(1) Oscar handicappers have The Martian running second for Best Picture says Variety.
In the Oscar race for best picture, “The Martian” has taken off like a rocket among the predictions by media experts at Gold Derby. One month ago, it wasn’t even in the top 10, but now it’s tied for second place with “Joy,” both sharing 17 to 2 odds. “Spotlight” remains out front and has picked up support as it debuts in theaters.
(2) J. K. Rowling tweeted her favorite fan art of Sirius and James Potter:
https://twitter.com/lilymydeer/status/653257716232757248
(3) Auditioning to be the next Doctor?
Who's afraid of a Dalek? Not me.
Maybe @bbcdoctorwho. pic.twitter.com/3QDhhpnxRx— Dr. Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) November 10, 2015
(4) “Future’s Past: The astronauts of 2001: A Space Odyssey“ at The Space Review covers actors Keir Dullea’s and Gary Lockwood’s appearance at Dragon Con.
Lockwood also said that they got to meet the Apollo 11 crew, and then he paused and said, “I liked Neil… I don’t like Buzz.” He added that often when he and Dullea do joint appearances at film showings, somehow Buzz Aldrin always seems to appear and people want to introduce Aldrin to him. Lockwood drolly replies that he already knows the moonwalker. He implied that he had a similar low opinion of William Shatner, with whom he appeared in the second television pilot for Star Trek.
Lockwood also told a great story about working on the centrifuge set, which he thought was brilliantly designed. He joked that he realized that Kubrick hired him for the job because of his previous experience as a cowboy stuntman. One day Lockwood found himself strapped into his chair, eating goop from his food tray—upside down. Keir Dullea was supposed to climb down the ladder at the center of the set and then the whole set would rotate as he walked over to where Lockwood was sitting. Kubrick called “action” and told Lockwood to take a bite, and Lockwood then watched as the three squares of goop slowly peeled off his tray… and fell nearly 70 feet to the floor below, splattering everything on the pristine white set. They didn’t shoot for the rest of the day.
The actors took some questions from the audience and had some really interesting answers. For instance, somebody asked if they knew that the film would be a classic. Dullea said that he had his doubts because the early reviews were so poor. In particular, he mentioned New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s infamous devastating review, where she referred to 2001 as “trash masquerading as art” and “monumentally unimaginative.” Kael later recanted upon seeing the film a second time, but 2001 received numerous other lackluster and even harsh reviews. Considering that 2001 was released way behind schedule and over budget, expectations had been high, and presumably many critics were waiting to pounce.
(5) Entertainment Weekly has the good word — “Mystery Science Theater 3000 Is Returning”.
Next year, TV viewers will be able to relive all manner of classic ’90s shows, with new episodes of The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Gilmore Girls, and Full House on the horizon. Add one more returning series to that list, as Joel Hodgson is announcing Tuesday that his beloved cult creation Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back after 15 years of dormancy.
For those unaware, the premise of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is brilliantly simple: A mad scientist has launched a man into space, and he torments said subject with psychological experiments that involve him watching some of the worst movies ever made. In order to keep it together, the poor marooned host talks back at the screen, aided by a pair of pop culture-obsessed robots. The MST3K crew may not have invented talking back to the screen, but they certainly brought it to the masses.
(6) Gray Rinehart finds connections between running for local office and his experience as a Hugo nominee in “Political Lessons and… the Hugo Awards?”
I ran for elective office this year, and lost. (For the record, I spent about 0.41% of the total that all four candidates in my district spent up until the election, and I got 3.5% of the vote. Not close to winning, but a good return on my meager investment.)
I was also nominated for a Hugo Award this year, and lost. The story behind that has been chronicled on this blog and elsewhere, and I won’t go into it in this post. (For the record, and as nearly as I can tell from trying to figure out the preferential voting numbers, about 9% of the 5100 novelette voters selected my story as their first choice. I ended up in fourth place . . . two spots below “No Award.”)
I introduce the fact of my being on political and literary ballots this year because I observed two things in the recent Town Council election process that seem pertinent to this year’s Hugo Awards. Specifically, that the political parties inserted themselves deeply into what was supposed to be a nonpartisan race, and other players also wielded considerable influence; and that a lot of voter information was readily available for the candidates to use.
A lot of food for thought. Among Rinehart’s many points:
And as long as we divide ourselves, or in the case of fandom subdivide ourselves; as long as we separate ourselves into (virtual or actual) walled-off enclaves and echo chambers, and associate only with those who look like us, act like us, and believe the things we do; we will find it harder to understand, relate to, and get along with one another — in civil life as well as in the SF&F community.
I think we would be well-served as a fannish community if we talked more about what we love and why we love it, without implying that those who do not love it as we do are ignorant or contemptible. And I think we would be better off if we recalled another RAH observation, also from Friday (emphasis in original): “Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms . . . but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”
(7) A fascinating installment of Robert W. Weinberg’s memoirs published by Tangent Online in 2011, “Collecting Fantasy Art #5: Lail, It Rhymes With Gail”
Six months later, Victor grew tired of the Freas and traded it to me. The impossible had happened. So much for my predictions. I now owned the original cover paintings for the first and second serial installments of Robert Heinlein’s novel, The Door Into Summer. Immediately, I contacted Al, the guy I had met at the 1976 World SF Convention in Kansas City, to see if he still owned the third and final cover painting for the serial. I had passed on that cover, though it had been priced cheap, because I had felt certain at the time I would never obtain the second cover painting for the novel. Now that I had that piece, I really wanted the third cover so I would have all three paintings for the novel.
No such luck. Al had sold the Freas painting at the convention. He didn’t remember who bought it, and he didn’t even remember how much they had paid for it. The painting was long gone. I had had a chance to buy it back in Kansas City and had passed it by.
I learned my lesson that day. Only too well. Never pass up a painting of minor importance because someday that minor meaning might explode. It was a difficult lesson to learn, but an important one. It’s one I have never forgotten.
(8) No other writer handles one-star reviews this badly. “British Writer Tracks Down Teen Who Gave His Book a Bad Review, Smashes Her With Wine Bottle” at Gawker.
A 28-year-old British man, most notable for his 2006 victory on the quiz show Countdown, tracked down a Scottish teenager who’d written a negative review of his self-published novel and shattered a bottle of wine on the back of her head. The aspiring author pleaded guilty to the 2014 assault in a Scottish court Monday, the Mirror reported.
Brittain claimed the early reception for The World Rose was strong, blogging that “The praise I received was remarkable and made me feel great; I was compared to Dickens, Shakespeare, Rowling, Raymond E Feist and Nora Roberts.”
…But he also complained about bad reviews from “idiots” and “teenagers.”
One of those teenagers was Paige Rolland, the eventual victim of Brittain’s savage bottle attack. Her entire harsh (but fair) review has been preserved on Amazon, but this passage really sums up her criticism:
As a reader, I’m bored out of my skull and severely disappointed in what I might have paid for. As a writer (albeit an amateur one) I’m appalled that anyone would think this was worthy of money.
Not only does it begin with “once upon a time” which you could argue is perfect as this is a fairytale (and it doesn’t work, it’s incredibly pretentious), but it’s filled with many writing no-nos. Way too much telling, pretentious prose, and a main character that I already hate. Ella is the perfect princess (true to fairytales, so we can at least give him a little credit despite how painfully annoying this is coupled with a complete lack of real personality shining through).
Rolland also noted that Brittain “has gained a bit of infamy on Wattpad where he’s known for threatening users who don’t praise him (pray for me),” which turned out to be quite portentous.
(9) Here’s a word I’m betting you haven’t in your NaNoWriMo novel yet.
The opposite of dysfunction is EUFUNCTION.
— Haggard Hawks ???????? Words | Language | Etymology (@HaggardHawks) November 5, 2015
(10) Strange poll.
We asked @nytmag readers: If you could go back and kill Hitler as a baby, would you do it? (What's your response?) pic.twitter.com/daatm12NZC
— NYT Magazine (@NYTmag) October 23, 2015
It’s a perennial question. I remember at the 1995 Lunacon that Mordechai Housman, an Orthodox Jew, was having fun circulating copies of his provocative article Hitler’s Crib, which tries to determine whether religious law would permit time travel and, specifically, whether it would permit traveling in time to kill Hitler.
(11) You know this guy: “Plane” at The Oatmeal.
(12) Today In History
- November 10, 1969 – Sesame Street debuts.
- November 10, 1969 — Gene Autry received a gold record for the single, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, 20 years after its release.
(13) Today’s Birthday Boy
- November 10, 1960 – Neil Gaiman
(14) James Whitbrook presents “The 7 Least Subtle Political Allegories on Doctor Who“. His pick at number one (most lacking in subtlety) is “The Happiness Patrol.”
But it’s the despot herself who is the most obvious pastiche. Sheila Hancock openly plays the leader Helen A as a satirical take on then-Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” who dominated British politics. At the time, this barely made ripples, but a 2010 story in the British newspaper The Sunday Times about the connection—featuring a quote from Sylvester McCoy describing Mrs. Thatcher as “more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered”—saw Conservative politicians in uproar at the anti-Conservative bias this revealed on the part of the BBC. Ex-script editor Andrew Cartmel was brought onto the BBC news program Newsnight to answer claims that the 1980s Doctor Who creative team had been a source of left-wing propaganda in the wake of the “revelation”… despite the story having been no particular secret, 22 years earlier.
Always remember – science fiction is never about the future….
(15) A previously unpublished Leigh Brackett story is one of the lures to buy Haffner Press’ tribute book, Leigh Brackett Centennial.
SF and mystery author Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) – who also wrote screenplays for The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo and The Empire Strikes Back —?is represented by an array of nonfiction pieces by and about here, as well as the previously unpublished story “They,” which Haffner describes as “a mature science fiction tale of power and intrigue, of homegrown xenophobia versus stellar exploration, with an answer to the ultimate question: ‘Are we alone?’” The volume collects the majority of Brackett’s nonfiction writings, supplemented with vintage interviews and commentaries/remembrances from such luminaries as Ray Bradbury, Michael Moorcock, Richard A. Lupoff and more.
Brackett writes of bringing Philip Marlowe into the 1970s for Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye in “From The Big Sleep to The Long Goodbye and More or Less How We Got There.”
SF-author and NASA employee Joseph Green records the time he hosted Brackett at the launch of Apollo XII . . .
Midwest bookseller Ray Walsh documents the day he escorted Brackett to view a new groundbreaking space-fantasy film in the summer 1977…
Order the book at this link: http://www.haffnerpress.com/book/lb100/
(16) John Scalzi gives his take on balancing awards and mental health:
I’ve won and lost enough awards to know an award is not The Thing That Changes Everything. An award is fun, an award is nice, an award may even be, at times, significant. But at the end of the day, whether you win or lose, you still go home with yourself, and you don’t change — at least, not because of an award. It’s perfectly fine to want an award (I’ve wanted them from time to time, you can be assured) and it’s perfectly okay to be disappointed if you don’t get one. But ultimately, putting the responsibility for your happiness onto an award, which is, generally speaking, a thing over which you have absolutely no control, is a very fine way to become unhappy. Which will not be on the award, or any of the people who voted for it. It will be on you, whether you want to own that fact or not.
(17) Luna Lindsey reviews two competing online tools in “Panlexicon vs. Visual Thesaurus — Who Will Win?” at the SFWA Blog.
I kept Visual Thesaurus on retainer as my go-to onomasticon until I stumbled upon Panlexicon.com in all of its simple, elegant magic.
The power of Panlexicon lies in its ability to search on multiple terms, which will bring up a larger spectrum of metonyms than most thesauri (including Visual Thesaurus). So it’s perfect for finding that just-out-of-reach expression when all you can remember are remotely-related numinous approximations of what you’re going for. Simply type two or more related words or phrases, separated by a comma, and voilà. (And of course, you can always search a standalone word.)
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Will R., Mark-kitteh, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Jim Meadows for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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I stopped reviewing books at all after some awful threats towards my family from some self-published authors on GoodReads.
If I had a time machine I would use it to kill Baby Rigged Intuition-Pump Creator.
If you were a baby Hitler, my love, then you would be used as a highly contrived justification for extreme violent acts in the name of a greater good. If you were a dinosaur baby Hitler, my love, THEN YOU WOULD BE UNSTOPPABLE.
@Nigel: Nice. There is a terrible sickness in the anglosphere this century, in which “Who MUST you kill?” is treated as the core ethical question. It’s come up recently regarding Jeremy Corbyn; it’s the constant preoccupation of US elites and British “decents.” If you’re not murdering you’re not caring.
We want to know that some tiny fraction of everyone is at least theoretically capable of being as great a big hairy ugly rotten bastard as the rest of us, because otherwise they were happy to act all self-righteous and theoretically let World War 2 happen, the great big hairy ugly rotten bastards.
Is there evidence that Rinehart signed up with the Puppies? The impression I had was that he was one of the people they roped in without informing ahead of time.
Boy, how can people be so foolish? Surely they should know that you don’t kill Baby Hitler, you, as Cora suggested, kidnap him.
The good folk over at Nerdfighteria have put together the plan for an Evil Baby Orphanage hidden somewhere in Tibet where all Evil Babies are prehabilitated.
A boarding school for the most evil minds of history in a remote location in
communist Chinaa Buddhist theocracy generally run by court officials on behalf of an infant*? I see no way how this could possibly go wrong 😉* I’m assuming this is the timeline we want/get after taking Stalin, Hitler, Mao most Chinese Emperors, Mongolian Khans etc out of the equation
Is there evidence that Rinehart signed up with the Puppies? The impression I had was that he was one of the people they roped in without informing ahead of time.
He could have done the honorable thing like Bellet and Kloos did, and withdrawn.
He could. But if we’re ever going to put this mess behind us then allowing those that got conned by Torg and Beale back in the tent is necessary.
There are those like JCW who’ve plainly burnt all their boats and are content ranting at their little cadre of frothing idiots, and those who allowed themselves to get suckered. Exactly where on the scale Rinehart lies I don’t really know, but I get the impression it’s at the Butcher/Anderson end.
We know that Butcher was a witting Pup nominee. But he was also pretty (strategically) quiet. I accept that makes him different from JCW, but it doesn’t make him a dupe.
I agree with the putting this mess behind us attitude. A good dollop of understanding and forgiveness is also appropriate.
One of the reasons Kloos and Bellet were so celebrated is that it was recognized that what they did, withdrawing from the chance of winning one of the highest awards in the industry, is really hard. Many people couldn’t do it. I probably couldn’t (not that I ever expect to find myself in line for a big award — just a hypothetical here).
I don’t recall seeing any evidence that Rinehart was rude or obnoxious, unlike so many of the Puppy nominees. He seems to have been swept into this unawares and was hopeful, however misunderstanding of the situation.
And if some of his friends urged that his work was worthy and should stay on the ballot and others urged him to withdraw for some greater good, well, I can forgive him some confusion and ambivalence.
Did we learn nothing from A Sound of Thunder?
(Why didn’t they kidnap a baby tyrannosaurus rex who was about to die in the past and bring it to the future and let it grow up. Start a breeding program. OK two tyrannosaurus rex. Return the baby tyrannosaurus rexes back to the past, so the originals wouldn’t be missed. Then set up a tyrannosaurus rex game reserve where you could hunt them. But what if one of the original baby tyrannosaurus rex would have grown up to be tyrannosaurus rex Hitler?)
JG Ballard’s High Rise on sale for 99p on UK kindle store.
Definite purchase for me, never read it and I’d like to rectify that before seeing Ben Wheatley’s movie.
I would think changing the past so that somebody is never born is close enough to killing them, that I wouldn’t want to change the past in any way further out than a couple of years. (No offense intended to infants, I would expect an arbitrary change to take longer than that to start nullifying people.)
I don’t extend this to future potential people, though.
NickPheas wrote:
And Annie Bellet too. And Black Gate. What makes me sad is that the people who withdrew before the ballot was public aren’t getting the same love. They made a harder decision, because they weren’t seeing the outrage under their noses, and yet they get less fame for it.
I think their names were Dave Creek and Edmund Schubert (and Julliette Wade, who withdrew before it was obvious that the Puppies could hand out Hugo noms like party favors–still an honorable decision, in my opinion, but arguably a less difficult one.)
Do I have the names right? Am I missing anyone?
#8
Welp,that certainly sets the bar for Authors Behaving Badly
As for Gray, I like him; he’s a pretty personable fellow and not generally given to being a jerk the way the Pup leaders have been jerks. He has behaved with minimal self-servingness through this whole thing. I think he’s wrong about there being an “invisible political party” controlling the Hugos, but when all your friends have the same wrong idea it’s easy to fall for it.
I have much less sympathy for Butcher. That “I was a neutral but” post destroyed what hadn’t been ruined by his condemnation of Gallo. How can he possibly imagine we’d be fooled into thinking him a neutral when his first act was to accept a bribe? If someone wants my sympathy they need to hide their belief that I am stupid better than that.
It may be of interest to UK Kindle Store users that Marie Brennan’s Lady Trent books are currently available at very good prices.
A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS is £2.39
THE TROPIC OF SERPENTS is £3.47
VOYAGE OF THE BASILISK is £2.40
Highly recommended if you like dragons, faux Victorianism and feminism.
@Jim Henley
I don’t know if I’d say that. As I recall, his only quote was ‘why should I care that people want to give me awards?’. The only other time he popped up was on a thread about Irene Gallo to say ‘she’s apologized. That’s enough’. My take was that he couldn’t care less about the whole Hugo business in the first place.
Mind you, I just read his short story in the Dangerous Women collection, and I swear it read like a Kate Beaton strong female characters comic. http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=311
@rob_matic
Terrific books, especially if you like that style of prose. Brennan really nails it.
The Brittain incident was around the same time as the Hale one, right?
@Cat
Dave Creek and Juliette Wade both withdrew before the nomination period ended if I recall correctly. Matthew David Surridge (who writes for Black Gate) refused to accept the nomination when he was notified – which let Laura J. Mixon onto the ballot.
Surely it is easy enough to determine which Puppy nominees withdrew before the final list went out, by comparing that final list with the initial slate as produced by Torgersen’s democratic, open and completely transparent selection process?
Jeez, Peace, I’m sorry that happened. Some people have neither discipline or manners.
Possible scrollable item, if OGH sees fit (I don’t think it’s been mentioned)-
Dublin 2019’s most recent free short story is by one Nigel Quinlan, Filer of this parish.
http://dublin2019.com/cow-for-a-queen-nigel-quinlan/
I’m asking a favor from someone out there. I signed up to get story recommendations from editors to help vote for next year’s Hugo Awards. I want to make a list of those stories and start reading as many as I can find. I have not received any recommendations lately and for the life of me I cannot remember how I was getting them. I don’t particularly want to scroll through weeks of my Facebook timeline. Could somebody please help me out?
Gray Rinehart never disavowed the Puppies, but he also never to my knowledge engaged in SJW-bashing, racism, misogyny or personal attacks. He had a hopeful, somewhat naive* belief that, since he’d written a good story and been nominated for an award, the story would stand or fall on its merits. He’s a decent soul, and I don’t think we ought to adopt an “are you now or have you ever been” standard toward people whose only transgression is to have been a Puppy nominee.
* His naivete is the kind I sometimes see in evangelical Christians: a belief that the rule-book or operating manual is the whole of the thing, and that the way things work on paper is the way they actually are. Hence, for instance, not knowing that you need an organization behind you even in a theoretically nonpartisan election.
@Alan Ziebarth:
I think you’re looking for SFEditorsPicks. I don’t Facebook, but hopefully their Twitter address will get you pointed in the right direction.
Alan Ziebarth, are you looking for recommendations from editors only, or from readers? Because dozens (hundreds?) of works have been rec’d on this site alone. Someone (Meredith?) is collecting the longlist; I don’t know if it’s been uploaded anywhere yet. There are also active recommendation threads on many other sites, and I know there’s at least one wiki that’s being continually updated, but I’m not on my home computer where it is bookmarked so someone else will have to tell you the URL.
(2) Awww…..
(6) I appreciate that Mr. Rineheart seems to understand the difference between “has influence” and “runs a secret cabal.” Although now I’m wondering about the identity and real purpose of that unnamed friend sending letters around. A time traveler from the future who knew how the final vote was going to go? Or a perspicacious fan who kinda knew the same thing?
I’m not sure about the notion that rudeness is the sign of a dying culture, because of the way “politeness” is often defined as not disrupting the current shape of things. My own culture (USA) might have appeared more polite in the past, but that’s at least in part because some truly appalling behavior toward disadvantaged groups wasn’t considered impolite. Almost any fight for social justice is going to, at some point, be perceived as rude by the existing power structure.
Then again, maybe every step forward IS a culture dying, and being quickly reborn as something else.
(8) I’m always amazed by the behavior of writers who engage negative reviews. What on earth do they think they’re going to accomplish?
Reviewer: your book sucks.
Author: you take that back!
Reviewer: your book still sucks, and you’re a petty, thin-skinned narcissist.
Author: you take that back or I’ll MAKE you take it back!
Reviewer: your book still sucks, and are you threatening me?
Author: ARRRRGGGGHHH! (hits reviewer on the back of the head with a bottle)
Reviewer: your book still sucks, and you’re a violent criminal who’s going to jail.
@Alan Ziebarth: the Facebook page you’re looking for is called SFEditorsPicks. They are still active, but even though I’m following them, their posts don’t show up in my feed either. I often don’t understand Facebook.
BLUSH
OK, I have to grant that I know nothing of Rinehart’s personal views, and don’t wish to project any on him. I will say, though, that it really was clear well before the end of voting that the Puppies crowd was, as I said, ignorant bullying liars, and everyone who got blindsided had a chance to know it and say something. Since I haven’t searched out his history, I don’t know if he did say something, and if he did and it was good, then I would be glad to know it.
He had a hopeful, somewhat naive* belief that, since he’d written a good story and been nominated for an award, the story would stand or fall on its merits.
On its own merits, his story wouldn’t have been nominated at all. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t particularly good either. It is bland and fairly unconvincing, only works to the extent it does because all but one character is an idiot, and suggests several other stories that would have been much more interesting.
@ Bruce:
This was Mr. Rinehart’s statement on the Puppy affair. I’ll let it speak for itself, but I’ll note that while he engaged in some “both sides do it” rhetoric, he did condemn the name-calling coming from the Puppy side.
@ Aaron:
I liked the story and voted for it – I’m always a sucker for stories about folklore and folk memory, and although it was a story of resistance against oppression, the author declined to paint the oppressors in Manichaean terms. I also don’t think that it suffered from an idiot plot, given that using folklore as a weapon isn’t an intuitive choice: it’s reasonable for this to take some time and thought to realize even if it were obvious in hindsight. But de gustibus, I guess.
My personal standard in voting for Puppy stories was “was it better than the worst non-Puppy nominee,” and Mr. Rinehart’s story beats Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s seven ways from Sunday.
Jonathan: Thanks. I admit, I’d respect it more if he noted the extent to which the Puppies leaders do in fact have histories of saying racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and sometimes even neo-Nazi things. Name-calling for insulting as bad; correctly naming what others do isn’t.
In any event, backing up to my original point, insofar as I have one. 🙂 I think he’d find the Hugo process much less like political party action if in future he steered away from that crowd. His experience is unusual, because they’re unusual in Hugo history.
I also don’t think that it suffered from an idiot plot, given that using folklore as a weapon isn’t an intuitive choice: it’s reasonable for this to take some time and thought to realize even if it were obvious in hindsight.
Twenty years and no one had figured out from Peshari folklore, architecture, history, and mortuary practices that they had a phobia about being underground. That requires everyone in the colony to be an idiot. There were other problems with the story as well – as I said, it was bland and unconvincing and there were some other plot elements that didn’t add up either. It wasn’t a terrible story, and as filler in a monthly magazine it wouldn’t have been out of place, but that’s not Hugo quality.
I also placed Heuvelt’s story behind No Award.
@Vasha Thank you very much.
@Aaron:
Going from there to realizing that the phobia is strong enough to be triggered by human burial customs, even though the Peshari aren’t the ones being buried, is non-obvious. Also, I doubt the human colonists had access to the entire Peshari literary corpus and that it took time to understand the aliens’ psychology and the implications of their religion. There were certainly more obvious ways the humans could have taken advantage of the folklore – building an underground city where the Peshari wouldn’t dare go, for instance – but the story describes the kind of blundering and mutual misunderstanding that has happened often enough in human history that I can forgive it happening between humans and aliens.
There were some thought-provoking ideas in that story – maybe not realized as well as they could have been, but the story stayed with me.
Dave Creek and Juliette Wade both withdrew before the nomination period ended if I recall correctly. Matthew David Surridge (who writes for Black Gate) refused to accept the nomination when he was notified – which let Laura J. Mixon onto the ballot.
No one “withdrew before the nomination period ended.”
It is not possible, under the current process, to withdraw before the nominees are even known.
All the information on who was nominated and who withdrew is included in this year’s Hugo Award statistics, which can be found at http://sasquan.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2015HugoStatistics-Final.pdf
@Morris Keesan:
I am shocked – shocked, I say! – that no one has yet presented you with an Internet for this.
RE 11) (the Oatmeal comic): From Sylvia @fearoflanding on Twitter: the full story of the crash of the Clipper Eclipse.
Her blog (Fear of Landing) is also pretty interesting for aircraft aficionados.
In its first 24 hours, the MST3K kickstarter almost made it to one million dollars.
I cannot believe the discussion of baby Hitler got that far without a direct link to this game. I’ve played it, though only once, and it seemed like a lot of fun.
I think these philosophical conundrums are usually intended to be as bare bones simple as possible, because adding nuance kills the thrill (or something) of it being a *hard* choice. Sort of like Facebook memes. Nobody seems to like “It depends”, or “but how about….” in their soundbite philosophy. Real philosophy ain’t for the weak, and I don’t even mean the stuff my brother studied in University (which is hella not simple). I mean the kind by which people live their lives.
(In other news, my keyboard has an O again!)
@Alan Ziebarth If you’re only looking for short-fiction (short stories, novelettes, and novellas), we’ve collected the SF Editor’s Picks suggestions (together with other reviewers) on Rocket Stack Rank. That may be an easier way to review them.
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/p/2015.html#_SFEditorsPicks_–_Anthology
The catch is that we don’t cover as many magazines as they do. We do the big six (Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Tor.com) plus selected other stories that people recommended. It might still be easier than digging through Twitter though.
> “No one ‘withdrew before the nomination period ended.'”
They withdrew themselves from the slate, prior to the end of voting.
Jim Henley: “If you’re not murdering you’re not caring.” There is a mighty truth said in jest. And the corollary is found in the way health and social issues are somehow not important unless they are costing lives.
@Iphinome: Everybody links to “Wikihistory” on their first trip.
Just finished “Stranger” by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith. It pretty much went: Introduction / 300 pages of teenage angst / concluding battle.
I can get behind a certain amount of adolescent raging (I liked Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, for example, which many thought had too much of it) but this seemed like a bit much even for me.