Friday, December 4, 2009December miscellany

Not much to report at the moment -- I'm still busy spinning out Vortex -- but I can update the last post:  Sharry and I will be visiting France at the end of May, including a visit to Epinal for the Imaginales conference (May 27-30 2010).

Otherwise?  Well, I've been cocooned for a while and doing a fair amount of reading.  Stephen King's Under the Dome was as absorbing as anything he's recently written, even at nearly 1200 pages.  Put a Vermont town under glass and it promptly turns into a New England version of Animal Farm, apparently.  The book's thematic subject isn't "good and evil" so much as good and evil's more earthly cousins, cruelty and kindness.  There are a couple of writers who can write cruelty as well as King (James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy), but kindness is a harder sell: you have to be willing to run the risk of sentimentality.  King negotiates that borderline as well as anyone currently writing, I believe.

Also currently reading and appreciating Cloudsplitter, by Russel Banks.  Essentially a fictionalized narrative of the life of John Brown by his surviving son Owen, it's a beatifully written exploration of moral complexity.  It had the ancillary effect of making me want to read a real-world biography of John Brown, though I'm not sure which of the several choices to tackle.

Otherwise . . . I was recently interviewed by Markus Maurer for the German on-line magazine Fantasyguide: the English-language version is here, if you're curious.

Addendum, December 7th:  I forgot to mention it, but wanted to draw attention to this very perceptive review by Paul Witcover of James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel's anthology The Secret History of Science Fiction, just because it says such interesting things about the genre.