Pixel Scroll 11/12 Vampire Elf-eared Zombie Shape-Shifting Warriors Of Gor

(1) An Al Hirschfeld signed lithograph of the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew is for sale by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society.

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This a signed limited edition (127 of 375) print originally owned by science fiction fan legend Marty Gear. The lithograph shows the cast of the Star Trek the Next Generation TV Series and was commissioned by cast member Brent Spiner (Commander Data) with many given to the cast and crew of the show during the show’s original run as gifts…. This hand signed numbered print was dry mounted and framed by Marty Gear in a silver frame with glass and was bequeathed to BSFS in Marty’s will. It is in perfect condition. We are offering this item for $1,495.00 plus tax and shipping.

(2) “(Almost) Every SFF Adaptation Coming to Television and Movie Theaters!” compiled by Natalie Zutter at Tor.com.

Thanks to Game of Thrones and Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, we’ve entered a golden age of sci-fi and fantasy properties being developed for film and television. It seems that nearly every network and studio has snatched up the rights to old and new classics, with a bevy of projects in production or premiering in the coming months. We’ve compiled a master list of every SFF adaptation currently in the works, from American Gods to Y: The Last Man. And surprising no one, prolific writers Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi each have a number of projects in varying stages of development.

(3) The fourth installment of Superversive Blog’s interview with Ruth Johnston, author of Re-modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance, is titled “Culture War Post 4: The War Over Archetypes!”

L. Jagi Lamplighter poses the questions in this series described as “Speculative Fiction meets Jung.”

Q: So the group that is interested in exploring gender roles and seeing them as less restrictive probably loves books like Ancillary Justice or Left Hand of Darkness, which do just that. In fact, it was probably a major factor in Ancillary Justice winning the Hugo in 2014.

A: If there’s one thing the two sides in the Hugo controversy agree on, it’s that the most important thing about Ancillary Justice is not the story itself but the way it used pronouns to obscure gender. Everyone is “she” until the narrator has a reason to identify male or female. It’s explained in the story as just part of the narrator’s native language which, like Chinese and Turkish, doesn’t specify gender in a normal sentence. The narrator, writing in English, is forced to make gender choices in every sentence, so instead just uses “she” for everyone. But I had to read some of the story to understand the thing about language, because when people talk about Ancillary Justice, they elevate the single pronoun to such importance that it’s like the story was really just about obscuring gender. If they liked the story, it’s because at last we’re disrupting mental assumptions that gender will always be visible. If they didn’t like the story, it’s because obscuring gender became more important than whatever was happening.

So that’s a great example of the wider culture battle interfering in science fiction and crowning a winner in what might otherwise just be a dispute about literary taste. Once it’s connected to the wider question of how we, in real life, see men and women, then it’s about life and death, good and evil. It’s like they’re saying, “If you don’t like this story, maybe it’s because you want to suppress the “‘other’.” Those who didn’t like the story respond in defensiveness: “well maybe if you like the story, it’s because you care more about message! You just want to disrupt society.” Now it’s no longer about literary taste, it’s about hurting people or destroying the culture, and things “just got real,” as they say. There are pre-existing political sides to take, and these sides are ready to swing into action even if they don’t care about science fiction or fantasy.

(4) From a website devoted to Joyce Carol Oates — “Into the Void: Lovecraft and the World Fantasy Award”.

Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Fossil-Figures” from the collection The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares won a World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her story collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque was a finalist for the collection award in 1995. The award itself is a bust of H.P. Lovecraft.

At the link is a Twitter conversation about the news that the Lovecraft statue will no longer be used for the award.

(5) The publisher of Castalia House, Vox Day, would like everyone to know the firm is doing well.

Two _1

Two simultaneous #1 bestsellers isn’t bad, especially when you only publish one book each month.

It’s also worth noting that in the Military Strategy category, Castalia House currently publishes five of the top 40 bestsellers.

(6) Kate Paulk, never known for her economy of prose, could have distilled today’s Mad Genius Club post into this sentence:

And yet, when I pointed out that our dear anti-Puppy friends were behaving like the Nazis did, complete with examples and quotes, I was horrible, just absolutely horrible.

(7) But this is a strange field. John Scalzi wrote a post reassuring the original Sad Puppy, Larry Correia, that when it comes to book tour audiences, “Size Matters Not”.

I’ve been actively touring novels since 2007, when Tor put me on tour for The Last Colony. Since that time, across several tours, I’d say my largest tour event had several hundred people at it, and my smallest event had… three. Yes, three. I was at the time a New York Times best selling, award-winning author, and yet three people showed up to a tour event of mine. And they were lovely people! And we had a fine time of it, the three of them and I. But still: Three.

Because sometimes that happens. And it happens to every writer. Ask nearly any writer who has done an event, and they will tell you a tale of at least one of their events populated by crickets and nothing else. Yes, even the best sellers. And here’s the thing about that: Even with the best sellers, it’s an event often in the not-too-recent past. Every time you do an event, you roll the dice. Sometimes you win and get a lot of people showing up. Sometimes you lose and you spend an awkward hour talking to the embarrassed bookstore staff. Either way, you deal with it, and then it’s off to the next one.

Also, tangentially: the dude on Twitter trying to plink one off of Larry because of the size of his event crowd? Kind of a dick. …

And then those seven or eight or forty or however many people will go home feeling valued by Larry, and they’ll keep buying his books and keep recommending them to friends and others. Because that’s the point and that’s how it’s done. The value of doing a book event is not only about who is in the crowd that day. It’s the knock-on effect from there — building relationships with fans and booksellers, and benefiting when they talk you up to friends and customers and so on….

(8) It really must be National Pat Your Puppy Day, because George R.R. Martin claimed to have found a silver lining in the Hugo disaster:

Last time I talked about some possible nominees for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. This time I want to focus on Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. In other words, best television episode. (No, not officially, but that’s what it usually comes down to, and let’s ignore the silliness of nominating an Easter Egg or an acceptance speech from the previous year’s Hugos).

I was no fan of the efforts of Puppies to game the Hugo Awards last year. I don’t think I have been shy in my opinions on that subject. But I will give the Puppies this much — their efforts did break the decade-long hold that Dr. Who fandom had on the nominations in this category. I have no problem with episodes of DR. WHO being nominated, and indeed winning, mind you… and the Doctor has won plenty of times in this category over the past decade… but when four of the six finalists are from the same category, that strikes me as way unbalanced and, well, greedy. The Doctor’s fans love their show, I know, but there is a LOT of great SF and fantasy on the tube right now. Nominate DR. WHO, by all means… but leave some room for someone else, please.

(9) Even S. T. Joshi got some love today — in Black Gate’s post “New Treasures: The Madness of Cthulhu, Volume Two, edited by S.T. Joshi”.

The reason his stock is still flying high is because Black Gate’s review of Volume 1 is quoted on the back cover…

G. Winston Hyatt wrote:

Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness serves as the inspiration for many of the authors in The Madness of Cthulhu… it’s masterful in concept and at times in execution. A fusion of Antarctic adventure, science fiction, and early-modern horror, it not only offers chilling passages with an escalating sense of dread and isolation, but also constructs a world horrifying in its implications about mankind…

The second volume contains 14 brand new stories inspired by Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.

(10) As SF Site News explains, “In 2014, SFWA developed an accessibility checklist for its internal events, such as the Nebula Award Weekend or the New York Reception. SFWA has now elected to make the checklist public and available to other events which may desire to have some guidelines.”

“Accessibility Checklist for SFWA Spaces” is now posted at the SFWA Blog.

The SFWA Accessibility Checklist is provided for the use of conventions and other gatherings who want to ensure that their event is fully accessible by all attendees.

The checklist was assembled by Matthew Johnson, Teresa Frohock, Peggy Rae Sapienza, Tanya Washburn, and Bill Thomasson.

(11) RedWombat in a comment on File 770.

Let us go then, me and you,
When the awards are nearly due,
Like shoggoths dissected upon a table;
Let us go, through eldritch winding blogs,
Muttering and wordy slogs,
Of those upset in one-line tweets
And those who pound the well-worn beats:
“PC censorship!”–a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What the hell is that?”
You behold the bust of Lovecraft.

In the room the fans go fore and aft,
Talking of H. Phillip Lovecraft.

(12) Glenn Fleishman visited Amazon’s new brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle to shoot some photos – and in the process caught a labeling error in the sf section where Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is listed as the 2015 Hugo Award winner. (It won in 2002.)

Amazon FleishmanAmerican Gods Fleishman

Pixel Scroll 10/9 Pixellary Mercy

(1) While I missed the story when this was done for the 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz movie, the image is still good for a laugh.

Super-sized version of the infamous Witch’s legs, complete with sparkling red ruby slippers, replicating an iconic scene from the movie ‘The Wizard of OZ’ in central London on December 1, 2009. As part of the Wizard of Oz Christmas season at Harrods.

Harrods_2

(2) “The Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise” is one of the iconic skits from Saturday Night Live’s first season in 1976. A.V. Club writer Phil Dyess-Nugent discussed it in a 2013 retrospective:

The acknowledged sketch-comedy masterpiece in these episodes is “The Last Voyage Of The Starship Enterprise,” a marvelously detailed Star Trek parody with a very fan-geek sensibility—which is a surprise coming from the writer, O’Donoghue, who you might not think of as the kind of person who would declare fealty to a cult sci-fi TV show. Maybe that, too, is in indication of how much the world has changed. Here’s another: The network suit played by Gould who appears on the deck of the Enterprise to explain the show’s cancellation has nothing to say about demographics or desirable marketing niches, but simply “low Nielsen ratings.” Chevy Chase’s Mr. Spock explains to his captain that Nielsen ratings “were a primitive system of estimating television viewers, once used in the mid-twentieth century.”

Watch it free on Hulu.

John_Belushi,_SNL_Vulcan_salute

(3) Another Lovecraft-inspired brew from Naragansett Beer will be released at a party October 10 in Providence, RI.

Back from the dead just in time for the spookiest month of the year, our beloved Bock has morphed into the Reanimator Helles Lager. At 6.5% ABV and 35 IBUs, we’ve reanimated our classic Bock by dry-hopping it with Czech Saaz to boost its hop presence with a sophisticated and spicy twist. You won’t want to miss this Lovecraft inspired brew and you can be one of the first try it on Saturday, October 10th at the Columbus Theatre! The party starts at 8PM and a special screening of Re-animator starts at 9PM to celebrate the film’s 30th Anniversary and the release of our latest beer!

lovecraft-reanimator-release

(4) Charles Stross is worried that low Earth orbit will eventually become as trash-strewn as an LA freeway onramp, which will make it nearly impossible to use it for satellites and navigation.

Here’s a technological question with philosophical side-effects that’s been bugging me for the past few days …

Today, the commercial exploitation of outer space appears to be a growth area. Barely a week goes by without a satellite launch somewhere on the planet. SpaceX has a gigantic order book and a contract to ferry astronauts to the ISS, probably starting in 2018; United Launch Alliance have a similar manned space taxi under development, and there are multiple competing projects under way to fill low earth orbit with constellations of hundreds of small data relay satellites to bring internet connectivity to the entire planet. For the first time since the 1960s it’s beginning to look as if human activity beyond low earth orbit is a distinct possibility within the next decade.

But there’s a fly in the ointment.

Kessler Syndrome, or collisional cascading, is a nightmare scenario for space activity. Proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, it proposes that at a certain critical density, orbiting debris shed by satellites and launch vehicles will begin to impact on and shatter other satellites, producing a cascade of more debris, so that the probability of any given satellite being hit rises, leading to a chain reaction that effectively renders access to low earth orbit unacceptably hazardous…..

(5) In the meantime, space exploration continues unimpeded by junk in the sky, as they will be happy to explain tomorrow at JPL’s annual Open House.

Saturday, October 10 and Sunday, October 11, 2015

9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

No tickets or reservations required

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, invites the public to its annual Open House on October 10-11,2015. The event is free of charge and takes visitors on a “ride” through the wonders of space. Highlights include a life-size model of Mars Science Laboratory, demonstrations from numerous space missions, JPL’s machine shop, where robotic spacecraft parts are built, and the Microdevices Lab, where engineers and scientists use tiny technology to revolutionize space exploration.

 

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(6) The work of composer John Williams is synonymous with science fiction media. He will be honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award on June 9, 2016. Williams is the 44th winner, but the first composer to receive the award.

John Williams’ storied career as the composer behind many of the greatest American films and television series of all time boasts over 150 credits across seven decades. Perhaps best known for his enduring collaboration with director Steven Spielberg, his scores are among the most iconic and recognizable in film history, from the edge-of-your-seat Jaws (1975) motif to the emotional swell of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and the haunting elegies of Schindler’s List (1993). Always epic in scale, his music has helped define over half a century of the motion picture medium. Three of Williams’ scores landed on AFI’s 100 Years of Film Scores — a list of the 25 greatest American film scores of all time — including the unforgettable Star Wars (1977) soundtrack, at number one. With five Academy Award wins and 49 nominations in total, Williams holds the record for the most Oscar nominations of any living person.

Besides Star Wars, he’s written themes for TV’s The Time Tunnel, Lost In Space, Land of the Giants, and movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Superman.

(7) Lela E. Buis tries to fathom what kept Michael A. Burstein from winning any of the Hugos he’s been nominated for

More today on Michael A. Burstein, who’s been nominated 10 times for a Hugo but never won. Just achieving the nomination shows he was a very popular author during these years. His nominations include the short story category, which requires at least 5% of the cast nominations in order to appear on the ballot. So what’s the problem? What was he missing that would have put him over the top?

(8) The third installment of Superversive Blog’s interview with Ruth Johnston, author of Re-modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance, is titled “If You Had Introverted Intuition, My Dinosaur”.

L. Jagi Lamplighter poses the questions in this series described as “Speculative Fiction meets Jung.” Rachel Swirsky’s now-famous story is the subject of analysis this time.

[Ruth Johnson] A: I think this story is a wonderful example of the hardest to explain, most mysterious mental function we can observe in personality: Introverted Intuition. Both kinds of Intuition are involved in a search for meaning, but Introverted Intuition is particularly intent on finding cloaked, disguised, suppressed truth.

I think that’s what this story is about. Of course, it isn’t really a story; it’s a scene that poses questions about meaning. There isn’t any movement in plot, rather the motion consists of a gradual revealing of the speaker’s state of mind. The scene: A woman sits by a hospital bed, where her fiancé, an archeologist, is in a coma. He was beaten by five drunken men for unknown reasons. The only dinosaur in the story is in her imagination, of course, as she envisions what would have been different if he had been even a small carnivore. The title poses the question: what if, instead of being who you are, you had been something else?

I think the key to the story is that she feels a small Tyrannosaurus Rex would have been a truer form for the soul of the man she loves. It would reveal his true nature, whereas his powerless natural appearance forms a kind of mask that makes him look like he ought to be a victim. The exercise in imagining is pointless if being a dinosaur wasn’t somehow a truer truth than the natural one; otherwise we could ask what if he were a Mack truck or an onion. By emphasizing that the dinosaur would be the same size as the human, she is making it clear that she sees the transformation as revelation, not random change. “If you actually looked like your true inner nature, my love, then people would see that you are strong and this would be a deterrent to getting hurt.”

When you posit that the appearance of a human being might be a disguise, a false archetype that covers truth, you are deep into Introverted Intuition’s territory.

(8) Disney and Lucasfilm will hold a massive world premiere for Star Wars: The Force Awakens in Los Angeles on Dec. 14, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. A premiere in London immediately follows.

(9) See the trading card with the most explicit Star Wars photo of all time.

The final chapter in the story of the biggest boner in Topps’ history.

The year was 1977 and the U.S. was caught in the throes of a pop culture phenomenon unlike anything it had seen before, all because of a little movie called Star Wars. The Topps Company, known for making pocket-sized stacks of popular baseball players since the 1930s, lucked out when Kenner’s subsidiary Donruss passed on the Star Wars license. What followed was one of the most successful series of trading cards ever created.

Five sets of cards and stickers were produced over the course of two years. In a time before the Wookiepedia, these were one of the few ways to get in-depth information about the beloved soon-to-be franchise. But the original editor of those cards, Gary Gerani, and his team made one small mistake that will go down in history.

(10) Today in History

Is the anniversary literally today? I don’t know, but Prague’s astronomical clock is 605 years old, and Google has marked the occasion today, October 9, with a Google Doodle.

The ornate clock, known as the Orloj, is one of Prague’s most recognised touristic spectacles, and is located in the Old Town Square in the centre of the city. Its hourly shows draw curious visitors from all over the world, where 12 apostles emerge from two windows to nod at the crowds below.

 

https://instagram.com/p/8GZCYnGeVg/

(11) Creature Features presents The Monster Squad on October 11:

1PM – Sun Oct 11, 2015

$15 – $65 – The Theatre at Ace Hotel, Los Angeles

Tickets on sale now

Creature Features haunts The Theatre at Ace Hotel with this special cast & crew reunion screening of THE MONSTER SQUAD, the epic 1987 smackdown between an intrepid band of middle schoolers and five of horrordom’s most fearsome beasties, led by Count Dracula himself!

This spook-tacular matinee showing will include two panel discussions before and after the film, hosted by Eric “Quint” Vespe of Aint It Cool News. Guests include: actors Andre Gower, Ryan Lambert, Ashley Bank and Stephen Macht, make-up FX artists Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, and composer Bruce Broughton, who will be on hand to premiere the brand new deluxe CD release of his score to the film, courtesy of La-La Land Records.

 

Monster Squad

(12) This brings back memories. The cartoon commercial for Bonomo Turkish Taffy

(13) A Gamera remake is on the way. There was a trailer shown at this weekend’s New York Comic Con.

(14) I know that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, so I will remain silent about “The Competitive World of AOL Disc Collecting”.

The discs came like a swarm of locusts, burrowing into post boxes and sliding through mail slots. They popped out of cereal boxes and appeared on meal trays during airline flights. They fell out of magazines and Happy Meals. They were stocked at the checkout counters of Best Buy, near the popcorn at Blockbuster, on bookshelves at Barnes & Noble. The ubiquity of AOL discs—those free marketing materials sent by American Online in the 90s to entice people to sign up for internet service—could be likened to world domination….

Of the bunch, Sloan Cline is arguably the most prolific collector. By her estimates, she has over 4,000 unique AOL discs stored in the basement of her home in Kansas. Every CD in her collection is different: There are discs in every color, ones in plastic cases or shrink-wrap packaging, ones promising various hours on the free trial. Versions one through three came on floppy disk, and some of the early ones came in metal tins—Sloan Cline has those kinds, too. There were also branded AOL discs, like her prized Marvel Spider-Man disc, and foreign AOL discs, which she got from her friends in Canada and Argentina.

(15) The National Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, NY has announced the shortlist for 2015 induction. The selection will be revealed November 5. The Hall of Fame typically inducts three toys each year, with last year’s honors going to miniature green army men, the Rubik’s Cube and bubbles.

The 2015 finalists are: American Girl dolls, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, spinning tops, Twister, Wiffle Ball, Battleship, puppets, Jenga, coloring books, Playmobil, Super Soaker and scooters.

The National Hall of Fame said the toys are judged based on icon status, longevity, discovery and innovation.

 

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(16) Today’s Birthday Boys

Born 1950 – David Brin

Born 1954 — Scott Bakula, famed for Quantum Leap and as Captain Jonathan Archer on Enterprise.

Born 1964 – Guillermo del Toro, acclaimed movie director.

(17) Guillermo del Toro talked about his second house/man cave which is filled with all sorts of horror movie memorabilia on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

And he graciously worked the crowd outside.

[Thanks to Iphinome, Will R., Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Sylvia Sotomayor.]

Pixel Scroll 9/23 Pixel Exigente!

(1) Today in History —

1846 – Eighth planet discovered — “German astronomer Johann Gottfriend Galle discovers the planet Neptune at the Berlin Observatory”.

Neptune, generally the eighth planet from the sun, was postulated by the French astronomer Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier, who calculated the approximate location of the planet by studying gravity-induced disturbances in the motions of Uranus. On September 23, 1846, Le Verrier informed Galle of his findings, and the same night Galle and his assistant Heinrich Louis d’Arrest identified Neptune at their observatory in Berlin. Noting its movement relative to background stars over 24 hours confirmed that it was a planet.

(2) A judge checked in with the Salt Lake Comic Con and San Diego Comic Con folks this week, who assured him they are working on a settlement:

Settlement talks are under way between San Diego Comic-Con and Salt Lake Comic Con over the use of the words “comic con,” FOX 13 is told.

Lawyers for both conventions met with a federal judge in San Diego on Tuesday to update the status of the lawsuit. Salt Lake Comic Con co-founder Bryan Brandenburg said both sides were working to reach an agreement.

“The judge wanted us to check in to see if progress had been made in the settlement. We reported the parties are still working out an agreement, but that we haven’t reached settlement, at least not yet,” he told FOX 13.

Brandenburg would not reveal any details about a possible settlement. The judge scheduled another hearing next month.

(3) Forbes writer Scott Mendelson theorizes a trailer will help draw people to theaters when The Martian opens this weekend in “’X-Men: Apocalypse’ Trailer Is Hyping ‘The Martian’”

If the rumor mill is to be believed, and in this case it makes sense, 20th Century Fox will be debuting the first much-anticipated teaser for X-Men: Apocalypse over the next week alongside the theatrical debut of Ridley Scott’s The Martian….

Back in the old days, you attached an important trailer to a big movie so that lots of people would see that big movie. Or at least you attached the trailer for your next big movie before your current big movie. That of course still happens, was we’ve seen from Universal/Comcast Corp. all summer long (Furious 7 trailers Straight Outta Compton or Fifty Shades of Grey trailers Crimson Peak)….

But here is a situation where the presence of a trailer for an upcoming blockbuster acts as major marketing not just for the movie in question but for the current (and arguably less commercial by default) release. At this point, a X-Men trailer helps The Martain more than it helps X-Men: Apocalypse. None of this is problematic in any real way, it just amused me.

(4) SF Signal’s new “MIND MELD: The Translated Books and Why We Love Them”, curated by James Aquilone, discusses the favorite translated sf of Aidan Doyle, Justin Howe (10badhabits.com), Tiemen Zwaan , Rachel S. Cordasco (facebook.com/bookishlywitty), Anatoly Belilovsky (http://loldoc.net), Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, Amy Sisson, and Matthew Johnson (www.irregularverbs.ca).

(5) I tend to be interested in what Mad Genius Club columnists say specifically about the craft of writing,such as Sarah A. Hoyt’s advice about revisions.

[First of eight points.]

1- when polishing a story limit yourself to three passes: sense, wording and typos.  Chances are if you go on (and boy, could you go on) you’ll take all the flavor and individuality out of the piece.  Flavor and individuality is why we read your story, rather than someone else’s.  Yes, I know it’s not perfect. Let it go.  No story is ever perfect.

(6) In her post “Harassment: What do we do?” dated August 20, Lydy Nickerson took Sasquan’s recent experience as a starting point to analyze the handling of harassment at conventions.

The thing that’s most recently caught my attention has been Lou Antonelli and Sasquan. For those of you who haven’t been making a hobby of the Great Puppygate Train Wreck, the extremely short version is that some guy, in this case Lou Antonelli, sent a letter to the Spokane police alleging that David Gerrold, one of the GoH for Sasquan, was dangerously mentally unbalanced and might incite violence. He then bragged about it on a podcast. There was a round of shock, awe, and horror; an apology to Gerrold from Antonelli; and other things. Sasquan was notified, as is proper. David Gerrold accepted Lou Antonelli’s apology. Sasquan issued a statement saying, very roughly, that Antonelli had violated the Code of Conduct, but for Reasons, including a request from Gerrold, they’ve decided not to ban him.

So, then there’s a bunch of Monday morning quarterbacking from just about everybody. Which is fine by me, I like detailed analysis, outrage, and train wrecks. But I’m paying special attention, because on a much smaller scale, this could be me. A lot of people were very upset, and there were two things that caught my eye. The first was a demand for consistent application of the rules, and the second was for transparency. There’s a lot of variation on those two themes, but those were the two I am currently noodling on. Consistent application was often equated with zero tolerance.

So, let’s start with the actual, root problem. People who feel vulnerable to harassment at science fiction conventions do not trust those conventions to fairly and justly administer the rules. I cannot come close to doing justice to how very reasonable it is for them to feel that way. That distrust? We’ve built it, brick and mortar, over years. It’s not just well deserved, it’s hugely massively utterly deserved. Harassment policies have been non-existent, or poorly explained or hugely badly enforced. We have multiple known cases of people being allowed to fuck up because they were well connected, or because the concom didn’t want to be arsed, or because concoms just didn’t think there was a problem….

(7) Paul Weimer on “Orwellian unpersoning on the Sad/Rabid Puppies Part” at Blog, Jvstin Style.

You know, its rich that Sad Rabid Puppies would go so far as to unperson someone they accused of being a “Social Justice Warrior”

http://leogrin.com/CimmerianBlog/your-cimmerian-bloggers/ http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/09/leo-grin-grins-when-he-slays/

Sure, freedom of association and all that…but this looks awfully…Orwellian?

The actual thing that caused this seems to be that one of the former bloggers said something bad about someone and their association with super genius Theodore Beale.

(8) John Scalzi in “eBook Sales and Author Incomes and All That Jazz” at Whatever.

I’ve noted before that I think in general there are three kinds of authors: Dinosaurs, mammals and cockroaches, where the dinosaurs are authors tied to an existing publishing model and are threatened when it is diminished or goes away, mammals are the authors who rise to success with a new publishing model (but who then risk becoming dinosaurs at a later date), and cockroaches are the authors who survive regardless of era, because they adapt to how the market is, rather than how they want it to be. Right now, I think publishing might be top-heavy with dinosaurs, and we’re seeing that reflected in that Author’s Guild survey.

What we’re missing — or at least what I haven’t seen — is reliable data showing that the mammals — indie/self-publishing folks, in this case — are doing any better on average. If these writers are doing significantly better on average, then that would be huge. It’s worth knowing.

(9) Deborah J. Ross in “Gossip and Controversy”

I have refrained from any commentary on the Hugo Awards and all the events that led up to them. This does not mean I have not had opinions. Excuse me, Opinions. Only that I saw no point in adding gasoline to the burgeoning wildfires. Now various voices are urging everyone to play nice, to not harbor grudges. To get on with the business of writing (and reading) the best stories we can. Here’s a post I composed a few years ago on the subject of gossip. I should add that I am not entirely innocent, and I have been on the receiving end of some vile accusations, as have folks I care about. It is helpful to me to consider my own behavior (both passing on gossip and being appalled by it) in a larger — and hopefully, more compassionate — context:…

A huge piece of the problem, in my experience, is that we are inundated with role models of gossipers. We are told overtly and covertly that it is not only acceptable but enjoyable to speak ill of others and to relish their misfortune. If they have no discernible misfortune to begin with, well then we will create some! If media portray the pain of those who are gossiped about, it is often to glorify retaliation in kind. Almost never are we taught what to do when we speak badly. Saying “I’m sorry,” or “Shake hands and make up,” (as we’re forced to do as small children) does not make amends.

Certainly, we must begin by looking fearlessly at what we have done or said (or left undone and unsaid), but we must also be willing to accept that there is no justification for our behavior. It doesn’t matter if what we said was true or not if it harmed someone. It doesn’t matter if we were hurting or grieving or too Hungry-Angry-Lonely-Tired.

What we have done does not make us unworthy, unlovable, inadequate, or anything except wrong. Good people can be wrong. Good people, when wrong, strive to make things right.

(10) Ruth A. Johnston, author of Re-Modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance, was interviewed by L. Jagi Lamplighter at Superversive SF about the psychology of science fiction. In “The SF Culture War Posts – Part Two” Johnston applies her theory to characters in John C. Wright’s Night Land stories.

Part Two of our multi-part look at the psychology of Science Fiction, as explained by Ruth Johnston, author of Re-Modeling the Mind, a new book that takes a fresh look at Jung’s work on personalities…

Q: Let’s talk about the ideas you share in your new book. What light can they shed either on the original Night Lands or on John and his version?

Science fiction fans are usually personalities in which Intuition is a very strong part, often the strongest and most dominant. When it’s Extroverted, the universe seems full of possibilities waiting to be connected. Under every rock or behind every star could be a great invention or cure. When it’s Introverted, the personality usually has an innate feeling of knowing the truth of the world, so that exploring ideas is a matter of looking inward, following an inborn map of meaning. It’s also a bit more pessimistic and idealistic: under every rock there might be a rattlesnake, not a cure for cancer. But the rocks do need to be turned over, because it’s terribly important to find truth and roll away anything that covers and hides.

William Hope Hodgson’s original story seems full of Extroverted Intuition to me. Technology keeps mankind alive and there’s no real downside. His dark world is filled with evil spirits and creatures, but mankind’s ability to solve problems keeps one step ahead so that they can build a good way of life. The optimism of his Intuition feels so powerful in the story that I believe he probably had this kind of Intuition in his personality. It creates a sort of worldview.

I think this is some of what charmed John when he read the 1912 novel, and because I know John from college, I can say without guessing that he has that kind of Intuition. In his mind, the world is full of dots to be connected, and we’ve barely begun to connect them all.

Now the other half of the polarity I’m calling A is Introverted Sensing, which can show up as an intense idealism about human social roles. In fantasy and science fiction, it comes out in taking fairy-tale roles like king and knight very seriously. It also believes strongly in archetypal images like mother and father, male and female. When someone with A writes SFF stories, the setting and events can become wild and even chaotic, but the human roles never move much from archetypes. We see this clearly in both Night Land versions, the original and John’s. Anyone walking in the Night Land is going to be surprised by whatever comes next, whether it’s a fire pit, a dangerous creature, an oddly detached spirit, a living stone monument, or a cluster of blind worms. The stories depend strongly on human thought, activity, and roles to give them structure: like putting a snail into its shell. Human roles are stable, not flexible and random like the setting and ideas….

(11) Vivienne Raper asks “Do the Hugo Awards have a short fiction problem?” at Futures Less Traveled

At least one person complained that the Sad/Rabid Puppy nominees kept award-worthy short stories off the 2015 Hugo ballot… So I was curious. Was this true? Were these stories better than the stuff I’d read? An experiment was in order. I’ve now read the nominees on io9’s Puppy-free ballot. Here’s how I’d have voted.

#1 WINNERWhen it Ends, He Catches Her, Eugie Foster

When It Ends, He Catches Her has a tale behind it, and it’s the saddest in the Hugos. The day after Daily Science Fiction published the story, Eugie Foster died. It was her last chance to win the award.

There is no doubt – to me – that When It Ends, He Catches Her should have won Best Short Story. It is a story I wish I could have written. That – to me – is the purpose of the Hugos, to showcase work that I know I can’t… Perhaps can never write.

But don’t stop there – Vivienne ranks No Award in second place, then goes on to discuss several proposed runners-up.

(12) Prometheus and Alien sequels are expected.

Ridley Scott set tongues wagging the other day by suggesting he might make as many as three more Prometheus sequels before tying it up with the Alien franchise, reports Comicbook.com.

Scott has promised that Prometheus 2 will answer many of the questions left open in the 2012 film. However, Scott has told German website FilmFutter (via bloody-disgusting) that he won’t show how the Prometheus franchise connects to Alien in the next film. He’s saving that reveal for … Prometheus 4?!

“It won’t be in the next one. It will be in the one after this one or maybe even a fourth film before we get back into the Alien franchise…,” explained Scott. “The whole point of it is to explain the Alien franchise and to explain the how and why of the creation of the Alien itself. I always thought of the Alien as kind of a piece of bacterial warfare. I always thought that that original ship, which I call the Croissant, was a battleship, holding these biomechanoid creatures that were all about destruction.”

Jon Spaihts’ original script for Prometheus was a direct prequel to Alien. In it, David (Michael Fassbender) the android comes across and revives the Space Jockey (also referred to as The Pilot) who was last seen as a fossil in the 1979 film. We would’ve seen how The Pilot ended up dead on LV-426 from a Chestburster, but that storyline was jettisoned during extensive rewrites. Instead, Scott chose to have David and the rest of the crew end up on a whole other moon and come upon the Last Engineer.

Prometheus 2 will begin filming in February of 2016.

“Maybe the next Alien will burst out halfway through the third Prometheus sequel??” joked Will R.

Earlier than that, figuratively speaking, There is an Alien sequel aiming for release in 2017.

Director Neill Blomkamp got media attention last February when he released concept art images from a new Alien movie he was working on, reportedly without authorization from any studio.

Variety reports separately that Blomkamp has a deal with 20th Century Fox to direct the movie, which will be a different project altogether to Fox’s Prometheus sequel with Ridley Scott. According to The Wrap, the untitled Blomkamp movie will be produced by Scott and take place after the events of Prometheus 2.

And he generated some more word-of-mouth for the project in July by repeating the stunt. First Showing then recapped what it knew about the prospective movie.

We don’t know too much about Blomkamp’s new Alien movie yet, however we’ll recap what we do know. Between this concept art and the last piece, it definitely looks like Sigourney Weaver will be back as Ripley. A few months ago, Blomkamp explained that “She knows about it, and part of it was just inspired by speaking to her on set when we were filming Chappie, and getting her thoughts on Alien and what she thought of the movies that came after Aliens and what she felt about Ripley and what was incomplete for her about Ripley. There was so much fuel in what she was telling me.” Fellow filmmaker Ridley Scott is also producing this new Alien, so he is directly involved in it and working with Blomkamp. The film is currently aiming for release in 2017, so stay tuned for any more updates.

 

A photo posted by Brownsnout (@neillblomkamp) on

[Thanks to Will R., L. Jagi Lamplighter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day James H. Burns.]

Pixel Scroll 9/11 ETA: The Scrollers Support Me in Email

(1) James H. Burns recalls the effects of 9/11 on Broadway in “Delphinus, in the Northern Sky” (posted in 2012).

It’s eleven years later, and we’re still here. Still able to perform, or write, or otherwise create, or, also wonderful, to be able to embrace those passions.

I was just thinking of the guts it took for the actors who resumed their places on the stage so soon after that day in September.

Remember the courage it took, for some of us, just to walk down the street. And these folks were resuming one of the toughest challenges, in the arts.

(2) Melbourne has a website that maps every one of its city trees. Citizens can report a particular tree’s condition and get the city to attend to it. The website has a button “Email this tree,” short for “Email the city about this tree.”

Except, as fans will do, many take the label literally, and email the tree about life, the universe, and everything.

People around the world have been e-mailing trees in Melbourne to confess their love.

As part of the Urban Forest Strategy — implemented to combat the steady decline of trees following a 13 year drought — the city assigned all of the Melbourne’s 77000 trees individual emails.

The idea was residents could use these emails to report trees that had been vandalised or were in a severe state of decline.

Only, people decided to make another use for the email and began writing love letters to their favourite trees….

Weeping Myrtle, Tree ID 1494392

Hello Weeping Myrtle,

I’m sitting inside near you and I noticed on the urban tree map you don’t have many friends nearby. I think that’s sad so I want you to know I’m thinking of you.

I also want to thank you for providing oxygen for us to breath in the hustle and bustle of the city.

Best Regards,

N …

Variegated Elm, Tree ID 1033102

Dear Elm, I was delighted to find you alive and flourishing, because a lot of your family used to live in the UK, but they all caught a terrible infection and died.

Do be very careful, and if you notice any unfamiliar insects e-mail an arboriculturist at once.

I miss your characteristic silhouettes and beautifully shaped branches — used to be one of the glories of the English landscape — more than I can say.

Melbourne must be a beautiful city.

Sincere good wishes

D

The Urban Forest Strategy will see 3000 new trees planted in Melbourne each year and since its implementation in 2012, 12000 new trees have been added to the city’s urban landscape.

(3) Step inside Crew Dragon, SpaceX’s next-generation spacecraft designed to carry humans to the International Space Station and other destinations.

(4) Major league baseball’s Pittsburgh Pirates welcomed back devoted Batman fan A.J. Burnett by sending up the Bat-Signal.

(5) Need a little adventure in your life? Tor.com is seeking an in-house publicity coordinator.

This person will work with publicity and editorial departments and contacts throughout all of genre publishing, developing plans for comprehensive book coverage on Tor.com and assisting with publisher and author outreach. They will also be responsible for encouraging and moderating conversation between readers on the site and on social media.

This is a full-time position working in our New York office. Ideally, we are looking for a candidate with at least 2 years of publishing experience, who is outgoing, extremely organized, and detail-oriented. Applicants should be both highly enthusiastic and knowledgeable about science fiction and fantasy across a range of media….

(6) Did I forget to mention – issue 24 of Hugo-winning fanzine Journey Planet, the Richard III theme issue, is available online. This issue contains a series of articles by Steven H Silver, Joan Szechtman, Chuck Serface,  K.A. Laity,  Ruth Pe Palileo and  Pixie P.as welll as pieces by editors James Bacon and Chris Garcia. The cover, some interior and technical art work was provided by Autun Purser, a full-time deep sea ecologist, who has created a series of travel posters, advertising travel to destinations from unusual fiction – the “Fantastic Travel Destinations.”

Bosworth_JP _cover_issue24 COMP

(7) Kevin Standlee shares several examples that show why Hugo Administrators aren’t activists.

  1. 1989 and A Brief History of Time (Scroll down and click “further detail” for a bit more information.) In 1989, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time had sufficient nominations to make the final ballot. The Administrator ruled it ineligible, as the definition of Best Non-Fiction Book (the title of the category now known as Best Related Work) at that time said that the book had to be about “science fiction, fantasy, or fandom,” and thus the Administrator ruled that science books weren’t eligible. This decision was controversial. There were attempted changes to the WSFS Constitution that year that were eventually rejected, IMO mainly because nobody could agree on a consistent proposal. It took several years of argument, but eventually the 1996 WSFS Business Meeting passed (and the 1997 meeting ratified) the change of the category from “Best Non-Fiction Book” to “Best Related Book,” thus:

Any work whose subject is related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time in book form during the previous calendar year, and which is either non-fiction or, if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text.

Note that ABHOT would have been eligible under this wording.

(8) Naturellement !

(9) These Black Mouse Printing Titanium Steel His and Hers Band Couple Rings are cute as the dickens and go for only $59.

Black Mouse rings

(10) Cat Valente in a comment on Jay Maynard’s award proposal at Black Gate

…Because it’s simply not right to say a good story has no message. Story and message are not separable, hostile camps demanding loyalty only to one or the other. A good story has themes. A good story is about something. A good story is not only about things that happen one after the other, but about why they happen, and how, and to whom, and how all those things interconnect. And all that can happen WITH ray guns and explosions and buxom princesses. It happens literally all the time. One does not kick the other out of bed for eating crackers.

The author always, ALWAYS, communicates their own culture and experience through their fiction. There is no writing without that cultural electricity animating it. It’s not good or bad. It just is. We cannot help it, we are human. To say that Ancillary Justice is message fiction and undeserving but Time Enough for Love is not is to say that some of those communicated experiences are good and should be promulgated and some are worthless and should be cast aside. And I don’t think there’s anything in the world that should be cast aside and never written about.

However, no one, not even the terrible, no good, very bad SJWs, has ever said that the best stories are ones where the “message” overrides the good story. Everyone wants a good story. Everyone wants to sink into a novel and get totally wrapped up in the tale. There is no need to split into camps on this topic because there is literally no argument. Everyone wants the same thing.

The difference lies in the fact that for some people, a story that communicates an experience that they are unfamiliar with, whether a gendered one, or racial, or sexual, or even literary, jars them out of the story and makes it harder to get wrapped up in it. I can even use my powers of empathy to understand that, because it jars me out of a story when I come across a message about how shitty and/or unnecessary women are, because I am a woman and I like to not feel like I am shitty and unnecessary. But unfortunately, for some people, me just writing a story that draws on my life experience IS political, because my experience isn’t theirs, and the central presence of women in a story is, for them, a political act….

(11) Ruth A. Johnston, author of Re-Modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance, was interviewed by L. Jagi Lamplighter at Superversive SF about her interpretation of the Hugo kerfuffle. It’s part of a series – later installments will apply her theory to characters in John C. Wright’s Night Land stories, and “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” as well as the larger Hugo/culture war picture.

Part One:  What Forces Drive the SciFi Culture Wars?

Q: In the Afterword to your new book, you suggest that ideas about personality might help us understand “culture wars” by showing how the sides just see the world differently.  What do you mean by “personality-based worldviews”? 

A: The thesis of Re-Modeling the Mind is that our brains can’t process all of the information that comes at us constantly, so each brain organizes itself around more limited options, depending on the neural strengths it already has. When we talk about “personality” we mean these limitations and abilities, which are usually clearly visible when we watch each other. We know ourselves this way, too. We know there are things we simply can’t take in, or if we can take in the facts, we can’t manage them to make decisions. There are things we pay close attention to, and other things we just can’t be bothered with. Personality is this very real neural patterning that filters the world so that it’s manageable.

But this means that our personalities also limit and even blind us to things other people can perceive and manage. We’re all in the same physical world, in the sense that we agree on where the objects are, so that we can avoid running into them. But at a more complex level, we really don’t all live in the same world. Our personalities can have such root-level different views of the world that we can barely have conversations. This is what I’d call a personality-based worldview.

I’m not a science-fiction reader, and I’d never heard of the Hugos until this year. But watching the ferocity of the battles made me feel convinced that at least some of this culture war is provoked by a clash of personality-based worldviews. In other words, probably the leaders and many supporters of each faction share some personality traits so that they all “live” in a similar world. In each faction’s “world,” its values are not only sensible but the only possible ones. Or if not the only possible ones, the only morally right or safe ones. This is why it’s so hard to have a conversation. It’s self-evident to each faction that its values are right, and the arguments offered by the other faction hold no water in their worldview. A lot of people on both sides feel that if So and So wins a prize, moral right or wrong will be rewarded.

(12) David Gerrold on Facebook is working out his own communication theory to explain “the recent squabble in SF fandom.”

…We now live in a world of self-organizing subcultures. Some of them are positive — organizing around the desire to address various challenges. Some of the clusters are negative, organizing around cult-like behaviors. Some are in the business of disseminating valuable information — some are in the business of misinformation and propaganda.

There’s a psychological phenomenon about new media — we give it gravitas. The first decade of any medium is the decade of education and assimilation. ie. We have to learn how to filter the information, we have to learn how to recognize that it is not an access to truth, merely one more way to be massaged. Example: The 1938 Orson Wells “War of the World” broadcast and panic. That happened while radio was still in its infancy for most listeners.

The internet is experiencing a prolonged childhood — most of us are still somewhere on the learning curve. We still trust too much of what we’re seeing on our computer screens, because we haven’t learned how to distrust it yet.

That’s the context in which we’re all operating. We’re being assaulted by an avalanche of data — we have to figure out how to mine it for actual information.

We have built the kind of technology that gives every person on the planet access to vast libraries of information and the ability to communicate with people all over the globe. But even if we’ve built a global village, we haven’t yet learned how to live in it. We’ve brought our prejudices and our beliefs and our parochial world-views.

Here, on this continent, we’ve built a cultural monomyth that carries within it the seeds of our own destruction — the mythic hero. We believe in John Wayne, the strong man who comes to rescue us. It’s a variation on the Christ myth. Or Superman. Or Batman. We’re incapable of being responsible, we need a daddy figure to sort things out for us. (The savage deconstruction of this monomyth is a movie called “High Noon.” It’s worth a look.)

Belief in superheros is an adolescent fantasy — it’s a way of abnegating personal responsibility. Whatever is wrong with the world, the Justice League, the Avengers, SHIELD will fix it.

The counterpoint is that whatever is wrong with the world — it’s not us. It’s THRUSH or SPECTRE or HYDRA or some other unnamed conspiracy. It’s always a conspiracy. …

(13) Steve Davidson has an advanced scouting report on next year’s Retro Hugos, which will be voted by members of MidAmeriCon II for eligible work from 1940.

But when it comes to the editor’s categories, we’re going to be restricted to one, that for Short Form.

Of course Campbell is the natural choice here, but take a minute to consider everyone who is eligible:

Mary Gnaedinger – Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Fantastic Novels (reprints)

Raymond A. Palmer – Amazing Stories, Amazing Stories Quarterly (reprint), Fantastic Adventures

Mort Weisinger – Captain Future, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories

Frederik Pohl – Astonishing, Super Science Stories

F. Orlin Tremaine – Comet

Charles D. Hornig – Future Fiction, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Quarterly

Martin Goodman – Marvel Tales/Marvel Stories

Malcolm Reiss  -Planet Stories

John W. Campbell Jr. – Astounding Science Fiction, Unknown

Farnsworth Wright – Weird Tales

None of the other editors had anything approaching the budget that Campbell had, yet Pohl, Hornig and Weisinger managed to put together some very fine issues from time to time (often relying on friends for copy at cut-rates), while Malcolm Reiss practically gave birth to the sword and planet sub-genre (not to mention introducing us all to Leigh Brackett!) with Planet Stories and several of the other magazines had a material impact on the field – if only by keeping certain authors and artists barely fed.

[Thanks to Mark (wait, not that one, the other one), L. Jagi Lamplighter, Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian. Title credit to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]