(1) GALLO WINS ART DIRECTOR AWARD. The Society of Illustrators has named Irene Gallo the recipient of the 2016 Richard Gangel Art Director Award. The linked site includes a wide range of examples.
Society of Illustrators
The Richard Gangel Art Director award was established in 2005 to honor art directors currently working in the field who have supported and advanced the art of illustration…
Irene Gallo is the Associate Publisher at Tor.com and the Creative Director at Tor Books. She has art directed countless illustrators and her work has received numerous awards, including this year’s Gold Medal winning image by Sam Weber for The Language of Knives.
Gallo’s shared her reaction in a four-part tweet.
I’ve been biting my tongue on this all weekend. I began to worry I dreamt it! (1/4) https://t.co/18DyxilYpG
— Irene Gallo (@IreneGallo) January 11, 2016
(2) WIBBLY-WOBBLY MUSIC. Open Culture tells “The Fascinating Story of How Delia Derbyshire Created the Original Doctor Who Theme”.
What we learn from them is fascinating, considering that compositions like this are now created in powerful computer systems with dozens of separate tracks and digital effects. The Doctor Who theme, on the other hand, recorded in 1963, was made even before basic analog synthesizers came into use. “There are no musicians,” says Mills, “there are no synthesizers, and in those days, we didn’t even have a 2-track or a stereo machine, it was always mono.” (Despite popular misconceptions, the theme does not feature a Theremin.) Derbyshire confirms; each and every part of the song “was constructed on quarter-inch mono tape,” she says, “inch by inch by inch,” using such recording techniques as “filtered white noise” and something called a “wobbulator.” How were all of these painstakingly constructed individual parts combined without multi track technology? “We created three separate tapes,” Derbyshire explains, “put them onto three machines and stood next to them and said “Ready, steady, go!” and pushed all the ‘start’ buttons at once. It seemed to work.”
(3) SPACESHIP SALESMAN. Interviewer Lauren Samer learned “John Scalzi Thinks Nerd Gatekeeping Is Complete Nonsense”, posted at Inverse.
[John Scalzi] Science fiction and fantasy is becoming more diverse in who writes it and what is represented — and I, for the life of me, cannot see what the problem is. I mean, come on. I write meat-and-potatoes classic science fiction. I’ve got spaceships, I’ve got lasers, I’ve got aliens. To suggest that there’s not a market for that type of science fiction is absolutely ridiculous. I’m doing great!
It just also happens that there’s lots of other cool stuff out there that is not like the sort of stuff that I write, and I think that’s great. Not everybody is going to be interested in the stuff I write — and not everybody should be. There should be science fiction and fantasy of all genres. It should be as inclusive as possible about the possibilities of the future and the possibility of alternate worlds and alternate setups. Otherwise, it’s fundamentally missing the point of what science fiction and fantasy can achieve.
(4) PACIFIC RIM 2 IS FEELING BETTER. No sooner did I relay the news that there would be no Pacific Rim sequel than its director, Guillermo del Toro, took to Twitter with this reassurance —
Pac Rim 2 cancelled? Don't believe everything you read. It's still going and I'll remain w it in one way or another!
— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) January 11, 2016
(5) PAY IT FORWARD. Kevin Standlee asks for help finding European references to the Hugo.
The WSFS Mark Protection Committee is assembling citations of usage of The Hugo Award in Europe (including the UK) in support of our application for registering it as a service mark in the EU. Things that could be useful include mentions of a being a Hugo Award winner (or nominee) on the cover of a work published within the EU and references to the Hugo Awards in EU-based publications, including fanzines. Mentions in non-EU publications aren’t as useful, because we’re working on backing the claim that The Hugo Award has been used in Europe for a long time. British references are just fine; the UK is part of the EU.
If you have material you think might be useful for this, write to Linda Deneroff ([email protected]), Secretary of the WSFS MPC. She’ll let you know how to get the material to her for our compilation.
(6) CLASSIC SF RERUNS. In the middle of 2015 the Comet TV network came into existence. It specializes in showing old sf TV episodes, and selected movies. Among its offerings is my childhood favorite – Men Into Space, which was on the air for one season in 1959.
According to Wikipedia, Comet has affiliation agreements with television stations in 78 media markets encompassing 33 states and the District of Columbia. The nearest station to me airing this content is KDOC in Orange County.
(7) BOWIE TRIBUTE 1. Molly Lewis and Marian Call (both singers of nerdy songs and frequent performers at Wil Wheaton, Adam Savage and Paul and Storm’s W00tstock variety show) cover “Space Oddity,” but only using the thousand most common words in the style of Randall Munroe’s Up Goer 5 and Thing Explainer:
(8) BOWIE TRIBUTE 2. Laurel and Hardy dance to “Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie.
(9) CLOTHING THE IMAGINATION. Ferrett Steinmetz does not miss George Lucas’ input to the franchise, for reasons explained in “A Brief Discussion of Star Wars Costumes”.
So I was thinking about the lack of imagination in the prequels versus the Force Awakens. And some of that’s evident in the costumes.
Because I just saw a picture of Obi-Wan… and he’s wearing basically the same outfit in the prequels that he wears in A New Hope. Which implies that Obi-Wan basically has dressed the same for, well, his entire fucking life. He retreated to Tatooine as part of a secret mission, wearing what are clearly fucking Jedi robes in retrospect, and Lucas didn’t care because, well, the characters weren’t what he cared about.
How ridiculous is it that someone would wear the same outfit for seventy years if he wasn’t some sort of bizarre cartoon character or performer? Especially if he went into hiding?
(10) KICKER PUPPY. Joe Vasicek’s headline says “George R.R. Martin may not be your bitch, but I am”, however, this is not exactly an exercise in humility.
This discussion is not new, even with regard to Mr. Martin. Way back in 2009, Neil Gaiman addressed this issue in a blog post where he stated quite memorably that “George R.R. Martin is not your bitch”:
People are not machines. Writers and artists aren’t machines.
You’re complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.
No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.
So that’s one end of the spectrum: that writing is an art, that it can’t be forced, that trying to force it is wrong, and that writers have no obligation to their readers to force anything. …
So George R.R. Martin may not be your bitch, but I most certainly am. Writing is not something that happens only sometimes: it’s my job, and I do it every day. And as for accountability, I absolutely feel that I’m accountable to my readers. They are the whole reason I am able to do this in the first place. If that makes me their bitch, then so be it.
(11) SAD MUPPETS 4. The start of a groundswell?
https://twitter.com/hannahnpbowman/status/686726832939352064
(12) WALTZING POTATO. They’re called YouTubers, and I’d bet 98% of them never hear the intrinsic pun. UPI reports — “YouTuber builds 6000 piece Star Wars AT-AT from Legos”.
[Charlie of the BrickVault channel,] a Lego-loving YouTuber followed instructions posted online to build a more than 6,000-piece Star Wars AT-AT in 26 hours and posted time-lapse footage online….
The BrickVault team said it took thousands of dollars to procure all of the supplies from website BrickLink, far more than the $218.99 price tag for Lego’s official 1,137-piece AT-AT kit.
(12) BUT CAN YOU TUNA FISH? This has been rightly captioned a “Bizarre Star Wars Japanese Commercial.” Aired in 1978, it shows galactic peace being achieved with canned tuna fish.
[Thanks to Mark-kitteh, Steven H Silver, James H. Burns, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Wendy Gale, and Lorcan Nagle for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Hampus Eckerman.]
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First?
@Tasha Turner True, ask me another, I’m good at this game.
Second. Tired.
Okay, third. Moving slow, I guess.
10) That’s amazing. Just… wow. I could write a script that would output thousands of words per minute, easily. Easily! I would then be able to smugly declare myself a superior writer to George RR Martin. Puppy logic is very puppy.
Fifth?
(12) WALTZING POTATO
Extremely cool. Hop ahead to 9:20 to see the trauma of trying to get it to stand on its own four legs, and then some up-close shots of the final thing.
I wonder how “bullish” the Puppies will be in their condemnation of The Society of Illustrators for their obviously political pick of Gallo.
(4) PACIFIC RIM 2 IS FEELING BETTER. – Yay!
(10) KICKER PUPPY. – Looking at the bit where he’s drawn up a table of GRRM’s “estimated words per day” and compares it to his typical production – ie blog posts etc…all I can say is (i) Whoooosh, and (ii) I wonder if this may have some contribution to the fact that he’s, you know, probably the best known living genre author in the world, and you’re…you?*
(11) SAD MUPPETS 4. – Throw Ask Lovecraft in, and I’ll contribute to the Kickstarter
*=Ok, that was a mean. Also, maybe Stephen King gives George a run for the money, but he has to prove that he’s not a Frankenstein monster first.
(5) PAY IT FORWARD
Hmm, I wonder if the actual “The Hugo Winners” collections count. Possibly not, but if so isfdb says there were UK editions in 63 & 64.
Most of my old stuff is in boxes, so the earliest reference I’ve found is my 1989 UK edition of Cyteen, which I’m sure will be nowhere close to the earliest.
(11) SAD MUPPETS 4
That didn’t embed quite right – the tweet is quoting @thinkpiecebot “Is The Hugo Awards to Blame For Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog’s Breakup?”.
This is obviously a very wise bot that has been slurping Sclazi’s twitter feed, because it also just tweeted “Social Media Can’t Stop Churros“
5) Found some links to bookstores, television programs and so on and forwarded them. Earliest I found while sitting by my computer was a fanzine from 1989. Will take a walk to my bookshelves later on to check old editions and magazines.
Woo, I made the Pixel Scroll!
*facepuppy*
(it’s like a *facepalm* but done with a puppy)
(because that mental image is adorable)
(and I need adorable to counteract the stupid)
My 1975 Panther edition of The Left Hand of Darkness has “Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for the year’s best S.F. novel” in a huge red starburst on the cover… strangely, no word on whether it also won “Most Understated Cover Design”; I’m guessing probably not.
Re 10) Kicker Puppy
:Sigh:
I had a conversation with a friend last night as I was trying to recharge the battery in my car about Martin and his lateness in the book. I also coincidentally listened to Bear and Lynch talk about Martin briefly on the latest Coode Street Podcast, where they are honest about the struggles to hit deadlines and make forward progress.
(1) GALLO WINS ART DIRECTOR AWARD
Woohoo! Congratulations to Irene Gallo! Well deserved!
It’s brilliant when a mainstream organization like this recognizes achievement.
1) Gallo Wins–Congratulations to Irene Gallo!
3) Spaceship Salesman–Scalzi being his usual self, sensible, clear and enthusiastic. Of course, I only read his stuff because affirmative action, you know. But still.
10) Kicker Puppy–on the one hand, I certainly understand encouraging would be writers to treat writing like a job that they sit down and do every day, with measurable goals and so on. On the other hand I think talent and inspiration have something to do with it too.
As to whether Vasicek’s approach work’s better than Martin’s, I believe the traditional Puppy measure of excellence is sales. *drops mic*
CLOTHING THE IMAGINATION – Steinmetz makes a good point, on balance. On the one hand, nothing about Star Wars is realistic so why pick on this. On the other hand, much of the legit praise for the first movie was the set dressing, and how everything looked lived-in.
WIBBLY-WOBBLY MUSIC – Having done some recording in contemporary studios with digital apps like Logic and Pro Tools and functionally infinite tracks, I can only boggle.
WALTZING POTATO
See, now I have Tom Traubert’s Blues running through my head. Tom Tuber’s Blues, maybe?.
10) I remember doing something similar in a seminar for IPX routing. After 15 hops, IPX declared infinity, therefore infinity = 16.
Given the old saw about monkeys and typewriters, it would then take 256 monkey years to write the complete works of Shakespeare.
Taking this, and information about an author, we could then determine how many monkey years would be required. Thus, the SMQ (Shakespearean Monkey Quotient) was born.
I believe my wife (then – girlfriend) nearly sprained her eyes rolling them when I told her.
Ok, this is silly. Many things could be said of the prequels, but slagging of the costumes is the very last thing I would concentrate on. The costumes are wonderful. Visual invention was not something the prequels lacked.
While I appreciate the original Gaiman piece about GRRM, I just wish he had chosen a different catch phrase because I grow tired of hearing it repeated and/or repurposed to fit other situations.
@Anna Feruglia Dal Dan:
I agree. Whatever one may complain about in the prequels, those were some interesting and creative costumes.
I was more put off by the CGI environments, which along with being airbrush-sterile and oddly terrible-looking kept giving me the heebie jeebies because they didn’t *sound* right.
If you are walking through a giant space with hard stone walls and arches there will be echoes and resonances. It shouldn’t sound like you’re in a small room lined with shag pile carpeting.
(1) Congratulations to Irene Gallo! Well deserved!! Too bad Tor is going to fire her any day now to end that devastating boycott.
(4) Also I’m stoked Pacific Rim 2 is still alive. I guess all we need now is Idris Elba shouting “We are cancelling the cancellation!”
(10) Have to agree with Jack Lint – the phrase is a rather unfortunate. But Gaiman is absolutely right. I don’t understand fans who would hassle a writer (or any other artist) about hurrying up their work. Just seems like the fastest way to get them disliking the work and either never finishing or handing over something subpar to shut people up. Makes no sense to me. Reminds me of the fastest way to get a young person to hate a book is to make it required reading. No matter how good it is, if it’s an assignment, it’s often more difficult to enjoy.
(1) GALLO WINS ART DIRECTOR AWARD
Congratulations to Gallo on a well-deserved award. The amount of fantastic, stunning artwork which has been published on Tor.com is just amazing.
(5) PAY IT FORWARD
I found a bunch of 70’s and 80’s covers in English (UK), French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Italian. The earliest ones I found were UK covers from 1968 and 1969 for Stranger in a Strange Land and The Big Time.
(5)
Can any cover beat the positioning of its Hugo Award declaration from this 1974 edition of “To Your Scattered Bodies Go”:
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/0/00/TRSCTTRDBD1974.jpg
Panther/Granada/Grafton Books (70s and 80s), Arrow (70s), and the last 15 years of Gollancz Sf Masterworks in the UK have all been quite keen to vaunt a novel’s Hugo Award on their covers.
In countries like Germany, Italy and France, when I killed the idle holidaying moment by browsing the shelves, publishers seemed to prefer the “Hugo Gernsback award” so that might be a point of nicety.
Obituaries in UK newspapers tend to refer to sf authors winning Hugos and Nebulas as it highlights their credentials for deserving a newspaper obituary.
This is all part of Vox Day’s cunning plan.
I sorta kinda made the Pixel Scroll the other day, as an unnamed straight man, and I say that counts and you can believe me because, after all, I made Pixel Scroll the other day.
[1] Good for Gallo! Especially after all the nonsense she had to face last year from the childish histrionics of the Puppies and Beale’s strategically highlighted tweet.
[9] There are plenty of reasons to be critical about the prequels but the costuming question is just silly. Yes, Lucas turned the outfits of Obi-Wan and Owen Lars into the default Jedi robes, but conflating what we saw in a few hours of film with being the only outfit Jedi’s wore is as silly as suggesting that Han Solo only owned one pair of trousers his entire life.
[10] It’s funny that his attempt to burnish Correia as the writer who should be emulated has nothing to do with quality. Joe Vasicek might be better served taking more time to write better stories, in which case he might have a shot at enjoying the same kind of prestige and success guys like Martin and Gaimen have, rather than grinding out same-y novels sausage factory style to maximize the profit of his existing small readership. Mindless word counting means nothing. I mean, seriously, I grind out somewhere between 750,000-1,000,000 words a year in my job as a business writer. But that’s because I have a contract and a timetable from my employer. There is no employee/employer dynamic in the production of creative endeavors. There is no correlation between success and time management; your work either resonates and sells or it doesn’t.
More and more, the strident championing of the indy market sounds mostly like a group of writers who aren’t good enough to be published, but can grind out enough dross to float along with a small nugget of fans, like a popular fanfic ship writer with a paetron account.
[ticky]
Hmm, no subscribe email. Let’s try again.
Any estimates how many words a day Lionel Fanthorpe put out at his peak?
@Jim (re #2): at least the Dr. Who theme was recorded without damage. Douglas Adams said that parts of Hitchhiker were given their wavery sound by wrapping adhesive tape loosely around the capstan (drive head) of a tape machine. (I forget whether he said this was on original record or playback-to-merge). He said this tended to kill the machine.
9. CLOTHING THE IMAGINATION
Personally, I hated the way Ben Kenobi’s robes became a uniform. Robes make sense on a desert planet, but made no sense for Yoda living on a swamp planet. I would have expected Luke to notice that he was wearing the exact outfit that Ben did.
10. KICKER PUPPY
I would think that writing an epic with many different viewpoint characters , not one of which is a reliable narrator, requires a different level of writing than simply measuring output.
More ordered arrivals today. For 2015 SFF — Carry On, A Crown For Cold Silver, and The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet. (They will all, however, have to wait at least until I am done with The Shadow Throne.)
Others that came were An Untamed State by Roxane Gay, Flora’s Dare by Ysabeau Wilce, Pollen by Jeff Noon, and Hotel World by Ali Smith.
As Kyra’s house collapses into a Biblio Black Hole from it’s own weight in books….
I am attempting to convince my spouse that covering all available wall surfaces with books is “good insulation”.
It is. I can attest to it.
My spouse and I were just having a conversation this weekend about the insulating properties of a wall covered in bookshelves, in fact. He convinced me, at least for the space in question.
(10) KICKER PUPPY – I’d be more impressed with that analysis by the numbers if it included all the other books Martin has worked on (and published) since the start of his epic, because, you know, when you’re going to analyze something that culminates in an insult it helps to start with facts. Otherwise you look silly.
Also serves as structural support for the walls, if you keep your shelves full of books and not trinkets…
I’d be a little wary about relying on books as insulation. If tightly packed then they’d likely do a good job, BUT if they’re doing an essential job then that might result in a high temperature differential. I’d be inclined to keep a separate shelf for signed first edition hardbacks and use easily replaced paperbacks for the exterior walls.
10. KICKER PUPPY
If quantity is a sign of writing skill, then Nora Roberts has pretty much everyone beat:
“[Nora] Roberts grosses sixty million dollars a year, Forbes estimated in 2004, more than Grisham or Stephen King, who is, incidentally, a Roberts admirer.”
If speed counts …
“According to my calculations, it takes Roberts, on average, forty-five workdays to write a book.”
And lastly, Ms Roberts commented:
“I hope to write the first romantic suspense time-travel paranormal thriller set in Mongolia dealing with Siamese twins who tragically fall in love with the same woman who may or may not be Annie Oakley,” she once joked.
All from The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/22/real-romance-2
*blinks* Paperbacks can be replaced?
Oh… I mean, I suppose, in theory they can…. It’s just, well, in practice they tend to, well, stay. (Hence the relative ease with which I was able to lay my hands on a bunch of 1970s paperbacks with “Hugo Award Winner” plastered across the covers. Don’t get the wrong idea, they haven’t been completely motionless for the last forty years – every so often they get taken out and re-read.)
I thought Gaiman’s original point was about the (false) entitlement of audience, not the author? I imagine lots of creative people feel a responsibility to their audience and that it would be internalized in as many different ways as creators.
If the creator fails their audience (as defined by the audience) often enough, then it’s no longer their audience, right?
[2] I love the Doctor Who theme song and always wondered how it came to be, so, thanks! It sounds so — strange and forward-looking, particularly when attached to the William Hartnell episodes.
[10] And once again, we have a significantly less famous author trying to imply that they simply have a superior work ethic compared to GRRM, and naturally they would never keep you waiting for the next installment of their massive intertwined epic with dozens of characters and plot threads and locations to manage. Because they don’t write those kinds of books.
@Kyra on January 12, 2016 at 7:50 am said:
But…. books ARE good insulation. Aren’t they? And excellent sound insulation too.
@Dex
There are a lot of good arguments for self and independent publishing, especially for people who would be, at a big house, “midlist” writers. But it seems to be a real Puppy thing to only make bad arguments. They appear to want there to be sides, with their valiant indy-published selves on one side and Tor, House of Evil on the other.
(1) GALLO WINS
Well deserved, congrats to her!
(4) PACIFIC RIM 2 IS FEELING BETTER.
Yay! I wonder if he’s thinking of doing it in a different medium, like a graphic novel or something else. Netflix and Amazon are producing high quality stuff and I could imagine they might be interested, but the cost might be prohibitive for something of that scale for either of them.
(10) KICKER PUPPY.
Do people think if they analyze Martin’s output enough it’ll somehow make him write faster? If you replace the word bitch with ‘word factory’ it reads better. GRRM isn’t your word factory, but I am, I will produce lots of words for you! Just supply and demand. Of course that ignores that GRRMs words are in demand and his words aren’t.
I do think that there is a unspoken agreement between author and audience when it comes to serial work. The audience is putting trust in the author to resolve what they started, that doesn’t mean the author is obliged to do it on a specific timetable but that doesn’t mean the audience needs to stick around either if they lose that trust. I’ll never invest time or money in a Melanie Rawn book again because she never completed the Exiles trilogy. It’s weird of all things that people are complaining about Game of Thrones though, there will be resolution one way or another. Can’t wait for GRRM? Well there’s the TV show. Yeah I’d like to finish it as I started it but that was like 15 years ago and it’s not like there’s a lack of things to read in the meantime.
In MMA terms, making verbal jabs at the Champion when you’re still fighting in the undercard of a local dive bar doesn’t make you look tough, it makes you look like a punk. Don’t be a punk.
@McJulie
Yes, inarticulate phrasing on my part. I understand that self and independent publishing is an apt and effective channel for some people, but man, their arguments really do make it sound like fanfic 15 years ago, when there were people who would grind out several hundred thousand words a year on the same ship to the adoration of those ship fans alone.
William Wallace Cook, a pulp writer of the early 20th cenutry, was nicknamed “the man who deforested Canada”. In 1910 alone, he wrote 54 novels. He once estimated that he wore out twenty-five typewriters over the course of twenty-five years.
My old bachelor apartment was on the upper story of the west end of an apartment block, with the exterior wall receiving full central-Arizona sunlight and temperature. In summer, heat leakage through that wall made the bedroom very *very* warm, even when the rest of the apartment was cooled by the A/C. . And I found that putting bookcases against that bedroom wall did indeed make a noticeable improvement in the temperature of that room.
But like Nick Pheas, I had concerns about temperature effects on books shelved along that hot, hot wall. So I tried (but, sadly, did not completely succeed) to see if I could completely cover that wall with copies of Thomas Monteleone’s SEEDS OF CHANGE.
(Wrinkly old gray-or-silver-haired fans may chuckle over that last line, though I fear that younger fannish generations will scratch their heads and need to have the joke explained to them. Some cultural catch phrases last only as long as the generation that spawns them.)