Eating Muffins in an Agitated Manner

Andaaz (2003)

Posted by Sari

Andaaz on ihan puhdasta melodraamaa alusta loppuun – tietysti laululla, tanssilla ja aina ah niin hauskan Johnny Leverin komiikalla höystettynä. Sukslaasilmäinen Akshay Kumar on rakastunut lapsuudenystäväänsä Lara Duttaan (Miss Universumi 2000). Akshaylla on aikataulu: hän kosii kun on valmistunut ilmavoimien lentokoulusta. Valitettavasti vaan kukaan ei kertonut tätä Laralle ja tämä suostuu helikopteria lentävän liikemies Aman Verman kosintaan. Kyyneleet silmissään Akshay laulaa ja tanssii häissä, ja lähtee ahdistumaan Etelä-Afrikkaan. Siellä hän tapaa länsimaistuneen Priyanka Chopran (Miss Maailma 2000), joka alkaa jahdata komeaa pilottia.

Priyanka seuraa Akshayta kotiin, puhuu Akshayn ympäri kihlaukseen ja osoittautuu Laran miehen sisareksi. Mikä sattuma! Ja mikä tragedia! Sillä Laran helikopteripilottipisnesmies on tällä välin kuollut kauheassa onnettomuudessa ja leski on surusta sekaisin koettanut itsemurhaa useampaan otteeseen. Akshay saa Laran houkuteltua takaisin elävien ja henkisesti vähän tasapainoisempien kirjoihin ja Priyanka hääpäivänään jalosti luovuttaa paikkansa Laralle jotta alun rakastavaiset saisivat lopulta toisensa.

Mitä tästä nyt sitten sanoisi, kovin keskinkertainen ison budjetin masalamelodraamaksi. Musiikki ei kolahtanut lainkaan, lesken ylenmääräinen ahdistus oli melodraamagenreen ja intialaiseen kulttuurin yhdistetynä ymmärrettävää mutta länsimaiselle katsojalle kovin luotaantyöntävää. Lisäksi minusta nyt triangeli meni ihan väärin, Priyanka olisi ollut paljon parempi vaimo Akshaylle.

Atheism, Alternate history and a Highly Civilized Man

Posted by Sari

Kim Stanley Robinson The Years of Rice and Salt

I have problems with alternate history novels. I either think that the point of divergence is too small or trite, or badly imagined. In this case, I can not really say that the chosen point of divergence is too small. Robinson after all, wipes the whole population of Europe off the map with the plague in 14th century, and re imagines the history of the world from that point until approximately present date. The result is a very robinsonian novel, a vast panorama of world and time which somehow ends up pretty much like our world in the end. To create some sort of continuum Robinson introduces the idea of reincarnation and follows three intertwined souls, K, B and I through history.

Somehow this just did not work for me. I kind of liked the idea of a longue duré novel but there were just too many points where I found the argument unconvincing. What kind of plague would wipe out all the people of Europe (including very sparsely inhabited Scandinavia?) but miraculously stop short of Asia? Could one Japanese really prepare the North American Indians for the onslaught of invaders from East and West? Could scientific revolution really be the work of few isolated geniuses in Samarkand? A trench war of sixty years without the invention of tanks? And how and why would everything happen pretty much the same and exactly the same pace as in a world where European culture dominates? If you take out such a huge thing like Europe out of the calculation, I think there would have been cumulatively more changes and differences than Robinson shows us.

Maybe Years of Rice and Salt is meant to be a meditation on humanity and history more than a nuts and bolts kind of alternate history, but even so, the point escapes me. It is bold, it’s language has surprising power, but in the end… just no.

Fawn Brodie: The Devil Drives

Sir Richard Burton was undoubtedly one of the strangest and most compelling men Victorian age ever produced. A solider, a truly remarkable linguist, ethnologist, explorer, adventurer, spy, one of the greatest swordsmen of the period, a poet, a translator, a diplomat and collector and publisher of erotica. He served in India and in Crimea, went on a Hajj to Mecca and Medina in disguise, discovered lake Tanganjika, served as a consul on four continents, had a tragic and well publicized quarrel with John Speke on the sources of the White Nile, and wrote about all of it in voluminous detail.

He also translated oriental erotica like Kama Sutra, and most famously Thousand and One Nights into English, was friends with such more or less notorious characters as Monckton Milnes, Algernon Swinburne and Fred Hankey, and suspected his army career in India was blocked by his rather frank report on male brothels in Karachi. He spent most of his life restless, always looking for something, always shocking the establishment and often taunting his superiors because usually he had known better than they.

Brodie’s biography of Burton from 1967 is thorough, engaging and well written, but it does leave reader asking for more. Burton’s life was so rich and full of controversy, his writings and opinions so varied, so simultaneously at odds with and reflecting Victorian England that the four hundred pages barely seem to scratch surface. Unfortunately his wife Isabel – a fascinating woman on her own right – burned Burton’s diaries and manuscripts after his death leaving generations of historians and anthropologists devastated. Even so I think more modern biographies might open up his character better. This one sounds really interesting. And  here is a link for a short lecture given by its author.

Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion

Dawkins is witty and funny and passionate and I pretty much agree with him, so reading God Delusion was one of those reaffirming rather than revealing readings experiences. It is bit of a sprawl, discussing religion (mainly Christianity and Islam) and religious questions from arguments of God’s existence or nonexistence to morality to possibility of evolutionary explanation for religion. Many of the arguments and examples are familiar from Dawkins earlier writings, and there are a few “yyeeess but…” moments, at least for me.

Nonetheless, The God Delusion is a worthy argument for atheism, wonderful debunking of ID and sent me surfing information on sundry things from Russell’s Teapot to Cargo Cults. Also, it is dedicated to one of our ages true humanists, Douglas Adams. How could it be bad?

Oh, and if you get BBC World, try to catch Hard Talk with Dawkins, it gives you the arguments from the book in a nutshell.

Some books

Posted by Sari

To prove to Marko I have been reading:

John Gribbin: The Fellowship. The Story of a Revolution

 There is a wonderful chapter near the beginning of Neil Stephenson’s Quicksilver where Daniel Waterhouse makes his way to Epsom where John Wilkins and Robert Hooke have in 1665 retired from the plague-infested London to continue their work. Based on John Evelyn’s often quoted description of the two famous natural philosophers at work, Stephenson creates a snapshot of the Scientific Revolution. There is Wren’s see-through beehive , experiments with wells and weights and carriages, Wilkins working on Philosophical Language, Hooke putting all possible things under the microscope and even a description of Hooke's self-confessedly gruesome experiment to keep a vivisected dog’s heart beating by blowing air to its lungs by bellows. 

It is of course fiction, alternate universe or secret universe fiction at that, and should not be taken for a fact, but I think Stephenson has managed to catch something that was true about the way these great natural philosophers worked. Firstly, they argued and had bitter sometimes mysterious feuds, but they also worked together, shared information and collaborated in most unexpected ways with each other. Secondly, they thought – as Shapin delightfully puts it – “that the poor shape of existing natural philosophy [had resulted from] inadequate quality control over its register of facts”. Thus they were busily building up a store of better quality facts by conducting experiments, being interested in all things - and reveling in it. 

John Gribbin, an astrophysicist turn to prolific popular science writer tackles the same cast of characters in his “The Fellowship. The Story of a Revolution”. In a series of biographical sketches from Galileo to Halley he traces the development of scientific ideas and method. Gribbin is out to prove that there is no such thing as a Kuhnian shift of paradigm, that the scientific revolution was a collaborative effort, and that Halley and Hooke are unfairly shadowed by Newton (who spent all that time with useless alchemy anyway).

The end result is frustrating. The frame on which the biographical sketches hang is the Royal Society, but for a book arguing for the collaborative nature of science the format really underplays the exchange of ideas. Also, his inclusion of biographical detail and exclusion of all their areas of interest not part of the path towards the modern scientific world-view makes the sketches unbalanced and extremely selective. Why is Sir Kenelmn Digby, Kitty Barton or Hooke’s incestuous affair with his niece relevant but Newton’s alchemy or Boyle’s astrology are not? These men did not, could not know which of their experiments and theories would end up being important and which would lead into a dead end. Looking at the shakers and movers of scientific revolution as teleologically Gribbin does might arguably be viable from the point of view of a scientist who is not interested in the byways and alleys the search for scientia took the cast of Gribbin’s characters, but for someone interested in the persons and the process, this book is ultimately a failure.

Tamara Siler Jones: Ghosts in the Snow, Threads of Malice, Valley of the Soul

The Pitch would be something like fantasy meets Patricia Cornwall. Jones writes murder mysteries in fantasy setting. Her “detective” Dubric Byerly is an old Castellan who sees ghosts of murder victims until he has solved what happened and punished the guilty parties. He is aided by his squire and pages, and the murders he is called upon to solve are usually more gruesome serial affairs.

What I like about Jones’ work is a good fit of two very different genres, competent story telling, and the fact they are also mentoring fics. Dubric has and is mentoring Dien and they both are mentoring the pages. Why is there so little good fiction about mentoring? It is such an interesting dynamic and so under-utilized. One of the reasons I have grown frustrated with Harry Potter was that Dumbledore is such a crap mentor and Rowlings keeps telling us he really is great.

Steven Saylor: Murha Via Appialla (Murder on the Appian Way)

Saylor’s novels set during the first century B.C. often have a back drop of great events. His detective Gordianus the Finder has helped the rich and famous of the city from Cicero to Caesar, always observing the defining moments of the fall of the Republic. This time Gordianus gets commissioned to find out who really murdered the rabble rousing politician Publius Clodius Pulcher on the Appian Way. Was it his rival Milo or someone else? With his customary skill Saylor weaves together the facts we know with pure invention arriving in an interesting resolution to the plot. Gordianus and his family are as unconventionally adorable here as before and the way Saylor through them depicts the city boiling over and descending towards anarchy is really the best part of the novel, quite outstanding, actually.

Rummutus ei saa koskaan loppua ja Asterixin lainaaminen on loputon syöksykierre

Posted by Sari

Finnconissa ryytynyt ja ei juuri lainkaan nukkunut mieheni meni kiltimmin kuin viisivuotias koskaan sänkyyn ajoissa saavuttuaan maanantai-iltana työpaikan kautta Jyväskylästä kotiin. Sitten iski katastrofi. Kertoillessaan hauskoja anekdootteja kadonneista vetureista ja sponsoroiduista oluista hän äityi kertomaan tarinaa myös nuoresta ja viattomasta fandomin edustajasta joka dead dogissa teki annasuovat ja ilmaisi jonkinasteista hämmennystä siitä että ihmiset muka lainaisivat Asterixia. Voivottelimme asiaankuuluvasti siinä jonkinaikaa nykyajan nuorisoa, ja sitten se tietysti alkoi.

Ole keltti ja anna suolaa
Hän sai ketjureaktion!
Millainen maa Helvetia oli? – Tasainen
Ei, sinä ET laula!!!
KUKKUU!!!
Ayyyy, äitiiii! Miksi tämän teiiit?
Hän on suurenmoinen.  – Ai kuka? – No te. – Ai hän.
Piani koira. Minä pidän pienistä koirista.
Gootit jotka hyökkäsivät goottien maahan yllättivät minut takaapäin
Aa tuuti lasta, felis domesticus tuli vastaan
Kuka tuo pieni käppänä on?
Tiedätkö mihin saat työntää brassicasi?
Gallia! Gallia! Gallia! Gall...  – Sparta.
Terve vanha Julius.
Se nenä...
Kas, lentokala
Minä sanon, Asterix serkku

Ja se vaan jatkui. Minä menin jo tietokoneelle ja vielä se huuteli sieltä perään: ”etkö sinä erota korsikalaista heimopäällikköä villisiasta?” Ei sitten tullut siitä aikaisesta nukkumaanmanosta yhtään mitään.

Finncon 2007

Posted by Sari

Firstly, props to all who made the con happen: ad astra per aspera (which, the internet tells me is not only a popular latin tag as I thought, but also the motto of both the Starfleet and the state of Kansas. The things you learn). Special thanks and congratulations go to Anne for a huge job well done ( also apparently winning some prize or another...) I was also very happy to see that our wedding present for Eemeli and Saija had found gainful employment :-)

I had fun, which is pretty rare for me, being a very contrary (heh) person. I enjoyed meeting old friends, and talking to new people. I have no idea if my own program items went well or not, but I enjoyed doing them. Being a part of programming  ended up bitter-sweetly being also a way to remember Leena who was a wonderful and wise co-panelist the first time I braved actually performing at Finncon.

I could have seen more of the programming, but I liked what I saw. Jukka’s interviews with Joe and Liz were, I thought biasly,  pretty great, and enjoyed a lot listening to the grumpy “old” women complaining about SF-related things. You have no idea how old I felt every time Senja started a sentence with “when we were young”…

I also saw the “salaiset kansiot” –panel. I am really interested in the way it has been percieved in the net, some people like it some (like the chairman himself) were not that impressed. Me being me, I am taking this little bit meta. I think The panel was a really old-school Finncon panel. Remember the time when Finncon was at Vanha Ylioppilastalo, had basically one program track, people were allowed to bring their pints on the stage and nobody really understood what it said in Tähtivaeltaja’s con-report? This was the kind of off-the-cuff lets-just-go-up-there-and-spout-bullshit –kind of panel Finncon used to have more. Because there was a sort of an assumption that most of the people there knew that if you put people like Hiltunen and Halme on stage result would be weird unstructured and (hopefully) funny hour of non sequiturs about underwater nazi zombies.

It was also an old-school panel in the sense that it played with inside information about fandom. Fandom as a collective knows about Aleksi’s underwear (no, he is never going to live that down), Petri’s fascination with sharks and that Ninni’s Pasinen has a thing about physics. Jukka knows that Marko is no friend of time travelling, that Ilja knows a thing or two about bad movies nobody should know, and that Vuorensola is right there on the first row, so he can riff off them all.

I think Finncon needs these program items where the bar is not set that high (or far…) and which rely more on us being a fandom than what is going on on on the stage. They can be successful or less succesful, you never know how the dynamics of the situation go, but they need to be there. Because the one thing Finncon really is at the moment in danger of loosing is the feeling of communality. Selling SF to the masses, being a big carnevalesque cultural festival and drawing in new people needs to be balanced with fandom doing things for fandom. And that is why I enjoyd “salaiset kansiot” panel immensly though it was silly and juvenile and really never went anyhwere. It reminded me of Finncon 1991 when I was a neo and decided that this was a tribe to which I want to belong.

Happily tired

Posted by jukkahoo

This is just a brief note in order to say Humongous THANKS for a con well done to all and everyone involved and responsible! This was a very nice Animecon, with lots of good SF-related programming Finncon!

All of the items I saw were enjoyable, funny, provocative, intelligent or just plain fannishly entertaining. Personally-wise I think things got better with progression. Publishing-panel went OK, but then again, I was out of my league with the Amazing Klute sitting next to me, with his Mighty Vocabulary! I was very nervous at the beginnig of James Lipton's first interview, but I think in the end it went rather well. I think James was at his best with Liz Hand. Kuis? was also rather entertaining, even from the POV of the host, hopefully otherwise too. I was slightly surprised by the difficulty level of some of the parts, since I had planned VERY easy and free-floving game-show.

I wasn't too impressed by my performance with the only Finnish-lingo panel of mine, the Syystäkin salaiset kansiot. I thought that it was decent enough fluff, was meant as such, but would've been better (even funnier?) with a modicum of pre-planning. Now I had done zip. Then again, I wasn't asked to do anything other than show up and spew crap. This, we DID.

In all, a good Finncon. Apparently the GoH's and various Special Guests also approve. Great. Still. Some thoughts did come up which I will hopefully write about soonish, as I was planning on doing a proper con-report this week. I talked with several people during the con how this time the feeling of fannishness was bit missing, mainly die to the over-flow of those kissankorvatytöt and other Barely Legal -pinups. Same thing happened last year, but at least then we did have the restaurant, which served as a gathering area for old pharts and grumpy spinsters the more SF-tuned attendees.

But now I have to stop, as jukkahoo needs some serious beddy-bye time.

To Finncon

Posted by jukkahoo

Time flies like a banana and it's already Friday the 13th. *happy birfday mr. president*

I had a chance to meet this year's guests at the Helsinki press conference, where the press was eagerly waiting for Joe Haldeman, in order to interview him. But where was Joe? Nobody knew. Bangor, Paris, St. Petersburg, all good choices, but the fact remained, that he was not in Helsinki. Hopefully he'll turn up.

Which he of course will. Aeroplanes, funny things.

We're leaving tomorrow at noonish. I should be in Jyväskylä by 4PM, as there is this panel I'm supposedly going to be talking about publishing. I will also be around for several other items, so if you start getting an excess of me this weekend, blame the organisers of this year's Finncon. THEY wanted me for all of these program items. Leikki leikkinä, ihan mahtava coni tästä tulee joka tapauksessa!

Yeah, you heard it right. Publishing. Be there and hear everything I know about the subject matter :)

Finncon is always very much anticipated in our family. I'm giddy and Sari..., well, not so. This year should be no exeption, but the news from last week really took some wind out of the fun. Losing Leena is a huge loss for the whole of Finnsih fandom and the whole field of SF/F in Finland.

Leena was the bedrock, the SF-Mother, who knew pretty much everything there was to know about important things. She faded to the background, but was still a formidable person to talk to, those far too seldom and apart times we managed to either make a visit to Tampere or Leena (and Juhani) to Helsinki.

She was one of the very first BNF's I remember from the early days when I started reading the fanzines. All those well-thought-out articles about various interesting authors. All those strong, authorative opinions about them.  *sigh*

Leena was also The editor, who (almost single-handedly) stood on the barricades, defending fantasy as a genre from all those more SF-attuned editors. A very strong reason, why I decided to make similar standing with my articles and pieces about different writers and subgenres.

R.I.P. Leena. You will be remembered.

A Nominee!

Posted by jukkahoo

Summer is here and Finncon is just around the corner. Lots of things to do, as one might guess. I've been slaving away at the Interior Ministry for few weeks now and will do so for the rest of the summer, so no holiday problems for me, no sir.

But what of this nomination business, you may ask? Well, it just happened that today the inaugural short list for the prestigious Tähtifantasia Award (Star Fantasy) was published and Uuskummaa? is among the five nominees. And what a line of worthy contenders: George R. R. Martin! Patricia A. McKillip! Jeff VanderMeer! Jonathan Carroll! And... me.

Wahey!

Really good books, makes me think of some recent World Fantasy Award shortlists, which to me have seemed to be the Really interesting shortlists of recent years. Incodentally, we had a panel on this one at Åcon (Å2 is coming...) with Ben Roimola and Tommy Persson, and we pretty much agreed that these shortlists are the Real Deal, not necessarily the winners. These lists (WFA and Arthur C. Clarke especially) have such a wealth of really good fiction that in order to keep up with whats really happening now, one ought to read most , if not all of the shortlisted ones. Recommended, really, just look, for example, at what these awards had in store last year. Great books.

Ah! But what of Tähtifantasia? There is a debate starting at Babek Nabel about the merits of the new award  (which I have no real enthusiasm to get into, as I am one of the contenders and thus somewhat... jäävi? disqualified? to really respond), but I'd love hear people's opinion on Who Should Win and Why? 

I'm extremely flattered and joyous over this nomination, especially with such brilliant co-nominees! Any which one could win this one. And let's not be too modest here: I think Uuskummaa? has a fair chance with this one since I firmly believe that the anthology is just jam-packed with nine extremelliously great short stories! Shurely you have a copy? Available from all the best bookstores and directly from the publisher.

And congratulations to Kirjava in general! Two nominees is a proof that they are doing pretty much everything right. As have the now nearly-deceased Loki-kirjat with their two nominees, sad to lose such an important purveyor of interesting fiction! And let's not forget Karisto, who have managed to gain a modicum of respect with their latest offerings after somewhat lacklustre years, filled with eddingses and jordans. And more good things are coming, so hooray! I hope this is leads way for the bigger publishing houses and their choices for translations of better fantastical literature...

So, rather exiting news to me. Now if people would just buy more copies of the book, so more of the same could be provided for needing masses... :)

By the way, here are some of the reviews and mentions I've found whilst browsing the interwebs (mostly in Finnish, but then again, so is the said collection!):

Netticolosseum
Minkä kirjan luin viimeksi
Sivuikkuna
14theditch
Kirjavinkit
Mediapäiväkirja
Helsingin Sanomat
Toimittajan spekulatiivinen lokikirja
Privaattidosentti
Luetut 2006-2007

To bed!