(1) The UCLA Library’s Special Collections include the Gene Roddenberry Star Trek collection and the Robert Justman Papers.
A year ago the Special Collections’ blog posted Justman’s memo to Roddenberry about some wigs and hairpieces that had gone missing. The Captain of the Starship Enterprise was the prime suspect.
Back in the day Shatner’s denials about wearing a toupee were news, but people long ago quit keeping his secret.
That anger spilled out in 1967 when the prestigious Life magazine sent a photographer to the Star Trek set – not to profile Shatner but Nimoy, who was being photographed having his pointy Vulcan ears put on in the make-up room.
James Doohan recalled in his memoir: “Bill’s hairpiece was being applied. The top of his head was a lot of skin and a few odd tufts of hair. The mirrors on the make-up room walls were arranged so that we could all see the laying on of his rug.”
Shatner suddenly exploded angrily from his seat and ordered the photographer to leave. George Takei, aged 70, who played Sulu, recalls: “Leonard was livid. He refused to have his make-up completed until the photographer was allowed back.”
(2) In celebration of Star Trek’s 50th anniversary in 2016, publisher Simon & Schuster is bringing back the popular fan fiction writing contest, Strange New Worlds.
Ten winning selections will be published as part of an all-new official anthology, coming from Simon & Schuster in 2016.
Plus, two first prize winners will receive a free, self-publishing package from Archway Publishing!
Register for the contest here.
(3) “CBS Pulls ‘Supergirl’ Episode Due To Similarities To Paris Attack” reports ScienceFiction.com.
Out of respect for the events that happened in Paris last Friday, CBS has decided to delay the episode of ‘Supergirl’ set to air tonight, titled ‘How Does She Do It?’ Apparently the episode revolved around Supergirl dealing with a series of bombings around National City, which the network felt might be a little to similar to the tragic events that struck Paris. With all of the heartbreak and discord currently enveloping that poor city, it makes perfect sense why the network would delay the episode, especially when shows like ‘Supergirl’ should serve as an escape for people from the real world, not a twisted reflection of current tragedies.
(4) “J.K. Rowling Said THIS Is Her Favorite Harry Potter Theory” – the theoretical tweets are posted on PopSugar.
The first Harry Potter book came out 18 years ago, but not a day goes by where new theories and plot coincidences don’t shock us all (and make us want to reread the entire series). J.K. Rowling keeps up with them too and she recently answered a fan’s question about which is her favorite.
(5) This year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special will be shown in North American cinemas on December 28 and 29. Get tickets through Fathom Events
The Doctor is back on the big screen this holiday season for a special two-night event featuring an exclusive interview with Alex Kingston and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the special featuring Peter Capaldi, Stephen Moffat and more….
It’s Christmas in the future and the TARDIS is parked on a snowy village street, covered in icicles, awaiting its next adventure. Time traveler River Song meets her husband’s new incarnation, in the form of Peter Capaldi, for the first time! Don’t miss this unique opportunity to celebrate the holidays with fellow Whovians in cinemas this December.
(6) It seems you can’t guarantee a win by betting on Albert Einstein after all. IFL Science brings word that an “Experiment Proves Einstein Wrong”.
Scientists at the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) have proven beyond reasonable doubt that Einstein was wrong about one of the main principles of quantum mechanics and that “spooky action at a distance” is actually real.
We are now certain that entanglement, the ability of particles to affect each other regardless of distance, exists and that it’s an intrinsic property of the universe. When a pair or a group of particles are entangled, they cannot be described independently from each other. Measuring a particular property, like velocity, of a single particle affects all the other entangled particles.
Einstein and many other scientists believed that this phenomenon was paradoxical, as it would allow for information to be exchanged instantaneously across vast distances. He dubbed it “spooky action at a distance” and he believed that there was a way to reproduce this phenomenon with classical physics. He claimed that there were hidden variables – quantities that we didn’t or couldn’t know – that would make quantum mechanics perfectly predictable.
(7) Mark Lawrence seeks feedback on what really creates a sense of diversity in fiction.
JK Rowling told the world after the event that Dumbledore is gay. There was no need to mention it in the books – it didn’t come up. So … after reading seven books with gay Dumbledore and no mention of it … do gay people feel represented?
If Tolkien rose from the grave for 60 seconds to mention that, by the way, Gandalf is black … would that be delivering diversity?
Or does diversity mean seeing black people’s experience (in itself a vastly diverse thing) represented in fantasy – and the fantasy world needs real-world racism imported so the reader sees that particular aspect of black people’s experience?
In my trilogy, The Red Queen’s War, the main character is of mixed race. It’s not mentioned very often – though he does meet someone in the frozen north who mocks and intimidates him over his ‘dirty’ skin. In the trilogy I’m writing at the moment, Red Sister, the world is reduced to an equatorial corridor hemmed in by advancing ice. All races are mixed and have been for thousands of years. There are many skin tones and it’s of no more note or interest than hair and eye colour. Does a person of colour reading that feel represented – or does the failure to connect with the prejudice of the real world mean that they don’t feel represented?
I don’t know. I’m asking.
I’m not writing these books to promote diversity or represent anyone – the worlds and characters are just the way they are – just how the pieces of my imagination and logic meshed together on these particular occasions. But the question interests me.
(8) Congratulations to Jonathan Edelstein on his first professional story publication, “First Do No Harm”, at Strange Horizons.
For twenty-seven thousand years—through kingdoms and republics, through prophets and messiahs, through decay and collapse and rebirth—the city and the medical school had grown around each other. The campus stretched across districts and neighborhoods, spanning parks and rivers, but few buildings belonged to it alone: an operating theater might once have been a workshop, a classroom a factory floor. The basement room where Mutende sat in a circle of his fellow basambilila was an ancient one and had been many things: office, boiler room, refrigerator, storage for diagnostic equipment. Remnants of all its uses were in the walls, the fixtures, and most of all, in memory….
(9) At The 48th Sitges – International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, The Invitation, directed by Karyn Kusama, picked up the Award for Best Feature Film in the Sitges 2015 Official Fantàstic Selection. The winners of the festival’s other awards can be found here.
(10) MousePlanet has the details about what’s going on with Star Wars at Disneyland – a long article with lots of photos — but SPOILER WARNING.
If you don’t want to know anything about Star Wars – The Force Awakens before you see it in the theater, you should probably skip this update too. Before you go, heed this warning: If you wish to remain spoiler-free until December 18th, don’t go into the Star Wars Launch Bay, don’t see the Path of the Jedi feature in the Tomorrowland Theater, and don’t ride Star Tours. Hyperspace Mountain is spoiler-free, and a complete blast – you can enjoy that worry free, and see the rest of the additions in a month….
Star Wars Launch Bay
The lower level of the former Innoventions building – now officially known as the Tomorrowland Expo Center – is now the Star Wars Launch Bay. From the moment you step inside, you enter a spoiler-filled space packed with artwork, props and merchandise from across the Star Wars saga, including from the upcoming movie Star Wars – The Force Awakens. The Launch Bay is divided into six sections, with some smaller areas around the outer ring of the building.
Entrance and Gallery
The largest portion of the Launch Bay is devoted to case after case of props and replicas from the Star Wars Saga, including previews of people, places and things from Star Wars – The Force Awakens. Again, if you’re trying to avoid spoilers, you have no business in this exhibit.
The Light Side (Chewbacca meet-and-greet)
Enter a rebel hideout, and come face-to-face with the best co-pilot in the galaxy. To occupy you while you wait in what could be a very long line, the queue is filled with props from the Light Side, including lightsabers and helmets.
The Dark Side (Darth Vader meet-and-greet)
Like the Light Side, the queue for the Darth Vader meet-and-greet is filled with Sith props. Lord Vader isn’t much one for conversation, but he does have some prepared remarks for your encounter on the deck of a Star Destroyer. Disney PhotoPass photographers are on hand to document your meeting.
Star Wars Landing Bay carpet.
(11) Norbert Schürer discusses “Tolkien Criticism Today” in LA Review of Books. It takes awhile, but he finally finds something good to say.
It is perhaps no wonder, then, that the field of Tolkien studies is in a sad state. This is not to say that there aren’t excellent critics (such as Tom Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, and Jane Chance) and outstanding scholarly venues (particularly the venerable journal Mythlore and the more recent annual Tolkien Studies). However, judging by seven recent works of Tolkien scholarship, there are various challenges in the field. Much criticism features weak, underdeveloped arguments or poor writing, and the field is overrun by niche publishers who seem to have little quality control…..
With the Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien: The Forest and the City (in parts), the future of Tolkien studies is perhaps not entirely bleak. The Companion in particular is a volume from a well-established publisher, which actually gives Tolkien academic cachet by including him in their Companion series. The essays in this volume and in Tolkien: The Forest and the City make well-developed, well-written, comprehensive, and compelling arguments. Thus, these books show the two requirements for good Tolkien criticism. For one, he should be treated like any other author in being discussed in seriously peer-reviewed journals and established academic presses rather than in essay collections and niche publications. Just as importantly, Tolkien should not be treated with kid gloves because he is a fan favorite with legions to be placated, but as the serious and major author he is.
(12) Jennifer M. Wood discusses “11 Famous Books That Have Proven Impossible to Film” at Mental Floss.
6. UBIK
Believe it or not, there is a Philip K. Dick novel that has yet to be made into a movie. Which isn’t to say that an adaptation of this 1969 sci-fi tale of telepathy and moon colonization (set in the then-futuristic year of 1992) hasn’t been tried. As early as 1974, filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin commissioned Dick to adapt his own work for filming. Dick finished the script in less than a month; though it was never produced, it was published in 1985 as Ubik: The Screenplay. In 2006, A Scanner Darkly producer Tommy Pallotta announced that he was readying the film for production. In 2011, it was Michel Gondry who was confirmed to be at the helm … until earlier this year, when Gondry told The Playlist that he was no longer working on it.
(13) Farnam Street Blog’s “Accidents Will Happen” is an excerpt from Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, by Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, 2001), about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal.
A B-47 bomber was taxiing down the runway at a SAC base in Sidi Slimane, Morocco, on January 31, 1958. The plane was on ground alert, practicing runway maneuvers, cocked but forbidden to take off. It carried a single Mark 36 bomb. To make the drill feel as realistic as possible, a nuclear core had been placed in the bomb’s in-flight insertion mechanism. When the B-47 reached a speed of about 20 miles an hour, one of the rear tires blew out. A fire started in the wheel well and quickly spread to the fuselage. The crew escaped without injury, but the plane split in two, completely engulfed in flames. Firefighters sprayed the burning wreckage for 10 minutes—long past the time factor of the Mark 36—then withdrew. The flames reached the bomb, and the commanding general at Sidi Slimane ordered that the base be evacuated immediately. Cars full of airmen and their families sped into the Moroccan desert, fearing a nuclear disaster.
The fire lasted for two and a half hours. The high explosives in the Mark 36 burned but didn’t detonate. According to an accident report, the hydrogen bomb and parts of the B-47 bomber melted into “a slab of slag material weighing approximately 8,000 pounds, approximately 6 to 8 feet wide and 12 to 15 feet in length with a thickness of 10 to 12 inches.” A jackhammer was used to break the slag into smaller pieces. The “particularly ‘hot’ pieces” were sealed in cans, and the rest of the radioactive slag was buried next to the runway. Sidi Slimane lacked the proper equipment to measure levels of contamination, and a number of airmen got plutonium dust on their shoes, spreading it not just to their car but also to another air base.
(14) Tomorrow you can download Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Stories Inspired by Microsoft —
— an anthology of short stories written by some of today’s greatest science fiction authors. These visionary stories explore prediction science, quantum computing, real-time translation, machine learning, and much more. The contributing authors were inspired by inside access to leading-edge work, including in-person visits to Microsoft’s research labs, to craft new works that predict the near-future of technology and examine its complex relationship to our core humanity.
AUTHOR ROLL CALL
Elizabeth Bear · Greg Bear · David Brin · Nancy Kress · Ann Leckie · Jack McDevitt · Seanan McGuire · Robert J. Sawyer The collection also includes a short graphic novel by Blue Delliquanti and Michele Rosenthal, and original illustrations by Joey Camacho.
(15) Abigail Nussbaum has “Five Comments on Hamilton”.
If you’re like me, you probably spent some portion of the last six months watching your online acquaintance slowly become consumed with (or by) something called Hamilton. And then when you looked it up it turned to be a musical playing halfway around the world that you will probably never see. But something strange and surprising is happening around Hamilton–a race-swapped, hip-hop musical about the short life and dramatic death of Alexander Hamilton, revolutionary soldier, founding father of the United States, co-author of The Federalist Papers, and creator of the US financial system. Unusually for a work of pop culture that is only available to a small, even select group of people, Hamilton is becoming a fannish phenomenon, inspiring fanfic and fanart and, mostly, a hell of a lot of enthusiasm….
(16) Local Three Stooges fans will convene November 28 at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. The 18th Annual Alex Film Society The Three Stooges Big Screen Event “showcases six classic Stooges shorts featuring Moe, Larry, Curly and Shemp preparing, throwing and wearing food. Will high society matrons be hit in the face with cream pies? Soitenly!”
On the bill of fare — A Pain In The Pullman (1936, Preston Black), Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb (1938, Del Lord), Idiots Deluxe (1945, Jules White), Crash Goes The Hash (1944, Jules White), Sing A Song Of Six Pants (1947, Jules White), Dutiful But Dumb (1941, Del Lord).
(17) SF Site News announced this year’s ISFiC Writer’s Contest winner:
M. Aruguete won the ISFiC Writer’s Contest with her story “Catamount.” The contest is sponsored by ISFiC in conjunction with Windycon. Aruguete won a membership at Windycon, room nights, and $300. Her story was published in the con program book. This year’s contest was judged by Richard Chwedyk, Roland Green, and Elizabeth Anne Hull.
(18) Jeff Somers, in a guest post for SF Signal, argues that his stories with psionics should stay on the sf shelf at the bookstore.
As the TV Tropes page on psychic powers says, “Telepathy, clairvoyance, pyrokinesis—the powers are supernatural, but the names are scientific, which is good enough for soft Sci-Fi.” This sort of disdain is the top layer of a debate that’s been raging for decades about whether or not a story can have psychic powers and still be considered Science Fiction as opposed to Fantasy. The argument is simple: There is absolutely no evidence that supports psychic powers of any kind being possible, and without at least the real-world scientific possibility, they’re essentially magic powers. Which makes your story a Fantasy, thanks for playing, you might as well shove a bearded wizard in there and start reading Wikipedia articles about broadswords.
Anyway, I started thinking about all this recently because I’ve been writing and publishing digital-only short stories set in the Avery Cates universe, and in that universe (from the very beginning) there are psionic (er, psychic) powers…
(19) Mindy Klasky points out the varied uses of feedback, in “C is for Critique” at Book View Café.
Critique partners offer authors valuable insight into what works and what does not work in a book. Sometimes, that criticism is directly on point—the mere statement of the problem is enough to help an author see what needs to be fixed. Other times, an author concludes that a critic is mistaken—she doesn’t understand the book, or she isn’t familiar with a particular sub-genre, or she was having a bad day as she wrote her criticism. Even in those cases, the rational writer considers the criticism as a warning that the reader was pulled off track at that particular point. Often, a critic finds fault with a particular aspect of a book (e.g., “your heroine sounds whiny when she talks to her best friend”) but an author discovers a completely different fix (e.g., the heroine shouldn’t be talking to her best friend in that scene; instead, she should be taking steps to solve her problem more directly.) Critics aren’t omniscient, but they can be good barometers of when a story succeeds.
(20) Kameron Hurley says this is “Why You Should Be Watching The Man in The High Castle“:
I’m not sure when I realized that this wasn’t a story about the Nazis and Japanese Empire laying waste to the happy United States we have in our happy memories. I think it was when the Japanese Empire raids a Jewish man’s house, seemingly for no reason, and I realized it looked a lot like a swatting raid, or a raid on some innocent brown man with an Arab-sounding name, or the FBI raid on an innocent professor accused of sending sensitive material to the Chinese. And in that moment I realized the entire world I’d been presented thus in the show far wasn’t so much different from the United States in 2015, and that in fact the show was very much aware of that. If you’re brown, or black, or Muslim, or have a non-white sounding name, or you look at a TSA agent funny, or say something about supporting terrorism online (threatening to murder a woman is still OK! But I digress), get ready to get raided, detained, tortured, thrown into prison, or disappeared. I thought about our creepy no-fly lists, about police throwing students to the floor in classrooms, about minor traffic violations that end with somebody strangling you to death in prison and pretending you totally hung yourself with a plastic bag. I thought of this whole world we’ve built, post-World War II, and realized this show wasn’t saying, “Wouldn’t things be so different?” but instead, “Are things really as different as we think?”
(21) Move and groove like everyone’s favorite kaiju with Logemas Godzilla Simulator.
There’s something big coming this way… Logemas’ latest Motion Capture and VR demo!
We’re tracking 7 objects, hands, feet, hips, chest and an Oculus DK2 with Vicon Bonita cameras and streaming into the Unreal game engine for some mayhem!
Of course, we all want to know where they attach the tail-motion-generator.
[Thanks to Petréa Mitchell, Meredith, Will R., Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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@Robert Thau, normally, I wouldn’t make this offer, but since the book is being offered for free, I think it’s morally defensible to email you an epub copy of the book. Send me an email at (rot13) [email protected] and I’ll send it to you.
(If anyone knows of a reason that this offer is unethical, please let me know and I’ll withdraw it.)
bloodstone75 —
I consider God Stalk to be a foundational work of fantasy literature and a classic that still holds up today.
But … that doesn’t mean you will. Heaven knows there’s works 99.9% of the people here adore to bits that left me going, “Eh. Really? That one?”
So, no you’re not being punked. But I also wouldn’t encourage you to force yourself to read it if you’re not getting anything out of it. I’d rather enthuse with you about Sunshine. Oh my god, isn’t it perfect?
Kyra:
I can’t be the only one now wondering about William S. Burroughs’s Mars novels, can I?
Philip Jose Farmer’s “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod” gave us one of his Tarzan stories….
A new-this-year SF story in an uncommon venue: Luis Alberto Urrea’s “Welcome to the Water Museum” in his latest collection. I’m not convinced it’s worth seeking out, though. The story concerns a family (main character, an adolescent boy) in a future American Midwest that hasn’t seen a drop of rain in 20 years; it describes ways they live with little water, and ends with the children being taken on a school trip to a museum to hear frogs croaking and sit in a room surrounded by the sights and sounds of a thunderstorm, the only time the children have ever seen rain. It struck me that the story was more about the adults’ nostalgia for a green past than about the children. The writing is very heavy on nostalgia and loss, with the class of kids described in a fairly conventional, sentimental way that could almost date from the author’s own childhood in the 1960s, and has the children being overwhelmed emotionally by the recording of rain,
Meh… is this emotional truth or sentimental slop? I incline to the latter.
I can feel the Tharks closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll telepathic codes, crooning over the sword and pistol I throw away at the Atmosphere Plant.
“You remember the white apes, I think, Mr. Lee…”
robinreid: Oh, wonderful! Thank you VERY much! I’ll be digging into the list o’links, and looking into Writing The Other!
There was a Murphy’s Rules strip in Pyramid (drawn by Phil Morrissey) that did Bunnies and Burrows pastiches like Bunnies and (Edgar Rice) Burroughs and Bunnies and (William S.) Burroughs… the latter including a rabbit sitting in front of a typewriter that was telling him he wasn’t tripping hard enough to finish this chapter.
Oh, and Bunnies and Burrows meets The Prisoner. “I am the new Number Two. You are Number… Lots!”
Well, there’s
– his NOVA EXPRESS: THE GRAND TOUR series, with Deja Vu Thoris, The Princess of Lithium …
– THE NAKED EXCEPT FOR SILKS, SOME DREAMING JEWELS AND A SWORD BELT LUNCH
– MY FATHER’S TYPERWRITER IN THE SKY
and who could forget:
IF YOU WERE A MARTIAN DINOSAUR, MY LOVE, THEN THE EGG-LAYING REPRODUCTION WOULD MAKE A LOT MORE SENSE
@Kyra:
I thought Sunshine was really addictive reading for most of it — and momentum carried me to the end. Without spoilering, I thought the climax was kind of weirdly abstracted and rushed, and the plot kind of spun its wheels in the middle. However, the setting and characters were great and I hope (?) there are more books forthcoming.
PS: I’m only fretting Godstalk because it seems like something I would like; if not, then not.
PPS: I forgot that I also read Storm Front; I guess that would be my review. :-/
Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft is free on Amazon.fr too.
> “I hope (?) there are more books forthcoming.”
For a while, McKinley spoke in quite some detail of a novel she was working on set in the same world, tentatively called Albion. But that was maybe six or seven years ago, and she doesn’t seem to have brought it up since then.
Alas, no, Sunshine stands alone. She’s said that she doesn’t do sequels (much as legions would probably love to see one.) A few of the fantasy books reference each other now and again–usually one or two lines only–but no sequels, and most of us have been waiting with gritted teeth for the second half of “Pegasus” which was split in two by the publisher, and which has been delayed and delayed and delayed.
She is my favorite comfort read on earth, but there are some frustrations to that fact.
Aaron:
That in itself is an argument that assumes “white guy” as the default. It seems more like it’s a nothing character in a black guy suit, and would still be a nothing if the suit was a white guy suit.
delurking:
All of this is true of white and straight characters as well. If the character is a contextless, cultureless blank, don’t bother.
Make your characters _something_, whether the reader gets to find out or not. That way, if and when the reader finds out, they’ll be finding out something more than a label.
Give ’em a voice, a background, a culture — if their ethnicity, sexuality and background don’t make any difference, that’s not a character.
If diversity means that anyone who’s not straight, white and male needs to be specific (and they should!), then the straight white guys need to be, too.
Jonathan:
Seconded.
@Kyra — does it help if I tell you that when I saw “Kyriarchy” “rule by Kyra” was the first thing I thought of?
Also, am happy to join in with any squeeing about Sunshine that can possibly be done. It was the first vampire book I read in ages that did anything new with them, and when I look at my bookshelves and contemplate just how many vampire books I have read at this point —
Wow, is all.
I loved Godstalk but I was hooked by the time she fell down the stairs. If the book isn’t working for you it’s okay to quit.
And oh yeah I love Sunshine. What a shame there are no sequels planned but I still love that book.
The thing about nothing characters that are black versus white, is we have thousands of white characters. We’re up to our necks in them. We’re swimming in them. We can afford to slough a few off as nothings. “Show don’t tell” meets “not complexity but the illusion of complexity” where something must be left out because space, and some characters don’t get developed, and that’s that and as long as you have enough real characters in the foreground it’s not a problem.
However non-white characters aren’t so thick on the ground. It’s worth making space for them to be complex. It might also be easier if you have several so no single one has to bear all the load.
It’s like the strong female character and authors talk about having to walk this careful line to make her powerful but not too powerful, likeable but not too nice… if you have several, no single one has to bear all the load.
For those who don’t follow Robin McKinley’s blog: She posted last week after more than two months of silence that her husband (writer Peter Dickinson) had a second stroke on Sep. 7. Everything else in her life, including the writing, has been pretty much put on hold since then.
Sad. PD is a great writer.
> “‘Pegasus’ which was split in two by the publisher …”
That explains SO MUCH that had been confusing me about that book.
I wish Peter Dickinson a good and speedy recovery.
Hmm, yeah, that sounds like projection of old people’s interests onto young people.
I’m not sure that a class of children who had never encountered rain would find a virtual storm anything but kind of weird, another strange old cultural artifact the old folks get sentimental about, like decades-old music or the toys of their own youth.
I think a story could make me believe there’s something deep in our lizard brains that would be utterly thrilled by the experience of our first rainstorm.
As a boy who grew up in Dallas, I still remember the thrill of seeing the first blue swath of ocean as my parents took me to Corpus Christi when I was around five. It was magic.
I’m contrary on “Pauper Prince/Jinn”. I thought it was Trying Too Hard. Floridly overwritten, overwrought, pretty obvious here and there, and very… dudely. It’s all about the menz. So many manfeels. And Trying Too Hard to be Lit’rary. I read it once and was “that was okay” and read it again and got angry with it. If it shows up on the final ballot, I may put it below NA and Puppies.
Kids who had never encountered rain are liable to think it’s wrong and even scary, especially thunderstorms. Lightning and thunder are scary even to people who experience them regularly. I picture them like dogs and cats, hiding under furniture and whimpering. At best, they’d go “Huh. Like a big shower stall. Oh, yeah, Grandma, it was neat.”
(As a half-grown, summer-born kitten, my cat saw rain for literally the first time in his life. It was obviously My Fault that water was falling from the sky, WTF was going on?! And that was a gentle drizzle with no thunder.)
@bloodstone75
GodStalk finally made it to the top of MountF770 last week, and I’m about 2/3rds of the way through. It’s…tough going for me as well. There’s a lot that’s good, butI had to fight through a lot of stuff.
i.e., the worldbuilding is confusing/ complex but is the hints you get are really fascinating (similar to that of the Malazan books). I hate almost all the characters, but there are some real gems there.The protagonist seems to develop new powers every 50 pages or so, but she does have a defined personality and isn’t just “being whatever the plot requires her to be (like, say, Harry Potter).
At this point, I’m commited to finishing book 1, and am likely to give book 2 a try later on. So let’s see how that goes.
You guys are riddling me with guilt. Again.
I have been hanging out with Tudor spies and code breakers, as a light hearted diversion, only to discover that some of them are really very, very good.
May the Patron Saint of Nominators preserve me…
@kyra: Just finished Vurt and I kind of want to write a review from an alternative universe where Burroughs, Burgess, and Dick are considered to be the Big Three of the Science Fiction Golden Age so I can say it was a very good book but a bit on the traditionalist side.
I highly recommend its sort-of sequel, Pollen.
@bloodstone75: I pulled the brand-new paperback of God Stalk off the shelving cart at the bookstore where I then worked, read the first paragraph that concludes with Jame “thinking enviously of birds,” and I was a goner. As Dana Gioia once said, when we encounter a new writer, what we really want is to surrender. All too often we don’t have to. I surrendered to God Stalk within a paragraph. Therefore, my advice for anyone who was not captivated by the opening would be completely useless. Do as you think best. 🙂
Even if being gay or bi was utterly unremarkable, same-sex couples aren’t likely to be having the same discussions about contraception as mixed-sex couples. Again, even assuming complete social acceptance, dating pools may be enough smaller to make a difference to people’s choices: think about a small town, and then consider a Mars colony with 100 people. (What would it be like to have your well-meaning parents insist that you had to date someone you had nothing in common with, because she was the only other lesbian who was anywhere near your age?)
The other thing about pasted-on diversity is that, especially in what is supposed to be a distant-future or fantasy world, it can make it a little more obvious that all the characters are thinking like early-21st-century white Americans. You don’t have to have specifically Hindu characters, no: but if everyone in your 42nd-century culture celebrates Christmas, complete with decorated trees and a fat man in a red suit, the reader is likely to wonder why that future looks so much like this specific piece of the present.
This is completely off topic, but I hope Mike will forgive me: on 19th November Ann Louise Roswald is holding her ‘Family and Friends’ sale at Hardy Tree Gallery at 119 Pancras Rd.*
This will contain the samples (ie worn by the models on stage), which are usually about 10 % of the full price, as well as reduced pieces from her Autumm Winter designs
So if anyone wants a crack at a couture garment with 90% off, it’s worth considering this..
*It can be difficult to find but I can give directions
Or recognize they’ve tuned in the Doctor Who Christmas Special….
Mike
In future I will endeavour not to read you in the vicinity of expensive pieces of kit.
Me falling around laughing is definitely not a good idea…
One of the commenters on Mark Lawrence’s blog states:
It boggles my mind that there are people who believe fantasy belongs to white Europeans, is read mostly by whites and should be tailored towards being “relatable” to whites.
Even in the ’70s as I was a child reading fantasy novels for the first time, I never held a view that narrow about the potential diversity of character and setting in the genre.
On the subject of books, I have reviewed Slow Bullets. Short version: I don’t regret reading it, but it is unlikely to get any nomination support from me.
Compared to my own review of Slow Bullets, Aaron’s is a very rave.
Thanks for the examples, everyone!
The university example above reminded me of something – one day at college, my social group had split into two (the “yay its warm lets lie on the grass” group and the “wtf is this nature bullshit lets sit on the bench” team) and as it worked out I ended up sitting with two or three other kids who also happened to be white. That day also happened to be the day the prospectus photographer was taking photos, and he felt the need to nab a black girl who was innocently walking past, who didn’t know any of us, and shove her into the middle of the bench. That was definitely tokenism, and frankly she looked deeply uncomfortable and I don’t blame her. I’m still not sure of the point – my college (and my borough) was roughly 50/50 white/not-white so there were plenty of opportunities to photograph natural friend groups with a mix – including, for example, the main part of my social group who were only on the other side of the path. It didn’t need faking, and it was all a bit weird.
@Vicki Rosenzweig
Good comment!
andyl: I am a year or two younger than Rowling. and from my experiences of school (I went to an all boys school – well all boys until I got to the sixth form when the school enrolled its first two girl students in the sixth form) and there were no hints of any relationships between the boys.
It’s been my observation that people who are part of a minority which is persecuted or held in lower regard, but which is not readily apparent from visual appearance, learn very quickly to hold their tongues and guard their behavior.
Just because you saw “no hints of any relationships between the boys” does not mean that they weren’t there. In fact, I would venture to say that they were almost certainly there, but that it was readily apparent that you were not likely to be receptive to such, so hints were not being displayed in your presence in any overt manner.
And one does not have to be bigoted or think badly of an invisible minority to still be utterly oblivious to the existence of members of that minority around them, and oblivious to any “hints” which are dropped in their presence. I did it for years. My naivete and obliviousness stun me now — but I was a product of my upbringing, so there you go.
Jim Henley: Compared to my own review of Slow Bullets, Aaron’s is a very rave.
I’m still snorting over that one.
When I’m talking about Diversity It’s really about representation. I want entertainment media to show a world full of the human beings I’m likely to see everyday and have since I was a young child. I can’t remember a time when I was only around white people.
When I read books/watch tv and movies/play games and the only people with agency are straight white dudes it’s an alien world to me. Yes straight white dudes play on the lowest difficulty setting but they are surrounded by women, children, LGBTI, disabled, and non-white people in real life and always have been even though history keeps trying to write the rest of us out.
Women and children in fantasy have frequently been used to give men a reason to do something. Rape/murder a woman/child important to a man and he has a reason to go on a quest or out for vengeance and it’s called realistic. Yet the majority of women aren’t raped (1 of 4/5/6 are raped depending on which stats you use so 3/4/5 aren’t raped). Most women/kids aren’t murdered or we wouldn’t be worrying about overpopulation (sorry too lazy to look up stats).
Why write a white cis male for your character? What is his being cis white male adding to your story? If you can’t answer that then ask would the book be more interesting if the character was y instead? Think about the people around you and what they do. Why aren’t you creating characters like them in your book? Why have you populated your SFF world with aliens and/or supernatural creatures, and white cis males, but not women/LGBTI/POC/disabled/elderly with agency? Did you account for this lack as part of your worldbuidling? How much suspension of belief are you requiring of your reader by leaving so many kinds of human beings out?
robinreid: 1. Looking at the booklist for Schurer’s course (UG only this fall), I note that he DOES use Children of Hurin, Beowulf, and Sir G and the Green Knight/Pearl/Orfeo but not The Silmarillion, which strikes me as odd. 2. I note also that their list of MA theses doesn’t seem to have many Tolkien titles in it (but does have a 1973 one of Tolkien illustrations from the Art Dept.!). 3. So perhaps he (who admits to reading Tolkien in his callow youth) is one of those academics who is vaguely ashamed of youthful indiscretions but teaches the course for the UG-butts-in-seats reason? As noted, for a program much larger than mine, they surely do not have many SF/F theses listed in their LibGuide. But he doesn’t seem to be as angry about teaching Tolkien as a major author as those a few decades back were about the addition of Mary Shelley to the canon (woman AND genre–doubleplus ungood). 4. Interestingly enough, in (s)trolling around their website, I found a person in their RELIGION dept. who had way more scholarly pubs on SF/F, including several on Tolkien.
P.S. Re cut-and-paste-diversity: When I went to a university in Tokyo in 1986 for an interview, their administration sent me a pamphlet about the program and their campus that included a two-page-spread aerial shot showing the buildings and diverse groups of students milling about. I found that odd, given that the program they wanted to hire me for was new. When I got there, I realized that several of the new buildings and all of the non-Japanese students and faculty had been convincingly drawn onto the actual photo. And a few years later, the campus really DID match the art.
@JJ
In a closed and competitive environment like a single-sex school it may just be that disclosing to almost anyone was too much of a risk, rather than anything specific to andyl. Some of the schools that funnelled into my college were single-sex and others weren’t; there was a marked difference in behaviour between the two. I don’t know if that’s universal (yay anecdata!) but certainly some studies I’ve seen into the impact of single-sex education support it.
@Mark & @JJ: In fairness, it’s not as bad as the $2,380.00 (is it gold-plated?!) on Amazon.com for McGuire’s book!
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan: I didn’t see (or missed) a reply to your question, so FYI: Ranking is only on the final Hugo ballot – not the nominating ballot.
@Cassy B.: No problem (and sorry if I was unclear). I downloaded the iTunes version just now. Hey, free book with stories by such luminaries (Kress, Leckie, Sawyer, and others I know are good but am not as familiar with) and a short graphic novel by Blue Delliquanti*? How can I pass this up! 😀 Even if it’s “inspired by” Microsoft (which I kinda tend to doubt).
* Seriously, why are you all not reading O Human Star?! I mean, those of you who aren’t reading it. /fan
@Robert Thau: You can’t make an account on Kobo or iTunes or (if there is one) your “local” Amazon.*? If it’s a question of credit cards, I didn’t think Kobo or iTunes they required one unless you were purchasing something that cost more than 0 (I’m a lot less sure about Amazon). Anyway, just curious.
Another vote here for no self-hate (nor IMHO oppression) required for GLBT portrayals. Especially in SF/F. Obvious allowances for SFF societies that are overall oppressive, or whatever – but oppression, self-hate, etc. shouldn’t be diversity checkboxes. There are other ways to have adversity for diverse characters than their diversity being their adversity.
(With apologies to Greg H. if I’m misunderstanding him, though if so, I’m not the only one.)
Meredith: In a closed and competitive environment like a single-sex school it may just be that disclosing to almost anyone was too much of a risk, rather than anything specific to andyl.
I don’t really think it’s specific to anyone — but I do think that members of such minorities develop very finely-tuned sensitivities as to when and how much they can “hint” about it. And I suspect that a lot of the people they’re around are, like I was, utterly oblivious, and wouldn’t know a broad, obvious hint anyway, even if it hit them over the head with a sledgehammer.
@JJ
I wouldn’t know – as a result of home education and basic personality type I ended up with a deficit of fucks to give about how other people might think of me over silly things. If people were ever likely to think less of me because of my sexuality, they could go hang until they get over it or shut up about it. 🙂 I never ended up with any such fine-tuned social instincts.
(Just to be clear, this doesn’t imply any bravery or anything like that on my part. I never had much to lose – people made a huge fuss over it? Oh well, I can just not be in that environment anymore. Big whoop. It was never the same sort of thing as having to deal with people I’d have to see every weekday for the next few years.)
Meredith: I wouldn’t know – as a result of home education and basic personality type I ended up with a deficit of fucks to give about how other people might think of me over silly things.
I envy you that. It took me many years to get to that place.
Trust me when I say that children in public schools start learning at the age of 5 or 6 just how important it is to blend in, watch what they say and do, and not show signs of weakness or differentness.
@Meredith / @JJ
Remember we are talking about ’83 when I was 16. This was when AIDS scare stories were plastered all over the media. Which could well have made a big difference to how much openness was shown.
Of course there were gay and bi people at my school, just that they were not visible at all and I think that there was a number of reasons for that. Including a lack of focus on sex, there wasn’t much talk of girls and girlfriends (imaginary, possible or real) either.
This very much depends on person and school.
In fairness, the big eyes and the giant robots should have been a giveaway.
I was also 16 that year. My recollection puts the AIDS scare a bit later than 1983 — closer to 1985-86, when Rock Hudson’s diagnosis became known, parents exhibited hysteria about having children with HIV in public schools and Elizabeth Glaser found out she and her children carried the virus from a 1981 blood transfusion during labor.