Pixel Scroll 12/16/19 It’s Not Easy Being Soylent Green

(1) MAKE IT SO AGAIN. Although showrunner Michael Chabon is moving on, Picard is not a one-and-done series judging by this item of state tax news. (However, CBS declined comment). “‘Star Trek: Picard’ Renewed For Season 2 Ahead Of Series Debut On CBS All Access Next Month” at Deadline.

… Like the first season that will premiere on CBS All Access on January 23, Season 2 of the Patrick Stewart-led Picard looks to be a 10-episode order for the streamer. As a part of that second season, the latest venture in the Alex Kurtzman marshaled Trekverse has been allocated over $20.4 million in California tax incentives….

Certainly, the huge reaction that Picard received when the resurrection of the philosopher-captain was first announced in Las Vegas last year and the tax credits made public today were a cold hard cash indication that the CBS Television Studios, Secret Hideout and Roddenberry Entertainment produced series was going to engage further, to paraphrase Jean-Luc himself.

(2) WELL-INFORMED. Joe Haldeman explained to his Facebook readers why he signed a petition to ban assault weapons – and how he became familiar with them.

We got this interesting petition, which Gay asked me to sign, from an outfit called Ban Assault Weapons Now.

I did sign it, but not reflexively. I do know assault weapons.

Unlike most people — unlike almost every American — I have been shot, both as a soldier and as a civilian. But I did carry a gun for most of a year “in country,” in Vietnam, sometimes two guns, and was conventionally glad to be armed.

Because of odd timing, I was never issued an M-16. They were not ubiquitous in Vietnam in 1968. I carried — and preferred, most of the time — the M-14 automatic rifle. We also had a Colt .45 automatic, sealed in a plastic bag, and traded around a Chinese AK-47, which my squad carried on convoy….

(3) ENJOYING THE WRONG FUTURE. In another article that takes off from Gary K. Wolfe’s Sixties sff novel collection for Library of America, Scott Bradfield holds forth on “Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes” in The New Republic. Tagline: “The great novels of the 1960s remain enjoyable because they got everything wrong.”

…The science fiction novels of the 1960s—as this two-volume collection of eight very different sci-fi novels testifies—remain enjoyable because they got everything wrong. They didn’t accurately predict the future of space travel, or what a postnuclear landscape would look like, or how to end intergalactic fascism. They didn’t warn us against the roads we shouldn’t travel, since they probably suspected we were going to take those roads anyway. And they definitely didn’t teach us what a neutrino is. But what ’60s science fiction did do was establish one of the wildest, widest, most stylistically and conceptually various commercial spaces for writing (and reading) fiction in the history of fictional genres. Each book is unpredictable in so many ways as to almost constitute its own genre.

Take, for example, Samuel R. Delany’s influential space opera, Nova (presented here in a newly corrected, author-approved text), which takes the concept of the “cybernetic” fusion of human and machine and runs with it. Nova envisions a universe boiling over with star-hopping spaceships, spine-socketed crew members, weirdly mutated sexual and familial relationships, synesthetic video-art instruments, and at least one character raised on another planet who speaks in a verb-delaying syntax several years before Yoda was a gleam in George Lucas’s eye. (“Not too good going to be is. Out of practice am.”) Delany’s prose was stylistically bright, fizzing with ambitious energy (he began publishing novels in his late teens and won several major awards early) and relentlessly inventive, with flashy new visions of the future in one paragraph after another….

(4) WILL YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?  Alastair Reynolds tells how he admired Niven’s “Tales of Known Space” and that despite recent discoveries a writer can still do wildly creative worldbuilding. Then the question is – how do your space-faring characters navigate your stellar neighborhood?

…In some instances, our observations have begun to put limits on the numbers and properties of planets around familiar, SF-friendly stars such as Epsilon Eridani. It may well turn out that what was perfectly reasonable speculation thirty years ago is now ruled out by current data.

Still, let’s assume for now that our real stars and imagined planets remain viable locations, and we wish to use them in new stories. That’s where an additional wrinkle comes in: it’s very easy to look up how far away these stars are, and on that basis, work out (depending on the mechanics of your imagined space technology) how long it would take to get there from Earth. But sooner or later your story may depend on getting from star A to star B, without stopping off at Earth en-route. How do we work out how far these stars are from each other?

All the information we need is present: for any given star, all we need are its coordinates in the night sky, and a figure for its distance….

(5) KEYS TO THEIR PERSONALITIES. In the Washington Post, Frank Lehman, a music professor at Tufts University, analyzes John Williams’s scores to the Star Wars films and argues the music Williams composed for evil characters such as Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader gives many clues to how we view these characters: “How John Williams’s Star Wars score pulls us to the dark side”.

…It’s said that the Devil gets the best tunes, but Williams has long proved that that maxim applies to Sith lords, too. Within Star Wars’ ever-expanding library of leitmotifs — recurring, malleable musical symbols — much of the most insinuating material belongs to the villains, from Darth Maul to Jabba the Hutt to Supreme Leader Snoke. Listening to these nefarious themes with the ear of a music scholar offers a lesson in the real power of the dark side, showing us how music can repel, deceive and, with the right compositional tricks, even charm.

(6) A DIFFERENT KIND OF COPIER. Daniel Dern’s GrabCAD article unexpectedly predicts “3D Printers Could Be Coming to a Library Near You”.

Public libraries have always been the place where you can go to borrow books, CDs, DVDs, and magazines. And in recent years, it’s now where you can go for 3D printing services.

“Libraries represent the public on-ramp to the world of 3D printing and design,” said Dan Lee, chair of the Advisory Committee for the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP).

According to a report from ALA, there are over 428 public library branches in the United States that offer 3D printers to the public….

… Using 3D printers requires education. The Medway library, for example, offers weekly walk-in 3D printer certification sessions.

How libraries charge for use of their 3D printers varies. Some charge per hour of printing time (probably around a dollar), while others will charge based on the amount of printing materials that will be required — typically nickel to a quarter per gram of filament.

(7) KERFUFFLE IS COMING. According to Vanity Fair, “David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s Lovecraft Movie Has a Massive Problem: H.P. Lovecraft”. Laura Bradley’s question is: “The renowned horror writer was also a known racist and anti-Semite. Are the Game of Thrones creators the right people to handle that history?”

… What is known, however, is that Lovecraft, for all his pop-culture influence, was also terribly racist. His letters and literary work overflow with these sentiments, and in some cases it’s not even subtext. In 1912 he penned a poem titled “On the Creation of N—–s,” in which, as Lithub explained in its thorough exploration of Lovecraft’s white supremacy, Gods create black people as a semi-human species somewhere between man and beasts.

Benioff and Weiss, no strangers to online controversy, are seeing some of the same pushback that happened when they first announced the now-defunct series Confederate for HBO: namely, why this story, and why them?

(8) LEFT BRAINED ALIENS. NPR invites us to “‘Imagine Pleasant Nonsense’ With ‘Strange Planet’ Creator Nathan Pyle”.

Nathan Pyle fills the pages of his new book Strange Planet with big eyed, bright blue aliens from a planet that shares a lot in common with Earth. These aliens sunbathe, sneeze and even wish each other sweet dreams like us, but they describe these practices with deadpan technical terminology like “sun damage” and “face fluid explosions.” The lifegiver aliens even implore their offspring to “imagine pleasant nonsense” as they tuck them in for the night.

“One of the points of Strange Planet is that this is all (gestures in every direction) delightfully odd. It’s wonderful how much complexity we [humans] have created,” Pyle tells me in an email conversation — and yes, those parentheticals are his.

Pyle was inspired to create the series one day as he and his wife were preparing to have guests over — and they began hiding their possessions to make their small New York City apartment appear as clean as possible. “I realized this would make an excellent comic. I drew this one based on the experience, and the series was born,” he says. He began posting the comics on social media in February, and in less than a year, the series has amassed over 4.7 million followers on Instagram.

(9) KARINA OBIT. Actress Anna Karina died December 15 at the age of 79. Her work has been saluted by many culture blogs, including Lawyers, Guns and Money. Alphaville is the only SF she did, “a science-fiction tale set in a loveless dystopian future…”

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • December 16, 2016 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story premiered. It was directed by Gareth Edwards with the  screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy. It is from a story by John Knoll and Gary Whitta. The cast includes Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Jiang Wen and Forest Whitaker. The film was a box office success, the critics loved it and it’s got an eighty eight percent rating among reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. The Fan Boys…? 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born December 16, 1917 Arthur C. Clarke. When I was resident in Sri Lanka courtesy of Uncle Sam in the early Eighties, nearly every American ex-pat I ran into was reading The Fountains of Paradise. The tea plantations he described therein are very awesome. I never saw him, but he was well-known among the small British community there.   I’ll admit that I’ve not read that much by him — Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama and that novel are the only long-form works by him I’ve read. I’m certain I’ve read The Nine Billion Names of God collection as well. And I’ve seen 2001 myriad times but I’ve never seen the sequel. (Died 2008.)
  • Born December 16, 1927 Randall Garrett. Ahhh, Lord Darcy. When writing this up, I was gobsmacked to discover that he’d written only one such novel, Too Many Magicians, as I clearly remembered reading reading more than that number. Huh. That and two collections, Murder and Magic and Lord Darcy Investigates, is all there is of this brilliant series. Glen Cook’s Garrett P.I. is named in honor of Garrett.  I’ll admit I’ve not read anything else by him, so what else have y’all read? (Died 1987.)
  • Born December 16, 1928 Philip K. Dick. Dick has always been a difficult one for me to get a feel for. Mind you Blade Runner is my major touchstone for him but I’ve read the source material as well, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said which won an John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and I’ve read a lot of the shorter works, so I’d say he’s a challenging writer is a Good Thing. (Died 1982.)
  • Born December 16, 1937 Peter Dickinson. Author who was married from 1991 to his death to Robin McKinley. He had a number of truly  great works, both genre and not genre, including Eva, The Tears of the Salamander and  The Flight of Dragons. His James Pibble upper class British mystery series are quite excellent as well. (Died 2015.)
  • Born December 16, 1957 Mel Odom, 62. An author deep into mining franchise universes with work done into the Buffyverse, Outlanders, Time Police, Rogue Angel (which I’ve listen to a lot as GraphicAudio as produced them as most excellent audioworks) and weirder stuff such as the Left Behind Universe and Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers, both I think game tie-ins. 
  • Born December 16, 1967 Miranda Otto, 52. She was Éowyn in the second and third installments of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film franchise. She‘s Zelda Spellman in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Mary Ann Davis in Spielberg’s version of The War of The Worlds. She also played Wueen Lenore inI, Frankenstein which had an an amazing cast even if the Tomatometer gives it’s 5% rating. 
  • Born December 16, Krysten Ritter, 38. She played Jessica Jones on the series of that name and was in The Defenders as well. She had a recurring role in the Veronica Mars series which a lot of a lot is us adore (it’s one of the series that Charles de Lint and his wife MaryAnn Hartis are avid followers of, and they contributed to the the film Kickstarter) and I supposed it’s sort of genre adjacent, isn’t it? (Do not analyze that sentence.) She’s been in a number of horror flicks as well, but nothing I grokked. 
  • Born December 16, 1988 Anna Popplewell, 31. She was Susan Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia film franchise, Chyler Silva in Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn (I saw this — it’s quite well done), she was (at twelve) Anna Sackville-Bagg in The Little Vampire, and she’s Frankie in the forthcoming  Fairytale which may be genre or genre adjacent. It might even be titled Fairytale of New York. Or not. 

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) SOUND AND THE FURY. ScienceFiction.com is excited because “Your Alexa Device Can Now Curse You Out With The Samuel L. Jackson Voice Package!”.

To get started, just say, “Alexa, introduce me to Samuel L. Jackson.” Then, choose whether you’d like Sam to use explicit language or not. If you change your mind later, simply go to the settings menu of the Alexa app to toggle between clean and explicit content.

The Bloomberg video is a bit calmer: “Amazon Alexa Now Lets You Make Samuel L. Jackson’s Your Personal Assistant.”

Amazon company kicked off its celebrity voice program for Alexa, giving customers the option to hear some familiar voices—and it’s starting with Samuel L. Jackson. Users can pay $0.99 and have Jackson respond to your Alexa requests for music, the weather forecast, and more. You can also ask questions that are specific to Jackson, including queries about his career, specific roles, or his interests outside Hollywood.

(14) STEPHENSON BOOK TO SMALL SCREEN. The A.V. Club reports that “HBO is taking a crack at adapting Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash for TV”.

Hollywood’s ongoing efforts to adapt every single book that some guy spent way too much time and energy recommending at you at a party in college continues apace today, with Deadline reporting that HBO has put a TV version of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash into development. The series comes courtesy of The Kid Who Would Be King and Attack The Block director Joe Cornish, with 21 Jump Street’s Michael Bacall set to write the script…[Snow Crash] is satirical, fast-paced, and with one of the most kinetic opening sequences ever committed to print, it’s also one of Stephenson’s most readily accessible books. (Which is to say, he keeps the parables about computer programming, cryptography, and 17th century economics to a minimum.)

(15) FREE DOWNLOAD. Free anthology of Tor.com fiction from 3rd quarter — “Download the Fall 2019 Tor.com Short Fiction Newsletter”.

(16) TAKEN TO THEIR LEADER. Lou Antonelli has posted the latest free story at his Sirius Science Fiction site: “’Trump Asks a Feminist Extraterrestrial Leader for a Favor’ by Marleen S. Barr”.

It’s satirical. Whether it’s satirical enough for you remains the question.

(17) RAMBO UNLIMITED. And to complete our free fiction trifecta, Cat Rambo has released a bunch of titles on KU: “Free Fiction: Stories Newly Enrolled in Kindle Unlimited”. Here are a few of them —

Tabat stories include:

  • §  Narrative of a Beast’s Life: Taken from his home village, the centaur Fino is enslaved and shipped to a new land, where he must learn to cope with the trainer determined to break him. This short story originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy.
  • Events at Fort Plentitude: An exiled soldier tries to wait out a winter in a fort beleaguered by fox-spirits and winter demons. Originally appeared in Weird Tales under editor Ann VanderMeer.
  • How Dogs Came to the New Continent is a short story pulled from the events of the novel Hearts of Tabat, told in the form of a meandering historical paper that teases out more behind the oppression of Beasts and their emerging political struggle.

(18) PLUS ONE. ComicBook.com reports “Guardians of the Galaxy Star Karen Gillan Has Completed Her Role on Marvel’s What If…?”

Marvel’s What If…? may be one of the most anticipated offerings coming to Disney+. The animated series, based on the comics of the same name, will explore many significant moments from the Marvel Cinematic Universe but from the angle of what would have happened had just one thing gone a little differently. It’s a premise that is set to offer Peggy Carter as Captain Carter instead of Steve Rogers as Captain America among other interesting twists, but while it’s an exciting premise it’s one that fans have to wait for as the series isn’t set to debut until summer 2021. But while we don’t yet have a release date, fans can at least take some comfort in knowing that work is underway and that when it comes to Guardians of the Galaxy star Karen Gillan, she’s already completed her voice work on the series….

(19) THE FUTURE OF A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY. Los Angeles Times: “After ‘Rise of Skywalker’ and Baby Yoda, Kathleen Kennedy’s plan for ‘Star Wars’ and beyond”.

 [Rob Bredow [(head of Lucasfilm’s visual effects division Industrial Light & Magic), speaking of Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy:]

“She said, ‘There have been a few times in my career where there have been these kinds of moments. Go for it,’” Bredow recalled in the cafeteria of Lucasfilm’s San Francisco headquarters. “She, and we, are looking for those opportunities to break new ground.”

By all accounts, the gamble on “The Mandalorian” has paid off for Lucasfilm since it debuted to an enthusiastic response on streaming service Disney+ in November. Viewers have obsessed online about the show’s introduction of so-called Baby Yoda, an infant from the same species as the green Jedi master…

Kennedy said she plans to make key decisions about the direction of the franchise in the coming weeks. But some things she already knows. While the “Skywalker” saga is ending, the company won’t abandon the characters created in the most recent trilogy. Additionally, she said, the plan is to move beyond trilogies, which can be restricting.

“I think it gives us a more open-ended view of storytelling and doesn’t lock us into this three-act structure,” she said. “We’re not going to have some finite number and fit it into a box. We’re really going to let the story dictate that.” […]

(20) WORKS FOR HER. NPR interviews somebody who had success with the idea — “Researchers Explore A Drug-Free Idea To Relieve Chronic Pain: Green Light”.

Ann Jones tried everything short of surgery for her chronic migraines, which have plagued her since she was a child.

“They’ve actually gotten worse in my old age,” says Jones, who is 70 years old and lives in Tucson, Ariz.

Jones would have as many as two dozen migraines a month.

Over the years, some treatments might work initially, but the effects would prove temporary. Other medications had such severe side effects she couldn’t stay on them.

“It was pretty life-changing and debilitating,” Jones says. “I could either plow through them and sometimes I simply couldn’t.”

In 2018, her doctor mentioned a study that was taking place nearby at the University of Arizona: Researchers were testing if daily exposure to green light could relieve migraines and other kinds of chronic pain.

Jones was skeptical.

“This is going to be one more thing that doesn’t work,” she thought to herself.

But she brushed aside the hesitation and enrolled in the study anyway.

It began with her spending two hours each day in a dark room with only a white light, which served as the control. In the second half of the study, she swapped out the conventional light for a string of green LED lights.

For more than a month, Jones didn’t notice any change in her symptoms. But close to the six-week mark, there was a big shift.

She began going days in a row without migraines. Even when the headaches did come, they weren’t as intense as they had been before the green light therapy.

(21) NOT DARWIN. But a sign of the times: “Driver ‘blows up’ car with ‘excessive’ use of air freshener”. Doesn’t smell so good anymore. (Includes a picture of the destruction.)

A driver caused an explosion in his car when he lit a cigarette after spraying air freshener.

He used “excessive” amounts of the aerosol scent before sparking up, according to firefighters.

Gas from the spray ignited, blew out the windscreen and windows and buckled the doors but the man escaped with only minor injuries.

Police said the incident in Halifax on Saturday “could’ve been worse” and warned people to follow safety advice.

The motorist was in stationary traffic in Fountain Street in the town at about 15:00 GMT on Saturday when the explosion happened.

It was so powerful it caused damage to windows at nearby businesses.

(22) YULE TRADITION. Marcus Errico, in the Yahoo! Entertainment story “The Joker’s still getting away… How ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells’ became the ultimate holiday spoof”, looks into the origins of “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” and traces its origins to the Batman TV series of the 1960s.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Rob Thornton, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Alan Baumler, Darrah Chavey, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]


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61 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/16/19 It’s Not Easy Being Soylent Green

  1. (11) Garrett managed to work in some really marvellous pubs and in jokes into Lord Darcy’s tales – my favorite is probably the “von Horst–Shea” process.

  2. 14) Snow Crash was the only SFF book I’ve ever seen a bookseller really, really hate. Longfellow Books years ago had a SFF book discussion group and that person, along with a woman named Katie, picked the novels as much as anyone did, when we discussed it, he vented off and on for an hour on how bad the premise, how unbelievable the characters were and how how the plot device couldn’t possibly work.

    It’s not his best book, that’d be The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. , but it’s hardly his worst one, I’ve reserved that for The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer Which is cringeworthy in places,

  3. 9) KARINA OBIT It may be her only SF film but she did the French language Shéhérazade which is definitely genre. It was done not long before that film and she was the storyteller herself. I’m thinking I did her a Birthday write-up sometime in the past year but I’m not seeing one. She was in The Magus based on the John Fowler novel of that name which is at least genre adjacent if not genre itself.

  4. 11) Michael Kurland added two more novels to the Lord Darcy series, with Garrett’s permission. Perhaps you’re remembering those?

  5. Brad J notes Michael Kurland added two more novels to the Lord Darcy series, with Garrett’s permission. Perhaps you’re remembering those?

    Quite possible. As he published these in 1988 and 1989 which is the year and year after Garrett died after eight years in a coma, I’d say it was more likely Garrett’s wife gave him permission.

    She was writing the Gandalara Cycle based on a draft of the first volume he’d done and certainly she’d have welcome revenue from the Darcy novels which were popular.

  6. @11: Clarke’s Earthlight was almost the first SF I read that didn’t come from the juvenile section of the library. (I read pieces of A Journey to the Centre of the Earth because my family owned a gorgeous copy, but didn’t finish it.) I also have warm memories of A Fall of Moondust, however slight it is, and assigned The City and the Stars the one time I taught SF; I don’t think I’d had the Trickster archetype made clear to me at the time, but I knew there was something unusual about Khedron.

    also @11: Garrett did a lot of collaborating under other names; I remember enjoying the Psi-Power trilogy (as by “Mark Phillips”), although in retrospect it’s slight. He may have been at his best in shorter forms — witness not only the two books’ worth of Lord Darcy novellas but also the Takeoff collections. (I’m still amused by “Backstage Lensman”, with its sharp parody and genre mixing.)

    also also @11: I started reading Dick so young that a lot of the paranoia went past me; I’m about to reread Ubik for a local book club and am wondering how I’ll react to it now.

    and Dickinson as well? This was a bumper day for genre authors.

    @13: see what happens when the attacker of rogue apostrophes retires?

    @Cat Eldridge: I liked Snowcrash, but D.O.D.O. seemed messy and not always plausible within its own premises, and I’d say Anathem, in which a small idea was expanded way beyond its reach, was worse than …Diamond… — but I may have missed some of the cringeworthiness of the latter. (I’m not hitting the snoozalarm, but I’ve been a long time waking and don’t claim to be there yet.)

  7. Chip Hitchcock says Cat Eldridge: I liked Snowcrash, but D.O.D.O. seemed messy and not always plausible within its own premises, and I’d say Anathem, in which a small idea was expanded way beyond its reach, was worse than …Diamond… — but I may have missed some of the cringeworthiness of the latter. (I’m not hitting the snoozalarm, but I’ve been a long time waking and don’t claim to be there yet.)

    I skipped Anathem after reading the first several chapters in the galley I was sent. Daimond just grated on me though this far on I can’t say why.

    Right now I’m enjoying being deep into the Arkham City series on the DCU app. It’s perfect for my short memory problems as each story is broken into chunks of the span of thirty or so pages of the original issue. Very nice indeed,

  8. 22)YULE TRADITION Mark Hamill first voiced The Joker in that episode in 1992. He last voiced in 2018 in the Lego DC Super-Villuans film. He’s said it’s still one of his favorite roles.

  9. Chip Hitchcock: see what happens when the attacker of rogue apostrophes retires?

    That was exactly my first thought! Now that the warrior at the gate is gone, the ravening hordes of improper apostrophe usage are descending on us! 😀

  10. I’m pretty sure Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg wrote about 40% of the magazine fiction published in the 1950’s…..

  11. 5) If anyone had any doubts about the iconicity of the Imperial March I have a fond memory of a protest back in 2011, when a row of cops assembling in riot gear were greeted with a cheery chant of “duh duh duh DUN DA DUN, DUN DA DUN” from the crowd.

    14) IIRC, Snow Crash began as a script for a comic, which makes it more vivid and televisual than Stephenson’s other stuff. But it’s going to lose impact without the narrator’s voice and in a kinetic medium that makes it hard to absorb detail.

    (As for Stephenson’s worst, I’d pick the Stephen Bury novels – particularly “Interface”. But I’m pretty sure his worst work is yet to come, when he finally makes the jump to full-on conservative Catholic.)

  12. @6 My public library has a 3-D printer. Two or three of them, actually.

    You can also check out appliances. Like crockpots. And you can check out board games.

  13. 14) Am I the only person that liked Diamond Age? I’ll grant that it’s a crapsack world and there was a streak of orientalism that seemed to have derived from reading too many Judge Dee books without critical thought. But there were so many ideas!
    And for those that didn’t like it, can you expand on why? I trust your experiences and voices and would like to learn.

  14. @BravoLimaPoppa: I liked Diamond Age when I read it 15 or so years ago; the opening chapter was a great parody of cyberpunk tropes, and the ideas about education and post-scarcity economics were interesting. But I suspect that on rereading the various issues with the book would be much more problematic for me. But I liked Anathem too (except for the Penrose-ian Platonism that came in at the end of the book). .

  15. @OGH: I saw the apostrophe was in the original, but was unclear what I was apostrophizing.

  16. @Cat and @Chip —

    It’s not his best book, that’d be The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. , but it’s hardly his worst one, I’ve reserved that for The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer Which is cringeworthy in places,

    Anathem is one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. Not necessarily best, but for sheer wtfness, it’s hard to beat. I remember being just blown away while I was listening to it.

    I’ve only read three Stephensons — Anathem, D.O.D.O., and Seveneves. Out of those, Anathem takes the top prize for me.

    I have Fall, or Dodge in Hell on Mt. TBR. Any reviews welcomed!

  17. Well, if the title for the new movie CATS was either CAT’S or CATS’ (or, tipping the hat to Cordwainer Smith, C’ATS), that would be a Cat-apostrophe.

  18. @Sophie Jane:

    IIRC, Snow Crash began as a script for a comic, which makes it more vivid and televisual than Stephenson’s other stuff.

    That makes sense, it is rather more visual than any of his other stuff that I’ve read, starting from the rather famous opening line. (And I say this as someone who has actively tried, with varying degrees of success, to get more visual feeling into my own writing at times.)

    That said, IMHO it’s also one of Stephenson’s more dated pieces of work, with bits of self-parody that won’t necessarily be as obvious to anybody who isn’t as familiar with the details of the Gibsonian cyberpunk that Stephenson was obviously building from.

  19. Snow crash may not be his best, but I think its probably the one thats the easiest to translate to TV, also because it has an actual endpoint (the cobweb and zodiac may work as well). My favorite is probably Anathem, but there are a lot of books I like. The worst? Probably Interface, although Big U is wonky and Seveneves too infodumpish even for a Stephenson fan like me.

    Fall will probably be his most divisive work, because its very weird and there are two very separate parts and I can see many, many readers being put off by that. I really like the ideas and characters.

  20. Daniel Dern: …(or, tipping the hat to Cordwainer Smith, C’ATS)

    This makes me wish I made videos — it would be an amusing mashup.

  21. CRL: I’m pretty sure Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg wrote about 40% of the magazine fiction published in the 1950’s…..

    I thought that about Mack Reynolds and Christopher Anvil is the 1960s, too.

  22. @Sophie Jane: Stephenson became a conservative Catholic? That sounds more like another writer of large, ambitious multi-volume sequences Who Will Remain Unnamed here. I certainly noticed a streak of what seemed at the time to be libertarian/contrarian-conservative nose-tweaking in The Diamond Age, but then I haven’t read any Stephenson since the last of the Baroque Cycle books, so maybe stuff happened while I wasn’t looking.

  23. I’ve loved “Snow Crash” (the first chapter was excerpted in gaming magazine “Pyramid” which is where I first encountered it, and then needed to find the actual book) Pyramid & “The Diamond Age”.

    Worst for me is “The Big U”, his debut and was out of print for ages for good reason. There are some good bits in it but it’s not a memorable novel.

  24. @Soon Lee: as I understand it, Stephenson was happy for The Big U to remain out of print, but then he found out how much used copies were going for, and decided the only thing worse than people reading it was people spending three figures for the privilege.

    @Russell Letson: I read Sophie not as saying he had become etc. but as implying he was trending in that direction. In my own judgment, REAMDE had enough of a whiff of “if you prick a chud, does he not bleed?” to it to discourage me from reading any more Stephenson.

  25. @ Patrick Morris Miller–Oops (to quote Rick Perry), I missed the present-tense “becomes.” Several times. All the same, that’s not a direction I would predict for any development in Stephensonian thinking. Though stranger things have happened. (See: Saul of Tarsus; Augustine of Thagaste.)

  26. Sophie Jane on December 17, 2019 at 1:08 am said:

    14) IIRC, Snow Crash began as a script for a comic, which makes it more vivid and televisual than Stephenson’s other stuff. But it’s going to lose impact without the narrator’s voice and in a kinetic medium that makes it hard to absorb detail.

    (As for Stephenson’s worst, I’d pick the Stephen Bury novels – particularly “Interface”. But I’m pretty sure his worst work is yet to come, when he finally makes the jump to full-on conservative Catholic.)

    I’m confused. Is there some news story I missed?

  27. In re (11) and Randall Garrett – If you can find it, his collection of parodys and send-ups “Takeoff!” is huge fun. It contains the aforementioned “Backstage Lensman,” which is just a hoot. Consider, in all ways, a hamburger…

  28. Anathem is my favorite Stephenson. As far as I know, that’s also the first book to suggest the internet might become useless due to the amount of fake news on there.
    REAMDE I liked least, even though it had an actual logical ending. There just wasn’t any significant weirdness in there.
    I haven’t read Fall yet, all the reviews keep mentioning Pilgrim’s Progress which I don’t know. Not sure if that’s a prereq for reading Fall.

  29. I loved Seveneves, though I usually find Stephenson a bit too rococo for my taste. I find the Baroque Cycle exhausting.

    But Snow Crash and Diamond Age are both fun enough. Possibly overpraised.

  30. @Sophie Jane
    5) If anyone had any doubts about the iconicity of the Imperial March I have a fond memory of a protest back in 2011, when a row of cops assembling in riot gear were greeted with a cheery chant of “duh duh duh DUN DA DUN, DUN DA DUN” from the crowd.

    During a student protest in the early 2000s, then senator of education Willi Lemke was introduced by the Imperial March, when he spoke to the students. i always felt that was a bit mean, because Lemke was actually a pretty good guy who had the misfortune of having to implement an unpopular policy.

    @CRL
    I’m pretty sure Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg wrote about 40% of the magazine fiction published in the 1950’s….

    Garrett was also still a prolific provider of short fiction to science fiction magazines in the 1960s, much of which was forgettable and some of which like the infamously awful story “The Queen Bee” was downright dreadful. When whoever reviewed the issue in question for Galactic Journey got to the first Lord Darcy story, they were stunned that here was a Randall Garrett story that was actually good.

  31. Steve Simmons notes In re (11) and Randall Garrett – If you can find it, his collection of parodys and send-ups “Takeoff!” is huge fun. It contains the aforementioned “Backstage Lensman,” which is just a hoot. Consider, in all ways, a hamburger…

    It looks like Starblaze did two Takeoff collections, bless them. They’re both around four bucks and shipping on Amazon for the 1980 and 1989 trade paper editions. I liked Starblaze editions!

  32. As I think I mentioned before, I used to be Randall Garrett’s page in the SCA. And Michael Kurland was married to my aunt at one point. I don’t know the details of how Kurland ended up writing more D’Arcy novels, but I do know the two were good friends for quite a while.

    Anyway, when I was young, I really liked the “Queen’s Own FBI” series by Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer (writing as “Mark Philips”). I don’t know how well they’ve aged, but I certainly thought they were fun at the time. Psychic powers are real…but strongly linked to insanity, and the FBI’s newest consultant is a sweet little old lady who is certain that she’s Queen Elizabeth! (I think. Might have been Victoria, but Elizabeth seems right.)

    As for Phil Dick, he once proposed to my mother. In a drunken haze at a convention bar. I think she (and I) probably dodged a bullet when she hastily declined. But I still like his stuff. Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Clans of the Alphane Moon are among my favorites.

  33. I admit I haven’t read any of Stephenson’s earlier stuff, but I did like Cryptonomicon quite a bit, and Seveneves to a lesser extent. And I’m glad I did actually read the entire Baroque Cycle, although that’s a journey I’m in no hurry to ever undertake again.

  34. Snow Crash is one of the books I ended up buying several copies of, because I was loaning it out so much. I liked Diamond Age when I first read it, but haven’t re-read it since it came out. Anathem and D.O.D.O. are probably my current favorites. Both have flaws, but that’s kinda Stephenson’s style–wild and exuberant and barely in control.

  35. I was blown away by Anathem, loved Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age (while being uncomfortable with the tinge of Orientalism), and enjoyed the Baroque Cycle. Seveneves had its moments and some good ideas, but was greatly hampered by its ridiculous biological premise and the inclusion of a lot of extraneous worldbuilding material which should have been cut. D.O.D.O. was somewhat better — Galland seemed to reign in some of Stephenson’s unnecessary profligacy — but there were plot holes and it became apparent that the intent was set up a shared universe with unlimited sequels rather than to create the best story possible.

    I haven’t read Reamde or Snow Crash yet, but I intend to do so. I am dubious about Fall, or Dodge in Hell given that Stephenson’s work seems to be undergoing a steady decline. Whether that’s the result of Too Big To Edit Syndrome or a gradual slide into conservative Catholicism (or both), I don’t know, but there are too many great books I know I want to read to spend time on a Stephenson doorstopper which is going to disappoint me again.

  36. Xtifr: definitely Elizabeth; a late acquaintance was once costumed as Sir Thomas Boyd of the Queen’s Own FBI, back when info on true-and-wearable Elizabethan garb was much less known than now.

  37. @bookworm1398,

    For me, it was Vernor VInge’s “Rainbows End” which we’ve also been discussing that I first saw the systematic spreading of disinformation online as a countermeasure to pervasive surveillance.

    Rainbows End (2006)
    Anathem (2008)

    I guess that by the mid 2000s that thought had crossed more than one writer’s mind.

  38. Heck, back in A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Vinge’s interstellar Internet equivalent was a source of more lies and confusion than actual useful information.

    Of course, in real life, a lot of us who were active on the early Internet had already taken to calling it “the net of a million lies” by then. 🙂

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