A quick rundown of the 19 or so active robotic explorers in and around the solar system.

This was fairly combat-heavy:



Having survived the encounter with the hyena-things with only almost all of the party being infected, the group made its way across the island to the abandoned town of Witchlight. Along the way, some natural history was committed; the centipedes are normal centipedes, an invasive species accidentally introduced by some ship or other.

Witchlight came into view, revealing itself as a collection of mostly tumble-down ruins of buildings. Poor Skeet got sent in to take a look and reported several corpses - sad news for Jal, whose sweetie Nefrit was in town the last we heard. Interestingly, although there were carrion birds circling overhead, none of them were feeding on the bodies. The party should have thought about that.

Skeet dropped down to get a better look and abruptly went silent. Quinn can hear everything the raven can and the last thing the raven heard was a crunch sound in extremely close proximity to the raven.

Sonlin checked the first building on the left. It had a corpse in it, an unusually lively one that immediately tried to grapple with her. Puk advanced up the street to guard against the dead bodies - zombies? - the group knew was up the street and immediately got tackled by two of them. Marcus and Jal hung back, like that ever does any good, and Quinn advanced to a narrow alley, taking a shot through a window at Sonlin's dancing partner on the way by, so he could give Puk covering fire.

Quinn criticalled one of the things with Dreadful Word. When it collapsed, he jumped to the conclusion it was because the attack was psychic. This was not the case - the things have a vulnerability to head shots and 20s were deemed head shots.

Someone, maybe the cleric, spotted that the walking dead were not undead but something else.

A zombie emerged from the first building on the right and went after Jal, who ended up taking more damage than a mage should in a fight like this. Two more attacked Quinn from out of nowhere (I forgot to note where they came from). Marcus remained out of close combat for the moment.

Unhappy at being grabbed, let alone the really gross French kiss the things kept trying to force on him, Quinn teleported onto a beam of the roof of the nearest house, which immediately collapsed, leaving him in the rubble. Luckily, the two attacking him were immobilized themselves long enough for Quinn to duck out the back door of the house he was in, leaving the two things free to go after Marcus.

Puk dealt with the second thing attacking him and then went after the ones still standing. He had the most amazing set of rolls: 20, 20, 20, 8 and 2, so combat after this point was very short (Sonlin got to finish off her own thing, I think).



As the party was taking a breather, they heard a shout and looked up to see Nefrit and someone on top of the one solid building in town. They let the group in. There were revelations from from bad to can we just set off the WMDs now?



* The "zombies" killed a bunch of people, including Nefrit's grad student (who had the speaking stone, thus that alarming last message.

* The "zombies" turned out to be corpses with squidlike things animating them from inside. The hyenas-things probably were much the same. Nobody could place what the hyena-things began as.

* The things also infected several of the survivors like they infected the PCs. The one who is farthest along sure looks like something is growing inside them, something squidlike.

* The DM ruled that the cleric had material for a d4 cure diseases on him and rolled a 1. The group decided that it's probably best if the only guy with cure disease got the cure, so he could use it if the party got more components. Marcus the cleric (an NPC since his player was away) seemed OK with this.

* Every time someone used a power with "thunder" in its description, the ground shook. This is because the island near Witchlight is unstable, especially after recent rains. There's a tall bluff just waiting to fall on the town.



Quinn used his thieving skill, the traps-related part of it, to tie the two sickest people down without hurting them but without any chance of them escaping (As he mentioned, this is a skill that makes him very popular in some circles back in town).

After enough time for it to get dark and for the party to get back its encounter powers but not dailies, the people on watch spotted 14 hyena-things headed "purposefully" towards Witchlight. They are accompanied by two much larger things, things that looked from the counters on par with a killer whale or school bus.

We decided to defer combat until next session.

Check it out:

In case you didn’t already know, Zombies Vs. Unicorns comes out September 21. It’s a collection of short stories—half zombie, half unicorn—by some YA authors you may have heard of, including me!

Team Zombie: Cassandra Clare, Libba Bray, Maureen Johnson, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Carrie Ryan, and me.

Team Unicorn: Meg Cabot, Garth Nix, Kathleen Duey, Diana Peterfreund, Naomi Novik, and Margo Lanagan.

There will also be a LIVE ZVU DEBATE here in NYC, at Symphony Space on September 23. Here are the details.

In Other News, Uglies fans might want to check out the free-this-week essay over at SmartPop. It’s called “Team Shay,” and is by Diana Peterfreund.

That’s it from me, except to say send in some fan art! Don’t let another Fan Art Friday go by in sadness!

Woke up to no dial=tone. After a sip of coffee I suddenly thought to check the jack, which somehow had come partly out.

Was in the middle of writing something when the power went out. We've actually had a pretty good summer for outages so I shouldn't complain, and yet here I am....

What the source was for the rumour going around yesterday that James Lee, the hostage taker at the Discovery Channel HQ, was Canadian?

From the Planetary Society Blog, a new, big mosaic of Voyager 1 images of the Great Red Spot

It's official. I'm taking a day off. I'm going to go read a book as soon as I finish watching last night's Rachel Maddow.

In other news, we're in the hurricane watch area, though odds are very good of us not getting much more than a glancing blow. I'm 40 miles inland, and the storm track is east of us; but this is a wonking big storm (230 miles in radius to the edge of the tropical storm force winds, and whoo, look at that thunderstorm cluster. Low pressure currently around 932 mb, which puts it in the range of Cat 5 Hurricane Donna, though still shy of Katrina's 902), so even if it misses by a wide margin, we're likely to get some wind and rain. So I'll be heading out in a bit to pick up bottled water and lamp oil, just in case. (Mission accomplished!) 

My poor tomatoes were really just socking in some beautiful fruit--all still green, of course. Pickled green tomatoes, anyone? Oh well, maybe they'll make it.

The Outer Banks, Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard are right in its sights, and it's regained category 4 status. It'll probably still be a cat 2 when it gets this far north. Oh East Coast barrier islands and peninsulas, thank you for taking the hit for the team. Be safe out there on the on the sand spits, guys.

Once it gets into that jet stream, it will accelerate strongly from its current leisurely 18 mph mosey.

Of course, depending on what the trough in the jetstream does, it could blow right up the Connecticut River, as Gloria did in 1985 and the "Long Island Express" famously did in 1938, when it sank Katharine Hepburn's Oscar. The odds of that are very slim, however, and I'm more aware of the possibility than concerned about it.

Of course, we have a freezer full of food.

Ahh, New England.

Seen on TV (NOVA, I think): an actual scientist pulling out the old "five hundred years ago people thought the Earth was flat" wheeze. Sadly, no beating with a sack of doorknobs ensued.

I think he was a biologist of some kind but still....

 

Some thoughts about the totalitopia I'm planning for our descendants (supposing we don't get to live forever whether in the meat package or in the cloud):

"Freedom is all about authority."  -- Rudy Giuliani

"Authority is all about freedom."  -- Me

W.H. Auden makes a beautiful distinction I have often drawn on between Eden and the New Jerusalem. The Utopian, Auden points out, looks always forward. His griefs are irritation and rage at incompletion. The dreamer of Eden looks backward to a world complete but impossible to return to, and the causes of his expulsion are no part of his dream; his trouble is melancholy. Between the two, "the gulf is unbridgeable." So that bridge would be the project; if you could imagine in a work of fiction (say) that the bridge had been made and crossed, and the fiction was convincing, what effect would that have? In Eden, Auden says, everyone should do what he wants; in the New Jerusalem everyone wants to do what he should. The two equations ought to match up; the joke is that they don't; the triumph would be to show they can and will.  

MattBoggan asked in a long-past post for the source of an epigraph that appeared in the small collection of my stories tiled Antiquities. The epigraph was this: "We say that to console us for the loss of Paradise God gave to us alone among all his creatures Hope and Memory. We might rather say, Only because we are creatures burdened with Hope and Memory do we intimate a Paradise that we alone have lost." He wanted to know if this was my own; it is.

In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world's first experiment in "terra-forming". They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem in order to make Ascension Island more habitable.

Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way"..

This just in:

David Anthony Durham is made of pure 100% USDA prime grade awesome.

(I just unpacked the Campbell tiara he sent me, to check its integrity. Awesome, awesome, awesome.)

I will generally be in the Crowne Plaza bar, I believe, when not on programming or otherwise engaged. If you know me well enough to have my American cell phone number, I can be texted via that number. (Please don't call except in emergencies.)

Programming:

Friday

12:00 noon - Room 211 - Keeping Pace: Maintaining Momentum in Fiction
4:30 pm - Room 207 - Reading (30 minutes)

Saturday

10:00 am - Room 213 - The Steampunk Playground
12:00 noon - Room 201 - Signing

Sunday

11:00 am - Room 219 - Anachronistic Fiction: Successors to Steampunk
2:00 pm - P2 - Hugo Rehearsal
7:00 pm - P2 - Hugo Awards

Monday

12:00 noon - Room 201 - Kaffeeklatsch

See some, all or none of you here!

First, the Norton Critical Editions have their own Twitter account.  I love love love the NCEs and, in fact, have assigned three of them (Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, Modern African Drama) in a course this term.  I cannot express the incredible booklust the background photo on that Twitter page causes me...

Second, the NCE Twitterers are seeking people's favorite ghost/horror stories.  I said Joanna Russ's "My Dear Emily" and Robert Aickman's "The Stains", though could have certainly listed 100 others, too.  Maybe they'll decide to do a big Norton Critical Edition of horror stories....   Wouldn't that be fun?  Go share your own favorites!

In other news, I am not alone in connecting certain elements of the work of William Faulkner with that of Samuel R. Delany.  [In that discussion, I'm username Melikhovo]

In further other news, and also from Ta-Nehisi Coates's extraordinary blog, news from Paris Review editor Lorin Stein that there is an upcoming interview with Samuel Delany.  (And I expect by the time it's published, Stein will have learned to spell Delany's name!)  I think this is the first time I've beaten the Paris Review to an interview...  I haven't asked Chip about it yet, but will do so soon.

Finally, best thing I read all day: Zunguzungu on the films of Judd Apatow, masculinity, homoeroticism, homophobia, etc.

In Oz, at the Hilton South Wharf next to the convention center here in Melbourne. No time for the usual bloggery this morning. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves. I'll report in when I can.

Crazed eco-freak takes hostages at Discovery Channel HQ.

Brit Mandelo asks about polyamory in F&SF. Most of the replies are on topic but of course there's also the people who would prefer not to see that sort of thing at all at all.

One brave soul points out the real menace inherent in SF&Fnal polyamory:


It just sounds so silly what we're talking about. If someone asked me "what are some good SFF books with monogamous relationships?" I'd be bewildered, because it's such a weird thing to me to care about in SFF. If you want a relationship book, read Romance novels. :)

I first saw a copy of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction at Readercon and, on a quick look at the table of contents, was impressed, because here was as solid a collection of basic SF as I'd seen in a while -- indeed, for one volume covering the years it does in a general way, I don't know of a better one (The Road to Science Fiction is great, but it's 6 volumes!  Others I can think of are either more focused on a particular era or are more thesis-driven).

One thing that's important to keep in mind about the book is that it is intended as a teaching anthology -- its primary audience is any sort of "intro to SF" class (it even has a companion website with sample syllabi).  As such, it seems to me really strong.

Jeff VanderMeer raised a good point about the anthology's odd inclusion of very few stories from the last 20 years.  It's bizarre, and one of those things that tends to happen with books edited by a bunch of people.  It would be nice if the introduction addressed this weakness, because there are always compromises that have to be made in an anthology, and I imagine the editors probably thought that more recent work is more readily accessible to readers through various other anthologies and websites, so their focus should be on the older stuff.  Indeed, in a class, it would be easy to supplement this anthology by also using something like Dozois's Best of the Best and maybe some online stories.  Problem solved.

A more efficient solution would have been to end the anthology with Jim Kelly's "Think Like a Dinosaur" from 1995, and use the extra space and money on enriching some of the other decades, but I expect Wesleyan would have frowned on a book in which the most recent story is fifteen years old.

So the lack of representation for the last 20 years is weird, but I can understand it, and I would happily have such stories as "The Liberation of Earth" and "Desertion" and "When It Changed" and so many others easily accessible.  The only giant and inexplicable omission I've noticed in the book so far is its failure to reprint Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations", which is the story "Think Like a Dinosaur" is in direct response to.  (Eric Schaller notes this in the comments to Jeff's entry.  I emailed one of the editors to see if anyone's willing to talk about this omission, but haven't heard back yet. See update in next paragraph.)  One of the nice things about the book is that it is explicitly concerned with the idea of an SF megatext, and for that purpose, including "The Cold Equations" would have made a lot of sense.  There could be a problem with rights or something that prevents the story being reprinted in the book, but, again, it would have been nice to see it addressed in the introduction.  Godwin's story is mentioned in the headnote to "Think Like a Dinosaur", which only compounds the oddness.

Update: Just heard back from the editors of the book -- "Cold Equations" was on the original long list, but length considerations came into play, as well as a desire from at least a few of the editors to allow "Think Like a Dinosaur" to be something other than just a response to "Cold Equations".

(Eric also mentions that it would have been better perhaps to reprint "Mr. Boy", which is, I agree, among Jim's most impressive works.  But it's much longer than "Think Like a Dinosaur", and for an anthology like this, long stories take up so much space that they need to be absolutely essential to be included.  "TLD" fits the book's purposes well and is short enough that it doesn't hog precious space. Also, any of us would choose different stories by some of the authors, but that's the nature of anthologies.  Some of the selections that on a first glance I thought were odd -- especially Clarke's "The Sentinel" and Aldiss's "Supertoys..." -- make sense within the context of the book; in this case, it encourages connections to familiar media: both stories partly inspired films [indeed, films either directed by Stanley Kubrick (2001) or intitiated by him (A.I.)].  So while they're not by any means the best or most representative works by those authors, that's not the purpose of their inclusion in the anthology.)

Larry Nolen speaks truthfully when he calls it a "safe" anthology.  I expect the editors would agree, because that's part of the point -- this is an intro anthology.  To fill it with lots of esoteric authors or less-familiar stories would be counter-productive to the stated purpose.  I'm not the audience for it (except that I might assign it to classes one day), because I already have copies of 95% of those stories.  This is not a book you give to somebody who has a shelf full of SF anthologies covering a bunch of different eras.  This is a book you give to somebody who's seen a few sci-fi movies and maybe read a couple books or a short story here or there, or  to somebody who has only read current work and wants a one-volume crash course in some of the classics of the field.  For such a person, this is a marvelous book.  Just stick a note in the end with a list of some of your favorite recent anthologies, so they can see the wonderful diversity of what's been published since 1995...

Oh and also:

Here's a Greasemonkey script that will disable those ()*&)(*&)*(& Facebook/Twitter crosspost boxes on livejournal.

Also, I will not be crossposting, if anybody wondered.

(Edited to clarify: it just takes the option out of your browser: it does not prevent other people from crossposting comments. Though why anybody would want to read a crossposted comment out of context is a mystery to me. Oh livejournal, try not to suck so much, please?)

Whew. A thousand words on Range of Ghosts today, and I am calling it at that rather than pushing on to a second thousand, because I can imagine few things I care less to do than write right now. At least I'm in the middle of the thrilling dawn assassination attempt and chase.

I did make jelly (wild grape/apple) and start a loaf of bread this morning, and I have to go to the post office on the way to climbing. Tomorrow may wind up being an unscheduled day off, just because my brain is tired.

In other news, I got ARCs for The Sea Thy Mistress yesterday. It comes out, at last check, in February. (Yes, it's got a drifting publication date. I apologize; this is the publisher's decision, for various reasons of their own.) I will probably find a way to give away a copy or two before too much longer.

For those of you who have been wondering what it's about, it turns out there's some sales matter and a blurb for it in the back of the MMPB of By the Mountain Bound.

It's more spoilery for the other two books than itself, but it's quite spoilery for the first two, so I place it behind a cut. Because I care.







So now you know.

QotD:

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you've got a serious problem.
--Toni Morrison