Thomas M. Disch, R.I.P.

‘. . . there are moments when a soul released from its cave of flesh will speed towards a mortal mind as it lies entranced in sleep, will curl across its surface, frothing, like waves across a beach, touching its tenderest parts and causing dreams to rise from its depths, like the bubbles of burrowing clams. And we awake, knowing we have been touched by something beautiful,whose beauty we shall never understand, knowing only that we have been witnesses to its inexpressible passing. We call her name, if we can remember it, and ask her to remain a moment longer, only a moment. But already she is gone.’

The Businessman, Thomas M. Disch 1940 - 2008

There are tributes from people who knew him here, here, and here. Go read his books, and his stories. Read The Genocides, Camp Concentration, 334, On Wings of Song. Read the stories collected in Getting Into Death and Fundamental Disch. He was a damn fine writer. He was one of the writers who meant a lot to me when I was a lonely teenage sci-fi geek in the late 1960s/early 1970s.

Update: Daily Kos has posted a fine memorial essay.

Evolution Strikes Back

A little while back, I mentioned Carl Zimmer's marvelous book, Microcosm, which uses research on the humble bacterium Escherichia coli to illuminate every aspect of the new biology. One chapter was given over to discussion of the work of the team led by Dr Richard Lenski. One of Lenski's papers, showing evolution of a new trait by E. coli (the ability to grow on citrate) in laboratory conditions, attracted the attention of Richard Schlafly, the right-wing Christian activist who runs Conservapedia. Schlafly demanded Lenski's data, resulting in the following illuminating exchange, documented on Ben Goldacre's Bad Science site, in which a closed mind meets a surgical strike.

(Link via Roz Kaveny and John Crowley.)

(By the way, it's instructive to follow the open-minded scientists link on Conservapedia's page about Lenski. Hmm. I thought those guys didn't like to be called Creationists any more, preferring the less contentious 'supporters of intelligent design'.)

Spaced

Out today, issue 217 of Interzone, which includes my story 'Little Lost Robot' (aka the big space robot story) as well as stories by Karen Fishler, Paul Tremblay, MK Hobson, Suzanne Palmer and Jason Sandford.

I was going to write something about WALL-E, which I saw last Sunday, but a bit of Googling will reveal a myriad indepth reviews. So I’ll just say that the first forty minutes is one of the best bits of SF cinema I’ve ever seen. The candy-coloured satire of the second half is less successful (and contains a gaping plot hole) but the odd-couple romance between the infinitely curious and engaging WALL-E and the advanced probe EVE carries the day, with a definitive Tinkerbell moment that had the small children in the audience gripped. Increasingly, SFX-rich movies seem pointlessly noisy and frenetic*; WALL-E shows how the same tools can be used in a rich and painterly fashion.

*mind you, the first five minutes of the new Batman movie look great.

Current reading: Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves and Alex Cox’s X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker.

And Junot Diaz has an excellent take on the sandbox game where I’m spending rather too much time shooting cops, mafia hoods and flying rats.