A girl to her friends: “I don’t cook. My mother said watching me cook is like watching somebody rape eggs.”
Author Archives: Tom Crippen
Saucers
I just read this story by Douglas Lain. Very modern, very socialist, but I liked it. For years I’ve wanted to write a story about a summer in Montreal when a big flying saucer parked itself overhead and stayed there. Now it may be too late, which goes to show.
Here’s a story I did write, and it was published in the same place as Lain’s. Strange Horizons comes up a few times in the Best S.F. of 2006 collection I got at Worldcon, so I gather it’s not a bad venue, though neither is it a rich venue. Writing quirky little s.f. stories seems to be up there with poetry and avant-garde jazz when it comes to worldly acclaim.
“The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories”
Seeing Gaiman at Worldcon caused me to buy his big short story collection, Smoke and Mirrors. My favorite story so far is “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories,” which I happened to read years back while sitting in the book store. It’s kind of a sideways rendering of Gaiman’s first time out in Hollywood, when Good Omens had been optioned and he and Terry Pratchett were doing the script. I love Hollywood stuff, especially modern Hollywood and the nonacting side, the agents and studio people, so it’s no wonder I like the story. But it’s a good job, too. He captures odd little moments that bring out the disjunction and strangeness in the way these people approach life (or the way that one hears they approach life), and he manages the tricky job of creating a long series of quick but distinct glimpses of producers, execs, flunkies, etc., each person different enough from the others and yet cognitively deformed in the same way.
The inside-Hollywood, studio-idiocy business stays funny but also becomes unsettling. The speed with which it moves, a pace that at first seems wide awake and brisk, becomes creepy; this is the only case I can think of where narrative speed is turned into something like a horror element. (Not a suspense element, which, as I understand it, would involve plot: how soon will that train hit that girl?) You start out by enjoying the contrast between the brisk Hollywood material and the story’s otherwise Gaiman-like air of menacing dreaminess; then the Hollywood material becomes the atmosphere’s key ingredient. Not bad.
Okay, content. A small-time British writer of quiet horror stories hits it big with a novel and is brought out to Hollywood to do the script. Nobody at the studio or the production company knows what they’re doing, and they keep being fired and replaced and no one remembers that the previous batch was there. Neither do they remember the old stars of the past, and the memory shortage gets more marked as the narrator approaches the end of his string of executives and they get younger.
Meanwhile, there’s a goldfish pool at the narrator’s hotel, and he learns from the pool’s caretaker that the fish have no memory and so they swim about forever and get nowhere and every 20 seconds it’s a brand-new world to them. Which is the Hollywood situation as the narrator finds it.
The narrator starts sketching out a story set back home in England and involving a stage magician in a sad little seaside theater. So he wants to be creative again and get out of this Hollywood bullshit. He writes a poem about the seaside theater, and that’s his creativity giving a sign of life.
In reading up for his story, the narrator comes across two 19th-century stage-magic tricks, both of which involve frames (I think) and thereby prefigure 20th-century show biz and its screen-based entertainment. Okay, but why? To me it just seems like a flourish — here’s a fancy idea! One of the tricks does involve a lady who descends from a painting and tells an artist to buck up, he’s got the stuff, and that is obviously apropos to the narrator’s situation.
To tell the truth, the story doesn’t seem too hard to decipher (except for that business about 19th century/20th century show biz, which may not be just a flourish after all). But it works better if you don’t.
Still, if anyone has further thoughts on meanings, or whatever, go ahead.
Well, duh
Palin’s favorable is down 7 points in Gallup.
Okay, fine. Anyway, we now have WMDs, Bush’s competence, and Sarah Palin. What I hope is that anyone who has been wrong on all three topics might now take a second look at the health care debate. Maybe reform isn’t about killing off old citizens and paving the way for rationed toilet paper (which I suppose would roll down the paved way).
S. M. Stirling
He ought to get a medal. I saw him yesterday at a Worldcon panel (“Why Do We Read Fantasy?”) for which all the other scheduled writers had bailed. He was up behind the table by himself and had to carry the day, and he did. There was a crowd of about a hundred, and he gave us a very well-worded, well thought-out account of his experience with and views on fantasy, then provided very well-worded, well thought-out answers to our questions (some of which were also pretty decent, some not). Stirling is obviously a smart and thoughtful man, and he has the further gift of being able to organize his thoughts into sentences even as they clear his mouth; it’s something I wish I could learn. And he listens. Some of the writers at the various panels tend to give generalized answers, but he was targeting what he said to what he was asked. So, all in all, we have one of the better hours I spent at the con.
update, I just checked out Mr. Stirling’s Wiki entry. I got to say, this stuff sounds really interesting. I especially want to look at the Draka series.
update 2, A friend tells me he saw Stirling at another panel, one on parallel histories of Canada, “and he was really sharp there.”
I should also mention that Stirling was very funny.
What a great name
I suppose the scam artist got carried away by inspiration at the end. He thought, “Screw the payoff, I just want to do that name.”
You have been approved for a lump sum payment of £750.000.00 GBP, in this Year Toyota Global Award. Send us the required information as stated below to file for claims.1.Full Name:…………..
2.Full Address:……….
3.Occupation:……….
4.Country……………Regards
Mr Adelheid Fankhauser
It isn’t taken out of some cult sci-fi comedy novel. I googled and there’s at least one person in Europe going about with this name and he’s done well at the study of maltherapeutin, which sounds to me like the science of providing bad therapy with a folksy accent, though probably there’s more to it than that.
In other news, I spent two hours in large, crowded rooms with Neil Gaiman today and can report that he is charming beyond smooth. This was at Worldcon, where the Hugo is awarded and which is being held here in Montreal this year. I also met Lev Grossman, though I had no idea who he was. He gave me a chapbook with the first chapter of his novel, which I liked, and at the end there was an author’s bio. It revealed he is by far the most literarily connected person I’ve ever spoken to. Seemed like a nice guy! He had wandered into the back of the room during a misbegotten shambles of a panel whose scheduled participants had bailed and been replaced at the last minute. The subject was fantasy novels and how much politics and economics they should contain. Grossman offered that he was a fantasy novelist — heads turned — and that he had just finished a novel about a world much like the Narnia world but with some revisionism as to adult realities, including socioeconomic realities. For instance, how come Mrs. Hedgehog or whoever has a sewing machine when there are no factories in Narnia? That sounded good to me, so after the panel I asked for his name, he gave me the chapbook, etc. Hence the revelation that followed.
Back to the panel discussion. A very odd, even semi-deranged, lout also wandered into the room, but he sat up front and soon planted himself in the middle of the conversation, such as it was. Otherwise the place was full of whispery fans who deferred to each other; we didn’t even raise our hands properly, just bent our elbows and parked a hand by our ear, fingers curled over. So the strange lout began talking loudly and soon offered an idea that I liked: how do we know that the whatever kids, Peter and Lucy and Susan and that other one, how do we know they were the first bunch to be sent along from our world to wake the sleeping king (or whatever their mission was). The fellow reasoned that getting the job done first crack out of the box was kind of a long shot. So maybe others had come along, failed, and died, and all over Narnia there were discreet little plots of land dedicated to the graves of the Wilkins children, the Anderson children, the Smith children, etc., but the talking animals didn’t want Peter and Lucy and the rest to know, so they covered it up. I liked that he remembered they would all be Anglo-Saxon family names.
All right, so maybe it isn’t the greatest single pop-culture revisionist geek goof you ever heard, but it sure livelied up the occasion. That panel sucked so bad. And the idea would come in handy if you were doing a parody about it being the late ’80s and DC somehow acquiring the rights to Narnia and hiring some schmuck writer who had just read Watchmen.
Has anybody read Farah Mendelsohn?
She wrote Rhetorics of Fantasy. An ad for the book says it “introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre” and utilizes “nearly two hundred examples of modern fantasy.” Sounds interesting, but I haven’t read a lot of fantasy lately and don’t even know what the current classifications would be. Tolkein-style quest is still going on, I suppose.