JOURNAL #43
June 16, 2009
I’m just back from the Science Fiction Research Assn conference in Atlanta. During the course of the weekend, I had a chance to hang out with the other writers at the evnt. That seldom happens at cons, where life tends to get busy to permit much leisure. When writers get together they tend to talk about current projects. When I mentioned that I was working on a new Alex Benedict novel to be titled Signs of Life, Kathleen Ann Goonan and Paul Di Filippo both recalled that there had been an earlier SF novel by that title. When I did a search, it turned out there’ve been a dozen or so books of different types, both fiction and nonfiction, with the title over the last twenty years. So that one’s gone.
I thought about using Breakfast with the Martians, in which ’Martians’ would refer to the various intelligent species that had never been found. But put that word on the cover and people will take a literal meaning from it. And of course there are no Martians in the book. So at the moment, the ship once again has no rudder. It’s remarkable how much easier it is to write a novel once the title is in hand.
One panel I’d particularly have liked to attend was What It Means To Be an SF Author in the English Department. It was chaired by Brett Cox, and included Warren Rochelle, Michael Bishop, and Andy Duncan. Unfortunately the schedule prevented me from going.
I had the opportunity to do a reading for WREK, the Georgia Tech radio station. I decided on a section from Time Travelers Never Die, in which Dave and Shel encounter Aldous Huxley while a young Dick Nixon plays the piano in a café in 1937 Durham.
We picked up a collection of ’Lights Out’ radio shows to provide entertainment while we traveled. The show had blown me away when I was seven years old. Some of the episodes still play quite well. I especially liked one from early 1941 in which a group of selfish Hollywood types find themselves in a chartered plane which freezes in midair while they try to take advantage of someone‘s death. Somebody has had enough. Arch Obeler, the director and probably one of the principal writers, was ahead of his time.