The Down Under Fan Fund administrators are taking nominations for the 2017 DUFF delegate who will travel from North America to Australasia to attend Continuum 13, the Australian National Convention, being held in Melbourne from June 9-12.
We are looking for fun, outgoing fans to participate in this 44-year-old fannish cultural exchange by visiting Australia and New Zealand, meeting lots of people, attending cons, and returning home to run the fan fund for the next two years. Are you that fan?
Submit nominations to Lucy Huntzinger at [email protected] by January 22, 2017.
Livia Llewellyn and Sarah Pinsker at KGB Reading. Photo by Ellen Datlow.
By Mark L. Blackman: On the evening of Wednesday, December 21 — the first day of winter – the monthly Fantastic Fiction Readings Series hosted authors Livia Llewellyn and Sarah Pinsker at its longtime venue, the second-floor KGB Bar in Manhattan’s East Village. The Bar is known for its red walls and Soviet era-themed décor, and the Series for the quality of its readers (the Series might justifiably be called Fantastic Fiction and Where to Find It). Readings are always free (though attendees are exhorted to thank the Bar by buying drinks, hard or soft).
Series co-host Matthew Kressel welcomed the crowd (somewhat smaller, likely due to the holidays) and reported on upcoming readings. Next month’s (next year’s) readers:
January 18 — Holly Black and Fran Wilde will be reading;
February 15 — Michael Cisco and Nicholas Kaufmann;
Sarah Pinsker, reading here for the first time, is the author of the Nebula Award-winning novelette Our Lady of the Open Road and the Sturgeon Award-winning In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind. Her work has appeared in magazines, anthologies and year’s bests. She is also a talented singer/songwriter (with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth forthcoming). The story that she read, “Talking to Dead People,” ran in the fall in Fantasy & Science Fiction. Two college roommates start a business in which they recreate models of “murder houses.” One, the narrator, painstakingly builds the miniatures, reproducing both the exterior and the interior furnishings (down to working shutters), while the other – who’s had a longtime fascination with Lizzie Borden (who, for the record, was acquitted of the “whacks” – and, no, their enterprise is called House of Wax, not Whacks) – gives “voice to the voiceless” by programming into an AI box known details of the cases and approximations of the voices of those involved, thereby allowing people to question the victims and the “murderers and monsters.” The AIs, however, seem to know too much, and one mystery is too close to home (literally) for one of the pair.
After an intermission, the Series’ senior co-host, Ellen Datlow, introduced the evening’s second reader.
Livia Llewellyn
Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror and erotica, whose short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and best-of anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year series, Year’s Best Weird Fiction and The Mammoth Book of Best Erotica. Her first collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, received two Shirley Jackson Award nominations (for Best Collection and Best Novelette, “Omphalos”). Her story “Furnace” received a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nomination for Best Short Story, and is the title story in her second collection, Furnace. The novella from whose first part she read, The One That Comes Before, appeared in an anthology with a small printing, but is due for republication (in English and Italian). In Obsidia, a city whose magical reality is open to question, suffering excessive heat and humidity, a woman (“she’s kind of a psychopath,” said Llewellyn) wakes in the night and imagines that shadows are impinging (her dishtowels are rearranged). It was beautifully atmospheric and haunting. (Her reading was interrupted by a straggler who wondered what was going on. He didn’t quite redeem himself by calling out when she finished “You rock!”)
Copies of Llewellyn’s books were for sale – as was the anthology Cyber World, which contains a story by Kressel – at the back of the room by the Word Bookstores of Greenpoint, Brooklyn and Jersey City.
Prior to the reading, as usual, Datlow whirled through the audience, taking photos. Her photos of the event may be seen on Ellen Datlow’s Flickr page .
Variety reports the Academy’s music branch disqualified Arrival’s original score, fearing “that voters would be influenced by the use of borrowed material in determining the value of Johann Johannsson’s original contributions to Denis Villeneuve’s alien invasion psychodrama.”
Per Rule 15 II E of the Academy’s rules and eligibility guidelines, a score “shall not be eligible if it has been diluted by the use of pre-existing music, or it has been diminished in impact by the predominant use of songs or any music not composed specifically for the film by the submitting composer.”
The most prevalent pre-existing music in the film is an emotional piece by composer Max Richter called “On the Nature of Daylight,” which also featured prominently in Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island.” It was determined that there would be no way for the audience to distinguish those cues, which bookend the film, from Johannsson’s score cues.
Richter’s piece bookends Denis Villeneuve’s film, underscoring the Amy Adams sequences at the beginning (for nearly three minutes) and the end (for five and a half minutes). According to Johannsson, editor Joe Walker used the Richter as temporary music, and cut the opening sequence to it.
“It was always the intention to replace it,” Johannsson explained, as nearly always happens with temp music in a film. “I did several attempts, but I didn’t want to emulate that [Richter’s] sound. I wanted the opening music to have a correlation with the rest of the score. So I composed a piece for a cappella voices, which ultimately didn’t make the cut.” …The same piece was used prominently in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010) and appears in at least three other films.
“It’s been around,” Richter quips. “It’s one of those pieces with a strong atmosphere. It does seem to have a gravitational field that pulls things into it.”
Eric Persing, president of Spectrasonics, whose sound libraries are widely used in film and TV, says it’s an unjust decision. He protested on Facebook (quoted here with permission) —
I’m sorry, but this is absolutely infuriating….it’s the Birdman problem all over again. It’s obviously now time to clear out the Academy Music judging branch and start over with a younger generation that understands the value of hybrid scoring…you guys have lost your minds and are completely out of touch. The rules are ridiculous.
Johannsson writes over 55 minutes of some of the most moving and fresh film music of the whole year and the committee rules “that the credited …composer did not write significant and prominently featured music in the film.” That’s just not true! His score is clearly and prominently featured throughout the film.
He got disqualified because of a single piece of additional music, and simply because it’s a classical piece? Obviously if it had been a featured song, this would not be an issue at all and Johannsson’s score would NOT have been disqualified. It’s purely because the non-score music used is orchestral that all these alarm bells start going off in the Academy Music branch. (oh no…..strings!)
Look guys, modern filmmakers don’t work in the traditional way and might include some additional pieces of music the composer didn’t write…just like they include licensed songs for key scenes in a movie. Judge the score for what it it is. That’s the current reality of filmmaking, is absolutely absurd to punish the composer over this reality….it’s time to adjust the rules to recognize how films are made now.
The Oscar eligibility issue has not interfered with the director-composer partnership — Johannsson is currently writing music for Villeneuve’s next film, Blade Runner 2049.
(1) MARS’ VIRGIN FIELD EPIDEMIC. Nautilus writer Christopher McKay, in a piece called “Make Mars Great Again”, says that Mars has life because of microbes sent aboard non-sterile Mars probes, and if the planet gets warmer in a century these microbes can be used for terraforming.
Mars is currently inhabited by an estimated 1 million microbes. They coat the surfaces and crowd the innards of our robotic landers and rovers, which international policy requires to be cleaned, but not fully sterilized. The bugs are dormant, but viable. If Mars warmed up and water began to flow again, these microorganisms would revive and reproduce. And it is within our power to make that happen.
The concept of terraforming—making a barren world suitable for widespread life—is well developed in science fiction. The term was first used in a science-fiction story published in 1942. It implies the creation of a copy of Earth, which need not be the goal, but the word caught on. (It is definitely more euphonious than the suggested alternatives of “ecopoiesis” or “planetary ecosynthesis.”) In the ’90s the award-winning science-fiction trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars centered on the science and ethics of terraforming. But terraforming is no longer just science fiction.
(2) DIFFERENT CURRENCIES. Sarah A. Hoyt raises compelling points in “Some Hard Thinking About Our Business”. Why doesn’t everybody go indie? And how much money is it costing them to go with traditional publishers?
So I am continuously puzzled watching indie authors who are doing better by an order of magnitude than any traditional writer I know succumbing to the lure of a traditional contract. I’m not disapproving, mind you — who the hell am I to be disapproving of other people’s business decisions? If I had my time again, I doubt I’d have made most of the ones I made. I’d still want to write for Baen, but that’s about it — I’m just jaw-dropped shocked. Because they’ll be giving up 90% of their income or so. But perhaps they want the respectability. And perhaps they think it will give them further reach.
Is the reach thing true? For now. For a time. More on this later.
Is the respectability that important? Sure, if you want to have some sort of job as a “real writer” such places are starting to choose indies, but not really. Some conferences too (though we’re not absolutely sure, in this new era how much attendance of conventions contribute to sales, with the remarkable exception of hard copy books [more on that later.]) expect you to flash your “real writer” credentials in the form of contract. I even understand it from the social point of view, where when you’re at a party and people ask what you do, the question after you answer “writer” is “so have anything published?” (Or maybe that’s just to me, because of the accent.) Mind you, you can answer “Sure” and list your books and not say “indie” but I also know that when I say “Sure, x books with Berkley, x with Bantam and x with Baen” people’s attitude changes completely. And I can see that when people suspect you’re indie they say “So you published yourself” and dismiss it. I know that’s a stupid reason to give up 90% of your income, but humans are social animals and I can see “not being embarrassed at parties” making a difference. I can even see the velveteen writer thing, wanting to be a “real” writer in your own eyes, the way you envisioned it.
Big Star Wars fan Sean Doolittle was kind enough to take some time away from his rigorous offseason sock-throwing regimen to write a film review of Rogue One … yes, really! Enjoy it all below, and don’t worry — there are no major spoilers, as Sean knows what he’s doing.
What really separates this movie from any other episode in the Star Wars franchise, though, is how dark and harsh it is. Rogue One is as much a war drama, with real, raw emotion, as it is a sci-fi adventure movie. This movie drops you into the middle of a brutal galactic civil war, one that’s taken everything from these characters and turned them into soldiers willing to fight for the Rebellion.
(4) NOT THE REASONS FOR THE SEASON. I thought Tor.com had a great discussion-generating post idea in “The Non-Holiday Movies We Always End Up Watching Over the Holidays” but they had more misses than hits as far as my tastes are concerned. (Anyone else watched Rocky II this month? I did.)
And it’s a discussion you can have on more than one level. I decided to watch Tracy and Hepburn in Desk Set the other night I’d long since forgotten that most of the climactic events happen at the office Christmas party. So can I count it as “non-holiday” or not?
(5) GHIBLI AND GRAVY. The YouTube video “Studio Ghibli in Real Life” is a charming YouTube video in which Studio Ghibli characters are placed into real-life Japanese settings.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
December 21, 1937 — Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater in Hollywood, California. It was the first animated feature-length film with sound and color.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRL
Born December 21, 1937 – Jane Fonda
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
Born December 21, 1957 — Tsutomu Kitagawa, a Japanese actor and stuntman best known for playing Godzilla in the Millennium (or Shinsei) series. He also played the costumed actor for the Blue (and occasionally, Black) Ranger in many of Toei Company’s Super Sentai Series in the 1980s, better known in the US as Power Rangers.
Today’s auction is for a set of books from Pamela Dean, including signed hardcover first editions of THE DUBIOUS HILLS and JUNIPER, GENTIAN, AND ROSEMARY, along with a signed mass-market paperback set of the reissue of the SECRET COUNTRY trilogy. That’s a total of five autographed books for you to enjoy!
About THE DUBIOUS HILLS: Centuries after a group of warring wizards eliminate war from the Dubious Hills, the Hills are a place where knowledge and ability are parcelled out in strange ways. Only the group known as the Akoumi understand death, only the Gnosi know how to teach, and only the Physici can know pain. Dean weaves a strange and compelling examination of knowledge, responsiblity and death.
About JUNIPER, GENTIAN, AND ROSEMARY: Three sisters live comfortably with their parents: Juniper, 16, who likes cooking and computer chats; Gentian, 13, who likes plays and astronomy; Rosemary, 11, who likes Girl Scouts. Enter Dominic, handsome as the night, quoting poetry, telling riddles, and asking help for a complex and fascinating science project. Gentian isn’t interested at first–she has her own life. But gradually her life, and her time, belong more and more to Dominic and his project, and her father begins to fear that the lad may be more than a charmer…
About THE SECRET COUNTRY: Each vacation for the past nine years, cousins Patrick, Ruth, Ellen, Ted, and Laura have played a game they call the “Secret”—and invented, scripted world full of witches, unicorns, a magic ring, court intrigue, and the Dragon King. In the Secret, they can imagine anything into reality, and shape destiny. Then the unbelievable happens: by trick or by chance, they actually find themselves in the Secret Country, their made-up identities now real. The five have arrived at the start of their games, with the Country on the edge of war. What was once exciting and wonderful now looms threateningly before them, and no one is sure how to stop it… or if they will ever get back home.
(11) THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MENTIONING RACE. Foz Meadows engages a recent controversy involving YA commentators — “YA, Race & Assimilation: A Response”.
Which is why, returning to the matter of QOP and Whitney Atkinson, pro-diversity advocates are so often forced to contend with people who think that “separating races” and like identifiers – talking specifically about white people or disabled people or queer people, instead of just people – is equivalent to racism and bigotry. Whether they recognise it or not, they’re coming from a perspective that values diverse perspectives for what they bring to the melting pot – for how they help improve the dominant culture via successful assimilation – but not in their own right, as distinct and special and non-homogenised. In that context, race isn’t something you talk about unless you’re being racist: it’s rude to point out people’s differences, because those differences shouldn’t matter to their personhood. The problem with this perspective is that it doesn’t allow for the celebration of difference: instead, it codes “difference” as inequality, because deep down, the logic of cultural assimilation is predicated on the idea of Western cultural superiority. A failure or refusal to assimilate is therefore tantamount to a declaration of inequality: I’m not the same as you is understood as I don’t want to be as good as you, and if someone doesn’t want to be the best they can be (this logic does) then either they’re stupid, or they don’t deserve the offer of equality they’ve been so generously extended in the first place.
Talking about race isn’t the same as racism. Asking for more diversity in YA and SFF isn’t the same as saying personhood matters less than the jargon of identity, but is rather an acknowledgement of the fact that, for many people, personhood is materially informed by their experience of identity, both in terms of self-perception and in how they’re treated by others at the individual, familial and collective levels. And thanks to various studies into the social impact of colour-blindness as an ideology, we already know that claiming not to see doesn’t undo the problem of racism; it just means adherents fail to understand what racism actually is and what it looks like, even – or perhaps especially – when they’re the ones perpetuating it.
Thanks to documentaries and YouTube, the younger set can experience some of the flavor of the late 1960s today, as well as what the Moon landing meant at the time to America and the world. The zeitgeist of hope and possibility might perhaps best be captured in a CBS News discussion on July 20, 1969—Apollo 11 landing day. Hosted by the inimitable Walter Cronkite, the great newsman interviewed science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein about the implications of NASA’s achievement. The program featured a discussion just after the landing, with a second segment following the first moonwalk by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
“Time just stopped for me, I think it stopped for everybody,” a 51-year-old Clarke said, describing how it felt to watch the lunar module touch down. “My heart stopped. My breathing stopped.”
(13) CURSUS HONORUM. James Langdell raises a good question:
How do you become a Ghost Of Christmas Past? Do you work your way up after starting out as Ghost Of National Pickle Day Past?
(14) THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS LAUGHS. Curator John King Tarpinian delved into the archives for these Stan Freberg Christmas parodies —
Green Christmas
Christmas Dragnet (1953) / Yulenet (1954)
The Night Before Christmas (1955)
[Thanks to Rich Lynch, Mark-kitteh, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators has announced the recipient of the 2016 Jane Yolen Mid-List Author Award is Jan Peck, author of The Green Mother Goose (Sterling, 2010) and Giant Peach Yodel (Pelican Publishing, 2012).
Two Honor winners were also chosen, Deborah Trotter of Moraga, California, and Joan Donaldson of Fennville, Michigan.
The award is a $3,000 grant to mid-list authors to honor their contribution and help raise awareness about their current works-in-progress.
Jane Yolen, who both funds and chooses the winners, said —
All of the submissions this year were top rate, and the stories of how these authors—many of them award-winners—who have all had some recent setbacks serves as a warning to all writers. We are at the whim of trends, changes in publishers, consolidation of publishing lists, cutbacks in educational spending and the development of newer ways of storytelling. These three winners are all really good at what they do. My one wish is that this small award will be a way of re-starting their book lives again. Selfish of me, really, I want to read more from each of them. They each have many more books, stories, poems inside that need to be seen by the reading public.
The rules say, “Two winners will share the $3,000 grant” – so it is not explicit what happens in this case, with one named “winner” and other “honor winners,” but Yolen’s comment seems to mean they are all receiving cash.
Founded in 1971, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators is one of the largest existing writers’ and illustrators’ organizations, with over 22,000 members worldwide.
On the quiet tree-lined streets of Cheviot Hills in Los Angeles there is the new house being built on Ray Bradbury’s old lot.
In November, Pat Rogers made a pilgrimage to see what the new owner is doing. She wrote, “The owner said he bought in that area because he liked the quaint charm of the neighborhood. Which is now a little less quaint and charming. He also just had the last tree over the sidewalk cut down. Sigh. So it goes.”
DnA: What are you planning to build? On the blogosphere one of the terms that’s being thrown around is McMansion.
BM: That is so, so wrong. It’s the exact opposite of a McMansion.
We are building this really, really modest house. Most of it is landscaping.
It’s really interesting because the ground is being excavated and the house is going down below the level of the ground, a lot of it, not all of it. We come up only four feet from the ground level.
TM: If you look at the maximum envelope which everybody’s building, we are we are building only 20 percent of the volume that we are allowed to build so it’s actually an anti, a super-anti-McMansion.
We are attacking that issue because I see this very much as a prototype for a California house. I’m aware of the Case Study program; I studied with Pierre Koenig and I see this as the next generation of a Case Study for a residential environment in California and it has do with scale, it it has to do with landscape, it has no air conditioning, it has to do with climate, it has to do with lifestyle. The main room is exterior, it’s an outside room and we’ve learned that because that’s how we live in our house currently.
Blythe also said, “There is a wall that we will design that will be seen from the outside of the house and all of the titles of his books will be embedded in this wall.”
How does it look right now?
Pat Rogers said, “If I put aside my bias about Ray’s house being torn down and take it as interesting architecture (the metallic looking walls may be adapted solar panels) — I would still have a problem with it in this neighborhood. Maybe if it was located out in the desert near Palm Springs or on Mars, it would be OK.”
Pat’s shadow points to where the last tree used to be.
Along with Anita Sarkeesian and Zoë Quinn, Wu is frequently cited by the media as one of the targets of GamerGate supporters’ harassment of women in the gaming industry.
“The reason I decided to run is simple: [President-elect Donald] Trump is terrifyingly now in the White House. I can’t sit by making pleasant video game distractions for the next four years while the constitution is under assault. Hillary [Clinton] ran a brave marathon, and now it’s time for women of my generation to pick up that baton and commit to public service.”
“The other reason I’m running is because I’m ready for a bolder Democratic Party. I didn’t personally support Sanders in the primary, but he tapped into a very powerful disconnect between our party’s leadership and our base. We want leaders that will fight for us, and all too often the Democrats don’t stand up to the fringe extreme of the Republican Party. I’ve been called a lot of names over my career, but I’ve never been told I’m scared of a fight. You know just how passionate I am about women in tech. But I believe we’ve hit an asymptote with what activism in tech can accomplish. People are aware of the problem, but all that’s getting done is window dressing. We don’t need more catered women in tech lunches, we don’t need speeches – we need structural bias against us to stop. And I think women in tech serving in the legislative branch is the next step forward.”
Wu says she has her eye on the 8th Massachusetts Congressional district, currently served by Democratic incumbent Stephen Lynch, just re-elected to his ninth term with 74% of the vote. He’s regarded as a moderate Democrat, but says to those trying to categorize him, “Calling me the least liberal member from Massachusetts is like calling me the slowest Kenyan in the Boston Marathon. It’s all relative.”
Less than 5% of the district’s eligible voters cast ballots in the 2016 Democratic primary (29,352). Wu says she feels she is capable of getting the necessary 10,000-15,000 votes needed to knock out the incumbent.
It is a good sign when on the first weekend a film is out fans are already scrutinizing footage and looking for information about how it was put together, and trying to figure out if there are any extra pieces to the puzzle out there that they can view. Fortunately for us all, one man in particular was so enamored by ‘Rogue One‘ (and I do not blame him as I too loved the movie) that he took the time to comb through the teaser, the trailers, and all of the promos he could find for ‘Rogue One’ and discover 46 shots used in the marketing campaign that did not actually make the final cut of the film.
The next phase of the conversation was something that can really only result when you get a couple of people with several decades of industry experience together.
DOHERTY: Of course, when I became publisher of Ace, that was the year that the Science Fiction Writers of America discontinued the publisher Hugo. I could almost take that personally. Pat LoBrutto, who was at Ace then, went over to Doubleday, and I brought Jim Baen in from Galaxy. Jim’s heart always was in short stuff, though. He loved military science fiction, but he really loved magazines and the magazine approach. Eventually, well—I liked much of what Jim did, but I didn’t want it to be all we did.
MODESITT: Well, but that’s what he’s done at Baen, in essence.
DOHERTY: And it worked out fine because, when I brought David in from Timescape, Ron Bush had gone from publisher of Ballantine, where he had renamed the Ballantine science fiction Del Rey after Judy-Lynn, over to Pocket Books. As president of Pocket Books, Ron tried to hire Jim away, because Ron, having come out of running Del Rey, was very high on science fiction and wanted a strong science fiction line over there, but Jim didn’t want to go to work for a big corporation. I knew Ron quite well over the years, so I called him up and said “hey Ron, look, Jim doesn’t want to join a big corporation, but he’s always dreamed to have his own company to do things in the way he saw them. And he’s a fine editor. You’re trying to hire him, you know that. Suppose we make a company for you to distribute, and you’ll be the distributor and we’ll be the publisher. We’ll make what we can make but you’ll make a guaranteed profit on the distribution.” And he thought, why not?
MODESITT: Well, it’s still working for him.
DOHERTY: It’s still working, and that’s how we started Baen Books. I actually gave Jim the inventory to start Baen. I allowed him to take any authors who wanted to go to the startup with Simon & Schuster, any authors that he had brought in that he had worked on. And that was the initial inventory, the first year of Baen. So they would have been Tor books.
MODESITT: I don’t know. I think it worked out better for all sides.
DOHERTY: I think it worked out just great. Baen is still a healthy company doing nicely under Toni [Weisskopf], and, hey, I’m still a partner over there.
MODESITT: Sort of the silent partner.
DOHERTY: A very silent partner. They do it all themselves. It would be conflict of interest to get too involved, but it’s fun to be part of it even on the outside.
(3) DARK SIDE OF THE ENT. Mariel Katherine shares “My Darth Vader Christmas Tree.”
(4) ALL WE ARE SAYING IS, GIVE ALT A CHANCE. From the Newsthump style manual —
The Alt-Jedi are best known for rejecting mainstream Jediism in favour of provocative behaviour designed to outrage the consensus, such as force-choking people and destroying worlds in colossal gouts of laser fire.
Attention authors: today’s auction is for the critique of a manuscript, up to 80,000 words, from award-winning author Leah Bobet. You’ll send your manuscript to Bobet by February 1, and she’ll return your critique by March 15.
Garden gnome attacks rise sharply during the holidays. This phenomenon is because people’s affection for Santa’s elves causes them to confuse friendly North Pole helpers with the vicious murdering murderers known as garden gnomes (gnomus hortus).
We must always remember that while gnomes enjoy a public image whitewash that passes them off as symbols of merriment and goodwill, they are secretly planning home invasions all over the world in a grand plan of evisceration and death. (Wait a minute—does that gnome look a little closer to the pet door than yesterday? Better board up the house just to be safe.) While we don’t know why gnomes attack us—for our metal? our spices?—we can be certain that they want us all dead. In 2016, the Gnome Defense Hotline based in Berlin has recorded 1,017 confirmed attacks worldwide….
Mary Poppins Returns set to take place 25 years after the events of the original film, and will see Mary Poppins, um, return to the Banks’ household when Jane and Michael experience a personal loss.
Chicago and Into The Woods director Rob Marshall is helming the film, which will feature an original screenplay from David Magee based on childrens’ author PL Travers’ The Mary Poppins Stories. Marshall, John DeLuca and Marc Platt are producing. It will also feature an all-new score by Marc Shaiman and original songs by Shaiman and Scott Wittman.
Joining Streep as Topsy, Miranda was Jack the Street Lamplighter and Lansbury in an unconfirmed role in Mary Poppins Returns are Emily Blunt as Mary Poppins, Colin Firth as bank manager William Weatherall Wilkins, Ben Whishaw as Michael Banks, Emily Mortimer as Jane Banks and Christian Dixon as the Milkman.
(8) THE SCRIPT DOCTOR IS IN. Jason Sanford loathes Passengers but says he has come up with a quick rewrite which totally fixes the film. I haven’t read the end of his post because I’m not ready for spoilers, though he insists he’s morally entitled to deliver them. The fact is, I don’t know if I’m even going to see the film. Whenever I’m ready Sanford’s link will be waiting for me here….
This adamant refusal to see color is the reason why I didn’t feel awkward with Harry Potter at the age when I started reading it; the reason why I can no longer read it without cringing. And color isn’t even the only thing that Harry Potter refuses to see. Sexuality, religion—you name it. Harry Potter isn’t an offensive text, but it’s equally inoffensive to the homophobic, xenophobic readers. And maybe those are the things that we need to talk about, when we are shocked that the fandom we loved so much as children also managed to nurture the people who are so hateful towards our mere existence.
The inescapable fact is that most minorities never really did exist in Harry Potter, except in a tokenistic way, or retconned into the narrative afterwards. Much before the controversy over the black Hermione, there was the controversy over the gay Dumbledore—one that played out pretty much along the same lines. Nothing in the books suggests that Dumbledore couldn’t have been gay, but nothing in them actually establishes, leave alone defends, his homosexuality either. You can read the vaguest hints of a homoerotic friendship with Grindelwald, but the fan-fiction community had been shipping everyone with everyone else for years, and I can never be sure of what might have been an intended hint in the books. (Sirius Black and James Potter were definitely homoerotic too, right? Non?) In the actual books, Dumbledore was just the generic unpartnered male. I’d have never known, if I didn’t read the “official” announcement on Rowling’s website, that she intended him to be gay.
….I want the racists in my stories, and I want the racists to lose. I want people like the Dursleys to call people like me Paki, nigger, gangster, terrorist, job-stealer, the proverbial dogs that their country is going to, and then I want to see them eat their words. I want to see the Death Eaters swelling with ancestral wealth built over centuries of slavery and colonialism—because aren’t they all old British aristocrats, and how else did those people get rich?—and mouthing their ancestral slurs. (Do you really think Draco Malfoy would’ve let Hermione off with just “Mudblood”, if she happened to be black?) I don’t want Mudblood to be a half-hearted allegory for gay, non-white or any other minority, I don’t want house-elves to enact a half-baked allegory of slaves, because minorities are not allegorical in this world, they’re not equal to the straight white people, and I’m sure Rowling knows that as well as I do.
Now that people have been reading and re-reading these books for going on two decades some have discovered the intrinsic social issues — struggles of the minority wizards versus the majority Muggles, between the wizard-born and “mudbloods,” of totalitarians against the free, or the exercise of supernatural power without allegiance to a deity (controversial among evangelical Christians) – aren’t virulent enough to keep pace with what they’ve learned about life in the real world. (Which is not a complaint you can make about Huckleberry Finn, whatever else someone might think about it.) So were the books inadequate from the start, or is this a consequence of someone who loved them outgrowing them? Rowling dislikes the first possibility as much as anyone, and has tried to patch things by reinterpreting several characters after the fact. But her efforts have been fatally undercut by making a hash of the Pottermore expansion into Native American magic. What does Mondal’s text say should be done with Harry Potter now? I find she doesn’t feel a strong need to erase these books from her Kindle – she simply says “I hate to discover myself more and more rejected by it on each subsequent read.” Mondal may still be making up her mind about the ultimate answer.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Dave Langford, and Jim C. Hines for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cadbury Moose.]
