Pixel Scroll 1/27/19 My Daddy Was A Pixel – I’m A Son Of A Dot!

(1) ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDALS. No genre works were on the shortlist, so needless to say today’s Andrew Carnegie Medal winners were all non-genre books. The omnivorous readers among you might like to know what they are anyway:

(2) ST:D PREMIERE FREE FOR A SHORT TIME. Thanks to The Verge I learned: “You can now watch Star Trek: Discovery’s season 2 premiere on YouTube”.

According to ComicBook.com, the episode will be available for the next two weeks, long enough to serve as a reminder that the series is back,

(3) OUTSPOKEN AI. Tansy Rayner Roberts and Rivqa Rafael listed “5 Books that Give Voice to Artificial Intelligence” for Tor.com readers. Among their picks is —

The Tea Master & the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

The trouble with reading SFF is that you end up with amazing life goals that probably will not be attained during your own lifetime. It’s bad enough when a favourite book leaves you wanting a dragon librarian to be your best friend, or a magic school to invite you in when you turn eleven… and now I need a spaceship who brews tea in my life.

A really good cozy mystery balances rich characters with charmingly creepy murders, and de Bodard hits all the right notes in this wonderful, warm homage to Sherlock Holmes in which our detective is Long Chau, an angry and traumatised scholar, and her Watson is a calm, tea-brewing shipmind.

As with the original Watson, Long Chau’s story is told from the point of view of the detective’s friend, which allows a contrast between the detective’s technical brilliance, and our narrator’s emotional intelligence. Yes, the emotional work in the story is largely done by the spaceship. That’s how great it is. –Tansy

(4) HEMMING DEADLINE. If you’re going to nominate for the Norma K. Hemming Award, you need to get it done by January 31. Details at the website.

Designed to recognise excellence in the exploration of themes of race, gender, sexuality, class or disability in a published speculative fiction work, the Norma K Hemming award is open to short fiction, novellas, novels, anthologies, collections, graphic novels and stage plays, and makes allowances for serialised work.

Entry is free for all works, and entries may be provided to the judges in print or digital format.

Nominations are open to all relevant and eligible Australian work produced in 2018

(5) FOOD REVELATIONS. Fran Wilde did a class about “Fantastic Worldbuilding.” Cat Rambo tweeted the highlights.

Fran Wilde’s online writing class talks about how to build a vivid, compelling world in the context of writing about an event set in that world. For other Rambo Academy live classes, see http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/upcoming-online-classes/

(6) BASED ON CIXIN LIU STORY. A trailer for The Wandering Earth has shown up on The Verge (“A new trailer for The Wandering Earth shows off a desperate plan to save the planet”). The film is slated for a limited release starting on February 8.

A new trailer for The Wandering Earth — described as China’s biggest science fiction movie ever — landed earlier this week, showing off an ambitious adventure that follows the efforts to save Earth after scientists discover that the sun is about to go out. 

The movie is based on a story by Chinese author Cixin Liu — who’s best known for his Three-Body Problem trilogy and last year’s Ball Lightning. While those books are huge, epic stories, The Wandering Earth is no less ambitious: when scientists realize that the sun will go out in a couple of decades, they hatch a desperate plan: to move the planet to Proxima Centauri. The construct thousands of giant engines to move the planet out of orbit, where it can then slingshot post Jupiter and out of the Solar System. 

And there was a previous trailer in December.

(7) THEY’D RATHER PLAY SOMEONE ELSE. Travis M. Andrews in the Washington Post tells about actors who really didn’t like their roles. People know Harrison Ford doesn’t like Han Solo, and Robert Pattinson apparently won’t like you if you tell him you really loved Twilight: “Penn Badgley thinks his ‘You’ character is a creep. Here are 5 other actors who hated the people they played.”

Robert Pattinson despises his iconic “Twilight” character, Edward Cullen, with a fury unlike any other. Pattinson has complained throughout so many interviews about Edward, the century-old telepathic vampire who falls for Kristen Stewart’s Bella (a witch or something), that there’s an entire Tumblr feed dedicated to his most (self-) scathing comments.

Among his harshest words: He has said “Twilight” “seemed like a book that shouldn’t be published.” That “if Edward was not a fictional character, and you just met him in reality — you know, he’s one of those guys who would be an ax murderer.” He called his performance “a mixture of looking slightly constipated and stoned.”

(8) OBSCURE AWARD. The Society of Camera Operators’ awards were presented January 26, and if you scan The Hollywood Reporter article closely enough you’ll be able to discover the single winner of genre note: “‘A Star Is Born’ Camera Operator Tops SOC Awards”.

Movie category had no genre nominees

Movie category winner

* P. Scott Sakamoto for A Star Is Born

TV category winner

* Chris Haarhoff and Steven Matzinger for Westworld

Other awards presented

* Jane Fonda — Governor’s Award

* Harrison Ford— President’s Award

* “Lifetime Achievement award recipients were Dave Emmerichs, camera operator; Hector Ramirez, camera operator (live and non-scripted); Jimmy Jensen, camera technician; John Man, mobile camera platform operator, and Peter Iovino, still photographer.”

* Technical achievement award — makers of the Cinemoves Matrix 4 axis stabilized gimbal

(9) HARPAZ OBIT. Former Israel Air Force Pilot Colonel (Res.) Rami Harpaz passed away January 24 at the age of 80: “Father of iconic ‘Hebrew Pilots’ translation of Tolkien dies” in the Jerusalem Post (behind a paywall).

Rami Harpaz lead a group of IAF pilots in Egyptian captivity to translate the iconic fantasy work into Hebrew while in prison, the book introduced Tolkien to Israeli readers and remains iconic.

…He was captured by the Egyptians during the War of Attrition, while in captivity he was given a copy of the Hobbit, the famous fantasy book by J.R.R. Tolkien, by his brother who was able to deliver the book to him via the Red Cross. 

Prison conditions were harsh and the Egyptians tortured the Israeli prisoners, yet despite of this, Harpaz and his fellow  prisoners began to translate the book into Hebrew. The initial motivation was to allow Israelis who could not read English well to enjoy the book in Hebrew. 

The translation was done in pairs with one person reading in English and speaking it out in Hebrew and the translation partner writing it down in Hebrew and editing it. Harpaz and three other captured pilots were the translators of what became known as ‘the pilots translation’ of the Hobbit. The final product was seven notebooks written by hand, the book was published in 1977 with funding provided by the IAF.   

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 27, 1832 Lewis Carroll. Writer of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. In 1876, he also  produced  his work, “The Hunting of the Snark”, a fantastical nonsense poem exploring the adventures of a very, very bizarre crew of nine tradesmen and a beaver who set off to find the snark. (Died 1898.)
  • Born January 27, 1940 James Cromwell, 79. I think we best know him as Doctor Zefram Cochrane In Star Trek: First Contact  which was re-used in the Enterprise episode “In a Mirror, Darkly (Part I)”.  He’s been in other genre films including Species IIDeep ImpactThe Green MileSpace CowboysI, RobotSpider-Man 3 and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. He played characters on three Trek series, Prime Minister Nayrok on “The Hunted” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Jaglom Shrek in the two part “Birthright” story, Hanok on the “Starship Down” episode of Deep Space Nine and Zefram Cochrane once as noted before on Enterprise
  • Born January 27, 1957 Frank Miller, 62. If you’re not a comic reader, you first encountered him in the form of Robocop 2 which I think is a quite decent film. His other films include Robocop 3, Sin City, 300, Spirit (fun) and various Batman animated films that you’ll either like or loathe depending on your ability to tolerate extreme violence. Oh, but his comics. Setting aside his Batman work all of which is a must read, I’d recommend his Daredevil, especially the Frank Miller & Klaus Janson Omnibus which gives you everything by him you need, Elektra by Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz, all of his Sin City work and RoboCop vs. The Terminator #1–4 with Walt Simonson. 
  • Born January 27, 1963 Alan Cumming, 56. His film roles include his performances as Boris Grishenko in GoldenEye, Fegan Floop In the Spy Kids trilogy, Loki, god of Mischief in Son of the Mask (a really horrid film), Nightcrawler In X2 and Judas Caretaker in Riverworld (anyone know this got made?). 
  • Born January 27, 1970 Irene Gallo, 49. Associate Publisher of Tor.com and Creative Director of Tor Books. Editor of Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction. Interestingly she won all but one of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director that were given out between 2004 and 2012. 

(11) KIPLING, SFF AUTHOR? Fred Lerner’s well-regarded essay “A Master of our Art: Rudyard Kipling considered as a Science Fiction writer” addresses a topic that surfaced in comments the other day.

…Like Verne and Wells, Kipling wrote stories whose subject-matter is explicitly science-fictional. “With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D.” portrays futuristic aviation in a journalistic present-tense that recalls Kipling’s years as a teenaged subeditor on Anglo-Indian newspapers. “The Eye of Allah” deals with the introduction of advanced technology into a mediaeval society that may not be ready for it.

But it is not this explicit use of science and technology in some of his stories that makes Kipling so important to modern science fiction. Many of Kipling’s contemporaries and predecessors wrote scientific fiction. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Conan Doyle are among them. Yet echoes of their work are seldom seen in today’s science fiction. Kipling’s appeal to modern readers lies instead in his approach and his technique.

The real subject-matter of Rudyard Kipling’s writing is the world’s work and the men and women and machines who do it. Whether that work be manual or intellectual, creative or administrative, the performance of his work is the most important thing in a person’s life. As Disko Troop says in Captains Courageous, “the most interesting thing in the world is to find out how the next man gets his vittles”….

(12) PACIFIC INKLINGS FESTIVAL. Sørina Higgins, Editor of The Inklings and King Arthur, will be the featured speaker when The Southern California C.S. Lewis Society presents The Pacific Inklings Festival and General Meeting on March 9.

(13) NOT A STAN FAN. HuffPost reports “Bill Maher Doubles Down On Trashing Stan Lee Fans, Adults Who Like Comics”.

His latest was supposed to address a controversial blog post from shortly after Stan Lee’s death. Address it, yeah. Back down from it? Not at all.

Bill Maher is not backing down when it comes to criticizing fans of Marvel giant Stan Lee, and fans of comic books in general.

On Friday’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” the host insisted that he had nothing against the late Lee, but that adult fans of comics simply need to “grow up.”

“I’m not glad Stan Lee is dead, I’m sad you’re alive,” Maher said.

But the head of Marvel did not respond as you might have predicted SYFY Wire learned: “Bill Maher receives high-profile invite to Stan Lee tribute event after controversial comic book remarks”.

Bill Maher received an invite to the Stan Lee tribute event in Los Angeles this coming Wednesday from none other than Marvel‘s Chief Creative Officer, Joe Quesada.

This came after Maher found himself in hot water once again after doubling down on his controversial comments about how comic books cannot be considered “literature” and how superhero movies are not “great cinema.” Moreover, he said that people who think otherwise “are stuck in an everlasting childhood.”

Maher played himself in a deleted scene in Iron Man 3, where he blames America for creating The Mandarin

(14) NEEDS SOME LUCK. Paul Weimer says this epic fantasy novel is well worth your time and attention in a review for Nerds of a Feather: “Microreview [book]: The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons”

Kihrin is a thief, an apprentice musician, and a resident of the Capital. He’s also possesses a rather powerful artifact whose provenance he does not quite understand, one that is difficult to take from him except by his free will. Even more than this, Kihrin and his artifact are pawns in a long simmering plot that would see him as key to the destruction of an empire. Instead of being a prophesied hero come to save the world, Kihrin’s role is seemingly destined for a much darker fate, unless his patron goddess, the goddess of luck, Taja, really IS on his side.

(15) MORE GOOD REVIEWS. Lady Business links to selected reviews around a theme — “Eight Book Minimum: Bring me queer ladies or bring me death!”

1. Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband by Joanna Russ [Top]
Someone’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband is Joanna Russ talking about the narrative tropes of gothic fiction from the late sixties and early seventies. The essay itself was originally published in 1973; I first read it in the collection To Write Like A Woman, which is great if you have a chance to read it. I found Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me at work though, and ah, it’s good to have it back.

The premise of this essay is that Joanna Russ, faced with the new wave of gothic fiction, had a publisher friend send her some of the most representative examples of the genre and broke down all of the common elements and analysed them as expressions of the “traditional feminine situation.” I would argue that regardless of how representative those books were, that’s a very small sample size (she mentions about half a dozen titles, and I’m just trying to picture the reaction today if someone tried this with, say, romantic suspense books). But her analysis is interesting? She’s analysing it, justifiably, as an incredibly popular genre with female readers, and picking out the elements that might be contributing to that (“‘Occupation: housewife’ is simultaneously avoided, glamorised, and vindicated” is one of the stand-out points for me, especially when coupled with the observation that the everyday skills of reading people’s feelings and faces are often the only thing keeping the heroine alive), but it’s a little strange to read. It’s interesting, and I can definitely relate some of her points to female-led genres today (I’m mainly thinking of things like cozy mysteries), but it is definitely an outsider to a genre picking apart its building blocks. So, interesting as a dissection of those specific titles and tropes, but maybe not representative of the wider genre.

(16) HOURS OF WITCHING. Phoebe Wagner checks in about the first season of a TV reboot: “Microreview [TV Series]: The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” at Nerds of a Feather.

…In addition to balancing the magical aspects of the show, multiple episodes explore issues of feminism, smashing the patriarchy, race, sexual orientation, disability, and bullying. Through Sabrina, these becomes issues of her world rather than political statements. While TV shows at times have issue-driven episodes that seem to be responding to the political climate of the previous six months, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina focuses on the lives of the characters, and since this is part of their lives, of course Sabrina is going to help them. That being said, especially early in the season, it at times felt a little white-savior as Sabrina works behind the scenes with magic to help her friends….

(17) THAT LEAKY WARDROBE. In this Saturday Night Live sketch, Mr. Tumnus (James McAvoy, reprising a character he played in a movie) meets several women who have recently arrived in Narnia.

(18) REVIEW OF “I AM MOTHER”. Variety: “Sundance Film Review: ‘I Am Mother’”. “After a mass extinction, a robot raises a little girl in a handsome, if derivative sci-fi thriller that salutes its own parentage.” The review gives much of this female-cast-led gerne film generally good marks, though significant issues are also pointed out. Bottom line:

What really presses [Director Grant] Sputore’s buttons is proving that he can make an expensive-looking flick for relative peanuts. If this were his job application for a blockbuster gig, he’d get the job. Though hopefully he and [Screenwriter Michael Lloyd] Green realize that the best sci-fi thrillers don’t just focus on solving the mystery of what happened — they explore what it all means. Sputore is clearly an intelligent life form. But as even his robot creator knows, “Mothers need to learn.”

  • Cast: Clara Rugaard, Rose Byrne (voice), Hilary Swank, Luke Hawker (motion capture), Tahlia Sturzaker.

(19) SPONSOR WILL DROP MAN BOOKER. BBC reveals that the sponsoring hedge fund feels “underappreciated” — “Man Booker loses £1.6m hedge fund sponsor amid talk of tension”.

Britain’s most famous literary award is looking for a new sponsor after hedge fund Man Group said it would end its support after 18 years.

The UK-based financial giant said its annual £1.6m backing of this year’s Man Booker Prize would be its last.

The link between the hedge fund and the literary world has not always been a smooth, with novelist Sebastian Faulks last year calling the firm “the enemy”.

Man Group said in a statement it had been a privilege to sponsor the prize.

But the BBC’s arts editor, Will Gompertz, said relations between Man Group and Booker organisers had been strained for some time, with a company source suggesting they felt underappreciated.

(20) DID IT MAKE A SOUND? A celebrity tree is no more: “Game of Thrones: Dark Hedges tree falls in high winds”.

A tree made famous by the TV fantasy drama Game of Thrones has fallen in strong winds.

Gale force winds of up to 60 mph hit Northern Ireland overnight on Saturday.

The Dark Hedges are a tunnel of beech trees on the Bregagh Road near Armoy that have become an an international tourist attraction since featuring in the hit series.

(21) OVER THE TOP. Let Quinn Curio tell you “The Dumbest Things About Gotham.”

What are the dumbest things that have ever happened on Fox’s Gotham show? Welcome to the party. The pain party.

[Thanks to John Hertz, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Mark Blackman, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip Williams.]

50 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/27/19 My Daddy Was A Pixel – I’m A Son Of A Dot!

  1. (10) If Frank Miller was born in 1961, he would be 58 and not 68. However, he was in fact born in 1957, which makes him 62.

    Incidentally, does anyone else regard one-word posts such as “First” and “Click” to be as moronic as I do?

  2. Steve Green: Thanks for the advice about how many candles belong on Frank’s cake. Appertain yourself your favorite beverage!

  3. (6) Well, far be it from me to contradict Cixin Liu, but that sounds like an implausible mess. Although I guess it isn’t any worse than Thanos snapping his fingers.

  4. @Steve Green

    “clicks” and “clickity” (and probably “first”) are just to subscribe to the comments thread. You have to put something in the comments to be able to check the subscribe box.

    But you know, you could just ask instead of automatically calling it “moronic.”

  5. Bonnie McDaniel: Well, far be it from me to contradict Cixin Liu, but that sounds like an implausible mess.

    Thank you for saying what I was thinking: That isn’t a hard science-fiction story, it’s a comic book fantasy, and the way that it flouts science in a hundred different ways would almost certainly have me throwing things and yelling at the screen.

    But hey, film companies are welcome to produce whatever they want, I just won’t be going to see things like that.

  6. (4) I think the heading should be Hemming, not Hemmnig. (It’s easy to do something like that.)
    (6) I agree with Bonnie. I don’t think it’s nearly that easy to move Earth – and I don’t see how you can get it fast enough to slingshot past Jupiter, never mind get it out of the solar system.

  7. (6) Also, didn’t Greg Bear do this, or something like it, first and probably better with Moving Mars? Although as I remember–it’s been twenty years or more since I read it–it wasn’t an engine slingshot, it was a quantum mechanics frame shift slingshot.

  8. 10). The 1st James Cromwell film that comes to my mind is “Babe”, which must qualify as genre, talking pig and so on.

  9. Bonnie McDaniel on January 27, 2019 at 7:22 pm said:

    (6) Well, far be it from me to contradict Cixin Liu, but that sounds like an implausible mess.

    My impression is that that’s basically what Cixin Liu does–a veneer of hard science overlaid on a core of wild fantasy. I mean, I basically had to put aside any desire I might have for basic plausibility in order to properly enjoy The Three-Body Problem.

  10. StephenfromOttawa: Me, too, but I decided against adding it to the draft since that would deprive someone of the pleasure of pointing it out….

  11. [7] When I was cast as the Scarecrow in a local production of Wizard of Oz, my friend Mark (who was cast as the Wizard) and I went to the director and told her we thought it should be the other way around. That didn’t get very far.

    [10] I once asked Brian Bolland at a Q&A how much he thought ROBOCOP owed to Judge Dredd. His face lit up, and he started answering me, and just then someone came in and said the panel was over, and we all went out to eat. (It was a disastrously and unexpectedly small con, so I was at a table with Bolland, as well as David Mazzucchelli and the rest of the invited guests.) I never got his answer, but I got word back later that he thought it was the best question he’d been asked at a con. I’d still like to know.

  12. 6. I vaguely recall a novel with this same scenario from a long time ago. An alien emissary warns earthlings of some issue that forces everyone to seal up their homes (I know, that made no sense structurally) and ride the now-airless planet to another star system. I wish I could remember the name or author, but I only remember how much head scratching it caused.

  13. incidentally, I’m aware of the Possible Hugo Nominations wikia, but is there one for Possible Retro-Hugo Nominations?

    (I’d like to remind people about Edmond Hamilton’s short “Exile”)

  14. (18)

    The review gives much of this female-cast-led gerne film generally good marks, though significant issues are also pointed out.

    Pretty sure that’s meant to be genre.

  15. 10) And lets not forget Frank Miller’s Give Me Liberty and Martha Washington Goes to War, drawn by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame. That was some seriously good SF.

  16. gerne

    Pretty sure that’s meant to be genre.

    Or it could be a gurn film, if they spend a lot of it making odd faces.

  17. @Bonnie McDaniel Well, far be it from me to contradict Cixin Liu, but that sounds like an implausible mess.

    I’d say that’s because the story is really about other things than moving the Earth. (It’s about the way people respond to a great collective endeavour and the risk and hardship involved… which has obvious resonance for China. Though I’d still call it a minor story.)

  18. 6) I’m reminded of TV SF back in the 1970s, when they knew how to move planets, all right…. the Earth-sized planet Medusa was dragged out of its orbit around Proxima Centauri by a passing comet, and drifted into our solar system after thousands of years (Star Maidens); the departure of Earth’s Moon for parts unknown was explained (by the explosion of nuclear waste dumps) in Gerry Anderson’s classic Space: 1999. It looks like The Wandering Earth might shape up to be a classic with a similar grasp of scientific rigor.

  19. The Dot and the Line?

    6) Bonnie, yes you are right, my mind went immediately to MOVING MARS and it was more of a quantum teleportation than anything.

    Also I seem to recall planets getting moved around in one of Stephen Baxter’s Manifold novels

  20. Larry Niven’s World Out of Time had some wholesale planet-moving, but it all took place off-camera (while the main character was on a tens-of-thousands-of-years long sublight journey in suspended animation) and was just within the solar system.

    (As I recall, rather than moving Earth directly, they stuck some REALLY, REALLY BIG engines onto Neptune or Uranus and used it as a gravity tug.)

    There was also Stanley Schmidt’s Sins of the Fathers/Lifeboat Earth, in which a very large engine of some sort was stuck on the Earth and it sped away into space to try to outrun an explosion at the galactic core, IIRC.

  21. @Christian Brunschen: The heroes of Cities in Flight do get around to moving a whole planet, as I recall.

  22. …and who can forget Doc Smith’s “Planets. Seven of them. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powered”? Not that I’m helping the case for moving planets as hard SF here, admittedly.

  23. @Bonnie McDaniel et al: I skimmed over @6 (hated 3BP, haven’t read later work) but I agree the idea is nonsense. Aside from the mechanics, there’s the question of why bother to move if you can keep the planet habitable while it’s in interstellar space, away from all stars. (This is one of the few things marked-down-from-2001 arguably gets a pass on.) I’d go a step further than @Sophie Jane and say this is not-too-subtle propaganda film, not unlike The Last Hero.

  24. Reading Harrison’s Centauri Device, and I guess I’ve discovered where Banks got the idea of giving his starships such whimsical names (although Banks’ are more outright comic.)

    Also, I thought I detected at times a distinct Pynchon inflection to some of his phrasing, and was gratified to find after some googling that he’s a fan of V.

    Also, I find the setting reminds me a little of Babel 17 (although only dimly, it being many years since I read that one) and seems to prefigure some aspects of cyberpunk.

  25. P J Evans on January 28, 2019 at 8:21 am said:

    And further in planet-moving: the Puppeteers’ five-planet set, in Niven et al.

    The Puppeteers didn’t just move some planets. They moved an entire star system, planets and all. That’s gotta be tricky–attaching engines to a star is definitely not an engineering task for the faint of heart! 🙂

  26. @Xtifr: I thought the Puppeteers left the sun behind, as surplus to requirements. Stross’ Palimpsest had some planet and star moving, though.

  27. gerne film

    Pretty sure that’s meant to be genre.

    No, its a German Gerne-Film, a film, that you watch gladly.

    (When I saw this quote my first thought was:Why is he replying in German?)

    (6) Im all for over the top premises, but this look like The Core – Chinese Edition.

    I was made for scrolling you, pixel, you were made for scrolling me.

  28. Jan 27 was the anniversary of the Apollo Fire. Jan 28 is the anniversary of the Challenger explosion.

    Rest in Peace

    Roger Chaffee
    Virgil I. Grissom
    Ed White

    Gregory Jarvis
    Christa McAuliffe
    Ronald McNair
    Ellison Onizuka
    Judith Resnik
    Dick Scobee
    Michael J. Smith

  29. (8) @Mike Glyer @Stephenfromottawa …. Cromwell is currently appearing in the alternate history / science fiction TV series Counterpart. And he’s ludicrously good.

    His delivery of the line “On that day, I betrayed my world. And myself. And I knew I would do it again” in last week’s episode gave me chills.

  30. (13) I try to stay as far away from these things as possible, but I can’t help being morbidly fascinated by the number of people who will jump into a discussion of Maher’s trolling to say something like “Well, Maher is right about comics, but I read graphic novels and those are good.” One comment I saw today (not here, to be clear) even called “graphic novels” a more serious art form.

    I feel like if someone said that they hate music but love symphonies, people would generally understand why that’s a hilarious thing to say.

  31. Re (2): ST:D? The shorthand for Star Trek Discovery is STD? How did I not notice this before. Soooo glad not to be watching it.

  32. PJ Evans says The Puppeteers didn’t just move some planets. They moved an entire star system, planets and all. That’s gotta be tricky–attaching engines to a star is definitely not an engineering task for the faint of heart! ?

    Wait a minute. I don’t recall that it was an actually sun at the center of the planets but rather was an artificial construct used to illuminate those worlds. Anyone got those novels handy that can actually verify what was at the center of the Puppeteer system?

  33. @Cat: Four of the five worlds are set aside for farming, and are each lit by their own satellites. The fifth is pole to pole Manhattan and lit only by its own city lights; its biggest problem is getting rid of waste heat. There’s nothing at the center of the formation. I have a memory that I’m not sure I trust that for some reason they are also taking their star with them, but it’s a red giant now and far away from the planets.

  34. Alex Awards 2019
    N.K. Jemisen for How Long till Black Future Month
    Naomi Novik for Spinning Silver

    Books written for adults that have strong crossover appeal for teenagers. And I’m pretty sure I missed at least one more genre title in the list of ten, if not more.

  35. Patrick Morris Miller says Four of the five worlds are set aside for farming, and are each lit by their own satellites. The fifth is pole to pole Manhattan and lit only by its own city lights; its biggest problem is getting rid of waste heat. There’s nothing at the center of the formation. I have a memory that I’m not sure I trust that for some reason they are also taking their star with them, but it’s a red giant now and far away from the planets.

    See I thought they weren’t taking any sun because it generated far too much waste heat. Your satellites make much more sense. I’m not even sure that this is their original home system.

  36. As I recall the Puppeteers kept the sun as a distant anchor until it was time to flee the Milky Way

  37. Peer: Im all for over the top premises, but this look like The Core – Chinese Edition.

    HEY! The Core had Bruce Greenwood and a damn good end title from 30 Seconds to Mars.

  38. 8) I suppose Westworld is the winner of genre note, and A Star is Born is not about astrophysics.

  39. Cat Eldridge on January 28, 2019 at 2:22 pm said:

    Wait a minute. I don’t recall that it was an actually sun at the center of the planets but rather was an artificial construct used to illuminate those worlds. Anyone got those novels handy that can actually verify what was at the center of the Puppeteer system?

    There’s a wiki for that.

  40. Also Feersum Endjinn (indeed).

    Was on a plane yesterday, watched Annihilation. I thought Natalie Portman was excellent, obviously the story diverged hugely from the book (lots more M-16s) but was entertaining. Not quite sure how you end up in the Army for 7 years then a lecturer at John Hopkins by 37, but that’s probably the least suspension of disbelief required 😉

    At least I got to the end of the film, I abandoned book three about halfway through as it had spent a lot of time going nowhere.

  41. @Eli: ~15 years ago Gaiman and Spiegelman were speaking in Manhattan; I forget where the remark started, but I remember Gaiman saying somebody telling him (cf your distinction) that he wrote graphic novels rather than comics, which left him feeling like a streetwalker being called a lady of the night.

  42. @JJ

    HEY! The Core had Bruce Greenwood and a damn good end title from 30 Seconds to Mars.

    I have to admit I didnt reach the end.

  43. (10) Alan Cumming played Saturninus in the Julie Taymor-directed Titus (based on Titus Andronicus by Will Somebody). I mention it here because while the play may not be genre per se, the movie definitely is. Very much worth watching.

  44. Since its original posting, I have added galleries for 10 more artists to the 2018 Best Professional Artists page. Don’t forget to check it out for ideas when you’re filling out your Hugo nominating ballot.

    (There is a permalink to the 2018 Artist, Editor, and Series posts at the top of all File 770 pages.)

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