Pixel Scroll 9/17/16 Mjölnir She Wrote

(1) FANAC FANHISTORY YOUTUBE CHANNEL. The FANAC Fan History Project has a website at Fanac.org with over 20,000 pages of photos, fanzines, references and other material. Their Youtube Channel will be used to provide a variety of audio and video recordings from conventions, clubs, interviews and other fannish endeavors. Most Recent video posts:

  • Albacon (2004) – David Hartwell interviews David Drake (1 hour, 16 minutes):

  • MidAmeriCon (1976) Worldcon – Alfred Bester interview (1 hour, 2 minutes):

(2) SORRY FROM PARIS. Norman Spinrad felt the need to apologize to the world via Facebook for the cover of his next novel, due out from Tor on February 7, 2017:

the-peoples-police-by-spinrad

My apologies to the people and the City of New Orleans for the misleading and insulting cover that Tor has insisted on putting on THE PEOPLE’S POLICE which will be published in February 2017. I’ve done all I can to no avail to get cover to reflect my true feelings about the city as does the novel. As does the novel’s dedication:

To THE INDOMITABLE SPIRIT OF THE BIG EASY…
Past, Present, and Future
Never let your song sing surrender

One picture is not always worth a thousand words. Trust me that with THE PEOPLE’S POLICE 65,000 heartfelt words are worth more than one darkly misguided picture.

Spinrad added in a comment:

But part of it was the tragic death of my editor David Hartwell. Leaving the novel as an orphan novel without a mommy, daddy, or hero, which just got thrown in the machinery. This is just the kind of shit than can happen with nobody to blame. But handling it the way they have by completely stonewalling me is not proper professional treatment.

(3) SJW CREDENTIALS TAKE OVER. Both Anthony and “As You Know” Bob linked to this wonderful story of crowd-sourced SJW credentialing at London’s Clapham Common tube station: “Every advert in a London Underground station has been replaced ith cat photos”.

The Citizens Advertising Takeover Service (CATS, if you didn’t get that) started a crowdfunding campaign to raise enough money to replace the standard adverts for new protein shakes and mortgage apps with pictures of, well, cats.

We reported on it back in the wishing and hoping stage, and now the plan has blossomed into the beautiful thing it is today, with more than 60 adverts displaying cute kittens and cats from every angle at Clapham Common tube station.

Or should we say CAT-ham Common.

At first, the plan was just to put up pretty pictures of cats.

But after thinking things through CATS decided to display photos of animals in need of loving homes – so many of the pictures you can see are cats from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home or Cats Protection, the UK’s largest feline welfare charity.

cats

(4) TELL YOUR FRIENDS – IT’S BATMAN DAY. Remind Hollywood to make money! Movie makers took to twitter to celebrate Batman Day and hype the Justice League movie.

Holy sands of time! It’s Batman Day, DC Entertainment’s official celebration of the Dark Knight’s birthday, and as the internet blows up with tributes to the co-holder of the title for world’s most well-known superhero, Batman v. Superman director Zack Snyder has given the world its first glimpse at his version of two of Batdom’s most iconic elements. We’ll cut to the chase: Snyder tweeted out set photos from his upcoming Justice League showing off the new version of the Bat-signal, and in the process snuck in a glimpse of J.K. Simmons as Commissioner Gordon. Check it out below.

(5) PRINT THRIVES AGAIN. Actual comic books are doing okay, too, according to Vulture “Comics circulation just hit a 20-year high”.

But due to momentum that’s hard to pin down but is likely owed to the increasing dominance of comics adaptations at the box office, companies have found their footing — and a wider readership — again. In fact, circulation just hit its highest level in 20 years.

According to the industry’s leading sales analyst, John Jackson Miller of Comichron, the monopolistic comics distributor Diamond shipped 10.26 million copies of comic books and graphic novels to comic-book shops in August. That’s the biggest distribution month since December of 1996. What’s more, DC Comics had a 44.59 percent share in that circulation, which is remarkable because the company lagged behind eternal rival Marvel for nearly five years before clobbering the latter in July. DC’s ascendance continues, and they had the most-ordered comic of August with the first issue of their Harley Quinn reboot.

(6) TIME BANDITS HEADLINES ART HOUSE CELEBRATION. Yes, there’s a day for everything – which means fans can look forward to seeing an old favorite from Terry Gilliam on the big screen once again, as Entertainment Weekly reports in Time Bandits and Phantasm: Remastered to play in cinemas on Art House Theater Day”.

EW can exclusively reveal that a 2K restoration of Terry Gilliam’s family-friendly fantasy-adventure Time Bandits and filmmaker Don Coscarelli’s horror film Phantasm: Remastered will both play in cinemas as part of the inaugural Art House Theater Day, which takes place Sept. 24. The event will also feature a collection of stop-motion short films from animation distributors GKIDS called A Town Called Panic: The Specials. Over 185 venues are participating in what is being described as a nationwide celebration of the cultural and community growth that art house theaters provide.

“Art House Theater Day is a chance to show film-lovers that their local theaters are part of a larger cultural movement,” event co-founder Gabriel Chicoine said in a statement. “These cinemas are not passive, insular venues — they are passion-driven institutions that collaborate with distributors, filmmakers, and each other to deepen film appreciation and to increase the diversity and artistic integrity of what you see on the big screen.”

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRL

  • Born September 17, 1951 – Cassandra (Elvira) Peterson.

(8) ANCILLARY SOUVENIRS. Twitter user Ellie squees about her Radch swag from Worldcon.

(9) CAN’T RAISE AWARENESS HIGHER THAN THIS. An astronaut wore a flight suit painted by pediatric cancer patients.

An astronaut on board the International Space Station debuted a colorful flight suit on Friday (Sept. 16) as part of an effort to raise awareness about childhood cancer and the benefits of pairing art with medicine. NASA flight engineer Kate Rubins revealed “COURAGE,” a hand-painted flight suit created by the pediatric patients recovering at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The unique garment was produced by “The Space Suit Art Project,” a collaboration between MD Anderson, NASA Johnson Space Center and ILC Dover, a company that develops NASA spacesuits.

news-091616a

(10) FINALLY, A REASON TO VISIT WINE COUNTRY. “’Martian Chronicles’ artist at the library” promises the Napa Valley Register.

Local writer and painter Lance Burris will exhibit 16 paintings illustrating visually evocative passages from Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles,” on Saturday, Sept. 24 at the Napa Main Library.

The event is free of charge and scheduled to take place at 2 p.m. in the magazine section of the library at 580 Coombs Street in downtown Napa.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an hour-long commentary by the artist on the art of illustration and Ray Bradbury’s writings.

The works and commentary are part of the artist’s 48 painting “Bradbury Collection,” which illustrates Bradbury classics that also include “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Illustrated Man.”

(11) FAN NOW CLASSIC PORTRAIT PAINTER. Nick Stathopoulos, a leading fine artist with roots in Australian fandom, was interviewed for Maria Stoljar’s podcast Talking With Painters.

Nick Stathopoulos at home with his painting ‘Don’t touch that dial!’

Nick Stathopoulos at home with his painting ‘Don’t touch that dial!’

Nick Stathopoulos has been a finalist many times in Australia’s Archibald and Doug Moran Portrait prizes (including this year’s Archibald portrait of Deng Adut). Last year his painting of Robert Hoge was shortlisted in the renowned BP Portrait Award in London which attracted over 400,000 visitors.  The portrait was also reproduced on the cover of the Times.

His art career spans many fields including illustration, book cover design, computer game design, animation, screenwriting, film making and sculpture and this is all on top of an arts/law degree. He has won several awards for his illustration work but has found a real passion in hyper realist painting of portraits and still lifes.

In this interview Nick talks about how children’s television of the 60s provided him with the inspiration to draw toys, cars and machines as a child, he explains why he can never eat another Freddo frog and reveals how he came to name his 2009 show ‘Toy Porn’. He generously discusses his art techniques in detail from the first sketches and meeting with the sitter to the final portrait. He also gives moving accounts of how he came to paint Deng Adut and Robert Hoge and the emotional impact those experiences had on him.

(12) THE NEXT GENERATION. Taking Flight is a charming video about a grandfather’s adventures in outer space and the jungle with his grandson.

Taking Flight is a short film inspired by the life and heritage of Antonio Pasin, inventor of the Radio Flyer wagon. In this fictional tribute to Pasin’s legacy, what begins as a small boy’s over-scheduled, over supervised, boring day with Grandpa turns into a larger-than-life journey, narrowly escaping wild monkeys and battling aliens to save the universe. Through the power of imagination and epic adventure, a boy learns to be a kid, a father learns to be a dad, and a grandfather reminds us all what childhood is about.

 

(13) THE BLACK COOKIES. If Dread Central asked a contributor to design thematic Oreo cookie packages for his favorite horror movies.

I recently discovered that my friend Billy Polard, who is primarily a musician but also happens to have some serious self-taught Photoshop skills, was creating his own wacky Oreo flavors over on Facebook, and though his Taco Bell and Pizza Hut-flavored creations didn’t necessarily excite my taste buds, they damn sure caught my interest. And they also, as you’ve probably gathered by now, inspired this very post.

I recently reached out to Billy to see if he’d be interested in whipping up some faux horror movie-inspired Oreo packages, and to my delight, he took the project by the horns and totally ran with it. You’ll find the results of his handiwork below, which we hope you’ll enjoy and share across social media.

Here’s one of the tamer examples.

gremlins

GRATITUDE.  My continued thanks to everyone who contributed to upgrade my technology. Today John King Tarpinian was over to copy my PC files onto the new external hard drive and then to the new laptop. Now I have easy access to all my archival material. Here’s a photo John took of me laboring over today’s Scroll.

mike-laptop-crop

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

120 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/17/16 Mjölnir She Wrote

  1. I’m glad the new laptop is up and running, I hope you’ve been able to get everything configured just the way you like it!

  2. Witty Ticcy Ray Bink!

    (Had to edit because though I’d typed four words, the computer had only managed to put in two of them before I hit Post. I was not typing fast, either.)

  3. (2) SORRY FROM PARIS.

    A large part of the author’s anger seems to stem from the fact that he feels that the cover portrays the book as being about “Black Lives vs. Blue Lives”. I don’t get that from the cover at all — but then I’m not black. I would be interested in hearing the views of black New Orleanians on that.

    I personally find the cover interesting (although I’m not thrilled by the font), and think it hints that it is a horror novel.

  4. Current reading: Windswept by Adam Rakunas. Thanks to all the filers who recommended this, I’m enjoying it immensely.

    ETA: fifth thief! (To be said ten times fast with a mouth full of mashmallows)

  5. I recently finished China Mieville’s This Census-Taker, and I would be interested in reading the rot-13ed thoughts of any other Filers who have read it.

  6. @JJ: That was my first take on the cover, too, which seems a bit at odds with the title. On looking again, I’m reading the cop face as black. So I don’t know what to think. I like Spinrad in theory better than in practice, but I love New Orleans novels generally, so I’ll be checking this one out to see for sure.

    New Orleans is a strange city. One of my two Great Teachers was married to a woman from there, and he knew the city well. On returning from my first trip there, I said it didn’t seem like a southern city at all. He said to me, “It isn’t. It’s a Mediterranean city.” And that’s how I’ve experienced it ever since.

    It’s still a southern city, of course, with all that entails, good and bad and sometimes worse.

    It’s just not only a southern city.

  7. Yay Mike!

    Nice-looking technology there. Glad you’re making it work.

    Today’s read: Behind the Throne, K.B. Wagers

    This was…okay. It was more of a court intrigue with a thin veneer of space opera, or a Goblin Emperor with inferior prose, characterization, and a main character a helluva lot less kinder than Maia. This was not to say it was bad, and I don’t regret reading it. (Although the author tried to distinguish her fictional culture by slapping on a bit of pseudo-India [as in the subcontinent, not First Nations] in her character names and gods, as well as having everyone dress in saris. Unfortunately that felt awkward at best, and I wish she hadn’t included it.) But the best I can call it is “competent,” and it’s lacking the spark that would move me to seek out the sequel.

  8. PRINT THRIVES AGAIN

    That’s odd, I thought comics were being destroyed by girl cooties and SJWs.

  9. Mike Glyer to John King Tarpinian: “Hold off on that photo for a second while I carefully pose these Hugos in the background, real casual like…”

  10. (1) Well, there goes more of my viewing time down the rabbit hole. 🙂

    (9) I love that spacesuit and its story.

  11. JJ on September 17, 2016 at 8:47 pm said:

    I personally find the cover interesting (although I’m not thrilled by the font), and think it hints that it is a horror novel.

    Doesn’t seem actively terrible but then maybe it is a poor fit for the novel?
    (the font looks like Tarattello with a few tweaks – a standard OS X font)

  12. Eh, it’s a cover. I’ve seen much worse. If it’s a tender love story with no killing, then probably not good, but if it’s got murder or occult anything, it’ll telegraph that just fine.

  13. Camestros Felapton: Doesn’t seem actively terrible but then maybe it is a poor fit for the novel?

    According to the Amazon synopsis, the (black) cop, the black bordello madam, and the black voodoo woman call on her dead husband for help and he responds. So I would consider it at least some flavor of horror, and the skull would certainly fit in with the synopsis.

  14. Darren Garrison: Mike Glyer to John King Tarpinian: “Hold off on that photo for a second while I carefully pose these Hugos in the background, real casual like…”

    You can see some of both the old and the new Hugos in the background of the full shot. But there are 11 of them, so I figure that some of the missing ones are doing duty as doorstops. 😉

  15. Things I am envious of in this scroll:

    – Ann Leckie Badges
    – That spacesuit!
    – Anyone commuting through a station full of cats
    – Kids who still get to have fun imaginative adventures in a wagon with Grandpa
    – OGH’s mantelpiece ornaments 😉

    2) Yeah I also read both faces as black (ETA: correctly, it would seem) and am not seeing the same significance which has upset the author – but I don’t think my opinion is a good reason for Tor not to have come up with something that he didn’t actively hate…!

    Reading update the second: OK apparently I *really* liked Windswept because I stayed in bed all morning finishing it (last night’s G&Ts may also have had something to do with it). Sequel soon but something new first! Am now looking at my TBR pile and have six recent acquisitions that are super calling out to me:

    Fire Logic by Laurie Marks
    Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone
    Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
    An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows
    Seraphina by Rachel Hartman
    The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

    File 770, if you had to sequence these reads in linear time, which would you read first? I’m sort of leaning towards Meadows because I haven’t read a 2016 for a while and I just realised the animals on the cover AREN’T HORSES OMG. But there’s also *women* with *swords* and *romances with other women* and *dragons* and *shapeshifters* and *how am I so behind with Max Gladstone I swear I loved the first book*. This choice cannot be made. The Kindle is going in the sink where I will wash away all the temptations and spend the rest of my life watching YouTube for entertainment instead.

  16. The cover for the Spinrad novel is, ehh, serviceable, but yeah, it’s nowhere near what I’ve come to expect from Tor. Was Irene Gallo sick with the flu that week?

    If I wanted to be sly, I might submit that cover to The Book Designer’s monthly “e-Book Cover Design Awards” competition to see what reaction it gets. The monthly entries always have some amateurish clunkers, but a lot of very professional covers as well. I’d put the Spinrad cover in about the middle third, but not at the top of that third. (About a 40 on a 1-100 scale.) Most of that comes from the choice of title font, which looks really amateur to me; the trompe l’oeil skull effect isn’t that bad.

    But Spinrad says the cover is misleading, not just poorly designed. So, judging from the cover and what I’ve read and know of Spinrad’s other writings I’ll try and figure out what the book might be about:

    Here’s the info the cover gives: 1) a title, THE PEOPLE’S POLICE; 2) two silhouettes, a man and a woman, both apparently black and the man wearing what appears to be a policeman’s cap; 3) a fleur-de-lis, 4) a silhouette of a city skyline, and 5) the above elements combined to give a trompe l’oeil image of a skull.

    The fleur-de-lis and the city skyline are apparently meant to suggest New Orleans, but I don’t think it would be that obvious to the casual bookstore/online browser. It took me a few seconds to make the connection, and only felt confirmed in that by Spinrad specifically stating the book is set in New Orleans.

    I know that Spinrad is a long-time radical and contrarian who likes his books to rub against the grain of societal norms, so I’d expect the book to have some of that approach. (This would not be deducible by someone who was unfamiliar with Spinrad’s other work.)

    So… CARNAC PREDICTS… the new Spinrad novel, THE PEOPLE’S POLICE, is set in a New Orleans where a populist uprising has resulted in most of the white population either leaving or being expelled (in particular most of the old Police Department), with NO operating as a self-governing self-policing socialist community, with attendant troubles and threats both internally and from outside.

    How’d I do? Off to Amazon, etc, to get an idea what the book will actually be about.

    [back]

    Here’s the teaser copy for THE PEOPLE’S POLICE:

    Norman Spinrad, a National Book Award finalist for his short fiction collection The Star-Spangled Future, has now written The People’s Police, a sharp commentary on politics with an interesting twist. Martin Luther Martin is a hard-working New Orleans cop, who has come up from the gangland of Alligator Swamp through hard work. When he has to serve his own eviction notice, he decides he’s had enough and agrees to spearhead a police strike.
    Brothel owner and entrepreneur J. B. Lafitte also finds himself in a tight spot when his whorehouse in the Garden District goes into foreclosure. Those same Fat Cats responsible for the real estate collapse after Katrina didn’t differentiate between social strata or vocation.
    MaryLou Boudreau, aka Mama Legba, is a television star and voodoo queen–with a difference. The loa really do ride and speak through her.
    These three, disparate people are pulled together by a single moment in the television studio when Martin, hoping for publicity and support from the people against the banks, corporate fat cats, and corrupt politicians. But no one expects Papa Legba himself to answer, and his question changes everything.
    “What do you offer?”

    Wow. Either I suck at cover-interpretation, or Spinrad has a valid point about the cover being misleading, or at the very last information-poor for potential bookbuyers.

  17. (2) It’s kinda ugly and suggests a horror novel, but I guess I don’t get why it’s a kerfuffle?

    Maybe I just don’t care. My opinion of Spinrad plummeted when I became friends with one of his ex-sisters-in-law, who said the first time she met him, he hit on her very heavily. She was 14 at the time and looked younger. Yuck.

    (3) No matter how many times I see this, I love it. I would go there if I lived within a day’s ground travel of the place. If I lived in London, I’d be spending extra time on the Tube and switching trains to get there.

    (5) Yay, I guess. Although IMO we could use LESS of Harley Quinn.

    (8) I got about half of those from a friend who went. I’m going to a con at the end of the month and will be proudly wearing the “Team Anander” one at least.

    Yay Mike for being in a chair instead of a bed. And Yay JKT for doing the legwork of hardware and software wrangling.

    @Arifel: Two Serpents Rise. No question. Then Meadows, Swordspoint and Serafina. I’ve read them all.

  18. @Cora,

    I grew up watching re-runs of Raumpatrouille 🙂

    For anyone who is interested, it can be seen in all its black-and-white glory and with subtitles in English here.

  19. What a great pleasure to see the Bester interview from 1976. I’ve been since the early 1970s a devotee of The Stars My Destination and most of the short stories, and had only seen still photos of him before now. He seems much younger than his actual age here (62). I know that at the time he was listed in the Manhattan phone book as “Alfie” Bester, so was somewhat surprised to see him introduced as Alfred.

  20. gottacook: What a great pleasure to see the Bester interview from 1976… He seems much younger than his actual age here (62).

    He really had quite a personality, didn’t he? Very articulate, voluble, and engaging. It would have been something to know him.

  21. Which should you read next? Depends what you’re in the mood for.

    Fire Logic by Laurie Marks

    This is an absolute classic. I can’t speak of it highly enough. Recommended if you want: epic fantasy with a grand sweep, grim and gritty realism with a core of hope, big ideas, memorable characters, and lesbian love stories as the obvious answer to the world’s problems.

    Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone

    In my opinion, this is the least good of all the Craft sequence novels I’ve read thus far; I was utterly underwhelmed by the main character. Nonetheless, it’s still Max Gladstone, which means the low bar is still pretty high. Recommended if you want: some of the best and most interesting world-building in the business.

    Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner

    Another classic! Wow, you’ve got a feast of riches here. Recommended if you want: interesting characters deftly depicted, political intrigue, not so much with the whiz-bang magic right now, swordfights, and gay male love stories as the obvious answer to the world’s problems.

    An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows

    On my TBR pile right now. Yeah, THOSE AREN’T HORSES!

    Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

    *Another* classic! Recommended if you want: Dragons!!!!, a story that’s a bit more YA-ish but not lacking in depth or richness, one of the most memorable main characters of all time and some great side characters thrown in as well, excellent world-building, and complex plotting done with a clear style and a sure hand.

    The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

    *YET ANOTHER* classic! Recommended if you want: also some of the best and most interesting world-building in the business, and an excellent gender-role-reversed fish-out-of-water lost-child story.

  22. I recently watched Raumpatrouille Orion myself, and was pleasantly surprised by it… the plots and characterization went deeper than I’d been expecting, and the visual effects were, well, pretty good for their era. I’m not going out and starting a new branch of the fan club or anything, but I certainly don’t begrudge the time spent watching!

  23. @Kyra @Lurkertype thanks so much for the responses – I can’t take credit for having an exciting reading list, that is entirely due to the quality of places I take recommendations from 😀

    Have decided to go Two Serpents Rise then (most likely) Seraphina – I suspect the reason I’ve been putting off this one for so long despite wanting to get into the series is because there’s a pouty white Episode 2 Anakin Skywalker lookalike on the cover (who I assume from the first couple of chapters is the underwhelming main character), but this is one of the few cases where I’m willing to override my apparent bias against male-writer-male-protagonist stories. YA-ish dragons are scheduled towards the end of the week so I can get through projected work stress and travel and imposter syndrome over next weekend without losing it. After that… we’ll see.

  24. Arifel:
    Wow, I’ve read every one of those books except “An Accident of Stars” and love literally all of them. I have no idea what you should read next, but am putting Accident on my to-read pile purely because of the company you’ve put it in!

  25. I find it kind of bizarre that some folks arguing with Spinrad about the book cover (FB) seem to be trying to tell him that he is wrong about his own feelings about the cover. One of them is even trying to school him on book marketing…

    I’ve pre-ordered it. Being in hardback, I have suggested that Norman crowd fund replacement dust jackets….

  26. steve davidson: One of them is even trying to school him on book marketing…

    Yes, that would be the person who markets books as a profession.

    I sympathize with Spinrad. I’m sure that it’s hard to see your baby put out into the world in a package that you don’t like. I also think that he has perhaps some valid reasons for feeling that the cover doesn’t accurately reflect the content. Like someone else up above, my first thought was that Irene Gallo must have been on vacation.

    On the other hand, based on the Amazon synopsis, the title he’s chosen doesn’t seem to reflect the content, either — nor is it particularly interest-provoking, in my opinion. If he’s pissed off about the book not appealing to anyone except people who are already Spinrad fans, he should have perhaps been more concerned about the title.

  27. Bruce Arthurs: The description doesn’t convince me that’s a bad cover. When Papa Legba asks “What do you offer?” there’s no good answer; a loa that powerful could expect something major and react badly to something minor. The description does suggest somebody in a hurry; I wouldn’t have thought anyone at Tor would let a sentence fragment off the premises, even if it was attached to a foundling — is Amazon writing copy now?

  28. 2016 book recommendation: Kill Process by William Hertling. A programmer working for a company that is basically Facebook comes to see the company as abusive towards its users and sets out to create something better.

    For those who like non-standard protagonists, this one is a 45-year-old female amputee. Also a serial killer.

    Domestic abuse is extensively discussed in this book, but not ever directly portrayed. This was a very deliberate decision on the part of the author; he includes a note at the end explaining why.

    The geeky stuff gets highly technical in places, but the author includes enough supporting explanation for you to follow along with what is happening in story terms if you don’t fully grok it, I think. (I come to it as someone who does understand all of it, so I may be wrong.)

  29. Spinrad knows what’s in the book and I don’t, so I am not going to argue about “misleading,” but I don’t see why/how it’s insulting to New Orleans.

  30. Spinrad knows what’s in the book and I don’t, so I am not going to argue about the cover being misleading, but I don’t see why/how it’s insulting to New Orleans.

  31. When I had a 40-minute commute for a little while, I invested in some old-time radio shows. I bought them because I didn’t know about archive.org and their trove of recordings. The place I went to had a free sample for every show (OTRCAT, and they still do that), and the free sample of Nero Wolfe was a credible Wolfe story. Not peak Wolfe, but it could hold its own, so I bought the disk.

    Other episodes weren’t at that level. I listened to it another time, and this time I noticed a writing credit that wasn’t in the other shows: Alfred Bester. Too bad he didn’t write the rest of the series! It was the first episode of the “New” series of 1950. I can’t tell who wrote most of the others, as they weren’t mentioning script writers most (or all?) of the rest of the time.

    Anyway, it’s the first of the shows here (same link as above), “Stamped for Murder.”

  32. Finished “Dark of the Moon” last night and enjoyed it much. Also found a way to watch Magnum P.I. on cable and was very pleased.

    [nth-stalk]

  33. @Petrea —
    Any feeling for how Kill Process will age?

    R. A. MacAvoy’s Tea with the Black Dragon came up on the lists as a cheap ebook not long ago, so I reread it. It was still a lot of fun, but partly as an exercise in techie nostalgia. Bleeding edge tech for 1983: I remember those days — mostly pre-Microsoft and definitely pre-Windows — I was being paid to write a printer driver for the very first laser printer right around then, and building computers out of Byte magazine’s Circuit Cellar that I couldn’t get software for because Microsoft started to dominate the market.

    But I think you had to be there to really appreciate t.

    It’s actually a very interesting book when you consider the components: it’s basically a technothriller, but with an ex-dragon secondary lead and a middle-aged female primary lead, and a lot of discussion of Zen and Taoism woven through. And a young woman hacker at the center of the thriller plot.

  34. It’s my impression Spinrad’s books for Tor have under-performed. Tor may not be highly motivated to spend a lot of time and money on an orphaned book they don’t expect to earn back its advance.

    (Say, should I review Westlake’s A Likely Story?)

  35. … and that now makes three 2016 SFF books IN A ROW I have just read where someone gets turned into a statue.

    I can only assume that it is this year’s equivalent of last year’s, “let’s destroy the moon!”

  36. I tend to agree with James, on this, as Spinrad may have been a pet project for Hartwell. Considering that his last major book for them tanked, and many others before that performed, well, poorly, he is somewhat lucky that they did not cancel the book outright. I don’t have much sympathy, especially when it comes down to contractual obligations, and he was probably was paid very well by Tor, and when you are talking about tens of thousands of dollars invested in a project, you rarely want to actually allow an author any say in the cover design process. Some, maybe, but not all. (Most are quite terrible at knowing what will attract a chain buyer’s attention, much less a sales force.) And if you have an abrasive author, and I am not saying he is or isn’t, it makes it even harder to work with them. It is usually, all around, easier to just dump the book, either outright, or put minimal investment in it, knowing that you are going to lose money on it, anyway. Maybe they thought they were honoring Hartwell’s wishes in this. But there is no win-win, here.

  37. The original title for THE PEOPLE’S POLICE seems to have been POLICE STATE. (Which sounds a lot more marketable to me.)

    Also realized my imagined-synopsis for TPP, above, comes pretty close to a description of Spider Robinson’s 1984 novel NIGHT OF POWER, about a black takeover of New York City.

  38. JJ on September 17, 2016 at 10:23 pm said:

    The one on the far left is from 1984 (I recognize that base), so one of his first two.

  39. @Joe H

    Excellent, hopefully I’ll have ploughed through much of the back catalogue on Alliance/Union that I’ve not read for years if at all by the time it drops.

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