The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

The University of Wyoming is hosting a NASAf-funded free (yes, FREE!) writer’s workshop in Laramie, Wyoming this summer, the second such outreach effort designed to teach writers about modern science, especially astronomy, and through their subsequent work hopefully impact the broader public.  Organized around the research of Mike Brotherton and billed as “Improving Science Literacy Through Words and Media,” the Workshop seeks the following:

We hope to both educate the public and reach the next generation of scientists. Therefore selection will be based in part on audience size as demonstrated through print runs, downloads, or sales figures when available.  Secondary considerations will include the content and potential of applicant work — to what extent science in general and astronomy in particular are likely to be a significant factor in their future publications.  Applicants should address these points when they apply.  Several slots will be reserved for the strongest minority/female applicants who may have additional promise in reaching groups less represented in both the physical sciences and hard science fiction.

Based on the past attendee list from 2007, it’s a great place to spend a week just to be surrounded by interesting people.

The program runs July 30 to August 5, and the ‘free’ part comes with a slight catch, in that participants have to get there (some travel can be paid if justified and applied for) and generally buy their own dinner; that’s still one heck of a deal, though.  Rooms are free, as are snacks, coffee and lunch.  Application deadline is March 31, so get cracking! 

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.

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?

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.

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.

Joe Scieszka, author of the Time Warp Trio book series, has been named America’s first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by Librarian of Congress James Billington.  (We stole the idea from the Brits, but that’s okay — that’s where the language comes from anyway.) 

Although time travel in his books is just a vehicle for getting at history and cultures, Scieszka’s naming highlights the importance of fun in promoting literacy nationwide; the utility of sf, fantasy and other speculative fictions in that effort; and also the way that such books increasingly meld into new digital media opportunities — see the Time Warp Trio tv series website as one example.  

The New York Times has a nice piece on Scieszka; and Newsweek’s got an interview with him discussing the importance of humor in writing.  This is, after all, the author of The Stinky Cheese Man.