Chrononautic Log

June 25, 2004

Tomorrow morning I’m flying out to Amelia Island, Florida, where I intend to spend several days lounging around doing nothing. I’ll be off line for about a week; if you need to get in touch with me, well, you probably know my cell phone number, or know somebody who does.

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I know the administration thinks it’s above the law, but this?

Even if the Senate were in session, the vice president, though constitutionally the president of the Senate, is an executive branch official and therefore free to use whatever language he likes.

That’s taking it too far, Mr. Vice President. I want to see some Justice Department memos on this.

(From the Washington Post, via Gwenda Bond.)

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June 23, 2004

Okay, so this morning I saw the following two headlines, or very similar ones, on the Seattle Times and the New York Times, respectively: Bush rejected torture ban and the apparently contradictory Bush prisoner policy set humane tone.

Unfortunately, I didn’t write them down; and I can’t look up the exact phrasing on the web, because they’ve both been changed: to Treat prisoners fairly, Bush said in 2002 and White House says prisoner policy set humane tone, respectively.

What’s up with that?

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Update: Rob provides the actual NYT headline: Orders by Bush about prisoners set humane tone. The Seattle Times headline: Bush disavows ban on torture.

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June 22, 2004

Everyone should read A Softer World.

It’s just like Red Meat, only not fucked up. (Depressed, yes, sometimes. But not fucked up. Also, not into reruns.)

(Thanks, Hannah. No, not that Hannah, the other Hannah.)

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June 21, 2004

1. “The Fog of War” is a fuckin’ amazing movie.
2. What’s with all the spam I’ve been getting recently about Chinese straw hats?

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June 15, 2004

. . . ’Cause I just bought a calculus textbook.

Of course, if it was a real mid-life crisis, I’d have paid list — $195.00 — instead of finding an old second edition on abebooks.com for forty bucks. But, still.

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June 14, 2004

So, help me out here: What’s the quickest way (with minimal disruption to my day-to-day life; one or two distance-learning or night classes at a time, say) for me to get from point A — three semesters of calculus and one college-level introductory physics class, taken nearly fifteen years ago — to B — being able to follow the math in journals like Classical and Quantum Gravity?

The straightforward way to do this would be to spend the next few years taking about a dozen or twenty college courses starting with single-variable calculus (again) and moving up to differential geometry, with excursions along the way into topology and partial differential equations — not to mention some actual physics.

Unfortunately, even the straightforward way isn’t that straightforward, since no one institution (that I can find) offers everything I’d want to take as a distance learning course or even as an on-campus continuing education course. It could be that the only real way to do it is to drop out of the work force again and spend five or six years getting a Master’s in math or physics; and I’m not sure I want it that badly.

Anyone got any better ideas?

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Cat and Girl (well, just Girl, really) find out what Timaeus and Critias were really on to.

Figure 1. The true location of Atlantis

Read on to understand why it is that the Z. A. Simons and J. M. Allens of the world haven’t had much luck finding it.

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June 12, 2004

Jed Hartman notes the release of the 2003 short list for the Sidewise Awards. He notes an ongoing gender imbalance among the Sidewise nominations, and wonders what goes into making them that way. He offers a “Tongue-in-cheek challenge”: to

write an alternate-history story that postulates a historical Point Of Departure which results in more women writing alternate history stories. Bonus points for making such a story so good and so interesting that it wins next year’s Sidewise Award.

I’m not sure why there aren’t more women writing AH, or (if they are) why more of the AH written by women doesn’t come up for the Sidewises. Buy me a drink at a convention and I’ll happily try out five or six different theories. But I think part of it, at least, is a perception thing.

I had this feeling, when I was writing “Five Irrational Histories” for Rabid Transit (the first of which nearly answers your challenge, Jed! Take note!) that I was violating the conventions of the genre. “You’ve got too many Points of Departure! And they’re impossible! And even if they were possible, they wouldn’t do what you say they do! And you don’t even mention the Civil War!”

See, when I think of the term alternate history (as opposed to when I, say, just write it, without thinking about it), I think of a certain sort of story that you might call “hard alternate history”: well-defined turning points, the appearance (if not the reality) of relentlessly logical extrapolation . . . conservative theories of history and human nature . . . a certain preference for “Men’s Adventure” sorts of plots. The counterpart (with all that entails in approach, tone, and so on) of hard science fiction. And — here’s where Jed’s question comes in — like hard science fiction, hard alternate history isn’t a sub-genre that’s particularly inviting to women.

Anyway, the gender question aside — if you’re into Hard AH, good for you, but it’s not really my thing. But my first instinct is still that That’s What Alternate History Is. So, when I was writing “Five Irrational Histories”, something about what I was doing bothered me.

But then I thought:

“Wait a minute. Conventions of the genre? With ‘alternate history’, you’re talking about a sub-genre that’s been around for hardly a century — and the ‘mainstream’ of alternate history (the Greenberg/Resnick Alternate Whatevers, Leighton’s SS:GB, Harris’ Fatherland, many of the works of S. M. Stirling, the complete works of Harry Turtledove) is a sub-genre of a sub-genre, even if it is the dominant one. Get a grip!”

I had this moment where I felt like Raymond Chandler discovering (via Dashiell Hammett) that Agatha Christie’s wasn’t the only way to write a mystery.

I was going to go into a mini-rant about the Sidewises preferring Hard AH, but looking at the past winners, I can’t really back it up. I’m still a little suspicious of any award that would prefer a tech-centric Stephen Baxter story (“Brigantia’s Angels”) to two of my favorite stories of all time — Howard Waldrop’s “You Could Go Home Again” and Maureen McHugh’s “The Lincoln Train”; but probably I’m just bitter because I had two stories on the reading list and neither made the short list. And neither one was “hard alternate history”.

Now that I sit down to actually do the research (or the poking around on the Internet that passes as research), though, I don’t think that Hard AH was ever as dominant as all that; it’s just the cumulative effect of seeing all those Turtledove novels and Resnick anthologies in the bookstores when I was growing up. In their nearly-ten-years the Sidewise Awards have done a pretty fair job of pointing out that there is more to the alternate-history subgenre than alternate versions of the wars-and-dates history that was apparently fashionable in the 19th century, and that most of us were still getting in junior high and high school.

Nonetheless, I think I’m on to something, even if it’s a thing people (the aforementioned McHugh and Waldrop, Michael Moorcock, Michael Swanwick, Liz Williams, Christopher Priest, Philip Pullman — just to pull a few names out of hats) have already been on to for a long time. If there’s one sub-genre of SF that shouldn’t ought to be pinned down and conventionalized, by its very nature, it’s alternate history. There’s an infinite number of ways to write alternate history. Let’s more of us do more of them.

Let’s get alternate.

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June 11, 2004

Kathryn Cramer finds a kid who gets it:

From a first grade perspective, extinction was something that happened only to dinosaurs. Together, Peter and I changed that point of view, acquainting them with fascinating animals recently gone extinct: the thylacine, the great auk, the quagga, the moa. At the end, I asked what people could do about the problem of extinctions. One eager boy, raising his hand urgently until I called on him, answered “Form an angry mob!”

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So I’ve finally given in and gotten an instant messaging account. chronodm on AIM. Those of you that are ahead of me on the technology curve, feel free to distract me now.

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June 10, 2004

What about Ray Charles? What about Robert Quine? What about William Manchester? What about them?

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June 9, 2004

Just got my eighth (1925) and tenth (1937, reprinted 1943) editions of the Chicago Manual of Style, courtesy of Wonder Book & Video of Frederick, MD. No more guesswork. No more digging through my three-times-longer Fourteenth Edition. No more agonizing over the introduction of unwelcome modern “innovations” into the rules of punctuation and typesetting. No more questioning the historicity of my font choices:

The whole history of type-founding shows no more brilliant and lasting achievement than the type produced by William Caslon of London, in 1720, which we now call Caslon Old Style. Thousands of type faces have had their day and been lost in oblivion in the five hundred years since typography was born, but this face has had an ever increasing popularity since it was first cut.

— A Manual of Style, Chicago 1925, p. 230

No other type is quite so safe, no other face provides such a great variety of pleasing effects with so little effort and no other presents so little objectionable as Caslon Old Style. The typographer who has in his cases the full equipment of sizes is like an artist with a full palette: complete opportunity for expression is at his instant command.

— A Manual of Style, Chicago 1937, p. 243

The Manuals themselves, I should note, both appear to be set in some variant of Bodoni.

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If I wasn’t already taking the following week off, I’d be real tempted to drive down to Mojave next weekend .

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. . . only directors who understand realism will be allowed to make fantasy movies.

The difference between Harry Potter in the hands of Alfonso Cuarón, who understands how to make movies about real people doing real things in real places, and Harry Potter in the hands of Chris Columbus, who understands how to make live-action cartoons, is night and day.

(I mean — my God — they’re actually in England in this one! In Tony Blair’s England! With, like, suburban roundabouts and car alarms and Docklands Light Rail! And the characters are actual kids, with adolescent anxieties and Marks & Sparks clothes and a sense of humor! And the castle, it actually has a sense of space! And — All right, all right, I’m sitting down . . .)

Mike Newell has also done some pretty good work, and I suspect Goblet will still be a significant improvement over Stone and Chamber . . . but with Prisoner, Cuarón’s given him a damned tough act to follow. I think we’re going to miss him.

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June 4, 2004

Images out of Moorcock or Miéville: Molly Ivins, on the secret war between the chickenhawks and the uniformed military:

What we’re looking at is one of those underwater struggles among various bureaucratic behemoths involved in some hideous internecine conflict of which we can see nothing except roiled water.

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Started laying out All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories last weekend, on the way to and from WisCon. Still fiddling with a few things — use of small caps and old-style figures, leading of and around subheads, that kind of thing; and there’ll be some clean-up to do, to make sure that italic punctuation is consistent, leading apostrophes haven’t been turned into single quotes, that sort of thing. But it’s starting to look like a book:

Figure 1. Sample page, from Jed Hartman’s fine tale, “The Last of the Zeppelins“

I’m a little surprised that the basics of DTP don’t seem to have changed noticeably from when I was laying out the school newspaper in PageMaker 1.0 on Windows/386, fourteen years ago (!); just that now it doesn’t take all night to print a dozen pages. (Though, come to think of it, word processing hasn’t changed much in those fourteen years either — not since the introduction of outline mode in MS Word 5.1, anyway.) I expect ASZAS still won’t be as good as real, professional copy editors and typesetters and compositors and whatnot would make it, but it’ll be good enough that I won’t feel I’m embarrassing myself.

I’ve also been transcribing our one reprint, Howard Waldrop’s “You Could Go Home Again”, from my Australian edition of his collection Going Home Again. That’s been interesting, too. For one thing, I’m noticing a lot of formatting and punctuation details, exactly the same things that (while laying out the other stories) I’ve realized I don’t really have a handle on. (For another, I’m reading the story much more closely at ten minutes per page than at three pages per minute.)

Naturally our one reprint would be (1) quite long indeed, and (2) from an author whose operation is still entirely analog — but it’s worth it.

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June 1, 2004

Still feeling a bit fragmented.

I was quite taken with Madison. I don’t know if I’d have felt the same way if it had been February or August; but still, this bears thinking about.

Mostly what I remember is alternating naps with stimulating intellectual conversations. There are worse ways to spend a weekend.

I have this vague idea that maybe I ought to post, or have posted, an hour-by-hour con report, but I’m having trouble concentrating that hard. I apologize.

Also, I’d like to apologize to everyone who wasn’t there for not trying, or not successfully trying, to drag you there.

Also, I’d like to apologize to everyone who was there that I didn’t get to say goodbye to before rushing off to sit in the airport for three hours.

Also, I want a Tiptree Award.

WisCon. It is the best con.

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