Pixel Scroll 2/1/17 We Had Scrolls, We Had Fun, We Had Pixels In The Sun

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(1) TRUE GRIT. The director of Arrival has signed on make another adaptation of Dune.

Denis Villeneuve, best known for his directorial work on Arrival, Sicario and the upcoming Blade Runner sequel, is set to tackle the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s celebrated sci-fi epic, Dune.

Villeneuve was first rumored to be in the running for the role in December, but it wasn’t until yesterday the confirmation was announced. Brian Herbert, son of Frank Herbert and a celebrated science-fiction author in his own right, made the announcement on Twitter.

(2) PETER WESTON EULOGY. This month, Ansible has an extra issue — #355-1/2 — with Tom Shippey’s funeral tribute to Peter Weston. Shippey illustrates Peter’s personality with anecdotes about his business.

What powered that success was not government assistance but reason number two, Peter’s complete lack of pretence. The success of Weston Body Hardware was not based on cunning marketing or managerial tricks, it was based on Peter’s 150-page catalogue of door locks, and unlike many managers Peter knew everything about his product. He took every picture in his catalogue himself, and in each one you could tell left-hand from right-hand.

He usually had a screwdriver in his pocket as well, for removing interesting locks from derelict vehicles, and he could tell a Hillman Minx lock from a Ford Capri blindfolded. I recall one occasion in Texas, 1988, when his attention was caught by a beautifully-refurbished sports car in a car-park. He stepped smartly over to it, looked down, shook his head and remarked (to himself, not the yuppie owner who was standing proudly by), ‘How very disappointing! An Austin-Healey 3000, and all they’ve found to put on the boot is a left-over lock from a Singer Vogue!’ It sounded absolutely apocalyptic.

(3) STICKY FINGERS. Bleeding Cool has the rundown on “The New York Comic Con Organiser Barred From Attending New York Comic Con” after he looted another dealer’s display.

…Frank Patz, organiser of the neighbouring comic con, Eternalcon in Long Island, New York, attending NYCC as part of Michael Carbonaro‘s Vintage Movie Posters booth, was arrested by NYPD Special Forces on charges of grand larceny and possession of stolen goods….

It is common practice at shows for the trash at the end of the shows to be raided by some vendors to find things that other vendors have left behind. However Eaglemoss representatives told me they were still in the process of breaking down their space, and the items in question were still inside the booth, and not considered trash.

Most of the items were returned after the arrest, and the charges are pending dismissal if Patz keeps a clean record for the next six months.

…However NYCC and the Javitz Center do not seem to hold with the “innocent until proven guilty” thesis. And so while Frank Patz will have no marks on his official police record as a result of this, he and all the individuals named, have been barred from entering the Javits Center, and show organisers Reed POP have barred them for life from attending any of their events, including the New York Comic Con, C2E2, ECCC and more.

(4) NEW PRESCRIPTION. Alasdair Stuart contends “It’s Time for Doctor Who to Change Television History for the Better” at Tor.com.

A Doctor who isn’t a white man is not a destination, it’s the start of a conversation. If the character worked—and it would—that would be an unmistakable turning point in how POC and female characters are portrayed on screen. It would also empower a generation of writers and actors, crew and producers to make their own work, with their own voices—work that, in the wake of a successful Doctor Who run with a woman or a POC in the lead role, would almost certainly find itself in a far more open and welcoming production environment.

That conversation is long and complicated and years overdue. It’s one that has to include bringing more and more women and POC into the fold as scriptwriters and showrunners and directors. It’s also one that needs to be years long in order for the changes it would catalyse to take effect. Most of all, it’s simply one that needs to happen, and there is no better time than now, and no better place to start than with Doctor Who.

(5) YOUR INVITATION TO A CONSPIRACY. John Scalzi shows us the way to make lemonade after he discovers an author has fallen for Vox Day’s insinuations about his bestseller status. (I argued in 2014 that Vox’s gambit was dubious because it equally undermined Larry Correia, then his ally).

I was pointed this morning to a blog post by an author not previously of my acquaintance who was making a bit of noise about the UK cover of The Collapsing Empire; the June 2016 cover reveal of the UK cover featured the strapline “The New York Times Bestselling Series”…

A little further digging revealed that this author almost certainly got this idea from one of my usual suspects (i.e., the same poor wee racist lad whose adorable mancrush on me has gone unabated for a dozen years now), who trumpeted the strapline as evidence that Tor is planning to fake a position for me and TCE on the New York Times bestseller list. As apparently they have done with all my work, because as you know I don’t actually sell books; Tor and Tor UK and Audible and a couple dozen publishers across the planet give me lots of money strictly because I am the world’s best virtue signaller, and therefore worth propping up with byzantine schemes to fake my standing on bestseller lists, because who doesn’t like virtue.

…(P.S.: If you would actually like to see me get on the New York Times bestseller list with The Collapsing Empire — or in the UK, the Times bestseller list (that’s the Times in the UK, that is, these newspapers with the same names are confusing) — then be part of the vast conspiracy of people who pre-order the book, either from your local bookseller, or via your favorite online retailer. Sadly, my publishers don’t actually prop me up. I really do have to sell books for a living. Again: Sooooooooo unfair!)

(6) BALANCING THE BOOKS. Tolkien once was a customer of a shop now closed and auctioning off its business archives: “These boots were made for Tolkien: Ledgers from iconic Oxford shoe shop Duckers go under the hammer”.

Famous names feature in the ledgers of shoemakers Ducker & Son which are about to be offered for sale by Oxford auction house Mallams, writes Richard Lofthouse…

They range from little-known Oxford academics and wealthy undergraduates with a taste in bespoke footwear to local luminaries such Tolkien, Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh and publisher Sir Basil Blackwell (who insisted his shoes were always rubber-soled).

First World War flying ace Baron von Richthofen, European aristocratic families and several maharajahs also shopped at Duckers. More recent patrons have included Olympic rower Matthew Pinsent, comedian Rowan Atkinson, former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson and Formula One boss Eddie Jordan.

Tolkien’s first order at the start of Michaelmas term 1913 is for a pair of black rugby boots for 14s 6d, a pair of porpoise laces for 8d, and a pair of ordinary laces for 2d. He was then an undergraduate at Exeter College, just up the street from Duckers’. The year had been a landmark one for Tolkien: he had changed his course from the Classics to English literature and, on the turn of his 21st birthday, had proposed to his childhood sweetheart Edith Bratt. Standing (above) in his pale jersey in the middle of the beefy athletes of Exeter College’s Rugby and Boat Clubs in 1914, Tolkien looks rather small; but he said that what he lacked in weight, he made up by extra ferocity.

A later page shows two orders by Tolkien in the 1950s, when he was Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and shoe prices had risen considerably: he bought three pairs for around £6 apiece. Fortunately his professorial income was supplemented by royalties from The Hobbit and, by the time of the last order, The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954–5.

(7) SNAKES, IT HAD TO BE SNAKES! I am told February 1 is Serpent Day. Not sure why that precedes Groundhog Day, but there you have it.

Serpents deserve a day dedicated to them; its presence is somehow necessary, what with all of the fables and stories abound with snake-inspired situations and wise or evil serpents, that have filled our culture for as long as any of our ancestors could remember.

(8) WHO FATIGUE. Are you tired of watching Doctor Who? I’m not, but if you are, CheatSheet offers four reasons that might explain why. (More likely, you’re tired of clickbait articles like this that drag you through multiple ad-saturated screens to see the complete post.)

  1. The Doctor got meaner

Fans familiar with the progression of the Doctor are familiar with the defining personality traits of each modern doctor. Christopher Eccelston was a stripped-down version of a previously flamboyant character, beginning a walk down a decidedly grimmer path for the Doctor’s personality. David Tennant after him was kind yet stern, with sharp features to match. He always carried with him a certain guilt over the burden of being the last of the Time Lords, leading into the reactively younger and more carefree Matt Smith iteration.

Finally, we were left with Peter Capaldi, the more mature and notably older version of the Doctor. It was more than a little jarring to go from the warm, goofy demeanor of Smith to the crotchety and sometimes mean-spirited Capaldi version. This in turn made it hard to adjust for fans, leading many to jump ship mere episodes in to the latest season.

(9) TAKING FLIGHT. Nerds of a Feather rounds out its Hugo recommendations with two more posts:

Best Graphic Story, Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form, Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form

Editor – Short Form, Editor – Long Form, Professional Artist, Fan Artist, Fan Writer.

(10) FURTHER THOUGHTS. Rich Horton ranges widely in his “Hugo Nomination Thoughts: Long Fiction (and some notes on Dramatic Presentation)”. And he compliments one of JJ’s posts, too.

Best Series

Considering this brand new category reminds me of one novel that I have just read, Impersonations, by Walter Jon Williams, a new pendant to his Praxis (or Dread Empire’s Fall) series. It’s a fun story, and I’m glad I read it, but I don’t think it’s Hugo-worthy by itself. I am strongly considering nominating the entire series for a Hugo, however.

And, indeed, that hints at one of my misgivings about the Hugo for Best Series. The most recent entry in a series may not be particularly representative of the series as a whole, nor as good as the rest of the series. The same comment, obviously, applies to Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, represented in 2016 by the rather pedestrian Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. I would say personally that both Bujold’s Vorkosigan series and Williams’ Praxis book are worthy, over all, of a Best Series Hugo, but that the best time to award them that Hugo has passed. (Which, to be sure, is primarily a function of this being a brand new award.)

At any rate, I was wondering what the possible candidates for Best Series, eligible in 2016, might be, and I was delighted to find that JJ, over at File 770, had done the heavy lifting, producing this page with a good long list of potential eligible series: https://file770.com/?p=30940.

(11) TRUE LOVE. With Valentine’s Day on the calendar this month, Seattle’s MoPOP Museum has sent those on its email list a set of Fictional Flames: A Lovesick List of #MoPOPCULTURE Power Couples.

In honor of cupid’s return, here are our picks for the fictional couples who remind us why we love to fall in love.

Uhura + Spock : Star Trek – This futuristic couple showed the world how to love long and prosper.

Clark Kent + Lois Lane: Superman – The most unique story of journalistic love. Ever.

Hermione + Ron: Harry Potter – These longtime friends fell hard with no love potion required.

Buttercup + Westley: The Princess Bride – True love has never been more adventurous.

Elizabeth + Mr. Darcy: Pride and Prejudice – This enduring duo have been charming readers and viewers since 1813!

Kermit + Miss Piggy: The Muppets –  The most sensational, inspirational, celebrational muppet couple.

Gomez + Morticia: The Addams Family – “Till death do us part” takes on a whole new meaning.

Mitch + Cam: Modern Family – These loving family men are the perfect suburban couple.

Rick + Ilsa: Casablanca – This bittersweet, war-torn romance will have you reaching for the tissues.

Willow + Tara: Buffy the Vampire Slayer – The couple that slays together stays together.

Han + Leia: Star Wars – She loves him. He knows. (He loves her too.)

(12) TRIBBLES AT THE UNIVERSITY. “The Trouble With Tribbles” episode of Star Trek will be screened at UCLA in the Billy Wilder Theater on February 5 as part of the “Family Flicks Film Series.” Details about price and schedule are at the link,

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of a classic television episode from a landmark series! Watch as Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) deal with an infestation of cute, fuzzy tribbles aboard the Enterprise. Soothing to the crew and annoying to the Klingons, the furry nuisances nonetheless hold the key to a mystery on board. Trekkie suits and transporters optional!

(13) BRAND ‘EM. Rawle Nyanzi, in “Fear of a Pulp Planet”, calls it a “Pulp Revolution” —

Bloggers Jeffro Johnson — whose Appendix N book I spotlighted here — and Jon Mollison, both of whom I’m acquainted with online, have made much of the “Pulp Revolution,” a nascent literary movement intended to turn modern sci-fi and fantasy away from a perceived focus on deconstruction and embrace its heritage as a literature of the heroic and wondrous. It also seeks to bring the works of long ignored pulp authors back into the limelight.

I find “Pulp Revolution” a more appealing label than Sad Puppies, if anyone wants to know. (Like that’s going to happen….)

(14) RINGS. I still haven’t forgotten the first film in the series. This is the third.

First you watch it. Then you die. Rings hits theatres Friday!

A new chapter in the beloved RING horror franchise. A young woman becomes worried about her boyfriend when he explores a dark subculture surrounding a mysterious videotape said to kill the watcher seven days after he has viewed it. She sacrifices herself to save her boyfriend and in doing so makes a horrifying discovery: there is a “movie within the movie” that no one has ever seen before…

The film is being promoted by a pranks like this —

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Dave Langford for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Robert Whitaker Sirignano.]

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95 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/1/17 We Had Scrolls, We Had Fun, We Had Pixels In The Sun”

  2. 1) We’ll see. I’ve learned to manage expectations about movies actually getting done. Too many seem like vaporware, and endless breathless news about scripts and possible casting do not, these days, excite me. Not until things are actually being filmed.

    14) Yikes, another one. I haven’t seen the Japanese original, I did like the American original.

  5. @13 – There was a gap in publishing action SF/Horror titles that Baen has filled nicely. Baen seems to have a stable of people selling a lot of books.

  8. 13) “New Pulp” is already a subgenre/movement and I strongly suspect not all New Pulp authors will be happy to be lumped in with the latest puppy offshoot. Hell, I’ve written new pulp of sorts and I want nothing to do with puppies of any stripe.

    As for coopting actual authors from the pulp era, we have absolutely no idea how they would have felt about this. If rediscovering SFF authors makes them happy, that’s great (though I continue to wonder how Jeffro Johnson et all can consider those authors forgotten, when most works on the Appendix N list are very well known). But I don’t understand why they need to coopt dead authors for their movement.

    I also don’t understand why pulp SFF via contemporary SFF has to be an either-or question. I certainly like both and so do many others. Never mind that the puppies seem to have a rather one-dimensional picture of pulp SFF. As for pulp influence on contemporary SFF, just look at the many Lovecraft retellings and responses released over the last year.

  9. @4: a former companion also argues that it’s time for the Doctor to branch out, but says she’s not interested in the role herself.

    @3: Having just sat a trial, I am unconvinced by the story’s suggesting the thief was ill-treated; they say he was caught with the goods and returned them. What happens when he isn’t caught. (There’s also the fact that private organizations have some latitude about barring individuals for cause.)

  10. (9) Happy to see Sense8’s Christmas Special in the Long Form recs; I really loved that episode. The Mexican storyline in particular was very heartwarming.

  11. though I continue to wonder how Jeffro Johnson et all can consider those authors forgotten, when most works on the Appendix N list are very well known

    They are incredibly, invincibly ignorant.

  13. I read Emma Newman’s “After Atlas” at a rush, and I feel BETRAYED. I hoped the corporatist dystopia mystery would end with success, or at least with me feeling OK about humanity. It most emphatically did NOT.

    I now require what we fanfic fans call HHJJ: Happy Happy Joy Joy. Suggestions?

  15. Doctor Science: I now require what we fanfic fans call HHJJ: Happy Happy Joy Joy. Suggestions?

    A Closed and Common Orbit, if you haven’t read it yet?

  16. JJ:

    I suggested that the library get it, and they said they would, but it hasn’t arrived yet. *pines patiently*

    Has anyone read “We Are Legion (We Are Bob)”?

  17. The Goblin Emperor is pretty feel-good. Same with Tanith Lee’s Sung in Shadow, which manages a happy ending even thought the Romeo analog is dead and in hell a few pages before the end.

  20. (1) Because what this world needs is yet another remake of Dune. I’m so sick and tired of remakes. Look: I can understand doing an old standard a second time if the first one wan’t up to snuff. But fergoodnessakes there’s a lot of properties out there. Be bold! Be daring!

  22. @airboy

    There was a gap in publishing action SF/Horror titles that Baen has filled nicely. Baen seems to have a stable of people selling a lot of books.

    Locus just came out with their annual summary-of-the-past-year issue. It looks to me like Baen is just coasting, selling about 70-80 new books per year, year after year. Why do you believe they filled a gap? It doesn’t look (from the numbers) as though they did anything.

    Nor is it that they held their ground while others shrank. The big ones have mostly been like Baen–just drifting. The ones smaller than Baen have mostly shown big growth over the past three or four years.

  23. @Doctor Science: “Has anyone read “We Are Legion (We Are Bob)”?”

    I probably ought to… 😉

    @airboy: “There was a gap in publishing action SF/Horror titles that Baen has filled nicely.”

    Are you under the impression that this is a recent development? I was buying their Heinlein reprints when I was still in high school, and that was thirty years ago. Or are you talking about a gap that existed three decades back with the intention of bringing a historical perspective to the discussion?

  24. 4) I think one of the biggest mistakes they made with Doctor Who is make him Important and Everybody Knows It. In the old days, the problems the Doctor stumbled over were the important things, and half of The Doctor’s success came from people underestimating him, even his old enemies. But now he’s The Center of the Universe, she is more than a little tedious.

    13) It’s not REAL pulp to me, unless the stories are written by a stable of authors using the same pseudonym.

  25. (13) BRAND ‘EM

    Like others I’d argue it’s more these people discovering the existence of modern pulp and rebranding it a bit. You can discover plenty on the fantasy side just by following Black Gate, for example. It certainly exists over in horror as well although I don’t really follow that. Over in tabletop rpgs you have the Old School Renaissance that’s been going on for at least a decade. Etc.
    Hopefully some fun and entertaining work will come out of this rebranding.

    (5) YOUR INVITATION TO A CONSPIRACY

    And the offending blog post was by…?

    (1) TRUE GRIT

    If a director really wants to impress me, announce that they’re adapting one of the sequels. Extra points if it’s Chapter House Dune.

  26. DUNE; another attempt to bring it to the screen, creating anticipations followed by extensive yawning.

    The way it should be done is to take all the existing footage from the previous attempts and blend them together.

  27. The way it should be done is to take all the existing footage from the previous attempts and blend them together.

    Including Jodorowsky’s Dune (not his screenplay, the film).

  29. 13: Pulp:

    A. what IS pulp? Are we to understand the term as a substitute for “classic SF” (the beginning to, oh, 1990?), or as an extension of the term as it was first used (I know right wingers tend to be strict “reconstructionists”) which suggests that it is low-brow, slap-dash, full of purple prose and action verbs, low on intellect, written by hack writers to order (the famous “butcher paper roll in the typer) and no more adventurous than substituting a blaster for a six gun or the windswept plains for stereotyped deepest, darkest africa) OR the version of that same trope as expressed by science fiction authors, manyof whom were working in the medium but trying to write something different?

    B: why is it that this group of people who seem so hell bent on re-inhabiting the past also seem so ignorant of it? “The Pulp Revolution” started sometime in the late 70s, early 80s with reprint series like SF Rediscovery (one could also argue that Amazing Stories “led” that charge starting in the late 50s with Cohen’s endless reprint mags…) and that have extended into today’s electronic realms and are amply represented by publishers like Haffner Press, Pro Se Press, our own reprint anthology series, and many others publishing either classic works or new material in the same “style”.

    C: most of the “pulp revolution” seems to be appearing on television and in film…even movies like The Arrival, (whose base story has been praised for its modernity) revisit one of the oldest tropes in the genre, first contact (but I suppose the “revolutionaries” think of that as deconstructionist…)

    D. every freakin time someone tries to start a new literary movement in science fiction and fantasy, we re-learn a couple of lessons that do not need re-learning:
    I. authors are going to write what THEY want to write; those who value money over art will bend their talent to writing what others (say) they want to read, all the rest will continue to hew to their muse and hope that the market eventually catches up with them (not counting editorial suggestion)
    II. we discover that we didn’t need a movement to remind us that that kind of SF/F has been written for years by others who didn’t bother to attach a political movement to it
    III. the best one can hope for is that Amazon adds another sub-genre “Best Selling” list – and we’ve already got far too many of those.
    IV. New “literary movements” introduce something new, they don’t mine the past
    V. these “sub-genre” eructions take place every five years or so (remember “Mundane” SF?), they start out by telling us all what kind of SF everyone ought to be writing and then they fade because, just like you can’t tell fans what they ought to be doing (and make it stick without good reason), you can’t tell an SF/F author what to do – unless you are offering a big check, and even then….

    Let me’splain…no that would take too long. Let me sum up:

    It’s already been done. It’s pointless. It will cease being a thing after a relatively short time. It can safely be ignored.

  30. (6) If the star of The Dead Zone was a customer they could say these boots were made for Walken.

  34. @Rose Embolism: It’s not REAL pulp to me, unless the stories are written by a stable of authors using the same pseudonym. [snort] — but AFAIK that wasn’t a common practice in “the pulps” (i.e., mostly magazines); it may have been true of dime novels but reached its peak in respectable-looking hardcovers. Some pulp magazines (and later pulp publishers like Badger) in fact took the opposite approach, with a writer using many names to cover how much of the work came from one person (cf Anson MacDonald, once voted the most popular writer in ASF).

  35. Some pulp magazines (and later pulp publishers like Badger) in fact took the opposite approach, with a writer using many names to cover how much of the work came from one person (cf Anson MacDonald, once voted the most popular writer in ASF).

    George Orwell, in his famous article on ‘Boys’ Weeklys’, claimed that ‘Frank Richards’ (author of the Greyfriars stories) and ‘Martin Clifford’ (author of the St Jim’s stories) clearly could not have been the same person throughout the run of those series. Later he corrected this; not only were ‘Frank Richards’ and ‘Martin Clifford’ each a single author, they were in fact the same person.

  36. There was, of course, Ellery Queen, who was normally Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee, but could on occasion be other people, including in one case Avram Davidson.

  37. I think Bud Webster’s extensive list of pseudonyms covers a lot of this territory. I remember finding out that Leslie Charteris farmed out Saint stories to other writers, including one of my favorites, which turns out to have been by Theodore Sturgeon. (It’s in the Second Saint Omnibus, possibly the last story. I should re-read it, but as I recall, it has echoes of the Maltese Falcon running through it.)

  38. @Stoic Davidson: It’s already been done. It’s pointless.

    I can hardly wait until the Puppies discover/invent this new thing called “sex”.

    @Chip Hitchcock: if the Puppies can give ridiculously narrow definitions of SF based on the stuff they loved as children, I can do the same damn thing to pulp.

    waves cane angrily You! Allayouse guys out there, you’re Fake Pulp Writers!

  39. Camestros Felapton on February 1, 2017 at 8:45 pm said:
    (5) I hadn’t read the post of yours on the Correia/Scalzi/VD bestsellers thing before but it’s a classic.

    I had not read it before either and it was very interesting.

  40. Dune – Can that story be told in one movie? The previous movie was pretty terrible so a good remake would be welcome. But who knows if it will ever come out.

  41. @Greg & Rev. Bob – I agree that Baen grabbed a good chunk of the market that was not being filled years ago. In terms of total releases they do not seem to be growing.

    Several of their authors seem to be doing very well in terms of profitable books (Ringo, Correia, Weber, Flint, etc….) and they have a number of newer authors who also seem to be profitable.

  46. (5) Sheesh. The magnitude of their simplitude overwhelms me.

    (8) The only fatigue I have is waiting for the next season. I have enjoyed Peter Capaldi’s tenure as the doctor and, like every other doctor that has come before, am sad that he’s is leaving.

    (14) Since I’m big horror geek, I’ll probably see this, but I’m more excited about seeing The Belko Experiment in March.

  48. Here is oddly satisfying video about people trying to jump a 10-m-tower for the first time (as someone who is afraid of heights, its an nearly impossible task for me to even get up).

    Scroll you on the other side!

  49. THE RING sequence. The Japanese novels were translated, and have (in Japan) all been made into films—which turns into strange science fiction. SPRIAL and LOOP are pretty good as novels. And then there were a couple of other things–a prequel and a TV series.

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