(1) KEEP ON FIBBING. Diana Pharaoh Francis says according to “Writer Club Rules: Truth is No Excuse” in a post at Book View Café.
That’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, that truth is no excuse for fiction. I’ve had students who want to fictionalize a real story and then have found themselves floundering because true things are often too unbelievable to work in fiction. Fiction needs to make sense. It needs to be plausible. Reality doesn’t. That’s why the saying, Stranger Than Fiction.
(2) SACRED QUESTER. In “Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?” in the October 16 Chronicle of Higher Education, David Wescott profiles Robin Hanson about The Age of Em, including where Hanson gets his wild ideas, how Hanson hopes to write sf someday, and how fans accost him with ideas about “transcension and living in blocks of computronium.”
Hanson considers himself something of an exception to that rule and has described his mission as a “sacred quest, to understand everything, and to save the world.” He argues that academics are primarily devoted to signaling their own importance, and not necessarily to the pursuit of intellectual progress. “We lie about why we go to prestigious colleges as students, we lie about why we fund research, we lie about why we do research … we lie about lots of things,” he says. “We are so tempted to bullshit and give the most noble reason for why we do things.”
For academics who do actually care about intellectual progress more than “prestige, promotions, salaries, funding, lots of students, and roaring crowds,” Hanson says, there is a lot of freedom.
For him it’s the freedom to study things like immortality, aliens, and what to do if you suspect you are living in a computer simulation. “There are important silly subjects,” he says. And while most academics shy away from silly, “silly doesn’t equal unimportant.”
(3) GHOSTBUSTER. Fox News reports “Bill Murray honored as he accepts Mark Twain prize for humor” in a ceremony at the Kennedy Center on Sunday night.
There were plenty of laughs at Murray’s expense in evening that took on the tone of a gentle roast. Jimmy Kimmel, Aziz Ansari, Sigourney Weaver and Steve Martin were among those who ribbed Murray for being aloof, unpredictable and difficult to reach — and somehow still lovable.
“I think you and I are about as close as two people can be, considering that one of them is you,” Martin said in a video tribute.
(4) TEPPER OBIT. Shari S. Tepper (1929-2016) died October 22 reports Locus Online. The author of over 40 novels, Tepper received a lifetime achievement award from the World Fantasy Convention just last year.
John Scalzi paid tribute at Whatever:
Also a bit depressing: That Tepper, while well-regarded, is as far as I can tell generally not considered in the top rank of SF/F writers, which is a fact I find completely flummoxing. Her novel Grass has the sort of epic worldbuilding and moral drive that ranks it, in my opinion, with works like Dune and Perdido Street Station and the Earthsea series; the (very) loose sequel to Grass, Raising the Stones, is in many ways even better, and the fact that Stones is currently out of print is a thing I find all sorts of appalling.
(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
- Born October 24, 1893 — Film producer-director Merian Cooper (the original “King Kong”).
- Born October 24, 1915 — Bob Kane, creator of Batman.
(6) FREER’S SCAPEGOAT OF THE WEEK. Remember when Dave Freer used to teach about writing in his column at Mad Genius Club? Me neither.
Here am I, in the esteemed company of such luminaries in my field as Larry Correia and John C Wright, as winners of the Wally Award, an honor I will treasure – because it isn’t every day I find myself lumped with authors that I try to learn from and imitate, and I hear some terribly tragic news.
There’s no doubt that being singled out by none other than Damien Walter of ‘The Grauniad’, a newspaper whose reputation for unbiased journalism is only rivaled by Pravda, legendary for its typos and grammos (hence Grauniad, rather than The Guardian), and with research and factual quality which is mentioned in the same breath as News of the World and Beano (although they cannot seriously compete with Beano in the opinion of most people of an IQ above ‘sheep, dim (Merino)’) and whose sf/fantasy correspondent’s effect on the sales and livelihoods of sf and fantasy authors has been equated with file 770. The last comparison I feel unfair, because despite Damien’s tiny readership his attempts to harm my career and ability to make a living, he actually had some effect on my sales, with his hatred of my unread work improving sales for me. It is for this reason I find the news that the floundering ‘Grauniad’ (the Venezuela of mainstream print media, which is running out of other people’s money) seems to have dispensed with his services, so sad.
(7) CLOSE CALLS. The BBC interviews Megan Bruck Syal about avoiding extinction by asteroid.
Sixty-five million years ago, a catastrophic impact forever changed the environmental landscape of Earth – and there was no way to see it coming.
This Earth-bound asteroid – or maybe several – changed the course of millions of years of evolution, altered the composition of our atmosphere – and the geology of Central America for good measure.
To prevent a similar event, we need to be prepared. Megan Bruck Syal, postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, works on the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (Aida) – which, for the first time, will test how effective a kinetic impact mission would be in altering the course of an Earth-bound asteroid.
“It’s not a matter of if an asteroid will impact again, but when,” says Bruck Syal. “Planetary defence began to be an issue when more and more near-Earth asteroids began to be discovered.”
She warns of close calls, like the Chelyabinsk meteorite – which in 2013 made international headlines when it left hundreds of people injured and damaged thousands of buildings in Russia. “It really captured the world’s attention because no one saw it coming. And it was pretty small yet it still did a lot of damage for its size.”
(8) BLABBY MCBLABFACE. Apparently, if you want to know what’s happening in season 7 of Game of Thrones, it would not be too hard to find out — “MAJOR SPOILERS: The Entire Plot of ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 7 May Have Been Leaked on Reddit”.
A brave Redditor named awayforthelads dumped what appears to be the entire plot of Season 7 onto the Freefolk subreddit. The subreddit has a long history of being the go-to place for Thrones leaks and last season was incredibly reliable at thoroughly spoiling almost every detail of Season 6.
As further proof of authenticity, awayforthelads has deleted his account, presumably to evade the wrath of HBO.
And actress Nathalie Emmanuel, who plays Daenerys Targaryen’s beautiful handmaiden Missandei, appears also to have confirmed the authenticity of the leak on Twitter:
(9) COSPAIN. Apparently it’s not a favorite holiday for some: “University of Florida offers counseling for students offended by Halloween costumes”.
Halloween can be scary, but it can also be… offensive?
The University of Florida wants students to know that counseling is available for students hoping to work past any offense taken from Halloween costumes.
“Some Halloween costumes reinforce stereotypes of particular races, genders, cultures, or religions. Regardless of intent, these costumes can perpetuate negative stereotypes, causing harm and offense to groups of people,” the school administration wrote in a blog post. “If you are troubled by an incident that does occur, please know that there are many resources available.”
(10) THE ETHICS OF ASTRONOMICAL ART. NPR feature: “Out of This World: How Artists Imagine Planets Yet Unseen”. There’s a brief shout-out to Bonestell, but the artists interviewed aren’t likely to be known to fans.
“It’s tricky with computer graphics,” says Ray Villard, news director for the Space Telescope Science Institute. “You can make stuff in such extraordinary detail, people might think it’s real. People might think we’ve actually seen these features — canyons, all kinds of lakes and rivers.”
“The point of these illustrations is to create excitement, to grab the general public’s attention. But there is a danger that many people sometimes do mistake some of these illustrations for real photos,” agrees Luis Calçada, an artist with the European Southern Observatory’s education and public outreach department.
“Many, many astronomers actually do see this danger on this kind of illustration,” he says, “because it might create false images on people’s minds.”
(11) FIRE WHEN READY. NPR reports on experiments planned for the ISS, including deliberately starting a fire in the cargo ship in “Gotcha: Space Station Grabs Onto NASA’s 5,100-Pound Cargo Craft”.
Astronauts used the International Space Station’s robotic arm to grapple the Cygnus cargo spacecraft early Sunday morning, starting the process of bringing more than 5,100 pounds of supplies and research equipment aboard. The cargo’s experiments include one thing astronauts normally avoid: fire.
“The new experiments include studies on fire in space, the effect of lighting on sleep and daily rhythms, collection of health-related data, and a new way to measure neutrons,” NASA says.
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
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Raising the Stones helped me become a different (and much better) person. Thanks for all the stories, Ms. Tepper.
[godstalk]
(4) 🙁
Tommy, can you scroll me?
(4) I offer condolences to all her family, friends, and fans, but I’m not in any of those groups. I tried a few of her books years ago and decided she was one of the writers I could safely skip. Should I ever meet John Scalzi I’ll have to remember to hide this fact.
(9) COSPAIN – Poor, poor babies. Upset by those thoughtless Halloween costumes!!!! Maybe UF should set up psych services for those upset about something said on the internet! Or something they saw in a movie?
(6) FREER’S SCAPEGOAT OF THE WEEK – In all fairness Mike, F770, and Walter, are Freer’s regular boogeymen, as opposed to an occasional frightener. I have a mild suspicion that the recent Author Earnings Report may have caused him to spike an already existing piece, as his recent posts have been more-heavily-than-usual on the death of eeevul tradpub.
(8) BLABBY MCBLABFACE. – Sigh. Now that the show has outpaced the books, I’m really learning the necessity of (i) Watching the show as soon as it’s available, and (ii) avoiding all the internets until I’ve watched it.
@airboy – ah. So you’re That Guy.
Nah. There’s not a chance in the world that he had something prepared which could have been spiked. Most of his columns anymore are just frames to stoke the MGC base.
@4: Tepper’s writing became increasingly dark, and she didn’t engage with fandom at all (save for one Wiscon); these may have made it easier for people to forget the number of stunning novels she did at her peak. Others may have dismissed her after trivial early novels of the True Game, or not have seen her produce new work often enough since she spent time after hitting her stride on two detective series, one of which featured a transparent copy of herself. (Not a Mary Sue; Shirley McClintock has to dig her way through to solutions.) I am glad she was around long enough to get her well-deserved World Fantasy Life Achievement award, which is only given to living authors.
11) how big a fire? I suppose it’s best to study these things before an actual emergency, but this sounds scary.
4) What I’ve read of her work, I liked. Requiescat In Pace. It’s been a bad year.
Also, the second time I looked at the Scroll title, it read, “I’m Freer…”. That was most unsettling.
Mike Glyer: There’s not a chance in the world that he had something prepared.
And even if he had, how would one tell the difference?
It’s not just me, right? 2016 really has been a tough year?
I really loved some of Tepper’s work and really hated the rest of it, and what I loved was on the slight end.
@airboy, there are parts of most movies that I can’t watch. I stay in on Halloween because people in masks scare the crap out of me. Do you think psych services would help? Asking for a friend.
6) So more than two months later, Dave Freer is still going on about that Guardian article where Damien Walter said unkind things about his writing. Apparently totally unaware that he’s not just making Damien’s day, he’s making himself look really insecure. Also whatever happened to “Never respond to or argue with reviews.” Apparently, that particular bit of (indie) writer wisdom has eluded the MGC.
I actually loved the True Game books, particularly Jinian Footseer. They were…maybe not that slight. But I’m arguably biased because I came in at exactly the right age, and they are books that are there when I need them, still.
Some of her books didn’t work for me, but the ones that did hit me hard.
(9) I may have been That Guy on occasion, since I enthusiastically took on the idea of Halloween costumes, but as an immigrant, was not always optimally attuned to the cultural sensitivities these costumes could trigger.
In one notorious case, I decided to dress up as an iPod “silhouette” ad. So I went to work wearing black clothes, an iPod, a piece of green cardboard taped to my back, and blackface. Nobody said anything, but I got quite a few funny looks, and in retrospect, the use of blackface probably was a bad idea, even though it was intended to be “silhouette-face”.
@bookworm1938
There are two parts to the flame experiments.
The first is an ongoing series of experiments in which small (a couple of mm) drops of liquid fuels are ignited in a controlled chamber and monitored — some unusual modes of combustion occur in zero-G. This takes place in the black metal rack pictured next to Scott Kelly here. This has been done multiple times already, and there have been papers published on the results. Small fires, completely contained, and subject to many safety reviews and protocols.
The second part, about which I’m having trouble finding details, happens at the end of the mission of the Cygnus module which was just launched. Sometime in November, it will be filled with trash from the space station and jettisoned, and its orbit will be modified such that it burns in the atmosphere. After it leaves the space station, but before it burns up, a larger scale fire will be set inside of it and monitored until instrumentation fails from re-entry heat.
(9)
We used to do costumes (of the hall variety) at work for Halloween. One of the best was the one where a co-worker scanned his badge, printed it as large as he could, and cut out the image: he came as his own badge!
The other one I remember was the young woman who came as Pikachu and for a while borrowed a Dia de los Muertes (Day of the Dead) mask. Do not mess with that Pokemon.
(6) I would like to attest that, based on the sales trends reported by Amazon, the interest in my books shown by File 770 participants has had a substantial positive effect on my book sales.
For what it’s worth.
I once went as the Yellow Pages (Ask your parents, kids). With walking fingers.
(6) Poor Freer, he so wishes he had more imaginary enemies, you’d think he’d get tired of ranting illiterately against Damian and File 770. Maybe he should try picking on other targets, see if he can get those sales up even more (But what if they ignored him? Being ignored is the one of Puppies’ greatest fears).
(11) I do hope there’s video!
True to MGC tradition, no link to whatever the hell he’s reacting to, so no means to telling if he’s talking about a real thing or out of his behind.
So I assume the latter.
9) The school also has a Bias Education and Response Team to handle reports of any discriminatory incidents.
“Some Halloween costumes reinforce stereotypes of particular races, genders, cultures, or religions. Regardless of intent, these costumes can perpetuate negative stereotypes, causing harm and offense to groups of people,” the school administration wrote in a blog post. “If you are troubled by an incident that does occur, please know that there are many resources available.”
So it sounds like a charitable reading would be that the university has said they’ll take complaints of offensive jokes and stereotypes seriously, and also that their regular counselling services are available for anyone who needs them. I’m not sure what’s odd or silly about that?
9) I remember a pride-parade where some genius thought it was a good idea to come dressed as a somali pirate. Including blackface and fake rocketgun. Managed to spawn a national outrage.
Halloween here is purely a horror based thing. Not the all-out masquerade as in US.
Re Tepper.
I’ve to date bounced off of all of the work of hers that I’ve tried. So, sadly, her oeuvre is one of the major gaps in my science fiction reading.
Re 7)
I hadn’t expected it, and its mildly spoilerly to say but in The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds.
gurer vf n guebhtuyvar bs vagreyhqrf jurer, va gur gvzryvar bs gur abiry (juvpu vf irel qryvorengryl abg bhef), ANFN unq gb qrsyrpg n qvabfnhe-xvyyre nfgrebvq sebz uvggvat gur HF va gur yngr avargrra fvkgvrf. Vg’f n fgenatr fvqryvar sebz gur erfg bs gur obbx juvpu gnxrf cynprf uhaqerqf bs lrnef yngre.
Welcome to the file
I guess you all know why we’re here
My name is Filer
and you know I’m not Dave Freer
If you want to scroll for me
You’ve got to write it all
So pick up your pencils
Put in your earbuds
You know where to put the snark
@nickpheas
I’m pretty sure Dave Freer is (still) responding to this Guardian article by Damien Walter in which he said harsh words about puppy fiction, including Dave Freer’s novel Changeling.
Cora, how can you possibly tell? I couldn’t thread my way through the tangle of word spaghetti.
But that was over two months ago, surely he’s got better things to be doing than continually stirring up outrage… oh.
For me, one of the failure modes of art is allowing the message to interfere with the story or characters, and I think that was a weakness in Tepper’s works.
Re: astronomical PR, there is nothing like that moment when Diane Sawyer reports on your exoplanet observation only to display the artist’s impression and state that Hubble took an image of an exoplanet with a cometary tail. Gah!
On the plus side, one of our other press releases ended up in a Hubble Gotchu on Jimmy Fallon, which has made for a nice talk slide over the past several years…
Completely off topic, although reading (2) triggered the thought. Some friends and I were discussing the ‘post scarcity economy’ — the idea that automated factories and so on can produce much more than people can afford to buy, because no one has jobs anymore because of automation.
I remember in my youth, maybe 50 years ago, reading a story where robots did all the work and manufactured so much ‘stuff’ that there were quotas for consumption, and POOR people had to consume more than rich people. It was a sign of affluence that you DIDN’T have to ride around in big cars and wear fine clothes (that you had to destroy each day and get new ones) and eat sumptious meals all day long. (Obesity meant ‘poor’, thinness meant ‘rich’) (oh, wait…)
Does anyone else remember such a story? Title and author?
One thing I’ve always thought about speculative fiction is that those of us who read a lot of it might not have the details right, but the problems created by new technologies bore thinking about.
Does anyone else remember such a story? Title and author?
Frederick Pohl, “The Midas Plague”.
Fred Pohl, The Midas Plague.
Damon Knight did something similar in “Analogue Men”, too. (Original title “Hell’s Pavement”, apparently). In that, behaviour-modifying implants plus commercial imperatives give us compulsory consumption in a Balkanised America ruled by department-store chains.
Astra
By a concidence, I had just read this in the Letterbocks column of Viz:
(8) “As further proof of authenticity, awayforthelads has deleted his account”
I’m not sure I would cite a news source that would say the above with a straight face.
We actually work pretty hard with Space Telescope Science Institute to get the artist’s impressions close to accurate (Ray Villard — who is quoted in the NPR article — and his group are great at this) but when you then talk to some ABC staffer who is prepping a 20 sec story with a couple hours to spare, the chances of information transmission error are high.
We can’t show our actual data because it’s spectroscopy and talk about an information gap!
I have been reading Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. I had missed it when it came out last year, but am reading it now due to the sequel (Crooked Kingdom) having been released recently. I enjoy the world building and general plot strokes, but it can lose itself for pages when diving into a backstory.
(9) I understand that I come across as an angry old coot when I say this, but it seems that colleges are going out of their way to mollycoddle students these days. Couching is no breeze matter, I do not like it being flung about as tacit approval for those who wish to get the vapors over a costume.
(6)
Is this not even a complete sentence? He never actually says the thing that there is no doubt about.
@Ghost Bird: The Analogue Men is substantially unlike “The Midas Plague” (and a post-crash ~sequel, “The Man Who Ate the World”). In the Knight, everybody, however well-off, is forced by ]brain[ treatments to spend all of their money every month; the plot develops around someone who is immune to these treatments. (Not a spoiler — we’re told this on page ~10.) In the Pohl, rich people can live a modest lifestyle if they choose, and only laws force the poor to consume. (Where they get the money to consume is left as an exercise for the reader; the Pohl is satire not particularly connected to reality, where the Knight starts by telling us how and why the mess works.) There is a very modest degree of common background from the 1950’s U.S. belief that people had to keep buying in order to prevent the economy from collapsing (the behavior around this belief lead to Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers, and the Reader’s Digest response “Waste Not, Have Not?”) — but even the reasoning behind the stories differs. For something more in the line of the Knight, see “The Wizards of Pungs Corners” (which also tinges of Clarke’s “Superiority”, discussed here recently due to being in JDN’s younger-readers-given-older-SF feature).
Meh. If I want to decipher rambling sentences that don’t get anywhere, I’ll volunteer to read slush.
Thanks for the pointer to “The Midas Plague” and that found me “The Galaxy Project” on Amazon, and now my TBR pile gets higher with the stories of my youth!
The description of how the story came to be was interesting as well.
(6) I got out of the quoted word salad that Damien Walter is apparently no longer working for “The Guardian”?
@GSLamb:
I’m having a wee bit of trouble parsing you. Couching is no breeze matter means…? Psychiatry is no joke? I do not like it being flung about as tacit approval for those who wish to get the vapors over a costume. What about someone who does not “wish” to “get the vapors” but instead is having trouble dealing with the actual anxiety caused by seeing awful racist stereotypes jaunting around their school grounds? What about a rape victim dealing with “comedic” Bill Cosby costumes? Where do the “vapors” end and actual distress begin?
“Suck it up” (not literally said by you, but implied here) is an extremely invalidating thing to say and is highly unlikely to help anyone actually deal with difficult feelings. No matter the cause. I’m glad that distressed students have access to a counselor if they feel they need it.
Oh, I don’t know, I rather think we’d be better off if people felt comfortable getting assistance with their mental health before the situation becomes dire.
I remember in my youth, maybe 50 years ago, reading a story where robots did all the work and manufactured so much ‘stuff’ that there were quotas for consumption, and POOR people had to consume more than rich people.
That would be the Frederik Pohl story The Midas Plague, originally published in Galaxy, but now most easily found in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume IIB.
Thanks to Aaron, James Davis Nicoll, and ghost bird for the pointer to “The Midas Plague” by Fred Pohl.
Back then it seemed insane. Now? Like I said, I was discussing post-scarcity economics with a couple of friends. We were talking specifically about political promises to ‘bring back coal jobs’ and ‘bring back manufacturing jobs’ to the US.
WRT coal jobs in Appalachia: ain’t gonna happen because those coal seams aren’t worth mining anymore. The easy coal has been pulled out and western coal that can be strip-mined is cheaper to dig up. Not to mention natural gas and renewable energy. But the PEOPLE in Appalachia aren’t disposable, we shouldn’t be throwing them away, what do we do about it?
WRT manufacturing jobs: automation makes it economical to make things here in the US, but the factories won’t employ thousands of people on assembly lines, and the people that are employed require different skills and education than the thousands of people that used to be employed in factories. Again, people aren’t disposable, so what do we do about it?
I haven’t heard one sensible discussion about this from ANY politician, certainly not the ones pandering to those displaced by the current economy.
(1): The mention of Trump’s candidacy being unrealistic reminds me of “A Sound of Thunder” where everyone in America was given the choice whether to vote for Mr. Keith… or vote for Mr. Deutscher. Bradbury never explains how Deutscher, the openly fascist candidate with a ludicrously Germanic name who wins in the ‘bad’ timeline, got to be one of the two viable candidates in the unaltered ‘good’ timeline.
(Also, why was there a presidential election in 2055, anyway?)
Naturally, nobody mocking the thought of people being made really miserable, or angry, or fearful by costumes has ever gone on an extended rampage by someone saying “Puppies” when they mean “Rabid Puppies”, or at someone saying “sci-fi” rather than “sf”, or at TV ads that put the dad of a family in the foolish buffoon role, joined in the hate on Youtube movie review MovieBob for not being sure if a screenshot in an ad was for Skyrim or Dark Souls, or defended the treatment of Zoe Quinn as justified by the concerns of ethics in game journalism. Nope, they’ve always been entirely rational and calm when confronting things they don’t like in the world. Every last one of them.
@techgrri1972 –
One policy under discussion is the universal basic income ( a la Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage”), which is gaining visibility across the globe.
Finland is conducting a test of basic income with 2000-3000 people, and the idea has been getting wider exposure here.
A google on “universal basic income” also produced a Freakonomics podcast on the issue.
Yes, I’ve been following that trend. And thinking back to “Beyond This Horizon” by Mr. Heinlein. And then fascinated by his explanation of the economics based on C. A. Douglas’ Social Credit system in “For Us, the Living”. And wondering if we could make it work.