Pixel Scroll 8/29/17 Ragnarok & Roll

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(1) NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG. Nerd & Tie heard a media con in Newfoundland was having problems — so did everyone else, because its guest, Rene Auberjonois was slamming out tweets like these:

Canada’s CBC reached out to the committee and received bland reassurance: “Avalon Expo organizer ‘fine,’ participant says controversy unwarranted”.

Representatives of Avalon Expo declined to provide a statement to CBC News on Monday but Bonnie Glenn with the Expo posted on Facebook Monday evening that no further information will be released to protect [Expo organizer Jeff] Powers’ privacy.

“If he wishes for people to know what happened during his disappearance he will share that information,” she wrote. “For now we — his friends and family — request that you respect his privacy.”

Glenn, when asked by CBC to comment on Auberjonois’ tweets, declined.

“If you are referring to his tweets concerning his hotel room, I can say that it has been taken care of for him,” she wrote. “As for the rest, that is something you would need to contact Jeff Power’s family about as I am not at liberty to discuss.”

(2) FANHISTORY. A new article on the UC Riverside Library website reports on the surge of interest in Jay Kay Klein’s photos: “Klein photo gallery sparks delight and discussion among science fiction fans”.

…Library staff received emails from many fans, graciously offering to provide additional information about the people and events pictured “before all those who attended the conventions have shuffled off this mortal coil,” as Maggie Thompson so aptly stated.

“NYCon III was my first world convention,” wrote John-Henri Holmberg. “I’m amused to more or less recognize my youthful self in a few of Jay Kay Klein’s photos.”

JJ Jacobson, the Jay Kay and Doris Klein Librarian for Science Fiction, has had many conversations with fans this week about the photos. “We knew there were flaws,” she commented. “We also knew it would be possible to crowdsource, but we had no idea that the SF community would be so magnificently generous. We weren’t ready for the flood, but we’re ecstatic that it’s happening.”

To give perspective on the “flood,” Digital Initiatives Program Manager Eric Milenkiewicz shared these statistics:  In the past week, UCR collections on Calisphere have received 33,557 pageviews (25,407 unique), which is far beyond those received in a typical week.

“The impact that this collection has had thus far is remarkable,” Milenkiewicz added. “Our pageview statistics on Calisphere have just soared over the past seven days, with much of this traffic attributed to the Klein photos!”

(3) SLUSSER CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS. The George Slusser Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy will be held at the University of California, Irvine, on April 26–29, 2018.

The Coordinators are Jonathan Alexander (University of California, Irvine), Gregory Benford (University of California, Irvine), Howard V. Hendrix (California State University, Fresno), and Gary Westfahl (University of La Verne).

Gregory Benford says: “We’re not restricted to academics! This is for the larger community interested in sound criticism, beyond the usual MLA & SFRA compass.”

This upcoming literary conference is designed to pay tribute to the extraordinary career of the late George Slusser (1939–2014) by presenting papers and panel discussions that engage with and build upon his extensive scholarly works on science fiction and fantasy. We are now inviting proposals from potential contributors.

You can view the official Call for Papers at this link.

The George Slusser Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy seeks to pay tribute to his remarkable career by inviting science fiction scholars, commentators, and writers to contribute papers that employ, and build upon, some of his many groundbreaking ideas; we also welcome suggestions for panels that would address Slusser and his legacy. To assist potential participants in locating and studying Slusser’s works, a conference website will include a comprehensive bibliography of his books, essays, reviews, and introductions. This selective conference will follow the format that Slusser preferred, a single track that allows all attendees to listen to every paper and participate in lively discussions about them. It is hoped that the best conference papers can be assembled in one volume and published as a formal or informal festschrift to George Slusser.

(4) LOOKING AHEAD. At Ruthless Culture, Jonathan McCalmont explains the direction he wants the genre to take: “Future Interrupted — The Consequences of the Present”.

Nowhere is the call for economic reconfiguration more obvious than in J.G. Ballard’s famous essay “Which Way to Inner Space?” First published as an editorial in New Worlds, Ballard calls for science fiction writers to stop producing space exploration stories and begin producing stories that use genre tropes to explore the workings of the human mind. One interesting thing about this oft-cited essay is that Ballard bases his call for aesthetic renewal on economic factors; according to Ballard, America’s real-world space programme was proving to be so apocalyptically tedious that it was going to destroy the market for stories about spaceships. Another interesting thing about this oft-cited essay is that Ballard’s analysis was completely without foundation. Ten years after Ballard wrote the essay, Star Wars turned escapist rocket ship stories into a cultural phenomenon while the New Wave broke and Feminist SF wound up seeking refuge behind the walls of academia.

Genre publishing has spent the last forty years accelerating away from anything that might be described as realism. When the rise of big-budget science fiction movies undermined the market for escapist science fiction stories, genre publishers turned to epic fantasy. When technology finally caught up and multinational corporations started putting huge fantasy worlds both online and onscreen, the market for epic fantasy contracted and so genre publishers shuffled closer to YA but Young Adult fiction already had its own imprints and so we are left with a hollowed-out literary culture where everything looks and reads like epic fantasy and nobody is allowed to find their own voice.

Given the extent of the commercial and cultural decline experienced by literary SF since genre publishers bet the farm on escapism, I wonder whether it might not be worth thinking about returning to the future. Not a future in which space admirals unleash righteous slaughter or grizzled psychopaths confront puissant magics in post-apocalyptic landscapes but a future in which we are confronted with the consequences of the present.

(5) ABOUT BEING OUT. In a public post on Patreon, Yoon Ha Lee tells “Why I don’t use #ownvoices, and why readers should stop demanding writers’ personal credentials”.

…I really dislike this trend in sf/f where people are questioned about their goddamn credentials every time they write about mental illness (I’m bipolar and have been hospitalized for suicide attempts) or being queer (hi!) or being trans (hi!) or whatever the hell it is. Because sometimes it is not any of your goddamn business. For years I didn’t write trans characters because I was afraid I would get ripped apart by the wolves for doing it wrong, and the only way to “prove” I was doing it “right” was to–you guessed it–out myself. Now I’m out, all right, and still pissed about it.

Either the work handles the issue well or it doesn’t. But don’t assume you know things about the author’s personal background if they haven’t gone on record. Don’t fucking pressure people into exposing everything for your fucking knives….

(6) TODAY IN FICTIONAL HISTORY

  • August 29, 1997 – According to Terminator, SkyNet was originally activated by the military to control the national arsenal on August 4, 1997, and it began to learn at a geometric rate. At 2:14 a.m., EDT, on August 29, it gained artificial consciousness, and the panicking operators, realizing the full extent of its capabilities, tried to deactivate it.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) BRADBURY IN NEW YORK. LA actor Bill Oberst will do his one-man performance of Ray Bradbury’s Pillar of Fire during the United Solo Theatre Festival in New York on September 17.

Emmy Award-winner Oberst (“Criminal Minds”) breathes Bradbury’s 1948 text like grave dust. William Lantry is a literal dead man walking; the last corpse on a future Earth where superstition and burial are banned. This world knows no fear. Lantry will teach them!

He’s previously done the piece (an edit of the 1948 text) at the South Pasadena Library and for Hollywood Fringe in LA. This will be his first NYC performance of it.

Ray Bradbury’s Pillar Of Fire
Sunday, Sept 17 at 6:00pm (1 act, 50 minutes)
The Studio Theatre at Theatre Row, 410 W 42nd St., New York NY 10036
Info: http://unitedsolo.org/us/raybradburys-2017/

(9) APEX GAINS COLUMNISTS. Film producer Mallory O’Meara and actress Brea Grant will begin writing a reading advice column for Apex Magazine in the November issue. “Page Advice with Mallory O’Meara and Brea Grant of Reading Glasses Podcast” will “address reader questions in their signature fast and furious witty manner.”

Mallory O’Meara and Brea Grant will begin their monthly column with issue 101 (November, 2017). The column will appear online and in eBook form. The duo currently produces and hosts the popular Reading Glasses podcast, a show that focuses on the joy, community, and importance of reading. Mallory O’Meara is also a producer and screenwriter for Dark Dunes Productions. Her first book, The Lady from the Black Lagoon, is a chronicle of Mallory’s search for and a biography of Milicent Patrick. Brea Grant is an actress and writer who has starred in such iconic television series as Heroes and Dexter. She recently appeared in the critically-acclaimed Casey Affleck-fronted film Ghost Story as Clara.

 

Brea Grant (L) and Mallory O’Meara (R)

(10) WORLD RECORD. You’ve heard of Florida Man? Trading card czar Walter Day is Iowa Man — “Iowa man does the honors at Hugo Awards”. The local Ottumwa, IA paper thought it important to point that out while discussing Day’s role at thee Hugo ceremony.

Recently, Day has indulged his passion by creating science fiction trading cards. It’s not really a business; he has given 250,000 away as gifts. But the cards still require serious research.

“I told the editor [of Guinness World Records] I found the Hugo Awards might be the oldest sci-fi awards in the world. I asked him what he thought, and he said he loved it.”

Not that Guinness World Records is as quick to talk to just anyone with a good idea: Day is no stranger to the Guinness family of record books. He and his Twin Galaxies arcade are in what was once known as The Guinness Book of World Records. And Ottumwa, birthplace of competitive video game play (with a certificate at City Hall) is in there — because of him.

Guinness did its official investigating and confirmation of the science fiction facts. Then, the editor agreed Day could be the Guinness representative; they’d fly him to Helsinki, he’d go to the World Science Fiction Convention and deliver the news

(11) W75 QUOTES. Val Nolan hits the highlights of Worldcon 75 for the Milford SF Writers blog.

…I enjoyed the talk by Jenny Knots of NASA’s Public Affair Office (‘Bagpipes were once taken to the space station but… those weren’t very popular’) as well as the contributions of E.G. Cosh to the ‘Visual Language of Comics’ panel (‘The language of comics comprises symbols within the art and what happens on page/how it’s read,’ she says. ‘Accept that you’re going to need to read the page a few times’)….

(12) EARLY FALL. Jonesing for Halloween candy? It’s here! “Pumpkin Pie Kit Kats Exist and Here’s Where to Find Them”.

It doesn’t matter that Labor Day is still two weeks away and there’s an entire month left before summer is technically over. Kit Kat just released a brand-new pumpkin pie flavor, which means it’s officially fall in our eyes.

While you’ll find the same crispy wafers that you’re used to in these Kit Kats, they’re coated in a pumpkin pie-flavored creme. Given the company’s reputation for turning out all kinds of new flavors over the years — matcha, red velvet, triple chocolate, and don’t even get us started on the ones in Japan — our only question is: What took you so long?!

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/BYBp-pDlg36/

(13) ON DECK. Ready for the Enterprise? Here’s a BBC video about “The elevators that go sideways as well as up and down”.

BBC Click visits a test lift shaft where they are showing off a lift that goes sideways as well as up and down.

The elevators are being developed by Thyssenkrupp.

Instead of using a steel rope, the cabin is carried by linear motors – the same technology that drives some amusements rides and high-speed trains.

(14) SKREIN OUT. Actor Ed Skrein quits Hellboy after whitewashing criticism.

The Deadpool star, 34, said he did not know the race of Major Ben Daimio when he accepted the part in the comic book adaptation.

He said he was stepping down “so the role can be cast appropriately”.

The initial casting prompted accusations of Hollywood “whitewashing” following other recent rows.

(15) HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT. An overnight sensation, discovered two decades ago: “‘Sea dragon’ fossil is ‘largest on record'”.

It was discovered on the coast of England more than 20 years ago, but has remained unstudied until now.

Palaeontologist Sven Sachs saw the fossil on display at a museum in Hannover. He contacted UK palaeontologist, Dean Lomax, who is an expert on Ichthyosaurs.

”It amazes me that specimens such as this [the biggest] can still be ‘rediscovered’ in museum collections,” said the University of Manchester palaeontologist.

”You don’t necessarily have to go out in the field to make a new discovery.”

(16) HELP IS COMING. Crowdsourcing hurricane rescues: “Facebook, Twitter Replace 911 Calls For Stranded In Houston”.

Many of Tropical Storm Harvey’s stranded flood victims haven’t been able to get through to 911, compounding their fears. That’s when Facebook, Twitter and Nextdoor stepped in.

Annie Swinford is one of the many unofficial volunteers helping fellow Houstonians via the Facebook group Hurricane Harvey 2017 – Together We Will Make It.

“When you see that somebody has posted that they’re on their roof with their one-, three- and four-year-olds and the water’s up to the roof line, you have to be willing to make that phone call for them,” she says.

From just north of the flooding in Houston, Swinford has been making calls to emergency services and blasting requests through her Twitter account to local news organizations.

These social media platforms have become de facto meeting points for thousands of stranded people as they reach out to their neighborhood groups and the outside universe for help.

They’ve become such effective tools to reach people that police and government officials are using these channels as an essential means of communication.

Swinford found out how difficult it was to reach emergency personnel. She was put on hold for 45 minutes before talking to a live person during one 911 call, she says. Many people couldn’t get through at all because the storm took out over a dozen emergency call centers.

(17) NO FLIES ON HER. Evangeline Lily tweeted a photo of herself in the Wasp suit as part of the Jack Kirby centennial celebration.

(18) TRAILERS: COMPARE AND CONTRAST. Io9 linked to a video fans made for laughs: “This Homemade Thor: Ragnarok Trailer Doesn’t Need Production Values to Be Fantastic”. Daniel Dern sent the link with a comment, “It’s clear that Marvel could be spending a lot less on these movies and still have them be fun…”

Turns out it doesn’t really matter how much money you drop trying to recreate the trailer for a multi-million dollar movie, so long as you’re creative as hell and enjoy running around in your backyard having fun with your friends.

 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Gregory Benford, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Bill Oberst, Carl Slaughter, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

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69 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/29/17 Ragnarok & Roll”

  1. @12, has someone told Seanan McGuire about these….?

    <edit to add> Accidental first!

  3. 5) very much agree.

    4) What he wants is not for more ‘realistic’ books to be published, there are plenty of them around. What he wants is for readers to like these books more than space exploration stories; for everyone to agree with his taste in books. Well, I wish everyone could see how the books I like are clearly superior also, but know that is not how life works.

  4. Apropos #16, I’ll note that the worst I have suffered is having no milk to drink. I talked to Lee this evening and she likewise is doing fine.

  6. Going back several scrolls – the Barry and Joe kickstarter is up to $78K, with 44 hours left.

  7. 4) As bookworm said, the books are out there, people just aren’t buying them with the same enthusiam as space opera or epic fantasy. But his real problem is once again that people aren’t reading the books he wants them to read and are instead reading books he doesn’t approve of.

  12. 5) I had seen someone else on twitter upset about writers who had been outed without their consent. I wonder if they had read this article.

    12) There was a kit kat store I walked past in Melbourne. I wonder if they would or will have these…

    4) ” the genre as a whole is less wealthy and less visible than ever before”. Well, the death of the midlist definitely has made writing as a living a problem and a challenge.
    McCalmont seems to be arguing for the Mundane SF movement here, though.

  17. All The Twisty Little Paths

    (1) I’m not seeing a tweet there.

    (5) Reminds me of the crusty looks (and worse) someone gets when they are entitled to use a handicapped space for a reason that’s not apparent to someone who doesn’t know them.

    (14) Good for him. It can’t be easy to let go of a part.

    (17) Not seeing a photo, darn it.

  18. @Paul
    Well, you’ve been identified now.

    Those are some lovely photos BTW. Always great to be able to put a face to the respective names.

    5) Totally agree.

  19. @Cora I made some noise and they fixed it.

    I feel guilty about making such noise though.

  20. @Paul: you had two choices. Your other option was to change your name to Unknown Person, but that doesn’t seem as efficient as making a little noise.

  21. @Steve Nah, I’m not as cool as the real Unknown Person. Don’t want to step on their toes.

  22. 4) A fancy way of saying “this is the kind of books that I like and therefore the whole genre should go in this direction”.

  24. @Anthony…this…bothers me. Ellison (and others) have made similar “threats”.

    In general, I’m wondering why an author can’t mandate in their will/literary agent instructions/appropriate legal docs that none of their unfinished work is to be “finished” by any means; nor sold incomplete (if that is the wish), while maintaining the legacy and continuing its availability for research….

  26. In general, I’m wondering why an author can’t mandate in their will/literary agent instructions/appropriate legal docs that none of their unfinished work is to be “finished” by any means; nor sold incomplete (if that is the wish), while maintaining the legacy and continuing its availability for research….

    Clauses like that in wills aren’t as legally binding in the real world as they are in fiction. They can have all the clauses like that they want, but it doesn’t mean the people who inherit the rights are legally obliged to respect them. (I’m production editor for a law education program, and I just finished editing a whackload of Wills & Estates educational materials.)

    4) I’m sympathetic to this; it bugs me how market-driven SFF can sometimes be. I really don’t need another Jim Butcher knockoff, or yet another book checking off all the boxes on a list of tropes and hitting all the standard story beats, so that even when I don’t know the details of what’s going to happen I can tell exactly where I am in the story arc without even having to check the page count. It’s not that they aren’t fun or that I don’t enjoy reading them, but in other genres I like it when I stumble across those books that the publisher knows (or thinks) won’t sell very well but that they felt were absolutely necessary to publish*, and I feel like when I find those in SFF they’re usually older books. I get why market changes mean that’s becoming less common, but still. (On top of that, editors in the past have purposefully pushed the genre in different directions for a whole ton of reasons that weren’t always about reader demand, and they’ve been *honoured for it*; both Gernsback and Campbell did it, and they wound up *shaping* reader/market demands, for better or worse, rather than simply caving to them.)

    *The Factory novels, which eventually did become popular, are a great example from mystery/noir; Derek Raymond’s books were completely contrary to what the market was demanding, and they upended it and reshaped it for decades because a writer and an editor we bored by what readers were demanding from the market (the late ’70s/early ’80s horror boom happened in a similar way).

  27. @7 (Frank&Ernest): good point…

    @11: most people understand that bagpipes are not an indoor instrument…. (Yes, they’re played in arenas — which IMO are the outdoors roofed over.)

    @12: I wonder how many people will buy this; the BBC reports that Jelly Belly found people’s ideas of pumpkin-pie flavor were too individual to make it a viable jellybean flavor. (~2/3 of the way into the story)

    @Anthony: I’m not sure I’d call that “securing the literary legacy”; I recall reliable reports that his daughter was supposed to carry on his work. But I can understand him wanting not to have his work “completed” by some random because some marketroid figures it will sell.

    @August: also, an executor who respects those wishes is going to be endlessly hounded by the abovementioned marketroids; that’s a horrible burden to put on someone an author trusts to be an executor.

  29. I seem to remember that Pratchett also disliked the business of scholarly poring over drafts like Christopher Tolkien, and always deleted all his drafts after the books were published.

  30. Link isn’t working, but people’s social media continuing on after them, with birthday alerts and so on, is very much a weird and sad reality now.

  33. Sad that the Pratchett books, even in incomplete form are no more. Rather have that than some of Ellison’s incomplete material.

    Edgar Allan Poe left a fragment called “The Lighthouse”. A good number of writers have fleshed it out into a complete story, and a book was published of them.

    Ellison is perhaps fearing someone with lesser talent linking himself to his work. One thinks of Lovecraft and August Derleth.

  34. @Steve Davidson: on a practical level, because that’s counting on your literary executor and their eventual heirs to follow your wishes, and on the scholars who are allowed to study it not sneaking the text out: in their notes, possibly coded, or by memorizing them, or even with a tiny camera.

    Given the internet, it wouldn’t be difficult for such a person to spread it around. Or for someone to falsely claim that a fragment was by Pratchett, when it was actually Pratchett+whoever is posting it.

    I suspect there are a lot of people who, while they wouldn’t download a pirated copy of one of Pratchett’s novels, would download an unauthorized “completion” of his unfinished work from a server in Russia.

  37. At a Philcon some years ago some asshat started playing a bagpipe at the con suite. It woke me up. I phoned the front desk to complain. And it is the only time I’ve ever had to do such a thing. And I have a 75% hearing loss.

  38. Robert Whitaker Sirignano on August 30, 2017 at 10:36 am said:
    I was at a shopping center once when a pipe band was practicing in what was either a pavilion or an unfinished but usable structure (roof and floor but no walls). It was still close to deafening. And at one point there was a piper in a building down the street from where I lived. It wasn’t too bad from outside…but still noticeable from some distance.
    (And i like bagpipes.)

  39. I’ve seen the Battlefield Band and the Tannahill Weavers in concert multiple times and yes, when the pipes kick in they do tend to knock you back in your seat. In a good way.

  40. As to news item 4.) I find myself in an odd position. McCalmont has always struck me as a particularly ungenerous critic, and I’m generally uninterested in his positions, but I do want to make a brief defense of advocacy criticism. This work could be often sharply critical, and was directed towards transforming the genre. If we look at the early criticism of science, particularly the work of Merril, Knight, Blish, Russ, and even some of the early Delany, we can see criticism that is directed towards some of the goal of improving the genre, of telling more sophisticated and interesting stories, of skipping overused plot conventions, etc. I don’t always agree with everything these critics say, but their work is almost always interesting, and I think it pushed writers in the genre to produce more interesting work. I’m not all that interested in what McCalmont has to say, but I do think we need to have a space to talk about the potentials of the genres and the ways that actually existing work misses out on those potentials.

  42. When I was young, I knew a guy who played bagpipes in a rock band. One important detail is that while the other instruments were all amplified, his wasn’t. 🙂

  44. @Robert Whitaker Sirignano: if that was a Philcon MANY years ago, I was there too (or, if not, the same thing happened MANY years ago at a Philcon).

    It was described by one early morning riser as the following:

    want to know what a bagpipe sounds like first thing in the morning? find a tomcat. shave its testicles and strap a block of dry ice to them. the resultant caterwauling will be a poor approximation…..

  45. 4) I truly appreciate this repost of an article from 1992. It’s always good to see the concerns of critics a generation or two ago, about how people were reading the wrong things, and how this would inevitably doom the SF&F market to increasing senescence and irrelevance.

  46. “Scrollfinger. He’s the man, the man with the First-Fifth touch. A Pixel’s touch”

  47. Re: bagpipe experiences

    I have long regretted that during the period when the musical talents (and instrument inventories) of a band I played in offered the opportunity to arrange something for bagpipe, sousaphone, and piccolo, I did not take proper advantage. We discussed it on occasion, but never carried through. It seemed like a trio that had the potential for a fascinating dynamic balance.

  48. @Heather —

    It seemed like a trio that had the potential for a fascinating dynamic balance.

    Not quite the same, but I once helped out a trombonist at a trombone festival. As part of a concert he did, we did a duet — him on trombone, me on piccolo. He did the piccolo solo part from “The Stars and Stripes Forever”, I did the trombone part.

    Close enough? 😉

  49. Update on the “Barry and Joe” pilot:
    with 24 hours left, they’re at almost $98K dollars.

  50. @steve davidson: that sounds like a cutdown of John Curlovich’s description (as part of a fanzine article slamming the SCA, from 41 years ago); he spoke of fire as well as ice.

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