266 thoughts on “Little Comments 8/30”

  3. Mike will be home soon which means we have a few things that need doing.

    @Camestros Can you tell Timothy that the Shoggoth is a type of squirrel?

    @RedWombat Can your garden provide a few fresh veggies for the fridge?

    @Everyone else, we need work parties to start lugging empty pizza boxes and liquor bottles to the bins

  7. All seven and we’ll watch them fall
    They stand in the way of love
    And we will smoke them all
    With an intellect and a savior-faire
    No one in the whole universe
    Will ever compare
    I am yours now and you are mine
    And together we’ll love through
    All space and time, so don’t cry
    One day all seven will die

  11. This is to help you to adjust to finish dancing in time before WorldCon 75 in Helsinki.

  13. Welp, googling to see who has ever bothered using the word “duodecilogy” before only gets me The 5 Best and 5 Worst Fictional Sci-Fi/Fantasy Authors . It gets used in Worst #5 (“Party Down”), but the best part of the article is Worst #4 – a character from Inferno by Niven and Pournelle which I’ve never read – who:

    At a sci-fi convention afterparty, attention-seeking Allen attempts to impress his friends by re-enacting a drinking challenge from War and Peace on a window ledge (an allusion lost on the “middle-aged adolescents” in the crowd). Unfortunately, halfway through an upside-down bottle of rum Asimov walks in the room, and the resulting inferiority complex sends poor Allen toppling over the edge and into the outer reaches of Hell.

    Clearly I need to read that rather than a duodecilogy.

  14. That’s terrific news ?

    If he finds a mess we might never get to use the time machine again, do you want us to get grounded? *hands Standback a pile of pizza boxes*

  15. Iphinome on August 30, 2016 at 12:30 am said:

    Mike will be home soon which means we have a few things that need doing.

    @Camestros Can you tell Timothy that the Shoggoth is a type of squirrel?

    He says “I always suspected as much”

  17. Well, Mr. Wright has announced he is writing a YA duodecilogy.

    that’s not a pretentious title at all … and it’s already as good as The Chronicles of Prydain.

  18. Ordinary New Zealand town becomes a steampunk mecca.

    Ehh, let me know when it becomes a steampunk mecha.

  21. Sure I can put the pizza boxes in the time machine!

    If your pizza doesn’t arrive within 30 minutes before you order, then it’s free.

    Mind you, if you don’t place an order in the next 30 minutes, you destroy the space-time continuum, but hey, free pizza.

  26. BGHilton on August 30, 2016 at 4:19 am said:
    Nothing teenage readers enjoy quite so much as much as adjectives that were obsolete when Kaiser Bill was on the throne.

    Luckily he has a publisher who knows what’s jiving with the young rapscallions of today.

  27. Nothing teenage readers enjoy quite so much as much as adjectives that were obsolete when Kaiser Bill was on the throne.

    Teenages have always seemed to like Lovecraft. So there is that.

  28. As a teenager I quite enjoyed Stephen Donaldson, being able to cope with massively overwritten angst and a heroic rapist. I suspect neither would be true now.
    Good luck to JCW, especially if the huge success he’ll find with his new series allows him to overcome some of his insecurity and live & let live.

  29. I would like to state, for the record, that my remarks about the unfortunate sink were just humorous remarks! KIDDING. The sink, at the time I made those comments, was just FINE, and could have been fixed EASILY. If only some people didn’t always go blundering in when they weren’t needed, AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

    I’m glad that’s settled. It needed to be said.

    Additionally, I have thought of a lovely, whopping big comment, but, unfortunately, it would not fit the remaining space in this text entry box.

  30. Today’s read — Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones

    Fantasy novel riffing on the tales of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer in the modern world. I enjoyed reading this book, but … the central relationship seems pretty skeevy to me, honestly. And I frankly don’t understand what happened at the end. Or why certain things happened throughout. I have a broad sense of what was going on and why, but the individual moment-to-moment events left me puzzled.

    I think this book was maybe too subtle for me.

  31. I think it ought to be ‘dodecalogy’. I don’t particularly expect anyone to take my advice – the system for numbering things with Greek and Latin terms has been in chaos since the word ‘bicycle’ was invented – but it would be more coherent etymologically.

  32. ::tick::

    This Old Man
    He worked for thirty years with
    Two strong hands, in the factory light his
    Lunch box held all his needs with
    Coffee sandwiches and dreams
    For Me

  33. (More on Mr Wright):

    Also, this is the first book of the first volume, which is a rather odd way of putting things.

    Also, has it occurred to anyone that the first volume will be ready just as the YA not-Hugo comes online?

  34. Ok, I’ve gotten the oobleck out of the kitchen sink pipes. Now I just need a little help putting it all back together again. Anyone have any teflon tape….?

  35. Also, has it occurred to anyone that the first volume will be ready just as the YA not-Hugo comes online?

    Is there anything about a collected Volume 1? Don’t see it.
    The first ‘Not A Hugo’ YA award surely will come in 2018 for works published in 2017, so this shouldn’t trouble the award. No doubt there will be several more published in the right year.

  36. I’ve seen “duodecalogy”, e.g. Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Similarly, the copy in my Baen paperback of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance refers to Bujold’s Sharing Knife “tetrology”, which should be “tetralogy”.

  37. [ticky]

    Huh. The description of Wright’s book leaves me less than enthusiastic, and the cover art looks…amateurish. Well, more power to him, I guess. Maybe somebody will think of him for next year’s Dragon Awards.

  38. When I was a little Ari, my small aspiring writer mind became so overloaded by all the trilogies and quartets and other numerically pleasing series that I decided if I was going to be a proper writer I’d have to plan out the minutiae of my planned magnum opus in advance before actually writing anything. Lots of notebooks full of nesting series and sequence and volume and book titles (including the occasional sentence of plot summary and even a page or two of actual writing, mostly about a girl suspiciously like me fighting against demon amphibians) were thus created. Nothing of publication quality but to be fair most single-digit humans also struggle with that threshold.

    I’m glad to see Mr Wright has found himself a similar hobby and wish him luck for the duration of his dodecahydrocartology.

  39. NickPheas: I think the three-volume ‘volume’ would count as a work appearing in parts; no need to collect it. And I guess that will be finished next year. But if not, yes, whatever does appear next year will be eligible. And the whole thing will also be eligible for the series Hugo.

    StephenfromOttawa: Yes, but duodecalogy still gets the Latin/Greek bit wrong.

  40. @mark

    It’s been several decades since I read “Inferno”, but my recollection is that it’s mainly an excuse for Pournelle to have a go at his enemies of the day (greens, human rights lawyers, teachers who believe in dyslexia, Kurt Vonnegut) with a side-order of Those Who History Has Cruelly Misjudged (Benito Mussolini).

  41. It occurs to me that it’s probably just as well that I haven’t revisited Inferno or Lucifer’s Hammer or Oath of Fealty in lo, these many years.

  42. I fear that Inferno (among other novels) would be a big old visit from the suck fairy were I to re-read it.
    OTOH, The Demolished Man was NOT a Suck fairy visit, and I wrote a piece on Tor about it.

  43. Oh, if there are three volumes…
    What joy. Perhaps he can be nominated for Cobweb & Moth not actually collected Book 1 and Book1, Volume 2 and Book 1, Volume 3 at the same time? Then the filthy SJWs/Elfs can rob him of multiple awards again.

  44. I’ve got a duodecalogy or three in my pokedex. Hopefully I’ll catch enough to evolve it.

    @Ghost Bird: that is unfortunately, a lot if Inferno, though that is a parallel to the “here are my enemies” of the original work.

    When i first read it, I was young and naive, abs enjoyed the worldbuilding immensely. It was only years later I said “Wait a minute…”

    That’s actually been the case with most of Niven and Pournell’s stuff actually. Growing awareness of the political and social context kind of ruined their stuff for me.

  45. @Ghost Bird:

    Wow that sounds like you’re joking, but you’re really not, are you? Also the way you’ve worded it makes me imagine Pournelle’s righteous diatribe against vegetables 😉

  46. @Rose Embolism

    That’s very much my own experience of Niven and Pournelle too. I can’t remember exactly when the disillusionment started but I think it may have been when it turned out the filthy hippies were right about about the ozone layer.

  47. Picking up a discussion from an old thread::

    rcade: I’m hoping that the series Hugo favors excellent series that wouldn’t get attention at the awards otherwise — because there are too many books and the first book didn’t get a nomination. Because of this year’s novel win, I’d be disinclined to nominate the entire [Broken Earth] trilogy unless it was so great it couldn’t be ignored.

    I think it’s a bit of a puzzle what the series Hugo is meant to do. On the one hand, if I were the person at TOR in charge of deciding who gets Hugos, I would agree with this; it makes sense to spread awards out more broadly.

    On the other hand, one of the motivations for the award seemed to be that works in series other than the first tend not to get Hugos, implying that the series is not sufficiently honoured by giving an award to the first book. (I think it makes perfect sense to do this; it will typically be the first book which presents the big science-fictional or fantastic idea why makes the series interesting. But clearly not all agree.)

    On the third hand, I think another part of the motivation is that Hugos generally don’t go to the sort of series which dominates much of the market, the ninety-first-episode-in the-adventures-of sort of thing which epic and urban fantasy and MilSF all have a lot of. And here, I think there are jolly good reasons for this, and we should stick to giving a awards to the kind of stuff we like, which means this award will inevitably overlap to some extent with the things that get Hugos already.

    That said, there certainly are are things that are unlikely winners of Best Novel but would work well for the series Hugo; series where the volumes don’t have closure, so don’t really work as novels; series where the most interesting thing is the setting.

  48. Anyway, I think it would be nice to have a discussion of current series, since we’ll have to start now if we’re to be properly prepared for the series Hugo in 2018. I wonder if Mike would be interested in starting a series thread.

  49. Anyone have any teflon tape….?

    [hands Cassy B the little plastic container – and a pipe wrench]
    I hope you didn’t mean the adhesive-backed Teflon tape….

  50. NickPheas: Actually I don’t know how many volumes the first ‘volume’ has; I was just assuming three because it seems normal. (I was quite flabbergasted when Rachel Hartman stopped after two.) Well, something will be finished next year, without doubt.

    And yes, why ‘elfs’? To show that they do not fit the normal conception of an elf? But there are already so many competing conceptions of an elf that that hardly makes sense. Um, well…

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