(1) PRINCESS ON CAMPAIGN. A set of election posters help publicize a new Star Wars novel — “Leia’s Past Haunts Her In new Star Wars: Bloodline Poster”, at IGN.
Set in-between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, the upcoming novel Star Wars: Bloodline focuses on Leia Organa, and the shifting role she finds herself playing after the Rebel Alliance’s victory and key moments that will define who she is in Episode VII.
IGN has the exclusive debut of four posters for the novel, which will be given to fans at C2E2 and other upcoming conventions.
The posters are all variations on one another – starting with an in-universe campaign image of Leia and then showing how it has been defaced in different ways by some who seem none too happy with the Princess from Alderaan.
(2) DARTH BY THE HEARTH. Meanwhile, Dad’s lifestyle is no longer as glamorous: “This Ukranian man lives his life as Darth Vader – and the photos are incredible”
While many people would consider themselves serious “Star Wars” fans, one Ukrainian man is taking things to the next level.
Darth Mykolaiovych Vader legally changed his name in homage to the classic “Star Wars” villain. He spends his days dressed in a Vader costume, complete with black cloak, gloves, and of course, the iconic face mask.
Reuters caught up with Vader to see what life is like as one of the world’s most famous movie villains. Turns out, even mundane tasks, like showering and dog walking, look a lot cooler when the Sith Lord does them.
(3) CARNEGIE AND GREENAWAY SHORTLISTS. The shortlists for the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals have been announced.
The Carnegie Medal, established in 1936, is awarded annually to the writer of an outstanding book for children. The Kate Greenaway Medal has been given since 1955 for distinguished illustration in a book for children.
Locus Online identified these titles on the shortlists as being of sf/f interest.
Carnegie Medal
- The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan)
- The Rest of Us Just Live Here, Patrick Ness (Walker)
- Five Children on the Western Front, Kate Saunders (Faber)
- The Ghosts of Heaven, Marcus Sedgwick (Indigo)
Greenaway Medal
- The Sleeper and the Spindle, Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Chris Riddell (Bloomsbury)
The winners will be announced June 20.
(4) A MONTH OF MARCH. C. Stuart Hardwick thinks a writing career is a marathon. He means it literally. See “Stay Fit” at The Fictorians.
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how infirm! In action how like a potato!
…American’s should ditch the office chair and switch to a treadmill desk they said. We could loose a few pounds a week just by walking instead of sitting, and address all the other health impacts at the same time. We are not evolved to sit around, nor to stand around, but to hike.
So okay, I decided to give it a try. Treadmill desks are stupid expensive, though, so I made my own. I put a laptop and $10 worth of wire shelving on a $600 Horizon T101 treadmill. I learned to touch type while walking at 2.2 MPH on an incline—just enough to barely crack a sweat. I started loosing weight.
After two months, I was so impressed, I decided to splurge on an upgrade.
I bought a dedicated workstation and bolted it to the treadmill with a monitor arm and a theatrical clamp (I blogged about it here: https://cstuarthardwick.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/upgraded-treadmill-desk-2/). My weight kept falling. In addition to the treadmill, I also started spending time on the exercycle as well, and I used MyFitnessPal to track my net calories. In six months, I lost 45 pounds.
(5) WU ON SYFY SERIES. Brianna Wu appears in a new episode of The Internet Ruined My Life.
200 death threats later, online harassment is a new kind of normal for game developer Brianna Wu. But she refuses to let it silence her.
Wu is one of the subjects in the latest episode of the new Syfy Network series, “The Internet Ruined My Life.”
Wu is the cofounder and CEO of a gaming studio, Giant Spacekat, which make games that empower women, not objectify them.
(6) NOW WE KNOW. Pat Cadigan gives an assist to Philip K. Dick.
Well, that answers that question: pic.twitter.com/oY8hXW9RK1
— Pat Cadigan (@Cadigan) March 15, 2016
(7) IRISH SF. The Dublin 2019 Worldcon Bid has been given permission by author Jack Fennell to publish his bibliography of Irish Science Fiction, which describes hundreds Irish Science Fiction stories and books published from the 1850s to the present day. Download A Short Guide to Irish Science Fiction [PDF file].
Jack Fennel has also written a book, Irish Science Fiction.
When I started my doctoral research into Irish SF, I thought that I had picked a nice handy topic: there couldn’t be that many Irish SF novels and short stories out there, and whatever amount there was must be very recent. Over the course of the next four years, I was proven wrong over and over again. There were hundreds of texts out there, so many that I had to abandon my plans to write a comprehensive overview. What struck me as particularly bizarre, though, was the difficulty I had in finding this stuff when there was such an abundance of it. The reasons became apparent as I continued digging.
Firstly, it was just an accepted truism that Ireland was not science-fictional. The phrase ‘Irish science fiction’ would, at best, bring forth memories of irascible Irish engineer Miles O’Brien from the Star Trek franchise (to date, the only character to shout “Bollocks!” on a Star Trek episode); at worst, it would trigger traumatic flashbacks to Leprechaun 4: In Space. The idea of Irish SF in itself was somewhat ridiculous, and more often than not played for laughs. There was a general perception, among the ‘uninitiated’ anyway, that the Irish just didn’t bother imagining such things.
(8) UNMADE INDIANAS. Simon Brew at Den of Geek knows all about “The Indiana Jones Films That Never Were”.
Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars
Following the success of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, George Lucas would develop an idea or two that could have seen a fourth Indy adventure in cinemas in the 1990s. One that got quite far into the writing process was Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars, an idea that Lucas started working on in 1993. He originally hired Jeb Stuart to write the script for him before passing on the mantle to the late Jeffrey Boam (who had co-written The Last Crusade.)
In this one, Indy very nearly gets married at the start to a linguist by the name of Dr. Elaine McGregor. Amongst the guests at the wedding would have been Marion, Willie, Sallah, and his father, but instead of walking down the aisle, McGregor hops into a car on the big day and disappears. The search is thus on to find her.
Turns out she’s working on the discovery of alien bodies and a strange stone cylinder. Indy and McGregor crack the code on said cylinder, which turns out to be coordinates leading them to a mountain. Russian spies want in though, and as Indy tries to rescue Elaine from one of their planes, a flying saucer appears. A further alien encounter sees a truck being lifted off the ground. Meanwhile, a mysterious countdown clock ticks away, with the assumption being that it’s a bomb.
(9) EXCUSE FOR A PUNNY HEADLINE. Sometimes they have storms in Ireland, you may have heard. “Storm ‘troopers’ to inspect Star Wars site after winter weather causes safety concerns” reports the BBC.
An Irish island used as location in the latest Star Wars film is to undergo safety inspections after it felt the full force of winter storms.
Skellig Michael, off County Kerry coast, is a Unesco World Heritage Site that has played host to 8th Century monks and 21st Century film crews.
Parts of Star Wars Episode VII were filmed on the rocky landmass in 2014.
(10) STRING THEORY. Alastair Reynolds salutes Supermarionation in “Hey Joe” at Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon.
After a military coup, a dictator misappropriates global aid funds to develop drone warfare technology to use against his own citizens. A stricken submarine ends up in the territorial waters of a Central American failed state, threatening to derail international peace talks. In a Middle Eastern Sultanate, a political assassination leads to a constitutional crisis, imperilling the progressive, democratic policies of the rightful successor to the throne. In the Arctic, a nuclear accident heightens an already tense East-West standoff…
Failed states. Democracies. Autonomous weapons. Middle East crises. Rising nuclear tension. The East and West at each other’s throats …
Sound familiar?
This is the world of 2013 – or rather the world of 2013 as envisaged in 1968, when Gerry Anderson began making Joe 90, the last of his series to be based exclusively around Supermarionation.
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 16, 1966 — NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott docked their Gemini 8 space vehicle with an Agena craft, a first in orbital history.
(12) THE FIRST TRUMP. Jeb Kinnison’s piece “Trump World: Looking Backward” is recommended as having a Canticle for Leibowitz illustratrion and flavor.
The Internet seemed to end the constraints on opinion, but a new sound of silence appeared when its two-way nature allowed crowds to join together to silence expression of ideas they found threatening. People lost their jobs because of one errant tweet, and politicians found it useful to stoke the flames of envy and resentment to gain votes. A new victim cult appeared, seeing racism and sexism in every element of US life, and command of the cult’s lexicon enabled entry to academic and government positions.
The left-behind grew angry, and simmered in disability payments and painkilling drugs while they saw their children discriminated against by the gateway institutions built by their forebears. They had supported the growth of the Federal government through costly wars and the building of a social safety net, only to be left out and denigrated by their ruling class. Federal agencies were taken over by progressives and affirmative-action hires, and wasted time and resources shuffling reports and holding grand meetings to write about working toward solving problems that barely existed while neglecting their core functions. The levels of incompetence tolerated grew and grew, until civil service employees could hold their jobs after being absent for years or being discovered spending most of their time viewing Internet porn. Major new government programs and projects failed and billions of dollars were wasted without consequence, those responsible for the failures being promoted to further damage the private economy by ruling from Washington.
And all that’s before Trump even appears.
(13) NUSSBAUM’S BALLOT. Abigail Nussbaum’s entry “The 2016 Hugo Awards: My Hugo Ballot, Short Fiction Categories” makes compelling reading for her honest admission that – like who knows how many Hugo voters – she’s allergic to paying for short fiction.
Before we get started, a few comments on methodology, and observations on the state of the field. Almost all of these stories were published in magazines that are freely available online, largely because that makes them easier to access whenever I have some free reading time. As I did last year, I ended up skipping the print magazines completely, as well as most of the for-pay online magazines. The one exception is the novella category, where the e-book boom continues to be extremely rewarding for both authors and readers, creating a new market for slimmer volumes and more contained stories that you can enjoy for just a few dollars apiece.
She also read the free fiction on Tor.com despite some misgivings – it was, after all, free.
Second, I should say that I debated for a long time over reading stories published on Tor.com, or in the publisher’s new novella line. The behavior last year of Tor editor Tom Doherty, in which he all but aligned himself with the Rabid Puppies and their leader Vox Day, was to me completely beyond the pale, and the fact that Doherty has not retracted or apologized for his words is a black stain on the entire company he runs….
(14) I’M SHOCKED. Via “Barbershops, Bookshops, Histories and Bad Math” by Jared at Pornokitsch, this link to the Observer post “Amazon Best-Selling Author” is a crock of shit”.
Last week, I put up a fake book on Amazon. I took a photo of my foot, uploaded to Amazon, and in a matter of hours, had achieved “No. 1 Best Seller” status, complete with the orange banner and everything.
(15) PHOTO TOUR OF LEGO HOGWARTS. From Popsugar, “A Supermom Created This 400,000-Piece Hogwarts Castle Out of LEGOs, and We Are Speechless”.
Finch’s absolutely epic 400,000 piece structure puts every single LEGO creation ever built — my tiny, school-bound Potter most of all — to shame.
The mother of two built a LEGO Hogwarts castle so full of detail, only a true fan could have lovingly pieced it together with such success. “I did quite a bit of research in the books and movies looking for the smallest of details, things like the old-fashioned slide projector in Lupin’s Defense Against the Dark Arts class, the location of the potions class, and the wood paneling in the charms classroom,” she told LEGO blog The Brother’s Brick.
(16) BITE ME. “’You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat’: ‘Jaws’ Writer Reveals Origins of Movie’s Famous Line” in The Hollywood Reporter.
The infamous line from Jaws, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” which landed at No. 3 on Hollywood’s Top 100 Movie Quotes, came about during those rewrites.
“It was an overlap of a real-life problem combined with the dilemma of the characters onscreen,” [Carl] Gottlieb says of the origins of the line. The real-life problem being a barge (named by the cast and crew S.S. Garage Sale), which carried all the lights and camera equipment and craft services, was steadied by a small support boat that was too tiny to manage the job.
Gottlieb recalls: “[Richard] Zanuck and [David] Brown were very stingy producers, so everyone kept telling them, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’ It became a catchphrase for anytime anything went wrong — if lunch was late or the swells were rocking the camera, someone would say, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.'”
Roy Scheider, who played Brody in the movie, ad-libbed the line at different points in his performance throughout filming. But the one reading that made it in to the final cut of the movie was after the suspenseful first look at the great white shark. Says Gottlieb, “It was so appropriate and so real and it came at the right moment, thanks to Verna Field’s editing.”
Gottlieb has heard the line pop up in a lot of strange places, but he says the most memorable time it was quoted back to him was in a casino: “I was playing poker and thought I had a winning hand, ’cause I had a full house, which is referred to as a ‘full boat,’ and the guy across the table from me said, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat,’ and he put down a larger full house.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Nigel, Will R., and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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I’m in pretty much the opposite position from Nussbaum: practically all of my short fiction reading is in print (Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Interzone), and very little online, partly because I really don’t like reading on screens (too much of that in the day job), partly because I tend to prefer longer works (novelette and novella length), but mostly because I don’t have the time – I can barely keep up with the three printzines.
@Lois Tilton: I also really miss your reviews. Although I didn’t always agree with you, we mostly disagreed in the most helpful way possible: we didn’t always agree on what was good, but we almost never disagreed on what was bad. That saved me a lot of time.
Bad is a lot easier than good.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve bought Heathers–at least twice on VHS and at least twice on DVD. I remember having to restrain myself from buying a copy of every version when they produced DVDs with variant covers for each main character. (Partially because of the movie itself and partially because there was a time I would watch a movie that was 2 hours of Winona Ryder reading a phone book. Silently.) Judging by the description of the new series, I’m giving it a major “nope.”
(Also curmudgeonly on the remake of the TV series 21 Jump Street into the movie 21 Jump Street, and not only do I have no interest in seeing the new Ghostbusters, I wish I could have all memories of having seen Ghostbusters 2 extracted from my head.)
Dozois’ stats incline me to suspect there are whole categories of diverse short fiction he is not predisposed to notice.
From the “You can Check out Anytime You Like” Department: WARM SMELL OF SCROLLITAS RISING UP THROUGH THE AIR.
Now I want to go find a relevant Robert E. Howard quote …
@Petréa Mitchell
I recently encountered an archaeology monograph Barbarians to Angels by Peter S. Well, 2008 .
that claimed that late Roman historians described a lot of migrations in continental Europe that weren’t, by modern standards. When they compared physical relics (even things like village layouts) from before and after a migration supposedly resettled an area, there were no discernible differences that one would expect to see if a different ethnic group had moved in.
Their suggestion was that migrations were philosophically respectable (possibly due to Aeneas) and describable in ways that some other kinds of political and dynastic shifts were not, so changes that we would consider internal changes got reported as migratory effects.
I don’t know the current state of thought about this — whether Wells is considered a crackpot or a solid scholar.
Link
That’s especially awful. I like it.
James Davis Nicoll: I’ve always wondered how you are so confident you know what everybody’s sexual deal is that you would assume such a list is reliable.
I am like PhilRM most of my short reading is issued from paying sources although I don’t read them in hard copy but on my Kindle ereader. With the exception of my ereader I try to avoid screens away from work so I tend not to bother with free stories unless I can download them in mobi. The exception to the rule is I will pretty much read any story published on Tor.com. The quality is always high. The only nomination I have in Common with Nussbaum is Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. I also nominated Lagoon for best novel by Nnedi Okorafor. I am a bit on Okorafor kick since I am slowly going through her Kabu Kabu her first short story collection.
I’ve always quite liked short fiction but tend to read it in either author specific compilations or other themed anthologies. so I’m quite pleased to have picked up the 2015 Hugo Long List Anthology for 99p
Just started that on the way home tonight after having finished the second last Discworld that I had not read, I Shall Wear Midnight, leaving just Shepherds Crown. Sniff
When we were doing the Locus list, I used to say that we could shorten the list drastically just by picking only the works that both Gardner and I recommended.
If I am systematically misgendering writers, I am happy to be corrected. I am pretty confident that that if you are looking for stories by women, Dozois anthologies are not the place to look, because with one main exception I am aware of, he produces books dominated by male authors.
Steve Davidson: Nobody ever remembers the rest of that quote. The full text is, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right, and if wrong, to be set right.” (emphasis mine)
@Lois Tilton: Bad is a lot easier than good.
You would think so, but then something like the Nebula nominations list comes out.
I think they do an excellent job, but they bring their own biases to story selection (it’s unavoidable, everyone’s got different tastes).
I’d also be wary of assuming that they can encompass the whole genre in three anthologies. Don’t forget that in compiling anthologies, sometimes reprint rights for stories may not be available (e.g. a stellar story might be a chapbook with reprint rights locked away for a year). Sometimes a writer may have several stellar stories but for reasons of length, the anthologist has to pick just one. Also for reasons of length, I’d expect novellas to be underrepresented in the Year’s Best anthologies.
@Steve Davidson: “the streets aren’t paved with gold, they’re paved with lead.”
Not only that, but judging by the current political situation, a lot of people appear to have taken to licking the pavement.
@Darren Garrison: “there was a time I would watch a movie that was 2 hours of Winona Ryder reading a phone book. Silently.”
I still remember when Pulp Fiction came out and a friend told me that Uma Thurman ended up looking “like Winona Ryder, and not in a good way.” I was puzzled until I saw the movie, at which point I had to admit that not only was such a thing possible, but it was a fair assessment.
@James Davis Nicoll: (Dozois stats)
That is one of the most singularly opaque tables I have seen in quite some time. Seriously, man – I get the need for abbreviated labels, but add a key or something!
Rev Bob, I am so filled with rage at your in retrospect reasonable suggestion I am literally typing. This is why I have an editor for the reviews, to avoid jamesisms nobody but me understands.
I hope the following is the dumbest thing I have to admit to today: until just now, I had not realized that of course Hartwell’s death means he will not edit more Best SF anthologies.
@Rev. Bob,
Isn’t it obvious? F= Female; M= Male; F/T = Ratio of Female to Total?
Oh dear, am I beginning to think like James Nicoll? This is unlikely to end well.
Soon Lee, I am happy to report that this year in FASS, I met several people who I consider as accident prone as me and one I must bow in awe to for tumbling down a particular set of stair twice. On one evening. Without injury, which is a trick I never managed.
@Soon Lee: “Isn’t it obvious?”
Well, no. The first few columns were fine, but I was translating the *OC sets as “of color” instead of “on cover” – and in the new key, it seems nobody knows what the last column is. When even the table’s creator can’t identify the column, that’s pretty opaque.
@ Mike, James
I am a not a native english speaker, and not so knowledgeable about the genre, but here is a non-exhaustive list of authors i got the gender wrong at first, or at least got confused for a while :
Kij Johnson, Kim Stanley Robinson, KJ Parker, Jo Walton, Nicola Griffith, Yoon ha Lee, An Owomoyela…
As to go check somewhere whether this author I am not familiar with is “of color”, or have a non-conventional sexual orientation… Sounds downright creepy to me.
@Soon Lee
I ask no one the impossible, such as scanning the full range of the genre, without having personal bias. But yes, for me, the most precious quality for someone trying is to be as widely read as possible. it is especially precious for me as very few people seems to be able to afford to, and that it is plainly unaccessible to me.
As for the novella length I totally agree. In this length I tend to rely a bit more on award shortlist, bcause I trust them a bit better in this length from experience, and because they are hard to come by in anthologies.
By the way, has anybody read the Guran’s best novella anthology ? I haven’t read it yet, but I understand it is supposed to act as a complement to the Horton’s year best in Prime Books catalogue. I am certainly enthused by the concept.
I noticed that James uses both POC/T & WOC/T, so yes, a key would be helpful.
@James, you should incorporate some feline genes into your genome so you too can do the same. I’m sure I can live without more “James has damaged himself in yet another interesting manner” stories.
@Rev Bob
Thanks for saying something I’ve been misunderstanding the tables for a while by assuming I knew what the labels meant & I was wrong.
I am a not a native english speaker, and not so knowledgeable about the genre, but here is a non-exhaustive list of authors i got the gender wrong at first, or at least got confused for a while
The situation is not helped by the fact that, due to publishing industry thinking, many female authors have adopted names that intentional occlude their gender, such as C.J. Cherryh, or C.S. Friedman.
@Rev Bob
Yes, I also assumed OC meant “of color”
@Vivien
I’m actively trying to read more diversely/representative of the population of the world around me. To do that it requires looking at author bios when buying books or including that information when requesting recommendations. Otherwise I end up with mostly straight white male or female authors. How else am I to get outside the straight white bubble?
Now if I were writing to authors whose bios don’t give me enough information to go on that would be creepy and stalker like.
You realize that sounds like a challenge? 🙂
I was really hesitant to try to track stuff like race both because I was afraid of all the failure modes, and also because I was pretty sure my stats on the subject would be shit. As it turned out, they were even worse than I expected.
I will admit there’s a particular edge case with gender that led me to avoid reviewing a particular book until the situation changed: author transitioned, transition not secret but also something the author did not want actively publicized. Could knowingly input wrong data, which would make my stomach hurt. Could put in the right data and hope that did not upset the author. Avoided issue by deferring review.
Avert your eyes.
You’re going to need a longer scroll…
PhilRM – Something like the Nebula nominations list usually doesn’t involve actual Bad.
@James: “I will admit there’s a particular edge case with gender that led me to avoid reviewing a particular book until the situation changed: author transitioned, transition not secret but also something the author did not want actively publicized.”
Now I’m curious to see how you’d handle the case of an author who deliberately avoided giving as much demographic information as possible – either obscuring or refusing to confirm a sex, gender, orientation, race, or even age.
On confusing tables, etc. My biggest pet peeve is when people don’t label graph axes and provide a legend. I work at an engineering firm and the amount of people that don’t do either is staggering. That was a huge requirement in school. There’s times that i literally have no idea what a plot is trying to tell me because I have no clue what the data even is.
I believe Hartwell’s last Best SF anthology was Year’s Best SF 18, covering stories published in 2012. A quick scan of the table of contents suggests that about half the stories are by women (I’m not sure of a few.)
“Unknown”. Parker being until recently a good example: they wanted that hidden so I willfully avoided finding out.
If there are introductions to each story or bios, the gender of the writer is usually mentioned. Or at least their pronoun, which is close enough. So anyone using “she” is female, and some of “they/zie” would be if binariness is insisted upon. Or you could put all “she”, “they/zie”, “name only, no pronoun”, “Mx.” and the like into not-male.
PoC would be tougher, but a Google would probably clear that up for most of them, if Gardner didn’t already know ’em personally.
Lois: That absolutely would have worked! But I dunno about the Nebula list — this year they have 2-3 works that I thought were bad. Not just “eh”, but BAD.
::tickbox::
lurkertype – Bad as in No Award bad, assuming those works make the other ballot?
I can’t give a properly informed opinion on the Neblist because I haven’t read the novels and there were some of the shorter works I haven’t seen, most notably the Tor novella line that they didn’t send them to me.
I consider it “meh” because of all the nominees there’s only one of my own recs and because some that I have read were not so good.
Gaaah. Why do some tech companies make it so damned hard to report bugs?
Long story short(ish)…
I’ve got a nifty gizmo that is a microSDXC card reader with some bells and whistles. (Two, actually – one only goes up to microSDHC.) Windows sees it as a USB stick. In August, when I updated a netbook to Windows 10, the gizmo became unreliable on it; Windows started disconnecting from and reconnecting to the gizmo every couple of minutes. I promptly reported the issue, was told after several interactions that they couldn’t replicate it, and rolled the netbook back to 8.1 to preserve functionality.
Last week, my main machine downloaded some Windows 8.1 updates. Lo and behold, the very same issue cropped up on it. Same thing happened on the netbook, too. So, I reported that the issue has come up again, and I have some serious déjà vu going on here with their responses. At one point, they even offered to replace the gizmos – how does that address the problem at all?
At least this time, I have a complete list of the Windows updates that my main machine applied between “working fine” and “uh-oh” status – and I’ve not only sent the company that list, but gone through Microsoft’s pages for every update and identified three prime suspects.
So, tl;dr version – an OS update immediately rendered both versions of this gizmo spectacularly useless in the same way on two different machines, but the manufacturer is showing almost zero interest in treating it as a technical problem.
At least I have a convention this weekend. Maybe I’ll come back Monday to the news that they’ve (finally!) verified the problem and are working on a fix.
@Camestros
You realize that sounds like a challenge? 🙂
Ummm, do we need to stage an intervention?
Have you also written Windows about the problem? It may be doing the same thing to other devices as well, and since it was their update, they might want to make a new update to fix it. (I know, here’s how to suck an egg, Grandma.)
@Lois: In the short story nominations, there’s one story that I consider “below No Award” bad.
File770 is so subdued, as we brood over our nominations, that I am reminded of:
Well, OK, strictly speaking Mike isn’t our captain, but this cries out to be filked, though not by me because I’m brooding over my nominations…
@Cally:
I haven’t written Microsoft yet because the problem only pops up with these two gizmos. No other removable storage devices that I have on hand exhibit this behavior, which pretty much guarantees that Microsoft will blame the gizmo manufacturer.
Looking at it from a corporate self-interest perspective, Microsoft has little incentive to fix a problem affecting two gizmos from one manufacturer. The manufacturer has a much bigger incentive to fix their gizmos’ firmware/driver to avoid the “now incompatible with supported versions of Windows” problem, and that’s what I expect will happen. The only question is how long it’ll take.
My current workaround is literally to take the card out of the gizmo, put it into a different reader, and plug that into the computer instead. I’ve systematically eliminated every variable I can to reach the conclusion that Windows does not like either iteration (HC/XC) of this gizmo. The gizmos aren’t broken; they worked just fine pre-update and still work on other machines. Windows isn’t broken; it handles my external hard drive and all my USB sticks just fine. It’s the interaction between them that’s the problem, and that’s not something I should have to hash out.
I can’t be the only one affected by this, but the manufacturer is treating me as if I am. I might talk to some other people at the con, see if I can check the gizmo on their machines to gather more info, but the data looks pretty damning so far.
Alain: The only nomination I have in Common with Nussbaum is Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.
A few years ago, Nussbaum’s choices and mine had a considerable amount of overlap, but they’ve been diverging significantly the last couple of years. I’ve only read a couple of things on her list, but I’m going to try to do most of the rest of them; the novellas are all on my TBR or Already Read list, anyway.
@Lois: Yes, at least one in “below No Award” bad. In “should not have been printed professionally” bad.
@Lois Tilton: Here’s the 2015 Lois Tilton & Gardner Dozois Short Fiction List. 🙂 It has seven stories.
@Vivien: You include Yoon Ha Lee in your list of authors whose gender you had trouble with. That particular case is someone who presented as female in online venues and elsewhere, but who then came out as a transman and started using male pronouns. (I found out about this after reading the interview with him in Uncanny, and being brought up short by the pronouns — “Wait: don’t I know that name as a woman?”) So I think that some confusion there is understandable and forgivable.
@Hampus Eckerman: “Heathers” was just about perfect! I’m scared of this new version and expect it to be very bad, but I thank you for the info nonetheless. 🙂