The Mumpsimus

This is the tenth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary today, August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found  here . Well, here we are. The beginning. I started the blog after reading something in an emailed newsletter from my internet provider about Blogger . It sounded interesting, and I was curious to learn about HTML, which you needed to know the basics of to be able to format anything, so I took some of the last few days of summer vacation and played around. I'd recently begun reading science fiction and fantasy again after a relatively long absence. The New Wave Fabulists  issue of Conjunctions  brought me back, showing that some interesting stuff had happened since I'd stopped reading SF with any regularity in the mid-'90s. I got interested in the writers associated with the New Weird , and, especially, the contentious discussions that surrounded it ...

I wrote a bit about The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction back when it first came out, and then a few weeks later I was tasked with having to create a syllabus for a "Special Topics" course in our Women's Studies program that I called Gender & Science Fiction . I knew I wanted to start the course with a variety of short stories to give the students some experience in reading SF before we plunged into novels, but I couldn't find an anthology that was eclectic enough for my needs. Then I remembered The Wesleyan Anthology , and took a look at its table of contents to see how well it would fit. Bingo, I had one of my textbooks. The students will present their final papers on Friday, and I wanted to take a moment here to say that the anthology actually worked even better than I thought it would, and try to explain some of the reasons I think that is so.

Readercon 21 was, for me, exciting and stimulating, though this year in particular it felt like I only had a few minutes to talk with everybody I wanted to talk with.  I think part of this is a result of my now living in New Hampshire rather than New Jersey, so I just don't see a lot of folks from the writing, publishing, and reading worlds much anymore. Before I get into some thoughts on some panels and discussions, some pictures: Ellen Datlow's and Tempest Bradford's .  Tempest asked everybody to make a sad face for her, not because Readercon was a sad con (just the opposite!), but because it's fun to have people make sad faces.  The iconic picture from the weekend for me, though, is Ellen's photo of Liz Hand's back .  I covet Liz's shirt. And now for some only vaguely coherent thoughts on some of the panels...

Rain Taxi has posted online an interview I conducted with James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel , editors of The Secret History of Science Fiction . Most of the discussion took place in a Masonic lodge in southern New Hampshire, although at one point I was blindfolded and taken to an undisclosed location that smelled of patchouli and motor oil.  Jim Kelly ducked out briefly to launder some money vacation in the Cayman Islands, and John Kessel made me repeat long passages of Latin that made my skin itch.  But I let nothing stop my relentless pursuit of the truth...

Dear Nebula Voters, I know what your real purpose is with the nominees for this year's award.  Don't think you can hide your secret, conspiratorial goals from me!  I know what you really want to do is cause me immense angst by putting some of my favorite people up against each other in your various (nefarious!) categories.  You know when it comes to awards I root for the people I know and like before I even consider anything else, because of course the people I know and like are all the greatest writer in the world, but what am I supposed to do when you, for instance, put VanderMeer up against Barzak in the novel category?! I'm safe, at least, with the short story category.  Jim Kelly is the only writer I know well there, so obviously he should win.  Novelette is worse -- Paolo Bacigalupi is the one person whose short stories have caused me to write a long essay , and he's a really nice guy (well, as long as you don't burn lots of hydrocarbons in front...

Though it is April, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine likes to stick to the future, and so the June 2009 issue is now available. This is a particularly special issue, as it includes James Patrick Kelly's 25th annual June story -- the first was the June 1984 "Saint Theresa of the Aliens". Last summer, Jim was the guest of honor at Readercon, where he was interviewed by John Kessel , and where I had the privilege of being on a panel about his work -- and of writing a little bit about him in the program book. In honor of Jim's June feats, here is what I wrote about him last year: JPK AND ME: THE EARLY YEARS by Matthew Cheney originally published in the Readercon 19 souvenir book, 2008 I'm not alone in having a golden age, a time when science fiction was the brightest star shining in the galaxy of my life, but I may be alone in being able to tie that golden age to specific issues of a magazine and to a specific byline in those issues. Yes, this is my gold...

A grand time was had by all at Readercon this year, and it was a great thrill for me to get to see one of my oldest friends in the writing world, James Patrick Kelly , as guest of honor -- honored so well and appropriately. The two panels I was on seemed to go well, though I arrived at the con only half an hour before I was on the "Triumphing Over Competence" panel and hadn't quite adjusted yet, so my contributions were few. Adam Golaski did a fine job of moderating, but it was a tough topic to focus in on in a way that would lead to real insights. Saturday's "The Career of James Patrick Kelly" panel felt much more successful to me, and one of its strengths was the diversity in the backgrounds of the panelists -- we had all discovered Jim's writings (and Jim himself) at different times and in different ways. Of course, afterward I thought of many things I should have said instead of what I did, in fact say, but I probably talked too much anyway, so i...

Barring a catastrophe, I'm going to be at Readercon this summer, partly because I haven't been to a science fiction convention in a while, and especially because James Patrick Kelly and Jonathan Lethem are the guests of honor. (I'm going to book a hotel room soon ... if anybody's looking for a roommate, let me know.) An essay I wrote about Jim Kelly will be appearing in the souvenir book, since Jim and I go way, way back. I'm able to write with authority about his years as a miner in New Hampshire's granite quarries, his conversion to a strange form of neo-paganism predicated on the worship of lawn ornaments, his ill-fated campaign for the governorship (he lost to his more liberal opponent, Mel Thomson ), and his years as a writer for the Union Leader's editorial page. I also share my memories of acting in one of Jim's least successful plays, On Godot Pond , which was a somewhat uneven mix of Beckett and down-home Yankee humor.

Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer James Patrick Kelly was an important mentor for Chris Barzak when the young Mr. B. was just beginning to figure out what it meant to be a writer. I asked Jim to join us in celebrating his protege's success, and here is what he had to say: I first met and worked with Chris Barzak when he was knee high to an adverb at the Imagination Writers Workshop in Cleveland, Ohio back in the summer of 1997, and I remember sitting out on a sunny patio and telling him that he needed to apply to Clarion and then go on to have a career as a writer. I also have a vague memory of him staring back at me like I was perhaps addled by the heat. The next year we did let him into Clarion and I worked with him again and informed him he was already a writer, just one who hadn't published yet. I'm pretty sure he was starting to believe by then. Over the years I have watched with pride as he has proved me so very right. I have recently derived a formula th...