I think book trailers are dumb. Partly it’s due to the fact that most are badly done (although they seem to be improving), partly it’s that the experience of watching a trailer is nothing like reading a book. A movie’s trailer at least gives you scenes from the movie it advertises. A book trailer gives you nothing of the experience, which is that of reading a written word. When I think about what attracts me to a book, it is usually a jumbled impression of fleeting sentences gained by flipping through the pages, catching sight of stray, disconnected sentences, and wanting to know more. Since the books themselves already contain these sentences, what is needed is a way of simulating that experience of skipping through pages as you’re standing in a bookstore or a library. As more of us buy from online dealers, and spend less time in bookstores, the act of riffling pages has become endangered. So trailers seem like a decent form for catching the attention of internet readers–except for the fact that, for me, they just don’t work.
What I’d like to see is something closer to a written trailer–a heavily edited, chopped-up, artfully scattered and rearranged, breathless set of passages from the book itself. Stray sentences, evocative names, intriguing set-pieces–spoiler free, or at least extremely misleading. Something that gives you the flavor, the scent of a book; sentences that convince you that you’ve got to dive in and find them in context.
Someone, some publisher, should have a contest. Encourage readers of some of your recent books to put together clever text-only teasers. Use the winning entries to promote those books.
(I tried this in the preface for my novel KALIFORNIA, which seemed justified then because the book was about TV. But really this approach, if it worked, wouldn’t need any meta-justification.)
The judges of the 2009 Philip K. Dick Award and the Philadelphia SF Society, along with the Philip K. Dick Trust, are pleased to announce seven nominated works that comprise the final ballot for the award:
BITTER ANGELS by C. L. Anderson (Ballantine Books/Spectra)
THE PRISONER by Carlos J. Cortes (Ballantine Books/Spectra)
THE REPOSSESSION MAMBO by Eric Garcia (Harper)
THE DEVIL’S ALPHABET by Daryl Gregory (Del Rey)
CYBERABAD DAYS by Ian McDonald (Pyr)
CENTURIES AGO AND VERY FAST by Rebecca Ore (Aqueduct Press)
PROPHETS by S. Andrew Swann (DAW Books)
First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, April 2, 2010 at Norwescon 33 at the Doubletree Seattle Airport Hotel, SeaTac, Washington.
The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust and the award ceremony is sponsored by the NorthWest Science Fiction Society. Last year’s winners were EMISSARIES FROM THE DEAD by Adam-Troy Castro (Eos Books) and TERMINAL MIND by David Walton (Meadowhawk Press). The 2009 judges are Daniel Abraham (chair), Eileen Gunn, Karen Hellekson, Elaine Isaak, and Marc Laidlaw.
For more information, contact the award administration:
David G. Hartwell (914) 769-5545.
Gordon Van Gelder (201) 876-2551
For more information about the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, http://www.psfs.org/:
At the end of this month, I will be attending the World Fantasy Convention for the first time in many years. I am scheduled for two events:
Friday, 5 P.M. – A Reading. Location TBD. I will probably read “Songwood,” before its appearance in the Jan.-Feb. issue of F&SF.
Saturday, 8:45 PM – 10 PM. Crystal Room. Group reading to celebrate the publication of Lovecraft Unbound, with Ellen Datlow and the following authors reading selections from their stories: Laird Barron, Amanda Downum, Brian Evenson, Nick Mamatas, Michael Shea, Anna Tambour, and me.
HENRIK SANDBECK HARKSEN, ed. Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales. Odense, Denmark: H. Harksen Productions, 2008. iv, 306 pp. €19.60 ($25.30) tpb.
ELLEN DATLOW, ed. Lovecraft Unbound. New York: Dark Horse, 2009. 421 pp. $19.95 tpb.
[snip]
The two present volumes are among the latest additions to the jewels in Cthulhu’s treasury. Both anthologies share the ambition of highlighting the “Lovecraftian”—the nebulous quality of weirdness and mood that is so much more than monsters from Outside and strange little New England towns. Marc Laidlaw puts it best when, in his comment on his story in Lovecraft Unbound, he writes, “Learning from Lovecraft, without leaning on him, is the challenge.” And in this, both anthologies succeed remarkably well.
[snip]
An adventurous mycologist looking for a missing expedition visits a certain Asian plateau in Marc Laidlaw’s “Leng.” This is one of the more subtly disturbing stories of the book in its depiction of bodily invasion and the subversion of self; certain properties of the unique fungus located by the mycologist remind me of Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Seed from the Sepulcher.” It is also a good example of how names from Lovecraft’s mythos can be dropped as part of the background for a story, not taking centre stage as in some pastiches of doubtful quality.
Game imagery is so pernicious that it is starting to invade science fiction novel cover art. Here, from Jeff Vandermeer’s forthcoming FINCH, which almost certainly contains mushrooms galore, is some architecture that appears to have come straight out of Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom. My kids saw only this much and thought these were Mario mushrooms:
Yes, that cover really is beautiful.
Meanwhile, from Ed Lerner’s forthcoming SMALL MIRACLES, a novel of nanotechnology gone awry, a bookjacket covered with a bunch of iconic Metroids:
Here is a real Metroid for comparison purposes.
And here is a mushroom.
Please do not rely on this guide in the field. Speak to an expert before consuming any wild-caught mushrooms or Metroids.
My blog was disabled when this interview came out, so here is a belated link. It’s one of the more enjoyable ones I’ve done in a while. A little bit of everything is covered, from games to Lovecraft. That’s pretty much the gamut, right?
Year’s Best Fantasy 9, edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, is available now, but not in stores. This is Tor.com’s first publication, and exists as a POD-only venture to be followed shortly by an ebook. It’s 475 pages, priced accordingly, available direct from Tor and from the usual Amazonian marketplace. I think the POD model is an interesting one for books, especially when they have the full force of a professional publisher behind them (good editors, skilled proofreaders, experienced production staff, etc.). This bodes well for the future.
The 2009 Hugo Award winners were announced this evening. For a change, I’ve read most of the winners, and they are all quite deserving. When the finalists were announced, I commented that Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is the one most likely to still have a steady reading audience a 100 years from now. It’s that sort of book. I especially enjoyed Gaiman’s own reading of it in the audiobook version.
Gord Sellar was up for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer this year, but didn’t win…however, I think he gets another shot at it next year, so I will go back to rooting for him at that time.
[This was written a few months ago…just came across it and realized I’d never posted it.]
I just gave my oldest daughter a copy of Carrie. I guess I want her to connect to a strong stream of pop horror; I’m curious whether the book can still grip a modern teenage reader more recently under the thrall of Stephanie Meyers. Whether she’ll read it or not, I don’t know. We’ll see. This reminded me of the influence of parental reading and recommendations on my own development as a reader…and a writer.
What really spurred this line of thought is the fact that I’m finally reading Deliverance. I saw the movie, of course—and I saw it in the theater when it first came out. But I already had strong impressions of the movie before I saw it, and they were received not from Hollywood, not from the previews, not from kids at school talking about the film—but from my mother. When the book came out in 1970, it was a best seller. My mother read it sometime in the early 70s, and I still her excitement as she tried to convey the scene in which the narrator of the story climbs a sheer rock face. I got such a vivid impression of that scene—the intensity of description, the fact that this terrifying climb stood for something deeper than the action itself–that nothing in the movie could rival it. In fact, I’m a bit wary of getting to that point in the novel, because I’m afraid it will never compare to what I’ve imagined it to be for nearly 40 years now. All the urgency came from my mother’s exhilarated attempt to describe what in the writing had excited her…and that scene I’ve never read has stayed with me and lurked as a significant force in my picture of what writing can mean, what it can do and convey to a reader, ever since. I’m reading Deliverance, but I’m not there yet. Soon I’ll know if this long-held memory will dissipate, if the influence of the unread Deliverance will end up paling by comparison to the actual Deliverance. But for now I’m in a state of suspense between the imagined narrative and the real one. It’s an interesting place.
My parents’ reading had a strong influence on my own reading. I’m curious about the experience of others in this regard. I think a lot of readers might find the taboo books to have been the most influential: Were there books your parents forbid you to read, that you sneakily devoured in secrecy? Were these more powerful reading experiences because of the taboo, or were you disappointed? My mother only ever prevented me from reading one book: The Exorcist. I had read a few chapters (again, in the early 70’s, at the height of Exorcist excitement—as the book was a huge bestseller and the movie was everyone’s obsession, impossible for a horror-oriented kid like myself to ignore) when she noticed me reading it. She had read it already and apparently something in there triggered her feeling for the first (and only) time that she should impose limits. I had already reached a description of a sexually violated Virgin Mary, without quite understanding what I was reading; and when I finally read the book much later, as an adult, the parts I found most interesting were the scenes of Father Karras’s research in the Catholic library (a purely literary passage that, unsurprisingly) never made it into the movie. But far more important than the book(s) she banned were the ones she read and tried to relate.
When I was very young, she read Lord of the Rings, and occasionally she would read passages to my brother and I while we were heading off to sleep. I’ll never forget The Mines of Moria, starting at the gate and the attack by the lurker in the waters, ending with the escape into light—though I scarcely knew who Gandalf was at the time. Then she read of Merry and Pippin’s time with Treebeard. I had no idea that these stories were taken from LOTR. When I read the books myself a few years later, there was a shock of discovery and disorientation as I realized that the scenes I was reading were the same ones I had heard…
More influential was The Martian Chronicles, as it served as my first impression of science fiction. I remember my mother telling me of a book she was reading, where the characters stroked the pages of a book and it spoke its stories to them. This was “Ylla.” I begged her to read me the whole story, and then lay claim to the copy of The Martian Chronicles she was reading—a Times edition trade paperback that eventually Ray Bradbury himself signed, and which I still treasure.
The other powerful literary influence in our house was the biggest bookcase itself—holding mainly the strange books my father had acquired, both from childhood (himself a bookish boy, I suspect) and in the course of required college reading. Some of these I fetishized: There was a book about biology, which included photographs of medical horrors as well as drawings of enormous carnivorous plants; another which taught introductory astronomy under a thick veil of fiction, following the spaceship journey of several kids through the solar system. I will never forget an illustration of the sweltering pilot pulling back hard on the handbrake to prevent the ship from plunging into the sun! But then there were the unillustrated books whose titles alone fascinated me: The Magic Mountain, which became crosswired in my mind with both The Big Rock Candy Mountain and the mountain that opened up to swallow the children who followed the Pied Piper. When I finally read The Magic Mountain, at around age 20, it was a strange and significant experience partly because this was a book I had studied from afar for many years before finally approaching.
My father never prevented me from reading a book, although unlike my mother, he did not quite appreciate my childish tastes, and rarely recommended anything that appealed to me immediately—with one exception. He bought me odd books for gifts—things with titles like Miscellany. Exercises in short fiction that lacked the weird or horrific angle that was all important to me. Later he gave me collections by Updike and Welty when I was old enough to appreciate them. But the one major influence he had on my childhood reading was Poe—both literary enough to satisfy his academic leanings, and lurid enough to appeal to me. My brother and I cowered under our covers on the nights he put us to sleep with “The Telltale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum.” These few nights of reading warped my imagination permanently. I took to writing Poe-esque tales, always featuring bloody daggers and vengeful spirits and hotels with haunted Room 13’s. (The dagger itself was a direct steal from another of my father’s books—a huge complete works of Shakespeare, whose frontispiece was a scene from Macbeth, with a horrified Macbeth contemplating a dagger floating eerily in mid-air darkness.)
Finally, there was one book on which my parents had an equal influence. I don’t remember who started it first, but at some point in the late 60’s, they began reading Catch-22 together. I remember them talking about it, reading their favorite passages to each other, howling with laughter. When I read the book myself, in junior high school, I continually tripped across passages they had read out loud: The one that stands out, blurred by years but still partially intact, involved the painting of a patient’s toes with mercurochrome or merthiolate. I don’t remember why it was funny, but I remember them laughing together, sharing the book with each other. And in an unintentional way, sharing it with me.
How about you? Feel free to share stories in the comments.
