Remembering Harry Harrison

The last time I saw Harry Harrison was in 2004, at the Campbell Conference hosted by James Gunn at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. Harry was there to be inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (after that year, those ceremonies were moved to Seattle) and his good friend Brian Aldiss was there; both men were founders of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, given annually for the best sf novel of the year. Harry spoke at the conference, which was attended by such luminaries as Greg Benford, Greg Bear, Joan Slonczewski, Jack McDevitt, Kij Johnson, Chris McKitterick, Betty Ann Hull, George Zebrowski, Fred Pohl, and Donna Shirley, former manager for Mars exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. My last glimpse of Harry was of him and Brian Aldiss enjoying a lunch and a couple of bottles--maybe three--of wine, another reminder of how much this witty, outgoing man enjoyed life.

He's best known for the movie Soylent Green, adapted from his novel Make Room! Make Room!, but he wrote a number of other intelligent and vastly entertaining novels (one of my favorites was West of Eden) and he was an unrelenting opponent of war and advocate for reason. A detailed obituary for the Guardian by Christopher Priest (coincidentally one of this year's Campbell Award winners) is here.

Don't Steal My Books

And don't steal anyone else's, either. This post on "Free Culture" and file-sharing is about musicians, but writers are facing the same problem and none of us will make up the difference on the road.

Remembering Gore Vidal

About himself, Gore Vidal once said: “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

My earliest memory of Gore Vidal isn't of him as a writer (I came to that later and have read most of his essays and novels), but as an aspiring political figure. He ran for Congress in 1960 in the district adjoining ours; my family lived in Albany, New York at the time, but even as a child I could see that Mr. Vidal was in a losing battle. It wasn't just that his district, unlike Albany's, was heavily Republican; no one as iconoclastic and as relentlessly frank as Gore Vidal was ever going to win any important political office in the U.S.

That he didn't win his political races may have been literature's gain, but it was also America's loss. We could have used that often cranky gadfly in the House or the Senate. The New York Times obituary is here.

UPDATE: A fascinating look at Vidal's teleplays and screenplays by F.X. Feeney at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The 2012 Olympics Begins...

...and as an American, my favorite part of the opening ceremony, after of course Her Majesty and James Bond's encounter and the salute to the rich tradition of British children's literature, was the shoutout to the U.K.'s National Health Service. Medicare for all!

Remembering Sally Ride, First American Woman in Space

Questions and jokes that were considered appropriate when astronaut Sally Ride was preparing for her first shuttle flight:

Speaking to reporters before the first shuttle flight, Dr. Ride — chosen in part because she was known for keeping her cool under stress — politely endured a barrage of questions focused on her sex: Would spaceflight affect her reproductive organs? Did she plan to have children? Would she wear a bra or makeup in space? Did she cry on the job? How would she deal with menstruation in space?

The CBS News reporter Diane Sawyer asked her to demonstrate a newly installed privacy curtain around the shuttle’s toilet. On “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson joked that the shuttle flight would be delayed because Dr. Ride had to find a purse to match her shoes.

The rest of the New York Times obituary of this brave and accomplished woman here.