Pixel Scroll 11/6 Remember, Remember, the Second Fifth of November

(1) April Carvelli investigates a cancelled media convention for Pop Cult HQ “IFCon Victoria: Scam or a Simple Mans Dream Gone Wrong?”

This convention was scheduled to occur over the Halloween weekend in Victoria, BC Canada. They didn’t have A-List bookings, but they had some well-known names and a lot of artists. They had booked Richard Hatch from the original Battle Star Galactica, Gil Gerard of Buck Rogers, William B. Davis best known as the Smoking Man on The X-Files and Claudia Christian from Babylon 5. They even had several of the Power Rangers…..

Then suddenly, four days before the con, it was canceled. It was reported that the organizer Bill Code had to be rushed to the hospital after collapsing the weekend before the event. Fans were told that he would be undergoing surgery and there was no way he could continue to run the con.

According to the initial posting, Code had been organizing the con for the last year and a half and had invested more than $84,000 but was no longer able to “handle and direct any part of the convention.”

Many of the exhibitors learned of the cancellation of the con through the Facebook page and most, if not all feel that they have been conned. The exhibitors aren’t alone. Artists, Fans, and even celebrity guests are screaming about how this con was handled and the treatment they received from Ken Twyman, the one who appears to have taken the reigns once cancellation of the con was imminent.

(2) Big Bang Theory producer Chuck Lorre writes a “vanity card” that flashes at the end of every episode. The latest one is a paean to science fiction.

I grew up devouring science fiction books. I was like a little Pac-Man, gobbling up everything I could get my hands on: short stories, novels, and, of course, comic books. Looking back, I realize that sci-fi and, to some degree, fantasy novels, were my first attempt at escaping reality (later attempts would prove to be a bit more problematic). Regardless, I now see that immersing myself in this kind of literature informs my current view of the world. The path of history is, for me, forever seen through the eyes and imagination of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Roger Zelazny, Frank Herbert, Larry Niven, Philip K. Dick, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and many, many more. Which is why I consider all efforts to control human behavior through force as ultimately doomed to fail. Sure, they might work for a while. That’s where the cool story is – the resistance and overcoming of authoritarian rule. But at the end of the day, the macro, sci-fi view is always toward greater freedom, regardless of what form it takes. The real evil, the much more insidious method of control, is actually what we do to ourselves. The abuse of drugs and alcohol, plus relentless consumerism and over-exposure to mind-numbing entertainment, are the real chains on the human spirit. Of course this means that I, having produced close to a thousand half-hours of television, am part of the problem. Sorry. I never meant to be a Minor Overlord for the Terrestrial Shadow Masters.

(3) Norman Hollyn has been one of the people helping develop the innovative future film school announced on Friday — “$20 Million to Establish Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts”

Those who want an education at the vanguard of new forms of filmmaking and emerging media — including virtual production, interactive and mobile media, film special effects, augmented and virtual reality, game design and more — will one day get the chance to study at the new Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The university on Friday announced a $20 million gift from the Johnny Carson Foundation…

(4) Joseph T. Major has a theory about a wowser in today’s news.

If you ever played Sid Meier’s Civilization (the original game), you would note that building the Pyramids gave you a Granary in every city in your civilization. Obviously Ben Carson has not upgraded.

(5) Yes, a scientific measure of the science in science fiction! “Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness” at TV Tropes. (via Lela E. Buis).

Example: a character is shown a machine for traveling into the past and asks, “How does it work?”

  • In soft SF: “You sit in this seat, set the date you want, and pull that lever.”
  • In medium SF: “You sit in this seat, set the date you want, and drive to 88 mph.”
  • In hard SF: “A good question with an interesting answer. Please have a seat while I bring you up to speed on the latest ideas in quantum theory, after which I will spend a chapter detailing an elaborate, yet plausible-sounding connection between quantum states, the unified field theory, and the means by which the brain stores memory, all tied into theories from both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.”
  • In really hard SF: “It doesn’t. Time travel to the past is impossible.”

(6) A. C. Thompson shares “Lessons Learned Editing an Anthology” at Magical Words.

  1. I am your editor, not your mama!! Therefore, it is not my job to teach you to write or completely re-write your first draft. I actually overheard an author tell someone, “It doesn’t matter if I can write. That’s what the editor is for.” WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!! It is your job as the writer to write a great story, polish it up (DO NOT SEND YOUR FIRST DRAFT), and edit– not write a ten page dissertation on why the editor is wrong and you’re right. The editor is an unbiased third party whose only interest is in making your story the best it can be. Don’t fight them every step of the way. If you disagree with something, discuss it. Don’t stomp your feet like a toddler and refuse to change it. Or make up some silly excuse as to WHY you can’t edit. It is worth noting that I did NOT have this problem on the Sherlock anthology. Every single author I have is the picture of professionalism and talent. I may be slightly biased, but seriously… those guys and gals rock!

(7) A modest proposal:

Ro Nagey claims once on a live radio show he answered that question, “By taking a little green pill.”

(8) Ralph Bakshi interview at Salon.

I gotta to ask this—when we meet Fritz in his self-titled film in 1972, he’s in the park and he’s checking out the pedestrians, the people and the scene, and he’s just calling bullshit on everyone, basically. How strong was your personal bullshit detector at the time? Like, could you tell [at that point] when someone was jiving you?

That’s a good question; let me think. Yeah, at that point I had finally gotten very angry and very wise. At that point I suddenly woke up. Everything that I grew up thinking was cool — fighting for your country and all of that — was starting to fall apart. I couldn’t believe that black people [were being restricted from the] vote. My life was changing. I was bored to years with Terrytoons animation. So I was using my life to try to expand my art form. I started to comment and I started to read. I read Ginsberg, I read Howl. I read Kerouac — I didn’t think he was good, but I still read him. I read Henry Miller. I started to read other people that were also happening [and] big at that time. It was just breaking all that stuff.

Did you find that creatively liberating as an artist?

Totally. Incredibly liberating.

Okay, so you go from Terrytoons to making your own films, beginning with the X-rated hit “Fritz the Cat.” And by the end you can do anything you want with animation from a technical standpoint and you have this new attitude.

I learned my craft at Terrytoons. I spent 15 years there, writing, directing, designing — every part of an animated cartoon—

(9) Julia Alexander at Polygon breaks out the new information revealed in the international trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens – click to see her video analysis.

Walt Disney Studios Japan posted the new trailer on their YouTube page Friday morning, and although some of the scenes can definitely be found in the English version that aired a couple of weeks ago, there’s some wild new footage.

(10) Here’s the trailer itself:

(11) Is there really going be an Ice Age 5? *croggle*

[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus, J. Neil Schulman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day Will R. and Meredith.]

156 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/6 Remember, Remember, the Second Fifth of November

  1. I, too, just nabbed a copy of Mothership Zeta. (Need to check if they have some sort of new-issue reminder set-up.)

    I spend years deliberately cultivating a mental block against online shopping, not only as a philosophical issue vis-a-vis brick-and-mortar stores, but because the ease of spending money felt entirely too alluring. (And especially with books, my tendency to buy things on a “might be useful some day” basis is a problem.)

    But once I made peace with the fact that almost all my fiction reading is going to be electronic these days, my “buy now” finger has been getting a lot of exercise. I don’t think I’ve yet done the thing where I’m ramping up the elliptical at the gym, dissatisfied with all the reading options on the iPad in front of me, and bought something new to read even as the sweat started pouring…but I can imagine it happening. (Nah, maybe not, because I have a lot of things already waiting to be read on the iPad.)

    I’ve also gotten a bit twitchy-fingered on the kickstarter and patreon sites. All my fears were true: the sheer ease of spending money online means I do it more often. Fortunately, my budget can take it.

  2. I looked through 20 SF stories from this year, trying to apply the “hardness scale” to them, and I don’t think it works very well. A key element that it’s missing is “how important is the SF to the plot?” An otherwise-plausible story that’s filled with minor bits of made-up technology would rate a 1, whereas a story the revolved entirely around a single ridiculous idea would rate a 4. A simple edit might turn the first story into a 5, whereas nothing could “harden” the second one.

    I think what really matters is how many times in a story the reader is asked to suspend disbelief. You don’t get more than a few of those, and the earlier in the story, the better.

    A more useful classification would probably be to talk about “soft spots” in the story–places where the technology isn’t quite right. (Say 0 means it’s known to be false, 1 means it’s assumed to be false, 2 means we don’t know, 3 means it’ll probably work some day, and 4 means it works now–in the lab, at least.) A story can tolerate a lot more softness in the “what if” than it can in the rest of the story. It can tolerate very little softness in exposition. (E.g. a narrator “explaining” how vaccines don’t really work just isn’t going to fly with most readers.)

  3. Rev. Bob on November 7, 2015 at 9:11 am said:

    @David:

    The show’s Supergirl first encountered Kryptonite as an adult, in the pilot.

    @Peace;

    Pretty much my reaction. I mean, The Flash brought us frozen laser beams earlier this season…

    Watching the show with some science and comics wonks has been a series of “Arrrghs” and mutual calmings-down.

    “Comic book science” has become something of a mantra.

  4. Redheadedfemme

    Well, having read your reviews I shan’t be tracking these books down; in fairness to the authors I should note that I would have come to the same conclusion just reading the blurbs…

  5. I’ve spent enough time on TV Tropes not to get sucked in easily. I do quite like checking the pages for shows to see how trope heavy they are (Farscape’s page is huge of course)

    I think my favourites are the Apocalypse How and Apocylypse Wow ones. I do find myself trope spotting a lot more now.

  6. Heather Rose Jones on November 7, 2015 at 10:34 am said:
    … I spend years deliberately cultivating a mental block against online shopping, not only as a philosophical issue vis-a-vis brick-and-mortar stores, but because the ease of spending money felt entirely too alluring. (And especially with books, my tendency to buy things on a “might be useful some day” basis is a problem.)

    But once I made peace with the fact that almost all my fiction reading is going to be electronic these days, my “buy now” finger has been getting a lot of exercise. I don’t think I’ve yet done the thing where I’m ramping up the elliptical at the gym, dissatisfied with all the reading options on the iPad in front of me, and bought something new to read even as the sweat started pouring…but I can imagine it happening. (Nah, maybe not, because I have a lot of things already waiting to be read on the iPad.)

    I’ve also gotten a bit twitchy-fingered on the kickstarter and patreon sites. All my fears were true: the sheer ease of spending money online means I do it more often. Fortunately, my budget can take it.

    I was finally won over by long waits at the hospital, and discovering that a well-stocked reader took less room than three books if I was going to be hanging about all day.
    Another plus, with the kid on the opposite side of the globe I can no longer simply throw physical books in her direction, but I can easily share things online.
    So I’m definitely splurging on ebooks now, since they aren’t just for me.
    She and her partner will be getting shiny new loaded-up kindles linked to my account for Christmas, and I can deliver new content from here.
    I’ll still be buying hard copies, but only for select things (Leske, Watchmaker, and the like), not everything I happen to read.
    It should reduce pressure on the book shelving system here too.

  7. Amazon UK ebook sales:

    The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, by Natasha Pulley
    Hugo-eligible and a big hit with some Filers.

    What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (The Chronicles of St. Mary’s book 6), by Jodi Taylor
    Hugo-eligible. Max is back – new husband, new job, but once you mix in a baby mammoth, Joan of Arc, and a great deal else things can’t fail to go wrong…

    Guns of the Dawn, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
    Denland’s wars have depleted the numbers of young men available to be soldiers. Emily Marshwic must join the ranks of conscripted women and march towards the frontlines. But she begins to doubt her country’s cause, and her choices will determine her own future and that of two nations at war.

    The Madman’s Daughter, by Megan Shepherd
    Juliet Moreau has built a life for herself after the scandal that ruined her life. But when she finds out her father is alive and continuing his work on a remote island, she is determined to find out if the accusations against him were true.

    Look Who’s Back, by Timur Vermes, translated by Jamie Bulloch
    Hitler wakes up in 2011.

    Percy Jackson: The Complete Series, by Rick Riordan
    Popular YA series. Percy Jackson was a normal kid until he found out he was the son of a Greek God.

  8. Ian:
    TVTropes proves more how popular a work is than how trouphavy.
    (Case in point, Perry Rhodan One Novela every week and sometimes more than one since 1961 is small, because the USA is not a country where they were succesful)

  9. @ redheadedfemme
    “Here are links to my reviews of The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins, and The Book of Phoenix, by Nnedi Okorafor. (With spoilers.) Short version: Neither one of them will make my Hugo list.”

    Thanks for the review links. The descriptions I’ve read of Mount Char had made me wary due to the gruesome element, I almost never enjoy grimdark/horror/gruesome. Your review convinced me that I don’t need to subject myself to this one.

    I’ve already bounced off Phoenix once and may pass on it for now.

    You have excellent taste, your reviews of all the books I’ve also read were correct! ;-p

  10. Has anyone read The Madman’s Daughter?
    I’m not quite willing to plunge in, when it’s not on sale in the US, but I’m curious.

  11. It seems to me that hardness isn’t really a scale, because there are two concepts of hardness, which create different dimensions. On one conception (the Asimovian one, I think) hard SF is that in which science is central to the story, rather than just supplying a background. On another, whose origin I don’t know, hard SF is that which conforms to the laws of real-world science.

    While you certainly can have SF which is hard in both senses (The Martian may be an example), they can often be independent of one another, and even pull against one another. The SF in which science plays the largest role is often that in which it is odd science – time travel, faster-than-light communication, psychohistory etc. – while the speculative fiction which most straightforwardly conforms to real-world science is often that in which science isn’t really significant.

    (Of course, it is possible to use the term in other senses as well. The Tor.com ‘Best books of the eleven-year decade’ poll defined Hard SF as ‘In space, or has aliens, transformational technology, posthuman futures etc.’ – which made me rather inclined to say ‘So, science fiction, then?’.)

  12. @Andrew M

    There’s also the third type, which I’ll mention for the sake of completeness, because it’s the hardness that our friends in the SP seem to use. This would be “hardness” in the sense of “hard men” or “hard choices” or such like. The way that Mil Sci Fi that Beale or Torgerson like becomes hard sci-fi, even if it’s FTL ships taking people to military stories and settings. Or even the presence of literal ghosts.

    Thus, the CoDominium series, or anything by Tank Marmot, or John Ringo, is called hard science fiction because its the right kind of culturally hard.

    From a certain point of view.

  13. I admit to finding deep problems with the notion of “hard SF” both in concept and as actually practiced. My touchstones on the topic:

    * Norman Spinrad’s essay, “Rubber Science”
    * Pournelle’s critique of “Neutron Star” as a story that couldn’t happen precisely because it conforms so well to scientific fact
    * The fact that the only writer I saw actually bother to explain how the artificial gravity worked in his story was Samuel R. Delany of all people (in Trouble on Triton)
    * The fact that the climax of Nova turns on a bit of scientific speculation about the geometry inside an exploding star
    * that at Capclave recently, a self-styled “hard SF” writer congratulated himself on the realism of not including artificial gravity in his stories during one panel while excusing himself for not including people of color in his futures “unless they have some plot purpose” in another. As if artificial gravity was somehow more bizarre than a future humanity you only need the Peach Crayola to color.

    Also, on the taste is an individual thing front, that WoW movie trailer looks like, to advert to to the language of Blighty, utter gobshite to me. I’m glad people who are closer to the target audience feel more positively.

  14. Another vote for Spinrad’s “Rubber Science”–proved very useful to students in my Science Fact and Science Fiction course.

  15. @Jim Henley

    Pournelle critiqued Neutron Star for being too hard/accurate? Oh that is rich.

  16. Greg Hullender on November 7, 2015 at 10:48 am said:

    I looked through 20 SF stories from this year, trying to apply the “hardness scale” to them, and I don’t think it works very well.

    The whole thing is intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I mean, this is a site that also has an article on the Conservation of Ninjutsu:

    In any martial arts fight, there is only a finite amount of ninjutsu available to each side in a given encounter. As a result, one Ninja is a deadly threat, but an army of them are cannon fodder.

    Or the Sorting Algorithm of Deadness: “On a scale of one to four, how dead is this guy?”

    Or the Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Hardness.

    🙂

  17. @TheYoungPretender: Pournelle’s point was shrewd. We know perfectly well how tidal forces work now. It beggars belief that people who fly among the stars would somehow not, particularly since the gravitational gradient is a straightforward conclusion from the inverse square law. So at every point, the story can’t happen:

    1. The original scientists wouldn’t be that stupid.
    2. The Puppeteers can do math and are a starfaring race, so it doesn’t matter that their homeworld had no moon.
    3. If the scientists died by accident, Bey Shaeffer wouldn’t have even a moment’s confusion as to why.

    The problem is the science was new to 20th-Century SF fans, but would be old hat to the folks running around Known Space. By not thinking that through, Niven’s imagination failed.

    You can still defend it as a fun read, and a nice demonstration of writerly skill at building tension. And yeah! But in no sense is it somehow a “higher level” of storytelling because it turns on a scientific fact and gets that scientific fact itself correct. It’s not even “more realistic” unless you define “realistic” in an arbitrary, narrow way that completely excludes the criterion “does it make sense that these people would do these things in this setting?”

  18. @Jim H

    Ah, I see, thank you. I had been aware of the problem with Neutron Star form the point of view of how Neutron Stars work. I had been unaware that there had been any back and forth about whether that meant it could be blessed, as it were, as hard science-fiction. Especially from someone who wrote several books that are essentially military books with FTL attached – the source of my continuing surprise at Pournelle’s opus being described as “hard” science fiction.

    The Capclave story is something I wish I could say surprised me. Sad.

  19. @ Lauowolf The Madman’s Daughter is exceedingly well written, and I found parts of it skin-crawlingly disturbing (as any take on Moreau should be). I was disappointed in the love triangle aspect of the story (in that there was one). If you’re not allergic to YA tropes (or just don’t read a lot in that particular genre) I doubt they’d be irritating. I enjoyed the experience of reading it, but not enough to track down subsequent efforts and it’s not a book that I’d shove into the hands of anyone who walked through the door.

    Atmospheric, good prose, but not my genre, basically.

    Also: I am not a huge horror reader, because I’m a total wimp, but I found it seriously, seriously disturbing.

  20. @Jon F. Zeigler: It was Gannon. At some point, he talked himself into believing that avoiding “tokenism” was the most important thing, defining tokenism as throwing in a character who is “non-default” for “arbitrary” reasons. He was also concerned that if he put someone with a black skin-tone in a medium-future story, they wouldn’t be products of contemporary black culture, so in what sense would they be black as we think of it? It was a remarkable case of talking oneself into believing that reinforcing white supremacy was somehow doing the right thing by people of color.

    I stress he was not the only white, straight, cis author on the panel who took that tack. At least one other (a boomer woman) agreed that you shouldn’t make a character a person of color or sexual/gender minority in your story “without a reason.” Apparently none of these folks considered These people exist so it makes sense they would appear in stories to be “a reason.” Sunny Moraine was on the same panel kind of gaping; then the audience erupted in nonviolent but insistent WTF?

  21. Not even fiftieth.

    Yes, there’s no way the characters in Neutron Star wouldn’t have known they were dealing with tidal forces.

    Temporarily laid low by the flu shot. Please note that while the flu shot makes me feel off for a few hours to a few days, depending on the year and the mix, the flu itself lands me in the ER, struggling to breathe. So in the unlikely event we have any anti-vaxxers here, stuff it.

    Send tea.

    Reading Forgotten Suns by Judith Tarr. Very good. Strong female characters in a mostly gender-equal society, which does leave me puzzling vaguely about what is giving me the seventies vibe. Though not in a bad way.

    Am I making sense?

  22. I’m still liking the definition that hard SF allows you one or two not-quite-right things in the what if, but thereafter, it shouldn’t cause an educated layman to stumble over things that break suspension of disbelief.

    In Neutron Star, the General Products hull is impossible nine ways from Sunday, but it’s part of the “what if.” The fact that it’s impossible the puppeteers didn’t know about tides is a different problem, but not with the science.

    Delaney only wrote soft SF. I don’t think he ever claimed to write hard SF.

    As for the guy at the Con, I suppose if it’s a story set 1,000 years from now, it would be really depressing if skin color mattered to anyone except when buying sunscreen. Never mentioning color seems odd, though. Still having races at all would seem odd, as opposed to a continuum.

  23. @Greg Hullender:

    In Neutron Star, the General Products hull is impossible nine ways from Sunday, but it’s part of the “what if.” The fact that it’s impossible the puppeteers didn’t know that is a different problem, but not with the science.

    Delaney only wrote soft SF. I don’t think he ever claimed to write hard SF.

    I…can’t see this as responding to anything I wrote. Of course Delany never claimed to write “hard SF.” That’s part of my point. (I’ll leave aside whether “soft SF” is a thing or a bankrupt construction standing in for a thing.) And General Products hulls have nothing to do with the problem with “Neutron Star” and were not referred to at any point, so it’s a mystery why you’re bringing them up.

  24. @Greg Hullender: Why? What has Pournelle’s critique, as recalled by me, misrepresented? I know perfectly well what a General Products hull is. I read everything Niven wrote prior to The Integral Trees. I know that the central mystery is “What ever could get through a General Products hull?” Neither Pournelle nor I are saying “The problem with ‘Neutron Star’ is that General Products hulls are unrealistic.” Our problem is the paradoxical unreality of the plot caused by the realism of the science of tidal forces. So what do General Products hulls have to do with anything?

  25. Greg Hullender on November 7, 2015 at 2:03 pm said:

    I’m still liking the definition that hard SF allows you one or two not-quite-right things in the what if, but thereafter, it shouldn’t cause an educated layman to stumble over things that break suspension of disbelief.

    That’s why TV Tropes defines it as a scale, rather than a binary yes/no condition. Level 3 (Physics Plus) allows some exceptions from known physics as long as they’re internally consistent. Typical examples include FTL or teleportation devices (“one to beam up!”). Level 4 (One Big Lie) is where the story only has one obvious break from reality, and focuses on exploring that. 4.5 (One Big Fib) is similar, but the idea is either particularly plausible or a common and standard one, like, again, perhaps FTL.

    By those definitions, “Neutron Star” would pretty clearly be “Physics Plus”, with the plusses being 1. FTL, 2. General Products hulls, and 3. nobody thinking about gravity very clearly. 🙂

    eta: more “hard sf” fits in the “physics plus” category than advocates of hard sf might like to admit. And don’t forget the MST3K mantra!

  26. @Jim

    Unfortunately I keep hearing that kind of “reasoning” whenever the representation-in-genre-fiction issue comes up. I have to wonder whether it’s a matter of (usually white) authors who are afraid that they can’t write authentic POC characters, salted with a generous helping of “I’m afraid of a mob if I get it wrong.” Rationalize to taste and serve.

  27. I’m sort of prepared to accept “Neutron Star” as a hard SF story, because it’s presented as the formal literary format of a hard SF story. Like a haiku or a sonnet – we accept the restrictions, conventions and unrealities of that format, because that’s how the rules of haiku and sonnet forms say they have to work.

    Well, the “physics example presented from the inside as a short story” format is a standard of a certain kind of SF, and it has its aesthetic rules and conventions just as much as a sonnet does. Yes, the critique that Shaeffer and everyone else would already know about these forces is perfectly valid… but it’s also irrelevant. It would be just as true, and just as irrelevant, to critique a sonnet by pointing out that people don’t talk in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme.

    So, I defend “Neutron Star” and its likes as hard SF, based on the literary theory of the hard SF form. Give me a few more minutes, and I bet I can work postmodernism and deconstructionism in there somewhere, too.

    I’m not sure whether defining a story as “hard SF” or otherwise based on its literary form, rather than the science involved, will appeal to everyone… but, hey, them’s the breaks.

  28. But what about the real continuity problem on Supergirl; why is Kara Danvers already wearing glasses when she has no intention of ever using her powers (i.e. has no need of a disguise and has greater than human vision)?

    And on Flash, while people keep mentioning the frozen laser beams, am I the only one whose jaw dropped when Cisco tracked Captain Cold via ultraviolet emissions, drawing an analogy to how heat is infrared, so cold is ultraviolet. Made me nostalgic for the early Green Lantern’s encounter with invisible but still invulnerable to his power ring “infrayellow”.

    More seriously, the main dramatic problem on Supergirl is that they’ve established that Superman is there and active as a hero…but apparently Kara and Clark never take any time to see each other (Clark sends her a cape via James Olsen rather than giving it to her himself) or even apparently talk on the phone. They’ve chosen to write it like they avoid any contact for no reason (they’ve not been said to have any problems with each other) rather than have encounters happen offscreen and get recapped in dialogue later. I understand why they can’t have Clark show up as more than a one scene sun shining directly in the camera view, but the way they’re dealing with it is clunky as hell.

  29. I’m disappointed to hear that about Gannon. Not as surprised as I would have thought, but disappointed.

    I don’t see why authors can’t just make protagonists and major and minor characters of varying ethnicities and if prodded for a reason say “it’s going to be a plot point seven books from now.” People will be so diverted by wondering what you’ve got planned they’ll probably forget all about actually *looking* for the plot point, and in the meantime they have plenty of time to get used to characters of varying ethnicities.

  30. Personally I set myself a challenge a while back: if I don’t have a specific plot-driven reason to make my protagonist a white male, I’m going to do something else. Turning the usual default on its head, as it were.

    “People who are not straight white males are a substantial majority of the human species” is all the “reason” we ought to need.

  31. @Steve Wright: Of course “Neutron Star” is “hard science fiction” generically. We completely agree, at least that far. However:

    Yes, the critique that Shaeffer and everyone else would already know about these forces is perfectly valid… but it’s also irrelevant. It would be just as true, and just as irrelevant, to critique a sonnet by pointing out that people don’t talk in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme.

    This is diegetically confused. The writer of a sonnet stands in our world and makes a choice to structure a block of language in an (8+6)x5 way, for reasons germane to the writer’s position in the world. I’ve done it myself! In the case of a verse play or a musical, we’re still dealing with a writer’s decision to structure and present a character’s speech or thoughts in a particular way to heighten the intensity. And we accept that this comes at a certain cost: it does foreground the artificiality of the storytelling, which is why writers striving for naturalism avoid it. Hence Nick Carraway doesn’t shift to verse at even the most emotionally vexed moments of The Great Gatsby.

    Bey Shaeffer stands inside ‘Neutron Star.’ and we are considering not the presentation and structuring of his thoughts and speech; we’re considering his reactions to and actions upon his own world. That’s a different level of artificiality, and there’s every reason to regard it differently than a writer’s decision to write 8 lines of rhyming pentameter, stick a volta in line 9, and then stop after 5 more.

    ETA: I used to do musical improv. We knew when to burst into song. It was when the scene reached an emotional crux.

  32. I wonder if these same authors refuse to mention hair color, or the presence or absence of facial hair, or glasses, or clothing, or height, unless it’s also somehow relevant to the plot?

  33. @Tom:

    I write the glasses off under a general “don’t stand out” rule. In the Danvers’ place, I would’ve assumed from Day One that she’d eventually follow in Clark’s footsteps, and that would mean that establishing a disguise is an immediate “must.” Does no harm if she stays incognito, protects her if she goes hero – no downside other than a little inconvenience.

    And yeah, I could do with some offscreen Chats With Clark, but I get the feeling this is her determined to find her own way. Getting the answers by cribbing from her cousin isn’t conducive to personal growth… but still, it strains credibility that he apparently never even gave her a basic Applied Superpowers seminar. “Just say no” may be the preference, but having a backup strategy’s always a good plan.

    As for the UV tracking… I noticed it, too, but I was more appalled by the lasers.

  34. Can I just mention that we make a hash of the haiku? We get the syllable count but ignore everything else that should go into writing haiku.

  35. “hard” SF.

    *snort*

    I have a hard time taking that term seriously because of how it’s been deployed in sexist ways over the past few decades, with the assumption that manly men write “hard” idea-driven SF and those wimpy girls write “soft’n’squishy” SF.

    This sort of rhetoric long pre-dated the puppies: arguably it starts with Campbell’s insistence on the “hard” sciences (and restricted list thereof), and it was a big part of the 1970s sf scene and into the 1980s with the advent of cyperbunk when (for the first time!) women started winning awards (like Hugos, heh) and were accused of taking over sf and driving the poor hapless men off the shelves of the bookstores by their icky fat fantasies and romances.

    Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” is so often held up as the prime exemplar of HARD sf, and one of my favorite take-downs (I’ve assigned in classes) is by Richard Harter Link to fairly lengthy essay with spoilers here.

    Key quote: The trouble with this story is this: From the internal evidence of this story the heroine did not die because of the cold equations of nature; she was the victim of criminal bureaucratic stupidity. That neither the author nor the editor nor the critics who praised the story perceived this speaks to flaws in the genre. The flaw in the story is that a failure in government, in administration, is tacitly treated as though it were a law of nature. It is a common fault, one that is pervasive in our society. But one expects more, one deserves more, from a self professed “literature of ideas”.

  36. @Jack Lint: Oh no! I almost have more violent kneejerk responses to the Problem of Haiku than to the concept of “hard SF!”

    Very briefly: I agree with you except that we get the syllable counts wrong too. English-language haiku should have way fewer than 11 syllables.

    @robinreid: Rock. And thanks for the link to the Harter piece.

  37. I will also point out that a review I wrote for the Tintin book The Castafiore Emerald, is used as a reference on TV Tropes.

    Well that is one TVTropes.I won’t get sucked into. The Castafiore Emerald is my least favourite Tintin book. I only reread it for completion sake when i am doing a Tintin marathon.

  38. JH —
    Fewer than 11? That’s a bold statement. The usual count is 17.
    Unless you are trying to imply that the correct number is 0.

    I might guess that you think we should be counting consonants rather than syllables, as that is probably a better match to Japanese practice.

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