And now, the first repost from my defunct alt-history/steampunk/retrofuturism blog, Leaves of Brass: my review of The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.
And as before, I wish to offer my thanks to Mr. VanderMeer for the opportunity to review this fascinating volume. This originally appeared on November 13, 2011.
See you over the fold!
This is the second of two posts about our vacation in Nevada and the Sierras last month. The first part covered the beginning and end of the trip: Sacramento, Pyramid Lake, Sierra Hot Springs, and Auburn. This second part will discuss the middle section, including the main reason for the trip in the first place: the World Science Fiction Convention, in Reno. I’m writing a separate post for it because I want to talk about some specific issues with the event.
First, let’s get the good stuff out of the way; after all, I don’t want to be completely negative. We did actually have a good time with the conference itself. For example, we were greeted in the dealer room by a fairly exotic iteration of a Dalek.
And we also got to see a couple of authors we both really like. The first talk we attended was with Old Man’s War author John Scalzi, discussing his trip to the Creation Museum.
Almost four years and he’s still getting mileage out of that story. No wonder he’s so happy.
Shortly after that, we got to see another favorite, Cory Doctorow, read a passage from his new YA novel Pirate Cinema, coming next year. As I recall, he said it was a section nobody had heard before. Well, I’m not going to spoil it–but this book is going to be fantastic.
We also ran into Doctorow a little later on the escalator, as he was heading off to record a podcast. Had a short chat about food (of which more later). I’d met him previously, at the 2008 ALA Annual Conference, and it was good to see him again.
And, finally, we got to see a live performance by the legendary Dr. Demento. We’re both longtime fans but had never seen him in person before, so this was extra extra fantabulous.
Between all of those, plus some very fun browsing in the dealer room on the second day, Worldcon itself was great fun. Unfortunately, this was not enough to counterbalance the many, many organizational and infrastructural annoyances that we encountered–problems that fed on each other and eventually ruined our experience, to the point that we left in disgust and despair after only two days.
From this point on, there will be much bitching and moaning; be warned.
So. As I mentioned in Part 1, we arrived in Reno already frustrated by our unpleasant and truncated stay at Pyramid Lake. We had been unable to swim, due to an algae bloom, and unable to relax, due to loud neighbors, and we eventually decided to leave for Reno after one day instead of the intended two. But showers, a decent meal, and a night in a real bed had us feeling a whole lot better, and we were optimistic about salvaging the trip once we got to the con.
Sadly, this didn’t last.
On Wednesday (August 17th), we moved from our short-notice room at the Holiday Inn to our conference hotel, the Courtyard. We had chosen this because it was the only one of the three to be entirely non-smoking (my spouse has asthma, and she had trouble the last time we stayed in a Reno hotel).
Unfortunately, our hotel choice had a serious consequence. The con shuttle, while offering quick and convenient transport between the convention center and the other two conference hotels (the Atlantis and the Peppermill), did not come to the Courtyard. We had known this in advance, and did not believe it would be a problem.
However, when we arrived for the con, we discovered that the convention center charged seven dollars for parking–per visit.
There was not a single word about this in the conference guide, and only a very tiny mention on the website (and it inaccurately states that it was per day, not per entry). That page also says, “of course most members will probably be taking advantage of the free parking available at our hotels.” Well, yes, if you happen to be staying at the Atlantis or the Peppermill and can make use of the shuttle.
However, those of us at the Courtyard were out of luck. It was either drive, walk a mile and a half (in the noisy, dusty strip-mall wasteland of south Reno), or take the bus (time-consuming, especially with a route change at Meadowood Mall halfway between). So we drove.
Now, that particular pain in the butt, we might have been able to deal with. But it ended up synergizing with the second, greater, and more conference-wide problem: no food. At least, no decent or convenient food.
Now, you need to know here that I am mostly vegetarian, and both of us are highly picky about what we will eat. We can’t stand high-fat, high-cholesterol, high-sodium junk food and avoid it whenever possible.
This is scanned from page 9 of the Convention Guide. You see the part that I’ve highlighted, about “(p)lenty of carts/food booths”? Well, I hesitate to call it a lie, because that would require that they knew it wouldn’t be true when they wrote it. But, whether deliberately or not, it was not true. At all.
There were no food carts. No food booths. There was one snack bar in the hallway, and a smaller snack bar in the middle of the dealer room, both with the same menu–hot dogs, hamburgers, sodas, and the like.
Did I mention that I’m a vegetarian? Did I mention that we don’t eat garbage?
Oh, there was a food court, across the hall from the snack bar. There were even signs there for a Starbucks. Unfortunately, the whole thing was shuttered whenever we passed by. At one point, when we complained at the information desk about the lack of food options, they tried to send us there–while it was shuttered. We never once saw it when it was open.
Which means that whenever we needed to eat, we had to leave the con and go elsewhere. Now, the most obvious solution would probably be the Atlantis, which had 11 restaurants right at the other end of a walkway from the convention center. And we did this for lunch on both days, out of desperation.
However, I’ve already mentioned my spouse’s intolerance for cigarette smoke. Nevada law may forbid smoking in casino restaurants, but they’re still connected to the casino. So the stink of smoke was inescapable. And the noise and garish ugliness of the casino made it impossible to relax and enjoy our food.
And going elsewhere to eat was pretty much out of the question, given that every departure would mean losing a couple of hours of con time (because of leaving the convention center, finding the car, making our way there and back, etc.). Not to mention having to pay seven dollars every damn time we had to park.
So, it wasn’t long before we were exhausted, grumpy, hypoglycemic, and wishing we hadn’t even bothered.
Those were the biggest annoyances, but they weren’t the only ones. We also had a lot of trouble finding decent eating options at or around our hotel. For example, take breakfast. The Courtyard wanted to charge $8.95 for the same greasy continental breakfast that every other hotel provides for free. (And when we’d finally resigned ourselves to paying it, they’d run out of eggs.) Thank the gods we found Kimmie’s Coffee Cup within walking distance.
We were also quite overwhelmed with the problem of managing our con schedule. Of course, this is a perennial problem at conventions in general, and at SF cons in particular. But the scheduling really did seem a little half-baked. Most days had little of interest in the morning, and then two dozen things at 1pm, ten of which we wanted to see. It felt like a lot more attention could have been paid to the schedule in general, with events distributed more evenly during the day. (As an example: we brought two shopping bags full of books we wanted to get signed. We ended up not going to a single signing.)
Those are quibbles, though. We could have handled that. But the twin fails of food and transportation together made it impossible for us to have a good time. After much sniping and bad noise, we gave up on the second day and decided to leave. We had been planning and saving for this trip for over a year, but once we got there we just wanted to get out. So we booked ourselves two days at Sierra Hot Springs.
Ironically, once we’d made up our minds to cut the trip short, we had a much better time. We went back to the dealer room and spent the afternoon browsing and buying a few souvenirs. (We also got to see George R.R. Martin in person, though we didn’t get to talk to him or attend a signing.) And we went out for sushi that night, and had a walk downtown by the river the next morning. That was very nice–especially when I discovered that one of my favorite college hangouts, the Java Jungle, was alive and well.
And then we put Reno behind us and got the hell out of town.
————
So, you ask: final thoughts?
This trip has pretty much ruined the con experience for us, at least for anything happening out of town, or away from plentiful dining options. We’ve had a hard time before–notably at Baycon 2006, where we were pretty much trapped by the hotel’s remoteness. At least, it was non-smoking, so we could enjoy the coffee shop.
But this was far worse. I don’t expect that we’ll be going to any other cons, unless they’re local (or in downtown San Francisco). I’m afraid I have to set the blame for this at the feet of the organizers; they really should have thought more carefully about the food options and the transportation issue.
(Though the smoking isn’t quite their fault; it’s going to be an issue with any event in Reno. Maybe someday the city will figure out how much California business they’re losing because of smoking.)
And I also doubt that I’ll ever be able to convince my spouse to set foot in Reno again. Pyramid Lake, yes. And possibly Burning Man. But not Reno. Hell, I’m not sure I want to go back–and I lived there for eight years.
Thankfully, we were able to salvage the trip. Despite the double fiasco of Pyramid Lake and Worldcon, this turned out to be a decent trip overall. But it definitely wasn’t the massive, fun blowout we were planning on.
Honestly, we should’ve just spent the whole week at Sierra Hot Springs. We would have spent less money and had a much better time.
Anyway, that’s it, I believe. Live and learn, I guess.
Yesterday I made an excursion to Borderlands Books in San Francisco for a reading by one of my favorite writers, Charles Stross.
He was in town to promote his new book Rule 34. (You in the back–quit giggling.*) Rule 34 is a sequel to his 2007 novel Halting State, which IMHO is one of his best. Can’t wait to read this one. Judging from the segments that he read, it’ll be similarly surreal and amusing. (Despite the multiple second-person narrative, which is hard to get used to but ends up working. Stross is the only writer I’ve ever seen who can really pull this off.)
Of course, afterward he hung out to do the obligatory book-signing. This was more entertaining than usual, with people bringing up huge stacks of books while his water was being stolen by a hairless cat.
(Apologies for the blurriness. Note to self: my phone’s camera can’t be trusted indoors.)
Then came the other fun part: after the signing was over, about a dozen of us fans accompanied Charlie and his wife Feòrag for a pint or three. Hours of drinking and excellent conversation ensued.
Oh, yes, and I also got to meet Fluff, the infamous plush Cthulhu. I believe I got out of there with my soul intact, but I’m not sure how I would tell.
All told, a most excellent evening. And a bit of a preview of Worldcon, too.
Thank you, Charlie and Feòrag; see you next time.
* And by the way… the Game.
Well, it turns out that I was lucky to be able to get those two Harlan Ellison signatures when I did. . . .
“The truth of what’s going on here is that I’m dying,” says Ellison, by phone. “I’m like the Wicked Witch of the West — I’m melting. I began to sense it back in January. By that time, I had agreed to do the convention. And I said, I can make it. I can make it.’”
This is sad, but not entirely unexpected; I’ve been hearing rumors about his health for some time. I wish I could possibly have made it to the convention (it was this weekend), but there was simply no way. Apparently there was some uncertainty about whether he’d be able to do it at all, but he did make it.
Even though I’ll never meet the man face to face, at least I know from my limited experience that, despite his nasty reputation, he is truly a wonderful human being. The world is better for his having been in it, and that’s as much as any of us can hope for. I wish him and Susan all the best in whatever time he has left.
Today, my spouse and I went to Corte Madera for an appearance by SF author William Gibson, promoting his new novel Zero History.
This is the third book in his third unintentional trilogy, continuing the story begun in Pattern Recognition and continued in Spook Country. Lots of threes here, which I choose to see as auspicious.
This was the second time I’ve seen him, the first being for Spook Country a couple of years ago. Pretty good discussion this time; lots of good questions from the audience. I asked him if, considering that his work has been steadily moving closer to the present day, if he’d considered writing something set in the past. He gave a wonderful, complex, rambling response that never actually got around to answering the question.
I’m looking forward to reading the book, too. Here’s the blurb, from his site:
Hollis Henry worked for the global marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend once before. She never meant to repeat the experience. But she’s broke, and Bigend never feels it’s beneath him to use whatever power comes his way — in this case, the power of money to bring Hollis onto his team again. Not that she knows what the “team” is up to, not at first.
Milgrim is even more thoroughly owned by Bigend. He’s worth owning for his useful gift of seeming to disappear in almost any setting, and his Russian is perfectly idiomatic – so much so that he spoke Russian with his therapist, in the secret Swiss clinic where Bigend paid for him to be cured of the addiction that would have killed him.
Garreth has a passion for extreme sports. Most recently he jumped off the highest building in the world, opening his chute at the last moment, and he has a new thighbone made of rattan baked into bone, entirely experimental, to show for it. Garreth isn’t owned by Bigend at all. Garreth has friends from whom he can call in the kinds of favors that a man like Bigend will find he needs, when things go unexpectedly sideways, in a world a man like Bigend is accustomed to controlling.
As when a Department of Defense contract for combat-wear turns out to be the gateway drug for arms dealers so shadowy that even Bigend, whose subtlety and power in the private sector would be hard to overstate, finds himself outmaneuvered and adrift in a seriously dangerous world.
Typical recent Gibson territory, which means it’ll probably be fascinating. I love how in his current work he’s using the tools of science fiction to examine our current bizarre contemporary world. He pointed out in today’s talk that our present is also somebody’s past and somebody else’s future, so this isn’t as much of a stretch as it might seem.
Oh, and of course, I got the book signed. Yet another one for the shelf. . . .
As I’ve mentioned, I’m trying to get going again with my self-education in Chinese. Naturally, I’d like this to include learning to read the language–which, unlike languages that use alphabets, has a very clear distinction between learning to speak and learning to read.
So, a couple of weeks ago, I had the bright idea of helping myself learn to read Chinese by obtaining a Chinese translation of a book I knew really well. If I already knew what a passage meant, I could then focus on how they got there, right?
And so, after a bit of poking around on Amazon.cn, I found what I was looking for.
This is a Chinese edition of The Hobbit, probably the book I know better than any other. It arrived today, and already I can tell that it’s going to be a great deal of fun to work with. I can already recognize some passages just from the sentence structure, even if I can’t read the characters. (For example, the title of this post is the translation of the book’s famous first line, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”)
And over and above the practical use, it’s rather an interesting item to look at. Should make for quite a conversation piece.
Now, I wonder how they dealt with the riddles. . . .
A little over a month ago, the goddess of books and reading saw fit to give me word of the Great Ellison Book Purge, wherein the legendarily prickly science fiction author Harlan Ellison had seen fit to free up some storage space by selling off a wide variety of items from his personal collection.
Being a longtime devoted fan, I naturally wasn’t going to let this go without getting something. I obtained the brochure and studied it carefully, marveling at some of the truly extravagant items on offer–some of which were available at astonishingly low prices. (Two copies of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Book of Dreams, one from the ultra-rare first print run, and both signed by Gaiman to Ellison? And only $350?!?!? If only I’d had that much to spare. Sigh.) I made a few selections, prepared myself for speed-dial, and awaited the hour.
When I made it through, my first couple of choices were taken. However, my third was available, and as it turned out, I’m happier with it than I would have been with the others…
You have before you an absolutely pristine copy of the first hardcover printing of The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, published in 1970. Apart from a 1969 Avon paperback mangled by an overzealous editor (and subsequently disowned by Ellison), this is a first edition. It spent the last 40 years in a box in Ellison’s house. (The plastic cover you see above was put on it by me, today.) Only $45, plus shipping.
Oh, and did I mention that personalization was included?
I have a fairly significant collection of signed SF first editions, but I’d really been wanting to get an Ellison. So this made me happy. It will have a place of honor.
But of course, it’s not going to just be sitting there. After all, I haven’t read most of the stories in it. So it’s also going to be read, as a good book should. (Yes, I know that reading harms the condition. I don’t care. I get books signed out of respect for the author, not as an investment.)
So pleased was I about the purchase, in fact, that I decided to get bold. While I had Susan on the phone, I asked if the good man might be willing to sign another book of his that I had. One thing led to another, and eventually this happened:
So overall, I’d say it was a most productive endeavor. Now, if only I can get a Greg Egan…
Have I ever mentioned what a complete and utter author whore I am?
I have a few books left over from my MLIS program that I don’t need anymore. They’re available free to anyone who wants ‘em; all I ask is that you pay shipping. All are in fine condition, no marks or writing.
Carol Kuhlthau, Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services
Patricia Senn Breivik, Student Learning in the Information Age
Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing
If interested, drop me a line via a comment here, through Twitter, or with the “Contact Me” link below the picture on my site.
UPDATE: I’ve removed the Martin from the list. I didn’t particularly enjoy it; while it’s very informative, it’s terribly dense and not a lot of fun to read. But I did learn something from it that immediately became an important part of the Roman alternate-history epic I’m plotting. So I’m keeping it.
The others, however, are still available. If I get no offers here, their next stop is eBay.
So here it is, a few days after my post about the Kindle/1984 fiasco, and as karma would have it, Nicholson Baker (one of my favorite writers) has a lengthy essay about the Kindle in the New Yorker. Being a lover of books and interested in the future thereof as Amazon would have it, he decided to buy one and try it out.
His impression? Generally negative. He discusses the development and evolution of the Kindle’s e-ink technology, the various iterations of the device itself, the handicaps imposed by DRM (though he doesn’t directly attack DRM by name), and, most importantly, the reading experience itself. He strives mightily to be fair, comparing Kindle editions to paper and making a point of reading an entire novel on the thing. But, generally, he seems to find the task to be most unpleasant:
I tussled with a sense of anticlimax.
The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.
This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?
This largely jibes with my own encounters with the Kindle. It’s usable, but that’s all. The contrast is unacceptably low, and the (non-backlit) screen is often dim and washed out. I haven’t tried to read an entire book on it, but honestly, I don’t want to.
Not to mention that anything involving graphics suffers terribly; Baker goes on about this at some length. Charts, maps, illustrations of all kinds are largely deleted; where they do exist, they’re muddled and difficult to read. This would seem to be a problem for one of Amazon’s target markets: students. Yes, textbooks are heavy and inconvenient. But if you’re going to create a device to replace them, you’d better provide functionality as good or better. Students need useful illustrations, and if the Kindle can’t provide them, it’s going to be hard for them to justify the expense.
Finally, Baker talks an awful lot about newspapers (one of his pet interests, as anyone knows who’s read his Double Fold). The Kindle, particularly the large-size DX, advertises itself as the salvation of newspapers. But according to Baker, it instead leaches out all that is enjoyable about newspapers:
It’s enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography—and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.
Baker does admit, at the end, that after some effort he was finally able to engross himself in one book enough to read it all the way through. But it wasn’t easy for him, and I really don’t have the patience to push myself that far. Not when I could just get the damn thing on paper and save myself a lot of trouble–not to mention money, when you factor in the initial cost of the reader.
Thanks, but no thanks. Yes, books are heavy, and hard to store, and a massive pain in the ass to move. But I won’t be trading them for a Kindle anytime soon.
