(1) MARVEL AT MOPOP. Ellie Farrell had a photo taken with a friend during her visit to MoPop’s Marvel exhibit in Seattle. Opened last Spring, the exhibit continues through March 3.
(2) SFF DOES WORK TOO. Charlie Jane Anders, in a Washington Post opinion piece “Kamala Harris is wrong about science fiction”, takes issue with Sen. Kamala Harris’s claim that “we need facts, not science fiction” to deal with climate change, saying that “science fiction creators have been doing some soul-searching that includes looking for ways we can do more to restore people’s faith in the future” in dealing with climate change, “the global crisis of democracy,” and “attacks on LGBTQ people’s right to exist.”
Sen. Kamala D. Harris was half right in her speech launching her 2020 presidential campaign when she said we need to address climate change based on “science fact, not science fiction.” The truth is, we need both. Science fiction has an important role to play in rescuing the future from the huge challenges we’re facing — and the responses to Harris’s statement illustrate this perfectly.
When the California Democrat’s statement about climate change went out on social media, a number of people pointed out the truth: Science fiction has been helping us to prepare for a world of potentially disastrous climate upheaval for years. But an equal number of loud voices took issue with Harris’s warnings about climate change, because in our post-truth era, the scientific consensus about what humans are doing to our planet is still somehow a matter of opinion.
And that’s why science fiction is more important than Harris gives it credit for. No amount of scientific evidence will convince deniers — or the vast number of people who merely live in a state of denial. We live in an era in which facts and fiction are blurring into an indistinguishable mess and power belongs to whoever can tell the best story, true or not. No one can even tell what’s real anymore, and what matters is just how something makes us feel — which is why we need better stories, that, in the words of author Neil Gaiman, “lie in order to tell the truth.”
(3) SATIRE CONSIDERED. Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency podcast for January 30 takes a look back at the original Starship Troopers movie:
You’re going to love this week’s phenomenal conversation about Starship Troopers (1997) with special guests Mary Robinette Kowal and Max Temkin! Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion (and very amicable disagreement) about how successfully the film executes its satire of fascist military fantasies. Just what are the possibilities and limits of satire? What can director Paul Verhoeven’s career tell us about this “pointed critique of American imperialism”? And exactly how long will it take Anita to remember the name of the game Spec Ops without Carolyn to help?
(4) YA UPROAR CONTINUES. On Facebook, Nick Mamatas delved into the questions surrounding Amélie Wen Zhao’s decision to pull Blood Heir (reported in yesterday’s Scroll). His post is quoted with permission:
A YA novel called BLOOD HEIR, which sounds entirely awful, has been pulled from publication by its author Amélie Wen Zhao after complaints of plagiarism, poor “Russian rep” as it was put, and anti-blackness from YA twitter aficionadi:
1. Definitely messed up Russian naming conventions—though I am happy to point out that many of the same people complaining about this book are thrilled to go see the next Avengers film, and even agitated in the past for more action figures of the Black Widow in her sexy bodysuit (you know, for young girls!), called wrongly Natasha Romanoff in the films. So there is definitely a power relationship here; this is at least partially a game of “let’s flex on the new girl” while queueing up to consume a billion dollars worth of slop from the Disney hog trough.
2. Haven’t seen any screencaps actually demonstrating plagiarism except for a single sentence (“Don’t go where I can’t follow.”) In cases like this, often people casually use the term to mean “cliché” or even “genre trope.” Frankly if people don’t like clichés and genre tropes, they shouldn’t be reading children’s literature. That said, I may have just messed the presentation of textual evidence. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a ton of plagiarism.
3. The author claims that her interest was exploring indenture as it is currently practiced in China and Asia; her critics complain that a major scene involves a black-coded girl with ocean-light eyes being auctioned off, and then dying while the main character sings her a lullaby. Sounds entirely awful. I think this is also a bit of what people mean by plagiarism—this character has been identified as smacking of Rue from HUNGER GAMES. The critics definitely seem to have a point.
4. As is common, moralism abounds. I’ve certainly seen more than one note fretting aloud that CHILDREN and the YOUTH will read this book and thus be exposed to its anti-blackness. Of course, all the right-wingers rallying against the “SJW mobs” and promising the author that *they* would read the book, ya know, to triggerown the shitlibs or whatever, are lying and performing their own version of “virtue signaling” as they call it. None of those kobolds would ever read a thing that doesn’t feature a photo of the author on a red-white-and-blue background.
I think the issue of Blood Heir was that it was trafficking in racist cliches and daring to do so with only a mere publishing company and not a giant media complex behind it. I’ll always feel a thrill when an author is punished for laziness and top-of-mind decision-making, but let’s be clear: moralism itself is a cliché as well, even when it’s left-moralism. YA twitter is absolutely a Pretty Person Club and Zhao was this year’s scapegoat. But Zhao’s crime of auctorial laziness is just one more datum point showing how sadly inadequate the acquisition and editorial process in big publishing is.
And Arthur Cover has written a public letter to Zhao which says in part –
I just wrote this letter to a young author named Amelie Zhao, who withdrew her YA fantasy novel from publication because of negative comments on line…. Obviously I feel very strongly about this….
A novel cannot be all things to all people. At least one comment on your novel that I read was from a person who felt it insufficiently validated his/her ideas about slavery and villains using a cane. Often when a character uses a cane it is symbolic of something and is not a commentary on people who use a cane in real life. Readers who can’t tell the difference aren’t your concern.
Decades ago I was in a conversation with Samuel R. Delany and when he learned that a writing class was divided equally on the merits of one of his stories, he was quite pleased. He knew he’d accomplished something because of the class’s reaction.
Do not stop. Please reconsider your decision regarding your novel. These critics (and I’ve been a nasty one) are throwing spitballs at a battleship….
(5) AUDIO PALS. In the Washington Post, Karen Heller has a piece about authors and their audiobook readers, “‘I can write the words. He supplies the melody’: The harmonious bond between authors and audiobook narrators”. Two of the authors Heller interviews are genre writers: five-time Bram Stoker Award nominee Jonathan Maberry, who says he now hears the voice of his audiobook reader, Ray Porter, in his head when he’s writing, and Canadian urban fantasy writer Kevin Hearne, who liked narrator Luke Daniels so much they’ve worked together on independent projects.
Jonathan Maberry, a fiercely prolific author of often frightening novels, hears voices rattling in his head. Specifically, one voice, that of actor Ray Porter, who narrates his audiobooks. A five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, Maberry would “imagine how Ray would inflect certain things, and I started to write toward his performance.” Be it horror, thrillers, science fiction, young adult and middle grade fiction, almost three dozen novels since 2006 — this is not a typo, and excludes anthologies, short stories and comics — Porter, without contributing a word, has helped Maberry accomplish the goal of most writers: selling more books. Says Maberry, “We’re very much a team.”
(6) NEW FAN FUND IDEA. Marcin Klak has written a proposal for creating a European Fan Fund to allow people from different countries to attend Eurocon. His draft of the rules and the winner’s responsibilities begins —
Purpose: The purpose of the Fan Fund is to create and strengthen bonds between European fans and fandoms. Currently in almost every country there is a fandom that quite often has small or no connection to the broader European fandom. Most fans do concentrate on the “here and now” and are not looking for friends in other countries.
The idea: A delegate would be elected by fans across Europe to travel to Eurocon. The delegate must offer to have a talk about fandom in their country. The delegate should also offer their participation as a guest in the Eurocon Awards ceremony, Opening ceremony and Closing ceremony. Any other help from the delegate should be encouraged. It will be for the Eurocon organizers to accept that help to the extent that suits them.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born January 31, 1923 – Norman Mailer. I never knew he wrote in the genre but he did. Ancient Evenings certainly has the elements of fantasy and The Castle in the Forest is interesting retelling of Adolf Hitler and his last days. (Died 2007.)
- Born January 31, 1937 – Philip Glass, 82. 1000 Airplanes on the Roof: A Science Fiction Music-Drama, Einstein on the Beach, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (with a libretto by Doris Lessing based on her novel of the same name), The marriages between zones three, four, and five (1997, libretto by Doris Lessing, after her second novel from Canopus in Argos), The Witches of Venice and The Juniper Tree would be a fragmentary listing of his works that have a genre bias.
- Born January 31, 1960 – Grant Morrison, 59. If you can find it, his early stuff on such U.K. publishers as Galaxy Media and Harrier Comics is worth searching out. Not your hero in tights materials at all. For his work in that venue, I’d recommend his run on The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul, all of his Doom Patrol work (and the DC Universe series this fall is based on his work), Seven Soldiers and his weird The Multiversity.
- Born January 31, 1977 – Kerry Washington, 42. Alicia Masters in Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Also played Medical Officer Marissa Brau in 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea. She voices Natalie Certain in Care 3. She also voices Princess Shuri in a short run Black Panther series.
(8) MR. & MRS. Bill writes, “The 1/29 scroll item about Tiptree got me to looking things up, and I found the attached” – a bit of social news from the Chicago Tribune for January 24, 1946. Definitely still news to me.
(9) WRONG ON JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter spotted another bad guess on tonight’s episode of Jeopardy!
Category: Scribbling Siblings
Answer: Aviation writer Robert Serling helped little bro Rod with “The Odyssey of Flight 33” episode of this series.
Wrong answer: What is “Star Trek”?
(10) GALAPAGOS AIR FORCE. BBC tells how “Drones help Galapagos tackle rat infestation”.
Drones are helping conservationists rid one Galapagos island of an infestation of rats threatening indigenous birds.
The drones have dropped poison on more than half of North Seymour Island in a bid to kill off the invasive species.
The island’s rare birds nest on the ground and their numbers are being depleted by the rodent invasion.The drones work much faster and more cheaply than helicopters which have been used in similar rat eradication projects elsewhere.
(11) TRACING CLIMATE HISTORY. Researchers think “America colonisation ‘cooled Earth’s climate’”.
Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate.
That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.
The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.
This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO?) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.
It’s a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the “Little Ice Age” – a time when winters in Europe would see the Thames in London regularly freeze over.
“The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of
the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO? and global surface air temperatures,” Alexander Koch and colleagues write in their paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews.
(12) THE ELEPHANT (SEAL) IN THE ROOM. Look what happens when those pesky humans aren’t around — “Seals take over California beach closed in US shutdown”.
A large herd of elephant seals has taken over a beach in California that was forced to close during the government shutdown.
The seals took advantage of the 35-day shutdown to make themselves at home on Drakes Beach, and in its car park.
So far they have been spotted lying on their stomachs, taking naps and occasionally snuggling their pups.
The beach will remain closed until the seals decide to move on – although it’s not clear when that will be.
(13) HELP WANTED. There’s a job vacancy in Gotham: “Ben Affleck signals Batman departure”.
Holy recasting, Batman! The search is on for a new Dark Knight following Ben Affleck’s apparent confirmation that he is hanging up his Bat cape.
The actor effectively said as much by retweeting a story saying Matt Reeves’ The Batman would be made without him.
“Excited for #TheBatman in Summer 2021 and to see @MattReevesLA vision come to life,” Affleck wrote.
The 46-year-old first appeared as the comic book superhero in 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
(14) DEATH RIDES A BOBBLEHEAD. Matt Monaghan, in “The Dia de Los Dodgers Skull Bobblehead is Amazing” on Cut4 has one of the all-time greatest fantasy bobbleheads EVER.
Bobblehead nights happen all the time at baseball games. Already this year, there’s been one for a nun, one for Pitbull and one for a bald eagle that flew into a pitcher’s face. But during Wednesday’s Rockies-Dodgers game, we may have found the coolest bobblehead ever: The Dia de Los Dodgers sugar skull bobblehead.
(15) STAN LEE GIVEN POSTHUMOUS KEY TO THE CITY. Hey, it’s LA. L. Ron Hubbard put out books here for years after he died. Who’s to say Stan won’t get some use from it? That was just part of what happened at the celebrity-studded tribute to Stan Lee on Wednesday night: “Stan Lee’s Friends and Fans Pay Tearful, Funny Tribute to Their ‘Generalissimo’” in The Hollywood Reporter.
…Hosting the show was Lee’s long-time friend and fan, filmmaker Kevin Smith, who was sure to note that Lee was “one of the best humans to ever walk the Earth” before inviting everyone to enter the theater. The theater itself was transformed into a monument to the man, with some of his most beloved comics on display, from the first appearance of Spider-Man and Black Panther to some of the most iconic adventures of the Fantastic Four. Costumes from the Sony-led Spider-Man films were displayed inside glass cases, but it was the energy in the room that truly punctuated the evening.
Smith put it best at the beginning of the tribute: “This is not a funeral, though he’s gone. This is a celebration! That’s how religions start. We all agree that we saw him tonight and that he’s no longer gone. Stan’s spirit is here with us.” With all the outpourings of love in the room, it’d be hard to argue otherwise. Copious footage of Lee played throughout the evening, including a touching clip of him singing “Cocktails for Two”, with all the energy of someone in their twenties, as his embarrassed assistants set up his microphone.
Smith kicked off the evening with the story of how he met Stan for his movie Mallrats and the grand efforts it took to convince the then less-recognizable legend to appear in his film after Lee read the script and remarked “I would never say this.” Smith admitted that Lee himself was never quite accepting or aware of his successes, despite his put on braggadocio. “This was a guy who spent his life dreaming of writing the great American novel, and he didn’t realize that he had been successful and fulfilled his dreams one-thousand times over,” Smith said. Smith himself admitted that “it was hard to understand that we were friends” before eventually coming to realize just how much Lee loved him.
…Perhaps the biggest moment of the night came with the appearance of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who detailed Lee’s love affair with L.A. before running through a detailed catalogue of his own nerdiness, including a proclamation that no one could offer him enough money to let go of his complete collection of original copies of the Wolverine comic series. Garcetti made it clear, “Stan Lee was a mensch who always fought for the underdog”, before presenting Stan’s former company Stan Lee’s POW! Entertainment with Garcetti’s third ever “Key to the City”, carved from a fallen tree and engraved with Stan’s image and catchphrase “Excelsior!”
(16) IN THE SPIRIT OF IAIN M. BANKS. A funny thread about pet names for weaponry – begins here.
(17) DEALING WITH A FOOD EVANGELIST. “Dear Mother Goose”, an advice column for children’s book characters, by Slate’s Emma Span. Here’s the problem, click to read Mother’s answer:
Dear Mother Goose,
I am being aggressively pursued by someone (I’ll call him S.I.A.) who is bizarrely obsessed with getting me to eat “green eggs and ham.” He has offered no explanation of where the ham and eggs came from, why they are green, or why he cares if I eat them. I have calmly and clearly turned him down, but he is following me everywhere, carrying a plate of food, which by now is cold, dirty, and wet as well as green. Nevertheless, S.I.A. thinks I might like the food. He has brought a mouse, a fox, and a goat to me, as if that would change my mind. We were even involved in a boating accident because of his behavior….
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Olav Rokne, John A Arkansawyer, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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Click provided early – content to be provided following tomorrow’s caffeine.
7) It’s not genre, or exactly of the thriller/spy genre, but Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost is still one of the best novels I’ve ever read about spying and intelligence.
[click]
6)
As for Zhao I kind of feel sorry for her now, imagine making what you thought was the right decision only to have people on Twitter and in magazines and on Facebook criticising you for it, I guess it’s the danger of using Twitter where everything is up for scrutiny 24 seven.
Clickity
Annie on January 31, 2019 at 8:42 pm said:
Those who fail to learn their Aesop* are destined to repeat it.
(*Or their Rick Nelson.)
A Million Little Pixels
(and in before SECOND FIVE EASY PIXELS)
#5 and audiobooks:
I love Wil Wheaton’s performances on audio books. He does a lot of John Scalzi, but his reading of “Ready Player One” made me go buy the ebook.
I groan when a series switches between narrators. David Weber’s Safehold series has two or three of them, and only one of them is any good as far as I am concerned. Ditto for Honor Harrington. Although I’m going to blame Weber for the mispronunciation of “Manticore” and “Manticoran” that is so grating in several of the books. I would think that the author would have a TEENY bit of time to listen to that.
Although I confess to not knowing anything about the production of an audiobook.
6)
Obviously I’ve not read the book. It might be awful. YA does seem to have a mob mentality at times. The list event of this type I remember was about the Helsinki WorldCon and felt awfully like Requires Hate’s ghost had inhabited a new host.
Grant Morrison.
Rather than the superhero stuff, which is sometimes very good and sometimes pedestrian, is recommend some of his short works.
Vinerama is a superb little story about Hindu space aliens appearing in a Bradford corner shop.
We 3 is a quote stunningly good story about animal cyborg soldiers doing an Incredible Journey riff, though there’s a pagination error in the reprint edition which is still annoying me note than a decade on.
3) In general, it seems to me that it would be better if the book came out, so that people could, y’know, read it and make up their own minds about it. But what do I know?
7) Grant Morrison’s take on Dan Dare was… interesting… too.
7) Also, Grant Morrison and DC just rebooted the Green Lantern Hal Jordan (in a comic titled The Green Lantern, naturally). This take on the Green Lantern Corps emphasizes the vast alien diversity of the DC universe in a way that feels a little similar to Brin’s Uplift universe. It’s a little more Lensmen and a little less superhero.
An Unkindness of Ghosts in on sale at Amazon today for $2.99 (does this count as a Meredith Moment?). I don’t see it for that price at Kobo; does anyone know if/where I can get an epub version at the sale price? Otherwise I’ll have to do the conversion dance.
More Meredith Moments: The VanderMeers’ Time Traveler’s Almanac: A Time Travel Anthology is $2.99, as is Robin McKinley’s Outlaws of Sherwood.
@Doctor Science
If it’s a sale and you want to share it, it counts!
11) That’s wild. It makes sense, but it’s wild that the massive death in the Americas helped cause climate change.
Paul Weimer on February 1, 2019 at 12:20 pm said:
It is weird that this particular wheel is being reinvented–it was already an idea a decade ago.
Meredith Moment. Symbiosis by Sue Burke is in this month’s Kindle sale at Amazon U.K. £1.99 for a book on the Locus reading list (is it eligible for the Campbell ?).
There’s a couple from the late Sir Pterry and I’ve scored another of the Malazan’s too.
@Darren: Thanks. I was sure I had heard that idea quite a while back.
Ooo. definitely grabbing the Almanac
@Paul: Yeah, the Almanac is huge – almost a thousand pages.
Paul King: Symbiosis… (is it eligible for the Campbell ?).
I presume you mean “is Sue Burke eligible for the Campbell?”; she’s been publishing short fiction for years, and a quick check shows a story in Asimov’s in 2014, so that would be a “no”.
I did really enjoy Semiosis.
Darren: is it reinventing the wheel or doing what scientists are supposed to do: checking a hypothesis by repeating experiments or conducting related experiments?
@Lenora Rose: It’s the latter. The new paper cites the study Darren is talking about (“Nevle and Bird, 2008”) along with half a dozen other works on the same subject. What’s new here is the comprehensive approach they took to testing the theory, which involved data about every step of the theory (the degree of deforestation after human settlement, how it was done, how much vegetation came back how fast, and the rate of carbon uptake before and after) rather than the individual measures other studies had looked at. It’s extremely thorough.
It’s true that the original hypothesis isn’t new, but they didn’t say it was, and it’s not their fault that science reporters don’t do homework.
I worked on that, sort of.
Back in the 1980s, I spent a few years working for a literary agency, and Norman was one of our biggest clients. He got about 750 pages or so into HARLOT’S GHOST and was unsure how to end it, where it was going, so he sent the ms to his agent to read and comment on.
The agent (the owner of the agency) didn’t read anything any more, so he handed the ms off to one of his vice presidents, who handed it to me. I was to read it overnight, and write Norman a revision letter in our agency owner’s name, advising Norman on how to finish the novel.
I asked if it made any difference that the only Mailer I’d actually read was the first 30 pages of TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE, after which I threw the book across the room. I was told no, it didn’t.
So I read the book all day at my desk, on the train home, in bed at home, on the train back in to the city, and finished it up at my desk again, and I can’t say I liked it all that much, but it was better than TOUCH GUYS DON’T DANCE. And then I had to suggest ways to complete it.
So I did. I wrote about 6 pages of advice, picking up on things he’d established and suggested ways they could be brought to a head and concluded, all the while conscious that I, someone who had never written a novel (but had written at that time a smallish stack of comic books) was advising Norman Fricking Mailer on how to write a novel.
Anyway, my boss and his boss both liked it enough to sign it and send it over to Norman, as if it was advice coming from Norman’s longtime and experienced agent. Go figure.
And I no longer remember what I suggested, and didn’t save a copy of the letter. And I didn’t read the novel when it was published to find out how it ended, and wouldn’t know now whether Norman used any of my suggestions.
But he sent a note back to the agency owner, saying that it was the single best revision letter he’d ever gotten in his entire career as a writer, and thanking him profusely.
So, that was nice.
On the other hand, sometimes I like to think that just as Norman’s agent didn’t write the letter, just had it assigned to an underling to be accommodating, maybe Norman didn’t write the thank you note either, but was observing the niceties with his agent.
Either way, I’ll never know.
@Kurt – that is an awesome story!
@Kurt–what he said!
Seriously awesome. I wonder whether Mailer would have resorted to alcohol, as Chandler did when stuck for a solution to The Blue Dahlia, or just given up without your advice. I suspect you’re right about the note — with that many hits behind him, Mailer probably would have had at least an assistant — but it’s still a cool story.
Kurt, that’s a great little story. Would it be okay if I tweeted a link to your comment? I think that’s within my abilities, but not if it’s unwelcome.
Kip – feel free!
I also was the first reader on Isaac Asimov’s FANTASTIC VOYAGE II and Harry Kemelman’s SOME DAY THE RABBI WILL LEAVE, among others, but all I had to do there was read it and say, “Yeah, it’s fine. Send it to the publisher.”
And the whole agency had to see the rough cut of TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE, with Norman in attendance, so we couldn’t throw things at the movie screen. At least I was able to walk out of the rough cut of the first PUNISHER movie…
Thanks, Kurt. I don’t like to boast, but I’ll bet at least a dozen people see it. No—TWO dozen. This could be the career boost you’ve waited years for!