Thanks karthur. Some of it is satire. Some of it qualifies as philosophy only because of the debasement of that term in the modern era. There's definitely variety.
Re the nature of the series, Popelopepepuss Zee Anonymous--I think that's clear if you were to have read any of the context of the posts. And I am not abridging them into paragraphs. Obviously, though, some texts I will be better prepared to engage than others, as with anyone who encounters them.
Nor am I trying to absorb all of what I read--I am reacting to those things that interest me in each text. At my leisure later, I will go back to many of these. In the meantime, having to blog each day ensures I will actually read these texts. If I made it a personal project, I might not be able to stick to it. And, hopefully, a few people will pick up the books as a result. Isn't that a positive result? Certainly there is nothing in this project that is comparable to putting a horse's head in your bedroom. Which is how your reaction came across.
Also, I think it's reasonable to say that an intelligent reader CAN DEFINITELY read and digest 100 pages in a day. I almost feel like you think you're the gatekeeper here and none shall pass without the secret password. Well guess what--I EZ All REDY IN YR HOUSE EATIN YER FOOD AN MESSIN WID YER BOKS.
JeffV
Shell--I don't know. I think it's helped make a few things clearer. It's also made me both more hopeful and more pessimistic. The pessimism comes from how little from these books seems to have been applied to the world, and how much of it is still applicable because of that. Like, if Bush had just read a little bit of Machiavelli, would he had acted so stupidly? I don't know.
Anyway, I think it's legitimate to question the legitimacy of the exercise, but all I know is I'm being sincere about it.
@Ann and Jeff VanderMeer: EEK--Tim--I mean the Pope guy, not you. Sorry. I got confused by the posting protocol. Cheers, JeffV
Tim: What a shrill shriek over something so harmless!
These are mostly abridgments, and few of these books are over 112 pages. I spend 2-3 hours each night reading the next in the series and then I post by noon the next day.
If you'd taken the time to read the entries, you would have noticed that most of the blog posts top 1,000 words, some of them close to 2,000 words--not 200 words. You'd also have seen that I tend to focus on one or two specific areas in each book. Because of course you can't assimilate everything therein even if you read it all the night before. But you certainly can comment on what interests you in the text.
Instead, you spent probably two seconds looking over a couple of posts and then made a judgment much more pompous than anything on my blog.
It's not a stunt, and it's not self-aggrandizing. It's a genuine attempt to cleanse my brain from a long year of distractions and an attempt to discover which of these writers I enjoy, and why. I plan on buying much longer works by many of these authors (the ones I wasn't already familiar with) and read them at my leisure.
You seem to be the kind of person Seneca would advise not wasting any time on. At this point, the burden is on you to prove that it's otherwise.
Now back to my reading.
JeffV
And the winners are...
ldevitt
GuardianOfChaos
ThomasinaMarten
Arachnophilia
Congrats! Each will receive the latest Aliens and latest Predator novels, along with a Predator chop figurine.
(We've sent a private message to all four, giving the email addy to send your snail mail to so we can do the shipping.)
Hey--thanks for these. Good stuff! Two more days to enter.
Doug: Whatever you're smoking, I'd like some. Because it must be pretty potent.
I thought Stone Gods was a damn good book, btw, and very topical.
Sorry--I thought you were talking about best-case scenarios, not run-of-the-mill.
JeffV
Although this post is provocative and interesting, I don't know if I see much point in the arbitrary juxtaposition of Multireal and Stone Gods. Good points about the "literary" mainstream, though. Where I despair in this continuing discussion, though, is the idea of generalizations made by both sides that don't have any relationship to what I love in my favorite books. My favorite books are entertaining and deep. They are literary and they are strange or surreal, too. They love language and they love their characters and the stories they tell. So at this point, after witnessing 20 years of this kind of discussion, I throw up my hands and say, "Why the f--- don't we demand ALL OF IT in what we love to read?" I know I do. - Jeff VanderMeer
Seeds is a beautiful little book, too. A small-size hardcover, impeccably designed. If you like your books to not only read well but look good, too.
Jeff
Conjunctions has a circulation larger than F&SF right now, if I'm reading the numbers right. That you haven't heard of it is not its fault. There is a general ignorance in genre of how big the biggest lit. mags are...Conjunctions, for my money, has more of a finger on the pulse of pop culture than many genre mags. Because, remember, genre and pop culture are not synonyms, even though some people think they are.
Writers of short fiction can't be in it for the money, so it doesn't make sense that they're writing to markets. If they are, then that's where the problem lies, and that is the fault of the writers. Because you *create* new markets eventually by going out in your own direction. It just takes longer. One thing the internet has done that's negative is made everyone's expectation of a path to success and career breakthrough being short even more so than in the past.
Jeff
Oh--I'd also say I agree with Ellis about the online venues pushing the hardest, doing the most cross-genre things. I'd argue that you see more cross-influence of comics/graphic novels in the best of the new generation, and most of that is on the websites.
And re the digests--the issue of what they're publishing is separate from their format. I think people might actually find more of the stuff in the digests more exciting if it was in a more dynamic format. As a publisher, I've seen the difference. Sometimes how you let a reader enter a text really does determine how that reader perceives it.
Jeff
In (1) above, I mean they're selling no worse than ever.
(1) Short story collections are selling now as badly as they've ever sold. Which is to say, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/6 as well as your average novel.
(2) Most of the genre magazines in the US have never really tried to appeal to the next generation. Something that looks more like a punkish music magazine would have more of a chance. A music mag that happened to run SF/F would have a better chance than a dusty old digest format that hasn't changed for so long.
(3) The problem *isn't* that there is too little adventure fiction. It's that the adventure fiction is so vapid that it isn't nourishing even as adventure fiction. And too few writers are taking chances, simultaneously. And, there are too many markets and too few really great writers who consistently turn out great fiction.
So, yeah, short fiction will be around for awhile. A lot of literary magazines are flourishing, like Conjunctions, which publishes much more interesting stuff than many more conventional mags.
Jeff
This has given me a great idea! I'm gonna start a website that's all about stuff no one gives a crap about, that no one will want to visit. The very anti-interesting aspect will fascinate people. - JeffV
I kinda appreciated Annalee taking a specific stance on the movie. I like the fact io9 isn't a kind of push-over People magazine of SF pop culture. You're very lucky to have a popular resource like this that gives you eye candy *and* substance. That's pretty rare. Over the last month, I've seen more interesting and thought-provoking stuff at io9 than any other news/entertainment site for SF. - Jeff
Yes, I'm sure it'll be corrected--just saying Mignola spelled it that way in the email interview. No excuse, just making a joke.
Whitworthian: if Mignola says it's Molock, it's Molock. If Mignola says the sky is made of blue cheese, it's made of blue cheese... ;)
Oh, I don't doubt the awesome, but try reading Lovecraft or any horror in broad daylight on the beach sipping a Margarita. Kinda ruins the effect. Killar penguins are always cool, though, as evidenced by: [silence-without.blogspot.com]
