(1) IS IT DEAD JIM? BBC reports “Fears grow for European Schiaparelli Mars lander”, which arrived on Mars today.
There are growing fears a European probe that attempted to land on Mars on Wednesday has been lost.
Tracking of the Schiaparelli robot’s radio signals was dropped less than a minute before it was expected to touch down on the Red Planet’s surface.
Satellites at Mars have attempted to shed light on the probe’s status, so far without success.
One American satellite even called out to Schiaparelli to try to get it to respond.
The fear will be that the robot has crashed and been destroyed. The European Space Agency, however, is a long way from formally calling that outcome.
(2) CHAMBERS RETURNS. Becky Chambers’ new novel launched this week. Thea James from Book Smugglers gives it thumbs up.
….A Closed and Common Orbit picks up right after the final events of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, with the once-Lovelace Artificial Intelligence, now reset and memory-less, finding a new life aboard a new body. Before, Lovelace had eyes everywhere and her task was to care for the health and wellbeing of the Wayfarer’s crew. Now, renamed Sidra, she finds herself in a new–and illegal–synthetic body, trying to cope with a limited, isolated, and physical existence that simply doesn’t seem enough.
(3) IT COMES IN PINTS? Emily Asher-Perrin undertakes a highly scientific thought experiment at Tor.com – “How Much Beer Does it Take to Get a Hobbit Drunk?”
But how much can a hobbit actually drink?
There is a joke in the Lord of the Rings films that is not present in the books–while hanging around at The Prancing Pony, Merry comes back to the table with a great big tankard. and Pippin asks what he’s drinking:
“This, my friend, is a pint,” he says wickedly.
Pippin’s eyes widen. “It comes in pints?”
It makes sense that hobbits would veer toward smaller pours because they are smaller people–you wouldn’t give a five-year-old a pint glass of juice because they have smaller stomachs and the glass would be harder to manage in smaller hands. But even if the average hobbit goes from half-pint to half-pint, that doesn’t mean that their rates of consumption are low in the alcohol department.
(4) ALLUSION OR UNCITED SOURCE? At Electric Literature, Carmen Maria Machado, in “How to Suppress Women’s Criticism”, argues that Neil Gaiman’s jacket blurb for Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life essentially did a disservice to Joanna Russ.
It was only then that I saw the lead blurb at the top of the dust jacket. Written by Neil Gaiman, it reads in part:
“Not just a terrific biography, but a remarkable act of reclamation: if there was ever a great writer of the twentieth century who fell victim to ‘How to Dismiss Women’s Fiction,’ it was Shirley Jackson.”
…That might seem like a lot of pressure to put on a blurb, especially because blurbs are an unavoidable part of a professional writer’s life. But Russ is dead. Jackson is dead. And in the thoughtless, uncredited, mangled deployment of that phrase —even in praise— Gaiman broke the chain between the two of them; a prominent, living male artist inserted between Russ’ ideas and Jackson’s reality. It would have been such a little, correct thing to keep that link alive — a gesture whose implications would have far outweighed its size. And yet, like so many tiny, seemingly insignificant cultural gestures — whose collective weight can buoy, or suffocate — it is a symptom of a larger condition.
(5) LOST LIGHT. James Davis Nicoll sent this link with the note, “Female blogger silenced.” After six years in the fight, wundergeek’s (Anna Kreider) game industry blog Go Make Me a Sandwich (how not to sell games to women) is signing off.
While it is undeniable that my blog has resulted in positive change in some parts of the games industry and community, that change has come at tremendous personal cost. First and foremost, it’s cost me my reputation; because of this blog, I will always be “controversial”. Go Make Me a Sandwich started as a personal project, something that I started as a hobby because I wanted to write about something that was a growing area of interest for me. By the time it took off, the damage was done; my Google Rank has inextricably tied my name to feminism forever, and that can be dangerous. It’s certainly translated into a level of difficulty in my meatspace life that I never anticipated before starting this blog.
Writing this blog has also taken a tremendous toll on my mental health. The backlash that I’ve faced because of what I do here has been terrifying…..
There are also those who know about the abuse and choose to believe that the abusers aren’t the problem. The real problem is me: my feelings about my experiences of marginalization and harassment and how I express them. There are many in our community who think that it’s a bigger problem that I’m not nice about my feelings toward my abusers than it is that I’m being abused. So instead of holding the abusers accountable for their abuse, which is known and well-documented, they instead decide to publicly castigate me for committing the womanly sin of having feelings about a thing incorrectly…..
…. MY WHOLE GODDAMN LIFE I’ve been told that I was “too much”. Too loud. Too opinionated. Too brash. Too arrogant. Too abrasive. Too bossy. My whole life, people have been trying to shove me into a box that I just don’t fit in, no matter how hard I try – the box of proper womanhood. This blog was my place where I could be ME. Unapologetically. Loudly. Defiantly! And walking away from that feels like walking away from part of myself.
It feels like climbing into the box voluntarily.
It feels like capitulation. Like surrender.
I’m sorry I couldn’t be stronger.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
- October 19, 1953 — Fahrenheit 451 published.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born October 19, 1945 – John Lithgow, of Buckaroo Banzai and Third Rock from the Sun.
(8) IT BITES. Washington Post critic Nelson Pressley says you can pass on the local production of Zombie Prom.
That shine is missing in “Zombie Prom,” another campy 1990s off-Broadway musical getting its area premiere. Boy meet girl, boy loses girl, boy despairs and jumps into a vat of nuclear waste. He returns as a zombie — but can he still go the prom?
This is strictly for hardcore musical devotees who want to see what Dana P. Rowe and John Dempsey wrote before their musicals “The Fix” and “The Witches of Eastwick.” The Unexpected Stage Company, last seen showcasing Deb Margolin in “8 Stops,” isn’t giving buffs a particularly good look. Virtually the only number inspiring a grin is the 1950s-style girl-group ballad “Jonny Don’t Go” (“ . . . to the nuclear plant” is the rest of the plea), sung with nice comic understatement by Julia Klavans as the doomed Jonny’s girlfriend, Toffee. The rock-and-roll quartet tucked up onto a platform in a back corner of the stage tries to capture the feel of the 1950s sock-hop score but can’t quite swing it. Neither can much of the rest of the indifferently designed, unevenly performed show.
(9) REFILL. John King Tarpinian found an even better image of the Logan’s Rum reference on The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episode.
(10) RURITANIA MISUNDERSTOOD. Since Ian Sales reads this blog, wouldn’t it be more efficient for him to engage the commenters here and clarify the misunderstanding?
judging by comments on File770 I appear to have invented a new critical term for sf that doesn't map onto my use of the term
— Ian Sales ???????? ???????? (@ian_sales) October 18, 2016
it's not just File770 (which is basically LJ) or just Americans. Sadly.
— Ian Sales ???????? ???????? (@ian_sales) October 19, 2016
"he seems to place primary value on development of big sciencey concepts". Show me where I said this in my piece. You are projecting.
— Ian Sales ???????? ???????? (@ian_sales) October 19, 2016
it would also require them reading my post and understanding its argument. It's an LJ thing, and File770 is the new LJ
— Ian Sales ???????? ???????? (@ian_sales) October 19, 2016
And spare my tender feelings, please – the new LJ, indeed!
(11) BIRDS OF MANY FEATHERS. Publishers Weekly talked to Ursula K. Le Guin about her new collections that are releasing today: “Four Questions for…Ursula K. Le Guin”.
Your work is typically labeled “speculative fiction” or “science fiction” or “fantasy,” in spite of your protests. How do you think the typical demarcations of “mainstream,” “literary,” and “speculative” fiction have evolved since you began writing?
I’ve never protested when my science fiction and fantasy is called science fiction and fantasy—why should I, when that’s what it is? But a lot of it isn’t, and I do protest having all my work lumped into a genre that only some of it belongs to. I’ve written for decades in various genres including realism, SF, fantasy, kiddilit, and fable. I published poetry long before I sold a story, and am still publishing it. I’m no longer writing fiction. I don’t fit into any pigeonhole. I’m all kinds of birds. The walls between fictional genres that were constructed by critical prejudice and ignorance are going down fast, and I love to watch them go! [That being said], genre is a permanently useful idea when used rightly, to indicate actual difference in subject-matter, style, expectation. It’s sort of like dogs, isn’t it? Your basic dog is a mongrel. No one breed is “superior” to all others, and exclusive inbreeding results in monsters. But variety and adaptability are valuable traits in a species, and there are real differences between breeds. Long live the Chihuahua, the Elkhound, the Poodle, and the Mutt.
(12) RESEARCH. Sarah A. Hoyt shares her strategy for “Making it Real – How To do Targeted Research” at Mad Genius Club.
Anyway, this is my method: if I am asked — as I was recently — to write something set in say the time of the revolution, the first thing I do is buy one or two general interest books, preferably ones well thought of. Then I buy a biography or ten written by people of the time. And then I outline the book and decide what targeted research I’ll need. Will they sit down at table? Will there be a tavern scene? All of those have books written about them. I find those and read them for the specific scenes I need. At this time, too, to “soak in” the feel of things I start watching documentaries about that time and place. This gives a “texture” to the book it would otherwise lack.
Of course, my books change as I write them, so sometimes I’ll find I have to write a scene that wasn’t in the outline, like horse shoeing or perhaps riding between two specific scenes. At that time, I will put notes all over the book that say “look up x” — most people use something to bracket those, that isn’t used in normal writing, so that we can do a final look see and make sure we got them all. I use curly brackets — and also, my monitor gets “porcupined” with sticky notes with things like “try to find book or website or reenactor who knows about x.” and “I’m almost sure the description of horse shoeing in the blah blah novel is wrong,” but it’s all I could find “so, replace it when you figure out the right one.” …
(13) NUMBER ONE. Castalia House again has topped an Amazon sales category with its latest release – a book that apparently was acquired at a bargain price:
Mike Cernovich’s new book, MAGA MINDSET: Making YOU and America Great Again, is the #1 bestseller in Amazon’s Politics & Social Sciences>Leadership category. That’s not surprising, as his prevous book, Gorilla Mindset, self-published in 2015, was also a bestseller
What is surprising, however, is that languishing behind the Donald Trump-supporting author’s latest bestseller is Stronger Together, a book published only last month, written by Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine. The Clinton-Kaine book, signed by Simon & Schuster to $14 million advance, currently sits at 5th place in the category…..
The new Cernovich bestseller, signed to an advance that was, according to Day, “pretty close to $14 million less than Clinton and Kaine got,”….
(14) ANCILLARY CUISINE. Lunchtime at Ann Leckie’s table earlier this week.
https://twitter.com/ann_leckie/status/788064135342804992
https://twitter.com/ann_leckie/status/788064320403886080
(15) INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY. Are people still trying to find out?
https://twitter.com/ChuckTingle/status/788773056504135680
[Thanks to Bartimaeus, James Davis Nicoll, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Tom Becker.]
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1) The Warhoons got it, and now some grim jed is using all four of his upper limbs to place his prize from Jasoom in a high place, as symbol of his triumph over the invaders. I have spoken.
PIxeled in the Scroll by my own Pixel.
(10) Ian Sales: “he seems to place primary value on development of big sciencey concepts”. Show me where I said this in my piece. You are projecting.
Nope, I’m interpreting.
It’s telling a present-day story in an invented setting, but a setting that is as familiar as the reader’s world. It’s only science fiction because of the furniture and vocabulary. That’s the essence of Ruritanian science fiction. It is genre fiction which builds an invented setting out of elements which might as well not be invented… Ruritanian sf is comfort reading, it is unadventurous and unlikely to promote critical discussion.
In other words, if it doesn’t engage in big sciencey concepts, regardless of how much plot and character development it includes, “it is unadventurous and unlikely to promote critical discussion”.
I invite Mr. Sales to come here and explain the error in this interpretation. 🙄
But…
(10) I have barely any opinion of Sales’s piece – I did read it, I thought I more or less understood the preference he was expressing, which is not one I share, but that his point would’ve been a lot clearer if he’d used examples. I think maybe some of the comments here were reading between his lines in a way that wasn’t what he intended, but I can hardly blame them given the somewhat vague way he was generalizing.
Those Twitter comments though… hilarious. How can anyone who spends any time on the Internet think that “people criticized me in a misguided way without enough specific cites” is specifically a LiveJournal thing? And he’s got people agreeing with him who almost certainly did not read the File770 comments, other than the tiny excerpt he quoted. LiveJournal is everywhere!!!
Mmmmmm tea leaf salad. Love that stuff.
The comments here on Sales weren’t even uniformly negative – his beef seems to be with JJ and maybe like two other people who agreed with JJ, but that apparently means the whole site is dumb and mean. A remarkably pissy response that makes me much less interested in this writer’s views in general.
Eli: How can anyone who spends any time on the Internet think that “people criticized me in a misguided way without enough specific cites” is specifically a LiveJournal thing?
By dismissing File770 as “the new LiveJournal” (whatever the hell that means; perhaps Mr. Sales would like me to post my interpretation of what he means by that remark as well?), he can avoid having to actually engage in meaningful discussion of his piece.
Maybe, if Ian Sales feels that we misunderstood his post, then he should have come here to clarify what he meant. Cause I understood it much like JJ.
It’s also nice that we’re apparently all Americans here. Even though there are people from all over the world commenting here.
Eli: Yeah, and what about that complimentary intro I gave him piece in the Scroll? You’d think that’d count for something…. 🙂
My impression was Sales understands there’s an international readership here — it was his correspondent who was trying to get Sales to endorse the slighting remark.
You’re right, Mike. It was the other guy, Will Ellwood. Still a stupid comment.
On a related note to (5) and other recent items about online toxicity, this two-parter by sf author K. C. Alexander may qualify as on topic:
1. “Calling It What It Is: the Unspoken Validation of Online Abuse”
2. “Imzy: Social Media With You in Mind”
Part 1 is a call to abandon Twitter due to its consistent inaction on abuse, and part 2 is a plug for a recently created competitor whose big selling point is having tried to tackle abusive behavior from the start.
I’m assuming (well, guessing pretty dang strongly that Tom Becker’s scroll title, “”The Pixel With The Ticks Will Be The Scroll That Is Droll,” is riffing on the “The Pellet with the Poison’s in the Vessel with the Pestle” scene (easily found on YouTube, natch) from the movie THE COURT JESTER starring (per IMDB) Danny Kaye, Glynis Johns, Basil Rathbone, Angela Lansbury [ way long before she did MURDER SHE WROTE or SWEENEY TODD – DPD ] and Cecil Parker.
Otherwise, I’m wrong. In which case it’s safe to drink.
Ticky.
(1) Joseph T. Major is correct. Barsoom got it (If it is later found by the orbiting satellites, it will be LGM).
(2) I must acquire this immediately.
(3) That’s some quality nerding.
(4,5) Sigh.
(10) I love how he and his cronies think File 770 is all Americans, and all stupid. Managing to insult the whole world because he can’t bother to pay attention, and wrote a vague, muddled piece! Arsehole. Cowardly arsehole, sniping away ignorantly on Twitter (so much more erudite than LJ? 🙄), instead of coming here. We seem to have hurt his widdle fee-fees. And it’s LJ all the way down!
He also says “it’s not just File770 or just Americans.” Meaning nobody else knew what the hell he meant either? If everyone’s confused, perhaps he might consider it IS him? Because right now it appears as if “Ruritanian SF” means “Things Ian Sales doesn’t respect, but won’t tell you exactly why, you cretins.” And here (where else did his witterings get any publicity?) there were at least two completely different interpretations of his essay, equally supported by the evidence.
(11) “I don’t buy that kill-your-darlings line. Does good judgment really involve murder?” Oh, Ursula. We could not love you more.
(12) Duh? I guess it’s good info for rank beginners, but this is how I did it as a teen before we had internet. I don’t buy the books, though; that’ll mess up your profit/loss ratio real good.
(13) Teddy doesn’t mention it’s number one in that tiny subcategory because it was FREE, and listed prominently on ebook freebie sites. I follow a couple so I don’t remember which.
(14) I must try this. To the pan-Asian supermarket!
(15) All of us are Chuck Tingle. None of us are Chuck Tingle.
(5) LOST LIGHT.
fuck
Ann Leckie’s pickled tea leaf salad looks scrumptious!
[god-leaf]
(5) LOST LIGHT.
Ask not for whom the bell toll; it tolls for all of us, and fandom is the lesser. 🙁
Tip o’ the cap to Kip W for the inspiration.
Tom Becker
You improved it.
@lurkertype re #11: is Le Guin thinking of some other meaning of “kill your darlings”, and if so what is it? I’ve heard it in the context of getting rid of phrases, sentences, or maybe even paragraphs within a story that are stylistically beautiful but not contributing (which often means actively getting in the way); I’ve never heard it referring to an entire story.
@Daniel Dern: Get it, got it, good!
Ian Sales is a bit of a prat, isn’t he?
You never see Ian Sales and Chuck Tingle in the same room. Just saying.
I’ve talked to Ian a couple of times, albeit briefly. Found him to be polite, friendly.
@Chip: I think UKL was extending the meaning there, if you look at the previous couple of sentences.
@James Worrad: Nah, they can’t be the same. Tingle is all about the love.
@PhilRM: Maybe he hopes to become the next Christopher Priest, prat-wise.
4) ALLUSION OR UNCITED SOURCE?
Read this earlier. Rereading made me sadder. Tired of women being suppressed…
5) LOST LIGHT
This sucks. I’ve enjoyed her blog for a while now. Supported a Kickstarter or three as well as Patreon. When is social media going to be for most of us and not for the small minority of harassers? When will bystanders, especially men, learn how and actively stand up and say stop and let those being harassed know they have support? In person starting a positive conversation with the harassed while ignoring the harasser can throw him off balance – I’ve seen this work online also.
(10) RURITANIA MISUNDERSTOOD.
I kind of like the Americans here. Is Ellwood trying to imply that you can’t be American without being dumb? Also, if this is the new LJ, then I want my own blog.
Hampus Eckerman: Is Ellwood trying to imply that you can’t be American without being dumb?
Actually, I think he’s pretty much flat-out stating that.
Which was not a terribly bright move on his part. Because the vast majority of Filers are some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever seen, I went over to check out his blog (as you do) to evaluate his basis for making the judgment that they are “dumb”.
OMG. The misspellings, the grammar errors, the phrases ending in prepositions, the misuse of words when he clearly intends a different word, and the appallingly-bad punctuation all gave me a huge, hearty laugh. And he claims to be an author.
Dude, your lack of writing skills is amply on display there. If you’re going to call other people (who happen to be highly intelligent) dumb, then you should probably clean up your own house first, so that you don’t look like a total laughingstock. 😆
5) what Dawn, JJ and Tasha said.
4) How to Suppress Women’s Writing was a hugely important book for me. The mechanisms it exposed and the ferocious joy of the style were invaluable, not to mention the beautifully intersectional ending. As Machado points out, Russ’ book, like Ellen Moers’, was an essential guide to women writers one should have heard of, but hadn’t. I think thing are a bit better now with regard to recognizing women writers. Since Moers, and Russ and Showalter’s efforts, great work by women isn’t as invisible as it was in my youth. Periodic “rediscoveries” of people I already knew about can be annoying, but seem like signs of progress.
Thanks for the good news in 2) and fun content in 11) and 14) to counter the sad things.
[I go and quitely sob in a corenr]
I’m prepared to give Ian Sales a lot of respect, just for the “Apollo Quartet” alone… and I read his article, and I don’t seem to have taken the same things away from it that JJ did.
What he seemed – to me, with my limited understanding – to be inveighing against is SF where the SFnal elements are just background set dressing that happen to make things convenient for the storyteller (just as the laws and customs and history of Ruritania were made up to suit Anthony Hope’s narrative convenience.) And, frankly, there is, at the very least, a lot of overlap between “SF in this style” and “pedestrian stories”. Basically, he seemed (to me) to be inveighing against what the Turkey City Lexicon calls “Used Furniture”… and, well, y’know, I can see his point, there.
At least, that’s what I thought he was saying. But what do I know? Apparently, I’m only an ignorant American. (Who was born in Wales, lives in England, and has never even been to America. But it seems these things don’t matter.)
(4) Couldn’t quite work out from the snippet what the issue was, though the full article makes it clearer. And explains the tweet I saw a couple of days ago in which Gaiman said that he’d asked for a blub correction in future printings.
Re 9) Logan’s Run? So is it aged 29 years and 364 days until its Lastday? (alternately, 20 years and 364 days for the novel)
I just want to thank Emily Asher-Perrin for, when writing a piece riffing on a line from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, bothering to point out that it’s not in the book. Too often I’ve seen pieces of this kind that quote from the movies and attribute it to the book.
4 – If you look hard enough for something to be upset about, you will find it.
5- If you want negative commentary on something people are passionate about and wish to avoid negative comments – don’t allow comments. This is not complicated.
“When will bystanders, especially men, learn how and actively stand up and say stop and let those being harassed know they have support?”
People are not responsible for what others say. If you say something as a [insert whatever demographic category you choose] others of that [demographic category] are not responsible. Individually, we are all responsible for our own actions. Collective guilt is very Old Testament.
In any impersonal communication form people tend to be much more nasty than they are face-to-face. Unfortunate, but true.
People can make their point without being nasty about it – if they choose to do so.
Ooh, is that some victim blaming from Airboy? Why yes, yes it is!
I’m extremely passionate about many subjects, and yet I’ve failed to make a single rape and/or death threat to anyone. It’s shockingly easy.
When your point is “I want people to attack my Ex-Girlfriend under the guise of ‘ethics in gaming journalism’ ” then no, that point actually can’t be made without being nasty about it.
I am somewhere in Texas on book tour. I have always been on book tour. I will always be on book tour.
(4): So, Gaiman got the title wrong? Is that all there is to it? He put it in quotes, so he was clearly alluding to a specific phrase, and it doesn’t seem like rewording the title was a paraphrase to make it fit the sentence better, as the correct title could be swapped in easily. Mangled, yes, but calling it ‘uncredited’ seems like a weird complaint; working in Russ’s name as attribution (e.g. “…who fell victim to what Joanna Russ called ‘How To Suppress Women’s Writing'”) would be poor style when the title alone draws the allusion seamlessly (and positions it as something the reader should recognize on their own).
airboy:
From the post:
I take it that airboy thinks you should never post anything on the net unless you want to accept to be treated that way.
Also, I am kind of tired of these speeches to defend looking the other way in the face of abuse and harassment.
@Tasha: it may be a small minority of active abusers — but the minority has a lot of quiet supporters, judging by the fact that Trump is still polling 30-40%. i.e., they may not agree with the language but they agree with the arguments. I don’t like it, but I am \so/ not a persuader myself and don’t see action from enough people who might be able to get movement. Note (wrt another subthread) that this isn’t just US misbehavior; Germany has PEGIDA, the UK has the upsurge in violence licensed by the Brexit vote — even Canada is having hater problems according to a BBC story yesterday.
I certainly tried to appeal that that side of him, but he has chosen to respond otherwise.
On a less dire note, some links from today’s BBC relating to recent threads:
Talking up colonization of Venus (cf a recent Scroll — not much new, but it’s interesting to see that someone thinks everything can be made of Teflon to get around the problem I pointed to.)
21 years ago: discovering the ~first exoplanet
All new Teslas will have self-driving capacity. To me as a former SWQA engineer this is important; they’ll be collecting orders of magnitude more testing-like data than they could get by themselves. How usable the data will be is another question.
Hawking is less one-sided about AI possibilities.
Stephen Hawking is just worried that his voice thingy will become self-aware and start making “yo mamma” jokes in the middle of an important lecture.
@airboy
Most of us can have passionate views on topics without threatening rape, physical violence, or calling people a c*nt. I know, the more you know….
Tasha Turner said:
The K. C. Alexander essays upthread are written especially for you! (I’ve put myself into Imzy’s invitation queue; I can report back about it if they get to me in any reasonable length of time.)
re: Ian Sales … I’ve interacted with him on some other books sites and found him to be insightful, opinionated, and quite prickly when criticized or disagreed with.
re:
the youtube video that made the rounds a few months back featuring a female ESPN journalist and some random males where the random males read some of the comments sent to her … was powerful. The most common remark I hear made about these issues is “if you want to be in the spotlight you have to expect that .. guys do that to each other all the time etc”. Made me wonder what the male equivalent would be to calling a woman a c*nt.
Hint: there isn’t one.
edited to add link to video
@Darren Garrison – Look for the MC Hawking song, The Dozens.
Re (13): If something is free, can it validly be a bestseller?