(1) HOTROOTING. Eddie Kim tells why he looks forward to the production, and shares a Redwall-inspired recipe: “’Redwall’ Netflix TV Series: The Best Food Porn Ever Written” at Mel Magazine. (“GRRM wept,” says N., who sent the link.)
The world of Brian Jacques’ Redwall is rife with every manner of woodland creature, depicting the lives of mice, moles, squirrels, badgers and beyond in mythic detail. As a young boy, I fell in love with everything about the series — the intricately illustrated covers, the sweeping tales of battle and camaraderie and the idiosyncrasies of each animal community. Over the course of 23 (!!) thick novels, Jacques weaves a tapestry of narratives, builds a unique lifestyle, dialect and even diet around various tribes and timelines.
I, being a Korean kid in Hawaii who loved the water, imagined myself as one of the river otters. They played hard, fought hard and adored the spicy flavor of hotroot in their foods. Just like me, I thought as I read another Redwall novel at the dinner table, eating spoonfuls of kimchi stew.
It wasn’t just the otters’ favorite shrimp ‘n’ hotroot soup that I craved; I’m fairly certain the Redwall books radicalized me at a young age into a type-A obsessive about delicious food. No matter whether I was reading Eulalia! or Martin the Warrior, I knew the book would feature page after page of lusty food prose, especially if it was a celebratory feast held in Redwall Abbey or another enclave. The words are straight out of a Chez Panisse menu: “Tender freshwater shrimp garnished with cream and rose leaves, devilled barley pearls in acorn puree, apple and carrot chews, marinated cabbage stalks steeped in creamed white turnip with nutmeg … crusty country pasties, and these were being served with melted yellow cheese and rough hazelnut bread.”…
(2) THE FELAPTON CUT. Camestros Felpaton has seen the elephant: “I watched Zak Snyder’s Justice League cut (slowly and pieces)”. (Don’t ask me where the “c” in Zack went.)
…This is very much a Zak Snyder film and contains all his intentional problems. It is pretentious, has lots of slow-mo, odd music-video like sequences, many people starring off into the distance to express their inner feelings and, of course, a colour palette that’s best described as “metallic”. The dialogue is grim. The characterisation is angst. It’s a clever but disaffected teenage kid’s idea that goofy comic books are essays on Nietzsche….
(3) POWER OF FIVE. This link waited patiently to be rediscovered in a cache of unopened February emails: James Davis Nicoll’s “Five SF Works That Explore the Mysteries of Alpha Centauri” at Tor.com.
… Not only is Alpha Centauri the nearest system to ours, two of its three stars are at least somewhat sunlike. Unsurprisingly, science fiction long ago saw the narrative potential offered by Alpha Centauri. Consider these five examples.
He begins with —
Alpha Centauri or Die! by Leigh Brackett (1963)
The Solar System is firmly under the thumb of an authoritarian government determined to bring peace with a stomping boot. While every reasonable need is filled, daily life is regimented and the space lanes are plied solely by robot ships. Not everyone is happy with this arrangement. The malcontents include among them men like Kirby—men with the skills to crew a one-way flight to Alpha Centauri and its known habitable world.
There are, of course, one or two catches. The State forbids such flights. The same robot ships that travel between the solar planets could follow the refugees to Alpha Centauri. Most importantly, there is a reason the Solar System’s authoritarian have never tried to annex Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri’s world may not be home to someone but it is definitely home to something. How it will react to invaders remains to be seen….
(4) GAMING HORROR IS HARD. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the February 10 Financial Times, gaming columnist Tom Faber looks at the recent release of The Medium (set in “an abandoned Soviet resort”) to discuss whether video games can be as scary as horror movies.
I started out with the venerable Resident Evil series, which since 1996 has oscillated between survival-horror and action-oriented adventures, also spawning a surprisingly robust film franchise starring Milla Jovovich. 2017’s Resident Evil 7: biohazard, due a sequel this May, seemed promisingly spooky at first. I arrived at an abandoned house in the Louisiana bayou and felt genuinely unsettled by the ominous creaking noises of the house, the squalid family kitchen and the sculpture out front, a cross between Alexander Calder and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Yes as soon as a monster emerged and I had to start waving an axe around, I mentally flipped into monster-fighting game mode and all the tension abruptly vanished.
Horror needs to be paced slowly to allow tension time to build, to hide its monsters in the shadows, but this is a hard proposition for games, a medium defined by interactivity and action. A new breed of narrative horror games prioritises atmosphere over combat, including Soma and Amnesia by Swedish team Frictional Games, an eerie demo for a cancelled Silent Hill sequel called P.T., and Taiwanese game Devotion, a disturbing tale which was removed from online stores due to a controversial reference to Chinese premier Xi Jinping.
(5) THOSE MONEY QUOTES. Most of the story is behind a Wall Street Journal paywall, however, the introduction is entertaining: “Is It Time to Kill the Book Blurb?”
Pulitzer-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen would have preferred that his forthcoming book, The Committed, have no praise-laden blurbs at all, he says. “Kill it. Bury it. Dance on its grave. They create so much work, emotional labor and guilt, whether one is writing one or one is asking for one.”
Often fawning and sometimes composed after only a casual skim of the book, pre-publication endorsements have been an entrenched part of the publishing industry since Ralph Waldo Emerson mailed a little-known Walt Whitman a note about his first poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, in 1855. Sensing an opportunity, Whitman’s publisher emblazoned a standout line from Emerson’s letter on the second edition of the book’s spine in gold letters: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. RW Emerson.”
As blurbs multiplied, however, the public’s distaste for them also grew. In 1936, George Orwell claimed that “the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers” was causing the public to turn away from novels altogether. “Novels are being shot at you at the rate of fifteen a day,” he wrote in an essay, “and every one of them an unforgettable masterpiece which you imperil your soul by missing.”…
(6) NOT COMING TO A TELEVISION NEAR YOU. That Hashtag Show believes “Star Wars Detours Leaked Episode Gives Us A New Hope for Disney+ Release”. Your lack of faith is disturbing.
Anyone ever heard of Star Wars Detours? No? It’s no surprise, since no one has aired it since its production. Ever since Disney bought up Lucasfilm, they’ve locked up this Star Wars animated parody series in their vaults and never looked back. With the leak of a single episode though, there may be a new hope that Star Wars Detours may come to Disney+.
A few days ago on November 29, 2020; someone leaked a single episode of the never-aired Star Wars Detours series onto Reddit. The episode featured the bounty hunters Zuckuss and 4-LOM attempting to rob Dex’s Diner, with decidedly mixed results. An all-star cast of Lando Calrissian, Boba Fett, Jabba the Hutt, and more contributed to the situation with utmost hilarity.
No one know who leaked this episode or why. All we know is that as soon as the leak occurred, Disney was just as quick to take it down with a copyright strike. By then though, it might as well have been closing the barn door after the horse already got out. Even Disney can’t make us unsee what we’ve already saw. Yet.
(7) A TITANIC MISSION. How far will it have to sink? “Seven Hundred Leagues Beneath Titan’s Methane Seas”. (Likely behind a New York Times paywall.)
What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn’s large, foggy moon Titan — plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun?
Those are the visions that danced through my head recently. The eyes of humanity are on Mars these days. A convoy of robots, after a half-year in space, has been dropping, one after another, into orbit or straight to the ground on the Red Planet, like incoming jets at J.F.K. Among the cargo is a helicopter that armchair astronauts look forward to flying over the Martian sands.
But my own attention was diverted to the farther reaches of the solar system by the news that Kraken Mare, an ocean of methane on Titan, had recently been gauged for depth and probably went at least 1,000 feet down. That as deep as nuclear submarines will admit to going. The news rekindled my dreams of what I think would be the most romantic of space missions: a voyage on, and ultimately even under, the oceans of Titan…
(8) TALE END. SYFY Wire broadcasts a promise: “DuckTales creators say series finale is going to have a lot of pay offs”.
…[The] series finale is aiming to go bigger and grander, as it sees Clan McDuck face off against their most devious foes yet: a secret evil organisation called the Fiendish Organisation for World Larceny, otherwise known as F.O.W.L. Led by Bradford Buzzard, F.O.W.L. is not only the biggest and most widespread threat the family has ever gone up against during all this time adventuring, but its also one whose roots began quite close to
the Money Binhome, with Bradford having served as the chairman of Scrooge’s company, with a seat on its board of directors at one point….
(9) HOW HE WANTED TO BE REMEMBERED. Only he would have said it in more flattering terms: “’Self-satisfied pork butcher’: Shakespeare grave effigy believed to be definitive likeness” reports The Guardian. An image is included at the article.
…The painted effigy is a half-height depiction of Shakespeare holding a quill, with a sheet of paper on a cushion in front of him. In the 17th century, a Jacobean sculptor called Gerard Johnson was identified as the artist behind it. Orlin believes that the limestone monument was in fact created by Nicholas Johnson, a tomb-maker, rather than his brother Gerard, a garden decorator….
(10) MEMORY LANE.
1976 — Forty five years ago, Joe Haldeman wins a Hugo for The Forever War at MidAmeriCon which was held in Kansas City. It had been published by St. Martin’s Press the previous year. The novel would also win a Nebula Award, a Locus Award for Best Novel and the Australian Ditmar Award. It has never been out of print and has a sequel, Forever Peace.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
- Born March 20, 43 B.C.E. – Ovid. Among three great poets of Roman literature (with Virgil and Horace). Known to us, and perhaps best known today, for his Metamorphoses, 15 books recounting fantastic legends e.g. Daedalus; many translations, from Golding’s (1567, used by Shakespeare) to Rolfe Humphries’ (rev. 2018): see this comparing Mary Innes’ (1955); Golding’s; Dryden, Garth & Co.’s (1727); and cussing about them. (Died 17 C.E.) [JH]
- Born March 20, 1868 – Ernest Bramah. Orwell said What Might Have Been inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four; WMHB and two others are SF. The Bravo of London and a score of shorter stories about Max Carrados are detective fiction, some being ours too. Timeless for five books about the superb fantastic Kai Lung, who said e.g. “In shallow water dragons become the laughing-stock of shrimps”. Website. (Died 1942) [JH]
- Born March 20, 1932 — Jack Cady. He won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, an impressive feat indeed. McDowell’s Ghost gives a fresh spin on the trope of seeing seeing a War Between The States ghost, and The Night We Buried Road Dog is another ghost story set in early Sixties Montana. Underland Press printed all of his superb short fiction into two volumes, Phantoms: Collected Writings, Volume 1 and Fathoms: Collected Writings, Volume 2. (Died 2004.) (CE)
- Born March 20, 1941 – Steve Sneyd. SFPA (SF Poetry Ass’n) Grand Master. Six collections e.g. Bad News from the Stars; Mistaking the Nature of the Posthuman – he knew very well that omitting a hyphen brought in resonance with posthumous. Four anthologies e.g. Laying Siege to Tomorrow. Nonfiction. Four hundred forty poems, three dozen short stories. Handwritten fanzine Data Dump, 226 issues 1991-2016. A note by me here. Some of where he led me here. (Died 2018) [JH]
- Born March 20, 1948 — Pamela Sargent, 73, She has three exemplary series of which I think the Seed trilogy, a unique take on intergenerational colony ships, is the one I like the best. The other two series, the Venus trilogy about a woman determined to terraform that world at all costs is quite good also, and there is the Watchstar trilogy which I know nothing about. Nor have I read any of her one-off novels, so please do tell me about them. (CE)
- Born March 20, 1948 — John de Lancie, 73. Best known for his role as Q in the Trek multiverse, though I was more fond of him as Janos Barton in Legend which stars Richard Dean Anderson (if you’ve not seen it, go now and watch it). He also was Jack O’Neill enemy Frank Simmons in Stargate SG-1. He has an impressive number of one-offs on genre shows including The Six Million Dollar Man, Battlestar Galactica (1978 version), The New Twilight Zone, MacGyver, Mission: Impossible (Australian edition), Get Smart, Again!, Batman: The Animated Series, and I’m going to stop there. (CE)
- Born March 20, 1950 — William Hurt, 71. He made his first film appearance as a troubled scientist in Ken Russell’s Altered States, an amazing film indeed. He’s next up as Doug Tate in Alice, an Woody Allen film. Breaking his run of weird roles, he shows in up in that not really bad Lost in Space film as Professor John Robinson. Dark City and the phenomenal role of Inspector Frank Bumstead follows for him. He was in A.I. Artificial Intelligence as Professor Allen Hobby, performed the character of William Marshal in Ridley Scott’s phenomenal Robin Hood, and in horror film Hellgate was Warren Mills. His final, to date that is, is in Avengers: Infinity War as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. Two series roles of notes, the first being in the SyFy Frank Herbert’s Dune as Duke Leto I Atreides. Confession: the digitized blue eyes bugged me so much that I couldn’t watch it. The other role worth noting is him as Hrothgar in Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands. (CE)
- Born March 20, 1955 — Nina Kiriki Hoffman, 66. Her first novel, The Thread That Binds the Bones, won the Bram Stoker Award for first novel. In addition, her short story “Trophy Wives” won a Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Other novels include The Silent Strength of Stones (a sequel to Thread), A Fistful of Sky, and A Stir of Bones. All are amazingly excellent. Most of her work has a strong sense of regionalism being set in either California or the Pacific Northwest. (CE)
- Born March 20, 1959 – Suzanne Francis, age 62. Nine novels, including a novelization of Frozen. From King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England, she went to Dunedin (rhymes with “need inn”), South Island, New Zealand, a UNESCO City of Literature. [JH]
- Born March 20, 1965 – Noreen Doyle, age 56. Archaeologist and in particular Egyptologist. Anthologies, The First Heroes with Harry Turtledove; Otherworldly Maine. A dozen short stories. Here is her cover for Spirits of Wood and Stone. [JH]
- Born March 20, 1974 – Andrzej Pilipiuk, age 47. Forty novels, two dozen available in English; two dozen shorter stories. Invented Jakub Wedrowycz (there should be a mark like a cedilla under the e, but the software won’t allow it), an alcoholic exorcist; in another series about a thousand-year-old teenage vampire, a 300-year-old alchemist-szlachcianka, and a former agent of CBS, the historical Michael Sendivogius sometimes appears. [JH]
- Born March 20, 1979 — Freema Agyeman, 42. Best known for playing Martha Jones in Doctor Who, companion to the Tenth Doctor. She reprised that role briefly in Torchwood and for several Big Finish audioworks. She voiced her character on The Infinite Quest, an animated Doctor Who serial. She was on Sense8 as Amanita Caplan. And some seventeen years ago, she was involved in a live production of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld’s Lords and Ladies held in Rollright Stone Circle Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. It was presented out of doors in the centre of two stone circles. I don’t think it was recorded, more’s the pity. (CE)
(12) NEVER GET AN ARTIST MAD AT YOU. They might do the monster mash – to you!Mental Floss unveils twelve “Secrets of Comic Book Artists”.
…Telling a sequential story across panels and pages is the purview of the comics artist, who must be accomplished in everything from the human anatomy to perspective to lighting. Whether they’re working with a writer or generating their own material, comic book artists must be versatile.
…To get more insight into how these fantasy illustrators operate, Mental Floss spoke to Coller and others. Here’s what they had to say about deadlines, owning their work, and getting penciled-in revenge….
8. COMIC ARTISTS CAN GET REVENGE IN THEIR ART.
It’s not uncommon for artists to use real people as models for their fictional characters—typically background or supporting figures. “You spend so many hours alone with a page that you get bored sometimes,” Jones says. “So you’ll draw your editors in the background.” Other times, it might be someone they’re annoyed with who meets an untimely end. “Maybe someone who has frustrated you becomes a bystander getting crushed.”
(13) DEAL OF THE DAY. Hey, I can’t afford it, but I’ve never seen an author make this offer before.
(15) LONG-DISTANCE MARRIAGE. [Item by David Doering.] I could have written this as an SF short story in the 70s. My home county, Utah County, will perform civil marriages via the Internet (as a Covid protection). However, it soon got noised about not just nationally, but internationally. Now couples in Israel who did not qualify to wed there could be officially married by a Utah administrator. As this article states, Israel will recognize marriages conducted by other countries, however — “Utah finds itself at the center of a new legal battle over Israel marriage rights” — at KSL.
Two Utah rabbis joined an administrative petition this week filed against the Israeli Interior Minister and the country’s population authority in an effort to lift an order that does not recognize civil marriages for Israeli couples completed through a Utah online system.
… Israel carries strict religious rules regarding marriage but recognizes legal marriages done by other states.
…However, once Interior Minister Rabbi Aryeh Deri learned of the practice, he ordered the population authority to stop registering the couples and counting their marriage as legitimate. The petition was filed in an effort to reverse the ban and take it all the way to the country’s Supreme Court….
(15) ON THE REVERSE. In “The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman” at The Paris Review, Halle Butler says admirers of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist sf and horror also have to take into account that Gilman was a supporter of nativism and eugenics.
…Herland, Gilman’s sci-fi novel about a land free of men, is an example of this. The inhabitants of Herland have no crime, no hunger, no conflict (also, notably, no sex, no art). They exist together in dreamlike harmony. Held one way, Herland is a gentle, maternal paradise, and the novel itself is a plea for allowing these feminine qualities to take part in the societal structure. Held another, we see how firmly their equality is based in their homogeneity. The novel’s twist is that the inhabitants of Herland are considering whether or not it would benefit them to reintroduce male qualities into their society, by way of sexual reproduction. Herland is a tale of the fully realized potential of eugenics, and for Gilman, it’s a utopia.
All of this is especially troubling when you consider that Gilman was a staunch and self-described nativist, rather than a self-described feminist, as the texts surrounding her rediscovery imply. Nativists believed in protecting the interests of native-born (or “established”) inhabitants above the interests of immigrants, and that mental capacities are innate, rather than teachable. Put bluntly, she was a Victorian white nationalist. When Gilman is described as a social reformer and activist, part of this was advocating for compulsory, militaristic labor camps for Black Americans (“A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” 1908). Part of this is pleading for racial purity and stricter border policies, as in the sequel to Herland, or for sterilization and even death for the genetically inferior, as in her other serialized Forerunner novel, Moving the Mountain.
These ideas of Gilman’s are hard to reconcile with our current conception of her as a brave advocate against systems of oppression—a political hero with a few, forgivable flaws….
(16) HEATED EXCHANGE. Literary Hub recalls a sophisticated analysis offered to disprove the then-new theory of evolution: “Charles Darwin’s Great Uncertainty: Decoding the Age of Our Planet”.
…[William] Thomson was a man of faith but he had no truck with biblical literalists who believed the earth to be 6,000 years old. His position was that a slowly changing ancient earth stood in direct contradiction with the scientific principles that he had worked so hard to establish—that energy cannot be created or destroyed and that heat tends to dissipate. Using these laws, argued Thomson, it would be possible to estimate the age of the earth and investigate whether it was old enough for evolution to take place.
In April of 1862, he brought out a paper claiming that a thermodynamic analysis of the flow of heat in the earth showed directly that it must be younger than uniformitarians, and by extension Darwin, believed. It starts, “Essential principles of thermodynamics have been overlooked by geologists.” Dissipation was the key to Thomson’s argument. Observations from mine shafts and tunnels showed that the earth’s temperature increases with depth below the surface. Thomson’s friend the Scottish physicist J.D. Forbes, by taking measurements in and around Edinburgh, estimated that the earth’s temperature rose by one degree Fahrenheit for every 50 feet of descent. This persuaded Thomson that the earth was cooling, losing heat to the atmosphere.
Using elegant mathematics, Thomson combined Forbes’s measurements with others relating to the thermal conductivity and the melting point of rock. Even acknowledging uncertainties in the data, he concluded the earth’s age was somewhere between 20 million and 400 million years. This was far too short a time for evolution. Even if the older estimate was true, Thomson argued the earth would have been considerably hotter than it is now for most of its existence. Before around 20 million years ago, the temperature of the entire earth would have been so high that the whole globe was molten rock. Evolution’s requirement that the earth was much as it is now for eons defied thermodynamic sense.
Darwin was shaken. “Thomson’s views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.” “I am greatly troubled at the short duration of the world according to Sir W Thomson.” “Then comes Sir W Thomson like an odious spectre”—these are lines from Darwin’s letters to friends. In turn, his allies felt unqualified to attack the physicist’s arguments and suggested that perhaps evolution worked faster than previously believed, a solution that didn’t satisfy Darwin….
(17) MARTIAN MINERAL WATER. “Mars’ Missing Water Might Be Hiding in Its Minerals” – Smithsonian Magazine has the story.
The Martian landscape is an arid expanse of craters and sandstorms, but scientists have spotted several signs that at one point in its life, the Red Planet was awash with blue waters. Scientists have theorized that much of the planet’s water was lost to outer space as the atmosphere dissipated.
But the planet’s vast oceans couldn’t have been lost to space fast enough to account for other milestones in Mars’ existence. The water must have gone somewhere else. A new study presents a solution: the water became incorporated into the chemical makeup of the ground itself. The research uses new computer models and found that if Mars once had a global ocean between 328 and 4,900 feet deep, then a significant amount of that water might now be stored in the planet’s crust.
The study, published on March 16 in the journal Science and presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, incorporated data collected from Martian meteorites and by NASA’s Curiosity rover….
(18) RADIO ACTIVITY. Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait says a new search tool finds “No alien signals found from 31 nearby Sun-like stars” at SYFY Wire.
The results? They detected 26,631,913 candidate signals. Yes, 26 million. Their new algorithm (which I’ll get to in a sec) screened out 26,588,893 of them (99.84%) as anthropogenic — that is, coming from humans. Radio transmissions, satellites, radar, and all sorts of human tech can emit radio waves, and they were able to find those pretty well and eliminate them.
Of those left, 90% or so were close enough to known radio frequency interference that they could be weeded out as well.
That left 4,539 candidate signals. They checked all those by hand, amazingly enough, and found…
… they too were all from radio interference. So, out of 26 million sources, not a single one was from aliens. Bummer*.
[Thanks to N., Michael Toman, Jennifer Hawthorne, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John Hertz, David Doering, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]
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first!
Didn’t expect Ovid, but delighted all the same.
Second! And who’d like a dark chocolate German Ritter bar? I found a nice deal on some. First three replies get them. Send me an email here.
(10) Forever Peace is not a sequel (except arguably in a thematic sense, and thematically there are about a billion “sequels” to The Forever War according to my rough estimate) to The Forever War.
@Cat:
What is a Ritter bar? If it’s chocolate, I’ll try it.
Edit: email sent.
(8) The finale did pay off (a couple of weeks ago)
(10) DeLancie shows up briefly in an episode of the original BSG – wearing a helmet that disguises his face, but not his voice
(16) Detailed discussion of Kelvin’s Earth age calculation and why it went wrong https://www.americanscientist.org/article/kelvin-perry-and-the-age-of-the-earth
The food in Redwall is amazing. I obsessed over those feasts when I was a smol Meredith.
Rich Horton on says Forever Peace is not a sequel (except arguably in a thematic sense, and thematically there are about a billion “sequels” to The Forever War according to my rough estimate) to The Forever War.
Haldeman has said that is an indirect sequel whatever that means. And yes it takes place in a different future.
Ritter is good! Sending you an email, Cat!
Bonnie asks What is a Ritter bar? If it’s chocolate, I’ll try it.
Here’s one of the Green Man reviews of the Ritter bars. Yes, I have a zine that reviews chocolate along with genre fiction. And music and puppets.
On a personal note, they’re one of my favorite bars.
Oh, I did spend some time trying to figure out meadowsweet cream when I was younger – meadowsweet is a real plant, but despite my best smol-me efforts I couldn’t find a way to make cream from it. However! If we imagine tiny off-page mice-milkable cows, it could be used to infuse dairy cream – perhaps during the process of clotting it for proper scone application – and would give it a subtle, almondy flavour.
(But sour cream scones is a pretty nice idea too.)
There is a direct sequel (same lead characters) titled “Forever Free”.
Everyone always forgets about it.
Ooh, I haven’t had a Ritter bar in ages. Sending you an email in case I haven’t been beaten to the punch.
lurkertype notes There is a direct sequel (same lead characters) titled “Forever Free”.
Everyone always forgets about it.
Including me apparently as I’ve never heard of it. Have you read it?
For good reason.
James Davis Nicoll says of Forever Peace and no one remembering it: For good reason.
Ok so it is bad, or just really, really forgettable? I do know that sequels to Really Great Novels rarely are as good as that novel was. Now the sequel to A Memory Called Empire is proving to be every bit as good as its predecessor.
It’s a squarish block of chocolate. Nice stuff.
(2) the missing C in Zak went to wherever the Martian Manhunter was for most of the movie
I remember struggling mightily with ‘Forever Free’, but finding ‘Forever Peace’ OK. Anyhow it has been decades, and a reread of ‘The Forever War’ shows it too is not entirely free of the ravages of time.
Currently enjoying ‘The War of the Maps’, after mostly enjoying ‘Seven Devils’. Listening to ‘All the Good Times are Past and Gone’, by Gillian Welch/David Rawlings.
I am a Pixel, I am what I Scroll
The last section of “The Forever War” was made into a play in Chicago in 1983 at the Organic Theater. I discovered it when I was attending class at the DEC training center in Schaumburg and staying down the road at the venerable Woodfield Hyatt, the home for many years to WIndycon, from a local news item because it was the week before Halloween. Since the class was an entire week, and I stayed through to Saturday morning, I was able to attend Friday night.
There was also something else I was going to attend that night: a combination LARP and improv theater event called “Dungeon Master”. Fortunately the latter ran at midnight, so I was able to attend both.
The timing I understood when I saw the actor who played Mandella in the “Forever War” play, Bruce Young, was also the organizer of “Dungeon Master”.
11) More formally, Publius Ovidius Naso. He spent much of his career in exile, his Ars Amatoria being considered overly spicy even by Roman standards. (I haven’t read it myself. These days, I doubt my health would stand it.)
4) I’m inclined to take the guy’s point on that one…. I find time to dip in to three MMOs, one SF, one fantasy and one horror, and the main difference seems to be in the visuals and the text, but they’re all fundamentally Go Places, Gather Resources, Kill Stuff. The horror one just comes with different interaction messages, that’s all… where Star Trek Online, say, might have instructions like “Use console”, “Examine strange device”, “Go to Alpha Centauri system”, “Do you wish to enter the Alpha Quadrant?”, the horror game’s equivalent is like “Use Old Tom’s corpse”, “Examine bloated snakebitten cultist corpse”, “Go to the old abandoned barn”, “Do you wish to enter the Lair of Darkness?” (Yes, those are all genuine examples.)
People do try for things with more atmosphere, for example by implementing something like a sanity system, but all too often that sort of thing becomes familiar and predictable too – as your sanity breaks down and you start turning into an H.P. Lovecraft protagonist, it’s represented as “the screen goes all murky and wobbly, and there’ll be a jump scare along in a minute.”
Clickity
For me, the scariest video games are the ones where all you can do is hide. Fighting big ugly grotesque beasts doesn’t particularly scare me. Even if they’re really really gross and kill you lots (the whole Dark Souls genre), it just doesn’t seem that scary. But the extreme survival-horror games where you basically have no recourse but to sneak around while trying to solve your puzzles–those are the ones that can actually terrify me!
I can’t really imagine an MMO being scary–I just don’t see how those two things would fit together easily, if at all–but there are some scary multiplayer games, like the recent indie cult hit, Phasmophobia, where up to four of you at a time can go investigate haunted houses.
12) Never annoy a filker, for your name is distinctive and scans to “Greensleeves”.
13) You know how bitcoins are like idling your car in your driveway 24/7 with the emissions controls disabled in hopes that it will shit out a solved sudoku you can trade for heroin on the dark web? NFTs are that, minus the heroin.
@Xtifr: Have you seen Alien: Isolation? It’s a survival game where you play Ripley’s daughter, who’s gone in search of her mother. Spoiler: she should have stayed home.
@Steve Wright He spent much of his career in exile, his Ars Amatoria being considered overly spicy even by Roman standards.
Not so much spicy (or no more so than Martial, or Petronius, though they’re admittedly later) as unwise. It’s all about conducting affairs with married women, written while Augustus was trying what we might now call a moral re-armament campaign.
On a different note, though, the mannered irony of Ernest Brahma’s Kai Lung stories is enough like Jack Vance that I’m surprised I’ve never seen them cited as an influence.
@sophie re: the kai lung stories. Hunh!
Lorien Gray says Ooh, I haven’t had a Ritter bar in ages. Sending you an email in case I haven’t been beaten to the punch.
Lorien, I never got your email. Everyone, I’ve expanded the available Ritter bars to five, so there’s two more available. Send me an email thisaway.
(10) After Forever Peace won the Hugo, Haldeman said that he plans to write something called Forever Amber to win another Hugo.
@andrew :cymbal clash:
I assume that’ll be a book about the traumatic effects of a centuries-long relativistic war on a group of infighting princes & princesses with reality-bending abilities.
@Joe put it that way…I’d read that book.
I assumed Haldeman was talking about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Amber – but a Zelanzy tie-in would be fine…
It’s still an interesting novel with a compelling premise of soldiers completely disconnected from the society they’re fighting for, but there are some elements that didn’t age gracefully — the treatment of sexual orientation in particular. That turns into farce.
Impressively, a Washington Post article from 1998 is still available on the web
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/daily/sciencefiction.htm
Phasmophobia loses some of its edge with familiarity. Watching streamers play it for the first time was really exciting. Chance for the occasional scream or shout when the ghosts showed up. Eventually, it becomes just another team game with well-equipped investigators quickly figuring out what sort of spirit they’re dealing with and going about their jobs.
There was some art exhibit I read about in the New Yorker where they displayed video game images from various bowling games and how the games have evolved from stick figure to photo realistic images. I’d be curious to see what the evolution of horror games is like. I remember getting some good jumpscares from games like the 7th Guest twenty-eight years ago. I’m sure those would just bore the kids today who are used to games like Five Nights at Freddy’s
That the play is the tragedy, “Pixel,”
And its hero, the Conqueror Scroll.
@Cat – I got an email failure notice. Trying again.
Is there going to be a “What Did People Nominate For The Hugos” thread this year, btw? I’m always interested to know what people thought was the Best Of.
(11) John de Lancie has another memorable genre credit, playing mad scientist Eugene Bradford for eight years on Days of Our Lives. He ultimately disappeared into the future after building a time machine, returning eventually with a custom-built android replica of his wife for some reason.
Kyra: Good suggestion. I’ve opened a post where people can share their Hugo nominations.
“It’s still an interesting novel with a compelling premise of soldiers completely disconnected from the society they’re fighting for”
Yes quite rcade. And yes your reflection on the way sexual relations were treated was lacking sensitivity and nuance. As distinct from Kameron Hurley’s ‘The Light Brigade’ which I though was a very fine homage.
It’s been a long time since I read it, but “The Forever War” seemed to me then to have very cleverly found a science fictional scenario that matched the self-perceived situation of (some) Vietnam-era (baby-boomer) American soldiers. Mandella and his compatriots were relatively elite members of their society who, but for the war, could expect successful lives, and upon their return to home they found their society had undergone startling changes that they had no context for understanding.
Ken Richards: As distinct from Kameron Hurley’s ‘The Light Brigade’ which I though was a very fine homage.
The Light Brigade wasn’t an homage to The Forever War. It was in dialogue with a number of works, including Starship Troopers, The Forever War, and Old Man’s War.
@JJ: Yeah. Hurley paralleled the last chapter revelation of Johnny Rico’s ethnicity, with her own last chapter revelation about a previously unrevealed fact about her main character, for example.
Is 15 the new 5?
@Patrick Morris Miller: Heh, love your description of NFTs.
And yeah, I’ve seen Alien: Isolation, but never played it. But I agree that it looks like exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. I think it’s generally considered the first good game to be based on the Alien franchise. I’m not entirely sure I’m ready for that level of scary, though! 🙂
@Jack Lint: I agree that familiarity with Phasmophobia can, eventually, breed contempt, but I think that’s true for a few other things as well. But until you reach that threshold, it can be pretty scary. (Also, they recently nerfed the thermometer, so you can’t just zip through the explore part of the game any more. Also, ghosts can open cupboards, so hiding got trickier!)
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is another horror game where all you can do is run from or hide from the monsters. I did have a very tense time when I played it but, again, I expect that going back and playing it again would be a very different experience.
@Xtifr
Inspired by a tweet from @Theophite describing Bitcoin, from a couple of years ago.
@Xtifr: which is exactly why the copy I bought on sale still lurks unplaced on my hard drive. I got creeped out enough by Death Stranding, where the worst thing about the monsters is that they are nearly invisible, part of the premise of the game is that you are Special and cannot stay dead, and the game’s grimness is leavened by the sort of quirky humor that appeals to my inner adolescent (some of the weapons you can use against the monsters are crafted from your poop).
(11) Regarding the “digital blue eyes” in the Dune miniseries, I was interested to learn that they mostly weren’t digital (http://cecilia.sawneybean.com/dune/eyes.html), although to me the effect still looked jarring enough that they might as well have been. I feel like I’ve seen other cases of an effect being done in a clever way using physical things that still ended up unfortunately looking just as artificial, but I can’t think of one off the top of my head.
About The Forever War, one thing that for me helps the later stuff to feel less dated than it might is the drily funny line where, after Mandella says “Oh, that’s no problem. I’m tolerant,” the polite reply is “Yes, your profile shows that you… think you’re tolerant.” [Ellipsis in original.] To me, that’s Haldeman basically saying “This whole thing is from the point of view of someone who’s as stuck in the past as I am. No matter how enlightened I try to write this, it’s not going to be very convincing for future readers, so let’s just say Mandella is trying but still doesn’t really get it and might never.”
Following on my last comment – it’s still the case that the actual events as depicted by Haldeman, even without Mandella’s personal reactions to them, are weighted toward familiar stereotypes: for instance, the idea that gay men would be more likely to use makeup. That may simply reflect Haldeman’s own unfortunate preconceptions, but in a way I think it still works better than similar imagery in other dated books because it’s so essential that Mandella be weirded out by everything. If the social expression of gender had been more like what he was used to, then he’d have the easier option of going “Eh, I guess people are basically the same no matter what” – which can be a way of glossing over prejudice, just as many conservative-ish people today feel like sexual or ethnic minorities are fine as long as they seem totally assimilated and behave like the majority – or, if the differences had been completely unrelated to 20th century standards and sore spots, like if people all liked to wear full face masks or talk like pirates, then it’d have been a more generic “the future is a foreign country” scenario. Instead Mandella has to adjust to a situation where he’s constantly reminded of difference in visible ways that specifically push buttons for him in the same way they would for the majority of Haldeman’s audience. This reads to me as an attempt, whether successful or not, to remind the reader: “Yes, this is all an allegory for the experiences of returning vets in the ’70s, but the fact that my generation had old-fashioned ideas that seem obviously old-fashioned now does not mean you’re exempt. Something about society will bother you irrationally in the future, if not this then something else. You might feel like it’d be OK if only it wasn’t in this style, or if only it wasn’t your mom, but there will probably always be some such hangup you can’t fully get past. You may have to settle for not being a total asshole about it.”