Pixel Scroll 4/4/16 Do Not Scroll Gentle Into That Vile Hive

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(1) HEAD OF THE CLASS. From Variety: “’Doctor Who’ Spinoff ‘Class’ Taps Katherine Kelly to Lead Ensemble Cast”.

“Happy Valley” alum Katherine Kelly has been tapped to lead an ensemble of newcomers in the “Doctor Who” spinoff “Class.”

Kelly will play a teacher at Coal Hill School, an institution that has been part of the “Doctor Who” universe since its inception in 1963. Students will be played by newbies Greg Austin, Fady Elsayed, Sophie Hopkins and Vivian Oparah.

Filming on “Class” begins this week. There’s no word yet on a target premiere date for the BBC Three/BBC America series created by Patrick Ness. “Doctor Who” and “Class” exec producer Steven Moffat likened the series to a British version of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

(2) ROLL CALL. Sci-Fi Storm completes the roster – “BBC announces the Class of Class”.

Joining Kelly as students at the school are Greg Austin (Mr. Selfridge), Fady Elsayed (My Brother the Devil), Sophie Hopkins (The Meeting Place) and newcomer Vivian Oparah.

With the focus on the young adult audience, each of the students is described as having “hidden secrets and desires. They are facing their own worst fears, navigating a life of friends, parents, school work, sex, sorrow — and possibly the end of existence.”

(3) TWO MINUTE WARNING. Tickets for next year’s Gallifrey One, the Doctor Who-themed convention in LA, go on sale April 16.

As we prepare for Gallifrey One 2017 ticket sales to start, please remember: tickets to Gallifrey One 2016 sold out in less than two minutes. We mention this because we want to emphasize very strongly that you should be prepared to be ready to purchase your tickets shortly before the time announced above….

2017 Ticket Prices

Prices for tickets to our 2017 Gallifrey One convention are as follows:

$95.00 Adult Full Weekend

$50.00 Teen Full Weekend (Ages 12-16)

$20.00 Child Full Weekend (Ages 3-11)

…Please note that we have elected to discontinue single-day tickets for 2017 in order to adequately support our entire attendee base with a complete weekend full of programming. All tickets will allow entry into the 2017 convention at any time throughout the weekend, and attendee badges can be picked up from Thursday afternoon through Sunday morning.

(4) SATURDAY NIGHT’S ALL RIGHT FOR FIGHTIN’. Wall Street Journal’s “Speakeasy” blog covers Peter Dinklage’s appearance on Saturday Night Live.

There was the expected “GoT” parody (video above), which had Dinklage hosting an “HBO First Look” special on the upcoming sixth season. The gag here – other than Kate McKinnon‘s serviceable impression of Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) – was that there was a quite a bit of truth to Daenerys’s dragons being the show’s scene-stealers. As it turns out, the dragons’ camera-hogging is the result of Bobby Moynihan‘s obnoxious motion-capture actor.

Moynihan also showed up as the brains behind “GoT” – author George R.R. Martin – during Dinklage’s monologue.

NBC has video clips from the episode, including the Game of Thrones sneak peek.

(5) DRAFTING. Rachel Swirsky explores “The difference between draft 1 and draft 12ish of ‘Love Is Never Still’” with sample text and numerous bullet point comments.

I thought it might be interesting to look at a passage from my most recent story, “Love Is Never Still,” as it existed in the first and last drafts. By the time I actually publish a story, I’ve often forgotten what the first draft looked like exactly.

(6) RECOMMENDATION. Mark-kitteh wanted to point out Becky Chambers’ 2014 short story “Chrysalis” at Pornokitsch.  Make it so!

(7) PRE-TRIP REPORT. John Scalzi tells Whatever readers “What I’m Doing in Los Angeles Next Weekend”. He’s coming to LA for the LA Times’ Festival of Books, with other appearances on his schedule — one of the more out-of-the-ordinary is:

7 PM, Nerdmelt Showroom, 7522 Sunset Ave, Los Angeles: I’m one of the featured performers at The Objectively Hottest Authors On Earth LIVE!, which is being presented in association with the Festival of Books. During the show, hosted by artist and comedian Sara Benincasa, I, Maris Kreizman, Cecil Castellucci and Isaac Fitzgerald will be saying and/or doing funny things, and being interviewed by Sara. It’s going to be fantastic. Tickets are $8 in advance and $10 at the door, and if you want to show up, don’t wait — the room is, uh, not huge, as I understand it. I can’t say what anyone else has planned but I will be reading an recently-written funny piece that hasn’t been published anywhere yet (although I’ve read it in a couple of places and it killed), so the only place you’ll be able to enjoy it is live, and the only place I’m planning to read it live in the foreseeable future is here, at the Nerdmelt Showroom.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • April 4, 1930 — American Rocket Society founded
  • April 4, 1975 — Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
  • April 4, 1983 — The space shuttle Challenger lifted off on its inaugural mission.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • April 4, 1965 – Robert Downey Jr.

(10) THE MARGIN IS THE CUTTING EDGE. That seems to be Noah Berlatsky’s bottom line in his post, “Why Cutting-Edge Sci-Fi Is Often Penned By Marginalized Writers” at The Establishment. I wish he hadn’t spent half his wordage attacking somebody else’s paradigm, and just kept strengthening his case with more of the kind of enlightening analysis he provided about Delany and Le Guin.

“Great science fiction explores the philosophical possibilities of science’s impact on reality,” sci-fi writer James Wallace Harris declares at SF Signal. You take real science, you add brilliant philosophy, and you’ve got sci-fi. Right?

Actually, no. Harris’ article has been widely pilloried on social media because, in his tour of “cutting-edge science fiction,” he managed to make a list without citing a single piece of work by a woman or person of color. But what’s been less discussed is that his omissions are tied closely to the fact that his definition of cutting-edge science fiction is ludicrously limited.

(11) POC TOC. People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction, funded by a Kickstarter appeal, will be another special issue of Lightspeed, guest-edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Kristine Ong Muslim, in partnership with section editors Nisi Shawl, Berit Ellingsen, Grace Dillon, and Sunil Patel, who are assembling a lineup of fiction, essays, and nonfiction from people of color.

The list of original short stories and flash fiction has been announced in the latest backer project update.

Original Short Stories/Novelettes (edited by Nalo Hopkinson & Kristine Ong Muslim)

  • A Good Home — Karin Lowachee
  • Firebird — Isha Karki
  • Fifty Shades of Grays — Steven Barnes
  • Depot 256 — Lisa Allen-Agostini
  • Digital Medicine — Brian K. Hudson
  • The Red Thread — Sofia Samatar
  • Salto Mortal — Nick T. Chan
  • Omoshango — Dayo Ntwari
  • Wilson’s Singularity — Terence Taylor
  • As Long As It Takes to Make the World — Gabriela Santiago

Original Flash Fiction (edited by Berit Ellingsen)

  • Binaries — S.B. Divya
  • Other Metamorphoses — Fabio Fernandes
  •  An Offertory to Our Drowned Gods — Teresa Naval
  • Morning Cravings — Nin Harris
  • Breathe Deep, Breathe Free — Jennifer Marie Brissett
  • The Peacemaker — T.S. Bazelli
  • Chocolate Milkshake Number 314 — Caroline M. Yoachim
  • A Handful Of Dal — Naru Dames Sundar
  • Hiranyagarbha — Kevin Jared Hosein
  • Four And Twenty Blackbirds — JY Yang

The appeal also funded horror and fantasy special issues, for which submissions are now being taken.

  • POC Destroy Horror! will publish in October, as a special issue of Nightmare Magazine, from guest editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The submissions portal for the issue is now open, so if you’re a POC writer, and you’d like to write something, by all means please do so and submit your story! Submissions are open now and close May 15, 2016. Just visit submissions.johnjosephadams.com/poc-destroy-horror to read the guidelines and to submit.
  • POC Destroy Fantasy! will publish in December, as a special issue of Fantasy Magazine, from guest editor Daniel José Older. The submissions portal for the issue will be open May 1 – June 15. Visit submissions.johnjosephadams.com/poc-destroy-fantasy to read the guidelines.

(12) KEY TO CHARACTERIZATION. “Why Character Agency is So Important” by Jadah McCoy at Fantasy Book Critic.

What the frick frack does character “agency” really even mean in relation to the wonderful world of book writin’? Character agency is such an integral part of writing believable characters, and it’s something that many people don’t really notice at all when reading.

Chuck Wendig puts it eloquently by saying, “Character agency is…a demonstration of the character’s ability to make decisions and affect the story. This character has motivations all her own. She is active more than she is reactive.”

In other words, the story responds to the character’s actions, not the other way around. Too many times I’ve sat in bed screaming at a character for their stupidity, for their inability to control anything around them, including themselves. Too many times these characters have done the Incredibly Stupid Thing because only the Incredibly Stupid Thing would move the plot forward, and it’s only at the expense of that character’s credibility. Just because isn’t good enough.

When decisions are taken away from the character, they become merely a pawn in a contrived chess game—one where all the moves are already planned out, and no matter where the pawn goes, the results will end up the same.

Characters are living things, like you and I. They think, they speak, they love and hate, they have desires and ideas, and they rebel (and often I can’t even control mine, they just commandeer whatever attempted plot I had penned out).  They are three dimensional. They are people on paper, and people have reasons for what they choose to do. They have thought processes, which sometimes they care to share and sometimes they don’t (not even with their own author).

(13) SEQUELS. “They’re Coming Back” is the title of a TV commercial for Independence Day: Resurgence, coming to theaters June 24.

Using recovered alien technology, the nations of Earth have collaborated on an immense defense program to protect the planet. But nothing can prepare us for the aliens’ advanced and unprecedented force. Only the ingenuity of a few brave men and women can bring our world back from the brink of extinction.

 

(14) REMAKES. While you’re waiting for the Independence Day sequel, you can practice throwing stones at mere remakes. CheatSheet pontificates on “8 of the Worst Sci-Fi Movie Remakes Ever”.

Since science fiction typically rely on special effects more than most other types of films, it would seem that older films in this genre would generally benefit from being updated with the latest moviemaking technologies. Unfortunately, it seems that in many cases any improvement that a remake offers in the area of special effects is canceled out by bad scripts or poor casting decisions. For this reason, there are many science fiction films that are several decades old, but still manage to hold up better than remakes that were made only a few years ago.

It’s a tough audience! #7 is Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake.

(15) FUTURE TECH. “The future if literature was to be believed” – an infographic from the Red Candy blog.

Literature has always been a vehicle for predictions about future technology, which turns out to become a reality. Who knows you might well see some of these items in the near future!

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Bonnie McDaniel, and Will R. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peter J.]

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129 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/4/16 Do Not Scroll Gentle Into That Vile Hive”

  6. 15) – I’m surprised they didn’t mention the… unique… experimental computer interface used in Bruce Bethke’s “Headcrash”. As a clue, the protagonist – after figuring out what it was, where it was to go, and dealing with that idea – nicknamed it the “ProctoProd”.

    Hmm – okay, so difficult to show in a family-friendly infographic…

  7. @Soon Lee

    Those who know the true meaning of sacrifice interpret the deep pre-fifth magic differently…

    *scans the posts for resurrected allegorical lions*

  8. (10) THE MARGIN IS THE CUTTING EDGE.

    Wow, Harris really phoned it in on that SF Signal article. It’s almost deficient enough to be considered a puff piece. 😐

  10. Double fifth!

    (1) HEAD OF THE CLASS. – Don’t be as depressing as Torchwood pls.

    (13) SEQUELS. – Nope.

  11. (4) SATURDAY NIGHT’S ALL RIGHT FOR FIGHTIN’. – Well, anyone willing to put their creative work up for public judgment merits a certain level of respect, and that certainly applies to everyone who found themselves involved, for whatever reason, in making the clips I watched.

  12. (15) However did that info graphic doesn’t have my job. I think I saw most of it at CES the last few years. Not the bird assassin, but then again, the Vegas sparrows are quite suspicious.

  13. (5) DRAFTING

    This is a really good but really complicated short story, and seeing how much went into producing it is fascinating.

    (6) RECOMMENDATION

    I don’t know whether to blame wordpress for bad spam filtering, or AdultFilmIndustryKitsch for making it impossible to type their name in comments.

    (11) POC TOC

    I funded, I await with interest.

    On the relating subject of upcoming anthologies from a few days ago, Michael Daiman Thomas of Uncanny has been recommending the upcoming “The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales”

    (14) REMAKES

    Does the craziest remake record go to “The Thing” (#5 on that list), with 3 versions that went “Good”, “Excellent” and “Why did they….” ?

  14. (15) FUTURE TECH.

    That Infographic is pretty cool!

    However, Oryx and Crake having met the wall very early in the piece (and I’m really not sure how I’m going to manage going back to it to tick it off my “Read All The Hugos And Nominees” list), I had no idea what “Chickienobs” were.

    There is not enough brain bleach in the world to rid me of what Google brought up. So, uh, thanks for that, I guess, Red Candy blog.

  15. (11) super psyched for this. Can’t wait to get the new specials and allll the Nightmare back-issues!

    Re capsule hotels. One of my friends booked himself into one when a bunch of us went to Japan. Luckily we managed to persuade him to change his booking, as he’s 6’4″ and built like a brick shithouse.

  16. @JJ Chicken nobs were the equivalent of the KFC urban legend. A brainless chicken based construct that grew bits of meat which was then used to make fast food.

  17. @JJ: Just curious, what prompted O&C’s meeting with the wall?

    I ask because I really enjoyed it (and the whole trilogy) and would be interested in dissenting opinions.

  18. (14) REMAKES

    The best remake I can remember is Werner Herzogs updated version of Nosferatu. It is hauntingly brilliant. I can’t believe how many people who have missed this pearl.

    And yes, Tim Burtons “Planet of the Apes” was horribly bad.

  19. (1) HEAD OF THE CLASS. – Don’t be as depressing as Torchwood pls.

    I expect Class to be much better than Torchwood. That was an idea with plenty of potential, let down by really stupid stories. And Torchwood was too self-consciously the adult spin-off from Who, with a compulsive need to show how adult and serious it was.
    But YA fiction is not known for being all sweetness and light either, and Ness… ask anyone who read The Knife of Never Letting Go about Manchee… 🙂

  20. Luckily we managed to persuade him to change his booking, as he’s 6’4? and built like a brick shithouse.

    Thus giving him metaphorical cold feet instead of literal ones.

  22. Airbag jackets pretty much exist don’t they? Certainly airbag necklace/cycle helmets have been one of those things tech pundits blurb on about for years, but you never ever see one in use. Though you probably wouldn’t notice it except in a crash…

    ETA: Ninja’d by Will R.

  23. I expect Class to be much better than Torchwood.

    It is hard to imagine anything much worse than Torchwood…

  24. Oneiros: Just curious, what prompted O&C’s meeting with the wall?

    I hit The Eight Deadly Words very early on. Dystopias are not necessarily my favorite thing — but I’ve read plenty of them, and enjoyed a lot of those. So who knows, it may just have been due to my state of mind at that time, and if I went back to it again at some point, I’d be fine with it.

    But obviously it’s not high up on my list; it will probably be got to after the rest of the Hugo and Nebula nominees (if I live that long). 😉

  25. Today’s read — The Year They Burned The Books, by Nancy Garden (not SFF)

    This YA story about the editor of a high school newspaper dealing with a far-right takeover of the school board clearly borrows a lot from the real-life attempt to get one of Nancy Garden’s books (Annie On My Mind) banned in Kansas. I will say that it took me back rather vividly to my own high school days, fighting the ridiculous censorship of my school’s drama department. However, although the book is a solid examination of controversial issues viewed from a teenage level, the story ultimately seemed kind of slight. The great Annie On My Mind will get rereads from me, but I think this one will remain an interesting but one-off venture into one of the author’s lesser Deep Cuts.

    (As a side note, the cover art on this edition is astonishingly terrible, and a glance at it led my spouse to accurately comment, “So, that book is from the 90’s, right?”)

  26. David Brin gets the credit for robot nannies? Somewhere a single tear is rolling down Asimov’s ghostly cheek….

    (Likewise, I think Fred Pohl’s Chicken Little would like a word with Atwood’s upstart poultry product.)

  29. RE: ID4 Sequel.

    I expect to be disappointed, but I hope that there is decent worldbuilding and acknowledgement of the fact that a boatload of reverse engineered alien technology from all those crashed ships would have an impact on human society far beyond just military technology. Given the state of military forces at the end of the movie, there is going to be a whole lot of unsanctioned scavenging of those things.

  30. @JJ: fair enough. I have a bit of a thing for dystopia/post-apocalypse/collapse type novels so it was just pushing all the right buttons for me.

  31. As far as I am concerned, dystopia has already arrived; the never ending stream of emails destroying my Hugo and Not a Hugo nominations has left me dyspeptic as well…

  32. @nickpheas:

    It is hard to imagine anything much worse than Torchwood…

    Really? You must have an insanely high bar then. I certainly wouldn’t defend it as being the pinnacle of anything, but when Torchwood was good, it was exceptional. (Admittedly, when it was bad, it was definitely worse than terrible. And there were more low points than high points. But there were high points.)

  33. For rather high values of ‘much’.

    Yes, Children of Earth, was very good indeed, the rest aspired to middling.

  35. I ponder sometimes if Chicken Little was inspired by Arch Oboler’s “chicken heart” episode of Lights Out (says here the script debuted in 1937 and was repeated the next year—I wonder when Cosby heard it).

  37. But wait! Hope springing eternal, I’ve had an email with my correct Hugo and Not a Hugo nominations. I am trying not to relax just yet, in case I am inundated once more, but I hope this is the right one…

    ETA
    The problem with Torchwood is that the only guy who has ever made a Welsh accent sexy is Tom Jones, and he wasn’t a member of the cast.

  41. Re: Airbag jackets

    Motorcycle leathers incorporating airbags have been used in professional racing for some time. (MotoGP fan here.)

  42. Honestly, as a rider myself, I’d be happy if my fellow riders just wore helmets. (I’m in a no-helmet-required state.)

    The number of times I’ve seen riders in shorts and flip-flops would make you shudder….

  43. The number of times I’ve seen riders in shorts and flip-flops would make you shudder….

    Even in a helmets-required state, people will ride in shorts and teeshirts. (Unless you have abrasion-proof skin, this is Not Recommended.)

  44. @Cassy B: Round here in the summer, you see riders in shorts and flipflops (and bikini tops as appropriate) and a helmet. That’s got to be the worst combination. Agree on the shuddering.

    In other news: One advantage of a Kindle is that books magically appear, probably as a reward for my being a good boy. Or maybe because I pre-ordered them a while ago and forgot. Be that as it may, last night the new Benedict Jacka book Burned showed up and demanded to be read. I’m about two chapters in to it, and it looks like poor Alex Verrus is once again in deep sh… er, trouble.

    I’m sensing something of the same progression in this series as I saw in the Harry Dresden books — the enemies and the stakes just keep getting higher, and our hero has to be either luckier than ever or discover some mysterious (and previously unsuspected) power. It gets tiring after a while.

    Also, I’ve been binge-watching Hap and Leonard on Sundance. No, it’s not SFF, but it’s really great to see a good adaptation of a book on television. I hope they make more.

  45. As I say to people who give me the side-eye when they see me in my helmet, boots, and Joe Rocket armored jacket, “Sweat washes off. Roadrash doesn’t.”

    (I admit that I don’t always wear the leather chaps unless it’s under 70 degrees F out. But I always always always wear jeans, at the very least.)

  46. +1 for all the comments on motorcycle gear. We are in a “helmet optional” state (you have to pay extra insurance). Fortunately, the insurance companies are selling more insurance to cover the added risk and our single point experience suggests that roughly 40% of riders don’t use a helmet. We were expecting it to be closer to 80-90%. A little Google-fu suggests that helmet usage had dropped to 73%…much better than the 60% implied above.

    I’m a helmet, jacket, and chaps guy for almost every ride. Next on my list is one of those Bluetooth helmets with the integral navigation systems….

    —
    Regards,
    Dann

  47. @Paul Weimer

    On ID4 and reverse engineering: realistically how much reverse engineering could you expect though? Hand a scientist from 1816 a crashed C-5 Galaxy and how much of it would they get? Particularly the electronics would require bootstrapping several levels of physics and chemistry.

    Then again ID4 aliens are conveniently Apple compatible…
    *eyerolls*

    (Admittedly it’s a popcorn and explosions movie and I’m over thinking it 🙂 )

  48. @Stoic
    Just me thinking about reverse engineering is overthinking it.

  49. Aaagh! Not just a helmet but a full face plate helmet. I’ve met bikers with debris permanently embedded in their eyes.

  50. My dear wife used to deal with the aftereffects of these freedom-lovin’ individualists living their life free of the iron hand of the nanny state. She worked for Social Security, which got to pick up the pieces of their rebellious lives and pour them into hospital beds.

    Apparently, there’s a middle option between “Live Free” and “Die,” and it involves being unaware you’re being looked after for the rest of your days.

    Oh, also: SCROLL THE PIXEL THAT DOES NOT SCROLL.

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