(1) What could be more appropriate to continue a discussion launched in yesterday’s Scroll than Jurassic Park: High Heels Edition! Thanks to Cathy for dropping this into the comments.
(2) “Emperor Palpatine and Sauron in the Afterlife” by Steve Ogden. Here is the first frame of the comic —
This crazy comic sprung from a Twitter conversation I was having with Scott King. He said he was considering writing an essay, the events of Star Wars as seen from Emperor Palpatine’s point of view. I said it would be a terrible idea, but really funny, to have a conversation in the afterlife between two dead bad guys, sort of swapping horror stories about how badly everything went for them at the hands of the Good Guys. Scott admitted it was both terrible and funny, and why don’t I go write it then. So I did, and here you have it.
(3) That was a strange experience – reading Alexandra Erin’s “Millennial Pledge: Trouble Edition”, which translates “Trouble in River City” into a bullet-pointed blog post.
(4) Recommended: Ty Templeton’s comic ”What if Bob Kane has created Bat-Man without Bill Finger?”
(5) Most of “The 20 Biggest Bombshells J.K. Rowling’s Dropped Since ‘Harry Potter’ Ended” are less cheerful than —
Chocolate Frogs
Harry, Ron and Hermione all wound up with their own chocolate frog cards, which Ron reported as his “finest hour.”
Harry’s card says that he is “the first and only known wizard to survive the Killing Curse, most famous for the defeat of the most dangerous dark wizard of all time, Lord Voldemort.”
Ron’s card gives him credit for “destroying the Horcruxes and subsequent defeat of Voldemort and revolutionizing the Ministry of Magic.”
On hers, Hermione gets credit for being “the brightest witch of her age” and that she “eradicated pro-pureblood laws” and campaigned for “the rights of non human beings such as house-elves.”
(6) Remember the Star Wars blooper reported by Screen Rant that I posted here the other day? Io9 checked with Mark Hamill who says it never happened.
TOTAL BS! Actually said "There she…" as in "There she is." Dialogue in that scene was dubbed. In-jokes disallowed! https://t.co/nWLmsLsgpw
— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) October 13, 2015
Instead of calling Carrie Fisher’s name out, Hamill insists that he started to say “There she is!”—dialogue provided in ADR that was cut short by Leia and Luke’s embrace.
(7) “Make Sure to Check Your Camera Settings” — a funny Flash reference at Cheezburger.
(8) Today In History –
- 1926: A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh was published.
- 1947: Capt. Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager pilots the rocket-powered Bell X-1 to a speed of Mach 1.07, becoming the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.
(9) John ONeill profiled The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volumes 1-3 at Black Gate.
The lack of a complete collection of Clifford D. Simak’s short stories has been keenly felt among many old-school fans. So as you can imagine, I was delighted to discover that Open Road Media has undertaken the first comprehensive collection of all of Simak’s short stories — including his science fiction, fantasy, and western fiction. The first three books, I Am Crying All Inside, The Big Front Yard, and The Ghost of a Model T, go on sale later this month.
All three, like all six volumes announced so far, are edited by David W. Wixon, the Executor of Simak’s Literary Estate. Wixon, a close friend of Simak, contributes an introduction to each volume, and short intros to each story, providing a little background on its publishing history and other interesting tidbits.
As a special treat the first volume, I Am Crying All Inside, includes the never-before-published “I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air,” originally written in 1973 for Harlan Ellison’s famously unpublished anthology Last Dangerous Visions, and finally pried out of Ellison’s unrelenting grip after 42 very long years.
(10) Margaret Hamilton’s pioneering work on NASA computers is covered by Wired in “Her code got humans on the moon – and invented software itself”.
Then, as now, “the guys” dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today’s diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier. It might surprise today’s software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day.
As Hamilton’s career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code for the world’s first portable computer. She became an expert in systems programming and won important technical arguments. “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it,” Hamilton says.
She’s an unsung heroine of Apollo 8, because she got them home after a fatal input error in the spacecraft somebody at NASA insisted would never happen.
(11) Scientists measured the erosion of terrestrial river rocks to deduce — “Pebbles on Mars Shaped by Ancient Long-Gone Rivers Dozens of Miles Long”.
Using publicly available images of the rounded pebbles on Mars from the Curiosity rover mission, the scientists calculated that those rocks had lost about 20 percent of their volume. When they factored in the reduced Martian gravity, which is only about 40 percent of Earth’s, they estimated that the pebbles had traveled about 30 miles (50 km) from their source, perhaps from the northern rim of Gale Crater.
(12) NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been used to produced new maps of Jupiter – the first in a series of annual portraits of the solar system’s outer planets.
New imagery from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is revealing details never before seen on Jupiter. High-resolution maps and spinning globes (rendered in the 4k Ultra HD format) are the first products to come from a program to study the solar system’s outer planets each year using Hubble. The observations are designed to capture a broad range of features, including winds, clouds, storms and atmospheric chemistry. These annual studies will help current and future scientists see how such giant worlds change over time.
(13) Well, this is bizarre, but extremely well-edited (NSFW) humor video, a mashup of Hitchcock’s movies with Jimmy Stewart and Kubrick’s sf/horror movies.
(14) Free Nick Mamatas!
No, no, you don’t need to bail him out — just read his story free on the Glittership webpage (or listen to it on the podcast) — Episode #18 — “Eureka!” by Nick Mamatas.
Adam hadn’t worn the crushed velvet blouse in his hands for a long time. It was from his goth phase, twenty pounds and twenty years prior. He shuddered at the thought of it distending around his spare tire these days, but he couldn’t bring himself to put it in the box he’d set aside for Out of the Closet either. And not only because it would be embarrassing if anyone saw it.
There were memories in the wrinkles of the velvet—well, not memories exactly. Half-memories, images and glimpses and smells. Two decades of gimlets and bad decisions and a few teeth and a trio of cross-country moves. What was the place? It was Huggy Bear’s on Thursdays, when they played disco for a majority black clientele, but on most nights it was just The Bank. A real bank, in the sepia-toned days when great-grandma worked in an Orchard Street sweatshop, a goth/darkwave club now….
(15) Kameron Hurley interviewed at SFFWorld:
With The Mirror Empire, you’ve challenged many genre assumptions/expectations/tropes, most notably genre roles and expectations. What other genre expectations did you seek to challenge but instead readers accepted easily?
So far readers have pretty much balked at everything I thought they would, though I admit I’ve been surprised at the reactions to Anavha, which were far more perplexed and passionate than I anticipated. It seemed like a fairly straightforward plotline to me, but putting characters with unexpected genders into those roles surprised people. I think it really made them think hard about reading abusive relationships like that in other books.
(16) Steve Davidson, taking as his sample the recommendations made so far at Sad Puppies 4, theorizes quite reasonably that works available for free are more likely to be recommended for awards. By implication, he wonders what will happen to authors who like to get paid.
I do believe that there is a distinct trend represented: freely available, easily accessible works may very well swamp the nominations – if those works are given a little initial traction by readers, like including them on a recommendation list, because (I belabor), the fewer “objections” you place between a consumer and a potentially desirable product, the more likely they are to “buy”. In other words, “click here and invest a few minutes” is far more attractive than “click here, pull out your credit card, wait for delivery, invest a few minutes”.
(17) Brandon Kempner latest survey “Hugo/Nebula Contenders and Popularity, October 2015” for Chaos Horizons. I’m late picking this up, and as Kempner notes in the post, Leckie’s book was still on the way when he wrote it.
Last year, I tried to track Goodreads stats a measure of popularity. This year, I’m tracking both Amazon and Goodreads.
I’ve been disappointed in both of those measures; neither seems particularly accurate or consistent, and they don’t seem to predict the eventual Hugo/Nebula winner at all. What is useful about them, though, is getting at least an early picture of what is popular and what is not. I do believe there is a minimum popularity cut off, where if you fall below a certain level (1000-2000 Goodreads votes), you don’t have much of a shot at winning a Hugo or Nebula. This also allows good comparisons between books that are similar to each other. If you think Uprooted and Sorcerer to the Crown are both contenders as “experimental”-ish fantasy books, one of those (Uprooted) is 10 times more popular than the other. If you had to pick between one of them being nominated, go with Novik.
(18) Dawn Witzke, in “Taking Sides” , says George R.R. Martin has convinced her to pick a side.
[GRRM] I have no objection to someone starting a people’s choice award for SF. Hell, I might even win it, since I have the sort of mass following that tends to dominate such awards. But it would not be as meaningful to me as winning a Hugo.
[Nitzke] There is no need to start a people’s choice award for SFF, one already exists. You may have heard of it, it’s called the Hugo Awards. And, I believe you might have won one of those once. After reading Game of Thrones, I can say it was definitely worthy of Hugo. (Trust me, that’s not a good thing.)
I do want to thank you, Mr. Martin. Without your rich elitist bullshit, I might have continued to sit on the sidelines again this year. Instead, I will be forking over the cash for a membership, because those of us who can’t afford to blow money on cons are just as much true fans as those who can. So you can go stuff it in your asterisk.
(19) Not everyone is tired of the subject —
https://twitter.com/horriblychris/status/654462570842091520
(20) Talk about a really sad puppy – William Shatner:
William Shatner is exploring strange new worlds in trash-talking his former “Star Trek” co-star George Takei.
Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk on the iconic sci-fi series, lashed out at Takei in an interview with Australia’s news.com.au published Monday.
“He is a very disturbed individual, the truth of the matter is,” Shatner said of Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu on the series and subsequent movie franchise. “I don’t know him. I haven’t seen him in 25 years, I don’t know what he is up to. It is not a question that has any meaning to me. It is like asking about George Foreman or something.”
And when asked about director J.J. Abrams, who is currently filming Star Trek Beyond, he told the Australian press:
“No matter what plans I make it is J.J. Abrams who makes the plans and no I don’t think he is planning anything with me,” Shatner said. “I would love to. In one year it will be our 50th anniversary and that is incredible.”
(21) “California nixes warrantless search of digital data” —
In what’s being called a landmark victory for digital privacy, California police will no longer be able to get their hands on user data without first getting a warrant from a judge.
Governor Jerry Brown on Thursday signed the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), SB 178, which requires state law enforcement to get a warrant before they can access electronic information about who we are, where we go, who we know, and what we do.
US privacy rights groups have long been concerned that law enforcement hasn’t considered it necessary to get a search warrant before they can search messages, email, photos and other digital data stored on mobile phones or company servers.
States such as California, tired of waiting around for Congress to update 29-year-old federal electronic privacy statutes, are taking reform into their own hands.
(22) H.G. Wells took a shot at foretelling the future — “A Peek Ahead” at Futility Closet tells you how well he scored.
Readers of the London Evening Standard saw a startling headline on Nov. 10, 1971: “The Prophecy H.G. Wells Made About Tonight’s Standard.” Wells had published a story in 1932 in which a man unaccountably receives a copy of the newspaper from 40 years in the future. “He found himself surveying a real evening newspaper,” Wells wrote, “which was dealing so far as he could see at the first onset, with the affairs of another world.”
Most of “The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper” is devoted to Wells’ prophecies regarding world events in 1971, and most of these, unfortunately, are misses. Newspapers today are printed in color and the Soviet Union has fallen, but geothermal energy has not replaced the age of combustion, body clothing has not (quite) been reduced to a minimum, finance and nationalism still thrive, gorillas are not extinct, the human birthrate has not dropped to “seven in the thousand,” and there are no plans to add a 13th month to the year.
(23) Here’s a massive cosplay photo gallery from New York Comic Con. (Activate by clicking on arrows in upper right corner of image displayed for Slideshow #1 and Slideshow #2.)
Look for an amazing Raiden, an outstanding Mr. Freeze, a spot-on Nosferatu, and a glorious Muto from Godzilla. Spider-Woman, Hawkgirl, Princess Amidala, Mystique, gender-swapped Booster Gold, Ratchet, Venom… the list goes on and on! Take a look at the slideshows below and share your favorites in the comments!
(24) The sf magazine market contraction predicted by Neil Clarke is not far off, but L. Jagi Lamplighter doesn’t want it to begin with Sci Phi Journal, so she is making an appeal for donations.
Jagi, here. I learned this morning that Sci Phi Journal needs help.
For those who don’t know it, Sci Phi Journal offers science fiction stories that have a philosophy to them. It is one of the few periodicals offering a place to the kind of stories that Sad Puppies stood for…in fact, it was on the Hugo ballot this year, as was one of the stories that appeared in it (“On A Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli).
Sci Phi offers a venue for the very kinds of stories that we all want to read but seldom get to see. It features some of the best new authors, like Josh Young and Brian Niemeyer, and a number of others. Both John and I have had stories appear in its pages.
It would be a real shame if it folded!
What can you all do to help?
If you should feel moved to make a donation, you can do so here. (The donate button is on the right. You may need to page down.)
(25) Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam will appear at Live Talks Los Angeles on October 19, 2015 at the Alex Theatre. It’s the launch event for Gilliam’s memoir. He gave an interview to a local paper to promote the appearance.
What led you to write the book?
It really was supposed to be a book about just my art — whatever my art is — starting with childhood cartoons. My daughter Holly assembled a chronology of the work I’ve done. I would sit with a microphone and talk about it. Somewhere along the line, the publisher says “Oh, God, this is better as an autobiography.” It ended up being that, even though it’s a very incomplete one. I refer to it as my “Grand Theft Autobiography.” It’s a high-speed chase, crashing around the place, a lot of bodies left all over the place. It’s not the great summation of my life in the last hours of my life.
What was your reaction when you started digging into the art you had made?
I was surprised because I don’t linger in the past. Things I’d done over the years had been filed away. Holly had been archiving and dredging this stuff out. The other day I found something and I thought, “God, I can’t believe I could draw that well 20 years ago!” I can’t draw that well anymore.
(26) A Back To The Future prediction still has an opportunity to come true.
At one moment in the 1989 film a billboard reveals the Chicago Cubs have won the 2015 World Series, the joke being that the Cubs hadn’t won the baseball World Series since 1908 and likely never would do.
“A hundred-to-one shot,” the charity fundraiser jokes with Marty, “I wish I could go back to the beginning of the season and put some money on the Cubs!”
But now it’s looking like the Chicago team could actually win the 2015 World Series.
The Chicago Cubs beat the St. Louis Cardinals this week to proceed to the National League Championship Series (NLCS) and will face the New York Mets or LA Dodgers on Saturday for the chance to play in the coveted World Series. Think of it as a sort of regional semi-final for the biggest game of the baseball season.
The film’s writer Bob Gale said he chose the Cubs as the winning 2015 team as a joke, saying: “Being a baseball fan, I thought, ‘OK, let’s come up with one of the most unlikely scenarios we can think of’.”
The Dodgers, if they advance, will have to start the back end of their rotation which would really boost the Cubs’ chances. No time-traveling DeLorean will be swooping in from 1963 delivering Koufax and Drysdale to save LA.
(27) A high-tech prank — Real Mjolnir (Electromagnet, Fingerprint Scanner)
A replica of Mjolnir (Thor’s Hammer) from The Avengers that’s pretty much unliftable unless you’ve got my fingerprints!
[Thanks to Cathy, David K.M. Klaus, Will R.,and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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@JJ
After 15 years of sysadmining I’d be lying if I said I’d never said a little prayer while hitting reset on occasion. Even if much of it was unrepeatable in polite conversation.
Then there’s the blood offering any laying on of hands in a machine’s interior seems to require…
The US is more religiously active than the UK, in spite of the latter having an Officially Established Church and the former not having such, because of the Officially Established thing. Because religions in the US don’t have Uncle Sam to lean on, they’ve had to go out and proselytize, had to compete for worshippers/adherents. It’s a very Darwinian situation, really, no matter that some of the contemporary “beneficiaries” of decades-on-end of Darwin-style social evolution are very much opposed to the teaching of evolution in public schools…
There’s a few videos of Wheaton performing William Fucking Shatner live, here’s a good one where he’s accompanied by Paul and Storm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7cwz7DJ4N8
Recently they did a an episode of a web show where they tasted wine together and they seemed friendly enough (I believe I saw it after it was linked here, in fact)
Aaron: Quite a few interesting points in your CapClave report. One I wanted to underline — you bought books from Larry Smith?
I should clarify. Larry wasn’t there, but his book store was.
I really enjoyed your Capclave report, Aaron. It sounds like a con I’d really enjoy. And the 50th Balticon with the epic guestlist sounds like it’s going to be great. I regret that neither of those cons is even a remote possibility for me at any time in the near future — I guess you will just have to keep producing excellent con reports.
@Stevie
I’d hate to accidentally start a highly localised version of the Troubles. 🙂
@IanP:
So true. I just made such an offering yesterday. Which I thought I was done with, having made a career transition away from IT.
Lorcan Nagle: Recently they did a an episode of a web show where they tasted wine together and they seemed friendly enough (I believe I saw it after it was linked here, in fact).
Wheaton’s animosity for Shatner stemmed from an encounter in which his childhood hero figure was utterly rude and dismissive to him, snootily declaring something along the lines of “I would never have allowed a kid on my bridge!” This was pretty devastating for Wheaton, who was still quite young at the time, and whose sense of self-esteem was already suffering mightily from all the abuse he received from Star Trek fans because of his Wesley character.
Years later, they encountered each other again, Shatner was nicer to him, and Wheaton had by that point grown into a fantastically sensible person with a decent sense of self-esteem who was able to recognize both Shatner’s abilities and his flaws, and be reconciled enough to let go of his anger and resentment and move on.
My impression is that years after Star Trek, Shatner went through a lengthy period where he seemed to step back from being such an arrogant asshole diva and treated other people with more respect and courtesy — but in recent years, he seems to have fallen back into that mode (advanced age often seems to have that effect).
When I posted, there were youtube links included which appear to have been stripped out of the email update, but the first one was Wheaton doing a reading of his story about that Shatner incident.
I wonder if it’s a case of believing his own hype. His worst excesses appear to have been after Trek became and phenomenon, and again now. He spent a lot of time in the wilderness before he got that bout of quirky fame on the tail of Boston Legal and the album Has Been, and he did that whole self-mocking tone. It could be he’s falling back into bad habits.
Unfortunately that probably is quantifiable one way or the other (how else would we know how many people in the UK self-identify their faith as Jedi?) which will spoil the debate. But for the moment I will say that what I suspect is the opposite of your suspicion.
I mean, just consider how many religions and denominations which now have significant followings were founded in Los Angeles alone within the past 100 years — anything from the Foursquare (Christian) denomination to Scientology. And it’s the HQ of the Self Realization Fellowship.
I got 3 free issues of F&SF at a local con, and one of them yielded something that’s going on my nominations. Analog I see now and again and most of the stories just aren’t very good any more. Which is a shame, O how the mighty have fallen, etc.
I hadn’t read F&SF for ages, and was quite impressed. There wasn’t a bad story in the bunch. Some weren’t to my taste, and a couple I didn’t get the point of (or did and thought “So, nu?”) but none of them were horrible. Many of them were quite delightful in humor, characterization, world-building, etc.
I too defer to the judgement of the Hugo administrators. If I have an open slot, it goes on my ballot. Either it gets in or it doesn’t, but either way I’ve had my say. This is probably going to happen in Novelette, and is certainly going to happen in the Retro-Hugos.
I wish I had a concierge. I get so tired of people trying to sell goods and services that are either overpriced or dodgy or a complete scam*. And that’s before an overdressed family tries to give me the Watchtower, or two young men in bad ties try to sell me on Salt Lake City Jesus. (Half the founding fathers of the town were Mormons! Their names are on the major streets! Coals to Newcastle, boys!)
So, “neutral” now means “brutal revenge fantasies against the Emmanuel Goldstein** figure of Puppidum”. Uh-huh. Got it. Will add to Pupspeak Dictionary. Also, suuuuper “Christian” behavior, there, like all the Puppies.
So, with this World Series, we won’t be getting hoverboards and it might be the End of Days. Well, it’ll save me from having to worry about the Christmas shopping at least. And the Hugos.
*Although the magazine sales scam did once get me the experience of meeting a Chinese kid who learned English in Glasgow. It was an accent I cannot describe, but was delightful.
** Yes, John exists, but the person the Puppies revile doesn’t.
Lorcan Nagle: He spent a lot of time in the wilderness before he got that bout of quirky fame on the tail of Boston Legal and the album Has Been, and he did that whole self-mocking tone.
I still think one of the high points of his career was his self-parodying performance in Airplane II (in which the “airplane” is a space shuttle).
Shatner also did a great self-parody in the Robert DeNiro / Eddie Murphy movie Showtime, in which a couple of real cops who’ve been forced to participate in a reality show get advice in showmanship from the actor who played a cop on TV:
Well, it looks like Ancillary Mercy hit the NY Times Bestseller list, despite the fact that Ann Leckie writes boring books that nobody ever reads.
Regarding the religiosity of the US compared to Europe and the UK — I think the difference might have more to do with the 1950s than with the 1770s. During that era we were VERY deliberate about defining ourselves in opposition to the Godless Communists as God-fearing Capitalists. That was when we added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, after all.
One of the things that is still true of American conservatives is that they want it to be 1955 FOREVER.
To add to the ecclesiastical pedantry, here in Wales there hasn’t been an established Church since 1920 (the Act of Parliament was passed in 1914, but there was something going on at the time that delayed implementation) – hence the difference in nomenclature: Church in Wales compared with Church of England.
@lurkertype
Reliability is definitely a virtue in magazines – you don’t want to wade through dross to find the gems – and F&SF does seem to have good minimum standards based on reading the last few issues, although I suspect of the big 3 I’d rank it slightly below Asimovs. What was the particularly good story?
Emma: No, the NYT list shows that people only read boring message books because the memo from Saul Alinsky at SJW HQ commands them to. They don’t ENJOY Leckie’s books, but they do read them under orders. (sarcasm off)
@Meredith
I thought Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden was very good indeed. Well worth buying at 99p
@Mark-kitteh: “Farewell Blues” the cover story in Jan/Feb. I also found “The Bone Giant” by Elizabeth Bear highly entertaining, and was tickled pink by “Best Places to Kiss in History”, which made me giggle at several points.
Although I got these 3 issues free, I would not have thought my money wasted had I bought any of them. For nada, it was a great gift, and I thank the publishers for putting them on the freebie table. Am considering a subscription, to trade off with a friend who gets Asimov’s. I didn’t care for the movie reviews, but eh, I can get those anywhere.
Mike
Long ago there was a radio show featuring some very, very clever people, and one of the participants would inevitably preface any response with
I suggest we adopt that excellent means of establishing that actually we agree with each other really, leaving me to get into training for the doctor’s protest on Saturday.
My daughter’s working i.e. the boring stuff she does keeping people alive, so I feel I should turn up to fly the flag, or at least wave a balloon; there’s definitely SF content because the website says that a family zone will be provided by the man on a horse statue. I shall be sure to take photos, and possibly even video, for File770 if it’s spectacular enough…
Congrats to Ann Leckie.
@Lukertype
+1 on The Bone Giant, and I’ll check out the others.
@Stevie:
I think that really depends on what you mean by “agree.” 😀
The RP will tell you that the only reason that Ann Leckie made the NYT list is that her publisher somehow gamed the system. It’s a talking point whenever The Scalzi gets a book on said list.
No doubt Tor was behind it even though it’s an Orbit book.
@ Stevie:
In 1827, a Tahitian named Thomas was arrested for theft in London, and there were evidently other Tahitians in the city, because the court found someone to interpret for him.
There are plenty of Indians, Moors and other foreigners in the Old Bailey annals as well, but as far as I can tell, Thomas was the one who’d come farthest.
The comics bracket semifinals are up! Find them in the last Pixel Scroll but one.
Shatner also did a great self-parody
as the host of the beauty pageant in ‘Miss Congeniality’.
@Meredith:
Ohhh, it is the biggest mixup that you have ever seen.
Me father he was Orange, and me mother, she was Green!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqs4EbU02As
(Though I’m part Irish, part Scottish, part English, and part German. Oddly, the Anglican priest was from the German branch of the family, and the Presbyterian priest from the Irish…)
Mike:
Unfortunately that probably is quantifiable one way or the other (how else would we know how many people in the UK self-identify their faith as Jedi?) which will spoil the debate.
Turns out to be tougher than I expected to find two surveys that break down religious affiliation with similar granularity, but these two come close:
Pew Religious Landscape Survey (US)
YouGov Religion Survey (pdf) (UK)
Not sure that ends the debate though, depending on how one quantifies diversity.
@JJ and @Mark
You don’t need Kindle Unlimited–you only need Amazon Prime. If you’ve got that, you can read back issues of F&SF for free, just by borrowing them.
As for quality, now that I’ve read all the stories in Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, F&SF, and Tor.com since the end of January (that’s over 300), I think I can say that, for me, anyway, Asimov’s and F&SF are much better than the rest of them. If you look at the results from the other reviewers, almost everyone favors one of the two. (io9 is an exception.) Have a look at the second chart here: http://www.rocketstackrank.com/p/2015-year-to-date.html
I agree that the puppy stories from Analog last year were really bad. If I were rating them today, I’d give most of them 1 or 2 stars and one would get 3 stars. (For me, even a 3-star story would go under “no award.”) But those weren’t really the best of Analog. That said, it does get the worst scores from the other reviewers we track–partly because they think a lot of its stories aren’t original enough. (I’m trying to rate story quality in isolation–a good story doesn’t have to have a new concept. No other genre expects that, after all.)
Anyway, even if Analog doesn’t do it for you, ignoring the other two print magazines means you really are missing some of the best stories of the year. The online mags have come a long way, but they’re not (quite) there yet.
The UK might have more religious diversity than 49 of these United States, but that remaining state, California, can probably beat the UK all by itself. Maybe even the UK + the other states. Creating religions has been one of California’s most popular hobbies since at least the 1920s. I’ve single-handedly launched three, myself.
Of course, every so often, we get a dickhead like El Ron who violates the unwritten rules of the religion-creation game. Like the rule that says that your religion shouldn’t require members to give up any other religions they might be members of. Without that rule, you’d have to pick and choose between your friends’ religions, and where’s the fun in that?
By the way, if there’s any coffee drinkers out there who would like to know how coffee is the One True Path to enlightenment (out of many One True Paths), let me know, and I’ll send you some of my pamphlets about Javacrucianism. 🙂
I think there’s an important distinction between how religious one is, and how comfortable one is putting that religion in public display. In some some aspects of US culture, one is almost ritually required to put a faith on display, for example in political speeches. Also, evangelism is soaked into US culture; almost nobody likes it, but everyone accepts that complete strangers will approach you, grill about deeply personal beliefs, and tell you that you are wicked, and you are expected to respond more or less courteously.
It is possible to be religious while finding such displays distasteful. In fact, most days I suspect there are aspects of faith that are deeply incompatible with such displays.
I don’t think Britain has a lot of those little one-congregation churches with huge long names, set on a country road or in a city storefront. Or extended-family churches. They’re all technically different denominations, and you might have half a dozen of them in a small town.
Quick heads-up for Amazon UK Daily Deals: I’ve just picked up Luna: new Moon and The House of Shattered Wings for £1.99 apiece. Also available: The Name of the Wind, The Final Empire, Al Robertson’s Crashing Heaven (which was already in my virtual TBR pile), and various titles by Joe Abercrombie and Joe Hill.
ETA: It’s now updated to a total of 57 titles.
To clarify: this is the Amazon UK listing for Friday which has just become live.
Jonathan Edelstein
Magnificent catch there, Jonathan; I’m impressed! I vote we add, in absentia,*
the name of Thomas the Tahitian to the nest of scum and villainry here in File770 since, based on the Court report, he may have some skills which would be rather useful…
* I concede that most trials held in absentia are seriously dodgy, but, given the fact that he’s dead, we are on reasonably solid ethical grounds…
Peter Jay
That’s wonderful; thank you!
On the subject of religion, and just because I thought it was neat rather than it being at all relevant to the discussion, I have to share today’s 10,000 moment.
I just came across a long review examining this book – http://www.amazon.com/Setting-Aside-All-Authority-Copernicus/dp/0268029881 – which I may have to see if I can find and actually read myself. It looks at the conflict between the Copernican System and the geocentricists in the 1600s that led to Galileo’s prosecution and makes the strong argument that, given the observations and understanding of physics at the time, geocentricism was a rational position supported by the evidence. The narrative we have now of brave Galileo beset by people ignoring the science for religious reasons is wrong, a later construct motivated by anti-clericism, and the scientific arguments for geocentricism only crumbled in the 18th century under better observation and Newtonian physics.
Tl;dr – It was rational at the time to think Galileo was wrong and Tycho Brahe right.
You could probably write a good historical novel which included those sorts of ideas, with a completely rational character logically concluding things we know now are wrong *without* being a bad guy. And the application to the modern day is also obvious.
I’m slightly surprised to learn that New Jersey has a noticeably higher percentage of Hindus than the UK.
Greg Hullender: You don’t need Kindle Unlimited–you only need Amazon Prime. If you’ve got that, you can read back issues of F&SF for free, just by borrowing them.
Amazon Prime gives borrowing rights from the Kindle Owners Lending Library — which allows a max of 1 book per month. At $99 a year for Prime it wouldn’t make sense to do that, when an e-sub for one of the “big three” SFF magazines ranges from $12-36 a year.
It’s not a question of “ignoring” the print magazines; it’s a question of “do I enjoy short SFF fiction enough to pay for subscriptions?” and “If I paid for subscriptions, would I actually read the magazines?” Right now, I have five years of Lightspeed magazines on my Kindle (acquired by participating in a couple of anthology Kickstarters which provided extra years of issues when stretch goals were met), and I’ve only read a couple of them.
Last year in preparation for Hugo nominations I read around 50 pieces amongst the three short fiction lengths — and half of those were from anthologies. I felt that was a real accomplishment for me, because it was far more than I’d ever read in a given year before.
I read around 150 SFF novels a year (in addition to working a fulltime job), and if I were to start reading all the short fiction magazines (or even some of them), the number of novels I could read would drop drastically. This is why I tend to read only short fiction which has been recommended by people whose judgment I trust, and which is available online. I’ve read two pieces which are on the RSR list, both of which I really liked. They were rated a 2 and a 3 on RSR. So I’m not sure whether your taste and mine overlap a lot; I’ll have to read some more of the stories which are available for free to make a determination on that.
I admire what you’re trying to do with RSR; I just haven’t figured out yet whether it will be a lot of help to me personally.
When I retire, I may be willing to spend more of my reading time on short fiction. Right now, I prefer to spend it mostly on novels.
lurkertype: I don’t think Britain has a lot of those little one-congregation churches with huge long names, set on a country road or in a city storefront.
Just out of very mild curiosity, does Britain have megachurches, does anyone know? I’m aware they exist elsewhere than the US, but they don’t seem to, well, “fit” in Britain, or in the UK in general, for some reason . . .
Mary Frances
They certainly would like to build megachurches, but it isn’t going to happen because the government has clamped down hard on anyone who might do it…
Stevie: They certainly would like to build megachurches, but it isn’t going to happen because the government has clamped down hard on anyone who might do it…
Well, that’s–really? Who are “they”? And what’s the government’s justification for preventing it? My rather offhand question and mild curiosity seems to have triggered something I hadn’t been aware I was interested in . . .
Brahe’s suggested model was already a massive concession to heliocentrism. Basically it involved the planets orbiting the Sun (which by that point for a decent astronomer was absurd not to accept) but to have the moon, stars and Sun orbit the Earth. The question is why would he bother with such a model? Because he thought the Earth was special and that because it was a big lumpy thing that it couldn’t move. Why special? Because of his religious and philosophical beliefs rather than because of empirical observation – and the second objection (the Earth is a big rocky lumpy thing and hence can’t be revolving around etc) was a belief that really wasn’t sustainable anymore once people could see that the moon was also a big rocky lumpy thing that definitely did move around on a regular basis.
Here is the man himself: “What need is there without any justification to imagine the earth, a dark dense and inert mass, to be a heavenly body undergoing even more numerous revolutions than the others, that is to say subject to a triple motion, in violation not only of all physical truth but also of the authority of Holy Scripture, which ought to be paramount.”
Now, I do think this is a wonderful example of how rational and learned people can cling to beliefs despite the evidence of THEIR OWN RESEARCH for cultural, philosophical and religious reasons.
Rational? Well in the sense of ‘not bat-dropping insane’ given the available evidence but not in the sense of ‘best hypothesis based on the evidence and reasoning’.
Think about this. It was Tycho Brahe who effectively killed the scholastic/Aristotlean view of the ‘heavens’. In that view everything beyond the moon was essentially unchanging (a view that was both religious and philosophical in nature – a reflection of earthly corruption below and divine perfection above). Brahe’s observations of a supernova allowed him to demonstrate that this was an occurrence in what was supposed to be celestial sphere of fixed stars (i.e. beyond the planets). In doing so he effectively killed the whole notion of the duality of the imperfect Earth (and moon) and perfect heavens. Now without that idea the whole geocentric model no longer made any sense except as a pure article of faith. There was NO reason to regard it as being particularly true as the only thing it brought to the party was the philosophical distinction between the crappy earth and perfect heavens.
The heliocentric model’s problem (and its problem with the Church) was that despite its computational advantages it violated that pure-heavens/crappy-earth distinction. Now if that distinction was taken as a given then you could argue that geocentrisim (or Brahe’s mashup mix of the two) was rational in so far as the pure-heavens/crappy-earth distinction was axiomatic for the crazy-mixed up view of the universe courtesy of Thomas Aquinas making Artistotle trendy in the Catholic church hundreds of years earlier.
Now here is a mystery – why do I keep writing about Thomas Bloody Aquinas? I no sooner stop writing about him in one odd context derived from SF/F related blog reading then I end up writing about him in another context (yesterday about John C Wright mangling history) and now he has snuck up on me again!
I’m being cyber-stalked by the ghost of Thomas Aquinas.
@Mary Frances — recall that, in some strict sense, the UK is a theocracy — the Queen is head of the Established Church — and all the other religions are permitted on what is technically sufferance.
There really isn’t an American-style freedom of religion.
There are megachurches in the UK, though we tend to call them “cathedrals”.
(New churches tend to be in converted buildings – old cinemas are a common choice for larger congregations)
They don’t allow that? Heavens (hee), they allow WalMart stores; megachurches aren’t any bigger nor require any more parking, and the traffic’s only hideous on Sundays, which WM also is.
TBH I think megachurches suck, but can’t see a reason for banning them beyond “I think they suck,” which isn’t the way of the world.
Yet.
SOON
Anyway, all New Jersey jokes aside, it is convenient to New York City and has some fine educational institutions, which would tend to attract smart, motivated immigrants like Hindus tend to be. I’m pretty sure the UK doesn’t have giant pockets of Hmong like the Upper Midwest and the Central Valley of California has.
Graydon: in some strict sense, the UK is a theocracy… There really isn’t an American-style freedom of religion.
Hence the mass exodus across the ditch beginning 400-some years ago, by people who wished to
set up their own theocracieshave religious freedom.I’m pretty excited for Balticon 50, and I should even be living in the area for when it happens, but I’m also of the opinion that it better damn well be amazing, after the new crew’s lackluster Balticon 49.
There were a few people at the con who opined that the new management seemed to have been concentrating on 50 and sorta let 49 fall to the wayside. I still enjoyed it, but it didn’t seem as awesome as others in recent memory have been.
I agree that the puppy stories from Analog last year were really bad. If I were rating them today, I’d give most of them 1 or 2 stars and one would get 3 stars. (For me, even a 3-star story would go under “no award.”) But those weren’t really the best of Analog.
For context, when I read all of the Puppy nominees for the Hugos, I went back and read and reviewed the full issues of Analog in which the Puppy nominees appeared. Not only were they not the best of Analog, in all cases the Puppy-nominated stories were arguably the worst story in the issue they appeared in. If the Pups wanted to nominate worthwhile stories from Analog there were a few good ones, but I suppose they weren’t written by people that Torgersen owed favors to or wanted to suck up to.