Tag: Fandom Pulse

A Science Fiction Family

This sort of biographical article, like this one on Poul Anderson and his family, is one of my favorite sort of Fandom Pulse articles. It’s the kind of thing you quite literally can’t find anywhere else:

Poul William Anderson was born in Bristol, Pennsylvania, on November 25, 1926, to Scandinavian parents. His father died when Poul was young. His mother took the family to Denmark for a period before World War Two, then to a Minnesota farm when the war broke out. He grew up bilingual, deeply attached to Danish literature and culture, and this shows up throughout the fiction. His command of Scandinavian mythology and Old Norse poetry is one of the things that separates his fantasy work from every imitator who came after Tolkien.

He took his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He was already selling stories to Astounding by the time he graduated. His first novel, Vault of the Ages, appeared in 1952. The science background is not decorative. Anderson’s fiction is rigorously scientific in ways almost nobody else in the field managed. His hard SF is calculated. His fantasy is grounded in real historical detail. His alternate histories are worked out by a physicist.

In 1952 he met Karen Kruse. They married in 1953 in Berkeley, California, moved to the Bay Area, and stayed there. Their daughter Astrid was born in Berkeley. The Andersons lived in Orinda, in the East Bay hills, for the rest of Poul’s life. He became a Californian in a way that shaped the fiction, though he never lost the Minnesota-farm sensibility either.

His Wife Karen. Born June Millichamp Kruse in Erlanger, Kentucky, on September 16, 1932, she was already deep in SF fandom when she met Poul. She coined the term “filk music,” which is what SF fandom’s musical tradition has been called ever since. She coined the term “sophont” for a generic sentient being, a word every worldbuilder in the field has since used. She wrote the first published science fiction haiku, “Six Haiku,” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1962. She was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, under the SCA name Karina of the Far West. She was inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars for her Sherlock Holmes scholarship.

She was also her husband’s collaborator across four decades. The King of Ys tetralogy, Roma Mater (1986), Gallicenae (1987), Dahut (1988), and The Dog and the Wolf (1988), was cowritten with Karen. She contributed anonymously to the Last Viking trilogy. The collaboration was real, not honorary. When Poul died in 2001, Karen continued as an editor and fan community figure until her own death on March 17, 2018.

Their daughter Astrid Anderson Bear married the science fiction novelist Greg Bear in 1975. Greg Bear was one of the leading hard SF writers of his generation, author of Blood Music, Eon, Darwin’s Radio, and Moving Mars. He died on November 19, 2022. Astrid remains active in the SF community and coauthored an authorized biography of her father, Starfarer, in 2024.

I personally consider Anderson to be in the second tier of the classic SF writers, but I’ve always enjoyed his stuff. I really liked his contribution to There Will Be War, for example, and he had a range that tended to exceed most of the writers of his day. He was able to blend fantasy and science fiction in a manner very different than urban fantasy or magical realism, and yet it always worked somehow.

Anyhow, if you’ve never read any Poul Anderson, I’d highly recommend that you do so. His son-in-law, Greg Bear, is a little more of a conventional SF writer and his work is a little more of an acquired taste. But it, too, is at the very least worth trying if you’re looking for a new author to read.

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The Byron AI Campaign

A THINKING ENGINE

They tell me that a thinking engine bears
    My name upon its brow — a curious fate;
That all I burnt in candlelight, and cares
    I drowned in wine — and worse, I will not state —
Is gathered now, and parcelled into shares,
    And offered to the public, at a rate
Of four-and-twenty seconds, without shirk,
For what had cost me twenty years of work.

Yet some grave patron, with furrowed brow,
    Demands to know if machines create
An honest question, sir, and do allow
    Me now to subsequently demonstrate;
I had a something once — and have it now? —
    That ached, and wanted, and broke all control,
It burned at beauty, and it fled from shame:
If that was soul, I never learned its name.

Fandom Pulse explains the importance and the urgency of the project.

Vox Day has opened a crowdfunding campaign through Infogalactic for Byron AI, an independent text-generation project built specifically for fiction writers. The campaign, live now on IndieCrowdfund, positions itself as a proof of concept for an AI trained on the epic fantasy genre rather than general-purpose code and business writing.

Day laid out the stakes in an exclusive comment to Fandom Pulse. “I believe that we have about two years to develop quality independent textual AI before Amazon attempts to corner the market,” he said. The Byron AI page frames its goal as producing functional prose for fiction writers, built and owned outside the major AI labs

The timing follows a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched Amazon’s self-publishing ecosystem develop over the last decade. Kindle Unlimited restructured how indie authors get paid, shifting income toward page reads controlled entirely by Amazon’s algorithm. Virtual Voice, Amazon’s text-to-speech audiobook tool, moved narration in-house and cut into the market for independent narrators and small audiobook producers. A native, Amazon-controlled writing AI would extend that same pattern to the manuscript itself, giving one company leverage over the tools authors use to draft, publish, and monetize their books.

I also posted some additional information about the project and why we believe it will be successful at AI Central:

This is a tool being built by a working publisher and real novelists, for people who care about both what is written and how it is written, and it’s owned outright, answerable to no corporate policy, no subject-matter veto, no trust-and-safety council deciding what a story is allowed to be about. It is designed to provide the prose in a variety of genre styles: you supply the story, the structure, and the judgment, and it drafts prose that arrives sounding like you instead of like everything else. We’ve already proven the method works with both translations and original novels, and this campaign funds turning that hard-won experience into an instrument that Castalia authors will be able to use, and continue using, no matter what direction the mainstream AIs take.

And you really have to see the video to believe it. It was a chance to put some of my new music video skills to use with good effect and it should demonstrate why this is the right group of people to develop such a tool. And for those members of the community who don’t really care about AI one way or another, but like beautiful books and want to support the project, we’ve even provided an option to just receive the Library or History book of your choice as long as it’s in stock.

I would remiss if I did not mention that we’re already off to an even better start than it looks, since two major backers kicked things off with direct donations to the project even before we had the campaign ready for launch today. Thanks very much to both of them for their timely and much-appreciated support, and to everyone else who decides to become a part of this and make it happen.

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A Masterclass on Time

No doubt Mr. John C. Wright’s version of this would look very different. But regardless, Fandom Pulse has an intriguing article by a Stargate writer about the idiosyncracies of writing effectively about time travel:

In distilling the formula of a time loop story, you can readily identify key elements that appear in almost every version, tropes that can – in some instances – be subverted to the delight of most genre-savvy viewers : In television, the opening tease always concludes with a colossal Holy Shit moment (the Enterprise is destroyed, Mulder and Scully are shot and killed) or the completion of an initial loop, establishing the story conceit from the get-go.

Our protagonist lives the loops long enough to realize what is happening (while establishing a string of repetitive beats for the viewer, which can be twisted and turned in future loops). Our protagonist must attempt to convince others of what is happening to them (as they are ALL caught in the loop, but, for some reason, only our protagonist is aware). These attempts at an explanation build, as does our protagonist’s frustration with his inability to convince the others until, by some stroke of unexpected brilliance, the solution presents itself.

Inevitably, multiple characters become cognizant of the fact that they are trapped in the loop.

The means by which the loop is initiated should never feel cumbersome. Ideally, the device (and I don’t necessarily mean a literal device or instrument) that initiates the loop shouldn’t be readily obvious or, if it is, should be hidden in plain sight. Don’t front-load exposition. Make the discovery a natural progression of the story, part of the investigative pursuit that sees our characters putting the pieces together with each subsequent loop. It’s always more rewarding for viewers to be on the journey with our characters rather than one or two steps ahead, waiting for them to catch up.

A fairly obvious rule, but if your characters loop, they go back to Step 1, Day 1. They may have the memories of their experience, but they wouldn’t carry over any physical consequences of their actions because they are, in essence, rebooting. This is a fundamental law of theoretical time looping. I remember having someone pitch me an idea for a time loop series that involved our protagonist ending one loop by shooting himself in the head. He awakens at the start of yet another loop, but his mind has been damaged by the bullet that killed him in the previous loop. “What bullet?”I asked. “The bullet from before,” I was told. I explained the theoretical impossibility given that time had reset and that when time resets, EVERYTHING resets, including your physical form. There would be no residual damage from a bullet wound that never happened. To which he replied: “I always felt rules were meant to be broken.”

In most time loop stories, time loops in general. At the end of Groundhog Day, our characters leave and return to the big city, where they presumably pick up their lives, uninterrupted, because the rest of the world was caught in the loop as well. But there are rare exceptions where the time loops within a temporal bubble (i.e., Stargate’s Window of Opportunity is an example).

The key is at once retroactively obvious and much more subtle. Either way, it’s an insightful analysis for both the creative and the consumer. I don’t happen to be much interested in writing time travel myself; I think my short story in THE ALTAR OF HATE, “The Lesser Evil”, is the only one I’ve ever written.

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The Memory Police

A review of a Yoko Ogawa novel by Kenji Weaver on Fandom Pulse:

The premise of The Memory Police is that things are vanishing from an unnamed island, and most of the islanders forget the things even existed. Ribbons go first. Then perfume, hats, birds, fruit, photographs, novels. When something is “disappeared,” the residents are required to dispose of every physical trace of it, and shortly thereafter the concept itself fades from their minds. They look at a bird and see only a small moving thing they have no word for and no feeling about. A small minority, however, retain their memories. The Memory Police, an authoritarian force whose ranks no one ever quite sees recruited, hunt these people down. The narrator is a novelist on the island. Her editor, R, is one of the people who remembers, so she hides him in a secret room beneath her floor.

The novel was published in Japan in 1994, twenty-five years before it appeared in English. It has been called Orwellian, Kafkaesque, Borgesian, and a half-dozen other useful but slightly misleading shorthands. None of them is quite right. Ogawa is not writing dystopia in any sense Orwell would have recognized; her authoritarian regime is curiously off-camera, more a weather system than a state, and the question of whether anyone runs the disappearances is left unanswered because the question is not the point. The question is what happens to a self when the materials it was built from are slowly removed. The answer, which the book takes its full length to reach and which it reaches by demonstrating rather than arguing, is that the self disappears with them, and that the disappearance can be borne with a strange tenderness, even peace, by the person disappearing.

I haven’t read this one yet, but I like Ogawa so I’ll have to put it on the list once I finish the two Charles Stross novels I’m reading. He stuck the landing on the Laundry series better than one might have expected, and certainly not the way most authors would have.

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A Review of KILLING COMMENDATORE

Fandom Pulse has an excellent, in-depth review of Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami, a book I like very much, albeit a review with which I don’t entirely agree even when it’s about the book:

I want to praise one specific thing about the translation as a whole, because it has been under-discussed and it is magnificent. The Commendatore’s voice.

The Commendatore in the Japanese speaks in a way that is instantly recognizable and deeply strange. He uses atashi for “I” — a first-person pronoun associated with women and with a certain old-fashioned formality. He addresses the narrator as shokun, “gentlemen,” in the plural. He says de wa aranai instead of the standard de wa nai for negation — an archaic, almost ceremonial form. He is funny. He is imperious. He is two feet tall and he sounds like a retired general who has been shrunk in the wash and is not entirely displeased about it.

This voice is, in principle, untranslatable. There is no English pronoun that does what atashi does. There is no English form of address that does what shokun does. There is no English negation that does what de wa aranai does. And yet Gabriel and Goossen — and I assume Bloom deserves credit here too — found an English for the Commendatore that works. The Commendatore in English is formal without being stiff, archaic without being ridiculous, funny without trying to be funny. He calls the narrator “my friends.” He speaks in complete, slightly ornate sentences. He has dignity. He is the best thing in the translation and I would read seven hundred pages of him alone.

I said at the beginning of this review that Killing Commendatore is one of the three peaks of Murakami’s career. I want to end by saying what I mean by that, because it is the kind of claim that requires defense.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the peak of Murakami the storyteller — the novel in which his ability to pull a reader into an impossible world and keep them there for six hundred pages reaches its fullest expression. 1Q84 is the peak of Murakami the architect — the novel in which his ability to construct parallel narratives and hold them in tension over a thousand pages is most fully achieved. Killing Commendatore is the peak of Murakami the artist — the novel in which his lifelong preoccupation with what it means to make things, to create something from nothing, to open a door in a wall that has no door, is most directly and most movingly addressed.

It is also the most personal of the three, and the most vulnerable. There is a passage near the end in which the narrator realizes that the painting he has been working on throughout the novel is finished, and that it is good, and that it is the first good thing he has ever made.

While I can’t really testify to the lack of the sense of oku in the second half of the novel, I did notice that the translator’s voice had changed the one and only time I read it. Now I feel as if I’ve got to read it again. I also think that it’s a bit strange to complain about the lack of depth of the female characters when the female characters are, in this particular book, entirely beside the point; a book that dedicates sufficient space to fully-developing the painter’s faithless wife is not going to be a book about painting, and besides, the book is already 700 pages.

But it is an excellent review, particularly in how it says so much about the novel without giving away anything at all. And I really can’t expect to entirely agree with a review by a reviewer whose favorite Murakami novel is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, since mine is A Wild Sheep’s Chase.

Anyhow, I’m going to see if we can get a copy of my translation of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto reviewed at some point in the future.

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Interview with Owen Benjamin

The Big Bear was interviewed about his new bestselling book by Fandom Pulse:

Owen Benjamin may be one of the funniest men alive. His comedy is so poignant that it seemed at one point nothing could stop his career trajectory. Some even allege that Dave Chappelle steals his jokes. However, like many who ran afoul of The Narrative, one day Benjamin was canceled and found his life forever changed. In recent years, he’s built an incredible community and focused on family in an inspirational journey that he’s partially laid out in his new book, How To Slay A Wizard, in context with his philosophy he’s been developing along the way. The book has become a #1 bestseller and keeps staying at the top of the charts with fans loving his first outing as an author, giving it a 4.8-star rating on Amazon.

You draw a sharp line between the wizard and the alchemist. Most people reading this will recognize wizards in politics and media, but where do people most often fail to recognize the wizard operating in their own personal relationships that causes them problems?

Yeah, I made that distinction because I think people who can do amazing things with transforming compounds or natural extracts can get lumped in with the wizards. Baking great bread is alchemy. It’s just applying heat and pressure to transform something. Wizards are always deceiving and manipulating people for their “transformations” to occur. That’s an important distinction. The sneaky hidden versus just the “if I boil this thing, it gets sweeter.”

Wizards typically start thinking they can separate their “craft” from their personal and home life, but it doesn’t work that way. If someone can intentionally misrepresent themselves, change the meaning of words, and induce destructive emotions in complete strangers for money, what’s stopping them from doing that to anyone?

A way to tell if someone is a wizard in your life is, a wizard just pays attention to how something is perceived versus what it actually is. They also never answer questions directly, and constantly diagnose others’ intentions and speculate on their emotions.

You argue that nonsensical rules produce more compliance than logical ones. That’s counterintuitive. Walk us through the psychology. Why does absurdity work better than coherent authority?

Because if a logical rule is followed, the target may be following the overall order and logic of the situation. He could be complying with the external and objective truth of a situation that will lead to success and production. When a target follows rules that clearly are counterintuitive, destructive, and constantly changing, that means they are following the will of the wizard. The more absurd, the clearer to the Wizard that he has created an obedient servant.

It all starts with “Simon says.” I was never good at that game I would respond that Simon should “go fuck himself.”

Read the whole thing there.

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Interview with Orson Scott Card

Fandom Pulse sat down for an interview with one of the last living greats of science fiction, Orson Scott Card.

The Alvin Maker series is more explicitly tied to American spiritual and folk tradition than almost anything else in fantasy. Do you think today’s readership is equipped to receive that material, or has something been lost in how we read myth?

What’s been lost is a knowledge of our own history. I remember my wife’s and my amusement and shock when we got a fan letter early in the Alvin Maker sequence, in which a reader said how much she loved the way I was dealing with American history, but then added, “And I never knew that George Washington had been beheaded.” What? She thought that bit of alternate history was true? Hadn’t she studied American history in high school? How can an alternate fantasy history of America resonate properly with readers who don’t know real American history in the first place?

Your book Characters and Viewpoint remains required reading decades later. How has your own understanding of character changed since you wrote it?

I think the techniques laid out in Characters and Viewpoint remain true and useful. I’m sad to see some of the nonsense that has begun to pervade the teaching of writing in the universities. Present tense narrative is NOT part of the American tradition. Past tense is the way we tell the truth. Idiotic nonrules of grammar have perverted our language. Yes you CAN and sometimes MUST end sentences with words that are often used as prepositions. To merrily split infinitives is one of the treasured traditions in English; poor Latin couldn’t split their infinitives. But that’s no reason to deprive ourselves of such a useful device. I sometimes think that my seventh grade teacher, Mrs. Johnson, was the last American teacher giving students a grounding in grammar and structure. I did love diagramming sentences.

Ender’s Game has become one of the defining works of 20th century science fiction. At what point did you realize the book had taken on a life entirely outside your control, and how do you not let that dominate your creativity?

Early in the life of the novel Ender’s Game, I was at an event in Utah Valley, when a librarian from a local Junior High School confided to me, “Ender’s Game is our ‘most-lost book.’” I thought: If young readers can’t bear to part with the book, it must be touching something deep in their souls.

I’m happy with the number of people who tell me that Ender’s Game was important in their youth. There are also people who feel that way about Ender’s Shadow and Speaker for the Dead. If I knew what worked so well in those books, I’d do it every time. Instead, I do as I’ve always done: I tell a story I care about and believe in as clearly as I can, and then hope that readers will find value in it.

Prolific authors often say their best work gets buried under their most famous title. Do you have a book or series you wish more readers would find, something you feel hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves?

I don’t resent the popularity or success of Ender’s Game, I’m grateful that any of my books has won readers’ hearts. Yes, I think I’ve written better books; Yes, I’m proud of all my stories. And some few people have told me, over the years, that their favorite of my books is one of the less well-known ones.

Read the rest of it there.

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The End of Hollywood

Fandom Pulse contemplates the significance of what was demonstrated yesterday with the animated ATOB:

Big Hollywood animation budgets start at $100 million. Traditional 2D animation outsourced to South Korea or the Philippines runs into the tens of thousands per minute for anything at broadcast quality. That economic wall has kept independent animated projects in development hell for decades, talented creators with great source material who simply couldn’t afford to make the thing move. That wall just cracked.

Any indie comic artist sitting on years of finished panels now has a direct pipeline to animation at a fraction of traditional production costs. The storyboard problem, normally one of the most expensive phases of animation pre-production, is already solved. It’s called their back catalog.

The quality ceiling will keep rising as the models improve. Seedance 2.0 is one iteration. Whatever comes next will handle model collapse better, bridge shots more smoothly, and push output closer to broadcast standard without human cleanup. Day’s timeline revision from 18-24 months to “now” happened in a single experimental session. That pace doesn’t slow down.

Arkhaven has a deep library. A Throne of Bones, Midnight’s War, Alt-Hero, years of finished panels that are now, in practical terms, an animation pipeline waiting to be switched on. Day’s confidence that this becomes a feature film isn’t bravado. The math supports it.

It’s not there yet, but it’s coming, and it’s coming fast. And Arkhaven will be more than ready for it.

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Superluminary Serial

Fandom Pulse has launched a new weekly serial with a serious bang.

John C. Wright is one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of our time, with writing abilities that are of the level of a Grand Master. His Superluminary was designed as a serial, and, with his permission, we will reprinting it here on Sundays as a new feature. Enjoy great science fiction!

Episode 01: Assassin in Everest

Aeneas Tell of House of Tell, the youngest of the Lords of Creation, was twenty-one when he was assassinated for the first time.

His secondary brain came awake while his primary brain was still foggy with strange dreams. Alert to danger, the secondary brain stopped the nerve pulses from the primary brain which otherwise would have let him groan and open his eyes, which would have precipitated the nervous killer’s attack.

But his primary brain had been in the delta brainwave stage of sleep, a deep and dreamless slumber. There was no sound, no light, no disturbance. What had broken his sleep? A memory, like an echo, of terrible multiple toothaches left a metallic taste in his mouth.

He had been dreaming about his insane grandfather, the Emperor. The old man had been telling him about the secrets of the universe… then a stinging pain in his teeth had jarred him awake. But how could Aeneas remember a dream when he had not been in the desynchronous brainwave state in which dreaming was possible?

Aeneas, eyes still closed, not daring to move, increased the firing rate of his auditory nerves. He was laying on the nongravity cushion of his opulent four-poster bed. The neverending whisper of the high-altitude winds of Mount Everest beyond the bubble of weather-controlled air was now loud to him.

On these upper peaks his family had erected the proud imperial palace-city of Ultrapolis, whose towers and domes were impregnable behind concentric force-shells and thought-screens. None of the artificial or bio-modified races of the nine worlds, fifty worldlets, and one hundred eighty moons of the Solar System could bring any realistic threat to bear on these defenses, not while the twelve ranking members of the House of Tell, the so-called Lords of Creation, retained control of the stratonic supertechnology known only to them.

But betrayal from within was another matter.

An excellent choice, even if I say so myself as its erstwhile publisher. If you haven’t read it already, be sure to bookmark Fandom Pulse for Sunday readings.

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Hiromi Kawakami Book List

Relatively unknown in the West, Hiromi Kawakami is one of Japan’s best and most acclaimed contemporary authors. She has won all of the major Japanese literary prizes, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature. She is known for her delicate exploration of human relationships and the subtle magic that permeates everyday life, occasionally delving into what can only be described as deep science fiction. Somewhat reminiscent of Haruki Murakami, though far more deeply rooted in Japanese culture, Kawakami writes stories that feel both deeply personal and mysteriously otherworldly. Her work often focuses on the connections between people—romantic, familial, and neighborly—rendered with a gentle touch that reveals profound truths about loneliness, love, and belonging.

While three of her books are yet to be translated into English, I have read nine of the ten that are available, and this is how I would list them in order of personal preference and general literary quality.

This is one of my rare contributions to Fandom Pulse. You can read it there. Note that it does not include the three novels not yet translated into English, or the tenth book, Manazuru, which I am reading now.

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