The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

One of my favorite odd sources of science fiction stories is the “Futures” columns in Nature and Nature Physics – somewhere Clarion grads might want to check out.   The 6 March 2008 issue of Nature  has a neat little story of transfiguration by Chaz Brenchley.  Other favorites include:
      o the February 21 Nature story Ever, by fantasy writer Jeff Crook;
      o two recent stories by 1967 UCSD Ph.D. alum Greg Benford, “The Champagne Award” in Nature and “Reasons Not To Publish” in Nature Physics;
     o Terry Bisson’s “BYOB FAQ” in the 11 October 2007 Nature; and
     o my all-time favorite, Vonda McIntyre’s “A modest proposal,” a riff on Jonathan Swift’s essay of the same name, from the 3 March 2005 issue of Nature.

On the other end of the scale is the wonderful interview with great artwork in the 5 July 2007 issue of Nature, bringing together four science fiction writers with backgrounds in the biological sciences to talk about SF.  It’s a very insightful discussion of the ways that science influences their writing, and vice versa.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for picking up on this Wired interview with Jeff and Ann VanderMeer about the New Weird, about parenting, and about their current work.  Jeff’s description of how he sees SF and fantasy as part of the literary mainstream nicely summarizes the rationale for our Literature Department wanting the Clarion Workshop to be housed on our campus:

I’m always mixing up science and fantasy, whether it’s mushroom tech or, as in The Situation, strange biotech. I’m writing more and more about the contemporary workplace, too.

I think the main thing is, we always approach our projects not from a genre or non-genre stance, but from a kind of where-does-this-fit-in-in-culture generally. We always have a very keen awareness of popular culture, along with high culture, low culture, noir. So our anthos have focus, but also that kind of “mix”. I mean, some of them, like City of Saints and Madmen, mix fiction/nonfiction forms, and add in tons of graphics–not quite a graphic novel, but… The main thing is, the internet and the way memes move now, there is no monolithic thing called “genre” or “literary mainstream” any more. There’s all of this fascinating cross-pollinations and collaborations that you never really saw before. I think that kind of stuff interests GeekDad readers. I think I like to write stuff that can connect with different kinds of readers in different ways. Like, a fantasy reader is going to perceive The Situation one way, whereas somebody who works in front of a computer all day but doesn’t read fantasy is going to take something else out of it, for example.

Keep an eye out, by the way, for news on another upcoming anthology out of the VanderMeer empire, The Leonardo Variations.  It’s of, for and by Clarion students, a charity effort supporting the Workshop.  Very exciting stuff.

Somehow I forgot to mention in yesterday’s robotics post the fact that iRobot Lead Roboticist Brian Yamauchi is a Clarion Workshop alum. Brian, whose website lists many of the project’s he’s working on, once described the value of the Workshop in his line of work as follows:

I was already good at creative thinking, and so were all of my classmates, but the real value was the life experience of being immersed in an environment with people who were passionate about storytelling and science fiction.

Another Workshop alum whose not currently a writer, Mark Nall of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, had a similar positive reaction:

One problem that many people have in technical fields is expressing complex topics to non-technical people. Clarion has helped me quite a bit in this area. With the lunar architecture about to be rolled out, I spend a lot of time speaking with people about why we are returning to the Moon, and what we will do when we get there. The workshop has helped me get through the jargon, and get to the story that people can understand.

Mark was in the news last week doing just that, explaining the rationale for his latest project, updating our maps of the moon in order to have a clearer understanding of its geography.

Mark and Brian actually crossed paths a while back at the Lunar Commerce Executive Roundtable; at the time, neither knew the other had attended Clarion. I guess space is a small world too…

As many of America’s great newspapers continue their decline into oblivion, one result is the cheapening of daily business sections, and especially the Monday business section.  Sometimes this leads to news that otherwise wouldn’t show up in the paper, including this morning’s Los Angeles Times article and sidebar on robots.  Much of the article has that “Japan’s in the lead again’ feel that pervades American stories on that nation’s technologies, but the sidebar’s recounting of Japan’s long love affair with robot-like devices is particularly interesting:

Japan’s love affair with robots could be said to be more than 300 years old. Wooden wind-up dolls known as karakuri appeared as early as the 17th century.

Especially famous is a kimono-clad tea-serving machine considered one of the world’s first “robots.” It carried a bowl of tea on a tray from the host to the guest, waited patiently until the guest replaced the bowl and then returned to the host.

Based on Western gun- and clock-making technology, these robots were designed as helpers or crowd-pleasers.

Speaking of crowd-pleasers, my favorite robot is the Roomba vacuum-cleaner robot from iRobot, the Burlington, Mass., company whose 2002 corporate milestones include a June search for terrorists in Afghanistan and the September launch of the Roomba.  Their website’s demo video is an unintentionally funny compilation alternating between a Roomba cleaning the house and various military robots speeding across unfriendly terrain, leaving one to think, if only they could sweep up in Afghanistan like they’re doing on that nice kitchen floor.  Or maybe that’s just me.