Pixel Scroll 11/24/21 So Good They Scrolled It Twice!

(1) THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES. Camestros Felapton’s Debarkle has reached its final chapter. The massive history of the Sad Puppies intertwined with right-wing political developments from 2014-2021 concludes with “Debarkle Afterword: Dramatis Personae” – very like the “where are they now?” credits at the end of based-on-a-true-story movies.

(2) ANGRY ROBOT BOOKS UNVEILS NEW LOGO. Angry Robot Books revealed their new logo, designed by Kate Cromwell, which comes as part of an overall rebranding including the launch of an upgraded website, enabling the direct sale of physical books.

AR Logo Icon

Formed in 2009, Angry Robot Books have undergone some key adjustments throughout the years but, since joining Watkins Media in 2014 and coming under the leadership of Associate Publisher Eleanor Teasdale in 2019, the award-winning science fiction, fantasy, and genre-boundary pushing company is thriving. This new logo represents the history of Angry Robot Books whilst simultaneously looking forward.

With initiatives such as Clonefiles – offering free ebooks to any independent bookshop physical purchase – Angry Robot Books have a cherished legacy of serving the book-buying public, and this new, upgraded website with physical sales capacity, deepens the direct connection between publisher and customer.

These developments come at an exciting time for Angry Robot Books as summer 2021’s runaway hit, The Coward by Stephen Aryan, is already in its third reprint and the October super-lead, Un-su Kim’s The Cabinet, continues to bask in reviews including selection for the Best Science Fiction of 2021 in The Washington Post. With 2022 books crossing geographical, figurative, mythological, and atmospheric borders, the future is bright for Angry Robot Books as highlighted in the recent survey of genre for 2022 at Library Journal which so prominently featured a range of the imprint’s titles and authors.

The new logo is part of the cover of R.W.W. Greene’s Mercury Rising, designed by David Leehy. The book will be released May 10, 2022.

Even in a technologically-advanced, Kennedy-Didn’t-Die alternate-history, Brooklyn Lamontagne is going nowhere fast. The year is 1975, thirty years after Robert Oppenheimer invented the Oppenheimer Nuclear Engine, twenty-five years after the first human walked on the moon, and eighteen years after Jet Carson and the Eagle Seven sacrificed their lives to stop the alien invaders.

Brooklyn just wants to keep his mother’s rent paid, earn a little scratch of his own, steer clear of the cops, and maybe get laid sometime in the near future. Simple pleasures, right? But a killer with a baseball bat and a mysterious box of 8-track tapes is about to make his life real complicated…

(3) LAST NIGHT ON RIVERDALE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Beware spoilers. Riverdale is going through a five-episode story arc when it is in the alternate universe “Rivervale.”  In this universe, Archie died as part of a pagan sacrifice.

“Rivervale” had a mention of Neil Gaiman.  Jughead in this universe is still a writer, but he discovers there is a secret apartment next to his apartment that is haunted.  Jughead and his girlfriend decide to turn the hidden apartment into a writing studio.  He says he wants the apartment to have “a Neil Gaiman nautical vibe,’” so he decides to decorate the window with ships in bottles. I dunno what Gaiman has to do with ships in bottles, and I’m sure Gaiman has nothing to do with Jughead’s making sure he chugs all the Scotch in the bottle before putting a ship in. The ghosts in the hidden apartment empower Jughead so he is able to “vomit out” the first draft of a novella in one night.  I’ll spare the details as to how Jughead’s typewriter gets as smashed as he does after downing a bottle of Scotch.

(4) ROONEY BOYCOTT OF AN ISRAELI PUBLISHER GAINS AUTHORS’ SUPPORT. China Miéville is one of the authors and publishing industry figures who have signed a letter endorsing Sally Rooney’s decision to turn down an offer with an Israel publishing house, describing it as “an exemplary response to the mounting injustices inflicted on Palestinians”.  Artists for Palestine UK organized the letter, and the complete text and a list of all signers is on their website: “Leading writers support Sally Rooney decision to refuse publication in Israel”.

The Guardian’s article includes this background coverage:

Rooney turned down an offer to sell Hebrew translation rights in her new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, to the publisher Modan, which had published her previous two books, and which had put in a bid. The bestselling Irish novelist said last month that she supported the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), which works to “end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law”, and that she did not feel it would be right to collaborate with an Israeli company “that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”.

While two Israeli book chains subsequently announced that they would pull Rooney’s books from their shelves, the novelist’s move has now been backed by 70 writers and publishers…

(5) SAVING THROW. “Thanksgiving” at Tablet Magazine is new seasonal fiction from Elizabeth Bear set in a near-future, climate-changed world. The ending reminds me slightly of the key to world peace from the end of Stand on Zanzibar.

… Kids these days can’t imagine how we lived without reality filters, without ambient power transmission, without biosphere impact laws. They get along fine without frogs, however, which is something I can’t manage.

Most of them never really missed a frog. They never had the opportunity. They have never really missed Vanuatu, or Cape Cod, or a sequoia. Just as I never missed a dodo, an ivory-billed woodpecker, the American chestnut. If I had grandkids—let’s say, my abstract, intellectual grandkids—they would not miss rhinos or sugar maples or coffee. Except in that same abstract, intellectual fashion. They would not give a damn about vanilla, sequoias, or ash trees except as historical curiosities similar to the aurochs, the cave bear, and dinosaurs…

(6) NPR’S PICKS OF 2021. NPR has put up its massive list of “Best Books 2021: Books We Love”. It’s sortable by category – this is the button to pull out the 48 “Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction” titles. The tool will also take you back to any of their annual selections since 2013.

(7) HELP KEEP THEM AFLOAT. The magazine Mermaids Monthly is running a Kickstarter to finance its second year: “Mermaids Monthly Year 2”. They have raised $4,212 with 35 days to go.

Our campaign goal for Mermaids Monthly 2022 is $33,000. This is a little bit higher than Mermaids Monthly 2021 because it covers some needs that the original team didn’t know about! In addition to covering the cost of content for 12 digital issues, the $33,000 will pay for one additional staff member for more coverage, as well as things like alt text generation, sensitivity readers, the submission system (Moksha), and international money transfer fees for paying our contributors who live outside the U.S.

(8) FIRST FOUNDATION. Cora Buhlert was on the Light On Light Through podcast to discuss Foundation — both the books and the TV show — with Paul Levinson and Joel McKinnon: “Foundation 1st Season: Cora Buhlert, Joel McKinnon, and Paul Levinson discuss”.

 There’s also a video version on YouTube:

(9) MIQUEL BARCELÓ (1948-2021). Miquel Barceló, the founder of Ediciones Nova, a Penguin collection dedicated to science fiction, died November 22. The Wikipedia sums up his career:

…He worked as an editor for Ediciones B, where he directed the NOVA collection, specialized in science fiction tales and novels, and writing introductory articles for the books published in the collection.

His last academic position was as a professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) where he promoted the creation of the UPC Prize, the most important prize in Spanish science-fiction. He directed and coordinated the UPC Doctorate program on Sustainability, Technology and Humanism. He also kept a monthly column for the computer magazine “Byte” and contributed to several publications on Astronomy and Artificial Intelligence.

In 1996 the Spanish Association of Fantasy and Science Fiction awarded a lifetime achievement award to Barceló….

(10) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

1974 [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Forty-seven years ago in the USA on this date, Murder on the Orient Express was first shown. Based off the Agatha Christie novel, the script was by Paul Dehn, who wrote the Bond film Goldfinger. It was directed by Sydney Lumet who direct Network, which is at least genre adjacent, isn’t it? It was produced by John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin who would go on to produce two more Christie films, Death on the Nile and The Mirror Crack’d

Oh, and it has an absolutely stellar cast of Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Rachel Roberts, Richard Widmark and Michael York. You can see the trailer here.

Critics loved it with Roger Ebert’s comments being typical with him saying it provided “a good time, high style, a loving salute to an earlier period of filmmaking.” The box office was amazing as it made thirty six million dollars on a minuscule budget of one point two million dollars.  Christie who died fourteen months after this was made said that this film and Witness for the Prosecution were the only movie versions of her novels that she liked.

Now you’re going to get your Obligatory Science Fiction connection to use the old rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup term. The Twelfth Doctor would riff off this story including the train setting in the “Mummy on the Orient Express” episode though the murderer there was decidedly not human. 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a most excellent seventy-eight percent rating. 

It would have three more versions over the decades, a 2001 TV film version, a 2010 episode of the Agatha Christie’s Poirot series, and a 2017 film with Kenneth Branagh as the Belgian detective. Branagh narrates the movie tie-in audiobook. 

I just purchased this poster for my apartment as it is one of my favorite films. 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 24, 1882 E. R. Eddison. Writer whose most well-known work by far is The Worm Ouroboros. It’s slightly connected to his much lesser known later Zimiamvian Trilogy.  I’m reasonably that sure I’ve read The Worm Ouroboros but way too long ago to remember anything about it. Silverberg in the Millenium Fantasy Masterworks Series edition of this novel said he considered it to be “the greatest high fantasy of them all”. (Died 1945.)
  • Born November 24, 1907 Evangeline Walton. Her best known work, the Mabinogion tetralogy, was written during the late 1930s and early 1940s, and her Theseus trilogy was produced during the late 1940s. It’s worth stressing Walton is best known for her four novels retelling the Welsh Mabinogi. She published her first volume in 1936 under the publisher’s title of The Virgin and the Swine which is inarguably a terrible title. Although receiving glowing praise from John Cowper Powys, the book sold quite awfully and none of the other novels in the series were published at that time. Granted a second chance by Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series in 1970, it was reissued with a much better title of The Island of the Mighty. The other three volumes followed quickly. Witch House is an occult horror story set in New England and She Walks in Darkness which came out on Tachyon Press is genre as well. I think that is the extent of her genre work but I’d be delighted to be corrected. She has won a number of awards including the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, Best Novel along with The Fritz Leiber Fantasy Award,  World Fantasy Award, Convention Award and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. (Died 1996.)
  • Born November 24, 1926 Forrest J Ackerman. It’s no wonder that he got a Hugo forfor  #1 Fan Personality at Philcon II and equally telling that when he was handed the trophy by Asimov, he physically declined saying it should go to Ken Slater to whom the trophy was later given by the con committee. That’s a nice summation of him. You want more? As a literary agent, he represented some two hundred writers, and he served as agent of record for many long-lost authors, thereby allowing their work to be reprinted. He represented Ed Wood! He was a prolific writer, more than fifty stories to his credit, and he named Vampirella and wrote the origin story for her. Speaking of things pulp which she assuredly is, he appeared in 81 films and as himself in over one hundred documentaries and programs which I’ll not list here. Eclectic doesn’t begin to describe him. His non- fiction writings are wonderful as well. I’ll just single out Forrest J Ackerman’s Worlds of Science FictionA Reference Guide to American Science Fiction Films and a work he did with Brad Linaweaver, Worlds of Tomorrow: The Amazing Universe of Science Fiction Art. Did I mention he collected everything? Well, he did. Just one location alone contained some three hundred thousand books, film, SF material objects and writings. The other was eighteen rooms in extent. Damn if anyone needed their own TARDIS, it was him. In his later years, he was a board member of the Seattle Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame who now have possession of many items of his collection. Not that he didn’t have problems around fans as Mike reported here. (Died 2008.)
  • Born November 24, 1948 Spider Robinson, 73. His first story “The Guy with the Eyes” was published in Analog February 1973. It was set in a bar called Callahan’s Place, a setting for much of his later fiction.  His first published novel, Telempath in 1976 was an expansion of the novella “By Any Other Name”. The Stardance trilogywas co-written with his late wife Jeanne Robinson.  In 2004, he began working on a seven-page 1955 novel outline by the late Heinlein to expand it into a novel. The resulting novel would be called Variable Star. Who’s read it? He won the Astounding Award, and has three Hugos: the first at SunCon for his “By Any Other Name” novella, the second at IguanaCon II for “Stardance that he wrote with Jeanne Robinson and the the at ConStellation for the “Melancholy Elephants” short story. 
  • Born November 24, 1957 Denise Crosby, 64, Tasha Yar on Next Gen who got a meaningful death in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” after getting an earlier truly meaningless one. In other genre work, she was on The X-Files as a doctor who examined Agent Scully’s baby. And I really like it that she was in two Pink Panther films, Trail of the Pink Panther and Curse of the Pink Panther, as Denise, Bruno’s Moll. And she’s yet another Trek performer who’s popped doing what I call Trek video fanfic. She’s Dr. Jenna Yar in “Blood and Fire: Part 2”, an episode of the only season of Star Trek: New Voyages as Paramount was not amused. 
  • Born November 24, 1957 John Zakour, 64. For sheer pulp pleasure, I wholeheartedly recommend his Zachary Nixon Johnson PI series which he co-wrote some with Larry Ganem. Popcorn reading at its very  best and I see GraphicAudio has done full cast audio performances of them which should be a real hoot. It’s the only series of his I’ve read, so anyone else read his other books? 
  • Born November 24, 1957 Jeff Noon, 64. Novelist and playwright. Prior to his relocation in 2000 to Brighton, his stories reflected in some way his native though not birth city of Manchester. The Vurt sequence whose first novel won the  Arthur C. Clarke Award is a very odd riff off Alice in Wonderland that he describes as a sequel to those works. Noon was the winner of an Astounding Award for the Best New Science Fiction Writer.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Calvin and Hobbes discuss what they learned from science fiction.
  • Shoe has an awful, genre-related pun. How can you resist?

(13) ON THE LINE. “Another Look At Bill Mauldin” in The Comics Journal, a review of Drawing Fire: The Editorial Cartoons of Bill Mauldin, says that the artist needed real-life experiences to generate effective drawings.

…Mauldin’s drawing style for the wartime cartoons was wonderfully evocative of the ambiance of the dogface’s life. He drew with a brush, and his lines were bold and fluid but clotted with heavy black areas, clothing and background detail disappearing into deep trap-shadow darkness that gave the pictures a grungy aspect that approximated visually the damp and dirty feelings bred by the miserable field conditions of a soldier’s life on front lines everywhere. Willie and Joe looked like they needed a bath, and so did many of their readers…

(14) MOVIES FOR A NEGLECTED HOLIDAY. That’s Connie Willis calls this list of movies for Thanksgiving Day, published on her Facebook page. (And Connie summons all her panache to explain why Miracle on 34th Street is on it.)

Poor Thanksgiving! It gets short shrift all around. Not only is it completely upstaged by Christmas, but now Black Friday means that Thanksgiving only gets a single day, and in the last few years (interrupted only by the Pandemic), Black Friday starts Thursday afternoon so you don’t even have time to do the dishes before Thanksgiving’s over and it’s on to the Christmas spending frenzy.

The same is true for movies. Hallmark devotes an entire month to Christmas movies and there are dozens of other new and old classics to watch, but there are hardly any Thanksgiving movies, and the ones there are always seem to involve a person who’s terminally ill. (Don’t believe me? How about STEPMOM, FUNNY PEOPLE, and ONE TRUE THING, to say nothing of THE BIG CHILL, in which the person’s already died?) Movies like that are the last thing we need in this Pandemic-That-Never-Seems-To-End.

So here’s a list of some cheerful Thanksgiving movies to watch in the ninety seconds or so between Thanksgiving dinner and Black Friday…

(15) LISTEN UP. “Doctor Who teases animated lost story The Abominable Snowmen”Radio Times has something else for us to be thankful about.

…As fans are well aware, 97 episodes of Doctor Who have been lost to time due to a since-scrapped BBC policy that saw them deleted from the broadcaster’s archives.

This has proved particularly damaging to Patrick Troughton’s time as the Second Doctor, given that almost half of his adventures in the role are incomplete.

The good news is that all of the affected episodes still exist in audio form thanks to recordings made by fans, which have been a great help in reconstructing them in the medium of animation….

(16) IT DOESN’T AGE LIKE WINE. “The Halo 3 Game Fuel fandom is dying”Polygon fosters that strange sensation called nostalgia for something you never experienced…

Two years ago, YouTube user xKorellx poured a bit of history down the drain. In a first-person video, they gently cradle a can of Mountain Dew Game Fuel in their palm. Swirls of orange and blue energy surround the Mountain Dew logo, and alongside it, a close-up image of Master Chief sprinting forward like he’s going to bust out of the can and into your pathetic reality. The vivid branding hasn’t faded in 10-plus years since Halo 3 Game Fuel left stores, but the can’s structural integrity is … compromised.

The silver top of the can is bloated and uneven. It looks to be moments from exploding. It has been deemed unfit for drinking or display. Solemn guitar music swells. xKorellx cracks the tab one-handed and pours the yellow-orangish liquid into the sink.

Today, a sip of that liquid will cost you anywhere between $35 and $80….

(17) WHAT COLOR BOOK COMES AFTER BLUE? “The Pentagon Forms New Department to Watch and Study UFOs” reports Vice.

The Pentagon announced the formation of the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), a successor to the U.S. Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The group study Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP), the U.S. military’s name for UFOs.

According to the Pentagon’s press release, “the AOIMSG will synchronize efforts across the Department and the broader U.S. government to detect, identify and attribute objects of interests in Special Use Airspace (SUA), and to assess and mitigate any associated threats to safety of flight and national security.”

UFOs have been an obsession of the Pentagon (and broader society) for decades. In the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book studied the phenomenon. In the preceding years, tales of strange lights in the sky captivated the world. Interest in UFOs waxed and waned over the years but exploded again recently when U.S. Navy pilots began giving interviews on high profile programs like 60 Minutes about the strange things they’d seen in the sky….

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “The Movie Criminal Tutorial” on Screen Rant, written by Seb Decter, Tyler Lemco, Jr. plays movie crime consultant John Doe, Jr.  Doe’s father, John Doe, committed the crimes that led to the 1960s movie The Italian Job, and inspired the younger Doe to allegedly pursue a life of criminal activity.  Doe says it helps to have a wide network (he knows Pajamas Sam, Pajamas Freddy, and Sam The Fish), always talk through a Pringles can on the phone so no one can recognize your voice, and come up with an original tool when you’re whacking somebody (he likes a computer mouse).

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Chris Barkley, Darrah Chavey, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

37 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/24/21 So Good They Scrolled It Twice!

  1. (11) I am a big fan of The Worm Ouroboros. However, Eddison’s prose style might not be to everybody’s taste, because is it is ornate and antique like the writing of William Morris and Mervyn Peake.

  2. You can always go the Swedish movie route, and pick Yellow. Wikipedia has only about 15 meanings for “Yellow Book”.

    (( I’m referring to the I Am Curious movies. ))

  3. (10) i misremembered the doctor who episode as “murder on the orient express in space” but apparently it’s called “mummy on the orient express”?

    also, j. michael reeves wrote a short story “murder on the galactic express” for his darkworld detective collection.

  4. Alive. No longer coughing up my lungs, which definitely aids breathing, due to appropriate use of appropriate chemicals. (After explaining to the nurse practitioner, who is also asthmatic, that for me, OTC cough medicine is in the category of Inappropriate Chemicals. Increased use of my inhaler, plus a tapering course of steroid pills.)

    Reading. Listening. Somewhat randomly.

  5. Ben Bird Person: also, j. michael reaves wrote a short story “murder on the galactic express” for his darkworld detective collection.

    Martin L. Shoemaker wrote a novella Murder on the Aldrin Express which is pretty good. It’s in Dozois’ Year’s Best #31.

  6. 11) Count me as another Eddison fan. I think I might actually like the Zimiamvia trilogy more than Ouroboros; it’s a damn’ shame the third book was never completed.

  7. Hmm. I am certain that I’ve read Variable Star (Robinson/Heinlein). I saw it on my shelves quite recently. Yet I can’t tell you a single thing about it. Which, I guess, means that it wasn’t so horrible that it scarred me for life. So it’s got that going for it. 🙂

  8. (1) Many thanks to Camestros Felapton for the Debarkle, especially for reading through all those puppy effusions. Reading just the selected quotes causes glazed eyes and nausea in me. Placing the puppies in context as part of a larger social and political conflict is a real service, as is documenting who said what as events unfolded. The footnotes are a treasure trove on their own.

    (11) I read The Worm Ouroboros because LeGuin praised Eddison’s prose style in an essay. Hated the ending, though.

    Best wishes for your health, Lis Carey!

  9. Well, as I type this it’s the 25th, which means its American Thanksgiving. And that means it’s time to listen to a classic of the season. I know you all know it, so here’s a sample from it:

    “If you’re in a situation like that there’s only one thing you can do, and that’s walk into the shrink whereever you are, just walk in, say, “Shrink, Camestros Felapton’s Debarkle has reached its final chapter.” And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s a nerd and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’s both fans and they won’t take either of them. And if three people do it, can you imagine, three people walkin’ in, reciting an item from today’s Pixel Scroll, and walkin’ out. they may think it’s a slate. And can you, can you imagine, fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day, walkin’ in, reciting an item from today’s Pixel Scroll, and walking out. Friends, they may think it’s a convention.

    And that’s what it is: the File 770’s Pixel Scroll Anti-Slate Convention, and all you got to do to get a membership is critique chapter five when it comes around in the editing cycle.

    With feeling.”

    Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. Glyer, and thanks for the Scrolls.

  10. Msb says Many thanks to Camestros Felapton for the Debarkle, especially for reading through all those puppy effusions. Reading just the selected quotes causes glazed eyes and nausea in me. Placing the puppies in context as part of a larger social and political conflict is a real service, as is documenting who said what as events unfolded. The footnotes are a treasure trove on their own.

    It’s worth noting that OGH did report here first what Camestros used in this series. It’d have been nice if Camestros acknowledged that it appeared it first. Just saying.

  11. Cat Eldridge: It’s worth noting that OGH did report here first what Camestros used in this series. It’d have been nice if Camestros acknowledged that it appeared it first. Just saying.

    Cat, much of what Camestros included in the Debarkle came from columns Camestros had written over the last 6 years. So yes, while some of it was pulled from things that Mike linked, the vast majority of it came from past columns written by Camestros, plus a significant amount of new research.

  12. JJ says Cat, much of what Camestros included in the Debarkle came from columns Camestros had written over the last 6 years. So yes, while some of it was pulled from things that Mike linked, the vast majority of it came from past columns written by Camestros, plus a significant amount of new research.

    I disagree with you on this. I know that you spend a lot of time over there and that may influence your beliefs, but it appears to me that it draws heavily off what Mike has written here. At the very least, an acknowledgment that some of it was pulled from what Mike wrote should have been included as that’s just standard protocol.

  13. Cat: I don’t feel shortchanged — File 770 is in lots of footnotes of the Debarkle. You may have taken something I said as a complaint which wasn’t meant that way.

  14. About Variable Star: When I reviewed it for Locus (August 2006), I found it very much a mashup of RAH and Spider, with the mixed virtues and quirks one might expect of such a combination. But I did find it engaging enough to finish (not an inevitability for any potential review book). It was perhaps helpful that the same column included Joseph T. Major’s leisurely, idiosyncratic, and generally insightful Heinlein’s Children: The Juveniles, which encouraged consideration of VS as an abandoned YA project completed by someone who had absorbed both the grownup and “juvenile” branches of the RAH career.

  15. Mike says I don’t feel shortchanged — File 770 is in lots of footnotes of the Debarkle. You may have taken something I said as a complaint which wasn’t meant that way.

    So noted.

  16. @Russell Letson: I enjoyed Variable Star quite a bit, but I don’t feel the urge to re-read it I feel for Heinlein but not nearly so much for Spider (who I enjoy reading).

  17. Happy birthday Spider Robinson. I first read his work in “Half an Oaf” 45 years ago, and have been enjoying it ever since. It doesn’t look like (from ISFDB) that he’s done any new fiction in nearly a decade, which is a shame.

  18. bill says Happy birthday Spider Robinson. I first read his work in “Half an Oaf” 45 years ago, and have been enjoying it ever since. It doesn’t look like (from ISFDB) that he’s done any new fiction in nearly a decade, which is a shame.

    He’s been working on his next novel, Orphan Stars, for well over a decade now, and he’s also working on his autobiography. The last thing he had published was a poem, “On the Way to The Stars”, which showed up in Final Frontier: A Sci-fi Celebration of the Indomitable Spirit That Carried Humanity to the Moon two years ago.

  19. As far as Spider goes, I did very much like his Very Bad Deaths and its sequel, Very Hard Choices. They came out at about the same time as Variable Star, and were much better, IMO. I had reached a saturation point with the silliness of Callahan & its spin-offs, so I found the Very… books a refreshing change of pace. But they’re also not as dark as some of his earlier non-Callahan books. Just some good, solid thrillers.

  20. I have to get Variable Star off my shelves and actually read sometime. Maybe over Christmas break. I did like the Very series, too (I liked Callahan’s well enough, but the last book had some serious continuity errors that impeded my enjoyment of it)

  21. 10) I’d just like to point out that The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is not a Bond movie, but an excellent Richard Burton picture based on John Le Carre’s novel.

    I found out only recently that both Bond and Le Carre’s George Smiley had fictional abodes just off the Kings Road in Chelsea, not far from my old halls of residence.

  22. The Pixel Who Came In From The Cold?
    The Spy Who Scrolled In From The Pixel?
    Tinker, Tailor, Pixel, Scroll?

  23. Cliff says I’d just like to point out that The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is not a Bond movie, but an excellent Richard Burton picture based on John Le Carre’s novel.

    You’re absolutely right and I’ve sent Mike corrected text to run in place of that text. Thanks much. It would’ve made an interesting Bond film though I think, a look at what happened after his career ended.

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