morvashepley

Today's funny bit of news: For exercise to be really healthy for the brain, and produce stem cells, it has to be voluntary, not forced, and it has to be in groups. There has to be a community involvement. In short, it has to be fun.

This morning I heard a tale of tipsy wallabies. It seems that they jump into the opium farms in Tasmania and feed on the crops. Then they get stoned and start jumping around in circles pushing the crops flat. When people see these circles in their crops, they think aliens have landed and start getting into a panic.

Hearing this story was an amazing coincidence because only yesterday I happened to read a similar story about marijuana. The story went that some crooks tried to grow marijuana on a reasonably remote farm, but the sheep broke in - they like green food - and ate it. Then the sheep were stoned.

I wonder what stoned sheep look like.

However, it should be said one of the presenters on the opium story suggested that poppies as such wouldn't be enough to stone the wallabies.

Three hours later I'm still waiting for the tradesman who insisted he'd be here at nine am.

On the upside, I found Nathan Crowder's story "Deacon Carver's Last Dime" in Crossed Genres. It's a gem. Check it out.

Cheers

At Morva House I've been building up a link list of all the sf&f short stories I've recommended this year. Yesterday I added another twenty to the list, taking the total to 56. Shortly I'll go and add some more while I wait for a tradesman who, I hope, will turn up today as promised and not next week. We've already waited three weeks longer than originally intended.

One of my favorite short stories that I've located recently is "The Big Deal" by James Brindle. One reviewer said you can hear John Cleese's voice when the main character speaks, and this is absolutely true. Once the story gets going, it is very like a Monty Python sketch, only with a plot and a conclusion, etc.

There is also Shirley Jackson's famous story, "The Lottery", which was first published in the New Yorker in 1948. If you check out the audio version of the story, you can hear a discussion in which someone mentions that had the story been published today it would have been consigned to the SF ghetto down the back of the shop. Go figure.

I also came across a couple of stories by Terry Dowling, a writer whose language is kind of surreal. He seems to make up words like hierocantrics (stone singing) that I can't find in  google but which explain themselves if you think about it for a moment.

Take care of yourselvs.

Morva Shepley

Free flow. 10mins. 199 words.

What, you think you're just a tourist here? You think nothing can touch you because you've got the crappy shirt and the expensive camera, you think just because you're just watching, nothing is going to watch you back?
 

 

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I'm not fond of the idea of parallel universes, worlds, what have you. If a world splits off every time one decision is made instead of another, there is going to be a lot of worlds. Every time you decided whether to ask, for instance, if someone wanted a cup of tea, and then when they decided to answer. Maybe such questions don't cause full blown worlds to develop. Maybe there is just a momentary branching, and return to the original trunk. But imagine all these branches spreading from every thought.

Then, because we don't want to be accused of being humano-centric, let's imagine that the worlds are diverging for the animals as well. Consider a cloud of insects on a warm evening. Birds dive through the cloud hoping to catch on in its beak as they go. Sometimes they get one, sometimes they miss. The birds are hungry, so catching their meal matters to them. The insects, of course, want to stay alive. That's a lot of diverging worlds just for one cloud of insects.

The idea of all those worlds sounds messy. Nature is very messy. Physics, though, as far as I've been given to understand, tends to the simpler, to conservation of energy. Does having multiple universes conserve energy?

That was one of the thoughts I had while watching Star Trek XI. It's the weight of it that worries me. All those realities with their own materials, wouldn't it tend to drag the multiverse down a bit? Would it look something like an attack of pimples popping up everywhere?

Remember that episode of ST New Gen where a whole bunch of Enterprises got together to swap their Worfs, to get their own Worfs back?  It was a conversation of energies.

I'm having fun at Morva House.

A while ago, I read a review in which someone criticised The New Yorker for publishing a science fiction story. The reviewer didn't feel he could read a magazine that included SF. So, now, being the interested sort of person I am, I am having fun going through fiction lists at The New Yorker and finding the SF&F stories. So far it hasn't been hard. I haven't even had to look at the archives yet. All I've had to do is look at the list of fiction and pick out a few likely titles.

So, to go with Gail Hareven's "The Slows" , I've found Italo Calvino's "Daughters of the Moon" , and Steven Millhauser's "The Invasion from Outer Space", which is still in the queue.

Now I've found another review of "The Slows" in which the author seems to have a problem with it just because it's SF.

If SF isn't considered fresh and original, then what does that say to us SF writer type people?

Over in the Star Trek community I found a couple of links I enjoyed. One is about what happens to when things turn out differently in the new universe. Maybe that whale ship meets up with V'ger.

http://community.livejournal.com/startrek/896526.html

My own feeling is that now Spock isn't all angsty maybe he'll pay more attention to V'gers information about everything, which could come in useful when the Borg come around next time.

And here's one about the Science in ST XI, by someone who really likes ST and paid attention.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/05/08/ba-review-star-trek/

Got around to seeing the new ST movie today.






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It was snowing heavily in Locust Grove, silently, steadily down through the fig trees, weighing on the palm fronds, soft drifts smothering the well. Meredith looked at it, the white softness on its roof, the little drips of ice about the stone wall, the frozen rope. She did not study it long, though, but, shivering, pressed onwards.

 

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In a rush on Monday morning found all her slacks were in the wash so she had to shave her legs because the dress was short, but her fingers were soapy and slippery and the blade dropped down the drain and she was in too much hurry to fish it out, so she brushed her teeth and wore a low cut blouse so that no one would look at her legs while she ran in flat shoes for the bus.

There's been plenty more free sf&f fiction found over at Morva House during the last few weeks. In fact, there is so much that I'm hoping to post a link to a story a day for the rest of the year. Actually, there's thousands of stories, but I'm just picking out the ones I liked.

An interesting point arose through one of these stories, though. "The Slows" by Gail Hareven was published in The New Yorker. I liked the story, but other reactions to it have been less positive. Some people felt that it was great that an Israeli woman had work published in The New Yorker, but didn't feel this was her best effort. Another blogger felt that SF didn't belong in The New Yorker at all. That blogger felt that "The Slows", and SF generally, was too juvenile to be worthy of his attention.

So I've had to give the matter some thought. Basically, although I feel defensive concerning SF, in the end the argument comes back to whether SF&F should even bother trying to follow the rules of another genre. Yes, I often feel that mainstream and/or literary fiction is just another genre. During NaNoWriMo last year I noticed that literary writers were themselves aware of this and made jokes about the kind of plot their genre demands. In fact, I felt that their literary challenges were far more fun than the SF ones, proving their line "...but boy do we know how to throw a party." The SF challenges tended to be of a "insert certain cliche" nature. Last year was my first NaNoWriMo, so I approached it cautiously. However this year I may succumb to temptation and use the literary challenges (if, of course, they look as interesting as they did last year) in my SF or F story.

I had better get back to finding my free flow challenges.

Cheers
Morva Shepley

I've come across this story about a potential law in France. Apparently the idea has also been raised in Canada and New Zealand. The idea is that if someone is accused three times of infringing copyright then their internet connection will be cut. That should be good, right? Writers' earnings are meagre enough without having someone steal their ideas.

However, there are a couple of problems with this law. The first is that no proof need be offered that copyright has been infringed. The onus would be on the internet user to prove that no infringement has occured. Google had something to say about this in the New Zealand case.

Naturally, it's easy to imagine how easily anyone could be accused of copyright infringement. Fan fiction would be one area. People whose ideas have come from a common source, the same article or reference book.

A second is the use of technology to filter and monitor sites, leading the creative people of France to feel that they are being used as an excuse to allow, in essence, the state to spy on its citizens.

"This law, which we are told will protect artists’ rights and copyright in general, seems to us a Trojan horse, deployed to try and establish control over the internet, and is thus a threat to freedom of expression in our country."

What blows me away is that the artists seem to have seen through this law, which is supposed to be for their benefit, straight away. Not only that, but they're thinking about freedom instead of profits first.

Cheers
Morva Shepley

Joss Whedon has won the Ray Bradbury award for excellence in sf screen writing. This is an award made by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and it has been presented to Whedon for his body of work. Here is a link to his acceptance speech, in which he does come across rather as an SF fan might.

http://www.tvsquad.com/2009/04/27/joss-whedon-wins-bradbury-award/

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Free stories and an essay over at Morva House. The essay is by Larry Niven. Years ago, when the Christopher Reeve Superman movies were coming out, someone told me about an essay, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", about the fact that if a man of steel made love to an ordinary Human woman the episode would probably not be good for her. It was a real giggle, therefore, to come across this essay. I hadn't realised before that it was written by Larry Niven, either, so I learned something new as well.

Another thrill was to come across "A Rose For Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny. I already had a copy in The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth, but it's a favourite of mine and so I was pleased to come across a way to share it with others, not to mention an excuse to talk about it. Since New Wave became old, long ago, and so much stuff was written that was more waffle than good story telling, it got a bit hard to mention that maybe there is some stuff worth remembering, too.

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Free Flow (20mins), except I stopped early because there seemed to be a good place to stop. The idea of the robots in this story comes from David R Bunch, I think. My memory could be wrong about this. Apologies anyway. Anyway, it was the idea of a smooth moon that triggered the story. Here goes:

 

 

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Well, you see, I'd write it all down.

Sitting on the dock of the bay, watching the tide roll away. Once upon a time I would have been sitting there with a typewriter. When electric typewriters came in, I thought I'd plug it into a lemon and let the lemon rest in the restless salt water, generating electricity. My plan in case of homelessness, you see, was a very scientific one. These days it would be a laptop and I could google more efficient ways of generating power. I'd need an umbrella, though, because, oddly enough, although they are meant to be portable laptops come with a warning that they should not spend too much time in the sun, or wind, or any of that outdoors stuff. It might need a plastic bag, too, to keep the sand out.

There I would sit, watching the ships roll in, then I'd watch them roll back out again, sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time.

OK, the Easter break is over. I've been interstate to visit my family, and there they were. The kids are getting bigger, the grown ups are wondering when that happened and how come we can't guzzle down the chocolate the way we used to. The school holidays seem too short. Our older boy had just a few days to recover from school camp before we packed and went on our Easter trip. By the time we got back there was just a little time in which we can upgrade school shoes and it's back to school again.

When I was a child time seemed to take so much longer.

I should be writing, or learning Japanese, or learning how to make computer games, but instead I'm reading. I've posted the results of some of this over at Morva House.

There is a special joy in coming across Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost,. There's a story to make you smile at the memory of it. And isn't it's take on materialism fun? The Americans in this story don't express their materialism as a desire to shop, but as a practical view of the world. Rattling chains must be rusty, therefore they need oil. Thinking of Wilde's sarcastic wit and messed up life, though, it's strange to think of him writing such gentle stories as this one, and The Selfish Giant, which is perilously close to sentimental. You'd have thought his life was too hard to allow him such thoughts.

Becoming momentarily more daring with my browsing, I looked at YouTube (being technologically challenged means that facing that inundation of entertainment pieces is a bit daunting) I came across Fairport Convention's Crazy Man Michael. I first heard that song at an SF con years ago. It's one of those songs where a hunter accidentally shoots his true love. In this case, it is not because he seems a glimmer of white through the trees and mistakes it for a swan or a doe. This time it is because he meets a raven who tells him that he will destroy his love. This makes him angry, and he shoots the raven. However, when he goes to collect his arrow all he finds is his true love on the ground.

Returning to the stories I've found, though, another interesting thing is coming across a string of stories more or less about religion and faith. "Article of Faith", "Nira And I", and a couple more that are still waiting in the queue. I put the posts in a queue on the theory that I will then have time to write stories without thinking about my blog. Actually, it just gives me more time to wonder what I will cook for dinner.

I have found a site that includes Cyrano de Bergerac, and one of the things I like about it is its pop-up annotations. I haven't seen those before. It could be a usual and well known thing to every one else, but to a techno-challenged one such as myself it seemed wonderful, a really neat way to take care of footnotes online. I could read this one the way a lot of people were reading Pepys diary online, a small bit at a time.

Oh, and I put a link to Kenneth Mark Hoover's "Haxan" , which he has been talking about in his blog. This story has a stunning opening, a real, hard, gritty, cowboy western scene. It's wonderful.

"26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss", which has been nominated for both a Hugo and a Nebula, also got a look in. It's one of those stories which looks at people just trying to cope with life and the mysteries of the world. There's an audio version of it aswell.

Now I've got to go and decide about the evening meal before the local shops close.

Cheers
Morva Shepley.

How to break out of jail and hide in the perfect paradise spot forever with the people I love. Of course.