The Mumpsimus

I haven't read much online fiction for a few weeks, so I decided to catch up today, reading the last month of stories at Strange Horizons , plus "More Beautiful Than You" by M. Rickert at Ideomancer . All worthwhile reading, but the best of the bunch is undoubtedly Eliot Fintushel's story "Women are Ugly" , which ties with Christopher Rowe's "The Voluntary State" for being my favorite story published online so far this year (though I haven't caught up with everything at SciFiction yet). Eliot Fintushel writes truly bizarre stories , and "Women are Ugly" announces itself as bizarre right from the beginning, with an epigraph from Spinoza followed by a paragraph of fairly short, odd sentences about the repulsive qualities of women -- sort of like "The Lady's Dressing Room" rewritten for children by Hemingway. It turns out that the narrator of the story is a man who is, probably, both mentally and physically...

It is those who care more about invented rules and silly shibboleths than about good writing who are the true barbarians. --languagehat

I'm very much looking forward to reading the new Locus because it has interviews with Jeff Ford and Alexander C. Irvine . Both are quoted on the cover : There are situations in life where you cannot quite name the experience -- you don't have the emotional maturity, or intelligence, or there is no way to name it ... You don't know how to describe the situation, so you tell a story around it to bring out that thing you couldn't name before. --Ford Everybody always has to complain about something, but in what time would you rather exist as a science fiction reader than right now? The days when science fiction was an adolescent literature are over. There will always be adolescent SF books, but the whole genre is no longer geared toward them. --Irvine To bide our time until the new issue arrives (with Locus Award results included), here are links to some other interviews with those two writers: Ford at Infinity Plus (interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer , SF Site , Boo...

A unique and passionate work of literary criticism is now fully available on the web (and may have been for a while): Jack Green's Fire the Bastards! , a 50,000-word essay published in three issues of Green's underground zine newspaper in 1962. It's about William Gaddis's first novel, The Recognitions and the reviews it received upon publication in 1955. (For a full history of Fire the Bastards , see Steven Moore's introduction to the print edition .) Fire the Bastards! is written with, for the most part, spaces instead of periods at the ends of sentences, very little capitalization, internal punctuation only when absolutely necessary (or when present in a quotation), and a freewheeling, informal prose style. It makes for compulsive reading if you're interested in how badly a book can be reviewed, and in revenge on those reviewers. For instance, here's Green on how reviewers use the term "ambitious" as a quiet criticism: but "ambiti...

Once again I owe Mark Sarvas a debt of gratitude for reminding me of an important date (or, as he says, "more goddamned anniversaries!!!"): the bicentennial of Nathaniel Hawthorne's birth on July 4. Personally, I'm fond of Hawthorne's death, not just because I was forced to read The Scarlet Letter as a freshman in high school, but because he paused to shuffle off this mortal coil in my own hometown, Plymouth, NH, with the only president New Hampshire has ever been allowed to send to Washington, Franklin Pierce , by his side (Hawthorne had written a biography of Pierce). Few people in Plymouth know that Hawthorne died there, and the inn where he died has long since rotted from memory. If you hate Hawthorne because of what high school teachers did to you, try to open your mind for this bicentennial. Some of his novels can be a chore, but he wrote many magnificent (and magical) short stories, including "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" , "...

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer notes that On the Boards , a theatre devoted to contemporary performance, has created Blog the Boards , a way for audience members to write reviews of performances. I was initially interested because I know some people who have performed there, so I wanted to see if they got any reviews, but as I roamed around, I found the dialogue interesting and the entire concept fairly provocative. In terms of feedback, it's not much different from the message boards some magazines and publishers have set up, but I don't know of any theatres doing quite the same thing. Certainly, Amazon lets people write their opinions about everything from books to owl puke , but for a theatre to open up a forum on its own website for people to freely review shows that are still running ... that takes guts. The spirit with which it is done is a noble one: But what if our bloggers write negative things about our work? Actually, we expect there will be criticism; we're...

I just discovered, to my delight, that Tachyon Publications will be reprinting Her Smoke Rose Up Forever , a collection of the best stories of James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), for whom the Tiptree Award was named. (Tachyon is also publishing The James Tiptree Award Anthology .) The book is due out in the late fall/early winter. A contents listing for the previous edition is here . The Tachyon website notes : "This update of the 1990 classic Arkham House edition contains revisions from the author's original notes." That could be good or bad, but the original collection is a masterpiece, filled with some of the most magnificent SF short stories of the past fifty years and a fine introductory essay by John Clute . Not much of Tiptree's best work is currently in print, the out of print collections can be difficult and expensive to get copies of, and I know of only two stories available on the web: "The Women Men Don't See" and "The Sc...