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]

Taking his role of "Official Intellectual Who Makes It Okay to Think About Comics" very seriously, Chabon's essay "Secret Skin" strips Superman and friends of their clothes piece by piece to consider just what's so powerful about the image of people in tights fighting crime:

So let's lose the cape. As for the boots—we are not married to the boots. After all, Iron Fist sports a pair of kung-fu slippers, the Spirit wears brown brogues, Zatanna works her magic in stiletto heels, and Beast, Ka-Zar, and Mantis wear no shoes at all. Perhaps, though, we had better hold on to our unitards, crafted of some nameless but readily available fabric that, like a thin matte layer, at once coats and divulges the splendor of our musculature. Assemble the collective, all-time memberships of the Justice League of America, the Justice Society of America, the Avengers, the Defenders, the Invaders, the X-Men, and the Legion of Super-Heroes (and let us not forget the Legion of Substitute Heroes), and you will probably find that almost all of them, from Nighthawk to the Chlorophyll Kid, arrive wearing some version of the classic leotard-tights ensemble. And yet—not everyone. Not Wonder Woman, in her star-spangled hot pants and eagle bustier; not the Incredible Hulk or Martian Manhunter or the Sub-Mariner.

Consideration of the last named leads us to cast a critical eye, finally, on our little swim trunks, typically worn with a belt, pioneered by Kit Walker (for the Ghost Who Walks), the Phantom of the old newspaper strip, and popularized by the super-trendsetter of Metropolis. The Sub-Mariner wears nothing but a Eurotrashy green Speedo, suggesting that, at least by the decency standards of the old Comics Code, this minimal garment marks the zero degree of superheroic attire. And yet, of course, the Flash, Green Lantern, and many others make do without trunks over their tights; the forgoing of trunks in favor of a continuous flow of fabric from legs to torso is frequently employed to lend a suggestion of speed, sleekness, a kind of uncluttered modernism. And the Hulk never goes around in anything but those tattered purple trousers.

Second Skin [New Yorker]

New Orange (1673). Those butter-fingered Dutch lost New York not once, but twice. The first time, the British came and seized the city of New Amsterdam by force in 1664, naming it New York after Charles II's brother the Duke of York. But then the Dutch took it back in the Third Dutch-English War of 1673 and renamed it "New Orange," after the Prince of Orange.
After that, the Dutch were living in a siege mentality and preparing to do whatever it took to keep the Big Orange in their grasp. But their politicians let them down, giving the city back to the Brits without a fight, in exchange for Suriname in South America. But what if the Dutch had hung on to it? It could have stayed Dutch long after 1776, and Americans would be making pilgrimages to the cannibis cafes of New Orange.

The Great Fire of New York (1835). This terrible conflagration started near Pearl St., and quickly spread to Exchange Place, the NYSE and Wall Street. It burned for between 16 and 24 hours, destroying 674 buildings across 17 blocks and 50 acres. Fire fighters had a hard time getting water because the Hudson was frozen solid. Metal from shutters and roofs melted and ran down the streets.
But it could have been much, much worse. The Great Fire of London, just 169 years earlier, burned for four days, not one. The New York Conflagration reached the top of the Tontine Hall, too high for the cold-numbed firefighters' hoses to reach. The last-ditch plan of using a huge "gin puncheon" (cask) to get water onto the roof tiles saved the upper part of the city. How would New York look now if the fire had destroyed mid-town Manhattan? Hint: the actual street where the fire started, Merchant St., doesn't exist any more, since that part of the city was rebuilt with a new layout.

The Blasting of Flood Rock (1885). In the nineteenth century, a section of the East River from 90th street to around 100th street, near the Harlem River was known as "Hell Gate" because it was so difficult for sea-faring vessels to navigate. It had a giant whirlpool (because of currents from Long Island Sound) and huge jagged rocks. A thousand ships ran aground every year. The Harbor Master of New York begged the federal government for help. So the U.S. Army destroyed the biggest rock, Flood Rock, by detonating 285,000 pounds of an explosive mixture called "Rack-A-Rock," plus 5,000 pounds of dynamite. It may have been the largest civil detonation up to that point. Here's a photo which 12-year-old Mary Newton took:
What if the Army had turned down the gig, or been unable to pull it off? Private efforts had already blasted some of the smaller rocks in Hell Gate. But without the destruction of Flood Rock, New York would have been unable to reach its full potential as a port city. Just 40 years after this blast, New York overtook London as the largest city in the world.

LOMEX (1941). Robert Moses, aka "Bob The Builder," had a plan to knock down a huge stretch of Lower Manhattan, including SOHO, and build a massive freeway across the city. It would have connected the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. At one point, in 1946, Moses proposed a six-lane elevated expressway in the vicinity of Canal St. Just imagine the huge overpasses. Plans continued into the 1950s. Here's an artist's conception of what SOHO would have looked like:
A huge grass-roots movement opposed the development, led by Jane Jacobs, author of The Life and Death of Great American Cities. But in the end, it was skyrocketing budget estimates for the project, plus the failure of downtown Manhattan office buildings to generate the expected traffic, that scuttled the project. (As recently as 1998, planners were discussing reviving the project on the Usenet group misc.transport.roads.) If the city and federal bureaucracy hadn't delayed LOMEX for so long, SOHO wouldn't exist today.

Neu York (1946). Finally, here's an "alternate history map" that shows what NYC would look like if the Nazis had won World War II. Melissa Gould painstakingly reshaped "Neu York," giving streets German names (Rhein instead of Canal) and eliminating post-war buildings and anything with a Jewish name. (Via Claire Light.)
Blade Runner concept art by Syd Mead.