Pixel Scroll 1/6/22 Don’t File In The Subspace Ether, Don’t Scroll In Pixel Rain

(1) TO QUIT, OR NOT TO QUIT. Four-time Bram Stoker Award winner Tim Waggoner reaches out to those who are thinking about giving up professional writing in “You Can’t Fire Me!” at Writing in the Dark. He comes up with five reasons for quitting, but fourteen for not quitting.

…Don’t worry. I’m not planning on quitting anytime soon. I still have four books that I’ve contracted to write, and I’ve always said that I need to write the same way I need to breathe. I don’t think I could quit if I wanted to. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about quitting sometimes. Hell, I’ve probably thought about it, to one degree of seriousness or another, hundreds of times over the years.

Quitting is viewed as one of the worst things you can do in American culture. It’s giving up, showing weakness, proving you don’t have what it takes to keep going, to keep fighting. But quitting writing – for whatever length of time – isn’t necessarily bad. As a matter of fact, it could be exactly what you need.

Why You Should Quit Writing (or at Least Take a Break)

1)      You’re not enjoying yourself. Writing isn’t always fun and games, of course. There’s a lot of hard work involved, not just in terms of craft but in terms of developing psychological resilience (to rejections, bad reviews, poor sales, etc.) But somewhere along the way, you should be getting some satisfaction from the process, and if you aren’t, why do it? Writing might not always make you happy, but in the end, it should leave you feeling fulfilled….

Why You Shouldn’t Quit Writing

1)      Your work is valued (by someone, somewhere). Maybe you don’t have a zillion readers and aren’t getting rich from your writing, but someone out there will read it and enjoy it. It might even change their lives in ways you’ll never know. Your art is a contribution to the world, and the world is a better place because your work is in it.

(2) DREAMHAVEN HIT AGAIN. DreamHaven Books, the Minneapolis bookstore run by Greg Ketter that has already suffered so much from crime, has been broken into again. Ketter told Facebook readers “I’m not sure how much more I can take of this. Another fucking break-in at the store. Broke a window, glass everywhere. Took boxes of comics. Annoying and expensive.”

DreamHaven has been repeatedly victimized. The store was vandalized during the May 2020 riots, with glass broken, bookcases turned over, and a failed attempt to set the place afire. Then, in November 2020, Ketter and an employee were attacked and robbed when they were closing for the night.

(3) STOKER AWARDS ADD CATEGORY. The Horror Writers Association announced a “New Bram Stoker Awards® Category: Superior Achievement in Middle-Grade Novel” which will be given for the first time in 2023.

For purposes of this Award, Middle-Grade novels are defined as novels (see clause IVe) intended for the age group 8-13 with word length beginning at 25,000 words. A Middle-Grade novel that is deemed to be a ‘First Novel’ according to Rule IVf may qualify for consideration in the ‘First Novel’ category (see Rule IVr) if the author insists in writing that the work be considered for ‘First Novel’ rather than ‘Middle-Grade’ novel; otherwise, said novel will remain in the ‘Middle-Grade’ novel category. The work may not be considered for both the ‘First Novel’ and ‘Middle-Grade’ novel categories concurrently.

Works published in 2022 will be the first year eligible for the award and will be presented at the Bram Stoker Awards ceremony in 2023.

(4) HELIOSPHERE MOVES DATES. HELIOsphere 2022 now will be taking place March 25 – 27 at the Radisson Hotel in Piscataway, NJ the committee announced today on Facebook. “This is due to an unfortunate but understandable double-booking by our hotel,” the committee explained. And, “Because of the date change, Seanan McGuire and Chuck Gannon will unfortunately be unable to come this year, but we hope that they will be able to join us in the future. We are looking forward to Guests of Honor Peter David and Kathleen O’Shea David, and may have some other surprises in store, too.”

(5) WHY 2023 SITE SELECTION SHOULD RESHAPE 2022 HUGO ELECTORATE. All the fans who bought supporting memberships in DisCon III so they would be eligible to vote for Chengdu in 2023 also acquired the right to cast nominating ballots for the 2022 Hugo Awards, creating an opportunity that the Hugo Book Club Blog discusses in “Hugos Unlike Any Previous”.

The 2022 Hugo Awards seem likely to be unlike any previous Hugos, because the Hugo-nominating constituency will be unlike any previous.

As far as we are aware, there has yet to be a Worldcon in which the largest single contingent of the membership came from anywhere other than the United States. Likewise, as far as we can determine, there has yet to be a Hugo Awards at which the plurality of votes came from anywhere other than the United States.

… The vast majority of these memberships were bought by people who have never previously participated in voting on the Hugo Awards, as this will be their first Worldcon memberships. And excitingly, they will be eligible to nominate works for the Hugos in 2022. Given that there are usually little more than 1,000 nominating ballots cast in a given year, these supporting members of Discon III could have an enormous influence on what makes the ballot at the Chicago Worldcon. We encourage them to nominate…. 

(6) DALEK AT THE FRONT DOOR. “The Doctor Who treasure trove in a Northumberland village cellar” is what the Guardian calls Neil Cole’s Museum of Classic Sci-Fi.

At first glance the Northumberland village of Allendale, with its pub and post office and random parking, is like hundreds of sleepy, charming villages across the UK. It’s the Dalek that suggests something out of the ordinary.

Behind the Dalek is a four-storey Georgian townhouse. In the cellar of the house is a remarkable and unlikely collection of more than 200 costumes, props and artwork telling classic sci-fi stories of Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Star Trek, Flash Gordon, Marvel and many more.

Together they make up the collection of one of Britain’s most eccentric small museums, one of many to be effectively forced into hibernation because of the pandemic.

Most are run on a shoestring. Not all of them will reopen. But Neil Cole, a teacher and creator of the Museum of Classic Sci-Fi, is cheerfully optimistic about the future.

“The closure has allowed me to restructure the museum and create more space,” he says. “In a way it has been useful because it has given me time I don’t normally get.

“I’ve made the best of it. I don’t have a lot of money but I have got a lot of energy and I do everything myself.”…

(7) BUSTED. Margaret Atwood was one of the authors targeted in this phishing scheme. “F.B.I. Arrests Man Accused of Stealing Unpublished Book Manuscripts” reports the New York Times.

They were perplexing thefts, lacking a clear motive or payoff, and they happened in the genteel, not particularly lucrative world of publishing: Someone was stealing unpublished book manuscripts.

The thefts and attempted thefts occurred primarily over email, by a fraudster impersonating publishing professionals and targeting authors, editors, agents and literary scouts who might have drafts of novels and other books.

The mystery may now be solved. On Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Filippo Bernardini, a 29-year-old rights coordinator for Simon & Schuster UK, saying that he “impersonated, defrauded, and attempted to defraud, hundreds of individuals” over five or more years, obtaining hundreds of unpublished manuscripts in the process.

…According to the indictment, to get his hands on the manuscripts, Mr. Bernardini would send out emails impersonating real people working in the publishing industry — a specific editor, for example — by using fake email addresses. He would employ slightly tweaked domain names like penguinrandornhouse.com instead of penguinrandomhouse.com, — putting an “rn” in place of an “m.” The indictment said he had registered more than 160 fraudulent internet domains that impersonated publishing professionals and companies.

Mr. Bernardini also targeted a New York City-based literary scouting company. He set up impostor login pages that prompted his victims to enter their usernames and passwords, which gave him broad access to the scouting company’s database.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

2008 [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Fourteen years ago at Denvention 3, where Will McCarthy was the Toastmaster, Stardust won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. The other nominated works that year were Heroes, season 1, Harry Potter and the Order of the PhoenixEnchanted and The Golden Compass. It followed wins for American Gods for Best Novel at  ConJosé, “Coraline” for Best Novella at TorCon 3, “A Study in Emerald” for Best Short Story at Noreascon 4. It would hardly be his last Hugo but that’s a story for another time, isn’t it? Stardust, the novel, was not nominated for a Hugo but it did win a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature.

There’s a superb audio narrative of Neil reading Stardust that I must wholeheartedly recommend. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 6, 1895 Tom Fadden. He’s on the Birthday Honors List for the original  Invasion of the Body Snatchers where his character was one of the first victims to yield to the invaders. It wasn’t his first SFF role as some thirty years before that role, he would make his Broadway debut as Peter Jekyll in The Wonderful Visit based off the novel of the same name by H. G. Wells, who also co-wrote the play. The last note of his that I’ll not was that one of his first television roles was Eben Kent, the man who adopts Kal-El on the first episode of The Adventures of Superman series. (Died 1980.)
  • Born January 6, 1905 Eric Frank Russell. He won the first Hugo Award for Best Short Story at Clevention in 1955 for “Allamagoosa,” published in the May 1955 issue of Astounding Science FictionSinister Barrier, his first novel, appeared in Unknown in 1939, the first novel to appear there. Most of his work has not made to the digital realm yet. What’s you favorite work by him? (Died 1978.)
  • Born January 6, 1954 Anthony Minghella. He adapted his Jim Henson’s The Storyteller scripts into story form which were published in his Jim Henson’s The Storyteller collection. They’re quite excellent actually. (Died 2008.)
  • Born January 6, 1955 Rowan Atkinson, 67. An unlikely Birthday perhaps except for that he was the lead in Doctor Who and The Curse of Fatal Death which I know did not give him the dubious distinction of the shortest lived Doctor as that goes another actor though who I’ve not a clue. Other genre appearances were scant I think (clause inserted for the nit pickers here) though he did play Nigel Small-Fawcett in Never Say Never Again and Mr. Stringer in The Witches which I really like even if the author hates.  
  • Born January 6, 1958 Wayne Barlowe, 64. Artist whose Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials from the late Seventies I still remember fondly. It was nominated at Noreascon 2 for a Hugo but came in third with Peter Nichol’s Science Fiction Encyclopedia garnering the Award that year.  His background paintings have been used in Galaxy QuestBabylon 5John Carter and Pacific Rim to name but a few films. 
  • Born January 6, 1959 Ahrvid Engholm, 63. Swedish conrunning and fanzine fan who worked on many Nasacons as well as on Swecons. Founder of the long running Baltcon. He has many fanzines including Vheckans Avfentyr, Fanytt, Multum Est and others. He was a member of Lund Fantasy Fan Society in the University of Lund.
  • Born January 6, 1960 Andrea Thompson, 62. I’ll not mention her memorable scene on Arli$$ as it’s not genre though it was worth seeing. Her best genre work was as the telepath Talia Winters on Babylon 5. Her first genre role was in Nightmare Weekend which I’ll say was definitely a schlock film. Next up was playing a monster in the short lived Monsters anthology series. She had an one-off on Quantum Leap before landing the Talia Winters gig. Then came Captain Simian & The Space Monkeys. Really. Truly. Her last genre role to date appears to be in the Heroes: Destiny web series. 
  • Born January 6, 1969 Aron Eisenberg. Nog on Deep Space 9. Way after DS9, he’d show up in Renegades, a might-be Trek series loaded with Trek alumni including Nichelle Nichols, Robert Beltran,  Koenig and Terry Farrell. It lasted two episodes. (Died 2019.)

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Off the Mark finds an alternate-world Willie Wonka whose movie is going to be very short.

(11) SPOILER WARNING. Radio Times asks, “Doctor Who: Is Yaz’s gay awakening too little too late?”

…It’s easy to see why such a last-minute development could be seen as tokenistic – a way of keeping Queer fans happy without having to depict an actual romance between the pair, because there simply won’t be enough time now. But could it be that a romantic attraction between Yaz and the Doctor was never planned by writer Chris Chibnall, and that it just emerged from natural chemistry between the actors? And if so, is that such a crime?…

(12) LOOKING BACK. In “Doctor Who spin-off writer on what made Sarah Jane show a ‘big hit’”, Phil Ford shares a key reason with Radio Times.

Premiering in 2007 and running for five series before wrapping up in 2011, The Sarah Jane Adventures (SJA) was created by Doctor Who’s then-showrunner, the fan favourite Russell T Davies. From the second series onwards, Phil Ford was the head writer and co-producer on the Elisabeth Sladen-starring show.

Speaking to RadioTimes.com for our RT Rewind retrospective on The Sarah Jane Adventures, Ford summed up the show’s broad appeal like so: “Russell always was of the opinion there was really no story that you couldn’t tell kids, as long as you told it in the in the correct way.”

“We never really pulled our punches so much on The Sarah Jane Adventures,” Ford added, “and I think that’s one of the things that made it such a big hit with kids and with their parents as well.” Essentially, then, the show’s ability to tell bold stories in an unfiltered way – even stories with hard-hitting, real-life topics – gave the series a resonance that appealed across numerous age groups.

Ford elaborated on that point with a specific example from one of his episodes: “In The Eye of the Gorgon [Ford’s first script for the series], a lot of it is about a woman who has dementia. I remember, very early on, Russell talking about the responsibility that we had, because there would be kids who would have grandparents who were going through the same thing.

“We didn’t want to magically take that away from her through the sci-fi story: it was important to Russell and to us that we were true to the condition. We didn’t want to tell kids, ‘It’s okay, because your grandparents who are suffering awful conditions could be magically made well again’. Telling mature stories and finding the truth was something that we tried to do all the way through.”…

(13) NAME YOUR PRICE FOR DE CAMP COLLECTION. The Publisher’s Pick free ebook program this month is offering The Best of L. Sprague de Camp. “The cart will show the suggested price of $1.99. You may change it to any price including $0.00”

A science fiction collection by one of the all-time greats of science fiction, L. Sprague de Camp. These stories and poems exemplify de Camp’s unique outlook on life and mankind and are told with a quiet but sharp irony that became his trademark. Bold, inventive and humorous, this collection is a must for fans of the writer.

(14) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 48 of the Octothorpe podcast “The Things You Nominate Are All Extremely Unpopular”

John Coxon and Alison Scott are watching cutting-edge TV, and Liz Batty is hungry. We discuss the @HugoAwards, talk about how (not to) get sponsorship for your event, and discuss some upcoming NASFiC bids in the wake of the @chengduworldcon.

The Octothorpe crew also sent along a faux advertising slogan saying “Sponsored by Tyrell: More Human than Human” with the shield of the Tyrell Corporation.

(15) DECLAN FINN. White Ops, a new novel by Dragon Award nominee Declan Finn, will be released January 18 from Richard Paolinelli’s Tuscany Bay Books.

The Pharmakoi rampaged across dozens of star systems, taking on the toughest races in the Galaxy in their campaign of conquest. But they are only the beginning.

Sean Patrick Ryan sees that another race is behind the Pharmakoi expansion; a race that wants to test our galaxy for weakness, and who needs to be eliminated from within. To fight the enemy in the shadows, Sean will put together a strike team to light up the darkness— with nukes if necessary.

They will get the job done at any cost.

Declan Finn is a NYC-based author of thrillers, urban fantasy, and sff. White Ops is available as an ebook from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Two more books in the series are on the way: Politics Kills on February 15, and Main Street D.O.A. on March 15.

[Based on a press release sent to File 770, which is happy to honor Finn and Paolinelli’s request to help launch this book.]

(16) FRIENDLY GHOST. Darcy Bell tells about “The House That Was Haunted By Benevolent Ghosts” at CrimeReads. Here is the middle of her anecdote.

…Though the renovation wasn’t finished, they invited friends for a weekend. They half hoped, half didn’t hope, that they would all hear the music, so at least they would have witnesses. But no music sounded, no one heard anything.

Until the next Saturday night, when they were alone . This time it was a man singing “Nessun Dorma,” from Turnadot.

Nessun dorma, said the husband, means: No one can sleep.

The husband wanted to tell someone, he even suggested hiring one of those people who get rid of poltergeists. They could just ask…The wife refused. She worried that if anyone knew she was hallucinating,  they’d think she wasn’t fit to be a mother. She didn’t tell her doctor. They didn’t tell the contractor why they wanted extra insulation between their bedroom and the attic, and anyway, it didn’t muffle the music….

(17) RUSSIAN SPACE MISSIONS THIS YEAR. Nature’s list of “Science events 2022 to watch out for” includes a Russian Luna lander and also Russian–European ExoMars mission with UK Rosalind Franklin rover atop Russian Kazachok platform.

Another epic space journey to watch will be the joint Russian–European ExoMars mission, which is scheduled to blast off in September. It will carry the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars, where it will search for signs of past life. The launch was originally scheduled for 2020, but has been delayed, partly because of issues with the parachutes needed to touch down safely.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Chris Barkley, Ian Randal Strock, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

34 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/6/22 Don’t File In The Subspace Ether, Don’t Scroll In Pixel Rain

  1. Thanks for the title credit.

    (9) Atkinson was in “Blackadder: Back and Forth” which was genre (time travel)

    (13) Already obtained., but thanks

  2. (9) I’d count Rowan Atkinson’s four Black Adder series as alternative histories as well.

  3. Sprague deCamp…. I don’t get intimidated by Famous People, or whatever. The reason is that one of the good things of entering fandom, long ago, in my mid-teens, was discovering that Famous Authors, for example, were not seven feet tall, with voices like thunder.

    Ok, well, maybe excluding Sprague.

  4. (7) Busted. I can’t get behind the paywall; can someone give me a one-sentence summary as to WHY?

  5. “Stardust” was fun when I first saw it, with the unexpected Captain Shakespeare (Robert De Niro) amongst a stellar (ahem) cast.

    I didn’t realise until quite recently that it also featured Daredevil Charlie Cox) and Superman (Hanry Cavill) early in their respective careers.

  6. @Nancy Sauer
    I read about it at SFGate, and they didn’t have a “why” either. (Apparently he wasn’t doing it to make money by selling them.)

  7. Nancy Sauer: They don’t really know. Just a guess.

    Indeed, the indictment details how Mr. Bernardini went about the scheme, but not why.

    Early knowledge in a rights department could be an advantage for an employee trying to prove his worth. Publishers compete and bid to publish work abroad, for example, and knowing what’s coming, who is buying what and how much they’re paying could give companies an edge.

    “What he’s been stealing,” said Kelly Farber, a literary scout, “is basically a huge amount of information that any publisher anywhere would be able to use to their advantage.”

  8. P J and Mike, thank you. From what I saw I couldn’t understand why someone would do that, and I’m relieved to know that apparently no one else has a clear idea either.

  9. 9) Blackadder’s Christmas Carol was also very much genre, as well as being somewhere in my top 5 Christmas Carol adaptations.

  10. (17) These missions assume, of course, that operations at the Baikonur Cosmodrome remain relatively undisturbed. Right this hot minute, that doesn’t seem like a complete given because of unrest in host country, Kazakhstan. Russia and other countries in their autocrat mutual admiration society are sending in troops to aid the government of Kazakhstan against the uprising. The world needs to keep an eye on just how brutal that aid may become.

  11. 9) the lack of digital means that I’ve reread very little Eric Frank Russell, but the one I remember (aka the one on my father’s shelves) was Wasp, about a spy surgically alerted to go be an advisor agitator in an alien empire.
    Fun to read at ten. Not sure how well it would stand up now.

  12. @NickPheas

    It’s been a while since I last re-read Wasp too, but I remember it as a bit minor, though perfectly okay. Every so often someone writes a piece about omg the hero is a terrorist!, which of course isn’t true because his employers have an Air Force 🙂

    Next of Kin is my favourite of his novels – suffers a bit from padding and it’s very much a John W Campbell “clever human outfoxes stupid aliens” story, but it’s very funny. And in these days of MilSF it’s nice to have something with a very different understanding of what military life is like.

    For something shorter, I recommend “…And Then There Were None”, which blew my mind when I first read it as child and introduced me to anarchism and passive resistance. It’s reasonably easy to find the text online – well worth looking up for anyone who wants a sense of what Russell’s like.

  13. It is appropriate that last year’s putsch took place on Eric Frank Russell’s birthday, as it reflected his view of the intelligence of people in crowds. His collected stories (Major Ingredients) and novels (Entities) are available from NESFA. I recommend boith.

  14. I was saddened last night when I logged onto Facebook and learned that one of my favorite fantasy/s-f authors had unexpectedly passed away. John Joseph Miller is/was a great storyteller for over forty years in GRR Martin’s Wild Cards consortium. I know Wild Cards isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but in my opinion, Miller transcended any limitations of impossible shared-world fantasy tropes. His John Nighthawk character, a black man who was gifted with immortality in the 19th century, is, to me, the most memorable character in the series. Miller wrote him into a crime thriller about the Roman Catholic church (‘Death Draws Five”) and brought him back for “Low Chicago” a true s-f/fantasy time travel novel.

    In “Low Chicago,” he borrowed the most popular character in the series, Roger Zelazny’s Croyd Crenson — now gifted with the ability to send people back and forward in time, for an adventure chronicling the century-spanning history of Palmer House, a famous real-world Chicago hotel.

    Miller was also a member of the Society for American Baseball Research and an authority on American Negro League baseball in the 20th Century. In one chapter of “Low Chicago, John Nighthawk lands in 1919 Chicago and witnesses an alternate-world World Series game where the infamous “Black Sox” pre-empt Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson with a Negro pitcher on their roster.

    So far, I haven’t seen anything about the cause of Miller’s unexpected death a few days ago on 1/5/22. Really too young to go! His most recent story, not set in the Wild Cards universe, is an alternate world baseball narrative written for Dreamforge magazine featuring Satchel Paige as the protagonist.
    https://dreamforge.mywebportal.app/dreamforge/stories/show/dont-look-back-john-jos-miller

  15. Stealing unpublished manuscripts was a plot line in one of the Nero Wolfe novels. But in that case the motivation was money.

  16. As a young and innocent (relatively!) sf reader, I read Next of Kin as satirizing military bureaucracy and rigidity. No idea if that’s how it would read today.

  17. In its Pixel, you will find a new definition of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a thousand Scrolls.

  18. @Lis Cary

    That’s definitely how I read it. But there’s a Campbell-style “humans outsmart aliens” element in there too – otherwise our hero wouldn’t be persuading his captors that the Lathians have the willies

  19. (9) Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean character is also possibly an alien, which might make all of Mr. Bean also at least genre-adjacent?

  20. (5) The vast number of Chinese who are eligible to nominate and vote for the 2022 Hugos could conceivably freeze out and overwhelm nominations for anything that’s not by Chinese authors or works in any other country.

    Also, who will allow their works to be part of the Hugo Voters Package if they stand to lose a substantial number of sales because people can get stuff for free?

    Hugo voters—and worldcon bidders—are indeed living in interesting times!

  21. bill says Rowan Atkinson played an angel in “Love Actually”.

    And this is very good time to remind y’all that the Birthdays are never intended to be all encompassing as I am fully expecting you will add considerably to them. I remember clearly several Filers complaining somewhat bitterly because I didn’t include their favorite role by their favorite performer. Now it didn’t help that I hadn’t even seen either performance…

  22. Andrea Thompson notably good in NYPD BLUE, famously left the series because of the Me, Too environment fostered by one of the (subsequently demoted) producers, particularly. Also had a less than fun turn as a professional news anchor.

  23. Andrew I. Porter on January 7, 2022 at 9:15 am said:
    (5) The vast number of Chinese who are eligible to nominate and vote for the 2022 Hugos could conceivably freeze out and overwhelm nominations for anything that’s not by Chinese authors or works in any other country.

    That seems like a fairly unlikely scenario. For one thing, at least in 2022, the Chinese contingent will almost certainly not be the majority of nominating members. My wager is that we’ll see a total of 1,500-2,000 nominating ballots of which 400-800 will come from fans with Chinese addresses.

    Combined with EPH weighting, it seems likely that there will be a fairly good level of representation from different constituencies of Hugo-voting fans.

    This is actually one of the main reasons why I always thought EPH was such a brilliant proposal. It’s not just about preventing another slate campaign from trying to game the system, it actually improves the awards shortlist in general.

  24. And this is very good time to remind y’all that the Birthdays are never intended to be all encompassing as I am fully expecting you will add considerably to them. I remember clearly several Filers complaining somewhat bitterly because I didn’t include their favorite role by their favorite performer. Now it didn’t help that I hadn’t even seen either performance…

    I’m not sure whether this is to be taken as encouragement or discouragement of adding birthday data.

  25. 7
    Perhaps the mystery is solved, and we will learn why it all happened from the culprit’s own mouth. I bet there’s a book deal involved. One of the more intriguing stories of the last few years.

  26. (5) WHY 2023 SITE SELECTION SHOULD RESHAPE 2022 HUGO ELECTORATE. It’ll be interesting, but of course, not everyone who buys a supporting memebership in order to join/vote in Site Selection will know about, care about, and nominate and/or vote for the Hugos.

    @Andrew I. Porter: “Also, who will allow their works to be part of the Hugo Voters Package if they stand to lose a substantial number of sales because people can get stuff for free?”

    I guess I’ve been hallucinating all the voter packets so far.

  27. My favorite Eric Frank Russell is probably Sinister Barrier, although in my opinion the second half doesn’t match up to the beginning; this is a common problem with revelation stories. It’s been some years since I read Wasp but as I recall, the aliens with their emphasis on maintaining face were an obvious stand-in for the Japanese in WWII as they were caricatured in the U.S. at the time. All too much like Heinlein’s The Day After Tomorrow in that respect.

  28. Wasp has the Kaitempi, a fairly obvious reference to the Kenpeitai (also known as the Kempeitai)—the military/secret police of Imperial Japan.

    I’d love to see NESFA Press make ebook editions of their Eric Frank Russell collections available if the rights can be acquired. While I love both Entities and Major Ingredients, even one of them is a lot heavier than an ereader.

  29. In grade school, I was goggle-eyed while reading a collection of Eric Frank Russell’s related short stories titled MEN, MARTIANS AND MACHINES. It featured the mixed human and Martian crew of an exploratory interstellar craft, which included the very human android named Jay Score. Their encounter with a non-anthropomorphic robotic civilization was a unique read for me.

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