(1) EXPANSE FREAKOUT PREMATURE. James S. A. Corey says to settle down.
Hey guys, love the enthusiasm, I really do, but maybe let us actually write season 3 before people lose their minds over 4th renewal.
— James S.A. Corey (@JamesSACorey) March 28, 2017
Anyway, they always have the books to fall back on…
Leviathan Wakes sold ten times as many books last year as it did six years ago when it was brand new and nominated for the Hugo. https://t.co/kNr0Z0mSl6
— James S.A. Corey (@JamesSACorey) March 28, 2017
(2) DON’T BE SHOCKED. Jim C. Hines didn’t expect people to be surprised when he told them “Yes, I Still Get Rejections”.
A while back, I posted something on Facebook about a rejection I’d received on a project. I was a bit taken aback when several people offered to “have a talk” with the editor. Others questioned the editor’s mental health for rejecting a Jim Hines story. It was flattering, in a way — I love that I have fans who are so enthusiastic about reading new stuff from me — but I think it might also reflect a basic misunderstanding.
Rejections are part of the job. They don’t suddenly stop when you become more successful. They’re less frequent, yes. Much less frequent, and my own mental well being is unspeakably grateful for that. But with the possible exception of folks like Rowling and King, we all risk rejection when we write.
Over the past year, I wrote a short story for an anthology that got cancelled. Another editor said they were interested, so I sent the story their way. They read it, said some nice things, and rejected the story. And they were right to do so….
(3) SF MUSEUM EXHIBIT. From June through August 2017, the Barbican Centre museum in London will present the exhibition Into The Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction, which is curated by historian and writer Patrick Gyger and will explore science fiction as an experimental genre. The Wire supplies the details in its article “A new Barbican exhibition will explore science fiction from a multidisciplinary angle”.
It’ll include more than 200 books, original manuscripts and typescripts, contemporary and existing art works, 60 film and TV clips, unseen footage, adverts, concept art, film props, comics, video games and robots.
Australian duo Soda_Jerk will present Astro Black, a two-channel video installation with a focus on Sun Ra’s theories of Afrofuturism and featuring footage of Kraftwerk, DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy. Plus Ben Frost and Daníel Bjarnason’s score inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1973 film Solaris will be performed with Poland’s Sinfonietta Cracovia, plus video accompaniment by Brian Eno and Nick Robertson.
(4) THIS IS SO WRONG. “Firm Floats Plan to Hang Colossal Skyscraper From an Asteroid” – NBC News has the story.
Dubbed Analemma, the fanciful tower wouldn’t be built on the ground, but suspended in air by cables from an asteroid repositioned into geosynchronous Earth orbit just for the purpose.
Over the course of each day, the floating skyscraper would trace a figure-eight path over our planet’s surface, according to plans posted online by Clouds Architecture Office. It would swing between the northern and southern hemispheres, returning to the same point once every 24 hours.
The speed of the tower relative to the ground would vary depending upon which part of the figure eight it was tracing, with the slowest speeds at the top and bottom of each loop, the plans say. The asteroid’s orbit would be calibrated so that the slowest part of the tower’s path would occur over New York City.
…Analemma would be powered by solar panels and use recycled water. Lower floors would be set aside for business use, while sleeping quarters would be sited about two-thirds of the way up. The plans don’t say exactly how people would get on and off the building, though one illustration seem to show people parachuting from the tower to the ground.
(5) EXTENDED FAMILY. Lightspeed Magazine’s Christian A. Coleman interviewed Nnedi Okorafor.
You wrote in the acknowledgments of Binti that your daughter, Anyaugo, essentially came up with the plot of the novella. Was she also involved in plotting Binti: Home?
Anya didn’t come up with the whole plot of Binti. I was stuck on that ship with Binti and the murderous aliens; I knew the ending, but I wasn’t sure what should happen next. I told her about being stuck and she suggested something that went on to become a major part of the plot. The same happened with Binti: Home. When I write, Anya is very often around me or FaceTiming with me. So I’ll look up from writing and talk to her about what I’m writing. She always has something to say, and nine times out of ten, it’s good stuff. The same with part three. There was a major part in part three that we actually argued over because it was disturbing. I wanted one thing; she was like, “Heck no! You can’t do that.”
We live with my characters.
(6) GRRM AND LIBRARIANS. StokerCon is coming up April 27-30 aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA.
George R.R. Martin will be there on Saturday for an interview and signing.
HWA is sponsoring Librarians’ Day at StokerCon 2017 – which is essentially a day pass for Thursday of StokerCon, as I haven’t seen anything requiring proof of being a librarian in the purchase information.
(7) TUMMY TIME. “Karen Gillan’s ‘Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’ Costume Explained, but Does the Reason Make It Okay?” Yahoo! Movies ponders the answer.
When the first footage of the film was released during CinemaCon, the reason for her ensemble was revealed. The plot involves four high-school students who are forced to clean out the basement of their school while in detention. They find an old video game (rather than a board game like in the version of the movie starring Robin Williams) and each chooses a character to play. The teenagers become the characters they selected, leading a nerdy boy to become The Rock’s character and a popular girl to become Jack Black‘s character.
A more shy, reserved teenage girl ends up becoming Karen Gillan‘s character. The video game is old and dusty, so presumably the reason that she is dressed in tiny clothing is because that’s how female video game characters used to be dressed.
Is that enough of a reason for a movie to dress the character this way? Should the objectification of the female lead in the movie become permissible because Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’s film creators wanted to be hyper-accurate to old video games? Does the fear of being anachronistic by giving Gillan pants or a fully formed top justify the male gaze? Do the critics who hated Gillan’s outfit feel soothed by this explanation?
(8) DON’T SOUND SO SURPRISED. Io9’s take is “The First Footage From Jumanji Is Surprisingly Very Fun”.
…They realize that, because they are in a video game, they each have video game powers. For example, Johnson’s character is super strong and Gillan’s character is a dance fighter, which they joke about. And also, she very quickly acknowledges how ridiculous it is that the game makes her outfit so skimpy. A kind of guide character tells them they have to place a jewel back into a statue to leave—but as they progress, the challenges get greater and greater. Killer animals, evil men on motorcycles, just lots of crazy stuff. And, like a video game, they each have three lives. If they lose those, they die for real.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 28, 1979 – Phantasm was released. John King Tarpinian adds, “Angus Scrimm, The Tall Man, used to come to Ray Bradbury’s Pandemonium Theater Company‘s plays.”
(10) IN GREAT DEMAND. James A. Owen’s seven-day Kickstarter to publish an Inklings Art Print Set hit 200% of its goal on Day One. These involve the illustrations he produced for Bandersnatch by Diana Pavlac Glyer.
Not only can you see the drawings of the individual Inklings at the Kickstarter site, several are matched with photos of scholars and fans who visited to the English locations and recreated the authors’ poses, which I found highly amusing.
(11)THE TRICORDER HAS ARRIVED. And in more than one version. The Washington Post’s Karen Heller, in “This ‘Star Trek’-inspired gizmo could win its inventors $9 million”, profiles George, Basil, and Gus Harris, who are hoping to win a prize of up to $9 million from the Qualcomm Foundation for producing the first successful “tricorder”–defined as a hand-held medical device that could detect blood pressure, diabetes, anemia, and nine other conditions. The rules are that this device has to weigh less than five pounds and can be mass-produced.
… Harris assembled a seven-member team — himself, three of his siblings and three friends — all of whom were managing full-time jobs. They worked nights and weekends in his home outside Philadelphia, crashed after 72-hour engineering marathons, churned out prototype after prototype on three 3-D printers in Harris’s jumble of an office, each plastic part taking up to 24 hours to fabricate and with his three children, ages 11 to 15, often overseeing sanding and wiring.
The XPrize field began with 312 teams from 38 countries.
Now, improbably, Harris’s group is one of two finalists for the $9 million prize. The winner is scheduled to be announced April 12.
Harris’s competition is Dynamical Biomarkers Group, as formidable as its name: a group of 50 physicians, scientists and programmers, many of them paid for their work, led by Harvard Medical School professor C.K. Peng, a physicist with a 29-page résumé, and backed by the Taiwanese cellphone leviathan HTC and the Taiwanese government.
So, this is basically a Basil and Goliath story….
Brothers George, Basil and Gus Harris examine prop tricorders from the Star Trek series. (Courtesy of XPRIZE)
(12) LUCAS INCREASES SCHOLARSHIPS. Liz Calvario on Deadline.com, in a piece called “George Lucas Family Foundation Donates An Additional $10M to USC in Support of Student Diversity”, reports that the George Lucas Family Fund has donated $10 million to the USC School of Cinematic Arts for scholarships for African-American and Hispanic students.
The George Lucas Family Foundation has donated an additional $10 million to USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, expanding its support of student diversity, announced Dean Elizabeth M. Daley. The new endowment raises the Foundation’s total donation to $20 million.
Established in the fall 2016 semester with an initial $10 million, the George Lucas Family Foundation Endowed Student Support Fund for Diversity was created for students from underrepresented communities who qualify for financial support. African American and Hispanic students in both undergraduate and graduate programs receive priority consideration for support from the Fund. Students are known as George Lucas Scholars or Mellody Hobson Scholars….
(13) IT MUST GO OFF. The File 770 comments section yielded an item for the Wordspy newsletter.
WORD OF THE WEEK
Chekhov’s lesbian n. The principle that every reference to a minority in a fictional story must be relevant and irreplaceable. [This is a play on “Chekhov’s gun,” the Russian short-story writer’s famous dictum that memorable story elements should also be necessary and relevant (see this week’s Quote, Words, Unquote).]
Okay, let’s codify it — Chekhov’s Lesbian: if a character in fiction is portrayed as a member of a minority group, that character’s minority status must become a relevant plot point before the end of the story. (Term used sarcastically.) —Darren Garrison, “Pixel Scroll 5/19/16 I Am Not In The Scroll Of Common Men” (comment), File 770, May 20, 2016
(14) SHORT NOTE TO L.D. COLTER. The Michael Glyer who’s on Twitter is not me. I don’t have a Twitter account because occasionally I’d fly off the handle and tweet something dumb and there it would be for the rest of time. The other Michael Glyer doesn’t appear to have that problem. So there could be worse things than me being mistaken for him.
(15) LOVECRAFT IN NEW MEXICO. As the locals say, it’s not new, and it’s not Mexico, H.P. Lovecraft of Ask Lovecraft visited George R.R. Martin in Santa Fe and recorded a couple segments of his vlog, which can be viewed at the link.
Seeing HPL at Meow Wolf was especially fun, since there are a couple of… ahem… decidedly Lovecraftian touches to be found in the House of Eternal Return.
If you ever get a chance to see Leeman Kessler perform as HPL, do catch him. It’s the next best thing to a shuggoth on your doorstep.
(16) MARTIAN ODDITIES. FiveThirtyEight does both a statistical analysis and a historical survey of Mars in the annals of pop culture — “This Is Why We Love Stories About Mars”.
Movies about aliens are getting more popular. Movies about Martians peaked a while ago.
…But multiculturalism was only part of the era’s Mars story. The 1950s and ’60s saw Martians firmly established on television as belligerent invaders. Marvin the Martian was introduced to give Bugs Bunny a worthy foe hell-bent on destroying Earth.3
There is something poetic about Marvin being the referee in “Space Jam” in the game between the Tunes and the Aliens. After all, he’s a creature of both worlds.
A 1960 episode of “The Twilight Zone” called “People Are Alike All Over” featured a Martian society that was just as indifferent and cruel as humans on Earth. The episode “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up” played into the anyone-could-be-the-enemy-spy fears of the early 1960s, with invaders posing as humans to begin their infiltration.
In comic books, Martians are — with one notable exception — the baddies. Martians who show up in a Marvel comic are sure to be villains. Sometimes they’re Nazis dressed up as Martians to scare New York. Either way, these comics are stories about external threats made real, conquerors, spies, warlords and assorted monsters of the week. In DC Comics, the White Martians are boilerplate invader types, as are Yellow Martians and the original Burning Martians. Only the Green Martians, of which there remains one — the Martian Manhunter — aren’t out for Earthling blood, despite their ridiculous power.
In the contemporary era, humans dealing with Martians are occupiers, not collaborators. It rarely goes well….
[Thanks to Gregory N. Hullender, Rich Lynch, Rob Thornton, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, DMS, rcade, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA.]
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(4) And nothing could possibly go wrong with that.
I know I’d stay the hell away from New York City.
@7 – Box Check! The character resembles something from mortal combat or tomb raider. The fat white guy in the pith helmet does not fit a stereotype!
@8 – Sounds like a fun movie.
@12 – Double Box Check! Scholarships for poor white students would be bad because……..
@13 – Box check!
[eye-stalk]
Now Listening: “Interstellar Overdrive” (Live in Stockholm 1967) by Pink Floyd
Now Reading: Excession by Iain M. Banks
(4) I’m not sure how you “hang” anything from an asteroid in orbit. (It needs to be a very small asteroid, to stay in geosynchronous orbit – do they understand the physics of gravity and mass?)
(14) SHORT NOTE TO L.D. COLTER.
I’ve made the same mistake, but thankfully realised it before tweeting to The Other Mike Glyer.
ETA: The Fifth comment has Mike Glyer reference. This is getting a bit recursive.
Fifth in War,
Fifth in Peace,
Fifth in the Hearts of his Countrymen!
(8) answers the question I was going to ask about (7): Does the movie comment on and use the fact of the ridiculousness of the skimpy costume? Because today’s high school students could hardly avoid doing so. And the answer us yes, it does. So based on that information (noting that I haven’t seen the movie and likely won’t), I’m okay with it. It makes sense to me.
YMMV
Hang from an asteroid. There is an Arthur C Clarke novel that does this in great detail. The skyscraper is a slight variation on the space needle concept, in which the weight of the vertical section is used to hold the asteroid in geocentric orbit even though it is too far from earth. In the variation here, the suspended object does not happen to reach the ground. The analemma orbit, as seen from the surface of the earth, was patented a long time ago. It’s a path to overfilling the geostationary orbital space, and works as described, though the usual filling material si amde of normal earth satellites.
@P J Evans
I’m not sure how you “hang” anything from an asteroid in orbit.
The center of mass of the asteroid + skyscraper is what is at the geosynchronous orbit. Everything on the Earth side of that point can be considered to hang — it is closer to Earth, thus gravity pulls on it a bit more than it does the asteroid. This is how gravity gradient stabilized satellites work.
(It needs to be a very small asteroid, to stay in geosynchronous orbit – do they understand the physics of gravity and mass?)
?? It doesn’t have to be “very small”, except to the extent that if it is large in comparison to the mass of the Earth, it makes more sense to talk about the Earth + asteroid orbiting each other than it does to talk about the asteroid orbiting the Earth; or if it is large in comparison to the orbital altitude, it can scrape the Earth’s surface. But up to those points, it can still occupy a geosynch orbit.
(13) IT MUST GO OFF.
Well there’s fame for Darren. I’ve actually used Chekov’s Lesbian elsewhere since then, but I’d forgotten which filer coined it.
(14) SHORT NOTE TO L.D. COLTER.
Tweeting something dumb is just Tuesday on twitter, I’d not worry about it!
The “other” Mike Glyer doesn’t have it so bad, there are some poor souls on twitter who get confused for much more famous people, such as the games journo George Osborne who spent a few days being lectured about his proposed new job as editor of the Evening Standard, or a long-suffering American John Lewis who fields a lot of questions about how to bring items back for a refund.
Hadn’t seen this before.
http://www.tor.com/2017/02/27/naomi-kritzer-cat-pictures-please-novel/
Meredith Moment: It Can’t Happen Here is in the Kindle Daily Deal in the UK. Note that the UK edition isn’t called It Can’t Happen Over There.
(4) will Neal Stephenson get a free apartment?
Story Bundle have a new AI bundle featuring novels by Lisa Mason, Linda Nagata and Walter Jon Williams. I have read a few of them but not all of them so Mount Tsundoku climbs a little higher.
(4) is a fun idea but silly. It sounds like they’re proposing the infrastructure for a space elevator, which could revolutionize access to space but isn’t yet within our engineering capabilities, but instead using it for real estate, which we have no shortage of on Earth. It’s sort of like inventing a warp drive that you use to speed up Internet order delivery.
(12) Don’t worry airboy: most of the $300+ million USC gives out annually in scholarships and grants is specifically for lower- and middle-income students, both white and of other colors. (They do have some merit scholarships, and some for more specific demographic groups, including descendants of the people they admitted generations ago- but the bulk of their grant aid is need-based, both with and without the $10 million the Lucas Foundation is giving.) If you think you can convince them of a legitimate need for scholarships limited to whites in particular, knock yourself out.
Since, unlike a space elevator, the anchoring asteroid isn’t in geosynch orbit…. won’t the air drag on the building eventually de-orbit the asteroid? (Not to mention, how do you engineer a building for constant very high winds? Nowhere is there a mention of the speed relative to the earth of the building, but at a wild guess it would likely be hundreds of miles an hour…..)
#4. This.
THIS is what happens when everyone thinks they can science fiction.
JUMANJI; Jack Black in a film is iffy. I’ve never been inclined to see anything that presents him in the leading role, rather than being a supporting character. So this might be good, as long as he’s not getting the most screen time.
Since this proposed medical device doesn’t make geological or meteorological measurements, shouldn’t it be called a “monocorder” or “unicorder”?
(Now I sit back and wait for that to become a word of the week.)
4) This is the future that liberals want.
The centre of mass of the system is in geosynchronous orbit, just like a space elevator. The difference is that the centre of mass for a space elevator also needs to be in geostationary orbit.
The dangling building will be travelling at a bit over 750 km/h on average as it loops between New York, the Equator, and the equivalent latitude south of the Equator so there will need to be some attention paid to reboost, but you’ve got a nice big lump to hang some solar arrays and ion engines from.
It seems that speed would also be a challenge for anything entering and leaving – you’d basically have an airport with 750 km/h headwind on the runway.
Also, wouldn’t the outer part be way outside both low Earth orbit and normal geostationary orbit, meaning the cable sweeps through the orbits of other satelites? Sounds like lots of potential fun.
I think I’ll side with the guy from MIT who describes it as a “fun utopian mega-project”.
Anthony, but wouldn’t the atmospheric drag of the building cause eventual de-orbiting? Or am I missing something obvious here? (Which I freely admit is quite likely.)
Thanks for doing the math on the velocity; 750 km/hour winds are nothing to take lightly. (if it’s “on average” and it’s (relatively) slow over New York, does that mean it’s actually 900km or 1000km winds as it crosses the Equator…?) Actually, now I’m wondering if the building itself would need heat shields from the friction of the winds….
@Lise Andreasen: Cool about Kritzer’s story-turned-novel! Although YA, I’m interested. 🙂
Mike: The RSS feed for File 770 currently shows excerpts from each blog post instead of the full text. Have you considered a change to this policy? I read comments in the Feedly RSS reader a lot of the time and would find it convenient to read the entire blog there as well.
I think this is controlled in WordPress by going to Settings, Reading in the admin dashboard.
4) I loved the logic of this bit:-
Well, you can buy an apartment in this thing if you like; me, I’m going to go for the really low-cost housing, down at the Earth’s core.
How close is this thing supposed to get to the Earth’s surface at a) New York and b) the Equator? Seems to me that the curvature of the Earth is something of a factor here… unless the asteroid pays out more line as the skyscraper approaches the higher latitudes, then reels it back in as it swings back towards the Equator?
I made some disparaging remarks last year about Heinlein’s Rolling Roads and Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing, but I think we’ve now found a civil engineering project that makes both of those look plausible, and even modest.
In Britton South Dakota for work the next few days /stalk
the crossing point at the middle point of the 8 shape will always be the same spot in geostationary orbit, but a problem with all tether structures is how to deal with objects in lower orbits.
Yep, hence the comment about hanging solar panels and ion engines on the counterweight. My brain is refusing to work out whether the reboost is a nice simple thrust in one direction or if it needs to be continuously angled.
I worked the average speed as New York being ~4500km north of the Equator so the dangling bit doing twice that every 12 hours. I didn’t allow anything for the width of the track, and it may be close to Mach 1 at Equator crossings.
Jack Black as the avatar of a teenage girl is the most promising thing, by far, that I’ve heard about this movie.
Odd for Marvin to be such a “hit” because by the end of the fifties, he’d been in about a half dozen cartoons. I guess the reruns (endlessly) propped him up a bit.
And INVADERS FROM MARS…That movie ran in on one of the local Philadelphia UHF channels quite frequently. There were times it was shown five to ten times a week.
4) The critical question is: how will internet access work? No-one will want to live up there unless they can provide a high speed connection.
More seriously, moving the asteroid seems to me to be the main technical challenge. By the time they develop the technology to do that, reboosting and high winds should be a snap.
(4) The interesting constraints on the orbit of the center of mass are that it has to have a period of 24 hours and it has to be stationary above NYC at apogee. That’s a fun little problem! I get an elliptical orbit with e=0.2228. The altitude above NYC is then 45,281 km. Since the altitude at perigee is 26,459 km, that suggests the skyscraper itself (as opposed to the center of mass) cannot be closer than about 18,000 km to NYC, even if it touches the Earth at perigee.
At perigee, it’ll be moving at 446 m/s with respect to the Earth, or just under 1,000 MPH. On the bright side, it won’t be in the atmosphere for very long.
I found the formulas on the Wikipedia Orbital Mechanics page very helpful. Plus an online calculator to solve cubic equations.
@ John Mark Ockerbloom
Shhh! The Amazon development department doesn’t like people giving away their in-process projects!
@ Heather Rose Jones
Such as the Reverse Impulse Delivery Engine, which sends your package to you before you order it.
I’m still having trouble getting over this:
I’ve been a loyal F&SF reader since 2000. For the first time, I’ve gotten a second subscription, to a print magazine – to wit, Asimov’s.
And the cover. It’s weird. It’s all crinkely! I keep feel like it’s going to get smushed, or rip right off!
I’m a little shocked by how this keeps nagging at my attention. I seem to have grown very acclimated to something very specific…
(Also, a bunch of pages have this faded print. Is this normal? What… what’s going on here? :-/ )
FTFY
(4) is of course one of the key plot locations of the final part of Stephenson’s Seveneves; though his could be locked in place in various locations on Earth with big clamps.
@Robert Whitaker Sirignano
Jack Black in a film is iffy. I’ve never been inclined to see anything that presents him in the leading role,
You might give both Bernie and The Big Year a try. He is very good in both of them, and he isn’t particulary “Jack-Blackish” (if that’s a word) in either of them. Both are good movies.
I admit he is a bit of an acquired taste, but I generally think he adds to a movie.
I bought the latest issues of the big three at Barnes & Noble this week after all the talk here about their circulation.
I am equally traumatized by the crinkling. Asimov’s and Analog both have that problem. I told myself that the bookstore had gotten copies damaged in transit. This is some of the worst printing I’ve ever seen. If it’s not a fluke I can’t imagine paying for a print subscription.
@Steve Wright Thanks for the “earth’s core” comment, which gave me a big grin this morning.
Sorry for the misdirected Twitter tag – thanks for setting me straight. (And thanks to the real Mike Glyer for the shoutout for A Borrowed Hell 🙂 ).
So a while back I made a quick CG model trying to visualize what the Earth would look like over the course of a day if it were tidally locked with the moon and kept it’s 23.5 degree axial tilt. It can give some idea of what the view of a day from this other-side-of-the-sky scraper would look like (only much closer.)
@rcade: Oh, I missed the circulation discussions… What’d I miss?
It does me good to hear it’s not just me. Is this new? Has this always been? crinkle, crinkle, crinkle. Well, next issue they promised a Karen Joy Fowler story; I can handle some crinkling for that…
@Standback: The circulation discussion starts about halfway down: .
The crinkling is a long-standing issue, unfortunately; it was true even when they used heavier cover stock. (Faded pages, however, are not; that’s clearly a production problem.) I’ve wished for a long time that Asimov’s used the same printer and binder as F&SF.
@Rob Thornton: “Such as the Reverse Impulse Delivery Engine, which sends your package to you before you order it.”
I’m not too worried about that. I hear the investors are backing out, for fear that they’re being taken for a RIDE. 😉
Wil McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol books feature a method of circumventing the speed of light, used for communication. Their tech makes the line between communication and travel somewhat blurry.
The real issue with the system is its failure modes potentially include issues like “will end all life in the Solar System”.
My understanding was that Star Trek always featured a separate medical tricorder, as far back as 1966.
@airboy
Because George Lucas is a private donor and has many times over the last three decades noted that women and POC are highly underrepresented as filmmakers. Considering he’s an expert in his industry and it’s his own dollars, I think he has a better idea about how he wants to improve the things he’s witnessed with his contribution than your sad knee-jerk reaction. Weren’t you just telling people all about your super-expert, mega-published background trying to make them defer to your opinion, like, three days ago? Try taking some of your own advice.
Applause.
I’ve been subscribing to Asimov’s since 1981 or so, and the new style flimsy covers are a major annoyance. I much prefer the F & SF style.
@gottacook “My understanding was that Star Trek always featured a separate medical tricorder, as far back as 1966.”
That’s my recollection as well, and this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder distinguishes between the general purpose and the medical versions as well.
“Scrolls! They were inwented by a little old lady from Pixelgrad”