John Hodgman
(1) HODGMAN TO PRESENT NEBULAS. SFWA has picked comedian John Hodgman to emcee the 50th Annual Nebula Awards in Chicago at the SFWA Nebula Conference on May 14.
John Hodgman is the longtime Resident Expert on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the host of the popular Judge John Hodgman Podcast. He has also appeared on Conan, The Late Late Show, @midnight, and This American Life. The Village Voice named his show Ragnarok one of the top ten stand up specials of 2013. In 2015, he toured his new show Vacationland. He has performed comedy for the President of the United States and George R.R. Martin, and discussed love and alien abduction at the TED conference.
In addition to the Nebula Awards, SFWA will present the Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, the Andre Norton Award for Outstanding Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy Book, the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award, the Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award, and the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.
(2) BYE BYE BABBAGE. Chris Garcia is mourning the withdrawal of the Babbage machine from exhibit from the Computer History Museum.
Babbage Difference Engine No 2
After eight years at the Computer History Museum (CHM), the Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 is bidding farewell and returning to its owner.
The Difference Engine No. 2 has had a wonderful home at the Museum. Our Babbage demonstrations have amazed more than 500,000 visitors, providing them with the unprecedented opportunity to see and hear the mechanical engine working—a stunning display of Victorian mechanics.
People will have to content themselves with CHM’s online Babbage exhibit.
Dave Doering said:
I figure they knew the price would one day come due for the chance to host it there for eight years. I mean, everyone today knows about “excess Babbage fees.”
(3) ASTEROID BELT AND SUSPENDERS. The government of Luxembourg announced it will be investing in the as-yet-unrealized industry of asteroid mining in “Luxembourg Hopes To Rocket To Front of Asteroid-Mining Space Race”. An NPR article says there are both technical and legal hurdles to overcome.
First, of course, there are technical challenges involved in finding promising targets, sending unmanned spacecraft to mine them and returning those resources safely to Earth.
Humans have yet to successfully collect even a proof-of-concept asteroid sample. …
The second issue is a legal one. Asteroids are governed by the Outer Space Treaty, nearly 50 years old now, which says space and space objects don’t belong to any individual nation. What that means for mining activities has never been tested in international courts because, well, nobody’s managed to mine an asteroid yet.
But there’s a fair amount of uncertainty, as Joanne Gabrynowicz, a director at the International Institute of Space Law, told NPR’s Here & Now last February.
“Anybody who wants to go to an asteroid now and extract a resource is facing a large legal open question,” she said.
The U.S. passed a law near the end of last year, the Space Act of 2015, which says American companies are permitted to harvest resources from outer space. The law asserts that extracting minerals from an extraterrestrial object isn’t a declaration of sovereignty. But it’s not clear what happens if another country passes a contradictory law, or if treaties are arranged that cover extraction of minerals from space.
Luxembourg hopes to address this issue, too, with a formal legal framework of its own — possibly constructed with international input — to ensure that those who harvest minerals can be confident that they’ll own what they bring home.
(4) WRITERS WHO THINK UP STUFF. Steven H Silver points out, “Of the authors listed in 8 Things Invented By Famous Writers at Mental Floss, Heinlein, Wolfe, Clarke, Atwood, Carroll, Dahl, and arguably Twain are SF authors.”
- THE PRINGLES CHIP MACHINE // GENE WOLFE
Prior to beginning his contributions to the science fiction genre with The Fifth Head of Cerberus in 1972, Wolfe was a mechanical engineering major who accepted a job with Procter & Gamble. During his employment, Wolfe devised a way for the unique, shingle-shaped Pringles chips to be fried and then dumped into their cylindrical packaging. (Despite his resemblance to Mr. Pringle, there is no evidence the chip mascot was based on him.)
(5) POLAR BOREALIS PREMIERES. The first issue of R. Graeme Cameron’s semipro fiction magazine Polar Borealis has been posted. Get a free copy here. Cameron explains how the magazine works:
Polar Borealis is aimed at beginning Canadian writers eager to make their first sale, with some pros to provide role models.
In Issue #1:
- Art by Jean-Pierre Normand, Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk, and Taral Wayne.
- Poems by Rissa Johnson, Eileen Kernaghan, and Rhea Rose.
- Stories by Christel Bodenbender, R. Graeme Cameron, Steve Fahnestalk, Karl Johanson, Rissa Johnson, Kelly Ng, Craig Russell, Robert J. Sawyer, T.G. Shepherd, Casey June Wolf, and Flora Jo Zenthoefer.
(6) A RATHER LARGE SCIENCE FAIR. The Big Bang UK Young Scientists & Engineers Fair, to be held March 16-19 in Birmingham, “is the largest celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) for young people in the UK.”
Held at the NEC, Birmingham 16-19 March 2016, The Big Bang Fair is an award-winning combination of exciting theatre shows, interactive workshops and exhibits, as well careers information from STEM professionals.
We aim to show young people (primarily aged 7-19) the exciting and rewarding opportunities out there for them with the right experience and qualifications, by bringing classroom learning to life.
Having grown from 6,500 visitors in its first year (2009) to nearly 70,000 in 2015, The Big Bang Fair is made possible thanks to the collaborative efforts of over 200 organisations
(7) JUST NEEDS A LITTLE SMACK. Michael Swanwick, in the gracious way people do on the internet, expressed his bad opinion of the movie I, Robot (2004) in these terms:
Just watched I, ROBOT. I want to punch everybody involved in the face. Very, very hard. Dr. Asimov would approve.
[Okay, to spare people’s feelings, I want to punch THOSE RESPONSIBLE in the face. Still hated the movie.]
This ticked off Jeff Vintar, who wrote the original spec script and shared credit for the screenplay. Vintar posted a 1,200 word comment telling how his original script got turned into an “adaptation” and how these links of Hollywood sausage got made.
Having been one of the film’s biggest critics, I have watched over the years — to my surprise — as many people find quite a bit of Asimov still in it. I’m always glad when I read a critical analysis on-line or a university paper that makes the case that it is more Asimov than its reputation would suggest, or when I get contacted by a real roboticist who tells me they were inspired by the movie and went on to a career in robotics. And then of course there are the kids, who love it to death…
But I never go around defending the film or talking about it, because although I still believe my original script would have made a phenomenal ‘I, Robot’ film, there is no point. That any film gets made at all seems at times like a miracle.
But your stupid, yes stupid, ‘punch in the face’ post compelled me to write. I love Asimov as much as you do, probably more, because of all the time I spent living and breathing it. I also wrote an adaptation of Foundation that I spent years and years fighting for.
So, you want to punch me in the face? My friend, I would have already knocked you senseless before you cocked back your arm. I have been in this fight for more than twenty years. You’re a babe in the woods when it comes to knowing anything about Hollywood compared to me, and what it’s like fighting for a project you love for ten years, some for twenty years and counting.
Yet this exchange did not end the way most of these Facebook contretemps do.
Michael Swanwick answered:
I feel bad for you. That must have been an awful experience. But I spoke as a typical viewer, not as a writer. The movie was like the parson’s egg — parts of it were excellent, but the whole thing was plopped down on the plate. For my own part, I’d love to have the Hollywood money, but have no desire at all to write screenplays. I’ve heard stories like yours before.
Then Vintar wrote another long reply, which said in part:
Other writers are not our enemies. We are not fighting each other, not competing with each other, although that is a powerful illusion. As always the only enemy is weakness within ourselves, and I suppose entropy, the laws of chance, and groupthink. Ha, there are others! But I stopped throwing punches a long time ago. (Believe me, I used to.) You guys are great, thanks Michael….
And the love fest began.
(8) OGDEN OBIT. Jon P. Ogden (1944-2016), devoted Heinlein fan and member of the Heinlein Society, died January 27, Craig Davis and David Lubkin reported on Facebook. [Via SF Site News.]
(9) ALASKEY OBIT. Voice actor Joe Alaskey, who took over performing Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck after actor Mel Blanc died in 1989, himself passed away February 3. CNN reports the 63-year-old actor had been battling cancer.
Mark Evanier’s tribute to Alaskey on News From Me also tells about one of his vocal triumphs outside the realm of animation —
When [Jackie] Gleason’s voice needed to be replicated to fix the audio on the “lost” Honeymooners episodes, Joe was the man.
A few years after that, Joe was called upon to redub an old Honeymooners clip for a TV commercial. When he got the call, Joe assured the ad agency that if they needed him, he could also match the voice of Art Carney as Ed Norton. He was told they already had someone to do that — someone who did it better. Joe was miffed until he arrived at the recording session and discovered that the actor they felt could do a better job as Art Carney…was Art Carney. Joe later said that playing Kramden to Carney’s Norton was the greatest thrill of his life, especially after Carney asked him for some pointers on how to sound more like Ed.
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY
- February 4, 1930 – The Snickers bar hits the market.
- February 4, 1938 — Disney releases Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. (Did Disney miss a product placement opportunity by naming a dwarf Grumpy instead of Cranky?)
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY CLUB
- February 4, 1976 – Sfera, the oldest SF society in former Yugoslavia, was founded.
[Via Google Translate] On this day in 1976, a group of young (and less young) enthusiasts launched as part of the astronautical and rocket club Zagreb “Section for science fiction”…
(12) TODAY’S BITHDAY BOY
- Born February 4, 1940 – Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero.
(13) WEIRD AL CAST. “Weird Al” Yankovic will voice the title character in Milo Murphy’s Law, Disney XD’s animated comedy series, reports Variety.
The satirical songwriter will provide the voice of the titular character Milo Murphy, the optimistic distant grandson of the famed Murphy’s Law namesake. In addition to voicing the main character, Yankovic will sing the show’s opening theme song and perform other songs throughout the duration of the series….
“Milo Murphy’s Law” will follow the adventures of Milo and his best friends Melissa and Zack as they attempt to embrace life’s catastrophes with positive attitudes and enthusiasm.
(14) RABID PUPPIES. Vox Day posted four picks for the Best Fancast category today.
(15) SAD PUPPIES. Damien G. Walter japed:
https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/693001785141772288
(16) PUPPY COMPARISON. Doris V. Sutherland posted “2014 Hugos Versus 2015 Sad Puppies: Novellas”, the third installment, the purpose of which she explains in the introduction —
In this series on the Sad Puppies controversy, I have been comparing the works picked for the 2015 Sad and Rabid Puppies slates with the stories that were nominated for the Hugo in 2014. Were the previous nominees truly overwhelmed with preachy “message fiction”? What kinds of stories had the Sad Puppies chosen to promote in response?
Having taken a look at the Best Short Story and Best Novelette categories, I shall now cover the Hugo Awards’ final short fiction category: Best Novella, the section for stories of between 17,500 and 40,000 words in length. Let us see how the two sets of stories compare…
At the end of her interesting commentary, she concludes:
…Let us take a look through some of the previously-discussed categories. Aside from Vox Day’s story, only one of the 2014 Best Novelette nominees can be read as “message fiction”: Aliette de Bodard’s “The Waiting Stars,” which has an anti-colonial theme. I have also heard the accusation of propaganda directed at John Chu’s “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere”, a story about a gay couple. But once again, I see nothing clumsy or poorly-handled about de Bodard’s exploration of colonialism or Chu’s portrayal of a same-sex couple. So far, the accusation of preachiness appears to be based largely Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”, which has the straightforward message that hate begets hate.
None of these stories push a specific message as strongly or as directly as John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them. This raises an obvious question: exactly which group is rewarding message fiction here…?
[Thanks to Gary Farber, JJ, David K.M. Klaus, Brian Z., Steven H Silver, Jumana Aumir, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Dave Doering for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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For those wondering about their Hugo nomination PINs, some data points: My surname begins with an S, and I got my PIN email around 11PM last night Kansas City time. I don’t know if they’re sending them out in alphabetical order, though. If they’re doing it by chronological order in their database, I joined MACII in late September 2015. I hope this is useful information to those who are still waiting.
Oh yes, and the email came from [email protected] .
Best Editor Short Form for VD, 586. He told his own minions to vote for Weisskopf for Long Form, so that’s not indicative.
To be fair, TSTWTUD was nominated by people who presumably liked it. It wasn’t on a slate. I remain baffled as to why they liked it.
Well, Handmaid’s Tale is NOT science fiction because the author herself said so.
(Poacher)
I’ll try to break the circle: Gernsback was the first one to identify the elements that needed to be present if a work was going to fit into his definition of a newly created genre.
Works created prior to the definition being articulated have some of those elements, but not all of them. They were used as exemplars (write me something kind of like this, but with more sciencey stuff in it).
There are currently two broad outlines of the history of the genre. One, proposed by Aldiss, attempts to enlarge the genre by incorporating historical antecedents and claiming that because they had a passing similarity to some elements of the genre we now know as SF, they are essentially SF and illustrate that “this kind” of literature has always been with us. (Personally, I think he’s somewhat confusing fantasy with science fiction). But even in Trillion Year Spree he continues to refer to works pre-1926 (actually, pre-1938) as “proto-science fiction”, while Westfahl states that you can’t have a “genre” until you define it and the defining took place in 1926. He illustrates this argument by demonstrating that using Aldiss’ method, you could claim that any one single piece of literature could be called just about any genre name you’d care to apply, depending upon what elements you choose to focus on. (Although you’d be hard-pressed to fit the Odyssey into a Western milieu).
Do those earlier works lose anything by being called (properly) proto-sf as opposed to SF? I don’t think so. Was Cyrano de Bergerac a “science fiction author”?, I don’t think so . Again, we’re not talking a clean transition here as in, there were no stories with spaceships, BEMS and blasters before 4/26. There were various elements, some of which could be found in earlier works. Eventually, the specific elements that make up the SF genre were identified. Now we have a genre.
@4: the link again pushes the idea that Heinlein invented the waterbed just because his novel was used to deny the patent. However, the history presented by various waterbed manufacturers (of which there were several when I was living in Cambridge MA in the 1970’s) goes back much further; IIRC, one claimed there were Egyptian analogs (actually made, not just described — another distinction the story fails to make). Whether RAH knew of any of these probably can’t be determined from this long afterward.
RAH also popularized the idea of remote manipulators, often called waldoes after his novella. These are something he might have dreamed up (Damon Knight says (in his intro to The Past Through Tomorrow “Heinlein was an engineer, specializing in linkages”), but I see Wikipedia says he cited an article from 1918 rather than claiming the idea as his.
If SF is to be defined simply as a publishing category, then H.G. Wells’s books are not only SF, they are masterworks, classics, big yellow Gollanczs of SF.
Re science fiction before the term was used: I recommend reading Poul Anderson’s “Mute Inglorious Tam” for an interesting take on this. The protagonist of the story is very clearly someone who could have been writing SF/F if he had been able to grope his way into a concept of it… but he is constrained by the limits of his culture.
Re Atwood and SF:
1) Hasn’t she gone back and forth on this a few times? ISTR that there have been times when she seemed to be accepting the SF tag for her work.
2) I’d like to see a debate on this between Atwood and Connie Willis. I was at one of Willis’ signings when someone asked her “how she felt about her work being described as science fiction”. Her response was epic — she started out by saying, “Well, unless someone has invented time travel and I don’t know about it, I AM writing science fiction!” and went on to do a very thorough takedown of the fallacy that SF and Literature are mutually-exclusive things.
For that matter, “literary” is also very much a genre these days, with its own tics and tropes, rather than being a catchall category for anything that didn’t fit into any other genre. I’ve been using the term “lit-fic” for about a decade.
“Mute Inglorious Tam” was Pohl/Kornbluth… I read it a long time ago and remember almost nothing about it.
@Greg Hullender:
I would recommend the opposite. Someone who gets slated by Vox and doesn’t want to be associated with him should publicly declare that they didn’t consent to being on the slate and publicly request to be removed from the slate as soon as possible. If Vox then drops the nominee from his slate, then so be it. This way, if the person gets nominated anyway, they should be able to avoid the stigma of having been on Vox’s slate, whether or not Vox dropped them, because they didn’t accept the slating.
If someone stays on Vox’s slate while intending to decline the nomination, then they get the backlash of having been on the slate without even getting the benefit of becoming a Hugo nominee.
Joshua’s recommendation has the advantage of being the more honourable course of action, it seems to me.
tbh, I think a more likely interpretation is that Sad Puppies voted for Weisskopf in Long Form because they knew who she is, and for Beale in Short Form because he better expressed their ressentiment.
But let’s assume Beale has 600 drones who will vote exactly as he says (and as they didn’t last year). If that is true –
He can shortlist any five items he likes, in every category (except possibly Novel)
But he doesn’t have enough support for any of them to win
He could fill the shortlist with shit – it will get No Awarded again. And EPH will pass by a landslide, making it much harder for him to do the same thing again. And the next year when he tries rounding up his loyal idiots, the question will be asked – why are we paying out this money to not win an award? The Hugos just aren’t a high-enough value target – if you’re not a fan, why do you care?
He could put together a shortlist of mostly-crap, with a couple of names who would have got nominated anyway. Again, a landslide for EPH. Maybe some of the people on his shortlist win this time, but only the ones who are not Rabid Puppies. Andy Weir, or File770, or The Expanse. And again, even his collection of betas will ask – why are we paying out this money so some guy we haven’t heard of beats another guy we’ve never heard of? Pay that money to have one of Beale’s books win, or some other MRA-type – yeah, maybe that would fly. Pay to have Cixin Liu beat Neal Stephenson? Why not just give the money to Trump?
Okay, so after some reflection on nominations, I’m thinking there’s a case not to give a shit when it comes to Beale’s nominations until the time comes to actually vote on the finalists. Outside of KotakuInAction, Brietbart, and ReturnOfKings, who’s going to care when they start saying doing the basement-dwelling internet boy routine of “Nyahuh! If you vote for that you’re morally, legally, heuristically, holistically, obliged to be my straw man, due to the power of my overwhelming logic!”
After all, let’s remember what our gracious host did last year, right? He got the story out, and he provided a nerve center where everything could get put up. There was and is a record, of every bit of bullshit, equivocation, and deception that got put out in support of the Puppy slate. We all have our record of exactly how much respect Torgerson has for female professionals. And how much to trust the Puppies when they said they’d told the people they slated. Dig a little and you can find out how everything about Beale’s attitudes you’ve heard is true and worse.
Getting our gracious host a Hugo isn’t the XanaD’OH! Gambit, it’s Beale cutting off his nose to spitehis’s face, and then claiming it was his master plan the whole time. He want to hoist himself in his own petard, let him. I’m sure he’ll get a shit load of up votes on Reddit for how cleverly his logic has put the SJWs in a corner. And the plot is to give a Hugo to one of the people who’s accurately chronicled what a shithead he is.
But outside those little troll caves, who who’s gonna care? And if the people nominated follow Kloos’s and Bellet’s route, more power to them.
@TheYoungPretender – Okay, so after some reflection on nominations, I’m thinking there’s a case not to give a shit when it comes to Beale’s nominations until the time comes to actually vote on the finalists.
Yup. Not only do I agree, but I can* make an argument for why that’s the only course that fails to give VD anything at all. In addition, that will make the subsequent claims of victory look even hollower than heretofore and might remove a few more folks from the clown car.
Where I disagree is in any analysis that gives VD credit for anything but the sloppiest of thinking and “plotting.”
*But won’t do it more than once a week, unless forced, because I get tired of hearing myself.
*snort* I doubt he even knows I exist.
Would that such blessed ignorance went both ways…!
Speaking of Breitbart, ReturnOfKings and basement-dwelling internet boys, Beale’s fellow traveller Roosh V is having a Very Bad, No Good– er, Day. Including being doxxed by Anonymous.
Beale, of course, is trying to deflect and spin this into an attack on Scalzi, because a Hugo-nominated editor can’t tell what satire is and isn’t, of course. But then, he can’t tell what rape is either.
Because of link limitations, I won’t even mention the Breitbart national security editor who got arrested yesterday for trying to bring a gun past airport security.
Today File 770 and the Hugos had a genuine real-life benefit for me: I was at a meeting at short notice that it turned out was being run by rules of order (not Robert’s, but similar), and thanks to having watched the WSFS business meeting I didn’t look like a total idiot when told I had to to get up and make several motions. Hurrah.
(Disappointingly there was no serpentine, and no-one asked why the member was rising)
I think it’s best to just ignore Beale for the time being. If I had to guess, I would say he’s moved the Hugo discussion amongst his sycophants to other channels and there isn’t really any way to guess what he’s up to. If you look at recent posts, a John Scalzi post and a Wil Wheaton post had 74 and 90 comments respectively, and non-Sci-Fi topics routinely get 100+ comments. But if you look at the recent Hugo posts on Fanzine, Fancast, Fan Artist and Fan Writer and Weir, with only one exception* none get more than twenty.
I suppose it’s also possible that his followers have lost interest in his little games after the poor showing in 2015.
*Fan Artist, and that’s only because one of the works had a flaw in it that drove commenting
If SF is defined as “giant squid[s] in space,” why aren’t we all discussing Ken Macleod’s Engines of Light trilogy, which has exactly those as a major part of the world-building, along with textual shout-outs to a variety of previous sf works? (I spotted and was amused by several, and am almost sure I missed some: for a non-spoilery example, a character says “octopodia was the key insight.”)
Those are good books, and they got some attention, but it would have been counterfactual to me to say “muitiple-Hugo-award-winning trilogy,” because the Hugo voters aren’t specifically looking for books about giant squid, not even giant squid in space.
@TheYoungPretender
Well, it was painfully obvious months ago that Beale was going to nominate people solely to make them either recuse themselves or be the horrible SJW hypocrite that always lies. I think a simple ‘vote for only if you think I deserve the award. Not for any other reason, please’ is more than enough to defuse that little ‘trap’ by Beale. Or, not caring at all and not getting involved in the awards at all, like Weir is apparently doing.
Cally,
I’m also an S and haven’t received my PIN.
@Glenn
So taking a gun into an airport is, well, an occupational hazard of a certain kind of manly man. You go to the airport in a hurry and Whoops! you left that pistol in the shoulder holster. Or what you really see a lot is the person who keeps the gun in a briefcase or shoulder bag, and someone absentmindedly sticks it onto the x-ray conveyor and hilarity ensues.
The prosecutions tend to be anticlimactic – there is a plea, the person involved has a light record, all of the signs – employment, light record, etc. – that get you probation. The airport usually does its prosecutions in the nearest county courthouse. You get to see people who nearly brought a gun on a plane get a slap on the wrist whilst people with a little bit of weed get thirty days. It cause one to think.
@Joshua on February 5, 2016 at 9:47 am said:
Maybe not. Supposedly last year Torgersen asked people if it was okay to list them and honored requests not to be listed. Those folks got zero recognition. The ones who withdrew after they were finalists are the ones who got invited to GRRM’s big party.
The biggest hole in VD’s strategy is honorable people who withdraw and allow organic nominees to get into the finalists’ list. VD has already said he’ll ignore requests to remove people from his list, so I don’t see how anyone should feel they have any obligation to ask.
[ticky]
@TheYoungPretender: We’ll see. Since the gentleman in question, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, is “a national security expert” who speaks a lot on counter-terrorism, it should certainly ding his credentials. After all, what sort of an expert on counter-terrorism doesn’t know you shouldn’t bring a gun into an airport’s secure area?
It’ll be interesting to see who disassociates from him.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/02/01/fairfax-man-nabbed-with-gun-at-reagan-national-airport-tsa-says/
I’m D and have not yet received my Hugo PIN. But I signed up in November.
Also, I seem to have fallen off the member’s list, although I did switch from unlisted to listed, and that may have caused the issue.
I’m patiently seeing where I’m light on potential nominees and making an effort to read those categories. Letters to Tiptree is waiting at the bookstore for me!
On when science fiction started:
Someone else may already have pointed this out and I missed it, but Gernsback himself said (in his editorial in the April 1926 Amazing) “Edgar Allan Poe may well be called the father of “scientifiction”.”, while stories by Wells, Verne and Poe graced that first issue.
Gernsback certainly seemed to think “scientifiction” predated his magazine.
Forgot to check the box.
@ TheYoungPretender and Glenn
Being responsible with a gun is apparently quite difficult. Accidentally taking your gun to the airport is apparently pretty common.
I wish the US courts would take these incidents of irresponsibility with a gun more seriously.
I’m a G, and the email with my PIN was date-stamped 01/29/2016 07:30 PM.
I’m also a supporting member of all 3 relevant WorldCons, not receiving hard-copy updates — don’t know whether that would affect the order of mailing at all.
From Breitbart. Which should do even more to damage his credibility.
@Hampus, Glenn, Cat
It should ding his credibility. Until you realize that being Breitbart’s security expert means your producing stories for people who think that the movie “Invasion U.S.A.” is realistic, and that the group of loonies in Oregon were right. These are the gun-owners where violating the law just means you’re fighting back against Obama’s nefarious plan to get Real Americans slaughtered like sheep. Because you’ll be ready for when the Takers and Foreigners rise up.
Correa and Torgeron’s kind of people, in other words.
I see no reason to subordinate my judgment of what is sf and what isn’t to that of Hugo Gernsback. He was important to establishing the field as a publishing category, but as someone else noted, he was no literary genius.
Clicky.
VD’s picks: It isn’t a bad list. The only obvious dud is the Castalia House Blog. Mad Genius is whatever it is but it does that thing it does in the way that it does it. Having said that, didn’t MGC recuse itself from the Hugos when SP4 started up? I may be wrong.
No pin 🙁
My PIN lies over the ocean,
My PIN lies over the sea,
My PIN lies over the ocean,
When will the Con send it to me?
Mid-Am-Con, Mid-Am-Con,
Please send that new PIN to me, to me,
Mid-Am-Con, Mid-Am-Con,
Please send that new PIN to me
ON SF, I agree a genre needs a set of tropes and styles to become a genre – a set of reader expectations that go beyond a single writer. However, a genre doesn’t need a name or for these features to have been documented and codified for it exist fully-formed as a genre. Consequently SF existed as a genre BEFORE anybody said ‘look at this thing – it is a genre and we can call it science fiction’.
Also eggs: totally came before chickens.
Supporting member from last year, name in the B’s, have not yet received my PIN. I have carefully checked my spam filter.
I get the feeling the admins are going to be getting a lot of e-mails come tomorrow.
Supporting member from last year; name in the B’s, got my PIN January 31. However they’re organizing their memberships, I don’t think it’s by last name…
@TheYoungPretender: The bigger credibility problem is that he’ll have a weapons charge on his record when he goes back to lecture at places like the National Counterterrorism Center.
Hmm… his Wikipedia page says he’s lectured at a number of government locations, like the NCTC, the National Defense University, and West Point. I suspect he won’t be invited back anytime soon.
@ Ray: t
LOL! Yes, that’s roughly the threat level his antics present.
Cheryl S:
Yep. For a tiresome troll like VD, all conditions are victory conditions. Whatever happened in 2015, VD was always going to define it as a victory condition–including all his nominees placing below “No Award.” Whatever happens in 2016, he will also define himself as victor. That’s a given.
I agree with you about giving him too much credit. But then, I tend to think that comparing him to an overcooked stalk of broccoli is giving him too much credit.
@ Glenn Hauman:
His post is yet another example, among so many, of why I think that likening VD to a stalk of over-cooked broccoli gives him more credit than he merits.
Well, I haven’t got mine either, but I’m not going to fire off an email to them if it doesn’t arrive by midnight. Probably it’s taking longer than they thought to send mail batch-by-batch. I’d give them another day.
My last name is towards the beginning of the alphabet. I was an attending member at Sasquan, I’m attending MidAmericon, and I have an attending membership for Helsinki (we’ll see if the finances work out). So far I have received 2 emails with my Hugo PIN, one at the end of January and one today.
I’m not surprised it’s taking them a while to work their way through. Sasquan had a lot of members, no idea what the MidAmericon and Helsinki figures look like, but I’m guessing they aren’t tiny.
Personally, I read through everything last year, or at least got far enough to know know whether I liked something or not. I really like Kevin J. Anderson’s zombie PI books, but I gave up on The Dark Between the Stars around 150-200 pages in. When I voted no award it was because I felt stuff wasn’t award worthy. I’ve dinged entire categories before the puppies, and I’ll probably do it after they stop slating too. I loathed the Heuvelt story last year and no awarded that category. Which was a disappointment, because the Heuvelt story that first got a Hugo nomination, The Boy Who Cast No Shadow, was amazing, but since then, he’s been law of diminishing returns as far as I’m concerned.
The category that surprised me last year was Best Editor Long Form. I thought that was the category after BDP Long Form where there was most likely to be a winner despite it being all slate nominees. I thought Sheila Gilbert might win. She’s be nominated before the slates came into existence, so I thought she might take the category. OTOH, if the puppies really were all about bringing attention to previously overlooked people who were worthy of being nominated, I think the slate did its job here, as I know quite a few people who really like urban fantasy and paranormal romance who did not realize Anne Sowards edited their favorite authors and will probably nominate her this year.
And whatever spurious justification he comes up with to define himself as victor, he’ll still be a loser.
Yep. Just like Donald Trump. Same mindset.
Same demographic appeal, come to think of it.
You aren’t wrong: http://madgeniusclub.com/2016/01/07/hugo-category-highlights-best-fanzine-and-best-semiprozine/
(Also: stop talking to yourself – it looks weird.)
@Cheryl S, Laura Resnick
There’s part of me that thinks that Teddy likes mattering outside of the rarified little circles of white supremacists, men’s rights activists, and internet trolls. Yes, he’s the sort of troll who will call everything a victory condition. But he’s can’t find people outside of troll-land who care about all the things he’s the super intelligent master of. Being the thinking Redditor’s xenophobic misogynist is a small pond to be king of.
Last year’s Hugos gave Teddy an opportunity to matter a tiny bit to people in the outside world of people don’t normally seek him out. His name came up in a few publications in the wider world (as something aside from being his father’s son, that is). Those sci-fi dweebs who didn’t bow before his genius were shown a thing or too! They’d have to give him a prize when he showed up!
But then when it was looking like things were going No Award, well, Teddy was for No Award too. And when TBP got it’s traction, he decided he’d get out on that as well, and depict himself as the sole reason it won. Now it seems once per category he’s trying co-opt one thing that everyone has heard of, and would have likely been nominated anyway.
Yeah, he’s gonna dance in circle and talk about SJW hypocrisy, but I think this is him giving a grab at the (small) relevance he got (briefly) in the (slightly) broader world by screwing with the Hugos last year. Some of these things will win on quality and, then Teddy will jump up and down shout “I helped! I helped!” at the top of his manly little lungs. Hell then squall about how its a sign he and his following of homophobes, misogynists and racists can matter. But Teddy is heading back to his troll cave, back to the situation where the broader world never cares who he is (except his father’s son), and decent people can ignore him.
This is the sort of slide back into obscurity for him. Perhaps something to bear in mind before we start racking people without points of evidence independent of Teddy mentioning him in the latest dispatch from his lair.
VD appears in a science context; I doubt the reason will surprise many.
I don’t think the genre of superhero fiction was a recognized category when the first Superman story was published. But I think that story is unequivocally a superhero story.
I think predecessors like Doc Savage, the Phantom and the Shadow are a bit blurrier, but Superman ain’t blurry at all.
@Glenn Hauman
That RooshV character recently called off events in Glasgow and Edinburgh after reportedly receiving more threats from Glasgow than everywhere else combined. I’m not sure whether to be embarrassed or proud…
Heh. Amusing.
Well it is now the 6th of February, and no PIN for me.
Not in my inbox, nor in the spam filter
But I am patient, because electrons must take longer to reach Antiodean shores.
Of course, everyone who voted for it or nominated it will have helped.
But how many of them will be wearing a fancy paper hat that says BOSS OF YOU? Hm? Hmm?