(1) Martin Morse Wooster opened my eyes to a previously unrealized fact — Wil Wheaton is a celebrity homebrewer.
On November 7, 2015, the American Homebrewers Association hosts Learn to Homebrew Day across the country. This year, celebrity homebrewers Wil Wheaton and Kyle Hollingsworth have teamed up with the AHA to promote the celebration! Kyle and the AHA created a video together, which can be viewed here.
Wheaton even has a dedicated blog for his homebrew activities – Devils Gate Brewing. He’s also appeared on Brewing TV.
(2) While researching the homebrew story, I observed Wheaton deliver this absolute home truth —
https://twitter.com/wilw/status/653255766992814080
(3) Crowdfunding conventions doesn’t always work. The fans who’d like to hold Phoenix Sci-Fi Con 2016 have only managed to raise $50 of the $12,500 goal in 13 days. The last donation was almost a week ago.
(4) “Neiman” has launched a new science-fiction and fantasy news aggregator, Madab, which is the word for “sci-fi” in Hebrew. (Says Neiman: “It fits, since I’m an Israeli in origin.”) The website focuses on books and written stuff, and follows more than a hundred sources.
(5) Zoë Heller, in “How Does an Author’s Reputation Shape Your Response to a Book?” for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, said about her experience as a slush pile reader:
The important thing was to send back manuscripts at a steady rate and to keep the slush pile low. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Under my supervision, the slush pile grew and grew until it became several tottering ziggurats of slush. I’d like to say that it was the thought of dashing writers’ hopes that paralyzed me. But I was quite heartless about that. What stopped me in my tracks was the dread of having to make independent literary judgments. I had never before been asked to evaluate writing that was utterly reputation-less and imprimatur-less. In college I had read I.A. Richards’s famous study, ‘Practical Criticism,’ in which Richards asked Cambridge undergraduates to assess poems without telling the students who had written them. The point of the experiment was to show how, when deprived of contextual clues, students ended up making embarrassingly ‘wrong’ judgments about what was good and bad. I was convinced that the slush pile was my own ‘Practical Criticism’ challenge and that I was going to be revealed as a fraud, with no real powers of literary discrimination.
Andrew Porter made a comment about his own experiences, which the Times published:
I read the slush pile at “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction” for 8 years, from 1966 to 1974, going in once a week to sort through anywhere from 100 to 140 unsolicited manuscripts. The ultra-short stories of under 500 words were usually rejected—none of the writers measured up to Fredric Brown, master of the short-short—while poetry, seldom published, also got the boot. Holiday stories sent in during the holidays were also rejected; most authors have no idea what sort of lead time magazines require. Then there were so many stories with punchline endings: “We’ll go to the third planet: the natives call it ‘Earth'” or “Eve? Gosh, my name’s Adam!” Some of those were 25,000 words, and most ended badly.
Occasionally there was a gem among the dross; I pulled Suzette Haden Elgin’s first published story from the piles, and it went on to be published and anthologized many times.
I was paid a pittance, yes ($25 a week), but did my best by the magazine and the authors. We sent them rejection forms, with sometimes a note encouraging more submissions—which was usually a mistake; they sent in their vast files of unpublishable stories. But sometimes…
All life is a is a judgement call, whether of unpublished stories, where to live, who to marry, or what to have for dinner. Heller failed the writers and her employers. I hope her subsequent life judgements have been wiser.
(6) Aaron Pound’s well-written CapClave report on Dreaming About Other Worlds ends with this insight:
After the convention, I spoke with my mother on the phone. She had traveled to New York to visit my sister for the weekend, and she was somewhat perplexed that the redhead and I had gone to CapClave rather than New York ComicCon. While the redhead and I enjoy big conventions with tens of thousands of attendees every now and then – we have been to DragonCon once, and we go to GenCon every year – there is simply no substitute for the congenial and friendly atmosphere of the smaller fan run conventions like CapClave, Balticon, Chessiecon, and the hundreds of other small conventions that take place every year. The blunt truth is that the large professionally run media conventions like New York ComicCon are simply exhausting. New York ComicCon had about 170,000 attendees this year. CapClave had about 400. To attend almost any panel at New York ComicCon, you have to wait in line, often for hours. You might be able to see stars like Chris Evans, George Takei, or Carrie Fischer, but you’ll likely see them from the back of an auditorium as they speak to a couple of thousand people. Or if you want a personal interaction you’ll pay for the privilege, and you will likely only be able to interact with them for a minute or two. At CapClave, on the other hand, the panels are small and interactive. I have never had to spend any appreciable time waiting in line for anything. Most of the authors who attend are more than happy to sit down and talk with you, whether after a panel, sitting in the con suite, or simply while hanging out at the hotel bar. An event like New York ComicCon is a spectacle, while CapClave, by contrast, is a conversation. There is room for both in the genre fiction world, but as for myself, I prefer the conversation.
(7) A Brian K. Vaughn comic may be made into a TV series.
After years of trying, Hollywood finally threw in the towel last year and stopped trying to make a movie version of Y: The Last Man. Brian K. Vaughan’s epic 60-issue series recounts the adventures of Yorick Brown, his pet monkey Ampersand, and all the ladies on Earth who want a piece of him because he is—spoiler alert—the last man, after a mysterious plague kills everything with a Y chromosome except for him. After the rights were returned to Vaughan following New Line dropping the ball on the films, it was unclear if anything would ever happen with it, given the creator had left television and was concentrating on comics once more.
But much like astronauts returning to Earth from the International Space Station, Y: The Last Man has returned to the world of filmed adaptations. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the sci-fi comic is being developed into a series for cable channel FX. Along with producers Nina Jacobsen and Brad Simpson, the network is looking for a writer to develop the show with Vaughan.
(8) Ross Andersen reports on “The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy” for The Atlantic.
Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009…..
The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.
But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.
It appears to be mature….
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”
Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.
If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they’ll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth’s network of radio stations.
(9) George R.R. Martin announces that Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive…
…is Emilia Clarke, our own Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea.
The Esquire magazine article is here..
(10) Tom Knighton reviews the novel The Martian:
I’d heard all about the science, how it was supposed to be so accurate. I’d heard that Weir wrote a pretty compelling story. While I’m not sure about the former, I do agree with the latter, they left out one key piece of commentary on The Martian. It’s actually funny!
Mark Watney, the main character, is a natural smart ass and an independent spirit…in addition to a mechanical engineer and botanist. Honest, if you’re going to strand a guy on Mars, it might have been the perfect choice, which some may perceive as a chink in Watney’s armor on this story, but I disagree.
(11) SFFWorld interviews Seanan McGuire:
SFFWorld: With so many interesting universes that you create, you have fans who like them all. But do you ever have fans getting mad at you because you are working on one series and they want a new book in their favorite series?
McGuire: Fans are people, and people sometimes get mad at air. I know I do. So I have people huff at me because I’m not doing what they want, but I also have people get mad because I use profanity, or because I exist in material space, or because I was at Disneyland when they thought I should be writing. I just keep swimming. I need to switch between projects to keep from burning myself out, and I like to think that my true fans would rather have me writing for a long time than get exactly what they want the second that they want it. Unless what they want is a puppy.
(12) “Most of the story team for the next Star Wars film is female” reports Fortune.
Today, Kennedy is president of Lucasfilm, producer of the next installment in the Star Wars series, The Force Awakens. Still, she believes the challenges for women have remained much the same since the late 1970s. “I don’t think things have changed much for women for jobs in the entertainment industry, especially in technical roles,” she said. Kennedy added that at a recent Saturday Night Live taping she attended, she saw no women operating the cameras….
“People in powerful positions are not trying hard enough [to bring women into the industry] and there are an alarming number of women who are not able to get those jobs,” she explained.
And — “Kathleen Kennedy Promises She’ll Hire A Female Director For A Star Wars Movie” reports GeekTyrant
“I feel it is going to happen — we are going to hire a woman who’s going to direct a Star Wars movie. I have no doubt. On the other hand, I want to make sure we put somebody in that position who’s set up for success. It’s not just a token job to look out and try to find a woman that we can put into a position of directing Star Wars.”
(13) No matter what William Shatner told the Australians, Justin Lin is directing Star Trek Beyond — and people are leaking photos of the aliens from Lin’s movie.
(14) “One step closer to Star Trek: New 3-D printer builds with 10 materials at once” from Christian Science Monitor.
It’s built from off-the-shelf parts that cost about $7,000 in total, and is capable of printing in full color with up to 10 materials at a time, including fabrics, fiber-optics, and lenses.
Traditional multi-material printers use a mechanical system to sweep each layer of the printed object after it’s laid down to ensure that it’s flat and correctly aligned. The extreme precision of such a system is a big part of the reason that printers are so expensive. But the MultiFab uses a machine-vision system instead of a mechanical one, which allows for precise scanning – down to 40 microns – without the need for so many pricey components, project engineer Javier Ramos told Wired.
(15) All six Bonds together, that is, at Madame Tussaud’s!
(16) Frock Flicks: The Costume Movie Review Podcast, does a serious, in-depth study of historical costuming in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – which gets high marks despite having been done cheap, cheap, cheap!
The Historical Setting of Monty Python and the Holy Grail
The movie is supposedly set in 932 A.D., and, of course, the story is King Arthur, which is quasi-fictitious anyway. The person who might be the historical basis for the Arthurian legends could have lived in the 5th to 7th century, and 932 is right around the reign of Æthelstan, who was a king of the Anglo-Saxons and the first to proclaim himself King of the English in 927. But hey, whatever this is a comedy, who pays attention to the title cards, right? Other than all those moose and llamas…
In a way, it doesn’t matter because medieval clothing, at least for men, is somewhat vaguely defined from the 5th though 12th centuries, being mostly belted tunics and such. But for reference, here are a few examples of how ruling men were depicted in documents of the period in England. The garment shapes are simple, and the higher up in status a man was, the more decorative trims and jewelry he got. It’s also interesting to note the hair and beard styles.
(17) John Hertz offers a piece he entitles, “Do you, Mister Jones?” —
All this throwing round of the word “geek” recalls a handy little acronym I had published a while ago in The MT Void 1279 (or you may have seen it later in Vanamonde 956, where I added “Among reasons to form one’s own opinions, people can be vigorous in accusing one of one’s virtues”; not to burden the File 770 Reference Director, I allude to Aesop, H. Andersen, B. Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man”, and “The Marching Morons”).
Grapes are sour.
Emperor has no clothes.
Each put-down of you means I win.
Kornbluth didn’t tell the half of it.
[Thanks to James H. Burns, John Hertz, Martin Morse Wooster, David K.M. Klaus, John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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Re: Campbell Eligibility for Weir
The qualifying rules for the Campbell are rather narrow, and explicitly state that a self-published work does not start the two-year window, even if it was wildly successful. If the author did not receive an advance payment, they are not eligible.
@Hypnotosov
I think you might have misunderstood me. I didn’t mean to be asking “why don’t you like it?” I meant to be asking, “what are the specific tropes/elements/signals that cause you to think it’s Cthulhu?” Because I can easily think of many examples of of overt Lovecraft pastiches or homages, but I was drawing a blank when trying to think of otherwise unrelated SF where Cthulhu makes a surprise appearance.
Also, will you think less of me if I tell you that sometimes, when I get into bed and the room is dark, I picture something reaching out from under the bed and grabbing my ankles, and tell myself “No, impossible, you have boxes under there. No room for monsters!”
#6:
I’ve long divided conventions into ‘fan’ cons and ‘dealer’ cons. The big multi-thousand comics cons are ‘dealer’ cons, run by professionals, and tend towards the network TV advertising model where the dealers are the actual customers and the fans are the product being sold to them. The ‘fan’ cons are generally run by volunteers and much smaller, though it’s certainly possible for ‘fan’ cons to get into the thousands. (Anime North here in Toronto is sort of straddling the line but mostly still a ‘fan’ con, though they’ve had to limit attendance to 20,000 people per day due to fire regulations and the fact that the only place that could support a larger crowd is out of their price range. FanExpo, which is definitely a ‘dealer’ con and which has attendance passing 100,000, uses that larger space in the convention centre downtown.)
I generally really prefer the ‘fan’ cons myself, which is why I’ve already signed up for Ad Astra this year. And will be looking for my fourteen year old Ad Astra Eleven T-shirt before I go.
I should probably add: after I tell myself that the boxes leave no room for monsters, a part of me starts inventing all kinds of bizarre ways there could still be a monster under the bed. But usually I’m already in bed by that point, so it’s okay.
Back in England I follow the rule of “anything not under the covers is fair game for the monsters”. Now that I spend most of my time in Thailand and other nice countries, I just imagine that my monsters were denied entry at the border so I sleep however the hell I want.
On a related note, I’m currently on my Book & Visa Run in KL. I set out to buy Ancillary Mercy but ended up buying two Lauren Beukes books instead because damn Moxyland was good. I can wait to finish the Ancillary trilogy for now but I definitely need more Beukes in my life as soon as possible.
@Aaron: I dream of the day that I’m
libelledquoted by Mike on File770. Of course first I guess I’ll have to start a blog of some description.Surely the spiders would eat any monster that dared to venture under my bed.
Re: Signalling Cthulhu
I just read “Farewell Blues” by Bud Websterin F&SF (good rec from lurkertype, thanks!) and a character mentions “Benares, Leng, Mount Shasta” which are all places with mythos links. Nothing else overtly Lovecraftian comes up (well, except maybe something spoilery which is another nod) but it signalled to me that the author was a Mythos fan and perhaps clued me in to how things might play out. No actual Cthulhu, but these little nods are pretty common I find.
@Kyra:
Spiders form a subset of “monsters.” Just, generally, a small subset.
ETA, @Mark:
Those do indeed look like R’lyehable indicators.
@Aaron: I dream of the day that I’m libelled quoted by Mike on File770. Of course first I guess I’ll have to start a blog of some description.
We few, we happy few, we band of bloggers we.
For he today that sheds his pixels with me,
Shall be my brother, be his blog e’er so sparse.
This day shall gentle his writing;
And gentlemen offline now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they did not WordPress or Blogger,
And hold their fanhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That were quoted with us upon Mike Glyer’s File 770.
historically accurate depiction of 1st century Judea
The professor I had for medieval history was a specialist in classical Greece and Rome. He said it was very accurate. (We watched Life at the beginning of the term because he felt you couldn’t understand the middle ages without knowing about imperial Rome.)
Eh, misuse of the term “squamus” is usually a hint.
Beyond that, references to tentacles, higher dimensions, incomprehensible natures, sanity eroding, “old when the human race had not come down from the trees”, “not dead, sleeping”, etc. and so on.
Basically, anything that indicates that the author is cribbing his alien from the pages of the Call of Cthulhu RPG.
Basically, any time I see Mythos crap in a book, I roll my eyes and mutter “pity the author couldn’t come up with an original idea.”
Actually, that’s no longer clear. While the Award Elibility FAQ on the Writertopia page says:
It also, in the end, defaults to SFWA’s rules:
And SFWA’s rules have been changed recently to include self-published works:
(So I think that Writertopia needs to change their FAQ to reflect the current situation.)
Since The Martian was self-published before January 1, 2013, then it seems like the income from the self-published publication doesn’t count towards SFWA eligibility, and therefore doesn’t disqualify him from the Campbell eligibility from the book being later published by Tor. But it’s an awfully-blurred situation. (We made no decision for the Campbell Award this year because Andy Weir did not receive enough votes to be on the final ballot.)
Best use of “squamous”:
http://www.bartleby.com/232/504.html
@Oneiros,
I snuck in with only a Twitter account; Mike does quote the occasional tweet. My tweets tend to be more about food & wine so I suppose I should incorporate more SFF to improve my chances.
Re: free vs pay venues for probability of getting nominated for Hugo.
I stand by an earlier comment that ‘free to read’ is making more of a difference in recent years, especially with the increasing nominating pool compared to the relatively static magazine subscriber numbers. During my recent break I caught up on my Asimov’s and generally in a given issue, stories ranged from good to excellent. The Oct/Nov double issue was particularly strong; de Bodard’s “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” is a contender on my nomination list but there are others from that issue too I think Hugo-worthy.
To mix a metaphor, filltering the wheat from the firehose of short stories published is non-trivial, so why pay to read when there are already so many good stories you can read for free?
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so.
For me, it’s not so much that they’re using a Lovecraftian trope as what originality they bring to their take of it. Also true of other tropes like Time Travel, FTL, Generation Ships, etc.
@Rev Bob
Those do indeed look like R’lyehable indicators.
That’s the worst pun I’ve heard all week. And by worst I obviously mean best.
Is it Dell who sets the Campbell Award eligibility rules? I don’t see anything in the WSFS constitution or bylaws on this, just that the nomination and voting procedure is the same as for the Hugos.
NickPheas
I have persuaded my bank manager that dispatching a hitman in your direction smacks of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted; there are some very well reviewed 2015 novels, including The Ship, Something Coming Through and The Roboteer as well as the Aliette De Bodard which I’ve bought, as potential Campbell/Hugo, along with some Abercrombies which should be uncomplicated fun.
I hope.
David Shallcross on October 16, 2015 at 10:08 am said:
Yes. The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer is sponsored by the current publisher of Analog. If Analog decided they didn’t care to sponsor the award anymore, it would go away and drop off the ballot. They pay for the Award, so they get to make the rules for it.
That’s because WSFS doesn’t regulate the Campbell Award rules. It merely allows for the JWC to be on the same ballot. No other non-Hugo Award is allowed to be listed on the Hugo Award ballot. This is because in the 1970s, other awards (the Balrog, I think) were starting to make their way onto the Hugo Ballot, and WSFS voted to put an end to this practice.
If, for example, a new award for YA fiction, voted on like a Hugo Award by the members of WSFS but not called a Hugo Award and not given a rocket trophy, was established, it would require an amendment to the WSFS Constitution to allow it to appear on the Hugo Award ballot. (Such a separate award is one of the options being discussed by the YA Award Study Committee. Their most recent report is within the 130-plus pages of the 2015 WSFS Business Meeting minutes.
At the height of the Puppy Wars, I sent a dismayed email to John C. Wright. As a fan of the Golden Age books, I was very unhappy with him. I thought that would be the end of it but he decided to publish my email (without my permission).
So, when I visited File 770 for the first time in years, I was surprised to find myself quoted in the Puppy annals.
I finished Foxglove Summer, the latest Rivers of London, the other day, and found it very enjoyable and a lovely tribute to Pratchett, to boot.
Just now I finished Sorcerer to the Crown, which I enjoyed immensely — and then, only after I’d bought and read it, did I realize that I’m one of Zen Cho’s invisble friends from the Internet. Way cool! I especially love the humor, like the svfu-sbbgzna va Snvel (nf frra va Nyvpr va Jbaqreynaq), naq gur snpg gung Oregvr Jbbfgre vf n snzvyvne, naq uvf nhag ernyyl *vf* n qentba.
“The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” was indeed interesting. I will have to read more of those Xuya stories. It is an alternate history that diverged in the 15th century and which (in short) has east Asia far less influenced by Europe than in our world. So the Vietnamese imperial court in “Citadel” is in space, with hyperspace travel. Its culture uses a lot of traditional signifiers, like silk, detached from traditional context. (Pictures if snakes and turtles and so on without there being many (if any) around — so those must seem as mythical as the dragons in the same pictures.) Culture based on modified Confucianism with profound cultural changes, such as a majority of positions of responsibility being occupied by women (and diversity of marriage arrangements including polyandry). Why not, if the Biblical roots of our culture are still visible in spite of huge changes.
Anyhow, “Citadel” was a bit unexpected. Seemed like it was going to be a war story, saving the empire from invasion, but instead it had a very intimate focus, a story of family and grief. Well done.
Today’s book arrivals: The Mystic Marriage (yay!), Vurt, We Are All Completely Fine, Lair of Dreams, Every Day, The Shadow Cabinet, Bird Box.
@ Rob Thornton:
Reposting private correspondence on social media (without asking permission of their correspondent) seems to be a Puppy custom.
The recent Seth Dickinson story “Please Undo This Hurt” does cosmic horror right, with no laughable tentacles or cults at all, just “Everything cold and always getting colder because the warmth puts itself out.”…
I emitted Foxglove Summer, because in retrospect it does seem to lay down some interesting hints as to the cosmology of the world, as well as implying that the wizards may not be surrounding special when it comes to supernatural creatures.
I’m also currently reading Sorcerer to the Crown, and I’ve decided never mind the overarching plot, I would happily read a book consisting solely of the antics of a school full of high-spirited Napoleonic-era gentlewitches.
The appeal is with the general premise of:
1. ancient aliens who have been present in some way on Earth for a very long time
2. who are essentially unknowable to us and which have no interest in our well being
3. which have innate psychic powers that can control us or drive us mad
Makes for spooky SF fantasy horror in general but creating an original setting for those elements will seem like a knock-off of Lovecraft. Attaching it directly to Lovecraft (even if just mentioning the necronomicon) adds that additional feeling of maybe something that is maybe true but we pretend isn’t because our feeble minds cannot cope.
A non-Lovercarft connected example would be Quatermass and the Pit
Well played sir, very well played indeed.
Someday, when I do my dystopic YA SF novel, the teen slang will consist solely of my writing stuff and seeing what Swype comes up with. Today’s winner: Emitted for “enjoyed”.
I would have said that ‘qualifying publication by SFWA (see the list)’ meant ‘publication which is accepted by the SFWA as a qualifying market’ (otherwise ‘see the list’ would be pointless); when the rules were drawn up there was no expectation that the SFWA would accept self-published work. I don’t think we should assume that the change in the SFWA rules necessarily brings about a change in the Campbell rules. The basic Campbell rule seems to be that it is for professional publication; the other bits are offered in explication of that.
By the way, is there any statement of the Campbell rules more official than the FAQ? The term ‘FAQ’ suggests an informal guide, and the language is often rather informal as well.
Some further thoughts on “Please Undo This Hurt”:
Fbzr crbcyr zvtug nethr gung vg vf abg n traer fgbel orpnhfr abguvat cheryl fhcreangheny unccraf va vg. Vg’f gehr gung nyy gur ubeebe vf va gur znva punenpgre’f vagrecergngvba bs zber-be-yrff beqvanel riragf, ohg V crefbanyyl guvax vg vf cneg bs traer sbe gung irel ernfba. Fur vf hfvat gur vqrnf bs pbfzvp ubeebe gb guvax nobhg ure yvsr naq gur jbeyq. Vs lbh sbyybj ure gubhtugf, vg vf n ubeebe fgbel; vs lbh qba’g, vg vf n zrgn-fgbel nobhg gur hfrf bs fhpu vqrnf, ohg fgvyy bs vagrerfg gb traer ernqref gura.
Agree or disagree?
However SFWA, at least, has expanded their definition of “professional publication” to include self-published works that generate enough income.
Has the Campbell Award also expanded its qualifying guidelines? It would seem so, since for the last decade or so, the basic rule-of-thumb of a professional publication for the Campbell has been “whatever SFWA says is professional”.
Comics bracket reminder: The first fifth round! Don’t miss your chance to line Cally’s pockets with forehead cloth money!
Re: Mythos stories. My usual reaction is “at least it’s not zombies!” 😀
But honestly, I think it includes a very interesting set of tropes. The idea of aliens that are so alien it breaks our minds is a really good one, with a lot of room for exploration. And I honestly don’t care if it’s scary or not. Really really really alien is the appeal to me. Which is also why I hate mythos-inspired stories with narrow concepts of good and evil (all too many of them fall into this trap), or which invoke too much of an “it’s magic” feel, rather than an “it’s alien” feel.
So, I guess you’d say I have a love/hate relationship with the Mythos.
—
Re: Homebrewing. A surprising number of literal homebrewers were involved with the early development of the first really successful homebrewed operating system, Linux. Which lead to a lot of joking about paying people for their work (on this free system) in virtual beer. And graphics involving the penguin mascot, Tux, with a beer in his hand. And things like that. Homebrewers are geeky, so it should be no surprise when geeks turn out to be homebrewers.
Well, so far in, I can certainly see why Antonia Honeywell’s The Ship has got stellar reviews; I suspect this is going to be a book which isn’t to my personal taste but which I think merits a Hugo nomination.
It’s just as well that I also bought some ‘cheer me up’ books…
Should anyone need to know, I can provide anecdotal data that 48 hours is sufficient time after biting a small chunk off one’s tongue to heal enough for hot or acid beverages. Truly the mucous membrane is a wondrous thing! (A *small* chunk, like 2x4mm. But the divot will be visible for some time.)
Yes, Cthulhu has seen some over saturation as of late. Count me as one who remains fascinated about the potential of “weird space-gods.”
I mean these things aren’t merely a slumbering behemoth beneath the sea. It is god. A weird, incomprehensible god to weird aliens from deep space. Just the proximity of its slumber to us is enough to drive one insane.
The last remotely good treatment of weird alien gods was really the only high point of Marvel’s Secret Invasion which collected the pantheons of Marvels gods to try and pacify the Skrull gods. It was a lot of hot god-on-god action that ultimately devolved into a slug match — it is Marvel Comics after all. But I credit them for playing around with a great idea.
Silly but True
Awhile ago I kept my commitment to buy a couple Markowitz Kloos books, and over the last couple days I read Terms of Enlistment Even taking into account that it’s a first novel, I thought it was terrible. I blame Scalzi, also PNH, both of whom are thanked in the acknowledgements. I wanted and even expected to like it, but first I hit the I wonder if this will get better stage and then the I might as well finish point.
It is of course insanely hard to write a really mind-bendingly strange alien (and to my mind Lovecraft rarely, if ever, succeeded, because his purple prose wasn’t up to being suggestive enough). Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” is a better example of suggesting rather than showing.
@Vasha
The requirement for writing a mindlessly strange alien is simple: fish sauce. And possibly eggshells.
I’ve received a request for story identification from a friend, and didn’t recognize the story from his description, but I promised to ask the wider group mind:
“Morris, I’m trying to remember the author and title of a 1950s-1960s-era SF short story, and thought you might come up with them.
As well as I can remember, it’s about a man stranded and dying alone in an alien place, in a house where there are horrible noises and corrosively uneatable food and drink. But the food and drink become eatable and the noises become lovely music. He thinks the house has adjusted to him, but in fact it has transformed him into an alien able to live in its environment.
Can you identify it?
If anyone recognizes this, we’d appreciate it.
Morris Keesan: Van Vogt’s “Enchanted Village?” Maybe?
TheYoungPretender
Well played, sir!
In regards to the Phoenix SciFi Con, part of the lack of response is that no one in Phoenix likely knows about it. The other comments about lack of information on the web page is spot on. No real information about the organizer other than a picture of him gaming at another convention and the only other staff member actually mentioned is the cosplay coordinator.
Without exception, the other fan run cons have been struggling. LepreCon (41) this year had the largest attendance in a decade (a bit over 500) and has WesterCon lined up for 2017, CopperCon (35) is taking a year off and it’s parent organization, CASFS, is pretty much broke. TusCon (42) is holding on (and will have GRRM in 2016). A local gaming con, MaricopaCon, has exclusively funded and sold memberships via Kickstarter (with no at the door memberships).
We have a new local Comic & Media expo happening this weekend (2nd year) that might draw a couple thousand and seems to be more focused on cosplay this year, Even Phoenix Comicon was flat this year, drawing a couple of thousand less than 2014. The Phoenix Comicon Fan Fest in December will probably do better since they have some higher profile guests this year. Although with their main event space seating about 500 people, that may lead to some issues for the big media guest panels.
I’ve been thinking of doing a state of local cons post on azsf.org for a while and it might be a good time to do that. Since I’m not currently involved with any of them, maybe it is time for a good serious look at things.
In regards to Wil Wheaton, he’s been talking about his home brewing for quite a while on wilwheaton.net. I’ve organized Wil Wheaton Rock Band with him in Phoenix a couple of times, which was a lot of fun to do.
I read it and the two sequels and I thought it was not terrible – as in ‘terrible’= stopped reading. It was sufficiently not terrible for me to see what happens next. I liked the idea of really big aliens. Aside from that lots of things that are variously not great about it like ‘characters’ – stuff like that.
Fish eggs. I mean fish shells. I mean oysters.
@Camestros: Yeah, the idea of really big aliens is facially interesting. It also takes two thirds of the first book to appear. And their immediate response to the first one they encounter in close proximity is so unconsidered that it represented the book losing its final chance to be taken seriously. I give Kloos two things:
1. His prose is competent. (And that’s as far as I’ll go. There were greater-than-zero solecisms, but most were minor.)
2. The narration itself was clear. I never wondered what was actually happening at any particular moment. Alas, what was happening at any particular moment was rarely interesting, either during Starship Troopers (first quarter of the book), Black Hawk Down (second quarter), or VEE AREN’T FRIENDS! (second half).
And the protagonist was neither very appealing or very compelling. At first I thought Kloos had set himself the too-large challenge of writing from the POV on whom life doesn’t leave much trace. Eventually I had to conclude it was the author himself who wasn’t reflective about events.
Mark-kitteh (that is your name now): glad you liked it. I noticed the mention of those places, but actual ‘Thu/Mythos content wasn’t in the story. I would like to read more stories with this particular background mythology — the supporting not-exactly-human characters were familiar enough that I wasn’t confused, but different enough that I didn’t know exactly how everything would go.
So them what hates Mythos won’t find it being squamous and rugose and shoving tentacles down your throat in “Farewell Blues”. It was just an Easter egg.
@Lee Whiteside: Even before your comment, I was thinking “Isn’t Phoenix already full up with plenty of cons? Do they need another one?” and indeed, they don’t.
I really enjoyed that “Holy Grail” article.
I’m putting Weir down for the Campbell; someone else can hash it out.
Congrats to lauowolf for her First Fifth.
[some slightly spoilery things below]
Yeah, blow up a a housing project possibly full of innocent people because you didn’t check what ammunition you were using? Totally not your fault and the people who say it IS your fault are cowardly corrupt officers who are only there because of nepotism and want to cover their arse. I decided that the main character had some unusual personality disorder which it meant he lacked the capacity to reflect on his own actions from an emotional perspective but without him actually being a psychopath.