It’s time to kick off The Big ComicMix Broadcast pre-game for the biggest pop culture event of the year – San Diego ComicCon 2007. Stick with us and you get a an upclose and personal, free ride for the show. Plus your wallet takes a hit (in a good way!) with some great comics and DVDs to grab this week. There’s news of 300 coming to cable and an important tip on what NOT to name your band!
Please Press The Button! Why? Cause we said please!
The 2006 John W. Campbell Memorial Award and 2006 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award were presented at the Campbell Conference this past weekend in Kansas City. Each award was voted for by a jury of experts.
The Campbell Award, for best science fiction novel, went to Ben Bova’s Titan.
The Sturgeon Award, for best science fiction short story, was given to Robert Charles Wilson’s "The Cartesian Theater," from the anthology Futureshocks.
Also at the Campbell Conference, the Science Fiction Research Association presented several awards:
[via SF Scope]
Last week, we were discussing the cons of continued stories, specifically what’s wrong with them, and we posited that they have a major problem in the difficulty new readers (or audiences) have in understanding the plot and characters. I said that there were remedies for this problem and now I’ll suggest, a bit timidly, that though remedies exist, nothing is foolproof.
Which brings us to the second difficulty with this kind of narrative, one closely related to the first. A potential reader who knows that the entertainment in front of him is a serial and that he’s missed earlier installments might think he’s come to the party too late, and so he won’t be tempted to enter it. Admittedly, this has more to do with marketing than stortytelling, but anyone who thinks that sales departments and creative departments aren’t entwined tighter than the snakes on a ceduceus isn’t paying attention.
There are probably more cons, but let’s let the subject rest with those two – we don’t want to beat anything to death, do we? – and proceed on to the pros.
Pro number one: Serialized stories build audience/reader loyalty. If you like the story you’ll want to learn what happens next and how the problems are solved and you’ll keep returning to satisfy your curiosity.
Pro number two (and this, to me, is the biggie): Serials present storytelling opportunities rare in other forms, if they exist at all. Continued narratives allow the storyteller to present a complex plot and a lot of subplots, as well as stuff that might not directly relate to the plot(s) but is, well, amusing.
One of the science fictional world’s classiest conventions, Readercon, was held this past weekend in the suburbs of Boston, and your intrepid reporter was there. There wasn’t anything much comics-related happening — Readercon famously concentrates on the written word to the excusion of everything else — but two awards were presented over the weekend, which may be of interest.
SF Scope has a full report on the winners of the Rhysling Award, for science fictional poetry. Rich Ristow’s “The Graven Idol’s Godheart” won in the short category (fewer than 50 lines), while the long category winner was Mike Allen’s “The Journey of Kalish.”
The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, funded by the heirs of Paul Linebarger (who wrote science fiction as Cordwainer Smith) to promote dead and obscure authors worthy of wider appreciation, went this year to Daniel F. Galouye, author of Dark Universe and Simulacron-3, which was filmed as 1999’s The Thirteenth Floor. (SF Scope, again, has a longer report.)
It seems that every news outlet in the world is scrambling to keep up with the Harry Potter frenzy. And I know you people at home are wondering, "How can I keep up with all of these mildly diverting stories that all rehash the same three or four facts?" Well, friends, wonder no more, for we have gathered those stories for you, in the handy "hyperlink" format, for your clicking pleasure. Please, no applause…it’s what we’re here for.
The Boston Globe manages to find some doom-and-gloom in the story of how the Harry Potter books got millions of kids to read long, complicated books: some of those kids might not be reading much else! (Shock! Horror!)
Continuing the all-Harry-all-the-time drumbeat, the Minneapolis Star Tribune anatomizes the secrets of Harry’s appeal.
And the Arizona Republic ponders the musical question: Will Harry Potter become a classic?
The Austin Statesman-American worries that young fans will abandon books entirely after Deathly Hallows. (Just as millions of Americans have given up on television after the Sopranos finale.)
The Slush God quotes from a bunch of writers who have seen the Transformers movie, most notably Cherie Priest, who made me laugh out loud with things like “I think that now I can DIE OF AWESOME POISONING because that was more awesome than a whole SWIMMING POOL THAT HAS BEEN FILLED WITH AWESOME, and then someone shoves A PAIR OF GIANT DUELING ALIEN ROBOTS INTO THE SWIMMING POOL, and there’s a UNICORN STANDING IN THE BACKGROUND, GRANTING WISHES and SHITTING DIAMONDS.”
Maureen McHugh explains the attitude of a writer towards a work in progress, via this handy chart.
Jacob Weisman, publisher of Tachyon Publications, recently got married, and both Frank Wu and Susan Palwick were there. The best part: they recited the Green Lantern oath (the one written by Alfred Bester) to each other as part of the ceremony.
Reports have been surfacing all weekend that both Two-Face and The Riddler will be joining The Joker in The Dark Knight, sequel to Batman Begins. If so, I hasten to point out that this is the sort of thing that killed the last round of Bat-films: too many villains.
One can hope that, at worst, we will see these guys in their pre-presumed identities. Then the movie will choke on an overdose of foreshadowing, but that beats the camera having to pick favorites for each shot. Nothing would beat two hours of Batman taking on The Joker, pure and simple.
Damn. And I really liked Batman Begins.
Outside of the sheer enthusiasm bubbling out of the building, one of the coolest things about going to the annual MoCCA (Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art) ArtFest is the ability to be turned on to non-corporate-owned comics that you probably wouldn’t see otherwise. Each year I come away with a stack of stuff and, being smack dab in the middle of the horrors of convention season, it takes a bit of time to get to the good stuff.
Of all the stuff I schlepped back from MoCCA, by far the best (and a tip o’ the hat to our own Martha Thomases) was The Salon, by Nick Bertozzi (Griffin Books, just released as such). The description, from Nick’s own website:
When someone starts tearing the heads off modernist painters around Paris, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo realize that they may be next on the killer’s list. Enlisting the help of their closest friends and colleagues: Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Alice B. Toklas, Erik Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire, they set out to put a stop to the ghastly murders–only to discover that an addictive absinthe that painters around Paris have been using to enter famous paintings may in fact be responsible for all their troubles. Filled with danger, art history, and daring escapes, this is a wildly ingenious murder-mystery ride through the origins of modern art.
Wow. Sounds intellectual and classy. Not the sort of thing that might trigger arrest, legal action, tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills, and put a man’s life and vocation on the line. (more…)
Well, maybe not the NJ Turnpike, but it seemed like every car in the world was in the Garden State Parkway heading southward both yesterday and today. Kinda fun if one’s travelling northward, but not at all amusing when one is among the plastic and metal hordes. It’s nice to come home to one’s own bed, one’s own computer desk, and one’s own ComicMix colleagues; here’s what we all cooked up for you this past week:
Had I only the foresight, Mellifluous Mike Raub could have entertained me in that horrid traffic with his latest Big ComicMix Broadcasts:
Of course our newest addition, Andrew Wheeler, has been cranking ’em out day in and day out, hope you’ve been keeping up! In addition, Robert Greenberger‘s had some crack analyses, Matt Raub‘s been reviewing everything in sight, and even Glenn Hauman made another columnar appearance this past week with Above and Beyond #3: Who made comics piracy big?. Plenty of cool reads during these hot times!
Neth Space reviews Tobias S. Buckell’s first novel, the alien-planet adventure novel Crystal Rain.
The Agony Column reviews Paul McAuley’s Cowboy Angels.
Monsters & Critics reviews an anthology called Many Bloody Returns, though I can’t quite read who the editors are.
SciFi Weekly reviews Emma Bull’s new Wild West fantasy novel, Territory.
SFF World reviews Dave Duncan’s Mother of Lies, the second of two books in his current fantasy series. (more…)
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