(1) A CELEBRATION. N. K. Jemisin and Walter Mosley will be among the participants in “A Celebration of Octavia E. Butler”, a live virtual event at Symphony Space on February 24 starting at 7 p.m. (Eastern). Tickets sold at the link.
Actors and authors come together for an evening of readings and conversation to celebrate the work of the visionary author whose Afrofuturistic feminist novels and short fiction have become even more poignant since her death. Her award-winning novels, including Parable of the Sower, Kindred, Dawn, and Wild Seed, have influenced a generation of writers. Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon) will lead a discussion with authors N. K. Jemisin (How Long ’til Black Future Month?), Walter Mosley (The Awkward Black Man), and Imani Perry (Breathe: A Letter to My Sons); and actors Yetide Badaki (American Gods) and Adepero Oduye (When They See Us) will read selections from Butler’s prolific body of work.
Audience members will be invited to join the conversation with questions for the panelists.
(2) RED PLANET CLOSEUP. EiderFox Documentaries takes the NASA footage and gives you “Mars In 4K”.
A world first. New footage from Mars rendered in stunning 4K resolution. We also talk about the cameras on board the Martian rovers and how we made the video. The cameras on board the rovers were the height of technology when the respective missions launched. A question often asked is: ‘Why don’t we actually have live video from Mars?’ Although the cameras are high quality, the rate at which the rovers can send data back to earth is the biggest challenge. Curiosity can only send data directly back to earth at 32 kilo-bits per second. Instead, when the rover can connect to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we get more favourable speeds of 2 Megabytes per second. However, this link is only available for about 8 minutes each Sol, or Martian day. As you would expect, sending HD video at these speeds would take a long long time. As nothing really moves on Mars, it makes more sense to take and send back images.
(3) WORLDCON FOLKS. Ty Schalter says he doesn’t know anything about the Worldcon, but his questions are good: “Worldcon vs. The World”. (Just the same it brings to mind a line from Field of Dreams: “Oh! You’re from the Sixties! There’s no room for you here in the future!”)
…How many of the people reading, writing, editing and publishing the state of the art in genre fiction also fly out to Worldcon every year? How many of the people who go to Worldcon every year are reading, say, FIYAH Magazine— the kind of bold, original, cutting-edge fantastic literature that’s currently earning Hugo Award nominations and wins?
I’m genuinely asking, because remember: I don’t know what I’m talking about. But from the outside, it sure looks like The SFF Community and Worldcon Folks are two pretty disparate groups of people, who don’t necessarily care for or value each other a whole lot.
I see it when SFF Twitter explodes with shock and outrage every time Worldcon steps on another rake— how did it happen again?! I see it every time Worldcon Folks are mystified that doing things the way they’ve always done them is now not just insufficient but immoral— and who are these people yelling at us, anyway?!
I see it every time I go to church.
Wait, church? Yes, at church — and in family businesses, and on non-profit boards. In Chambers of Commerce and Kiwanis clubs. In all the gray-haired, tuxedoed, former cultural revolutionaries of the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame harrumphing about letting N.W.A. in their storied institution. In every walk of life, everywhere, there are cultural and social organizations caught in an existential battle of whether to preserve their traditions or their values.
As a white guy turning 40 this year, I have an appreciation for the SFF of the 20th century and its associated Baby Boomer fans, slans, SMOFs, etc. In many ways, they’re who I grew up aspiring to be. But now that I’m grown, I can see the cultural blind spots and moral holes in the kind of let’s-just-us-smart-people-get-on-a-rocket-and-let-all-the-dumb-people-die Visions of A Better Future that still entice prominent members of the middle-aged-and-up set….
(4) HUGO DYNAMICS. Eric Flint’s Facebook comments in a discussion about Baen’s Bar include his views about the Hugo Awards and the Sad Puppies slates.
(5) AURORA AWARDS ELIGIBILITY. The Canadian Science Fiction & Fantasy Association is compiling its eligibility lists. Do you know of work that belongs there? More information at their website.
Just a quick reminder that the Aurora Award Eligibility Lists for works done by Canadians in 2020 are open and awaiting your submissions. The Eligibility Lists will close on February 28th at 11:59 EST. If you have created, published, read, or know of works or activities that should be on our lists please assist us and submit them. Help us find all the fantastic work done by Canadians in 2020! All works should be submitted to the eligibility lists on our website at www.prixaurorawards.ca
(6) BE LARRY’S GOOGLE MONKEY. Larry Correia is crowdsourcing the next step in his retaliation against the Worldcon for DisCon III disinviting Toni Weisskopf as a guest of honor. Camestros Felapton has the screencap in his post “More Larry Nonsense”. Correia’s public call says in part —
… I need examples of writers/editors/fans who WorldCon is perfectly comfortable with, and their shitty posts, tweets, memes, of things that aren’t “inclusive”. (advocating violence, shooting cops, killing Trump, celebrating Rush’s death, putting us in reeducation camps, whatever. If it makes you feel not included, I’d like to know)
If you don’t have a screen cap but are going from memory, that’s fine….
(7) HORRIBLE FAN BEHAVIOR. Examples of bad behavior in the sff community aren’t hard to come by. Harlan Ellison’s recitation of fannish awfulness, “Xenogenesis,” was probably written off the top of his head. It originated as his 1984 Westercon GoH speech. The Internet Archive has a copy in the transcript of an Asimov’s issue — https://archive.org/stream/Asimovs_v14n08_1990-08/Asimovs_v14n08_1990-08_djvu.txt
Ellison precedes his dossier of criminal acts and psychopathic behavior with this introduction:
… In biology there is a phenomenon known as xenogenesis. It is a pathological state in which the child does not resemble the parent. You may remember a fairly grisly 1975 film by my pal Larry Cohen titled It’s Alive! in which a fanged and taloned baby gnaws its way out of its mother’s womb and slaughters the attending nurses and gynecologist in the delivery room and then leaps straight up through a skylight, smashes out, and for the duration of the film crawls in and out of the frame ripping people’s throats.
Its natural father is a CPA or something similar. Most CPA’s do not, other than symbolically, have fangs and talons. Xenogenesis.
In the subculture of science fiction literature and its umbilically attached aficionados, we have the manifestation of a symbiotic relationship in which the behavior of the children, that is, the fans, does not resemble the noble ideals set forth in the writings and pronouncements of the parents, the writers. For all its apocalyptic doomsaying, its frequent pointing with alarm, its gardyloos of caution, the literature of imagination has ever and always promoted an ethic of good manners and kindness via its viewpoint characters.
The ones we are asked to relate to, in sf and fantasy, the ones we are urged to see as the Good Folks, are usually the ones who say excuse me and thank you, ma’am.
The most efficient narrative shorthand to explain why a particular character is the one struck by cosmic lightning or masticated by some nameless Lovecraftian horror is to paint that character as rude, insensitive, paralogical or slovenly.
Through this free-floating auctorial trope, the canon has promulgated as salutary an image of mannerliness, rectitude and humanism. The smart alecks, slugs, slimeworts and snipers of the universe in these fables unfailingly reap a terrible comeuppance.
That is the attitude of the parents, for the most part.
Yet the children of this ongoing education, the fans who incorporate the canon as a significant part of their world-view, frequently demonstrate a cruelty that would, in the fiction, bring them a reward of Job-like awfulness….
(8) WHO KNEW? Science Sensei regales fans with “40 Times Science Fiction Was Wrong About Predicted Future Events”. Connie Willis’ emcee routines about sf predictions are much funnier, admittedly.
… No matter how accurate some writers are about the future, they are victims of the time they live in. It’s not Verne’s fault that he wrote his books in the 1800s and lacked the knowledge we have today. Yet this is what happens when you write about the future. Those future people can look back to see how accurate you were. Verne is one of many amazing writers who were both right and wrong about his future predictions. Yet some were completely wrong, and this involves far more than books. That is what our article is about, the science fiction out there that ended up getting the future very wrong. Enjoy!
25. Back to the Future Part II (Food Hydrators In 2015)
The original Back to the Future, starring Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox came out in 1985. The movies were all released within 5 years in real-time but they had to always return to the year of the original film, 1985. Instead of the past, the second film focused on the future
In this film, we see a Future 2015, where they have an entire world we almost wish was real. One of the impressive futuristic inventions in the film was a Food Hydrator by Black & Decker. Any food you wanted could be made with it, cooked quickly and ready to go in seconds. We never saw this in 2015, and we’re still upset about it!
(9) THAT JOB IS HELLA HARD. David Gerrold comments on “What Would It Take to Actually Settle an Alien World?” and his writing generally in a new installment of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast at WIRED.
David Gerrold is the author of dozens of science fiction books, including The Martian Child and The Man Who Folded Himself. His new novel Hella, about a low-gravity planet inhabited by dinosaur-like aliens, was inspired by the 2011 TV series Terra Nova.
“The worldbuilding that they did was very interesting, very exciting, but because I was frustrated that they didn’t go in the direction I wanted to go, I was thinking, ‘Let me do a story where I can actually tackle the worldbuilding problems,’” Gerrold says in Episode 454 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
Hella goes into enormous detail about the logistics of settling an alien world, and grapples with questions like: Would it be safe for us to eat alien proteins? Would it be safe for us to breathe alien germs? What effect would plants and animals from Earth have on an alien ecology? It’s a far cry from many science fiction stories which assume that alien planets would be pretty much like Earth. “My theory is that there are no Earthlike planets, there’s just lazy writers,” Gerrold says….
(10) THE WORLD SF MAKES. Sherryl Vint’s Science Fiction is being released by MIT Press this month.
Summary
How science fiction has been a tool for understanding and living through rapid technological change.
…After a brief overview of the genre’s origins, science fiction authority Sherryl Vint considers how and why contemporary science fiction is changing. She explores anxieties in current science fiction over such key sites of technological innovation as artificial intelligence, genomic research and commodified biomedicine, and climate change. Connecting science fiction with speculative design and futurology in the corporate world, she argues that science fiction does not merely reflect these trends, but has a role in directing them.
(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
- February 20, 1955 — On this day in 1955, Tarantula premiered. It was produced by William Alland, directed by Jack Arnold. It stars John Agar, Mara Corday, and Leo G. Carroll. The screenplay by Robert M. Fresco and Martin Berkeley was based on a story by Arnold, which was in turn was based on by Fresco’s script for the Science Fiction Theatre “No Food for Thought” episode which was also directed by Arnold. It was a box office success earning more than a million dollars in its first month of release. Critics at the time liked it and even current audiences at Rotten Tomatoes gives at a sterling 92% rating. You can watch it here. (CE)
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
- Born February 20, 1925 — Robert Altman. I’m going to argue that his very first film in 1947, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, based off the James Thurber short story of the same name, is genre given its premise. Some twenty five years later Images was a full-blown horror film. And of course Popeye is pure comic literature at its very best. (Died 2006.) (CE)
- Born February 20, 1926 — Richard Matheson. Best known for I Am Legend which has been adapted for the screen four times, as well as the film Somewhere In Time for which he wrote the screenplay based on his novel Bid Time Return. Seven of his novels have been adapted into films. In addition, he wrote sixteen episodes of The Twilight Zone including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and “Steel”. The former episode of course has William Shatner in it. (Died 2013.) (CE)
- Born February 20, 1926 – Pierre Boulle. For us, Planet of the Apes and eight more novels, thirty shorter stories; famous for The Bridge on the River Kwai; a dozen other novels. Knight of the Legion of Honor, Croix de Guerre, Médaille de la Resistance, earned during World War II. (Died 1994) [JH]
- Born February 20, 1926 – Ed Clinton. A score of short stories (some as Anthony More). “Idea Man” essay in the Jan 44 Diablerie. Review & Comments Editor for Rhodomagnetic Digest. (Died 2006) [JH]
- Born February 20, 1943 – Dan Goodman. Active fan in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis. Literate, articulate, wry. Edited and I believe named the Minn-StF clubzine Einblatt. For a while in The Cult, to which the Fancyclopedia III article hardly does justice, but see Hamlet Act II scene 2 (Folger Shakespeare line 555). In Lofgeornost at least as recently as 2014. A story in Tales of the Unanticipated. A note by me here. (Died 2020) [JH]
- Born February 20, 1943 – Suford Lewis, F.N., age 78. Active in the LASFS (L.A. Science Fantasy Soc.); then NESFA (New England SF Ass’n): a Founding Fellow (service; first year’s Fellow of NESFA awards, 1976), President, chaired Boskone 10, co-chaired B44, edited six Bujold books for NESFA Press, also the excellent Noreascon Two Memory Book (post-con; 38th Worldcon). Ran the Retrospective-Hugo ceremony for L.A.con III (42nd), the Masquerade (our on-stage costume competition) for Noreascon Three (47th). Co-ordinated and actually brought into being Bruce Pelz’ Fantasy Showcase Tarot Deck, herself drawing Strength (! – Major Arcana VIII; a dozen-year project; see all the images and BP’s introduction here, PDF), and exhibiting all the original artwork at N2. Fan Guest of Honor at Windycon VI (with husband Tony Lewis). That ain’t the half of it. Big Heart (our highest service award). [JH]
- Born February 20, 1943 — Diana Paxson, 78. Did you know she’s a founder of the Society for Creative Anachronism? Well she is. Genre wise, she’s best known for her Westria novels, and the later books in the Avalon series, which she first co-wrote with Marion Zimmer Bradley, then – after Bradley’s death, took over sole authorship of. All of her novels are heavily colored with paganism — sometimes it works for me, sometimes it doesn’t. I like her Wodan’s Children series more than the Avalon material. (CE)
- Born February 20, 1954 — Anthony Head, 67. Perhaps best known as as Librarian and Watcher Rupert Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he also made an impressive Uther Pendragon in Merlin. He also shows up in Repo! The Genetic Operaas Nathan Wallace aka the Repo Man, in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance as Benedict, and in the awesomely great Batman: Gotham by Gaslight voicing Alfred Pennyworth. (CE)
- Born February 20, 1964 – Tracey Rolfe, age 57. Half a dozen novels, as many shorter stories. Clarion South 2004 (see her among other graduates in Andromeda Spaceways 10). “How do you deal with writer’s block?” ‘I usually take my dog out for a walk.’ [JH]
- Born February 20, 1979 — Brian James Freeman, 42. Horror author. Novels to date are Blue November Storms, This Painted Darkness and Black Fire (as James Kidman). He’s also done The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book (superbly done) which he co-authored with Bev Vincent and which is illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne. He publishes limited edition books here. (CE)
- Born February 20, 1989 – Nathália Suellen, age 32. Digital artist and commercial illustrator. A score of covers for us, but certainty is elusive at borders. Here is Above. Here is Unhinged. Here is The Gathering Dark (U.K. title). Here is Henry, the Gaoler. Here is a self-portrait. [JH]
(13) EMOTIONAL ROBOTS. On March 10, Writers Bloc presents “Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro with Westworld’s Lisa Joy”. Book purchase required for access to the livestream.
Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, seduces us with his storytelling. His novels (The Remains of the Day; Never Let Me Go; and others) draw us in and we are powerless to leave the page. His novels are deceptive–while he lulls us into his gorgeous and straightforward prose, he presents us with profound observations of human behavior, and explorations of love, duty, and identity. In his new novel, Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro introduces us to Klara, an artificial object who watches the world from her perch in a shop. She watches the comings and goings of those who enter the shop, and those who merely pass by. She hopes that someone will choose her. and that she can be loved. Magnificent.
In conversation with Lisa Joy. Lisa Joy is one of the creators and writers of the acclaimed HBO series, Westworld. A dystopic genre-bending series, Westworld explores the fraught relationship between humans and human-looking robots at an amusement park. What happens when artificial intelligence interferes with the people who employ them? What happens when artificial intelligence breaks its own boundaries and those robots start to feel, to love, to cause harm? Westworld has won countless prestigious awards.
(14) ELUSIVE APPOINTMENTS. “How some frustrated COVID-19 vaccine hunters are trying to fix a broken system” – The Seattle Times has the story.
That pretty much said it all, the other day, when a 90-year-old remarked in a Seattle Times story that the easy part of navigating our COVID-19 vaccine system was when she had to walk 6 miles through the snow to get the shot.
George Hu is only 52, but he can sympathize. When the former Microsoft developer tried to find appointments online for his 80-year-old in-laws, he was dumbfounded how primitive it all was.
“All tech people who see this setup are horrified,” Hu says.
That was my experience trying to nab a slot for my 91-year-old father. As everyone discovers, there isn’t one or a couple of places to hunt vaccine, but rather … hundreds, many with their own interfaces. I ran into one vaccine provider that was using Doodle for its vaccine appointment scheduling, another using Sign-Up Genius, another with a “don’t call us, we’ll text you back sometime” online form.
Rather than a global health emergency, it felt more like when the PTA is signing parents up for a bake sale.
“It’s whack-a-mole, except there are 300 holes,” Hu says. “And also you have no clue if the mole is ever going to pop up in any of them.”
(15) WHAT A BUNCH OF SCHIST. The headline made me click – “The missing continent it took 375 years to find” at BBC Future. Maybe your power to resist will be greater!
It took scientists 375 years to discover the eighth continent of the world, which has been hiding in plain sight all along. But mysteries still remain….
Zealandia was originally part of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which was formed about 550 million years ago and essentially lumped together all the land in the southern hemisphere. It occupied a corner on the eastern side, where it bordered several others, including half of West Antarctica and all of eastern Australia.
Then around 105 million years ago, “due to a process which we don’t completely understand yet, Zealandia started to be pulled away”, says Tulloch.
Continental crust is usually around 40km deep – significantly thicker than oceanic crust, which tends to be around 10km. As it was strained, Zealandia ended up being stretched so much that its crust now only extends 20km (12.4 miles) down. Eventually, the wafter-thin continent sank – though not quite to the level of normal oceanic crust – and disappeared under the sea.
Despite being thin and submerged, geologists know that Zealandia is a continent because of the kinds of rocks found there. Continental crust tends to be made up of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks – like granite, schist and limestone, while the ocean floor is usually just made of igneous ones such as basalt.
But there are still many unknowns. The unusual origins of the eighth continent make it particularly intriguing to geologists, and more than a little baffling. For example, it’s still not clear how Zealandia managed to stay together when it’s so thin and not disintegrate into tiny micro-continents.
Another mystery is exactly when Zealandia ended up underwater – and whether it has ever, in fact, consisted of dry land. The parts that are currently above sea level are ridges that formed as the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates crumpled together. Tulloch says opinion is split as to whether it was always submerged apart from a few small islands, or once entirely dry land….
(16) THE BUZZ. Mental Floss assures us that “Wasps Are Ridding Anne Boleyn’s Birthplace of Moth Infestation”.
…Now, however, it’s home to common clothes moths that could wreak havoc on rugs, clothing, and other vulnerable artifacts—including a rare 18th-century canopy bed and a tapestry that Catherine the Great bestowed upon the household in the 1760s. The moths have had much freer rein throughout Blickling Hall in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and periodic pest counts have proved that the population has grown considerably over the past year.
“There’s no doubt lockdown suited our resident bugs,” assistant national conservator Hilary Jarvis said in a press release. “The relative quiet, darkness, and absence of disruption from visitors and staff provided perfect conditions for larvae and adults alike from March onwards.”
To curb further spawning, the National Trust has enlisted the help of an unlikely ally: microscopic parasitoid wasps (Trichogramma evanescens). In 11 especially moth-ridden locations within the hall, staff members will plant dispensers that hold around 2400 wasps each, which will destroy moth eggs by laying their own eggs inside them. Though it seems like Blickling Hall will have simply swapped out one infestation for another, the wasps pose no threat to the upholstery or anything else—they’ll eventually die and “disappear inconspicuously into house dust,” if all goes according to plan….
(17) TENET COMMENTARY. CinemaWins tells you “Everything GREAT About Tenet!” There must have been more good stuff in there than I suspected.
- Everything GREAT About Tenet! PART 0 (Plot Breakdown):
- Everything GREAT About Tenet! PART 1:
- Everything GREAT About Tenet! PART 2:
(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Jim Henson Introduces Kermit The Frog to Dick” on YouTube is a November 1971 clip from The Dick Cavett Show with both Jim Henson and Kermit as guests where you can clearly see how Henson changed his voice to be Kermit.
[Thanks to Michael Toman, rcde, John Hertz, N., Andrew Porter, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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Schrodinger’s Kitten’s First!
(4) it reads more and more like “olphart yelling at clouds – or kids”
(11) Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel…
Is Tarantula now more famous for being featured in Science Fiction Double Feature or for being part of one of those trivia questions where you have to figure out what famous actor had an uncredited role in the film? (Answer: Clint Eastwood was a fighter pilot at the end of the film. As far as I can recall, no beauty was involved in this cinematic conclusion.)
And to tie two things together Anthony Head was also in the Rocky Horror Show.
15) That’s not exactly new news, but it is interesting to reiterate how much of “New Zealand” is indeed underwater.
4) “To every book its reader,” as we librarians say.
7) Apparently swatting predates the current era by several decades.
(12) You could argue that Robert Altman’s final film, A Prairie Home Companion is also genre, as one of the characters is The Angel of Death.
(6) BE LARRY’S GOOGLE MONKEY.
Well there you go. Fair warning, Larry is going to rock the (slate) vote.
(4) So, it would be better if we were judging stories on their politics, rather than on what we actually enjoy and consider good stories?
We’re actually acting like high school students, giving awards to the members of our clique(s)?
Granting his premise for the sake of argument, how does Lois Bujold winning prove it’s possible to overcome that cliquish bias he’s so sure is the real basis he’s not going to win a Hugo?
Matheson also wrote the great haunted house novel Hell House, which had a pretty good film adaptation as The Legend of Hell House (1973).
How many of the people who go to Worldcon every year are reading, say, FIYAH Magazine— the kind of bold, original, cutting-edge fantastic literature that’s currently earning Hugo Award nominations and wins?
Does Ty Schalter really not know who the nominators and voters for the Hugo Awards are every year?
Among numerous other work, Matheson wrote one of the better episodes of Star Trek, “The Enemy Within”.
(3) WORLDCON FOLKS. Many elder statespeople of the SFF community are on the right side of history, and many Sad Puppies were in fact clueless young runts who didn’t know a lick about the traditions they thought they were defending.
Clicking through to Schalter’s blog post, I notice that he has used a graphic almost identical to one used by Brad Torgersen.
I really, really resent Schalter blaming Worldcon for the actions of the Puppies and acting as if the Puppies were representative of Worldcon members.
I also resent Schalter claiming that Fozard’s attitudes represent all Worldcon members, which is far from the truth.
I was taught that if I had to start an essay with “The most important thing you need to know about all of this is that I don’t know what I’m talking about” that I needed to just stop right there — unless and until I first remedied that by learning what I needed to know in order to speak about something knowledgeably. 🙄
OMG, and now I’ve looked Schalter up on Twitter, where he describes himself as a “pro writer”, and by quoting J.K. Rowling as “rather cleverer than most men; mistakes correspondingly huger”.
Last I checked, pro writers do their research before publishing what they write. Well, he’s got the “mistakes” part right — too bad he hasn’t got the “clever” part right. 😐
Bonus Birthday:
Born February 20, 1988 — Robyn Rihanna Fenty, aka Rihanna, age 33. Singer, Actor. Genre roles include Petty Officer Cora Raikes in Battleship (she was one of the best things about that movie, but I admit the bar is set rather low). In the film Home, she was the voice of Gratuity “Tip” Tucci, a young girl searching for her mother in a world conquered by comically inept aliens (it was loosely based on a novel called The True Meaning of Smekday which I have not read. The movie, however, is adorable). She also played a shape-changing alien named “Bubble” in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets which I know several commenters here didn’t like, but I did.
I always had the impression that Bujold stepped away as quickly as her contract allowed. Certainly, her second and third series of books were NOT with Baen.
6) I think the evidence as described is going to be thin on the ground for Larry. Fortunately, he’s got that ‘from memory is fine’ clause to fall back on.
(4) I find it very hard to believe that there is much bias – as such – for and against book publishers in the Hugo Awards, Most people just don’t think of publishers much. They barely notice who has published a particular book – and the idea of cliques identifying with particular publishers are just daft – at least if we’re talking about significant numbers.
There are factors which will favour particular publishers – which authors they publish, their marketing reach and so on. Tor got quite a hold on the novella list by publishing far more Hugo-quality novellas than their rivals. If a publishing house puts out a lot of Hugo quality fiction and manages to get it read by Hugo voters they will do better than a publishing house that does less well at those things.
Magazines are different but I would bet that it largely comes down to the same thing. People who like a magazine will regularly read it and be more likely to pick up on stories from it than from rival magazines that they don’t read,
14) We also have had some problems with vaccination rollouts in Sweden. Every region does it their own way. In some regions, they sent instructions to the elderly on how to go online and use their electronic bank id to book an appointment, ignoring that many over 90 had neither computer, smart phone nor bank id. Thankfully they have now made it possible to book by phone.
So while the self-made solution mentioned in the article is better than what was before, it would still leave many of the most needy by the side merely by lack of connectivity.
On Schalter’s article I think he slightly clumsily make a point that is increasingly going to have to be picked up by Worldcon how can they better reflect the community doing the voting? I totally agree Worldcon seems stuck in traditions just look how many people get upset when things like Fringe show what digital technology can do
I always assumed the primary reason Eric Flint doesn’t get nominated for Hugos is that he primarily (solely?) writes the 1632 series and that just doesn’t produce Hugo-friendly stand-alone works. Maybe he’ll get a nod in Best Series eventually, now that that’s a thing.
(3) If I understood the blogpost right, he sees a split beetween the organisers and the fans, which okay, shrug. Yes, the Hugos are our most important award, because people have decieded that they are. (For good reasons) Could another award become more important, of course. (And I do of course pay attention to the Nebula, the IGNYTES had a good start) Conclusion: Meh on that one, more research would have made this perhaps more worthwile.
(4) I am not that much against it then most. There is somethink that is right there. Not every work is created equal, everyone has biases what they read and what not. And Eric Flint is probably right, that he won’t win a Hugo, because he is mostly written book after book in a series. And I have the strong suspicion that if you series doesn’t catch on, early, it is harder to win a Hugo for it. (Can be different if it can work as standalone, but I have not read enough of his series to answer that question)
If I should judge a book number 10+ from a series for the Hugo, it has a worse chance than other works, book 2 is no problem, I probably will read book 1 first.
Bias is a strong word but we all choose what we pick up, and everyone knows that some works fall through the radar.
A theory of mine, their are 2 qualities that a work needs to be nominated: Quality and visability, aka enough People have to know it is there.
I fully admite that the puppys archenemy Tor is more on my radar than Bean.
The marketting of Bean doesn’t reach me, Tor.com is a site I regulary visit.
Eric Flint has written quite a bit outside the 1632/Ring of Fire series, though nothing that strikes me as a potential Hugo contender.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Flint_bibliography
Meredith: I always assumed the primary reason Eric Flint doesn’t get nominated for Hugos is that he primarily (solely?) writes the 1632 series and that just doesn’t produce Hugo-friendly stand-alone works.
Flint has a bunch of works in ISFDB going back to 1998. A lot of them are in the 1632 universe, but there are a fair number in various other series, too. The one thing that the vast majority of them have in common is that they are collaborations with at least one other person. Omitting anthologies and omnibuses, a rough tally of the novels in ISFDB shows 74 are collaborations with 21 other people, and only 11 are credited solely to Flint. (The more astute among you will have realized that’s an average of 3.7 novels a year for the last 23 years. These aren’t exactly works of high art.) He’s got a few dozen short fiction credits, but most of them are collaborations, too.
I’ve read 1 of the sole-credit novels and 2 of the collaborative novels. My impression is that they are competent and workmanlike, but not particularly exceptional. The reality is that when the vast majority of his works are collaborations with numerous different people, it’s hard to say what part of that is distinctly Flint. It’s really extruded science fiction product (if you liked X, here’s a bunch more of the same, familiar and predictable). And that is not what generally gets award recognition.
But that “if you liked X, here’s a bunch more of the same, familiar and predictable” is really Baen’s stock-in-trade. It gets them a lot of long-term customers who are looking for more of what they already read and liked. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a perfectly fine business model — but you can hardly complain when those works are not what get award recognition, because what mostly gets award recognition are works which are innovative, unique, or unusual in some way.
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What harm would be done to the Worldcon community by pointing out when people are doing criminal things in it? The rational response to such is to be grateful for the chance to clean up and to fire the wrongdoers into the sun.
I mean, that’s what a caring, compassionate community does.
(Although the list of crimes to look for is a mixed bag. I know plenty of people who expressed relief – although not “celebrating” to be sure – when Rush Limbaugh died. The rest of it though? Yee-ikes, yeah, I would cheerfully remove anyone who advocated for such from my community. What’s wrong with people that they wouldn’t?)
(12) I would add Brewster McCloud to Altman’s genre work. Sally Kellerman plays a fallen angel in that film. It’s an odd film, but one of my favorites.
And I had no idea he had a cameo in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
JJ says But that “if you liked X, here’s a bunch more of the same, familiar and predictable” is really Baen’s stock-in-trade. It gets them a lot of long-term customers who are looking for more of what they already read and liked. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a perfectly fine business model — but you can hardly complain when those works are not what get award recognition, because what mostly gets award recognition are works which are innovative, unique, or unusual in some way.
What’s really going on is that the number of hardcore Baen readers is lot smaller than the number of genre readers in general and it seems obvious that they don’t take part in the Hugo process in any meaningful manner. So Flint can’t get nominated if Baen fans don’t take part in the Hugo process.
And I agree with JJ that Baen works generally are not innovative, unique, or unusual in their content. Much of it is politically retrograde as well.
The 1632 books would be an eminently reasonable Best Series nomination. I’ve read a few and enjoyed them, but lost the plot quite literally at the point they were releasing a book every three months and the trading order became obscure. Some entirely jolly, some terribly dull.
Book seventeen of a series doesn’t stand a hope in Best Novel though.
[11] Tarantula is famous in some circles because their primitive special effects never got scaling right. As I recall, depending on the shot, the titular arachnid varies from the size of a moving van to the size of a house, sometimes within the same scene.
Being published by Tor or Orbit wouldn’t significantly improve Eric Flint’s chance of winning a Hugo. Writing the sort of novel that does win a Hugo would greatly improve his chances of being published by Tor or Orbit.
Paul King says Being published by Tor or Orbit wouldn’t significantly improve Eric Flint’s chance of winning a Hugo. Writing the sort of novel that does win a Hugo would greatly improve his chances of being published by Tor or Orbit.
However if he was published on those Houses, he’d need to be a better writer than he is now as they have much higher standards than Baen has.
With the 1632 series, Eric Flint has monetised fanfic, which does increase productivity, but also means that the quality is rather uneven. IMHO, that would get in the way of a successful run at Best Series.
stewart says With the 1632 series, Eric Flint has monetised fanfic, which does increase productivity, but also means that the quality is rather uneven. IMHO, that would get in the way of a successful run at Best Series.
I’ve not looked at I’m thinking of nominating but this isn’t on the list.
I thought Eric Flint made a lot of interesting points in the Hugo debate that I hadn’t seen before.
The collaborative nature of the 1632 project would make it a worthy potential nomination for a Best Related Work someday. It can’t be precisely described as fan fiction, since it’s a path for making authorized and compensated contributions to the official canon of the 1632 universe, but it scratches the same itch.
Here’s an article on Grantville Gazette that explains more about the effort and mentions a few other times authors encouraged fans to contribute stories — Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover and FanDemonium’s Stargate novels.
All of the 1632 project’s work was being done on Baen’s Bar, to my understanding, so those subforums being offline has to be throwing a monkey wrench into their plans.
I don’t think there is any kind of logical explanation for who gets the Hugo, there are many more great stories than award slots, and there is an element of luck in what gets noticed.
Also, never say never, two years ago I would have put Martha Wells in the no Hugo category since she had been writing for decades already, but then things changed.
Flint’s attitude is a good one, write what you want and don’t worry about awards.
Larry Correia has been saying for years that the Worldcon community would purge all conservatives and then begin to eat our own. I guess that didn’t happen, since he now needs to make a lazyweb request for people to tell him the liberals who should be eaten.
Jason Sanford has a new Twitter thread responding to critics of his report. He writes:
His thread links to one of my comments here. I applaud his discernment.
@Michael J. Lowrey: [11] Tarantula is famous in some circles because their primitive special effects never got scaling right. As I recall, depending on the shot, the titular arachnid varies from the size of a moving van to the size of a house, sometimes within the same scene.
So just like the mosasaur in Jurassic World, which varies in size by about a factor of six depending on the scene.
rcade says Larry Correia has been saying for years that the Worldcon community would purge all conservatives and then begin to eat our own. I guess that didn’t happen, since he now needs to make a lazyweb request for people to tell him the liberals who should be eaten.
Of course, Corrieia isn’t really a conservative, is he? He’s a reactionary that wants to tear apart social systems in the most destructive manner possible. Heinlein was a conservative of the small l libertarian bent but I doubt he’d recognise the present-day Republican Party or want anything to do with it.
@rcade:
Not as of now. I can only imagine that he had been hounded off Twitter as well.
In the last minute I saw the thread deleted and available and deleted and available again. Maybe when you unprotect your account on Twitter it takes time to propagate to all of its servers. I think it’s still online.
Maybe he rewrote the tweet you linked. This one worked for me:
https://twitter.com/jasonsanford/status/1363504731163877376
One of my most radical thoughts is that John Scalzi is actually a very successful Baen-style writer, except he doesn’t work inside the publisher’s ideological and moral sphere. That’s why the Baen crowd hates him so.
(12) As a bit actor cast as “Man Drinking”, Robert Altman was definitely the creative driving force behind “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
6) I’ll save Larry the trouble—in recent days, I said that we could raise tons of money for Texas if Ted Cruz would offer to be punched out on live TV. (Hmm, although I did say Cruz would have to offer, so I guess that may not count? That one may go to the judges.)
I’ve also definitely said that you should always punch Nazis, and I’m sure I’ve had lengthy discussions on whether eating the rich is going to lead to health issues and mulching the rich might be better from an epidemiological standpoint. I have also expressed a desire that various politicians be eaten by weasels, and have been deeply, deeply sarcastic when various police departments exhibit beans and milkshakes as tools of terrorism by antifa.
(How do we class threads on hypothetical body disposal? I always pop up to suggest hog waste lagoons, on the grounds that if they dive for the body in that, they deserve to catch me, but mostly because everybody talks about feeding bodies to pigs and it’s a cliche now. Also they don’t digest teeth. These are important concerns, people!)
In a far-off future, if a Worldcon wished to disinvite me for such content, I’ll go quietly. I said it, I own it, I’ll probably say it again, and if their values diverge strongly from mine, they certainly don’t owe me a guest spot. Heck, I’ll probably even tell my fans to stand down and chill and they’re not helping me by yelling at the concom.
Unless it’s over the always punch Nazis thing. I do have SOME standards.
write what you want and don’t worry about awards
And don’t complain when you don’t get those awards.
(12) The world has succeeded in forgetting Altman’s Quintet, possibly for good reason, but it’s the closet thing he made to a genre film.
I know I’m in the minority, but I actually enjoyed Quintet a lot when I saw it several times upon release and while a recent viewing revealed it had not aged as well as I had hoped, I still think it is an underated movie.
Altman’s 1967 film “Countdown” could also be considered genre.
I go back and forth on whether I celebrate Rush Limbaugh’s death (“Yay, someone who was actively and deliberately spewing poison and making the world a worse place will no longer be able to do so!”) or mourn his life (“He could have done so much good in the world with that platform, power, and talent. He chose instead to do unmitigated damage to the country and body politic. On purpose. That’s a tragedy.”) — but someone who celebrates his life, praises his deeds, and mourns that he is no longer around to do them any longer? That tells me something about what they value, and nothing good, Larry C.
(7) There’s only so much Ellison I can handle at any one time, but I did manage to make it to the bit where he brags about impersonating a police officer in order to stalk somebody.