his Collected works) but once he got where he was going, he got there almost every time. Had he not suffered from years of writer's block, or been unable to master the novel, he would be the one known by the mundane world: "I hate that sci-fi stuff, but you guys did, after all, have Sturgeon."

Simak, Jonathan? Goodness, he was my favorite for the longest time. I haven't reread him in ages and maybe I wouldn't feel about him the way I used to. My best memory of him was Denver's worldcon in 1981: for reasons I can't remember, I found myself in the section of the con occupied by its organizers. As I walked past one room, I screeched to a halt, because there HE was. I hesitantly came in, asked if he would autograph one of his books, which he did gracefully then the old guy gave me a firm handshake. God, I'd have loved having him for a grandfather.

Whoops. I meant to start the list of "other authors whose shortest fiction can do weird things to our central nervous systems" with Poe, creator of the modern science fiction short story, creator of the modern detective story. Poe articulated his theory of short fiction and short poetry precisely in terms of the effect on the reader. I think it appropriate to have a short list of greatest quintessentially American authors of short fiction start with Poe, continue through Stephen Crane and Mark Twain, and feature Sturgeon and Heinlein, followed by some of the other great authors mentioned in this thread. The NYRoSF has discussed how long it took the average Science Fiction author to rise to the level of the average pulp author of Mystery, Adventure, Westerns, and other genres. Sturgeon showed how far above average are the mountain peaks in our terrain.

My wife and I would love to see a feature film of a Simak novel, probably one with dogs.

A movie based on a Simak story? I'd like that. True, 40 years ago, "the Outer Limits" did adapt "Good Night, Mr. James", but that wasn't typical of Simak. What I'd like to see done is the short story "the Big Front Yard", or, even better, the novel "Way Station". One can dream.

Suh-WEET JESUS!

The world's ugliest dog:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/uglydog.asp

Cripes, that thing is two-thirds of the way to being a liche.

Didn't there used to be a Particle about Hoo-Doo? And, if so, am I the only one who thought of:

The Rotational Spectrum and Structure of the HOOO Radical
Kohsuke Suma, Yoshihiro Sumiyoshi, Yasuki Endo*
The adduct of the hydroxyl radical with oxygen has been studied theoretically, in connection with atmospheric reactions, but its stability and structure remained an open question. Pure rotational spectra of the HOOO and DOOO radicals have now been observed in a supersonic jet by using a Fourier-transform microwave spectrometer with a pulsed discharge nozzle. The molecular constants extracted from 12 rotational transitions with fine and hyperfine splittings support a trans planar molecular structure, in contrast to the cis planar structure predicted by most ab initio calculations. The bond linking the HO and O2 moieties is fairly long (1.688 angstroms) and comparable to the F–O bond in the isoelectronic FOO radical.

========

Comments by software geeks about FOO may be inserted here.

Also from a recent issue of Science is this tasty anecdote.
GLOBAL VOICES OF SCIENCE:
Ascent of Nanoscience in China
Chunli Bai
Science, Vol 309, Issue 5731, 61-63 , 1 July 2005

"The three most widely used high-tech words in China now are 'computer,' 'gene,' and 'nanometer,' according to the China Association for Science and Technology. The ability to utter these words, of course, does not guarantee that the speaker understands their meanings and implications. I witnessed an episode that illustrates the point. A news reporter asked a woman he was interviewing for a story about nanotechnology if she had ever heard the term 'nanometer.' 'Yes,' the lady answered. But when the reporter asked her what she thought the word meant, the woman replied that it might denote a special kind of rice. She was in fact drawing upon her knowledge of the language. In Chinese, the word for 'meter' has two meanings: One refers to the unit of length, and the other means rice. The woman's misunderstanding of the term 'nanometer,' in this case, is more amusing than concerning. But as nanoscience and nanotechnology become ever more consequential in our lives, we in the scientific community need to better inform and educate the public about the transformations this new nano era is likely to bring."

Don't look at the world's ugliest dog pic that Stefan Jones provided. I've seen that demonspawn before. Before looking at it I thought, "How ugly could a doggie be, really?". Now I've stared the Lovecraftian horror in the face and things will never be the same. I am no longer an atheist; clearly there exists an angry, malevolent god.

Don't look at the world's ugliest dog pic that Stefan Jones provided.

What pic? Let me loAIIEEEEIIEIEIEIEIEIE

Re: Ugliest Dog pic.

Awww, don't you just wish you could pick him up, and cuddle him, and let him know how loved he is?

Isn't he sweet ?

Caption for Ugliest Dog Pic:

"In the scene that followed, Joe claimed he had no idea the deep-frier was still hot. Only the most strenuous efforts by the management prevented Mrs. Buncombe from succumbing to hysterics. Fluffy, her award-winning long-haired Chihuahua, had lost the merit of his sobriquet and it was doubtful that he would ever show again."

Here's an absurdly beautiful painting.

It's the 2d winner of CGNetworks Master & Servant Contest.

Makes me glad my mom's Very Old dog is a Lhasa Apso and age has not reduced his hair coat. Mom got the dog from my sister when sis became a retail proprieter and the dog went crazy when left alone at home long days/hated being IN the shop. He's been a huge comfort to my mom though, and it will be a sad day when he passes/

I mentioned to a co-worker that mom still had the dog and she said, "Good lord, he's still ALIVE?" After thinking I realized he's at least as old as my Melisande Anastasia cat and she's a class of 1987 cat. So he's extraordinarily old for a dog.

"Isn't he sweet ?"

Oh, jeeeze, do we have to imagine how it TASTES too?

There is an antidote to the Wraith Dog picture.

Mary Dell write:

> Here's an absurdly beautiful painting.

I was particularly taken with: http://cgnetworks.com/challenge/entries/8/6721/6721_1116332313_large_tiff.jpg

It's the daschunds I guess.

btw - what about that kangaroo thing that won the 3d prize - technical skill, yes, but my god that's a grotesque picture!

Thought I had posted this, but apparently the Etheric Aphids ate it. Apologies if it shows up twice.

Ed McBain, and Evan Hunter, and Sal Lombino, and a number of other good writers, have all died at age 78.

Otto Penzler has one more 87th Precinct novel on the way, which will bring the total to 55. A not inconsiderable achievement, considering that they can be considered one serial novel. And, of course, there's all the other work: The Blackboard Jungle, the screenplay for Hitchcock's "The Birds."

Good obit at guardian.co.uk.

New Yorker Restaurant Reviews We Actually Did Finish Reading, But Aren't Sure Why

Tables for Two: Bar Americain

Mixed drinks . . . includ[e] the Sazerac (a New Orleans concoction of brandy and bitters...)

Bobby Flay has finally gone too far.

JVP: Sturgeon alone of humanity was immune to sentimentality? Perhaps I used the wrong word. You say he addressed "the secrets of the human heart". Perhaps what I wanted to say was that he addressed the secrets of the human heart in a way that was very much of his time and now seems a little peculiar and a little dated.

I do like Sturgeon a lot, and I think his best short work bears comparison to the very best of the field, but on a recent re-read of More Than Human I didn't find the towering masterpiece I remembered, instead I kept being brought up a little short.

Jo Walton:

I am not trying to put Sturgeon above all other writers, nor deny that many authors are seen differently when the world they deconstruct has vanished. I'm politely disagreeing with the readers in this thread who pegged him for sentimentality, when I believe that his emotional strategy was far more devious and intricate. The New York Review of Science Fiction article I refer to goes into detail on the sophistication of his methods, which, since written in apparently plain prose at time, might go unnoticed by readers with low expectations. But now you make me worry about More Than Human... The small press autobiographical work on his monstrous stepfather put much of his work in a different light for me.

Last weekend I was at Gaylaxicon. I moderated my first panel, by which I mean not only that it was the first time I was a mod, but the very first time I've been on a panel at a convention, and I was moderator. Afterwards my fellow panelists said they couldn't tell (I hadn't told them beforehand), though one did say that it was "interesting" that I didn't ask any questions at all.

Well, I figured they'd have plenty to say on the topic ("Embracing Difference"), and I kind of said a couple things, and at one point flat-out redirected the conversation from "why it's hard to get along with people who are very different from you" to "what's good about it when you succeed." (I laugh, now, to think I felt a bit guilty about that.) They had TONS to say; we could have gone on, productively, for the next 3 hours IMO.

I was on a different panel ("Religion in SF") of which I was not the moderator, and too bad, because the moderator had all the style and finesse of a prison guard. We were only allowed to answer her specific questions, and she made absurd pronouncements like "Every religion has at least one law," and then declared our objections off-topic. She felt perfectly free to go off on wild tangents, but reined us in sharply if we deviated even slightly from answering her narrow and often foolish questions.

I hated her, as you can tell. I'm going to write to the panel coordinator and tell him about these two experiences, and ask him not to put me on panels where she's mod ever again.

Afterwards, however, I met some very charming young folks who seemed to get all the jokes made by the three panelists who had senses of humor; they surprised me by coming up afterwards and asking whether I was the Xopher who posts on Making Light! Two of them lurk, and one occasionally posts; I encouraged them to post more often, but they seemed shy.

So: the lurkers support me at conventions! [ducks]

And that's what a real leader sounds like, all right. To his predictions I say amen, aché, so mote it be.

Report from the field, book division -- riding the bus this morning I saw a woman reading Petty Treason so I asked if she was enjoying it. She was, and said she really likes the idea and is looking forward to the next one.

This week's Entertainment Weekly reviews 4 actual SF books! It's a typically glib treatment, but hey, at least they're looking at SF for a change.

What, no baseball in the 2012 Olympics? That would never have happened if they were held in NYC. And furthermore:

Baseball Food And Drink: Healthy Chemistry Scores A Surprise Hit

"A baseball stadium may not be the first place that comes to mind when looking for healthy foods, but researchers are finding that some ballpark favorites, including beer, contain compounds that are good for you -- in moderation, of course. Whether you plan to attend a game in person or watch one on television, consider these intriguing findings from studies originally published in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry..."

Re: Jo Walton's diminished "More Than Human" experience:

The last word
James Wood on why even great novels can have disappointing endings
Saturday June 11, 2005
The Guardian

"What is the 'natural' ending of a work of art? How to close something whose premise, whose founding conceit, is that, like life, it doesn't end? The Russian formalist critic Viktor Schlovsky praised Chekhov for his 'negative endings', by which he meant, in part, the way his stories frustrate our sense of tidy form by refusing to end: 'And then it began to rain....'"

Xopher, good for you! I've been on numerous panels at local /regional conventions as well as been the moderator. The most hellish experience was a panel at a large regional (Archon, when it was still at the Henry the VIII/Escher Hilton). Panel subject was "how Tolkein INFLUENCED fantasy fiction." Unknown to me, two of the panelists were also Victorian Economics specialists. And several of their buddies showed up to be audience. After about 20 minutes (it seemed like years to me....) of struggling to head off their need to make the topic into how Victorian influences etc. created Tolkein's world view I finally seceded as gracefully as I could and said, "I know so little of what you all want to talk about that I'm superfluous here...Goodby and thanks for all the fish."

Jo, I had a similar reaction on rereading More Than Human. But it's still an extraordinary work, and I can think of nothing like it. What it isn't, I think, is a great novel.

Some links:

Good, engaging squirrel photography

and

well-meant but rather disturbing Christian drawings (I particularly recommend the dental hygienist and the rather uncomfortable-looking truck-driver.)

Steve Taylor wrote:

I was particularly taken with: http://cgnetworks.com/challenge/entries/8/6721/6721_1116332313_large_tiff.jpg

It's the daschunds I guess.

Thanks for posting this. As one who rents space from a pack of Dachshunds (I pay in kibble), it was immediately clear to me who the servant was. Is it possible to get a print, do you think?

btw - what about that kangaroo thing that won the 3d prize - technical skill, yes, but my god that's a grotesque picture!

Yech! I agree totally! Every so often, I see a picture like that, and I wonder about the interior life of the artist. Must be interesting.

Juli Thompson - Most artists will sell you a print if you contact them directly - he doesn't seem to have an email listed but I'll PM him via cgnetwork and ask him for it.

BTW, the WIP page for that image is here.

Vassilissa, those Jesus drawings are hilarious! "Jesus, the ultimate backseat driver." The one that gets me is the surgery one - shouldn't he at least wear a hairnet?

Eew, French horn Jesus...as the picture was loading I was afraid that Jesus would be muting the kid's horn for him. (So to speak.)

I hate to say it, but that's not Jesus in the bank teller picture. That's the First, saying "No one's going to miss a couple of fifties."

I just finished Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. First of all: whoa. Second: is there a name for that subgenre yet? If not, I propose "wifipunk." Third: whoa!

The Mumpismus has a detailed writeup of some of the Readercon panels including mentions of our hosts (Day 1 & Day 2). Also, I have posted a Readercon photo album plus a commentary on the childcare situation.

The mention of childcare reminds me I wanted to ask a question:

What's the usual charge for babysitting these days? (A friend has been making pocket money by babysitting for friends and relatives, but even for friends and relatives I get the feeling she's woefully undercharging.)

While we're on the subject of Theodore Sturgeon, child care, and architechture (was that this thread?), the little girl potty trained in Barron's "Once Upon A Potty" is named Prudence.

On a related subject, this year in Atlanta, the young girl down the block charged us three (at first) and (later on) four dollars an hour for babysitting, and I think we suggested the raise.

I figured that the creator of Magnus the Great would want to know that the creator of his best buddy Charlie the Tuna has died:

Tom Rogers, 87, a retired advertising copywriter whose beret- and sunglasses-wearing hipster tuna became an icon of pop culture, died June 24 in Charlottesville, where he lived with his son's family. He drowned while swimming alone in the family's backyard pool.

This posting connects with the argument about whether Science Fiction is (strong) intended as prophecy, (mild) didactic and presenting a menu of futures to choose, or (weak) merely entertainment with "the future" a mere location for the plot and characters.

My claim for priority in proposing and publishing (1993) the technology of Artificial Meteorite Strike Spectroscopy, the key to the Deep Impact mission, has been verified by the editor-in-chief of Sky & Telescope (by emails), and picked up by the Pasadena Star-News. The article to which I hotlink starts with a ramble through the record rainfall this past Southern California season, then turns into a mostly accurate interview with me, although I took pains to explain (on the cutting room floor) the difference between a proprietary claim (patent, copyright, tradmark) and the "open source" protocol of the scientific method. I can live with being designated "Altadenan's quirky scientist, academic and author," as that was a role played by my former neighbor and mentor, the eccentric supergenius Richard Feynman.

Scientist claims mission his idea.

My refereed conference proceedings 1993 publication, complete with quantitative analysis, was contemporaneously cited in "The Mercury Messenger," a newsletter produced by a NASA employee, albeit facetiously and quasi-disparagingly. It's a big step, in science, to be interesting enough to be be considered wrong, as opposed to unpublishable or nonsensical. Onlyb a small percentage of "wrong" ideas turn into multi-hundred million dollar successful space science missions. I'm proud of this, one of my wackier ideas. Most other of my wacky ideas (i.e. interstellar spaceships built of frozen hydrogen) are not likely to be reduced to practice any time soon. My very wackiest ideas (using the Evolutionary Algorithm to generate working computer programs, as I first demonstrated in 1975, years before Koza patented it) or (Nanotechnology, in which I wrote the first Ph.D. dissertation in 1977, just as I was helping K. Eric Drexler develop and popularize the idea) are simply too early to reward me in the short run. In the long run, I contend that if you write enough Hard Science Fiction, some predictions will turn out true (even if by sheer luck, as my prediction in a story in the BSFA "Focus" that Io would have volcanoes).

I just read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and I agree with him, it's not SF. Oh, there's an alternate present and clones, but it's really a boarding school story. If it was SF, there would be action against the clone situation, rather than the condemnation of science that the author wants us to have. I'm glad I got it from the library.

Brooklyn-born super-editor Byron Preiss dies in tragic car crash. RIP, and thank you for so many great science books, fiction anthologies, and genre works in so many media.

COMICS LOSES ONE OF ITS MAJOR VISIONARIES: BYRON PREISS
by JIM STERANKO
Around noon on July 9, 2005, writer-editor-developer-publisher Byron Preiss was involved in a fatal auto accident as he drove to his synagogue in Long Island, New York-and American popular culture lost one of its most productive and visionary champions....

Bruce Arthurs: What's the usual charge for babysitting these days? (A friend has been making pocket money by babysitting for friends and relatives, but even for friends and relatives I get the feeling she's woefully undercharging.)

The rule of thumb I've generally heard for urban areas is that for two children, the amount per hour should be whatever a movie ticket costs in your area. In suburban areas, it should be whatever you pay the neighborhood teen per hour to cut your lawn. I know a lot of parents who pay a lot less than that, which I find stunning--why in the hell would you ever pay someone more to mow your lawn than to watch your children?!

Aconite: because historically, boys cut grass and girls watched babies.

And besides, the neighbors can see if your lawn isn't properly cared for.

Circa 1960, in Brooklyn Heights, NYC, I got $1.00 per hour for babysitting. It rose towards $5.00 per hour plus being allowed to raid the refrigerator if there were multiple children and/or preparing meals for the kids. I'd save the $$$ and spend them on science fiction from used book stores, chemical equipment and reagents bought by high school cut-outs, and $22/hour flying lessons. I don't know the rate of exchange between movie tickets and seaplane flights, or lawnmowing and those 1 kilogram tennis ball cans of sodium metal in mineral oil. Which one can't even buy through the cut-outs in the current Security State anyway.

"Hey, sarge, we got a weirdo who checks Sci-Fi out of the library, is flying light aircraft near downtown Manhattan, and buys chemicals that could take out zeppelin base in a heartbeat. Should we bust the bum, or tail him in hopes of finding Meester Beeg?"

"No, it's much worse than that. He gets paid to hang out with underaged boys and girls. I say SWAT team, pronto!"

JVP wrote:
(using the Evolutionary Algorithm to generate working computer programs, as I first demonstrated in 1975, years before Koza patented it)

We've got internal code for antenna array problems (originally written in 1973, per the source code listing in front of me.) which uses genetic algorithms to determine optimal placement of antenna elements.

It's still quite useful, thanks to the GNU compiler collection making it possible to run old Forth code.

Bill Blum:

I was aware of this sort of optimization by genetic algorithm, where a model is fixed and the multiple parameters are selected in a very nonlinear fitness landscape.

My breakthrough was in evolution in "semantic space" where the populations are not of strings of parameters, but strings of characters in a high-level programming language, whose fitness is based on how well the program runs when compiled or interpreted.

Specifically, I implemented the genetic algorithm while beta testing John Holland's "Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems: An Introductory Analysis with Applications to Biology, Control, and Artificial Intelligence" (to use the title of the 1992 MIT press edition) in 1974.

I wrote this in APL, and evolved short but nontrivial APL programs. One gave a best-fit to the data that I had from simulations of nonlinear enzyme systems. It provided a non-obvious nonlinear equation that solved a previously unsolved problem in the scientific literature.

Knowing the answer, I could work backwards, and derive a first-principles derivation. That took 30+ pages of matric exponentials and stuff. After some months of cogitation, I got this down to a 1-page proof using the Krohn-Rhodes Semigroup Decomposition of the semigroup of differential operators of the nonlinear system of differential equations for a Michaelis-Menten kinetics living organism's metabolism.

This resulted in the world's first Nanotechnology PhD dissertation, simultaneously the world's first Artificial Life PhD dissertation, which I've mentioned was neither accepted nor rejected at COINS department, UMass/Amherst.

Its chapters became about a dozen refereed papers and conference presentations.

And it was a breakthrough that was found by the artificial evolution of High Level language software. I think that this was a first, and John Holland agrees.

I was directly influenced by my mentor Richard Feynman, greatgrandfather of Nanotechnology. He himself went to work for a summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, doing simulated evolution of programs (in LISP, I think) at Thinking Machines, with W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis.

I don't begrudge Koza his paptents, and the $$$ he earned as consultant thereafter, nor all the engineers and scientists and portfolio managers using the genetic algorithm. But evolving working programs, that was philososphically interesting to me as a reader and writer of Science Fiction about emergent intelligence in networks (Moon is a Harsh Mistress, etc.) and the whole Golem/Frankenstein thread.

John M. Ford: you made me laugh tea up my nose!

Apropos of nothing, does anyone here have sufficient power to make marketing folks stop describing every vampire book on the market as "a novel you can really sink your teeth into?"

My next goal for array design?

I'd like to implement firmware updates for wireless routers that would allow for steerable nulls by MAC address--- so that Cory Doctorow will never be able to use wireless again.

"Characters in fiction often dedicate their lives to revenge, but real people usually find better things to do."

-- damon knight

Of course, there's a strong argument that we are all fictional characters now, in some noospheric round-robin of Chaucer, Sade, Ann Radcliffe, Dostoevsky, Jane Austen pastiching HPL, and a couple guys named Burroughs. Oh, wait, I missed Hunter Thompson and Balzac under the table. Stop that, you guys.

John M. Ford:

Now that you have rended the ontological veil, you shall die. Or, worse, be translated into another genre. Soon you shall feel the horror of being a zeppelin-punk graphic novel compressed into an e-book marketed by spammers to rural Chinese MMORPG wage-slaves.

In defiance of creeping virtualosity, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon sanding primer, reading a book printed on paper, and picking up dog crap.

I almost pulled my drill press out of the storage closet to start some repairs on a display table I found in the trash, but instead played an hour of Tropico.

I figure I'm breaking even, reality wise.

I'd like to start a new meme, please:

O'Connor was confirmed to the Supreme Court unanimously in 1981. Her replacement should be unanimously supported as well.

Any attempt by Bush to nominate a partican judge who can only get confirmed by Republican Senators ought to be immediately reframed into demanding O'Connor's replacement be as good as O'Connor herself was. And her unanimous confirmation sets the yardstick for defining "good".

Pass it on.

I particularly like the Jesus, the Executive's Friend one, because either the Executive in question has some sort of endocrine condition or Jesus is about four feet tall.

JvP: My claim for priority in proposing and publishing (1993) the technology of Artificial Meteorite Strike Spectroscopy

Jonathan, that might have been the first publication (though I'd be surprised), but it was hardly the first time the idea had been though of. Some time in 1992, when I was, briefly, Mission Planner for the Clementine mission (or, as one org chart showed, "Mission Planer" -- responsible for smoothing out rough spots?) I designed an impactor experiment for the Clementine asteroid flyby. (Clementine started as an asteroid flyby mission; lunar mapping was added as a way to get more science at low cost, and unfortunately ended up being the only part of the mission that was completed). It never even occurred to me to claim priority on the idea; it was too obvious.

The impactor didn't make the cut for the mission, in part because the attitude control and navigation folks weren't willing to shoot for a close enough pass by the asteroid -- too far out, and the launch mechanism got too complex, nor could you see much with the (very limited) impactor mass we could afford -- but also because the emphasis was on fast and cheap, so even small add-ons to the basic mission were ruthlessly limited.

One of the spent Apollo stages was deliberately impacted on the Moon, although I believe the intent was more to provide a known seismic source than to look at the impact spectra (since we could study chunks of the surface close up by then).

Jordin Kare:

First, an idea may be obvious in retrospect, but its first quantitative, researched, referenced, refereed publication is an important place to start in considering the history and development of the idea.

I admit this even when it is not beneficial to me to say so, as with my doing work in what is now called Nanotechnology before Drexler published, and helping him to be established by getting popular magazines such as Analog and Omni to write about him. But he published first in the New York Academy of Sciences, and that gives him a kind of priority that makes my work with Feynman and in the first Nanotechnology Ph.D. dissertation (1977) merely a precursor to Drexler's first academic publication in the field.

Second, the Clementine mission (which itself has a dispute as to whom, such as Stew Nozette, first got the "idea") was one of many proposals to use propulsion, guidance, and sensor systems developed at taxpayer expense for "Star Wars" to give planetary science data. I'd proposed many such missions to NASA and other agencies, including a pseudo-Clementine that would hit Phobos, Deimos, and Mars with submunitions. As you suggest, the missions that fly are usually given more weight in history than those that stayed on paper.

I see no data that these S-IVB impacts were observed by spectrophotimeter, but can't yet exclude that possibility. There seems to have been a systematic analysis of Apollo 12, 14 and 16 seismic station data on these impacts, but I can't yet find any other documentation of impact observation.

See table:

"Impact Sites of Apollo LM Ascent and SIVB Stages"
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo_impact.html

Thank you for taking my claim seriously enough to join in the chorus of "I had a similiar idea, and didn't bother to submit it to a journal, because I had a cool day job." I would be grateful, and cite you appropriately in an historical paper on the concept that I've been suggested to write, if you can find earlier publication.

You have worked as PI on government grants based on ideas that others have discussed earlier, and sometimes even presented at conferences, but what matters is, who wrote and submitted the grant application, collected the money, and performed the research?

Failure is an orphan. Success has a thousand fathers.

Tell you what. We'll support you guys getting baseball for the Olympics, if we get cricket. Deal?

The Jesus in the Boardroom reminds me of that first scene between Gandalf and Bilbo in FOTR: you know there's some forced-perspective trickery involved, but damn if that wrong-sized table and teacup doesn't completely fool you into thinking the two people are completely different sizes!

Voila! Jesus Baggins!

nerdycellist:

So, if Frodo = Jesus, does that make Bilbo = John the Baptist, and Sauron = Satan? Is the Fellowship of the Ring = the Apostles, in which case, is Boromir an attempted Judas? I have a feeling that J. R. R. Tolkien would be politely but absolutely dismissive of such equations. But, of course, we speak of the Film, not the book. So is Peter (note the name) Jackson, the Father, or the Son, and is Tolkien the holy ghost? Oh, and does that mean that The One Ring = The True Cross? And Sting = the Whip used to drive moneychangers from the temple? Visualize the alternate world where the Beatles produced and starred in the film, and John sings "the way things are going, there's gonna crucify me."

Dave: as I understand it, the host country gets to add two events (for L.A., of course, it was Drive-Bys and Water Rights Polo). So the US could have had baseball had they won, but are not in a position to propose it for London, unless Tony Blair has some kind