Monthly Archives: September 2008

Rowling Wins Fair Use Case

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Steven Vander Ark

J. K. Rowling has won her copyright action against a small Michigan publisher. A U.S. District Court ordered RDR Books not to publish Steven Vander Ark‘s The Harry Potter Lexicon, and punished it for copyright infringement by awarding Rowling $750 for each of the seven Harry Potter novels and for the two books she has written about the Harry Potter universe a total of $6,750. What little silver lining there may be comes from the fact that…

Fair use cases tend to be considered on a case-by-case basis, something that heartened the lawyers from the Stanford Fair Use Project, who were encouraged “by the fact the Court recognized that as a general matter authors do not have the right to stop the publication of reference guides and companion books about literary works.”

The Guardian tracked down Steven Vander Ark in England and discovered he is hard to discourage. He thought the court’s judgment appeared to leave “a lot of leeway” for a revised edition of The Harry Potter Lexicon, but said there were no immediate plans to produce one. And his reason for being in England? To research his next Potter-themed book, about real places that have made their way into Rowling’s fiction. “Obviously I do a lot of research on Harry Potter. And the more research I did the more I realised that the places in the books were places in the world, particularly those in the west country, because she went to university in Exeter.”

[Via CBA News and John Mansfield.]

30 Years of Odd Book Titles

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Since I linked to an article about the winner of the annual Diagram Prize for oddest book title, the media has also reported the awarding of a Diagram of Diagrams prize for the oddest book title of the past 30 years. The winner is Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers:

In The Bookseller’s online poll to find the “Diagram of Diagrams”, Derek Willan’s comprehensive record of a sector of Greece‘s postal routes gained 13% of the public vote. Gary Leon Hill’s People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead finished second (11% of the public vote) and John Trimmer’s guide to avoiding maritime mishaps, How to Avoid Huge Ships (10%) finished third.

[Via CBA News and John Mansfield.]

Let the Bosons Fly High!

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“World ends, film at eleven!” Look for that promo Wednesday night if the critics’ frightening predictions come true when CERN starts the first injection of a beam through the Large Hadron Collider a few hours from now, at 9:30 Central European Time.

The Geneva-based particle physics laboratory has stressed in a peer-reviewed report the soundness and safety of the project. But the media’s morbid fascination with the possibility of – almost a longing for – a disaster has prompted one service to offer live video of the LHC startup, while CERN has promised journalists satellite uplink will be provided throughout the day by Eurovision.

But when it comes to discussing the Large Hadron Collider, quite in contrast to other scientific controversies of the day, say, global warming, the left and right wings of the sf community are surprisingly in agreement that there’s little reason to get in an uproar.

Cheryl Morgan scoffed at “A Nation of Doomsayers” while pointing out The Guardian’s silly opinion poll that poses two extreme choices: “Are you worried the atom smasher will unwittingly destroy the planet or is that scientifically illiterate, millenarian twaddle – which is it to be?”

Similarly, Jerry Pournelle showed how unworried he is by ironically commenting:

Well, according to a German chemist it won’t matter since they will create a Quasar in the center of the Earth, and in a few years we’ll see light beams coming out of the oceans, after which we are all doomed.

The most reassuring prediction I’ve found about the imminent startup of LHC was Stephen Hawking’s $100 bet with Professor Gordy Kane, of Michigan University, over the existence of the Higgs boson. Not because Hawking might win, but because he clearly expects to be around to settle the bet.

Take Back Your Government

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Jerry Pournelle told readers of Chaos Manor over the weekend that Baen will start work on an eBook issue of Robert A. Heinlein’s nonfiction book about practical politics called Take Back Your Government. “It may be out before the next election,” he said.

The book was never published in Heinlein’s lifetime. Baen released it in 1992, with an introduction and notes by Pournelle, and copy on the back cover possibly designed to make the book appealing to supporters of Ross Perot, then a third-party presidential candidate.

Readers of Heinlein’s fiction will find they are already familiar with his opinions about humanity’s real driving forces, such as his rejection of altruism:

Of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of ‘altruism’ is the worst. People do what they want to, every time. If it pains them to make a choice – if the ‘choice’ looks like a ‘sacrifice’ – you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness… the necessity of having to decide between two things you want when you can’t have both. The ordinary bloke suffers every time he chooses between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids, between getting up to go to work and losing his job. But he always chooses that which hurts least or pleasures most. The scoundrel and the saint make the same choices.

I recommend Thomas Perry’s fascinating 1993 paper that explores — from admittedly scant evidence — Robert Heinlein’s pre-World-War-II political activity, and speculates why Heinlein let Take Back Your Government, a finished book, sit in his files unpublished for 50 years.

NASA Chief Gripes

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The head of NASA publicly supports administration space policy while he privately fumes over the ordered retirement of the Shuttle fleet by 2010:

NASA chief Michael Griffin lamented the mandated 2010 retirement of the agency’s space shuttle fleet and the all-too-likely possibility that U.S. astronauts will be absent from the International Space Station for extended periods in the future in a leaked e-mail intended for top advisors.

LA Times Swats The Fly

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The Fly, key art

How many times have you seen a review of the latest Hollywood epic say, “Great FX, but….”? Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times Music Critic, feels the same about the Los Angeles Opera’s production of The Fly:

Just about any subject is ripe for opera. The film world and lyric stage have been influencing and stealing from each other since the days of silents. Brundlefly is no less reasonable a character for musical amplification than Rigoletto.

Yet in L.A. Opera’s ongoing monster mash (the commission before “Grendel” was Deborah Drattell’s “Nicholas and Alexandra,” which featured Rasputin), music has ranked in importance somewhere below makeup.

If you’d like to see and hear for yourself, click on the L.A. Opera site. There are many photos and several videos of the Paris and Los Angeles productions of The Fly. The L.A. company is shown here in an audiovisual outline of the story, and a second video samples the vocal performances.

Snapshots 2

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Nine developments of interest to fans:

(1) The end of the story run here about decommissioning ceremonies for Star Trek: The Experience has been written at Trekmovie.com:

On Monday September 1st, 2008, over 1500 fans gathered in the Space Quest Casino inside the Las Vegas Hilton, to pay their final respects and observe the final decommissioning ceremony of Star Trek: The Experience.

(2) Harlan Ellison has sued Paramount alleging the studio is withholding payment after licensing the rights to the plot of his “City on the Edge of Forever” Star Trek episode to Simon & Schuster. 

(3) What the Talking Squid says is true:

Just look at what Zadie has done here: she has managed to write an exceptionally interesting introduction to a man who was not particularly interesting by any of the standard measures.

(4) In 2006, while they were in the neighborhood for L.A.con IV, the Heinlein Society paid a visit to the LaurelCanyon (Los Angeles hillside home that Robert and Leslyn Heinlein bought in 1938:

The house…is partly described in several stories, including “Year of the Jackpot” and “And He Built a Crooked House.” Later, the Manãna Literary Society would often meet in this house, as described in Anthony Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue.

(5) Thanks to arrangements made by Steven Silver, the official Hugo Awards website will soon have a photo of the 1982 Hugo to fill that page, instead of the little red “x” that’s been heroically performing that duty. The Chicago Worldcons of 1982 and 1991 used Lucite Hugo rockets instead of the more familiar chrome-plated rockets produced by Peter Weston — and when there was a raised-pinky objection on the Smofs list to calling these “plastic” Hugos, Dave Locke blinded them with science:

I dunno what they were, but Lucite is defined as a transparent thermoplastic acrylic resin. Maybe I’m wrong, but that sounds like one of the many sins below the ‘plastic’ umbrella.

(6) All this talk about historic Hugos has prompted Taral Wayne to claim his share of the credit for the 1978 Hugo trophy:

I was downloading photos of the Hugo awards and noticed that the credit line for the 1978 Phoenix Worldcon was blank. I don’t know who designed the base per se… What I can say now is that the art on the engraved plaque on the base is a piece of art of mine. It was also used as a logo for the con, and put to various other uses. I don’t have one of the Hugos of course, but received a copy of the engraving anyway.

(7) Astronomers began discovering “hypervelocity” stars only recently: so far, they’ve spotted more than a dozen.

The stars stood out because they traveled faster than any stars ever seen — fast enough to completely escape the Milky Way. Here’s what some astronomers think may be happening. A binary star system — two stars bound by their mutual gravitational pull — skirts by the supermassive black hole. One star in the system enters orbit around the black hole, while the other star flies free of its companion. The first star eventually falls into the black hole, while the second star shoots away from the black hole at extreme speed.

(8) Janice Gelb asks, “Have you see the Diagram prize for the oddest book title of the year?” The Guardian has also posted a slide show of some of the covers.

(9) And there’s a brief note in the September 4 edition of Los AngelesTimes about how things are progressing in the Clark Rockefeller case:

Prosecutors in Massachusetts said Wednesday that they are close to securing an indictment for kidnapping against the man who portrayed himself as Clark Rockefeller, as authorities in Los Angeles continue to explore his possible connection to a double murder.

[Includes links via the Nashville club newzine, and Andrew Porter.]

The Buzz Has Begun

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An operatic version of “The Fly” was set to debut at the Los Angeles Opera on September 7.  NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a story on September 5:

A man who accidentally recombines his DNA with an insect during an experiment? Exactly what you’d expect from science fiction. It’s not what you’d expect from opera.

There’s an audio excerpt as well, running 5 minutes, 31 seconds.

[Via Middle Tennessee Science Fiction Society newsletter # 71, and Andrew Porter.]

 

See Denvention TV Coverage

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John Picacio has posted video from a newscast aired by the Denver NBC affiliate at the beginning of Denvention 3. Picacio recognized these faces:

John Hertz and his propeller beanie got a lot of love. Look for a funny cameo by SCI FI editor Scott Edelman. Looks like the blonde, braided head of LOCUS‘ Amelia Beamer is in the background at the :59 mark (looks like her, anyway). FACT‘s Laura Domitz pops up at the :57 and :56 mark. And oh yeah — News9 has apparently discovered a new way to spell my name — “Piacacio” instead of “Picacio”. Now I know how Paolo Baciagalupi feels….

There also are glimpses of Marty Massoglia, Robbie Bourget, jan howard finder, Gail Barton, Dennis Caswell, and plenty of others. Are you there, too?

[Via Isaac Alexander]