Pixel Scroll 11/29/16 In A Scroll On The Web There Lived A Pixel

(1) FURTHER DISCOVERIES. Two more Star Trek: Discovery cast members have been announced reports Variety.

Doug Jones and Anthony Rapp have joined Michelle Yeoh as the first official cast members of “Star Trek: Discovery.”

Jones will play Lt. Saru, a Starfleet science officer and a member of an alien species new to the “Star Trek” universe. Anthony Rapp will play Lt. Stamets, an astromycologist, fungus expert, and Starfleet science officer aboard the starship Discovery. Yeoh, whose addition to the cast was reported last week by Variety, will play Captain Georgiou, the Starfleet captain aboard the starship Shenzhou.

(2) IT IS WHAT IT AINT. Mike Resnick, in “What Science Fiction Isn’t”, says the history of science fiction is littered with discarded definitions of the genre. The creator of the field, Gernsback, SFWA founder Damon Knight, critic James Blish, all were sure somebody else was doing it wrong.

And what’s driving the purists crazy these days? Just look around you.

Connie Willis can win a Hugo with a story about a girl of the future who wants to have a menstrual period when women no longer have them.

David Gerrold can win a Hugo with a story about an adopted child who claims to be a Martian, and the story never tells you if he is or not.

I can win Hugos with stories about books remembered from childhood, about Africans who wish to go back to the Good Old Days, about an alien tour guide in a thinly-disguised Egypt.

The narrow-minded purists to the contrary, there is nothing the field of science fiction can’t accommodate, no subject – even the crucifixion, as Mike Moorcock’s Nebula winner, “Behold the Man”, proves – that can’t be science-fictionalized with taste, skill and quality.

I expect movie fans, making lists of their favorite science fiction films, to omit Dr. Strangelove and Charly, because they’ve been conditioned by Roddenbury and Lucas to look for the Roddenbury/Lucas tropes of movie science fiction – spaceships, zap guns, cute robots, light sabres, and so on.

But written science fiction has never allowed itself to be limited by any straitjacket. Which is probably what I love most about it….

(3) A PRETTY, PREDICTABLE MOVIE. Abigail Nussbaum’s ”(Not So) Recent Movie Roundup Number 22” includes her final verdict on Doctor Strange.

Marvel’s latest standalone movie has a great opening scene, and a final battle that toys with some really interesting ideas, finally upending a lot of the conventions of this increasingly formulaic filmic universe.  In between these two bookends, however, there’s an origin story so tediously familiar, so derivative and by-the-numbers, that by the time I got to Doctor Strange‘s relatively out-there conclusion, all I wanted was for the thing to end.  As noted by all of its reviewers, the film is very pretty, positing a society of sorcerers who fight by shaping the very fabric of reality, causing geography and gravity to bend in on themselves in inventive, trippy ways.  The film’s opening scene, in which bad guy Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) and Dumbledore-figure The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) stage such a battle in the streets of London, turning buildings and roads into a kaleidoscope image, is genuinely exciting.  For a brief time, you think that Marvel might actually be trying something new. Then the story proper starts, and a familiar ennui sets in….

(4) THE CASH REGISTER IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD, Fanartists have been doing this all along – so Mr Men thought to himself, “I should get paid!” — “Mr Men to release a series of Doctor Who themed books”.

dr-twelfth

In a fun new partnership, BBC Worldwide and Mr Men publishers Sanrio Global have got together to create a series of Mr Men books based on each of the 12 Doctors….

The books be published by Penguin Random House and will combine “the iconic storytelling of Doctor Who” with the Mr Men’s “whimsical humour and design”.

And, of course, there will also be a series of related merchandise released to coincide with the first four books’ release in spring 2017.

They will follow stories based on the First, Fourth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors, played by William Hartnell (1963-1966), Tom Baker (1974-1981), Matt Smith (2010-2013) and Peter Capaldi (2013-present). The remaining Doctors’ stories will follow on an as-yet unconfirmed date.

(5) NORTHERN FLIGHTS. Talking Points Memo says the Internet is fleeing to Canada. Well, okay, I exaggerated….

The Internet Archive, a digital library non-profit group that stores online copies of webpages, e-books, political advertisements and other media for public record, is fundraising to store a copy of all of its contents in Canada after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency.

Five hundred years from now will somebody be writing “How the Canadians Saved Civilization” like that book about the Irish?

(6) STOP IT OR YOU’LL GO BLIND. Gizmodo found out “Why Spaceflight Ruins Your Eyesight”

Astronauts who return to Earth after long-duration space missions suffer from untreatable nearsightedness. Scientists have now isolated the cause, but finding a solution to the problem will prove easier said than done.

The problem, say researchers from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, has to do with volume changes in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) found around the brain and spinal cord. Prolonged exposure to microgravity triggers a build-up of this fluid, causing the astronauts’ eyeballs to flatten, which can lead to myopia. A build-up of CSF also causes astronauts’ optic nerves to stick out, which is also not good, as the optic nerve sends signals to the brain from the retina. This is causing nearsightedness among long-duration astronauts, and it’s problem with no clear solution in sight (so to speak).

(7) APPLAUSE. Congratulations to JJ – her post about Walter Jon Williams’ Praxis series got a shout-out in Tor.com’s newsletter —

Your Praxis Primer Impersonations is the latest book in Nebula Award winning author Walter Jon Williams’ Praxis series, a standalone story that fits into the bigger arc of Williams’ ongoing space opera adventure. For a helpful rundown on the series, check out this guide to the Praxis universe, with links to excerpts for each installment! If you enjoy fast-paced, fun military science fiction like David Weber’s Honor Harrington books, pick up Impersonations, or start with The Praxis: Dread Empire’s Fall, the first book in the series.

(8) CARTER OBIT. Author Paul Carter has died at the age of 90 reports Gregory Benford. “I wrote a novella with him about Pluto and had many fine discussions at the Eaton and other conferences. A fine man, historian, fan.”

David Weber in his introduction to The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (2015) credited C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner’s “Clash by Night” (Astounding, March 1943) and Paul Carter’s “The Last Objective” (Astounding, August 1946) as two of the earliest examples of military science fiction (by which he means something a bit more cerebral than all the space opera that preceded them):

The Last Objective by Paul Carter appeared in 1946, but Carter wrote the story while he was still in the Navy; his commanding officer had to approve it before it could be sent to Astounding. It’s just as good as [Moore & Kuttner’s] Rocketeers, but it’s different in every other fashion.

Carter describes wholly militarized societies and a war which won’t end until every human being is dead. Rather than viewing this world clinically from the outside, Carter focuses on  a single ship and the varied personalities who make up its crew. (The vessel is tunnelling through the continental plate rather than floating on the sea, but in story terms that’s a distinction without a difference.)

Carter is pretty sure that his CO didn’t actually read the story before approving it. My experience with military officers leads me to believe that he’s right, though it’s also possible that his CO simply didn’t understand the story’s horrific implications.

Carter also wrote a book about sf history. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia says his The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction (anth 1977) “demonstrated an intimate and sophisticated knowledge of the field.”

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • November 29, 1948 — Kukla, Fran and Ollie debuted on television. (And a couple of years later, my father worked as a cameraman on the show)

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born November 29, 1898 – C. S. Lewis

(11) HINES AUCTIONS KRITZER CRITIQUE. In the fourth of Jim C. Hines’ 24 Transgender Michigan Fundraiser auctions, the item up for bid is a story critique from award-winning author Naomi Kritzer.

Attention writers: Today’s auction is for a critique of a short story, up to 7500 words, by Hugo award-winning author Naomi Kritzer.

Kritzer has been writing and selling her short fiction since before the turn of the century, and she’ll use that experience and expertise to help you improve your own story.

Disclaimer: Winning this auction does not guarantee you’ll win a Hugo award — but you never know, right?

(12) WE INTERRUPT THIS NOVEL. George R.R. Martin will attend a book fair in Mexico. Then he’s going to finish Winds.

My first real visit to Mexico starts tomorrow, when I jet down to Guadalajara for the Guadalajara International Book Fair: https://www.fil.com.mx/ingles/i_info/i_info_fil.asp I’m one of the guests at the conference. I’ll be doing interviews, a press conference, a live streaming event, and a signing. I expect I will be doing some tequila tasting as well. I am informed that Guadalajara is the tequila capital of Mexico. I am looking forward to meeting my Mexican publishers, editors, and fans. This is my last scheduled event for 2016. My appearance schedule for 2017 is very limited, and will remain so until WINDS is completed. So if you want to meet me or get a book signed, this will be the last chance for a good few months…

(13) THEIR TRASH IS HIS TREASURE. Artist Dave Pollot’s business is improving old, clichéd, mundane art prints and selling them to fans through his Etsy store:

holy-seagulls-batman

This is a print of repurposed thrift store art that I’ve painted parodies of Batman and Robin into….

The Process: This is a print of one of my repurposed paintings. I find discarded prints and paintings (ones you may have inherited from great grandma and brought to your local donation bin), and make additions. Sometimes I paint monsters, other times zombies, and most times some pop culture reference- Star Wars, Futurama, Ghostbusters, Mario Brothers…the list goes on. I use oil paints and do my best to match the style of the original artist. My hope is to take these out of the trash can and into a good home; full-circle- from a print that proudly hung on your Grandma’s wall, to a print that proudly hangs on yours.

(14) BANZAI LAWYERS. SciFiStorm reduces the bad news to basics: “MGM sues Buckaroo Banzai creators over rights; Kevin Smith exits project”.

Let me see if I can sum this up, as it seems a lot has happened very rapidly…MGM and Amazon struck a deal to develop a series based on the 1984 film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and signed on Kevin Smith, the creator of Clerks and all the other Jay and Silent Bob movies and the guy I’d most like to just hang out and have a beer with, as the showrunner. But original writer Earl Mac Rauch and director Walter D. Richter claim they have the rights to a TV series. So MGM preemptively filed a lawsuit to have a court to seek declaration of the rights.

Telling fans in a Facebook video…that the lawsuit was “news to me,” Smith announced that he has dropped out of the project.

(15) PLAQUE. Gregory Benford sent along a photo of the plaque he received as a Forry Award winner last weekend at Loscon.

forry-award-min

(16) TREE FULL OF TENTACLES.  Archie McPhee is working desperately hard to sell you this seasonal abomination:

While her Cthulhumas Wreath Creature guards the entrance to the house, this year there’s a bright red Cthulhumas tree watching everyone and everything and it never, ever sleeps.

‘Twas a week before Cthulhumas, when all through the house every creature was trembling, in fact so was the house. Not one stocking had been hung by the chimney this year, for fear that Dread Cthulhu was already near.

The cats were nestled all snug in their beds, completely indifferent to our cosmic dread. And mamma in her robes and I in my mask, had just steadied our minds for our infernal task, when from deep in the basement there arose such a din, at last we knew the ritual was soon to begin.

Down to the cellar I flew like a flash, lit all the candles and sprinkled the ash. Light on the altar came from no obvious point, it soon became clear time was all out of joint.

When what to my cursed bleeding eyes did appear, but a fathomless void, then I felt only fear. With a wriggle of tentacles and shiver of dread, I knew in a moment I was out of my head.

Then a nightmarish god, with his eight mewling young, burst forth from the dark and shrieked, “Our reign has begun!“

christas-cthulhu

(17) SPEED TYPIST. Just the other day File 770 lined to a clip from Chris Hardwick’s Almost Midnight all about Chuck Tingle.

Looks like it took no time at all for Tingle to write a book commemorating the occasion: Hard For Hardwick: Pounded In The Butt By The Physical Manifestation Of My own Handsome Late Night Comedy Show.

tingle-hard-for-hardwick

(18) ONE STAR REVIEWS. One-star reviews were a weapon used by some in last year’s literary fracas, though never with any sense of humor. But a Chicago Cubs blogger just put out a book about their World Series season — and it is getting the funniest bunch of one-star reviews I’ve ever read. Read this sample and it will be easy to guess why the author received such a hostile reception….

I know this author from the Internet. He runs a website and routinely posts opinions and people comment on those opinions.

Ín real life he routinely bans commenters on his website that disagree with him. This leads to one of the bad features of this book. If you think a bad thought about the book, it shuts close and you are unable to read it until you contact the author by email and apologize. This is an annoying feature.

Also in real life when one of the author’s website opinion posts are disliked by the majority of readers he deletes the post and comments like it never happened. This book has a similar feature in that the words disappear from the pages over time and eventually you are left with 200+ blank pages that really aren’t good for anything but the bottom of a bird cage. This decreases the value of the book and does not make it suitable for archiving.

Overall, I can’t recommend.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Andrew Porter, and Harold Osler for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

115 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/29/16 In A Scroll On The Web There Lived A Pixel

  1. The problem with Canada saving civilization is we’re outnumbered nine to one and are right next door. And we are outgunned in every way. Anytime Trump’s supporters want to swarm south over the Louisiana/Canada border while nuking the crap out of our ally New Mexico, what’s to stop them?

  2. The problem with Canada saving civilization is we’re outnumbered nine to one and are right next door.

    Don’t worry; most USAmericans couldn’t find you on a map anyway.

    ETA: W00t! My first fifth!

  3. (8) I initially read this as “Carter Orbit.” Even after I read “died at the age of 90” I was reading on to see when he went into space…

  4. #2: the purists haven’t heard (or in older cases forgot) Campbell’s declaration that the range of literature was while the range of SF was . However, Resnick goes overboard on both the snark (at good writers who don’t have the mass appeal to stay in print) and some of the facts (Piper was recognized as SF long before Turtledove started, although he may have gotten a boost from using tech to travel between histories rather than sticking to one alternate. Brunner OTOH didn’t even do that.)

    recent reading:

    Dan Vyleta, Smoke. Set in an alternate late-Victorian England, 2.5 centuries after a book-burning&rewriting that rivaled classic China’s. Very political (the lower classes emit Smoke when they even think of sinning, while the upper classes are trained not to — making distinction very easy), very baroquely written (sometimes overwritten — I don’t think we need quite as much scenery description in the middle), with almost archetypical characters (one cheerful, one fighting what he’s been told is his wyrd). I’m not sure I liked it or agreed with the conclusion, but it was … compelling.

    Con Lehane, Murder at the 42nd Street Library (i.e., NYC Central). Contemporary mystery, but I know a lot of SF readers also dip into this genre and it’s about one of our temples. Blurbs sounded fascinating, but I can’t recommend; too many connections/coincidences for plausibility, and all the characters are repellent. (Not interestingly repellent as in some Banks work, just people you’d cross the street from.)

    Ballantine & Morris, The Ghost Rebellion (Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences #5). very-small-press publication. More action and less thought, with just enough light erotica that RT will probably still like it. Plenty of hooks for the promised conclusion (#6) but a reasonably wrapped up segment. Readers from South Asia may be triggered by the characterization of all freedom fighters as terrorists \and/ dupes, but the leads show a glimmer of understanding that something’s wrong with the Raj; otherwise an entertaining light read if you can ignore the bad copyediting. (If this is representative, their Ace editor was doing something, contra my assertions that one usually can’t tell what an editor is doing because there’s no before-and-after comparison. I’d volunteer my amateur services for the next one but I don’t see a contact pick on their pages.)

  5. @16 – Was wonderful. Thanks for pointing this out. Both the Cthulhu wreath and tree were amazing.

    @13 – Would be better if the person could paint. I’ve seen this done better by others.

  6. The Gizmodo article reminds me I read one there tonight that pointed out the short link from Gamergate to the Trump Administration. One more thing to be horrified about these folks. Well, let’s see how many in Congress are concerned about him not putting his businesses into a blind trust. Maybe the Pence Administration will start very soon.

  7. @Chip Hitchcock: Thanks for the recent read mini-reviews! Smoke is one of my upcoming audiobooks to listen to (when I get to it depends on my mood); I’ll take “compelling” and hope I enjoy it. 🙂

  8. 12) Guadalajara is a cool city, Tequila itself is small but also fun – lots of money being put in by Sauza to renovate it.

  9. 2) Resnick doesn’t think SF fans consider “Charly” to be an SF movie? Man, he’s full of it. Does he also think we don’t consider “Flowers for Algernon” to be an SF story?

    Recently read: Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris. Harris is primarily known for the Sookie Stackhouse series, but I like her other books better. This is the first of a 3-book set, very low-key urban fantasy with a crossover to murder mystery, and it has the distinction of being one of the few books I’ve read with a small-town setting that didn’t remind me, forcefully, of why I never want to live in a small town. Everybody in Midnight, Texas has a secret, which means that the usual complete lack of respect for other people’s privacy and boundaries just doesn’t happen here; the residents keep an eye out for each other but know how not to pry. The characters are well-drawn, and there’s a nice twist ending that I, at least, didn’t see coming at all. Bonus: the protagonist of this series is my favorite secondary character from the Harper Connolly mysteries, and one of the other characters is from the Lily Bard series! Minor content warning: the bad guys here are from a white-supremacist group very like the ones that have been backing Trump. OTOH, they do get their comeuppance, so there’s that. The other two books in this series are now on my wishlist.

  10. Lee: Resnick doesn’t think SF fans consider “Charly” to be an SF movie?

    What he said is that movie fans are conditioned not to put it on their lists of favorite sf movies.

    He didn’t say that they (or he) didn’t regard Charly as sf.

    Here are two lists that Charly isn’t on.

    Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies

    io9 – 25 Classic Science Fiction Movies That Everybody Must Watch

    It’s probably not on a lot of lists of greats.

    I wouldn’t put it on such a list myself, though not for the reason Resnick is guessing. It’s just an OK movie. I’d think of a lot of better sf movies to fill up my list before I ever got to Charly.

  11. (2) Example the first: to be fair, she changed her mind really quickly when she found out what it entailed.

    And “Charly” isn’t on best-of/favorite lists because as OGH said it’s a fairly bland, meh, average movie. Not nearly as good as the book. Was quite disappointed when I saw it after reading the story. I’d have to get way down in my SF viewings before it got to be on my list too. Not b/c it’s not SF, but b/c it’s dull.

    (13) Not really better than the originals, unlike that guy who alters Kincaid works.

    (17) Wot, no credit for linking to that book in comments and subsequently having to erase my Amazon and browser history?

  12. Recent reading: The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers. Finally got around to reading this, after hearing recommendations from many people. Enjoyed the reading, but not to the level I expected. Saw a strong Firefly influence, and felt like this was a story arc in a similar tv series. Nice presentation of a multi-race spacefaring civilization (where humans are one of the more minor participants), but never got deeply engrossed in the story or characters. Don’t regret the time spent reading it, but probably won’t go on to read the sequel. Other people’s mileage obviously varied.

  13. I finished reading an arc of Thoraiya Dyer’s CROSSROADS OF CANOPY, which was an interesting fantasy for its location (within the trees of a rainforest in a fantasy universe), and a main character whom I’m still deciding whether or not I actually liked or simply misread at the beginning. Still chewing that one over.

    I’m onto NF for a bit, with a long delayed and long desired re-read of the classic GODEL ESCHER BACH by Douglas Hoftstadter.

  14. WAMU-FM, which is Washington DC’s NPR station, has an old-time radio show on Sunday from 7 PM through 11 PM EST and they will occasionally play an SF radio show like Dimension X. I have heard several Bradbury stories and “With Folded Hands” by Jack Williamson. They have also been playing Adventures of Superman as a serial lately. The station streams the show live.

    http://wamu.org/

  15. I admire both Resnick and his writing but he’s flat out wrong that nothing by Gernsback, either as an an editor or as a writer is in print. A check at Amazon shows his Ralph 124c 41+ novel was published again just two years ago, and authorized reprints of the Astounding Annuals and Amazing Stories are ongoing. I looked because I found it hard to believe that in the age of digital publishing that he was completely out of print.

    Oh and you can purchase a copy in digital form of the Wireless & Electrical Cyclopedia Catalog No. 20 that he edited in 1918!

  16. (4): My favorite Amazon reviews are Hamilton Richardson’s reviews of the Mr. Men series.

    From the beginning of his review of Mr. Messy:

    If ‘1984’ or ‘The Trial’ had been a children’s book, Mr Messy would be it. No literary character has ever been so fully and categorically obliterated by the forces of social control. Hargreaves may well pay homage to Kafka and Orwell in this work, but he also goes beyond them.

  17. Paul Weimer
    I devoured Gödel, Escher, Bach, and eagerly purchased Metamagical Themas, but slid right off of it. Some time later, I went back to the first book, and slid off of that one as well. Perhaps my attention span has

  18. @Kip Re-reading GEB is definitely feeling like work. Good, thought provoking work, but not light in the slightest.

  19. 13) Elderly relatives usually have a bunch of these not very good landscape paintings and I’ll probably inherit a couple of them one day. This might be a solution what to do about them that is better than just throwing them away, since they have little value.

    16) Love it.

    I was holiday shopping yesterday and bought a German edition of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet as a present. On the cover, there was a huge Tor sticker, which confused me a tad, because even though Tor is German-owned (by publishing conglomerate Holtzbrink) they don’t operate in Germany. Plus, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet was never a Tor book except in the same alternate puppy universe where Ann Leckie and N.K. Jemisin are also Tor authors.

  20. 2)

    …there are 11 Sheckley books in print. Of all the books, fiction and non-fiction, that James Blish wrote, only two remain in print.

    Yea, but one of them is A Case of Conscience. OTOH I’m sure I’ve read some Sheckley but I couldn’t tell you anything about it.

    I have gone round and round with a Hugo-winning novelist over the question of whether Repo Man is science fiction or not. That is to say I maintained that a film that features people just exploding, a wayward neutron-bomb building scientist, a secret agent with a metal hand and real-live-dead-aliens in the trunk of a car that launches itself into space and/or time does indeed count as science fiction and he did not due to it being nominally set in Los Angeles circa 1984.

  21. That’s just silly. By that criteria The Terminator (just off the top of my head) doesn’t qualify as science fiction either.

  22. @James Davis Nicoll we may be saved by the fact that a lot of Trump supporters are the same people who couldn’t locate Canada on a map and are also suspicious of books and facts to start with, so if we keep really quiet and turn off the lights at night, maybe they’ll think we are just a weird forresty part of the Arctic circle? (Honestly it was not that long ago that I was answering some questions from Americans while on a trip that were, in all seriousness, how do we keep our igloos from melting in summer and how many dog sleds does each house need?)

  23. Yea, but one of them is A Case of Conscience. OTOH I’m sure I’ve read some Sheckley but I couldn’t tell you anything about it.

    Much of the work of both is available as ebooks. Knight as well.

    I’ve read Knight and Blish’s criticism recently. I think their experience with some of the stuff in 30s and 40s pulps which was contemptuous of scientific accuracy and good writing alike might have shaped their attitude to better writers who played fast-and-loose for more artistic reasons (including maybe a bit of fear that they presaged a return to the Bad Old Days). Aldiss’ Hothouse is another book that comes in for criticism in both for being scientifically unworkable, never mind the images in it.

  24. @Paul I keep going back to Hofstadter and Dennett’s The Mind’s I. Lots of SF snippets in there!

  25. @Shao Ping – well yeah, for residential igloos we just grab a can or two of the low-grade stuff that comes after you give the trees one last big squeeze to get out the maple dredges, but for the House of Parliament igloo and such, they just let ’em melt in summer and rebuild in October once the great walrus migration has been allowed to run through Ottawa first, which is Canadian tradition!

  26. 13) My wife once bought art at a Convention. It was a painting of a stack of southwestern looking baskets in an outdoor market. The artist had tried to sell it for years but it never went. So she added two tiny eyes and a small trail of smoke coming out of one of the baskets and BOOM, wife bought it the next time it went up for sale. It doesn’t take much to turn a still life into intriguing SFF art.

    —-

    This tweet thread came across my feed the other day and I’ve been thinking about it since. Do some conrunners really think fans in Eastern Europe and China spend thousands of their own money to bid for a WorldCon just to get a Visa? Really? It’s not that hard to get a tourist Visa to the US, even from Croatia or China. I know I’ve been skeptical of some “foreign” bids, but that’s been Americans pushing for a bid in another country where the local fan base isn’t involved.

    I supported the Helsinki bid both times because I want WorldCon to get more out in the World. I’m so glad we have five bids from foreign countries on the horizon in the next eight years. I hope China comes up with another bid. A bid from South America would be lovely. I know there are thriving fan communities down there. Maybe they’ll want to host a WorldCon, too.

    It would be even better if we could come up with a method of bidding for WorldCon that doesn’t involve people staking tens of thousands of their own money, though.

  27. @ULTRAGOTHA Subsidizing convention bids is already a tradition. Pre-support. And most parties have a kitty. The bidders are making huge personal commitments, but every little bit of support helps.

    Basically I think you have to be nuts to bid for a Worldcon, but some of my friends who I really like and respect have done it anyway.

  28. Tom, I think to have WorldCon in more of the World, we’re going to have to confront and change the attitudes Crystal points out in her Tweet thread and also make it easier to run a bid.

  29. “bid for a WorldCon just to get a Visa”

    Can ULTRAGOTHA or anyone really break down this idea for a non-American who doesn’t get at a glance how this idea even works for the racist paranoid types?

  30. I think there’s a major distinction between works where the speculation is a small part of the work vs. those where the speculation a big part. The more attention a book draws to the speculation, the more likely readers are to read it as speculative fiction. Faulkner’s novels take place in an imaginary county in Mississippi, but no one would call them SFF. “Shogun” takes place in a modified 1600s Japan where the names and actions of key historical figures are changed, but I’ve never heard anyone try to call it alternate history. “Seven Days in May” was set in a then-future year, but I think no one reading it ever seriously considered it SF (it’s about an attempted military coup in the US, and it’s all about politics). In all these cases, the speculation is there solely to make the author’s job easier; the reader pays it little or no attention.

    An SFF story, by contrast, attracts readers who want to explore the speculation. “What’s it like to live on a space station? Or on a different planet? Or to go close to the speed of light?” Toward this end, the author puts at least as much work into outlining the speculation as he/she puts into creating any of the characters. I think that extra work, more than anything else, makes SFF different in kind from mainstream fiction.

  31. Strictly speaking, Smith didn’t say that he was exiting the Buckaroo Banzai project. He said that he would have to exit it if the original writer and director didn’t give it their blessing. That leaves plenty of wiggle room depending on what transpires over the next few months.

  32. Lee: I have seen SFF people claiming that Flowers for Algernon is not SF, apparently on the grounds of ‘we were made to read in in high school, and everyone knows that what one is made to read in high school is horrible litfic’. And that chart that those people did of that poll that those other people did (*waves hands*) classified it under ‘I don’t want to be seen in that section of the bookstore’.

    Greg: I’m sure that is right. There are plenty of political thrillers which feature unreal presidents and prime ministers, but aren’t considered AH for that reason; or again, Quintin Jardine’s books about the Edinburgh police feature the First Minister of Scotland and, in one case, the Pope, and they certainly aren’t the real First Minister or the real Pope, but the books are still straightforwardly crime/mystery stories.

    But of course there are edge cases, where it’s not clear what the dominant interest with which one would read the work is; in that case the reputation of the author may determine how it’s classified. Consider David Mitchell’s work, for instance. Cloud Atlas has four episodes set in the past or present (naturalistically presented) and two in the future. In GhostWritten gur snagnfgvp ryrzrag perrcf hc ba lbh tenqhnyyl – va snpg vg’f zragvbarq ba gur svefg cntr, ohg va n jnl gung znxrf lbh guvax vg’f senhqhyrag – naq gur rkcrevrapr jbhyq or irel qvssrerag vs lbh xarj lbh jrer ernqvat FSS sebz gur fgneg. Though nowadays the fantastic element seems gradually to be taking over his work.

  33. I have picked up one of those AMAZING anthologies (1928), and found the writing in most of the stories to be bad and clumsy. Were I 10 years old, I might not have noticed, and would have enjoyed it for the ideas. I have read Hugo Gernsbeck’s fiction. It is better to enjoy knowing it exists than to actually try to read it.

  34. ULTRAGOTHA: I was sent Crystal Huff’s series of tweets the other day and didn’t put them in the Scroll because they are an unfair, divisive, damaging slur.

    Did somebody say these things to Huff? Then identify the person. EVERYBODY did not say these things — I know I never have, nor has anybody ever said them in a conversation with me. I don’t need Huff inviting everybody to think that because I am part of the Worldcon-running community these are my views.

    Apparently, sometime since she helped lead a winning bid, and resigned as co-chair of the con, she has decided to endorse the narrative that people involved in running Worldcons are lacking every compassionate, generous, inclusive human trait. With comments like, “This was especially a bias noticeable in action against places where English wasn’t the 1st language or the dominant race wasn’t white,” she’s this year’s version of the Jim C. Hines tweet.

    A couple of years ago a Chinese Worldcon bid came out of the blue, and unsurprisingly lost. Fans don’t vote Worldcons to people they’ve never met or heard of previously. Huff, a guest this year at an sf conference in China, now has met them and speaks well of them. Instead of taking into account her advantage, she strongly implies racism is behind other people’s resistance.

    The fandom I’m familiar with spent decades hoping to get a Worldcon in Japan, which happened in 2007. Takumi and Sachiko Shibano were guests of honor at the Worldcon I chaired in 1996.

    So, no, I refuse to take Huff’s views at face value.

  35. I laughed at the Cthulhu thing, thanks!

    Re the story about the girl who wanted to menstruate: she’ll get over that real quick, after a few rounds of flooding at the worst possible time.

  36. Mike, I agree that the reason the China bid in 2014 lost was more due to “haven’t engaged much with WorldCon” than other reasons. I do think it would be a good thing to have more WorldCons in non-western countries and that was more my reason for sharing the link.

    Given your statement, I apologize for putting the link on your site and have no objections if you delete it. You’ve made clear in the past that there are things you don’t want to host and I support your decisions in those matters.

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