The Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, VA already staged a faithful re-enactment of Poe's death last week, but the funeral will be much cooler than the original travesty. According to the Associated Press, Poe's cousin Neilson Poe, never announced his death publicly, and "fewer than ten" people attended the "hasty funeral." A train and derailed and crashed into a stonecutter's yard, shattering Poe's tombstone before it could be installed at his grave. Poe's enemy, Rufus Griswold, wrote him a "libellous obituary" that damaged his reputation for decades.

Sadly, there's not enough left of Poe's actual corpse to dig up and rebury in the new funeral, explains Jeff Jerome, creator of the Poe House & Museum:

When they dug up Poe's body in 1875 to move it, it was mostly skeletal remains. I've seen remains of people who've been in the ground since that time period, and there's hardly anything left.

But Jerome is still determined to make the funeral "as realistic as possible" for the packed house of fans, who are traveling from as far away as Vietnam for the event. So he's commissioned special effects artist Eric Supensky to create a new Poe corpse for the occasion, and it looks amazingly convincing. "I got chills," Jerome told AP. "People are going to freak out."

The funeral's master of ceremonies will be John Astin, better known as Gomez Addams on the Addams Family. Attendees will include actors playing Sarah Helen Whitman (a minor poet whom Poe courted), poet Walt Whitman, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alfred Hitchcock. But the first eulogy will come from none other than Poe's biggest detractor, Griswold — to give the rest of the mourners some anti-Poe vitriol to react against. [AP]

Now Butler's papers will join those of Jack London, Charles Bukowski and Christopher Isherwood in the library, which just received 39 cartons and eight file-cabinet drawers full of Butler's manuscripts, correspondence, school papers and photographs. It's a gold mine, including typed drafts of Kindred, and note cards with Butler's thoughts on the writing process.

Hodson heard Butler speak at a women's history seminar at the library years ago, and was immediately stunned by her ideas. So she ran up to Butler and "put my business card under her nose," she tells the Pasadena Star News. She kept pursuing Butler, until one visit, when Hodson was driving Butler around, and Butler told her, "the Huntington is in my will."

As Hodson says, it's terrible that Butler's papers are being delivered to the Huntington so soon — Hodson had expected someone else to be unpacking those boxes, years from now — but it's great that scholars will have access to so much insight into the inner workings of Butler's mind. [Pasadena Star-News]

In addition to these author portraits, Hey Oscar Wilde! includes renderings of science fiction characters, including Barbarella, Paul Atreides, Robert Neville, and Big Brother.

[Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!!! via Neatorama]

Isaac Asimov by Jason Armstrong
Mike Mignola by Scott Mills
Cormac McCarthy by Jamie Tolagson
William Gibson by Pia Guerra
Arthur C. Clark by Jeff Lemire
Douglas Adams by Tom Fowler
Michael Moorcock and J.R.R.Tolkien by Walt Simonson
Rod Serling by Scott Campbell
Neil Gaiman by Leigh Gallagher
HP Lovecraft by Bruce Timm
Samuel R. Delany by Mark Badger
Margaret Atwood by Andi Watson
Ray Bradbury by Val Mayerik
JK Rowling by Terry Moore
Kurt Vonnegut by D'Israeli
Aldous Huxley by Brian Ashmore
Alan Moore by Frazer Irving
HP Lovecraft by Saverio Tenuta
Edward Gorey by Troy Nixey
HG Wells by Charlie Adlard
Neal Stephenson by Matthew Clark
Jules Verne by Ted McKeever
Robert A. Heinlein by John K. Snyder III
Anne Rice by Craig Hamilton

Not surprisingly, Bushnell's novel in progress is about a "video game designer in the future," and it's "a hilarious experiment," he tells Switched.com. He won't go into much more detail, other than to promise there'll be some awesome action sequences. Bushnell has come out against ultra-violent video games like Grand Theft Auto because it's not constructive or cathartic to portray violence against a cop, sex worker or pimp. But it's okay to show someone killing zombies, because "they're already dead!"

Meanwhile, Bushnell is also coming back to video games, co-founding a new company called Reality Gap. He says that company's major innovation is to have a single in-game currency that will work across all of its games. So if you make tons of ducats in a medieval fantasy game, you can transfer that wealth to a space-adventure game and use to buy ray guns. (At least, that's what he seems to be saying.) Bushnell says a made-up currency was Chuck E. Cheese's major innovation back in the day:

The [game] token system was very key to the success of Chuck E. Cheese. It's something you can promote. You don't want to give away quarters, but with tokens, you can give away games. It gives you some very interesting flexibility to do cool and interesting things.

[Switched]

And, of course, there's something I call quantum flux, which is like the binding force behind everything in the universe. Plus, it can cause time travel. And it's an energy source, too.

Fournier goes on to talk about his effortless writing process, explains the various plot holes plugged by quantum flux, and describes his book as "The Matrix times a million." We can't wait for the sequel.

Sci-Fi Writer Attributes Everything Mysterious To 'Quantum Flux' [The Onion — Thanks, John!]

Cassidy says the project was inspired by a visit to a Hugo Award-winning author's house, where he began to wonder about the connection between a writer's work and their environment:

I spend a lot of time thinking about people's environments — the places they build around themselves, the things they choose to live with. Is there a connection, I started to wonder if there was a connection between the places that writers work and their work itself.

Cassidy plans to collect these and additional photos — including the Neil Gaiman and Lois McMaster Bujold's workspaces — with interviews from the authors into a full-length book.

[Where I Write via Metafilter]

The new day appears to be the brainchild of science fiction writer (and Liaden series co-author) Sharon Lee, along with some friends. Apparently they chose the date because June 23 is the day when Cyrano de Bergerac made his first fictional journey to the Moon. According to the Facebook page, yesterday was

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Day! A day of celebration and wonder! A day for all of us readers of science fiction and fantasy to reach out and say thank you to our favorite writers. A day, perhaps, to blog about our favorite sf/f writers. A day to reflect upon how written science fiction and fantasy has changed your life.

We'll definitely help spread the word about this day next year, especially if we get some advance notice. This time around, one person lit a candle in memory of A.E. Van Vogt, another person wrote some fantasy, and Lee celebrated the SF books that had made a difference in her life.

Of course, Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Day is going to face some stiff competition. According to this site, June 23 is already Take Your Dog To Work Day, National Columnists Day and National Pink Day. If your dog happens to be a science-fiction writer (and pink), then it'll all work out. At least they didn't try to do it on June 22, which was National Chocolate Eclair Day. Then we would have had a fight on our hands.

So consider this an open invitation to talk about the science fiction writers who changed your life. Or maybe what happened when you took your dog to work.

"As environmental ideas have entered the zeigeist, mostly thanks to global warming—and still mostly focused on that issue—plenty of technology companies are lining up to tell us how they're helping green/save/clean the environment. Advertising agencies and PR firms are delighted to sell us any number of "green" gizmos and they're throwing in some nice self-esteem blowjobs for all of us, using their persuasive talents to assure us that we're enlightened and forward thinking because we just stuffed a green X into our Prius.

"But green blowjobs aren't really my gig. I'm not interested in PV cells, or solar paint, or zero emissions cars, or any of a zillion other objects that companies want to sell us so that we can feel good about ourselves while we roar off the cliff. If I had to think of a couple technologies that I greatly admire, I would say... wool sweaters and long underwear are fabulous. They have a low manufacturing cost and are far more efficient than burning coal for electric heat, or burning heating oil, and they might even obviate the need for a better-insulated house. I remain enamored with bicycles and their gears. These technologies are so wonderfully elegant and do so much while asking so little that I like them quite a lot. And certainly I like the hat and gloves I wear so that I can ride my bike to work in the winter, instead of being tempted to drive my car.

"But the one—the most absolutely key, the rock star green technology—that I champion over all others is birth control: vasectomies, IUDs, the pill, condoms. I don't care which kind you or your family prefers or finds most appropriate, I love them all. Any technology that reduces the absolute number of consumers (and particularly Americans and Europeans who consume the most) now that's a TECHNOLOGY!" — Pump Six And Other Stories author Paolo Bacigalupi, interviewed at EcoGeek.org.

Writer Chris Nakashima-Brown just got back from a three-day colloquium on "parallel worlds" in Mexico, with Bruce Sterling, Linda Nagata, Mark Dery, Christopher Priest and M. John Harrison. Nakashima-Brown posted a tantalizing collection of soundbites about the Singularity, the economy and our posthuman future.

Among the choicest are Christopher Priest's claim that only speculative fiction novels really put the individual's choices at the center of the story: "Only in the modern speculative novel is responsibility the core, the argument, the message."

Bruce Sterling argues that celebrities, athletes and models will be the leading edge of posthumanism, but then he also says, "In the future, the poor will not be able to avoid becoming posthuman, because they just can't afford it."

And M. John Harrison says culture may already have collapsed, "and we may already be on the other side of it." Now, our personalities are being mediated through mass media. And the job of science fiction is to show how we're "compiling our personalities from moment to moment." The writer's task, says Harrison, is to "write about individuals who are constantly being mediated and re-mediated. Not alienated, but pureed." (Which sounds sort of Dickian to me.)

Nakashima-Brown's unreconstructed notes are a bit frustrating to read, but it sounds like it was a fascinating discussion, and just the bits you can read are thought-provoking.

Posthuman image from Anders Raytracing Page. [No Fear Of The Future]

The book in question, About Writing, isn't quite what I'd expected from someone who's been teaching creative writing for the past thirty years. It's definitely not a style guide or a tutorial on fiction writing. (The book's subtitle, "7 essays, 4 letters & 5 interviews," could be a bit of a clue.) Instead, it's Delany's ruminations, gathered over the years, about both the craft of fiction writing and the writer's life in general.

There are fantastic insights in there, as well as advice that might make you rethink everything about your approach to fiction writing - even if you end up disagreeing with some of it.

You have to have a bit of patience, though. Delany says, in the book's intro, that he doesn't think you can talk about how to write fiction, without also discussing why people write fiction, and the world in which we write it:

[This book] deals with three other topics and the relations between them. One - which it shares with most books on writing - is, yes, the art of writing fiction. The other two are far less often discussed in classes and rarely figure in such "how-to" books. First, how is the world structured - specifically the socio-aesthetic world - in which the writer works?... Second (and finally), this book discusses the way literary reputations grow - and how, today, they don't grow.

He goes on to prove his point in the intro, mixing a nuts-and-bolts discussion of scene-setting with a long passage on the nature of begeisterung (roughly translated as "inspiration," but it's actually one of those German words that needs a 500-word explanation in English.)

There are some good nuts-and-bolts essays - in particular, the essays on "Thickening The Plot" and "Characters" are pretty helpful. Even here, though, Delany throws some curveballs, albeit welcome ones. Take the essay on plot, for example. Delany goes off on some tangents, and also seems to be discussing scene-setting instead of plotting. But it all comes together, when he explains that the key to a good plot is actually visualizing the events of the story as if they really happened. And if you're forced - by a cranky critique group, or your own conscience - to change the story's events around, then you must revisualize the story all over again. See it in your mind, through the lens of key details, until you can convince yourself that "on some level the story actually did happen (as opposed to 'should have happened') in the new way." It's actually pretty amazing advice.

A lot of the other nuts-and-bolts advice winds up in the back of the book, in an appendix called "Nips, Nits, Tucks And Tips." Including info like when to use the first person, how to punctuate dialogue, and the dramatic structure of fiction.

The rest of the book includes speeches, essays and letters, where Delany tells funny anecdotes and reminisces about his early friendships with storytellers and his encounters with other science fiction writers. (I didn't actually know he taught Vonda McIntyre at Clarion, but apparently he did.) He explains why Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is a bad book, discusses how to achieve literary acclaim (including a discussion of Doris Lessing's refusal to cooperate with a would-be biographer) and a lengthy discussion of the state of writing and editing today.

The book is full of insights and startling arguments, but it's probably not a book you'll read in one go. I've found myself picking it up, reading one essay, and putting it down again for a day or two. It might actually be that rarest of creatures - academic bathroom reading. This isn't, by any means, a criticism. It's a very dense, ruminative book full of ideas that will pop into your head a few days after you read them. But it also feels a bit, at times, like Delany is sitting in an overstuffed armchair lecturing the reader, which goes over better in smaller doses. Luckily, the book comes packaged with the dosages already divided up.

Kingsley Amis, science fiction editor, critic, and author of The Altering, Russian Hide and Seek, and The Green Man, fills the stereotype of the drunken writer. He once noted that he had a “reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks of our time.” Although he claimed his inspiration didn’t come from the bottle, he made room for drinking, as well as writing, in his daily schedule:

I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter. That’s probably about ten-thirty, still in pajamas and dressing gown. And the agreement I have with myself is that I can stop whenever I like and go and shave and so on. In practice, it’s not till about one or one-fifteen that I do that—I usually try and time it with some music on the radio. Then I emerge, and nicotine and alcohol are produced. I work on until about two or two-fifteen, have lunch, then if there’s urgency about, I have to write in the afternoon, which I really hate doing—I really dislike afternoons, whatever’s happening. But then the agreement is that it doesn’t matter how little gets done in the afternoon. And later on, with luck, a cup of tea turns up, and then it’s only a question of drinking more cups of tea until the bar opens at six o’clock and one can get into second gear. I go on until about eight-thirty and I always hate stopping. It’s not a question of being carried away by one’s creative afflatus, but saying, “Oh dear, next time I do this I shall be feeling tense again.”

- The Paris Review, Winter 1975

Where Amis lazed about until the afternoons, Asimov preferred to devote the entire day to writing, often working all day, seven days a week, and sometimes writing entire books in a matter of days, a work ethic he reportedly developed in childhood:

His usual routine was to awake at 6 A.M., sit down at the typewriter by 7:30 and work until 10 P.M.

In "In Memory Yet Green," the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1979, he explained how he became a compulsive writer. His Russian-born father owned a succession of candy stores in Brooklyn that were open from 6 A.M. to 1 A.M. seven days a week. Young Isaac got up at 6 o'clock every morning to deliver papers and rushed home from school to help out in the store every afternoon. If he was even a few minutes late, his father yelled at him for being a folyack, Yiddish for sluggard. Even more than 50 years later, he wrote: "It is a point of pride with me that though I have an alarm clock, I never set it, but get up at 6 A.M. anyway. I am still showing my father I'm not a folyack."

The New York Times, April 7, 1992

Haruki Murakami, the Japanese surrealist writer who authored such novels as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, takes an approach toward writing and his daily life that is at the same regimented and mystical:

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

The Paris Review, Summer 2004

By contrast, Philip Roth, who wrote the alternate history The Plot Against America, works without a schedule, preferring to write as inspiration and insomnia strike him:

When I came to visit, it was a late-winter morning, and the snow was piled high around the studio. Roth was wearing a blue Shetland sweater, green corduroy pants. Often there is tweed. He dresses like a graduate student of the late fifties. He led me to the back room. There was a team photograph of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. There were free weights, a lifting bench, and an exercise mat. He had quintuple-bypass surgery eleven years ago and is determined to keep in shape. He stays out here all day and into the evening: no telephone, no fax. Nothing gets in. In the late afternoons, he takes long walks, often trying to figure out connections and solve problems in the novel that's possessing him.

"I live alone, there's no one else to be responsible for or to, or to spend time with," Roth said. "My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don't have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don't have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back out and I work for two or three more hours. If I wake up at two in the morning—this happens rarely, but it sometimes happens—and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can't sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I'm on a call. I'm like a doctor and it's an emergency room. And I'm the emergency."

David Remnick, Reporting: Writings From The New Yorker

Daily Routines: Writers [Daily Routines via Metafilter]

Over on her blog, she writes:

A friend sent me the URL for an amazing YouTube video in which over 200 people simultaneously freeze in place for five minutes at Grand Central Station (only in New York!) What's fascinating about this is the reactions of all the passers-by. They smile; they cell-phone their friends; they wait interestedly around to see what will happen next. One guy says it's probably a "protest" of some kind. A Grand Central employee, unable to drive his work cart through a frozen group, calls his supervisor to ask what he should do. But nobody is alarmed.

This is when I realized that I must think differently from all these others. Had I seen this sudden mass freezing, the first thing that would have come to mind was a virus of some kind, possibly genetically engineered, that causes a vastly speeded-up Parkinson's-like syndrome, locking muscles in place. I would have called 911, afraid that lung muscles would be next and all these people would stop breathing. I would have wondered if it were contagious.

(1)I need to stop thinking like an SF writer in normal life. (2)I have no appreciation for performance art. (3)I trust that when people do something, it's for straight-forward reasons of their own and not because they're deliberately trying to mess with my mind. (4)I should never live in New York.

You've said that optimistic, planet-hopping science fiction leads people to believe we can abuse the Earth as much as we want, because we can just colonize space. Why is that?

Are you sure planet-hopping SF is optimistic? I find a lot of it escapist and genuinely despairing. I'm thinking of commercial SF, say movies like Lost in Space, where a destroyed environment is simply the spur to get us hopping across star systems in search of a beautiful new planet. To me that's a counsel of despair. We'll destroy this planet, it seems to say, so we need to find a nice new one.

An optimist, at least this optimist, feels that reducing carbon output and finding ways to bind it are just the kind of problem that human beings are good at solving. We can and we will strike a balance with the rest of this planet. How good we are at it will determine how many of us will die and how much of our culture we get to take with us.

But most science-fiction fans are often the greenest people around. They all drive hybrids!

I have no doubt your friends are green. They are probably just the people to be able to understand the chemistry behind global warming and to believe that the future can be very different from our comfortable life now. I'm sure they also know that you can't approach the speed of light without time dilation effects and that faster-than-light travel is highly unlikely. And as SF fans, they probably read the better SF novels.

But the better SF novels are not the SF that actually plays a perceptible role in society. The SF that has impact and that performs a powerful social function is media SF. Media SF continually and relentlessly shows large sections of society that it will be easy to fly to new green habitable worlds. This may be the wrong message when there's a strong chance that we only have this one planet.

Isn't it too soon to conclude that planets like Earth are rare in our galaxy?

Of course it's too soon. But it's way too late not to acknowledge that we may not get very far into the galaxy. That will limit the number of Earth-likes within range. The best we can hope for is anti-matter drives that get us up to a good percentage of the speed of light. That puts, by my rough reckoning, a horizon on how far we can get. I'd say about 30 light years at the outside.

And the term "Earth-type planet'' does not mean one in which there is oxygen, abundant water etc. It means a planet that has rock, is likely to be within a range of temperatures and which may have water and has gravity within a certain range. In all likelihood, it means a planet that needs terraforming. Let's consider the cost, difficulty and time needed to terraform Mars. Imagine having to do that across a 20 light year gap. It would make terraforming Mars the better option.

So why does so much science fiction cling to the faster-than-light drive?

Various reasons, many of which simply have to do with ease of storytelling. FTL gets you places faster, saving plot time. Lots of lovely green worlds give you an assortment of exotic locales. It absolutely makes sense to have galaxy busting spacecraft jumping all over the galaxy if all you want to do is write a fun story.

It sounds like you want to tell SF writers to eat their spinach. Is there any way to describe "mundane SF" that stresses the exciting story possibilities instead?

It's only spinach for writers. You have to be original, and there are fewer magic wands to get you out of plot difficulties. But the theory is, that once we get cooking on the new tropes, we'll have new and different futures to show. I'm co-editing the Mundane SF issue of Interzone with Julian Todd, and it does seem that our next step is to stop saying what we don't use, and start to pointing towards the fiction we're aiming at.

That issue has some neat near-future stories and some far-future stories, particularly a good one from Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. It's also got a story from Elisabeth Vonarburg, and work for some relatively new authors as well. One of the stories I wrote for the issue was a far-future Mundane story, which I liked, but it was too long for the issue at 15K.

What topics are you hoping to see mundane SF stories cover?

I'd like to see far- as well as near-future Mundane stories. I'm very hopeful given the range of stories we got for the issue. We did get a lot of climate-change or pandemic stories. But we also got a lot of speculation on the impact of technology on religion, genetics, psychology and psychotherapy. We got sailing stories, closed environment stories, lots of post-cyberpunk stories.

There also seems to be a link between writing mundane and being more concerned with gender issues or material of interest to women. I have no idea why that would be, but it's good to see.

What are some examples of mundane science fiction that you recommend?

Charles Stross' novel Glasshouse is self-identified Mundane. Ken MacLeod's next novel is self-identified mundane. I don't know if it's out in the States, but Anil Menon's first novel The Beast with Nine Billion Feet is mundane SF. The line we take is this: authors aren't mundane but stories are. This leaves authors free to write something else. The only person who can say if its author was playing the mundane game is the author him/herself. So it is kind of fun to spot stories that might have been Mundane, but unless the authors agree, well, it's not Mundane. My own personal might-have-been-Mundane favorite is Gattaca. Also lots of Philip K Dick, Samuel Delaney and J G Ballard.

While he says residuals aren't really about the money, the translation is: yes, it's all about the money. He uses the analogy of a baker getting paid for the first loaf of bread he bakes, but not for every loaf of bread he makes after that, which doesn't make sense logically. Now, if that original loaf of bread was given to the person who ordered it, who then invented a bread cloning machine that could churn out copies of that loaf with no further income due to the baker then yes, we would see his point. Speaking of which, his point seems to be: that baker ain't getting paid.

Anyhow, if you've been scratching your head over what the writers are really wanting out of this strike, Jossadile Dundee does a good job and presenting it in a clear and calm manner that trumps anything you'll see on your local news station. Now settle this thing already so we can watch someDollhouse.

Lessing's five-novel masterwork, The Children of Violence, starts out as a super-realistic semi-autobiography and ends with the main character gaining psychic powers on the eve of World War III. Many of her other books from the sixties and seventies blend realism and confessional writing with speculative elements. Her venture into actual space opera, the Shikasta series, is the only science fiction story to become a Philip Glass opera.

It's not speculative fiction, but 1985's The Good Terrorist is a must-read for anyone wanting to write believable characters in an extreme situation. It's also required reading for anybody who wants to understand how a "normal" person could become a terrorist. Image by Getty Images.