134 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/22 I Saw Mommy Reading Pixel Scroll”

1. Here’s a Christmas Card for you all 🙂

2. First Second fifth!

3. Thirfth!

4. Forfth!

5. Camestros Felapton: Stunningly awesome!

6. Wow! Camestros!

7. @Camestros,
   Was that a SpaceX shout-out? Happy Holidays!

8. Woohoo! Thanks to OGH’s timetravel abilities, I retroactively claim Fifth!

   @Camestros

   In the spirit of the season, I say to you “That’s no Christmas tree…”

9. I really like that Hobbits diagram.

   And the Holmes pun made me groan and call up Mom to pass it along.

10. Since there’s been difficult stuff in recent threads, I bring a little levity. My new cats continue to settle in, or rather pretty well have settled in and claimed the place as their own. Here they are watching me play World of Warcraft, which the girl finds particularly fascinating – she’s spent more than an hour at a time leaning in, periodically reaching out to touch my character. And here they are keeping me company when I was up in the middle of the night. They are so vibrant, curious, and happy.

11. One hour (probably a little less) left to vote in the third round of the Science Fiction Movie Bracket! Don’t miss your chance to agonise over the horrible, horrible choices that Hampus’ evil, evil dice have given us.

12. Thank you for that awesome holiday card, Camestros.

13. Camestros, that’s great!

14. JJ on December 22, 2015 at 11:18 pm said:

    Thank you for that awesome holiday card, Camestros.

    Don’t thank me – I expect everybody to reply using their own chosen weapon erm, um, mode of expressing themselves! 🙂

15. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians may be the worst Christmas movie ever, but there are definitely worse movies. The MST3K version of SCCtM is pretty entertaining, but even the MST3K crew weren’t really able to salvage Monsters A Go-Go.

    Bummer about the SFWA anthology, but no, I don’t think I’d want to pay that much.

16. There’s a better free version of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Or if you’re already paying for Hulu, there’s another better version there, too.

    Or you in fact could still pay to see it…in the proper form.

17. Xtfir: For general awfulness I’m very fond of Plan 9 From Outer Space.

    We had the actor who played Marco the Cop in Plan 9 at a Loscon one year. It gave me pause to think that had been his greatest role.

18. My likely 1941 Retro Hugo nominations in the written fiction categories:

    Anyway, parking that thought, I am minded to nominate the following:

    Short Stories
    “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, by Jorge Luís Borges
    “The Piper” by Ray Bradbury (as Ron Reynolds)
    “The Stellar Legion” by Leigh Brackett
    “John Duffy’s Brother”, by Flann O’Brien
    “Quietus”, by Ross Rocklynne

    Novelettes
    “Farewell to the Master”, by Harry Bates
    “Into the Darkness”, by Ross Rocklynne
    “New York Fights the Termanites” by Bertrand L. Shurtleff
    “It”, by Theodore Sturgeon
    “The Sea Thing”, by A.E. van Vogt

    Novellas
    The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares
    Fattypuffs and Thinifers, by Andre Maurois
    If This Goes On, by Robert A. Heinlein
    “The Mound”, by H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop
    “But Without Horns”, by Norvell Page

    Novels
    Kallocain, by Karin Boye
    Captain Future and the Space Emperor, by Edmond Hamilton
    Twice in Time, by Manly Wade Wellman
    The Ill-Made Knight, by T.H. White
    The Reign of Wizardry, by Jack Williamson

    Needless to say, this is not a slate, nor even a list of recommendations; it’s a record of my own state of mind and perhaps a hook for discussion.

    Thanks in particular to von Dimpleheimer for making so much short fiction of 1940 easily available.

19. Thanks for the holiday card Camestros

20. @Camestros

    That’s perfect Camestros, thank you. 🙂

21. Nicholas Whyte: My likely 1941 Retro Hugo nominations in the written fiction categories

    Thank you for that. It’s much appreciated.

    During my work break over the holidays, I am going to be doing power-reading of 2015 novels (I’ve got 40 of them from the library just sitting here waiting to be devoured, nom nom nom).

    Once I get through with those, I’m going to try to catch up on this year’s short fiction, using the SFWA list, the Hugo Wikia, and Renay’s spreadsheet as guides.

    And once I’ve done that, I’m going to try to get into the 1940 stuff. Unfortunately, my library only has the White and Hamilton novels — but I’ve requested those, and my library may also, in anthologies and collections, have at least some of your shorter recommendations which aren’t public domain.

    So I appreciate very much being given a starting point, because the nomination deadline will come far too soon.

22. @ Camestros
    Wonderful animation and card. Happy, happy to you and yours, too, and the same to all Filers.

    SFWA – sounds like Cat and Co. have had a good year on balance. The recommended reading list pointed me to some stories that I hadn’t seen before and I’m glad they released it.

    HOBBIT MAP – I think I need a map for the map!

    @ Bruce Baugh – Kitties!!!! They’re adorable, still. Please feel free to share any time.

23. Winners for the third round of the Science Fiction Movie Bracket can be found here. Quarter finals are open for voting here.

24. I got 35/50 in the SF quiz. I was very good at guessing the first paragraphs of novels I hadn’t read.

25. Here are my own current frontrunners for the Retro Hugos. These are my current faves, and therefore not necessarily what I will end up nominating when I’ve read more:

    Best Novel:
    Currently liking:
    Kallocain by Karin Boye
    Slan by A. E. van Vogt
    The Ill-Made Knight by T. H. White
    The Last Man by Alfred Noyes

    Best Novella:
    Currently liking:
    The Wheels of If by L. Sprague de Camp
    The Roaring Trumpet by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
    The Mathematics of Magic by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
    Magic, Inc by Robert A. Heinlein
    Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson

    Best Novelette:
    Currently liking:
    Blowups Happen by Robert A. Heinlein
    The Roads Must Roll by Robert A. Heinlein
    Fruit of Knowledge by C. L. Moore
    The Smallest God by Lester Del Rey
    It by Theodore Sturgeon

    Best Short Story:
    Currently liking any five of:
    Robbie (AKA Strange Bedfellow) by Isaac Asimov
    Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges
    Evening Primrose by John Collier
    Thus I Refute Beelzy by John Collier
    Song in a Minor Key by C. L. Moore
    The Tapestry Gate by Leigh Brackett

26. Hi Kyra,

    I found it a pretty tough choice to knock “Thus I Refute Beelzy” by John Collier off my list. The domestic violence is pretty skeevy, but the denouement is very impressively executed.

    (On the other hand I’m afraid “Song in a Minor Key” didn’t do much for me; not having read any of the rest of the series, I couldn’t get invested in the hero for the few pages the story lasted.)

    I’d missed The Last Man as a potential nominee. Drat. Now I’ll have to go read it. I’m certain of The Ill-Made Knight and Kallocain, but less so of my other three choices. (I won’t nominate Slan or Gray Lensman.)

27. Fortunately I have lots of things to do today, otherwise I’d sit around feeling somewhat inadequate; you guys are both talented and kind. Camestros’s holiday card was amazing, and Bruce’s cats really are delightful; I’m happily surprised that grown up cats would settle in so quickly, and that’s a tribute to Bruce for making them feel at home. My mother always said that the way to stop cats wandering from a new place was to put butter on their paws, but I don’t think that goes very well with computer screens.

    The Hobbit map looks rather like the London Tube Map, which is a trap for the unwary; Junego has the right idea. And thank you to Nicholas and Kyra; I have been feeling mildly guilty about my failure to read much for the Retro Hugos and it’s now extremely guilty.

    Hampus is working away on the movies, and Filers are providing multiple edits of one rather obscure film; all in all it’s a typical File 770 day, and I really will have to get off the Web and do things!

28. Re: 1941 Hugos… are there different editions of Kallocain? I found it online, and was severely disappointed by the story I read…. (Spoilers follow):-

    Lbh trg gur jryy-ernyvmrq qlfgbcvna frggvat, lbh trg gur vagrecrefbany pbasyvpgf frg hc… lbh pna fbeg bs frr ubj gur fgbel zvtug qrirybc, nf gur gehgu qeht erirnyf gehguf gung ner gbb hapbzsbegnoyr sbe guvf uvtuyl-ertvzragrq fbpvrgl gb pbcr jvgu… naq gura, fhqqrayl, onz! Aneengbe vf pncgherq ol gur rarzl naq guebja vagb n CBJ pnzc, cybg guernqf nyy erznva haerfbyirq, fgbel bire, gur raq. Vg’f abg rira n cebcre qrhf rk znpuvan, orpnhfr gur qrhf rk znpuvan ng yrnfg fbegf rirelguvat bhg – guvf raqvat fvzcyl phgf gur fgbel fubeg. V jnf teniryl qvfnccbvagrq.

    It struck me as a massive storytelling fail. Unless it was the translator getting bored with the story and not finishing it properly… hence my question as to whether there’s alternative, non-failing, editions out there.

    Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, I just finished reading The Elven by Bernhard Hennen and James A. Sullivan – translated by Edwin Miles, with a pub date for the translation of 2015, so that makes it Hugo eligible, doesn’t it? Anyway, eligibility notwithstanding, this thing is Epic with a capital E, possibly a Gothic capital E forged in the furnaces of the dwarves and quenched in dragon’s blood. It follows the fortunes of one Mandred Torgridson, the ruler of Firnstayn, a small village threatened by a monstrous “manboar”; when Mandred sets off to hunt the beast, he is drawn into a world of elves and sorcery and danger, and begins a quest that will last for hundreds of years. This book’s got everything – drunken centaurs, heroic elves, anthropophagous trolls (who can also be heroic), talking trees, crazed priests, monstrous golems, and more heroic stands against impossible odds than you could shake an enchanted runesword at. It’s even, if I recall one scene correctly, got a kitchen sink.

    I suppose it’s got flaws – the whole thing is very Germanic (the authors are pretty much steeped in German folklore and German mediaeval literature), and so the prose style might seem a bit flat and clunky, at times, to people who didn’t cut their literary teeth on the Nibelungenlied. And, at the start, at least, I wondered where it was going… it seemed, initially, to be rambling from incident to incident in a picaresque but not exactly structured way. However, by the end of the book, all the various elements had been pulled together, and reached a resolution and a conclusion that was properly epic. And tragic. And Germanic.

    Anyway, it’s worth a look, I think.

29. Steve,

    Tastes vary. I felt Boye was to an extent challenging the reader by not telling the story you might have expected; I also found the resolution reasonable enough, and the originality and execution of the premise compensated for other flaws. (I’m still likely to ote for The Ill-Made Knight if it is a finalist.)

30. > “I’d missed The Last Man as a potential nominee. Drat. Now I’ll have to go read it.”

    It definitely has flaws, but there’s also a lot of interesting stuff in it. (And it’s the novel that introduced the concept of the Doomsday Weapon.)

31. Karin Boye was foremost a poet and has written one of the most famous swedish poems:

    “Of course it hurts when buds burst.
    Otherwise why would spring hesitate?
    Why would all our fervent longing
    be bound in the frozen bitter haze?
    The bud was the casing all winter.
    What is this new thing, which consumes and bursts?
    Of course it hurts when buds burst,
    pain for that which grows
    and for that which envelops.”

    (rest of it here)

    I have no idea how the english translation of Kallocain is, but in the original, the language is one of the things that gives the most pleasure. It was not written because Boye wanted to, more of a feeling that she had. In a letter to the author of Aniara, she wrote: “I have with sweat and internal vomitting finished a large novel, a futuristic novel. She wrote it after a visit to Sovjetunion, but probably nazi-Germany was as much inspiration.

    She was scared when sending it to the publisher, because even in neutral sweden, it wasn’t safe to write books like this. In a letter to the publisher, she offered to change all names to chinese(!). She was also fighting with depression at this time and in april, the year after the book was published, she committed suicide.

    So, a bit of bonus history for you!

32. (10) HERE COMES SANTA CLAUS

    Those robots aren’t pulling that thing. They’re not even attached.

    So are these some new generation of Big Dog robots? The last version I saw had “knees” pointing towards each other (not all four legs in the same configuration) and sounded like an angry nest of hornets when it moved.

33. > “I found it a pretty tough choice to knock ‘Thus I Refute Beelzy’ by John Collier off my list.”

    Collier has long been a favorite of mine. My original long list had five Collier stories on it; I narrowed it down to those two.

    > “(On the other hand I’m afraid “Song in a Minor Key” didn’t do much for me …)

    My opinion of it is almost certainly influenced by my being a fan of Moore’s Northwest Smith stories as a whole. I’ll freely admit it doesn’t stand on its own well. Which may very well end up getting it knocked off my list and replaced with something else, honestly — I do think nominees should be able to stand on their own.

34. What do people like for the Fancast Retro-Hugo? Is there anything at all that qualifies?

35. I don’t think any Fancasts survive if they were existed, and if they do they might fit better into Dramatic Presentations.

36. HIGH CASTLE: I quite liked Season 1. Strong performances and nice worldbuilding. I felt the very end of S1 was hamstrung by trying to split the difference between the renewed and done-in-one scenarios.

    BOND ON ICE: My first summer job was pruning Christmas trees, during my junior high years. Now you know.

    CINEMATIC COAL LUMP: The worst thing about Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is that it wasn’t the movie I thought it was. When I was a kid, I saw previews for a horrible Christmas movie like it that memorably contained the villain exulting, in a vague “foreign” accent, “Christmas is not coming – I think!” I thought Martians was that movie. But when my son and I watched it online a decade ago, that line appeared nowhere within it.

37. @Stevie: Actually, these kitties are only about six and a half months old. They’re just in great shape, having gotten good care all along.

38. I can second Steve on The Elden; it’s not perfect, and it took me a while to get into it, but I was glad that I’d persevered. Certainly worth a look because it does knock most heroic fantasy over and jump up and down on it.

    ETA
    Bruce: those kittens/cats are really remarkable for 6.5 months old; they probably have hidden super powers as well.

39. Camestros: Needs more lens flare. Also more cowbell. (Seriously, though, that’s lovely. Thank you.)

    A smart store-owner would market those melted Darth Vaders as Qnegu Inqre’f unys-zrygrq uryzrg, fhvgnoyr sbe Xlyb Era’f fgbpxvat (minor spoilers for the Force Awakens, or at least the trailer.)

40. I’m very glad to hear that Man in the High Castle will continue. Not only because I enjoyed it, but also because it was very useful when I was teaching the past conditional: What would the world have been like IF… ?

    While I’m here I’ll note that I have finally started watching Game of Thrones and am constantly annoyed that nobody on the Wall ever wears a hat. C’mon, John Snow, you’re losing all your heat through your head, at least wear a hood… My disbelief clunks and shatters every time.

41. (16) CINEMATIC COAL LUMP

    Milton DeLugg, composer of the earworm “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” theme song “Hooray for Santy Claus”, was only one of many memorable lights lost to us this year.

    I hope, when people do their end of the year round ups of notable 2015 deaths, that he warrants a mention.

42. Hampus, thank you so much for sharing that amazing poem.

43. Thank you, Mike, for the mention of the Hugo Recommendation Season!

    I am currently collecting recommendations for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) and would love to hear what all of you loved this year, and most importantly, why you loved it.

44. I looked at that Orbit quiz and found myself wondering where I took a wrong turn. Here I thought I was a science fiction/fantasy person, what with sixty years of reading, studying, teaching, and reviewing it. I did notice a couple of books-in-prose among the questions, but even they were off my radar. (And I like movies and telly–saw 2001 in Cinerama and sat through the real original Star Wars twice in a row on its first run and didn’t walk out of Zardoz despite it finding it weak on making sense*. . . .)

    * But hey, John Boorman, Charlotte Rampling, and Sean Connery.

45. I strongly disliked the handful of C. L. Moore stories I have read and haven’t read any Northwest Smith stories, but I really liked “Song in a Minor Key.” Moore packed so much into 800 words that I almost feel that reading Smith’s adventures would be redundant.

    @Nicholas Whyte, You’re welcome. Volume Six should be done by tonight and the final two volumes will be done within a few weeks. I believe “The Mound” is only about 13,500 words, so probably a novelette.

46. I think “Song in a Minor Key” is the only Northwest Smith story whose plot James Nicoll wasn’t able to summarize with the sentence “Things end badly, but not for Smith.”

    I don’t know. It’s a lovely mood piece, but does it hold up if you don’t know its context? (It seems to for von Dimpleheimer, which is nice to know!) It might make my list, regardless.

47. Jim Henley on December 23, 2015 at 5:01 am said:

    CINEMATIC COAL LUMP: The worst thing about Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is that it wasn’t the movie I thought it was. When I was a kid, I saw previews for a horrible Christmas movie like it that memorably contained the villain exulting, in a vague “foreign” accent, “Christmas is not coming – I think!” I thought Martians was that movie. But when my son and I watched it online a decade ago, that line appeared nowhere within it.

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053241/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3 perhaps?

48. (14) Are they infusing the Peruvian soil with perchlorates?

49. Mike –
    please drop me a line with an e-mail I can reply to?

    I have a possible entry from someone in next round-up, or as a guest post.

    – Craig R.

50. Camestros Felapton, that was lovely; thank you! And I wish happiness and many, many wonderful books to everyone here on File770, whatever holidays you may celebrate.

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