Pixel Scroll 1/24/18 You Can Get Anything You Want At Filer’s Pixel Rant

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(1) WORLDCON 76 MEMBERSHIPS SPONSORED FOR MEXICANX FANS, CREATORS. Artist John Picacio, a Worldcon 76 guest of honor, and John Scalzi, are funding four memberships —

John Scalzi, who will fund a pair of the memberships, also publicized the announcement on Whatever: “John Picacio Offering Worldcon Memberships to Mexicanx Fans and Creators”.

(2) COMMEMORATION. Naomi Novik was asked by the New York Times to write an appreciation of Ursula K. LeGuin. She responded with a poem — “For Ursula” – which begins:

I want to tell you something true
Because that’s what she did.
I want to take you down a road she built, only I don’t want to follow it to the end.
I want to step off the edge and go into the underbrush
Clearing another way, because that’s also what she taught
Not how to repave her road but how to lay another
Even if it meant the grass came through the cracks of the pavement, and the thicket ate it up.

(3) DID YOU REMEMBER? Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin were at Berkeley High School at the same time in 1947. However, it spoils the story to add that they didn’t know each other…. See “When Ursula K. Le Guin & Philip K. Dick Went to High School Together” at Open Culture from 2016.

(4) OF ACE BOOPS. Doctor Strangemind’s Kim Huett draws this great anecdote from the pages of a classic Australian fanzine — “Ursula Le Guin & Her Elusive Hugo!”.

And now for my favourite Ursula Le Guin letter, one which highlights the two things I like best in an author, a lack of pretentiousness and a sense of humour. The following letter appeared in Philosophical Gas #2, published by John Bangsund in October 1970. The Hugo in question was awarded to Ursula for The Left Hand of Darkness at Heicon ’70, the worldcon held in Heidelberg, Germany in August of 1970. I assume the rocket was accepted on Ursula’s behalf by Terry Carr of Ace Books (which would explain a lot).

(5) SFWA AFFIRMED. Jennifer Brozek on “SFWA and its Community”:

Last night, I went to the SFWA Reading to see my friends Josh Vogt, Greg Bear, and Tod McCoy read. I realized something: I’d missed my SFWA community. These are people I only see at conventions and SFWA events. I’d been so busy with my own stuff lately, and needed some distance from the organization after I stepped down as a Director-At-Large, that I’d pulled away too much. That was the wrong approach, but I suppose it was one I needed at the time.

It’s hard to express just how good it feels to be in a room full of like-minded people who all understand why losing one of the greats like Ursula K. Le Guin is such a tragedy or why naming Peter S. Beagle as SFWA’s newest Grand Master is such a joy. So many of the people I met up with last night are at various points in their writing careers. It was like looking at my past, present, and future writing self. They all understood the language of the writing professional and the publishing industry. It felt like coming home. It felt like family.

Recently, SFWA has had to deal with some tough issues. All of them center around protecting its membership at large. I know, intimately, what they’ve been going through—all the time spent, the discussions had, the decisions made—and I’m proud of the Board. I think, with the evidence they had on hand, they did the only thing they could do to protect the SFWA organization and the community they’ve built.

(6) MORE ON COMMUNITY. SFWA President Cat Rambo tweeted —

(7) RETURN OF THE SHADOW CLARKE JURY. CSFF Anglia has empaneled a new Shadow Clarke Jury for 2018 — Gary K. Wolfe, Alasdair Stuart, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Nick Hubble, Samira Nadkarni, and Foz Meadows. (Speller and Hubble are the only returning Sharkes.)

Dr. Helen Marshall, General Director of the Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy says in “And Now for a Word from our Hosts” —

The Arthur C. Clarke Award has long been an excellent point of reference for taking stock of the changes in the field. It has a deliberately loose mandate to identify the “best” science fiction book of the year, acknowledging that the definition of “best” must be decided by a changing pool of jurors on an annual basis. The Clarke shortlist and the eventual winner showcase the work that has been done in the field, providing an intriguing snapshot of a field in flux. Since its inception the award has been at the heart of a robust critical discussion which interrogates the centre of the genre, its heartland, as well as the margins, where the genre pushes outward. This is why we’ve chosen the Clarke Award submissions list as a starting point for our discussions, and why we return to their shortlist in our discussions.

…What a shadow jury might do, then, is bring these debates into sharper focus. We believe the criticism is valuable, and that detailed, provocative, and respectful criticism enhances our understanding of the text and the cultures which produced it. This form of criticism is not intended to serve the needs of marketers or publicists but those of readers and writers. It aims not only to make visible but also to illuminate and contextualise.

Shadow Clarke juror Maureen Kincaid Speller’s manifesto for the return engagement, “You’re Never Alone with a Critic – Shadowing the Clarke Award, 2018”, says in part —

Here’s the thing – a critic’s job is not to provide plot synopses, nor is it to tell you whether or not you’ll like a novel. It is definitely not a critic’s job to act as an unpaid publicity agent. A critic’s job is to look at the fiction itself, and to have a view about it. Critics write about all sorts of things. They think about where a text sits in relation to other works of sf, they explore themes, tease out aesthetic similarities and differences; they consider what a novel says about the world at large, and, yes, they make judgement based on their experience as informed readers. Which is, if you think about it, exactly the same kind of work as that carried out by an award jury.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that criticism per se has become so frowned upon in the last few years. Is it just that people don’t want to admit this is what is going on behind the scenes? Is it because the word ‘criticism’ carries two meanings, one analytical, the other disapproving? We couldn’t tell but we were fascinated by this pushback against the Shadow Clarke project and decided we needed to explore it further. So, we have decided to run the project for a second year, and this time, rather than simply focusing on the Clarke Award, we’re taking the opportunity to use the shortlisting process as a springboard to exploring the business of criticism more broadly, because we continue to believe that critical analysis has a vital role to play when it comes to talking about science fiction.

(8) STRONG ATTACHMENT. Live Science reports the discovery of a “1.7-Billion-Year-Old Chunk of North America Found Sticking to Australia”.

Geologists matching rocks from opposite sides of the globe have found that part of Australia was once attached to North America 1.7 billion years ago.

Researchers from Curtin University in Australia examined rocks from the Georgetown region of northern Queensland. The rocks — sandstone sedimentary rocks that formed in a shallow sea — had signatures that were unknown in Australia but strongly resembled rocks that can be seen in present-day Canada.

Will this open the way for an Aussie Worldcon with adjacent NASFiC?

(9) WHO IS COMING. LA’s premiere Doctor Who convention takes place in three weeks, and the program has been posted: “Gallifrey One 2018 Schedule of Events Now Online”.

With great pleasure, Gallifrey One today is proud to announce the release of our Schedule of Events for our upcoming convention, The 29 Voyages of Gallifrey One in February. As in prior years, we are using the Sched online scheduling system for a seamless and easy-to-navigate program that can be used on your desktop or mobile device….

Full Screen (General Purpose) version
Fully viewable version, with custom views of events, searchable, plus panelist and guest listings
http://gallifreyone2018.sched.com

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • January 24, 1984 — Apple Computer, Inc. introduced the Macintosh personal computer.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) RON ELLIK AND THE RONVENTION (1962). Although I never met LASFS member Ron Ellik, who died before I ever joined the club, he was a well-known newzine editor (Starspinkle) and influence on Bruce Pelz, who kept his friend’s name alive in the title of his annual wine and cheese party that I attended for years. Now Rob Hansen gives us new reasons to remember him —

Ron Ellik in 1962.

This year’s Eastercon is being held in Harrogate for the first time in more than half a century. Known as the RONVENTION, that earlier one was organised by Ron Bennett and attended by TAFF-winner Ron Ellik, hence the name. At the January first-Thursday pub meeting here in London, Eastercon committee and staff persons Mark Plummer and Caroline Mullan asked me if I could add a section on the RONVENTION to my website that they could link to. Since this was one of those I’d always intended to get around to I was happy to oblige. I drew mainly from conreports by James White and the two Rons when putting it together: “Ronvention, the 1962 Eastercon”.

I’m uploading this earlier than originally intended because of something I realised after I started work on it, namely that tomorrow, 25th January, is the fiftieth anniversary of Ron Ellik’s death at the tragically young age of 30. So I’m publishing it today in memory of him.

Weird to think that when Ron died, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were still alive, the Beatles were still together, and astronauts had yet to leave Earth orbit and strike out for the moon.

(13) OSCAR ISSUE. The Washington Post’s Cindy Boren, in “Kobe Bryant’s Oscar nod rings awkward in a year Hollywood is hyper-focused on sexual assault”, says Dear Basketball, an Oscar nominee for Best Animated Short Film, may be in trouble because, despite its John Williams score and Glen Keane animation, it features Kobe Bryant, who settled a sexual assault case in 2003 for a substantial sum in an out-of-court settlement.

(14) WOEBEGONE. The MPR News (Minnesota Public Radio) post “Investigation: For some who lived in it, Keillor’s world wasn’t funny” has more information on the firing of Garrison Keillor. Several incidents are described at the link.

For weeks, Minnesota Public Radio refused MPR News’ repeated requests to comment on the company’s separation from Keillor. But as negotiations with Keillor’s company stalled and pressure from news organizations mounted, Jon McTaggart, president and CEO of MPR and American Public Media Group, broke his silence.

In an interview with MPR News Tuesday afternoon, he said the company’s separation of business interests from Keillor came after it received allegations of “dozens” of sexually inappropriate incidents involving Keillor and a woman who worked for him on A Prairie Home Companion. He said the allegations included requests for sexual contact and descriptions of unwanted sexual touching.

McTaggart, who after the interview with MPR News sent an email to MPR listeners and members further explaining the separation from Keillor, says cutting Keillor off was the most painful decision he’s made as CEO. But in-house and external investigations into the matter bore details he could not ignore.

“When we reached a point that from all sources we had sufficient confidence in facts that really required us to act, we took the action we did,” he said. “It was the right thing to do. It was the necessary thing to do, and we stand by it.”

Since the firing, Prairie Home Companion has been renamed Live From Here.

(15) WHAT FATE. Charles McNulty ponders “As artists fall into disgrace, must their art be consigned to oblivion?” at the Los Angeles Times.

The cavalier way men have systemically abused their power over women in and around the workplace warrants little leniency. But a more slippery question has emerged in this me-too moment of cultural reckoning: What to do with the works of artists whose conduct has been abhorrent?

In the growing gallery of alleged predators, there aren’t any artists I hold dear. James Toback’s films aren’t in my Netflix queue. I never mistook Kevin Spacey for one of the greats. And my admiration for James Levine’s conducting has been mostly of the dilettantish variety.

But inevitably a contemporary artist with whom I feel a special kinship will shatter my illusions about his or her character. I doubt that I will throw away the books or delete the recordings or swear off the films. I’m sure I’ll be disillusioned and quite possibly disgusted, but I know that an artist is not identical with his or her masterpieces and that few human beings can live up to their greatest achievements.

This is a theme that Marcel Proust returns to in his epic novel, “In Search of Lost Time” (more romantically known in English as “Remembrance of Things Past”). The narrator recalls a dinner party in which, as a young man, he meets his hero, the writer Bergotte. The young Marcel, intimidated to be seated among the important guests of the swanky Swanns, is struck immediately by the way Bergotte bears no physical resemblance to the man he had “slowly and painstakingly constructed … a drop at a time, like a stalactite, out of the limpid beauty of his books.”

More distressing to Marcel than Bergotte’s coarse appearance is “the busy and self-satisfied mentality … which had nothing in common with the type of mind that informed the books.” The narrator, a natural philosopher, begins to understand through this encounter that art is not contingent on the specific circumstances of an artist’s life.

(16) SF HISTORY. Michael Dirda, in “An expert’s guide to science fiction’s greatest — and neglected — works”, reviews the companion volume to A Conversation larger than the Universe, an exhibit on view at The Grolier Club in New York City from January 25 through March 10 (see the January 19 Pixel Scroll, item 7).

Being well-read both inside and outside the genre, Wessells contends that the first major work of alternate history was a 1931 collection of essays, edited by J.C. Squire, titled “If It Had Happened Otherwise.” Its fanciful “lapses into imaginary history” include “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” by none other than Winston Churchill. Wessells also lingers over one of the most chilling dystopian novels of the 20th century, “Swastika Night,” written by Katharine Burdekin under the pen name Murray Constantine. Drafted in 1936 and published in 1937, it projects a Nazified far-future Europe where Hitler is worshiped as an Aryan god and women are kept in pens as breeding animals. (For more about this remarkable book, I recommend Daphne Patai’s excellent Feminist Press edition or the Gollancz SF Masterworks paperback, for which I wrote a short introduction.)

(17) A COMFORTING DOOM. Jill Lepore’s “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction” in the June 5-12 New Yorker last summer, is an essay-review of several dystopian novels, including Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and Ben H. Winters’s Underground Airlines. Martin Morse Wooster flagged up its quotable last paragraph:

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one.  It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices.  Its only admonition is:  Despair more.  It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own.  Left or right, the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has itself contributed to the unravelling ot the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism. ‘This isn’t a story about war,’ (Omar) El Akkad writes in American War.  ‘It’s about ruin.’  A story about ruin can be beautiful.  Wreckage is romantic.  But a politics of ruin is doomed.

(18) UP IN THE AIR. Maybe we’ll get them after all? “Degree in ‘flying car’ engineering offered online”.

The online course is being offered by Silicon Valley e-learning school Udacity and will begin in February.

It is the brainchild of former Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun, who previously headed up Google’s self-driving car project, Waymo.

Prof Thrun is hoping to attract at least 10,000 applicants to what he is describing as a “nanodegree”.

A nanodegree, according to Udacity’s website, is an online certification that can be earned in six to 12 months, and aims to teach basic programming skills in various disciplines.

…Previously Udacity has offered a self-driving car course, which has attracted 50,000 applicants since 2016.

(19) KIDS PUT IT TOGETHER. “K’Nex builds toys rollercoaster you can ride in VR”. (Video) A little like those model railroad trains with the tiny camera on the front – only a lot faster.

Toy-maker K’Nex has designed a toy rollercoaster kit that children can assemble and then “ride” by wearing a virtual reality headset.

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones tried it out at the Toy Fair 2018 exhibition in London.

(20) VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. BBC reports “A submersible mission in Antarctic waters has revealed unique ecosystems so rare they deserve special protection, say scientists.” — “Antarctica’s Weddell Sea ‘deserves protected status'”.

The seabed investigation, co-ordinated by the campaign group Greenpeace, will help build the case for the creation of the world’s largest wildlife sanctuary.

Covering 1.8 million sq km, the marine reserve will be considered by Antarctic nations at a conference in October.

It would ban all fishing in a large part of the Weddell Sea.

… Along with the smaller creatures that live on the seafloor, the reserve would bring additional protection to larger animals such as leopard seals, orcas, humpback whales and penguins.

(21) WETTER RESISTANCE. The BBC’s Nicholas Barber argues “Why ‘The Shape of Water’ is the most relevant film of the year”.

All things considered, the savvy choice for best picture might be Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which has been nominated in a whopping 13 different categories. Admittedly, it’s yet another film with a male director, but it does have a female co-writer, Vanessa Taylor, and a female lead, Sally Hawkins, and it passes the Bechdel Test within minutes. If that weren’t enough, it has major black and gay characters, as well as a South American immigrant; true, he’s a half-human, half-newt South American immigrant, but that’s not the point. More diverse and inclusive than any of the other best picture nominees, the film doesn’t just rail against sexism, racism and homophobia, it argues that they are all symptoms of the same patriarchal disease – a disease which all voiceless and oppressed people should defeat together. In short, The Shape of Water is a lot more militant than the average magic-realist fable about a woman who fancies a fish-monster. What’s more, it’s even more topical now than when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last August.

(22) WORKSHOP WISDOM. Cynthia Felice shared “Five things I learned at Clarion”. The first is:

  1. Writers who write naked or wearing only a fedora do not write any better than a writer who is fully dressed.

(23) TRAILER PARK TRASH. Cnet doesn’t want you to miss it — “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek gets a trashy parody trailer”.

Ever since news emerged that Quentin Tarantino, famous for films like “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill,” had pitched a great idea for a Star Trek movie to film studio Paramount, we’ve been wondering what Tarantino Trek might look like.

We now have one possible answer in the form of “Star Trek: Voyage to Vengeance,” a fake trailer made up of moments from the original series.

The video comes from Nerdist and features a laundry list of some of the original series’ most cringe-worthy moments, including the space hippies and almost everyone Captain Kirk ever kissed.

 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Mark Hepworth, ULTRAGOTHA, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael J. Walsh, Carl Slaughter, Daniel Dern, David K.M. Klaus, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

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121 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/24/18 You Can Get Anything You Want At Filer’s Pixel Rant”

  2. (10) My college years spanned this date – when I was a freshman, there was a room of typewriters in the library that students could reserve time on, but by the time I was a senior, I could write my papers in one of the Mac rooms.

  9. 14) I believe one reason MPR changed the name of A Prairie Home Companion is that they had to because Keillor’s company has the rights to the name as well as to a lot of the characters he created. It seems to me that the breakup between Keillor and MPR is more like a divorce than a firing.

    I also thought the Nerdist Quentin Tarantino parody was QUITE funny.

  10. (1) Good!

    (7) Given that they include Foz Meadows, who definitely groks popular fiction and who has impressed me with her analytical critics of popular works, I’m tentatively hopeful.

    (I also happen to think that they got pushback because the original Shadow Clarke jurors didn’t write good criticism, at least of A Closed and Common Orbit.)

    (8) Why not make it a Westercon as well?

    (15) I think the thought of erasing bad people’s works from the public discourse is a contributing factor to the defence that many shitty artists get from their peers (examples: Roman Polanski with far too many movie people; HP Lovecraft with ST Joshi et al).

    Shitty people can make great works, and our challenge is to be able to appreciate the great works while being aware of that there is a shitty person behind it. In some cases (I think Lovecraft is one), I think the artist being a shitty person (in this case a racist) directly contributed to what their works great.

    (Note: I use shitty person as a shorthand here, both for personal behaviour and toxic beliefs.)

    (17) Very interesting observation. I think I’ll have to mull that one over a bit. It dovetails nicely with Charles Stross’s observation that news media today acts as an addictive depressant.

  11. (1) WORLDCON 76 MEMBERSHIPS SPONSORED FOR MEXICANX FANS, CREATORS.

    It’s interesting how the image that Picacio chose for his tweet bears a strikingly uncanny resemblance to the cover of a second-rate steampunk novel, isn’t it? 😀

  12. (15) WHAT FATE. We all decide for ourselves, as always (artists falling into disgrace isn’t exactly a new thing, even if it’s happened a ton of late).

    @Karl-Johan Norén: You sum it up nicely.

    (23) TRAILER PARK TRASH. ROFL, that was great! The selective bleeping was a nice touch, BTW.

  13. (7) RETURN OF THE SHADOW CLARKE JURY

    As I said yesterday, this is largely a new jury compared to last year, and I look forward to seeing what they produce. I’m particularly happy to see Foz Meadows in there.

    I’ve now noticed that the actual Clarke jury is also available: Dave Hutchinson (writer), Gaie Sebold (writer), Paul March-Russell (academic, editor), Kari Maund (aka Kari Sperring, writer, academic, editor), Charles Christian (Urban Fantasist website and lots of other stuff); Andrew M. Butler (chair)

    Both juries look very good with a mix of interests. The shadow jury seems to have slanted slightly less British and slightly more core genre than last year, which is interesting but I probably shouldn’t read anything into it this early.

  14. 1) This is a great thing John Picacio is doing.

    16) I remember reading Squire’s essay collection back in college. It sort of is a very very very early prelude to modern volumes such as “What If?”

  15. 7) Which makes it all the more puzzling that criticism per se has become so frowned upon in the last few years. Is it just that people don’t want to admit this is what is going on behind the scenes? Is it because the word ‘criticism’ carries two meanings, one analytical, the other disapproving?

    I was going to say that it’s because fandom is on the rise and fandom is the antithesis of criticism, but I realise that’s not really fair. Fandom is about building community through shared responses to a subject. Criticism (in any of the senses of the word) can absolutely be part of that community-building process. The problem is that the community-building is considered the most important thing, so critics who come from outside the boundaries of the conversation get scolded for bad manners.

  16. 16) Mention of the J.C. Squire thing reminds me of James Thurber’s (ahem) unauthorized contribution to that volume, “If Grant Had Been Drinking At Appomattox” – which is, well, at least a different take on alt-history.

  17. 7) saying ‘I disagree with what you say here’ is not the same as saying ‘I frown on criticism”

    11) I also have a problem with passwords and fully sympathize.

    15) I’ve personally taken the hypocritical position that if I haven’t yet read anything by that artist, I won’t in the future. But if I have read and enjoyed it I won’t throw it away.

  18. @1, I think it’s a great idea, but I’m a little confused by the terminology. I know “Latininx” is a useful term, because it stands for both “Latino” and “Latina” (darn those gendered nouns….) but I’ve not encountered “Mexicanx” before. Maybe it’s just because I’m a clueless Anglo, but I’ve not encountered “Mexicana/Mexicano” (which I’m assuming the x is standing in for). Is Mexicanx the proper term for person-from-Mexico now?

  19. Steve Wright, I’ve long enjoyed Thurber’s take on that. There’s an even shorter Appomattox bit quoted in Poor H. Allen Smith’s Almanac.

    Historian Cump Toliver reports that he has found the actual first words spoken by Grant and Lee at Appomattox:
    Grant: Hoddy.
    Lee: Hey how yew?

    (I’m pretty sure I have this right. I keep my highly prized Smith books on a couple of carefully curated cubbies in my #1 bookshelf, so of course the volume is nowhere to be found.)

  20. 9) I’ll be attending my 18th consecutive Gallifrey One this year. I take some years off from doing panels, but this year I’ll be on three.

  21. 7) It’s because last year they picked a really stupid fight then doubled down on it relentlessly.

  23. Moment of Meredith: James Morrow’s The Wine of Violence is on sale for $2.99 at Amazon, iBooks, and the rest of the usual suspects.

  25. I’ve heard Mexicano/a before, but not often and not as a regular usage. OTOH, I’m two borders away, not one.

  26. You rarely hear “Mexicano/Mexicana” in English. But John is bilingual so he might be blending a bit.

  27. @3: If Dick was even vaguely as strangely paranoid in high school as in his first published works (just a few years later), I’m not surprised nobody remembers him; could be he was either shunned or shunning, but in either case he would have been out of step for the time — AFAICT Berkeley (unlike, e.g., Laurel Canyon) was not strange until later.

    @4: Wonderful! I’ve read lines from Le Guin that made me smile, or wince, or think — but that’s the first time I’ve laughed out loud.

    @17 ends with a generalization which may not be entirely true but is definitely an alteration in the genre; ISTR Amis (and Conquest?), in the preface to one of the Spectrum anthologies, noting SF’s optimism, saying that if Brave New World were in-genre it would have had some indication of a brighter future.
    Or this could have been in the lectures collected as New Maps of Hell; it’s not in the 3 volumes on my shelves. I did find a wonderful quote that the Sharkes should consider:

    A mint julep is not a far more subtle and complex glass of bourbon, nor is a bourbon a classically simple and authoritative version of the vulgarly prettified mint julep.

    ISTM that I agree with the Sharkes more than most Filers, in that I thought the Chambers horribly manipulative (the author palming and flashing facts, and bending events, for weepy effect), but the Sharke reactions to not-always-intemperate criticisms seemed to me to obscure rather than advance their goals.

    @23: the rest of the points are all plausible, but the question for #1 is not whether the writers with weird habits are better than the rest, but whether the weird-habiters would write as well as they do without those habits. During my last several years as a software engineer I fell into specific arriving-at-my-desk habits, at least some of which were to nerve me up for the steaming mass that I knew would be in my emailbox. (I worked at GMT-5(4); a lot of the people I dealt with were at GMT+2 or GMT+4.5, and so had a whole day to pile up issues.)

  29. On cats and chlorophyll:

    One day I was eating a salad with my dinner and while my back was turned, my credential Sam plowed his face into the leafy greens. From then on, I bought him catgrass, but every now and then I slip him some arugula.

  30. Karl-Johan Norén on January 24, 2018 at 10:31 pm said:

    (8) Why not make it a Westercon as well?

    That part is easier. The Westercon Bylaws, section 3.1, almost allows Australia to be part of the Westercon rotation, pending the pesky detail of Australia annexing the USA or vice versa. The amendment to change the wording is trivial.

    (In case anyone wonders, that wording is there due to some Recreational Parliamentary Procedure during Westercon 51 (1998, San Diego) when Terry Frost, the DUFF delegate, was passing through. While discussing the time that the Australian NatCon once got awarded to Seattle WA, he suggested that Westercon could be awarded to Australia, and I obliged by giving him the necessary technical wording. The meeting nearly adopted it whole-hog, but Ben Yalow slipped in the “must annex each other” provision to “save” Westercon from the whimsy of the Business Meeting attendees. An attempt at, as I recall, Westercon 56 (2003, SeaTac WA) to repeal the provision entirely as a bit of bylaws clean up nearly backfired on the maker as the meeting came close to replacing the main text with that of the Australian text without the must-annex provision. Thereafter, nobody has wanted to touch this particular parliamentary can of worms.)

  32. (3) It is somehow strangely appropriate that the picture next to Ursula’s is not a photograph of Philip K. Dick himself, but rather of the android crafted to resemble him. I’m pretty sure it was deliberate, too — the credit links to the flickr page which is clearly captioned “Philip K. Dick android”.

  33. The problem is that the community-building is considered the most important thing, so critics who come from outside the boundaries of the conversation get scolded for bad manners.

    That wasn’t why the Sharke jurors were being scolded. They weren’t being critics of ACACO – they were criticizing the author for not writing the book they wanted to read, which IS rude, and IS why they were being scolded.

  34. I note that Jon del Arroz responded to John Picacio’s offer on twitter with the following:

    “I want to attend because I’m the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction and it’s my right to go to a gathering open to the public regardless of my political affiliation. You should choose me to end the bigotry and make a statement in solidarity over our common heritage.”

    My question is, does anybody know, one way or the other, if del Arroz’s Hispanic heritage is specifically Mexican heritage?

  35. I know this is from io9 but these were 2 really good short stories from the Into the Black short story contest.
    Link.
    Share and enjoy.

  36. I’ve wondered myself how to pronounce Latinx/Mexicanx in speech. I’ve only ever seen it written. Does anyone know?

  37. @stfg —

    “I want to attend because I’m the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction”

    I laugh every time I see him make that claim. ;-D

  39. @Contrarius

    Well, to be fair, it’s about as accurate a statement as him saying “it’s my right to go to a gathering open to the public regardless of my political affiliation.” So at least he’s consistent.

  40. stfg: does anybody know, one way or the other, if del Arroz’s Hispanic heritage is specifically Mexican heritage?

    I saw someone comment on Facebook something to the extent of (and I’m paraphrasing here, I didn’t screenshot it and I don’t remember whose wall I saw it on) “I know him and what his heritage is, and he’s not Hispanic”.

    But it’s not others’ place to tell someone they’re not who they say they are ethnically, so if he says that he’s Hispanic I’ll be accepting that at face value.

    I’ll still be laughing hilariously at his “leading voice in Hispanic SF” claim, though. That’s about as true as me calling myself “the leading voice in Pixel Scrolls”. 😉

  41. I enjoyed Chambers’ books and acknowledge that there is a lot to criticize there. The books are sentimental rather than full of actual sentiment, for one thing. So it was never that the Sharkes found fault that was the issue for me. It was their specific criticism that was incomprehensible to me, like they had read an entirely different book. Then, when there was a reaction to this, they didn’t just double down. They basically stated that anyone who found anything worthwhile in it wasn’t up to the rigors of real literature. A soft response might have nipped this in the bud.

    To me, their initial criticism and response to the backlash indicated that they found the entire genre beneath them and, therefore, fans must also not be worthwhile, and certainly not have the education and sophistication that they have…

    Apparently, you can’t enjoy literary fiction and SFF.

  42. stfg: I think it doesn’t matter whether it is or isn’t, Worldcon has already reduced his attending membership to a supporting one, and wouldn’t reinstate it even in the (extremely) unlikely event Picacio was crazy enough to listen.

    On the level of pure fact, I suppose it matters. Nothing in his bio on a bare bones search actually appears to specify beyond Hispanic, but I didn’t exactly dig far.

  45. Cassy:

    Is Mexicanx the proper term for person-from-Mexico now?

    In this usage it means “person of Mexican heritage,” rather than merely person-from-Mexico,* so it includes Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and it’s explicitly gender inclusive, while “Mexican” is implicitly so. Much like Latinx versus Latin.

    “Mexican” is still a proper term for people from Mexico, but Mexicanx isn’t an improper one, and it’s the one John chose to use. As he’s noted, it feels natural to him.

    *I was going to say that it apparently means that, but I saw posts from John P over at Whatever where he directly says that, so yeah, that’s what it means.

    stfg:

    I note that Jon del Arroz responded to John Picacio’s offer on twitter with the following:

    Del Arroz’s problem isn’t that he can’t afford to buy a membership, it’s that the con committee has declined to allow him in. Finding someone else to cover the costs won’t change that. I suspect he knows that, because it doesn’t involve a wild guess as to who women in SF are related to.

    Jayn:

    I’ve wondered myself how to pronounce Latinx/Mexicanx in speech. I’ve only ever seen it written. Does anyone know?

    According to John: “My pronunciation is meh-hee-KAH-nex.”

    Since the X in “Latinx” replaces the O or A in “latino/latina,” I’d assume it’s pronounced “la-TEE-nex.”

  46. MODERATOR’S STATEMENT:

    “My question is, does anybody know, one way or the other, if del Arroz’s Hispanic heritage is specifically Mexican heritage?”

    Over the months there have been several attempts to discuss JDA’s heritage and I have decided I’m not willing to host any more.

    I don’t want File 770 posed in the role of some kind of grand jury about anyone’s ethnicity, and it’s a very bad look for the people doing it no matter whether they take license from the person’s online behavior.

  47. Discussing what “Mexicanx” means is an okay topic as long as it’s about the word only.

  50. @TooManyJens

    Sorry, but I buy my catgrass for the nonce. However, I have recently bought seeds and am planning to grow when Spring rolls around. I will report back on the results. 🙂

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