The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

This just in from the Clarion Foundation’s online newsletter:

Another Universtiy of California connection to science fiction came up recently, when I learned that the UC Davis Special Collections Library has roughly “500 drawings, sketches, and photochemical reproductions (including photographs used as reference for sketches)” from the papers of sf illustrator Charles Schneeman.  The collection also includes “a small collection of correspondence from such science fiction authors as Isaac Asimov.”  He had a wonderful period style, as evidenced by the cover art for the Dec. 1938 and  June 1947 issues of Astounding Science Fiction and a drawing in the Gray Lensman’s series.

Schneeman’s daughter Barbara, donor of the works, became the first woman dean of agriculture in U.S. history in 1993, when she took the post at UC Davis.  She’s now an emeritus faculty member.

Today’s Los Angeles Times reports on the efforts of L.A. developer Sonny Astani to bring his memories of “Blade Runner” to life in the city’s Figueroa district.  As shown here, Astani’s seeking approval for a 14-story high ‘billboard’ made up of “of tiny panels embedded with LEDs, or light-emitting diodes — a concept viewed by some at City Hall as the next frontier in outdoor advertising.”  While massive billboards already exist, Astani’s would be the first with moving images — and would face right out onto the 110 Freeway, where drivers so desperately need distractions like this.

Reading through Astani’s comments, one gets the sense that he didn’t notice that Blade Runner’s vision is dystopian, not utopian.  Then again, he’s not alone: the story also focuses heavily on desires among developers in the district to turn Figueroa into Times Square West, like that’s a good thing. 

Good news in the Los Angeles Times this week in the decision from HP and Sony to make Sony’s motion picture library available on demand for DVD purchasers.  This follows up on HP’s Oct. 2007 announcement of an agreement with “30 digital content providers” for on-demand DVD delivery, allowing content with limited market appeal to become available for sale.  The LA Times piece specifically notes the likelihood of “classic science fiction movies” becoming available for the first time in decades.  I’d love to see a list of all those films, ranked by genre and the number of times they been purchased; and then buy three never-purchased sf or fantasy films, just to see how bad they are.  It would make a nice background distraction at a summer lawn party.

What I’m really hoping for, though, is the next stage in this technology, when we’ll be able to build our own DVDs from the digital content.  All my favorite swordfights from classic films: Basil Rathbone and Danny Kaye in The Court Jester; Carey Elwes and Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride; Aragorn and Lurtz in LOTR; interspersed with all the light sabre scenes in the Star Wars saga, for example.  Now that would be entertaining.

Clive Thompson has a fascinating piece on science fiction in the latest Wired, “Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing.“  The article kicks off with a nice discussion of Cory Doctorow’s After the Seige (from his latest collection, Overclocked), but closes with the broader question:

So, then, why does sci-fi … get short shrift among serious adult readers? Probably because the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists. Plus, many of sci-fi’s most famous authors — like Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick — have positively deranged notions about the inner lives of women.

But the worm is turning. For whatever reasons — maybe the reality fatigue I’ve felt — a lot of literary writers are trying their hand at speculative fiction. Philip Roth used a “counterfactual” history — what if Nazi sympathizers in the US won the 1940 election? — to explore anti-Semitism in The Plot Against America. Cormac McCarthy muses on the nature of morality in the Hobbesian anarchy of his novel The Road. Then there’s the genre-bending likes of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Susanna Clarke, and Margaret Atwood (whom I like to think of as a sci-fi novelist trapped inside a literary author).

Those aren’t writers whose books are adorned with embossed dragons. But that doesn’t mean they don’t owe that dragon a large debt.

Here at UCSD, we also think the worm is turning, although not because literary authors are writing science fiction so much as the fact that the world is changing so fast — both via technological advances and thanks to global warming — that science fiction provides unique opportunities to envision alternative futures.  Kim Stanley Robinson describes it as ”this science fiction novel that we are all living in.”  That’s why the interest at UCSD in hosting Clarion extends beyond the Literature Department, which has always viewed the divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature as artificial, and into the sciences, the social sciences, and our various research units.

By the way, as to the ”execrable prose stylists” problem that Clive refers to, I’d have to say he’s not reading the same authors I am.  But if that worries you, one option is to attend the annual Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.  Applications are being accepted now — for information, check here.

A recent post on the Federation of American Scientists web site announces a new grant they, in partnership with SRI and the University of Virginia, received from the Andrew Mellon Foundation:

FAS and SRI, with support from the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, will convene a series of 3 invitational summit meetings in 2008 that will bring together distinguished humanities scholars with experts in online communities research and virtual world technologies to identify how virtual world technology can be used to address significant issues in humanistic scholarship and advance scholarship. The findings from these summits will frame and inform further work to design, build, and populate a prototype virtual world, and evaluate its impact on advancing humanistic scholarship, scholarly communication, and learning.

I’m guessing here, but I think it’s a safe bet that the grant was based on their 2006 Summit on Educational Games.

Who better to help with questions around the populating of virtual world than the authors, students and alumni associated with the Clarion Workshop? Especially given UC San Diego’s very strong focus on virtual worlds and the technologies that underlie them, in labs like that of Adriene Jenik, Sheldon Brown, and the Calit2 Experimental Game Lab. Anyone interested in taking the lead?

The Special Collections Library at UC Riverside, home to the Eaton Collection of science fiction literature and memorabilia, will hold “Chronicling Mars: the 2008 Eaton Conference” at UCR May 16-18.  They’re selling it as “a scholarly conference with a touch of fun,” and invitees [not all of whom have accepted yet] include the Killer Bee’s — David Brin and Gregs Benford & Bear — along with Kim Stanley Robinson and Ben Bova.  Should be a wild time; register here.

The conference includes a Short Story contest open to all UC registered students, undergraduate and graduate, with a $500 first prize and $250 second prize.  The story, of up to 6K words, “must engage directly with the topic of Mars and be recognizable as Science Fiction.”  Howard Hendrix will judge the contest, and also attend the conference.

My “Word Origin Calendar” reminds me today that the term “parallel universes” was invented by an sf writer:

In 1934, a science fiction writer named Murray Leinster published Sideways in Time, a short story positing that time travelers would not experience a single past and future, but instead a series of alternate worlds existing alongside each other. He called them “universes in parallel,” which subsequent writers adapted as “parallel universes.”

Seminal Leinster stories Sideways in Time, A Logic Named Joe (which presages the age of the personal computer), and First Contact can all be found in the First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster, published in 1998 by NEFSA Press.

The San Diego Union-Tribune, like many U.S. newspapers, has cut back on its “Books” section.  Luckily, though, the UT has kept its periodic sf and fantasy column, “Eccentric Orbits,” by San Diegan Jim Hopper, and Hopper every column covers three to five books, two in detail and the others under a more snapshot approach he calls “Random Vectors.”  It gets more authors covered, giving more exposure to the field than he would otherwise.

 Yesterday’s Random Vectors included the following on 2007 Clarion teacher Greg Frost on his latest work, Shadowbridge:

If you’re looking for literal high fantasy, try Gregory Frost’s “Shadow Bridge” (Ballantine, 255 pages, $14), the first volume of a duology. A world of bridges runs high over an ocean world. A puppeteer and storyteller, Leodora, tells an old story to a demigod, who all but gives her an answer before turning back to stone. Forces, it seems, are hunting her, under her performing name, and trouble approaches for her and her little troupe. The prose has an exotic, even ethereal feel, and Frost twines Leodora/Jax’s tales into the body of the story quite nicely. The legends she recounts somehow make this fantastic Shadowbridge place more real, as if it has an actual history among and beyond the tales and myths.

Among the “new media” opportunities that help put sf and fantasy writers in front of new audiences — and make them more available for existing fans — are the increasing availability of downloadable videos of author events. One of the best is the Authors@Google series, which brings authors in during lunchtime for reading to assembled engineers. Examples from a quick YouTube search include Karen Joy Fowler and Kelly Link, April 2007; Joe Haldeman, Nov. 12, 2007, reading from The Accidental Time Machine; and Cory Doctorow on May 21, 2007, reading from Overclocked. (To see if a favored author has spoken there, check out the YouTube “@Google” channel site.)

A second stage of such programming (not counting the ubiquitous presence of Cory and other web pioneers among the authors, for whom being on the web is as central to their work as their writing) is starting to emerge. One example is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Dec. 21, 2007 TechTalk at Google.

Stan’s talk came following the announcement by Google that it would spend $100 million on climate change mitigation, and appears to be part of an effort by the company to put novel ideas in front of its engineers, to foster ideas from them in turn. In that vein, Stan’s speech is heavily focused on things Google could do to promote a better future.Here at UCSD we’re looking at the idea of organizing such writer events for companies that, unlike Google, aren’t of a scale and scope to pull in the authors on their own. Just as Stan’s Google talk was geared to what Google could do in response to climate change, what about talks at computing, digital media and printing companies imagining the digital environment five, ten, fifteen years out? Or at a cell phone manufacturer or service provider, imagining how new apps might maximize consumer uptake of technologies that allow immediate, localized responses to the world around us?

Spurring creativity — that’s really at the core of what Clarion is all about.