the greater tromps

I'm too tired to post anything right now, after a day of Bookfair signing and tromping the Forbidden City... but fortunately I tromped in company with Robert J. Sawyer and Carolyn Clink, and there are photos over at Rob's blog.

Tomorrow I walk the Great Wall of China. Not all of it, though.

No Bookworm, I'm afraid

I was just told the Bookworm appearance in Beijing for tomorrow has been cancelled -- I'm not quite sure why or by whom or whether this was a Harper Collins decision or a Bookworm decision or (most probably) a series of miscommunications between the two: I was told yesterday that Bookworm "will not allow signing of books there since it is quite a few companies are involved," and then, a few hours later, told that I wasn't going. My apologies to anyone who was planning on being there to see me. Currently the only signing in Beijing is tomorrow at 9:30 am at the Book Fair.

I just did an interview with CCTV-9, along with a local literature professor and the director of the British Council, and I'll post here when I find out when it'll be broadcast.

Long Post, I'm afraid....

I'll be signing books in Beijing at the Book Festival at 9:30 am this Friday, the 31st. It's at the China International Exhibition Centre. No details yet on the Bookworm event.

....

So the conference was terrific. 5000 Chinese SF fans, a host of Chinese authors, a Russian Cosmonaut, several Japanese writers and a clutch of Western authors – one English author (me) and Canadian author Rob Sawyer (who is probably the most famous and beloved foreign SF author in China), Nancy Kress and Michael Swanwick, not to mention David Brin for the first few days with his family en route to WorldCon in Japan, along with author David Hill and about a half dozen North American and Australian or New Zealand SF fans, academics, and people who thought it would be fun to go to Chengdu, and two Americans who already lived there.



And it was. Lots of fun, that is.

You can read about it here...

And the food...

The trouble with the food is that I really like it. Not just sort of like it, but really like it. After a couple of occasions when I stopped enjoying something after finding out what it was, I decided not to worry about what things were, or at least, not to ask. Mostly I'd just eat it and enjoy.

I remember in Singapore feeling like I was being fattened for the slaughter. In retrospect my time in Singapore was like a slimming week at a health farm. In Chengdu our Chinese hosts wanted to make sure that we were being fed and were happy, so every meal was, literally, a banquet. I can probably manage about one banquet a week in real life. One a day if I have to. Here I'd eat a large breakfast (because I do when I travel, because you're never sure when you'll eat next. Probably a big mistake in retrospect. But I loved the Chinese breakfasty things...) and then once the conference was over we'd find ourselves having a banquet for lunch. Followed, just at the point where I was beginning to feel no longer uncomfortably full, by a banquet for dinner.

Chengdu is in Sichuan province, where the Szechuan cuisine comes from. The food is great. I mean, I liked pretty much everything I put in my mouth. But it's now lunchtime on the following day and I am still feeling full from yesterday.

I'd met Rob Sawyer
before at the Hugo awards in Toronto, but we didn't know each other, met Nancy Kress with her late husband Charles Sheffield at ICFA in Florida, but didn't really know either of them, so enjoyed getting to know them (and Rob's wife Carolyn). I knew Michael Swanwick a little better because we share some enthusiasms -- James Branch Cabell and R.A. Lafferty and Hope Mirrlees for three -- and it was marvellous talking with Michael, who knows an awful lot about everything.

My view of the conference is sort of fragmented -- I signed a great many things for an awful lot of people. I talked and was translated as I talked. (I think my interpreter Heather was pretty good, because when she translated my jokes, people laughed.) There was an international forum on the future of SF or something like that.



The conference was about Science Fiction and about fantasy and about the future. My favourite bit of the conference was probably outside the conference – after it was over, a meeting in a teahouse between some of the Chinese authors and some of the foreign authors, just comparing notes and finding stuff out.



Let's see. Pandas. I knew about the Chengdu Panda reserve because I had a friend who worked there for a summer. Really, it was all I knew about Chengdu. It's lovely. And it's a wonderful thing being an honoured foreign guest somewhere like that -- you get shown all the cool stuff, get to see Pandas, red ones and giant ones, and then find yourself put in a blue disposable smock and gloves (to protect the pandas from you, asnd not the other way around) and you get a year-old Panda placed on your lap. Utter, utter happiness. Better than any number of awards. Makes being a writer completely worthwhile. I suspect that world peace and harmony would come about in weeks if people just got to put pandas on their laps every few months. Honest.



Then it rained. Real, monsoony rain. Nancy Kress told me that she couldn't get any wetter and I assured her she could, and it kept raining and she did. Lunch at the Panda refuge restaurant was a banquet, where the food just kept coming. (It would be easier if you knew how many dishes would arrive. But you never do. And when you think, Ah, that was all the food, you are surprised by the arrival of another five bowls.)

From the Pandas we went to a museum to learn about the Jinsha people and culture in that part of the world in what, in England, would be considered prehistoric times, only it wasn't prehistoric for them. The museum was fascinating. Unfortunately we weren't quite sure where we were or what we were seeing, and the Museum Guide wasn't up to giving us the five minutes of background that we needed to figure it all out, so we had to work it all out as we went along -- we were initially shown bones and excavations and had no idea who left the bones or even that there was a thriving city of 10,000 people there back in the dawn of time, and we only put it together on about the third or fourth museum room. Amazing stuff, though -- jade and gold workers from before what I would have thought of as history.

From the museum we travelled to another part of Chengdu, and dinner in a courtyard. Which, apart from it being the second banquet of the day, was amazing, lots of tiny courses, each brought over, and mostly I just ate and sometimes asked what I'd just eaten ("That sweet course? the red things in the white stuff?" "Those are wolfberries in cloud-fungus." "Gosh.") A full moon.



Michael Swanwick and I looked at a pavement, where a pile of garbage, an old cassette tape, and what looked like an old videophone were to be found, and we said, at the same time, “It's a Bill Gibson moment,” because it was, so I took a picture.




And back to the hotel. Where I fell asleep sitting up in a chair trying to do email. Which was why I only posted a picture of me and my panda as a blog entry that night.



Yesterday we got into a bus which took us to the Leisure conference. Outside, Michael Swanwick sat on a dragon head and achieved enlightenment.

Truthfully, I'm not quite sure why we were there or what it was for, but it was enormously enjoyable: a presentation on Chengdu and the Sichuan area as a holiday destination, I guess, and the future of leisure in Chengdu. Whatever it was, we had a wonderful time: we watched twin girls demonstrating a tea ceremony, three girls playing amazing things on ancient native instruments,

songs were sung, talks were given, speeches were made, and at one somewhat surreal point the North American contingent were chivvied up on the stage to massacre “Oh Susanna”. I videoed the event, and have made it very clear to all involved that for a significant amount of money I will refrain from putting it up on YouTube.

The Russian cosmonaut, on the other hand, could sing.


My own share of surreality had occurred a few minutes earlier when a chef had expertly demonstrated a dessert called, I think, Three Cannon Shots, in which rice is balled and bounced off a drum-top into a container of powdered sugar and cinnamon (I think), and then I was called up to demonstrate the technique as performed by an amateur. I managed to get all the balls into the right place on the third attempt.


Some of the statistics were astonishing. You could eat in a different restaurant in Chengdu every day, and not repeat a restaurant in 80 years....

Then lunch. David Hill, author and former chef, had made a Jambalaya using local ingredients, which was the strangest fusion cuisine I think I've ever eaten.
It was great, unique, filling... and was thus immediately followed by a hotpot banquet.

On the bus and to a local high school, where we were presented with flowers and saluted, introduced and led out again, leaving only the Cosmonaut and David Hill to talk to the kids.

Then a short shopping trip – I bought Maddy's birthday present and some books of postcards.

From there we headed out of the town for the Grape Festival. I think I'd sort of imagined the Grape Festival as something that probably went back thousands of years to Jinsha times, and I kept on thinking that until I saw people selling grapes beside the road, beneath huge red umbrellas.

The grapes were huge mauve California-style grapes, at which point it occurred to me to ask. “How long have grapes been grown here?” Turned out that they were a very recent crop, that the festival was four years old, and the grape vines were indeed originally from California. The people used to sell watermelons beneath the red umbrellas.


From there to a banquet.



And the food just kept on coming...


I skipped breakfast this morning. Just packed, and flew to Beijing, and I wrote most of this on the plane.

...

Random observations: Chinese planes are, on the basis of the two I've taken so far, nicer than US planes. Better service, cleaner, more comfortable. They remind me of being on planes in America twenty years ago, when it was less unpleasant.

Random observation two: Chinese driving and road-crossing techniques seem to exist in a cheerful anarchy that would get you killed in most, perhaps all, other countries. I have watched five cars drive abreast on a three lane highway. I've not yet seen anyone using a seatbelt. Haven't yet seen any accidents, which is very odd.

Chengdu and elsewhere

I have a little Chengdu information:

On Aug 24th at 7.00pm at the Chengdu Bookworm there is some kind of meet-and-chat with the visiting authors (I think) and the public, and I expect some signing.

And on August the 25th at 3.00pm I'm going to give a talk on The Nature of Fantasy at the conference hall of the science and technology museum.

And here's a Daily Scans link to a two page comic that Mark Buckingham and I did to celebrate Alan Moore's 50th Birthday: http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/3895760.html

Neil- Sorry to waste your time, but as someone who is away from home frequently, I thought you might have some insight on the matter. I am starting a new job next month that will require me to be away for extended periods. How do you cope with doing this? My daughter is eight, and she is having a rough time with the idea of Daddy being away (and I am as well-and not taking the job is not really an option), and I'm hoping you can help. Please don't use my name if you post this.Thanks!

It's always hard. For years we never went on holiday, because I was always so glad to be home and Going Somewhere felt like work. Being home, with my books and my family, ah, that was a grand adventure....

When Maddy was that age and younger I went away for several months to work on American Gods, and I'd still read to her every night, over the phone (she'd have a copy of the book as well at her end), which somehow helped. She'd still get half an hour or forty minutes every night, and I'd read her a chapter and then we'd talk. We'd also write poems in email back and forth. It helped -- having a rhythm, having something predictable and time that was hers. And trying to make it as much of a game as we could. But it's not perfect. And it's never easy.

Fortean Mysteries

When I first came to the US in the late 1980s -- before I even moved to America -- I used to love the Weekly World News. It was like a little doorway into a world that worked on story logic. While a story here or there would be too far-fetched, there was a strange delight to wondering if some of the stories might be true, and one would occasionally run across things one had already seen in the Fortean Times or in the News Of the Weird. But mostly it felt like a joke -- one that you were in on, and that some people weren't -- "There are people who believe this," it seemed to be saying. "Be thankful you aren't one of them." It was a portrait of a cock-eyed, X-Files world.

It famously only existed because the owners of the National Enquirer had a black and white printing press and, after the Enquirer went colour, nothing to print on it.

I stopped reading it in about 1992, picked it up again in around 2000 when a friend got a job writing for it, and I had a wonderful time suggesting stories. I noticed they rewrote them to put jokes in, though -- weak, "don't take any of this seriously" jokes.

A few weeks ago I heard from my friend Bob Greenberger (who worked there) that the owners were closing it down.

So I picked up the final copy today, because I was passing a cash register and it was the last one after all. Even allowing for the probability that it was filled with articles they'd commissioned and hadn't run because they weren't very good, or that they were reprints, it... well, the whole tone of the thing felt wrong. The articles were just silly. It wasn't story logic any longer. A baby gets delivered in an avocado because the sperm donation got mixed with avocado sushi... There wasn't the feeling reading it that anyone could have believed it. Not children, not the stupid, not someone who'd been born and raised on Mars and this was the only thing they'd read. It was like the joke had become nobody could believe this stuff. And now nobody was buying it. It had a Sergio Aragones drawing though, and some comics...

I can't believe I'm sitting typing about the long-lost glory days of the Weekly World News. Probably, it was of its time anyway.

And truly I've always preferred the Fortean Times.

...

Summer ended yesterday. It rained and it was cold, and I went and brought the cats indoors -- Coconut and Princess had gone off and become garden-and-woods-dwellers, just coming back to be fed. Today they were wet and miserable and taking refuge in the gazebo, so they are in the Cat half of the house.

(The house has divided itself, post Cabal, neatly into Cat and Dog. The TV room is in the Cat half of the house, but I seem to wind up using the Slingboxes to watch TV in the Dog half of the house, because he worries more if I'm not there.)

I bought goldfish -- two medium-sized ones and five tiny ones, that would have simply been hoovered up and eaten by the big ones that died, and the tank looks bright and nice and occupied.

...

Bathroom reading has been the giant DC Comics PHANTOM STRANGER Showcase collection, much of which I'd never read, and my respect for Len Wein just went up (and it was high to begin with). The early Phantom Stranger stuff doesn't work particularly well -- he's a man in a coat who turns up. Then Bob Kanigher creates a sort of template for disaster, in which four teenagers (called The Teenagers) stumble into something that may be mystical or may just be Scooby Doo, and Dr Terry Thirteen -- the Ghost Breaker -- and the Phantom Stranger keep arguing over which is which, and occasionally Tala Princess of Evil turns up and tries to snog the Phantom Stranger, telling him to kiss her and come over to the dark sice, and he says things like "Never shall I submit to your hellish blandishments!" and he doesn't and then the mystery gets solved. It's possibly the worst recipe for a comic ever created. Slowly other writers -- Denny O'Neil and Gerry Conway -- sensibly drop the Teenagers, and edge Terry Thirteen into a back-up feature, and don't do quite as much of the "I am Tala, Mistress of the Dark! Snog me and come over to the Dark Side!" stuff. And then Len Wein comes in and in the space of an issue turns it all around, makes the Stranger the star of his own book, redeems the whole thing and pulls it together. And over the next twelve issues Len pretty much creates the whole Phantom Stranger character and his dynamic that we've got today (allowing for the barnacle encrustation that any character gets over thirty years of being in the funny books) and he even makes Tala cool. (And then I made her a waitress in Books of Magic.)

...

I'll be signing books in Beijing on Friday the 31st of August at 9:30am at the Harper Collins stand at the Book Fair.

At some point that same day (I don't have a time yet) I'll be doing a signing and a reading at http://www.beijingbookworm.com/ -- Bookworm "Beijing’s premier English language lending library, bookshop, restaurant and events space".

may be comin' to your town...

There's a lot of travel coming up, some of it Stardust or Beowulf related. But I thought I should start to put some of it down here. I just realised that the stuff I've put up recently over in the Where's Neil blog hasn't posted, and I haven't been updating the Google Calendar thingie, so we need to untangle that. But for now...

I'll be at the Chengdu international conference on science fiction at the end of August. I wish I could go from there to Worldcon in Japan but it doesn't seem likely. I'll be flying from there to Budapest and from there to Italy...

(Googling the Chengdu festival, I found this fascinating article on SF in China -- parts one, two and three. We learn that In the early eighties, the Party considered Sci-fi an evil, which could lead the public astray. All sci-fi writing across China ceased. The magazine Science Fiction World was the only survivor of the crackdown. But that things change..."Sci-Fi writing is now supported by Chinese government as it is considered to be a genre that can inspire the whole nation's ability to think imaginatively and popularizes science nationwide, " Yao Haijun, the editor of Science Fiction World magazine, said.)

I'll be at the Mantova (Mantua) Literary Festival on the 7th and 8th of September (I just found some details at http://www.neilgaimania.it/html/view2.php?id=32&nomedb=articoli).

I'll be in the UK at the end of September: The Bath Children's Literary Festival. (Bath as in the beautiful town, not as in a festival dedicated to literature about bathing children. My event is http://www.bathkidslitfest.co.uk/event_J19.htm) There will be an evening reading and Q&A that may also be a signing on Tuesday the 2nd of October. Then the UK Stardust premiere in Leicester Square on the 3rd of October.

I learned this morning that there may be a trip to Sweden and one to Japan in there, but I don't have details and confirmation yet. And probably more to come. (Actually, there is definitely more to come.)

...

I'd promised myself I wouldn't keep linking to Stardust reviews but then I learned that " This summer, Hollywood will release a romantic fantasy adventure movie again, its likes a long time we never seen this genre made by Hollywood. " And I'm still wondering if the review was translated from another language, or if there was some awful compositing accident in which the words were dropped and jumbled, or if the person who wrote it uses English in their own way. Either way it's very charming, if rather odd.

A more normal one is http://media.www.dailytexanonline.com/media/storage/paper410/news/2007/08/02/LifeArts/A.Modern.Fairy.Tale.To.Enchant.Us.All-2929151.shtml which concludes by saying, To say that "Stardust" bears some similarities to "The Princess Bride" would be fair. This movie measures very favorably against that earlier classic and is the best young adult oriented "modern" fairy tale since. It truly is "The Princess Bride" for this generation. Which is nice. I've tried to explain to interviewers that, no, I don't think it has much in common with The Princess Bride, they're at present the only two things in that genre.

James Vance, is a fine writer and an old friend who has a terrific blog over at http://www.james-vance.com/jvblog/. He's done an interview with me about Stardust at http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=070804_8_H6_spanc37312 where he asks a few different questions and, as a result, gets some different answers.

And here's the San Francisco Chronicle -- http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/05/PK27RB3233.DTL&type=movies -- which begins "That disturbance in the universe you may have felt is the potentially unholy alliance between Hollywood and Neil Gaiman..."
...

Dear Neil ,You do sound a little grumpy.Here's one more thing that might - I hope - put a smile back on your face:
http://dailymotion.alice.it/video/x2aj1j_a-gentlemens-duel_shortfilms
Don't miss out on it, it's wonderful. Greetings from Rome.
Nathalie

You know, oddly enough, I saw this a few weeks ago -- Francisco Ruiz, who made it, was one of the storyboard artists on Hellboy 2, and we shared a bus in to the studio each morning, and when he went back to the US he left me a DVD. Which proves there really are only 500 real people in the world and they all know each other. Or just that the world is a very small place indeed.