(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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Well, except for that whole diddling Marian when she was a minor thing.
My happy thought for today is that Bring Back MST3K has reached the 6-episode mark. And still 10 days to go!
Peace Is My Middle Name on December 2, 2015 at 3:39 am said:
My favorite Sasquan experience was getting to be on a panel with her daughter Cordelia, who works as a forensic scientist and inherited her mother’s voice, sense of humor, and love the The X-Files (apparently her first forensic medicine class was full of young women who all wanted to be Scully.)
The panel was about bad science on television.
@Peace
I tend to see it as more of a spectrum — where would things like magical realism, surrealism, or subjective realism fit in a strict binary?
[19] Does anyone else find the whole “Supreme Dark Lord” and “International Lord of Hate” ha-ha-but-actually-we’re-serious-too posturing kind of… tiresome?
And today’s scroll title requires me to post a link to The Smithereens.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNZbP3ZVem4
Oh, and about Indiana Jones — I actually think he’s more of a semi-amoral antihero right from the start. He doesn’t start out fighting Nazis for any moral good. He just wants to get a cool artifact.
Finished The Ship by Antonia Honeywell.
Meh.
I was hoping for a bit more explanation of just how the somewhat wet heroine’s father came to accumulate all the luxuries in Britain during a time of sustained economic collapse.
John Wayne Shot First would make for a pretty neat T-shirt
So does that mean that at the end, Han should have let Vader take a shot or two before gunning him down from behind?
The whole point of the western movie/TV duel is that you have to shoot first. You could say the same thing about certain Japanese samurai/chanbara movies where iaido is featured. Not sure who started the whole thing about not throwing the first punch, but it seems contrary to our whole pop culture history.
Xtifr on December 1, 2015 at 10:37 pm said:
While Lucas and Scott may own their versions of their stories, they can’t take my headcanon away from me!
Heroes of many Earths
The cops’ guns in E.T.
The fact that Han shot first
No no, you can’t take that away from me…
You can’t take that away from me.
The western TV/movie/novel duel thing is actually that you don’t DRAW first. This has nothing to do with nobility, it’s about evading the law — as long as you didn’t draw first, it was self-defense instead of murder. The classic Western gunfighter, whether a good guy or a bad guy, was therefore supposed to be fast enough to draw second but still shoot first. You saw the other person draw, but were so fast you got your own gun out and shot them dead while theirs was still halfway up. You win AND you don’t go to jail. It’s about skill, not mercy; that the other person was trying to kill you is taken as a given.
Why Indiana Jones Never Got Tenure
One of my favorite reads at this time of the term.
(21) LUCAS EXPLAINS / (22) YOU WERE WARNED –
Lucas’s explanation would make sense if Han was supposed to be a generic good guy and not a smuggler. The John Wayne version of Han Solo would’ve never taken his pay and left only to redeem himself by flying back.
And yes Star Wars is his. Or Disney’s rather now really. Regardless of who is in charge of tinkering with it if it goes from liking it to not liking it, that’s cool, but that doesn’t mean folks can’t criticize the changes (constructively or otherwise).
3/4 – Connie just sounds like an awesome lady.
An ‘evil logo’ for Beale?
“A boot stamping on an acid-burned female face, forever”.
[ticky]
Finished Watchmaker and unfortunately, I don’t share the love y’all have for it. The ending just fizzled out.
Gene Wolfe’s A Borrowed Man, however, is a different story entirely. I’m about halfway through it right now, and if it keeps on the way it’s been going, it will take a high spot on my longlist.
@Rev Bob –
I so agree with you regarding Han Solo’s arc. He is supposed to be a gray character, a cynic, a skeptic, redeemed by love. He was not heroic when we meet him. He was only smuggling the heroes for money, then agreed to help free Leia for money. Even though he helps blow up the Death Star at the end of the movie, in my head cannon he kept the money. In one of the other movies, IIRC, he references that he hasn’t had time to pay Jabba back.
I always liked the novelization version of the Greedo scene. Now, I haven’t read it since I was 12 so I may not remember correctly, but it implied that the only way Han was getting out of there was by killing Greedo, and describes the reaction of the cantina regulars as basically shrugging it off because Greedo was an idiot for allowing Han to put his hands under the table.
How could older Lucas think of a lovable rogue as a John Wayne character? Though he did play characters who were redeemed by love, as in The Angel and the Badman.
World Weary says:
In the radio version it’s even clearer that he takes the money, then has a change of heart later. Leia gets a chance to talk to him and almost persuades him to stay behind (Leia is a much more active character in the radio version), and then it’s implied that he came back because he kept thinking about what she’d said.
That’s a scene that was filmed for A New Hope but didn’t make it into the final movie because there wasn’t time/budget to replace the Jabba stand-in with the stop-motion animated character they’d been planning. It was added to the Special Edition release with a CGI Jabba.
Bangless That’s an interesting theory, at least to the extent I can grasp it. I wonder if there is any way to test it? What was more fun, though, was reading the comments. Wow, there are even stranger kooks at physics discussions than there are at evolution discussions (where I used to often hang out), and that’s going a long way into the kook weeds.
Hard SF Nice work and article, Greg. There were a few on your list I haven’t read! Thanks :-9
It would be interesting to survey old issues of the SF mags and do a similar breakdown to see what percentages were which kind of story. Heinlein, imo, wrote mostly situational or soft SF as did many of the big names, especially if you disqualify FTL as hard SF. The perceived reduction in hard SF may just be a function of the increased volume and the increased diversity of authors and themes, at least in part.
Duelling Spaceships: Am late, as often occurs, but wanted to pat myself on the back for guessing which spaceship Tyson would choose and, roughly, why. Go, junego!
plus ::godstick::
Dr. Strangelobe –
I was thinking it should be something more sinister looking, like a black hole sucking all light towards it. A rough sketch would look like this
@NickPheas: “I never knew that Teddy had an emblem.”
I think it’s an asterisk.
@James Davis Nicoll: (Indy the perv)
Hunh. I never picked up on that.
That’s a scene that was filmed for A New Hope but didn’t make it into the final movie because there wasn’t time/budget to replace the Jabba stand-in with the stop-motion animated character they’d been planning.
I think World Weary was probably referring to this scene from The Empire Strikes Back, from about the 30 second mark to the one minute mark.
As AndrewM points out, literary taxonomy isn’t quite like the botanical kind, and genre labels squirm around as a result of both audience/market expectations and authorial tinkering with the ingredients that make up the various genre recipes. (I note that the metaphors in that sentence interact in strange and perhaps, um, unappetizing ways.)
The primary source for “speculative” as a descriptor for SF/F is Heinlein’s 1947 attempt to unpick the implications of “science” in SF–the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has a nice thumbnail account of the term’s development since then. From the New Wave onward, “speculative” has sometimes been taken as a kind of license-to-imagine more weakly tethered to restrictive notions of the possible/probable.
Genre labels are all over the place. “Science fiction” and “fantasy” are associated with different sets of what George R. R. Martin usefully called “furniture”–though there are also decorum rules and generating protocols in play, along with what I would call metaphysical and epistemological givens in the world-building. Gary K. Wolfe has pointed out that “horror” is a genre named for the story’s effect/affect–some but not all horrors are supernatural. (And some scary supernatural effects are not horrific.) Then there’s the Clutean project that starts with the notion of “fantastika,” which connects to literary-taxonomic attempts to separate “the fantastic” from “realism” in western literature.
When I was in grad school, I thought a watertight taxonomic system might be possible, but they all proved leaky–though the placement and nature of the leaks reveal a good bit about how readers read and writers write.
[Looks at empty classroom, takes off mortarboard, goes to lunch.]
I was in the same hotel as Connie Willis, apparently. It looked like it should be used as a set for the ongoing GARY SEVEN Trek spinoff.
It took a little doing, since they were on the opposite wall from the window, but I found the controls.
Didn’t need a door, really, since it was in an alcove that went around a corner.
Of course, if you’re in a couple that wants to use the toilet and shower simultaneously, I can see where there’s a privacy issue, but not much more than if there’s a frosted-glass door…
I didn’t notice, since I just set my alarm on my phone, which is more familiar and reliable than figuring out a strange clock or depending on hotel employees. Haven’t used a hotel wake-up service or hotel clock since I got a smartphone.
Same here.
Yeah, that was weird. Had to sit on a chair to get my shoes on…
rob_matic:
Glad you liked it!
@junego
Thanks. There was quite a discussion about this on Metafilter, and based on that, I made a tweak to the definition, since it seemed to be confusing some folks. Here’s the explanation I wrote for the Metafilter folks:
Looking at the comments, I notice that a few people seem to be making the assumption that to qualify as hard SF (by Rocket Stack Rank’s definition) that the story must be perfect. That’s not the case.
I think the exact wording of the definition is at fault here, so I’ve reworded it slightly. It originally said that “the science must be accurate enough that an educated layman can suspend disbelief,” meaning “disbelief in the story,” not “disbelief in the science.” The whole idea of hard SF is that the science is real.
The changed definition says “the science must be accurate enough that an educated layman does not have to suspend disbelief.” That makes it clearer, I think, that the big difference between hard and soft SF is that soft SF asks the reader to suspend disbelief in key bits of science and technology whereas hard SF does not. Sure, hard SF stories can have errors and omissions in them–everything does–but that doesn’t turn them into soft SF.
A single error or two (e.g. the sandstorm in “The Martian”) may be annoying, but as long as we can read past it, it doesn’t ruin the story. So “The Martian” still qualifies as hard SF by our definition. Too many errors would have spoiled the story, but it still would have been hard SF–it just would have been bad hard SF.
Asimov’s Foundation series and his robot novels cannot be read as hard SF (by our definition) because they’re filled with “magical” technologies that are never explained and/or have no connection to real-world science; there is no psychohistory, there are no positronic brains, etc. They’re still great stories that can still be enjoyed because Asimov folded all that stuff into the “what-if” and we happily suspend disbelief. They’re not mistakes on Asimov’s part–he fully intended us to suspend disbelief for his invented science and technology.
Hard SF is not better than soft SF or vice versa. They’re simply different styles, and most people enjoy both.
@ Peace
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 had heard something like that, too. Went googling and came up with this article from New Scientist.
Forgotten Return to Africa
The upshot is that some of the extreme southern, and most ‘isolated’, African tribes show an influx of Southern European dna about 3000 ya. Neanderthal dna was included with. I think this means that there are still Africans without any Neanderthal, but it’s unclear now how many may or may not have it.
I’m going to start an internet rumor that Kurt Busiek is writing a Gary Seven Star Trek spinoff just in hopes that it will make it happen.
CONFIRMED! Kurt Busiek has written a Gary Seven Star Trek spinoff and the first season is already in the can.
Because we need more book recommendations.
My teenaged self would rather write THE QUESTOR TAPES.
My adult self would rather write TABITHA STEVENS, FBI. I think.
My teenaged self would rather you write The Norliss Tapes. Which might turn out like Adam Stevens, FBI.
Even more confirmed! (i.e. something that actually exists in the real world)
Samurai Jack is returning!
http://www.tor.com/2015/12/02/samurai-jack-returning-to-tv-cartoon-network/
I only encountered hotel electric curtain closing buttons this year.
:You are in a small room. You are very tired.
>Leave room.
:You are too sleepy.
>Go to sleep.
:You cannot sleep as all the lights are on and the main curtains are open.
>Close curtains.
:You pull on the curtains but they do not move.
>Use magic.
:You cannot use that here.
>Help:curtains
:Maybe there is a button you can press.
>Look around
:There are numerous switches around the room. None are labelled.
>Press switch 1.
:The television comes on. There is a very loud game show on in a language you cannot understand. The TV is very loud.
>Press switch 1.
:The TV turns off.
>Press switch 2.
:A light comes on inside a cupboard.
>Press switch 3.
:All the lights in the room turn off. The room is in almost complete darkness except for the glow of a clock.
>Press switch 3.
:It is too dark to find switch 3 now.
>Walk to clock.
:You walk towards the clock stubbing your toe on the minibar as you go.
>Look around.
:There is a switch (4) by the clock.
>Press switch 4.
:The television comes on. There is a very loud game show on in a language you cannot understand. The TV is very loud. However the light from the TV makes it easier to see things in your room.
>Press switch 3.
:All the lights in the room come on.
>Press switch 1.
:The TV turns off.
>Press switch 5.
:Switch 5 can be pressed at the top or the bottom. Which do you choose?
>Bottom.
:The thin, transparent net curtain covering the window automatically retracts. You now have a better view of the offices in the tower block next to your hotel. There are people working there, occasionally looking across to the hotel. They can probably see you are wearing Doctor Who pajamas. They are probably judging you.
>Switch 5 press top.
:The net curtain closes automatically.
>Switch 6 press top.
:The main curtain closes automatically.
>Switch 6 press bottom.
:The main curtain opens automatically.
>Switch 6 press top and then bottom repeatedly while humming the theme from Thunderbirds.
:There are people working in the offices opposite, occasionally looking across to the hotel. They can probably see you are wearing Doctor Who pajamas. They are probably judging you.
>Switch 6 press bottom. Press switch 3.
:The curtains are closed and the room is dark except for the glow of the clock.
>Go to sleep.
:You cannot sleep because of the glow of the clock…
@camestros: I am reminded of the Infocom game BUREAUCRACY as well as HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY…
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…
Interesting question. I don’t read a lot of it either, so am not sure, but my feeling is that the Horror shelves are dominated by supernatural stuff; there’s no doubt that horror as a genre of film includes non-supernatural stuff, but it’s less clear with written fiction.
But if it does include non-supernatural stuff, I think that confirms my point about the non-logicality of genre assignments. We have one set of shelves with lots of very different material held together only by the fact that it is speculative; but then we have one fairly significant kind of speculative fiction having to go and share a shelf with other stuff, based on a completely different criterion. (Of course there is also speculative material on the general Fiction and Crime and Romance shelves, but that’s occasional; with Horror it’s a whole genre.)
(If I wanted to be annoying I could also point out that there is non-supernatural fantasy, like Gormenghast and Swordspoint ; but certainly these are special cases.)
@emgrasso, re The Builders
I wouldn’t feel too concerned, The Builders is perfectly adequate and fun-ish but no more than that.
(9) HARD SF.
Good article, although I note the cunning placement of a TV Tropes landmine. From Greg’s list I’d pick out Edited, The End of the War, and The Tumbledowns Of Cleopatra Abyss as personal favourites, but there are several more in there.
I’ve been umming about whether I’m going to take out a subscription to Analog next year, and I think this is the nail in the coffin. I may pick up individual issues based on srtrong recs, but otherwise I’ve not really found the 3 issues I’ve read particularly inspiring apart from the specific stories I’d picked them up for.
(3) CONNIE AT SASQUAN.
I’m still amazed at the tales of the SasquanSmokeApocalypse: “the people filming Syfy’s Z Nation, a Zombie-Apocalypse TV series which films in Spokane had to put filters on to remove some of the smokiness from their end-of-the-world landscape.”
Re: Vandermeer StoryBundle. That’s sooo much better than other recent StoryBundles. Damn.
> “Because we need more book recommendations …”
So, one of the few books on those lists which haven’t hit my TBR pile yet is The Library At Mount Char. That’s in part because it’s been disrecommended here a little bit, but if I recall correctly, that was mainly because people were put off by the violence and brutality in it. I don’t mind violence and brutality, so I’d like to ask, is there any other reason people didn’t like it? I mean to say, was it “I might have liked it if it weren’t so brutal”, or was it, “I didn’t like it and it was too brutal as well”? (Or if you have a different opinion, such as unreservedly liking it or anything else, please feel free to weigh in as well.)
Greg Hullender: I’m quite struck by the fact that there are so many stories which satisfy both criteria. My own feeling has always been that they define different senses of ‘hard’. Asimov called his own work hard SF because it is about science, although obviously the science isn’t real; contrariwise I’ve seen works that are hardly speculative at all called ‘extremely hard science fiction’, because they don’t depart from real-world science (since obviously, if a story is set in a world which in scientific respects is just like the one we live in, everything in it will be scientifically possible). Writing stories in which the science is both real, and sufficiently distinctive to be the source of a speculative plot, seems to me especially difficult, so I’m surprised that there is so much of it.
@Kyra
The violence and gore was the main reason I was put off by The Library at Mount Char, and also because, in my opinion, the protagonist was a sociopath. That said, there is a lot of inventive worldbuilding and mythology to be found there. It all comes down to what you can stomach, I guess.
Never ask a scientist an SF question. They are good at making SF boring.
You pick the Starship Enterprise because it has that magic SF food generator and it will make any food I want. Burgers and Fries in space?
Do you prefer that or the mush they eat on the international space station?
We need scientists, but they are kind of lame.
@Andrew M: “my feeling is that the Horror shelves are dominated by supernatural stuff”
Dean Koontz has been a notable counter-example. Back when I was reading his work, he seemed to have a shtick of doing “this looks like something SF-ish or supernatural, but the explanation turns out to be mundane” – with the exception, as I recall, of psychic abilities.
I haven’t read his work since it became The Odd Thomas Chronicles, though, so I can’t testify to his recent material.
You are thinking about the Mota cave discovery (choose your favorite link from google.) Africans before this back-wash of European genes (including around half a percent of Neanderthal) were merely quazi-mota.
@Guessingo
Are your serious?
@camestros, that was great. Really read like an old Infocom text adventure.
@Andrew M
.
I was going to call that “hardly SF” but there weren’t enough stories that fit the bill. So I included things that involved technology that seems it ought to be possible (e.g. as in “Edited”). That got closer to Ben Bova’s definition, which included anything that can’t be proved to be impossible.
Once upon a time I read a very good argument about the characters in Star Wars:
When you’re a kid, you want to be Luke Skywalker.
When you grow up, you want to be Han Solo.
When you grow up, you want to be Obi Wan Kenobi.
(@camestros: Still laughing far too much. Also, where did you get the Doctor Who pajamas?)
Kyra, the violence (including torture) in The Library At Mount Char was… offputting. I disliked the main viewpoint character strongly; someone above characterized her as a sociopath and I think that’s accurate. Yet despite that, it’s currently on my Hugo Novel longlist, because the writing and worldbuilding was just that good. This is a novel worth reading, but it has ALL the trigger warnings for anyone with problems with violence against children, women, men, animals, the planet….
It’s no so much an emblem as a picture of him giving Scalzi’s house the finger from behind a tree two properties away.
Actually, I wanted to be Leia. Still do, in fact. Though once I hit my teens, I didn’t just want to be Leia, I wanted to have Han as well. Kid me would rather have R2D2.
Horror includes a lot of depictions of abnormal mental states that cannot be taken as actual depictions of mental illness. That’s a type of fantastical story then. If there’s no other supernatural elements, it’s stll not realism.
I think an effective psychological horror story is a sort of what-if of the mental realm; what if a mind reacted to these particular circumstances in this way, to terrifying effect; sometimes the mental events depicted are more possible (in terms of current psychological understanding) or less, but in order to connect with the reader they have to have a sort of truth — emotional, social, whatever.
Han should shoot first, but I’ll give Lucas a pass for that. He had his reasons for changing the character. Fine.
However, how can Greedo miss Han by 2 feet from 5 feet away?
Connie Willis’s hotel brings back memories of the Swansea “UK Year of Literature” and the memorably comforting sign in my cold, cold room: THIS HEATER IS CONTROLLED FROM THE RECEPTION DESK. PLEASE ASK AT RECEPTION IF YOU WISH IT TURNED ON.