I will be without internet access until Wed, November 11th, at which point regular broadcasting will resume.

I’m going to be carrying and packing and moving the office, so it is unlikely that I’ll be online until Tuesday of this coming week.

I’m entirely flattered – and the auto generator – which you can find HERE – is absolutely hilarious!

I don’t know exactly what it means, but when someone starts mashing up your stuff, for good or for bad, you have definitely hit some kind of new plateau.

Yeah, yeah, I got it in Saturday school. Beware of snakes bearing apples. Especially if they’re female snakes cause we all know that its all the woman’s fault.

Yeah, yeah.  Seen it already. Take a previously male character and make them female for the re-do.  Wow – what a completely unexpected and awesome twist.  One up it? How bouts we take a female character and turn her male in the re-do.  No one will expect that.

Yep.  Ages old trope: sacrifice your ideals for egoboo and eventually really, really bad things are gonna happen to you.  That is, after you enjoy a life of luxury and fame and adoration, the awesomeness of which will be inversly proportional to your punishment.

Uh huh. The black man is really an alien.  A traitorous alien.  Think I remember seeing something like that on the Outer Limits re-do. Wonder how this is going to go down amongst the ‘SF fail’ crowd.  (Probably should have been a female black alien.)

Yawn o-rama. City sized ships. Way, way advanced aliens. All your diseases cured.  Mein Fuhrer, I can valk!

O sweet whatever you invoke during moments of total incredulity:

Chad: “You mean ‘universal health care’”?

Anna: “That’s what your people call it.”

Been there. Done that.

If they’re so easily dismissed, a sentence or two would have sufficed. Instead – full-on columns devoted to emotional screeds making the case against not only the day and the concept, but the group of people who the dissenters perceive as being responsible.

Early on I said that I loved the idea. I love the IDEA.

The idea is not actually reshelving the books in the store so much as it is getting folks to think about the classification of books and how such artificial divides affect public perception. In that respect ISFRD has already succeeded, as the volume of postings and comments on the subject attest.

It has also served to illustrate that a goodly percentage of the blogosphere still perceives the partisans of genre as nerds.  This despite the supposed “win” of genre fiction over the mainstream, as was so eloquently and humorously pointed out yesterday by John Scalzi here.  (Note that Scalzi uses the word geek in its now widely accepted non-pejorative sense.  Not Nerd.)

I think that Scalzi is mostly right.  Folks who want to make money will now turn to genre properties as readily (or slightly more so) as they do to mainstream properties, and they’ll make their billions back, which will encourage them to do even more of the same and, as a consequence, more and more aspects of  geekdom will slip into mainstream culture (like Obama and the Vulcan ‘Live Long and Prosper’ sign).

The battle that hasn’t been won yet though is the acknowledgment that these things ARE drawn from genre fiction, owe their success to the early adopters (nerds) and continue to thrive because of that fan base.

If that battle had been won, Atwood et al would not need to be marketed as general fiction and Atwood et al would not need to keep on defending their ‘not me’ position.

The war is still going on though because there still remains a major inequity: the “mainstream” is still allowed to borrow and use the works of the genre without acknowledgement, or attribution or acceptance of the wider world to which it belongs.  This situation is similar in many ways to that which took place in the early years of rock-n-roll music.  The originators – mostly black artists – could not get airtime on white radio stations. It took the unacknowledged adoption of the new forms by white artists for rock to become successful.

Like  I said, I like the idea of ISFRD.  I think that the bookmark concept (putting a ‘this is really SF and if you want to find more of the same, go to the genre shelves’ bookmark inside selected works) proposal is a nice compromise and I’d say this to those who have been contemptuous of the idea:

schedule your own damned reshelving day for November 19th – call it something like “Eradicate the Influence of Nerds in Literature Reshelving Day” -  go to the bookstores to undo the work of the crybaby nerds and help continue the perpetuation of the myth that science fiction (genre fiction) isn’t worth any real attention unless some marketing type happens to think it could make oodles of money and calls it something other than what it really is.

While you’re at it, pick up a copy of 1984 from the general literature section  and give it a re-read.

approximately one half of my books have been moved to the new place. If I have the energy, the remainder will be moved today. I’m actually getting some shelf space over there, so I may finally be able to post some pics of my collection that isn’t a pile of cardboard boxes.

I finally found out why Matt Staggs has abandoned all of the Octopi faithful – he’s doing some BIG time PR and marketing, specifically for Jeff VanderMeers’s Finch. Good on you Matt!

And speaking of Jeff – the schedule for the Finch tour (otherwise known as the “want to know what a zombie writer looks like? Check Jeff out in a few weeks and you WILL know” tour) has been posted and can be found here

I have November 20th in Boston at Borders on Boylston street marked on the calendar and have already told the wife that it is a MUST do on the schedule.

John Ottinger’s Best Endings in SF and F post here (of which I am a participant I don’t hesitate to remind you) is generating some interest and interesting factoids, which I will apply my penchant (obsession?) for adding things up to:

Top Endings

I Am Legend (6 mentions)
Lord of the Rings (4 mentions)
1984 (2)
Childhood’s End (2)
Ender’s Game (2)
Last Argument of Kings (2)
Mistborn (2)
Stormbringer (2)

Also of interest: 44 series/novels/shorts/movies were mentioned

34 novels
2 movies
2 short stories
6 series

15, or fully one third of the mentions were for “old” (pase, passed over, irrelevant, untimely, out of sync, rusty, dusty, moldy and mildewed) works.

Gee. Seems like at least some of those guys/gals did know a thing or two ’bout writin….

I didn’t name a specific work, but I have to say I agree with the selections of A Martian Odyssey (the ending still makes me laugh!), I Am Legend (the whole point of the novel’s exercise and the one thing that NONE of the movies has ever really captured), and Childhood’s End.

If I had picked a story by name, it probably would have been Alamagoosa by Eric Frank Russell. That story doesn’t just make me laugh, it makes coffee come out of my nose!

John Scalzi pleads with geeks to get over themselves and drop the complaints about SF’s lack of mainstream acceptance – here.

First – I refer John to the Amazing SF Death Stories Blog Post Template entry here from a few days ago and point out that he could have suitably modified the template for his rant. Yes, it was a funny rant, but if John had used the template, he’d have been able to spend more time writing copy that I pay for. Just sayin.

Second, I reject his contention: anything that is mainstream is, defacto, NOT science fiction. But it is still pretty cool to imagine that geeks could have a conversation with Prez Obama – and hold their own – on subjects other than the economy, Afghanistan or Fux News.

More importantly, he asked ME (and a few other folks who’s names you might actually recognize).

I already know the answer to the title question – but you all might not, so head on over to John’s place and see what some of the best and brightest in the field (and me) had to say on the subject.

As we were finishing up packing Eric’s things, the trick-or-treaters were hitting the street. Two cute little girls (dressed as ‘Death’ and a Vampire) came walking by and Karen struck up a conversation with their mom who was in attendance.

Karen’s question to the mom surprised me: “Does it end at 8 o’clock?”

Trick or Treating ends at a set time? Since when?

On the rise home and before sitting down at the PC, I thought back a little bit to my days of mischief nights and Halloween, and I’m kind of blown away by how much things have changed: girls dressed as Death? (Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but when I was growing up, girls dressed as ballerinas, witches and Barbie; maybe a Bride of Dracula or Bride of Frankenstein for the older girls) Trick or Treating has a time limit? I remember going and hitting houses up until midnight!

And of course, the entire holiday is much more muted than in my youth. I remember virtual trains of kids walking down the street – not onsies-twosies. And, at least around here, hardly anyone dresses their house up anymore.

Fandom has changed? So has Halloween.

In the meantime, check out this great short film – GOOGLED.

(Via John Ottinger)

Waiting for that to happen doesn’t waste nearly enough time and, while I can think of plenty of other time-wasters to add in, I figured that attending an area SF con or two might not be a bad option.

The New England Fan Experience is coming up pretty fast – though it strikes me as having more of a “commercial con” feel to it

Arisia 2010 follows shortly thereafter and I’ve yet to be to one of these ‘dissident offspring of Boskone’ convention

and, of course, Boskone 2010 arrives in February.

Who, if anyone is planning on attending any of these events? Be careful in responding as I will be basing my choices on your responses.