(1) Star Wars is causing a great disturbance in the toy aisles:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and other retailers have loaded up on plastic lightsabers, robotic Yodas and other toys tied to the coming movie, crowding out shelf space and inventory dollars elsewhere in the toy section. The big bets are pushing orders for toy makers, such as Mattel Inc., closer to the holidays and squeezing some smaller competitors in the $22 billion U.S. toy industry.
One property hit hard: “Peanuts.”
Iconix Brand Group Inc., which controls the license to the newest animated Charlie Brown movie, this month cut its sales outlook from “Peanuts” licenses by $24 million for the year largely because it miscalculated how many Snoopy dolls and other “Peanuts” products retailers would buy.
(2) Sean Wallace advised on Facebook:
Authors: always make sure that a year’s best allowance is in your short story contracts. If you need to see an example of what I mean, Tor.com’s contracts are pretty good on this score: “The Author will not, without written permission from the Publisher, publish or permit publication of the Work or any material based upon the Work in any form or medium until one year after the date of first publication of the Work by the Publisher. Anthologies of the year’s best science fiction or fantasy shall be exempted from the one-year restriction set forth in this paragraph.”
(3) Aliette de Bodard’s guest post on Over The Effing Rainbow deals with “Science-fiction, fantasy, and all the things in between”.
I used to be quite rigid about genre separation: in particular, though I read both fantasy and science fiction, I wasn’t very keen on “merging” them together. In recent years, I’ve found myself being more and more elastic with my definition of genre, and in particular with my definition of “science fiction”.
Partly, it’s because expectations are such a double-edged sword: they are a helpful guide, but like any guide, they can become a cage. It’s very easy–and a very slippery slope–to go from “readers expect this” to “I shouldn’t deviate from this”. Much as I like being aware of what is done and why, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the (over)splitting into genres and subgenres: I found that tropes, used too many times and without the infusion of freshness from an outside source, calcified into books that were…. ok, but not good, or not great. Books that I read to pass the time (and there’s nothing wrong with that!), but that I felt were missing something. Part of the reason why I read is to find new things, new ideas; and I wasn’t finding that in books that adhered too rigidly to expectations. Ie, a little rulebreaking from time to time never hurt anyone! (also, if you’re going to break a rule, break it good and hard. My personal motto *grin*)
The second thing that made me uncomfortable was becoming aware of the way “science fiction” was used to elevate certain works, and dismiss others altogether…
(4) Walter Jon Williams says Taos Toolbox must move its location, but is still on for 2016.
Yes, there will be a Taos Toolbox next year! I’ve had to delay the announcement due to our losing our lodging, and to the fact that there will be massive construction in the Ski Valley next year.
The master class for writers of science fiction and fantasy will be held July 17-30, 2016, at Angel Fire, NM, just a short distance from Taos.
Teaching will be Nancy Kress, Walter Jon Williams, indiepub guru Emily Mah Tippetts, and James S.A. Corey, author of The Expanse.
(5) When his bike was stolen and he was without transportation to his two jobs many miles from home, conrunner Adam Beaton turned to GoFundMe.
That’s why the money will be used for a scooter. I don’t need anything fancy, and I’m not looking for a car because I’d rather not have another bill for insurance on my plate right now. A simple scooter doesn’t require a motorcycle license and also doesn’t require insurance. It’s also far less expensive than buying a car, even a used one, which is why I’ve tried to keep the target goal as low as possible. Honestly I just need simple transportation that I can use to get me to-and-from work so I can continue being a productive member of society and not lose my jobs.
The community came through with the $600 he needed.
Wow. In less than two days, the goal was made. I’m very blessed to have such great friends and family. Especially some of you who I know are also facing some difficult times and still helped me out anyway. Thank you, thank you, thank you. If you’d still like to contribute, it’ll definitely help in getting a scooter that’s say, a bit less used.
(6) Today In History
- November 17, 2008 – Twilight, the movie that launched a global teenage vampire romance phenomenon, premiered in Los Angeles.
(7) “New LEGO Slippers Will Spare Parents The Unique Pain They Know All Too Well” says Huffington Post.
Now the LEGO brand has teamed up with French advertising agency Brand Station to create some slippers with extra padding that will protect parents from this tortuous sensation.
(8) Another inventor has come up with the “Prosthetic Tentacle”.
A student designer has created a prosthetic tentacle as an alternative to artificial human limbs,
Kaylene Kau from Taipei made the remarkable invention as part of a design school project.
The limb would be able to grip many different objects by curling up with the help of a simple motor.
It’s actually a pretty simple invention. The controls on the limb tell the motor to curl or uncurl, and there is no ‘hardwire’ link to the nervous system, as seen in some of the most advanced robotic or artificial limbs in development.
(9) Daniel Dern sends links to the SF-themed comic strips he’s seen so far this week.
(10) Famous Monsters #283 sports a Star Wars-themed “variant newsstand cover” by artist Rob Prior. The issue includes interviews with Mark Hamill on Star Wars, Greg Nicotero on The Walking Dead, and Sam J. Jones on Flash Gordon.
(11) “Yorick: A Unique Life-Size Skull Carved From a Crystallized Gibeon Meteorite” at Junk Culture:
A rare and singular combination of natural history and modern art, Lee Downey’s “Yorick.” is a life-size skull carved from a large Gibeon meteorite that crashed in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia a thousand years ago. An artist who is known for selecting exotic materials with which to work, Downey acid-etched the carving to uncover the Gibeon meteorite’s singular, lattice-like pattern. “A symbol of death, of eternity, of immortality, of demise and rebirth.” he explains, “Of any material I could think of to fashion an accurate human skull out of, this Gibeon meteorite best embodies the ‘mystery’ most acutely.”
The skull will be auctioned by Bonhams on November 24, perhaps for as much as $400,000. The auction webpage explains the origin story of this type of meteorite.
ABOUT GIBEON
- Gibeon is iron-based and one of the rarest forms of meteorite.
- It originated billions of years ago from an unstable planet that existed briefly between Jupiter and Mars.
- When the planet broke apart, a section of its core traveled through space for four billion years.
- Only the vacuum of space – which provides no surrounding molecules through which heat can be conducted away from the meteorite – allows the prolonged period of intense heat necessary for the alloys of iron meteorites to crystallize.
- During its journey, the meteorite’s alloys crystallized to form an octahedral crystalline structure that cannot be recreated on earth.
- When it met the earth’s atmosphere, about 1000 years ago, it exploded over the Kalahari Desert.
- The iron rain formed a meteorite field in Great Namaqualand, Namibia, which was first discovered by the local Nama people.
- A 48,000 gram block was cut out of the heart of a complete, 280 kg iron meteorite, which Downey then painstakingly carved down to the carving’s 21,070 grams.
- Radiometric dating estimates the age of crystallization of Gibeon’s metal at approximately 4 billion years.
(12) The Doc Dave Winiewicz Frazetta Collection will be auctioned by Profiles in History on Friday, December 11 at 11:00 a.m. PST. Catalog and flipbook at the link.
(13) Winiewicz holds forth on “The Essence of Frazetta” in this YouTube video.
(14) The previous pair of news items come from John Holbo’s discussion of fantasy art and “Men wearing a military helmet and nothing else in Western Art” in “Frazetta Auction – and French Academic Art” at Crooked Timber. The post begins with a revelation about Frazetta’s source for images of fallen warriors in two of his works.
(15) Shelf Awareness editor Marilyn Dahl plugs Larry Correia’s latest book tour and adds some career history.
Larry Correia took a somewhat unexpected journey on his way to becoming a bestselling author. He self-published his first book, Monster Hunter International, when he was an accountant and a gun dealer, and discovered how fundamental handselling is, along with a bit of luck. Don Blyly of Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis, Minn., asked for a copy, read it and finished it in one night. He purchased a large number of POD (print on demand) copies for the store and handsold them. Then fate appeared. The week Uncle Hugo’s began selling the book, Entertainment Weekly ran the store’s bestseller list, with Monster Hunter International at #3. Toni Weisskopf, publisher of Baen Books, speedily signed Larry to a one-book deal, which turned into 16 in less than six years. In addition, while promoting his POD edition, Correia traveled throughout the Mid- and Southwest, becoming a bookseller favorite. He’s launching Son of the Black Sword with a tour that started in New England, continued to the Pacific Northwest, then traveled down the West Coast and across the desert, wrapping up in Scottsdale, Ariz.
(16) Stuart Starosta of Fantasy Literature scored an interview with Cixin Liu.
What was it like when The Three-Body Problem won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best SF novel and was nominated for the 2014 Nebula Award? Is it exciting to discover so much interest in your works overseas? When you first wrote the series, was it intended mainly for Chinese readers or did you imagine there would be English readers as well?
I was in Chicago for the Nebula Awards in June but was too busy to attend the Hugo Awards ceremony. Yet The Three-Body Problem was awarded the Hugo Award so I was disappointed that I missed this opportunity. But I am delighted that the translator, Ken Liu, was able to receive the award. His excellent translation played a very important role in earning the award so I have always believed that we won the award together. I am of course very happy that my own work is so successful outside China. The genre of science fiction was introduced to China during the end of the Qing Dynasty by Westerners. One century later, China’s science fiction work is finally being published and recognized in the West. But from another perspective, science fiction novels are the most global type of literature compared to other translated works. These works often involve many aspects of Chinese culture that may be foreign to Westerners so science fiction in translation should be easier for a Western audience to understand.
(17) And Sasquan, in the interests of promoting peace and world brotherhood… no, cancel that story. David D’Antonio, 2015 Hugo Ceremony Director, is still chasing after people to give them souvenir asterisks.
The 2015 Hugo Ceremony is over, and we’re reminded that not every nominee could be present. During the Pre-Hugo Reception we offered all present their own 2015 Hugo Asterisk to commemorate an extraordinary year and signify the several records set (including the record number of Hugo voters). Should any of those nominees who couldn’t be present desire one, we do have extras and will be happy to send one along. Please contact us at [email protected] at your earliest convenience. Unfortunately, that email list will be closed after two (2) months so we regret that we will not be able to fulfill requests after that time.
Sasquan attendees could get their own asterisk during the convention for a suggested donation to Sir Terry Pratchett’s* favorite charity, The Orangutan Foundation. $2800 was raised and has been sent to help orangutans at Leakey Center.
(18) A photographer imagines the daily, mundane life of Darth Vader at Mashable.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Daniel Dern, JJ, Alan T. Baumler, Michael J. Walsh, John King Tarpinian, and Paul Weimer for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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@ Darren Garrison
Well, since there’s no science angst, I’ll just go back to drooling over the art.
@James Moar
Ha! That would be slightly less dark, at least.
While on the subject of meteorites, some of you might have an interest in some photos of meteorites from my collection. I’m personally fond of very low metamorphic grade chondrites—their name comes from the fact that they contain (anywhere from a few to a crap-ton) spherules of rock ranging from less than 1mm up to (rarely) more than 10mm that were once molten, then refroze. There still is much debate on their origin—some believe that they represent the original snowflakes/dust bunnies of fluffy dust from the original protoplanetary disk that have been flash melted by various possible methods (check the wiki entry for a partial list) and some believe that they are droplets of lava from volcanoes and major impacts on early planetestimals (personally, and unscientifically, I lean towards the melted dust bunny hypothesis.) Many chondrites also contain clasts—fragments of debris that may be from deep within the meteorite’s parent body or from a different parent body altogether, created by large impacts on the parent body.
Sizes of these meteorite fragments range from around ¼ or an inch up to around 3 inches. Zoom into the photos and you can see clasts of obviously different materials in some of them, and also different patterns of crystallization in individual chondrules. This is a hobby best appreciated with a microscope.
http://s313.photobucket.com/user/darrengarrison/library/meteorites
Surprised no one commented on the auction house resurrecting an old theory about an “unstable planet that existed briefly between Jupiter and Mars.” The planet of Phaeton (aka Tiamat, Astra, Maldek) theory has been replaced by the theory that planets cannot form in that region due to large gravitational perturbations by Jupiter during the formative period of the solar system.
That is rather simplistic, therefore ultimately untrue.
The Sasquan committee are the stewards for this year of an ongoing award which is administered under a set of rules that is established by the community. And if they do something toxic at their award ceremony, people have to live with their choices the next year, and going forward.
The majority of their choices about the Hugos and the ceremony were governed by the approach publicly articulated by David Gerrold, that this would be a ceremony honoring all the nominees. Which obviously includes those whose nominations were not popular with a large segment of the convention membership. Most of their choices made sense to me — for example, limiting the number of presenters (most gave more than one award), David Gerrold’s efforts to regulate the applause, and discourage booing.
There are two that did not.
First, the livestreamed pre-ceremony talk show was played on the big screen in the auditorium — a show where John Scalzi and George R.R. Martin shared their views of the controversy. That was not a strategy calculated to make all nominees feel welcome.
Second, the asterisks.
I didn’t read that bit from the auction house; but many of my childhood books were predicated on the asteroids being part of a former planet — Alan E. Nourse’s Scavengers in Space, e.g. (Although I assume that when I was reading the books in the 1970s, that theory was already blown.)
And I’ll never look at spherule-containing meteorites again after reading Lovecraft’s “Colour Out of Space”.
The parent body for Gibeon would have been rounded and a few hundred kilometers across, and would likely be having people campaign for calling it a dwarf planet, if it were still around. So that point they accidentally got more or less right.
That pre-show got a lot more critical than I expected, but I was told by somebody that the auditorium was so loud before the ceremony people couldn’t hear it.
Were people in the hall able to hear the pre-show? How did they react to some of the stronger statements being made?
I didn’t realize that we were looking at such a resource crunch for meteorites. Oh well, a minor- ok, major-orbital adjustment to 16 Psyche, and we can get all the nickel-iron meteorites we could want.
Mike,
Things can of course be both simplistic and true. I agree that we all have to live with the consequences of Sasquan’s choices; I am putting it on the record that I am happy to do so.
@Lisa Goldstein
Re: Witches of Lychford
And all of these women end up fighting against… a megastore that wants to move into the village. It seems a bit overkill.
The supermarket plot is probably an aspect that doesn’t play as well for non-Brits. Basically, there’s a certain stereotypical British view of cosy small town/village life with local shops for local people, which are metaphorically or actually bulldozed when the Big Supermarket Chain sets up just out of town, which causes some residents to get very het up and deploy the more byzantine parts of the UK planning system to try to stop it. Rumours of a Tesco arriving can exercise the letters page of a small town newspaper for years. Having a character be a vicar and the shenanigans involving the town council are part of the same strand. WoL is satirising this by making it an actual mystical effect. It’s kind of in the same vein as the joke about the bypass in Hitchhikers, or the M25 in Good Omens. I don’t know if there’s a true US equivalent?
@Mark.
The movie “You’ve Got Mail” comes to mind in regards to a US exploration of the “Megastore versus local store” phenomenon and a community agitating against it.
@rcade:
Let’s not pull a Torgersen and say we know better than Gallo what she meant when she apologized.
And Doherty’s note is hardly scathing. It says all of Tor’s employees should be clear when they’re on their own soapbox and that he disagreed personally with her Puppy synopsis. There is no indication anywhere that I have seen that her job was in any danger at any point.
We can argue about the substance of her characterizations (which I think were pretty under-nuanced) and whether every puppy is liable for the grotesqueries of the “leaders” and their co-conspirators. I’m no fan of theirs.
Just finished Al Roberson’s Crashing Heaven which I thoroughly enjoyed. Reminded me of Implied Spaces and Accelerando.
I do like it when an author can make the whole ‘show don’t tell’ thing work with the setting even with a fairly far future world.
@Paul
Ah, I’ve never seen it but remember seeing a trailer so I think I know what you mean. Yes, kind of like that.
—–
Scalzi declares he’s taking a year off consideration for awards:
I had Life of the Mind faintly penciled in for novelette. Never mind, more room for more choices!
I’m also going to agree with the proposition that Irene Gallo’s words on a public forum were ill-chosen for someone in her professional position and her own apology, which basically says just that, should close the matter; reading her mind, or her boss’s, beyond their public statements is rather pointless.
Cute.
If you don’t want to discuss the PR game that Doherty was playing or assess whether Gallo was making an apology under compulsion, that’s your prerogative.
She wasn’t apologetic in her personal Facebook post when Theodore Beale first made an issue out of it. As puppies showed up with complaints, she responded to them with mockery by posting photos of cats.
The only apology she offered coincided with Tor’s founder blogging about her in a post that completely reeked of corporate crisis management. Quelle surprise!
One wonders though: hadn’t Sasquan already gone above and beyond by treating the Puppy nominees just like the half century of nominees before then who’d gotten there without stuffing the ballot box? Because whatever else, they weren’t like that fifty-odd years worth of nominees, they had hacked the system and expected a gold star for it.
The Puppy’s were treated to something they had not earned in the way of those who came before them. Why should they expect the special treatment of people not speaking about the plain truth of how they all got there?
@Mark
That reminds me of series 1 of “The League of Gentlemen.” Great show if you haven’t seen it.
My girlfriend is very fond of Bentley Little (whose horror novels, from the ones I’ve read, seem to basically be variations on “why is X so evil?”, where X is a church, or a big box store, or a doll, or whatever). And they’re usually called “The X”. You may or may not know all these things. Anyway, one of his novels is called “The Store” and it’s about an evil big box chain store coming to a town and being all evil.
On a more serious note, we drove from Michigan to California a while back, taking the Southern route (mostly I40, IIRC). Large chunks of the midwest now consists of dried out husks of towns surrounded by strip malls, chain restaurants, and big box stores, all gathered by the freeway(s). Horrifying.
I didn’t mind at all the basic premise of “The Witches of Lychford”. It felt to me like the author was introducing the characters via a slight variation on a typical plot, preparing the way for more stories/novels within that setting. That was also my first encounter with that author, and I found it very fun.
Yes, the current US equivalent is having a Walmart come to town.
It’s not exactly the same — Walmarts generally set up outside town and kill off the downtown by draining away all the customer traffic — but it’s much the same sort of thing.
And Cornell is using it as a dodge, anyway, using the cover of the supermarket hubbub to mask what’s truly going on, and what’s truly going on is certainly a big enough threat for a fantasy novella.
I didn’t think three women amount to “all these women,” either. Groups of three women are fairly common to mythic tales, and this one seemed to use the idea pretty well, at least to my eye.
And Tor.com has commissioned a sequel, so I’m happy to know there’s more coming…
I liked Witches of Lychford too; the plot may be conventional, but the way the characters (three distinctive women; I particularly liked Autumn) reacted to it was decidedly inluenced by 21st-century culture.
– One of the ongoing themes of the Persona 4 JRPG is a big store has moved into town and the small family owned businesses are closing. “Every day’s great at your Junes.”
– Why is it “throw under the bus” and not “throw to the wolves” ? The wolves might stop giving time for other people to get away. The bus will keep going if the bus driver is behind schedule.
– I’m trying to think of the most recent notable use of an asterisk and the one that I can think of is when Marc Ecko bought Barry Bond’s record breaking home run baseball and was going to brand an asterisk on it. That was in 2007. Have we had any other asterisk action since?
@rcade
I – and I suspect a lot of people – respond more thoughtfully to, say, a trusted and liked colleague (like Doherty) pointing out the flaws in my statement than I do to a large gathering of trolls turning up on my doorstep and shrieking at me. Her apology was quite specific in scope and I wouldn’t be surprised if she gave a great deal of thought to what she felt she could honestly apologise for without lying. It seemed very like apologies I’ve made in the past that I meant but were nonetheless skirting around things that I wasn’t sorry about at all.
@Kathodus
Yep, League of Gentlemen is spot on satire on that point.
The UK has its share of communities where a dominant industry has totally disappeared, most notably coal mining or fishing, and there are also some places where the modern high street has collapsed and will now never properly recover, but I understand that the US version of this tends to be much worse.
@Kurt
A sequel? Colour me excited.
In the Walmart example, is an effective opposition possible? In the UK there are various tactics with the planning system that get used, sometimes with remarkable success. (I’m just asking out of general interest at this point)
The Fantasy Movie Bracket has moved into the first heat of the second round! Some fan favourites and tough choices once again, but luckily Cally is back and on hand with forehead cloths. *phew* I don’t know about anyone else but I was running pretty low after some of the pairings in the first round. Also, DRAGONS.
@rcade:
As Meredith indicates, the actual apology is basically “I wasn’t clear enough that it was me talking as an individual” and “I was too broad in my summation.” Hardly abject.
And you think Doherty’s post “reeked of corporate crisis management”? Okay. I disagree. The lack of any followup, any reaction to the Torcott, etc., tells me it was a blip (now erased from her FB).
If, in the end, your belief is that Gallo:
a) was both correct and artful in her statement,
b) did not blur the corporate/personal line at all, and
c) was publicly humiliated by her boss and unfairly forced to clarify her statement.
then I guess we’ll just have to park it here.
@Mike Glyer
You’re much closer to this stuff than I am, of course, but I would swear that the original motivation for the asterisks was that people on the puppy side were saying that even if non-slate nominees won, their awards would have an asterisk next to them, because either a) they only got on the ballot because someone else withdrew or b) because the slates eliminated their competition. I have tried and tried to find that quote online, but without success, but I’m sure I saw it somewhere.
My impression was that THAT was the motivation for the asterisk awards. “They’re saying all the awards will have asterisks? Okay, we’ll beat them to the punch and pass them out ourselves, and try to twist the meaning into the bargain.” Again, I think I saw this in writing somewhere (David Gerrold’s Facebook page?) But I cannot find it now.
I, at least, went through the whole convention thinking that was the point of the asterisks. I didn’t talk to anyone who took them as meaning anything more than “Yes, something bad happened to us, but we’re going to make light of it and have fun anyway.” The Sasquan I attended (only Con I’ve ever attended) was all about fun. It has seemed to me that the puppies’ complaints about them were manufactured after the fact and blown out of proportion.
But, as I say, you’re much closer to the center of things. Do you know for a fact that there was ill intent?
@Mark
Yeah, in the local area we had fishing, mining and farming. The farmers are still holding on.
Another annoying UK supermarket habit are the towns with multiple branches of the same chain and no competition.
Catmark:
Depends on the state, and possibly on the town as well.
@Joe H. “I’ve been getting the Fantagraphics reprints of the full run of Peanuts. Just one volume to go … ”
Nope two, as they’ll be adding an apocrypha volume that just went public a few days ago. From a Facebook post by Nat Gertler, one of its curators: “Most of what’s in it has not yet been announced, and the contents haven’t really been finalized, but it should have hundreds of pages of genuine Schulz Peanuts that have not been in the earlier volumes… most of which has not been in print in this century, and much of it has never been in any book before. Did Schulz do some of the comic book stories himself? You betcha!”
After Doherty’s post, there was quite a bit of anger directed at Tor from fans because of the apology being offered in response to Beale’s stunt. Based on some off-the-record rumblings I read, I feel like the company decided that the best course of action was to shut up, tell its employees to avoid public comment on either Gallo or the Tor boycott and let it all blow over.
I wager that at some point, we will hear from a Tor insider who says it was a mistake to apologize — even though the boycott was an epic fail — simply because it fanned the flames and satisfied nobody.
Didn’t stop Charles Sheffield from using it in Sight of Proteus during said 1970s. And I think Rob Sawyer may have used it more recently.
Whoops, posted too soon …
This explains one of the big subplots in Terry Pratchett’s “Reaper Man.”
We in America can sympathize with the story, but it’s a little different here. Most of the big malls and superstores here rolled over sparsely-inhabited farmland to make the horrible American suburbs, and there was no one much around to protest beforehand.
Pratchett’s mall is a good one to,read about for the full horror.
There are eldritch powers against automobiles in Battle Mountain, Nevada and to a lesser extent in Buttonwillow, California. You have a higher-than-normal chance of your car mysteriously failing as you drive near those spots. No one knows why, but everyone knows it’s so. People suspect the mechanics of these areas as being in league with evil powers, particularly in Battle Mountain. As also evidenced by the fact that they have a a large sign on said mountain that says “BM”. Bowel Movement? BaphoMet? Always thought Mulder and Scully should look into it.
Nrgn. I had “The Life of the Mind” in my Novella longlist, and the audio version of “Scalzi Is Not Popular” in BDP Short. Time to find more in those categories.
Cough. Sorry, ran out of editing time.
Pratchett’s mall is a literal parasite on the community and is great fun to read about.
@lurkertype
Is it certain that the audiobook would be included in refusals? It strikes me as perhaps a little unfair for a very successful author to refuse a nomination partly on behalf of someone who is, while very funny, considerably less well known. I expect Erin might benefit a lot from a nomination like that.
@Peace is my Middle Name – Agreed on the Pratchett.
Erin Alexander could still be nominated in novelette or whatever the appropriate length category is. Scalzi just wouldn’t accept the nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation. (Assuming that’s even where audiobooks go — I’m still a little confused about that.)
I kinda think the same. But I also think both Doherty’s apology and Gallo’s were written with the help of (or possibly by) lawyers, and as such don’t represent what either of them might say on their own, but rather a compromise between that and what the lawyers thought was appropriately liability-limiting.
I’ve asked Scalzi to clarify.
Alexandra Erin did some nice work last year and deserves recognition. I’ve got her in Best Fan Writer. I’m not sure whether the audio book is Dramatic/Short (because it’s definitely a performance and a parody, as was “F Me Ray Bradbury”), or Related Work (being a commentary on Worldcon kerfuffles). I could see it as either. But I await John’s reply.
TooManyJens on November 18, 2015 at 4:07 pm said:
This amendment was ratified this year at Sasquan and is in effect for 2016:
So yes, audiobooks are eligible under the appropriate story category.
Re Scalzi
I duly note the alterations to my long lists for novel, novella, and look forward to his clarification of the audiobook situation.
I see absolutely no reason, in principle, to assert that the written word is identical to the spoken word; after all, we could just stay home and read Hamlet but we don’t. For that matter, Lock In had two separate audio editions, which demonstrates that John is very well aware of the way in which actors bring different voices to the same words…
Today’s Read: Railhead, by Philip Reeve. A solid YA read, taking what looks like it’s going to be a fairly standard heist plot and taking it a step beyond by not shrinking away from the ethical implications. However, the book is eventually willing to let the main character off a little easy, keeping this from going as far as it could have; it’s not at the level of his Mortal Engines or Fever Crumb books. Nonetheless, an enjoyable read.
Yes, I was thinking Walmart would be a good US equivalent — they’ve certainly driven a lot of mom-and-pop stores out of business over here. So I understood that part of the story, and I also got that the megastore was a front for an evil force (and a damn good metaphor), but I still think that having three women seemed a bit of an overkill, and I wanted to know more about them. Though, now that I know there will be more stories in the series, I see that there was some set-up in this story that will probably be played out in later stories, so I’m looking forward to that.
@Lisa Goldstein: As set-up for further stuff, that’s fine, but we’re here to judge it as a stand-alone story, which means questions like “why so many characters jammed in to stop a Wal-Mart?” are valid for Hugo consideration.
(Are you the one who wrote “Weighing Shadows”? That was AWESOME!)
The Scalzi Hath Replied Unto Me!
“Nominate it if you like and if it’s nominated I’ll simply decline my share. No reason not to honor Alexandra Erin if you like.”
Now I wonder how many words “Scalzi Is Not” etc. is when written.
I have to mildly disagree with Lisa G.; the novella did provide adequate space to develop all three characters (but yes, there’s opportunity for more also), and all three were necessary because of the sharp contrast in how they approached the magical dilemma they faced. One theme is that no one wants to learn witchcraft Judith’s way, by apprenticeship, any more; but although Autumn has book smarts instead, she’s still effective. So not too much mourning lost folkways here.
Xtifr: Offering the asterisks to people who might want them
But that’s not what they’re doing. They’re only offering them to the Hugo nominees who couldn’t make it to the ceremony.
Kurt Busiek: If I was a 2015 Hugo Nominee who hadn’t been able to make it to the ceremony, I’d sure want my asterisk.
The nominees are a limited number of people, and I’m pretty sure that Sasquan knows who they gave them to. It’s a simple matter of extrapolation to figure out who didn’t get them.
Why in the world would Sasquan assume that all of this year’s Hugo nominees have a notification subscription to their page on Facebook? It’s pretty much guaranteed that they’re not going to reach all of the eligible recipients that way.
I think it’s a middle finger. Believe me, I sympathize with the sentiment, but this post was not only a gratuitous jab at the Puppies, it’s ineffective for accomplishing its stated intent.
I’m planning on nominating “Scalzi is not….” as a Best Related Work. For what it’s worth.
Annie Bellet also request not to be nominated this year http://anniebellet.com/on-awards-this-year/
Cassy B.: I’m planning on nominating “Scalzi is not….” as a Best Related Work.
I’m only going to do that if I genuinely don’t think there are five other Related Works which are really deserving of a nomination. And I’m pretty sure that there are at least five things this year which are on a level with Patterson’s Heinlein bio and Walton’s What’s So Great.
I loved Adam-Troy Castro’s “The Last Voyage of the Starship Lily”. It’s funny as hell. But he’s pointed out that it shouldn’t be nominated for Short Story, that there are numerous more deserving works out there. And he’s right.