(1) HAPPY TENTH BIRTHDAY. Neil Clarke has a great article about the birth of Clarkesworld — Clarkesworld Turns Ten – Part Four – The Beginning.
A lot of people were willing to provide advice. The most common thoughts were “don’t do it” and “it will be dead in a year.” A certain level of stubbornness, foolishness, and passion are required to enter this field and I was already over the edge. I doubt that anything said–unless it was from Lisa–would have deterred me at that point. There were a number of things that did help though, including the advice that I tell people to this day: “know how much you are willing to lose and don’t cross that line.”
(2) YOUR LACK OF FAITH IS DISTURBING. John King Tarpinian thinks this makes a suitable successor to the lava lamp – the Star Wars Death Star 3D LED Light Lamp.
(3) MYTHOPOEIC AWARDS: Here’s another bit of news I never put in the Scroll. It did get listed in comments while I was sick, but since I used to be a Steward of the Mythopoeic Society I like to put a spotlight on these awards when they come out….
The winners of the 2016 Mythopoeic Awards were announced at Mythcon 47 in San Antonio, Texas, on August 7, 2016.
Fantasy Awards
Adult Literature
- Naomi Novik, Uprooted (Del Rey)
Children’s Literature
- Ursula Vernon, Castle Hangnail (Dial Books)
Scholarship Awards
Inklings Studies
- Grevel Lindop, Charles Williams: The Third Inkling (Oxford Univ. Press, 2015)
Myth & Fantasy Studies
- Jamie Williamson, The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
(4) BRITISH INTELLIGENCE WITH STEPHEN HAWKING. Creativity Online covered this in March — “Professor Stephen Hawking Is Jaguar’s Latest ‘British Villain’”.
Jaguar’s “British Villains” campaign, which kicked off at the 2014 Super Bowl, has starred some distinguished British actors: Tom Hiddleston, Mark Strong, Nicholas Hoult and Ben Kingsley among them. Now, the campaign introduces a new evil mastermind, played by Professor Stephen Hawking.
Directed by Smuggler’s Tom Hooper, who helmed the original “British Villains” ad, the global ad promotes Jaguary’s first SUV, the F-PACE, and introduces the new theme of “British Intelligence” to the campaign. The spot opens with young man drives the SUV up an mountain road to a modernist lair redolent of a Bond villain. He’s off to meet his master: revealed to be Hawking. As they walk into an underground control room, the pair exchange some quips about the laws of time and gravity. “We are the masters of time and space,” says his underling and before Hawking finishes: “And we all drive Jaguars. Ha ha ha.”
(5) MAKES YOU WONDER. ScienceFiction.com has the scoop: “Lynda Carter’s President On ‘Supergirl’ Gets A Name”.
Carter, who also appeared on an episode of ‘Smallville’, is returning to superhero prime-time action in the third episode of ‘Supergirl’ which will air in two weeks. Carter will play the President of the United States, Olivia Marsdin, a name that would appear to be a tribute to William Moulton Marsden, the psychiatrist who created Wonder Woman back in 1942 as an alternative to the testosterone-heavy male superheroes appearing at the time.
… In the episode, entitled “Welcome To Earth,” President Marsdin will need Supergirl’s protection as the humans vs. aliens debate boils over with Supergirl (Melissa Benoist) suspecting that Mon-El (Chris Wood) could be a threat. Meanwhile, her sister Alex (Chyler Leigh) will team up with new character Maggie Sawyer (Floriana Lima).
(6) ESCHEW OBFUSCATION. Sarah A. Hoyt, in “Keeping It Real”, has interesting advice about striking a balance to help keep stories believable for the reader.
However, imagine how much better it could be if you wrote well. How many more people you could reach.
So, to begin with, what are the elements of “real.”….
2 – Do not obscure the writing with a lot of your opinions, philosophies and views of life. Save that for the blogs. Okay, this is not true. You can do it, if it fits the character voice, which is what I try to do in DST and Earth Revolution, and which Heinlein did pretty well. BUT do not do it as an omnipresent, omniscient, not-in-the-story narrator. The more you do go on, the more we get tired of reading unmoored stories.
This is not even just for politics, morals, etc. I’ve found the main difference between Heyer and modern regency writers is that Heyer never felt the need to talk at LENGTH about how her characters felt about each other every minute. Yeah, sure, she gave us hints, but most of it was showing not telling.
We’ll discuss how you can be fooled into thinking telling is showing, how to port-in your telling when absolutely needed, etc.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born October 12, 1968 — Hugh Jackman
(8) LOOK BACK AT WORLDCON MASQUERADES. The “A Look Back” series of videos features clips from science fiction and costuming convention masquerades and other events from the past 30+ years in the International Costumers Guild Pat & Peggy Kennedy Memorial Library.
This episode features highlights from the MidAmeriCon 1 masquerade held in Kansas City in 1976, using the video recording from the Scott Imes archives.
(9) GIVE MY REGARDS TO SHATNER. The New York Post knows “Why Broadway wasn’t William Shatner’s final frontier”.
You can see him Friday at Montclair, NJ’s Wellmont Theater in “Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It.” It’s a sharper, tighter version of the one-man show he performed on Broadway in 2012.
Full of anecdotes and a couple of songs, this autobiographical show grew out of off-the-cuff speeches he’d given for years at comic conventions. After an Australian producer suggested he put together a show, Shatner says he thought, why not?
“If the audience grew restless or I failed, I could quit and it would remain buried Down Under,” he says. “But it didn’t fail, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
“Shatner’s World” delves into his theater career and his first “42nd Street”-like break, when he went on at the last minute and saved the show.
The show was “Henry V” at the Stratford Festival in 1956 and Shatner was the understudy for its star, Christopher Plummer. Plummer woke up one morning and collapsed to the floor, felled by a stabbing pain in his groin. As Plummer writes in his memoir, “In Spite of Myself,” what he thought was venereal disease turned out to be a kidney stone.
Plummer tried to break out of the hospital to get to the theater, but “the thought of Shatner or anyone replacing me in that part instantly brought back my pain.” He screamed for help. A nurse jabbed him with morphine and he was down for the count….
(10) GUNN CENTER. Starbridge: A Visual Blog highlights books pulled from the shelves of our lending library at the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas.
This week’s post features an entry in Andre Norton’s Forerunner series. These books feature characters discovering and interacting with the artifacts of a powerful but long-lost alien race. Andre Norton published over 300 titles over the course of her seven-decade career. She was the first woman the SFWA named Grand Master, and also the first to be inducted into the SFF Hall of Fame. The cover art was illustrated by artist and educator Charles Mikolaycak, whose work was frequently influenced by his Polish and Ukrainian heritage.
(11) POWER RANGERS TEASER TRAILER. The Power Rangers are high school kids, but getting top billing are Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Banks and Bill Hader. Who have probably all been through high school, I admit.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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(Mike suggested I post this as a comment)
A question for the filers (and perhaps for Mike): Should scroll titles
that include cultural references have explanations (perhaps hotlinked)?
For example, Mike recently used my submission, “–we also stalk gods.”
Show of hands, tentacles, etc — who knew this was a Heinlein reference?
(Not to mention a God Stalk reference… if I hadn’t been filemongering
for a year now, I wouldn’t have.)
And this scroll’s title is riffing on the first line of Peter S. Beagle’s A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE: “The baloney weighed the raven down.”
I presume that many/most of [us] grey/white/no-hairs will recognize SF
golden/silver age references, but even there, not everybody has read (or
remembers), say, most of the short stories by Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke,
Heinlein, etc. Much less Kornbluth, Kuttner, Sturgeon, et cetera.
And I often wonder whether there’s some pun, in-joke, cultural reference,
etc. that I’m not getting.
I typically include sources when I submit something like this, so/in case
Mike doesn’t recognize it.
‘Nuff asked. [1]
[1] via the typical signoff in Marvel Comics letter columns and other text
stuff, “‘Nuff said!”
I wouldn’t mind having title explanations in the scroll itself, perhaps as the first item in parentheses. It wouldn’t have to be involved; just “this is where this scroll title came from” or “explanation found here [link]”.
Magewolf said:
🙂
Explanations would occasionally be helpful. The ones I don’t get are awfully hard to google into recognition.
Bacon Is Happening, But You Don’t Know Where It Is, Do You, Mister Ghlaghghee?
@Kip W: That’s great! I’d never heard of Elsie Carlisle before, although I’m a big Annette Hanshaw fan.
I posted explanations for my scroll titles but in retrospect, I’m not sure if that was condescending or not. Filers seem to have a broad range of interests. Maybe we can provide explanations on request?
@Mike Glyer
Hmm — why? Why now?
Because, the times, they are a-changing.
Rob Thornton on October 13, 2016 at 2:40 pm said:
I don’t think it’s condescending, and making them “on request” means, among other things, that the explanation will be [buried] among the comments, so those of us [sic] who don’t get to all the comments… and people just reading the scrolls proper… may miss ’em. Simplest, I’d think, to simply include a terse explanation; those who already know the answers can skip ’em.
On the “title-splaining,” for example, if I riffed on today’s Nobel Prize winner with “I Ain’t Gonna Work At Bernie’s [Madoff, not Sanders] Firm No More,” how many would recognize the source being the Bob Dylan song title, “I Ain’t Gonna Work On Maggie’s Farm No More” ?
Campaigning always starts several years before. There has been whispers about Dylan for years, but no one thought it would come to anything.
So if someone wants Le Guin to win in 5 – 10 years, campaigning should start now. And it should be from famous mainstream authors and critics.
@Hampus Eckerman
George R.R. Martin should start campaigning for Le Guin.
Then somebody else should start campaigning for GRRM
El Pistolero: Then somebody else should start campaigning for GRRM.
As a candidate for a Hugo, GRRM is reasonable. For a Nobel in Literature? Yeah, nah.
@Petréa Mitchell:
Thanks! I checked out ClassicaLoid last night and found it entertaining. The music-themed mansion is a very fun design, I thought the voice actor who played Beethoven was quite good, and I laughed aloud when I saw Supreme Commander Bach-sama. Definitely keeping this in my queue.
(I fell down a Reddit hole trying to find the wording of Bach’s title. One commentator liked the premise, “but the random mecha dancing just ruined it for me I think.”
This person and I have very different ideas about anime.)
Someone mentioned Mighty Morphin Power Rangers? I just went through the archives of Ranger Station at Comics Alliance, which compares every MMPR episode with its corresponding episode of Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger. As I love both shows it was very fun reading.
@Hampus
Seeing as Le Guin’s already 86, I would hope it wouldn’t take 5-10 years to get her a prize. It’d be nice if she was still around to receive it.
@Daniel Dern. Yes, please on the explanations. Bonnie’s idea sounds like a good way to do it.
Doesn’t seem condescending at all to me. The Beagle and Heinlein references both I’ve read so long ago that I couldn’t place them.
@JJ
Opinions vary. I personally would put GRRM’s body of work up against, say, Marquez, and think it compares favorably, but I can also see why others would think I’m crazy about that.
I’m curious tho…who of the currently living SF&F masters would you think worthy some day of a Nobel Prize in Literature?
Forgot to close my tags on the prior post and missed the edit window. O the shame!
I would appreciate explanation of the scroll title puns, as I often don’t get them. Either as a scroll item, or in the credits for the day’s post.
Perhaps a simple way to do it would be to make the title a link (if the title itself won’t do it, repeat it below), or better yet, just make it hovertext and put the unmunged text so it shows for that.
Maybe even simpler still, something like “Today’s title by Jo ‘You Knew the Job was Dangerous When You Took it’ Phannworthy,” so the explanation is out front in text that will reliably show up for everybody.
@ El Pistolero:
Besides Le Guin, I might suggest Gene Wolfe or Patricia McKillip as potential Nobel candidates. Other outside candidates would include Paul Park and John Crowley.
El Pistolero: I’m curious tho…who of the currently living SF&F masters would you think worthy some day of a Nobel Prize in Literature?
GRRM has put out some great speculative fiction — but so have a great many other authors; I’m not sure why GRRM would stand out above a lot of others. Nobel Prizes aren’t given for number of copies sold. And I don’t know that I could call his work groundbreaking — which is what I would expect of an author winning the Nobel for Literature (whether or not that is actually always the case).
I definitely think that Ursula K. LeGuin would be a real candidate; her work is what I would call groundbreaking.
I think James E. Gunn would also be a likely candidate, because of the work he has done in terms of getting SF established as a branch of literature, and the scholarly work he, and others under his sponsorship, have done in the field.
Nobel candidates? Samuel R. Delany!
Though after reading that Doris Lessing couldn’t get anything done for months after she won due to all the attention, I kinda don’t want it inflicted on any of the grand masters of sf in their last precious years of life.
Joe H (to Petrea): the no-Dylan text shows up on a Bogle lyric page; the lyrics index doesn’t include works by others that Bogle has sung (e.g., he recorded “Lock Keeper” not long after Stan Rogers released it), so I figure this one is his.
Ursula K. Le Guin is the only credible genre SFF writer candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature at the moment.
Other likely candidates who sometimes commit SFF are Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon and Haruki Murakami.
I, too, would like a brief comment about the origins of Pixel Scroll titles. Frequently I “get” them; then there’re ones like today. Or the one mentioned above as a Heinlein reference.
I’m not as well-read or widely-culturally-versed as many of y’all, it seems.
The key word there is “many.” Different people get different ones, and I’m beginning to think the best system might just be for whoever gets it first to blurt it out. The only one who gets them all would be Mike, and it could be assumed, for argument’s sake, that some of the ones he doesn’t choose could have been ones where he didn’t get the reference.
(Yeah, that’s the ticket! He didn’t go for that one pos brill suggestion of mine because he just didn’t get it! Yeah! This theory must be correct! It’s already doing wonders for my ego.)
Mark Helprin?
It will most likely take at least 2-3 years of non-USAians before the LeGuin could be considered, but as said, there must be some kind of buzz before.
@Lee: Well spotted! Yeah, I remember when it was policy not to publish anonymous letters in comics and magazines. Have we been less free back then?
@Rob Thornton: Thanks, I can always use one of those!
Re: Dyllon: They would have always thought about wether to include songwriters and Dyllon is arguebly one of the most influential ones. Maybe after the Death of Bowie, Prince and Reed they thought time is pressing.
Re : references: I dont mind either way. Since I only started reading in english (as opposed to German translations) about 12 years ago, I might miss more than most. But normally I dont care – like with the title I find them funny or clever anyway. Case in point: This scroll. I didnt get the Beagle-reference, but found it a clever play on words (like “The red herring was shot by checkhovs gun” or “The ballyhoo of misused word”).
“Babyscrolls, unfiled, 20cents”
Kip W said:
I’ve been generally including references in submitting scroll candidates to Mike, FWIW.
“Babyscrolls, unfiled, 20cents”
If this refers to what I think it does, I’d have done it as
“For filing, baby pixels, never scrolled.” Gotta have six words. But yours is pretty darn good.
Peer: “Babyscrolls, unfiled, 20cents”
Bill: “For filing, baby pixels, never scrolled.”
I got that one!
//ticky//
I didn’t catch the Beagle reference in this thread’s title, either–and I probably reread A Fine and Private Place every year, or almost. I like the idea of title explanations in the post itself, but in among the title credits where they are easier to not-read for those who’d like to keep guessing. Like the crossword puzzle answers are small and upside-down in the newspapers.
(10) That’s the edition I have on my shelf. It was probably the first Andre Norton I ever read. Difficult going for me at the time – I was probably in my early teens – but I picked more of it up on each reread. Finding the other Forerunner books was a huge treat because I hadn’t realized there were more of them.
(11) Eric Franklin said: I … I watched a lot of the original Power Rangers. In my defense, I was only seventeen when it debuted, and I was home and bored and had read all of the books in the house and it was raining (I’m in Seattle – it’s always raining). It also aired just after Animaniacs did, and we didn’t have a remote control for our TV.
This mirrors almost exactly the afternoon ritual my friends and I had in our dorm floor lounge during my Freshman fall quarter. Only, the lack of remote control combined with 1. the Animaniacs credit easter eggs and 2. our vehement disinclination to watch Power Rangers meant that we all leapt up and ran screaming from the room in mock-terror as though the moment the Animaniacs closing credits ended were a starting gun or a zombie apocalypse warning siren.
When the Power Rangers showed up, I was already a responsible adult with a history of having watched Spectre Man on cable. They seemed like a perfect continuation of the crazy Japanese live-action tradition, and I filled up a couple of VHS tapes with random episodes so I could show them to people later one who wouldn’t believe the show had ever existed.