Pixel Scroll 7/5/16 Scrollamagoosa

Radio SFWA(1) RADIO SFWA OFFICIAL VIDEO. Henry Lien has released the video of Radio SFWA as performed on stage at the Nebula Banquet in May.

Lien, who wrote the song as a recruiting anthem for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, sang as Emperor Stardust backed by the brilliantly-choreographed Eunuchs of the Forbidden City doing SFWA spellouts and other routines. They received a well-deserved standing-O at the end.

Click CC (Closed Captioning) to view the lyrics.

Click Settings to watch it in 1080 HD.

Emperor Stardust

  • Henry Lien (Nebula Nominee, SFWA Member)

The Eunuchs of the Forbidden City

  • Liz Argall (SFWA Member)
  • Tina Connolly (Norton Nominee, SFWA Member)
  • Alyx Dellamonica (SFWA Member)
  • Patrice Fitzgerald (SFWA Member)
  • Fonda Lee (Norton Nominee, SFWA Member)
  • Reggie Lutz (Future SFWA Member)
  • Kelly Robson (Nebula Nominee, SFWA Member)

(2) MIDWESTERN MIGHTINESS. “Marvel reveals New Great Lakes Avengers Series”Nerdist has the story.

They’re not Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. They’re not even the West Coast Avengers. At one point, they received a cease-and-desist order to prevent them from using the Avengers name. But their tenacity could not be stopped and their inherent silliness endeared them to readers all around the world. And that is precisely why Marvel is announcing today, exclusively on Nerdist, that they are bringing back the Great Lakes Avengers in an all-new monthly ongoing comic book series….

Let’s begin with the obvious question: why is now the right time to revive the Great Lakes Avengers?

“Now is the time for Great Lakes Avengers to return, one, because I simply want to do it,” [editor Tom] Brevoort joked. “They need to give me perks to keep doing the comics that people like and that sell really well,” he added with a laugh.

Great-Lakes-Avengers-Cover

(3) SALTIRE. At another spot on the map, BBC reports a “Scottish superhero challenge to Marvel and DC Comics”.

Glaswegian [John] Ferguson, who set up Diamondsteel Comics with his Lancashire-born wife Clare, said other elements of Scotland’s past and folklore also feature.

He said: “The Stone of Destiny, the Blue Stanes, the Loch Ness Monster and the Caledonian Fae traditions all have a significant place in the Saltire universe.

“Saltire’s origin is built from myth and legend so a comparison might be Marvel’s Thor although perhaps a bit darker and grittier. He does have an iconic visual appeal similar to the famous American superheroes.”

A year in the making, Saltire: Legend Eternal, the first comic book in a new series of the comics has been “meticulously inked, coloured and lettered” to compete with the high standards set by Marvel and DC Comics, said Ferguson.

(4) WHO NEEDS A DEGREE? Recently, David Tennant and Steven Moffat each received honorary degrees from different schools in Scotland.

Dr Who star David Tennant has travelled back in time to his old acting school to pick up an honorary degree.

The Broadchurch actor has been awarded an honorary drama doctorate from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

The 46-year-old was recognised during a ceremony in Glasgow.

Tennant studied drama at the Royal Conservatoire between 1988 and 1991, then known as the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, before enjoying success on stage and screen.

He said: “I’m honoured and rather humbled to be here – it’s all quite overwhelming but lovely to be back. It evokes some very vivid memories.

“It was a very important time for me. I don’t think I would have survived without my time here – for me it was essential. Three years of getting to practice in a safe environment.

“I was quite young, quite green, and I did a lot of growing up here and learned an enormous amount. They were very formative years that I look back on very fondly.”

Dr Who writer Steven Moffat also received an honorary degree from the University of the West of Scotland in Paisley.

(5) TRUDEAU. In Yanan Wang’s story for the Washington Post, “How Canada’s prime minister became a superhero”, about Justin Trudeau’s appearance in the Marvel comic Civil War II: Choosing Sides  she explains that writer Chip Zdarsky (who writes as “Steve Murray”) put Justin Trudeau in the comic book because his father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, made an earlier appearance with the Alpha Flight team (who are Canadian superheroes) in the 1980s.

She also unleashes this quote from Peter C. Newman, a prominent Canadian business journalist:

“If God had meant for us to be heroic, he wouldn’t have made us Canadians.  This is the only country on Earth whose citizens dream of being Clark Kent, instead of Superman.” To regard themselves as heroes would be “boastful,” Newman observed, which Canadians were decidedly not.

(6) CONTROVERSY. “In His New Novel, Ben Winters Dares to Mix Slavery and Sci-Fi”, a New York Times article, covers a lot of ground about a book whose reception is all over the spectrum.

In Ben H. Winters’s chilling new thriller, “Underground Airlines,” a bounty hunter named Victor tracks fugitives for the United States Marshals Service. But his mission, like his past, is complicated: The people he’s chasing are escaped slaves. Their main crime is rejecting a life of forced servitude. And Victor himself was once one of them.

From the moment he started writing it, Mr. Winters knew that “Underground Airlines” was creatively and professionally risky. The novel tackles the thorny subject of racial injustice in America. It takes place in a contemporary United States where the Civil War never happened, and slavery remains legal in four states, and it’s narrated by a former slave who has paid a steep moral price for his freedom.

“I had reservations every day, up to the present day, because the subject is so fraught, and rightfully so,” Mr. Winters said. “It isn’t as if this is ancient history in this country.”

Mr. Winters, 40, has pulled off high-wire acts before. As one of the early literary mash-up artists, he churned out zany best sellers like “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” and “Android Karenina.” His best-selling trilogy, “The Last Policeman,” is a genre-defying blend of crime writing and science fiction, starring a stoic police officer trying to solve crimes as the world braces for a catastrophic asteroid collision….

“He’s taking a direct whack at one of the main critical things that’s happening in this country right now,” said Lev Grossman, a book critic and author of the fantasy series “The Magicians.” “This is a white writer going after questions of what it’s like to be black in America. It’s a fearless thing to do.”

(7) WORLDCON IN MEMORIAM LIST. Steven H Silver announced that the deadline for getting names onto the In Memoriam list for the MidAmeriCon II program book is Friday, July 8.  Names currently under consideration can be found at http://www.midamericon2.org/home/general-information/memoriam-page/. Suggestions for additional names can be made there as well.  Any names suggested after July 8 will make it into the Hugo scroll, but not the program book.

(8) TODAY IN SILLY HISTORY

  • July 5, 1935 — Hormel Foods introduced the canned meat product SPAM.

(9) DID YOU PAY ATTENTION? Den of Geek put the Back to the Future movies under a microscope and came up with “The Back to the Future Trilogy: 88 Things You Might Have Missed”. The most I can say is that I hadn’t missed all of them. Take number one, for example:

  1. The Doc’s clocks (I)

As the first film opens and we pan across Doc Brown’s incredible assortment of clocks – all previously synchronized to be exactly 25 minutes slow – the eagle-eyed may notice that one of the clocks features a man hanging from its hands. It’s actually silent comedy star Harold Lloyd, dangling from a clock in perhaps his most famous turn in 1923’s Safety Last. Aside from being a cool little nod to a past movie, it also prefigures the later scene in which Doc hangs from the Hill Valley clock in near-identical fashion.

(10) FUTURE WARFARE. Jeb Kinnison will be on the “Weaponized AI and Future Warfare” panel at LibertyCon, and is preparing by organizing his thoughts in a series of highly detailed blog posts.

In Part I of Weaponized AI: My Experience in AI, Kinnison shares details of his professional background in technology, which informs the rest of his discussion.

Autonomous control of deadly weaponry is controversial, though no different in principle than cruise missiles or smart bombs, which while launched at human command make decisions on-the-fly about exactly where and whether to explode. The Phalanx CIWS automated air defense system (see photo above) identifies and fires on enemy missiles automatically to defend Navy ships at a speed far beyond human abilities. Such systems are uncontroversial since no civilian human lives are likely to be at risk.

DARPA is actively researching Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS). Such systems might be like Neal Asher’s (identity) reader guns, fixed or slow-moving sentries equipped to recognize unauthorized presences and cut them to pieces with automatic weapons fire. More mobile platforms might cruise the skies and attack any recognized enemy at will, robotically scouring terrain of enemy forces:…

Many of the readers of Mil SF have had experience in the military themselves, which makes platoon-level fighting stories especially involving for them. The interpersonal aspects are critical for emotional investment in the story — so a tale featuring a skinny, bespectacled systems operators fighting each other by running AI battle mechs from a remote location doesn’t satisfy. Space marines a la Starship Troopers are the model for much Mil SF — in these stories new technology extends and reinforces mobile infantry without greatly changing troop dynamics, leaving room for stories of individual combat, valorous rescue of fellow soldiers in trouble, spur-of-the-moment risks taken and battles won by clever tactics. Thousands of books on this model have been written, and they still sell well, even when they lack any rationale for sending valuable human beings down to fight bugs when the technology for remote or AI control appears to be present in their world.

One interesting escape route for Mil SF writers is seen in Michael Z Williamson’s A Long Time Until Now, where the surrounding frame is not space travel but time travel — a troop from today’s Afghanistan war find themselves transported back to paleolithic central Asia with other similarly-displaced military personnel from other eras and has to survive and build with limited knowledge of their environment.

(11) KRUSHING IT. At secritkrush, Chance Morrison has launched a review series about Hugo-nominated short fiction. Still looking for one that Morrison liked…

Novella it a tough length. Most of the time Novellas feel like they are either bloated short stories which could benefit from an edit or a story which really ought to be expanded into a novel to do it justice. Binti is one of the latter….

Why, given this setup, was the book not a comedy, even a dark one because I really cannot take it seriously but it is really not funny?

One day Google (the search engine) develops consciousness and decides that it doesn’t want to be evil, unlike Google the company….

Writing stories under 1000 words is exceedingly difficult. Writing one of the five best (allegedly) SF short stories of the year in less than a thousand words? Highly unlikely.

Data and River Tam/Jessica Jones together at last! They fight crime commit crimes….

(12) ON THE TRAIL. Lisa Goldstein feels a little more warmly about “’And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead’” – at least room temperature.

“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander is the only novelette on the Hugo ballot that was not also on the Rabid Puppies’ slate.  To get that far, against all the Puppies voting in lockstep, means that it’s probably a very popular story.  I liked it as well, but I had some reservations.  Which puts me in a minority, so you should definitely read it and make up your own mind.  Hey, I don’t claim to be infallible here.

(13) WORLDCON ANNOUNCES FILM FESTIVAL. The 2016 Worldcon will host the MidAmeriCon II International Film Festival.

The Festival will showcase the best film shorts, features and documentaries from around the world, spanning the science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comic genres. Many film makers will also be in attendance and taking part in Q&A sessions to provide a unique behind the scenes perspective on their work.

The MidAmeriCon II International Film Festival is being led by Nat Saenz, whose extensive track record in the field includes the Tri-City Independent/Fan Film Festival (www.trifi.org) as well as events at the 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015 World Science Fiction Conventions. Nat continues to bring a truly global perspective to his audience, with the 2016 programme including films from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Russia, Germany, Spain, Greece, France, Italy, and the UK, as well as the USA and Canada.

The Film Festival will run through all five days of the convention, starting at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, August 17 and concluding at 2 p.m. on Sunday, August 21.  All films are open to full and day attending convention members (subject to relevant age restrictions in line with film classifications). All screenings will take place at the Kansas City Convention Center.

A full screening schedule can be found at www.midamericon2.org/home/whats-happening/programming/film-festival/.

[Thanks to Henry Lien, Steven H Silver, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Dawn Incognito.]

154 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/5/16 Scrollamagoosa

  1. If there are any Puppies lurking about here, I hope they notice that, far from being monolithic or conformist in our opinions, there’s almost nothing we agree is “great” or “Hugo-worthy”. But we *are* pretty good about agreeing when something is just terribly written and shouldn’t have been on the ballot.

  2. Preparing to vote, I realize I started the Bollander story when it was first published because I liked the illustration but never finished it since I found it dull. Now I have to finish the damn thing. I hope it gets more interesting.

    It doesn’t. I did read it when it first got discussed here and totally forgot about it by the time the Hugo packet arrived.

  3. NickPheas on July 6, 2016 at 5:33 am said:
    Would an American pronounce the name of rodent like “swirl”? Would all Americans do so?

    I prefer to go full Soldier-of-the-Mist and call ’em “Shadowtails.”

    Fun with etymology!

  4. Re (10)

    Some coffee went up my nose when Kinnison wrote that many MilSF fans have experience in the military. While MilSF can be quite popular in some military circles, it’s a bit of a leap to say that because of that, most of its fans have military experience outside of Call of Duty and their minds. But I guess he must appeal to his market.

  5. Re: the hypothetical rhyming of “squirrel” and “girl”

    The question isn’t only whether there are dialects in which “squirrel” can be pronounced as a single syllable, but that there are dialects in which “girl” gets something like one and a half syllables. There are American dialects in which “r” is so strongly vocalic that it stakes out syllabic territory even when it isn’t part of a semi-vowel cluster, as in “girl”. E.g., there are dialects in which “hire” and “higher” are pronounced functionally identically.

    In such dialects, “girl” becomes something closer to “gir-ull”, which then requires less syllabic reduction on the part of squirrel to land in the same rhyme-space.

  6. It’s odd that you use Elektra as an example when Elektra has experienced some of the greatest personal failures that any person could ever experience

    Her defining character trait is that she kills people. She will always kill people and always kill the people she sets out to kill. She will die a few times but always come back. It’s hard to generate sympathy for the private life of a person whose primary character trait is to kill people. This is also true for the Punisher and a few others. It’s possible Elektra: Assassin still rocks socks, but my brother lost my copy years ago so I can’t check.

    And you are defining her principally by what she isn’t, rather than by what she is.

    I am literally telling you what she is like based upon my reading of the comics where all the things she does and says are manifestations of this personality.

    one of the chief ways in which the other person describes the characters is by recounting what the character has done, their achievements, and so forth.

    Some things she does: charms me, makes me laugh, and entertains the heck out of me. These are achievements I very much admire.

    Or at best, she is an incomplete character.

    That’s… not how character works? You’re only a collection of traits if you haven’t sweated blood and lost your family and committed mass murder for the greater good in your efforts to defeat Galactus? Jeeves & Wooster missed a few beats there.

    However, the bottom line is that unless she experiences something akin to a struggle in some aspect of her life at some point

    It’s a light, fun, smart, humorous comic. As with fully rounded and realised characters in other light, fun smart humorous works, she will, and does, experience light, fun, smart humorous struggles, as is entirely appropriate. If that’s not your thing, cool beans, but stop telling me misery is the only source of meaning in fiction, because that is a caricature of current comics.

  7. Heather Rose Jones: Speaking only for my tongue (!) the double-r in squirrel seems to be doing some work elongating the vowelishness, so that without making it a two-syllable word, it still doesn’t rhyme properly with girl. Though I know what you mean about some dialects elongating girl in the same way, so that it might….

  8. QUOTE OF THE DAY:

    Kyra: I consider SFWA to be a one-syllable word, pronounced as spelled.

  9. Hey, check out this story on Tor.com. It’s got to be one of the most gonzo stories (and opening lines) you’ll ever read.

  10. How do you pronounce squirrel?
    I favor vermin, or tree rat depending on the mood. My mom has been at war with the little bastards for forever (started over a garden) and continued over bird feeders (they wrecked her Yankee flipper) and her potted plants.
    My mom? She has an additional pronunciation: target.

  11. Sorry to be one more voice to rant about Seven Kill tiger, but why is this introduced as a “thought experiment”? Arent those suppose to be logical, scientific and having a point? If this is a thought experiment, Im offereing my own:

    A Mexican thinks all Americans are stupid. He walks into a church in Texas and blows up a bomb. The bomb explodes and everything in the United States is obliterated and everyone is dead.
    China and the EU agree to plant corn and wheat on the soil of the former United States and from that point on hunger is no longer a problem in the World.
    The End.

    Mike can acccept the Hugo Award on my behalf.

  12. “If that’s not your thing, cool beans, but stop telling me misery is the only source of meaning in fiction, because that is a caricature of current comics.”

    I haven’t said anything of the sort, despite this second attempt by you to misconstrue what I have been saying into that.

    Misery doesn’t equate to meaning. In fact, misery doesn’t even equal to struggle. However, struggle is a necessary element of successful storytelling, which is something that every freshman in high school learns within a week of taking his or her first creative writing class. That struggle can be large or it can be small. It can be something that makes the character miserable or it can be something that ultimately enlightens the character or it can be something that ennobles the character because the character’s struggle is about overcoming something around him and her.

    There is no struggle for Doreen Green, because Marvel’s writers don’t create one for her. She starts out every story a happy, go-lucky character and ends every story the same happy, go-lucky character. Time passes. She says funny things. The people around her say some funny things back to her. Then they run out of page space and the story, such that it was, ends.

    Occasionally, a big powerful adversary that every other character in the Marvel universe struggles to defeat shows up and Doreen defeats him or her within a few panels and moves on, having learned nothing from the experience, because she doesn’t have anything to learn. This is, by definition, a flat character. Obviously the writers are attempting to accomplish another narrative goal with the use of her, because developing the character is not it. They have no intention of developing the character and exert no effort to do so.

    This may be entertaining in a shallow way, but it isn’t really storytelling. Or at least, it isn’t storytelling in the sense that we were all taught storytelling. Finally, and once more, I have never claimed that MISERY equals anything. At most, I have said that conflict is the core of a story and with Squirrel Girl, we are never given anything resembling, if we broke down the narrative like we’ve all been taught to do, a central conflict.

  13. I’m central-New-York raised but resident in the midwest for fifty years, and I would rhyme “squirrel” and “girl” without blinking, though to my ear the former is clearly two syllables while the latter might (when my sothren tothe is operating) contract to “gurrl.” I distinguish “higher” and “hire” by eyeball or context (both are two syllables). But then, my speech is a hopeless mix of the places I’ve lived, my college and grad-school classmates (an unholy mix of NYC/Long Island, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Chicago), British TV shows, Marx Brothers movies, and a short stretch in Northumberland (oh, aye), all overlaid with nearly forty years of outstate Minnesota, doncha know.

    Oy, is this a great country (linguistically) or what.

  14. @BravoLimaPoppa ; For a long time I pronounced it “god dammit Mac eat the damn thing already!”

    Norwegian Forest Cat + semi-rural Tennessee = rodent apocalypse.

  15. There is no struggle for Doreen Green, because Marvel’s writers don’t create one for her.

    Obviously you can’t be reading the comic because that simply isn’t the case. If you are reading the comic then clearly it is not for you but I utterly and categorically reject the idea that there’s no conflict in the comic, albeit of a light, fun variety entirely in keeping with the tone of the book. What makes her an interesting superhero is her approach to conflict resolution – her ability to defuse threats and meet challenges with non-violent, lateral solutions is part of what the book is about – if you don’t appreciate that then I think your discourse on the manifold uses of struggle as a story-telling tool rings hollow.

  16. David Goldfarb asked:

    Someone spoil me: does this get dealt with, in between page 165 and when the Hard Rain actually happens?

    Not that I recall. There’ll be some more science holes to distract you from it, though.

  17. Fun with historical pronunciation: One of the more memorable moments of enlightenment I had when seeking out radio shows for Sasquan was hearing an adaptation of an Isaac Asimov robot story, introduced by John Campbell, in which everyone including Campbell pronounces “robot” approximately like “ro-butt”. I’ve been wondering ever since if this was the more common pronunciation within fandom at the time and when it might have died out.

  18. Peer Sylvester: Mike can acccept the Hugo Award on my behalf.

    What did they call that personal bulletproof armor in Ancillary Justice? I’ll be needing to order one of those generators to wear for the ceremony.

  19. Thanks Mike, I knew Youre up to the job!

    FWIW: I would rhyme squirell with SFWA

  20. @David Goldfarb

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t the heat transfer at a higher rate within the atmosphere than it would through space? Not that it wouldn’t reach the space station. Just that it would have a harder time making that trip as opposed to being contained within an ecosystem that provides a more efficient means of transfer (i.e. air) as well as a means of absorbing the energy (phase changes to water).

    There are some orbital issues that are integral to the plot.

    Gurer ner n pbhcyr bs pbasyvpgvat vffhrf rneyl ba. Gurl xabj gur VFF arrqf gb trg chfurq gb n uvture beovg sbe n ubfg bs ernfbaf vapyhqvat enqvngvir urng. Ohg gurl arrq vg va n ybjre beovg gb znxr vg rnfvre gb trg nqqvgvbany crbcyr/erfbheprf/zbqhyrf frag hc.

    Gur VFF vf nggnpurq gb na veba uhax bs zrgrbe. Fb bar bcgvba vf gb yrg gur veba zrgrbe npg nf n onggrevat enz jvgu gur erfg bs gur uhznavgl rkvfgvat va gur pyrne fcnpr gung sbyybjf nybat oruvaq.

    Ubjrire, zbivat gung ynetr uhax bs zrgrbe gb n uvture beovg erdhverf zhpu zber shry. Fb gur bgure bcgvba vf gb qrgnpu naq hfr gur ninvynoyr guehfg gb zbir rirelbar gb n uvture beovg.

    Naq nf jngre vf gur fbhepr bs shry sbe gur ebpxrg ratvarf, gurl unir gb or pnershy nobhg ubj zhpu jngre gurl hfr. Gurer vf n fpenzoyr sbe jngre nf jryy.

    Lrg nabgure snpgbe vf gung gur rnegu’f ngzbfcurer rkcnaqf nf vg vf urngrq. Fb gur nve sevpgvba jvgu gur VFF vapernfrf nf gur ngzbfgcurer rkcnaqf gbjneqf gur VFF ryringvba. Gurl pna’g fgnl va bar beovg, sbyybjvat oruvaq gur onggrevat enz/zrgrbe. Gvzr vf n snpgbe.

    V guvax gur pbzcrgvat vffhrf nyy perngr n oryvrinoyr nzbhag bs grafvba gung freirf gur cybg ernfbanoyl jryy.

    Jung trgf zr vf gung nyy bs gur yhane qroevf vf fher gb pbagnva puhaxf gung ner ynetr rabhtu gb vasyhrapr gur onggrevat enz. Nf gur VFF vf rvgure pybfr gb gur fnzr cynar nf gur zbba be vagrerfrpgf gung cynar ba n erthyne onfvf, V guvax gur yhane qroevf svryq jbhyq or zber bs n ceboyrz.

    Nyfb, V guvax gur nzbhag bs raretl orvat vzcnegrq gb gur rpbflfgrz vf cerggl fryrpgvir. Vg’f rabhtu gb pnhfr guvatf gb pbzohfg, ohg abg rabhtu gb ghea nyy gur jngre ba gur cynarg vagb fgrnz juvpu jbhyq unir xvyyrq bar bs gur gjb fheivivat tebhcf bs uhznaf ba gur cynarg. V qvq fbzr irel ebhtu onpx-bs-gur-rairybcr* pnypf naq sbhaq gur jvaqbj bs yhane znff gung npuvrirf gur erfhyg va gur obbx gb or cerggl aneebj.

    *ebhtu rabhtu gung V’z abg funevat. V’z fher gur trareny fpnyr vf ernfbanoyr, ohg xabj gung gur nffhzcgvbaf V znqr ner tebff rabhtu gb or ynhtunoyr gb nalbar gung vfa’g zber guna 20 lrnef erzbirq sebz hfvat pbyyrtr culfvpf naq pnyphyhf ba n qnvyl onfvf.

    On other subjects:

    (2) Never heard of ’em before. Not surprised that the Midwest isn’t the source of a more serious group of Marvel heroes. Also, the cover doesn’t appear very diverse for a Detroit based story. Unless they are in the ‘burbs. In which case it still isn’t very diverse.

    Just started “Between Two Thorns” by Emma Newman. She set the hook (for me) at the end of the third chapter. So I guess I’m in for the long haul!


    Regards,
    Dann

  21. fnzr cerzvfr nf frirarirf, n jbeyq jvgubhg gur zbba. Jnf gurer n punyyratr tbvat nebhaq? Na negvpyr gung tbg n ohapu bs crbcyr guvaxvat nobhg gur vqrn? GSF vf fb zhpu orggre guna gur ovgf bs Frirarirf V pbhyq trg guebhtu gung V qba’g guvax V’yy rira obgure jvgu gur Fgrcurafba (fbeel qhqr) (abg fbeel).

    Lots of similarities (end of the world theme in particular) and the comparison I think shows how good The Fifth Season is. There are enough commonalities that you can compare how much better Jemisin manages them than Stephenson – and I quite like Seveneves!

  22. Camestros Felpaton: skwi-rhull doesn’t rhyme with gerl no matter how I say it

    Mr. Spock questions the logic of your statement, for if you said it enough different ways … you’d have an audiobook of Shakespeare spoken by monkeys. Or something.

  23. Is this talk of Squirrel Girl reminding anyone else of The Flying Squirrel from “The Tick vs. Education”? (Battle cry: “I like squirrels!”) Just me? Okay!

    Also the first time I heard anyone pronounce robot as “ro-butt” was Rod Serling introducing a Twilight Zone.

  24. E.g., there are dialects in which “hire” and “higher” are pronounced functionally identically.

    Wait. You mean they can be pronounced non-identically? *boggle*

  25. Mike Glyer on July 6, 2016 at 12:59 pm said:
    Camestros Felpaton: skwi-rhull doesn’t rhyme with gerl no matter how I say it

    Mr. Spock questions the logic of your statement, for if you said it enough different ways … you’d have an audiobook of Shakespeare spoken by monkeyssquirrels. Or something.

    FIFY

  26. Dawn Incognito asked:

    Is this talk of Squirrel Girl reminding anyone else of The Flying Squirrel from “The Tick vs. Education”?

    Well, it got me thinking of the Flying Squirrel from the Red Panda Adventures.

    Also the first time I heard anyone pronounce robot as “ro-butt” was Rod Serling introducing a Twilight Zone.

    Was it just him, or did the actors pronounce it that way too?

  27. To our gracious host: is there any convenient compendium of reviews of this years Hugo finalists? Now that I’m finally digging into the packet in earnest, I find myself incredibly curious about what other people have had to say.

  28. I think I generally pronounce squirrel to rhyme with girl. Squirelly and girly definitely rhyme. And both rhyme with swirly, so there you are.

    On the issue of “girl,” I am thinking of a British cast recording for the musical Company in which some old Brit who is supposed to be playing an American (like all of the roles in that show) keeps singing, “Have I got a gel* for you, boy oh boy.” I want them to cast someone who can at least pretend to be using an American accent, because “Have I got a gel for you” is just odious.

    But there seem to be no end of Americans who pronounce the word “tour” in one syllable as if it were “tore,” as opposed to two syllables and more like “tewer.” I am a “tewer” person, because that is the way I learned it. As opposed to learnt it. I might be willing to accept “I am going on [tur],” but never “I am going on [tor].”

    *Pronounced like the first syllable in gelding. Hard g, as in goofy grape with a great gaping wound, but not a soft g, as in gelatin.

  29. @Doctor Science: What I wasn’t expecting was that The Fifth Season has gur fnzr cerzvfr nf frirarirf, n jbeyq jvgubhg gur zbba. Jnf gurer n punyyratr tbvat nebhaq? Na negvpyr gung tbg n ohapu bs crbcyr guvaxvat nobhg gur vqrn? GSF vf fb zhpu orggre guna gur ovgf bs Frirarirf V pbhyq trg guebhtu gung V qba’g guvax V’yy rira obgure jvgu gur Fgrcurafba (fbeel qhqr) (abg fbeel).

    Dang, I didn’t even think about that–cannot remember now which I read first–but whichever one it was, no brain cells were fired with ha, interesting element!

    I adore TFS, the geology (I was raised by a geologist) being but ONE of the reasons, and yes, the second person pov is beautifully done. If the graduate course I taught it in last spring is any indication, quite a few readers didn’t get the big reveal (of course they may have been hampered by being graduate English majors who, like many I have known, are NOT sff readers–these days I see more and more grad students who are major fans of comic books, tv and film, sff, but still only a relatively small percentage who are book fans).

    The different reasons for the shared thing are fascinating–we have a legend/myth to explain it in TFS as opposed to the very long explanations in Seveneves (which I actually found rather enjoyable but then I like infodumps and am not scientifically trained enough to catch the problems), and the placement in the plot: it’s the Most. Amazing. GRARGGHHHEEE@@@@!!! cliffhanger ever in TFS.

    Am chewing my nails until the next one comes out.

    Luckily for me, I found Rachel Caine’s Great Library series, two books so far, most recent one just out, and FLIPPED head over heels for it–brilliant worldbuilding, fascinating plot, superb premise (the Great Library of Alexandria was not destroyed–but the resulting ‘future’ is dystopian), and fantastic characterization.

    The first was published 2015 (why did I not KNOW!), the second, if it remains as good as it’s begun, I will nominate even if it is middle book of series (don’t know if it’s to be a trilogy or not!).

  30. @BigelowT

    Mum gets quite irate at various BBC Newsreaders saying “an ‘otel” so much for Received Pronunciation.

  31. Chiming in to say I saw the near rhyme or half rhyme (in my idiolect) of squirrel and girl right away, though the first has about 1.5 syllables, the second only one. But I have heard people whose pronunciation of “girl” has two syllables, so…..

    I’m also one whose pronunciation of “hire” and “higher” would not be that distinct….my Queens-born roomie mutters a lot about my pacific northwest dialect (Idaho then Washington state), especially the fact that “Don and “Dawn” are pronounced exactly the same. She pronounces a lot more of the “w” and “U”s in “au” dipthongs than I do.

    Now I must pimp the amazing Dictionary of American Regional English, created by linguists by talking to people all across the country about what words they use for common objects (is “Coke” a specific brand, or a generic; do you use “pop” or “soda” or both; do you gather eggs, or pick them, out in the chicken house, etc). While mass media and increasingly available technology is paring away at regional dialects, the U.S. because of its huge size, patterns of immigrant movement, and language change, has a LOT of different dialects.

  32. A brief update on reading – since I was recovering from illness, I got to read a lot more than I usually do.

    I worked my way through Ken Macleod’s Engines of Light trilogy which I enjoyed (but I’d have liked to explored the step into the future aspect of of his luminal travel a lot more).

    I also read The Corporation Wars: Dissidence by Macleod. That was a wild ride and I’ve got to wonder what’s happening back on Earth while all the action is going on in a distant star system.

    Then there was Paul McAuley’s Confluence trilogy. That was an interesting tribute to Wolfe (the language alone) and an attempt to move beyond him as well. McAuley definitely had ambition and I think this is an underappreciated work.

    Another was McAuley’s Into Everywhere which was OK and an interesting set up, but I didn’t find it as compelling as his other works.

    Then there’s Neil Asher’s Dark Intelligence. Meh. I don’t think I’ll pursue it beyond the first volume. To me it’s Culture light and the character’s aren’t as interesting.

    I’ve got Every Heart A Doorway and Sorcerer of the Wildeeps cued up for transit and lunch time reading. Maybe The Raven and the Reindeer as well.

  33. @bravo Indeed. I love the Confluence books dearly because of that resonance. If I hadn’t read Wolfe not long before, I’d have missed the connection.

  34. Maybe I should give Fifth Season amother try, I only got through two chapters the first time around. The language used seemed to designed to obscure rather than explain – but it’s getting a lot of praise.
    The Seveneves discussion helps clarify for me why Ninefox Gambit is not hard sci-fi, it’s because you can’t make statements like – according to my calculations, the degree of rot caused by x wouldn’t be enough for effect y. I would call it space opera.

  35. I would also love a digest of review-sites about this year’s Hugo nominees.

  36. Then there’s the set of US-ian dialects that practice conservation of ‘r’; it gets dropped at the end of words like “drawer,” leaving this dangling schwa, but added to words like “wash” so they are pronounced “warsh.” It has to be more than one dialect; both my mother (raised on the East Coast, mostly lived in the MidWest) and my MIL (pure Pacific Northwest) do it, but I think it might be generational. I don’t hear it in their parents and I rarely hear it in people my age or younger.

  37. Ooh! and don’t forget the “r” that JFK, for one, would put at the ends of non-rhotic words if the beginning of the next word was a vowel. So he would say, “We’re going to Cuba today,” but “We’re going to Cuber again tomorrow.”

    I keep thinking of a passage in Edward Eager’s book (probably Half Magic, but maybe Seven Day Magic) with the chant,
    “Lancelot’s a chur-rul!
    Beaten by a gur-rul!”
    So there’s an example going back to, um, the court of King Arthur. Yes. That’s the ticket.

  38. Finished Ancillary Mercy and loved it. I also realized that I finally got used to the “pronoun thing”.

    This book has lots of questions about personhood and free will and morality. AIs and ancillaries are essentially slaves, but Breq is a rare being in that she is an AI with the ability to choose her own damn orders. Some of her choices were surprising, but completely in tune with the character she has been revealed to be in the previous books.

    There are some extremely touching moments in this book, mostly relating to Breq’s relationship with Mercy of Kalr and her human crew. With her realization that she is taking Ship for granted, and also that her crew actually care about her. Who could possibly love an ancillary?

    Me, for one. I love the direct voice of Breq, her conscience, and the fact that she is pretty much constantly singing. I also find it adorable that her crew take comfort in her singing and try to put her at ease by singing themselves while going about their duties. Breq is tough and unafraid to make hard decisions, but also has a very deep moral code.

    I thought this was a great resolution to the series, but it leaves enough avenues open that I would love to see more stories set in the universe.

    I also now have a fierce craving for tea.

    There’s something Breq says that really resonated with me: “The point is, there is no point. Choose your own.” It reminds me of a line from the second-season Angel episode “Epiphany”: “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.” I guess that speaks to me because I’m an agnostic who has lots of existential thinky-thoughts.

    That’s four of the best novel finalists read. From favourite to least- so far:

    The Fifth Season
    Ancillary Mercy
    Uprooted
    The Aeronaut’s Windlass (trailing way behind)

    Second in line at the library for Seveneves, feeling some trepidation given the discussion I’ve seen about it. But my last Stephenson was Anathem which I really dug, so who knows?

  39. Mike Glyer on July 6, 2016 at 12:59 pm said:

    Camestros Felpaton: skwi-rhull doesn’t rhyme with gerl no matter how I say it

    Mr. Spock questions the logic of your statement, for if you said it enough different ways … you’d have an audiobook of Shakespeare spoken by monkeys. Or something.

    Mr Spock is right to question me as I see my statement is ambiguous and open to three plausible readings:
    1. asserting that the two words don’t rhyme is independent of how I may pronounce them (i.e. even if they do rhyme when I say them, that is not the test of whether they intrinsically rhyme)
    2. asserting that in general, these two words don’t rhyme taking into account the complete space of my pronunciations of them
    3. asserting that in the complete of my pronunciations of each word there is no pairing that rhymes

    1. is not what I meant
    3. is definitely false. For example I might pronounce skwi-rhull the way I would normally pronounce “glass” and pronounce gerl the way I would normally pronounce “bass” (as in the fish) and the two words would rhyme. I think this is Mr Spock’s point.

    I believe that 2 is true but it is too strong. It is true because the complete space of how I might pronounce either word is vast and the number of pairings in that space that would rhyme would be so tiny in comparison that it would be effectively zero. However, using that criterion nothing rhymes.

    Mr Spock and I would then have a problem. We would have together demonstrated the mathematical improbability of rhyme and yet empirical observation would show that rhyme was prevalent. How to explain the anomaly? God? That would be at odds with Mr Spock’s Neoplatonist view of the deity which would not permit God and mathematics to be at odds. Sin? Is rhyming a rebellion against nature and hence the work of the devil? This seems too fanciful an explanation for either of us.

    While our finding would seem to indicate an element of design in our surroundings it would still be at odds with theological explanations. Whence therefore comes the rhymes? The most parsimonious explanation is that both Mr Spock and I are in a simulation. The most likely culprits being Romulans with a holodeck messing with our heads because they do love their shenanigans. Having seen through the facade of reality, the simulation would collapse and we’d fight our way to freedom. Only to discover that we now lived in a universe full of blank verse.

    Mr Spock though has an excellent memory and a fine singing voice. For example, he memorised the complete lyrics of the song “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred whilst he and I were trapped in the Romulan simulation. In addition, he is now the only person in the universe with a full repertoire of rhyming pop-hits.

    Mr Spock goes onto to take over the universe as a kind of ultimate pop-idol. Not even the Klingons can resist the infectious yet banal rhymes of hat & that, car & far, Milan & Japan or even shirt & hurts.

    Or I might be wrong. It’s one or the other really.

  40. @Camestros Felapton

    There are enough commonalities that you can compare how much better Jemisin manages them than Stephenson

    I don’t think it’s quite fair to compare SF and Fantasy straight up. Magic is always going to look more elegant and unassailable than science.

  41. Checking in on the reading of Hugo-nominated novels, my current gym-treadmill book is Uprooted. And I’m starting to ruminate on what I believed was my willingness to be spoiled by reading other people’s reactions before reading a book.

    On the one hand, my reading priorities are my own, and I have no interest in dashing off to prioritize the next Hot New Book that everyone’s talking about. Many HNB’s never make it onto my queue at all. But neither am I going to deliberately avoid reading people’s discussions of a HNB, because if I never get around to reading it, those discussions will be the basis of my general background cultural literacy.

    But I’m getting idly curious about what I’d think of Uprooted if I hadn’t read all those reactions and discussions about it beforehand. I honestly don’t know. At any rate, when I finish (which may be another couple of weeks at this point), I’ll post my own review on my blog and probably talk about this conundrum some more.

  42. @robinareid – DARE is one of my favorite things! I really just need to splurge and buy it for myself. I really hope their gofundme and other initiatives are successful enough for them to develop the web and app features they want to develop. UW-Madison’s been gutted in so many ways, though, that I fear this will be one more casualty.

  43. Doctor Science: I don’t find TFS to be so much “epic fantasy” (as it says on the cover, wtf) as “Clarke’s Law-Level SF”. The fact that the Science in this SF is geology of course fills me with great glee

    My perspective is that it’s not Geology Science Fiction. It’s Geology Magic / Fantasy.

    There may be more science fiction in subsequent books if they get more into the details of what appears to be a technological remnant from previous age (which clearly still involves a big element of magic). But apart from that, and the descriptions of the geological results of the magic, there’s not much science in The Fifth Season.

  44. A propos of contemporaneous books with similar themes, both Bradley P. Beaulieu’s The Twelve Kings of Sharakhai and Cat Rambo’s The Beasts of Tabat share such a similar premise starting out, that I wondered if they were both the result of a writing workshop challenge to produce a story based on “young woman becomes a kickass gladiatorial fighter and has adventures with her young male friend”. It was an unfortunate comparison for the second book, which I didn’t feel came anywhere near being as good as the first.

Comments are closed.