(1) A sweet new image for science fiction loving dogs!
Cool Corgi Dresses Up As All 13 Doctors From ‘Doctor Who’ —
(2) What brand of cigarettes did Godzilla smoke? I never wondered before. See behind-the-scenes photos from the Japanese movie productions, including the fellow who wore the monster suit taking a smoke break. At Dangerous Minds.
Actor Haruo Nakajima (pictured above) spent nearly 25 years inside the rubber Godzilla suit that he gleefully trampled over mini-Tokyo in for various Godzilla or monster-themed films from the early 50s through the 1970s.
(3) James Lileks’ satire for National Review, “The Twitterverse Strikes Back against the Phantom Menace of Anti-Star Wars Racists!”, begins –
According to my Twitter feed, gullible people are complaining –
I should just stop right there and wrap it up, right? After breaking news like that, where could I possibly go?
…Anyway. If Luke comes out in the new film wearing the Leia slave bikini; if Chewie marries Groot; if Han makes a big speech about how the end of the Empire means they can rebuild the galaxy along the lines of, say, Denmark; if the main villain is named Ben-Ghazi — then you might complain that you’re being Force-fed some political drivel. Even then it wouldn’t matter.
(4) A pretty fancy bookmark. A map of Middle-Earth annotated by J.R.R. Tolkien for illustrator Pauline Baynes is being sold by Blackwell’s for 60,000 reports the Guardian.
A recently discovered map of Middle-earth annotated by JRR Tolkien reveals The Lord of the Rings author’s observation that Hobbiton is on the same latitude as Oxford, and implies that the Italian city of Ravenna could be the inspiration behind the fictional city of Minas Tirith.
The map was found loose in a copy of the acclaimed illustrator Pauline Baynes’ copy of The Lord of the Rings. Baynes had removed the map from another edition of the novel as she began work on her own colour Map of Middle-earth for Tolkien, which would go on to be published by Allen & Unwin in 1970. Tolkien himself had then copiously annotated it in green ink and pencil, with Baynes adding her own notes to the document while she worked.
Blackwell’s, which is currently exhibiting the map in Oxford and selling it for £60,000, called it “an important document, and perhaps the finest piece of Tolkien ephemera to emerge in the last 20 years at least”.
It shows what Blackwell’s called “the exacting nature” of Tolkien’s creative vision: he corrects place names, provides extra ones, and gives Baynes a host of suggestions about the map’s various flora and fauna. Hobbiton, he notes, “ is assumed to be approx at latitude of Oxford”; Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University.
David Doering argues, “I feel that such artifacts need to be in public, not private, hands. This is a critical piece of our cultural history and is of immense value. It should not allowed to disappear into private hands.”
(Fifth 4) John C. Wright explains how “My Elves are Different; Or, Erlkoenig and Appendix N”.
When calculating how to portray the elves in my current writing project (tentatively titled Moths and Cobwebs) I was thinking about Erlkoenig and Appendix N, and (of course!) about GK Chesterton. There is a connected train of thought here, but it meanders through some ox-bows and digressions, so I hope the patient reader enjoys the scenic route of thought.
First, Erlkoenig. I had noticed for some time that there was many a younger reader whose mental picture of the elves (those inhabitants of the Perilous Realm, the Otherworld, whose ways are not our ways) was formed entirely by JRR Tolkien and his imitators. They are basically prelapsarian men: like us in stature and passions, but nobler, older, and not suffering our post-Edenic divorce from the natural world. This is not alien to the older themes and material on which Tolkien drew, but there is alongside this an older and darker version.
(5) Nancy Fulda outlines “What To Expect When You Start An Internet Kerfuffle” for the SFWA Blog.
And so you write a blog post.
It is the most difficult and most magnificent thing you’ve ever written, pure words of truth sucked directly out of your soul. You feel triumphant. Liberated. (Terrified, too, but that doesn’t matter now.) You have said the Thing That Must Be Said, and you have done so with courage and clarity. You click a button, and send your words winging toward humanity.
And then, of course, the internet does what the internet does best.
It starts kerfluffling….
Day 2: Negative feedback.
Your post has reached people with opposing viewpoints. Many of them. Blog posts pop up across the internet, criticizing and often misrepresenting your stance. Angry comments multiply like weeds. Email conversations ensue. You become embroiled in a number of difficult and confrontational exchanges, often with people who seem incapable of understanding what you’re trying to say.
You may get hate mail. Depending on what you’ve said and who you’ve said it to, the content of those emails may be very, very ugly indeed. Your hands are trembling by the time you click the delete button.
By the end of the day, you’re afraid to check your email. Comments are still rolling in, and somehow, even the positive messages only make you more aware of the bad ones. You wonder whether this was all a mistake. At the same time, you can’t stop refreshing your screen. The rest of your life has ground to a screeching halt; deadlines missed, meals skipped, loved ones neglected. Even when you’re not online, your thoughts are spiraling around what’s happened there.
And people are still retweeting your post.
(6) Today’s Birthday Boy
- October 23, 1942 – Michael Crichton
(7) Last weekend the Iron Hill brewery chain in Pennsylvania offered Harry Potter-themed fare reports Philly.com.
The pub will serve Dumbledore’s Dubbel, a sweet Belgian ale; and Voldermort’s Wrath, a West-Coast style IPA with an intense bitter hop flavor. In addition to the limited brews, a Harry Potter-themed menu will be served for those hungry wizards. Items include:
- Aunt Petunia’s Mulligatawny Soup
- Slytherin Smoky Pumpkin Salad
- Ron’s Corned Beef Toasts
- Hogwart’s Express Pumpkin Pastry
- Dumbledore’s Cauldron Beef Stew
- Butterbeer-Braised Pork Loin
- Pan-Seared Chinese Fireball (salmon)
- Mrs. Weasley’s English Toffee Crumble
For the non-beer drinker: Butterbeer and autumn-themed mixed drinks will be available.
(9) Details about J.K. Rowling’s new Harry Potter play are online. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will pick up 19 years after the seventh book, and it will focus on Harry and his youngest son, Albus. Here’s a brief about the plot play’s website:
It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn’t much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children.
While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.
(10) Here’s some artwork from the forthcoming production.
(11) The pilot and second episode of Amazon’s original series The Man In The High Castle can be viewed for no-charge here through 11:59 PM PST on Sunday, October 25 in the U.S. and UK.
The season launch of all episodes will be November 20.
(12) Andrew Liptak recalls the history of science fiction in Playboy magazine at Kirkus Reviews.
(13) Alastair Reynolds covers his trip to Russia on Approaching Pavonis Mons.
My wife and I are big on art, and we’d long wanted to visit the Hermitage. I can safely say that it was everything we’d hoped it would be, times about ten, and although we went back for a second day, you could cheerfully spend a month in the place and not see enough.
(14) Zombie George R.R. Martin will soon be on the air:
For all you Z NATION fans out there, and those who aren’t (yet) too, my long-anticipated guest starring role as a rotting corpse is scheduled for the October 30 episode, “The Collector.”
(15) At Teleread Chris Meadows pays tribute to prolific Amazon reviewer Harriet Klausner, who was an important part of the growth of online book sales via Amazon.
Harriet Klausner, at one time one of the most recognizable names on Amazon, passed away on October 15, at the age of 63. Klausner was a speed-reader who was one of the most prolific customer reviewers on Amazon, with over 31,000 reviews to her credit at the time of her death. According to a 2006 Time profile of her, she read an average of 4 to 6 books per day. Although the details of her death were not disclosed, it must have happened fairly quickly—the last review on her Amazon.com reviewer page is dated October 12.
(16) Jonathan R. Eller speaks about Fahrenheit 451 at Wisconsin Lutheran College on October 26.
(17) The wisdom of the Fred!
https://twitter.com/FredKiesche/status/657600422794915841
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Robotech Master, Phil Nichols, Steven H Silver, David Doering, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day the indefatigable Will R.]
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@Peter J
TBR pile collapse?
@Mark & @Anna
Quite enjoyed Grunts myself though its a long time since I read it.
JCW’s post, yet again, demonstrates that the Pups aren’t nearly as well read as they presume themselves to be. The sort of ignorance on parade that JCW exhibits isn’t surprising given the track record of the Pups, but one might think that they might at least refrain from evaluating books that, by their own admission, they haven’t even read. Given that he has zero credibility, it is hard to figure out how, but posts like that somehow make JCW have even less credibility. Is negative credibility a thing?
Always with the negative scrolls Mister Glyer, always with the negative scrolls.
I had not come across Ursula Vernon’s remarkable short story
until today. It too features the devil, but in a very different light to Sandra McDonald’s
I think that Tolkien broke new ground in a number of ways, but his creation of female characters as people with power tends to get overlooked, in much the same way that his depiction of the shortcomings of the elves tends to get overlooked.
Equally importantly, it looks to me as if Ursula’s story is eligible for nomination for the 2016 Hugos…
Every time I scroll to town
People keep pixellin’ my puppy around
It doesn’t matter if my puppy’s a hound
You better not pixel my puppy around.
(Alt: All those scrolling bridges.)
Okay, that trailer for The Man in the High Castle looks awesome! I want to figure out a way to watch it on our big screen TV!
More scary elves from C.J. Cherryh: The Dreaming Tree, Faery in Shadow, etc.
The ‘Elves’ in Poul Anderson’s “The Queen of Air and Darkness” are not good to associate with, either.
RE: JCW:
I can always appreciate when people return to the roots of a thing and explore the less popular but oftentimes more interesting aspects of it and elfin horror is somewhat underrepresented category overall.
Of the things that go bump in the night or hide under the bed, the worst can be the ones without fur, horns, and sharp claws but rather the pretty-face covering a wicked soul.
The song he linked to was particularly unsettling. Great, great fodder for story and characters.
Silly But True
@Stevie
Pocosin is indeed eligible and very good.
I’ll speak up for the elves in Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword too. (Broken Sword may well be an Appendix N book; I forget.) They are deeply amoral and also alien; however, physically they’re not dissimilar to Tolkien’s.
Looks like JCW is living down to a nick name I saw for him.
It also looks like he missed Bordertown and it’s elves. Though admittedly there are a few good ones in the series. There’s also Warhammer 40,000 with the Eldar and Dark Eldar. Warhammer Fantasy has its elves, though I don’t recall if it has dark elves.
Also, graphalia is a terrible thing.
He never uses the “E” word (does he?), but I think an argument could be made that Moorcock’s Eldren/Melniboneans/Vadragh/Ndadragh are the forerunners of most genre elves.
And Tad Williams has written some good elves, both in Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, and in Shadowmarch — they manage to keep that air of alienness to them that’s so often missing.
Mark
Re Ursula Vernon’s Pocasin
I agree; I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to define the line which divides the really good from the competent. The latter may well possess a number of virtues but it slides from the memory, whereas Pocasin sticks like a burr.
I’d like to know more about the witch, even though I know I won’t; she exists somewhere outside the story. And that is a remarkable thing…
I’ll speak up for the elves in Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword too. (Broken Sword may well be an Appendix N book; I forget.)
Yes. Yes it is.
One might note that of the Poul Anderson selections contained in Appendix N, The Broken Sword is the one that Johnson did not read or review.
@Aaron:
What?! How the hell do you not read The Broken Sword when it’s right there? Just for one’s own personal enrichment? It is one hell of a book.
How the hell do you not read The Broken Sword when it’s right there?
Because Jeffro’s much ballyhooed tour through Appendix N is a woefully incomplete sampling that consists of reading one (and maybe two) works by each author mentioned in the list. He read The High Crusade and Three Hearts and Three Lions from Poul Anderson. Based on that, he apparently decided he was sufficiently well-versed in Anderson’s fiction.
Incuriosity seems to be a defining personal characteristic of most Pups in general, and Johnson specifically.
What?! How the hell do you not read The Broken Sword when it’s right there? Just for one’s own personal enrichment? It is one hell of a book.
Not a clue. And it is one of Anderson’s best, IMO.
Wow, JCW still knows how to waffle on endlessly about absolutely bollock all. What I got from it is Leckie is bad because something something riffing on older ideas whereas he’s a visionary genius because something something riffing on older ideas.
Anyway, I only skimmed it but I’m pretty sure his train of thought missed its connection somewhere along the line there.
Edit: Agreed on The Broken Sword – a friend of mine actually pushed a copy into my hands and forced me to read it, and I’m glad she did.
Wait, so if I click through the JCW piece I will find that elves are a reason to shit on Ann Leckie one more time? That’s…obsession.
These Tor authors will stop at nothing to tear down their good-old space-opera adventure-writing competitors at other publishers, I guess.
Y’know who did a good Appendix N reread? Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan over at tor.com
http://www.tor.com/tags/appendix-n/
To quote the finest living writer himself:
Edit: there’s another conclusion one could draw, and that I draw from experience. Maybe we do know who these authors are, and maybe we really enjoy them (Le Guin is one of my all-time favourite authors for her Earthsea books and The Left Hand of Darkness). So maybe we like Leckie because she’s offered up a fresh take on an idea we are already aware of? I personally thought the pronoun thing was a bit blunt force but it works for her world and the Radch, and I like the world she’s created. I’d like to see it from perspectives other than Radchaai some time though.
Meredith:
I’m pretty tired of people writing long complaints about how terrible young fans are … I can’t imagine why younger fans might not want to spend time with those people.
It’s inconceivable to some people that the perceived superiority of the books of yesteryear could be mere memory bias. No, kids today read terrible books because SJWs or something.
As Anna said, Fingolfin is a Good Guy Elf, and so is his son Finrod. But they do seem to be exceptions.
Edit: there’s another conclusion one could draw, and that I draw from experience.
One has to wonder, given that JCW has never read Ancillary Justice, if he has actually read any of the other works he references in his poorly thought-out diatribe. Including his own.
I think we may be a bit hard on Jeffro here – how was he to know that The Broken Sword was (as people are saying, and as I agree) the Anderson book to read, out of the three?
@Jon Meltzer All he had to do was read file770. If you wanted the best book about shapeshifting starship-captains with an affinity for fine cheeses and a hedgehog fetish, someone here will know just the book for you. Then the crowd will chine in with five more.
There are readers here.
Stevie – Pocasin was amazing. And the Devil portrayed in it was altogether a more fascinating and beguiling character. Loved his parting gift to the witch! I guess if anybody will appreciate stubborn refusal to back down for a point of principle, even in the face of a more powerful force, it’s be the Devil. 😉
@Jon Meltzer: basic research?
Also, surely someone doing a reading of the Appendix N books would be better off reading all of the Appendix N books instead of taking wild stabs in the dark at all the authors with more than one book listed. Right?
I think we may be a bit hard on Jeffro here – how was he to know that The Broken Sword was (as people are saying, and as I agree) the Anderson book to read, out of the three?
My issue isn’t that he skipped the one book. It is that he essentially did little more than a cursory sample of most of the authors on the list and has made sweeping pronouncements based on that incomplete knowledge. Appendix N only lists three Anderson novels, all of which are fairly short, and Johnson couldn’t even be bothered to read all three.
The best book about shapeshifting starship-captains with an affinity for fine cheeses and a hedgehog fetish. Sounds intriguing. Any recommendations?
Now we’re veering off into straight-up High Fantasy 🙂 With taverns.
JCW is missing a whole bunch of other stories which also use those same ideas. He’s utterly deluded if he thinks that he and Swanwick are the only ones — but given that while he may be deeply read in SFF (lots of books by a few authors), he doesn’t seem to be very widely read (books by lots and lots of different authors), so I can totally believe that he doesn’t realize how many SFFnal ideas have each been presented by many, many authors.
The “someone’s done it before” criticism doesn’t hold any water. There are very few SFF stories that come out now which manage to conjure up a completely novel idea. What the best ones do, however, is come up with a novel treatment of a previously-used idea — which is exactly what Leckie did.
Given JCW’s incredibly bad C.S. Lewis fanfic, I have to laugh when he criticizes any other author for lack of originality — and double-laugh when he hasn’t even bothered to read the book he’s criticizing, and hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s talking about.
Just nobody give JCW the BDSM elves from John M Ford’s The Last Hot Time, OK? I am not volunteering to clean up the brain matter again…
Actually, scary elves are not so rare in modern fantasy
I’ll add to that Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses by Duane, where they are, while beautiful, very scary. (Pointy ears optional, I think, in hers.)
Sort-of related to Pocosin, there’s another excellent character portrait of a witch in “Of Sorrow and Such” by Angela Slatter (yet another Tor.com novella).
This is not alien to the older themes and material on which Tolkien drew, but there is alongside this an older and darker version.
Keebler.
The “someone’s done it before” criticism doesn’t hold any water.
JCW doesn’t seem to understand that ideas are almost trivial. Execution is everything.
Lewis wasn’t original – he was copying from classic myth and Christian mythology, but at least his execution was decent. JCW treading the same ground isn’t original either, and his execution is clumsy and ham-fisted.
Leckie may or may not be original, but that doesn’t matter. Her execution of the ideas in her books is what makes them so good.
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
Regarding pre-ordering Bujold in e-book: I noticed when trying to pre-order a Lee/Miller title on amazon, that the Baen ebook did not show up as orderable until the day of publication. Thinking about it, that’s probably so Baen can sell the e-arc instead. I haven’t gone systematically checking for other Baen titles, so I don’t know if that is true of all Baen ebooks.
I wonder if John C Wrights kids are all studying and taking the SAT one after another. He loads his posts up with words you only see on the SAT. His posts aren’t good enough for me to go through the effort to google what the words mean.
Larry Correia needs to fisk these posts and make fun of the way he writes. He writes like a stuck up academic.
If you want to see Z Nation just to see GRRM, don’t bother. The show is horrible. Its basically ‘lets take Walking Dead’ and remake it as cheaply as possible and throw in as much god awful plotlines as we possibly can. Zombie GRRM in walking dead would be cool. As a Jets fan, I’d like to see Tom brady and Bill Bellicheck get ice picked as zombies, but I may be a little biased on that one.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan: I tried to pre-order Gentleman Jole but there doeas not seem to be an ebook edition? Surely a mistake?
Sylvia is correct; until publication day, the only way you can get it is by shelling out for the eARC. My personal recommendation is to wait 3 months until it’s actually released: the ebook will only cost half as much as the eARC, and they might actually have fixed some of the copious spelling, grammar, and formatting errors in the final version.
Normally, I’d be all over this book too — but having seen just how semi-unreadable several Baen eARCs have been, I won’t waste my money.
If such a book doesn’t exist, somebody should bloody well write it. I mean, November is just round the corner, hint hint.
There is a shapeshifting space captain in Consider Phlebas. Just sayin’.
Yes, that was my original decision. As long as people refrain from discussing the book until it’s properly out. GLOWERS.
Speaking of Bujold, how many people have read her stand-alone novella, “Penric’s Demon?”
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/10/penrics-demon-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold.html
I just read it yesterday, and I was blown away. This may be my favorite SFF novella for the year.
There’s a trick where you type the name of both the book and the reviewer in a little box and it gives you links like this:
http://www.castaliahouse.com/retrospective-the-broken-sword-by-poul-anderson/
@Nick Mamatas…
Beware…
The Keeblear Horror!
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/81972-the-keeblear-horror—part-1
Silly But True
Speaking of $1.99 sales, Claire North’s Touch is on sale in the US Kindle store as well. I bought it solely on the strength of Filers’ recommendations of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, though I haven’t had a chance to read that one yet.
If he actually thinks Ancillary Justice and The Left Hand of Darkness are doing the same things with gender, I wonder whether he has read either.
Well, I went and looked and didn’t see a criticism of Leckie per se, and it had nothing to do with elves. He criticized Leckie’s fans for proclaiming her first book the greatest SF novel of the 21st century without bothering to read Left Hand of Darkness or Vacuum Flowers.
The literary-genealogical line of dangerous elves & such that Anderson drew on can be traced back (as already hinted way upthread) to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Go find a good production (say, the Peter Hall RSC version with Judi Dench, Ian Richardson, Ian Holme, Diana Rigg, and Helen Mirren) and note Puck’s introductory speech, the early exchange between Oberon and Titania, and then the benediction speech at the end. Fairyland is a scary, perilous, and not very human-friendly place, and was so right up to its relatively recent sentimentalization. See also Eleanor Arnason’s rather Andersonian take (with perhaps a dash of de Camp) on the Icelandic branches of the family in Hidden Folk.