I will be headed off to Conjure, this year’s Australian National Science Fiction Convention, in three or four hours. I will be in Brisbane for the event from Thursday 13 April till late on Monday 17 April. I will have minimal, if any, email access while I’m there. I will get return emails as soon as I return on 18 April.

There are many reasons to join The Science Fiction Book Club, but this is one of the ones that I’m happiest to be able to report on. Last year, as readers of this blog know, Jared at Centipede Press published a handsome volume that collected the best stories by the husband and wife writer team Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. The book was a lovely object, but it’s only real flaw was that it’s price put it beyond the reach of many readers. While I still wouldn’t hesitate to direct the dedicated collector towards the Centipede Press edition of Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, I think it’s a wonderful thing that the SF Book Club has been able to arrange to publish its own edition of the book. It’s a massive volume, 928 pages in all, and I can’t wait to see it. You can, of course, order it from the Book Club. I know it’s unfortunate that readers outside North America can’t sign up for the Club, but if you can sign up, I think it’s worth it. I wouldn’t hesitate to do so, if I but could.

Still got the flu. Still complaining. I’m reading Scott Westerfeld’s space opera, Succession, which is terrific. Fast, cool, interesting, and definitely holding my interest, despite the flu. Don’t know if I’ll have finished it by the time I head to Brisbane, but I’m definitely loving it.

On space opera: following on a point made by Andy, space opera happens in space. If it’s not in space, it’s not space opera. Also, no, planetary romances are not space opera. They come out of a different tradition – as CHARLES completely correctly point outed to me to day. A planetary romance comes from the lost civilisation tradition, while space opera grows out of both the western and the naval action adventure. The new space opera – a group to which Westerfeld’s novel clearly belongs – is “new” because it’s darker, it doesn’t necessarily involve the triumph of man or humanity, it has nifty new technology, and it has actual characterisation.

For what it’s worth, and this is a brief post written late at night with the flu, I rank both David Weber’s Honor Harrington books and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan stories as space opera, but not as new space opera. They still very much follow that older tradition of space opera, clearly described by Brian Aldiss in the introduction to his anthology, Space Opera.  I also understand that space opera used to be a perjorative term. I just don’t think it’s a relevant observation. The point is that what was once ‘space adventure’ is now described as ‘space opera’. Move on.

Oh, and a last thing. New space opera is not an intrinsically different, new thing from space opera. It is, though, an evolutionary step in the history of space opera. Novels like Succession, like The Centauri Device, Consider Phlebas, and Singularity Sky, and stories like the Shaper/Mechanist and Xeelee tales are all new space opera.  Work like that done by Bujold, Weber et all is fine and is space opera, but it follows an older path.

Still got the flu, which if anything is getting worse. I want to post something intelligent about the history of SF, the role of anthologies, and so on and so forth. Instead, though, this meme picked up all over the place. Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

3 neat facts:
1860 РThe discovery of the planet Vulcan is announced at a meeting of the Acad̩mie des Sciences in Paris.
1872 – Brigham Young is arrested for bigamy for having 25 wives.
1879 – Fred Spofforth claims the first Hat-trick in test cricket on the Sydney Cricket Ground against England.

And I didn’t even have to include King Zog, and any king named Zog has to be neat.

2 births
1920 – Isaac Asimov, Russian-born author (d. 1992)
1939 – Jim Bakker, American televangelist
Hey look, Bakker is so weird, that it’s kinda neat. And there were other weirder ones.
1 death
2005 – Frank Kelly Freas, American artist (b. 1922)

Deaths on the other hand, are never neat.

Warning: Whining will follow. I’ve had the flu for a week now. I’ve been feeling horrible with it for probably four days. I still feel ‘orrible. This morning I downloaded my email and found all kinds of fun contractual horribleness that had to be dealt with. There are times I really just want to go away, climb under a rock and hide. Apart from feeling stressed over contracts and other business stuff, I’ve got deadlines all over the place, and I’m going to disappear over East for five days.

Pfeh.

It’ll all be cool next week. Not because anything will change next week, except for hopefully the flu. Just, it’ll be next week. This stuff always passes. Pfeh. Hi CHARLES.