Monthly Archives: June 2010

Litigating a Legal Fiction

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The National Pork Board sent a 12-page “cease and desist” letter in response to ThinkGeek’s April Fool’s ad for “canned unicorn meat” that used the NPB’s familiar slogan “The other white meat.”

Bloggers naturally seized on the obvious joke — to take at face value that the Pork Board was pig-headed enough to believe unicorn really was being offered for human consumption in competition with pork.

ThinkGeek ended its legal woes by issuing a public apology, though they couldn’t resist ending with a humorous stinger:

Luckily, the Sisters at Radiant Farms, where the unicorns are nursed through old age before being slaughtered, canned, and brought to market at ThinkGeek, have nothing to worry about–this kind of use is protected as a parody. (We’re hoping the NPB doesn’t tell the Sisters that unicorns don’t actually exist; it’d break their little sparkly hearts.)

[Thanks to David Klaus and Andrew Porter for the story.]

2010 JWC Memorial Award Finalists

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Toronto-area fan Lloyd Penney sent me a link to Quill & Quire’s post about the John W. Campbell Memorial Award nominees that focuses on the four Canadian finalists — Margaret Atwood for The Year of the Flood (McClelland & Stewart), Cory Doctorow for Makers (Tor Books), Robert J. Sawyer for Wake (Viking Canada), and Robert Charles Wilson for Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (Tor).

Scrolling down to the comments I found coast-to-coast complaints about Margaret Atwood’s presence on the list from people offended by denials that she writes sf, one quoting her 2009 line that “a book is only sf if it is set ‘somewhere in space, far, far away in a distant galaxy’”.

My own reaction went in a different direction: Does a Campbell memorial award signify anything today? How many of the nominated works would Campbell have wanted for Analog? And no doubt the feeling would have been mutual — How many of the writers would have offered their fiction to that renowned gatekeeper of the Golden Age?

The other authors on the shortlist are: Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books), Iain M. Banks, Transition (Orbit), Nancy Kress, Steal Across the Sky (Tor), Paul McAuley, Gardens of the Sun (Gollancz), China Mieville, The City & the City (Del Rey), Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia (Gollancz), Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo’s Dream (Spectra), Bruce Sterling, The Caryatids (Del Rey).

The award will be presented during the Campbell Conference awards banquet at the University of Kansas on Friday, July 16.

Bob Null (1938-2010)

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Bob Null at Conozoic, the 1989 Westercon. Photo by Galen Tripp.

One of the most popular and hardworking active members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, Bob Null, passed away June 23 after a long fight against cancer.  He was 72.

Bob first walked into the club in 1979 and over the decades served 20 terms as the club’s vice-president – no sinecure, but a demanding job with responsibilities like opening and closing the clubhouse at all kinds of hours several days each week, and shepherding a myriad of club property.

Bob served many terms on the LASFS Board of Directors, too, and made himself indispensable to local conventions, such as the club’s annual Loscon. His mastery of logistics was universally acknowledged. Everyone referred to his assignment as “the Bob Null position.”

One of my memories about him is that when we introduced the L.A.con III staff during the general committee meeting, with lots of out-of-towners present, Bob Null got the biggest round of applause. His work was respected by fans everywhere.

The folks at the annual Doctor Who convention, Gallifrey One, went into detail about his contributions:

[Bob] has been an important part of Gallifrey One since our foundation. Bob made certain our supply truck was ordered, supervised its loading and unloading, and provided material management throughout the convention. He purchased supplies for the Con Suite, organized our office equipment, supervised the loading and unloading of our TARDIS, and verified the usability of equipment such as our art show displays and main stage pipe & drape.

LASFS has a tradition of honoring all donors of a certain amount as Patron Saints, a list which naturally includes Bob. Of course in his case, besides being celebrated at the 19th meeting of each year, he’ll be remembered every time a truckload of equipment is sent off to a con and anyone works on the club archives– in fact, just about every time the key turns in the clubhouse lock.

A4 Pix Nix as Hugo MC

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Garth Nix has been named master of ceremonies for the Aussiecon 4 Hugo Awards Ceremony. The Australian fantasy and sf novelist has sold over 5 million books worldwide and his stories have been translated into 38 languages.

I could have passed on the opportunity for a Variety-style headline but when it comes to wordplay resisting temptation is not what I do best.

The full press release follows the jump.

Continue reading →

Let Darth Be Your Guide

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The Tom Tom GPS system offers Darth Vader as an option for vocalizing your directions (also C3PO, and coming in August, Han Solo).

Geoff Boucher of the LA Times “Hero Complex” blog noted last month:

If you do choose the Dark Lord of the Sith as your driver’s guide, you will get actual instructions such as “Bear left, to the dark side. Then in 200 yards you have reached your destination. The Force is with you, but you are not a Jedi yet.” You also will get the theme music, the bad-ventilator breathing, light-saber effects and the sound of a TIE fighter zooming by. I might just drive around in circles for days…

Both of the links in the first paragraph are places you can view the faux documentary of Darth Vader recording his lines in the studio, too.

It’s likely that someone who works more cheaply than James Earl Jones is behind the mike. Jones originated the performance in the first Star Wars movie, but lots of other actors have done so for games and other features.

[Thanks to David Klaus for the story.]

Bova Column on SF Conventions

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Ben Bova  devotes his latest column for the Naples News to science fiction conventions.

For example, some years ago in a hotel far, far away (it was in St. Louis, actually) the hotel staff took one look at the fans arriving for their convention and decided to treat them like scum. Service was worse than dismal. The hotel even shut down the elevators at midnight, which stranded late-night revelers in the lobby. I was among them and got into a fist fight (mild mannered me!) with a young elevator operator who refused to take a group of us to the floors where our rooms were located.

Within a week after that convention closed, several national aerospace organizations canceled their plans to hold meetings at that hotel; the hotel’s insurance carrier tripled the hotel’s rates, and a few other inconveniences were rained upon the hotel’s management and staff.

…Not the least being the installation of self-service elevator controls. The Chase-Park Plaza’s elevator operators were out of a job by 1974 when I was there for the Popular Culture Association convention.

[Via Tony Lewis on Smofs.]

Snapshots Colt .45

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Here are 8 developments of interest to fans.

(1) Kristine Kathryn Rusch has done a great service for fans everywhere by publishing the lyrics to the song Janis Ian wrote this for the Nebula Awards banquet. It begins —

WELCOME HOME (THE SFWA SONG)
(Janis Ian)

I learned the truth at seventeen
That Asimov and Bradbury
and Clarke were alphabetically
my very perfect ABC’s
While Algernon ran every maze
and slow glass hurt my heart for days
I sat and played a sweet guitar
and Martians grokked me from afar…

(2) In spite of everything I laughed at this. The xkcd online comic offers a Michael Bay-style cinematic version of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico titled “The Worst Case Scenario.”

(3) How weird is this? Look up “write-in” on Yourdictionary.com, then click on the “sentence examples” tab. Two of the examples are references to Topic A direct from the TAFF.org.uk site. The first, which originated here mentions Martha Beck by name. A second, plucked from the official TAFF Administration FAQ, says “The sole write-in campaign which was felt to endanger the spirit of TAFF did not in fact succeed.” Faanish dictionaries always express the author’s bias, but this is the first instance I’ve seen of a mundane dictionary dabbling in fanpolitics.

(4) A remake or Logan’s Run has been in the works for a long time. Carl Rinsch, who is Ridley/Tony Scott’s protege has been assigned to direct the movie.

(5) William Gibson, in his Book Expo America talk, told the audience there no longer is a future — while insisting he means something different by that than other incipient geezers who have such things in the past:

The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.

Please don’t mistake this for one of those “after us, the deluge” moments on my part. I’ve always found those appalling, and most particularly when uttered by aging futurists, who of all people should know better. This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future.

(6) The LARRY NIVEN web page (unofficial but sanctioned by the author) has been changed from www.larryniven.org to www.larryniven.net following difficulties with the ISP . It’s possible that there might be “teething problems” with the new address for a short while – broken links etc.

(7) Those of you who commented on my post about TV theme music are likely to enjoy an article titled “Underscoring Richard Wagner’s influence on film music” by Jon Burlingame in the Los Angeles Times:

Millions (billions?) of moviegoers understand the leitmotif concept even if they’ve never heard the term, courtesy of John Williams’ “Star Wars” scores and, more recently, Howard Shore’s epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

“Wagner kept his leitmotifs in a constant state of flux,” notes Chicago musicologist Doug Adams, whose book “The Music of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Films” will be published later this year. “It was not theme and variations. It was a grab-bag of material that was constantly evolving, constantly changing. That’s how Howard Shore treated all his thematic material in ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and that’s largely what Williams does in the ‘Star Wars’ and ‘ Indiana Jones’ films….

One of Wagner’s other innovations involved music matching physical movement on the stage or, as it would later become derisively known in films, “Mickey Mousing,” since music matching action was so commonplace in cartoons. “Hollywood didn’t invent this,” Mauceri says. “The refugee composers” —specifically Austrian-born Korngold and German-born Franz Waxman, both of whom fled the Nazi menace in the 1930s — “were carrying on the very thing that they saw every day in the opera houses.”

(8) Speaking of Colt .45’s (as I do inthe header)… I enjoy the Autry Museum a lot, and get over there at least once a year. It recently featured in an LA Daily News article about a new issue of stamps depicting its namesake, Gene Autry, plus William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and Roy Rogers. I was interested to discover that the images were created by local Monrovia artist Robert Rodriguez.

[Thanks for these links belongs to David Klaus, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian and Australian SF Bullsheet.]

Update 06/21/2010: Corrected the xkcd comic title in hopes of appearing ever so slightly less illiterate…

Written By Celebrates Bradbury’s 90th

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Written By, The Magazine of the Writers Guild of America, West features Ray Bradbury on the cover of its Summer 2010 issue.

“This issue honors Ray Bradbury’s 90th birthday,” John King Tarpinian notes. “I was lucky to be given a copy of this not-for-sale magazine which is given to WGAw members. The main article honoring Ray is titled “A Lion at 90.” There is also what I believe to be a never before publisher story by Ray, ‘The Dog in the Red Bandana.’ The cover art by Romano is going to be available for sale at Every Picture Tells a Story.”

The issue is a free read online. The Bradbury article is here.