Whatever

Subterranean Press tells me yesterday’s pre-orders for Hate Mail were well into the three-figure range. Since we’re only printing a thousand of them, that means a fair chunk of the entire stock was sold in the first day. So, two things here:

1. You guys rock. Thank you.

2. If you’re planning to order one, sooner might be better than later.

Thanks again. I feel warm and fuzzy.

If you were to ask who I was a “true fan” of, it would probably be Daniel Lanois. Lanois is better known — to most folks who know him at all — as a producer (of U2, Peter Gabriel, Robbie Robertson and Emmylou Harris) and as a musical collaborator, most notably with Brian Eno. But he’s also a musician in his own right and has been making albums since 1989, when Acadie came out and quickly became one of my all-time favorite albums. I’m enough of a fan that when this morning I found out he’d made another album without me knowing about it — the here is what is album you see pictured above — I actually got irritated with myself that I had somehow missed it coming out. My Lanois Fanboy sense wasn’t tingling! Well, I’ve since corrected the error: Not only did I immediately download the MP3 version of the album, but I also went to Lanois’ Web site and shelled out $60 for the special deluxe limited edition CD/DVD package that comes complete with an autographed picture. I feel better now, thanks.

While I was at the Web site, I learned that Lanois, who had previously been signed to Warner Bros records and then to Anti records, has gone the self-releasing route and has now made all his records available as downloads through his site, in most cases both as 192kbps mp3s (for $9) and as high-resolution WAVs (for $10), which can be paid for via PayPal. Naturally, I think this is good news, and I recommend that each of you go instantly to his site and pick up a couple of albums. My suggestion, if you are not familiar with his work, is to pick up one or both of his first two albums, Acadie and For the Beauty of Wynona, before heading off to the later albums, which are generally a bit trippier — i.e., the sort of stuff people who are already huge fans want (the albums are also available on Amazon, both as CDs and as mp3s, if you don’t want to deal with PayPallery).

To help you decide whether Daniel Lanois is for you, musically speaking, here’s probably his best-known song, “The Maker,” off Acadie. It’s been covered by folks like Emmylou Harris, Dave Matthews and Willie Nelson, but the original version is still my favorite. Enjoy.

This dude is now very likely to compete in the Olympics —

– and the reason that he was initially denied a chance to compete was because it was ruled that his prosthetics gave him too much of an advantage over runners with standard-issue legs. That was just overruled, but the fact that was how the ruling initially went tells you a little bit about where the technology is (and, also, what a kickass athlete Oscar Pistorius here must actually be). Clearly, I think this is all very neat.

So, there are 278 entries in the Zoe’s Tale ARC contest that got in before the deadline, and a lot of you folks wrote actual short stories, so the finding of a winner might take a smidge longer than I expected (especially since I have some real work to do today). So to cover my ass, let me say that I’ll announce the winner Monday. Also, to make up for the delay, let me say that there will be at least one runner-up position, who will also get something for their troubles. Sound good? Okay then.

The excellent folks at io9 do me a solid and link to my AMC column on Speed Racer today, but some of the folks commenting there don’t appear to have actually read the column before commenting, because a fair portion of the comments boil down to “John Scalzi is completely wrong about this because [insert point actually discussed in the column].” At least one of them was nice enough to note he/she didn’t read the column before trying to disprove my point using information I specifically note in the column, though.

Lesson: It’s always a good thing to read what you’re commenting on. Just sayin’.

It’s on its way:

The California Supreme Court ruled today that same-sex couples should be permitted to marry, rejecting state marriage laws as discriminatory.

But note:

The state high court’s ruling was unlikely to end the debate over gay matrimony in California. A group has circulated petitions for a November ballot initiative that would amend the state Constitution to block same-sex marriage, and the Legislature has twice passed bills to authorize gay marriage. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed both.

Basically, if you’re wanting to have a same-sex marriage in California, sooner would be better than later.

That said, a good day for basic human rights in my native state.

Update: From the ruling:

“Our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation like a person’s race or gender does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights. We therefore conclude that in view of the substance and significance of the fundamental consitutional right to form a family relationship, the California constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as opposite-sex couples.”

Rock on.

Whatever reader and commenter Kate Baker recently had some music she wrote and performed played on a radio program called “Off the Beaten Track,” which is broadcast on WELY in Minnesota. Kate got permission to stream the segment on her own site, so if you’ve not heard Kate’s very lovely voice and songs, here’s your chance.

Note that DJ Vince O’Connor talks for six and a half minutes at the opening of the show; the first song starts after that point.

I’m extremely pleased to announce that Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998 - 2008 is now available for pre-order straight from Subterranean Press. For those of you who don’t know, Hate Mail is a retrospective of the entire run of Whatever, all the way back to the hazy days of 1998, when the concept of blogging was so new they didn’t even have the word “blog” yet. We called them “online diaries.” We also had to type uphill in the snow, both ways. And we liked it.

The book is limited, signed edition, and only 1,000 copies of the hardcover are being produced (it’s possible there will be a trade paperback version later, but it will be a long time from now if at all, and it won’t be signed). The limited edition will be $35 (the same price as Coffee Shop), and there will be a special lettered, traycased edition for $250. There will be only 26 of those.

Why should you order Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded? I have a list of reasons:

1. It includes Whatever entries from the early years (1998 - 2002), which are not currently on the site. Now you can finally see what you missed.

2. It also includes entries from 2002 - 2007, which are on the site, but thanks to the generally awesomely broken and disorganized nature of Scalzi.com and Whatever (because I suck, you see), are difficult to get to.

3. Writing the foreword: Wil Wheaton. Yes, the Internet’s own Wil Wheaton. You know Wil. You like Wil. And if you shell out for the lettered edition, you’ll get Wil’s signature along with mine. And that’s just so much geek joy.

4. If you order the book through the Subterranean Press site, you will receive an exclusive, special extra: A chapbook entitled “Waiting For Athena,” with Whatever entries about Krissy’s pregnancy and Athena’s birth. You can only get this if you order through SubPress; ordering off Amazon or BN.com will cause you to miss out.

5. This picture (or one very much like it) will be on the cover:

6. And this picture (or one very much like it) will be on the back cover:

7. Every penny of author income from the sale of these books will go to the Athena Scalzi World Domination Foundation, a foundation dedicated to the principle that things would be much better if a quirky nine-year-old girl ruled the planet. How could you not want that?

8. The book is printed in English, with words flowing from left to right. These superior and unique features, we believe, will offer better reading comfort for most of the book’s intended audience.

9. Copies of Coffee Shop, the previous Subterranean Press limited edition book based on Whatever entries, have an asking price of up to three hundred dollars on the rare books Web sites. Think what Hate Mail will be worth, especially after my death during the long-predicted Horrible Dolphin Incident of 2011. Yes! Profit from my freakish demise! I want you to.

10. It will make you smarter, wittier, and more attractive to the people you wish to be more attractive to. Just like beer.

All of these are excellent, excellent reasons.

Here’s the SubPress order page again, and remember, ordering through SubPress is the way to get the “Waiting for Athena” chapbook. The book itself will be published September 13, which is the ten-year anniversary of Whatever. Save the date.

It’s a two-fer week for Big Ideas, and today we have Jeri Smith-Ready, who brings you: vampires! And not just any vampires. No, her vampires have better musical taste than you do, and in Jeri’s latest book Wicked Game, they’re not afraid to prove it. But how does exquisite taste in music combine with an exquisite taste for blood? I’ll let Jeri spin this tune for you.

JERI SMITH-READY

Have you ever met someone who’s still stuck in the 1960s? Or the 80s? Someone who hasn’t changed his or her worldview or tastes in decades? People who believe, for instance, that no decent music has been created after their own glory days?

The vampires in my new novel Wicked Game are culturally and psychologically stuck in the era in which they died. They speak the slang and wear the fashions of their original lifetimes. This intimate connection with the past makes them excellent disc jockeys, each with his or her own show on independent radio station WMMP-FM. But it also makes it hard for them to cope with our modern world.

Challenge #1: This ‘frozen-in-time’ idea seems ripe fodder for sitcom-style schtick, but a novel (especially a series) requires characters to grow and change. So I needed a catalyst. Enter Skywave, Inc., a communications conglomerate that wants to buy WMMP and turn it into another hit-playing clone (the tragedy of media consolidation is another of the book’s Big Ideas, but we won’t go into that here).

Why is this a problem? Without a musical link to the past, the vampires would be doomed to eventually “fade” into insanity, becoming little more than mindless, bloodthirsty ghouls. Thus a routine corporate takeover becomes a matter of life and un-death, shaking the characters out of their complacency and comfort.

Another catalyst comes in the form of Ciara Griffin. Ciara is a recovering con artist who takes a job at WMMP in sales and marketing (go ahead, say it: con artistry to marketing—not a stark career transition). To boost ratings and save her undead friends, Ciara rebrands the station as “WVMP: The Lifeblood of Rock ‘n’ Roll” and asks the DJs to “pretend” to be vampires as a marketing gimmick.

The increased public exposure forces the vampires to stretch their minds and interact more with the contemporary world. (Luckily, their jobs already require them to stay in touch with current events by reading daily news reports on the air.) Faced with new people and ideas, the vampires begin to feel alive again, and younger than they have in decades. They might not be comfortable, but they’re happy.

Due to his younger age, 90s grunge DJ Shane McAllister is less fossilized than his colleagues. Ciara schools him on new music and teaches him to drive stick shift—she’s determined not to let her new boyfriend ‘fade.’ Shane, who once thought himself incapable of learning and changing, takes the monumental step of introducing new music on his eclectic ‘Whatever’ broadcast (no affiliation with the illustrious ‘Whatever’ blog).

Of course, not everyone agrees that change and growth are such great ideas. A posse of ancient vampires (who live in a cult-like compound near Camp David) will shed as much blood as necessary to keep the station from revealing the truth disguised as a lie. The choice between ‘dangerous freedom’ versus ‘safe suffocation’ plays out in the conflict between the two cadres of vampires.

Challenge #2: The characters could have easily fallen into clichés of their eras, so I did my best to buck the stereotypes. Jim the hippie DJ, for instance, sports the trappings of peace, love, and understanding, but it’s just a façade he took on as a mortal, mainly to get chicks. Out of all the DJs, Jim is the most materialistic and holds the least reverence for human life. Reggae vamp Noah, on the other hand, remains true to his Rasta religion by making his bites as painless as possible and by never drinking blood-bank blood (no processed food allowed). Most people only know Rastafarians as pot-smoking, reggae-playing slackers, but Noah manifests deeper, less familiar aspects of the Rasta faith and way of life.

How many of us over the age of thirty are stuck in time, convincing ourselves that staying young means staying the same? The vampire DJs embody this “back in my day” attitude, this existential fossilization. Since vampires “die” at a certain point in time, they provide the perfect representation of this psychological glitch. Werewolves just wouldn’t have had the same resonance.

So my Big Idea for this book? I believe that we can be more than mere products of our backgrounds. I believe that the ability to grow and change, to have the freedom to reinvent oneself, is what being human—what being truly alive—is all about.

And isn’t this exploration of what means to be human—and alive—ultimately what speculative fiction is all about? It’s a genre of ideas, and that’s a big reason why I love reading it, writing it, and sharing it with other fans.

As they say on the radio, thanks for listening!

—

Learn more about Wicked Game here, and read the first chapter here. Visit WVMP radio, meet the DJs and listen to their favorite tracks here. Also visit the MySpace pages for Jeri and Ciara.

In this one, I talk about why the movie Speed Racer is totally doomed. Does the reason have something to do with Star Wars? Well, how could it not?

Check it out, and if you want to comment, do so there. The AMC people were happy the last column got lots of interesting comments.

You have until one second before midnight to get your entry in to win a Zoe’s Tale ARC, so, you know. Tick Tick Tick. All the details are here. I notice that lots of folks are turning in sort of epic entries, which is very cool, but I’ll note that longer doesn’t necessarily mean better. It’s entirely possible a short, punchy entry could win, too. Heck, one of my favorites so far is a single sentence.

Even if you don’t feel like entering, I do suggest you drop by the contest thread and check out the entries. There’s an insane amount of creativity going down there. I’m having too much fun reading them. I think you will too.

Last note: If you decide to enter, please make sure your entries go into the official contest thread, not here. If you put it in this comment thread, I might not see it, and/or I might not count it.

For those of you with your noses smooged up against the windowpane of Whateveresque, the Whatever reader forum, wishing you could get in, good news! Registration is now open through 10 pm Eastern time.

As always, help an administrator out in approving your membership request by choosing a member name that is recognizably NOT a spambot name (here’s a primer on how to do that).

Once you sign up, hop by the “All About You” section and let people know who you are. Because we’re all interested in the new kids.

I’m guessing napping, myself.

SF Signal, following up on the various discussions on Young Adult SF/F, asks various members of the sf/f community to suggest YA books for adult readers. Interestingly, I and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my editor at Tor, offered up the same suggestion, for largely the same reasons. It’s like we have similar tastes in books! And now we know why he bought my book.

In the thread for the entry, there’s this cranky comment, from Jonathan McCalmont:

Yet another part of YA’s Glorious Five Year Plan to convince all adult SFF readers to buy books marketed at kids.

I’m starting to feel man-handled. Every morning I check my feed reader and the night has born the fruit of some corner of the SFF blogosphere wondering why I’m not reading YA, why I’m not respecting YA and why I’m not reading YA right NOW instead of writing this comment.

If ever a blogosphere hobby horse was in need of a backlash it’s this one.

Mr. McCalmont misapprehends the situation here, I think. YA doesn’t need adult SF readers (it’s got more than enough readers as it is) and I don’t actually suspect most YA editors and publishers care whether adult SF/F readers pick up their books; it’s a bonus if they do, but otherwise, eh. The reason people are talking about YA is not a top-down master plan by publishers, but a bottom-up discussion among the sf/f community about whether it is missing vital sf/f work simply because it’s shelved somewhere else in a bookstore than where adult sf/f readers usually go.

YA is literally the dark matter of the sf/f reader universe, an analogy that is especially apt since, just as there is more dark matter than “regular” matter in our universe, so too do the sales of YA sf/f dwarf the sales of adult sf/f. I don’t think it’s a horrible thing to shine a light on what we might be missing, and possibly to our own detriment, both as individual readers and as a community.

The Pope (via the Vatican’s head astronomer) says that believing that alien life could exist elsewhere does not conflict with the Catholic faith:

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.

It looks like science fiction’s secret plan to place copies of The Sparrow randomly around the Vatican finally paid off!

Poor, rural, working-class white folks in Appalachia didn’t vote for the rich urban former law professor senator from Chicago. They went for the rich urban former law professor senator born in Chicago instead. But since the vote went so overwhelmingly in one direction rather than the other, and rich urban former law professor senators with Chicago ties are otherwise largely interchangeable, there has to be another controlling factor here. I can’t think what it might be, though. Maybe it will come to me if I think about it.

Oh, wait, I know now. Poor, rural, working-class white folks from Appalachia wanted to strike a blow for feminism. Well, way to go, West Virginia! You’ve certainly done that. And now, clearly, you’ve shown that you’re the most feminist state in all the union.

And to think they once said it couldn’t happen there! They said that poor, rural, working-class folk such as yourself could never vote for a woman to be a presidential nominee, barring something being monstrously and unspeakably wrong with her opponent, perhaps at the genetic level. Well, you showed them, West Virginia. You showed them all.

Your reward is to have Gloria Steinem build a summer home in your borders, possibly in Mingo County, which, with a vote that went 88% for Clinton — a staggering 11 times what Obama got in that county — is inarguably the single most feminist-friendly county in the entire state. Heck, Gloria’s got the U-Haul ready; maybe she’ll live there all the time now. Maybe she’ll bring her friends. Quick, have the menfolk bake a welcoming apple pie. Tell them not to skimp on the cinnamon. You know men. Always skimping, they are.

I’m so proud of you, West Virginia, you glorious feminist paradise, you.

A while back I took a picture of Athena in one of her more glowery moods and Photoshopped it for my own amusement, and recently Krissy suggested that she’d like the resulting Photoshop on a t-shirt or mug. So I obliged her. Having now performed my uxorial duty, I’m now making the designs available to the rest of you through the magic of Zazzle. If you ever wanted a coffee mug or t-shirt of my daughter doing her best “demon spawn” look, now’s your chance.

Ironically, all profits (I think a dollar or so from each sale) are likely to go to Athena’s college fund. But, you know, honestly, don’t feel obliged. Zazzle prices are moderately expensive, and Athena’s college fund is doing perfectly fine these days. And I think the market for Athena paraphernalia is, rightly, small. But it might be fun for her to go to school with one of these shirts on.

No? Hmmm. Let’s fix that.

There. Don’t you feel better now?

Will almost certainly not be Bob Barr. Nor do I actually plan to vote for the man. Nevertheless, should he actually win the endorsement of the Libertarian Party later this month (as I understand is expected), I expect he’ll pop into the position of my “Backup Candidate,” i.e., the person I’ll vote for if Barack Obama spontaneously combusts/is abducted by aliens/massacres a kindergarten full of adorable baby seals and gorges on their blubber live on national television. If it comes to that point, I’ll vote for Bob Barr before I vote for John McCain. Of course, if it comes to that point, we’re probably all in trouble in other, disturbing ways. But let’s not worry about that now.

Note that admitting I’d vote for Barr before McCain is a fairly serious statement on my part, because when Barr was actually in Congress, he was a conservative Republican and a bit of a prick. He impinged on my consciousness primarily as one of Newt Gingrich’s bilious felch monkeys; the one who led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton, and then got all blotchy and red when it became clear that neither Clinton nor most of America were in the least concerned about the trial. However, since Barr left Congress, he’s done lots of stuff I respect, like regret his vote on the Patriot Act and work to reverse its damages to our constitutional rights, leave the GOP and join the ACLU, and generally get cranky about what’s been done to the country during the Dubya administration.

Now, I’m not going to forget he was once one of Gingrich’s felch monkeys, mind you. It’s something you don’t just gloss over. But on the other hand one doesn’t leave the GOP and become a member of the Libertarian Party because one feels it’s really going to light a fire under one’s career in Washington, now, does one. One feels his commitment to libertarian principles is reasonably genuine, otherwise he’d just have stayed where he was. As a presidential candidate, Barr offers a genuine alternative to what McCain would offer — which, if you believe minority whip Roy Blunt, would be a third Bush term.

But let’s be real, here: the question not really whether I put Barr ahead of McCain in my voting queue, since I had no intention of voting for McCain in the first place. The question is whether some folks who might otherwise vote for McCain will do so, and whether there will be enough of them to constitute a genuine drag on McCain in the election. Regarding the former, sure, I think there are folks who’ll jump off the McCain Express for Barr, since when you get right down to it, Barr’s small government, states-rights, “fair tax”-loving, immigrant-phobic positions are more classically Republican-y than anything McCain is going to manage, and McCain is a candidate that apparently lots of Republicans tolerate but none of them actually love, and only a few more than that seem to even like.

Regarding the latter, well, I don’t suspect Barr will pull huge numbers from the GOP. But as Nader showed in Florida in 2000, you don’t need to have huge numbers to screw a candidate, you just need enough to throw a spanner into the works. It’s entirely possible Barr could get those numbers, particularly, I think, in the South and the West.

And you know, I’m fine with that. Barr’s not going to be President, but if he helps make McCain not president, too, I’ll honor him for his service to the country. He has my backup vote.

One day Melinda Snodgrass started wondering about aircars and why we don’t have them yet. Most people would stop there, with maybe a brief side thought about themselves puttering around in the sky like George Jetson. Snodgrass, however, kept going with that thought and ended up with a book: The Edge of Reason, which is not about aircars at all, but is instead, as editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden described it to me:

A contemporary metaphysical thriller about the secret battle between the forces of rationality and the Old Ones From Beyond Time, the latter of whom are using superstition and religion as the means by which to knock over the barriers that prevent them from breaking through and eating our brains.

Which is, you know, quite a leap from George Jetson and his aircar. How did Snodgrass get from the one to the other? Well, questions like this are exactly why The Big Idea exists at all. So here is Melinda Snodgrass to share her line of reasoning.

MELINDA SNODGRASS

I can pinpoint the exact moment, and indeed the exact place, where I got the idea for The Edge of Reason. It was New Year’s Eve, 1999, at around 5:00 pm in the afternoon. I was sitting in the bar at El Pinto with a number of other New Mexico writers including Steve Gould, Laura Mixon-Gould and Walter Jon Williams. Between sips of margarita and munching on chips dipped in chili con queso we watched the television broadcasting the millennial celebrations from around the world. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t really the millennium, but it was being billed that way.)

Suddenly I said to the group, “It’s the dawn of the twenty-first century. Where’s my aircar? Where’s my Moon base?”

From an off-handed remark we began a discussion of why, at the beginning of a new century, were people putting more credence in crystal power, guardian angels, spirit guides, Tarot cards, and psychic readings than in chemistry, physics, astronomy and biology?

We ran through the usual suspects — the Religious Right, Americans’ distrust of intellectuals, globalization and the fear of a big bad world and other cultures we can’t control — and came to no good answer. But I kept pondering the issue and I suddenly thought: What if there were creatures that wanted to keep us ignorant and afraid? That raised two more questions — why would they do it, and how would they do it?

The why I decided upon was that there were creatures in other multiverses who fed on powerful emotions. Since hate, fear, grief, and pain are a lot easier to engender than love and joy they set out to encourage us in our worst tendencies. They became our dark myths and our gods.

The how was also fairly straightforward. We kill with great abandon in defense of of our gods, and our absolute certainty that ours is the only true god. Add to that our tribalism that has led us to distrust and kill the other, and I had the broad concepts of the book.

I’d just spent fifteen years in Hollywood so I cast it as a pitch — this book is about the struggle between science and rationality and religion and superstition. (Actually my terrific editor, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden had the best high concept pitch — “This is the Left Behind series for rational people.”) But high concepts don’t get a book