David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

First, let me say that I despise Adobe Flash. Animated ads using Flash are ugly, distracting, and consume great quantities of CPU and battery power. Websites that use Flash for major portions of their UI (and why, oh why, do so many restaurants do this?) are incompatible with many devices (not just iPhones), often have nonstandard user interface elements that make them difficult to use, and can interfere badly with printing and accessibility. I use the ClickToFlash extension in my web browser so that Flash appears only when I really want it to, and that’s not often.

However, comma. I have to agree with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch when he says that Flash has been given a bum rap: “When you’re displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content. If you used HTML5, for example, to display advertisements, that would use as much or more processing power than what Flash uses.” This is absolutely true. I have found that sites (and I’m looking at you, Apple) that use HTML5 to display videos have all the downsides of Flash but are, as yet, not quite so reliable… and because HTML5 support is integrated into the browser, there is as yet no equivalent of ClickToFlash to suppress those CPU-hogging, annoying, battery-gobbling videos.

As website makers increasingly switch from Flash to HTML5 to provide animated ads and other annoyances that I’m happy don’t appear on my iPhone, I’m afraid it will make my web experience worse. It would be nice if there were some way to turn this stuff off, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

OryCon 32, my home town convention, is next weekend, and after some last-minute switcheroos I think I have my final program:

Friday 2:00PM: Writers’ Workshop. (closed session)

Friday 7:00PM, Mult/Holl: Opening Ceremonies. The theme this year is Alice in Wonderland and I’ll be playing the Mad Hatter and Cheshire Cat. Fear me.

Saturday 10:00AM, Mult/Holl: My Trip to “Mars”. This is probably going to be your last chance to see my Mars slide show, as I have vowed to retire it after one year (I don’t want to be a one-trick pony). People really, really like this talk. If you haven’t seen it, see it now!

Saturday 1:30PM, Lincoln: David Levine Reading. I haven’t decided yet what to read. Maybe my Wild Cards story, which will be published this month. Or maybe a brand-new story I just finished last week.

Sunday 10:00AM, Mult/Holl: Match Game ’10. Contestants try to match answers with six panelists for real prizes! Kevin Standlee hosts; I’m one of the celebrities, along with Seanan McGuire and others.

Sunday 5:00PM, Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing: Sci-Fi AuthorFest IV. This Powell’s book-signing event features a whole bunch of SF authors who just happen to be in town for some reason. Click the link to see who will be there. Open to the public, so even if you aren’t coming to OryCon maybe I’ll see you there!

Heading off bright and early tomorrow to exciting Columbus, Ohio for the World Fantasy Convention. I’ll be on the following program items:

Thursday 9:00 pm: The Logic of Absurdity, Fairfield room
Exploring the difference between a completely absurd fantasy and a satire which more or less describes the real world in a way absurdist fantasy doesn’t. Is the difference merely the degree of distortion?
Eric Flint, Gerald Warfield, David Levine (m)

Saturday 1:00 pm: The Fantasy of James Thurber, Morrow room
Ginjer Buchanan (m), Andy Duncan, David Levine, Sharon Reamer, Elaine Isaak

Kate and I are also going to Tron Night, a 20-minute IMAX preview of the new movie, at the AMC Lennox Town Center on Thursday night. Tickets are sold out but each of us can bring one guest.

Apart from those… look for me in the bar!

In case you haven’t heard by now, Realms of Fantasy has folded. Again. I’m sorry to see it go; though I was often frustrated by its long response times, I was always happy to be published there because of the excellent full-color illustrations they commissioned for each story (the illustration for “The Ecology of Faerie” was particularly fine). I’d be really surprised if Realms were to rise from the ashes a second time, though stranger things have happened.

In the writing biz, if you have sold a story to a market that goes out of business before the story appears, we say that you have “killed” the market. (The fact that there’s a word for this tells you something about the writing biz.) This is, I think, the second market I’ve killed, the first being Aeon (though I still hold out some faint hope that the story I sold them will appear in the long-promised collection End of an Aeon). In this case, Shawna had accepted a story of mine but not yet sent a contract, so I didn’t even get any money for the hit. Maybe I just maimed it.

So, anyway, now I’m looking once again for a home for the magical lesbian plumber story. I’m really fond of this one and I was thrilled to have it accepted at Realms, because it was rejected by F&SF, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Subterranean, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Interzone/Black Static, Glimmer Train, and Clockwork Phoenix 3. Any suggestions as to where else I can send it? It’s 7200 words long, which is too long for a lot of markets.

A friend asked me this weekend for some SF/fantasy recommendations. Having established that he found Perdido Street Station too bleak, I wound up recommending these:

• Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
• The Native Star by M. K. Hobson
• His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
• Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Interesting that these are all alternate-history fantasies with a definite romance component…

Here are a bunch of little writing-related news items too small to justify their own post:

You can now read my story “Finding Joan” at Daily Science Fiction. Free!

You can win a copy of Wild Cards 1 — the reissue of the first volume in the Wild Cards series, with additional new stories by me, Carrie Vaughn, and Michael Cassutt — from Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist.

StarShipSofa is going to podcast my story “A Passion for Art” from Interzone 228. Yay! But Gardner Dozois in Locus didn’t like it. Ya win some, ya lose some.

Francophones! You can now buy Légendes, an anthology in French including my “L’histoire de l’Aigle Royal” (The Tale of the Golden Eagle) plus “Changement d’itinéraire” (Changed Itinerary) by Mary Robinette Kowal, “Le goût du miracle” (Taste of Miracles) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and more! I love that the shipping options on the order form include “I find myself in the Metropolis” (i.e. Paris), “I find myself overseas,” and “I find myself elsewhere in the world.”

(I’ve been feeling pretty worthless as a writer lately, since it’s been very difficult for me to produce any words at all since before we left for Australia. But I have to remind myself that not many people can say “why yes, one of my Hugo-nominated stories was just translated into French.” I’ll find my way back onto that horse one of these days, I swear.)

I got mugged by a short story idea yesterday at 5:30 AM. Eventually I gave up on getting back to sleep, got up, and wrote 850 words of notes about it. Now I’m not sure whether I’m going to work on that today or the YA novel, but as always I’m particularly brain-dead on the second day after a night of not enough sleep so what I’m going to do right now is write a silly little blog post about “the Google.”

Tobias Buckell said on Twitter the other day: “What is with older folks in the Midwest adding a definite article before a product term? She’s not using ‘The Facebook’ it’s just ‘facebook.'” This prompted me to begin wondering seriously about why this is so.

The inestimable Language Log addressed George W. Bush’s infamous use of “the Google” a couple of years ago, but I have a theory.

We use “the” to refer to items that are unique in their context — items where there’s only one of them that we could possibly be referring to. We say that something fell on “the floor,” even though each room has its own floor, because in any given room there’s only one floor. For this reason, “the” is used when referring to monopoly public services like “the phone,” “the water,” “the electricity” (“oh no, the electricity went out”), “the newspaper,” “the bus,” and “the train.” (“The hospital” is a special case; there may be many hospitals, but when you use “the hospital” you’re referring to the generic service of hospitalization.) But nobody says they came by “the airplane,” because we’re keenly aware of air travel as a system of competing providers.

People who talk about “Google,” “Facebook,” and “email” without using “the” are aware of them as entities in a system of competing providers. (“Email” doesn’t get a “the” because it’s one of many communication alternatives including Twitter, IM, and SMS.) We look something up “on Google” because we are aware we could also be using Yahoo or Bing. But older folks who are familiar with public utilities but new to the Internet (note: “the” Internet because there’s only one) have probably just been handed the one search engine by whoever configured their browser, so they treat it as something like a public utility — they look things up on “the Google.” Likewise, they are unaware of social networks other than “the Facebook” or communication methods other than “the email.” You can expect to see this usage for anything that becomes dominant enough that the speaker is unaware of alternatives.

That’s my theory and it belongs to me. And it’s mine.

I finally got a chance to listen to the Drabblecast podcast of my horror story “Floaters,” which was released while I was in Australia. With the music and voices and all, it literally gave me chills! You can hear it here:

http://web.me.com/normsherman/Site/Podcast/Entries/2010/8/25_Drabblecast_177-_Floaters.html

My story begins at approximately 08:00. I don’t recommend listening right before bedtime…