The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

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?

A few items of interest from the 2007 Nebula Awards:

• Nebula Award winners with Clarion links include Karen Joy Fowler, president of the Clarion Foundation and author of Wit’s End, for her short story, “Always”; and alum Ted Chiang, for his novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.  Two out of five isn’t bad, I guess.
• Another contribution to the ’are we mainstream or are we not?’ debate surrounding sf and fantasy came when literary mainstream author Michael Chabon won the Novel award for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
• Ted Chiang’s win reminded me of a December 2003 interview available here, in which he had the following to say about Clarion’s effect on his writing: ”Clarion encouraged me to keep on writing. Before I was accepted to the workshop, I hadn’t received any encouragement about my writing, and I was on the verge of giving up. Clarion was the first time anyone told me they liked my work. Clarion also introduced me to the SF community. Before I attended, I hadn’t known anyone who read SF, let alone wanted to write it, so meeting my fellow students there was like discovering a family I’d never known I’d had.”
• And lastly, the runup to the Nebulas, held in Austin, TX this year, included a very nice Dallas Times piece on science fiction in Texas, home to 71 members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  Robert E. Howard was perhaps the most famous and most quirky of the state’s sf progeny, but now only one among many.  Most of those, it notes, are clustered around Austin, the state capital — not overly surprising, if you’ve seen the rest of Texas.

Today’s New York Times Book Review has a wonderful piece on (in)compatability of reading tastes and its effects on love that hits home with me.  I read mostly science fiction, fantasy and, increasingly, young adult sf and fantasy; my wife can’t stand any of the above (although she’s a big Karen Joy Fowler fan). Luckily, I’ve married a woman who doesn’t rank my taste in literature; she just likes sitting on the couch next to me while we’re both reading. 

In the piece, a woman breaking up with a man tells her friend he didn’t know who Pushkin was: “Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.”

Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”

Maybe it’s just a New York thing, but it seems pretty silly to me.  After all, it’s not like we’re both sitting there reading aloud, right? 

 Oh, and speaking of Karen Fowler, her latest, Wit’s End, comes out this week.  Her website has her on the road for two weeks solid starting last evening, with events in Sacramento and Davis before heading cross-country.