(1) ALT-FACTS. The Hugo Book Club Blog contends “Alternate facts make bad alternate history”.
… Even one of the better Alternate History works written by a very conservative author, Another Girl, Another Planet by Lou Antonelli, only really works when it avoids history altogether. When it is a big outer space adventure, it’s relatively engaging. But the version of history depicted in the novel involves weird depictions of Barack Obama as a feckless Marxist ideologue; not so much a counterfactual as a motivated smear job….
(2) NETFLIX TRAILER. Sweet Tooth is “a post-apocalyptic fairytale about a hybrid deer-boy and a wandering loner who embark on an extraordinary adventure.” All episodes of Sweet Tooth premiere on June 4, only on Netflix.
(3) #FINISHINFINITYTRAIN TRENDING WORLDWIDE. There’s an avalanche of tweets from people calling for a studio to finish the Infinity Train series.
Rose has an entire thread that starts here.
Fan art, too!
(4) THREE’S COMPANY. Kevin Standlee has some extended comments about the new Winnipeg bid and the rules governing whether it should appear on the published site selection ballot in “And Then There Were Three” on his Livejournal.
…Speaking theoretically, there are probably only about six cities in Canada that have the facilities to host a Worldcon. Two of them are in the east (Toronto and Montréal), and they’re both within 800 km of DC, which makes them ineligible to file (even as a write-in bid) under WSFS Constitution Section 4.7. (I’ve not looked at Ottawa or Quebec City’s facilities; if they have enough, then there might be eight potential sites rather than six. Also, any city I name includes anything in that city’s general area.) There’s little point in bidding for a site that’s ineligible in all but the most highly-unlikely scenarios — even more unlikely than the combination of circumstances that crashed the site selection at the 2011 Westercon, because Westercon’s rules are subtly different from Worldcon’s, and anyway, it seems unlikely to me that the existing bids would drive away so many supporters that None of the Above would win.
There are two plausible sites in western Canada (Vancouver and Calgary), but they have a somewhat less obvious political flaw, in that they’re less than 800 km from Seattle, which is bidding for 2025, The 2025 Worldcon will be selected at the 2023 Worldcon. A Worldcon selected for one of those cities would automatically disqualify Seattle’s bid. Bidding is hard enough without borrowing trouble by creating a group (Seattle’s supporters) that automatically would be biased against voting for you.
That leaves only two significant sites: Edmonton and Winnipeg. CanSMOF selected Winnipeg’s proposal, but I’m sure that Edmonton (and Calgary, and Vancouver) would make good places for a Worldcon someday….
(5) ELLISON WONDERLAND. Dread Central eavesdropped on Mick Garris’ podcast and learned “How Clive Barker Found Inspiration in Harlan Ellison’s House”.
…“[Harlan] had such an incredible collection of fantastic paintings,” Barker says on a new episode of Post Mortem with Mick Garris. “They were classics—covers of Weird Tales and all that wonderful ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s stuff.”
Garris recalls his own visit to “Ellison Wonderland” just as fondly. He didn’t, however, get a look inside Ellison’s bomb shelter, as Barker did when he was there. (“I do know that you had to go through a hobbit door to get into it,” Garris says.)
“Behind [the door] was a locked room which he said would survive three atom bombs,” Barker says. “This is all very Harlan, right? Maybe if that’s true, then you’re just saying ‘Hello’ to the cockroaches when you get out! But it was an incredible room, because in there, he had the books that he’d collected over the years that he would want to survive the apocalypse. I don’t have a bomb-proof room, but I’ve got those books, too—the books that I feel bespeak our culture.”
(6) EASY MONTHLY PAYMENTS. Vox’s Terry Nguyen dissects the changing attitude in favor of multiple subscriptions to creators and entertainment streams: “Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+: Why we might never reach subscription fatigue”.
…A self-described avid budgeter, Mason currently spends about $120 per month on 11 subscriptions, from streaming services to Substacks and artist Patreon accounts — up from last year’s average of $94 per month.
Quarantine and the demise of digital media were driving factors in Mason’s decision to support more independent artists and writers. The pandemic is partly responsible for facilitating a subscription boom over the past year, but it’s also contributed to the growth of the creator economy, as more people make things from home. “I’m 32 with no kids, no student loans, and no plans to buy a house again,” Mason, the editorial director for the New York Times’s Games team, said. “I’m very much someone who will pay an artist for a thing that they’ve made.”
The monthly $5, $10, and $15 credit-line charges add up, though. When the subscription business model was pioneered by news publishers in the 17th century, there was little competition. Within the past two decades, all sorts of businesses have begun clamoring for a slice of the subscriber pie, from consumer product startups and retailers like Dollar Shave Club to media organizations and internet personalities.
A few major players have become so integral to people’s buying or streaming patterns, like Netflix or Amazon Prime, that consumers approach them almost as a sort of utility….
(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
- April 29, 2005 –On this day in 2005, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film premiered in the USA after premiering a day earlier in the U.K. it was based loosely off the series by Douglas Adams, and it was directed by Garth Jennings with production by a not insignificant multitude of individuals. The screenplay was credited to Douglas Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick which is a neat trick indeed given that he’d died some years before. It had a rather stellar cast of Martin Freeman, Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Bill Nighy, Alan Rickman, Anna Chancellor and John Malkovich. Critics mostly liked it and it scores an excellent sixty five percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. It did not figure in the Hugo nominations the following year.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
- Born April 29, 1880 – Lillian Jones. Her one novel I know of is the first (1916) Utopia published in America by a black woman. A century later came Karen Kossie-Chernyshev ed., Recovering “Five Generations Hence” (2013) with the text, annotations, and essays. Here is a note from the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. (Died 1965) [JH]
- Born April 29, 1908 — Jack Williamson. I’ll frankly admit that he’s one of those authors that I know I’ve read a fair amount by can’t really recall any specific titles as I didn’t collect him either in hard copy or digitally. A quick bit of research suggests the Legion of Space series was what I liked best when I was reading him. What did y’all like by him? (Died 2006.) (CE)
- Born April 29, 1919 – Elmer Perdue. One story in Stirring. Founding member of the N3F (Nat’l Fantasy Fan Fed’n). Long before aluminum cans and even Country Club malt liquor – ahem – he could crush a tomato-juice can in one hand. Active in FAPA (Fantasy Amateur Press Ass’n). Fan Guest of Honor at Quakecon. More here. (Died 1989) [JH]
- Born April 29, 1924 – Paul S. Newman. A novel and a shorter story; beyond that, or besides, or something, Guinness World Record for most prolific comic-book writer: 4,100 stories, 36,000 pages. Comic-book version of Yellow Submarine. Tom Corbett, Space cadet. (Died 1999) [JH]
- Born April 29, 1943 — Russell M. Griffin. Author of but four novels as he died far too young of a heart attack. The Makeshift God, his first novel, I remember that novel as being a rather decent dystopian affair, and Century’s End was even bleaker. He wrote but nine stories. He alas has not made it into the digital realm yet. (Died 1986.) (CE)
- Born April 29, 1946 — Humphrey Carpenter. Biographer whose notable output includes J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography; he also did the editing of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, and is responsible for The Inklings: CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams and their Friends. He also wrote the engaging Mr. Majeika children’s series which is most decidedly genre. (Died 2005.) (CE)
- Born April 29, 1955 — Kate Mulgrew, 66. Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager and she’ll be voicing that role again on the animated Star Trek: Prodigy. Other genre roles include voicing Red Claw on Batman: The Animated Series, the recurring role of Jane Lattimer on Warehouse 13 and Clytemnestra in Iphigenia 2.0 at the Signature Theatre Company. Finally she voiced Titania in a recurring role on Gargoyles. (CE)
- Born April 29, 1956 – Alexander Jablokov, age 65. Six novels, four dozen shorter stories. Contributor to NY Review of SF. John Clute says AJ’s first novel has darkly suave competence, the most recent is exuberantly gonzo. AJ innocently says “In my work, I like good prose, interesting details, and as much humor as I can comfortably fit in.” [JH]
- Born April 29, 1960 — Robert J. Sawyer, 61. Hominids which is quite excellent won the Hugo for Best Novel at Torcon 3, and The Terminal Experiment won a Nebula as well. Completing a hat trick, he won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Mindscan too. Very impressive. And then there’s the FlashForward series which lasted for thirteen episodes that was based on his novel of that name. Interesting series that ended far too soon. (CE)
- Born April 29, 1969 – Julia Knight, age 52. Eight novels, a couple of shorter stories. Has read The Great Gatsby, Gone with the Wind, Tales of the Dying Earth. “When not writing [likes] motorbikes, watching wrestling or rugby…. incapable of being serious for more than five min –” oops. [JH]
- Born April 29, 1970 — Uma Thurman, 51. Venus / Rose in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Kage’s favorite film alongside Time Bandits), Maid Marian in the Robin Hood film that starred Patrick Bergin which I highly recommend, Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin. (CE)
- Born April 29, 1976 – Micol Ostrow, age 45. Five novels, one shorter story for us, also a book (with Steven Brezenoff) classified as nonfiction being The Quotable Slayer i.e. Buffy. Fifty books all told. Earlier, ten years a children’s-book editor. “I live and work in Brooklyn, NY, alongside my Emmy Award – winning husband and our two daughters. It’s pretty much the best.” [JH]
(9) VISIT TO THE COMIC SHOP. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Marvel (and, I presume, DC) are seriously younger-izing some of their characters/stories… I took a pic of the back of the book, because IMHO it’s funnier in context of other titles.
(10) FANTASTIC COLORS. WIRED explains “How Pixar Uses Hyper-Colors to Hack Your Brain”: “But at Pixar the virtual cameras can see an infinitude of light and color.”
… In a way, every filmmaker is really just playing with moving light and color on surfaces. That’s the whole ball game, a filmic given. But Pixar takes it further, or perhaps just does it more self-consciously and systematically. Its emotionally weighty, computer-generated animated films deploy precisely calibrated color and light to convey narrative and emotion—from the near-total absence of green in WALL-E (until postapocalyptic robots find the last plant on Earth) to the luminous orange marigolds that symbolize Miguel’s trip to the magical Land of the Dead in Coco through the contrast between the cool blue luminosity of the afterlife with the warm, snuggly sepia of New York City in last year’s Soul.
In fact, almost every Pixar movie works within a specific color palette, a story-specific gamut that filmmakers like Feinberg pull from and use to plan the look of each scene, a road map known as the color script. But Coco complicated that process. When its story moves to the Land of the Dead, it cranks up all the dials, colorwise. Those scenes look made out of neon, like a bio-organic version of Tokyo’s Shinjuku District at night. “When it came time to do the color script, it was like, ‘The Land of the Dead has every color. All of it takes place at night, so we can’t use time of day to elicit emotion. There is no weather in the Land of the Dead, so we can’t use weather to elicit emotion.’ Those are three pretty typical things we use to support the story,” Feinberg says….
(11) OCTOTHORPE. In Episode 30 of the Octothorpe podcast “Try to Always Use Chaps in a Gender-Neutral Way”, “John Coxon can’t make a poll, Alison Scott knows the religious forms, and Liz Batty has one more games thing (sorry). We chat about Swancon, DisCon III, FIYAHCON and the Hugo Awards.”
(12) GOOD CAT. “Kid’s Science Fair Project Answers the Eternal Question: ‘Do Cat Butts Really Touch All the Surfaces in Your Home?’” at Popsugar. Highly scientific answer at the link.
…For his homeschool science fair project, Kaeden [Griffin] tackled one of the most perplexing questions stumping pet owners: “Does your cat’s butthole really touch all the surfaces in your home?”
Kaeden, like many others out there, assumed that if his cat sits on a surface, then their “butthole will also touch said surface,” and to test his hypothesis, he and his mom, Kerry, applied nontoxic lipstick (bright red lipstick, in fact!) to the buttholes of their two well-behaved cats. The cats were then given a series of commands — including sit, wait, lie down, and jump up — and were compensated with praise and treats. The lipstick was removed with a baby wipe once they collected the necessary data, which took place in less than 10 minutes….
(13) BAD DOG. Or so the narrative goes. “The NYPD is sending its controversial robot dog back to the pound” – The Verge has the story.
The New York Police Department has canceled its trial of a robot dog made by US firm Boston Dynamics after receiving fierce criticism regarding the “dystopian” technology.
“The contract has been terminated and the dog will be returned,” a spokesperson for the NYPD told the New York Post. John Miller, the department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, told The New York Times that the machine was “a casualty of politics, bad information and cheap sound bytes.” Said Miller: “People had figured out the catchphrases and the language to somehow make this evil.”
The NYPD began leasing the machine nicknamed Digidog last year. “This dog is going to save lives, protect people, and protect officers and that’s our goal,” said the NYPD’s Frank Digiacomo in an interview with ABC7. The robot was deployed roughly half a dozen times during its tenure, mostly acting as a mobile camera in potentially hostile environments…
(14) SPACE AS SEEN FROM THE BOTTOM OF A LAKE. A high-tech project is“Hunting ghost particles beneath the world’s deepest lake” says DT Next.
A neutrino-spotting telescope beneath the frozen Lake Baikal in Russia is close to delivering scientific results after four decades of setbacks. A glass orb, the size of a beach ball, plops into a hole in the ice and descends on a metal cable toward the bottom of the world’s deepest lake.
Then another, and another. These light-detecting orbs come to rest suspended in the pitch-dark depths down as far as 4,000 feet below the surface. The cable carrying them holds 36 such orbs, spaced 50 feet apart. There are 64 such cables, held in place by anchors and buoys, two miles off the southern coast of this lake in Siberia with a bottom that is more than a mile down.
This is a telescope, the largest of its kind in the Northern Hemisphere, built to explore black holes, distant galaxies and the remnants of exploded stars. It does so by searching for neutrinos, cosmic particles so tiny that many trillions pass through each of us every second. If only we could learn to read the messages they bear, scientists believe, we could chart the universe, and its history, in ways we cannot yet fully fathom.
“You should never miss the chance to ask nature any question,” said Grigori V. Domogatski, 80, a Russian physicist who has led the quest to build this underwater telescope for 40 years. After a pause, he added: “You never know what answer you will get.” It is still under construction, but the telescope that Dr. Domogatski and other scientists have long dreamed of is closer than ever to delivering results. This hunt for neutrinos from the far reaches of the cosmos, spanning eras in geopolitics and in astrophysics, sheds light on how Russia has managed to preserve some of the scientific prowess that characterised the Soviet Union.
The Lake Baikal venture is not the only effort to hunt for neutrinos in the world’s most remote places. Dozens of instruments seek the particles in specialised laboratories all over the planet. But the new Russian project will be an important complement to the work of IceCube, the world’s largest neutrino telescope, an American-led, $279 million project that encompasses about a quarter of a cubic mile of ice in Antarctica….
(15) THE GOTHA OF DELIVERY DRONES. In the Washington Post, Dalvin Brown reports on a new drone by the German company Wingcopter that can deliver three packages on one flight whereas existing delivery drones can only deliver one package at a time. “Wingcopter is mass producing ‘triple-drop’ drones to deliver more packages, faster”.
… “Today, in order to deploy three packages at one time, companies would have to buy or lease three drones,” Plümmer said. “Price-wise, you’re not going to want to have three of them when you can have one. And no one wants thousands of drones flying above their heads.”
The start-up’s new device is central to its broader vision of providing drones to firms seeking ways to distribute hot meals, groceries, medical supplies or other lightweight goods. It was created to “power logistical highways in the sky,” Plümmer said.
The company says the eight-rotor air vehicle is capable of level-four autonomy, which means it is mostly autonomous but requires a human for some tasks.
It has a 5.8-foot wingspan and measures under 4.5 feet from nose to tail….
(16) AVOIDING THE END. The original attempt to stop global warming! “Did Vikings Host Ragnarök Rituals at Surtshellir?” in Smithsonian Magazine.
…The team’s findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, show that the eruption that formed the cave, known as Surtshellir, occurred in the late ninth century A.D., soon after the first Viking settlement of Iceland.
Per the paper, this incident was probably the first major volcanic eruption witnessed by people in northern Europe since the end of the last Ice Age more than 10,000 years prior. The explosion covered about 90 square miles of fertile land in volcanic rock.
“[T]he impacts of this eruption must have been unsettling, posing existential challenges for Iceland’s newly arrived settlers,” write the authors in the study.
According to Owen Jarus of Live Science, the Vikings entered the newly formed cave soon after the lava cooled. They constructed the boat structure, placing ritual offerings inside and burning the bones of animals, including sheep, goats, cattle, horses and pigs. Historical records show that the Vikings associated the cave with Surtr, a giant responsible for battling the gods during Ragnarök and bringing about the end of the world in Norse mythology….
(17) BOOK TRAILER. An appetizer to get you interested in Einstein – The Fantastic Journey of a Mouse Through Time and Space by Torben Kuhlmann. More about the book as well as a sneak peek here.
Time is relative! Award-winning, illustrator Torben Kuhlmann’s brilliant new book bends time and imagination! When an inventive mouse misses the biggest cheese festival the world has ever seen, he’s determined to turn back the clock. But what is time, and can it be influenced? With the help of a mouse clockmaker, a lot of inventiveness, and the notes of a certain famous Swiss physicist he succeeds in traveling back in time. But when he misses his goal by eighty years, the only one who can help is an employee of the Swiss Patent Office, who turned our concept of space and time upside down….
Suppose Albert Einstein’s famous theories first came into being through an encounter with a little mouse.
[Thanks to Rob Thornton, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, N., Hampus Eckerman, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, James Davis Nicoll, Olav Rokne, Michael Toman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
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First!
I’m enjoying Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers quite a bit. It doesn’t feel dated at all in the way that a lot of Eighties cyberpunk does.
Don’t let me discourage you from leaving a comment.
8) Well I haven’t read a lot of Jack Williamson, but his Humanoids novels still stick in my mind even though I read them in high school. They made me seriously think about the future of us as humans.
P.S. +1 to Vacuum Flowers as well.
4) The Western Canadian locations are a little more complex.
Calgary is further from Seattle than you would expect. It’s more like a 1,150 KM drive, and it takes 13 hours. It’s about as easy to drive from Calgary to Winnipeg as it is to drive from Calgary to Seattle. The city definitely has the facilities (Lived there ~20 years and have run large-scale events there in the past), and those facilities are all right on the light rail public transit. Also, good access via air travel, since it’s a flight hub.
Edmonton also has the facilities, but even though I live here, I would hesitate to suggest it as a Worldcon host, mostly because the airport has so few international flights. A vast majority of Worldcon folk would end up having to take multiple legs to get here.
Ottawa could definitely host a Worldcon. But my experiences in that city have been almost universally negative, so I’d likely recommend against it.
8) Highlights from Jack Williamson’s long career, for me, include sinister robotic nannying in The Humanoids, ingenious paradoxes in The Legion of Time, and of course the resurgence of ancient lycanthropes in Darker Than You Think. But there’s a lot of other stuff to choose from.
Vacuum Flowers Iread when it was serialized in Asimov’s, I think. I should reread it sometime.
(8) another vote for The Humanoids stories.
Birthday boy, Irvin Kershner also had reason to honor today. Director of a very popular genre movie, The Empire Strikes Back.
(6) EASY MONTHLY PAYMENTS.
Some of my subscriptions include to the newsletters of Elizabeth Bear and Aliette De Bodard. I’m likely to add several more when I find ones that I’m interested in supporting. Yes that’s a hint to suggest writers that I might support.
8) My understanding that Mulgrew was going to voice, not Janeway herself, but rather a holographic character based on Janeway.
@Cat: Yes, “Vacuum Flowers” is still a good book. I read it serialized, and then the SFBC copy is still kicking around here. Going the way it did, it was both WTF in a delightful way in the 80s, and saved itself from dating like so many books its age. I re-read it periodically. Glad to see so many Filers agree.
@Steve Wright: Those are all great stories. I voted for “Darker Than You Think” for a Retro-Hugo. It is genuinely creepy without the gore so much horror insists upon. And “The Legion of Time” is pulpy fun.
David Shallcross says My understanding that Mulgrew was going to voice, not Janeway herself, but rather a holographic character based on Janeway.
Huh. One second… yep, you’re right. She’s the Ship Emergency Hologram based off Captain Kathryn Janeway. I really want to see the premise they use to explain that character. I’m looking forward to this series as it has a lot of potential.
lurkertype says Yes, “Vacuum Flowers” is still a good book. I read it serialized, and then the SFBC copy is still kicking around here. Going the way it did, it was both WTF in a delightful way in the 80s, and saved itself from dating like so many books its age. I re-read it periodically. Glad to see so many Filers agree.
It’s hard to write a near future book whose technology does seem dated forty years on. Vacuum Flowers neatly avoids doings so as does another favorite of mine, Sterling’s Islands in The Net.
No comments to make, because I’m dizzy and going to lie down.
At for a potential German Worldcon, the problem is not so much the facilities, because many cities have convention centers of sufficient size to host a Worldcon. Even fairly small Oldenburg has a convention and events centre with a capacity to handle 16000 people, if every part of it is in use, i.e. more than enough for any Worldcon. Not that there will ever be a Worldcon bid for Oldenburg, simply because the city only has a tiny local airport (you can fly to the East Frisian islands and that’s it) nor does it have the hotel capacities to handle a Worldcon.
However, the real problem are the airports, because a lot of cities either have no airport at all or an airport without overseas connections. So that leaves only a handful of possible locations.
OlavRokne on April 29, 2021 at 5:47 pm said:
Sure, but the only objective distance is straight-line, as “driving distance” isn’t objective, and it’s about 700 km between the Calgary Convention Centre and the Washington State Convention Center.
I liked the look of Calgary when I helped run Westercon 58 (“Due North”) there in 2005.
Edmonton and Winnipeg look to me to be similar to past Worldcon hosts Spokane and Reno in terms of their flight connections. Memphis used to be a passenger hub, but is no longer, as Delta “de-hubbed” it after it merged Northwest Airlines.
I wanted to go to that, but was living just shy of the 60th parallel at the time …
(1) ALT-FACTS.
This is a really well-written piece. Stories written from a starting point other than the real world aren’t Alt-History, they’re Fantasy.
JJ says This is a really well-written piece. Stories written from a starting point other than the real world aren’t Alt-History, they’re Fantasy.
I’m very fond of S.M. Stirling’s The Peshawar Lancers which is does an interesting riff off established British Indian Imperial history. I finally got to hear it as an audio work which was quite interesting.
(12) GOOD CAT. The cats were then given a series of commands — including sit, wait, lie down, and jump up
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA
1) I’ve never cared for alt history because I always have disagreements with the author about what the results of various changes would be. The strange thing is I don’t have that reaction in science fiction, you want to say that Earth will never surrender to the alien invasion or that they soon come to accept and work with the aliens -either outcome is fine with me. But with real history it’s different, I can’t suspend disbelief so easily and keep thinking the book is missing half the story and wrong about how the people it’s talking about would work.
1) Fun fact that might not be known to people who have not spent time as children’s librarians: Rush Limbaugh wrote a couple of children’s books. (I have not read them. I just know they exist. My first library job was in a place where they were rather popular.)
Incidentally, while we’re on this subject, reading very old non-alternate histories can also be a bit painful in their patriotism. I have a copy of Stratemeyer’s The Minute Boys of Lexington, one of the few books he wrote under his own name rather than through the syndicate. While I have a copy of the sequel, The Minute Boys of Bunker Hill, I found the first one so painful I have not read it.
6) I have never understood the subscription model. I’ll watch streaming shows when I have access to them– Peacock finally works with Linux now so I can binge Criminal Intent– but my endgame is to get all the shows I actually care about on DVD. (Admittedly this is going to be a bit harder with Disney. As a librarian I have issues with streaming because a lot of things aren’t coming out on DVD at all and this impedes our ability to provide it to people who can’t afford all this streaming.) I don’t get “let’s subscribe to a box and pay money to get stuff we didn’t even pick out shipped to us.” Unless it’s library books. I would totally sign up for one of those libraries doing book boxes.
2) Saw mention of something called “Sweet Tooth” coming to Netflix, and wondered if it might be based on the comic. “Nah,” I thought, “That’s too obscure a property. It must just be something with the same title.” (I looked at part of the first issue when it came out, but decided it wasn’t my cup of tea. Apparently there were people with a much more favorable reaction. Favorable enough to pitch and sell a series to Netflix.)
6) Besides the basic cable package for the TV, I subscribe to Netflix (both streaming and 2-at-a-time DVDs) and HBO (which includes HBO Max from my cable provider). Tempted to try juggling free trial periods for other streaming services, but experience with book clubs and such says I’d probably end up paying at least one month’s fees before remembering to cancel a service. I support various artists and publications on Patreon to the tune of a bit more than $30/mo, varying from $1 to $5 each. Magazine subs (print) run about $200/yr. (Yikes! All this adds up!)
10) Watched OVER THE MOON recently. Lots (LOTS) of day-glo colors used in the movie, especially once the Moon is reached. Felt oversaturated to me, and felt an urge to don sunglasses a few times. Otherwise I thought the film highly enjoyable.
Has anyone else seen the French CGI-animated teen-age superheroes show MIRACULOUS: TALES OF LADYBUG AND CAT NOIR? Impulse-caught via Netflix. Definitely aimed at young teens (or a bit younger, even), but catchy and charming. With five seasons and a movie next year, kinda surprised hadn’t come across mention of it until recently. There’s a LOT of fanart of the characters online, once I looked for it.
13) I realize this is just me, but I am so, so conflicted right now. Like. I appreciate there are ethical issues, particularly with the expansion of autonomous technologies used in policing? But at the same time, I would really love every police officer on the face of the earth to be trailed 24/7 by a camera drone monitoring their usage of violence in the name of protecting the law and putting every act of violence to public scrutiny. You can switch off a body camera, but switching off a drone’s camera is like taking the engine out of a car. There is no form of negligence that could make it happen.
1) I think alt-history and “patriotic history” are often more closely allied than the article suggests. It seems to me that a lot of alt-hist is based on the easy stories we get in school rather than the uncertain complexities of actual history, and I think that’s part of the attraction. So we have endless repeats of the famous battles of the American Civil War, or cuddly versions of the British Empire, or stories that don’t repeat history but take care tonsort the historical figures into white hats and black hats and make it clear which is which.
All of which is to say, I guess, that history is inherently political, and fictions of history even more so, by their nature.
@Cora
Yep I would guess somewhere in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region would be the best bet for a German Worldcon. Multiple international airports and good rail links to countries to the west. I would certainly support such a bid (well I would support any German bid).
1) I am a bit torn because I kind of like the plot, let’s chance history, chaos ensures.
I think masives chances can work. Wildcards, Watchmen is for me an example. (not that there aren’t shots at politics)
Other works that didn’t start that can be because of timechances, defined now as alternative history (Even if it is here mostly used to feed a shogoth Perry Rhodan is my example, starting with a moonlanding in 1971, was when it was written in 1961 not that strange)
I think were it doesn’t work is wishfulfilment and it should stay in reality.
Re German worldconbid:
Munich and Berlin (I know not Coras favorites) could also work. Okay Rhein-Ruhr would be practically for me to combine it, with visiting family.
10) I work on Pixar’s renderer (PhotoRealistic RenderMan), particularly on the components that deal with computing illumination on surfaces (as well as within smoke, clouds etc). One of the problems we have to solve is that a scene may contain many lights and we don’t have the compute time to calculate the illumination from all of them falling on a particular point on a surface – a calculation that we need to perform for every point visible to the camera, as well as for all points which are visible via reflection/refraction to those points (and so on recursively). The computation involves both a combination of the surface’s response to the light and a test to see whether the light is indeed visible to the point, since it may be shadowed/occluded by other geometry in the scene, and this last part is particularly compute-intensive.
To mitigate this we have some code that makes a rapid estimate of each light’s potential contribution and then we select what we deem the most important subset among them to perform the more expensive computation.
This was all working quite well until we started seeing scenes from Coco production containing hundreds of thousands and even millions of light sources. Long story short: I had to rewrite the selection algorithm so we could get the shots rendered in a decent amount of time. That was a fun show to work on!
“Other genre roles include… Clytemnestra in Iphigenia 2.0 at the Signature Theatre Company”
Kate Mulgrew won an Obie Award for this work! The 2007 show updated the Greek myth for modern America, a way to talk about Iraq & about the celebrity of the wealthy (e.g. Paris Hilton). The show wasn’t actually genre, more genre-adjacent, but it was wild & spirited. US soldiers do a striptease to LL Cool J, and Clytemnestra tries to seduce her daughter’s groom. Mulgrew looked like she was having fun, and earned her award with a strong, layered performance.
Re: Conceivable German Worldcons, Munich definitely. Second-largest airport hub in the country, and connections more or less everywhere. Mountains just an hour away.
Berlin not so much. The outcome of the Second World War rendered Berlin an airport backwater, a situation that continues to this day and got worse after the collapse of Air Berlin in 2017. Intercontinental flights will almost all require an additional leg to get from the airline’s European hub to Berlin. (Arguing against interest here, as I currently live in Berlin.)
Bruce Arthurs asked “Has anyone else seen the French CGI-animated teen-age superheroes show MIRACULOUS: TALES OF LADYBUG AND CAT NOIR?”
It’s been running on the Disney cable channel for some time and I’ve seen the dvds for it at Target.
Kit Harding: I was just cataloging some of the later Minute Boys books earlier this month. James Otis wrote many books in the series after Edward Stratemeyer left off. Otis also published many more books relating American history events, even those of recent vintage, as boys’ adventures,e. (Some of his Boy Spies books featuring boys in the Spanish American War, were published the same year as the war.) You can find lots of his books online, since they’re all in the public domain now.
From a quick look at some of the books as I was cataloging, they stick quite close to the common tropes of many early boys adventures and other pulp fiction: The protagonists are heroes fighting for the unambiguously Good Guys against the unambiguously Bad Guys, sometimes with Lesser Peoples taking roles of helpers to the heroes, minions of the villains, or objects of rescue.
The books, and the success I presume they had (given that so many titles were published) do reflect that American history was largely taught that way at the time. I found it interesting that, while Otis’s books cover a lot of American conflicts (not just the Revolution and the Spanish American War, but also the War of 1812 and various French and Indian conflicts), none of his books that I’ve found center on the American Civil War.
It’s a conspicuous absence, given the sheer volume Otis published (not to mention his own experience as a young writer reporting on the war). And it reflects, I think, that the formula he usually used for the books, where one side is definitely the Good Guys and the other side the Bad Guys, would have been too controversial for his publishers at the time he was writing. (Nowadays, it’d be an easier sell, but the Lost Cause was heavily promoted in the South at the time, and groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy were quite influential in condemning literature they thought treated Southern whites “unfairly”.)
(9) Super’d kids books… rather than simply adding Marvel alongside existing classics, I wonder if somebody’s ready to go the next step, e.g., “The Pokey ‘Portin’ Little Puppy” — starring, of course, Lockjaw’s offspring Puppy, adopted by Franklin Richards. (IIRC, there was also a story arc involving a whole litter of little Lockjaws, but I’m not easily finding that.) ‘Nuff barked!
@StefanB And there’s a lot of science fiction that takes the continuation of the Soviet Union by that name, and usually the Cold War, into the 21st century for granted.
(7) The main thing I remember about the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie was finding it unimpressive and the date who took me even less impressive.
Alt facts can work in alt history. I believe Ken Macleod’s The Human Front employs a fictional jonbar to great effect. I should reread that. I remember loving it.
I suppose it depends on whether the alt the writer utilises is odious to the reader or not.
Meredith moment: Jane Yolen’s matriarchal series The Great Alta Saga is available from the usual suspects for a very reasonable three dollars and ninety nine cents.
Hey, thanks for the tip on the Yolen!
I hope jablokov ebooks the backlist. My favorite story is Many mansions, favorite novel… Deepdrive.
I recommend Feeley’s Oxygen Barons and Harris’ Shadows of the White Sun for those who enjoyed Vacuum Flowers. I read them one after another back in the day, so they all seem to complement each other in my mind.
Brown Robin says Hey, thanks for the tip on the Yolen!
My pleasure. For services rendered to the author in the firm of finding of a fairy tale collection she wanted, The One-Armed Queen, the concluding novel, has a character named Cat Eldridge who is a ethnomusicologist.
Speaking of Alt-History: Accoridng to the quite popular Shadowrun Roleplaying Books, Today (30. april 2021) is the date when magic reappears and half of the population transform into Orcs, Dwars, Trolls or Elves
So if you are feeling a bit weird today…
@Cat Hurrah for Tuckerization!
@Bruce Arthurs — I didn’t buy Sweet Tooth in the original comics, but I bought the first trade and really liked it. I don’t remember if I liked it from the start or grew into it, but I liked it enough to continue all the way through with great pleasure. I’m looking forward to seeing if I like the show, too.
Speaking of cats and commands: Miriam Lloyd, who was mentioned on the birthday list here a few days ago, used to brag of her ability to hypnotize cats. She would hold the cat on her lap, and stroke it while staring deeply into its eyes. Then she’d say, “do what you want!” and let it go.
Worked every time!
(1) The claim that Card’s Pastwatch says Columbus “wasn’t that bad a guy (despite all the genocide)” is kind of a pet peeve for me. I have no love for Card’s politics or his religious views, but that doesn’t mean everything he writes is in keeping with what a standard right-wing ideologue would believe, and as flawed a book as Pastwatch is in many ways it is pretty obviously not about Columbus being a good guy or the genocide being not that big a deal. The character as written is a zealot whose actions are as brutal as they were in reality; the whole point of the plot is that extraordinary action is required in order for there to be the slightest chance at any meaningful change in this guy, and that the goal isn’t to soothe his conscience but to undo the horrible damage he caused. It’s “the redemption”, not “the exoneration”. If the critic simply doesn’t believe in the possibility of redemption or in real change for bad people then that’s their right, but the book’s point of view is what it is.
Potential locations for a German Worldcon would be Hamburg, the Rhein-Ruhr area, Berlin (BER is actually open now, though operating at limited capacity due to covid), Frankfurt and Munich, which have both the facilities and the airports and also touristy appeal. Stuttgart certainly has the facilities and a fairly big airport, but they only have a single overseas connection to Atlanta.
Hannover and Leipzig have both extensive facilities (both routinely handle Dragon Con or SDCC sized events and Leipzig has a con and literary event tradition as well) and airports big enough for overseas connections, but in practice their airports have been reduced to holiday travel hubs, so they’re out. Leipzig also has a far right (and far left, though they’re less likely to harrass Worldcon visitors) problem. Besides, the Avengers trashed Halle-Leipzig Airport in Captain America: Civil War.
Heidelberg, location of the 1970 Worldcon, has convention facilities, but it doesn’t have an airport. I also have no idea why Heidelberg was chosen as the location for the 1970 Worldcon and neither does anybody else. Most likely, it has to do with the to me inexplicable fascination Americans have with Heidelberg. Yes, Heidelberg is pretty, but there are lots of other German cities which are just as pretty, but much less popular.
@Cora
It sounds like a great opportunity to get Americans to learn about passenger rail in countries that have it.
@Cora: Back when I was in high school (the 1980s) studying German, we heard a lot about Heidelberg (“alt Heidelberg, du feine, du Stadt an Ehren reich”), and in American media, the cool fencing scars come from there too.
I have a younger cousin teaching English to refugees in Heidelberg.
We successfully taught our cats “sit” and “wait” in order to keep them out from under our feet while we prepared their meals. The twining around the ankles thing was getting really old, so we’d tell them “Go wait for dinner” (go to the hearth where your food will be delivered) and “sit down” (no translation needed). If they left their post, dinner production would pause until they went to “wait” and “sit” again. It was a trial for both them and us, but they did eventually get the message, enough for it to be a reliable party trick to wow visiting friends with.
This saved my bacon one day when, after a vet visit, on the way up from the car toward the house, Null squirmed out of my control (more fool me for thinking all I needed was an over-the-shoulder canvas sack and not a pet carrier) and raced off down the block. I raced after him, and yelled “Sit!” And he sat. Just for a moment, mind you, more or less on automatic, you could almost see him thinking “Wait, what am I DOING?!” even as he did it–but long enough for me to catch up with him and grab him.
“Jump up” was a lot easier. They were going to jump up on the sofa anyway, so we’d say it while they were doing it. Eventually they came to understand it as an invitation. We have begun teaching “jump up” to the bunny, who knows that after he jumps onto the sofa or the bed at our behest, he’s probably getting a few small treats.
@P.J. Evans
The German passenger rail system is indeed very good, however, it’s not all that easy to navigate if a) you’re not used to passenger rail and how it works and b) the entire system is in a foreign language.
That’s very cool that your cousin is teaching English to refugees in Heidelberg BTW. From 2015 to 2017, I taught German to refugees, which was very rewarding.
@Andrew (not Werdna)
The fencing scars can be found in any city with an old and long established university, i.e. you can also find them in Göttingen, Tübingen, Greifswald, etc… There still are fencing fraternities at these old universities, though they no longer deliberately scar each other in modern times.