Sunday, September 18, 2005
Here Comes the Bride

I know I'm not the only one eagerly looking forward to Tim Burton's new stop-motion animated film The Corpse Bride. I've always been a passionate reader, less so with movies, so it takes a really good one for me to look forward to it. I remember seeing Beetlejuice for the first time and thinking, Now this is a truly original director. Something I hadn't thought before or have thought since. That impression was renewed when I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas. Not many directors make that leap from live action to animated movies, but Burton made it look easy. It probably helped that a college film project of his was a stop-motion animated short film, in which he persuaded Vincent Price to do the narration. (The movie was about a boy who wanted to grow up and be Vincent Price, so you can see why.) Then Burton ventured into another medium close to my heart: books. He published a short story collection called The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and other stories. It had Burton's distinctive irreverent style. One of the smaller skits showed Santa Claus giving a teddy bear to a little boy... who had recently been mauled by a grizzly. The twisted take on Christmas is atheme visited before in Nightmare Before Christmas, and part of a larger satirical outlook on traditional values. Burton skewered small town life in Beetlejuice,father/son relationships in Big Fish, race relations and pop culture respectivelyin the Planet of the Apesand Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remakes. And for all his satire, he also evinces a real fondness for the people and cultures he pokes fun at. Maybe his outlook comes from feelings of being a misfit, since his heroes are almost always misunderstoodoutsiders with spiky black hair (think Edward Scissorhands), much like Burton himself. Now his most recent film tackles another traditional value: marriage. Given the subject matter, I expect it will be up to his usual standards. And in the current environment of cookie-cutter, family-friendlycomputer animated movies, this one sounds like arefreshing breath of stagnant, graveyard air.

Posted by Robert Williams 2005-09-18 22:59:53

Saturday, September 10, 2005
Things Seem Small by Comparison

Well, my first booksigning came and went today, and it was an unqualified success. All my friends and family came out, some of whom I hadn't seen in years. I also met some great new people and picked up a few new readers. All in all, a wonderful day.

I have felt somewhat guilty over the last few days, promoting my book while so many people are suffering down south. Idonate to the Red Cross and give canned goods at drop-off points but still, bad feelings persist.I think such feelings are natural and involuntary, you just can't help it when you watch what is happening down in New Orleans on the news. I tell myself that life has to go on. After all, I don't feel guilty driving into my 9-5 job every day. But still, I keep the Gulf Coast in my thoughts as I chase my dream, and appreciate that I am able to do this while so many people are in such dire circumstances.

Anyone interestedcan go to redcross.org to keep up on the relief effort and make donations. You'll be glad you did.

Posted by Robert Williams 2005-09-10 21:32:13

Saturday, August 27, 2005
Hitting the Concrete

Well, I dropped off some copies of Storms at the bookstore for them to display before my booksigning on September 10. It feels great to have books in a brick-and-mortar store. Just think, someone will be in there browsing around, see my book on the shelf, pick it up and start flipping through it. The first line hooks them. Before they know it they are fifty pages in and thoroughly absorbed... I become giddy thinking about these things. Hey, the simple pleasures of life make it worthwhile. :)

Another writer was there doing a signing of her own, and I bought a copy of her book figuring it would save me up some good karma. Over the last week I've been putting up flyers andcalling friends and family to see if I can work up a good crowd. I've bumped into a few of my neighbors while out walking the dog and invited them too. I figure the worst that could happen is I'd make a nuisance of myself. Promotion is a lot of work but I'm actually finding it quite enjoyable. It gives you a sense of accomplishment to finally put the book out there for people to see, and it's exciting to think that in a few weeks I'll be the one signing books on the other side of that desk. More musings to come. Cheers, all.

Posted by Robert Williams 2005-08-27 19:29:35

Saturday, August 20, 2005
What is Sci-fi?

It strikes me as odd that so many reviewers consider China Mieville's wonderful book Perdido Street Station a work of fantasy. To me, this novel has science fiction written all over it, no pun intended. On the other hand, Ray Bradbury has often said he considers himself a fantasy writer, despite The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 being considered science fiction classics. So what makes something sci-fi and what makes it fantasy?

Isaac Asimov (who hated the abbreviation "sci-fi" by the way, preferring to use "sf") said that science fiction is, not invariably but almost always,literature in which the society it portrays is "set in the future and exhibits a level of scienceand technology that is to some degree more advanced than our own." I guess the qualifier he put in there would refer to fiction in the same vein as the TV shows The Twilight Zone and The X-files, which are set in the present day but often feature classic science fiction themes, i.e. aliens, time travel, mad scientists, etc. And then there is science fiction set in the past. Not just historical sci-fi, or "steampunk," but also science fiction in which the future age it portrayed has come and gone. Do we now consider 2001: A Space Odyssey sci-fi or historical fiction?

Growing up, I often heard the phrases "hard sci-fi" and "soft sci-fi," where hard sci-fi, in which Arthur C. Clarke is considered something of a grand master,held to strict scientific accuracy, so it could conceivably really happen, and soft sci-fi was less technically accurate but often more psychologically insightful, like Harlan Ellison or Ursula K. Le Guin.You don't hear these phrases much anymore, instead anything that doesn't adhere to scientific accuracy is considered fantasy, and often only hard sci-fi, that is scientifically accurate, is considered "true" science fiction.

Then there is today "speculative fiction," which appears to have a broader definition but that definition changes depending on who you ask. It's a relatively new term that is still getting the finer points worked out, but includes brand new genres such as alternate history. You could say science fiction is now undergoing a revolution of sorts, with whole new genres and fields being created before our eyes.

Posted by Robert Williams 2005-08-20 12:32:30

Sunday, August 14, 2005
Film version of

I had an editor tell me once that she didn't like time travel stories because all the ideas in them had been done to death. I couldn't disagree more. In time travel stories, an author can take you to any time period from the creation of the universe to the end of time itself, and an infinite number of alternate timelines besides. Don't tell me there isn't room for a lot creativity there.

Case in point: Ray Bradbury's classic story, "A Sound of Thunder."It's one of my favorites, and now they are making it into a movie with Ben Kingsley. I think I brought this up once before.

With A Sound of Thunder, I hear lately that there are problems. The original production company went bankrupt during post-production, and there wasa long delay in finishing the movie because there simply wasn't enough money. The Internet Movie Database givesa US release date of September 2, but I haven't seen so much as a single trailer or poster (never a good sign). Troubled productions occaisionally turn out good movies, but often they don't. There is a picture on the movie's official site(http://asoundofthunder.warnerbros.com/) of what appears to be a giant sea monster, or perhaps an evilcaterpillar, neither of which appear in Ray Bradbury's story, I assure you.

To be honest, I have gotten very disillusioned with movies and TV lately. They just can't seem to make anything good. Just look at the recent slump in ticket sales. Perhaps it's just my imagination at work, but I have been enjoying books much more than films or TV. I think perhaps this time I'll just stick to my tattered copy of "The Golden Apples of the Sun" and if the movie's buzz is bad, I'llcope through the miracle of denial. :)

I haven't used my rant muscles in some time. They needed exercise.

Posted by Robert Williams 2005-08-14 20:10:34