(1) JUST. ONE. SCHOOL. UPDATE. There was the inevitable brush with bureaucracy, but the books everyone donated are now being checked out to kids at Greenville High School in the Sierras of California.
“Just. One. School. A Saga Continues” (August 11) at Throwing Chanclas.
Last night I attended a monthly board meeting of Plumas Unified School District in Quincy, CA. I don’t normally attend such meetings as I thankfully as a reporter do not have the school board as my regular beat. I attended because I got last minute word that the Library Project was an agenda item. I’d received no phone call or email from the district, no inquiries whatsoever. As this was my idea and I’ve been heading up the volunteer effort (we’ll let my 17 years experience as a college instructor + knowledge of books, music, and film go at this point). So I show up there because um…my library, OUR library is on the agenda.
So I address the school board and give them a brief history of the project. As the board only has one member who regularly engages online, they were not all completely aware that we exist. So I spend my five minutes of public comment time on facts of our project and I answer a few questions.
The curriculum director–who has never set foot in our library, nor called me or emailed me to ask questions–gets up and makes a brief presentation whereupon she states that she’ll “approve” students to check out books as soon as we produce a list of titles so that she can decide whether they belong in our library.
…America. This is why we can’t have nice things. This is why Holden Caufield whines about how every time you see something beautiful someone else has scrawled an OBSCENITY upon it.
None of this comes out of my mouth however. I do remind however that we are two schools, not one. That all summer 98% of my volunteers have been from community members and Indian Valley Academy students and parents and that we have no such stipulations concerning censorship and approval. Our goal –which we had thought and hoped was shared–was to get kids reading–especially kids who don’t read. And we’ve already been achieving our goal.
Mary of the Good Week (August 28)
There’s some bureaucratic snags. The curriculum director finally came down to look at the site (honestly we are a brisk 22 minutes from Capital City–it wasn’t that hard) and we hope she went away knowing that the books aren’t hers that they are indeed the communities and the kids.
…We had a great moment last week when a kid who was on track to drop out and have no use for the world walked into the library almost on a dare and realized that every graphic novel and Japanese manga he ever wanted to read was in there. (He was too cool for school and then left like a kid coming out of a candy store). We let him borrow the Death Note series.
Just. One. Book. Live with Students! (September 9).
Since Sept 6 when we opened we’ve checked out about 65 books, dvds, and cds to students and faculty. Considering the two schools have only 200 students combined that’s some great reach.
THANK YOU!’
Oh and on a side note. Whoever sent the soundtrack to Hamilton? I LOVE YOU. That’s the first thing that I checked out.
(2) SFWA ISSUES STATEMENT ON GALAKTIKA MAGAZINE. On March 23, 2016, Bence Pintér published an article at Mandiner Magazine regarding numerous stories published by Hungary’s Galaktika Magazine in 2015 – most of them translated and reprinted without the knowledge or consent of the original authors. The unfolding story is included in today’s SFWA statement on Galaktika, warning professionals to avoid working with the publication.
SFWA has refrained from comment so far due to hopes that Galaktika would resolve outstanding issues, but so far this has not been the case. It has taken the Hungarian agency representing one leading U.S. agency months to arrive at an agreement with Galaktika calling for a per-story fee of $75 covering 37 stories by 16 authors; this agreement was finally signed by István Burger on 7th September 2016, and apparently the money is on the way to the Hungarian Agency. Meanwhile, the same agency is still working on finding a satisfactory arrangement with other clients whose authors are involved, although no other agreement is in the works yet (as of mid-September 2016). Some clients of the Hungarian Agency reportedly are inclined to give Galaktika a post-publication license; others want to review legal options that their own clients can undertake; others are working with other U.S. agents to explore a possible collective response.
SFWA formally recommends that authors, editors, translators, and other publishing professionals avoid working with Galaktika until the magazine has demonstrated that existing issues have been addressed and that there will be no recurrence. Authors should check to determine whether or not their works have been published by Galaktika on the magazine’s website at http://galaktikabolt.hu/galaktika/page/6/. SFWA recommends that members work with their agents and publishers to address the issue before passing it to Griefcom. At the moment SFWA has three active grievances against Galaktika
(3) GETTING THERE EVENTUALLY. Kelly Robson, “On Being a Late Bloomer”, at Clarkesworld.
I always wanted to be a writer. That’s not unique. Many writers have their destiny revealed in childhood. Like others with this particular itch, I read voraciously, and when I bought my first Asimov’s magazine at the age of sixteen—a moment embedded in my senses more vividly than my first kiss—I knew I had to be a science fiction writer.
But it took me more than thirty years to become one. And by that, I don’t mean I was thirty before I published my first fiction. I was forty-seven. By anyone’s measure, that’s late for a first publication.
Most of us have preconceived ideas about how a writer’s career should proceed, and we judge ourselves harshly if we don’t achieve the various benchmarks on time…
(4) VISIT TO THE CHINESE NEBULAS. Cat Rambo has written up her trip to China: “Beijing/Chengdu Trip, September 206: Some Notes, Observations, and Images”.
We were treated very well. Overall, recent wins by Cixin Liu have drawn significant attention to SF in China. In all of this, I am speaking primarily about science fiction, rather than fantasy, since the Chinese see the two genres as very distinct from each other. There has also historically been tension between science writing and science fiction, which is the past has been perceived as being aimed at children, or at least that is something that came up multiple times over the course of the visit.
Nowadays, that’s very different. Numerous groups in China are working on putting together Worldcon bids and I would suspect the question is not so much whether or not we’ll see a Worldcon bid from China in coming years so much as which city will host it: Beijing, Chengdu, or Shanghai. Several people, including the World Science Fiction Society, said that they’d love to see SFWA’s Nebulas hosted over in China if we’re ever interested in doing that. Crystal Huff had been sponsored by the first group as part of their effort to research what would be needed to run a Worldcon.
(5) THE DARK ADDS MORENO-GARCIA. The Dark Magazine has hired Silvia Moreno-Garcia as co-editor alongside current editor Sean Wallace. Moreno-Garcia will assume her responsibilities effective October 1 and her first issues will start next January.
Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination, Silvia’s debut novel, Signal to Noise, about music, magic and Mexico City, was listed as one of the best novels of the year at io9, Buzzfeed and many other places and nominated for the British Fantasy, Locus, Sunburst and Aurora awards. She was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for her work on the anthology She Walks in Shadows and is the guest-editor for Nightmare Magazine’s POC Destroy Horror. She edits The Jewish Mexican Literary Review together with award-winning author Lavie Tidhar. Her website can be found at www.silviamoreno-garcia.com
“Silvia has always impressed me with her editorial acumen and acquisitions, both with her own anthologies and Innsmouth Magazine, and it is to our credit that we have her onboard going forward,” said Sean Wallace, co-editor and publisher of The Dark Magazine.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRLS
- Born September 26, 1932 — Donna Douglas. Her “Eye of the Beholder” Twilight Zone episode had one of the best reveals on any TV show.
- Born September 26, 1956 — Linda Hamilton
(7) ANCILLARY COMIC. Someone has been peeking inside the heads of Ancillary Justice readers.
(8) CROWDFUNDING TERRY JONES BOOK. Terry Jones’ publisher Unbound is crowdfunding the publication of the third volume of a Medieval adventure trilogy he has written. They discuss his recent announcement on this page.
It’s safe to say that when Unbound launched, five years ago, we could not have done it without Terry Jones.
He launched his collection of stories, Evil Machines, and went on every form of media to help us launch the business, brilliantly communicating what was new and exciting about Unbound. Here was one of the country’s best loved comic writers and performers – a Python! – entrusting us with a brand new book and pushing our start-up for all it was worth.
First and foremost, though, Terry has been a friend, not ‘just’ a driving force and collaborator. So the news of his illness has hit us hard.
We launched this book in the hope that we could get it to him for his 75th birthday in February but the announcement of illness gives us all pause for thought. We have considered whether we should remove the project but after speaking to the family we have decided we still very much want to publish this book because it completes the trilogy and because it meant a great deal to Terry that we should. So we hope you’ll agree that we should continue to fund and publish the final fictional work from an old and dear friend.
There’s an excerpt from Chapter 1 at the site.
(9) LETTERS TO TIPTREE. Alisa Krasnostein’s scorecard reads —
LETTERS TO TIPTREE has won: the Tin Duck, Ditmar, Aurealis Convenor Award, Locus, Alfie, British Fantasy; shortlisted for the British SF and WFA, long listed for the Tiptree. Which kinda blows my mind!!!!
(10) AN INGENIOUSLY DECEPTIVE WORK OF ART. Nobody knows about this transportation disaster because it didn’t happen it happened on the same day as the Kennedy assassination, you see…. Artist Joe Reginella told The Gothamist how he perpetrated the hoax.
Staten Island Ferry Disaster Monument
Reginella told The Post that the project took six months to plan and that it’s “part practical joke, part multimedia art project, part social experiment.” The fliers, which he and his team have been giving out around downtown Manhattan and Staten Island in recent weeks, promise an octopus petting zoo, historical exhibits and a “Ferry Disastore” gift shop at the nonexistent museum.
It also includes directions to a fictitious shoreline address across the street from the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, where some people have ventured to. Francesca Navarro, who works the front desk of the Staten Island Museum, told the Post that despite the ludicrousness of the premise, some people can’t help but check it out: “I think they maybe have a suspicion it’s fake, but they feel like they just have to prove it.”
The Post found a few of the tricked: “Australian tourist Tamara Messina [said]: ‘The brochure sounded very intriguing,’ adding that her three young sons ‘seemed a bit more concerned that it may happen again’ as the family rode the ferry.”
In addition to the fake monument, there’s a website for the Staten Island Ferry Disaster Memorial Museum. The New York Post says people are still looking for it.
About the Memorial
The Staten Island Ferry Disaster Story. . . It was close to 4am on the quiet morning of November 22, 1963 when the Steam Ferry Cornelius G. Kolff vanished without a trace. On its way with nearly 400 hundred people, mostly on their way to work, the disappearance of the Cornelius G. Kolff remains both one of New York’s most horrific maritime tragedies and perhaps its most intriguing mystery. Eye witness accounts describe “large tentacles” which “pulled” the ferry beneath the surface only a short distance from its destination at Whitehall Terminal in Lower Manhattan. Nobody on board survived and only small pieces of wreckage have been found…strangely with large “suction cup-shaped” marks on them. The only logical conclusion scientists and officials could point to was that the boat had been attacked by a massive octopus, roughly half the size of the ship. Adding to the tragedy, is that this disaster went almost completely unnoticed by the public as later that day another, more “newsworthy” tragedy would befall the nation when beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. The Staten Island Ferry Disaster Museum hopes to correct this oversight by preserving the memory of those lost in this tragedy and educating the public about the truth behind the only known giant octopus-ferry attack in the tri-state area.
(11) SOMETIMES. Just saw this today and it cracked me up.
https://twitter.com/crashwong/status/767507775454871552
(12) THAT MALLEABLE VERSE. And I had a smile left over for this —
This Is Just to Say
I have signed
the Genius Loci
that are at@borderlands_sfForgive me
they have my first sale
so spooky
so good pic.twitter.com/M7UFxuUPpb— Sunil Patel (@ghostwritingcow) September 26, 2016
[Thanks to Janice Gelb, Sean Wallace, Ruth, Steven H Silver, Dawn Incognito, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Will this ::ticky:: work?
ETA: Yes!
1) This made me smile broadly on a rather blah day, so thanks for posting it.
First?
[ticky-check]
(3) Late Bloomer: This speaks to me, as I am now old enough to join AARP and struggling to get my first “real” sale. (I’ve done freelance work for a game company, but somehow that doesn’t feel like real writing cred.)
Recent reading:
“The Garden of Sons and Husbands” by Alex Jeffers. I don’t know where I was expecting this story to go, but it went in an entirely different direction.
Re (7), it’s the little sparkles in panel 2 that really sells it.
That Kelly Robson piece was a nice morale booster.
I’m a late bloomer too, over 50 before I finally finished a novel that I deemed worthy of going on my permanent record. I’ve written crappy disposable things, receiving checks and fan mail for some of it. As of yet I am an unsuccessful self-pubbed novelist, but at least I’m a novelist! Always knew I was one.
TICKY!!
[Rob clears his throat]
“godstalk!”
[Rob curtsies and goes off stage right]
The curriculum director – who has never set foot in our library, nor called me or emailed me to ask questions – gets up and makes a brief presentation whereupon she states that she’ll “approve” students to check out books as soon as we produce a list of titles so that she can decide whether they belong in our library.
WTFF. I hope they got that person’s authoritarian tendencies shut right down.
I am so heartened when I look at the “after” photos. So many books. SO MANY BOOKS. So many kids who will now have the chance to read, and get engaged in the world through books, and maybe go on to better lives because they got into reading.
@Dawn on 7: I’m no longer a regular user of tumblr so I’m not sure if the symbolism has moved on, but my reading of the diamonds in Panel 2 is that they’re the equivalent of hearts but for a really strong, mutually beneficial platonic relationship. The use comes from the Homestuck webcomic which had aliens with four “quadrants” of formalised relationship with each other that also included romantic love and a relationship for sexy nemeses (the latter is denoted with the spade suit).
Which is to say, I ^v this comic and also that File770 is back to ticking strength. (ETA forgot tringle brackets won’t work here! Basic phone workaround attempted…)
And on a related note:
Three days ago, I asked you Filers if you’d be willing to help get over the line the Donors Choose project I’d chosen to support a few months ago, to provide a class set of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in graphic novel form to sixth-graders in a rural school in high-poverty district North Carolina.
The teacher who posted the project says, “We serve 600 fifth and sixth graders at a rural school in Western North Carolina. About 50% are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. Most would be the first in their families to attend college. I am the language arts and social studies teacher for a team of 56 sixth graders at this school. About a fourth of them report reading for fun.”
The project would have expired on October 4th if the remaining $220 was not achieved by then. Given that F451 has been dropped from The Big Read program by the NEA, it looks as though a lot fewer young people will ever get to read that book in the future. That made me really sad, and I asked you Filers for your help.
And wow, did you come through. In two days, the goal was reached, the books were ordered, and 56 students will benefit from this project.
When told that the sudden rush of donations was due to the project being publicized in an online SF forum, the teacher posted:
Thank you so much for swooping in to rescue this project! I was just resigning myself to adjusting my plans for doing this Science Fiction unit without Fahrenheit 451 (and despairing that there really is no equal substitute for this classic) when I got the email notifications that the books had been fully funded!
It’s going to be a privilege to be able to delve with students into Ray Bradbury’s work with this graphic novel edition. Thank you for making it possible.
I understand from another donor that there is an online community out there who helped me out with this. I don’t know if you are part of this group, but means a lot to me to know that there are people in Canada, California, even right over the border in Georgia, who joined hands online and encircled my kids.
I am floored by this and so grateful. To know that people with a real love of this work came together to put it in the hands of my kids means even more.
With gratitude,
Ms. Tarantino
I never cease to be amazed and humbled by the generosity of Filers. Thank you so much for helping this project become a reality. You Filers rock.
And to the Filer who responded:
I’m not really a member of the sff group that was alerted about your project, but I do read the blog. I was having a bad mood day and thought I’d turn it around by doing something nice for someone else. I am glad it had that effect.
Oh, no. Nuh-huh. You are a Filer, just as much as anyone else here (with all the dubious rights and privileges which that might entail 😉 ).
After all the obits, missing ticky-box, and general malaise, (1) (7) (10) (11) (12) made me smile.
(3) Late Bloomer, too. Turning 50 next year, with only a handful of stories and two or three sales to date. Despite knowing I wanted to be a writer since 1979.
1) I really hope that if they haven’t already, that they write up a comprehensive collection development/selection policy asap to protect themselves from the type of obstructionism they’ve just experienced.
godstalk, glorious godstalk,
new scrolls and pixels!
while we’re in the mood —
box tickys and obk gvpxlf!
puns, filking and book reviews
“what next” is the question?
box checkers have it, Filers —
inbox congestion!
“You are a Filer, just as much as anyone else here (with all the dubious rights and privileges which that might
entailappertain.”FIFY.
(Also: This was really neat!)
@JJ: HAHAHAHAHA, thanks, I love that. And the original. 🙂
Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.
I have to say, being a File 770 editor is much cooler than my previous editing gig. Which was my Junior High School newspaper.
Clickity clickety click!
With all that godstalking here, it’s really a testimony to His benevolence that God has not yet taken out a restraining order against File770.
Now on my Kindle: The Fall of the House of Cabal The latest in Jonathan L. Howard’s Johannes Cabal novels.
The first book, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer is – no question – the funniest book I’ve read in the last decade. And the other books in the series have (mostly) been a ton of fun (with the exception of Johannes Cabal and the Fear Institute, which I didn’t love).
Lnl fgnyx!
@microtherion: Did we ever specify which God we were stalking?
@Eric Franklin: I loved most of the Johannes Cabal books as well. Was not too enthusiastic about Carter & Lovecraft, though.
(1) I’m a child of the library
(This is Cheshire Moon’s version of Piers and Gill Cawley’s song. It’s under the Woody Guthrie license. Spread it far and wide to save your libraries.)
I made my first SFF sale when I was 39. Sold my first novel at 46–it was published when I was 47. And yes, I wanted to be a writer from small.
There’s no time limit, no official schedule, and no expiration date. Your pace, whatever it is, is okay. Since I’m a mom I can say in that mom voice, “It’s not a race!”
@Ann Leckie: ! 🙂
I’m wondering how many times one might have overheard something like “Not now, dear. Mommie has to finish up her next award winning novel…” coming from the Leckie household….
@Ann Leckie: The only reason I am not responding with a barrage of ASCII hearts right now is because the formatting doesn’t seem to know what to do with the “<" symbol.
EDIT: Nope, it does! Yay formatting!
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
@4: More coverage of the Chinese Nebulas here on Amazing, along with the news that the fan group – SF AppleCore – that Amazing works with – were the recipients of the Gold “Best Fandom” award.
It would not surprise me in the least if AppleCore wasn’t behind one of those potential Worldcon bids Cat mentioned.
If you’d like to hone in on “Chinese SF Fandom”, you might find a bit of insight reading our Chinese contributor’s posts – http://amazingstoriesmag.com/author/shaoyan-hu/ and http://amazingstoriesmag.com/author/regina-kanyu/
@microtherion Carter & Lovecraft had to overcome my expectations – I wanted more Johannes Cabal, and had expected it to be closer in feel to the Cabal novels. But once I set that disappointment aside, I quite enjoyed it as its own thing.
This years Long List Anthology has just launched its Kickstarter
Much good stuff in there (Double Wombat!) and I like the inclusion of Letters to Tiptree
@JJ
Great, but doesn’t
“new pixels and scrolls”
fit the original tune better?
If you love “Oliver!” and by some chance haven’t watched “Scrooge” (the musical with Albert Finney), the set designer and some of the rest of the production crew are the same, so it has a lot of the same feel.
@Ann Leckie, speaking as a 47-year-old with one, count it, one pro sale, I feel inspired by your example.
Today’s Read — The Devourer of Gods, by Thomas Benjamin De Mayo
Fantasy; in an 8th century America where both the Irish and the Vikings have established permanent settlements, sorcerers conspire against the gods and the gods conspire right back.
This promising debut novel gets a lot of its mileage out of its setting, where Christian, Norse, and Native American peoples and mythologies exist in uneasy proximity to each other. The plot is complex and intricate, slowly revealing wheels within wheels within wheels. Much of the dialogue is written in a high-fantasy style that seems somewhat dated and could be taken as cliche, but I think it’s being used here for specific effect, evoking the Norse sagas that the book owes much to. I think it ultimately works. However, that same desire to emulate Norse sagas, coupled with a large cast of characters, made the characterization fairly thin at times. They’re not all alike by any means, but once the basic personality traits are established not a lot of time is spent getting deeper into their heads. Still, I’ll be interested to see what the author does next.
Potential warnings: rapes occur but generally nongraphically/offscreen, violence is frequent and sometimes graphic but not overwhelmingly so.
Someone just told me that a years’ subscription to F&SF on the Kindle is just $5 right now. I think it’s usually $12. By contrast, Analog and Asimov’s are about $30/year.
To steal from Evelyn Barber, you cannot say Necromancer without saying romance….
Greg – Thanks for the head’s up! I mostly use my kindle to house short story anthologies and had been thinking about adding some magazines to the mix, so this will be a fine edition!
Slightly fandom related, or at least from someone we’re all familiar. It would appear that http://www.TrumpDebateFacts.com was unregistered… and has now been registered the by the one and only Dr. Chuck Tingle.
@3 mentions a couple of names, but ISTM that late bloomers have become a lot more common recently; the old line about “The Golden Age of SF is twelve” used to apply to when people starting writing, not just peaking on reading, but no longer. OTOH, there have always been \some/ authors who started not-so-early (whether or not they kept their day jobs); cf Heinlein or Doc Smith. Maybe we’re too invested in the myth of the writer surviving on a crappy job (or a wild assortment of scratch jobs) while cranking out work in a garret, until one day the lightning strikes?
Very funny, Tinglesque humour.
They rank this debate claim:
“The stories of me stumbling out onto the streets of New York City and devouring the souls of four homeless citizens so that I could retain my fading youth and repair the seams in my human suit are inaccurate.”
as true, the stories are inaccurate.
@James Davis Nicoll,
“Look at the way the moonlight glistens on the pale bones of the undead – that’s so necromantic!”
@Ann Leckie,
You’re a great inspiration! (I’m one of those who aspire to write something, and have recently taken a writing course – I’m currently 45.)
emgrasso: Great, but doesn’t “new pixels and scrolls” fit the original tune better?
Well, possibly — but then how would I be able to make use of the fact that the rot-13 of “tickys” rhymes *cough* with “pixels”???
@K8
Freudian slip?
Uhmmm, I’ve stopped getting notices for new posts?!? So I’m clicking both tickies here and hope that fixes my problem. :-/
ETA: Got my subscribe notice, now let’s see if I get new posts. (Still signed up to follow File770 at WordPress.)
@microtherion
@lurkertype
Did we ever specify which God we were stalking?
In Tai-tastigon there are a thousand or so to choose from. I try not to offend any of them, so I do my stalking anonymously.
1) Libraries are so integral to me being who I am. I love to read about kids you need to getting the chance to have the same kind of experience.
On the topic of late bloomers…
I began writing my first vaguely novel-like objects when I was 17. They were, of course, dreck. Thank goodness I never showed them to anyone who would have been inclined to tell me so. The only person I allowed to read them was my youngest brother, whose feedback consisted solely of demanding further pages as I wrote them. (I should note, in all honesty, that the family was living in Germany that year and new English-language reading material was in short supply on a day-to-day basis. So his tastes may have been more generous than they would otherwise have been.)
I knew, in theory, that human beings wrote the stories that got published in books. But I had no idea how one would even go about intersecting the world in which I was writing stories with the world in which stories got selected for publication. I had no community of writing peers to interact with and no idea how one would go about finding one. Following my usual habit, I researched the heck out of the question, subscribing to Writers’ Digest for several years and examining the submissions procedures included in my favorite SFF magazines. I even went so far as to submit a couple of short stories to one of those magazines when I was in college, but I had no way to evaluate the inevitable rejections.
So I kept writing, but without any notion of how one moved on to the next step. I started attending SFF conventions and interacted socially with published authors, but I still had no idea how one moved from “I have all these file folders of stories I’ve been writing” to “here’s how you turn this into something an agent or publisher might take seriously, and here’s how you bring it to their attention if you do.”
I still don’t know how most people do it. I sold my first short stories surrounded by a solid dose of personal connections (which is a good way to feed an Imposter Syndrome) but the first time that I got a novel-like-object to the point of submission, it wasn’t SFF, so none of the advice or connections I had were any use. (It collected a bunch of rejections and went back in the trunk.)
I sold my first novel at age 55 and, although it was SFF, I didn’t sell it to an SFF publisher or using an agent, so I still have no idea how one goes about such things. In fact, if I were writing mainstream SFF rather than something that came in sideways through a lesbian press, I probably would still be unpublished. Because I still have no idea how other people figure out how to get from where they are to where they want to be.
@Heather, I’m really glad you did. Your work keeps rolling around in my imagination and helping illuminate things I’ve tussled with a long time.
… here I am, Filed in the middle with you…
@Mark-kitteh: Long List Anthology sounds great again! (except “Today I Am Paul”, which I kind of hated) Wombat and El-Mohtar squared!
@Kyra: That novel sounds pretty neat. (and they seem to be literally, dare I say it, god-stalking?) It’s a pretty cool cultural mix.
@TYP: I love it! A slightly new direction for the good Doctor Tingle.
I want someone to write a song a la “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (or a sea shanty) about the Staten Island Ferry vs. Octopus.
Ugh, Twitter is currently being spammed with dozens of identical links for Liu Cixin’s Death’s End. I can’t tell if it’s because a bunch of twits are reposting NPR’s tweet as if it was their own, or if someone hired a bunch of advertising tweets on the author’s behalf.