It just occurred to me that I hadn’t asked anyone whether I could post their material here. If you don’t want me to use anything, please let me know and I’ll make sure I don’t use it. If I forget (because my memory isn’t what it used to be), let me know and I’ll remove it and apologize.
I posted the reviews for Up from the Bottomless Pit and Other Stories by Philip José Farmer and Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi and the bio teasers for Nathan Brazil and Rich Horton as four different posts.
First, I wanted to see what the reviews would look like in this format. I didn’t change the cover size to make bigger verisons. I just changed the HTML attributes. I didn’t add the bold/italics for titles. The content was scraped rather than taken from the original HTML because the original would include the HTML line breaks.
I posted the teasers to see if I could build a single page for each person which would applear like those links in the sidebar that started with the bio followed by the reviews. Each had tags and categories assigned like those for the reviews.
After this was done, I tried to use PHP functions to pull together the review and bio. To do that, I needed the bio to be the newest post followed by the reviews. That proved to be a bust when I realized that the WP format doesn’t allow posts newer than today’s date. Well, it does but it just doesn’t show them until the date happens. So my next try will be to build separate pages for each with the bio on top followed by a PHP script retrieving the reviews. This may include just a link to the review or perhaps the whole review. If it is the whole review, Nathan’s 90+ reviews will generate a lot of pages.
As I said in the June Books list:
Since SF Site began in June 1997, we have posted something more than 6,100 pages of HTML made up of more than 3,500 reviews plus hundreds of interviews, columns and link pages. During that time, we have looked at a variety of storage and archival methods. I have remnants of a variety of programming and scripting languages along with database formats littering my hard drive. None of them proved viable for SF Site purposes. However, a new method has come along that show a lot of promise. Its mix of database, scripting and use of CSS lets anyone who wants an elegant look with sophisticated tools construct a web site simply and efficiently. I have to tip my hat to the developers of the blog, particularly WordPress.
This blog has been set up to consider alternative formats for SF Site content, review possible archival methods, look at different designs for web site pages and to chatter like tweeners. I have no plans to open it up to search engines. You are welcome to register and I’ll change your admin level to any you’d like (for those who aren’t sure what this means, there are a number of participating levels from just subscribing to admin of the whole shebang). The look may change from time to time as themes are tested and page content is extracted from the DB.
I’ll be adding commentary, bits of content and thoughts on how/whether the blog format might meet the site’s direction in future. All help is appreciated.
 |
If Nathan Brazil were dyslexic, he’d be the dog of the Well world. In reality, he’s an English bloke who lives on an island, reading, writing and throwing chips to the seagulls. Drop by his web site at www.inkdigital.org.
Rich Horton is an eclectic reader in and out of the SF and fantasy genres. He’s been reading SF since before the Golden Age (that is, since before he was 13). Born in Naperville, IL, he lives and works (as a Software Engineer for the proverbial Major Aerospace Company) in St. Louis area and is a regular contributor to Tangent. Stop by his website at http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton.
“It was difficult to get most Americans, remote from the coast, to fully comprehend that they were as endangered as those living next to the oil stream. They had been told again and again, via the mass media, that starvation from lack of food and of oxygen might result. But this was too vast a concept for most Americans to visualise.”
The foreword for this collection, “Philip José Farmer On The Road to the Emerald City” by Christopher Paul Carey, states that “Farmer’s words glitter in the dreamer’s mind like Dorothy’s magic shoes, glinting in the brilliant sunlight of Oz.” It is a fine and honest appraisal of what’s on offer. The combination of Subterranean Press and Philip José Farmer is a terrific example of how well publishing can work when a publisher is blessed with the brains to spot a good thing. In this case, several good things plucked from the dimly lit corners of Farmer’s career. Up from the Bottomless Pit and Other Stories is a compilation reprinted from the pages of Farmerphile, a quarterly magazine dedicated to the author’s works. So anyone expecting brand new stories may be disappointed. Happily, this is the only disappointment here. The book is well presented, including a scattering of black and white illustrations throughout, from various artists, many of which perfectly compliment their stories. The collection itself comprises intentionally obscure examples of Farmer’s work, including rare short stories, a novel beginning, non-fiction, and a complete eco-novel.
Chief among the offerings is the title piece, which is an intense story about an ecological disaster, whose time has come around again. Up from the Bottomless Pit presents an alternate 70s nightmare, set in a world where demand for oil has become so great, that oil companies abandon caution in their efforts to extract more of the black gold. The result is a hole in the ocean floor, from which gushes an all but unstoppable torrent of crude oil. This quickly creates a deadly danger to life on Earth, as the vast slick spreads out, and begins to affect our fragile ecology. Some of the concepts here, and certainly the characterisation, are of their time. Others are way ahead of the curve, quality writing that delivers lessons which still have relevance. It is very easy to see a point in our not too distant future, where Big Oil’s rampant greed takes that one step too far, and as a result cannot control what happens. As always with Farmer stories, the plots are well drawn, and the key scenes driven home with the cold sharpness of a stiletto. Some parts of Up from the Bottomless Pit are quite harrowing, yet delivered in such an economical fashion as to shame authors who prefer a more gratuitous approach. Farmer’s technique reveals he had the foresight and ability to adopt a less is more strategy, long before anyone had even thought of the phrase.
One point I must make clear is that Up from the Bottomless Pit and Other Stories is not strictly science fiction. In fact, almost all of the works presented here fall into the category of Farmer’s mainstream speculative fiction. Every story has something to say, even if one or two show their age. “The Essence of the Poison,” “The Face That Launched a Thousand Eggs,” “The Light-Hog Incident” and “I Still Live!” are all titles to entice the reader into Farmer’s intricate thought processes. New readers should not start here, as this is not the best introduction to Farmer, or the best he has to offer. What it is, is a quirky collection of the author’s more oddball works, and as such is well worth adding to your bookshelf.
Paolo Bacigalupi is a new writer who has made a profound impression on the SF field with just a few stories — all, I believe, collected in this volume. He is generally a hard SF writer, and his central theme, by far, is the environment. In this way he differs from a writer like Greg Egan, to whom he has been compared — Egan seems to have a wider range of SFnal interests. (But give Bacigalupi time!) That said, while the bulk of his stories are certainly set in depressing, environmentally ruined futures, they are also packed with plausible and fascinating SFnal furniture — he’s truly a science fiction writer, a pretty hard SF writer, and one who scratches the same itch John Campbell wanted his writers to scratch.
This first collection is arranged as a retrospective, that is, the stories appear in order of publication. His first sale, “Pocketful of Dharma,” about the Dalai Lama being unable to reincarnate because he is imprisoned in a data cube, was colorful and different enough to make people take immediate notice when it appeared in F&SF in 1999, though it’s not quite successful. It was four more years until his second story appeared, also in F&SF (where, indeed, the bulk of his stories have been published). “The Fluted Girl” has an even more exotic central image — girls — slaves of a rich woman — who have had their bones altered so that they can be “played” like a flute. The real subject isn’t the body manipulation, but slavery and ownership of one’s own self. Again, a fascinating story, that justly got noticed, but one I didn’t feel quite closed the deal.
But in 2004, with his third story, “The People of Sand and Slag,” I felt Bacigalupi came into his own. It’s set in a profoundly ruined future, and tells of three miners who encounter a dog — dogs being nearly extinct in this time. What seems at first blush conventional takes a savage and believable turn that drives home Bacigalupi’s point. This is still my favorite Bacigalupi story, but he has consistently been nearly as good since then. Slightly different in flavor is “The Pasho,” set much farther in the future, and focussing on the conflicts between an tradition-minded old man, and his grandson, who has gone away to study to become a Pasho — a man who understands the science that, people like his grandfather feel, led to the environmental ruin of their future. “The Calorie Man” is set in a future shaped by environmental damage and rampant corporatism, and in which much energy is generated by human effort. Corporate control of genetic modification drives an exciting thriller plot. “The Tamarisk Hunter” is an effective and bitter look at water conflicts in the fairly near future West, when California is more or less bleeding the mountain states dry, and the few who remain there eke out a living by such stratagems as accepting bounties for eradicating the stubborn, water-wasting, tamarisks. “Pop Squad” is shockingly effective, if a bit forced perhaps — in this future most people have become immortal, and thus babies are illegal. The protagonist’s job is to track down illegal mothers.
“Yellow Card Man” is set in the same future as “The Calorie Man,” and displays the same cold-bloodedness that drove “The People of Sand and Slag,” though from a different angle, as a failed businessman dealing with a now successful man who he had fired in his earlier career. Redemption is perhaps available — but not easy to grasp. “Softer” is quite a departure for Bacigalupi — straightforward contemporary horror, following a man’s actions after he kills his wife. Finally, the anthology closes with a brand-new story, “Pump Six,” about a man who works for the New York City sewer department. Environmental toxins have profoundly affected human development — abetted by general societal decay — so that nobody is educated any more, and nobody understands the infrastructure, such as the sewage pumps, that still maintain livable conditions in the big city. The story is not quite hopeful but it is in a way more pleasant than many of Bacigalupi’s stories — the hero is a basically good man, who loves his wife, and who wants to understand his job, and indeed who is a bit more capable than most anyone around him. But his efforts are almost certainly too little too late. (One more story, “Small Offerings,” from the 2007 anthology Fast Forward 1, a brief, dark, story of how environmental toxins might affect childbearing, is available only in the special edition.)
Pump Six and Other Stories, with its retrospective organization and in that it features the author’s entire published short fiction to date, quite strikingly positions Paolo Bacigalupi as one of the best young SF writers of our time: a writer who has already done first-rate work and who is ready, I feel sure, to really thrill us.
