(1) LE GUIN’S PROTEST. Ursula K. Le Guin’s letter to the editor in The Oregonian concisely explains the injustice of allowing Ammon Bundy and company to continue occupying a federal wildlife refuge.
Federal land: The Oregonian’s A1 headline on Sunday, Jan. 17, “Effort to free federal lands,” is inaccurate and irresponsible. The article that follows it is a mere mouthpiece for the scofflaws illegally occupying public buildings and land, repeating their lies and distortions of history and law.
Ammon Bundy and his bullyboys aren’t trying to free federal lands, but to hold them hostage. I can’t go to the Malheur refuge now, though as a citizen of the United States, I own it and have the freedom of it. That’s what public land is: land that belongs to the public — me, you, every law-abiding American. The people it doesn’t belong to and who don’t belong there are those who grabbed it by force of arms, flaunting their contempt for the local citizens.
Those citizens of Harney County have carefully hammered out agreements to manage the refuge in the best interest of landowners, scientists, visitors, tourists, livestock and wildlife. They’re suffering more every day, economically and otherwise, from this invasion by outsiders.
Instead of parroting the meaningless rants of a flock of Right-Winged Loonybirds infesting the refuge, why doesn’t The Oregonian talk to the people who live there?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Northwest Portland
Think Progress has a story about the letter with more comments by Le Guin.
Le Guin told ThinkProgress that the letter was printed unchanged, and she “got a pleasant note informing me it was to be published,” but nothing more from the paper or the author. A request for comment to the Oregonian’s public editor went unanswered as of publication.
The science fiction author is not alone in wanting the ranchers to return Malhuer to the public. Most Western voters, according to a recent poll, disagree with Bundy and do not want the states to take over public lands.
“We have been going out to the Steens Mountain area, on and near the Wildlife Refuge, for 45 years — first to teach summer classes at the field station, later just to be there in the grand high desert country,” she said. “We spend a week every summer on a cattle ranch very close to Refuge lands. I am proud to consider the family who own the ranch and the local hotel as friends, and I have learned a great deal from them. The Refuge Headquarters is a quiet, fragile, beautiful little oasis that is particularly dear to us.”
(2) WHAT IF BOOK FESTIVALS PAY WRITERS? Claire Armitstead’s opinion piece in the Guardian argues the burden of paying writers to attend book festivals would have unintended side-effects: “Book festivals are worth far more than fees”.
Philip Pullman became cheerleader for a growing band of refuseniks last week when he resigned as president of the Oxford literary festival because it didn’t pay speakers. Thirty more writers immediately picked up the chant, with a letter to the trade journal the Bookseller calling for all authors and publishers to boycott festivals that expected writers to appear for free.
…Edinburgh is one of the biggest festivals and an honourable exception to the no-pay rule, offering the same flat rate to all its contributors. But it’s not unusual to hear writers grumbling that this is tokenism, and no recompense for the hours (and expense) of travelling. So what is a reasonable return? Should it be calibrated to audience size, or offset against book sales? Or should it be a flat rate – only bigger than it currently is?
There are now more than 350 literary festivals in the UK, which adds up to a whole heap of calls on writers’ time and energy – and one argument is that if they can’t afford to pay contributors they should simply shut down. But small festivals do more than simply put writers on stage; they support local bookshops and create a buzz around books. They circulate flyers publicising authors and their work. They are part of the great reading group boom that has bolstered book sales by turning reading into a social activity.
…So while I have every sympathy for hard-pressed authors, I feel they need to be careful what they wish for. The logic of the marketplace – in book festivals as in every other arena – is that, were fees to become obligatory, the haves will end up having more, while the have-nots will find themselves banished to outer darkness. It would mean the end of a golden era of access to books and the people who write them. And that would be impoverishing for all of us.
(3) OXFORD MAY PAY WRITERS. Philip Pullman and other protesting writers have made the Oxford Literary Festival consider paying authors.
In a statement issued on Tuesday morning, the Oxford literary festival said that it “recognises and understands the strength of feeling in the literary community regarding the payment of speaker fees to authors and writers and we are sympathetic to this cause”.
But, adding that it is a registered charity that receives no public funding, with no full-time staff, supported by a team of 40 unpaid volunteers, the festival said that “for every £12 ticket sold, a further £20 in support has to be raised from our generous sponsors, partners and donors in subsidy”. The festival’s current supporters include FT Weekend and HSBC.
“We have of course been aware of the debate regarding author payments for some time, but given the limitations of the tight budgets we run to (the festival’s last audited accounts show a loss of £18,000 in 2014) paying each speaker would require an additional 15% in costs or £75,000 for the 500 speakers across our 250 events planned for 2016,” said the festival.
Once this year’s event in April is over, organisers have nonetheless said that they “will meet with all interested parties to discuss how to achieve payment of fees for all speakers – while safeguarding the presence of our record levels of unknown writers for 2017 and beyond”.
(4) ONE LORD A’LEAPING. Middle-Earth political science student Austin Gilkeson lectures on “The Illegitimacy of Aragorn’s Claim to the Throne” at The Toast. (Traffic to the post is hyped by the GIF of a flaming Denethor hurling himself from the promontory of Minas Tirith.)
After the War of the Ring and Denethor’s death, Gondor did embrace Aragorn as its new king, partially because he’d arrived at the head of an army of the Dead. But while “commands a terrifying ghost army” is a fantastic qualification for fronting a Norwegian black metal band or a community Halloween parade, it’s less than ideal for ruling a vast and diverse country of the living.
Even worse, Aragorn’s supposed suitability to rule is directly tied to his pure Númenorean blood….
Given that the Númenoreans ruined their civilization to the point that it was personally destroyed by God Himself, the Gondorrim probably shouldn’t have been so quick to crown a long-lived, pure-blooded Númenorean like Aragorn. They’d probably have been better off elevating Pippin Took to the throne. Hobbits at least dally with the good things in life: hearty food, heady ales, fireworks, and weed.
(5) EVERYMAN HIS OWN NUMENOREAN. Stephen Hawking issued another warning that humanity may wipe itself out in years to come.
Cheery physicist Professor Stephen Hawking says that mankind could be wiped out by our own creations within the next 100 years.
Answering audience questions at this year’s BBC Reith Lectures, he said that our rush to understand and improve life through science and technology could be humanity’s undoing.
He has previously suggested that colonising other planets will be the only way that the human race can survive, but he warns that we may lose Earth to some kind of major disaster before we have a chance to properly do so.
“Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low,” he explained, “it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years.
(6) SFWA KICKS IN. Science Fiction Writers of America has begun donating to some non-members’ crowdfunded self-publishing efforts.
Beginning in January, SFWA will be making small, targeted pledges to worthy Kickstarter projects projects by non-members, designating them a “SFWA Star Project.” Projects will be selected by the Self Publishing Committee, coordinated by volunteer Rob Balder. Selections will be based on the project’s resonance with SFWA’s exempt purposes, and special preference will be given to book-publishing projects in the appropriate genres.
Funds for these pledges will come from the SFWA Givers Fund, from a $1000 pool approved by the Grants Committee in December. When a pledge results in receiving a donor reward such as a signed book, these items will be auctioned off at fundraising events, to help replenish the Givers Fund.
The first two Star Projects are:
- Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu by Jonathan Green, and
- Blacktastic: A Podcast of Black Scifi and Fantasy Stories.
SFWA President Cat Rambo also blogged about the initiative.
Over the past few years, I’ve been helping with the effort to open SFWA doors to professional writers publishing outside the traditional structure, to the point where we are the only writers organization (I believe) to accept crowdfunded publications as membership qualifying material. The Star Project effort ties in nicely with that and it’s gratifying to see SFWA continue to expand to match the changing needs of professional F&SF writers.
(7) BETTER THAN THE FILM. Rachael Acks has a completely entertaining and THOROUGHLY SPOILERY review of SyFy’s theatrical release 400 Days. You’ve been warned. And it’s safe to read the first paragraph, where nothing is given away –
400 Days is the first theatrical release film from a company (SyFy) that’s been cranking mediocre to howlingly (we hope intentionally) funny terribad movies out onto its cable station for years. Getting in to movie theaters is a big deal, a major investment, but doesn’t necessarily guarantee a movie’s actually good, right? Let me tell you, I’d rather watch a SyFy offering any day than Transformers 4. But is this Syfy going legit, so to speak?
(8) RSR INDEXES ARTISTS. Rocket Stack Rank has now added exhibit and viewing tools for a wide number of creators eligible in the Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist categories. Gregory N. Hullender says, “The value we’ve added here is that we’ve gathered together hundreds of online images and set up a lightbox so people can riffle through them quickly.”
The drawback to the Best Fan Artist exhibit is that it features only semiprozine cover contributors at the site, and a link to eFanzines’ cover index where one can see some artwork in fanzines produced as PDFs. I will be the first to agree there are technical barriers and questions about permissions in the way of indexing art from PDFs (in contrast to semiprozine covers which are already available online) – however, RSR needs to figure out how to present fan art on a level playing field.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- January 19, 1990 — Natives of a small isolated town defend themselves against strange underground creatures in Tremors, seen for the first time on this day in 1990.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born January 19, 1809 – Edgar Allan Poe
(11) CONRUNNERS COULD USE MORE FANS LIKE THIS. Icelandic strongman Hafthor Bjornsson, known for his role as “The Mountain” on HBO’s Game of Thrones set a Guiness World Record for being the fastest person to carry two refrigerators 65 feet.
(12) CLEVELAND THANKS THE FANS. In response to a club’s charitable work, “Cleveland celebrates Star Trek’s roots with thank you to The Federation”.
Cleveland City Councilman Martin Keane will present a resolution of appreciation at 7 p.m. PJ McIntyre’s, on Lorain Avenue in Kamm’s Corners, is hosting a celebration from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
According to the resolution, the 60-member Cleveland chapter, named the USS Challenger — named to honor the crew of the ill-fated space shuttle Challenger — has raised $15,000 for local charities, and has conducted annual drives for food for local food banks; supplies for local animal shelters; Toys for Tots campaigns and supported March for Babies, Heartwalk and Laura’s Home.
Given that the reporter pointed to another Cleveland/Star Trek connection — did you know Majel Barrett was a native of suburban Shaker Heights? — it’s a pity no one told her that Roddenberry previewed the show for fans at the 1966 Worldcon in Cleveland.
(13) LOVECRAFT LETTERS. Heritage Auctions will take bids on a parcel of 10 handwritten letters by H. P. Lovecraft at its Rare Books Auction #6155 on April 6. The letters to aspiring author Frederic Jay Pabody are full of writing and publishing advice.
Lovecraft recounts recent visits with his “literary friends” R.H. Barlow and Adolphe de Castro, the suicide of Robert E. Howard, other “weird” fiction authors, the nature of good marriages and bad marriages, religion (or the lack thereof), Atlantis, some splendid passages about the nature of “seriously artistic” weird fiction, and his repeated inveterate hatred of typewriters.
One highlight from the letters includes a hand drawn map or, as Lovecraft calls it, a “rough Mercator’s Projection chart” of Kusha, a land associated with the myth of Atlantis.
Another letter, displaying Lovecraft’s somewhat morbid sense of humor, describes his short story “The Haunter in the Dark”, in which he kills off a character based on his friend and fellow writer Robert Bloch, as “a kind of revenge.”
“In both ‘The Dark Demon’ and ‘The Shambler from the Stars’ Bloch has a figure modelled more or less after me come to a hideous end. Well- I’ve survived other fictional deaths – Long having left me as a charred cinder on the floor of my apartment over a decade ago in “The Space-Eaters.” In a recent unpublished mss. Kuttner kills off Bloch, himself, + myself under thin disguises… slaughter de-luxe! I am decapitated – but my head is later found with its teeth buried in his carotid artery. Nice, wholesome ideas the boys have!” (December 20, 1936).
(14) BUGS. Kudos to Black Gate’s John ONeill for turning today’s entomological headline into a beautiful genre blog post – “I Don’t Mean to Alarm Anyone, But We’ve Discovered Giant Insects on Monster Island”.
(15) PEOPLE OF EARTH. TBS has given a series order to People of Earth, a comedy starring Daily Show alum Wyatt Cenac as a skeptical journalist investigating a support group for alleged alien abductees.
In the series, from Conan O’Brien and Greg Daniels (The Office) and formerly known as The Group, Cenac’s Ozzie Graham slowly becomes sympathetic to the survivors’ stories and eventually comes to suspect that maybe he is an abductee, as well.
The cast includes Ana Gasteyer (Suburgatory), Oscar Nuñez (The Office), Michael Cassidy (Men at Work), Da’Vine Joy Randolph (Selfie), Brian Huskey (Veep) and Tracee Chimo (Orange Is the New Black).
[Thanks to Will R., Brian Z, Cat Rambo, Jim Reynolds, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kurt Busiek.]
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Cheryl S. would you be very wroth with me if I admit that I’ve always wanted to introduce hummingbirds to Hawai’i?
@JJ
Updated. Thanks!
I’ve long thought that if you wanted to have a long-term legacy, you should try to introduce highly invasive species to new areas. Pick the right species, and you will affect the future evolution of ecosystems for millions of years to come! I’d love to see giant wetas in the US, but those don’t seem to be too competitive. Triops would be a cool edition to more bodies of water, but those may need marginal conditions, too (ephemeral ponds) so I guess I’d have to settle for more lakes and rivers full of comicial dancing fish.
Cally says:
I’ve had some Coffee Mate Italian Sweet Creme (yes, they spell it like that, because I’m sure there’s no cream in it, just sugar and soybean oil) with a Star Wars imprint for sometime, but I didn’t know what character it was meant to represent. I did a quick search for these Star Wars Coffee Mate creamers (cremers?) in general, and here’s the list:
Darth Vader — Espresso Chocolate
C3PO — Hazelnut
Chewbacca — Spiced Latte
R2D2 — French Vanilla
Boba Fett — Italian Sweet Cream
I am so sad that my flavor is Boba Fett. WTH? I would’ve assumed that these flavored coffee creamers are more of a woman thing than a man thing, but those yahoos in Oregon did ask for emergency supplies of the French Vanilla (AKA R2D2 flavor), so what do I know? Still, I would’ve rather had Leia on my creamer bottle. She fits Italian Sweet Creme a whole lot better than Boba Fett. Although Jabba the Hazelnutt might’ve been funny.
@ Greg Hullender
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is Christopher Doll
The cover art copyright date is 2014 – not sure what that means
@Lori Coulson – Cheryl S. would you be very wroth with me if I admit that I’ve always wanted to introduce hummingbirds to Hawai’i?
Nope, I’d just judge you a little… (Not really. I think hummingbirds are amazing.)
Seriously, though, however progressive and scientific we think we are as a species, ecosystems are incredibly complicated and we don’t know enough about how they work to successfully introduce non-natives without harm.
The more cool stuff that is discovered –
Hawks as muscle for hummingbirds – the more it indicates that interrelationships are massively complicated and unknowable in their entirety.
Boba Fett? Really? What, are those cremer bottles reprints from Empire Strikes Back or something?
@Graydon
I was taught better in marketing classes for my Bachelors of Science degree in Business Management (BS in BM). Pfft
I stand by what I said. I’m not sure if your trying to explain to me because you think I don’t know how the world works or making excuses for the arrogant men in marketing or trying to show me support. Because none of what you said disagrees with my statement. *confused as heck in NJ*
Darth Vader was cool, and had that VOICE, he was scary and sinister and smooooth. Luke was whiny.
Rey was cool and action-filled and go-getum. Competent and a survivor. Kylo Ren was whiny.
It’s not villains vs good, oh marketers. It’s cool vs whiny.
Greg Hullender: Re: Unknowns.
Planetfall by Emma Newman cover is by Anxo Amarelle.
Leila kicks butt. Why does no one like her. LOL even as a hostage/slave she wasn’t whiny.
@Stoic Cynic
That sounds like a likely explanation, and one that, once pointed out, seems obvious. I should have thought of it with my brain!
@Tasha Turner: Some people definitely like Leia (I assume you mean).
A woman recently did a very amusing live-tweet series while she watched the original trilogy for the first time. She initially leapt to Team Vader because of the cool, well, everything. She refused to root for Luke because he was so whiny, and wasn’t even all that impressed with “Space Indy” (as she insisted on calling Han), but once Leia started to get some screen time, she became very conflicted. She started rooting for Leia to join up with Vader so she could get one of those cool capes! 🙂
Space Voldemort vs. the Whiny Space Criminals. Well worth a browse if you have some spare time and a high tolerance for a very disrespectful take on the series. 🙂
(I guess I should add a language warning for those silly people who are offended by common vernacular terms starting with “f” and “s” and the like.)
Msb —
> “A much more nuanced and realistic take on the hidden princess and rightful heir reclaiming kingdom tropes.”
Very much so. I like that the “good” side is often so morally questionable in what they have to do to succeed.
It’s also interesting in the context of a fairly long “woman disguised as male knight” tradition in legend and fairy tales. (Heather Rose Jones actually had an interesting post on the tradition on her blog a little while back.) I’ve been finding it interesting seeing where the Tamir Triad keeps to the tropes of the tradition and where it — quite deliberately, I’m sure — goes down a different path.
@Graydon & Cheryl S.,
Returning islands to their native state is doable but takes a large amount of resources & time. It took decades (since the 1970s, with work ongoing) for Titiri Matangi island (which I linked upthread) which is orders of magnitude smaller than Hawaii (0.85 sq. mi. vs 10931 sq. mi.). Native species of plants & birds from the mainland or other islands were re-introduced after pests were eradicated.
(Reviving extinct species is a whole other SFnal topic)
@Tasha Turner —
Let’s see if I can disambiguate myself, here.
You stated I think marketers need to be doing more market research and less relying on their gut instincts or what they know.
I’m not disagreeing with your statement. (I don’t disagree with your statement.)
I’m taking a position that an incumbent, used to a certain degree and mode of success, has an incentive to prevent change. (If you’re winning, and things change, it’s overwhelming likely you are now winning less.) This leads to a construction of “need” built from a desire to maintain a personal advantage, rather than to advance some larger interest. (Client or corporate employer or brand.)
Incumbents are observed to do this stability-of-personal-expectation thing in defiance of all sorts of well-known best practices, all sorts of plausible expectations of even more money (e.g., Kodak’s corporate suicide), and in ways that much more closely align with individual goals than an understanding of the corporate goals appropriate to a fiduciary duty.
So I think the rigid gender marketing has a lot more to do with “if we let women or facts in here, average remuneration will go down” than it does with anything true about the target markets, and that this won’t change barring some strong commercial disaster and maybe not then. (Up until .. 1920? 1930? right about the point there started being money in movies, about half of movies where directed by women. When there started being serious money involved, that stopped. It’s stayed stopped. It’s really hard to come up for a reason for that other than a conscious decision that the people who should get the money don’t include women.)
So I think marketing decisions like deciding Kylo Ren would be the identification character represent less being incompetent and more deliberate policy and that an awareness of leaving money on the table isn’t enough to change the policy.
Tonight’s read — Letters From The Sky, by Tamer Lorika
… Huh.
A teenager’s guardian angel has fallen in love with her. I’m … not entirely sure what to make of this one. Extremely idiosyncratic use of language sometimes makes this feel almost like outsider art. The setting seems to be 1939 France, although for some reason that’s carefully never stated, and the names seem to don’t make much sense if so (Jeanne Dark? Paris Orange? Jedrick?), and there was at least one anachronism, although that may have been simply a mistake. There are plot points that seem to go nowhere (was … the tiny kitten … evil? or something?), and then it ends abruptly at what certainly feels like the middle of things, but there aren’t any sequels, I checked.
I’m going to fall on the side of saying this was a valiant effort at writing a book, but it really needed to go through several more drafts to get where it needed to go. It’s not going on my list of good lesbian romance SFF. Ah, well.
@Greg Hullender: Here’s what I could find —
CROOKED by Austin Grossman
Cover design: Lauren Harms
Cover photograph: Brian Gilbreath
LOIS LANE: FALLOUT by Gwenda Bond
Jacket and book design: Bob Lentz
FUTURISTIC VIOLENCE AND FANCY SUITS by David Wong
Cover design: Rob Grom
Cover photographs: cat (Mayte Torres/Getty Images), guns (Martin Shaper)
GOLD FAME CITRUS by Claire Vaye Watkins
Book Design and illustrations (pp. 194-200): Lauren Kolm
INK AND BONE by Rachel Caine
Cover design: Katie Anderson
SLADE HOUSE by David Mitchell
Design: Peter Mendelsund
THE BEAUTIFUL BUREAUCRAT by Helen Phillips
Cover design: Lucy Kim
WAKE OF VULTURES by Lila Bowen
Cover design: Lauren Panepinto
OK, I’m going to explain the tiny kitten thing, because I am finding myself unable to let this go.
So, a fairly reasonably chunk of the book is devoted to the main character finding and adopting a tiny kitten. And as long as the tiny kitten is sleeping beside her, the guardian angel doesn’t come to visit at night, and this goes on for long enough that the main character starts freaking out and wondering if she made her guardian angel up in her head or something. Then one night, the tiny kitten isn’t there, the guardian angel shows up and is like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been trying to visit but something was stopping me,” and then does some magic stuff which might be legit or might be creepy. The next day, the main character finds out that the kitten is dead.
So, I figure, one of three things is going on:
1) The Guardian Angel is actually some kind of creepy demon! She killed the kitten that was somehow protecting the main character! Everything we know is wrong! Anarchy in the streets!
2) Someone is trying to make it LOOK like the Guardian Angel killed the kitten! She’s being framed! Our main character is going to grow more and more suspicious until the truth is revealed!
3) The kitten was evil! It was keeping our heroines apart! More tempting impediments are going to get in their way until we find out who is behind it all!
Now, it’s always nice when a book goes in a direction you didn’t predict. However, I must confess that, although unpredicted, I am not entirely satisfied with the direction this book ended up taking with this, which was:
4) GIVING NO EXPLANATION AND NEVER SPEAKING OF IT AGAIN.
@bookworm1398
Thanks! We looked at the original cover (for the self-published book) and it does differ significantly from the cover on the professional version. Our guess is that for copyright purposes they considered it a derivative work, but for Hugo purposes it might well be considered a significant modification. If it gets nominated, I think it’d be up to the committee to figure it out.
Thank you very much for the info! We’ve updated the site.
@Mister Dalliard
Thank you too. Also updated.
The best thing about File770 is that we really are a community where the people help each other out!
We now have nine covers without artists. (We added a few more covers during the day, so the numbers don’t add up.) Again, if anyone actually owns one of these books (or works in a bookstore or library) it would be great if you could look on the dust jacket and see if there’s a credit for the artist anywhere.
Thanks again!
@Kyra
Oh, thank you! That tweaked my interest enough that, despite the book being outside my normal realm of reading, and despite your less than positive review of it, I sought out the author’s website, read an excerpt or two, and was even less intrigued* by everything except the kitten. I’d given up on ever finding out what that kitten’s deal was**, and though I don’t actually know, I at least know approximately as much as anyone other than the author can.
* Your review made the book much more interesting than did the excerpt I read.
** All of this in less than 15 minutes, yes. Slow end-of-work day.
@Soon Lee, I somehow missed your earlier reference, so thank you for linking. I’m a little concerned with the strew poison bait to kill the rats approach, but it appears to have worked, for some value of effective.
The Hawaiian archipelago is, so far as I know, unique in both its distance from any continental mass and in how early outside predators were introduced to a pristine environment (the Polynesians brought dogs and pigs as well as plants). Since it’s not really known what a virgin Hawaii would look like, the target is already a little fuzzy. Add in the unknown impact of Hawaiian monk seals (it’s not a healthy population, even with 1500 miles of habitat), the way land and sea interact and millions of years of isolation that can’t be imitated and it’s unlikely anything useful will happen.
One of the islands, Kaho’olawe, is acting as a kind of microcosm though and it is progressing, sometimes a literal inch at a time. The navy got rid of most of the bombs (it was used for decades for target practice by the US military) and goats and now volunteers work to eradicate or move cats and rats and reintroduce native species, some grown by schoolchildren all over the state.
And, um, I’ll put away my soapbox now.
@Greg Hullender, I have Wake of Vultures. Reading from the back cover:
Jacket Design by Lauren Panepinto
Jacket Illustration copyright Shutterstock
@Kyra – THEY KILLED A TINY KITTEN?! *flips table*
I know! And for no apparent reason!
THAT SOMEHOW MAKES IT WORSE!
I just heard the news about David Hartwell. It’s so sad. I’m still in shock.
He was such a legendary figure in SF publishing. He will be sorely missed.
@Graydon
This looks like logic and working against yourself I will never understand.
@Kyra —
the names seem to don’t make much sense if so (Jeanne Dark? Paris Orange? Jedrick?)
“Jeanne Dark” => Jeanne d’Arc; a relatively neutral Anglophone pronunciation of “Dark” could be mistaken for the French pronunciation of “d’Arc”.
Were they a militant and saintly character?
Cheryl S, did Polynesians introduce rats also? They did in NZ, but we didn’t do land-based mammals at all.
Effective restoration methods can be counter-intuitive. Gorse is an introduced pest plant species in NZ (as well as Hawaii and elsewhere), but it is used when re-planting native forest. Initially the gorse shelters seedlings, but the native temperate rainforest trees outgrow the gorse bushes, and starve them of sun in due course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorse_in_New_Zealand
(1) Give it back to the original owners, I say — the local native tribe.
(4) Everyone with any Western European ancestors is descended from Charlemagne. Presumably there weren’t as many kids in the Isildur line? Also, I’d think “commands a terrifying ghost army” makes up for any irregularities in lineage.
(8) Useful! And big ups to JJ for telling me who did the cover for “Watchmaker”. It’s both beautiful in its own right and perfectly descriptive of the book’s content.
(11) I know many many cons who’d love someone who could carry refrigerators into the con suite. Also big heavy things into huckster’s room, art show, exhibits…
re: Hartwell — EGADS, enough with the people dying, January!! The past 10 days has been horrible. He was just commenting here last week, wasn’t he?
@Greg: Beside the two you showed, Chris McGrath also did covers for the following in 2015: “Heirs of Empire”, “A Red-Rose Chain”, “Last First Snow”, “Disciple of the Wind”
The other weird problem with Hawaii–or more accurately, a problem that occurs in a lot of places, but is particularly stark in Hawaii–is that…well…do you want an ecosystem that WORKS?
This is legitimately tricky. Ecosystems self-organize, and they form complicated and unexpected feedback loops. (See also: introduce wolves into Yellowstone and eventually rivers change course.) How you define a working ecosystem dictates what you try to do. Do you want it to provide habitat for your last few native species–or give tourists something to look at–or feed a population–or provide what we generally lump under the not-very-descriptive name “ecosystem services”–cleaning the water and preventing runoff and sequestering carbon and controlling soil erosion?
These are very different things! Kudzu’s a champ at a lot of ecosystem services! Princess Tree is hailed as a carbon sequesterer! (I shudder.) Monarchs eat one damn genus, and not all of that, and some of them are pretty bad for grazing livestock. Do you want the moths that grow on St. John’s Wort, or do you wipe it out as a weed because if cows eat it their milk can cause photo-sensitive lesions?
If I were absolute ruler of the planet and could wave my hand and have the resources of earth at my disposal…I still wouldn’t be sure what would be ethical to do in Hawaii, or safe or smart or sane.
But I might make a couple new islands nearby and start offloading native species and ban all non-researchers on pain of the dictator’s extreme displeasure.
Torgersen’s comment about Aaron puzzles the hell out of me. Maybe it is because I don’t watch South Park (saw it a couple of times, found it viscerally annoying, never made any effort to see another episode.)
But surely the outcast kid that all the other kids hold in contempt to the point where being friends with us is social poison, is sort of the ur-fan–the person we as fans sympathize with most? Or am I alone in this?
@Ursula: How do wolves lead to river changes?
> “Were they a militant and saintly character?”
No, but they were a teenager being visited by an angel, so I’ll say that yes, that’s what the author must have been going for even though beyond that it makes, let’s say, little sense.
Wolves/Rivers:
Do we get to guess?
Wolves control populations of plant eaters, which changes erosion patterns, which changes rivers?
I know farming subsidies deforested much marginal land in NZ, which really bit decades later when a cyclone remnant went especially far south and washed hillsides into rivers (and the sea).
Paris green is a highly-toxic pigment that used to be used in paints. And, because of its toxicity, as insecticide and rat poison.
Paris Orange could be the Protestant version?
Bruce Baugh on January 20, 2016 at 5:40 pm said:
I’m not Ursula but it’s fascinating.
Commoner’s first law of ecology: Everything is connected to everything else.
Torgersen’s comment about Aaron puzzles the hell out of me.
Thinking things through doesn’t appear to be BT’s strong suit. He doesn’t seem to be able to refer to anyone he dislikes without coming up with some insulting acronym or nickname for them, giving him all of the maturity of a grade schooler.
In my case, his chosen nickname is silly, since it isn’t really applicable, and also somewhat ironic, since BT seems to have been shedding friends at a rapid rate this past year, some of whom have made their disassociation from him quite public.
The real interesting thing is that he seems to have become obsessed with me to a moderately creepy degree, including apparently stalking my social media (he has talked about some things that he could have only found out by trolling through my twitter feed). Given that I have him blocked on twitter, that takes some modest dedication.
@Tasha
I like Leia a whole lot more than Rey. Leia is smart and brassy but with normal human flaws.
The character development for Rey wandered too close to Mary Sue territory for my tastes. She had issues as well, but had talents that developed without any plausible reason expressed within the plot.
Regards,
Dann
@Aaron: I’d just like to state for the record that I like you. You have my permission to use me as a reference.
Well, I live in an area with pigeons – flying rats- and grey squirrel – non flying rats. I went to school elsewhere in one founded by radical feminists, with massive grounds, lawns, woods etc. and when I was bored I looked out of the windows and watched the red squirrels amuse themselves, because it delighted me.
I am not, I hope, a horrible person but I would cheerfully exterminate every grey squirrel on this island to rescue the remaining indigenous red squirrels.
@RedWombat & @ULTRAGOTHA:
Okay that’s genuinely incredible! That’s pretty much all I have to say.
Bwad:Teddy::Aaron:Scalzi?
Surprised a good Mormon boy like Brad even watches “South Park”! It’s rated TV-MA, which Mormons aren’t supposed to watch. It’s got all that cussing, sex, scatology, and literally called Mormonism “dumb dumb dumb dumb” in a musical episode. Admittedly, they were kinder to Mormons than Scientology.
@Aaron
From what I’ve seen at file770.com I like you. Geez being stalked by puppies doesn’t sound fun. First CUL and now BT.
@Dann
Hey we’ve found something we agree on. If you talk specifics that day is bound to come. Who knows maybe we like some of the same books. 😉
@Jim and @Tasha: Thanks. It is the fact that I know people like you exist that makes BTs attempted insults so toothless. He’s flailing helplessly and everyone knows it but him.
Is that not awesome!?
Cliff-notes for anyone not clicking through–wolves eat elk (or more accurately, according to the biologists, wolves make elk very nervous, nervous elk stay in areas with good sight-lines, which exaggerates the impact way more than the actual reduction in numbers) elk thus don’t graze down willows in the low valleys down to stunted stubs, beavers require willows to eat over the winter, so more wolves = more beavers, beavers build dams that alter the entire hydrology of an area, so you ultimately change whole rivers by reintroducing wolves.
You also get awesome things like increased songbird and fish populations, because they like the willow-shaded ponds, and all because elk are scared of wolves.
Wow. Wolves and rivers. That’s really cool.