June 2007 – John Joseph Adams

Archive for June, 2007

Header Notes

I was just reading Adrienne Martini’s review (in the Baltimore City Paper) of The New Space Opera edited by Jonathan Strahan & Gardner Dozois, which is generally positive, but ends with a negative comment about the anthology’s header notes:

While a large percentage of this collection is full of space opera goodness, Dozois and Strahan’s introductions do them no favors. Instead of interstitial bits of text that help place the writer or the tale in some sort of context, the editors have merely crafted extra long bibliographies. Dozois, who edited Asimov’s magazine for 20 years as well as more than a dozen other anthologies, and Strahan, former book reviewer for Locus magazine and an Australia-based anthology editor, have been in the field long enough to have some opinions. It’s a shame that they only provide details that you could easily find out for yourself, rather than their thoughts on any given tale. It’s also a shame that they used the same line of description–enough ideas packed into this short story “to fuel many another author’s eight-hundred-page novel”–for both Kelly’s and McDonald’s stories. That may be true, of course, but it makes the stories in question feel redundant rather than as vital and “new” as they are.

That got me thinking about what the essential ingredients to good header notes are. As it happens, I haven’t written the header notes to Wastelands yet, so this topic is of great interest to me. Any thoughts?

Readercon Schedule

I’ll be attending Readercon in Burlington, MA next weekend (July 6-8), and I just got my schedule:

Friday 8:00 PM. Kaffeeklatsch

an intimate get-together between author and readers

Saturday 12:00 Noon. Panel

Sense of Wonder, or Sense of Cool?

John Joseph Adams, Thomas A. Easton, Laura Anne Gilman, Ernest Lilley (M), Ian Randal Strock

Sf seeks that sense of wonder, but we think much of today’s best sf brings forth a different feeling. To some of us, stories such as those in Charles Stross’s _Accelerando_ sequence evoke a response more along these lines: “It really might be like that? Cool!” The emotion is less an awed contemplation of the universe and its inhabitants, and more the delight we have toward a new, really loaded computer, electronic gadget or online capability-what can we do with it, what are the implications? What the author shows us may be amazing, beyond present technology or knowledge, but it feels better understood and more under our control than the cosmic wonders of older sf. Cool is more widely shared than wonder, but less, er, wonderful. Can this be part of the reason for the decline in the popularity of sf-cool can be reliably found in more places? Does fantasy supply wonder more reliably today?

I’m driving up to the con Friday morning, along with Doug Cohen, Rajan Khanna, and Jenny Rappaport. We expect to stop over at the Traveler Book Restaurant on the way, and arrive mid-afternoon sometime.

The Kaffeeklatsch is the perfect excuse to come by and say hello if we’ve never met before. So if you’re free, be sure to drop by! If that “intimate” description confuses you as to the nature of a Kaffeeklatsch, just ignore that; it’s basically going to be me sitting at a table (with coffee!) and chatting with whoever shows up. Very informal and relaxed. At least, if I understand it correctly. I haven’t actually done one (or attended one) before.

Google Reader

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions for my LJ feed problem with Bloglines. I’m currently trying out Google Reader, and I like it so far. It’s got a bunch of handy features, and a slick interface, and being that it’s very similar to Gmail (which I use), it feels very comfortable and familiar even though it’s new to me. We’ll see how well it works; so far it seems to be finding all of the LJ feeds I keep track of.

One cool thing Google Reader offers is a shared items page, which allows you to mark posts you find noteworthy and share them with your friends. You can see my shared items page here. Right now, it’s just got two posts I marked to test the feature. I noticed the shared items page also features an RSS feed of its own, so you can subscribe to the feed of my shared items, which would be, in essence, a “best of the blogosphere” according to me.

LJ Help

I continue to have problems keeping up with LiveJournals on Bloglines. Some of them show up consistently; others seem to never show up at all.

I’m contemplating wielding the power of my own LJ account to use the Friends feature to read LJs, but it sounds like it will be a tedious process to create the list. Also, is there a way to setup filters and whatnot, so that I can have only a certain group of Friends listed on the page where I see updated posts from my Friends?

Wind Unwinds Rogue’s Life

June 29 —

Fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss, whose novel The Name of the Wind is a finalist for this year’s Quill Awards, told SCI FI Wire that it is book one of a trilogy in which a fugitive hero tells his life story.

More …

Golden Birthday

Fairly recently, I came across a story in the slush which mentioned a special, one-time birthday everyone has once in his/her life called a “golden birthday.” Curious if it was real or not, I googled it. Wikipedia defines it as: “the day when the age someone turns is the same as the day in the month he or she was born. (For example, someone turning 26 on December 26 celebrates his or her golden birthday).”

This was especially of interest to me because this year will be *my* golden birthday. My birthday is July 31, and I turn 31 this year. Seems like fate that I should discover this concept just in time to celebrate it myself. So…what should I do to celebrate?

UPDATE: Just wanted to add that I don’t drink, so if you’re thinking of that kind of celebration, that won’t work for me. :)

How Many Rrrrrrrs in That?

via Blake Charlton: a keyboard made especially for pirates.

Wastelands Cover, Copy, TOC & Pub Date!

Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books just posted the cover and cover copy for my forthcoming anthology, Wastelands:

Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the harbingers of Armageddon–these are our guides through the Wastelands…

From the Book of Revelations to The Road Warrior; from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Road, storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving eschatological tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. In doing so, these visionary authors have addressed one of the most challenging and enduring themes of imaginative fiction: the nature of life in the aftermath of total societal collapse.

Gathering together the best post-apocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today’s most renowned authors of speculative fiction, including George R.R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King, Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon. Whether the end of the world comes through nuclear war, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm, these are tales of survivors, in some cases struggling to rebuild the society that was, in others, merely surviving, scrounging for food in depopulated ruins and defending themselves against monsters, mutants, and marauders.

Complete with introductions and an indispensable appendix of recommendations for further reading, Wastelands delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre’s core.
John Joseph Adams is the assistant editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In addition to his work at F&SF, Adams is a reporter for SCI FI Wire and a book reviewer for Publishers Weekly and Intergalactic Medicine Show. His essays, interviews, and reviews have also appeared in Amazing Stories, Kirkus, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Locus Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Subterranean Magazine.

Table of Contents

The End of the Whole Mess — Stephen King
Salvage — Orson Scott Card
The People of Sand and Slag — Paolo Bacigalupi
Bread and Bombs — M. Rickert
How We Got Into Town and Out Again — Jonathan Lethem
Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels — George R. R. Martin
Waiting for the Zephyr — Tobias S. Buckell
Never Despair — Jack McDevitt
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth — Cory Doctorow
The Last of the O-Forms — James Van Pelt
Still Life with Apocalypse — Richard Kadrey
Artie’s Angels — Catherine Wells
Judgement Passed — Jerry Oltion
Mute — Gene Wolfe
Intertia — Nancy Kress
And the Deep Blue Sea — Elizabeth Bear
Speech Sounds — Octavia E. Butler
Killers — Carol Emshwiller
Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus — Neal Barrett, Jr.
The End of the Word as We Know it — Dale Bailey
A Song Before Sunset — David Grigg
Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers — John Langan

That’s the actual TOC order. The publication date continues to fluctuate, but at the moment we’re saying January 2008.

Doppelgangers

The other day, Doug Cohen posted about his encounter with two similarly-named writers and a pesky email address that caused him to confuse the two. Long-time readers of my blog may recall that I had a similar encounter a few years ago, though mine happened to be with another John Adams, rather than with two other writers. I also had what turned out to be a false-alarm with a doppelganger.

‘Dreams’ Imagines Films That Weren’t

June 28 —

Fantasy author Tim Pratt, whose story “Impossible Dreams” won this year’s Asimov’s Readers’ Award for best short story and is a finalist for the Hugo Award, told SCI FI Wire that the story concerns a guy named Pete, a somewhat undersocialized movie buff who totally lives for cinema.

More …

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