The Complete Review talks about the death of the slush pile and why it's problematic for the future of writing and publishing.

The real (publishing) revolution of the iPad may have nothing to do with the iPad itself.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo has probably the best write up of why the iPad will be successful, even if it's not for you and me.

Speaking of Gizmodo, I still say the iPad would be much more interesting if it had a screen like this.

The hyperbolic tone is a little aggravating, but the core concept about a-plots and b-plots in fiction here is interesting.

And in other news, this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the everyday life of terrorists is rather fascinating.

The iPad is basically a big iPod Touch with optional 3G internet, optional external keyboard and the ability to use iWork. It has access to an Apple ebook store, which is nice, but because it runs iPhone apps it can already read Kindle, eReader and B&N books as well as books from FictionWise and Books on Board through Stanza. So that's just not such a big deal. It's not a Kindle killer because it doesn't have an eInk screen, which means it's backlit, just like the iPod Touch, iPhone and laptops. Though I must admit it looks sweet for reading color comics on.

I'm still waiting for a tablet that can change from eInk to regular screen and back, like some of the technology demos that have been floating around.

What this is: A decent alternative to a netbook, because you can write and read on it, and do low key work related stuff. No flash, which means no Hulu etc, but most Netbooks are too slow for Flash video anyway, whereas the iPad can do video from the iTunes store and from YouTube. And it's supposedly very fast, unlike most Netbooks, and it's going to have rock solid OS software unlike the creaky Windows XP that's on the typical Netbook. So it's a good addition to Apple's lineup, but yeah, not exactly the revolution people were thinking about.

So in the interests of being less vitriolic and not just hurling insults, I thought I'd approach some of the more irritating aesthetic (as opposed to political, ethical, or social) problems with the SF Ghetto and Con Culture in particular. Some of this stuff is just dumb, and it's probably not worth pointing out why. But I think it needs saying in order to point out the differences between what I think about this stuff, and the things I'm more vocally critical of.

1. Filk

Filk makes no sense to me. My enduring image of filk is that guy from Trekkies who was really bad at being in drag, singing a klingon hymn of some sort. It made me cringe. I still cringe when I think about it. It was that bad. Supposedly the idea behind filk is a group of people getting together and singing songs. That, on its own, is a good thing. Music is wonderful and we all need more of it in our lives, even people like me who have a lot of it. What doesn't make sense to me is the form that Filk takes, which, to an outsider, appears to be something like a cross between Weird Al Yankovic and Mark Russell, only with none of the musicianship or genius to be found in those musical satirists. The point here is not that the idea of filk is a bad one, it's that it seems to be executed in an internally contradictory way. What I mean by that is that on the one hand it's pushing this "everyone can sing" idea which is laudable. But at the same time, the actual activity itself is rife with in jokes and jargon that are only really accessible to a very small group of people. It's this internal irony, that seems to be completely missed by the participants, that I find displeasing about filk.

2. Costuming

On a completely different note, a piece of flash fiction I wrote is up today at 365 Tomorrows! It's called Logos Ex Machina.

Actually, maybe the note isn't so different. The story's about infidelity, jealousy and bestiality. Enjoy!

One thing I seem to have gleaned from the flurry of comments to Tuesday's post about Arisia is that I went to the wrong convention. In the words of one of the commenters:

Arisia started as a "reaction" to another more literary "Con" - Boskone. To make it short, Boskone was trying to focus more on literary works, and in short become more "serious". Arisia was started as a "fun" con. There was a very specific focus in the early days on - Costuming (in the halls and masquerade), Parties, and an openness to movies/anime/"whatever". (Please be aware that I am simplifying grotesquely here) But the basic idea behind Arisia fundamentally is that it's a less "serious" con, even though there's a strong contingent of interest in literature & Science/Science Fiction.

Looking at the schedule for last year's Boskone and the guest list for this year's, I see none of the "alternative lifestyle" material of Arisia and quite a lot more writers I enjoy and topics that look interesting to me personally. Had I done any research whatever, I might have discovered this and saved myself a lot of bother. I won't be going to Boskone next month, for a number of reasons not the least of which is I'm a little conventioned-out after Arisia, though I may go next year while I don't think I'll be attending another Arisia. (I do wonder if I'll find myself something of a pariah at conventions from now on because of my posts. I suppose I'll have to go and find out.)

"When I moved here from the west coast," said Marlin May, a black, homosexual SF fan who I met first on Twitter, and who compared "coming out" as an SF fan to "coming out" as gay, "I didn't know a lot of people. But when I started going to con[vention]s here, I felt like I was home. I was back where I belong."

It was a sentiment I heard over and over again from people at Arisia, New England's Largest Science Fiction Convention (attendance: about 3,000). On one panel, the moderator opined that cons are “where we seem to fit. In other places is where we're playing roles,” with the deliberate irony that the convention was full of role playing games. One woman I talked to referred to Arisia specifically as a “lifestyle con”. This was a convention run by fans for fans to come and hang out and play and fuck. Which helped explain the lack of corporate presence that one finds at your average comic book convention. There were no booths for major publishers here, no b-grade sci-fi actors being paid for autographs, no developers giving advanced previews of their latest video game offering. A panel on the future of Doctor Who, which at New York or San Diego Comic-Con would have been made up of writers, producers, and/or stars of the TV show, was instead made up entirely of fans. The moderator began “Well, we've only got fifteen seconds of footage to go on, so I'm not sure what we're going to talk about,” and then the panelists started talking about their favorite episodes of the show instead. Most of the panels were simply manned by other fans, who didn't seem any more qualified to talk about a given subject then those in the audience, which was probably why the audience felt so entitled to give their own opinions at length whenever the mood arose, as if everyone was part of the panel.

I'm on a bus (with WiFi!) to Arisia, "New England's largest and most diverse science fiction and fantasy convention". I decided that after the wonderful time I had at ReaderCon, I should take a look at a more traditional SF con. I'm skeptical as to how interesting it will be for me; looking at the schedule, the literary portion of the sf world seems to take a side role to television, films, and role playing games, and there's far fewer names I recognize on the panels. But I'm willing to keep an open mind.

Also, sadly my cell phone is in the shop, which means I probably won't be able to twitter up the storm I normally do at conventions (we'll see if there's any wifi at the con). On the other hand, I now have a video camera, which means there may be some interviews to be had.

Stay tuned.

Just a quick note to let people know that I do plan to eventually return to the Atlas Shrugged project. The problem is that I have moved and I can't find my copy of the book. At some point I'll break down and buy another one. But spending money on that trash weighs heavy on my heart and there are so many good books to read...

that having been said, to the jackasses on the Dune forum who were talking about me behind my back? Frank Herbert still couldn't write his way out of a paper bag. Dune is bad because the story stripped of the admittedly wonderful sci fi setting is predictable and boring, the quality of the prose is extremely poor, and the characters are wooden and one dimensional. there's much better space opera out there. Or at least there ought to be because really, there isn't.

There are officially too many damn ebook readers.

There will soon be two kinds of happy ebook-reader owners. The people who paid a fair amount for a reputable ebook reader from one of the companies they already buy books from, and the people who spend like $50 on a no-name ebook reader that supports a lot of formats, who gets every book they can think of as a pirated copy over BitTorrent. Everyone else—both the buyers of tier-two ebook readers and the makers of them—are going to be screwed.

Not quite the way I would have put it, but not wrong.

E-Ink Is Dead, Pixel Qi's Amazing Transflective LCD Just Killed It

It's a real LCD display that turns seemlessly into a non-backlit display a la eink, without the lag in update time or the other difficulties of eink. I'm still waiting for a production model, though. Show me something I can buy!

Catherynne M. Valente tells us How to Write a Novel in 30 Days. Suck it, VanderMeer!

And finally, Avatar and American Imperialism gives us a pretty good analysis of the film Avatar's psuedo-anti-imperialist message.

Some years ago a "52-books-in-a-year" meme sprouted up, in which people "challenged" themselves to read a book a week for a year. I thought at the time, as I do now, that this is an absurdly small number of books; reading for merely a half-an-hour to an hour a day one can easily polish off a book a week (depending, admittedly, on the length and difficulty of the book and the reading speed of the individual). Considering that the "average" American supposedly watches four hours of television a day, sacrificing a quarter of that to book reading doesn't seem like much of a challenge, and I'm under the impression that most bibliophiles read quite a bit more and watch quite a bit less. To prove the point at the beginning of 2009 I decided to simply keep track of my reading. My final tally came to 125 books. You can see whole list at Library Thing. (The Doc Savage book "The Man of Bronze/The Land of Terror" counts twice as it's two books collected as one.) Below are short reviews of the best of this list.