https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTZ3VAjHiS0
(1) A Tokyo department store is offering a $91,000 solid gold figure of the alien Baltan, a villainous monster from Japan’s superhero Ultraman TV series. The perfect accessory to go with the 2007 Hugo base, except none of the winners I know can write the check!
(2) Stephen Fabian, among the most gifted illustrators ever, and whose professional career was capped by multiple Hugo nominations and a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award (2006), has put his gallery online. StephenFabian.com contains 500 drawings and paintings that he did for fan and professional publications beginning in 1965. Fabian includes autobiographical comments about each drawing or painting. For example, appended to his notes on the drawing “Born to Exile”:
And the greater wonder of it is, for me, that every once in a while I receive a surprise gift from a fan in appreciation of my artwork. In this case a fan sent me a beautiful copper etching that he made of my drawing that you see here, and that etching hangs on the wall in my drawing room. Other surprise tokens of appreciation that I’ve received from fans are; a miniature spun glass ship, a knitted sweater with an artist’s palette worked into the chest area, a neatly carved wooden figure of a “Running Bear,” that came from a missionary preacher in New Zealand, a fantasy belt buckle, and a miniature paper-mache sculptured “gnome” that keeps watch over me. I cherish them all, they give form and reality to that wonderful feeling of appreciation that comes from the heart.
(3) Enter a selfie by tomorrow for a chance to win a box of “Marshmallow Only Lucky Charms”.
General Mills announced the “unicorn of the cereal world,” Marshmallow Only Lucky Charms, is finally a reality — but there are only 10 boxes.
The cereal maker said the 10 boxes of Marshmallow Only Lucky Charms will be given out as prizes in the “Lucky Charms Lucky Selfie” contest, which calls on participants to post pictures of themselves holding “imaginary boxes of Lucky Charms” on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag, “#Lucky10Sweepstakes.”
Entries must be posted by Oct. 18, the company said.
(4) The Gollancz Festival ‘s “One Star Reviews” features Anna Caltabiano, Simon Morden, Sarah Pinborough, Joanne Harris, Brandon Sanderson, Aliette de Bodard, Richard Morgan, Bradley Beaulieu, and Catriona Ward on camera reading their most savage reviews.
(5) Then, Game of Scones is a Gollancz Cake Off with Jammy Lannister and fantasy authors AK Benedict, Edward Cox and Sarah Pinborough competing for the Iron Scone.
(6) Oneiros wrote:
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.
I notice there is a lot of competition in the comments for the honor of being Santa Claus, but how many others can fix this up for you? While saving the internet from another blog? Merry Christmas!
(7) Mark Kelly journals about his Jonny Quest rewatch – a show that was a big favorite of mine as a kid.
So: the show is about Jonny Quest, his father Dr. Benton Quest, a world-renowned scientist, Quest’s pilot and bodyguard “Race” Bannon, and their ‘adopted son’ Hadji, an Indian boy who saved Dr. Quest’s life while visiting Calcutta. The episodes involve various investigations by Dr. Quest, who seems to have a new scientific specialty each week (sonic waves one week, lasers another, sea fish another, a rare mineral to support the space program on another) or who is challenged by alerts from old friends (a colleague who is captured by jungle natives) or threats from comic-book character Dr. Zin (via a robot spy, etc.)
(8) Accepting submissions – No Shit, There I Was —
Who We Are: Alliteration Ink is run by Steven Saus (member SFWA/HWA), focusing on anthologies and single-author collections, with over a dozen titles across two imprints.
Rachael Acks is a writer, geologist, and sharp-dressed sir. In addition to her steampunk novella series, she’s had short stories in Strange Horizons, Waylines, Daily Science Fiction, Penumbra, and more. She’s an active member of SFWA, the Northern Colorado Writer’s Workshop, and Codex.
Who: This will be an open call. All who read and follow the submission guidelines are welcome in the slush pile.
When: Rachael wants stories no later than 6 Jan 2016. No exceptions will be made. The Kickstarter will occur after the table of contents has been set.
What We Want From You:
Stories 2,000-7,500 words long. Query for anything shorter or longer.
All stories must begin with the line, No shit, there I was. It can be dialog or part of the regular prose.
(9) Childhood’s End starts December 14 on SyFy with a three-night event. Stars Charles Dance, recently of Game of Thrones.
John King Tarpinian says, “Hope they do not screw this up.”
I’m not completely reassured, because when I checked the SyFy Youtube channel today, this was the first video they were hyping —
(10) Today in History:
October 17, 1933: Physicist Albert Einstein arrived in the U.S. as a refugee from Nazi Germany.
(11) Congratulations to frequent commenter Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag on her award-winning photo in the Better Newspaper Contest sponsored by the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association.
DSN reporter Laura Gjovaag came away with the Sunnyside newspaper’s only first-place award. She won the top award in the black and white sports photo action, or feature, category. The photo of Lady Knight softball player Jenna den Hoed appeared in the May 20, 2014 issue, and beat out all entries in the category submitted by all four circulation groups.
(12) Ultimately, Sarah A. Hoyt’s “Magical Thought” is about a particular anti-gun protest in Texas involving dildos, but on the way to that topic she writes —
The problem is that more and more — and unexpectedly — I run up against this type of thought in places I don’t expect.
We ran into it a lot over the puppy stuff. No matter how many times we told them we were in it for the stories, and because our story taste was different from theirs, they kept thinking magically. It went something like this “We’re good people, and we’re for minorities. So if these people don’t like the same stories we do, they must be racist and sexist.”
This was part of the nonsense that started Gallo’s flareup. She had some idea we’d get all upset at TOR publishing Kameron Hurley’s book. Because you know, we have different tastes than those primarily on the left who controlled the Hugos so long, so we don’t want them to … get published?
This only makes sense if the person saying it is inhabiting a magical world, where objects/people of certain valences are played against each other like some kind of card game.
This is not real. I mean sad puppy supporters might not — or might, I won’t because it’s not to my taste, but — read Hurley’s book, but we won’t recoil from it like a vampire from a cross. A Hurley book doesn’t magically cancel out a Torgersen book. Or vice versa.
On the good side, at least on that level, our side doesn’t act like that. We don’t say “ooh” at a new Ringo book because “Oooh, that will upset those liberals” we say “oooh,” because we’ll get to read it. Books are books and people are people, not points in some bizarre game.
(13) Umair Haque says he can explain “Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It)”.
Here’s my tiny theory, in a word. Abuse. And further, I’m going to suggest in this short essay that abuse?—?not making money?—?is the great problem tech and media have. The problem of abuse is the greatest challenge the web faces today. It is greater than censorship, regulation, or (ugh) monetization. It is a problem of staggering magnitude and epic scale, and worse still, it is expensive: it is a problem that can’t be fixed with the cheap, simple fixes beloved by tech: patching up code, pushing out updates.
To explain, let me be clear what I mean by abuse. I don’t just mean the obvious: violent threats. I also mean the endless bickering, the predictable snark, the general atmosphere of little violences that permeate the social web…and the fact that the average person can’t do anything about it.
We once glorified Twitter as a great global town square, a shining agora where everyone could come together to converse. But I’ve never been to a town square where people can shove, push, taunt, bully, shout, harass, threaten, stalk, creep, and mob you…for eavesdropping on a conversation that they weren’t a part of…to alleviate their own existential rage…at their shattered dreams…and you can’t even call a cop. What does that particular social phenomenon sound like to you? Twitter could have been a town square. But now it’s more like a drunken, heaving mosh pit. And while there are people who love to dive into mosh pits, they’re probably not the audience you want to try to build a billion dollar publicly listed company that changes the world upon.
(14) “3+1” — A funny claymation short by Soline Fauconnier, Marie de Lapparent, and Alexandre Cluchet.
(15) “(Give Me That) Old-Time Socialist Utopia: How the Strugatsky brothers’ science fiction went from utopian to dystopian” by Ezra Glinter at The Paris Review.
Since they started writing in the mid-1950s, the brothers published at least twenty-six novels, in addition to stories, plays and a few works written individually. According to a 1967 poll, four of the top ten works of science fiction in the Soviet Union were by the Strugatskys, including Hard to Be a God in first place and Monday Begins on Saturday (1965) in second. For at least three decades they were the most popular science-fiction writers in Russia, and the most influential Russian science-fiction writers in the world.
Their popularity wasn’t without political implications, however. Later in their lives, the Strugatskys were characterized as dissidents—sly underminers of the Soviet regime. In its obituary for Boris, who died in 2012 (Arkady died in 1991), the New York Times called him a “prolific writer who used the genre of science fiction to voice criticisms of Soviet life that would have been unthinkable in other literary forms.” This is mostly true—their work did become critical and subversive over time. But at the beginning of their career, the Strugatsky brothers were the best socialist utopians in the game.
(16) Todd Mason at Sweet Freedom discovered the 1963 LASFS Lovecraft panel:
Briefly, and in October it’s almost mandatory, particularly for a lifelong horrorist such as myself, to deal with something eldritch, but I’ve finally read the August Derleth-annotated transcript of a symposium recorded on 24 October 1963 at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, a discussion of Lovecraft and his influence featuring a panel including Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, writer Arthur Jean Cox, Sam Russell, and Riverside Quarterly editor Leland Sapiro, along with some comments and questions from the audience. Given that Bloch and Leiber were both helped and influenced by Lovecraft early in their careers and were the two most important exemplars of how to take his model for approaching the matter of horror fiction and improving upon it, it’s useful, if not as comprehensive here as one could hope, to see how they thought about that influence and their respective takes on Lovecraft’s work and legacy. Bloch unsurprisingly seems most taken by the interior aspects of what Lovecraft was getting at in his best work, the questions of identity and madness and usurpation from within; Leiber, also not too surprisingly, is at least as engaged by the larger implications, philosophically and otherwise, of humanity’s not terribly secure foothold in Lovecraft’s universe. The notion that such non-fans of Lovecraft as Avram Davidson and Edmund Wilson had more in common with him than their experience of his work led them to believe is briefly if amusingly explored. Not as significant as some of Leiber and Bloch’s other considerations of Lovecraft, but useful to read, and one’s suspicions of what August Derleth made of what he was transcribing and annotating, particularly when it touches on his own involvement with Lovecraft’s body of work, are mildly telling.
Click the link for a copy of the symposium transcript [PDF, 24 MB file]
(17) Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is due in theaters November 25.
(18) If you click through the newly released archive of Apollo photos quickly enough you get something like stop motion animation.
[Thanks to Will R., Andrew Porter, Harry Bell, Karl Lembke, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peace Is My Middle Name.]
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Meet me in the thread, pixel, pixel
Puppies all around, pooping, pooping
Tear those puppies down, scrolling, scrolling
Droppings in the ground where flowers grow
Old familiar whine
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans
Shiny happy people laughing
Filers all around, love them, love them
Never make amends, dish it, dish it
There’s still time to cry, crappy, crappy
Save an unkind word for tomorrow’s whine
Old familiar whine
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans…
That’s great, it starts with a _ pup _ slate
Filks and flames and aeroplanes
Sarah Hoyt is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself blog
Worldcon has its own needs, don’t misrepresent your own deeds
Feed it up a thread, speed, grunt, no, strength
The bracket starts to clatter with a fear of height, down, height
Wire in a filer, represent the genres
And a publisher for hire and a combat site
Left turn wasn’t coming in a hurry with the Furries breathing _ down _ your _ neck
It’s the end of the pups as we know them
It’s the end of the pups as we know it
It’s the end of the pups as we know it, and I feel fine
Congratulations on that fantastic shot, Tegan — the figures frozen in action on the verge of follow-through, and the expression on the runner’s face, are just perfect.
And I’ve never been tempted to write a story on spec, before, but damn: “No shit, there I was” is about as tempting a lead as I’ve seen for the motivation to come up with an SFF tall tale.
Wasn’t the Cocks not Glocks a protest that it is now legal to carry guns in schools but is still illegal to have sexual aids? It doesn’t need magic thinking to join the dots between the two ludicrous positions.
That Hoyt piece made no sense, and butchered the term magical thinking, which is not surprising of course. What I’m left wondering is, did Irene Gallo actually say some thing to the effect of what is attributed to her?
I have a title credit? Woo!
Wait … I don’t recall this one. It may not actually be one of mine.
Peace Is My Middle Name: I don’t recall this one. It may not actually be one of mine.
It was from The other Nigel:
There was an old game called SimEarth, in which you had to (amongst other things) evolve races of creatures to levels of technological prowess. One of the first milestones was the discovery of fire. I was always amused when the game told me “The fish have discovered fire!”
@JJ:
Ah, right. I was quoting someone else, so they deserve the credit.
For the UK people.
In addition to the cheap(ish) Kindle books already posted it seems that there are quite a few more at only £1.99. Including
* James Blaylock SF Gateway Omnibus: The Last Coin, The Paper Grail, All The Bells on Earth. Three books for £1.99 must be a bargain right?
* Wolves by Simon Ings.
* Glorious Angels by Justina Robson
* Principles of Angels by Jaine Fenn (first in the Hidden Empire series).
* Retribution Falls: Tales of the Ketty Jay by Chris Wooding
* Last Call by Tim Powers (and Declare is £1.79)
* Bête by Adam Roberts
* Maul by Tricia Sullivan
* Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds
And
* The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein (at 99 pence). The Outskirter’s Secret (the second book in the series) is £1.94
lurkertype: Just like she doesn’t realize people think Puppies are racist for calling black people savages, and homophobes for fantasizing about killing gay people. It takes a lot of work to live in such a counterfactual world
She’s been doing it for so long that I suspect it’s pretty easy for her nowadays.
“WORSE. This is magical thinking based on a world that doesn’t exist…”
This statement reminds me of one of those twirling hyno-spirals. Look away, Will…look away.
“More importantly I don’t know how we break through the indoctrination that these people so dearly paid for to convince them to think and discuss things in logical terms.”
Personally, I like elephants. And pickles.
I can’t believe I’m the only one who spotted the really hilarious self-blindness bit in Hoyt’s mental diarrhea.
Check it out – her comment about why conservatives support carrying guns on campus:
“But they absolutely believe that we defend the second amendment not because we want to be responsible for our own self-defense, not because we believe power derives from the individual and that therefore an individual must be capable of reining in the government when it gets out of control.”
followed by her complaint against liberals:
“This is not grown up thinking. It’s magical thinking, in which complex issues get reduced to amulets and symbols, countered by other amulets and symbols.”
Sometimes I think Hoyt has multiple personality disorder, and somewhere in the mediocrity and foolishness, there’s one really smart personality that’s not allowed to communicate with the outside world, but can only express its anguish by dropped coded messages of snark into the screeds the rest of her produces.
Can we filk if we want to?
Will our friends leave us behind?
‘Cos my friends don’t filk, and they say if I filk,
Well, they’re no friend of mine.
Can we go where we’re wanted?
A place where they will never find
And write lyrics like we came from out of this world,
Leave realism far behind.
And can we filk?…
And if you wander down the links, The Lost Steersman is £2.54 and The Language of Power £2.59.
Sigh…
Aha, thanks to Mike for reminding me about the No Shit anthology. Seriously tempted to write something utterly unplanned and gonzo and see if it gets picked up.
That’s a fantastic photo by Tegan. Congratulations.
No shit, there I was, about to write a comment on File770, when my TBR pile collapsed on my collection of filk recordings…
Hypnotosov:
Sort of. The prelude to Gallo’s infamous comments was her saying something like “this will make the puppies sadder. ”
But she said it about a collection of feminist essays, not a novel. (and I’ve seen Torgersen name Hurley’s feminist related works winner as an example of what’s wrong with the Hugo’s, so It’s hardly an outrageous claim.)
@andyl
Blue Remembered Earth, another of the things I was going to buy anyway…
That’s seven books I’ve bought this weekend and I’m still only two thirds through Exiles Gate… Much as I am enjoying that I’m finding the protagonist’s stream of consciousness style makes it slow going.
Johan P: I’ve seen Torgersen name Hurley’s feminist related works winner as an example of what’s wrong with the Hugo’s
… while saying that MZW’s collection of lame, plagiarized “jokes”, racist and sexist riffs was a work worthy of nomination for a Hugo.
The stupid in that one, it burns.
We don’t say “ooh” at a new Ringo book because “Oooh, that will upset those liberals” we say “oooh,” because we’ll get to read it.
Certainly so. OTOH, the expressed goal of a lot of the previous Hugo nominations by the Puppies was to do that.
I suppose there are people who really think that Beale’s newest book is the greatest thing since fluffernutters. To each their own. I suspect that it will be promoted out of all proportion of people who actually liked it. Or even read it. Which all goes back to nominating what you read and liked, rather than what a slate tells you will make people’s head explode. Round and Round and round we go.
Hoyt is really in fine form today. If her goal is to get me to ignore her (until the Hugos roll around again and her particular brand of nonsense possibly retoxifies), call W and book the aircraft carrier.
On a more serious note, I think Graydon should be banned from File 770 for calling us all Pol Pot wannabes. It’s dirty pool to accuse us of plotting to literally kill the Sads — obviously an extension of how we literally killed their Hugo hopes with all that unethical and anti-white No Awarding, not to mention (as I read somewhere, I forget where exactly) our plans to put them in death trains and ship them to death camps for, you know, all the deathing.
I know this is true because they mentioned the word “genocidal” in one of their posts.
So, drop the banhammer on them, please. Or maybe just suggest that they drop the facile “we all look the same from orbit” argument, since we don’t live in orbit. We live down here, where we all try to make sense of things rather than just mumbling that shit and Shinola are equivalent. Illogic is demonstrable and arguments are either persuasive or not. If you can spin gold from Hoyt’s moldy straw men, get to it, Rumplestiltskin.
Otherwise, meh.
Paul Weimer
And this is the point where I conclude that there is no point in wasting brain space on people who use books as weapons to be thrown at people, in default of a device which would make people’s heads blow up.
Heaven forbid that they should actually read books, much less enjoy discussing them, and passing on recommendations to others who have expressed an interest.
Thinking about handbags – I believe they are called purses in the US – is much more interesting than going
though in fairness just about anything is more interesting than going
.
So, I am contemplating purchasing a large flap over clutch in Langton leather, in a shade known as Burnt Red, but I am hampered somewhat by the fact that I could buy a lot of books for the money, even if it is on sale. It’s serious decisions like these which need brain space…
Bloodstone75
I think this is what you are referring to:
That was Brad Torgersen, on Sarah Hoyt’s blog, and Mike quoted it, number 6 on the days links, at:
https://file770.com/?p=24373&cpage=3
I think that’s what shrinks call projecting…
@bloodstone75
I’m not sure how much of your comment is a joke and how much is serious. I hope you’re not actually asking for Graydon to be banned.
Does Vimeo have an option to show videos at slower speeds? The Apollo one looks cool but right now it gives me a headache when I try to watch it.
Everybody filks / sometimes…
Just like that Sarah Hoyt
Writes a blog, reads like she’s ranting
Oooh Ringo, oooh Ringo, oooh
@Meredith:
Er, guess I needed my sarc tags? I thought “all the deathing” would cover it.
@bloodstone75
Starting the paragraph with “On a more serious note” was a bit confusing.
To be “fair”*, I don’t think BT have ever said that. He’s been fairly clear that he listed that book on his slate because MZW is a pal and he thought he deserved a nomination,and not because that particular work was good.
(* Is this what’s typically called “damning with faint praise”?)
****
On a different note, I just started on Kowal’s “Shades of milk and honey”. I’ve read enough of Sense and Sensibility to recognize similarities, but not more than a chapter or two. Do people here think I should I read S&S first to get a full enjoyment of Kowal’s book?
@Meredith:
Apologies. I was exaggerating to make a humorous point.
To be clear: Graydon, look how my assembling a pile of nonsense out of misquotes, scraps, utter malarkey, and unsupported “ideological” convictions does not magically transform that pile into a coherent argument, even though it comes from my sovereign perspective.
@Johan P
Hmmm, I don’t think you need to read S&S first, although as I was reasonably familiar with S&S etc when I read Shades I’m probably not the best judge. There certainly aren’t any major plot points etc dependent on knowing the style.
Stevie on October 18, 2015 at 7:22 am said:
… So, I am contemplating purchasing a large flap over clutch in Langton leather, in a shade known as Burnt Red, but I am hampered somewhat by the fact that I could buy a lot of books for the money, even if it is on sale. It’s serious decisions like these which need brain space…
Well, is the clutch big enough to carry a book?
Because, if not you needn’t worry.
Otherwise, a difficult question, books or containers for books?
Though with all the swell UK book sales people tell us are going on, perhaps both are possible.
Johan P on October 18, 2015 at 5:34 am said:
I feel silly for missing that. In my defense I was looking for something more substantial, but apparently Hoyt was exaggerating.
And obviously terrible example of magical thinking since the cause and effect are pretty well established 🙂
Recent reads:
Finished up “Further Adventures in Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian YA Week” (which started with Starbreak and End of Days) (I’m not sure how these themed weeks happen, I don’t plan them) with:
Half A War, by Joe Abercrombie. Good book, and I pretty much always enjoy Joe Abercrombie. However, it didn’t quite reach the level that series highlight Half The World did; in Half A War, I found some of the twists predictable (which I don’t normally do with Abercrombie), and while the main POV character was great, some of the others were a little less interesting.
This week is shaping up to be Lesbian Fantasy Novels week, which, to be fair, is one that recurs every time I can manage it. So far:
The Mystic Marriage, by Heather Rose Jones. The follow-up to Daughter of Mystery does not disappoint. Flawed but likable characters and a love story worth sighing over. There’s an overarching plot that keeps things moving, but it takes second place to character — which is fine with me, especially since it very much seems to be setting dominoes in place for later books. This is, frankly, the kind of book I aspire to be able to someday write.
Silver Kiss, by Naomi Clark. This one … was disappointing. In a way, I think it ran afoul of urban fantasy genre conventions. I might have liked a chamber piece about a werewolf moving pack home with her human girlfriend and having to deal with her family and her pack. Instead, those interactions took a distant backseat to tracking down an Evil Drug Dealing Werewolf, a plot that often made little sense and relied far too much on coincidence and people behaving nonsensically.
Possibly next up: The Traitor (AKA The Traitor Baru Cormorant) by Seth Dickinson
@ Johan P
I think it could go either way. As someone who has spent a lot of time immersed in Austen (largely by virtue of the fact that several of her works are in the rotation for my audio-book anti-insomnia treatment), I found it a something of a flaw in Shades of Milk and Honey that the framework felt like a patchwork of Austen stock characters, motifs, and plot-tokens. (And not just from Sense and Sensibility.) I thought it went interesting places from that beginning, but for me it had to work harder to escape that sense of pastiche.
Someone less familiar with Austen might find the wholesale character/motif-borrowing set-up less distracting. On the other hand, I think that recognizing that the story is stocked with Austen character-types can make one more forgiving of those characters’ quirks and flaws. So: your choice on the Austen read.
I did like how Father Yarvi becomes a cynical Abercrombie style character but not irredeemably so. But I agree on the twists – not very twisty.
Somethink a little bit OT:
Learned that weekend that my homecountry has an award for children- and youthbooks called the Momo.
Since I assume that this is named after Michael Endes Momo, my reaction was awasome.
What’s the Frequency, Puppy?
Funny…the only place I can really think of R.E.M. intersecting with sci-fi is in Until the End of the World, and then only very slightly. (Peter Gabriel stole that movie, musically, at least.)
The Pixel Resolutions
Too much pixel and no scroll.
I am not a reader of Austen (though I am familiar with the conventions of her works) and I enjoyed Shades of Milk and Honey enough that I’m considering buying the whole series for comfort reading. YMMV.
re “Shades of milk and honey”: Thanks, people. I think I’ll just read the book on its own, then, and not try to look for Austen connections.
Johan P: I just started on Kowal’s “Shades of milk and honey”. I’ve read enough of Sense and Sensibility to recognize similarities, but not more than a chapter or two. Do people here think I should I read S&S first to get a full enjoyment of Kowal’s book?
That will depend very much on whether you enjoy Austen. When I first read a couple of her books years ago, I was shocked to find that I consider them one step up from Harlequins, and was mystified as to all the acclaim for them. So it was not surprising that I tried SoMaH and bounced off it pretty quickly. I just figure Austen and derivatives are Not My Thing.
I don’t think knowing Austen matters too much for Shades of Milk and Honey. Kowal’s sequels in particular go off in a rather different direction.
@JJ
Really? You got something entirely different out of Austen than I did, then. I concluded that the Great Romance wasn’t much there but what was there in abundance was biting, meanly funny social commentary.
SoMaH sets up the rules of its world plenty internally. So the Austen knowledge just means you get Easter eggs. The subsequent volumes are much less Austen — lots of action. Jump right in.
Stevie: indeed, how big is the purse? Is it one of those clutches where you can only get a lipstick and a tissue in, and not ID/credit cards/cash/phone? Those are useless. If it’s a good size and goes with the rest of your wardrobe (or the wardrobe you’re going to have soon), I’d say go for it. If you can actually put a book or ebook in it, so much the better.
Alas, I’m not up for filk right now, but have enjoyed everyone else’s.
I am HIGHLY likely to buy “No Shit, There I Was”.
Tintinaus: Exactly. The purpose of the protest is right there in the name!
Apropos of Puppies and their favored US political party, I give you the delightfully titled The War on Chronology.
http://arsenalfordemocracy.com/2015/10/18/the-war-on-chronology/#.ViP-SVUViko
Iphinome, I clicked through to that comment you posted (had to scroll down bit), which opens with (and then elaborates on) this theme: “It is my conviction that women are socialists and fascists by nature and that is why they are leading the charge on common sense and destroying everything in their path.”
It’s yet another example of why I’m perpetually bemused by the Sad Puppies who insist their faction is different than and separate from VD’s Rabid faction. Week after week, for more than 8 months now, the groups and their rhetoric strike me as indistinguishable.
Hoyt once again demonstrates that her followers are the worst people on the planet.