Pixel Scroll 7/17

Praise, complaints and tales of derring-didn’t fill the Scroll today.

(1) George Barr, Fan Guest of Honor at MidAmeriCon, the 1976 Worldcon, unexpectedly popped up in a soft-sell blog entry for PR firm Signal Hill, “Science Fiction Illustrator Finds Home”

Barr’s art, often marked by a distinctive watercolor-over-ballpoint pen technique, illustrated science fiction magazines for decades, including the covers of “Amazing Stories,” “Fantastic Stories” and “If.” Barr also brought books to life through his work with publishers like DAW Books and Ace Books.

Prior to compiling this impressive resume, Barr did a great deal of free work for “fanzines,” non-professional publications popular in the science fiction world. Not only did it help build his portfolio, but it was a way to get his illustrations out, he says. The work even earned him a Hugo Award for best fan artist at the World Science Fiction Convention in 1968.

Barr earned these achievements with only one formal art course under his belt. Though he says he learned a lot about color, harmony and composition, the emphasis on commercial art did not play toward his interests. The freedom of the fantasy genre spoke to him most, he says.

“There was absolutely nothing you could imagine that could not occur,” says Barr of the genre. “You can conceivably be drawing anything that ever existed or might.”

Barr is 78 and has good things to say about the retirement community where he lives.

(2) Was the late Christopher Lee’s illustrious war record a complete fabrication? The Daily Mail writer who penned Lee’s obituary is now deconstructing his claims.

Until the end of the war, the man who would be Dracula served with the air force as an intelligence officer, briefing and debriefing pilots, and liaising with other units.

It was during this time that he claimed to have served in some way with the Long Range Desert Group and the SAS.

As Gavin Mortimer has shown, there is simply no evidence to support this. Lee may have worked alongside these units in some way, but he was emphatically not a part of them.

‘Lee didn’t exactly lie,’ says Mortimer. ‘But he did lead us on, encouraging us to believe [his job] had involved more derring-do than it actually did.’

In an interview he gave to Belgian television to promote Lord Of The Rings, Lee claimed also to have served with a small special forces organisation called No 1 Demolition Squadron, better known as Popski’s Private Army (PPA) after its charismatic leader Major Vladimir Peniakoff.

Like the Long Range Desert Group and the SAS, the PPA was a raiding and reconnaissance unit, and its exploits are venerated by many.

Again, there is no hard evidence to support Lee’s claim that he worked with the PPA.

(3) It’s not so much the complaints about Comic-Con that drew me to Heidi MacDonald’s roundup of what the convention’s critics had to say, but what she revealed in passing about the support other cons give to fans with disabilities, which far exceeds anything I see at the cons I attend:

There were many complaints about Hall H this year as always. Was it different? Not sure. I do know at least one person told me he got in and found many empty seats inside while a huge line was still waiting to get in, but that could be due to safety measures for crowd control. I would like to draw your attention to this post by Nick Eskey on the Talk Back panel and the subsequent comment threads as it deals with disabled attendees and the line wait. While to some hearing a fellow complain about not having a place to plug in his CPAP machine while waiting for Hall H may seem the height of folly, but you know, physically challenged fans have the same right to experience whatever it is they want out of Hall H as anyone else.

This is that guy that only slept 16 hours and needed his CPAP machine. You apparently only caught part of what I was saying, which is, that if they had not removed the outlets I could have used my CPAP machine and slept outside just fine. Besides that, however, you missed the point completely which is not everyone with disabilities can sleep outside. Because of that they should be given special consideration for their placement in line. What other convention gives ADA this sort of consideration? Try Emerald City Comic Con and PAX Prime, both in Seattle and both allow ADA to ALWAYS be first in line. Try DragonCon in Atlanta, where ADA have volunteers that will guide them through the convention, hold their spot in line and generally assist them in whatever way needed. I was on the BoD for OkCon and we bent over backwards to assist our ADA. Maybe because we had people on the board with disabilities.

And there’s even more in the Nick Eskey post she links to.

(4) On the other hand, fans are responding skeptically to a blogger’s complaint to SDCC management that the nine-year-old Who fan in his party was traumatized by the horror-oriented displays near the items they went to see. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the complaint myself. As the parent of a 13-year-old, I have discovered my former ideas of what’s okay for kids were pretty out-of-touch.

I attended SDCC this year as part of a larger group. One of our party, a nine-year-old, is a HUGE Whovian (we are a large Whovian family), so the first day at the convention we immediately made our way to the BBC America booth for Doctor Who merchandise, photo ops, and chatting with the BBC America representatives onsite about Doctor Who and upcoming events. We found that the booth was sandwiched between a booth for AMC’s The Walking Dead and Starz’s upcoming series Ash vs Evil Dead. Though problematic on its own, we were extra upset to find that both horror booths had their walls covered in TVs playing, on loop, terrifying clips of zombie horror (The Walking Dead) and absurdly gory violence (Ash vs Evil Dead), of which the latter’s level of violence I, even as a 24 year old man, actively avoid because it’s an anxiety trigger to me.

That night our 9 year-old woke up screaming with nightmares about zombies attacking her, and the next day she burst into tears when we tried to enter the con floor (despite the fact that we were far from the horror booths). For the rest of the con, while we were able to get her onto the con floor without a meltdown, we had to make a wide berth around the BBC America booth because of its proximity to the Walking Dead and Ash vs Evil Dead booths, which was secondarily upsetting for her because she was previously extremely excited to be near the Doctor Who things (especially the TARDIS set up at the Hollywood Sci-Fi Museum booth, also placed next to the Ash vs Evil Dead booth – she wanted to take her photo with the TARDIS so badly).

…Thank you so much for all that you do to organize and present this convention every year. Beyond this, we had very little issues with the rest of the con and overall had a great time. It’s simply unfortunate that the experience was marred by the emotional trauma inadvertently caused to our child stemming from the placement of BBC America’s booth between two of the biggest horror booths at the convention.

(5) John King Tarpinian says Mystery & Imagination Bookshop in Glendale is getting a lot of people wanting to buy reading copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, which led to a surprising discovery. “They are running out of paperback reading copies. A good customer says she wants a copy, the bookshop has one paperback left but Malcolm remembers that Christine paid $2 for a 40th anniversary hardback the other day and figures he’d be nice by offering it to the customer for $5 when she comes in. Malcolm, as is his habit, opens the book to discover it is SIGNED by Harper Lee. This is how a $2 book becomes a $1000 book.”

 

(6) While analyzing how the Hugos fit into contemporary fandom, Karl-Johan Norén points out that everyone thinks he/she is at the center of fandom.

(Ur-)Fandom came to Sweden in the 1950s. In the early 70s Tolkien societies evolved here from it, in many ways similar to SCA in the United States. The ties between the Tolkien societies and fandom in Sweden are still strong, and we can mingle relatively easily. However, media fandom, cosplay, LARP, and lots of other stuff were direct imports from the United States. Here the cultural differences are much larger and more profound. Partly this is because of the direct import, partly this is because Swedish fandom after the disastrous feuds of the 80s closed in on itself and very much focused on the core of discussing science fiction as books.

Put another way, the splinter lines within all the various off-shoots, special fandoms, and so are much easier to see here in Sweden. But the same tendencies are very much present in the United States, I imagine.

Another thing which has happened, from the 90s forward, is that the Internet has made it much easier to set up special interest groups that can gain critical size and connectivity. Baen’s Bar is one early such example, but there are many more nowadays.

So which of these disparate groups do the label “fandom” belong to nowadays? All of them. However, there is a tendency to use the word “fandom” as a shorthand for “the specific fannish group that I happen to be a member of”. I believe this is especially true within “core” fandom, the one that evolved around the pulp magazines in the 20s and 30s, with a primary interest in written science fiction. Historically, I think that movement can claim having first dibs on the label, but it helps to remember that fandom nowadays is much bigger and diverse than “core” fandom is.

(7) And as a kind of postscript, here are John Scalzi’s, Cheryl Morgan’s and Fred Kiesche’s tweets inspired by the report Michael Z. Williamson is voting No Award in every Hugo category.

170 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/17

  1. Kyra:

    It’s up to you, of course, but I, at least, would find it easier to keep track of the conversation if you started the voting in that day’s Pixels. Because we can’t search comments, and we can’t control the length of comment pages, it’s much easier to find a previous comment if one can at least narrow it down by date.

    Does that make sense?

  2. 1. ENEMIES FROM UP THERE, ENEMIES FROM DOWN HERE
    H. G. Wells: War of the Worlds
    Hate to take it away from Butler, but WotW is foundational. Also, recently I stayed up until 3am in the bathtub rereading it…

    2. ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, WE CONTROL YOUR WORLD
    Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
    I tried reading Foundation again recently, and couldn’t get past the leaden prose. Also, BNW still seems terrifyingly possible.

    3. AS ABOVE, DROWNBELOW
    C. J. Cherryh: Downbelow Station
    Never could get into Ballard- and DBS is a masterwork.

    4. THE FIRST CYBERPUNK NOVEL VS. THE FIRST CYBERPUNK NOVEL
    William Gibson: Neuromancer
    I couldn’t get past Our Hero the Rapist and the whole conceit of sequestering women falls apart in logical and practical ways (for a start-why can’t women teleport?) Neuromancer on the other hand is still incredibly influential and the world depiction is applied future shock.

    5. I AM TOTALLY NOT LOST IN THE COMPLEXITIES OF THIS NARRATIVE
    Frank Herbert: Dune
    Even if it has Yet Another Goddamn Galactic Empire (YAGGE), I love the weird ecology and worldbuilding.

    6. HATE IS THE PLAN THE PLAN IS DEATH
    George Orwell: 1984
    Much as I love Tiptree, I see this all the time in our politics.

    7. DO YOU GROK ME, MY DROOG?
    Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
    Both very of their time, but ACO is to me, better written.

    8. STRANGE PEOPLE, STRANGE DAYS
    Kate Wilhelm: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
    I bounced off Dhalgren, hard. Also, the predictive element of WLTSBS seems more believable than ever.

    9. NEAR THE BEGINNING AND NEAR THE END
    Jules Verne: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
    The Verne is still the hardest of hard SF, and I also find the characters more engaging.

    10. IS UNDERSTANDING POSSIBLE Y/N?
    Ursula K. LeGuin: The Left Hand of the
    Yes Solaris is a masterpiece, but I found the LeGuin so much more readable.

    11. THE MOVIES REALLY DIDN’T DO EITHER OF THEM JUSTICE, HONESTLY
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
    No contest. Shelley basically defined a subgenre.

    12. TRAPPED IN A WORLD THEY NEVER MADE
    Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale
    Ufortunately, prescient enough that people are using it as a how-to manual instead of a warning. The current War Against Women shows that THT is still quite relevant

    13. LEARNING MORALITY — THE HARD WAY
    Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
    I couldn’t complete MtH.

    14. FAR TRAVELLERS
    Madeleine L’Engle: A Wrinkle in Time
    I couldn’t really being myself to care what happened to the characters in UoW. And AWiT is possibly THE classic TA SF book.

    15. UM, ALL THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE, HASN’T IT?
    Walter M. Miller Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz
    Much as I love Zelazney and that novel, I have to give it to the grander historical sweep of ACfL. Also, there’s the really awful section about transpeople in TLoL.

    16. THESE TWO ARE PROBABLY NOT GOING TO GET ALONG
    Joanna Russ: The Female Man
    Honestly, after reading “Creating the Innocent Killer”, I can’t stand Ender’s Game.

  3. Jim Henley on July 20, 2015 at 2:32 pm said:
    @Aaron:
    You are speaking in unapproved phrases.
    Let no one receive more than one hundred blows.

    LoL – also I enjoyed your surprise guest appearance on Language Log 🙂

  4. 1. ENEMIES FROM UP THERE, ENEMIES FROM DOWN HERE
    H. G. Wells: War of the Worlds

    2. ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, WE CONTROL YOUR WORLD
    Isaac Asimov: Foundation and Empire

    4. THE FIRST CYBERPUNK NOVEL VS. THE FIRST CYBERPUNK NOVEL
    William Gibson: Neuromancer

    5. I AM TOTALLY NOT LOST IN THE COMPLEXITIES OF THIS NARRATIVE
    Frank Herbert: Dune

    6. HATE IS THE PLAN THE PLAN IS DEATH
    George Orwell: 1984

    7. DO YOU GROK ME, MY DROOG?
    Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land

    9. NEAR THE BEGINNING AND NEAR THE END
    Jules Verne: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

    10. IS UNDERSTANDING POSSIBLE Y/N?
    Ursula K. LeGuin: The Left Hand of Darkness

    11. THE MOVIES REALLY DIDN’T DO EITHER OF THEM JUSTICE, HONESTLY
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

    12. TRAPPED IN A WORLD THEY NEVER MADE
    Phillip K. Dick: Ubik

    13. LEARNING MORALITY — THE HARD WAY
    Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451

    14. FAR TRAVELLERS
    Iain M. Banks: Use of Weapons

    15. UM, ALL THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE, HASN’T IT?
    Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light

  5. OK, I’m going to call it here (unless there are last-minute surprises or something …)

    War of the Worlds defeats Kindred by 5 goals
    Brave New World EXACTLY TIES Foundation and Empire!
    Downbelow Station defeats The Drowned World by 4 goals
    Neuromancer defeats The Stars My Destination by 5 goals
    Dune defeats The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World by 8 goals
    Her Smoke Rose Up Forever defeats 1984 by 5 goals
    Stranger in a Strange Land defeats A Clockwork Orange by 5 goals
    Dhalgren defeats Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by 4 goals
    Childhood’s End defeats 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by 1 goal (a real squeaker!)
    The Left Hand of Darkness defeats Solaris by 16 goals (massive win!)
    Frankenstein defeats The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by 17 goals (even more massive win!)
    The Handmaid’s Tale defeats Ubik by 4 goals
    Fahrenheit 451 defeats More Than Human by 5 goals
    Use of Weapons defeats A Wrinkle in Time by 5.5 goals
    Lord of Light defeats A Canticle for Leibowitz by 3 goals (close throughout as expected)
    The Female Man defeats Ender’s Game by 6 goals

  6. With regard to Sir Christopher Lee’s role in World War II, I read an interview with Jon Pertwee in which he said that he, Lee, and Ian Fleming were a three-man unit working together — and given Pertwee’s love for gadgets, he said he was their “Q”, designing and constructing things as needed for missions.

    It’s been written that much of what Sir Christopher did in that period is still classified, so I think the controversy, such as it is, is moot until such time occurs that the full record of his war work is released.

  7. My current plan for a tie is to advance both to the next round. I want to keep brackets a multiple of two, so right now I plan that for every tie, one bracket in the following round will turn into a three-way contest (a triangular field shall be constructed in the manner of Myth Conceptions.) Two books that have previously tied each other will not be placed in the same bracket again if at all possible; the random pairings will be rerolled if that happens.

    As requested by at least one person, I plan to put the new round up in a more recent Pixel Scroll thread as soon as I have it sorted.

  8. @David

    With regard to Sir Christopher Lee’s role in World War II, I read an interview with Jon Pertwee in which he said that he, Lee, and Ian Fleming were a three-man unit working together — and given Pertwee’s love for gadgets, he said he was their “Q”, designing and constructing things as needed for missions.

    That sounds like the premise for a great sitcom.

  9. I think The Ginger Doctor has valid concerns. As I wrote to him,

    “I’m sorry that some of the fans here don’t understand the difference between “scary monsters”, which created the fine British tradition of children watching Doctor Who from behind the sofa so they can duck and hide at the scary parts, and bloody gore-splatter. I’m 59, and it upsets and triggers me as much as it does you and your child.

    Some people are so inured to bloody violence that they aren’t capable now (regardless of if they were before) of seeing this distinction.

    And there’s this, an actual line from an episode, which by metaphor may explain some of the above:

    ‘Open your eyes, Lisa. You can’t become desensitized to the violence if you don’t watch the violence.’ — Bart Simpson to Lisa Simpson as they sat in front of their living room television.”

    Someone else said that the AMC and BBC America cable channels are owned in common, which if true would explain the adjacent placement of the Doctor Who, The Walking Dead, and Ash vs. Evil Dead exhibit booths. In future years, perhaps they should spend the big nickle and hire a few extra staff people for the first example to be physically separate from the second example and whatever third examples there might be.

    Since Comic-Con already separates out sexually explicit exhibits into an “Adults Only” area, there is no reason why a bloodily explicit “Adults Only” exhibit section couldn’t be created as well.

    I realize that the convention isn’t aimed at children, but there must have been over fifty kids in home-made Iron Man costumes for Robert Downey, Jr. to judge in a previous year’s (last year?) convention, from the video of it I saw, and in collections of pictures of random costumed fans taken at most any anime/comic conventions, there is usually at least one, if not more, of a parent and child in costume together. Kids love costumes, just as they do on Hallowe’en, and that some fannish parents will bring their little ones to also have fun has to be taken into account.

  10. 1. ENEMIES FROM UP THERE, ENEMIES FROM DOWN HERE
    H. G. Wells: War of the Worlds
    Octavia Butler: Kindred
    Kindred—it’s a better book, better written, with a dazzling cold open.

    2. ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, WE CONTROL YOUR WORLD
    Isaac Asimov: Foundation and Empire
    Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
    Foundation and Empire. True confession: Always felt Brave New World was overrated, despite all its predictive powers, and anything involving the Mule in F&E is spectacular.

    4. THE FIRST CYBERPUNK NOVEL VS. THE FIRST CYBERPUNK NOVEL
    William Gibson: Neuromancer
    Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination
    Neuromancer, though I was much younger when I read Bester, so I might like it more now that I’m not 12. But I don’t have time to check!

    7. DO YOU GROK ME, MY DROOG?
    Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
    Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
    Stranger in a Strange Land. Maybe the Kubrick movie is coloring my memory of the book, but Stranger is more humane and more imaginative.

    11. THE MOVIES REALLY DIDN’T DO EITHER OF THEM JUSTICE, HONESTLY
    Douglas Adams: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
    Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
    The hardest one. Douglas Adams is one of my biggest influences, so I go with Restaurant at the End of the Universe (I’d vote for Hitchhikers as the most representative instead, or the entire original trilogy, because Life The Universe and Everything, in what may be the best retcon ever, actually answers the question “Why did the bowl of petunias think ‘Oh no, not again?’
    Frankenstein has held up remarkably well after 200+ years and is a force of nature. But, when all is said and done, 42.

    12. TRAPPED IN A WORLD THEY NEVER MADE
    Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale
    Phillip K. Dick: Ubik
    Handmaid’s Tale—and it’s not close. Handmaid’s Tale is more suspenseful, more disturbing, more relevant. HOWEVER if you swapped in FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID (the best PKD I’ve read), it’d be a much tougher call.

    14. FAR TRAVELLERS
    Iain M. Banks: Use of Weapons
    Madeleine L’Engle: A Wrinkle in Time
    A Wrinkle in Time; Banks left me cold.

    3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 15: Have not read either one. 6,13,16: only read one out of two.

  11. tonieee wrote:

    “That sounds like the premise for a great sitcom.”

    I hadn’t considered that

    Yes. Yes, it does.

  12. Just as well voting is closed. I think there wasn’t a single bracket in which I had read both works (Though I was still one of the ones asking for both Canticle and Lord of Light to go on, as I WANT to read both, and that isn’t remotely true of all of the unread books.)

    I really want to see the fantasy version when the SF one is done. I will do ever-so-much better at at least knowing the candidates….

  13. Hi, Greg! I will add your votes for the first bracket round into the records. (Your vote would have given the decisive victory to Foundation and Empire, but since that had been a tie, Foundation and Empire is still moving on up anyway, so happily nothing got shortchanged, I think.)

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