(1) EASTERCON 2021. Next year’s UK Eastercon site has been selected reports the Friends of Eastercon blog.
ConFusion 2021 won an online bidding session for the 2021 Eastercon, to be held at the Birmingham NEC again, with 95% of the vote. Permission to record the session was refused.
(2) AID FOR ARTISTS. Publishers Lunch linked to the newly announced “Maurice Sendak Emergency Relief Fund”.
The Maurice Sendak Foundation has granted $100,000 to the New York Foundation for the Arts for an emergency relief grant program “to support children’s picture book artists and writers impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.” They will provide grants of up to $2,500 a person, and hope to raise at least another $150,000 in the initial phase.
(3) AND RESCUE FOR RETAILERS. The New York Times tells how “Comic Creators Unite to Benefit Stores”.
A large group of comic book creators are banding together to help support comic book retailers whose business have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
Using the Twitter hashtag #Creators4Comics, more than 120 creators will be auctioning comic books, artwork and one-of-a-kind experiences. The auctions will run from Wednesday through Monday and will benefit the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which is accepting applications from comic book shops and bookstores for emergency relief.
The effort was organized by the comic book writers Sam Humphries and Brian Michael Bendis, along with Kami Garcia, Gwenda Bond and Phil Jimenez. Humphries will be auctioning “How to Break Into Comics by Making Your Own Comics,” which are video-chat sessions with aspiring writers. “It mirrors my own comic book secret origin story,” he said in an email. More information can be found at the Creators 4 Comics website….
(4) CONZEALAND VIRTUAL ATTENDING MEMBERSHIPS. The 2020 Worldcon website has been updated with information about attending memberships for its Virtual Convention.
An Attending Membership is for people who will engage in the live, interactive Virtual Convention. There are a number of different types of Attending Memberships. Attending Memberships are all inclusive. You do not have to pay anything more for access to any of our online activity.
You will receive all our publications. This also comes with the right to nominate and vote in the Hugo Awards in 2020. You can also vote in Site Selection for the 2022 Worldcon.
- Young Adult Attending is based on being born in 2000.
- Unwaged Attending is a NZ resident of any age who does not have a consistent wage. This includes students, retirees, beneficiaries etc. Please contact us if you have questions about this.
- We will trust that if you become waged by the convention, that you will upgrade to a Full Attending.
(5) RE-VOYAGER. “Garrett Wang And Robert Duncan McNeill Are Launching A ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ Rewatch Podcast” reports TrekMovie.com. The podcast’s twitter account is @TheDeltaFlyers.
This morning, Star Trek: Voyager star Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris) announced that he has teamed up with co-star Garrett Wang (Harry Kim) on a new podcast called The Delta Flyers. The new pod promises inside stories as the pair plan to rewatch every episode of Voyager, with the first episode arriving in early May.
(6) EISNER AWARDS. Newsarama reassures that “2020 Eisner Awards Going Forward Despite SDCC Cancellation”.
“I’m happy to report that the judging has been handled mostly virtually to date,” SDCC’s Chief Communications and Strategy Officer David Glanzer told Newsarama. “Things are in flux as you can imagine but our hope is to be able to have a list of Eisner winners for 2020.”
Longtime awards administrator Jackie Estrada is working with this year’s judges Martha Cornog, Jamie Coville, Michael Dooley, Alex Grecian, Simon Jimenez, and Laura O’Meara.
(7) OUT OF PRINT. In “This Is The Book That Outsold Dracula In 1897″, CrimeReads’ Olivia Rutigliano shows why an old bestseller is likely to remain in obscurity despite that singular achievement.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula has remained in print since it was first published in April 1897. A bestseller in its day, it has gone on to spawn countless derivatives and become one of the most indelible pop-cultural touchstones in recent history. Obviously. But, upon its first release, it was seriously outsold by another novel, a supernatural tale of possession and revenge called The Beetle, which fell out of print after 1960. And let me tell you, it’s something else.
Written by Richard Marsh, the author of extremely successful commercial short fiction during this era, The Beetle is actually rather like Dracula in form and plot. In addition to its being an epistolary novel, it is similarly about a seductive, inhuman, shape-shifting monster who arrives in England from the East, entrances a citizen into becoming its slave, and wages an attack on London society. And civilization’s only hope against this invader is a motley group of middle-class individuals (including one forward-thinking young woman and one expert on the supernatural), who must figure out what the creature actually is and ascertain why it has arrived to England, before finally destroying it….
(8) A FRIGID FORMULATION. Dann is “Re-Visiting Those Damned Cold Equations” at Liberty at all Costs.
… There is a forthcoming anthology of rebuttals to The Cold Equations. I expect many essayists to add elements that are not present in the original story to reach their own preferred conclusions. Rather than address the story as written, they will probably add in a factor that is not otherwise evident as a lever to be used against the main purpose of the story.
Rather than discussing the merits and criticism of the story, I’m first going to travel to Texas, rhetorically.
Lt. Governor Dan Patrick implied that he was willing to die to ensure the survival of his children and grandchildren. He went on to suggest that lots of grandparents would make the same choice. The context of his comments was the “choice” between maintaining our self-quarantine that is significantly damaging our economy or resuming normal social habits at the demonstrable risk of killing off a substantial number of our elderly.…We are not currently at the point where we need to be deciding who lives and who dies. We are most certainly not at the point where we need to risk the lives of senior citizens by prematurely restarting the economy.
That being said, we do have to make choices; sometimes hard choices….…The fact is that we all have to make choices based on what we hope is the best of information. We are all learning now about the importance of certain types of medical and personal protective equipment. We are learning that we had manufacturing and import capacity to cover the usual needs of society, but not enough to cover our needs during a pandemic. We are learning that we had stockpiles sufficient to cover a few significant regional calamities, but such stockpiles were entirely insufficient for a larger catastrophe.
…Will the critics of The Cold Equations pause in their rush to suggest alternative conclusions to acknowledge the practical limitations, however ham-handedly presented, that were in play?
(9) WHAT BOX? In a review of Bishakh Som’s new collection, NPR’s Etelka Lehoczky reports that “‘Apsara Engine’ Doesn’t Break The Graphic Novel Rules — It Ignores Them”.
There’s something a bit uncanny about Apsara Engine, the new comics collection by Bishakh Som. The world of comics is all about genre — superhero, sci-fi, fantasy, horror — and most of the time it’s pretty easy to match any book to its proper slot. Even highbrow graphic novels tend to categorize themselves through the style of art they employ and the types of stories they tell. Not this book, though. Its images and concepts seem to come from a place all their own. Som’s imagination is science-fictiony, without being particularly technological, mythic without being particularly traditional, and humanistic without cherishing any particular assumptions about where we, as a species, are headed.
You might classify these comics as “literary,” but Som’s approach to storytelling is as uncanny as her style and themes. Even the book’s structure keeps the reader off-balance. Som intersperses tales of future civilizations and half-human hybrid beasts with vignettes of run-of-the-mill contemporary life, so the reader never knows if something odd is about to happen.
You might classify these comics as “literary,” but Som’s approach to storytelling is as uncanny as her style and themes.
…Som’s artistic style breaks boundaries, too. She’ll employ traditional comic-book techniques for page layouts and character designs, then toss them aside with the turn of a page. A character who’s drawn iconically, with just a few efficient lines defining her features, will become lushly realistic at a pivotal moment. A story drawn in the usual square panels will suddenly burst forth into a series of flowing, uncontained two-page spreads.
Such moments of explosive transition provide the book’s heartbeat. It’s a mesmerizing arrythmia. The deceptiveness of what we think of as “ordinary life” is a running motif, one Som explores through unexpected juxtapositions. In “Come Back to Me,” a pretty young woman engages in an utterly mundane inner monologue while walking on the beach. Her reminiscences about the time she cheated on her boyfriend, which appear above and below the drawings, continue to unspool implacably even as she’s pulled into the ocean by a mermaid….
(10) BINNS OBIT. Merv Binns’ obituary, written by Leigh Edmonds, has appeared in The Age: “A luminary of Australian science fiction”. An excerpt:
In 1970, Binns established Space Age Books, with the help of his friends Lee Harding and Paul Stevens. It soon established a reputation as the best source of science fiction, fantasy and counter-culture literature in Melbourne, and probably Australia.
Space Age became the hub of a growing science fiction community and Binns became associated with leading authors, editors and publishers, as well the growing number of fans, in Australia and internationally.
As a result, Binns and Space Age were integral to the hosting of World Science Fiction Conventions in Melbourne in 1975 and 1985.
(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
- April 18, 1938 — Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1, a comic book published by National Allied Publications even though the cover said June. The character was created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster. This was actually an anthology, and contained eleven features with the Superman feature being the first thirteen inside pages. Five years ago, a pristine copy of this comic sold for a record $3,207,852 on an eBay auction. It was one of two hundred thousand that were printed.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born April 18, 1884 — Frank R. Paul. An employee of editor Hugo Gernsback, he largely defined the look of both cover art and interior illustrations in the pulps of the Twenties from Amazing Stories at first and later for Planet Stories, Superworld Comics and Science Fiction. He also illustrated the cover of Gernsback’s own novel, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660. You can see his cover for Amazing Stories, August 1927 issue , illustrating The War of the Worlds here. (Died 1963.)
- Born April 18, 1922 — Nigel Kneale. Writer of novels and scripts merging horror and SF, he’s best remembered for the creation of the character Professor Bernard Quatermass. Though he was a prolific British producer and writer, he had only one Hollywood movie script, Halloween III: Season of the Witch. (Died 2006.)
- Born April 18, 1945 — Karen Wynn Fonstad. She designed several atlases of fictional worlds including The Atlas of Middle-earth, The Atlas of Pern and The Atlas of the Dragonlance World. (Died 2005.)
- Born April 18, 1946 — Janet Kagan. “The Nutcracker Coup” was nominated for both the Hugo Award for Best Novelette and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, winning the Hugo at ConFrancisco. She has but two novels, one being Uhura’s Song, a Trek novel, and quite a bit of short fiction which is out in The Complete Kagan from Baen Books and is available from the usual digital suspects. (Died 2008.)
- Born April 18, 1952 — Martin Hoare. I’m not going to attempt to restate what Mike stares much better in his obituary here. (Died 2019.)
- Born April 18, 1965 — Stephen Player, 55. He’s deep into Pratchett’s Discworld and the fandom that sprung up around it. He illustrated the first two Discworld Maps, and quite a number of the books including the25th Anniversary Edition of The Light Fantastic and The Illustrated Wee Free Men. Oh but that’s just a mere wee taste of he’s done as he did the production design for the Sky One production of Hogfather and The Colour of Magic. He did box art and card illustrations for Guards! Guards! A Discworld Boardgame. Finally he contributed to some Discworld Calendars, games books, money for the Discworld convention. I want that money.
- Born April 18, 1969 — Keith R. A. DeCandido, 51. I found him with working in these genre media franchises: such as Supernatural, Andromeda, Farscape, Firefly, Aliens, Star Trek In its various permutations, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, Spider-Man, X-Men, Hercules, Thor, Sleepy Hollow,and Stargate SG-1. Has he ever written a novel that was a media tie-in?
- Born April 18, 1971 — David Tennant, 49. Eleventh Doctor and my favorite of the modern Doctors along with Thirteen whom I’m also very fond of. There are some episodes such as the “The Unicorn and The Wasp” that I’ve watched repeatedly. He’s also done other spectacular genre work such as the downright creepy Kilgrave in Jessica Jones, and and Barty Crouch, Jr. in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He’s also in the Beeb’s remake of the The Quatermass Experiment as Dr. Gordon Briscoe.
- Born April 18, 1973 — Cora Buhlert, 47. With Jessica Rydill, she edits the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a most excellent site. She has a generous handful of short fiction professionally published, and she’s also a finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo this year.
(13) COMICS SECTION.
- Bizarro tells us what monsters sing.
(14) TOUGHER THAN DIAMOND? “DC to Sell New Comics. Here’s Why it Matters” is a Nerdist analysis of a potentially revolutionary development.
It’s been a wild month for comic book fans everywhere. Since the COVID-19 crisis fully took hold we’ve been getting used to new ways of living, working, and accessing our favorite art, even SDCC has been canceled! It was only a few weeks ago that Diamond–the comic book industry’s only physical distributor–would stop distributing single issues to comic shops. Since then, there have been plenty of rumors, failed plans, and new ideas. But now DC Comics has announced they will be selling comics directly to shops via two new distributors.
It’s great news for comics fans but also has massive implications for the future of the industry as a whole. We’re here to break down why.
… The fact that DC Comics is breaking with the exclusive deal Diamond has had with them for decades means that they are introducing two new distributors into the market for the first time in 20 years. It could essentially break the monopoly that Diamond has had on the industry. Possibly freeing up the proverbial trade routes that have long been under the control of one massive company….
(15) LEGACY OF THE PLAGUE. Sari Feldman looks ahead to “Public Libraries After the Pandemic” at Publishers Weekly.
…In a previous column, I wrote about the unprecedented library closures around the country in the wake of the pandemic. The value of public libraries is rarely questioned in times of crisis—think of the New Orleans Public Library after Hurricane Katrina, or the Ferguson Municipal Public Library during the unrest there. But this crisis—more specifically, the social distancing required to address this crisis—strikes at the very foundation on which the modern public library rests. And as the days go by, I find myself increasingly concerned about how libraries come back from these closures.
For one, I suspect that Covid-19 will change some people’s perspective on what can and should be shared. I fear many people will begin to overthink materials handling and the circulation of physical library collections, including books. It’s a reasonable assumption that people will emerge from this public health crisis with a heightened sense of risk related to germ exposure. How many of our patrons—particularly those with means—will begin to question the safety of borrowing books and other items from the library?
In terms of our buildings, open access for everyone has long been a celebrated library value. Public libraries have evolved, survived, and have even managed to thrive through a digital transformation by reconfiguring our spaces to be more social, more functional, and by offering more programs and classes. Can we maintain that in an age of social distancing? Will libraries need to supply gloves for shared keyboards? Will parents and caregivers still want to bring their children to a “Baby and Me” program? Will seniors still find respite in a library community?
(16) ONE PICTURE AND A THOUSAND WORDS. In “Revisiting Ursula K. Le Guin’s Novella About Interplanetary Racism” at New York Times Books, artist Ben Passmore visually comments on a Le Guin story.
A graphic novelist renders “The Word for World Is Forest,” a work that mixed the reality of racism with the fantasy of retribution.
(17) COUNTDOWN. In the Washington Post, Christian Davenport says NASA has authorized the first human spaceflight launching from the U.S. since 2011, with veterans Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley scheduled to go to the International Space Station on a SpaceX craft. “NASA sets a date for historic SpaceX launch, the first flight of NASA crews from U.S. in nearly a decade”.
…This time, though, the launch will be markedly different from any other in the history of the space agency. Unlike Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or the space shuttle era, the rocket will be owned and operated not by NASA, but by a private company — SpaceX, the hard-charging commercial space company founded by Elon Musk.
(18) KEEP YOUR DISTANCE. The Washington Post’s Travis M. Andrews says that last Saturday a giant music festival was held “featuring emo titans American Football, chiptune pioneers Anamanaguchi and electropop pioneer Baths,” but social distancing protocols were followed because this was a virtual festival that took place inside Minecraft. “Thousands gathered Saturday for a music festival. Don’t worry: It was in Minecraft.”
… Interested parties could “attend” in a few different ways. Some watched on the video game streaming site Twitch. To really get into the action, though, you needed to log into Minecraft, plug in the proper server info and, voilà!, you’d pop to life in a hallway and then explore the venue through your first-person viewpoint.
Purchasing a VIP pass (with real money) allowed access to special cordoned-off parts of the venue and the chance to chat with the artists on the gamer hangout app Discord. Meanwhile, the nearly 100,000 unique viewers on Twitch were encouraged to donate money to disaster recovery org Good360, which ended up with roughly $8,000 in proceeds.
(19) BIG SQUEEZE. “‘Bath sponge’ breakthrough could boost cleaner cars”
A new material developed, by scientists could give a significant boost to a new generation of hydrogen-powered cars.
Like a bath sponge, the product is able to hold and release large quantities of the gas at lower pressure and cost.
Made up of billions of tiny pores, a single gram of the new aluminium-based material has a surface area the size of a football pitch.
The authors say it can store the large volume of gas needed for practical travel without needing expensive tanks.
…As well as developing electric vehicles, much focus has been on hydrogen as a zero emissions source of power for cars.
The gas is used to power a fuel cell in cars and trucks, and if it is made from renewable energy it is a much greener fuel.
However, hydrogen vehicles suffer from some drawbacks.
The gas is extremely light – In normal atmospheric pressure, to carry 1kg of hydrogen which might power your car for over 100km, you’d need a tank capable of holding around 11,000 litres.
To get around this problem, the gas is stored at high pressure, around 700 bar, so cars can carry 4-5kg of the gas and travel up to 500km before refilling.
That level of pressure is around 300 times greater than in a car’s tyres, and necessitates specially made tanks, all of which add to the cost of the vehicles.
Now researchers believe they have developed an alternative method that would allow the storage of high volumes of hydrogen under much lower pressure.
The team have designed a highly porous new material, described as a metal-organic framework.
(20) CREDENTIAL TO KILL. NPR reveals what your SJW credential already knew — nature is full of self-propelled cat food: “The Killer At Home: House Cats Have More Impact On Local Wildlife Than Wild Predators”.
What does an outdoor cat do all day? According to new research, it could be taking a heavy toll on local wildlife.
A tracking study of more than 900 house cats shows when they kill small birds and mammals, their impact is concentrated in a small area, having a bigger effect than wild predators do….
“Even though it seems like their cat isn’t killing that many, it really starts to add up,” said Roland Kays, a scientist at North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. (Full disclosure: Kays isn’t a cat or dog person but a “ferret person.”)
Kays and colleagues collected GPS data from cats in six countries and found most cats aren’t venturing very far from home.
“These cats are moving around their own backyard and a couple of their neighbors’ backyards, but most of them are not ranging very much further,” Kays said. “So initially I thought: ‘Oh, this is good news. They’re not going out into the nature preserves.’ “
Then Kays factored in how much cats kill in that small area. Some cats in the study were bringing home up to 11 dead birds, rodents or lizards a month, which doesn’t include what they ate or didn’t bring home to their owners.
“It actually ends up being a really intense rate of predation on any unfortunate prey species that’s going to live near that cat’s house,” he said.
(21) FLASHER. “Deep Sea Squid Communicate by Glowing Like E-Readers” – NPR item includes video so readers can test whether they see the patterns.
Deep in the Pacific Ocean, six-foot-long Humboldt squid are known for being aggressive, cannibalistic and, according to new research, good communicators.
Known as “red devils,” the squid can rapidly change the color of their skin, making different patterns to communicate, something other squid species are known to do.
But Humboldt squid live in almost total darkness more than 1,000 feet below the surface, so their patterns aren’t very visible. Instead, according to a new study, they create backlighting for the patterns by making their bodies glow, like the screen of an e-reader.
“Right now, what blows my mind is there’s probably squid talking to each other in the deep ocean and they’re probably sharing all sorts of cool information,” said Ben Burford, a graduate student at Stanford University.
Humboldt squid crowd together in large, fast-moving groups to feed on small fish and other prey.
“When you watch them it looks like frenzy,” Burford said. “But if you pay close attention, they’re not touching each other. They’re not bumping into each other.”
(22) THE HORROR. Consequence of Sound introduces a video publicizing Stephen King’s novella collection — “Stephen King Reads From New Book If It Bleeds: Watch”.
Stephen King jumped into the live stream game on Friday afternoon. The Master of Horror flipped on the camera to read the first chapter from his new book If It Bleeds. As previously reported, the book collects four different novellas — similar to Different Seasons or Four Past Midnight — and is available for Constant Readers on April 21st.
Wearing a Loser/Lover shirt from It: Chapter One, which is just all kinds of charming, King read from the first novel Mr. Harrigans Phone. The story continues the author’s mistrust of technology in the vein of Cell, and should make us all think twice about our respective smart phones. So, think about that as you watch King from your couch.
[Thanks to Michael Toman, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Bella Michaels, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
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11.I made the File 770 birthday list, woo hoo. Thanks Cat and Mike.
BTW, it’s also Eric Roberts’ birthday, who is 64 today and played the Master in the 1990s Doctor Who TV movie. I’ve always loved the fact that I share a birthday with both a Doctor and a Master.
Other April 18 birthdays of fannish interest are: Cheryl Morgan, Kristine Scalzi and Cavan Scott (UK author of comics and tie-in novels).
16) Love this, especially since The Word For World Is Forrest was my first Le Guin.
1) If there is a direct flight from somewhere in North Germany (Bremen, Hamburg, Hannover) to Birmingham again next year, I may actually be able to attend Eastercon. Cause the direct flights from Hannover to Birmingham that I’ve used several times in the past were no longer available this year and then corona hit and there wasn’t even an Eastercon.
(14) Diamond’s monopoly occurred organically because no one else was interested, rather than resulting from a deliberate plan, so the phrase “breaking with the exclusive deal” is disingenuously pejorative.
(8)
Well yes. That’s why when I wrote about James Patrick Kelley’s Think Like a Dinosaur I side tracked into philosopher Phillipa Foot’s infamous Trolley Problem. Ethical dilemmas exist and how we should respond to them and how we should avoid them is an interesting question.
And that is were The Cold Equation fails. It contrives a dilemma and shrugs its shoulders and shoves the girl out of the airlock. The personal impact of that is interesting, the aftermath of that action is interesting but we don’t get that. As a story, it shrugs its shoulders and moves on.
To tie it back to contemporary events to match Dann’s interesting essay, I see elsewhere the current situation posed as deaths versus the economy. Yet, pulling apart the situation we can see a contrived dilemma, not unlike the Cold Equations. There are things that could have been avoided and options that some regard as politically unthinkable (eg massive deficit spending, temporary nationalisation of some industries and so on). It’s both weak morality and weak problem solving to not consider that there is inevitably a much bigger range of choices available — each with their own unpalatable aspect and their own unintended consequences but still a greater variety than two.
(4) I just checked the membership link. So…. if you’re buying a fresh, new CoNZealand adult attending membership it’s NZ$300. If you did not pre-support and voted at site selection in Dublin it’s still NZ$300 to upgrade. If you did pre-support and voted at site selection in Dublin it’s also still NZ$300 to upgrade.
Doesn’t seem like having a supporting membership is worth anything at all if you want to upgrade to participate in the online convention. Or am I reading this incorrectly?
Diamond’s monopoly came about because Marvel wanted their own distributor to exclusively distribute their comics and bought Heroes World. That triggered the rest of the big publishers to choose between Diamond and Capital City for exclusive deals. When most of the big imprints picked Diamond, that was about it for Capital City. Then when Marvel gave up on Heroes World, there was only Diamond left standing.
(12) DeCandido has a series of novels called the Precinct series (Dragon Precinct, Unicorn Precinct, Goblin Precinct, etc.) that aren’t tie-ins. I haven’t read any, but you can get them on Kindle for 99 cents/each at the moment.
Also Rick Moranis’s birthday. Ghostbusters, Honey I reduced or expanded the kids, Little Shop of Horrors, Spaceballs, and, since we mentioned it with Max Von Sydow, Strange Brew.
And noted futurist Conan O’Brien. Why it seems only yesterday when he regularly took us to the year 2000. Wrote the monorail episode of The Simpsons. Has appeared as himself in an assortment of genre or genre adjacent projects.
Break out your Alexander Nevsky DVDs ’cause it’s Victory Over the Teutonic Knights in the Battle of the Ice day in Russia.
We hope you enjoyed the beer, oh, like I mean the file, eh.
There is already a convention called ConFusion in the Detroit area which started in 1975 and still occurs anually.
@Rich
I wondered that myself, so I logged in by requesting a login link, the same as I did when I wanted to get onto the site for nominations. When I clicked on “Upgrade” the option presented for Attending was $225 in New Zealand dollars (about $135 US dollars as of right now), which I believe takes into account my already purchased Supporting membership. Did you log in to the site?
@8: what a load of dingos’ kidneys. The unpreparedness is like Shrub’s Secretary of War telling us we went to war with the army we had, not the army we wanted, in a war that he chose to go to when he did; the US would have been far readier if the Cheeto and his sycophants and his enablers had gotten off their fat asses right away instead of claiming there was nothing to be worried about. That’s human fckups, not “cold equations” — just as Harter pointed out wrt the story, over 4 decades ago. The expectation that some of the stories will cheat (because that’s what them libruls do, right?) is similarly bullst. And that half-witted (at best) Lt Gov conveniently ignored the fact that the novel coronavirus kills the young as well as the old — and would have killed a lot more of them if not for the shutdowns; the economy can be fixed — or even supported against catastrophe if the reactionary idiots get out of the way — but dead is permanent.
@Dann: regardless of what else you say in this essay, you should be deeply ashamed of the part quoted here.
@12 (Tennant): not to mention his starring role as Crowley in the Good Omens miniseries — possibly some of his best work, as he had to show someone realizing that his official enemy is his best (maybe only) friend.
@Jack Lint: it’s a bit late for a beer, but I’ll hum to myself some of the Prokofiev score to the Sergei Eisenstein film, since I did (~17 years ago) the suite he made of the movie music.
I was just talking to a friend tonight about when and how the Main Library here in San Francisco would open. He’d been checking out books and reading the papers there.
And since the bookstore near him has closed so he can’t buy his paper and he isn’t the kind of person to have books around the house, he’s suffering from such withdrawal that he’s actually getting comfortable using his phone to read things on-line.
The drawback to that is that he’s such a hypochondriac he’d been getting ‘alternate’ health and diet books from the library–we all heard way too much about the deadly effects of yeast and how it grows through-out your body and saps your energy and health.
7) The Beetle has seen the occasional reprint over the years, which is how I happen to have read it myself – it is a pretty weird book, and I don’t think it’s anywhere near as good as Dracula, but it’s worth taking a look at.
12) Other Nigel Kneale stuff of genre interest includes the anthology series Beasts, the UFO-spotter comedy Kinvig, and the chilling ghost story The Stone Tape. All of which are recommended, at least by me.
20) Having watched next door’s cats as they gleefully dismantle pigeons in my back garden, I believe this.
(4) …awww crud.
I was so excited about being able to attend Worldcon virtually, but I only just now finally checked the actual dates.
No fault of Conzealand, but the Wednesday-Thursday is Jewish Tishaa Be’Av, one of the really major days of mourning, and then there’s the Friday-Saturday, which are Shabbat.
I think I’m a mite foiled here. Alas :-/
Happy Birthday Cora!
I think I’m adjusting to this brave new world all too well. I prefer Zoom meetings to physical ones, streamconcerts never have annoying drunk girls going “whoooo!” and Facetime doctors don’t transmit any scary microorganisms. And e-books are nice and clean. My latest adaptation involves purchasing an 80 foot rope so that I can tie a bag to the end and pitch it out my window to make no-contact burrito deliveries easier. Maybe I’ll investigate virtual conventions next.
12) Just a note that Janet Kagan has three novels. Besides Uhuru’s Song, there are Mirabile and Hellspark. Hellspark is particular is excellent.
I think there’s a good case to be made for Mirabile being called a story collection rather than a novel. I’ll certainly agree that all three volumes are well worth reading — I’d have happily read a dozen-book series set in the Hellspark galaxy.
There were a few years in the very late ’80s and early ’90s when Janet Kagan was publishing a bunch of excellent stories and beginning what seemed to me a very promising career, with a Hugo win in 1993 signalling that she had really “arrived”. Then after that Hugo win she suddenly stopped publishing. I gather there were health issues, both physical and mental. Alas.
A happy birthday to you Cora. And congrats on the Hugo nom, too! 🙂
David Goldfarb says I think there’s a good case to be made for Mirabile being called a story collection rather than a novel. I’ll certainly agree that all three volumes are well worth reading — I’d have happily read a dozen-book series set in the Hellspark galaxy.
There were multiple versions of Mirabile as it started it as a short story collection before becoming a fix-up novel. And I’m not quite sure when it became the latter as despite the 1993 Nebula ballot listing at ISFDB listing it as such, the same lists all four printings as collections. Who here read has the fix-up novel? Is it simply narrative material placed between the stories? And was it done by her? It’s in print as Bean ebook.
12) Hellspark is really good.
It think this sentence is missing a “not”
(Jack Lint already answered the question).
Currently reading “Becoming Superman” and “Catfishing on Catnet” – which have some unexpected resonances.
@15, I’m a member of a local community theater troupe and we’re contracted to do a storytelling event at the local public library, in July. We’re in rehearsal right now (over zoom; storytelling, at least, doesn’t require in-person rehearsals for blocking!) because we have no idea whatsoever whether the library will be open in July, and so we need to be ready to perform Just In Case. (I mostly run the lighting board; I’m not an actor. The only time I get on stage is to tell stories.)
This whole situation is hell on theater, too. Many companies are likely to fold. (Small theaters and community theaters usually run on razor-thin margins.)
I currently have unread library copies of “Agency”, “Ancestral Night”, and “The Raven Tower”, with an extended return date of July 15. Obviously no great hurry to get them read. I’ve been borrowing way more ebooks than usual.
Note my comment correcting a typo had a typo (“It” versus “I”). Sigh.
Happy Birthday Cora, and the best of luck with the Hugos!
Yes, but they are rarely binary. Most ethical dilemmas in literature – Trolley problem or cold equations – are presented in a way there is only THIS or THAT -and in reality a lot has to happen before this is really the only choice you are having. I like the quote from suits: “What are your choices when someone puts a gun to your head? You take the gun, or you pull out a bigger one. Or, you call their bluff. Or, you do any one of a hundred and forty-six other things.”
Presenting something as a binary morale choice may be academically interesting – but Id argue that 9 times out of 10, the person doing so is selling you something – but its a very poor approach to reality.
@Chip
I would say your reply here actually gives an example of what Dann is expecting. You are attacking the story existing because “mistakes” were made leading up to it so that renders the story worthless.
In the many arguments I have seen over the years about this story the most common tactic is nitpicking about the details leading to the story because the person making the argument does not believe in the concept of “Hard Choices” .
More on Janet Kagan: Before she was a professional sf writer, and before she married Ricky Kagan, she was Janet Megson, and (with Eli Cohen) edited three issues of “Akos,” the official clubzine of the Fantasy and Science Fiction Society of Columbia University (FSFSCU). These were pubbed in 1969 and 1970. They contained the usual mix of material that college clubs included: fiction, poetry, reviews, editorials, longer essays on science and sf. For the curious, you can find them here: http://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Akos/. If nothing else, they are worth visiting for Judy Mitchell’s covers and interior art.
It is exactly that, and it was done by her for the 1991 Tor edition. I read it a couple of weeks ago. All the stories have the same protagonist and are set on the same world, and there is a through-story in them too.
It would probably help to point out a hard choice in real life where there was no third option.
The current pitch of „we let people die or the economy tank“ isnt it. There are plenty of coices, and jf you let a big number of people die, the economy will tank anyway.
#20 reminded me of this The Oatmeal comic:
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill
@Magewolf:
Or, the person believes that there are hard choices, but that “The Cold Equations” doesn’t present a convincing one.
“Do I donate part of my liver to my sibling, which will probably save their life, but might kill me?” is a hard choice, and there may not be another transplant available.
Whether to risk your life in an unglamorous job in order to earn enough money for groceries and maybe a new pair of shoes is a hard choice, and one that real people are facing right now.
Either of those examples is a harder choice than the one in the story, because the person facing the risk is also the one making the decision. Not “do I kill a stranger who I know only because she did something stupid, to save the lives of a large number of other strangers?”
@Vicki: That reminds me of Saladin Ahmed;s tough choice https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/965658086127144961
“people love to ask the baby Hitler time travel question but the really radical question is what you do if you’re face-to-face with George Washington hunting enslaved human beings who escaped his clutches
(it’s possible I’m writing such a story)”
Happy birthday Cora!
Don’t need a pixelman to know which way the file scrolls.
There is a version of the trolley problem where you are asked to push someone off a bridge to save others on the track. That is essentially the choice in Cold Equations. Thing is, when presented with this problem almost no one says they will push. Logical or not they just can’t do it. In the Cold Equations the pilot pushes without hesitation and this is presented as the normal way of things. That is what makes the story seem strange to me.
@bookworm1398: The pilot does hesitate, but also does push. One wonders how much time in pilot training is given over to the topic.
“If you like my File and you think I’m Pixely, come on baby let me Scroll”
Thanks for the birthday wishes, Charon, Rob, Kevin, Xtifr and anybody I may have forgotten.
Thanks for the title credit, Mike.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS. Happy belated birthday, @Cora Buhlert! 😀 Also happy birthday to Cheryl Morgan
(17) COUNTDOWN. Oh how I hope this is a smooth, amazing success.
Thanks.
@Magewolf: your reply ignores one of the fundamentals of SF: the author gets to build a piece of a universe. Godwin (possibly under Campbell’s urging) chose to build a universe so ethically broken as to produce the choice of the story, and presents that choice as a matter of hard physics rather than bad ethics. Not only is the premise bullpuckey, but he himself tore it apart in “Mother of Invention”, as I pointed out here a few months ago. The claim that those of us who object to the story are bringing in extraneous matters is beyond disingenuous at this point and descends into outright lying.
I think everyone’s forgotten the context in which The Cold Equations were written in–one where girl stowaways on spaceships had become a cliché.
Happy birthday (belated) Cora. Looking forward to nominating “The Cold Crowdfunding” next year.
@Vicki et al —
Catching up on an aging discussion, and I may have confused attributions somewhere along the line —
This should not be a hard choice at all. In fact, I instantly volunteered to do exactly this when my brother was diagnosed with a fatal progressive liver disorder just three years ago. The decision required no thought at all. (Unfortunately, it turned out he was already too ill for the transplant, and I was never even tested for compatibility.)
@Chip
And you are doing it again. How would having the correct “ethics” put more fuel in the rocket after it had launched?
@Magewolf —
Having the correct ethics would have prevented the ship from launching with inadequate fuel in the first place, because any society that valued human life would have planned for contingencies.
@Andrew
Double thanks.
@Contrarius
How much fuel would not be inadequate? Keep in mind all the fuel was siphoned from the main ship so the more contingencies you plan for for the small ship the less you can plan for the large one.
I think the real sticking point with this story is the fact that it shows the universe running on physics not fault or blame. Physics is incapable of caring whether the girl should have been able to be there or if the whole plan and ship was badly designed all that matters is how much fuel was needed for a certain mass to make the rendezvous that kept the planet alive.
Would less people complain if the girl was a savant hacker who managed to stealth her way onto the ship without thinking to check the operational stats of the ship to see that it was going to have to redline everything to just barely get to the planet with a full tank of fuel? She would end up just as dead for the same reasons.
@Magewolf: I think the real sticking point with this story is the fact that it shows the universe running on physics not fault or blame.
No, the real sticking point of the story is that the entire system is so ludicrously designed that shoving stowaways out of the airlocks of rescue ships is such a likely event that the pilots are equipped with weapons to force them out the door – rather than say, placing guards at the entrance to make sure no one sneaks in, or measuring the absolutely crucial parameter of the vessel’s weight before it is launched, or, say, just putting up a sign that says “Board this ship and you die. No exceptions.” No one would ever design a system with zero margin for error. Would you board an airplane that had only just enough fuel to reach its destination with no allowance for bad weather or mechanical problems?
Probably a year or so before I read The Cold Equations, I read a book by Robert Serling (the older brother of Rod**), whose title now escapes me (I no longer have a copy, although I can picture it). It was a history of aviation safety, particularly of the airline industry, which while it may sound like a dry topic was really quite fascinating. The whole point of the book was the quest for increased margins of safety, so that airliners could handle the unexpected. The most memorable incident: early in the deployment of the model, a Boeing 707 was struck by lightning, detonating one of the wing fuel tanks and blowing off about one-third of the wing. The two pilots managed to keep the plane in the air and safely landed it at the nearest airport. The most impressive testimonial they received was a letter from the 707 design engineers at Boeing: they’d done wind-tunnel studies that suggested that the 707 couldn’t stay airborne with that much wing area gone.
How would having the correct “ethics” put more fuel in the rocket after it had launched?
We don’t need to rely on ethics to make sure the amount of fuel on board included a reasonable margin for error, just competent systems engineering.
**Robert Serling also wrote a pretty decent thriller, The President’s Plane is Missing, exactly what it says on the tin.
@Magewolf —
What Phil said.
@Phil —
Dammit, Phil, you keep beating me to the punch!
This. Small modification: No one in a universe with one iota of ethics and/or common sense would ever design a system with zero margin for error.
@Contrarius–
Whether donating part of your liver is a hard choice depends on questions like, what would be the effect on other people if the person facing the decision and their brother both died? You don’t have to be a monster to take a spouse or children into account when deciding whether to risk your own life to possibly save your brother’s.
@Magewolf: the story does not happen in the figurative vacuum that you are trying to impose. When airline travel was uneventful, boarding was easy. When hijackings started to happen, pilots didn’t go armed (and risk hitting the hull and letting the air out); passengers were screened before being allowed on the plane. (Yes, after a time some determined people defeated the screening measures; the dominant answer was still screening.) If the story showed the very first instance of a stowaway, it might not be ethically bankrupt; as people have been pointing for four decades, that is not the case.
A long time ago I had a private pilot’s license with an instrument rating; I haven’t been in charge of plane since before this argument first blew up, but I still read about the field. (The blog Fear of Landing is recommended.) What is notable about almost all of the accident reports is the long chain of errors that led to twisted metal and scattered bodies; you are trying to get us to ignore everything leading up to the final act.