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12-30-09: Wrapping up 2009 With Jeremy Lassen : Time's Ten Best
Well, I understand why Jeremy Lassen is happy. Congratulations are in order; Paolo Bacigalupi's 'The Windup Girl' was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Time Magazine. And that's only part of what we talked about for the final Agony Column podcast of this year.
This was the year that saw some great speculative fiction; China Miéville's 'The City and the City,' Warren Fahy's 'Fragment,' as well as the explosion of some genre tropes. But then, who thought that vampires, having pretty much blown up every year since 'Interview With the Vampire' debuted, would continue to do so this year. And this was the year of some low-key heavy hitters; Caitlin Kiernan and Catherynne Valente. To hear our conversation about the end of the year and the end of the world, just follow this link to the MP3 audio file.
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12-29-09: The Chat Before Christmas With Thomas Frank, December 24, 2009
"I mean, they had their chance, you know?"
—Thomas Frank
If there's one thing that's clear as we lurch towards a new year, it's that everyone is quite happy to be shut of the last ten years. From the Y2K panic to twin tragedies of 9/11 and the Iraq war, from housing bubble to the ugly crash, we are all simply so done. We're eager to draw the line and hope to quickly step over it, bringing nothing from the past that we may have to scrape off our shoes. We are all simply so done.
Let's all join Thomas Frank, then as he hoists a glass to "A Low, Dishonest Decade." While Frank is best known for 'What's the Matter with Kansas?' and 'The Wrecking Crew', this time around we got back to a book he wrote in "the before time," 'One Market Under God,' an excoriation of "Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy." After all, this little tome from Y2K sought to pop the bubble a mere eight years before it was large enough to take down, uh ... the world.
Of course, it wasn't just the sort-of, almost new Depression that rained on our parades. (Unless, like me, you’d invested heavily in BarrelWear once you saw things start to circle the Big Swirly.) There was also the tiny, almost insignificant matter, or pretty much our entire government being up for sale, and unhappily, not even to the highest bidder. It was the sort of decade in which even a man like Jack Abramoff, a guy who wears a black hat in case we didn't get who the bad guys were, starts to seen a little like a tragic figure. Sure, your sympathy might last all of ten seconds, and it is clearly tens second more than deserved, but at least had the decency to get caught and fess up. Everyone on the other side of his deals, with too few exceptions, is still in the business of selling the United States government to business; now they're in business and not in the government, and they're still toxic waste. We've managed to throw away the keys before they got locked up. I suppose it's just a matter of getting things in the right order. Listeners who want to hear to New World Order subjected to some Old World Wit need but follow this link to the MP3 audio file of our conversation.
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12-28-09: A 2009 Interview with Jeffrey Ford at the World Fantasy Convention
"If you want to write, and you want to write a lot, you've got to have a lot of tricks in your bag."
— Jeffrey Ford
Few writers are able to live up to that quote, but Jeffrey Ford is most assuredly at the top of his own list. He does indeed have a lot of tricks in his bag, and it is obvious when you look at the variety of novels he's written. And he was perfectly at home at the World Fantasy Convention, where I managed to get a few minutes of his valuable time. With the pace he keeps, I suspect he could have written a story in that time.
But then, Jeffrey Ford's own story is pretty much speculative fiction itself. What I found really, really interesting, as a reader, in this interview, were Ford's descriptions of how he tortured grammar itself to create a surreal world, or a world that was as bizarre as the world we are living in. Since every day seems to offer up more evidence that reality is cognizant of the rules of reality than either fiction, speculative fiction, or fantasy, it seems that more writers will need to pick up Ford's tricks and tropes. Strap yourself in, if this century is going to be stranger than Ford's fiction, we're going to have some ... interesting times ahead.
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