(1) If today is The Martian’s birthday remember that…
…in nine days Marty McFly arrives from the past …
(2) Can you pass HowStuffWorks’ “Real Tech or Star Trek?” quiz?
Confession: I bombed.
(3) Jeffro Johnson has completed his Appendix N survey. Keep reading and he’ll explain what that means —
So it’s all up now.
With this piece on Tolkien going up, I’ve done forty-three posts on Appendix N now. I read every book Gygax mentioned by name, at least the first book of each series, and I picked out one representative work for each of the entries that consisted of an author’s name alone. I also wrote about two thousand words on each book.
(4) A bit more from 2013 on how journalists exploited Gravatar to identify online commenters.
“Crypto weakness in Web comment system exposes hate-mongering politicians”
Investigative journalists have exploited a cryptographic weakness in a third-party website commenting service to expose politicians and other Swedish public figures who left highly offensive remarks on right-wing blogs, according to published reports.
People have been warning of the privacy risk posed by Gravatar, short for Globally Recognized Avatar, since at least 2009. That’s when a blogger showed he was able to crack the cryptographic hashes the behind-the-scenes service uses to uniquely identify its users. The Gravatar hashes, which are typically embedded in any comment left on millions of sites that use the avatar service, are generated by passing a user’s e-mail address through the MD5 cryptographic function. By running guessed e-mail addresses through the same algorithm and waiting for output that matches those found in comments, it’s possible to identify the authors, many of whom believe they are posting anonymously.
“Disqus scrambles after leak fuels Swedish tabloid expose”
Disqus is updating its widely-used comments platform after a Swedish tabloid exposed politicians and other public figures for allegedly making highly offensive comments on right-wing websites.
The Swedish daily Expressen, working with an investigative journalism group, said it uncovered the identity of hundreds of people who left offensive comments at four right-wing websites through their email addresses. It then confronted the authors of the comments, many of whom freely admitted to writing them.
(5) “Dinner and a Movie with Vincent Price featuring Victoria Price” is in Toronto on November 18 and 19. The event at the Gladstone Hotel features a four course meal created by Gladstone Chef Katie Lloyd and inspired by the late actor’s 1965 cookbook, A Treasury of Great Recipes. Tickets are available.
And for nostalgia’s sake, here is a video of Vincent Price guesting on a cooking show with Wolfgang Puck.
(6) Jerry Pournelle reports that the new There Will Be War collection, volume 10, is filling faster than expected:
There are still a few fiction slots open, and we are looking for serious previously published non-fiction on future war; previous publication in a military journal preferred but not a requirement.
Oddly, some of the aspiring contributors don’t seem to understand what the collection is about. Publisher Vox Day warned —
PLEASE STOP SUBMITTING straight SF, urban fantasy, SF romance, and anything that is not clearly MILITARY SCIENCE FICTION. A submission will be rejected out of hand as soon as it becomes apparent that it is not mil-SF. We’ve received a startling number of submissions that are not even remotely relevant to one of the most famous anthology series in science fiction.
(7) Mascots meet under the Hugo at Octocon.
https://twitter.com/Frazerdennison/status/653200065645907968
https://twitter.com/Teddysteves/status/652580716081999872
(8) Ah, Sweet Marketing!
https://twitter.com/APiusManNovel/status/653544755507372032
(9) Nathan Barnhart’s review of Ancillary Mercy for Speculative Herald is touted as its “first 10 star rating”:
Along the way we get a few surprises. Most noticeable for me is the humor that is present more than at any other point of the series. Breq herself gives us some lighter moments; including padding a report with results of radish growing competitions. But most of the humor comes from the translator to the mysterious Presger (an alien group that once treated humans as their own ant farm but is now confined by a treaty). Zeiat, while acting as a translator between two races provides the humor by some humorous cultural misunderstandings. In lesser hands Zeiat could have been nothing more than a cheap form of comic relief but here she serves a very real purpose within the story. Beneath the humor of the misunderstandings is the constant reminder that even a culture as expansive as the Radch are at risk. The Presger are held in check only by a treaty they signed; a treaty the Radch still doesn’t completely understand the implications of.
(10) Io9 posted a detailed infographic “Get To Know The Incredible Starships of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Trilogy” a couple of weeks ago, which is even more fun now that I have read the third book.
(11) Screen Rant presents “10 Movie Outtakes That Made It To The Big Screen.”
(12) And here is my Get Out Of Literary Jail Free card, sent by somebody who thinks I will need it, because of the way I phrase Frankenstein stories in the Scroll.
[Thanks to Will R., Brian Z., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
But he doesn’t understand how time works.
People tend to read things written recently. Although we read back, the further back you go the less we read. Things from the last 20 years are read more than things 50 years old are read less than things a century old.
When Gygax chose the works in Appendix N, many of them were recent authors for him. Few were more than 40years old. But everything on that list is more than 40 years old for us. The idea that the pulp fiction of the last century is a canon we must be familiar with is silly.
I’ll go further. Appendix N tells you nothing whatsoever about the canon of fantasy in the 1970s. It tells you a great deal about the lifetime reading list of one man born in 1938. Now, let me be clear: that man, E. Gary Gygax, was one of the transformative geniuses of our age, a member of a small set of creative entrepreneurs who made popular culture what it is today. As such, Appendix N is or should be supremely interesting to both scholars and enthusiasts of that culture. And it’s not a completely idiosyncratic list by any means; it probably has a lot in common with the sword-and-sorcery favorites of many people of Gygax’s generation. And for the record, I love The Broken Sword way more than The Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t try rereading The King of Elfland’s Daughter again if you paid me.
But what it’s not is the beginning and the end of what “fantasy readers in the 1970s” considered the greatest works of the genre.
Because I’ve been reviewing a spate of “military SF” novels, I thought it would be interesting to Google around to see how the broader SF audience saw that subgenre*. What I see suggests that a substantial portion of the audience for milSF comes to it via gaming, with anime and comics right behind and books trailing considerably. And they tend to exhibit the historical myopia that most casual consumers of cultural products do–they are unaware of the depth and breadth of the tradition they are enjoying. For example, when I searched “war science fiction,” the first page of results included a blog site with an extensive list of recommended materials. The categories were, in order, films, comics, anime, video games, then books. And the book that “started it all” was Starship Troopers. Not War of the Worlds, let alone The Battle of Dorking. Nor was there any mention of Gordon Dickson, Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, Keith Laumer, or Jerry Pournelle.
I have my suspicions about the subgenre features that appeal to some segments of the milSF audience–a considerable overlap with what used to be labeled “men’s adventure” fiction, which was often marketed in numbered series of paperback originals with scary-hairy-chested protagonist names–The Destroyer, The Executioner, The Hunter, The Penetrator. (Google “men’s adventure paperback series” and click on Images. Most of what you need to know is right there. Though I have to say that Soft Nudes for the Devil’s Butcher is over the top even in this context. And yes, these series tended toward vigilante rather than armed-forces fantasies, but naybe some milSF fans are into uniforms and tribal cohesion as well as mayhem.)
* There are many ways in which I am demographically and aesthetically off-center.
I followed the link to VD’s blog and saw that Chuck Gannon is getting the formal denouncement both there and in comments at Monster Hunter because of a piece he wrote on Scalzi’s blog back in September. Larry C is more generous but the comments get harsh quick http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/10/12/sad-puppies-guest-post-by-chuck-gannon/
Comics bracket round ending in five hours, so if you haven’t voted yet your clock starts now. 🙂
Just popping in for a sec – making progress on elsewhere stuff, but slowly – to note this about the things Gygax put in Appendix N: more of them are readily available to the casually interested shopper now than was the case in the mid-1970s. I know, since I tried to find a bunch of them then, and the resources of the LA county library system, the Caltech stacks open to the public, and such were simply not sufficient. Now? Most of it’s at Amazon, a lot of it’s at Audible, and what isn’t there is other places. It’s easier to publish a lot of these things, and it’s easier shop for them.
(It’s also easy to construct a more informative and useful bibliography, but I believe I’ve done my stock rant about Gygax’s prose style and its baleful influence.)
@Camestros Felapton
Get harsh quick? More like immediately drop into radical right-wing lunacy. The take that group has on politics is completely delusional.
Gannon’s opinions didn’t go down that successfully at Scalzi’s either, but he’s getting a quicker, hotter roasting at Monster Hunter Nation. VD’s response starts “I happen to know that Charles Gannon is both a coward and a liar. But more importantly, he’s just wrong…” (no direct links available)
Oh, and later there’s James May telling Jim Butcher he’s talking bullshit!
The fantastika of 70s was far more than just the fiction typified by Appendix N.
Indeed, the fantasy listed in Appendix N was to a certain extent, somewhat reactionary even at the time. It was the fantasy fiction that Gary Gygax had grown up on, and he cut his reading teeth in the late forties through the fifties and into the sixties. By the 1970s, the fiction that Gygax had grown up loving was already old hat to a certain extent.
Since VD has been mentioned, I’ll add this odd non-sequitur: Last night, I dreamed I went to Manderley…
No, wait, that’s not it. Last night, I dreamed someone in sf/f held some sort of fundraiser in which people were asked to contribute recipes and people would bid a dollar or something to up-vote their favorites, and the site kept raising money as more recipes were added and more voting occurred.
In this dream, I contributed a chili recipe that I submitted under the pen name Teddy Beale and in which I wrote something like, “Be sure to soak and boil the kidney beans according to package directions, because they contain toxins which, if not properly cooked, will make you almost as sick as the toxicity of Vox Day’s blog can make you.” The recipe promptly got voted to the top of the heap, and as more people voted for it, it raised lots of money, and so VD found out about it. He behaved predictably, i.e. he became enraged and threatened to sue me. And all my friends were bemused: “So this guy is furiously demanding a retraction and threatening a lawsuit… over kidney beans?”
Apparently that is my subconscious mind’s summary of the Puppy mess.
What’s particularly cringe-worthy is that Correia begins the post thusly:
That is just . . . wow.
Ahem. A hat may grow old without becoming either non-functional or unattractive. I have a couple of hats older than I am that I wear with considerable satisfaction. And not all the looks I get amount to “Pipe the geezer in the hopelessly unfashionalble headgear.” Though nobody mistakes me for a real hip street-smart dude*, either.
* Or whatever it is I would aspire to were I still in the courting-breeding-and-dominance-asserting game.
Russell
You raise an interesting point; I would add that there is an even more marked difference between the way in which someone who starts out with an interest in military history views MilSF, and the way in which someone arriving via films, comics, anime etc. perceives it.
I’m not sure whether this could ever be resolved; after all, I am sure that I could never convince one of my cousins, a marine, that the paras know what they are doing, just as I could never persuade his brother, a helicopter pilot in the Navy, that helicopter pilots in the army should be allowed off the ground.
Of course, my father, who served for 35 years in the Royal Airforce, felt that the proper place for both army and navy was on the ground, and on the water, leaving the air for those who knew what they were doing there.
The only thing which united them was their firm conviction that even the other services were slightly better at understanding what war is like than civilians in general, and politicians in particular, are…
ETA Your first comment, not the one about hats. I wholeheartedly support the right of anyone to wear whatever hats they wish…
1. I like the fundraising plan your subconscious came up with.
2. voxpopoli – ‘the raw kidney beans of blogs’ [grin]
I sort of knew this yet didn’t really know it:
I saw JM’s comment as I was skimming through but I had missed that it was in response to Jim Butcher. Then shortly after JM goes off, Larry C invites people to compare the comments at his blog to the comments at Whatever (with the implication that his commentators are more even tempered). I tend to think of Larry C as the least self-deluding of the Puppy leaders but…hmmm
I spent a fair amount of time talking to Chuck Gannon at CapClave this past weekend. We only briefly touched on the Puppy issue (mostly talking about Faulkner’s novels instead), but he seems to have still been in the “both sides” camp. I recall that a number of people disagreed with him when he posted his essay on Whatever, but no one called him a liar and a coward, or accused him of being a treacherous lying “SJW” (or whatever the opposite of that would be) either. I wonder if the comments on Correia’s blog will remove the scales from Gannon’s eyes about the true nature of the Puppies.
Excuse me while I fall off my chair…
The funny thing is, I don’t like kidney beans and don’t ever cook them. I recalled their toxins issue from a conversation with a vegetarian a few years ago, which got me to look up kidney beans afterwards–and, yep, they’re toxic if not boiled long enough. This increased my natural inclination not to cook or eat them.
For the record, I have never before dreamed about Vox Day. (shudder) I suppose I did so because a number of people at the recent Ninc conference asked me about the Puppies and about VD, both repulsed and mystified by their activities.
Well, that was more or less predictable, dontcha think?
hris Nelson on October 13, 2015 at 5:02 am said:
Actually, I had problems with it because I’m too knowledgeable about current technology. The first question about universal translators? I’ve worked with natural language processing (NLP). I have a very good idea of the state of the art, and I assure you, it bears no resemblance to Trek’s universal translator. So I answered “no” (because that’s the correct answer), and the quiz told me I was wrong. I made it about two more questions in before giving up in disgust.
—
Anyone else want to comment on VD’s claim that There Will Be War is “one of the most famous anthology series in science fiction.” Because honestly, I’ve barely heard of it, despite having been a serious, heavy reader of SF since the early seventies.
It’s nonsense like this that had me partially agreeing with a lot of the stuff in the “Appendix N” article. Except, I was thinking it applied to people like the puppies. Not familiar with canon. Check. Too concerned with political correctness. Check. No interest in many subgenres. Check.
Of course, the right wing tries to pretend that political correctness is a left wing phenomenon, while at the same time loudly objecting to anything that references ideas they’re uncomfortable with. (Feminism, gay rights, religions other than Christianity, etc.) Basically, the guy who wrote the article correctly identifies a whole swath of his side’s faults, but falsely assumes that everyone else shares those faults.
He also claims he didn’t read the comments at Whatever, so . . . I doubt he’s basing this on anything but his own baseless assumptions.
Speaking of Gygax, I’m about a third of the way through the new biography Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons. A lot of it is told in dramatic narrative, which might grate on people who need strict historical accuracy, but it’s been an interesting read so far regardless. I figure Gygax had enough of an influence on fantasy that the book could at least be considered for the Best Related Work category.
Laura Resnick @ 11:15 — Now this is just weird. First LunarG @ 10:29 posts about a dream featuring a gastronomic fundraiser, and then you do. What is going on here? Anyone else here have a dream about food and fundraising?
I use tinned kidney beans to save on the hassle – and I buy little tiny tins of them. I think they go well in spicy meat dishes (no I won’t say ‘chilli’ as I know that provokes arguments) in small quantities.
@Mark. You did make me look to see Beale’s comment.
Super Genius Theodore Beale strikes again :Shakes head:
Brian V Esk Nineteen: Thank you! Added to my nightstand. Yet. Gary Gygax is such a pivotal figure that he’ll be remembered centuries from now. Someone should write a more critical biography.
I figure Gygax had enough of an influence on fantasy that the book could at least be considered for the Best Related Work category.
Oh definitely. In addition to authoring D&D and developing the RPG industry, he was also a minor fantasy author, so he’s certainly “inside” enough that his biography should be a valid Related Work nominee.
Looks like genetic testing has demonstrated that Africa had a massive immigration of Indo-Europeans about 3,000 years ago, so that Africans have up to 25% Indo-European DNA and even in the remotest parts of southern and western Africa people have 5-6% Indo-European ancestry (and between 0.3-0.7% Neanderthal DNA).
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34479905
Why is this relevant? Well, it’s neat. But it also blows up one of T. Beale’s stupid arguments about how his humanity level is different from that of a prominent African-American author, since he was alluding to Neanderthal DNA.
He also claims he didn’t read the comments at Whatever, so . . . I doubt he’s basing this on anything but his own baseless assumptions.
The comments on Gannon’s guest post on Correia’s blog just prove, yet again, that the best way to discredit the Puppies is to let them talk.
Their criteria for declaring things to be “real tech” are awfully inconsistent.
Reading the comments over at Correia’s place is a really good object lesson in in-groups having literally no idea how they appear to outsiders. I wonder what weirdo extremist things occasionally get said here that we don’t notice? I’d expect substantially less of them since there isn’t a consistent political ideology here, but perhaps there are still a couple of things?
Mind you, some of them are going for the ‘but Scalzi mods so the real extremists weren’t visible!’ approach to defending their own comment section, so perhaps some of them have an inkling that there was some lines crossing going on.
Well… the claim doesn’t appear to be that a specific immigration event is responsible for Indo-European genes being in southern Africa, it’s just mentioned to point out that the populations were not totally isolated from each other.
But that was already known. There’s been trade and travel back and forth across the Sahara and along the Zanj for at least as long as recorded history.
What Butcher said (excerpted for relevance): “Especially since fighting them, as we understand it on the Internet, isn’t fighting. That happens with guns and knives. What we do here is mostly high school clique stuff, grotesquely magnified.”
What May said (also excerpted for relevance): “What bullshit. Men are being kicked out of college in kangaroo courts exactly because of the “rape culture” ideology pushed by these freaks. Tell THEM it’s just an internet fight. Tell a black guy or Jew they’re a monster for punching a neo-Nazi in the nose. Tell the frat at the U of Virginia which was closed down for a rape hoax based on the #JustListen pushed by Steven Gould and Jim Hines. Tell the cop assassinated while pumping gas that racial incitement is just an internet thing.”
Butcher limited his consideration of the internet fight to Puppies/Anti Puppies calling each other names on the internet. May points out that the larger context of internet delivered speech has real world consequences and offered examples. Neither is wholly wrong in the context of their remarks.
Tell the frat at the U of Virginia which was closed down for a rape hoax based on the #JustListen pushed by Steven Gould and Jim Hines.
Given that no fraternity was closed down at the University of Virginia, one might be a little bit less than confident of May’s grasp of the facts. Phi Kappa Psi is open and operating at the University right now. In short, May is wholly wrong.
@Peace
That is pretty neat. It seems pretty plausible that a bunch of people (possibly speaking various Semitic languages, not Indo-European ones) made their way back into Africa by way of the Nile Valley or the east coast. Lots of people like that were always filtering into Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Egypt, and from there south into the rest of Africa. Then there were the Phoenician populations that settled in and around Carthage a little later, and had trade routes stretching across the Sahara. There have been connections between southern Arabia and east Africa for a very long time too.
Or, hmm, a lot of people from Egypt or southern Mesopotamia might have had reason to find greener pastures right about 3000 years ago, given that was when the Assyrians went on their last big rampage.
(Sorry if I wax pedantic. I’ve been buried in ancient history even more than usual lately.)
@ Aaron.
They were suspended for 3 months. That’s real.
Their house (where people live and study) was vandalized with paint and windows were smashed with bricks. That’s real.
Their house was repeatedly picketed, making it hard to live there (several protesters were arrested). That’s real.
The death threats, reported to the police, were deemed credible and students moved out of the house and some left campus (temporarily). That’s real.
A nationally distributed column by another UVA law student called them animals and called for asset forfeiture and was widely praised and republished – spreading the lie. That’s real.
Those events don’t get erased because the school belated realized that the article and allegations therein were manufactured; inaccurately and libelously targeting that fraternity. May’s message, that there was real impact, is rather well documented.
By some fans’ estimates, MilSF may at least be in its 4th epoch.
There is of course “pre-MilSF” pretty straight sf space opera which began a focus on military thought and action rather than just “had military conflict” in the stories.
The first epoch is put from Cordwailer Smith to Heinlein maybe even up to Haldeman since The Forever War is so defitionally MilSF.
The second as defined by 80s Pournelle and Drake. Drake gets credit (“blame”) For his explosive popularity as sparking wider pop culture appeal which led to the third…
90s MilSF bandwagoneers. Certainly popularity of Pournelle and Drake continued, but the sub-genre became more defined by the large quantity of by-the-numbers formulaic books with a futuristic tank on the cover written by poor inexperienced authors who had even less experience in war. Slap that tank on the cover with a grim looking Heavy Metalish (magazine) sexy soldier woman and it sold regardless of its literary or military merit.
I think we might be in or approaching the end of the fourth, which had been dominated by the response to 9/11. I think fans themselves got fed up with the bad stuff of the 90s and embraced MilSF authors in the 00’s who had actually been professional warfighters before they were professional storytellers. The current crop like Kratman and Ringo who have been successful recently have offered a sense of authenticity and I think their success speaks to a difference with what had been cranked out the prior decade.
There are other successful newcomers who can spin the story credibly without the service. I’d put then-2005 Scalzi’s Old Man’s War as MilSF and has been successful.
I don’t really view these as being any sort of rigid epochs, but just something I was able to recognize in some of the types of products that were published and generating buzz.
I’ll note how Ancillary might fit in. From its beginnings, MilSF canonical works have women fighting alongside men, even well before it was generally accepted in our society. Starship Troopers had women fighting along side the men, all the way up the chain. Nearly all combat pilots were exclusively women, including starship commanders. The Forever War has men and women on the front lines; it goes further to support Haldeman’s playful social commentary between the fighting to make his army of the future — his humanity of the future for that matter — homosexually normative, with the then-millennial-old straight protagonist becoming the “queer” one in the mix. Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers is another example with women. MilSF has actually been pretty progressive on that issue.
Silly But True
When I spotted the post yesterday, I went through the couple hundred comments that had been left by, oh, about 24 hours ago and the pirhana had already just about stripped Gannon’s carcass to the bone. It didn’t seem to matter that he was clearly partial to the Puppies — he was not ideologically pure, and he shoved aside Vox Day, so munch, munch, munch.
Those events don’t get erased because the school belated realized that the article and allegations therein were manufactured; inaccurately and libelously targeting that fraternity. May’s message, that there was real impact, is rather well documented.
May’s message is bullshit. The school suspended all fraternity and sorority activities for three months following the Interfraternity Council’s voluntary suspension of activities. The University President’s message explicitly called for people with knowledge of the facts to come forward so that the truth could be found, and it was. There were allegations, there was an investigation, and there was resolution. The idea that there was some sort of miscarriage of justice on the part of the University or any other actor is simply bullshit. Even the idea that Rolling Stone can be sued for libel is dubious. May is simply talking out of his ass.
Contrary to his assertion, the fraternity wasn’t closed. Pretty much every other “fact” used to back up his claims is bullshit too. He just makes shit up because he has an ideological ax to grind and saying crap like “kangaroo courts are expelling male students” sounds good to his audience of credulous sycophants.
Mike: speaking as someone who has been stripped to the bone now and again, did you catch the part where Jim Butcher echoed the call for civility and Brad Torgersen admitted he was wrong to have fanned the flames?
Given that no fraternity was closed down at the University of Virginia, one might be a little bit less than confident of May’s grasp of the facts. Phi Kappa Psi is open and operating at the University right now. In short, May is wholly wrong.
I get where the confusion is, though. I’d read the headlines that the fraternities were ‘suspended’ and assumed that meant the houses were closed. Not until I dug a little deeper that I found it meant ‘not able to participate on campus’. Which does shut them down yet doesn’t require the students living there to leave.
Rev. Bob: exactly. It’s the logical end point of men doing manly things together, with no gurlz allowed. And not without precedent in the annals of history; these guys totally love the Greek warriors and we all know what THEY were up to. Sacred Band of Thebes, Spartans (Puppies’ favorite ancient warriors, whose wives dressed like boys when it came time for rare reproductive-only sex), Athenians.
Mark-Kitteh: Revisionary history is the Pups’ favorite kind, since it allows them to pretend they didn’t say all the stupid stuff they did.
andyl: Bradbury and Moore were not PC enough? Ray was fairly non-offensive and gentle (tho he wasn’t keen on fascism). You’d think having a sword-swinging woman, like Moore did, is “PC”.
I knew Poul Anderson a little bit, and he was not Christian other than in a vague sense of being raised in a time and place when everyone was, nominally. He was WAY more interested in sagas and the ancient Norse/Germanic religion, as even a cursory glance at his bibliography points out. It’s all Odin and dragons, people. He came from the deeply Scandinavian part of the US (just like Gygax and friends), and that influence was strong.
Russell Letson: excellent analysis. Explains the Pups’ blind spots, since they seem to have come in via movies and games and don’t really know books. “Men’s Adventure Fiction” is still alive and well in ebook, and even in the Manly Chested paperback days, often used SFnal gadgets and tropes — as do the James Bond movies. Much milSF is Men’s Adventure Fiction IN SPAAAACE.
Poor Charles Gannon. The Whateverites roasted him slowly and the Pups are insta-broiling him with a giant blowtorch. I think he should probably stop talking on the subject, for his sake.
Laura Resnick: your subconscious is wise and amusing. And that’s probably a good fundraiser! You and LunarG should get together on this, your dreams are literally in sync!
(Most people’s dreams are dull; Filers are amusing and well-plotted.)
Whew. Sorry for the wall o’text, but you guys are fun to talk to!
And another sign of the fragmenting/expansion of genres is that all the overtly Christian stuff now is its own genre(s). Christian mysteries, SF, fantasy, romance… they all have explicit Jesus and are marketed as such. Some of ’em even ain’t too sure about CS Lewis, all that allegory.
I know what #squadgoals means, though I will never achieve that. And I only know because Taylor Swift has lovely kitties who show up on Instagram and get forwarded. Personally, I am much more down with the squad of Japanese kitties who wear things on their heads (see them achieving more #squadgoals than you can imagine by Googling “Shironeko”). I love those ?.)
CassyB: I was reading a story in National Geographic about Africa and I glanced at the map and automatically thought “the great gray-green greasy Limpopo!” And the alpha tomcat of our neighborhood was always “the cat who walks by himself” because that was exactly his attitude. Feed him, pet him, then he’s gone.
I watched Mad Max Fury Road last night, so naturally I spent all of today demanding that people ‘witness’ whatever mudane task I happened to be doing.
I’m making a cup of tea, witness me!
George Miller, 70 years old and more badass than ever.
It didn’t seem to matter that he was clearly partial to the Puppies — he was not ideologically pure, and he shoved aside Vox Day, so munch, munch, munch.
One might note that at CapClave, an event full of people with little or no sympathies for the Puppies, Gannon seems to have had no troubles at all. He wasn’t harassed, or attacked, or otherwise discomfited. In fact, he was on multiple panels, attended at least one party that I was at (Tom Doyle’s book launch for The Left-Hand Way), was at the mass author signing with more than a few people getting his book, and seems to have been treated fairly and with respect.
On the other hand, Correia’s commenters have treated him somewhat differently.
Re: Epochs of milSF. I. F. Clarke’s Voices Prophesying War (first ed. 1966) goes back to 1871 and before. Of course, most of this is not quite the same kind of genre-adventure stuff that characterizes much of the commercial category these days.
“I’d expect substantially less of them since there isn’t a consistent political ideology here, but perhaps there are still a couple of things?”
There’s a pretty consistent ideology here.
There’s a pretty consistent ideology here.
Oh do let us know what it is.
My gigantic post up there got the middle bit moved to the bottom. I guess I scared the software. Will write less next time. (I didn’t have time to make it shorter!)
Pournelle’s There Will Be War Volume VIII had a number of stories that don’t fit the ‘manlyman shoot everything’ mold that seems to be a worry here.
‘Still Time’ by James Patrick Kelly, for one
Gregory Benford’s ‘To The Storming Gulf’.
And my favorite ‘The World Next Door’ by Brad Ferguson.
Anyway–the volumes have ranged quite a bit in the type of story offered.
Here’s what they want in this version:
“Poetry encouraged, but see the previous series; it needs to make sense. Hard science fiction mainly; urban fantasy with a military theme possibly acceptable, but mostly we want hard, realistic stories. They need not be action adventure; good command decision stories encouraged. Space opera always considered. Again see the previous nine volumes. ”
To me it looks like the three stories I liked in Volume VII wouldn’t be accepted–that’s fine. As I read it they’re looking for more stories along the line of Honor Harrington than Miles V.
It’s very likely they’ve gotten swamped by those wanna-be writers who submit to everyone and everything. And they probably have to read at least a couple pages to see if it can be used or salvaged.