Pixel Scroll 9/3/21 If It Doesn’t Scroll Naturally, File It

(1) MASSIVE DOCTOR WHO POLL. Herald of Creation today finished releasing the results of its poll of the best Doctor Who episodes, a Twitter marathon that began in July with number 296 “The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos” (a Thirteenth Doctor episode, unfortunately.) Here are the top five, with apologies that WordPress won’t display single tweets. (And since Herald of Creation revealed them in last to first order, that shuffles things up, too.)

(2) ELIZABETH BEAR MEDICAL UPDATE. In an open Patreon post, Elizabeth Bear announced she’s been diagnosed with cancer: “The good news is that I’m a writer and I already own 75 pairs of pajamas.” Wishing her the best of care.

This is one of those bad news but not the worst news posts, which is to say that I’ve been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer and am in the process of scheduling surgery and radiation for it.

This means that The Folded Sky will probably be a little delayed, because at least two months of my life are going to vanish in a puff of waiting rooms and lasers. The good news on that front is that I’m working on the copy edits for The Origin of Storms right now and those should be handed back very soon. And I think I’ll get the short story I’m working on finished by deadline, too…

Don’t fret about me too much: I’ve got a great care team and a great group of local family and friends, and the odds are in my favor. The survival rate for early detected breast cancer is 99% these days.

I expect to be crushingly bored and annoyed and somewhat terrified for three months or so, and then suffer through biannual mammograms for the rest of my life, however long that is….

(3) MEMORY BOOK. A Kickstarter appeal has been launched to fund a limited edition hardcover book of art by the world famous fantasy and science fiction artist, Rowena — Paintings and Drawings by Rowena by Kim DeMulder.

The magically amazing artwork of Rowena is known to people everywhere in the world. She painted literally hundreds of book covers and illustrations for many different publications. She won many awards during her career, including the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist in 1984, and was a four-time Hugo finalist for Best Professional Artist. Her professional peers made her a 1999 Chesley Award nominee. And the World Fantasy Conventions awarded her a lifetime achievement award in 2020.

Sadly, Rowena passed away in February 2021 and the art world experienced a profound loss.

And that means, of course that there will be no more Rowena art produced…ever. However, legends never die and here is the opportunity to keep her legend alive. This new book of her artwork contains many pieces that were never published before. And will also include several pieces that were never published in Rowena’s previous art books. Over 100 pages of paintings and drawings and even some poetry are contained within this hard cover volume.

 This beautiful book is being lovingly designed and edited by Kim DeMulder, who had lived with Rowena for approximately the last 18 years.

(4) DOES YOUR CON NEED HELP? Speculative Literature Foundation is still taking applications for their Convention Support Grants.  It’s a rolling grant – the first recipients were announced last month.

This has been a difficult year for the conventions that have long been the lifeblood of our field. The SLF is pleased to announce a new Convention Support Grant for 2021-2022.

We’ll be giving out $10,000 over the course of the year, in grants of $500 – $1000 each, to science fiction and fantasy conventions. (Literary conventions that have significant speculative literature content are also welcome to apply.)

These grants are intended to support conventions both in developing their online presences (through the purchase of tech, training costs, hosting costs, etc.) and making in-person gathering safer once it’s appropriate, perhaps in the last quarter of 2021 (through purchase of cleaning supplies, masks, renting additional rooms for better spacing, etc.). Non-profit organizations preferred.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Open for submissions: Conventions taking place between January 1 and May 31, 2022, application period: August 15 – September 15, 2021

Please visit our website for more specific information on the application process: https://speculativeliterature.org/convention-support-grant/

(5) L’AUDACE L’AUDACE TOUJOURS L’AUDACE. “The French military’s newest weapon: science fiction writers” says Literary Hub.

…Essentially, reports Le Monde and WorldCrunch, the French Military of Defense is working with the University of Paris Sciences and Lettres to train their military on sci-fi-esque ideas. The science fiction writers, already in the business of thinking of futuristic technology and social innovations, come up with futuristic scenarios that could possibly endanger France between 2030 and 2060. Once the sci-fi writers, called the “Red Team,” fact-check with “The Purple Team,” academics working in AI and tech, and the “Blue Team,” military, the military uses those ideas as practice scenarios.

…A little surprisingly, a fraction of the scenarios are made available for public consumption on the Red Team’s website; the two scenarios currently on the site are “The Sublime Door Opens Again,” a world where hypervelocity missiles have caused armies to design shields that can cover a whole city, and “Chronicle of an Announced Cultural Death,” a world where communities have siloed themselves into “safe spheres”.

The Red Team also has a YouTube channel filled with what are essentially commercials for themselves.

(6) IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster, Designated Financial Times Reader.] In the August 28 Financial Times (behind a paywall), Lorien Kite discusses a vacation she took with her family in Iceland, organized by Black Tomato “Take me on a Story” based on Jules Verne’s Journey To The Centre Of The Earth.

The action begins almost as soon as we make it through the melee of duty-free shopping and Covid-related bureaucracy at Keflavik arrivals only to be greeted by our guide for the next four days, Arnar Olafsson.  Outside, loading the vehicle, we find an envelope wedged under the windscreen wiper, which opens to reveal a letter with certain words rendered in Scandinavian runes together with part of a runic-to-roman key–though not a big enough part for us to make much headway. Later, after we are dropped off at our base for the first two days, the stylish Hotel Husafell near the Lankjokull glacier, a parcel including the missing section is delivered to our door.

The packages keep coming, all containing puzzles or messages that whet the appetite for the next day’s activities and sustain the narrative of a mysterious uncle with the initials “GH” who has discovered a way to the centre of the Earth and is now on the run:  It’s a kind of treasure hunt, borrowing from the 1959 and 2008 films as well as from the book.

(7) DHALGREN IN DEPTH. On Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, edited by Bill Wood, and put together with a great deal of assistance from Delany himself, will be released by Fantastic Books on September 9.

This book—full of reviews, critical essays, and in-depth analyses of Dhalgren as a novel, and as commentary on life and the world—is an excellent companion to the novel itself. There are also discussions of how to read the novel, and clues to unraveling some of the mysteries hidden therein. Dhalgren is a difficult novel to read—playing with the reader’s perception through the use of circular text, interior echoes, multistable perception, and repeated imagery—but it is a worthwhile read. The book includes nine full-color illustrations (and more spot black-and-white illos), as well as an essay on “The Making of Hogg,” Delany’s infamous and nearly unpublishable novel.

Samuel R. Delany is the winner of two Hugos and four Nebula Awards. He has been honored with lifetime achievement awards, including SFWA’s Grand Master, the Eaton Award, the Lambda Pilgrim Award, and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Dhalgren, his most popular and most controversial novel, was first published in 1975. It was nominated for the Nebula Award, remains in print to this day, and has sold close to two one million copies in a variety of editions.

Contributors include Douglas Barbour, Mary Kay Bray, Rudi Dornemann, Harlan Ellison, Robert Elliot Fox, Jean Marc Gawron, Kenneth R. James, Gerald Jonas, John Nizalowski, Steven Paley, Darrell Schweitzer, Steven Shaviro, K. Leslie Steiner, Theodore Sturgeon, and Samuel R. Delany himself.

The table of contents is on the publisher’s website.

(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • 2003 – Eighteen years on this date, Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show was published by BenBella Books. It’s a look by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel by genre writers who are very obviously fans of those series. I won’t list all of the authors and their essays who are here so I’ll single out just a few such as David Brin who wrote “Buffy vs. the Old-Fashioned ‘Hero'”, Laura Resnick’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ambivalent” and Sherrilyn Kenyon “The Search for Spike’s Balls”. It’s available should you want to read it from the usual suspects for a mere four dollars and ninety nine cents. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 3, 1940 — Pauline Collins, 81. She played Queen Victoria in the Tenth Doctor story, “Tooth and Claw”, a most excellent tale, but she first showed up on Who over thirty years earlier as Samantha Briggs in “The Faceless Ones”, a Second Doctor story. She’s appears in Tales of the UnexpectedThe Three Musketeers, Julian Fellowes’ From Time to Time film and the Merlin series. 
  • Born September 3, 1943 — Valerie Perrine, 78. She has an uncredited role as Shady Tree’s sidekick in Diamonds Are Forever, her first film appearance. Her first credited film role is as Montana Wildhack in Slaughterhouse-Five. She’s Eve Teschmacher in Superman and Superman II. She showed up as Tins in “The Three Little Pigs” episode of Faerie Tale Theatre, and was April Flowers in “Who’s Who: Part 3” of Ghostwriters.
  • Born September 3, 1943 — Mick Farren. Punk musician who was the singer with the proto-punk band the Deviants. He also wrote Hawkwind lyrics who several genre writers have included in their novels.  His most well-known genre work was the The Renquist Quartet about an immortal vampire. His late Eighties novel The Armageddon Crazy was set in a post-Millennium States dominated by fundamentalists who toss the Constitution away. (Died 2013.)
  • Born September 3, 1954 — Stephen Gregg. Editor and publisher of Eternity Science Fiction which  ran 1972 to 1975 and 1979 to 1980. It had early work by Glen Cook, Ed Bryant, Barry N Malzberg, andrew j offutt and Roger Zelazny. (Died 2005.)
  • Born September 3, 1959 — Merritt Butrick. He played Kirk’s son, David, in The Wrath of Khan and again in The Search for Spock. Note the very young death. He died of toxoplasmosis, complicated by AIDS to be precise. (Died 1989.)
  • Born September 3, 1969 — John Picacio, 52. Illustrator who in 2005 won both the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist and the Chesley Award for Best Paperback Cover for James Tiptree Jr.’s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. He won the Hugo for Best Professional Artist at LoneStarCon 3 and at CoNZealand. He’s nominated this year for the same Award. 
  • Born September 3, 1974 — Clare Kramer, 47. She had the recurring role of Glory, a god from a hell dimension, that was the main antagonist of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She’s been a lot of horror films including The Skulls IIIThe GravedancersThe ThirstRoad to HellRoad to Hell, Big Ass Spider! and Tales of Halloween

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) SUSANNA CLARKE Q&A. “Susanna Clarke: ‘Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman taught me to be courageous in writing’” in The Guardian.

The book I wish I’d written
The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton. It’s an extraordinary novel, funny and clever. It is subtitled A Nightmare. But it’s an odd sort of nightmare – one where terror keeps dissolving into cheerfulness (which is the opposite way round from most nightmares, and from a lot of contemporary fiction). Chesterton describes scenes and objects and colours with an almost heraldic vividness – or, looked at another way, as if they were pages in a modern graphic novel. He makes London feel like a fairytale, which to him I think it was. I have read The Man Who Was Thursday many, many times, but I still don’t understand it. I’ll keep going.

A word of warning: it is a book of its times. There are no women characters. Well, there might be one, but she says three things and vanishes immediately….

(12) DUELING KAIJU. John Scalzi’s tweet  brings to mind something I saw during the 1986 Worldcon, possibly in the same hotel. (How many downtown Atlanta hotels have these glass-walled elevators?)  Quote follows.

…At other times, the illusion of flight and the view of other elevator cars hurtling past inspired new fannish stunts. Late Friday night the car I was riding stopped at the 38th floor, admitting Jerry Pournelle and Barbara Clifford. Seconds later, another car stopped beside us on the 38th floor. Staring from its window was a 3-foot-tall inflatable Godzilla held upright by two laughing fans. Both elevators left the 38th floor together, and raced downward on a parallel course. Like a tailgunner sighting bogies through his perspex dome, Pournelle jackhammered his arms from the recoil of imaginary twin-.50s and yelled, “Die, monster, die!” Godzilla’s bodyguards imitated Jerry and they shot each other down into the lobby….

(13) MORE NEWS. Petréa Mitchell returns to the con reporting field with the launch of her new Substack newsletter SMOF News. Issue 1 is live here.

SMOF News aims to be a newsletter covering fan conventions and related topics of interest. Please send your press releases, your news tidbits, and your outraged letters to [email protected].

Each issue will have 4 parts:

  1. Discussion of the big news of the week. If there is no big news, the space will be filled by editorializing, helpful tips for congoers, Q&As, or whatever else seems appropriate to the moment. Like this introduction, for instance.
  2. News in brief from around the convention world.
  3. Convention listings for the next five weekends.
  4. One interesting link that may or may not have anything at all to do with geek fandoms.

Newsletters will be published every Wednesday evening, Pacific Time.

(14) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 39 of the Octothorpe podcast is now up.  John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty are at their computers for the first time in ages, and spend awhile catching up on locs before talking about convention COVID-19 policies. Listen here: “Bar Cookies”.

(15) HOME WEET HOME. “Meet The Women Who Live In Real-Life Disney Houses” is an aggregation of Instagrams and Tik-Tok videos with framing comments at The Refinery, if you want to satisfy your curiosity.

On TikTok, the hashtag #disneyhouse currently has over 120 million views. Here, you can see everything from handles shaped like the talking doorknob in Alice In Wonderland to princess beds to Aladdin rugs to doors decaled to look like Boo’s from Monsters, Inc. In recent years, much has been made of ‘Disney adults’ – often childless millennials with an all-consuming love of Walt’s wares. Disney adults subtly dress like Disney characters, they holiday in the parks multiple times a year and they fill their homes with Disney décor. 

(16) TEN PERCENTER. Powell’s Books has picked a list of 50 Books for 50 Years. I’ve read five. (Sometime I’m going to make my own list so for once I can have a good score.)

Which books have foretold the present, lit our paths, warned us back, egged us on? What books stand with us now, reflecting the present?

Read why we picked each of these remarkable volumes of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comics for our anniversary list — and share your favorites with us using the hashtag #50Books50Years.

(Click for larger image.)

(17) MADE OF CHEESE. The moon, maybe, the movie for sure. Moonfall comes to theaters February 4, 2022.

In Moonfall, a mysterious force knocks the Moon from its orbit around Earth and sends it hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it. With mere weeks before impact and the world on the brink of annihilation, NASA executive and former astronaut Jo Fowler (Academy Award® winner Halle Berry) is convinced she has the key to saving us all – but only one astronaut from her past, Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson, “Midway”) and a conspiracy theorist K.C. Houseman (John Bradley, “Game of Thrones”) believes her. These unlikely heroes will mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space, leaving behind everyone they love, only to find out that our Moon is not what we think it is.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Mark Hamill talks to Star Wars Coffee about his role in The Mandalorian. This is actually quite interesting and only four minutes long.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Ian Randal Strock, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Jack Lint. Or Kendall. I’m not sure.]

61 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/3/21 If It Doesn’t Scroll Naturally, File It

  1. (7) Two different spellings for the name of Delany’s book.

    (8) Loved Seven Seasons.

    (2) Echoing Soon Lee’s good wishes for Elizabeth Bear.

  2. Andrew (not Werdna): I went to elementary school with a Dahl and it seems to have ruined me for spelling the title of Delany’s book correctly.

  3. 2) Healing vibes to Elizabeth Bear.

    5) An Archy and Mehitabel reference, eh? There’s life in those old characters yet!

  4. @Mike: There’s got to be a way to work in a pun with “Files and Dahls” but it’s not coming at the moment.

  5. Soon Lee says Best wishes to Elizabeth Bear. Cancer sucks.

    Yeah best wishes to her. It sounds like her chances are quite good.

    I’ve got a friend in Oregon who’s dealing with a recurrence of his skin cancer which is made worse by him being immune compromised as he’s a kidney recipient which means he’s on the meds that suppress his immune system severely. He just got his Covid-19 booster.

  6. (16) have three on Mt TBR, have read three others. (A lot of them, I don’t even recognize the titles.) “She’s Not There” is good.

  7. ‘Dhalgren’ has to be up there in the ratio of ‘bought but not read’. Somewhere near ‘Fouclault’s Pendulum’, ‘The Name of the Rose’, and ‘Infinite Jest’.

  8. Iain say ‘Dhalgren’ has to be up there in the ratio of ‘bought but not read’. Somewhere near ‘Fouclault’s Pendulum’, ‘The Name of the Rose’, and ‘Infinite Jest’.

    A lot of very thick works which Dhalgren is get bought but go unread in the end particularly is one has large TBR piles competing for one’s attention. I think it says a lot for Tolkien that we all actually got all the way through both The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings which is a great deal of text.

  9. P J Evans says I’ve actually read “The Name of the Rose”. It isn’t easy reading.

    I’m curious. Did you watch the film? It obviously pared down the novel quite a bit given the length of that work. Did it capture the novel well?

  10. (9) I first saw Valerie Perrine in her memorable appearance in a public TV (PBS, or its predecessor) broadcast of the Bruce Jay Friedman play Steambath. She co-starred with Bill Bixby. Definitely a genre work.

  11. @Cat Eldredige
    No, I haven’t seen that movie (or many others). I can see they’d have to pare stuff, but there are two main plot lines driving it, and you need both.

  12. P J Evans who did an amazing job of butchering my last name says No, I haven’t seen that movie (or many others). I can see they’d have to pare stuff, but there are two main plot lines driving it, and you need both.

    Ok, that’s interesting. Any Filer who’s read the novel and seen the film? I am curious how they stuffed eight hundred pages into a little over two hours running time. Neat trick that.

  13. Yeah, my fingers aren’t syncing well with my brain any more. Usually I can catch stuff….

  14. I just found out that there was a miniseries adaptation of The Name of the Rose a couple of years ago. It’s on a streamer I subscribe to, so maybe I’ll try it.

  15. I read the book and saw the film [Name of the Rose, that is], but in both cases it’s been 25-30 years, so recollections are fuzzy.

    I haven’t watched it yet, but I see there was also an 8 episode Italian miniseries adaptation recently with John Turturro in the lead role. That does seem like a better length.

  16. I did read Dhalgren all the way through, but then I was already a huge Delany fan when it came out. I still–after all this time–haven’t quite decided what I think of it, but I’m happy that it’s popular, successful, and respected, for Delany’s sake, if nothing else. 🙂

  17. @Mike Glyer & @Jack Lint: Yay, maybe-quasi-co-title-credit! 😉

    OMG I just looked and the Puppy roundup titles don’t have “The Year of the Dog”; what a missed opportunity. Where’s that shoggoth-infested time machine. . . .

  18. (2) ELIZABETH BEAR MEDICAL UPDATE. I hope for the best possible outcome for her!!!

    (9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS. Happy Birthday to John Picacio – one of my favorite artists! And to Clare Kramer, who did a bang-up job as a crazy goddess. 🙂

    (10) COMICS SECTION. LOL at this. 🙂

    (17) MADE OF CHEESE. What the heck?! “In Soviet Russia, moon comes to you!” Not for me, methinks, but the trailer is a trip.

    (18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. That was pretty cool. I’ve seen zip “The Mandalorian,” so his voiceover for his younger self is news to me!

  19. The film version of The Name of the Rose basically works exactly the way you’d expect it to, by cutting out all the intellectual digressions and debates and paring down to the basic action. It’s not a bad adaptation, exactly, just a rather obvious and routine one. The miniseries… has its own strengths and weaknesses. (Most of the people I know who’ve read The Name of the Rose have been pleasantly surprised by how accessible it is… you don’t absolutely need to follow all the stuff about mediaeval heresies for the plot to make sense. Foucault’s Pendulum, now, that is a bit more on the dry side.)

    Am I a bad person, by the way, for looking at item 3 and thinking “Aha! The benefits of Brexit!” ?

  20. I read The Name Of The Rose and saw the movie. I actually don’t recall much of the book now, but didn’t find it particularly hard going. As Steve says, Foucault’s {endulum is quite a bit heavier going. Infinite Jest is touching, eminently readable, often hilarious. It is non-linear, which may put some off. I got probably past halfway through Dhalgren before deciding it just wasn’t for me.

  21. Did it capture the novel well?

    No.

    ‘Dhalgren’ has to be up there in the ratio of ‘bought but not read’. Somewhere near ‘Fouclault’s Pendulum’, ‘The Name of the Rose’, and ‘Infinite Jest’.

    Like Cliff, Dhalgren is the one among these that I didn’t manage to make it through, and I’m a little surprised to see The Name of the Rose on a Tough Reads list. On the other hand …

    16) 11/50. I feel unlettered now.

    Best wishes to Elizabeth Bear.

  22. 2) Best wishes to Elisabeth Bear. At that moment only jerks would mind if her next novel is late.

    16) To make OGH and Kyra feel better, I read 3 (Perhaps I could count a fourth because I have read a lot of Calvin and Hobbes and one other is at last on the Mount).

  23. I read Name of the Rose when I was a teen; I recall enjoying it quite a bit – no idea if I’d like it now.

  24. I loved Dhalgren enough to read it twice. Parts of it are grooved into my brain, for better or for worse. Possibly not enough of it, but neither of my copies is easily at hand.

  25. I loved The Name of the Rose, the book. Still remember it well. Never saw the movie, because there seemed roughly zero chance that a two-hour movie adaptation of an 800 page book that included many fascinating intellectual digressions and a library that only us slightly mad catalogers could love would be worth seeing.

  26. Lis Carey says I loved The Name of the Rose, the book. Still remember it well. Never saw the movie, because there seemed roughly zero chance that a two-hour movie adaptation of an 800 page book that included many fascinating intellectual digressions and a library that only us slightly mad catalogers could love would be worth seeing.

    Now that’s the answer that I was looking for. Thanks, Lis!

  27. In college, a friend who loved The Name of the Rose ran an RPG for a little while and the main (only?) adventure we did was basically the book. I’m not sure I ever read the book, but I own(ed?) it, so probably I read at least part of it, years ago. I barely remember the movie or the RPG.

    @Lis Carey: The RPG adventure I played in included the library! 😉 So did the movie (short clip of the protagonists exploring it).

  28. Kendall: So did the movie (short clip of the protagonists exploring it).

    OMG, Christian Slater looks so young in that. He would have been around age 16-17 at the time.

  29. @JJ: LOL I know, right? It’s like aw, baby Slater! Sometimes I forget he was in this movie.

    I think my RPG character may have been an analog of Slater’s; I don’t remember for sure, though.

  30. JJ says OMG, Christian Slater looks so young in that. He would have been around age 16-17 at the time.

    The film came out in August of 1986 when he would’ve been seventeen but the principal photography could’ve been shot as long as two years before that which wasn’t unusual for films at that time as post-production could be a lengthy process. A net search failed to pin down when they did their actual filming.

  31. Cat Eldridge: principal photography could’ve been shot as long as two years before that

    Which is why I said he would have been 16 or 17 at the time. IMDb says filming was 11 November 1985 – 10 March 1986. So he was 16.

  32. JJ say to me Which is why I said he would have been 16 or 17 at the time. iMDB says filming was 11 November 1985 – 10 March 1986. So he was 16.

    Ahhh I should’ve checked IMDb. Usually someone on the net has a fan page madly, deeply dedicated to these things but not this time. Thanks!

  33. Joyce Reynolds-Ward says Best wishes to Elizabeth Bear, and fuck cancer.

    Yes, fuck cancer.

    I recently got a cat-scan for cancer because of some symptoms. It was negative. And my PCP didn’t tell me I was being screened for that until afterwards, when she said, “Congratulations, you’re free of cancer.” She didn’t want me to worry for the week it took to get screened.

  34. 1 I agree that Caves of Androzani is the best Dr. Who. I have the unpopular opinion that Colin Baker is the best doctor but was cursed with the worst stories. Peter Davison’s worst stories were as good as Bakers best.

    2 Best wishes to Elizabeth Bear for a quick recovery!

    3 Love Rowena’s art!

    7 Really shocked to find that Dhalgren is Delany’s most popular book. I would have guessed Nova, and my roommate would have guessed Babel-17. There is no doubt that it his most literary novel, and many feel it is his best, but it’s popularity surprises me. I was always bummed that he chose not to complete the sequel to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, which I would probably choose as his best novel.

    16 I’ve only read 4 and haven’t even heard of most of these books.

    17 I’m with rochrist on this one – I was hoping for Jack McDevitt too!

  35. (16) Like others I’ve never heard of most of them, and my count is abysmal.
    Read: 0
    Mount Tsundoku: 5
    Seen adaptations of: 5

  36. (16) Of this batch, I have a copy of Watership Down. I’m sure I’ve also read The Princess Bride, in the two-color edition (distinguishing S. Morgenstern’s text from Goldman’s commentary). I think I’ve read The Satanic Verses, but Midnight’s Children, also by Rushdie, sticks in my mind better. And I have two Calvin and Hobbes collections, but not the one named. So that’s about 3 out of 50.

  37. I think The Name of the Rose is an easier read than Dhalgren, the first has a very conventional plot with overt nods to Sherlock Holmes and detective fiction but with digressions into the nature of inquiry and making sense of experiences. The film strips things down to the bare bones of the plot and the setting. It’s OK and a good cast (including, as noted, Baby Christian Slater).

    I can’t imagine what a film of Dhalgren would be like 🙂

  38. I can’t imagine what a film of Dhalgren would be like

    “To wound the all-starring SFX”

  39. The edition I had of The Princess Bride gave an address to which you could write and request the text of the “excised Wesley/Buttercup reunion scene” (I did this, more than a decade before the internet). I laughed so hard when I actually got the snail mail response from the publisher. I give Goldman high marks for making arrangements for that petite blague, and for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for going along with it. What a hoot.

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