Michael Chabon, of course, won the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay, his novel about Golden Age comics creators dealing with inspiration, sexual identity and the Holocaust, among other things. He also wrote the Hugo-winning alternate history novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Both Manhood and his earlier essay collection, Maps And Legends, deal with geeky, science-fictional elements. And he edited two anthologies of pulp science fiction by some of today's best authors, McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales and McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories. (And according to his Wikipedia page, he created a fictional alter ego, a quasi-Lovecraftian horror novelist named August Van Zorn, which I didn't know about until just now.)

The thing that's stuck in my head most about Manhood For Amateurs is definitely the passionate espousal of fandom, and the idea that fan obsession comes from the same place as the artistic impulse — the desire for communal expression. Why do you think people often see fans as in opposition to "true" creative people? Now that fans are running all the comic book companies, producing Doctor Who, and reinventing Star Trek, do you see this changing? What will it take for a work of fanfic to be recognized as art? Have you ever written fanfic?

Well, I'm not sure I fully accept the premise of the question: "People often see fans as in opposition to 'true' creative people." Or rather, you may be right, "people" do see it that way, but if so then these people are deeply ignorant of the history of popular culture and its production. Fans began to take over creative responsibility in the world of Science Fiction as early as the mid-thirties; I doubt that by the mid-seventies there were many major practitioners in the genre who had not started out as a passionate, Con-going, zine-compiling fans. The second great age of American cinema was entirely created by fans (Coppola, Scorsese, Rafelson, Ashby, Spielberg, Lucas, et al) ; The Godfather is as much about the intensive study of gangster films as it is about gangsters. Same goes, even more so, for Scorsese. Rock and roll, same deal. The Beatles work is fan fiction on the work of Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers: It's not simple (or even complex) imitation; it's elaboration, infilling, transformation, a strategic redployment of the tropes and figures of the source material/primary text; the Beatles are in dialog with Buddy Holly, as Badfinger was in dialog with the Beatles and Jellyfish with Badfinger. Or you could go Stones/Stooges/Sex Pistols. The word "influence" is insufficient and too one-sided to describe a relationship that is much more accurately reflected by the system of tribute/ appropriation/critique that fandom employs. This kind of process, by which one generation of fan/critics (because anyone who doesn't understand that a fan is a critic doesn't know what a fan is, and there is nothing sadder to contemplate than the idea of a critic who is not also a fan) becomes the creators whose work inspires and obsesses and is critiqued by the next generation of fans, who in turn become critic-creators, has occurred in every popular art form across the board going back fifty or five thousand years. The apostles wrote fan fiction on Torah. So your "people" are silly people, and we don't need to listen to them.

The other thing about Manhood For Amateurs, now that I've had a chance to mull it over, is the sense that shifting gender roles and the changing demands as you grow older mean that you have to keep reinventing yourself. To what extent is this like the process of world-building in a fantasy/SF universe?

It means — it means, if I take your meaning aright, that I am my own sequel, my own series, the CHAPTERHOUSE OF DUNE to my own DUNE: MESSIAH.

Why do you think such a high proportion of alternate history novels revolve around World War II in some way or another? Do you think it's different for authors who weren't alive during World War II and the Holocaust to imagine them turning out differently, than for someone like, say, Philip K. Dick, who was in high school during the war?

Well, of course PKD did a pretty fair job of imagining just that in THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. I think the thing about WWII is that it was so huge, so important, so clearly one of the two or three most significant periods in human history — and yet even a cursory study of it reveals it to have been woven of dozens if not hundreds of teensy little frail threads which, if pulled or tucked a different way, might easily have produced a completely different outcome. Say, for example, that the British Navy had not captured a German cypher machine from a sunk U-Boat in 1941. Cracking of the navy codes is delayed... key messages are never intercepted...

That's true for EVERYTHING that happens of course: "for want of a nail." But you can really feel the Little, Big of it with WWII.

As someone who's written both historical fiction and alternate history, how would you say the research process differs for the two genres? Do they allow you to comment on the here and now in much the same way, or in different ways?

Research is research; historical fiction is alternate history, in the sense that you are still saying What if? What if, for example, a Russian nobleman named Andrei Bolkonski, with such and such a set of traits, was running around the battlefield of Austerlitz, getting wounded and rescued by Napoleon, whom he once admired...etc. Whether you are writing Napoleon Loses Austerlitz (alternate history) or simply Fictional Prince Andrei Gets Injured at Austerlitz (historical fiction) the research is going to be the same.

When your first novel came out, you were nearly mis-classified as a gay writer. You told the Metro Weekly in 2002, "There's a big lump that's called literary fiction or mainstream fiction or non-genre fiction or whatever, and that's sort of where I am. That's not a problem that really dogs me, except for that brief moment when Mysteries of Pittsburgh came out and Newsweek did a big roundup of all the hot new gay novels. That was me being pigeonholed and possibly confined to a section of the bookstore from which it can be very hard to get out once you're in. Luckily the book attracted a diverse readership."

Do you think people who are writing science fiction or fantasy should try to avoid getting shelved in those sections, for the same reasons you were keen to avoid getting shelved in LGBT fiction? Should we, as readers of SF and fantasy, be trying to get the novels we love shelved in "fiction," or should we be trying to find ways to help deserving genre authors to cross over? (Like your inclusion of people like Tim Pratt and Cory Doctorow in the Best American Short Stories anthology.) If this is just a marketing issue, do we need better labels, or just more flexible ones?

Pride and Resentment are the twin banners flown from the walls of all ghettos. We love being in; we want to get out. We are at home; home is not the world. Endogamy weakens us over time.

I think, in the end, it is largely a marketing issue. Personally I would prefer to see bookstores shelve all fiction together regardless of genre. Or maybe just have two sections, "Good Stuff" and "Crap." Into Crap we will consign all novels regardless of genre or reputation that trade in cliche and dead language. If I ever own a bookstore I will do it that way. Only I will just leave out the Crap section.

Chabon talks about how his eldest son startled a British attendant at the Smithsonian with his Dalek T-shirt, and then his other children had to regale the man with tales of their Cybermen and Time Lord shirts, until he understands they're a geek family. And then Chabon talks about how the new Doctor Who series has brought his family together, and sings the show's praises:

And if you aren't watching and loving the glorious new BBC incarnation of Doctor Who, geeking out on the mythos of the Daleks and Time Lords and Cybermen, swooning to the polysexual heroics of Captain Jack Harkness, aching over the quantum transdimensional heartache of Rose Tyler, and granting yourself the supreme and steady pleasure of watching the dazzling Scottish actor David Tennant go about the business of being the tenth man to embody the time-and-space traveling Doctor on television since the show's debut in 1963, then I pity you with the especial harsh pity of the geek.

As you might have gathered from its subtitle ("The Pleasures And Regrets Of A Husband, Father, And Son") Manhood For Amateurs is Chabon's collection of essays about being a man, and the various personas he's taken on. But even as he delves into the heart of his own struggles with maleness, Chabon invokes science fiction and comics, exploring topics as diverse as why Big Barda is the greatest superheroine, or why all futurism is now retro-futurism, and we've lost our starry-eyed optimism. Like manhood, these geek avatars gain their meaning from other people, they're public and subject to interpretation. They also change over time, like the Doctor. (Chabon, himself, has gone through incarnations, including being a "little shit" in his twenties, as he makes clear at various points.)

The Doctor Who essay, one of the last in the book, returns to the theme of the book's first essay: the solitary and communal sides of fandom. Chabon grew up, like many of us, as a solitary geek, with nobody to share his obsession with comics and science fiction paperbacks. The first essay talks about how he tried to start a local comic-book fan club, with his mother's help — they even paid $25 to rent a room for the first meeting, and only one other boy showed up, then immediately left before he could get sucked into this "loser's club." The Doctor Who essay is about how the new version of the show has given Chabon's children the gift of each other, and how fandom and families are the same, with their rituals and obsessions.

Most provocatively, in the earlier "Loser's Club" essay, Chabon even suggests that fandom and the artistic drive come from the same impulse, and even hints that fanfic and literature spring from the same well:

This is the point, to me, where art and fandom coincide. Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city — in every cranium — in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makees it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

Manhood For Amateurs isn't just notable for the honestly with which Chabon deals with every aspect of his life, including his insecurities and his relationships with women and his own children — it's also a more revelatory look at fan culture, and science fiction, through the lens of the personal essay. Anyone who's interested in discussing science fiction and its attendent genres for their personal as well as cultural significance should be checking out these essays.

More than ever, Chabon uses superhero comics, Star Wars toys and Doctor Who's Daleks as signposts to the masculine imaginary. He geeks out about these things as if they are the only points of certainty in a shifting, illusory world.

(The book is by no means perfect: At times, his opinion-spouting gets a little overwhelming, and by the time he gets to the section where he talks about women, about two-thirds of the way through, I was starting to wonder if Chabon really did live in some male-dominated enclave — but then a lot of the last third of the book is about women, and he addresses that criticism of his writing head-on. But my criticisms of the book mostly have nothing to do with its discussions of science fiction or geek culture, and they're pretty minor in any case.)

Manhood, Chabon seems to be saying, is improv. You create yourself on the fly, in roles as perplexing and diverse as husband, father, lover and friend, and hope to project an impression of knowing what you're doing. The fact that Chabon deconstructs masculinity while pulling together so many elements of science fiction turns nerd culture into a set of anchor points. You sort of expect Chabon to use comic-book and science-fiction icons to illuminate his inner world, the way in which superhero storytelling in Kavalier And Clay became a kind of emotional atlas. But it goes beyond that: one of the constants in Chabon's essays is the primacy of play, in the midst of all this role confusion. And geeking out is an essential ingredient of that play.

The discussions of play includes a very carefully considered history of Lego toys, and their development from abstract bricks to a world dominated by crudely representational minifigs. (We featured a "quote of the day" a while back, in which Chabon talked about how his kids were remixing these Lego sets and transcending the tyrannical corporate-sanctioned instructions.) He joins the chorus of people lamenting the fact that kids no longer roam free on their bicycles and skateboards. He narrates some bizarrely awesome-sounding games he and other kids played, based on the 1973 Planet Of The Apes TV series (not the movies, weirdly enough). And he talks about stargazing, and discovering our smallness in the cosmos, as well as the Long Now Foundation's 10,000 year clock and how it's making him wonder why we've stopped obsessing about the far future.

All in all, Manhood For Amateurs is a much geekier book than you might have expected from its title, and yet also a much more personal book than most geeky essay collections. If you've suspected that fandom's signs and collections of ill-fitting clues were markers in someone else's inner cosmology, just as they are in yours, then you will definitely bond with this book.

Discussing his new book, Manhood for Amateurs: the Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son, Chabon explains:

JC: In a couple of the early pieces, you express a concern for the lack of mystery in the lives of children.

MC: I'm not sure it's so much a lack of mystery. I think there's still plenty of mystery. It's a lack of freedom, it's a lack of unsupervised play.

JC: Both physically, and through the proscriptive, highly specialized Legos …

The thing with Legos — I hope it's an example of how I recognize the possibility that I might be overstating my objections. Not everything that at first glance seems to be a further illustration of the kind of cultural imperialism I see at work in the adult world over the world of childhood — not everything is necessarily an example of that. Certainly kids retain their love of subversion, and I think it's just innate to a child's mind to want to subvert authority. I think it's unfortunate that the adult world figured out a way to take over that impulse and package it and retail it and sell it back to children, and to their parents.

In the world of Legos, what I did discover is that my kids were taking these beautiful, gorgeous, incredibly restrictive predetermined Legos Star Wars play sets — and yeah, they really wanted it to be put together just the way the box showed it. I don't think it occurred to them you'd want to do anything else with it. But inevitably, over time, the things kind of crumble and get destroyed and fall apart and then, once they do, the kids take all those pieces, and they create these bizarre, freak hybrids — of pirates and Indians and Star Wars and Spider-Man. Lego-things all getting mashed up together into this post-modern Lego stew. They figure out a way, despite the best efforts of corporate retail marketing.

[Los Angeles Times]

I was thinking about this the other day, when I was watching Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II TV movie. I was wondering why this post-apocalyptic story of tyrannical dominatrices and mutants was less interesting than Star Trek, and I couldn't escape the conclusion: Genesis II was less interesting because it was less fun — and especially less escapist. Instead of cool people on an awesome spaceship packed with fantastic toys, like Communicators and Tricorders, you had a guy trapped in Planet Of The Apes without any apes. And with an extra helping of Roddenberry's signature preachiness.

And I started thinking about escapism, and why we tend to look down on it. We have a bias — myself included, on occasion — against works that allow people to burst out of the bonds of unpleasant reality. They're automatically less smart or interesting than works which seek to confront you with the real world's unpleasantness, to impress on you how unsavory our world really is.

Escapism is the candy-coated pill, the sedative designed to lull you away from realizing quite how messed up things are — and how much culpability you, as a no-doubt middle-class person, have for the situation. Escapism is opium, soma.

The distinction between escapist and "realist" fiction isn't even a matter of utopian versus dystopian narratives — after all, much escapist fiction is dystopian, and plenty of realistic fiction has an utopian impulse at its core. But when movies or books depict someone escaping from the world's unpleantness, or just offer a vision which allows the watcher or reader to escape through their imagination, then we deplore the cowardice of anyone who seeks to run away from their problems in this way. Most of all, escapism is inherently just not serious.

Escapism: pulpy and tacky

Ursula K. Le Guin makes the case against escapism very potently in her essay "Escape Routes," gathered in the collection The Language Of The Night: Essays On Fantasy And Science Fiction:

What if we're escaping from a complex, uncertain, frightening world of death and taxes into a nice simple cozy place where heroes don't have to pay taxes, where death happens only to villains, where Science, plus Free Enterprise, plus the Galactic Fleet in black and silver uniforms, can solve all problems, where human suffering is something that can be cured — like scurvy? This is no escape from the phony. This is an escape into the phony. This doesn't take us in the direction of the great myths and legends, which is always towards an intensification of the mystery of the real. This takes us the other way, toward a rejection of reality, in fact toward madness: infantile regression or paranoid delusion, or schizoid insulation. The movement is retrograde, autistic. We have escaped by locking ourselves in jail.

And inside the padded cell people say, Gee wow have you read the latest Belch the Barbarian story? It's the greatest.

They don't care if nobody outside is listening. They don't want to know there is an outside.

Because the most famous works of SF are socially and culturally speculative, the field has got a reputation for being inherently "relevant." Accused of escapism, it defends itself by pointing to Wells, Orwell, Huxley, Capek, Stapeldon, Zamyatin. But that won't wash: not for us. Not one of those writers was an American. My feeling is that American SF, while riding on the tradition of great European works, still clings to the pulp tradition of escapism.

That's overstated, and perhaps unfair. Recent American SF has been full of stories tackling totalitarianism, nationalism, overpopulation, pollution, prejudice, racism, sexism, militarism, and so on: all of the "relevant" problems.

She was writing this back in the 1970s, so the specific accusations about SF are outdated. But as a summation of the "escapism is childish and not literary" viewpoint, it's pretty much perfect. And as you can tell, a big part of the hatred for escapism comes from a desire to be literary, and to be taken seriously by the upper echelons of the (supposedly monolithic) literary world. Writing in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction in 1976, Barry N. Maltzberg raged that the literary/cultural establishment "either does not know we exist or patronizes us as pulp hacks for escapist kids."

One more quote. In his book On SF, Thomas M. Disch characterizes escapism as a "security blanket," and adds:

There are times when all of us would rather flee our problems than confront them head-on with the heightened awareness that genuine art forces on us. For such times, nothing will serve but escapism.

He goes on to say that certain trashy SF authors are as bad as Star Trek or Magnum P.I. (even though the latter show constantly bombarded us with Magnum's Vietnam War flashbacks.)

If you read these quotes carefully, a few things jump out at you. First of all, there's the equation of escapism with "pulp" traditions — which was obviously a big deal for authors like Le Guin and Maltzberg, who were trying to escape (sorry!) from the "pulp" label and prove that they deserved a higher grade of paper stock. And then there's the idea that escapism prevents your SF from being "relevant" or commenting on real-world issues — when, in fact, the most escapist narratives are often the most topical. (Just watch the original Star Trek.) There's the idea, which was way more prevalent in the 1970s, that explicit social commentary automatically made your work better or smarter.

There's also a certain feeling of disapproval, even dismay, that people are having too much fun. If I hadn't read tons of books by Le Guin and Disch, and discovered first hand how enjoyable (and frequently, how escapist) their work can be, I would think both authors wrote dry Socialist Realist works, in which their protagonists were born and died in the same gutter.

There has been a move to re-embrace escapism in recent years — Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay was about the fictional creation of a Golden Age superhero who was actually called The Escapist. And Chabon shows us exactly how The Escapist's real-world origins reflected the political and social trends of the 1930s and early 1940s, and how much his adventures reflect the struggles and traumas Sammy and Joey are going through in their real lives — everything from Sammy's secret homosexuality to Clay's family trapped in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe becomes part of the secret backstory of the Escapist and the League of the Golden Key. In Chabon's novel, backstory is the story — when you try to strip the League of the Golden Key and the other details from the Escapist's origin, you chip away at what makes the Escapist who he is, and the reasons why he does what he does.

It's no coincidence, of course, that Chabon has also been a champion of bringing the pulps back into the sphere of the literary — he edited two anthologies of mock-pulp science fiction stories for McSweeney's a few years ago, chock full of literary and genre superstars doing pastiches and homages to the plot-heavy stories of the past. Authors like Chabon and Dave Eggers are able to celebrate the pulpy and retro in a way that Maltzberg never could back in the 1970s, because they're already assured of their literary status, and need not fear being marginalized. (And meanwhile, the "new space opera" and posthuman SF novels that throng on our shelves are the very picture of escapism, with their heroes who live for zillions of years and can port themselves into new customized bodies whenever they feel like it.)

But in any case, we're now far enough from the pulp era that the "pulpy" label has lost much of its sting, even as unabashedly pulpy urban fantasy heroines in tight pleather pants are eating science fiction's market share for lunch. So maybe it really is time to reclaim the word "escapism" and transform it into a paean to works that liberate and illuminate us.

A theory of escapist art

So I promised you an explanation of why escapism is the highest form of art — and yes, there may be a slight amount of hyperbole involved there. At the same time, escapism has given us some of our greatest speculative art works, and has the potential to spawn even greater ones in the future, if we recognize it for what it is.

First of all, let's dispose of this false dichotomy between "escapism" and "realism." Neither of those things is ever entirely pure, and each always contains elements of the other. Any time you have a flight of fancy, or a grace note, or an elivening metaphor, in a "realist" work, you are engaging in escapism. Because whenever you invoke the imagination, or suggest another world (made out of thought, or images) beyond your protagonist's "real" world, you're allowing the reader a brief escape. And in fact, if you look at "real life," some of our "realest" experiences involve escape.

Think about that old literary standby, the "coming of age" narrative — it is the most pure escapist story you can have, even if it doesn't always have a happy ending. (More on happy endings later.) The "coming of age" tale is about someone outgrowing his or her childhood, and casting off the stifling restrictions of parents, school and conformist expectations. It is a story about reaching escape velocity, and bursting out of childhood's gravity well. This is never a tidy process in real life, nor is it often in literature. But it's the original escapist tale, and in many ways, it's the template on which all other escapist tales build.

The reverse is also true — escapist elements don't automatically make a work less realistic. Just as the "coming of age" story is about escape in the "real" world, it's more than possible to tell a realistic story about a world that repesents an escape from our reality. We've all accepted, by now, that you can tell a realistic story about that ultimate avatar of escapism, Batman. (Batman is in many ways a more escapist figure than Superman, because Batman is just like us — except that his amazing training and gadgets turn him into an unstoppable force.) Look at Paul Pope's amazing, stark graphic novel Batman: Year 100. And if you want SF that comments on real-world issues, it's hard to get more topical than the first few seasons of the Battlestar Galactica remake.

And that leads to another point — escapism can be incredibly dark. I said earlier that many escapist works are dystopian, and it's clearly true. The "last survivors of a post-apocalyptic world" story is full of escapism — for one thing, you're one of the chosen few, and you're incredibly special and wonderful as a result. You no longer have to pay taxes (like Le Guin's heroes), and you live in a world where the worst has already happened. And many escapist films are show someone escaping from an incredibly dark world, even if it's only through the power of the imagination. Think of Guillermo Del Toro's beautiful Pan's Labyrinth, which is at its core a work about the escape into fantasy. Even if both the real world and the fantasy are dark and disturbing. Or Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which takes place in a dystopian world and shows us Sam Lowry's flights of the imagination as well as his attempts to escape in real life. Did I mention that escapist works don't have to have happy endings?

At the same time, who says that realism is the best thing a literary work can aspire to? It really is true, as many SF writers have said lately, that we live in a world that's changing so quickly, that any attempt at pure realism will become historicism instead. And then there's the subjective nature of "reality." But most of all, realism is like art that attempts to be purely representational: it can't show any deeper reality beneath the surface, nor can it reflect all of the stuff that's happening just beyond the frame of our perceptions. We've all lived through historical moments where a new meme or phenomenon seemed to "come out of nowhere," only to look inevitable in retrospect, once we see all of the early indicators that we ignored at the time, because they were outside of the narrative we were telling ourselves about "reality."

If the goal of a literary work (and remember, "literary" is not synonymous with "good." More on that here) is to reflect "reality," then "realism" is one tool among many for doing so. And escapism is another.

I already suggested, above, that metaphors are inherently escapist because they take us away from the strict view of what the thing "is." And the reverse is also true: escapism is a metaphor. TV shows like Lost In Space and Star Trek are so transparently metaphors for the hopes and fears of the Space Age that it's impossible to watch them now without thinking about what people were living through at the time. You get as revealing a mirror into the Space Age, Cold-War psyche from Star Trek as you do, say, from John Updike's Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux. The stuff Star Trek tries to say about the politics of the 1960s is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the stuff that it says without meaning to, about Manifest Destiny and the post-colonial project of redeeming the Third World.

We tend to think of escapism as a childish impulse, but that's by no means always true — like Brazil, or The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, many great escapist works are about adults, who are trapped as only adults can be, in prisons partly of their own making, and look for a way out.

Escapism also shows what we're trying to escape from — this seems like an obvious point, but it's one that often seems to be overlooked. This changes over time, and also varies from creator to creator. Some escapist works are concerned about breaking out of a totalitarian, oppressive state, others are more concerned with running away from middle-class American life. There's escapism from war, from conformity, from individualism, from failure, from success. Whether or not an escapist work explicitly shows us what we're escaping, it's still always there, revealed by what the escapist elements aren't. Escapism always reveals what we're escaping, and serves as a mirror of whatever the artist (or corporate overlord, as the case may be) views as the most horrendous elements of current reality. It's convex where dire reality is concave, like a plaster cast mold. If your goal is to get the clearest possible picture of "reality," looking at that reflection may be your best shot.

And yes, escapist entertainment does reflect the era that spawned it. The Space Age gave us lots and lots of space heroes, but today's escapist avatars are much more likely to be superheroes — who existed during the Space Age, but were much more confined to comics and the occasional weak TV series. Actually, thinking about it some more, our most escapist works currently seem to fall neatly into three categories: superheroes, vampires and post-apocalyptic survivors. All of whom share a few categories that seem emblematic of our times: they're individualistic, they're special, and they're often at odds with a world that doesn't understand how special and great they are. In other words, they're the perfect heroes for a time when we're no longer involved in a collossal economic struggle like the Cold War, but instead are facing a crumbling middle class and a number of insoluble global struggles, in North Korea, Iraq and Iran, among others. Escapism illuminates our times.

Escapism also does go hand in hand with the epic, the same impulse to celebrate great heroes that gave us the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Returning to the Le Guin quote, it strikes me that what she's describing as escapism is actually better described as "weak story-telling." Stories in which there are no consequences, in which the choices are easy and the heroes always right, aren't escapist — they're just bad.

If escapism is frequently tawdry and dull — if our culture gives us Transformers 2 instead of Superman II — blame the creators, don't blame escapism itself. In fact, holding a low opinion of escapism (and saying things like "It's just a movie about explosions and robots, don't expect too much from it") lets the Michael Bays of this world off the hook too easily.

Let's give the last word to C.S. Lewis, who's quoted by Arthur C. Clarke as having once said, "Who are the people who are most opposed to escapism? Jailors!"

The AV Club's "Gateways To Geekery" series recommends Robert Sobel's Pulitzer Prize-nominated 1972 novel For Want Of A Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won At Saratoga as the gateway drug for alternate history virgins:

This effective blending of the fanciful and the banal is what makes For Want Of A Nail such a good place to start. The writing style, by its very dryness, achieves a wonderful balance between the counterfactual history-which goes into tremendous depth, with endless variations springing forth from the most minor historical divergences-and the fictional wonders, to the point that when a huge corporation, the invented Kramer Associates, ends up as a nuclear power near the end of the book, it seems like the most reasonable thing in the world. For those interested in the "history" part of "alternate history," the book is incredibly well-researched and meticulous in its presentation of real-world historical figures; for those who like the "alternate" part, it's fascinating for how those figures play a completely different role in this always plausible, yet entirely unpredictable, divergent path of American history.

And if that book grabs you, the AV Club suggests a few classics, like Philip K. Dick's The Man In The High Castle and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years Of Rice And Salt, as well as the harder-to-find Norman Spinrad novel, The Iron Dream. But the Club warns newbies off Turtledove ("his body of work is intimidatingly vast, and not very good") and says Roth's The Plot Against America "works best as literature, with its historical aspects often coming across as flat or not entirely credible." No mention of other oft-raised classics, like Fatherland. Or The Yiddish Policeman's Union, for that matter. (Although both books do get mentioned in the comments.) [AV Club]

Says Chabon:

Jack Vance is the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don't get the credit they deserve. If ‘The Last Castle' or ‘The Dragon Masters' had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it would be received as a profound meditation, but because he's Jack Vance and published in Amazing Whatever, there's this insurmountable barrier.

The Times article gives a great look inside Vance's life and creative process, including the fact that he wrote his first published stories while serving in the merchant marine during World War II. And it talks a lot about his playful use of language, and the ways in which he uses a mock-high culture voice to flesh out his richly imagined worlds. And of course, the ways in which he explored how languages can shape culture, in books like Languages Of Pao.

Even besides the fact that he's getting a massive write-up in the Times, the article also makes the case that Vance is finally getting his due as a literary master. There's the new tribute anthology set in his desolate far-future world, Songs Of The Dying Earth, with superstar contributors including Simmons and Neil Gaiman. There's Totality Online, a website which allows you to search all of Vance's published works for any word or phrase. And there's a complete 45-volume set of all of Vance's published works, the Vance Integral Edition. At age 92, maybe Jack Vance's time has finally come. [New York Times]

"Utah has become Hollywood's destination spot for depicting exotic intergalactic worlds.," notes the state's Salt Lake Tribune, citing the new Star Trek, the original Planet of the Apes, and now, the adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' pioneering Barsoom saga.. But while Star Trek spent just four days shooting in the Beehive State, the Tribune reports that director Andrew Stanton's (WALL-E) production will spend at least seven months there, including 45 days of filming. The state has other ties to Burroughs; he served as a railroad cop in Salt Lake City in 1904.

Burroughs' John Carter novels, about a Civil War vet who finds himself doing a lot of alien-fighting and princess-rescuing on the planet next door, are the source of what will be the first live-action movie for much of the Pixar team. The script, co-written by Stanton, got a recent polish from Michael Chabon. We've been waiting for a good John Carter movie since, oh, about 1917, so the prospect of Disney's 2012 release fills us with childlike glee. No doubt Utahns feel the same way; the $28 million and 400 jobs the production is expected to bring to the state should more than make up for losing the Footloose remake to Georgia. (With Chace Crawford instead of Zac Efron in the lead? Georgia can have him.)

Michael Chabon, author of such books as The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, has signed on to rewrite the script for Disney's big-screen adaption of A Princess of Mars, the first of eleven books in the John Carter saga. Chabon's previous screenwriting experience is writing a draft of Spider-Man 2, although only about a third of his material made it to the finished film.

Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily on the LA Weekly website first mentioned this news last Wednesday in passing in a post about Chabon switching agents; the post listed John Carter of Mars as one of his screenwriting credits.

Intrigued, Chabon fansite The Amazing Website of Kavalier & Clay contacted the man directly. Chabon confirmed the story:

"I've been hired to do some revisions to an already strong script by Andrew Stanton and Mark Andrews," Chabon said. "I wrote my original screenplay The Martian Agent back in 1995 because I wished I could do [Edgar Rice] Burroughs's Barsoom. So this is pretty much a dream come true for me."

Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs first began exploring his vision of Mars, which he called Barsoom after the native Martians' name for the planet, in the 1912 serial Under the Moons of Mars, which was later collected and published in 1917 as Princess of Mars. The books follow John Carter, a Civil War veteran who is inexplicably transported to Mars and plunged into civil war between the dying planet's many inhabitants.

Thanks to his bravery in battle and extensive military skills, Carter quickly earns the respect of the warlike Green Martians, but their capture and imprisonment of the Red Martian Princess Dejah Thoris soon tests his newfound allegiances. Building off of nineteenth century astronomer Percival Lowell's long since debunked notions of Mars, including the planet's infamous supposed canal system, Burroughs spun a pulpy tale of epic adventure and romance that influenced the likes of Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan.

Disney gained the rights to the John Carter books in 2007, after Paramount gave up on the project. Previous adaptation attempts had included directors such as Robert Rodriguez and Jon Favreau. Current director Andrew Stanton is best known for his work with Pixar, where he directed Finding Nemo and Wall-E. Stanton and Mark Andrews completed a first draft in 2008; it is unclear whether Chabon will be simply revising or completely rewriting the script. The movie is currently set for a 2012 release date to mark the centenary of the original serial.

[The Amazing Website Of Kavalier & Clay]

Both authors were clearly fans of one another's work; the format was something akin to a very digressive chat show with Matt Fraction hosting, feeding in questions and moving things along. Chabon energetically defended and riffed on the idea of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who could break out the deepest geek shibboleths at need, talked about encounters with Stan Lee and Will Eisner, and generally paid homage to the culture that had energized a lot of his work.

If there was a narrative line to the appearance, it was the tale of Chabon's gradual coming-out as a genre fiction fan and author. He painted a vivid picture of a lit/nerd's progress. He was born in 1963, and grew up during a Lee/Kirby hegemony, immersed in genre fiction of all kinds - Lovecraft, Conan Doyle, Moorcock, Leiber (if I judge Gentlemen of the Road's influences correctly). In the days pre-internet, even pre-VHS, fans of pulpy genre work had a lonelier watch to keep, turning out for only the rare face-to-face moments at screenings and conventions.

When he tried to bring this material to the MFA fiction program at U. C. Irvine, he was frozen out - it was still the age of Carver, of brief, lapidary studies of broken marriages. He made a breakout debut with Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but the material that had such a hold on his imagination and sense of identity only gradually made its way back into his fiction - comic book allusions in Wonder Boys, where he pushed some of his genre passion onto a fictional alter ego, a Lovecraftian author name August Van Zorn (who at one point was purported to have written a collection entitled The Abominations of Plunkettsburg). Then the early slipstream of Werewolves in Their Youth, then the full-on comics fest of Kavalier and Klay, which at the time seemed like a dead-end project. He credits comics fans as the early adopters of the work that helped turn it into a success.

This narrative was framed within a larger story of a kind of nerd cultural insurgency by which the literary and artistic worlds are gradually being made safe for geekdom. Since 2000, we've seen Lethem's Fortress of Solitude followed, Susannah Clarke, Kelly Link, and so many new slipstream authors we're at a point where it's hard to count them all. As staple SF magazines like Asimov's Science Fiction lost prominence, McSweeney's took on their role in a high-art guise. Chabon edited McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, where he deliberately mixed genre authors and literary fiction writers.

He also described the backlash his fantasy novel Summerland received, and pointed out that on the other side of the coin, a high-art author like Cormac McCarthy can write Westerns and post-apocalyptic SF, but will never get moved over to that side of the bookstore, because "if it's good, it can't be SF."

But if it's a gradual struggle, victory feels inevitable. The hardened boundaries between high and low culture handed down from the early 20th century can't stand forever. As Chabon pointed out, 1963 was a year with a powerful cohort including Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo Del Toro, and Jonathem Lethem is only a year behind. Today, the closeted nerd artists have now infiltrated culture's governing institutions as editors, studio execs, and reviewers. Today, our boundary-annihilating president collects Conan the Barbarian comics.

Image via ToFuGuns.

Maybe that pigeonhole is bigger than we thought. Duchovny commented in a recent interview with Sci Fi Wire:

I never thought of The X-Files as science fiction. I always thought of it as playing this character in this world. The world was recognizable to me. It wasn't The Jetsons. It was present time. You couldn't fly. You couldn't transport our bodies over a teleport and all that stuff, so it was the real world, and it didn't feel like sci-fi to me.

Point taken — but, uh, remember your UFO poster? That room full of bug-eyed green fetuses? The computer that developed free will? (Not to mention the abducted sister, the abducted partner, the alien worm virus, the malevolent slime, the supernaturally strong clones ....) That's science fiction, buddy. And there ain't no shame in it.

We've gotten into trouble before playing genre-labeling games, but in the spirit of Michael Chabon, it must be said: Science fiction is, indeed, just good storytelling, with far-out ideas that are backed by what we know of the universe so far — and it spurs us forward to discover more. As Duchovny put it later in the interview, The Dark Knight suffocated theaters this summer (and is now suffocating joyful DVD and Blu-Ray players everywhere); there's a reason for that. Science fiction is for everybody, and it's here to stay.

Duchovny definitely understands that last bit. Though most non-Philes seem to be pooh-poohing the idea of any more Mulder and Scully, he's still into it:

I always talk to [X-Files creator] Chris [Carter] about how fascinating today it would be to take this guy from his early 30s and let's take him into his mid-50s, late 50s. Maybe nobody wants to see 60-year-old Fox Mulder, but we can grow him. We can take him through life's hardships and changes. It doesn't have to be this cartoon where nothing changes. You can actually form the flow of this movie and the expanse of this show to embrace actual passage of time and what that does to a person and relationships. To me, that's interesting as an actor and as a person. As an intellectually based character, you don't give a damn what he looks like.

Well, to a point. As long as Old Fox Mulder doesn't look like the freakishly speed-aged Doctor from "The Last of the Time Lords," I'm on board.

Duchovny Still Believes in X-Files [via Sci Fi Wire]

Image from Scificool.com.

I actually find myself disagreeing with Michael Chabon, somewhat, when he claims there's no real difference between literary and genre fiction. I've spent enough time in the literary scene (well, a literary scene) to get a sense that there is such a thing as literary writing. It has its own set of clichés, its own expectations, and its own chosen subject matter. You don't pick up the New Yorker, much less a small lit journal whose name ends in "Review," expecting to see the same kind of thing you'd see in Asimov's. You just don't.

At the same time, there's no one "literary establishment," with a single viewpoint. A couple of years ago, the New York Times Book Review polled 125 critics and authors to decide the best novels of the past 25 years. The winner, Toni Morrison's Beloved, got only 15 votes. Most other selections got only a handful of votes, meaning that nobody could agree on the best works. Not only that, but the list of winning books absolutely screams "lowest common denominator," with an over-representation of boring hacks like John Updike. (My hero Donald Hall spends a whole chapter in his seminal writing handbook Writing Well explaining, pitilessly and irrefutably, why John Updike really is a terrible writer, sentence by sentence.)

And that's the thing: the most literary writing from the "literary world" never really attains much prominence outside of a cloistered scene that talks amongst itself. There are tons of writers who are literary superstars in some context, but they'll never get profiled in Entertainment Weekly or reviewed in the NYTBR, any more than any paperback scifi writer will. In fact, the literary world is a lot like science fiction in that respect. There are literary stars who never break out of the lit ghetto, and then there are some who cross over and become "mainstream." There are people who the Quinnipiac Review will fall over itself to publish, whom you'll never in a million years hear of.

Which is the point, sort of — maybe at some point in the past the term "literary" referred to works, from whatever genre, that had stood the test of time and gained classic stauts. But nowadays "literary" refers to a particular type of writing. It's a genre in its own right, just like science fiction.

"Literary" certainly doesn't mean "good." It's a description for one way in which writing can be good. But something can be literary and not particularly good, and writing can be good without being particularly literary.

Let's take a concrete example: I recently reviewed David Louis Edelman's Multireal, and a while before that I reviewed The Stone Gods by former literary darling Jeanette Winterson. There is no doubt in my mind that Edelman's novel is a much better book than The Stone Gods, which is a severely flawed work. But The Stone Gods is a thousand times more literary than Multireal. Literary qualities that The Stone Gods possesses include a masterful, poetic prose style; a clever experimentation with narrative form; a heavy layer of irony over the main characters' inner lives; a story that jumps around in time and repeats the same motifs and characters across different settings. Multireal, by contrast, tells a complicated story in a fairly straightforward way. The earlier novel, Infoquake, has one big flashback that takes up a third of the book, and there are some dream sequences here and there. But it's not that arty.

Certainly there are some SF writers writing today who are "literary." Kim Stanley Robinson comes to mind, as does Geoff Ryman. Sarah Hall's Carhullan Army/Daughters Of The North, which just won the Tiptree Award, is extremely literary. Many lit snobs now talk about Samuel R. Delany with as much rapture as they reserve for Raymond Carver or Alice Munroe.

What would you get if science fiction novels and stories were more "literary"? It wouldn't necessarily make them better, or even help them gain respectability. But here's a random, and possibly wrong-headed, selection of what you might get if science fiction went more "lit.":

1) More ambiguity. A friend of mine used to joke that the New Yorker's short stories always had to end with a "clarifying moment of ambiguity." We're not sure what's just happened, and nothing has actually been resolved, but we feel somehow better, or worse, about the whole business now that it's over. Oh, and here's a teacup. Isn't it shiny? So forget having everything explained — in fact, the less we understand about what just happened, the better.

2) Fancier word-play. Most science fiction stories and novels use language as a tool to get the story across. They're usually written serviceably, but not sparklingly. There are usually way too many adverbs, too many passive sentences, and too much use of the verb "to be." In literary writing, by contrast, there's an obsession with prose style. Every sentence must dapple, like sunlight through a babboon's toes in the jungle. A couple years ago, I got on the mailing list for a few of the biggest literary publishers and found myself receiving a couple dozen literary books a month. I read as many of them as I could, and the writing was often quite lovely, even when the stories left no other impression on my mind. MFA programs are exploding with people who have been drilled to create prose bonsai.

3) Paragraphs that start with numbers. I have no idea where this fad came from — maybe poetry? — but I still see it a lot, especially in short fiction. It used to be lists, or fake memos, but I think those are out now. But numbers are still around.

4) Heroes who are less heroic. Look at it this way: Why is Hamlet the most written about of Shakespeare's plays? It's not because it's good. Hamlet is actually a pretty weak play, lacking the cleverness of As You Like It or the heaviness of the Scottish play. Several other Shakespeare plays, including The Tempest, have nicer writing. Actors like Hamlet because the lead role gives them a chance to have fun grandstanding and Burbageing. But critics love Hamlet because the main character is such a poor hero. He couldn't lace his boots without agonizing about it for hours, and he's horrified by his own mortality in precisely the way that a hero isn't supposed to be. So goodbye escapist science fiction heroes, hello angsty wanderers!

5) Tell us more about the teacup. It's chipped on one side, but somehow the friction from all those fingernails holding it steady has worn it down. So the chipped area feels almost polished, as if the cup-maker chipped it herself, and then glazed it. There's a stain on its base that no amount of scrubbing with the wiry brush is ever equal to removing. It has a pattern of flowers and baby's breath, which you haven't noticed in years.

6) A fetishization of a certain kind of person. People joke about the literary story revolving around suburban malaise, but it's sort of true nonetheless. During my year of reading piles of literary books, I read tons of near-identical stories of growing up with a nanny, or being a soccer mom, or being a business dad. For some reason, a lot of literary novels start with a funeral, forcing a successful thirtysomething or fortysomething person to return to his/her family and uncover the buried secrets of his/her childhood. (Think Sweet Home Alabama, but not quite as cute.) In science fiction terms, this would mean more stories about middle managers, shuttling around below decks on the starcruiser and wondering if this is all there is to life.

7) Why do we feel bad? A lot of the most interesting literary fiction that I've read lately has a kind of malaise running underneath it. Angsty, or maybe angry. I'm thinking Gary Amdahl type stuff. Stories about people who feel bad or pissed off for reasons they can't articulate, and which we understand even less well than they do. Science fiction has come a long way since the days when it had to feature "happy, competent characters" with no emotional problems. But it's still the literature of problem-solving, not anhedonia.

So it's a "be careful what you wish for" type of thing. As I said earlier, some science fiction is genuinely literary, as much as anything in The New Yorker ever is, but I wouldn't want to see all science fiction writers making that their life's goal.

I love literary fiction, for mostly different reasons than I love science fiction. There are truths you can only tell by being playful with words, or by delving into intentional murkiness. The best literary fiction is both clever and heart-throttling, making you confront the "boredom, the horror and the glory" of life by forcing you to see more clearly, or more murkily, than you're accustomed to seeing. The best science fiction, by contrast, is about exploring brilliant ideas, thought experiments, possible futures or just escapist fun. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Illuminatus said:

Don't hate on Chabon. That guy is in the trenches defending SF and Fantasy. Check out Maps & Legends if you need proof. And he's bringing literary snobs (read, my former roommate) over to SF and Fantasy. He earned it . . . What you're saying is that it bothers you that the superior author won the prize. That's like saying Olympic gold medalists shouldn't be allowed to compete in other tournaments, because they are guaranteed the prize.

It just isn't the case. Neither Cormac McCarthy nor Thomas Pynchon were even nominated, despite the fact that both The Road and Gravity's Rainbow are sci-fi books. GR even won the Saturn Award. This isn't some lit author slumming it to win an award, this is recognition of good writing in a genre the author respects and cherishes.

Most big lit writers who try this sort of stuff fail miserably or, worse, are chastised for it. The Road and The Yiddish Policeman's Union are exceptions, not the rule.

Goodness, 95% of the Hugo winners are hardcore SF writers, it's alright if once every two decades a "mainstream lit" writer gets one. It probably means they've earned it.

Then Pink Clerical Collar wrote:

And as for Chabon, he's never pulled a Vonnegut; he's too legit to quit, and after KAVALIER AND CLAY, he's a fanboy I trust to keep it real no matter how mainstream /slipstream / crossed streams he gets.

Ron Hogan added:

Annalee writes, "It felt a little wrong to me that the award went to somebody who writes mainstream literary fiction that merely borrows a few tropes from SF."

TYPU does not "merely borrow a few tropes." It is a fully formed science fiction novel—and, apparently, one that both science fiction fans AND science fiction writers consider worthy of recognition as best in show, considering that Chabon also won the Nebula three months ago.

Using the "merely borrows a few tropes" argument, by the way, one might conceivably argue that Charlie Stross wasn't doing science fiction when he wrote HALTING STATE, merely dabbling in technothrillery with a few futuristic touches.

Tim Faulkner asked pointedly:

If scifi fans don't want their favorite genre to be an ostracized ghetto, why do they insist on it being an ostracized ghetto?

Lightning Louie finally persuaded me completely by writing:

But here's the thing: "mainstream" is a total misnomer, a marketing term. The "literary fiction" section at your local retailer boasts plenty of fantasy and science fiction novels, as well as representatives of other genres, whether it's Winter's Tale, Little, Big, or Lonesome Dove. The notion of genre as a form of identity politics is just an excuse not to read more widely, and it's a surefire guarantee for boredom.

OK, you guys totally win. One of the foundational ideas behind io9 is that science fiction is mainstream pop culture, and writers like Chabon prove that's the case.

It's sometimes hard to throw off that ghetto feeling when you're a scifi nerd. But even the Hugo voters who made Chabon this year's winner know that the world of scifi is changing. It's not just the genre of underground scifi conventions. It's everybody's genre, and has invaded literary fiction and Hollywood movies alike.

So that's why I was wrong about Chabon. He represents the future of science fiction as popular fiction, and it's encouraging to see people both within and outside scifi fandom recognizing that.

Chabon, of course, has come in for some scorn recently from Publisher's Weekly (In PW's review of his essay collection Maps And Legends) for being "bitter and defensive about his love for genre fiction such as mysteries and comic books. Serious writers, he says, cannot venture into these genres without losing credibility."

Without mentioning that mean review, we asked Chabon whether he feels he's faced any opprobrium for his love of science fiction and other genre fiction. He responded:

I don't actually feel like I've suffered from that that much... I'm coming at it now having proven myself, and I've established my credentials, and i don't get as much resistance as I might. But I certainly remember in my early 20s, I wanted to write SF of a kind back then. And I turned in a lot of these stories to the writers workshop at UC Irvine. I was met with, if not hostility then incomprehension. [People said things like] "I can't help you with that. I don't write science fiction. I don't read science fiction." That was part of what encouraged me to stop trying for a while and start doing something different... Part of what made me want to write [the novel] Mysteries Of Pittsburgh was I wanted to not waste my time with something [that couldn't get any meaningful feedback at Irvine]. I'm not really encountering that right now, but I certainly do see that other writers [encounter it]... And when HP Lovecraft was selected for the Library of America, so many of the reviews were supercilious, [with] raised eyebrows... A lot of the writers I most admire have suffered from it.

Other stuff Chabon addressed on Tuesday:

The status of his movies: Kavalier And Clay "is dead for now, nothing is happening, totally moribund, what we have here is a dead shark." The Yiddish Policemen's Union has had the "Coen brothers hired to write and direct and do all that... They have a reputation for working quickly and getting movies made, they don't have a reputation for getting a bunch of movies started and leaving them behind."

Why he rewrote Jewish history in Yiddish:

It's American history that I'm rewriting... I read about this at some point: Harold Ickes, father of the soon to be out-of-work Hillary [Clinton] adviser, [was] Secretary of the Interior in the Roosevelt Administration [and] was deeply concerned about the plight of the Jews. Since he was the Secretary of the Interior, he had this one thing he was in charge of, territories [including Alaska]. He had this plan of creating reservations [for the Jews]. You read about these little footnotes and might-have-beens ... and then I encountered this phrasebook called Say It In Yiddish. It says on the cover, "A Phrasebook for Travelers." [It's a] modern phrasebook dealing with all sorts of conveniences, dealing with travel agents and other things in Yiddish... [including some neologisms, like a new word for "downtown."] I just thought, "where would you go with this phrasebook? Where would you take a phrasebook like this?" The more I thought about it, the more I thought I would like to go there. I wish I could see it for myself.

Why is Yiddish Policemen's Union third person, present tense:

I wrote a 600 page version in first person past tense, [a] traditional Raymond Chandler version... I ended up with 600 pages of this loquacious Jew who wouldn't shut up and kept going off on tangents. He was a terrible detective narrator, he couldn't tell a story straight. "Just the facts" was not possible for him. I made the switch to third person, and that threw the whole novel open. I threw out that entire 600 page draft... I didn't want it to feel like a fairy land or a made-up place... I wanted it to feel like now, it's happening now... as soon as I switched to the present tense it felt more now. I felt more involved in what was happening, so maybe the readers would [as well].

Is it just a coincidence that Iranian president Ahmadjinedad said the Jews should go to Alaska, which is the backstory of Yiddish Policemen's Union?

Total coincidence... at the root of this outrageous statement and behind this novel [are the same idea]. What underlies the initial Ickes proposal [was] this idea that we need an empty place to put these people... Harold Ickes looked at his map and said there's 15,000, 20,000 natives living there, and 10,000 Europeans living in this vast territory [of Alaska], and he thought: great place to put these people nobody wants... The same kind of spatial logic is underlying what Ahmadjinedad is saying. He's trying to come up with what in his view is a rational inoffensive proposal: "You've got all this space up there, you love these people so much. Why don't you take them?" I don't think he's actually read this book.

In Yiddish, is the Hotel Zamenhof named after founder of Esperanto?

Yes. All the signage is in Esperanto... I imagine some pious soul, founder of the hotel, was an admirer of Esperanto... Zamenhof was originally a Yiddish speaker. Yiddish was originally called Jewish Esperanto [because it was a pan-European language.] It was a failed project. It was a failed utopia. It didn't work out, but it's still there. [That's] true of this place in my novel.

NOVELLA: "Fountain of Age", Nancy Kress (Asimov's Jul 2007)
Kress' latest collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls, is about to hit the bookstores. I'm excited to read it, and will be reviewing it here!

NOVELETTE: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", Ted Chiang (F&SF Sep 2007; Subterranean Press)

SHORT STORY: "Always", Karen Joy Fowler (Asimov's Apr/May 2007)
Fowler's latest novel, Wit's End, just came out this month.

SCRIPT: Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro
This tale of a girl, a fairy kingdom, and a nation full of fascists was one of the best fantasy movies I've ever seen. Del Toro is directing Hellboy 2, and two forthcoming movies based on The Hobbit. His monsters are more sympathetic and nuanced than most human characters.

ANDRE NORTON AWARD: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (Scholastic)
Apparently Rowling has ever won a Nebula before. About time.

My favorite multiverse Marxist, Michael Moorcock, was presented the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. I hope that means he gets to wear a cloak or something. Or maybe shiny shoes? Nothing says "grand master" like shiny shoes.

(Thanks for the reminder, Saadiq!)

Nebula Winners [Locus Online]

What we found: As you might imagine, the real surge in literary novels with science fiction themes came in the past five or six years, after literary journal Conjunctions published its "New Wave Fabulist" issue and magical realism was on the wane. There were literary novels with SF themes, like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which didn't really fit into the general subject areas of "alternate history," "time warp," or "post-apocalyptic." We were most interested in seeing which years featured the most literary novels featuring those themes.

Of those three subcategories, alternate history was the most consistent, with literary authors using it to explore how wars could have gone differently, but also other topics. Not surprisingly, you saw more alternate history novels at the start of this period, when the U.S. was active in Somalia and still bombing Iraq, and then at the end, when we had invaded Iraq. Alternate history is traditionally a fairly conservative genre, with authors like Newt Gingrich dabbling in it and exploring how things could have turned out worse if we hadn't stiffened our spines. But a recent spate of alt-history novels is more liberal, exploring a world where the Aztecs never fell (Atomik Aztex) and a world where the Jews got a homeland in Alaska and we avoided the Middle East conflict (Yiddish Policemen's Union).

There was a boomlet in time-travel fiction, and stories about time acting strange, in 2003-2004, with Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife proving a huge mainstream hit. This was the peak of the Bush-era resurgence in conservativism, with a lot of mainstream nostalgia about World War II and the Greatest Generation.

And then was a boom in post-apocalyptic fiction in more recent years, with three huge classics of the genre hitting in 2006. In particular, Cormac McCarthy's The Road has become the poster-child for the literary-authors-going-speculative trend. These books coincided with the Indian Ocean Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and a worsening Iraq conflict. But there's been a lull in the post-apocalyptic genre since then as well.

The biggest difference in Chabon's draft is the character of Doctor Octopus, who's much more complex and rich, with moments of great urbanity.

Otto doesn't have a wife who dies as a result of his octopus-arms experiment going awry. Instead, he's single and actually courts Peter's would-be girlfriend Mary-Jane, with a great deal of success. There's a great scene where they go to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant. Says Octopus, "I like to eat with my hands." He also tells her,"I'm a little freaky."

There's also a running subplot where Harry Osborn, Peter's roommate and the son of the Green Goblin, has put extreme security measures in place in their apartment, including steel bars and retinal scanners, among other things. Harry is having weird nightmares about his dead father, and he takes out a $10 million bounty on Spider-man's head, with the help of the Daily Bugle. Spider-Man keeps almost getting killed by ordinary people whom he's trying to help, because they want a chance at that money.

Remember that whole sequence in the movie where Peter decides he's sick of being Spider-Man, and then loses his powers for no particular reason? And he suddenly needs glasses again? And it's never explained, but then he randomly gets his powers back when he needs them most? In Chabon's draft, it actually makes sense. He talks to Otto Octavius, who gives him a special "pacer chip" that will reverse his spider-encoding DNA. Because Otto worked on the super-spider project that led to Peter getting his powers, he has the ability to reverse them.

So Peter injects himself with the chip, and slowly loses his powers. By the end of the film, he's totally powerless and having to improvise using a truck and some "webbing" made out of orange fencing when he fights Dr. Octopus.

Instead of Dr. Octopus going berserk and robbing a bank, he finally loses it when he's on a date with Mary Jane. He decides to wear his cybernetic arms on the date, because of the "endorphin push" he gets from them. (The script talks a lot about the "endorphin push" and how it counteracts Otto's pain, to the point where it becomes super-creepy.) And while on the date, Otto uses his cyber-arms to beat up a couple of guys who hassle him and Mary Jane, to her horror.

Dr. Octopus doesn't become permanently fused to his exo-arms until a bit after that, when he and Spider-Man have their subway-train fight and Spider-Man is trying to disable the arms.

And the reason why Dr. Octopus wants to capture Spider-Man is not just to please Harry Osborn, but also because that "pacer chip" that took away Spider-Man's powers will also help stabilize his fusion with the bionic limbs, which is killing him. The sequence where he makes an alliance with Harry over Spider-Man's prospective dead body makes a lot more sense in Chabon's draft.

The business with Aunt May finding out that Peter could have stopped the thief that killed Uncle Ben and becoming angry is much more intense and moving in Chabon's draft. And then later in the movie, she and Peter have an incredibly poignant scene together where she tells him that feeling crushed by your responsibilities is just normal life, for everybody. It's not something you can escape, and it's not a special destiny. It's just life.

And instead of Spider-Man getting his powers back as mysteriously as he loses them, he gets them back by using a knife and some pliers to dig the "pacer chip" out of his arm. It's a gross but extremely effective scene.

And in the end, Dr. Octopus manages to capture Spider-Man and straps him to his nasty spine-extracting machine. And that's when Harry and Mary Jane both learn Spider-Man's true identity. And it's Mary Jane who gets through to Dr. Octopus, thanks to the connection that the two of them forged earlier in the movie, and convinces him to abandon his experiment. Then Spider-Man breaks free and saves her from Otto's collapsing laboratory building.

All in all, it's much more coherent and effective than the somewhat jumbled version we saw on screen, not surprisingly. Get it while you can!

Update: McSweeney's has already taken the PDF down, after just a couple of days of being online. But I would be shocked if you had any trouble tracking down a copy.

[Jeff Vandermeer]