Mowatt ran to Save the Rhino on Christmas
(1) ANOTHER WAY TO HELP. Jim Mowatt’s rhino-saving run is now a book: From Parkrun To London Marathon: Running The London Marathon For Save The Rhino.
Some time ago I thought it would be a jolly good idea to run the London Marathon.I was fantastically excited about it and eager to consume every blog, book and youtube video I could find that contained any tiny morsel of information about the marathon. I consumed everything I could find and wanted more. Ideally I wanted a book that would relate how someone prepared for the marathon and give me a description of what it felt like to actually run the steps it would take to get around the streets of London. I couldn’t find what I wanted so I have now written the book that I wanted to read. It is now available on Amazon for anyone who might want an insight into how it feels to train for and run a marathon. I also describe the shorter runs that I did in the rhino costume.
The book is called, From Parkrun To London Marathon. Every penny I receive after Amazon have taken their cut will be sent to Save The Rhino International.
(2) READY TO WRIMO. Kameron Hurley says she’s finally gotten past an “epic brain freeze” – just in time for “NaNoNoNoNo”.
Finally, I was able to sit at the keyboard, in the dark, with a beer and a skull candle, and just completely inhabit another world. In my mind’s eye I was surfacing back in Nasheen again, running around a contaminated desert, dodging bursts and bombs, and trying not to care about my companions too much because the world had already ended and living was so very glorious. That’s the sort of writing experience I crave, when you feel like you’re not making things up so much as dictating a story as you’re living it in your head.
(3) MINNEAPOLIS WORLDCON BID. Emily Stewart announced there will be a Minneapolis in 2023 Open Discussion about a possible Worldcon bid on November 19.
If somebody could satisfy my curiosity about who in addition to Stewart is starting up the discussion, I’d appreciation knowing.
(4) CURSED CUBS IN SFF. With the Cubs staying alive for a couple more days, an article about the Cubs and Science Fiction… The Verge has an article about sf and fantasy stories that reference the Cubs’ World Series drought, including those by Jim Butcher. Andy Weir and John Scalzi.
(5) BASEBALL SEASON. Meantime, Steven H Silver invites you to gaze in amazement at his very long bibliography of baseball-referencing science fiction.
(6) CLARKE CENTER PODCAST. Launching today, Into the Impossible is a podcast of stories, ideas, and speculations from the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination.
Early episodes will take listeners through exciting, ranging conversations with and between scientists, artists, writers, and thinkers of different stripes, on the nature of imagination and how, through speculative culture, we create our future. The first episode includes Freeman Dyson (physicist and writer), David Kaiser (physicist, MIT), Rae Armantrout (Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, UCSD professor emeritus), and Brian Keating (astrophysicist, UCSD).
(7) JUST $79,000 SHORT. Jason Davis is asking Kickstarter donors for $100,000 to fund The Harlan Ellison Books Preservation Project, “To create definitive versions of all Harlan Ellison’s writings, fiction and non-fiction, to preserve in print for posterity.”
A digital library of Harlan’s entire literary oeuvre created from thousands of papers filed in his home office.
Harlan’s preference for working on manual typewriters from the instrument’s heyday through to his latest work has resulted in an astonishing volume of paper, much of it crammed into overstuffed drawers that often require the industry of two people to extract or—even more difficult—reinsert files.
While oft-reprinted stories like “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “Jeffty Is Five” exist as formal, preferred-text documents from which all reprints are set, many of Harlan’s more obscure pieces exist only as faded carbon copies on decaying yellow pages.
Some of the never-before-reprinted stories collected in HONORABLE WHOREDOM AT A PENNY A WORD and its sequel only exist on 60-year-old carbon copies of the original typescripts and, due to fading of the carbon impressions and yellowing of the paper, are almost illegible. Though one can usually reference the published version of a faded tale in Harlan’s copy of the original pulp magazine, itself exceedingly brittle, it’s preferable to work from the original, which might contain passages excised by the original editor upon initial, and often only, publication.
Jason Davis says the fruits of the project also would include —
At least five all-new Ellison collections.
In addition to reissuing the back catalog titles, there are several more HarlanEllisonBooks.com titles in various stages of completion.
Originally, I was hired as a freelance editor for the first four HarlanEllisonBooks.com releases, but the original publisher moved on and I arranged to continue the project. Since the 2012 release of ROUGH BEASTS and NONE OF THE ABOVE, the endeavor has been a deficit-financed operation wherein I, as editor and publishing associate, used all my free time (outside of my editorial day job) to collect, edit, layout, design, typeset, publish, and market new Ellison books (12 so far), with all expenses out of pocket. Only after the books are released do I receive payment via a commission (not unlike an agent’s) paid to me by Harlan, who is paid directly by our distributor two months after each individual book sells.
(8) NEW HECKEL BOOK. The Dark Lord Jack Heckel, an author covered here by Carl Slaughter, is on sale today from Harper Voyager Impulse.
After spending years as an undercover, evil wizard in the enchanted world of Trelari, Avery hangs up the cloak he wore as the Dark Lord and returns to his studies at Mysterium University. On the day of his homecoming, Avery drunkenly confides in a beautiful stranger, telling her everything about his travels. When Avery awakens, hungover and confused, he discovers that his worst nightmare has come true: the mysterious girl has gone to Trelari to rule as a Dark Queen. Avery must travel back to the bewitched land and liberate the magical creatures . . . but in order to do so, he has to join forces with the very people who fought him as the Dark Lord.
(9) TODAY’S BELATED BIRTHDAY LAB
- Born October 31, 1936 – Future founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratory lit off their first rocket together.
Eighty years ago, when interplanetary travel was still a fiction and that fiction looked like Flash Gordon, seven young men drove out to a dry canyon wash in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and helped jump-start the Space Age.
They were out there on Halloween 1936 to try what few people at the time had tried: lighting a liquid rocket engine. It took them four attempts to get a rocket to fire for a glorious three seconds — though an oxygen hose also broke loose and sent them scampering for safety as it thrashed around.
The result was encouraging enough for this group — made up of five grad students studying at Caltech and two amateur rocket enthusiasts — to keep going, to build more rockets that would lead to an institution where they could do this kind of work every day.
(10) THE CRITIC. James Davis Nicoll reprinted his list of rejected ideas for review series which includes categories like —
- Least Believable Teenaged Girl Protagonist Written by a Man
- Beloved Classics That Make Modern Readers Say “What the Helling Hell, Old Time SF Fans?”
- SF Books She Wrote and He Took the Credit For
- Hard SF Ain’t Nothing But Nonsense Misspelled
(11) FOUND IN TRANSLATION. When Newsweek invites you to “Meet the Man Bringing Chinese Science Fiction to the West”, it’s Ken Liu they’re talking about.
As Xia Jia, an award-winning sci-fi writer and lecturer in Chinese literature, puts it in the essay that closes Invisible Planets, Chinese sci-fi since the 1990s “can be read as a national allegory in the age of globalization.” But Liu argues that the everyday problems encoded by speculative stories in China apply just as much in the West. “People’s lives tend to be dominated by the same considerations…petty bureaucracy, how to make a living, how to give your children a good education…how to adjust to a radically changing society.”
(12) DRAGON AWARDS TAKING NOMINATIONS. Thanks to Camestros Felapton, we know the Dragon Awards site has been updated its to accept nominations for the 2017 awards. Eligible works are those first released between 7/1/2016 and 6/30/2017.
Welcome to the second annual Dragon Awards! A way to recognize excellence in all things Science Fiction and Fantasy. These awards will be by the fans, for the fans, and are your chance to reward those who have made real contributions to SF, books, games, comics, and shows. There is no qualification for submitting nominations or voting – no convention fees or other memberships are needed. The only requirement is that you register, confirm your email address for tracking nominations and voting purposes, and agree to the rules. This ensures that all votes count equally.
Once you have submitted a nomination for a category you cannot change it. If you are not sure about a category, then leave it blank. You can come back at a later date and add nominations for any category you leave blank using this same form. Make sure your name (First and Last), and the email address match your original submission. No need to fill in your original nominations, the form will append the new nominations to your prior list.
Nomination Deadline: July 24, 2017. We encourage you to get your nominations in early.
(13) LATE ADOPTER. Is TV narration for blind people really a thing?
Annoyingly, this TV has narration for blind people on and I don't know how to turn it off
— Ian Sales ???????? ???????? (@ian_sales) October 29, 2016
(14) AIRBRUSHED COSTUME. This is what it looks like when it’s Halloween and your dad is Dan Dos Santos.
I introduced Uno to ‘Akira’ a few weeks ago, and we both immediately thought he’d make a great Tetsuo. He doesn’t care that none of his friends will know who he is.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Tom Galloway, JJ, Steven H Silver, and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]
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13. Yes it is, and there should be even more of it.
Way Down Upon the Scrolley River
Barrett’s Pixelteers
The Last Scrollskatchewan Pixel
Scrolley the Gater went chomp, chomp, chomp
Soylent Green is Pixels
To Scroll Man
Pixel on the Scrollient Express
The Last Pixel Scrolled at Noon
He Shall Pixel in the Sky
(12) DRAGON AWARDS TAKING NOMINATIONS.
And, in yet another stunning example of DragonCon ducks being all over the barnyard instead of in a row, their link to the rules redirects to http://www.dragoncon.org. 🙄
(13) For quite some years, though not for all shows, yes.
(10) Heh. Would… love? to see examples of some of the categories. I belive a significant amount of snark would be generated.
snowcrash: (10) THE CRITIC. Heh. Would… love? to see examples of some of the categories. I belive a significant amount of snark would be generated.
I’d contribute to a kitty to sponsor that!
One of the commenters suggests:
I Like Cats (stunt reviews which ignore everything in the book that doesn’t happen to or with a cat or felinoid equivalent present)
I really like that idea.
ticky
4 and 5) What is it that compells American writers to wax poetic about baseball? The rest of the world doesn’t care. Also, while I’ve read books referencing all sorts of sports I don’t care for (cricket, rugby, quidditch, ice hockey, even American football) that still managed to be interesting, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that managed it for baseball.
10) We can probably all think of examples for the different categories.
13) It’s been a thing in Germany for a while now and a very good thing it is, too. Though I sympathise with Ian Sales, because it can be very annoying when the TV gets stuck on narration for the blind and you can’t switch it off. That sometimes happened with my old TV, but stopped once I got a new one.
14) That’s a great costume.
@JJ
Paging Timothy, the talking cat.
So, The Dragon admins specifically urge people to get their nominations in early…and once you nominate in a category, you can’t change it (unless you go create another email address, but surely no one will do that…). But the eligibility period doesn’t end until next July, so if you nominate before then, woe if something eligible you like better comes out before next July….
It is me, the pixel!
(8) NEW HECKEL BOOK. Okay, this sounds pretty amusing. 🙂
(14) AIRBRUSHED COSTUME. “Tetsuooooo!” Very nice!
SF Reading: Too busy at work to read print/ebook! 🙁 But I’m listening to Tor.com Collection Season 2 to/from work and just finished “Drowning Eyes,” which was pretty good, but not really anything special. Now I’m listening to “Patchwerk,” which has just gotten interesting.
13) I’ve seen some DVDs that have “English descriptive service” as one of the soundtracks, so it doesn’t surprise me that some TVs have that built in.
4) One of my favorites showed up in in a story The Space Gamer in the 80’s, which was a magazine for F&SF board and roleplaying games. The story was a framing device for a variant on the O.G.R.E board game, and in the story, the Cubs had gotten into the last World Series before civilization collapsed. Worse, they were up 3-2 on the Blue Jays before things went to pot. (If the Blue Jays had made it instead of the Indians, that would have been really weird this year for me!)
In the story, the protagonist decides to spray paint “Go Blue Jays” on the remnants of a skyscraper in the ruins of Chicago. Even after the apocalypse, with better things to worry about, like day to day survival. the inhabitants don’t take this lightly…
Just finished Bradley Beaulieu’s Twelve Kings. Took me quite a while to get through, partly because it’s a bit of a door stopper and partly because I didn’t get too enthused by it. It’s not a bad book, but some aspects of the plotting and motivations didn’t hang right for me. Also, many of the characters have regular, modern day Turkish names in a fantasy desert setting which I found a little jarring (Turks are not desert people).
Still, it’s nice to read a fantasy setting which isn’t pastoral Europe with the edges filed off.
Tetsuooooooooooooo!
@Cora: Baseball is slow, almost meditative, and leaves a lot of space to be filled in. There are more good American novels about it than the other sports combined. (I think. I’ve never counted and I haven’t read them all.)
(13) Yep! There were ads running in the UK (on Channel 4 I think?) covering subtitling and narration for their tv shows. Being neither deaf nor blind I never thought to check how well they’d done either of them.
@rob_matic: Oh dear. I bought Twelve Kings for a change of pace from the general European fantasy, as well. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.
On that note I read Grace of Kings recently and I’m really hoping that Wall of Storms cuts out some of the waffle. I like it well enough, and the setting is great, but some sections definitely dragged.
Re sports in books: I find most mainstream sportsball to be quite dull to both watch and play, so reading about them is pretty much the last thing I want to do in most cases. The one time I remember buying a book specifically involving a sport, it was Climbers by M. John Harrison. Because I like his writing and I also like climbing.
A scroll is nothing but a pixel misspelled.
I had one of those narration runs on a film I was watching and had to reboot the DVD to disable it. I guess it would be very useful for the legally blind.
My five-year-old science fiction short story “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground” is going to be published! Never ever give up.
FOUND IN TRANSLATION— Heh. I think I’ve got a sonnet by that title somewhere around here.
Hey, I finally found the local SF club (or one of them), only eight years after the first time I tried, in the same room, but nobody else showed up. Interestingly, someone said this club has been meeting for eight years. No idea. But I read one of my stories (it was a reading meeting), and it went over pretty well. , It was even suggested that the story would fit well into a podcast, which they just happened to have one of which.
Scroll season.
Pixel season!
Scroll season.
Pixel season!
Pixel season.
SCROLL SEASON! TICK!!!
Did I tick the box? Oh, hell, I’ll just… HEY! LOOK! OVER THERE! NO… THERE!!!
I’ve seen occasional complaints about the narration pointing out the blatantly obvious from people who didn’t know their TV had accidentally switched to Audio Description.
I learnt about it from cinema ads — there was a Puss in Boots one running for a while, maybe it’s up on YouTube? (I can’t check right now)
I once had a DVD of Terminator 2 with narration for the blind (I think maybe they used the euphemism “visually impaired.”) It was fun to listen to some of the descriptions, especially when the calm, neutral voice blandly described the intern licking Sarah Conner’s face. (When an “even more special special edition” DVD came out, I gave the older special edition to a friend, and the new edition didn’t have the narration track.)
On a similar note, I’ve noticed that there are two levels of closed captioning. One simply prints out the spoken dialogue. The other also includes descriptions of sound effects (loud footsteps, crickets chirping, shot rings out, door slams, maid screams, etc.)
@rob_matic
I really loved Twelve Kings in Sharakai. I just bought the prequel novella Of Sand and Malice Made, which I haven’t yet started. I loved the change of setting from a traditional epic fantasy, I loved the main female protagonist Ceda. I loved learning about the city and the kings and her backstory told by gradually peeling layers off. I was totally interested in it and I am very excited for the sequel in a few months. I felt that the ending was a tad rushed; she just spent the whole book trying to figure out what to do and then in a matter of about a page and a half, she figures out what is going on, where to go, and how to get what she wants…I couldn’t quite connect all the dots that happened so quickly at the end. But still, one of my favorite fantasy novels I’ve read in some time.
(I think maybe they used the euphemism “visually impaired.”)
A Pedant Writes: Not simply a euphemism. There are lots of ways not to be able to see very well that stop short of completely blind.
@Cora
For many, maybe most, boys growing up in the US in the 50’s and 60’s, baseball was life. If we weren’t playing baseball, we were talking about baseball, or sneaking our transistor radios into school to listen to baseball games. We might have trouble with memorization in school, but all of us could recite the complete lineups of our favorite teams, with lifetime statistics if needed. We might have trouble with math, but we knew how to calculate batting averages and winning percentages. All of our heroes were baseball players.. From the age of 5 or 6 until we reached puberty, baseball was all consuming.
I think for many male US writers older than 50 or so, if they think of their childhood, they think of baseball, and if they remember summer they remember baseball, and that nostalgia and reverence sometimes crops up in their writing.
TL;DNR: Watch the movie Sandlot to understand to understand American’s past reverence for the game.
Not uncommon on foreign-language discs, where there are definitely two different reasons to want the subtitles on.
Not sure if it’s been mentioned, but Oz Reimagined is 99 cents on Kindle atm. Includes stories by Rachel Swirsky, Ken Liu, and Kat Howard among others.
The first round of the Goodreads Choice Awards has opened.
In fantasy, I did the write-in thing for Sebastien de Castelle’s Saint’s Blood….’cause that is what a fan does. **chuckle**.
Of the 15 official nominees, I only see three books that I am likely to read. Mostly because they are later installments of series that are on my TBR pile. There are another 3-4 books/authors that I have heard of and would likely read at some point. But the rest? Meh.
Mark Lawrence pointed out on Facebook that his one eligible book has more ratings and a higher average rating than a few of the “official” nominees.
Fans of the grimdark sub-genre in general are not getting much love this year.
I didn’t see much in the SF category that sparked my interest, but the YA/FSF category had several that looked pretty interesting.
The graphic novel category had several old standby’s. Erg. But it also had Monstress, which is a great series, IMHO.
In any case, the first round is open, y’all!
@Cora – re: baseball
I’ll add in the experience of having pick-up games in the summer that ran nearly from sunrise to sunset. The players came and left throughout the day, so the make-up of the teams was always changing. We modified the rules for “ghost” runners in case we didn’t have at least 4 players on a side. And everyone in the neighborhood was welcome to play. Even those of us with less athletic ability.
I’m not a huge baseball fan, but I understand where that emotional tie comes from.
Regards,
Dann
forgot the c4c
[selecting the checkbox]
When I was a first reader for the Mystery Guild, I got a lot of animal-related mysteries. A couple stick in my memory. In one, a cat and dog find a dead body and immediately work out who the killer is based on what they can smell. Of course they cannot talk so this does the human investigators absolutely no good.
Another was The Dog Park Club, in which a group of people whose only common ground is that they all use the same dog park, decide to pool their skills to investigate the mysterious disappearance of one of the park regulars. It turns out their pool of skills is remarkably ill-suited to solving crimes. Reviewers tended to love it or hate it.
I have a new found hate against urban fantasy, otherwise I would have gone for Anne Bishop’s Marked in Flesh.
(13) Yes indeed; the official term is “video description”. More info if you’re still curious.
@Cora
Baseball has a mythic quality. It’s the oldest of organized sports in North America and incredibly, we have statistics going back in the late 19th century, which creates a connection between the game today and it’s entire scope of history. The most successful African-American business of all time were the Negro Leagues. Latin America is dominated by baseball fans, more so than in America.
It’s also gloriously contradictory. It’s the only team sport where the defense has the ball. It has no clock and no tie games, so teams have to be beaten in every game, allowing for the impossible comeback. It is a team sport that highlights and measures individual performance and yet, cannot be dominant based on any one individual.
@Cora: expanding on @Arkansawyer, Cheryl Morgan observed some years ago that baseball is about not action but the potential for action. (I’d add that in the years before slow-motion replays it was one of the few sports where people could see each step in a play, giving plenty for them to debate afterward.) Basketball was made up and urban, football required gear and organization, ice hockey wasn’t available to most of the country (where baseball is playable even in a heat wave) and soccer was unheard of, but baseball was something anyone could play (and had for a long time before whatever little thing Doubleday did that got him named as its founder — there’s an ordinance from decades before his time prohibiting baseball from being played near the meeting house). wrt not liking any baseball books, have you read Brittle Innings? You’d need to accept some of it as a lesson about a culture you’re probably not familiar with, but it has an interesting connection.
@Ghost Bird: on the other side, I was once accused by a fully blind person of using “handicapped” as a euphemism (“If you mean ‘blind’, say ‘blind’.). This was decades ago, before newer terms became ]PC[, and in fact I was quoting it as the collective description used by a convention we’d shared a hotel with. (IIRC an old-time Disclave, which always took part of a huge hotel because it had everything needed PLUS a great space for con suite and parades of mundanes to comment on as many of us had been.)
The sheep protagonists of the murder mystery Three Bags Full by Swann have the same problem. Now they’re sure who the murderer is, how to tell the humans? I really like the book; the sheep are unreliable narrators who haven’t a clue about a whole other story that’s going on around them.
Cally said:
That is so going in my TBR pile.
I read this description, immediately went to purchase the book, and found that I can only buy the ebook edition in German, not in English.
This is an author who is not being well served by their publisher/agent.
(10) The whole set looks like Books I Wouldn’t Review For Less Than $10 A Word Even If I Could Get Through Them, Which Is Already Damn Unlikely.
I’d much rather drink bad wine than read a crappy book. Life is short enough already.
Re: descriptive audio tracks for the visually impaired, I remember finding the “SAP” (secondary audio programming) setting on our new TV (minimum…holy crap 16 years ago??!?) and discovering them. I think my dad explained to me what they were. Blew my mind as my ignorant self didn’t realize that legally blind people watched TV.
Congrats on the upcoming publication, Rob!
@Ghost Bird on November 2, 2016 at 6:21 am said:
The phrase that the Audio Information Network of Colorado uses to describe their target audience (people who cannot read print materials unaided) is “blind, visually impaired, and print handicapped.” (And that still leaves out language and literacy difficulties.) But, yeah, “blind” and “visually impaired” are def. not synonymous.
@Chip:
On the one hand, people with disabilities are just as capable of being inappropriately dogmatic as anyone else, without being Representative Examples of PC Gone Mad. One the other, blind people can get really weary of sighted people tip-toeing around the word “blind,” and are just as likely to develop a hair-trigger about it as any other person in a marginalized population subject to such nickel-and-diming.
When I worked more closely with the AINC, I once heard the director and a guest, both blind, arguing with each other over which term was preferable, “handicapped” or “disabled.” Each felt strongly, for reasons valid to them, that one of the terms was entirely inappropriate. I suppose one might take away from this that “See, blind people themselves can’t even agree on what we should call them, so to hell with this PC shit!” but I think the better takeaway is “Director prefers X term, Guest prefers Y term, blind people are not a monolith; in other news, sky is blue.”
10) I’d pay money to see some of these categories made into a regular annual award, with the top 10 nominees listed as well as the winner.
14) Awesome! I don’t even know who the character is, but OMG.
Re baseball: Nobody goes to a baseball game to watch the game. It’s all about drinking/socializing with the other people in your section of the bleachers. (Someone once told me that it was a con analogue, which made a lot of things make much more sense.)
@ Rob T.: Congratulations!
@ Dann: That’s a lovely, evocative description.
ETA: Arisia is putting out a special hardcover edition of Oor Wombat’s annotated fairy tales bundled with Toad Words and Other Stories. Pre-order your copy here.
@James Nicoll: The dog and cat investigating murder sounds like the series from Rita Mae Brown. She went from an angry lesbian activist to a writer of modern cozies, set in Middle Virginia.
wrt not liking any baseball books, have you read
The one I recommend is Willie’s Time, by Charles Einstein. It’s about baseball, and the 50s and 60s in the US. And Willie Mays. It’s good for the background.
You’re right: poking through my folder of finished reviews, I see it was Brown’s Cat of the Century.
The books are definitely not what I expected from the author of Rubyfruit Jungle. To quote an old review of mine:
13) What I’d like to know is, was the narration in Icelandic?
I have a hearing loss of 75% and the loss of vision in one eye. My assessment of what to be called hovers toward “still functioning with you insensitive gits”. Well, I tend to use stronger language.
When I usher, I try to be on left, which puts my deaf and blind side towards the stage and the audience I am supposed to be watching.
And NOT the audience, I meant.
Two more baseball references:
“Rumfuddle” by Vance
_Damn Yankees_ by Douglas Wallop (I’m assuming that a deal with the devil
story counts as sf)
Has anyone else read Borderline by Mishell Baker? It’s a somewhat unusual urban fantasy– the viewpoint character has moderately well-controlled borderline personality disorder, and has to deal with elves in Hollywood.
Part of what’s unusual is that it’s just elves, instead of having elves-and-werewolves-and-angels-and-witches-and who-know-what-else.