June 6 —
Mutliple-award-winning SF and fantasy author James Morrow, whose novel The Last Witchfinder is a finalist for this year’s Locus Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award, told SCI FI Wire that the book was inspired by a mind-boggling sentence in physicist Edward Harrison’s Masks of the Universe.
Does anyone know if LiveJournal purposely disabled RSS feeds or something? It seems like none of my LJ feeds are working in my RSS reader.
Matt Kressel is Stephen Colbert’s “Geek Friend.” Don’t worry about Stephen, BTW; if you think he looks a little, well, flat, it’s just because he had a lot to drink before his BEA appearance to calm his nerves (being surrounded by all those books made him uncomfortable).
Speaking of BEA, at the Tor booth, I picked up an amusing item: a brochure designed to be an introduction to SF publishing jargon for the uninitiated. It’s called “Science Fiction and Fantasy: an Introduction from Tor.”
It begins with basic definitions of SF and Fantasy, then inside discusses conventions, the various awards, categories and sub-genres. One odd thing I came across in the pamphlet is a term I actually wasn’t familiar with:
Ruritanian: Witty, swashbuckling adventures set in imaginary European nations in the post-industrial era. (Overlaps with STEAMPUNK.)
Is that really a whole sub-genre? I’ve never even heard of that. Googling the term revealed that it is derived from the novels of late-19th/early 20th- century fantasist Anthony Hope. However, there seems to be some discrepancy between Tor’s definition of the term and what I found on the web. The Tor definition is spot on with other references I found, except for the post-industrial part.
Has anyone actually heard this term before? What are some classic examples of it?
In my Wiscon post, I mentioned that I scored a bunch of free Prime Books from Sean Wallace. But since I had so little room in my luggage, I had to ship them back home. Now that I’ve got them, I can catalog my loot:
Prime has got some of the best designed books coming out lately. Best American Fantasy and The Secret History of Moscow in particular have really beautiful covers that kind of scream “Read me!”
As it happens, I probably didn’t really need to pick these up at Wiscon, as Prime was also at Book Expo America this weekend, which I also attended, so I could have picked these up then.
Although I was told BEA was a great place to score free loot, I actually found the pickings to be rather slim. It was probably because I didn’t go on Friday, and by Saturday most of the good stuff was already gone. But I did manage to pick up a few interesting things:
I was just watching the film The Departed. When I got to the end credits, I waited to see who it was written by, as I didn’t know. After Scorsese’s name comes up as director, it says that the screenplay is by William Monahan.
Well, if you know about film credit terminology, you know that “screenplay by” is not the whole answer to my question. A “written by” credit means that that person wrote the story and screenplay, that he is, in essence, the writer of the movie, as the credit suggests. “Screenplay by” means that that person wrote the dialogue and shaped the story for the screen, but someone else wrote the story (or at least someone else helped write the story). In some cases this is a result of a screenplay that was good in concept but bad in execution which gets rewritten, thus the “screenplay by” and “story by” credits are sometimes different, and when this is the case, the “screenplay by” credit will be shared; in most cases, however, a “screenplay by” credit means that the film was based on an existing property (i.e., a book, a video game, etc.). Typically, the “story by” credit or “based on” credit appears directly after the “screenplay by” credit.
In The Departed, however, it is not until after all of the producers, all of the actors, hell, even all of the stunt people are credited that the reason for the “screenplay by” credit is revealed: The Departed is based upon the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs.
Come on, Marty. You’re going to make a very faithful English adaptation of a recent and not at all obscure foreign film, and then try to hide the fact from general audiences? Not cool. But hey, at least you’ve got that Oscar.
June 1 —
Multiple-award-winning SF grand master Brian Aldiss told SCI FI Wire that his latest novel, HARM, was written in anger and disgust when faced with the fact that both Great Britain and the United States regularly question and brutally torture a percentage of their prisoners.
