Views from Medina Road

About 370 Locus Poll ballots received so far; I compiled them Friday evening to see how the results are coming along. Leaders in a couple categories have changed since the first check, 300 ballots or so ago, and it's fair to say that 5 or 6 of the categories remain too close to call. So don't forget to vote. There's a big red button installed on the homepage, at the direction of Locus Management, to keep reminding you.

I regret that I will be unable to attend ICFA this year, again, and Nebulas, though I've made the hotel reservation, are in serious doubt. Partly a financial issue, partly one of domestic interference.

Caught up on email today, including a couple items that made it to the homepage despite being a month or more stale. I'm hoping you'll not be able to tell which they are.

Still have never seen McAuley's White Devils in a physical book store. I bought mine from Amazon.

No, no word of the cat.

It's easy to come up with rules and prescriptions, but not so easy to follow them. Here's what I would say constitutes a good blog: 1) update daily, 2) keep it short, 3) don't talk about what everybody else is talking about, 4) but don't make it entirely about yourself. Needless to say, this blog fails miserably by these criteria (and no one else seems to follow these rules either, quite), which is why you shouldn't take any of my rules or prescriptions too seriously.

The past week has been hectic and somewhat distressing. Saturday Yeong and I attended the opera, an LA Opera production of Die Frau ohne Schatten, a beautiful, well-staged opera that played out like a supernatural fantasy story--about an Empress of the Spirit Realm whose husband will turn to stone unless she can acquire a shadow--until an odd, weirdly anachronistic resolution in which the two female leads singing ecstatically about the joys of motherhood. We had great seats, because I bought the tickets a year ago, before the move the new house; I couldn't afford them now.

Which segues to the next topic, my having to budget website expenses more carefully than I have until now. This Monday there was another spike in visitors to the site, which would be good except that big spikes bring surcharges from the hosting service. (And I can't figure out where the visitors are coming from; my server statistics are not revealing.) Even without such spikes, I don't have the reserve I once had to finance the site, so that the reluctant conclusion is that I'll be reducing paid reviews and essays on Locus Online down to nil, after another month or so. (There are some April 1st pieces, and one or two others, already committed.)

The distressing part of this past week was having negligently lost my cat, or one of my cats. Complicated story. Before I moved last year, I had 3 cats, all originally strays, all outdoor cats. When I moved (to a house with no yard to speak of), I kept the female cat and brought her indoors, and gave the 2 male cats to my friend Larry K (no, not that Larry K), who for a time had been my roommate at the old house--so he knew the cats. One of the 2 males--whom I'd both had for over 10 years--was quite old and died shortly thereafter. Recently Larry has been remodeling his house, and he asked if I could keep the other male, Puss'n'Boots, at my house for a few days while sandblasting was going on. I picked the cat up Sunday evening and brought him to my house. Since Puss'n'Boots knew me, he seemed calm enough, once he got here. He and my female cat weren't pals, so I put Puss'n'Boots in a separate room, with food etc, and cracked the window to let air in. Sometime during the night, he clawed a hole in the window screen, and escaped. By morning, he was gone, loose in a strange, unfamiliar area, 10 miles from what had become his home. I walked the streets and posted flyers and called the animal shelter, with no results--of course. It's hard to be optimistic that we'll ever find him. He was a tough male cat, so I'm not concerned that he might not survive. But I feel terrible that I betrayed him, let him get loose, and have no way to find him and take care of him again. You don't realize how many houses, how many yards and trees and bushes there are where a cat might be huddling, just in your own little neighborhood, until you walk up and down streets for 2 hours. For all that we have such control and knowledge of some parts of our lives, of some things in our technological, SFnal society, it only takes a lost cat to remind us how many things, in practice, remain unknowable.

There's a lovely warm breeze this evening, with occasional dry gusts, like a parched desert wind off the Martian plains; the latest modulation in the transitional weather this past week here in southern California. It was still cool last week, but by Sunday it was balmy, then positively toasty on Monday and again on Tuesday. Today there was a coolish tinge to the midday air, but it failed to dispel the sundown warmth. The sweater vests are put away; the summer shorts are pulled out for fitting.

More rearrangement on the homepage today; the site is more and more becoming a blog itself, with chronological updates and categorized archive pages. It's the way of the web.

A friend at work, who only occasionally glances at Locus Online, posted an item about the 2003 Recommended Reading list on fark.com, one of his favorite sites. Here's the entire thread, with 100 some comments. Always interesting to see what people think are the obvious titles that Locus somehow overlooked.

The link brings some fresh eyes to the site--traffic the past 2 days has been about 250% of normal--but at a cost. The site has an unlimited bandwidth account, but it's not free; the spike in traffic last month after the Reading list and poll form went up brought me a surcharge of $150, and I can now expect a similar surcharge for the traffic from fark.com.

In other news, it seems that negotiations between Locus Publications and Westercon fell through, and the Locus Awards will now *not* be presented at Westercon 57 (July 4th weekend near Phoenix). Where they will be presented has not been determined. I've asked Locus HQ if any other details can be released; depending on what I hear, I may post an item on the Locus Online homepage.

And Jonathan Strahan has heard that s1ngularity::criticism is folding, though there's nothing about that yet on the site itself.

Imagine my surprise, after yesterday's post, at opening this morning's Los Angeles Times Book Review and discovering a review of the new Gregory Benford novel. The explanation for this rare event must in part be because Benford is a 'local' author, where 'local' has a generous, California-sized meaning, Benford living in Irvine, some 60 or 70 miles south of LA proper.

The review is OK, mostly descriptive, though the reviewer, a 'regular contributor' to the Book Review, can't help point out the way in which SF novels work somewhat differently from the presumed norm of literary fiction...

Science fiction, as Benford notes in an afterword, is an "idea-intensive genre," and the value of this book lies more in its speculations about "where evolution and technology might take us" than in its mixture of a coming-of-age story with an extended chase sequence. At one level, "Beyond Infinity" is little more than a girl-and-her-dog yarn in which the dog, like Lassie or Rin-Tin-Tin, is smarter than the girl and protects her from successive perils.

And

The library is a handy device that helps Benford with the chore that burdens every science-fiction writer: having to spend so much time describing and explaining new things. Lecture material clogs the action and interrupts emotional continuity even after mysterious forces from space scorch the Earth...

Still, it's nice the LAT notices us, once in a while.

Here's a curiosity. Most literary prizes--the National Book Award, the NBCC, etc.--ignore genre fiction candidates, let alone offer separate categories for genre fiction. That's probably due to the usual literary snobbishness about genre fiction, though one could easily argue that genre fiction (especially SF/F/H!) has plenty awards of its own.

But not the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, whose finalists have just been announced. They have an entire *category* for "mystery/thriller".

A year can pass between reviews in the LA Times of books even remotely resembling SFFH. And then they're by Michael Crichton or Ray Bradbury.

Spent some time today weeding the Links Portal page, under the SFFH news/reviews/fiction column, consigning several dead links, or year-or-more stale sites, to a little heap in the bottom left corner, where they will duly be swept away. At the same time, I mined several other sites for new links, and added them both under this heading, and the SF Blogs & Journals heading. There's no exact science to this--I don't add every possible link I see; I add those than within 30 seconds or so appear to be worth checking back on. (I suppose I'm old-fashioned about this, but what is it about bloggers who provide no clue about who they are or what their blog is 'about'? Granted I don't have a personal page myself... but... I have references.)

Cheryl Morgan has a nice post today about why a Best Website category would be worthy addition to the Hugo awards.

Working the past month's magazines this week, to finish a Monitor page tomorrow, or this weekend at the latest. Then another New Books page. Somehow not enough new-in-paperback or classic-reprint titles seen this past month to warrant pages, so those will wait until third week of March or so.

(It's what I'm listening to. No idea who the Eskimo is, though.)