Never judge a book by its cover, or an actor by the character he or she portrays.

Most of you only know Sibel Kekilli for her portrayal of Shae in HBO’s GAME OF
THRONES. In her native Germany, of course, Sibel is recognized for a wide variety of
other roles, including a long stint on the popular police procedural TATORT, the
German LAW & ORDER. She is also a two-time winner of the Lola Award (the
German Oscar) for Best Actress for her starring roles in WHEN WE LEAVE and
HEAD-ON.

Sibel is more than just a gifted actress, however. She is a kind and gentle and
compassionate person as well, one that I am proud to know… and she is a woman of
rare courage. In these dark and highly politicized times, when the safest course for any
public figure is silence and smiles, Sibel has never hesitated to speak her mind, giving
of her time, her money, and her fame to help others. Every time she speaks up, she
subjects herself to another flood of abuse, slurs, death threats, and the like… but she
persists, nonetheless.

Sibel Kekilli is a true hero.

She has worked for years for Terre des Femmes, fighting violence against women all
around the world.

Now Sibel has a new venture: working with PAPATYA to rescue girls (from the ages of
13 to 21) threatened with forced child marriages and abductions. Sibel has recently
used her own funds to buy computers for the girls. She’s also lent her support to an on-
line counseling site, SIBEL ( named after her character from HEAD-ON) to offer advice
and help to those who need it.

Homepage

She has my admiration and support. I hope she has yours as well.

Current Mood: determined

Tags: charity, friends, game of thrones, politics

Talking ‘Bout My Generation

June 11, 2019 at 8:22 am
I’ve written a lot of things during my career: science fiction, fantasy, horror, various
hybrids of all of the above. And once upon a time, like many writers, I wrote a novel
about the times and events I’d lived through… a story about my own generation, the
Boomers, about our dreams and our disillusionments. It was centered on the music. Of
course it was. Rock n roll was as central to my generation as the Vietnam War, the
counterculture, television, and the sexual revolution. All those things wove
together. Of course, being who I was, I added a fantasy/ horror element. The resulting
novel was called THE ARMAGEDDON RAG. It was nominated for the World
Fantasy Award (but lost, alas) and got some great reviews. I think it sold about twelve
copies, but that’s another story. Oddly enough, it also opened the door to television
and film for me, when a produce named Phil deGuere optioned it for a feature film…
(that never got made, alas again)… but that’s another story too.

This post is not about the RAG, not really. It’s about another generational novel, one
that has just been published, written by Lewis Shiner. Lew is an old friend, one of my
original Wild Cards writers, the creator of Fortunato, the Astronomer, and Veronica,
among other characters. He was a mainstay in the early Wild Cards books back in the
80s and early 90s. His first novel FRONTERA was a Hugo finalist, and he was one of
the rising stars of the “mirrorshades” movement when cyberpunk came along. After
that, however, Lew’s muse led him off in other directions. He drifted away from
science fiction and wild cards, and went on to write a number of mainstream novels…
about skateboarding, about tango dancing, about race relations, and yes, about rock
music (the excellent GLIMPSES, a World Fantasy Award nominee — unlike
ARMAGEDDON RAG, it won).

And now Lew has written his magnum opus. It’s a huge book, maybe five times as
long as my RAG… much longer than anything Shiner has written before… but not a
word is wasted. It’s called OUTSIDE THE GATES OF EDEN.
EDEN starts in the 60s and goes all the way up to the present day and the near
future. Along the way it touches on the counterculture, the Summer of Love, the
Vietnam War, Woodstock, and so much more… it is, in short, the story of a
generation. Honestly, I really don’t know how Gen Xers or millenials will respond to
it. Maybe they’ll see it as a historical novel, as distant from themselves as a novel of
the Civil War. I can’t imagine a Boomer not responding to what Lew has done here. I
read this in galleys, long before publication, and I find myself thinking back on it
often. Let me give this one the ultimate compliment: I wish I had written it. I didn’t,
though. Lew did.

You can read it for yourself by grabbing a copy from SubPress at:

https://subterraneanpress.com/outside-the-gates-of-eden

Current Mood: contemplative

Tags: awards, novels, the 60s, wild cards

In the Hall!
June 10, 2019 at 5:20 pm

Very pleased to announce that I am being inducted into the Hall of Fame!

No, not the one in Canton, nor the one in Cooperstown. Not the halls in Cleveland or
Seattle either.

Come October, I am being inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

The announcements just came out:

https://www.nj.com/entertainment/2019/06/new-jersey-hall-of-fame-to-induct-george-
rr-martin-martha-stewart-laurie-hernandez-and-more.html

https://www.njarts.net/uncategorized/southside-johnny-the-smithereens-to-be-among-
nj-hall-of-fame-inductees-2/

So… pretty cool, I think. Southside Johnny, the great great NY Giants Bart Oates and
Harry Carson, Peter Benchley, Jason Alexander, and all sorts of other great folks will be
joining the Hall with me as well. And the list of previous inductees is pretty amazing
too. I mean, hey, the Boss!
Thanks to everyone who voted for me.

The induction ceremony will be October 27 in Asbury Park.

Though I’ve lived in New Mexico since 1979, I was born and raised in Bayonne, and
New Jersey will always be a part of me. And now it would seem that I will always be a
part of New Jersey as well. Not bad for a kid from the projects.

Current Mood: accomplished

Tags: awards, bayonne

Author Events
June 10, 2019 at 9:09 am

If you’re not fortunate enough to live in the Land of Enchantment, you’ve missed out on
all of the wonderful author events we have at the Jean cocteau Cinema. But of late,
we’ve started recording the events for streaming and later viewing.

Here are three of our most recent events, with

— LEE CHILD (Thrillermaster, and creator of Jack Reacher),

— ALAN BRENNERT (from my days on TWILIGHT ZONE, author of DAUGHTER

OF MOLOKAI).

— MARLON JAMES (author of BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF)

Autographed books from all of our featured writers are available from the Jean Cocteau
website.

Enjoy.

Current Mood: pleased

Tags: jean cocteau cinema, jean cocteau cinema bookstore, signed books, writing
Wahls Wins Sense of Wonder
June 6, 2019 at 7:04 am

Back in 2017, I announced that I would be sponsoring an annual scholarship to the

Clarion Writers Workshop in San Diego. I named it the ‘Sense of Wonder’
scholarship. This is what I said then:

” I’ve made my life in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy, and an awful lot of
people helped me along the way. I wouldn’t be where I am today without
them. But if I may echo something that Robert A. Heinlein once said, you can
never pay back the people who helped you when you were starting out… but you
can pay forward, and give a hand to those coming after.

“With that in mind, I’m pleased to announce that I will be funding a new
scholarship for the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop. Held
every summer at the University of California San Diego under the auspices of the
Clarion Foundation, the workshop’s roots go back the 1960s and Clarion College
in Pennsylvania, where it was founded by Robin Scott Wilson, Damon Knight, and
Kate Wilhelm. Its alumni include more professional sf and fantasy writers than I
can possibly hope to name, and the list of Clarion instructors over the years is a
veritable Who’s Who of our genre.

“Many of the students at Clarion already receive financial aid through a variety
of existing scholarships and grants that cover all or part of their expenses, but
there’s always need and there’s never enough money, and it’s my hope that this
new scholarship will offer an opportunity to one more worthy applicant who might
not otherwise have been able to afford the experience. It will be a full scholarship,
given annually, and covering tuition, fees, and lodging for a single student for the
full six weeks of intensive writing and criticism that is Clarion.

” We’ll be calling it the Sense of Wonder scholarship.

“The award will not be limited by age, race, sex, religion, skin color, place of
origin, or field of study. The only criteria will be literary.

” The first science fiction novel I ever read was Heinlein’s HAVE SPACE SUIT,
WILL TRAVEL, a book that begins with a boy named Kip in a used spacesuit
standing in his back yard, and goes on to take him (and us) to the moon, and Pluto,
and the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, along the way encountering aliens both
horrifying (the Wormfaces) and benevolent (the Mother Thing), as well as a girl
named Peewee. In the end it’s up to Kip and Peewee to defend the entire human
race when Earth is put on trial. I had never read anything like it, and from the
moment I finished I knew I wanted more; more Heinlein, more science fiction,
more aliens and spacesuits and starships… more of vast interstellar vistas that had
opened before me.

“Since then I have read thousands of other science fiction novels, and written a
few myself. Modern imaginative fiction is a house with many rooms, and I’ve
visited most of them. Cyberpunk, New Wave, magic realism, slipstream, military
SF, dystopias, utopias, urban fantasy, high fantasy, splatterpunk, the new weird,
the new space opera, you name it. I’ve sampled all of it, and I’m glad it’s all there,
but when it comes right down it, the SF I love best is still the SF that gives me that
sense of wonder I found in that Heinlein book almost sixty years ago, and
afterwards in the works of Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, Alfred Bester, Ursula K.
Le Guin, Jack Vance, Andre Norton, the early Chip Delany, Jack Vance, Frank
Herbert, Robert Silverberg, Jack Vance, Eric Frank Russell, Cordwainer Smith,
Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, and so many
more. (Did I mention Jack Vance?) I love the aliens, be they threatening or
benevolent, the more alien the better. I dream of starships, strange worlds beneath
the light of distant suns. I want the sights and sounds and smells of times and
places and cultures colorful and exotic. That was the sort of science fiction that I
tried to write myself with the Thousand Worlds stories that made my name in the
70s, when I was just breaking in as a writer.

It’s my hope that this new Clarion scholarship will help find and encourage young
aspiring writers who dream the same sort of dreams, that it will give a small boost
up to the next Roger Zelazny, the next Ursula Le Guin, the next Jack Vance. “

This year’s winner of the Sense of Wonder is JAMIE WAHLS.

Here’s the official press release from Clarion:

Clarion Workshop Announces George R.R. Martin’s

’Sense of Wonder’ Scholarship Recipient

BERKLEY, Calif. — Jamie Wahls had his plans in order after receiving his acceptance
to the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop. Then George R. R.
Martin picked up his tuition by awarding Jamie this year’s Sense of Wonder
Scholarship.

The scholarship, administered by The Clarion Foundation, seeks to encourage aspiring

writers who strive to capture that sense in stories which cross the vast vista of
interstellar space. The workshop, now in its 51st year, is hosted at the Arthur C. Clarke
Centre for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego.

Wahls’ short fiction about transhumanism, regret, people falling in love with
spaceships, galactic stewardship, and the dangerous security flaws in our mental
architecture can be found in places like Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld. He works
at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkley, Calif., a nonprofit that
researches the question of how to make super-intelligent machines safe and useful.
His day job sounds challenging enough. When asked about why he also writes science
fiction, Jamie responded:

“Why do I write? I grew up reading 1950s science fiction, and I am very glad I did. It
had its flaws, sure — our culture is now more progressive in many wholesome
and clearly good ways — but that era had an underlying sense of possibility and
determination that I found noble; a deep, unembarrassed belief that the future could and
would be brighter than today, and the raw, bastard resolve to seize that future and bring
it to all humanity.

“Nowadays, few of us had our formative years in the shadow of total war. This era’s
Great Causes are important, still, terribly so — but they’re subtler, and therefore harder
to feel certain about. It makes us … embarrassed to care too deeply about something. It
makes us shy to believe in something truly wondrous.

“But! As text conveys knowledge, fiction conveys experience. I want to show characters
fighting for things that are actually worth fighting for — such as a really, really good
future for all of humanity. I want the next generation who grow up reading this to say
‘yes, that’s the sci-fi future I demand — that’s the one that’s anywhere near good
enough.’

“Because settling for anything less will mean we, as a civilization, will slouch onward
into one of the boring dark corporate dystopia futures, if we get a future at all.”
Kim Stanley Robinson, celebrated science fiction writer and board member of the
Clarion Foundation, said of Wahls, “One of the great delights of reviewing stories
during application season for Clarion is coming across talents like Jamie’s. For George
R.R. Martin to support up-and-coming writers through his ‘Sense of Wonder’
Scholarship is a tremendous gift to the next generation of science fiction authors.”

Find more about Wahls at what he describes as his “brutally minimalist” website
jamiewahls.com. His twitter account is @Jamie Wahls.
The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop is an annual six-week
immersive workshop taught by a rotating staff of renowned science fiction and fantasy
writers. The application period for the 2020 workshop opens in December. More
information is available at theclarionfoundation.org.