(1) WWCD? Cody Christensen of Cedar City, Utah has a petition on Change.org called “Make Leia an Official Disney Princess” which requests that Disney induct Princess Leia into the pantheon of princesses and that some sort of ceremony for Carrie Fisher be held at a Disney theme park. He has over 40,000 signatures.
After the tragic lose of Carrie Fisher, we feel that it is only fitting for Disney to do away with the rule that an official Disney princess must be animated and make Leia a full-fledged princess. This would be a wonderful way to remember Carrie and a welcoming to one of Disney’s new properties that is beloved by millions.
What we are asking is that the Walt Disney Corporation hold a full ceremony inducting Leia as the newest Disney princess as well as a special service in memory of Carrie Fisher.
Christensen told Geek how he got the idea for the petition.
“I started the petition because it was something that bugged me since Disney bought the property. Disney had princesses and Leia was a Princess. Then I found out that Disney had set rules for who could and couldn’t be a princess. (Supercarlin brothers video) With Carrie’s death, I think that it’s time to change the rules.”…
“I actually have 5 daughters and there are constantly princess movies playing in the background.” he said “We are big fans of the current Princess line-up, but I think that Leia is a really strong, positive, awesome role model for my girls, and she would make a great addition.”
(2) SPEAKING OF DISNEY PRINCESSES. Abigail Nussbaum reviews Moana, The Lobster, Star Trek Beyond and Lalaland at Asking the Wrong Questions.
Moana – Disney’s latest attempt to reinvent the princess movie takes two novel approaches: drawing on Polynesian folklore and mythology for its story, and recruiting Hamilton wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda to write the film’s songs. Heroine Moana (Auli’l Cravalho) is torn between her duties as the daughter of the village chief and her desire to roam the seas, but finds herself able to gratify both desires when she’s tasked with restoring the heart of creation goddess Te Fiti, aided by Maui (Dwayne Johnson), the demigod who originally stole it. The plot is thus a picaresque, in which Moana and Maui encounter various dangers and challenges on their journey to Te Fiti, during which they also bond and help each other overcome their hang-ups. It’s a similar structure to Tangled–still, to my mind, the best of the modern princess movies–but Moana lacks that film’s multiple intersecting plot strands and broad cast of characters, and ends up feeling simpler and more straightforward. What it does have is genuinely stunning animation, especially where it draws on the scenery of the Pacific islands and the iconography of Polynesian cultures, and some excellent songs by Miranda, which pay homage to both the Disney and musical theater traditions while still retaining entirely their own flavor–I’m particularly fond of a scene in which Moana and Maui encounter a giant, jewel-encrusted lobster (Jemaine Clement), who sings a David Bowie-inspired glam-rock ballad, and then complains that no one likes him as much as The Little Mermaid‘s Sebastian. But pretty much every song here is excellent and memorable in its own right.
(3) TAIL-GUNNER LOU. “Is there a blacklist?” asks Lou Antonelli, because the rejection slips he gets now are not quite as warm as they once were.
A colleague asked me the other day if I felt there is a blacklist in literary s-f against non-PC writers.
I replied I don’t know, there’s no way to tell for sure; that’s the nature of a blacklist – it’s a conspiracy.
I will say that before 2015, when I was a double Sad Puppy Hugo nominee, my rejections almost always included invitations to submit to that market again.
Now, that is very uncommon, and in fact almost all my rejections now end with “best of luck” or “good luck with your writing” – and no encouragement to submit again.
Someone wrote anonymously to encourage Lou’s suspicions, inspiring a follow-up post decorated with a photo of Senator Joe McCarthy:
I don’t often approve anonymous comments, but I did in this one case, since it sounded true, and given the subject matter, it’s completely understandable why someone would prefer to remain anonymous:
“Day after the election, when I posted a picture of myself with a Trump hat, a famous editor of whom almost anyone would know her name, had her assistant message me to tell me how awful I am, that I’m not going to be invited to write in anthologies again, coupled with the threat that the publishing industry is small and word travels fast.
“Blackballing is real. But you are not alone.”
(4) BUMPER CROP. Mark-kitteh noticed that after SFCrowsnest’s brutal review of Uncanny Magazine #14 yesterday, Uncanny’s editors made some lemonade:
HUGE NEWS! We have received so many new @Patreon patrons, we are definitely adding AN ADDITIONAL POEM PER ISSUE! Fight on, unicorns! 😀
— Uncanny Magazine (@UncannyMagazine) January 5, 2017
(5) UTES READ GEEZERS. At Young People Read Old SFF, James Davis Nicoll has set the table with Miriam Allen DeFord’s “The Smiling Future”.
Miriam Allen de Ford was a prolific author of both mysteries and Fortean-flavoured science fiction stories. She was also an active feminist, disseminating information about family planning in a time when that was illegal in many regions. Although widely anthologized while alive , since her death she seems to have lapsed into obscurity, at least on the SF side of thing. A pity.
“The Smiling Future” is perhaps not de Ford’s best known science fiction work but it does have the advantage of being on the internet archive, not true of much of her work (because her work was mainly for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, none of which is on the archive). Also, it has dolphins and who doesn’t like dolphins? Selecting it out of all the de Fords I could have selected is therefore something of a calculated risk. Will the risk pay off?
There was enough of a positive reaction to get a good discussion going.
(5) WARNING. It takes a long time to stop laughing at Camestros Felapton’s “A Poster for Timothy”.
(6) SECOND WARNING. Not that Camestros Felapton won’t be a nominee for his work published in 2016, but the first thing he should put in his Hugo eligibility post from 2017 is “A Cat Reviews LaLaLand“. Quite funny, though beware, spoilers abound! …I read it anyway.
(7) PUPPY THOUGHTS. Brian Niemeier L.Jagi Lamplighter is delighted to be part of SuperversiveSF’s new collection Forbidden Thoughts, which boasts a foreword by Milo Yiannopoulos.
But what can you do with a super controversial story in this age of safe spaces and trigger warnings?
Then, in the midst of the Sad Puppy fervor, I caught a glimmer of an answer. Jason Rennie, editor of Sci Phi Journal and the brilliant mind behind SuperverisveSF, suggested in the midst of a flurry of Sad Puppy emails, that the authors involved get together and do an anthology of anti-PC stories, kind of a modern Dangerous Visions–putting into story form all those thoughts that the SJWs don’t want people to think. Basically, doing what SF is supposed to do, posing difficult questions.
Those of us on the email chain decided on the title: Forbidden Thoughts.
I LOVED this idea. Here was my answer to what to do with my controversial story.
So, I kept on Jason about this, and I kept on the other authors. When a few were too busy to be able to fit writing a new short story into their schedule, I convinced them to submit incendiary blog posts.
So we now had a volume with stories by, among others, John, Nick Cole, Brian Niemeier, Josh Young, Brad Torgersen, Sarah Hoyt, and, a particularly delightful surprise for me, our young Marine fan friend, Pierce Oka. Plus, non fiction by Tom Kratman and Larry Correia submitted some of his original Sad Puppy posts–the thing that started it all!
(8) THE FORBIDDEN ZONE. There probably are a few things The Book Smuggler would like to forbid: “The Airing of Grievances – Smugglivus 2016”
In publishing and on Twitter, advocates for equality, feminists, poc readers and authors were attacked left and right every time they called out racism and sexism in publishing. And folks, there was a lot of that this year. Like that one time when a publisher had a book of “parody” covers that was so racist it almost made our eyes bleed. White authors continued to be awful and show their asses, like that one who said that those who call out cultural appropriation are getting “too precious.” And just a few days ago, we all found out that racist nazi piece of shit Milo Yiannopoulos got a huge book deal with a major publishing house…
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
Born January 5, 1914 — George Reeves, TV’s first Superman.
(10) SOMETHING TERPSICHOREAN. Sparknotes explains Bradbury’s dedication of Something Wicked This Way Comes.
In “A Brief Afterword,” Bradbury explains why Something Wicked This Way Comes is dedicated to Gene Kelly and describes how the book was written. Bradbury met Gene Kelly in 1950 and they became friends shortly thereafter. In 1955 Kelly invited Bradbury and his wife, Maggie, to a private screening of his “collection of musical dance numbers with no connecting plotline,” Invitation to the Dance, at MGM studios. Bradbury and his wife walked home and along the way he told his wife that he desperately wanted to work with Kelly. She suggested that he go through his stories until he found something that would work, turn it into a screenplay, and send it to Gene Kelly. So Bradbury looked through many of his short stories and found The Black Ferris, a ten page story about two young boys and a carnival. For a little over a month he worked on the story and then gave Gene Kelly the eighty page outline of a script that he had created. Mr. Kelly called Bradbury the next day to tell him that he wanted to direct the movie and asked for permission to find financing in Paris and London. Although Bradbury gave his assent, Gene Kelly returned without a financer because no one wanted to make the movie. Bradbury took the partial screenplay, at the time titled Dark Carnival, and over the next five years turned it into the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes that was published in 1962. As Bradbury writes at the end of his afterword, the book is dedicated to Gene Kelly because if he had not invited Bradbury to that screening of his movie, then Something Wicked This May Comes may never have been written. When the book was published, Bradbury gave the first copy to Gene Kelly.
(11) CALLING ALL CARLS. An emergency session of internet scholars has convened at Camestros Felapton’s blog to help him identify “That difficult first novel”.
I was stumped by a trivia question which asked: “What was the first novel in English?”
The problem with the question is one of setting boundaries, specifically:
- What counts as a novel? Do legends count? What about Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur? Is it a novel, a retelling or a purported (if fanciful) attempt at history?
- What counts as ‘in English’? Does Chaucer’s middle English count? What about Malory’s middle English (which is more like modern English than Chaucer?)
- Do translations count? Don Quixote is very like a novel, so might the first translation of that into English count?
(12) LOUDSPEAKER FOR THE DEAD. ScienceFiction.com has the story behind this particular effect — “Raising Cushing: New Video Shows Off CGI Work Done To Create ‘Rogue One’ Grand Moff Tarkin”.
Now, for those interested in how exactly they managed to bring Tarkin to life in the film, ABC News has released a new video on Twitter courtesy of ILM (check it out below) showcasing some of the work that went into building Tarkin, that shows in a handful of seconds what clearly took MONTHS of effects work to accomplish, giving us in brief all of the steps necessary to get the character right. They cast a man that already bore a striking resemblance to Peter Cushing, then digitally enhanced his features until he was Peter Cushing, animating all of his moments from that point onward to carry on the illusion.
Tonight on @Nightline: visual effects wizards at @ILMVFX reveal secrets & challenges behind the digital characters in @starwars #RogueOne. pic.twitter.com/0jhkcDhuND
— Clayton Sandell (@Clayton_Sandell) January 4, 2017
(13) WHEN SHALL WE THREE MEET AGAIN? A reboot of Charmed is in the works.
The story hails from Jessica O’Toole, Amy Rardin and Snyder Urman with O’Toole and Rardin penning the script.
The original Charmed starred Alyssa Milano, Holly Marie Combs, Shannen Doherty and Rose McGowan. Combs has already tweeted her reaction, saying “We wish them well.” Milano also took to Twitter. “#Charmed fans! There are no fans like you. You’re the best of the best,” she said.
(14) THEY CAME FROM SPACE. Here’s another job that pays more than yours — “These guys hunt for space rocks, and sell them for enormous profit to collectors”.
These ancient meteorites can be older than the Earth itself. The price tag is high: Just 100 grams of Mars rock, enough to fit in the palm of a hand, can demand $100,000.
For help tracking down such rare rocks, private collectors turn to professional meteorite hunters. These adventurers earn their living by crisscrossing the globe, searching for astronomic treasures. The risks are real, including prison and death, but so are the potential rewards — rocks that can be flipped quickly for fortunes.
The man who sold Jurvetson his Mars rock is 44-year-old Michael Farmer. Since the late 1990s, Farmer has traveled to some 80 countries looking for these precious rocks. Perhaps his best-known find is a nearly 120-pound meteorite discovered in Canada, which he and his partners sold to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto for $600,000.
“Any time you dig up a treasure worth more than half a million bucks, it’s a good day,” said Farmer, who works closely colleagues around the world tracking meteorite showers.
This work is not for the faint of heart. In 2011, Farmer was kidnapped, beaten and nearly killed by Kenyan thieves. That same year, he was charged with illegal mining in Oman and imprisoned for two months. Farmer says his motivation is not purely monetary, but rather the thrill of the chase.
(15) GETTING THE POINT ACROSS. After seeing this cover some of you will find it hard to believe I am not the Washington Post’s copyeditor:
https://twitter.com/samthielman/status/817022669564551168
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Rose Embolism, JJ, Mark-kitteh, John King Tarpinian, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip Williams.]
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@Kendall, Ghost Bird:
Plus, the hero(ine) goes by some spelling or another of Merlin, adding a bit of Arthurian legend into the mix. But there’s no actual supernatural/magic, just medieval plus SF plus a fake religion.
And, of course, naval battles. Can’t forget those.
Lou Antonelli:
You are actually saying that these people decided on who to vote for in a presidential race – deciding the future for economics, foreign policy, healthcare, climate change, discrimination, unemployment – based on what one person on the internet wrote in the comments of a blog?
I think you are calling these voters idiots with no grasp of politics that votes totally on feelz.
(7) PUPPY THOUGHTS
The Amazon sample gets you the foreword by Milo, a poem, and a Nick Cole story, and I was foolish enough to read them.
Milo rehashes and revises a bit of history with some bluster about censorship, SJWs, etc. Exhibit A for SJWs ruining everything is of course Ghostbusters, because it’s all about him. (There’s also a transphobic swipe in another section, just because.)
I’ve got no appreciation for poetry so I’ll offer no comment on the poem apart from that it’s a pure political polemic that sorta rhymes.
Then it’s “Safe Space Suit” by Nick Cole in which (as already described by an intrepid adventurer in yesterdays scroll) what he describes as an “African-American Lesbian Woman” called Jemison crashes a Mars-bound spaceship because she’s actually incompetent and only been selected because PC. She sits in the left seat, and competent white guy Haldeman sits in the right seat but is unable to bring himself to save them all from her. Cole harps on about the left/right seat thing several times as if he’s afraid his audience might miss how clever he’s been. That’s actually the most subtle bit of satire in there.
There’s a warp drive designed by “Martin” and “Wendig” that tries to redefine reality the way they want it but doesn’t work. As the ship crashes Engineer “Correia” hits the eject button, but the only one who makes it out is “Tanya Stark”, who lands in her Safe Space Suit that tells her everything’s okay even though there’s deadly radiation, and finds some Burroughs-style aliens who capture her and eat her brain. Some more satire from the brain eating alien, the end. (OK, I was skipping pretty heavily at that point).
If I was going to bother to criticise it as a story, the obvious point would be that it’s actually two stories bolted together, skipping from something in the region of hard sf to pulp without much connection between the two – the two characters don’t connect in any real way. Remove the in-jokes and satire and you’re left with…clumsy?
On the one hand, this anthology is exactly what I’d like to see this group doing – rather than moaning that they’re not getting the stories they want and disrupting other people because of that, they’ve written and published the stories they want. Hurrah, choice and the marketplace in action.
On the other hand, it seems that the stories they wanted may be heavy-handed satires with malicious in-jokes, in which case…hurrah that I don’t have to read them?
What they want more of is obviously message fiction.
3) Lou Antonelli: welcome to the real world, where actions have consequences, and making yourself massively obnoxious in public means that people won’t want to work with you.
Color me completely unsurprised by the puppyfic anthology. Rabid, clumsy, boorish message fiction – exactly what they denounce, but since it’s their message, suddenly it’s just what the doctor ordered. I suspect the market will not be kind.
On a more positive note, Day Six of Graphic Novel Week comes to a close with Victorian Batman, Vampire Batman, Iron Fist, and the adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s original City on the Edge of Forever script… which was quite well done. That leaves me with three Serenity collections and Batman: Black and White for Day Seven. Unfortunately for me, I missed out on a reduced price that would’ve changed my lineup, but I may get another chance at that apple in April when the next collection in that series comes out.
Speaking of e-deals, the first three (of four, five if you count the Christmas short) books in the Carrie Hatchett, Space Adventurer series are currently 99 cents each (US), and the fourth book is $3.99. I’m not sure if that’s regular price or not for the first volume, but I know the second and third are usually more expensive. The series looks like nice, lighthearted fun, and since I already had the first book, I went ahead and scooped up the next two. Hopefully I’ll manage to actually get to them sometime this year.
In other reading, not only did I finish Seanan McGuire’s Indexing: Reflections this week, swiftly followed by Every Heart a Doorway yesterday, but I’ve started Velveteen vs. the Seasons for the trifecta. And it is a trifecta; each book represents a decidedly different take on the intersection between the modern world and fairy tales. The juxtaposition is intriguing, and I’m convinced that reading these particular books together is a fuller experience than I would have gotten from spacing them out. (In particular, the Snow theme of Reflections and the Portals aspect of Doorway resonate nicely with the first Velveteen story, in which Velveteen steps through a portal to serve Winter.)
So, I’ve presently struck 27 books from Mount Tsundoku in a bit over five days. I am pleased with this progress. 🙂
It has been many years since the one time I read In the Barn, but I don’t remember anything that seems impossible from a biological standpoint. I don’t see why enough selective breeding and genetic engineering couldn’t produce the end result.
@Darren Garrison: I think the biological and ecological implications of a world where there are no large mammals other than man are, well, insufficiently explored in that story. (The whole thing has a very high “oh-come-off-it” level for me. Vegan message fiction with enormous boobs.)
c4c
JJ:
That was my thought as well. In terms of outside results, there’s no obvious difference between several editors individually deciding “I don’t want to work with that guy”, and a secret cabal sending out a blacklist with that guy’s name on it.
And the story from an anonymous source have lots of warning signs that says “take with multiple pinches of salt”. Yeah, it’s possible that the alleged message from an editor’s assistant exist, but the details of what sparked it and what it says is almost certainly not accurate.
The Amazon Age has gifted us with tens (if not hundreds) of sub-genres. It’s looking like it is time for another one: Puppy Science Fiction.
PSF for short.
The “P” offers instant identification for those readers who can’t handle real science fiction, and offers a suggestion as to what other readers will be doing with (or to) the product.
Smart publishers of PSF will offer works in three formats – print, ebook and TP roll.
***
This is (more) evidence of two things: 1. the connection between puppies and the “Alt-right” (note my usage of the proper AP form) and 2. that puppies will not stop their BS, ever.
The latter suggests to me that any efforts at accommodation or reconciliation are pointless and the sooner they are shuffled off to their own little dimly lit corner of the SF world, the better.
(14) THEY CAME FROM SPACE: Mike Farmer has a hunting career that would be fitting for Indiana Jones. Here’s a taste of his travels that doesn’t even include the Omani kerfuffle.
(I was invited by a meteorite hunter on a desert expedition in the area after the arrest and near international incident and after seeing the hunter’s photos of unexploded bombs found while searching for meteorites in earlier expeditions. Even though I’m the same age as Mike, I decided that I was Getting Too Old For That Shit. There may or may not have been an age when I wanted to be Indiana Jones, but today I’d rather just watch him.)
Too bad the story didn’t include meteorite hunter Geoff Notkin, because he has a science fiction/fantasy tie-in–he was childhood friends with Neil Gaiman and once was in a punk band with him.
No, the tag should be “Puppy-Oriented Story.”
I wanna know where Aaron got all those thousands of angry voters that he then personally drove off. Dude, share a little with the rest of us next time!
I would have, but I had no idea! Who knew I had such influence? I think that in the next election candidates should come to me hat in hand, since I apparently have the power to determine election outcomes.
The really funny thing here is that I obviously occupy a lot of space inside LA’s head. On the other hand, except for when he pops up on one of the round-ups here, I pretty much don’t think about him at all.
Why did you vote for Trump?
(don’t say revenge
don’t say revenge)
REVENGE!
Surely CUL should go self-pubbed and leave the trad pubs alone, as they are a dying bunch of gatekeepers and he gets 100% of the revenue, not 10%? Or is that too much work for him?
As others have noted above, being loud and obnoxious probably has more to do with it, though I suspect “striving for mediocrity’ doesn’t help.
Thanks to those who jumped on the grenade of the puppy collection – it all sounds ridiculously transparent and not very good message fic. That’s not a shock.
Continuing the Campbell discussion from a couple of scrolls back: am I right in thinking that Becky Chambers is still eligible? As I understand it she was last year, on the same basis as Weir, i.e. first professional publication, and so her eligibility should carry over to this year as well. (And unlike Weir she has followed it up with new stuff this year.)
@Darren Garrison: No, the tag should be “Puppy-Oriented Story.”
Or perhaps, “Puppy-Oriented Object”, since it’s not clear many of them will qualify as actual stories.
airboy
While everything so far suggests grounds for impeachment, I can’t see the republicans doing it.
On the other hand, obese angry men, especially those apparently suffering chronic jaundice, seem likely candiates for heart attacks.
@kathodus
Milo qualifies, at the very least, as a blatant apologist for neo-Nazis. If you have the stomach to, read his Breitbart article “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-right” in which he tries to make the Alt-right movement sound palatable to mainstream conservatives by portraying their overt racism and anti-Semitism as adorable juvenile pranks that those cute darn kids are just trying to shock their elders with and don’t really mean. He says that all those alt-righters who crack Holocaust jokes and express disgust with race-mixing (he literally references both those things) are totes okay because they’re being “almost entirely satirical” (and apparently Milo is okay with the percentage of them who aren’t being satirical about it.) Most conclusively, he gives a respectful tongue bath to Richard Spencer as an ‘intellectual’ founder of the alt-right – Richard Spencer, subsequently infamous as the guy sieg-heiling Trump. Anyone who saw Richard Spencer talk or investigated him in the slightest could not possibly think he was anything but deadly serious about his racism, anti-Semitism, and neo-Nazi leanings…so I can’t take Milo’s apologetics as anything but him being an accessory to such things.
Sorry, I know this isn’t the place for such rants – but I have friends who are just in denial about this and it’s haunting me that they just don’t see it.
Canine Regurgitated Aggression Piece?
Sometimes I submit stories and editors reject them. In the past I’ve assumed that the story just didn’t do the trick, because most magazines reject 99% of unsolicited submissions and there’s names that get attention and mine isn’t one of ’em… but maybe it’s a blacklist!
Is that the same Lou Antonelli who admitted on a podcast that he told the Spokane police that convention guest of honor David Gerrold was a menace? I can’t imagine why he’d have trouble finding people who wanted to work with him.
If you start seeing conspiracies in rejection letters, you are probably in the wrong business. Unless you are on the very, very top you always get rejected for various reasons. Floods and Draughts I call it.
(My tongue.in-cheek-comment is in moderation, so this a probing comment as well)
The snowmen of Hoth.
He was also the Lou Antonelli who posted the personal information for an editor who rejected a story of his because of the David Gerrold incident, inciting his followers to send her death and rape threats.
He sowed, now he’s reaping.
“First they came from outer space, and I said nothing because I didn’t grok Intergalactic Standard.”
[1] A simple solution: Animate her. Hasn’t she already been animated in Lego Star Wars? Does Disney not own that? (I ask from actual ignorance, but any time I don’t know for sure, I assume Disney does own whatever it is.)
[14] My grandfather’s mineral collection was largely dispersed in the 70s, decades after he died, when Grandma moved out of her house. The central display case, though, with his best rocks, was still around into the 80s. I loved his meteorite, a fist-size shiny chunk of nickel and whatever. Alas, my parents disregarded my wishes and probably just dumped it somewhere when they moved. They had problems of their own to worry about, I guess, but I still dream of that meteorite.
[10] That reminds me of a post over at New Pals, from about five years ago. Knowing how easy it is to get people (me, for instance) to click over, I’ll conveniently quote the whole thing.
@Darren Garrison
Let us not forget that a top all of this stuff is the fact that Antonelli is a middling writer at best. When you’ve got sales numbers like Gaiman or King or even Dan Brown, you can afford to be whatever kind of insufferable you choose. When you’re still scratching work from editors as opposed to them coming to you, these things add up.
Given the time period and the assumption that your grandfather wasn’t rich, it was almost certainly Canyon Diablo (unless it was Sikhote Alin–here’s a very nice one about the same size as the one you are describing being offered by the aforementioned Friend Of Gaiman. If anyone wants to buy it and donate it to my collection, I won’t be too proud to accept it.)
I have a similar fist sized iron meteorite that got away memory, also from the 1980s–a wandering Seller of Various Stuff that periodically showed up at my local large outdoor flea market had one, but the price of more than $100 was way out of my teenage budget so I settled for a handful of Indochinite tektites (which at the time were still thought to be possibly splashed off of the moon.)
@Andrew M
Becky Chambers has a Dec 14 short story credit that is probably pro. Sadly she came in 7th in noms last year.
ETA checked and writertopia had her as 2nd year eligible last year, so that’s that.
Darren Garrison
My maternal grandfather is known to have gone out west on road trips (he lived in Riverside, and was an engineer for Western Electric in Chicago). He edited The Earth Science Digest for a while. I think we have one copy from his tenure on that somewhere around the house. He was also interested in photography (besides his still photos, I had a handful of frames from a movie he took of some raptor) and astronomy (I have a telescope he built). There are numerous large holes in my knowledge of him. I found a patent of his online, I seem to recall. By the time I’d have thought of quizzing Mom on it, her mind was far away. Even if I’d asked three or four years before her death, though, she would have been able to tell me more about him than she could have about anyone in her family who was still alive.
Then he may possibly have bought his meteorite here.
Too easily confused with one of the names Canada’s ReformaTory party used, the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party. No, they didn’t expect the press to leap on the initials with little bleats of joy.
Now they call themselves the Conservative Party of Canada, which would be great if the Communist Party of Canada didn’t have a prior claim to CPC.
@Daren Garrison – *cracks knuckles* FOR YOU and because I’m a pedant I have re-read that dreadful story to make sure I am remembering correctly. I must love you people, or enjoy being annoyed, or both.
It’s worse than I remember, and that’s saying something. Let’s take it from the top!
1) There’s no genetic engineering, it’s all selective breeding, hormones and torture. That’s a plot point. Kinda THE plot point.
2) Where are they getting rennet, or is there no cheese on this world? (I will accept handwavium, I’m fine with fungus or citric acid, I just want it mentioned that they have nothing harder than ricotta because human breastmilk makes crap cheese and doesn’t curd unless you get into molecular gastronomy.)
3) At one point our lovely hero rapes a human cow because she’s in heat and looks like his boss. I’m not saying this couldn’t happen, but Jesus Christ, what a wretched little pissant.
4) Part of the reason cows are efficient is that they are quite large. They produce milk for very large offspring. If you wanted to selectively breed a human cow, you’d start by breeding huge humans, not lithe/pert/svelte/blah blah with huge boobs.
5) No amount of selective breeding will turn a human into a cud-chewing ruminant. Ditch the cud. You cannot selectively breed in extra stomachs.
6) Tracking back to 3) now that my gorge has settled, humans do not go into heat, no matter what all those Daily Mail articles said. Humans are a menstrual animal, they do not absorb the endometrium, they shed it, and you will not selectively breed them out of that in a couple hundred or thousand years.
7) Oh, this one is nasty. All the content warnings. (I’m on my phone or I’d rot13) Our charming hero, having raped the human cow that looked like his boss, is sad because her vagina is so big and decides it’s selective breeding at work again to make delivery easier and THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS THAF IS NOT HOW ANY OF IT WORKS A CERVIX HAVE YOU HEARD OF IT YOU BLITHERING DISGUSTING IDIOT
8) This is a hypothetical world where they can afford the time investment to grow and feed a dairy animal for–let’s say twelve to fourteen years, in a box (we get it, Piers, you don’t like veal) with hormone supplements. Which will then produce far less milk than a cow, digest food far less efficiently, have to eat special nutrient bars, and nobody thought to grow a goddamn almond tree? The whole production line is apocalyptically stupid and only makes sense as a hyper-luxury good. Hell, DONKEY milk is hard to come by, and they’re infinitely easier to raise and mature in approximately a fourth the time. But no, everybody’s got milk on this planet! (But again, no decent hard cheese.)
9) I hate everything now.
speaking of Milo….
http://amazingstoriesmag.com/articles/great-milo-david-gerrold/
“Never piss off a man who buys ink by the barrel”
@Red Wombat
I don’t know whether to applaud the epic ranting or just emit multiple ugh sounds at the details of that story.
Red Wombat, that is a heck of a post.
(3) Huh. Someone who’s spent the last year or two solidly establishing his brand as “that petty, vindictive guy who holds grudges for ages, tries to get people he doesn’t like arrested, flips out on social media to the point where even he admits that he has a problem with anger management and should stay off social media, then doesn’t stay off social media, and doxes editors who rejects him” now has trouble getting work?
Yeah. Gotta be his political opinions. Dang those liberals, huh?
Oh, nearly forgot!
10) Artificial insemination is used on the majority of commercial dairy farms. It’s quick, it’s easy, it save wear and tear, you don’t expose your livestock to a dangerous animal. If you go on and on about what a brute this scary human bull is and what a waste the male babies are and don’t even hand wave the OBVIOUS freakin’ solution, I start to think that maaaaaybe you just wanted to put in a messed-up sex scene.
There. I think I’m done.
you don’t expose your livestock to a dangerous animal.
Back in the 20s and into the early 30s, my grandfather had a dairy farm (shorthorns). With a dangerous animal. Said dangerous animal got my great-grandfather against the barn wall and stove in his chest. We still haven’t forgotten, and it’s been more than 90 years.
I was under the impression that a blacklist consists of something more than “a bunch of people in industry X don’t like this person and won’t hire them.” There would need to be some reason to believe that those people were coordinating their efforts, and that they weren’t motivated less by a sincere antipathy to that person, but rather by some organized directive to shun that person regardless of their own opinion… usually based on something that’s not part of that person’s public behavior within the actual industry, but rather something like “they were secretly in the Communist Party once” or “they were mean to my boss’s girlfriend at a party.” None of that seems to fit what Antonelli is talking about even if you take all his claims at face value.
It’s not even about whether the reasons for the antipathy are valid or not. I mean, if I had trouble finding work as an illustrator because lots of art directors were irrationally prejudiced against anyone with blue eyes, that would be bad, but no one would need a blacklist for that because everyone can easily see that I have blue eyes.
I’m sure their fans will buy it, but the Puppy anthology seems pretty much primed to be placed on the Hugo slate, huh? Except it was published January 2nd, so it will have to wait until 2018. Superversive couldn’t have gotten it out three days earlier? Once again the Puppies are defeated by failing to engage with the system they try to abuse.
Also Milo Yiannopoulos is listed as an author (or even the lead author) despite Kindle Direct’s publishing setup having a perfectly good contributor slot for ‘Foreword by’. But that might move the big name to the back of the list. I wonder how Amazon feels about that…
Re: Yiannopoulos and the Alt-Right: Don’t take any stories about divisions among them seriously. They obviously are divided, if you’re defining the alt-right as everything from Puppies to Trump trolls to Neo-Nazis, but they all follow the same patterns and swarm to aid in one another’s dramas when alerted, so it makes no difference. They eat up any support by someone with status and ignore any conflicts of values, because they’re desperate for recognition.
They don’t need to have consistent values because they’re always on the attack and they train themselves to detect the ‘real enemy’. Take their side and they can pretend they’re being ‘rational and objective’ by agreeing with people they would otherwise oppose. Go against them and they’ll dig through every scrap of information about you until they discover something that they always hated you for.
@RedWombat, I’m sorry you had to reread that! There are a few Piers Anthony works that I think I might enjoy re-reading some day, but that one went into the Hell No category right away.
@Jayne – I agree he’s a Nazi apologist. Or, I guess, a neo-Nazi apologist. I’m not sure if I’d say he’s’ worse than the ideological Neo-nazis (Spencer, Beale, etc.) or just as bad, but in a slightly different way. He is a nihilist who loves tweaking people, and earnest people who are fighting for justice are easy targets, especially when many of them come from marginalized groups and have cause to fear online harassment turning into real-world harassment. I’m not trying to downplay his role, and I assume if the Alt-right/Neo-nazi movement gets itself together to form a political party, he’ll be the barely-tolerated court jester as long as he’s still worth keeping around.
I always regret rising up to CUL’s bait – his distemperate ranting calls to my urge to fight back against bullies and blowhards, and later I feel like the proverbial mud-covered pig wrestler – but I think @John Seavey’s assessment of CUL’s “blacklisting” is credible.
@Red Wombat You are braver than I am…and if anything, you made it even more clearly horrible than the horribleness (which was not inconsiderable) that I remembered. I didn’t even think about cheese…
@5: Mel again fails reading comprehension (or perhaps writes very carelessly), but I have to agree with the general assessment that this is a weak story, and I’m not seeing the author as having much effect on SF even in her own time. (Wilhelm, used last month, doesn’t get cited for classic stories, but she made quiet waves for several decades.)
@steve: your Shavian approach to PSF has appeal, but I’d worry about toxicity.
(5) Camestros, I’m pretty sure I liked La La Land more than you did, but that poster is hilarious and so is the blog post.
Anyone who liked the technical and musical aspects of La La Land but thought the story was too uplifting would be well advised to check out the director’s previous movie Whiplash, which I finally got around to seeing. Excellent performances by both leads and lots of great music, and one gigantic trigger warning because about 50% of the movie consists of extreme verbal abuse (whereas 50% consists of intense big-band jazz performances— but those are overlapping percentages, some scenes contain both at once).
@Red Wombat:
I think I love you (in a perfectly intellectual, non-creepy manner 😉 )
Yeahhhhh, I’ve read Firefly (scrubs brain with steel wool) and I think that is an accurate assessment.
@Mike Glyer: Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Rose Embolism
??? I know I sent you that link to the book list, but I don’t see it here? Am I totally missing something?
@Kip Williams: [1] A simple solution: Animate her. Hasn’t she already been animated in Lego Star Wars?
Princess Lea has also been animated in the Rebels cartoon. It was a pretty decent episode. I also think it gently mocked the “Princess Lea gets captured” trope.
@Red Wombat: I’m so sorry. On the plus side of life, there are hedgehogs.
I must admit that Again, Dangerous Visions served as porn substitute to my oh so impressionable adolescent mind.
There were several titillating stories in there (depending on your kink(s) and squick-factor).
My understanding (at the time) of one of the purposed of ADV (and its predecessor) was, in particular, to shed SF’s blue nose (aka Campbell’s secretary) and make SF more “Human” by including aspects of humanity that had heretofore been self-banned.
(Wasn’t there a story in there that starts out something like “aaaaa, first piss of the morning…” or some such?)
In reading Ellison’s intro and afterword:
…””In the Barn,” which is very much the kind of story that was being sought when DV was first conceived.”
“…it was apparent here was a man who was willing to stand toe-to-toe with all the self-styled little literary dictators…”
(in a letter to Ellison regarding revisions) …”you ask for revision not deleting the meaty portions, but intensifying them…As it stood, I did not consider it high class literature
and from Anthony’s afterword:
“this story is a true representation of a situation that exists widely in America…only one detail as been changed:one form of mammal has been substituted for another in the barn.”
Anthony is/was a vegetarian, so apparently, In the Barn was a polemic against carni-culture…(sheesh, talk about message fiction..!
(1) WWCD?
I’ve checked with a specially selected focus group of 13yr olds, and their reaction was a universal “hell yes”.
In fact, I got a 5 minute harange on how Mulan and Tiana get to be a Disney princess despite not being princesses in their movies and Leia is a real princess so she definitely should get to be one and how do they sign this petition anyway?