(1) ALTERNATIVE FUTURISM AT UCR. Despite everything else that’s happened to sf studies there, the sun still rose over Riverside this morning and the University of California Riverside announced new events in its continuing Alternative Futurisms Series. The series is funded by a $175,000 Sawyer Seminar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Authors Daniel José Older and Walter Mosley will speak on Wednesday, Feb. 3, followed on March 3 by a panel of award-winning authors discussing the expectations of science fiction and fantasy produced by Caribbean writers….
“Throughout 2015-2016, the Sawyer Seminar on Alternative Futurisms is helping to build bridges amongst the various zones of scholarship and creation in people-of-color futurisms and fantastical narratives,” said Nalo Hopkinson, co-organizer of the yearlong seminar, a professor of creative writing and an award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy. “Following a successful fall quarter, which included a conference, film screenings and panel discussions, the winter quarter is focusing on creators of people-of-color science fiction and fantasy.”
… “The Sawyer Seminar has brought together faculty, students and the larger community around the important question of imagining a diverse future,” said Milagros Peña, dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS). “I am proud of CHASS’s continuing commitment to science fiction studies.”
Events scheduled this month and in the spring include:
Thursday, March 3, 3:30 p.m. Interdisciplinary 1113 – Panel discussion on Caribbean science fiction and fantasy. Panelists are: with Karen Lord, an award-winning Barbadian author (“Redemption in Indigo,” “The Best of All Possible Worlds”) and research consultant; Karin Lowachee, an award-winning author (“Warchild,” “Cagebird”) who was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic; Nalo Hopkinson, award-winning author (“Midnight Robber,” “Falling in Love With Hominids”) who was born in Jamaica and teaches creative writing at UCR with a focus on the literatures of the fantastic such as science fiction, fantasy and magical realism; and Tobias Buckell, a best-selling author who grew up in Grenada and whose work (the “Xenowealth” series, “Hurricane Fever”) has been nominated for numerous awards.
Monday, April 11, 4 p.m. (location tbd) – Readings by Ted Chiang, whose work (“Tower of Babylon,” “Exhalation,” “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”) has won numerous awards; and Charles Yu, whose debut novel “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” was a runner-up for the Campbell Memorial Award.
(2) EARTHSEA OF GREEN. The Kickstarter appeal for Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin raised its target amount of $80,000 on the very first day. A total of $83,268 has been pledged by 1,164 backers as of this writing.
(3) RABID PUPPIES. Vox Day’s daily slate revelation was “Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Fan Artist”, with picks Karezoid, rgus, Matthew Callahan, Disse86, and Darkcloud013.
(4) DAY VERSUS DAVIDSON. Vox Day also reacted to Steve Davidson’s attempt to get Andy Weir to repudiate slates: “SJW attempts to block Weir nomination”.
As for why I did not recommend Mr. Weir as Best New Writer last year, it was for a very simple and straightforward reason. I had not read his novel. Unlike so many of the SJWs, I do not recommend novels I have not read, writers whose books I have not read, or artists whose work I have not seen. Those who have not brought their works to my attention have only themselves, and their publishers to blame, if I remain unfamiliar with them. I am but a mere superintelligence, I am not omniscient.
It is perhaps worth noting, again, that I do not care in the least what a writer or an artist happens to think about being recommended; die Gedanken sind frei. People can recuse themselves, publicly repudiate, or virtue-signal, or perform interpretive dance to express the depth of their feelings about Rabid Puppies. It makes no difference to me.
That being said, it appears Marc Miller is not eligible for Best New Writer despite having published his debut novel in 2015. I shall have to revisit that category at a later date.
Although it really doesn’t have any implications for the current discussion, it’s an interesting bit of trivia that Bryan Thomas Schmidt, who was on both the Sad and Rabid slates last year as a short fiction editor, was the person who edited Weir’s novel The Martian.
(5) BIGGER ISSUE. David J. Peterson argues that Puppy drama is overshadowing a really important issue – the lack of a YA Hugo.
No, to my mind the real injustice in the Hugo Awards is the lack of a separate award for YA fiction. More than anywhere else, YA is drawing new readers to science-fiction and fantasy. Yes, right now HBO’s Game of Thrones is huge, and it’s based on a very adult series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, but beyond, what else is big—and I mean big big—in SFF? A few series come to mind: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Mortal Instruments. I’m sure you can think of others (oh, duh, Twilight, whatever you think of it). All of these are very successful YA series (all by female authors, incidentally), and all of them have been made into movies that range from moderately successful, to wildly, outrageously successful. Generally, though, unless it’s world-shatteringly successful, YA novels don’t stand a chance of being nominated for a Hugo, let alone winning (of all the books listed above, only two were nominated for best novel—Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire—with the latter winning)….
Writing YA fiction is a different endeavor than writing adult fiction. There are different rules in play; a different audience to consider. It’s a different approach altogether. Different. Not better. Not worse. But different. Think of your favorite YA novel and your favorite adult novel (two that jump to mind immediately for me are Matilda and The Great Gatsby). Can you rank one over the other? I can’t. It’s not because I can’t decide which one is better: It’s because they’re not even playing by the same rules….
And that’s my point with YA and the Hugos. YA is underrepresented, but it’s not because readers are ignoring it or anything like that: It’s because it’s competing in a category it shouldn’t be. Right now, enormous YA works are grabbing new readers by the truckload and essentially delivering them into SFF fandom, but they don’t have a seat at the table. This is an issue that has been raised before, but I think the whole Sad Puppy thing has really shoved it to the side, and that, to me, is a real shame.
(6) SEEKS LOVE. Meantime, James Troughton just cuts to the chase —
Can everyone vote for me so I win a Hugo award ? I promise I'll write more 'n' better 'n' more next year if you do? THANKS. #HugoAwards
— James Troughton (@JRTroughton) February 1, 2016
(7) FINDS LOVE. Congratulations Laura Resnick on the film option offered on one of your romance novels!
The deposit has cleared, which means it’s time to announce: I’ve been offered a film option deal for my romance novel, FALLEN FROM GRACE. This means I’ve licensed the right for a filmmaker to apply for development money from (of all things) the National Film Board in South Africa (where the story would be relocated and the movie made, if it’s made). It’s a multi-stage process and may never get beyond this point (or may never get beyond the next point, “development,” etc.), but I’m still excited. I’ve had an initial approach 2-3 times before about film adaptations (though not for this book), but no one has ever before pursued it beyond the initial “are these rights available?”
(8) BLUE TWO. The New Zealand Herald reports “First Avatar sequel to start shooting in NZ this April”.
The follow-up to the blockbuster hit Avatar will start production in New Zealand this year.
Director James Cameron is set to start filming the first of three Avatar sequels in April, which are scheduled to be released one year after the other.
The first sequel was supposed to come out in cinemas later this year, but delays have forced the release date to the end of 2017.
According to My Entertainment World, the film will start shooting in California’s Manhattan Beach and New Zealand.
The website also reveals the premise for the film, saying “Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) permanently transfers his consciousness to his Na’vi avatar and begins a new life with Princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) after they defeat the human colonisers.”
(9) DRAWERS IN A MANUSCRIPT. M. Harold Page recommends a book about period costumes at Black Gate: “Pulp-era Gumshoes and Queen Victoria’s Underwear: Stitches in Time: The Story of the Clothes We Wear by Lucy Addlington”.
It puts us in the shoes (and unmentionables) of the people we read about — the Pulp-era gumshoes and flappers, the Victorian Steam Punk inventors, the swashbuckling musketeers. They all feel a bit more real when we know how they dress in the morning, how they manage the call of nature, what fashion bloopers they worry about, how their clothes force them to walk or sit.
It also helps us decode some of the nuances. For example, men’s shirts were actually regarded as underwear until well past the Victorian period. If you took off your jacket, you’d immediately don a dressing gown. To be in your shirtsleeves was to be not entirely decent. The color of your shirt reflected your class and… and it’s a rabbit hole of nuance and snobbery. You just have to read it.
(10) X-FILES. If you’re in the market for a spoiler-filled recap of the latest X-Files episode, click Mashable’s “’The X-Files’ Episode 3 was a silly hour of TV that couldn’t have been better”.
(11) TOO MUCH LAVA. Open Culture today highlighted this eight-minute animation of the destruction of Pompeii from 2013. Well worth the eight minutes.
A good disaster story never fails to fascinate — and, given that it actually happened, the story of Pompeii especially so. Buried and thus frozen in time by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, the ancient Roman town of 11,000 has provided an object of great historical interest ever since its rediscovery in 1599. Baths, houses, tools and other possessions (including plenty of wine bottles), frescoes, graffiti, an ampitheater, an aqueduct, the “Villa of the Mysteries“: Pompeii has it all, as far as the stuff of first-century Roman life goes.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 commenter of the day IanP.]
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I just read one of the stories from the new issue of The Dark, “And the Woods Are Silent” by Amber Van Dyck. Pretty interesting if you like horror. It’s about a woman, Saki, who feels she’s doomed to be like her violent, treacherous parents (depicted as shapeshifters) and about how the people who love her can’t truly understand that. It’s also about carnivory and how people deny the carnivore in themselves. Saki’s descent into violence is told in an involving stream-of-consciouss manner that I thought was well done.
Just read @redwombat’s story about That Time with Bob and the Unicorn.
Very funny and a great voice. I’d love to see more stories narrated by Doctor Williams.
ULTRAGOTHA on February 3, 2016 at 12:22 pm said:
Well, you’d need different credit cards for the memberships.
Or you could be reimbursing them — not externally obvious, short of posting “Dear Minions, your reimbursements for the memberships I asked you to buy are on their e-way.” …
@ Rev Bob
I certainly hope not. It was perhaps an awkward way of saying “The Hugo is a popular award, therefore books will tend to be nominated that are central to the preferences of the most people, as opposed to be central to the preferences of smaller groups of people, or marginal to the preferences of larger groups of people.” It doesn’t necessarily require people to think that YA shouldn’t be nominated for Best Novel for it to happen that specific YA books don’t normally attract the level of support necessary for it to happen.
@ Lace
I’m still grinning ear-to-ear about that one. (I try to be very reticent about anything that would appear like promotional postings in social spaces, but I don’t mind if other people plug me!)
Vasha on February 3, 2016 at 4:35 pm said:
I just realized that “El Tor” is rot13 backwards, sort of.
V qvqa’g guvax nobhg gur cnenyyry orgjrra Gbz naq gur rtt, ohg vg’f ng yrnfg vagrerfgvat gb guvax nobhg.
Gubz nccrnef gb vaqhpr gur rtt gb ungpu. N juvgr-srngurerq oveq rzretrf. Vg syvrf vagb gur sberfg, rvgure gb uhag be gb erghea gb snrevr.
Gubz nccrnef gb vaqhpr Gbz gb “ungpu,” fgnegvat jvgu gur jbhaq va uvf svatre gung arire urnyf. (Be vf gur jubyr guvat n zrgncube nobhg ubj puvyqera yrnea gurve cneragf nera’g vasnyyvoyr?) Ur’f vavgvnyyl gbhpurq ol fbzrguvat jvgu oynpx srnguref. Ur ehaf vagb gur sberfg, srryvat yvxr ur’f ergheavat ubzr.
Ohg jul gur urpx qbrf qlvat Gubz pbhtu hc juvgr srnguref?
Gehgushyyl, vg jnf n fgehttyr gb whfgvsl tvivat guvf fgbel guerr fgnef.
Best Saga was neither passed nor rejected by the Sasquan Business Meeting; it was referred to a committee consisting of the proposers and some others, which is to report to the MACII Business Meeting, and may propose a new version.
See page 82 of the Minutes: http://sasquan.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2015-WSFS-Minutes-Complete.pdf
Re: duplicate names in the workplace
My department has 4 of us discrepancy investigators, and when we were filling an empty position, we offered first to another Heather. She would have been sharing my office. It would have been confusing, but as it turns out, not as confusing what ended up happening. Which is that she instead took a position doing the same job title as me, not only in a different department but a different division of the company (same job site though). So instead of solving the confusion by turning around in our office chairs and saying, “I think this was meant for you” we have to run memos and documents halfway across site to each other. Oh, and my replacement computer was delivered to her desk…but that’s because her desk is the one I used to sit in when I worked in that department previously.
There are all manner of jokes about “there can be only one”. (Especially since there had been another Heather in the department when I was first hired but she left a couple months later.)
Re: Same names. You mean like me, my father Tom, my stepfather Tom, and my stepbrother Tom? Paternal grandfather was also a Thomas, but he went by his middle name (and died before I was born to boot). Side note; if you’re going to insist on naming a kid after a parent or someone who’s around a lot, at least give them a usable middle name in case they feel strongly about establishing their own named identity. In my case, since they named me exactly after my father, I was stuck with the unusable “Young” (my grandmother’s maiden name). I am willing to cut slack for not knowing in advance that giving a kid a name with both “Young” and “Junior” in it would cause playground problems when said kid turns out to be the youngest one in his school classes.
There also was at least one run at a prominent technological institute of t-shirts reading DAMMIT, standing for “Daves And Mikes @ MIT”
@Heather Rose Jones: Congrats on the great review! I read “Romance Novels for Feminists” regularly and respect the blogger. Also “The Mazarinette and the Musketeer” got a favorable short review at Tor.com.
@Tom Galloway
Just as long as you didn’t have a brother named “Thom” who turned up on a snowy winter night.
@John Seavey:
Jo Walton once posted a concise set of guidelines for coming up with proper names for fantasy fiction. The kind of common sense you don’t commonly see — simple and powerful. This post isn’t it, but looking for and finding just that took me long enough that I’m not inclined to go out seeking again.
What I’m thinking of is a phonological way of coining alien names. She picked some number of consonants to concentrate on, and a subset of vowels, and combined them into various possibles that she drew on as needed. The resulting names felt like they were all from the same world, the same language. I wish I could do justice to it, but I have stuff to do. These sunflower seeds don’t eat themselves.
When I took 2nd year Russian in college, the instructor spent a session describing the various levels of formality in Russian names (which variant you can properly use depends on your relationship with the person):
Alexander Fedorovitch
Alexander Fedorovitch
Alexander
Alexei
Alyosha
and I think there is at least one other variant I’m forgetting. One of the other students joked that there were really only 2 Brothers Karamazov.
Rats that should be
Alexander Fedorovitch [family name]
Alexander Fedorovitch
for the first two levels. Pointy brackets are sneaky.
7) I know it’s not the main point, but I get really irritated when people confuse middle grade with young adult. Harry Potter and Matilda are middle grade. Having said that, I’d rather see an award for literature for youth rather than restrict it to YA.
@Kip W,
This one?
Gah! That should have been #5. I know my kidlit, but I can’t type.
Characters who end in S: I’ve got one named “Kayliss” in my current series and I’ve frequently caught myself writing around plurals, making changes like “he grabbed Kayliss’/Kayliss’s arm” to “Kayliss was standing there, and he grabbed her by the arm.” I can’t decide whether that hanging apostrophe offends me nearly as much as three adjacent Ss so I weasel my way out to the extent possible.
Co-workers stealing my name: there aren’t a lot of people named after the moon of Pluto; I pronounce it “Sharon.” Many years ago I worked briefly as a phone operator — right alongside Cheryl, Shirley, Cherie and Sherry. I went by “Ronny” just to minimize confusion.
Fictional names: I tend to reason that characters have moms, and moms are going to call them when it’s dinnertime, so give them one to four syllable names that can be easily shouted by an impatient mom. Even if she’s the type to give her babies grandiose names she probably uses an everyday nickname that’s easy on the tongue.
@Soon Lee:
You know you got it. Bull’s-eye! I’ve bookmarked it — not on the expectation that I’ll suddenly write a fantasy novel, but every so often, I want to tell people about it. Thanks!
A few years ago, the Social Security Administration site about names had, along with the “most popular girls’/boys’ names in the last year” (for the U.S. as a whole, or any individual state), a list of the most popular names for pairs of twins. Some of them struck me as cute but harmless, like Autumn and Winter, and others sounded like “these people didn’t expect twins and didn’t want the birth certificate to just say “Baby Boy”: there were at least a dozen people that year who thought it was a good idea to have twin sons named Christopher and Christian. Also multiple pairs of Jayden and Aiden, and (separately) Jaden and Jada. Looking at that briefly made naming twin sisters “Pauline Esther” and “Esther Pauline” seem like the height of common sense.
(This may be another example of God being able to get away with things that mere mortal novelists cannot.)
Kip W on February 3, 2016 at 5:39 pm said:
Jo Walton once posted a concise set of guidelines for coming up with proper names for fantasy fiction.
A buncha (10?) years back, Analog had a feature (editorial?) on how to create alien names. I’m pretty sure it was written by editor emeritus Ben Bova, rather than then-current editor Stanley Schmidt. It included, among other things, “lopping off the first letter(s) of things.” Or maybe it was pre-pending a letter or two.
By the time I realized I wanted to write it that he’d missed the obvious example of “S’wonderful” it felt too late to bother…
“‘S Wonderful.” Jus’ sayin’.
[ducks behind sofa]
Vicki: My grandfather and great uncle, twins, were named “Lloyd” and “Floyd”. Which is exactly the same name, just spelled differently (and, in America, pronounced differently). There’s also a case in the family tree of a Willi and Villi, if I remember correctly.
The amazing thing is that Floyd wanted my mother to give my twin and me rhyming names.
@HRJ:
It just hit me with that kind of “these exceptional cases succeeded, thus no action needs to be taken” vibe.
It appears to me that many, many people dismiss any of the very real administrative concerns about how the Hugo Awards work regarding a YA Hugo Award. It gets me sufficiently frustrated to suggest that we simply add the category (with a four-year sunset-if-not-re-ratified clause) and define it as broadly as possible, with no guidance whatsoever regarding category placement, and watch how it works. We’ll then have all of these people who think it’s no big deal complaining about how works that aren’t “proper” YA ending up in the category, or maybe a work ending up in the “wrong” category, and saying variations of, “Why did you Hugo Award people make the right decision!”
People want a Strong Administrator, except when the Administrator doesn’t do what they want.
I have fewer issues with creating a new set of youth awards or maintaining a current set like the Golden Duck than trying to shoehorn a YA category into the Hugos, since there’s no easy definition that can be used to define it as separate to Best Novel – and if there’s a YA Novel, why not YA novella, novelette, short story…
Easier by far to maintain a distinction between the awards rather than set yourself up for an administrative nightmare with regard to eligibility. There’s absolutely no reason that I can think of (Kevin Standlee may disagree) that they couldn’t be given out alongside the Hugos or whatever, but that doesn’t mean they should be Hugos.
tl;dr: a not-a-hugo would just be easier.
@ Vicki Rosenzweig re: names for twins
Back in the days when I did historic name consultation for people in the SCA, we had a few canned speeches we used to try to debunk common misconceptions about medieval names, especially in contrast with names from medieval fantasy/gaming. One of them was about “meaningful” names, and had an example to the effect of, “When people named their kids things like John or Edward or Thomas, they didn’t think about what those names meant. Nobody named a twin ‘Thomas’ just because that’s what the name originally meant.”
And then I was doing some analysis of baptismal names in a 16th century parish register from Wales, and discovered that, in fact, among births identified as twins, the name “Thomas” was over-represented to a statistically significant degree. Rather amusing.
My great-grandmother was a twin: Rose and her sister Lily. (That’s where my middle name comes from.)
@Kevin Standlee
Define it as having a protagonist under 21 Earth-years of age who acts mostly without adult supervision. Require ID. 🙂
Back in high school, there was a pair of sisters, one named Jamie Lynn and the other named Lynn Jamie. The one named Jamie went by “Lynn”, and her younger sister Lynn went by “Jamie”.
(“Jamie” was one of the first girls I ever had a crush on, and would be one of the very few people I’d like to see again at a high school reunion. Alas, she was smart enough and ambitious enough to take summer classes for extra credit, graduated in three-and-a-half years, and fell into an administrative limbo where she wasn’t on any reunion committee’s list of graduates to try and contact. I expect she’s probably out there somewhere, doing something brainy and important under a married name.)
I knew a woman who named her twins Aaron and Erin.
Her vowels were impeccable, but I assume at least one of them developed a nickname early on.
(Me, I grew up in Maryland, where we didn’t really do all the vowels.
Did you guys know that pin and pen are pronounced differently?
I learned that as a adult.)
Curses to the person who gave me that Queen earworm!
Here is your punishment.
Here we read and here we post
File770 covers the most
Read the books, and rate the best
Argue brackets at Kyra’s behest.
We don’t waste no time at all
When we’re not reading, we’re feeling the call
Crack the jokes, and counter the troll
We’re just waiting for the Pixel to Scroll.
Oh every night, and every day
We’re sharing news at fandom’s café
One love none of us can conceal
We’re all enraptured by spec fic’s appeal.
Filk the songs, and play our game
Unleash the puns, the Title’s the goal
Till one day Mike tags your name
You know it’s time for the Pixel to Scroll.
Rich or poor or famous for
writing books, we all belong
(Hugo! Hugo!)
No matter what it is you like
your taste cannot be wrong
(Hugo!)
I need another line to fit this song.
So share your choices and be proud
Science fiction, fantasy, horror allowed
We’ll celebrate when Worldcon comes around
And Hugo gives out rockets and rockets and rockets
What the hell are you waiting for?
Just nominate, we don’t need to cajole
You’ve just got time to pick your faves
While you’re waiting for the Pixel to — Pixel to Scroll.
A YA Hugo? I’m against it. Should it cover just novels? But what about novellas? Short stories? What about YA books so good they should be contending for the regular Hugo? We shouldn’t shut them out of either category, which leads to the possibility of a book carrying of both the standard Hugo and the YA. It took me less than five minutes to find two YA novels that have won Hugos – one of which was so YA it was first serialized in Boy’s Life. Let’s just not go there, OK?
If you want a YA award, simply don’t call it a Hugo. A lot of problems above immediately go away.
@Blue Steve: “What about YA books so good they should be contending for the regular Hugo? We shouldn’t shut them out of either category, which leads to the possibility of a book carrying of both the standard Hugo and the YA.”
We already have precedent covering that. As I recall, if a work is nominated in multiple Hugo categories, the admins put it in one or the other. If the YA award is deemed not-a-Hugo, there’s no more problem with a book winning both than there is with it winning, say, the Hugo and Prometheus.
The question I have about the YA Hugo is how many possible new voters are already reading nominally adult works? I started reading off the general shelves at age 13 (yes, I know, horribly late), 6 years before my first convention, 8 years before my first Worldcon, and 10 years before I first voted on the Hugos. It’s not clear to me that this new category would attract new people.
Tom G says There also was at least one run at a prominent technological institute of t-shirts reading DAMMIT, standing for “Daves And Mikes @ MIT”. Didn’t there used to be an APA:David out of Mpls, just for people named David (since there were so many of them in the area)?
@Charon D., @John Seavey, @Vasha, etc.
Yup, while technically both James’s and James’ are acceptable to both linguist me and English prof me, there is still a moment of hesitation about writing either one. It does not help to know that plurals, possessives, and plural possessives are all /?z/ after /s/ and /z/ as well as after various other fricatives and affricatives, nor that a typical native speaker of English acquires this apparently complex rule for when it’s /s/, /z/, or /?z/ by the age of 3 or so. It’s a moment of visual hesitation, not auditory. I don’t hesitate with the ‘s after “Mendez” or “Rich,” but when it’s “Carlos,” I do.
APA documentation has made it even more awkward for my grad students who use APA (instead of MLA) because (1) only family names + initials are used, and (2) all gendered pronouns are avoided (even if you know the gender of a writer) unless the topic involves gender. So the writer can’t bail out on the apostrophic issue by fleeing to “his” or “hers,” leaving instead many a “their” guaranteed to irritate another % of the readership. I resolve to henceforth stick to writers w/o an “s” (Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, JRRT and GRRM, Franz Kafka, etc.) and abjure Anthony Burgess, Brian Aldiss, Charlie Stross, and Connie Wiilis along with Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. And you’re flat out, Algis Budrys!
P.S. Once had 4 students named “Amber” along with an “Ambra” out of about 25 advisees!
I’d made something similar for other purposes in Excel before. I can’t find it so I made a new one and put it here: https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/02/04/word-maker/
[Caution: the link after that one opens an Excel file – I’m confident it doesn’t have anything nasty in it because I made it and it is in macro free format but..people should still be careful opening Excel files from strange people they meet in the comment sections of blogs]
Not the same rules but same idea.
On the topic of books containing characters who share the same name I submit my favorite Wilkie Collins novel (although probably not his best– that would be The Woman in White) : Armadale.
Featuring, not two, not three but FOUR characters all named Alan Armadale. And yes, it is exactly as bonkers as it sounds. For my money, the real hero of the book is the child prostitute, murderous, drug addicted, suicidal poisoner, Lydia Gwilt. (Believe it or not there are no spoilers in that description.)
My favorite twin name combo was two boys named Hunter and Chase.
@Greg Hullender, @Vasha, I suspect I liked Tom, Thom better than both of you. I have a wide tolerance for open narratives and no clear resolution, which certainly describes this story. I have not quite three possible explanations:
Jurer guvf qvssref sebz gur fgnaqneq punatryvat fgbel vf gung Gbz vfa’g gnxra jura gur punatryvat vf yrsg. Gb pbzcyrgr gur aneengvir, gur bar ur jnf cneg bs rira orsber Gubz neevirf, ur arrqf gb tb ubzr, vagb gur sberfg, vagb gur pbyq, nyy gur jnl gb gur jbyirf.
Vs Gubz pna ungpu n qvssrerag fbeg bs oveq sebz n puvpxra’f rtt, creuncf ur pna ungpu uvzfrys vagb n urnygul puvyq, gur bar ur jnf zrnag gb or. Ohg gung pna’g unccra hagvy Gbz vf tbar, gur oynpx srngure gb Gubz’f juvgr.
Nyfb, ba lrg nabgure yriry, creuncf Gbz vf qlvat naq Gubz vf uvf perngvba, gur fvpxyl, qlvat puvyq jub uvf zbgure jrrcf bire, juvyr ur ehaf njnl gb yvir va gur sberfg. Whfg orpnhfr Gbz vf gur aneengbe qbrfa’g zrna ur’f eryvnoyr.
Back in the mists of time I used to process EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) applications for UK college students (basically, students whose parents earned under a certain threshold would be eligible to receive up to… £30? per… fornight, I think? For the purposes of their education – buying stationery, books etc that they needed, in theory) and twins used to have to send in their forms in the same envelope.
Opened an envelope one day… two applications dropped out. Surname: Lee. Forenames: Bruce and Jet.
@Rev. Bob: I can’t speak for Blue Steve but I said something very similar not so long back. My main quibble with it is that it’s an extra administrative headache on top of an already huge admin job, and one that isn’t really necessary. Another thing is that it could get contentious if an author believes they write for adults but are categorised as YA by the voters/the admin/whatever criteria ends up being used (or vice versa), which can lead to extra headaches for all involved.
Separate it out, make it not-a-Hugo and a lot of that goes away. It’s still another huge administrative task but not one that will directly affect an already monolithic one.
I posted this morning
Commented down by the tick box
Drifting I turned on up-thread
Bound for my pixel scroll
In the giving of my lies to SJWs
Puppies silenced me
Leaving no trace
I beg to leave, to read your wonderous stories
Beg to read your wonderous stories
He spoke of fans not far
For fans they were in his mind
Of fusion found on slates
Where reason captured his time
In no time at all he showed me Aristotle
In haste I quickly
Checked the box
If I was late
I’d post again, to read your wonderous stories
Had to read your wonderous stories
Reading your wonderous stories
Reading your wonderous stories
It is no lie I see deeply into the Hugos
Imagine all Hugos
You’re close
And were you there
To vote so cautiously at first
And then so loud
As he spoke my ballot climbed into the sky
I bid it to return
To read your wonderous stories
Return to read your wonderous stories
Return to read your wonderous stories
(Yes, “Wonderous Stories”)
Within myself
There are a million votes
Spilling over
Falling out into a winning slate
Feel the Puppies push me
Hear the ballots piling
See my ballot filling up
It’s my recurring dream
Within myself
A Puppies world begins
Over and over
Where the white flame of desire burns
(Crowded House, “Recurring Dream”)
*slow clap* for the Yes filk. Very ambitious!
On the other end of the same-name conundrum in fiction, there’s Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, in which the protagonist and his siblings are each named from a different letter of the alphabet, but varyingly, in that the protagonist will sometimes be called–by the 3rd person narration *and* by the supporting characters–Alan, or Adam, or Aaron, or Abraham, or what have you. It’s introduced a little clumsily at first (one rogue-A name in the midst of pages and pages of just Alan, making it look like a mistake), but then he just runs with it. Throughout, he respects the typical reader tendency to recognize character names by first initial; other than the protagonist’s family, there are no characters whose names start with A through G, at least not that I can remember.
In real-life anecdotes: When I first joined my roller derby league as a training skater, there was an overabundance of Jens. Also there was a Vicki to go with my Niki, and it’s hard to hear the difference when the trainers are shouting to us across the track. You never saw a class of skaters so grateful to adopt their derby names upon passing their minimum skills assessment. Til then, though, the joke was that if you forgot someone’s name, just yell “Jen!” and there was a good chance she’d look up.
At one point my husband worked at an office where there were entirely too many Johns. He said, “Heck with it. Call me Spike.” The nickname stuck at least through the duration of that job. (This was some years before Pratchett’s Going Postal was published, I think, so no reference intended there.)
Re: naming characters: there’s always the Seven Brides For Seven Brothers option: Adam, Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, Ephraim, Frank, and Gideon.
It’s not quite the right age bracket, or I’d suggest calling the YA award the “MacGregor” after Ellen MacGregor, the author of the Miss Pickerell series.
I’ve been trying to think of another author from way back who is primarily known for YA/Juvenile, but most of the juveniles I read when I was young were by authors better known for non-juveniles, like Heinlein and Norton.
The Appleton almost works, except that Victor Appleton (Sr. & Jr.) weren’t real people, but Stratemeyer house brands.
—
As for name’s-the-same: I once dated a woman who also went by Chris (as I do when I’m not going by X). Neither of us found it at all confusing, but I’m afraid a few of our friends did. Still, it’s something I’ve never seen in fiction. 🙂
@Laura Resnick: Let me be the 5th-to-the-somethingth-power to congratulate you!
@Soon Lee: ROFL! OMG you actually rickrolled us; well played. (bows) 😀
@redheadedfemme: LOL! I started playing the song and thinking your words over it. 😉
@Schwab Fans: Schwab is coming to a bookstore near my office! I’m probably going to finally get A Darker Shade of Magic in ebook, and try to read it before she’s there, so I can go and not worry about spoilers. I started the sample last night and liked what little I got to read before sleepytime.
THE NAME GAME:
Someone named X at our company just hired someone else also named X (not the real name, obviously), and we have 2 or 3 others already. I told the hiring manager that we were at our quota for people named X; she agreed!
Then there’s someone at my company whose last name is my first, and thanks to help desk and e-mail auto-complete and people not paying attention, occasionally she gets e-mails or a help desk ping intended for me.
Years ago, I had several friends with the same first name, so I numbered them to be silly – but it was useful when talking to one of them about another. When I stopped being friends with X #2 (trust me, for Just Cause), X #3 really wanted me to renumber him to X #2, and was a little bummed out that I wouldn’t! (Again, X isn’t the real name.) LOL, like it was a promotion or something, I think.
HUGO STUFF:
@YA Hugos: No, just no. Not everything needs its own Hugo category. Wise words by many here. I’m not really a fan of the “not a Hugo” concept, either; IMHO it has most of the same issues except a silly fiction of calling it, say, a Chavez instead of a Hugo. (The Campbell, while people make fun of its not-a-Hugo status, is a lot less silly to me, given it’s sponsored by an outside company.)
@Vasha: Having produced/sold pro work doesn’t make one not a fan. Did these “fan artists” produce non-pro work during 2015 – that’s the question. (Not that I care; I’ll happily ignore Beale’s picks for Fan Artist now, and vote them under No Award later.)
Speaking of which, I haven’t really looked into Fan Artist stuff yet. ;-(
THE NAME GAME:
When I was about 12-13 I was in a chemistry class of 15 people, four of whom were called Nick. We made a point of all sitting at the same workbench so that if the (new and inexperienced, but rather sweet) teacher looked in our direct and said “Nick, don’t do that” we could all assume it was one of the others.
Xtifr: “I’ve been trying to think of another author from way back who is primarily known for YA/Juvenile, but most of the juveniles I read when I was young were by authors better known for non-juveniles, like Heinlein and Norton.”
Well, there’s the Danny Dunn series, written by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams. Book in the series after 1960, when Abrashkin passed away from ALS, were solo works by Williams, but he kept Abrashkin’s name on the books in respect for Abrashkin’s work in developing and writing the earlier volumes.
I’ll admit, “the Abrashkin/Williams Award” would be a mouthful.
Xtifr: I’ve been trying to think of another author from way back who is primarily known for YA/Juvenile, but most of the juveniles I read when I was young were by authors better known for non-juveniles, like Heinlein and Norton.
A lot of people here have suggested Diana Wynne Jones (I’ve not read her, so I can’t weigh in on that).