Pixel Scroll 10/15 Trial by Filers

(1) Martin Morse Wooster opened my eyes to a previously unrealized fact — Wil Wheaton is a celebrity homebrewer.

On November 7, 2015, the American Homebrewers Association hosts Learn to Homebrew Day across the country. This year, celebrity homebrewers Wil Wheaton and Kyle Hollingsworth have teamed up with the AHA to promote the celebration! Kyle and the AHA created a video together, which can be viewed here.

Wheaton even has a dedicated blog for his homebrew activities – Devils Gate Brewing. He’s also appeared on Brewing TV.

(2) While researching the homebrew story, I observed Wheaton deliver this absolute home truth —

(3) Crowdfunding conventions doesn’t always work. The fans who’d like to hold Phoenix Sci-Fi Con 2016 have only managed to raise $50 of the $12,500 goal in 13 days. The last donation was almost a week ago.

(4) “Neiman” has launched a new science-fiction and fantasy news aggregator, Madab, which is the word for “sci-fi” in Hebrew. (Says Neiman: “It fits, since I’m an Israeli in origin.”) The website focuses on books and written stuff, and follows more than a hundred sources.

(5) Zoë Heller, in “How Does an Author’s Reputation Shape Your Response to a Book?” for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, said about her experience as a slush pile reader:

The important thing was to send back manuscripts at a steady rate and to keep the slush pile low. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Under my supervision, the slush pile grew and grew until it became several tottering ziggurats of slush. I’d like to say that it was the thought of dashing writers’ hopes that paralyzed me. But I was quite heartless about that. What stopped me in my tracks was the dread of having to make independent literary judgments. I had never before been asked to evaluate writing that was utterly ­reputation-less and imprimatur-less. In college I had read I.A. Richards’s famous study, ‘Practical Criticism,’ in which Richards asked Cambridge undergraduates to assess poems without telling the students who had written them. The point of the experiment was to show how, when deprived of contextual clues, students ended up making embarrassingly ‘wrong’ judgments about what was good and bad. I was convinced that the slush pile was my own ‘Practical Criticism’ challenge and that I was going to be revealed as a fraud, with no real powers of literary discrimination.

Andrew Porter made a comment about his own experiences, which the Times published:

I read the slush pile at “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction” for 8 years, from 1966 to 1974, going in once a week to sort through anywhere from 100 to 140 unsolicited manuscripts. The ultra-short stories of under 500 words were usually rejected—none of the writers measured up to Fredric Brown, master of the short-short—while poetry, seldom published, also got the boot. Holiday stories sent in during the holidays were also rejected; most authors have no idea what sort of lead time magazines require. Then there were so many stories with punchline endings: “We’ll go to the third planet: the natives call it ‘Earth'” or “Eve? Gosh, my name’s Adam!” Some of those were 25,000 words, and most ended badly.

Occasionally there was a gem among the dross; I pulled Suzette Haden Elgin’s first published story from the piles, and it went on to be published and anthologized many times.

I was paid a pittance, yes ($25 a week), but did my best by the magazine and the authors. We sent them rejection forms, with sometimes a note encouraging more submissions—which was usually a mistake; they sent in their vast files of unpublishable stories. But sometimes…

All life is a is a judgement call, whether of unpublished stories, where to live, who to marry, or what to have for dinner. Heller failed the writers and her employers. I hope her subsequent life judgements have been wiser.

(6) Aaron Pound’s well-written CapClave report on Dreaming About Other Worlds ends with this insight:

After the convention, I spoke with my mother on the phone. She had traveled to New York to visit my sister for the weekend, and she was somewhat perplexed that the redhead and I had gone to CapClave rather than New York ComicCon. While the redhead and I enjoy big conventions with tens of thousands of attendees every now and then – we have been to DragonCon once, and we go to GenCon every year – there is simply no substitute for the congenial and friendly atmosphere of the smaller fan run conventions like CapClave, Balticon, Chessiecon, and the hundreds of other small conventions that take place every year. The blunt truth is that the large professionally run media conventions like New York ComicCon are simply exhausting. New York ComicCon had about 170,000 attendees this year. CapClave had about 400. To attend almost any panel at New York ComicCon, you have to wait in line, often for hours. You might be able to see stars like Chris Evans, George Takei, or Carrie Fischer, but you’ll likely see them from the back of an auditorium as they speak to a couple of thousand people. Or if you want a personal interaction you’ll pay for the privilege, and you will likely only be able to interact with them for a minute or two. At CapClave, on the other hand, the panels are small and interactive. I have never had to spend any appreciable time waiting in line for anything. Most of the authors who attend are more than happy to sit down and talk with you, whether after a panel, sitting in the con suite, or simply while hanging out at the hotel bar. An event like New York ComicCon is a spectacle, while CapClave, by contrast, is a conversation. There is room for both in the genre fiction world, but as for myself, I prefer the conversation.

(7) A Brian K. Vaughn comic may be made into a TV series.

After years of trying, Hollywood finally threw in the towel last year and stopped trying to make a movie version of Y: The Last Man. Brian K. Vaughan’s epic 60-issue series recounts the adventures of Yorick Brown, his pet monkey Ampersand, and all the ladies on Earth who want a piece of him because he is—spoiler alert—the last man, after a mysterious plague kills everything with a Y chromosome except for him. After the rights were returned to Vaughan following New Line dropping the ball on the films, it was unclear if anything would ever happen with it, given the creator had left television and was concentrating on comics once more.

But much like astronauts returning to Earth from the International Space Station, Y: The Last Man has returned to the world of filmed adaptations. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the sci-fi comic is being developed into a series for cable channel FX. Along with producers Nina Jacobsen and Brad Simpson, the network is looking for a writer to develop the show with Vaughan.

(8) Ross Andersen reports on “The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy” for The Atlantic.

Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009…..

The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.

But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.

It appears to be mature….

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.

If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they’ll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth’s network of radio stations.

(9) George R.R. Martin announces that Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive…

…is Emilia Clarke, our own Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea.

The Esquire magazine article is here..

(10) Tom Knighton reviews the novel The Martian:

I’d heard all about the science, how it was supposed to be so accurate.  I’d heard that Weir wrote a pretty compelling story.  While I’m not sure about the former, I do agree with the latter, they left out one key piece of commentary on The Martian.  It’s actually funny!

Mark Watney, the main character, is a natural smart ass and an independent spirit…in addition to a mechanical engineer and botanist.  Honest, if you’re going to strand a guy on Mars, it might have been the perfect choice, which some may perceive as a chink in Watney’s armor on this story, but I disagree.

(11) SFFWorld interviews Seanan McGuire:

SFFWorld: With so many interesting universes that you create, you have fans who like them all. But do you ever have fans getting mad at you because you are working on one series and they want a new book in their favorite series?

McGuire: Fans are people, and people sometimes get mad at air.  I know I do.  So I have people huff at me because I’m not doing what they want, but I also have people get mad because I use profanity, or because I exist in material space, or because I was at Disneyland when they thought I should be writing.  I just keep swimming.  I need to switch between projects to keep from burning myself out, and I like to think that my true fans would rather have me writing for a long time than get exactly what they want the second that they want it.  Unless what they want is a puppy.

(12) “Most of the story team for the next Star Wars film is female” reports Fortune.

Today, Kennedy is president of Lucasfilm, producer of the next installment in the Star Wars series, The Force Awakens. Still, she believes the challenges for women have remained much the same since the late 1970s. “I don’t think things have changed much for women for jobs in the entertainment industry, especially in technical roles,” she said. Kennedy added that at a recent Saturday Night Live taping she attended, she saw no women operating the cameras….

“People in powerful positions are not trying hard enough [to bring women into the industry] and there are an alarming number of women who are not able to get those jobs,” she explained.

And — “Kathleen Kennedy Promises She’ll Hire A Female Director For A Star Wars Movie” reports GeekTyrant

“I feel it is going to happen — we are going to hire a woman who’s going to direct a Star Wars movie. I have no doubt. On the other hand, I want to make sure we put somebody in that position who’s set up for success. It’s not just a token job to look out and try to find a woman that we can put into a position of directing Star Wars.”

(13) No matter what William Shatner told the Australians, Justin Lin is directing Star Trek Beyond — and people are leaking photos of the aliens from Lin’s movie.

(14) “One step closer to Star Trek: New 3-D printer builds with 10 materials at once” from Christian Science Monitor.

It’s built from off-the-shelf parts that cost about $7,000 in total, and is capable of printing in full color with up to 10 materials at a time, including fabrics, fiber-optics, and lenses.

Traditional multi-material printers use a mechanical system to sweep each layer of the printed object after it’s laid down to ensure that it’s flat and correctly aligned. The extreme precision of such a system is a big part of the reason that printers are so expensive. But the MultiFab uses a machine-vision system instead of a mechanical one, which allows for precise scanning – down to 40 microns – without the need for so many pricey components, project engineer Javier Ramos told Wired.

(15) All six Bonds together, that is, at Madame Tussaud’s!

(16) Frock Flicks: The Costume Movie Review Podcast, does a serious, in-depth study of historical costuming in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – which gets high marks despite having been done cheap, cheap, cheap!

The Historical Setting of Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The movie is supposedly set in 932 A.D., and, of course, the story is King Arthur, which is quasi-fictitious anyway. The person who might be the historical basis for the Arthurian legends could have lived in the 5th to 7th century, and 932 is right around the reign of Æthelstan, who was a king of the Anglo-Saxons and the first to proclaim himself King of the English in 927. But hey, whatever this is a comedy, who pays attention to the title cards, right? Other than all those moose and llamas…

In a way, it doesn’t matter because medieval clothing, at least for men, is somewhat vaguely defined from the 5th though 12th centuries, being mostly belted tunics and such. But for reference, here are a few examples of how ruling men were depicted in documents of the period in England. The garment shapes are simple, and the higher up in status a man was, the more decorative trims and jewelry he got. It’s also interesting to note the hair and beard styles.

(17) John Hertz offers a piece he entitles, “Do you, Mister Jones?” —

All this throwing round of the word “geek” recalls a handy little acronym I had published a while ago in The MT Void 1279 (or you may have seen it later in Vanamonde 956, where I added “Among reasons to form one’s own opinions, people can be vigorous in accusing one of one’s virtues”; not to burden the File 770 Reference Director, I allude to Aesop, H. Andersen, B. Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man”, and “The Marching Morons”).

Grapes are sour.
Emperor has no clothes.
Each put-down of you means I win.
Kornbluth didn’t tell the half of it.

[Thanks to James H. Burns, John Hertz, Martin Morse Wooster, David K.M. Klaus, John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]

219 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/15 Trial by Filers

  1. @Camestros: [More spoilers. This book is not worth the effort to ROT-13 stuff.]

    Yeah, and eventually I decided it couldn’t just be Grayson, the protagonist, who was the problem.

    a. Grayson notes that the rioters had weapons “they weren’t supposed to have access to.”
    b. Post-atrocity – calling a spade a trenching tool – the soft, rear-echelon bureaucrat who doesn’t know what it’s like, man, shows up in Grayson’s room. He is among other things the battalion intelligence officer.
    c. He wants to talk all about the atrocity itself. He shows no interest whatsoever in debriefing Grayson on the odd firepower in the rioters’ hands. Grayson’s sargeant in the same hospital never says word one about being questioned on the rioters’ arsenal. She herself seems to find it literally unremarkable. Kloos has made the point during the Black Hawk Down section that something at least a little strange is going on here, but after that literally nobody cares – not within the book, not putting together the Scrivener binder.

    The structure of the book is literally careless. Perhaps Kloos gets better in later ones.

  2. @Camestros: Also, Kloos keeps getting numbers wrong in little but distracting ways. At one point, a soldier in the mess refers to “a hundred dollars worth of beef” on her plate. So, okay, very roughly we’re looking at tenfold inflation between now and the present of the book. But then later, Kloos refers to values of dropships and starships that, in light of the price of beef given in the book and the prices of, say, A-10 Warthogs and light cruisers today, probable are a hundred to a thousand times too low,

    Later, he says a shelter is super-crowded with 38 people in it, and is “about 30 feet by 30 feet” (10M square for yinz in Metricland) and mostly clear space (no furniture). When I read that this afternoon, I was literally sitting in a 30′ x 30′ room – the waiting room of my daughter’s pediatrician. And it was obvious how easily one could fit 38 people in that space. Kloos even describes it as having benches along all the walls. At 3′ per person, even allowing for the entrance door and the doorway to the bathroom, almost everyone could find room to sit along the wall!

  3. @Morris Keesan:
    I’m getting something of a Ray Bradbury vibe from the description. I believe I’ve read the story in question in one of Bradbury’s story collections; unfortunately, that was many years ago and I can’t even remember for sure which collection, much less which story. Or even if my memory is correct and I’m not mis-transcribing memories of ‘Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed’ onto this.

  4. Camestros Felapton on October 16, 2015 at 4:22 pm said:
    Jim Henley on October 16, 2015 at 4:08 pm said:

    And the protagonist was neither very appealing or very compelling. At first I thought Kloos had set himself the too-large challenge of writing from the POV on whom life doesn’t leave much trace. Eventually I had to conclude it was the author himself who wasn’t reflective about events.

    [some slightly spoilery things below]
    Yeah, blow up a a housing project possibly full of innocent people because you didn’t check what ammunition you were using? Totally not your fault and the people who say it IS your fault are cowardly corrupt officers who are only there because of nepotism and want to cover their arse. I decided that the main character had some unusual personality disorder which it meant he lacked the capacity to reflect on his own actions from an emotional perspective but without him actually being a psychopath.

    The main character gets less psychopathy as it goes on.
    I’m mostly through the second book at the moment, and finding it an okay read.
    I do admit that I found the first fifty or so pages awfully weapon-this-shoot-that-stuff-tactics-dense for my tastes, but there are people for whom that is a plus.
    So, milsfi, I guess.

  5. @camestros @jimhenley That bit with the rioters is actually setting up something for Book 3.

    Gur rnegu tbireazragf frrz gb xabj nobhg gur nyvraf nyernql, naq ner cercnevat sbe gur riraghny pbyyncfr ol nezvat pvgvmra zvyvgvnf sbe jura gurl chyy sbeprf bhg bs gur pvgvrf.

    (Books for reading in the bath or on the beach, in my opinion.)

  6. @Simon Bisson: No kidding. I don’t like to complain*, but when I deciphered that my immediate reaction was pretty much, “Hubbafuckawha?!”

    I mean, that’s a really stupid plan!

    *Lie.

  7. Yeah, it is. But they seem to have decided it’s that or extinction…

    Now, for good MilSF, may I recommend Linda Nagata’s excellent near future The Red series? Enhanced soldiers with a dose of feral AI.

  8. Books for reading in the bath and on the beach

    are, in my view, a fine thing; I have just finished Antonia Honeywell’s The Ship and could certainly do with some lighthearted cheer. Listening to Leonard Cohen’s music to slash your wrists to whilst reading The Ship is certainly inadvisable.

    This is not a book for those who prefer their dystopia lite, nor for those who prefer their protagonists to be even mildly likeable, if they can’t get a downright plucky and cheerful heroine dealing with a destroyed world. Honeywell isn’t interested in those cliches.

    It is, however, a very good novel which justifies the reviews in serious publications, and I’m pretty sure It will be high up on my nominating intentions, despite the fact that it’s not really my cup of tea…

  9. Which reminds me, I’m guessing The Red: First Light isn’t eligible for the Hugos as it’s a print update of a self-published e-book. However the rest of the series definitely is…

  10. Jim Henley on October 16, 2015 at 4:44 pm said:

    @Camestros: Also, Kloos keeps getting numbers wrong in little but distracting ways. At one point, a soldier in the mess refers to “a hundred dollars worth of beef” on her plate. So, okay, very roughly we’re looking at tenfold inflation between now and the present of the book. But then later, Kloos refers to values of dropships and starships that, in light of the price of beef given in the book and the prices of, say, A-10 Warthogs and light cruisers today, probable are a hundred to a thousand times too low,

    I have to say I didn’t notice that.

    As Simon B points out, aspects of the urban rioters situation are explained more in Book 3, and by Book 3 the range of characters has improved a bit (a gay Russian) but the whole world still has this feel as if it is inhabited by faceless robots until the main character directly interacts with them – hence that odd feeling that there are exactly two women in the whole of the Earth’s armed forces.

    On the Book3 aspect, I did get a bit of hmmm/ick feeling of the honorable soldier returning from the war to find his homeland in anarchy but brave souls (many ex-soldiers) banding together to form militias a bit too ‘freikorps’ post WW1.

    …but I’ll probably read number 4 but mainly because I’m hoping the big aliens win. It turns out they are giant book critics who are trying to stamp out MilSF.

  11. @Stevie

    I’m glad my instincts that The Ship sounded like a good book with an interesting concept that I really didn’t want to read seem to have been accurate, based on your impressions. Saves me a couple of quid to spend on something I’ll enjoy!

  12. …but I’ll probably read number 4 but mainly because I’m hoping the big aliens win. It turns out they are giant book critics who are trying to stamp out MilSF.

    And Camestros wins the Internets for the day. (and I recommend either Nagata or Gannon as a palate cleanser).

  13. @snowcrash I’m still amused by all the folk who failed to notice that the author of the piece lives in a MidWestern farming town. He’s not an effete coastal metrosexual at all!

  14. Heather Rose Jones: Should anyone need to know, I can provide anecdotal data that 48 hours is sufficient time after biting a small chunk off one’s tongue to heal enough for hot or acid beverages.

    Oww! Are you all right? Well, you say you can provide anecdotal data of recovery, but still . . . that sounds excruciating.

  15. It’s a lovely evening in San Jose. But, oh, Americans, I know everything is bigger here, but can you dial it down on the robins? They scare me…

  16. Meredith

    I’m happy to have saved you time and money on something you really wouldn’t enjoy.

    I bit the bullet to get started on The Ship because a first novel highly commended by people who don’t usually gush is distinctly unusual. And I can see what they see; a remarkably gifted writer of an extraordinary work.

    It’s not to my taste but I think it deserves a Hugo nom…

  17. Rob Thornton on October 16, 2015 at 10:33 am said:

    At the height of the Puppy Wars, I sent a dismayed email to John C. Wright… I thought that would be the end of it but he decided to publish my email (without my permission).

    That’s appalling. (How ill-bred does one have to be to do that?)

  18. Re: Publishing private emails.

    My suspicion is that the recipient could argue that in sending it to them via email, they are free to do with it as they wish if you did not explicitly tell them that they can’t republish it. No assertion of the contents as your IP, or some such.

    Now, is it a —k move to publish it? That’s another kettle of fish entirely…

  19. Hullo, Simon! Glad you’re enjoying our neck of the woods. You understand why now we put up with the semi-regular droughts, when we can sit outside after dark in mid-October in short sleeves and drink fabulous wine and eat great food.

    It’s actually been a not-very-good year for the bird population, so I’m amused that you’re scared of the robins. They’re not THAT big even in a good year! They’re smaller than the pigeons, after all, and those flying rats are no match for the occasional hawk or turkey buzzard. The wild turkeys are fairly large, for that matter, and the less said about Canadian geese, the better (feathery bitey shitting machines).

    @Stevie: thanks for the warning. I have a low tolerance for utterly depressing stories no matter how well-written they are, so I’ll be skipping that one.

    The latest “modern man” response is so ableist I can’t even. I hope he gets run over by a wheelchair.

  20. @lurkertype

    To be honest, I hardly even register the pressures to be fit/healthy/extreme sportsing these days unless someone breaks out the laziness crap or tries to use disabled bodies to ‘inspire’ able-bodied people to make more of an effort. Then I get tetchy.

    It might be more difficult to ignore for men, though.

  21. xtifr

    Re: Homebrewing. A surprising number of literal homebrewers were involved with the early development of the first really successful homebrewed operating system, Linux. Which lead to a lot of joking about paying people for their work (on this free system) in virtual beer. And graphics involving the penguin mascot, Tux, with a beer in his hand. And things like that. Homebrewers are geeky, so it should be no surprise when geeks turn out to be homebrewers.

    Also Steve Woz was involved with the original Homebrew Computer Club in the ’70s, which was one of the cross fertilization points of the personal computer revolution.

  22. McJulie: I’m curious what causes you to have that “ugh, it’s Cthulhu” reaction. Tentacles? Existence across vast cosmic dimensions of time and space? Indifference toward humanity? Worshiped by a cult? General incomprehensibility?

    The SF book’s characters are dealing with an alien invasion or a First Contact with aliens, who perhaps have psychic abilities (both to read others’ minds and to project thoughts into others’ minds) or other “alien” qualities — and then the “big reveal” comes toward the end and it turns out that the aliens are semi- omnipotent creatures who look like extremely large squid and live in large aquatic tanks.

    And my response is basically a “you’ve got to be f*cking kidding me”, because the idea of aquatic creatures being able to develop technology to travel in space seems especially ludicrous to me.

  23. That “modern man” responer gave away his cluelessness in the first sentence, when he referred to the NYTimes piece as “unintentionally satirical”. I should have stopped reading then, or a few sentences later when he provides his credentials for being “manly”, which are basically that he kills things. I notice that he appears to live in a world in which there are no adult women; the only female humans in his life are “girls”.

  24. I think Mary Frances has the right answer for my friend; it matches a response I got a few minutes later from a different group. No confirmation yet from the original requester, who’s probably asleep right now (at around 4:30am, CEST)

  25. JJ on October 16, 2015 at 7:24 pm said:

    And my response is basically a “you’ve got to be f*cking kidding me”, because the idea of aquatic creatures being able to develop technology to travel in space seems especially ludicrous to me.

    I can see how it makes sense. Imagine you are a intelligent squid monster living in a squid monster society on an Earth like planet. Now just above the waves is dry land. On that land are all sorts of resources and also potential transportation short cuts but to access them you’ve got a range of problems. You need to cope existing in a lower pressure environment and so you will need to make vessels that carry your aquatic environment with you and which allow you to interact with stuff. It is a similar problem to the one we face going into the sea but the direction in terms of pressure is in the opposite direction. Consequently for the squid monster going from sea to land is a lot more like us going into space than for us going land to sea is.

    Of course the squid monster has the same problems of getting into orbit as we do and similarish but different problems with coping with low gravity once in orbit.

  26. @Simon Bisson For what it’s worth, my impression is that American robins are MUCH mellower than the little British birds they were named after. (Very different bird families, too, I believe).

    They also have very different habits. It was very disorienting to realize from reading Hogfather that British robins are apparently Christmas birds. In areas with actual seasons, American robins are migratory, and generally considered harbingers of Spring. They may hang around all year in places like southern California, but when I was growing up in New England watching for the first robin of Spring was a thing we paid attention to.

  27. @emgrasso

    Robins aren’t exactly winter birds – they’re here all year round – but they do feature heavily on Christmas paraphernalia. Apparently its because Victorian postmen resembled robin redbreasts due to their uniforms and after that it just stuck, although I don’t know if that’s apocryphal.

  28. @Vasha

    Agreed.

    It also struck me when I first saw it that the John Carpenter Masters of Horror episode “Cigarette Burns” was very much like this. There was no way Carpenter could actually show us a movie like La Fin Absolute Du Monde and capture the full horror of the material in question. So he shows us glimpses of weird pretentious French art house film scenes with people driven insane clawing their eyes out. The actual premise that a filmed desecration so utterly horrific to drive viewers into murderous madness I thought was a pretty good one.

    Silly But True

  29. Rob Thornton on October 16, 2015 at 10:33 am said:
    At the height of the Puppy Wars, I sent a dismayed email to John C. Wright. As a fan of the Golden Age books, I was very unhappy with him. I thought that would be the end of it but he decided to publish my email (without my permission).

    So, when I visited File 770 for the first time in years, I was surprised to find myself quoted in the Puppy annals.

    This made me curious, and I dug up Wright’s post on this.
    (I started to look at the comments, but couldn’t really cope once they started baying.)
    Sadly, I guess Wright thought he had struck a telling blow by presenting links to If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love and The Queen of the Tyrant Lizards, in order to allow the different quality of two stories to speak for him.
    And, indeed, reading the two together is quite effective, though not to the end he seems to have intended.
    I think heavy-handed is the kindest comment I can find.
    Being in a research sort of state of mind, I tracked down the May 2015 response to Wright’s post here.
    And I couldn’t read it.
    I just quailed at the unrelenting display of Puppydom on Parade.
    Hard, hard days.
    I never did make it to the comments.
    Shudder.
    Off to make a cup of tea and recover myself.

  30. Camestros Felapton: Consequently for the squid monster going from sea to land is a lot more like us going into space than for us going land to sea is.

    The difference is that for us to construct sea-going (or space-going) vessels, we can mine materials available on land and construct tools with them, then use the tools to construct the vessels. Doing so requires combustion (= free oxygen) to melt and forge the tools and vessel parts.

    If you’re a squid, the whole opposable thumb thing seems to be a real problem for accomplishing that — plus achieving kiln-level temperatures underwater with no free oxygen is more than a bit of a stumbling block.

  31. I wouldn’t worry about the lack of thumbs; octopuses are capable of quite fine manipulations with their tentacles. But yes, high tech without combustion is hard to imagine. Clever use of volcanic vents perhaps?

    Also, octopuses can and do emerge from the water for minutes at a time. Further development of that ability could be assisted by non-metallic technology.

  32. What if your squidish creatures possessed a natural ability to examine and alter the genes of other living beings? They could breed biotech that would suit their needs instead of needing to construct it with kilns and smelting.

  33. @Marshall, well, that’s the kind of idea that can be passed over without examination in a story like Octavia Butler’s Dawn, but realistically speaking I don’t believe it. How does a macroscopic creature directly alter another one’s DNA? With engineered viruses, perhaps; but knowing about the existence of viruses and DNA takes a whole load of technology itself.

    OK maybe I’m not giving evolution enough credit, considering some of the ways that parasites influence their hosts for example. So convince me it’s possible.

  34. There was an old game called SimEarth, in which you had to (amongst other things) evolve races of creatures to levels of technological prowess. One of the first milestones was the discovery of fire. I was always amused when the game told me “The fish have discovered fire!”

  35. JJ on October 16, 2015 at 9:41 pm said:

    Camestros Felapton: Consequently for the squid monster going from sea to land is a lot more like us going into space than for us going land to sea is.

    The difference is that for us to construct sea-going (or space-going) vessels, we can mine materials available on land and construct tools with them, then use the tools to construct the vessels. Doing so requires combustion (= free oxygen) to melt and forge the tools and vessel parts.

    If you’re a squid, the whole opposable thumb thing seems to be a real problem for accomplishing that — plus achieving kiln-level temperatures underwater with no free oxygen is more than a bit of a stumbling block.

    Multiple tentacles – squid monsters laugh at your puny opposable thumbs. Dark, inky laughs.

    Kiln level temperatures? Undersea volcanic vents. Of course squid monsters also manipulate various sea creatures such as coral and mollusks* to simply grow rigid tools made out of calcium compounds.

    Now sure, being able to burn stuff is great – squid monster accepts that but that is just an incentive for squid monster to launch its conquest of land. At least that’s what I was told growing up in North Sea. erm…no, no, I’m a normal human not a squid monster in a human flesh costume, just ignore that last bit. I have no idea what a squid monster would actually do but they are fully justified in doing it and crushing the hegemony of the stupid vertebrates and their monkey overlords.

  36. Squids and octopuseses are very clever creatures, and I’m sure on some other planet they could probably figure something out once enough dead aeons go by. Those tentacles and suckers allow for a lot of fine manipulation. Whether they’d be able to make something with enough water to support them against the land’s crushing gravity, I don’t know. We monkeys can make our airtight vessels pretty small, going to either lesser-gravity place.

    Even in places with the mildest of seasons, American robins are migratory. And pretty much very docile. They’re just loud.

  37. The other Nigel on October 16, 2015 at 10:51 pm said:
    There was an old game called SimEarth, in which you had to (amongst other things) evolve races of creatures to levels of technological prowess. One of the first milestones was the discovery of fire. I was always amused when the game told me “The fish have discovered fire!”

    I loved that game. It was great fun.

    That was why one of its sequels, “SimWolf” was so very disappointing. After “SimEarth” I expected some fun life simulation, but my wolves kept dying of thirst because I didn’t regularly march them to a water source and shove their heads in. And no matter how many antelopes bred there was never enough food.

  38. @Camestros Felapton:

    Now sure, being able to burn stuff is great – squid monster accepts that but that is just an incentive for squid monster to launch its conquest of land. At least that’s what I was told growing up in North Sea. erm…no, no, I’m a normal human not a squid monster in a human flesh costume, just ignore that last bit. I have no idea what a squid monster would actually do but they are fully justified in doing it and crushing the hegemony of the stupid vertebrates and their monkey overlords.

    Yes! Yes!

    Conceivably, I mean. I am a normal human being with all the appropriate loyalties.

  39. @Jim, Camestros:

    Not that it’s relevant to any of us completely normal humans, but I do note that “squid monster” scans perfectly to “code monkey.” Perhaps this is a sign of where JoCo’s sympathies lie with respect to the “lesser” animal kingdom…

  40. Not that it’s relevant to any of us completely normal humans, but I do note that “squid monster” scans perfectly to “code monkey.” Perhaps this is a sign of where JoCo’s sympathies lie with respect to the “lesser” animal kingdom…

    It also scans perfectly to “Wil Wheaton”. Is Wil perhaps our squid overlord?

  41. And my response is basically a “you’ve got to be f*cking kidding me”, because the idea of aquatic creatures being able to develop technology to travel in space seems especially ludicrous to me.

    I can certainly understand why a “big reveal” that the aliens are basically Cthulhu might feel cheap, especially when the SFinal aspects of the race or its technology haven’t really been thought through.

    But, as a fan of the shockingly intelligent Giant Pacific Octopus, I would have no problem at all with an intelligent spacefaring race kinda based on that species. They only live about seven years and aren’t very social, which is probably why they haven’t taken over the planet already.

  42. @Simon Bisson
    “Now, for good MilSF, may I recommend Linda Nagata’s excellent near future The Red series? Enhanced soldiers with a dose of feral AI.”

    I just finished book 1. It was pretty good. It reads much like an action movie, very entertaining. For MilSF, the emphasis is not so heavily on the armament.

    Have you read “The Trials”, book 2 yet?

  43. I haven’t read any of Nagata’s novels yet, but this short was an enjoyable piece of MilSF, or possibly Mil-fantasy, and probably matches what junego says about The Red.

  44. Re: technological squid, it occurs to me that physical manipulation of shell-growing mollusks might be a non igneous way of manufacturing durable objects of all sorts. It (more) intelligent squid figured out a way to use their shell-bearing kin as biological 3D printers…

  45. @Mark
    “I haven’t read any of Nagata’s novels yet, but this short was an enjoyable piece of MilSF, or possibly Mil-fantasy, and probably matches what junego says about The Red.”

    That’s her style of writing, all right. Decent story. Her novel isn’t all combat footage, though there is a fair amount. I’d recommend it for an enjoyable read.

  46. RE: intelligent squid

    I have some completely obsolete ebook readers (Rocketbook and Ebookwise) that I have thousands of stories for. Although the batteries no longer hold a charge very well, I can still read one device when plugged in.

    That buildup is to explain that a few years ago I read a pretty good SF book with intelligent ‘squid’ on another planet that’s in that obsolete format. I can’t remember the author or title, though. Maybe I’ll go dig it out of the computer file later.

    The details are a bit fuzzy, but the squid-like aliens had domesticated some fellow sea creatures that secreted hard substances and/or they secreted such substances themselves. They used that method to develop technologically to a certain point. They were then discovered by another alien species who were helping them with more advanced technology. There was a binary planet system (or two moons revolving around each other) that had each evolved sentient species. Humans show up and conflict ensues.

    I thought it was a plausible way for a technological civilization to at least start to develop underwater.

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