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Indiana law focuses on ‘sexually explicit’ materials

“Planning to open a bookstore in Indiana? Maybe a newsstand? How about a pharmacy? You may be officially labeled a purveyor of “sexually explicit materials.” Now, if you’ll just sign this registry, the secretary of state will accept your check for $250.

At the end of March’s legislative session, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed House Act 1042, which requires all new businesses selling “sexually explicit materials” to notify the secretary of state and pay a licensing fee. Failure to comply is a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and up to 180 days in jail.

Exactly who – or what – defines “sexually explicit” is the $250 question, and the crux of any test of the law’s constitutionality. One such test may come from the Media Coalition, a trade association representing publishers, libraries and booksellers in 1st Amendment cases.”

(via The Chicago Tribune)

Pixar to adapt Philip K. Dick story for the big screen

April 12, 2008 / TiamatsVision

[..] Walt Disney’s King of The Elves, based on the Philip K. Dick story about a gas station attendant who receives a knock on the door one rainy night. It’s a group of elves. Small, maybe a foot tall each. They are all green, with leaves and foliage growing off of them. They beg him for shelter from the storm. Despite his better judgment he allows them to stay and as reward he is made king of the Elves.

Directed by Bob Walker and Aaron Blaise. It’s pretty far out from release, of course, but they showed some art. The elves I described a little above. The art was very painterly and the idea is that these little green buggers live in modern day Mississippi and have been undiscovered based on their appearance. With the leaves growing on their bodies if a human enters their domain they can just ruffle their foliage, duck their heads down and be completely undetectable.”

(via Ain’t It Cool. H/T: The Website @ the End of The Universe)

Complete Text of William Gibson’s The Gernsback Continuum

April 5, 2008 / Klint Finley

This story, reprinted in the Mirrorshades anthology, was the first Gibson story I ever read:

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.

I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen’s corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina. Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big, trendy “trade” paperbacks: illustrated histories of the neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Occupied Japan. I’d gone over to shoot a series of shoe ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky Day-Glo jogging shoes had capered for me down the escalators of St. John’s Wood and across the platforms of Tooting Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had decided that the mystery of London Transport would sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot. And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fashionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes, who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals.

American Heritage: The Gernsback Continuum

For more Gibson, check out our dossier.

New Evidence Proves James Bond was Based on Occult Knowledge

April 3, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“A remarkable new discovery by international best selling author, Philip Gardiner, has revealed that Ian Fleming based his fictional character on occult knowledge he had accumulated over the course of his life.

The new book, The Bond Code, reveals how Fleming included special etymological and numerological codes within his Bond novels to re-create ancient sacred tales of deep psychological importance. Drawing upon esoteric knowledge and an understanding of alchemy, Ian Fleming produced a work no different to the tales of the Holy Grail or dragon slaying fairy tales, within which lay the ancient understanding of human wisdom.

The author, Philip Gardiner, is an expert on esoteric philosophy and etymology and realised there was a code at play when watching the film, Live and Let Die. For two years he researched Ian Fleming and read his novels, discovering vast amounts of information previously unrealised.”

(via PRLog)

His Dark Materials prequel, Once Upon a Time in the North by Philip Pullman, except

March 27, 2008 / Klint Finley

I’ve never read any of the His Dark Materials books, or seen the recent movie, but I thought some people would be interested in this:

Except from Once Upon a Time in the North by Philip Pullman in the Guardian.

(via Robot Wisdom).

Plot Synopsis Project

March 19, 2008 / TiamatsVision

For all you aspiring writers out there, there’s a great project going on via LiveJournal with various authors who are posting their plot synopsis that they sent along with their pitches to sell their novels. Via Joshua Palmatier (jpsorrow):

“A few weeks ago, after I posted the question/interview about plot synopsis and my answers, Chaz Brenchley, desperance suggested that perhaps someone should post examples of the plot synopses they used to sell their novels, the ones that were for books already published and out there. I thought this was a great idea and with his permission (and participation) I set up what I’m calling the “Plot Synopsis Project”. Essentially, I gathered together a group of authors who were willing to post an entry about their own plot synopsis writing technique as well as a sample copy of one of their own plot synopses OR post an entry about how they got published without using a plot synopsis, to show everyone how different people write their synopses, and that it isn’t necessarily required to get published. There are other routes. I would say that MOST people have to write a plot synopsis in order to get published though . . . and most of us hate doing it. I personally do.

And just to clarify, by plot synopsis, I mean the (usually) 3-5 page summary of the book that is (usually) included in a submission package to the agent or editor, along with a cover letter or query letter, and sometimes with the first few chapters of the novel. This is not the one paragraph pitch, or even the one line pitch. Some of the other authors will talk about these other things as well in their discussion, but the main thrust of these posts is the 3-5 page synopsis.

So, what you have here is my entry in the Plot Synopsis Project. At the end of every participating post in the project, there will be links to the other authors’ blogs and their posts there. So take a moment to read through what I have to say, and then at the end, click on one of the links to find out what some other authors have to say about the subject. Hopefully, this will help all of the aspiring writers out there.”

Here’s a link of the writers involved separate from any plot synopsis, in case one wants to avoid an accidental spoiler, via Tobias Buckell’s site.

(Thanks Smoking Pigeon!)

Timothy Beal: Religion and It’s Monsters

March 13, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Timothy K. Beal is Florence Harkness Professor of Religion and director of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. He has published eight books, including Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (Beacon, 2005), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and one of Publishers Weekly‘s ten Best Religion Books of 2005; Religion and Its Monsters (Routledge, 2002), which was a Reviews in Religion and Theology Editor’s Choice; and The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, and Annihilation in Esther (Routledge, 2007).

He has published essays on religion and American culture for The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has been featured on radio shows including NPR’s All Things Considered and The Bob Edwards Show. He is co-editor, with Tod Linafelt, Georgetown University, of the book series Afterlives of the Bible with the University of Chicago Press. I was impressed with the perspective that Timothy brought to one of his books, Religion and Its Monsters, and Timothy made some time to discuss various aspects of the book with me.”

(via TheoFantastique)

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction

March 4, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Sponsored by Cornell University’s Institute for Digital Collections (CIDC) this image-bank provides a visual resource for the study of the Fantastic or of the supernatural in fiction and in art. While the site emerges from a comparative literature course on the topic at Skidmore College, it is also intended to open the door to consideration of some of the constant structures and patterns of fantastic literature, and the problems they raise. In this sense, the materials presented here may find a use among students in a variety of disciplines.

In order to take maximum advantage of the materials in the Cornell collections, it seemed best not to adhere to a strict definition of either the Fantastic or its predecessor, the Marvelous, as these have emerged in literary criticism and theory. It will be useful, nevertheless, to note some general markers which have informed the choices implicit in these pages. In the context of western literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Fantastic involves dread, fear and anxiety in the face of phenomena that escape rational explanation, or that reveal the notion of reality to be no more than a construct. A fantastic experience can therefore be likened to the breaking or shattering of a frame. While the literary fantastic is limited to the last 200 years, the Fantastic in art can be construed more broadly. This elasticity allowed us to choose images from works spanning a period from medieval manuscripts and printed incunabulae, to the early twentieth century.”

(The Fantastic in Art and Fiction)

Whitt and Perlich on Myth and Science Fiction

February 24, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“I recently mentioned a new book that looked very interesting to me, Sith, Slayers, Stargates and Cyborgs: Modern Mythology and the New Millennium (Peter Lang Publishers, 2007), edited by David Whitt and John Perlich. Dr. David Whitt is Associate Professor of Communication at Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Dr. John Perlich is Associate Professor of Communication at Hastings College in Nebraska. I contacted David and John and they were were all too willing to discuss this fascinating book. After reviewing some of the chapters we had an opportunity to discuss aspects of the book.”

(via TheoFantastique)

‘The Prince of Nothing’ in relation to quantum mechanics

February 9, 2008 / Fell

I got this email from my good friend Jason this morning regarding a series of literary fantasy novels I posted about a short time ago, The Prince of Nothing, by R. Scott Bakker:

You got read this on the Three Seas Forum, this cat Deadshade, is a phd physicist with a specialty in QM, his synopsis/interpretation is eloquent, elaborate, and utterly breathtaking. it essentially toches ground on alot of our dicussions on the subject/s, but his training and education enables him to elucidate in a way we were not!! check it out homes, if the link doesnt work just go to the forum and look for the topic “Inchoroi motivations & Quantum Mechanics”. I got so excited after reading it i had to print it off….

http://forum.three-seas.com/viewtopic.php?t=1287

For fans of the books, the post on the Three Seas forum will be of interest.

PS — SPOILER. While it doesn’t ruin the overall story, it’s a spoiler nonetheless.

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