(1) THE MORE BEST THE MERRIER. Gregory N. Hullender explains, “Now that three of the four big ‘Best of’ SFF anthologies have released their tables of contents, Rocket Stack Rank has produced a combined list, ranked according to which stories were included in the most anthologies or otherwise recommended.
“As usual, the table includes information on how to find/borrow/buy copies of the stories, as well as story descriptions and links to reviews.
“When Neal Clarke publishes the table of contents for his anthology, we’ll update the table to incorporate it.”
(2) NASFiC ’17. If you’re thinking about buying a membership in NorthAmeriCon ‘17, to be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, keep in mind that rates are going up on January 22.
(3) ICONIC MOVIE CASTING. Imagine Wil Wheaton as Ralphie in A Christmas Story. It could have happened.
So. For the five of you who don’t know, Peter Billingsley played Ralphie in A Christmas Story. We both auditioned for the role, and even went to final callbacks together. I wrote about it way back in 2001:
I think that A Christmas Story is the greatest Christmas movie ever made. Each year, I watch it, over and over, on TNN or TNT or TBS, or whatever T-channel does that marathon, and I never, ever, get tired of it. Every year, when I watch it, I am reminded of the time, when I was about 10 or so, that I auditioned for it. The auditions were held on a cold, rainy day in late spring, down in some casting office in Venice, I think. I saw the same kids that I always saw on auditions: Sean Astin, Keith Coogan, this kid named “Scooter” who had a weird mom, and Peter Billingsley, who was very well known at the time, because he was “Messy Marvin” in those Hershey’s commercials. I sort of knew Peter, because we’d been on so many auditions together, but I was always a little star struck when I saw him. (One time, I saw Gary Coleman on an audition…now, this was HUGE for all of us kids who were there, because we’re talking 1982 or 83…and he was Arnold freakin’ Jackson, man…wow). [tangent] Whenever I see Sean Astin, I sob at him that he got to be in Goonies, and I didn’t, and he always says, “Hey, man, you got Stand By Me. I’d trade all my movies for that.” I haven’t seen him since he did Lord of the Rings…but something is telling me that he wouldn’t be so keen to trade that.
(4) CARRIE FISHER R.I.P. The actress passed away today. One of the most interesting tributes is this collection — “15 of Carrie Fisher’s Best, Most Honest Feminist Quotes” from NYMag.com.
“Oh! This’ll impress you – I’m actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I’m a PEZ dispenser and I’m in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can’t have it all?”
(5) RUBIN OBIT. Vera Rubin, who confirmed the existence of dark matter, has died at the age of 88.
“It was Vera Rubin’s famous work in the 1970s that showed pretty much all spiral galaxies were spinning way too fast to be accounted for by the gravitational pull of the their ‘luminous’ matter (the stuff we see in a telescope). Rubin and others reasoned there had to be a giant sphere of invisible stuff surrounding the stars in these galaxies, tugging on them and speeding up their orbits around the galaxy’s center.”
(6) ADAMS OBIT. Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, died Christmas Eve at the age of 96.
The novel, first published in 1972, became one of the best selling children’s books of all time and was made into an animated film in 1978.
Adams did not begin writing until 1966 when he was 52 and working for the civil service. While on a car trip with his daughters, he began telling them a story about a group of young rabbits escaping from their doomed warren.
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- December 27, 1904 — Peter Pan, the play, by James Barrie, opens in London.
- December 27, 1947 — The first Howdy Doody show, under the title Puppet Playhouse, was telecast on NBC.
- December 27, 1968 — Apollo 8 astronauts — Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, William Anders — returned to Earth after orbiting the moon 10 times in a flight that helped open the way for moon-landing missions.
(8) LONG JOURNEY AUTHOR. The Book Smugglers continue their personal holiday season with a guest post from a popular author — “A Happy Smugglivus with Becky Chambers”. Chambers discusses the movie Arrival and the book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal, among other things.
Smugglivus greetings from California! While most of my home state is badly in need of a drink, winter up here on the Redwood Coast means rain, and lots of it. It’s the sort of weather that lends itself well to hiding away with a good story or some old-fashioned book learnin’. Now, since most of my brainspace is used for writing sci-fi, I tend to reach for other stuff in my free time. I read a lot of non-fiction, I binge-watch with the best of them, and I love video games more than is reasonable. Happily, this year provided me with plenty to sustain me through these dark and soggy days.
2016 was also a gauntlet of suck in a great many ways, and I know I’m not the only one leaving it feeling ill at ease and overwhelmed. To that end, I’ve cherry-picked five of the best things I cozied up with in the past twelve months, things that filled me with curiosity and joy. In these times, we need those qualities more than ever. Whether you’re after some real-world science, mind-bending puzzles, or pure escapism, I’ve got you covered.
(9) SUBSTANTIAL CONVERSATION. Abigail Nussbaum reviews six books in “Recent Reading Roundup 42” at Asking the Wrong Questions (including The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin and Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee.).
Infomocracy by Malka Older – If nothing else, a reader turning the last page of Older’s debut novel has to tip their hat to her for her prescience. Or perhaps a better way of putting it is that Older, while she was writing this book, had her finger on the pulse of issues and problems that have only recently come to dominate the conversation about how democracy in the 21st century functions, and of how it fails. Set in a near-future, Infomocracy imagines a world in which the familiar geopolitical rules have been replaced by “micro-democracy”, with the world divided into “centenals”, each containing one hundred thousand residents who are free to vote for any government they wish, be it nationalistic, ideological, or corporate. Different governments can thus have citizens all over the world, which can mean that neighboring streets can have different laws and government services. Every ten years, the world holds an election, in which the governments try to win over new centenals in order to cement their power, and hopefully make a bid for the coveted “supermajority”. There are, obvious, some glaring problems with this system that Older never fully address–we don’t, for example, learn what the supermajority actually gives the government that holds it, and more importantly, it’s never made clear how this system supports itself economically. But the focus of Infomocracy is less on these issues, and more on using its micro-democracy system to reflect on the problems of sustaining democracy in any form….
(10) WEST PACIFIC RIM. Reminds us of a Guillermo del Toro movie — “Giant Avatar-style robot takes first steps in South Korea”.
A giant South Korean-built manned robot that walks like a human but makes the ground shake under its weight has taken its first baby steps.
Designed by a veteran of science fiction blockbusters, the four-metre-tall (13-foot), 1.5 ton Method-2 towers over a room on the outskirts of Seoul.
“Our robot is the world’s first manned bipedal robot and is built to work in extreme hazardous areas where humans cannot go (unprotected),” said company chairman Yang Jin-Ho.
While its enormous size has grabbed media attention, the creators of Method-2 say the project’s core achievement is the technology they developed and enhanced along the way.
“Everything we have been learning so far on this robot can be applied to solve real-world problems,” said designer Vitaly Bulgarov on his Facebook page.
He has previously worked on film series such as Transformers, Robocop and Terminator.
(11) A MODEST PODCAST PROPOSAL. Dann has compiled “The Indispensable Podcast Listing” for his blog Liberty At All Costs. He admits —
It isn’t really a list of indispensable podcasts, but what’s life without a little hype. Given the number of SFF and writing-related podcasts mentioned, I thought it might be of some modest interest to you.
And it was, thanks to Dann’s introductory notes about each one.
(12) YEAR-END MISSES. At Galactic Journey, The Traveler is burning the winter solstice oil to make sure he doesn’t miss a single potential award-winner — of 1961. “[December 27, 1961] Double And Nothing (The Phantom Planet And Assignment: Outer Space)”.
Our effort at the Journey to curate every scrap of science fiction as it is released, in print and on film, leaves us little time for rest. Even in the normally sleepy month of December (unless you’re battling Christmas shopping crowds, of course), this column’s staff is hard at work, either consuming or writing about said consumption….
The Phantom Planet is a typical first-slot filler movie. Spaceships launched from the moon keep getting intercepted by a rogue asteroid. Only one crewmember of the third flight survives, a beefcake of a man who shrinks to just six inches tall when exposed to the asteroid’s atmosphere. What’s stunning is not the lack of science in this movie, but the assiduous determination to avoid any scientific accuracy in this movie. However, I the sets are surprisingly nice…and familiar. They look an awful lot like the sets from the short TV series Men in Space….
(13) THE YEAR 2016. Chuck Tingle captures what some people are feeling about the year gone by.
please enjoy brand new tingler name of POUNDED IN THE BUTT BY THE SENTIENT PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION OF THE YEAR 2016 https://t.co/LghNT1nvxu pic.twitter.com/RTv5NPTkcr
— Chuck Tingle (@ChuckTingle) December 26, 2016
(14) NUTRITION NATURE’S WAY. Casse-Croute is a very short cartoon about brightly colored animals in the forest and all the shiny bugs they eat!
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Dann, Taral, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Sylvia Sotomayor.]
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@Mike
Thanks for the link love!
BR,
Dann
ETA well this is a first for me….
Tingle isn’t for me, but the world is a better place thanks to him and his books. Love is real!
It is good the world includes Tingle, but I’m still pissed off about the people we’ve lost to 2016, just today. That is so not fair.
Pounded in the Scroll by the Anthropomorphic Concept of Pixels!
Re: 4, 5, 6:
*SIGH* Requiescat In Pace. I’m numb at this point. “Doug”‘s been working overtime.
🙁
I don’t know the etiquette of such things, so apologies if this is off but, regarding #1 (the combined list of “year’s best” stories), you could have read it here first.
Of course, my little bouncing baby blog isn’t a big deal and I didn’t get so fancy so maybe the other thing is the better link but I thought I’d mention it. (I gather one sort of has to.)
On #4, very sad news. But she portrayed a great character well and that alone would be enough to make her as immortal as anyone can be.
The author of Watership Down, my favorite novel ever, AND my favorite General/Princess. I’ll be hiding under the covers with my cat until 2016 goes away.
Jason: Plugging one’s own blog? Why, I never…well, hardly ever….
You know, I have other things to do and already commented on a bunch of deaths elsewhere, so I really shouldn’t read through the scroll in depth now.
I’ll just click the box and go pack up the recycling. See ‘ya in the (my) morning.
(4) oh, damn. Thanks, Carrie Fisher, for staying with us for a while and accomplishing so much while you were here.
@10: is there a real person in the bot when it’s walking, or just a dummy? Looks like the latter; if so, I wonder what the operator looks like when walking it from the inside, and when they’ll be confident enough to try it. It looks like an interesting solution to \some/ of the difficulties with guiding robots remotely, but I wonder how many places something that big will be useful in lieu of existing tech that can get through smaller spaces.
And the link in @4 is great….
Saw Rogue One today.
All the feels.
I Never Scroll Anything Twice
Hey, Hey, it’s the Pixels
have we had…
It rubs the pixel on its skin or else it gets the scrolls again
yet?
Ultragotha
“I never scroll… pixels.”
(10)
A baby Kaiju?
Dances With Scrolls
Scrolling By Words On A Snowy Evening
And surely we’ve done The Scrolled Man And The Sea?
Good gods. When even GRRM thinks 2016 has gone too far…..
(1) THE MORE BEST THE MERRIER. Interesting, though I was more interested in just the which-best-anthology info…
@Jason: …so thanks, Jason. RSR’s list is just a different beast from your post (and interesting in other ways), but I like seeing the straightforward best-anthology-only info as you presented it. I’m looking forward to seeing if anyone else cracks the “three bests” and whether Miller’s story makes the fourth collection.
@Anyone: Aren’t there other “best of” anthologies? Why does four sound like a small number to me.
(4) CARRIE FISHER R.I.P. Some great quotes in that list. R.I.P. 🙁
(14) NUTRITION NATURE’S WAY. Cute! 🙂
I don’t mean for this to sound like a grump at the compilers, but it’s a bit disappointing that all those “big four” year’s best collections are edited by men…
Thanks for everything Carrie. We’ll miss you.
Chuck Wendig has written a heart-wrenchingly on-point post about 2016:
What I Say To 2016 As It Exits… And To 2017 As It Enters
… during our most recent rewatch of [Empire Strikes Back], I responded particularly to one Han Solo moment… Luke has gone out and is promptly mauled by the cantankerous Wampa. Han and The Gang learn that Luke has not returned. Night is falling. The temperature on an already frigid planet is dropping. And Han says, fuck it, I’m gonna go look for my buddy. So he mounts a Tauntaun… and rides out.
But! But.
Just as he’s riding out, a short exchange occurs:
Rebel Deck Officer: Your Tauntaun will freeze before you reach the first marker!
Han Solo: Then I’ll see you in Hell!
… But then, of course, as 2016 continued to harangue the world with news of new POUTUS appointments and sad deaths, the phrase came out of my mouth as sort of a grim, teeth-clenching rejoinder to whatever 2016 had on order. It became an automatic response to the year in general, both in what it still brings and retroactively as to what it already gave.
THEN I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL, 2016.
But it occurs to me – 2017 isn’t likely to be much better… I expect it will have some unpleasant surprises in store. And when it springs its many traps, I will remember Han Solo saying:
“THEN I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL.”
And yet, I’ll also remember what goes into that phrase and why he said it. I’ll remember this exchange, too:
Rebel Deck Officer: Sir, the temperature’s dropping too rapidly.
Han Solo: That’s right, and my friend’s out in it.
The reason he gets on that tauntaun and rides out into certain icy doom is because his friend’s in the middle of that shit. Night’s falling. The cold is seizing the planet. And he goes out anyway. That’s where we’re at, folks. The mercury in the thermometer is dropping like an elevator with its cable cut. The night will be long. The year ahead will have sharp teeth and and a big mouth and some of us will do better with that Wampa than others. Just the same, our friends are caught in the storm. And we’re going to have to mount up anyway, and ride out even if our snow lizard will be a popsicle by the first marker. Because others need our help.
So, 2017 and all your tricks and all your traps:
I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL.
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2016/12/27/what-i-say-to-2016-as-it-exits-and-to-2017-as-it-enters/
Arifel: I don’t mean for this to sound like a grump at the compilers, but it’s a bit disappointing that all those “big four” year’s best collections are edited by men…
It’s even more disappointing that these aren’t considered part of “The Big Ones”, as they should be:
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, edited by Paula Guran
The Best Horror of the Year, edited by Ellen Datlow
The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas, edited by Paula Guran
Wilde Stories: The Best of the Year’s Gay Speculative Fiction, edited by Steve Berman
Heiresses of Russ: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, edited by Steve Berman + a different woman editor each year
All of these have been published for numerous years now; the Clarke “big one” was only published for the first time in 2016.
3) I can’t remember what story it was for the life of me, but I seem to remember a alternate historical article/ficlet where Wil had gotten a role in Dangerous Liaisons instead of ST TNG, and continued onto a long and successful movie career. Maybe I am imagining that I remember it in the early not-yet-caffeinated morning, though.
Heeeee hardly ever plugs his blog!
So give three scrolls and one scroll more for the right good pixel of File Seven-Seven-Oh!
A medium dry martini, lemon peel. Pixelated, not scrolled.
(4) RIP. Here’s a link to her roast of George Lucas (which is hilarious):
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/watch-carrie-fisher-roasts-george-lucas-at-afi-tribute-w457934
[godstalk]
Chuck’s title is a bit Too PC for me. It should have been Pounded to DEATH in the Butt by….
I rarely find myself quoting Star Wars. I tend to go to more cerebral stuff, like Kubrick.
Col. Bat Guano: (speaking to 2017)…and if you try any preversions in there, I’ll blow your head off.
@Steve
And you’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company
@4: An NPR writer observes that Carrie Fisher Was In On The Joke, and a clip (with transcription) of Terry Gross interviewing Fisher with her dog Gary
Here’s a really moving talk-show appearance by Carrie Fisher with her mom; it’s really nice to see that she had found some peace both within herself and with her mother, with whom she’d had a lifelong tempestuous relationship.
She struggled with a lot during her life, and it was so good that she managed to come out the other side of it. I wish that she’d had longer to enjoy being in that place, but I’m glad that she got to be there before the end.
And with all the public appearances she made in conjunction with The Force Awakens and her latest book, I take some consolation from the fact that a couple of new generations have now gotten to know a bit of the fierce warrior that she was.
@Jason
Short fiction needs all the help it can get. I hadn’t seen your blog before, but it’s a welcome addition.
@JJ
We also don’t consider John Joseph Adams’s The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Part of the problem is that these are all subsets of the field–only the big four claim to be surveys of the whole–but the bigger problem is that they don’t (to my knowledge) produce their lists of stories in time to help people do reading for the Hugo and Nebula nominations.
@Kendall
We talked about just producing the simple list, but we decided to incorporate the feedback from other reviewers on the grounds that it would give the best guidance to people who use RSR to pick stories to read.
Taking a closer look at Jason’s list, I note that it’s incomplete. For example, it doesn’t contain The Visitor from Taured, by Ian R. MacLeod. I think that’s because he only included stories whose text is available for free online. Anyway, Visitor from Taured also appeared in all three anthologies.
@ Greg Hullander, @ JJ
Turning this around, one of the problems with “surveys of the whole” best-of anthologies is that they will, by their nature, be homogenizing. As JJ notes, there are a lot of long-running, more specialized best-of anthologies. And I would argue that a useful picture of the state of SFF as a whole needs those spotlights just as much as it needs collections purporting to be the overall “best of everything”.
As we once again roll into award-consideration season, I’ll regularly be hauling out my soapbox about how there is far too much great writing for any one venue to recognize. And the more that venues agree on what items to recognize, the less useful they are for the purpose of highlighting interesting stories. I don’t need three different lists telling me, “This is is the list that we all agree is the best set of stories.” I need three different lists telling me, “Here’s my particular angle on what I’m looking for, and here’s a list of work that might be of interest to you if that angle resonates with you.”
@Heather Rose Jones
Actually, you might be able to get something like this. Different reviewers tend to be quite different from each other. Notice that only two stories appear in all three best-of anthologies. If you identify one or two reviewers who seem to share your tastes, you can just focus on the things they recommend.
No one tells you the angle they’re coming from, though, and it’s not clear that most people could articulate that even if they wanted to.
@Heather
Well said.
BR,
Dann
If someone was planning a grand survey of all the annual Best SF of the year anthologies, to the exclusion of related genres like fantasy and horror, then one little detail that might leap out is that the last (and only) time a Best SF of the year series was helmed by a lone woman was half a century ago. The lunar landings are more recent.
If you have access to HBO On Demand, watch “Wishful Drinking”, the film they did in 2010 of Carrie Fisher’s stage show. (We watched it last night.)
She’s brilliant, she’s hilarious–and it’s both a sad and a cheerful way to remember her.
Went to see Rogue One last night, an excellent film made even more poignant by finding out about Carrie’s passing just before we went in.
@Greg Hullender: Thanks for the info – so Miller’s not the only one in all three. Gah, I need to create my own list or (infinitely more likely) take some more time to read over your post. 🙂
@JJ: I didn’t think Clarke’s sounded familiar; thanks, I didn’t realize it was that new.
@Rob Thornton: Great roast bit from Fisher, thanks.
About “best” lists or anthologies: Even with a core reviewing staff of eight or ten or so, plus Divers Hands contributors and non-staff auxiliaries*, Locus can just about manage a set of annual summing-up and recommendation pieces. I know that almost every such essay I’ve written since 1990 begins with a disclaimer: this is what I’ve managed to read and it’s obviously the elephant’s toenail. Actually, I’m not even sure it’s an elephant any more–something big for sure, but I keep hearing about scales and tentacles and fur and wheels, so the beast is stranger than I used to think.
* The e-mail distribution list I see for suggestions about long-form runs to 21 names and short fiction to 16.
I find myself uninterested in ‘Best of the Year” when they lack Merrill’s, Wollheim’s or Harrison’s editorial credit, with all due respect to Datlow & Dozois.
But then so much has changed – so much MORE to go through, I don’t think any so-called annual best really manages to survey the field and offer as comprehensive a view as the ones that were published through the 70s.
Between a scroll and a filed place
Mike Glyer: so I’m in the vanguard? 😉
Kendall: very welcome – and you’re right – I was so struck by the similarity that I didn’t convey enough of the differences. And, yes, I am curious what Clarke’s picks are in themselves and how they effect the tally. I know Dozois usually announces around this time but I’m not sure when Clarke does – hopefully not too long to go.
JJ:
[Greg]: We also don’t consider John Joseph Adams’s The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Nor David Afsharirad’s The Year’s Best Military & Adventure SF. But I agree with Greg that the others are mostly subsets (and the Best American is an outlier in other ways). I think a case could be made that Dozois, being the only pure SF anthology (in theory, though in practice a fantasy or two will force its way in) could be seen as a “subset” or that the Datlow and the main Guran should be included among the “big” ones but, at least for me, my bias favors SF over horror (and not one identity over another ;)).
I don’t think anyone is saying that the other annuals aren’t valuable but that they just aren’t quite as “comparable” as the “big” (“main”) ones, as different as those can also be.
Greg Hullender: thank you very much! And I agree that short fiction needs all the help it can get. I had run across yours right after I started mine when I was looking for kindred spirits/blogs and like what I’ve seen. (As far as my list only including the freely accessible stories, that’s true and (along with the lack of review weighting) is probably the biggest difference. I should have included the others, simply unlinked, but was focused on what people could jump to directly.)
I’ve been reading annual best SF anthologies at least since 1972 (that’s the oldest one on my shelf), and I don’t think it was ever possible to say that such a short list of stories could ever really be “the best.” It’s not just the size of the field–it’s the unavoidable subjectivity of the whole idea.
I think the most you can say is that these anthologies do a good job of collecting a lot of good stories into one place. The average reader might be three times as likely to find a story that he/she liked by reading a best-of anthology rather than reading stories chosen at random from magazines.
@Jason
Simplest is probably just to add a note that says what is and isn’t there and why.
“Simple” is a relative term, of course. We ended up with three paragraphs, two bullet lists, and two graphs to explain what our list means. 🙂
Feel free to send me e-mail at rocketstackrank dot com, if you want to. The address is greghull.
@Greg: It’d actually be really nice to have Guran’s Novella anthology included – that one isn’t limited to any subset, except by length. And while the big anthologies don’t technically limit the length, in pragmatic terms, they’re weighted rather heavily against longer pieces.
I don’t think there’s a TOC yet, but Guran’s “Best Dark Fantasy and Horror” TOC went up just a few days ago, so it could be in the pipes 🙂
Greg: the intro paragraph does mention web sources but I could also say what it specifically doesn’t include (if I don’t end up actually including the rest after all). What I may do is just say “for a full list go to RSR.” And thanks – I was thinking of trying to email you, so I’ll do that soon.
Standback: I’m not so sure that the annuals are weighted against novellas proportionally. A lot of novellas are published stand-alone these days so there may be more than I think but printzines publish very, very few and no place on the (open) web publishes them besides the token-payment market of GigaNotoSaurus, yet Dozois does usually reprint at least 2-4 and I think the other annuals are comparable. (I’m basically making up these numbers but just trying to describe the ballpark.) So the annuals include a lot more novelettes and shorts than novellas but there are a lot more novelettes and shorts. That said, I do like the promotion of the longer short fiction.
I organize the ybs a little differently, by category. I will post my thoughts when I get home.
Paula’s novellas yb ended this year, unfortunately. There won’t be another. It sold decently, but nowhere as well as our other two.
@Sean Wallace
Ah, so there won’t be one for novellas published in 2016 then? And Standback just convinced me to look at it! 🙂
By the way, I’d be happy to get e-mail from you too, if you want, at the address above. Or just ping me on SFWA. Figuring out the right anthologies to review continues to be something of a black art.