When you spoke of the seven wonders and you reached in your coat for your telescope

[sovay]

This was not a bad week. There was the wiped-flat exhaustion from Readercon that I failed to notice until Tuesday or so, but there was also my brother's birthday and Legend of Korra with gaudior and The Blues Brothers (1980) with derspatchel at midnight, which I may now consider the ideal time to start watching that movie. I have been listening to Anaïs Mitchell's Young Man in America (2012), which is a kind of epic cycle of American myth; it's not so much that it pulls back from the archetypal scope of Hadestown (2010) as it is a different way of focusing the same body of music and stories, the stretching shadow of the Depression. Yesterday, however, was a bad day. I got a poem out of it, but it was still a very bad day.

Today, the mail arrived. I am looking at:

1. A certificate for my poem "Tapping the Vine" placing second in the 2011 Dwarf Stars Award.

2. Copies of Gil Adamson's The Outlander (2007) and M.R. James' Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, sent me by handful_ofdust.

3. The Alan Turing T-shirt ajodasso sent me a link to on Tuesday and which I ordered promptly, because I know a necessary item of clothing when I see it.

Okay, universe, I'm sure there's a point in here somewhere.

Have some panoramic views of Mars.

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry for the dies horribilis, and I hope today will be a better. I'm glad there at least wasn't a bad week before it.

Congratulations on the certificate! I'm happy for the books and t-shirt.

Thanks for the views of Mars! (I know, intellectually, that I'll not, but on some level every time I see something like this I hope I'll suddenly see thoats and flyers and red and green people, or at least a wooden landship under sail, with a snarling-beast figurehead and wheels spun of crystalline wire.)

[sovay]

(I know, intellectually, that I'll not, but on some level every time I see something like this I hope I'll suddenly see thoats and flyers and red and green people, or at least a wooden landship under sail, with a snarling-beast figurehead and wheels spun of crystalline wire.)

I think it's awesome that it's actual Mars. We know what the fantasies look like. The real thing is (flat, red, it doesn't matter: it's not a controlled environment) unpredictable.

(That said, you could totally write about a rover reaching fantastic Mars.)

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I think it's awesome that it's actual Mars. We know what the fantasies look like. The real thing is (flat, red, it doesn't matter: it's not a controlled environment) unpredictable.

Well, yes, it is awesome.

I suppose that as much as anything else I find it amusing that, despite having known about the real Mars (or at least the then-current understanding of the same) since before I knew any of the fantastic versions, I still wish, on some level, for one of the fantastic versions, or at least something like,* a place with languages I could learn and artefacts I could analyse.

(That said, you could totally write about a rover reaching fantastic Mars.)

Good point!

I don't seem to be any good at writing anything but sappy romance, silly comedy, and the combination of the two, but it could be worth trying, sometime.**

*I'm very fond of Alexander Jablokov's 24th Century Mars (seen peripherally in Carve the Sky (1991) and directly in River of Dust (1997)), which has had underground colonies for a few hundred years. You could do archaeology there, and not only chasing possible traces of the Acherusians (might-or-might-not-be-real million-years-absent aliens). The (thoroughly human) Martians are people who eat vanilla-flavoured porridge for breakfast, who learn swordplay as soon as they can walk, and whose emergency rations are brutally over-spiced. They'd be overwhelming to live amongst, but I wish I could meet a few.
**Of course, it has been done. My favourite (and I hope I'm not bringing up someone who's been rude to you or to any friend of yours) is probably the S.M. Stirling version from In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (2008) where the Viking probe ends up being hauled aboard a landship and taken away to the nearest university, whose scholars pay the ship's crew a small fortune for it.