(1) OPEN DISCUSSION OF OPEN LETTER. Several authors have responded to the challenges raised in the letter posted here: “Writers Circulate Letter of Concern About Saudi Worldcon Bid”.
- Robert J. Sawyer wrote extensive comments about the Open Letter in this public Facebook post.
- Seanan McGuire, an author who’s also been a Worldcon runner, has added her insights on Twitter, Thread starts here.
- Cat Valente’s thread starts here, and the comments are along these lines —
(2) EVANIER ON MALTIN PODCAST. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Leonard and Jessie Maltin’s latest podcast is with their long-time friend, Mark Evanier. (Click here.) Evanier talks about how he began his career as Jack Kirby’s assistant and then goes on to discuss his years at Hanna-Barbera, including what it was like to work with Tex Avery and Mel Blanc and how Jonathan Winters once used some downtime to do some improv in his office. Also discussed was his six-year run as the writer of Garfield and Friends, and how he gave work to such comedy legends as George O’Hanlon (the original voice of George Jetson) and Rose Marie. He also discusses his role at Comic-Con, where he is one of six people who has attended every Comic-Con. As part of his Comic-Con segment, he gives some valuable advice about running panels. He is also an author, with his edition of the seventh volume of The Complete Pogo about to be sent to the printer. Evanier’s long-time partner was Carolyn Kelly, daughter of Pogo creator Walt Kelly, and Evanier vows to finish the definitive Pogo collection Carolyn Kelly began.
Ray Bradbury is discussed beginning at minute 56, and Evanier discusses what it was like to interview Bradbury in front of several thousand Comic-Con attendees. (He routinely asked Harlan Ellison fr advice about what questions to ask Bradbury). He notes that Bradbury always liked to go to the hucksters room to see what was new in comics and how he would always happily sign his works. Leonard Maltin noted that Bradbury had a youthful spirit throughout his life and “never lost his sense of wonder.”
(3) FUTURE TENSE. The July 2020 entry in the Future Tense Fiction series is “Legal Salvage,” by Holli Mintzer, a story about artificial intelligence, thrifting, and taste.
Twenty, 25 years ago, someone lost a building.
It started as a U-Haul self-storage franchise, and switched allegiance between a few other companies as it changed owners. The last owner had been running it as an independent when he died. His heirs were halfway across the country, and before they could do anything about it, one of them died and the other two spent down the rest of the estate fighting over how to split it….
It was published along with a response essay, “How Can an A.I. Develop Taste?” by Kate Compton, an artificial intelligence coder, artist, and educator.
…As humans, our possessions mean many different things to us. Their value may be practical. We need a blender to make smoothies and a bike to get to work on time. But many objects also have sentimental value and hook into the complex web of human emotions and relationships. We may have aspirational objects that tell us who we want to be (someone who goes camping more, exercises more, would wear those impractical shoes). We also keep nostalgic objects that remind us, through memory or our senses, of people or values that we want to remember. Sometimes our collections simply “spark joy” (in Marie Kondo’s words) in some unknowable way.
In “Legal Salvage,” we meet three collectors: Mika, Ash, and Roz. We also learn about people who abandoned power tools or neon signs or commemorative saltshakers in their storage lockers. We don’t know what these objects meant to the vanished collectors….
(4) JACKSON ON SCREEN. “Josephine Decker Releases A New Film About The Horror Writer Shirley Jackson” – transcript of an NPR inetrview.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The new movie “Shirley” starts after the author Shirley Jackson has published her most famous short story. It’s called “The Lottery.” You might have read it in high school.
JOSEPHINE DECKER: The town annually stones to death one of its members because that’s just what’s done. You know, I think there’s a reason that that has stayed in our canon. It’s incredibly intense to talk about institutionalized oppression.
SHAPIRO: That’s the movie’s director Josephine Decker. Her film “Shirley” is a fictional story about a real person. And so I asked Decker how she compares the author, who died in 1965, to the character Shirley Jackson that Elisabeth Moss plays in the movie.
DECKER: It was a tricky challenge I guess you could say. But our MO was really just to prioritize making the audience feel like they were inside of a Shirley Jackson story. We put that above all else. So we were always adventuring into her fiction as the primary source for our inspiration of how to approach the film. We were very clear that we wanted to make a film that wouldn’t be mistaken for a biopic, even though I think it totally (laughter) has. It’s hard – when you call a film “Shirley,” I guess people get confused.
(5) CAMP IN TROUBLE. Huntsville’s Space Camp, and the US Space & Rocket Center museum in general, are in deep financial trouble due to knock-on effects of the pandemic and are seeking donations to help stay open: “U.S. Space & Rocket Center launches ‘Save Space Camp’ Campaign” on WAFF 48.
(6) THAT’S STRANGE! Yahoo! News shares tweeted footage from four years ago in “Benedict Cumberbatch Surprised Fans In Comic Store As Doctor Strange In New Video”.
A behind-the-scenes video of Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange delightfully stopping by a comic bookstore is making the rounds, and it’s exactly a bright spot the internet needed these days.
Scott Derrickson, the director and co-writer of “Doctor Strange,” on Monday night shared a “never before shown moment” of Cumberbatch, in full character regalia, casually walking into. a comic book store in New York City during the filming of the 2016 superhero flick.
(7) MEDIA BIRTHDAYS.
- July 28, 1940 – Bugs Bunny, the iconic cartoon character, made his official debut in the 1940 Oscar nominated short, The Wild Hare. The Looney Tunes standout was first voiced by actor Mel Blanc. NPR “Morning Edition.” “What’s Up, Doc? Bugs Bunny’s Age. Cartoon Rabbit Turns 80”.
- July 28, 1955 — X Minus One’s “The Embassy” first aired. The story is that a man walks into a detective agency wanting to hire them to find the Martians that he says are here on Earth. It’s based on a story by Donald Wollheim published in Astounding Science Fiction in the March 1942 issue. The script is by George Lefferts. The cast includes Joseph Julian and Barry Kroger. (CE)
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
- Born July 28, 1844 – Gerard Manley Hopkins. Including this original extraordinary poet will startle any Christian. “What? That’s not fantasy!” Be kind, brothers and sisters. Discovering him was worth all the quarreling with my teacher after high test scores put me in English IV my freshman year in college. Read this; and yes, it’s a sonnet. If you didn’t look up “Heraclitean” and you should have, shame on you. (Died 1889) [JH]
- Born July 28, 1866 – Beatrix Potter. Famous for The Tale of Peter Rabbit; two dozen of these. Prizewinning breeder of Herdwick sheep. Conservationist. Careful mycological paintings finally published in W.P.K. Findlay’s Wayside & Woodland Fungi (1967); Linnean Society finally apologized for sexist disregard of her research (1997). (Died 1943) [JH]
- Probably best known for Tales of Peter Rabbit but I’d submit her gardening skills were second to none as well as can be seen in the Green Man review of Marta McDowell’s Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life here (Died 1943.) (CE)
- Born July 28, 1928 — Angélica Gorodischer, 92. Argentinian writer whose Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was got translated by Ursula Le Guin into English. Likewise Prodigies.has been translated by Sue Burke for Small Beer Press. (CE)
- Born July 28, 1931 – Jay Kay Klein. For decades he was fandom’s photographer. He wrote Analog’s Biologfor thirty years. Fan Guest of Honor at Discon II the 32nd Worldcon. Big Heart (our highest service award). First Fandom Hall of Fame. At the end he donated some 70,000 photos to the Eaton Collection at U. Cal. Riverside; so far 6,000 digitized and available electronically. Our Gracious Host’s appreciation here. (Died 2012) [JH]
- Born July 28, 1941 — Bill Crider. Though primarily a writer of horror fiction, he did write three stories in the Sherlock Holmes metaverse: The Adventure of the Venomous Lizard, The Adventure of the St. Marylebone Ghoul and The Case of the Vanished Vampire. He also wrote a Sookie Stackhouse short story, “Don’t Be Cruel” in the Charlaine Harris Meta-verse. (Died 2018.) (CE)
- Born July 28, 1947 – Colin Hay, 73. Six dozen covers, a few interiors. Here is The Left Hand of Darkness. Here is Orbitsville. Here is Rendezvous with Rama. Here is Before the Golden Age vol. 2. [JH]
- Born July 28, 1955 – Ed Green, 65. Hard worker at cons within reach, local, regional, world. Chaired Loscon 24 and 31, co-chaired La-la’s Eleven (9th in a series of relaxacons, named with variations of “La-la Con” i.e. for Los Angeles and La-la Land). Served as LASFS (L.A. Science Fantasy Soc.) President. Evans-Freehafer Award for service to LASFS. [JH]
- Born July 28, 1966 — Larry Dixon, 54. Husband of Mercedes Lackey, both GoHs of CoNZealand, who collaborates with her on such series as SERRAted Edge and The Mage Wars Trilogy. He contributed artwork to Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons source books, including Oriental Adventures, Epic Level Handbook, and Fiend Folio. (CE)
- Born July 28, 1968 — Rachel Blakely, 52. You’ll most likely know her as Marguerite Krux on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as that was her longest running genre role. She was briefly Alcmene on Young Hercules, and played Gael’s Mum on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. And showed as Penelope in the “Ulysses” episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. (CE)
- Born July 2, 1980 – Kelly van der Laan, 40. Four novels, three shorter stories in her Spring (in Dutch, Lentagon) series – first novel came from Nanowrimo; a dozen more short stories. “Pink Water” won first prize in the Fantastic Story contest. Collection Lost Souls just released in February. Likes Corey, King, Lynch, Martin, Sanderson, Rothfuss. [JH]
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Is Herman the subject of alien catch-and-release?
(10) FROSTY IN SPACE. Official ice cream of the Space Force TV show, “Ben and Jerry’s Boots on The Mooooo’N.” Here are four minutes of laughs about the ice cream in “Boots on the Moooon: Space Force R & D Diaries.”
(11) LAST CHANCE TO SEE. BBC reports “Van Gogh: Postcard helps experts ‘find location of final masterpiece'”.
A postcard has helped to find the probable spot where Vincent van Gogh painted what may have been his final masterpiece, art experts say.
The likely location for Tree Roots was found by Wouter van der Veen, the scientific director of the Institut Van Gogh.
He recognised similarities between the painting and a postcard dating from 1900 to 1910.
The postcard shows trees on a bank near the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise.
The site is 150m (492ft) from the Auberge Ravoux, the inn in the village, where Van Gogh stayed for 70 days before taking his own life in 1890.
(12) STEVEN KNOWS BEST. In Yahoo! Entertainment’s “‘Waterworld’ at 25: How Kevin Costner’s choice to ignore Steven Spielberg resulted in one of the most expensive movies ever”, Ethan Alter interviews Waterworld screenwriter Peter Rader, who says that Steven Spielberg’s advice to director Kevin Reynolds and star Kevin Costner to film most of Waterworld in a tank rather than on the water led to colossal cost overruns when the film’s sets were destroyed in a typhoon.
Memo to all aspiring filmmakers: When Steven Spielberg tells you not to do something, you’d be wise to listen. Kevin Costner and Kevin Reynolds learned that lesson the hard way during the production of their 1995 action epic, Waterworld. Set in a dystopian tomorrow where the polar ice caps have melted, erasing “dryland” and bathing the world in water, the movie was conceived as an ambitious aquatic Western with a science-fiction twist. But when Waterworld washed ashore in theaters 25 years ago this summer, all anyone could talk about was the out-of-control budget and behind-the-scenes creative battles that culminated with Costner replacing Reynolds in the editing room. According to Waterworld screenwriter, Peter Rader, the source of the movie’s many troubles stemmed from one fateful decision: the choice to shoot the entire film on the open water rather than in a controlled environment like a studio water tank….
(13) IN THE QUEUE. “Virgin Galactic set for last key rocket test flights”.
Virgin Galactic is about to start a key series of powered test flights of its passenger rocket plane.
The company’s Unity vehicle has so far conducted only glide flights after moving into its operational base in New Mexico earlier this year.
The powered ascents will see Unity ignite its hybrid rocket motor to climb to the edge of space.
These tests will set the stage for Virgin Galactic to introduce its commercial service.
Six hundred individuals have so far paid deposits to take a ride on Unity, with many of these individuals having put down their money a good number of years ago.
But George Whitesides, the company’s chief space officer, said their wait would soon be over.
“Our next flight will be just purely two pilots in the front to do a systems check,” he told BBC News.
“And then, once we’ve done that – well, we’re in pretty exciting territory because the plan is to start putting [four of our] people in the back. We haven’t shared exactly how many flights that will be because we’ve got to see how it goes. But it could be a fairly small number.”
(14) HAVE A LOOK AROUND. “The interior design of Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane” – BBC video.
Fare-paying passengers will have big windows to view space from the vehicle’s cabin.
(15) PUTTING IT TOGETHER. “Iter: World’s largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly” – BBC has the story.
The world’s biggest nuclear fusion project has entered its five-year assembly phase.
After this is finished, the facility will be able to start generating the super-hot “plasma” required for fusion power.
The £18.2bn (€20bn; $23.5bn) facility has been under construction in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, southern France.
Advocates say fusion could be a source of clean, unlimited power that would help tackle the climate crisis.
Iter is a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. All members share in the cost of construction.
(16) STUCK IN A GROOVE. At the New York Times, two space journalists say “Too Much Mars? Let’s Discuss Other Worlds”.
Three government space agencies around the world are getting ready to return to Mars this summer. Along with China and the United Arab Emirates, the United States plans to land the fifth NASA rover, Perseverance, on the red planet (along with a small, experimental helicopter, Ingenuity). But the rover’s most important job will be scooping up and caching some samples that humans or robots may eventually retrieve.
The planetary science community will cheer these missions. But many researchers have started asking, more loudly than usual, why we’re going back to Mars yet again. So we invited Rebecca Boyle and David W. Brown, two journalists who have devoted a fair share of their careers to interviewing space researchers at NASA and in academia, to discuss why Mars, a planet that lost its atmosphere long ago, seems to absorb so much of the oxygen — and budgetary resources — in the rooms where explorations of our solar system are decided.
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] The Screen Junkies take on a classic in Honest Trailers: E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial on YouTube. The junkies spend most of their time bashing the ’80s cheesefest Mac And Me, which they show is almost like E.T. “except for one major difference: E.T. is good!” (DId you know Jennifer Aniston made her debut in Mac And Me?)
[Thanks to Joey Eschrich, Andrew Porter, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, JJ, and Michael Toman for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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Pixel dawns on MarbleScroll
8) Gerard Manley Hopkins is awesome and I’d bet cash money that his wild stylings influenced pre-Tolkien fantasists like Dunsany, Eddison, and the lot.
@8: Gorodischer is also only the 3rd person (if I read the table correctly) to win the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award for work mostly or entirely in languages other than English. (Preceded by Borges and Calvino; followed by Sapkowski and Miyazaki.)
Apparently several Australian entomologists are Marvel fans; the BBC reports insects named in honor of Deadpool, Thor, Loki, Black Widow, and Stan Lee. Lots of pictures.
8) One of my colleagues at the University of Vechta was a Gerard Manley Hopkins expert and wrote a paper about how traditional Welsh ballads influenced Hopkins’ work.
Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries Renewed pfor second season.
From Variety:
Acorn TV renewed “Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries” for a second season. A spin-off of “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” created by Fiona Eagger and Deb Cox, the show follows Phryne Fisher’s niece Peregrine (Geraldine Hakewill), who has inherited the detective gene from her famous aunt and uses it to solve the most puzzling crimes in 1960s Melbourne. “Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries” is set to begin production in October and will premiere in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Australia in 2021.
@12, Hopkins–Closer to the surface than sonnet form is the Old English line, built on alliteration and the caesura, though Hopkins is looser and doesn’t stick to the four-strong-beat limit of Beowulf. You can see the lines straining at the limits of conventional prosody, exploding it.
So, a fantasy series then. 😀
Clickity
1) When ever I heared people talking about the bid it is very negative. 10% of the votes are a estimation I heared.
I don’t think the danger is big.
Well, no, that isn’t a sonnet. I would go so far as to say that it is almost (but not quite) entirely unlike a sonnet. Down in the footer of the page there’s a link to “Carrion Comfort” — that’s a sonnet.
StefanB: When ever I heared people talking about the bid it is very negative. 10% of the votes are a estimation I heared.
I’ve got 1% in the Filer pool. If that.
@StefanB
Yes, all the uproar about the Jeddah bid is a bit strange, because Jeddah has no chance of winning.
I also feel sorry for the fans behind the JeddiCon bid, who had their fannish credentials questioned at several points. I no more think that Jeddah is a viable Worldcon location than anybody else, but the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia is not the fault of the Saudi fans.
19) We’ve always been overly fascinated by Mars. Even the old science fiction– it’s always being invaded by Martians; Venusians have much less cultural currency. I think that probably gets deeper into the backs of the minds of people planning these missions than they’d likely admit.
You are right https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2020/07/29/martians-are-more-popular-than-venusians/
StefanB: When ever I heared people talking about the bid it is very negative.
Well, yes. Saudi is a hell hole.
The problem is that to a causal observer, Jeddah and Chicago are being presented as equally valid options. We know that the voting system is almost certainly going to reject it utterly, but it’s still there. Still getting serious consideration.
I wonder if they naively thought that this would be a good way to draw attention to their local scene.
nickpheas says The problem is that to a causal observer, Jeddah and Chicago are being presented as equally valid options. We know that the voting system is almost certainly going to reject it utterly, but it’s still there. Still getting serious consideration.
Serious consideration is not something it’s being given. Conversation about it, yes; actually influencing those who voted as I did, no. JJ earlier estimated 1% of the voters might choose it. I’d be surprised if it was that many. It’d be more problematic as a possible WorldCon site if it’d been say Istanbul.
Ha, I would have enjoyed those discussions.
With “They Might Be Giants” as the musical guests of honor.
“Take me back to the Worldcon site”
Approximately 1./300 of the CoNZealand members are reported as being from Saudi Arabia (15/4522). It wouldn’t take a great deal of discipline on their part to produce 1% of the votes, if most other people think Chicago is a foregone conclusion.
The problem with the Jeddah bid, I think, is that it looks like a sign of a community that doesn’t care about vulnerable minorities and that “no one takes it seriously” and “the existing process will reject it” look like larger-scale versions of standard minimising tactics. (“It’s just a joke”. “They apologised – what more do you want?”) Emphasis on the “look like” of course, but the implicit threat is still there.
And the wider problem is that Worldcons have more visibility and prestige than they used to, and systems that worked well for a more homogenous and inward-looking community don’t always cope well with that. Fixing those systems without centralising power anywhere is going to be hard, but I think it’s worth doing.
Meredith Moment: The ebook version of Murder and Magic, a collection of four Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett, is available for $2.99 at the Usual Suspects.
Meredith Moment —
If there’s still anyone here who doesn’t have it, Middlegame is currently available for $2.99 at Amazon US.
Cat Eldridge: It’d be more problematic as a possible WorldCon site if it’d been say Istanbul.
(not Constantinople)
Sorry… I’ll show myself out. 😀
@rob_matic
Yes, I’m actually surprised that they didn’t try to run a bid for a more liberal Muslim country that would have been more palatable to western voters. They can’t be entirely unaware how their country is viewed by the rest of the world.
JJ says not Constantinople)
Sorry… I’ll show myself out. ?
(Scrambles to check name of that city.)
Well it’s Istanbul this week and given Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, I don’t see that changing. Excepting in pop songs.
It would make a splendid WorldCon site if you can ignore the authoritarian rule of Erdo?an. But then so would any number of third world capitals such as Columbo, Sri Lanka. And the arrack is kick ass there.
Cora Buhlert says Yes, I’m actually surprised that they didn’t try to run a bid for a more liberal Muslim country that would have been more palatable to western voters. They can’t be entirely unaware how their country is viewed by the rest of the world.
I’ll admit that I’m having a hard time thinking of a Muslim majority country with a liberal bent other than Turkey and Bosnia.
We could vote in standards for Worldcon sites but if we we are. not careful, it could disallow a few states in the United States though the Constitution really takes care of most of the issues. I think that Russia could host a Worldcon and they could be disqualified by LGBT concerns for example. It really depends on how foreign visitors are treated. Some countries give foreigners a pass and some don’t.
A possible problematic site could be anywhere in China. Though it is more of a Great Fire Wall issue for fans surfing the Internet. I do enjoy my local newspaper and read it daily on the Internet when out of town. So has Cheng du been getting the criticism that the Saudi bid has been getting? I suspect not. For one thing, Chinese hijackers did not fly planes into the World Trade Center in 2001.
@Kit Harding: the old summary (I’m not sure this fits the details) is that it’s all the fault of the limited vocabulary of Italian: Schiaparelli described markings he though he saw with a word that could have meant either natural or artificial occurrence, and people ran with the reading they found interesting. The same might have happened to Venus if someone had thought they’d seen markings rather than solid cloud cover — or it might not, given the long-term associations of the two planets with different forces. But I don’t think it affects mission planning that much; Mars is both easily-reachable and relatively non-hostile — no clouds blocking the Sun (IIRC the recent Mars missions have depended heavily on solar power), no sulfuric acid in the atmosphere, not hot enough (on average) to melt lead — so expeditions there cost less and can do more. I suspect there’s also the science-is-built-of-steps effect: expedition 1 discovers X, meaning that expedition 2 can reasonably look for Y and Z; in this reading Venus could catch up, especially given recent reports of features suggesting volcanic activity, which was thought to be ruled out by a lack of plate tectonics. (This all from weak memory — anyone with cites feel free to correct.)
@Sophie Jane: ISTM that the attitude you describe is insufficiently willing to make distinctions, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear people claiming it’s valid. I suspect that no matter how many individual statements there are, there’s room to find darkness in the absence of universal condemnation.
And do you have any thoughts on how the system could be fixed (a term I think many participants would object to) without centralizing power? I tend to observe politics rather than joining — a couple of episodes led me to conclude I’m good at getting people to turn against what I support — but I’d like to see what people propose.
@Cora Buhlert: that’s commonly called carpetbagging. Sometimes it works through ~absence (Portland etc. bidding Reno; mid/north-easternUS fans bidding Orlando in ’77); sometimes it requires contacts and collaboration (Seattle linking with Spokane fans). ISTM that Jiddah would have had language issues with the latter; I’m not sure any Arabic-speaking country would have been much more acceptable (maybe one of the Gulf statelets?), and I wonder how many Turkish fans speak Arabic or vice-versa.
@Sophie Jane
I’ve been trying to think of a rule change and I’ve had a hard time coming up with something that couldn’t be abused. It’ll be interesting to see if it gets as far as crowdsourcing ideas and hammering out details or if it just gets stuck on Something Must Be Done. There might not be much energy behind changing things if the bid gets as small a voting share as predicted, since the most upset peeps don’t seem to be WSFS members or even willing to work with WSFS members and processes. A pretty significant minority didn’t want the anti-slating rules on the basis that they felt it was a temporary problem, and that group would likely be a lot bigger if the bid gets trounced at the vote because that looks an awful lot like problem solved.
(Doesn’t solve the problem of “bids from countries with widespread human rights issues may make Worldcon look bad to those who are unfamiliar with the system” of course…)
@David Goldfarb
John Hertz replies by carrier pigeon:
I can still hear that English professor reading “Carrion Comfort” aloud. A masterwork (I mean, the poem).
“Heraclitean Fire” is in sprung rhythm. Have another go. If I didn’t worry about seeming to meet condescension with condescension – to give you credit, you remind me of Elliot Shorter’s “This is a knife” – I’d say “Tap it out with a pencil”.
There were a lot of questions for the people representing Chengdu at the last Smofcon on that and similar topics. A significant number of the people were worried about the lack of liberties in China.
@Cat Eldridge
I hardly think either of them is “liberal”.
From Human Rights Watch:
Turkey:
“Most media, including television, conforms to the Erdogan presidency’s political line.
The Istanbul annual Pride march was banned for the fifth year, and other pride marches in cities such as Antalya and Izmir were also banned.
Police used teargas to disperse women’s rights activists attending the Istanbul International Women’s Day demonstration on March 8 to protest the endemic problem of violence against women in Turkey. ”
Bosnia:
“lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people continue to face discrimination and violence. The state fails in practice to protect women from gender-based violence or hold most of those responsible for it to account.
the Bosnian constitution discriminates against ethnic and religious minorities”
Amnesty International:
Bosnia:
“Roma continued to face systemic barriers to education, housing, health services and employment.”
Turkey:
“Thousands of people were held in lengthy and punitive pre-trial detention, often without any credible evidence of their having committed any crime recognizable under international law. There were severe restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly and people considered critical of the current government – in particular journalists, political activists and human rights defenders – were detained or faced trumped-up criminal charges.”
bill, I’ll admit I hadn’t looked at current conditions there But a decade or so ba k Turkey was quite liberal. (Walter Jon William’s This is Not A Game Is set there.) It may well be that there isn’t a single Muslim majority where the authoritarian government doesn’t engage in human rights abuses.
Anybody here that the Feds are leaving Portland real soon? On paper, they cut a deal with the City to be responsible for crowd control, but the political sites are saying the polling data says the Feds being there is making Trump even more unpopular than he already was.
@Cat
Yeah, the mayor says they agreed to leave, but they’re leaving some people behind to “protect” the courthouse. (They’re going to Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee.)
Albania might be okay. Indonesia isn’t there yet but probably will be before any other supermajority Muslim nations are.
.
Malaysia?
(I mean there are issues there, but Im not sure if rhey are worse than, say The US. But I really am not an expert)
How’s Kazakhstan? Not that I see a bid for Almaty likely to appear any time soon.
@Camestros: Oh, neat! That’s very illustrative.
Meredith Moment: “The Android’s Dream” is $2.99 at the usual suspects.
Meredith moment: This is a second-hand report, but apparently, John Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream is $2.99 via some online retailers, including (at least) Amazon US and Apple.
This is one of my favorite works by Scalzi. A light-hearted thriller with a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle humor, but not an overt comedy. With sheep.
eta: ninja’d
I seem to have read that the Chinese government prohibits movies dealing with time travel (and books presumably?) for some reason related to, I don’t know, wanting to control history or prevent people from thinking about how history could change? What if the Hugos have a handful of time travel stories? Correct me if I’m misinformed.
P J Evans says Yeah, the mayor says they agreed to leave, but they’re leaving some people behind to “protect” the courthouse. (They’re going to Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee.)
Well that should be really good for passing off Democratic voters. Milwaukee? Geee, the Democratic Convention was suppose to be there. Must just be a coincidence.
Very few Turkish fans (or even Turkish people in general) speak Arabic. There are a lot of Syrian refugees and other Arabic-speaking migrants in Turkey, but they are probably not in a position to be helpful for a bid.
I’m also unsure which Arabic-speaking country would be acceptable and in addition politics in the Middle East is somewhat fractious so a carpetbagging Saudi bid would probably be unwelcome in many of the neighbouring countries.
It’s debatable how liberal Turkey actually was – it’s always been authoritarian to some degree – but it’s the secular or Western-facing half of society that’s now under the boot.
As Cat Valente said, yes they have the right to bid, and also yes, if it gets a significant number of votes that’s a bad sign.
A number similar to the number of Saudi members of CoNZealand, no big deal. Even ten percent of the vote, not good–that’s either people who genuinely think a Saudi Worldcon is a good idea, or who are casting some kind of protest vote. Voting for people who object to my very existence is either saying they agree with that frightening stance, or consider women’s and LGBTQ rights trivial compared to the desire to have multiple Worldcon bids they don’t have to organize themselves. Which is also frightening.
I agree with Cat Valente and Robert J. Sawyer. I don’t think the Worldcon should be held in Jeddah, but I accept the bid is legitimate and that it is organized by Saudi Arabian fans and writers. The petitioners should have skipped the issue of “legitimacy” and stuck to their criticisms of the bid, most of which I agree with.
Xifr: A light-hearted thriller with a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle humor, but not an overt comedy. With sheep.
But are they electric sheep?
@Nina
Do electric-blue sheep count?
@Cat Eldridge: Turkey has been going downhill for quite a while; it hasn’t quite gotten to the stage of president-for-life like Russia, but Erdogan is grabbing more and more power and squeezing his opponents harder and harder. I heard some years ago that Turks considered themselves Muslims but not fervent ones; Erdogan is also trying to chip away at that.
@peer: IIRC, One of Malaysia’s PMs (Mahathir Mohamad) thought that the most effective way to shut down a former colleague who had gone into opposition (Anwar Ibrahim) was to have him charged with sodomy; they may not be as bad as Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t look good.
@JohnC: I have also heard this, although the reason also escapes me.
(5) Space Camp has raised 40% of its fundraising goal.