Pixel Scroll 10/6 Beyond the pixelated event horizon

(1) Put together “William Shatner” and “flying” and I’m going to think of the “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” episode of The Twilight Zone. Not Scotland’s former first minister Alex Salmond — he thinks of a different Shatner role when he flies, and it got him into trouble.

Alex Salmond found himself in a bizarre situation with airline staff after booking on to a flight under the name James Kirk – the captain of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise.

The former Scottish first minister caused confusion when British Airways initially refused to let him board a flight at Heathrow under the sci-fi alias.

The Mail on Sunday reported that it took a series of telephone calls for the senior politician to persuade the airline that he should be allowed on board.

Salmond said he often travelled under a false name for security reasons and as a Trekkie – as fans of the show are known – he liked to use Kirk’s name, partly as a joke but also because it was easy to remember….

He told the Mail on Sunday: “It was all sorted out. I just wanted BA to ‘beam me up, Scotty’.”

(2) “Lines from The Princess Bride that Double as Comments on Freshman Composition Papers” by Jennifer Simonson on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

[Last 3 of 9.]

“Skip to the end!”

“That is the sound of ultimate suffering.”

“Inconceivable!”

(3) Ursula K. Le Guin will appear at UCLA on Sunday, November 15 at 4 p.m. Tickets from $19-$49.

Incomparable storyteller and worldweaver Ursula K. Le Guin joins us for a conversation celebrating her incredible oeuvre, hosted by Meryl Friedman, CAP UCLA Director of Education and Special Initiatives.

(4) A report on Diana Pavlac Glyer’s talk about the Inklings’ “dangerous friendships”, by Scott Keith.

I recently finished the C. S. Lewis biography authored by Alister McGrath entitled, C. S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. I highly recommend it. Over the weekend, I also attended The Great Conversation (TCG) C. S. Lewis symposium. At the symposium, Diana Pavlac Glyer, professor of English at Azusa Pacific University gave a talk on the influence of the Inklings on the thought of C. S. Lewis. I am struck by the extent to which great writers like Lewis and Tolkien seemed to use what McGrath calls, “midwives” when writing their great works. Or as Glyer put it, “We all need dangerous friends.”….

Gradually, the schedule of Inklings’ meetings became regularized, so they generally met on Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child pub (which they called the “Bird and Baby” or just the “Bird”) and at Lewis’s study rooms in the college where he was an Oxford Don, Magdalen College, on Thursday evenings. At the pub they smoked their pipes, drank, and had good food almost like hobbits. While they sat in the bar, they talked about language and literature. Others in the group included Owen Barfield, Warren Lewis, Nevill Coghill, Hugo Dyson, and Charles Williams.

As it is described by those in the know, the Inklings were not afraid to mix it up a bit. These men were not all alike. Lewis was brash and boisterous. Tolkien seems to have been more reserved and introspective. They did not agree on many things. Tolkien is said to have believed that Lewis’s use of allegory in his Ransom Trilogy and Chronicles of Narnia, was perhaps too obvious. In fact, they often disagreed on issues of morality. McGrath explains that Tolkien believed that Lewis’s view concerning civil marriage was against the teaching of the church. Thus, the evidence points to the fact that Tolkien disapproved of Lewis’s marriage to Joy Davidman.

(5) Gregory N. Hullender of Rocket Stack Rank has responded to Neil Clarke’s recent editorial “The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Reviews”, where Clarke opined that short-fiction reviews are of little value.

In Hullender’s RSR post “Getting More From Short Fiction Reviews” he draws a distinction between a review system and a recommendation system. While conceding that Clarke is probably right that reviews alone aren’t worth a lot to most people, he argues that as part of a recommendation system, reviews can be very valuable indeed.

(6) Scientists think they may soon be able to answer “What color was the T-Rex?”. From NPR –

INSKEEP: That’s Jakob Vinther of the University of Bristol in Britain. Vinther and scientists from Virginia Tech confirmed traces of melanin in fossils dating back millions of years, and that melanin may provide a vital clue.

VINTHER: The kinds of hair colors that we see in humans, ranging from black to ginger, are made by melanin.

MONTAGNE: Bits of melanin are found inside cells, and the shape of those bits says something about the color of the creature.

VINTHER: If you have a black melanosome, they’re shaped like a sausage whereas if you have a red melanosome, then they’re shaped like a little meatball.

INSKEEP: Turns out, this meatball and sausage theme is pretty consistent across nature.

VINTHER: I myself is quite sort of ginger in my appearance. My beard is very, very sort of reddish. And if you took a look at the melanosomes in my beard, they will be shaped like little meatballs. And then if you have, for example, an American robin, they have this reddish-brown chest and they would also have these kinds of meatballs.

MONTAGNE: So the researchers are presuming the shapes may also have matched the color of creatures from the distant past. The team checked the melanin from two species of bat that lived almost 50 million years ago. They were a reddish-brown color.

(7) The Western Science Fiction Association maintains a convention listing page, and Stephanie Bannon invites conrunners to send their events for inclusion. Contact info at the site.

(8) It never occurred to me the Archie characters were based on anybody in particular. A documentary filmmaker tracked down the real life Betty.

In 1939, 18-year-old Betty Tokar Jankovich briefly dated, and quickly dumped, a comic book artist named Bob Montana. Though she quickly forgot about the young illustrator, he never forgot about her. More than seven decades later, Jankovich was shocked to discover that an ex-boyfriend she only vaguely remembered had named a character after her: She was the inspiration for Betty Cooper from the Archie comics.

Jankovich would likely never have known about her Archie connection if not for filmmaker Gerald Peary. A documentarian, journalist, and Archie super-fan, Peary decided to research the real-life inspiration for the comic book characters. He didn’t expect to actually meet any living real-life members of the gang—he just wanted to find out if they’d really existed.

(9) Sales prices of some items in Profiles in History’s recent Hollywood Auction have been made public.

The “slave Leia” costume worn by Carrie Fisher in Return of the Jedi sold for $96,000.

The costume — once colorfully described by Fisher in a Newsweek article as “what supermodels will eventually wear in the seventh ring of hell” — came with a certificate of authenticity from Star Wars designer Richard Miller.

CBS News has results for 22 other pop culture items. Among them:

  • The 16-inch miniature Rebel Blockade Runner, seen in the opening moments of Star Wards (1977), sold for $450,000.
  • Leonard Nimoy’s velour tunic from the second season of the original Star Trek series went for $84,000.
  • George Reeves’ gray knit wool costume from The Adventures of Superman, when it was filmed in black-and-white, fetched $216,000.
  • The signature stylized “S” insignia is in dark brown on a field of crème. An “undersuit” made of durable synthetic satin-like fabric featured a sculpted rubber muscles. Also includes a molded fiberglass “flying pan” to hold Reeves when he flew, after he refused to hang from wires.
  • The duck that dropped down when someone said the secret word on Groucho Marx’ You Bet Your Life brought $16,800.
  • Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones fedora from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade sold for $90,000 and his bullwhip, used in the first three movies, sold for $204,000.

(10) John Ringo, who has said before there will be a continuation of the March Upcountry series, co-authored with David Weber, had a status report on Facebook. I’ve enjoyed the series so I’m glad to hear it, although fans should expect to wait another couple years before seeing more of Empire of Man.

(Another funny. David had just broken his wrist and was just starting to use voice-to-text to write. So at one point in an email I got the line ‘I’m looking forward to senior manuscript.’ Took me forever to figure out ‘senior’ was Dragon’s attempt to translate a Southern accent saying ‘Seeing your.’) 🙂

Anyway, most of the ‘middle stuff’ is politics. So I’m going to write what I know (blowing shit up) and send it to David then say ‘David, this is your specialty. You figure it out. Looking forward to senior manuscript.’ 🙂

I’ll probably end up writing it, Junior Author’s job, but it will give David a skeleton to hang the ‘politics’ on and come up with some ideas. 🙂

So the answer to ‘what next’ is Empire of Man. But don’t get your hopes up. It will only be about half done when I’m done and currently the schedule is blocked with other stuff out to 2017.

(11) Previously unreleased Apollo photos, rather spectacular in places — “8,400 High-Res Images From The Apollo Moon Missions Were Just Put Online – Here Are The Best”.

Apollo 9

Apollo 9

(12) In a news flash apropos of our latest round of brackets, Deadline.com ran an article “HBO Confirms ‘Preliminary Discussions’ For ‘Watchmen’ TV Series”. HBO has spoken with Zack Snyder, director of the 2009 movie Watchmen, about a potential series.

(13) Pepsi will release Back to the Future Part II-inspired Pepsi Perfect, but like Doc Brown’s DeLorean, the price will be sky high.

Pepsi announced it is paying tribute to Back to the Future Part II with the release of Pepsi Perfect, the formerly fictional beverage featured in the film.

The company announced Pepsi Perfect, which contains Pepsi Made with Real Sugar and features packaging consistent with the beverage served to Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part II‘s fictional version of 2015, will be available starting Oct. 21.

The company said fans thirsty from a hard day riding on their hoverboards will be able to buy the limited-edition Pepsis at a price of $20.15 for a 16.9-ounce bottle and visitors to New York ComicCon will have an opportunity to get their hands on the collectable beverages early starting Oct. 9.

Must be the law of supply and demand at work — they’re making only 6,500 bottles.

(14) Today is election day at North Pole, Alaska and a familiar name is on the ballot. Seriously. So they say.

Santa Claus is running for the North Pole City Council.

The North Pole Clerk’s office announced on Thursday that the former North Pole Chamber of Commerce president, whose driver’s license really does bear his legal name of Santa Claus, is one of two candidates who have launched write-in campaigns for City Council. The other is La Nae Bellamy.

The North Pole City Council has two seats up for election this year, but no one filed for office during the regular filing period. Candidates run as a group for the at-large seats, with the top vote-getters declared the winners. Claus and Bellamy will need voters to write in their names next Tuesday, Oct. 6.

The lack of candidates appears to be a problem throughout the Fairbanks North Star Borough. The two candidates for the Fairbanks City Council are uncontested, as are two school board seats. North Pole Mayor Bryce Ward is also uncontested in his re-election bid.

[Thanks to Mark sans surname, Locus Online, Ansible Links, Gregory N. Hullender, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day IanP.]

133 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/6 Beyond the pixelated event horizon

  1. @cally

    Thanks for info. I don’t listen to many recordings of stories either, but reread the Raksura world enough that audio might be another way to enjoy it. I’ll check it out.

  2. I actually didn’t mind The Watchmen movie.

    And I _really_ liked the opening. I thought that was very well done.

  3. @Mark

    rot13ing starting tomorrow or Friday should work. Just want there to be enough people who have read it and are interested. Looks like Jim Henley might be done by then, too.

  4. Well, I have Mercy, but I also have a headache sufficiently awful to keep me in bed for the day; no book could survive that so I’m deferring it for a while…

  5. I’ve acquired Mercy, but think I’d better re-read first. So, starting Justice today….

  6. Hardly at all spoilery for Mercy, just a stray thought:

    Xnye Svir cnegvphyneyl erzvaqf zr bs Cerfreirq Xvyyvpx.

  7. Ok, so I’m done with Sorcerer to the Crown, which was nice, if a little light, and The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which was great but not light in any way whatsoever.

    Hoo boy. They’re both good reads, but Traitor… is almost at my upper limit of dystopia-ness. Which is quite a feat since it’s not a grimdark book. The last time anyone managed that was Daniel Abrahams’ Long Price Quartet, which was one of my favourite Reads That I Will Not Re-Read because it just hurts too much.

    Time to visit Breq now I guess.

  8. Re: Raksura. I thought there was zombie like things in The Falling World, but I am likely misremembering somehow.

  9. Before I go near Mercy, I really have to finish Ancillary Justice. I read the first chapter or so & thought them awesome… but then jumped straight to Sword for my Hugo reading. (Which btw, stood mostly alone just fine. I quite liked it.) I’m not especially allergic to spoilers, thankfully.

    Meantime, though, I’m reading the Skylark of Space as part of my classic SF reading, and Seraphina as part of my prep for next year’s Hugo nominations. Which I am loving. (Seraphina, that is. Skylark I am enjoying more than I feared but the cracks of age are showing.)

    Jonathan Edelstein: That was a great story rec — and hits very hard right on a line of thinking I’ve been chewing on lately. And it’s poetic and beautiful. Thanks.

  10. brightglance on October 7, 2015 at 10:07 am said:
    Hardly at all spoilery for Mercy, just a stray thought:

    Xnye Svir cnegvphyneyl erzvaqf zr bs Cerfreirq Xvyyvpx.

    I knew I should have brushed up on my Ychana. I can’t even make out what gender that is supposed to be.

    Lenora Rose on October 7, 2015 at 10:18 am said:
    Before I go near Mercy, I really have to finish Ancillary Justice. I read the first chapter or so & thought them awesome… but then jumped straight to Sword for my Hugo reading. (Which btw, stood mostly alone just fine. I quite liked it.) I’m not especially allergic to spoilers, thankfully.

    Leckie writes the first chapters of the books as if the reader is new to the series, which I find helpful when picking up the new installment 🙂

  11. on Mercy:
    It has a very Breq solution. Which includes a certain amount of ‘why didn’t we think of that?’

  12. @ Jonathan Edelstein Exactly right; that’s a story that has a lot more going on than it’s length really suggests.

    If we’re thinking about running another comics bracket, I find it hard to believe that no one has yet nominated Shaun Tan (probably for The Arrival but maybe just for body of work).

    A graphic novel with no sf/f content that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Stitches by David Small (of the author/illustrator combo Stewart and Small: Imogene’s Antlers, The Library, The Gardener, etc.). It’s a memoir focusing on his childhood and adolescence. I made the mistake of picking it up in the bookstore (because I’m a huge fan of his picture books) and ended up sobbing in a corner, while the clerks looked at me nervously.

  13. @brightglance

    Oh goodness, that suddenly makes sense. It’s a good job I’ve finished, otherwise I’d be remapping all the characters in my head.

    @Hypnotosov

    Leckie writes the first chapters of the books as if the reader is new to the series

    Very much so. I was a bit worried that I ought to have gone back for a re-read, but actually Mercy had a very gentle start.

    @snowcrash

    Ok, so I’m done with Sorcerer to the Crown, which was nice, if a little light, and The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which was great but not light in any way whatsoever.

    I’ve yet to read Traitor (although I clearly need to get to it – would it count as light reading after I get to Seveneves?) but I liked Sorceror very much.

  14. I’ll be getting to Ancillary Mercy soon, but first I’m zipping through The Beastly Bones, the follow-up to William Ritter’s excellent YA book Jackaby (which I will freely admit I picked up to read because Ritter is a teacher at the high school I attended *mumble* decades ago). Think “Doctor Who meets Sherlock Holmes”, and you have a good idea of the tone of the books.

    Then it’s the third volume (and final) of the massive Autobiography of Mark Twain.

    There are just too many good books coming out in October!

    (And of course, later this month brings Gilliamesque: A Pre-Posthumous Memoir, by Terry Gilliam.)

  15. CKCharles on October 7, 2015 at 10:53 am said:

    If we’re thinking about running another comics bracket, I find it hard to believe that no one has yet nominated Shaun Tan (probably for The Arrival but maybe just for body of work).

    [slaps own forehead] I didn’t think of The Arrival either which makes me feel doubly stupid because I’d just reviewed a new Shaun Tan book on my own blog – and had been wondering what kind of category it would fit in with the Hugo’s [It is a book of photos of figures he made as illustrations for the German version of Phillip Pullman’s version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales]

    So yes, The Arrival is an amazing book.

  16. @brightglance
    I’d forgotten that character and had to google. It does match, but I was reminded more of a composite of the servants and bodyguards in the Foreigner series rather than a single character.

    @snowcrash
    Is Traitor going on your Hugo long list? I downloaded the sample but haven’t read that yet.

  17. @ Camestros: Holy shit there’s a new Shaun Tan! *hies off to bookstore* (Will it make me cry on the subway?)

  18. Junego; I can’t speak for snowcrash, but Traitor is currently the only sure thing on my Hugo Nom shortlist, and I’m considering Dickinson’s chapter-by-chapter spoiler-heavy blog posts (not linking because they’re hella spoiler heavy, but googling Seth Dickinson’s website will guide the interested to them) for my related work longlist. I haven’t been grabbed this hard by a fantasy book since… probably Game of Thrones, maybe even all the way back to Tolkien.

  19. CKCharles on October 7, 2015 at 11:23 am said:

    @ Camestros: Holy shit there’s a new Shaun Tan! *hies off to bookstore* (Will it make me cry on the subway?)

    No it probably won’t make you cry, and I don’t know how widely available it is. It isn’t a Shaun Tan book per-se (i.e. not a new illustrated story) – it is just a sort of coffee-table book of models Tan made as illustrations. It is gorgeous though.
    https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/childrens/young-adult-fiction/The-Singing-Bones-Shaun-Tan-9781760111038

  20. @Paul

    re: The Falling World – zombies?
    I thought of them as more like ghosts or people stuck in something like time-amber. But I’m very unknowledgeable about zombies. They’re total “meh”. Don’t read any stories or watch any movies/series. Hated “Night of the Living Dead”, which loses me almost all nerd cred, I know!

  21. They missed the perfect line from TPB for freshman papers:

    “Get used to disappointment”.

  22. Having given up on The Vorrh for the moment, I’m on my way through The Annihilation Score, to be followed by by Ancillary Mercy and then presumably The Just City.

  23. I wrote a giant squee for the Arrival but the internet ate it.

    The only reason I hadn’t was because I think of Shaun Tan as a picture-book creator*, even though the Arrival, his best work I know of, is very much in graphic novel format.

    Doesn’t help the gender balance, but may increase diversity in other ways.

    *Although his picture books ought to be required reading for adults without kids to excuse them, and I, a picture book collector before I was sure I would have kids never mind before I did, don’t say that often.

  24. Sorry, Lenora Rose, but The Red Tree is Tan’s finest work. That one double spread of the girl and the huge dead fish looming over her….gah. That was my introduction to him, back when I worked at the bookstore, and I immediately bought all the copies of both The Red Tree and The Rabbits so as to have copies to give away.

  25. @Rose,
    Well, I think his responses to his cut of the post-Constatine adaptations gives him completely solid ground.

    For the Watchman movie, he signed away his entire stake to co-creator Dave Gibbons, because Gibbons could use it more than he.

    For V for Vendetta, he had his name excised from the movie credits and reportedly accepted nothing.

    All in all, he chose to forego millions otherwise earned due to his creative differences with the movie adaptations.

    I think if you hate the adapted work so much, either of those is a rather principled position to take and still be allowed to bag on it.

    In the case of Watchman, Moore came to realize his obstinacy on adaptations, reprints, and derivatives was in the end hurting Gibbons and so generally relented to help his co creator out.

    Silly But True

  26. rob_matic on October 7, 2015 at 6:54 am said:
    I’m on Chapter 2 of Ancillary Mercy and feeling a really strong thirst for tea.

    I feel a quite puzzling craving for fish sauce. I don’t even LIKE fish sauce.

  27. /delurking

    For those nominating for the Hugos, Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon for Kindle dropped to 2 bucks today on Amazon US.

    /relurking

  28. I think if you hate the adapted work so much, either of those is a rather principled position to take and still be allowed to bag on it.

    My view is that someone who does slashfic of classics is in a poor position to do any criticism of an adaption of grits work. I mean, did he apologize at all to, or even ask permission of the estates of Conan-Doyle, Stoker, Stevenson or others? If he doesn’t give a fig about the wishes of those authors, why should he think he ought to command any more respect?

  29. Ancillary Mercy AND Sorcerer to the Crown AND Foxglove Summer arrived today. We see The Martian tomorrow afternoon (the first time the guy who’s working 2 exhausting jobs could make it). Since I placed the book order, I get Mercy first bwa ha ha.

    I posted about abuse in the comics industry, especially asking for discussion of how it differs (or doesn’t) from other fields, and if there’s a field that has been that bad but got better. Can it be done without massive lawsuits?

  30. @Hampus Eckeman:

    12) I remember reading about Terry Gilliams ideas about Watchmen and it made me almost thankful that it was Snyder who got the work instead.

    I remember being at an interview with Terry Gilliam here in Toronto (for the Space TV channel) when he was promoting Tideland. He actually commented about Watchmen at that, saying that he had pretty much decided he couldn’t do it justice in less than at least three hours, which nobody was going to pay for, and said he ‘didn’t want to go down in history as the person who ruined Watchmen’. One might wish he recognized his own limitations more often.

    The interview was also fun for the fact that one of the audience questions came from Rick Green (The Frantics, Prisoners of Gravity, The Red Green Show, History Bites). Granted, it was no big surprise that he’d show up to a local taping of an interview with Gilliam; even aside from being ‘Commander Rick’ and doing interviews on Prisoners of Gravity, Rick’s been involved in SF fandom, including being GoH at Ad Astra at least once, for years.

  31. @ Paul Weimer, thank you for letting me start my morning with two ways to read about what people love and why.

    @Jonathan Edelsteinon, thank you for recommending that story again. It was lovely and I might have missed it without the second reminder.

    And…thank you to the people who talked about Tooth and Claw, Daughter of Mystery, Bryony and Roses and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet in such a way that they came to the top of the pile and got read this week.

  32. Do Pixels Dream of Electric Scrolls?

    or its more mainstream movie adaptation:

    Scroll Pixel

    Starring Pixillate Scoll, Pixel Scroll, Scroll Scroll, Pixel Scroll Pixel, and introducing Pixel Pixel.

    The story of a Scroll Pixel brought out of retirement one last time, to scroll a group of Pixellants who escaped from military slavery, and have returned to earth to Pixel their Pixel.

  33. Rose Embolism :

    My view is that someone who does slashfic of classics is in a poor position to do any criticism of an adaption of grits work. I mean, did he apologize at all to, or even ask permission of the estates of Conan-Doyle, Stoker, Stevenson or others? If he doesn’t give a fig about the wishes of those authors, why should he think he ought to command any more respect?

    You don’t see a difference between clearly identified fanfic and adaptation, which still bears the name of the work it purports to be adapting?

    Cheryl:

    And…thank you to the people who talked about Tooth and Claw, Daughter of Mystery, Bryony and Roses and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet in such a way that they came to the top of the pile and got read this week.

    Yay! And you’re welcome for any part I had in that. I take it you liked them?

    I have to get to Briony and Roses sometime, but I’m guessing it won’t be soon. I dropped Last First Snow for The March North, because reading Graydon here reminded me how curious I was, and I tell you, keeps the reader on her toes (in a good way) [1]. So I’m reading that, which will be a while, then the Gladstone [2]. Then I can start to think about facing Mount770.

    [1] The prose is marvelous, and the voice is wonderful, but you have to tune your ear to it a little; it’s also compact, so more awake is better.

    OTOH, I’ve also been reading Gertrude Stein all week, which may help by contrast or hinder by rendering one dizzy.

    [2] There was nothing wrong with it. Nothing at all. I’m promiscuous and remiss in my reading.

  34. @Robert Reynolds: (TPB and term papers)

    They also left off the perfect line for a failing grade: “That is what ‘to the pain’ means. It means that I leave you to live in anguish, in humiliation, in freakish misery until you can stand it no more.”

    @Will R.:

    I see your Pixel and raise you “The Cat Who Scrolled Through Paywalls.”

  35. I took this week off to decompress after the Q3 death march and just spent a day reading Ancillary Mercy. No spoilers, other than to say that the ending was satisfying even if it didn’t tie things up in a package with a bow on top. Leckie doesn’t seem to suffer from Heinlein/Stephenson syndrome (aka “OMG! How do I end this thing?”).

    You don’t need to re-read the previous books first. Leckie provides almost enough context.

  36. Well, my headache has eased off, but, rather than launch into the book itself around midnight, I have been reading Anne’s interviews and comments.

    I had not realised how highly Anne regards CJ Cherry’s work; if you are going to stand on the shoulders of the great who came before you, then CJ is, indeed, both a rock, and a superstar. It makes me all the more determined to give my considered view of the book, as well as the trilogy, since these are high bars she has set herself…

  37. @LordMelvin

    “Junego; I can’t speak for snowcrash, but Traitor is currently the only sure thing on my Hugo Nom shortlist…”

    Interesting. The book sounded fascinating but somewhat depressing. I’ll have to move it up on my list after reading your and others’ recommendations. I’ve started “Sorcerer to the Crown” and will finish that first.

  38. Ancillary Mercy: Done. Loved it. Loved the ending. Not a spoiler, but I teared up a little when I came to the keystone sentence of the entire trilogy, its six little words.

  39. @Jim Henley

    I teared up a little when I came to the keystone sentence of the entire trilogy, its six little words.

    Since you were balrogging up such a nice straight line, I can’t resist:

    “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

  40. Susana S.P.:

    You [Rose] don’t see a difference between clearly identified fanfic and adaptation, which still bears the name of the work it purports to be adapting?

    My reading of Rose’s comments about League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was that she was describing Moore’s original comic in relation to the classic literature it “borrows” its characters from; your “still bears the name” makes me think you’re talking about the movie in relation to the comic?

Comments are closed.