Views from Medina Road

I am not headed to the Locus Awards in Seattle, where all the cool people will be this weekend; various circumstances alluded to in previous posts will be making this an extremely frugal year for travel and convention attendance, for me. Instead I will stay home and stoke the fires of keeping the website running, with an imminent update to the awards index and a few outstanding finishing touches to the 2009 site redesign. (Fortunately, at least for the Locus audience out there, my presence at cons is no longer necessary for the quick posting of breaking awards news. At least in theory; we'll see.)

If I'd been posting more regularly, I might have commented about, say, the Star Trek movie. I thought it was OK; I have a long, long history with Star Trek (it was perhaps the formative experience of my golden-age-12-year-old-childhood) and at this late stage can only sigh at the recycling of trek tropes--time travel, Romulans (or was it Klingons?), and so on--and hope that someday they might remember to "explore strange new worlds and..." so on -- to confront genuinely new premises that were the reason the series excited me in the first place. (Not the political and space operas the subsequent series became.)

I might have commented about, say, Up, the latest delightful Pixar film, which nevertheless left a slightly sour taste in my mouth at the identification of the scientist as the villain. It would be nice if pop culture had a different attitude about scientists.

And I might have commented about the admittedly few books I've read lately (I'm reading/rereading H.G. Wells, among others), though I am resolutely not commenting about ongoing progress on the background expansion projects for the website... those are better off revealed only when complete.

I did receive a review-copy CD which I hope to review soon, though whether as a blog post or as a full-fledged review on the site, remains to be seen.

Hope everyone has fun in Seattle.

After our sojourn in Napa Valley last weekend, Yeong went to work in Hayward on Monday and I drove up to visit the gleaming Locus HQ office tower on Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland, where I --

Well, no. The Secret of Ridgewood Lane is that there is no Locus office tower, gleaming or otherwise; Locus Magazine is run out of the home of its publisher Charles N. Brown. And it's not really a secret; any number of distinguished guests, casual visitors, and staffmembers have been to the house over the years, as CNB likes to relate in his magazine editorials.

Despite which, it's remarkable how frequently we hear of people who do seem to think that Locus is run by a large staff out of some office building. (A little of that is reflected my way; I occasionally get emails directed to the 'reviews department' or the 'advertising department'. The website operation is even smaller than the magazine's; it's just me here.)

The real Locus HQ is Charles' house on Ridgewood Lane, nestled in the hills of Oakland, east of San Francisco Bay, up windy twisty roads that afford spectacular views (especially as one is leaving). The living room is crammed with SF art works and museum facsimiles from Charles' world travels. The main floor has a master bedroom and two smaller bedrooms, the latter converted to offices. When I stopped by Monday afternoon I dropped in on Tim Pratt and Kirsten Gong-Wong busy on side-by-side PCs in one of the rooms, while Amelia Beamer color-corrected photos on a computer in the second room. Carolyn Cushman appeared briefly from the downstairs basement, home of the Locus library (and winecellar, and spare bedroom, with its 'Psycho' Murphy bed), where she spends her days cataloging new books.

Charles had Amelia fetch a bottle of wine and we sat chatting for a couple hours, mostly about the dismal fate of publishing and of Locus in general. (Only slightly kidding.) Later I drove down the hill and down the bay to fetch Yeong as he finished work for the day in Hayward, then we returned to Oakland to meet Charles and Amelia for an excellent dinner at Garibaldi's.

The next day was graduation at UC Berkeley for Yeong's elder son from the School of Economics, held outdoors in the campus Greek Theater. It was sunny and almost but not quite too warm, though warm enough to require headgear during the two-hour event. The usual speeches and special awards were followed by the parade across the stage of the 400 or so students receiving mock diplomas as their names were read. I suppose it's not surprising that easily two thirds of the students were Asian. Then followed a reception on the esplanade by the familiar Berkeley Campanile, and a quick look into the campus bookstore, before I had to head to the airport for my flight home.

It was the first university graduation I think I've ever attended, after my own. They all look so young, of course, but also so very smart.

Sunday we drove through Napa Valley, past dozens of wineries and through hundreds of vineyards, with stops at Mondavi and Grgich Hills and Stag's Leap and Sterling Vineyards, with its Greek villa architecture atop a hill accessed by a ski-lift style tram. Along the way we stopped for lunch.

The CIA is the Culinary Institute of America, apparently based in New York but with a facility in Napa Valley, California. The first and only time I visited Napa Valley, some 14 or 15 years ago, my friends and I stopped there for lunch, and it was worth returning to during this second trip: in addition to the educational institute in a grand stone building along the edge of the valley of vineyards, the Napa site includes a restaurant where you can sit at a semi-circular bar and watch the chefs in the center as they prepare your meal. As it turned out, on weekends (we were there this time on a Sunday) the kitchen is staffed by professional chefs; the students are there on weekdays. Still, it's fun watching them work, if not quite as revealing in these days of Food Channel TV. (And the food is very good, if perhaps not quite as exceptional as at a genuine 4-star restaurant.)

More about Locus HQ and how to get graduated at Berkeley next time.

This weekend I'm in Napa, gateway town to the Napa Valley, the most famous winemaking district in the US. I'm spending a long weekend in the area with my partner leading up to his son's graduation from UC Berkeley on Tuesday. We flew up to Oakland yesterday and drove to Napa, which I expected to be overrun with tourists, souvenir shops, and high-end art galleries, along the lines of Ojai or La Jolla.

There must be tourists somewhere, since I had no luck finding a charming b&b to stay at -- all of them booked -- but downtown Napa at 5pm or so on a Saturday was alarmingly empty. We strolled among an odd mixture of newly built mixed-purpose condo projects, old Victorian mansions from the town's heydey, and a whole lot of empty storefronts -- too many to be recent effects of the economy. We chatted with the hosts of a wine bar who explained about the lack of tourists -- this is the weekend *before* Memorial Day weekend, mainly -- though we didn't bring up the empty storefronts issue.

Today we head up the valley to visit wineries and have lunch at the CIA. Tonight: back to the city. Monday, perhaps: a visit to the gleaming Locus HQ tower in Oakland.

The new homepage is posted, along with new pages linked to a common set of menu bars, despite a few gaps in the superstructure between those new pages and the older pages, and despite a known browser issue or two. The day is ending and I'll be busy tomorrow and back to work on Monday, so I figure I might as well get it all up there for people to see -- and throws stones at. I just discovered the new blogs -- for Reviews, and Perspectives, don't display properly in Internet Explorer (always the 'special' browser) and have posted a note to that effect, rather than hold everything until Monday evening or later when I'll next have a chance to debug.

Tomorrow I expect Gary Westfahl's Star Trek review, which will go up in the new Reviews blog (and I plan to see the film myself tomorrow). Eventually I'll tweak the layout of the News and Roundtable blogs to match the common website theme, including the menu bars. The last 2% may take another few weeks...

Here's a screen capture of the site four days ago.

Just a quick post to say that I haven't forgotten about the redesign, that I'm actively working on it every day time permitting, and that it is -- as we always say in the software development world -- 90% done. The homepage is actually 99% done -- significantly cleaner and crisper, I think -- but part of the point of the redesign is to establish a similar look and menu bars across *all* pages, along with merging static pages with blog pages, and engineering all of those to be consistent simultaneously is taking a bit longer than anticipated.

Next week by right around this time I should have Gary Westfahl's review of the new Star Trek film. And Nick Gevers has promised me a new SF Quintessential interview real soon now. And Cory's column from the May issue of Locus will be up within the next week.

I've missed the past couple years' Nebula Awards, but this year the ceremony was in my neighborhood, over at the University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA, my alma mater (B.A., Math). The event was scheduled in conjunction with the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a popular event held on the campus that I've only ever attended once about ten years ago (despite of course being quite a book person myself, in a city rather unfairly regarded as unliterary) -- the festival is rather like a farmers' market version of a dealers' room, with occasional panels of celebrity writers held in nearby lecture halls. Similar enough to SF cons that I haven't felt the need to attend ever again...

SFWA's event was staged in Covel Commons, a sort of combined student union/conference facility in the northwest corner of the UCLA campus amidst several dorm halls, a building that didn't exist way back when I attended the university (like half the buildings on campus, it seems). The top floor banquet hall opens onto a terrace with a fine view of the campus and city beyond, and that is where I arrived -- after some back and forthing to find the central campus Parking Kiosk to purchase entrance to the parking structure next door to the Commons -- to find Jim Kelly and Greg Benford, to meet David Schwartz, say hi to Connie Willis, and run into old college pal Kenn Bates.

The banquet began at 7:30. I sat at a table with Amelia Beamer, sole Locus HQ representative at the event, and Gary Wolfe, with Ellen Klages, Madeleine Robins, Tim & Serena Powers, and David Smeds. The 'sea bass' was actually Chilean Sea Bass, and quite good; the others reported the filet was quite decent as well. All the tables were provided with bottles of red and white Frog's Leap wine.

After opening remarks by Christine Valada, toastmistress Janis Ian sang a science-fictional version of her signature hit "At Seventeen", which began

I learned the truth at 17
That Asimov and Bradbury
And Clarke made up the special shelf
that (something something) ABC...

--except that I don't remember exactly the last couple lines. The song continued with a remarkable number of SF'nal allusions, from Odd John to titles by Resnick and Willis and Asimov and a host of others, and each verse ended with

You are no more alone
So welcome home

The handwritten lyrics were to be auctioned at a special SFWA auction later in the evening...

Then followed a humorous Keynote Speech by Chuck Lorre, a Hollywood sitcom writer best known currently for The Big Bang Theory...

The awards presentations themselves went on quite some time, what with no fewer than six associated awards -- the Andre Norton Award, the Solstice Award (three of them), the SFWA Service Award, the Bradbury Award, the Grand Master Award, and the Author Emerita Award -- before the Nebulas proper.

Highlights of those included the Bradbury Award to Joss Whedon, who was not present but whose acceptance speech was played from a YouTube video -- note his use of "fictionalized scientifics", "fi-sci"; the Grand Master, presented by the always eloquent Robert Silverberg to the jolly but at times incoherent Harry Harrison; and the Author Emerita, to M.J. Engh, who spoke of the loners of the world and who offered to go on speaking another hour and half.

Of the Nebula winners, only John Kessel was present to accept his award, and he was clearly thrilled to have won. He noted that it had been a full 26 years since his first Nebula win -- for novella "Another Orphan" -- and he was putting SFWA on notice that he expects to be back in another 26 years -- that would be in 2035 -- to pick up his third.

Just before the final award, the novel award to Le Guin's Powers, Jane Jewell and SFWA President Russell Davis gave special thanks to organizer Christine Valada, who had lost her house recently in one of the Southern California wildfires...

(Statistical note -- with this win, Le Guin has now tied Connie Willis for the most number of Nebulas ever, six, and she now leads everyone with the most number of Nebulas for novels, four (for The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Tehanu, and now Powers. Heinlein and Bujold have won four Hugos for novels, but no one until now has won four Nebulas for novels. ...I haven't had a chance to check out John Kessel's claim about a 26 year record between first and second Nebulas, but will do so soon.)

I hung around after the awards for a bit, but the post-awards party was back at the hotel, so I went home. I drove back over to the Luxe Hotel on Sunset Blvd on Sunday morning, to meet Gary Wolfe and Amelia Beamer -- amidst a busy Sunday morning banquet event held by some local temple -- as they finished an interview with Larry Niven and checked out of their rooms. We had a leisurely lunch, again with Ellen Klages and Madeleine Robins, until it was time for Gary to head to the airport, and Amelia and Ellen and Madeleine to drive home to the Bay Area.