Galaxis 4 ... Is not the Last One

I've decided not to end my digital science/science fiction magazine Galaxis with the current issue, #4. I'm working up plans to have a fifth issue after all, and this one should appear in digital and in limited print editions.

So while I put the finishing touches on the first Galaxis Reader book and start pulling together the fifth edition of Galaxis magazine, it's a good time to remind everyone that Galaxis #4 is still available for you to read, free, online.

Read the magazine:

Gregory Benford & Larry Niven's Bowl of Heaven

An hour ago, I finished reading Bowl of Heaven, a 2013 science-fiction collaboration between Larry Niven and Gregory Benford. I am left feeling refreshed — it has been a very long time since I read a hard-science, deep-space SF novel — and stunned. Stunned because the book reads at times as if it went right from the writers' computers to the printer, without going through an editor. I'm sure that isn't true, but how else to explain mistakes that had me wondering if I had missed a couple pages or was losing my mind?

It started early in the book where one character is injured; a metal shard had been embedded in his leg during an accident. He is tended to by a teammate, who removes the shard and applies medication. A few paragraphs later, however, a different teammate is removing the shard and medicating him.

It continued throughout the book. People who are described as being in a room are suddenly in a different room. An alien who is on the bridge of an airship descends a stairway and goes to ... the bridge. People who left a room are suddenly back in the room. The amount of time that has passed since the launch of the humans' spaceship is stated, but then it's given as a different amount of time later.

On and on.

I have read Benford's books before, but I'm surprised to say that I don't believe I have ever read anything by Niven, which is an admission not to my credit. Niven is a science-fiction legend with numerous big books to his credit. But, for whatever reason, I had never read his work. That was part of what made me select this book to read next after I finished reading a couple history books (Anne Applebaum's post-World War II history book Iron Curtain — a book that was stunning in a good way, though telling a very sad tale — and Robert Graves' historical novel Count Belisarius). This was my chance to read Larry Niven.

I actually enjoyed the grand-premise tale of Bowl of Heaven. The characterizations and relationships are a bit out of date (sorry guys, but having interpersonal relationships be key to the characters and their organization but not even mentioning a gay character — and then in the most oblique way — until the book is nearly finished suggests being a bit out of touch), but I'm willing to overlook that. However, I was astounded at the poor editing. It's old news that even big publishers don't do proper editing any more, but these mistakes (repeated incidences, actions described twice — just a few paragraphs apart — but differently, and more) are incredibly unprofessional. If it was a mind-bending game of fluid reality with the readers, that would be something, but of course the story would make use of that. No, that just was not the case. Bowl of Heaven was a normal hard-science SF novel, and publishers Tor did themselves, their authors, and their readers a major disservice — publishing malpractice, really — by releasing a hardcover book with this many major, obvious errors in it.

The writers should have caught some of this in the various drafts they would have proofed. But writers are often focused on making sure other aspects are correct; that is compounded by working with a collaborator. We'll give Niven and Benford a small slice of the blame, but the majority of the blame cake has to be served up to Tor.

The sequel to what apparently is the first of a series has been published. Called Shipstar, it was published by Tor in April 2014. Think they had an editor do a good line-by-line on this one?

Interview with Author Cara Black

Cara Black; photo by Steven Fromtling

Cara Black, author of the Aimée Léduc series of mystery novels from Soho Crime, is profiled by yours truly in the current edition of the Marina Times:

Cara Black: International woman of mystery novels  

by John Zipperer 

If you walk down Market Street with mystery novelist Cara Black, what else do you talk about but murder? As she chatted about the chilly late July weather, she occasionally flipped her hair away from her eyes, only to have the wind blow it back. But at the mention of a real unsolved murder case here in San Francisco, Black’s eyes widened and she asked for details. She then shared a true story about another unsolved murder here, a locked-room killing in her own neighborhood involving a victim from France.  

France and death are not far from the surface when Black talked with the Marina Times about ...

Read the entire article

Kemal Kayankaya: A summer Frankfurter everyone can enjoy

My review of the mystery novels of Jakob Arjouni, from the July 2012 issue of the Marina Times:

BOOK NOTES
Kemal Kayankaya: A summer Frankfurter everyone can enjoy
By John Zipperer

Mystery novels about Germany that show up on our shores tend to be either reprints of World War II-era books or new novels set in that time. It’s an interesting milieu, but it’s unimaginative. Jakob Arjouni escaped those confines by writing mysteries set in modern-day Germany, dealing with very modern problems and featuring a refreshingly different kind of protagonist.

Kemal Kayankaya is a German private eye, mostly working the underside of Frankfurt. He can be found dealing with the prostitutes, local mobsters, two-bit thugs, and other lowlifes among whom Kayankaya generally finds his life, his customers and his friends.

Read the entire review

Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012

Just this morning on the subway ride to work, I was reading an interview in Filmfax magazine with writer/editor Dr. Samuel J. Sackett. Decades ago, he had sent his first story to author Ray Bradbury to get his opinion on it. Bradbury "rewrote the first two pages into one page to condense it and, of course, it was all in his style which was not my style, so I had to rewrite that page as I would have written it," Sackett told the magazine. "But there was one sentence I simply couldn't rewrite because I couldn't think of another way to put it, so there's one sentence by Bradbury in that story. But I don't remember which sentence."

Upon arriving at work, I learned that Ray Bradbury has passed away at the age of 91. As they say, the death of an old man is no tragedy – meaning, as I take it, it's neither a surprise nor too soon. But that doesn't mean it is not an occasion for sadness and happiness; to lose someone who crafted tales of great poetry is a loss and at the same time a reminder that this weird human species is capable of producing someone who can make a martian pulp story into poetry.

I believe Fahrenheit 451 was the first of his books that I read, probably back in junior high school. (I was just making reference to the wall-sized TV screens in a conversation with a friend last week.) Sometime later, I read his epic book The Martian Chronicles, a book that is inescapable as a lodestar for later writers tackling the topic of former civilizations on Mars, just as one can't write about robots without either referencing or being seen to avoid referencing Isaac Asimov's robotic laws.

Bradbury was an unusual genre writer in many ways. Unlike the hard-SF writers or the new wave SF writers, Bradbury's stories were a gentler, more humane sort. It says something good about the science fiction world that his stories were not only read but celebrated within it. I think they will be celebrated for many years to come, and their influence will be sustained, even if later generations "don't remember which sentence" of the continuing narrative about Mars came from Bradbury. He's woven himself too much into the stories.

Join Lev Grossman and Me in Palo Alto June 18

If you have read Lev Grossman's The Magicians and its sequel, The Magician King, then there's a pretty good chance you will want to join us on Monday, June 18, at the Cubberley Theatre in Palo Alto, California. Grossman will be appearing there at our Commonwealth Club program, which begins at 7 p.m. I'll be moderating the event, but I'll be just as interested as you are to hear him talk about these books and his other work.

Grossman is Time's book critic and author of – besides the best-selling Magician books – Codex and Warp.

Get details on the event, and reserve your tickets!

If you haven't read those two books but you enjoy fantasy and science fiction, then I suggest in the next few weeks you buy them and read 'em. The Magicians has been described as "Narnia for adults" and "Hogwarts with sex and drugs," both of which sound a bit more sensationalist than the reality. But they are a fresh take on the fantasy/magic genre, and they deserve to go on your bookshelf next to Potter and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

In the meantime, follow Grossman's blog. He is an open and entertaining writer, not afraid to be incredibly open and honest in his writings (such as his description of how he totally screwed up an interview with J.K. Rowling years ago).

Then come meet Grossman and say hello to me on June 18.

Defy the Ban: Send a Student a Copy of Slaughterhouse Five

The recent move by a Republic, Missouri, school board to ban Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s anti-war classic Slaughterhouse Five is not occurring without consequence. The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is offering to send up to 150 copies of the book to students in the high school who were going to read the book before it was banned.

The Library says, "We think it’s important for everyone to have their First Amendment rights. We’re not telling you to like the book… we just want you to read it and decide for yourself." Students can apply for the free books online at the Library's web site.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this move by the school board is that it was done at the behest of a Missouri University professor. He reportedly objected to the book's profanity, sexual content, and perceived insults to Christianity. The school board, never one to second-guess a learned professor, agreed to ban the book with reasoning that, with one or two word substitutions, could have come from North Korean censors: The book offenses include creating "false conceptions of American history and government or that teach principles contrary to Biblical morality and truth."

Yes, Biblical morality is being used by a public school system to ban one of the most celebrated books of the past century.

You can help the Library underwrite the cost of this effort by donating to the cause. And maybe buying a copy of the book yourself, and be sure to pass it along to a young person after you're finished reading it.

Sex and the City ... Berlin 1931, That Is

Deutsche Welle has an (English language) article about German novelist Irmgard Keun, who wrote a number of popular books, including The Artificial Silk Girl, which has been compared to Sex and the City.

I've increasingly been thinking about the idea that women in the West were more independent in the years between the world wars than they were after World War II, when they were sent back home and told to spend their time being amazed by their electric washing machines.

I haven't read The Artificial Silk Girl yet, but I've put it on my Amazon wish list. Thanks, DW.

Bookless in San Francisco

In the past few years, downtown San Francisco has lost all of its big bookstores. Most recently, in the wake of Borders' bankruptcy, we saw two Borders stores close downtown. A year or so earlier, we lost the large independent Stacey's bookstore and the Virgin Megastore (which wasn't primarily books, but it had a large books section). And before that, in 2007 we lost a large Cody's Bookstore.

All of those stores were within a relatively short walking distance of my office. If I wanted to pick up a book or new magazine, or if I just wanted to browse, I had many choices.

Now, there is no large downtown San Francisco bookstore. None. In fact, within the downtown area proper, how many bookstores of any type are left? Ignoring the stores on the periphery of the business district (and there are some good, unique small bookstores, such as Kayo Books) and a couple in Chinatown (you can quibble over whether Chinatown is in "downtown" or if it's a neighboring district), there's only one store that I know of: Alexander Book Company on Second Street off Market. It, too, is a nice bookstore. But it is not a giant one, and it is not large enough to be an anchor bookstore for a major city's downtown.

Will Barnes & Noble set up shop in any of the vacant space? That company currently only has one store in the city, off in the somewhat hard-to-access Fisherman's Warf area. A prime downtown store near the Powell Street subway station or Union Square could be a coup. Then again, B&N is reportedly up for sale, and it might not be in an expansionary mood.

Will an independent company set up a large store downtown? That would be a wonderful occurrence, but getting funding for a bookstore in the current economy is likely to be difficult, to say the least.

It looks more likely that this busy downtown area, filled with over-educated people, will go forward for the foreseeable future being severely bookstore-deprived.

Monster Brains Showcases Postwar German Science Fiction Covers

Over at the very cool Monster Brains blog, Aeron Alfrey has a gallery of covers from the old postwar German science fiction publications Utopia (which came out in magazine format and in book format over a number of years in the 1950s and 1960s).

The thought that came to my mind while scanning some of the lurid covers was that there were so many of them that featured stories by American writers. Nothing inherently wrong about that, of course. American SF was at one of its peaks during the postwar period, as was aggressive American promotion of its culture around the world.

But it brings to mind something I heard once about Japanese science fiction, in which there is seldom a story by Japanese writers in which it is the Japanese who are leading a spacecraft or a space mission. It was always a united international effort or it was led by another country.

In Germany, the longest-running science-fiction franchise (and perhaps the longest-running SF franchise anywhere in the world) is the pulp series Perry Rhodan, which is still going strong with magazines and books and multimedia (including an oft-promised new film). There's no way I could summarize in one sentence a series that has run for more than 40 years, but here's the pertinent information: It stars an astronaut from Earth who gets in all sorts of adventures in time and space; that hero, Perry Rhodan, is an American astronaut.

If you looked at German science fiction from before the war, you see a different situation, especially if you go back to the fertile time period before the first world war, where German writers such as Kurd Lasswitz were producing some groundbreaking science fiction, such as Two Planets.

On the other hand, the interwar period is kind of a different and difficult situation, at least in print. If you're up for an at-times-academic book on a fascinating subject, I suggest you check out Peter S. Fisher's Fantasy and Politics: Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), which shows how much interwar German SF was created to serve horrid racial and political revenge fantasies that make Hitler's eventual crimes seem in the spirit of the moment.

Naturally, I think we're all glad that the interwar nightmares of German science fiction are no more. But I do think we're poorer for losing the brave and humane writing of the Lasswitz generation. I for one get sick of Americans leading every space trip, sick of English-speaking people who look like you see them at Wal-Mart being the same ones establishing space colonies or dealing with aliens. Science fiction is a genre that deals with widening people's experiences and minds, and they should certainly be able to deal with a truly mixed cast of characters, or an SF story from a truly Chinese point of view.

These Utopia covers on Monster Brains are from the decade or two right after World War II. But the situation has not changed dramatically today. Unfortunately. The Germans are poorer for the inability to punch its considerable weight in the SF market. American readers are poorer for not getting other viewpoints. And science fiction as a genre is poorer for not living up to its potential.

Thomas Mann's Wise Words

On my subway ride to work this morning, I began reading "The Best German Novelist of His Time," an article by Phillip Lopate in the February 24, 2011, issue of The New York Review of Books. Lopate is discussing the writer Theodor Fontane, whose work I have never read. In fact, I hadn't planned on reading this article; I'm way behind on my magazine reading (I'm already carrying around the March 10 issue of NYRB), and I usually find the reviews of novels and the articles about novelists to be the less-interesting part of that excellent magazine. But I guess the Germanophile in me won out, and I didn't have to wait long for my reward.

The fourth paragraph of the article is an extended quote from another great German novelist, Thomas Mann, discussing "The Old Fontane":

Does it not seem as though he had to grow old, very old, in order to fulfil himself completely? Just as there are youths born to be youths only, fulfilling themselves in early life and not maturing, certainly not growing old; so it would seem that there are other temperaments whose only appropriate age is old; who are, so to speak, classic old men, ordained to show humanity the ideal qualities of that last stage of life: benignity, kindness, justice, humour, and shrewd wisdom—in short a recrudescence on a higher plane of childhood’s artless unrestraint. Fontane’s was such a temperament.

What a great quote. What a great insight in one man and into men. One could probably stretch Mann's words too far by trying to apply them to not just people but countries, but it would be a fascinating effort, if done well. Until that occurs, however, I am going to let Mann's words shift around in my head and grow more interesting as their human applications add up.

Mr. Lopate's full article (partially behind a pay wall) is on the NYRB's web site. It's also available in print if you can still find the February 24, 2011 issue around.

Treasure Trove of Taschen

The UK newspaper The Independent has a photo feature celebrating German art publishing house Taschen, and that occasions a bit of a salute here on Weimar World Service.

This web blog loves good books, and it also loves a quality success story.

Taschen Books publishes tons of very reasonably priced books on topics ranging from high-brow to low-brow. The Independent notes the publishing house's growth into an art house publishing giant, and it certainly is that. It produces many, many beautifully illustrated, well-designed, colorful books (hardcover and softcover, coffee-table-sized and pocket-sized), filled with rare photos and artwork. Taschen books are treasures.

The topics have covered everything from What Great Paintings Say to Caravaggio to Frank Lloyd Wright to, well, um, The Big Penis Book (which is about exactly what you think it is). But a sweet spot for the company is design and architecture, and it has tons of books on cities, artists, furniture, architecture, and related topics. Whether you're a modernist or a traditionalist or (like me) a lover of a mix of both, Taschen has something for you.

And why is it worth celebrating, besides its quality, breadth, and bravery? Because the company got its start as ... (drum roll) ... a comics shop.

Yup. From such a humble beginning grew a huge, multi-lingual, multi-national, high-end publisher. It's a pleasure to see the company still around, still being provocative and high-quality (despite the many imitators) more than 30 years after it began.

A Whole Month to Go yet Before Daniel Kehlmann's Fame Is Published

Sigh. The English translation won't be published until mid-September.

See, this is why everyone should live in Europe, so we can get the original edition when it first. comes out.

Above: As Amazon says.

And as Barnes & Noble says

Harlan Ellison's Selling Some of His Book/Comics/Magazine Hoard!

Harlan Ellison is thinning his massive collection of printed materials, at the behest of his wife, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The publications list and directions are here. Some of the items are pricey, others look like a steal.

Think TV's One Big Wasteland? Get Aaron Barnhart's Tasteland

If you think television is one big terrible zone of reality TV awfulness and lowest-common-denominator drivel (i.e., reality TV awfulness), well, you're correct. But, it's a whole lot more, and Kansas City Star TV critic Aaron Barnhart has written a book that will show you what's really happening on -- in Harlan Ellison's words -- the glass teat.

 I've known Aaron for more than two decades, even before he started his cult-favorite e-mail newsletter focused on late-night television. That e-newsletter grew into the TV Barn web site (for which I wrote a weekly science fiction column for a year or two a decade ago) and eventually led to his perch at the KC Star. Fun fact: Aaron actually owned an Apple Newton.

I won't even pretend to be unbiased in this book-buying recommendation. Aaron's smart and talented and a good guy. But even biased people are sometimes correct, and this is one of those cases.

Hie thee to Amazon and buy a copy of Aaron Barnhart's Tasteland. I've already ordered mine.

300,000 Books for Sale

Today is the final day of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Big Book Sale. The last day of the sale, all books are priced at just $1.

I went to the sale yesterday, when prices were a not-bad $5 or less per book. It was nice to be in a room where a reported 300,000 books (including a few DVDs, CDs, vinyl records, etc.) were being adopted by their new loving parents.

Perry Rhodan auf Deutsch and in English

I saw The Simpsons Movie the same day I watched an episode of The Simpsons, and frankly the blended together in my mind when I was later trying to remember what was in the movie.

A somewhat similar dissonance when I recently took a break from reading the German-language Perry Rhodan book, Kampf um die SOL, to read the English-language translation of a different Perry Rhodan book, Lemuria I: Star Ark (from FanPro, whose web site has since gone offline, so there may never be a Lemuria II). Having previously read a German-language Rhodan novel (Raumschiff in Fesseln, for you completists), so I knew what to expect when I read Kampf um die SOL, but it wasn't until I read the English novel that I learned how much of it I got wrong. (What? That character's not a robot? Huh?)

Goes to show how shaky my German still is.

Anyway, if you're not familiar with Rhodan and you're a science fiction reader, you should check it out – in some language (it's in German, English, French, Spanish, Czech, etc., etc., etc.). Begun back in the early 1960s, the Rhodan magazine, stories, and comics have been published ever since, making them the longest-running science fiction series in the world. Yes, longer than the Star Trek franchise. And it's still wildly popular. See the official German-language Rhodan site here [http://www.perry-rhodan.net/ ] and the English-language site here [http://www.perry-rhodan.us/ ].