Pixel Scroll 11/8/18 Octokittens

(1) DUMBLEDORE. Another Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald  featurette, “Distinctly Dumbledore,” released this week. The movie arrives in theaters November 16.

At the end of the first film, the powerful Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) was captured by MACUSA (Magical Congress of the United States of America), with the help of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne). But, making good on his threat, Grindelwald escaped custody and has set about gathering followers, most unsuspecting of his true agenda: to raise pure-blood wizards up to rule over all non-magical beings. In an effort to thwart Grindelwald’s plans, Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) enlists his former student Newt Scamander, who agrees to help, unaware of the dangers that lie ahead. Lines are drawn as love and loyalty are tested, even among the truest friends and family, in an increasingly divided wizarding world.

 

(2) WHAT’S UP, WHITE WOLF? Joseph D. Carriker identifies a big problem with the next Camarilla book for Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition in a public post on Facebook.

So, filing this under “Second Verse Same As The First”: the excerpt below is from the upcoming Camarilla book for Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition.

In it, it describes a vampire-dominated Chechnya. Even setting aside the gross implications of that design decision – and there are plenty of them – it also turns the internment of queer people into literal death camps into what amounts to a distraction.

This text literally refers to the “controversy” (which is such a weighted word in this context, quite frankly, carrying with it connotations of mountains being made of mole-hills) over queer internment and murder as “clever media manipulation.” This text literally turns the ending of queer lives into a throw-away feint that hides vampires. Which is a monstrous reframing of that real-world thing STILL GOING ON.

This is egregiously vile. It’s not okay. Our lives are constantly being *ended* for straight peoples’ prejudices in real life, but also in fiction and media for straight peoples’ fucking entertainment, and all of this is just “second verse same as the first.”

…This is not a good fucking look, White Wolf. Not in the least.

(3) PRO TIP. How to avoid crossouts while autographing books:

(4) ABEBOOKS BACKS DOWN. An Amazon subsidiary has yielded to an international protest by booksellers and abandoned its plans to stop allowing rare and used booksellers in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia and South Korea to sell books on AbeBooks. The New York Times article “After Protest, Booksellers Are Victorious Against Amazon Subsidiary” says the “Banned Booksellers Week” protest involved nearly 600 booksellers around the world who stopped selling nearly 3.8 million titles via AbeBooks.

A worldwide strike by antiquarian booksellers against an Amazon subsidiary proved successful after two days, with the retailer apologizing and saying it would cancel the actions that prompted the protest.

It was a rare concerted uprising against any part of Amazon by any of its millions of suppliers, leading to an even rarer capitulation. Even the book dealers said they were surprised at the sudden reversal by AbeBooks, the company’s secondhand and rare bookselling network.

The uprising, which involved nearly 600 booksellers in 27 countries removing about four million books, was set off by the retailer’s decision to cut off stores in five countries: the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, South Korea and Russia. AbeBooks never explained its actions beyond saying it was related to payment processing.

“AbeBooks was saying entire countries were expendable to its plans,” said Scott Brown, a Eureka, Calif., bookseller who was an organizer of the strike. “Booksellers everywhere felt they might be next.”

… “I don’t think anything like this has ever happened before with any part of Amazon,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, chief executive of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce analytics firm. “It would be much harder to have a strike on Amazon itself, just because there are so many sellers there and they are not part of an organized community.”

(5) KATHERINE KURTZ JOINS WOTF PANEL. Broadway World reports “Internationally Acclaimed Author, Katherine Kurtz, Named as Judge for Writers of the Future”.

Historical fantasy author of the Deryni series, Katherine Kurtz, is the newest judge to join the ranks of the internationally-acclaimed L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, now in its 35th year.

Kurtz is now amongst a blue-ribbon panel of 23 judges, including Brandon Sanderson, Orson Scott Card, Nnedi Okorafor, Tim Powers, Jody Lynn Nye, and Robert Silverberg….

(6) REMEMBER THE CRATONS. Fragments of ancient continents, known as cratons, have been isolated as parts of Antarctica using data from a European satellite (Newsweek: “Lost Continents Hidden Deep Beneath Antarctica Ice Sheet Discovered From Space”). Cratons—both in Antarctica and as parts of other continents—comprise the oldest surviving parts of Earth’s lithosphere. The satellite data was from a mission that ended in 2013.

Scientists have discovered the remnants of ancient lost continents hidden deep beneath Antarctica’s ice. Using the European Space Agency’s gravity mapping satellite, researchers were able to peer beneath the ice to map out the terrain below.

The findings, published in Scientific Reports, reveal a long-lost landscape littered with cratons—large, stable blocks of the Earth’s crust that are remnants of ancient continents. They are part of the lithosphere—which consists of the crust and upper mantle—and are generally found in the center of modern continental plates. Studying these features allow researchers to understand the history of the Earth—and its future.
The ESA’s Gravity Field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) satellite was launched in 2009 to measure the pull of Earth’s gravity. However, during its last year of operation, it was flown at an altitude of just 158 miles—meaning it could take extremely accurate measurements of localized gravity gradients. Using this data, the team was able to build up a patchwork 3D image of the lithosphere beneath Antarctica—including the cratons.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and JJ.]

  • Born November 8, 1847 – Abraham “Bram” Stoker. You know that he’s author of Dracula, but did you know he wrote other fiction such as The Lady of the Shroud and The Lair of the White Worm? The short story collection Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories was published in 1914 by Stoker’s widow, Florence Stoker. (Died 1912.)
  • Born November 8, 1906 – Matt Fox. I’m here to praise an illustrator of one of those magazines that published the stories of such writers as Robert Bloch, Manly Wade Wellman and Ray Bradbury. The covers by Fox were of course intended to lure you to magazine rack, pick up the magazine and purchase it. Such was what he did for Weird Tales from 1943 to 1951. After that, during the fifties and sixties he worked for Atlas Comics, inking and penciling Journey into Mystery, World of Fantasy, Tales of Suspense and Journey into Unknown Worlds. It is thought that his last known published work is an advertisement, printed in 1967, for original mail-order glow-in-the-dark posters. (Died 1988.)
  • Born November 8, 1932 – Ben Bova. He’s written more than 120 books. While at Analog, he won six Hugo awards as Best Professional Editor, and he was once editorial director at Omni. Hell, he even had the thankless job of SFWA President. (Just kidding. I think.) I couldn’t hope to summarize his literary history, so I’ll single out his Grand Tour series that, though uneven, is overall splendid hard sf, as well as his Best of Bova short story collections put out recently in three volumes. Like R.A. Lafferty, I know each of you has favorites by him.
  • Born November 8, 1952 – Alfre Woodard. Her most memorable genre role is as Lily Sloane in Star Trek: First Contact in which she assisted Zefram Cochrane in building the Phoenix. Other genre roles are Captain America: Civil War,  A Series of Unfortunate EventsLuke Cage, The Last Ship, True Blood, The animated Black Panther, and  K-PAX.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) TEXAS LEGISLATOR OF GENRE INTEREST. Here’s an election news item you may have missed — Luke Plunkett, in Dragon Ball Z Composer Elected To Texas State Senate” on Kotaku says that Nathan Johnson, a lawyer who has composed a lot of Dragon Ball Z music, was elected to the Texas state senate from the 16th district as a Democrat.

Johnson, a Democrat, won 54% of the vote to beat out the incumbent, Republican Don Huffines. It’s not like he just suddenly jumped into office from composing—he’s a lawyer by trade…

(10) WELCOME HOME. Been a long time since I was overseas, however, I remember the importance of gifts that are easy to pack…

(11) A SPLIT-LEVEL HEAD. James Davis Nicoll, who barely has room enough for his own thoughts, tells why he’s horrified by the idea – “Get Out of My Head: SFF Stories About Sharing Brain-Space With Somebody Else” at Tor.com.

I have a modest dream. I hope one day to live in an isolated skull-shaped mountain guarded by carnivorous birds. My lair would be surrounded by a fearsome fence, adorned with the heads of uninvited guests. I like my privacy. It should not surprise anyone, then, that I would emphatically NOT like to have a second person sharing my head.

Mental timeshares are a rich source of plot for science fiction and fantasy authors. I was reminded of this trope when I was reading, or re-reading, a few novellas in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric series.

(12) STAND ASIDE, CHAUVET. “Indonesian Cave Hold Oldest Figurative Painting Ever Found, Scientists Say” — new uranium-thorium dating tech shows paintings are 40,000 years old, vs Chauvet’s 32,000 and Lascaux’s mere 17,000.

It depicts … a cow. Despite the humble subject matter, the painting is extraordinary because it’s at least 40,000 years old. That makes it thousands of years older than the oldest such paintings in Europe.

The Indonesia painting is one of thousands of drawings and stencils in a warren of limestone caves tucked into remote mountains at the far eastern edge of the island of Borneo, a part of Indonesia called Kalimantan. Archaeologists went there in the 1990s looking for cave art.

The BBC reports uncertainty from some reviewers:

The prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet in France, and Altamira in Spain, are similarly magnificent. They contain images of a veritable prehistoric menagerie, including cave lions, hyenas, horses, deer, rhinos and bison.

But a paper published earlier this year in the journal Science pushed the dates for cave art in Europe back to as much as 65,000 years. These paintings pre-date the known arrival of modern humans in Europe, leading to the study’s suggestion that they might have been made by Neanderthals.

One of the authors of that paper in Science was Prof Alistair Pike, an archaeologist from the University of Southampton. Prof Pike – who was not involved with the new research – welcomed the findings, but expressed reservations about the date for the oldest figurative painting.

(13) NEW FOSSIL SITE. NPR is there to see the bones — “Scientists Unveil Ancient Sea Monsters Found In Angola”.

When the South Atlantic Ocean was young, sea monsters ruled it.

Some of their bones have turned up along the coast of West Africa and are going on exhibit Friday at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. They tell a story of the bloody birth of an ocean.

The fossils of giant swimming reptiles called mosasaurs have been found in the rocky cliffs of Angola, overlooking the Atlantic. It’s not a country known for fossils. Few scientists have looked there — half a century of civil war made it too dangerous. But geologically, Angola is special.

(14) DOWNSIZING. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The Verge talks  bout how “SpaceX’s helipad-equipped boat will bring astronauts safely home”. I mean, Apollo used a frikin’ aircraft carrier plus many other ships for recovery. Now SpaceX will use the GO Searcher, which looks more like the captain’s gig for an aircraft carrier—though it does have a brand new helipad grafted above the main deck.

Go Searcher is part of a fleet of ocean vessels that SpaceX has acquired over the years to aid in its spaceflight efforts. The most famous of these are SpaceX’s autonomous drone ships, which are used as landing pads when the company’s Falcon 9 rockets are recovered in the ocean after launches. Go Searcher used to accompany these drone ships when they were tugged back to shore as a support vessel. But at the end of summer, SpaceX gave Go Searcher a suite of upgrades — including the addition of a helipad and a radar dome — to make sure the boat can swiftly recover Dragon capsules that carry astronauts back to Earth.

As part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, SpaceX has been developing the Crew Dragon capsule to take astronauts to the ISS. And the company is also responsible for getting these crews safely back to Earth. When astronauts need to return home, the plan is for the Crew Dragon to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. During an ideal mission, Go Searcher will lift the Crew Dragon out of the water with a crane, attached to the end of the boat, according to NASA. The capsule will then be hauled onto the deck of Go Searcher, and the astronauts will be evaluated by doctors from SpaceX and NASA.

(15) BOOK TRAILER. Does A Town Divided by Christmas mark the beginning of a “War on Christmas” series by Orson Scott Card?

It began with a quarrel over which newborn should be the baby Jesus in the town’s Christmas pageant. Decades later, two scientists arrive to study small-town genetic patterns, only to run up against the invisible walls that split the leading citizens into two congregations that can only be joined by love and forgiveness. And maybe a little deception, because there might be some things that people just don’t need to know.

 

(16) REACH OUT AND TOUCH E.T. One grad student – completely disregarding warnings by everyone from Stephen Hawking to Cixin Liu — would like to use a laser beam to send a “Here We Are” signal to aliens (Popular Mechanics: “Firing a Giant Laser Into Space Could Help Find Aliens, MIT Scientist Says”). There’s no word if the laser would be attached to a shark.

If scientists wanted aliens to find Earth, how would they arrange such an encounter? A new paper from MIT suggests that a giant laser, magnified by a giant telescope and aimed out into space, could do the trick.

In what author James Clark calls a “feasibility study,” he proposes that a high-powered 1-to 2-megawatt laser be focused directly into space. While the Earth has been sending signals like radio waves into space for over a century, like those famously seen in the opening of Contact, it’s possible that solar entities like the sun and exoplanets beyond the solar system have been interfering with signals, making it harder for potential aliens to touch base.

The goal of the laser-telescope rig is the creation of an energy beam, meant to stand out amid all of the excess noise in the solar system. Its target would be areas like Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, and TRAPPIST-1, a star around 40 light-years away with seven exoplanets in orbit. Scientists say 3 of those exoplanets are potentially habitable.

“If we were to successfully close a handshake and start to communicate, we could flash a message, at a data rate of about a few hundred bits per second, which would get there in just a few years,” says Clark, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in a press statement.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “The 3-Second Dumpling” on YouTube explains how you can cook dumplings in three seconds if you happen to have a cannon and a flamethrower! (I may have linked to this one before – but let’s do it again!)

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day John Winkleman.]

49 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/8/18 Octokittens

  1. 7) The Lair of the White Worm is a wonderful movie, but Bram Stokers book is a very weird thing with a convoluted plot that goes in all bizarre directions. I was kind of flabbergasted that it could have been published anywhere. I guess it is interesting to read in a meta sort of way. Like watching Plan 9 From Outer Space.

  2. (5) KATHERIE KURTZ JOINS WOTF PANEL. – missing an N there…

    (7) Birthdays – While it’s true that Ben Bova has written over 120 books, and won six Hugo Awards, I think the phrasing here is more than a little misleading. To me it implies that he won his awards for the books, when in fact he won them for his editorship of Analog.

  3. David Goldfarb: The “N” is restored. Appertain yourself the beverage of your choice!

  4. @17: That’s not just cooking the dumpling in 3 seconds, that’s making and cooking. (I once got to a restaurant early enough to see the staff making dumplings; even the experts took a lot longer than 3 seconds.) It looks very impressive, but I wonder how well the meat inside (which looks like it starts out raw) is actually cooked when wrapped in dough and hurled through a bonfire; I’d expect burned outsides and raw insides.

  5. PS: I remember something similar a while ago, but IIRC it was all indoors; possibly it was assembly without cooking?

  6. 16
    I think that should be “if the laser”, not “in the laser”.
    (Well, maybe that’s where that “n” escaped to.)

  7. (3) When Larry Niven signed my first edition of Ringworld (where Louis Wu celebrated New Year’s Eve by teleporting in the work direction) with “To Brenda”, which was the name of the young lady before me in line, all I got was a stet mark crossing out her name and adding mine.

  8. 2) I thought the original outcry over the Vampire reboot sometimes tried too hard to find the worst possible reading but this is actually pretty gross. And, as is characteristic of edgelord stuff, it’s gross in a way that has just enough plausible deniability to allow a performance of “not seeing what the fuss is about” if there’s criticism. Luckily there are plenty of previous editions to play instead, if Vampire is your thing.

  9. scrollin scrollin scrollin
    keep them pixels scrollin
    though the files are swollen
    five-hide!

  10. 2) Just ugh. It’s one thing if someone writes and self-publishes something awful like that, when they do it on their own. But a game book has to not only go through editing but play testing, right? Wonder if they got bad feedback and ignored because it’s what they wanted to to, or if that really went over everyone’s heads? Or….the Chechnya/GLBTQ concentration camps situation was not that widely publicized, maybe most people think it’s an outlandish completely fictional situation. Even so, even assuming casual reader/players think it’s more of a Shoah-based trope, it’s offensive enough. Gotta be very careful how you deploy that sort of thing even when you have great intentions. To play casually with an atrocity that is still going on, and in this way — well, just yuck. It’s like publishing a game in 1994 where the vampires are behind the Rwandan genocide.

    Also, happy birthday to Alfre Woodard! I had no idea that she was in her mid 60s, I would have guessed 10 years younger. Especially after recently watching her rock her role in the first season of Luke Cage.

    Possible pixel scroll title: “I’m scrolling on the bad side and I got my pixels to the wall”

  11. Octokittens?

    I am reminded of Ocho, from CJ White’s trilogy…

    2) Ugh. Recent and ongoing atrocities are fraught, to say the least. It makes a twisted sense in a world where the Vampire factions are behind everything, in effect, but yeah. Better choices should have been exercised here.

    12) Damn, wow.

  12. Crossposting from the 11/7 Pixel Scroll:

    I’m slowly boxing up my dead-tree SFF library to give to charity. (I had a good selection of Lafferty, so I went to get the books to offer to send to filers… and discovered that the Lafferty books were some of the ones that were destroyed in the crawlspace flood I had two years back. *sigh* )

    But that got me to thinking: if any Filer is looking for specific books (mostly from 1970s through the 2000s, but some later) from any particular author, I’d be happy to send them if I have them. Limited time offer, as I’m boxing them up and they won’t be available for much longer…

    Email me at (rot13) [email protected] or put requests in the most recent Pixel Scroll. Absolutely no guarantee I have what you want… but I do have some 3000-4000 books that I’m giving away, and I don’t mind some of them going to the good folks here.

  13. @cmm Wonder if they got bad feedback and ignored because it’s what they wanted to to, or if that really went over everyone’s heads?

    From previous criticisms, I’m pretty sure they actively thought they were being cool and edgy and were working with playtesters who agreed.

    And… having said that I thought the previous “OMG Vampire is being written by nazis now” stuff was a bit of a reach, I notice they’ve got liberal outrage at “Sharia law” as a distraction created by a conspiracy that secretly runs the world for its own benefit, which is a least a close rhyme with classic antisemitic conspiracy theory. But I’m probably overthinking.

  14. Lafferty Books can be bartered and negotiated for and with on the FB page FEAST OF LAUGHTER. in case any 770 filers have some they desire to send to good loving homes…

  15. @Soon Lee: thanks for the link — that’s probably what I was remembering and @P J Evans was referring to. In both cases I notice the extremely doubtful expression on the face of the young woman being demonstrated to, when asked to eat the result; that’s about my reaction also. Baked Alaska is a fine dessert, but I like my mince and shrimp more cooked.

    @Mark: way cool (including the note that she earned out her advance “several times over”). I wonder how the sobbing juvenile canines will try to spin it, or whether they’ll figure out there’s nothing they can say that won’t make them look bad to themselves.

  16. @Chip

    Yep, and she’s since specified that it doesn’t include her foreign sales either. You’d imagine that the Broken Earth trilogy makes up the majority of that 1 million+, but clearly her backlist has gotten a good boost as well.

  17. @Chip —

    I wonder how the sobbing juvenile canines will try to spin it, or whether they’ll figure out there’s nothing they can say that won’t make them look bad to themselves.

    Making themselves look bad never stopped them before, so why should it now?

    Several weeks ago and several blogs distant, a puppy type was making fun of Jemisin for having to “beg for rent money” through a Patreon. When I pointed out that she is making about $70,000 per year from her Patreon alone, he then turned around and declared that she was defrauding her patrons because supposedly she isn’t churning out new books quickly enough.

    You just can’t win with these folks.

  18. I wonder how the sobbing juvenile canines will try to spin it

    Simple denial is their usual tactic. Scalzi doesn’t sell–his publishers post false numbers (and sign him to fake contracts) to try to promote his/their liberal agenda. So clearly, they’ll do the same for Jemisin.

    Conspiracy theories can answer anything!

  19. (1) This franchise needs to merge with another successful franchise. The world needs Dumblebee!

    (2) I think it was the Werwolfbook were the holocaust was at least partially retconned as a mean to fight werewolves. This is worse 🙁

  20. @Hampus: I’m pixeled and all my books are read.

    Really? I find that hard to believe… 🙂

  21. I agree. My To Be Read stack actually consists of several boxes, and some of the books are thirty years old.

  22. David Brain on November 9, 2018 at 11:01 am said:

    @Hampus: I’m pixeled and all my books are read.

    Really? I find that hard to believe… ?

    Not everyone has a Mt. Tsundoku. Some of us struggle to acquire enough books to satisfy our basic reading needs! Being a fast reader and a book addict can be a curse in its own right. Even if you have enough money to be able to feed your habit (a serious problem for fast readers), bookstores aren’t open 24 hours. 🙂

  23. Xtifr: Not everyone has a Mt. Tsundoku. Some of us struggle to acquire enough books to satisfy our basic reading needs!

    You’re sort of like a Bussard Ramjet of literature?

  24. @Xtfir That’s what I like about e-books! Available 24 hours.
    That said, I do sometimes run out of books because nothing interesting is on sale. That’s when I’m able to reread old favorites.

  25. @Bruce Protip: put the inscription you want on a post-it stuck to the title page. Niven signed my Ringworld correctly.

  26. Lee Whiteside, I probably have Kerr; I don’t think I have any Hoover. I’m currently at Windycon; I’ll check what I have when I get home. (I know I *had* some books by Kerr, but some books were destroyed by a flood in my crawlspace, so I can’t be sure without checking whether I still have any or not.)

    I’ll check Sunday and let you know one way or the other.

  27. Here’s my advice on book signings: do a little research on the book before you bring it to the author. I am very fond of GRRM’s Armageddon Rag but when I brought my copy to him for an autograph at Balticon, I got a signature and a rather sharp response. Later, I found out that the book failed in such a way that his career was endangered.

  28. @Rob: Nice to hear from another fan of Armageddon Rag. As I understand it, the reception of Armageddon Rag (and maybe Fevre Dream, too) was poor enough that Martin had to go into TV work for several years.

  29. I felt a little geeky thrill when I proffered a copy of Executive’s Comic Book to Harvey Kurtzman. His eyes actually widened a little and he said “Where did you get that?” And I said something like ‘a used book store in Denver’ and didn’t mention the other copy.

    And when Colleen Doran was invited to go to Japan along with Jules Feiffer and others, she was nice enough to bring my copy of The Great Comic Book Heroes along for an autograph. (Like the Kurtzman, it was a book that lifted the top of my head right off and let all kinds of stuff in.) She brought it back to me afterward and said she was glad they’d had it along, because no one had thought to bring graphic examples, and here was a book full of some of the best. Well, obviously, I meant to do that.

  30. 2) White Wolf, prior to its buy-out by CCP and subsequent sale to Paradox, learned by hard experience (::cough:: WoD: Gypsies, Berlin by Night) to not have a supernatural influence at the root cause of every human atrocity, because they were rightly critically dinged for trivializing real-life horrors. I freelanced for them for the best part of a decade, and I continue to freelance for Onyx Path, and there are, in fact, iron clad fucking rules in the the freelance pool against doing stuff like this for a reason. Mining actual ongoing human rights abuses for entertainment value is obscene and doing so for Edgy McEdgelord “artistic” cred is utterly contemptible.

    ParaWolf does not apparently share this perspective, seems dead intent on bringing back everything that was horrid and cringeworthy in the still-figuring-stuff-out stages of first edition Vampire, and ignoring everyone who tries to advise them against remaking those mistakes. It doesn’t help that they’ve got Mark Rein-Hagen on staff sticking his foot in it at every available opportunity and reminding the fanbase how much better the Old World of Darkness became when he was no longer involved with it in any meaningful way.

  31. Mike Glyer on November 9, 2018 at 1:37 pm said:

    Not everyone has a Mt. Tsundoku. Some of us struggle to acquire enough books to satisfy our basic reading needs!

    You’re sort of like a Bussard Ramjet of literature?

    Ha-ha! Wow, I can’t say I’d ever thought about it like that before, but yes, I suppose that fits! 😀

    Anyway, I’d comment more on the topic, but I’ve gotta run while the bookstores are still open! 😉

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  33. (3) I was able to pick up a second copy of the first edition of Ringworld, and Niven didn’t get distracted when he signed that one.

    I’ve never had GRRM sign any of my books, but if I did, it would probably be Fevre Dream, followed by Armageddon Rag. I haven’t read any of the Game of Thrones series, I’m still waiting for him to finish it, and besides, I think I only have ebook editions of them.

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