(1) Star Wars: The Force Awakens character posters are out.
(2) The WTF Bad Science Fiction Covers took a detour to Canadian sci-fi and comics.
Batman and Robin fail to prevent yet another Mountie murder due to their fondness for midnight, off-piste jaunts.
(3) Speaking of the Dynamic Duo, Batmobile designer George Barris passed away this morning at the age of 89.
In the ’60s TV show “Batman,” the Batmobile was powered by atomic batteries, equipped with a radar scope and “bat beam,” and slowed by parachutes. The latter really worked — Barris was once pulled over on the Hollywood Freeway for using them.
For many years, Barris’ handiwork was all over the television screen. He created the Munsters Koach — a combination of three Ford Model T’s — for “The Munsters”; the surfboard-topped, flower-decaled Barris Boogaloo for “The Bugaloos”; and the convertible version of KITT from “Knight Rider,” among many.
(4) Kalimac researches a Worldcon tradition.
The San Jose Worldcon bid wants to crowdsource suggestions for Guests of Honor. It says that among “the traditional criteria for Worldcon Guest of Honor consideration” is “an established career, usually considered to be 30 years from entry into the field.”
And I wondered, how long has it been 30 years? In the early days, the SF field hadn’t been around very long, and because it was small, new names could easily make a big impact. I remembered that Robert Heinlein was GoH at the third Worldcon in 1941, only two years after he sold his first story. That would be highly unlikely to happen today, even for another Heinlein.
So I made a list of all the professional fiction writers who’ve been Worldcon GoH over the years. Just the authors, because the SF Encyclopedia is conscientious about listing first published stories, but it’s not so rigorous with the entry dates of artists or other categories of pros. Making a quick chart, I found that less than 30 years was the rule up until about 1970, and, that among authors, only Hugo Gernsback (1952, 41 years since his first published SF story, but he was really honored as an editor, and it was only 26 years since he’d founded Amazing), Murray Leinster (1963, 44 years), and Edmond Hamilton (1964, 38 years) exceeded it, though a few others came close.
Since 1970, under-30s have been less common, though for many years they still occurred frequently (Zelazny, 1974, 12 years; Le Guin, 1975, 13 years; Ellison, 1978, 22 years; Haldeman, 1990, 21 years; and some others). But since 2001, there have only been two authors with less than 25 years: Bujold in 2008 (23 years), and 2017’s Nalo Hopkinson (who will be 21 years at that point).
(4) Amy Sterling Casil’s engaging and substantial new post for Medium has a satirical title, but here’s what it’s really about —
This article is about 3 fantastic women artists whose work was sold or misidentified as painted by a man. This is only connected to Tim Burton in the sense his film Big Eyes about Margaret Keane (Medium readers may know the film as featuring Bond villain Christoph Waltz) introduced me to the concept that rather than my personal problem, I might just be one of the more recent members of a long line of women whose creative work had been literally misappropriated by men. As in “sold for profit under male names” like Frank Keane did to “Big Eyes” artist Margaret Keane until she fought back in court and won.
(5) Like anyone, Joe Vasicek sometimes bounces off books, and not necessarily the ones you’d predict (Brandon Sanderson!).
He discussed several examples in a post on One Thousand and One Parsecs – “Books I haven’t been able to finish”.
The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
On this I have to plead guilty of letting my own personal sentiments get in the way of enjoying the story. I read The Golden Compass and LOVED it… right up to the last five pages. I HATED the ending of that book—SO dissatisfying, as if the author had stuck out his tongue at me and said “neener neener neener! I’m not going to give you the ending you want—better read the next book!”
UGH. I hate that.
So I came at this book a little prejudiced. I read the first page with a judgmental eye, thinking “nope, no hook on the first page. Oh, and there’s an unnecessary adverb, and there’s a said bookism, and there’s a…” etc.
Still, I didn’t let that stop me from reading on, and after the first chapter, I was interested in the story. I just wasn’t… I don’t know, interested enough. The book stayed in my car, I got busy with other things, and eventually just dropped it.
(6) More people don’t bounce off Philip Pullman, whose epic fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials is going to be produced as a drama series for BBC One.
To be made in Wales, the series, which will be told across “many episodes and series” has been commissioned by Charlotte Moore, controller BBC One and Polly Hill, controller BBC Drama Commissioning, and will be produced by Bad Wolf and New Line Cinema.
Hill said: “It is an honour to be bringing Philip Pullman’s extraordinary novels to BBC One. His Dark Materials is a stunning trilogy, and a drama event for young and old – a real family treat, that shows our commitment to original and ambitious storytelling.”
His Dark Materials consists of the Northern Lights, first published in 1995, which introduces Lyra, an orphan, who lives in a parallel universe in which science, theology and magic are entwined. Lyra’s search for a kidnapped friend uncovers a sinister plot involving stolen children and turns into a quest to understand a mysterious phenomenon called Dust. In second novel, The Subtle Knife, she is joined on her journey by Will, a boy who possesses a knife that can cut windows between worlds. As Lyra learns the truth about her parents and her prophesied destiny, the two young people are caught up in a war against celestial powers that ranges across many worlds and leads to a thrilling conclusion in the third novel, The Amber Spyglass.
(7) Mark Lawrence answers the question “Do author blogs matter? One million hits” —
Very soon this blog of mine will pass 1,000,000 hits – it has 994,396 at the time of posting and averages around 1,400 hits a day.
I blog when I feel like it and generally don’t feel under pressure to come up with something to ‘fill the space’.
The high traffic author blogs tend to be political, championing the causes beloved of the more extreme left or right. I don’t go there. I’m more about curiosities of the genre, the business of writing, info graphics, and random shit.
I do get a lot of authors asking me whether blogging is ‘worth it’. Mostly they’re people who don’t want to blog, find it a chore to come up with regular posts, but worry that they’re somehow letting themselves down if they don’t – missing out on book sales that would otherwise be theirs.
So, is blogging ‘worth it’?
I tend to tell the authors who ask me this question that they can probably relax. If they enjoy blogging, go for it. It might help a little. But if they don’t enjoy it, just don’t. My feeling is that the difference between bestseller and getting pulped isn’t ever going to swing on whether you blogged.
(8) Kate Paulk ostentatiously pays no attention to Ancillary Felapton’s “An open letter to Kate Paulk” in “That Moment When” at Mad Genius Club.
Seriously, folks, when the best you can manage in so-called critique is to claim that something I wrote was poorly written (without evidence of my alleged poor writing – which means it’s probably a case of either “oooh, my feelz” or “I don’t get it, it must be horrible”) and then go on to repeat every single tactic I dissected with hardly any variations, you’re doing it wrong. You’re also kind of amusing, in a train-wreck kind of way.
I’m not going to bother dissecting this rather shallow bit of hurt feelings – I’d spend more time on it than it deserves and hand the so-called author more page views and it really isn’t worth that (yes, it. Since this particular author is using a handle that’s not obviously male or female, and is clearly so far in the non-binary-gender camp it’s through the other side or something, I can’t default to “he” or “she”. I’m writing in English, which leaves “it” as the sole option for the non-binary-gender sort.)
(9) Brad R. Torgersen wonders, could this be “The Year Without Politics?”
My Facebook friends have also noticed that I am dialed up extra-cranky about the cultural Chekist infestation that’s plaguing social media right now. I was prepared to launch into a lengthy tirade about the whole schizophrenic mess, but (irony of ironies) Bill Maher did it for me!
Now, nobody can accuse me of fondness for Maher; he’s far too much of a raging anti-theist. But I think he nailed it right between the eyes with his Halloween 2015 commentary. It really says something when a chap like Maher is going off on the Politically Correct. His point at the end is especially apt. It’s something I’ve been saying for awhile now: the cheap “virtue” of internet slacktivism, is no virtue at all. It’s just self-righteous no-effort self-huggies for people who don’t want to break a sweat, nor get their hands dirty. You want to make the world better? Get off the damned internet and go do something that takes work. Otherwise, you’re not helping anyone, or anything.
Which takes me to Sad Puppies — or, rather, the people who fought against Sad Puppies with every fiber of their being. Because when the Hugo awards went off-script, it was literally a catastrophe so terrible and great that the Puppy-kickers pulled out all the stops to challenge Lord Vox in the Ritual of Desecration.
(10) Kermit is in trouble with more than just Miss Piggy – “’The Muppets’ Showrunner Exits ABC Series”.
Bob Kushell is exiting ABC’s “The Muppets” as showrunner, TheWrap has learned.
Kushell’s exit comes amid reports that the executive producer clashed with co-creator Bill Prady on the creative direction of the series. No official replacement showrunner has yet been named.
The news comes after the network gave the freshman comedy an additional three episode order last week, bringing the total number of episodes for the first season to 16. The show’s most recent outing scored a 1.4 rating among adults 18-49 and an average of 4.5 million viewers during its half-hour run.
(11) This Week In History
On this day in 1928, THE VIKING, the 1st all-Technicolor feature with a synchronized soundtrack, opened in theaters. pic.twitter.com/r9ioGDYleE
— The Nitrate Diva (@NitrateDiva) November 2, 2015
(12) In NASA news, “Researchers Catch Comet Lovejoy Giving Away Alcohol”.
Comet Lovejoy lived up to its name by releasing large amounts of alcohol as well as a type of sugar into space, according to new observations by an international team. The discovery marks the first time ethyl alcohol, the same type in alcoholic beverages, has been observed in a comet. The finding adds to the evidence that comets could have been a source of the complex organic molecules necessary for the emergence of life.
Poul Anderson would have enjoyed this discovery – and perhaps used it as an excuse for a sequel to his short story “A Bicycle Built For Brew”.
(13) Alastair Reynolds reviews ”Asimov’s April/May 2015 double issue” on Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon.
Unfortunately – for me, anyway – the lead story in this issue, “The New Mother” by Eugene Fischer, was one of those pieces I couldn’t finish. I did try. It’s an extremely lengthy account of the emergence of a strange new sexually transmitted pandemic that gives rise to diploid eggs, allowing for “virgin” births. It’s competently told – there’s nothing clumsy about it on a line by line or even page by page level – but the net result is, to my eyes, dull, diagrammatic storytelling, propped up by lengthy infodumps in the form of article excerpts. If you’ve ever wondered how the American medical system would respond to the kind of pandemic outlined in the story, it’s probably accurate enough in its imagined details, but despite two goes I couldn’t get more than a few dozen pages into it. I wasn’t engaged by the journalist protagonist, her situation, her travels, the dull-but-credible dialogue. The stuff I want from short science fiction – colour, pace, weirdness, estrangement, invention, language, mood … it’s all absent here. Sorry.
(14) Lis Carey’s review of “The New Mother” was rather more enthusiastic, though she also identifies a serious flaw (not quoted here).
I was totally caught up in it. This is in many ways a very American story, with the issues surrounding HCP very tied up with American culture wars issues. That’s not a weakness, but it is a reason this story may be less accessible to non-Americans.
(15) Today In History
- November 5, 1605 – Guy Fawkes is caught guarding a cache of explosives beneath the House of Lords, foiling the Gunpowder Plot. The date is set aside by Parliament for thanksgiving. Guy Fawkes Day comes to be celebrated with bonfires and fireworks. (The photo comes from an old issue of Tops.)
(16) Tammy Oler’s review of Ancillary Mercy at Slate, “Oh, the humanity”. SPOILER WARNING.
Central to Leckie’s trilogy is how important it is to feel a sense of control over one’s identity and how being recognized is a precondition for having power. These themes are not exclusive to one particular time or place, of course, but Leckie taps acutely into the feelings (and fears) that drive current American politics and movements for change. One of the chief pleasures of the trilogy is just how many wrongs Breq tries to make right and how committed she is to making incremental progress even when problems become fraught and complicated. Breq’s actions are underscored by her profound grief, anger, and shame that give way, even if just a little bit, to the solace and hope she finds in her crew and her makeshift family of A.I.s. The end of Ancillary Mercy is satisfying because it is so very un-Radchaai: diverse, messy, and honest. “In the end,” Breq realizes, “it’s only ever been one step, and then the next.”
(17) Famous Monsters’ Caroline Stephenson reviews Tamashii Nations’ samurai-inspired Ashigaru Stormtrooper.
(18) Today’s Scroll closes with this 30 for 30-style documentary remembering the magical season chronicled by Angels in the Outfield….
No one will ever forget the incredible run the 1994 California Angels made on the back of Mel Clark. It was a team in disarray, managed by former cop Roger Murtagh, beloved by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and starring Rust Cohle in centerfield. Despite the early season disaster, somehow, the team turned things around and went on to win the pennant.
ESPN’s 30 for 30 didn’t remember this improbable run in baseball history, probably because it’s from a movie, but College Humor did. The result is a five-minute mockumentary of pure perfection.
[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh, Will R., Hampus Eckerman, Susan de Guardiola, John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA.]
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Vasha, thanks for your kind words. I’m honestly not sure how much I should trust my own taste, never mind anyone else! I’ve been publishing my thoughts on each year’s votes since the turn of the century, yet I am finding the change of pace necessary to write about my nominations a bit of a challenge.
I do have a weakness for time-travel romances, and a deep loathing of cute robot stories, so that will affect my vote on the short stories. Anyway, reasonable people can have very different views on what they like reading.
I note that two of your picks are from The Apex Book of World SF 4 – that’s on my (virtual) bookshelf for when I work through the magazines I have assigned myself, and I am looking forward to it.
I’m quite happy when people’s tastes diverge from mine, because a) it’d be rather boring otherwise and b) something different to read and think about. Nicholas, I’ve dug through and found your round up posts. Very interesting, I’ll be trying a few of your favourites to see what I think.
Picking out one I’d read, “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination” didn’t quite work for me because while there were 3 interesting and quite lyrical stories in there, the framing story meant to join them all together didn’t make the theme come together in the way it was obviously meant to. If the second or third of the individual stories had been published separately, I’d have liked them on their own terms though.
PS. And thank you for recommending “Utrechtenaar”, that was indeed fascinating.
One of my problems with shifting identities is when you discover that somebody that very explicitly and wrathfully unfriended you long ago because you were not willing to be one of the mean girls has been commenting alongside you all the time. Oh well. Maybe they have become nicer since.
@Anna Feruglia Dal Dan:
People can and do get better.
@Meredith, I am constantly befuddled to hear of your name difficulties. I grew up with a Meredith in my class at school, right from kindergarten, and I was probably 12 when I discovered the author Meredith Ann Pierce. Never seemed that out-of-the-ordinary of a name to me. Could the name be losing popularity among parents? (My classmate and I were both born in 1976; I seem to recall you saying that you’re a smidge younger…?) Or maybe it’s a regional difference, US vs UK?
Of course, sample set is pretty small here, so maybe two people’s experience isn’t sufficient for making proclamations about name popularity.
I was also befuddled when I disovered that “Nicole” has variant spellings (the neighborhood bank put an “h” in there when my mom opened my first account in my name), so I suppose I’m easily befuddled.
Nicole, I suspect that the gender ambiguity of “Meredith” refers, in part, to the fact that it began as a purely masculine given name (Welsh: Maredudd). Somewhere roughly around 1900 it began being given to girls, and at least in the US female use has pretty much replaced male use entirely (as is often the case with less common names, once a name gets “girl cooties”).
Very often this sort of gender shift comes by way of surname use. I.e., a male given name becomes a surname, then if the original given name becomes less common, the sense of the name as being gendered is eroded. Surnames of all types regularly get transferred to use as given names, often in order to preserve a family name from a maternal line. Shifts in gendered usage become somewhat random in that process. Surnames that derive historically or linguistically from female-associated names have just as often turned up being given to boys as given names.
It’s a subject I find fascinating, though there was very little opportunity to dig into the intricacies when I touched on the topic in Baby Names for Dummies.
@Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little
I was born in 1989, but my feeling is it might be slightly more common now than it used to be! I see it around more, although one of the reasons I left off any initials for my username here was because I was fairly confident that I was probably going to be the only Meredith. So far *crosses fingers* I’ve been right. But generally, the USA is bigger and has more people in it so I’d assume that would make even fairly unusual names more common. (As a very small sample size, I think there are four of us on the Sasquan member list, including me. The result of typing “Katherine” is 33 – and that doesn’t include the Kathy’s, Catherine’s, Kate’s, Kathryn’s etc!)
Mind you even quite common names like Olivia confuse people – my sister spent much of her childhood correcting people who wanted to call her “Oliver”..! This while she had waist length hair and refused to wear trousers.
@Heather Rose Jones
Yup!
(For anyone unfamiliar, ‘dd’ in Welsh is a ‘th’ sound.)
I liked that aspect because of the manipulative characters in (the real) Willke Collins classic The Woman in White – but yes, I’d have preferred a more sympathetic Collins. And I didn’t mind the side effect you mentioned in 3.
Coincidentally The Scalzi is also tweeting about singular ‘they’
I doubt any one will be to astonished that he has no issue with it.
I went to high school with a girl Meredith (although she was called Mimi for short) back in the 70s, and it seemed like a normal name way back then, as well as completely female. Shirley, Leslie, etc. were also completely female by then. Mimi’s sister was named Sydney, by the way. Another of those male-to-female names…
My husband said almost exactly the same thing. I thought, given the “judy” and all, and the fact that the play is a comedy, that it was a joke. Taylor Mac’s Wikipedia article does avoid gender pronouns completely (not even a spare “judy”), but there are so many Mac’s in the piece, plus it calls him “the child of” as opposed to “the son of,” that I think somebody was being careful. Still, the snippets of reviews posted at the Playwrights Horizon site refer to him as “he” and “him,” so I think he must’ve given his ok for that. I mean, it’s the official page. If his “judy” thing is serious, he’s beyond pretentious. If it’s a joke and something he stuck in his bio just for the play HIR, I guess I can say that’s amusing and not judge him too harshly.
On other topics, I finished The Watchmaker of Filigree Street last night and my overall conclusion was that it’s lovely. I found the characters — especially Thaniel — compelling and intriguing as well as sympathetic for the most part. Tenpr tnir zr cnhfr n srj gvzrf, V jvyy nqzvg, juvpu vf n funzr sbe gur bayl znwbe srznyr punenpgre. Ohg znlor gung jnf vagraqrq nf n whqtzrag ba ure gvzr, naq gur qnzntr vasyvpgrq ol orvat n jbzna bs gung gvzr, engure guna ba ure nf n ercerfragngvir bs gur traqre. Or maybe I’m being too kind because I found so much of the book so inventive and delightful. I found it moved along nicely, the characters and situations were teased and expanded on in a way that pulled me along with it, and I had the I-can’t-wait-to-finish-this experience, which doesn’t happen all that often for me.
When you are using “they” as a singular and wish to indicate something like the person wanting to do something, would you say “they want to…” or “they wants to…”?
(I’ve been eternally attempting to work on a general audience non-fiction book and have struggled with the use of gendered pronouns—I had been of the opinion that all the newly-made up ones like “ze” are utterly idiotic, and that “they” is a plural word and settled on default he/him/his as a least-worst option. But now that I’m aware that “singular they” has a deep history, I’ll have to reconsider. About the “they”—I still think “ze” and such are idiotic.)
Re: Homeboys–Gee, thanks. Now I have the theme song to the obSF Homeboys in Outer Space stuck in my head.
Thinking about The Historian, and Drood but also the various criticism of Seveneves and The Dark Forest that people have made here (which I’ve tended to agree with on specifics but not as a whole) – I think it is because I have a bias for ambitiousness in novels and I’ll forgive a lot of faults if it looks like the author had some big crazy plan.
I’ve always used “s/he,” myself, and haven’t found it unpleasant. His or her is more complicated. I suppose I could go with s/he and their if I needed to. Or s/he and hir. Hem?
Mostly I just find a way around it. It takes extra time, but that’s what writing is all about. Recast, recast, recast!
@ Peace is my Middle Name:
People can and do get better.
Yes. And people can and do have different interpretations of what leads to the action.
I recognized Anna’s name when I began commenting here (I never expected to be so drawn to the community and active over here, so I’d used my generic pseud from early fannish days for blog commenting). I tried to note engage with her since I thought it would be unethical, and would have been happy to continue doing so. Since she has chosen a different approach, I’ve just added her name to the list of people whose posts I won’t see here (since I have a SERIOUS case of SIWOTI that I have been working on curbing for some years).
In regard to the “unfriend” comment, for those not familiar with LiveJournal terminology, “friend” there simply meant “someone whose LJ I subscribed to and whose friends-locked entries if any I could read.” I never knew Anna personally: a friend of mine, when I was visiting her in England, revealed my LJ pseud to a whole group of her friends in a pub and told them to friend me without my knowledge or consent (my friend did not realize I kept Ithiliana separate from my academic name since, well, slashy fan fiction, living in the Buckle of the Bible Belt, hard enough as a queer woman on campus without adding that connection). A few of them, including Anna, did “friend” me.
Later, in the midst of the fandom imbroglio that was Racefail, I removed at least two of them from my LJ flist. I don’t remember the specifics–not so many years later.
Racefail changed many things in a number of fannish spaces I inhabited. I’ve not been active in DW in the last few years primarily because of a cascade of health problems (thyroid, diabetes, depression) that I’ve spent some three-four years learning to manage.
I don’t plan to rehash any of that here which is why I’ll no longer be reading what Anna says.
And in the interest of full disclosure since I like to control who spreads information about me and where, the only other pseud I’ve used online is Ithiliana, in LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, and for posting my fanfic at Archive of Our Own (if you like Frodo/Faramir, or LOTR RPF with Viggo, David, and Sean Bean, feel free to check it out!).
Universal English Grammar Checker: say it out loud, if it sounds funny then it is ungrammatical, if it doesn’t it is fine.*
‘They wants’ sounds funny so it is ‘They want’ even if the pronoun is referencing a single person. Singular they retains some of its plural powers regardless.
*[I have substantial empirical proof that this works which unfortunately I can’t share here. I am genuinely shit at grammar but I have to work closely with actually not-BS grammar experts and I have to find ways to reduce their level of mockery 🙂 ]
@Rev Bob: gender markers/name
Heh. If I inform you that my mother now regrets not giving me a middle name that starts with N, will that be enough of a hint for you to guess which part of a car her husband had for a surname?
Not only is it not enough, but even deciphering your hint doesn’t make the penny drop. I am TERRIBLE at riddles!
My mother who grew up in a part of eastern Washington where winters were long and hard loved seeing the first robin as the sign of spring (springs and summers are beautiful there). So that’s why she named me Robin she told me. I didn’t realize the gender issue until a visiting scholar from Australia and his family came by on their American vacation (he knew my father from geology). His son son, a few years younger than I was (I was in maybe junior high then) was named Robin and vocally loudly outraged at hearing that a GIRL had HIS name.
Camestros Felapton :
I have a formal proof of this which I’ll see if I can html code into the margins here…
My assumption would be that if a person has been ‘nice’ while you’ve known them here, there oughtn’t be a problem all of a sudden, even if it might require some adjustment of thinking. There’s someone here who I took awhile to connect to a very nasty drama in Due South fandom (shifting identities!), but since they haven’t engaged in the same activity here or elsewhere while I’ve been here I’ve chosen not to hold it against them… Unless or until I see it happen again.
This is exactly what I like about this place: that I can say I disliked a particular book for certain definite, but necessarily unspecific reasons, and that will tell an on-the-fence reader that it might be exactly their cup of tea.
Also, we all seem to have the good sense to love the Hilary Tamar books.
Likewise, I can confidently skip Drood because Wilkie Collins seems to be portrayed in a negative light. I know everyone reads The Woman in White and The Moonstone, but for my money Armadale is his best book and Lydia Gwilt might be my all time favorite 19th century character.
@ BigellwT
re: Watchmaker
Another convert, excellent!
“Lovely” is a nice way to describe the book, also layered, mysterious and rich. I think the main characters are presented as complex and fully individual. Their actions flow from each one’s personality and circumstances, neither wholly heroes or villains.
I’d be happy to visit other stories in that world.
@ Darren Garrison
“About the “they”—I still think “ze” and such are idiotic.”
I don’t understand this attitude. English has done nothing but mutate constantly for a thousand years or more, with the rate of mutation accelerating. If we need new words to better express social realities why shouldn’t we create them?
New English words for June 2015
But we don’t need new words for this; English already has this one covered.
And when new words are needed, the new creations will be accepted more quickly if most people don’t find them ugly or awkward.
@Robin: (terrible at riddles)
Wow, I thought the rot13 was as much of a dead giveaway as it would’ve been if I’d groused about not getting royalties from Mel Brooks for Men In Tights.
(See, if you say “Rob N.” together in a hurry…)
Surname Banks?
I’ll get my coat…
@Junego:
I absolutely agree and I meant to say that, that the fact that they are layered and flawed made them feel that much more human, vulnerable and worth the time to spend reading about them. D’oh on me that I forgot!
“They” takes “want”, whether singular or plural. It’s true that most third person singular words take “wants”; singular “they”, however, takes “want”. (Frankly, there are other English language words and combinations that are far more irregular than that.)
@Peace indeed they do. I believe I am one of them.
I am a bit of a Polyanna, I tend to like most people and get along with everybody (although they may find me horribly irritating, I don’t know.) Hell even Mamatas has his good points. There are only two people in fandom I was personally acquainted with and that I will not speak to, and I feel a bit sorry for one of them.
But there are a handful of people I really don’t want to have much to do with. Some of them are friends and helpers of RH; some are people I found really disturbingly gleeful during Racefail. Most of the people involved in Racefail found it incredibly painful and lacerating. It was the very few who found it all jolly good fun I don’t trust. I learned a great deal of useful things during that time, all of them very painfully. The fact that being on the right side doesn’t excuse being a jerk was one of them. I was a jerk a couple of times too many.
Which is why I am glad for Mike’s gentle tugs to the sleeve now and then.
Oh, and since there hasn’t be nearly enough love for Europe in Autumn, people can still make amends by reading Europe at Midnight which has just come out to, as they say, rave reviews.
‘You’ was originally plural, and when it became singular retained its plural-sounding verb forms (‘you are’, etc.). So plural-sounding verb forms with singular ‘they’ are totally reasonable.
What might be a bit more problematic is ‘themselves’, when talking of one person (and there ‘you’ has adopted a singular form, ‘yourself’). While ‘themself’ is clearly not yet standard English, I do actually find it more natural than ‘themselves’ in some contexts.
@ Rev Bob:
Wow, I thought the rot13 was as much of a dead giveaway as it would’ve been if I’d groused about not getting royalties from Mel Brooks for Men In Tights.
(See, if you say “Rob N.” together in a hurry…)
DOH!
I did say I was terrible at riddles. And word games. And anagrams and such.
(And Scrabble and crossword puzzles! Which somehow is letting the Team of English teachers down somehow, according to all the people I know who are good at the above and yet NOT English teachers.)
And DOUBLE DOH! Because, HOOD! Car part.
Yes, that stumped me too.
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
Oo, I picked up EiA after finding it for one my sales posts. Good to see a thumbs up for it.
And another article about gendered languages: On Hebrew and Living in Gendered Language by Ilana Masad
Sure, singular they can be a problem with groups of three or more; but that same example works equally badly if there are two women, or two boys, in a room: “She told her” or “He asked him” doesn’t tell you who is speaking to whom.
Any of those is more easily avoided by going back to names or more specific identifiers such as “the teacher” or “her mother” than some of the singular/plural ambiguities of “you.” I can make a point of clarifying by asking someone “Can you come over on Tuesday. Just you, I want a one-on-one conversation” or “I’d love it if you and your family could come over this weekend.” But when the invitation is just “you” it’s not that rare for Person A to mean “just you” and be surprised when B’s whole family shows up, or for A to mean the whole family and wonder why B shows up with her spouse but not their children.
Unfortunately, “you all” isn’t part of my dialect; not only would I probably not think of using it, I can’t assume that if the other person just says “you” they mean “you-and-only-you” rather than “you and the rest of your social unit.”
@Vasha: Ah! Thanks, now I get it (“depreciative”).
@ Lis
re: Language changes.
Some people must feel the current language does not do the job, or they wouldn’t be trying a variety of new words to fill a need.
The language will evolve to meet peoples’ needs. Whether that means using old words in a new way or inventing new words, the change will happen. Railing against either of these seems pointless to me, like my grandmother being irritated that “square” was no longer a compliment when applied to a person.
People will accept the changes when they’re used often enough by a large enough proportion of speakers (and maybe when old fogies like me die off :-9 ). Several people right here have said that some or any of the new neutral pronouns are fine with them. Personally, I sort of like ‘zie’, ‘zer’ or ‘xie’, ‘xer’ or similar. And, as you point out, everyone may just end up just using ‘you’, ‘their’, ‘they’, etc.
Don’t mean to sound dismissive, this is just my personal philosophy about the matter. I don’t think anyone will take away our keyboards if we don’t comply. 🙂
Thanks for the mention!
@ BigelowT
So we’re agreed that Watchmaker is one of the mostest best stories of the year. Right? ^_^
It’s on my Hugo longlist and will probably end up on the shortlist unless there are 2 or 3 more very exceptional novels out there. Not impossible, given what else is on my Hugo TBR, but highly unlikely.
Reading recommendation triggered by the gendered name discussion: Wildcatter by Dave Duncan, in which humanity has invented “herms”, who can move between male and female. (It’s implied that they do this on a monthly cycle without particular effort, but it’s also shown that the transition can be made to happen at any time if the right medication and diet are available.) There’s a character named Meredith, who the protagonist is surprised to learn is a cis woman, because the name has become herm-gendered.
Also: a weird but scientifically plausible planet, hyperspace that sometimes eats ships whole and spits them out decades later, and an insanely competitive exploratory culture which I suspect is based on the author’s days in the oil industry.
Meredith: I’m confused about your name confusion as well, as I’ve always known the name, and as female. But I’m a decade or two older than you, so maybe the name’s less familiar now.
Nicole: Well, there’s an H in Nicholas, so the girly version can have one too.
Rev. Bob: I’m poor; got anything for me?
I quite liked “The Shape of My Name” and it’s on my list unless something better comes along.
“Watchmaker of Filigree Street” is on my list no matter what.
I’ve used “themself”, which isn’t a word, but ought to be the singular of “themselves”. People understand it that way.
Using the plural/polite second pronoun for the singular/familiar has kind of left a gap in English, which is why “y’all” has evolved. That way, there’s “you” (singular), “y’all” (plural) and “all y’all” (superlative, massively plural, often not present).
“They wants” sounds funny because we’re not used to hearing it. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Language shifts. Maybe we’ll come to a general agreement that “they want” and “themself” are preferred, maybe it’ll be “they wants” and “themself” (“themselves” just seems wrong in this context). I’m more than willing to put up with potential linguistic awkwardness in order to indicate that I respect and value non-binary people.
I’m less than thrilled with he/him/his as a gender neutral general audience option. If you must use gendered language, switch between the masculine and the feminine forms throughout. Otherwise, singular ‘they’ works just fine.
/god-stalk
@lurkertype: “Rev. Bob: I’m poor; got anything for me?”
Sorry, I haven’t been Rob N. Banks for quite a while, if indeed ever… 😉
The singular/plural forms of you and they have got me ruminating on hypothetical to increase pronoun distinctions in English (if we wanted to do so), i.e., differentiating in meaning by the number-indication of associated forms.
This was triggered by recalling the point when I overcame my last discomfort with singular “they” and used the form “themself” in formal correspondence.
As noted above, the verb forms used with singular “you” and singular “they” follow the historic association with the specific pronoun (rather than by following the semantic number). And yet for the reflexive, we do distinguish singular and plural (“do it yourself” versus “do it yourselves”, etc.).
As Vicki notes, the singular/plural ambiguity in pronouns often needs to be clarified by additional information. Another context where a similar ambiguity creates social conflicts is not having a distinction between inclusive versus exclusive “we”. (I.e., does “we” include the person you’re speaking to or not?)
Now I’m visualizing a grammatical distinction that places singular “you”, singular “they”, and exclusive “we” into one set of grammatical paradigms, the plurals and inclusive “we” into a different set. So rather than treating “you is” as an uneducated “error”, treat it as a singular in contrast to “you are” for the plural. Similarly “they is” vs. “they are”, “we is” vs. “we are”. Of course, this only removes ambiguity for the present tense, and for forms of “be”, but it makes an interesting thought-experiment.
As a historic precedent for this sort of regularizing of verb forms, I’ll note that the pronouns of Quaker “plain speech”, which retained “thee” as the second person singular, eventually evolved to use it with 3rd singular verb forms and to use the accusative “thee” for the nominative as well. (“Thee is”, “thee goes” rather than retaining the older 2nd pl sg forms and the original nominative “thou art”, “thou goest”.) It also occurs to me that the Quaker plain speech movement shines a useful light on debates about conscious manipulations of English pronouns for socio-political reasons. But the whole history and its debates are a bit long to go into here. In the end, plain-speech pronouns fell out of use (and they did so only within my lifetime in some circles) not because they didn’t work for their original function, but because they eventually came into conflict with a different Quaker principle which might be summed up as “being ostentatiously plain is antithetical to the principle of being plain.”
“There’s someone here who I took awhile to connect to a very nasty drama in Due South fandom (shifting identities!),”
Which took place when you couldn’t have been more than ten years old, so you know about it (a) second hand and (b) very likely from a far from disinterested party.
“but since they haven’t engaged in the same activity here or elsewhere”
Or at all, actually.
“while I’ve been here I’ve chosen not to hold it against them…”
Big of you since you weren’t involved in the first place. But it’s a waste of time if you are going to drop large hints about a dark history for a commenter here, and in any event, there is a contingent of individuals who will hasten to enlighten any innocent who encounters me about that apparently loathsome past (my loathsome presence not being enough for everyone to shun me, apparently.)
“Unless or until I see it happen again.”
Or, as before, some disturbed individual decides to make nasty and false allegations to enlarge their own credibility and destroy someone else’s.
Not, of course, that has ever happened to anyone else, let alone me.
I was, like Anna, somewhat disturbed to find that ‘rrede’ is someone I would have avoided interacting with, from my awareness of her fannish activies, although Ms Reid is entitled to use whatever user name she wants to. I know a lot of people feel that way about me, so I use this pen name wherever I comment whether related to my writing career or not. The ‘shifting identities’ Meredith refers to is nothing more than the normal change of nom de plumes across fandoms, and fanfic to pro fic, and is not a sinister action.
Any questions? You know where I live.
@Ann Somerville
If you’ve never met a ten year old in fandom, they were keeping their age very quiet. Speaking from experience.
I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I would really appreciate it if people would keep their disputes from other locales, and mentions of them (whether oblique or overt), out of File770. There is enough contention here among us for regulars to deal with, without dragging that shite in here, too.
Go deal with it where it occurs. Don’t subject people here, who don’t give a shit, to it.
In case no-one’s linked it, Merriam-Webster chimes in on “they”.