Pixel Scroll 8/11/18 Pixel of Steel, Scroll of Kleenex

(1) BOURDAIN IN NARNIA. The New Yorker Recommends’ Helen Rosner links to “‘No Reservations: Narnia,’ a Triumph of Anthony Bourdain Fan Fiction”.

Of all the billions of pages that make up the Internet, one of my very favorites contains “No Reservations: Narnia,” a work of fan fiction, from 2010, by Edonohana, a pseudonym of the young-adult and fantasy author Rachel Manija Brown. The story is exactly what it sounds like: a pastiche of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Channelling the casual charisma of Bourdain’s first-person writing, Brown finds him visiting the stick-wattled burrow of sentient moles, where he dines on pavender (a saltwater fish of Lewis’s invention) and is drunk under the table by a talking mouse. He slurps down eel stew and contemplates the void with mud-dwelling depressives. Later, he bails on an appointment at Cair Paravel, the royal seat of Narnia, to bloody his teeth at a secretive werewolf feast.

“No Reservations: Narnia” (2010) begins —

I’m crammed into a burrow so small that my knees are up around my ears and the boom mike keeps slamming into my head, inhaling the potent scent of toffee-apple brandy and trying to drink a talking mouse under the table. But is it really the boom mike that’s making my head pound? I know for sure that my camera man doesn’t usually have two heads. I have to face facts. The mouse is winning.

Yesterday, I thought I knew what to expect from Narnia: good solid English cooking spiced up with the odd unusual ingredient, and good solid English people spiced up with the odd faun. And centaur. And talking animal. I’d longed to visit Narnia when I was a kid, but every time the notoriously capricious entry requirements, such as the bizarre and arbitrary lifetime limit on visits, relaxed the slightest bit, it would get invaded, get conquered, get re-conquered by the original rulers, or get hit by some natural disaster….

Cat Eldridge sent the links with a note: “Weirdly enough Rachel Manija Brown was once a reviewer for Green Man Review.

(2) TUNE IN THE HUGOS. Kevin Standlee outlined the “2018 Hugo Ceremony Coverage Plans” on the award’s official website.

The 2018 Hugo Awards Ceremony is scheduled for Sunday, August 19, 2018 at 8:00 PM North American Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7) in the McEnery Convention Center Grand Ballroom in San Jose, California. The ceremony is open to all attending members of Worldcon 76, with additional seating available in “Callahan’s Place” in the convention center Exhibit Hall.

The Hugo Awards web site will once again offer text-based coverage of the Hugo Awards ceremony via CoverItLive, suitable for people with bandwidth restrictions. For those with the bandwidth for it, Worldcon 76 San Jose plans to offer live video streaming of the Hugo Awards ceremony. Details of the live-streaming coverage will be available at the 2018 Worldcon web site.

The Hugo Awards web site coverage team of Kevin Standlee, Susan de Guardiola, and Cheryl Morgan plan to be “on the air” approximately fifteen minutes before the ceremony. You can sign up at the CoverItLive event site for an e-mail notification before the event starts. Remember that the CoverItLive text coverage is text-only, and is likely to not be in synch with the video streaming. Also, the CoverItLive team here at TheHugoAwards.org is not responsible for the video streaming coverage and cannot answer any questions about it.

(3) VISA PROBLEMS. Another example of security screening that interferes with cultural exchanges. The Guardian reports some authors are having exceptional difficulty getting visas to attend a book festival in Scotland: “Home Office refuses visas for authors invited to Edinburgh book festival”.

According to Barley, the dozen authors were asked to provide three years’ worth of bank statements to demonstrate financial independence, despite being paid to participate in the Edinburgh book festival, and having publishers and the festival guaranteeing to cover their costs while in the UK. Barley said any deposits that could not be easily explained were used as grounds to deny the authors’ visas; one had to reapply three times due to her bank statements.

“It is Kafkaesque. One was told he had too much money and it looked suspicious for a short trip. Another was told she didn’t have enough, so she transferred £500 into the account – and then was told that £500 looked suspicious. It shouldn’t be the case that thousands of pounds should be spent to fulfil a legitimate visa request. I believe this is happening to many arts organisations around the country, and we need to find a way around it.”

Barley called the situation humiliating, adding: “One author had to give his birth certificate, marriage certificate, his daughter’s birth certificate and then go for biometric testing. He wanted to back out at that point because he couldn’t bear it, but we asked him to continue. Our relationship with authors is being damaged because the system is completely unfit for purpose. They’ve jumped through hoops – to have their applications refused.”

The Scottish first minister called on the government to fix the problem: “Authors’ visa struggles undermine book festival, says Sturgeon”

Nicola Sturgeon has accused the UK government of undermining the Edinburgh international book festival by failing to resolve authors’ difficulties in obtaining visas.

The festival’s director, Nick Barley, has said some of the invited writers have been “humiliated” by the process they had to endure to get into the UK.

Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, who will take part in the event, tweeted on Thursday that the difficulties were “not acceptable” and the government “needs to get it sorted”.

Barley said about a dozen people had gone through an extremely difficult process to obtain a visa this year and several applications remained outstanding. The festival starts on Saturday and will feature appearances by 900 authors and illustrators from 55 countries.

Festival organisers provide assistance with visa applications and they have reported an increase in refusals over the past few years. Barley said one author had to supply his birth certificate, marriage certificate and his daughter’s birth certificate and go for biometric testing in order to get his visa.

He said the UK’s reputation as a global arts venue could be seriously hindered if problems in obtaining visas worsened after Brexit.

(4) DISCRIMINATION. David Farland (pseudonym of Dave Wolverton, currently the Coordinating Judge, Editor and First Reader for the Writers of the Future Contest), blogged about his view of “Discrimination in the Writing World”.

A few days ago, I saw a Facebook post from a woman who complained that she didn’t want to see panels by “boring, old, white, cisgender men” at the upcoming World Science Fiction Convention. Now, I’ve always fought against discrimination based on age, race, sexual orientation, and gender, so I was kind of surprised that this person managed to offend me at every single level. I can’t help it if I was born sixty years ago, male, white, and cisgender.

There is a concerted effort by some special interest groups to push certain agendas. More than twenty years ago, just before the Nebula awards, I remember hearing a woman talking to others, pointing out that if they all voted for a certain story by a woman, then she’d certainly win. Apparently the ethics of judging stories based upon the gender of the author eluded her, but it worked. The story written by the woman won.

With the Hugos, white men in particular are not even getting on the ballots, much less winning.

The question is, if you’re a writer, what do you do? What if you write a book, and you don’t fit in the neat little category that publishers want?

For example, what if you’re male and you want to write a romance novel? What are your chances of getting published? How well will you be welcomed into the writing community? Isn’t a good story a good story no matter who wrote it?

Apparently not. I had a friend recently who created a bundle of romance novels and put them up for sale. She had ten novels, nine by women and one by a man, and it sold terribly. Why? Because the nine female romance writers refused to even tell their fans about the bundle because there was a male author in the bundle. So instead of selling tens of thousands of bundles, as she expected, she sold only a few hundred.

Of course, discrimination is pretty well institutionalized in the publishing industry. By saying that it is institutionalized, what I mean is that in certain genres, your chances of getting published are based upon your gender.

(5) NICHOLS HAS DEMENTIA. Hope Schreiber, in the Yahoo! Entertainment story “Nichelle Nichols, actress who portrayed the iconic Lieutenant Uhura in ‘Star Trek,’ diagnosed with dementia”,  cites a TMZ report that Nichols is under the care of a conservator.

Nichelle Nichols, the actress who brought Lieutenant Uhura in Star Trek to life, has been diagnosed with dementia, according to conservatorship documents obtained by TMZ. She is 85 years old.

TMZ says that Dr. Meena Makhijani, a specialist in osteopathic medicine, has been treating Nichols for the last two to three years. According to Makhijani, the disease has progressed. Nichols has significant impairment of her short-term memory and “moderate impairment of understanding abstract concepts, sense of time, place, and immediate recall,” according to TMZ.

However, the actress’s long-term memory does not seem to be affected at this time, nor are her body orientation, concentration, verbal communication, comprehension, recognition of familiar people, or ability to plan and to reason logically.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

  • Born August 11 – Ian McDiarmid, 74. Star Wars film franchise including an uncredited appearance in The Empire Strikes Back, other genre appearances in DragonslayerThe Awakening (a mummies horror film with Charlton Heston), The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles series and reprising his SW role in the animated Star Wars Rebels series.
  • Born August 11 – Brian Azzarello, 56. Comic book writer. First known crime series 100 Bullets, published by Vertigo. Writer of DC’s relaunched Wonder Woman series several years back. One of the writers in the Before Watchmen limited series. Co-writer with Frank Miller of the sequel to The Dark Knight Returns,  The Dark Knight III: The Master Race.
  • Born August 11 – Viola Davis, 53. Amanda ‘The Wall’ Waller in the first Suicide Squad film; also appeared in The Andromeda Strain, Threshold and Century City series, and the Solaris film.
  • Born August 11 – Jim Lee, 44. Korean American comic-book artist, writer, editor, and publisher.  Co-founder of Images Comics, now senior management at DC though he started at Marvel. Known for work on Uncanny X-Men, Punisher, Batman, Superman and WildC.A.T.s.
  • Born August 11 – Will Friedle, 44. Largely known as w actor with extensive genre work: Terry McGinnis aka the new Batman in Batman Beyond which Warner Animation now calls Batman of the Future, Peter Quill in The Guardians Of The Galaxy, Kid Flash in Teen Titans Go!, and Thundercats! to name but a few of his roles.
  • Born August 11 – Chris Hemsworth, 35. Thor in the MCU film franchise, George Kirk in the current Trek film franchise, and King Arthur in the Guinevere Jones series;  also roles in Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, Snow White and the Huntsman and its sequel The Huntsman: Winter’s War,

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) SAWYER’S SCHEDULE. Robert J. Sawyer clarified on Facebook his plans for Worldcon 76 in San Jose next week:

I’ll be there. However, many months ago I made a decision not to apply to be on programming. I don’t have a new book this year, and I figured there are lots of younger/newer/diverse writers who could use the panel slots I would have taken up.

This was meant to be a quiet, private choice, but since then, there’s been a big blowup about this year’s Worldcon programming (see https://file770.com/worldcon-76-program-troubles/), with people withdrawing from the program or complaining about not being put on it in the first place. My situation is neither of those (and the Worldcon programming has been redone to most people’s satisfaction now).

However, I will be making two public and one private appearances at the Worldcon, for those who want to see me or get books signed:

* On Friday, August 17, at noon, in room 210E at the Convention Center, I will be attending the unveiling of the new batch of Walter Day’s Science Fiction Historical Trading Cards, introducing the new authors being added to the set (I’m already on a card, as you can see); Walter Day will be giving away some of these collectible cards (including my own) to those who attend.

* Also on Friday, August 17, at 4:00 p.m., in the Dealers’ Room in the Convention Center, I will be autographing at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) table.

* And on Saturday, August 18, at 2:00 p.m., I’ll be hosting a meet-and-greet for my Patreon patrons; you can become a patron here, and get other cool perks, too: https://www.patreon.com/robertjsawyer

(9) AUSTRALIAN FANZINE ARCHIVE. Kim Huett reports, “The National Library of Australia not only has a significant fanzine collection, some of the librarians take an active interest in the fanzines in their care. Take for example this recent post which talks from an outsiders perspective about all sorts of Australian fanzines, some of which are actually about science fiction: “Fanzines For fans, by Fans”.

Fans of the TV shows, Star Trek and Doctor Who, have perhaps the best known examples of fandom in the mainstream but this isn’t where fanzines start. The fanzine Futurian observer was talking about a well-established Australian science fiction fan community back in 1940.

In a year in which the inescapable realities of war were everywhere, this little publication denounced ‘the threatening ban on magazines’, reported on Government ‘restrictions on pulp imports’ and referenced meetings in which quizzes and scientific discussions were star attractions.

One of the first lines in Issue #1 is a dire warning that Australian fans needed to be more engaged. In contrast, issue #35 talks about a parody newsletter from a convention that never happened and the author ‘hibernating’ from the ‘Sydney scene’ to avoid the ‘fighting, scratching and squabbling’.

You can read digitised copies of Futurian observer here.

Fanzines are a fascinating insight into the volatility of fan communities and how they operated at the time of publication.

(10) DOCTOR STRANGEMIND. Huett also sent a link to his own site with this introduction: “Anybody who is a fan of David Langford’s ‘As Others See Us’ segment in Ansible is going to really enjoy the latest installment of Doctor Strangemind. Have you ever wondered what the official Soviet line was in regards to science fiction? Well now you can read ‘The World Of Nightmare Fantasies’ and wonder no more: ’To Pervert & Stultify’. Really, I spoil you people,”

…I’ve reproduced the entire condensed version of The World Of Nightmare Fantasies here so you might enjoy the authors attempt to crush various butterflies of fiction with their rhetorical sledgehammer….

…The American Raymond F. Jones, experienced writer of “scientific” fantasies, attempts to lift the curtain of the future for the reader. He uses all his flaming imagination in describing a machine which analyses the inclinations , talents, character and other potentialities of a new-born infant. If it finds the child normal, it returns it to the arms of the waiting mother. If it finds a future “superman,” the mother will never see him again; he will be sent to a world “parallel” to ours where he will be raised without the help of parents. But woe to the baby the machine finds defective – it will be immediately destroyed. According to the “scientific” forecast of author Jones, a network of such machines will cover the world of the future.

This tale, monstrous in its openly fascistic tendency, appears in the American magazine Astounding, under the optimistic title of Renaissance. Jones’ fascist revelations are not an isolated instance in American science fiction literature. There are numerous such examples under the brightly colourful covers which enterprising publishers throw on the market in millions of copies. From their pages glares a fearful world, apparently conceived in the sick mind of an insane, a world of nightmare fantasies. Miasma, mental decay, fear of to-day and horror of the future: all these innumerable ills of capitalism are clearly reflected.

(11) WOTF. Past winner J.W. Alden says in his experience the Writers of the Future Contest was a tool of the Church of Scientology, no matter the public relations effort to portray them as separate: “Going Clearwater: The Illusory ‘Firewall’ of the Writers of the Future Contest”.

In 2016, I won Writers of the Future. At the time, I counted it as one of my proudest moments. A story I’d written, The Sun Falls Apart, took first place in a contest judged by some of the biggest names in the genre. I’m still proud of that part. Unfortunately, that sense of accomplishment was undermined by a negative experience which forced me to confront the actual nature of the contest: Writers of the Future is a Church of Scientology endeavor. I now believe its primary purpose is not to help emerging writers, but to further the aims of the church, primarily by promoting the name of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. I make no judgments on any individual’s religious beliefs, but since I won the contest, I have come to believe it exploits writers in pursuit of this goal….

The Firewall, many claim, exists to prevent the contest from becoming a platform for the church and to ensure there’s no proselytizing of winners–though one of the first things you learn when you go asking about the Firewall, is that it seems to mean different things to different people. It’s the Firewall that keeps the contest’s panel of judges onboard. The judges of this contest include big names in the genre–names like Brandon Sanderson, Orson Scott Card, Robert J. Sawyer, Larry Niven, and many more. Hence, it’s the Firewall that ultimately lends the contest legitimacy. In my opinion, the Firewall does not exist. Or at the very least, it doesn’t exist for everyone.

It didn’t exist for me.

After winning the contest he was asked to come to Clearwater, Florida and do a signing. Clearwater is home to the church’s Flag Service Organization.

And so, I’m not that surprised one afternoon when I receive a text message from Kate*, one of the employees of Author Services Inc., the (Church of Scientology-owned) organization that runs the contest. They ask if I’d be willing to take part in an event they describe as a “massive Barnes & Noble book signing” in Clearwater, FL in a few days. The last minute nature of this invitation seems odd, but not out of step with the general disorganization that winners grow used to when dealing with ASI. At first, I turn down this request. At the time, I live in the West Palm Beach area, and I’m not willing to drive across the state on such short notice. They respond by offering to fly me out and put me up in a hotel. At that point, I say, “Sure. Why not?” I mean, it’s just Barnes & Noble, right? Book signings are fun.

However, Alden says this is what really happened:

…After that, it’s finally time for the book signing . . . which is not taking place at a Barnes & Noble. It turns out the “Barnes & Noble signing event” is actually taking place here at the Fort Harrison Hotel, during a Scientology ceremony called “Flag Graduation.” Scientologists who underwent training at the Flag Building are having some kind of graduation ceremony. Part of the ceremonies will involve announcing my presence, then directing the congregation to my signing table for an autograph. After the day I’ve had, I am not shocked by this revelation. My belief in the Firewall has long since abandoned me. I am not happy about the bait and switch. But I’m not surprised, either.

I’m led into a huge conference room with a stage and hundreds of chairs. By the time we get there, it’s already packed full of Scientologists finding their seats. Tori leads me straight to the front row. At this point, I become genuinely worried about the possible public repercussions of this little trip. Just like in L.A., there are photographers and videographers everywhere. The thought of photos and video of me at an actual Church of Scientology event floating around somewhere is (at the time) concerning. What happens next tempers this concern somewhat, if only because it grants me the conviction that this is not the first Scientology event I’ve been photographed at. Before their graduation ceremony, they play a video of the Writers of the Future gala. A Church of Scientology official talks it up beforehand, citing it as part of L. Ron Hubbard’s legacy, with the underlying message that it’s one of the many Good Things the CoS is doing in the world. In other words, Writers of the Future (and not just the name–the video of the gala, the anthology, the words and likenesses of the winners) is used as internal propaganda at an official Church of Scientology event. That’s certainly how I interpreted it, anyway….

I first started telling the story above in private circles within the SFF writing community. Over the past two years, I’ve told it to fellow WotF winners, to friends at conventions, and in private online discussion groups. Most recently, I posted about it on Codex after Nick Mamatas and Keffy R.M. Kehrli spurred the aforementioned conversation on social media about the questionable aspects of the contest back in April. I also posted a couple of twitter threads around that time, in which I voiced frustrations about the contest and rage-faced over the revelation that unattributed quotations from Dianetics were included in Writers of the Future workshop materials. Since the tweetstorm, I’ve also been in discussion with former winners and even a few contest judges who reached out to me about it.

Since all of that started happening, I’ve also had run-ins with supporters of the contest who have accused me (and others) of trying to destroy it. Let me make one thing clear: I’m not trying to destroy Writers of the Future. For one, I don’t believe that is within my (or anyone’s) power, so even if that were my goal, I wouldn’t waste the effort. My goal is merely to inform emerging writers about the troublesome aspects of this contest, because I don’t think they’re talked about enough. That includes relating my own experience that bizarre weekend in Clearwater. If anyone sees that as an effort to delegitimize or destroy the contest, all I can say is this: if spreading the truth about something delegitimizes it, was it really legitimate in the first place? …

(12) MAIN AND OTHER STREAMS. Penguin Random House would be happy to sell you these “21 Books You’ve Been Meaning To Read”, a list with a surprising amount of sff. Not this first title, though. This one has been picked for its clever misspelling —

War and Peace

A legendary masterpiece, this book is synonymous with difficult reading, so why not challenge yourshelf.

(13) WRECK-IT RALPH RETURNS. Ralph Breaks the Internet – sneak peek.The movie comes to theaters November 21.

“Ralph Breaks the Internet” leaves Litwak’s video arcade behind, venturing into the uncharted, expansive and thrilling world of the internet—which may or may not survive Ralph’s wrecking. Video game bad guy Ralph (voice of John C. Reilly) and fellow misfit Vanellope von Schweetz (voice of Sarah Silverman) must risk it all by traveling to the world wide web in search of a replacement part to save Vanellope’s video game, Sugar Rush. In way over their heads, Ralph and Vanellope rely on the citizens of the internet—the Netizens—to help navigate their way, including Yesss (voice of Taraji P. Henson), who is the head algorithm and the heart and soul of the trend-making site “BuzzzTube,” and Shank (voice of Gal Gadot), a tough-as-nails driver from a gritty online auto-racing game called Slaughter Race.

 

[Thanks to John Hertz, Jumana Aumir, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Carl Slaughter, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Danny Sichel, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]

103 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/11/18 Pixel of Steel, Scroll of Kleenex

  1. So true: “Second, forget about awards. So many of them are rigged nowadays that they don’t mean much.”
    Hugos & Nebulas once had real economic clout. Now they don’t correlate with sales at all.
    I’ve had a long successful career and not won an award in decades since 1980s. But I’ve made millions. Still have an audience. Last book advance was $100,000.
    Amusing that those who call down “old white guys” are really just ole time racists.

  2. I can’t help it if I was born sixty years ago, male, white, and cisgender.

    I note he doesn’t deny being boring

    I remember hearing a woman talking to others, pointing out that if they all voted for a certain story by a woman, then she’d certainly win.

    All his reports are hearsay, but even if this is true, so?

    With the Hugos, white men in particular are not even getting on the ballots, much less winning.

    First on the list of finalists for Best Novel – The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi (Tor)

    The question is, if you’re a writer, what do you do? What if you write a book, and you don’t fit in the neat little category that publishers want?

    Write better.

    For example, what if you’re male and you want to write a romance novel?

    Well, you could always do what women have had to do for years to get published in other genres – use a pen name of a different genre. A number of men do this, and do very well.

    She had ten novels, nine by women and one by a man, and it sold terribly. Why? Because the nine female romance writers refused to even tell their fans about the bundle because there was a male author in the bundle.

    Sure, Jan.

    The irony of no.4 being under a story at no.3 of real discrimination against (one presumes) non-white foreign authors, does not escape this reader.

  3. Comment seems to have gotten lost, so reposting:
    (5)
    I read about this back in May.

  4. (4) For example, what if you’re male and you want to write a romance novel?

    Do what Tom E. Huff did and use the pen name Jennifer Wilde (and Edwina Marlow, Beatrice Parker, and Katherine St. Clair).

    Or, alternatively, be a whiny-ass about it on the internet.

  5. Gregory Benford on August 11, 2018 at 7:42 pm said:

    Amusing that those who call down “old white guys” are really just ole time racists.

    Haven’t you noticed? The definition of racism has been tweaked so that it applies only to white people.

  6. (3) This is discouraging. I’d like to think we can stop this nonsense in the US by kicking out the Trumpists, but if the UK is behaving this badly, kicking out the Trumpists is only the start.

    (4) Yeah, sadly, for Whiny Guy’s theory, plenty of men are writing romance novels. They’re not putting their real, unaltered names on them for the same basic reason that Caroline Janice Cherry was encouraged to alter her name, back in the 70s. That is, marketing. Straight white men still get plenty of awards; they just don’t get all or nearly all of them anymore. Most men do fine with that, and do manage to notice the straight white men still winning lots of awards.

    @Gregory Benford–I don’t quite know how to break this to you. The awards don’t go to the person with the biggest advance or the most royalties, and unlike in the 1980s, you’re no longer the person writing the exciting new stories we’ve never seen before. You have those past awards. You still have a large audience who love your work, which makes publishers happy to shell out money to publish your work. Why can’t you enjoy that, and your past awards, rather than being grumpy and resentful about today’s exciting, new writers telling different kinds of stories getting awards? Why can’t you be happy for, to pick two random examples, Ann Leckie and N.K. Jemisin?

    Personal update: Google account recovered. Interested in password saver recommendations.

  7. @Lis Carey: I use two for different purposes, Password Safe and LastPass. Probably LastPass is better for your purposes, just at a guess. Password Safe is kind of overkill for an individual, if you ask me, but it’ll probably always be free. I’m not as sure about LastPass.

    They’re both okay. I’m sure there other good ones.

    It’s a funny thing, how we, or at least I, feel about this stuff:

    I don’t trust my browser to hold my passwords, yet I trust the LastPass browser extension. I let LastPass hold my encrypted passwords, but I feel creepy about it.

    I have so few personal passwords–some accounts I just reset every time, then generate long random passwords–to remember that I don’t use a password manager myself. If I did, I think I’d use Password Safe: Everything on my machine until I send out a password. But at work, using LastPass is easier than using Password Safe. I have opinions.

  8. 4) As a cis het white guy, I have thought about some of those issues. In the end, I think that the truth is in the work. While Ann Leckie and N. K. Jemisin (as Lis mentioned) are writing top-level books that deserve all the attention and respect that it gets, the Puppy-supported writing is essentially dreck. That says everything to me.

  9. (4) Setting aside the question of whether anyone wants to attend panels of boring people, regardless of demographic, I’ll note that the presence of older white cis-gender men on panels not only isn’t a problem but is not in any danger of going away. What gets annoying is panels consisting only of older white cis-gender men…especially when the panels are on topics for which people not fitting that demographic would be very interesting contributors.

  10. Guys, if I never win another award and only make scads of money, and I decide this is a sign of oppression, will one of you kindly beat me with a wet noodle for awhile? (Yelling “GODSTALK!” while doing so is optional but encouraged.)

  11. 4) “So instead of selling tens of thousands of bundles, as she expected, she sold only a few hundred.” Is that a reasonable expectation? I’m translating that in my head to “selling thousands of copies of each of ten novels, which is tens of thousands of bundles”. When i say it like that, it seems a lot less likely.

  12. @wombat. OK, but only if it is an artisanal curated organic noodle, and you enjoy the beating.

  13. 4) When you’re used to special privilege, any move toward equality feels like oppression. One also wonders when was the last time he actually looked at a Hugo ballot.

    5) That’s sad.

    @ Darren: Anyone, of any color, can individually be a racist. Racism, though, is a systemic thing, and as such can only apply to those who benefit from it — whether intentionally or not. Which, sad to say, is still primarily white men.

    Sticky information is still not sticking.

  14. 3) The UK Home Office seems to have gone nuts of late, both in deporting or threatening to deport people who have lived lawfully in the UK for decades, worked and paid taxes there (see the Windrush scandal) and in refusing visa and going completely overboard in requesting documents. Foz Meadows recently tweeted about what she and her husband, both white Australians, experienced when her husband had a university teaching job in the UK.

    In fact, the tendency of the UK Home Office to treat anybody trying to enter their country as a potential criminal is why I haven’t yet registered for Eurocon 2019 in Belfast, though I was planning to go after WorldCon 77. But so far, it’s not known whether EU citizens will have to apply for a visa after Brexit as well and I am not giving the UK home office bank statements, original birth certificates, social media passwords, etc… just to be allowed to visit their country.

    4) As others have pointed out, there are male romance authors, both working under female pen names as well as under their own names. There is Tom E. Huff a.k.a. Jennifer Wilde, Leigh Greenwood, Gill a.k.a.Roger Sanderson, Bob Mayer, Peter O’Donnell a.k.a. Madeline Brent and others. The reason why a lot of romance readers are wary of male authors is that with the rise of self-publishing, plenty of male authors have tried their hand at romance, because they view it as easy money, usually without ever having read a single romance. The results are as you’d expect and so readers are wary.

    Regarding awards, it took fifteen years for the first woman and seventeen years for the first writer of colour to win a Hugo Award. Compared to that, a few years of mainly female winners are nothing. Not to mention that there are several men, including white men, nominated for the 2018 Hugo Awards in the fiction categories. John Scalzi, Kim Stanley Robinson, Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jackson Bennett and K.M. Szpara are all white and male. Yoon Ha Lee is male as well, though not white. If we include the YA not-a-Hugo, we also have Phillip Pullman and Sam J. Miller. So no, male writers are not being discriminated against. And if writers who once used to get nominations and awards no longer get them, that doesn’t mean that the system is rigged, it merely means that tastes have changed and that today’s audiences are looking for something different.

    6) Is Jim Lee really just 44? Cause that would make him younger than me and I recall reading his X-Men comics as a teenager in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

  15. Guys, if I never win another award and only make scads of money, and I decide this is a sign of oppression, will one of you kindly beat me with a wet noodle for awhile?

    Just one of us? We might have to draw lots.

    You know, I was kind of behind on my Hugo reading (it has been an interesting year), so I read a lot of it at the last minute and a significant number of the authors were men, quite a few of them white. I’d say I’m getting tired of hearing how not automatically dominating something is the same as not being there at all, but that’s not quite true. I’m totally and completely over it, actually.

    Old white dudes, please oh please, before you start feeling sorry for yourself (or at least subjecting the rest of us to your whining), will you actually do some math and then report accurately? You are not the majority, so it’s not really a surprise to the rest of us that you no longer dominate the majority of the slots on many awards ballots.

  16. Cora, you are correct, Jim Lee is 54.

    And Mike, if you go in to correct that, you might as well correct the publisher to Image.

  17. (6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS. I don’t believe I knew the “Ghostbusters” remake had a subtitle.

    (11) WOTF. When I see “WOTF,” my brain trips and I say, “WTF?” Then I go, “No, wait, that has an ‘O’ in it.”

    Minor in the grand scheme of it all, but #1 WTF was in that drink?! “Smells like vinegar” does not mean “is vinegar.” Probably harmless, but yeah, I wouldn’t’ve touched it, either! That’s just creepy. #2 And the medical questionnaire?! I’ve never heard of hotels with doctors on staff, so the lack of one doesn’t explain the creepy, detailed medical questionnaire.

    (12) MAIN AND OTHER STREAMS. Heh, cute. I had to read it a couple of times to catch the typo (I was too focused on the title).

  18. @Cora: If Farland/Wolverton wants to write M/M / gay romance, he wouldn’t need to use initials or a full pseudonym like plenty of women do in that sub-genre. 😉

  19. (1) That was very good! And now I’m hungry.

    (2) Their coverage was the only one up and running through the whole show last year. No griefers allowed to comment, and it runs on the smallest of bandwidth. Highly recommended.

    (3) Wow, that’s at least as bad and maybe worse than the US! I didn’t think that was possible (Too bad Scotland didn’t go indie before Brexit).

    (4) Boo hoo, poor SWM, only allowed to rule 98% of the world. And so many of his “facts” are either hearsay or completely wrong. He’s been spending too much time in the Scinos reality distortion field (See item #11).

    (5) Sad, but I suspected it last time I saw her at a con. However, she remains charming and gorgeous and delightful to listen to. I hope she has good people looking after her.

    (8) So polite, you’d think he was Canadian or something. 😉

    (10) Cuz of course Soviet SF wasn’t ever didactic and political either (I have some. The speechifying is… wow).

    @Lis: Seconding LastPass. It has saved my butt more than once. Just NEVER lose the master password.

    @Wombat: What kind of noodle do you want? Or not want?

  20. (2) TUNE IN THE HUGOS.

    The post title “Hugo Ceremony Coverage Plans” makes me think that it’s about buying a healthcare plan for the Hugo Ceremony. What’s the deductible on that? 😀

  21. (4) DISCRIMINATION

    With the Hugos, white men in particular are not even getting on the ballots, much less winning.

    This year’s novel finalists include John Scalzi and Kim Stanley Robinson. Going back over the last few years novel lists I can see Neil Stephenson, Jordan/Sanderson, Charles Stross, Scalzi (winner) & KSR again, GRRM, Mieville…etc etc.

    What is it about this particular issue that renders the complainers incapable of doing basic research?

    @Gregory Benford

    So true: “Second, forget about awards. So many of them are rigged nowadays that they don’t mean much.”

    So, which awards are rigged and in what way?

    Hugos & Nebulas once had real economic clout. Now they don’t correlate with sales at all.

    Do you want Hugos and Nebulas to improve sales (“economic clout”) or go to the best seller (“correlate with sales”)? Or are you trying to present this as evidence to suggest they are “rigged”?

    I’ve had a long successful career and not won an award in decades since 1980s. But I’ve made millions. Still have an audience. Last book advance was $100,000.

    Congratulations, I’m very happy for you. You seem to be forgetting your Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon and Sideways award nominations from the last decade though. Or do authors with six figure advances spurn anything less than the win nowadays?

    Amusing that those who call down “old white guys” are really just ole time racists.

    So who exactly is racially discriminating against you?

  22. (2) I only realised today (when it was pointed out to me) that, of course, the Hugo ceremony will be on MONDAY my time (early afternoon). Consequently I shan’t be wearing my normal Hugo ceremony garb of pyjamas & dressing gown. I’ll be at work doing whatever it is my job is supposed to be (I’m not sure but it involves meetings and sometimes PowerPoint slides).

    (4) oh dear

  23. Hmm, my posts seem to disappearing everywhere. I’ll try this once more.

    For (10), in the course of trying to track down one of the stories mentioned in the original article in Literaturnaya Gazeta (haven’t found that one, because the online archives at LG seem to go back only to 2007), I found what appears to be a different abridgement of the article than that used for the translation at the post. This one is from Tekhnika–molodyozhi (Technology for the Youth), called “In a World of Delirious Fantasy” (V mire bredovoi fantastiki), and it differs in great detail from the translation. (No mention of “The Lights of Mars,” for example.) It is credited to Anonymous Sovieticus and is available online several places; I’ll try a different link in case that’s making my posts about it disappear, and do be sure to check out the garish illustration of delirious fantasy around the poem at the end (omitted from the translation). The poem is cited in an interesting Wiki article, by the way:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

    Quote: Years later a science fiction comic, Technique – The Youth – 1948. – ? 2 titled “In a world of crazy fantasy” (Russian: “? ???? ???????? ??????????”) featured a poem of political attacks on the cover which included a similar line: “Every planet’s Negroes are being lynched there.”

  24. I like to impose a question to my fellow filers, that I discussed yesterday with sime friends:
    What is your favorite book about a rebellion/fight for independence on a moon or planet and why?

    Re Benford: The game that one two awards, did not sell nearly as well as four others that didnt win Anything. Awards are not the NY bestseller list. Or else fifty shades of grey would have won the nobel Price. Thats not what awards are for.

  25. Also, regarding the alternate version of the tirade mentioned in (10) that I linked to, here’s a rough translation of the poem at the bottom. It ain’t Pushkin, so I have no qualms passing this rendering along.

    Engulfed in the fever of war.
    Mister is threatened by the entire universe.
    Here the gun decides everything.
    They lynch the Negroes of all the planets.

    Here the world strives for degeneracy.
    And ghosts stream from booklets,
    And here the robot than man
    Is smarter, in the author’s opinion.

    Why do they make so zealously
    All this vile [merzostnoye] literary trash [chtivo]?
    All this dreadful delirium [or, all these dreadful ravings] are the defense
    Of the brutal/beastly rule of Wall Street.

  26. Gregory Benford: I was kind of surprised that this person managed to offend me at every single level. I can’t help it if I was born sixty years ago, male, white, and cisgender.

    So you’re offended that there are people who prefer panels featuring writers with whom they share commonalities and/or whose works they enjoy, when that writer doesn’t happen to be you? Do you really expect every fan to be interested in a panel because you are on it? Surely not… especially if they’re not interested in hearing panelists whine about someone else getting a piece of the pie for a change.

     
    Gregory Benford: What if you write a book, and you don’t fit in the neat little category that publishers want? For example, what if you’re male and you want to write a romance novel? What are your chances of getting published? How well will you be welcomed into the writing community? Isn’t a good story a good story no matter who wrote it?… Of course, discrimination is pretty well institutionalized in the publishing industry. By saying that it is institutionalized, what I mean is that in certain genres, your chances of getting published are based upon your gender.

    Congratulations. You are finally getting the faintest glimmer of what women and minority writers have been dealing with, full-on, for decades. I hope that the enlightenment does you some good.

  27. @JJ: You might want to check your attributions. I think they are a hundred percent wrong.

    You might also consider whether the final paragraph isn’t a fine display of equal-assholism, where the solution to some people being treated like shit is treating everyone like shit. It’s an improvement in some sense, except that things get worse for everyone overall.

  28. John A Arkansawyer: You might also consider whether the final paragraph isn’t a fine display of equal-assholism, where the solution to some people being treated like shit is treating everyone like shit. It’s an improvement in some sense, except that things get worse for everyone overall.

    Except that that isn’t what I said at all. As Mark points out, there’s very little basis in reality for most of Mr. Farland’s claims. What’s important is that he is finally asking himself questions about things that he took for granted, before women and minorities started getting a piece of the pie.

    Male writers aren’t actually being treated like shit now. They aren’t being discriminated against. They are just having to share the pie with women and minorities, and some of them perceive that as “being treated like shit”. That they are having that reaction to what is actually increased equality should certainly be providing some food for thought — for those who are willing to actually think about it.

    ETA: Thanks for pointing out that I incorrectly attributed the original post, which was by David Farland/Wolverton; Benford just echoed those grievances.

  29. Lee notes 6) Is Jim Lee really just 44? Cause that would make him younger than me and I recall reading his X-Men comics as a teenager in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

    My bad, he’s 54. Numbers can be elusive some days.

  30. @Cora

    Not nuts, this is deliberate policy openly brought in by a previous Home Secretary. Theresa May, now reaping what she helped sow.

    @lurkertype

    Unfortunately given over 60% of Scottish trade is with England we’d been even more screwed if we were independent with an rUK Brexit. Even more worryingly a substantial subsection of Independence true believers think we would be better off out of both the EU and UK.

  31. Gregory Benford: You’ve had a long and successful career, you’re making millions and getting six-figure advances on your novels, and yet somehow the system is still rigged against you? You may need a sense of perspective. Might I advise you to read story number (3) in the scroll to get a sense of what actual discrimination looks like?

  32. @JJ: You were quicker to refute me–good try, but I stand by my perception of equal-assholism in your words–than to check your own work.

    As to what makes it equal-assholism: I work in a male-dominated field where I hear guys make those claims. I can see with my own eyes the claims are not true to fact* and I don’t take those claims seriously. Then along comes someone who ‘splains it to them in this manner:

    “Congratulations. You are finally getting the faintest glimmer of what women and minority writersworkers have been dealing with, full-on, for decades. I hope that the enlightenment does you some good.”

    No matter what the intent of a statement like that, the impact of it is two-fold.

    First, by suggesting that they are now feeling what people discriminated against feel, you are tacitly endorsing their false perception of discrimination. I find this boggling. Why on earth would you undercut the appeal of your argument in such a manner? You feed their emotional grievances. Is there some point to it? It seems like madness to me.

    Second, the evident satisfaction in such a statement, from “Congratulations” to “I hope it does you some good”–I really prefer “Bless your heart”–doubles down on that emotional failure. At the same time you’re tickling their feelings of grievance, you’re visibly looking down on them.

    *Except about age-based discrimination. I stay in my job to some extent out of fear for being terminally discriminated out of the hiring market.

  33. Ok I fir one am Very, very happy that there are a number of successful talented woman and others who are not white male writers active writing today.

    Nalo Hopkinson’s first issue of Sandman Universe is brilliant. My audiobook is Elizabeth Bonesteel’s Breath of Containment, and my current review galley is K.B. Wagers’ There Before The Chaos, the first in a new trilogy entered around gunrunner empress Hail Bristol and set in a truly amazing universe.

  34. (11) I once submitted a story to WOTF. (I neither won nor placed.) This would have been in the first five years or so of its existence. After all that time and at least two moves, I still get junk mail from Bridge Publications, trying to hook me on Scientology and hawking LRH reprints.

    Firewall? What firewall?

    (13) Not to be That Nerd or anything, but the vast majority of arcade games were written to run on standard hardware. When one game’s popularity faded, frequently all the cabinet owner had to do was change the cabinet art and reprogram (or replace) the ROM with the new hotness. Sometimes a game had specialized doodads – Missile Command’s trakball, for instance – but those were usually minor, easily swapped out, and often added to the developers’ toolkit for later games (Centipede, Millipede) to maintain the easy-update selling point.

    Which is to say that I am seriously underwhelmed by the Quest For The Rare Part plot. I expect that the movie will still be fun, but it looks like a very flimsy premise.

  35. I don’t think I had even realized Gregory Benford was still writing, checking wiki I think it was his mid-90s output (incl. that Foundation universe book) that put him on my ‘don’t bother with’ list.

  36. @Rev.Bob: I haven’t seen W-i-R and don’t plan to watch the new one, but consider this: the CPS2 security chip.

  37. (4) I read The Courtship of Princess Leia decades ago, and still remember how appallingly bad it was — it was a clear, unambiguous effort at writing an “anti-feminist” novel. It turned Leia into a giggly, bubble-headed schoolgirl who couldn’t decide between Han Solo and some random pretty boy. A clear attempt at character-assassinating the only female character of note in the Star Wars universe as it existed at the time.

    So it’s little surprise that Wolverton is still spouting claptrap.

  38. Peer, autocorrupt autocorrect HATES you in your post. <wry grin>

    (I don’t have any sime friends; only gen friends….)

    My favorite colony-rebellion SF story has to be The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I’m honestly afraid to go back and read now it for fear of what the Suck Fairy may have done to it….

    @12, I’ve read War and Peace. I actually picked it up for beach reading several years go. For your typical SF reader, it’s not a difficult book. It’s not even a particularly long one, compared to, say, Weber’s recent oeuvre… I honestly think it got it’s reputation for difficulty because it’s a thousand pages when novels of its time were 150 pages long. I did make myself a cheat sheet of the main characters, because the same person might have several different names depending on who is talking to him. First name, last name, patronymic, an assortment of titles, nicknames….

  39. Meredith Moment:

    The Princess Bride: A Illustrated Edition…, is part of Amazon’s KDD at $2.99.

    There are six David Gerrold titles on sale today at most of The Usual Suspects, including two collections of short fiction (one a repackaging of With A Finger In My I plus additional material). One of them, Alternate Gerrolds, is $3.99, the rest are $2.99.

  40. #4. More silliness I shall nitpick on:

    With the Hugos, white men in particular are not even getting on the ballots, much less winning.

    Truly Farland/Wolverton is colorblind. 😛

    I remember hearing a woman talking to others, pointing out that if they all voted for a certain story by a woman, then she’d certainly win. Apparently the ethics of judging stories based upon the gender of the author eluded her, but it worked. The story written by the woman won.

    His brief “retelling” (if I can even call it that) doesn’t indicate they were talking about voting for her because she was a woman. I’m guessing it was because they liked the story or liked her. But then, weren’t the Nebulas known for decades for logrolling? This story implies that to me, not that they picked some random story solely because the author was a woman.

    “boring, old, white, cisgender men”

    I can understand finding this offensive, except there’s the word “boring.”.

  41. I thought Benford’s 2017 alternate history novel The Berlin Project was very good.

  42. Whoops, too slow with the edit window. I’ll allow that “boring, old, white, cisgender men” does sound a little offensive (though boring still seems key). I imagine if I talked about not wanting to see another panel with “boring, young, black, trans women” on it that I’d get grief for it.

  43. Ferrit Bueller: The link to that Soviet rant against sf was interesting, particularly that very weird illustration, which is I guess supposed to convey how awful sf is?

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