Sometimes You Just Have to Cast "Zot!"

Just being silly, and playing with Apple's "Paper" application. I took a break from revising a big project ... and unfortunately there is no "Zot" spell for that!

Four Story Ideas About Books

Bookstalkers

Magic exists, and you need to destroy books to make it happen. More than that, the books need to be powerfully-written and have something to do with the effect you want. Fiction works better than nonfiction. Worst of all are books of nonfiction that purport to be divine or supernatural in any way. Goodnight Moon is good for a sleep spell. Agatha Christie books are good for poisonings.

Sleepers

Librarians dedicated to keeping sorcerous books out of the wrong hands hide the books in plain sight, in a large university library. The books sit openly on the stacks, but they are not cataloged. Their spine labels indicate call numbers that do not actually exist in the Library of Congress cataloging system. Our protagonist gets suspicious because he's a cataloger, and he passes by a book that Doesn't Seem Right. Alas for him, his activities have been noted. A hidden camera watches every forbidden book, though at a distance, since mechanical devices tend to fail around the strange tomes. For that reason there's also the Sleepy Student brigade, slumped at strategic positions with Secret Service style earphones and cell phones. Their job is to identify, follow, and perhaps delay the perusers of the forbidden texts until a senior librarian can arrive. (Other permutations: Books with UV markings and librarians with special dark glasses for reading them; dummy books; books composed of tomes sliced up and spliced together, making it difficult for one peruser to check out a whole text without serious effort.)

Zombie Book

A device that has stored a group of photons, "frozen" them so they cannot propagate. The photons encode the locations and passwords to critical computers on the global net, computers which have already been infected by a virus, but lack only the proper trigger to become "zombies," at the command of the device's master. The device has the appearance of an ancient grimoire, bound in dubious leather.

A Thousand and One For All

A librarian in a fantasy world is charged with weeding books. One ancient book refuses to go gently and promises to tell the librarian a new story each day the librarian keeps it in the library...

Unamerica

I wonder how they vote
In the Americas that are unreal
In the blank spaces of Grover's Corners
In the ancient streets of Arkham
In the graveyard of Spoon River.

I wonder how it looks from the sea-foam of Klatsand
And the dandelions of Green Town
When our candidates Etch-a-Sketch reality
And drone away
What Gotham City thinks of the gold standard
How San Narciso sees Guantanamo
Who will carry the state of Utana
Or Area Code 555
On election day.

Maybe their candidates are fictions too
And it's Jed Bartlet versus Lex Luthor,
Martha Kent versus Mr. Smith.
Maybe their issues are our fever dreams
Of Manchurian candidates or super-mutants,
Mayan calendars or killer comets.

Or maybe it is we who are becoming more like they.
We dream of dystopia and world's end
Instead of paving the potholes.
It's more exciting that way.

The line can be blurry
For this is the country of Oneida and New Harmony,
Thoreau and Emperor Norton.
We like our utopias
And it can seem we're always rolling our stones
Upslope to a city on a hill.

I wonder if tomorrow's America
Looks like a lost Atlantis under rising waters
Or the broken land of Williams' Urstadge
Or King's dusty Gilead
Or all of the above.
I wonder about our ghost Americas
In this witching week of autumn light
Before the votes are all unsealed.

And in the throwing of the switch and the touching of the screen
The checking of the box and the drawing of the line
Which ones we are making real.

Various

We've been happily occupied visiting family and getting in the swing of the school year, so just some brief thoughts here...

Our travel plans changed, so unfortunately I wasn't able to attend Worldcon in Chicago this year. If anyone tried to contact me there and I failed to reply, I wasn't meaning to be rude, just failing to be in two places at once. (Teleportation just isn't my super power. I'm pretty good at finding stuff lost in the house, though. Although since I'm probably the one who lost it in the first place, that may not count either.) Hope everyone who attended had a great time. Congratulations to the Hugo winners!

I just got the great news that my standalone science fiction story "Waiting for a Me Like You" is slated for the November/December Fantasy & Science Fiction.

The very talented author Matthew Hughes has a new website. If you like far-future science fantasy in the vein of Jack Vance, you should definitely check out Hughes' work.

Paul Gilster's blog Centauri Dreams frequently has fascinating posts that I keep meaning to link to. The focus is on the long-term possibilities of interstellar travel, but anything related to astronomy and space exploration (and sometimes science fiction too) is fair game. Three especially interesting posts recently were about the possibility of habitable planets around white dwarf stars, the implications of contacting aliens truly more intelligent than ourselves, and a moving farewell to Neil Armstrong.

Hope the last days of your summers are treating you well.

The Romance of Mars

The Curiosity rover has landed safely on Mars, evading the "Mars Curse" that so often seems to plague spacecraft sent to that planet. Great news (especially at a moment when so much other news has been dreadful) and I look forward to years of new findings and images.

There was a time when it seemed as if the exploration of Mars, however exciting, had snatched away the romantic desert world of Burroughs, Brackett, Bradbury and others and replaced it with something barren and lifeless. I suppose Mars as we see it today still qualifies as "barren and lifeless," but once we started getting imagery of the surface, the romance started creeping back in.

Image taken by Viking 2 lander in 1976. Source: Wikimedia Commons

And then came these brave-seeming robotic characters -- Sojourner, Opportunity, Curiosity. They're not exactly John Carter of Mars, but they do inspire a sense of adventure. Good luck, Curiosity (and all the dedicated human beings behind you.)

EDIT: Removed hypertext link to Viking 2 image and added the actual picture to the post.

New Story and Interview

Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night (via Wikimedia Commons)

Just a note to say the September 2012 Asimov's is out now, including my new story "Star Soup," a new Great Ship series tale from Robert Reed, a time-travel character drama by Dale Bailey, and many other cool-looking things.

There is also a short interview with me at the F&SF blog about my story "Grand Tour." The questions were asked by Stephen Mazur.

Something Wicker This Way Comes*

Image © copyright Jim Champion and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons License.
The original was cropped for use in this blog post.

(* Yes, I still have Ray Bradbury on my mind...)

My story "How the Wicker Knight Would Not Move," a somewhat grim tale from the world of Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone, is now up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It shares issue #99 with a cool-looking Asian-themed fantasy by Alex Dally MacFarlane evocatively titled "Fox Bones. Many Uses."

It's great to see BCS nearing 100 issues, a tribute to the hard work of its staff, Editor Scott H. Andrews and Assistant Editor Kate Marshall. Thanks for making it all happen.