The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

Yet another start-up taking a shot at search, Cuil.com, launches today.  Taking the Irish word for ‘wisdom’ as its name, and pronounced ‘cool,’ Cuil’s management (former Googlers all) tells the Los Angeles Times that they’re taking the high road:

The Menlo Park start-up behind the website isn’t trying to be a Google killer — it’s trying to reinvent search, says Anna Patterson, president and co-founder of Cuil.

She’s an ex-Googler, the architect of the Web giant’s TeraGoogle search index that launched in 2006. She joined Google in 2004 after her work on Recall, then the largest search engine with 12 billion pages, which she began programming during a difficult pregnancy. That feat spurred a bidding war among search engines for her services. (Note to moms: Microsoft does not allow breast-feeding in its lobby.)

As exciting as her three years at Google were, Patterson said she soon discovered she was an entrepreneur at heart.

The computer science Ph.D. and mother of four says search engines cannot keep up with the explosive growth of the Internet nor with the needs of users who too often get frustrated sifting through too many random results. Cuil says it has come up with a search engine that indexes 120 billion Web pages, ranks results by relevance instead of popularity, organizes the results by ideas and protects the privacy of its users.

Okay, so I’ll leave aside the easy shot at Microsoft.  But rankings by relevance?  And by ideas?  And they protect my privacy?  Maybe they are Google-killers.

… in today’s Los Angeles Times under the headline, “Michael Chabon is serious about genre.”  Oddly enough, the article claims to be “about [Chabon’s] crusade to save comics, science fiction, fantasy, horror and detective fiction from condescension,” yet it’s included in a series of Calendar section articles gathered under the less than uplifting category, “Shameless Pleasures.”  Ah, well, what can one expect from the MSM these days?

Chabon’s defense of genre comes through strongly.  On Cormac McCarthy’s science fiction work, The Road:

I thought it was an excellent novel. The least interesting thing to me as a reader was that it was science fiction. It presented a very pure example of post-apocalyptic literature, pared down to the essentials of a post-apocalyptic vision. But it’s nothing that anybody reading science fiction over the last 60 or 70 years hasn’t seen done many, many times before — maybe not by writers of McCarthy’s caliber.

In terms of the vision it was presenting, it was notable only for the intense, McCarthy severity.

In fact, I responded to it much more as a work of horror fiction. But the response you saw out there generally was the sort of oh-my-God isn’t this incredible, Cormac McCarthy has written a science fiction novel! Sometimes a little bit of a panic sets in, where critics aren’t sure what to do about it or say about it.

We’ll have to bring him down to campus some time…

I’m thinking no two Comic-Cons are the same, because none of us walk the same routes or stumble into the same booths and play-things.  But I’m ready to seek the six, got my secret code to play Freaky Creatures, am totally psyched about Twilight, and just so ready for Trick ‘r Treat that I’m planning to ask director Mike Dougherty if they’ll do a benefit screening for Clarion when the movie comes out in October — but as I do a little Googling maybe rethinking that on the fly, omigod, reading about the movie I’m not so sure it’s the kind of thing you want to show donors…  And oh, did I mention My Name is Bruce, the Bruce Campbell movie headed for limited release in the fall and DVD in 2009?  Maybe that would be a good benefit screening; still a horror movie, but not psycho-violent, and I’d bet we could get Bruce to drive on down to San Diego (probably in a 20-year-old Lincoln or some such) to do a panel discussion.  At least, I like to think of him in a 20-year-old Lincoln…

Anyway, to keep track of the Hollywood side of Comic-Con, I’d watch the IMDB Comic-Con page.  Me, I’m in it for the books. 

Two fun sightings today: Nancy Holder, Clarion Board member, giving away free books, and Traci Castleberry, Clarion 2005 alumna, hanging out.  Traci and I walked the floor for a while; I pointed X-Men #10 to her, the first one I could remember reading when it was on the shelves.  It’s a $250 comic these days; 12 cents when I first bought it.  Ah, how time flies.  Back tomorrow, for a lunch with Eric Nylund, yet another Clarion alum of much repute!  It’s so cool walking the floor as the Ambassador of Clarion — wait! do they have a costume for that?

Oh — forgot to mention.  Saw Will Wright’s Spore presentation.  Indescribably spectacular game concept and game space.  Indescribably. 

As Comic-Con rolls into town with tonight’s pre-event, I thought I’d get a few items out of the way before they get lost in the Comic-Con craziness.  I’ll be down at the Convention Center tomorrow and Friday, and already have one meeting scheduled with a Clarion alum, so I’ll have a few comments on the show.  In the meantime, though:

• The 2009 Eaton Conference has been announced, focusing on “Extraordinary Voyages: Jules Verne and Beyond” in collaboration with the North American Jules Verne Society.  “Long before the invention of aircraft, automobiles and submarines, 19th century author Jules Verne described those modes of transportation in dozens of novels and short stories. The author of those tales of extraordinary voyages will be the focus of the 2009 Eaton Science Fiction Conference, scheduled May 1-3 at the University of California, Riverside.”  Abstracts for proposed presentations can be submitted as described at the conference press release, and there will once again be a short story competition open to any undergraduate or graduate student in the UC system.  Keep an eye out for more detail at the conference’s very cool website.
• Just so you can get a little ahead of the Comic-Con crowds, check out this post from Patrick Neilsen Hayden on the free e-books available at Tor.com, the new website that Tor is launching at the Con.  (See the official press release.)  Patrick and his colleague Liz Gorinsky stopped by the Workshop today to talk to the Clarion students, something I’m pretty sure they also did last year.  Nice timing, having the Workshop halfway done when Comic-Con rolls in.  I should also note here, that just as they did last year, the Comic-Con folks comped a one-day pass to the Con for all the students; the ones who aren’t still feverishly writing will be wandering the halls on Saturday.
• In case you missed it, check out this killer story in the New York Times on Sunday about the reissue of one of Michael Moorcock’s first Elric novels.  It includes a wonderful summary of Moorcock’s “one-man stand” against reactionary politics in the genre.  In addition to the fact that any science fiction or fantasy review that calls the author ‘Nietzschean’ is definitely worth reading, it includes hilarious sentences like this one: “Through Elric’s incipient adventures, as he contends with villains whose names suggest the sounds H. P. Lovecraft made when he cleared his throat — the sorcerer Theleb K’aarna, Queen Yishana of Jharkor, a monster called Quaolnargn — the morality of these stories is rarely more sophisticated than your average heavy-metal album cover.”
• And last but not least for now, for those of you wondering about the insides of the Workshop, a current student’s blog indicates that its most important feature is sleep deprivation — perhaps someone should tell the military?  No, just kidding!  His latest post in the Clarion 2008 series discusses the “splendid theatrical performance” by UCSD alum David Brin.  I’m not sure if Damien is riffing on David’s own presentation style, but his description of “two pieces of advice” that David provided turn out to be three, which I for one find highly reminiscent of every performance by Dr. Brin that I’ve ever seen. 

If you’ve gotten your copy of the New Yorker with the highly controversial Barack Obama cover, make sure to check out “Yurt,” the story by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Associate Professor of Literature here at UC San Diego.  Sarah is director of our Creative Writing program, and best known for her novel, Madeleine is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award.

The story is excerpted from Sarah’s next book, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, which will be out in the fall — it’s available for pre-publication ordering at all your favorite booksellers, including my personal favorite, Mysterious Galaxy.  In the meantime, check out Sarah’s UCSD homepage for background on her career.

 P.S.  This isn’t really a Clarion post, I suppose, but hey, every once in a while I like to pitch my peeps.

If you’re interested in tracking what’s going on in the Workshop this summer, or just interested in hearing more from one of your favorite authors, you might want to check out the podcasts that Shaun Farrell over at Adventures in SciFi Publishing is putting up.  Each week, they’re interviewing the Clarion instructor at the end of the week’s programs; so far, two of the podcasts are up:

• Kelly Link, Week 1
• Jim Kelly, Week 2

I’ve heard Kelly’s, but Jim’s just went up so I’ll have to download it for listening over the weekend.  Later on today, they’ll be interviewing Mary Anne Mohanraj, and should have that one up by this time next week.  Nice.

Two interesting and utterly contradictory takes on Wall-E in today’s Los Angeles Times.  One article, in the Entertainment section, reflects on the fact that it’s not “2001: A Space Odyssey” or, as reporter Reed Johnson puts it, “the apes [in “Planet of,” presumably] weren’t cuddly.”  The other, by conservative writer Charlotte Allen, tries to convince fellow conservatives that they shouldn’t be upset about the film just because its dystopic future reminds them of Al Gore.  Seriously.

When was it that every single bit of culture became a reflection of someone’s political views, or that every single movie had to make a statement about society?  Have we lost the chance for a movie to just be a movie?

Somebody seems to have convinced Buzz Aldrin to stop taking his medication … at least that’s what it seems like based on his bizarre interview with SciFi.com, described as follows at TVSquad.com:

In an interesting move by one of the iconic astronauts, Buzz Aldrin blamed science fiction for the lack of space flight in modern society…. According to him, sci-fi fed greater expectations than realistically possible and led to a lack of interest in the general public of promoting space travel.

“I blame the fantastic and unbelievable shows about space flight and rocket ships that are on today,” Aldrin said in an interview at the TCA. “All the shows where they beam people around and things like that have made young people think that that is what the space program should be doing. It’s not realistic.”

Let’s see, if I remember right, the iconic television show from the height of the 1960s race to the moon was Star Trek, where they, uh, “beam people around and things like that.” 

Meanwhile, Ben Bova has a totally different take in a wonderful “Sunday Perspective” article in tomorrow morning’s Naples [Fla.] Daily News on his time as Science Advisor to a terrible television show, “The Starlost.”  Created by Harlan Ellison, the show was doomed from the start by a writers’ strike that forced it to Toronto and into the hands of a bunch of amateurs.  Ellison left in disgust after a while, but Bova stuck it out:

My task, as science advisor, was to read the scripts (which were pretty awful) and spot technical flaws (which were plentiful), then suggest ways to correct those flaws without having to toss the entire script into the wastebasket (which is where most of them belonged).

I did my job dutifully. I was thanked profusely. I was paid handsomely. And all my advice was ignored. They shot the scripts as written, technical klunkers and all.

But at the end of each episode I got a full screen credit: Ben Bova, Science Advisor. It was like being identified as Adolf Hitler’s personal chaplain. The show’s producers had no interest in technical accuracy; all they wanted was a “name” to show that they had hired a science consultant.

Perhaps if Buzz Aldrin were to read that story, he’d notice one critical detail about science fiction films and television: it’s all about the money, and not about whether some show or film helps support the current, admittedly pitiable space program.  Doh!

Getting research advances out of the lab and directly to patients is always difficult, but especially when the discovery comes from a lab in the social sciences.  It’s good to see one such discovery from UCSD has moved quickly, helping Iraq and Afghanistan vets who’ve lost limbs to readapt to life in the States.

The story is told very briefly in a longer June 30 New Yorker article, “The Itch,” which describes in often graphic terms recent research into how we perceive things like itching and pain.  It’s a tremendously interesting piece relating pain research to advances in areas like how the visual system works, such as recent discoveries that much of the “visual” data we process actually comes from our memory, not from our eyes. 

Toward the end, the article discusses the work of one of UC San Diego’s more interesting people, Cognitive Science professor VS Ramachandran, who often focuses on oddities in brain behavior as indicators for deeper understanding of how the brain works.  One such set of experiments has focused on phantom pain, which is pain, often excruciating, that patients who have lost limbs or other body parts experience in the non-existent limb: the brain basically manufactures the pain, but while the source of the pain is not there, the feeling of pain is just as powerful as if it were.  Rama has found a strikingly low-tech way to deal with such pain, and apparently the military has picked it up for use with veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan:

… an experiment that Ramachandran performed with volunteers who had phantom pain in an amputated arm. They put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside, so that, peering through the open top, they would see their arm and its mirror image, as if they had two arms. Ramachandran then asked them to move both their intact arm and, in their mind, their phantom arm—to pretend that they were conducting an orchestra, say. The patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief. People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom arms in painfully contorted positions could relax. With daily use of the mirror box over weeks, patients sensed their phantom limbs actually shrink into their stumps and, in several instances, completely vanish. Researchers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recently published [in the Nov. 2007 New England Journal of Medicine] the results of a randomized trial of mirror therapy for soldiers with phantom-limb pain, showing dramatic success.

At a time when dramatically higher battlefield survival rates are occurring because of other treatment advances, it’s great to see science addressing the quality of life for recovering soldiers move that fast.

The death of Thomas Disch this past weekend by his own hand is a sad footnote to the life of a very talented if severely underrated man.  Disch’s obits in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, with their extensive commentaries by National Endowment for the Arts President Dana Gioia, reflect how far science fiction has come in the many decades since Disch began writing, but the fact that this kind of institutional recognition comes only now, at his death, is a sad reminder of the lack of such renown while he lived.  Disch wrote a particularly literary form of science fiction which was never widely accepted by traditional SF fans of the day, making him an outlier in an outlying literary form.  His only Hugo came for the 1999 nonfiction work, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World.  Camp Concentration, perhaps his best known novel, is one of those SF “must-reads.” 

Paste.com has a nice little blurb on Disch, but more importantly links to commentaries on his passing by Cory Doctorow, Eileen Datlow, Jeff VanderMeer and others.