The 2011 Hugo voting deadline is Sunday, July 31, 11:59pm PDT. The Hugo Voter Packet also closes at this time warns Kate Kligman, the 2011 Hugo Administrator.
More information about voting and the packet is available here.
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Scientists Give Time Travel Thumbs Down
Some people think the biggest problem in the SF field is staying ahead of real science. So many casualties – Burroughs’ Mars, Bradbury’s Venus, Asimov’s Mercury.
If that’s true, the second biggest problem must be coping with the actual invention of stock items in the science fictional repertoire. For example, it’s harder to make up a story involving a computer now that everybody thinks he knows how they work – regardless of the likelihood that they’ll work in new ways as they become more capable and user interfaces evolve.
That’s why science fiction writers should be thanking the team of Hong Kong scientists who just showed time travel is impossible.
The possibility of real time travel was raised a decade ago by scientists who said they observed faster-than-light propagation of optical pulses in a specific medium. Here is a photo of the earlier team that claimed it observed time-travel.
Their report was later discredited as a visual effect but researchers continued to entertain the question whether a single photon might be able to exceed light speed. Now that has been ruled out:
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research team led by Du Shengwang said they had proved that a single photon, or unit of light, “obeys the traffic law of the universe”.
“Einstein claimed that the speed of light was the traffic law of the universe or in simple language, nothing can travel faster than light,” the university said on its website.
What a relief this will be to SFWA members who’ll never have to hear someone griping that a writer’s time travel device is unrealistic because it doesn’t work like the one they have at home.
[Thanks to Janice Gelb for the link.]
2011 Bulwer-Lytton Contest Winner
Sue Fondrie of Oshkosh, WI has won the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this truly fowl sentence:
Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
The Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks writers to submit the worst possible opening sentences to imaginary novels. The contest website describes winner Fondrie, an associate professor at UW Oshkosh, as a bit of a fan: “Out of school, she introduces two members of the next generation to the mysteries of Star Trek, Star Wars, and–of course–the art of the bad pun.”
Judges deemed additional selected entries as hideous examples of genre fiction. Unfortunately their choices for Sci-Fi and Fantasy honestly are too pathetic to bother quoting, but I liked the Adventure winner by Jack Barry:
From the limbs of ancient live oaks moccasins hung like fat black sausages — which are sometimes called boudin noir, black pudding or blood pudding, though why anyone would refer to a sausage as pudding is hard to understand and it is even more difficult to divine why a person would knowingly eat something made from dried blood in the first place — but be that as it may, our tale is of voodoo and foul murder, not disgusting food.
A “Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mention” also went to Lawrence Person of Nova Express zine fame:
After five years as freelance writer, Greg finally managed to double his income, letting him add a processed cheese product slice to the baloney sandwiches he had for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Person is a past host of the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop which never tolerates any Bulwer-Lytton rated prose, as you can tell from their ferocious primer.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]
Historic Marker for UFO Abduction?
(L) Betty and Barney Hill. (R) The historic marker.
The internet is abuzz with reports that New Hampshire has put up an official historic marker for the first widely reported alien abduction. A prominent example is “Betty And Barney Hill UFO Abduction Story Commemorated On Official N.H. Highway Plaque” at Huffington Post:
New Hampshire — the “Live Free or Die” state — has done something that may surprise UFO believers as well as skeptics. It has just erected a historical marker commemorating the 50th anniversary close encounter of Betty and Barney Hill.
Curiously, this marker is unacknowledged by the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources official website. Another page on the site sorting the markers by town yields the same negative result.
We can only hope that the truth is out there!
[Thanks to Janice Gelb for the story.]
Update 09/03/2011: The New Hampshire state list now includes the Betty and Barney Hill Marker, #224, in Lincoln.
Biggest Watering Hole
in the Rootin’-Tootin’ Universe
Astronomers have discovered a a vast water cloud ringing a quasar about 12 billion light years away:
The cloud…contains 4,000 times more water than our entire Milky Way galaxy, or about 140 trillion times the amount of water found in all the oceans on Earth.
Since you can’t breathe in space, it would be strange if you could drown. And I guess there’s really no risk of that here — the cloud is relatively insubstantial, 300 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere. Besides, you’d freeze to death first: the temperature in the cloud is minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit.
What astronomers are seeing is light that left the quasar just 1.6 billion years after the beginning of the universe, says the study’s co-author Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland. “This discovery pushes the detection of water one billion years closer to the Big Bang than any previous find.”
One thought – that’s an awful lot of water in one place. What if it’s not a natural phenomenon? Maybe it’s a Bussard ramscoop filling station!
In the Original Babylonian
The evil done to Harlan Ellison’s television scripts by cigar-chomping producers has long been part of his (and Cordwainer Bird’s) legend. So naturally many fans will be intrigued to read the master’s own versions of these scripts, the prose as it came directly from his Olympia manual typewriter, when the publisher releases a three-volume set this fall titled Brain Movies: The Original Teleplays of Harlan Ellison:
Brain Movies: The Original Teleplays of Harlan Ellison Volume 1
Reprinted from Harlan Ellison’s original typescripts for the first time: his scripts for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (two different drafts!), The Outer Limits, The Hunger and “Paladin of the Lost Hour” (featuring the unfilmed original ending) and “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich” from The Twilight Zone, along with their original treatments.Brain Movies: The Original Teleplays of Harlan Ellison Volume 2
Reprinted from Harlan Ellison’s original typescripts for the first time: his scripts for Ripcord, four episodes of Burke’s Law—weighing in at an average of 75 pages each—and the Flying Nun teleplay (and treatment) written in the hopes of landing a date with Sally Field.Brain Movies: The Original Teleplays of Harlan Ellison Volume 3
Reprinted from Harlan Ellison’s original typescripts for the first time: his unmolested teleplay for Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, two episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Cimarron Strip, the pilot for Ellison’s own series The Starlost (recently adapted into a graphic novel by IDW) and a bonus treatment for the Logan’s Run tv series.
Volume One presents six of Harlan Ellison’s teleplays reproduced from actual file copies, including his handwritten deletions and emendations. Readers also have an immediate opportunity to order the “Limited Babylonian edition” of Volume One signed by Ellison and J. Michael Straczynski which features three documents Straczynski commissioned Ellison to write at the outset of Babylon 5:
(1) A detailed manifesto explaining to potential writers for the series what not to do in science fiction television.
(2) The UNABRIDGED opening narration to be read by Michael O’Hare as Commander Jeffrey Sinclair over the beginning of each episode, written in collaboration with Straczynski and never featured in its entirety in the finished episodes.
(3) Thirteen never-heard humorous voice overs written to be spoken over the Warner Bros. logo that ended each episode. What you heard spoken was, “Babylon 5 was produced by Babylonian Productions Inc. and distributed by Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution.” But Ellison had other ideas.
Straczynski has written an open letter to Babylon 5 fans plugging Ellison’s collection:
In many cases, the book contains both the script and the treatment, something almost never seen outside the studio. Most amazing of all, the book contains not just the shooting script for Harlan’s HITCHCOCK episode, it contains an earlier draft filled with his handwritten annotations and changes.
When an episode is broadcast, you don’t get to see the writer’s mind at work, don’t have the opportunity to experience the moment he decided to make a line of dialogue or a scene go this way instead of that way, how a turn of phrase was altered in just the right way at the last moment, you see only the end product. By including the draft with the handwritten annotations, you can see the creative process being enacted right before your eyes. The opportunity to see inside the writer’s mind is unspeakably rare.
Best of all, these are not re-typeset versions of the script, they are painstakingly scanned reproductions of the ORIGINAL SCRIPTS, exactly as they were written.
And for the budding science fiction writers out there, what better than having Harlan Ellison break down in his manifesto how to write effectively in the genre, how to avoid various kinds of traps and make your writing better?
Not just those budding writers, many fans who have followed Ellison’s print and media work over the decades still have infinite curiosity about Harlan Ellison’s writing process. What a window this will be into his creative process.
It’s a characteristically bold move, Ellison giving any interested reader the opportunity to compare his original vision to the aired episodes and understandably betting on himself.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]
Larry Tucker Hospitalized
Ann Arbor fan Larry Tucker suffered a stroke on July 15. He’s currently in the city’s St. Joseph’s Hospital, alert and aware but paralyzed on the right side and unable to talk.
Larry’s contributions to fandom have been significant and colorful. He is a past chair of ConFusion (1978-80). He famously produced an audio zine, Uncle Albert’s Electric Talking Fanzine, and a companion, Uncle Albert’s Video Fanzine.
He’s also been a mainstay of the Science Fiction Oral History Association and appears in the group’s latest podcast discussing The Great Propeller Beanie War.
[Via Joel Zakem, Andrew Porter and Leah Zeldes.]
Markstein Gravely Ill
Don Markstein is in dire health, reports John Guidry. A longtime New Orleans SF Association member now living in Phoenix, he is best-known for Don Markstein’s Toonopedia, a vast website about comics characters, artists and publishers.
Guidry urges:
PLEASE write him a letter etc. while there is still time for him to hear from those of us who knew him well. If you know anyone who was in NOSFA… please forward this to them, as well as fellow fans out there who were not in our old club.
Send mail to: Don Markstein, Life Care Center of Paradise Valley, Room 230, Phoenix, AZ 85032
[Via Andrew Porter and George Wells.]
Speculative Literature Foundation Offers Grant
The Speculative Literature Foundation is accepting proposals for the Gulliver Travel Research Grant from July 1 until September 30, 2011.
The full press release is after the jump.
Snapshots 69
Here are 8 developments of interest to fans:
(1) Last week I saw Independence Day again, where Mary McDonnell is cast as a doomed First Lady, one of the early casualties of an alien attack. She also played President Roslin on Battlestar Galactica, who survives a Cylon attack and goes from 43rd in line to president of all of the surviving colonists.
I wonder how many actresses have played both a First Lady and a President? If there’s another, surely McDonnell must be the only one who’s been assailed by space invaders in both roles.
(2) If you sent your kid to Hogwarts how much would you have to pay?
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” raked in more than $475 million globally and $168 million domestically in its record-setting opening weekend. By one calculation, that global total is enough to send 11,000 young wizards and witches to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Centives, a blog run by Lehigh University’s Economics Society, calculated the cost of Hogwart’s tuition based on the cost of a typical English boarding school plus the items specified in the admission letter Harry receives in the first book of the series. Including items such as “three sets of plain robes” and “one cauldron,” as sold on Amazon.co.uk, the economists estimate the total cost for first-year students at Hogwarts at 26,816 British pounds, or $42,752. Read the full breakdown here.
(3) And since ‘tis the season for Harry Potter news, I’ll follow up with a link to “What If Famous Tennis Stars Went to School with Harry Potter?” by Chris Chase at Busted Racket. Here’s how his thought experiment works:
If the biggest names in tennis went to Hogwarts and sat under the Sorting Hat, in which house would they be placed? Because it’s a Friday in July, I was able to ponder this question for a lot longer than any grown man should. The decisions are below…
Gryffindor (courage, bravery, loyalty, nerve and chivalry)
Roger Federer, Maria Sharapova, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Francesca Schiavone, Andy Roddick, Laura Robson
(4) Writer Monica Valentinelli took a 100-day break from social media. She quit tweeting and ignored Facebook, though still kept up her blog. Reporting back to her fellow SFWA members, Valentinelli concluded the experience overall was a plus: “Good content is more valuable to a writer’s career than social interaction.”
(5) What makes you think Andrew Wheeler’s experience with the Hugo scene has left him a bit jaded? Just because he ends his comment about the Best Fanzine Hugo category by asking readers “What will you vote against?”
Not that he’s wrong, you understand…
(6) A North Yorkshire farmer paid tribute to the 40th anniversary of Star Trek by creating the world’s largest maize maze, where a visitor can lose himself “running around the Starship Enterprise, in Mr Spock’s head or on a ‘Borg cube’.”
(7) Seeing Joe Lansdale interviewed by CNN reminded me of an AggieCon long ago when I met several Texas sf/horror writers for the first time:
CNN: Your fiction crosses many genres from thriller to Western to horror to young adult. How does that affect your publishers?
Lansdale: I think I made the right choice for me. I don’t know if it would be the right choice for someone else, but what I did is I created my own genre. And so when people come to me most readers know that I do a variety of different things and so they like the unexpected. I know I do.
(8) I should be able to run one more Harry Potter reference without violating the rule of three (originally a rule about the structure of jokes in a Johnny Carson monologue, but helpful in many other writing tasks…)
The Guardian reports JK Rowling’s childhood home, that may have inspired elements of her magical world, is on the market for around £400,000. There’s still an inscription on a bedroom window frame that reads: “Joanne Rowling slept here circa 1982.”
As well as the gothic style, beams and vaulted ceilings, another feature that might have stuck in Rowling’s mind as she sat down to write Harry Potter is a boy-wizard-sized cupboard under the stairs. Potter, of course, was forced to live in such a cupboard by his unpleasant aunt and uncle. The house also has a trapdoor leading to a cellar not dissimilar to the one guarded by the fearsome three-headed dog in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Current owner Julian Mercer says:
“JK Rowling would have been here in her formative years and could have taken inspiration from the cottage. The architecture is very Hogwarts-like. It has vaulted ceilings, stone windows and oozes gothic spirit.”
[Thanks for these links goes out to David Klaus and Andrew Porter.]