Canopus Award Accepting Entries

canopus-awardThe Canopus Award for Interstellar Writing has been established by 100 Year Starship. The award will recognize “the finest fiction and non-fiction works that contribute to the excitement, knowledge, and understanding of interstellar space exploration and travel.”

100 Year Starship, led by former astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison, is an independent initiative to ensure the capabilities for human interstellar travel exist within the next 100 years.

“Imagination, varied perspectives and a well told story are critical to advancing civilizations.  In particular, beginning with the simple question ‘What if?’ pushes us to look beyond the world in front of us and to envision what could be, ought to be and other realities,” said Dr. Jemison.  “Both science fiction and exploratory non-fiction have inspired discovery, invention, policy, technology and exploration that has transformed our world.”

Canopus Awards will be made in two categories:

  • Previously Published Works of Fiction
    • Long Form (40,000 words or more) and
    • Short Form (between 1,000 and 40,000 words).
  • Original Works based on this year’s 100YSS Public Symposium theme “Finding Earth 2.0”.
    • Short Form Fiction (1,000-5,000 words) and
    • Short Form Non-fiction (1,000-5,000 words).

Submissions for original works and nominations for previously published works are being accepted through August 31, 2015.

The Public is invited to nominate previously published works via this link — https://100yss.wufoo.com/forms/the-100yss-canopus-award/

The 100 Year Starship staff will review all submissions and a list of the best five in each of the two categories (short fiction and short non-fiction). This determination period will last from September 1, 2015 through October 1, 2015.

A judging panel of scientists, writers, cultural influencers and experts will vote on the winner in each of the categories.

Winners will be announced and honored during 100YSS’s annual public symposium, October 29-November 1 in Santa Clara, California.

Margaret Ford Keifer (1921-2015)

Margaret Ford Keifer and Mary Ann Beam in 1988. Photo by George Young.

Margaret Ford Keifer and Mary Ann Beam in 1988. Photo by George Young.

Margaret Ford Keifer, longtime member of the Cincinnati Fantasy Group, passed away July 28. She was 94, and had attended all 66 Midwestcons held since the con was founded in 1950.

She was predeceased by her first husband, Don Ford (co-founder of First Fandom) who died in 1965, and her second husband, Ben Keifer, who died in 1974.

Andrew Porter recalls: “A charming and intelligent lady; I went to dinner with her and others at one of the last Midwestcons I attended, and she held up her corner of the conversation well. Mike Resnick sold off her and her second husband, Ben Keifer’s, SF collection for her, and the income allowed her to do many useful things.”

Front row, L-R: Margaret Keifer, Lloyd Eshbach, Pat Lake, Dee Dee Lavender, Bea Mahaffey; Back row: (unknown), Don Ford, Roy Lavender.

Front row, L-R: Margaret Keifer, Lloyd Eshbach, Pat Lake, Dee Dee Lavender, Bea Mahaffey; Back row: (unknown), Don Ford, Roy Lavender.

[Thanks to Joel Zakem and Andrew Porter for the story.]

Pixel Scroll 7/28 Pixels in My Pocket Like Scrolls of Sand

War, Famine, Conquest, Death, and a Puppy make up today’s Scroll.

(1) The headline reads “Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking Want to Save the World From Killer Robots” – more euphemistically called autonomous weapons.

Along with 1,000 other signatories, Musk and Hawking signed their names to an open letter that will be presented this week at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

“Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group,” the letter says. “We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.”

(2) Margaret Atwood, in her article about climate change on Medium, senses perception of change is accelerating.

It’s interesting to look back on what I wrote about oil in 2009, and to reflect on how the conversation has changed in a mere six years. Much of what most people took for granted back then is no longer universally accepted, including the idea that we could just go on and on the way we were living then, with no consequences. There was already some alarm back then, but those voicing it were seen as extreme. Now their concerns have moved to the center of the conversation. Here are some of the main worries.

Planet Earth—the Goldilocks planet we’ve taken for granted, neither too hot or too cold, neither too wet or too dry, with fertile soils that accumulated for millennia before we started to farm them –- that planet is altering. The shift towards the warmer end of the thermometer that was once predicted to happen much later, when the generations now alive had had lots of fun and made lots of money and gobbled up lots of resources and burned lots of fossil fuels and then died, are happening much sooner than anticipated back then. In fact, they’re happening now.

One of the many topics she covers is the use of didactic fiction to awaken students to environmental problems.

Could cli-fi be a way of educating young people about the dangers that face them, and helping them to think through the problems and divine solutions? Or will it become just another part of the “entertainment business”? Time will tell. But if Barry Lord is right, the outbreak of such fictions is in part a response to the transition now taking place—from the consumer values of oil to the stewardship values of renewables. The material world should no longer be treated as a bottomless cornucopia of use-and-toss endlessly replaceable mounds of “stuff”: supplies are limited, and must be conserved and treasured.

(3) Of course, what people usually learn from entertainment is how to have a good time. Consider how that cautionary tale, The Blob,has inspired this party

Phoenixville, Pennsylvania — one of the filming locations for “The Blob” — hosts an annual Blobfest. One of the highlights for participants is reenacting the famous scene when moviegoers run screaming from the town’s Colonial Theatre.

(4) However, there are some fans who do conserve and treasure their stuff, like Allen Lewis, who recently donated his large sf collection:

The University of Iowa has struck gold. Not the kind that lies in the federal reserve, but one of paper in a Sioux Falls man’s basement. After 20 years of collecting, he is donating his one-of-a-kind collection of 17,500 books worth an estimated three quarters of a million dollars.

(5) And the University of Iowa makes good use of the material, for example, its project to digitize the Hevelin fanzine collection:

Hevelin-fanzines-e1437769140485Now, the pulps and passion projects alike will be getting properly preserved and digitized so they can be made accessible to readers and researchers the world over. The library’s digitization efforts are led by Digital Project Librarian Laura Hampton. She’s just a few weeks into the first leg of the project, digitizing some 10,000 titles from the collection of Rusty Hevelin, a collector and genre aficionado whose collection came to the library in 2012. You can follow along with Hampton’s work on the Hevelin Collection tumblr.

“These fanzines paint an almost outrageously clear picture of early fandom,” said Hampton. “If you read through every single fanzine in our collection, you would have a pretty solid idea of all the goings-on that shaped early fandom—the major players, the dramas, the developments and changes, and who instigated and opposed them. There is an incredible cultural history here that cannot be replicated.”

(6) The DC17 Worldcon bid has Storified a series of tweets highlighting reasons for vote for their bid.

https://twitter.com/DCin17/status/626081453638483968

It absolutely is an All-Star committee.

(7) JT in Germany has posted his picks in the Best Related Works category, and Antonelli’s Letters from Gardner ranked at the top of his personal scorecard.

Letters from Gardner by Lou Antonelli — 3 of 5 This is the one I was most interested in, as it’s about the actual mechanics of writing. It’s a series of short stories, starting as he’s trying to break into publishing short science fiction, and follows his career. Each of the stories is paired with an intro and follow-up about the changes the stories went through, including his interactions with famed editor Gardner Dozois. Unfortunately, the included sample was only just getting into the interesting part of his correspondence. It was good enough that I’ll be buying it soon enough.

(8) Another successful crowdfunding effort is bringing out Lovecraft: The Blasphemously Large First Issue, a new comic that portrays H.P. Lovecraft as “a modern-day, kick-ass action hero & alchemist.”

Writer Craig Engler is thrilled to report the copies have arrived from the printers and will be going out to donors. Lovecraft 48 pg COMP

(9) Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis by Abigail Santamaria is due out August 4. The biography of Helen “Joy” Davidman. Katie Noah’s review appears in Shelf Awareness (scroll down).

Joy cover

While she clearly admires her subject, Santamaria acknowledges Joy’s failings: her tendency to exaggeration and even lying; the spending sprees she could rarely afford; her troubled relationship with her parents and brother. Joy’s marriage to Bill also receives an even-handed treatment. Bill was undoubtedly an alcoholic who struggled to maintain a stable family life, but Santamaria clearly outlines the part Joy played in the failure of their marriage.

Frustrated by professional and personal setbacks, Joy uprooted her life–and that of her two young sons–to travel to England in 1952. She had struck up a flourishing correspondence with Lewis, and she set out to woo her literary lion. Santamaria chronicles the difficulties of Joy’s life in England and Lewis’s reaction to her arrival, but admits that, in the end, they did fall deeply in love. As Joy’s health began to fail, her relationship with Lewis flourished, and their last few years together were blissful.

(10) When Syfy isn’t busy feeding celebrities to sharks, they produce episodic sci-fi shows like the new Wynonna Earp project.

This classic by Beau Smith which was brought to us by IDW Publishing is being given a 13 episode first season run and stars Melanie Scrofano (‘RoboCop‘,’Saw VI’) in the lead role! She’ll be playing the great granddaughter of Wyatt Earp and works for The Monster Squad. Following in his infamous footsteps, she works with the US Marshals, only in a secret department that tracks down fiends that are just a bit more sinister than your regular criminal.

(11) They’re also readying an adaptation of Clarke’s Childhood’s End — here’s the supertrailer shown at Comic-Con

[Thanks to Mark, Andrew Porter, Michael J. Walsh, Martin Morse Wooster, Linda Lewis, John King Tarpinian and David K.M. Klaus. Title credit to Brian Z.]

 

Windycon To Sponsor Fluxx Tournament

By Steven H Silver: On August 15, 2015 Windycon is sponsoring a Fluxx tournament at Geek Bar Beta in Chicago. Fluxx is a card game, played with a specially designed deck published by Looney Labs, Windycon’s gaming Guests of Honor this year. It is different from most other card games in that the rules and the conditions for winning are altered throughout the game, via cards played by the players. Because the rules and goals change, people who have never played the game have a good chance of winning, “beginner’s luck” truly comes into play.

The tournament will run from 12 noon until it ends. There will be 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes. Each game you play will be with a randomly picked version of Fluxx, so who knows what you’ll be playing next. (One game might be basic Fluxx, then Zombie Fluxx, Pirate Fluxx, Cthulhu Fluxx, or even Monty Python Fluxx.) Anyone can enter and anyone can win. You can win a membership to Windycon, t-shirts, decals, and more! Come in, bring your friends, join us, and have fun.

To register please contact [email protected] You can also show up at Geek Bar Beta the day of the event and register that day.

If you aren’t familiar with the game, we will give lessons at the tournament as necessary, or your can have it explained by Guest of Honor Andy Looney himself in this video:

“God Is An Iron” Funds, Will Play Sasquan

god is an iron posterBlack Box Montreal, an independent theatre company, has succeeded in crowdfunding a production of Spider Robinson’s story God is an Iron and will perform it at Sasquan.

We’re very excited about going to WorldCon in August! We’ve secured our plane tickets, bought our passes, and our performance schedule is set. We be performing God is an Iron at Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention, in Integra Telecom Ballroom 100B on Thurs, August 20th at 8:30pm, with a Q and A session to follow. See you there!

Robert J. Sawyer is enthusiastic. “I saw the Montreal Fringe version of this play in 2014, and it blew my socks off.”

They’ve started rehearsals at Black Theatre Workshop’s rehearsal hall.

After Sasquan, there also will be a 6-show run at Mainline Theatre in Montreal from September 16-20.

Pixel Scroll 7/27 Riffing on AD&D

A long-eared geezer, eight stories and an embarrassing admission in today’s Scroll.

(1) Today’s birthday boy is… Bugs Bunny. He’s 75 years old.

(2) David Steffen answers “Why Do I Value The Hugos?” on Diabolical Plots.

[Excerpt is the second of seven points.]

I’ve been following the Hugos closely for several years, trying to read and review as many of the nominated works as I can digest between the announcement of the ballot and the final deadline.  I also follow the Nebulas, and I glance at the results from other SF genre awards, but for me the Hugos take up most of my attention come award season.  With this eventful Hugo year, it crossed my mind to wonder why the Hugos specifically, and whether I might perhaps be better off devoting more of my attention to awards that don’t collect controversy the way the Hugo Awards always seem to do, and in escalating fashion these last few years….

  1.  The Hugos Have a Long Reading Period

The Nebulas and the Locus awards have very short reading periods (the period of time between the announcement of the ballot and the voting deadline) of only about a month.  If I want to read as much of the fiction as possible, that’s not nearly enough time–I can’t finish all the short fiction, let alone start the novels.  The Hugo ballot is announced around Easter weekend (usually early April or so) and the voting deadline is at the end of July, so there are nearly four months to try to do all the reading.  The Hugo Packet isn’t released right at the beginning of the reading period, but usually enough of the short fiction was published in online venues so that I can fill my reading time with Hugo material.

https://twitter.com/LisaR_M/status/625448045316943872

(3) Then maybe Lisa would rather hear about – Worldcon site selection?

Spacefaring Kitten thinks it’s only fair that Helsinki win the right to host 2017 because all the other contenders have already had a turn…or seven.

A few facts to consider:

Five last countries that have hosted a Worldcon: United States (2015), United Kingdom (2014), United States (2013), United States (2012), United States (2011). Next year, the Worldcon will be in United States. In case the bid for Washington DC in 2017 (that is sort of a favorite at the moment, I guess) is successful, that’s third United States year in a row, and given the fact that there are only US bids for 2018 at the moment, it’s quite probably going to be four years of back-to-back United States Worldcons and seven United States Worldcons in eight years. That’s a lot of United States in one paragraph.

Competing for the 2017 Worldcon location, there are also bids for Montreal (in Canada) and Shizuoka City (in Japan). After 2000, the Worldcon has been in Canada twice (2009, 2003) and in Japan once (2007). Now, I’m sure that all proposed locations would hold a wonderful convention, but Helsinki would certainly be something new.

worldcon(4) Toymakers have got to protect the brand. Or, “Why Thomas the Tank Engine Doesn’t Kill Anybody in Ant-Man.

“I believe in Edgar [Wright] and Joe Cornish’s original drafts it was a train set,” Reed recalls. “At some point in the process that predated my involvement it became Thomas. As I came on, they had not secured the rights to Thomas. We had to do this whole thing where we did this presentation for the people who own the rights to Thomas. Thank God they agreed and found it funny, but there were definite stipulations. For example, nobody could be tied to the tracks and run over by Thomas. Thomas couldn’t be doing anything that could be perceived by children as evil Thomas. Thomas had to stay neutral in the battle, which was always our intention. Like anybody, they’re protective of their brand. I didn’t know what we were going to do if we didn’t get the rights to that. There are certain things I was going to be devastated about if we couldn’t have them. Thomas was one, because… you could do any kind of toy train, but the personality of that thing and the eyes moving back and forth give it a whole vibe and took it to another level.”

(5) Another Castalia House child prodigy! Jeffro Johnson reports in “First Session Report for my Daughter’s Dungeon Design!”

At the age of nine, my daughter has designed a 15 level dungeon, gotten paid for her work, and received back playtest report. It doesn’t get any better than that…!

It’s true – and entertaining, too.

(6) The Official Tolkien Calendar 2016 featuring artwork by Tove Jansson will be released on July 30. The cost is £9.99.

Jansson, who passed away in 2001, is well-known worldwide as the author and artists behind the popular Moomin series. As an accomplished artist, she provided the artwork for the Swedish editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Hobbit (also later used in Finnish editions). In Boel Westin’s autobiography of Jansson, she is quoted as saying “The figures are banal: dwarves, gnomes, fairies, dark-elves. But the scenery is luring in its macabre cruelty … Haunted woods, pitch-dark rivers, a moon-lit moor with burning wolves.

2016 Tolkien Calendar(7) Ursula K. Le Guin is offering writing advice through an “Online Fiction Workshop” at Book View Cafe. Use the form at the post to submit your question.

I have enough vigor and stamina these days to write poems, for which I am very thankful. It takes quite a lot of vigor and stamina to write a story, and a huge amount to write a novel. I don’t have those any more, and I miss writing fiction.

Reliable vigor and stamina is also required to teach a class or run a workshop, and so I had to give up teaching several years ago. But I miss being in touch with serious prentice writers.

So in in hope of regaining some of the pleasures of teaching and talking about writing fiction with people who do, I’m going to try an experiment: a kind of open consultation or informal ongoing workshop in Fictional Navigation, here on Book View Café.

I hope it will work its own process out as we go along, but here’s how I plan to start:

I invite questions about writing fiction from people who are working seriously at writing fiction.

(8) Explore the author’s earliest novels in Part I of SF Signal’s Interview with Samuel R. Delany.

Q: Your new book, A, B, C: THREE SHORT NOVELS, takes the reader back to the beginning of your career by offering up your first three novels. What is it about these works that impelled you to offer them up again?

Samuel R. Delany: With all these books’ clumsinesses and immaturities, I think—I hope—I was trying for something that is probably harder and harder to see with time’s passing. Indeed, it may never have been there. The only thing that might have thrown some highlighting onto it at the time they were published were slight differences between them and what was then coming out in the genre. Because so many changes have taken place in the background against which individual works now register, however, it’s harder and harder to read the signals.

(9) The Guardian included Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves on its 70 title longlist for the “Not The Booker prize”.

If you want to become part of this noble process, all you have to do is vote for two books from the longlist, from two different publishers, and accompany those votes with a review of at least one of your chosen books in the comments section below. This review should be something over 100 words long, although, as the rules state, we probably won’t be counting all that carefully.

Readers have until August 2 to vote titles onto the shortlist.

(10) After using geometric logic to deduce the wrong writer behind “Ray Blank’s” real-life identity, I was informed by a friend that it’s not even a secret. Eric Priezkalns says it’s him:

Ray Blank is the pen name I use when submitting speculative fiction to publishers.

And just in case I needed more convincing, my friend also ran comparative text samples through IBM Watson Personality Insights. Because science!

Really, though, it’s just not any kind of a secret.

[Thanks to JJ, Mark, Will R., Jonathan Olfert, and John King Tarpinain for some of these stories. Title credit to Soon Lee]

Renee Alper (1957-2015)

Gifted filker Renee Alper died July 27 from an infection. She was 57.

Alper discovered Tolkien while in the fifth grade, an interest which in time led her to fandom.

She developed severe arthritis after starting college and was forced to drop out. During a year-and-a-half of enforced inactivity, she read a notice that The Mythopoeic Society was forming a group in the Chicago area. She responded and helped found Minas Aeron in 1977, together with Michael Dorfman, and Greg Everitt.

A wire service story about the new club attracted out-of-town Tolkien fans to join, prompting them to rename their group the American Hobbit Association. The organization soon had more than 200 members, most from the U.S., but several from England, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong. They also recruited Christopher Tolkien, Clyde Kilby, and Raynor Unwin. The AHA newsletter was named Annuminas (West Tower) and they later published The Rivendell Review. The group continued to meet locally for 12 years.

Alper also wrote locs to many sf fanzines and was one of the first subscribers to File 770 in 1978.

Arthritis confined her to a wheelchair most of the time, but her physical challenges became much greater in February 1989 when she suffered a devastating spinal cord injury in an auto accident. While on the way home to Cincinnati, after a day trip to visit her boyfriend in Columbus, the vehicle she was in skidded on a patch of ice and crashed off the side of the road. She broke her neck in numerous places, and was in a halo brace for the next six months.

The emotional trauma accompanying the loss of mobility is described in her essay “Never Should on Yourself” (From There To Here: Gary Karp’s Life on Wheels) — as is a breakthrough she experienced during a conversation with her motion therapist, Eric:

One day Eric asked me, “Do you know that you can be completely content even if nothing in your life improved from the way it is now?” I answered, “Sure, I know, on some esoteric level, that’s true. They say that given the right attitude, even a prisoner being tortured can find contentment. But come on, Eric, look at how my life is: incredible pain, stuck in a wheelchair with spasms, limited mobility, enormous problems finding personal care help – how can I be content?”

She adds that psychotherapy, with the right therapist, was an indispensable tool to her recovery.

Alper became a teacher, a singer, songwriter, public speaker, actress, director and playwright. She used her experiences to write a play about a disability support group, Roll Model, and “Non-Vertical Girl” (2009), which presents her life story as a one-woman musical fringe show.

CPI-NonVerticallogo_000“Non-Vertical Girl” follows the heroine from the onset of a lifelong illness as a teen, through a devastating car crash, and ultimately to love and success. Alper began with a review of all the terms used over the centuries to refer to someone with limited use of their limbs, which changed over time as each came to have a negative connotation: crippled, invalid, handicapped, disabled.

She chaired Cincinnati Playwrights Initiative’s Cold Readings and also read for the Cincinnati New Light Festival. Other Alper works were produced by the Cincinnati Fringe Festival (“Extreme Puppet Theatre”), Talent2000USA (“Roll Model”), and The Renegade Garage Players (“Roll Model Jr.,” “Trust,” and “The Rescue”).

Drawing on her long history as a Tolkien fan, she served as “dramaturg” for Ovation Theatre Company’s adaptations of The Lord of the Rings over a three year period. Alpert told an interviewer —

I liked saying “I am the dramaturg, I speak for the text” — you know, “I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees.” Because where the author deviated from the text, I basically said yay or nay, but he didn’t always listen. The biggest faux-pas he did was having Sam and Rosie get pregnant before they were married. I hopped up and down, waved my hands, did everything I could, but he kept it in the play.

Alper was a devoted and talented filksinger. Dave Weingart, another leading filker, credited her with having “a wonderful voice”.

She was a prolific songwriter, too, and was twice nominated for the Pegasus Award for excellence in filking. “Natira’s Song (For The World is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky)” was a 1991 nominee for Best Love Song. “On The Inside” was a 1994 nominee for Best Filk Song —

Virtual Reality can be deceiving
Everything is not as it appears
And only a naive soul could be so believing
To fall in love having only met
On the inside, on the inside

Alper also won or placed in the Ohio Valley Filk Fest Songwriting Contest nine times from 1991-2003, with songs like Reed Turner: Novel Hero, Deer John Letter, If I Were a Rich Fan, and Tear It Down.

She produced several tapes, including Wheelchair in High Gear, Four On the Floor, and Thoracic Park.

For a time, she hosted Filkaholics Anonymous at her home in Mason, OH.

She was a GoH at Musicon 2 (1993) in Nashville, Tennessee.

Alper even had connections to gaming fandom. Gamerati did a video interview with her in 2011.

Despite all the physical suffering she endured every day Alper retained a dry wit, and wryly concluded one post on a meetup board:

If there is an exit interview for life, I have a few suggestions for the customer service department….

I Dreamed I Saw Grace Slick Last Night

By John Hertz: (reprinted from Vanamonde 1154)  In fact I’ve met Grace Slick, alive as you or me.  She was born in the Year of the Rabbit, she’s been painting, and her birth surname was Wing.

I’ve met Joan Baez, who sang “Joe Hill” at Woodstock and whose Antioch degree is different from mine.  But I don’t want to get too far from the Lewis Carroll masterpiece Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, establishing him as a master, published to the wonder of us all, the enrichment of the Imagi-Nation, and the benefit of humankind 150 years ago this month.

Through the Looking-Glass (1871) came later, although I’ve seen one of Ms. Slick’s paintings with both, likewise “White Rabbit” and Walt Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland”, and although my mother says I learned to read at about age 3 (you also may’ve been reading then) by making her read Looking-Glass aloud until I was reading it with her.  And, she sometimes says, correcting her.  Humph (not to be confused with Humpty-Dumpty).  I don’t remember that part.  But it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

This month’s Alice has never been out of print.  It’s in almost two hundred languages, e.g. Basque, Chinese, Esperanto, Finnish (4 translations), Hebrew, Hungarian (3 translations), Japanese, Latin, Polish (8 translations), Russian (7 translations, one by Vladimir Nabokov), Serbian, and Swedish (11 translations) which holds the Celerity Honor (wups! there goes half my readership – hey, you! wake up! get a dictionary! don’t be a vegetable!) having started in 1870; there’s a Shaw Alphabet text too.

It’s full of reference jokes, most following the best practice, fun if recognized but undaunting if not; e.g. Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision in Chapter 9, or digging for apples in Chapter 4 (“apple” in French is pomme, and pommes de terre are potatoes).  Some things well-known in its day may call for help now – e.g. bathing machines in Chapter 2, which aren’t like Chapter 4 of Between Planets.

Hosts have illustrated one or both of the Alice books.  I remain partial to Sir John Tenniel.

alice15a

What besides wit and satire (sarcasm is in anger, satire is with love)?  The story line is punctilious, from tears to a thimble, from a caterpillar to a cat, from a duchess to a dormouse to a dance to a decision; the verisimilitude is careful, from the best butter to the head-downwards lizard; the characters – don’t say they’re cardboard – look at the rabbit with his servants and his King, look at Alice as she grows – never mind her body size, or compare Chapters 2 and 12.  There’s beauty and vanity.  The pack-of-cards moment is worthy of Bleak House or The City and the Stars.  Both those protagonists, it must be said, were rebuilders.  But that is not the canvas on which our author chose to paint Alice.

Might Wonderland in the strict sense – if those words apply – be no fantasy, since it’s only a dream?  Might it be science fiction?  Here again is Sturgeon’s Apothegm (hey, you!) Science fiction is knowledge fiction.  Or perhaps the science is mathematics – especially if that includes logic – or is it the other way round?

Alias Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (in Latin, Carolus Ludovicus; reversed, Lewis Carroll) – born at Daresbury – which is in Cheshire – the author was indeed a mathematician.  He denied the story of Queen Victoria’s so enjoying Wonderland she suggested his next book be dedicated to her, thereupon receiving An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867).  Although his Alice was far more famous than his algebra, he always answered comminglers “Mr. Dodgson neither claims nor acknowledges any connection with books not published under his name.”

Alice earns and has a place with us.  Not so long ago a Boston committee bidding for the 47th Worldcon realized it if they won would be Noreascon III and a Mad Three Party, produced a suitable (I keep warning you about these puns) Masquerade entry at the 42nd Worldcon, and over 4½ years published 26 issues of The Mad 3 Party fanzine

alice25a– more than half being edited by Leslie Turek, who chaired Noreascon II and any minute now will be Fan Guest of Honor at Sasquan – to which we gave a Hugo.

Is this a book for children?  The author himself said it was.  Unlike the Hatter, although I may be mercurial, I don’t deny it.  But we don’t relegate to children the sense of wonder.  On the contrary, we pursue it.  There’s glory for you.

More on the Bradbury Building

At the Worldcon in 2006, Forrest J Ackerman gave a talk entitled “My Life Inside a Time Machine” in which he mentioned the Bradbury Building. Fanhistorian John L. Coker III recorded and later transcribed his remarks, and included them in his book Tales of the Time Travelers.

(Forrest J Ackerman) “My grandfather, George Herbert Wyman, was the architect of the legendary Bradbury Building, featured in Bladerunner, and Wolf, and Demon with a Glass Hand, and many mundane movies. It was interesting the way it came about for him to architect that building. He had never even done a doghouse. He was an apprentice in the office of the best-known architects of the day, and he had read the bestseller, the science fiction novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. It is a story of the man who went to sleep in 1895 and woke up in the year 2000. In the novel there was one page that described the interior of an office building in the year 2000. My grandfather was just making some little designs bringing that page to life. Bradbury looked over his shoulder and said. “Well, young man, that’s the kind of a building I want.” My grandfather said, “Gee, I’m only an apprentice here. I don’t know if I should take the job away from my boss.” Bradbury said, “I want you or nobody.”

bellamyCoker published Tales of the Time Travelers in 2009 in an edition of 26 signed, slipcased copies, with many copies being presented to the contributors. The few remaining copies sold immediately for the list price of $500. (Beware if you see an offer for a free download of the book. Coker says, “There seems to be a bad person online who is doing some type of scam, whereby if one clicks on a link, some type of problem occurs. I do not recommend that you click on any links. I do hope to reprint the book in softcover in the future.”

Pixel Scroll 7/26 – The Answer, My Friend, is Scrollin’ in the Wind

Rants, disenchants, and Peter Grant, in today’s Scroll.

(1) “The Taffeta Darling,” a guest brought in by the Dallas Gaming Expo to help direct games, says the whole thing was run so badly she quit and wrote “Where’s The Ball Pit? Or Why I Left Dallas Gaming Expo”.

This weekend is the Dallas Gaming Expo, a video gaming convention that had hired me to be their voice of the convention and help them run their gaming tournaments. For the first time ever as a guest, I left what would have been a paid convention gig due to disgust, disbelief and a good conscious [sic].

The Dallas Gaming Expo turned out to be a classic example of a promoter looking to make loads of money off of the gaming community without really knowing what the should be done. This expo was presented with huge expectations with loads of guests, arcade gaming, skeeball, video game tournaments and more! Unfortunately what attendees got Friday night was a ball room full of chairs, 4 wobbly projection screens and about 6-7 TVs with consoles. As a guest of the event I smiled, and hoped for the best and said I was having fun, well because that’s what ya do.  I also wanted to see this event succeed. I thought maybe more would be coming and hopefully it will be better in the morning. I stayed through the night and ran the Super Smash Bros tournament along with guest Natalie Green, which honestly was a lot of fun for me to watch and engage in. On the flip side the tournament itself had quite a few snags including casual rules for tournament play, broken controllers, lagging screenplay, no official forms, and the reliance on a group of volunteers that tried it’s best to make things work.

After bailing on DGE, she went across town to Quakecon, another gaming event in Dallas this weekend.

A dissastified customer has even started a Change.org petition to ban the Dallas Gaming Expo from happening again (though only 29 signers as of this writing).

(2) I know in the world of sf&f there’s a tremendous competition to be the field’s biggest narcissist, but honestly, is anybody more stuck on himself than Michael Moorcock? The headline of his latest interview — “Michael Moorcock: ‘I think Tolkien was a crypto-fascist”.

“I think he’s a crypto-fascist,” says Moorcock, laughing. “In Tolkien, everyone’s in their place and happy to be there. We go there and back, to where we started. There’s no escape, nothing will ever change and nobody will ever break out of this well-­ordered world.” How does he feel about the triumph of Tolkienism and, subsequently, the political sword-and-sorcery epic Game of Thrones, in making fantasy arguably bigger than it has ever been?

“To me, it’s simple,” he says. “Fantasy became as bland as everything else in entertainment. To be a bestseller, you’ve got to rub the corners off. The more you can predict the emotional arc of a book, the more successful it will become.

Nothing ever changes in Middle-Earth? Evil is defeated, the spirits on the paths of the dead are redeemed, all the elves leave, the Shire is trashed…. Never mind. I’ve read bales of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels. Entertaining, but he didn’t beat Tolkien at his own game.

(3) A radio dramatization of Iain M. Banks’ novella “The State of the Art” (45 minutes) is available free on the BBC for another three weeks.

The Culture ship Arbitrary arrives on Earth in 1977 and finds a planet obsessed with alien concepts like ‘property’ and ‘money’ and on the edge of self-destruction. When Agent Dervley Linter, decides to go native can Diziet Sma change his mind?

From Wikipedia:

The novella chronicles a Culture mission to Earth in the late 1970s, and also serves as a prequel of sorts to Use of Weapons by featuring one of that novel’s characters, Diziet Sma. Here, Sma argues for contact with Earth, to try to fix the mess the human species has made of it; another Culture citizen, Linter, goes native, choosing to renounce his Culture body enhancements so as to be more like the locals; and Li, who is a Star Trek fan, argues that the whole “incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species” should be eradicated with a micro black hole. The ship Arbitrary has ideas, and a sense of humour, of its own.

“Also while I’d been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC’s World Service, asking for ‘Mr David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.’ (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth’s entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn’t get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.”

(4) After a 17-year hiatus, W. Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook Magazine is coming back. A Stephen Fabian cover will be on the back and this artwork by Dusan Kostic will be on the front —

Weirdbook 31

(5) Futurefen is a new WordPress site hoping to serve as a news and conrunning resource for kids programming.

I started this site because of frustration with getting timely and accurate info about kid programming from SFF conventions. I wanted to start a larger dialogue about how conventions can better serve ALL members of our community, and provide a centralized resource for information for fans with kids. For many of us, quality kid programs are a necessity to attend a convention. For us as a community, we need to foster and include and welcome kids to our gatherings because kids are our future. They’re the future fans, the future scientists, future writers and artists and inventors, future interesting people. Many of them are those things RIGHT NOW, and they have a lot of good they bring along with the energy they take.

I don’t really know if/how this site is going to work, but here we go. Let’s make a difference. 🙂

(6) Peter Grant scoffs at Jason Sanford’s announcement that the Tor Boycott has failed. Grant encourages supporters to ”Stay the course”.

I repeat what I’ve said before:  the Tor boycott is a long-term effort.  I know for certain, based on solid feedback from literally hundreds of individuals, that it’s already biting.  It was an eye-opener at LibertyCon last month to have so many people come up to me, thank me for taking a stand, and confirm that they were part of the boycott.  I’m certain that in 2015 alone, the boycott will have a six-figure effect on Tor’s turnover – not much for a multi-million-dollar-turnover publisher, but that’s just the start.  As those involved in the boycott continue it and spread the word, the impact will grow.  I fully expect it to reach a cumulative total of seven figures over time.  Again, that may not seem like a lot to scoffers and naysayers;  but I think in today’s publishing market, where margins are already razor-thin, such a loss of turnover may have an impact out of all proportion to its dollar value.  Vox Day, who’s also called for a boycott of Tor, has more ‘inside information’ than I do, and he’s also confident that the campaign is having an impact.

Thank you to all of you who’ve taken a stand on principle and stood up for what is morally and ethically right.  That has a value all its own, in a world that doesn’t attach much value to either morals or ethics.  Stay the course.  This will go on for years, and I think it will bear both short- and long-term fruit.  (As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, there’s already convincing evidence of that.)

(7) Whereas all George R.R. Martin is saying is give peace a chance when you meet in person at Sasquan.

From talking and emailing with various friends and colleagues, however, I know that some of them will NOT be going to Spokane, mainly because the Hugo Wars have left a bad taste in their mouths. Others will attend, but not without trepidation. They wonder how much of the acrimony of Puppygate will spill over into the con itself… to the panels, the parties, the hallways. Will this worldcon be a celebration or a battleground? A family reunion or a family feud?

I wish I could answer that question, but no one really knows. I’m hoping for “celebration” and “family reunion,” and I think that’s the best bet… but we won’t know till the fat lady sings and the dead dogs howl.

And he has some gentle words for people he feels have been caught in the middle.

I don’t know Kary English. (It is possible I have met her or been in the same room with her at some previous con, but if so I don’t remember. I meet a lot of people). Until Puppygate and her double nomination, I had never read any of her work. But I agree with much of what she had to say in those posts, and I applaud her for saying it, knowing (as surely she must have) that by breaking ranks with “her side,” aka the Puppies, she would face the wroth of some of those who had previously championed her. I know that there are some on “my side” who have slammed English despite these posts, insisting that she spoke up too late in the game, that she was trying “to have it both ways.” No, sorry, that’s idiocy. Like Kloos and Bellet and Schubert before her, she’s opting out of the kennel and the slates. I will not fault her for not doing so sooner. This thing has been hard for all concerned, and these choices are painful… especially for a young writer who has just received his or her first Hugo nomination.

If there is any hope for reconciliation post-Puppygate, it lies with voices of moderation and forgiveness on both sides, not with the extremists and the haters. It lies with Marko Kloos and Annie Bellet and Edmund Schubert. I hope they are all at worldcon. I would like to meet them, buy them a drink, shake their hands, and argue about books with them.

[Thanks for these links goes out to JJ and John King Tarpinian. Title credit to Brian Z.]