Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 24

Greek elections

What is there to say? Syriza moved to the right to get a big win, and one that suggested the possibility of hope, but to get a majority it aligned with ANEL. The kindest possible spin one can put on this is to imagine the momentary bizarre alliance between Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan, but if Nader had aaaaalmost won an election. The Internet-standard explanation of ANEL as the Greek UKIP makes sense, but doesn't quite capture the extent to which ANEL traffics in conspiracy theories and whatnot. Ron Paul at his kookiest? Murray Rothbard and various Trotskyists in the New York version of the Peace and Freedom Party except that people were so fed up they'd actually found out about the Peace and Freedom Party?

On the plus side, the Chemtrails and Communism Brigade may just trigger an exit from the euro, and perhaps Spain and Portugal will follow...

On An Odd Note

We got out contributor copies of Gerald Kersh's On an Odd Note today.

Here's Opie on first exposure to the book:



And, after accidentally looking at some of the interior text and despite being an illiterate toddler, here he is ninety seconds later!



If you like short stories, or wish to read my remarks in Kersh and short stories, you need this book. Also, Valancourt sells ebooks direct from their site via gumroad, which is one of the smoothest little ebook-selling thingies I've ever experienced. Plus it's good for the authors and the publisher, duh.

Check it out!

Friday Quicker Notes

Over at work, a new joint named Market on Market finally opened, after some typical delays. It's an upmarket grocery store featuring sausages at $11 a pound and the like, plus it serves $14 sandwiches, pizza, sushi and oysters, wine, chocolates and macarons, etc. Its main competitors in the area are the homeless-only Burger King, Walgreen's, and the now clearly terrified Lunch Geek. Don't worry though, you still have to step over heroin needles and piles of human shit to enter the mystical realm of Market on Market. There needs to be a word for this sort of instant gentrification, as the usual process of declassed whites with artsy pretensions moving in and making the area "safe" or the wealthy and their associated service businesses hasn't happened. It's more of an occupying force fueled by fine cheeses than anything else.

Early this week, the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Award was announced, and I was pleased to see that "The Street of Fruiting Bodies" by Sayuri Ueda from Phantasm Japan was on it, in the short story category. I should have e-files for HWA members to read by this afternoon.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died. Good, though any king who dies of old age is a travesty. Luckily, Abdullah the Butcher is still alive.



Finally, Clerks III, are you fucking kidding me?

Hack the Hugos: Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Tired of Dr Who dominating the Hugo ballot? Let me suggest this piece of fantasy:


Undertaker vs Brock Lesnar (WrestleMania 30... by watchwwelive

That's right, The Undertaker v Brock Lesnar at Wrestlemania XXX. Hell, the Undertaker's entrance alone would qualify. Undertaker has many supernatural powers, including the Zombie Sit-Up and various other impossible abilities. (He's come back from the dead, teleports in and out of the ring at will, has summoned lightning in arenas, etc.) Lesnar, for his part, is clearly a near-future super-soldier from an era where steroids only have massive, positive effects.


And, as yendi points out, WWE has been on SyFy for years so clearly it's genre.


Undertaker vs Lesnar, Hugo Awards. Let's make it happen.

Tuesday Quick Notes

Mostly book stuff:

I was happy to write the introduction to a new edition of Gerald Kersh's short story collection On an Odd Note, which is available now. I've already turned one unbeliever into a true Kershite, which was great to see. If you like ebooks, you can buy them directly from the publisher which is very helpful to them and very easy for you.

Over at the ol' dayjob, we're running a giveaway contest for our latest book, Dendera, about which best-selling author Jami Attenberg said: "Dendera is riveting, hilarious, dark, gory, and absolutely brilliant...it's as if Elena Ferrante and Stephen King collided on a Japanese mountaintop." It's old ladies versus a hungry bear, so check it out! The contest topic this time is also a perennial favorite: best film adaptations of SF/F novels.

I got a royalty statement for The Nickronomicon and it earned out its advance, which was a tiny one, but still. I also got my payout for the Under My Roof film, which is sweet and will likely go mostly to taxes.

Onward, I suppose! And I guess that was all book stuff, sorry!

Supporting "From the Nothing, With Love" by Project Itoh, for the Hugo Award

I'm not much for the now-"obligatory" award eligibility posts, despite the claims that they help level the playing field for fans that are spoiled for choice in their reading material. A decade in the Horror Writers Association showed me that few people actually expand their reading; instead they just identify their own interests, aesthetic or otherwise, with this or that writer and uncritically support whatever work is eligible that year. This same dynamic is behind the identity-based campaigning of the past few years, whether it involves concerns about privilege or tradition or political conservatism or particular fandoms.

I also don't like it when editors publicly support a particular work or works they acquired as it smacks of playing favorites, and yet, here I am. Partially I'm writing this because Project Itoh is the ultimate marginalized writer—he is deceased. The other writers whose work appeared in Phantasm Japan can campaign on their own if they wish. (There's nearly enough Japanese members of most Worldcons to get something on the ballot.) There is plenty of excellent work in Phantasm Japan, such as Sayuri Ueda's "The Street of Fruiting Bodies", Tim Pratt's "Those Who Hunt Monster Hunters", Yusaku Kitano's "Scissors or Claws, and Holes," and Dempow Torishima's illustrated novella "Sisyphean", which has split critics down the middle.

Project Itoh's novelette, "From the Nothing, With Love" is an engaging SF/fantasy take on the James Bond mythos, and I do mean mythos. It's also been the favorite of several reviewers and bloggers, and already has some recommendations.

For example, the Skiffy and Fanty Show writes:

“From the Nothing, With Love,” written by the late Project Itoh and translated by Jim Hubbert, is a fantastic, chilling little genre-bender that brings science fiction and metafiction to the espionage thriller; it grips from the opening and never lets go

Writer Aliette De Bodard has it on her list of stories for award consideration, writing -Project Itoh, “From the Nothing, With Love” (in Haikasoru’s Phantasm Japan). James Bond and ontological considerations–yeah, I know, doesn’t sound like they’d go well together, but they do. (ETA: moved to novelette following a correction).

Then there's this blogger, an Anglophone writer to lives in Japan, who is very enthusiastic:

From the Nothing, With Love, meanwhile, sees the late Project Itoh [trans. Jim Hubbert] not so much take the fan theory that ‘James Bond’ is really just a code name for a series of different agents and run with it as bundle a sack over its head, kidnap it, then drag it in a headlong sprint down the backalleys of technothriller and psychological horror whooping maniacally as he goes. It’s a gloriously baroque piece exploring similar notions of consciousness and free-will to his novel Harmony and is one of those stories that you might consider buying an anthology for all by itself.

"From the Nothing, With Love" is expertly translated by Jim Hubbert, reads so well that it feels like a short story rather than the 10,000-word novelette it is. There are plenty of stories in which Western writers examine some bit of Eastern culture (pop or otherwise), but few stories available in English in which a non-Western writer takes on such a seminal bit of post-war Western pop culture. (Well, except for everything Haruki Murakami writes, but he can take care of himself too.) It's an idea-driven story—remember when SF was the "literature of ideas"? It's a work in translation, a rarity for the Hugo ballot-though not for Itoh, who won a Philip K. Dick Special Citation for Harmony and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson award for his novelette "The Indifference Engine" as well. It even tangles with that thorny fannish question: How do all these James Bond adventures fit together after so many decades?

So, I'm asking you to check the story out by picking up a copy of Phantasm Japan from a bookstore or library, and giving it a thought come Hugo time, which is now, apparently.

And tell your friends. Thanks!

Oh man...

Hey, I'm back home after a couple of weeks of kicking around PA, NY, and CT. I was in CT to teach at Westconn's MFA program, which I really enjoyed. Long-time readers will remember that I am an alum of the program myself and didn't like it much. Things have changed, partially because of a shift and demographics toward younger people, more locals, and more genre people. It's a pretty great week, even when it's eight degrees outside. One other thing that helped was the end of university-catered dinners. Struggling to find decent restaurants really brings people together.

In NY I briefly met publishing legend Herman Graf in an elevator, and it was a thrill to meet someone so experienced yet not at all jaded—he was very enthusiastic about Thomas Ligotti even decades later.

In PA I went to Farley's Bookstore in New Hope and was impressed by the store's commitment to independent presses, including huge face-out shelves for Raw Dog Screaming, Hanging Loose, and Writers Tribe Books. Also, there was Christmas and New Year's and my usual hideyhole on the Lower East Side

Boy, what else has happened? We have a new issue of The Big Click, guest-edited by Alex C. Renwick, which you should check out. And, of course, you can subscribe.

While I was away, contributors received their copies of The Starry Wisdom Library, an anthology in the form of an auction catalog for Lovecraftian texts, from 1877. A number of the authors enthusiastically posted photos of their books, which surprised and impressed me. When I got home, I saw why. Librarian and bookman Nate Pedersen did an amazing job making the book look like a real catalog too. Here's a favorite page of mine:



The Charlie Hebdo situation continues to fascinate. Every weird rhetorical habit of Internet discourse has emerged, including complaints that rival atrocities aren't being discussed. Generally these remarks accompany a link to a major newspaper article about the 2000 people killed by Boko Haram last week, except that actually reading the articles shows a much lower immediate body count and a single claim by a government official of the two thousand dead. I call that sort of thing a "propaganda number"—it's being floated for a political purpose, because the actual body count, which is disgustingly high at several hundred, isn't high enough...to what? Probably to get some more US money and advisors, really. The headline is what is important, and the headline is working as it is both worldwide news and apparently not being discussed at all.

Then there are the racist cartoons, which are controversial not only because we like our free speech heroes to be polite liberals, not aged radicals still trying the ol' épater le bourgeois gimmick with pictures of hook noses and buttholes. There's also the delusion that leftists cannot be racist, which must mean that the cartoons are either not racist or the magazine was right-wing rather than left-wing. The magazine was an obscure one internationally until the controversy, and bomb, erupted, a few years ago. Imagine if Vice were the size of The New Republic, but with the reputation of Screw. if Salman Rushdie was one of the editors. Much of the discussion over the cartoons is really a discussion over Europe's attempt to integrate non-European immigrants, without particular reference to the particular situation of Muslims in France. The cartoons, the notion of freedom of the press (are a handful of terrorists the state now??) are as irrelevant as the zoning laws around the World Trade Center or the chapel in the Pentagon were on 9/11. As a published satirist and a lover of deli meats, this has been a very hard news cycle for me, let me just say.

Speaking of satires, the producers down in San Diego put up blog post with vids and animated gifs about another night of VFX test shots for their film of my book Under My Roof. Things will go boom.

Taylor Negron, RIP or "I went to UCLA...for lunch."

Taylor Negron was a great comedian and had a bit of stardom of in the 1990s, but then when the stand-up fad faded, so did he.

Apparently, embedding videos now sets off LJ's spam detectors, so I can't even show you any of his material. Ah well, Google him. Even the link to his obituary LJ objects to, so now that it was cancer that killed him.

Hugo Award Post

Various shadowy forces would like you to know that this little thing we did might make a good nominee for the Hugo Award Dramatic Presentation, Long Form for the Hugo Awards:



Don't like Tom Cruise? Here he is, dying a dozen times:



And we also have a super-neat possible Related Book: The Battle Royale Slam Book.

And our anthology Phantasm Japan—the English-speaking authors can promote their own work, of course, but we would highly recommend checking out Project Itoh's "From the Nothingness, With Love" in the novelette category.

Charlie Hebdo

What is most interesting about the horrific attack against the French periodical Charlie Hebdo is that it was not yet another example of the now-common mental-illness-with-political-content terror attack. The gunmen were well-prepared, and escaped. They had a plan. The usual thing, of course, is ending such an attack with suicide, capture, or via cop bullets. These attackers were too good; they thought tactically, strategically, and politically. Of all the pieces being passed around online, I think Juan Cole's is the most useful.

I am still on the East Coast, typing via iPad. It is eight degrees Fahrenheit in Connecticut. More later.