Pixel Scroll 11/21 The Incredible Linking Fan

(1) For lovers and others of giant movie monsters, “Doc Kaiju” — well known at the Classic Horror Film Board — has put together a rather remarkable compendium of such creatures: Kaijumatic: House of 1,000 Giant Monsters

Or, as he likes to put it:

Now with 1003 pages stuffed with 1670 big stars from 749 movies!

And, he updates it, constantly.

(2) Barney Evans has uploaded 50 photos taken at the 1988 Loscon, including many from the masquerade.

(3) “David Tennant Answers Our Burning Questions… Sort Of” in a Yahoo! video and profile.

As any David Tennant fan knows after years of watching him promote Doctor Who and Broadchurch, no one evades questions more delightfully. Hoping some of the mind control capabilities of his latest character, the villainous Kilgrave in Marvel’s Jessica Jones (now streaming on Netflix), had rubbed off on us, we invited him in to Yahoo Studios, handed him a card filled with questions, and asked him to answer them.

One example:

Name a book, TV show, or movie you’ve pretended to have read or seen, but you totally haven’t.

That’s a very good question. Probably in audition I’ve done that several times with some worthy director, who asked me what I thought of their latest opus.

(4) Entertainment Weekly looks on as “Stephen Colbert mocks scientists for making wrong Lord of the Rings reference”:

This week, a new species of spider was identified and given the name Iandumoema smeagol, a reference to Smeagol, the hobbit who would become Gollum after getting ahold of the One Ring. The cave-dwelling spider was given the name Smeagol because it shared a similar lifestyle with the character, who lived in a cave and stayed out of the sun until he morphed into the monstrous Gollum.

Colbert, however, wasn’t having any of it on Friday’s show. “Smeagol wasn’t a scary creature who lived in a cave,” Colbert said before recounting Smeagol’s biography, and how he killed his cousin after finding the One Ring.

Explained Colbert: “Smeagol hid from his guilt and the yellow face of the sun, by retreating into a cave, where his shame and his fear turned him into an unrecognizable creature. That creature wasn’t Smeagol anymore; that creature was Gollum. You should have named the spider Gollum. You don’t discover a venomous snake and name it Anakin. You name it Darth Vader.”

 

(5) Brandon Kempner strikes gold in “SFWA 2015 Nebula Recommended Reading List: Analysis and Prediction” at Chaos Horizon.

Table 1: Correlation Between Top 6 (and Ties) of the 2014 Nebula Suggested Reading List and the Eventual 2014 Nebula Nominees

Novel: 4 out of 6, 67.7%
Novella: 6 out of 6, 100%
Novelette: 5 out of 6, 83.3%
Short Story: 6 out of 7, 85.7%

(6) Netflix will remake Lost in Space.

The original comedy, which ran from 1965 to 1968, centered on the Robinson family as they attempted to colonize another planet in deep space — a mission that was sabotaged by a foreign secret agent and caused their ship to get knocked off course.

According to our sister site Deadline, the updated version is an epic (but grounded!) sci-fi saga about “a young explorer family from Earth, lost in an alien universe, and the challenges they face in staying together against seemingly insurmountable odds.”

(7) Laughing Squid presents the entire history of Doctor Who illustrated as a medieval tapestry.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, Bill Mudron has created a “slightly ridiculous” tribute to the Bayeux Tapestry that shows the entire history of the show. It begins when the Doctor runs away from his home planet of Gallifrey and ends with “The Day of the Doctor,” the 75-minute 50 anniversary special set to air on BBC One on November 23rd, 2013. A larger version of the illustration can be found on Mudron’s Flickr, and prints are available to pre-order online.

 

Doctor Who tapestry COMP

(8) The sparks fly when Galactic Journey’s time traveler to the sf genre of 55 years ago rubs together the contemporary and historical notions of political correctness in “I aim at the Stars (but sometimes I hit London)” .

If the United States is doing well in the Space Race, it is in no small thanks to a group of German expatriates who made their living causing terror and mayhem in the early half of the 1940s.  I, of course, refer to Wehrner von Braun and his team of rocket scientists, half of whom were rounded up by the Allies after the War, the other half of whom apparently gave similar service to the Soviets.

The traveler comments on a hagiographic von Braun biopic released at the time, and provides a scan of the souvenir Dell comic book based on the film.

(9) Michael J. Martinez prepping to see the new Star Wars movie by watching the two original trilogies in their canonical order. He begins — Star Wars wayback machine: The Phantom Menace.

This is basically a movie that’s supposed to remind us of the first trilogy, but does very little to actually create an origin story for those older movies. Instead, we have attempts at nostalgia. Look, Jedi! Lightsabers! The Force! Spaceships and space battles! But even there, we have problems. Such as:

There’s no smart-ass. All the prequels were missing the Han Solo archetype — the scrappy outsider and audience surrogate who can stand toe-to-toe with these gods and monsters.

There’s George Lucas’ efforts at being cute, with the Gungans. I think George felt that he needed to appeal to the cute younger audiences, starting with Return of the Jedi, and thus we had Ewoks. Now we have Gungans, complete with silly mannerisms and catchphrases. Adults always underestimate kids’ ability to grasp nuanced entertainment, and this is no exception. We didn’t need Gungans.

The stereotypical accents and mannerisms of the Gungans and the Trade Federation folk have been covered elsewhere. But still…WTF were you thinking, man? Just no.

Wooden dialogue and stiff acting. I think I know what George was going for here — a shout-out to the sci-fi serials and movies of the 1940s and 1950s. Fine, I get it. But it didn’t work. At all.

(10) “Don’t nominate me for any awards” posts Lela E. Buis.

I don’t want to be left out of the trending commentary….

(11) “4 Beautiful Ray Bradbury Quotes That Celebrate Autumn”  selected by Jake Offenhartz at History Buff.

Though mid-afternoon sunsets and leafless trees may give the impression that winter is fast approaching, we’re still technically just halfway through fall. Which strikes us as good enough reason to look back at the work of Ray Bradbury—master of science fiction, adversary of censorship, and chronicler of all things fall. The author wrote extensively about the season, penning autumnal wisdom in various projects throughout his career, most notably in a short story collection called The October Season and a novel titled The Halloween Tree. We’ve collected some of our favorite fall-related quotes below, so cozy up and have a read:

1. The October Country (1955)

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”

(12) Merlin is in Disney’s future says CinemaBlend.

If you were going to create a checklist for how to make a current Hollywood blockbuster there are a few things you want to be sure were on it. First, you want to base it on an already existing piece of fiction, preferably a book. It would be even better if it were a series of books, about a character people were already familiar with. It would need to be able to have big fantasy action set pieces too. Then you want to bring in a production team that was involved in one of the previous fantasy action franchises based on a series of books, because that stuff looks great on a trailer. It looks like Disney just checked off all their boxes as they just brought in an Academy Award winning screenwriter from The Lord of the Rings to pen the screenplay based on a 12 book series about Merlin the magician.

Philippa Boyens is known, almost exclusively, as one of the writers behind the incredibly successful films based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

(13) Guy Gavriel Kay, Member of the Order of Canada.

(14) Caitlin Kiernan, two-time WFA winner, regrets the Lovecraft bust is being retired, in her post “I have seen what the darkness does.”

You may or may not have heard that the World Fantasy Committee has voted to change the design of the World Fantasy Award from Gahan Wilson’s bust of Lovecraft, which has served as the award since it was first given out in 1975. No, I don’t approve. I don’t believe this was the appropriate course of action. I’m saddened by this lamentable turn of events, and I’m glad that I received my two World Fantasy awards in advance of this change. How long, now, before the Mystery Writers of America are pressured to abandon the Edgar Award? When we set this sort of thing in motion, where does it end?

(15) A limited TV series based on a Vonnegut book – it could happen, reports A.V. Club.

Back in April, we reported that Kurt Vonnegut’s fourth novel, Cat’s Cradle, had been optioned for TV by IM Global Television. At that point almost nothing was known about the project other than the fact that it would indeed use Cat’s Cradle as its source material, which is implicit in a TV show labeled as Cat’s Cradle adaptation. Now though, according to Deadline, a precious few details have emerged: the show will live on FX as a limited series, and be written and executive produced by Fargo creator Noah Hawley.

Vonnegut’s original work was published in 1963 and takes on science, technology, and religion with equal satirical fire. After the novel’s narrator, John, becomes involved in the lives of the adult children of Felix Hoenikker, a fictional co-creator of the atomic bomb, he travels to the fake Caribbean island of San Lorenzo and encounters a strange outlawed religion called Bokononism that many of the area’s inhabitants practice anyway. Through Hoenikker’s children he also learns about ice-nine, a way to freeze water at room temperature that could be devastating if used improperly. Needless to say, destruction and dark humor ensue.

(16) On its February cover, Mad Magazine slipped Alfred E. Newman into a crowd of storm troopers.

MAD-Magazine_555x717_532_54d52a91bb51c7_86515890

(17) IGN will be ranking the top 100 movie trailers of all time in a feature that will be unveiled November 23-25.

(18) Comic Book Resources retells a bit of lore about the making of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in “Movie Legends Revealed: The Accidental ‘Star Trek’ Actress?”

It is a funny scene, but it was also ad-libbed. Notice how everyone else ignores them? The woman who answered them was also supposed to ignore them. The comedy was supposed to derive from the fact that they couldn’t get an answer (and, yes, from the way Chekov says “vessels”).

The woman in question was San Francisco resident Layla Sarakalo, who woke up one day to discover her car had been towed. She had missed the notices that “Star Trek” was filming on her street, and her car was in the way. She decided that one way to get the money to pay for the towing was to get a job as an extra on the set.

 

[Thanks to Shambles, James H. Burns, Will R., John King Tarpinian, and Lynn Maudlin for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]

160 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/21 The Incredible Linking Fan

  1. The wording in the swatting bill that might be a hitch is “to knowingly transmit false or misleading information”…

    All CUL has to do is convince them that he thought the danger was serious when he wrote the letter. If he waxes hysterical enough, he might be able to manage that, and maybe that’s not behavior we want to encourage.

    [edited to add] And of course we don’t want “knowingly” just taken out, because then any time you reported a prowler to the police and it turned out to be just a raccoon that was knocking garbage cans over, you’d be in trouble.

  2. Meredith: I’ve been wanting to ask (and point me if it’s been discussed before) — are there in fact any takes on dragons you don’t like? Because while I’d call myself mostly a fan of dragons, I also find one of their strengths to be their occasional weakness, which is that there are so many different ideas gathered under the concept of dragons (eg. Smaug, Temeraire, Seraphina, and Puff) that some either ping as “Really not dragony enough”, or just “Stupid idea. You could have been so awesome”. But you seem to often hit “Dragon! Squee!” So I’m getting curious.

    (It is more a strength than otherwise, witness “you’ve seen one vampire you’ve seen em all” syndrome)

  3. Great filling filers 😀

    I was expecting a trend of if I’m on a ballot it’s not by my will disregard. This so called trend of don’t nominate me wasn’t on my radar. Not only do we need to try to understand the complicated rule of eligibility but also a list of who(m?) not to nominate this year by their request. I’m really starting to miss the days when I let others do the hard lifting and I simply read and voted on the finalists.

    difference between “The Edgars” and “The World Fantasy Award” seems to be obvious to me right there in the names, but maybe reactionary ideology causes a form of blindness.

    Maybe it’s because I was a technical writer but the difference seems blindingly obvious to me.

  4. @Lenora Rose

    Hmm. If I’ve come across a take on dragons that I really didn’t like, it must have been very “meh” rather than “urgh this is terrible” because I’m not sure I remember one. I didn’t like Reign of Fire but that wasn’t really the fault of the dragons so much as, um, everything else.

    Some dragons are less dragony than others, but I can usually find something in the depiction that I like. I guess The Hobbitish dragons are my least favourite, because they’re a bit too predictable and overdone, but I still don’t dislike them exactly – I’m just less likely to get really excited about them. And they’re very dragony! Just having dragons somewhere in the story won’t really set off the squee, I’d rather they were fairly central in general, but they don’t have to be the main characters, and I don’t mind whether they’re on “our” side or not. Oh, and grimdark is almost never my thing, and having dragons won’t trump the grimdark.

    Which takes turned you off? If I haven’t read/seen them I’ll have a look and see if I end up with a squee, meh, or urgh. 😉

  5. Lost in Space started out somewhat serious and got sillier as it went along. Some blame the initial success of the more campy Batman series. Then again, the pilot episode of Batman is also a lot more serious than later episodes. Maybe TV was like that back then.

    This also happened with The Avengers, so it wasn’t even just an American thing.

  6. @ Tasha Turner

    I’m not entirely sure there’s actually a trend of “don’t nominate me.” I know Mary Robinette Kowal said she’ll turn down any Hugo nominations she gets this year after being the face of donating memberships last year, and I saw that John Scalzi said not to nominate him, and I think Annie Bellet said something of the sort… and those are the only ones I know of.

    Frankly if I remember that someone asked not to be nominated I’ll honor their wish but I don’t intend to run around looking to see if every author whose work I nominate is okay with it. They’re quite free to turn down a nomination and I won’t be mad at them, so there’s kind of a safety interlock in place there.

  7. jayn: So I read The Traitor Baru Cormorant and was…underwhelmed. The worldbuiliding was interesting and believable at first, but when you get too close a look at how perfectly Oppressive the Oppressive Evil Empire is, credibility started to slack off.

    Oh, thank the gods that I’m not the only one. I was starting to wonder what was wrong with me. I just finished this book — no. let me rephrase that — I just forced myself to finish this book.

    At first it was pretty interesting, but around the halfway point, I started to lose interest, because I don’t read SFF so that I can gorge on hundreds of pages of endless economic strategy, and political strategy, and military strategy, that just goes on and on and on…

    I tried to analyze why I was feeling so “meh” about the book, and I realized that it’s the same thing that made me “meh” about The Three Body Problem: the author has a few clever ideas, and chugs out several hundred pages with characters and a world which exist purely to enable them to trot out their clever ideas at the end (with maybe an idea thrown in here and there throughout the book to try to keep the reader’s interest). (Now that I think of it, I could pretty much say the same about Seveneves.)

    I kept waiting for the characters to get fleshed out. It never happened, not even with the protagonist. It seems to me that the book is almost a wholesale example of “telling rather than showing”.

    I should have hunted down Bourke’s review (thank you for that, Vasha!) as I have found her responses to books to be a reliable barometer for my own responses.

    Not gonna be anywhere near my Hugo nomination ballot. No way. No how.

  8. I actually liked The Traitor Baru Cormorant well enough, bearing in mind I pretty much agree with most of the criticisms being brought up here. But they didn’t ruin the book for me. It’s not in my top five books of 2015 that I’ve read so far, but would likely make my top fifteen and could just squeak into my top ten depending on my mood, which puts it into “quite good” territory for me. If it ends up winning an award or two I won’t feel a travesty has occurred (although nor would I feel that if it doesn’t win any at all.)

    On the other hand, I seem to have somewhat idiosyncratic tastes in my fantasy lit, at least judging by the fantasy movie bracket and the 21st century fantasy bracket. Ah, well. I guess everyone does, really.

  9. @Kyra

    I’m quite certain I’ve seen more than just you compliment Baru. 🙂

    I have noticed that when a generally quite popular book (or film, or television show) gets criticised here there’s almost always several people chiming in with relief that they’re not alone in disliking it (perfectly understandable, and I’m sure I’ve joined in once or twice), which perhaps gives an exaggerated impression of how many people have that opinion. I wouldn’t take it as a sign of anything else. 🙂

  10. Fair enough. I can think of more than one occasion where I chimed in with something similar when a few people said, “Eh, I didn’t really much like [book or movie whose popularity made me wonder if I had been taking crazy pills].”

  11. @cat

    I’m not entirely sure there’s actually a trend of “don’t nominate me.”

    I do refer to it as

    so called

    and brought it up based on item in pixel scroll today:

    (10) “Don’t nominate me for any awards” posts Lela E. Buis.

    I don’t want to be left out of the trending commentary…

  12. @Kyra

    I just had a quick search around* and there are some very favourable comments about Baru from quite a few people – so yes, definitely not alone in liking it! A few even had it pencilled in as a Hugo nominee candidate, pending reading more stuff.

    I’m faaaairly sure I either started or joined in on one mini dislike-fest for Star Trek Into Darkness, a film whose Rotten Tomatoes scores mystify me. There have probably been others, too, but that one springs to mind.

    *I really need to make more progress on the Projects three. It would be much easier to find this sort of thing if I’d already done the legwork – hopefully now the PIP wotsit is behind me I can dedicate some more time and spoons.

  13. Regarding the Cixin Liu interview linked here a few days ago, can there be a single SF author in the West who would name these three first when asked his favorite authors in the field?

    You’ve said that Arthur C. Clarke has been a major influence on your books. What about other SF writers? Do you read them and if so, which are some of your favorite writers or books?

    My favorite science fiction authors include Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Jules Verne. My favorite books are 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous with Rama, The Martian Chronicles, and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  14. @rcade: I’d imagine the availability of SFF in translation would have been a factor in Cixin Liu’s taste. Or if he reads English, the availability of the books themselves.

    Per Wikipedia, he was born in 1963, so he would have been 15 when Deng Xiaoping started opening up the Chinese economy in 1978. I suspect that Western novels would have been difficult to get a hold of, but who knows.

  15. Lost in Space was not an intentional comedy. But if you’re not eight anymore, it’s pretty funny.

    So if I had been a year or two older I might have enjoyed LiS ? I found the story and acting inferior to Thunderbirds. Though “The Man Trap” was a disappointing monster story it contained enough appealing elements that I would walk through storms to see further ST episodes.

  16. Lost In Space features an abusive psychopath coddled and forgiven by everyone, and I hate hate hate it. The abuse is played for laughs, and that puts it up there with The Honeymooners as television that makes me angry and sick.

  17. I have some friends with tastes like Liu’s. They’d be good Puppies recruits were it not for the fact that they’re fully comfortable with people having other tastes, and are or are in relationships with people who are queer, of color, or both. When encountering sf/f in styles they don’t like, they shrug and move on to something they do like. 🙂

  18. I didn’t think Liu’s picks looked exceptionally odd. I could easily imagine any of those writers in a lot of fen’s top ten.

  19. I’d imagine the availability of SFF in translation would have been a factor in Cixin Liu’s taste. Or if he reads English, the availability of the books themselves.

    That’s my guess too. When Brad Torgersen and other puppies yearn for SF to be exactly like it was when they discovered the genre as children, it’s ironic that the best novel winner during Puppypalooza was a Chinese author whose influences make him sound like an American author in 1975.

    In this Wall Street Journal interview, Liu talks about finding translated versions of English-language SF books in his home as a child during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when most Western books were banned.

  20. @ Tasha Turner

    Fair enough. Consider my comment about not being sure there is a trend as applying to 10) rather than to your comment. Come to think of it, I also kind of expect a trend of “If I’m on a slate it’s against my will”–and come to think of it “don’t nominate me” does cover that–it just goes farther than I would have expected. I would expect that most people who don’t want to be on a slate/”recomendation list nudge-nudge-wink-wink” would be perfectly happy to be nominated by people who read what appeals to them and pick their honest favorites without reference to political reasons.

  21. Not sure I agree with Colbert, given that Gollum still thought of himself as Sméagol hundreds of years later.

  22. Cixin Liu: My favorite science fiction authors include Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Jules Verne. My favorite books are 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous with Rama, The Martian Chronicles, and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

    Well, I have read all those books and authors, and that explains why I found The Three Body Problem such a slog.

  23. I didn’t think Liu’s picks looked exceptionally odd. I could easily imagine any of those writers in a lot of fen’s top ten.

    I find it unusual. When Jeffro Johnson showed up here with strong appreciation for SF works before 1980 and almost no appreciation for authors since then, it was quite a contrast to the average fan here who loves new works and older classics.

    I’m not saying that’s bad. People should like what they like with no apologies.

    But when they use their love of older works to assert that nothing new is any good, that’s a ludicrous position. I loved the books I read as a teen in the ’70s and ’80s, but the era we’re in today has terrific authors and many classics in the making.

  24. @Meredith: (twelfth “brackets” filk line)

    If you really want an alternative to “Twelve bracket choices,” there’s always “Twelve cooling headcloths.” 😉

  25. @HelenS “Sméagol” was swallowed up by the Ring and only returns as an alternate personality after Gollum’s interaction with Frodo. I suppose one could argue that since S&G collaborate in the Cirith Ungol trap, associating Sméagol with spiders is justified, but Colbert’s suggestion of Shelob (or Ungoliant) makes more sense IMO.

  26. @Cally – Are you kidding? The herring worked out great! That’s the most Kevin’s been grossed out on air. Bad food is good radio. Thank you!

  27. Thanks lurkertype and JJ…I feel less alone in my lack of enthusiasm for Baru now. But dammit, I still haven’t halfway filled out my nominations list for novels – thus far only Uprooted and Fifth Season, with Ancillary Mercy as alternate. Does anyone recommend I try KSR’s Aurora next?

    And Meredith, I am in complete agreement about Star Trek Into Darkness – I believe I used the word “desecration” in the heady rage of the aftermath of my only viewing.

  28. @Tintanaus

    The language of that proposed bill seems incredibly broad. Why is that a thing? Well, because there are two things that make something illegal. The law that makes it illegal – and the decision of the state to care. The police have to arrest on it, and the prosecutor has to back the arrest up. The language of this bill is any fact that a police force or prosecutor thought was knowingly wrong can justify an arrest and charges.

    It would be carte blanche for any U.S. Attorney’s office that didn’t like being accused of misconduct to arrest their critics. You just accuse whatever press organ that has criticized you of knowingly publishing false information about their conduct, name their work as your probable cause, and go to town. The U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts, who you may have heard of in the Aaron Schwartz affair, is one of the first who comes to mind.

    That language at the state level would be even worse. Local police department doesn’t like the complaint about the conduct of its officers? Accuse the person filing the complaint of that language, and lock him up. Now both this and the Federal example might ultimately get dismissed. But this is time lost while you were in jail, money to the bail bondsmen, money to an attorney, accusations in the press, the state has its tool to say “talk back and get it hard.” Excellent way for the local law to come down on anyone using the internet to say the police erred when they shot a black kid for jaywalking.

    Short version, I think that language of that law would get a host of First Amendment challenges, both from the conservatives of the world who want to keep the ability to call the liberals pedophiles and the left of center folks who dislike the idea of an all-powerful policing arm. “Chilling effect” would really be a good way to describe this.

  29. jayn: dammit, I still haven’t halfway filled out my nominations list for novels

    I know, I remember already having more than 5 novels I was really enthused about this time last year. So far I’ve got Ancillary Mercy, Dark Orbit, and Touch on the list, with The Trials / Going Dark as a possibility.

    Ruled out (this doesn’t necessarily mean that I thought they sucked, just that they didn’t have that Hugo WOW! factor) are Seveneves, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Karen Memory, Persona (good but not SFF), The Affinities, Corsair, Nemesis Games, Zeroes, Superposition / Supersymmetry, Zeroes, Revision, and The Doomsday Equation. I’ve just started Luna: New Moon.

  30. I just started Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald also and only have finished 10 pages.

    It was cheeky for the book to begin with six naked teens of both genders in an airlock, one of whom was a viewpoint character who noted to himself that he’d had sex with most of the others. (As a rite of passage the six were going to venture out for an extremely dangerous unprotected 15-second crossing of the Moon’s surface to another airlock.) I felt like I’d wandered into one of the more licentious Philip Jose Farmer novels.

    The next viewpoint character, a destitute women whose air, water, food and network bandwidth are all metered, convinced me the book might work out. There’s a fantastic line about her priorities as she decides where to spend a one-time pittance she’s earned: “You can turn down your breathing, pirate water, scrounge for food, but you cannot beg bandwidth.”

  31. (catching up on some scrolls)

    I finished Planetfall and it was great! I should go out of town more often (more reading time). Although I hate present tense, it worked very well here (I didn’t even notice at first, blush), especially with the shifting back and forth into memory-in-past-tense, although I expected that to be set off (italics or whatever), but I got used to it and it was an effective technique in this case – wouldn’t work in other books. V’z abg fher ubj V srry nobhg gur raqvat. Still, really, really great book! Cool SF, engrossing character . . . tough to put down. I’m tempted by the audiobook already; she reads it, and IMHO does a good job. I first found Planetfall via a recording of her reading.

    Now I’m torn between various already-owned 2015 books in my TBR stack and, heh, Emma Newman’s Between Two Thorns (already owned; I read the sample a while back and was intrigued). I know her fantasy will differ wildly from Planetfall, but still, part of me thinks “stick with her for now.”

    Anyone read Between Two Thorns and have Thoughts About It?

  32. @rcade: I’ve told myself to give Luna: New Moon another chance (I read a very positive review of it), but the first scene wasn’t a good start, IMHO. And it sounds like a soap opera, which makes me nervous. I’ll be interested to hear more thoughts from you on it when you finish it.

  33. I kind of liked Lost in Space when I was a kid, but I was a kid. I have not been waiting anxiously for a remake. I did eventually see the movie, and I think that was more than enough revisiting that particular ‘verse. My interest in a reboot of the show is about as close to nil as you can get. But if others are into it, far be it for me to stand in their way.

    As for older SF, yeah, I love a lot of it, but I totally do not understand the folks who pine for the “good old days”. And there’s a surprising number of them. It’s not like it’s a puppy thing, per se. The ones I know come from all sides of the political spectrum. But I totally don’t get it. I think SFF is healthier than its ever been, and the average number of great books per year is higher than it’s ever been. Of course, if you compare just-last-year (or even just-the-last-five-years) to all-the-years-before-1970, then you’re going to have more good books in the latter category, but that’s not exactly a reasonable comparison.

    But I do know that feeling of relief when someone admits to disliking a book that it seems like everyone but you loved. 🙂

  34. I liked “Luna: New Moon”, but it is quite obviously the first of two books in that setting, with those characters. It doesn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger, but certainly within sight of the cliff. It would have done better awards-wise having both volumes published in the same year, a la “Blackout/All Clear”.* It’s on my longlist, along with “Uprooted”. World-building is great, very hard SF indeed mixed with characters who aren’t two-dimensional cutouts.

    “Radiance” by Valente is the one I’m trying to get more people to read, along with of course “Watchmaker of Filigree Street”**. And then “Sorcerer to the Crown”. Normally I am all about the SF, but I think the F is stronger this year.

    *Unless it turns into another freakin’ trilogy, which I don’t think from the pacing.

    **KATSU!

  35. > “Persona (good but not SFF)”

    I actually didn’t much like Persona (which is a pity because I usually like her writing), but how on earth is it not science fiction? The whole book is straight-up near-future political SF and part of the plot hinges around someone getting a surgically implanted microcamera.

  36. @ jayn
    re: novel nominations

    I have your three plus The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. I have Trials/Going Dark by Nagata as a possible (but you have to read the first of the trilogy, The Red) and it wasn’t an ‘I love this one!’ like the others were.

    My TBR of hopefuls that are near the top include Luna, Radiance, The Mechanical, Dark Orbit, Europe in Autumn, Touch, and some others. That stack changes without notice depending on starting and bouncing and/or what others say. There are just too darn many good books out there (plus the problem of variable mileage with recommendations)! Don’t know if any of that helps you. :/

  37. @ TheYoungPretender
    re: Anti-swatting ptoposal

    Thanks for the insight. The whole proposal had me wondering about the way it could be misused by the Gov. Looks like it may need a thorough revamp, if it can be saved at all.

  38. I will never forgive “Star Trek Into Darkness” for what they did to Uhura. Never.

  39. I didn’t get how the world of “Persona” was supposed to operate politically.. these young tabloid-fodder celebrities who apparently could have real influence on international relations if they were clever. I thought the book had some good suspense though.

  40. In terms of novels, I’m currently at:

    Stuff I loved and currently consider myself very likely to nominate:
    Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
    Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge
    The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemison
    Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman

    Stuff I really, really liked a lot and am also considering nominating:
    The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan
    Half The World by Joe Abercrombie
    The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones

    Stuff I liked a lot and might have nominated if I there weren’t books I liked even better:
    The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne Valente
    The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black
    Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray
    Last First Snow by Max Gladstone
    The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge
    The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
    The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

    Stuff that was fun to read, but that I didn’t think was a Hugo-level book:
    Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
    A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab
    Dead Heat by Patricia Briggs
    End of Days by Susan Ee
    Half a War by Joe Abercrombie
    Kitty Saves the World by Carrie Vaughn
    Low Midnight by Carrie Vaughn
    Magisterium: The Copper Gauntlet by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare
    Railhead by Philip Reeve
    The Ruby Circle by Richelle Mead
    Originator by Joel Shepherd
    Serpentine by Cindy Pon
    Sorceress by Claudia Gray
    Touch by Claire North

    Stuff that just didn’t do it for me, for one reason or another:
    Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace
    The Buried Life by Carrie Patel
    The Chimes by Anna Smaill
    Dearest by Alethia Kontis
    Firefight by Brandon Sanderson
    The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
    The Just City by Jo Walton
    Persona by Genevieve Valentine

    … Plus at least 22 books I’m planning on reading but haven’t gotten to yet. :/ Some of which have gotten considerable buzz, and some of which haven’t.

  41. Back to Lost in Space for a moment. There are two basic phases of Lost in Space: stuck on a planet and wandering around the stars. If you’re doing Swiss Family Robinson in Space, then that’s the first phase. That’s something you could realistically do as a TV series. Limited number of sets if nothing else. It’s a bit boring depending on the crisis of the week. Maybe the Space Pirates show up and you have to come up with various traps to keep them away from your Space Tree House.

    The second phase is just Star Trek Voyager or Stargate Universe with fewer people/resources and more family squabbles. Neither series is particularly remembered fondly, though people will say that SGU was just starting to find its way when it got canceled. So other than trading in on the Lost in Space name, I’m not sure what a new LiS series offers thats new.

    Maybe people just want another series about a child prodigy and his faithful robot.

  42. I haven’t been reading a lot of novels this year (mostly shorts) but one that I absolutely loved was Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor (and I highly recommend the audiobook of that).

  43. I’d have liked Lost In Space better if the pilot had ended more like The Cold Equations.

    (Yeah, I never liked that show, even as a kid. And I hated The Cold Equations,too. )

  44. Kyra: I actually didn’t much like Persona (which is a pity because I usually like her writing), but how on earth is it not science fiction? The whole book is straight-up near-future political SF and part of the plot hinges around someone getting a surgically implanted microcamera.

    A political setup which is slightly different from our own is fictional. I don’t consider it science-fictional or fantasy, though. The implanted microcamera was literally the only thing in that book which was science-fictional — and only barely, at that.

    I would probably not have bothered reading Persona if I had known that it was basically political fiction.

  45. I liked Persona, but it is rather thin on the science fiction. Aside from the camera, it takes place in the future or maybe the near future. Its not the political set up we know, how the UN is setup. So alternate future history, maybe?

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