38 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/8/23 Strange Scrolls Lying In Ponds Passing Out Pixels”

1. (1) Yep. (Retired) programmer and sysadmin here, and one thing I learned, about 13 years in, was that when someone told you what they wanted, and it wasn’t your boss, you sit them in a chair, and pull out the rubber light bulbs and bare hoses, and beat them around the head and shoulders until they admit what they actually are trying to achieve.
   (2) Getting really tired of revisionist history. Joanna Russ was immensely admired when she was writing, and I’m really tired of hearing either “there were few if any women” and “not allowed to write like that”.
   Birthdays: Sigourney Weaver, yep. She was wonderful in Galaxy Quest… and Aliens is the only one of the series that I happily watch. “Get away from her, you bitch” wasn’t topped until Susan Ivanova told the Earth fleet where to go.
   (9) I hate to say this, but people back then, the what, second generation that had actually had the advantage of public education, were more sophisticated. My father, a factory worker, listened to the opera Saturdays, and Susan Schwartz remembers the steelworkers near where she lived listening. They read. Now… most American don’t read a book a year.

2. 5) Frank Herbert: Well I got farther than you did, I finished Dune, Dune Messiah!, and Children of Dune and have gotten about 40% of the way thru God-Emperor of Dune before I get lost and give up. I’ve seen the 1980’s Dune movie, I had just finished the book before seeing it and afterwards most of the rest of the audience was confused and a friend I was with mentioned that I had just read the book and I ended up at the front of the theatre answering questions and explaining what the movie hadn’t. I also enjoyed the SciFi Channel miniseries of “Dune” and “Children of Dune”. I thought that they were well done, even with the limits of a basic cable-tv budget. Without the huge big screen budget, they tended to focus on the characters and relationships not on the spectacle.

   Thanks for the Title Credit

3. Frank Herbert. I like “The God-Makers”. It’s a fix-up of some shorter pieces, but it really doesn’t feel like it – they hold together.

   @mark
   My father liked opera, and I’m pretty sure he was the one with the book-club membership – NOT BOMC, but Heritage, which did lovely hardbound (and illustrated) editions of mostly-classic books. He started reading SF in the early 50s, I think, when he got stuck in an east-coast airport on one or another business trip.

4. Mark, I thought I’d see if your claim that most American don’t read a book a year was accurate.

   I discovered that everyone I found who put together a rating of countries and reading came to different conclusions because they, well, I do t know why they came to those conclusions. At any rate, no two ratings agreed on anything though China and India tended to be one and two. Thailand came in up there a lot.

   The States? Usually in the top five reading countries, always in the top ten. Most polls I read didn’t say how many books they read in a year.

5. @ Cat Eldridge. The differences in ratings are – do they count books read for school or work? And how long does it have to be to qualify?

   The US is certainly the top book publisher, so it must have some readers.

6. I’m from a sophisticated family too, my parents and grandparents listened to the Opry every Saturday night.

7. Thomas the Red, I realised just now that I did see the first Dune film a very long time ago but really it was very good and the novel impressed me a lot more.

   I did try watching the Syfy version of the Dune but something annoyed the Hell out of me, to wit the effing neon blue eyes! I know they were trying to show the effects of spice but I’ll be damned if that was the way to do it as it look like a really shitty special effect.

8. bookworm1398 says Cat Eldridge. The differences in ratings are – do they count books read for school or work? And how long does it have to be to qualify?

   The US is certainly the top book publisher, so it must have some readers.

   Some did, some didn’t.

   Length is never mentioned in the polls I looked at.

   There a lot of polls out there, so…

   Some did it by hours of reading; some by the books read; some did it by the numbers of nooks bought. Some counted o moly fiction, some counted everything. A few broke out and has polls just for YA material.

   Polls were generally either conducted here, in the U.K. or in Asia, mostly in India for the latter. Citizens of that country read a lot, i mean a lot if I trust the polls, as in a hundred or more books a year.

9. I liked Dune part 1 of a few years ago, and will definitely catch Part 2. Normally I don’t approve of splitting one book into 2 movies, but Dune is such a big book with lots of worldbuilding, and certainly “kid and mom move to planet” differ a lot from “guy and mom conquer planet, start holy war”.

   It isn’t as low-budget as the Sci Fi Channel version, nor as WTF and grotesque as the Lynch version. I know he was unhappy about the extended cut, but it did make slightly more sense than the theatrical one, and this theatrical one didn’t feel the need to hand a glossary out to the viewers. Or add extra WTFery to a story that’s already got weirdness baked in. I mean, Mr. LT and I had read the book at least twice each and were a little confused.

10. There’s a widely-shared infographic that says Americans only read one book a year after high school, and other discouraging things. The creator of that infographic later realized that he had made some significant mistakes. For instance, a Pew survey he relied on actually said that Americans only read one book in the year following high school graduation. Which is, of course, rather different.

    I am not going to go dig up the original and the correction of it, and the references for the corrections, because I’ve done that quite a few times before, and no one ever cares. They like the discouraging version better.

11. We have a vote in a month on whether to acquire by eminent domain control of the power companies and run then as a public utility.

    (Disclosure: I’m opposed as I think the utility companies are doing a fine job, and I think the amount of debt that will incurred is unconscionable.)

    I’m only bring this up because the campaign for this is leaning heavily on a poll done that surveyed at large utility companies in this region wherein our power company came in last four years running. But their ads says that the polls found thst company to be the worst power company in the auSA.

    The moral of this story is that polls are works of fiction not to be trusted and they will be used to create yet more fictions.

    Cynical? Not me.

12. Here’s a Gallup poll from 2022 that claims that, on average, Americans currently read about 13 books per year. More details at the link.

13. RE: 2) “…60s and 70s didn’t have bold women doing swashbuckling things…” Can anyone say ANDRE NORTON? Her female protagonists ranged from Het to Gay to Asexual and regularly went adventuring across worlds, dimensional barriers and space. They just didn’t usually shoot them up as they went, unlike the male swashbucklers!
    5) Sigourney Weaver- I loved her in Aliens and she was pretty great in Avatar, too! An important icon for women in SF.
    9) My father brought back boxes of the Armed Forces Editions back from his service in the Navy in WWII, I remember reading some of them. Cheap bindings but important comfort in a world at war and far from home.
    Also 9) Mark Twain said; “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure” and Heinlein noted that poll questions could be written to elicit any answer you want. I always take poll results with more than a grain of salt.

14. 2) while Newitz overstates the situation, she’s in general right. Russ was not as widely read as her excellence would prompt one to expect. As to critical reception, read the criticisms accurately predicted in The Female Man. While Andre Norton published a number of books with adventurous female protagonists, she did so under a name that readers could interpret as male (and for reasons good).
    Glad to hear about this new collection, but think I will stick with my motley collection of paperbacks.

15. Mark is on it, as usual.
    And are people really reading books? Reading the comments here over the years, I get an impression that people are not reading, but hearing books being read. Not the same thing at all. Try listening to somebody reading Ulysses out loud – you simply can’t follow that one, you don’t get the time to think about what’s being read, sorry, heard…

    But it can work and make a lot of difference. I love the Swedish poet and Nobel laureate Thomas Tranströmer’s poetry, but I had quite a revelation when I listened to him reading his own poetry, how it changed its nature to prose!

16. Re:Frank Herbert
    I have read all the Frank Herbert “Dune” books and love them all for different reasons. (The Brian Herbert Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson prequels & finale are disappointing, lacking the depth & gravitas of the elder Herbert’s writing.)

    My favourite quote (from much later in the series):
    “You may share their [Bene Gesserit] dream, whatever that is, but . . .”
    “Grow up, humans!”
    “What?”
    “That’s their dream. Start acting like adults and not like angry children in a schoolyard.”
    —- Frank Herbert “Chapterhouse: Dune” (1985)

    We (humanity) should grow up. But I fear we never will.

17. I’ve read all the Frank Herbert written Dune books. He also wrote some great short stories: Committee of the Whole and The Featherbedders leap to mind

18. 9) anecdotes are not anec-data- my grandmother born in 1916(from my faulty memory) in Asia, may never have learned to read English, Mandarin or the national language(under the colonial rulership of Britain then). Education levels in 19th/early 20th Century were uneven compared to mid-20th Century to now(at least more uneven then, maybe majority or proportion were illiterate/unused to reading novels whereas its inverse proportion now-more people are literate compared to a century ago/more likely to read novels now)

    So my opinion is that it’s been 400 years since the invention of the printing press and it’s a fact that reading(novels/printed magazines in English) peaked in the 20th century in the western world(USA/UK/Canada n maybe Australia/New Zealand).

    However television (and the internet/podcasts nowadays) might account for the diminishment (or perceived diminishment) in reading quantities comparing 1920s/1930s reading population to current. Who reads a printed newspaper daily nowadays, compares to the millions who did so before the internet/tv news took over?(my mom still reads daily newspaper, but maybe accumulates a few days when she’s busy)

19. I read them all too. Tried a couple of the Brian and Kevin books, but found them to be complete garbage.

    The latest Dune movie is a triumph. Spectacular visuals, great performances and it carried for me a much stronger emotional punch than any of the previous attempts. My daughter, not a particularly big SF or even movie fan, was captivated. We showed her the Lynch version the following evening and it was laughably bad in comparison. There’s a brilliant bit where Paul asks the Shadout Mapes who she is and she replies ‘I am the house keeper’ in the most sinister, inappropriate voice. Hilarious!

20. Come along my friends to the scroll that never ends. We are so glad you could attend! File inside, file inside.

    1) “…And being yelled at by people who don’t know how to turn their workstation on.”
    – My first two web developer jobs in a nutshell. And “people” was my bosses.

21. IIRC, Molly C. Quinn portrayed daughter Alexis on Nathan Filion’s Castle.

22. 5) I never made it beyond Dune in the series. The second book just wasn’t as interesting to me. I do remain partial to Herber’s “The White Plague” and simply hope it was not a work of prediction.

    Re: reading

    Most of my unit were readers when we deployed to Desert Shield/Storm. Everyone had a stash of books. Trades were made. Books were read. My understanding is that the tradition of military service members being readers continues but is tempered by other entertainment options being available.

    Alongside TV, Internet, and audio books I think we should add gaming as claiming some of our attention. Some of the best storytelling occurs within video games. Halo: Combat Evolved had good world building and a simple story. The more recent Days Gone is a tour de force of storytelling that has me crying big honkin’ man-tears every time I play it. Horizon Zero Dawn also tells a great story.

    Regards,
    Dann
    – CLOSED FOR TAGLINE DEVELOPMENT —

23. 6) Tom Gauld making a Sirius point there.

    I’ve read all of Frank Herbert’s Dune books… I think you could be excused for stopping at any point after the first book, to be honest. (I haven’t read any of the Anderson/Brian Herbert spin-offs.) Other Frank Herberts… I think Under Pressure aka The Dragon in the Sea aka 21st Century Sub is my favourite; I liked Whipping Star but was less keen on the sequel The Dosadi Experiment; I found Hellstrom’s Hive strongly written but very grim and disturbing…. I think that’s all the Herberts I have strong opinions on.

    The two-part approach is one way of dealing with the big casting problem in a Dune movie – the fact that Paul is about fourteen in the first part and twenty-one in the second. Previous adaptations have dealt with this issue by (David Lynch) ignoring it completely, or (SyFy Channel) combing his hair a different way. (That’s the big casting problem – there are other problems with a cinematic version of Dune, like the way most of the story is told in labyrinthine internal monologues.) I quite liked the Villeneuve film, although I was amazed by how drab everything looked – even some quite pleasant places, like the ducal palace on Caladan, looked like conference centres before the decorators moved in. A matter of personal taste, there.

24. 2) Joanna Russ was honored by some parts of SF; she was (and remains) one of our most revered figures for WisCon (when she couldn’t come to us, we interviewed her remotely at a time when that was a high-tech Big Deal), the Otherwise Awards and the circles associated with them. Her How to Suppress Women’s Writing is a must-read for anybody interested in publishing (commercial or academic) and intellectual history in general.

25. (5) Molly Quinn is a major Star Trek fan, and I recall seeing a photograph of her in costume at a Trek event around the time she was appearing in Castle.

26. (1) If you go back to Martha Wells’ earlier fantasies, one of here trademarks is amazing set piece action sequences. The Raksura can shape shift between a humanoid groundling form and a powerful flying form. Scenes occur on the ground, in the air, and even underwater, requiring continual awareness of each character’s current form and position in 3-D space. It is not easy to write these scenes, especially as well as Martha does. When it came to Murderbot having 3-D situational awareness that includes network awareness and views from cameras and drones, it was a lot of work to make it clear and easy to follow. Truly great story telling. But it was something that Martha already was very good at. Being able to use her programming background was great, too. I’m a programmer, but there is no way I could write about programming and make it exciting like Martha does.

27. Discussions about the paucity of female writers in sf became a tedious subject for fanzine articles, convention panels, and academic publications in the 1970s. I can’t believe the arguments are still being trotted out 50+ years later! Where has the historical memory of the field gone? And I really, really would like to see greater appreciation for Andre Norton, not only for her own work but as a mentor of younger women’s work.

28. 2) To expand on Orange Mike’s post: The Newitz piece reminds me a bit of
    the recent Lester-del-Rey-invented-fantasy piece in Slate. I encountered Russ’s work as it appeared, and I recall the stir it caused in the field. She got read, got noticed, and got reacted-to. But since what Newitz calls “the science fiction crowd” was (and remains) not a monolith, not all the reacting was “positive.” Just as not all the reactions to, say, late Heinlein were “positive.” I was not the only reader who took Russ seriously (that is, as a producer of fictions aimed at more than diversion)–her fiction and her critical and reviewing work were quickly recognzied in the academic SF community.

    On the other hand, I suspect I was not the only reader to be troubled by what Newitz calls her “strong misanthropic streak,” which I eventually (thanks to Gwenyth Jones’ excellent 2019 book) came to see as the product of the way personal as well as sociopolitical forces shaped her character. Russ’s work is strong stuff, emotionally and intellectually challenging, and if it’s not “popular” in the mass-market sense, that’s no surprise. But Russ wasn’t simply ignored.

29. Speaking of “Dune”, The New Yorker has an interview with Patrick Stewart which mentions an embarrassing incident during the shooting of the Lynch version:

    Oh, Lord. This is the most embarrassing one. We were filming “Dune” [in 1983], and I learned that there was someone called Sting joining the cast. I thought, Sting? That’s a weird name. I’d never heard it. He showed up a few days later, incredibly handsome guy. One day, like Whoopi, he was just sitting on his own, and I went over and said, “We haven’t really met. My name is Patrick Stewart. I’ve been told you’re a musician. What do you play?” And he said, “Bass.” I said, “You know, I’ve often wondered why people choose to carry that huge instrument around. I mean, some of them are bigger than they are! Why not play the flute or something like that?” He laughed. And I said, “Well, are you with a band?” And he said, “Yes, the Police.” And I said, “You play with a police band?” He understood that I didn’t know who the hell he was. I mean, he couldn’t have been a bigger star.

30. First, over decades, from at least the nineties up to the last 10 years, I regularly see polls that say Americans read 3-4 books per year, and that’s in all the stories I read about the polls. Given how many books/year my family reads, that means a lot of Americans don’t read books.

    Second, Dune. The mini-series version of the 1982 Dune was much better, since it was about 6 hours, and didn’t fill in the second half of the book with a 15 min voiceover. But I’m very much looking forward to the current part 2.

    I read the first book, and that was enough. I’m still waiting for the book promised in the mid-seventies Playboy review of the then-latest Dune, where the reviewer wrote “when Mr. Herbert finishes the series, somewhere around 1995, with Imperial Morticians of Dune….”

31. The first Russ story I came across, in some anthology or other, was her vampire piece, “My Dear Emily”. Teenaged me loved it and started watching out for Russ, hoping for more stories like that — and of course she never wrote anything else remotely like it. Another favorite, “Nobody’s Home”, imagines a future in which an ordinarily bright person, by today’s standards, is now an awkward embarassment to be shuffled from one social group to another, simply unable to keep up. I often feel like that when reading Russ, as though I’m listening to someone much smarter who is doing me the courtesy of not talking down.

    It doesn’t help that many stories are written in response to earlier works that I didn’t know about. If you haven’t read Lud-in-the-Mist, then “The Zanzibar Cat” will make no sense at all.

32. Americans say they read an average of 12.6 books during the past year

33. Bill, American reading thirteen books a year, I refuse to think of it in that partial number, bests Great Britain I discovered with a few hours worth of research who according to Penguin UK and others who’ve studied that question only average over that past few decades ten books a year.

    Canadians do better at fifteen while Australians according to the Australian Publishers Association are truly slackers at five books per year and New Zealanders, well, once again they prove that they are a land of greatness as they read twenty one books a year.

    All of these figures are median numbers.

34. (2) I love to see more genre Library of America editions. Joanna Russ is one of many authors I’ve been meaning to read… (I have several Kindle editions. And I think I have a paperback copy of The Adventures of Alyx.)

    I also wish we could see some of the “forgotten” (but not really forgotten by fans) women SF writers of the past brought back into print. And the forgotten dudes as well.

    (5a) I bought “Dune” in mass market paperback because I loved Star Wars, and a science fiction movie magazine said it was one of those SF books that fans of Star Wars might like. Or maybe that it was the SF novel that science fiction fans most wanted to see adapted as a movie. It’s not Star Wars, but I liked it anyway. I wore out the foil lettering on the cover so much that my schoolmate thought it was called “Dunf.”

    (5b) R. L. Stine is cool. People talk about how Harry Potter books turned reluctant readers into readers — but R. L. Stine doesn’t get as much credit. (Goosebumps is the second-best-selling series of all time! I was more of a Fear Street fan myself, although I was out of the target age. 😉 )

35. 5) I’ve never read any Goosebumps, etc., books; but many years ago (late 70s) the Scholastic Book Club published about half a dozen issues of an SF magazine called Weird Worlds (some reprint fiction; some articles about Battlestar Galactica or other contemporary media; some articles about occult/paranormal/unexplained mystery stuff) and when I went back recently and acquired the set, I couldn’t help but notice that they were edited by one “Jovial” Bob Stine.

36. Sometime in the 80s I remember a friend having a few kids’ books by “Jovial Bob Stine”, among them “The Sick of Being Sick Book”. When I first heard of R. L. Stine years later I wondered if that was the same author but have never bothered to find out.

37. 5) Humble Bundle currently – as of THIS MORNING – has a Goosebumps bundle.

38. @ Robin Whiskers
    R. L. Stine also wrote for Dynamite magazine as Jovial Bob Stine. And he created Bananas magazine.

    @ P J Evans
    I saw that eerily timely bundle…

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