(1) Nothing says the holiday season like this Kurt Adler 28” Star Wars Stormtrooper Light-Up Tinsel Lawn Decor…
Holding a small, neatly-wrapped present for a festive twist, this soldier of the Galactic Empire is wearing his all-white uniform and armor.
(2) “Sir David Attenborough and giant hedgehog launch new TV show Natural Curiosities”.
If Sonic is the first name that pops into your head when hearing the word “hedgehog,” British naturalist Sir David Attenborough wants to change your perceptions about the prickly creature.
A life-like hedgehog statue, measuring 7 feet tall and 12 feet long, covered in coconut fiber and over 2,000 wood spikes, was unveiled on Clapham Common in London to launch Attenborough’s new nature series, “Natural Curiosities” on UKTV this week….
A recent survey of 2,000 British adults revealed that because the “average Briton takes only 16 walks in the countryside each year, dramatically limiting their exposure to wildlife, a quarter of Britons say they have never seen a wild hedgehog, rabbit or fox, while 26 per cent claim never to have spotted a grey squirrel or frog, and 36 per cent say wild deer have eluded them,” according to the Daily Mail.
(3) Richard Davies discusses “Fragile Treasures: The World’ Most Valuable Paperbacks” at AbeBooks.
In terms of sheer numbers, collectible softcovers are vastly outnumbered by collectible hardcovers. However, many paperbacks – books with soft, not rigid, paper-based covers – sell for high prices. The reasons vary – authors self-publish, publishers lack the necessary budget or the desire to invest in a particular author (think of poets particularly) or simply softcover is the format of choice for the genre….
Published in German, Kafka’s Metamorphosis is the king of the collectible softcovers. Its famous front cover, designed by Ottomar Starke, shows a man recoiling in horror. Probably no more than a thousand copies of this novella were printed. It wasn’t printed in English until 1937. Today, this story of a salesman transformed into an insect is studied around the world.
(4) Ethan Mills is observing Stoic Week at Examined Worlds. The second post in his series considers the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
Tuesday: What is in Our Control and the Reserve Clause Tuesday’s morning text is one of my favorite parts of the Meditations from Marcus Aurelius, one that has helped me get out of bed on more than one occasion!
Early in the morning, when you are finding it hard to wake up, hold this thought in your mind: ‘I am getting up to do the work of a human being. Do I still resent it, if I am going out to do what I was born for and for which I was brought into the world? Or was I framed for this, to lie under the bedclothes and keep myself warm?’ ‘But this is more pleasant’. So were you born for pleasure: in general were you born for feeling or for affection? Don’t you see the plants, the little sparrows, the ants, the spiders, the bees doing their own work, and playing their part in making up an ordered world. And then are you unwilling to do the work of a human being? Won’t you run to do what is in line with your nature?
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.1
Thinking about this through a science fiction lens invites questions about the work of a human being. What are we like as a species? Marcus compares humans with other terrestrial animals, but science fiction might extend the comparison to extraterrestrials as well.
Is it our nature, as Star Trek tells us, to “seek out new life and new civilizations”? Is this what gets us out of bed in the morning? Consider the theme of exploration in the recent book/movie, The Martian. Is it inevitable that we long to leave our terrestrial bed? Is our species at the beginning of a dawn of space exploration? Or should we be wary of over-indulging this exploration drive, as Kim Stanley Robinson’s amazing novel, Aurora, seems to imply?
(5) This video has been reported in a comment on File 770, however, I may not have linked it in a Scroll.
Sasquan Guest of Honor Dr. Kjell Lindgren sends welcome from the International Space Station to members of the 2015 World Science Fiction Convention.
(6) Today In History
- November 4, 1922 — The entrance to King Tut’s tomb was discovered. On November 26, 1922, Carter and fellow archaeologist Lord Carnarvon entered the interior chambers of the tomb, finding them miraculously intact.
(7) This is billed as a Dalek relaxation tape by Devour.com.
(8) Lawrence Railey is skeptical about “The rise of the Self-Insertion fic” at According To Hoyt.
Diversity isn’t the goal. At best, it’s a side-effect. Good story-telling is the only purpose, and the Puppies believe that nothing should get in the way of that.
And, quite simply, this notion that one must share essential attributes with the main character in order to enjoy a story is patronizing, narcissistic, and stupid. A black man can enjoy a story about a white woman. And, in the case of the story I just finished reading a couple days ago, a conservative white man can enjoy a story about a transsexual robot named Merlin living on distant planet.
Books do not have to be self-insertion fics, and they do not need to push a socio-political agenda.
The fact that the Puppy Kickers don’t know any better is disappointing to say the least.
(9) Steven Harper Piziks advises writers show equine intestinal fortitude in “Writing Nowadays: The Anti-Waiting Game” at Book View Café.
How things have changed. Now you’re as likely to get a giant email dump with a PDF in it and a frantic note from someone in the editorial food chain: “I know this is short notice, but we need you to go through these changes by Friday morning!”
Every author I know has gone through this. Demands that manuscripts be rewritten within two days, or over Christmas, or when the author is on vacation. There’s an idea out there that because email allows instant delivery, instant writing must follow.
Horse manure.
Just say no. Politely and firmly.
(10) An appreciation of the late French sf author Yan Ayerdhal by Jean-Daniel Breque at Europa SF.
French science fiction writer Yan Ayerdhal died Tuesday, October 27, 2015, after an intense bout with lung cancer.
Born Marc Soulier on January 26, 1959, in Lyons, he thrived on SF from an early age, since his father, Jacky Soulier, was a big-time fan and collector—he co-authored a few children and young adult SF books in the 1980s. Ayerdhal worked in several trades before becoming a full-time writer: he was a ski instructor, a professional soccer player, a teacher, he worked in marketing for L’Oréal, and so on….
Most notable among his novels are Demain, une oasis (“Tomorrow, an Oasis”, 1991), L’Histrion (“The Minstrel”, 1993), Parleur ou les Chroniques d’un rêve enclavé (“Speaker, or Chronicles of an Enclosed Dream”, 1997), Étoiles mourantes (“Dying Stars”, in collaboration with Jean-Claude Dunyach, 1999), and Transparences (“Transparencies”, 2004). Most of them were illustrated by Gilles Francescano. He was the recipient of several SF awards: the Tour Eiffel award, the Rosny aîné award (three times), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (twice) and many more. He had one story published in Interzone, “Flickerings” (May 2001 issue, original title: “Scintillements”, 1998, translated by Sheryl Curtis).
(11) Jesse at Speculiction rejects 100 Year Starship and its new award, in “Awards Like Stars In The Sky: The Canopus”.
What’s interesting to see on the Canopus award slate is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, a cautionary tale that seems to draw focus away from space and back to Earth, and not Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, a masturbatory exercise in space gadgetry if ever there were. One would have almost expected Stephenson’s novel to be a shoo-in given the novel’s theme, but I’m not the award’s organizer.
Looking through the Science Fiction Awards Database, a person finds many a defunct award. The group were able to hold the ship together for a few years, sometimes even a decade or more, before the strings let loose (probably the purse strings) and the award slipped into the night of genre awareness (that vast space comprising the majority of material older than ten years). I’m not pronouncing the Canopus’ doom, but with so many crises at hand on Earth, I think I’m in Aurora’s boat, not Seveneves. Shouldn’t we be solving Earth’s problems before tackling the riddle of space????
(12) A patent has been granted for a space elevator.
Patent granted to space elevator brings science fiction one step closer to reality
Canada-based Thoth Technology was recently granted U.S. and U.K. patents for a space elevator reaching 12.5 miles into the sky. The ThothX Tower is a proposed freestanding piece of futuristic, pneumatically pressurized architecture, designed to propel astronauts into the stratosphere. Then they can then be launched into space. The tower would also likely be used to generate wind energy, host communications technology and will be open to space tourists.
(13) And in the biological sciences the news is –
Never too late to be who you are: Britain's oldest tree appears to be undergoing a sex change after 3,000 years – https://t.co/KOcVJ1ZVhW
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) November 4, 2015
(14) Never bet against Einstein when general relativity is on the line!
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity has been proven right again — and this time, physicists have pinned down just how precise it is: Any deviations from his theory of general relativity are so small that they would change calculations by just one part in 10,000 to one part in 100,000.
(15) Though not a genre film, Christmas Eve has Patrick Stewart in it.
[Thanks to rcade, Daniel Dern, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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(8) The *RISE* of self-insertion fiction? The RISE of it?
When was fiction ever NOT mostly self-insertion???
White heterosexual men have most often and consistently told stories in which white heterosexual men are the protagonists. Chinese authors have mostly written about Chinese people. Indian authors have mostly written about Indians. Nigerian authors have mostly written about Nigerians. Women protagonists are written by women more than they’re written by men, and this has always been so. Gay protagonists are written about by LGBT authors more than straight authors write them as protagonists. Jews write about Jewish protagonists more often than gentile authors do. Christian authors write Christian protagonists more often than Jews, Muslims, or Hindus do.
When was this ever not so?
The fact that more white males had more opportunities to publish in our culture than anyone else until recent times (and that white males who were not heterosexual typically needed to conceal that from the public to function in our society until recent times) ensured that straight white males as protagonists were simply the most visible self-insertion in stories for generations in our culture. It is the prevalence of that particular group’s self-insertion in our culture’s storytelling that gives it the appearance of being a default setting; but it’s just self-insertion, no different, in practice, from anyone who is not a straight white mail writing from a perspective closer to their own and using protagonists closer to themselves and their experiences.
Lawrence Railey gives every appearance of being unable to construct a rational argument. And in this way, he is well-suited to keeping company with Sad Puppies.
Full-time leech/MRA Dean Esmay is there as well.
Do we think this source is reliable as the one VD has at Tor who knew that Scalzi’s numbers were so disappointing that he was going to get dropped?
Lol! Ah, yes, the LEAK… that forced Tor to offer Scalzi a $3.4 million deal just to save face!
@rob_matic: I enjoyed most of House of Shattered Wings and thought it flowed fine… until nearly the end. The ending seemed rushed; seome bits too neat, others just dropped.
In my part of west London, foxes are more common than cats, and most evenings you’ll see one or two of them wandering the streets. The record for our back garden was seven a couple of summers ago (two adults and five three-quarter grown cubs). They are a pests, ransacking dustbins and scattering rubbish everywhere. Also they defecate copiously. Haven’t seen a hedgehog in London for years, and I’m not sure why (there are as many hedges/fences as ever). A few years ago we put a small pond in our garden, and within a couple of months a toad had taken up residence.
We spend quite a bit of time in Somerset, and while I’ve yet to see a live badger, badger roadkill — worth commenting on only a couple of years ago — is now commonplace. A highlight of last summer was spotting a mole crawling across the grass (we knew they were there, obviously, but I’d never seen a living wild one).
@rob_matic
Hey, how much more legit to you need than a random IRC conversation? Frickin’ typical SJW smear tactics…
At this time of year all the motorway signs in Scotland (even in the middle of Glasgow) are plastered with “Warning, High risk of deer in road” Change of the clocks means they’re coming out to feed on the verges during peak times.
Dad’s still annoyed by them eating his purple sprouting broccoli from his allotment too.
Spiny Norman’s looking well.
Dinsdale!
MRA’s really creep me out.
Article wasn’t a good argument for the rise of self-insertion fiction, however was a perfect example of self-persecution fiction.
That giant hedgehog reminds me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yww2x3bm9k
Night of The Lepus (1972)
Possibly the most ridiculous creature feature ever made.
My standard response to comments like those in (8) is: if self-insertion and reader-reflection are irrelevant to good storytelling, then let’s spend an entire year (heck, let’s make it five years) where the protagonists of all published novels are required to be queer women of color living in non-US cultures and where the stories accurately reflect their lived experience as such. Good storytelling is good storytelling.
What’s that? There are good stories that simply couldn’t be told under those requirements? Gosh.
Are we still doing Hugo recommends? Just read this short story, Wooden Feathers by Ursula Vernon, that I think is worth a look for people’s short-story longlists. LINK
It hit me in the feels. Hard.
Wooden feathers? That’ll never fly
@cassy b Dang, that was good. A most original take on an old story.
@Cassy B.:
So good. Between this and our shared love of Eustace, I’ll be looking out for more recs from you, as soon as I’m done reading all the Ursula Vernon I can find. Why I haven’t already escapes me.
If the sum total of their practical advice boils down to a.) record your interactions with strange women in neutral settings to protect yourself and/or b.) don’t put yourself in a position where you are alone with a strange woman in a neutral setting to protect yourself, then it strikes me that the protection extended by this behavior extends both ways. If a potential assaulter refuses to even be alone with a potential victim, then the chances of him assaulting her diminishes dramatically, right? And if your goal is, in fact, to see sexual harassers and rapists punished for their crimes, then one of your ancillary goals would then be to ensure the veracity of the claim being made.
Susana, don’t neglect T. Kingfisher. That’s Ursula Vernon’s pen-name.
(And I’ll be watching for your rec’s, too!)
@Heather Rose Jones
(snicker) I like it. After all, one of the points of reading is to experience the world from other perspectives… And really, queer woman of color in non-US culture leaves a lot of perspectives on the table that I have missed out on.
Also, off-topic, Daughter of Mystery has joined my comfort-reads.
@rob_matic and Ian
I ground to a halt in the middle of House of Shattered Wings and somehow never picked it up again. I do mean to try again, though; sometimes I have a hard time getting into a book I end up loving. Ancillary Justice was one such (though in that case watching what the pronouns kept doing to the inside of my head kept me entertained until I got to the point where I got caught up in the characters.)
We’re always doing potential Hugo recommendations around here. 😉 Whatever the subject overall is.
@idontknow,
it’s not advising to never be alone with ‘strange women’ (whatever that means)
It’s advising to never be alone with any women.
and he then goes on to justify this with:
Don’t like that, ladies? Tough. You were just fine with collective guilt when the shoe was on the other foot. Enjoy your turn!
So sensible advice, or just more MRA hate?
Wooden Feathers was most enjoyable! Thanks for the rec, Cassy B!
The MRAs should look into converting to Orthodox Red Sea Pedestrianism–I think they would find kindred souls.
https://www.google.com/#q=orthodox+jewish+airplane+women
I think ‘strange women’ is pretty much self-explanatory. It’s pretty much any woman you don’t know. Or at least don’t know well. And sensible advise can be included in with misogyny, just as it can be included in with with misandry. Negative, overblown rhetoric can come from either side. That doesn’t negate the fact that it’s a pretty good idea to insulate yourself from criminals who have a vested interest in destroying your life, no matter the mechanism they choose to use to try to do that.
That doesn’t negate the fact that it’s a pretty good idea to insulate yourself from criminals who have a vested interest in destroying your life
what criminals ?
It’s basically MRA’s spreading unfounded rumours.
@Darren
That will never work, MRA’s are basically raging bigots who also hate women (as well as jews, blacks, gays etc)
@idontknow
I honestly don’t want to live my life thinking the worst of everyone. Paranoia isn’t a fun way to live.
Adding another emphatic thumbs up for Wooden Feathers. A lovely and thought provoking story.
“I always figure you might as well approach life like everybody’s your friend or nobody is; don’t make much difference. ”
Paden, Silverado
The thing is that it’s not strange women that they suggest you be careful of. They’re saying all women because as soon as you do something the woman doesn’t like (example, a bad grade or refusing to sign off on something) she may charge you with harassment. At least one commenter says no professor will mentor/advise female students for fear that a woman could turn on him and charge him with impropriety.
Theoretically, this warning should be extended to men too as there’s no reason a man couldn’t charge you with sexual harassment.
So you know, never do anything that isn’t recorded. Just in case.
Is that a direct quote?
Because what I see is petulance, wounded pride, and a total failure of imagination and human fellow-feeling.
If you can look at all of the evidence of everything that’s happened in the last 10 years and believe that there are no extremists out there who are guilty at the very least of defamation or, in extreme cases, malicious prosecution, then I will have no more success trying to make that case to you than I would trying to convince someone on the other side that a sizable number of sexual assaults occur on college campuses.
However you choose to define it, what these people are describing is fear of being the victim of a crime. So whether you believe in the severity of the crime or not, the actions they are advocating are actions taken to insulate themselves from victimization by a criminal.
Meredith:
No, it isn’t. And I’d prefer not to live that way either, but these days, there are people out there who are willing to try to destroy other people’s lives, whether they do it through assault or they do it through defamation. I don’t think advocating that it’s a good thing to protect yourself as best you can is bad advice, whichever of the two you are more likely to be a victim of.
on #8–You know what would have been really cool? The blog post’s author would have actually asked an actual minority how they felt about representation. Then you wouldn’t have such straw-language as the following:
“Chuck Wendig’s rant about people not seeing themselves in stories is perfectly in line with this thought process. If we extrapolate his line of thinking, there must be, for example, gay black characters so that gay black men can connect with the story and insert themselves into it. For without a suitable number of these characters, they cannot connect with the story. Or, in simple terms, they can’t make the story about themselves personally.”
Black gay men who read (and write) spec fic actually exist.
@idon’tknow: There are false reporters for every crime on the books. Only with sexual assault is that used as an excuse to discredit all accusers. Please stop talking about this if that’s the best you have as an argument, as I really have no further patience for stupid today. I already read that excerpt from the Railey essay where he seems to be arguing, “There’s no need for every piece of fiction to be about self-insertion, which is why everyone should stop writing about people who aren’t white men like me,” and that pretty much used up my tolerance for bullshit.
The risk in saying “How d’you like them apples? Hannh? Haannh?” Is that the person you think you are teaching a lesson to may actually agree that careful, mindful and cautious treatment of all human beings, themselves included, is warranted.
If they have to live every second of their own lives that way anyway, they may fail to see why it would be an outrage that those comfortably in power should as well.
I recently read So Much Cooking, by Naomi Kritzer, in the latest Clarkesworld, and I really liked it. Don’t bounce off the recipes in the first part of the story. There are only a few, you can easily skip over them, and they’re not what the story is about.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that I am trying to discredit all victims of sexual assault. If someone has been assaulted, then their attacker should be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. Conversely, if someone is victimized by someone who is trying to destroy his life by accusing him of a crime he did not commit, then his attacker should also be arrested, prosecuted and convicted. The actions these people are describing taking would seem to be actions designed to remove the ambiguity of a he said/she said situation, right? And again, a man choosing to isolate himself from strange women in neutral settings would seem to reduce the chances for victimization of either kind to occur, wouldn’t it?
I am not entirely sure what the controversy is here. Isn’t this the same policy that most hospitals have for male nurses and most female prisons have for male guards simply writ large?
Re 8 ).
Ironically, my only response to the author involves self insertion.
@Dex
There is a certain logic to that. Eric, like many of his rugged, self-reliant, libertarian peers, is resorting to pan handling these days to make ends meet:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6835
So why not step up his game and try his luck on the MRA pro circuit? Quite a few people seem to be making a decent living tilling the fecund fields of aggrieved male entitlement.
And again, a man choosing to isolate himself from strange women in neutral settings would seem to reduce the chances for victimization of either kind to occur, wouldn’t it?
For some reason, these sorts of problems only seem to crop up very often for MRAs. Most men seem to be able to live all of their lives without ever having to worry about being falsely accused of sexual harassment. Maybe the problem ESR is wailing about isn’t the women.
Idontknow, what you seem to be failing to understand is that many (most?) young women *already* learn to be careful about being alone with strange men. So for a man to winge about actually having to be careful about being alone with a strange women strikes me as, well, overwrought.
Especially since my understanding is that false rape accusations are very, very rare, while real-but-unreported actual rape is not uncommon.
It’s the voice of unconscious privilege.
It doesn’t have to happen ‘very often.’ In this day and age, it only has to happen ‘once’ for someone’s life to be effectively destroyed, which is why it is a strategy that has some appeal for criminals and extremists. That has always been the attraction of crime. You have the potential to gain a disproportionate reward for the amount of effort you expend. The vast majority of women would not do this. Even the vast majority of rape victims would not. But there are a few, just like a few men will commit sexual assault, who would and do. And it’s been exposed enough times at this point to make any claim that it ‘never’ happens ludicrous.
@peace,
Its a direct quote, wehuntedthemammoth are all over this story, as you would expect.
@Cat: Indeed. I started being annoyed at Ancillary Justice (mostly by the present/past back’n’forth), got a little more annoyed at something else (I forget what), then realized, “Whoops, I’m hooked!” and wound up loving it, including the present/past back’n’forth. Heh.
@idontknow
This is deeply offensive to suggest that the statistically insignificant numbers about falsely reported sexual assault is in any way comparable to the ongoing nature of actual sexual assaults that even the most conservative sources are forced to agree that one in four women will face in their lives.
In this day and age, it only has to happen ‘once’ for someone’s life to be effectively destroyed, which is why it is a strategy that has some appeal for criminals and extremists.
Except there’s exactly zero evidence that “criminals and extremists” are using this strategy.
Except for the fact that we have, you know, documented proof that it’s happened very publicly more than once.
@Cassy B I read “Wooden Feathers” and liked it enough to write a review of it.
http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2015/11/wooden-feathers-by-ursula-vernon.html
Thanks for recommending it!
Except for the fact that we have, you know, documented proof that it’s happened very publicly more than once.
Prove it. Prove an “extremist” used this as a strategy. And then prove that it “ruined someone’s life”. Provide citations from primary sources. Make sure you define “extremist” and “ruined life” while you are at it.