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Anthony Burgess didn’t read science fiction

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 20:13:00 +0000

THIS WAS 1985 — not the Anthony Burgess novel, the year (Anthony Burgess wrote so many books you might have to make that specification about a number of words or phrases — “On going to bed, I read ninety-nine novels — no, I mean I really did go to bed and read ninety-nine novels!”). I was dropping out of college and had begun a novel and returned to New York. A bookstore in Manhattan announced a rare reading and signing by Anthony Burgess, a primary hero of mine at the time, for his autodidact’s erudition and braggadocio, and for how he’d gentrified a number of outre genres just by picking them up and mingling them with his erudition and braggadocio. I grabbed a couple of first editions — an unseemly three first editions, actually — and stuffed them in a sack and took the subway uptown. I was hours early, completely certain the event would be standing-room-only. Well, it was eventually, but I was still early. I camped out on a folding chair, front row center. The room filled and eventually the great man was introduced. I don’t think he read anything. He pontificated, chain-smoked and wheezed, retailed anecdotes, was charming and spellbinding and ghastly. Soon the chance came for questions from the audience. There I was, front row center, my hand in the air, and as if claiming the privilege of my having arrived three hours early, I was called on first. With great posturing of my own I set up my question, a painfully obvious one: “You recently published a list of the 99 best novels in English in the last century; which of your own would you select to round out the hundred?” It was painfully obvious he’d been asked before and painfully obvious how he’d rehearsed the mock-casual, mock-surprised response. “Well, to be quite honest I hadn’t thought I was leaving room for one of my own, humph humph, that wasn’t my intention, but I suppose it is reasonable to expect an author to have a favorite among one’s own works, hack hack, I’m sure many people will expect me to say Earthly Powers, which has been received as a sort of ‘chef-d’oeuvre’ in many quarters, hem hem, but in truth the book of which I’m fondest, hurr hurr, very likely for private reasons of my own yet it is my vanity to think that among my novels it is the likeliest to endure, heh heh, and certainly no one here will have heard of it, it was given a very negligible treatment either here or in Great Britain, a novel with the odd title ‘MF’…”

“Red Dawn”: Dumbest ’80s remake ever?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:20:00 +0000

If I told you I was making a movie about a small group of child soldiers, who use IEDs and scavenged weapons to fight a guerrilla war against a larger occupying force, what would you picture? The war-torn sands of Gaza? The refugee camps of Somalia? The mountains of Afghanistan?

How about the small towns of rural Colorado? That’s the setting for “Red Dawn,” the 1984 piece of militia porn that pitted a group of American kids against the combined might of the invading armies of Cuba, Nicaragua and the USSR. Led by Patrick Swayze, they lived off the land and harvested what seemed to be a never-ending supply of rocket-propelled grenades, with which they blew up tanks and Soviet-American Friendship Centers.

The film was released in the height of the Cold War, and its ludicrous premise (best summed up as “Hey kids, let’s go fight an insurrection!”) fit well with the rest of the decade’s fear-mongering anti-Soviet propaganda and jingoistic paeans to American exceptionalism. Let’s not forget that this was the same year that Reagan joked, “My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Junot Díaz: My stories come from trauma

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:36:00 +0000

JUNOT DIAZ’S LITERARY STAR keeps rising. In the past two weeks, The New York Times featured Díaz in their Sunday A&E section, the cover of its Sunday Book Review, and last week in its magazine section replete with pages from his notebooks. Earlier this year, he had three stories in The New Yorker – two that appear in his new collection and another perchance a chapter from a new work in progress. This Is How You Lose Her is currently on the Timestop ten-fiction bestseller list. The book’s launch in New York City drew a wraparound crowd of nearly 1000. And last week, Díaz received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

I first met Junot Díaz ten years ago at what is now Texas State University in San Marcos. He was a guest of its Creative Writing program headed by Tom Grimes and visiting his friend and fellow writer Dagoberto Gilb. I was then book editor of the San Antonio Express-News. That evening Díaz read from a work in progress, Monstro – a sci-fi tale set in the Dominican Republic. Over dinner, our conversation centered on two Dominican actors that had made it in Hollywood: Maria Montez and Rafael Campos. Junot had heard about but never seen Montez’s cult film Cobra Woman (1944) and Campos’ scene-stealing role as a Latino teen in Blackboard Jungle (1955). At the time, neither film was on video, but I had taped both off a cable network. I later sent Díaz VHS copies. He thanked me with a bottle of fine Dominican rum.

Don’t sleep on the Hugo Awards

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 17:06:00 +0000

The World Science Fiction Convention convened yesterday in Chicago. Unlike San Diego's Comic-Con, Worldcon hasn't gone Hollywood just yet -- you're more likely to share an elevator with astronaut Story Musgrave than Seth MacFarlane. The big autograph sessions are with authors like John “Redshirts” Scalzi, and panels cover topics like “Anarchism in Fantasy and Science Fiction” and “Are You a Dickhead?” (a retrospective of author Philip K. Dick's work, of course).

Sunday evening, Scalzi will host the annual Hugo Awards, the event that makes Worldcon important to people who don't know urban fantasy from Urban Outfitters. Hugos cover a lot of science fiction, horror and fantasy ground (categories include film, podcasts and illustration, among others), but the novel and novella nominees are of particular interest to anyone who loves literature.

Science fiction’s 2012

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Back in 1987, L. Ron Hubbard created a time capsule of sorts. He challenged his fellow science fiction writers, along with a smattering of famous scientists, to write letters to the people of 2012 offering their visions of what the world might look like in another 25 years. (Yes, that Hubbard -- the Scientology guy. But he was a well-known SF writer before he started the church, and it was in that guise that he threw down this challenge.)

So here we are, in the high summer of 2012, and it's time to go back and see just how much they got right -- and wrong.