(1) ANTI-TROLL SPRAY. Mary Robinette Kowal, President, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, issued a “SFWA Statement from the President on Goodreads” at the SFWA Blog.
…As some of you may be aware, over the course of several weeks, trolls created dozens of false accounts as part of a harassment campaign against some writers. We reached out to Goodreads to ask for assistance in stopping those attacks and they were, thankfully, responsive. Goodreads was as committed to solving this as SFWA was. If readers lose their faith with the site because of false reviews, that’s a problem for all of us.
During the course of the conversation, we shared with them some ideas that they might use to block this form of targetting. They are working on implementing some of those, although I hope you’ll understand that we won’t be able to share the details of those particular efforts….
There are also some existing tools on Goodreads that were not immediately apparent. We offered to highlight those to our members while Goodreads puts the other measures into place.
Flagging reviews – Goodreads does not allow Ad Hominem reviews or attacks on an author. They made it clear to us that when reviews become about the author, not about the book, authors are able to flag uses of harmful language or when the intent is to harm the person, not to review the book. If an author is receiving an avalanche of those, they may send a link to [email protected] or send a link via Goodreads’ contact form.
Reporting entire accounts – Sometimes, a single actor will create negative reviews of an author’s entire body of work. In those cases, any author may send a link to [email protected].
(2) RIPPED BODICE. Since Courtney Milan is one of them, the Scroll will report all the winners of the inaugural Ripped Bodice Awards for Excellence in Romantic Fiction. The award was launched last year by Leah and Bea Koch, co-owners of the Ripped Bodice bookstore in Culver City, Calif., and is sponsored by Sony Pictures Television. Chosen by a panel of industry experts, each honoree receives $1,000 plus a $100 donation to the charity of their choice.
The winning titles are:
- Xeni by Rebekah Weatherspoon
- Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan
- Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert
- A Prince on Paper by Alyssa Cole
- One Ghosted, Twice Shy by Alyssa Cole
- An Unconditional Freedom by Alyssa Cole
- American Love Story by Adriana Herrera
- Trashed by Mia Hopkins
- The Austen Playbook by Lucy Parker
(3) PRACTICE OR MALPRACTICE? The Guardian ponders “The diehards of doom! Why Doctor Who is the show fans love to hate “
If Doctor Who seems like a show that has been disappointing its devotees for 56 years and counting, perhaps that is to be expected. After all, no other TV series in history has shown such a wilful disregard for anything approaching a house style, happily pressing the re-set button every week and leaping between planets and time zones, comedy and tragedy, psychodrama and space opera.
(4) FREE READ. Tor.com has published one of the stories that will be included in Ken Liu’s upcoming collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories: “Read Ken Liu’s ‘Staying Behind’ From the New Collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories”. It’s not a new story, but it may not have been freely available before.
(5) BOOT TO THE FUTURE. BBC discovers “Back To The Future is being rebooted – on stage, not on screen”.
More people want a new Back to the Future film than want a new instalment in any other franchise. But one of its creators says doing another movie would be like “selling your kids into prostitution” – so it’s been rebooted as a stage musical instead.
Walking though the Manchester Opera House foyer a week before the first performance of Back to the Future: The Musical means picking your way through piles of props and kit that are waiting to be slotted into place before opening night.
A skateboard and some of the Doc’s scientific equipment are lying around, and a crew member walks past carrying what look like dancers’ 1950s dresses. The components of the Doc’s nuclear-powered flux capacitor are probably spread around somewhere.
…Thursday’s first performance will mark the end of a 12-year journey to bring one of the best-loved films to the stage. Another journey will start – the show is set to go to the West End after Manchester, and then perhaps Broadway.
“It’s the same story of the movie,” says Bob Gale, who has scripted the stage show and co-wrote the movies. “But there are things that you can do and can’t do on stage that differ from cinema.”
So in the show, Marty plays more music, and new songs take us deeper into the characters’ emotions and back stories. But some of the action (like the skateboard chase and the gun-toting Libyan terrorists) has been changed. And, sadly, there’s no Einstein the dog.
“Lots of people were clamouring, ‘Why don’t you guys do Back to the Future part 4? Why don’t you do a reboot of Back to the Future?'” Gale says.
‘The wrong thing to do’
But he and Robert Zemeckis, director and co-writer of the three films, had it written into their contracts with Universal that no new film could be made without their say so. Studio bosses have tried their best to persuade them.
…”We don’t want to ruin anybody’s childhood, and doing a musical was the perfect way to give the public more Back to the Future without messing up what has gone before.”
(6) DUNCANN OBIT. Geraldine Duncann died February 2 at the age of 82, her daughter Leilehua reported on Facebook. Duncann announced to FB readers in January that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Astrid Bear described Duncann in these terms:
As Mistress Geraldine of Toad Hall, she was a major force in the Society for Creative Anachronism from its very early days, excelling in all she tried, whether cooking, sewing, embroidery, pottery, singing, writing, or anything else. Her generosity, wit, intelligence, and zest for life were wonderful.
Her memorial/celebration of life will be on her birthdate, May 9, at the Golden Gate Bridge and include a Bridge Walk. Details will be posted on her FaceBook page and her Questing Feast Patreon blog.
(7) SHRAPNEL OBIT. [Item by Steve Green.] John Shrapnel (1942-2020): British actor, died February 14, aged 77. Genre appearances include Space: 1999 (one episode, 1975), Fatherland (1994), Invasion: Earth (three episodes, 1998), Spine Chillers (one episode, 2003), Alien Autopsy (2006), Apparitions (five episodes, 2008), Mirrors (2008), The Awakening (2011), Merlin (one episode, 2012), Macbeth (2013), Hamlet (2015).
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- February 15, 1955 — Captain Midnight aired “Saboteurs Of The Sky”. Captain Midnight began September 9, 1954, on CBS, continuing for thirty-nine episodes until January 21, 1956. This was the twenty-fifth episode of the program’s first season. Captain Midnight itself started as a serial film, became this show, and later was both a syndicated newspaper strip and a radio show. The series starred Richard Webb who was not the actor of the Captain Midnight role , Robert O’Brien, from the film serial. (Two actors, Sid Melton and Olan Soule, were retained from the serial.) When the TV series went into syndication in 1958 via Telescreen Advertising, several changes happened. First a change in advertisers happened as Ovaltine was no longer involved. More importantly Wander Company owned all rights to use of Captain Midnight which meant that Screen Gems had to change Captain Midnight to Jet Jackson, Flying Commando, and all references in the episodes to Captain Midnight to Jet Jackson, Flying Commando, both text and sound wise. You can watch this episode here.
- February 19, 1978 — The Project U.F.O. pilot: “Sighting 4001: The Washington D.C. Incident” first aired on NBC. It was created. by that Jack Webb Harold Jack Bloom, was based rather loosely on the real-life Project Blue Book. It starred William Jordan, Caskey Swaim and Edward Winter. Most of the UFOs were by Brick Price Movie Miniatures that were cobbled together from the usual model kits. You can see the pilot here.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born February 19, 1893 — Sir Cedric Webster Hardwicke. His first SFF role was a plum one — in 1937‘s Solomon’s Mines as Allan Quatermain. He’s been in a lot of genre films: On Borrowed Time, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Invisible Man Returns, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The War of the Worlds (the voice doing providing commentary). (Died 1964.)
- Born February 19, 1912 — Walter Gillings. UK fan. He edited Scientifiction, a short lived but historic fanzine. Shortly thereafter he edited Tales of Wonder, regarded as the first UK SF zine. Clarke made his pro debut here. He’d edited a number of other genre zines later on, and ISFDB lists him as having two genre stories to his credit whereas Wiki claims he has three. (Died 1979.)
- Born February 19, 1930 — John Frankenheimer. Depending on how widely you stretch the definition of genre, you can consider his first SFF film as director to be Seven Days in May. Certainly, The Island of Dr. Moreau is genre as is Prophecy and Seconds. He also directed an episode of Tales from The Crypt, “Maniac at Large”, and directed Startime’s “Turn of The Screw” with Ingrid Bergman in the lead role off the Henry James ghost story of that name. (Died 2002.)
- Born February 19, 1937 — Lee Harding, 83. He was among the founding members of the Melbourne Science Fiction Club along with Bertram Chandler. He won Ditmar Awards for Dancing Gerontius and Fallen Spaceman. In the Oughts, the Australian Science Fiction Foundation would give him the Chandler Award in gratitude for his life’s work. It does not appear that any of his work is available fir the usual digital sources.
- Born February 19, 1937 — Terry Carr. Well-known and loved fan, author, editor, and writing instructor. I usually don’t list awards both won and nominated for but his are damned impressed so I will. He was nominated five times for Hugos for Best Fanzine (1959–1961, 1967–1968), winning in 1959, was nominated three times for Best Fan Writer (1971–1973), winning in 1973, and he was Fan Guest of Honor at ConFederation in 1986. Wow. He worked at Ace Books before going freelance where he edited an original story anthology series called Universe, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies that ran from 1972 until his early death in 1987. Back to awards again. He was nominated for the Hugo for Best Editor thirteen times (1973–1975, 1977–1979, 1981–1987), winning twice (1985 and 1987). His win in 1985 was the first time a freelance editor had won. Wow indeed. Novelist as well. Just three novels but all are still in print today though I don’t think his collections are and none of his anthologies seem to be currently either. A final note. An original anthology of science fiction, Terry’s Universe, was published the year after his death with all proceeds to his widow. (Died 1987.)
- Born February 19, 1944 — Donald F. Glut, 76. He’s best known for writing the novelization of the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back. I’m more fascinated that from the early Fifties to the late Sixties, he made a total of forty-one amateur films including a number of unauthorized adaptations of such characters as Superman, The Spirit and Spider-Man. Epoch Cinema released a two-DVD set of all of his amateur films titled I Was A Teenage Moviemaker.
- Born February 19, 1963 — Laurell K. Hamilton, 57. She is best known as the author of two series of stories. One is the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter of which I’ll confess I’ve read but one or two novels, the other is the Merry Gentry series which held my interest longer but which I lost in somewhere around the sixth or seventh novel when the sex became really repetitive.
- Born February 19, 1964 — Jonathan Lethem 56. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a weird mix of SF and detective fiction, is fantastic in more ways that I can detail briefly here. I confess that I lost track of him after that novel, so I’d be interested in hearing what y’all think of his later genre work particularly his latest, The Feral Detective.
- Born February 19, 1966 — Claude Lalumière, 54. I met him once here in Portland at a used bookstore in the SFF section. Author, book reviewer and editor who has edited numerous anthologies. Amazing writer of short dark fantasy stories collected in three volumes so far, Objects of Worship, The Door to Lost Pages and Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes. Tachyon published his latest anthology, Super Stories of Heroes & Villains.
(10) FIRST NEWBERY WON BY A GRAPHIC NOVEL. Publishers Weekly opines, “Jerry Craft’s Newbery Win Was an Unforeseeable Dream” – but it came true.
…But his reverie was broken by the phone 12 minutes later. “I picked it up and thought, ‘Please don’t let this be a credit card offer.’ Can you imagine? I would have just burst into tears.”
On the other end of the line, Newbery committee chair Krishna Grady told Craft that his graphic novel New Kid (HarperCollins) had been chosen as winner of the 2020 Newbery Medal. “Then the people in the background started screaming and then I started screaming, then I screamed more and they screamed more,” Craft said. “It was pretty amazing.” It is also historic, as New Kid is the first graphic novel to win the Newbery Medal.
New Kid introduces African-American seventh grader Jordan Banks, an aspiring artist who leaves his home in Washington Heights each morning and takes the bus to his new, private, mostly white school in the Bronx. In his sketchbook, he chronicles what it’s like for him to navigate his two different worlds, the ups and downs of middle school, and the various micro-aggressions he faces each day. The book was inspired by Craft’s own school experiences, as well as those of his two sons, and has been a hit since its release last February. Prior to ALA Midwinter, New Kid had already earned starred reviews in the major review journals, landed on numerous best-of lists for 2019, became a New York Times bestseller, and won the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature.
Craft was still riding high from the Newbery call when his phone rang again at 7:07 a.m. “I thought, ‘OK, that’s weird,’” Craft said. “I saw area code 215, which is Philadelphia [where ALA Midwinter was being held], and I thought, if they’re calling me up to say, ‘Hi, we thought you were Jerry Pinkney when we called earlier. Sorry about that—we hope you didn’t tell anyone,’ that would have made me cry even more.” But, of course, there was no such mix-up. The second call alerted Craft to the fact that he had also won the Coretta Scott King Author Award. “I was stunned,” he recalled, noting that he hadn’t heard any buzz, or seen anything like a mock Coretta Scott King Award poll.
(11) WHEN I’M ‘65. AGalactic Journey understandably covers a lot of space — “[February 18, 1965] OSO Exciting! (February 1965 Space Roundup)”.
Requiem for a Vanguard
Hands over hearts, folks. On February 12, NASA announced that Vanguard 1 had gone silent, and the agency was finally turning off its 108 Mhz ground transceivers, set up during the International Geophysical Year. The grapefruit-sized satellite, launched March 17, 1958, was the fourth satellite to be orbited. It had been designed as a minimum space probe and, had its rocket worked in December 1957, would have been America’s first satellite rather than its second. Nevertheless, rugged little Vanguard 1 beat all of its successors for lifespan. Sputniks and Explorers came and went. Vanguards 2 and 3 shut off long ago. Yet the grapefruit that the Naval Research Laboratory made kept going beep-beep, helping scientists on the ground measure the shape of the Earth from the wiggle and decay of Vanguard’s orbit.
(12) THE TINGLE WAY. Now that you’ve explained it, I understand!
(13) POUNDED BY YOUR CREDIT CARD. But wait! There’s all kinds of Chuck Tingle merchandise available. Like this hoodie, or this towel.
(14) FADING SCREAM. “‘The Scream’ Is Fading. New Research Reveals Why.” – the New York Times squints harder.
“The Scream” is fading. And tiny samples of paint from the 1910 version of Edvard Munch’s famous image of angst have been under the X-ray, the laser beam and even a high-powered electron microscope, as scientists have used cutting-edge technology to try to figure out why portions of the canvas that were a brilliant orangeish-yellow are now an ivory white.
Since 2012, scientists based in New York and experts at the Munch Museum in Oslo have been working on this canvas — which was stolen in 2004 and recovered two years later — to tell a story of color. But the research also provides insight into Munch and how he worked, laying out a map for conservators to prevent further change, and helping viewers and art historians understand how one of the world’s most widely recognized paintings might have originally looked….
(15) SPORTS GEEK. Expanding a writer’s horizons: “Taking on Celtics rookie Grant Williams at his favorite board game” in the Boston Globe.
If you’ve never heard of the board game Settlers of Catan, you aren’t alone.
Marcus Smart hadn’t. Neither had Kemba Walker. Nor Brad Stevens.
If you have heard of it, you’re in good company, too.
The game is a favorite of Celtics rookie Grant Williams.
Williams was introduced to Settlers of Catan — Catan, for short — when he was a sophomore on the basketball team at Tennessee. He walked in on Riley Davis, the team’s video coordinator, playing the classic strategy game with players Lucas Campbell, Brad Woodson, and Yves Pons. A self-proclaimed nerd, Williams wanted to learn.
“They’re like, ‘Oh dear, we have to teach Grant now,’ ” Williams recalled. “Next thing you know, we played and I won my first game.”
Williams was hooked. The group kept a board at the training facility, where they would play at least twice a week, as well as one in each of their dorm rooms. There also was a “road-trip board” that would travel with the team.
…The objective of the game sounds simple: Collect resources to build roads, settlements, and cities on the island of Catan. The implementation is a bit more complicated.Bear with me as I try to explain.
(16) PUCKER UP. SYFY Wire oozes enthusiasm about “Krispy Kreme’s Rick and Morty sweets”.
Krispy Kreme and Adult Swim have teamed up for a limited line of sweet R &M-inspired products, including a donut modeled after Pickle Rick. Don’t worry, though, the green pastry isn’t salty and sour like a brined cucumber. That would be nasty. Instead, it’s filled with “mouth-watering lemon crème, dipped in white choc truffle, with a white choc ‘Pickle Rick.'”
[Thanks to Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, Olav Rokne, Nina Shepardson, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer, plus a crowdsourced aspostrophe.]
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(3) Doctor Who’s first minute or so, featuring a police officer walking through the fog, were quite satisfactory, but since then, it’s just been ruined.
Learned this a few hours ago. Scott Palter has died.
http://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/February_19_2020/The_Passing_Of_RPG_Legend_Scott_Palter_
@1: I’m glad somebody has the energy to keep shoveling the mountain of Puppy poo (and like substances from other sources).
@9 (Frankenheimer): I would not consider Seven Days in May genre; it’s a political non-techno thriller, like most of Knebel’s work. (He went into other thrillers later in life, reportedly because he felt he couldn’t do anything in fiction that was both believable and stranger than Watergate.) But Frankenheimer looks like he has plenty of other credits.
@9 (Carr): as noted here on their releases, a lot of his fan writing is available from the UK TAFF site; these include some interesting fiction (e.g., “Night of the Living Oldpharts”) too faanish for the genre collections.
@Andrew: hehe.
(1) I think MRK is being very diplomatic there. The Goodreads tools available are very ineffective and if the trolling had been more subtle would have resulted in no action being taken. It took weeks and weeks of multiple people complaining for Goodreads to start speeding up the deletion of blatantly false reviews.
The independent audit of the RWA schmozzle is available https://www.rwa.org/Online/News/2020/Audit_Documents.aspx
(9) Dear God. The Terry Carr entry doesn’t even mention the Ace Science Fiction Specials, that monumental series of books from the late 1960s and a brief revival about 20 years later. Nothing mentioned in the entry even approaches the significance of that project.
@Camestros
Courtney Milan has things to say about it on her Twitter.
I just realized the licensed characters are missing from the header. When did that happen?
@Jeff Smith: Some time early last month, once that header became out of date.
Quick correction on (9), Cat: Walter Gillings died in 1979.
Clickity
7) John Shrapnel is a sad loss. It’s worth watching Space: 1999 (yes, all of it, including the second season) just to see him effortlessly out-hamming Brian Blessed in that one episode.
I bet she does! I’ve been reading through it and good grief, the combo of incompetence and malice that we all watched unfold is laid out in detail…and this is a report trying to be diplomatic and looking for ways forward.
I feel bad for the board members who voted initially to endorse the ethics complaint against Milan. The report demonstrates that they were both pressured and lied to about the findings and key facts were hidden from them. Actually it was worse than that, key facts were hidden AND the case was misrepresented with the implication that there was hidden worse evidence against Milan e.g.
‘Several Board members told Pillsbury that Mr. Suede stated that Ms. Milan’s behavior was analogous to a boss repeatedly “whipping his penis out.” ‘
In fact, there was nothing more to the complaint than the public Tweets that were already common knowledge.
(9) Jonathan Lethem’s early works are all pretty solidly SF: “Girl, In Landscape”, a very good coming of age story of a young woman on an alien planet, but it’s also The Searchers (the John Wayne film); “As She Climbed Across the Table” a so-so novel about a scientist falling in love with a black hole. There’s also “Amnesia Moon”, which is pretty forgettable.
Genre adjacent there’s “Motherless Brooklyn”, a mystery novel that I didn’t really connect with at the time but the movie looks like it might be pretty good.
One of my all time favorite novels and his best is “The Fortress of Solitude”. It’s not really genre except for a Very Specific Thing in it, but it’s very good and worth your time.
(1) Was it various sad animals that trolled good reads? Didn’t what’s his face, the guy who was boycotting Tor Books (how is that going?) try to do this years ago and got booted off the site?
(6) I was really sorry to hear about Geraldine. I knew her when I was young–she was good friends with my mom, and was one of a very few women, along with Karen Anderson, that my mom unreservedly admired! I’d lost track of her for a while, but got back in touch a few years ago through social media, and was amazed that she didn’t seem to have slowed down one bit, despite the passage of time! I know she inspired a lot of people, and even death can’t take that away from her.
(birthdays) I definitely like Jonathan Lethem. Gun, With Occasional Music was an astonishingly good first novel. As She Climbed Across the Table, Girl in Landscape, and Chronic City were excellent as well, and Motherless Brooklyn, despite not being technically genre, was an amazing read. I haven’t read his latest yet, but certainly plan to.
As for Terry Carr, another part of the story is all the writers he discovered or developed, including William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepherd, Howard Waldrop, Michael Swanwick, Jack McDevitt, Richard Kadrey, and Ted Reynolds. A group I’ll take over any collection of Campbell’s writers you want to offer! Plus, as I’m sure a lot of folks here can attest, Terry was a hell of a nice guy!
(14) That’s the start of a Doctor Who story of ever I heard one.
(1) So a semi-major social media platform (a) does complaint management via e-mail, (b) outsources consistent low-grade trolling to the SFWA?
I’m so impressed.
(11) Chuck Tingle is clearly the big winner of the Puppy Wars.
Sir Cedric Hardwicke’s last role was in a memorable Outer Limits episode titled “Form of Things Unknown,” with David McCallum and Vera Miles. It was intended to be a pilot for a new series called The Unknown, and I remember it as very spooky with tilted camera angles and lots of timepieces.
Corrective click
Test
3) Doctor Who got a review stating that it went downhill in episode 2:
https://twitter.com/GordonRidout/status/1062513713809383425
(Not completely unjustified, the intro episode is rather better than the caveman ones immediately after.)
1) Tomlinson discusses the source of the trolling here (a freely available post despite being on Patreon): https://www.patreon.com/posts/32921860
Mark Yon notes Quick correction on (9), Cat: Walter Gillings died in 1979.
Checks email. Yep that’s what it said. I’ve sent a note to OGG for him to fix it. Mistakes happens. We do a minimum of some twenty five hundred birthdays a year.
Scroll title missing its apostrophe.
Of course I meant four hundred Birthdays a year. Me and math aren’t on speaking terms most days…
Cat, your arithmetic isn’t that far off: 360-pl;us Birthdays and 8 people per – 2500 is close enough.
@jayn: For want of an apostrophe, the scroll was lost. 🙂 If I weren’t just starting my first cup o’ tea, I’d try to write the whole thing.
(15) They have done theme editions of Catan like Star Trek and Game of Thrones. Given the number of theme Monopoly games, I imagine that a Boston Celtics or NBA Catan could be done. Trading point guards for power forwards or something.
(9) February 19 is Millie Bobby Brown’s birthday. At 16, she’s likely the youngest person I’m going to find as an addition to the daily birthday list.
Also Merle Oberon’s birthday. I don’t think she had any genre work, but I’ve always thought that her name itself always was a work of fantasy.
I Scroll the Pixel Front
P J Evans says more correctly that me
Cat, your arithmetic isn’t that far off: 360-pl;us Birthdays and 8 people per – 2500 is close enough.
Yeah even correcting I got it wrong. My bad. It’s somewhat fewer than that, maybe by a quarter, as I do repeat that many from years to year, but most are fresh Birthdays.
I always start by seeing which authors have Birthdays today. If there are enough that tickle my fancy, I use them first. If not, I go into the video entertainment circles to finish off. I do have my biases and y’all know them by now.
@Camestros Felaptron: I’m not surprised Kowal is being diplomatic; she probably finds it gets more results. It’s tempting to say that the way to deal with Goodreads’s negligence is to get a bigger hammer — but that requires that a bigger hammer be available.
@Camestros Felaptron (later): I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Suede said that, but going beyond mendacity into mendacious vulgarity is positively Trumpian.
@Xtifr: that’s an interesting list, but all-male; of the two Ace editors, I would have guessed Le Guin’s first books were more up Carr’s alley, but the simple suspects don’t tell me who was editor for Rocannon’s World.
@Jack Lint: I can imagine how difficult working out the licensing details would be — but I can also see it being a (perhaps unneeded?) boost to the game.
Pterry would smile: two kids from his home area have persuaded Kellogg’s to commit to using environmentally responsible palm oil — as opposed to the unrestricted plantation spreading that’s estimate to kill 25 orangutans per day.
Jack Lint notes Also Merle Oberon’s birthday. I don’t think she had any genre work, but I’ve always thought that her name itself always was a work of fantasy.
Actually she does. She was Delari in Night in Paradise. which given she invoked the wrath of sorceress Queen Attossa is definitely fantasy. And her first film, The Lodger, was about Jack the Ripper.
Thanks for the crowdsourced apostrophe — I’ve corrected the title. Everyone appertain yourselves your favorite beverage!
@Merle Oberon: As far as I can tell from WIkepedia, the version of The Lodger she was in was the 1944 version, so not her first movie. And I don’t think Jack the Ripper is necessarily genre, but I haven’t seen this movie. I agree that Night in Paradise looks to be a fantasy.
14) On canvas, no one can see you scream!
Just read somewhere that the person on the painting is not the one screaming, they are covering their ears. Its nature thats screaming.
Yay apostrophe free title credit!
Another of Terry Carr’s fan accomplishments was his major contribution to the “Carl Brandon” hoax, in which Terry and other Bay Area fans convinced people that “Carl” was a real person and a major talent. For reasons you can find in Fancyclopedia, they decided to make “Carl” Black. Years later, this inspired the naming of the Carl Brandon Society.
http://carlbrandon.org/about/
(15) (Settlers of) Catan is 25 years old this year*. I’m never quite sure how to react to folk who treat it as though it’s some sort of radical novelty. Then again, I have tried watching basketball with no idea of the rules and that was equally baffling to me. It’s all about perspective, I guess.
*I know this because at the Saturday night of the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow, I played Magic: the Gathering, RoboRally and Settlers of Catan all for the first time; all titles that were pretty new, and I can honestly say that it changed my life.
BTW my small Twitter survey has ended. I asked if in Harry Potter, Voldemord was, at the height of his powers, ruling England, Great Britain, Europe or the World. The poll ended with Great Britain in the lead (although I suppose thats without Northern Ireland).
I never got this sense of scale from the books. He was the baddest bad wizard of all times- did he really just stay in Britain or did he try to conquer more? OTOH: How much damage can he do without Muggles noticing? And he was defeated quite easily if you think about it… but then again, what does „best dark wizard“ really mean in a world where every adult wizard can cast instakills…
I may overthink this.
Chip Hitchcock on February 20, 2020 at 9:08 am said:
Fair complaint, but I’ll still rank Carr above Campbell, who wasn’t exactly known for seeking out women either. Neither one would make my list for greatest editor of all time, though.
Rocannon’s World was Ace, so it might have been Terry, but was more likely Don Wolheim, who also gave us Cherryh (one of my very favorites).
Just finished reading: Zero Bomb by M T Hill. I don’t think it’ll make any of my ballots, but I enjoyed it enough to mention it in passing. A darkish British dystopia that’s almost but not quite cyberpunk–not enough cyber. Contains enough of the trademarked dry British humor, though, to avoid being called grimdark. An interesting take on the question of what automation will continue to do to jobs in the near future.
Oh, and speaking of themed versions of Catan, Wil Wheaton managed to get Jerri Ryan to join him to play Star Trek Catan on his YouTube series, Tabletop.
@ Peer. I got the impression that he got taken out before he could really establish himself. He was still in the gathering and consolidating power phase.
And “biggest dark wizard” wise, it wasn’t that he had more magical power than most. It was the organization he built up along with his willingness to use things like Horcruxes that other dark wizards would have thought too extreme.
Oh, I know about mistakes, Cat – usually me that makes ’em! But I thought you might want to correct.
Mark Yon says Oh, I know about mistakes, Cat – usually me that makes ’em! But I thought you might want to correct.
OGH is the only one who has the ability to edit the contents of this website. I can no more edit here than he can edit over at Support Peter Beagle which I’m the Editor of. So all I can do is bring it to his attention.
At some point, playing Settlers of Catan became “one of the rituals of my people”, i.e., something my family enjoys in common during holiday get-togethers, given that we sort of ran out of small talk decades ago. It has enough complexity to feel fresh each time, enough interaction to spur conversation, requiring only light attention to keep track of. There were a couple other games in our regular rotation but Catan held special place.
The second to last time I saw my mother, the extent of her cancer-induced dementia became obvious when she was no longer able to track the game enough to play. The last time I saw her, we played Catan in the living room beside her hospice bed, holding vigil until she stopped breathing.
Since then, there’s been an extra layer to the game, when we got together to play. Unfortunately, my father’s depression has turned board games into a locus of self-pity and paranoia and we’ve had to give them up as a family togetherness thing.
But I still love Catan.
@David Brain: Catan might or might not have been older; I know that MTG became notorious the previous year due to reports of a banner at Conadian that advertised “Wizards of the Cost” (and that was before the pricing even started to get deliberately crazy). But IMR the story treated Catan not as new but as breaking into new territory in a way very few created board games have done — especially these days, when there’s more focus on video games
@Xtifr: I was thinking about the many female authors introduced through DAW (I’m also a huge Cherryh fan) versus Terry’s debatable behavior around that time (as quoted here, e.g. in the Universe selections and in a … discussion … with Marta Randall) — but Wollheim always struck me as being a little more conventional (and published the Gor books), where Le Guin was her own kind of Wave, stepping beyond the usual boundaries of genre fiction, as Terry did with his own fiction and his anthologies. I wish someone had interviewed both of them more extensively (and more online-ly) about the Ace years.
@Heather Rose Jones: that’s a serious stack of memories to have for what most people would dismiss as “just a game”. There’s one fellow player-of-games (neither of us would call ourselves gamers) who I’ve been missing for almost 10 years; our choice was usually the Empire Builder family because it left room for conversation.