Pixel Scroll 10/5/17 Pyxel Queste

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Your host is on the road to New Mexico where he will celebrate his mother’s 91st birthday.

So it’s up to you, Dear Reader, to add your wisdom in the comments, along with the links to what should have been in the Scroll.

(1) THE BIG RED TWENTY. James Davis Nicoll’s latest core list – “Twenty Core Speculative Fiction Works Featuring Gingers (Cosmic or Otherwise) Every True SF Fan Should Have On Their Shelves”. It includes –

(2) BRIANNA WU VS. TRUMPZILLA. Frank Wu has the story —

So, when Brianna decided to run for US Congress, she wanted to have a very serious campaign on the issues.  Fighting for gun control and intelligent tech policy.  Defending our environment and public schools.  Fighting against wage and racial inequality, and against all the unhinged policies of Donald Trump.  I asked her if I could make my own campaign ad to support her.  With giant monsters.  Amazingly, she said yes.  So here it is.

(3) WINTER HAS WENT. That iceman Otzi (read some of this first for a refresher) has them in an uproar.

https://twitter.com/EleanorsaLizard/status/915762220063105024

(4) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

Born October 5 — Paul Weimer

(5) THE BEYOND. Official trailer.

[Thanks to Carl Slaughter, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Cat Eldridge, and Frank Wu for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day JJ and Arifel.]

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70 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/5/17 Pyxel Queste”

  2. I was just handed a 1964 paperback of Bradbury’s October Country at work.

    Weekend reading sorted.

  3. While I know the list of SF/F redheads is not meant to be definitive, I must note the omission of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd.

  4. I’m still watching The Orville and still enjoying it enough to keep watching. A week ago, the episode was Orphans of the Sky meets “Nightfall.” Last night, it was John Varley’s “Air Raid”/Millennium. Am I missing any other “inspirations” that ought to be as obvious as those?

    And I thought it was a better version of Air Raid than the film was. (Just to connect it to Star Trek–it was directed by Jonathan Frakes.)

    It’s not earth-shatteringly-great SF, but it’s fun and definitely has some writers who have read SF over the years.

  5. @kathodus: no worries, not really into knowing who the person is, except perhaps as a name to avoid 🙂

    @Arifel: congrats on getting through the proposal stage! Hope you can get started on your PhD – four years will fly by. Or grind by. Depends I guess 🙂 I wanted to start on my MA before I turned 30 but that dream looks to be dead now. Maybe I can start before I turn 31 though, and if I’m smart/good enough maybe I can get my PhD before I turn 40.

  6. Still reading that Buzzfeed article on Breitbart. About 3/4 of the way through, I see another nasty SFF figure pop up – requireshate appears to be mentioned by David Aurbach, as a friend of Arthur Chu.

  8. @Hampus

    She’s in one of the screencaps. If you search for Arthur Chu and look at the images beneath the text, you’ll find it.

  9. In replying to John below, I realized that Mike must be on the Southwest Chief, not the Sunset Limited. I’ve been on both.

    John A Arkansawyer on October 6, 2017 at 6:47 am said:

    @Kevin Standlee: Did you do the whole Chicago-Los Angeles trip?

    Yes. I was using Amtrak points and realized that it was the same points to go Emeryville)-Chicago (California Zephyr) as Chicago-San Antonio-LA (Texas Eagle/Sunset Limited), so we went out on the Zephyr (with a bunch of other Bay Area fans who were on the same train — we took over several of the tables in the Sightseer Lounge and formed a sort of TrainCon on the way out) and back on the Eagle/Sunset).

    The Texas Eagle runs daily between Chicago and San Antonio. Three days a week, one coach and one sleeper from the Eagle are detatched from the train when it gets to San Antonio, and are collected by the Sunset Limited on its three-days-a-week trip from New Orleans to Los Angeles. (And vice versa, of course.) In our case, we had a couple of hours to wait in San Antonio in the evening, and my wife and walked down to the Riverwalk area, in a sort of preview of the following year’s Worldcon. We had to get out of our sleeper, becuase Amtrak for whatever reason hadn’t plugged the car into ground-side power, and that meant the unpowered cars rapidly became well-nigh uninhabitable with no air conditioning or circulation.

    The following day, my wife was very sick, which we put down to con crud from Chicago, but our experience the following year in San Antonio, in which she was sick for weeks thereafter, suggests that she’s deeply allergic to something in the air around that area. Locals suggest she suffers from “Juniper fever,” an alergy to local tree pollen. In any event, I doubt we’ll ever go back there again.

    (We spent a night in Los Angeles and then took the Coast Starlight in coach back to the Bay Area, in case you’re wondering how that “open jaw” trip closed.)

    I really crave making that trip myself to Los Angeles from Little Rock. (I’ve done the route to Chicago in whole and in pieces.)lee Do you have any tips other than get a room? Which I’d like to do.

    Not really. Sleeping rooms are expensive (and used to be a bargain on Amtrak points until Amtrak figured out how badly they had undervalued them), but they make the trip much nicer. And when Lisa got sick, it meant she could lay up in the room and have the car attendant bring us our meals (which are included with the room), and that was worth a lot, too.

    Someday maybe the big loop, out to LA, up to Seattle, and home by way of Chicago.

    That sounds like a good trip. The Empire Builder is the only one of the long inter-city trains we’ve not taken. We’ve been out-and-back on the Zephyr-Wolverine (Detroit NASFiC), done the Zephyr-Eagle-Sunset-Starlight loop (Chicago Worldcon), and (for the Montreal Worldcon) gone out by the Zephyr-Lake Shore Limited-Adirondack (overnight in Chicago and Schenectady), then back by Adirondack-Lake Shore Limited-Southwest Chief-Starlight (overnight at Los Angeles; the Montreal-LA return was continuous with longish layovers at Schenectady and Chicago).

  11. @Rob Thornton, he also wasn’t expelled for what he said per se, but rather for using official SFWA channels to say it.

    @John A Arkansawyer, Traincon 4 to and from Worldcon 76 will be going from Chicago to LA on the Southwest Chief, with a coastal run up to San Jose; the return will be on the California Zephyr after a short hop to Emeryville. Deposits are being taken now, or you can make your own arrangements and join mid-run. If you’re interested I can put you in touch with the organizer. Write lenorejone at the gmail. (S missing from address courtesy of former employer.)

  12. Lenore Jones / jonesnori on October 6, 2017 at 6:28 pm said:

    Traincon 4 to and from Worldcon 76 will be going from Chicago to LA on the Southwest Chief, with a coastal run up to San Jose

    San Jose’s site is pretty convenient to the trains, too. Not quite as convenient as Helsinki was, but not bad. The mainline (Amtrak) station in San Jose is also a light rail station. It is around a 2 km ride on light rail to Convention Center station (which is indeed right in front of the Convention Center/Hilton/Marriott), and one more stop to Paseo de San Antonio (where the Fairmont Hotel is).

  13. @JJ

    Re Stranger tithings trailer,

    I’d have to go for a lie down, if I wasn’t already. So I’ll settle for a Squee Instead.ut down the iPad and sleep off the beer festival.

    SQUEEE!!!

  14. Some 30+ years ago, I remember reading the Thieves World books, being impressed by how Shadowspawne always put down the front of his foot first. And now I hear that everyone did that?

    Dizzapointed!

  16. Worldcon and the Bay Area and a long train ride is a pretty awesome thought and it falls during the most critical ten days or so of my work year.

    I asked for it off for Kansas City when I still had someone who “hates you, Johnnie” controlling my career, and got it, because I’d been sufficiently marginalized as to not be needed at our most important time. Now that things are different, perhaps I can get things running so smoothly it’ll be easy to let me go.

    Um, wait.

  17. Ah Thieves World. Enjoyed that one, last but not least because it highlighted some problems with the concept: lack of consistency, a tendency to overpower characters in the course of the series and writers doing their own thing, not using the setting/shared universe which tenders the concept a bit pointless. All things that occasionally show up in similar works (like comic books). But there were some cool characters. And the first couple of books and the last were quite enjoyable to my younger self.

  18. @Peer – I re-read the entire series back in… 2011? I didn’t read the post-80s anthologies, though. I was a huge fan of Shadowspawn as a kid, but found his stories syrupy and much less fun than I had when I was younger. On the other hand, Cherryh’s story lines, which I’d found dense and difficult to read as a kid, were great. I ended up searching out more Cherryh to read after my TW re-read. The later books – particularly The Dead of Winter – have more depth and emotional scope to them (or at least, that’s what I took away from them). Anything I say about TW should be taken with a large dose of salt, as I was very much into the series in my formative years and so may subconsciously ignore some of the Suck Fairy’s wand-smashings.

  19. Cherryh’s story lines, which I’d found dense and difficult to read as a kid, were great. I may have been fortunate in being an adult when Cherryh started writing; the high-school me who was baffled by the massive flashback in Lord of Light would probably not have been able to handle the compression of her writing. Since then she’s become one of my favorites — partly I suppose due to Merchanter’s Luck but more because the stakes are always convincing.

  20. @Chip – Merchanter’s Luck is one of my favorites of hers, and “the stakes are always convincing” is spot on.

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