Some will write about how good of an editor he was. And there will the obligatory homages to Rogue Moon and Who?, his classics in the genre. All of that will be covered by others who will do it much better than I, so I will leave them to it.

Instead I’ll talk about Michaelmas, a flawed book with a conventional alien invasion plot, but with a more personal meaning. It was the novel that brought me into the computer industry. Besides being a forerunner to (and better than 99% of) the cyberpunk subgenre in science fiction, it was the first novel to explore the potential of human/computer teams, without making either one the slave of the other. Oh, there was no doubt who was in charge (Michaelmas, the human). But he listened to and often accepted the advice of the computer (Domino) and in general treated Domino as he might a human member of his staff.

That was what excited me. It made real to me the possibilities of computers not as calculators, but as assistants in the real meaning of the term: as things to assist us in what we do best. It was the synergy between Domino and Michaelmas that excited me. I wanted to make that happen in real life.

I was happily on my way to becoming a chemist when I read that book. It was a life-altering experience. Call him cranky, curmudgeonly, call him whatever you want. Just remember it takes a whale of a writer to reach into someone’s life like that.

I never knew Budrys the man, but that doesn’t matter. My world is a little darker today for his absence. And for the umpteenth time, I’m going to re-read Michaelmas.

You know how it is, the story is going along nicely, you’re getting in to the characters when suddently the author slips, and destroys the illusion that he’s been building up and that you’ve been enjoying. You want to scream, but settle instead for throwing the book across the room.

Well, that’s what happened here. No, it wasn’t the sneers he throws at religion; I’m getting used to that by now. That seems to be the current trend. When an author today wants to hang the “intelligent” label on one of the characters, the character disses religion. After all, it’s not possible to believe and be intelligent at the same time, is it?

But, as I said, that’s not why the book went airborne. The premise of the book involves the crossing over between parallel universes of a scientist. The twist is the scientist is a neanderthal, coming from a universe where the spark of consciousness lit up the minds of the neanders, not the cro-mags. He’s been learing english through conversation, aided by a computer, which beeps whenever it hears a word it cannot translate.

The situation is handled really well, until at one point the computer translates (into english) the exclamation “That’s so oxymoronic!” As if I’m supposed to believe that word has come up in conversation, when words like “endanger” haven’t. It blew the whole mood, destroyed the credibility of the process. After I picked up the book and read a few more paragraphs I realized that the reason for this was that the author needed to gather some momentum for the obligatory No Thinking Person Can Believe scene (since the author had been silent on religion up to this point, I confess I didn’t see it coming until it got here) and so had to suspend the limititations he’d imposed on his scientist to this point.

Still, the “first contact” scenes are handled well enough. The plot is too flimsy to carry the novel, but that’s more because the book isn’t plot-driven. Nor for that matter could you call it character-driven. It’s more driven by the examination of the concept of quantum states and many worlds, and by the chance to view of Neaderthal scociety.

If you’re looking for a strong plot, or compelling characters, pass this book by. If you enjoy travelogs to unfamiliar societies, however, you’ll enjoy this one a lot.

I never met him face to face, something I was hoping to rectify and now will never have the chance. Our opinions and beliefs diverged more than they converged, which you might think was a good reason not to meet. But if you do, then it’s clear you never knew rich.

You didn’t need to agree with him; in fact I often got the impression he preferred it if you didn’t. Not because he was scrappy old curmudgeon, lusting for the cut and thrust of a good fight (though if it happened, he was able to keep his end up nicely). But it seemed somehow, just by disagreeing with him, you uplifted him. The existence of contrary points of view was interesting in itself, and was a phenomenon to be respected and studied for what it was: confirmation of the diversity of the universe, and the strength that flows from it. There was something to be learned from every person he met.

Dr Gafia has now left the planet. And the planet is the bigger loser.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

We got the bid! Have patience. It’s a new site and we just got the bid for 2008, so there’s a lot of decisions that are just now being made. I’d tip you off to them here, but Robert Bloch promises me he’ll stop haunting me if I do, so you’ll just have to be patient. Just expect to come and have fun.

Wow. Me on a concom. Now that’s horror.

Starngely enough, I really like working conventions, and working with this group was a new experience, and a good one. Miriah and her support team from ISS worked heroically, and thanks largely to them I actually looked like I was capable of doing my job. Both Lea Farr and Charlie Harmon went far above the call of duty to make my time in the Program Ops office an enjoyable one, and the entire staff had enough enthusiasm for the job to make it an altogether fun experience.

One of the hazards of working Program Ops is you don’t get much feedback on what is going right with the convention, all you hear are complaints. And there are always complaints; you can’t please everyone. One example: We were told we should have cut the number of kaffeeklatsches in half, because holding two different ones in a 600 square foot area made it hard for the hearing impaired. Doing so would, of course, have disappointed some pros and their fans, who would not have had the chance to get together at all. So either way someone gets irritated with us. (Personally, I was on the side of the hearing impaired complainer until he as much as called me a liar to my face when I told him we were noting the complaint as something to be more heavily considered for the next con. Just a note for his future reference, if he’s reading this: It never helps your case if you go out of your way to insult the person you’re trying to convince to help you.)

The intent of the programing head was to provide as varied a program as he could, WorldCon-class programming in a space that was certainly not WorldCon class in size. A laudable goal, and one which was achieved, although achieving it made several panel audiences much smaller than they otherwise would have been, and made getting to some panels problematic.

There were rough patches, some made worse by the cultural differences of the staff (we’d all worked different conventions, and so were used to doing things in different ways) but those got smoothed out by mid-con. At something over 1500 attendees, this was the smallest con I’d worked in over two decades, so the looseness of some of the operation scared me at first, as did the low number of volunteers. You need bodies and a more rigid system to run a large con, but smaller cons can spend more time in improv mode and still succeed. And smaller numbers of attendees means a smaller number of volunteers; there’s no valid reason to suggest the percentage of volunteers would go up as number of attendees goes down. But once I’d had time to think about it rationally, I understood and adjusted, just as other con staff began to understand me and adjust.

It was a fun time. If you were there, thanks for making it fun. If you weren’t. you missed out on something good.

Susanna Clarke’s first novel has a good sales run at the moment, and it’s up for Hugo. With some difficulty, I read it. Well, perhaps “read it” is too strong a term. At several points along the way, my eyes frankly glazed over, and I skipped pages. An actual page count of what I read vs what I skipped would reveal I probably read about 85% of it. And that was too much.

She seems to have a full-blown case of the disease that has been afflicting George RR Martin, JK Rowling, and many other writers today. I’m not sure what the exact cause of it is, but the result is The Big Book, the book that’s too long for the story it’s telling. I don’t know if they think readers want more pages to justify the higher price, or if the cutbacks in staff at the publishers are resulting in editors that are incapable doing their job because of time constraints, or what. But many books today are just too long.

This is an excellent case in point. This 782-page monstrosity shouldn’t have been over 500, and probably could have been less than that. The plot is rather good, as are the sub-plots, but they get so bogged down in detail that on more than one occasion I had to resist the urge to throw the book across the room. Come on, get to the point already!

The Big Book has always been with us, but not in such large numbers as today. Yes, Lord of the Rings was long. But, to tie the two together, JS&MN reads as if Tolkien had included all of the Silmarillion as footnotes in the Rings trilogy.

The basic idea here is that a mean-spirited magician (Henry Norrell) is wanting to be the only magician in England, when a young pup with some talent comes up; Norrell can’t resist keeping him around (you know the story, it’s as old as the hills) and Things Develop. Mix in the idea of a long-disappeared English King that his subjects expect to return and let simmer.

This is generally a good dish to preprare, but Clarke has decided it needs to be garnished with a dry-as-dust academic tone, including footnotes that go on for pages(!) and all sorts of irrelevancies that serve mainly just to brag about the back story she’s created for the book. Yes ma’am, it’s a well-crafted deep back story, and you’ve certainly done your homework. But every good fantasy tale has one of those, trotting it out and putting it on display is tacky at best, and boring at worst. In the case at hand, it oscillates between the two poles.

I can’t explain why the book has sold the copies it’s sold; I haven’t yet got around to the other Hugo nominees, but this makes me dread going through the rest of them. If the art of writing is knowing what to leave out, then this book is truly artless.

Maybe I’m just being silly, but I expect the book to tell me a story, and hopefully through the story’s development learn something more about myself or the people around me. This book has a good story buried in it, struggling to get out, but the excavation process is painful, and frankly, not worth the effort. I can only recommend this book for those who think doctoral dissertations make good reading.

This is just silly. I suspect, however, it just is keeping in step with the general erosion of our societal attitude toward truth and facts. “Science Fiction” used to mean “no supernatural effects need apply.” The premises of a science fiction story had to be either demonstrable as fact, or at least possible/probable given what we know.

We have relaxed our collective definition of truth. It used to mean, “that which we can prove.” It now appears to mean “that which we cannot disprove.” There is a large distance between those two points that we have leaped, without good reason. I hope someday we recover our senses, before it’s too late and we’re lost.

And I was. The premise is that the blessed Father Vidicon is walking down the throat of Hell (having, of course, passed successfully through the Hellmouth) and hears the pleas of those who are struggling against Murphy. A young man, Tony, a computer troubleshooter, stumbles across a message from the blessed father, and becomes pressed into service, falls in love, and tries to maintain a relationship with both a beautifule woman and the blessed father.

All the while Tony strives against a delightful bestiary representing the problems we all encounter, Father Vidicon continues his walk, struggling with the more powerful sendings.

Stasheff has put together an allegory for our time, sort of a Pilgrim’s Progress, albeit with both a technological and philosophical twist. While the former would, no doubt, delight Bunyan, the latter I’m equally sure, would not.

Definitely a Good Read, though perhaps we techno-dweebs are most likely to identify with Tony. There is a low probability of this becoming a series, which is a Good Thing (I’d call it impossible, but I know better; still I hope it doesn’t as the story is complete as it stands) because I think the tale would lose something were it to continue.

And let me give a shout to Filk Radio while I’m at it. Especially made for those who like their music on wry. (If you have iTunes, you don’t need their dedicated player, but you won’t get the song titles if you don’t.)

A big problem, as evidenced by the comment thread, is that both sides never tire of turning the opposition into a straw man, and both keep trying to win the argument by definition. A good case in point is the description of the “anthropomorphic all-God” in the comments. It’s a misstatement of Christian positions to say God is “man-like.” Man is, in fact, God-like. (“Let us make man in our image” — KJV) Is “theomorphic” a word? The point is God is the original, man the derivative being. Characterizing God as “anthropomorphic” is a good way to antagonize your respondent.

What’s my position?

1) I find many of the suppositions made following the theory to be suspicious, to say the least. They may be true, but they don’t make sense to me, and there really isn’t way to test them. They are assertions, which make a sincere (at least most of them do) attempt to cover/explain the currently known facts. But several explanations can manage that, so without being able to test the theories, I don’t see a compelling reason to select one over another.

2) Just because I find it unlikely, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t believe it (there’s another problem in terminology — one doesn’t believe in evolution, one believes evolution; there’s no person there to believe in, after all) and forbid you telling other people about it. This attitude, alas, sets off the howler monkeys on both sides of the question.

3) Also, simply because I don’t see it as true doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. I’ve learned long ago not to limit God’s behavior by my own understanding. I don’t have His brainpower; when I know more, I’ll understand more.

Just to explain more about my point #1 above: Let’s say you know nothing at all about the world. You see a video which shows someone entering rooms in a house and turning on lights. Without being able to set up an experiment to test, you can theorize:

1) There is pressure plate under the floor which turns on the light.
2) There is a motion sensor which turns on the light.
3) The house demands you scratch it on a sensitive area and the light is its pleasure response.
4) The beings in the house have an abundance of energy and they power the lights by touching a contact plate.

(I’m sure there are other theories possible, but that’s enough, I think, to make the point.)

There isn’t an experiment we can perform that will *prove* that life on this planet emerged and developed according to the current theories (I use the plural, because there’s not complete agreement among those who accept evolution — nor is there agreement among those who do not, for that matter) this side of time travel. At best we could demonstrate that it could have happened that way, but even that hasn’t been done, yet.

We look at old bones, and we build fleshy creatures that may only vaguely resemble the actual being in question. You would, for example, have a hard time reconstructing my fleshly body from just my bones. I’ve had the same bones all my adult life, yet my height varies by 5% or more routinely, and occasionally by more. My weight has varied by 60% and more. Now imagine you’ve never seen a human and explain where they carry their body fat. They’re just guesses. Do they hold tegether, yes (for the most part) they do, but so does the future histoy of Miles Vorkosigan, does that mean he’s real? Or the Tharks? How about the Puppeteers and the Kzinti?

You see what I mean? Evolutionary theory is largely guesswork and suppositions, unproven and unprovable. (I once ran in to someone who claimed a computer simulation could prove it. Try as I might, I couldn’t get him to see it was tautaulogical: You build a simulation that runs according to the rules of evolutionary theory and behold, the result supports evolutionary theory! Yah think? Computer simulations are useful tools when we understand the problem domain; we don’t know enough about this one. The problem is when you build the solution into the test, you never can learn anything.) It’s just a case of choosing the set you find yourself comfortable living with.