Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 47

Friday Quick Notes...Uh, Make That Friday LONG Notes

First, in local news, a new restaurant has opened up in the death spot on Telegraph ave, making it the fourth establishment to give it a go in that space in five years. (Remarks on an earlier attempt here.) But this one, Rangoon Super Stars, might have a shot. First, it is closely related to the already popular Burma Superstar, of which there are several locations. Second, it's a bit cheaper and less flashy than previous restaurants in the location. And third, it's actually good. I'm not necessarily a fan of Burmese food—to me a car-crash of Indian and Thai food, neither of which I like all that much—but I looooved my dish of garlic pork. Literal oh-boy-I'm-chewing-and-I-can-have-another-bite-after-I-swallow love.

And the service was also excellent. Restaurant service in Berkeley ranges from disinterested to sadistic, so I was amazed. Olivia got a very hot item, and so they not only refilled her water glass but took my suggestion to bring her a larger glass. They have a small basket of chewy sugar cane for people who need the heat to cut the heat in their mouths. They asked to clear plates rather than just grabbing shit off the table. Holy shit! Anyway, just get over there if you're local. Even if Rangoon Super Stars can't beat the curse, at least you can get some good meals, served well, before they shutter.

If you weren't at the Barnes & Noble in Emeryville last night, you missed this:



Editors really need to support their writers, I think. Have you at least read Toh EnJoe's Self-Reference Engine...or are you just one of those #DiversityinSFF people who really only mean, "My work should be published more often!"? Here's an interview with EnJoe, at SFSignal, to further whet your appetite.

Speaking of readings, Greg Bossert and I will be reading at SF in SF tomorrow. I may have the new, supercheap at $7.99, paperbacks of Love is the Law to sell. Come and see me. Bring money. I'll also do some lifting, on request.

And speaking of lifting, and then dropping very hard, I cannot believe that Christophe Beha's blog post on the New York Times Book Review was picked up by Slate. It's a riot of shallow thinking and nonsensical claims, though many of the latter were simply accepted by Beha after being initially stated by best-selling novelist Jennifer Weiner. Most egregious:

It seems to be part of Weiner’s argument that the TBR systematically excludes the kinds of commercial fiction that women read and write while still including crime fiction and other kinds of male-oriented commercial fiction, that it has no rational basis for doing so, and that this practice has the practical effect of excluding female writers. This may all be true, and if it is true, it should be fixed. My fix would be to exclude crime fiction and other male-oriented commercial fiction as well as female-oriented commercial fiction.

Where to begin? Most obvious: crime fiction is not a genre of male-oriented fiction. Crime fiction is indeed sufficiently female oriented that male authors such as Joe Konrath sometimes adopt initials (e.g., J. A. Konrath) to obscure their gender, just as women do to obscure theirs. Also, here are the top-selling mass market paperback crime novels of the week, according to my fancy-dancy measurer:



For those who do not know, C. J. Lyons is a woman. So that's...seven out of ten.

Hardcovers?



For those who do not know, C. J. Box is a man. Galbraith, of course, is J. K. Rowling. So, five out of ten.

Trade paper...



Three out of ten. Not so good, surely, but it's also worth noting that one of these is from Ian McEwan, which would certainly qualify it as a "Holy Crap" book worthy of passing under Beha's eyes.

You see, Beha thinks that the Book Review should only review "Holy Crap" books. But how to find them? Well, by systematically excluding genre fiction, which "is designed to conform to the expectations of its genre or subgenre, and usually the best that can be said about any given example of it is that it does or does not succeed in conforming to those expectations." Of course we can all name a million exceptions. Beha even acknowledges that most literary fiction doesn't qualify as "Holy Crap" either—how could it, given the ideological hegemony of MFA programs, for one thing—but he has a solution. He is going to look at the publicity materials. Because:

I think that authors and editors and publicists usually recognize holy crap books when they see them and have become increasingly good at making sure such books don’t get dismissed by assigning editors as genre fiction even when they are trying to pitch those books to a wider readership as more conventional genre books.

Barely even a fucking sentence. Editors and authors and publicists assign editors to genres? WHAT?!*

Now, part of the problem is that Beha's debating partner is Jennifer Weiner, who has hitched her wagon to the diversity star in a bid to be taken seriously by the Times. (Weiner isn't actually all that interested in diversity—she eagerly attacked Jennifer Egan when the latter, far superior, author dared to suggest that women writers be ambitious rather than derivative). But 'Review more women, and that means reviewing more commercial fiction' is a better-sounding argument than 'Review my books! I'm rich and famous and have movies so you have to love me!'

And what it really boils down to is this: it's not that genre fiction is formulaic and unworthy of serious notice. It's not the literary fiction is any better than genre fiction in this regard—as I told one of my fellow Writing Salon teachers, "Formula? Quick, where do you tell your students to put the epiphany in their stories?"—it's that Weiner's fiction is formulaic and unworthy of serious notice, in particular. She's just dragging all the rest of us along with her, leading to Beha's nonsensical ramblings. Weiner no more needs a Times review than any random issue of any college-backed literary journal does. We already know what's in it. So the search for "Holy Crap" is a good one; it's just that Beha has no idea what he is looking for, how to look for it, or where it might be. And for this he gets a berth at Slate? Well, now we know where to find the crap on the Internet, if not the holy crap.


Finally, if I could dare mention genre-mixing work of my own, you might be interested to know that the publisher is selling Bullettime ebooks for five bucks, for the month of September. Why not buy one and see?



*Chris Barzak makes sense of the sentence here.

LOVE IS THE LAW, under ten bucks, forever.

So, the other day, the F&Gs for Love is the Law hit the Dark Horse offices. F&Gs are folded and gathered pages—the unbound book, basically. And after getting a good look at them, the length of the book, and the trim size, it was decided that the price of the book would be $7.99, not $14.99.

So, in bookstores, there will be a sticker over the normal barcode, and if you pre-ordered the book from any online retailer, your credit card will be charged $7.99 or so, and not the $10.43-$14.9 range that the book had been on pre-sale for. I don't know if LitL will be a true "mass market" paperback—that is, a paperback that stores return for credit by shipping the stripped cover back—but it's definitely in the mmpb mode for lack of a better term. So what this means for you, if you had any interest in reading this book, or trying any of them, is that you can buy a physical copy of my books, new, for under ten dollars. Sept 25th in comic shops, Oct 8th in bookstores.

AND, if the mail is with us, you should be able to buy copies at SF in SF, where I'll be reading on Saturday! Greg Bossert is my co-reader. So come out. And bring money. Even if you bring a ten-dollar bill, you can walk out with a book, and wine-breath thanks to the charity bar.

See you then.

9/11

So for the first time, my Facebook friends feed is not full of photos like this on 9/11:



Which explains why Obama is rattling the sabre so vigorously for Syria. Frenzies never last forever, especially when the world is worse by every measure thanks to it.

Crime bragging

BN.com has spit out the table of contents for Best American Mystery Stories 2013. Now I know who else is in it. Odd mix. Here's the line-up:

TOM BARLOW
Smothered and Covered • 1
MICHAEL CONNELLY
A Fine Mist of Blood • 14
O’NEIL DE NOUX
Misprision of Felony • 29
EILEEN DREYER
The Sailor in the Picture • 46
DAVID EDGERLEY GATES
The Devil to Pay • 61
CLARK HOWARD
The Street Ends at the Cemetery • 91
ANDRE KOCSIS
Crossing • 126
KEVIN LEAHY
Remora, IL • 158
NICK MAMATAS
Thy Shiny Car in the Night • 172
EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL
Drifter • 180
DENNIS MCFADDEN
The Ring of Kerry • 194
MICAH NATHAN
Quarry • 211
JOYCE CAROL OATES
So Near Any Time Always • 225
NANCY PICKARD
Light Bulb • 263
BILL PRONZINI
Gunpowder Alley • 277
PATRICIA SMITH
When They Are Done with Us • 300
RANDALL SILVIS
The Indian • 316
BEN STROUD
The Don’s Cinnamon • 366
HANNAH TINTI
Bullet Number Two • 381
MAURINE DALLAS WATKINS
Bound • 392

For those who follow such things, there seem to be more women than unusual in the BAMS table of contents this year. Watkins has been dead for forty years or more, but I guess something came out last year anyway.



Meanwhile, Crows n Bones has an early review of Love is the Law, which reads, in part:

Nick Mamatas’ Love Is The Law is a genre- defying bastard of a novel. Starting off as a murder mystery, it blends revolutionary politics, suburban alienation, hardcore punk and the teachings of that old whore Aleister Crowley in a disorienting, unpredictable read. Part of the fun is that the book never becomes what you expect.

Read the rest here.

I know when I'm being horrible.

Do you?

This may well be the most awful legitimately published short story not written by Mike Resnick that I've ever read.

Worldcon

So, Worldcon. The Japanese had an excellent time, of which I am glad. Our Thursday night party--the salmon jerky and dried octopus tentacles especially--was a hit. And the J panels I'd constructed mostly went well. I think audiences especially enjoyed the Beyond Godzilla vs King Kong, and the Disaster and Supernatural Literature panels, the latter of which coaxed both tears and laughs from the audience. One woman shared her own experience with Hurricane Katrina afterwards, and we were all quite moved. We also had an offsite reading at the local Barnes & Noble, with the university's Japanese language students in attendance.

The big fun news was Haikasoru's first Hugo, for Ken Liu's short story "Mono No Aware," from The Future Is Japanese, which you should buy if you've not yet. Here's a pic of my co-editor Masumi Washington and Ken Liu's friend Alex Shvartsman (who was recognized by several Japanese people on the Haikasoru twitter feed as the first foreigner to win a Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix in Japan!) with the trophy, which was quite heavy this year:



The Haikasoru twitter feed was quite busy, so check it out. I Storyfied the English-language tweets here.

My SMOF ZONE pic led to some minor dust-ups, which put me in the LOL ZONE. I didn't attend any of the business meetings, as none of the issues seemed all that important to me personally. Here's one version of events, and another. I don't have a strong opinion about a YA Hugo, though I think the fewer categories the better. My only thought is that if an "objective definition" of YA is necessary, to only qualify books with JUV BISAC prefixes.

This year's Hugo details (link to PDF) are interesting. "Mono No Aware" made the ballot with relatively few votes, but won fairly handily. This suggests to me that the Hugo packet of ebooks and stories was definitive, at least in this case. Voters read the story and were persuaded to vote for it, which is as it should be.

In other news, I got seventeen votes for Best Editor, Short Form, despite only editing one half of one anthology this year. So that was nice to see. And my novelette "Arbeitskraft" got thirty votes in that category, seven short of making the ballot. If only I had begged for votes made "obligatory" eligibility posts and tweets as is done so often these days.

Next stop, London? Or maybe Detroit!

Haikahugo!

Team Rocket wins its first Hugo Award! Congrats to Ken Liu for "Mono No Aware."

Cthulhu follies

At Worldcon, heard many great things about programming, including a non-racist "future of border protection" panel thanks to firm panel moderation.

On the other hand, on the Cthulhu Internationale panel, a panelist claimed that Lovecraft lived in and often wrote about Maine, and that a common them of his stories was that racial differences don't matter in the face of alien threats. Good thing I was blackballed from programming this year (CI was a panel I developed by the way), so that this important misinformation could be promulgated.

Worldcon

Best place for Worldcon updates is Twitter. (I am nmamatas.)

For exampele, this sign was hanging outside the business meeting:

At Worldcon!

Here I am in San Antonio, and my day job, Haikasoru, aka Team Rocket, is having a party!

8PM-11PM

At the Rivercenter!

Suite 3226!


There will be squid.