Cool Asimov’s stuff

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I can't seem to stop posting lately. Logorrhea or something. And I still haven't gotten around to the literally hundreds of items I've been saving up.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about right now.

I'm feeling particularly fond of Asimov's today. I subscribe to the magazine in an electronic version from Fictionwise, and I read bits of it on my Palm while eating lunch. Today I started reading the January 2005 issue, which is the first with Sheila Williams at the helm, and it starts with three pieces of nonfiction that are worth reading and that are available for free online:

  • An editorial by Sheila Williams that talks about her background and tastes and so on. (Actually, it seems like I've been reading a bunch of "how I came to sf" pieces lately; I recently read Tiptree's "Everything but the Signature Is Me" in the new Tiptree Award Anthology 1, and that essay and the introductions by Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler are by themselves worth the price of the book. But I digress.) Oh, and among other things I'm pleased to see her mention her assistant Brian Bieniowski; it seems to me that various kinds of editorial assistants do a lot of unsung work in the sf world, and I'm glad to see them getting a little more attention lately.
  • It turns out Roger Ebert was once an sf fan. Who knew? He contributes an article on his history with fandom, which was particularly interesting to me due to my father having shown me, last weekend, the single issue of the fanzine my father published sometime around '57 or so, which featured among other things an otherwise unpublished short-short story by Greg Benford. (I dropped Benford a note about it.) All these synchronistic threads—everything is indeed deeply interwingled. Odd, though, that Ebert hasn't heard that paper fanzines still exist. Though I imagine someone has told him by now.
  • I'm afraid I'm often not that fond of Silverberg's editorials, but this month's, "Gardner Moves On," is a nice paean to short-fiction editors who've shaped the field, and to Gardner in particular, while also expressing firm confidence in Sheila. Nicely done. David M. jokingly asked me recently, more or less, if I wanted to be John W. Campbell, shaping authors' stories; I noted that I'd rather be Maxwell Perkins, the editor who edited Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Thomas Wolfe (the protagonist of Waldrop's zeppelin story in the zeppelin book; also purveyor of literary autobiography/memoir), and others; Perkins may or may not have had a strong influence on Wolfe's novel Of Time and the River. But I had forgotten about some of the other great sf editors; I'd happily settle for following in the footsteps of Gold, Boucher, Pohl, or Cele Goldsmith Lalli, who Silverberg doesn't mention but who seems to me to be chronically underrated; she was the first to publish Le Guin, Zelazny, and Disch, among others.
  • Finally, Jim Kelly's next On the Net column is online, though I think it won't appear in print 'til the February issue. And it's a very nice piece on Digital Rights Management and the Creative Commons license. Did y'all know that everything on Jim's site is freely copyable (for noncommercial purposes) under a CC license? Not all of his work, just everything on the site; but the site includes, among other things, all the audio files of him reading his stories aloud. Cool beans. Jim continues to be one of my heroes.

5 Responses to “Cool Asimov’s stuff”

  1. M.Hogarth

    Actually, if you read any amount of Ebert’s reviews you soon realize the depth of his SF background. 🙂

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  2. Jed

    I’m embarrassed to admit that after reading (and usually quite liking and often agreeing with) a bunch of Ebert’s reviews, I had him pigeonholed as someone with a vague passing acquaintance with sf. I think I leaped to that (now obviously wrong) conclusion mostly from his reviews that I mentioned in my own reviews of Treasure Planet and Terminator 3; his objections to those movies didn’t sound to me like the objections of an sf reader. But clearly I was just wrong.

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  3. M. Hogarth

    Hmm. I stopped reading him before those reviews, so I didn’t really notice. But there were times in his older reviews where he’d mention adaptations of SF novels and he seemed conversant with the themes. And he’s a bit of a gearhead–when he talks about continuity and sense in SF films (or in movies that use SF tropes, like time travel, even when they’re not billed as SF movies), the objections he often raises to them are the objections of someone who’s thought about time travel or what-have-you in a SFnal way.

    Alas, I stopped reading him when he started getting too political. But in general, his reviews struck me as canny things. 🙂

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  4. Rich Horton

    Hi, Jed.

    I knew Ebert was an SF Fan — he was a member of the Champaign-Urbana Science Fiction Assocation (CHUSFA), the University of Illinois SF club. I grew up in the Chicago area reading his reviews in the Sun-Times (long before Siskel and Ebert got together on the Chicago PBS outlet). It was an odd, pleasant, shock to find, when I joined CHUSFA after going to college, that he had been a member years before.

    I also ran across a story he published in the early 70s in Fantastic (the Ted White era). It may be his only professional SF credit.

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  5. Rolf Wilson

    Roger Ebert was certainly never a member of ChUSFA. The Champaign-Urbana Science Fiction Association was not founded until 1977, years after he was there. [I was one of those who founded it, so I speak with authority]
    I wouldn’t be surprised if there happened to be a membership sheet for him in the big red book, though. It was a running joke to put in “members”, fictional or not, just for fun.

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