The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

There’s a wonderful feature article in today’s San Diego Union-Tribune on the work of Ray Harryhausen, one of the great Hollywood model makers from the early days of creature features.  The accompanying list of Ray’s greatest creations lacks the necessary images — like the Cyclops shown here, or the classic skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts.  Having grown up on Ray’s movies, it was great to see the tribute and learn a little about the man.  There’s lots more at his website, The Seventh Voyage.

 The article’s author, David Coddon, is an associate editor at the UT and also teaches features writing for the Humanities & Writing department at UCSD Extension — like the upcoming “Meet the Editors” session designed for freelance writers.

Canadian bookstore chain Indigo Books & Music has released a survey on family reading habits in Canada finding that six of ten families read together daily.  Their favorite categories?

And what are families reading? Chapter books or book series play a strong role in family reading while naturally encouraging more reading. Science Fiction titles and Fantasy books round out the top three genres enjoyed by booklover families…

No real surprise there, I think.

The Philip K. Dick Foundation website alerted me that Dick’s only book for young adult readers, Nick and the Glimmung, will be released sometime later this year.  The book was recently mentioned in the New York Times’ Book Review blog Paper Cuts:

To my mind, perhaps the most unusual example of a well-known genre author crossing over into YA turf is a long out-of-print relic called “Nick and the Glimmung,” written by none other than Philip K. Dick. Published in 1988, six years after his death, and never released in the United States, “Nick and the Glimmung” has the gentle pacing and simplified vocabulary of a young-adult novel, but its sensibility and subject matter are unmistakably Dickian.

According to Subterranean Press, its publisher, the book won’t be out until December — hopefully just in time to make a nice Christmas present.  Hint, hint.

It was just a couple of days ago that I mentioned the link between science fiction and science.  Now Newsweek has an interview with a UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist about his research on California’s Lake Mead that includes the following:

It may sound like the plot of an apocalyptic sci-fi flick, but Tim Barnett, a research marine geophysicist and climate expert at Scripps, says there’s a 50 percent chance that the manmade lake, a reservoir created by Hoover Dam located on the Colorado River 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, will be dry by 2021, or even sooner if climate changes continue as expected and water use is not curtailed.

This just a couple of weeks after Time had an article about the rash of apocalype movies hitting the market, “Apocalypse New,” including the following from Cloverfield’s J.J. Abrams:

One of the cultural aftershocks of the bombing of Hiroshima was the awakening of Godzilla and the Japanese monster movie as a way of reckoning with the nightmare of U.S. atomic weapons. “Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears,” says J.J. Abrams, creator of Felicity, Alias and Lost and producer of Cloverfield. “When Godzilla came out, the idea of doing a movie about the destruction of a city because of a radioactive man-made thing must have had a similar feeling. On the one hand, it’s a silly man in a rubber suit. On the other hand, it’s a way to process these fears that are mostly bottled up.”

Our real-world tools are enough any more in our search for either meaning, or predictability.  Science fiction works so much better. 

There’s a great piece on MSNBC’s Cosmic Log today about a visit by Doug Liman and Hayden Christensen, director and star of the new sf movie “Jumper,” to MIT to meet with some physicists to discuss the movie.  With teleportation at the core of the film, Liman was waiting to be “shredded,” but found the visit “incredibly inspiring, because the physicists explained how they use movies to make physics more appealing and more magical.”  MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, who organized the event, found it much more fun and enlightening than he’d expected:

Tegmark said the best thing about science-fiction movies, even movies where the science is especially fictional, is that they spark more interest in science fact.

“As a scientist, often the hardest thing is not finding the right answer, but finding the right question - and science fiction is great for generating the right questions,” Tegmark told me. “It’s like when you’re watching a movie and you say, ‘It’s obvious that that’s impossible.’ Then you realize, it’s not so obvious why it’s impossible. You start asking very basic questions about the nature of space and time.”

That’s how Einstein started along the path that eventually led to E=mc² and more.

He also admitted to being a little surprised by the number of “groupies” scattered among the MIT students, noting that “the affair had a party atmosphere, with some students sporting Darth Vader masks and lightsabers.”  Sounds more like a con.

UC San Diego has had the good fortune to have seven major figures in sf, fantasy and horror attend the University.  One of those was Suzette Haden Elgin, founder of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and a 1971 Linguistics Ph.D.  In the first of what we plan as a series, we interviewed Suzette by email and have posted the exchange on our new Interview Page.

Suzette, then a 32-year-old mother of four whose sf stories helped pay her way through the program, discusses the ongoing importance of linguistics to her writing over her career; the ways in which the speed of change in the ‘Real World’ makes it harder to keep sf ahead of reality; and the similarities between fantasy writing, anthropology and linguistics.

Suzette’s time at UCSD overlapped with that of Greg Benford (1967 Physics Ph.D.) and especially Vernor Vinge (1971 Mathematics Ph.D.).  The three never met, she tells us.  Wouldn’t that make a wonderful sf story, an imagined meeting on campus of three so very different writers, a la Tom Stoppard’s Travesties?

A very nice example of what it means to be in the Clarion community is posted today on Ellen Kushner’s LiveJournal site.  Last year’s Clarion students have held on to their Google Group, sharing news (babies, marriages and publications) as well as questions.  A question come in from one student about the process of historical research, and Ellen’s post is a lightly edited compilation of the responses, including one from Karen Joy Fowler.  Tremendously interesting stuff. 

One of the big ideas we have for the UCSD-Clarion relationship focuses on the thin line between creativity in storytelling and creativity in science.   Stumbling across the web today and landing on Magic Dragon, I bumped into Ursula K. Le Guin’s description of the “creative spark” behind her cloning-focused story Nine Lives:

Omnivoracious, the Amazon blog where its book editors share their “passion for the written word through news, reviews, interviews, and more,” has a Clarionish post this morning, with Jeff VanderMeer interviewing Greg Frost on his latest, Shadowbridge.  In the course of the interview, Greg talks about his experience teaching Clarion this past summer, and harkens back to his own student days:

I’ve now taught, in order, the third, the last two and the first weeks. So if anyone’s looking for a teacher for weeks two and four, I’m willing to try them out now. The first week was sort of a combination of saying “This is how hard you’re going to work” and “These are the people who are just like you–they want it just as much as you do and that should unite you all.” That’s the common thread. No two people write the same way, but they’re all stretching to produce finished stories, and what one person knows might aid another, who might in turn have the missing piece you need. You can have a Clarion where they all tear each other to pieces, or you can have one where there’s a collective process of teaching and learning going on. I tried to kindle the latter. Stan Robinson warned them the first night that they would bond with the others in their group in ways they’d never anticipated. He’s right, because he and I were thrown together in 1975 at Clarion and that friendship has proven unshakeable. Robert Crais, who drove up to speak to them at the end of week one, is another permanent friend forged out of that Clarion class.

Think about it: Greg Frost, Stan Robinson and Bob Crais, together in the circle critiquing each other’s work in the Clarion way. Make me a fly on that wall.

I stumbled across a first UK edition of King Arthur and His Knights recently, and had to grab it: it was my first book, the one that set me off into reading fantasy and, later, science fiction.  The drawings were tepid; the text, execrable; but I loved this book.  My father had read fairy stories, ghost stories and the Pooh books to me before this, but King Arthur was the first I read on my own.  From there, I graduated to A Wrinkle In Time and, a good while later, The Hobbit, but this was the first one.

What’s your seminal book?  Remember it?