(1) BANGLESS. In the beginning…there was no beginning?
At Phys.org — “No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning”
The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.
The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a “Big Bang” did the universe officially begin.
(2) KNOWING YOURSELF. Tobias Buckell supplies fascinating ideas for learning about yourself and your writing in his answer to “How do I know when to trunk my story or novel?”
… I have several writer friends who are what I would call Tinkerers. They write via a method of creating something, then they continue to tinker it into perfection. It’s amazing to watch, and as a result they often have skills for rewriting that are hard to match.
Some, like me, are more Serial Iterators. They do better writing something new, incorporating the lessons of a previous work. They depend on a lifetime of practice and learning. They lean more toward abandoning a project that hasn’t worked to move on….
When I wrote 150 short stories at the start of my career, I abandoned over 100 of them to the trunk. I did this by knowing I was interested in iteration and not interested in trying to rescue them. I had an intuitive sense of how long it would take for me in hours, manpower, to try and rescue a story, versus how many it would take to make a new one. That came with practice, trusted readers opinions being compared to my own impressions of the writing, and editorial feedback. But I am very aware of the fact that I’m not a Tinkerer.
(3) CONNIE AT SASQUAN. She makes everything sound like a good time no matter what. Her nightmare of a hotel was an especially good source of anecdotes — “Connie Willis Sasquan (WorldCon 2015) Report”.
But instead of being taken to rescue on the Carpathia–or even the Hyatt–we were transported to a true shipwreck of a hotel.
It was brand-new and ultramodern, but upon closer examination, it was like those strange nightmare hotels in a “we’re already dead but don’t know it yet” movie. The blinds couldn’t be worked manually, and we couldn’t find any controls. There was no bathtub. The shower closely resembled the one in a high-school locker room, and there was no door between it and the toilet. (I am not making this up.) The clock had no controls for setting an alarm–a call to the front desk revealed that was intentional: “We prefer our clients to call us and request a wake-up call”–and when you turned the room lights off, the bright blue glow from the clock face enveloped the room in Cherenkhov radiation, and there was no way to unplug it. We tried putting a towel and then a pillow over it and ended up having to turn it face-down.
That wasn’t all. If you sat on the edge of the bed or lay too close to the edge, you slid off onto the floor, a phenomenon we got to test later on when we began giving tours of our room to disbelieving friends. “Don’t sit on the end of the bed,” we told them. “You’ll slide off,” and then watched them as they did.
(4) CONNIE PRESENTS THE HUGO. Her blog also posted the full text of “Connie Willis Hugo Presenter Speech 2015”.
… This one year they had these great Hugos, with sort of a modernist sculpture look, a big angled ring of Saturn thing with the rocket ship sticking up through it and marbles representing planets, and brass nuts and bolts and stuff.
They looked great, but they weren’t glued together very well, and by the time Samuel R. Delaney got off the stage, his Hugo was in both hands and his pockets and on the floor, and mine had lost several pieces altogether.
“Did you lose your marbles?” I whispered to Gardner backstage.
“No,” Gardner whispered back in that voice of his that can be heard in the back row, “My balls didn’t fall off, but my toilet seat broke!”
(5) TAFF. Sasquan has donated $2,000 to the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund.
(6) LUNACON. Lunacon’s Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign has ended, 58 people contributed a total of $6,127. The funds will be put to good use to make Lunacon 2016 a success.
(7) BEYOND NaNo. Amanda S. Green, in “NaNo is over. What now?” at Mad Genius Club, helps writers who missed the target deal with their results, and shows how her own experiences have taught her to adjust.
That collective sigh of relief and groan of frustration you heard yesterday came from the hoards of authors who met — or didn’t — their NaNoWriMo goals. Now they are looking at those 50,000 words and wondering what to do with them. Should they put them aside for a bit and then come back to see if they are anywhere close to a book or if they more resemble a cabbage. Others are wondering why they couldn’t meet the deadline and wondering how they can ever be an author if they can’t successfully complete NaNo. Then there are those who know they finished their 50,000 words, that they have a book (of sorts) as a result but aren’t sure it is worth the work they will have to put in to bring it to publishable standards.
All of those reactions — and more — are why I don’t particularly like NaNo. I’ve done it. I’ve failed more often than I’ve successfully concluded it….
I’ll admit, as I already have, that I usually don’t meet my NaNo goals. That’s because I know I can do 50k in a month and don’t adjust the word count. That is when Real Life tends to kick me in the teeth. Whether it is illness, either of me or a family member, or death or something around the house deciding to go MIA, something always seems to happen. It did this year. The difference was that I still managed to not only meet my 50k goal but I exceeded it.
So what was different?…
(8) SF POETRY. Here’s something you don’t see every day – a review of an sf poetry collection. Diane Severson’s “Poetry Review – Much Slower Than Light, C. Clink” at Amazing Stories.
Much Slower Than Light, from Who’s that Coeur? Press is currently in its 7th edition (2014) and is probably quite different than the 2008 6th edition (I don’t have a copy from which to compare); there are 6 poems, as far as I can tell, which have been added since then and the 6th edition apparently had poems dating back to 1984. This is a retrospective collection; representing the best Carolyn Clink has offered us from 1996 through 2014 and is likely to morph again in a few years when Clink has more wonderful poems to call her best. There is an astonishing variety in form and subject and genre. There are only 22 poems in all, but all of them are gems.
(9) HARD SF. Greg Hullender and Rocket Stack Rank investigate the “Health of Hard Science Fiction in 2015 (Short Fiction)”.
Now that 2015 is almost over as far as the Hugos go, we decided to look over all the stories that we or anyone else recommended and see which qualified as hard SF. In particular, we wanted to investigate the following claims:
No one is writing good hard-SF stories anymore.
Hard SF has no variety and keeps reusing old ideas.
Hullender noted in e-mail, “Lots of people talk about the health of hard SF, but I haven’t seen anyone give any actual numbers for it.”
(10) YA SF. At the Guardian, Laxmi Harihan analyzes “Why the time is now for YA speculative fiction”.
I write fantastical, action-adventure. Thrillers, which are sometimes magic realist, and which sometimes borrow from Indian mythology. Oh! And my young heroes are often of Indian origin. So yeah! My brand of YA is not easily classifiable. Imagine my relief when I found I had a home in speculative YA. There are less rules here, so I don’t worry so much about breaking them.
So, then, I wanted to understand what YA speculative fiction really meant in today’s world.
Rysa Walker, author of the Chronos Files YA series told me, “Anything that couldn’t happen in real life is speculative fiction.”
Speculative fiction is, as I found, an umbrella term for fantasy, science fiction, horror, magic realism; everything that falls under “that which can’t really happen or hasn’t happened yet.”
(11) WENDIG AND SCALZI. Chuck Wendig and John Scalzi’s collected tweets form “Star Wars Episode 3.14159: The Awkward Holiday Get-Together” at Whatever.
In which two science fiction authors turn the greatest science fictional saga of all time into… another dysfunctional holiday family dinner.
https://twitter.com/ChuckWendig/status/671687401933135872
(12) “Anne Charnock, author of Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind Discusses Taking Risks With Her Writing” at SF Signal.
I admit it. I’m a natural risk taker, though I’ve never been tempted by heli-skiing, free climbing or any other extreme sport. I’m talking about a different kind of risk taking. I’m a stay-at-home writer who taps away in a cosy lair, inventing daredevil strategies for writing projects. My new novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, is a case in point.
Readers of my first novel, A Calculated Life, were probably expecting me to stay comfortably within the category of science fiction for my second novel. Science fiction offers a huge canvas, one that’s proven irresistible to many mainstream writers. But for my latest novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, I wanted to crash through the centuries. The story spans over 600 years—from the Renaissance to the twenty-second century. It’s an equal mix of speculative, contemporary, and historical fiction.
(13) SUNBURST AWARD. A “Call for Submissions: The 2016 Sunburst Award” via the SFWA Blog.
The Sunburst Awards, an annual celebration of excellence in Canadian fantastic literature, announces that its 2016 call for submissions is now open.
The Sunburst Awards Society, launched in 2000, annually brings together a varying panel of distinguished jurors to select the best full length work of literature of the fantastic written by a Canadian in both Adult and Young Adult categories. 2016 is also the inaugural year for our short fiction award, for the best short fiction written by a Canadian.
Full submission requirements for all categories are found on the Sunburst Awards website at www.sunburstaward.org/submissions.
Interested publishers and authors are asked to submit entries as early as possible, to provide this year’s jurors sufficient time to read each work. The cut-off date for submissions is January 31, 2016; books and stories received after that date will not be considered.
(14) VANDERMEER WINNERS. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer announced the winners of their Fall Fiction Contest at The Masters Review. (Via SF Site News.)
Winner: “Linger Longer,” by Vincent Masterson
Second Place Story: “Pool People,” by Jen Neale
Third Place Story: “Animalizing,” by Marisela Navarro
Honorable Mentions:
The judges would like to acknowledge “The Lion and the Beauty Queen” by Brenda Peynado and “Linnet’s Gifts” by Zoe Gilbert as the fourth and fifth place stories.
The three winners will be published on their website, and receive $2000, $200, and $100 respectively.
(15) LE GUIN POETRY READINGS. Ursula K. Le Guin will be reading from Late in the Day: Poems 20-10-2014 in Portland, OR at Another Read Through Books on December 17, Powell’s City of Books on January 13, and Broadway Books on February 24.
As Le Guin herself states, “science explicates, poetry implicates.” Accordingly, this immersive, tender collection implicates us (in the best sense) in a subjectivity of everyday objects and occurrences. Deceptively simple in form, the poems stand as an invitation both to dive deep and to step outside of ourselves and our common narratives. As readers, we emerge refreshed, having peered underneath cultural constructs toward the necessarily mystical and elemental, no matter how late in the day.
These poems of the last five years are bookended with two short essays, “Deep in Admiration” and “Form, Free Verse, Free Form: Some Thoughts.”
(16) GERROLD DECIDES. From David Gerrold’s extensive analysis of a panel he participated on at Loscon 42 last weekend —
1) I am never going to be on a panel about diversity, feminism, or privilege, ever again. Not because these panels shouldn’t be held or because I don’t like being on them or because they aren’t useful. But because they reveal so much injustice that I come away seething and upset.
1A) I know that I am a beneficiary of privilege. I pass for straight white male. And to the extent that I am not paying attention to it, I am part of the problem.
1B) This is why, for my own sake, I have boiled it down to, “I do not have the right to be arrogant or judgmental. I do not have the right to be disrespectful of anyone. I must treat everyone with courtesy and respect.” Sometimes it’s easy — sometimes it takes a deliberate and conscious effort. (I have become very much aware when my judgments kick in — yes, it’s clever for me to say, “I’m allergic to stupidity, I break out in sarcasm.” But it’s also disrespectful. I know it. I’m working on it.)
(17) CANTINA COLLABORATION. Did you know J.J. Abrams wrote the Star Wars: The Force Awakens Cantina Band Music with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda? Abrams told the story on last night’s Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
There are also two other clips on the NBC site, “J.J. Abrams broke his back trying to rescue Harrison Ford,” and “J.J. Abrams was afraid to direct Star Wars.”
(18) BOOK LIBERATION. A commenter at Vox Popoli who says he’s sworn off Tor Books was probably surprised to read Vox Day’s response (scroll down to comments).
I myself will not be purchasing, reading, and therefore not voting for anything published by Tor
[VD] Who said anything about purchasing or reading? Never limit your tactical options.
His answer reminded me of the bestseller Steal This Book. Although in that case, it was the author, Abbie Hoffman, who gave his own book that title.
(19) VOX LOGO NEXT? In a different post, Vox added a stinger in his congratulations to a commenter who bragged about being the point of contact for the outfit that does Larry Correia’s logo-etched gun parts.
I’m actually his point of contact at JP, so I’m feeling proud of myself today.
[VD] Good on you. Now tell them that the Supreme Dark Lord wants HIS custom weaponry and it will outsell that of the International Lord of Hate any day.
And it should look far more evil and scary than that.
(20) Not This Day in History
- December 1, 1830 — According to an agreement with his publisher, French novelist Victor Hugo is due to turn in a draft of his book Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) on this day. He doesn’t. He works on other projects, and gets several deadline extensions. The book is not published until 1831.
(21) LUCAS EXPLAINS. In a long interview at the Washington Post, George Lucas offers his latest explanation why he re-edited Star War to make Greedo shoot first.
He also went back to some scenes that had always bothered him, particularly in the 1977 film: When Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is threatened by Greedo, a bounty hunter working for the sluglike gangster Jabba the Hutt, Han reaches for his blaster and shoots Greedo by surprise underneath a cantina table.
In the new version, it is Greedo who shoots first, by a split second. Deeply offended fans saw it as sacrilege; Lucas will probably go to his grave defending it. When Han shot first, he says, it ran counter to “Star Wars’ ” principles.
“Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?’ ” Lucas asks. “Because I was thinking mythologically — should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first] — you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.”
(22) YOU WERE WARNED. Anyway, back in 2012 Cracked.com warned us there are “4 Things ‘Star Wars’ Fans Need to Accept About George Lucas”.
#4. Because They’re His Damned Movies
An obvious point, but it needs to be stated clearly: Star Wars fans don’t own the Star Wars movies. We just like them. If they get changed and we don’t like them anymore, that’s perfectly cool, because we don’t have to like them anymore. That’s the deal. All sorts of creative works come in multiple editions, director’s cuts, abridged versions, expanded versions. Lucas appears to be far more into this tinkering than other filmmakers, but he’s hardly unique. Take Blade Runner: …
(22) DUELING SPACESHIPS. Millennium Falcon or Starship Enterprise? There is no question as to which space vehicle Neil deGrasse Tyson would choose.
[Thanks to Gregory N. Hullender, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, Brian Z., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Josh Jasper.]
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First fifth!
First.
And therefore First Corinthians, by royal decree.
[MOVIE] “Scrollilas in the Mist”
[NEUROMANCER] “It’s like my body’s developed this massive pixel defficiency.”
[DUNE] “He who controls the scroll controls the universe.”
::ticky::
Steal This Book was by Abbie Hoffman. Rubin’s book from the same era was, if memory serves, Do It. I always liked Abbie. He was weird and often wrong, but vivid and really believed in shit. Rubin…Rubin was, in my opinion, a poseur. Smart, but mostly with an eye for the main chance.
Also, Pre-fifth!
Lydy Nickerson. Whoops! Will fix that pronto.
[This is not the fifth comment. Treat this like the Free Space in Bingo….]
So this is my free ticket to fifth? Do I have to put an asterisk on this fifth? Is there some sort of conspiracy involved?
brb, hyperventilating…
Also, I haven’t clicked through yet, but there’s one important difference between the revised Blade Runner and the revised Star Wars (21&22); the revised version of Blade Runner made changes that actually improved the movie. They fixed a line that had been dubbed with different dialogue. They fixed an out-of-place matte background that had changed the mood of the final shot. They didn’t… they didn’t throw in a bunch of random dinosaurs dancing around, and have Deckard Solo use the character he’s supposed to be deathly afraid of retribution from as a doormat.
At the risk of things blowing up again, it’s hard for me not to see Correia and VD as anything but hucksters with the guns. Good for them I guess.
Five SCROLLED-ON rings!
Four scrolling birds…
“He’s got a ticket to ride….”
Three French fen
Blade Runner is a little trickier, since Scott borrowed the story from Dick in the first place. But in any case, while Lucas and Scott may own their versions of their stories, they can’t take my headcanon away from me! 😀
Two system republic.
One awesome spaceship
(22) DUELING SPACESHIPS – of course it’s the Enterprise. No contest.
(3) CONNIE: I read this entry aloud to the husband. Delightful as always. Particularly the quoted bit.
Two Turtledoves? Too obvious?
Re: LUCAS EXPLAINS
I think changing Han to make him “John Wayne” in the cantina scene ruins his arc. Of course Leia isn’t going to marry that Han. She marries the man he grows up to be. Greedo-killer Han is in the depths, a ruthless mercenary, and his arc in the original trilogy is a wonderful story of redemption.* But you have to need redemption for that to make any sense! Otherwise, he’s just a rough guy who cleans up nice.
You know, like Indiana Jones. Indy was a good guy from the first moment we saw him, and he had a consistent hero arc. That works for him. It’s what that character needs. But it’s not what Lucas ’76 set up for Han, and it’s not what he needed. Lucas ’15 should trust Lucas ’76 a bit more; that cat had some good instincts.
* In an odd way, Han’s original arc mirrors Anakin’s prequel arc. Anakin descends into the depths by being coaxed into villainy through his desire for Padme, while Han climbs out of them by performing heroic deeds for Leia.
In unrelated news, since I know we have some fans of The Last Unicorn here – this limited offer should be of interest:
Rev. Bob: To raise money for two good causes (Peter’s unexpected need to move and supporting Rickert & Beagle Books, in Pittsburgh) Conlan Press is premiering Peter’s ultra-rare THE LAST UNICORN: THE LOST VERSION in a three-format ebook bundle for a VERY limited time. This special $15 offer ends at midnight on December 31st!
Do I understand correctly, that this is just the 80-page original version, and does not include the published novel?
@JJ:
Not having taken the plunge myself, I can only speculate based on the references to the 2006 Subterranean Press edition. According to Wikipedia, that hardback “contained Beagle’s original 85-page unfinished start on the story, plus a new introduction and afterword that set the fragment in context and discuss the differences between it and the complete novel published in 1968.”
Greatest prime less than 4 times fifth
My recent reading comes from the rapidly growing subgenre of “YA Lesbian Romance SFF Written By Male Authors Featuring Heroines With Southwest Asian Ancestry”. (At least, it’s enough of a subgenre that I somehow just read two in a row.)
Afterworlds, by Scott Westerfeld. Two YA novels for the price of one, Afterworlds alternates between the story of a recent high-school grad working on her first YA Paranormal Romance novel, and the Paranormal Romance novel itself. The former is pretty good, the latter only OK, and when I put the book down I was a little puzzled because I wasn’t sure what the point was — but the day after I read it, something clicked, and I realized how the two stories were commenting on each other, showing the difference in the depictions of teenaged love when shown in a realistic way and when shown in an “angsty YA Adventure” way. This has made the book grow in my estimation in retrospect, and while I wouldn’t rate it up with Westerfeld’s classic “Uglies” series, I enjoyed it all right and I like what it was doing. So, all told I’d give it a “pretty good” kind of rating, and it’s going on my Good Lesbian Romance SFF list.
The Glass Republic, by Tom Pollock. It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading this, the second book in this series. Although people I respect love it, I read the first book and went, meh. It seemed to be a fairly unexciting entry in the “magical London” subgenre, not nearly at the level of, say, Kate Griffin. But the second book focuses on a different character, and I decided to give it a chance. And … eh. People keep having reactions and saying things that don’t seem quite like what people would do or say, and the worldbuilding raises a lot of unanswered questions. There are some very interesting ideas here about beauty and opposites, but they don’t seem fully fleshed out. I was finding the love story pretty charming, but then there was a whole knife attack thing and the whole “this does not seem like the way people would act” thing happened again and … eh. I mean, it wasn’t bad or anything, just … eh.
Just finished Watchmaker of Filigree Street…and as I did so the sequel to The Mechanical downloaded. I only read novels about clockwork now it seems.
Re #22
They are his damned movies? Well, he did make them, its true. But this gets to the whole engagement with created works. People reading things into books, or seeing things that the author did not explicitly or consciously intend. Releasing a creative work into the wild invites people to make a version of it their own in their own headspace.
It doesn’t even have to be intentional. Long ago, when I was young and strong, I remember discussing the Burton BATMAN in High School. One of my classmates had noticed something fashion related running through the film that I had not seen. The movie that he had seen, the movie within his headspace, was a compilation of the work, and his thoughts, unique to himself.
So, someone of us like the Han Solo scoundrel that he clearly was in the original version of SW thank you very much, and Lucas tinkering to change that in subsequent versions isn’t going to chance that canon in our heads.
Getting a ticket to Ryde is a 1950’s scientifictional experience, as it’s pretty much the last public hovercraft service in the world. And it’s getting new hovercraft next year!
Head Cannon: what Patrick O’Brien fans use to rewrite the naval battles.
(3) CONNIE AT SASQUAN
(4) CONNIE PRESENTS THE HUGO
Connie Willis is a delightful person.
(10) YA SF
The definition of “speculative fiction” as a catch-all for everything that isn’t strict realism is very strange when you look at it.
Taking an example from my profession, it is as though people only classified two schools of visual art:
1. Realistic portrayals of actual people, places and things (or thinly fictionalized versions of the same)
2. “Speculative art”, which encompasses everything else.
Meaning that original cave art (but not modern mystico-mythologizing about it), all portrait art (including portraits of houses), strict history paintings, pictures of humans doing verified human hings even if their anatomy is utterly impossible, and bland Classical Realism paintings of Girl Listlessly Playing a Flute would be considered one thing.
And all of abstraction, symbolism, mythology, allegory, and religious art; any depiction of a god, angel, sphinx or other impossible being; any image of heaven or the afterlife; all proposed but as yet unbuilt architecture; all unknown landscapes; all visual illusions; all ideal cities; all collaged chimeras; anything that flies without strict aerodynamic principles; impossible geometries; abstracted shapes; indeed, anything that deviates from currently accepted “realism”; all would be lumped together as the same sort of thing.
I see the Sunburst award has a submission fee for novel-length work. Is this common for juried awards?
@Peace is My Middle Name:
On phone so this will be short. I use speculative fiction as an umbrella term which encompasses a lot of sub genres. In my f2f class days the diagram filled the length of the blackboard. Arguably realism has sub-genres as well.
@Robinreid:
I know realism does. I can get a bit too excitable about the gamesmanship game of competing genres.
I try not to fall too deep down the rabbit hole generally.
To be fair, while the categorizing of the clear majority of world literature into a single often undifferentiated category treated as inferior to the single narrow category of limited realism rankles a bit, when I practice my tolerance I can recognize that realism is as rich and diverse a category as any other.
Tenant has heat now, so…progress? Still a bunch more to do before my crisis is completely resolved.
Clicky.
@Lis
I read that as a reference to David’s character in Jessica Jones…
Glad you’re making progress.
Re: #22 :
John Wayne shot first in many ( all?) of his greatest roles : Stagecoach. Red River. The Searchers. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. El Dolardo.
I have been binging on graphic novels recently. There’s a lot of enjoyable stuff out there, isn’t there?
The Wicked + The Divine V2 – I thought this was excellent.
The Autumnlands V1 – my introduction to the works of Kurt Busiek and a worthwhile one.
Rat Queens V2 – lots of fun
Copperhead V1 – decent but it’s basically Western-clichés-in-space
Queued up to read, courtesy of the File770 recommendation hivemind:
ODY-C
Lazarus
(3) CONNIE AT SASQUAN
(4) CONNIE PRESENTS THE HUGO
WILLIS AND GERROLD AT TENAGRA!
Right, given his blog, I think Vox having his emblem on an assault rifle is several orders of magnitude more scary than Correia’s on an assault rifle. There’s masculinity maintenance on the one hand, and on the other hand there’s “how close can I come to calling for ethnic cleansing before he police show up?” that Vox practices.
I hope slighting Correia’s perceived level of dangerousness doesn’t trigger another downward spiral and meltdown on his part.
Edited for Politeness: Hi Larry!
I never knew that Teddy had an emblem.
Peace: I don’t think the division of works into genres is generally very logical; it depends on communities of interest. If I go into a typical bookshop I see sections for Science Fiction and Fantasy (together), Horror (separately, despite its being quite naturally seen as a subgenre of fantasy), Crime, Romance, and Fiction, i.e. Everything Else, which includes a vast number of works of different kinds. Why are these the recognised divisions? One can easily imagine quite different ways of dividing things up. I think the actual divisions largely exist because there are communities of people interested in these things.
One reason for grouping various kinds of speculative fiction together is that it may be hard to determine the boundaries – witness the perennial disputes about ‘Is this science fiction or fantasy?’ – but that might apply to other genres as well. What I think really keeps them together is that the same people are often interested in all of them. A community developed around the idea of science fiction; that community then provided a home for other kinds of speculation, often written by the same people; and so a genre developed which includes speculation of all kinds. Once this has developed, it’s possible to see similar features in works written outside the genre community, so the concept of speculative fiction embraces them as well.
Oh, neat, I had no idea Charnock had a new novel out.
Yet another Bundle style fiction collection that might be of interest to scrollers, this time from Storybundle.
Gods damnit, will people please stop releasing bargain bundles of inteersting fiction faster than I can read the damn things…
NickPheas, no. 18
Teddy seems to claim one, he wants it to be scary, and he wants it to outsell the Correia’s. I’m wondering what will best represent the online whining and meltdowns of the dignity culture. Teddy’s logo would be a logo that should represents what Teddy holds dear, taken, as always, from words Teddy himself has written and that Teddy himself has published on the internet.
Traditional male authority. The superiority of those with the precious Neanderthal DNA signals their superiority over those who do not have it. The superiority of European culture, over those who “rape the culture of Europe.” HIs opposition to the secret cabals secretly controlling the world who oppose the above things. And it should be catchy, and memorable.
In fact, I think he can probably scour antique weapons dealers for plenty of firearms that have an insignia that describes that set of Teddy’s beliefs(that I fell I must mention again that he has advocated, repeatedly, in his own words) already stamped upon them.
Though not in Germany, as that symbol is illegal to display there…
VD may not be a PUA, but he sure loves to neg his fanbase.
Hard SF was very interesting; I need to keep Rocket Stack Rank in mind as one source of short story recommendations.
Connie at Sasquan / Connie Presents The Hugo were great–she is one funny writer. Thanks for catching those for me; I am glad I saw them! I watched the live feed of the Hugos and just about fell out of my chair at the marmot reference, though later I found out she meant an actual marmot.
Book Liberation–I think Mike may have misinterpreted Beale’s comment; he seemed to me to be contradicting his fan who said “I won’t buy/read” so I thought he was saying “don’t rule out buying/reading” rather than advocating torrenting or the like. Of course this is Beale so perhaps he’s Aristotling.
Gerrold Decides–if he decides to become respectful of the Puppies… well, actually the Puppies will never realize it, because I’m guessing that in his lexicon “respectful” does not mean “fails to point out where claims are mistaken” and in the Puppies lexicon it does. So never mind.
I thought I recalled reading about recent DNA analysis that showed that human migration went both ways over the last n-thousand years, so that all Africans, even the remotest, have some European DNA and thus some Neanderthal ancestry.
I’ll admit this is coming from someone who doesn’t read a lot of it, but doesn’t Horror encompass supernatural and non-supernatural content quite easily? While on the other hand, that’s a fairly big deal when defining a work as Fantasy….
Although difficult to parse, as it was written by VD, the “who said anything about purchasing or reading” line seems to suggest that VD is advocating voting for books published by Tor without bothering to acquire or read them first.
I can only assume the “tactical reasons” he is referring to would be putting someone on his slate involuntarily so all of the SJWs would reflexively vote against authors they like because VD endorsed them. Or something. I predict that he is setting himself up for disappointment.
@Peace
Completely unchecked that he completely doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about.
Keep in mind that there are authors on Tor that are quite acceptably to Vox and his ilk. Larry Niven’s certainly one of them and I suspect there’s others as well.
I tried reading one of his latest novels and gave up after a chapter as it was a very thinly veiled attack on all things green politics. And Red Tide, an ebook shared universe set in his Flash Crowd setting, is largely naked screes on SJWers.
I’m not just famous, I’m File770 famous!
(10) YA SF
Am I the only one who finds it frustrating that so much of the emphasis on “diversity in SFF” is focused on the YA market? Like: don’t readers of adult fiction also need a diversity of reads? Or have we just been written off? After all, we survived our childhoods without representation, so publishers figure we’re used to it by now. (I say “publishers” because authors definitely seem to be trying to write the stuff — it just doesn’t get much support.)
I guess we can only hope that the next generation of industry professionals grew up reading diverse YA and have different default expectations.
“The Builders’ [novella 2015]: I’m about halfway through it and I think that’s as far as I’m going. I have decided replacing human racist stereotypes with essentialist human ones is not an adequate replacement for actual world-building or characterization. Or plot for that matter.
And after a month of writing rather than reading, I have plenty of good stuff to read. “Three Slices” is quite good (and even better by comparison with the Builders): novellas by Kevin Hearne, Check Wendig, and Delilah S. Dawson, all set in existing series. Divination using cheese is a theme… the Wendig wasn;t really to my taste but well-written.