The Fredösphere

Once again my good friend Tony C. Smith comes through in the StarShipSofa podcast by running a six-minute-long commercial for They're Made Out of Meat, or what Tony so affectionately refers to as my "meat opera." Listen to the whole thing, or better, subscribe to the podcast . . . or best, head over to Amazon with 89 cents in your hand and BUY THE MEAT!

Labels: Starship Sofa, They're Made Out Of Meat

My friend (and regular guest at the StarShipSofa podcast) Dr. Amy H. Sturgis wrote an essay that lists all the ways we all will die in 2012. It's a surprisingly long list.

Labels: Starship Sofa, We're All Going to Die

"What Shall We Do With a Drunken Robot" is a piece of fluff I created as part of a comprehensive strategy to procrastinate on my top priority (secret) project. My production values as a recording engineer are low, but I made the recording anyway, using the following musical instruments: banjo, synth, slide whistle, washing machine, and sundry percussion.

My dear friend Tony C. Smith of the StarShipSofa podcast liked my robot song well enough to include it in the latest SSS edition, which you must go download and listen to right now.

Tony efforts at promoting SF have resulted in their first physical artifact, a book anthologizing some of the best stories of the show. Here's the blurbage:

StarShipSofa Stories Volume 1 is only a few days away from going on sale. Here's a sneak preview of the cover art, designed by Skeet.

Skeet's brief was to create a picture that would pay homage to the 50s SF pulp magazines. I think he's produced an amazing piece of work.

Get ready for the 16th September when the book will be available to buy in print form. There will also be a new website and free eBook released on that day.

I hope you think it captures the style and feel of the SF Golden Years.

Labels: Composition, Starship Sofa

It's not easy to write convincing fiction when one of the characters is a great artist. The explanations of the art and its greatness usually fall flat. Two embarrassing examples from Ayn Rand's novels come to my mind instantly. In the opening pages of Atlas Shrugged, the theme of a mysterious symphony keeps popping up, one that is brilliant and perfect precisely because it was never written (oooh, that's spooky!). The other example comes from the The Fountainhead: Howard Roark's architectural masterpieces are left mainly to the imagination in the novel (I presume—I never read it) but must be shown in the movie version because of the nature of the medium. This showing is not to Roark's advantage because the artists hired to create the architectural drawings and matte paintings inevitably relied on clichés, because if they were geniuses like Roark they wouldn't be working in Hollywood. (One friend's reaction upon seeing those "masterpieces" was to blurt out, "he invented the 1950's!").

Two works of fiction from the world of SF feature characters who are musicians, and to my delight get them mostly right. First is Ian R. MacLeod's Song of Time. A supporting character, prominent in the first few chapters (the ones I've read so far) is a brilliant young pianist who dies a slow death, but not before transmitting his passion for music to his sister, the main character. I'm amazed to report that some of the lad's advice on the topic of practicing is actually useful. Amazing.

The other musician, a composer actually, is the first-person main character of the short story Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffery Ford, available from my good friends over at the Starship Sofa Podcast. I thought it regrettable that the story told of a magnum opus consisting of two-voice counterpoint (only two? To carry an extended work? I doubt it) but otherwise the depiction of the life and work of a composer felt right to me. As a bonus, the character is also a synaesthete, one of a group that, long-time readers know (hi Mom!), I have made the butt of good-natured jokes here at the Fredösphere (if jokes about concentration camps can ever be good-natured. . . and I say, when they're about synaesthetes, they are!).

Labels: AynRand, Composition, Creativity, MusicTheory, Starship Sofa, Synaesthetes