SF author Michael Bishop's son dies at Virginia Tech

For science fiction readers, there's a sad footnote to the news about the shootings at Virginia Tech: Jamie Bishop, the son of noted SF author Michael Bishop, died during the tragedy. (Locus Online here, see entry for Monday April 16; I learned about this via Brett Cox.)

Couric: Lying's OK, but plagiarism is bad!

The Washington Post is reporting that that a one-minute Katie Couric commentary on how exciting it was to get her first library card was largely stolen from a Wall Street Journal piece. The star isn't in trouble, but an anonymous producer has been fired.

The weird thing about the story is what the Post's Howard Kurtz delicately calls "the personal flavor of a video -- now removed from the CBS Web site -- that began, 'I still remember when I got my first library card, browsing through the stacks for my favorite books.' "

A CBS spokeswoman says that Couric is "horrified" by the plagiarism.

The spokeswoman doesn't mention whether Couric feels any sense of shame that she apparently routinely passes off a producer's work as her own. Apparently it doesn't bother her that her "first person" essay was piped into her by a producer who sticks a wind-up key in her back. It just bothers her that the producer stole the essay from a third party.

More on Robert Anton Wilson

A memorial service for Robert Anton Wilson has been announced.

Last May, my newspaper, The Sandusky Register, published my column on Wilson. I tried to take advantage of the still-hot "Da Vinci Code" craze to focus attention on Wilson. Here's the text of the column:


If you're sick of hearing about "The Da Vinci Code," Dan Brown's exciting but factually-challenged thriller, this week won't provide any relief.

The new movie, starring Tom Hanks as a college professor who looks like Harrison Ford and dishy French actress Audrey Tautou as a dishy French detective, opens in theaters Friday.

As nearly everyone knows, Brown's book has a cliffhanger at the end of nearly every chapter and is hard to put aside.

But although "The Da Vinci Code" works as fiction, it fails as history. Its controversial claim that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and the two had kids is built upon half-truths and outright falsehoods.

It's an old theory -- I first ran across it on Jefferson Airplane's 1972 LP, "Long John Silver" -- and not a particularly convincing one. Entire books have been published detailing Brown's mistakes. It's not true, for example, nobody believed Jesus was divine until the Emperor Constantine suddenly cooked up the theory at the fourth century Council of Nicaea.

Brown's assertion Jesus must have been married because unmarried Jewish men were unheard of in the ancient world also presents an easy target. Paul of Tarsus, a Jew, converted to Christianity and made a big deal out of the fact he was a confirmed bachelor. You've heard of St. Paul.

Churches use "The Da Vinci Code" to deliver their own message. For pastors, the book is heaven-sent: Americans actually want to listen to lectures and read books detailing the history of early Christianity.

I have my own agenda. I'm hoping a little of the "Da Vinci" hype will rub off on "The Illuminatus! Trilogy," three very odd and very interesting novels by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Originally published in the mid-1970s as three separate novels, the work now is usually sold as an omnibus volume containing all three titles.

The books helped launch the genre of conspiracy fiction popularized by Brown. The main villains in the books were the Illuminati, a purported secret society also featured in Brown's "Angels and Demons."

In many ways, Brown's very commercial book is an inversion of the "Illuminatus" books, which are too long and too strange to be bestsellers.

The novels are (loosely) about the eternal warfare between liberty-loving rebels and a secret society which seeks to use governments to enslave mankind. The rebels' weapons include self-destructing mynah birds, birds taught to say "Here, kitty, kitty" and then turned loose in the big city to undermine the social order by freaking out witnesses.

And while Brown's characters push the "Code's" main theory rather humorlessly, the Illuminatus novels refuse to take anyone or anything at face value. Ayn Rand's novel, "Atlas Shrugged," becomes "Telemachus Sneezed." The books' hero carries out missions in a yellow submarine.

The books began as a joke during a barroom conversation between the two authors, who at the time were editors at Playboy magazine. The original idea was to write a novel in which every conspiracy theory the authors had ever heard of would be true.

It took several years to find a book company willing to publish the work. The trilogy was never a best seller but has remained in print, attracting a loyal audience of libertarians, nut cases and minor newspaper columnists.

Shea died in 1994, but Wilson, 74, remains a prolific author and radical skeptic who attacks all ideologies, even skepticism.

In a recent interview, Wilson suggested the world would become "more sane" if dogmatic statements were qualified with the word maybe, as in "Maybe God hates gay people," or "There is no God except maybe Allah, and maybe Mohammed is his prophet."

Robert Anton Wilson dies

One of my favorite writers, Robert Anton Wilson, died Thursday. He was the co-author (with Robert Shea) of the "Illuminatus!" trilogy and many other books, most of which developed themes first deployed in "Illuminatus." An obituary is available here.

Robert Anton Wilson needs help

One of my favorite writers, Robert Anton Wilson, is broke and needs help from his fans, according to a news item in ANSIBLE, the monthly science fiction newsletter published by Dave Langford. The dispatch says, "ROBERT ANTON WILSON, co-author of the _Illuminatus!_ trilogy and guru of offbeat thinking, has only months to live and is broke. He faced eviction from his apartment until a fund-raising call brought help with the rent. Donations to the cause of allowing RAW to die peacefully at home can be sent c/o Futique Trust, PO Box 3561, Santa Cruz, CA 95063, USA (dollar checks payable to him), or Paypal to olgaceline at gmail dot com. He writes: `I am dumbfounded, flabbergasted, and totally stunned by the charity and compassion that has poured in here the last three days. To steal from Jack Benny, "I do not deserve this, but I also have severe leg problems and I don't deserve them either."'
Wilson's official web site is here.

Critters


My wife and I went on vacation a few weeks ago to Hilton Head, South Carolina. We took my mother-in-law, Treva Richey, along with us and hooked up with my wife's sister and her family.

When we rented a house in Hilton, the literature they sent to my wife gave instructions on how to behave if we saw an alligator. I figured this was just hype designed to make the place seem more interesting than it really is, but when we arrived there was a lagoon in the back of our house, crossed by a footbridge. And sure enough, on most days an alligator about five foot long would come drifting along behind our house. (Ann also managed to ride her bike within a few feet of the thing as it was trying to relax on the bank.)



Obviously, my new career as a nature photographer needs work, but here he is.



We also had a lizard who lived on our front porch. If this little fellow enjoys eating mosquitoes, he'll never go hungry in South Carolina.

Tom Disch

I'm indebted to Brett Cox for returning from Readercon and duly reporting to me that one of my favorite writers, Thomas Disch, has a blog. You can read it here and also subscribe to it at Bloglines.

Disch complained in a recent blog entry (I think he may later have deleted it) that at Readercon "all the books I signed were crumbly with age. No novels after Camp C, no books of poetry."

Made me feel bad I haven't been to Readercon lately. I guess I'm an atypical Disch reader, since nearly everything of his I've read has been since CAMP CONCENTRATION. I've only read one novel so far, ON WINGS OF SONG, but I have three books of poetry in my book collection (YES, LET'S is especially good -- it's the "greatest hits" collection), a book of poetry criticism THE CASTLE OF INDOLENCE and a short story collection, THE MAN WHO HAD NO IDEA.

A few of Disch's poems are posted here.

I've started reading 334.

Karrin and Nancy's rainy day

My wife and I went to a jazz festival in Toledo on June 18, mainly so that I could see my favorite jazz singer, Karrin Allyson. Unfortunately, it was a stormy day, and Karrin Allyson's performance had to be cut short after just six songs. The performance was supposed to also feature Nancy King, a jazz singer who performs with Allyson on Allyson's great new album, "Footprints," but the storm began before King could participate.

That was kind of a bummer, but there was a nice incident later. While the headliner, Al Jarreau, was performing, I noticed Karrin Allyson standing off to the side of the stage with another woman. I walked over to try to get a picture. I didn't know who Nancy King was until "Footprints" came out, but when I got my copy I looked King up on the Internet, and I noticed the woman next to Karrin looked like the picture I'd seen. She was closest to the fence I was behind, so I asked her, "Are you Nancy King?" She was, and when I explained how I'd figured out who she was, she asked, "Did you look at my web site?" I explained I'd just found out who she was but that I planned to track down her music, too. She suggested I pick up her new album with Fred Hersch, "Live at Jazz Standard."

I asked if I could take her picture, and she asked if I wanted Karrin Allyson in the picture, too, and I said sure, so she grabbed her friend and they posed for me. That's Nancy on the left and Karrin on the right. I got to talk to Karrin Allyson, too, and asked her to come back to Ohio, and she asked my name and shook hands.

It turned out my favorite music downloading site, eMusic, had "Live at the Jazz Standard," so I bought it. The same site also has the entire Karrin Allyson catalog.

My Utopia

I recently wrote a column for my paper outlining the changes I would make if I could somehow become dictator and impose all of the laws I want.

My favorite part was this: "Due space will be provided in public libraries and college literature courses for our greatest living literary geniuses -- Neal Stephenson, Susanna Clarke, Robert Anton Wilson, Iain Banks, Elinor Lipman and Tom Perotta." My dad didn't recognize the names but looked them up on the Internet and discovered I was referring to real authors.

The rule that got the most comment though, was requiring all women to wear red clothes at least once a week. (I just like the way women look in red.) A few days after the column was published, I covered a meeting of the county commissioners in Erie County, Ohio, and all of the women on the third floor (of the County Services Center, where the commissioners meet) were dressed in red, including a county commissioner and the county clerk. They looked great, of course.

Column is here.

The Joe Cimperman tax

I've been reading a fascinating book called THE WAL-MART EFFECT by Charles Fishman, a business journalist, which lays out the good and bad consequences of the rapid expansion of Wal-Mart.

One undeniable effect, according to Fishman, is that Wal-Mart lowers the inflation rate in the U.S. and saves people who choose to shop there a large amount of money. Citing an academic study, Fishman asserts on Page 151 that grocery prices at Wal-Mart supercenters were found to be "on average 27 percent lower than at traditional groceries, an astonishing discount. It's like getting one week of groceries free every month, just for moving your shopping to Wal-Mart."

The pattern of Wal-Mart distribution in Cuyahoga County, where I live, is rather interesting. Democratic city officials such as Joe Cimperman have succeeded so far in blocking Wal-Mart from opening any stores in the City of Cleveland. The older suburbs have Wal-Marts. And as you get farther away from Cleveland, you are more likely to live near a supercenter, where you can save on food as well as the items that all discount stores carry. You'll also notice that Cleveland has the worst-looking neighborhoods and that the further you get away from the city, the nicer the houses look. In other words, the people who are generally better off are more likely to have access to cheaper prices for the basic goods they need to get by.

Perhaps the higher prices paid by Cleveland residents ought to be known as the "Joe Cimperman Tax," in honor of politicians who do the bidding of labor unions rather than following the best interests of their own constituents.

Dazed by the old radios

Radio Daze is a company that makes most of its money selling parts over the Internet and through catalogs for repairing old radios, receivers from the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s. You can't buy radios from its catalog, just parts and radio kits.

But when you visit the company's headquarters near Rochester, you can see a showroom of dozens of old radios, all for sale, which the customer can carry out the door himself or have shipped anywhere in the world. My wife bought me a 1941 table radio with both AM and shortwave bands. When we set it up in our living room and tried it, we pulled in a shortwave station from Croatia.

George Alec Effinger site

I've launched the George Alec Effinger pages . I've included a FAQ, links, and a blog. A bibliography will be posted soon.

Rediscovering Philip Jose Farmer

I've been re-reading Philip Jose Farmer's "World of Tiers" books, one of his best-known series. I was a big Farmer fan in my youth. The re-reading was sparked by the discovery, in a used bookstore, that Farmer has published a sixth book in the series in the 1990s.

The books are THE MAKER OF UNIVERSES, THE GATES OF CREATION, A PRIVATE COSMOS, THE WALLS OF TERRA, THE LAVALITE WORLD and the book I found in the bookstore, MORE THAN FIRE. (For the purposes of this discussion, I'm treating RED ORC'S RAGE as a related book but not a part of the series.)

I've read the first two and I'm mostly done with the third book. The prose is creakier than I remember, and the stories are more improbable. For example, in A PRIVATE COSMOS, the hero, Kickaha, jumps on a stampeding herd of buffaloes, hopping from animal to animal. Anyone who has watched an experienced cowboy struggle to stay on top of a bull for only a few seconds at a rodeo will know how unlikely this is.

Still, the books are very imaginative and fast-moving, so I guess you have to take them as they are. The pocket universes created by Farmer's Lords (immortal humans employing "super science" are very well done. In fact, the settings are a high point of the books and enable Farmer to have fun with Plains Indian tribes, German knights, Viking marauders, Olmecs and other promising material. In some ways, these books seem to presage the Riverworld books, which I'll re-read in a few months.

Farmer is alive and well at age 87 and his Internet minions have created an official page for him that has a great deal of useful information, including a bibliography that quotes many of the reviews of his work.

A PRIVATE COSMOS features an introduction by Roger Zelazny, another of my old favorites, who does a nice appreciate of the first two "Tiers" books.

During the late 1970s, when I was a student at the University of Oklahoma, the campus science fiction club brought Zelazny in as a guest speaker, and I asked him about the introduction. He mentioned that Farmer, who he described as a bit of a hypochondriac, was worried that he would die before completing the "Tiers" series and had made Zelazy promise to finish the series, if necessary. Of course, the sad sequel to the story is that Zelazny has died since then, although it's a blessing we still have Farmer.

NASA tests solar sail





While my journalism career up in Cleveland has had its ups and downs, I've been fortunate to have two jobs in a row that allowed me to cover NASA, a science fiction fan's dream. Currently, I work for the Sandusky Register; part of my beat is covering NASA Plum Brook Station in Sandusky.

Plum Brook has the biggest vacuum chamber in the world, about 100 feet wide and 120 feet tall, and it's currently being used to test a prototype solar sail. A solar sail is "pushed" by sunlight and will be used someday to propel small, unmanned spacecraft.

My Hugo ballot

I voted for the fiction categories for the Hugo Awards -- my normal process for keeping up with what's going on -- although this time I ran out of time before I could read most of the short fiction nominees. I did read all of the novels, however, so here is how my Hugo ballot looked, with a letter grade and a few comments:

(1) Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke, A+. The best novel I've read in several years. Vivid and brilliant. (2) The Algebraist, Iain Banks, A. Very good far-future space opera. Perhaps a bit like Vernor Vinge, only better written. (3) Iron Sunrise, Charles Stross, A. Cyberpunk space opera. Stross is much better than I realized. Any of these three books would do the award credit, although it would be a shame if Clarke didn't win.

(4) River of Gods, Ian McDonald, B-. This novel about Indian circa 2050 is a good novel in many ways, but I couldn't take it to heart. For one thing, I was taken aback that McDonald dislikes Indians and Hinduism so much. (5) Iron Council, China Mieville, C+. Very competently done, but I thought it was boring. Everyone should read Perdido Street Station, though, which I thought was a wonderful novel.

New George Alec Effinger book

As a longtime science fiction fan, I worry that many of the writers I love will be forgotten soon after their deaths. It's not as if I'm an antiquarian; I love many of the current writers, such as Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robinson. But I also worry about writers I've loved for years, such as Roger Zelazny and Jack Vance, being forgotten by readers in the 21st century. I went to a science fiction convention years ago where Darrell Schweitzer, a fan, editor and writer, talked about a panel that was devoted to Jack Williamson. It was a disaster, Schweitzer said. Few people at the convention appeared to know who Williamson was. (He's a famous old SF writer who wrote a wonderful horror-science fiction novel called "Darker Than You Think.")

One of my favorites, George Alec Effinger, died in 2002, and already there is little sign that he's remembered in Cleveland, the city of his birth. Effinger was expecially good as a short story writer, and there's a new collection, "George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth," which collects several of his most famous stories but also includes any stories never collected in an Effinger anthology before.