News You Can Bruise for 2009 October

It's The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth Series, published in 1959 (not 1957, as I said earlier). It's a best-of anthology from F&SF, edited by founding editor Anthony Boucher, and it's full of big names. And sexism.

Both the big names and the sexism are front-loaded. Here are capsule reviews of all the big stories in the anthology. There are some tiny stories and poems as well, but they're generally only as short as they need to be to convey a horrible pun, so I'm not gonna review them.

• "Ministering Angels" by C.S. Lewis is unutterably awful. Apparently inspired by this quote from "Dr. Robert S. Richardson's controversial 1955 article, The Day after We Land on Mars":

  [W]e may be forced into first tolerating and finally openly accepting an attitude toward sex that is taboo in our present social framework... To put it bluntly, may it not be necessary for the success of the project to send some nice girls to Mars at regular intervals to relieve tensions and promote morale?

  Assuming you don't immediately spot the enormous hole in this logic, you might consider "Ministering Angels" to be a hilarious send-up of Dr. Richardson's [no relation] idle fantasy. And if you're a fan of awkward, moralizing parental facts-of-life lectures, you'll love a kick-up-your-heels sex romp written by C.S. Lewis. Me, I'd rather read slash written by George Bernard Shaw. In fact, I'll write my own story! With blackjack! And space hookers!

• Poul Anderson's "Backwardness" is one of those stories that should be called "Untitled" because any clever title spoils the story. But it's fun. There's a great scene between the Cardinal Archbishop of New York and an alien priest.
• "The Wait", Kit Reed's first story... has not aged well. Though not itself sexist, the twist ending only works if the reader is constantly thinking "It's the 1950s and I'm reading this in a magazine, this can't be going where I think it is!" There's also weird stuff in the story that I just don't understand. I thought it must be a metaphor for something, but after reading other peoples' online reactions I think it's just weird stuff in a story. So that's certainly a plus.
• Ah, Isaac Asimov, king of genteel sexism. "The Up-To-Date Sorceror" doesn't have any space hookers, but only because that would be too crude for Asimov's taste. The excruciating correctness and moral probity of the story is clearly a ruse and probably intended to be satirical.

  I remember reading a 19th-century story called something boring like "Personal Recollections of General Grant", a parody of hagiography which portrays Ulysses S Grant as a squeaky-clean teetotaler. I thought Mark Twain wrote it, which would have caused severe lacerations to the hand that feeds, but apparently not. (If you know what story I'm talking about, let me know.) Anyway, the tone of "An Up-To-Date Sorceror" reminded me of that Grant story.

• Despite the title (and some of his other work), Fritz Leiber's "A Deskful of Girls" is not titillating at all. It's also not that interesting a concept, but it's extremely well-written, and the way it showcases the damaged psyches of the three main characters is good noir.
• Brian W. Aldiss's "Poor Little Warrior!" is "Shooting an Elephant" meets "A Sound of Thunder", recommended only if you can stand prose so purple it verges on the ultraviolet. Includes brontosaurus [sic] farts.
• Shirley Jackson's "The Omen" is excellent: a funnier, not-totally-unbearable The Chain of Chance. Not the source material for the movie The Omen.
• There's a Jules Verne story in here. No kidding. "Gil Braltar" was published in 1887 to fill out a novel, and translated for F&SF as part of a comprehensive barrel-scraping project. It's kind of funny, I guess. What do you want? It's 120 years old. I don't expect to be funny when I'm 120 years old.
• Avram Davidson's "The Grantha Sighting" is funny and good-hearted, the way science fiction from the 1950s ought to be.
• Cyril M. Kornbluth's "Theory of Rocketry" begins: "Mr. Edel taught six English classes that year at Richard M. Nixon High School, and the classes averaged 75 pupils each." And I wouldn't say it gets better from there, but it's really good.
• The intro to Ron Goulart's "A New Lo!" (do not read this as "A New Lol") compares Goulart to Thurber, and the story is indeed what you'd get if Thurber wrote a Charles Fort parody. Usually I hate three-page "funny" SF stories, but this one was great.
• John Shepley's "Gorilla Suit" has kind of a McSweeney's vibe to it. It's damn funny, and one of the only stories Shepley ever sold.
• Zenna Henderson's "Captivity" is a perfectly fine but not great story that I wouldn't be too surprised to see published today, as a perfectly fine but not great story.
• "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" is the funniest Albert Bester story I've ever read. Sumana read it when she was a kid, and agrees with my assessment. Highly recommended.

In general, the best stories are by the non-big names.

"How Love Came to General Grant" parodies the self-bowlderizing style of Harold Bell Wright. This HBW website says that "readers quickly recognize which characters are intended to be models for good behavior, and which are symbols of evil," as you can tell from scrupulously accurate passages like this:

"Madam," said he, turning to Mrs. van der Griff, "Am I to understand that there is liquor in those glasses?"

"Why yes, General," said the hostess smiling uneasily. "It is just a little champagne wine."

"Madam," said the general, "It may be 'just champagne wine' to you, but 'just champagne wine' has ruined many a poor fellow and to me all alcoholic beverages are an abomination. I cannot consent, madam, to remain under your roof if they are to be served. I have never taken a drop--I have tried to stamp it out of the army, and I owe it to my soldiers to decline to be a guest at a house where wine and liquor are served."

Wright and half of the other parodied authors are completely forgotten today, but the parodies are still funny, because they parody types of writing that are recognizable and/or immortal. Here's the beginning of the first chapter. Who cares who it's parodying, it's hilarious:

On a memorable evening in the year 1904 I witnessed the opening performance of Maude Adams in "Peter Pan". Nothing in the world can describe the tremendous enthusiasm of that night! I shall never forget the moment when Peter came to the front of the stage and asked the audience if we believed in fairies. I am happy to say that I was actually the first to respond. Leaping at once out of my seat, I shouted "Yes--Yes!" To my intense pleasure the whole house almost instantly followed my example, with the exception of one man. This man was sitting directly in front of me. His lack of enthusiasm was to me incredible. I pounded him on the back and shouted, "Great God, man, are you alive! Wake up! Hurrah for the fairies! Hurrah!" Finally he uttered a rather feeble "Hurrah!" Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

That was my first meeting with that admirable statesman Woodrow Wilson, and I am happy to state that from that night we became firm friends...

The non-forgotten authors include F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O'Neill. I still have no idea how I came to read the Grant vignette from this book in the first place.

• Yesterday Sumana and I met a science fiction author on the subway. He's Ryan Britt and he posts a flash story every week at Side Affects.
• Darwin-mania continues: Charles Darwin Hath A Blog.
• Adam Parrish wrote an automated agent to play Apples to Apples.
• Will I ever get tired of huge astronomy gallery websites? No, because I'd only get tired of them if they let me download all the images and look at them at my leisure, put them in my screensaver, etc., which never seems to happen. Here's another one.
• It's October, so James Rolfe is taking you to classic horror film school.
• I've been running to David W. Blight's incredible class on the Civil War. We're getting in to the Reconstruction era, so soon it'll be time to switch to something else--maybe Michael Sandel's class on justice, despite the logo that makes it look like a daytime court TV show called "Justice with Michael Sandel".

In other news, the 2009 IF Competition games are released, including "Earl Grey", a crazy game co-written by Adam Parrish and beta-tested by yours truly.

IMDB says there are four movies meeting this easy-to-state-but-difficult-to-state-precisely criteria: the "Dawn of the Dead" remake, "The Ring Two", "Shankardada Zindabad" (a Telugu film featuring a hallucinated Gandhi), and the forthcoming remake of "An American Werewolf in Paris". I know Rob Zombie made a sequel to his remake of "Halloween", but I don't know whether it can be considered a remake of the original "Halloween II".

me: oh, i forgot to tell you that michael bloomberg was at the farmer's market on saturday
Sumana: did you see him?
me: no, but i saw a big blob of campaign staff and new yorkers surrounding a slowly moving point

• Pit Scribblenauts's object interactions against Nethack's.
• Investigate how well Scribblenauts implements kashrut.
• Improve Scribblenauts's design, controls, and marketability with bold spinoffs like the Scribblenauts text adventure, Star Trek: Scribblenauts, and the sinister Scribblenauts-Prime.
• Propose Georges Perec-style speedruns and Scribblenauts-enabled animal sacrifices.

Plus: complaining, and pterodactyls with ropes attached to them. Includes spoilers for Scribblenauts and Nethack.

We also talked a little about Adam's entry in the IF competition, but I cut it out because competitors are still embargoed from talking about their games. I'll post it separately later.

Errata: 1. In vanilla Nethack you can't sharpen a weapon on a flint stone. There are also no creatures who can eat rock, so the code I mentioned never gets executed. 2. In Scribblenauts, you can get a generic fish-as-food by typing "fish"--but no human will eat it. 3. "Machinima" is pronounced with a soft "ch" and a long "e". 4. Nobelium's half-life depends on the isotope, but they're all pretty short. 5. There's a Scribblenauts level where the Penny Arcade trick is a winning strategy.

Hall, the Los Angeles-based artist seated at right, based this lifelike drawing and a related painting on a photograph she took in spring 1986, just before she suffered an emotional and physical breakdown.

The drawing's vivid colors, bright sun, and festive atmosphere belie the artist's troubles. Despite the sitters' cheerful camaraderie, Halls' companion at left was not a family member or friend but a local woman she hired to pose with her for her composition.

I was floored by "Piece of Cake" because the saturated colors and the fashions (but not the place settings) perfectly capture the Los Angeles I grew up in. I felt like I was looking at a photo of my mother's richer friends. And this wasn't a one-time theme: D.J. Hall is still painting Southern California women looking into imaginary cameras.

Here's some commentary; I don't really have anything to add, except that a timeline of Hall's paintings would make a really good history of women's sunglasses.

Pictures of his stuff are really difficult to find, but here's one of the better ones. Luo Ping collaborated with a poet friend to create a folio of paintings of animals along with Aesop-like moral poems. He left lots of space for the poet to write his poem. And the poet wrote little tiny poems in tiny characters, creating a work with a disorienting amount of whitespace. The linked picture, in case you didn't click, is a picture of some ants, and a little poem about ants with the characters arranged so that they themselves look like a line of ants.

(That's not really a story about Lou Ping's craziness, but it shows the kind of person he hung out with.)

There were also two works that had been the subject of repeated commentary. One of them was a small collection of normal-sized paintings on an enormous scroll with about 170 commentaries tacked onto it. It looked like a Digg thread, and the placard said that Luo Ping took the scroll on his travels as a kind of resume. There was also a series of paintings of ghosts, which had been posted to Digg (as it were) twice: first as "What the government doesn't want you to know about ghosts" and then a hundred years later as "Amusing pictures of ghosts [pics]".

(The photo currently on the Wikipedia page is of the board from the Met that I see every time I go.)

It turns out if you ask for a takeout container in England, they don't really know what to do, and improvise as best they can. We found this out firsthand when someone wrapped Sumana's leftover pasta in tinfoil (the article describes "a hastily assembled foil 'envelope') and all the oil leaked out into my bag.

Writer Katy Salter dares to suggest that people should not be ashamed to ask for a doggy bag. (The feedback prompt at the end: "Would you ask a restaurant to box up your food? Email food@...") She closes with this bombshell:

But the biggest secret? You don't have to ask for a doggy bag at all. Take a tip from the States and dress your request up in face-saving euphemisms - you want the food 'boxed' or 'to go'.

While you're at it, take a secondary tip from the States: those aren't euphemisms. They're accurate descriptions of what you want. "Doggy bag" is the face-saving euphemism! It's clearly intended to convey "Of course I wouldn't dream of taking food home from a restaurant, but my precious Alsatian simply adores endive salad." Don't blame the Americans if your euphemisms turn dysphemic!

Bonus tip from article: "Ask for a clean container rather than bring your own." You might want to bring your own anyway, just in case you get a foil envelope.

Officials felt that the vital orders of the Government must be definite and clear cut, and they therefore used not only the word "stop," to indicate a period, but also adopted the practice of spelling out "comma," "colon," and "semi-colon." The word "query" often was used to indicate a question mark. Of all these, however, "stop" has come into most widespread use, and vaudeville artists and columnists have employed it with humorous effect, certain that the public would understand the allusion in connection with telegrams...

"Stop" is of course never necessary at the end of a message.

What's the standard science fiction term for densely packed computing matter, the stuff you use to build an upload civilization? I thought it was "computanium" but that only gets a handful of search results, and I know there's a standard term for it.

Are you ready to have your mind blown? Behold: A statue of a fossil!

Back when evolution had yet to decide on the best way to do teeth, there were edestids, sharklike creatures whose lower jaw just kept growing out and out in a spiral for the shark's entire lifetime. This was so ridiculous I thought it must be a hoax, but I also saw an edestid jaw fossil in the AMNH. I still think there's a good chance it's a hilarious Iguanadon-thumb-like misunderstanding. The Smithsonian is also skeptical, and presents a reconstruction where the spiral teeth go down the shark's throat.

When I was a kid I owned an awesome globe of Mars that my mother and I found at a yard sale in LA. When my mother died I mailed it to myself and, as long-time NYCB readers know, it was lost by the doubly-damned US Postal Service. But thanks to the Whipple museum I found the name of the globe manufacturer, so I can get one from eBay, though I'm not going to do that this instant.

I saw a cool vocal theremin. I think how it works is: you make a shape with your hands and it vocalizes the sound you'd make if you made that shape with your mouth. But I'm not sure and technical detail was sadly lacking because it was in an art exhibit. Good job, though, Michael Markert, 2007.