(1) MUNSTER REVIVAL. “Who will play Marilyn?” John King Tarpinian wants to know. Variety reports “‘Munsters’ Reboot in Development at NBC With Seth Meyers Producing”.
The planned reboot is inspired by the original series and will follow an offbeat family determined to stay true to themselves struggles to fit in in hipster Brooklyn. Jill Kargman will executive produce and write the script, with Seth Meyers and Mike Shoemaker also executive producing. Universal Television (UTV) will produce along with Meyers’ and Shoemaker’s Sethmaker Shoemeyers Productions, which is set up with a first-look deal at UTV.
The development “The Munsters” reboot keeps Meyers in business with NBC, where he currently hosts the late-night series “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” In addition, the network recently ordered the Meyers-produced comedy “A.P. Bio” to series.
(2) KGB READINGS. Fantastic Fiction at KGB hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Gregory Frost and Rajan Khanna on August 16. The evening begins at 7 p.m. in the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs), New York.
Gregory Frost is the author of Shadowbridge, Lord Tophet, Fitcher’s Brides, and The Pure Cold Light and a whole mess of short stories of the fantastic. His collaboration with Michael Swanwick, “Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters, H’ard and Andy Are Come to Town” won an Asimov’s Readers’ Award for 2015. That worked out so well that he and M. Swanwick are currently engaged in writing another collaboration. Greg is the Fiction Workshop Director at Swarthmore College, and with Jonathan Maberry founded the Philadelphia branch of The Liars Club, a collective of semi-deranged and often inebriated authors. Greg is working on a collaborative series with Jonathan Maberry based upon their novella “Rhymer,” published in the anthology Dark Duets.
Rajan Khanna is an author, blogger, reviewer, and narrator. His post-apocalyptic airship adventure series starting with Falling Sky and Rising Tide concluded in July 2017 with Raining Fire. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and several anthologies. His articles and reviews have appeared Tor.com and LitReactor.com and his podcast narrations can be heard at Podcastle, Escape Pod, PseudoPod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Lightspeed Magazine. Rajan lives in Brooklyn where he’s a member of the Altered Fluid writing group.
(3) ABOUT THE CANCELLED ALZHEIMER’S LARP. Worldcon 75 published a “Statement on the Cancellation of LARP ‘A Home for the Old’”, a planned item that had drawn a lot of criticism in social media after people at the con saw the description in the schedule.
On Friday 11 August Wordcon 75 cancelled one of our programme items. A Nordic Freeform Event entitled “A Home for the Old” by Frederik Berg. The statement that we released in relation to this cancellation was neither a fair nor a full report of the facts and we would like to correct this.
Worldcon 75 believes that the event facilitator, Massi Hannula Thorhauge, would have guided the players with due regard for a subject as serious as Alzheimer’s. The convention asked her to run this event and we know she would have made sure those who signed up did not make light of the disease. She is a valued member of Worldcon 75 staff and we thank her for her time and enthusiasm throughout the con.
The description of the event published in the Worldcon 75 Programme was not a fair representation of the game. It was written for a specific audience and as presented to Worldcon lacks vital context and frameworks.
Both the convention and the event facilitators acknowledge more care should have been given to this, in light of the very sensitive subject and the cultural differences between many Worldcon members.
These cultural and contextual differences were at the root of the decision to cancel the item. While this freeform event has been extremely successful elsewhere we felt that it was not acceptable to the Worldcon members as presented. We were also concerned that some possible players may not have appropriately engaged with the material, given how different Worldcon is from Nordic gaming events.
We would also like to highlight how important gaming is as part of the genres we all love. Games such as “A Home for the Old” have helped those who have lost friends and relatives to Alzheimer’s and given them a greater understanding of the pressures put on those who care for people with the disease.
While playing games purely for fun is vital, they can also be used to teach, to explore even difficult subjects and themes, and to inspire. They are a hugely important part of a Worldcon programme and we are thrilled we have had so many people playing games in Helsinki this August.
(4) TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. Dorothy Grant shares a warning about click farms at Mad Genius Club.
- Speaking of click farms, several indies have recently reported their accounts being locked / books taken off sale after buying “advertising” with a “guaranteed number of readers.” You know that picture of Batman slapping Robin? Yeah, picture that. Here’s how NOT to get your account locked and books delisted:
A.) You cannot guarantee buyers ethically. If buyers or readers are guaranteed, that means you’re paying a click farm to run a program on a laptop slaved to a bunch of stolen iphones, each loaded to an Amazon account, “borrowing” and “reading” them. Unless you’re paying a click farm in North Korea, in which case it’s a poor schmuck pacing down a table, manually finger-swiping every iphone.
B.) If you can’t sign up for their mailing list, it’s a click farm. Real promoters want everybody to sign up for their lists, so they can grow. Click farms say they have a list, but if it’s not obvious and easy to find, then it’s a lie.
C.) If they don’t have a website, it’s a click farm. ESPECIALLY if their only presence is a “closed facebook group.” Again, if they’re not soliciting more people to join them, they’re not right.
D.) If it’s too good to be true, it ain’t true. It’s more likely to be this: https://kotaku.com/inside-chinese-click-farms-1795287821
(5) NEBRASKA. Have a twofer: Carhenge is in the totality path: “As Eclipse Madness Sweeps U.S., A Stonehenge Made Of Cars Prepares”.
The ancients who built Carhenge back in 1987 didn’t know about this eclipse. Carhenge was the brainchild of a local named Jim Reinders, a petroleum engineer who spent years working in England. While there, he became acquainted with the prehistoric site of Stonehenge. It was built of giant rocks that people dragged for miles from the quarries. Archaeologists think the original Stonehenge was built to mark celestial events, such as the solstice.
Reinders wanted to build a version of Stonehenge as a memorial to his dad, who had passed away a few years earlier. But stones seemed heavy and cumbersome.
“So he decided if we build it out of cars, the wheels on it would greatly simplify the logistics,” says Howard. “And besides that, there’s not a stone in Nebraska that would work.”
(6) BR0K3N. “Password guru regrets past advice” – BBC has the story.
Bill Burr had advised users to change their password every 90 days and to muddle up words by adding capital letters, numbers and symbols – so, for example, “protected” might become “pr0t3cT3d4!”.
The problem, he believes, is that the theory came unstuck in practice.
Mr Burr now acknowledges that his 2003 manual was “barking up the wrong tree”.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born August 13, 1899 — Alfred Hitchcock
(8) KEEP HORROR OUT OF THE KITCHEN. Get your own copy of Mary and Vincent Price’s A Treasury of Great Recipes 1965 – 2015.
A Treasury of Great Recipes has come to be regarded as “one of the most important culinary events of the 20th century” (Saveur Magazine) and was recently named the eighth most popular out-of-print book of any kind by Booklist. It has inspired countless chefs, garnered fans from around the world, and recently spawned many supper clubs who have been “cooking and eating Vincent” around the world.
(9) BY JOVE, I THINK HE’S GOT IT. Camestros Felapton offers a good, precise description of the phenomenon: “Parallels between minor SF kerfuffles & real world politics are both trite & true”.
My interest here was not the Brian Niemeiers of the groups but others, less inclined to create an SJW conspiracy out of nothing. In several cases, you could see them correctly reasoning that if they want the Dragon Awards to have any status then they would need authors like John Scalzi and N.K.Jemisin involved. However, they would always return to the idea that it was up to people like John Scalzi to, therefore, fix the problem by participating. Commenting here, author David Van Dyke took a similar tack – the Dragons need broad based participation, therefore can authors that the SF right calls “SJWs” (whether they are or not) please participate. This despite the fact that the reasons WHY authors didn’t want to participate were clear and unambiguous – they didn’t want to get caught up in the culture war that other on the SF right want the Dragons to be.
What is particularly interesting is this. When the right that is adjacent to the more belligerent alt-right NEED somebody to be reasonable, to compromise in WHICH direction do they turn? Note how it is the LEFT? This is more than just the modern conservative dictum of not-shooting-right/no-enemies-on-the-right but a tacit acknowledgement that they themselves have no capacity to control their allies.
The alt-right want the Dragons Awards to be a culture-war shitstorm because culture-war shitstorms help them recruit small numbers of extremists via radicalization and the comradery of a conflict. It’s a tactic anybody on the left will recognise from many micro-Trotskyist groups in the past, whose expectation of a conflict (e.g. a labour dispute) was that making hyper-strong demands (not necessarily EXTREME demands but essentially shitty negotiating positions) would not lead to a successful outcome but would lead to a better struggle and new recruits.
(10) THE YEAR IN RABIDITY. Jason Sanford leafs through the Hugo voting stats and concludes he is “Measuring the slow Hugo Award death of the rabid puppies”.
These numbers back up previous estimates of the weakness of the rabid puppies and give more evidence that 80 to 90 Hugo voters at most support Vox Day’s ballot stuffing. These are extremely small numbers compared to the more the 2,000 people who cast nominating ballots, or the 3,319 people who voted in the final Hugo ballot.
The reason the rabid puppies were able to cause so much trouble with the Hugo Awards in recent years is because the awards were easily gamed by a small group of slate voters. Only cultural constraints within fandom prevented this from happening previous to the rabid puppies.
The results of this year’s Hugo voting shows that making an award resistant to slate voting is a must in today’s genre.
Perhaps the Dragon Awards, a new SF/F award which is now being ravaged by slate voting from the pups, will learn from the Hugo experience. Or perhaps not.
(11) THE POINTS. Camestros Felapton also looks at the Rabid numbers in “Hugo Stats Time Some More”.
So a mean in the low 70s and a median of 83 votes. Which looks to be irrelevant because those votes are probably all from 2016 members. The Rabid vote drops precipitously in the final numbers.
(12) HELP WANTED. There’s a lot of money to be made looking for aliens, if you’re the right person — “The Reason China Can’t Find Anyone to Operate Its Alien-Hunting Telescope”.
China continues to up its game in space sciences, including one particularly ambitious project, the world’s largest radio telescope. There’s just one problem: they can’t find anyone to operate it.
The country’s government is looking to hire a foreigner as chief scientist to oversee the telescope’s daily operation, reports the South China Morning News, and it’s even offering free housing and a $1.2 million salary to boot. But no one has been hired, presumably because of challenges associated with the job and the high level of requirements needed to even apply.
The “Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope”, or FAST, is a $180 million, 1,600 foot-long radio telescope that’s capable of receiving radio signals from as far as 1,000 light years away; making it a leading instrument in the search for alien life. To give you an idea of its scale, FAST is roughly the size of 30 soccer fields.
(13) THE SUMMER OF HUH? Hippy disinformation? The BBC explains the accidental invention of the Illuminati conspiracy.
The Illuminati that we’ve come to hear about today is hardly influenced by the Bavarians at all, as I learned from author and broadcaster David Bramwell, a man who has dedicated himself to documenting the origins of the myth. Instead, an era of counter-culture mania, LSD and interest in Eastern philosophy is largely responsible for the group’s (totally unsubstantiated) modern incarnation. It all began somewhere amid the Summer of Love and the hippie phenomenon, when a small, printed text emerged: Principia Discordia.
The book was, in a nutshell, a parody text for a parody faith – Discordianism – conjured up by enthusiastic anarchists and thinkers to bid its readers to worship Eris, goddess of chaos. The Discordian movement was ultimately a collective that wished to cause civil disobedience, practical jokes and hoaxes.
… The text itself never amounted to anything more than a counter-culture curiosity, but one of the tenets of the faith – that such miscreant activities could bring about social change and force individuals to question the parameters of reality – was immortalised by one writer, Robert Anton Wilson.
According to Bramwell, Wilson and one of the authors of the Principia Discordia, Kerry Thornley, “decided that the world was becoming too authoritarian, too tight, too closed, too controlled”. They wanted to bring chaos back into society to shake things up, and “the way to do that was to spread disinformation. To disseminate misinformation through all portals – through counter culture, through the mainstream media, through whatever means. And they decided they would do that initially by telling stories about the Illuminati.”
At the time, Wilson worked for the men’s magazine Playboy. He and Thornley started sending in fake letters from readers talking about this secret, elite organisation called the Illuminati. Then they would send in more letters – to contradict the letters they had just written.
“So, the concept behind this was that if you give enough contrary points of view on a story, in theory – idealistically – the population at large start looking at these things and think, ‘hang on a minute’,” says Bramwell. “They ask themselves, ‘Can I trust how the information is presented to me?’ It’s an idealistic means of getting people to wake up to the suggested realities that they inhabit – which of course didn’t happen quite in the way they were hoping.
… British electronic band The KLF also called themselves The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, named after the band of Discordians that infiltrate the Illuminati in Wilson’s trilogy as they were inspired by the religion’s anarchic ideology. Then, an Illuminati role-playing card game appeared in 1975 which imprinted its mystical world of secret societies onto a whole generation.
Chip Hitchcock, who found the link, assures everyone, “Yes, I’ve sent in a complaint about the incorrect date for the card game.”
(13) WHEN DEATH IS ON THE LINE. I was surprised to learn he’s still alive.
Vizzini, Mr. Hall, Rex, Grand Nagus Zek. Really, this list could go on. Welcome Wallace Shawn & his cast of characters to #DragonCon2017! pic.twitter.com/a28H3SMf3N
— ????????Dragon Con ???????? (@DragonCon) August 12, 2017
(14) FLICKER OF TIME. Anti Matter trailer #2.
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Carl Slaughter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]
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13) I knew Robert Anton Wilson quite well (he was my step-father-out-law), and he always said that he and Bob Shea (co-author of the Illuminatus trilogy) got a lot of their ideas from letters sent into Playboy. (Both worked in the letters department.) They took all the craziest conspiracy theories they received, and tried to imagine that they were all true.
Now, I know that Wilson knew Kerry Thornley before that, and it’s possible that he and Thornley were also sending made-up letters to Playboy. But Wilson never mentioned anything like that while I was around. Even if it’s true (which I admit it might be), I suspect that only accounts for a few of the crazy theories that Shea and Wilson shoved into Illuminatus. Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists have been around a long time.
I’d hesitate to conclude that Wilson and Thornley invented the Illuminatus conspiracy, even though I remain certain that Wilson and Shea embellished it, and, quite probably, put it on the map.
Clickity clackity I feel so wackity
@12: They drop all that money on building this thing without figuring out who’s going to run it? Are they setting the requirements so high that they can claim everyone should believe whatever results they report? Should I boggle at ideology-driven incompetence, or are there similar screwups in the West?
Camestros’s essay is interesting, but ISTM that he misses how much the alt-right was encouraged by conventional conservatives; tell people loudly and often how they’re being screwed by liberals, and they won’t notice who’s really holding the screwdriver (or worse, playing “Let’s You and Him Fight”).
edit: pre-pre-fifth!
(3) ABOUT THE CANCELLED ALZHEIMER’S LARP.
I wish it could have been approached with appropriate sensitivity & gone ahead. While Alzheimer’s & dementia is no laughing matter, sometimes bleak humour can be a way of coping with it.
While in hospital recently, one of the ward patients has dementia. Sometimes she was fine, other times she would come into your room & pick up your stuff to examine. She would also use salty language (a lot of effing cusswords) and we’d be woken up at once during the night by her screams. We patients quickly got used to it & the nursing staff were unfailingly polite & caring. That said, black humour about the overall situation was common amongst us patients. (I personally appreciate black humour but can see how some might find it offensive)
(9) BY JOVE, I THINK HE’S GOT IT.
It’s like some people can’t take responsibility for their own actions sometimes.
(10) THE YEAR IN RABIDITY.
If “the slow Hugo Award death of the rabid puppies” is happening, it’s because of the rule changes & appropriate use of No Award. So please, please, please, do not repeal EPH or 5/6.
13: Xlftr: I’m glad you made clear that ILLUMINATUS was by Wilson AND Shea and they should get equal credit for their book. Shea came out of fandom: he was a member of the second group of Futurians in the 1950s. His historical novels (with a little fantasy) such as THE SARACEN should be better known than they are; They’re very entertaining.
It’s been only five years since the last attempt of a Munsters revival, Mockingbird Lane with that Bryan Fuller guy producing. NBC did air the pilot and it was an interesting take. We’ll have to wait and see on the new one.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned that there are two #13s in this scroll.
Lee Whiteside says It’s been only five years since the last attempt of a Munsters revival, Mockingbird Lane with that Bryan Fuller guy producing. NBC did air the pilot and it was an interesting take. We’ll have to wait and see on the new one.
I really liked that pilot. It took the original premise and made something fresh. Not sure why the series was killed off.
@Martin Wooster: Agreed. Shea’s solo work isn’t as well known as Wilson’s, but it’s very good. I didn’t know he came out of fandom, though. Which is curious, because so did I–literally born into it–but Wilson’s the one I ended up getting to know, while I never actually met Shea.
Ships passing…. 🙂
@Chip Hitchcock: @12: They drop all that money on building this thing without figuring out who’s going to run it? Are they setting the requirements so high that they can claim everyone should believe whatever results they report? Should I boggle at ideology-driven incompetence, or are there similar screwups in the West?
It’s more a case of them needing someone to get the telescope into operation, which is a major technical challenge; without that, it won’t produce any results.
They do seem to have created a major hurdle for themselves, in that the requirements for the position are so stringent that there probably aren’t more than a handful of candidates, and it’s not clear why any of them would particularly want the job. “Move to a remote part of China and sacrifice all your research time for years” is not really a very attractive prospect, even at $1.2 million per year.
Xlftr: The second group of Futurians were New York City fans in the mid-1950s who like the first and more famous group of Futurians, went on to become pros. The most famous members of the second Futurians were Algis Budrys, Larry Shaw, and Shea.
I corresponded with Shea and had one great five-hour conversation with him in 1990. He was very nice and very courteous–a fundamentally decent guy. But I only met Wilson once.
Dang me — that would have been extraordinarily clever if it hadn’t been a mistake.
John Lorentz: I’m surprised no one has mentioned that there are two #13s in this scroll.
It’s a secret message for the Illuminati inserted by Mike Glyer… the jig is up!
(1) Munsters… mildly interested… Seth Meyers… interest falls to zero. I watched the pilot for the one a few years back and would have gone for that. Another hacky sitcom, nope.
(3) It’s entirely the fault of the con for not clearly explaining the idea and just assuming everyone would somehow intuit their good intentions and already know all about the LARP customs of another area of the world.
THEY might have known what a swell person the leader was and how the topic would be treated, but they completely ignored that most of the con never heard of her, so it’s hardly the fault of foreigners who have the audacity to have different cultures (A country who has a language nobody else uses, they KNOW cultures differ!). LARP may be a big thing in Scandinavia, but it’s NOT a vital part of Worldcon. Indeed, it was for a long time complete anathema at lit or media cons, grounds for having your membership revoked!
There was a LOT of unclear/lack of communication from this con — not getting back to people inquiring about disabled accommodations, firing the awesome packet compiler for the crime of honesty, all the way back to the bid parties where they didn’t make it clear how far away most of the hotel rooms were from the con. I know, I went to a bunch of them and nobody ever mentioned distances to me, nor the lack of eateries adjacent to the con. Just blithe, airy assurances that sure, it was going to be exactly like North American ones except for using Euros! No culture shock at all! Look, there’s a Holiday Inn right next to the convention center if you don’t want Euro-style hotels and a commute, no worries! (no explanation that it was only bookable if you were disabled)!
Let this be a lesson to future cons: over-explain things, particularly if this is the first time your area’s had a Worldcon, or even not in the past 30 years. Put stuff on your web page, not just Facebook and Twitter. Answer your email promptly. Fully brief your bid party hosts. Reiterate what is and isn’t included.
(7) I like it. Sounds like a fun place to watch.
(8) But this came out 2 years ago — are there any copies left? (checks Big River) Yes, for $38, non-autographed. Sorry, Vincent.
(9) Right wingers gonna right wing. Their rhetoric is the same, regardless of what the topic is. I only voted ONCE for the Dragons, so they best not come at me with “But what about her emails?!” I still take responsibility for my own actions, and fixing of my own problems, not expecting other people to do it for me.
(10) Kinda like Worldcon did with EPH and 5/6. Heck, it wasn’t even Worldcon’s fault, but they didn’t go bleating to other groups to fix it, they rolled up their sleeves, sat in Business Meetings, and took action. And got MORE transparent and honest, unlike the Dragons.
(12) “Be the best in your field. Come to the middle of nowhere in another country, give up your own research, work ridiculous hours, make not really that much money.” Yep, that’s gonna have people breaking down the doors. Just train up your own people; it’s not like the 4-5 men with these qualifications are going to be able to work with a Mandarin-speaking staff. For $1.2 million, I bet you could get a lot of smart Chinese scientists.
(13) @Xtifr: you should inform Auntie Beeb of this.
(8) This is a very good cook book.
Where can one read about the concerns that were raised about the larp? Seems like I haven’t been paying enough attention during the con.
Here.
(13:2) Wallace Shawn is also a well-known playwright, and recently was directing one of his plays here in London. I can happily say I have been on the Tube with Vizinni, and like all good Londoners I completely ignored him once I realised who he was.
Oskari Rantala: Where can one read about the concerns that were raised about the larp?
Scroll Item #3 above.
Blog post by a Finn here.
Some discussion in the comments on this Pixel Scroll.
Unfortunately, a lot of the discussion I’ve seen has been on Facebook posts which are Friends-locked because people got tired of being falsely accused of being snobs against LARP and being told that their concerns about the way the program item was described were invalid. 😐
OK, a weird question on the new Best Series award, while listening to the WSFS Business Meeting:
Apparently, graphic novel series are totally eligible for Best Series, as long as they meet the required wordcount.
How about other formats?
Could we nominate Doctor Who as a whole, rather than individual episodes under BDP:SF?
Can we nominate Welcome To Nightvale, which is an audio podcast (with extensive transcripts)?
@Standback, I don’t think so – dramatic presentations are not usually measured with word counts. Even if they were, dramatic presentations and graphic novels will have to run a long time to get to 240,000 words.
Lets nominate Naruto next year.
I’m sure One Piece (either the anime or the manga) has been running long enough to hit the Best Series word count limit.
@Standback: Huh, I didn’t even think about the possibility of nominating the excellent Welcome to Night Vale as a series. Perhaps since they release the transcripts as books in their own right (and there are the tie-in novels too), they’d be over the word count for series based on that. Otherwise, I’d say it’s a better fit for Dramatic Long Form overall (or if there’s a particularly standout episode in any given year – like The Woman From Italy – as Short Form).
That said I’ve listened to the promo extracts of the WtNV novels and something just seems slightly… off… about them. Not in the WtNV way, but in a way that just doesn’t quite seem to work in novel format.
[godstalk]
(12): Sounds like a great opportunity to be the first person to contact the Trisolarians.
@Oneiros: Yeah, that actually seems like it could be one of Best Series’ oh-so-fun corner cases. “We have two books of transcripts and two original novels, but actually the fandom is all based around the podcast!”
Can’t imagine WtNV wouldn’t qualify, even without the novels; it’s 100% text, and for like five seasons already (plus the live shows). Alice Isn’t Dead and Within the Wires are going to take longer, though…
As for the novels, I read the first one. I had low expectations for it, and yeah, I really didn’t feel like it worked. A novel needs to be sustained for waaaaay longer than an episode or a show; and this is a show that usually relies heavily on jump-cutting and not sustaining anything. Can’t recommend.
Obituary for Doctor Who writer/actor Victor Pemberton:
Just finished the ninth Sandman Slim novel from Richard Kadrey (The Kill Society) and was pleased to find that it was quite good. No obscure post-punk references this time, though at one point a rock song does appear in a rather surprising context. The plot rolls through the action gracefully and the ending is duly stuck. The only problem that I might call the author on is the “oh-so-coincidental appearance of characters from past books” syndrome, but it was not gratuitous enough to really bother me.
So I would give it a recommendation, especially since it is a satisfactory ninth (!) novel.
@Lenore:
Graphic novels aren’t either, though, are they? 😀
(Actually I have no idea how graphic stories are defined. For example, why is it that The Vision volume one specifically was nominated, when the complete story (across two volumes) was all in 2016?)
12: I’d take half that salary if they dropped a few of the stringent requirements…(YES! getting paid to read SF in a remote location free from distraction….)
This is seriously such a can of worms.
Can I nominate the Game of Thrones show next year? The whole Song of Ice and Fire series is in its universe; it passes wordcount!
9: in the spirit of the convergence of mundane politics and fannish kerfuffles, I’ve got to ask the following:
is fandom now prepared to call the alt-rt what it really is – nazism?
US politicians following Trump’s unsurprising failure to call out the terrorists in Virginia, as well as numerous pundits and commentators are making this statement: stop using their vague and politically somewhat-correct phrase of the “alt-rt” and start calling them what they really are – terrorists and nazis.
Will fandom follow? Foz Meadows did late last year, I’ve done so in numerous venues…are we finally going to reject the excuses, dissembling and straight out BS and let them know that there’s no place for even “yes but…” in this discussion? If you support them, however weakly, you’re one of ’em and have a choice: withdraw your support or get out, there’s no place for you in fandom.
The “slow Hugo Award death of the rabid puppies” is not happening. They set out this year to get one or two works on the ballot in most categories and succeeded with 11 finalists. That number would have been 16, but five of their choices were declared ineligible.
Next year they can do the same thing and put more malicious and insulting finalists on the ballot. All it will take, based on this year’s numbers, is around 75 nominators voting in lockstep with Theodore Beale.
We did nothing to stop this, so there’s no reason to declare victory.
If GRRM manages to finish The Winds of Winter in time, it could be nominated for best series via the novel.
Why would the wordcount of the books be applied to the Best Series eligibility of the TV show?
@rcade: Why not?
I’m not saying it’s a good idea. I’m just saying absolutely nothing prevents it.
(IIRC, Harry Potter was argued to be eligible, on the strength of Cursed Child. Anybody wants to argue why Cursed Child extends the Harry Potter series but Game of Thrones doesn’t expand Song of Ice and Fire, I’m all ears… 🙂 )
@steve Davidson: I think the problem is that terms like “Nazi” have been thrown around too long as a generic term of abuse for “anyone with political positions I dislike”… so, even when you’re dealing with actual, real, literal Nazis (and, I agree, some of them are), if you call them that, they can just shrug it off and say “ah, you’re just calling us names”.
Personally, I don’t care what we call them, so long as we don’t give them anything – whether it’s something relatively trivial (like a Hugo award) or something serious (like political power.)
Per Mike Godwin’s twitter feed (yes, THAT Godwin):
Should anyone be interested, I’ll be running a book discussion of Susan Matthew’s newest “Under Jurisdiction” novel, Blood Enemies, on Compuserve’s SF forum. Discussion will cover two chapters a week, starting with the “what has gone before” on Wednesday August 23 and Chapter 1 on Saturday August 26. If you don’t have an AOL or Compuserve login you’ll have to make one, but it’s free….
I bring it up here because I recall a few people mentioning the novel when it came out, so I thought perhaps some Filers would be interested.
I got my copy of The Stone Sky today.
That is all.
Oneiros on August 14, 2017 at 5:17 am said:
Between Welcome To Night Vale (novel), It Devours, Mostly Void,Partly Stars, and The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe it certainly passes the word count.
It does lose something in the transcripts from reading it versus hearing it, not just due to the great voice work but sound effects and music at the end all really come together in the audio play in a way that doesn’t translate.
Kyra on August 14, 2017 at 8:20 am said:
Jealous! I have library books out but I just want to dive into it and am torn, which is the best sort of problem to have.
@Kyra: I’m so jealous! I have to wait a whole extra day and it’s TOO LONG.
3) I think the con should have communicated more clearly and written a new description with the multicultural context of WorldCon in mind, but I find the thing where people go to a completely different country and assume that everything works exactly like it does at home somewhat obnoxious.
8) Going to have to get that!
@Matt:
True BUT, reading it makes Cecil Baldwin’s voice appear in my brain, which is pretty Hugo-worthy in and of itself! 😛
@Martin Wooster: I didn’t see the term “Futurians” in the Lee Hoffman papers I dug through for Chicon IV; was she outside that period (despite having been married to Larry Shaw for a while), or do you consider her less significant? (I’m not sure I’d heard of that Shaw before taking the above job.) Ellison did show up a few times in the papers (and so appears in In and Out of Quandry); did he never connect?
@lurkertype: all the way back to the bid parties where they didn’t make it clear how far away most of the hotel rooms were from the con. That was not my experience of their bid; several other Filers have also discounted this claim.
@me re @9: I wrote too soon; it’s now clear Camestros’s complaints about the Right not condemning the {Far,rabid,”alt-“}Right were being answered yesterday. Several senators were using Trump’s stupid statement to call out a President they’re getting more and more fed up with — but it was also a springboard to direct denunciations of the initial demonstrators in Charlotte.
@Cassy B
I think that’s one the best things I’ve ever seen on Twitter. Mind you that’s a fairly low bar.
With regard to TV series and podcasts being eligible for Best Series, given that the proposed amendment to the Constitution was worded thusly:
A.1 Short Title: Best Series
Moved, to amend the WSFS Constitution to change the written fiction Hugo Award categories by creating a Best Series award and correcting related references to the existing Hugo Award categories by adding or deleting words as follows:
I would be reasonably confident that a Hugo Administrator would rule such works not eligible, should they get enough nominations to make the final ballot.