And yes, it’s time to stop attaching “punk” to everything in literature, before fiction itself is renamed stuffpunk.

GAUDEAMUS is also suffering a very odd fate for which I so far have no explanation; after some years of being functionally out of print, there is possibly a paperback coming out on September 1 (according to Locus and Amazon) and yet nobody at Tor has returned phone calls and emails asking about it from either me or my agent. This would be perfectly consistent with the conspiracy in the book. Perhaps there are more narrators in the chain than we dream of.

Thank you for all the cool pics – I don’t know what it is about your blog, but I always come back to it because of the photos. The image that started it all, was of a bright yellow koi from Japan. It still makes me smile.

Happy New Year

I gather that Majestic novelizes the UFO conspiracy theories about government coverups. I dislike politics and the government, and I think it’s a false move to suppose that aliens would get involved in that boring aspect of human culture. Like, why not fashion, rock and roll, science, or the movies?

Yes, it does talk about the “conspiracy of secrecy,” but it depicts aliens that are so far above being bothered by our politics that none of what you were suspecting in that regard comes into play. I would recommend that, should you plan to seriously go into writing the SF/UFO novel, that you read it, if for no other reason you know “what went before.”

Sorry to hear about your pirate incident…

No, of course I’m not familiar with your work. Why would you think I’d be blithering like this?

I gather that Majestic novelizes the UFO conspiracy theories about government coverups. I dislike politics and the government, and I think it’s a false move to suppose that aliens would get involved in that boring aspect of human culture. Like, why not fashion, rock and roll, science, or the movies?

To me, politics and ware are the least interesting things that humans do. Why would aliens have to “go through channels” in order to approach people? In my opinion, bringing in the military when talking about aliens shows a complete failure of the imagination.

Re. your question about how the pictures fit with the text on my blog, I can give two answers.

As a practical matter, I shoot photos nearly every day, and I Photoshop the best ones and format them to be 600 pixels wide to fit in the blog. I keep a list of the photos that are “on deck,” and when I write a blog entry, I stick in a photo every couple of paragraphs. This lets me show off my photos, and it breaks up the blog—it’s dull to see honking big blocks of text.

As an artistic matter, I choose the order of the photos so that there is nearly always some reverberant connection between an image and the text nearby. I think of the images as subconscious commentary on the text, catching a taste of the irrelevant-but-spot-on images that pass through one’s mind as one reads something. In the case of this SF UFO post, I was in fact thinking of the images as being how the saucerians might think about what I’ve written.

Oh, and that’s not just “a pirate,” that’s an action doll of Johnny Depp playing Captain Jack Sparrow! During my photo shoot, the doll was briefly animated by an alien mind and was walking around on its own. It made several lewd requests, which I declined.

UFOs do work well in comedy SF movie, such as Men In Black, Mars Attacks and Galaxy Quest.

Maybe Saucer Wisdom could make a great movie?

Enjoyed this exposition. Have toyed with the idea of the “Great American UFO Novel,” but I think Whitley beat me to it with Majestic.

I must confess I don’t quite get what a seashell on a chain-link fence, a pirate, and a metal tower have to do with UFO SF. Are you telling us that we’ve already been taken over?