The Mumpsimus

First, a confession: The only Margaret Atwood novel I have ever finished is Surfacing, which I actually read twice and hold in fairly high regard. I've tried many of her others, and generally abandoned them about half-way through. I get to the middle and think: "You know, I really don't care if I ever finish this book. It isn't bad, it's just that ... I really don't care." I might say I suffer from Atwapathy.

But I have liked some of her poetry very much, and also some of her nonfiction, and so I was interested to find an excerpt from a recent lecture in which she examines her two SF novels, The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake. Atwood has, in the past, said she doesn't write science fiction, but anyone who's ever read any science fiction knows that she's lying, or deluded, or maybe just using a very strict definition of science fiction. In any case, she refers to William Gibson in this lecture, and has some interesting things to s…

Before picking up Pattern Recognition, I hadn't read anything by William Gibson in years. After reading Neuromancer and most of his short stories, I decided Gibson just wasn't my thing -- too cold, too techno-hip, too hardboiled.

But something about Pattern Recognition drew me toward it, something about the plot (as outlined in various reviews) caught my attention and made me curious. And Gibson's a guru to many people, so I should at least see what he's been up to recently.

I nearly didn't make it past the first chapter. The sharp, dry sentences. The short paragraphs and present tense. "Google" used as a verb.

It was easy enough reading, though, so I read on. So many product names. Why, I wondered, do I so hate contemporary references in a modern novel? They clang in my mind's ear like Celine Dion's singing. But shouldn't writers chronicle how we live, including the stuff we buy? Of course. I just happen to respond to product names…

Alan Lattimore has a post which meditates on what seems to be a publishing myth various curmudgeons such as myself have occasionally propagated: that gigantic fantasy trilogies (and quartets and quintets and sextets...) sell tremendously well and are stealing readers away from books with fewer pages and fewer Dark Lords. Some sources within the publishing industry say that, with a few exceptions, Big Fat Fantasies just don't sell that well compared to other books.

This is unfortunate. We curmudgeons are now going to have to find another shibboleth on which to pin all the blame for readers' bad taste...

We have been trained to regard certain kinds of art (especially the violent, the arcane, and the assaultive) as "experimental". But there's all the difference in the world between studying oxidation and producing loud noises with gunpowder. The former leads somewhere; the latter (analogous to rock groups' raising the ante with decibelage, luridness, and violence) does not.--Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing

For some reason, I've been reading various posts from blogs and message boards about rejection slips and how editors reject stories and books. The only absolutely essential reading I've come upon is the blog post Slushkiller by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a piece of writing which deserves wide distribution and numerous awards, because it is funny, insightful, sympathetic, smart -- well, I trust you can add your own positive modifier.

Also worth looking at are the discussions over at the F&SF discussion board, which began when a disgruntled aspiring writer created a thread to excoriate F&SF's assistant editor, John Joseph Adams, for -- of all things -- responding too quickly. (Yes, F&SF can be remarkably fast -- my most recent rejection from them came within a week, and for a moment I thought as the disgruntled aspring writing [DAW] did, that the story couldn't possibly have even been read, but the rejection note was so kind that I quickly gave up that idea and…

Sad news: the great New Zealand writer Janet Frame has died. Frame chronicled the inner space of anxiety and madness as well as anyone ever has, in brilliant novels such as Faces in the Water and Scented Gardens for the Blind. She achieved some fame when her autobiography was filmed by Jane Campion as An Angel at My Table, and recently she was the subject of a major biography and made the short-list for the Nobel Prize. For more information, see the New Zealand Book Council website.

From Ron Silliman comes news (to me) of plans to make a movie of Samuel Delany's Dhalgren. If the film is even slightly faithful to the book, it would be quite a fascinating piece of work. Of course, it could come to nothing, too, since so few films which even make it past the point of having screenplays commissioned ever actually make it to the screen, but we can keep our fingers crossed.

(In other news, this summer will see a film of Asimov's I, Robot starring Will Smith and apparently not based on Harlan Ellison's screenplay, first published in Asimov's and then as a book.)

The post with the reference to a film of Dhalgren is actually a letter from the screenwriter, who is responding to an excellent post in which Silliman figured out the standard three-act structure of commercial films.

Having studied playwrighting and screenwriting at NYU for three years, this is a subject I know well. Being an inveterate contrarian, I rebelled as much as possible against the id…

Mark Sarvas links to a review of Vanishing Point, a new novel by one of the odder writers out there, David Markson, whose books tend to be ostensibly random accumulations of fragmentary information which, after twenty or fifty pages, begin to suggest form and patterns and then, more often than not, end up being surprisingly powerful by the last page.

Markson's novel Wittgenstein's Mistress is one of the greatest post-apocalyptic/last-person-on-Earth books I've ever encountered (and it may not be post-apocalyptic at all, since that judgment is left to the reader), one of the only books I've read which simultaneously conveys senses of claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and endlessly expansive loneliness along with subtle humor, lightness of style, and trivial erudition. The situation in Wittgenstein's Mistress grounds Markson's experimental structure and allows resonances beyond what he was able to achieve in the more hermetic situations of the novels which followed i…

Tim Burton has made some wonderful films, particularly his early work (Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands hold special places in my heart), and despite the execrable Planet of the Apes remake, I've generally thought of him as one of the great makers of SF films.

And then I saw Big Fish, which is currently in theatres. The first half is charming, though lacking in any sort of tension, but the second half -- and, in particular, the last twenty minutes or so -- is one messy ball of ghastly, saccharine goo. It's worse than Spielberg at his most manipulative and meretricious, and demonstrates utter contempt for the intelligence and imagination of the audience.

Burton and his screenwriter (John August), perhaps with the assistance of the original novel (I haven't read it), have bungled a perfectly respectable premise by smashing it beneath a sledgehammer of reality and trite moral proclamations. The central idea of a father who tells so many tall tales that his family ultima…