Nick Mamatas' Journal

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Quote of the day
"Suspense writers, present and future: Remember you are in good company. Dostoyevsky, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe...there are hacks in every kind of literary field...Aim at being a genius."

—Patricia Highsmith

When I've expressed similar sentiments as regards horror, I've been called a faggot. As regards SF and fantasy, I've been called patriarchal.

But then again, wasn't Patricia Highsmith a patriarchal faggot? AHA! I knew I was onto something...

Sherlock Holmes
Did you know that it is very difficult for people today to read The Day of the Locust because there is a character in it who just happens to be named, well

Homer Simpson?

So too with Sherlock Holmes, which would have been a perfectly acceptable television movie of the week at ninety minutes, if TV still broadcast movies of the week that weren't about ladies with cancer. Instead, it's more than two and a half hours of Charlie Chaplin and his homosexual friend John running around Hogwarts doing passable bartitsu (read my article! Send Clarkesworld money if you like it!) while nothing of any import happens. I mean, lots happens, and all for the viewer's benefit, but nothing really is of interest. So certainly forget everything you know about Sherlock Holmes, and also about, you know, human motivation or understanding.

You see, there is a certain Lord Blackwood, who is a member of the Columbine High trenchcoat Mafia, which you know because he's wearing one of those awful leather dusters nerds wear when they try to act cool all the time. He is doing human sacrifices as part of his plan to conquer the world through ritual magic. He is caught, hanged, rises from the grave with witnesses, and then uses magic to kill a few more people, and then Holmes kills him again after foiling a great plan to kill everyone in Parliament. ("And nothing of value was lost...") And that's the real problem with the movie.

Surely people will make a big deal as to whether the Holmes in this film is authentic. Holmes is a young nerd with severe mental problems in his stories and in this movie he's a middle-aged flâneur with severe mental problems. One out of three...well, that's pretty bad. But the real problem isn't Downey's endless mugging and bug-eyed bug-eyeree, but that the story doesn't support the Holmes character at all. As this is a Holmes picture we're talking about, nothing is ruined by mentioning that Blackwood is in fact not a supernatural figure; he just likes incredibly contrived plans. He is a member of a secret society along the lines of the Freemasons and they do practice rituals, so Blackwood uses various far-fetched chemical methods and technologies to make it seem like he has magical powers. Except that none of this is necessary.

Let's say you're a member of Parliament, and hey, for that matter let's say that also happen to believe in Hermetic magic, even though nothing really seems to ever work. What line are you more likely to fall for:

"Behold, for I have true magical powers that look like special effects! Follow me and I shall use them to conquer England and then America! Also, no, I can't show you how to have magic powers too, or do anything right here to impress you."

or

"Hey, we're all rich bastards and we're in the same room together. Since we're already home secretaries and members of Parliament and even the ambassador to the US, let's use our influence to take over England, and then America! And that way I won't have to kill young chicks for no reason except social bonding. We can do that after we take over."

The latter sounds pretty good, eh? I know I'm ready. I'm not joking. Just get me into one of those smoke-filled rooms for five minutes and I swear your folding money would have my face on it within three years. I read once that if everyone in the world lived like the average American, we'd need four planets. I say that if everyone lived the way I told them too, we'd already OWN four planets! ARE YOU WITH ME? ARE YOU READY TO DIE FOR MEEEEEEE?!?!

Anyway, movie. Sherlock Holmes uses the old trick of depicting genius by making everybody stupid, and then making Li'l Miss Smartypuss (that's Sherlock) a tiny drop less idiotic. So, for example, Blackwood is about to be hanged, so his last request is to talk to Sherlock Holmes so he could give him vital clues and taunt him. If Blackwood was really smart, his last request would be, "No Sherlock Holmes at all, thank you." Don't even talk to the guy! There's no reason to.

I won't go into all the ways in which the plot-spectacle of the film makes no sense—have I mentioned that the film is two and a half hours long, and that's mostly establishing shots? Really! As it turns out, London has a river and a big clocktower and a bunch of poor people with black teeth. I'll just use one example. Much like the audience, nobody in the movie really cares too much that Parliament and everyone in it is being threatened with death. So they throw in a bit about taking over America too. The ambassador to the US objects, pulls a gun on Blackwood, and bursts into flame. Later, Sherlock explains that of course what happened is that Blackwood had installed in the lodge of the secret society a sprinkler that he turned on when the ambassador came to the meeting (late) and that sprinkler sprayed an odorless colorless flammable (or inflammable, if you're a snoot like me) liquid. A spark from the revolver is all it took to make it seem as though the ambassador combusts spontaneously through the power of black magic.

So, even leaving aside this unique substance, created for Blackwood (and the film) by "a ginger midget" in a secret lab that Holmes and Watson just happen to discover, with its experiments all out in the open and apparatus and results on display moments before rather than moments after arsonists come to burn down the place in broad daylight, isn't it

a good thing the ambassador came late so he could get sprayed on while nobody else did

a good thing he's an American and thus not a gentleman, who of course would always have an umbrella

a good thing he didn't just have his coach pull up right to the door

a good thing he decided to wear his magic secret society cloak out instead of changing in to it in the changing room

a good thing he pulled out a revolver instead of, oh, a knife

a good thing he made his speech from across the room rather than doing one of those secret handshakes with Blackwood before trying to shoot him, then they both might have died, or Blackwood would have at least been injured

a good thing he didn't just rush Blackwood even when aflame

a good thing his bullet somehow didn't actually come out of the gun or hit Blackwood, though the powder in the pistol did go off and leave a spark

a good thing he didn't show up just to denounce Blackwood, or was just planning to kill him later when fifteen Very Important People weren't sitting around waiting to be witnesses

a good thing nobody else lit up a cigarette during the ambassador's speech

You know, like that. The whole movie is like that. The super-logical explanations Holmes gives for everything—which, in a clever moment, he does to taunt Blackwood while the villain is about to fall down the Inevitable Hole over which 90 percent of final movie fights take place, instead of it being the hero struggling with the bit while the antagonist gloats—make no sense at all unless we assume an invisible audience of millions of not-very-interested viewers watching everything Blackwood does for kicks.

He's doing it for *points at the camera lens* YOU!

The Ambassador thing isn't even the worst one. It's Doctor Watson being fooled by the ol' "Romeo and Juliet" tonic after Blackwood is hanged—Blackwood died young and left a suspiciously good-looking corpse plus the apparatus that let him live past the hanging while remaining in a vegetative state just long enough to be buried in crypt that was...oh, never fucking mind already—that probably takes the cake. Probably.

The movie also suffers from having only ninety minutes of material. In addition to endless establishing shots and a very silly Holmes-is-really-thinking-NOW montage, all the jokes and little bits of repartee are endlessly repeated. The dog dies three times, for example. The dog also farts once, and that's supposed to be a laugh. At least three-deaths/one-fart is an inversion of the usual Hollywood wacky dog formula. Watson is hideously injured in an explosion but is up and about and ready to beat up three ruffians a few scenes later. (Btw, he walks with a limp and a cane.) The gay subtext is sub-House and Wilson level. There's a joke about autoerotic asphyxiation at the very end, just to give the audience something to think about on the walk home. There is an inexplicable scene in which Holmes has captured some flies. We don't need to know that Holmes is an eccentric nut through such set pieces, we've all already come prepared. And any one or two of the dozen or so asides about how kooky Holmes is would have done. Then there are other things—such as Holmes mental dissections of his fights—that are brought up once or twice and then dropped entirely.

What is in the film isn't much. Jude Law remains famous for no reason. Remember when he was in every film made between the summers of 2004 and 2005 (inclusive)? Oh, those were dark times for humanity, weren't they. Well, he's still awful. Downey who is usually great, or at least has screen presence, probably did the film for the cocaine...and there wasn't any! The female characters were non-entities, the villain has less screen time than a random police officer named Clarkesy and the secondary baddy is named Lord Coward. Guess what he's like?

Also, Moriarty is played by a hat.

A crow appears for no reason several times, except to hint that INDEED there is ACTUAL magic in the movie. (Nah, just a crow.)

There are two types of films that come out on Christmas Day. The first and rarer types are prestige pictures which are leaked into theaters at the end of the calendar so as to qualify for the Academy Awards and be fresh in the minds of the voting members. The second and more common type is the movie that promises thanks to its stars or spectacle or reputation to have a very big opening day and then fall off due to awful word of mouth. The closer a film opens to Christmas Day, the worse even the people who made it thinks it is.

Here's the only mystery of Sherlock Holmes—why did they even book noon and 3PM shows, because all that would do is lower ticket sales for the evening programs? Take the money and run!

I hope you all like what I left you when I broke into your homes last night.

Don't worry if you can't find it immediately. Sometimes it takes a couple days to really become...fragrant.

Couting Coup with a Pig-Sticker
I received an offer letter for Move Under Ground from an independent foreign-language publisher (language announcement TK on signing) this morning. A good Christmas present, one made better by the fact that the same publisher had rejected the book earlier this year, but with a promise to send it along to a friend of his at another company with a more amenable list. He wrote, this morning, "On a second thought and a more selfish one I admit, I hate the idea of giving the book to somebody else since I liked it so much..."

This sort of thing happens to me a lot. "Who Put the Bomp?" was paid for and published out-of-pocket by

scalzi because he just liked the story too much. Generally, in fact, acceptance letters I receive read like, "I wasn't sure if it was the right fit at first, but I'm trying to take more risks and continue to break out of the box," to quote one from earlier this month. Then there was the venue that purchased Story B one hour after submission and in the acceptance letter mentioned that they are still considering Story A, submitted in March, as it was "good and also challenging."

Of course, for every letter like this I get three or four—or usually, my agent does—that read, "Wonderful, loved it, can't publish it." Or, for books, "can't sell it." Stories are a lower-risk proposition for editors than books, after all. The "good stories" (As in "The most important thing is a 'good story'") in an issue of a magazine or anthology can do all the selling, and the outlier material generally isn't a drag on financial performance. Outlier books though, in these days of consolidation and mass layoffs of editors at "prestige" imprints, generally don't get the patronage. Heck, a poet friend of mine with seven books is having trouble selling her eighth to the publisher of three of them, a publisher which was founded as a poetry press, because the list is shifting away from poems and toward other, more popular stuff. (Propaganda for the Democratic Party, novels by writers who were dropped from major publishers for being outliers, comic books about people who slouch and walk past restaurant windows full of happier sorts who just don't understand, etc.)

I suppose one of the charges I get from writing and submitting fiction is the sense of "Yes! BOW to the story, Oinky!" I get when receiving acceptance letters. And, truth be told, I've been Oinky myself. I originally rejected Kristin Mandigma's Excerpt From a Letter by a Social-Realist Aswang for Clarkesworld, the decision made purely from the fear that I'd be the only one to like the story. I even tried to place it elsewhere for a while on the author's behalf, then finally broke down and wrote Mandigma a tearful plea to give me the story after all. Worked too! Readers didn't seem to object too violently, and it's been reprinted in The Apex Book of World SF (which you should buy with your Christmas money next week). See, that means at least two people like it!

And the worm can turn. Yesterday I received from the wonderful UK criminals Murder Slim Press a copy of Hating Olivia by Mark SaFranko, which I bought four years after its release by this micropress—the book looks practically handmade, with no barcode and the ISBN and price on a sticker—because I heard that Harper Perennial will be reissuing the title in the US, and I wanted lit-nerd bragging rights when it comes out. From glue gun publishing to Rupert Murdoch is really sticking it to Oinky! (Of course, if the Bookscan numbers on Dan Fante's reissues are a bellwether, Oinky will likely soon stick it right back, but we're counting coup here, not overthrowing capitalism. Yet.)

Indeed, this all is my ultimate objection to the recent misuse of the word "indie", as in "indie author", which generally means self-published author of utterly commercial fiction about young children in a fantasy world, tiger-men with zap guns, or Christian serial killers. Or worse, they're small publishers just hanging on to some reactionary aesthetic that is simply no longer commercial. You are not indie if you self-publish your commercial nonsense because "The Big Boys" don't want it. You are not indie if your publishing program harkens back to the good ol' days of commercial fiction before it was ruined by women or big words. You are a beady-eyed shopkeeper, as tedious and annoying as Mrs. Olesen from Little House on the Prairie with your mind-numbing hustle and your ridiculous airs. Real indie writers create stuff so odd that someone else must ultimately publish it (even if they saw it as some leaflet you taped to a lamppost), often despite their own better judgment. That publisher becomes an indie and then you get to be an indie author, even if some bigger pig tries you out later in a historical moment when downtown is hip. A publisher is indie when it doesn't see itself as a training ground for "new" writers who are "working their way up" some hideous and greasy ladder, but as a superior alternative to well-funded capitalists whose lists are too commercial. To sum it up:

Indie

Not Indie

If you're your own Oinky, you're not indie at all. The power of whatever bundle of aesthetics and themes makes a piece potentially "indie" can be measured to the extent that other people will bleed money or risk their own homes and health to publish the material.

Stick it to Oinky.

Finally, a superhero for girls!
This is a red band trailer. NSFW.

Chain store follies
I was sent a 10 percent coupon for an in-store purchase at B&N. There's one by my workplace, so I printed the coupon and went to get get a book that had over the last two weeks gotten major write-ups in the New York Times, LA Times, SF Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, etc.

"We're out," they told me. "We're out because we never had any."

"Oh. Are you getting some."

"We have...one on order."

I left the store.

Then B&N sent me another coupon over the weekend for 20 percent off plus free shipping plus "member's pricing" (prior to the subtraction of 20 percent) for online shopping only.

So NOW I'm getting the book.

Sheesh!

Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, The Interview
It's Cthulhu Month at Tor.com and I was asked to pitch an idea. What came immediately to mind was a Q/A with the great Lovecraftian writer Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire. Called by S. T. Joshi the miner of "some of the richest veins of neo-Lovecraftian horror seen in recent years," Pugmire is one of the few Lovecraftians to actually go beyond Lovecraft...as opposed to simply throwing in a machine gun or something. He's also one of the most unusual individuals you might meet. He's known in fanzine culture for one of the seminal queer zines, Punk Lust, and today creates the occasional perzine under the title Idiot Chaos. After a visitation by dead relatives a few years ago, Pugmire re-entered the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He still dresses like this though:

Pugmire has never written a novel, but is well-known enough to soon be getting the oversized artbook treatment from Centipede Press. His work has appeared in some of the more prominent anthologies in the field and is widely reprinted, but he revises his stories constantly so fans simply must buy his collections when they come out. All thriller, no filler. Pugmire's recent books include The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams and Weird Inhabitants of Sesqua Valley. Pugmire's short story "Some Bacchante of Irem" appears in latest issue of Dark Discoveries, an H.P. Lovecraft special. He vlogs as MrWilum on YouTube. He also recently experienced congestive heart failure.

Anyway, Tor.com didn't want it (though something of mine will be showing up on that site in time to save Cthulumas) but I decided to interview Pugmire anyway. I'll also be using an LJ-cut tag for the first time in years given the length of the piece, but please click through anyway.

You're a gay Mormon transvestite punk rocker—what's the attraction to Lovecraft, who would likely have been terrified of you had you been alive in his era?

( Read more... )

Brittany Murphy
Movie star Brittany Murphy is dead of a heart attack at 32.

She went into full cardiac arrest early Sunday and could not be revived, the Website TMZ reported.

Ah, drugs. Or marathon running without training first. Or perhaps a birth defect of some sort. Sad; I always liked her. My favorite movie was the underrated Cherry Falls, which poked fun at slasher movies by reversing the usual sexual politics of promiscuity=death.

Like many people though, bad decisions and limited range haunted her career, which lately boiled down to certainly not being fired on the set of a movie, the direct to Netflix Deadline, and, of course, over 200 episodes of voice acting on King of the Hill. (She was the voice of Luanne.)

Shockingly enough, the first page on non-safesearched Google Images results for Luanne King Hill is mostly cartoon pornography.

Also shocking, the Daily News report I linked to was written by someone I was in the ISO with years ago.

Note for forthcoming podcast
Drabblecast will be running joanierules.bloggermax.com as a podcast in less than two weeks.

For your information, the podcast will alter the following terms from the story to suit the presumed audience of Drabblecast.

"Kuntdrip, fuckyu Frog bitch" will now be "Vag-face, F-U frog bitch"

"Fucking cat" will now be "freakin' cat"

"cunt" will now be "dick"

Please mentally reinsert these words into the stream of the story as you listen to the podcast, which I will link to on the 30th of this month. Remember, that's cuntdrip, fuck you, fucking cunt. One more time: cundtrip, fuck you, fucking cunt. Please do not mess up the order of these terms when listening.

Thank you for your time and attention.

And furthermore, my Christmas present to all of you
I'll be seeing Sherlock Holmes opening day as well.

Avatar
I sure was glad that one of the friends I saw Avatar with last night ordered an extra large popcorn, because I needed a puke bucket to sit through that movie.

Also, it was in 3D, which made me a little dizzy.

Avatar is a nineteen-hour long film about a stupid ex-Marine who is employed by one of those The Companys one often hears about in science fiction movies to infiltrate the native American Indian/blue panther population of a planet because all the good stuff—a propertyless mineral called unobtanium (haw haw, I write scripts and look at the Internet!)—is under their giant tree. The Marine, who was injured and without the use of his legs in his human body, is named Sully (because he is SULLYING a natural world) and there is a careful scientist named Grace (because she is not exploitive and horrible and can be said to live in a state of GRACE) and an old soldier in charge of blowing things up whose name I didn't catch, but it was probably something like Colonel McEarthrape. (Because he likes to RAPE the EARTH, even when he isn't on it!)

The central conceit of the movie is that Sully and others can "drive" avatars that look just like the Big Blue Indian inhabitants, and that way can communicate and ultimately gain the trust of the indigenous population. Sully doesn't know a word of the native language, doesn't know anything of the local flora or fauna, and has no experience in his new body (voted Sexiest Space Gay at Furcon 2154's art show!) but he's American! Fuck Yeah! So it all works out for him. Despite satellite and radio technology, The Company has no way of tracking the location of the avatars either...well, not in the first act. Later on, they flip the avatars on and off at precisely the right dramatic moment. "I came here to tell you—" *thud*

Avatar does represent a step forward in science fiction film in that it is only forty years behind science fiction literature rather than the usual fifty years. The filmmakers were clearly terribly worried that Stupid American audiences wouldn't get their opus—I'll sum it up for you right now, it's Dances With Ewoks—that they gave Sully an extended voice over explaining most everything occurring on-screen. The choice of Sam Worthington, whose Tony Danzaesque voice grates at the best of times, to do the voice over is just one of those things filmmakers do to show that they are just as stupid as the audience. So don't feel bad, youse guys, that you got laid off the week before Christmas and this cartoon cost $350,000,000 to make. ($75,000,000 alone was for Sigourney Weaver's Botox treatments. The woman was born in ninteen forty-nine, people! I believe the rest was spent on sleeveless T-shirts for Michelle Rodriguez. Which is strange, because I'm sure she has plenty at home.)

There are also lines like this: upon entering the bio lab, "This is the bio lab." A great predatory bird, we are told, is called Last Shadow. "Because it's the last shadow you'll ever see," Sully figures out and explains to the audience. "Gee, thanks Einstein," the audience responds. When there's a fight, people say, "Let's dance!" The stupid guy is told, "Don't do anything exceptionally stupid," by a smart person—sadly nobody followed this bit of advice. The Weasely Company Dude calls the natives "savages" because he didn't get either the HR or the PR department reports on Respecting Others, plus that way we'll know he's bad! McEarthrape says, "We'll fight terror with terror," I suppose because saying, "I'M EEEEEEVIL! EEEEVIL I TELL YOU AND I LOVE TO RAPE...THE EARTH!" would have been considered too realistically gritty. When I wandered into the lobby for a few minutes just to look at the carpeting and came back I was still able to predict every line of dialogue despite surely missing a very important tree or something. The natives have their own language too. It sounds like this: "Ook Ta Lo lo Shvan." Just to make sure acting was as difficult as possible. Also, they are Pernesque dragon riders!

Anyway, Sully meets an Indian princess who senses his pure heart because some dandelion fluff falls on him. She takes him home and everyone inexplicably agrees to teach this young and extremely stupid warrior all the ways of their clan. These secret ways involve traversing video game landscapes and carefully looking at leaves because, as they explain in every title at the metaphysical bookstore at the end of my block here in Berkeley, Everything Is Connected. (Sully had never heard such a thing!) Then there is some furry CGI sex—the audience laughed—and the stupid stupid Indians wake up all surprised that the bulldozers are coming to tear down their Home Tree.

Our little Keeblers, you see, just don't comprehend the "sky people" despite having learned English and such. Like those primitive but noble American Indians, they are childlike and foolish as they try to use their arrows against attack copters (which only works in the third act, not the second), but they have a great wisdom and thus Sully decides to become their leader. His battle plan is, as of course it must be, GO FOR IT! Then it's a nine-hour long battle of Endor. Also, Michelle Rodriguez dies. I knew that was going to happen because she was in the movie.

Much has been made of Avatar's stunning visual sense, generally from people who never flipped through an issue of Heavy Metal in their lives. The night exteriors look more like those black light posters people used to hang in their dorm rooms in the 1970s. You know, back before the invention of fun in 1987. Everything's glowing because, as it turns out, Everything Is Connected. Despite the many native clans (Horse clans! Just like Indians! Clans that live by the sea! Just like Indians! Clans that live in a single giant tree! Just like...oh.) banding together under the leadership of Vinny Barbarino and all the hardware The Company has its command, the war is settled by a one-on-one karate fight between McEarthrape (in one of those robosuits from Aliens) and Sully. Just like King Philip's War in American history actually. Too bad nobody taught King Philip karate, eh, eh? Sucker!

Anyway, there's a second magic tree and it is made out of that fiberoptic stuff and it is also God and so all the CGI creatures we saw in the first act come back and kill all the helicopters and stuff and Sully gets permanently avatared and gets to have blue furry sex with Uhura from Star Trek forever. The funny thing is that the filmmakers probably thought they were making a kick-ass movie about the depredations of capitalism (you know, like the BUDGET of this monster!) and the horrors of genocide, but they really just made one about how Hollywood liberals are the most obnoxious assholes in the world. Anyway, I hope everyone involved in his movie contracts mouth cancer so they can no longer say things like, "Yes, I agree to work on Avatar II: Avat Tarrer" except for Michelle Rodriguez, whose lips I'll protect from free radicals by covering them with my lips always and forever.

I suppose I'll mention a few positives. An early scene in zero-G is interesting. The crazy CGI spaceships and labs are treated as everyday objects—indeed we don't get our first character telling us to be impressed by going, "wwwoooww" until the scientists show up at some floating mountains. (It's a "flux vortex"! A what? A SHUT UP JUST SHUT UP AND LOOK AT THE FLOATING MOUNTAINS!) There's a bit in the second act where we see Sully in his wheelchair and they CGIed his legs to look a bit skinnier then they had before—he's not been exercising at all because he is spending too much time in his avatar body. They then ruin this subtle and clever bit of filmmaking by having him put on shaving cream while staring forlornly into a broken mirror.

Avatar is as stupid as Transformers 2 and for those with a brain in their heads is twice as offensive. I'm not easily offended; I even think the White Guy Becomes An Indian thing can be done well on rare occasions—Howard Waldrop's Them Bones comes to mind—but this movie was just awful. How awful? I left as soon as the credits started to roll, but even as I ran for the lobby I heard a snippet of lyrics from the end credits theme. Here's the first verse:

Walking through a dream, I see you
My light and darkness breathing hope of new life
Now I live through you and you through me, enchanted
I pray in my heart that this dream never ends

Now imagine your school days, and someone handing you these lyrics in the form of a note. And when you open up the note to read it, they start crying because they just love you so much and wanted to share their feelings for you through poetry. Wouldn't it be better if aliens just came down and killed us all? See, I knew you'd see what I mean.

One half of the master plan, accomplished!

The infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the entrance to the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland has been stolen.

Now all that need happen is for the sign to be replaced with one reading "EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON" and people will stop saying that!

Killing in the Name of...Christmas!
You know, I thought the whole Facebook stunt to propel Rage Against The Machine's 1992 song "Killing in the Name Of" to the top of the UK's pop chart by Christmas was really lame. Then I heard the likely alternative:

One, it's a cover of a Hannah Montana song. Two, it's about hope and trying hard. Three, as my friend pointed out, it sounds like something they would sing on South Park except it isn't funny at all. Four OH MY GOD. Five, you know that in eighteen years or so this song is going to be dusted off by Internet nerds and they'll call it ElderRolling, and I'll be old then and I want to keep from having to hear this song in my mid-50s in my cyberjack implant.

So, to the peoples of the United Kingdom, HOW CAN I HELP YOU? HOW CAN I HELP YOU WITH THE UPHILL BATTLE! HOW CAN HELP YOU WITH THE CLIIIIIIIIIIIIIMB...oh God it's already starting! Quick, tell me what to do?!

There have been a lot of dumb threads on the topic of short stories and $$ lately
...but this one is the donkey-ass dumbest, and that is despite the intervention of several intelligent and thoughtful participants.

Is it the holidays? Does Christmas lower IQ? Is it the "public option" being tossed into the shredder? Blood flow to the brain slows down in cold weather? What?

How Interesting: A Tiny Story
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the rumors of a Harlan Ellison story in Realms of Fantasy weren't just rumors. With Ellison, until you're finished reading the story, it's a rumor. "How Interesting: A Tiny Man" is an apposite title for the piece, in more ways than one. From what I was able to piece together from Ellison's awkward online guestbook, the story was originally supposed to be part of an anthology celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of The Twilight Zone. I'm a pretty big Zonehead and the book managed to fly entirely under my radar except for Ellison's pulling his story from it, so it was probably for the best.

I understand that Ellison also submitted "How Interesting: A Tiny Man" to The New Yorker, which rejected it. This led to some fanboy fuming on the board but Ellison wisely quieted them down.

Then I guess Lapine met Ellison's price and here we go. Other Change of Hobbit didn't have the magazine yet so last night after work I stopped at a Borders and, amazingly, the store was not only not boarded up and full of crack addicts smoking in the dark amid empty shelves (give it till January), it actually had the magazine!

I almost vomited when I read what appeared to be the first few lines of the story: "Across the endless vista of human experience the voiceless whispers of remarkable stories rustle on the wind, and too many of them escape our understanding because we do not know the many languages that fill the silence."

That gibbering nonsense couldn't be from Ellison. It just couldn't. And indeed, it wasn't. Realms seems to have developed the horrid habit of putting introductions to stories below the author bylines:

(Btw, if you're wondering if the reason you can't really see the byline or the illustration credit because of your monitor, the answer is no. In real life the bylines are nearly impossible to see. I had to shift the magazine around quite a bit to get a clear look at that awful choice of yellow.)

Most of the introductions in this issue are more like "Love can fell even the mightiest of us" and are thus more obviously introductory. Not this one though. What sort of crazy lunatic thought that breathless bit of glurge was a good thing to put atop this story? What sort of crazy lunatic could even commit such nonsense to paper or pixels in the first place? It's the 21st century! We have science now! Pills! Leather restraints! We can end such nightmares, friends, if we all pull together and support the reinstitutionalization of the literary droolcup set.

Once I finally started reading "How Interesting: A Tiny Man", it...wasn't bad. It was good. Not "call your friends" awesome or "Time to take Ellison out back and shoot him" awful. A minor work. "How Interesting: A Tiny Story," really. In it, a man develops a tiny man. People find it interesting. A TV appearance ruins everything. That common thematic enemy of Ellison, the masses (this time in the form of everyone's favorite whipping boy, irrational Christians) come down against the tiny man. "Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved" is found sufficiently clever to be stated twice within the ~2000 word story. (I hope this all isn't venting about honking Connie Willis's boob.) The physical facts of the story—the creation of the man, who exactly wants what with him, how he and his maker flee, aren't really important. The narrative voice is simplified Ellison—the scientist as naif and curmudgeon at once. Kanye West is namechecked for some reason, but in the same sentence as Black Sabbath. That sort of thing.

Most interestingly, "How Interesting: a Tiny Man" offers two endings, though they are horrifically laid out as two short grafs in a sea of white space on a lonesome page of their own. One ending is the sort that gets stories rejected, though it can also be read for laughs. The second ending is more fittingly Ellisonian but indeed actually needed the first ending to help it along. Neither would have been sufficient alone, though I suppose I wished there was some narrative (as opposed to just thematic) reason why two endings were offered.

Ellison's biographical note reads in part that he'd "rather be a vertical has-been than a young never-was." Mission accomplished, maybe, but "How Interesting: A Tiny Man" was the best story in this issue of Realms. Sometimes too short is better than too long.

ETA: You can read this story and the whole issue via PDF here:
http://www.fantasticbooks.wilderpublications.com/rof-feb-2010-web.pdf