Pixel Scroll 3/14/16 Pixels Gather And Now My Scroll Begins

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(1) WHAT A SAVINGS. Get your Grabthar’s hammer t-shirt from TeeChip. These babies are going for $22.99, while they last!

Grabthars hammer t fruit-of-the-loom-cotton-t-131313

(2) WOODEN IT BE LUVERLY. It took over a year to carve, and “This Beautiful Millennium Falcon Was Made With Over 3,000 Pieces of Wood”.

(3) HISTORY OF A MYSTERY. Memorabilia of the 1955 Cleveland and 1956 NYC World Science Fiction Conventions  is up for auction on eBay. There are publications, etc., but the most interesting part to fanhistorians would be the Cleveland committee’s file copies of correspondence, like the letter sent in advance of the con to its “mystery guest of honor” Sam Moskowitz (lower right). The seller is looking for a starting bid of $499.99, and the auction has six days to run.

clevention correspondence

(4) CORNELL’S SHERLOCK. Paul Cornell’s episode of Elementary will be broadcast in the US this week. You can view the trailer on his blog.

On this coming Sunday, the 20th March, at 10pm, my episode of Elementary, ‘You’ve Got Me, Who’s Got You?’ will be broadcast on CBS.  Those in the Central and East Coast time zones should note that the NCAA March Madness second round (I assume that’s something to do with sport) will be taking place that day, so there’s a chance the episode might be delayed.  At any rate, I’ll be up at 3am my time to live tweet along with the show.  So that’ll be fun.  And possibly quite weird.  If you haven’t already found me on Twitter, I’m @paul_cornell.

As the official synopsis says: ‘when a man who secretly fought crime dressed as a popular comic book superhero is murdered, Holmes and Watson must discover his real identity before they can find his killer.  Also, Morland makes a surprise donation to Watson’s favorite charity, in order to compel her to do him a business-related favor.’

Which is spot on, really!

(5) THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LOOKING-GLASS. Fantasy-Faction’s Nicola Alter tries to ease fantasy fans into the idea of reading sf – “Trying Out Science Fiction: A Guide For Fantasy Purists”. I’ve always had to listen to sf fans who talk about their dislike of fantasy (and, oh, the howls of rage when a Harry Potter book won the Hugo), but it never occurred to me there might be fantasy fans who had to be convinced to read sf. Now I know.

I picked up a trashy sci-fi novel in my teens and immediately encountered a confusing story full of alien languages and weird words, with unappealing characters and an empty, lacklustre world. I couldn’t make any sense of it and it made me vaguely depressed, so I put it down. I decided science fiction wasn’t for me.

Over a decade later, I finally gave it another go. I had often heard science fiction works mentioned by fellow fantasy fans and seen the genres placed side-by-side at conventions, in bookstores, and online. I thought: I really ought to explore this “other side of the coin” and see what all the fuss is about.

So, I started reading sci-fi. And found books I loved – even books I adored. I added several science fiction works to my all-time favourites list. In the process, I learned a few things that might be helpful to any fantasy lovers wanting to embark on a similar exploration of this sister genre:

Don’t Start With The Classics

There are many online forums where people ask, “I’ve never read any science fiction but I want to try it out, what should I read first?” and get a stream of comments recommending classic works like Dune and Stranger in a Strange Land and Foundation. These are indeed important works that have been enjoyed by many, but they’re probably not the best ones to start with. It’s like telling someone who’s never read fantasy to begin with Lord of the Rings or Elric of Melniboné. Yes, these are important stories and forerunners of the genre but they’re not exactly accessible or easy reads for a newcomer. (The exception here would be Ender’s Game, as it’s very accessible and easy to read despite its “classic” status).

You’re better off tackling the classics later, after you’ve cut your teeth on a modern, accessible read and worked up a taste for more….

(6) THEY PEEKED. Spy pics show off Star Wars’ new cool aliens and vehicles in “Meet Your New Favorite Alien From Star Wars Episode VIII” at Birth. Movies. Death.

Star Wars Episode VIII has committed the cardinal sin of filming outside, which means people with cameras have had a chance to snap pictures of the set. Most of the pics that have turned up have been kinda dull, but a whole slew appeared recently that have me beyond excited.

 

(7) DON’T DRINK AND TIME TRAVEL. That’s the lesson of this review of Version Control at Mashable.

Now comes Version Control, the trippy second novel by Dexter Palmer and the first pick for our new series — science fiction novel of the week. It’s easily one of the smartest, most unusual time-travel stories you’ll ever read — and one you don’t need a PhD. to understand, because it’s focused entirely on some very fascinating and flawed characters.

If time travel ever happened in the real world, it would probably look something like this: a bunch of obsessive scientists blandly insisting that what they’ve built is a serious-sounding “causality-violation device” (CVD), rather than a super-cliched “time machine.” And like many of our greatest technological advances, it would come with a whole bundle of unintended consequences

(8) KEN ADAM OBIT. Production designer Ken Adam, whose work included the war room in Dr. Strangelove and some of the sets in Dr. No, died March 10 reports the New York Times.

With “You Only Live Twice,” the fifth Bond film, Mr. Adam had more than half the total budget at his disposal. He spent $1 million of it building a volcano that contained a secret military base operated by the international terrorist organization Spectre.

“He was a brilliant visualizer of worlds we will never be able to visit ourselves,” Christopher Frayling, the author of two books on Mr. Adam, told the BBC in an article posted on Friday . “The war room under the Pentagon in ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ the interior of Fort Knox in ‘Goldfinger’ — all sorts of interiors which, as members of the public, we are never going to get to see, but he created an image of them that was more real than real itself.”

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS

  • Born March 14, 1879 – Albert Einstein

Mental Floss has “10 Inventive Myths About Einstein Debunked”:

10. THE MYTH: HE WAS ONE OF ONLY 10 OR 12 WHO COULD UNDERSTAND THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY.

Tired of being questioned about this idea, Einstein told the Chicago Daily Tribune in May 1921, “It is absurd. Anyone who has had sufficient training in science can readily understand the theory. There is nothing amazing or mysterious about it. It is very simple to minds trained along that line, and there are many such in the United States.” Today, a number of experts have taken on the challenge of decoding the complex theory and succeeded.

 

  • Born March 14, 1957 – Tad Williams

(11) THE SEMI-COMPLEAT RABID PUPPY. Vox Day reaches the finale of his slate: Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Novel.

The preliminary recommendations for the Best Novel category.

  • Seveneves: A Novel, Neal Stephenson
  • Golden Son, Pierce Brown 
  • Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm, John C. Wright
  • The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, Jim Butcher
  • Agent of the Imperium, Marc Miller

(12) FOR THE RECORD. In a comment on the above post, John C. Wright summarized his experience at Sasquan last year.

Instead of criticizing me for bring unenthused and indifferent to World Con, which was the case and would have been a legitimate criticism, the Morlock here invents the idea out of nothing that I expected a warm welcome from the hags and termagants who have been sedulously ruining science fiction for twenty years, and that I was foolish for having such foolish expectations. Actually, I was treated quite warmly by the people I met there, the fans and other professionals. It was only David Gerrold and Patrick Hayden who were rude.

(13) AXANAR SUIT AMENDED. Trek Today presents as a list of bullet points all the newly specified copyright infringements performed by Axanar.

The Hollywood Reporter headlined a particular one: “Paramount Claims Crowdfunded ‘Star Trek’ Film Infringes Copyright To Klingon Language”.

After the Star Trek rights-holders sued producers, led by Alec Peters, who put out a short film and solicited donations with the aim of making a studio-quality feature set in the year 2245 — before Captain James T. Kirk took command, when the war with the Klingon Empire almost tore the Federation apart — the defendants brought a dismissal motion that faulted Paramount and CBS with not providing enough specificity about which of the “thousands” of copyrights relating to Star Trek episodes and films are being infringed — and how.

Ask and ye shall receive.

On Friday, Paramount and CBS filed an amended complaint that responded in a few ways.

To the argument that because the crowdfunded film hasn’t actually been made yet, the lawsuit is “premature, unripe and would constitute an impermissible prior restraint on speech,” the plaintiffs point to defendant’s Facebook post that mentioned a “locked script.” They also note a press interview that Peters gave on Feb. 1 where he said, “We violate CBS copyright less than any other fan film,” as an admission he indeed is violating copyright.

Click to read the amended lawsuit in full.

(13) WESTERCON 70 PR. Dee Astell, Chair of Westercon 70 (a.k.a. ConAlope 2017/LepreCo43) announced the con’s Progress Report #0 and #1 are available for download.

(14) LOVE WILL KEEP US TOGETHER. Vanity Fair Hollywood says “Xena Reboot Series to Turn Implied Homoerotic Undertones into Glorious Homoerotic Overtones”.

NBC has ordered a new Xena pilot from writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, architect behind the CW’s cult hit The 100, and he plans to be a little more forthcoming about the undeniable chemistry between Xena and Gabrielle with this updated iteration. During a Q&A session on Tumblr, Grillo-Marxuach confirmed that the two women would be lovers, no bones about it:

i am a very different person with a very different world view than my employer on the 100 – and my work on the 100 was to use my skills to bring that vision to life. xena will be a very different show made for very different reasons. there is no reason to bring back xena if it is not there for the purpose of fully exploring a relationship that could only be shown subtextually in first-run syndication in the 1990s. it will also express my view of the world – which is only further informed by what is happening right now – and is not too difficult to know what that is if you do some digging.

His passing reference to differing worldviews alludes to a minor kerfuffle among devotees of The 100 following the death of fan-favorite character Lexa, who was in a relationship with the also-female Clarke prior to her untimely demise. Fans cried foul and the choice to extinguish one of the small lights of hope for LGBTQ viewers on television, and Grillo-Marxuach has evidently heard their pleas loud and clear. This new series—the fate of which is still something of question mark, considering that NBC is still far from ordering it to series—will right past wrongs and placate the fans in one fell swoop. And best of all, it’ll provide young viewers with a hero with whom they can identify.

(15) DESPERATELY SEEKING MARVIN. Yahoo! News has the story: “Europe-Russia mission blasts off on hunt for life on Mars”.

One key goal of the Trace Gas Orbiter is to analyse methane, a gas which on Earth is created in large part by living microbes, and traces of which were observed by previous Mars missions.

“TGO will be like a big nose in space,” said Jorge Vago, ExoMars project scientist.

Methane, the ESA said, is normally destroyed by ultraviolet radiation within a few hundred years, which implied that in Mars’ case “it must still be produced today”.

TGO will analyse Mars’ methane in more detail than any previous mission, said ESA, in order to try to determine its likely origin.

(16) MARS ATTACKS GAME. Here’s a video demonstration of how to play Mars Attacks: The Dice Game by Steve Jackson Games. (If this really turns you on, there are four more videos about the game at the SJG site.)

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Mark-kitteh, Will R., Tom Galloway, Andrew Porter, and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Iphinome.]

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206 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/14/16 Pixels Gather And Now My Scroll Begins”

  1. msb on March 15, 2016 at 7:21 am said:
    @ Vicki Rosenzweig
    From The Praise Singer (Renault):
    “Tell them in Lakedaimon, passer-by,
    That here, obedient to their word, we lie.”

    The rather free Italian translation from Salvatore Quasimodo I learned is

    “A un passante”
    Staniero va’ a Sparta e di’ che qui cademmo
    in obbedienza alle sue sacre leggi

  2. von Dimpleheimer on March 15, 2016 at 8:45 am said:
    Thanks for the badge advice. It makes sense that if it had to be my legal name they wouldn’t ask what I wanted on it. I’m tempted to write Xaxnax or Short Joke now, but will probably just go with my real first name.

    I haven’t been reading File 770 much the last week. Did I miss any talk of a File 770 Lunacon meetup?

    It CAN be your legal name. Having a handle is not compulsory. I use my legal name – there is only one of me. 😉

  3. @Lowell Gilbert: @Tasha: don’t say Chip didn’t warn you…

    Looked like all too common a problem to me. Wasn’t nearly the engrossing read I was hoping. Maybe it’s because in the last month I’ve read several con demise/take a year or two off for similar reasons.

    I do have the advantage of not being emotionally involved. During the time this was happening I was graduating high school, applying to college, working 3 jobs, and dealing with a number of very serious family crisis. Conventions weren’t on my radar. Putting food on my family’s table, clothing myself, putting money together to pay for college, and convincing myself suicide was not a solution.

    What’s sad is seeing fandom continue to make similar mistakes. Not learning from our own history. Thirty years later and we are making a number of the same mistakes.
    1. Not making sure attendees understand consequences of damage to hotel could prevent future cons

    2. Power plays rather than working together for what’s best for the convention

    3. Pretending problems don’t exist in hopes they’ll go away

    4. Ignoring history instead of learning from it – acting like each con is completely unique – what happened to that con couldn’t happen to us even if our problems look similar – codes of conduct, treatment of hotel & staff, enforcement of rules, not doing anything when there is a known problem, we’ve always done things this way so not going to change even if it’s obviously causing us problems, not looking forward or backwards just focusing on now.

    I’m sure many feel that’s not what’s going on. We keep reinventing the wheel and it looks a lot like the last wheel. It’s crisis management throughout the planning or casually following the organizations playbook. A few people are working really hard to change things. But many more seem to give lip service. Which is why we can count on 1-5 SFF con scandals a year.

    I’m not saying the volunteers aren’t working their butts off to do the best they can. And they need to be appreciated for stepping up to the plate. The question is how do we as a larger part of fandom help them stop repeating the same mistakes. A part of that lays squarely on our shoulders:
    1. Attending fans need to clean up their behavior

    2. Attending fans should alert con & hotel staff to problems

    3. Attending fans need to take responsibility for their kids, friends, and family – step up and say something or find a way to remove them from brewing situations. Don’t let your kids roam free – follow con policies.

    I have thoughts. Many thoughts. Lots on personal and group responsibility.

  5. Just read this excerpt from a new debut novel out next month and was hooked! Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

    I’ve recommended Old Man’s War to a scifi newbie and it worked pretty well. They were a young male though…Last week, though, I was recommending Ancillary Justice to quite a few people I work with that I found out enjoy scifi. Those aren’t books I’d recommend to newcomers. Especially the first book. There is so much you have to figure out for yourself in AJ and piece together. For a pure-scifi newb, I’d recommend something much easier to read and access.

    (I also really really agree with staying away from the “Classics”. Partially because I really didn’t like so many of the “essentials” that so many people talk about (Foundation and Stranger in a Strange Land especially).)

  7. @JJ: No problem, and BTW thanks for linking to the Crown web site; I totally spaced on doing that. (blush)

    @Various: Thanks for the feedback on the “Death Gate” series! I’m going to bookmark it for when I’m in a Golden Agent mood, probably. And wow, a lot of people have read this.

    @Shao Ping: “while I thought of myself primarily as a fantasy in middle school”

    Nonsense, I’m sure you’re real. 😉 (I presume you meant “a fantasy reader” but I couldn’t pass this up, sorry.) (EDITED to fix typos. OMG Murphy’s law, edited again.)

    @Paul Weimer & @JJ: LOL at your Billy Joel riffs! 😀

    @k_choll: Sleeping Giants is on my “look into this” list; thanks for the excerpt link.

    @RedWombat: If Gabrielle – or Xena – died, wouldn’t they just get a replacement from another universe, like Hercules with Iolaus. One of the few things I know about the Hercules show. The descriptions of Iolaus’s many deaths amuses me. BTW Iolaus died four times. Hmm, “Iolaus 2 left his life with Hercules so he could become a merman” – these shows are freaking weird, LOL.

  8. @Ultragotha: The link given is distinctly biased; however, many of the facts are correct. I was the chair (an office I hadn’t sought and have avoided since) and was therefore the one woken up at ~3am to witness various small-hours vandalism.

    @Tasha: one of the aggravating things at the time was we weren’t even the first; Norwescon had blown up the previous year (partly by overflowing a hotel that had been claimed to be roomy enough for a Worldcon), and there had been smaller examples (e.g., Lunacon 1981) and individual bad actors (such as someone I tried to have suspended decades before another con got around to it) well before then. Note that pushing responsibility can also be done clumsily; I wonder how much pushback Arisia saw for having a >1-hour line of people waiting to sign a good-conduct pledge before they could pick up their badges?

    various re OMW: the issue I had was that going at it like stoats (thank you Dan Morgan) was the only thing anyone could think of. My maternal grandfather’s first action would have been a very long, very upright walk, and I’d bet the same or would be true for anyone who had been dealing with arthritis/rheumatism — or COPD, or arteriosclerosis, or any other general enfeeblement (maybe even more on-and-off issues — e.g. gout?). Surely a military-recruitment station would have had serious fitness facilities — or at least an infinite walk as in 2001?

  9. @kathodus: Oddly, I can’t find anything by Graydon Saunders on Amazon, but he’s on Kobo; but there, the previews don’t load and the descriptions are bizarre and unilluminating. For the first book, “Egalitarian heroic fantasy. Presumptive female agency, battle-sheep, and bad, bad odds.” For the second book, “Egalitarian heroic fantasy. Experimental magical pedagogy, non-Euclidean ancestry, and some sort of horror from beyond the world.” What the heck?!

    I can’t even figure out how to get more info on this book, or a sample, or anything. Maybe I’ll check iTunes later. Following a link to James Davis Nicoll’s site got me errors on multiple pages, because Ctein has no last name (I posted a comment on Nicoll’s blog, but don’t know his e-mail). Anyway, I’ll take your word for it that these Saunders books exist, but they seems well-hidden on the ‘net! And/or I’m incompetent today.

  10. @Chip Hitchcock: Re. OMW, they did do other things, like exploring their amazing strength and agility. It may have gotten slightly less description; I don’t recall. But yeah, it was there.

    I’m amused how big a deal this part of the book seems to be for folks. 🙂

  11. @theyoungpretender: “…they all felt betrayed by him”:

    as I suspect they felt betrayed by the author of another (older) popular “Mil-SF” series, War with the Chtorr….

    What a shock to learn that the author is a card carrying….(wait for it)

    liberal

  12. I never liked Old Man’s War, but I seldom like military SF. So I guess I would only recommend it to people who actually likes to think war is romantic and fun to read about.

  14. Re: Lord Foul’s Bane. I had the exact same problems other people upthread mentioned when I first read the books – the rape, his reluctance to help for no good reason, and also his extreme self-pity. I read them all (the first trilogy) only because back then I couldn’t start a trilogy and stop it before it was done. This was well over 20 years ago. I seem to recall I ended up somewhat enjoying the books in the end, but I’m not sure. I found the File770 comment, by Bruce Baugh, that convinced me to re-read and re-assess: https://file770.com/?p=24066&cpage=1#comment-311974

    Re: Saunders – Cherryh is the other author who Saunders reminds me of. The tone, especially in “The March North” is very Cook, the use of archaic or very specific but not often-used words is reminiscent of Wolfe, and the tight narrative, where the world slowly unfurls before you as you suddenly “get” an off-handed comment three chapters ago because of another off-handed comment is very Cherryh.

    @Kendall – he’s not selling his stuff on Amazon. I forget the exact reasoning, but it’s something to do with their business practices. I read that somewhere on Goodreads when I was trying to figure out how the hell to get his books. I ultimately bought them from Google Play. There are instructions somewhere for grabbing the epub file embedded in the (annoying) Google Play format.

    I saw him offer to send someone an epub of one of his books when they were unable to procure one elsewhere. I could maybe send you a copy of The March North (which is much cheaper than A Succession of Bad Days, and IMO good but not nearly as good as it).

    Oh, just checking the price and found the first is $5 and the second $10, on Kobo. You can preview the first one here (the first 4, short, chapters):
    https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/the-march-north-1

    The second one (first 6, I think, longer excerpt it seemed):
    https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/a-succession-of-bad-days

    Both excerpts provide interesting examples of Saunders’ world-building and dry humor. I find his magic system very interesting. His writing can be very thick and difficult, but (and I’m speaking as someone who really loves to read for escape more than anything else) I’ve found it well worth the effort.

    ETA: Saunders is one of those authors that makes me miss reading for class, not the ridiculous time frame you were given to supposedly absorb great works or whatnot, but the class discussions, where you’d find out the myriad elements you’d completely missed or had flown over your head. Nabakov’s “Pale Fire” is something I’d never have appreciated if I hadn’t read it for a class.

  15. Kendall: Saunders has made the decision to not sell on Amazon. You can find The March North and A Succession of Bad Days on Kobo and Google Play. And yes, the descriptions are not very helpful; what the books are is tight third person, in media res, very densely written and very good. You have to figure a lot of things out for yourself. The writing is kind of a combination of John M. Ford and C. J. Cherryh, and the setting is a world where wizard wars happened for tens of thousands of years in the past, producing a very, very dangerous landscape, and, in the Commonweal, an aversion to ever letting wizards rule again.
    But how do you prevent people with literally god-like powers from ruling?
    This is fantasy with evolution, chemistry, and physics. And magic, which distorts all of the above.

  16. I don’t think anything would send me back to Thomas Covenant. Life is too short.

  17. von Dimpleheimer asked:

    I’m buying my first attending membership to a con (this weekend’s Lunacon) and the webpage asks for “name on badge.” Is just my first name sufficient? Or do they need my full name and title as on my driver’s license, Dictator for Life (in Exile) Xaxnax Quibbletipper XXI of Mars?

    Others have covered most of the answer, but I’d just like to point out that it’s totally optional. You can leave it blank, and you’ll get either your first name or your full name as your badge name.

  19. Kendall – Cally’s answer is spot-on. Well, I don’t know John M. Ford’s writing, so I can’t vouch for that. More food for my TBR monster, it seems.

  21. Lois Tilton on March 15, 2016 at 6:31 am said:

    I preferred last year’s Rabid Puppy logo to the current design, overly cluttered with skulls.

    If you look at it wrong, it appears that the middle puppy is wearing a castle tower as a hat.

  22. re: mil sci-fi

    I tend to need something extra to read mil sci-fi. The Old Man’s War trilogy got subversive; the Ancillary trilogy was quite subversive, and in general I need a good deal more than the standard Niven-Redacted meditations on the manly glorys of war to be worth the read.

    As far as other books I’ve read, I finally got around to Just City and I’m undecided. Exceedingly well written, good grasp of the source material, and makes the gentle stab at the inconsistencies of the source text. I don’t feel as blown away by it as others have though.

  23. @Chip Hitchcock

    If you have other points of view on the topic I’d love to read.

    Note that pushing responsibility can also be done clumsily; I wonder how much pushback Arisia saw for having a >1-hour line of people waiting to sign a good-conduct pledge before they could pick up their badges?

    Oh yes pushing responsibility is difficult. If fans are going to insist on holding concoms more responsible than we have to do our part. It’s going to be inconvenient or annoying as we transition and figure out the best way to make things work.

    I don’t know enough about Arisia and the good-conduct pledge signing but I’d expect disabled and older people to have a separate sign in which accommodated their circumstances. I’d have had it at the top of my list. But organizing something and having it work out as planned are frequently two different things.

    I learned that as I helped my mom with the many events she planned for the company she worked for which had to take into account the regular staff of mostly Americans and the visiting upper management from the Japanese parent company. Most of my helping was watching to prevent disasters during the events themselves and stepping in when needed. Not the role most 8-16 year old kids take on at a parents corporate parties. I didn’t play with the other kids I was too busy. I also listened to all it took to plan these events for 10+ years of my life.

    One of the things I learned between watching my mom and helping to plan many weddings is people spend a lot of time arguing over details which aren’t all that important and no one will know if they don’t happen and not enough time on the big issues. They tend to forget the forest/main goal while being bogged down by each tree.

  25. @TheYoungPretender, I am currently reading The Just City and while I’m enjoying it, I’m definitely keeping my socks on.

    @Hampus Eckerman – I never liked Old Man’s War, but I seldom like military SF. So I guess I would only recommend it to people who actually likes to think war is romantic and fun to read about.

    I read a lot of MilSF and neither of these things are true for me. I do find writing about people and groups under stress of interest and am a big fan of tight narratives. War itself? No. And I’m trying not to take your comments personally, but it’s hard seeing an interest dismissed so comprehensively and incorrectly.

    I liked but did not love OMW and its sequels. I appreciate Scalzi’s blog, but his fiction is usually too facile for me.

  26. @ Tasha

    You’ve been watching too much TV, movies, and reading too many books to be that cynical.

    On the contrary, it’s because I watch too much TV, movies, etc. etc.

  27. @Doctor Science – Not really. Characters from The March North show up, at least two of them have significant parts in it, and one of the main characters in A Succession of Bad Days may or may not have been in the book, but was definitely in the events described. The significance of some aspects of the world would probably be lost, but the story should all make sense, and it’s not Military Fantasy, but rather basically about a school for sorcerers.

  28. @Doctor Science – the plots stand alone, but I found The March North provided a more accessible window into the world and gave me a grounding that was helpful when the sorcerers in A Succession of Bad Days proceeded to twist reality into pretzels. Less pieces I needed to figure out to understand what was happening.

    Disclaimer: I prefer the first book to the second.

  29. @Kendall: perhaps because it’s so in-your-face: IIRC, the narrator is tripped by a prowling woman when he first sets foot outside his room, and makes it sound like this is the first thing everyone does. Not that I’m going to go back and read; this Scroll has already put too many things on my TBR….

    @Isabel Cooper: See above. I know people who were like that in college, but it wasn’t the only thing the undergraduates overall did. (At least not mine; the Saturday night the fire alarm went off around 1am there was one mixed couple on my floor.) And you, being female, can make the recommendation; I’d beware offering it to any woman I don’t know well, as such action could be read too many ways.

    @Cheryl S: “facile”. Thank you; that was the one-word wrap-up I couldn’t come up with.

  30. I remember when Xena first appeared, in a “Hercules” episode, and thought she was a natural for her own show. When she got it, though, I never could watch it. Seemed like I’d get halfway to the set, and then I’d have to cover half the remaining distance, and half the remaining distance of that… well. Never quite understood why I couldn’t watch the show. Seemed like, I dunno, some kind of… conundrum, or something.

  31. @Kip And here the way I had heard, a duo of doctors were physically restraining you from watching the episodes.

  32. If you look at it wrong, it appears that the middle puppy is wearing a castle tower as a hat.

    Maybe the RPs, like the Jägermonsters, consider big hats to be status symbols.

    I see the skull cup has made it into this year’s design.

  33. Cat on March 15, 2016 at 4:44 am said:
    Read the first Thomas Covenant book. Got to the part where the main character is a rapist. Read to the end hoping the main character would be horribly killed. Didn’t get my wish. Never read another book in the series. Not likely to start now. Ugh

    I’m another who couldn’t finish that book. Ugh.

  34. @Chip: Hee! Fair enough. In mine, while it wasn’t the only thing we did, we were mostly either fucking, having drama at each other over who we wanted to be fucking, throwing parties slash getting drunk in the hopes of having the nerve to proposition each other, or playing video games slash D&D.*

    I guess I figured that the OMW characters were old enough have the nerve and skip the drama, and they didn’t seem to have a lot of video games on the ship. 😉

    I do, however, totally see what you mean re: the gender of the reccomender/recommendee.

    * I once described my typical sophomore Thursday schedule: stay out until 11 playing a game, stay up until 1 playing Mega Man and drinking, stay up until 3 talking about boys, stay up until 6 hooking up with boys, go to 8 AM class in a cocktail dress and boots because fuck it going to sleep now is pointless and I haven’t done laundry in a month anyhow.

    I miss those days. Trying to do that sort of thing now would kill me in a week, though.

  35. Cheryl S:

    “I read a lot of MilSF and neither of these things are true for me. I do find writing about people and groups under stress of interest and am a big fan of tight narratives. War itself? No. And I’m trying not to take your comments personally, but it’s hard seeing an interest dismissed so comprehensively and incorrectly.”

    Sorry about that. There is something in military fiction, regardless of genre, that makes me angry and sometimes my reactions aren’t that good. I mostly try to avoid it.

  36. Re: Lord Foul’s Bane

    I got about a chapter past the rape, up to his explanation for it, before I decided to give the book a pass. Sixteen year old me was far from a paragon of feminism and self-awareness, sad to say, but I had that much figured out.

  37. I feel about the TC stories about the same way I do about S6 of Buffy: yes, this may be *realistic*, but it’s not *enjoyable*. The world is full of awful people with whom I have absolutely no desire to hang out; I don’t need my fiction to be the same way, even if it portrays them really true to life. (See also: Gone Girl.)

    And another way in which both Buffy S6 and TC annoy me is that I hate the “but maaaaaybe it’s all in your heaaaaaad!” trope. Nope. Not here for that. Pretty resentful of long-running stories which suddenly stick that in when I’ve signed on for something else entirely, in fact.

  38. I’ve known people claiming that fantasy is better than SF for ages. Because, y’know, fantasy is all about plots and characters and stuff, while SF is all about gadgets and technology. And, of course, that old canard, which some people are still trying to make be true: SF is for men! Which, in case it wasn’t obvious, cuts both ways. Rockets are so phallic! 😉

    Of course, I’m old enough to remember when fantasy really was a second-class genre compared to SF, in terms of sales and popularity as well as respect. But those days vanished in the post-Tolkien wave (i.e. around about the time the World Fantasy Award was created.) Nowadays, I think it is, if anything, the reverse. Which I find sad, because I really do mildly prefer SF.

    It’s particularly ironic to hear someone complain about SF’s use of “alien languages and weird words” when the first thing you think of when you hear the term “fantasy” is: …Tolkien! 😀

    Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
    ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

    On the other hand, while I prefer SF in general, I don’t particularly care for MilSF. With the notable exceptions of Elizabeth Moon and John Scalzi, there’s little of it that can hold my interest. That said, I do love Space Opera, which is why I get annoyed by people who try to bundle the two as if they were the same thing. An award for “MilSF and Space Opera” makes about as much sense to me as an award for “Western and Mystery”.

  39. I really enjoy MilSF. Which somewhat surprised me, given my views on military/war (get from that what you will). Really liked OMW and the sequels (although I haven’t read the most recent one), I think The Red by Nagata is just spectacular, and on and on. One series that I tried out that I couldn’t figure out if I liked or hated was William C Dietz’s Legion of the Damned. I read the entire first book, was reasonably entertained, but in retrospect I think I really didn’t like it.

  40. I have a question for folks who’ve read Planetfall. I happen to be much more bothered by bad biology than bad physics in science fiction. Now, in Chapter 4, we’re told that organisms on the new planet use DNA so identical to Terran that it can be integrated into the human genome. Is there going to be a scientifically reasonable explanation for that? If not I may not bother with the rest of the book.

  42. Is there any e-book app that allows you to have two tabs open to different parts of the book simultaneously?

    Depends on how many devices you want to use.

    With the free Kindle software, I could be reading a book on my Kindle and have the glossary open on my phone, with the map up on my desktop screen for size and (maybe) color…

  44. Re: Lord Foul’s Bane. I had the exact same problems other people upthread mentioned when I first read the books – the rape, his reluctance to help for no good reason, and also his extreme self-pity.

    The latter two are why I never made it to the first one – that’s more than a third into the book, coming up on halfway! How did anyone put up with him that long?

  45. @Doctor Science: Oh, thanks for that link! I literally laughed out loud. Whatever else is wrong with Twitter, at least it guarantees that when a famous person says something silly, there will be dozens of responses that are genuinely funny.

  46. Kip W on March 15, 2016 at 12:52 pm said:
    I remember when Xena first appeared, in a “Hercules” episode, and thought she was a natural for her own show. When she got it, though, I never could watch it. Seemed like I’d get halfway to the set, and then I’d have to cover half the remaining distance, and half the remaining distance of that… well. Never quite understood why I couldn’t watch the show. Seemed like, I dunno, some kind of… conundrum, or something.

    Please…

    Paul (@princejvstin) on March 15, 2016 at 12:57 pm said:
    @Kip And here the way I had heard, a duo of doctors were physically restraining you from watching the episodes.

    …make it stop.

  47. @Hampus Eckerman – Sorry about that. There is something in military fiction, regardless of genre, that makes me angry and sometimes my reactions aren’t that good. I mostly try to avoid it

    I kind of knew that about you. I think anything that glorifies war is, at best, repulsive, whether it’s fiction or the latest polemic by someone safely out of harm’s way. I stay far away from that kind of military SF. That still leaves a lot of fiction that suits me.

    By the time the rape happened in the Thomas Covenant book, I was already pretty numb. I kept waiting for the wink and nudge that would indicate the author was sending up the genre. But nope. I’m pretty sure that was the series that taught me staying with something I despised was a fool’s game.

  48. @TYP: “Or Teddy is to busy doodling romantic pictures of Trump surrounded by hearts in his Trapper Keeper? Seriously, Teddy’s blog is on the quick road to Amazon self-published erotica starring Teddy and Donald Trump.”

    Don’t tempt me.

    @von Dimpleheimer: “the webpage asks for “name on badge.” Is just my first name sufficient?”

    A friend of mine sometimes attends cons as “Inga’s Lap” or “The Lap” – because his S.O.’s name is Inga, and she’s frequently sitting on his lap, so he’s embraced his purpose in life.

    @Paul:

    The way I heard it, someone’d nailed Kip’s feet down to prevent him from prying the bars apart with his beak and VOOM!

    (ETA, for clarity – yes, I’m sure ‘e knows a pair o’docs when he sees one. I’m just freestylin’ here.)

  49. Rev. Bob
    Well they had to, didn’t they? I mean there was nothing else they could do, be fair. I had transgressed the unwritten law.

  50. In re ‘Boskone From Hell’ – the more things change, the more they stay the same. Boskone probably wasn’t the first to have long-term fast growth due in significant part to an ill-behaved subgroup, terminating in the convention being unable to book a facility. But they’re definitely not the last – cf the recent Rainfurrest collapse, and at least one gaming con that managed to avoid the same by sheer dumb luck. The part about local students knowing the con as an easy place to indulge in drugs and bad behavior reminds me of a Windycon when word on the street got out about the ‘free rave.’ Fortunately the concom reacted appropriately, and things did not go off the rails.

    The root cause of the collapses is only partly growth. It’s growth of that destructive subset, coupled with the parent organizations inability or unwillingness to do the ugly but necessary part. They have to either reel in or expel the destructive subset, or they have to wave enough money at the facility that they’re willing to put up with it.

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