By John Hertz: (reprinted from No Direction Home 21; written 20 Jul 19) It’s National Lollipop Day.
I went to a See’s Candies shop and got a root-beer lollipop. Their lollipops are resolutely un-discoid.
And it’s the Glorious 20th, indeed the 50th anniversary of humankind’s first landing on the Moon. Sweet.
I’ve seen two fine commemorations, Unsolicited Opinion No. 42(!) from Chris Barkley, and No. 46 of Journey Planet (PDF) from Chris Garcia and (currently) James Bacon, an issue guest-edited by Steven H Silver.
Looking backward can have two edges – or more. Maybe it’s not so much like a sword as like a snub cube.
I remember Larry Niven’s saying “We put a man on the Moon, why can’t we put a man on the Moon?” Others have said it too. Maybe not enough have.
More recently people have been saying we should put a woman on the Moon. I hope for it.
Then there was, and there still is, the question of resources. Where should we put those?
When President Obama was inaugurated I sent him a poem and urged he consider leadership into math and the physical sciences. He never answered, but he was busy.
I said it as a liberal-arts guy. I could say it again.
Chris Garcia published the poem.
The best I’ve made so far today is (unrhymed 5-7-5-7-7-syllable lines)
When governments pay,
Conquest fuels discovery;
When private wealth pays,
It hopes for a quick profit:
But science, explorers, go.
I’m not content but there isn’t much more of today left.
In an airport bookshop on the way home from Spikecon I got a copy of the 50th-anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings (J. Tolkien, 1954; 2004 ed. corrected various errors introduced in reprinting, and had an improved index; I’d only the 2nd ed. 1965; haven’t seen the 60th-anniv. ed. 2014).
This remark struck me (bk. 5, ch. IX; 2004 ed. at p. 877); Tolkien’s Elves (Legolas Greenleaf is speaking), who lived long, and were not weak, loved language, and sped what was sung well.
Follow what may, great deeds are not lessened in worth.
We reached the Moon with the Apollo 11 mission of the United States National Aeronautics & Space Administration. Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) was the first human being to set foot there. E.E. Aldrin, Jr., “Buzz” Aldrin to us and the world, was the second. He’s on the front cover of Journey Planet 46, a famous photograph taken by Armstrong, on the Moon in a white Space suit, feet apart.
Barkley met Armstrong while Armstrong was a University of Cincinnati professor in 1974. The tale in Unsol. Op. 42 doesn’t mention eponym Cincinnatus of Rome, two and a half millennia ago, who was summoned from his farm in a crisis, accepted dictatorial power, defeated the enemy, and returned to his farm; Armstrong, having had to fly the Apollo 11 Lunar Module manually to a safe landing with 20 seconds of fuel left, and upon return having ticker-tape parades in New York and Chicago attended by six million, was teaching aeronautical engineering when Barkley met him.
Silver chauffered Aldrin to and from an International Space Development Conference in 2010. Greg Benford, also in Journey Planet 46, tells of going to see Aldrin, who asked if Benford would collaborate on a science fiction novel. Didn’t happen; Benford thought existing commitments wouldn’t leave him free enough, so recommended John Barnes, with whom Aldrin co-authored Encounter with Tiber (1996) and The Return (2000); but Benford did get to drive Aldrin home from a Planetary Society meeting another time.
Aldrin on the Apollo 11 mission was able to return a service given his father, acknowledge a pioneer, and put a further link in one of history’s little chains, with a book.
Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945), called with good reason the father of modern rocketry, perhaps of the Space Age, launched the first liquid-fueled rocket at Auburn, Massachusetts, in 1926. He taught physics at Clark University and taught Aldrin’s father. Other scientists and the press ridiculed Goddard’s theories of Space flight. He wrote an autobiography around the time of launching that rocket; it remained unpublished until 1966.
Aldrin took a copy with him, autographed it “Flown to the Moon on board Apollo 11 / July 16-24 1969 / Buzz Aldrin”, and gave it to Goddard’s widow, who later gave it to Clark where it may be seen.
The New York Times on July 17th, i.e. the day after the Apollo 11 launch, published under the headline “A Correction” a summary of its 1920 editorial mocking Goddard and concluded “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”
Aldrin, a Presbyterian, using a kit given by his pastor, took Communion. Later he said “Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate…. Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the Moon in the name of all mankind.”
Tonight he said “Looking back, landing on the Moon wasn’t just our job, it was a historic opportunity…. Today belongs to you”, and an hour ago ”Goodnight Moon!”
George Phillies, President of the National Fantasy Fan
Federation, editor of TNFF, and ballot counter for the Neffies, distributed
the Neffy Award ballot in the July Issue of TNFF.
Best Novel (over 100,000 words)
Against Three Lands – George Phillies
A Guide For Murdered Children – Sarah Sparrow
Legion – The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds – Brandon Sanderson
The Princess in the Tower – Chris Nuttall
Uncompromising Honor – David Weber
We Sold Our Souls – Grady Hendrix
Best Shorter Work (under 100,000 words)
“Shadowdrop” – Chris Willrich – Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue 261
“The Black God’s Drums” – P. Djèlí Clark – Tor Publishing
(1) DRESSING UP. An 11-minute video of cosplay at San Diego
Comic-Con.
San Diego Comic Con 2019, at the San Diego Convention Center. In its 50th year it was an hectic and news worthy convention with some really great costumes and creativity, thanks everyone for participating
(2) DUBLIN 2019 REMINDERS. The Hugo voting deadline is upon
us —
Voting will end on 31 July 2019 at 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Time (2:59am Eastern Daylight Time, 07:59 Irish and British time, all on 1 August)
Professor Jennifer Zwahr-Castro is researching Worldcon, and investigating why we attend and what we get out of the experience. She would like to invite all Dublin 2019 attendees to take part in her research by filling out a survey.
(3) THE CHERRY ON THE TOP OF MT. TBR. An email from NESFA
Press tells me they are pleased to
announce two new ebooks available immediately–
Moskowitz, Sam, The Immortal Storm (978-1-61037-334-0)
Nielsen Hayden, Teresa, Making Book (978-1-61037-333-3)
(4) CLOSE READING. [Item by rcade.] Catherynne Valente tweeted that in 15 years
writing professionally, she doesn’t think she’s ever described the size of a
woman’s breasts.
After some internal debate over whether I should, I broke the news to her that she had.
Radiance uses "smallish" and "ample" once each as adjectives, according to a Google Books search that made me feel uncomfortable to undertake.
(5) BOOKER PRIZE LONGLIST. Margaret Atwood’s inclusion on
the 2019
Book Prize Longlist was reported in yesterday’s Scroll – but here’s the
complete list, or
‘Booker Dozen’, as the cognoscenti say.
This year’s longlist of 13 books was selected by a panel of five judges: founder and director of Hay Festival Peter Florence (Chair); former fiction publisher and editor Liz Calder; novelist, essayist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo; writer, broadcaster and former barrister Afua Hirsch; and concert pianist, conductor and composer Joanna MacGregor.
The
2019 longlist, or ‘Booker Dozen’, of 13 novels, is:
Margaret Atwood (Canada), The
Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)
Kevin Barry (Ireland), Night
Boat to Tangier (Canongate Books)
Oyinkan Braithwaite
(UK/Nigeria), My Sister, The Serial Killer (Atlantic Books)
The rising academic interest in the zombie as an allegory for cultural and social analysis is spanning disciplines including, humanities, anthropology, economics, and political science. The zombie has been used as a metaphor for economic policy, political administrations, and cultural critique through various theoretical frameworks. The zombie has been examined as a metaphor for capitalism, geopolitics, globalism, neo-liberal markets, and even equating Zombiism to restrictive aspects of academia.
— Dr Hamilton (Zombiist) ??????? (@Scott_EricH) July 25, 2019
Loving "Going Green: Mother Nature Bites Back in The Girl With All the Gifts" from @sarah_clearysc @UCDZombiism2019 – need to incorporate this into my ideas tomorrow re posthumanism in zombie stories & the upsurge against the anthropocene the #ecozombie might show #UCDZombies2019pic.twitter.com/eYegF6GsyE
Konstantinos Kerasovitis giving his talk on “Zombie Colony: The Heteronomy of the Greek State & The Datura of Cultural Capital”, highlighting that voodoo became a product of tourism, drawing parallels to Greek tourism through the zombie #UCDZombies2019 @UCDZombiism2019 pic.twitter.com/IUGDx9UZ0k
— Theorizing Zombiism (@Theorizing_Zs) July 25, 2019
On a recent morning, 15 teenage girls and young women reported for duty at an office overlooking the Pentagon. Their mission: Save the world from nuclear war.
“This is where I want you to stop being you,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, a defense think tank. “You’re going to have to start to role-play.”
Pettyjohn was leading a war-game exercise on North Korea. Typically, military commanders and policymakers use war gaming to test strategies and their likely consequences. But nothing about this game was typical. It was designed by women — RAND’s “Dames of War Games” — for teenagers from Girl Security, a nonprofit that introduces girls to defense issues. The partnership was a first for both groups; it’s among a series of recent efforts to boost women’s participation in national security.
“You have to fight,” Pettyjohn told the teens. “You are the military commanders.”
The scenario Pettyjohn laid out was bleak. U.S. talks with North Korea had collapsed, and deadly tit-for-tat attacks had spiraled into open conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Half the teens would join the blue team, assuming the roles of U.S. and allied South Korean generals. The others went to the red team, playing North Korean leaders determined to stay in power.
(8) SOMEDAY MY BLUEPRINTS
WILL COME. Curbed’s Angela Serratore shares credit with architects
of the Eighties and Nineties for corporate Disney’s current world domination: “The
magical (postmodern) world of Disney”.
It was 1991 and Michael Eisner was on the brink of changing everything.
After becoming the CEO of the Walt Disney Company in 1984, Eisner, a native New Yorker, set out to turn the old-fashioned Disney brand into one that would speak not just to the present moment but also, crucially, to the future. During his tenure, the company would eventually acquire the television network ABC and the sports behemoth ESPN and produce films that would come to define the Disney Renaissance—The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Aladdin, among others.
An amateur architecture and design buff, Eisner also understood that a company like Disney ought to have a real presence—theme parks, of course, but also office buildings, studios, and hotels. What if, his design philosophy seemed to suggest, people could look up at Disney headquarters in Burbank or Orlando and feel the same awe and delight they must’ve felt on Disneyland’s opening day?
We all wish we could change the past, at least some of the time. Relationships, elections, conversations: there are countless moments in our lives we’d love the chance to rework, or simply reimagine. Living in an era when we can easily tweak the small (delete a sentence, crop an image) but feel helpless when facing the large (political turmoil, climate change), it’s hard not to fantasize about reworking our histories.
But this inclination is not new. Attempting to rework the past, at least on paper, has been the outlet of artists and authors for as long as people have been wishing for different endings. “As If: Alternative Histories From Then to Now,” an exhibition at the Drawing Center, presents eighty-four works from 1888 to the present that “offer examples of how we might reimagine historical narratives in order to contend with the traumas of contemporary life.”
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 25, 1907 — Cyril Luckham. He played the White Guardian on Doctor Who. He appeared in The Ribos Operation episode, The Key to Time season during the Era of the Fourth Doctor, and the Enlightenment story during the Era of the Fifth Doctor. He was also Dr. Meinard in the early Fifties Stranger from Venus (a.k.a. Immediate Disaster and The Venusian). (Died 1989.)
Born July 25, 1921 — Kevin Stoney. He appeared in three serials of the science fiction series Doctor Who over a period of ten years, playing Mavic Chen in The Daleks’ Master Plan during the time of the First Doctor, Tobias Vaughn in The Invasion during the time of the Second Doctor and Tyrum in Revenge of the Cybermen during the time of the Fourth Doctor. Other genre credits include: The Adventures of Robin Hood, Danger Man, The Avengers, The Prisoner, Doomwatch, The Tomorrow People, Space: 1999, The New Avengers, Quatermass, and Hammer House of Horror. (Died 2008.)
Born July 25, 1922 — Evelyn E. Smith. She has the delightful bio being of a writer of sf and mysteries, as well as a compiler of crossword puzzles. During the 1950s, she published both short stories and novelettes in Galaxy Science Fiction, Fantastic Universe and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her SF novels include The Perfect Planet and The Copy Shop. A look at iBooks and Kindle shows a twelve story Wildside Press collection but none of her novels. (Died 2000.)
Born July 25, 1937 — Todd Armstrong. He’s best known for playing Jason in Jason and the Argonauts. A film of course that made excellent by special effects from Ray Harryhausen. His only other genre appearance was on the Greatest American Hero as Ted McSherry In “ A Chicken in Every Plot”. (Died 1992.)
Born July 25, 1948 — Brian Stableford, 71. I am reasonably sure that I’ve read and enjoyed all of the Hooded Swan series a long time ago which I see has been since been collected as Swan Songs: The Complete Hooded Swan Collection. And I’ve certainly read a fair amount of his short fiction down the years.
Born July 25, 1973 — Mur Lafferty, 46. Podcaster and writer. Co-editor of the Escape Pod podcast with Divya Breed, her second time around. She is also the host and creator of the podcast I Should Be Writing which won aParsec Award for Best Writing Podcast. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Escape Artists short fiction magazine Mothership Zeta. And then there’s the Ditch Diggers podcast she started with Matt Wallace which is supposed to show the brutal, honest side of writing. For that, it won the Hugo Award for Best Fancast in 2018, having been a finalist the year before. Fiction-wise, I loved both The Shambling Guide to New York City and A Ghost Train to New Orleans with I think the second being a better novel.
The man who came up with Twitter’s retweet button has likened it to “handing a four-year-old a loaded weapon”, in an interview with BuzzFeed.
Developer Chris Wetherell said no-one at Twitter had anticipated how it would alter the way people used the platform.
…He told BuzzFeed that he thought the retweet button “would elevate voices from under-represented communities”.
Previously people had to manually retweet each other by copying text and typing RT and the name of the tweeter but once the process was automated, retweeting meant popular posts quickly went viral.
While some went viral for good reasons, such as providing information about natural disasters, many others were not so benign.
Gamergate – a harassment campaign against women in the games industry – was one example of how people used the retweet to co-ordinate their attacks, Wetherell told BuzzFeed, describing it as a “creeping horror story”.
“It dawned on me that this was not some small subset of people acting aberrantly. This might be how people behave. And that scared me to death.”
Before humans headed up there, animals were the first living creatures that were sent into space. But India will now become the first nation to fly a spacecraft with only humanoid robots. Science writer Pallava Bagla reports.
The Indian government has sanctioned $1.4bn (£1.1bn) to the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) for its first manned space flight by 2022.
…To date – using indigenously made rockets – Russia, the US and China have sent astronauts into space. If India can achieve this, it will become the fourth country to launch humans into space from its own soil.
But, unlike other nations that have carried out human space flights, India will not fly animals into space. Instead, it will fly humanoid robots for a better understanding of what weightlessness and radiation do to the human body during long durations in space.
Nasa is finding out how people cope with the demands of long space missions at its Human Exploration Research Analog (Hera).
For 45 days a crew of four people live in a habitat which simulates a mission to Phobos, a moon that orbits the planet Mars.
The crew carry out daily maintenance tasks on board, enjoy views of space from the capsule window and keep in contact with mission control via a five minute delay, meaning that a response to a communication takes 10 minutes.
(15) REASONS TO VOTE. Joe Sherry ranks the YA
award contenders in “Reading the Hugos: Lodestar” at Nerds of a
Feather.
…Generally, it takes a novel that breaks out of the YA spaces and gains visibility in some of the more SFF communities that I engage with (see, Children of Blood and Bone) or has some aspect that catches the attention of those communities (see, Dread Nation) or are beloved by commentators I deeply admire and respect (see, Tess of the Road). Also, I almost said the “wider SFF communities”, but that would not have been correct because YA publishing and readership is absolutely huge and has a significant overlap in science fiction and fantasy that should not be understated.
This is all to say that I was familiar with three of the novels on the ballot, and I was excited to read everything here to see which novels would break out into my list of new favorites. At least one, and let’s find out which….
Rifts over a dormant volcano in Hawaii have resurfaced in recent days, pitting the state’s culture and history against its ambitions.
Plans for a powerful new telescope near the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano could bring in hundreds of jobs and boost science and the economy. But some native Hawaiians insist the site is sacred and that the long-planned construction should not go ahead.
Last week, protesters blocked access to the building site on Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in the world when measured from its underwater base. At least 33 people were arrested, given citations and released.
Hawaii’s governor has issued an “emergency proclamation” that increases powers to break up the blockade but said he wanted to find a “peaceful and satisfactory” solution for both sides.
Here, some of the people at the centre of the debate explain what Mauna Kea and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project mean to them.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an author I’d follow into almost any genre, and that’s a good thing given how varied her career has been so far. From the 80’s nostalgia-heavy Signal to Noise to the romance fantasy of manners The Beautiful Ones, to the criminally underrated sci-fi novella Prime Meridian and even the editorial work she does on The Dark Magazine (a recent addition to my short fiction rounds), Garcia brings talent, nuance and a particular eye for female characters challenging overwhelming imbalances in power over the forces against them. Now, in Gods of Jade and Shadow, Moreno-Garcia brings her talents to a historic fantasy where 1920’s Jazz Age Mexico meets the gods and monsters of Mayan mythology, taking protagonist Casiopea Tun on an unexpected but long-dreamed-of adventure with a deposed Lord of the Underworld….
A French inventor has failed in his attempt to cross the English Channel on a jet-powered flyboard.
Franky Zapata, a former jet-ski champion, had been hoping to cross from northern France to southern England in just 20 minutes.
But the 40-year-old fell into the water halfway across as he tried to land on a boat to refuel.
He took off from near Calais on Thursday morning and was heading for St Margaret’s Bay in Dover.
Mr Zapata was not injured when he fell and later announced he was planning a second bid to fly across the Channel next week.
(19) FIRE ONE. James Gleick traces the long,
fictional effort to infect Earthlings with “Moon
Fever” at New York Review of Books.
…The first moon landing was at once a historical inevitability and an improbable fluke. Inevitable because we had already done it so many times in our storytelling and our dreams. Astonishing, even in hindsight, because it required such an unlikely combination of factors and circumstances. “The moon, by her comparative proximity, and the constantly varying appearances produced by her several phases, has always occupied a considerable share of the attention of the inhabitants of the earth,” remarks Jules Verne in his fantastic tale From the Earth to the Moon (1865). The French fabulist imagined that the pioneers of space would be none other than Les Yankees: “They had no other ambition than to take possession of this new continent of the sky, and to plant upon the summit of its highest elevation the star-spangled banner of the United States of America.”
To get there, Verne proposed a projectile fired from a giant gun. He had probably read Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (1835), in which a Dutchman journeys to the moon by lighter-than-air balloon and meets the inhabitants, “ugly little people, who none of them uttered a single syllable, or gave themselves the least trouble to render me assistance, but stood, like a parcel of idiots, grinning in a ludicrous manner.” Like Poe, Verne embellished his story with a great deal of plausible science involving computations of the moon’s elliptical orbit, the distances to be traveled at apogee or perigee, the diminishing force of gravitation, and the power of exploding gunpowder….
The speed and extent of current global warming exceeds any similar event in the past 2,000 years, researchers say.
They show that famous historic events like the “Little Ice Age” don’t compare with the scale of warming seen over the last century.
The research suggests that the current warming rate is higher than any observed previously.
The scientists say it shows many of the arguments used by climate sceptics are no longer valid.
When scientists have surveyed the climatic history of our world over the past centuries a number of key eras have stood out.
These ranged from the “Roman Warm Period”, which ran from AD 250 to AD 400, and saw unusually warm weather across Europe, to the famed Little Ice Age, which saw temperatures drop for centuries from the 1300s.
The events were seen by some as evidence that the world has warmed and cooled many times over the centuries and that the warming seen in the world since the industrial revolution was part of that pattern and therefore nothing to be alarmed about.
Three new research papers show that argument is on shaky ground.
The science teams reconstructed the climate conditions that existed over the past 2,000 years using 700 proxy records of temperature changes, including tree rings, corals and lake sediments. They determined that none of these climate events occurred on a global scale.
(21) TRAILER PARK. From the novel The Future of Another Timeline,
by Annalee Newitz, comes a riot grrl band called Grape Ape. They are lost to
our timeline, but you can see them here in all their glory. The Future of
Another Timeline comes out from Tor Books on Sept. 24, 2019.
[Thanks to rcade, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Carl
Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, Michael Toman, mlex,
Anthony Lewis, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to
File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]
By
Martin Morse Wooster: If you’re wondering why there are
so many musicals based on movies, blame the New York Times.
This
winter I read Razzle Dazzle, a very
entertaining oral history of Broadway between 1900-1990 by Michael Riedel.[1] According to Riedel, when Beauty and theBeast was released, Times critic Frank Rich said the film was “the
best Broadway musical” released that year.
The suits at Disney headquarters read Rich’s review and thought to
themselves, “Hmmm! Turning our movies
into musical theater! What a really good
idea!” And so the Disney Theatrical Group was born.
Aladdin
is the second Disney musical I’ve seen, after The
Little Mermaid. But while The Little Mermaid was the theatrical
equivalent of AAA baseball, Aladdin
was the national tour that played at the Kennedy Center Opera House, a 3,000-seat
venue.
I
knew this was an upscale evening when I stopped to buy a CD and refrigerator
magnet. Disney wouldn’t sell me a CD: I
could only buy it as part of a package that included a program that was very
pretty but that I really didn’t want to buy.
But
the store was full of schwag! Had I
wanted to, I could have gotten the official Aladdin
fleece blanket, the lamp, the dolls, the teddy bear, the expensive dolls… I didn’t see anyone buy any of this stuff, but
they wouldn’t make it if people weren’t buying it.
As
for the musical, the score is by Alan Menken, who’s written scores for a DVD
shelf full of Disney musicals. His first
collaborator was Howard Ashman, who wrote the lyrics for Beauty and The Beast and The
Little Mermaid (and, pre-Disney, Little
Shop ofHorrors). But Ashman died of AIDS in 1991 while Aladdin
was in development, so Sir Tim Rice was brought in as lyricist. To my mind, Sir Tim is a lesser lyricist than
Ashman, but he wrote the lyrics for “A Whole New World,” which is the greatest
Disney power ballad of all time and which won an Oscar.
For
the stage version of Aladdin, which
premiered in 2014, Chad Beguelin was brought in for a new book and some new
songs. In the stage version, Howard
Ashman wrote the lyrics for five songs, Sir Tim Rice wrote two, Chad Beguelin
wrote four, and the rest were collaborations.
Having
bought the CD/program, here are some secrets from it. Remember the great Max Fleischer cartoon
where Popeye met Aladdin and the genie?
That’s the genesis of this musical.
You’re supposed to detect traces of Fats Waller and Cab Calloway in the
score.
And
yes, the genie is black.
As for the plot—well, come on, you know the plot. Disney released the Aladdin remake last month![2] The smarter question is: what are you getting on stage that you aren’t
getting in a movie theatre?
Well,
the book has quite a lot of snark in it.
Beguelin does indeed rhyme “awful” with “falafel.” And if you want more Mediterranean food
jokes, there were some for hummus and baba ganoush.
And
there’s dancing! Lots and lots of
dancing! Aladdin has three sidekicks,
and boy do they dance! They make a
“Dancing With The Stars” joke in Aladdin,
except here it’s “Dancing With The Scimitars,” and yes, they dance with
scimitar swords.
But
what made Aladdin work was the sets
and the direction. Casey Nicholaw
directed; he got a Tony for this show and another Tony for The Book of Mormon. The set
designer was Bob Crowley, who has done a lot of work for the National Theatre
and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain.
Every
time I saw one of Crowley’s brightly colored sets, I told myself, “This is
cool.” And the flying carpet was very cool.
As
for the performers, two stood out. Korey
Lee Blossey was the genie I saw; he’s actually the understudy but was fully
prepared for the demanding part and even did a cartwheel on stage just to prove
he could. Jonathan Weir played the
villain Jafar; he’s done a lot of work in Chicago and has a great voice. He reminded me of Jonathan Harris in “Lost in
Space.”
Washington Post
theatre critic Nelson Pressley called Aladdin
a “Big Gulp XL” of a musical, and when I watched it, I felt the same way I feel
when the free Cherry Coke kicks in after a Saturday afternoon at the movies. Aladdin wasn’t great art, but a very well
made, high-quality entertainment with plenty of first-rate singing, dancing,
and jokes.
Finally,
a word about Disney. A Financial Times article recently
referred to Disney as “the apex predator” of entertainment, but the reason they
got to the top is because they hire first-rate talent and give them a chance to
show their excellence. Yes, Disney has
stinkers (OK, I saw Cars 3) but more
often than not their productions work.
I
suspect Frozen will be the nest
Disney Theatrical Group production to come to Washington. I can’t wait to see it.
[1]
The best bit of ancient gossip in Razzle
Dazzle is about David Belasco, who was the lion of Broadway in 1910 but is
only remembered because he wrote the plays Puccini turned into Madama Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West. According to Riedel, Belasco liked wandering
around wearing a priest’s vestments. No
one knows why, but one likely reason is that Belasco thought the vestments
would attract women.
[2]
Yes, I saw the new Aladdin. It’s good, but The Lion King is much better.
Rutger Hauer, the versatile Dutch leading man of the ’70s who went on star in the 1982 “Blade Runner” as Roy Batty, died July 19 at his home in the Netherlands after a short illness. He was 75.
Hauer’s agent, Steve Kenis, confirmed the news and said that Hauer’s funeral was held Wednesday.
His most cherished performance came in a film that was a resounding flop on its original release. In 1982, he portrayed the murderous yet soulful Roy Batty, leader of a gang of outlaw replicants, opposite Harrison Ford in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi noir opus “Blade Runner.” The picture became a widely influential cult favorite, and Batty proved to be Hauer’s most indelible role.
More recently, he appeared in a pair of 2005 films: as Cardinal Roark in “Sin City,” and as the corporate villain who Bruce Wayne discovers is running the Wayne Corp. in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins.”
… Hauer increasingly turned to action-oriented parts in the ‘80s: He toplined the big-budget fantasy “Ladyhawke” (1985), reteamed with fellow Hollywood transplant Verhoeven in the sword-and-armor epic “Flesh & Blood” (1985), starred as a psychotic killer in “The Hitcher” (1986), and took Steve McQueen’s shotgun-toting bounty hunter role in a modern reboot of the TV Western “Wanted: Dead or Alive” (1986).
Let’s get the monologue on the table, first thing, because he wrote it himself, and it’s brilliant:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
That’s Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, playing the artificial person Roy Batty in his death scene…
… Then, in 2017, a friend introduced me to Roll20, an online platform that serves as a digital tabletop, and everything changed. On a computer, I have the power to alter my settings—I can zoom in, change colors, and make whatever tweaks I need in order to make things accessible for my specific visual impairment. And things I lacked the power to change, my DM could: giving tokens borders with higher contrast, adjusting the lighting on a map, or—if I got lost looking for something—shifting my view in the direction I needed to be focusing.
I could roll dice directly on the platform and see my result easily, and best of all, I had a digital character sheet I could alter easily and at will, rather than a few pieces of paper I’d require another player to edit for me. And then I discovered other websites, like DnDBeyond, which made it easy to look up stats and spells online—again, in a medium far more accessible for me.
I still required a dungeon master willing to take the time to describe certain things to me and to make whatever color and contrast adjustments I needed, but even playing with strangers via Roll20’s Looking For Game system, my experience has been positive. Thanks to the websites I used, the things I needed didn’t require all that much work on their end, and now I was able to fully immerse myself in a hobby I’d once believed would be impossible for me because of my disability.
In 2018, when Sony Interactive Entertainment unveiled the latest versions of two of its top-grossing video game titles — “God of War” and “Marvel’s Spider-Man” — they included new features that meant a lot to a specific subset of players: those with disabilities. To aid people with motor skill impairments, for instance, “God of War” introduced an option to press and hold a single button instead of tapping it repeatedly; it also let players with hearing disabilities adjust individual audio settings such as volume, dialogue and sound effects. For players with visual impairments, the subtitles in “Spider-Man” are now resizable and include tags that always indicate who is speaking.
Five years ago, according to Sam Thompson, a managing senior producer at Sony Interactive, it was possible to count on one hand the number of video games that had features catering to people with disabilities. Today, there are hundreds of such games. The shift, says Thompson, is “kind of amazing” — and he gives credit to a small nonprofit in Harpers Ferry, W.Va.
The group, called AbleGamers, was the brainchild of Mark Barlet, a 45-year-old disabled Air Force veteran and entrepreneur…
… Where to start? Whether you’re a longtime fan of GOOD OMENS, Gaiman’s funny book about the apocalypse co-written with the late Terry Pratchett almost 30 years ago, or a new convert thanks to the sparkling new Amazon/BBC series, now is the perfect time to hear (or revisit) the audiobook.
… For something darker that’s perfect for an extended road trip, Gaiman’s 2001 epic novel AMERICAN GODS, in which old gods clash with new ones, also comes in two unabridged versions: one narrated by Golden Voice George Guidall, and a Tenth Anniversary Edition performed by a full cast. Can’t get enough gods? Follow up with ANANSI BOYS, about trickster god Anansi, read by Lenny Henry, and NORSE MYTHOLOGY, read by Gaiman.
… In the mood for nonfiction?THE VIEW FROM THE CHEAP SEATSand ART MATTERS collect Gaiman’s essays and speeches and will give listeners insights into Gaiman’s wide-ranging interests and his writing process—and maybe even inspire you to make your own art.
… P.S. If you fell in love with Michael Sheen and David Tennant’s performances in the Good Omens series, don’t miss their own star turns on audio: Sheen gives a wonderfully immersive, Earphones Award-winning narration of Philip Pullman’s THE BOOK OF DUST: La Belle Sauvage, and Tennant brings his acting chops and Scottish charm to The Wizards of Once and How to Train Your Dragon series by just-named UK Children’s Laureate Cressida Cowell.
…Yet, in the end, Humphrey Carpenter failed in his attempt to throw the Inklings into the dustbin of irrelevance; because overall the book had the opposite effect of its intent – awakening for many, such as myself, a long-term and intense fascination with a ‘group of friends’ who were also, in reality, so much more than merely that.
(6) FROM THE BEEB. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan
Cowie.] BBC Radio 4 has aired the
second in the science and SF series Stranger Than Sci-Fi where astro-physicist
Dr Jen Gupta and comedian Alice Fraser travel the parallel worlds of science
and sci-fi.
Last week’s was on artificial wombs. Today’s is
on black holes (or frozen stars if you are of Russian persuasion and wish to
avoid the rude connotation) — “Black
Hole Jacuzzis”.
The program will be downloadable from BBC for a month
once it is broadcast
Paul Krassner being interviewed in the men’s room during the 1978 ABA convention. (photo: Andrew Porter)
Mr. Krassner was writing freelance pieces for Mad magazine in 1958 when he realized that there was no equivalent satirical publication for adults; Mad, he could see, was largely targeted at teenagers. So he started The Realist out of the Mad offices, and it began regular monthly publication. By 1967 its circulation had peaked at 100,000.
“I had no role models and no competition, just an open field mined with taboos waiting to be exploded,” Mr. Krassner wrote in his autobiography.
The magazine’s most famous cartoon was one, drawn in 1967 by the Mad artist Wally Wood, of an orgy featuring Snow White, Donald Duck and a bevy of Disney characters enjoying a variety of sexual positions. (Mickey Mouse is shown shooting heroin.) Later, digitally colored by a former Disney artist, it became a hot-selling poster that supplied Mr. Krassner with modest royalties into old age.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.
July 24, 1948 — Debut of Marvin the Martian in Bugs Bunny’s “Haredevil Hare.”
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 24, 1802 — Alexandre Dumas. The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After. Are they genre? Good question. (Died 1870.)
Born July 24, 1878 — Lord Dunsany whose full name and title was a jaw dropping Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany. So ISFDB lists him as genre for the Jorkens body of work among works. H’h. Gary Turner, who some of you will recognize from Golden Gryphon Press and elsewhere, reviewed The Collected Jorkens: Volumes One, Two, and Three, for Green Man, so I’ve linked to the review here. They also list The King of Elfland’s Daughter which I’m going to link to another review on Green Man as it’s an audio recording with a very special guest appearance by Christopher Lee. (Died 1957.)
Born July 24, 1895 — Robert Graves. Poet, historical novelist, critic. Author of, among other works, The White Goddess (a very strange book), two volumes called the Greek Myths, Seven Days in New Crete which Pringle has on his Best Hundred Fantasy Novels list and more short fiction that bears thinking about. (Died 1985.)
Born July 24, 1916 — John D. MacDonald. Primarily a mystery writer whose Travis McGee series I enjoyed immensely, he wrote a handful of genre works including the sublime The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything. ISFDB lists a collection, End of the Tiger and Other Short Stories, which I presume is genre. (Died 1986.)
Born July 24, 1936 — Mark Goddard, 83. Major Don West, the adversary of Dr. Zachary Smith, on Lost in Space. Other genre appearances were scant. He played an unnamed Detective in the early Eighties Strange Invaders and he showed up on an episode of The Next Step Beyond which investigated supposed hauntings as Larry Hollis in “Sins of Omission”. Oh, and he was an unnamed General in the Lost in Space film.
Born July 24, 1945 — Gordon Eklund, 74. He won the Nebula for Best Novelette for “If the Stars Are Gods”, co-written with Gregory Benford. They expanded it into a novel which was quite good if I remember correctly. So would anyone care to tell the story of how he came to write the Lord Tedric series which was inspired by an E.E. Doc Smith novelette?
Born July 24, 1951 — Lynda Carter, 68. Wonder Woman of course. But also Principal Powers, the headmistress of a school for superheroes in Sky High; Colonel Jessica Weaver in the vampire film Slayer; Moira Sullivan, Chloe Sullivan’s Kryptonite-empowered mother in the “Prodigy” episode of Smallville; and President Olivia Marsdin In Supergirl.
Born July 24, 1964 — Colleen Doran, 55. Comics artist and writer. work worth particularly worth noting she’s done includes Warren Ellis’ Orbiter graphic novel, Wonder Woman, Legion of Superheroes, Teen Titans, “Troll Bridge” by Neil Gaiman and her space opera series, A Distant Soil. She also did portions of The Sandman, in the “Dream Country” and “A Game of You”. She’s tuckerised Into Sandman as the character Thessaly is based on Doran.
Born July 24, 1981 — Summer Glau, 38. An impressive run in genre roles as she’s was. River Tam in Firefly and of course Serenity, followed by these performances: Tess Doerner in The 4400, as Cameron in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Bennett Halverson in Dollhouse (Is this worth seeing seeing?), Skylar Adams in Alphas and lastly Isabel Rochev who is The Ravager in Arrow.
Born July 24, 1982 — Anna Paquin, 37. Sookie Stackhouse in the True Blood series. Rogue in the X-Men franchise. She also shows up in Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams as Sarah in the “Real Life” episode.
(11) COMICS
SECTION.
Poorly Drawn Lines has a funny entry that actually references the phrase “sense of wonder.”
… You might think that I, who was the target of much Sad Puppy whining and mewling, would be sitting here happily munching on popcorn while this bit of Wikidrama unfolds. But in fact I think the deletion attempt is a problem. Neither Williamson nor Hoyt are exactly on my Christmas card list at the moment, but you know what? Both of them are solid genre writers who for years have been putting out work through a major genre publisher, and who are both actively publishing today. They are genuinely of note in the field of science fiction and fantasy. One may think their politics, in and out of the genre, are revanchist as all fuck, or that their tenure and association with the Puppy bullshit didn’t do them any favors, or that one just doesn’t care for them on a day-to-day basis for whatever reason. But none of that is here or there regarding whether, on the basis of their genre output, they are notable enough to be the subject of a damn Wikipedia article. They are! Wikipedia notability is kind of a middlin’-height bar, and they get themselves over it pretty well.
Or to flip it around, if neither Williamson nor Hoyt is notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia, there’s gonna be some bloodletting in the site’s category of science fiction and fantasy writers, because there are a fair number of Wikipedia-article-bearing genre authors who are no more notable than Hoyt or Williamson. If they go, there are legitimately many others on the chopping block as well.
According to Camestros
Felapton, “John
Scalzi is wading into the Wiki-fuss”, Scalzi also made entries to the
Wikipedia deletion discussion itself. He probably did, and although the links aren’t
working for me Camestros has the full quotes anyway.
(13) FUTURE SHOCK. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Writing in The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum takes
a look at the BBC/HBO co-produced near-future science fiction series Years
And Years. The series, which is built around the conceit of moving
through years at a rapid pace — often three years in a one-hour episode,
provides a mostly-realistic future that won’t fill many viewers with
hope. ““Years and Years” Forces Us Into the Future”.
“Years and Years” keeps leaping forward, forcing us into the future, as the economy crumbles, the ice caps melt, authoritarianism rises, and teen-agers implant phones into their hands. It’s an alarmist series, in a literal sense: it’s meant to serve as an alarm, an alert to what’s going on in front of our eyes, and where that might lead, if we don’t wake up.”
In the wake of Boris Johnson’s elevation to the post
of Prime Minister, I’d say that the series might seem overly optimistic about
the future of the United Kingdom. But I’d heartily recommend seeking out the
series.
Do you remember the good old days when we had “12 years to save the planet”?
Now it seems, there’s a growing consensus that the next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the global heating crisis, among other environmental challenges.
Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that to keep the rise in global temperatures below 1.5C this century, emissions of carbon dioxide would have to be cut by 45% by 2030.
But today, observers recognise that the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year.
The idea that 2020 is a firm deadline was eloquently addressed by one of the world’s top climate scientists, speaking back in 2017.
“The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and now director emeritus of the Potsdam Climate Institute.
The sense that the end of next year is the last chance saloon for climate change is becoming clearer all the time.
Teen activist Greta Thunberg has lashed out at French lawmakers for mocking her in a speech to parliament that was boycotted by far-right politicians.
The 16-year-old addressed legislators on Tuesday, telling them to “unite behind the science” of climate change.
She and other children were invited to France’s parliament by a cross-party group of politicians.
“You don’t have to listen to us, but you do have to listen to the science,” she said.
Ms Thunberg, whose solo protest outside the Swedish Parliament inspired the school climate strike movement, has been lauded for her emotive speeches to politicians.
But lawmakers from French parties, including the conservative Republicans and far-right National Rally, said they would shun her speech in the National Assembly.
Urging his colleagues to boycott Ms Thunberg’s speech, leadership candidate for The Republicans, Guillaume Larrive, wrote on Twitter: “We do not need gurus of the apocalypse.”
Other French legislators hurled insults at Ms Thunberg ahead of her speech, calling her a “prophetess in shorts” and the “Justin Bieber of ecology”.
Republicans MP Julien Aubert, who is also contending for his party’s leadership, suggested Ms Thunberg should win a “Nobel Prize for Fear”.
Speaking to France 2 television, Jordan Bardella, an MEP for the National Rally, equated Ms Thunberg’s campaigning efforts to a “dictatorship of perpetual emotion”.
Comedian and broadcaster Sir Michael Palin is to have surgery to fix a “leaky valve” in his heart.
The Monty Python member discovered a problem with his mitral valve – a small flap that stops blood flowing the wrong way around the heart – five years ago.
It had not affected his general fitness until earlier this year, he said.
“Recently, though, I have felt my heart having to work harder and have been advised it’s time to have the valve repaired,” he wrote on his website.
“I shall be undergoing surgery in September and should be back to normal, or rather better than normal, within three months.”
(17) PICARD & COMPANY. TV Line did a mass
interview — “’Star Trek: Picard’
Cast on the Return of Patrick Stewart’s Iconic Captain.”
The cast of ‘Star Trek: Picard’ previews the CBS All Access series with TVLine’s Kim Roots at San Diego Comic-Con 2019.
[Thanks to John A Arkansawyer, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Mike
Kennedy, Hampus Eckerman, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Martin Morse
Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Olav Rokne, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew
Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing
editor of the day Jack Lint.]
[Editor’s Note:Second in a series.Dublin 2019 has posted the 2019 WSFS Business Meeting Agenda (July 21 update) [PDF file] containing all the business submitted by the July 17 deadline. File 770 will post about some of the proposals and invite discussion.]
Another proposed rule rollback would get rid of the requirement
for people to buy Worldcon memberships by the December 31 deadline in order to
be allowed to nominate for the Hugos.
Item D.8 on the Dublin 2019 business meeting agenda is — Short
Title: No Deadline for Nominations Eligibility.
D.8 Short Title: No Deadline for Nominations Eligibility
Moved, to amend the WSFS Constitution by revising Section 3.7.1 as follows:
3.7.1: The Worldcon Committee shall conduct a poll to select the finalists for the Award voting. Each member of the administering Worldcon or the immediately preceding Worldcon as of the end of the previous calendar year shall be allowed to make up to five (5) equally weighted nominations in every category.
Proposed by: Nicholas Whyte, Kathryn Duval, Marguerite Smith, Steven Mollmann, Tammy Coxen, Hanne Madeleine Gates Paine, Doug Merrill, Karl-Johan Norén, Claire Rousseau and Vince Docherty
Commentary: At present, those who want to nominate for the Hugos must either be members of the previous year’s Worldcon, or have joined the current Worldcon before 31 December of the previous year.
Until recently, the deadline was 31 January. The move to make it a month earlier (proposed by Nicholas Whyte and Kathryn Duval in 2017, ratified in 2018) was partly prompted to fit with the then proposed three-stage nominations process (which did not pass) and partly inspired by tidiness (no other date is in the constitution).
In practice, it has led to some frustration among members who join after 31 December and who did not realise that there was a deadline.
From the administrator’s point of view, it is actually much easier to give new members nominating rights, up to the deadline, than to exclude them. This has been the practice for voting on the final ballot for the Hugos for a very long time.
This does carry a certain risk of entryism, with people joining at the last minute as part of a campaign. The deterrent here is social: Hugo voters have now demonstrated that they will react strongly against any such moves by voting for No Award ahead of finalists who have reached the ballot as a result of such campaigns.
*****
Commenting on the supporting arguments —
In practice, it has led to some frustration among members who join after 31 December and who did not realise that there was a deadline.
If this year’s administrators have had to deal with people who are unaware of the deadline, could a contributing factor be that Dublin 2019’s WSFS page fails to tell people there is any deadline in its description of the rights of members? It only says —
If you are a full or supporting member of Dublin 2019 then you are a member of WSFS. As a WSFS member (through Dublin 2019) you are entitled:
to nominate works for the 2019 Hugo Awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and the 1944 Retro Hugo Awards.
Next, there is an argument about the administrator’s convenience:
From the administrator’s point of view, it is actually much easier to give new members nominating rights, up to the deadline, than to exclude them.
Let’s remember that there has been a deadline in the rules for almost three decades – it has been part of the Hugo Administrator’s brief for a long time. That it would be “much easier” not to have to do that part of the job might not mean that it should stop being part of the job.
This has been the practice for voting on the final ballot for the Hugos for a very long time.
It is more accurate to say that practices for Hugo nominating and final ballots have been different for a very long time, and not gloss over the reasons why there are different rules for each.
“In counting the nominations, we observed a significant pattern of what appeared to us to be bloc voting, amounting to over 50 votes in some categories. The number of these votes was sufficient to place nominees on the final ballot in the following categories: Novel, Professional Artist, Fan Writer, Fan Artist, and John W. Campbell Award. More seriously, about half of these ballots were received with new Supporting Memberships, nearly all of which appeared to have been paid for by the same persons (the payments were made with blocks of consecutively-numbered $20 money orders, purchased at the same post office.) We were highly disturbed by this practice….”
Leslie Turek, editor of N3’s conrunning publication Mad 3 Party, looked for ways to make this abuse more difficult to repeat. The first of her two ideas was to encourage maximum participation by members in nominating works for the Hugos. Her other idea produced the rules change —
Second, I’m thinking of proposing a change to the voting rules, to limit nominations to people who joined the Worldcon by December 31 of the year covered by the awards… This would mean that no one could send in a membership and a Hugo [nominating] ballot at the same time: they would have to purchase their membership before December 31, and then also send in a ballot after December 31. This won’t stop a determined bloc-voter, but it would certainly mean they’d have to plan a lot further ahead and be a lot more organized.
The motion was passed for the first time in 1989. At the 1990 business meeting, it was amended to make the deadline January 31, ratified by vote, and added to the WSFS Constitution.
Even the makers of the current motion understand that by rolling back the rule they will be increasing the risk of abuse:
This does carry a certain risk of entryism, with people joining at the last minute as part of a campaign.
But they think everyone should be satisfied because they can always vote No Award – rather than continuing with a rule meant to discourage the abuse.
The deterrent here is social: Hugo voters have now demonstrated that they will react strongly against any such moves by voting for No Award ahead of finalists who have reached the ballot as a result of such campaigns.
Maybe so, but people campaign under the existing rules already – the question is, how much easier do you want to make it for them? Fans at the Dublin 2019 business meeting will need to decide if a membership deadline is a helpful tool in leveling the playing field.
(1) PRESENT AT THE CREATION. Craig Miller distributed flyers for his
forthcoming Star Wars memoir at San Diego Comic-Con. The four-page
fold-over can be seen at his Facebook page. Here’s the placeholder cover:
(2) HOYT ON THE BUBBLE? A call to delete Wikipedia’s entry
for Sarah A. Hoyt is also under consideration: “Wikipedia:Articles
for deletion/Sarah Hoyt”. Some of the supporting arguments are:
Of eleven sources on the page, all but one source back to either Archive.org remnants of her old personal website or to her husband’s website.
The final source on the page is a podcast.
Some of the content appears plagiarized from other websites or promotional materials from the publisher such as book jacket author bio text. The text of the Writing section appears copied verbatim from fan site https://www.risingshadow.net/library/author/567-sarah-a-hoyt.
(3) LAUGHTER ON THE RIGHT. Meanwhile, today’s post at According
To Hoyt comes from guest blogger Frank J. Fleming who offers “Frank
Tips for Writing Satire”.
…Just make sure you’re making fun of someone your audience doesn’t like, because if you make fun of someone they do like, that’s what you call “bad satire.” And then you’re going to get mobbed and probably doxxed. A good strategy for that is to own multiple houses.
Ha, you idiots; I wasn’t even at that house you doxxed! That was a burner home!
(4) THE ROCKET RETURNS. The Mysterious Bookshop is offering
a new edition of Anthony Boucher’s legendary 1942 novel Rocket
to the Morgue, which features characters based on his science fiction
writing contemporaries. New introduction by F. Paul Wilson.
Legendary science fiction author Fowler Faulkes may be dead, but his creation, the iconic Dr. Derringer, lives on in popular culture. Or, at least, the character would live on if not for Faulkes’s predatory and greedy heir Hilary, who, during his time as the inflexible guardian of the estate, has created countless enemies in the relatively small community of writers of the genre. So when he is stabbed nearly to death in a room with only one door, which nobody was seen entering or exiting, Foulkes suspects a writer. Fearing that the assailant will return, he asks for police protection, and when more potentially-fatal encounters follow, it becomes clear to Detective Terry Marshall and his assistant, the inquisitive nun, Sister Ursula, that death awaits Mr. Foulkes around every corner. Now, they’ll have to work overtime to thwart the would-be murderer?a task that requires a deep dive into the strange, idiosyncratic world of science fiction in its early days.
With characters based heavily on Anthony Boucher’s friends at the Manana Literary Society, including Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Jack Parsons, Rocket to the Morgue is both a classic locked room mystery and an enduring portrait of a real-life writing community. Reprinted for the first time in over thirty years, the book is a must-read for fans of mysteries and science fiction alike.
“Issues of immigration, issues of identity, all these things, they’re not new, and they’ve been there for a long time,” she says.
Okorafor talks and writes from experience. The graphic novel introduces Future through an extended scene at LaGuardia, where she queues up for screening along with aliens of all shapes and sizes, as well as a little white girl who yanks on her locks. At the checkpoint, she is pulled aside for a second screening by a security guard who asks invasive questions about whether the baby in her belly is human. The confrontation is ripped straight from an incident in 2009, when a TSA officer at LaGuardia took Okorafor to a private room to squeeze each of her four-and-a-half-foot locks for hidden contraband. Preoccupied with her hair, the officer missed the bottle of pepper spray that Okorafor had forgotten to remove from her bag. In LaGuardia, that misdirection allows the character to carry the alien through, undetected.
As an author, Okorafor travels a lot, and it’s become clear to her that airport and border crossings are more about control than safety.
“It’s the space between, a place of contention, a place of displacement, a place of fear, a place of identity,” she says. “It’s where you become very aware of all the things that you are and what they mean, in the context of where you are. And depending on who you are, that place can feel very hot or it can feel very chill.”
As you know, I do not use my connection to you on the web page or Facebook/Twitter to move outside the subjects of books, reading and writing. I am going to break that rule now.
For three years, I have kept quiet about Donald Trump and his effort to be President of the U.S. I am not a political activist. I am a writer of fantasy adventure books, and while I have opinions about politics and people involved in politics, I pretty much keep them to myself. My writing speaks for me. My writing is my voice to the larger world. But a few weeks back I listened to a young journalist speak about the importance of standing up for what you believe if you love your country. He said that if you had a platform, you had an obligation to use it. He said if you have a voice, you needed to use it. He said, finally, that writers need to write about what matters – in some form, in some way, at some time…
Brooks speaks out at length.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born July 23, 1888 — Raymond Chandler. He of the hard boiled detective genre is listed by ISFDB as doing some stories of a genre nature, to be exact ”The Bronze Door”, “The King In Yellow”, “Professor Bingo’s Snuff” and “English Summer: A Gothic Romance”. I’ve neither heard it nor read these. So who here has? “The King In Yellow” is in the Raymond Chandler megapack I just downloaded from iBooks so I will read it soon. (Died 1959.)
Born July 23, 1910 — Kendell Foster Crossen. He was the creator and writer of stories in the Forties about the Green Lama and the Milo March detective and spy novels. Though the latter is not genre, the former is as the Green Lama had supernatural powers. In the Fifties he began writing SF for Thrilling Wonder Stories, including the Manning Draco stories about an intergalactic insurance investigator, four of which are collected in Once Upon a Star: A Novel of the Future. None of his SF is on iBooks or Kindle alas. (Died 1981.)
Born July 23, 1914 — Virgil Finlay. Castle of Frankenstein calls him “part of the pulp magazine history … one of the foremost contributors of original and imaginative art work for the most memorable science fiction and fantasy publications of our time.” His best-known covers are for Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. “Roads,” a novella by Seabury Quinn, published in the January 1938 Weird Tales, and featuring a cover and interior illustrations by him, was originally published in a extremely limited numbers by Arkham House in 1948. It’s now available on iBooks though not Kindle. (Died 1971.)
Born July 23, 1923 — Cyril M. Kornbluth. I certainly read and liked The Space Merchants and The Syndic which are the two I remember reading these years on. Given his very early death, he wrote an impressive amount of fiction, particularly short fiction. Wildside Press has all of his fiction available on iBooks and Kindle in a single publication. (Died 1958.)
Born July 23, 1947 — Gardner Dozois. He was the founding editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies (and was editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction for twenty years, getting multiple Hugo and Locus Awards for those works. His writing won the Nebula Award for best short story twice, once for “The Peacemaker”, and again for “Morning Child”. Being Gardner Dozois: An Interview by Michael Swanwick covers everything he wrote to that date. (Died 2018.)
Born July 23, 1956 — Kate Thompson, 63. Author of the New Policeman trilogy which I highly recommend. Though written for children, you’ll find it quite readable. And her Down Among the Gods is a unique take on a Greek myths made intimate.
Born July 23, 1970 — Charisma Carpenter, 49. She’s best remembered as Cordelia Chase on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. She was also Kyra on Charmed and Kendall Casablancas on Veronica Mars. She was Sydney Hart in Mail Order Monster and Beth Sullivan in the direct to video Josh Kirby… Time Warrior! Franchise.
Born July 23, 1982 — Tom Mison, 37. Ichabod Crane, the lead on Sleepy Hollow. Ok did anyone here actually watch it? I had the best of intentions but never caught it. The only time I saw him was he showed up on Bones in a cross-over episode. He’s The Mime in the forthcoming Watchmen series
Born July 23, 1989 — Daniel Radcliffe, 30. Harry Potter of course. (Loved the films, didn’t read the novels.) Also, Victor Frankenstein’s assistant Igor in Victor Frankenstein, Ignatius Perrish in Horns, a horror film, and Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Old Vic in London.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
The Argyle Sweater has a novel idea – at least, Rich Horton says, “I’d read the novel in which the Salem witches did this!”
Exactly 110 years ago this Thursday, French inventor Louis Blériot became the first person to fly an airplane across the English Channel, the body of water separating the United Kingdom and France.
To honor the achievement, another French inventor plans to make his own cross-Channel trip this week — but he’ll attempt to do so while riding a flying hoverboard that looks strangely similar to the one used by Spider-Man villain the Green Goblin.
The trip will require a mid-Channel refueling,
though inventor Franky Zapata is said to be considering doing
this while hovering above a ship rather than landing on one so he can claim a
non-stop flight. In an interview with The Guardian,
Zapata (who recently overflew this year’s Bastille Day parade) laid out
his plans to make the attempt to cross from Calais to Dover. Contrasting the
Bastille Day flight to the Channel crossing, he is quoted as saying, “I used 3%
of the machine’s capabilities [on Bastille Day] and I’ll need 99% for the
Channel. It won’t be easy at all and I reckon I’ve a 30% chance of
succeeding.”
Things I have in common with my biological half-brother Rick that I don’t share with my adopted family:
Candy. We stopped by the store and I grabbed an Almond Joy, because I like to keep an emergency snack around my hotel room in case of sudden hunger. Apparently this is also Rick’s preferred candy bar.
Tattoos. My adopted family did not approve of them. Everyone in my biological family has them; I personally have six. At one point Rick and I were cruising around Hollywood looking for a tattoo parlor to give us matching brother-sister ink, but we couldn’t find anybody good so abandoned that idea for now.
Fearlessness. I flew down on one of those small commuter jets, and Katrina asked if it was scary, and I didn’t know what to say. I have a twisted scariness threshold and so does Rick. We both enjoy terrifying experiences like horror films and we both confessed we’d love to see a ghost or monster or alien or sasquatch or chupacabra or other similar frightening thing. He’s more outdoorsy and used to do crazy things involving motorcycles and championship fights. I’m the inside type and get my kicks from litigation deadlines and murdering my fellow video game players (and writing action-adventure stories, that too). We are a clan of warriors and although we occasionally ripple with anxiety, we also tend to have rock steady nerves….
Nasa has outlined more details of its plans for a landing craft that will take humans to the lunar surface.
The plans call for an initial version of the lander to be built for landing on the Moon by 2024; it would then be followed by an enhanced version.
The news comes as work was completed on the Orion spacecraft that will fly around the Moon in 2021.
This mission, called Artemis-1, will pave the way for the first attempt to land since 1972.
The presolicitation notice to industry calls for proposals on an initial lander design capable of carrying two people down to the Moon’s South Pole in 2024.
Companies will then be given the option to develop an enhanced lander capable of carrying four astronauts to the lunar surface. It would also be able to stay for longer, including through the two-week lunar night.
This lander would support Nasa’s plans for a “sustainable” return to the Moon that would eventually involve the construction of an outpost on the surface.
Iron Age roundhouses, Roman burials and Saxon pottery have been discovered in a “hugely important and hitherto unknown settlement”.
The seven month-long dig in Warboys in Cambridgeshire also uncovered “a rare example” of “early Saxon occupation mingled with the latest Roman remains”.
Archaeologist Stephen Macaulay said: “We almost never find actual physical evidence of this.”
The settlement reverted to agricultural use after the 7th Century.
(15) SUPERMAN’S BREAKFAST. Here’s a 3-minute video with “uncut
footage of George Reeves directing test of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes commercial at
his home”
Hackers who breached a Russian intelligence contractor found that it had been trying to crack the Tor browser and been working on other secret projects, the BBC has learned.
Tor is an anonymous web browser, used by those wishing to access the dark web and avoid government surveillance.
It is very popular in Russia.
The hackers stole some 7.5 terabytes of data from SyTech, a contractor for Russia’s Federal Security Service FSB, and included details of its projects.
It is not clear how successful the attempt to crack the anonymous browser was, as the method relied heavily on luck to match Tor users to their activity.
Hackers from a group known as 0v1ru$ gained access to the company on 13 July, and replaced its internet homepage with a smug smiley face often used by internet trolls.
…On the Midway’s deck sits a white Sea King helicopter painted with the famous 66 squadron number and painted on the nose of the helicopter are the silhouettes of five Apollo capsules. But walk around to the other side of the helicopter and you’ll see the number “68” painted on the other side.
If you head about 800 kilometers to the northwest, to Pier Three at the former Alameda Naval Air Station and go aboard the USS Hornet Museum, on her aft flight deck you will see another Sea King, also painted with a large “66” on the side of her fuselage. The Sea King on display on the Hornet was used in the movie Apollo 13, which is why it retains its markings from the helicopter carrier Iwo Jima, which was the recovery ship for that mission. The helicopter was obtained from the Navy and restored off-site before being hoisted aboard the Hornet. The museum has several other helicopters that are painted like the recovery aircraft for the American space program, including a Piesecki HUP-25 Retriever of the type used to ferry John Glenn from the USS Noa to the carrier USS Randolph following his Friendship 7 orbital flight in 1962, and a UH-34 Seahorse of the type used for the Gemini and Apollo recoveries.
The real Helo 66, the one in the Apollo 11 documentary and all of those famous Apollo era photographs, crashed into the ocean off the coast of San Diego in 1975. That helicopter, BuNo 152711, was lost in a tragic accident during training to hunt Soviet submarines.
The Republic of Ireland’s postal service has apologised for spelling “the moon” wrong in Irish on its new commemorative stamps celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing.
The postal service, known as An Post, launched the stamps last week.
Four astronauts are featured on the stamps with Irish ancestry.
The Irish word for moon is “gealach”. But the stamp accidently spelled it “gaelach”, which means being Gaelic, Irish or relating to the Scottish Highlands.
Instead of reading “The 50th Anniversary of the First Moon Landing”, it now reads “50th Anniversary of the First Landing on the Irish”.
[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge,
Martin Morse Wooster, rcade, Mike Kennedy, Rich Horton, Carl Slaughter,
Contrarius, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to
File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
While the Sad and Rabid Puppies slates were filling up most of the slots on the 2015 and 2016 Hugo ballots, majorities at the Worldcon business meetings passed and ratified several rules changes that made it much more difficult for that to keep on happening. The success of these majorities has tended to overshadow how many fans did not want any changes made – no matter how often Vox Day dictated what made the ballot – or else did not want these particularchanges made. And there are business meeting regulars who evidently feel now is the time to start turning back the clock.
Here’s a matched set of proposals to end the “5 and 6” part of the Hugo nomination reforms. If you are going to the Dublin 2019 business meeting, you will have to decide whether the claims made about convenience and efficiency warrant undoing the protective rules put on the books just a few years ago.
Moved, to suspend the changes introduced by 5 and 6 for the following year’s Hugo Award nominations (only).
Proposed by: Nicholas Whyte, Kathryn Duval, Marguerite Smith, Steven Mollmann, Ian Stockdale, Tammy Coxen, Hanne Madeleine Gates Paine, Karl-Johan Norén, and Vince Docherty
Commentary: Please see the commentary for Amendment D.7.
D.7 Short Title: Five and Five
Moved, to amend Section 3.8.1 by deleting and adding material as follows:
3.8.1: Except as provided below, the final Award ballots shall list in each category the sixfive eligible nominees receiving the most nominations as determined by the process described in Section 3.9.
Provided that unless this amendment is re-ratified by the 2022 Business Meeting, the changes to Section 3.8.1 shall be repealed, and
Provided that the question of re-ratification shall be automatically be placed on the agenda of the 2022 Business Meeting with any constitutional amendments awaiting ratification; and
Provided further that any business meeting prior to 2022 may move to suspend the changes introduced by 5 and 6 for the following year’s Hugo Award nominations (only).
Proposed by: Nicholas Whyte, Kathryn Duval, Marguerite Smith, Steven Mollmann, Ian Stockdale, Tammy Coxen, Hanne Madeleine Gates Paine, Karl-Johan Norén, and Vince Docherty
Commentary: “Five and Six” was one of the reforms made in 2015-16 to minimise the future effects of block voting. It already has a 2022 sunset clause and a provision that any business meeting may suspend its operation for the following year’s Hugo Awards.
After three years, we now have enough information to be clear: EPH does make a difference to deter bad actors, “Five and Six” rather less. On the other hand, having 20% more finalists does significantly increase the administrative and financial burden on each year’s Worldcon, as anyone who has been to a recent pre-Hugo reception can testify.
In addition, the burden placed by the Hugo process on diligent readers has also increased in recent years, with the addition of a new category of novels (the Lodestar) and especially of the Best Series category. In 2019 there are 31 categories in the Hugo Awards, a record. It would be a kindness to voters to reduce the required reading from six finalists per category back to five.
Although there is a 2022 sunset clause for “Five and Six”, realistically we already have enough information to repeal it now, and to make life a little easier for Hugo administrators and voters from 2020 onwards.
The Constitution normally takes two years to amend, but in this particular instance the WSFS Business Meeting also has the power to suspend Five and Six for the following year. So we can decide now to do that for 2020 (see Resolution B.3), with the constitutional amendment taking effect in 2021.
The losers will be those who had placed sixth in recent years. There is only one case of a sixth-placed finalist at nominations stage going on to win the Hugo in the last three years (the rather odd situation of Best Fan Artist in 2017, where two finalists were disqualified). On the other hand, a reduced pool of finalists increases the cachet of being among that number.
*****
“After three years, we now have enough information to be clear: EPH does make a difference to deter bad actors, ‘Five and Six’ rather less. On the other hand, having 20% more finalists does significantly increase the administrative and financial burden on each year’s Worldcon, as anyone who has been to a recent pre-Hugo reception can testify.”
That’s it – that’s the argument — the sixth nominees are eating
too many canapes at the pre-Hugo reception?
And if “Five and Six” is conceded to have some effect – at the time it was passed people already knew its impact would be “rather less” – then let’s take pleasure that the nominees eating the cheese and crackers were not picked by somebody’s slate.
The shortlist for the Prix Rosny Aîné 2019 for French science
fiction has been announced by Joseph Altairac, awards secretary. There
are two categories, novels and short stories. The winners, decided by a vote of
the members, will be revealed at the French national SF convention at l’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, August 22-25.
ROMANS / NOVELS
Jean BARET : Bonheur™ (Le Bélial)
Catherine DUFOUR : Entends la nuit (L’Atalante)
Estelle FAYE : Les Nuages de Magellan (Scrineo)
Johan HELIOT : Frankenstein 1918 (L’Atalante)
Camille LEBOULANGER : Malboire (L’Atalante)
Émilie QUERBALEC : Les Oubliés d’Ushtâr (Nats Editions)
NOUVELLES / SHORT FICTION
Laurent GENEFORT : Conatus
Stéphane CROENNE : Ne signe pas ça, Chloé !
Catherine DUFOUR : Sans retour et sans nous
Léo HENRY : Écouter plus fort
Sylvain LAMUR : Les Chants de l’engoulevent
Christian LÉOURIER : Vue en perspective du Jardin des Plantes
