(1) I WONDER WHAT THE KING IS DOING TONIGHT. Kameron Hurley observes that fame and fortune don’t go hand-in-hand: “Dancing for Dinner: Fame, Publishing, and Breakout Books”.
In my own life, I find I have to remind people often that I have a day job. I actually had a client email me after a conference call one time and ask, “Are you THE Kameron Hurley?” and I had to admit that I was. I had to have a conversation with my boss about online harassment, and how the release of my upcoming essay collection, The Geek Feminist Revolution, might create some pushback at my job, and how we should handle that should it happen. The whiplash you get in going to an event where people literally scream with happiness when you walk into a room and back to private life where you’re just another cog is really weird (to be truthful, I greatly enjoy my anonymity in Ohio, and don’t want it another way, but the dissonance is weird).
Yet this balancing act between public and private life, or public personae and private day job, is something that many thousands of other writers and artists struggle with every day. I was reading that Joe Abercrombie kept his day job for a lot longer than you might have thought (and even then, picked up freelancing jobs until a few years ago), and Gene Wolfe has had a day job his whole career. Most of us have to do this. It’s just… increasingly awkward to find that the fame part comes so much faster than the money part (if the money comes at all). There’s this strange assumption that by being an artist, you have traded away your private life in exchange for money. But what about those of us who never have the money to keep ourselves safe from the fame?
(2) HILL’S DARKSIDE. Coming in October from IDW, “Joe Hill’s Terrifying Scripts For Tales From The Darkside Collected”.
Originally planned as a reboot for the storied series, Hill’s scripts for these never-broadcast television episodes allow the New York Times bestselling author to stretch his creative muscles, his effortless mastery of the twisted subject matter injecting new terrors into this silver screen legend.
Joining Hill in resurrecting this classic is Charles Paul Wilson III, known to many Joe Hill fans as the artist responsible for the nightmare vision made real in their most recent collaboration…
“When I was offered a chance to reinvent Tales from the Darkside, I leapt,” said Hill. “This was a landmark show for my generation: our Twilight Zone, our Outer Limits. Right away, I wanted to do something that honored the spirit of the original Darkside… and at the same time I wanted to go bigger, to do something fresh, something with scope. In the end I wrote three scripts and sketched a vision for a whole Darkside universe. I envisioned a series of individual horror stories that would, ultimately, turn out to be connected by a single mythology. I really wanted to do something with the scale of Locke & Key. TV is tough and in the end we didn’t quite make it to the little screen. But it’s a delight and a thrill to share the scripts alongside Charles Paul Wilson’s beautifully sick illustrations. Here’s the show that could’ve been, now playing in your imagination.”
Tales From The Darkside was created by George A. Romero.
(3) MONSTER CENSUS. Max Florschutz, in “Being a Better Writer: Micro-Blast #3”, answers the question “Do I Need Fantastic Creatures in My Fantasy?”
No, actually.
All right, let me explain a bit more. Usually when we think of fantasy we think of fantastic creatures: Beings like dragons, unicorns, monstrous beasts, etc. Such creatures fill the realm of myth and legend the world over, and are a common sight in fantasy stories. But do you need one in your story?
Well, no. There are plenty of stories out there where the fantastic and the incredible happen without any sort of mythical, shocking, or otherwise out-of-the-ordinary beasts and creatures entering the narrative. A lot of stories are about human interaction, no beasts needed. You can still write a fantastic fantasy without any indication or even mention of fantastic beasts, and there are plenty of fantasy books that prove this as well. For example, take the success of GRRM’s Game of Thrones books. Granted, they pull in dragons and other fantastic beasts as the series moves on, but such elements only, if I recall correctly, appear right at the end of the first book—the rest of that introduction to the series draws more on the characters and the goings-on of a political kingdom to keep you reading (as well as lots of incest and other elements, which is why I only ever read that first book and didn’t care to move on).
My disinterest in the series aside, the first title in the series shows that your fantasy doesn’t need to have fantastical beasts in order to be gripping. You can write a fantastic amount of drama, magic, and excitement without ever needing a fantastical creature.
(4) STRAW WARS. Bence Pintér, editor-in-chief of the Hungaran SF portal Mandiner.sci-fi, recommends a funny video from Hungary. Public workers created Star Wars sculptures from bales of straw in Tiszaigar, a small village in the Great Hungarian Plain.
(5) PLANETARY SOCIETY. Robert Picardo’s Planetary Post, “A Visit to JPL.”
Welcome to the fourth installment of The Planetary Post, our monthly newsletter from Robert Picardo featuring the most notable space happenings. This month we head to JPL for a tour with two young friends.
(6) LONGLIST. Aaron Pound is gathering data for “The Hugo Longlist Project” at Dreaming of Other Worlds.
As I noted a few days ago, it does not appear that anyone is tracking the nominees on the Hugo longlist. There are plausible reasons for this, the most important of which is that it is entirely informal and unofficial. The Hugo administrators usually do not even bother to determine if a particular nominee is eligible in the category they have been nominated in unless it makes the list of finalists. This does not mean, however, that this data is not without value. Thus far, however, it has not been compiled into a coherent whole. This project is intended to fill in this gap by compiling all of the Hugo longlist data into a series of posts so it is all accessible in one location. Some notes:
- Though the Hugo statistical data that is released concerning the top fifteen nominees lists the total number of nominations each work received and ranks them accordingly, they are presented here in alphabetical order. Perusing the statistics, it is not uncommon for a work to receive the most nominations in the nominating round, but not win the Hugo award in the award selection round. This indicates to me that the raw number of nominations is not a worthwhile guide to whether one work is “better” than another in the eyes of the Hugo voters.
(7) NEBULA TRIP REPORT. Zak Zyz filled in readers about “My trip to the Nebulas, Installment 1: Cry Havoc and let slip the Blogs of War”.
I was sick as hell on Thursday but made a point to get out to see at least @MikeRUnderwood’s sales panel. Very valuable info, he first went into an explanation of a few retail-style presentation techniques useful for displaying books when working a booth at a con.
Two presentation points I plan to implement:
- Have bookstands, a tablecloth, and ideally a banner or a sign that complement your brand
- Have a stack of books underneath yours, so people know they aren’t taking your last copy.
Mike Underwood has a lot of sales and retail experience and it shows. He talked about a flowchart method to his sales pitch, favoring a soft-sell approach with a lot of emphasis on gauging the comfort and interest level of a prospective buyer. He talked about the importance of genre familiarity, knowing what’s popular for comparison not just to your own genre, but to build bridges to people who aren’t necessarily SFF readers (or even big readers at all) in larger conventions with a more diverse crowd. A final tip was offering people who were interested but not willing to commit to a sale a chance to join your email list.
This was a valuable panel that taught me a few things that will make it easier to sell books in person. He also fielded my question about selling books to independent stores, with some great advice about talking to book buyers. Just the information in this one panel was worth the price of admission to me.
I should also note Mike has an active Kickstarter going for Genrenauts.
(8) CAMERA ARTISTE. John Scalzi announced on Whatever that he posted an exquisite set of photos of the Nebula Awards banquet in this Flickr album.
(9) ZERO YOBS. Nigel battled Damien Walter on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/732495139118022656
https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/732496768487690241
I don’t think Walter is actually wrong. Those looking for WSFS rules permitting an action should try the thought experiment of looking instead for rules that will prevent that action. The WSFS rules give great latitude to the committee in all matters that aren’t specifically addressed in the WSFS constitution. The necessary ingredient is for the corporate entity running the con to have the political will to act — I have no idea whether MACII has even discussed the idea. Also, it would cost money to refund memberships — don’t underestimate that issue.
(10) S.H.I.E.L.D. TRAVELS IN TIME. Comic Book Resources reports “ABC Bumps ‘Agents of SHIELD to New Timeslot”.
When “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” returns to ABC this fall, the show will air in a new timeslot: Tuesday nights at 10 pm EST. This pushes the show back an hour from its original 9 pm slot, which will now be filled by “Fresh Off the Boat” and “The Real O’Neals.”
The news follows the cancellation of “Agent Carter,” which aired during “S.H.I.E.L.D.’s” past two winter hiatuses, and ABC’s decision not to move forward with the Mockingbird-centric “Marvel’s Most Wanted” spinoff.
(11) INNOVATION. The Valley Forge in 2017 NASFiC bid has posted a new progress report on Facebook.
We’re pleased to announce the Valley Forge 2017 Mobie Fund!
Mobie Fund Mission: The Mobie Fund will provide monetary assistance to those fans who have difficulty attending NASFIC due to the financial burden of mobility scooter rental. We will seek donations from all who want to help make NASFiC accessible. Valley Forge 2017 will match donations to the fund, up to $500.
After the site selection vote at MidAmeriCon II, the 2016 WorldCon, we will accept donations in cash or through Paypal via our website. At the same time, those who wish to apply for financial assistance for mobility scooter rental can contact us through our website.
Please note: The Mobie Fund is first-come, first-serve. We will confirm that your spot is available, but it won’t be secured until we receive your registration for the con. Upon arrival at the hotel, you can pick up your pre-paid mobie at the mobie rental spot. If, at the end of the con, the Mobie Fund still has a balance, we will reimburse that money among the other mobie riders at the con.
(12) SUICIDE SPINOFF. According to Yahoo! Movies, “Margot Robbie Spearheads Proposed Harley Quinn Movie With More Female DC Comics Characters”.
Months ahead of the opening of Suicide Squad, Warner Bros. is already contemplating a spin-off for the DC Entertainment anti-heroine, Harley Quinn.
Margot Robbie, who stars as the villainess in Suicide Squad, is attached to reprise the character and would also produce the untitled spin-off, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
But in an interesting twist, the project is not a Quinn solo movie. Rather, it would focus on several of DC’s female heroes and villains.
Details are being closely guarded but names such as Batgirl and Birds of Prey have surfaced, although in what capacity, it’s not clear. Warner Bros. isn’t commenting.
There is also a scribe penning the script but those details, too, are being kept secret, although it is known that the writer is female.
(13) STANISLAW LEM HONORED. A Kraków Science Festival will be named after Stanislaw Lem says Radio Poland.
Late science-fiction writer, philosopher and futurologist, Stanislaw Lem, is the patron of the 16th edition of the Science Festival, which begins in Kraków, southern Poland, on Thursday.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Lem’s death. The slogan of this year’s festival is “Time and Space”. “Lem’s work strongly refers to the concept of time and space, which are also the domain of science,” the chairman of the festival’s organising committee, prof. Robert Stawarz, said.
(14) OLDIE BUT GOODIE. Just discovered this 2011 Robot Chicken video today: “Aliens Acid Blood.“
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Bence Pintér, JJ and Will R. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Leslie C.]
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[ticky]
::ticky::
}icky-tay{
(9) Who, exactly, is the convention supposed to ban? Voxman? Everyone who nominated Space Raptor Butt Invasion? And what good would that do at this point?
fifth?!
(8) CAMERA ARTISTE. John Scalzi announced on Whatever that he posted an exquisite set of photos of the Nebula Awards banquet in this Flickr album.
The photos of the Radio SFWA performance appear to have captured Henry Lien wearing a skirt and high heels. 😀
4) Figures made from straw bales are pretty common in many parts of continental Europe and sometimes they have a geeky theme.
Last year, I took this photo of straw minions in my neighbourhood.
One of the issues here is that it’s not just the members of the current Worldcon. What about the members of the previous and subsequent Worldcons? The current Worldcon can’t refund their memberships. While a Worldcon could decide to void some of its own memberships, it’s unclear to me how they could void memberships to a Worldcon that happened a year ago, or to a Worldcon run by a different legal entity than theirs.
FWIW, this is an argument for restricting nominating to only members of the current Worldcon. If we did that, the current Worldcon could at least technically decide to void specific members’ memberships (and thus their ballots) for whatever cause they wished.
This is not at all a theoretical question. There’s pretty strong speculation that most of the Griefers this year are coasting along on supporting memberships from last year’s Worldcon. Thus Kansas City has to deal with the annoyance and aggravation of dealing with bad actors without the slight compensation that Spokane had of having additional revenue to spend on their Worldcon.
Borderline: just finished it. Wow. And that’s a first novel?
(10) S.H.I.E.L.D. TRAVELS IN TIME. It’s usually a bad sign when they start futzing with your time slot, right? OTOH, Elementary got renewed despite changing nights.
Bill Gates reviews Seveneves: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Seveneves
What Walters stated was: “Remove the Rabid Puppy voters, ban them from participating, reinstate real writers.”
He didn’t have any idea of who would do this or how. The issue of whether the WSFS would have the legal authority to do so was almost a moot point.
On Mike’s point – I’d think have general discretionary powers probably isn’t much help if the constitution doesn’t grant some sort of discretionary power over memberships but I’m not a lawyer 🙂
Camestros Felapton: Let’s look at a parallel case. Do you think a Worldcon can ban a member who violates its antiharassment policy? (Not that banning is the only possible alternative.) Where is that authority coming from?
Last year’s Worldcon memberships are irrelevant. The 2016 nominations are done deal, and Sasquan members aren’t eligible to vote on MACII’s Hugo finalists.
If MACII revoked current-year memberships held by people engaged in trying to destroy the Hugos, it would make those people ineligible to vote in 2018 site selection, or to nominate for the 2017 Hugos (if they are not also Worldcon 75 members).
Worldcon 75 would have to make its own decision about its own members, although they would need MACII’s data to see what the overlap is.
The policy says upfront that they can and attendance is on the condition of accepting the terms of the policy (i.e. by attending you are saying ‘I agree to do this’) and the rules are presented up front. The authority for having a code of conduct comes from the constitution placing a responsibility on the committee to run a convention, which then in turn puts other responsibilities on them, such as being to some extent responsible for the well being of people attending – so if it was challenged they can say ‘we need this policy to fulfill our legal responsibility to run a convention and the policy gives us the power to remove membership and the member agreed to the terms of the policy by turning up’
I guess that suggests you could do something similar with voting i.e. a statement to the effect that by voting you are agreeing to vote in a way that doesn’t do X, Y or Z bad things (e.g. nominate works that would bring the Hugos into disrepute or in a manner designed to undermine the integrity of the awards) and that you understand that if you do do bad things your membership will be revoked. More tricky because it isn’t clear why they need such a good-behavior policy to fulfill their responsibility to run the award – and hence it might be something that is a step beyond their remit? Still, that sounds like an interesting idea (but obviously not something that actually happened)
Ticked.
It would have been trivial to de-VD this year’s Hugo – just can all ballots that included SRBI. Job done. Simple. If the Hugo admins wanted to, it would have also been invisible to outsiders until the number of nominations were released post awards, though I’d have gone with “you’re assholes and your votes have been discarded for trying to game the system”. Private association, no free speech, let’s move along.
Trying to be fair to VD is a waste of time, he regards that as weakness.
It’s much to late to do that now, of course.
@Chris S
Now now, for all you know Tingle voted for himself and it’d be unfair to toss out his ballot. Can all the ones who voted for SSARR and pass their info on to future concoms so there won’t be a repeat.
(13) STANISLAW LEM HONORED
I had this talk with a polish comic book artist just two weeks ago. According to him, Lem was required reading in school and not only one book, but several. So this doesn’t surprise me.
Oh flip, the mortification.
Nigel: Oh flip, the mortification.
Are you pining for the fjords now? 😉
Mortified, not mortifying. Which is not to say I’m not singing with the choir invisibule right now, so long as the singing consists mostly of groans of embarrassment.
(1) I WONDER WHAT THE KING IS DOING TONIGHT.
Or, of course, there’s the case of Philip Glass continuing to work as a cab driver and a plumber, including once being famously interrupted by a shocked Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes while installing a dishwasher (“But you’re Philip Glass! …but you’re an artist!” “I’m artist but I’m sometimes a plumber as well and you should go away and let me finish”).
Adrian Tchaikovsky still works for a firm of solicitors, I believe. Which is nuts when you consider how productive he is.
@rob_matic
Huh, you’re right. That’s pretty intense when he’s written better than a book per year. (Also, while I’m entering the 10,000 today, Wikipedia tells me his surname is really Czajkowski)
@Chris S
But the Hugo administrators dont have the right to toss out nominations just because they think some niminators are assholes. Se everything else written in these threads about rules and being rulebound. It is not that kind of hierarchical dictatorship.
A question regarding this banning thing. I suspect that the vast majority of rabid puppies can’t be identified from membership lists (Vile Faceless Minion 88 probably didn’t sign up under that nym) so the only way to identify them would be by their ballots. The ways I can see this working would be either a) the admins are asked to make the banning decisions or b) other WorldCon staff are given access to ballots to make banning decisions. Let’s just say I see significant issues with both options, but which option (or an option c?) do those suggesting it propose?
I don’t think identifying people just because of SBRI is enough, but I agree it would serve as a pointer.
Would be nice if cons were prepared to release anonymised nominating information. Never really convinced that such data could not be passed through several dozen transformations to remove all trace of the original nominator’s ID.
If someone nominates all 5* items from a slate** in a category*** then they are classed as a bad actor and their nomination can be ignored. Refund their money if you want, personally I’d just state that rule in big text on the nominating web page. If someone wants to pay $50 to try and damage the system then it’s their own damn fool fault if they get caught.
One doesn’t really need to pass data onto future cons. If Dead Elk 88, registered under the name Bob Dobbs, has his nominations disregarded by being a bad actor in one year, and plays honestly, then there is more joy in Heaven etc. If they continue to try and fuck the system then they continue to be ignored.
* Or perhaps at least 4. Otherwise Voxman just slates 4 items.
** Slate rules being invoked when a pre-determined proportion of the nominations fit the identical pattern.
*** Run it per category rather than per nominator so that if people are accidentally trapped because a lot of people really like Lightspeed and only get their short fiction from there, then a false positive still leaves them able to contribute in other areas.
The Knights Who Say ‘Nom’?
Re: Dayjobs and authors. It does seem that a majority of authors I know either have one, or have a spouse with a really good one, or, for financial safety, both.
@Simon re: Borderline. Yeah. We at Skiffy and Fanty were impressed too. If you are of a podcasting listening mood, you can hear Julia Rios and I talk to Mishell here:
https://skiffyandfanty.com/2016/05/12/296mishellbaker/
Wow, contributing editor of the day! I’d like to thank everyone who made this honor possible.
Which, to be honest, is basically one of the cats. The other two are jerks.
Is there a reason why this approach or something like is being avoided? Rule slates as a variety of voter fraud? I get that it might end up being a lot of bloody work but year after year until this is sorted a lot of the work being put into the Hugos is going to seem wasted or spoiled so long as griefers have a measurable impact. It would be far more of a deterrent than NA because any disruption would be effectively invisible and enumerators are presumably already instructed on how to spot various possible efforts at fraud. EPH might be a desirable move away from First Past The Post, but it’s starting to look over-engineered and under-performing as a response to Rabids, and banning people in the internet age just looks feeble and unconvincing to me, though a lifetime ban for the Voxman seems justifiable as a gesture.
I enjoyed Borderline. Thought that it was pretty awesome how it blended a lot of characters with different form of MI and disabilities without taking away from the urban fantasy storyline.
Another book, I’ve enjoyed recently is Outriders by Jay Posey. Outriders Thought it was a great MilSF romp, and how it focused ona single small tactical unit, rather than giant space battles and such. I’m a huge fan of the large scale stuff, but love to see the variety.
@alexvdl
Strangely enough, Amazon just tried to sell Outriders to me as well. I find real people more convincing than Amazon though. So, if I liked The Red then Outriders is worth a try?
[ticky]
@Mark,
I’d say if you enjoyed the Red, you would definitely enjoy Outriders. Outriders didn’t go into the moral questions with the same depth that Red did, but there are similarities in theme. And they are are different enough that you don’t feel like you’re retreading. I should actually update my review to reflect that. Thanks!
My understanding is that there was some chatter about Dr Tingle in quite un-Puppy-like corners of the internet before Mr Day picked up on it, so it is quite possible that some people who are not RP supporters voted for his work; I don’t think that could be used by itself as a basis for exclusion.
Banning Day would have no effect beyond giving him something to crow about (“you saw that! you saw him oppressing me!”). The thing to do, I think, is to put some more fixes into the nomination system, so that it’s harder for bad actors to game it. (If Day fell under a bus tomorrow, there’d be another troublemaker along sooner or later; banning individual trolls – while I agree it might be satisfying – gets us nowhere in the long run.)
I’m distrustful of any mechanical slate-identification-and-removal process – any rules-based system can be gamed or sabotaged, and there is too much risk of innocent nominators being, as it were, caught in the machinery. (Suppose there’s a small group of popular novels, for instance, one year? If there’s a lot of buzz about a half-dozen or so novels, you’re going to get a lot of similar-looking nominations ballots – how do you prevent them being falsely detected as slate ballots?)
@Andrew M,
You think that of all of the Tingle Ouevre, random fans settled on SRBI , independently of Beale, and decided that they loved it so much that they nominated it for a Hugo?
Although I disagreed with taking harsh methods at first, like throwing out all identical ballots, I’m coming around. The argument against it is that we might inadvertently hurt honest voters and we’ll get a lot of calls of ‘fascist’ from people on the Internet. Taking the long view, though, most people walking into bookstores won’t know or care. What they do care about is that they can trust the Hugo ‘brand’ to lead them to good books.
If one were to try to identify & exclude slated ballots (regardless of whether or not I think it’s a good idea), I don’t think you’d want to use Best Novel or some of the other major categories — I think the red flags would be further downballot. This year, BRW is an obvious indicator.
In other news, this week Film Critic Hulk came back from a long absence to write a complete teardown of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. One of the things Hulk critiques is Inarritu’s disregard of genre:
@4: does that sculpture of Leia use inner tubes in place of hairy earphones? Talk about working with found materials….
@Micael Gustavsson where in the rules does it say the Hugo Admins can’t toss ballots? Genuine question to which I don’t know the answer. I don’t believe the rules forbid it.
Why the focus on banning people? In the internet age, that’s just not going to work.
@Chris S
Members have a right to vote. The only way to disqualify votes is by revoking memberships. The administrators are nowhere given the right to toss away votes they dont like.
And the important thing is what they have a right to do. There is a lot of things they are never expressly forbidden, but which can be assumed to be forbidden through the members right to vote.
(3) Guess someone didn’t notice the six baby direwolves in chapter 1.
That’s sad. Nicholas Fisk has died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Fisk
Guardian obituary
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/18/nicholas-fisk-obituary
Honestly I had no idea he was still alive.
Direwolves used to be real. Heavier built version of current day wolves but now extinct.
@nickpheas: 🙁 – sad, indeed. He was a mainstay of my SFnal childhood; I must have had his books out of the local library more times than I can count.
@NickPheas and Steve Wright — Trillions! I remember that book! I could probably walk right to its location in the children’s section of the public library from my childhood, had that library not been torn down and relocated. Could not have told you the author to save my life, though.