John Joseph Adams – Page 28 – John Joseph Adams

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DVD Review: Fido (2007)

Do yourself a favor and check out this movie called Fido (now on DVD). Basically, it’s what you’d get if you mashed up Leave It to Beaver and Night of the Living Dead. In the 50s there’s some kind of space germ that turns the dead into zombies, resulting in a zombie war. A company called Zomcon develops technologies and strategies for beating back the zombie hordes so people can live in peace again. There are vast areas of land known as the "Wild Zone"–desolate wastelands where the zombies roam free. An oasis in that wilderness is the town of Willard, which is a sort of perfect, utopian piece of suburbia. The town is made possible by the perimeter fence that keeps the zombies out. Or the wild zombies anyway. See, some scientist developed a collar that allows you to control zombies. Put it around their neck, and you can stifle their impulse to consume human flesh. It also makes them receptive to commands, so they become a sort of slave, doing menial tasks no one else wants to do. The movie’s about a boy whose family gets their first zombie, who he names Fido.

It’s good stuff. A good, solid story, with just the right amount of humor. Pretty good performances all around, and some nice, subtle social commentary. Highly recommended.

Foreign Markets List

Author Douglas Smith just updated his excellent foreign markets list. Hey, it’s a new year–why not make one of your resolutions to sell some of your stories in translation? Looks like there’s plenty of viable markets here, most of which will read your stories in English, translate them free of charge, and pay you cash money.

And all those stories you’ve got in your trunk? Why not try those in foreign markets as well? Maybe no English-language readers but your mom likes that one story, but who knows, it could be a big hit in Polish.

The Pizza is Burning

The pizza place a couple blocks away from me is on fire. This photo was taken from my driveway. That big building you see there is a middle school. (Good thing there was no school today.) It looks like the fire’s IN the school, but there’s like a whole block between the school and the pizza place. Unfortunately, right next to the pizza place is a gas station, so hopefully they’ll contain the fire before it spreads over there.

F&SF, February 2008

The February 2008 issue of F&SF is now on sale. Also, on the F&SF website is this month’s bonus story, First Tuesday by Robert Reed (reprinted from our February 1996 issue).

Here’s the table of contents:

NOVELETS

Retrospect – Ann Miller
If Angels Fight – Richard Bowes

SHORT STORIES

Balancing Accounts – James L. Cambias [interview]
Memoirs of the Witch Queen – Ron Goulart
Petri Parousia – Matthew Hughes
Bread and Circus – Steven Popkes
Philologos; or, A Murder in Bistrita – Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald

DEPARTMENTS

Books to Look For – Charles de Lint, covering InterWorld, by Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves; M Is for Magic, by Neil Gaiman; Jumper: Griffin’s Story, by Steven Gould; and Vampire Academy, by Richelle Mead.
Books – Elizabeth Hand, covering The Adventures of Amir Hamza, by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami, new translation by Musharraf Ali Farooqi
Coming Attractions
Film: Look, You Fools… – Lucius Shepard, covering The Invasion
Curiosities – Peter Tremayne, covering Uneasy Freehold (retitled The Uninvited), by Dorothy Macardle (1941)

CARTOONS

Arthur Masear

COVER

Kent Bash for "Balancing Accounts"

Joseph Franklin Adams, Sr. (1923-2007)

My grandfather passed away last night after a long battle with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and a variety of other ailments. He was 84, and very nearly made it to 85–his birthday was just 22 days away.

For the past year and a half or so, he’s been living in a nursing home, after spending the prior five years living with me. After my grandmother died last year, it became impossible to take care of him on my own, since he couldn’t be left alone, so after a brief stint a really terrible place, I got him placed in the Menlo Park Veteran’s Home in Edison, NJ. That place was a godsend, and I’m very thankful he was able to spend the rest of his days there, with those good people taking care of him.

His death was not a shock; a few weeks ago, the doctors had talked to me about his quality of life (or lack thereof), and discussed his advanced directive options. Over the past several months, he’d deteriorated considerably. I used to be able to visit him and he’d know me, and could talk a bit, and boy did he look forward to going outside with me so he could have a cigarette. But a couple months ago, at some point, it was like a switch going off–there didn’t seem to be any medical event that the doctors could point to as the cause, but just like that, my grandfather–the man I knew growing up–seemed to be completely gone, and in his place was a man who looked just like him (albeit much thinner) but had none of the other qualities that made him who he was.

Because I was prepared for this eventuality, his death was easier to take. I had lost him bit by bit, until eventually, there was nothing left to lose.

"Balancing Accounts" by James L. Cambias

James L. Cambias, whose story "Balancing Accounts" is the cover story of the February 2008 issue of F&SF, said in an interview that the story is about a small-time independent robotic space tug called Annie who is hired by a mysterious client for a voyage between two of Saturn’s moons. "During the voyage Annie learns the true nature of her cargo and must fight off pursuers determined to capture or destroy what she’s carrying," Cambias said.

"Balancing Accounts" is Cambias’s attempt to update an old space-opera trope: the scruffy, hand-to-mouth space merchant crew. "I tried to make it work without violating physical laws or realistic economics," he said. "That meant it had to be within the Solar System (no faster-than-light drives) and couldn’t involve a human crew."

The protagonist, Annie, is a robot rocket tug who hauls cargo among the moons of Saturn. "She’s autonomous and ‘incentivized’ — her purpose is to generate income for her owners back on Earth and Mars, and can more or less do whatever she chooses in order to do so," Cambias said. "But Annie has learned that there’s more to life than just earning micrograms of Helium-3; she works just as hard to accumulate ‘non-quantifiable assets’ like the goodwill of her fellow robots, a reputation for honest dealing, and what a human might call friendship."

(more…)

Wastelands Ad in Locus

The new Locus showed up today, and inside I discovered not a review of Wastelands, as I’d been hoping for, but a nice full-page ad for the anthology on page 16, right in the middle of Gary K. Wolfe’s glowing review of Paolo Bacigalupi’s collection, Pump Six and Other Stories. That’s a great spot for attracting the right sort of reader for Wastelands, as most of Paolo’s stories are rather apocalyptic (when choosing the stories for Wastelands, I had several of his to pick from).

Actually, I say full-page ad, but while the ad itself is a full-page, Wastelands shares the ad space with three of Night Shade’s other titles: Snake Agent, The Demon and the City, and Precious Dragon by Liz Williams–the first three installments in her Detective Inspector Chen series, which are all now coming out in mass market paperback, with the fourth volume, The Shadow Pavilion, due out in hardcover in May.

F&SF December 2007 Acquisitions

F&SF’s December acquisitions include:

The Economy of Vacuum by Sarah Thomas (4900 words) *slush survivor*
You Are Such a One by Nancy Springer (4500)
Days of Wonder by Geoff Ryman (16,800)
In Denial by Albert E. Cowdrey (7600)
The Roberts by Michael Blumlein (20,507)
Shadow of the Valley by Fred Chappell (15,100)
The Texas Bake Sale by Charles Coleman Finlay (6000)
Dec. 22, 2012 by Sophie White (poem)

Wastelands #1 Best-selling SF Anthology on Amazon

More obsessive Amazon tracking reveals that at as of 4:30 PM today, Wastelands is the #1 best-selling SF anthology. Though as you’ll note from the screen capture below, Amazon’s categories aren’t very exact–the book ranked #2 is not an anthology at all, it’s a novel. Technically speaking, the #3 book isn’t an anthology either, but it’s a collection, and the category incorporates other collections, so I’ll let that slide.

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