Let your voice be heard!

Dave Gross of Amazing has posted a call for letters of comment. He says:

“Due to the surprising dearth of letters of comment, we’re without a full “Dispatches” for issue 606 and looking into the abyss of the deadline. Help! Send us your thoughts on issue 604, on Amazing Stories in general, or a recent book, movie, comic, or audiobook you’ve enjoyed–or hated.

“You’ll be glad you did, and we’ll be evuh so grateful.

“And you can send those to amazing@paizo.com. Don’t forget to include your city & state.”

P.S. Be sure to say you loved those audiobook reviews! ;)

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Has anyone seen the new issue of Chronicle (formerly Science Fiction Chronicle)? I’m not sure what the month on the issue is, but it’s got a picture of Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson on the cover (and an interview with them inside). Anyway, I was with Gordon at the post office on Friday when it arrived and he looked at it and said that Brian Herbert looks like John C. Reilly. Which wouldn’t necessarily be bad, but what he really looks like is the reanimated corpse of John C. Reilly. Really, it’s quite a ghastly photo, definitely worth checking out.

If anyone can find an image of it for me online, please post it as a comment so everyone can see it. I looked for it, but couldn’t find it (DNA’s Chronicle website has the current issue listed as December 2003). In other DNA news, Warren’s new KISS magazine showed up the other day too, in which at least half of the articles are written by one Warren Lapine. Seemed kind of odd to see a table of contents with so many articles written by the same person. But the magazine overall looks much better than most of the DNA magazines, in terms of its production values.

Here’s that cover image, courtesy of Jon Hansen.

If this cover had word balloons, they would read:

Brian Herbert: "Brains!"

Kevin J. Anderson: "I’m going to kick some ass with my
zombie friend!"

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I’m off to Worldcon tomorrow morning, so if you notice a delay in slush response times or in response to emails, that’s why.

Adios!

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Here are my responses to
The Tolbert
Cultural Index.  My choices are bold; questions I abstained from
answering have been italicized.  Enjoy:

1. USB 2.0 or Firewire
2. The Smurfs or the Snorks
3. Fraggle Rock or the Muppet Show
4. Kerouac or Ginsberg
5. Kansas or Boston
6. Sally Mann or Diane Arbus
7. Soul Coughing or Weezer
8. Penny Arcade or PvP
9. Orbital or Fatboy Slim
10. Unreal Tournament or some WII crap
11. BoingBoing or Metafilter
12. Pirate or Ninja
13. Beethoven or Bach
14. Asimov’s or Analog
15. Slacks or jeans
16. Dandelions or carnations
17. catfish or salmon
18. Discordian or SubGenius
19. D20 or GURPS
20. BitTorrent or Kazaa
21. Suicide Girls or Playboy
22. Slashdot or Kuro5hin
23. Tick animated or Tick live action
24. Family Guy or King of the Hill
25. Firefly or Buffy the Vampire Slayer
26. highway or city (driving)
27. Saturn or Kia
28. Donnie Darko or The Matrix
29. NTFS or FAT32
30. drive-in theatre or cineplex
31. Greek gods or Roman gods
32. painful death by fire ants or 7th grade
33. Warren Ellis or Grant Morrison
34. Jugglers or clowns
35. train or bus
36. Movable Type or LiveJournal
37. PHP or Perl
38. School House Rocks or After School Special
39. Transformers or Go-Bots
40. Roger Zelazny or Neil Gaiman
41. E.O. Wilson or Stephen Jay Gould
42. Lake Monsters or Bigfoot
43. Pajamas with feet or pajamas without feet
44. The Iron Giant or Toy Story
45. The Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Brothers
46. saturday morning cartoons or after school cartoons
47. VH1 or MTV
48. BiPolar Disorder or Schitzophrenia
49. credit unions or banks
50. ecology or molecular biology

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By the way, do feel free to pass along your comments on my review to the editors of SF Weekly via their feedback form.

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My somewhat scathing review of The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad is now up at SF Weekly.

Let me know what you think.

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I happened to catch a bit of America’s Most Wanted tonight, and they were talking about a guy named John Adams. I started to watch the show, to see what else they said about the guy. Some odd similarities emerged.

(1) He claims to write science fiction novels and screenplays. One web site said he claimed to worship the god RAH (others said Ra, the Egyptian sun god). Could RAH mean Robert A. Heinlein?

(2) He was a state trooper in Fairbanks, Alaska. My mom was born in Fairbanks, Alaska.

(3) His arrest warrant for kidnapping and murder was issued on July 31 (1998). My birthday is July 31.

(4) He claims to have studied UFOs. I took an anthropology/critical thinking class in college that was about debunking UFOs (among other paranormal phenomenon).

It was starting to get creepy until I realized his name wasn’t Adams, it was Addis. But still… if I was living in a fantasy novel, that would surely signify something.

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Just a quick note to point out that the new Amazing Stories now has a message board, in addition to their editor’s blog.

Drop by and let them know what you thought of their 1st issue of the 21st Century. Oh, and after you read the October issue, let them know how much you liked my audiobook reviews and clamor to see more from me. :)

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Here’s a tip for you slush writers out there:

Don’t indicate that you’ve read the submission guidelines unless you actually follow them.

For example, don’t send our writers’ guidelines flyer back to us with your submission–indicating, one assumes, that you’ve read it–if you’ve printed it on canary-colored paper, didn’t include an SASE, didn’t double space, and didn’t put your name on each page of the manuscript (all of which are clear violations of the writers’ guidelines). It’s just a bad sign all around, and even the most forgiving or optimistic editor can’t help but be discouraged by such a portent. Though it’s not necessarily a condemnation of your writing skills, it certainly doesn’t say much about your reading comprehension.

Okay, so the SASE, the double spacing, the lack of a name on each page… we can chalk those up to carelessness. But what’s the deal with the canary-colored paper? I don’t know why anyone would think that’s a good idea. The only thing I can think of is that he was trying to match our guidelines flyer, which is printed on canary-colored paper. But it doesn’t say “Make your submission look like this flyer” on it anywhere, so it’s not much of an explanation.

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The new F&SF anthology,

In Lands That Never Were: Tales of Swords and Sorcery, arrived at our
offices the other day, and I got to take home my very own copy, personalized to
me by "the legendary" Gordon Van Gelder.  (He was described as "the
legendary" on the cover copy of the previous F&SF anthology,

One Lamp: Alternate History Stories From The Magazine of Fantasy & Science
Fiction.) 

I was
quite delighted to discover that it is one-third dedicated to me:

This book is for three Johns:

John Joseph Adams
John G. H. Oakes
John O’Neill

All
brave warriors in the barbaric land
that is contemporary publishing.

 
This is, I believe, the first time my name has appeared inside a book.  Go
buy it.
 

Table of Contents

• The Hall of the Dead
  by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp

• A Hedge Against
  Alchemy by John Morressy

• Ill Met in Lankhmar
  by Fritz Leiber

• Counting the Shapes
  by Yoon Ha Lee

• Firebird by R.
  Garcia y Robertson

• Dragon’s Gate by Pat
  Murphy

• After the Gaud
  Chrysalis by Charles Coleman Finlay

• The Swordsman Whose
  Name Was Not Death by Ellen Kushner

• The Island in the
  Lake by Phyllis Eisenstein

• Darkrose and Diamond
  by Ursula K. Le Guin

• King Rainjoy’s Tears
  by Chris Willrich

• The Fantasy Writer’s
  Assistant by Jeffrey Ford

(Curiosity: I keyboarded "Ill Met in Lankhmar,"
"A Hedge Against Alchemy," and "The Hall of the Dead" in order to produce and
electronic edition of the text for use in typesetting.)

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that we’ll have copies of this available at our table in the dealer’s room at Worldcon this year.

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