Best Buddies
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).
Celebrity Spooks Haunt No Humans
SF: A Non-Geek’s Guide
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?
Loot from Wiscon & Book Expo America
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:
- The Grass-Cutting Sword by Catherynne M. Valente
- Best American Fantasy edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer
- Best New Romantic Fantasy edited by Paula Guran
- Science Fiction: The Best of the Year edited by Rich Horton
- Fantasy: The Best of the Year edited by Rich Horton
- The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia
- In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss
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:
- Stardust by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Charles Vess (I’ve read this, but only the book version; I’ve never seen this original illustrated version)
- The Anubis Murders by Gary Gygax (the first of a new pulp reprint book line from Paizo Publishing called Planet Stories)
- The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks
- Bloodline by F. Paul Wilson
- Heavy Metal Fun Time Activity Book (which is, strangely enough, exactly what it sounds like)
Credit Where Credit is Due?
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.
Aldiss In HARM’s Way
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.
Easy Come, Easy Go
After I got off the plane in Madison this weekend, I hopped in a taxi with S. C. Butler plus one, and Rick Bowes to travel to the con hotel. On the way there, I checked my email on my phone and discovered an email from an editor who had commissioned some freelance work from me. The deadline was tight–June 1–but the work I had to turn in was very short, and so while I had done research and took some notes, I hadn’t written the pieces just yet. So I was rather surprised to discover an email from my editor in which he attached his edit of the two pieces I hadn’t written yet.
Obviously, I was concerned. I’ve been taking Ambien*, and when I woke up the other day I found my laptop in the fridge, so I wondered if I’d forgone sleep binge-eating in favor of sleep binge-writing. Actually, I was kind of hoping that was the case; if I were able to harness such a skill, it would be a great way to get some extra work done.
But alas, it was not the case. There was a mix-up, and this particular project was actually assigned to me and someone else, and this someone else was actually assigned the project first, so it went to him/her. Which is a shame, because it would have been a fairly lucrative opportunity for not that much work, but such is the life of a freelancer. However, my editor did promise to get me something else in the near future, which would likely be just as good if not better than this project. And in fact, he already came up with something for me: I’m to create a series of quizzes based on a certain entertainment property. It looks to be fun, and again pays pretty well for what seems to be fairly easy work, so I can’t complain.
* No, not really.