Nick Interviews SF Author Robert J. Sawyer

The August-September 2010 issue of Philosophy Now magazine has published my interview with science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer. I’ve included the link to the article here, which for a short time will allow you to read the entire interview. Once it’s gone, you’ll need to buy the magazine to read it. I’d recommend you go one better and subscribe. PN is a great publication!

Robert J. Sawyer

Subscribe to Philosophy Now.

Great Summer; Less Blogging

It’s been a great summer, which means a lot less posting. But I’m popping in after a very long hiatus to drop some 3s on you: 

3 PUBLICATIONS: 

One in print and two forthcoming:

1. I interviewed SF author Robert J. Sawyer for Philosophy Now magazine, scheduled to appear in the next issue (Aug./Sept. #80);
2. “Blind Spot,” a short story that I wrote in collaboration with my pal Rick Wilber, is set for the Oct./Nov. issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF);
3. a story of mine just appeared in the anthology 2034: Writing Rochester’s Futures.

I’m only mentioning them in passing here. I’ll write a bit more about them in my next entry. 

MY 3 FAV BOXING FILMS: 

Okay, this was a tough one, but only once I got past the first two. Raging Bull (De Niro and dir. Martin Scorsese) is an obvious pick, but a worthy one. It’s not only one of the best boxing films ever made, it’s one of the best films period. I’m also going to choose Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby. Some people may argue this one with me, but really, why?

Then things start getting harder. You’ve got films like Requiem for a Heavyweight, Somebody Up There Likes Me, The Hurricane, and, more recently, Cinderella Man, just to name a few. (No, I haven’t forgotten all the f-king Rocky films, although I’ve tried to.) 

I’m going with The Set-Up (1949). This film captures the inside world of chump (vs. champ) boxing as good as anything you’ll see. Robert Ryan as Stoker is pitch-perfect, the action is gritty and noir, and Robert Wise’s direction and cinematography are superior. Also in this black-and-white gem of a film is one of the finest choreographed boxing matches I’ve ever seen. The story is told in “real time,” which in my opinion adds a lot to the tension and immediacy of the movie. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. 

This video clip of The Set-Up will give you a great feel for the film. 

MY 3 FAV BOOKS OF THE SUMMER: 

I really wanted to dislike Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. It’s the hottest series in the world (literally – a friend of mine just returned from a yoga retreat in Lesbos and said that people were reading it there). Everyone loves it, and that kind of serious bandwagoning makes me want to go counter-culture all over it. 

So. I really hated liking The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I hated liking The Girl Who Played With Fire. And I hated liking The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. The truth is it’s the best bunch of books I’ve read in a long time. I’ve also seen the first two films, which I liked, and I’m now living in dread, as I’m sure many other fans of the books are, over how badly Hollywood is going to screw up the series once they get their hands on it. The books can’t be ruined: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. 

To learn more about the Millennium series and the author (sadly deceased), visit Stieg Larsson (The Man Behind Lisbeth Salander). 

Swedish Author Stieg Larsson (15 August 1954 – 9 November 2004)

Couple More Pics from Icy Manitoba

Me and Kelly Hughes from my Feb. 5 appearance at Aqua Books, and a fine sf/fantasy book display at the McNally Robinson at Grant Park in Winnipeg (thanks Chadwick Ginther!) with my two novels up front left. WoooHoooo!

Fun in Winni

I had the pleasure of appearing on the Kelly Hughes Live show at Aqua Books in Winnipeg on Friday, Feb. 5. This was my first chance to meet Kelly, although I’d been to his book store a few times on previous visits.

I found him to be a very funny guy, honest and intense, and we had a bit of common ground and talked about what it’s like to own a bookstore. Here’s how the event was pitched in the Winnipeg Free Press:

Kelly Hughes Live! Gets His Geek On
Friday, February 5/10 7pm
With Kids in the Hall’s Kevin McDonald, SF writer Nick DiChario, X-Men colourist Lovern Kindzierski and UFO expert Chris Rutkowski, music by Al Conroy (aka not half)

I had a great time on the show. Kevin McDonald from Kids in the Hall was hysterically funny, and I really enjoyed the local Half Pints Brewing Company’s Stir Stick Stout — highly recommended!

Check out the Aqua Books website. It’s definitely a place to visit if you’re in Winnipeg.

It’s Hell to be a Writer…

And there are very few writers who would argue that point. It takes the eternal optimism of a fool. You have to be ever hopeful, regardless of how hopeless you feel. You can’t let your resolve slip for a moment, because if you do, if you think about how little effect your words have in the world, no matter the passion, desire, and intensity you bring to them, everything you live for will come crashing down around you. So you live in fear of the end of your life, not because you’re afraid to die, but because you know, in the end, your words will die.

There’s probably no film that understands these things better or illustrates them with such a frightening sense of honesty and clarity than Starting Out in the Evening (2007). This is a story of an old novelist whose best work is long behind him and already forgotten, who feels the press of time, and suddenly a young, pretty grad student takes an interest in his work. How the novelist responds to her interest drives this film with an emotional power that will catch you completely by surprise and, if you’re a writer or understand what it means to be one, kick the crap out of you. Frank Langella, one of our finest living actors, delivers a brilliant performance. Highly recommended.

Of further interest…

Andrew Wagner (dir).

Based on the novel by Brian Morton.

Salon book review.

Frank Langella bio.

Goodbye ’09

I apologize for being on such an egregiously long hiatus. I’ve been busy in good ways and bad ways, but mostly good ways, so I’m forgiving myself and slipping in under the wire to post a few year-end goodies before 2010 hits.

Go out and make 2010 memorable. What’s your New Year’s resolution? Mine is “Read, Think, Create.”

Films

I’ve seen a bunch lately, but here are a few quick recommends:

Everybody’s Fine is definitely not your feel-good holiday film of the season. But it is De Niro being great.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Incredibly inventive animation and a great story.

Precious is about as raw and real as a film gets. This and the inspired performances across the board make it a must-see, even if it’s awfully hard to take at times.

The Men Who Stare at Goats. Crazy idea, Jeff Bridges in fine form, and a good script make up for maybe a little too much Clooney.

Paranormal Activity is the movie that the Blair Witch team should have made after The Blair Witch Project. I had trouble sleeping for a week afterwards. WoooHooo!

TV

Believe it or not…

This was my year for actually watching, faithfully, a network TV show for the first time in at least a decade. ABC brought Robert J. Sawyer’s excellent novel Flashforward to life with an incredible cast and some of the best network writing I’ve ever seen. The show is on break, but starts up again in March 2010. If you missed any episodes, you can watch them all online for free.

Mad Men. Cripes, if you’ve never seen this show on AMC about ad agency execs in the 1960s, rent all the episodes and catch up for next season!

Books

I’ll mention only a few of my most recent reads:

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. A good friend of mine turned me onto this surprisingly fun and interesting sort-of-business book. It contains the riches of the universe and should be read by everyone who’s trying to make a living in the world today. An expanded and updated edition was just published in December ’09.

Two titles from Crossing Chaos, Enigmatic Ink, that might be completely off your radar:

Dead Business Men by author/illustrator Justin Aerni is some weird kinda cross between Tales From the Crypt and Bevis and Butthead. It’s a graphic novel about three guys trying to break out of the worst corporation imaginable to work for: Hell. The illustration work is nicely twisted.

Marvelous Hairy by Mark A. Rayner offers up some rare and wonderful crazy Canadian satire mixed with chaos theory. Yep, it’s as bizarre as it sounds. Rayner has a great sense of humor and a nice, light story-telling style that will keep you laughing and flipping pages.

One last pretty cool year-end surprise:

Much to my delight, the University Press of Mississippi published Conversations with Octavia Butler, edited by Conseula Franics, which includes my 2004 interview of Octavia along with several other interesting and revealing conversations. She died tragically in 2006, way too young at age 58, after a fall outside her home in the state of Washington.

Existenial Theater

The new issue of Philosophy Now magazine (Sept./Oct. 09) is available. The issue is dedicated to existentialism, and in it you’ll find my review of Revolutionary Road, the film, mostly, but also Richard Yates’ incredible novel, which I couldn’t resist talking about as well.

I’ve copied in the first few paragraphs here, and I encourage you to buy the magazine. There are a number of terrific articles for all of us parlor existentialists to enjoy. It’s a great issue.

Subscribe to Philosophy Now, one of the coolest magazines in the universe!

Nick DiChario asks if it’s existential, or just depressing.

All April Wheeler wants is for her husband Frank to shut up. Chances are you’ve felt a similar frustration. You suffer a setback in life – not your run-of-the-mill disappointment, but a game-changer, one of those epic collapses that forces you to take a long, hard look at who you are and what it means to be alive in a world that has turned against you; a moment that makes you reassess a life-long dream and decide whether it’s time to give up on it for good – and you just need a little time and space to think it through.

This is exactly where April is in the opening scene of Revolutionary Road, the film based on Richard Yates’ classic 1961 existential novel. April always wanted to be an actress, and she went to acting school before she met Frank. When she joined the local production of The Petrified Forest, it was mostly to remind herself of her former life, to rediscover the flame that once burned brightly inside her. Connecticut isn’t exactly Broadway, but for a woman of thirty-something, mother of two, opening night at the high school was a big deal. If she had performed admirably – if she had gotten a standing ovation, or even a sincere round of applause – it might have been enough to justify her existence.

But she was awful – so awful that she knew she would never act again, and most likely had no talent to begin with. Although this scene is passed over quickly in the film, Yates gives it a good measure of attention in his novel. It is an important moment, a moment in April’s life when desire runs hard up against truth and comes out the worst for it. Frank does his best to console her, make her feel better about her failure; but all she really wants him to do is shut the hell up so she can think, put it all in perspective and rearrange her psyche to cope with the death of her dream. Not too much to ask for – but Frank is incapable of giving it. During the ride home the couple argue violently, each saying things they know will deeply hurt the other. Welcome to the lives of Frank and April Wheeler.

There Isn’t Enough Time to Read All the Books I Want to Read!

Two More Authors to Read and Keep Reading

Victor Pelevin and Jack Vance

Friend and fellow writer Chadwick Ginther loaned me his copy of Victor Pelevin’s The Life of Insects. We’d been chatting about the author, and I’d mentioned that Pelevin was one of those writers I’d recently heard a lot about but hadn’t had a chance to read. I knew a little of Pelevin, that he was a Russian author who liked to mess outside the lines of realism and mix philosophy and pop culture and other weirdness into his stories. Basically, just the kind of stuff I love. Even though I was expecting a strange bit of literary smoke, it took me awhile to get into the book. Were the visiting American and his two Russian acquaintances really mosquitoes? Who (or what) was Marina? A flying ant? And what could possibly be running through the head of a young dung beetle other than his black sphere? I soon discovered that the trick to mastering this book was to simply give in to it and let the prose and the odd bits of philosophical observations carry me into the lives and stories of the people-insects. Once I realized that Pelevin’s characters were not humans transforming into insects (or vice versa) but they were both humans and insects at the same time, living in both worlds, this one and that one, I stopped worrying about the details and simply became one with the music he was playing. Take, for example, this completely bizarre love scene between Sam and Natasha:

“Sam felt his proboscis straightening up under Natasha’s dexterous hands, and he looked ecstatically into her eyes. A long dark tongue with a shaggy tip divided into two short hairy branches hung from her jaw. The tongue shuddered in excitement, and dark green drops of thick secretion tricked down it. ‘Eat me,’ whispered Natasha, tugging on the antennae protruding from beneath Sam’s eyes, and he buzzed and groaned as his proboscis crunched through the green chitin of her back…”

Are you kidding me? That’s great stuff. And as the short novel crawls and digs and buzzes and flies and hums forward, you begin to see more and more how the lives of humans and insects are strangely similar, how we, much like insects, are driven by instinct and hope and absurdity and our inescapable social structures. The book is disorienting, clever, poetic, and sophisticated, and you can’t help but think of the Russian tradition of political allegory as you read along. Highly Recommended.

Jack Vance

I’m the first to admit that I have not read nearly enough of the sf classic authors. One of those authors is Jack Vance, generally considered among the very best writers in the field, winner of the Hugo and Nebula and World Fantasy awards, not to mention the Grand Master. There was a great article about Vance in the NY Times Magazine back in July 09 written by Carlo Rotella, in which a number of popular authors were quoted as having been influenced by Vance during their early teen years, including guys like Neil Gaiman, Dan Simmons, and Michael Chabon. 

So when I happened upon The Languages of Pao in the library, I decided to mend my ways. Although the book was originally published in the 1950s, I found it to be a great read and none the worse for wear. How often have you read a science fiction novel where the central conceit is linguistics? The book has interplanetary politics and intrigue, an assassination plot, and a powerful story of loyalty, homesickness, and survival. The young protagonist and heir to the throne of Pao, Beran Panasper, is just a boy when his father is murdered. He is spirited away to the planet Breakness to spare his life, where he is educated and taught many languages, and given the tools he will need to one day reclaim his rightful place on Pao. Vance is one of the cherished few sf stylists, and this book, not surprisingly, will pull you in with its wonderful language. I understand that The Dragon Masters is a must read. Many of Vance’s books have been republished and are still available and reasonably priced. If anyone has a favorite, let me know. I’m up for more. Highly recommended.

Of further interest…

More books by Victor Pelevin.

Jack Vance’s biblio.

Inglorious Bookstore

Here are all the books that remain almost three years after the demise of my once proud and beloved bookstore. Eight grocery bags. They will soon be donated to the local library. All good things must come to an end. Sigh. (There’s that darn cat again.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inglorious Basterds. Well, heck, just go see it. The movie is brilliant. Forget that it’s Quentin Tarantino, purge all your preconceptions, ignore everything you’ve heard and read about the film, and just go see the darn thing. It’s a great film filled with incredible performances and truly creative madness, part action-adventure, part pulp-fiction, part alternate history. It’s a compelling story and a gift to the imagination. Partake. Yes, it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Highly recommended. (Inglorious Basterds official movie website.)

I caught Odd Man Out, a classic brit noir, at the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House last week. Although director Carol Reed is best known for his masterwork The Third Man (based on Graham Greene’s novel), I honestly think Odd Man Out is a better picture. It’s a tour de force by actor James Mason, who plays an IRA soldier wounded and on the run from Belfast police. The film will keep you riveted for the entire 116 minutes, and the ending is nothing shy of brilliant. My apologies to those of you who don’t have the Dryden Theatre in your hometown. I know it sucks. But rent Odd Man Out if you can, or watch it online. Highly recommended.

James Mason in Odd Man Out

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of further interest…

Graham Greene writes about The Third Man

Thin Air, Fine Time

As you might expect, I had an incredible time at Thin Air. This week long literary festival was a big fat deal in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and rightly so. One of the main events for SF fans was Thursday night, Sept. 24, when the premier of FlashForward aired on ABC TV, based on Rob Sawyer’s fabulous novel. McNally Robinson at Polo Park cleared out a corner of its store, rented a monster-size movie screen, and threw a huge viewing party. 120 or so peeps showed up to help Rob celebrate opening night. Here are some pics from the event.

Rob introducing the show just before air time…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rob and his wife Carolyn Clink…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Karen Dudley and her dad chillin’ out before the show…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A happy crowd! Author Bev Geddes up front next to SF icon Robert Charles Wilson…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Robert Charles Wilson with his wife Sharry…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rob signing books after the show…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The festival lasted all week, and I made it to a number of events and had a fine time. In addition to Rob’s premier party, on Friday morning I went to Glenlawn Collegiate high school and ran through some creative writing exercises with the kids. Yes, even ninth graders can concentrate! Here’s the proof as they scribble away during a free-write…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Friday afternoon, Rob and Bob and I sat on a panel about “the future” at the University of Winnipeg. That night was the SF event on the Mainstage dowtown at “the Forks.” All three of us read excerpts from our novels and answered questions afterwards. My darn camera battery ran out of juice, so I didn’t get any pictures, but if anyone passes some of theirs along to me I’ll post them later. All in all, the week’s events reminded me of how great it can feel to be an author. Canada sure knows how to treat its writers! I was thrilled to be included. Thanks to Rob, Robert J. Sawyer Books, and Fitzhenry and Whiteside for helping me make it happen.

Of further interest…

Robert J. Sawyer’s website.

Variety reviews FlashForward.

USA Today reviews FlashForward.

Robert Charles Wilson’s website.