While your host is still working back up to full velocity, here’s a fresh post to ornament with you comments and continued discussions.
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Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom
Engineers Develop ‘Material That Computes,’ Recognizes Images
I’ve felt these probably fracking-related Oklahoma earthquakes before, staying at my mom’s house in northwest Arkansas, but I didn’t feel this one here in Little Rock. I know someone who did. She lives up in a high-rise apartment building, which probably swayed more than this little house.
Pawnee, Oklahoma is right near where I grew up. I know that area well. It was on a junior high band trip after we’d marched around the town square that I bought my first pack of Trojans in a gas station bathroom. They never did get used. It’s a pretty little town. I’m glad no one was hurt.
@Petréa Mitchell: Good for you for pecking out the corn from that cow patty. I try to do that myself when I can, but today, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even.
NASA’s Juno Orbiter Sends Back the First Images of Jupiter’s North Pole
includes an interesting audio/video of Jupiter “talking to us” through eerie radio signals
@PhilRM
Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock looks like a literary fiction/SF hybrid to me, though upon closer examination it turns out to have been published by an SFF imprint, Amazon’s 47North. You’re correct that Matthew di Abaitua (whom I haven’t read) is indeed an SF writer, not a borderline writer. I must have gotten him mixed up with someone else.
First and only earthquake: I live in a part of the world where earthquakes are few and far between. However, there was one in my area in 2005 that reached 3.8 on the Richter scale and that I actually felt. It was a summer evening, I was going down the stairs to fetch something to drink or eat, when all of a sudden there was a very loud bang. The windows rattled and I suddenly found myself sitting on the stairs, even though I’d been standing a second before, At first, I thought it was some kind of explosion, so I got up and went outside to check if I could see anything. It wasn’t until I heard the radio news the next morning that I realised that it had been an earthquake.
There was another earthquake in the same area (probably caused by drilling for natural gas) in 2014, but I wasn’t at home for that one.
I was in downtown San Francisco during the Loma Prieta, sitting on a commuter bus that nearly flipped over, watching the brick buildings collapse. Then I went home and packed a bag full of catfood and extra jeans and phoned people on the east coast to ask them what the news was saying, while watching smoke clouds from burning buildings fill the skies. We had no power for several days (and no internet for several years). Lots of people died when a stacked freeway structure collapsed, and the Bay Bridge was closed for months. It was an adventure.
Cora: Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock looks like a literary fiction/SF hybrid to me
I was hugely disappointed by that book. The SF part of it is pretty much non-existent. It’s a literary book.
Whereas I was absolutely delighted with Charnock’s A Calculated Life, which is very SF.
Good to know. I was thinking of checking it out, because I like Paolo Uncello and the story of a forgotten female artist sounds fascinating. I still might read it, since I don’t exclusively read SFF, but it’s still good to know that I needn’t expect much SF.
A couple of the many articles just posted, relating information revealed at the Missions NYC con this weekend, including that the new Star Trek series on CBS All Access will be set after the timeline of Enterprise and about 10 years before TOS‘ five-year mission TOS, the main/featured character will be a female Lieutenant Commander, not the ship’s Captain, and there will be a gay character in the crew.
Bryan Fuller Shares Details on Star Trek: Discovery
Star Trek: Discovery Secrets Revealed at Missions NYC!
Cora: Good to know. I was thinking of checking it out, because I like Paolo Uncello and the story of a forgotten female artist sounds fascinating. I still might read it, since I don’t exclusively read SFF, but it’s still good to know that I needn’t expect much SF.
It’s a decent book. I honestly think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn’t gone in believing it was SFF.
Writer and game designer Monica Valentinelli’s Worldcon recap, which is largely positive — though it appears there was some serious misbehavior on the part of one of the Firefly panelists.
My first earthquake was a 4 pointer, when I was living in Orange County, the winter of 2002. No one in the apartment building or in the area seemed to pay it much mind. I think, I can’t be sure, I felt a second one just before I moved away, but that one was even weaker.
For those here who might find it interesting (I did), I offer the Worldcon report of author and small press publisher Ivery Kirk, who with her co-author Luna Teague have written two novels in a series called (I kid you not) Timebangers, about two young women who travel back in time to have sex with historical figures.
Matt Y:”Worldcon voters hate the name Smith, just ask them how they feel about Matt Smith.”
Who?
@All,
Still on names: Absent my first name, what would you guess to be the ethnicity & origin of “Lee”?
(One of the correct answers applies to me.)
The Surprising Intersection of Islam and Scifi
“A new anthology is working to give geeky Muslims a bigger voice in science fiction with a collection of short stories both based on and inspired by Islamic culture.
“Islam and Science Fiction founder Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad has released Islamicates Volume I, a free collection of 12 short stories. Ahmad said he started the anthology (and the website 10 years prior) because he didn’t see enough Muslim representation in science fiction. At least any that he could find.”
link to download book in various e-book formats
Not my first earthquake, but the most dramatic was the one in Virginia several years ago. I was at work (Central Ohio) when my chair suddenly felt like someone was kicking it, which then became the sort of jerking you feel as a wooden coaster climbs that first hill. I would never survive in real quake country, rather than ducking under the desk, I brought up the US Geological website so I could report that I’d felt the quake…
Matt Y: ”Worldcon voters hate the name Smith, just ask them how they feel about Matt Smith.”
Soon Lee: Who?
Yes.
My first quake was some complete non event in the UK or Australia, but I’m getting more used to them in this corner of SE Asia – we had a pretty major shake in the centre of the country last week and felt it on the tops of the buildings where I live too. My survival sense is also pretty non existent so all I did was look out the window to see if the neighbours were doing anything (they weren’t) and then go back to my book…
While we’ve got a lovely Abbot and Costello routine going here, I’m gonna be a killjoy in case Soon Lee wasn’t making a joke and is confused by the response.
Matt Smith = The Eleventh Doctor Who.
And I leave you with an Animaniacs riff on “Who’s On First”:
https://youtu.be/Mdqv5xIsFLM
I had a delightful back-and-forth with some Puppy people in the comments of the MGC post discussed upthread. Sadly, Dave Freer ended it by demanding that I doxx myself or otherwise he’ll put me in the spam filter.
I would have loved to hear what earning shortlists the Dragon Award finalists John C. Wright and Dave Freer are on, but now I’ll never know.
Absolutely. I was very pissed of at that outcome.
Paulk has obviously never been to Worldcon before, or been through the process until going Full Puppy. Of course, hiding in her Puppy Safe Space, she didn’t really go to Worldcon this year either.
Just about everyone I know forgets the names of the authors of the works they want to nominate. Often they don’t look it up before turning in their ballot. So they aren’t deciding via name, gender, ethnicity (you often can’t tell the last 2 by the name even if you know it), nor sexual orientation or country of residence. “Cat Pictures, Please” f’rex: I just remembered “The awesome story about the sentient AI who likes kitty pix!” Even when I looked up the author, I had no idea of her race, cis or trans-ness. I mean, “Naomi” is probably a woman, and the writing seemed like she was American or maybe Canadian, but mostly it was The Story I Made Everyone I Know Read.
And while I thought the ending of “Binti” was way too convenient, the world-building and writing were good, and absolutely everything about “The Fifth Season” is perfect. If they have yet to grow up, then we’re in for astounding work that will leave all my socks in orbit forever. Which will be inconvenient in winter. And those black women! So coddled! So catered to!
O, the poor masses of Worldcon held hostage by the SJZucchini! When WILL they be able to bravely rise up to vote for the right-wing SWM pew-pew they so long for? It’s almost as if there wasn’t a secret ballot, and we weren’t getting rid of the 5% rule because everyone’s got so many opinions. Puppies are so fond of thinking in lockstep that they believe everyone is. AND STOP CALLING US LIARS!
@JJ: Puppies aren’t allowed to get counseling. It’s unmanly. And people might think they weren’t 100% self-confident. And they might change their minds.
@Paul/Jvstin: So, because it’s inclusive of the entire world, Worldcon should only reward SWM from ‘Murica. Uh-huh. Freer gets farther and farther from consensus reality every day, doesn’t he? And if sales = quality, then the bestest fantasy novels EVAR are the “Twilight” books, and the best SF novels EVAR are the accumulated “Star Trek” tie-ins. Uh, in ‘Murica or in English. But we know Puppies hate the recent Chinese winners, for not being right-wing or ‘Murican. (I’d like to see any of them give as good a speech in Mandarin as Ms. Hao did this year in English).
@Lee Whiteside: Thanks for the notification!
@Dawn: I dropped what I was reading and shirked both chores AND sleep to read “Obelisk Gate”. But you do you. I think you might wanna finish “Dream-Quest” first, b/c after OG, I couldn’t read any more SFF for a while and had to switch genres to avoid being let down. But shirk the chores for sure when you get to it!
I can pass for normie too, and I am a cis-SWW of education. It makes my life much easier in some ways than that of PoC, non-het, non-cis out in public. Except when there’s stairs. I mean, I won’t get insulted or beat up on the stairs, but people are gonna glare at me for taking so damn long.
@Cora: Not to mention that “write what you want” is liable to be “what other people want” enough so that you will make money with the lower costs and higher royalties of self-publishing. If you’re going to turn out cookie-cutter stuff written to market, might as well go with old-school publishing.
I’m impressed that your neighbor’s cat understands English. 😉
@techgrrl1972: I think we’ve established that Puppies are great at projection. However, they’ll deny it, because as I said earlier, they don’t believe in therapists.
@Charon D: I am not going to SFCC, staying home with my small fluffy cat. However, if you go to next year’s SVCC, or the more lit’rary cons hereabouts, I would like to meet up. Or I’d like to meet your giant fluffy cat and worship him.
@Chad: So glad your baby SJW credential is okay! My childhood cat got into the dryer once — luckily it was only set to fluff, no heat, and Mom was close enough to hear the thump and yowl, so he only did a couple of turns.
@Snodberry: My exact thoughts about both “Binti” and “Anathem” — though “Anathem” got better again. And really good again in the glossary.
The most annoying part about being a couple miles from the epicenter of the 1994 Northridge quake was that I couldn’t find my shoes, and so when I walked out of the motel, my socks got wet where the pool had slopped over. So I had to sit around in wet socks for a couple of hours till sun-up, and even in LA, that’s kinda cold in January. The eeriest thing was that with the power out, you could see stars. I suddenly understood the ending of “Nightfall” much better.
I live near the Hayward Fault and it’s true: we do know which fault lines cause quakes, how far away they are, how deep, and what magnitude. Everyone in the room guesses, then you consult the USGS website. Loma Prieta was obviously “San Andreas, south of here but in the area, BIG” and Northridge was “RIGHT HERE AND HOLY F*CKING BIG”. The t-shirt I bought the next morning from a guy on a street corner has the wrong magnitude, because they adjusted it up later.
@BigelowT: “You may have more knowledge than I do what her specific ancestry is, however.” I really and definitely don’t. Just went by the first credible-looking Web page I found; quite possibly you found better ones. Paulk sounded (to me) more Scottish than not, but what do I know? Also might differ from what folks arrived with, prior to Oz immigration.
@JJ ‘I still think it’s absolutely hilarious that Paulk is convinced that the vast majority of Business Meeting attendees were being railroaded by a small SJW cabal. She really doesn’t know how to read a room.’
Word. What’s particularly peculiar about that was that there were, what — two? three? — appeals from the ruling of the chair. Those were all sustained by the assembly because Jared is a quite good parliamentarian and scrupulously fair, but the basic reality that the assembly are in charge, not the front table, was fully on display.
Loma Prieta ’89 was serious enough to break some Californians’ sang froid (like Sylmar ’71, Northridge ’94), not to mention casualties. Still, one must hold up the side: In ’89, upon reaching home in S.F. five hours after leaving Berkeley (bridge outage), I joked with my fiancee about bicycling to the Marina District’s Safeway market to buy Shake’n’Bake (the Marina being on fire at the time).
First (and only) earthquake – being the UK this was pretty low level – a magnitude 5 about 15-20 miles away in the middle of the night. My house has a goods-only railway line fairly close nearby, and they run very heavy very slow loads past in the middle of the night which makes for a long, low rhythmic rumbling. So when I woke up briefly to some shaking and rumbling, my mind just registered “funny sounding train” and went back to sleep.
@Andrew M
Yes, but she says two. I don’t think it impossible, though, that the second is ‘Cat Pictures Please’.
She actually seems to have liked Cat Pictures, Please. Along with what I originally quoted, she said “This story was interesting enough, but it didn’t really leave much of an impact.” on Folding Beijing; and “Another cute piece, but with a liberal side of “hmm” that kept me thinking after I’d finished. This is one of my personal contenders for this category.” on Cat Pictures Please. I judged Binti and 5th Season had got the worst scores from her, and therefore were probably what she was talking about. I didn’t consider the editor categories though, and I see she was fairly meh on both the winning editors, but again not as harshly as she was on Fifth Season and Binti.
@SpaceFaringKitten
Yes, I saw Dave’s latest. Demanding you answer certain things on pain of being banned seems to be his opening salvo when he’s decided to ban you no matter what. I also notice he’s not making the same demand of various other pseudonymous posters, probably because they agree with him.
First earthquake: 2007 in Singapore. Room started shaking and vibrating. Was mostly happy about it. Of course, nothing like my friend the geologist who has written a study about the potential for earthquakes in Sweden. He once phoned and sounded like a very happy deranged madman after experiencing an earthquake in greece.
Thought Biniti was ok, writing was really good, but had problems with the unexplained magic stuff that kept happening. Cat pictures, please, I didn’t like at all. Almost to boring to finish. Penric’s Demon, I liked very much.
@Dawn Incognito,
I don’t know.
(Actually I did know Who Matt Smith is, and I can also appreciate that the urge to provide answers is hard to resist.)
Mark: I saw Dave’s latest. Demanding you answer certain things on pain of being banned seems to be his opening salvo when he’s decided to ban you no matter what. I also notice he’s not making the same demand of various other pseudonymous posters, probably because they agree with him.
Seriously? What a huge childish baby. I mean really, what sort of adult actually behaves that way?
Tasha:
Oh, I know it doesn’t have to be. But in this case, I think it is.
She’s got her heels dug in on the postulate that SJWs are determined to award unworthy fiction because they look to demographic categories and politics rather than quality. So when she sees a story that has the kind of author-demo or political angle that she associates with this postulate, she goes in looking to discover that it’s unworthy slop, and sure enough, she reaches such a conclusion. It would take a seismic upheaval of perception to overcome that kind of determined expectation.
And if that seems like psychoanalyzing someone I don’t know, at least it’s on a smaller scale than her analysis of the SJWs and CHORFs and whatever other terms have been waved around.
After seeing her take part in a movement that bayed loudly about the corrupt worthlessness of the Hugos to anyone who’d listen, based on outright lies, it was breathtaking hypocrisy to get up in front of the Business Meeting and claim that taking steps against this cynical and dishonest campaign of disrepute would bring the Hugos into disrepute. I can admire her willingness to get up and participate, but not the content of what she said.
So I have little interest in giving her (or her fellow-travelers) the benefit of the doubt. I think they’re dishonest to the world around them and dishonest to themselves, and they’re so deep in their agenda they can’t judge fiction in any way not framed by that agenda.
That may be an unkind assessment, but I’d need to see some pretty solid evidence before I thought it was an incorrect one.
Which is not to say I think she should like BINTI merely because I did. Merely that she can’t allow herself to approach it with an open mind because she’s too committed to the rut she’s dug herself into.
Yoiks, behind again/still! Darn antibiotics are still kicking my tush and just got an email from my dr. that I have to take another week’s worth, as the infection hasn’t completely cleared up. Blick. :-/
I have an unusual request. My son runs a niche PR firm that specializes in video games. One of his clients is the creator of a game called Elite: Dangerous – a very realistic space adventure, trading venture, combat simulation game that’s single and multiplayer. [Whew, thank goodness for Wikipedia for a description. I am not a gamer.]
Elite site
Remember the announcement about finding an Earthlike planet orbiting within the Goldilocks zone of Proxima Centauri b?
Proxima planet
Well, the developer of this game is a real astronomy nerd and has insisted on insane levels of realism in the game by, among other things, consulting with real astronomers. Anyway, cutting to the punch line, this game universe had predicted an almost identical planet in an almost identical orbit around this star back in 1993 based on his research! In the game story this is the first habitable planet humans colonize and they name it Eden.
It’s a weirdly nerdy and cool story and my son would like to pitch it to some outlets/magazines/whatevers for the publicity. The sprog asked me for some ideas and I mentioned io9 and Ars Technica. He’d already thought of Wired and some game outlets.
I was wondering if anyone here had any suggestions? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
ACK! Forgot to say – great to see you getting a bit back into the swing, Mike. We’ve missed you, but don’t overdue.
@Soon Lee: based on how you spell it, my mind jumps straight to Korean.
@Kurt Busiek:
It really was the strangest thing, that small speech. (She also participated, IIRC, during a later part of the Business Meeting.)
I remember when I saw her rise to come to the microphone and say her name, thinking ‘Oh, good. One of the SP4 people is engaging with our process and seems to be being polite.’ She started out, sounding civil and measured, and I had hopes she was going to say something helpful. About 80% of the way through, she reached her set of pronouncements about this measure, if it passed, being likely to destroy the reputation of the Hugos permanently or something like that. Which pronouncement she didn’t explain or elaborate about, but just stopped, yielded the mic, and walked back. So, we moved on, just a bit perplexed (speaking for myself), but somewhat charmed by her courteous manner.
I found myself remembering the respectful manner, and straining to remember, wait, what was it she concluded? Something rather outlandish about putting the Hugos in disrepute, wasn’t it? (I’m just saying that it was a bit difficult to take in.)
That having been said, I’m really not sure I’d rush to judgement and call it hypocrisy, having seen enough times people just parsing the world differently based on radically different starting assumptions to think I recognised it on parade, here. Different assumptions; different conclusions. It’s enough to say one strongly disagrees. I’m not sure I’d be quite that quick to assert dishonesty.
E.g., just because many participants in a ‘movement’ declared the Hugos ‘worthless’ for standard reasons of online rhetorical overreach doesn’t mean Paulk considers them entirely worthless. Likewise, she might have meant bring the Hugos into further disrepute. (I don’t agree about the Hugos being in disrepute at all. I’m just groping to understand.) So, one need not conclude hypocrisy. And if we needn’t, I’d personally rather not. (And it costs nothing to be polite.)
@lurkertype
That voters know the ethnicity and/or political agenda of writers is the big fallacy. I dont know the political leanings of authors. Should I? Heck, I didnt even know that Andre Norton was a woman until a Post about her on Black Gate last week (Andre being a common boys name in Germany and there were no pictures or cvs on the paperbacks).
Evertime I ask a puppy how I should know the politcal leanings of an author and why, they stop answering me. Weird.
And BTW: Has anybody asked Freer yet why McDonalds still hasnt got a Michelin star yet? They do sell the most food. Much more than the french laundry or The Fat Duck…
Rick, I encourage you to go watch SciFi4Me’s bizarre interview with Paulk, filmed at Worldcon. She lies repeatedly and outrageously in it, and I think it will pretty much put the kibosh on any thoughts you might have about her participating in good faith.
Today’s Meredith Moment:
An omnibus e-book of R.A. MacAvoy’s Damiano Trilogy (Damiano, Damiano’s Lute, and Raphael) is on sale for $1.99 for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple, and Google.
@JJ: the Ivery Kirk report on MACII mentions paying for “professional editing”. GIven the number of scams I’ve heard about, I wonder what they got for their money; has anyone read Timebangers?
@JJ: While I admire your determination, is it possible that your ideological rigidity about the no-goodness of each and every Pup at all times keeps them in line as much as it does your own folks?
Writers named “Smith” are so unpopular among sf fans that Sun Yat-sen’s godson chose to publish under the pseudonym “Smith” rather than using his real name.
The surname “Smith” is held in such contempt by fandom that Heinlein decided to start a well-known novel with:
“Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Jones.”
@Junego — http://www.pcgamer.com and http://www.rockpapershotgun.com seem like sites that might be interested, if they weren’t already on his list …
Greg Hullender said:
Only 63, mostly on the one section of the Nimitz freeway that didn’t have proper reinforcement. Not that you’d know it from the national coverage, which was all the collapsed freeway and the broken bridge and the impressive fire in the Marina District. My uncle got a panicked call from a friend in Scotland who thought the entire Bay Area had been leveled.
I remember everyone in my extended family who lived in the area gradually collecting at our house that evening after some long trips home. My dad usually commuted home on the Nimitz but hadn’t left work yet when the quake hit; one of my aunts had to get across the Bay and all the bridges had been closed; my mom had to go rescue my uncle because the subway system had stopped automatically when the quake hit and stranded him two stops from his car.
But I also remember that life more or less resumed its routine the next morning. Everyone went to work or school, the buses in our area (the East Bay) were running normally, and my school was undamaged and everyone showed up for classes. There was a special morning session to get together and talk about the quake, and everyone was like, whoa, that was definitely an event, but no one had suffered any direct harm or losses.
PhilRM:
The science was ludicrous: there is no sense in which “imagine the most complex equation and then split it in half and then in half again and again” has any meaning in mathematics, there were not one but two deus ex machina to save the protagonist, and the resolution was completely unbelievable.
I agree about the unbelievable resolution (unless you agree with the Strange Horizons reviewer, and see it as a dark and bitter story about an uncaring universe; but I think she has to stretch to get that interpretation). But I’m a bit puzzled by the ‘deus ex machina’ claim, though I see it a lot. ‘A solution comes from an unexpected place’ (because there is much about the universe that we don’t know) is a well-known science-fictional plot; what’s objectionable, I take it, is if there’s a highly developed plot, which is then ignored when the solution is given, but within the small confines of this story I don’t think that can be so. There was simply a problem – a fairly straightforward one – and then a revelation which gave the solution. And indeed, one at least of the revelations was set up from the start, when we discovered that Binti had a mysterious ancient artefact of unknown purpose; it was rather obvious that that was going to turn out to be relevant.
In other news, I see in Ansible that the other Campbell award was also presented at Worldcon, and went to Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman. Has anyone read it? What sort of a book is it?
@lurkertype Just about everyone I know forgets the names of the authors of the works they want to nominate. Often they don’t look it up before turning in their ballot. So they aren’t deciding via name, gender, ethnicity
I knew the race, ethnicity, and whether a number of the authors I was nominating fell under the LGBTI umbrella. I needed to go find out a lot of info for the nomination ballot which frequently brought me to pages with author pictures and bios. In addition, now I’m searching out and reading more representative and #OurVoices SFF the authors don’t blur together the way they did in the past. I follow the authors I like on social media, blogs, so I see their faces and bios regularly. Am I really a tiny minority who knows the authors of the books I read among Worldcon members?
John A Arkansawyer: While I admire your determination, is it possible that your ideological rigidity about the no-goodness of each and every Pup at all times keeps them in line as much as it does your own folks?
I am amused by you thinking that it is “determination”.
I’d love to be able to give the Puppies the benefit of the doubt. I had hopes that maybe at least some of them had realized that their approach to wanting the Hugo Awards to be representative of their tastes had been the wrong one, and that SP4 was a sign that they were moving to becoming participating members of fandom.
But the vitriolic rhetoric and continual spouting of falsehoods over at MGC and the other Puppy blogs has not stopped, nor has it even lessened.
If they want to start behaving like decent, mature human beings, I would welcome that with open arms. But I don’t see that happening.
Ultimately, they are responsible for choosing to behave the way that they do. Do I judge them based on how they behave? Of course I do. But it isn’t me making them behave that way.
Chip Hitchcock: the Ivery Kirk report on MACII mentions paying for “professional editing”. GIven the number of scams I’ve heard about, I wonder what they got for their money; has anyone read Timebangers?
Well, they sold 80 copies at Worldcon, so someone is reading the book — dunno if that’s anyone here. While I find the premise amusing, it’s not really something I’m tempted to pick up.
I do know that Jennifer Foehner Wells, who has experienced some significant success as a self-published author (of the sort that is likely to get her a publishing contract, as it did Anne Charnock and Becky Chambers), has been having her books professionally edited (as well as buying lovely covers from Stephan Martiniere). I’ve read her two novels and would definitely say that her editor (whoever it is) is not a scammer and is doing her work justice. I think Kendall has been pretty impressed with those books as well.
The Hath No Fury Anthology Kickstarter is now accepting open submissions for stories for inclusion in the anthology.
Stories must feature a well-developed female protagonist who is not just a cardboard cutout. She needs to have a clear goal, motivation, and conflict. She has a background that shaped her to be who she is. Stories must be 7k words or less. This is a hard limit for new submissions.
Not being a big comics reader myself, I don’t know who the people featured in this show are, but anyone with an interest in comics may want to check out this week’s Radio Wales Arts Show:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07qsdw4
“Gary Slaymaker visits Cardiff Fantasy Centre, Wales’s oldest independent comic shop, to discuss his passion for comics and to meet customers who went on to work in the industry.
Gary speaks to artists David Roach and Mike Collins (who have both worked for DC and Marvel Comics), and also talks to Rhondda-born writer Rob Williams, whose current run on DC’s Suicide Squad comic has received rave reviews from fans and industry professionals.”
A couple of links:
A nice interview with Naomi Kritzer in Clarkesworld. You will be shocked (shocked!) to learn she owns cats.
Cora Buhlert on Why we celebrate that so many women and writers of colour won Hugos this year with too many good points to quote.
@JJ: Thank you for a more polite answer than my snarkiness might have deserved. I just think about what I’ve learned about family systems theory in my studies for church leadership. One of the principles taught us that I wholeheartedly approve of is that you start work with the healthiest member of an unhealthy system. As near as I can tell, so far as the Pups go, that’s Kate Paulk. It might be productive to give her the benefit of the doubt wherever possible. Maybe even where it isn’t, if it is. If you know what I mean.