Rob Hood won two Ditmars last week.
The first was as co-editor (with Robin Pen) of Daikaiju! Giant Monster Tales. It has just received yet another excellent review, this time in the Internet Review of Science Fiction (free access but registration required). Daikaiju! is one of the signature anthologies of the year. (How to buy it.)
The second was for criticism in a piece called “Divided Kingdom: King Kong vs. Godzilla” which now appears online (free, no registration required) on Rob’s own site, courtesy of BenBella Books. The essay originally appeared in King Kong is Back, edited by David Brin.
Go read.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden from Making Light notes that an agent on the 20 Worst Agents list has been sending out cease-and-desist letters to people who make her behaviour public, and in Teresa’s case, has been filling her employer’s ear with false accusations intended to shut down her criticism. And so, I’ve replicated the links that Teresa has recommended. There are two reasons for this: the first is that unpublished writers are easy prey for scammers and this is a public service announcement, and the second is that P+TNH are wonderful and I like standing next to them. Virtually speaking, of course.
Go read.
We have a logo. Consequently, we have a new banner. The artwork is by Bob Eggleton. Bob has won 9 Hugos, 12 Chesley Awards, not to mention a couple of LOCUS Awards and a Skylark. Thanks, Bob.
We are not worthy. We are not worthy.
The rule: List three albums of great music that get almost no attention.
- Sixteen Haikus, Sigmatropic
- The Disconnection, Carina Round
- Bachelor No. 2, Aimee Mann
William Faulkner said, “Kill your darlings.” What he meant was: if you write something that you love beyond all reason, it is wrong and should be cut from the piece.
It sounds bizarre. Take out the very best thing in the story? “You must be kidding!” I hear you cry. Or I would if you said it and I was standing beside you at the time.
Faulkner really meant it. And he is not the only one. In the deleted scenes from 28 Days Later there is a shot of our hero Cillian Murphy running up a flight of stairs. As he runs, the camera wheels this way, then that as he turns up a bend in the stairs, and because the stairs are lit from below, the pattern of light and shadow through the railings makes a zebra-stripe jungle through which Murphy skitters. It’s gorgeous. So director Danny Boyle cut it out of the film. Why? Because he has a rule that the best shot of his movies always gets the chop.
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And the Ditmar 2006 winners are…
- Best Novel: Geodesica: Ascent by Sean Williams & Shane Dix
- Best Novella or Novelette: “The Grinding House” by Kaaron Warren
- Best Short Story: “Fresh Young Widow” by Kaaron Warren
- Best Collected Work: Daikaiju! Giant Monster Tales ed. Robert Hood & Robin Pen
- Best Professional Artwork: Cover to Australian Speculative Fiction: A Genre Overview by Nick Stathopoulos
- Best Fan Writer: Shane Jiraiya Cummings for Horrorscope
- Best Fan Artist: Shane Parker for Conflux Poster Art
- Best Fan Production: Australian SF Bullsheet, ed. Edwina Harvey & Ted Scribner
- Best Fanzine: Ticonderoga Online, ed. Russell B Farr, Liz Grzyb, Lyn Battersby
- William Atheling Jr. Award: “Divided Kingdom: King Kong vs Godzilla” by Robert Hood
- Best New Talent: Rjurik Davidson
- Best Professional Achievement: Robert Dobson, Robert Hoge, Kate Eltham, Heather Gammage for Clarion South 2005
> About the Ditmar Awards
After decades of suffering under a regime of poorly dubbed re-edits, bad prints and TV-oriented pan-and-scan claustrophobia, Toho Studio’s classic daikaiju eiga are finally being released to DVD in the West in properly tidied-up original formats — sweeping Tohoscope and with vibrant colours, clear sound and decent subtitles. Suddenly all those narky mainstream critics who dismissed them with a few snide quips seem somewhat less credible. True, many of the films are definitely not great films by any stretch of the imagination, but even the worst of them (those suffering from the mid-70s cash-strapped blues, for example) no longer look like cheapies produced by amateurs.
A recent release relevant to us at the Talking Squid is Space Amoeba (aka Yog, the Monster from Space). It features this famously cheesy creation: Gezora, a giant space-amoeba-enhanced cuttlefish/squid. Sooner or later Gezora had to turn up here to introduce himself; though he doesn’t actually talk in the film, the invading space amoeba itself does.
For a panoramic screenshot that shows just how big Gezora is, plus some evaluative comments, check out my review here.
Just recently I was lucky enough to secure an interview with Gezora himself, (more…)
Barrington J. Bayley has been plugging away without much commercial success or critical notice since 1954, when his first story appeared in Vergo Statten Science Fiction Magazine, a publication that appears to have infected the author with its historical invisibility. Bayley was one of three key writers (the others were Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard) who conspired to change science fiction by launching the New Wave in the 1970s. Moorcock is now famous among science fiction and fantasy readers, and Ballard is an international phenomenon who has reached far beyond his home genre. Yet Bayley remains virtually unknown and undiscussed — except by a small number of colossi of the field such as Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. Sterling had this to say about him:
Bayley writes science fiction with the natural fluency of a man who can’t help it. He has the ineffable, unfakeable genius of a true SF visionary: of Wells, Stapledon, and Ballard; of Bester, Dick, and Farmer.
Small things do not content this man. He is tooling along in second gear if he does not blow your mind ten times in eighteen pages. He is at home re-inventing the nature of space-time, stretching the limits of consciousness, reassembling reality. He leaps past the jugular and deep into the frontal lobes.
Expert praise is lovely, but it hardly makes up for a lack of presence in the minds of genre readers, or worse, genre buyers. Bayley appears to have lost his drive some time after writing The Zen Gun in 1982, only to regain it with a flurry of stories in Interzone around the late 90s, and then drying up again after 2001. And now he’s back in Futures, the regular story at the back of Nature.
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Behold Vampyroteuthis infernalis, a squid that lives at ocean depths of 600 m to 1200 m, where the waters are so dark that the squid’s colour-based defences, the chromatophores and ink sac, are atrophied possibly to the point of being completely vestigial, and the only chromatophores that work normally are those associated with bioluminescence. Instead of squirting ink, its arms can release clouds of glowing particles to confuse predators. Its flesh is gelatinous like a jellyfish. Two of its arms have evolved to become long filamentous sensory organs — at least, that’s what biologists suspect — and it is the only cephalopod to have fins. V. infernalis is the only species in its genus.
In short, this squid is weird and unique, is well adapted to the dark, and its name translates from the Latin as “vampire squid from hell.” We expect our marketing people to have the prototype stuffed toys any day now.
I’m pleased to announce that the Australian popular science magazine COSMOS includes my story “Empathy” in the current issue.
COSMOS has already published fellow squid Robert Hood, and you can read Rob’s story “Cross-currents” online via the COSMOS fiction archive along with stories by Charles Stross, Gregory Benford, Paul di Filippo, Joe Haldeman and others. “Empathy” should be online in the next few weeks as the magazine rolls over to the next issue, but I strongly encourage readers to buy the magazine. Apart from having a hard copy on high-quality paper, COSMOS is an excellent magazine all round. I think it fills a very interesting niche that I can’t quite describe yet, somewhere between New Scientist and National Geographic in tone, but unlike either one, and it is one of the very few journals in Australia (or indeed the world nowadays) that gives a lot of space to strong feature articles. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
