(1) PRECISION. In “Save the Allegory!” on Slate, Laura Miller calls on writers to actually define “allegory” correctly. She quotes from C. S. Lewis’ The Allegory of Love at length and makes lots of superhero references.
What people usually mean when they call something an allegory today is that the fictional work in question can function as a metaphor for some real-world situation or event. This is a common arts journalist’s device: finding a political parallel to whatever you happen to be reviewing is a handy way to make it appear worth writing about in the first place. Calling that parallel an allegory serves to make the comparison more forceful. Fusion says that Batman v Superman is a “none-too-subtle allegory for the fight between Republican presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.” (It is not.) The Hollywood Reporter calls Zootopia an “accidental anti-Trump allegory”—this despite the fact that there is no literary form less accidental than allegory. The meaning of the word has drifted so far that even works that aren’t especially metaphorical get labeled as allegory: A film about artistic repression in Iran is a “clunky allegory” for … artistic repression in Iran.
Allegory or metaphor: The distinction might seem obscure and academic to many readers. Shouldn’t allegory be grateful to get any attention at all? Isn’t it just an archaic literary mode that nobody uses anymore? Yes and no. About the only people creating true allegories today are political cartoonists. But a culture never entirely discards its roots, and allegory, which first appeared in the waning years of the Roman Empire, is one of the foundations of Western literature. Maybe if we understood it better, we’d realize how much we owe to it.
(2) NEXT AT SFWA. While detailing her writing and travel plans for the summer, Cat Rambo also previews SFWA’s upcoming activities in “Catching My Breath and What’s Coming Up”. In her second year as the organization’s president, she will be putting some needed infrastructure in place.
In SFWA areas, I’m focusing on a new committee that I’ll be working with, the Membership Retention Committee, whose job will be to look at the new member experience for SFWA members as well as how to keep the organization useful for members. (If you’re interested in volunteering with that, feel free to drop me a line.) Other efforts include a) working with SFWA fundraising, b) a small musical endeavor that I just prodded someone about and which involves Tom Lehrer (yes, that Tom Lehrer), and c) helping out where I can with some of M.C.A. Hogarth’s amazing efforts, such as this mysterious thing here lurking under a tarp that I am not at liberty to discuss. *mouths the words “SFWA University” then is dragged away by the SFWA honey badgers while shouting something about a guidebook*
Three other important SFWA things:
- I’ll be watching the results of our decision to admit game writers with keen interest. I can tell you that the initial set is criteria is being voted on right now and I expect to see it announced soon.
- An effort is in the works that I think will prove a lovely tribute to longtime SFWA volunteer Bud Webster and which will, in the longtime SFWA tradition, provide a benefit for professional writers at every level of their careers.
- And we’ll (finally) be announcing some of the partnerships we’ve been making — you saw reps from Amazon, Audible, BookBub, Draft2Digital, Kickstarter, Kobo and Patreon at the Nebulas and those relationships are going to extend beyond the weekend and give our members special resources and relationships at all of those companies — and others, including one that I am super-stoked to have facilitated.
(3) DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH. Neil deGrasse Tyson gives his view about how long you could survive on each planet in our solar system. It’s a 2015 video.
(4) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born May 22, 1859 — Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.
(5) POSERS FOR TINGLE. Neigh, a thousand times neigh!
https://twitter.com/Hoisengineer/status/733799146138783744
(6) EVERMORE. The Baltimore Sun quotes lots of people involved with the convention in “Balticon grew to 50 as sci-fi, fantasy grew more mainstream”. Several are Filers.
Even 50 Balticons later, Ray Ridenour remembers his introduction to the annual gathering of the Baltimore region’s science-fiction and fantasy aficionados.
Ridenour, then a student at the University of Maryland, College Park, recalls taking the elevator to the top floor of the city’s since-demolished Emerson Hotel. This was the first Balticon put together by the then-4-year-old Baltimore Science Fiction Society, and he had little idea what to expect.
“As soon as I stepped out of the elevator, I heard something very noisy and stepped back in,” he recalls. “Two guys roared by in a wheelchair; one of them was singing loudly, the other was pushing loudly. They careened down the hotel aisle and then zoomed in another direction and disappeared.”
Ridenour asked someone walking by if they had any idea what was going on. “‘Oh, yeah,'” came the reply. “‘That was the president of the club.'”
Ridenour, now 68, a graphic artist and designer living in Hampden and a veteran of every Balticon since, knew he was in the right place. “So I said, ‘Well, these guys look like they know how to party.'”
…Baltimore natives Miller, 65, and Lee, 63, authors of a series of books set in the Liaden universe, were guests of honor at Balticon 37 in 2003. Veterans of Balticons dating to the mid-’70s — they met at Balticon 10 in 1976, when Lee won a short-story contest Miller had helped start — they have been married since 1980.
Balticon’s strength, Miller says, lies in its deep fan base. At a time when many fan gatherings have become massive affairs staged by professional organizations whose business is organizing conventions, with an emphasis on movie- and TV-star guests, Balticon is still organized and run by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society and skewed toward the written word.
“Balticon hasn’t lost touch with the fact that it’s a bunch of fans putting this together, for their own interests and the interests of their friends,” Miller says.
(7) DUNGEON N-COUNTER. Jo Lindsay Walton tweeted this sample of what goes on in the Sputnik Award’s Dungeons of Democracy.
Have you voted in the Sputnik Award yet? https://t.co/hJFMaMFCPq #sputnikaward pic.twitter.com/8cP5n0u3k6
— Jo Lindsay Walton (@jolwalton) May 22, 2016
(8) ARE GO. Michael Flett describes the 2015 revival in “Thunderbirds 1965” at GeekChocolate.
…Adhering strictly to the ethic of the late sixties, wires are visible, the motion and expressions of the puppets are limited but still capable of expressing great character, and while Tracy Island is extended by the use of archive footage of tropical islands there can no justifiable objection to this use of stock footage nor in the famous launch sequences or any repeated shots of flybys, as this was all part and parcel of the original productions.
What is undeniable is the loving recreations of puppets, props, sets and machines, from Lady Penelope’s wonderfully shiny pink Rolls Royce FAB1 to the Thunderbirds vehicles themselves, the characters themselves graced by the creations of costume designer Liz Comstock-Smith who has crafted an exquisite new wardrobe for Lady Penelope, much to the chagrin of her chauffeur Aloysius Parker who in addition to his other duties must act as porter.
“When one is visiting, one tries to look one’s best,” his employer drily responds as she arrives at Tracy Island in opening episode Introducing Thunderbirds, less of an audio adventure now granted a visual dimension than, as the name would suggest, a showcase of International Rescue’s secret base and the amazing vehicles used to perform their daring missions.
Adapted from the soundtrack of F.A.B., The Abominable Snowman offers more in the way of spectacle with big explosions from the opening moments as a fire rages at Meddings Uranium, named of course in honour of the late special effects designer Derek Meddings who worked on many Anderson shows and later progressed to several James Bond films….
(9) STOP FIGHTING THE LAST WAR. Jim Henley, in “Hugo McHugoface Has Sailed”, offers his own frame for the Hugo reform discussions.
…Various options – including some kind of jury component and restricting voting rights (e.g. to only attending members) – have raised the objection that “They change the fundamental character of the award.” That class of objections fails to recognize the core truth: the character of the Hugo Awards has already changed. Again, the character of the Hugo Awards has already changed.
The Hugo Awards have become an internet poll in the age of Boaty McBoatface, freeping and chan culture. Nobody set out to make them this, and ex ante it was reasonable to imagine that the supporting membership fee (currently $50) was enough of a gating function to keep LULZers and trolls from targeting the process for abuse. But experience shows that there are enough motivated bad actors willing to spend that much to tie up the bulk of the ballot with whatever works their whims inspire them to place there, motivated by any combination of venial and mortal sins.
There is no question of preserving the character of the Hugo Awards. That ship has sailed, and it is not named for David Attenborough. The question is how can the award process be restructured so that future nominees and award winners will be of a character consistent with the Hugo tradition for the ’70 years prior to the mid-’10s.
I suppose the other question is how long it will take Hugo fandom and WSFS members to admit this.
(10) VERBAL AUTOPSY. Toby Litt tells Guardian readers “What makes bad writing bad”.
…Bad writers continue to write badly because they have many reasons – in their view very good reasons – for writing in the way they do. Writers are bad because they cleave to the causes of writing badly.
Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself.
When Updike began writing Rabbit, Run it was either going to be a great technical feat or a humiliating misjudgment
While bad writers may read a great many diverse works of fiction, they are unable or unwilling to perceive the things these works do which their own writing fails to do. So the most dangerous kind of writers for bad writers to read are what I call excuse writers – writers of the sort who seem to grant permission to others to borrow or imitate their failings.
I’ll give you some examples: Jack Kerouac, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou. Bad writers bulwark themselves against a confrontation with their own badness by reference to other writers with whom they feel they share certain defence-worthy characteristics….
(11) DOWN UNDER FAN FUND. Julian Warner, Justin Ackroyd and Lucy Huntzinger officially announced that the winner of the 2016 race is Australian fan Clare McDonald-Sims. She was the only candidate. The administrators say voting numbers to follow. McDonald-Sims will attend MidAmeriCon II.
(12) IT’S STILL NEWS TO SOMEONE. Fanac.org now has James V. Taurasi’s classic fan newzine Fantasy Times online, published from 1941-1955.
Also, congratulations to Jack Weaver, Fanac.org’s Webmaster of 20 years, and the site’s software developer, who received a special award at FanHistoricon in Virginia last month.
(13) TANK FOR THE MEMORIES. NPR covered yesterday’s transfer from the harbor to the museum – “A 66,000 Pound Space Shuttle Fuel Tank Is Parading Through The Streets Of LA”.
The last remaining space shuttle external propellant tank is moved across the 405 freeway in Los Angeles on Saturday. The ET-94 will be displayed with the retired space shuttle Endeavour at the California Science Center.
A massive space shuttle fuel tank is winding its way through the streets of Los Angeles Saturday, on a 16-mile trek heading to the California Science Center.
It’s set to be displayed with the space shuttle Endeavor. The tank, which was never used in a mission, is the “last flight-qualified space shuttle external tank in existence,” according to the science center…..
As The Associated Press reports, the giant tank started moving at midnight from Marina del Rey, where it “arrived by barge Wednesday.” It’s crawling along at about 5 mph, the wire service reports, and is expected to take 13 to 18 hours to reach the science center….
The tank was donated by NASA, and Science Center President Jeff Rudolph tells Danielle that he’s thrilled to acquire the tank.
“As soon as we got Endeavor, we said we got to see if there’s any way we can get that one remaining external tank,” he says. Danielle adds that the center is hoping to eventually add booster rockets to the display.
According to the center, that means it will be the “be the only place in the world that people will be able to see a complete shuttle stack — orbiter, external tank, and solid rocket booster — with all real flight hardware in launch configuration.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Will R., Brian Z., and Jim Henley for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
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First!
(10) VERBAL AUTOPSY.
Oh ouch.
First after
Lis!Jim!Dang. Pounded in the Butt by Forgetting to Tick the Box.
Fifth?
Fifthish. Maker Faire was busy. Much of interest, though.
(Ninjad)
I rolled bear-butler-cop-blender on David Malki’s rollasketch, which I figure is peak-Wondermark.
… Does Neil deGrasse Tyson think Mercury is in a 1:1 spin–orbit resonance? Because it’s 3:2. That has been known since 1965.
James Davis Nicoll. Of course I noticed that immediately.
(Er, actually, WTF does that mean?)
(Er, actually, WTF does that mean?)
I think it means it rotates three times for every two times it goes around the sun.
(10) Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self.
Ouch, yes; but that is the best description I have ever seen for John C Wright.
It also works nicely for Updike.
Couldn’t agree more with (9). Keeping the existing system or trying to patch it in order to preserve the form of the awards will necessarily sacrifice their character. Oh, and big ups to Jack Lint for the FotC title.
(9) STOP FIGHTING THE LAST WAR.
If we were still “fighting the last war”, we would be sitting back & letting EPH run a few years. Instead, we are discussing additional anti-griefer measures. Even GRRM who was staunchly in the “don’t change the rules” camp now says that EPH isn’t enough: “We are slapping bandaids on a sucking chest wound”.
BTW, kudos to Jack Lint for the “sweet as” Pixel Scroll title.
(10) Bonnie McDaniel, of course, said that in all modesty. I modestly had the same thought.
(7) DUNGEON N-COUNTER.
This is so brilliant.
(8) My copy of the “new” Thunderbirds episodes arrived at the weekend, and I think the review is entirely fair: the episodes themselves are a little flat, but the production is absolutely staggering; you’d swear they had found some lost reels of film from the original show, so perfect are the recreations of characters and sets.
(sigh) Remember when they still painted the external fuel tanks?
Insert reference to Niven’s “The Coldest Place” here.
The deliberately slow, arcane and commitment-oriented nature of changing the WSFS and their rules for the Hugo Awards can be a strength, but, in my view, as Jim points out, in this 4chan age, it can be a weakness against more nimble griefers.
Re (7). When he showed me the idea a few days ago, I was a bit skeptical at first, but I’ve become much more enthusiastic in the potential practice, enough that I am now part of the advisory board for the award.
@Soon Lee: I wouldn’t focus overmuch on the specific phrase, “STOP FIGHTING THE LAST WAR.” It’s just Mike’s chosen subhed for the link (for which I am very grateful), and not from the blog entry itself.
(6) EVERMORE.
Balticon has been a delight every time I’ve attended. A really well-run convention.
I suspect 3) is pretty seriously over-simplified on a number of counts…. Surviving vacuum exposure is an interesting, if somewhat gruesome, area of study. The general consensus seems to be (I’m only an interested layman, so take this with a pinch of salt) that holding your breath is a bad idea, as it’s basically trying to contain normal air pressure inside your lungs, and your lungs are a bit too delicate to be used as a pressure vessel. (This holds true even at the lower pressure and higher oxygen content typically used by astronauts.) I think Arthur Clarke made this point, in several scenes where astronauts have to brave vacuum without spacesuits (the most famous one being in 2001), and it seems to hold true, although the experimental evidence is (for obvious reasons) pretty limited.
Rather than rant any further (I spent an excessive amount of time on this subject for one of my justly unpublished novels), I’ll just drop in a reference here. (Bottom line: two minutes is kind of optimistic, though there aren’t going to be spectacular gory explosions or anything like that.)
I suspect it’d take more than a second for the atmospheric pressure, lack of oxygen and intense cold of a gas giant to kill you, too, although it’s not something I’d care to test myself. (James Nicoll has pointed out the other problem with Mercury’s rotation already; I’m also sceptical about the “one side of you is on fire and the other side is frozen solid so that averages out to comfortable” thing, too.)
If EPH doesn’t pan out, then it’s time to ban slate ballots. In the age of the electronic brain it shouldn’t be too hard to detect ballots which agree with each other almost completely.
(10) I highly recommend the short story “Inspiration” by Isaac Babel, which I recently had the pleasure of reading (in “Penguin Modern Short Stories 4”). “It was all very depressing.”
I was always creeped out by the puppets in any of Gerry Anderson’s productions.
Its a good thing he didn’t make anything with clowns.
Fifth squared! (Plus one)
As for 10… I’ve never been forced into reading a bad novel draft, thankfully, but I did once get forced into reading a bad self-published philosophical treatise. I almost gave up half way through when my friend the author (a male former classmate) stated that if women naturally had the same intellectual curiosity as men, why hadn’t they made any breakthroughs in chemistry while they were stuck in the kitchen? Unfortunately, being female myself, he would have probably considered this proof, so I had to stick it out for the full 400 page experience…
James Davis Nicoll said:
I assume that the combination of Mercury’s minimal atmosphere and the slowness of its rotation means that for the two minutes a person could live to straddle the terminator, Tyson’s description is effectively true. But I’m not an astrophysicist. 🙂
I see CeeV has already jumped in on the question of time scales for Mercury.
Also much of Earth’s surface isn’t habitable for more than a few days at most unless you have a boat.
ALL MY PIXELS
(Thought about “All My Pixels Remembered,” but naah.) Anyway:
Speaking of Gerry Anderson, here’s the uncanniest valley of all, courtesy of Pete and Dud. One of them blinks, but in character.
Much of earth is habitable : depends on what you are.
Any news of the Hugo packet?
@NickPheas: https://twitter.com/midamericon2/status/734715086472810501
Today’s read — The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All The Way Home, by Catherynne M. Valente
Of potential special interest to file770 readers: This book has wombats in it.
(This is a 2016 book, and I will be adding it to the 2016 recommendation list.)
Fantasy about a girl who goes to Fairyland and has adventures there. This is the fifth and final book of the Fairyland series, and will therefore be continuing my unfortunate streak of adding the umpteenth novel in a series to the rec list. On the other hand, since it’s been a darn good year for series finishing up so far, it kind of makes me wish there were more awards for series out there.
The fifth book marks something of a return to form, since the fourth book in the series somewhat inexplicably decided to leave behind all major characters for a while and follow what is essentially a subplot. It wasn’t a bad book, just an odd choice that I’m not sure worked, and one of the results was that at the very beginning of this latest book I had to struggle a bit to remember what had been going on and I felt rather, to quote one of the characters, as though I “had skipped several chapters in [my] favorite novel and opened it up again only to find everyone much further along than [me].” In addition, as with another book I minireviewed recently, there was ultimately so much going on the some plot threads seemed a bit skimped.
That being said, this book was a good ‘un, chock full of Valente’s wonderful descriptions (“The carriage-driver was a lady caught halfway between beautiful and terrifying — her face so gaunt, her hair so wild, and her eyes so huge that she looked like an electrified dragonfly who had once asked to be made into a human girl for Christmas and almost, almost gotten her wish.”) I’d recommend it just for those. The story caught me up and it ended in a way that ultimately made sense.
Thumbs up.
My notebook is on the fritz so I almost missed out on my day as contributing editor!
What’s also called tide-locking. With our moon, for example, tidal forces slowed its rotation on its axis until it takes just as long to rotate once as it does to orbit the Earth once. This is why we only see the one side of it [1].
In olden days, we thought Mercury was tide-locked in the same way, with one side always towards the sun and one side in eternal night. This seemed to be supported by observation. In 1965 we discovered that in fact the situation was a little more complex: because Mercury’s orbit is so eccentric it cannot lock into 1:1 but instead is in a 3:2 relationship where it rotates three times on its axis for every two revolutions around the Sun. By one of those meaningless coincidences, Mercury’s synodic period is about twice its rotation period so when observing was best, it was generally in the same orientation wrt the Sun, giving rise to the illusion that it was in a spin-orbit resonance of 1:1.
1: I know about libration. This is a simplified model.
I very much liked Jim Henley’s line,
Also, this is the 50th Balticon, not the 50th anniversary.
10) I fear the excerpt was the best part of the article. Toward the end it wandered into that sort of phrase that sounds profound until you stop for two seconds and go “Wait, what is that even supposed to mean?”
Why is it F770 never features Orson Scott Card’s delightful ramblings? Sure, there’s a lots of Oscar Leroy but at least he knows enough not to think of Canada as a haven from the grim spectre of sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssocialism, as a conservative Mormon defines it.
(He’s a bit confused about the French Canadians but, eh, he’s American)
(7) DUNGEON N-COUNTER – This has encouraged me to submit my own ballot. Whee!
Hee hee hee.
Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self.
This is only true of one class of bad writers, in my extensive fanfic-reading experience.
There are also bad writers who are bad because they haven’t gotten better yet. Bad writing is a developmental stage for *all* writers, so the “bad writer” can easily be a good writer in training.
I don’t actually call someone a “bad writer” unless they’re experienced (and preferably published) enough to have grown out of it if they wanted to. Even then, only some of them are in love with their prose. There are bad writers who don’t have the time and energy to get better: they’re writing as fast as they can (for money or love) already.
Where you get real, sustained bad writing as a career (Dan Brown, I’m looking at you; also, Left Behind) is when the bad writing hits enough of a sweet spot with an audience that the writer’s self-love has an admiring chorus.
possibly of interest: http://www.therabidpuppies.com has a proud and excited new owner 🙂
@James Davis Nicoll – That reminds me, someone mentioned that Chuck Tingle is going by Dr. Chuck Tingle at times. I was reading something he wrote yesterday and it hit me – his writing style, at least in his tweets, is similar to Dr. Brunner of soap fame. I wonder if that explains the Dr. appelation?
Jack Lint
Yeah, I think that happened to me a couple of times while I was on the long drive.
Hey Mike (Gleyer type),
Any chance we can get a post for Balticon so that those of going can figure out meetups/etc.?
Kate said: If EPH doesn’t pan out, then it’s time to ban slate ballots. In the age of the electronic brain it shouldn’t be too hard to detect ballots which agree with each other almost completely.
So, say… if x number of ballots have y number of identical nominations in z number of categories, the ballots will be disallowed. First, the rules would have to be changed to define a slate ballot and make it clear they aren’t allowed, then the administrators would have to be given the authority to use strict guidelines to disallow ballots that are clearly slating.
Then the griefers would find a way around the rules by slating in fewer categories or something.
I don’t know. Fighting people who are being jerks for the sake of being jerks is a boring and annoying game. They find it funny because they have the mentality of 3-year-olds (if that’s not too insulting to 3-year-olds, which it might be). Those fighting it just find it tiresome. I don’t know how to fight these man-children.
I take solace in the fact that the voters in the final round will keep them from actually winning, but it’s small comfort.
@ James Davis Nicoll: Be sure to click the square icon on the upper left corner of the photo, and then click the link that comes up.
@James Davis Nicoll, I’m trying desperately to keep from giggling out loud at my desk at work. I’m honestly not particularly interested in erotic fiction, much less male homosexual erotic dinosaur fiction; it’s just not my thing… but I’m starting to feel very warmly toward Mr. (Dr.?) Tingle.
@ kathodus
I may be the person you remember bringing up the “Dr. Tingle” references, although I was thinking more in terms of the contexts and motives for other people using the honorific. My assumption is that whoever the Tingle author is, has achieved an academic degree that conveys the title of “doctor”. It’s a reasonable assumption–there are lots of us running around with random PhDs that may or may not have anything to do with our literary or fannish activities.
But I’m intrigued/amused/curious about the reasons why one person will have the title “stick” as part of their public persona (whether they initiated the use or whether other people did) while other people will either fail to be addressed by it (even when pertinent to the context) or even be treated as being egotistical/stuck-up/full-of-it for doing so.
My guess, in this particular case, is that the people using “Dr. Tingle” are highlighting the interpretation of his work as sophisticated performance art, implying “this is a intellectual with credentials, not just some raunchy porn-monger.” That it’s a way of not merely denying that association with Tingle would be embarrassing, but instead suggesting that aligning oneself with a “Doctor” confers prestige and status to the community. (In a humorous fashion.)
Or I might be over-thinking the matter, as I usually do. But as a *cough* doctor of linguistics, I’m always pondering the ways language is used, not simply to convey information, but to negotiate social relationships and to add meta-textual interpretation. Think about which SFF authors are freely offered the honorific of Dr by readers and fans, and the possible social purposes for doing so.