Author Archives: Alison

Con Report: Con-Version 23, August 17-19

(Cross-posted from Reality Skimming.)

It seemed to come together late for all concerned, but it came together: Con-Version 23. I’d decided to be a lurker at this con and not volunteer for any panels, and I headed over to Calgary a day early to have a chance to hang out with Rebecca Bradley (science GOH) and Marie Jakober. Coming in to land from the north, I didn’t get much sense of Calgary’s growth, which I am assured has been prodigious; it was certainly as green as the coast, testifying to a wet summer. No mosquitos, because of the cold, change from Westercon.

First event, after a side-trip to the UofC library to polish off a little work, was Rebecca and Robin’s party, attended by the Con GOH Jack McDevitt, the singing IFWAns (more about them later), Edge notables and assorted others such as Marie and myself. Though blurry with fatigue (How can someone get jet-lagged on a 1 h time change? – I blame the altitude) I was up until midnight, having fascinating back-deck and buffet-table conversations on a huge range of subjects, and eating too much of the yummy food. I finally got to thank Jack McDevitt for giving me my one and only Nebula award nomination, years ago, for Blueheart. Lynda Williams, Jennifer Lott (Lynda’s daughter) and Nathalie Mallet arrived from PG around 9 pm, all full of beans despite having driven all day.

The Show’s Not Over ‘Till the Captain Sings

The con itself kicked off the following evening, with the opening ceremonies, which I skived, and with the musical: “The Phantom of the Space Opera”, which I am very pleased I did not, though I arrived after the start and missed seeing the chair at the front Marie had saved for me. Stood at the back, and took digital pot-shots of the action, most of which turned out blurred. Either the subject was dancing too hard, or I was laughing too hard.

In brief, the story involves the crew of the Starship Insipid, captained by one Captain Quirk, who endure a visitation by the Phantom of Space Opera (Steve Swanson), who is searching the galaxy for musical talent. One by one, in a desperate attempt to avert the consequences of having the Captain sing, the crew take turns trying to impress the implacable Phantom. Dr. Temperence “Bones” Brennan (Rebecca, perfectly typecast) standing in for Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, alas can do little for the mounting casualty count, declaring “I’m the lady who loves bones” and delegating the disposal of the inadequately skeletonized remains to Nurse Chapstick (Colleen Eggerton). Which works fine until Amanda Grayson (Danita Maslan) reveals she was standing in for her son Spork, who has returned to Vulcan on account of Ponn Farr, at which point Nurse Chapstick, who has been waiting SEVEN LONG YEARS for this, demands the keys to the space shuttle; Phantom or no Phantom, dead redshirts or no dead redshirts, she’s Vulcan-bound. Shotty (Kim Greyson) delights the audience if not the Phantom with “Pretty Kingon”, complete with lusty growl, delivered to the Klingon women on the viewscreen. The blue-collar gang receives a moment in the spotlight never granted them by the original show as the ship’s plumber and Number 2 (Val King) takes her turn at command between coffee and lunch break (got a good union, that woman), and the ship’s cook (Nicole Chaplain-Pearman) deals handily with a sudden infestation of tribbles (protein!). Even the Bored, with their multicoloured suspiciously Rubic’s cube-like ship and tinfoil prostheses, are summarily dispatched.

But the end is unavoidable – the Captain (Randy McCharles) has to sing. For a moment it seems as though the villain will be incapacitated by the sheer screechin’ sonic horror of the Captain’s highs – as indeed are all the crew and the front 5 rows of the audience – but the song ends, the Phantom rallies, and Things Look Bad for Our Heroes. Quick huddle; Captainly insight that the Phantom’s mortal weakness is that he is a male phantom, at which point Lieutenant Allura (Anna Bortolotto) is pushed forwards with urgent instructions to – well, distract him. “Can it be,” breathes the Phantom. “Can it be … talent?” While Lt. Allura hypnotizes the Phantom, Shotty and others – a little conga line – sneak up on him with the quantum technobabbleogizmo intended to neutralize his power (which looks suspiciously like a Tralthan football sock).

The Phantom bagged, he is expelled from the conveniently-located bridge airlock, and swallowed by a whale (which I know is, as Granny Weatherwax would say, Traditional, but I’m having a little bit of trouble fitting into the story). Nothing keeps a bad pandimensional being down, and the Phantom promptly reappears, and boy, is he ticked. So the story ends, very Untraditionally, in death and destruction. Or I may not have got that straight, but I was laughing too hard.

For additional entertainment, there were viewscreen interpolations of Leonard Nimoy’s rendering of The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, and William Shatner’s Rocketman, delivered in his best lounge-lizard recitative. There was also a very strange mockumentary – I hope it was a spoof – about an attempted demolition of a beached whale carcass.

Most of the cast members have been filking and singing karaoke for years. The strength of the voices varied, but the performances were consistently lively, and the words came through well. There was a continuity hiccough in the middle where a miscue sent the entire cast 15 minutes into the future, but that was quickly corrected and, hey, this is SF! And it enabled a couple of priceless ad-libs from people who were clearly having WAY too much fun. I gather the filming didn’t take, so the cast are or have reassembled to videotape it; when they do, ooh, I wants it! My photos on Flickr:

Announcing, ORU Anthology 2

Lynda’s ORU panels have become a standard feature, and this one was special because of the release of the Okal Rel Anthology 2 from Windstorm Creative, which included stories from IFWA members, and a classy cover by none other than the Phantom himself (Steve Swanson). Lynda’s copies had not arrived by the time they made it out, but Sandy Fitzpatrick’s had [link to Flickr]; I apologise for the flash whiteout of the book cover, but in the photo without flash, the book was visible, but the faces looked like they’d been cast in a horror-movie and had just seen the monster over my shoulder! Lynda distributed more of the famous ORU buttons (I picked up the ones that said “Get Rel” and “I make bad cargo” – the latter being from Righteous Anger and referring to Horth’s being a very bad backseat driver). I read the scene from Throne Price that introduces Horth, Sandy read the beginning of her story “Return”, and Randy the beginning of his, “For Amanda”.

Lynda, Marie and Rebecca Get Religion

All in their different ways. On Sunday morning, Lynda and Marie did a two-woman panel on “Unconventional Religion and SF: The Way of the Future in More Ways than One?” The balance was more towards life than science fiction, with discussions of the need for ritual, whether religion is necessary as a moral anchor for a society, whether religion’s influence was benign or pernicious in the modern world, whether the human race will evolve beyond a need for religion, private versus public religion, etc. As is usual, on Monday, the day after Con-Version, the very first copies of Rebecca’s forthcoming The Lateral Truth: An Apostate’s Bible Stories arrived from Scroll Press; it is to be their second release, in November. Rebecca read two stories from it. The first I don’t recall, but the second “The Cares of the World, and Martha”, is a sardonic commentary on the tendency of male revolutionaries to take for granted that domestic comforts just happen. Marge Piercy (feminist author of Vida – about the radical left in the 60s and 70s – and City of Darkness, City of Light – about the French Revolution) would approve.

Rebecca’s several science GOH presentations stemmed from her interest in Alternative Archaeology, the heady brew of misdatings, misattribution, mysticism, charlatanism, and fantasy that swirls around antiquities such as Nan Madol, Tihuanacu, and the Sphinx. She entertainingly dissected the many and strange roots of the pseudo-science of Paleovisitology, as promulgated by von Daniken.

News and new releases

At one point I came into the Dealer’s Room to find a group-photo just breaking up: this was Edge, making the official announcement of its merger with Dragon Moon Press, which, with the previous merger with Tesseracts, makes it the largest dedicated SF/F publisher in Canada. And the ORU was there at the beginning: Throne Price was Edge’s third title. (Marie’s The Black Chalice being the first). I’d long admired the Dragon Moon covers, and I picked up a copy of Jana Oliver‘s Sojourn, partly because of its cover, and party because I was wondering how she’d manage to pull of what promised to be a merry farrago of time-travellers, shape-shifters, and historical serial killers in 1888 London. She did. It moves quickly, with details of a less-than-idea future deftly sketched in (adding a new twist to redundancy – being marooned in time), and two charming Victorian gentlemen (with secrets of their own) and an amiable large spider as companions to her independent time-travelling heroine.

Aside from The Lateral Truth, the other books I’m waiting impatiently for are Nathalie Mallet’s The Princes of the Golden Cage, which is gathering good reviews (see Nathalie’s blog), and Nina Mumteanu‘s Darwin’s Paradox, which is forthcoming from Dragon Moon Press.

SF is Alive and Well and Living in Calgary

A panel on “Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy” attested to the vitality of the Canadian SF scene: Susan Forrest from Red Deer Press, Brian from Edge, academic Robert Runte, Karl Johanson of Neo-Opsis, and writers Nina Mumteanu, Calvin Jim (aka helmsman Sudoku of the good ship Insipid) and Lynda. Virginia O’Dine from Bundoran Press was in the audience. What distinguishes Canadian SF: Robert’s take on it (maybe quoting, I didn’t note down): American SF ends with the character triumphant, Japanese SF has no ending, British SF ends in gloom and defeat, Canadian SF ends in a different place altogether, unsure whether it’s better or worse. Either I don’t agree, or I’m not Canadian, since my own resolutions could be best described as “the end of one set of problems is the beginning of another” (a steal from the end of Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers, by the way), which I consider optimistic – since by then the reader should know the character’s up to it. I don’t think British SF is quite as gloomy any more: in the 70s and 80s, yes, but the space opera renaissance doesn’t encourage it. The hero-as-bystander phenomenon in Canadian SF was the subject of a thread in the SF Canada listsrv recently.

What else?

Doing karaoke with the IFWAns until long after the last bus had gone – the DJ said he’d never known a first set go 2 and a half hours. Good food: both the Radisson Airport hotel restuarant and the nearby Thai Place were excellent. Good company: eating lunch with Rebecca, Marie, and Jack McDevitt; eating breakfast with Lynda, Jenny and Marie, eating at times I’d lost track of with Marie and Jenny. Missing panels while talking about David Weber’s Bahzell fantasies with Sandy. Coming late to Jack McDevitt’s reading and being perplexed and entertained by an excerpt from his story from the forthcoming anthology “Sideways in Crime“. Talking about researching European history with Nina Mumteanu. Hanging out at the Edge table [Flickr] – come a long way from 3 books! Other things I’m sure I’ll remember once I’ve hit publish on this enormous post. I did try live-blogging via email, but found my entries parked in the ‘draft’ queue when I logged in. Time to find and change a default.

All photos on Flickr tagged with conversion23.
Con-Version 23 on Technorati: “Con-Version 23”

Programs worth extolling: DoubleTake, Skim, PDFLab

DoubleTake. A recent MacWorld article (Software Treats, August 2007) put me onto the excellent DoubleTake, a shareware program that enables the stitching together of multi-shot panorama photographs. I’ve accumulated quite a number of these over the years, but never had the patience for manual assembly. DoubleTake takes away most of the grief: It is extremely easy to use, with direct drag and drop from the Finder or iPhoto (or who knows else), live previews of changes in scale, orientation and exposure (among others – but no independent colour adjustments that I can see), and the ability to save into a number of formats. Its matching is remarkably accurate in most instances, and if it misjudges, then all you have to do is drag the added photograph into rough alignment and let the software refine. I’ve now put together 2 – 7 photograph panoramas, most in well under fifteen minutes. I’m putting them on a separate page, in the form of iframes to allow for scrolling of the wider pans.

Skim. Courtesy of MacResearch, I discovered Skim, which satisfied a yearning for something that would let me annotate PDFs on screen in the same way Adobe Acrobat does (which I don’t have on Mac). The program is freeware, and under active development (having reached v 0.6.1). It has replaced Preview as my default PDF reader.

PDFLab. I take full advantage of the ‘Print to PDF’ functionality in OS X to reduce the amount of paper I print out. Periodically I would go in search of a means of assembling multiple PDFs into one file, encounter intimidating strings of command-line instructions which would induce me to back away slowly, and resolve that I could live with numbering them sequentially and sticking them in one folder until I had the hour I would need to work out and document the methods described. MacWorld to the rescue again, by introducing me to PDFLab. Again, it really is as simple as dragging and dropping, or clicking add, setting files in order, hitting the appropriate button, and typing in a filename. I’m sure it’s invoking all the command-line magic, but it certainly didn’t take me an hour to produce my first PDF!

Girls' magazines revisited

The BBC’s Women’s Hour series of five 15-minute dramas this past week offered a sequence of five plays entitled “43 Years in the Third Form”, by Jane Purcell, that interweaves the story of three generations of women with dramatized segments from the girls comics they read. Along the way, the series offered tacit and sometimes explicit comment on the changing expectations and opportunities for girls.

  1. Elizabeth, in 1952, strives to be chosen as a Girl Adventurer by Girl Magazine, exemplar of the virtues of selflessness and domestic helpfulness, an ambition she achieves with the help of her brother, who recognizes the sacrifices she makes for her family. In her own way she returns the favour, via the laxative-laced toffee she prepares in her resentment at his receiving the education she is denied, which turns him into a legend at his hated boarding school.
  2. By 1968, Elizabeth is herself a mother, anxiously schooling her lively daughter to give safely conventional responses in her interview for admission to grammar school. Expectations have changed, and Bea’s ambition to be a poet, and if not a poet, a ballerina, or a spy – inspired by her reading of Bunty magazine – are welcomed by her prospective headmistress. Do the arithmetic, and interpret Elizabeth’s intense instructions to Bea as to how to avoid the subject of her father, and one fills in the consequence of the neglect obvious in the first segment – teenage pregnancy and single motherhood.
  3. The third segment, set in 1976, belongs to Elizabeth’s sister-in-law Mary, who finds ironic amusement in the breathless advice and exortations of Jackie magazine when set against the experience of a divorcée whose husband left her for his male lover. The gulf between magazine romance and the reality of girls’ lives is revealed when her daughter’s worldly young friend Mandy proves to be as desperately uniformed of “the facts of life” as any child of the previous generation, and Mary steps forward with some frank talk and much needed nurturing.
  4. The next segment features Mary’s twins, baby-sitting each other and scaring each other silly with ghost stories from Misty, on the night of Margaret Thatcher’s election, in 1979.
  5. And in the final segment, set in 2007 after the era of girls comics is over, Elizabeth, her daughter, and her cellphone-affixed granddaughter, return to her childhood home after Elizabeth’s brother’s death, there to rediscover the stack of old magazines, reminisce about their lives, and bring the story full circle.

I am one of those who grew up on those comics. Specifically Princess Tina, Tammy, Sally (borrowed copies), Bunty, Jinty, Mandy, and Jackie (in no particular order). I remember most fondly the stories during the spy/superhero/space era of the late sixties, which gave a distaff spin to the prevalent cultural heroes: a female James Bond (Jane Bond, of course, albeit sans sex), three space stewardesses (who always saved the day, particularly the brainy brunette), an athlete kidnapped and brainwashed (unsuccessfully) into an all female army bent on world domination (I can still remember the rhyme; I won’t repeat it). Then there was the usual school and sports stories – “Bella at the Bar” was one, about a working-class girl who becomes a champion gymnast, despite opposition from family and establishment, and her own bolshie temperament.

I wish that our transatlantic moves hadn’t separated me from my stacks of old comics. It would be great – ok, since it’s comics I’m talking about, enormous – fun to reread them. Wince-making at times, I’m sure, but I have a sense they could be read as delightfully subversive, in the way that a genre can be subversive when it is regarded as “that rubbish” and beneath notice of the arbitors of culture. Writer Jane Purcell and academic Mel Gibson were interviewed for Woman’s Hour about girls comics as a social phenomenon at the start of the series. They discussed comics as an expression of girls’ bedroom culture, something to be read in private, yet shared between friends (each comic had an estimated 6 readers). Comics promoted values of heroism, friendship, upward mobility, and aspirations towards education and career, although their heroines were often shunned and misunderstood, except by the reader. As Jane Purcell said, she was presented with a much wider range of role models than today’s girls are offered by magazines concentrating on diet, boyfriends and celebrities. Mel Gibson examined the decline of girls’ comics for her PhD thesis*. They pretty much vanished during the ‘eighties/nineties, and although there are nostalgia sites for boy’s comics, there are few for girls’ comics. The BBC cult site 2000AD and British Comics, has a positively pink page on Paper worlds: Why girls’ comics were wonderful, by Jac Rayner, but I can wish, can’t I, that some web-savvy woman who didn’t move across the Atlantic three times before she was sixteen will emulate the affictionados of The Trigan Empire, and bring them back to life.

* Published paper: Reading as Rebellion: The Case of the Girl’s Comic in Britain,” International Journal of Comic Art 2.2. (Fall 2000): 135-51, via comicsresearch.org.

War, Mutiny and Revolution

War, Mutiny and Revolution in the Germany Navy: The World War I Diary of Seaman Richard Stumpf (Daniel Horn, translator and editor).

Stumpf enlisted in 1912, served as an ordinary seaman on the Helgoland for most of the war, was subsequently transferred to the Wittelsbach and the Lothringen, and was discharged in November 1918. He’d kept his diary from 1914 through 1918, and in 1926 came forward to offer it to the Reichstag Investigating Committe as the testimony of an ordinary sailor. That body had already for 7 years been examining the reasons for the loss of the war and the collapse of the German regime – in which the naval mutinies figured prominently – amid accusations from the Right of Socialist subversion, and counter-accusations from the Left of poor conditions, ill-treatment and disregard for the lives of the sailors. The diary rather shook its readers, as Stumpf was anything but a radical, being a staunch Catholic, politically conservative, and a loyal patriot, to which his diary attested, at the same time as it attested to the sailors’ grievances.

Stumpf was a tinsmith by trade, a Catholic, a trade unionist, nationalistic and conservative. He was also an autodidact who continued to educate himself throughout the war, a critical reader of newspapers and avid collector of other peoples’ information and accounts. Prior to the war he had spent a year as a travelling journeyman in the Tyrols. He also seems to have had a good source in an Executive Officer who kept the men informed and countered rumours and restlessness with
analysis. As best I can determine, this is not the raw diary, since he has worked in information that only later became available to him: for instance, the entry dated August 20 includes a narrative of the Battle of Helgoland, which took place on August 28, with commentary on the information subsequently gained from the examination of unexploded British shells (the British shells were inferior to the German).

I’m not very far in, but Stumpf is a born diarist: he gives a detailed, candid account, moving from objectivity to subjectivity and
back; he frames his information and is responsible in his reporting (allowing for the bigotry of the time). From him I have an important scene in the novel: immediately prior to the outbreak of war, the Helgoland, the ship on which Stumpf was serving, was in the Fiord of Songe, where the Royal Yacht was moored on the Kaiser’s yearly holiday. Stumpf describes the ships putting on a display for the Kaiser, the men in holiday mood, the showy departure, and sketches in the beautiful
natural setting. (I have to find and look through Simon Schama’s book on landscape and culture because I’m sure German romanticism figures strongly in it, and I may be able to use it). Since I’m thinking of a non-linear structure for this novel, moving freely back and forth through time, that idyll will be juxtaposed with one of the grimmer scenes – at present I’m thinking of putting it adjacent to the scuttling of the fleet itself (the final chapter), or adjacent to the scenes from the internment itself. Probably the latter, making it the second last chapter in the book.

Fullerton: The Blooding of the Guns

This is the first of a nine-novel (I believe) series about Nicholas Everard, a British mariner. The first three are set during WWI (with the setpieces being respectively the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the Zebrugge Raid in 1918, and a submarine run through Gibraltar with the objective being to sink the Yavutz Sultan Selim, formerly the Goeben, in the latter days of the war). The battle of Jutland is a long setpiece, and it’s a model for the writing of such action scenes: based on what his three viewpoint characters describe I believe it would be possible to plot the exact position of his fictional ships: there’s the shocking detonation of the battlecruiser Indefatigable, the out of control Warspite circling between the lines, the eerie appearance of a becalmed frigate with full sail like something from another time (and if I could think of what to do with that beyond the obvious, I’d have a short story!). I have to line up an account in VE Tarrant’s Jutland: The German Perspective of the mysterious damage taken by one of a group of German ships from an unseen enemy with the part of Blooding of the Guns
where, with Nick in command, the ship inadvertantly joins a group of German ships in the dark, realizes it before they do, fires off one torpedo and high tails it. Characterization is not complex, and the characters don’t seem to have much dimension outside their profession. Nick has a passion for Sarah, his young stepmother; so, for that matter, does his uncle Hugh. Sarah is a cypher; you hardly know anything about her as a woman, much less why all the men in her family are fixated on her. I find that kind of blank-projection female character irritating. Outside combat, Nick is a hapless laddie, careless about the career aspects of the navy, while in combat, he’s inspired and lucky. Even hapless, Nick is his own man, while his brother David, their father’s favourite, is defensive and brittle, and, as someone who knows him says to Nick, believes everyone is against him. David cracks, witnessing combat and carnage, and does not survive the sinking of his ship, which I thought was a lost opportunity from a novelist’s point of view, but there does seem to be a morality in war novels that dictate death as a penalty for weakness. I don’t think Fullerton would want to write the novel about a man who cracks, and then has to live on after it. I, on the other hand, have an idea, but it’s the novel after this one.

So it’s a model for the writing of action: the detail and authority are downright intimidating (Fullerton was a submariner in WWII), but what is encouraging is that I am recognizing sources and seeing how they have been used. Less a model for characterization. I have to watch an overemphasis on the home/background material, as I suspect both Fullerton and Monsarrat are right about the intensity of combat, but much of the war at sea in WWI was in fact spent in port, for the larger ships of both navies, and that is crucial to the novel and gives me licence.