Pixel Scroll 1/15/16 By Grabthar’s Hammer, You Shall Be Scrolled!

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Schedule note: There will not be a Scroll on January 16 – I will be away at a meeting and won’t have time to prepare one. I’ll still moderate comments, since I can do that by using my Kindle to check in periodically.

(1) DOWN THESE MEAN FOOTPATHS. Peter McLean, author of Drake, explains some of his work in a post at Black Gate, “On Writing Modern Noir Fantasy”.

A Noir world.

So what’s that? Noir needs to be dark, by definition, but I don’t think it has to be tied to any particular time period. The classic Hollywood Noir is set in LA or New York in the 1940s but it can work equally well in the backstreets of ancient Rome or the mean cantinas of Mos Eisley, or even in modern South London for that matter.

Noir implies bitter, cynical black-and-white men in hats and beautiful, dangerous women with secrets to hide, but it doesn’t have to be that either. You could have a hard-bitten battle-scarred female veteran of an alien war as your main character and still be writing Noir.

It’s about the feel and the vibe rather than the place or even the people who occupy that place. Noir is about dark thoughts and dark motives, deep introspection followed by double-crosses in back alleys and brief moments of sudden, brutal violence.

But there is a certain aesthetic as well, and I think that’s important. To understand the visual motif you only have to look at how the old movies play with light and shadow, the half-seen faces and the way sunbeams stream through the slats of a blind into the air of a smoky room.

(2) LISTEN IN. Leah Schnelbach of Tor.com was there for – “Race, Publishing, and H.P. Lovecraft: A Conversation With Daniel José Older and Victor LaValle”.

Earlier this week, a large and enthusiastic crowd packed Greenlight Bookstore in defiance of freezing temperature and threats of snow. Greenlight hosted a launch party for Midnight Taxi Tango, Daniel José Older’s second novel in the Bone Street Rumba series. But rather than the usual reading-and-wine-soaked-light-conversation that is the centerpiece of most literary events, this party soon became a lively and wide-ranging conversation about race, publishing, and the true legacy of H.P. Lovecraft. Older’s reading was fantastic, but it was his discussion with Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver and the forthcoming The Ballad of Black Tom, that turned the event into one of the best literary nights I’ve ever attended.

(3) FREAKY FRIDAY. Washington Post writer Peter Marks reports the Disney Theatrical Group and Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia are producing a musical version of Freaky Friday, which will receive its premiere this fall. The musical will be composed by Tom Kitt with lyrics by Brian Yorkey.

In a deal that rockets Signature Theatre into a whole new producing orbit, the Arlington company will team up this fall with the Walt Disney Co. to present a world-premiere musical version of “Freaky Friday,” with a score by the Pulitzer Prize-winning team behind “Next to Normal.”

(4) BEAR NECESSITIES. Adam Rowe’s “The Taxonomy of Crazy Fantasy Art: A Visual History of 1970s Polar Bear-Drawn Sleighs” at the B&N Sci-FI & Fantasy Blog, a glorious post idea in its own right, includes this insightful quote —

As one blogger at the Ragged Claws Network puts it, “Chaykin’s attempt to supply Urlik Skarsol’s polar bear team with a semi-plausible harness […] actually diminishes rather than enhances Frazetta’s gloriously silly original concept by drawing undue attention to the mundane question of how, exactly, the fantasy hero’s cool mode of transportation could be made to work in the real world and whether Chaykin’s design is, in fact, a viable solution.”

(5) NOT HAPPY DAYS. Geek Art Gallery shows what forces would have been awakened if these new heroes and villains had met while attending Star Wars High School.

(6) YODA YOU CAN TALK LIKE. Infogram by Grammarly.

Star-Wars-Grammar-By-Yoda

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Alan Baumler.]

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307 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/15/16 By Grabthar’s Hammer, You Shall Be Scrolled!”

  1. Huh. Well, the 16th is done and over with where I am, but apparently it was Appreciate A Dragon Day. So I’ll give a belated appreciation to my 3 favourite dragons:

    Smaug, LotR (obvs)

    My armor is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!”

    Morning Bright, Smax

    You see, it’s like this. In the beginning, God created me… Then he made the universe, from what was left. You will never forget this next moment.

    Alduin, Elder Scrolls:Skyrim

    Alduin, Bane of Kings, ancient shadow unbound, With a hunger to swallow the world!

    . Huh. Are there any significant good dragons?

  3. snowcrash: Huh. Are there any significant good dragons?

    The entire population of Pern? Mayland Long (I may not have the name right) in MacAvoy’s Tea with the Black Dragon?

  4. I would have bet my life that “Stellar Legion” was a brutal, satirical indictment of colonialism and the dehumanization of the enemy, but then I read here about Brackett being a conservative who was in favor of the Vietnam war.

    Just finished that story, and it reads pretty racist and pro-colonialism to me. The indigenous people in the story are savages worthy only of death.

    Not necessarily a bad story, though. One of the best so far. But then, the Bradbury Mars story shortly after that one in the compilation is pretty much the exact opposite and blows it out of the water. But it’s maybe kinda literary, so, SJW?

  5. Good dragons: Seraphina. One in a book I read in childhood; all I remember is thaat when upset she soothed herself by reciting the names of the Hebridean Islands. And the ones in Earthsea aren’t exactly malicious.

  6. Does Adzel, from Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League stories count as a dragon?

  7. Thanks to all who’ve offered insights on Aurora, especially your review, James Davis Nicoll. All of these have helped quell the nagging feeling that I am somehow reading the book wrong.

    I have started to think of the last 8 months as “the year of slog”: first there was all the horrible Puppy fiction including Skin Game and The Dark Between the Stars, then The Three-Body Problem, Seveneves, Lagoon, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Something Coming Through, and now Aurora.

    I read ~150 novels in 2014 (around ~120 in 2015) and I remember feeling that less than a handful of them were a slog. Reading, even reading for Hugo nominations, shouldn’t feel like such a chore. Reading should be a joy — and up to the beginning of “the slog”, it was a joy for me.

    So, yesterday I set Aurora aside. I may come back to it. I may not. It will certainly not be getting anywhere near my Hugo longlist, anyway.

    I’ve started Ian Tregillis’ The Mechanical and am already halfway through it. I wouldn’t consider myself a huge fan of steampunk (or in this case, clockworkpunk) — and yet I am finding myself interested and absorbed, and not feeling as though it’s a slog.

  8. Falcor and…err…whatever the one in Dragonheart was. And Tecwyn, though that is so obscure I doubt even here anybody knows him.

  9. von Dimpleheimer: I would have bet my life that “Stellar Legion” was a brutal, satirical indictment of colonialism and the dehumanization of the enemy, but then I read here about Brackett being a conservative who was in favor of the Vietnam war.

    I would say the same about how Starship Troopers read to me as a brutal, satirical indictment of war, militarism, dehumanization of the enemy, social welfare-bashing, and fascist governments — but I know that Heinlein intended it as a straight-up endorsement of those things.

    I think that sometimes authors don’t realize when, in their books, they make caricatures of the things they are attempting to lionize.

    On the other hand, there are those who are incapable of reading a book in any manner other than straight literalism, so the fact that the authors have actually bashed what they wanted to lionize is utterly lost on those people. 😐

  11. JJ –

    I have started to think of the last 8 months as “the year of slog”: first there was all the horrible Puppy fiction including Skin Game and The Dark Between the Stars, then The Three-Body Problem, Seveneves, Lagoon, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Something Coming Through, and now Aurora.

    First part of 2015 felt that way for me trying to get through the Hugo nominees and a couple of other books that I had high hopes for that just didn’t click with me. Then I hit a strong streak of just fun reads towards the second half of this year. Hope you hit on something similar.

    I’ve started Ian Tregillis’ The Mechanical and am already halfway through it. I wouldn’t consider myself a huge fan of steampunk (or in this case, clockworkpunk) — and yet I am finding myself interested and absorbed, and not feeling as though it’s a slog.

    I’m not a fan of Steampunk, I think I disliked The Aeronaut’s Windlass partially because it felt like it stuck close to tropes of that subgenre even if it made the world make less sense rather than more, but I loved The Mechanical. Glad to see you’re also enjoying it. The sequel The Rising came out recently and is also great. Hope it helps break your slump.

    As for good dragons, there’s also Spyro and Toothless to consider!

  12. Most of the dragons in Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw were decent people. And I am pretty sure Patricia Wrede wrote a good (and funny) dragon in Dealing With Dragons.

    I’m also sure I’m missing something crucial, because my brain is whispering.

  14. Tanya Huff’s Enchantment Emporium/Gale series has some excellent dragons (not all good, but fascinatingly developed and not automatically evil either). (Plus, the Gale women especially the Aunties can give even a dragon pause).

  16. “Stellar Legion” was so over-the-top, I still can’t comprehend anyone other than Ghengis Khan in a fedora reading it and cheering when the protagonist “redeems” himself.

    The Bradbury story I really liked was the Clarissa one. But I think I am in the minority. I didn’t know he wrote stuff like that. I had this impression all his stories were like “All Summer in a Day.”

  17. Tasha Turner on January 16, 2016 at 10:55 am said:

    I get the impression that, for some people, having the characters all be decent people is striking enough to be considered a major trait.

    I’m thrilled with books written for adults where the majority of the characters are decent people. This matches my view of real life and IMHO makes stories more complex. I wouldn’t want very single book to be this way but I’d be happy to have the grimdark trend lessen greatly. I’d like to pick up more happy books. Life is grim enough.

    I sometimes wonder if people whose lives have been touched by real grimness tend to have less of a taste for grimdark.

    I don’t know if my experience is merely anecdotal and atypical, but it has seemed to me that the people I know most into grimdark have tended to be those from the most comfortable and sheltered backgrounds.

    But I am probably oversimplifying things. People love types of stories for many different, personal reasons.

  18. I vaguely recall the dragon in “The Dragon and the George” wasn’t too bad.

  19. Peace Is My Middle Name: I sometimes wonder if people whose lives have been touched by real grimness tend to have less of a taste for grimdark.

    I think that is probably true of most negative experiences. People who’ve been subjected to physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or rape, or violence are not surprisingly probably not going to enjoy reading about those.

    I had a close friend whose (rot13ed for anyone sensitive to personal tragedy) zbgure qvrq va gur pne — va sebag bs gurz — nsgre n ubeevsvp iruvpyr nppvqrag. This friend could not stand to watch TV or movies with violent vehicle crashes, or to read graphic descriptions of their aftermaths.

    I spent many years living with a manipulative, conscienceless sociopath — and I have zero desire to read (and get zero enjoyment from) books featuring them, such as The Talented Mr Ripley, Gone Girl and even that 2015 book which shall remain nameless so as to avoid spoilers.

    I think a lot of the “entertainment” value in horror books comes from not having close experience of the sort of horror which occurs in the book. It’s an “I can experience something I’ve never experienced” thing. Look at Lovecraft’s enduring popularity — how many people have been psychologically scarred by encounters with the Old Ones*? So they don’t mind being scared reading about them.

    A lot of people really enjoy Goblin Emperor and Long Way because they’ve experienced horror, hatred, or violence personally, and they need and want to experience some pleasantness.

    * I’m totally not trivializing your experience if you have been psychologically scarred by encounters with the Old Ones

  20. I’m posting this from Arisia 2016, whose Writer GoH is John Scalzi—and as I learned yesterday afternoon, the Writer GoH at Arisia 2017 will be none other than our very own RedWombat aka Ursula Vernon!

    SQUEE!

  22. I’m posting this from Arisia 2016, whose Writer GoH is John Scalzi—and as I learned yesterday afternoon, the Writer GoH at Arisia 2017 will be none other than our very own RedWombat aka Ursula Vernon!

    Super exciting. Have a great time. Say hi to mutual friends for Larry & I. We had to cancel at the last minute due to my health problems and I didn’t make sure people knew. 🙁

  24. Good dragons: Kalessin in the Earthsea series. (Read Tehanu to find out how important he is. Which is about the only thing I recommend Tehanu for.) Also [SPOILER] in Tales From Earthsea.

  25. I think a lot of the “entertainment” value in horror books comes from not having close experience of the sort of horror which occurs in the book. It’s an “I can experience something I’ve never experienced” thing.

    I dunno about readers, but having read a bunch of interviews with horror writers recently, some of them say they have happy lives and like to draw on imaginary fears; whereas Sunny Moraine, for one, said that their stories are coming out of hurt in their own life. Surely that must be true of some readers too. There are various ways to experience horror, throlls or catharsis being two.

  26. More good dragons:

    * [SPOILER] in Spirited Away

    * My SO says there is a good dragon in Dragonheart

    * Robin Hobb’s Rain Wilds/Liveship books have dragons with a variety of personalities, but most of them are more or less on the side of good

    * Duh, I forgot another one from Earthsea – [SPOILER] who is introduced in Tehanu and shows up again in Tales From Earthsea

    Hmm, lots of spoilers. I seem to like works where people are secretly dragons.

  27. I always thought one of the keenest strokes in classic National Lampoon was the Hanoi Times reviewing movies. I can’t find it now, but it was dismissive yawns at movies we consider shockingly violent. “A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: Boring look at antics of British schoolboys.”

  28. @Cheryl S. –

    I’ve just started reading Ancillary Mercy. I’d forgotten how much I love how Ann Leckie writes. Her prose is so clean and her characters are so vivid that I keep jumping out of the story to express my delight to myself. I’d also forgotten that sometime near the middle of Ancillary Justice my brain decided to just code all the characters as female, while accepting that some might have penises.

    I have just begun reading Ancillary Justice aloud to my husband. Being thus obliged to read the book in word-by-word time has made me appreciate Leckie’s prose all the more. The details she chooses to give stage-time to are telling and thoughtful. My husband cracked a wry smile at the bit in chapter 2 where Justice of Toren bribes the children with sweets for songs, and comments on how the bribes used to be more nutritious back before the infrastructure was more or less rebuilt. The day-to-day details of invasion and occupation can be so poignantly mundane.

    I’m also noticing more, at this pace, which characters are described as being biologically male. “Oh, this character has a beard? How’d I never notice that before?” Also how many characters are explicitly described as dark-skinned, and how that trait is “fashionable” in the Radch. Little details that just flew by me when I was reading at my usual DEVOUR IT WHOLE speed.

    We’ve only got through Chapter 2 because his preference is for one chapter a week (mine would be to just keep reading until I was hoarse), and we followed up that chapter with a conversation about how Justice of Toren One Esk could come to be such a different character than Justice of Toren the Whole Troop Carrier, despite the overarching AI experiencing each ancillary’s POV as simply “me”… and all the while, in the privacy of my brain, I was jumping up and down and with a wild grin and chortling NUNS! ALL THE NUNS! after the manner of a regular at the “Mark Reads” blog. (Number 18 being the relevant bit of that link.)

    Anyway, he likes it bunches and he thinks the writing is better than many things we’ve read together recently and I just wish we could do more chapters sooner because IT IS SO GOOD.

  29. . Huh. Are there any significant good dragons?

    Lots of good choices already mentioned. Gleep, from the MYTH books comes to mind, too…

  30. Peace Is My Middle Name

    I sometimes wonder if people whose lives have been touched by real grimness tend to have less of a taste for grimdark.

    It differs for everyone. Personally when I was a kid going the the Child Protection system I got hooked on horror books and read them as escapism. Because fictional monsters are something that is safe to be scared of rather than the terrible shit real people do to each other.

    Another good dragon: Falkor!

  31. Re: Generation ships: Between Ballad of Beta-2 and (*sigh*) The Starlost, I developed an aversion to the subgenre.

    We’re barely dealing with the generation ship/planet we’ve got.

  32. I remember a dragon I liked a lot in a book I read when I was little. It was about a dragon in a cave in Cornwall, and a small girl wanders into the cave and finds him, and then MAGIC and FRIENDSHIP and the dragon sends the girl back to Camelot and King Arthur. Anybody know this book?

  33. Heh. This certainly has indicated that I tend to forget about good dragons as such – tough the only works above that I’ve read or watched directly would be Temeraire, Earthsea, and Dragonheart. I think part of it is because to me good dragons – ie, Temeraire et al are anthropomorphised to an extent that I consider them to be not quite dragons.

    Though now that I think about it, the dragons from Bone were good, and they were always very dragon-ish to me.

    the Writer GoH at Arisia 2017 will be none other than our very own RedWombat aka Ursula Vernon!

    Oh well done to the Crimson Marsupial! Though I must say that I’m a bit disappointed. I was hoping someone would get that T Kingfisher, as I really liked that Bryony & Roses book.

  34. BigelowT: I remember a dragon I liked a lot in a book I read when I was little.

    Rosemary Manning’s Green Smoke? Just a guess–but this edition does look like a reprint of something originally published earlier.

  35. @snowcrash – Well, they’re an up-and-comer yet. Give it a few years. *grin*

    And thanks, all! Looking forward to it a lot!

  36. Favourite dragons:

    Horatio Heavyside Dragon from C.S Foresters Poo-Poo and the Dragons. A very polite dragon with manners so good that he even laughs at the jokes of Mr. Brown. From a childrens book that I recommend everyone to read.

    A many-headed dragon from the swedish childrens book “Small is Nice” about a dragon that wouldn’t stop growing and wanted to eat everything and had to be defeated by all other dragons in the forest.

  37. @Paul Weimer:

    I’m glad you mentioned Gleep. I was beginning to despair. But then, that could be a side effect of mainlining all three parts of the Childhood’s End miniseries in one four-plus-hour stretch…

    I may have to wait until tomorrow to tackle The Martian. The last half-hour of CE about did me in for the night, and I want to come at it fresh. (Then I can haz reading of the book!)

  38. Dragons? The tiny one Moomintroll caught and kept in a jar. It bit him, and he let it go. The enchanted prince that the cook princess fed on radish in a Joan Aiken short (I’m often heard chanting “When the dragon feels saddish, feed him on radish.”). Worzel the Velantian, the Dragon Lensman. So many more, filling my memories.

  40. I sometimes wonder if people whose lives have been touched by real grimness tend to have less of a taste for grimdark

    It certainly doesn’t work the other way around. I have had no serious issues with my life and can’t stand horror or grimdark.

  41. World of Warcraft has a bunch of good dragons, the red dragonflight in particular.

    Hard lives and grimdark: Well, I’ve had my share of life suckle from permanent disability, PTSD, and all, and I’m a huge horror junkie, including a bunch of nihilistic stuff. On the other hand, I don’t actually like a lot of what I think of as grimdark, like Warhammer 40K. (Some folks have done interesting storytelling in that setting, but the setting is ridiculous.) It’s certainly possible that I’m being unfair, in the way my high-school self used to think, “If I like it, it’s hard rock, and if I don’t like it, it’s heavy metal.” But yeah, there’s an element of making up stresses for people who don’t already have their share, as opposed to examining kinds of stress in experience, thought, and imagination that are already there, just in fictional frameworks.

  42. Re: Dragons –

    I just finished listening to the audiobook of Castle Hangnail and would like to submit every single appearance of dragon within that book for consideration.

    Especially the last one. I was waiting for that to happen all book long.

  43. Good dragons? Idris, who sometimes lives in Ivor The Engine’s firebox and like welsh choral singing.

  44. GOOD DRAGONS: #1 If you’re a comics fan, then Lockheed from the X-Men is (was?) a good dragon. 🙂 Like a very intelligent pet with a mind of its own, early on, IIRC.

    #2 Diane Duan’s Door Into Shadow has an interesting, good dragon named Hasai; he’s not just anthropomorphized. There’s tons of dragon stuff in that and the next book; most are good, but a couple perhaps aren’t.

    HORROR: I haven’t had any major tragedy, at least nothing unusual for my age, but I usually avoid horror completely. I’m really, really not into it.

    @Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little: Ooh, cool, reading to your husband; I’d love to read aloud to someone (am I weird?). There are lots of things I believe I, like you, didn’t pick up on, like gender and race markers (there’re only a few people I’m pretty sure are male, so I suspect I missed stuff).

    I should listen to the Ancillary Audiobooks, but sample of the first one doesn’t grab me, narrator-wise, so I’ve been avoiding it. The 2nd & 3rd books have a different narrator, who sounds better from the samples. Anyone listened to the first (narrated by Celeste Ciulla)?

    ETA: Another issue is I’m not thrilled with changing narrators for the same first-person narration. ;-(

  45. I’m a space cadet. The best dragon, of course, is the tattoo on my lower left arm! How could I not think of that?! It’s very good, trust me. 😀

  46. @nickpheas

    I remember the dragon from Ivor the Engine, and the Soup Dragon from The Clangers of course.

  47. Today’s read: City Of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett.

    … I’m afraid I’m going to have to give this one a mixed review. Not a *bad* review, mind, but a mixed one. And I will say up front that part of the problem is that I can’t help mentally comparing it with City Of Stairs, one of my top 5 SFF books of 2014. Would I have been more impressed with it if I were considering it in a vacuum? Possibly. Its hard to say.

    Anyway. The Sci-Fi Bulletin called City Of Stairs, “A murder mystery, spy thriller, fantasy adventure, and philosophical treatise rolled into one.” That’s a pretty accurate assessment, I think, and the exact same thing could be said of City Of Blades. But where City Of Stairs, in my opinion, handled all of these elements masterfully — there was only one short scene in COS I thought didn’t work, an infodump I felt was a bit clumsy, but even that only looked bad in comparison to the rest of it — City Of Blades handles some of them well and some of them not as well.

    What Worked, Part I. The Philosophical Treatise. City Of Blades is a thoughtful and fascinating look into the question of what it means to be a soldier, against a backdrop of the nature of death and what it means for the meaning of life. Top marks for big ideas transmitted meaningfully by means of character and plot.

    What Worked, Part II. The Fantasy Adventure. Once things all come together and really get moving in about about the last quarter of the book, the action is tense and the stakes are high.

    What Didn’t Work, Parts I and II. The Murder Mystery and The Spy Thriller. Basically … I figured out what was going on less than halfway through the book. That ended up being a bit frustrating. Figuring out what’s going on a few pages before the characters do makes me feel smart. Figuring out what’s going on 150 pages before the characters do makes me feel like the characters are dumb, because I know I’m not THAT smart. When the big What Is Going On revelations came, my reaction was either “yes, yes, I got it already, move on”, or “oh … so it WAS the completely obvious thing then? I was hoping it wouldn’t be.” Either way felt kind of like a let-down.

    As a note, when I told my spouse (also a big fan of City Of Stairs) about this last, by the way, her reaction was, “Oh, well, you care about that kind of thing more than I do, so I might not feel the same way.” So, your mileage may vary.

  49. Kyra: Figuring out what’s going on a few pages before the characters do makes me feel smart. Figuring out what’s going on 150 pages before the characters do makes me feel like the characters are dumb, because I know I’m not THAT smart. When the big What Is Going On revelations came, my reaction was either “yes, yes, I got it already, move on”, or “oh … so it WAS the completely obvious thing then? I was hoping it wouldn’t be.”

    This is a huge thing for me in terms of enjoyment. I love mystery plots in my books, movies, and TV — yet I frequently get hugely frustrated and let-down when I figure out the “whodunit” or “whoisit” near the beginning of the piece.

    Lightless, by C.A. Higgins, was one like that. I figured out two major plot reveals one or two hundred pages before they are revealed in the book. There was much to like about the book; the plot’s bones were very good, and it had a lot of potential to be an incredible book. But the way it was fleshed out didn’t work very well in terms of suspense. The author’s a physicist, and in her early 20’s, I think — and I figured that that she must not have read very many mysteries in her life, because an avid mystery reader would see a lot of her plot points coming a mile away.

  50. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews a minor Jules Verne novel, “The Self-Propelled Island”.

    Aside from its tendency toward leisurely travelogue, “The Self-Propelled Island” consists largely of slapstick comedy, prescient satire of capitalist privilege and melodrama. Ultimately, it develops into another of Verne’s pessimistic, late-in-life cautionary tales about technology and society, a chronicle of progressive disillusionment leading to disaster.

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