(1) IT’S A WRAP. Tom Cruise will star in Universal’s reboot of The Mummy, now scheduled to arrive in theaters on June 9, 2017. This version will be set in the contemporary world. Cruise is not playing the title role, trade outlets are referring to his character as a former Navy SEAL.
So who is The Mummy?
Sofia Boutella, best recognized as the badass beauty with swords for legs in Kingsman: The Secret Service, will be playing this new version of the Mummy.
Who’s directing it?
Alex Kurtzman will be calling the shots. The only feature film he’s directed to date is People Like Us, but he’s best known for being a writer on a ton of big blockbuster movies, like Transformers, The Island, Mission: Impossible III, and J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek series. It currently has a script from Jon Spaihts (Prometheus).
(2) TRACING FIREBALLS TO THEIR SOURCE. In “A Precursor to the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement” Jon Peterson of Playing at the World identifies Leonard Patt as a forgotten influence or source on Gary Gygax, whose Chainmail (a collaboration with Jeff Perren) was the first game designed by Gygax sold as a professional product. It included a heavily Tolkien-influenced “Fantasy Supplement”, which made Chainmail the first commercially available set of rules for fantasy wargaming.
Patt, should he still be with us, would surely be unaware of how Chainmail followed his work, let alone the profound influence that concepts like “fire ball” and saving versus spells have had on numberless games over the decades that followed.
…In the early, pre-commercial days of miniature wargaming, the environment was very loose and collaborative, and these kinds of borrowings were not uncommon – but attribution was still an assumed courtesy. Gary Gygax has something of a reputation for adapting and expanding on the work of the gaming community without always attributing his original sources. The case of the Thief class is probably the most famous: the first draft of Gary’s rules do note their debt to the Aero Hobbies crowd, but as the published version of the rules in Greyhawk (1975) did not, the obligation of the Thief rules to Gary Switzer and the others at Aero Hobbies long went unacknowledged. Regarding Chainmail, Gary in late interviews says nothing to suggest that concepts like fireball were not of his own invention; Patt’s rules compel us to reevaluate those claims. Nonetheless, we must acknowledge that Gary had a singular gift for streamlining, augmenting and popularizing rules originally devised by others: certainly we wouldn’t say that Patt’s original rules could have inspired Blackmoor, and thus Dungeons & Dragons, without Gary’s magic touch and the elaboration we find in the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement.
But if you ever vanquished an enemy with a fireball in Dungeons & Dragons, or Magic: the Gathering, or Dragon Age, and especially if you ever made a saving throw against a fireball, thank Leonard Patt!
(3) LIGHTNING STRIKING AGAIN AND AGAIN. The Kickstarter appeal for People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction has raised $20,192 as of this writing – 400% of its original goal. Another special issue of Lightspeed, it will be guest-edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Kristine Ong Muslim, in partnership with section editors Nisi Shawl, Berit Ellingsen, Grace Dillon, and Sunil Patel, who are assembling a lineup of fiction, essays, and nonfiction from people of color.
Lightspeed’s Destroy series was started because of assertions that women, LGBTQ, and POC creators were destroying science fiction. The staff of Lightspeed took that as a challenge. Building on the astounding success of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! (and Horror, and Fantasy) and Queers Destroy Science Fiction! (and Horror, and Fantasy), POC Destroy Science Fiction! brings attention to the rich history and future of POC-created science fiction and fantasy.
Like the previous Destroy issues, this campaign has the potential to unlock additional special issues focusing on Horror and Fantasy as well.
(4) DOUBTFUL. Breitbart.com’s Allum Bokhari dishonestly represents a commenter’s statement as a File 770 news item in “SJWs Are Purging Politically Incorrect Sci-Fi Authors From Bookstores”.
(5) BAKKA PHOENIX REPLIES. Yet he is getting the clicks he wants. One Toronto bookstore owner was intimidated into making a public denial — “A Question Worth Answering”.
We are Bakka Phoenix, a different bookstore entirely. We’re not going to comment on a rumour about XXX’s activities: that way lies madness and a lot of silly Twitter feuds. You might want to contact them directly (their website is XXX). Also, please note: from a Canadian perspective, Breitbart looks more like an outlet for the borderline-lunatic fringe than a credible news source.
But if you were wondering, we can assure you that we ourselves carry many books we find personally or politically reprehensible. Let’s face it, your left wing is somewhere off to our right, enough so that we’d have trouble even agreeing on the definition of ‘conservative’. Frankly, we find a lot of US political posturing completely unhinged.
But… so what? We’re in the business of selling books. Good books. Bad books. Titles some people love; titles others hate enough to throw across the room. Some books will transform readers minds and lives and be remembered for decades. Others will be forgotten immediately upon reading (or even partway through). We don’t have to like a book, its author, or its message in order to sell it. To suggest otherwise merely proves that the suggester spends very little time in actual bookstores.
The many wonderful independent booksellers I’ve met feel the same way. Independent bookstores exist for precisely that reason: to ensure that readers have the widest choice possible. So we — all of us — stock books we think our readers might be interested in, personal taste bedamned.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
- Born January 22, 1934 – Bill Bixby, of My Favorite Martian and The Hulk.
- Born January 22, 1959 – Linda Blair, of The Exorcist.
(7) BUTTER WOULDN’T MELT. Kate Paulk wrote a post educating her readers about the Best Editor Hugo categories.
Both these categories have seen controversy since their introduction: first the lobbying to split Best Editor – the whispers say this was so that a specific individual could receive an award instead of always playing second fiddle to a very prominent (and very skilled) magazine editor, the apparent hand-off of both through much of their history between an extremely small number of people – so much so that it appears a group of Tor editors considered the Long Form award to be their property (just look at the list of winners…).
The first comment, by Draven:
“yeah well, you know who we say for long form…”
The second comment, by Dorothy Grant:
“Hmmm, Maybe, maybe not. This year will be the last year David Hartwell will be eligible. (He edited L.E. Modesitt & John C. Wright, among others.) The industry lost a good man, and a good editor, yesterday. Granted, he’s won three, but these things do happen in tribute.”
The third comment, by Kate Paulk:
“They do indeed, and David Hartwell is certainly a worthy nominee.”
(8) BRUSHBACK PITCH. Clayton Kershaw, the best pitcher in the National League, also has a less well known claim to fame – his great-uncle Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. That explains his loyalty to the diminutive world, and his recent contradiction of NASA on Twitter.
Did you read about a new planet in our solar system? Is #planet9 real? Our head of Planetary Science discusses.https://t.co/t0b1Atqpqg
— NASA (@NASA) January 20, 2016
U mean 10th right? #neverforgetpluto
— Clayton Kershaw (@ClaytonKersh22) January 21, 2016
(9) SINBAD. The Alex Film Society will screen The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) on Thursday, April 28 at the Alex Theatre in Glendale.
(10) A SCI-FI KID REMEMBERS. Film fan Steve Vertlieb has compiled his memories about meeting genre stars into one extravaganza post:
After some forty seven years of writing about films, film makers, and film music, I thought that I’d take a moment to remember the glorious moments, events, and artists who have so generously illustrated the pages of my life, and career, over these many remarkable years. Do return with me now to Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear when artistry and grandeur populated the days of our lives…days when gallant souls courageously rescued their leading ladies from screen villainy…days when culture and dignity proliferated the screen, television, radio, and the printed page. Look for it only in books, for its sweet reflection of gentle innocence is but a faded memory…a tender, poignant whisper of grace and wonder that, sadly, has Gone With The Wind.
Those memories are also the driving force of his autobiographical documentary Steve Vertlieb: The Man Who “Saved” The Movies. The director keeps an online journal of their progress.
A FILM DIRECTOR’S JOURNAL #3…THE PHILADELPHIA “SHOOT”
Whew! It would be a bitch of an exhausting marathon, because we had lots of LITERAL ground to cover in Center City, hopscotching from one locale to another blocks away; then to another, then to another; finally finishing up on the “high steel”, the center of the city’s Benjamin Franklin Bridge, stretching from Philadelphia across the Delaware River into Camden, N.J. But everyone agreed. And our “Philadelphia Marathon” was off and running.
The documentary film will wrap in February, 2016, with film festival screenings planned for this Spring.
(11) ALAN RICKMAN. Today Star Talk Radio site revisited Neil deGrasse Tyson’s 2012 conversation with Alan Rickman.
So what does astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson ask him about? Failing physics in high school, of course. They also talk a little about acting, including how Alan chooses and prepares for his roles, from researching the heart surgeon in Something the Lord Made to the wine-tasting scene in Bottle Shock. You’ll hear Alan explain his sense of responsibility to his audience and what he describes as “the mysterious mechanism of acting and theatre and storytelling.” Neil and Alan also get philosophical about the limits of human perception, the flocking behavior of birds, and the interaction of sound and memory.
(12) MARTIAN HOP. Tintinaus has a great addition to The Martian musical, based on Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler.”
Every Martian knows that the secret to survival,
Is solving the next problem,
And then the problem after that.
‘Cause every day’s a winner
Even if you’re gettin’ thinner,
And the best that you can hope for
Is growing tates in your crewmate’s scat.
You gotta know when to sow ’em
Know when to hoe ’em
Know when to harvest
For a bumper yield
You never count sauce satchels
‘Cause that would be depressing.
Knowing how long ungarnished taters
Will be your only meal.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kyra.]
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Not to be confused with Leviathans Wake, which I’m told is a work of genius, but is really hard to parse.
I haven’t got to that one yet but I think it’s great that he is self-publishing his backlist. I’ve been steadily working through them and it’s been very rewarding. He seems to try his hand at whatever sub-genre catches his eye and he pretty much always pulls it off.
Regarding David and Best Editor Long Form …..
I want this to be very clear. I withdrew from one category only, Best Editor Long Form, permanently. I would very much like to be nominated again in Best Editor Short Form, and for NYRSF (or any other category). But I felt after all these years, and finally three wins in four years, that I should withdraw permanently from Best Editor Long Form, as long as it remains a category. And I am pleased to see the way the category has opened up to younger talent.
https://file770.com/?p=7045
Which struck me as a very Hartwell thing to do.
I blame? thank? everyone who was talking about Chris Foss in the not-too-distant past.
https://twitter.com/hoopmanjh/status/690967011828985856
@Kip W: “Listen, strange fans, sittin’ in basements, distributin’ cards, is no basis for a system of government.”
(looks around, approaches podium)
King Bob!
(drops mic, leaves stage)
SCROLL ITEMS:
(1) IT’S A WRAP. Meh? I loved the Brendan Fraser one; I’m not sure I need a Cruise do-over set in modern times. I don’t expect much from this, but who knows. (I’m not anti-Cruise, though not always a fan, either.)
(2) TRACING FIREBALLS TO THEIR SOURCE. I wasn’t part of my current RPG group when this happened, but: A Thief in the party (I mean, cook! yeah, the party cook!) accidentally burned down the Elven Woods with a wand of fireballs. He still hasn’t lived it down. I’m not sure if those in the group at the time would want to thank or curse Leonard Patt. 😉 Oddly, the guy’s character has survived longer than anyone else; the rest have mostly died or been otherwise replaced.
RANDOM:
@Rev. Bob: Congrats 😉 and this – “The factory had no procedure for this, so CAH bought the plant’s total production capacity for the week and told them to produce nothing.” – is hilariously awesome.
@Cat: “Puppies like to diddle the Hugos.” – Ouch, thanks for the mental image (not what you meant, I know, but there is a common meaning for “diddle” that’s, er, NSFW). 😛
@Johan P: Very nice filking of “My Favorite Things”! 🙂
@Various: Ebook U.S. & U.K. sale of interest (to me, anyway):
Russ Linton’s self-published Crimson Son, about the powerless son of a superhero gone missing (this is not a plot summary), is only 99 cents. It has no DRM at Kobo, so I expect the same at iTunes, too, when I buy it (as I plan to). Also, the U.K. Amazon ebook is 99 pence.
As I recall, I heard Linton read from it at World Fantasy in Arlington, VA and was intrigued. I have some vague recollection it may be YA, but maybe not; the protag’s 19, but it’s not categorized as YA on Amazon.com, and anyway protag age alone doesn’t IMHO make a book YA. So I’m not sure. Maybe a crossover, like adult with YA appeal, or YA with adult appeal.
Whack fol the dah bringin’ ice to Ceres
But the aul cloakin’ tech gives Mars a shake
There’s a guy with a hat and he’s beltin’ Belters,
Havin’ lots of fun at Leviathan’s Wake!
I’ve only been watching the show, so that’s all I got.
EDITOR STUFF:
@Camestros Felapton: Yeah, I dislike using awards for specific time/work as if lifetime achievement awards. It’s especially silly when someone’s won in the past and was a Worldcon Guest of Honor (generally recognized as being essentially a lifetime achievement award).
I’m not saying people shouldn’t vote for Hartwell (or anyone else), but I hope they do so based on the qualifying work – not just because he died. No disrespect intended to a great in the field.
Related: Thinking of the end of Ms. Kramer’s post (well, the whole thing) still brings tears to my eyes. She was so poignant and heart-wrenching.
@Michael J. Walsh: Thanks for reminding us re. Hartwell’s permanent withdrawl from Best Editor Long Form.
@JJ & Cat: ISFDB lists “The New York Review of Science Fiction” as a 2015 credit, and a 2015 Tor.com anthology (published in 2015, despite being 2014 works). So, three anthology/magazine items (ETA: counting the one @Kurt Busiek mentioned). So Hardwell definitely qualifies for Best Editor.
@Cat: Not really related, but keep in mind it’s not just anthologies for Short Form, but also magazine.
BTW I suspect the “Tor editors considered…” bit refers to the outrage in some quarters for people gaming Beale into the category. I seem to recall some reaction quoted by Certain Puppies at the time with that same “OMG TOR EDITORS THINK THEY OWN THIS” rhetoric. As silly then as it is now, IMHO.
Tor has 5/8 of recent wins, but, I also seem to recall Tor has the biggest SFF program in the U.S. And they’re part of Macmillan, a big international publishing company. So it’s not really surprising they may get more editor wins than, say, Pyr or (gak) Castilla House (sp?). But I don’t know the specific numbers; maybe Locus publishes info like this? It seems like their type of info.
@Cheryl S.: I’m guessing the different requirements stem from a lot more novels come out than anthologies, but I don’t know for sure. There’s probably commentary on the web some where from when the split was proposed; it wasn’t so long ago the web shouldn’t remember. Does any one editor come out with four anthologies a year?*
* ETA: By which I mean, not just one, but a reasonable number considering this should contribute more than one name to the BESF category.
@rob_matic
Yeah, I’ve got a long term goal of working through his back catalogue too. I read both Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind when they first came out via the local library. After that I lost track of him for many years, I don’t think he was ever well published in the UK, until I picked up a reprint of Hardwired recently.
I’m doing something similar with CJ Cherryh’s Alliance/Union verse and for much the same reason. This means I still have Cyteen to read for the first time…
Just read Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman. It wasn’t quite what I expected from the only other Gilman novel I’ve read, Halfway Human, heavily focused on gender and pretty brutal reading. Dark Orbit does have a subplot set on the planet Orem, which has bizarrely extreme antagonism between the sexes and one scene of torture and threatened rape (if you don’t want to read that, skip from the part where Thora remembers waking in a smoky room to the next blank-line break. And maybe the next Orem scene too.). However, this is only one strand in a story that’s all about perception and its shaping of reality. The main plot is entertaining and downright funny.
There are two main characters. Sara Callicott is an anthropologist (a xenoethnologist), and therefore has the job of trying to understand the perceptions people tell her about from their point of view. Thora Lassiter calls herself a sesualist, meaning that she believes that humans are capable of perceiving more than their conscious minds admit; she listen to mystical experiences, subconscious urges, dreams, etc. for clues. Thora has had experiences which were dismissed as mental illness or superstition, and due to becoming a political embarrassment, has been made part of a distant scientific expedition to study a planet, Iris, where dark matter may be concentrated to interesting effect; Sara is also with the expedition, ostensibly to study its team interactions but really to keep an eye on Thora at the behest of her old mentor. It turns out to be a good thing that she’s experienced in First Contact when the planet is found to be inhabited by some very unusual humans, who live underground and don’t use their eyes at all.
The main narrative focuses on Sara in third person and is interspersed with long excerpts from Thora’s journal (complaint: the latter are all in italics, which I find wearying to read page after page of.) Thora is very earnest but Sara’s point of view really livens up the story; she’s a refreshingly laid-back older woman with a sense of humor and a didsain for authority. This latter brings her into constant conflict with the expedition’s rigid and paranoid head of security, Dagan Atlabatlow, who (perhaps significantly) is the son of immigrants from Orem.
The story discusses a number of of different aspects of the problem of perception. It takes literally, and greatly expands on, the idea that conscious observation has the power to create quantum events. It also literalizes the notion that people are shaped by other people’s view of them. Most interesting to me were the exploration of how a mind might be formed differently growing up with the presence or absence of light, and reflections on discovery like the following:
I liked this book but somehow it didn’t quite cross the threshhold to something I’d nominate, even though I don’t have much specific to say about any faults.
@Johan P
I stand corrected. Thanks!
@Kendall
Sorry about the unpleasant mental image; I should have perhaps said “Pups like to mess up the Hugos.” I will try to be more careful in the future.
Quite true that Short Form considers magazine editing; my bad.
I might speculate what Paulk meant by Tor editors considering BELF to be “their personal property” but trying to follow her train of thought has never worked out well in the past–she has always claimed to actually mean something else–so I merely noted that this was her accusation, and the way that accusation matches against actual BELF winners, should one choose to look.
In particular the Editor awards have a personal quality to them that already engenders emotive arguments.
It is notable how often the Puppy kerfuffle rhetoric drifts towards the Editor categories as is:
1. The repeated claim that the Long Form category’s existence is down to Tor/PNH
2. Jim Baen’s posthumous nomination in the Long Form category (and not winning it)
3a. Tor’s multiple wins in this category
3b. PNH’s multiple nominations in this category
4. The lack of Baen Books wins in this category
5. Toni Weisskopf losing to No Award in 2015 in this category
If Hartwell is nominated (putting aside for the moment all the legitimate reasons why he might be, chief of which being him being a clearly effective and well loved editor) then all outcomes will be further grist to the Puppy mill.
1. A Hartwell nomination wins. This will be added to the ongoing claim that Tor is controlling things (yes, despite the contradiction – as can already be seen with how they count his past awards)
2. A Hartwell nomination loses. This will be shown as how awful the Worldcon non-Puppies are and how heartless and how awful and also how awful they are, plus how awful they are, awfully.
3. Hartwell nomination is disqualified for the reasons given earlier. I don’t know if this is likely but this will also be added to the list of terrible crimes committed by the nefarious powers that be [because he edited JCW or because of VD’s claims or because SP4 might nominate him etc etc]
However…
4. There are insufficient nominations for Hartwell to be a finalist. This will be cited as ballot stuffing by the nefarious powers that be for the same reasons.
But…
That the Puppies will throw foot-stamping tantrums regardless of the outcome (just flavored differently) simply demonstrates that there is NO course of action that appeases the Puppies. Ironically this actually makes them irrelevant. Just as VD’s multiple Xanadu* gambit victory conditions also makes him irrelevant [if all outcomes are a VD ‘victory’ then we need not concern ourselves with what *he* regards as a victory].
As always the right response to the Puppies is to do what personally feels right to you.
*{I forget who coined that instead of Xanatos, but I like it}
Ah, Days of Atonement was the book that really convinced me Mr. Williams could write, because it’s totally not the sort of book I usually enjoy, but I still enjoyed it immensely. Sucking me in with the kind of thing I like is easy; sucking me in with something I don’t care for takes real skill! 🙂
Like most of his non-series books (and, in a broader sense, most of his series), it’s pretty much completely different from anything he’s written before or since, except that, like most of his books, it’s quite good.
I suspect he’d be much better known if he picked one thing and stuck to it, instead of jumping all around the literary spectrum the way he does. Unfortunately, I don’t think he’d be as good as he is if he stuck to one thing. It’s a bit of a paradox.
@ IanP
I hope you enjoy Cyteen; it remains one of my favorite books. There are some nice British one-volume editions, and mine has seen hard use and still survives.
Er, no.
According to me he edited at least those two. That Google Books only turned up two does not meant there were only two. Google Books is not exactly comprehensive.
Plus, of course, since it appears he permanently withdrew from the category, it doesn’t much matter how many long-forms he edited, unless people want to go against his stated wishes. Not me, uh-uh.
Two other notable things I read recently: A post by Max Gladstone (Dec 16 ’15), “Jessica Jones Has Better Fights Than Daredevil”, which is about how character should be present and revealed in fight scenes, with examples from a variety of movies; and a story by Malka Older (Tor.com, Oct 21 ’15), “Tear Tracks”, which is a lovely alien-contact story where the heroine has trained intensely for her diplomatic mission but finds herself tripped up by cultural assumptions she didn’t know she was carrying around; it’s very relevant to how we approach space missions now, and the realization in the last paragraph is great.
I struggled a bit with Cyteen at first (who is this horrible person and why do I care?), but once you get to the part where young Ari appears, the book becomes a serious delight, and it remains one of my favorite of Cherryh’s. In other words, don’t be put off if you struggle a bit at the beginning!
@Cat: No worries; I grinned as I cringed.
@Camestros Felapton: Ugh, yeah, methinks you’re correct about how any Best Editor outcome could (and may) be spun in PuppyLand in absurd ways. Let’s plan to remember your comment and try to ignore them. (Heh, it’s tough to ignore PuppySpin!) But re. #3, he is clearly eligible in BESF, so this outcome seems unlikely, unless a bunch of people mistakenly nominate him in BELF.
@Kurt Busiek: Not sure if you saw my comment, but in addition to the Benford collection, he (co-)edited an anthology for Tor.com and edited The New York Review of Science Fiction. So he is very qualified for short-form (which at this point in his career only requires one qualifying anthology or magazine issue).
As for the lack of Editor Hugos for Baen editors, my approach remains thus:
1. Baen books are shittily edited. They admit this. They’re fine with it.
2. That there are Baen books that appear to be better-edited than one would expect from a system that doesn’t bother with proofreading is, apparently, a matter of the authors compensating for the lack of proper editing their publisher supplies. That is not to the credit of their publisher’s editors.
3. Proofreading is not all there is to editing. But it’s a necessary part of the process, so there. Not hiring proofreaders (or, in their lack, doing it yourself) is shitty editing.
4. No Hugos for people who are fine with doing a shitty job.
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvWW4irYi-Q
Yeah, I didn’t say anything about short-form.
He’s very qualified for short-form and probably qualified for long-form, too; he’s just withdrawn from the latter category, and while it’s no longer necessary to listen to him on the subject, it would seem rude not to.
On a completely different topic, does anyone know how to discourage wild turkeys? This has become a matter of some urgency here.
On a possibly-related note, if anyone wants to take extremely close-up pictures of wild turkeys, Worcester is a good place to do that right now.
Should David be nominated in any category the Hugo administrator is required to contact the nominee or – in this case ….
3.9.1: Worldcon Committees shall use reasonable efforts to notify the nominees, or in the case of deceased or incapacitated persons, their heirs, assigns, or legal guardians, in each category prior to the release of such information. Each nominee shall be asked at that time to either accept or decline the nomination. If the nominee declines nomination, that nominee shall not appear on the final ballot.
http://www.wsfs.org/bm/const-2014.html
My pixellated love shall scroll
Viler than empires, but more trolls
Re: Editor, Long-Form
Wasn’t M. Hartwell’s wish not to considered for a Hugo ever again? I mean, I see that Paulk has joined Beale in trying to get some use out of his death for their sordid little dramas, but shouldn’t Hartwell’s expressed desires trump all of this?
TheYoungPretender: Did you read this link? https://file770.com/?p=7045.
1. Ignore any improvement in the quality of their work.
2. Make petty criticism of minor faults
3. Make unflattering comparisons between them and more experienced turkeys
4. Ensure that there is no clarity about what work they are responsible for and their actual level of authority
5. Intervene erratically in the work they are doing in a way that leaves them feeling that their work is disappointing and inadequate
6. Be unclear about expectations but ensure that you make it clear after the fact that they have failed to live up to them
7. Shout, be aggressive and be demeaning in your interaction with them
8. Be clear to them how much you prefer the work of some other species of wild bird
Camestros Felapton: Which of those eight tactics do you think would work best to keep them from following me three-quarters of the way across the street? Or, if that is not feasible, do you know how to persuade them to go the final quarter?
A request, can those who liked Cyteen say why they liked it? It’s one of the only books I’ve thrown across the room and I wonder if there is something in thebook I’m not seeing. Or if it’s all a result of my dislike of the idea of tampering with people’s minds without their consent.
Leslie C: perhaps you have already seen this video documenting the daily harassment of an innocent* mailman, but it appears carrying a big stick might be your best recourse. A large dog might also help.
There are lots of wild turkeys around my area, but I’ve never known them to be aggressive.
*Assuming he is innocent. Who knows.
I only have time to toss this in – geeks guide to the galaxy has recently interviewed Tim Powers talking about his approach to writing a secret history.
Here’s a link to the wired article with excerpts
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/geeks-guide-tim-powers/
Cheryl S.: I’m sure in her own mind, Kate Paulk is a wonderful person, unflinchingly honest and terrifyingly bright. Props to her for actually linking the official rules for Best Editor, even if nobody draws the logical conclusion and gets to the place where at least some people couldn’t vote for Toni Weisskopf because the rules for Best Editor Long Form require something other than team effort, yay team.
That’s the part she handwaves away with “This is one of the reasons I personally consider the Long Form award in particular more of a “participation prize” – it tends to be nominated for and awarded more in recognition of contributions to the field overall.”
In other words, “I’m going to claim that we’re just doing what Hugo nominators and voters have done all along, by pretending that I have special knowledge of what their motivations have been”.
Leslie C–
You need a herding dog. I recommend a no-nonsense, evil-minded English shepherd.
I’m not entirely sure they’re being aggressive. Apparently that depends on what sex the turkeys think I am, and apparently turkeys are bad at figuring that out.
There are these three toms that hang around along route 9 and have been doing so for some months. They were just off the curb, in the road, when I pushed the walk button today, and they waited quite politely, and when the walk light went on they followed me, as I thought, across the road, only when I turned around I saw that they had only gone, as I said, three-quarters of the way.
Surely, I thought, they would move when the traffic came through, but they did not move. Cars slowed. Cars went around them. They stayed put. So, when the light changed again, I crossed again, and they followed me back and onto the sidewalk, where they stayed. They were standing very close, within a foot, three quite large tom turkeys whose heads had all gone very red. They were flipping their tails up and puffing their feathers out. And I realized that I had a problem: if I walked back across the street, they were going to follow me, again, three-quarters of the way, creating a traffic hazard and a turkey hazard and whatnot. I tried shooing them up the bank and away from the road. They did not want to shoo. I could get one of them to flap a few feet away but the others just kept hanging out with me. They weren’t trying to peck or anything, just standing very close.
I finally walked down the side street, with the turkeys right behind me, very close, three big turkeys, until they gave up. I went on about a hundred feet farther to be sure and crossed at that point. Last I saw they were still hanging out on the corner.
@ Leslie C
For your purposes, I suspect #7 would be most effective.
For a completely effective approach, I suspect we must first determine exactly why the turkey crosses the road.
(5). This was the type of response I was hoping for when this first cropped up.
@Heather Rose Jones:
It’s clearly not to get to the other side, so this could be a tough one.
The last time this happened, it was a bantam rooster that wanted to either fight or make love to my shoe. He was tiny, so I just let him get on with it, whichever it was. Still not sure.
The Three-Turkey Problem is a tough one.
I’m reminded (uselessly, as there is nothing in the anecdote to help anyone) of friends in Texas who lived by the road between Bandera and Kerrville, and had shots fired at their house by people who drove by and saw turkeys in the yard.
I read Days of Atonement in hard cover, shortly after it came out. I was very impressed by it. He managed to create an anti-hero that I hated for the entire book. I was softening a little, but he pulled it out at the end, and I hated the protagonist at the end even more than at the beginning. This is hard to do. There are other really wonderful things about the book, but I’ve never re-read it. I really, really hated that guy. On the other hand, boy was I involved and invested.
On Cyteen, I’ve read it multiple times, and all I can say is, I really feel like I’m missing something. I don’t hate it, but somehow I never feel like I found it’s heart.
Leslie C on January 23, 2016 at 4:07 pm said:
Have you searched yourself for fowl attractant?
Alternatively, you could get a net and a stick. Catch the turkey, then place the stick across its neck and jerk the body upward. Dinner!
Kendall: ISFDB lists… a 2015 Tor.com anthology (published in 2015, despite being 2014 works). So, three anthology/magazine items (ETA: counting the one @Kurt Busiek mentioned). So Hardwell definitely qualifies for Best Editor.
Um, no. That “2015 Tor.com Anthology” is an e-book package of a bunch of short fiction published on Tor.com in 2014, and every single editor of one or more of those short pieces is credited as a “co-editor”. I would firmly dispute that it’s a qualifying work.
Certainly the NYRSF is qualifying. I think anyone interested in nominating Hartwell for Best Editor Short Form should probably be asking PNH if he can provide a list of short fiction edited by Hartwell in 2015.
As for Best Editor Long Form, I’m going to honor Mr Hartwell’s wishes that he be permanently withdrawn from that category.
@bookworm1398
One could argue that all societies do one form or another of mental modification on their young people, and it sticks fairly well for the most part. Advertising and political ads work that way too. (Look at the huge success of the climate-denial movement.)
People also condition themselves. You learn not to tell your boss to shove it, for example, and you don’t blow up at people without excellent reason. In a sense that’s voluntary, but those who don’t condition themselves to behave properly in general have no friends and no jobs.
In extremis, people can beat their conditioning. The conditioning against murdering someone, for example. I’ve read that if you ever do it once, it becomes easy to do after that. (Not all conditioning is bad.) Anyway, no one consented to being socialized; we force it on children.
So we know lots of ways to condition people’s minds, and very little of it is done with their consent. The Union in Cherry’s stories is just explicit about it. A world where you’re explicitly conditioned to obey just takes what happens in real life and shoves it in everyone’s face.
I played with a similar idea in one of my stories, and someone in my critique group freaked out over it. I asked her, “Don’t you recognize modern corporate America here?” (Full disclosure: she still didn’t buy that argument.) 🙂
What makes Cyteen interesting for me is that it describes a successful, troubled-but-healthy society that has values utterly different from our own. And of course there’s the mystery of “who really killed Emory” to try to figure out.
Hmmm I see my advice may have been less than helpful re. wild turkeys. However I’m sure I saw a book on my shelf that might be helpful.
It was called “Large Fowls Bane” or something similar. Apparently you need a white gold ring and hefty dose of misanthropy.
Is anyone planning to propose to eliminate the Best Editor (Long Form) Award at the business meeting this year? I keep trying to find a way to help people nominate for it–even a controversial way, like the RSR proposals for Best Editor (Short form)–and I keep coming up with nothing.
It seems to me that the category is just a gift to the slates that even EPH can’t fix. I think we’re going to arrive at Midamericon2 having just No-Awarded it (again) and facing the likelihood of having to do that indefinitely. Am I the only one thinking this?
Before I could consider Baen editors for awards I would need to know which books they had edited, and the books in question would have to have been edited well.
The first would apparently be a pretty major change in Baen policy. I am not sure I have read enough Baen books this year to have any idea about the second.
Isn’t there some useful advice in Joanna Russ’s classic How to Suppress Wild Turkeys?
It seems to me that the category is just a gift to the slates that even EPH can’t fix. I think we’re going to arrive at Midamericon2 having just No-Awarded it (again) and facing the likelihood of having to do that indefinitely. Am I the only one thinking this?
Nope. But then again, I had issues with that category before slates.