(1) The UCLA Library’s Special Collections include the Gene Roddenberry Star Trek collection and the Robert Justman Papers.
A year ago the Special Collections’ blog posted Justman’s memo to Roddenberry about some wigs and hairpieces that had gone missing. The Captain of the Starship Enterprise was the prime suspect.
Back in the day Shatner’s denials about wearing a toupee were news, but people long ago quit keeping his secret.
That anger spilled out in 1967 when the prestigious Life magazine sent a photographer to the Star Trek set – not to profile Shatner but Nimoy, who was being photographed having his pointy Vulcan ears put on in the make-up room.
James Doohan recalled in his memoir: “Bill’s hairpiece was being applied. The top of his head was a lot of skin and a few odd tufts of hair. The mirrors on the make-up room walls were arranged so that we could all see the laying on of his rug.”
Shatner suddenly exploded angrily from his seat and ordered the photographer to leave. George Takei, aged 70, who played Sulu, recalls: “Leonard was livid. He refused to have his make-up completed until the photographer was allowed back.”
(2) In celebration of Star Trek’s 50th anniversary in 2016, publisher Simon & Schuster is bringing back the popular fan fiction writing contest, Strange New Worlds.
Ten winning selections will be published as part of an all-new official anthology, coming from Simon & Schuster in 2016.
Plus, two first prize winners will receive a free, self-publishing package from Archway Publishing!
Register for the contest here.
(3) “CBS Pulls ‘Supergirl’ Episode Due To Similarities To Paris Attack” reports ScienceFiction.com.
Out of respect for the events that happened in Paris last Friday, CBS has decided to delay the episode of ‘Supergirl’ set to air tonight, titled ‘How Does She Do It?’ Apparently the episode revolved around Supergirl dealing with a series of bombings around National City, which the network felt might be a little to similar to the tragic events that struck Paris. With all of the heartbreak and discord currently enveloping that poor city, it makes perfect sense why the network would delay the episode, especially when shows like ‘Supergirl’ should serve as an escape for people from the real world, not a twisted reflection of current tragedies.
(4) “J.K. Rowling Said THIS Is Her Favorite Harry Potter Theory” – the theoretical tweets are posted on PopSugar.
The first Harry Potter book came out 18 years ago, but not a day goes by where new theories and plot coincidences don’t shock us all (and make us want to reread the entire series). J.K. Rowling keeps up with them too and she recently answered a fan’s question about which is her favorite.
(5) This year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special will be shown in North American cinemas on December 28 and 29. Get tickets through Fathom Events
The Doctor is back on the big screen this holiday season for a special two-night event featuring an exclusive interview with Alex Kingston and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the special featuring Peter Capaldi, Stephen Moffat and more….
It’s Christmas in the future and the TARDIS is parked on a snowy village street, covered in icicles, awaiting its next adventure. Time traveler River Song meets her husband’s new incarnation, in the form of Peter Capaldi, for the first time! Don’t miss this unique opportunity to celebrate the holidays with fellow Whovians in cinemas this December.
(6) It seems you can’t guarantee a win by betting on Albert Einstein after all. IFL Science brings word that an “Experiment Proves Einstein Wrong”.
Scientists at the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) have proven beyond reasonable doubt that Einstein was wrong about one of the main principles of quantum mechanics and that “spooky action at a distance” is actually real.
We are now certain that entanglement, the ability of particles to affect each other regardless of distance, exists and that it’s an intrinsic property of the universe. When a pair or a group of particles are entangled, they cannot be described independently from each other. Measuring a particular property, like velocity, of a single particle affects all the other entangled particles.
Einstein and many other scientists believed that this phenomenon was paradoxical, as it would allow for information to be exchanged instantaneously across vast distances. He dubbed it “spooky action at a distance” and he believed that there was a way to reproduce this phenomenon with classical physics. He claimed that there were hidden variables – quantities that we didn’t or couldn’t know – that would make quantum mechanics perfectly predictable.
(7) Mark Lawrence seeks feedback on what really creates a sense of diversity in fiction.
JK Rowling told the world after the event that Dumbledore is gay. There was no need to mention it in the books – it didn’t come up. So … after reading seven books with gay Dumbledore and no mention of it … do gay people feel represented?
If Tolkien rose from the grave for 60 seconds to mention that, by the way, Gandalf is black … would that be delivering diversity?
Or does diversity mean seeing black people’s experience (in itself a vastly diverse thing) represented in fantasy – and the fantasy world needs real-world racism imported so the reader sees that particular aspect of black people’s experience?
In my trilogy, The Red Queen’s War, the main character is of mixed race. It’s not mentioned very often – though he does meet someone in the frozen north who mocks and intimidates him over his ‘dirty’ skin. In the trilogy I’m writing at the moment, Red Sister, the world is reduced to an equatorial corridor hemmed in by advancing ice. All races are mixed and have been for thousands of years. There are many skin tones and it’s of no more note or interest than hair and eye colour. Does a person of colour reading that feel represented – or does the failure to connect with the prejudice of the real world mean that they don’t feel represented?
I don’t know. I’m asking.
I’m not writing these books to promote diversity or represent anyone – the worlds and characters are just the way they are – just how the pieces of my imagination and logic meshed together on these particular occasions. But the question interests me.
(8) Congratulations to Jonathan Edelstein on his first professional story publication, “First Do No Harm”, at Strange Horizons.
For twenty-seven thousand years—through kingdoms and republics, through prophets and messiahs, through decay and collapse and rebirth—the city and the medical school had grown around each other. The campus stretched across districts and neighborhoods, spanning parks and rivers, but few buildings belonged to it alone: an operating theater might once have been a workshop, a classroom a factory floor. The basement room where Mutende sat in a circle of his fellow basambilila was an ancient one and had been many things: office, boiler room, refrigerator, storage for diagnostic equipment. Remnants of all its uses were in the walls, the fixtures, and most of all, in memory….
(9) At The 48th Sitges – International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, The Invitation, directed by Karyn Kusama, picked up the Award for Best Feature Film in the Sitges 2015 Official Fantàstic Selection. The winners of the festival’s other awards can be found here.
(10) MousePlanet has the details about what’s going on with Star Wars at Disneyland – a long article with lots of photos — but SPOILER WARNING.
If you don’t want to know anything about Star Wars – The Force Awakens before you see it in the theater, you should probably skip this update too. Before you go, heed this warning: If you wish to remain spoiler-free until December 18th, don’t go into the Star Wars Launch Bay, don’t see the Path of the Jedi feature in the Tomorrowland Theater, and don’t ride Star Tours. Hyperspace Mountain is spoiler-free, and a complete blast – you can enjoy that worry free, and see the rest of the additions in a month….
Star Wars Launch Bay
The lower level of the former Innoventions building – now officially known as the Tomorrowland Expo Center – is now the Star Wars Launch Bay. From the moment you step inside, you enter a spoiler-filled space packed with artwork, props and merchandise from across the Star Wars saga, including from the upcoming movie Star Wars – The Force Awakens. The Launch Bay is divided into six sections, with some smaller areas around the outer ring of the building.
Entrance and Gallery
The largest portion of the Launch Bay is devoted to case after case of props and replicas from the Star Wars Saga, including previews of people, places and things from Star Wars – The Force Awakens. Again, if you’re trying to avoid spoilers, you have no business in this exhibit.
The Light Side (Chewbacca meet-and-greet)
Enter a rebel hideout, and come face-to-face with the best co-pilot in the galaxy. To occupy you while you wait in what could be a very long line, the queue is filled with props from the Light Side, including lightsabers and helmets.
The Dark Side (Darth Vader meet-and-greet)
Like the Light Side, the queue for the Darth Vader meet-and-greet is filled with Sith props. Lord Vader isn’t much one for conversation, but he does have some prepared remarks for your encounter on the deck of a Star Destroyer. Disney PhotoPass photographers are on hand to document your meeting.
Star Wars Landing Bay carpet.
(11) Norbert Schürer discusses “Tolkien Criticism Today” in LA Review of Books. It takes awhile, but he finally finds something good to say.
It is perhaps no wonder, then, that the field of Tolkien studies is in a sad state. This is not to say that there aren’t excellent critics (such as Tom Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, and Jane Chance) and outstanding scholarly venues (particularly the venerable journal Mythlore and the more recent annual Tolkien Studies). However, judging by seven recent works of Tolkien scholarship, there are various challenges in the field. Much criticism features weak, underdeveloped arguments or poor writing, and the field is overrun by niche publishers who seem to have little quality control…..
With the Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien: The Forest and the City (in parts), the future of Tolkien studies is perhaps not entirely bleak. The Companion in particular is a volume from a well-established publisher, which actually gives Tolkien academic cachet by including him in their Companion series. The essays in this volume and in Tolkien: The Forest and the City make well-developed, well-written, comprehensive, and compelling arguments. Thus, these books show the two requirements for good Tolkien criticism. For one, he should be treated like any other author in being discussed in seriously peer-reviewed journals and established academic presses rather than in essay collections and niche publications. Just as importantly, Tolkien should not be treated with kid gloves because he is a fan favorite with legions to be placated, but as the serious and major author he is.
(12) Jennifer M. Wood discusses “11 Famous Books That Have Proven Impossible to Film” at Mental Floss.
6. UBIK
Believe it or not, there is a Philip K. Dick novel that has yet to be made into a movie. Which isn’t to say that an adaptation of this 1969 sci-fi tale of telepathy and moon colonization (set in the then-futuristic year of 1992) hasn’t been tried. As early as 1974, filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin commissioned Dick to adapt his own work for filming. Dick finished the script in less than a month; though it was never produced, it was published in 1985 as Ubik: The Screenplay. In 2006, A Scanner Darkly producer Tommy Pallotta announced that he was readying the film for production. In 2011, it was Michel Gondry who was confirmed to be at the helm … until earlier this year, when Gondry told The Playlist that he was no longer working on it.
(13) Farnam Street Blog’s “Accidents Will Happen” is an excerpt from Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, by Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, 2001), about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal.
A B-47 bomber was taxiing down the runway at a SAC base in Sidi Slimane, Morocco, on January 31, 1958. The plane was on ground alert, practicing runway maneuvers, cocked but forbidden to take off. It carried a single Mark 36 bomb. To make the drill feel as realistic as possible, a nuclear core had been placed in the bomb’s in-flight insertion mechanism. When the B-47 reached a speed of about 20 miles an hour, one of the rear tires blew out. A fire started in the wheel well and quickly spread to the fuselage. The crew escaped without injury, but the plane split in two, completely engulfed in flames. Firefighters sprayed the burning wreckage for 10 minutes—long past the time factor of the Mark 36—then withdrew. The flames reached the bomb, and the commanding general at Sidi Slimane ordered that the base be evacuated immediately. Cars full of airmen and their families sped into the Moroccan desert, fearing a nuclear disaster.
The fire lasted for two and a half hours. The high explosives in the Mark 36 burned but didn’t detonate. According to an accident report, the hydrogen bomb and parts of the B-47 bomber melted into “a slab of slag material weighing approximately 8,000 pounds, approximately 6 to 8 feet wide and 12 to 15 feet in length with a thickness of 10 to 12 inches.” A jackhammer was used to break the slag into smaller pieces. The “particularly ‘hot’ pieces” were sealed in cans, and the rest of the radioactive slag was buried next to the runway. Sidi Slimane lacked the proper equipment to measure levels of contamination, and a number of airmen got plutonium dust on their shoes, spreading it not just to their car but also to another air base.
(14) Tomorrow you can download Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Stories Inspired by Microsoft —
— an anthology of short stories written by some of today’s greatest science fiction authors. These visionary stories explore prediction science, quantum computing, real-time translation, machine learning, and much more. The contributing authors were inspired by inside access to leading-edge work, including in-person visits to Microsoft’s research labs, to craft new works that predict the near-future of technology and examine its complex relationship to our core humanity.
AUTHOR ROLL CALL
Elizabeth Bear · Greg Bear · David Brin · Nancy Kress · Ann Leckie · Jack McDevitt · Seanan McGuire · Robert J. Sawyer The collection also includes a short graphic novel by Blue Delliquanti and Michele Rosenthal, and original illustrations by Joey Camacho.
(15) Abigail Nussbaum has “Five Comments on Hamilton”.
If you’re like me, you probably spent some portion of the last six months watching your online acquaintance slowly become consumed with (or by) something called Hamilton. And then when you looked it up it turned to be a musical playing halfway around the world that you will probably never see. But something strange and surprising is happening around Hamilton–a race-swapped, hip-hop musical about the short life and dramatic death of Alexander Hamilton, revolutionary soldier, founding father of the United States, co-author of The Federalist Papers, and creator of the US financial system. Unusually for a work of pop culture that is only available to a small, even select group of people, Hamilton is becoming a fannish phenomenon, inspiring fanfic and fanart and, mostly, a hell of a lot of enthusiasm….
(16) Local Three Stooges fans will convene November 28 at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. The 18th Annual Alex Film Society The Three Stooges Big Screen Event “showcases six classic Stooges shorts featuring Moe, Larry, Curly and Shemp preparing, throwing and wearing food. Will high society matrons be hit in the face with cream pies? Soitenly!”
On the bill of fare — A Pain In The Pullman (1936, Preston Black), Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb (1938, Del Lord), Idiots Deluxe (1945, Jules White), Crash Goes The Hash (1944, Jules White), Sing A Song Of Six Pants (1947, Jules White), Dutiful But Dumb (1941, Del Lord).
(17) SF Site News announced this year’s ISFiC Writer’s Contest winner:
M. Aruguete won the ISFiC Writer’s Contest with her story “Catamount.” The contest is sponsored by ISFiC in conjunction with Windycon. Aruguete won a membership at Windycon, room nights, and $300. Her story was published in the con program book. This year’s contest was judged by Richard Chwedyk, Roland Green, and Elizabeth Anne Hull.
(18) Jeff Somers, in a guest post for SF Signal, argues that his stories with psionics should stay on the sf shelf at the bookstore.
As the TV Tropes page on psychic powers says, “Telepathy, clairvoyance, pyrokinesis—the powers are supernatural, but the names are scientific, which is good enough for soft Sci-Fi.” This sort of disdain is the top layer of a debate that’s been raging for decades about whether or not a story can have psychic powers and still be considered Science Fiction as opposed to Fantasy. The argument is simple: There is absolutely no evidence that supports psychic powers of any kind being possible, and without at least the real-world scientific possibility, they’re essentially magic powers. Which makes your story a Fantasy, thanks for playing, you might as well shove a bearded wizard in there and start reading Wikipedia articles about broadswords.
Anyway, I started thinking about all this recently because I’ve been writing and publishing digital-only short stories set in the Avery Cates universe, and in that universe (from the very beginning) there are psionic (er, psychic) powers…
(19) Mindy Klasky points out the varied uses of feedback, in “C is for Critique” at Book View Café.
Critique partners offer authors valuable insight into what works and what does not work in a book. Sometimes, that criticism is directly on point—the mere statement of the problem is enough to help an author see what needs to be fixed. Other times, an author concludes that a critic is mistaken—she doesn’t understand the book, or she isn’t familiar with a particular sub-genre, or she was having a bad day as she wrote her criticism. Even in those cases, the rational writer considers the criticism as a warning that the reader was pulled off track at that particular point. Often, a critic finds fault with a particular aspect of a book (e.g., “your heroine sounds whiny when she talks to her best friend”) but an author discovers a completely different fix (e.g., the heroine shouldn’t be talking to her best friend in that scene; instead, she should be taking steps to solve her problem more directly.) Critics aren’t omniscient, but they can be good barometers of when a story succeeds.
(20) Kameron Hurley says this is “Why You Should Be Watching The Man in The High Castle“:
I’m not sure when I realized that this wasn’t a story about the Nazis and Japanese Empire laying waste to the happy United States we have in our happy memories. I think it was when the Japanese Empire raids a Jewish man’s house, seemingly for no reason, and I realized it looked a lot like a swatting raid, or a raid on some innocent brown man with an Arab-sounding name, or the FBI raid on an innocent professor accused of sending sensitive material to the Chinese. And in that moment I realized the entire world I’d been presented thus in the show far wasn’t so much different from the United States in 2015, and that in fact the show was very much aware of that. If you’re brown, or black, or Muslim, or have a non-white sounding name, or you look at a TSA agent funny, or say something about supporting terrorism online (threatening to murder a woman is still OK! But I digress), get ready to get raided, detained, tortured, thrown into prison, or disappeared. I thought about our creepy no-fly lists, about police throwing students to the floor in classrooms, about minor traffic violations that end with somebody strangling you to death in prison and pretending you totally hung yourself with a plastic bag. I thought of this whole world we’ve built, post-World War II, and realized this show wasn’t saying, “Wouldn’t things be so different?” but instead, “Are things really as different as we think?”
(21) Move and groove like everyone’s favorite kaiju with Logemas Godzilla Simulator.
There’s something big coming this way… Logemas’ latest Motion Capture and VR demo!
We’re tracking 7 objects, hands, feet, hips, chest and an Oculus DK2 with Vicon Bonita cameras and streaming into the Unreal game engine for some mayhem!
Of course, we all want to know where they attach the tail-motion-generator.
[Thanks to Petréa Mitchell, Meredith, Will R., Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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Anna:
City of Blades (I keep thinking it’s Swords, too) isn’t until January 26, even in the US. Whimper.
I’m on it, after I finish Watchmaker, which is great thus far, and I’d be zipping through it if it weren’t for life being so damn life-like. But I have to read the first one first, and I’m very slow compared to other fen.
Mark:
You have optimism left after Prometheus?
(Prometeu, in Portuguese, is a homonym for (he) promissed, and we usually follow it up with “and didn’t deliver”.)
Congrats, Jonathan Edelstein!
So, here’s something that’s not quite a random observation, but it was too odd not to share here. I did the calculation for another forum, and had to check it twice because of how it fell into place.
Remember that second-grade class George W. Bush was reading to on 9/11 at the time of the second impact? If those kids followed the traditional U.S. educational path – no skipped or repeated grades, no “year off” before college, and a four-year degree program with no complications – they will receive their bachelor’s degrees this coming spring.
Does anyone else feel ancient now?
Amazon Canada also has Future Visions available for free. That’s an impressive list of authors.
Yep I read Europe In Autumn last year and was surprised there wasn’t a lot more buzz about it. It was one of my Hugo nominations last year. I wasn’t so blown away by Midnight although it was still good, it is a very different type of book though.
Mark Lawrence (and most of the comments at his site) seem to be missing the point about diversity in SF (and why we need diverse writers, too, for that matter).
It’s not enough to put brown skin on a character, or the label of gay on a character, or the label of Asian on a character. It’s not the skin or label that makes the character worth writing about; if you’re just going to do that, then yes, don’t bother.
Lawrence should read Zen Cho or Daniel Jose Older or Sabrina Vourvoulias, if he wants a look at how diversity in fiction actually works. Or Rachael Swiskey’s Grand Jete. That was also nice work.
This is basically an argument against desiring greater representation in fiction, isn’t it?
What does “diversity” mean, exactly, in a SFF context? It’s a term often used, but seldom defined. For instance:
1) If an author’s panel is made up 50/50 of women and men, but they are all white, does the panel pass the diversity test?
2) Must each book by each writer have a racially diverse cast? Does this apply to Chinese writers? How about a Chinese-American writer : do they need major white and/or African American characters in order to pass the diversity test?
3) What categories get on the diversity checklist? Is religion included? For instance, does having a Muslim character count as diversity? Would having an all atheist cast fail a diversity test?
I guess what I’m asking is, does the diversity test apply to the field as a whole — that is, as long as there are women writers, gay and lesbian writers, and writers of color being published and winning awards, the SFF field is sufficiently diverse? Or does it apply to each individual writer? And if applies to each individual writer, does it apply only to their ouevre as a whole, or must it apply to each individual novel?
Rev. Bob – I’ve spent the past decade working with undergraduates. THEY JUST KEEP GETTING YOUNGER.
Re: Mark Lawrence – he’s interested in a conversation, but he’s going to keep writing characters “just the way they are”? Why on earth would I take the time and energy to do homework for him that he isn’t even going to use?
This is basically an argument against desiring greater representation in fiction, isn’t it?
I think it is more of an argument against having a white guy in a black guy suit being your attempt at diversity.
JJ asks:
Monthly! Next question?
Can we only imagine far future or fantasy worlds where characters with different coloured skin are fundamentally different?
Sorry for the delay in responding.
JJ said:
1. This actually turns out to be the easy part: the hard part is making sure they’re not entangled with anything else, or in other ways than you’d like. The NIST experiment takes a bright laser beam and splits (with very low likelihood) photons from that beam into two lower-energy photons, which are created at the same time with known properties. There’s about a half-dozen ways you can then entangle the photons’ polarization, but the trick is always the same: you set things up so that you know that they are at right angles to each other, but you don’t know the angle of either one.
2. The particles are photons, particles of light, so they move plenty quick. If you set things up right, they’re created different enough that getting them apart is pretty easy. (You can also set things up so that getting them apart is impossible, for other kinds of experiments.)
3. This is the whole point of the experiment–there’s some math (from the 60s) that shows that if you get correlations between particles that are stronger than a certain amount then those particles are entangled. If you want local realism–like Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen did–then things that are far apart can’t be entangled.
The correlation in question I mentioned above, but it’s actually really simple. You choose an angle for a measurement the polarisation of the photon on one end of the experiment, and you get either ‘yes, it’s that angle’ or ‘no, it’s the other angle’. You do the same thing at the other end, separately. You then compare all the measurement results later, and if they correlate ‘too much’, then you have entanglement.
It turns out that the primary diffuculty with this experiment over the last 10 years or so has been getting the photons from where you make them to where you detect them reliably enough. In order to get enough correlation, you need at least 2/3, and probably something like 80%, of the photons you make to get detected at the far end. A lot of really tedious work (trust me on this one) has been done chasing down 1% of loss here and 2% of loss there…
(Another post coming, but this is plenty long enough. I’m going to bed soon, but I’ll read this in the morning and see if it makes sense. )
Can we only imagine far future or fantasy worlds where characters with different coloured skin are fundamentally different?
If your attempt at diversity is only cosmetic, is it diversity?
Rev Bob: Does anyone else feel ancient now?
That’s fascinating–and yes, but no more ancient than I’ve been feeling generally (turned 60 this month).
And I think the first time I felt REALLY ancient was when I learned that one of my newly hired colleague’s mother was the same age I was. I mean, yeah, OK, my students’ parents being my age–fine, no prob.
But collegues! GULP!
The person whose name I no longer remember who recommended Planetfall: please reimburse me three hours of sleep I missed last night because I could…..not……put…….the……book……(kindle)………DOWN!
I had to keep reading.
It was…..wow.
Brilliant deconstruction of space colony tropes throughout.
The fourth heat of the Fantasy Movie Bracket is on! There have been some very close scores in this bracket so don’t miss your chance – your vote might make all the difference between a favourite staying in or going out!
Re Norbert Schürer: a number of the Tolkien critics who are apparently not worthy of his august attention are grumbling at not only his characterization of the criticism (ignoring a number of books published during the past two years), but also his Harold Bloomian-snark at Tolkien’s work (he TEACHES Tolkien with that attitude? seriously?)?
I posted my rebuttal on my dreamwidth academic journal.
It isn’t only cosmetic to portray in your fiction a secondary world or a far future that is not rooted in early 21st Century notions of privilege.
It isn’t only cosmetic to portray in your fiction a secondary world or a far future that is not rooted in early 21st Century notions of privilege.
No, it is a deeply privileged thing to do.
Junego said:
It means we don’t live in a clockwork universe. Free will can exist without a bunch of complicated nonsense, and the future is fundamentally unpredictable. Cause very much causes effect, but the outcome is probabilistic: there’s some inescapable randomness in there.
At the moment something like time travel is a more serious possibility than an ansible. The problem with faster-than-light communication is that there’s no ‘now’ defined for places that are far away. Two events that are space-like separated can occur in either order, or simultaneously.
That’s kinda tricky. Special relativity is baked into the Quantum that was done here: photons don’t exist without something called ‘second quantisation’, which requires SR, but that’s been true for 80 years. What this result implies is that the particles aren’t ‘cheating’ and sending each other information to demonstrate entanglement: the correlations that “shouldn’t” exist really do.
Cosmology, which is where GR mostly works by itself, is… ugh. Hard to do experiments on. The standard model of cosmology, which includes GR, has needed fixing-up at least once a year for the last 10-15 years. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if a paradigm shift occurred in that field in the next decades.
That being said, the fundamental idea of GR (that gravity and acceleration are the same thing) might survive that. I’d be less confident of the whole dark energy/dark matter thing, which is having trouble.
At medium-ish scales (satellites, etc.), GR works extremely well: as well as QM does on any scale when gravity is negligible.
There’s a thing called the “Information Paradox” that is important in understanding how GR and QM interact, and its resolutions so far are really confusing. The holographic bound, which looks like good science, implies that the surface area, not the volume, of a space describes how much information is contained in it.
Standard quantum physics also has problems in that a lot of numbers appear from nowhere: the Standard Model has a huge number of free parameters that have to be derived from experiment, which makes people sad. It also doesn’t include gravity except as a classical free field, which is a problem if you want to derive classical physics from QM.
I agree that GR is the one more likely to change in a big way, but…
Argh, must get back to grading, but regarding Mark Lawrence’s post:
Can we only imagine far future or fantasy worlds where characters with different coloured skin are fundamentally different?
What do you mean “we,” white man?
Or does diversity mean seeing black people’s experience (in itself a vastly diverse thing) represented in fantasy – and the fantasy world needs real-world racism imported so the reader sees that particular aspect of black people’s experience?
So after a parenthetical note that “black people’s experience” is “vastly diverse,” the only option given is “importing” racism?
*headdesk*
He needs some remedial reading: I would recommend he start with Nalo Hopkinson and N. K. Jemison and Jewelle Gomez and Tobias Buckell and (although more of her work falls onto the sf side of the spectrum of fantastic literature) Octavia Butler.
Then maybe he might stop asking such ridiculously simplistic and binary questions.
Ok, last comment before I go to bed.
The results here are utterly unsurprising. Ever since 1964, this has been predicted, and ever since about 1980 experiments have been getting done. What this does is force the philosophers to care, but not much else. (It’s also good for Krister’s career, so yay for that, he’s a good guy and a good dancer.) The last great hope for determinism was that the previous experiments had flaws in them, and that Something happened at the light cone, but quantum won out in the end.
Hooray for that. I like free will.
Well, that’s a pretty abrupt dismissal of the works of Ursula Le Guin.
@ clack (re: diversity)
Of course diversity is most meaningful within the field as a whole. But for any individual work (or convention panel, or anthology, or …) a useful test is to ask: given the overt setting and premise, is it possible to achieve the specific mix (or lack thereof) that is presented without the action of some unstated dystopic or horrific condition? In this context “dystopic” includes a vast number of real historic conditions that acted to exclude classes of humanity from specific contexts.
So, for example, given the overt setting and premise of Rowling’s Potterverse, is it possible to have a cast of that number and scope without having a single out queer person among the students, professors, parents, incidental characters? That is, is it possible without some completely unspoken level of anti-queer prejudice operating within the wizarding world that is so taken for granted that nobody even notices its action? I pick on this work as an example in part because of the vast scope of the world we’re shown. Not identifying Dumbledore overtly as gay is the least of it. The complete lack of any sort of queer affections displayed among that large a set of students (among which we definitely are shown plenty of heterosexual hormones running amok) implies a deep closet.
So, is the Harry Potter series non-diverse simply because of this one lack? Not necessarily, but that lack is striking once you look for it. In a way, it’s more striking than books/universes with a more homogeneous cast that at least have an underlying premise (however horrific) for that homogeneity.
What Aaron said.
It’s an argument for not assuming that all cultures are 1950s American Suburbia, or that in 2550 we’ll default to 2015 white American culture.
It’s an argument for doing diversity right.
Seriously, when you read the here-I-put-a-guy-with-brown-skin-in-my-story attempts at diversity, and then you read what someone like Zen Cho is doing, the difference will be clear to you.
@Aaron:
The reductio of this is the mistake Chuck Gannon and another panelist were making at Capclave. “If I put a black person into a story set far enough in the future that the early 21st-century ‘black experience’ isn’t relevant, what’s The Point of making them black?” But we’ve known the answer to that since Nichelle Nichols first donned a Starfleet uniform: it shows that black people have a share of the future too.
For example, the “humans” of Banks’ culture novels aren’t even descended from Terrans. But it still matters that Banks describes many of them as having dark skin.
I think you’re referring to me. I’m not sure that my race and gender is any less relevant than yours here.
Well, that’s a pretty abrupt dismissal of the works of Ursula Le Guin.
Except her characters aren’t merely white guys in black suits. They have different experiences based upon their differences. Are you sure you’ve read Le Guin’s work?
I’ve definitely read it and I’m pretty sure that her characters’ experiences aren’t based on our current ideas of racial privilege.
I’m confused. Are we talking about the black woman lawyer in “The Lathe of Heaven”? Because she seemed to be considerably more a black person with black experiences rather than a white woman with brown facepaint.
::Heartily curses all of you::
::adds Planetfall to Mount F770::
Anyways, I’m not entirely sure regarding Mark Lawrence. He tripped my Authors Behaving Badly alarm a few years back when he showed up whining in a critical review’s comment thread (along with his editor!).
(11) in the scroll reminds me of Damon Knight’s excellent definition of sf as work which appeals to the authority of science as justification for its imaginary elements. I love that, because it doesn’t require that the science be good or right or anything, only that the story suggest that things are the way they are because science. (He didn’t use the phrasing “because science”, but I think he’d have liked it.) Psionics are scientific because they’re presented as science, whether in detail or with vague handwaving.
I’ve definitely read it and I’m pretty sure that her characters’ experiences aren’t based on our current ideas of racial privilege.
You may want to try reading them again.
Lightspeed had a “Queers Destroy Science Fiction!” issue this year. I read and reviewed all the stories (even the flash fiction). In all but one story, the gay element was mostly (or entirely) decorative. (The exception was Two By Two, by Tim Susman).
Speaking as a gay man who loves SF, I find that if there is a POV character who has feelings for another guy (whether consummated or not) that adds a lot to the story for me. Doesn’t matter if he faces oppression for it. In fact, I think I’d rather read a future story where being gay isn’t a problem per se. Stories about young men dying from AIDS abandoned by family and friends hurt too much to read.
A non-focus gay character doesn’t add much. I mean, it’s nice to see that the author thought about us, but that’s about it. On the other hand, POV gay characters written by sympathetic straight people can be very entertaining; you tend to make us much nicer than we really are. 😉
I think authors should focus on writing the best stories they can with the characters they have. Building some diversity into the characters (even the non-focus ones) makes sense, because it reflects the world we live in, but above all else, get the story right. If your characters are true to your story, no reasonable person will complain. And the ones who do complain cannot be made happy no matter what you do.
No we’re talking about
so it would be her Hainish books.
@Greg Hullender:
Thank you. Those are good and helpful observations.
Diversity doesn’t have to mean oppression. Who is saying that?
It does have to mean more than look-here’s-someone-who’s-brown/gay, are you happy now?
Slapping on a coat of brown/gay and then writing everything else the same is not enough, IOW.
ETA Lathe of Heaven is a good example, yes.
@ Peace Is My Middle Name:
The first character that came to mind for me was Ged from Earthsea, followed by the Voe Deo characters from Four Ways to Forgiveness. Neither (and certainly not the Voe Deo) precisely maps to the 21st-century African or African-American experience, but culture and race, as the latter is conceived on their respective worlds, play a part in their characterization.
There are times when I don’t want to read a realistic (by today’s standards) depiction of any of the minority groups I belong to; I’d rather read the fluffy bunny utopian version, even if the rest of the story isn’t fluffy bunny utopian. I wouldn’t say that something isn’t diverse because it fulfilled my fluffy bunny utopian desires. There’s room for the realistic depictions as well as the fluffy bunny utopian depictions and I for one would rather have the option of both, because sometimes I want one and sometimes I want the other.
@Heather Rose Jones
I agree that even if the non-POV characters are mostly window dressing, the exclusion of one type does seem to say something. As though you had a world where everyone had blue eyes and blond or red hair. (Red-dwarf star, maybe?)
However, I did read the whole Harry Potter series and never noticed this up until you mentioned it just now. This sort of “background inclusion” is, in my opinion, a “nice to have” but not a “have to have.” It makes a difference, but only a small one.
Okay, can someone give me an example of diversity iz pastede on yay? I’m not sure what people are referring to when they say that depicting a minority in [x] way isn’t diverse?
@delurking
If there is no oppression, then there is no issue with diversity. Diversity is all about overcoming exclusion that has its roots in oppression. People with blue vs. green eyes are different, but no one pushes to make sure books show appropriate numbers of each. People with AB-negative blood are really rare, but they don’t have diversity issues either. Left-handed people experience a few inconveniences, but not enough that they raise diversity issues.
So, yes, diversity does have to imply oppression. Otherwise it’s just decoration.
As someone who has seen the white men bloviating on and on about “diversity” in academia (and as a queer white woman who has experienced the realities of the administration being all….shock…straight white men), I 100% agree with the current criticisms of the word “Diversity” and how white people use it.
Re (18) Jeff Somers, in a guest post for SF Signal, argues that his stories with psionics should stay on the sf shelf at the bookstore.
Except for the auto-kinetic ones, of course 🙂
Peace Is My Middle Name on November 17, 2015 at 7:51 am said:
Genly Ai of Left Hand of Darkness is also black. The lawyer in Lathe of Heaven’s contemporary American experience of blackness is so essential to her character that she doesn’t even exist in the world where everyone is the same shade of gray. But it doesn’t affect Genly Ai’s experiences very much at all. That seems like another important aspect of diversity.
The problem with dismissing “cosmetic” diversity is that it could be read as criticizing a work for having people of diverse backgrounds, experiences, identities, appearance, etc. because people are like that (diverse) and not because these differences serve any particular purpose in the story.
On a World Fantasy Convention discussion of gay and transgendered characters in fiction, an audience member said something like “well, if somebody in a story is gay, I always look for WHY they’re gay” and Grá Linnaea responded with “homosexuality is not an unfired gun.”
Also, what Meredith on November 17, 2015 at 8:13 am said.
@Meredith
Okay, can someone give me an example of diversity iz pastede on yay? I’m not sure what people are referring to when they say that depicting a minority in [x] way isn’t diverse?
I can’t decode “iz pastede on yay” (ROT13 didn’t help). 🙂
There’s more to being gay than whom you’re attracted to. Depending on when you grew up, there’s fear of ostracism, fear of being thrown out by your parents, subjected to conversion “therapy,” losing your job, getting AIDS, going to jail, being accused of molesting children, etc. There might also be dancing, drinking, drugs, parties, and compulsive sex. There might be violence, either from gay bashers or from a partner who goes berserk sixty seconds after his orgasm. And there should be self-hate, at least at some stage. (FYI, my own experience was relatively tame; the nerd gene turns out to be a lot stronger than the gay gene.) 🙂
So if you write a story about a really sweet young gay guy who’s trying to work up the courage to tell a friend that he wants them to be more than friends, and who meets either warm acceptance or gentle refusal, then, one could argue, you’ve entirely failed to capture the gay experience. If it’s set in a future where it’s a total non-issue (other than the fact you can get turned down), then it’s really removed from what most of us experienced.
But, as a former activist, I can tell you that that future world is what we were fighting for, and only a really deranged person would blame you for writing about it.
I cannot speak for activists from the black community, but I’d be stunned if very many of them felt differently. Sure, there’s value in writing about the real pain that real people experience, but this is science fiction we’re talking about!
@Heather Rose Jones:
“The complete lack of any sort of queer affections displayed among that large a set of students (among which we definitely are shown plenty of heterosexual hormones running amok) implies a deep closet.”
According to the British ONS (Office of National Statistics) 1% of women and 1.5% of men are homosexual. In addition, 1% of men and 1.4% of women identify as bisexual.
So, being representative in the Potterverse means that about 1 in 80 of her characters would be gay, lesbian, or bisexual. So, strictly speaking, if Rowling has less than 80 characters, she passes this particular diversity test.
That said, I do get the impression that her whole magic school milieu would have had in a more realistic world more gay, lesbian, and bisexual people than that national average, just as in my university milieu, gay people are over-represented.
Well, for some reason this conversation inspires me to note that the countdown to Black Friday on Amazon UK has Mercedes Lackey’s most recent Valdemar novel on sale for 99p, which seems like a good deal since it was only published in October.
For those of you who are following the Mystery Science Theater 3000 revival, there was some big news yesterday:
1) Jonah Ray of the Nerdist podcast is officially being tapped as the new host. (According to Entertainment Weekly, Baron Vaughn and Hampton Yount are being tapped as the new bots, and Felicia Day(!) is going to be the new mad scientist carrying on the legacy of Dr. Clayton Forrester, but this has not yet been confirmed by Joel.)
2) The Kickstarter officially funded last night at around 7:30, so we are guaranteed at least three episodes of the new series! They have stretch goals out to twelve episodes, though, so further donations are still very important to MiSTies.