(1) ROBOWATCH. Of course, I’ll understand if you don’t have any money left for this item after running out to buy yesterday’s featured rocket pen with the tiny astronaut. Which is okay! Because this post is from 2015 and the auction is long over.
MB&F has just announced that they will be donating a unique Melchior (co-created with L’Epée 1839) to the Only Watch auction taking place in November of this year. The Melchior, released at Baselworld earlier this year, is a highly functioning robot-form timepiece that was created in a limited series of 99 pieces. This is the 100th piece.
(2) LEARNING CURVE. Ann Leckie has been thinking about rejection.
…Hence my ambivalence–the difficulties are real, and I know every writer has to make their own decision about what to go through, how much rejection to deal with (and whether or not they can handle cluelessly–or maybe intentionally–hurtful comments along with that rejection, including offhand remarks about certain sorts of people not really existing or not being interesting or worthy of stories, when that would include you, yourself). At the same time–if you can do it, if you can stomach it, well, the chances may be really small, but you never know.
And there’s a thing that Mark Tiedemann said to me a while back that I thought was really smart. He said that really, when you submit to an editor over and over (we were mostly talking about shortfic here but still), you’re teaching them how to read your work.
Part of that systemic prejudice, part of what upholds it, is the way people are only familiar with certain kinds of stories. Other kinds feel off, weird, unrealistic (no matter how accurate and realistic they may be). It’s that incessant repetition of the “right” kind of story that keeps reinforcing itself. And this didn’t happen by accident–we’ve many of us been trained from small to appreciate certain kinds of stories, just like we’re taught from infancy to appreciate certain kinds of music. Most of the work, most of the training, is exposure to a high volume of work that fits the culturally approved model.
The way a reader learns to appreciate other sorts of stories, from other points of view, is to be exposed to them over and over. Editors and agents and slush readers–every time you submit, they are being exposed to your work.
(3) IT GOES AROUND. Atlas Obscura’s article about the world’s oldest globe is complete with photos and map recreations. Just about the time it was finished, Columbus was finding something unexpected that would fill the big empty space between Cipangu (Japan) and the Azores.
If the world’s oldest surviving globe has taught us anything, it’s that just when we think we’re starting to figure out how the world works, turns out we barely know anything at all.
Known formally as the Erdapfel (literally “Earth Apple,” or in some colloquial translations “potato”), the oldest globe is an impressive and beautiful artifact, even if its cartographic science is a little off. The Erdapfel dates back to 1492, and is far from the first globe ever created, but it is, so far, the oldest discovered terrestrial globe still in existence.
Round representations of the Earth go back to Ancient Greece, and the earliest spherical maps of the world were being created in the Islamic world in the 13th century or earlier. But none of those are thought to survive. Other than descriptions and flattened maps that would have covered earlier globes, the Erdapfel is the oldest remaining artifact of its kind.
(4) END OF DISCUSSION. At Chaos Manor Jerry Pournelle quotes what he had to say about required FDA drug testing and approval as part of a discussion in a SFWA Forum – which was shut down by a moderator.
That was too much. A SFWA moderator, backed by the officer who had requested that the discussion halt, locked the conference, and it sits in frozen silence. The reason given was that it was too personal, and I was privately informed that there were complaints about me. Since I named no one at any time, I mildly protested that I was unaware of what was personal about it that would be personally offensive to professional writers voluntarily reading a topic no one could possibly feel required to read.
The answer I got was that these discussions upset some members, and that a SFWA forum was no place for political discussions at all. And that’s the point: we have come to this, that a professional writers’ association finds that we can no longer have discussions that include politics because some members (who voluntarily read the topic) find it upsetting, and toxic, presumably because they disagree with the opinions expressed. For the life of me I cannot tell you what professional science fiction writer would find anything I said there personally offensive. Disagree, yes, of course; many disagree; that is to be expected, and it is those the FDA will rally to support the proposition that the FDA should insist that generic prescription of Name Brand drugs whose patents have expired be forbidden until double blind tests of the generic drug’s effectiveness have proved its effectiveness.
I think health care costs can be drastically lowered by letting doctors have more room to try different remedies; obviously only with informed consent of the patient, but medical associations I would suppose will work to assure that; but apparently the entire discussion can’t be discussed in a science fiction professional organization because some members are upset over encountering opinions contrary to their own – and if it can’t be discussed there, where the devil can it be discussed?
(5) WHY YOU CAN’T TELL A BOOK BY ITS COVER. Huffington Post picked up on Nnedi Okorafor’s discussion of a time publishers whitewashed her book cover.
Nebula Award-winning science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor wrote a book in 2007 called The Shadow Speaker. The story followed its protagonist ? a Muslim girl named Ejii, who the author described as “black skinned” ? through Niger in 2070.
So Okorafor was understandably unhappy when her publisher suggested putting a white woman on the book’s cover.
Today, the author shared the anecdote as part of a Twitter conversation about whitewashing in fiction. She tweeted the cover suggested by the publisher and the revised cover, updated to feature the story’s black protagonist, per the author’s request.
As a black woman writing a black female main character in a scifi novel, seeing my character whitewashed on the cover felt-like-erasure: pic.twitter.com/h5Nlhp8DHe
— Nnedi Okorafor, PhD????? (@Nnedi) March 14, 2017
(6) HUGOS RECS. Abigail Nussbaum explains her 2017 Hugo ballot nominees in the media categories.
Best Related Work: This is the category that I always feel most guilty about not nominating more widely in. There’s a lot of great non-fiction being written in genre right now, on- and off-line, but since my threshold for substantiveness excludes most individual blog posts, I often end up with very little that I want to nominate here. The solution, obviously, is to read more long-form non-fiction–UIP’s Modern Masters of Science Fiction is a great source that I somehow never get around to–but happily this year has been a good one for long-form online essays and blog series. (Not listed in this ballot, because he’s asked people not to nominate it, but still very much worth reading and remembering, is Jonathan McCalmont’s “Nothing Beside Remains: A History of the New Weird”, which delves into the short half-life of this genre, and the critical conversation that surrounded it.)
- A People’s History of the Marvel Universe by Steven Attewell – The only criticism I can make of Attewell’s series is that it seems to be on permanent hiatus, just when we could use an independent history of this corner of pop culture, told from a decidedly leftist perspective. Attewell delves into the origins of several key Marvel characters and concepts, from Magneto’s background as a Holocaust survivor, to the infamous “mutant metaphor”. He describes both the evolution of ideas we’ve come to take for granted, and the pitfalls the Marvel writers fell into as they tried to grapple with social upheaval and the need to reflect it in their world of heroes and villains. With superheroes currently one of the dominant forms in our pop culture, a perspective like Attewell’s is invaluable.
- Boucher, Backbone, and Blake – the Legacy of Blakes 7 by Erin Horakova – One of the many remarkable things about Erin’s essay is how accessible and thought-provoking it is even to someone like myself, who has been hearing about Blakes 7 for years, but has seen almost nothing of it. This is by no means an introductory piece or a guide to newbies. Its focus is specific, one might almost say deliberately fannish. And yet, by turning her eye on some very particular aspects of the show, and the people who were instrumental in achieving them, Erin builds a larger argument about the intersection between art and politics, about the capacity of popular entertainment to grapple with difficult, even radical ideas, and about the specific circumstances on the set of Blakes 7 that allowed it to do so, and how modern work would struggle to achieve the same effect. It’s a brilliant piece of cultural commentary (as already acknowledged by the voters for the BSFA award’s non-fiction category) and one that absolutely belongs on this year’s Hugo ballot.
(7) A LINE IN THE CHROME. Scalzi does not object to award eligibility posts – he makes them – but he doesn’t want to be directly asked for a Hugo nominating vote. Does that mean an ethical lesson is being imparted here, or is this a lesson in netiquette?
Not sure I like the new trend of folks begging for Hugo noms in emails. And by "Not Sure" I mean I absolutely won't nominate that thing.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) March 14, 2017
(8) PRATCHETT BUSTED. The BBC has the story.
A bronze bust of Sir Terry Pratchett has been unveiled ahead of plans to install a 7ft (2.1m) statue of the author in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
It was created by Paul Kidby, who illustrated Sir Terry’s Discworld novels, before his death in 2015.
The statue of the author, who lived locally, is due to be erected in the marketplace or Elizabeth Gardens.
Mr Kidby said getting his expression right so “he’s not unhappy” but “not smiling too much” was the hardest part.
(9) THE GREEN FLASH. Skyboat Media’s Kickstarter has funded – so there will be an 11 hour digital audiobook of Lightspeed Magazine’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction.
(10) TODAY’S DAY
- March 14 – 3.14 – is Pi Day.
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 14, 1968 — Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, aired its last episode.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRL
- Born March 14, 1887 — Sylvia Beach, founder of the Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Co. “Ray Bradbury visited this bookshop every time he was in Paris, usually in July,” remembers John King Tarpinian. “They would save signed first edition Jules Vern books for Ray.”
(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GENIUS
- Born March 14, 1879 – Albert Einstein
(14) COMIC SECTION. John King Tarpinian was amused by another Star Wars reference in Brevity.
(15) STARDUST IN OUR POCKETS LIKE GRAINS OF SAND. AKA, The Mote In Your Eye. Because the New York Times says there are “Flecks of Extraterrestrial Dust, All Over The Roof”.
After decades of failures and misunderstandings, scientists have solved a cosmic riddle — what happens to the tons of dust particles that hit the Earth every day but seldom if ever get discovered in the places that humans know best, like buildings and parking lots, sidewalks and park benches. The answer? Nothing. Look harder. The tiny flecks are everywhere. An international team found that rooftops and other cityscapes readily collect the extraterrestrial dust…
(16) APPLY TO BE A HARPER VOYAGER. The Harper Voyager line is putting out a call for any SFF-obsessed bloggers and social media “bigmouths” to apply to join their team of super-readers.
Harper Voyagers are granted special access to early review copies, private author chats, and more. The application period runs from now through May 4 – use the application form at Google Docs.
ARE YOU A HARPER VOYAGER?
Are you a fan of Science Fiction, Urban Fantasy, Fantasy or Horror? Would you like special access to e-galleys, author interactions, and swag? If so, the Harper Voyager US team invites you to apply to become a “Harper Voyager” super reader!
As a Harper Voyager super reader, you’ll get special access to early review copies, special entry to an exclusive online forum where they can post reviews and thoughts about the exclusive book previews, engage in private author chats, and special interactions with Harper Voyager authors at regional events. Most of all, we hope our super readers will help generate excitement for our stellar authors!
Please Note: This program is asking super readers to post honest reviews on Goodreads and consumer sites, participation in online Voyager events; virtual support of Voyager authors across social media. If you chose to post these reviews online at consumer websites, you must disclose in the review that you received your copy for free and send us a link to the review.
(17) LISTEN IN. DMS says Ian Tregillis tells a pretty good story beginning at 8:25 of this interview.
Ian Tregillis is the son of a bearded mountebank and a discredited tarot card reader. He was born and raised in the Minnesota Territory, where his parents had settled after fleeing the wrath of a Flemish prince. (The full story, he’s told, involves a Dutch tramp steamer and a stolen horse.) He holds a Ph.D. in physics for his research on radio galaxies and quasars, and is an alumnus of the Clarion workshop.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Jerry Pournelle, DMS, Daniel Dern, JJ, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
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ticky
RE: 5) WHY YOU CAN’T TELL A BOOK BY ITS COVER. Huffington Post picked up on Nnedi Okorafor’s discussion of a time publishers whitewashed her book cover.
Just reviewed “A Taste of Honey” by Kai Ashante Wilson and I think Tor.com has done just the opposite. Men shown on the cover are black, but Wilson gives no clue about race in the text. Am I wrong? Anyone else find it in there?
Lela E. Buis: Just reviewed “A Taste of Honey” by Kai Ashante Wilson and I think Tor.com has done just the opposite. Men shown on the cover are black, but Wilson gives no clue about race in the text. Am I wrong? Anyone else find it in there?
Did you actually even read the book? The cover perfectly reflects the descriptions of the two main characters in it.
Aquib is Olorumi:
“For a full season, the king’s heralds had cried through the City’s streets just how all Olurumi, whether of the Blood or salt of the earth, were to treat with the embassy from Daluz once the foreigners arrived”
(at 3.5% in)
“Olorumi were brownskinned, and Cousins generally of the duskiest, richest color. The gods were much darker, of truly black complexion. Or not exactly: imagine the iridescence atop a natural pool of petraoleum, though the effect was never so”
(at 31.7% in)
Also, the hair of the two characters is described very distinctively early on.
🙄
(1) ROBOWATCH. Aw, this would go great with my robo-collection at work, a couple of whom have timepieces embedded in their bellies. Darn, 2 years 2 late. The Astrograph looks pretty cool, too! And – okay, I have to stop now, or I’ll link a bunch, like the ST:DS9 one.
(3) IT GOES AROUND. Pshaw, any Green Lantern fan can tell you that the oldest globe is Oa. 😉 Seriously, though, that’s interesting.
(9) THE GREEN FLASH. I’m very happy it funded. I believe their second-to-last-day livestream (and probably the added reward levels) helped them get a lot in the last day.
(14) COMIC SECTION. Cute. BTW I like how you’re including things like this periodically, @Mike Glyer! Frequently they’re links to comics I don’t read.
(17) LISTEN IN. “a discredited tarot card reader” – heh.
– – –
Meredith Moment: Rachel Dunne’s epic fantasy Bound Gods is $1.99 from Harper Voyager (uses DRM) in the U.S. This caught my eye a while back, though I know little about it. A sequel comes out in June.
– – –
ETA: @JJ: Nice. I don’t recall any mystery about skin color in the first novella, either. 😉
ETA #2: Sacrificial first fourth.
@JJ: As a certain someone here might express mirth: *snort*
Dare I say it? … Fifth?
Oneiros: As a certain someone here might express mirth: *snort*
Royalties for that *snort* ($1.27 USD), should be sent to me at licensing@file770snorts.com.
Eat my snorts.
Ew.
@JJ:
Just checking – did that email arrive?
Rev. Bob: Just checking – did that email arrive?
Si, Señor, y gracias. Apologies for not acknowledging yet; I expect that I will be getting back to you in a week or two. 😀
@JJ:
No problem. Just wanted to make sure the hailing frequencies were clear, so to speak.
Lela: Even if the characters hadn’t been explicitly described, do you really think that “depicting characters of unspecified race as black” is the opposite of “depicting black characters as white”? I mean, don’t you think it’s bizarre that the existence of black people in media is considered a political statement rather than a simple reflection of reality? Or is answering silly questions not as much fun as asking them?
I’m so glad Nnedi Okorafor was able to push back on that awful decision – hopefully her recent successes will help reinforce progress away from Unnecessarily White Covers.
A recent reading recommendation: I picked up Furthermore by Tahereh Mafi at the weekend, as I recognised it from the Booktube SFF awards, and ended up reading it in one sitting on the same day. It’s a YA (or technically middle grade?) fantasy about a girl born without pigment in a world where colour represents magic. Alice is a 12-year-old with a missing father and a neglectful mother, desperate to impress her community and be accepted but without the skills or relationships to make that happen. Fate, and the reappearance of a fellow almost-teenager called Oliver, intervene and Alice ends up on a quest to find her father in the dangerous magical land of Furthermore, where one wrong step can get you eaten for your magic or turned into origami. Adventure and well-realised self discovery ensue, all told in the voice of a charming omniscient narrator reminiscent of Cat Valente’s Fairyland series. The depiction of the young characters hits on a perfect mix of arrogance and insecurity while still remaining fundamentally sympathetic, and the plot and worldbuilding move along nicely although the ending feels a little rushed – there’s enough resolution to be more than just sequel setup, but only just. Nevertheless, recommended for young adults of all ages! (It’s also a 2016, though I think we’re too close to nomination deadline for that to matter to anyone…)
OT: Forgot to drop into the comments yesterday that a piece of mine got published at Tor yesterday, on Kingsley Amis’ THE ALTERATION:
http://www.tor.com/2017/03/14/overlooked-classic-rewrites-the-history-of-western-authoritarianism-the-alteration-by-kingsley-amis/
Followed the link to Chaos Manor. I must admit I agree with Dr. Pournelle. Obviously we don’t see the entire exchange, but I am accepting that Dr. Pournelle’s quoting of his own posts are accurate.
In which case I have to ask “WUT?” because he is in no way being offensive. He makes a rational case that you can disagree with, but it is rational and made with logic. He makes points that can be debated from several points of view, but I don’t see anything that anyone could reasonably be offended by to the point of shutting down the thread.
Unless there are other posts, not Dr. Pournelles, that took the thread into territory the moderators felt were worthy of stopping the discussion.
Based on what we can see, he certainly appears to have a good reason to feel the SFWA board moderators are being … um, too harsh in judging the offensiveness of his posts. Would be interesting to see someone else’s viewpoint of the entire thread.
On another note from that same Chaos Manor post, Dr. Pournelle stuck in a couple of comments about paying for other people’s health care that makes me think he doesn’t understand the concept of insurance (ALL KINDS OF INSURANCE) creating risk pools that can be used to forecast costs fairly accurately using actuarial methods. The idea is you get a large risk pool of all kinds of people, then base the premiums on the total risk.
Yeah, that means healthy people pay more than they would if old farts like me were left out, but that’s the idea of risk pools. It’s just like homeowners insurance, or auto insurance. You pay the premiums and hope you never collect on them. I don’t get why people who MUST buy auto insurance (with defined minimum coverages) in order to legally drive a car get their underwear in a bunch when the topic is health insurance.
@Techgrrl1972 – Probably because most people seem to get their understanding of insurance from Diskworld: “You are betting the insurance company that your house will burn down”, etc.
@Techgrrl1972
Generally, when people are “inexplicably offended” by the “rational arguments” of a successful white guy it’s because they feel the “rational arguments” regard cost or harm to them as irrelevant – that they’re just collateral damage. This is usually unintentional on the part of the successful white guys – when the costs are invisible to you it’s easy to forget they exist – which is why they think they’re being objective and rational in the first place.
I can’t comment on the actual discussion threads in this case, but the suggestion seems to be that people with less money might be better able to afford healthcare if they were willing to accept an increased risk of dying. That’s rational behaviour from the point-of-view of The Market(TM) but – if that was what Pournelle was saying – it ‘s also an implicit judgement that people with less money are less deserving of life. Which is an interesting question of abstract moral philosophy if and only if you don’t have to worry about how to afford healthcare.
(4) END OF DISCUSSION
I find it uncontroversial that a professional organisation would impose some limits on discussions in its private spaces, and given his stated political positions I hope that Jerry Pournelle thinks the same. Discussions about what those limits should be and whether they are enforced consistently are of course valid, and I guess that this blog post represents him attempting to put the pressure on. I doubt we’ll ever see the other side of the argument, which he of course knows, and is perhaps counting on.
(7) A LINE IN THE CHROME
Seems a pretty clear line to me – eligibility posts are one thing, and what Scalzi describes as “begging” is another. How to tell the difference? If you avoid doing it on social media because you think you’d be criticised and are emailing privately instead, there you are.
(8) PRATCHETT BUSTED
Hurrah.
I read surprisingly few 2016 novels to nominate. Of the ones I did read, I really only felt 3 were worth nominating:
The Obelisk Gate (NK Jemison)
Of Sand and Malice Made (Bradley Beaulieu)
Summerlong (Peter Beagle)
There were some other enjoyable books, but these were the best ones and stuck with me the longest. Summerlong was the surprise of the bunch, a light, fast read that had a much bigger impact than I was expecting and dealt with much bigger issues.
4) If I hadn’t gotten called in to serve as head moderator after Dr. Pournelle tangled with a former one, I would have never run for SFWA board. He has only himself to blame for the current oppressive regime.
Re: (4) I’m a little surprised how long it took me to realize that Eric Raymond is just a poor man’s version of Jerry Pournelle.
I was a party to that thread on SFWA (Jerry was gracious enough to refer to a couple of my posts as “eloquent”), and I don’t think it was Jerry’s post that got it shut down.
The topic of the thread was “Having a Cold Sucks Butt” and at one point someone who looks a lot like me wondered whether genetic testing might someday make it easy for doctors to tell which drugs would work best for different patients. People raised various issues with this (technical and political), and, as Jerry says, it was a decent discussion.
That was mid-January, though. The post was shut down two months later after someone (not Jerry) started making really rude postings. The moderator asked everyone to tone it down, but two people (not Jerry and not me) kept at it, so they shut down the thread. I can point to the post that I think caused them to do it, and it wasn’t Jerry’s. His just happened to be the last post before it was shut down.
I’m disappointed that someone complained about one of Jerry’s posts. I generally disagree with his politics and economics, but he’s always very courteous and he does listen.
ETA: Drafted and posted before I saw Cat’s post above.
[4] I’d advise Jerry Pournelle to come back to sff.net where there are no damn moderators, but it’s too late now, the pall of repression is ubiquitous
[catnip-stalk]
@8: a BBC link I didn’t find! (I’m surprised it wasn’t more visible, considering that he was a huge-selling and knighted author, but I don’t know how they decide which localish news items go on their front page.) Thanks for posting this.
@17: one should not read Powers casually….
@Jake: Flutesnoot, aside from all his political nonsense, has shown flashes of real brilliance as I’ve never seen from Pournelle; he also has shown a repeated capacity for being an \entertaining/ fool, which I’ve only seen once from Pournelle (and that was at MAC I, 40 years ago.)
@Greg: in other words, Pournelle is trying to make it all about him? How typical. (He’s been one of those dishes-it-out-but-can’t-take-it types to me for ~40 years, ever since a local fanzine’s detailed and unheated disassembly of one of his my-viewpoint-is-the-only-valid-one arguments so dismayed him that he attempted a boycott of a local convention.)
(2) LEARNING CURVE
Leckie has some very pertinent thoughts, as always, and that’s pretty much me she’s talking about. Yes, I probably did make the wrong choice in looking around at major sff publishers and concluding that they weren’t interested in books like mine and not even trying. If I’d sold Daughter of Mystery to a mainstream press, it would have gotten better editing and better publicity and much better distribution. It would have had a home that actually understood what kind of book it was trying to be. But it also almost certainly would have gotten that only hypothetically because it wouldn’t have been bought at all. And if it hadn’t been bought, I wouldn’t have been inspired to write the next book and the next, and to plan the series.
And that’s the conundrum. I hate seeing myself classified as one of those third-rate writers who took the indie press route because my stories couldn’t hack the Big Time. And to some extent I’ve locked myself into that box for the foreseeable future. But the alternative for me wasn’t spending years collecting rejection slips from people who, when it came down to it, weren’t interested in “gentle historic fantasy with lesbians” (although of course no one would ever say it so baldly). The alternative was the books never getting written at all. Because I simply don’t have the necessary chutzpah to outlast those years of rejection slips.
Ah, someone else likes Summerlong! One of only three for me, too. It’s possible I’m being pickier than last year, as there’s less pressure to nominate a lot so as to combat a threat, but I think it has been rather a thin year.
I have decided I can’t possibly cover everything, and that (given VD’s support is probably in decline and, even if it isn’t, he can’t take over all or even most of the ballot) I don’t need to. Nominations are a way for people who know the field better than me (and in many categories people who have read five things know the field better than me) to inform me of what’s worth looking at.
I find the categories fall neatly into three groups of six:
Categories where I have a Plan, and have been reading with nomination in mind: Novel, Novella, Graphic, Related, Series, Campbell. (Series, the one I don’t really approve of, is the only one where I have five picks.)
Categories I have decided to ignore, having no real knowledge of them: DP Long, DP Short, Editor Short, Semiprozine, Fancast, Fan Artist.
Categories where I have a couple of favourites or might think of something: Novelette, Short Story, Editor Long (another I dont approve of), Pro Artist, Fanzine, Fan Writer.
(4) Is it just me, or does Pournelle seem to be trying an Argument from Incredulity fallacy here? “I can’t see how this post could possibly offend anyone, therefore it must not be offensive” carries with it the implication that Pournelle is a flawless judge of the impact of his own words, which…um…may not be the case, shall we say. I mean, Lord knows I’m not a flawless judge of the impact of my own words, and I’d be surprised if I ever met anyone who was.
(6) HUGOS RECS.
The Blakes 7 essay that Nussbaum links to is excellent.
I probably don’t have time for a full B7 rewatch, do I?
@Mark If you are a podcast listener, might I recommend Down and Safe?
(5) Okorafor has continued to tweet about this today, and both her commentary and her rejoinders are spot on.
(3) Also saw this video of how globes were made in 1955 today. Way newer than the linked globe, but still worth the minute it takes to watch.
Speaking of light fast reads that have a big impact, may I just mention that Our Wombat’s novel Summer in Orcus is on my Hugo ballot…?
(I’ll try to read Summerlong before Friday, but the deadline looms…)
@Paul,
Alas, my listening time is pathetically brief, I’ve only kept up with one podcast this year and that’s only tangentially SF.
The Hugo and the pussicat
If anyone’s interested, I’ve also posted my ballots in the short fiction and fan/publishing categories.
@Abigail Nussbaum
I left you a comment about your semiprozine list a few days ago, as you’ve got two ineligible ones.
Will there be a “What did you nominate for the Hugos?” post? I really enjoyed that last year, and it was interesting to see the spread and some consensus among Filers.
I have completed my nominations, and now exhaustedly re-reading Ancillary Justice. I want to re-read that series before jumping into 2017 pubbed books.
Techgrrl1972: Followed the link to Chaos Manor. I must admit I agree with Dr. Pournelle. Obviously we don’t see the entire exchange, but I am accepting that Dr. Pournelle’s quoting of his own posts are accurate. In which case I have to ask “WUT?” because he is in no way being offensive. He makes a rational case that you can disagree with, but it is rational and made with logic. He makes points that can be debated from several points of view, but I don’t see anything that anyone could reasonably be offended by to the point of shutting down the thread.
Having read Dr. Pournelle’s opinions in various sitiuations where I saw both sides of the story, I am pretty much convinced of two things: 1) he has indeed quoted himself accurately, he’s just left out the parts other considered offensive, or left out their stated reasons for it being offensive, and 2) the people who considered what he said was offensive have legitimate reasons for doing so.
When someone whom I have seen habitually behave offensively assures me that, even though I can’t read the rest of the thread, what Dr. Pournelle said was not at all offensive, I’m inclined to believe just the opposite. 😐
Okay, you guys really, really need to know that all of the spiders in the world can eat 85 million elephants in a year.
Beth in MA: Good suggestion. I have set up a “What did you nominate?” post that will go online two minutes after the voting closes.
If I may offer a Meredith Moment, there’s a Humble Bundle entitled “Women of SciFi and Fantasy” at humblebundle.com. (It’s awkward to post a link at the moment because my work computer is blocking the site and I’d have to type the whole think manually.) Various people have said the lineup is quite worthwhile.
@Mark: yeah, I saw that. But since I don’t have anything to nominate instead, I might end up putting them on my ballot anyway, since the awards committee does have some discretion in approving nominees.
Women of Science Fiction & Fantasy Bundle
Includes works by Octavia E. Butler, Elizabeth Hand, Kate Elliott, Diana Pharaoh Francis, Robin McKinley, Jo Clayton, Katherine Kurtz, Pamela Sargent, and Jane Yolen, with more works yet to be announced. (People who buy now will get links to download additional books as they are added.)
Abigail Nussbaum: I might end up putting them on my ballot anyway, since the awards committee does have some discretion in approving nominees.
They only have discretion over things which are not clearly covered in the rules. If a semiprozine doesn’t have 4 issues, they have to disqualify it. If it’s a prozine, they have to disqualify it.
You may have already considered this, but the 2017 Hugo Nominees Wikia and The 2017 Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom have a bunch of eligible semiprozines listed.
Thanks JJ!
Do glasses on sculptures ever work well? Either they look like solid goggles or the frames end up looking too heavy. O for a world where we all have access to Retinax V.
Also in the alternative universe I visit occasionally, it’s called Entropy Estates.
As someone who Jerry Pournelle kicked out of his GEnie forum around 23 years ago for discussing a political issue, which then led to an argument between Pournelle and I about moderators and free speech, I am enjoying this news item immensely.
Pournelle should accept that the SFWA forum, like any other, has the right to decide how much discussion to allow on politics. That’s the position he took all those years ago.
@Mark: there is always time for a B7 rewatch.
I’ve given my own nominations… and am now reconsidering several of them in the light of subsequent comments. So that’s probably a good thing, except insofar as it requires me to think carefully and make intelligent decisions, which is not exactly playing to my strengths. Never mind.
@ Jack Lint
The wire-rimmed glasses on the statue of Gandhi at the San Francisco Ferry Building work very well artistically. Unfortunately, (as the linked Wikipedia article notes) they get stolen with startling frequency. (I think they’re essentially an actual pair of lensless glasses fastened to the sculpture.)
VICTORY for the Oxford Comma! 😀
Awesome. What next. the he-ain’t-good-enough-to-hang-ing-ident?
The Hugo Ballot has been mostly wrestled into place. If anyone has any 11th hour fanartist recommendations I’d love to see them.
@JJ great news, shame about the it’s-“funny”-because-femininity-and-sex-work-are-inherently-demeaning illustration…