Classics of SF at Loscon 43

By John Hertz: We’ll take up three Classics of Science Fiction at Loscon XLIII, one discussion each.  Come to as many as you like.  You’ll be welcome to join in.

I’m still with “A classic is a work that survives its own time.  After the currents which might have sustained it have changed, it remains, and is seen to be worthwhile for itself.”  If you have a better definition, bring it.

Each of our three is famous in a different way.  Each may be more interesting now than when first published.  Have you read them?  Have you re-read them?

Since they’re from fifty-seven years ago, I’m calling this

The Lanthanide Series

Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

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His second Hugo-winning novel; Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) his third.  When asked how he wrote such contradictory books, he said “I’m a science-fiction author.  I make things up.”  Troopers may get praise from those who feel drawn to its world, blame from those who feel repelled.  Is that all there is?

Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

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Inventive, check.  Novel about the meaninglessness of it all, check.  The Times Literary Supplement said “He is doing something unique to science fiction.”  This may be true.  No one else seems to have done anything like this to us.  Extra credit: more, or less, didactic than Troopers?  Than Andromeda?  Why?

Ivan Yefremov, Andromeda Nebula

 

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Poetic, lyrical.  Sold 20 million copies.  Changed Soviet science fiction.  A thousand years in the future when Earth is a Communist paradise, starships at 5/6 the speed of light meet alien challenges and we struggle against Time.  Published in Russian 1957, G. Hanna tr. (as Andromeda) 1959, M. Kuroshchepova tr. 2014.

Anthologies in the Pipeline from Editor Jonathan Maberry

By Carl Slaughter: Jonathan Maberry is the editor of three anthologies coming out in 2017.

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Aliens: Bug Hunt, all new stories of the Colonial Marines (Titan Books, 2017), will be released April 11, 2017.

Here’s the killer lineup!

  1. Brian Keene is a best-selling horror author and comic book writer. His landmark novel The Rising helped establish the genre of zombie literature.
  2. Christopher Golden, #1 New York Times best-selling author, editor and comic book writer. His works include Tin Men, Lord Baltimore (with Mike Mignola), Cemetery Girl (with Charlaine Harris), and Aliens: River of Pain.
  3. Dan Abnett is a multiple New York Times best-selling author and comic book writer who’s work includes the Gaunt’s Ghosts series, The Horus Heresy, Doctor Who, and the Guardians of the Galaxy comic that inspired the motion picture.
  4. David Farland, is a New York Times award-winning author who has worked with Star Wars, The Mummy, and his own bestselling fantasy Runelords series.
  5. Heather Graham Pozzessere: International best-selling author of over seventy suspense novels.
  6. James A. Moore, is a best selling author of twenty-five novels including his own Seven Forges series who has also worked with Aliens, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the World Of Darkness.
  7. Jonathan Maberry, NY Times bestselling author of Patient Zero, Rot & Ruin, and many other novels; anthology editor and comic book writer.
  8. Keith DeCandido is a Scribe finalist whose works include Star Trek, Supernatural, Stargate SG-1, and many others.
  9. Larry Correia is the bestselling author of the Monster Hunter International series, the Grimnoir Chronicles, and the Dead Six military thrillers
  10. Matt Forbeck is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning game designer whose latest works include Halo: New Blood, the Marvel Encyclopedia, and his Shotguns & Sorcery series.
  11. Mike Resnick is a best-selling author of military science fiction, including The Outpost, The Dead Enders series, and many more; and has edited dozens of anthologies. He has won multiple Hugo Awards, the Homer Award, the Skylark Award, as well as many international awards.
  12. Paul Kupperberg is a former editor in chief for DC Comics, and a prolific writer of comic books and newspaper strips.
  13. Rachel Caine, New York Times bestselling author of almost 50 thriller, SF/F, and YA novels, including Ink and Bone, and the Morganville Vampires series.
  14. Ray Garton, bestselling author of over sixty books and recipient of the Grandmaster Award from the World Horror Convention.
  15. Scott Sigler, NY Times bestselling author of Infected and the ALIVE, Book I of the Generations Trilogy.
  16. Tim Lebbon, is the best-selling author of Coldbrook, The Cabin in the Woods, the Noreela series of fantasy books (Dusk, Dawn, Fallen and The Island), the NY Times Bestselling novelisation of the movie 30 Days of Night, Alien: Out of the Shadows, and Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi – Into the Void.
  17. Weston Ochse, USA Today New and Notable List, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of SEAL Team 666 and Grunt Life
  18. Yvonne Navarro, Bram Stoker award-winning author of the Dark Redemption Series, Aliens: Music of the Spears, and seven Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels.

maberrry-nights-of-the-living-dead

Nights of the Living Dead Anthology edited by Jonathan Maberry and George Romero will be released July 11, 2017

Calling ALL zombie fans! New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry (Patient Zero, Rot & Ruin) and the godfather of the dead himself, George Romero (Night of the Living Dead) are joining forces to edit Nights of the Living Dead, an anthology of all-original stories set in the 48 hours surrounding Romero’s landmark film. If you love zombies –and who doesn’t?—it all started with NOTLD. Every zombie movie, comic, book, game, or toy exists because of Romero’s landmark film.

Nights of the Living Dead will be published by Griffin, and will include stories by:

Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author.

Brian Keene, an American author, primarily of horror, crime fiction, and comic books. He has won two Bram Stoker Awards. His 2003 novel The Rising is often credited with inspiring pop culture’s current interest in zombies

Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Aftermath.

David Wellington, bestselling author of the landmark Monster Island and its sequels as well as the critically acclaimed new zombie novel, Positive.

George Romero, the Godfather of the dead.

Isaac Marion, author of the #5 New York Times bestselling zombie novel, Warm Bodies, which was made into a successful movie.

Jay Bonansinga, New York Times bestselling author of the Walking Dead novels.

Joe R. Lansdale, bestselling & Bram Stoker Award-winning author of 45 novels as well as comics and short stories. His mystery series Hap & Leonard is in production for TV. His Bram Stoker Award-winning short story, “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks,” was included in the first-ever zombie anthology, Book of the Dead (edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector).

John Russo, co-screenwriter of Night of the Living Dead, and author of the first-ever zombie novels Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead.

Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Patient Zero, Rot & Ruin, Dead of Night, Zombie CSU, and co-author of Marvel Zombies Return.

Keith R.A. DeCandido, bestselling author of the Resident Evil novelizations, as well as popular novels in the worlds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek, Sleepy Hollow, V-Wars, etc.

Mike Carey, award-winning comic book writer (Lucifer, soon to be a TV series, Hellblazer, X-Men: Legacy) and novelist (the Felix Castor series, The Girl with All the Gifts, which is in post-production for film).

Mira Grant, New York Times bestselling author (pen name of Seanan McGuire) whose Newsflesh series hits every zombie best-of list and was ranked #74 in an National Public Radio listener poll of the top 100 thriller novels of all time. Mira/Seanan has won the John W. Campbell Award, Darrell Awards Hall of Fame, six Pegasus Awards, and a Hugo Award.

Neal Shusterman & Brandon Shusterman. Neal is a winner of the National Book Award and a bestselling author. His son, filmmaker Brandon, is a frequent collaborator on Neal’s short fiction.

Craig Engler is the Co-Creator/Writer/Co-Executive producer for Syfy’s hit zombie series Z Nation, and co-writer of the upcoming  Z Nation comic book. He also wrote Zombie Apocalypse, one of Syfy’s highest-rated original films.

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Baker Street Irregulars co-edited by Michael A. Ventrella and Jonathan Maberrry will be released March 21, 2017.

Thirteen authors, including Gail Z. Martin, David Gerrold, and Jonathan Maberry, come together to pen short stories innovating Sherlock Holmes, adapting and revolutionizing the iconic character.

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most iconic and lasting figures in literature. His feats of detection are legendary, and he continues to capture audiences today. But BAKER STREET IRREGULARS presents the celebrated detective in a dozen different, wildly entertaining new ways. In Ryk Spoor’s thrilling “The Adventures of a Reluctant Detective”, Sherlock is a re-creation in a holodeck. In Hildy Silverman’s mesmerizing “A Scandal in the Bloodline”, Sherlock is a vampire. Heidi McLaughlin sends Sherlock back to college, while Beth Patterson, in the charming “Code Cracker”, turns him into a parrot. The settings are as varied as Russia in the near-future, a dystopian world, a reality show, an orchestra. Without losing the very qualities that make Sherlock so illustrious a character, these authors spin new webs of mystery around their own singular riff on one of literature’s truly singular characters.

Pixel Scroll 10/28/16 The Pixel Came Back from the Nothing-at-Scroll

(1) YOUR ONE-MAN WIKI. Remember, Camestros Felapton is reading Infogalactic so you don’t have to – “Say, Camestros what’s your new fave Voxopedia page? [Update]”.

Why, I’m glad you asked that question, disembodied voice that writes the blogpost titles. My new favourite Voxopediapage is:

LIST OF ASIAN MEN’S INVENTIONS: …

And that’s not all – Elsewhere on Voxopedia more women have gone missing:

Kitty Joyner is the lead picture for ‘engineer’ on the Wikipedia page

Look, she has a slide rule and everything! Sadly her presence was just too confusing for the poor folks at Voxopedia. Maybe that big circular gizmo in the background didn’t look pi=4 enough. So, to prevent fainting and to protect sensitive dispositions, Joyner has been replaced by Oliver Heaviside.

Phew!

(2) BIG BRAIN THEOREM. TV Guide’s Liam Matthews ranks “The 11 Smartest People Who Have Appeared on The Big Bang Theory.

The Big Bang Theory is a show about scientists, and it bolsters its academic credibility by bringing in guest stars from the world (galaxy?) of science to play themselves, as well as casting actors with graduate degrees to play characters on the show.

I’m not qualified to rank these guest stars on smarts, because I failed physics in high school. But as a professional clickbaiter, I am qualified to rank them based on how annoying I find their public persona. So without further ado, here are the 11 smartest people who have appeared on The Big Bang Theory, ranked from most to least annoying.

(3) KELLY FREAS. The Space:1970 blog posted “Kelly Freas STAR TREK Portfolio (1976)”.

In 1976, legendary science fiction illustrator, Frank Kelly Freas, published the Star Trek Portfolio, featuring gorgeous charcoal portraits of the officers of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Needless to say, it’s a highly-desired collectible these days.

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JJ says, “I think that Spock bears a strong resemblance to Tommy Lee Jones! Of course, in 1976, Tommy Lee Jones looked like this…”

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(4) VERBAL ENGINEER. Popular Science interviews Ken Liu:

In your Dandelion Dynasty series, you reimagine transportation, military hardware and the rest of the technological landscape in a style you’ve come to call “silkpunk.” How did you come up with that approach?

In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as a language. The task of the engineer is much like that of a poet in that the engineer must creatively combine existing elements of technology to solve novel problems, thereby devising artifacts that are new expressions in the technical language.

In the silkpunk world of my novels, this view of technology dominates. The vocabulary of the technology language relies on materials of historical importance to the people of East Asia and the Pacific islands: bamboo, shells, coral, paper, silk, feathers, sinew, etc. And the grammar of the language puts more emphasis on biomimetics?—?the airships regulate their lift by analogy with the swim bladders of fish, and the submarines move like whales through the water.

(5) FABULOUS OLD STUFF. Marcin Wichary recommends the Museu de la Tècnica de l’Empordà in Figueres, Spain.

(6) WHERE’S THE BEEF? Episode 21 of Scott Edelman’s podcast Eating the Fantastic features Alyssa Wong and one of  Kansas City’s famous barbecue joints.

Alyssa Wong

Alyssa Wong

Listen in as we chow down on BBQ and talk about what franchise inspired her to write fanfic, the exciting moment when she first encountered a character who looked like her, where she hopes to be 10 years down the road, how she encountered Faceless Ghost Grandma, why she said, “I hate being bored and I don’t like rules,” and more.

(7) EUROCON LIVESTREAM. The 2016 Eurocon in Barcelona, Spain will be livestreamed on November 4, 5 and 6 — http://kosmopolis.cccb.org/bcneurocon/.

Their trilingual dictionary may come in handy —

eurocon-barcelona-trilingual-dictionary

(8) NAME THE YA AWARD. Lew Wolkoff of the Young Adult SF/F Award Committee asks fans to participate in their survey.

As you know, the World Science Fiction Society is in the process of creating a Campbell-like award for Best Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy Award.  The motion passed at Kansas City and was passed on to Helsinki for, hopefully, final approval.

One of the matters that has yet to be settled is the name of the award.  The Young Adult SF/F Award Committee is currently doing an online survey to get suggestions on what that name will be.  This survey ends on November 15.  The results will be tabulated, and a second survey of members of the World Science Fiction Society will be taken to get a recommended name (or names) for the 2017 Business Meeting.

Each year the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) gives out the Hugo and Campbell awards at its annual convention, Worldcon. The awards highlight the best science fiction and fantasy works of the previous year, and they are presented for best novel, short story, graphic story, editor, artist, and a number of other categories. Thus far there has been no award to recognize young adult (YA) books.

In response to this, the Young Adult Award Committee was created to study the viability of an award recognizing excellence in YA science fiction and fantasy at Worldcon. WSFS has since supported the creation of an award for YA fiction, and the committee’s task now turns to naming it.

We are looking for an award name that is especially evocative. We hope to capture the transformative, transportational, and captivating power of books for young adults.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRLS

  • Born October 28, 1902 – Elsa Lanchester, Frankie’s bride.
  • Born October 28, 1952  — Annie Potts. When you decide who ya gonna call, she answers the phone.

(10) KEEPING YOUR UNIQUE VOICE. Credit where it is due – Dave Pascoe had a good column of writing advice today at Mad Genius Club.

One significant trick I learned from Dean Wesley Smith is focusing on a specific writing technique for a story. Make sure you get the sensory information into every page. Whether it’s a mention of the odors you characters smell, or the vivid colors around them (or drab, if that’s the way you roll, you dystopianist, you), or the moan of the chill wind between the weathered slats of the abandoned homestead in which your people are sheltering for the night, give the reader anchors for their imagination. And then, let the reader know the character’s reactions. That low moan, that sends a prickle up the spine of your hero, that recalls the hunting cat that terrified him as a child.

(11) TEXT TO SCREEN. Those who have been participating in the adaptation discussion here will want to eyeball Violette Malan’s “My Top Ten Novel-to-Movie Adaptations” at Black Gate.

I want to begin by saying that I’m making no judgments (well, hardly any) on which is the better version, the book or the movie. I’m only saying I thought the adaptations were good. Anyway, in no particular order, here are my top ten film adaptations (at least for this week) with the screenwriter, the source material, and the director identified.

The Princess Bride William Goldman from his own novel, directed by Rob Reiner I can’t think of anything new to say, at least not today, about what is probably my favourite movie of all time.

The Shawshank Redemption Frank Darabont adapted and directed from the Stephen King novella (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption)

The single greatest change from novella to movie was casting the Red character as a black man. Whether that was done because they wanted Morgan Freeman, or whether it was done beforehand, I don’t think matters. A couple of other things were changed (the kid whose testimony could have freed Andy Duschesne wasn’t murdered in the original) but in each case it was done to underline some aspect of character or plot that the conciseness of screenwriting (see above) necessitated.

(12) A VIKING FUNERAL. Anne C. Perry witnesses “The Extinction Event: The Beginning of the End” at Pornokitsch.

Five years later, Jurassic has published almost fifty books. That’s thousands upon thousands of pages of stories by over a hundred authors, with art by a dozen artists, which have (so far) raised more than £8,000 for charity along the way, which is a hell of a history. Especially given that Jurassic London lost fully half of its staff after the first year, when one of the two of us (me!) leveraged her experience founding a small press to get a job in traditional publishing.

If, five years ago, we could have chosen how we’d end Jurassic, The Extinction Event is exactly what we would have wanted: it’s big, bold, brilliant and beautiful. It contains 33 stories, some from previous publications and some which are entirely original, and features new art from nine artists. In Extinction you’ll find apocalypse, bombast, lightning and lava. You’ll also fine joy and sorrow and laughter and misery, cowboys and werewolves and mummies and spaceships… and, for some reason, rather a lot of spiders.

(13) TUCKERIZING RAISES BONANZA. Monster Hunter Nation came through in a big way to help pay someone’s medical bills. Larry Correia reports:

Earlier this week I posted about taking donations to help out my buddy Mitch with his medical bills, and that we’d be taking donations in exchange for me using your name in a book.

So many of you jumped in that we had to close it the next day. We raised over $20,000 in a day and a half….

Logistically speaking, that many names is going to take me a long time and several books to work through. There are a few spots in Monster Hunter Siege I will be able to use for charity red shirts, but this is going to take years.

I tell you, once I run through these names, and I’m doing this again for some other cause several years down the road, I’m totally going to jack up the price on you guys. 🙂

The important thing is that you are awesome, and you did something amazing for a good man. Mitch is already using this money to pay bills. Once again the Monster Hunter Nation has come through. I love you guys.

(14) SCHADENFREUDE. If you like seeing someone dish it out, Michaele Jordan’s “MidAmeriCon II: Con Report” at Amazing Stories is for you. She flays the programming division, MidAmeriCon’s version of LonCon’s Fan Village, Dave Truesdale, and Charlie Lippincott.

This programming bias came back to bite them in the butt. When [Charles] Lippincott saw that MidAmericon II was planning a Star Wars day, he decided this was his chance to cash in. He prepared his own ‘MidAmericon II’ program. (We know he prepared it in advance because 4-page, 10 x 14, glossy fliers with full color illustrations do NOT happen overnight.) It was to be an all-day media event, hawking autographs ($50.00 apiece) and featuring talks, slideshows and Q&A (conflicting with numerous other con functions, including the masquerade, and again not free). He did NOT consult with the con about this program.

Having laid his plans, he proceeded to escalate his demands to MidAmericon II, demanding more money, more publicity, more perks, etc. (As I was working the press room, I saw some of his emails myself, and can personally verify that he took a high-handed ‘gimme-gimme’ approach to what we will laughingly call negotiations.) When the con failed to meet some of his new demands, he canceled on the day before the con.

He then proceeded to hold his own stream of events anyway, just across the street — without removing MidAmericon II’s name from his glossy flyer — while bad-mouthing the con at every opportunity. He stood by his plan to charge high prices for attendance at his events. I mean, really. Would YOU pay $50.00 for Charles Lippincott’s autograph? Or another $50.00 to see a slide show of scenes from movies you already know well?

Well, turnabout is fair play. The Lippincott counter-con was a disaster.

(15) THE BIRD. Why, no, Stubby, I didn’t know these authors were acquainted! “When Charles Dickens & Edgar Allan Poe Met, and Dickens’ Pet Raven Inspired Poe’s Poem ‘The Raven’”.

“There comes Poe with his raven,” wrote the poet James Russell Lowell in 1848, “like Barnaby Rudge, / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” Barnaby Rudge, as you may know, is a novel by Charles Dickens, published serially in 1841. Set during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, the book stands as Dickens’ first historical novel and a prelude of sorts to A Tale of Two Cities. But what, you may wonder, does it have to do with Poe and “his raven”?

… It chanced the following year the two literary greats would meet, when Poe learned of Dickens’ trip to the U.S.; he wrote to the novelist, and the two briefly exchanged letters (which you can read here). Along with Dickens on his six-month journey were his wife Catherine, his children, and Grip, his pet raven. When the two writers met in person, writes Lucinda Hawksley at the BBC, Poe “was enchanted to discover [Grip, the character] was based on Dickens’s own bird.”

(16) SANDERSON HITS JACKPOT. “DMG Nabs Rights to Brandon Sanderson’s ‘Cosmere’ Book Universe in Massive Deal” reports Variety.

DMG Entertainment has nabbed film and licensing rights to “Cosmere,” Brandon Sanderson’s acclaimed series of interconnected fantasy novels. The entertainment and media company has committed to spending $270 million, which will cover half of the money needed to back the first three movies made from Sanderson’s canon. That makes it one of the largest literary deals of the year. DMG beat out several interested parties for rights to the series. As part of the pact, insiders say Sanderson will receive a minimum guarantee on each film that is produced, as well as a rich backend, allowing the author to make millions.

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Hampus Eckerman, and Scott Edelman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Wright.]

Where Will George Lucas’ Spaceship Land?

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The Lucas Museum as it would look in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park.

To speed prospects of getting his Lucas Museum of Narrative Art built somewhere, George Lucas has released architect’s drawings of the building as it would look in Los Angeles, beside the Coliseum in Exposition Park, and in San Francisco, on Treasure Island. Each location has the support of its city’s mayor—Eric Garcetti in LA and Ed Lee in San Francisco. The museums have been designed by Chinese architect Ma Yansong (MAD Architects) — and both look like space ships.

In June, Lucas abandoned efforts to build the museum in Chicago, unwilling to engage in time-consuming litigation with Friends of Parks to use the lakefront location approved by local government. That was Lucas’ second defeat, having turned to Chicago after his original proposal to build on the grounds of the Presidio failed to gain acceptance in San Francisco.

The Los Angeles version of Lucas’ museum would include:

  • underground parking for 1,800 cars (the museum’s construction would take out two surface parking lots)
  • between 265,000 and 275,000 square feet of indoor space
  • about 100,000 square feet of gallery space
  • “shaded landscaping” underneath the new museum structure
  • landscaped, public terraces on the roof level
The Lucas Museum as it would look on San Francisco's Treasure Island.

The Lucas Museum as it would look on San Francisco’s Treasure Island.

And what will be on the walls of the museum? Controversies about public land use have overshadowed some writers’ nagging efforts to belittle the works likely be on display in the museum. Attempting to fend off these complaints, a museum executive gave Charles Desmarais, San Francisco Chronicle art critic, a personal presentation about the works being donated to the museum. Desmarais has pronounced them worthy:

Leaning against the walls and sprawled on tables is a selection of 55 original drawings and paintings, as well as eight thick notebooks containing more than 700 photographic reproductions of works in Lucas’ art collection. All are slated to become part of the first holdings — the Seed Collection — of the long-planned Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

Guiding me through the images, which were brought here just for our meeting, is Don Bacigalupi, the museum’s founding president and a much-credentialed art historian and museum director. Bacigalupi says the museum will eventually have its pick of the rest of the collection — about 10,000 paintings and works on paper and 30,000 film-related objects — that the renowned filmmaker has assembled over a period of 40 years and that is still growing.

It seems nearly everyone has an opinion about the collection of the Lucas Museum, which made Bacigalupi its first professional staff member last year. “It’s a ‘Star Wars’ museum,” some have said. “It’s a Hollywood memorabilia museum.” On Twitter, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight called it “George Lucas’ planned Treacle Museum.” But who has actually seen the collection? Only a few people, says Bacigalupi — and no journalist. Until now.

Having had the first opportunity to evaluate the collection, I am glad to say it is none of those things. In fact, it may just be the core of a great museum.

San Francisco officials are hoping their city has a stronger claim on Lucas’ affections than Los Angeles.

“We’d like to think their heart is here,” said Adam Van de Water of the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. “He lives and works here, it’s a spectacular site, and we think it’s a natural fit.”

But the decision could come down to which city is able to get the museum through its legal approval process most quickly.

According to Don Bacigalupi, the museum’s president, the design work and search for approvals are being done simultaneously in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Within the next two to four months, Lucas and his team will decide which location offers the clearest path to starting construction in a year or so, with opening day three years later.

NaNoWriMo 2016

By Gregory N. Hullender: What Is NaNoWriMo?

Every November since 1999, hundreds of thousands of people have spent the month of November attempting to write a complete 50,000-word novel in just thirty days. Participation may reach half a million this year. It’s free, there are no judges, and there are no prizes other than what you learn in the process and your own satisfaction at finishing. That’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). You can sign up now http://nanowrimo.org/ and start writing on November 1.

National Novel Writing Month logo“No judges” means the whole thing is on the honor system. You’re supposed to start from scratch—not merely wrap up something that already has 40,000 words—and you’re supposed to submit your own work—not feed random garbage into the word-counting app. It’s best thought of as a motivational aide, not a contest.

As you write, you copy/paste your text so far onto a web page that counts the words for you and updates your total. (It discards the text, so there’s no worry about anyone stealing your work.) You should do this at least once a day. It then updates your totals and reports whether you’re on track or not.

The NaNoWriMo site encourages you to share your experience with friends, neighbors, co-workers, and relatives. There are a number of widgets you can post on Facebook or Twitter to share your word-count info and progress estimates. The idea is that you’ll make yourself work harder rather than be humiliated in front of all those people.

A lot of the fun comes from interacting with other authors. The NaNoWriMo site has forums covering every imaginable topic around novel writing, and it’s very easy to spend hours just asking questions, reading answers, and writing your own answers. (But this doesn’t count toward your 50,000 words, of course.)

Forum participation is a good way to find a few “writing buddies.” Your friends and family will get bored with you talking about NaNoWriMo pretty fast, but your writing buddies will be happy to cheer you on every day for the whole month. Some may even become friends for real.

NaNoWriMo FAQ

I “won” NaNoWriMo in 2012. Here are some things that worked for me:

I devoted an hour or two every evening to writing, and I didn’t let anything preempt that time.

I started with a really rough outline of what would happen. I never prepared a proper outline, but I started off knowing how it would end. That doesn’t mean that’s how it actually did end, but at every point, I thought I knew how it would end.

Every few days, I’d spend 15 minutes or so making a rough outline of the next few chapters or scenes. The rest of my writing time was spent filling those in.

I (almost) never went back to revise. The story had to move forward. The one exception cost almost a whole day’s work, but I’d written myself into a corner, so I didn’t have much choice. Obviously you can’t afford to do that more than once or twice.

I didn’t allow myself to browse the forums until after I’d already made that day’s quota of words. It’s very easy to spend hours in the forums if you’re not careful. For example, partly in response to numerous relativity questions, I wrote a whole relativity calculator. http://gregsspacecalculations.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html That probably used up as much time as a week of writing, but using it as a reward for meeting the day’s writing quota meant it didn’t hurt me.

I never attended any of the in-person events that NaNoWriMo schedules in major cities, but some people find it works for them to spend an hour or two writing in a room with other people followed by socializing afterwards.

I think most people have fun and learn a lot about writing, even if they don’t get a publishable work out of it. It’s very cool to be able to tell people “I’ve written an SF novel. I never published it, but I did write one from beginning to end.”

The big payoff is when you hit that 50,000-word number and your stats page shows you as a winner. Almost as good as when you write “The End” a day or two later.

NaNoWriMo 2016 Press Release http://d1lj9l30x2igqs.cloudfront.net/nano-2013/files/2016/10/PressRelease2016v5.pdf

Ride the Enterprise from Worldcon to Eurocon in 2019

Dublin’s bid for the 2019 Worldcon is unopposed, with less than a year til site selection voting takes place in Helsinki at Worldcon 75. Dublin’s proposed dates are Thursday, August 15 through Monday, August 19, 2019.

Dave Lally notes there also is a bid to have Belfast’s annual Titancon host the 2019 Eurocon. Its dates would be the week following Worldcon: Thursday, August 22-Monday, August 26, 2019. Titancon, a Game of Thrones themed convention, is the only Eurocon 2019 bid.

Lally says that if both Cons and Irish cities (100miles/160Km apart) win their respective bids, approaches will then be made to Iarnrod Eireann (Irish Rail) and to Translink (NI Railways) who jointly run the service, a train known as THE ENTERPRISE, and to CBS (who owns the Star Trek rights) to rename it for the duration of the two cons – THE ENTERPRISE: NGC 1701.

The Enterprise is an express train that runs between Dublin and Belfast eight times Monday through Saturday, and five times on Sunday. Lally says it’s had that name since August 1947 (long, long before Roddenberry, Shatner and Stewart et al).

Norman F. Stanley (1916-2016)

Norman F. Stanley, circa 1970s.

Norman F. Stanley, circa 1970s.

By Jon D. Swartz and John L. Coker III: Born in May 1916, Norm Stanley was a science fiction (SF) fan from Maine who was very active in fandom in the 1940s.  He was a member of the famous Stranger Club, and was one of the club members who attended Noreascon 3 as a Fan Guest of Honor.

Norm was also tangentially involved in the Skowhegan Junior Astronomical and Rocket Society, the kind of fan club that combined both science and SF activities and was common in this country in the 1930s and 1940s.  He was generous with his fellow club members, and  let them borrow from his seventy bound-volumes of SF prozines.

He attended early conventions such as Philcon, as well as some of the early Boskones.  He also participated in Mainecon Jr, a “conference” in the language of the times, in 1943, with his friend Jim Avery and the visiting Claude Degler.  He gave Degler some fanzines, and got along well with him.  This generosity of his, plus the “conference” they had had with Avery, apparently qualified him to be a member of Degler’s legendary Cosmic Circle.  Norm was still active in fan matters in the late 1940s, and attended the 1948 Torcon where he participated in a roundtable discussion on the probable date of the arrival of interplanetary travel.

Norm’s major fanzine was Fan-Tods, which ran for nineteen issues.  He also published Beyond with Roscoe E. Wright.  Fan-Tods was a SF fanzine that was subtitled “The Magazine for the Tod Fan.”  It appeared in the 1940s-1950s, and was edited and published by Norm from his home in Rockland, Maine.  This fanzine was mimeographed using blue ink.  Issue #1 appeared in December, 1942; with #2 appearing in Spring, 1943; #7 in Summer, 1944; and then following a regular quarterly schedule until issue #18 in 1949 — after which there was a three-year break; and then Issue #19 was published in the Fall of 1952, and was the last issue.  Fan-Tods was an apazine, distributed through FAPA (Fantasy Amateur Press Association), and then VAPA (Vanguard Amateur Press Association).  Cover illustrations were by Wright, among others.  By issue #7, Wright had become a co-editor.  SF historian Harry Warner once described Norm as “a power force in FAPA.”  

Jack Speer’s 1944 poll of the top SF fans found Fan-Tods to be among the nation’s top five fanzines.  On the other hand, in 1947 – in his fanzine Matters of Opinion Speer wrote an article, “The People vs. Norman F. Stanley,” that was very critical of the 16th issue of Fan-Tods.

In the 1940s, Norm was very much a member of the “sense of wonder” camp of SF.  According to Warner’s All Our Yesterdays, when Norm’s mother told him about atomic bombs and Hiroshima he remembered thinking:  “I confess my first reaction was one of elation, which even the obvious misgivings couldn’t quench. ‘Geez, we might blow up the whole planet,’ I thought, ‘but it’s still wonderful.’ ”

In addition to his fanzine work, Norm wrote for the SF prozines, including several letters to Astounding Science Fiction.  Three of his letters were published in 1938, two in 1939, and one in 1940.  In addition, he had an essay (“The Theory of Thing Things”) published in the 1948 Torcon Report.

Norm was one of the original members of First Fandom; and he was elected to the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2013.

Norman and Eleanor

Norman and Eleanor

Norman F. Stanley passed away on October 22, 2016, at the Sussman House, Rockport, Maine, with his family in attendance.  He was 100 years of age.  He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Eleanor, their two children, a granddaughter, and four children of a nephew.

Here is a link to the obituary notice that appeared in The Courier Gazette / The Camden Herald on October 26, 2016:  http://knox.villagesoup.com/p/norman-stanley/1588807

norman-stanley

Sources: All Our Yesterdays; The Immortal Storm; Fancyclopedia 3; ISFDB; Wikipedia; and other Internet sites.

Pixel Scroll 10/27/16 Take a Pixel, Maria, Scroll It Up My Screen

(1) HARASSMENT CLAIMS ANOTHER CREATOR. Comics Beat’s Heidi MacDonald reports another woman comics creator abandoned Twitter because of abuse — “Bestselling author Chelsea Cain driven off Twitter by harassment from comcs ‘fans’”.

Mockingbird writer Chelsea Cain, the bestselling author of Heartsick and other thrillers, deleted her Twitter account today after receiving abusive tweets yesterday….

In a now vanished series of tweets (one screencapped above)  Cain noted that she was getting harassing tweets, presumably over the above Mockingbird cover and her work there in general. It’s possible that she was targeted from 4chan or Reddit as well. After saying she was considering pulling the plug…she did just that.

This ignited a firestorm of support on Twitter as well….

And a #standwithchelseacain hashtag was trending for quite a while and is still gaining steam. I doubt this is going to calm down any time soon.

I guess everyone feels a little burnt on social media at the mo, but the harassment problem isn’t a woman’s problem, it’s a MAN’S problem. The good men of comics and everywhere need to make it clear they do not support or tolerate hate, abuse and misogyny. This isn’t a borderline case. It’s clear, indisputable harassment. And that should not be part of the “comics conversation.”

The abuse against women in comics is equally clear and indisputable, and the abuse against women of color is even worse. And so on down the line. It’s toxic and inexcusable.

(2) TAKE THE LONGER WAY. Scifinow has an interview with Becky Chambers.

[CHAMBERS] So when they asked me, “What would you like to do next?” I was like, “Well, I don’t have anything for this crew, but Pepper and Lovelace, those two are, they’ve got stuff that I’d like to explore.” So that was just the thread I picked up and went with.

They’re such a great pairing! So they were the starting point?

Yeah, it really did happen by accident. That was one of the last things that I figured out in The Long Way. A lot of the stuff that happened in the book I’d scribbled down and imagined well before I actually sat down and wrote the thing, but I was a long way through the first draft before I knew where Lovelace was going to go after the first book. Somehow Pepper just sort of naturally took that spot.

It was one of those wonderful moments where something happens when you’re writing that you didn’t intend and it’s just like, “Oh, that actually works really well!” I started thinking about how these two women have vastly different backgrounds and life experiences but they actually have quite a bit in common, and it was fun playing with that. It was fun finding the similarities between two characters who, at first blush, don’t look like they could have anything similar at all and yet are walking such similar paths.

(3) THE SCIENCE IN SCIENCE FICTION. Joshua Sky interviewed Larry Niven for Omni.

JS: One of your goals as a writer is to continuously publish science fiction that is at the cutting edge of science. Is that still the case?

NIVEN: Yes, Fred (editor of If and Galaxy magazines at the time) gave me that goal, because I was already doing it, without quite making it a goal. He in fact suggested me writing stories and he finding scientists to write articles alongside the stories on the same subject, and we never got that far. I think he must’ve found that to be too much work.

JS: Is your process that you check the news, read the latest discoveries in science, and then write a story based on your findings?

NIVEN: That was my goal. In fact, I never really managed it.

JS: Is it difficult to keep track of the latest developments in science?

NIVEN: That’s easy. That’s a hobby. Doing your research for fun, and hoping it generates stories. Sometimes it does.

(4) WHAT I REALLY MEANT TO SAY. Here’s a Los Angeles Times article that will refresh your memory about the new California law requiring autographed memorabilia come with a certificate of authenticity —  “The high cost of an autograph”.

The bill’s author, Assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang, faced with a firestorm of protest from booksellers, issued this letter that argues her legal language should not be interpreted in the draconian way people assume.

assemblywoman-letter-p-1

assemblywoman-letter-p-2

(5) VANISHING CULT. The LA Times’ Josh Rottenberg asks, “In an age of comic-book blockbusters and viral sensations, whatever happened to the cult movie?”

Those old video stores have virtually all disappeared now, of course, along with many of the independent movie theaters that, in decades past, drew steady crowds to such “midnight movies” – all of it swept away in the transition to a fully digital, on-demand world. And the cult movies themselves? It seems they’re in danger of going extinct as well.

In today’s fragmented, ever-churning pop culture ecosystem, the long tail of home video that once gave oddball movies a shot at a glorious cult afterlife has shortened to the point of vanishing. With even big-budget commercial films often struggling to break through the endless clutter of content, the challenge for smaller, quirkier fare is that much harder.

Even when a particular offbeat film – say, “The Babadook” or “It Follows” – manages to catch a viral wave, it is almost instantly overcome by the next fresh piece of “must-watch” entertainment that demands your already overtaxed attention. Instead of a long tail, we now have a collective case of incurable cultural ADHD.

(6) WRITER’S NOTEBOOK. In his latest post at This Way To Texas, Lou Antonelli shares an idea for a story – “The Revenge of the Internet” — inspired by this premise:

OK, the big problem with social media – which I think everyone recognizes – is that it allows you to attack or insult people with impunity. it unleashes our worst nature. We can get away with saying things to people we would never say to their face, or even on the phone, and we can do it across great distances….

(7) GENDER COUNTING. Juliet McKenna says this is what the numbers say about “Gender in Genre and the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off 2016”.

When the only thing that counts is what readers make of the writing, the story really is all that matters.

The second thing I’m seeing here? Out of three hundred SPFBO [Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off] submissions this year, the field was 49% male, 33% female and 18 unknown as they were using initials. Can we assume those initials all belong to women? I’d say that’s a risky assumption – and even if that were the case, that still means only a third of the books were written by women prepared to raise a hand to be identified as such. What does that tell us?

Once again, it confirms something I’ve seen time and again since I started writing about inequalities in visibility in SF&F. Something I’ve had confirmed as an endemic problem in fields such as medicine, science, computing, literary criticism, history and the law. Women are still culturally conditioned to put themselves forward much less and to hold their own work to a far higher standard before offering it for publication. It’s a problem that frustrates and infuriates editors, from those working on academic journals, through fiction anthologies in all genres, to the commissioning editors in publishing houses. With the best will in the world, the best initiatives to improve diversity and representation can only work if those who’ve been historically excluded now step forward.

(8) BEFORE THERE WAS DYSTOPIA. In his article “We should remember HG Wells for his social predictions, not just his scientific ones” at The Conversation, Victorian fiction professor Simon John James notes that it’s H.G. Wells’s sesquicentennial, and gives back ground on Wells’s political achievements, including how Wells’s ideas inspired the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights.

Today, given the role that national identity continues to play in human beings’ efforts for greater self-determination, the prospect of Wells’s world state seems even less likely. One surprising legacy remains, however, from Wells’s forecasts of a better future for humankind. Letters from Wells to The Times led to the Sankey Committee for Human Rights and Wells’s 1940 Penguin Special The Rights of Man; Or What Are We Fighting For? (recently reissued with a preface by novelist Ali Smith). Wells argued that the only meaningful outcome for the war would be the declaration of an agreed set of universal human rights and an international court to enforce them.

Wells’s aspiration was the guaranteeing of the right to life, education, work, trade and property for every man and woman on Earth. (Surprisingly, given his earlier flirtation with positive eugenics, Wells also insisted on “freedom from any sort of mutilation or sterilisation” and from torture.) The influence of Wells’s work is clear in the United Nations 1948 Declaration of Universal Human Rights. These rights now have legal force if not universal existence: so are perhaps Wells’s most significant prophetic aim.

(9) JABBA’S JAZZ BAND ON THE TITANIC. I was amused by a sportswriter’s use of a Star Wars metaphor here. (There’s no reason to go read the whole article unless you want to know why a pro basketball team – the Philadelpha 76ers – has been tanking for years.)

Maduabum is not at the center of this story, but as a part of The Process he is known to the community of people who believe in it, roughly in the same way that the name of the lead singer in the band playing on Jabba the Hutt’s barge is known to your harder core Star Wars weirdos. Maduabum is a component part of a bigger story, in other words, and a peripheral cast member in that story’s expanded universe.

It’s a story that, as so often happens with things like this, is now being told by people with significantly more emotional investment in it than the original credited author. The person who came up with all this was, however idiosyncratically, trying to tell a compelling story successfully through to its conclusion, which is a complicated but prosaic thing. That story didn’t really come to life, and so cannot really have been said to work in any meaningful way, until it changed hands, as generally happens to stories that work the best. The story becomes the shared property of people who really care about it, who have more invested in it, for one, but also pursue it with both a more robust and a more authentic imagination than the story’s creator brought to it. The Process is no longer in Hinkie’s hands. It belongs, now, to the community of believers that keep it alive, and who care about it for reasons that go well beyond the stated goal of building a winning basketball team or attending some cramped and beery victory parade down Broad Street. ChuChu Maduabum is a peripheral part of that story, but he’s part of it. He’s Sy Snootles, yes, but he’s also a real guy. The Philadelphia 76ers owned his rights for six months, and then they traded them.

(10) DON’T SKIP OVER THIS. Steven Lovely picked “The 30 Best Science Fiction Books in the Universe” for Early Bird Books. You may think it’s only been ten minutes since you saw a list of sf/f greats, but this one includes a bunch of present day greats, too, like Ancillary Justice and Three-Body Problem.

(11) ORIGINAL TOURIST TERROR TOWER. In the October 27 Washington Post, John Kelly interviews Itsi Atkins, who probably invented the haunted house attraction in St. Mary’s County in 1971.  Atkins talks about how he came up with the idea and how much he enjoyed scaring people at “Blood Manor” in the 1970s: “He dreamed of screams: Meet the man behind the modern haunted house”.

With Halloween bearing down on us like an ax-wielding maniac, now’s a good time to remember Edwin “Itsi” Atkins, pioneer of fright.

“In all my research, I can’t find anybody who has a live-action haunted house before 1971,” Itsi told me when I rang him up in Georgia, where he lives now. Yes, people had “yard haunts” — elaborate decorations in their front yards — and Disneyland had its Haunted Mansion. But that was an amusement-park ride, which took safely seat-belted riders through a gently scary attraction.

What Itsi claims to have invented is the interactive experience of walking through a haunted house while being assaulted by scary actors amid frightful tableaux.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and Martin Morse Wooster for some off these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mart.]

New Fanhistory Videos from Fanac.Org

The YouTube Fanhistory Channel has added a selection of videos from Worldcons of the 1970s and 1980s.

Ms Marian’s Bedtime Story

11 minute video. MidAmeriCon, the 34th World SF Convention, was held in Kansas City in 1976. This entertaining video, framed as a children’s story, is full of references to the fannish lifestyle and how fans live Fandom as a Way of Life. It was created in the summer of ’76 to be used as filler on the convention’s closed circuit channel. The material is part of the Video Archeology project coordinated by Geri Sullivan.

 

Constellation (1983) Worldcon: Masquerade

1 hour, 48 minute video. This video of the masquerade shows the wide variety of costumes and skill levels that were shown. At around 1:42, there is information on how the masquerade was judged and the winners are announced and shown again at the end.

 

Panel: Women in SF: Their Right and Proper Place

1 hour video. MidAmeriCon (1976) Worldcon Panel: Women in SF: Their Right and Proper Place. This video of the panel “Women in SF” features Susan Wood, Kate Wilhelm, Marta Randall, Amanda Bankier and Suzy McKee Charnas. Includes an interesting description by Suzy McKee Charnas of her evolutionary networking of female SF writers. This video will give you good insight on where the discussion regarding women writers in SF was in the mid 70s as well as a few choice editor anecdotes. Note: there are a few sound problems. Part of the Video Archeology project coordinated by Geri Sullivan, with technical work by David Dyer-Bennet.

 

MidAmeriCon (1976) Worldcon – George Barr and Robert Heinlein, Guests of Honor

One hour 15 minute video. MidAmeriCon (1976) Worldcon – Speech by George Barr (Fan Guest of Honor) plus tributes to Robert Heinlein (Pro Guest of Honor) along with his response. This video of the Guest of Honor Banquet includes tributes to Robert A. Heinlein from Wilson “Bob” Tucker, Alfred Bester, Frederik Pohl, George Scithers, Jerry Pournelle, L. Sprague de Camp, Larry Niven and others. There’s a lot of respect and love evident in these tributes, and not a little humor. Part of the Video Archeology project coordinated by Geri Sullivan, with technical work by David Dyer-Bennet.

 

[Thanks To Andrew Porter for the story.]