devi | (no subject)

I was up marking coursework till nearly 3am last night and now my head is full of wool and my neck feels simultaneously stiff and too wobbly. Today was running up and down stairs chasing more coursework, sending the students out to buy plastic folders and find me the hole punch because surely you're not submitting THAT? It's all in but one now, finally, and for the rest of the evening I am off duty. I am eating bucket pasta and thinking about watching 24 Hour Party People, which always inspires me because it's about a shambolic disorganised mess of a person who through sheer enthusiasm manages to make great stuff happen, almost by accident.

But even despite my adrenalin-filled get-things-done state, I still found myself perched on the edge of the bed half-dressed for half an hour this morning, breathlessly devouring the end of Geoff Ryman's Air. Oh my. I'd only picked it up while packing my bag to see how far I was from the end. I went out to catch the bus still staggered by the brilliance.

More people ought to know about Geoff Ryman. Okay, lots of people seem to have read 253, his book of thumbnail portraits of people on a tube train, but who knows about The Child Garden, the love story of a girl and a polar bear opera-singer in a near-future sub-tropical London? It's full of amazing language and big ideas and is one of the best books I've ever read. Was, his remix of The Wizard of Oz, is also great and very, very dark. Lust is an awkward one, about a scientist who develops the power to manifest anyone he fancies, alive, dead or fictional, but it's still got more crunchy concepts and moments of insight and beauty than any three more processed and pasteurised books you care to mention, and towards the end goes careering off into a gorgeous crazed mystic tangent about what really happens when you die. He writes about time and memories and the random connections between people, the texture of cities and making art and throwing impromptu street parties in the face of death. With balloons.

Excuse my fangirling. I just think he's criminally ignored, though he did win a bunch of awards for Air, which is set in the last village in the world to get online. When I was in Trinity Netsoc we invited him over to give a talk about 253 and online fiction (yes, it was the late nineties, how can you tell?) and a bunch of us committee people got outrageously drunk with him in his B&B while he told the guy who was Secretary to stop wasting his life and go have babies. It sounded as if he felt he'd failed at his life. I think he ought to have people peeling grapes for him, if there was any justice.

Off to the Bristol Comic Expo tomorrow with a bundle of Wasted Epiphanies to thrust upon people. With polar bears in it, yes. I rip off Mr Ryman all the time without meaning to.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Geoff Ryman is - probably - my most favourite author, for various values of favourite (I have about ten values, so there are ten 'most favourite'). The Child Garden is one of those books I insist people read to the extent of buying them copies, and is also one of the maybe five books (Thinks: The Chymical Wedding, The Alexandria Quartet, Invisible Cities being three of them off the top of my head) that I would quote as having had a very immediate and cognate influence on the way that I choose to put words together. I am encouraged by the fact that you also think that Ryman is a great author. I haven't read the other books, but I'm going to make an effort to read them, now.

Hmm, yes, there's an SF Masterworks edition of The Child Garden in Borders at the moment, with a picture of Canary Wharf surrounded by tropical ferns, and I almost bought it so I could give it to some unsuspecting victim. Hmm, maybe I will.

I've bought Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman for two boys now. Though not this one yet, hmm.

Yeah, I just googled and found it, and was about to send it to two or three people who should read it when I realised that this was solipstic madness, especially given the current uncertainties to my future.

Still, I know what I shall be rereading this weekend in between Other Things.

I wrote that next simultaenously rather in reply, it should be clear.

He also, if you followed him in Interzone, wrote a short story about Lesbian Totalitarians, with 'work camps' for men, on which the comments at the time said, you can get away with that, but no one else could.

I read The Unconquered Country but I recall little other than a thing about counting in 'bunches' which now always pops into the top of my head when I see things about mathematical geniuses.

There are altogether too many SF stories about Lesbian Totalitarians. Buoyed up by reading Breakfast In The Ruins, the updated version of Barry Malzberg's Engines of the Night (the best 'my life and SF leading onto my thoughts on SF' stylee book in existence), I have ordered various collections of short stories, since Barry is big on 'author x is best in short form'. One of said authors is James Tiptree Jr. who has at least one Lesbian Totalitarian stories in it. Perhaps there should be a monthly magazine of them on the lines of IASFM
'Alice Sheldon's Lesbian Totalitarian Story Magazine' or something.

O fuck, there goes my credit card limit.

Personally, I would look to

mr_snips for borrowing previous Interzones, including the very wonderful 'lost things found in boxes'

Yes, it was clear, and I was bemused. I had always thought of Geoff Ryman as one of those authors that only I knew about and loved.

He also, if you followed him in Interzone, wrote a short story about Lesbian Totalitarians, with 'work camps' for men,

"O Happy Day". Which isn't so much about the lesbian totalitarians as it is about the gay men who are in charge of the work camps, which are only for straight men.

Also of note: the ass-babies story.

Quite right. I (had forgotten) was eliding details.

> the ass-babies story.

Do I really need to know? Possibly not.

Gay men having children. Falls with "O Happy Day" under "things that only Geoff Ryman could get away with", possibly.

Geoff Ryman writes mpreg! Heh!

And he does have a thing about biologically unlikely pregnancies, doesn't he?