182 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/1/16 We Have Scrolled The Pixel, And It Is Us”

1. Lois McMaster Bujold is releasing another Penric “really long Novella” or “very short Novel”–Penric’s Mission.

   Cover reveal here.

   Release date “Real Soon Now”.

2. The spouse and I will sometimes watch TV with captions because we’re getting to the point where we can’t hear everything that’s going on. So I noticed that Vikings has some very weird captions, which seem determined to tell you everything that’s going on, and sometimes a bit more. I don’t remember a specific example, but they’re something like: “Ominous footprints make their way up the path. Squeaky gate opens. Character so-and-so gasps in fear.”

   I told a friend about this. It turned out she had actually done subtitles, and she said this was exactly the Wrong Way to do it. You’re supposed to make them as short as possible, so people have time to read them.

3. @Nancy
   I did indeed, and liked it quite a bit.

   Shaun Duke and I talked to Mishell about BORDERLINE on an episode of the Skiffy and Fanty Show podcast, too: https://skiffyandfanty.com/2016/05/12/296-mishell-baker-a-k-a-the-queen-of-quills-borderline-an-interview/

4. I remember finding the “SAP” (secondary audio programming) setting on our new TV (minimum…holy crap 16 years ago??!?) and discovering them.

   I don’t know if it is the part of the country I’m in or the cheap-ass TVs I buy, but whenever I’ve tried the SAP setting on any programming, I’ve never once got anything (even if it indicates SAP is available.)

5. @Lisa Goldstein — We were watching Crimson Peak with subtitles the other day and there was one point where a voice came from off camera and the subtitle said: [GHOST]:Get out! (or whatever the dialogue was; I forget the specific wording, but you get the idea).

6. @Cora– To all these lovely descriptions of baseball, I’ll add a few points.

   It’s not just boys. As a kid, the games at the local park were both sexes, decades before Little League was forced to mend its ways. In recent years, several star pitchers in Little League have been girls.

   It’s our sport. It’s part of being American–even in the broader sense of the word, which is why the major leagues encompass both the US and Canada. And why so many players are from the Caribbean, and Central and South America. And the periodic agitation for a major league expansion team in Mexico. Why it’s popular in Japan and Korea and the Philippines…Oops. Might have overlooked something…

   I don’t honestly see any reason why you should care about baseball any more than I care about soccer. On the other hand, I don’t read British or other books and whine about their obsession with soccer. It’s their sport. They didn’t grow up playing baseball or following it, any more than I grew up playing soccer or following it.

   Baseball and its British cousin/ancestor/whatever, cricket, are the only major sports not played to a clock. It’s a totally different rhythm and feeling. I love it. I’m not bothered in the least with you not caring if it stops existing tomorrow, but I’m more than a bit bemused you the fact that you would bitch about “American writers waxing poetic about it.” Why shouldn’t they? And, honestly, why should they give a shit about the fact that “the rest of the world” (except the places that also love baseball) focuses that passion on some other sport(s)?

   How is it any skin off anyone’s nose, either way? How do you not gain a little bit by experiencing in fiction that little bit of what to you is an alien culture?

   Enjoy soccer, or whatever t he heck you enjoy. Don’t expect, though, that Americans will stop loving baseball, or writing about it, merely because it’s not the approved sport in your neighborhood.

7. 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.

   At least neither of them were insisting on “handicapable.”

8. What is it that compells American writers to wax poetic about baseball?

   Lots of us like baseball.

   The rest of the world doesn’t care.

   Some do, some don’t. Baseball’s quite popular in Cuba, Japan, Argentina, the Dominican Republic and lots of other places that aren’t the US.

   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.

   That doesn’t mean American writers should stop writing books that appeal to their readers, but that you may not be a reader for baseball fiction.

   But I’ll second the recommendation for BRITTLE INNINGS, because it’s a terrific novel and SFF-related. Also SUMMERLAND by Michael Chabon.

   And as long as we’re citing SFF baseball novels, IF I NEVER GET BACK, by Darryl Brock.

9. Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is an excellent novel (whether or not it makes the sport itself interesting). Coover tells his story from the dual points of view of the creator of a table top baseball simulation and the players in the games. Developments in the game trigger the creator’s life to spiral out of control. Can his game and real life be saved?

10. @cora:
    For what it’s worth, I can’t stand baseball. I think it’s dull and uninteresting. But I seem to really enjoy baseball fiction.
    I’m not entirely sure why, either. Maybe it’s because the books aren’t about baseball – they’re about the specific culture(s) that develop around it.
    The House of Daniel by Harry Turtledove will be on my Hugo nominations list this year. It was good enough that I actually tried to watch a baseball game earlier this year, because the book made me want to like the game.

11. 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.

    A couple of years ago, while at a (non-sf) con in Toronto, I had the great good fortune to watch a Blue Jays game from a luxury box. Half of us were drinking and socializing, with an occasional nod to the game, and the other half were intently focused on every pitch. It varies.

    Pixel with a Glass Scroll

12. I once turned down an invitation to go see a local ball game from a sky box, and only later realized I should have gone just to enjoy the sky box. Hm. Haven’t kicked myself for that one in a while. Ow.

    I’ll recommend a baseball book: Rhubarb, by H. Allen Smith. Because it’s by H. Allen Smith. A cat inherits a baseball team. He’s not a talking cat, and we aren’t privy to his inner thoughts. He’s a cat. There are two sequels, Son of Rhubarb, and The View from Chivo. I haven’t read those over again, and neither recommend nor discourage their being read. In one of those, perhaps the third in the series, Smith inserts himself into the story, always ostentatiously describing himself as handsome, with chiseled features that set all hearts a-flutter. Something damn near fannish about that.

13. The Rhubarb movie is fun, too. It’s a cute cat. Also Angels in the Outfield, which doesn’t have a cat AFAIK. I think it was remade but I’m talking about the one from the 50s.

14. My favorite baseball book is The Last Magic Summer by Peter Gent. Yes, it is about baseball…and life, and family, and growing up…and it is beautiful. I have given copies of it to several of the other father’s I coached with.

15. Cosigning everything John and others have said about baseball and linking to the beautiful Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu by John Updike.

16. Shao Ping: That Updike article is stunning, filled with quotable lines. “All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in?”

17. I don’t know. I can in some vague way understand what people like in sports, I just can’t understand why they would write poems about it. I think I have never seen a Swedish poem about ice hockey or soccer.

    I and my fellow swedes were taken to a sports bar to watch a baseball game once. We gave up after a while on trying to understand the rules. Our own version, once described as anarchist baseball, is much simpler. But I do enjoy reading about X-men playing it.

18. @ULTRAGOTHA

    Lois McMaster Bujold is releasing another Penric “really long Novella” or “very short Novel”–Penric’s Mission.

    I see that she describes herself as “semi-retired” now.

    For the Penric stories, she’s been using clips from old paintings rather than having someone create something new, and that’s worked pretty well. In this case, she’s almost certainly using Schindler’s View of Ragusa, except that she had someone remove the mother and daughter from the picture. (I think the daughter’s shadow is still there, though.)

19. Both on the tiptoe stand, at full extent,
    Their arms aloft, their bodies inly bent;
    Their heads from aiming blows they bear afar;
    With clashing gauntlets then provoke the war.
    One on his youth and pliant limbs relies;
    One on his sinews and his giant size.
    The last is stiff with age, his motion slow;
    He heaves for breath, he staggers to and fro,
    And clouds of issuing smoke his nostrils loudly blow.
    Yet equal in success, they ward, they strike;
    Their ways are diff’rent, but their art alike.

    For me, as perhaps for Virgil and Dryden, an enormous part of the poetry of sports is triumphing, even if momentarily, over aging. Which probably indicates a larger point: it’s the narratives that surround sports and athletes that often matter more than the athletics. Ali vs. Foreman isn’t great simply because they were great boxers but because more importantly it is a great story.

20. @Mike: It really is. The most famous line probably is “Gods do not answer letters” but perhaps my favorite is the last one: “So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.”

21. That Updike article is mesmerizing!

    Baseball is the eternal summer of our youth, and that’s why we love it.

22. Classic EC Comics baseball horror story.

23. Oneiros: 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.

    k_choll: 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 really enjoyed Twelve Kings as well.

    Of Sand and Malice Made is actually a novel for classification purposes; I peg it at about 57,000 words. I quite enjoyed it, too.

24. After John Fogerty left Creedence Clearwater Revival, he had a pretty rollicking baseball song called “Centerfield.”

    Also, nobody’s mentioned that hoary old chestnut “Casey At the Bat”?

    (I’ll get my coat)

25. Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is an excellent novel…

    Wow, it’s been more than 40 years since I read that book!

    Thanks for the reminder–I thought it was a fascinating read.

26. @JJ, k_choll: good to hear some more opinions! I’m still going to read it, given its length it’ll be a good one to start on my next long flight.

27. Actually, I had just been reading an article from The Scrap Book (1906, or 1908: both numbers seem plausible tonight, for some reason) in which the authorship of “Casey at the Bat” is discussed and evidence scrutinized. I’m in the middle of other things, but there were two other persistent claimants to authorship of the famous poem, one of whose names is found in the earliest book printings, and I was wondering just how all that came to be. Google Books has the volume, and it’s an interesting read.

    I also translated the poem once, into one-syllable words (aka Words of One Beat).

28. Kickstarting now: Piracity

    An anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories by writers from Bristol and the Caribbean. With pirates, obviously. Arrr!

    Authors include Karen Lord, Stephanie Saulter, R.S.A. Garcia, Gareth L. Powell, and Jonathan L. Howard.

29. @Kip W

    Martin Gardner, who wrote a little SF, wrote The Annotated Casey at the Bat.

    It includes:

    “Who Wrote ‘Casey at the Bat’?” Harry Thurston Peck. The Scrap Book, Vol. 6, December,1908, pp. 945-54. An important article. It tells in detail the story of George Whitefield D’Vys’ claim that he wrote Casey, refutes it, and establishes Thayer as the true author.
    In spite of this thorough refutation, D’Vys’ false claim lingered on for decades. The New York Times, as late as February 21, 1932, referred to it, prompting Thayer to write from California that “for this [Casey], perhaps the greatest of my sins, I was exclusively to blame.” Thayer refers to Peck’s 1908 article for a true account of the poem’s history.”

    (Gardner also wrote The Annotated Alice, which should be in the library of every Lewis Carroll fan, if only for the chapter on Jabberwocky.)

30. I find it interesting that when someone says they don’t like reading stories that focus on baseball, the immediate reaction from a whole bunch of people is, “Well, you should read A. B, and C!” This is uncomfortably similar to being told, on expressing a dislike for Food X, that “You just haven’t had it made RIGHT yet!”

    Obviously at this point it’s mostly the people who do like reading baseball stories recommending things back and forth to each other. But maybe we could allow the person who made the original comment to know what they do or don’t like, without having to tell them that they’re Doin It Rong?

31. Peck’s article from The Scrap Book.

32. The RHUBARB movie featured Leonard Nimoy in an uncredited role as one of the players on the cat-owned baseball team. I think it may have been his first professional performance.

33. I wasn’t responding to the original post, but chipping in with a baseball story (or two, as it turns out) that I really liked, in order to prove that I’m no ivory-tower snob. No sir, I like to hang out and read one or two baseball stories, perhaps while looking at pictures of beer. My thanks to everyone who has given substance to the mention of The Scrap Book when I was too lazy.

    At this point, I’ll also mention that I was in Damn Yankees in 1976, playing Applegate, and have been singing “The Good Old Days” lately, because I found a song folio from the show that’s easier to handle than the piano score I’ve had for some years. During the show, I would always stand in the wings and “Unh!” along with the “Who’s Got The Pain (When They Do The Mambo)?” number, and learned after the run was over that Sherri, who performed in the song, stood in the wings and sang along with my big solo, which made me very happy.

    Bruce, that may have preceded his role in RADAR MEN FROM THE MOON, which I’m characteristically too lazy to look up. Footage from the serial turns up in Proctor & Bergman’s immortal J-MEN FOREVER: “Hey, aren’t you Leonard Nimoy?” “I’m a space man! From the Moon!”

34. (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.
    

    Up here in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, an area that routinely hosts conventions larger than many recent Worldcons, nobody seems to want a Worldcon. “Minneapolis in ’73” has been a running joke for four decades now.

    So, to answer the question, yeah… we don’t know either. Emily is the president of Minn-STF, the parent organization of Minicon.

35. rob_matic, if you email me at (rot13) pnyylfbhxhcnglnubbqbgpbz I may be able to help you out with something.

36. Josh: Up here in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, an area that routinely hosts conventions larger than many recent Worldcons, nobody seems to want a Worldcon.

    Just because other cons are held there which are larger, it doesn’t mean that they require the same sort of facilities. Someone recently posted (here or somewhere else) that there is a dearth of hotel/convention facilities which would be suitable for the Hugo Awards ceremony, and that the hotels are spread out, making the usual Worldcon party arrangements difficult.

    (can anyone point to where I read this?)

37. @ULTRAGOTHA: Thanks for the news. “Penric and the Shaman” left my socks firmly in place on my feet, but it was enjoyable enough, and I remain enough of an LMB fan to purchase anything she puts out.

    @Lee: I’ll be happy to tell you more about Tetsuo (the character in #14) if you’re interested.

    Oh, and has everyone seen Matt Harding’s new dancing-around-the-world video?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBJi0jZR7oQ
    I just watched it, and re-watched the one from 2012, which was better than I rememebered it being. Neither has the “shock of the new” that the one from 2008 did, but there’s no recapturing that.

38. With regard to the discussion about cats in SFF, Ellen Datlow’s anthology Tails of Wonder and Imagination, which contains 40 stories about cats from the last thirty years of science fiction and fantasy stories, is on sale right now for $1.99 on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Google, and Apple.

    The Table of Contents is a veritable Who’s Who of SFF authors.

39. Josh: Just goes to show how long I’ve been in fandom, back to when the Minneapolis in ’73 committee was actually trying to win their bid. They liked throwing parties, so when they gratefully dodged the bullet by losing to Toronto, they kept on safely bidding for a decided year, establishing one of fandom’s great traditions.

40. Richard Greenberg’s play “Take Me Out” has a lovely speech on why baseball is cool. I don’t have the script so I don’t have the whole thing, but I found part of it online. The character who says it is an accountant named Mason, played by Denis O’Hare on Broadway, who didn’t get the appeal of baseball until he got a particular client and then he started watching the client’s games on TV to try to understand it. He likes the numbers part, being an accountant, but he also likes the fact that somebody loses.

    “Baseball is better than democracy — or at least than democracy as it’s practiced in this country — because unlike democracy, baseball acknowledges loss. While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says someone will lose. Not only says it — insists upon it! So that baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy evades. Evades and embodies. Democracy is lovely. But baseball’s more mature.”

    (Pause.)

    “Another thing I like is the home-run trot.”

41. Reading: I’m currently about half way through Alastair Reynolds’ Revenger (sadly, only the second full-length novel of his I’ve read) and I’m not sure if it’ll make by ballot, necessarily, but it seems tailored to my interest with almost laser-like focus — far future, incomprehensible relics of past (alien?) civilizations, Treasure Island in space? Yes, please …

42. @ David G.: That video should have a warning for acrophobes. The last scene is… well, for me it’s just awesome, but I can see how some people might get freaked out.

    @ JJ: If Gaiman’s “The Price” is the story I’m thinking of, it’s some of the darkest horror I’ve ever read. And I don’t want to go look it up to see.

43. Lee: If Gaiman’s “The Price” is the story I’m thinking of, it’s some of the darkest horror I’ve ever read. And I don’t want to go look it up to see.

    Well, it is an Ellen Datlow anthology. 😉

44. Greg, I think using out of copyright illos for one’s self published stories is a great idea. They also removed the distinctly non-Wealdean steam ship. 😉

    I’m looking forward to this one as well. I’m enjoying Penric and Desdemona considerably.

    Oh, GO CUBS! Just to keep my oar in with everything else.

45. @Nancy L: per recent discussion, a number of us have read Borderline. I’ve had it past here with obliviously bent people, but reading someone who knew they were bent and was learning to work around it (and around people who would take advantage) was fascinating, even if the storytelling craft was not all there yet; I’m planning to read the second when it comes out.

    Bonnie McD: I \love/ that song! I was a last-string infielder at a school where everyone had to do either baseball or track in the spring, and have paid little attention since then (mostly to move my commute away from home games), but the cheerful enthusiasm is infectious. OTOH, I’ve sung in a “cantata” built around “Casey”; it was AWFUL.

    @Lee: nobody is saying Cora is “doing it wrong”. However, a number of us have pointed to excellent work that involves baseball, that a person willing to ask a question (instead of slagging off the idea) might consider reading.

46. @Shao Ping:
    Come, my friends,
    ‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
    Push off, and sitting well in order smite
    The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
    To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
    Of all the western stars, until I die.
    It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
    It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
    And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
    Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
    We are not now that strength which in old days
    Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
    One equal temper of heroic hearts,
    Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

47. I find it interesting that when someone says they don’t like reading stories that focus on baseball, the immediate reaction from a whole bunch of people is, “Well, you should read A. B, and C!”

    In this case, however, the original poster did not say that they don’t like reading stories about baseball, but that they’d never read one that managed to make baseball interesting to them.

    That’s kind of a red flag (checkered flag?) to just about any community of readers who likes recommending things.

    This is uncomfortably similar to being told, on expressing a dislike for Food X, that “You just haven’t had it made RIGHT yet!”

    No, it’s more like, on saying that you’ve never tasted Food X in a manner that you thought was well done, people suggesting ways it could be well done.

    If the OP actually meant “I don’t want to read baseball stories”…well, I expect people would be recommending good baseball stories to each other anyway. I expect if someone said they never read a book they liked about bees, we’d be seeing bee fiction discussed, whether that someone was looking for suggestions or not.

    This on top of “I don’t know why people cook Food X in Location, no one else cares,” which suggests the question “Why do people in Location cook Food X?”

    It’s all in the phrasing. If you don’t want to hear about Food X, don’t dramatically state that you have a knowledge deficiency about it, or people will try to address your lack.

48. Not only does baseball acknowledge loss, it revels in it. A great hitter fails to get to 1st 60% of the time.

    The very best teams still lose a third of their games (and the worst win a third — it’s that middle third that decides everything).

49. Oh dear, I dared to mildly insult the great American institution of baseball. I also think a lot of people in the US underestimate how ridiculous the rest of the world finds it that the US refers to what is the North American baseball league (i.e. US teams and a handful of Canadian ones) as the World Series, because it’s not. People are allowed to enjoy whatever sport they enjoy, but calling a regional championship the World Series is rather myopic.

    Coincidentally, I recently learned from a colleague married to an American that there apparently is a North German junior baseball league. Never knew about this, though it’s good for kids who like to play baseball.

    Anyway, apparently the very things that make baseball even more boring for me than other sports (and I’m not a big sports person at all), namely that it’s slow and doesn’t take place in a set time frame, are the very things that are features for many. The con analogy makes sense, though.

    Personally, I think the best things about football – soccer to Americans – is that it ends after 90 minutes, 120 minutes if it’s a playoff game and there’s overtime, and that there’s always something going on on the field, even if it’s just people running around. It’s also democratic (not saying that baseball isn’t) – in the stands you find people from all walks of life and a university professor might well end up next to a steelworker and a wealthy widow wearing her team scarf over designer clothes may well end up next to an immigrant woman wearing a hijab in the team colours.

    Anyway, a lot of these posts actually exemplified my issues with Americans writing about baseball. Because baseball is inevitably used as a metaphor for the meaning of life, the nature of the US, etc… Whereas it’s really just people hitting a ball with a stick. Coincidentally, while I’m a big fan of Michael Chabon, Summerland is the one book of his I passed on.

    And using baseball as a metaphor is endemic to writing about baseball, whereas writing about other sports, most of which I don’t care about either, doesn’t do that. Okay, so Ian Fleming goes on a bit too much about golf in Goldfinger (and golf is the designated “old people with too much money” sport here in Germany and I care about it as little as I care about baseball), but he never tries to turn golf into anything other than it is. Ditto for writers about any other sport.

    I don’t mind mainstream writing about baseball – as long as it’s clearly labelled. Most baseball in SF, meanwhile, is quite silly (unless it’s near future or retro SF), because while I suspect most of popular sports today won’t survive a couple of hundred years into the future, baseball has a lower chance than most, because it’s appeal is very regional, limited mainly to the US and a handful of countries strongly influenced by the US. Football (requires only a ball, some players, a free space and something to designate a goal) and basketball (ditto, though you also need a basket) have a much higher chance of surviving. And most likely, far future sports won’t look very much like ours. Coincidentally, I actually like the pod-racing sequence in The Phantom Menace, because it mixes tropes and visuals from contemporary formula 1 racing and ideas taken from the chariot race in Ben Hur and somehow adapt them to a completely different world. The original Battlestar Galactica also featured a vaguely basketball influenced game in some episodes. And of couse, there’s always Rollerball, which again is influenced by contemporary sports, including roller derby which is probably even more American than baseball, and yet very different.

    As for referring to specific teams still existing in the far future, sorry, but that’s just wish fulfillment. The Cubs or whoever winning the galactic baseball championship is just as silly as me writing that Werder Bremen just won the galactic cup – Green white forever.

    And since everybody is recommending baseball books, here are a few good ones about football a.k.a. soccer. Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby was pretty good and written before Hornby went off the deep end or rather before I realised that I wasn’t supposed to sympathise with his geeky male protagonists (who were always so relatable, even if their obsessions weren’t mine), but with their boring girlfriends. The Damned United by David Peace is also excellent. My old creative writing professor and mentor Ian Watson (not the SF author) has also done a lot of football writing, but that was published by regional small presses and is therefore difficult to get hold of.

50. Paul, thanks for the pointer to the interview.

    If anyone remembers where previous discussion of Borderline was, I’d appreciate a pointer. A fast search didn’t turn it up.

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