Just heard on the news that John Prine has died from the coronavirus.
Damn. Damn. Damn. I loved his music. He was discovered by Kris Kristofferson, another of my long time favorites. Great songwriters, the both of them.
What a miserable day. What a miserable month. What a miserable year.
Take care of yourselves, friends. This virus is no joke.
Meanwhile, enjoy one of my favorites from Prine.
Current Mood: 
morose
April is here, though up where I am there is still a lot more snow than flowers.
The weirdness continues, all around the world. Sometimes it is hard to recall how much has changed in just one month.
Regular readers of my Not A Blog and the Wild Cards website know that I usually do an April Fools post. We have had some great ones over the years, even fooled a few people. Not this year, though. None of the ideas we were playing with seemed quite appropriate, with everything that is going on. Or maybe I just wasn’t feeling very funny.
Science Fiction writers are supposed to be good at predicting the future (that’s a myth, actually, but never mind), but I have to confess, I have no notion where or when any of this is going to end. I can see half a dozen branching alternatives, some of which are very grim indeed, and some much less so. One does not want to be too alarmist, of course. But at the same time, it would be folly to be too dismissive of the dangers. All we can do is shelter in place, keep an eye on the news, and take this day by day.
The Jean Cocteau Cinema and Beastly Books remain closed. When I first shut them down a few weeks ago, it was only for a month… the idea being that we would re-evaluate on April 15 and see where things stood then. As I write this, on April 2, that April 15 date is looking wildly optimistic. If things change at all in the next two weeks, they are likely to be changing for the worse, not the better. Most likely, then, both cinema and bookstore will need to remain closed… for how long, I have no idea.
Our mail-order service at Beastly Books remains open, however. Unlike Amazon, we don’t sell toilet paper or medical equipment, so nothing will take priority over your book orders. Take a look at the selection at https://jeancocteaucinema.com/product-category/signed-books/
All our books are autographed, and reading is one of the best ways to pass the time while quarantined. (I know I am doing a lot of it). Also, truth be told, your book purchases will help us keep paying our staff at the cinema and bookstore, since there is no other source of income at present. And we have some great, great titles in stock.
In other virus-related news, conventions and festivals and sporting events continue to cancel or postpone all over the world. Including SF cons. Some of them, I fear, may never come back, since — in some cases, not all — venues and hotels are refusing to let the events out of their contracts, which means the sponsoring organizations could have huge debts with no income to help offset the costs. This year’s Nebula Weekend is going virtual. Some of the writer’s workshops at which I sponsor scholarships — Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, and the Taos Toolbox — may need to do the same. None of them have made that determination yet, since the workshops are still months away, but I know all of them are exploring their options.
The biggest news in that regard is that this year’s worldcon, CoNZealand, has also decided to go virtual. I know what a difficult decision that was for the Kiwis, who have worked so hard bidding and winning the con, and dreamed so long of bringing fandom to their magical island. New Zealand is one of my favorite places in the world, and Parris feels the same way. We have been there several times before, and I know we will visit again… just not this year, alas. I gather that pushing the con back to late 2020 or early 2021 was not feasible, for various logistical reasons, which meant that going online was the only real alternative to cancellation. How that will work, I have no idea. No one does, really. It has never been done before. The technical aspects are going to be daunting, no doubt… but I know that everyone concerned is going to do their best. Fingers crossed.
If there is a silver lining in these clouds, this will give me more time to finish WINDS OF WINTER. I continue to write every day, up here in my mountain fastness.
Want something to read while you’re waiting? This would be a good time to check out my Wild Cards series, if you haven’t done so already. There are twenty-nine of them (some still in the pipeline), which should keep you reading for a good long time. If it is more Westeros you want, and you just know A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, take a look at A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS (the Dunk & Egg novellas) and FIRE & BLOOD (wherein you will find the source material for the new HBO series, HOUSE OF THE DRAGON). And there are some other wonderful writers out there as well. The QUILLIFER series by Walter Jon Williams is the best work WJW has ever done, and I am really enjoying the new AFTERSHOCKS series from Marko Kloos.
Need something to binge watch? The third season of OZARK is riveting, HBO’s recent Stephen King mini-series THE OUTSIDER is a faithful, engrossing adaptation of his novel, and the DOCTOR SLEEP film is very good as well. I am also really enjoying THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, an adaptation of the Philip Roth novel that seems more timely than ever before. And WESTWORLD and BETTER CALL SAUL are must watch too.
However you spend your days, my friends, stay safe.
Current Mood: 
anxious
The world is changing so quickly around us these days that it is hard to keep up.
New Mexico has requested that all non-essential businesses close, to help fight the spread of the coronavirus. Accordingly, we are going to go ahead and shutter our bookstore, Beastly Books, on Montezuma Street in Santa Fe. As with the adjoining theatre, the Jean Cocteau Cinema, the store will remain closed until April 15, at which point we will re-evaluate and act accordingly.
I am going to continue to pay the Beastly Books staff during the closure, just as we’re going with the JCC. I urge all small business owners… and all large business owners, for that matter… to do the same. The economic consequences of the virus are going to be severe enough without throwing people out of work and cutting off their paychecks.
Although the brick-and-mortar side of Beastly Books will be closed, we will continue to sell books via mail order. You can choose from among our large stock of autographed books in all genres at https://jeancocteaucinema.com/product-category/signed-books/
JCC and Beastly Books will be back as soon as it’s safe, better than ever.
Thanks for your patience and understanding. And do keep safe, friends, wherever you are.
Current Mood: 
sad
Strange days are upon us. As ancient as I am, I cannot recall ever having lived through anything like the past few weeks.
We’re taking steps here in New Mexico, like everywhere else.
Meow Wolf is closed. A wise precaution, given the huge size of the crowds that customarily gather daily to see the House of Eternal Return. MW draws people from all over the country, indeed all over the world, and it is very much a hands-on exhibit where visitors are encouraged to touch everything and go everywhere. Shutting it down promptly was a good move.
As of today, I am also closing the Jean Cocteau Cinema. The JCC only has a seating capacity of 130, and we achieve that no more than three or four times a year; attendance at the theatre and the bar is usually well below the state-mandated cap of 50. Even so, why take chances? I prefer to err on the side of caution, so we’re shutting down the theatre until April 15, at which time we will take stock and re-evaluate. Honestly, I have no idea where things will stand in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the US, or the world in a month’s time. Things have been changing so fast. But our intent is to keep the theatre closed until the relevant authorities tell us that it is safe to reopen.
I am also shutting down my non-profit, the Stagecoach Foundation, for the duration. Stagecoach customarily holds classes and workshops in various aspects of film and television production, for kids aspiring to have careers in the entertainment industry, but we won’t be having any while the coronavirus is still raging.
Despite the shutdowns, we will continue to pay our employees at Stagecoach and the Jean Cocteau, for the foreseeable future.
We are keeping our bookstore, Beastly Books, open for the time being. The bookstore never has more than a handful of customers at any one time, except for author events — and we’re cancelling or postponing all of the signings and readings we had scheduled. We have stocked the store with disinfectants and sanitizers, and we will be carefully monitoring the situation going forward. If it seems best to shut the bookstore too, we will do that.
Meanwhile, however, our mail order service will also remain open. With quarantines, lockdowns, and social isolation on the menu everywhere, and all the usual entertainment venues closing their doors, reading is the best way to pass the empty hours. If you need a few books to get you through the next month or so and distract you from all that is going on in the world, we have some great reads on offer, and ALL our books are autographed. Have a browse at https://jeancocteaucinema.com/product-category/signed-books/
For those of you who may be concerned for me personally… yes, I am aware that I am very much in the most vulnerable population, given my age and physical condition. But I feel fine at the moment, and we are taking all sensible precautions. I am off by myself in a remote isolated location, attended by one of my staff, and I’m not going in to town or seeing anyone. Truth be told, I am spending more time in Westeros than in the real world, writing every day. Things are pretty grim in the Seven Kingdoms… but maybe not as grim as they may become here.
Some days, watching the news, I cannot help feeling as if we are all now living in a science fiction novel. But not, alas, the sort of science fiction novel that I dreamed of living in when I was a kid, the one with the cities on the Moon, colonies on Mars, household robots programmed with the Three Laws, and flying cars. I never liked the pandemic stories half so well…
Let us hope we all come through this safe and sound. Stay well, my friends. Better to be safe than sorry.
Current Mood: 
stressed
I was deeply saddened this week to read of the death of Mike Resnick, one of the true giants of contemporary science fiction. Mike has been battling serious illness for some time, so the news did not come as a complete surprise… but it came too soon, too soon, and our field and our community will be the poorer for his absence.
I don’t recall when I first met Mike, but it was a long, long time ago, back in the 1970s when both of us were still living in Chicago. I was a young writer and he was a somewhat older, somewhat more established writer. There were a lot of young writers in the Chicago area in those days, along with three more seasoned pros, Gene Wolfe, Algis Budrys, and Mike. What impressed me at the time… and still impresses me, all these years later… was how willing all three of them were to offer their advice, encouragements, and help to aspiring neo-pros like me. Each of them in his own way epitomized what this genre and this community were all about back then. Paying forward, in Heinlein’s phrase.
And no one paid it forward more than Mike Resnick.
He was fine writer, and a prolific one, as all his Hugo and Nebula nods will testify. After they started giving out those little rocket pins for Hugo nominations, Resnick would wear them on his shirt like medals: pointed up for a story that won, down for a story that lost. That always charmed me. Mike won the Hugo five times; once for novella, once for novelette, thrice for short story (like me, he never won the big one, Best Novel). He lost a lot more (we had that in common as well). He took that in stride, with a shrug and a smile, in the true spirit of a Hugo Loser.
He never won for Best Editor either, and as best I recall he was nominated only once, under unfortunate circumstances. That was a pity. He deserved more recognition for his editing. He edited something like forty anthologies, I believe, and he always made a point to fill them with a lot of young aspiring writers, new names and no-names making their first or second or fifth professional sale. I can’t say how many careers he helped launch, but it was a lot. In modern times, only Gardner Dozois was more assiduous in searching out new talent. Mike called his discoveries his “writer babies” and they called him their “writer daddy,” and many a time I would see him in the lobby of a con hotel, with a dozen of his literary children sitting around his feet as he shared his wisdom with them… along with a funny story and ribald anecdote or two.
His last great act as an editor was the founding of GALAXY’S EDGE, a new SF magazine that he launched… in an act of madness that was all Mike… at the time when the old magazines were struggling to survive. GALAXY’S EDGE always featured a lot of new writers too, and Mike paid them decent rates… a feat he accomplished by twisting the arms of old coots like me to give him reprints for pennies, to free up more money for the newcomers. (Lots of us old coots were glad to do it. Like Mike, we believe in paying forward). I hope and trust that GALAXY’S EDGE will keep going strong, as a lasting testament to his legacy.
These days, all too often, I meet writers who come to conventions only to promote themselves and their books. They do their panels, and you bump into them at the SFWA Suite, but nowhere else. Not Mike. Mike Resnick was fannish to the bone. You’d find him at publisher’s parties and the SFWA suite, sure, but he’d also pop up at bid parties, in the bar, in the con suite. He made more than one Hugo Loser party, both before and after the days I was running it. You’d see him in the dealer’s room, at the art show, at the masquerade… his Chun the Unavoidable costume, from Jack Vance’s DYING EARTH, was a classic. When he appeared on panels, he was funny, sharp, irascible, irreverent, always entertaining… and he would do entire panels without once plugging his own new book, a trick more program participants should learn. The place you’d find him most often at worldcon was the CFG suite, the redoubt of the Cincinnati Fan Group. He was the professional’s professional, sure, but Mike was also the fan’s fan. For some writers conventions are for selling, selling, selling… for Mike, they were more about giving, giving, giving. And having fun. That too. Mike always seemed to be smiling or laughing. He loved science fiction, fantasy, fandom, writing, reading, cons… and he shared his passion with everyone around him.
Science fiction has lost a fine writer, a unique voice, a magnificent mentor… and a profoundly good and decent man.
Current Mood: 
melancholy
Memorial Day started as a day of remembrance, originally for soldiers slain in the Civil War. In more recent decades it has come to mark the beginning a summer, a holiday celebrated in thousands of back yards across the nation with hot dogs and potato salads. In the science fiction community, it has also become a traditional date for conventions, taking advantage of the three-day weekends. There are a dozen or more Memorial Day cons around these days… but some of them go way back.
It was at one of those conventions that I first met Gardner Dozois: Disclave 1971, in Washington D.C. Gargy (unbeknownest to me at the time) was the assistant editor at GALAXY who had found my story “The Hero” in the slush pile and passed it along to Ejler Jakobsson with a recommendation to buy. That became my first professional sale. A few months later, when I walked into Disclave, the first con I ever attended, Gardner was the first person I met. He was working the registration desk. “Hey,” he said. “I know you. I fished you out of the slush pile.”
He went on to become one of my oldest and dearest friends. We never lived in the same city, oddly, not even the same time zone… but we hung out together at worldcon every year, and sometimes at other cons as well, we workshopped together, taught together, talked together on the phone and by letter (those papery things we exchanged before email), won awards together, lost awards together, founded the Hugo Losers Party together (Kansas City, 1976), edited books together… and laughed together, that above all. Gardner was a brilliant writer (albeit very very slow — yes, even slower than I am) and one of the greatest editors our genre has ever produced, but he was also a very funny man, a joy to spend time with.
He died a year ago, on May 27th. To my shock — we had spoken on the phone only three days before, and he was the same old Gardner, full of jokes and plans for what he’d do when he got out of the hospital — and dismay. A year has come and gone, and I still find it hard to accept that I will never see him again, still have days when I think, “I should give Gargy a call, it’s been a while,” before I remember. I fear, given the date of his death, that Memorial Day weekend is always going to be a day of sadness for me from now on. (FWIW, Gardner was also a veteran, having served in the army during the Vietnam era, though in Germany rather than Nam).
Some of you may never have known Gargy, except as a byline on ASIMOV’S and BEST OF THE YEAR and our crossgenre titles, WARRIORS and ROGUES and DANGEROUS WOMEN. Here, to give you a taste of the man, is a YouTube of the panel I did with Gardner and Howard Waldrop a few years ago at Capclave, the D.C. area con that succeeded Disclave after the… ahem… unfortunate incident. There’s no subject for this panel, no big issue to discuss, just three old friends telling stories and having fun.
I love that someone taped it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvdsmhQYTyc
That’s a great memory for me. But there are so many more. And maybe the best times were back in the 70s, when we were both “Young Turks” (yes, people really called us that) and Rising Stars, just starting out, sleeping on floors and sharing rooms and rides at cons, scrounging meals off editors, with none of us having a pot to piss in.
Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.
Miss you, Gargy.
Current Mood: sad
Death is part of life, I know. But lately it seems to me that there has been far too much of it in SF and fantasy.
Vonda McIntyre passed away last week. I’ve known Vonda for a long time; we were the same age, part of the same “generation” of writers, breaking in during the early 70s. Though I can’t claim to have known her well, I admired her writing and always enjoyed her company when I found myself in Seattle. She was a kind and generous person, and at the Spokane worldcon, where she was guest of honor, she showed herself to be especially humane and tolerant during the ugliness of the Puppy War. Her novel DREAMSNAKE was a Hugo and Nebula winner, and she won another Nebula at the Santa Fe Nebula banquet that I ran. I was pleased to read that she finished a new novel just days before she died.
And just now I received word that Gene Wolfe has died as well. I haven’t seen Gene for a few years, sadly, but I knew him well when I lived in Chicago in the 70s. When my friends Alex & Phyllis Eisenstein and I founded the Windy City Writer’s Workshop, we assembled a good group of young aspiring writers… and two giants, Gene Wolfe and Algis Budrys. Gene and Ayjay became mentors of a sort to the whole group of us, attending every monthly workshop and giving us more good advice about the art, craft, and business of writing than I can possibly recall. I learned so much from Gene, and his praise… not always easily earned… meant so much to me. He was a magnificent writer as well, one of the best our genre has ever produced. It is a disgrace that he never won a Hugo (though he was nominated a number of times). He was, however, a SFWA Grand Master and a worldcon Guest of Honor, the two greatest honors our field can bestow. His work will be read as long as SF endures, I believe.
We have lost two of the good ones. SF is poorer for their passing, but their work remains. Read their books.
Current Mood: sad
The Wall in A SONG OF ICE & FIRE was inspired by Hadrian’s Wall, which I first saw in 1981 with my friend Lisa Tuttle. I’ve told that story about a thousand times in a thousand interviews. (Of course, the Great Wall of China was also a factor, but I’ve only read about the Great Wall, I’ve never seen it. One day I want to visit China, but not until I’ve finished these books).
Hadrian’s Wall is the reality. My Wall is the fantasy. In fantasy, you take reality and turn it up to eleven. (I have used that line in numerous interviews as well).
But now something very strange is happening. Reality is turning around to imitate fantasy.
English Heritage has appointed Watchers on the Wall. On Hadrian’s Wall.
Dressed as Roman legionaries, you say? No, dressed as brothers of my Night’s Watch.
Here’s the whole story:
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/about-us/search-news/pr-game-of-thrones/
So far there are no plans to raise rebuild Hadrian’s Wall in ice and raise it up to 700 feet high, but the way things are going, that might be next.
Current Mood: 
amused
Unless you have been hiding in a cave somewhere… or down with the Mole Man in the bowels of the Earth… by now you will have read that Stan Lee has died, at the age of 95.
A good age, that. Stan Lee lived a long life, and leaves a grand and glorious legacy behind him. He has been part of my world for so long that it seems impossible that he is gone.
Not that I can claim to have been a friend. I never had that honor. Oh, yes, I met Stan a dozen times or so, at various San Diego Comic-Cons over the years. Every time I did, it was like meeting him for the first time; he never remembered our previous meetings, and I don’t think he had any idea who I was. It made no matter. He was always genial and generous to me, as he was to all the fanboys who surrounded him at those cons. And when I was in Stan’s presence, that’s just what I was: a fanboy, slightly tongue-tied and more than a little in awe.
I owe so much to Stan Lee. He was, in a sense, my first publisher, my first editor. “Dear Stan and Jack.” Those were the first words of mine ever to see print. In the letter column of FANTASTIC FOUR #20, as it happens. My first published loc, a commentary on FF#17, compared Stan to… ah… Shakespeare. A little overblown, you say? Well, okay. I was thirteen…
And yet, and yet… the comparison, when you think about it, is not entirely without merit. There were plays before Shakespeare, but the Bard’s work revolutionized the theatre, left it profoundly different from what it had been before. And Stan Lee did the same for comic books. I had been reading comics all through my childhood, but by the late 50s I had started to drift away from them. I was buying fewer and fewer “funny books” (as we called them back then), and more SF and fantasy paperbacks. The DC comics that dominated the racks had become so formulaic and tired, they were no longer holding my interest as they had when I was younger. I was “outgrowing” comics.
And then Stan Lee came along, and pulled me back in. The first issue of FANTASTIC FOUR that I chanced on (#4, it was, the one where the FF met Prince Namor) caught my interest as nothing had for years. A short while later, along came Spider-Man. And then the rest, one by one, in an astonishingly short period of time. The Hulk. Thor. Iron Man. Ant-Man (and the Wonderful Wasp). The X-Men. The Avengers. Wonder Man (who died in the same issue he was introduced). Black Panther. The Inhumans. Galactus and the Silver Surfer. And the villains… Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, the Vulture, the Sandman, Mysterio, Loki… and on and on. (We will not talk about Paste-Pot Pete. This is a tribute).
These characters had personalities. Quirks, flaws, tempers. The heroes were not all good, the villains were not all bad. The stories had twists and turns, I could not tell where they were going. Sometimes good guys fought other good guys. The characters grew and changed… over at DC, Superman and Lois Lane had been locked into the same relationship for decades, but Peter Parker went through girlfriends like a real teenager, he graduated high school and went to college, people could and did die.
You had to be there to understand how revolutionary all this was. Comics as we know them today would not exist except for Stan Lee. They might not exist at all, if truth be told.
No, of course, he did not do it all alone. The genius of Marvel’s artists, especially Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, should never be minimized. They were a huge part of Marvel as well. But Lee was at the center of it all.
That letter in FF#20 was only the first of many I sent to Stan and Jack, and Stan and Steve, and Stan and… whoever the artist was on the book I was writing to. A number were published, with my full address attached. Other comics fans around the country saw the letters, and began sending me fanzines and letters of their own. My friendship with Howard Waldrop began thanks to those letters… him in Texas, me in Jersey. And after reading some of those early ditto’d fanzines, I began to write for them as well. My first published stories. Heroes of my own creation. Manta Ray. Garizan the Mechanical Warrior. The White Raider (who, like Wonder Man, died in his first story). And, then, a little later, heroes created for STAR-STUDDED COMICS by my friends from the Texas Trio, Powerman and Dr. Weird. I could not draw so I wrote “text stories,” superhero stories in prose. Which people liked. Which encouraged me to keep writing. And as I wrote, I did my best to write like Stan Lee.
These days, in interviews, I am often asked which writers influenced me most when I started out. There were a lot of them. For SF there were Heinlein and Andre Norton and Eric Frank Russell, for fantasy Robert E. Howard and JRRT and Fritz Leiber, for horror the inimitable H.P Lovecraft. Later on, when I was older, there was Jack Vance and Ursula K. Le Guin and Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany and Alfred Bester, and later still William Goldman and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
But the greatest influences are the earliest influences, I think, and at the beginning there was only Stan Lee.
Comics have had a lot of great writers in the half century since the Marvel Age began. Neil Gaiman, Len Wein, Alan Moore, and more and more and more… the list goes on and on. But if not for Stan Lee and the worlds and characters and style he created, their own careers and accomplishments would have been very different, if not impossible.
Let me close with one last letter of comment.
Dear Stan,
You did good work. As long as people still read comic books and believe in heroes, your characters will be remembered. Thanks so much. Make Mine Marvel.
George R. Martin
35 East First Street
Bayonne, New Jersey
Current Mood: melancholy
I was saddened yesterday to read of the death of Paul Allen.
I cannot claim to have known Paul well, but I met him a few times, and always enjoyed his company. He had a house in Santa Fe, and when he was there, we would sometimes get together for a breakfast and talk about… well, all sorts of things.
With great power comes great responsibility, Stan Lee once wrote. In the modern world, there is no power greater than wealth. Paul Allen used his great wealth for the benefit of his community, his country, and his planet. He left the world a better place than he found it, and no more can be asked of any man.
This was a kind man, a bright man, a profoundly good man. He will be missed.
Current Mood: sad
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