The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

There’s a marvelous interview with 2008 Clarion teacher Nalo Hopkinson in the Sunday Books section of Halifax, Nova Scotia’s ChronicleHerald.  The interview, which took place at April’s Halifax International Writers Festival, focuses both on Nalo’s career and her 2007 novel, The New Moon’s Arms, a work it says “shimmers with light and radiates with heat, especially from the central character, Calamity.”

Calamity, the novel’s protagonist, is a very lusty, at times cranky, and menopausal woman. Hopkinson explains that she wanted to create a 50-year-old character who could be real, who could suffer from arthritis, gain weight, and yet be “heading to 60 and still be sexual.”

For Calamity menopausal energy reignites powers she had as a young girl.

Throughout the story Calamity struggles with many things — including a tension-filled relationship with her daughter, and an unresolvable family secret — but as often as not Calamity struggles with herself. Her tongue is as sharp as a shark’s tooth and she speaks before she can stop herself from saying too many things that hurt those she loves.

Great — just what I needed: another ‘must-read’ for my mile-long must-read list.

Dr. Michael Ward, Anglican clergyman, writer, and speaker and, until recently, Chaplain of Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge, will speak about his new book, Planet Narnia, at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 13, at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.   Ward’s thesis, as described in the event announcement:

The Chronicles of Narnia are beloved the world over, making them perhaps C.S. Lewis’s best-known work. However, the Chronicles seem peculiarly disjointed in their mythology: each book differs from every other in apparently haphazard ways. This thematic tangle led some, like Lewis’s close friend J.R.R. Tolkein, to dismiss the series entirely. Given Lewis’s appreciation of craft and cohesion, many scholars have sensed that there must be a hidden thread binding the tales together, but their proposals have failed to be broadly persuasive- until now.

In his recent book, Planet Narnia, Dr. Michael Ward argues that the underlying unity between the seven Chronicles of Narnia comes from what many would consider an unlikely source: C.S. Lewis’s lifelong fascination with the “seven heavens” of medieval astrology.

Details on the event, sponsored by UCSD’s Graduate Christian Fellowship, can be found here.   A Facebook site for discussing the event (before and after) has been set up here.  The book’s website, including links to reviews and such, can be found here; the excessively detailed FAQs page makes for particularly interesting reading.

Pardon me for coming late to this party, but an April 14 Washington Post opinion piece that continues to be reprinted in other papers is worth checking out.  It’s “The Future Is Now,” by Joel Achenbach, about the speed at which technological change is reshaping our lives:

Science and technology form a two-headed, unstoppable change agent. Problem is, most of us are mystified and intimidated by such things as biotechnology, or nanotechnology, or the various other -ologies that seem to be threatening to merge into a single unspeakable and incomprehensible thing called biotechnonanogenomicology. We vaguely understand that this stuff is changing our lives, but we feel as though it’s all out of our control. We’re just hanging on tight, like Kirk and Spock when the Enterprise starts vibrating at Warp 8.

Things are moving so far, so fast that it’s well nigh impossible to keep up.  The solution proposed by Christine Peterson of the Foresight Nanotech Institute: “Read science fiction.”

Science is becoming ever more specialized; technology is increasingly a series of black boxes, impenetrable to but a few. Americans’ poor science literacy means that science and technology exist in a walled garden, a geek ghetto. We are a technocracy in which most of us don’t really understand what’s happening around us. We stagger through a world of technological and medical miracles. We’re zombified by progress.

Peterson has one recommendation: Read science fiction, especially “hard science fiction” that sticks rigorously to the scientifically possible. “If you look out into the long-term future and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong,” she says. “But if it doesn’t look like science fiction, it’s definitely wrong.”

We have folks looking seriously at the technological literacy problem, which can partially be dealt with by reforming science education so that it’s more relevant to broader audiences — not by dumbing it down, but rather by broadening the focus in Biology, for example, beyond just the training of future doctors and biology teachers to include teaching of relevance to future biotech employees, future informed citizens, etc. 

Achenbach’s piece is quite good; the online discussion afterward is less interesting, but still worth reading.

Earlier this week, the Second Life-focused blog Not Possible IRL had an interesting post on UCSD’s Sheldon Brown, Director of our Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, and his ongoing project, the Scalable City.  The post, “Using game technology to explore the “unreality” of virtual landscapes,” includes a link to the trailer on Youtube for Sheldon’s project.

Scalable City - a project by Sheldon Brown and Experimental Game Lab - creates environments, from urban to rural, via a data visualization pipeline.

Now Scalable City has opened at one of my favorite museums in the whole wide world, The Exploratorium in San Francisco. As you move through the interactive exhibit, you literally “paint” the flying landscape with highways, buildings, and automobiles. According to Sheldon’s website, “Each step in this pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying exaggerations, artifacts and the patterns of algorithmic process. The results of this are experiences such as prints, video installations and interactive multi-user games and virtual environments.”

Sheldon tells me that when he describes the project, the light bulb that goes off in people’s heads often displays itself in the form of comments like, “Oh, you mean like Second Life!”  In real life (pun intended), his project is a way of looking at second, third and fourth generations of the technologies that enable Second Life, in the near-term future when virtual reality worlds will be far more extensive, adaptable and available.  The next one in the pipeline appears to be Avatar Reality’s serendipitously named Blue Mars, blogged here and here this past February after being previewed at GDC 2008.

Last year’s Clarion class met with Sheldon one afternoon, in a first experiment at lab tours and conversations with faculty designed to develop relationships and see if anything interesting emerges.  This year, we’re regularizing the program a little more, setting such discussions for Friday afternoons between 3:30 and 5:00, one of the very few times during the Clarion Workshop that could be called “down time.” 

As I mentioned a month or so ago, UC Riverside’s Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Utopian Literature (which has a cool new web site, by the way) will host its periodic Eaton Science Fiction Conference, this year titled ‘Chronicling Mars,’ May 16-18.  Today’s San Bernardino-based Press-Enterprise has an story and interview with the conference’s keynote speaker, Ray Bradbury.

“What I’m going to talk about is going back to the moon,” said Bradbury by phone from his Los Angeles home. “We should not have left the moon 30 years ago. We should have stayed there and built a base. And in the next few years, we need to build a base.”

He sees that as a jumping-off point.

“Then we will go to Mars and colonize Mars and it’s going to take about 100 years, and then we will go out into the universe and other planets,” he said. “Space travel is going to make us one single race.”

The conference will be a little bit of Mars-mania, with speakers including Greg Benford, David Brin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Frederick Pohl, Greg Bear, Larry Niven, and more.  I’ll be there, in my Clarion t-shirts — look for me!

From the “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up” file, a Reuters story out of Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, summarizing the slow diminishment of the cult status of Turkmenbashi, ‘Father of All Turkmens,’ the nation’s dead former dictator: 

A rotating gold statue of Turkmenistan’s former leader is to be removed from the centre of the capital, state media said on Saturday, as his successor chips away at the late president’s personality cult.

Saparmurat Niyazov spent his 21 years in power building Turkmenistan into one of the world’s most isolated regimes while imposing his mark on the gas-rich Central Asian state.

He styled himself Turkmenbashi, or “Father of all the Turkmen”, and spent giant sums building sumptuous memorials to his own wisdom, including a 75-metre-tall (246 feet) tower in central Ashgabat whose summit is a statue of himself.

But President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has ordered the giant syringe-like structure that towers over low-rise Ashgabat to be removed to a southern suburb, state media said.

If you ever need source material for creating some insane dictator for a story or novel, you can find boatloads of material in the life of this nutcase.  The only problem: would your readers believe it?

With thanks to the glorious Mr. Lewis Carroll, and in recognition perhaps of a renaissance in Carroll-ish strands within literary science fiction and fantasy, I point tonight to the marvelous blog post at the UK’s Guardian books site by 2008 Clarionite Damien G. Walter.  Damien, along with classmate Emily Jiang, is a respondent to this blog, something that the new blog etiquette requires me to disclose; their equally stunning classmates so far seem less forward (less interested perhaps?) as they prep for the crazed six-week phenomenon that is Clarion. 

Damien’s blog post heralds the excitement of the Mundane movement — a rather joyous dichotomy, this idea of a wondrous Mundane.  I won’t try to summarize the piece, because it makes its own case so well.  What strikes me as wondrous about the  post is the simple fact that the Mundane movement, for all its power, is but one of several tremendously important strands emerging from the literatures of science fiction and fantasy.  Whether you choose to focus on Geoff Ryman and the Mundane as Damien does, or Kelly Link and magical realism, or Jeff VanderMeer and the New Wierd, or Neil Gaiman and the intersticial storytelling that bridges between graphic novels, novels, young adult novels and film, and then back again, the world of science fiction and fantasy literatures is becoming as varied and exciting as the field of ‘Literatures in Spanish’ that replace the old Western-centric approach differentiating between Spanish literature and the novels of the so-called New World; or ‘Literatures in English’ that brings English (UK) Literature, American Literature and Caribbean literature in English together into a single topic. 

Damien’s piece announces the death of the starship and the birth of the mundane reality at the core of sf and fantasy.  (Okay, that’s a gross exaggeration, but I’m trying to make a point here.)  I would argue that the starship, in partnership with the vampire and comic heroes such as Iron Man, live on and indeed reign supreme in the other media that reflect the sf and fantasy genres: film, television, the web.  They will continue to dominate in those genres well into the future, since the emerging ‘Literatures of SF/Fantasy’ have more power in the written word than in other media.

Meantime, where our past focus in the study of literature writ large was framed largely by the dichotomy between ‘High’ and ‘Low’ literatures, the emergence of so many powerful variants within sf and fantasy may herald a new age.  Where it goes, well, only time will tell.  Or time travel.