Cold City | Tor/Forge's Blog

The Week in Review

December 14, 2012 Leave a comment

Welcome to the week in review! Every Friday, we comb through the links and images we found and shared this week, and pull the very best for this post. Consider it concentrated genre goodness from all around the web.

Because we love tormenting fans (and ourselves, let’s be honest), check out this post from Irene Gallo of Tor.com, who went behind the scenes to watch A Memory of Light being printed at the bindery. Also: Tor.com is having a NYC midnight launch for the final Wheel of Time book!

Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit comes out today! Over on io9, there’s a fun list of 12 things you probably didn’t know about the epic new movie.

Looking for new reading material for the holidays? Tor.com has you covered. They’ve invited some of their regular reviews to share their favorite reads of 2012. The result is an eclectic list of books sure to please almost any genre fan.

A well deserved award: SFWA has named Gene Wolfe the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award Winner for 2012. If you want to check out some of the award-winning author’s earlier works, we’ve just announced 19 of his backlist titles are now available as ebooks.

Tor.com has launched a new series: Talking with Tom. In this initial conversation, the legendary founder of Tor chats with L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

In November, science fiction author Frederik Pohl made a rare appearance at Windycon, where he did an interview with ChicagoScope.

Finally, io9 has their impressions of the first nine minutes of Star Trek: Into Darkness. Is anyone else ridiculously excited for this movie? I know I am, but I’m a bit of a Trekker, so…

The Tor/Forge newsletter went out this week! Check out these fascinating articles from our authors:

And, just to make Friday that much sweeter, here’s a list of sweepstakes and sales we have going on!

Newsletter Sweepstakes: Big Fat Books for the Holidays (Ends 12/16)
Goodreads First Reads: Impulse by Steven Gould (Ends 12/18)
Goodreads First Reads: The Sixth Station by Linda Stasi (Ends 12/19)
eBook Sale: People of the Earth by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 1/2)
eBook Sale: Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 1/2)
eBook Sale: Larry Bond’s Red Dragon Rising: Edge of War by Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 1/2)
eBook Sale: Imager by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 1/2)
Goodreads First Reads: Homeland by Cory Doctorow (Ends 1/9)
Goodreads First Reads: Kalimpura by Jay Lake (Ends 1/9)
Goodreads First Reads: A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan (Ends 1/9)

The Toughest Part of Writing Cold City

December 10, 2012 6 comments

Written by F. Paul Wilson

That would be researching Manhattan in 1990.

Why 1990? Because that’s the year a twenty-one-year old who will go on to become an urban mercenary known as Repairman Jack arrives in New York. Cold City is the first of a trilogy that will chronicle his early years there.

We’re talking less than a quarter century ago, so you wouldn’t think it would require much research. Especially for a guy who’s in and out of Manhattan all the time. My agent is there, my publisher is there, plus I go to conventions, writer gatherings, even an occasional play (no musicals, thank you). I was in Manhattan many, many times during 1990, so what’s the big deal?

Because over the years, all the images stored in your memory bank tend to bleed into each other. I knew 1990 preceded the Disneyfication of Times Square, but what exactly was it like? I Googled, I Binged, I tried all sorts of search strings, but kept coming up with bupkis. Old New York is easy. If I want to know how deep the mud ran in Five Points after a heavy rain in 1850, no problemo.

Top songs of 1990 – easy. Top films – simps. Top TV shows – cake. Technology… that took extra effort. The Internet? Not much going on there. The World Wide Web was still years away, and online activities were limited to bulletin boards and proprietary services like Genie and Prodigy via 14.4 kbs modems through a phone line. As for home entertainment, this was pre-DVD and Netflix, so all movies were on tape, and mom-and-pop videostores were everywhere.

Cellular phones (called car phones or mobile phones back then) existed for the most part in bags or briefcases. The state-of-the-art self-contained models were the size of a brick with a big antenna. (A nifty online article, “The Evolution of Cell Phone Design Between 1983-2009,” answered a lot of questions.) All those bricks did was make calls (no email, no GPS, no Yelp, no Angry Birds) and hardly anyone had them. So if you wanted to make a call, you had to dig out some change and find a phone kiosk. We’re talking less than a quarter century ago but, compared to today, communication was like smoke signals.

All that data was pretty easy to gather, but figuring out what stores lined Times Square in 1990? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Finally one of my search strings got a YouTube hit. YouTube? What the hell, I clicked it and found that someone had posted a home movie of a car or bus ride through Times Square in 1991. Not 1990, but damn close enough. So I started searching for other videos and found one professionally shot right in Times Square in 1990. Happy dance time.

Memories of pre-Disney, pre-Giuliani midtown flooded back. I remembered the now-extinct grindhouse theaters that lined the Deuce (42nd Street) between Eighth Avenue and Broadway, all the XXX peep shows in Times Square and on Eighth Avenue, and the prostitutes on Ninth behind the Port Authority who’d lift their tops as you drove past to show they were really female.

(Altogether now: “Those were the days, my friend, we’d thought they’d never end…”)

So here’s the moral to this tale: Don’t neglect videos in your research. They’re gold mines. They allowed me revisit the grit of 1990 Manhattan and translate it to the page. Just for you.

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