Pixel Scroll 11/11 Let it scroll on, full flood, inexorable

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(1) On Veterans Day: “Ten Science-Fiction and Fantasy Authors Who Served in the US Armed Forces” from Suvudu.

9) Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Elizabeth Ann Scarborough was an Army nurse during the Vietnam war, an experience she has drawn upon in her fiction on occasion. She is the author of several series, including Acorna and Petaybee, but her modern fantasy novel The Healer’s War is perhaps the most autobiographical. Interviews with Scarborough aren’t easy to find online, but here’s one in which she mentions her nursing experience.

10) Gene Wolfe After serving in the Army during the Korean war, Gene Wolfe returned home and became an engineer. Writing was a hobby that he pursued in his off-hours, but his talent was apparent from the very beginning. He is the author of numerous books, but his The Books of the New Sun series revolutionized fantasy and is a classic of the Dying Earth genre. If you have a literary bucket list then this series belongs at the top. Wolfe spoke about the effect the war had on his fiction during an interview with MIT’s 12 Tomorrows: “It’s a real wake-up call. What military service does is rub off a lot of the pretense and self-deception from a person. You have to keep going, knowing that there are people over there who are trying to kill you. You’re right: they are.”

(2) N. K. Jemisin reacts to dropping the Lovecraft statuette from the World Fantasy Award in “Whew”.

That’s a sigh of relief. One less thing to feel conflicted about. One more thing I can celebrate freely, easily, and without reservation.

I’m talking about the World Fantasy Award, which will now no longer be represented by the head of H. P. Lovecraft. My feeling re the whole thing is a) ’bout time, and b) whew. Because while I have no idea if I’ll ever win a WFA myself — I’ve been nominated twice and that’s awesome — I have watched other anti-racist friends and fellow writers of color win the award. It’s impossible not to feel that visceral clench of empathy when they speak of the awkwardness of Lovecraft, of all people, as the representation of their honor. I’ve heard a number of winners talk about the ways they plan to hide or disguise or otherwise disrespect their own award so that they can reach a place of comfort with it. I’ve contemplated what I would do if I won, myself. (Was planning to put it on full display atop my cat’s litterbox.) I never show off my nomination pins, because I don’t feel like explaining when people ask, “Who’s that supposed to be?”

(3) Rocket Books is running a series of sf author trading cards. Here are the four most recent sf all-stars.

(4) Entertainment Weekly had Harrison Ford recreate his classic pose as one of four new covers for their upcoming Star Wars special issue.

Ford cover poses

(5) Worldcon organizer Ben Yalow is quoted in the New York Times story “F.C.C. Sides With Hot Spots, and Hospitality Industry Feels a Chill”:

…Since many convention centers outsource functions like their network management, it can be harder for planners to haggle down the price of Internet access, but the arrangement spares the center from having to finance technological upgrades and might provide it with a commission as well….

 “Basically, you’re looking at six figures or more to wire up the place, and every couple of years you’ll probably want to do another low six-figure upgrade,” said Ben Yalow, a recently retired information technology professional with experience setting up and configuring networks in hotels and convention centers….

Hospitality industry experts predicted that the F.C.C.’s recent actions would force event facilities to become more competitive in their pricing, so as not to lose out entirely on the Internet revenue stream….

 “I think the long-term solution is going to be that convention centers and hotels drop their prices down to someplace reasonable,” Mr. Yalow said. “They’re not going to make money off this the way they used to.”

(6) “A member of Britain’s Parliament feuds with store over ‘Star Wars’ shoes”.

A member of Britain’s Parliament has been nicknamed “Shoebacca” after using House of Commons letterhead to complain about missing out on Star Wars shoes.

Angela Rayner, 35, a Labor party member who represents Ashton-under-Lyne, used notepaper with House of Commons letterhead to write a letter of complaint to the Irregular Choice shop after the store sold out of Dan Sullivan-designed Star Wars shoes that featured R2-D2 figures as the high heels.

 

(7) David Gerrold responded to the latest news about accessibility and harassment policies on Facebook. This excerpt is what he said about accessibility.

For the past two or three years, when I have been invited to conventions, I have requested that panels be made up of qualified individuals of all genders. While sometimes it happens that a panel ends up as all-male or all-female (as a function of subject matter), con programmers should make every effort to be inclusive.

In the future, I will be expanding that request to include ramps and other appropriate accessibility requirements for disabled participants. Larger conventions should consider having a sign-language interpreter for deaf attendees.

I have to make it a request, not a requirement — because some conventions might not have the resources. A convention survives on its attendance. Small cons can’t always afford these things. The rule of thumb is to spend the money where it will serve the most people….

A convention is supposed to be a gathering of the community, a place where we share our love of the genre and go home inspired. We don’t want our friends in fandom going home unhappy. The unwritten rule in fandom has always been that everybody is welcome, everybody is included — but it’s not enough to have that as an ideal, we have to demonstrate it by accessibility and inclusion.

(8) On Veterans Day, Cedar Sanderson recommended reading Tom Kratman’s columns for EveryJoe.com based on Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.

Here are the links to Kratman’s “Service Guarantees Citizenship (Part I)” and “Service Guarantees Citizenship (Part II)”.

We’ve been discussing the system put forth in naval officer and science fiction author Robert Heinlein’s book, Starship Troopers. For some background see last week’s column. For more background, read the book and spurn the wretched movie.

*****

So why are we – those of us who are in favor – even concerned with radically changing the system that has, and for the most part well enough, seen us through over two centuries? It’s simple: We think that system’s time has run, that we are not the people we were and that our ruling class is no longer worthy. Indeed, it’s not even trustworthy, let alone generally worthy. We observe that our political and economic fate has fallen into the hands of the denationalized rich, who frankly don’t care a fig for us. We see that where once we were an “ask what you can do for your country” people, we are increasingly indistinguishable from the worst third-world kleptocratic and nepotistic hellholes. We see the PC fascisti replacing us with unassimilable foreigners, often enough from cultures that are not just incompatible, but which actively hate us. We see that we are fracturing in ways that are arguably worse than anything we’ve ever seen before, worse even than before and during the Civil War. Yankees and Rebs used to, at least, mostly speak the same language. Our language today, as spoken by left and right from north and south, may sound the same but the words and concepts have changed meanings.

In short, we think that we either, in Brecht’s words, elect a new people, as our denationalized and corrupt rulers seem to be trying to do via immigration, or we fall hard – so hard we’ll never stand again.

(9) Adam-Troy Castro quizzed his Facebook readers:

Unanswered question, from a thread: what if the World Military Fiction Award were a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest? Would you consider a black novelist childish for questioning the appropriateness of that choice, or the award committee too PC for considering that maybe he had a point?

(10) Today In History

(11) Today’s Birthday Boy

  • Born November 11, 1922 — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut

(12) David Kilman at Amazing Stories devotes the November installment of Scide Splitters to “1941 Retro Hugo Eligible Novellas”.

Two of the three novellas I will be exploring today are ones that I read at an early age, albeit in modified form as they were incorporated into The Incomplete Enchanter. My reviews here, however, are of the stories as they appeared in their original form published in Unknown Fantasy Fiction. Even though all three were advertised as novels when first published, I have confirmed that all three are of novella length (17,500 to 40,000 words).

(13) Litigation Comics  from The Line it is Drawn #265 – “One Moment Later” on Famous Comic Book Covers at Comic Book Resources.

Litigation Comics

(14) Nerds of a Feather hosted a roundtable discussion on Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni Rising between Joe Sherry, Rob Bedford, Paul Weimer, Jonah Sutton-Morse and Fred Kiesche. Here’s a sample:

Joe Sherry: Two things stand out for me. One: How quickly Kurtz gets into the action of the story and how tight the timeline is here. Everything that happens is so immediate,  but it feels appropriate with the political risk of Kelson being able to hold on to a crown he is barely prepared to accept because he is only about to hit his legal majority all the while he is about to face a challenge from an external threat with an internal agent. I’m not sure that stuff really gets old when it’s written so smoothly. Two: This may be colored by how I feel about some of the later novels, but what I like is the minutiae, the details of how things work behind the scenes – the Council sessions, the rituals of the church, the tidbits on Deryni history.

(15) Larry Correia, in “The 2015 Still Not a Real Writer Book Tour Recap” at Monster Hunter Nation, shows how to make the jump from Sad Puppy to Bestselling Underdog.

One stop was at Powell’s in Beaverton. It is a great store, and I had a great time with a good crowd. But I saw later on Twitter somebody had apparently seen me there, and taken to Twitter to talk about my pathetic showing, and how nobody was there at the lamest book signing ever, and hashtag something about how I was the saddest puppy of all.

That struck me as odd, since we had over forty people show up, which by most author’s reckonings is great, and we filled the signing area to the side. But then I realized what he’d probably seen (mistakenly thinking that a Puppy Kicker was honest and not just lying about me on Twitter, silly me). I’d gotten there almost an hour early, and had killed time just hanging out in the audience with the seven or eight people who’d shown up really early too. I figured that was what he’d seen, because by seven o’clock we had filled the chairs, and more people kept coming in the whole time.  So being my usual diplomatic self, I responded and told him that the “big hand goes on the seven, doofus”. Luckily, some of the fans had taken pictures of the crowd too, and since you guys are so super helpful, you posted the photographic evidence to the dude.

Now, a smart person would say, whoops, my bad. But not a Puppy Kicker. They have that whole narrative about how anybody who disagrees with TRUFAN is irreparably damaging their career, so of course he doubled down. Oh no. He was there at 7:05! And he saw my 40! And that was still horrible garbage failure of suck, because that bookstore ROUTINELY gets 500(!) people at a book signing…

This of course came as a surprise to the people who work there, and my more famous author friends who sell ten times as many books as I do, who only got around 200 there. Basically, you can count the number of mega superstar authors who routinely get five hundred people at a book signing on your hands, and have fingers left over. Puppy kickers are harsh, man. I think the average book signing in America is like five to seven people.

But I don’t make the rules. Five hundred it is! Anything less is shameful garbage.

(16) Max Florschutz tells his own strategy for “Dealing with Detractors” at Unusual Things.

You ignore them.

For the most part. But seriously, this is usually the best solution. Because if you try to do battle with them, be they trolls or individuals/groups in power, you’re basically throwing gas on a flame. It’ll ignite, and sometimes that can catch you on fire as well. If nothing else, a detractor will try their hardest to make sure that if they’re going down, they’re going to take you with them, any way you can.

Now, some detractors can take things to the point where you need to confront them in some way or another. But you know what?

Let them ruin themselves.

You see, the thing about these detractors is that they’re toxic individuals to one degree or another. And one way or another, unless they change, they’ll end up poisoning whatever atmosphere they’re involved in. Eventually, people catch on. It might take years, but eventually, one way or another, time has a way of catching up with those who’ve made their hobby tearing down everyone else and eating away at their own pyramid. And as long as you haven’t let them catch you in their claws, they probably won’t take you with them when they fall. Ignore them, work with those critics and individuals who are concerned with making your work the best it can be, and detractors will remove themselves from the creative pool; exercising a form of social Darwinism.

(17) Mike McMahan has written an ST:TNG parody, Warped: An Engaging Guide to the Never-Aired 8th Season.

The official parody guide to the unaired eighth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, based on the popular @TNG_S8 Twitter account from creator Mike McMahan!In the basement of the Star Trek archives, behind shelves of U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D models, bags of wigs, and bins of plastic phasers, sits a dusty cardboard box. Inside is a pile of VHS tapes that contain never-before-seen episodes and behind-the-scenes footage for something truly amazing. The world thinks there are only seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but there’s one more. A secret season.

 

(18) Marvel’s Jessica Jones – Official Trailer #2, coming on Netflix. Suvudu gives a detailed rundown.

[Thanks to Ryan H., JJ, Daniel Dern, The G., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]

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299 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/11 Let it scroll on, full flood, inexorable”

  1. Every story he ever told me of his RAF days made me very glad he’d been called up in 1946, because I’m pretty sure if he’d been let loose on airplanes even one year earlier, we’d all be speaking German today.

    ….possibly including call-up dates after the 8th of May 1945?

  2. @ Steve Wright:

    Courage, teamwork, self-discipline, self-sacrifice… all of these are good things, none of them will do you much good if you are trying to fit completely the wrong engine into the front of a Spitfire.

    Certainly. You’ll note that I didn’t include intelligence and efficiency among the military virtues – which is yet another reason why they are not the whole of civic virtue, and why they would make a terrible qualification for the franchise.

  3. @Jonathon Edelstein

    Curiously though, would boot camp’s extraction of you from your bubble be exactly the kind of thing The Colonel appears to be most worried about? Who knows what incompatible cultures some of these foreigner descended types laid claim to. As a side note, one does wonder whether one gets a broader miix in boot camp as opposed to whatever kind of Officer Candidate School The Colonel went through.

  4. Just a heads-up, one of the Goodread 2015 horror nominees, Suicide Forest by Jeremy Bates, is showing as a free Kindle download on Amazon now.

  7. @Jonathan Edelstein

    From the vantage point of twenty-odd years later, one of the critical things military service did for me was that it took me way out of my comfort zone and exposed me to people, cultures and values that I might otherwise not have encountered. Boot camp breaks bubbles. It was also very much out of character, given my life up to then, and it’s necessary to do things out of character sometimes in order to find out what one’s character actually is.

    As a Swiss veteran, I agree with that. It’s not that I have any love for the military, and particularly its command structure, but as a forced melting pot for most male citizens at the time, it had its merits, and with a civilian service alternative now available, it might be a concept worth expanding (in fact, an ever-shrinking part of the population is doing national service, to the point where service is de facto near-voluntary).

  8. I have to wonder if Correia’s account of events with respect to the anonymous tweeter is accurate. We only have his word to go on that the individual was a ‘Puppy kicker” or a “truefan”, or any of the other things he attributed to the person. While thinking less of Correia because of his role in founding the Puppies is fairly common, there are people who have an axe to grind with him for numerous other reasons, the primary one being that his online persona is being a complete ass to pretty much everyone he encounters.

    As with many Puppies, Correia provided no links and no quotes, just vague attributions. Searching through Twitter using the various alleged snipes that were supposedly directed at his book signing turns up nothing. I can’t find anything connected with Correia’s name using the words “lamest”, “pathetic”, “saddest puppy”, or any of a number of permutations on those terms. It is possible that Correia’s unnamed foil is someone I have blocked on Twitter, so their tweets wouldn’t come up in a search, but it leaves one with only Correia’s account of the exchange to go on, and I’m not sure I’d regard him as a reliable witness.

  9. @Peace

    Cripes, The Incompleat Enchanter dates from 1940?

    Yup, it was one of the most frequently mentioned things when people were brainstorming here. 🙂

  10. As long as there is a problem with rape in the military–scumbags raping their sisters in arms, and higher ups covering it up by pressuring the victims–I won’t be real receptive to the argument that the military inculcates virtue. I don’t doubt that it’s a stressful situation that causes some of the people in it to grow and mature, but that’s a bit different.

    @ Chris S.

    Not sure why LC has such a bad case of imposter syndrome – he is a bestselling author, and should be proud of that, but seems to need validation from pretty much everyone he meets.

    Agreed, on all counts. He’s not the only author who has been told he’s not a real writer–someone told Lois McMaster Bujold that once. The difference between them is that Lois shrugged, decided some people felt very strongly about genre versus mainstream fiction, and got on with her life. Whereas Larry clutched it close until it gnawed its way in and lodged in his heart, where he has carried it ever since, blaming the whole world for it.

    If Larry had said “I gave a reading at WorldCon in the same time slot as Lois McMaster Bujold and an entire roomful of people came to hear me” as many times as he has said “not a real writer” I think he’d be a happier man.

    I also think that if he succeeded at getting a Hugo he would discover it was no cure for insecurity.

  11. I remember reading Starship Troopers in high school, enjoying it a great deal and seeing all the inherent problems. Even within Heinlein’s system, there is plenty of room for corruption, oligarchy and political dynasties. Given that a certain number of members of every military have to be REMFs, once someone became, say, a general, he could make sure that his sons and daughters (I remember how all the pilots were women because of their increased reflexes) were posted to non-combat positions. One can climb the rans as a staff officer without seeing any action. In fact, it’d be criminal mismanagement to send cryptographers and intelligence analysts into combat, rather than have them actually work to save lives. Depending how deep the corruption ran, you could then have these analysts, no matter how bad they are, elevated through the ranks, joining their parents at the rank of general. If managed right, the general and his family could end up controlling the entire political system behind the scenes, making sure that anyone who seemed politically problematic found themselves serving as bullet catchers for the less problematic. Call it the Uriah option. Without an independent, civilian, oversight of the military, there is nothing that prevents several families from essentially setting up a fiefdom in the military, avoiding combat but having the power and dictating where people find themselves when out of the service. The only thing that could topple the system would be the inevitable decline that happens with all aristocracies or a complete military defeat.

    I find Verhoven’s version much more believable than Heinlein’s, if not quite as well told. Heinlein is actually fantastic for creating systems that seem logical and fantastic at first, but on deeper reflection are actually incredibly problematic. (Ian McDonald’s vision of the moon under extreme libertarianism is, so far (I’m only about halfway through the book), fantastic and depressing.)

    Also, as much as I have friends who are veterans, plenty of people who are assholes both enter and leave the military on a regular basis. One only needs to look at the military’s history of addressing sexual assault to see that. I also know veterans who are complete assholes. Not many, and I tend to think that it does improve the people who go in, but there are still people who come out who I wish nothing to do with. I will add that, with the exception of one person, everyone I knew did things like repair tanks or maintain computer systems. I do have a friend who was in the Navy and participated in boarding actions against suspected pirates. He doesn’t talk about his service at all beyond stating that, except to say that he is glad to be out.

  12. I have to wonder if Correia’s account of events with respect to the anonymous tweeter is accurate.

    this was my immediate and first thought … gotta have a windmill to tilt at after all …

  13. Have any of you read any of Correia’s books?

    They’re exemplars of bad insecurity management about manliness. I have no idea why the insecurity is there in the first place (nor do I think it productive to speculate) but there really isn’t anything there except the desire to imagine one’s self as able to win a fistfight with a werewolf.

    Now, writers are not a group notorious for good mental health and insecurity management through writing is much more common than not, but it still matters how conscious you are about it. One of the important first steps is to stop telling yourself that the thing you’re afraid of is certainly true.

    Should you fail to do that, it’s quite possible that your construction of the meaning of events is going to be significantly at odds with the social consensus.

  14. James Moar on November 12, 2015 at 8:00 am said:

    ….possibly including call-up dates after the 8th of May 1945?

    Candidly, I think they were taking a big chance, even in 1946.

  15. Aaron and Clif – I was able to identify the tweeter from Correia’s own tweets in response; however the tweet at which he took offence appears to have been deleted.

  16. Have any of you read any of Correia’s books?

    Yes. I read the entire tedious Grimnoir Trilogy. And reviewed them too. My reviews of the series start here with Hard Magic

  17. @Aaron — So you know why the appropriate thing to quote at Correia might well be Chesterton: army of eastland yokels, not strong enough to fail.

  18. @ Nicholas–

    Ah, that would explain why I couldn’t find any tweets about Correia being “pathetic”, or the “saddest puppy” even after having gone to Correia’s website to be armed with the proper date. Thanks for letting us know,

    @ Graydon

    I’ve read the three in the Warbound series, and a chunk of the first Monster Hunter book. The man can write okay; it’s just not the flavor of potboiler that I care for. The problem comes when he can’t accept that he writes like McDonalds makes food, which means he can sell a bunch of his product without winning awards for it. You would think that the money would be a consolation, but apparently not.

  19. I was able to identify the tweeter from Correia’s own tweets in response; however the tweet at which he took offence appears to have been deleted.

    I’ve had Correia blocked for over a year on Twitter. He’s just too tiresome to deal with.

  20. Remembering Heinlein from a voracious reading of him in my youth, I’d say he was obsessed with heroics (not a bad thing for a genre writer of that time) but ignored the national value of a normal life. Ordinary people were often ignorant of the truth (Have Spacesuit Will Travel, The Puppet Masters), or manipulated by governments, religions, or business interests (Podkayne of Mars, Stranger in a Strange Land), or just plain wrong (choose any straw man character from any book). The only story I can think of where ‘normal’ people were given any kind of agency was The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I don’t think he wanted citizens as much as he wanted a nation of heroes.
    I may sound harsh, but I enjoyed these books at the time. Then Le Guin rescued me.

  21. @Laura:
    (I have an endless supply of these stories. All true.)

    Why do people still set up signings, for anyone short of, I don’t know, a Rowling or a Gaiman? It seems like they can’t possibly return on investment. N hours of the writer’s time, even at minimum wage… it scarcely seems like the publisher is going to see that sum, let alone the writer, and then there’s transportation and so on. The math can’t possibly work.

  23. An interesting point of history. In 1945 before ‘Victory in Japan’ the UK had a general election. For most of the war it had been governed by a coalition of the major parties, led, of course, by Prime-minister Winston Churchill. The country had been on a war footing for several years and while most people weren’t soldiers per-se most people had been involved in the war effort to some extent and whole cities, including the most populous city had been subject to night bombing. It was about as militarized as a Western industrial democracy could be and the PM was seen (and is still portrayed) as military hero.

    Naturally Churchill didn’t win that election. Instead the Labour Party won, the bookish looking Clement Atlee became PM and a set of sweeping social reforms including the National Health Service were established – and overseas independence for former colonies was enacted effectively ending the British Empire.

  24. So being my usual diplomatic self, I responded and told him that the “big hand goes on the seven, doofus”.

    Have I been reading analog clocks wrong all this time?

  25. Cat says:

    As long as there is a problem with rape in the military–scumbags raping their sisters in arms

    And brothers, who are even less likely to report it or have the report followed up on…

  26. I’m actually quite impressed with ‘Starship Troopers’, frequently because of the flaws people point out in the society it depicts. I don’t know if they’re the author’s flaws or if he intended to depict a flawed society, but I have seen few books that have sparked so many interesting and stimulating discussions on the role of the individual and the state in society. Far from being a flawed book, it’s a great polemic that may or may not fulfill the goal the author had of convincing people of his beliefs.

    That said, my biggest problem with the society in ‘Starship Troopers’ is that it conflates moral courage with physical courage. In Heinlein’s government, only those who have the courage to risk death for the state are allowed to have a voice in its direction. But those same people have spent two years being indoctrinated into the state’s beliefs and values, and may not have the moral courage to defy it, which is what’s genuinely required to keep a society healthy and responsive to the needs of its citizens. Voters need to be protestors, and not soldiers–and while I don’t want to suggest that the two cannot be one and the same, they are not synonymous.

  28. Graydon on November 12, 2015 at 8:57 am said:

    Have any of you read any of Correia’s books?

    I read Monster Hunter Nation the other day and I was a bit mean to it considering it was his first book. However, I have to agree he does write action sequences very well and he keeps his story moving at a good clip. The descriptions of the neat new gun his character has got though read like some gamer boasting about the new weapon they had acquired for their character – then made more ridiculous because for plot reasons the fancy guns tend not to be very effective against the monsters they fight. Again video game logic – bigger gun therefore harder to kill monster.

  29. John Seavey says:

    I’m actually quite impressed with ‘Starship Troopers’, frequently because of the flaws people point out in the society it depicts. I don’t know if they’re the author’s flaws or if he intended to depict a flawed society, but I have seen few books that have sparked so many interesting and stimulating discussions on the role of the individual and the state in society.

    Good point. That’s pretty much why I decided I needed to read it a few years ago.

  31. Petréa Mitchell on November 12, 2015 at 9:53 am said:

    So being my usual diplomatic self, I responded and told him that the “big hand goes on the seven, doofus”.

    Have I been reading analog clocks wrong all this time?

    The chairs had filled by 06:35.

  32. David Brain

    In fact we do still have the largest wholesale meat market in this country, and one of the largest in Europe; it’s just that nowadays the animals are dead before they get here.

    The Corporation of London has rights and privileges unique to itself; the voting for local government bears no resemblance to anything in existence elsewhere. We still have Wardmotes, and within the boundaries of the City the Lord Mayor of London outranks everyone but the Sovereign herself, unless it happens to be the State Funeral of Margaret Thatcher, in which case the Lord Mayor carried the Sword of Mourning* ahead of everybody else into St Paul’s.

    The Lord Mayor’s banquets require the Prime Minister and the Chancellor to make important speeches within the City itself, mindful of the fact that in its long history the City has chosen to withdraw financial support and to topple regimes; keeping the City happy is thus built into the process.

    Of course, the City is not the only place with special rights and privileges; for example, Stratford Upon Avon has the MOPs fair which allows traders and people with fairground rides to set up in the whole of the town, grinding it to a halt in the process. This can be a bit of a blow for a shop manager unfamiliar with the town; any complaints are met with ‘take it up with Charles II, mate’.

    *And I know; if the Sword of Mourning turned up in a fantasy work we’d probably groan but it really does exist.

  33. no one without a law degree should vote – society would work much better if everyone were required to understand the law before they had a hand in making it, no?

    Anymore I’m leaning towards anyone with a law degree not being allowed to run for office.

  34. I think Neil Gaiman has a story from The Good Omens tour where he and Terry Pratchett had a signing where almost no one came. To make matters worse, it was in a big city like New York. Given the size of the crowds either one of them could later draw anywhere it boggles the mind.

    So go to book signings. Maybe no one will show up and you can make friends with the author(s). Maybe they’ll put you on their Christmas card list.

  35. I read Monster Hunter Nation the other day and I was a bit mean to it considering it was his first book.

    I don’t know … sounded spot on to me ..

  36. Amoxtli on November 12, 2015 at 9:50 am said:

    @Laura:
    (I have an endless supply of these stories. All true.)

    Why do people still set up signings, for anyone short of, I don’t know, a Rowling or a Gaiman? It seems like they can’t possibly return on investment. N hours of the writer’s time, even at minimum wage… it scarcely seems like the publisher is going to see that sum, let alone the writer, and then there’s transportation and so on. The math can’t possibly work.

    The cynic in me says, if the people who insist these signings are necessary could actually do maths, they wouldn’t be in publicity.

    (Speaking of maths: 16/20. Damn you Bisson.)

  37. I read ST in 1961, and while I enjoyed it (as I had all the Heinlein I’d been reading for the previous six years), I wasn’t convinced by the imaginary political system or the polemical History and Moral Philosopy sections that argued for it. I continued to read Heinlein up to and after his death, and after an attentive reading of the Patterson bio, I’m willing to see the Old Man as a more complex personality and writer than those of the “Heinlein was a fascist” or “Heinlein was a militarist”* schools. Certainly not close to my politics, but not unworthy of engaging, despite the now-obvious personal quirks.

    * My father served in the Navy about a half-generation behind RAH–1939-46–and he retained a strong respect and affection for the institution for the rest of his life. So I can understand the hold that the service, and the idea of service, had on Heinlein’s imagination. In 1970, I applied for conscientious objector status, and despite his own sentiments about military life and the current war, my father supported me. People can be complicated.

  38. A standard good-sized crowd at Powell’s is anywhere from 40 to 60 people. I’ve never seen any not named “Neil Gaiman” draw 500 there in all the years that I’ve been going to Powell’s.

    Neil, on the other hand…the last time he was in Portland for a signing tour was for Anansi Boys. Powell’s rented a downtown church, and packed in more than a thousand people (I was in the balcony), and they handed out lottery tickets to determine the order that people came up to get books signed. (My luck was poor that night–my number was one of the very last called that night. I’d read half the book, purchased when I came in the door, before I had a chance to talk to him.)

  39. My favorite book signing story.

    I was working at Amazon when George R.R. Martin’s “Dance With Dragons” came out. He came to Amazon to talk and do a signing. I’d been too busy to even buy the book yet, but I have a first-edition of the first book, so I thought I’d bring that. I didn’t have a lot of time for it, but I figured the event wouldn’t be too crowded since it was employees only.

    I got there a little early, put my name in the drawing for a free copy of the new book, and took a seat. There were 500 chairs in the room. They filled up, and there were at least three ranks of people standing, with more coming in while he talked. The table for the signing turned out to be in the back of the room, so the couple of hundred people standing were instantly first in line. Fair, I guess, but it meant I had no hope of getting a book signed before my next meeting.

    And then I won the drawing.

  40. Stevie:

    *And I know; if the Sword of Mourning turned up in a fantasy work we’d probably groan but it really does exist.

    Used to discourage hecklers?

  41. Harold Osler:

    Anymore I’m leaning towards anyone with a law degree not being allowed to run for office.

    Don’t worry, I have no plans in that regard.

  42. Consolidated list for Fantasy Movie bracket can be viewed here. Bonus bracket still open for nomination.

    Please go there to see if your favourites were added to the list and if not, be sure to proclaim their superiority anyhow.

  43. Regardless of the intrinsic worth of the service performed, I have a fundamental problem with the “Service qualifies you for Citizenship” idea: It says that only those who serve the State are worthy of privilege. It’s basically fascism.

    The way I read the book, RAH was trying to set up a hierarchy of loyalties. ISTM that one theme that runs through all his literature is that every human being acts in a way that benefits his own self-interest. In ST, Heinlein is trying to demonstrate that any person will act to save themselves, someone else may act to save family members, but that the highest moral standing is someone who will put his own body between war and his society. (Not ‘state’, that word has become loaded.)

    He spells this out pretty clearly in the infodumps of the History and Moral Philosophy course Johnny takes as an officer-in-training.

    “Fight because I’m MI? Brother, you’re drooling like Dr. Pavlov’s dogs. cut it out and start thinking.” doesn’t sound like something that would come out of a statist fascist’s mouth.

    Further on in that chapter, the instructor says specifically that (except in wartime) most veterans were not in any way subject to the full rigors of military discipline or exposure to life-threatening action, yet their votes counted just the same. (Remember, you could not vote UNTIL YOU RETURNED from your service.)

    Quoting again: “I’ll state the obvious: under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.”

    I am not suggesting that the society Heinlein shows us in ST is an obtainable one. However, as I watch the idiocy of our current (USA) presidential primaries, where the GOP candidates seem to be fighting to see who can most loudly proclaim allegiance to the nonsense that is Ayn Randian selfishness, and simultaneously compete (with a few exceptions) for the role of generalissimo who will lead us to military victory over the Caliphate while pushing even more wealth up to the top 1/10th of 1%, I can’t help but sigh and wish for just a LITTLE commitment to “We the People” and “The general Welfare”.

  44. Anymore I’m leaning towards anyone with a law degree not being allowed to run for office.

    I would prefer if our elected officials had at least a firm understanding of basic civics and the nature of the laws they are dealing with. All too often I have seen Congress pass laws without any understanding of what effect those laws will have – because they didn’t bother to educate themselves on the ways that Federal law is interpreted and applied.

  45. Here in the UK, we have plenty of lawyers in parliament, trying to run things. Doesn’t make anything work any better. Their knowledge of legal matters ends up subservient to their pursuit of power. IIRC, under Blair we had the farcical occurence of his wife, a lawyer, undertaking court action on behalf of a client, against government policy, which was dreamt up and supported by a bunch of lawyers in Blairs government.

    Plus the small number of lawerly people I’ve met have not struck me as actually concerned with justice, even although they appear to be upright citizens. Instead, the law as a game seems more to the point. Obviously if you treat everything else like that it can go a bit pear shaped.

  46. Re: (8)

    So has Irene Gallo gotten a big old public apology from a lot of people who were pearl-clutching and dismayed about how rude and inaccurate she was last spring?

    Because after a certain point, there’s enough evidence on the table. The Colonel here is waxing lyrical about the vile others, others with cultures that make them enemies, in service of shadow-y cabal of plutocrats (who are tying to corrupt the blood of the nation by encouraging this immigrations). At what point, if something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has feathers like a duck, do we all it a duck instead of fretting about The Colonel’s intent and wondering whether he’s saying all these fascistic things in the name of fascism or not?

    And Cedar Sanderson of course was linking to it as something so deep and insightful. And of course the last week of Vox has had plenty about good Europeans fighting against the vast brown tide. I’m sure Beale, and Correa when he gets over his feels, and Torgerson when he gets around to it, will be saying just how freaking brilliant The Colonel’s rant was as well. And really, the part excerpted above captures it: it’s about blood and soil, the shadowy cabal conspiring to disrupt the blood of the volk with its machinations. The Colonel is quacking, waddling, and has the feathers here.

    One of the things I truly respect about Jamison’s politics is that she was willing to call a horse and horse, and say how Teddy’s whole schtick is just treading a legal line that avoids the legal consequences of his white supremacism. None of the crap about how he’s really a performance artist, none of the schtick of “oh, Beale is just playing a character,” just the straight truth, that many of us find too ugly to say.

    But anyone, here we have some of the people, probably soon a bunch of the people who, in spite of their bigness and toughness were just hurt in the feels by Gallo describing them in a way that turned out to be accurate.

    They want to wax lyrical about blood and soil; anyone who got all shocked at Ms. Gallo can apologize to her about how upset they were at her for calling a horse a horse.

  47. They want to wax lyrical about blood and soil; anyone who got all shocked at Ms. Gallo can apologize to her about how upset they were at her for calling a horse a horse.

    Or, the way I like to phrase it: Call a spade an effin’ shovel. Irene knew a spade when she saw one.

  48. Laura, when you wrote, “The math can’t possibly work.”, something jogged in my mind. I finally nailed it down – it’s comments from folks I’ve known who run (or fan) comics shops, or roleplaying game stores. There are things that they need to carry that won’t sell, but which people who may well become regular, valued customers apparently expect to see. Stocking them is a kind of performative ritual: “You see, we carry the right spread of things, you can trust us to do right by you.” It’s a weird thing, but fairly quantifiable in various cases – don’t carry this stuff that people look at but don’t buy, and sales of the stuff they do buy slump.

    It wouldn’t surprise me to find that a lot of author tours are the same kind of performative act, and that canceling them would end up doing more financial harm than it’d save, overall.

  49. As an engineer, I frequently think, when I hear the nonsense that comes out of politicians’ mouths, that demonstrating a basic understanding of science and engineering principles should be required to get the franchise…

    …but then I come across a group of scientists or engineers discussing politics, and I quickly take it all back! 😀

  50. BTW, in case it wasn’t apparent, what I said about a law degree as a qualification to vote was sarcasm.

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