From an email address trap to social software

Since my company takes President's day off, I spent a couple of hours on Monday at 360 Primo. It's a good place to write: not only it is a very cool coffeeshop, it has flaky WiFi as a bonus. :-) Flaky WiFi, while annoying, is just what you need while writing. It keeps you from temptation of surfing the web. Fewer distractions.

But a mind, determined to find distraction, will find it. And so, unable to access the internet, I started to explore the only thing I could connect to: Less Networks site. Less Networks is the WiFi provider for 360 Primo and a number of other wireless hotspots around Austin (and elsewhere, apparently). For some reason, while every other page on the internet was loading very slowly, Less Networks site was speedy and responsive.

Lame excuses: why would you need an account to access a wireless network?

Less Networks WiFi differs from other WiFi spots in Austin in that you need to sign in to use their network. Meaning, you need to create an account, and for that you need to give out your email address. When I first came across one of their hotspots at (some other) Austin coffeeshop a couple of years ago, I thought, great! Yet another company found a novel excuse for harvesting email addresses! There was an article in the local newspaper about Less Networks, where they said this feature was for user convenience: it will allow Less Networks users to access all of Less Networks hotspots with the same username. I could not believe what a lame excuse it was: after all, everybody knows that you don't need an account to access a wireless network! Your computer can connect to any wireless network (that does not use encryption) without you having to give out any of your personal information! :-) Did this company think WiFi users were complete idiots?

Then a couple years later I read another article about Less Networks, where this misfeature was spun as a security feature. Supposedly, if users are required to log in, that will prevent them from doing evil things on the internet, because Less Networks will know who they are. I found this explanation to be insincere as well. Your account is tied to nothing but your email address, and that's not a solid piece of identity, given how easy it is to get a disposable email address.

But on Monday I explored their site further to see what all "benefits" I might get from my account at Less Networks, and I was surprised to discover that they have branched out into social software. (Or maybe they've been there all along, and I just didn't know it. :-)) It turns out you can see the profiles of other Less Networks users in the same coffeeshop (but only if you choose to make your own profile visible, so no one can see you against your will). And not only you can customize your profile with your picture, you can also indicate your relationship status. Available options are "seeking men", "seeking women", and "not looking".

A marriage of wireless networks and dating software

Seeing that, I thought: dammit, I had a similar idea in 2002!.. even as I realized I was probably one of thousands of people who had the same idea. :-) Marrying wireless network software with dating software sounds like a match made in heaven. :-) Indeed, many people who hang out in cofeeshops with their laptops for hours on end are single. And many of them may see a cute or interesting person in the coffeeshop, but rarely approach them, as that would feel rather awkward (try to chat up a stranger in a quiet place like a coffeeshop, and you'll feel as exposed as an actor on stage). Wouldn't it be better to silently send an instant message to that cute person, to gauge their interest? This idea had occurred to me back in 2002; I thought it would be cool if WiFi-enabled coffeeshops ran software that would enable people in the coffeeshop to connect. But of course, I'm one of the 99% of the population that dreams up all sorts of ideas but would never even think of putting them into practice (there's no market for something like that... who would ever want such a thing?.. people can barely do x on their computers, you can't expect them to do y... if there was money to be made of off something so simple, someone would have done it already). Not to mention that my personal circumstances back in 2002 were very inconducive to entrepreneurship. And wireless networks in Austin were still nascent -- you were lucky if you could get a good signal at a WiFi coffeeshop. Anything more was a pipe dream. And then soon my single days ended, so I lost interest in the subject. :-)

And now I see Less Networks is going somewhere with this idea. Though I don't think they provide a way for users to instant-message other users, which is a feature I would think as most useful for people trying to connect with others in the same coffeeshop. But I shall not bemoan their running away with "my" idea, because I'm pretty sure 10000 other people in the US had the same idea at the time, and no one lifted a finger to do something about it. As the saying goes, many hear the call but few are chosen. :-)

The God or the Machine: A World Fantasy Convention 2006 panel

(Yes, World Fantasy Convention 2006 was 3 months ago, but so what? The words spoken there were timeless!)

Panelists: Ted Chiang, Louise Marley, Michael A. Stackpole, W. J. Williams, Janine Ellen Young (moderator)

What it was supposed to be about (synopsis from the program book): When do "scientific" worldview elements move a concept out of fantasy? Systematic magic, planetary bodies, rudimentary experimentation, the cusp of alchemy into chemistry...

What it was really about

First, the panelists admitted they didn't really understand the topic of the panel as stated in the program book. They didn't get much mileage out of "scientific worldview elements moving a concept out of fantasy". After addressing the distinction between technology and magic, and Ted Chiang stating why he believes Clarke's famous adage is incorrect, the panelists quickly became mired in the age-old debate of what is science fiction, and what is fantasy. Oh no, not again, you say! Well, this discussion wasn't quite like beating a dead horse. I heard some interesting insights.

Ted Chiang, Walter Jon Williams and Janine Ellen Young at The God or The Machine panel at the World Fantasy Convention 2006

A lot of western fantasy writers prefer magic to be systematic, i.e. to have laws, rules, constraints. An arbitrary magic, where everything is possible or impossible, depending on whether it is convenient for the author, they don't find very interesting. But does systematizing magic move it closer to science? Not necessarily.

Traditionally it's thought that it's the presence or absence of scientific / technological elements -- the so-called furniture -- that causes most people to view a certain story as science fiction or fantasy. But actually, the worldview expressed in a story may be more relevant. (Though apparently there are no universal criteria how to determine the genre a particular story belongs to, because some people in the audience disagreed over which genre certain books belonged to.)

The full article can be found on my website.

"Email this story": a spammer-exploitable feature?

Yesterday I disabled the "Mail story to a friend" feature on my SFragments site. Why? I think it's parasitic, because it may be exploited by spammers. Since I posted my musings on the spam-exploitability of this feature on my other blog, I got responses from some people that confirmed my suspicions.

Why my website logs were making me suspicious

My SFragments website (where I write about science fiction conventions I've been to and authors I've met) runs Geeklog content management system (though to call it a content management system may be too pompous; it's more like a group blogging system). Every article, or a blog entry if you will, has a "Mail story to a friend" button. By clicking this button, a user is taken to a page where he or she has to enter his own and recipient's email addresses and an optional "personalized" message, then click a button "Send message", which would email this article to the recipient.

Every time a user clicks on something in my website, the HTTP request sent by the user's browser is logged in my website's logs. So when a user goes to "Mail story to a friend" page, it will show up in the logs. And for a few days last week the logs have been showing me that there had been quite a few attempts to email some of my articles -- over 10 attempts per article, ~ 50 attempts a day. No way is my web site so popular that people would be emailing my articles by the dozen. Any time I see high numbers of anything in my logs, my first thought is, spammers. More so because I've already had a problem in the past with my website being flooded with comment spam, of which I wrote in this post. I disabled comments, but I think spammers are ingenious enough to exploit other ways of abuse.

Here is what I suspect spammers were doing

What I suspect they were doing is running a program that accesses the "Mail story to a friend" page, fills in the sender and recipient addresses, fills in the personalized message field with spam content, and clicks the "Send message" button. It all can be done by a script, with no human effort. That way they may be tricking my Geeklog system into sending out spam. Two advantages of this method are that (1) the spammers are not risking that their ISP will shut them down, because the mail is not originating at their ISP; and (2) since the spam message is attached to my article, it has a chance of fooling the spam filters, because the bulk of the text -- my article -- would not appear as spam to spam filters. I've heard that one of the ways to trick Bayesian filters is to mix in spam with huge chunks of "legitimate" text.

I wasn't sure, and still am not sure if that's what was really happening, because the volume of emailing -- ~ 50 messages a day -- was been a bit too low for what you would expect from a spammer. AFAIK, spammers send out ~ 5 MILLION messages a day. At the same time, the volume I'm seeing was a bit too high for "legitimate" users. So I said in my other blog.

Then a blogger Zerolove left this comment:

Could be using multiple Geeklogs!

I use Razor2 and DCC (Distributed CheckSum) to find spam that passes bayesian filtering. If I see that your post was to x number of other users I would block it. So by using multiple Geeklogs it would be coming from multiple IP's there for not only passing Bayes but also passing Razor and DCC. So if they use 100 websites x50 emails each it would add up!

That's an even better reason to disable the "Mail story to a friend" feature, and I did so. (To be fair, the flurry of emailed stories in the logs was a one-time occurrence -- I watched the logs for about a week before disabling this feature, and I didn't notice it again.) But I decided to be on the safe side.

In any case, I can't think of a more useless feature a content management system may have. Does anyone ever use them? I mean, not on my site, but in general? When people want to forward me something interesting, they just copy and paste the link in the email message. I never got stories forwarded to me by way of "Mail this story" feature. So I conclude it is one of those things that perfectly illustrate the law of unintended (and in this case, ironic) consequences: a thing that's only marginally useful to its intended users is widely open to abuse.

Internet phone companies: good for managing your wireless router, if nothing else

A week after we moved into our new house, the internet service at the house disappeared. The wireless router still worked. The signal was strong as ever. But none of the machines could get on the internet.

At first it looked like a screw-up on Roadrunner's part, which was easily fixed

Plugging a laptop directly into the cable modem (we have Roadrunner) verified that the the wireless access point wasn't the point of failure. Steve's laptop, plugged in directly into the cable modem (bypassing the wireless access point), was unable to get an IP address. So the problem was lack of service from Roadrunner. Steve's call to Roadrunner's tech support revealed that Roadrunner messed up switching our account from the old apartment to the new house. Interestingly, this happened a week after the move. At the beginning, they turned on the service at the house on the day of the move, and it worked with no problems. Then a week later they decided to finally cut the service off at the old apartment, and accidentally disabled both. Well, anyway: a short phone call later Roadrunner got it fixed. Their tech support had Steve plug his laptop into the cable modem again, and verified that the laptop was getting an IP address and was able to access the internet. So Roadrunner considered its end of the problem solved.

But the story didn't end here

But the story didn't end there. As we found out a few minutes after Steve hung up with Roadrunner, for all intents and purposes we still didn't have internet access. Despite the cable modem now working, the wireless router wasn't getting an IP address. Various rebootings and resettings didn't help. And we could not call Roadrunner back and ask for more help. Here's why. As I understand it, the type of service we signed up for with Roadrunner has a funny loophole. The contract does not allow more than one computer to use Roadrunner. If we wanted to use multiple computers, we would have to sign up for a more expensive type of service. And if you have a wireless access point at home, it's obvious that you are connecting multiple computers to it. Though in theory, even if you had only one computer, you might still want to have WiFi, so that you could to carry the computer around the house. So I guess Roadrunner can't automatically claim you are violating the contract if you have a wireless router... but still. So there is what I would describe as an uneasy truce between one-computer subscribers and Roadrunner. Roadrunner ignores it if a one-computer subscriber has a wireless router, but they tell you they won't help you administrate your router. That's your responsibility.

Who to call, then, if your router still doesn't work after Roadrunner fixed the problem? (And, I repeat, the wireless part was working well: it was emitting a signal. It's just that it wasn't getting an IP address from Roadrunner. So it definitely had something to do with what RR did on their end -- it would have been too much coincidence if the router just started malfunctioning at the same time.) I suppose we could have called Linksys (the manufacturer of the router). But Steve had a better idea...

Next step: call Vonage

...let's call Vonage. For you see, we subscribe to an internet phone service from Vonage.

Actually, we don't use it. There's no logic in that. Steve got Vonage because it provides very cheap long distance phone calls. The problem is, neither of us makes long distance phone calls very often. It's not like we have no one to call: Steve's and my families live correspondingly halfway across the US and halfway across the world. And the result? Steve talks with his mom on his cell phone; whereas I, since my emigration 12 years ago, have talked with my family on the phone exactly twice. :-) Not because I am an ungrateful daughter and sibling (though I might be :-)) but because spoken word is soooo not my medium. I am a written word person. I like a medium where I can edit myself and present the other party with complete thoughts, instead of half-finished phrases. I like a medium that does not require me to rack my brain trying to come up with filling for "uncomfortable" pauses. So, long distance phone service to me is like a proverbial bicycle for a fish. :-) And there is a significant downside of having a phone service that uses your internet connection: when the internet is down, your phone is down. OTOH, a conventional land line would stay up when the internet is down. So if one needs a land line of any kind (which I don't -- a cell phone is enough for me), a conventional land line makes a lot more sense than an IP phone. So frankly, I don't know why Steve wants to keep Vonage service.

If you are paranoid about privacy, Vonage may not be for you

There is just one little detail about Vonage service that may raise the hackles of anyone who is paranoid about privacy; I on the other hand, believing my files may only hold interest as a fast remedy for insomnia, don't mind surrendering a little privacy for convenience. :-) When you subscribe to Vonage, Vonage "locks" your wireless router so that its tech support could administrate it. By "locking" the router I mean that Vonage has the password to the administrator's account. They still let you administrate it yourself (at least partially) by creating a different account for you. Regardless, you don't have a complete control over your router.

I'm not clear on details of this. Steve said that he bought our wireless router already pre-locked for Vonage! I don't know if all Linksys routers sold in the US are that way (doesn't seem likely to me) or if this one was one of a batch of pre-locked routers sold as part of a deal between Linksys and Vonage, where you could get a Vonage subscription cheap by buying a Linksys router.

How did Vonage tech support fix our router problem?

But when you are racking your brain over what's wrong with your router, it's handy to be able to call Vonage and say "your phone service isn't working" (omitting that we really just want to get on the internet, not to use their IP phone) and get them to fix it. And fix it they did -- they had to. The problem turned out to be interesting. To me, at least. Not technically, but politically.

The answer, suggested by Vonage tech support, was to change the MAC address of our wireless router to be the same as that of Steve's laptop. (I didn't know MAC addresses were changeable, but apparently they are.) Why? Because when Steve made his previous phone call to Roadrunner and had them fix the problem on their side, Roadrunner made it so that only Steve's laptop would be able to connect to their service. Remember, Steve had his laptop plugged into the cable modem during the phone call for the purposes of testing. Roadrunner recognizes his laptop by its MAC address.

So, in order to make the wireless router to connect to Roadrunner, the router now had to be given the same MAC address as Steve's laptop. Once Steve did that, it started to work.

Because they knew a secret Roadrunner kept from us

Of course, Roadrunner didn't tell Steve that they will limit our service to this particular MAC address. Steve had no way of knowing that. If not for Vonage, we would not have found out. And I don't know how Vonage's tech support knows those things: maybe from experience? Maybe they have to deal every day with customers whose service stopped working after they moved to a new house?

So the whole situation looks pretty weird to me. Roadrunner messes with your settings and they won't tell you what they changed. And you can't call them to find out, because hey -- they've done their job, and any problems you may have afterwards are your router problems, not Roadrunner's. Even though RR effectively disabled your router by keeping a key piece of information from you.

I don't know, maybe I misunderstood something, maybe there's more to this story. Steve wasn't most forthcoming with the details. He was in a grumbly mood after those two phone calls, and I don't blame him. Running a tech support gauntlet does that to you. So I didn't press him for details.

XML and doilies

I found this blog post on the web that resonated very well with my own thoughts about writing science fiction. Since it was in a password-protected blog, I shall not identify the poster (not that he / she has anything to be embarrassed about).

"Plot always seems to get in the way of nifty ideas. I've realized this recently while looking at Americomics and fanficking; there are so many neat ideas that can happen in scifi/fantasy/superhero universes, but to have a story those ideas must be tempered (and burdened) by an actual plot, having someone do something with or because of the idea.

Personally, this is why I prefer my profession as a programmer/web developer, and my hobby as a writer of bad fanfic. As a programmer I get paid to make nifty ideas, but I'm not drudged down with actually having to do anything with them. That's what users are for. :)"

It sums up so well what I've been experiencing as I toil away at my own writing. Plot indeed gets in the way of nifty ideas. And programming lets you express your ideas without burdening them with a plot. But, unlike the author of the comment, I haven't given up a search for a perfect balance of plot and ideas. Or I should say, a search for a plot that would work with the ideas, not against them. It's very hard, but it's also one of the most interesting things I've done in a long time.

(And I don't write fanfic, BTW.)

It could be that my daily mindset, imposed on me by my work as a programmer, works against these efforts. To me, thinking about programming is not verbal, it is spatial / visual. Ideas come to me as visual structures, not as words.

The images they may take are sometimes amusing. One sleepless night, when I ruminated on some programming problems I'm currently working on (because it was more entertaining and less futile than trying to force myself to sleep), this visual popped into my head. XML files were hanging from a clothesline by their angle brackets. They looked like doilies. Or maybe paper snowflakes. They had jagged / scalloped edges, where the jaggedness was realized on several different scales. The angle brackets made up the lowest-level jaggedness, and the identations of nested XML tags provided several scales of higher-level "scallops". Doilies (or paper snowflakes) are like that, too. I was probably 9-10 years old by the time I made my last doily. In the time and place I grew up, girls were required to take classes in "feminine" crafts, such as sewing, knitting and crocheting. And doilies are the easiest thing to crochet, so they were the staple of the craft classes. Even my 10-year-old self realized how lame this particular element of home decor is, but not before its imagery invaded my figurative thinking. Such are the vagaries of a girly mind. :-)

Cute analogies

A few posts ago I was musing about the best ways to introduce scientific ideas in science fiction, to explain them in terms vivid enough to intrigue a reader, instead of slowing down the action. In Sunday's New York Times magazine I found an inspiring example of how it can be done. (I put the particularly memorable sentence in bold.)

Where Protons Will Play

To be sure, the article I'm referring to is a science fact article, not fiction, but I think there's something to be learned from this little perl of explanation. I'm not being sarcastic -- this excerpt seems silly and clever at the same time:

[F]locks of protons will be made to zip around the tunnel in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. Then they will be forced to crash into each other, with (it is hoped) spectacular results for physics.

Physicists, you see, learn about the subatomic world by smashing things together and then looking at the debris. Imagine a midair collision between two watermelons; it would make quite a mess, but nothing very interesting would result. Suppose, though, you get two protons to collide head-on. If they are moving fast enough, the energy of their collision, converted into mass à la Einstein's E=mc2, will produce a shower of new particles. (It would be as if colliding watermelons splattered into a shower of pineapples, blueberries, mangoes and more exotic fruits.)

A suggestion for IKEA: how to get customers buy more while helping them less

At IKEA (where I went last weekend to look for dining tables and other furniture for the new house) I got an impression that it prides itself on having streamlined the shopping process to a fault, on getting the customer to glide smoothly through their shopping apparatus without disturbing a single cog (read: employee) in the machine.

Communist-style customer service with a positive spin!

All throughout the store you can find tips on how you, the customer, can save work for the store's employees, thus keeping IKEA's costs down. IKEA is the first store I've seen that actively, openly discourages you from using its workers for what they are for: to help. "Why should I clear my table?" asks a sign in the cafeteria. Answer: because it reduces the amount of work for the employees, and with fewer employees, we can keep our prices low. Why should I try to figure out where to find things on my own, instead of asking for help? asks another sign (in a much more polite/cheerful language, though). Answer: the less help you need, the fewer employees we need, and that helps us to... all together now: Keep Our Prices Low! :-)

In other words, IKEA customer service concept eerily reminds me of the Communist-style service, where the customer was treated as invisible at best, or worse, as an intruder. However, I have to admire IKEA for putting such a positive spin on it: you, the customer, are not unwanted or invisible, you are smart, capable and self-sufficient for doing things yourself, figuring out things on your own! We are not ignoring you -- we are empowering you! :-)

And the store is indeed well organized to help you be self-sufficient, from take-home maps with shopping lists on the back, to the flat car-friendly packaging. And despite all the discouragement, the store employees are friendly and helpful when you dare to approach them. So I'm not griping. But there is one more thing they could do to be more consistent with their spirit of efficiency and customer empowerment.

Namely...

Technology that has a potential to send people on a shopping spree

Currently IKEA provides blank shopping lists on the back of take-home maps, so that you could scribble down model names and prices of things you want. That's better than nothing, but it would be much better if they invested in a bunch of scanning wands, which the customer could wave over the barcodes of items they are interested in, and automatically add them to their shopping list or wish list. The shopping/wish list could be instantly posted on IKEA's website (protected by a username and password, of course). The customer could keep it private, or make it public, or available to friends, and such. The list could even be made accessible to the customer's friends from LiveJournal, MySpace or any social networking site, with their login credentials obtained from that site (eliminating a need for friends to create a separate account); or it could be integrated into one's Amazon wish list. Or some combination thereof. Of course, the customer would also have an option to keep the list private and use it for their own reference instead of as a gift registry.

And if they wanted to go really fancy, scanning wands could be equipped by digital cameras (a cheapo kind, as in cell phones, would suffice) so that the customer could take his/her own pictures of the furniture, which would be instantly added to the item's description in the wish list. Even though IKEA website already provides images of things, in my eyes they are not represenatative of how the items look in reality. I, as a customer, may want to take pictures of things from different angles, to capture the aspects that are important to me.

A wand-generated online shopping list would be much better than scribbling your list on a scrap of paper, because scraps of paper get lost, pencil marks fade and smear and what-have-you. Also, an online shopping/wish list can easily be shared between, and added to by, other family members.

And think of the "going wild" aspect of it! To point and click at things is just... cool! It's a game! It makes you want to point and click more! And the more items you have on your list, the more you may end up buying!

As far as I understand, some stores already use scanning wands to enable customers create gift registries. I saw customers wielding wands in Babies'R'Us. So it's not a new idea. But it would be nice to extend it to creation of shopping lists. Anything that makes it easier for customer to keep track of what he/she wants, makes it easier for them to buy. I wonder if investing in such things would actually result in bigger sales for the store.

A review of "Cross Plains Universe"

I recently finished a short story anthology titled "Cross Plains Universe: Texans celebrate Robert E. Howard". It was the official book of the World Fantasy Convention 2006. I'm not sure what "an official book of a convention" means, but in practical terms it meant that every convention member got a free copy of it.

I haven't read anything by Robert E. Howard and don't really plan to, since barbarians are not really my thing; so I can't say that a tribute to Howard is of great interest to me. The main reason I read this anthology was for its social value. The FACT reading group was going to discuss it at one of their meetings. I thought this book might be worth reading as a facilitator for socializing with the FACT people. :-) Another reason I read it was because I kind of/sort of know many of those authors -- not very well, but I've run into many of them at various SF-related events in Austin, and talked with them on some occasions. So it was interesting to see what they werex like as writers.

There were two kinds of stories in the "Cross Plains Universe" anthology. One, stories about Robert E. Howard. Maybe I would have appreciated them more if I had known a fact or two from Howard's biography. The only one of those stories that amused me was "A Whim of Circumstance" by Mark Finn, because it's funny even if you (like me) know nothing about Howard and are not interested in his writing: this story stands on its own.

Rick Klaw's "A Penny A Word" also has a nice crypto-historical twist.

Rick Klaw at the Lone Star State of Fantasy panel at the World Fantasy Convention 2006, discussing other famous Texas fantasy writers besides Robert E. Howard.

The second kind of stories in this book did not have Robert E. Howard as a character, so I can only guess the reason they were included was because they were written in Robert E. Howard's spirit or style. But I can't be sure because I haven't read anything by him.

From the tribute stories I inferred certain things about Howard's writing. Such as...

If my guess is correct, I got an impression that Robert E. Howard's stories

1. were adventure fantasy (which I already knew);
2. were often set in exotic countries;
3. featured scheming seductresses who get men to do their will and then betray them;
4. featured a quest for diamonds or some interesting artifacts hidden in chambers, and
5. the chambers were guarded by supernatural beings.

Of several tales in "Cross Plains Universe" that featured these plot elements, I found Chris Roberson's "The Jewel of Leystall" to be more interesting than others, because the diamond turned out to be not what it seemed. There was even a slight science-fictional aspect to the story. Also, the centipedes were cool.

Oh, and (6): to a lesser extent Howard must have written about large apes as well, because two of the tributes featured such animals. That's a far lesser number than the number of stories about seductresses and diamonds, but still, there was a minor trend there.

Overall, this collection was a pleasant read -- none of the stories, except one or two, were actually boring -- but the reason why this book won't stick in my mind is because most of those tales seemed rather pointless to me.

Because?

Most stories seem unfinished, as if they were excerpts from a larger adventure

They were snippets of adventures that may make sense if they were chapters in a novel, and you could imagine that a resolution awaits a few chapters later. But the stories themselves were often without a resolution. Howard Waldrop's story about two guys who go to Mexico and see weird things there, or Jessica Reisman's story about two girls who get transported into a fantasy world, are examples of such. Too bad, because they are written quite amusingly -- they have cool "furniture" (to borrow a phrase from Walter Jon Williams). It's just that you expect something important, life-changing to happen to the characters, or at least something that would justify the whole adventure... or barring that, an unpredictable plot twist... and nothing happens. The very first story in the book, about a Roman warrior who encounters ghosts in the forest, is another example of a pointless adventure. And it does not even have cool furniture.

Of all the adventure stories, the one I liked the most was Lawrence Person's "The Toughest Jew in the West", because it does have a meaningful and somewhat unexpected ending.

Can this book inspire one to read Robert E. Howard? Hardly.

Was this book supposed to inspire me to read Robert E. Howard? If so, it failed. Then again, the idea of judging the quality of Robert E. Howard's work from the tribute stories reminds me of a joke that used to be popular in $my_home_country. This joke is usually told about a certain ethnic group, and it's not fair to it (as if any joke is), so I need to scrub it of all the references to that ethnicity. So let's say the characters were named simply Bob, Joe and Jim.

Bob tells Joe that Luciano Pavarotti is in town on a tour, and will sing in a local opera production for one night. He grumbles over the fact that he can't afford the outrageously expensive tickets. Joe says: "You're not missing much: Pavarotti can't sing worth crap. I know -- Jim sang one of his arias for me over the phone".

Now that I think about it, what I find fascinating about this joke is not so much its punchline, as its premise: a bunch of ordinary, straight guys fretting about not being able to go to opera! This joke would not make any sense in the US. Did I grow up in a strange place and time, or what?

Part 4: possible solutions

Approach 2: use a fantasy setting for a science fiction novel.

How does it address problem 1? Obvious. My characters can be ordinary humans, and I can bring them to life using the common tools writers use to characterize the protagonists and their surroundings: appearance, clothing, gestures, descriptions of nature, architecture, etc. A bonus: I can use fantasy cliches -- in a good way, as shorthand. (The Fantasy Cliches panel in this year's World Fantasy Convention validated my temptation to use this approach. :-))

How does it address problem 3? Well, a fantasy world can be anything I want it to be, and it does not have to correspond to any real-life setting with which my readers may be familiar, so there is no requirement of accuracy. Thus, I don't have to imitate a cowboy dialect, or street slang, or British upper class speech mannerisms, or any of those things I'm completely ignorant of.

How does it address problem 2, the problem of introducing unusual ideas and explaining them without slowing down the action? Perhaps it doesn't; it's just that at least a fantasy setting doesn't work against it, because cliches-as-shorthand can move the story along to counteract the slowdown caused by explanation. The trickiness of this appraoch is, of course, how to reconcile science-fictional ideas with a fantasy setting. Advanced scientific ideas can't spring out of nowhere in a non-technological society. Well, there is an old cop-out: the science in question was introduced by an advanced technological civilization that long ago had visited the world where the action takes place, and left its artifacts, or perhaps passed some of its knowledge to a special caste of priests or wizards. It's an old, hackneyed setup, but I'm not going to reject it just because of that. The editors on the Fantasy Cliches panel swore up and down that cliches are OK if the story is good. They also said 90% of attempts to completely avoid cliches lead to a dull story without a plot. Who am I to argue? :-)

I already have some ideas for a story or, hopefully, a series of stories, that will use Approach 2. Of course, I can't use this approach in each and every story I write (unless it's a series of connected stories), or it will get old very soon. Still, now that I've thought of two ways to navigate around my roadblocks, it gives me something to do. For the next couple of years, even. :-) If I successfully implement both, I'll be in good shape. Then I'll have to worry about what to do next, but perhaps by then I will have built stronger writerly muscles and will have acquired a bigger arsenal of tools.

Though it's not easy to feel too optimistic about it at the moment.

Part 3: possible solutions

Addressing problem 1. How to "flesh-out" protagonists that don't live in the flesh?

Approach 1. Maybe my protagonists could live in virtual reality. That is, while they are crossing the unfathomable depths of space incarnated as rays of elementary particles, they could imagine that they are something else somewhere else, floating in some kind of consensus reality, projected by the same computational devices that encode their personalities. That way they could build all kinds of imaginary worlds and imaginary bodies for themselves; without human constraints, their interactions could be even richer than they are in the human world.

Advantages of this approach

Indeed, if one lives as a ray of particles, which sounds like a rather boring life, wouldn't they want to spruce up their bland reality with a little imagination, by pretending to be, say, a giant squid or a cartoon character?

Something in me whispers, no, they wouldn't. Their reality only looks stark to us, meat-humans; the encoded personalities would probably see it as something entirely different and much richer. To paraphrase a Confucian saying, to suggest to them that they may add variety to their lives by re-enacting a fictional reality based on human imagination would be like asking a lion to become a cockroach. :-)

But this approach would solve all 3 of my problems (which I talked about in the two previous posts) pretty well. It's obvious how it would solve problem 1: in a virtual world the characters can be fleshed out in as much detail as I want. It would also go a long way toward solving problem 2. Whatever idea you come up with, it's easier to show its consequences in action in a virtual world, governed just by your imagination, than in a physical world with its "hard" constraints. And problem 3 can be avoided too, because a world governed by your imagination does not have to match the reality your readers know. So you can get away with knowing fairly little about it.

And since I write my stories for my contemporary human readers, not for the actual future humans who may encode their personalities onto rays of light, I need not try to attain a realistic portrayal of the existence of photon-encoded personalities, the way it may actually be some day. (As if I could). I only need to make the story entertaining, and the characters convincing, to my contemporary humans. And if lions have to become cockroaches in order to become accessible to us, so be it.

All in all it seems not too bad an idea, to let my "abstract" protagonists live in a virtual reality of their own creation. And they may even have a reason to want it, given that they originated as humans. Their personalities were copied from actual human personalities. So they may still have some human sensibilities (until they discover how much richer is the reality once you eliminate human constraints).

Disadvantages:

This approach is basically a one-trick pony. I can set one of my stories in virtual reality, but not all of them. I already tried this device in one of the stories I worked on this year. After spending several months on it and rewriting it in at least two different versions, I was so unsatisfied with it that I pushed it way, way to the back of the back burner. :-) Also, it ballooned way beyond a short story and into the territory of novella. In which case, I thought, hell, why not make it a full-blown novel? But it will have to wait until I have built stronger writing muscles. Because in the state it is now, I still haven't found that proverbial Archimedes lever for this story that would move its world. :-) (Even though I've mulled over the ideas suggested by my friend D, I still can't satisfactory wrap my mind around it. One of my fonder wishes for the New Year is to find the Archimedes lever for this story in time for the next year's NaNoWriMo. :-))

Regardless, there is a limited mileage I can get out of the virtual reality setting. After I used it once, I won't be able to reuse it. So I need to think of other approaches as well. More about them in the next post.

Part 2: Other problems I face when writing science fiction

Problem 2. It's hard to incorporate science-fictional ideas into a story without slowing the action down.

Introducing science-fictional ideas that are -- at least I hope -- somewhat new, is a double-edged sword. Of course, all SF writers strive for originality. (I'm trying to silence the cynic in me who says a lot of writers have no aspirations to originality and simply write what readers are known to like. "Extruded science fiction product", to paraphrase Lawrence.) New ideas help to achieve originality. New ideas also mean you can't rely on cliches, or on popular science fiction tropes. New ideas mean there is much more you have to explain to the reader before he or she can make sense of your story. This was one of the thoughts expressed in the World Fantasy Convention panel on cliches, and it's funny that it took me perhaps several weeks to realize how relevant that panel was to what was going on in my writing life.

For example, you can use tropes such as faster-than-light without explaining them to your readers, since everybody understands the concept. But if your story is based on an idea less overused than this -- for example, on quantum entanglement, which I haven't seen satisfactorily explored in most SF I've read (Greg Egan notwithstanding) -- you have to explain it. This is always hard, as such an explanation needs to be woven into the action, instead of presented as an infodump. Not only it is not easy to generate a chunk of plot that would clarify a particular concept by letting the reader see its workings, but it also makes the story longer. And (this is just my rule of thumb, though) the longer the story is, the more interesting it should be in order to keep a reader's attention.

Problem 1 and Problem 2 feed upon one another, magnifying one another. On one hand you have bare-bones characters (or should I say, bare-particles characters? :-)) without literally much meat on them :-) . They resist vivid characterization, making it harder for readers to identify with them, hence, making the story less interesting. On the other hand, complex or novel ideas, or at least their explanation, slow down the movement of the story. To recap, giving up the familiar for the sake of innovative makes the writer's job much harder.

Problem 3. To write about the familiar is hard in its own way.

The above did not imply that familiar stuff is easy to write about. Definitely not, at least not for me. Portraying the conventional reality is a tall enough order in itself, because my readers, too, are familiar with it (often better than me), and they can call me to task if I haven't portrayed it convincingly. I am always in awe of writers who can accurately convey speech patterns of various ethnic and socio-economical groups in such an evocative way that a few sentences uttered by a character vividly paints him or her as belonging to a certain group, leaving the reader's imagination to fill in the details. For me, this skill seems just as unattainable as a figure skater's triple axels. All my characters sound the same. I don't know if I'll ever make progress in this respect. So I try to find a way around it by avoiding writing about anything that has recognizable traits of our everyday reality. It's a cop-out. But at this point I feel I have to do it if I want to write at all. If I wracked my brain trying to think of a speech mannerisms and turns of phrase that would best characterize my protagonist, I would not make any progress at all. I would stare all day at the blank screen and feel incredibly demoralized.

So, writing imaginary stuff interestingly is hard, and writing familiar stuff is hard in its own way. But writing imaginary stuff is easier to me overall, so I'll stick with it. For now. I just need to think of ways to conquer problems (1) and (2).

How am I going to address these problems? How should I balance familiar against the unfamiliar? What is the perfect ratio of familiar and the unfamiliar, so that the story would feel innovative, but not so alien that the reader would lose interest? I thought of a couple of approaches, which I shall explore in the next installment.

A long essay on why writing is hard for me, part 1

I have almost finished writing another science fiction story. The third this year. Or maybe a third-and-a-half, if we count a short-short story I wrote as a semi-joke. However, this story is not completely finished. Nor is it truly unfinished. It is in a strange state where most or all of its content is written down, but paragraphs, or entire blocks of paragraphs, need to be reshuffled, so that the content could be presented more convincingly. I doubt I'll do it this year.

It needs to sit and marinate for a while, and I will have to return to it with fresh eyes.

I tried to identify to myself the difficulties I experienced with this story. I thought I'll be able to explain them in a few simple sentences. Once I started putting them on paper, the few sentences ballooned into a long essay. But the final week of the year is an appropriate time for long essays on things I've learned this year, is it not? Thus, I'll present my musings in installments over the next few days.

Problem 1. Protagonists without outward characteristics are boring.

It is hard (for me, anyway) to write a story with characters that don't exist in human flesh. (I'm speaking about my most recent, not-quite-finished story, but the problems I'll describe here are specific not just to this story, but also to almost all story ideas I have in mind. They preclude those ideas from turning into finished work.)

The characters of my most recent story used to be humans, but their personalities have long ago been digitized and encoded onto rays of elementary particles. They still have ties to the humanity, though -- in fact, they are working in service of humanity. They are hurtling at light speed across the universe on a mission directed by a human government. So they are not total strangers to humanity, far from it.

Regardless, the physical reality surrounding them is nothing like ours. They don't have anything like our senses, perceptions or body language. So I can't describe their interactions among themselves, and with the environment, in the usual way one would describe human interactions. For example, the whole aspect of appearance and body language is lost. I can't add depth to the characters by describing their clothes or their posture or bearing. Rays of particles don't wear clothes, they can't shrug their shoulders or smile. ;-) I can't even use expressions like "he saw" or "she heard", because their perceptions of the world -- the information they get from cosmic radiation and the like -- are nothing like hearing or seeing.

In a word, when you remove all the outer human characteristics, it's hard to keep these protagonists from coming out very one-dimensional, and their conversations rather dry and flat. This has made me doubt whether this story was viable at all. That's why I'm letting it marinate, on paper and in my head.

There is a real dilemma here. If you want your story to be set in a distant future, it would be silly if your protagonists looked and acted and had similar mannerisms as the 21st century people. It would be even sillier if we created far-future humans by taking our contemporaries and decorating them with superficial "futuristic" high-tech and body-mod bling. I've seen this done in science fiction, and those characters inevitably came out looking like a little more radical version of a 21st century pagan-bisexual-pierced-tattooed-burning-man-going urban hipster. That's not at all what I wanted for my characters. So it would seem wise to give up any pretenses at being able to extrapolate their outward appearance, and forego the appearance entirely, focusing only on their thoughts and dialog. But that leads to protagonists being rather flat and boring.

That's one aspect of the difficulty I'm having. I'll talk about another aspect in the next installment.

For a moment I thought, maybe it was just me.

(See the header of the pre-previous post.)

I got a new laptop at work, which, to borrow a phrase from certain digerati, I'll call Teh Shiny. :-) It has both Windows and Linux on it. Our SA at work installed Debian on it. That's the only distribution he supports. For a short while I was truly impressed with how well and painlessly it worked. It only took Steve about 2 hours to get the wireless connection working, as opposed to days and days he spent on my other Linux laptops (with very little result). And the wireless connection was stable from then on, instead of flickering on and off. That was encouraging. The laptop also recognized USB devices and did not crash when a USB device was plugged in. When I plugged in my camera, it came up automatically. More than that, when I tried to play an .AVI movie file, it played! In my previous attempts to play movie files on SUSE 9.1, the player immediately crashed, or in the best case, played the sound without the video. This was a quantum leap above my previous experiences with Linux.

I was happy, except for one little detail. There was no sound. The movie was silent. The sound icon on the desktop was set to the minimum, and when I tried to push it towards the maximum, it would bounce right back. So I asked the SA at work if he could do anything about the sound. He thought it shouldn't be hard. Well, after spending a day working on my lappy, he told me that with all the customizations he made the laptop has diverged quite a bit from standard Debian, and he would like to install Ubuntu on it instead. (No word as to whether he got the sound to work, but if I had to guess, the answer is no -- otherwise why would he want to install a different operating system on it? :-))

So now I'm thinking, as an answer to the question raised in the pre-previous post, maybe it's Not Just Me. :-)

FACT group discussion of Stanislav Lem's "Cyberiad"

In May of 2006 the FACT reading group discussed "Cyberiad" by Stanislav Lem. Most of the attendees (~ 6-7 of them) liked the book. A few of them had read Lem before, mostly his novel "Solaris".


It was noted how well "Cyberiad" held up from the technological standpoint. "Cyberiad" was written 40 years ago, but its scientific / technical ideas don't appear obsolete. It is about computers and machines but doesn't have specific technology that dates it. One reader compared it to "White Light" by Rudy Rucker, saying Rudy Rucker's mathematical science fiction has some of this flavor.


I myself was also impressed by how Lem had found a way to write science fiction that is not threatened with becoming obsolete in the next decade or the next five years. That's because "Cyberiad" is already very obviously a farce, and nothing in it should be taken literally. As illustrated by the passage (page 147): "By now the stars have vanished in the general gloom, so the two proceeded gropingly, till suddenly their ship lurched, and all the furniture, pots and pans went flying". The characters of his tales, the two robots, are so smart they can construct machines that simulate entire civilizations, yet the ship they fly in is furnished with pots and pans. Not to mention that being robots, they presumably don't need to eat, much less cook. But in this farcical manner he explores very interesting questions about human nature, and the nature of the mind.


A flipside of this lack of technological explanations is that more than one person felt the stories in "Cyberiad" would be best characterized not so much as science fiction but as fairytales. Some saw it as a positive, and others as a negative.


Reader 1. "I have to be hog-tied to read fantasies and modern fairly-tales, because there so much fo its is... there's suspensions of disbelief, and then there is hanging it by its neck until its dead. Despite that, I am enjoying [the Cyberiad]. It's not dating itself because it's totally ignoring technological explanations."


Reader 2. 'I'm gonna take a somewhat different tack. I was impressed by translation, it's an easy read, but I don't see any science in it. It's a mechanistic fairy-tale. Having done some AI work, [I can say] it has nothing to do with computer science AI." He quotes the book: "'Postulate everything with letter N' -- it's not how computers work. It didn't bother me, but it early on told me that it's not science." He gives another example: "[how can you say that] one planet is behind another? "


He deemed the science in "Cyberiad" to be completely unscientific, and thought it was primarily a framework for a social commentary.


And this brings us to another of the book's characteristics, widely noticed by the readers: that its main purpose was to be a political satire. Or so the readers perceived it. Stanislav Lem wrote "Cyberiad" in the socialist Poland, where literature, art, and all public discourse were heavily controlled by the communist government, to keep out the ideas they considered threatening to the communist ideology. Several of the FACT readers pointed out various methods Lem employed in order to get his message past the censors.


Reader 3. "It's very interesting that he's using the early Greek myths as a backdrop for doing this kind of thing, making it very fun. His descriptive style is very much as an early socratic dialog. It fits very well with what he's doing. Lem employed Socratic dialogs in Cyberiad to get past censors. "


Reader 2 comments on how Lem had to shape Cyberiad to fit the mold of socialist realism, as was required of writers in a communist society. "I thought Cyberiad was a framework for a social commentary. All the strawman bad guys are monarchs, because it is acceptable to say bad things about monarchs. In a society where fantasy has a bad rap, a mechanistic fairlytale [is the best framework]." He brings up an example of the story where the soldiers' intelligence combines and everything stops fighting. "I think that combining things for a better result is a very communistic idea."


Reader 4. "Lem is Hegelian in his thesis and antithesis, which I think is one thing socialist realism liked. All of Lem had to have socialist realism, because that's what the state said was literature. He liked Strugackys and Bulgakov and others. If you set your story elsewhere, since it wasn't set in Poland, you could say something Polish readers would agree with, but censors would allow. "


Readers admired Lem's style, his language and his sense of humor. Everybody enjoyed Lem's way with dialog. A few people noticed influences of Greek philosophy on Lem.


Reader 5. 'I read it 30 years ago and I loved it. But I was an undergrad in physics. But today it seems like a different book, because of how much Greek I studied since then. You are right: these are fables. They always have a point. You are supposed to learn something from each story. Epigram is probably a Greek word I'm searching for. Every story is a parable, and it seems too Greek to me. "


Reader 6. "In a good way."


Reader 1. "I think it's got a realy incisive quality. "


She mentions the strange, nonexistent words starting with letter N, which are listed in the first story.


Reader 6. "You wonder why those words are not familiar, and then you find out there is a reason for it."


One will need to read the first story of Cyberiad to find out why they are not familiar, though.


Everybody admired how well the translator of "Cyberiad" did what must have been a tremendously difficult job. People were impressed that a lot of Lem's jokes came through in English translation, and appreciated the effort it must have taken to translate the poetry.


Reader 5. The amount of effort those 6 lines (the Samson poem) took, probably was days.


(Here is what he is talking about. Imagine having to translate this into a foreign language. Every word needs to start with letter S.


Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.)


I'm sure the famous "Love and Tensor Algebra" must have been just as difficult to translate.

Maybe it's just me, or maybe Linux is really not ready for the desktop

In preparation to moving to the new house, I decided it's time to pack. But not the physical stuff. First I was going to clean up the Augean stables of my data. In a gesture the futility (or just ill-timedness) of which is becoming more apparent day by day, I am trying to consolidate my data scattered around numerous partitions of numerous laptops. Some laptops I've used over the last, say, 4 years, had both Windows and Linux partitions. So right now I'm dealing with a total of 5 partitions. Many of them have the same identically named folders. Some files in those folders have the same names, but different sizes and dates. Other files are identical. Yet other files exist only on some laptops and not on others. All this bedlam has resulted from the fact that for many years I haven't thought of a good way to synchronize files between different computers. I still don't have a foolproof way to accomplish this, but at least I have thought of something that should work well enough. Or so I thought until yesterday.

Why it's not an easy problem for me, and how Linux makes it harder

It complicates matters that at some times in my life I've used Linux for daily computing needs, such as when I worked with Gimp for long periods of time. At those times I also stored other elements of the daily computing narrative -- mail, pictures, interesting articles saved from the net, on the Linux partition of the machine I was working on. Then, as I was getting more and more frustrated with Linux (see, for example, this entry), I would switch back to Windows, but I would not always copy the files over to the Windows partition of the machine. Or I would copy some files but not others. (And not just because I was lazy: Linux did not cooperate well on this task. Imagine this: you copy a directory from one location to another, and then find out that not all files in the directory got copied. About 1/4 of the files didn't make it over. Why? What's so special about the ones that were left behind? You pore over their names -- too long? Contain symbols that could be by some stretch of imagination interpreted as scpecial characters? No, nothing like that. Their dates, their extensions? Any pattern at all? Nope. SUSE had randomly decided to not copy some files when copying a directory. I first noticed this bug in SUSE 8.<something> , and later when I upgraded to 9.1, it still had it. This meant I could not copy all my directories from a Windows partition to a Linux partition in one operation. I had to descend down each directory tree, and select individual files and copy them that way! What tedium, what a stupid waste of time. No wonder I wasn't very diligent about maintaining my files synchronized.)

Then after a couple of years I acquired a new laptop, which again was partitioned into Windows and Linux, I copied over some files from the old laptop to the new, but not others, and the story repeated itself. Add to this a fact that I keep some of my personal data on my work laptop (yes, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, but is there anyone who doesn't do that? :-) and it's easy to see how I got myself into an unbearable mess.

Finally I decided to bite the bullet and sort out this mess once and for all. I set out to review the data scattered over several laptops, determine the "definite" version of each file that may exist across several laptops with different date-time stamps, and to put all those files on a gigantic external hard drive. I may try to sell my old and slow laptop, if I can find a buyer, or just give away, keeping only the newest laptop (not so new anymore either). The external hard drive plugs into a USB port and therefore can be easily ported from a machine to a machine, hereby relieving me of a need to keep files synchronized between machines. So the files would live in just one place (with appropriate backups to other external hard drives, perhaps).

I thought it was a good solution, until Linux threw a proverbial wrench into it.

So I held my nose and got on with the job. First, I copied the data from the old laptop's Windows partition over to its Linux partition (can't do it the other way around: Windows does not see the Linux partition, nor do I remember my Windows password I stopped using 2 years ago. :-)) I sorted out file dates, times and sizes, and was able to satisfactorily determine the "definite" version of each file that was in doubt. So far, so good. Tedious, but... not so much more than scrubbing the bathroom. Given the choice between physical cleaning and data cleaning, I'm not sure which one I would choose.

Then I plugged in the USB hard drive into my old laptop, and was elated to see that Linux (SUSE 9.1, to be exact) recognized it and was able to read the data on it! This was more than I typically expect from Linux! So I proceeded to copy the files to the hard drive. Which was a slow process, because the hard drive, having been used before with my new laptop, already contained different versions of some of the files I was copying! So I hunkered down to sort out the "definite" versions of each file in doubt. I did not spend more than 15 minutes on this before my old laptop froze. The mouse stopped moving, the keyboard stopped reacting to keystrokes. My laptop went completely catatonic, and there was nothing left for me to do than to push the power button to shut it down.

I have experienced these out-of-the-blue laptop freezes before with Linux, and I always suspected that they were somehow caused by my unstable wireless connection at home. (Which is another tale of woe unto itself, mentioned in the post I linked to above.) My wireless signal flickers in an out of existence several times an hour, sometimes several times a minute. I was wondering if perhaps SUSE gets into a bad state trying to pick up the wireless connection. But this time I did not have the wireless card plugged in. This time I was using an ethernet cable, since I've given up on having wireless access on Linux long ago. So, just in case, I unplugged the ethernet cable and rebooted. Again, the laptop froze after just some 10 minutes. It barely made it through boot up!

Then I started to wonder if it was the USB hard drive, after all, that was causing this problem. I unplugged it, rebooted the lappy, and voila -- it's been stable for days. So it must be the USB driver, or something, that causes it to freeze. Wow. For all the highly praised Linux stability, for all the talk of how it puts Windows instability to shame, I must say USB devices never caused any of my Windows boxes to crash. Of course, my version of SUSE is 2-3 years old, and there may be better USB drivers for it now; (but then, a little voice whispers to me that Windows XP is 5 years old, and I never had to download new drivers for it!) Of course, a person who truly enjoys fixing such things would probably hunt down a better USB driver for Linux, but I'm not one of those people. I don't have days and weeks to spend on this. I just want to Get Things Done.

I almost long for the days when I used to complain that Linux can't see devices I plug in. It seems that things are worse when it can actually see them! :-)

And now I have a nice stable lappy, but I can't back up my files. :-) Well, I actually have a way -- I zipped up my files and ftp'd them over to my website. From there I'll copy them onto an external hard drive. How silly.

It's Not A Cliché... Yet: a World Fantasy Convention 2006 panel

Another post from World Fantasy Convention. As the name suggests, this was a panel on cliches in fantasy. It was amusing, just as one would expect from the topic. The panelists were Glen Cook, Carole Nelson Douglas, Eric Flint, Diana Gill, and L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (moderator). The full post can be found on my website. This is just a synopsis. What it was supposed to be about, according to the program book: Pirates and Arthur are fantasy clichés, as are dragons. What about Nazis, dinosaurs, ninjas, and talking gorillas? Do elements of such ideas exclude them from frequent use in fantasy, preserving them from becoming clichés? Or is it only a matter of time? What it was really about: The plight of famous authors, such as Shakespeare and J. R. R. Tolkien: creating imagery so powerful that it captures public imagination for centuries, inspiring thousands of imitators, has an ironic consequence. What fantasy cliche annoys writers and editors the most? Is it always necessary to try to avoid cliches? Can they be used deliberately? When is cliche not a cliche, but a useful shorthand? As much as cliches are ridiculed, don't readers -- and by extension, editors -- secretly want them?
Eric Flint (left), L.E. Modesitt Jr. at the "It's Not A Cliché... Yet" panel.
Read more about the World Fantasy Convention 2006 in my blog.

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Curb Your Hound of Evil: Finding the Dark Woods in an Urban World: a World Fantasy Convention 2006 panel

Panelists: David Coe, Robin Hobb, Tamara Siler Jones, Jane Lindskold (moderator), Kelly Link

Synopsis from the program book: Panelists discuss how the urban/modern world works as a backdrop to modern fantasy/dark fantasy. Where do we find "The Dark Woods" in the urban world, and what lies within? How much is left to explore in urban fantasy?

So, where do the panelists find an inspiration for urban fantasy in modern backdrops? Where does the mystery lie in the modern world? You could easily guess what source of inspiration was mentioned most often: old houses. Were these panelists refugees from the Fantasy Cliches panel? :-) (The latter, by the way, was quite funny and one of the most worthwhile panels at the WFC. I think it deserves a longer and more detailed report than my reports have been so far, and it will be forthcoming next week.)

Jane Lindskold. "I am fascinated by old spaces. For me to see the wires, the pipes, in a building, it's to see like your own hand cut open. It ties with what you (another panelist) said about "organic", only it's mechanical organic. I live in the most mundane ranch house, there are millions of them, and I can't believe how many secret compartments there are. Plus, remnants of a tear gas alarm system, and a couple of other strange things. [When we travel, we stick things we don't want other people to find, in them.]"

Other than old houses, where else?

Robin Hobb. You can take any fantasy setting and bring it into modern time. Why does once upon a time should be long, along ago? Why not yesterday? [You have to ask yourself:] who are the wizards in our cities? [and you'll get] a million ideas for stories.

David Coe. My character access to magic [in my urban fantasy] is through a hallucinogenic addictive drug that destroyed his father's mind and is now destroying his own. It's a journey to a mind of a drug addict. To me, the most fascinating dark woods are in the human mind, not in a fantasy or urban fantasy setting.

David Coe. More pictures from the World Fantasy Convention 2006 can be found in my my series of blog posts on WFC 2006.

Moderator Jane Lindskold asks an interesting question. I was thinking about an interesting thing you might encounter when putting a story in play in the modern setting. How do things like guns, cell phones, cameras change [how you handle the mythic material?] For example, there are security cameras in grocery stores all over the place, [which makes it impossible for the mythical creatures like elves and fairies to pass unnoticed through a modern urban setting]. Or would you ignore those issues and hope that the readers do too?

Robin Hobb. It's almost more fun when you have very modern trappings to set things off, because then what is strange and archaic becomes even more strange and archaic. When you stay in a hotel, who are you tipping, is it really the hotel maid? (Did she mean that maybe the maid's work is done by little elves, or...? -- E.) What do the wizards do day-to-day in the city? They had to adapt, just like we had to adapt, to cars and cellphones.

Jane Lindskold answers her own question with this example from her experience [?]. "One of the first short stories I sold was a fantasy, but it came from a classic SFnal what if: what if you had a dog that had a transfusion of werewolf blood? It was alled "Good boy". A friend vet said that when they had a call of a dog hit by a car, they would call the local pound and get a large dog for a blood infusion. In my story, the pound happens to have a great big dog, and then a German shepherd gets a tranfusion of werewolf blood, and turns into a little boy when the moon turns full.

[To me one of great joys in urban fantasy is to think, what if all that stuff was real and crossed over to the modern world?]"

One of the more interesting moments came when a guy in the audience asked a question: "Why in the urban fantasy when you meet fairies, they are still in the middle ages? Why have they not evolved into modernity along with the humans?" The panelists are apparently well-versed in fairy'ology, because they are having a completely straight-faced discussion that goes like this:

Kelly Link. "One, fairies are allergic to iron, which makes building things complicated. Another reason is, that while it's not a parasitical relationship, but those people who live adjacent to us are not fond of our technology. Traditional fairies don't make things. They steal things from people."

Kelly Link. More pictures from the World Fantasy Convention 2006 can be found in my my series of blog posts on WFC 2006.

Jane Lindskold. "Time flows differently in the fairlyand. So it would take them a very long time to catch up with our world."

A guy from the audience. And their magic may eliminate a need for technology.

Fantasy is Fundamental: Young Adult Fantasy in the 21st Century: a World Fantasy Convention 2006 panel

Panelists: Holly Black, Charles de Lint, Lisa Freitag (moderator), Barry Goldblatt, Mark London Williams

Synopsis from the program book: Fantasy is a core component of Young Adult literature. Like all literature, YA fantasy develops in the context of its time. Our panelists discuss how the social, cultural, and political context of the new century is shaping, and will continue to shape, YA fantasy literature.

Harry Potter is credited with inspiring children to read. But has it, really? One of the panelists (it may have been Barry Goldblatt) says kids did not suddenly start loving reading. It wasn't that they wanted to read more of all sorts of literature. They just wanted to read more of Harry Potter, or something very much like it.

Barry Goldblatt. "Kids eat Harry Potter and all the knockoffs. Kids are voracious readers, and they also very quickly make up their mind about what they like and what they don't like. It's is actually very easy to get kids to try new things. What is hard is to get them to like new things. They become set in their ways very quickly.

The trick is to give kids something like Harry Potter so they recognize all the touchstones, but is also perhaps different enough so that they could stretch a little bit. Librarians and educators are struggling to do this, because it's very hard. "

YA becoming more mature and risque

One of the major themes of this discussion was an increased specialization of YA fiction. These days you have young-young adult (12-14 years) and old-young adult (14 years and up). All the panelists remember the time (such as in their adolescent years) when not only these subcategories did not exist, the very category of Young Adult fiction barely existed. Teens who had outgrown children's books had to quickly start reading grown-up books since there wasn't much else.

This is a part of a larger cultural debate, says Mark London Williams, on is what is a teenager. "It is a category that did not always exist. Similarly, there were times when there was [no literature] for teenagers. I went from Lord Of The Rings to Manchurian Candidate. When I wanted to read books about politics, I took them from my parents' shelves."

On the other hand, a lot of books written for grown-ups are nowadays being repackaged as Young Adult, such as books by Andre Norton, or Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.

Holly Black. "Teenagers were reading Charles De Lint books for many years. His stories that were originally adult stories were republished for kids. I'm looking for a word: spongeability... fungeability..."

A voice from the audience: permeability?

Holly Black: "Yes, that's what it is." (Erasing boudaries between adult and young adult fiction.)

Barry Goldblatt. "A lot of books were published as adult books that now make up the YA cannon. Like "To Kill A Mockingbird". If you published something like "To Kill A Mockingbird" today, it would immediately be recognized as as YA book. "

He says back then children's fantasy books were supposed to be sweetness and light. Controversial topics were off limits. In contrast, these days Young Adult literature does not shy away from mature topics. This was a big point of the discussion.

Holly Black. "[It's been said that] there are two things you can't do in YA: boring and bestiality. And [whenever I quote it], the entire room immediately starts coming up with titles of books that have bestiality in them. Everything else you can think of has been tried in the YA books. [...] One of the reasons why YA is now allowed to publish a lot of controversial material, is because teenagers are spending their own money for it. A little younger kids, for which their parents buy books, you can't do it. "

Charles De Lint. "[YA books with adult themes] were around always, like Holly said, but they were not in the foreground. But these days kids are exposed to a lot more. [And they want to recognize themselves in the characters of the books they read.] So these days if you have two 14-year-olds in a story [who are hot for each other, and all they do is hold hands, kids are not going to read that book, because that's not realistic.]"

So it would seem that the Young Adult category is essentially a marketing invention, created in an ongoing attempt of publishers to make teenagers part with their money. Holly Black says, though, that there is an upside to YA marketing. "What I love about YA marketing, is [that in the YA section of a bookstore] you see genre books next to literary books, fantasy books next to mystery books, etc. So kids [don't get boxed in by the genre]."

A much debated question: do boys read? If not, why not?

A woman from the audience says: "I used to work as a bookseller. In the middle grade boys used to read like crazy, but in the upper teenage years, boys drop out. In the old YA category all the books I sold were almost exclusively to females. I wonder if anything it's done to address them."

Barry Goldblatt. "We always look for great books for boys. But it's like leading the horse to water: you can't make them drink. We haven't found a magic bullet to get the boys to read. Boys are taught that everything is more important than reading: sports, dating. Boys who read are considered geeks.

There's still an understanding from parents that reading is supposed to be educational, not fun. And we work really hard in our educational system to make reading not fun. That's why a lot of girls still hang on to reading, whereas boys just drop out. Don't make them write book reports about it. Don't make them take tests on the books they've read."

Holly Black. "In defense of boys; when I've gotten into classics for teenagers, there are often guy writers in the programs. When I ask them what they are reading, they often say adult. I get an impression that a lot of guys are reading, they are just not reading teen books."

A woman in the audience would like the panelists to address the question of the gender of protagonist. It seems the girls would read the books with a boy protagonist, but boys won't read books with a girl protagonist.

Charles De Lint says that even though a lot of fans who contact him are girls, there is a significant percentage of boys, even though his protagonists are girls.

Barry Goldblatt says Scott Westerfeld's books are eaten up by many girls, but there are also a lot of boys who read it because there's all those cool gadgets in it. His books, while they have female protagonists on the covers, are very boy-accessible.

(A guy in the audience next to me wonders out loud at the term "boy-accessible".)

Barry Goldblatt thinks it's more about what the protagonist does, rather than what gender he or she is. If a girl is obsessing about dating, the boys probably won't read them. But if she is like Jennifer Garner in Alias, they might read them despite the fact that she's female.

Lisa Freitag. "The more irreverent the tone of the book is, the better things seem to go [i.e. the more boys are likely to read it]."

Finally, here are some good new YA novel recommendations from the panelists.

Mark London Williams recommends "Boy Proof" by Cecil Castellucci. "It's a book about a teenage girl growing up as a genre geek-fan, who is a kind of person who goes to World Fantasy Convention."

Charles De Lint. Ellen Klages "The Green Glass Sea" is a book about what it means to be a 12 year old. She captured it wonderfully.

Barry Goldblatt "Life As We Knew It" by Susan Beth Pfeffer is one of my favorite post-apocalyptic books of all time. At the beginning the girl protagonist is only concerned about going to the prom, and the news about a meteorit that's about to hit the moon doesn't really impact her. I've never seen a picture of what it's like wen the world is destroyed, from a point of view of a small town girl, who's not at the epicenter, but it builds up over time. It's a wonderful book.

Holly Black. Delia Sherman's Changeling came out recently, it's hard to describe, it's wonderful in many ways.

Barry Goldblatt and Holly Black

. More pictures from this and others World Fantasy Convention 2006 panels can be found in my series of blog posts from WFC 2006.

Fantasy, Social Networking, and the Blogosphere: a World Fantasy Convention 2006 panel

Panelists: Elizabeth Bear, Matt Cardin, Lynn Flewelling (moderator), David Levine, Andrew Wheeler

What it was supposed to be about? Here's a preview of the panel as published in the program book. What are the benefits and drawbacks of community development and audience interaction in the new online environments? Does the ease and speed of feedback change the nature of the fantasy writer's process and work?

If there was one panel at the World Fantasy Convention that was a waste of time, this was it. A decade after the internet became mainstream, some of the panelists sounded as if they still lived in the mid-nineties era of wide-eyed wonder: OMG, there are people inside my computer!. To be fair, this tone was set by one particular panelist, who was 10-15 years older than everyone else on that panel, and a self-proclaimed Luddite. This person's comments were peppered by such exclamations as "On the other side of that wall, the screen of the computer, are total strangers, who are reading about my personal thoughts! People who read my blog now know where I live and what I do in the morning!" Hence, this person concludes: "I don't post anything that I wouldn't say out loud. And I don't mention the names of my children." Earth-shattering revelations, no less. :-)

Most other panelists seemed to have a much more comfortable relationship with technology. Unfortunately, the panel did not go beyond rehashing some old cliches about the internet. Is a persona one presents to the internet as real as the actual person? Are online activities more like acting, where you create the kind of persona you like? Etc. Is there anything left to say on this topic that hasn't been said since the 1990s? Judging from the panelists' comments, no.

To be fair, one panelist countered the usual perception that people's online faces are all fake. His online personality feels to him more authentic than his real-life personality, because his blog is the only place where he can fully express himself, where he can talk about things that truly interest him.

"I make my money by being a high school teacher. I deal with sophomores and juniors that tell me I use too many big words. My wife has no much use for books, reading, anything like that. She is very creative in a whole lots of ways, but we can't talk on this level. So these things I can't say in the social context, in the family context. So in my blog I say a lot of things that I can't say anywhere else, but they are authentic to me. "

This isn't unheard of; it was the "My wife has no much use for books, reading, anything like that" part, coming from a writer, that gave me a pause. :-)

Three or so writers in this group have blogs on LiveJournal: among them, Elizabeth Bear (LJ username "matociquala" and "elizabethbear", and David Levine (LJ username "davidlevine"). Some others had blogs on Blogger. They compared notes on different types of blogs. It was agreed that, to quote Andrew Wheeler, "LiveJournal is more community driven, it gets more comments, more comments on comments. The software it runs it is very friendly in that way. It's good for threading comments. Blogger is more linear. So you get fewer comments."

Elizabeth Bear. In LiveJournal, threading is very helpful to posing a quick question and getting answers, or making a 1-line comment on a movie you've just seen.

Elizabeth Bear further says: I'm on LiveJournal. I liked the way its communities work. You wind up in a comunity, there's a network. I use my LiveJournal as a resource, when I need an answer. I ask the most amazing questions. Like about penis tattoing. I got really good answers from professionals, who have done that kind of work. I'm, wow, this is a tool! So to speak. (Audience laughs.)

That's a undoubtedly correct observation, but what's the use of discussing it in a World Fantasy Convention, when there are much better forums out there for discussing online communications? I don't see much writerly insight in that.

While others were comparing different kinds of blogging software, the self-proclaimed Luddite went into a detailed comparison between blogs (and LiveJournal in particular) and newsgroups. This person thought of blogs as being a special kind of newsgroups.

"A difference between a newsgroup and LiveJournal is that in LiveJournal you are the host of the party. But a newsgroup is much more egalitarian: everybody speaks. I prefer the newsgroup: it's less work, and the onus is not on you to be interesting several times a week. I feel a lot more exposed in LiveJournal. LiveJournal is about advertising: you make yourself more available."

Hmm. To me, newsgroups and blogs are two very different animals, and I never thought of one in terms of the other. Perhaps this would be natural if my first familiarity with the internet was through newsgroups, and this form of participatory activity imprinted itself so firmly in my mind that I would see any kind of internet community as a kind-of-a newsgroup. But there are fundamental distinctions between the two, such as the one pointed out later by one of the panelists: "On Usenet SF groups you would not post a message "I had a bad day" but on LiveJournal you would. LJ is much more personal." Also, as Elizabeth Bear noted, "on Usenet, everytime you post something, somebody would jump on your throat and correct your punctuation. It's just not worth it." I very much agree. Somehow the comments on LJ rarely get as vicious as flame wars in newsgroups. It could be that people are much more polite when they comment on someone's post than they would be in newsgroups, because they are on the other person's "turf". To berate someone in their blog post comments would be similar to coming to their house and slugging them in the face. :-) In the newsgroups, though, we are all on equal turf.

Such distinctions may be of interest to sociologists, but again, I don't see how this topic is relevant to the World Fantasy Convention. Are these insights specific to fantasy or science fiction writers? Hardly. Well, it's just that, perhaps, you know the panelists are writers when they employ metaphors such as these:

Andrew Wheeler: In Blogger you feel like you are holding forth from a podium.

David Levine. LiveJournal is more like, everyone has a little table in their corner of the room, and we are passing notes...

Lynn Flewelling. Or throwing paper airplanes at each other.

By the way, the questions posed in the panel synopsis in the program book could have been answered in two sentences:

Does the ease and speed of feedback change the nature of the fantasy writer's process and work?

All the panelists gave an unequivocal "no". Or rather: the reader community influences what they write about in their blogs, but not their fiction writing.

Matt Cardin. I have a small dedicated audience who read my stuff. [...] When I started to blog this past summer, it picked up a lot of steam, there's a lot of comments flying back and forth. So the blog posts I'm writing to somebody. But my fiction [is something I'm writing for myself]. Blogging hasn't affected the way I write.

Andrew Wheeler. Sometimes you feel you do blogging for comments, or for links. You want to throw stuff out there and you want to see what people think about it. So you say things in a bigger, stronger way than you would otherwise.

None of the panelists think it's a good idea to tailor your fiction to what you perceive your blog readers want. Matt Cardin tells a story about Orson Scott Card started to respond to his readers' feedback in the newsgroups on the first two books in some of his series (not Ender), and quality of his next books plummeted.

Andrew Wheeler. One thing to remember is that the people who talk back are not usually representative of the larger readership. Knowing what the readers who are NOT talking to you actually want is fairly difficult.

Elizabeth Bear. If you start doing what everybody wants, you'll achieve mediocrity. There isn't a good book that hasn't bounced off at least one wall. If you are perfectly nice in your writing, you'll produce pabulum.

The writers seem to agree that while blogs don't actually help to sell books (Elizabeth Bear says she has sold no more than a couple of books through her blog), they are still a useful marketing tool.

David Levine. Having a blog is a lot like being at a convention. Having a face. I use my own name on my blog, and my own picture as my LiveJournal user icon...

(Elizabeth Bear. That's not Will Shakespeare?

David Levine. That's older, Jewish Shakespeare.)

David Levine. ... so that the editors would recognize my name and face from my blog. Just like at conventions, editors may think, he seems like a nice guy, he seems like he won't embarrass me if I send him on a book tour.

Elizabeth Bear and David Levine. See more pictures from this panel in my blog post on the "Fantasy, blogosphere and social networking" panel.

World Fantasy Convention: The Lone Star State of Fantasy

The only discussion panel I made it to on Thursday night was "The Lone Star State of Fantasy". The panelists were Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Rick Klaw, Caroline Spector and Eric Marin.

I found it disappointing. The whole panel was devoted to the discussion of what makes Texas fantasy weird. Some of the obvious reasons were ponted out, such as that Texas is so damn big. In between all these open spaces there are many isolated towns where anything can happen.

A guy in the audience. In Texas you can find little towns that would scare the crap out of you. Where people drag people behind cars.

Jayme Lynn Blaschke. A farmer in San Antonio shot this dog-thing that was almost blue. It was almost necrotic. It was kind of cool, so I put it up on my blog. Then I got an email from East Texas: hey, I shot one of these things too! I started getting all these emails of people who thought they shot a chupacabra.

Another factor is that that the Texas state itself is playing up the mythology. Everything is bigger in Texas, as they say.

Jayme Lynn Blaschke. At A&M they have a hornets' nest that's 14 feet across. It's the 3rd largest in Texas. It's about 2.5 million wasps. If you are going to write it in a story, everyone is gonna say, oh, get out of here!

Yet another reason why Texas inspires weird fiction is that Texas still has a frontier mentality; it is perceived by writers as a state where unknown lurks and anything can be expected. This said, the panelists magnanimously acknowledged that Australians has a lot of affinity with Texans because of the frontier mentality; hence, weird fiction set in Australia would also have a true ring.

Other parts of the world, it was implied, can hardly live up to the task of serving as a setting for weird fiction. The only panelist who wasn't from Texas -- he was from Maine -- conceded that weird fiction would be less believeable if it was set in Maine, as opposed to Texas. He didn't explain why. But isn't a lot of Stephen King's fiction set in New England, in its quaint, little, time-forgotten towns? Isn't the supernatural element quite believable in King's stories? I wondered. I am hardly a judge of this subject, since I'm not being very familiar with Texas fantasy, and I don't know what's weird about it. But it all sounded a bit parochial to me.

Left to right: Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Rick Klaw, Caroline Spector. Read more about the World Fantasy Convention 2006 in my blog.

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World Fantasy Convention: Day 1: Thursday

Thursday was day 1 of the World Fantasy Convention. This year it's in Austin, so I am attending it even though I'm not a big fan of fantasy. Who knows, maybe I could be convinced otherwise. I've heard ome intimidating things about WFC, such as that it's a professional convention, whose goal is to bring writers, agents and editors together to make book deals, and they don't want lowly fans to be cluttering the halls. But they do take the fans' money and sell them memberships, so I guess we are welcome at least in that way.

Thursday night there was only one discussion panel I wanted to go to, so I mostly hung out at the bar and in the ConSuite. This wasn't any different than it is at a usual, "fan-friendly" convention. The pros drink as heartily as us fans. At the ConSuite I ran into a family of very friendly writers -- a woman, her husband, and their 15-year-old son (the latter too had sold SF stories professionally!) -- and had an interesting chat with them. The woman was born and grew up in Portugal (but has lived more than 20 years in the US) is a SF/F writer. She writes in English. She has published a few books. So, it was very encouraging to know that it's not unheard of for a non-native English speaker to successfully write in English. Nabokov wasn't the only one, apparently. The woman said she knew several more SF/F authors in that category.

Authors Leah Bobet and Elizabeth Bear at the World Fantasy Convention 2006. More pictures from WFC can be found on my blog

On the other hand, being a non-native speaker sometimes actually helps to undestand the language, as is evident from a funny fact the guy mentioned. Whenever he calls customer service or some such thing where he's supposed to give his name over the phone, the customer service reps often misinterpret his last name. Especially if the rep sounds like he/she may be a Southerner. His last name is Hoyt, and people (especially Southerners) universally hear it as White. He always has to spell it out very carefully, and even then they are sometimes not convinced it's not White.

As a non-native English speaker, I suspect that spelling versus pronunciation are mapped out differently in my brain than in the brain of a native English speaker. For me there is very little overlap between Hoyt and White, so I would never confuse the two.

So far the World Fantasy Convention seems like any other convention, only more humane. There are no more than 2 discussion panels going on at the same time, and there are breaks for lunch and dinner! This makes convention experience less taxing. Also, people here are a little better looking. :-) (Maybe it's an infusion of literary agents from glamorous places like New York that's raising the looks quotient of the convention. :-)) The difference is rather subtle, though. The people are a little more dressed up than in a typical convention. Instead of Fannish Drab, the color scale runs towards Gothy Black.