(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.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
> “Kid me would rather have R2D2.”
My brother and I actually participated in a psychology experiment where we were asked which character in Star Wars we most identified with. It was testing whether both male and female participants would identify with a male character, or a female character, or whether there would be a split.
Both my brother and I, independently, picked droids. Apparently the person running the experiment was somewhat annoyed.
@YoungPretender: Hey, my dad had that symbol on a really neat sword he brought back from his European adventure camping trip of 1942-1945! So I know it looks swell on weapons.
@David Brain
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.
I think, with the new film, we could add one more line to that.
When you mature, you want to be General Leia.
@Aaron, yes, that scene from Empire had the dialogue that I remembered – thanks!
@Kyra – I gave Library at Mount Char almost 100 pages. At that point, I gave up on it. I hit the 7 Deadly Words. Not only that, since I didn’t care about the characters, I didn’t care how the situation was resolved. When I wasn’t actively repelled, I was bored. I have my fingers crossed that it doesn’t end up on the Hugo shortlist because I don’t want to finish it. I would not have liked it even with a PG rating.
@Kurt, the shower thing would bother me because I get cold easily and without a shower door to close, the whole bathroom would have to heat up, not just the smaller enclosed space. I would anticipate a cold breeze the entire time.
Also @Kurt, I would watch the hell out of Tabitha Stevens, FBI. I remember an attempt to make a series about Tabitha starring Lisa Hartman (later Lisa Hartman Black). I remember seeing the pilot but remember nothing else about it. I don’t think she was doing anything as interesting as your version!
@Lurker
Thanks for getting the reference!
@All else
My reaction to #8, i.e., Teddy Beale’s desire to have some guns that were stamped with his emblem in reference to Correia, was an over veiled observation that there are already plenty of firearm collectors and antique dealers with swastika-stamped guns.
There’s a door between the toilet/shower area and the rest of the bathroom. So all that has to heat up is a small L-shaped space that’s bigger than a normal shower but didn’t take long to heat up. No breeze.
There were two runs at a TABITHA series — the first one, starring Liberty Williams, didn’t go beyond a pilot, and the second, starring Hartman, lasted about a dozen episodes.
In the Williams version, she was an editorial assistant at a magazine, in the Hartman version she was a production assistant at a TV station. The big difference was that in the first, her younger brother Adam had magic powers and was a mischievous troublemaker; in the second, her older brother Adam had no powers and was a Darrin-like scold.
The fact that they couldn’t figure out how old Adam was, even though he was born three years after Tabitha, paled next to the fact that on BEWITCHED, Tabitha was born in 1966, so by the time of her spinoff series she should have still been in 6th or 7th grade. But she was in her 20s in both shows.
The Williams version was actually fun, as I recall, but I was 15 when it aired, so they may have secretly replaced it with crap while I wasn’t looking.
But yeah, if I did TABITHA STEPHENS, FBI, I wouldn’t bother trying to replicate the dynamics of BEWITCHED, which worked for the 1960s, but dated awfully fast. I’d explore the world of witchcraft, making Tabitha an often-reluctant agent of the law stuck between two world, each of which has a claim on her. It’d be urban fantasy-adventure with comedic touches rather than straight comedy.
Not that we need to worry about it ever happening…
Tabitha! I remember that show! I remember watching it. I don’t really remember anything about it. It’s funny, Tabitha should have been exactly my age, but I didn’t realize it at the time. It seemed perfectly normal that somebody who was from a show that I had watched in reruns to already be an adult.
Bewitched was one of my favorite shows growing up, but even as a kid I recognized how horrifically dumb and arbitrary most of the plots were.
The sex role dynamics were weird, sort of proto-feminist without really committing to that. Normally, a show like that would expect you to identify with Derwood, I mean Darrin, except how could you? Endora was much more fun. And I think on some level the writers knew that? But had to act like they didn’t know it? That’s what I mean about weird.
I used to watch I Love Lucy, too, even though I never liked it that much. One of the things about Lucy, is that Ricky would “forbid” her from doing something, and she would always do it anyway, and it would turn out to be a (hilarious) mistake and end up validating that Ricky was right all along.
But Darrin “forbidding” Samantha from using magic was always — you knew she was going to use it anyway, but nothing about the plot ever validated him having forbidden it in the first place. It was just him sputtering. But the show never pointed that out in dialog. She just said “yes, dear, of course” and did whatever she thought was a good idea.
All of which to say, I would watch the hell out of Tabitha Stephens, FBI. Or a TV version of the Sabrina comics new series, which looks pretty amazing: http://archiehorror.com
I am feeling unsurprisingly low this evening. Talk to me, plain people of File 770, about sense-of-wonder stories you love.
@Bruce: If you are into graphic novels, I loved Lumberjanes. I also loved Bitch Planet and Saga 5, but those are kind of brutal reads.
I’m enjoying Empire of Imagination, a biography of Gary Gygax. It is kind of charming how completely boringly normal most of Gygax’s life was.
@Kyra: What redheadedfemme said. It’s got repeated brutality unjustified by the story, and I didn’t really care about any of the characters. It was just icky. The worldbuilding was great; I’d like to see someone who wasn’t so fond of lovingly detailing violence do something with the setting. I mean, Character X is an evil psycho, we got that 100 pages and two scenes of the old ultra-violence ago. If it was a movie … well, it couldn’t be shown in theaters anywhere. It was unpleasant. But well-written.
If it shows up on the Hugo ballot … euch. The file in the packet really should start with “ALL THE TRIGGER WARNINGS”.
@YoungPretender: Thanks for letting me add my little fillip. Dad’s sword originally belonged to a guy in the “Air Weapon”. It was from France.
Coming soon on your dial-up 1200 baud modem: “Camestros and the Amazing Hotel Room Adventure”. XYZZY will only get you to the Land of No Taxis.
John Wayne shot first in many ( all?) of his greatest roles : Stagecoach. Red River. The Searchers. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. El Dolardo
Shot first or drew faster? Not the same thing, after all.
@Bruce Baugh
Gene Wolfe’s newest, A Borrowed Man, is terrific. It’s a science fiction murder mystery that tackles questions of personhood and the rights of clones. There are so many layers to this story, and the writing is simple but never simplistic. Highly recommended.
@Aaron: I am, so I shall check out Lumberjanes, thank you.
@redheadedfemme: Thanks! I love me a lot of Wolfe, but bounced off a couple of his later ones and have tended to wait for recommendations since. Onto the list it goes. 🙂
Harold Osler: Good question. We know in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence that Valence never shoots at Wayne because he doesn’t know he’s there. Valence does fire three times, twice to intimidate Jimmy Stewart’s character, wounding him once. Wayne’s setup is that he can only shoot Valence from cover if Stewart actually fires his revolver, which he finally manages to do.
Shot first or drew faster?
In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence it depends on how you define “shot first”. Wayne’s character shoots Valence from an alleyway with a rifle while Valence is having a rather one-sided “showdown” with Jimmy Stewart’s character.
@Kyra–“So, one of the few books on those lists which haven’t hit my TBR pile yet is The Library At Mount Char”
I picked it up because it had been mentioned both here and other sites. Couldn’t finish it–I don’t know if the timing was bad but I just couldn’t get interested in it. I didn’t care what happened to the people in it.
But I’ll agree with the worldbuilding was good. I just didn’t bond with anyone in it.
@Bruce Baugh: I have two recommendations for pick-me-up stories from intermittently trying to write a short-fiction roundup this week (in between attempting to finish Radiance, which is sometimes fun and often exhausting or irritating, my usual reaction to Cat Valente nowadays I’m afraid):
“By the Numbers” by Lynn Kilmore: When aliens arrive in earth orbit, a mathematics professor is delighted by the fact that they are communicating in mathematics; to talk to them, she has to maneuver around colleagues who have different ideas about communication than she does
“The Plausibility of Dragons” by Kenneth Schneyer: In medieval Europe, a Moorish scholar and a female knight defeat a most unusual threat by brains and teamwork.
I adored The Library At Mount Char. Some very black humor, a fascinating protagonist, well-done prose, excellent worldbuilding, and a rather . . . interesting? take on that age-old question: “if God is good, why do bad things happen?” This is really dark, so if you don’t like that sort of thing you won’t like this—but dark fantasy is one of my favorite subgenres, so this was right up my alley.
Thanks, Vasha! *queues those up*
@Russell Letson:
I had to dash off to another class, erm, well, technically office hours, so I could not reply earlier!
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.
Yep!
My take on it for my lit students is that the academics/critics are always laboring along behind writers who do what they do and have a great deal of fun and enjoyment writing–some of my favorite writers don’t want to even verbally commit to writing in a set genre!–and things are always changing–including the cultural contexts, so that the genre categories are useful only to start thinking about any single work and perhaps to generate some interesting questions about the text.
My students often tended to look depressed at that point (I now teach almost entirely online so don’t see faces), perhaps because it would be easier if the system could be used to generate nice sticky labels that would be *right.*
McJulie: 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?
The word I was thinking of is “Infantile”.
@robinareid But as any good engineer knows, a system doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. Depending on the application, it might be acceptable to handle boundary cases by simply listing ambiguous works on both sides. If that only accounted for a few percent of all works, that’d likely be fine.
In many things, even though perfection is impossible, excellence is achievable.
I just got an email from the food pantry; at least one of the people who donated to their fund drive identified themself as a Filer. Thank you!
@Greg: Hmm, I’m not quite seeing how your comment follows from what I said.
If “perfection” in a genre taxonomy was achievable, it would be the result of stasis in creation.
It’s great fun to create taxonomies and schema (as I also tell my students): and it’s the way to “excellence.”
The problem is they often come pre-trained to expect that a taxonomy is in fact “perfect” and they just have to slot things into it.
The joy is in the thinking about the ambiguities and edge cases (for me anyway).
Added because I missed the edit box somehow (nearly lost the comment to a glitch): the reliance on a taxonomy in fact tends to shut down critical thinking because the wish to slot everything in nice and neatly often leads to overlooking actual elements of the text(s) under discussion.
Pingback: Sasquan’s Donations | File 770
Some other good stories I’ve read recently (though none of them great, probably):
“Who Will Greet You at Home” by Lesley Nneka Arimah: Set in a version of Nigeria where women make their children out of various materials, and the babies come to life when blessed by the mother’s mother; the heroine is bitter about her own childhood and wants to make a perfect child. Strange and resonant. In the interview accompanying it, the author talks about how she translated the cultural pressures of motherhood into this setting with no men.
“Candidate 45, Pensri Suesat” by Pear Nuallak is a fascinating (though barely fantastical) tale touching on Thai mythology, art, and androgyny.
“Silver Buttons All Down His Back” by A. C. Wise: Devon’s life wearing an assistive device has made him self-conscious about being looked at. Issues of visibility and invisibility will interfere with his relationship with his new lover, an astronaut.
“Dispatches from a Hole in the World” by Sunny Moraine: Content warnings for this devastating story of queer community surviving and remembering the Year of Suicides.
“Android Whores Can’t Cry” by Natalia Theodoridou: Dark science fiction; a reporter trying to write about a city under an extremely repressive regime. Androids, the exploitation of the body, the concealing and revealing of decay and death… Content notes: Domestic abuse, sexual abuse, references to state violence, some graphic violence
This is a tangent I know, but the Tabitha Stevens discussion reminded me of a weird dream I had where the daughter of Bella from Twilight ditches Jacob and starts dating Eddie Munster. Her dad tries to break them up but finds out that Grandpa Munster is literally Dracula and can’t bring himself to confront the guy. I don’t know what happened next because I woke up, which is probably just as well.
I was trying to put my finger on something unsettling about some of the reactions here to books like The Library At Mount Char and A Borrowed Man. It clicked in place seeing the description: “excellent worldbuilding.”
Reading Gene Wolfe’s work, however much you do or don’t like it, is a process of glimpsing through the small, flawed window of the narration a world in which the author has taken a few novel premises and thought long and hard about the ramifications, physical, societal, spiritual, and so forth, meaning that you have to think deeply about them starting from the moment you hear about the book’s existence (a title like A Borrowed Man being a great example) and generally continuing months or years after you’ve finished reading it a bare minimum of twice.
Reading Scott Hawkins’ work, however much you do or don’t like it, is to appreciate his nods to various well-known tropes and moods, to enjoy quirky characters who do weird stuff and engage in snappy dialogue about it, and to try your darnedest not to think about the ramifications, physical, societal, spiritual, and so forth, lest you might fail to enjoy it while it lasts.
@Brian Z.: Are you saying the new Gene Wolfe book is actually good? Because The Book of the Short Sun and Soldier of Sidon broke my heart, and I reluctantly concluded he was done. If his new book is good, that would be wonderful news.
@Bruce – Diane Duane’s got a new Young Wizards self-pub out–“Interim Errantry.” Two shorts and a full length novel called “Lifeboats” that was just…really nice. Decent people working together to save a world in the face of despair. It was very kind.
@Brian Z
Reading Scott Hawkins’ work, however much you do or don’t like it, is to appreciate his nods to various well-known tropes and moods, to enjoy quirky characters who do weird stuff and engage in snappy dialogue about it,
Good heavens, Brian. Did you read the same book I did?
There aren’t any “quirky” characters in The Library at Mount Char, only characters with varying degrees of nastiness and sociopathy. There isn’t “weird” stuff, only blood, guts, gore, torture, brutality, and rape.
I mean, if you can stomach that sort of thing in your reading, fine. More power to you. But don’t try to minimize it by suggesting that it’s “quirky” and “weird” and “snappy.” It most certainly isn’t.
@Jim Henley
I’m reading it right now [Gene Wolfe’s A Borrowed Man], and I think it’s wonderful.
Henley: opinions seem to differ about Pirate Freedom (was that 2007?), and I found some aspects disappointing, but it is hard to argue it isn’t a masterpiece. The most useful direct comparison with something like The Library at Mount Char is probably The Sorcerer’s House (2010). Hard to imagine any author of books about shadowy magical alternate world forces reaching into our own reading that one without secretly thinking “Well, that’s a wrap, then.” If you kept wondering when he was going to write another great science fiction novel and missed Home Fires (2011?), then you missed his next great science fiction novel.
I found The Land Across (2013) in which he takes on Dracula and politics to be a weaker book, still a lovely, intricate read with no shortage of things to endear you to it, but if you are getting back to Wolfe don’t start with that one.
Read A Borrowed Man this year, and put it on your ballot.
redheadedfemme: I didn’t much like The Library at Mount Char, myself, no. It was weird in the sense of “weird fiction,” and I thought some of the characters were intended to be quirky and some of the dialogue was intended to be snappy. But I agree with you absolutely, for a book presenting itself as an entertaining read, some of the nastiness was only enjoyable insofar as you tried not to think about it carefully.
Bruce, you may have already read A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, I highly recommend it as a feel-good book.
Hope you’re feeling better soon. 🙂
@RedWombat: Ooh! Thank you! Hmm. Binge rereading of Duane may be a sensible thing.
@JJ: Chambers is here in my queue, and I haven’t gotten to it yet. Thanks. 🙂 (Alas, this is not just acute problems, but the stacking up of chronic ones, mine and those of people I care about. Doing what I can, though, and thank you. Good will matters.)
@Bruce
When I’m depressed, I revisit one or more of the following books:
A Civil Campaign or Curse of Chalion, both by Lois McMaster Bujold
Thud or Going Postal, both by Pratchett
If you haven’t already read Castle Hangnail, you’ll want to remedy that immediately, and Hamster Princess brought me great joy as well.
Hope you feel better soon!
Viktor—
Which is the real problem with Lucas making that change to the story: it’s not just that it changes Solo’s character, but that it was clumsily done. There is no earthly reason why Greedo should miss. He has his weapon drawn, it’s pointing at Solo, and he intends to kill him. Talk about Stormtrooper marksmanship, this guy had to have been at the top of the class.
@redheadedfemme and Brian Z.: Thanks. I’m intrigued now.
@NelC et al: I’m now recalling a classic anecdote by Sandy Peterson (I think) in an early issue of Chaosium’s Different Wirld’s magazine, about complaints regarding the accuracy of firearms in the Call of Cthulhu rpg. Short version: Peterson – and his dad the cop – probably wouldn’t find missing at that range to be unrealistic.
After sleeping 15 hours, my bug/bad-cold seems a bit better, so I watched the Flash/Arrow crossover on DVR. Did anyone else think Casper Crump, who played Vandal Savage, looks like an Evil Robert Silverberg? (Back when Silverberg’s hair was still dark.)
@Bruce Arthurs: Oh wow yes.
@Bruce Arthur’s — I’m glad you’re feeling somewhat better.
@Bruce Baugh — Bingen reading of Duane is rarely a bad idea.
Now I’m flashing back to “Murphy’s Rules”, the old comic about game rules and what’s broken with them (like how in “Champions” an ordinary human could destroy a car with their bare feet in some short amount of time).
@Peace Is My Middle Name:
Ahhh, Murphy’s Rules. It did suffer from a degree of ‘Reality is unrealistic’ at times.
@Russell Letson, robinareid:
I’m reminded of composer Erik Satie, who falls into the category of one of the most influential men in early 20th century music that most people have probably never heard of. At least part of the reason people have never heard of him, despite working with Ravel and Picasso and being one of the founders of the concept of ambient background music that you weren’t supposed to actively listen to (or ‘musique d’ameublement/furniture music’ as he called it), is that he spent a great deal of his life and energy bouncing around between styles and trying new things. He said early on that he did not want to create a ‘school’ of music, he didn’t want followers or people studying him. He tended to make fun of established forms. (One of his pieces, mocking the romantic tradition of margin notes describing how to play the piece, said one line should be played ‘like a nightingale with a toothache’.)
As a result, his work was wide-ranging, more than a little eclectic, and impossible to pigeonhole. And, aside from a few pieces orchestrated by Ravel, almost forgotten.
I enjoyed The Land Across but I agree with your assessment there. It is full on Wolfe: dream logic, unreliable narration, a constant feeling of something else going on etc.
Looking forward to the new one. Haven’t downloaded it yet. I’ve the new Tregillis to read first.
@Jenora Feuer: Satie gets played a fair amount though, even if people don’t recognize his work when they hear it. I notice whenever it appears in a soundtrack, and that happens surprisingly often, given (as you say, and I agree) that few people are familiar with the name or can identify the works. (I can because my mom was a fan.) If you go look him up on IMDb, you’ll find an extensive listing, including Hugo, Warehouse 13, True Blood, The Royal Tannenbaums, The X-Files, Star Trek: TNG, The Benny Hill Show(!), and The Man Who Fell to Earth. I dare say most people here have heard him at least once, and probably many times 🙂
—
On an unrelated note: Jack McDevitt has a new novel out (released Dec 1), and in a surprise move, it’s a sequel, but not in either of his main series (Priscilla Hutchins or Alex Benedict). Instead, it’s a sequel to the until-now-standalone novel Ancient Shores. It’s called Thunderbird.
I admit I was a little disappointed with his last novel, but that was a collaboration which never seemed to quite jell. This one’s solo again, and I absolutely love almost all of his solo work. And while ordinarily I would think that a sequel would be less award-worthy than a standalone, in this case, he’s revisiting a one-off world he hasn’t been back to in two decades, which suggests he’s got something new, and quite likely interesting, to say about it. The end of Ancient Shores definitely set us up with the opportunity for all sorts of new xenoarchaeological discoveries.
I’ll report back once I’ve read it, but I am most definitely holding a spot on my nomination list in reserve until I’ve had a chance to do so.
composer Erik Satie, who falls into the category of one of the most influential men in early 20th century music that most people have probably never heard of
I have two or three CDs with his music. He’s not quite that unknown.
I recall in some “catina cocktails” article, the “Greedo” cocktail had the warning that drinking too ment could lead to decreased reaction speed and accuracy…
@Peace, Jenora: “Now I’m flashing back to “Murphy’s Rules”, the old comic about game rules and what’s broken with them (like how in “Champions” an ordinary human could destroy a car with their bare feet in some short amount of time).”
Murphy’s Rules? I wouldn’t know anything about that… 😉