Pixel Scroll 10/16 Callahan’s Scrolltime Saloon

(1) Anne and Jared at Pornokitsch advise air travelers about the 5 Best Airport Snacks. Anne trends toward the practical and healthy. Jared picks stuff I would eat….

Anne says:

  1. Edamame. Honestly, you’ll probably find somewhere that does sushi. Skip the fish and treat yourself to a carton of these beauties.

Jared says:

  1. Jerky. Jerky is cow gum! A bag of it can last for at least a flight, and probably outlast your jaws’ ability to chew it. Whatever that cheap brand is that comes in perfectly cut squares? Avoid that. Oh, another jerky thing – the first time you open the bag, it will belch forth the fetid odor of desiccated cow, like the breath of a zombie dragon. Probably best to do that before boarding.

(2) Wil Wheaton’s fame as a homebrewer was yesterday’s Scroll topic. Wheaton’s also willing to offer opinions about wine.

William Shatner had him as a guest on Bill’s show Brown Bag Wine Tasting. You may not have known Wil and Bill were “old friends” but it says so right here on the internet.

Old friends Wil Wheaton and William Shatner have more in common than their Star Trek past. Join them for a conversation about home brewing beer, the outer limits of space, video games, and some great wine tasting.

Shatner told how his show was created in an interview by Food & Wine:

What was your inspiration for Brown Bag Wine Tasting? It’s an offbeat idea to have nonexperts like a Real Housewife discuss wine.? I was talking to Mike Horn, a friend of mine, one day, and I just thought, Brown-bag wine tasting. Mike’s a radio producer and has a vast interest in wine, too, and when I mentioned ?it, he loved the idea. I’d already been doing an interview show for three years on the Biography Channel, and combining ?the two just sort of happened in my brain.

How do you get people who don’t know much about wine to describe one?? Here’s an example: We had Dave Koz, the saxophone player, on the show. I told him to bring his instrument. Then, when we tasted the wine, I said, “Don’t talk. Play what it’s like on your sax.” And he played this 45-second jazz run of what the wine tasted like. It was great. …

Just for fun, what sort of wine do you think Captain Kirk would drink? Or Denny Crane from Boston Legal? Or the Priceline Negotiator?? It’s well known that the Klingon vineyards produce the best wine. Denny Crane would drink single malt Scotch. And the Priceline Negotiator would tell you—but only for a fee.

(3) Shatner earlier had a lot to say about a show young Wheaton appeared in. William Shatner Presents: Chaos On The Bridge is a documentary covering the “tumultuous early years of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as told by the writers and producers who worked on it.” It wouldn’t be surprising if the two actors needed a bottle of wine to break the ice!

Den of Geek interviewed Shatner about his documentary.

[Shatner] Now, when [Gene Roddenberry] came about later onto The Next Generation, he had evolved. He was much more the gregarious, political producer, and was able to handle people in an acceptable way. Except then he began to get sick, and his illness made it difficult for him to reach out to people. He was once again in conflict, and it was that conflict which I began to understand when I made the film.

It does seem like The Next Generation had a lot of conflict around its beginnings, not just with Gene and those around him, but at virtually every level of its production. I came away from the documentary wondering whether it’s typical, at least in your experience, for TV shows to be born out of such turmoil?

No, no, not at all. It’s normally the exact opposite, in that every moment you waste is money lost, so everybody in the production is geared up towards getting everything done exactly on time. On the Star Trek I was on, in the third year we weren’t allowed to go over. We had to quit at 6:12 every day. Not 6:11, or 6:13. At 6:12 they pulled the plug, no matter where we were. It’s that level of organization that you expect in television. So what we saw on The Next Generation – the chaos, the time-wasting, the people in conflict with each other – it just can’t take place. It’s supposed to be eradicated, and the fact that it wasn’t made the situation worthy of study.

(4) Halloween draws nigh…

(5) The Alex Film Society will host a showing of Son of Frankenstein at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, CA on October 29. Some special guests will be on hand —

Sara Karloff and Bela Lugosi Jr. are scheduled to join us onstage at the Alex Theatre to discuss their fathers’ careers and the horror films that made them famous…

Son of Frankenstein is also blessed with perhaps the greatest horror film cast ever. Karloff gives his farewell performance as the creature and Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of Ygor is creepy, roguish, even pitiable and one is reminded of what a fine actor he could be with a role worthy of his talent. Presiding over all of this is the solid presence of Basil Rathbone as Baron Wolf Frankenstein. Watch for scene-stealer Lionel Atwill, who delivers his definitive screen role as the one arm Inspector Krogh.

This first rate production gave a whole new meaning to Baron von Frankenstein’s famous shout out: “It’s alive!”

 

Basil Rathbone in "Son of Frankenstein"

Basil Rathbone in “Son of Frankenstein”

(6) Here’s sales “velocity” to envy. On preorders alone, Subterranean Press has SOLD OUT its forthcoming Harlan Ellison collection Can & Can’tankerous.

Can & Can’tankerous gathers ten previously uncollected tales from the fifth and sixth decades of Harlan Ellison’s professional writing career: a written-in-the-window endeavor that invites re-reading from the start before you’ve even finished it; a second entry in his (now) ongoing abcedarian sequence; a “lost” pulp tale re-cast as a retro-fable; a melancholy meditation for departed friend and fellow legend, Ray Bradbury; a 2001 revision of a 1956 original; an absurdist ascent toward enlightenment (or its gluten-free substitute); a 200-word exercise in not following the directions as written (with a special introduction by Neil Gaiman that weighs in at four times the word count of its subject); a fantastical lament for a bottom-line world; the 2011 Nebula Award-winning short story; and Ellison’s most recent offering, a fusion of fact and fiction that calls to mind Russ’s frustration and Moorcock’s metaphor while offering a solution to the story’s enigma in plain view.

Strokes be damned! Ellison’s still here! HE’s still writing! And with more new books published in the last ten years than any preceding decade of his career, his third act is proving to be the kind other living legends envy.

(7) And speaking of velocity of sales, congratulations to Ann Leckie –

(8) Neil Gaiman declares his bias – in favor of libraries – an an op-ed for the Guardian.

It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living though my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So I’m biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

(9) Here’s somebody else that has sold a few books. ”21 Bone-Chilling Secrets About R.L. Stine” at Mental Floss.

  1. All I ever wanted to be was a writer. I started when I was 9. I’d be in my room writing little joke magazines, and I would bring them to school. I was a shy, fearful kid, and it was my way of getting attention. People always ask, “Did you have any teachers who encouraged you?” and the right answer is, “Yes, I did.” But I didn’t. They begged me to stop!

(10) A collection of Lord Dunsany items will soon go on the block at Heritage Auctions.

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, [1878-1957], known more popularly as Lord Dunsany, was an Irish writer of fantasies and one of the great “world builders” of the early twentieth century. He was the Eighteenth Baron of Dunsany, a poet, a playwright, a novelist, a sharp shooter and chess champion, a hunter, a soldier, and a world traveler. He inspired a generation of authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula K. Le Guin; and although not as currently well-known, he was in his time a social and literary sensation. With his distinctive cut quill pen and his larger than life personality, he remains a figure of fascination to this day.

In our upcoming Rare Books Auction #6148, Heritage is pleased to present this remarkable collection of over 418 Dunsany books, letters, and other related ephemera.Featuring a core of 232 volumes (comprised of ninety-six titles written by Lord Dunsany in a variety of editions), there are many special copies which bear inscriptions, tipped-in letters, and wax seals. This lot includes several of Dunsany’s limited first editions, such as the beautifully printed G.P. Putnam large format editions of Time and the Gods, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, and two inscribed copies of The Chronicles of Rodriguez. These four volumes, uniformly bound in quarter vellum and orange cloth (three in their original illustrated dust jackets), are each signed by both Dunsany and his illustrator Sidney Sime.

And, of course, no discussion of the works and worlds of Lord Dunsany would be complete without a nod to his illustrator and kindred spirit Sidney Sime [1867-1941]. Sime’s early life, partly spent scratching images of fantastic creatures on the walls while working in the Yorkshire coal mines, stands in stark contrast to that of Lord Dunsany’s, born to both title and wealth. However, their mutual love of the fantastic brought them together and resulted in several striking literary and artistic collaborations.

(11) Astronomer Edwin Hubble was also a successful high school basketball coach (for at least one year) in New Albany, Indiana.

But Hubble is finally getting recognition in New Albany, where the legendary astronomer taught Spanish and physics for a year and took the boy’s basketball team to state.

New Albany High School will soon reveal an art piece memorializing Hubble — the only notice of his stay in the region — for the time he spent as a teacher at the old school

Here is a photo of the commemorative plaque.

(12) James H. Burns has a post about the Mets playoff win on the New York CBS station’s local website. Jim says, “I wanted the title to be ‘A New York Mets Reverie.’”

(13) “A neural network tries to identify objects in ST:TNG intro”

Experiment by Ville-Matias Heikkilä applies deep learning recognition to the Star Trek: Next Generation opening titles … and doesn’t really do a good job of it …

 

[Thanks to Will R., Andrew Porter, Joel Zakem, James H. Burns, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]

83 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/16 Callahan’s Scrolltime Saloon

  1. @Edward W. Robertson

    VD doesn’t know how lots of publishing things work, for a publisher.

    Or, as I’m sure his fans will say, he’s rhetoricing (Aristotle!).

    (Actually, that rhetoric excuse is pretty useful for him, isn’t it? Blanket cover for all ignorance and lies. Although why anyone swallows it is beyond me…)

  2. @Stevie. Here are four novellas I thought were really good so far this year:

    Entrepreneurs, by Robert Grossbach. An engineer on Earth in the 1980s attempts a business deal with rather tiny space aliens. http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/09/entrepreneurs-by-robert-grossbach.html

    Waters of Versailles, by Kelly Robson. Sylvain de Guilherand secretly uses a captive water spirit to provide indoor plumbing to Louis XV’s Versailles, but the spirit is childish, playful, and getting bored. http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/10/waters-of-versailles-by-kelly-robson.html

    Sleeping Dogs, by Adam-Troy Castro. An old man, long in hiding on a remote, tropical world, struggles to cope with the arrival of a figure from the worst part of his past. http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/09/sleeping-dogs-by-adam-troy-castro.html

    The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, by Usman Malik. Salman pursues the truth behind stories his grandfather told him about an impoverished princess he used to know back in Pakistan and the Jinn that protected her. http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/09/the-pauper-prince-and-eucalyptus-jinn.html

    They’re all very different from each other, but they’re well-written, complex, and moving. Sleeping Dogs and The Pauper Prince were both recommended by other reviewers as well.

  3. JJ, you mistake us. I too love edamame, but it isn’t going to cheer my crushed soul and keep me going through the minor hell that is air travel. Not to mention the unfermented soybeans at the reduced pressure and enclosed space of an airplane. I mean… yikes. Very few people should eat fiber before getting on a plane, either.

    Rev. Bob, we once met a whole guild of guys who are natural-look Santas, wearing subtly-holiday stuff on all group outings. Delightful as you could imagine, and always carried cheap little toys in their pockets to give to kids. I espied a few of them on my TV the next December when Cap’n Mal Castle and Beckett were investigating a murder amongst a slew of Santas.

    VD’s entire model of the world is based on not understanding how many things work, and making sure that his sycophants don’t either.

    Novellas: I liked “Entrepreneurs” as well and am waffling about putting it on my list; the characters are great, but the physics/chemistry is ludicrous. It will only stay on if I don’t find more. “Prince/Jinn” was entertaining enough, but it didn’t have that oomph that says HUGO to me. It’s too long, for one thing — should have been a novelette instead. And a bit too florid? overwritten? Dunno. I was meh.

    Right now I’m going for “Citadel of Weeping Pearls”, “The Servant” and “The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild” (last two from Clarkesworld).

    Sudden urge for Leckie books translated into Latin so that garum decides the fate of the universe.

    The title of this Scroll brings back fond memories of both the books and the Usenet group.

  4. @Stevie:

    For novellas, here’s a couple I really liked.

    The Servant, Emily Devenport, Clarkesworld Magazine, August 2015

    The New Mother, Eugene Fischer, Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2015

    (The latter link is to a different site.)

    Shoot. Now that I looked at the definition of “novella” again, The Servant is actually a novelette. It’s still quite good though.

  5. I read all of Leviathan Wakes today, skipping a lot. I hate it when a book forces me to skip ahead beacuse it does the “leaving mysteries dangling” thing for the whole bloody book or therabout. I liked Leviathan, but I would have liked it a lot more without the repeated SUSPENSE! Cliffhangers

  6. RHF: Ack, well, have moved “The Servant” into Novelette. Which I needed another nominee for anyway. Thanks for the heads-up. That is a great story and needs to be on the ballot. I’ve read it about 4 times and like it each time.

    I still have 7 in short story, though.

  7. Greg Hellender, redheadedfemme, Lurkertype,

    Thank you for the suggestions!

    it’s really helpful because I want to broaden my reading; I can never be sure I’ve not missed something brilliant, but it improves my odds to have people who have actually read the works making recommendations, so that I can, in turn, read them and reach my own judgements.

    I realise this concept seems to be as alien to Puppidum as the Jackeroo, but I see no reason why I should stop…

  8. Anna

    You mad, impetuous fool; I do hope you awarded yourself something enjoyable as a reward…

  9. Anna

    And, just to demonstrate that my family had me bang to rights when it came to the insatiable curiousity bit, I would dearly like to know why Leviathan Awakes was on your must-read-now list. Clearly something’s passing me by, but it would be nice to know what I’m missing.

    Nota Bene

    I too have speed read Leviathan Wakes, and shortened it even more than you. And I suppose I’d better stop there before I’ve got the whole thing down to five paragraphs…

  10. Shortly after I moved to Washington, Goodspaceguy was running for county executive; I decided that someone who thought King County should have its own space program didn’t have a good handle on either space exploration or the county’s needs. Yes, it’s Boeing country, so can benefit from space stuff, but it’s also at 47 degrees north latitude.

  11. lurkertype on October 17, 2015 at 2:50 pm said:

    Rev. Bob, we once met a whole guild of guys who are natural-look Santas, wearing subtly-holiday stuff on all group outings. Delightful as you could imagine, and always carried cheap little toys in their pockets to give to kids. I espied a few of them on my TV the next December when Cap’n Mal Castle and Beckett were investigating a murder amongst a slew of Santas.

    http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20091214/greenwich-village/naughty-santas-ticketed-for-boozing-washington-square-park

    The kid’s first year at NYU, she emerged from the library only to land in a sea of santas, all milling about, some drinking heavily, and many behaving rather badly.
    A couple of them were even brawling with each other.
    (“Mom, I saw Santa decking Santa!”)

  12. I have just posted a review of the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. (In very brief: nothing award-worthy there, but worth reading, with reservations.)

  13. Vicki Rosenzweig
    I note that Rocket Lab USA is planning on launching sun-synchronous orbit micro-sats from about 44 South (Birdlings Flat, Canterbury, NZ). If I understand correctly, proximity to the equator is more useful/helpful for geostationary orbits. NZ does have an advantage in that there are only a handful of airline flights a day that need to be worked around when launching.

  14. See, this is why you want professionally vetted Santas. None of that drinking and punching like you get with amateurs who don’t own their own suits and grow their own beards.

  15. My novella list so far is:
    Allen M. Steele, “The Long Wait” (Asimov’s, Jan 2015)
    Kristine Kathryn Rusch “Inhuman Garbage” (Asimov#39;s, Mar 2015)
    Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric’s Demon (Spectrum)
    Eugene Fischer, “The New Mother” (Asimov’s, Apr/May 2015)

    I have read both “The Waters of Versailles” and “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn” and enjoyed both, but neither completely ticked the boxes for me.

  16. Joe H said ‘As far as novellas go, I’m still exceedingly fond of Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall.’

    So am I, but I’m afraid it’s not remotely a novella in Hugo terms. It’s about 49,000 words (I was curious and so asked the publisher.)

    Mark

  17. @Mark

    Thanks. It seemed a bit long (for a novella) to me when I read it but I was seeing lots of people refer to it as a novella.

  18. I checked out Brandon Sanderson’s “Legion” and its sequel “Legion: Skin Deep” from my library because the latter was on this year’s Hugo Novella longlist. The former comes packaged with his Hugo-winning Novella “The Emperor’s Soul”, which I remember having loved (and voted first), so I read it again — and it reminded me that it’s pretty much the novella by which I judge all others, in terms of plotting, character development, innovation, and emotional effect. It also brought home to me, in stark relief, just how incredibly bad this year’s finalists are by comparison.

  19. @Andyl

    ‘It seemed a bit long (for a novella) to me when I read it but I was seeing lots of people refer to it as a novella.’

    Including UK publisher PS who describe it in their latest email newsletter as ‘a truly sumptuous haunting novella’.

    — Mark

  20. Stevie on October 17, 2015 at 4:59 pm said:
    Anna

    And, just to demonstrate that my family had me bang to rights when it came to the insatiable curiousity bit, I would dearly like to know why Leviathan Awakes was on your must-read-now list. Clearly something’s passing me by, but it would be nice to know what I’m missing.

    Nota Bene

    I too have speed read Leviathan Wakes, and shortened it even more than you. And I suppose I’d better stop there before I’ve got the whole thing down to five paragraphs…

    I found myself on the tube with just the phone and the only thing I had downloaded on it and hadn’t read was a sample for Leviathan.

  21. I’m pleased we have so many options for possible Father Christmas’, but do we have any fawns to play Krampus? Anyone half-goat and been keeping it quiet?

  22. Regarding novellas: I think there is a culture clash going on here. SFF people (those who move in Hugo circles, at least) have long been familiar with novellas, and see them as a kind of short fiction, the sort of thing that might appear in a magazine or an anthology. The wider world, on the other hand, has recently discovered novellas, and seems to see them primarily as thin books, a corrective to the tendency of novels to get longer and longer.

    (I recently saw an interview with Daniel Handler – who writes as mainstream, though has work has fantastic elements – saying ‘In college I wrote what I guess we would now call a novella’, suggesting that he sees them as a new thing.)

    The Hugo novella category covers the top end of short fiction and the bottom end of thin books, which may not exactly fit actual publishing practice. (Patrick Rothfuss had two stories last year, one of which is much, much, longer than the other, and which clearly belonged to different publishing categories, but were both novellas in Hugo terms.)

    I do wonder if there is a case for revising Hugo categories to accommodate this – not reducing their number, as some have proposed, but changing the word limits.

  23. @Andrew M

    If there’s been a permanent shift in what lengths stories are published at then there would certainly be a case for change; I can’t say I’ve noticed any major issues myself, although some of the Tor novella line are pushing at and/or breaking the 40k boundary (but still within the 20% flex rule).
    I suspect there’d be more awkward edge cases being discussed if there was an immediate problem.

  24. I have finished Jacaranda, and it was good, although it seemed like the ending should have been more climatic for the main character somehow. Also I have drastically revised my estimate of the length, given all the blank spaces between chapters — it’s less than 35,000 words.

  25. @Andrew M.
    “I do wonder if there is a case for revising Hugo categories to accommodate this – not reducing their number, as some have proposed, but changing the word limits.”

    I tend to agree that novella should definitely be expanded and or there should be a short novel category with a higher word count (but have no idea what that number would be) that goes down to 30,000 words or so, kill novellette* by splitting the word count down the middle with half going to short story and the other half going to novella.

    * I hate the novellette category. It just doesn’t make sense, a novella is already a short novel. So let’s have a teeny, tiny novel, too!?! Grrrrrr….Wait, are these word counts an industry standard or does everyone sorta wing it?

    ETA: Did quick Wikipedia check and word count seems to vary a lot.

  26. @Hampus

    Those shoes are ace! I wonder if they’d make a custom pair in blue? (For cosplaying as a draenei from world of warcraft.)

    @junego

    I actually like the novelette category, although not for any logical reason, but just because the length seems to work quite well for a lot of stories. I’d rather split the novel and add short novel than remove any of the short fiction categories, but if need be expanding novella up and moving the novel wordcount threshold up would be my preference over deleting novelette and expanding novella down.

  27. @Meredith
    “I actually like the novelette category, although not for any logical reason, but just because the length seems to work quite well for a lot of stories. I’d rather split the novel and add short novel than remove any of the short fiction categories, but if need be expanding novella up and moving the novel wordcount threshold up would be my preference over deleting novelette and expanding novella down.”

    You’re right, that’s not a logical reason ;-p. But neither is my distaste for the poor, misunderstood category. As one of the Filer mottos goes (paraphrased) “There’s no accounting for taste!”

    Seriously, I do think there needs to be some adjustment in categories. With the trend toward offering novellas as stand alone purchases, I think adjusting that count up to maybe 60,000 words or similar would be the best compromise. That would allow for some short novels to compete in a less crowded arena, too. Adding another category doesn’t appeal to me, probably because this is my first year voting and nominating and “OMG there’s too much to read!!!!” syndrome has set in.

  28. @Stevie

    Thank you for Honeywell’s name; I’d been looking for “the ship” but its surprisingly hard to google such a common name and sip from the fire hose.

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