(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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Thanks, Mike. Back in my blogging days, I think I formulated it as “If you’re not bombing, you’re not relating.”
Hitler is small potatoes. If the hypothesis that Akhenaten was the inspiration for the rise of xenophobic monotheism in Israel was true, then killing Akhenaten would have likely resulted in a world without Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. There would not only have been no Holocaust, but no Diaspora, no Dark Ages, no Crusades, no 9/11, and no motive for a very large percentage of the wars fought in the Western (and Middle Eastern) world over the past 2000 years.
Also, I assume most of you are familiar with Wikihistory, by Desond Warzel?
http://www.tor.com/2011/08/31/wikihistory/
@Darren Garrison,
Yes, Iphinome linked to it further upthread, to which Seth Gordon replied: “@Iphinome: Everybody links to “Wikihistory” on their first trip.”
[There should be a Time Travel version of Godwin’s Law that states that “As an online discussion on time travel grows longer, the probability of a link to “Wikihistory” approaches 1″]
I have another book to enthuse about today: Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor. Although some of Okorafor’s recent books have been fairly gloomy, this one is anything but: if I had to sum it up in one word, it would be “energizing”. This story of aliens landing in Lagos, Nigeria, is a love-letter to a city that Okorafor depicts as being full of infinite possibilities, precisely because it can be chaotic and poorly governed; she suggests that uneasy tension between extremes of privilege and poverty is a state full of seeds of growth. She depicts Lagos as a rich mixture of cultures, languages, and religions and throws all of the cities diversity together in violent collisions as the aliens catalyze convulsive change. Although many of the book’s numerous characters die (sometimes completely senselessly), it is a tremendously optimistic story.
Lagoon is a very entertaining book to read. At the center of it are three superpowered humans, Adaora, Anthony, and Agu, who are the most developed characters in the book, but only Adaora, I thought, really got much development. That’s because of sketching a wide variety of characters — animals and spirits as well as humans — rather than getting deep in any one; but the briefly-encountered cast is well drawn. I especially appreciated the attention paid to nonhuman viewpoints in depicting the whole diversity of Lagos.
One thing that every reader will notice is that part of the dialogue is in Pidgin English. If you are not familiar with this language, it will be partly incomprehensible. Luckily, there is a glossary in the back; incomplete, however, so I did my best to create a supplement to it. I hope this may be useful. It is worth taking the time to puzzle out the dialogue.
I also strongly recommend the audiobook, narrated by Ben Onwukwe and by the amazing Adjoa Andoh. They bring this many-voiced, Nigerian-accented book to life, and Andoh is always particularly vivid, whether conveying the creepy serenity of an alien, Adaora’s pepperiness when she loses her temper, or the fast cadences of an African-American rapper.
All the Internets.
(My current D&D game started in WWII, veered into alternate dimensions, and hints at the possibility of time travel. So of course “can we kill Hitler” came up. I got to be the provider of a #lucky10K moment for a fellow player who’d never heard of Wikihistory.)
Oh! First fifth time a link I posted appeared in the roundup. Makin’ my mark on the world. And it looks like ::ticky::
I just finished the “Old Venus” anthology (edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois). David Brin’s story “The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss” was exceptionally good.
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/11/the-tumbledowns-of-cleopatra-abyss-by.html
“Jonah is a young man in a matriarchal human society hiding at the bottom of an ocean on a far-future Venus whose terraforming seems to be going wrong after thousands of years.”
In a sense, Brin cheated. The anthology was for stories set on the hot, wet, Venus that we imagined prior to Mariner 2, but he wrote one set on a far-future terraformed planet. Regardless, he definitely wrote the best story in the volume.
@Greg: “Tumbledowns” was indeed an interesting story; sort of a case study of how a small society, having much of their attention taken up with difficult survival, and without the possibility (at least initially) of exploring new terrain, would have their mental horizons shrink. And it’s a heroic-engineering story.
My favorite, though, was “Botanica Veneris”, for its sly subversion of travel and adventure narrative through the perspective of an oblivious narrator who completely overestimates her own importance and the centrality of her European aristocratic concerns to the Venusian world at large. Such is the recent recentering of attention in science fiction. And the only thing that future generations value about Countess Rathangan is her art, which she herself (however much she loves making it) thinks only has value as a source of funding for her real mission. Such is the judgement of history.
Lenora,
The Evil Baby Orphanage game came about as part of the chatter between the Vlog Brothers and their Nerdfightaria horde. The game maker was inspired by/part of the talk and reached out to the community before Kickstarting.
@Greg
Tumbledowns is also one of my favorites from Old Venus.
@Greg: Just looked at your review of “Botanica Veneris” — we know from the first page of the story that Lady Ida’s mission to the Duke of Yoo failed, and she didn’t survive, because we are going to be reading papers that have just been recovered after generations in the possession of the Dukes of Yoo. (We never find out what became of the gem.) It’s not a cheat that the story doesn’t fulfill certain expectations of fully telling Lady Ida’s story, because hers isn’t the “real story” in quite the way she thinks it is. All the encounters with people who have different views of the world than hers are the point.
Archergal, thanks for the @fearoflanding recommend.
Amazon are getting in on the action of deciding the best books of 2015 a bit early. Their editors choice for SF&F is Uprooted.
@Tintinaus
As an empirical data point, Kim Yong-un went to boarding school in Switzerland. The results don’t exactly make us proud.
I’m reading now. I’d agree a lack of Pidgin English makes it a difficult read at points but I’m managing ok from context. I suspect I’ll do a 2nd read after reading the glossary and your supplement. I am enjoying so far. I liked Binti (sp?) better.
Years of reading incomprehensible made up languages (i.e. elvish), mythology from around the world, as well as romances with foreign languages sprinkled around teaches one to just go with the flow and usually by the end of the story/book I’ve understood enough. Sometimes I reread after reading a glossary sometimes I enjoyed enough the first time around.
@Lenora Rose: LOL at the Evil Baby Orphanage game – I’d never heard of that. Thanks!
It’s kind of sad that “how about anything other than murder” is considered too nuanced for these “philosophical conundrums” (put in quotes ‘cuz I’m not sure they’re either philosophical or conundrums, though they’re always proposed like that, of course). I think you’re right, though. I picture some kid in class saying “buy why not just do X” and the teacher replying stridently, “That’s not the question!” ;-/
(In other news, congrats on the O! You’re using it with wild abandon, I see. 😉 )
@Mark: Hey, cool, their top 20 also included Ancillary Mercy! Odd that their overall top 20 didn’t include their top SF&F pick, but a different book from their top 20 SF&F (Seveneves). I don’t get how the top SF&F book can be X, but the top 20 overall books have a book that…they didn’t think was as good? Hmm. I must be missing something.
@Cassy B
I am, and it has not. Progress currently suspended while I drag myself out of a high-fatigue phase.
@John Lorentz
I’m sorry, I should have been more clear: They withdrew from the Sad Puppy slate.
@Kendall
Hmm, I think it might just be a mistake – the other categories seem to be done right. I’m not really setting much store by these mysterious* editors, but if they liked Ancillary Mercy then they’re doing something right.
*For values of “mysterious” that include “couldn’t find anything out about with 30secs lazy googling”
@Meredith: You have permission to add my short fiction picks (the boldface lines on this page) to the longlist. I’ve talked about almost all of them in these comments.
SMBC answers the question: “What if you killed baby Hitler and the world was a measurably better place?”
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3918
@Vasha
I just reread the intro, and it actually refers to her disappearance, so you’re definitely right. I’ve corrected the review. Thanks!
I’m going to read through it again and see if I get that. To me, it just seemed to be a “travel story,” where the point of reading it is the descriptions of the places. Nothing wrong with that, but (for me, at least) it needs more than that to be something special.
If we’re going to get silly – what if Hitler was the kid in Omelas?
Metro 2033 is available for free on Kindle at the moment. There’s a video game series by the same name based on it, however the book is a really weird/cool dystopian novel written by a Russian author that’s a wild trip if you’ve never read it.
Vasha on November 11, 2015 at 10:51 am said:
I have another book to enthuse about today: Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor.
I was going to second this, but I dallied, so I only end up thirding it instead.
I think it is a must read.
Also one of those why did I start reading this at 10pm things.
(What was I thinking?)
Anyway, I didn’t find the dialect an obstacle to reading, though maybe it slowed me a little at first.
There is a glossary, but most of it is clear in context, especially as you go along.
Probably on my short list.
My money is that it would have all happened anyway, except with Mithraism. Other than wishing each other a merry Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, we’d get mostly cosmetic changes.
But I tend to believe that most of the time, people are what they are and do what they’re going to do, and use religion as justification for that. Angry people will gravitate to angry branches of any faith. The number of people who are genuinely changed by their religion, in my experience, is fairly limited–and even then, I’m not entirely sure that which religion it is matters all that much.
To put it another way, if you’re already on the road to Damascus, sooner or later you’re gonna meet SOMEBODY.
@Greg: Well, I’ll admit that most reviewers, even ones who really liked it, didn’t see the subversiveness in “Botanica Veneris” that I did. Lois Tilton did, though.
Would those of you who’ve read Old Venus say that Botanica Veneris resembles The Women Men Don’t See? Sounds somewhat similar, thematically, but post-colonial?
Regardless, that anthology sounds interesting. I keep seeing it mentioned here.
Re: Killing Akhenaten. I feel like someone would have figured out the potential political power of monotheism at some point, whether it was Akhenaten or Moses, or someone entirely different who actually invented the concept.
Please excuse my repeating what I wrote back on September 28, this time un-rot13’d: “This is on the surface an adventure tale like many others in the Old Venus volume; but it slyly subverts the point of view of the main character, with her proud view of the nature of aristocracy; while moving through a culturally diverse world. She’s following her ne’er-do-well brother, and stories about him give points of view such as the Maasai safari organizer with well-earned contempt for his clients. It turns out that Ida’s real objective is to settle a matter of honor with her brother, but she’s mistaken the sort of story she’s in, and what seems highly important to her really isn’t (not even to her brother, in the end); and because of this, she not only fails in her objective, but fails to survive. It’s the best example of what an Amazon reviewer says is this book’s “persistent theme of familiar earth prejudices and traditions crudely transplanted into places too alien to support them,” except it isn’t just on Venus that white people aren’t the center of the universe, a familiar theme from Ian McDonald.”
Damn–serial posting again–but if anyone cares what *I* would have changed–and assuming I can’t do something like “Introduce reliable birth control by the Roman Era” or “teach germ theory to the Phoenicians”…
I’d import livestock to the New World. Pigs could come in on Kon-Tiki-style rafts, but I might have to actually stuff a cow in the time machine. Pigs are dreadful environmental nuisances, and I won’t swear that they wouldn’t have wreaked havoc on the ecosystem, but they’re also a vast reservoir of diseases that the New Worlders would have built up immunity to by the time the Europeans arrived.
Cowpox prevents against smallpox. Plus there’s great advantage to having cows domesticated–the lack of anything but llamas as draft animals limits you. And fertilizer from cows is a great asset in very poor soils and radically increases your soil fertility.
Ideally, this would come with a master level class in sustainable farming, but I don’t know how much the time machine can carry.
@Kendall: I entirely agree that the problem is neither philosophical nor a conundrum. The trolley problem is overused, but at least it is used to illuminate some problem like the doctrine of double effect. The Hitler baby could possibly be used to test moral intuitions about, say, harming innocents, but tbh the use of time travel means as a thought experiment, instead of isolating intuitions to make things artificially clearer, it simply muddies the waters. In any case, that’s not how it’s being used.
Instead of being remotely philosophical, as Jim Henley observes, it’s about showing “If you’re not murdering you’re not caring.” So it’s not really a conundrum either, just a way of signaling you’re not going to let your moral feelings get in the way of making tough decisions.*
*where “tough decisions” means you know they are morally wrong and are going to do them anyway, but since you feel the decisions were tough, you’re a good person nonetheless.
@ Kathodus:
There were quite a few cultures that had little or no contact with Egypt but had henotheistic religions with a supreme creator god – pretty much all the Niger-Congo and Bantu-speaking peoples, for instance – and as these cultures became literate and their religions were codified, I suspect at least some of them would have evolved toward monotheism. There would be plenty of animist survivals in such a religion, but how different would that be from praying to saints?
@Kathodus: Yeah, not a bad comparison. Not that the stories are at all similar, really, but as a naratorrial device for undermining assumptions….
@RedWombat —
All a livestock germ reservoir does is wipe out the new world population ahead of 1492. Because the founding population was so small, the population of the Americas just plain lacked chunks of the immune system the rest of the species had. No copies of those genes. (Gene flow has mostly taken care of that by now, but not completely.)
I’d want to go back further and make sure the founding population is larger and has all those genes.
While we’re way back there, there has to be some way to keep from eating the megafauna off the North American continent and keeping the mammoth steppe biome. One of horses, camels, mastodons and mammoth ought to be domesticable but that doesn’t really help. Introducing domestic horses and pastoralism and shifting the protein calories to something other than mammoth wouldn’t really help, I don’t think; mammoth was obviously such cheap tasty calories. It gets into having to uplift the mammoth or comb them for wool to feed the industrial cloth mills of 15,000 BC and … we aren’t even in the vicinity of unpredictable anymore.
(Central American, Andean, and Amazonian cultures appear to have figured out the sustainable farming on their own, better than the present never mind 1600 Spain.)
I’m with Ursula: mass violence is part of our nature. It’s not all of it, by any means, but the fact is it didn’t take monotheism to start our ancestors on the sport of slaughtering each other and other species, nor to start the organized oppression of their neighbors, or a bunch of other bad things. The tendency of megafauna and fellow hominids to go extinct not long after our pre-monotheistic ancestors arrived in the vicinity means something. Any belief system at hand can be a weapon for those so inclined.
@Shao Ping: isn’t the climax of Ancillary Justice Breq refusing to make a choice like that and saying “there must be a different way”? (Just received my copy of Ancillary Mercy today, BTW.)
@Vasha: It could be! Which gives me another reason to read it. 🙂
I can’t get Nigel’s Irish Fiction story to load up. Just a blank page.
I do think there’s ONE secret cabal in the Hugo nominators, because otherwise I don’t see how the hell Heuvelt always gets nominated. IMO he’s a terrible writer and I’m plenty SJW. But none of my SJW friends like him either. He always ends up behind No Award right down there with Teddy, JCW, and pals on my ballot. So HE has a personal tiny little secret cabal, but I don’t think anyone else does (Puppies are obviously not a secret cabal — they’re a loud open one).
I’m halfway through “Old Venus” and have found all the stories worth reading. It’s fun having the “jungles/amphibious natives” Venus along with today’s culture of post-Soviet government, drones, etc. The faux-Jeeves and Wooster story was moderately amusing; more so when I realized what it was and read the thing in Fry and Laurie voices. I haven’t gotten to the stories Greg H. and Vasha mention, so I haven’t seen anything Hugo-worthy yet. However, I do want to pick up the previous volume “Old Mars”, b/c I wanna read about the deserts and canals and the dying race.
Wombat: I don’t know about Mithraism, since it prohibited women from even joining, unlike today’s monotheistic religions. The ladies may be unable to be clergy and have to sit in the bad, separate seats, but they’re in the house of worship, hearing The Word. There aren’t even any women in the Mithraic myths, unlike Miriam, Virgin Mary, and Aisha. The Mithra boys also liked really small chapels, so you don’t get cathedrals and Grand Mosques — although I suppose they could have eventually evolved into that. Would there have been a revelation about a Mrs. Mithra or a daughter of Mithra? Might have been interesting if the Roman Empire had gone all in for Isis and Osiris, though, with Ra as the Sol Invictus figure.
Regarding the American continents, I’d say teach them to domesticate the horse instead of eating them all. Doesn’t solve smallpox, though.
RedWombat said:
Well, they had at least one other draft animal– the Inuit were using dog sleds before the Europeans turned up, and further south, people used dog-pulled travois.
…why?
Graydon says:
Maybe by encouraging the development of dwarf mammoths sooner. (At least one isolated population with dwarfism may have survived to 4000 years ago.) Perhaps they might have been domesticatable?
So HE has a personal tiny little secret cabal,
A group that would normally be described as “fans”. I agree with your assessment of his writing – I’ve ranked him either last or behind No Award every year he’s been on the ballot, but for a single writer to have a fan base doesn’t seem unusual or even like a cabal.
Aaron: I was joking, of course. But honestly… I’ve never met IRL or virtually anyone who’s nominated him. Mediocre ideas presented badly with clunky prose. At least they’re short? And he only got the award this year because it was either him or Puppies — so not really earned fairly even then. My reaction is always “Why is this even on the !@#$% ballot?” And that reaction gets a No Award from me.
If time-travelers kidnapped Baby Hitler instead of murdering him, what would they do with him? Raise him as one of their own, of course.
So, in some timeline or other, I would have spent some of my younger self’s Saturday morning cartoon time watching MR. PEABODY AND HITLER. (Part of the TROTSKY AND BULLWINKLE show, perhaps?)
FWIW, I’m one of the people who wouldn’t have been born in those “kidnap baby Hitler/send Hitler to art school/etc. and prevent the Holocaust scenarios” and I’m entirely OK with the hypothetical time traveler doing those things. In that timeline, each of my parents would most likely have had other children, who would probably have been fine people.
Regarding Old Mars and Old Venus…I’ve had both in my wishlist for ages.
But I have to say I understand the reports that ebook sales have declined somewhat. The prices have been jacked up to a degree I find annoying.
I go into my wishlist looking for something to buy and read, (not this month, this month I’m writing, not reading) see the prices, and buy something else, often independents or backlist stuff.
It’s really annoying that the price of Old Mars, which came out more than 2 years ago, has not dropped to ‘paperback’ pricing yet.
I’ve been buying more books this year before the pricedrops because of Hugo possibilities, but I don’t like it.
Last month I was noticing that the only things left in my wishlist with prices under $10 were things that were not out yet.
Soil depletion! Many soils are in dreadful shape in the Americas–slash and burn clearing of the rainforest will get you fertlity very briefly, but rainforest soils are, frankly, rather poor. That’s what ended the Maya, most likely. There was some very cool stuff being done in Central America with crops grown on floating island-like platforms, but the ultimate fall of a number of civilizations seems to be traceable to outgrowing the food base. The Anasazi, farther north, appear to have cleared out in response to a relatively minor (as such things are measured) drought. (I’m not sure there’s a lot to be done about that, honestly–the desert’s just not a kind place.) And the soil here in the Southeast of North America is frankly crap because the glaciers never got here, so they’re thin, exhausted, and sadly lacking in minerals.
Now, the Incas appear to have effectively wiped out hunger in their empire. Those people knew their way around a potato. Seriously impressive stuff. Carry on, Incas.
Anyway, given access to herbivore dung on a larger scale than guinea pig/turkey/llama, and some solid information about crop rotation and methods of improving soil fertility that didn’t rely on slash-and-burn, I suspect the Mayan empire would have endured rather longer, and in any event, people wouldn’t still be dealing with soil depletion today. Better soil means you clear less land for agriculture because you’re not always exhausting it, so deforestation is slowed, which slows soil erosion and helps with habitat loss and all kinds of useful stuff. And good soil sequesters more carbon than crap soil! Which slows CO2! THE WORLD IS SAVED BY HIGH QUALITY DIRT! DIRT GETS A PARADE! YOUR CIVILIZATION CELEBRATES ‘WE LOVE THE DIRT’ DAY!
…ahem. Sorry. I get a little carried away.
The timeline’s worst would obviously get a Saturday morning cartoon show:
“Na na na, na na-na na, na na na, na na-na na…
Four banana, three banana, two banana, one
All bananas playin’ in the bright warm sun.
Flippin’ like a pancake, popping like a cork
Hitler, Stalin, Jesus and Ben Fucking Stillerrrrr
@Vasha. I reread “Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan,” by Ian McDonald, and I discovered I had completely missed the point of the story. Thank you so much for hassling me about it!
I’ve rewritten it and raised the rating to five stars. Once you understand the story properly, it’s arguably the best story in the book.
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/11/botanica-veneris-thirteen-papercuts-by.html
Lois was right about reading it twice, and I’m glad I did.
@Vasha
Thanks!
RedWombat said:
Like, say, how to make terra preta, which is believed to have supported stable cities in Amazonia? You don’t have to go nearly as far as you think to help the Maya out.
Well, if deforestation is your primary worry, how about importing an agricultural system where most of your domesticated plants are trees? Like what they did in northeastern North America in pre-colonial times?
(If anyone needs a break from fiction reading, find yourself a copy of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. All this and many other fascinating vignettes!)
@Greg: In your rereading you noticed some important things I hadn’t — thanks. Yeah, it’s that rich of a story.