(1) What could be more appropriate to continue a discussion launched in yesterday’s Scroll than Jurassic Park: High Heels Edition! Thanks to Cathy for dropping this into the comments.
(2) “Emperor Palpatine and Sauron in the Afterlife” by Steve Ogden. Here is the first frame of the comic —
This crazy comic sprung from a Twitter conversation I was having with Scott King. He said he was considering writing an essay, the events of Star Wars as seen from Emperor Palpatine’s point of view. I said it would be a terrible idea, but really funny, to have a conversation in the afterlife between two dead bad guys, sort of swapping horror stories about how badly everything went for them at the hands of the Good Guys. Scott admitted it was both terrible and funny, and why don’t I go write it then. So I did, and here you have it.
(3) That was a strange experience – reading Alexandra Erin’s “Millennial Pledge: Trouble Edition”, which translates “Trouble in River City” into a bullet-pointed blog post.
(4) Recommended: Ty Templeton’s comic ”What if Bob Kane has created Bat-Man without Bill Finger?”
(5) Most of “The 20 Biggest Bombshells J.K. Rowling’s Dropped Since ‘Harry Potter’ Ended” are less cheerful than —
Chocolate Frogs
Harry, Ron and Hermione all wound up with their own chocolate frog cards, which Ron reported as his “finest hour.”
Harry’s card says that he is “the first and only known wizard to survive the Killing Curse, most famous for the defeat of the most dangerous dark wizard of all time, Lord Voldemort.”
Ron’s card gives him credit for “destroying the Horcruxes and subsequent defeat of Voldemort and revolutionizing the Ministry of Magic.”
On hers, Hermione gets credit for being “the brightest witch of her age” and that she “eradicated pro-pureblood laws” and campaigned for “the rights of non human beings such as house-elves.”
(6) Remember the Star Wars blooper reported by Screen Rant that I posted here the other day? Io9 checked with Mark Hamill who says it never happened.
TOTAL BS! Actually said "There she…" as in "There she is." Dialogue in that scene was dubbed. In-jokes disallowed! https://t.co/nWLmsLsgpw
— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) October 13, 2015
Instead of calling Carrie Fisher’s name out, Hamill insists that he started to say “There she is!”—dialogue provided in ADR that was cut short by Leia and Luke’s embrace.
(7) “Make Sure to Check Your Camera Settings” — a funny Flash reference at Cheezburger.
(8) Today In History –
- 1926: A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh was published.
- 1947: Capt. Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager pilots the rocket-powered Bell X-1 to a speed of Mach 1.07, becoming the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.
(9) John ONeill profiled The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volumes 1-3 at Black Gate.
The lack of a complete collection of Clifford D. Simak’s short stories has been keenly felt among many old-school fans. So as you can imagine, I was delighted to discover that Open Road Media has undertaken the first comprehensive collection of all of Simak’s short stories — including his science fiction, fantasy, and western fiction. The first three books, I Am Crying All Inside, The Big Front Yard, and The Ghost of a Model T, go on sale later this month.
All three, like all six volumes announced so far, are edited by David W. Wixon, the Executor of Simak’s Literary Estate. Wixon, a close friend of Simak, contributes an introduction to each volume, and short intros to each story, providing a little background on its publishing history and other interesting tidbits.
As a special treat the first volume, I Am Crying All Inside, includes the never-before-published “I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air,” originally written in 1973 for Harlan Ellison’s famously unpublished anthology Last Dangerous Visions, and finally pried out of Ellison’s unrelenting grip after 42 very long years.
(10) Margaret Hamilton’s pioneering work on NASA computers is covered by Wired in “Her code got humans on the moon – and invented software itself”.
Then, as now, “the guys” dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today’s diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier. It might surprise today’s software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day.
As Hamilton’s career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code for the world’s first portable computer. She became an expert in systems programming and won important technical arguments. “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it,” Hamilton says.
She’s an unsung heroine of Apollo 8, because she got them home after a fatal input error in the spacecraft somebody at NASA insisted would never happen.
(11) Scientists measured the erosion of terrestrial river rocks to deduce — “Pebbles on Mars Shaped by Ancient Long-Gone Rivers Dozens of Miles Long”.
Using publicly available images of the rounded pebbles on Mars from the Curiosity rover mission, the scientists calculated that those rocks had lost about 20 percent of their volume. When they factored in the reduced Martian gravity, which is only about 40 percent of Earth’s, they estimated that the pebbles had traveled about 30 miles (50 km) from their source, perhaps from the northern rim of Gale Crater.
(12) NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been used to produced new maps of Jupiter – the first in a series of annual portraits of the solar system’s outer planets.
New imagery from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is revealing details never before seen on Jupiter. High-resolution maps and spinning globes (rendered in the 4k Ultra HD format) are the first products to come from a program to study the solar system’s outer planets each year using Hubble. The observations are designed to capture a broad range of features, including winds, clouds, storms and atmospheric chemistry. These annual studies will help current and future scientists see how such giant worlds change over time.
(13) Well, this is bizarre, but extremely well-edited (NSFW) humor video, a mashup of Hitchcock’s movies with Jimmy Stewart and Kubrick’s sf/horror movies.
(14) Free Nick Mamatas!
No, no, you don’t need to bail him out — just read his story free on the Glittership webpage (or listen to it on the podcast) — Episode #18 — “Eureka!” by Nick Mamatas.
Adam hadn’t worn the crushed velvet blouse in his hands for a long time. It was from his goth phase, twenty pounds and twenty years prior. He shuddered at the thought of it distending around his spare tire these days, but he couldn’t bring himself to put it in the box he’d set aside for Out of the Closet either. And not only because it would be embarrassing if anyone saw it.
There were memories in the wrinkles of the velvet—well, not memories exactly. Half-memories, images and glimpses and smells. Two decades of gimlets and bad decisions and a few teeth and a trio of cross-country moves. What was the place? It was Huggy Bear’s on Thursdays, when they played disco for a majority black clientele, but on most nights it was just The Bank. A real bank, in the sepia-toned days when great-grandma worked in an Orchard Street sweatshop, a goth/darkwave club now….
(15) Kameron Hurley interviewed at SFFWorld:
With The Mirror Empire, you’ve challenged many genre assumptions/expectations/tropes, most notably genre roles and expectations. What other genre expectations did you seek to challenge but instead readers accepted easily?
So far readers have pretty much balked at everything I thought they would, though I admit I’ve been surprised at the reactions to Anavha, which were far more perplexed and passionate than I anticipated. It seemed like a fairly straightforward plotline to me, but putting characters with unexpected genders into those roles surprised people. I think it really made them think hard about reading abusive relationships like that in other books.
(16) Steve Davidson, taking as his sample the recommendations made so far at Sad Puppies 4, theorizes quite reasonably that works available for free are more likely to be recommended for awards. By implication, he wonders what will happen to authors who like to get paid.
I do believe that there is a distinct trend represented: freely available, easily accessible works may very well swamp the nominations – if those works are given a little initial traction by readers, like including them on a recommendation list, because (I belabor), the fewer “objections” you place between a consumer and a potentially desirable product, the more likely they are to “buy”. In other words, “click here and invest a few minutes” is far more attractive than “click here, pull out your credit card, wait for delivery, invest a few minutes”.
(17) Brandon Kempner latest survey “Hugo/Nebula Contenders and Popularity, October 2015” for Chaos Horizons. I’m late picking this up, and as Kempner notes in the post, Leckie’s book was still on the way when he wrote it.
Last year, I tried to track Goodreads stats a measure of popularity. This year, I’m tracking both Amazon and Goodreads.
I’ve been disappointed in both of those measures; neither seems particularly accurate or consistent, and they don’t seem to predict the eventual Hugo/Nebula winner at all. What is useful about them, though, is getting at least an early picture of what is popular and what is not. I do believe there is a minimum popularity cut off, where if you fall below a certain level (1000-2000 Goodreads votes), you don’t have much of a shot at winning a Hugo or Nebula. This also allows good comparisons between books that are similar to each other. If you think Uprooted and Sorcerer to the Crown are both contenders as “experimental”-ish fantasy books, one of those (Uprooted) is 10 times more popular than the other. If you had to pick between one of them being nominated, go with Novik.
(18) Dawn Witzke, in “Taking Sides” , says George R.R. Martin has convinced her to pick a side.
[GRRM] I have no objection to someone starting a people’s choice award for SF. Hell, I might even win it, since I have the sort of mass following that tends to dominate such awards. But it would not be as meaningful to me as winning a Hugo.
[Nitzke] There is no need to start a people’s choice award for SFF, one already exists. You may have heard of it, it’s called the Hugo Awards. And, I believe you might have won one of those once. After reading Game of Thrones, I can say it was definitely worthy of Hugo. (Trust me, that’s not a good thing.)
I do want to thank you, Mr. Martin. Without your rich elitist bullshit, I might have continued to sit on the sidelines again this year. Instead, I will be forking over the cash for a membership, because those of us who can’t afford to blow money on cons are just as much true fans as those who can. So you can go stuff it in your asterisk.
(19) Not everyone is tired of the subject —
https://twitter.com/horriblychris/status/654462570842091520
(20) Talk about a really sad puppy – William Shatner:
William Shatner is exploring strange new worlds in trash-talking his former “Star Trek” co-star George Takei.
Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk on the iconic sci-fi series, lashed out at Takei in an interview with Australia’s news.com.au published Monday.
“He is a very disturbed individual, the truth of the matter is,” Shatner said of Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu on the series and subsequent movie franchise. “I don’t know him. I haven’t seen him in 25 years, I don’t know what he is up to. It is not a question that has any meaning to me. It is like asking about George Foreman or something.”
And when asked about director J.J. Abrams, who is currently filming Star Trek Beyond, he told the Australian press:
“No matter what plans I make it is J.J. Abrams who makes the plans and no I don’t think he is planning anything with me,” Shatner said. “I would love to. In one year it will be our 50th anniversary and that is incredible.”
(21) “California nixes warrantless search of digital data” —
In what’s being called a landmark victory for digital privacy, California police will no longer be able to get their hands on user data without first getting a warrant from a judge.
Governor Jerry Brown on Thursday signed the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), SB 178, which requires state law enforcement to get a warrant before they can access electronic information about who we are, where we go, who we know, and what we do.
US privacy rights groups have long been concerned that law enforcement hasn’t considered it necessary to get a search warrant before they can search messages, email, photos and other digital data stored on mobile phones or company servers.
States such as California, tired of waiting around for Congress to update 29-year-old federal electronic privacy statutes, are taking reform into their own hands.
(22) H.G. Wells took a shot at foretelling the future — “A Peek Ahead” at Futility Closet tells you how well he scored.
Readers of the London Evening Standard saw a startling headline on Nov. 10, 1971: “The Prophecy H.G. Wells Made About Tonight’s Standard.” Wells had published a story in 1932 in which a man unaccountably receives a copy of the newspaper from 40 years in the future. “He found himself surveying a real evening newspaper,” Wells wrote, “which was dealing so far as he could see at the first onset, with the affairs of another world.”
Most of “The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper” is devoted to Wells’ prophecies regarding world events in 1971, and most of these, unfortunately, are misses. Newspapers today are printed in color and the Soviet Union has fallen, but geothermal energy has not replaced the age of combustion, body clothing has not (quite) been reduced to a minimum, finance and nationalism still thrive, gorillas are not extinct, the human birthrate has not dropped to “seven in the thousand,” and there are no plans to add a 13th month to the year.
(23) Here’s a massive cosplay photo gallery from New York Comic Con. (Activate by clicking on arrows in upper right corner of image displayed for Slideshow #1 and Slideshow #2.)
Look for an amazing Raiden, an outstanding Mr. Freeze, a spot-on Nosferatu, and a glorious Muto from Godzilla. Spider-Woman, Hawkgirl, Princess Amidala, Mystique, gender-swapped Booster Gold, Ratchet, Venom… the list goes on and on! Take a look at the slideshows below and share your favorites in the comments!
(24) The sf magazine market contraction predicted by Neil Clarke is not far off, but L. Jagi Lamplighter doesn’t want it to begin with Sci Phi Journal, so she is making an appeal for donations.
Jagi, here. I learned this morning that Sci Phi Journal needs help.
For those who don’t know it, Sci Phi Journal offers science fiction stories that have a philosophy to them. It is one of the few periodicals offering a place to the kind of stories that Sad Puppies stood for…in fact, it was on the Hugo ballot this year, as was one of the stories that appeared in it (“On A Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli).
Sci Phi offers a venue for the very kinds of stories that we all want to read but seldom get to see. It features some of the best new authors, like Josh Young and Brian Niemeyer, and a number of others. Both John and I have had stories appear in its pages.
It would be a real shame if it folded!
What can you all do to help?
If you should feel moved to make a donation, you can do so here. (The donate button is on the right. You may need to page down.)
(25) Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam will appear at Live Talks Los Angeles on October 19, 2015 at the Alex Theatre. It’s the launch event for Gilliam’s memoir. He gave an interview to a local paper to promote the appearance.
What led you to write the book?
It really was supposed to be a book about just my art — whatever my art is — starting with childhood cartoons. My daughter Holly assembled a chronology of the work I’ve done. I would sit with a microphone and talk about it. Somewhere along the line, the publisher says “Oh, God, this is better as an autobiography.” It ended up being that, even though it’s a very incomplete one. I refer to it as my “Grand Theft Autobiography.” It’s a high-speed chase, crashing around the place, a lot of bodies left all over the place. It’s not the great summation of my life in the last hours of my life.
What was your reaction when you started digging into the art you had made?
I was surprised because I don’t linger in the past. Things I’d done over the years had been filed away. Holly had been archiving and dredging this stuff out. The other day I found something and I thought, “God, I can’t believe I could draw that well 20 years ago!” I can’t draw that well anymore.
(26) A Back To The Future prediction still has an opportunity to come true.
At one moment in the 1989 film a billboard reveals the Chicago Cubs have won the 2015 World Series, the joke being that the Cubs hadn’t won the baseball World Series since 1908 and likely never would do.
“A hundred-to-one shot,” the charity fundraiser jokes with Marty, “I wish I could go back to the beginning of the season and put some money on the Cubs!”
But now it’s looking like the Chicago team could actually win the 2015 World Series.
The Chicago Cubs beat the St. Louis Cardinals this week to proceed to the National League Championship Series (NLCS) and will face the New York Mets or LA Dodgers on Saturday for the chance to play in the coveted World Series. Think of it as a sort of regional semi-final for the biggest game of the baseball season.
The film’s writer Bob Gale said he chose the Cubs as the winning 2015 team as a joke, saying: “Being a baseball fan, I thought, ‘OK, let’s come up with one of the most unlikely scenarios we can think of’.”
The Dodgers, if they advance, will have to start the back end of their rotation which would really boost the Cubs’ chances. No time-traveling DeLorean will be swooping in from 1963 delivering Koufax and Drysdale to save LA.
(27) A high-tech prank — Real Mjolnir (Electromagnet, Fingerprint Scanner)
A replica of Mjolnir (Thor’s Hammer) from The Avengers that’s pretty much unliftable unless you’ve got my fingerprints!
[Thanks to Cathy, David K.M. Klaus, Will R.,and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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The Wired article isn’t entirely right – according to the Smithsonian, computer programming used to be considered women’s work.
PJ Evans, there was a thing in that article that quoted Shatner as saying Takei’s wedding was a “publicity stunt”. Really? A wedding as a publicity stunt???? I mean, I’m sure such things happen in Hollywood, but I’d like to believe that most weddings are because of, oh, I dunno, love and all that…
(And Takei is still married, by all accounts happily, so that rather debunks that accusation.)
Honestly, that sort of statement uses up quite a lot of my stock of benefit-of-the-doubt.
.
I just looked this up, since I was curious.
The short version is that Takei didn’t invite Shatner to the wedding, which didn’t bother Shatner (he says that hardly know each other), but apparently he DID talk to the media about not inviting Shatner because he doesn’t like him, and Shatner got angry about (as he saw it) Takei using the occasion of his wedding to attack Shatner’s character.
Here’s a link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/22/william-shatner-slams-geo_n_136781.html
@Meredith: Thanks for doing comics bracket heads-ups. Just a note here that round 4 closes in about four hours.
I expect nothing less from one of the good denizens of the File.
@rob_omatic
I have to admit, the Puppies have made me better about reviewing books I love on Amazon. It would appear that spray bottles and rolled up newspapers will be needed; a few minutes to keep the books one enjoyed from being overwhelmed by the derp.
@Aarron
Also, amidst the Puppy word salad, there’s one thing I’ve noticed once I took another look at the SP4 organizing: since when has various Vampire or furry or what have you erotica been the “the good old stuff?” Heinlein certainly kept his characters uses of a ray gun limited… No judgment if that’s what you like. But in the last few months, “no judgment if that’s what you like” has very much not been the Puppy attitude, as either they like it, or its worthless trash that people only like because of affirmative action. It is perplexing. Looking at some of those pictures and novel covers, I’d never figured John Wright as the stiletto boots type…
@Laura Reznick, Takei says he did send a wedding invitation to Shatner. LINK.
Right now, all we have is he-said/he-said. (I know, the more usual form is “he-said/she-said”, but that doesn’t quite work in this instance…)
Short of interrogating the wedding planner, I don’t know of any way to determine who is telling the truth. I don’t think Shatner’s made himself look particularly good, regardless. <wry> I’d be more than a little irritated to be told that MY wedding was a “publicity stunt”….
Re: Takei & Shatner:
In The View From the Bridge, the memoir of writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who directed the 2nd Star Trek movie (and wrote movies 4 & 6, I think). He was new to ST when he started directing The Wrath of Khan, didn’t know any of the actors but was aware of the ST phenomenon. There’s a paragraph or two about the first couple of days on the set, as they’re all settling into the work, where he reflects on how odd this must all be for them.
He said it was clear that although people think of them as a team, because their characters are such an iconic and loyal team, it was clear that most of them, despite knowing each other a long time, didn’t know each other well, and didn’t feel any particular connection to each other. He wondered what it was like for them to be irrevocably part of this international phenomenon and identified with the ST universe for the rest of their lives, and to repeatedly encounter each other for the rest of their lives, all due solely to a single instance of casting that had occurred almost 20 years earlier
You’re right. We have no way of knowing. And, yes, a dignified silence or a “I just want what’s good for the team” sort of non-comment in the press would have been the best course of action.
Laura/Cassy: Surely the question of whether Takei “DID talk to the media about not inviting Shatner because he doesn’t like him” is not a “he said/he said” thing. Either Takei said such a thing to the press or he didn’t; I’ve never seen any evidence that he did.
Personally, the “publicity stunt” line, and the general attitude on display in that Huffington Post interview (dismissing the importance of coming out— “you’re gay, who cares?”— immediately after acknowledging that having to be closeted for decades must have been a terrible thing), would be enough to put someone on my permanent asshole list.
Btw, the whole mess did at least provide a nice moment at the very end of “To Be Takei” where San Francisco drag performer Leigh Crow impersonates Shatner in public to hilarious and rather sweet effect.
Interesting to compare the books on Chaos Horizon’s list with some of this year’s popular YA SFF titles. I understand why Brandon didn’t include them, but if he had, there are quite a few that would have made the top of the list by a wide margin. Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard, for example, has about three times as many ratings on Goodreads as Armada.
But Goodreads tends to lean hard toward YA. I suspect that’s why A Darker Shade of Magic (i.e. an adult title by an author with a lot of YA fans) ranks so strongly in Goodreads even though it hasn’t had quite the same buzz in Hugo voter circles as some of the other titles on the list.
It used to be the football equivalent of the Apocalypse Series was the Minnesota Vikings playing the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl. (Wasn’t that the match up in The Sum of All Fears that was cut short?) That was ruined by Denver winning the Super Bowl. So the new equivalent would be the Vikings and the Buffalo Bills.
The Cleveland Indians haven’t won the World Series since 1948 so they’re the American League team with the longest World Series drought. But they didn’t make it this year. The Mets, Dodgers, Blue Jays and Royals all have waited around 20-30 years since their last World Series victory which isn’t nearly as impressive.
Just remember, “When the little bears from the city of the big wind win the World Series, then you shall know the end is nigh.”
Long after Star Trek on TV had been canceled, Shatner came through a dinner theater where I worked and he was, well, pretty much of a diva. When you’re a big star, you can be a diva. When you are at a dinner theater because your TV series has been canceled and that’s pretty much the only acting gig you can get, you should probably be more careful. He was pretty much the opposite of easy to get along with, let’s just put it that way. Although I did not see the incident, everybody was talking about a rehearsal during which he went ballistic and kicked over half the set. So, anyway, I am inclined to take Takei’s side of this, having formed an opinion of Shatner based on his conduct in a different setting.
@Stevie
I am always puzzled, considering the UK has an official state religion and the USA does not, that the USA always seems much more explicitly and publicly religious than we do.
I have on occasion during this kerfuffle declared my religious beliefs as a counter to Puppies insisting everyone against them is anti-Christian, but I’ve always felt rather uncomfortable with it. Religion is, in my opinion, and I think largely the opinion of a lot of the UK, a largely personal matter and the concern only of those who also share it.
@Microtherion
The problem the Puppies have had for much of this affair is an inability to deliver on the goods. If they’d put good stuff on the ballot, slating would still be wrong, but at least people would have been less offended about having to slog through rubbish. Not even delivering on their primary story aims as well as not delivering on quality is just the icing on the cake.
@McJulie
I’m ending up rather paranoid about what I might let slide as a Filer. 🙂
@Susana S.P.
I only read a little way in and that was more than enough. Disgusting story. I would also like to know if Cally stocks brain-soap!
@Jim Henley
Go you!
@David Goldfarb
You’ve put the work in and I’d hate for people to miss the bracket. 🙂
@Laura Resnick
Whereas the Next Generation crew seem to think of themselves very much as a team or extended family, and from what I understand Deep Space Nine was somewhere between the two. I wonder what goes into making an acting team vs people who just happen to work together?
Allow me to introduce my very own line of quality Brain-Bleach, designed to fade, if not erase, the stains caused by puppy incontinence and other disgusting internet messes….*
While quantities last! Buy two, get one free! Same-day shipping!
(*no warranty is made, express or implied, as to Brain-Bleach’s efficacy on concentrated vileness. Use only as directed on label. Not to be taken internally.)
Meredith on October 15, 2015 at 12:04 pm said:
… Whereas the Next Generation crew seem to think of themselves very much as a team or extended family, and from what I understand Deep Space Nine was somewhere between the two. I wonder what goes into making an acting team vs people who just happen to work together?
Some of it might have to do with having been the first ST, so that when fandom suddenly happened it came as a surprise.
I mean, I had heard that the actor who played the Sheriff of Nottingham experienced kids treating him like a villain, so the whole actor/role confusion is clearly nothing new.
But I’m pretty sure OS was the Big Bang of fandom proper.
Those guys had no idea what was hitting them, and it took a while for the reality to set in.
(Cf. the changing titles of Nimoy’s autobiographies.)
For the later series, people signing on pretty much understood about the longevity of the project they were becoming involved with, which might well lead to a different attitude going in.
Not to mention just the vagaries of different people’s characters, of course.
Cassy B on October 15, 2015 at 12:13 pm said:
Allow me to introduce my very own line of quality Brain-Bleach, designed to fade, if not erase, the stains caused by puppy incontinence and other disgusting internet messes….*
While quantities last! Buy two, get one free! Same-day shipping!
(*no warranty is made, express or implied, as to Brain-Bleach’s efficacy on concentrated vileness. Use only as directed on label. Not to be taken internally.)
But I’d have to arise from my swooning couch to receive delivery.
I’m considering going into a Decline as a result of dealing with the first and last rolls of the dice.
The horror of that moment, I shall never never forget!
At the very least, I’m going to hide here amongst the cats, whimpering in anticipation of the next round.
Begging for Filer knowledge:
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett and The Black Guard by A.J. Smith are both in the Kindle UK Daily Deal today – either of them any good? Worth getting? Dark or not dark?
Cassy, I’ll take a case or five! Are all the hucksters around here named Ca**y?
Re: public declarations of religion, the cherry on top with Dawn Witzke is that she writes Catholic novels. I just… no.
I’ll shut up about this now, and go read Magonia.
Which reminds me, The March North was great, and exactly like nothing else I’ve read. I can’t recommend it enough.
@von Dimpleheimer Yes, finding the right search term on the library web sites does seem to be important. Glad you got it to work!
I thought Dark Eden was decent and didn’t find it particularly dark in tone (although the setting is a difficult one for the characters).
@Susanna S.P., as it happens, Cally is my clone. (I keep her around for spare parts….)
As you are my Very First Customer, let me throw in this Unicorn Chaser*
(*No liability is accepted if unicorn turns and chases you…)
And The March North is going on my Hugo ballot, unless I read about three more really amazing novels this year. And Graydon Saunders is going on my Campbell ballot, even if he’s not sure he’s sold enough to qualify. After all, he’s BOUND to sell more copies before the end of the year. I’ll let the Hugo Administrators sort that out.
That unicorn looks like he’s running away from something very fast.
Wait, this isn’t Soylent brand bleach, is it?
(I’m sure it’s news to exactly no one, but I just recently found out that Soylent was now a drink you could buy, and I still haven’t gotten over the bogglement.)
You know, you’ve put your finger on something. Some time ago somebody I know in s work environment, addressing a group that included me, very solemnly stated that he was “a Christian”. It made me feel incredibly embarrassed and not a little put out for reasons I couldn’t really state clearly. I knew he was, actually, and the closer I could come to giving a reason for my disquiet was that in the UK, most of the people he was addressing were very likely of some Christian denomination or other (even if lapsed, like me). So it felt like he was declaring that he was more Christian than we were, sort of a capital C Christian. That was, I think, disrespectful, although I realise that the terminology doesn’t help here.
But there is also the specifically UK thing of “religion is a personal affair”. It’s ok to mention in conversation with friends: in an official setting… awkward.
Actually something similar goes in Italy. Of course most people in Italy are Catholics, sort of, for values of Catholics that include “I last saw the inside of a church when I got married”. That would not stop pugnacious atheists taking issues with affirmations of devoutness. We had pugnacious atheists* long before Dawkins made them a publishing phenomenon, although when you live in the shadow of the Vatican you have a much better excuse**.
*Technically anticlericals. Some of them may be deists or some such.
** Full disclosure, I was one. I have become a lot softer towards the Catholic Church since I moved to a theoretically Protestant country.
@Susana S.P., Cassy Brand Brain-Bleach is certified inorganic; no carbon atoms were harmed in the manufacture of this product. <noddy-nod>
(I have a different sister, not Cally, who loves Soylent. Me, I can’t get past the name…)
@Meredith:
In some ways, I think it’s because the UK has a state religion that it’s less religious. State-sponsored religions can tend to become bland because they are never allowed to upset the apple-cart.
The USA, on the other hand, was largely settled originally by people who were fleeing religious persecution so they could go to a place where they could be the ones doing the persecuting; many of those people were never really on-board with the idea of not having a state-sanctioned religion (and several of the original colonies did have one). Then you get to the multiple ‘Great Awakenings’ which involved charismatic preachers creating their own sects (several of which, such as the Mormons and the Seventh Day Adventists, are still around today), and those weren’t stomped out at the time because the government officially had no say in religion. The end result is hundreds if not thousands of vaguely related variant Christian groups, many no larger than a single church, each of which is convinced they are the ‘one true faith’. And that’s even before we get into things like the Southern Baptists which started as a group actively focused on biblical justifications for slavery.
The USA is pretty much unique in the way it became a mix-and-match source for so many different variants on religion.
Susana S.P. on October 15, 2015 at 12:56 pm said:
The real product named Soylent is actually close to what Harry Harrison originally imagined. I don’t know if it’s actually based on the book—it seems unlikely, but not wholly improbable. Harrison’s Soylent was made from….soya and lentils. The more famous ingredient was only added in the movie.
Of course, more people are familiar with the movie version, so the choice of the name for a real product does seem…unfortunate.
Greg Hullender: In #16, Steve Davidson thinks that difficulty of access will make people less likely to nominate works from Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF. That’s sad because they’ve definitely got the best stories.
I don’t think that’s true. It may have been at one time, but at this point, I think that other online magazines have caught up with them, even surpassed them in some cases. Certainly the Analog stories on the Puppy slate were a huge disappointment — to the extent that me ever getting a sub to that magazine is now hugely unlikely. And it does not reassure me as to the objectivity of the reviews at RSR if you’re expressing that belief.
I don’t participate in Kindle Unlimited because even though it would be financially advantageous for me to do so, its payment system is exploitative of, and unfair to, authors whose continued productivity I wish to support. And unfortunately, my library’s online magazine inventory does not include any SFF-themed titles.
@Cassy B – I’ll let the Hugo Administrators sort that out.
They’re going to point out that The March North was published in 2014.
rob_matic: For some comic relief, let’s all enjoy this particularly fine example of the hate-bombing of the reviews of Ancillary Mercy on Amazon:
Reviewer who has only ever reviewed one book, this one, so clearly a grudge review: Leckie’s vison of an all-female fighting force is offensively condescending to women in the military everywhere… Leckie’s attempt to depict a female military is a complete disaster.
So, even though this person may have read the book (or part of it), they didn’t actually understand what they were reading.
@Jack Lint
Yes, but the Jays last appearance in the playoffs was 23 years ago. The Mets last playoff appearance was 2006, the Dodgers and Royals were in the playoffs last year. It’s a very different situation, especially considering the Jays spent two decades behind the two highest spending teams in baseball.
@Meredith
Declan Finn has always been one of the more odious of the Puppies in my opinion, skittering around the leaders, offering up his badly written revenge porn, giggling like the inspiration for Salacious B Crumb. Whenever he pops up, I’m reminded of the Aaron Sorkin line: “I don’t think you’re the Devil. I think you’re the guy that runs out to pick up the Devil a pack of cigarettes.”
Only a couple of hours left to getcha vote in on the fourth round of the comics bracket! Don’t miss your chance to buy a forehead cloth and curse the dice! Next round is the first fifth one so you’ll want your favourites to get to that. 😉
@Graydon, <headdesk> which is why I *meant* to write A Succession of Bad Days. Somehow, I got the order flipped in my head. My notes, however, show the correct title…
Sorry ’bout that.
@JJ
RSR mark up other reviewers opinions as well in a very helpful way, but I believe the scores are the opinion of Greg and another?
Personally, if I had one magazine for my desert island it would be Lightspeed, and Analog isn’t impressing me much, although I will try them again at some point.
You make a good point about Kindle Unlimited.
In 2003(?) I went on a GeekCruise that shared a ship and organization staff with a TrekCruise. Wil Wheaton, who was booked for both, gave a reading/performance that had the refrain “William F*cking Shatner”. It was very funny in parts (I have seldom laughed as hard as I did then) but it did not shine a very pleasant light on Mr. Shatner’s behavior. In the discussion period afterward, a few people mentioned cases where they had encountered Mr. Shatner in non-theatrical contexts, and his behavior and attitude was unpleasant. (I think one of the anecdotes involved a horse show of some kind.)
There were also rumors floating around the big NYC Star Trek conventions in the late 70s that advised avoiding Shatner.
Regardless, I have been thinking of him for many years now and “William F*cking Shatner” and tend to avoid his performances. It’s sort of the same phenomenon as thinking about reading wors associated with the canines.
@Meredith
“I am always puzzled, considering the UK has an official state religion”
Scotland excepted of course, up here the national church is the Presbyterian Church of Scotland which is not state controlled and the queen is an ordinary member not its head. Then you have the various breakaway Wee Free’s out on the islands.
Personally I’m agnostic, which means I get to be irritated by both the excessively religious and those who think using terms like “sky fairy” is funny.
@IanP
You’re right; I didn’t make the distinction between national(s) (Christian of various flavours, and what I was thinking of) and state (England-specific). Thank you for the reminder!
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan wrote: Of course most people in Italy are Catholics, sort of, for values of Catholics that include “I last saw the inside of a church when I got married”.
Now I’m remembering the line Michael Green (The Art of Coarse $ACTIVITY) liked to quote: “The first time I went into a church, they threw water over me; the second time, confetti; the third time it’ll be earth.”
Dex:
1993 (playoffs and World Series) was 22 years ago, although it was a repeat, sort of, of 1992.
I wish them all well, but I seem to be sitting this one out until the Series starts.
very solemnly stated that he was “a Christian”
In a US context, I’d assume he was some version of fundamentalist Protestant.
Aaron: Quite a few interesting points in your CapClave report. One I wanted to underline — you bought books from Larry Smith? Therefore I can deduce he’s not only out of the hospital but back in business? I haven’t seen anyone mention that til now.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan: Considering the few hundred years worth of…contentiousness…about religion in England, “religion is a personal affair” was probably the sanest attitude to take.
(Added because edit of prevous comment timed out.)
Steven King could very well have been involved in an Apocalypse Series. Had 2004 gone to Game 7, it
1) Would’ve been played on Halloween in Fenway.
2) Might’ve had Red Sox reliever Mike Myers pitch (same name as villain in Hallloween)
3) Probably would’ve had King throwing out the first pitch.
Not to mention the lunar eclipse that happened during when Game 5 would’ve been played. I figure something Cthulhu-like would’ve erupted from around second base during the seventh inning stretch.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan: it felt like he was declaring that he was more Christian than we were, sort of a capital C Christian. That was, I think, disrespectful, although I realise that the terminology doesn’t help here.
IanP: Personally I’m agnostic, which means I get to be irritated by both the excessively religious and those who think using terms like “sky fairy” is funny.
As an agnostic who would be an atheist but for recognizing (due to many years of working with computer programming) that it’s never a good idea to claim that I know anything for absolute certain, I don’t think making fun of other peoples’ religions is amusing or appropriate.
But I find the propensity of many religious people in the U.S. for declaring that their particular flavor of religion is somehow superior to others (often in relation to Islam, but quite frequently to other versions of Christianity) absolutely ludicrous to the point where I’ve utterly lost patience with having to hear it.
Meredith, Anna, Jenora
People get so confused about the nature of the Established Churches of England and Scotland that the Queen herself devoted some time to explaining it; it’s worth bearing in mind also that HRH is passionately committed to the Commonwealth, which has no Established Churchs beyond England and Scotland, and has a huge variety of religions outside Christianity in its many and varied forms.
I suspect that England has more diversity of religion and spiritualities, including none at all, than the US, simply because our Empire was before the U.S. Empire, and we are handily geographically located for the influx of populations. London itself was, for a century or more, the busiest port in the world, and wherever ships dock they bring populations with them; sailors were paid off at the end of the voyage, and thus the East End of London, and other British ports, became home to an extraordinary variety of people. If you’ve ever wondered how Lascars arose to provide stock villains for pulp fiction then the answer is that they got off a boat.
I suppose that the bottom line is that the Elizabethan settlement worked:
is not exactly a battlecry for the inalienable right to persecute someone who disagrees with you over trifles. I appreciate that Puppidum has difficulty in grasping that…
RE: Starfleet Battles
Admittedly, I have no more special insight than the next person, but I’ve always felt the bitterness could be traced to a couple of big things: blaming Shatner for fouling Takei’s grand plans for Sulu Excelsior spinoffs and Shatner choosing not to take the stage with the full cast with an ailing Doohan just before he died.
Takei did the Capt. Sulu Adventures audiobooks with Simon & Shuster and was planning a weekly TV series Entitled Captain Sulu, circa 1994:http://www.amazon.com/Transformations-Star-Trek-Captain-Adventure/dp/067188624X
Silly But True
NickPheas: Witzke has published my comment saying that the Hugos was never a Good Reads/People’s Choice style mass participation award and agreeing it’s silly to pretend that things are something they’re not, pointing out that the Hugos don’t call for any involvement in Worldcon fandom apart from deep pockets. I can’t be bothered to explain that “joining the convention as a supporting member” and “paying the membership fee” are different ways of describing the same thing.
I see from the comments there that the Puppies remain woefully ignorant of the definition of “poll tax”, and of the fact that Hugo nominating and voting rights are merely one of the perks of purchasing a Supporting Membership and not the reason for the existence of the Supporting Membership.
Half my family is nominally Irish Catholic and the other half is nominally Church of England and (truthfully or not) family legend says it hails from Oliver Cromwell’s sister. For obvious reasons, I don’t even discuss religion with my extended family most of the time. 😉
Meredith
I think that’s an amazingly good idea!
@Cassy B — no worries!
I’m entirely delighted you like either Commonweal book that much.