At the start of the second chapter of his autobiography, Life, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones writes, “For many years I slept, on average, twice a week. That means that I have been conscious for three lifetimes.”

That means three lives’ worth of Richards’ memories from the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll, right? Well, kind of. It seems Richards spent one of those extra lives as a heroin addict and most of another one feuding with Stones front man Mick Jagger. He spares no ink on those topics, so Life actually works about to about a life and a half. Having said that, it still lends itself to being read in big chunks. Fans of classic rock will devour it.

The book begins by establishing a main theme: It’s always been the Stones vs. the Establishment (read: police), and the Stones make a fool of The Man every time. Full story »

A WordsDay Special

If writing a 50,000-word novel in a month sounds like a crackpot idea, it is. So admits Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month and author of No Plot? No Problem! But Baty’s book also makes the idea sound like a total lark—and totally doable, too.

Baty and twenty of his friends, living in the shadow of Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com boom, launched NaNoWriMo as nothing more than something to do to kill time. “My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this,” he writes: “Being surrounded by pet-supply e-tailers worth more than IBM has a way of getting your sense of what’s possible all out of whack. The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in out mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them.”

No Plot? No Problem! is not the book he set out to write that week. Full story »

Monday, November 22 is the forty-seventh anniversary of JFK’s assassination.

The weather in Dallas that afternoon could not have been more beautiful. President Kennedy, with the top down in his limousine, took full advantage of the sunshine and warm temperatures, waving to the throngs of people lining the motorcade’s route and flashing his winning smile. Camelot had come to central Texas.

Farther down the route, overlooking Dealey Plaza, Lee Harvey Oswald waited, rifle at the ready. The scope on the gun was a little wobbly, the lens in the scope a little blurry, Oswald’s marksmanship skills a little questionable—but Oswald had his mission. Full story »

So I’m in Boston visiting a new granddaughter, born three and a half weeks ago but unseen by me until this past Thursday when I flew in from London, and boy, is she a peach. I’m getting some quality grandfather time in with her, and also getting to read to the older ones. Well, just the one who’s three and a half—the one in the middle, who is not quite two, doesn’t quite sit still long enough. But the oldest one will sit still for books now, and will let me read to her for quite a while—just like my own kids did. And this brings back one of the main pleasures of parenthood—reading to my children. And now I get to read to my grandchildren.

When my kids were growing up, my schedule was always a bit uncertain, at least when they were very young. Full story »

A WordsDay Special

Week Two usually takes a heavy toll on the writers participating in National Novel Writing Month, but for Lindsey Grant, the week has offered a little bit of a reprieve. NaNoWriMo’s program director has been fighting off a cold—a gift everyone in the office has been passing back and forth for days.

“Usually everyone’s sick in December, once we all crash from the adrenaline of this month,” Grant says. “This year, I guess it just came a little early.”

During Week One, she lost her voice and had to offer to do interviews by e-mail. But by the middle of Week Two, the 28-year-old Grant was back up to speed. “I’m surrounded by soup and tissues,” she laughs.

Grant is one of five full-time employees, assisted by another two part-time tech supporters and a team of contractors and interns, who run The Office of Letters and Light (OLL), the nonprofit organization in charge of NaNoWriMo. The event also depends on some 590 volunteers who act as liaisons in more than 528 different regions around the world; an additional 350 volunteers assist in various other capacities.

“We eat, sleep, breath this,” Grant says. Full story »

A bit of Saturday afternoon fun, courtesy of Thomas Stearns Eliot and Wordle.

In honor of the Sabbat, I offer up this fragment from my poem “Eleven Fables.”

______

9. Dog, Two Roads, Samhain

October hardwoods crest the Blue Ridge,
red gold orange, the incandescent
rumor of All Hallows.

Dog, tail flying full mast,
sniffs from oak to maple,
back again: Full story »

“We’re in the middle of a sort of transition right now,” Ian Astbury told the crowd that had packed Buffalo’s Town Ballroom Friday night.

Two thousand-plus fans had come to see The Cult blast through a seventeen-song set that included old favorites like “Fire Woman” and “She Sells Sanctuary” and new tunes like “Every Man and Woman Is a Star” and “Embers.”

And while you might expect one of rock’s most enduring band’s to of course know how to rock, damn it all if these guys aren’t still playing for keeps. Full story »

The Bankside Power Station was closed in 1981 leaving a handsome, and increasingly derelict, face-brick building in a prestigious spot by the side of the river Thames in the heart of the city of London.

After an expensive conversion the building reopened as the Tate Modern. “Modern” in that it features art produced since 1900. Here you will find works by Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. However, the Tate also commissions new work.

On 12 October they opened a major new installation in the vast – completely insanely gargantuan – Turbine Hall. Ai Weiwei is a 53-year-old Chinese ceramicist and his Sunflower Seeds is nothing less than 100 million individually crafted and painted porcelain sunflower seeds poured onto the floor. These were produced by 1,900 skilled artisans from the city of Jingdezhen, famed for its production of Imperial porcelain, over a two-year period.

Until Thursday you could happily walk and play in the seeds. Kids lay on their backs to make sunflower seed angels, businessmen shrugged off their patent-leather shoes and strolled back and forth in their suits, young couples picnicked. It was delightful.

Since Thursday it is a health hazard. Full story »

What books have been sitting by the Scrogues’ bedside these days?

“My patterns are diverse to the point of randomness,” says Lex. Mike Sheehan echoes that sentiment: “There is no rhyme or reason to my reading patterns. I may buy a hot new book and let it sit for months or years before I crack it open, I may impulsively pick something up at a yard sale and start reading that night, or vice versa.” And anyone’s who’s followed my book reviews over the past twelve months can certainly tell there’s a scattershot randomness to the books I pull from the shelves.

A look through our libraries is a glimpse into the diverse interests and energies that fuel S&R as a blog and as a community of writers. Hopefully there’s something here to fuel you, as well.

Full story »

We’re more than three quarters done with 2011, so, much like Oscar commentators—in fact, exactly like Oscar commentators—we’re more than prepared to start ticking off our candidates for nominations for the 2011 Hugo best novel award. Yes, yes, we still have three months to go, there’s an Iain M. Banks novel coming along in a couple of weeks, and there’s always the Christmas season, but as we survey the year so far, we’ve already got some pretty good candidates. In fact, the stuff coming along this year is going to make a much stronger list than this past year. This is turning out to be a banner year.

And Ian McDonald, who has yet to win a Hugo for best novel, leads the pack, as far as I’m concerned, with The Dervish House. I’ve loved his stuff for years—especially the Chaga series, which he still needs to get back to. His last two novels, Rivers of Gods and Brasyl, were about two non-western cultures (India and Brasil) that have both eagerly adopted western technology (virtual reality and quantum computing, respectively) and run with it, and how they might look in a couple of decades. Both were fantastic reads, yet neither won a Hugo.
Full story »

Sage

I am not my geography,
you say,
          but immure yourself
in dead country
retching your dreams into an open grave.  

Stands of aspen overwatch
Eagle Nest and Angel Fire.
Toward Cimarron
yellowjacket light immolates the sky.  

Listen: there are liturgies of geography where
no graves gouge the land.

I recently completed my fifth trip through Joseph Ellis’s indispensable Founding Brothers. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2001, the book provides one of the best all-around glimpses of the Founders, depicting them more like a squabbling family than a collection of wizened sages.

The book has had a profound influence on the way I understand the founding of the Republic, and it’s certainly had a huge influence in shaping my attitudes about the Founders themselves. It’s the book, for instance, that first transformed me into an Adams fan (and, in particular, I like the way the book treats Abigail Adams with the same kind of primacy it gives her husband, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, and Burr). Full story »

I’ve come to be of two minds about China Miéville. On the one hand, he is a powerful writer with a strong, if dark, vision. He does have a fanatical following, including a number of bright people over at Crooked Timber, who have devoted a number breathless group discussions to Miéville’s work. Miéville has the kind of dark world view, and writes a gutsy prose, that seem to appeal to philosophers and other academics, apparently. On the other hand, after a number of books whose outcomes was just unremitting bleakness and despair, I sort of gave up. I never did read Un Lun Dun, or the recent short story collection. Plus he’s written a number of books in dire need of some serious editing (The Scar in particular). So I approached our final Hugo nominee, The City and the City, with some hesitation. And it’s a pleasant surprise, in that it avoids many of the excesses I associate with much of Miéville’s earlier work. In fact, it’s a good, tight, noir murder mystery—that takes place in a city that’s actually a divided city, where the two cities overlap in space and time, but the residents of each have learned to avoid and ignore each other.
Full story »

I’m not normally a slam guy. I’m a poet, and slam poetry tends to be more about the performance and less about the words, per se. That’s a generalization, I know, and there are exceptions. Most slam I see has more in common with hip-hop than poetry.

All that said, this guy is amazing.

Full story »

I occasionally have these conversations with people that run a long a fairly predictable script. The subject of reading will come up, and people will talk about what they’ve been reading, and then drift more generally into what people like and don’t like, that sort of thing. Then comes the good part, when I tell people that I usually read science fiction, because that’s the most interesting stuff out there. At this point there’s usually a pause, and the other person will look at me sadly, with a note of pity, and say something along the lines of “Oh yeah, that Star trek stuff. Can’t stand it myself.” I just had one of these recently with an old friend, who is smart and well read. These conversations, I must say, no longer surprise me. He did mention, I should point out, that he hasn’t actually read much science fiction the past thirty years or more, although he did like that Neal Stephenson book he read.

I long ago gave up any pretense of trying to cure people of what they don’t know. If readers choose to compartmentalize themselves, I can’t help that. But it does lead to some interesting conundrums for some people. Reviewers here in London were universally enthusiastic over Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (an embarrassingly bad book from a good writer), Full story »

We leave alternate Americas and possible futures and return to the here and now with Wake, the first volume of Robert W. Sawyer’s planned trilogy about an emerging consciousness on the World Wide Web. Just to make sure we get it, Sawyer is titling the subsequent volumes Watch and Wonder. Well, this might not be so bad if this had been a better book. But it left me feeling pretty unimpressed, sadly, for all the interest that this concept might generate. Because as Sawyer points out (in the press release accompanying the book’s publication), the web will soon have as many connections as there are neural connections in the human brain. This does raise a tantalizing prospect, one that science fiction writers have been exploring since Arthur C. Clarke in the 1960s—an emergent artificial intelligence.

Sawyer deliberately takes a route contrary to the cyberpunk ethos initially forged by William Gibson in Neuromancer. Where cyberpunk is dark, gloomy and, yes, punky, Sawyer has us approach the concept through the persona of 15-year-old Caitlin Decter, blind from birth but who has her sight restored to her. Caitlin is, purely by coincidence, a math genius and a whiz programmer, Full story »

I spent the weekend up in Gunnison at the annual Writing the Rockies Conference, hosted by Western State College. While there, I got to enjoy weather that was staggeringly beautiful, great beer from the Gunnison Brewery and the Crested Butte Brewing Company (Gunnison’s GABF Gold Medal-winning Summertime 69 was righteous, by the way), outstanding readings and seminars from the likes of Colorado Poet Laureate David Mason, and an all-around excellent event thanks to the conference director, Dr. Mark Todd, and his team. Props to all.

The high point for me was the open microphone event last night, where I got to read a few of my newest works. Full story »

Our third Hugo best novel nominee is Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest. Boneshaker is the name of a machine designed to tunnel under the earth, which it did in 1880 underneath Seattle with catastrophic results—part of the city collapsed, a form of gas was released that turned people into zombies, and the remaining citizens (those that survived, anyway) were forced to wall in what was left so no one could get in or out. But of course people do, including, sixteen years later, the teen-aged son of the inventor of Boneshaker, who wants to clear his father’s name, and then Briar Wilkes, the inventor’s widow and Ezekiel’s mother, who must go and try to rescue her son. It’s all rousing stuff, with a decided steampunk edge to it—yes, there are dirigibles, lots of them. Plus a genuinely engaging and feisty pair of protagonists, Briar and Zeke.

Priest actually had me fooled for a while, because for about the first one-third of the book, I kept wondering why this book had been nominated. Yes, it’s a well drawn out historical fantasy, and she does a good job on what life in this hard environment was probably like. But the first third basically reads like a Young Adult novel, which is more or less what I thought it was for a while. Full story »

The Windup Girl is now considered, if I can believe the chatter on various SF blogs, one of the front-runners for this year’s Hugo Award, and it’s pretty easy to see why. It’s an impressive first novel (although embodying themes that Bacigalupi has been exploring in short stories for several years now), and it looks as if Bacigalupi has set himself up with a solid franchise here—there will clearly be a sequel, and maybe more than one. There better be. We find ourselves in the world of the 22nd century, where a number of current trends have run unchecked, global warming and the concentration of power in food companies the major two. It’s not an attractive world in a number of ways—countries have fallen as sea levels have risen and entire economies have been obliterated; the calorie companies (American, of course) dominate food production; plagues of rust and other plant diseases (that have resulted from bioengineering plants in the first place) have wiped out whole crops; biotechnology is the dominant scientific and technological exercise because it is so desperately needed, both to create new crops resistant to disease and to check the diseases that already ravage the planet; and fossil fuels (except for coal) are largely gone. And yet life, and people, persevere.
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