Pixel Scroll 11/26 The Strange High Pixels on the Blog

(1) TRADITIONAL THANKS. Joe Vasicek’s “Giving Thanks” at One Thousand and One Parsecs is one of the best posts I saw that combined an sf theme with a serious reflection on the holiday.

So in the spirit of that first Thanksgiving feast, here are the things that I am especially thankful for this year:

  • I am thankful for my near and extended family. Tolstoy was wrong when he said that all happy families are alike: every family has their own quirks, even the ones that hold together. I wouldn’t give up my family’s quirks for anything.
  • I am thankful to live in a free country, where my rights to life, liberty, and property are respected and honored. I am also thankful for the brave men and women of our armed forces who sacrifice so much to keep it free.
  • I am thankful for the opportunity to pursue a career as an author, and for the flexibility and control that indie publishing provides. I have no one but myself to blame for my failures, but my successes are all my own. Even after four years, it’s still exhilarating.
  • I am thankful for my readers, who have made and continue to make this publishing journey possible. I am thankful for all that they do that supports me, from buying and reading my books to sharing with friends, posting reviews, sending me fan mail, and connecting in a hundred other little ways that together make this whole thing worthwhile. Seriously, you guys are awesome. The only thing I could ask is to have more of you!

(2) AMAZING THANKS. Steve Davidson sends holiday wishes to all in a post at Amazing Stories.

Whether you occupy the North American continent or not, and whether you celebrate “Thanksgiving Day” or not, I would like to take this opportunity on behalf of myself and all of the supporters, contributors, members and passersby at Amazing Stories to wish you a few moments of happy reflection on this day.

I urge you to take a moment to think back over the year and remember the people and happenings you’re thankful for this year.

I’m thankful for my wife and her support, and of the support and well-wishes I receive from our extended family….

(3) CONTRARY THANKS. David Brin ends his post “Cool science stuff… and more reasons to be thankful” at Contrary Brin with minor key gratitude.

Okay!  That great big pile of cool items ought to keep you busy, clicking and skimming while groaning and loosening your belts on Thanksgiving (my favorite holiday)… or else however you folks elsewhere around the world celebrate Thursday.  (Ah… Thursday!)

Don’t let grouches undermine our confidence.  Star Trek awaits.  Do thrive and persevere.

(4) DAUGHTERS. Three writers who love their daughters for exactly who they are:

(5) PREMIERE CONTEST. Omaze.com’s new charity fundraiser offers a chance to “Win a Trip to the Premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens”. Deadline to enter is December 4 at 11:59 PST. The winner will be announced December 5.

Charity:

Africa Cancer Foundation; Arts in the Armed Forces (AITAF); Barnardos UK; Central London Samaritans; Damilola Taylor Trust; fStop Warrior Project; Feeding America; Make-A-Wish; Malala Fund; PACER: Children’s Mental Health and Emotional or Behavioral Disorders Project; Phab; St. Francis Hospice, Raheny; The Circle; UNICEF; Union of Concerned Scientists (“Charity”)

Prize Provider:

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (“Prize Provider”)

Details:

This experience includes attending the red carpet premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (“Picture”) in either Los Angeles or London. The attendance by any specific cast member, filmmakers, or such other talent from the Picture during the Premiere is not guaranteed and shall be subject to such talent’s availability and Sponsor’s and/or Prize Providers’ sole discretion. Neither Sponsor nor Prize Providers guarantee any type of meeting or photo opportunity with any specific cast member or talent from the Picture during the trip.

(6) CAPALDI IN AUCKLAND. “’Dr Who’ arrives to soothe pain” in the New Zealand Herald.

SPOILER WARNING. MAYBE.

Peter Capaldi

Peter Capaldi

Though Peter Capaldi, who plays the 12th incarnation of the sci-fi character hinted that, as it has been for more than 50 years, things in the show aren’t always clear-cut.

“My message for them would be life is tough,” Capaldi joked to The Herald about fans upset by Clara’s passing, sounding not unlike his second most-famous character, harsh spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker from political comedy The Thick of It.

“But Doctor Who is never quite what it seems. We haven’t told a lie. The story is the story but the Doctor is not going to rest. He is not going to accept that that is the last time he will be see Clara.”

(7) DAVID TENNANT. Io9 points to“David Tennant Celebrates 100 Years of General Relativity in This Clever Animation”, a YouTube video.

(8) Today In History

  • November 26, 1922 — In Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, British archaeologists Howard Carter and George Carnarvon became the first humans to enter King Tutankhamen’s treasure-laden tomb in more than 3,000 years.

(9) Today’s Birthday Boy

  • Born November 26, 1919Frederik Pohl. Pohl himself had started out in sf as a teenaged fan – not without controversy, for he was one of the six Futurians who were thrown out of the First Worldcon in 1939. The scales of justice would balance later when he was named guest of honor at the 1972 Worldcon, L.A.Con I.

(10) Leah Schnelbach’s “Frederik Pohl Made Doing Literally Everything Look Easy” at Tor.com is an entertaining overview of one of the field’s great figure. One paragraph may need a small fix.

Agent. Frederik Pohl attempted a career as a specialist science fiction literary agent, at a time when that wasn’t really a thing that existed. By the early 1950s he had a large number of clients, but he finally decided to close the agency to focus on editorial work. He was the only editor Isaac Asimov ever had.

Perhaps she meant “only agent”? Asimov’s work went under the hand of lots of other editors, according to the Internet Science Fiction Database.

(11) WRITER DISCIPLINE. Marc Aplin tells “How Writing Is A Lot Like Fighting – Part 1: Introduction” at Fantasy Faction.

The key to both statements is that the speaker’s practice/training has given them a degree of confidence that allows them to enter into a familiar situation (whether opening a word document or stepping into a ring/cage) and allowing their instincts to take over. It is important that you understand here that this isn’t simply ‘willingness’ to do their chosen activity (although that will be the first step), this is instead such a strong grasp of fundamentals that the person can switch their conscious mind off (i.e. ‘enter the zone’).

(12) CELTIC EXHIBIT. “British Museum Explores Celtic Identity” by Sean McLachlan at Black Gate.

For many of us, the Celts are an enduring fascination. Their art, their mysterious culture, and the perception that so many of us are descended from them makes the Celts one of the most popular ancient societies. So it’s surprising that the British Museum hasn’t had a major Celtic exhibition for forty years.

That’s changed with Celts: Art and Identity, a huge collection of artifacts from across the Celtic world and many works of art from the modern Celtic Revival. The exhibition is at pains to make clear that the name ‘Celts’ doesn’t refer to a single people who can be traced through time, and it has been appropriated over the last 300 years to reflect modern identities in Britain, Ireland, and elsewhere. “Celtic” is an artistic and cultural term, not a racial one.

The first thing visitors see is a quote by some guy named J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote in 1963, “To many, perhaps most people. . .’Celtic’ of any sort is. . .a magic bag into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come. . .anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight.”

(13) HUMBLE BUNDLE. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America announced that the newest  Book Bundle will be supporting SFWA’s Givers Fund.

Pay what you want for Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire, One-Eyed Jack (Elizabeth Bear), Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Word Puppets (Mary Robinette Kowal).

Pay more than the average price to also receive Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, The Year’s Best Science & Fantasy Novellas: 2015, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015, New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird, and Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful.

Pay $15 or more for all of that plus Ad Astra: The 50th Anniversary SFWA Cookbook, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2015, and Warrior Women.

Choose the price. Together, these books ordinarily go for up to $86. Here at Humble Bundle, though, you name the price! …

Support charity. Choose where the money goes — between the developers and three charitable causes (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Worldbuilders, or the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America–Giver’s Fund).

The bundle will be available til December 9.

(14) LETSON REVIEW. At Locus Online, Russell Letson begins his review of Greg Bear’s Killing Titan with an admission:

I should probably cop to this: I’m fascinated by military history, but I’ve never been much taken by what I think of as genre military SF, by which I mean adventure stories set in the military establishment and emphasizing weaponry, com­radeship, chains of command, career progress, and (of course) combat. As much as I enjoyed and understood Starship Troopers and The Forever War, I have found the run of routine combat or military-life series, well, routine and no match for the best of their historical-setting cousins (C.S. Forester, Bernard Cornwell, Pat­rick O’Brian, George MacDonald Fraser).

Nevertheless, it’s a positive review of Bear’s novel.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Greg.]

75 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/26 The Strange High Pixels on the Blog

  1. Trying to draw a neat flow diagram between the politics, politicians and parties of the Founding Era and those of today’s USA is madness, guys.

    Oh sure. But there’s more Democratic-Republican DNA in the Democratic Party than there is in the Republican Party.

    The Democratic-Republicans were opposed by the Federalists, but the Federalists were a spent force by the early 1800s, and the Democratic-Republicans dominated politics until roughly 1820, and then split, with the larger chunk migrating into the Democratic Party, and the remainder merging with the ideological remnants of the Federalists and forming the Whig Party. The Democratic Party has existed in some form or another since the 1820s, but has morphed from a primarily Southern party in orientation into what we have now, through a number of iterations. The Whig coalition fell apart in the 1850s, and the pieces were picked up by the new Republican Party, which was a mostly northern party for a while, and eventually became aligned with the power brokers in the north, who were the harbingers of big business and banking. Both the Democrats and Republicans have gone though several shifts in the twentieth century, and bear limited resemblance to anything that existed in 1860, and certainly no resemblance to anything that existed in Jefferson’s time.

    In short, anyone who says “Jefferson was a Republican” is really glossing over a lot of history, and they are wrong as a matter of definitions too.

  2. MSB :

    “where my rights to life, liberty, and property are respected and honored”

    I’ll be more thankful when everyone can say that. Happy Thanksgiving!

    If not everybody can say that, then nobody can say that – if rights to life, liberty and property are contingent on whether a cop or a politician likes your skin color, political ideology, or religion, then they are not rights.

    America ceased to be the land of the free a while back.

  3. My Dad was DFL County Chairman back in the 1950s and 60s when it was still the JJ dinner. I am much happier calling it the Humphrey Dinner, and not just because my parents were later on his staff at the Senate and Vice Presidency.

    Jackson was appalling.

  4. @Aaron:

    *whimper*

    And yes, my friend is wrong, and furthermore being dishonest, since he is a professional historian (more or less) and knows perfectly well what he’s doing.

    I like him for many good reasons, but that bugs me.

  5. The best story I read this week was “Little Men with Knives” by L.S. Johnson. It’s the dark story of a divorced school-cafeteria worker whose life is not completely ordinary because every evening she puts a plate of food on her porch for the two-foot-tall dwarfs she’s seen emerging from a hole under her hedge. Now, this year I’ve read a lot of stories about women breaking free of adversity and bad lives, and most of them elicit nothing but a shrugging “That’s nice.” Why did this one impress me more? Maybe because the protagonist’s traps of poverty, powerlessness, and mental paralysis, and the little social details of the shitty town she lives in, are depicted with such squirm-worthy exactitude. Maybe because the author applies equal precision to depicting the steps she takes to get herself out — hanvqrq, ubjrire zbenyyl dhrfgvbanoyr ure zrnaf. Vg’f n ovg uneq gb srry fbeel sbe ure uhzna ivpgvz, gubhtu fur fubhyq’ir unq zber rzcngul sbe gur punvarq-hc qbt. Gur zra va guvf fuvggl gbja nera’g qbvat jryy, ohg gurl bayl hfr jung yvggyr cbjre gurl unir gb shegure tevaq qbja gur jbzra va gurve yvirf. (Ab jbaqre gur cebgntbavfg guvaxf bs ure urycref nf yvggyr *zra*.) Guvf vf gur ubeebe-fgbel glcr bs gur erirefny naq cnlonpx fgbel (gur jbez gheaf), nobhg fbzrbar ng gur irel obggbz bs gur fbpvny beqre svaqvat ure cbjre.
    Content Note: Animal death; physical and mental abuse; gore; suicide of a secondary character

  6. Looking at one bit of Camestros’s diagram I can see one possible link between early 1800’s and now.

    In 1812 there was a splinter of the Republicans called the Clintonians. If Hilary makes past the Dem primary and the Republicans continue in the awful direction they are going, I can imagine some moderate Republican voters jumping ship to support the largely pro-corporate HC.

  7. Kendall: Thanks for the tip on The Bees ebook at Amazon. I’ve had it on my wish list and the $1.99 price today was too good to pass up.

  8. @Beth in MA

    though I’m still not sure how I managed to explode butter in the microwave.

    I’ve done that. I think it happens when the butter doesn’t melt evenly – when you have a pool in the middle surrounded by unmelted butter, that’s a bad sign. I’ve taken to using a lower setting on the microwave and watching it like a hawk because cleaning the microwave after that happens is no fun at all.

  9. Also this week, I read Dreams of Shreds and Tatters by Amanda Downum, which was… okay. It’s based on the Carcosa mythos of Robert Jackson Chambers (King in Yellow etc.); in my opinion Downum largely failed in conveying ineffable terror. It’s been so long since I read Chambers that I don’t recall if the extremely negative attitude to sex in this novel is taken over from him. Maybe not. I’m not saying that because one of the two main characters, Liz, is asexual, and her boyfriend Alex is celibate by choice, which works for him. Their warm romantic relationship is really appealing. But theirs is the only relationship, out of many, that survives to the end of the book with both partners alive. Over and over, sex plays the part of a destructive force, a lure, a drug… The other main character, Blake, does not follow up on his feeling that there’s something wrong about a visit from his dead lover Alain because the monster in Alain’s shape distracts him with sex and then taunts him that when he tries to remember Alain “you’ll only be thinking of me”, that is, the carnal rather than the real spiritual person. Said monster, defeated at the climax of the book, is a maenad, the incarnation of unruly libido, and the Yellow King’s right-hand woman; she is opposed by her twin in chaste white robes who helps the heroes and says “my sister’s path of flesh and blood is not the only way.”

    Anyway, this somewhat uncommon attitude is not what dragged the book down for me; rather, I found it repetitive, with poorly depicted characters and too many “tics” in the writing.

    Content Note: Self-harm, suicide, plentiful violence

  10. The history of American political parties is giving me flashbacks to studying C19th British party politics. Some of the patterns are very similar even if the issues were different.

    Spent too long on trains today, the only advantage of which was making a good start on Uprooted; I’m entirely hooked.

  11. I had a mixed reaction to “Little Men with Knives.” There was nice writing and evocative imagery — the dwarves’ source of clothing in particular — but the relationship between the protagonists and the dwarves was too flat. I felt a connection to the protagonist because of the struggles she had endured, but I wanted more meat on the conflict that drove the story.

  12. the relationship between the protagonists and the dwarves was too flat.

    Ubj qrrc fubhyq gur qjneirf or jura gurl’er svtzragf bs ure vzntvangvba? Seems to me that the conflict was her needing to get out of her terrible circumstances — “man vs. society” as the textbooks say. This was convincing because society, and its mechanisms of oppression, was depicted in detail.

  13. Re: Little Men with Knives

    Ubj qrrc fubhyq gur qjneirf or jura gurl’er svtzragf bs ure vzntvangvba?

    Vzntvanel sevraqf unir zber arrq gb or vagrerfgvat guna erny barf, abg yrff. Vs zvar pbhyq bayl trfgher naq zhggre havagryyvtvoyl ng zr, V’q svaq n arj frg bs vzntvanel sevraqf.

  14. To whoever it was who mentioned the Hasbro robotic cats – thanks! My grandmother, who is 92 and had never been catless until she moved into a nursing home, is just entranced by it. So are the other residents – I may have won Best Christmas Gift this year 🙂

  15. @Camnestros

    Good diagram. Only quibble I’d have is that you can say that the Republican party has had a much clearer line since its founding in the 1850s – at root, and from the beginning, it was the party of large industrial concerns. All that has changed is the the clothing that those concerns have worn. In the 19th Century, they saw the threat as tradition and thus took up the emblems of progress, and so were the champion of abolition early, and very much the party of science and modernity latter.

    In the 20th Century, when the threat has been seen as communism, or mass movements of labor, they became the party of cross and flag. In the 21st this has continued. The one common thread is that the end of the sentence is always “whoever will say that no-one should ever regulate big business.”

    And thus all the jibes about property.

  16. @rcade: (bowing) 🙂 I haven’t read the sample for The Bees yet, but I still have time! I did wind up buying No Return (another one I listed) and started reading it last night..

  17. Burp.

    Ate and drank into stupor Thursday. Ate and drank leftovers today. Napped extensively. Thanksgiving is a truly excellent holiday.

    Alas, we are out of leftovers, so I have to rustle up something from now on.

  18. @lurkertype: “Alas, we are out of leftovers, so I have to rustle up something from now on.”

    Just don’t opt for beef. Some places still hang cattle rustlers. 😉

    I had fake leftovers yesterday, by which I mean a couple of turkey pot pies. I’ll probably venture out to do some actual grocery shopping today, since I need to pick up a couple of packages anyway. Not looking forward to the sore back, but at least I can make the one trip and relax for the rest of the day.

  19. TheYoungPretender on November 27, 2015 at 8:37 pm said:
    @Camnestros

    Good diagram. Only quibble I’d have is that you can say that the Republican party has had a much clearer line since its founding in the 1850s – at root, and from the beginning, it was the party of large industrial concerns. All that has changed is the the clothing that those concerns have worn. In the 19th Century, they saw the threat as tradition and thus took up the emblems of progress, and so were the champion of abolition early, and very much the party of science and modernity latter.

    In the 20th Century, when the threat has been seen as communism, or mass movements of labor, they became the party of cross and flag. In the 21st this has continued. The one common thread is that the end of the sentence is always “whoever will say that no-one should ever regulate big business.”

    And thus all the jibes about property.

    Not at all.

    One of the firm beliefs of my great great grandfather, one of the founders of the Republican Party and a supporter of industry *and* environmentalism, was that business should indeed be regulated in the name of an orderly and just society.

    Thus he (and my great great aunt, also a significant figure) pushed for factory inspections, safe work conditions, eight-hour work days, at least one day a week off for workers, minimum wages, and banning child labor.

    This in addition to food safety regulation, national parks, equal rights for black people, and equal rights for women.

    Abraham Lincoln pushed to use telegraphy, the Internet of the nineteenth century, and laughed at “old fogeys” (pretty sure he used that actual term) who feared new technology. The love and embrace of the new was built into the Republican Party at its founding.

    The Republican Party is absolutely not what it was.

    But it really was what it was. Progressivism was not just a symbol used to cover up industrialist rapacity.

    How the party has changed is very complex.

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