(1) VITA BREVIS. Arnie Fenner’s tribute at Muddy Colors to artists and cartoonists who passed in 2015 is excellent.
(2) DOCTOR STRANGE. “First Look at Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange” at Yahoo! Movies.
The first official glimpse of Benedict Cumberbatch as Marvel hero Doctor Strange graces the new cover of Entertainment Weekly, and the biggest revelation is that he probably isn’t spending much time in the makeup chair. The actor sports facial hair and a cloak that will be familiar to comic-book fans, as well as Strange’s powerful amulet, the Eye of Agamotto.
(3) DARTH ZIPPO. “Watch This Homemade, Gas-Powered Lightsaber Destroy Things” at Popular Science.
The entire thing was built and modified from existing components, using a replica Skywalker lightsaber shell, a section from a turkey marinade injector, and several 3D printed parts to make it all work together. The result is a finished product by a Youtube craftsman that is neither as clumsy or random as a blaster.
(4) PALMER AND SHAVER. “When Good Science Fiction Fans Go Bad” is a companion article to Wired’s “Geeks Guide To The Galaxy” podcast which interviewed Ray Palmer’s biographer and learned about the Shaver Mystery.
Author Fred Nadis relates the strange story of Palmer in his recent biography The Man From Mars, which describes how Hugo Gernsback, founder of the first pulp science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, helped inspire his readers to create a better future.
“He saw [science fiction] in very practical terms of shaping the future,” Nadis says in Episode 182 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Almost a visionary experience of imagining the future and new technologies and what they could do, but he also felt like we had to spread this faith.”
If you’re interested in comparing viewpoints, here’s a link to the post I wrote about fandom’s response to Richard Shaver.
(5) WRITING NEUROMANCER. William Gibson’s 2014 piece for The Guardian, “How I wrote Neuromancer” was news to me, and perhaps will be to you.
On the basis of a few more Omni sales, I was approached by the late Terry Carr, an established SF anthologist. Terry had, once previously, commissioned a limited series of first novels for Ace Books – his Ace SF Specials. Now he was doing it again, and would I care to write one? Of course, I said, in that moment utterly and indescribably terrified, something I remained for the next 18 months or so, when, well out of my one-year contract, I turned in the manuscript.
I was late because I had so very little idea of how to write a novel, but assumed that this might well be my first and last shot at doing so. Whatever else might happen, I doubted anyone would ever again offer me money up front for an unwritten novel. This was to be a paperback original, for a very modest advance. My fantasy of success, then, was that my book, once it had been met with the hostile or indifferent stares I expected, would go out of print. Then, yellowing fragrantly on the SF shelves of secondhand book shops, it might voyage forward, up the time-stream, into some vaguely distant era in which a tiny coterie of esoterics, in London perhaps, or Paris, would seize upon it, however languidly, as perhaps a somewhat good late echo of Bester, Delany or another of the writers I’d pasted, as it were, on the inside of my authorial windshield. And that, I assured myself, sweating metaphorical bullets daily in front of my Hermes 2000 manual portable, would almost certainly be that.
(6) INTERNET TAR. Ursula K. Le Guin tells readers at Book View Café she never said it:
The vapid statement “the creative adult is the child who survived” is currently being attributed to me by something called Aiga —
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/design-quote-creative-adult-is-child-who-survived-ursula-le-guin/
…Meelis pointed out this sentence in the 1974 essay “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” (reprinted in the collection The Language of the Night):
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
Nothing about “creativity” whatever. I just said a grown-up is somebody who lived through childhood — a child who survived….
It is high time that this sentence, “The creative adult is the child who has survived,” be attributed to its originator, Prof. Julian F. Fleron.
If he did not originate it, and wishes to be freed from the onus of supposedly having done so, that’s up to him or to those who wish to preserve his good name. I just wish, oh how I wish! that he hadn’t stuck me with the damn thing.
(7) SCHOEN. Lawrence M. Schoen is interviewed by Sara Stamey at Book View Café.
Can you tell us about your small press, Paper Golem, which aims to introduce readers to fresh new authors? Any advice for those interested in setting up a small press?
More than a decade ago, one of my graduate students lured me away from academia to come work for him in the private sector as the Director of Research at the medical center where he was CEO. The result was fewer work hours and more money. I mention this because it meant that I was in a position to start a small press, going into the venture not with an eye toward making a fortune (stop laughing!) but rather the more modest goal of breaking even and using the press to “pay it forward.”
(8) STRAUB SELLS HOUSE. “Horror Author’s Not-Scary UWS Townhouse Sells for $7M” reports NY Curbed.
Despite the nature of author Peter Straub‘s work—he’s a horror author known for Ghost Story, The Throat, and his collaborations with Stephen King—his former Upper West Side townhouse is very much not terrifying. The gorgeous home, located on West 85th Street, was built in the 1880s and has some of its original details, including a stained-glass panel over the staircase and six fireplaces. It went on the market back in April, but unsurprisingly went quickly; according to StreetEasy, it sold at the beginning of the month, for slightly under its original $7.8 million asking price. (h/t 6sqft) Coincidentally, Straub’s daughter Emma, an author herself, recently sold her equally gorgeous townhouse in Prospect Lefferts Gardens.
Andrew Porter commented, “This is very disturbing news. I’ve known Straub for decades. He recently decided not to attend the World Fantasy Convention, held the beginning of November in Saratoga Springs NY, because of health concerns. I wonder if the effort of climbing up and down all those stairs finally got to be too much for him.”
(9) COINCIDENCE. Hundreds of readers “liked” the mainstream political graphic David Gerrold posted on Facebook but it seems an ill-considered choice by someone who recently hoped to convince people an asterisk had another meaning than ASSH*LE.
(10) MYTHBUSTER. Sarah A. Hoyt’s discussion of “The Myths of Collapse” is a good antidote to misinterpretations of history that are fairly common in the backstory of created worlds, however, it is also intended as political advice, and while fairly mild as such YMMV.
1 Myth one — collapse creates a tabula rasa, upon which a completely different society can be built. Honestly, I think this comes from the teachings on the collapse of Rome and the truly execrable way the middle ages are taught.
First of all, once you poke closer, Rome only sort of collapsed. Depending on the place you lived in, your life might not have changed much between the end of the empire and the next few centuries. I come from a place where it’s more like Rome got a name change and went underground. In both the good and the bad, Portugal is still Rome, just Rome as you’d expect after 19 centuries of history or so.
Second the society that was rebuilt wasn’t brand new and tabula rasa but partook both of the empire and the incredible complexity of what happened during collapse.
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY
- December 28, 1895 – First commercial movie screened.
In 1894, Antoine Lumiere, the father of Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948), saw a demonstration of Edison’s Kinetoscope. The elder Lumiere was impressed, but reportedly told his sons, who ran a successful photographic plate factory in Lyon, France, that they could come up with something better. Louis Lumiere’s Cinematographe, which was patented in 1895, was a combination movie camera and projector that could display moving images on a screen for an audience. The Cinematographe was also smaller, lighter and used less film than Edison’s technology.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born December 28, 1922 — Stan Lee
(13) SF-LOVERS. “Scientists on their favourite science fiction”:
We invited scientists to highlight their favourite science fiction novel or film and tell us what it was that captivated their imagination – and, for some, how it started their career….
Matthew Browne, social scientist, CQUniversity
Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks
I love a lot of science fiction, but Iain M. Banks’ classic space-opera Consider Phlebas is a special favourite.
Banks describes the “Culture”, a diverse, anarchic, utopian and galaxy-spanning post-scarcity society. The Culture is a hybrid of enhanced and altered humanoids and artificial intelligences, which range from rather dull to almost godlike in their capabilities….
Perhaps the best thing about Consider Phlebas (apart from the wonderfully irreverent ship names the Minds give themselves) is the fact that a story from this conflict is told from the perspective of an Indiran agent, who despises the Culture and everything it stands for.
My own take on the book is as an ode to progressive technological humanism, and the astute reader will find many parallels to contemporary political and cultural issues.
(14) THE CLIPULARITY. The December 28 Washington Post has a lengthy article by Joel Achenbach about whether robots will kill us all once AI becomes smarter than people. He references Isaac Asimov and Vernor Vinge and discusses the nightmare scenario developed by Nick Bostrom about whether a machine programmed to make something (like paper clips) Goes Amok and starts ransacking the world for resources to make paper clips, destroying everything that gets in its way.
People will tell you that even Stephen Hawking is worried about it. And Bill Gates. And that Elon Musk gave $10 million for research on how to keep machine intelligence under control. All that is true.
How this came about is as much a story about media relations as it is about technological change. The machines are not on the verge of taking over. This is a topic rife with speculation and perhaps a whiff of hysteria.
But the discussion reflects a broader truth: We live in an age in which machine intelligence has become a part of daily life. Computers fly planes and soon will drive cars. Computer algorithms anticipate our needs and decide which advertisements to show us. Machines create news stories without human intervention. Machines can recognize your face in a crowd.
New technologies — including genetic engineering and nanotechnology — are cascading upon one another and converging. We don’t know how this will play out. But some of the most serious thinkers on Earth worry about potential hazards — and wonder whether we remain fully in control of our inventions.
(15) BAEN AUTHOR JOHN SCALZI. John Scalzi explains why his next novel won’t be out until 2017 in “Very Important News About My 2016 Novel Release (and Other Fiction Plans)” but makes it up to everyone by highlighting several pieces of short fiction that will be in our hands next year including….
* A short story called “On the Wall” which I co-wrote with my pal Dave Klecha, which is part of the Black Tide Rising anthology, co-edited by John Ringo, for Baen. Yes, that John Ringo and that Baen. Pick your jaws up off the floor, people. I’ve made no bones about liking Baen as a publisher, and I’ve noted for a while that John Ringo and I get on pretty well despite our various differences and occasional snark. Also, it was a ton of fun to write in his universe and with Dave. The BTR anthology comes out June 7th.
This news was broken in August but may have been overlooked by fans occupied by another subject at the time….
Black Tide Rising’s announced contributors are John Ringo, Eric Flint, John Scalzi, Dave Klecha, Sarah Hoyt, Jody Lynn Nye, Michael Z. Williamson, and Kacey Ezell.
(16) WRITER DISARMAMENT TALKS STALL. “George R.R. Martin and Christmas Puppies” is Joe Vasicek’s response to the recent overture.
Now, I don’t disagree with Mr. Martin’s sentiment. I too would like to see reconciliation and de-escalation of the ugliness that we saw from both sides in 2015. And to be fair, Mr. Martin does give a positive characterization of what’s going on right now with Sad Puppies 4. That’s a good first step.
The trouble is, you don’t achieve reconciliation by shouting at the other side to lay down their guns first. You achieve it by hearing and acknowledging their grievances. You might not agree that those grievances need to be rectified, which is fine—that’s what negotiations are for—but you do have to make an effort to listen to the other side. And it’s clear enough that Mr. Martin is not listening.
The core of the Sad Puppies movement is a rejection of elitism….
(17) OUT OF DARKNESS. Were reports that Mark Lawrence is a Grimdark author premature? In Suvudu’s “’Beyond Redemption’ Author Michael R. Fletcher: ‘NO SUCH THING AS GRIMDARK’”, Lawrence says he meant “Aardvark”….
Does anyone actually set out to write grimdark?
I certainly didn’t. I thought Beyond Redemption was fantasy, and maybe dark fantasy if you wanted to label it further. But then I live under a rock.
So I reached out to a few of the authors who have been accused of defiling reality with their overly dark writings.
All quotes are exact and unedited.
Mark Lawrence (Author of The Broken Empire series, and the Red Queen’s War series): “aardvark.”
Other quotes follow, from Django Weler, Teresa Frohock, Scott Oden, Anthony Ryan, Tim Marquitz, and Marc Turner.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, Will R., and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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If anything I thought it was unsubtle in its criticism of the sexism of Victorian society – women not being able to control their own property and struggling to study independently was central to the story and heavily drawn as being due to the legal and societal prejudices of the time and the social class of one of the protagonists. Having said the mother was something of a caricature as was the stern-Victorian-father
Don’t worry they think Descartes is a stinker as well. They see Western civilization as a kind of marriage between The Church (caps) and everything else (law, science, art etc). The Enlightenment therefore is when that marriage broke down and they see Descrates as part of that process rather than anticipating it.
But then I guess I’m putting Descrates before divorce.
@Peace Is My Middle Name
It seems harder to find depictions with some futuristic buildings interspersed with older architecture, such as you would get in a living city.
Blade Runner is the big example I can think of. Large portions of the film take place and were shot in the Bradbury Building in LA.
There’s also some Frank Lloyd Wright interiors used but geographically they’re in the wrong place I think so I don’t think they’re meant to represent the actual buildings.
Hoyt’s younger than I am, so her reason for criticizing the execrable teaching of the Middle Ages would not be mine for agreeing with her, but I was certainly given some execrable teaching about the Middle Ages during my public school education. These were the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome (476 AD), when the wealth of human knowledge disappeared (like banks in the Depression) and intellectual growth did not resume until the Renaissance. Although Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind was published in 1921, his attitude still prevailed —
The real headscratcher is that van Loon’s own book contains dozens of far more nuanced interpretations of medieval times, but his overarching view was characteristic of the most widely-accepted narrative in popular culture.
I went on to major in history and, after absorbing these prejudices in grade school, was astonished to discover works like Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change, full of information about developments in life, government and invention during that alleged dark time. (A fine book, though nowadays people are less impressed with the importance of the stirrup.)
No reputable historian does.
::tick::
@Kurt Busiek:
Daredevil #6, page 14, panel 1.
Oddly, there’s a Mike Glyer post apparently in moderation a few posts above this one. The list shows it, but it’s not here. <puzzled>
After Mark Hopper’s post; before Peace is My Middle Name’s.
Which leads to the burning question; who moderates the moderator…?
Camestros Felapton:”But then I guess I’m putting Descrates before divorce.”
*winces*
@Mike: That’s true too. I was mostly thinking of this continuing phenomenon among people much younger than me that was a thing in fannish circles when I was young (and, honestly, fell prey to on and off myself). But just plain bad teaching is also a thing, for sure.
Cassy: that’s because it’s actually on the previous page: https://file770.com/?p=26809&cpage=2#comment-382931
OHG’s missives aren’t always in chronological order.
As far as “Yay! Civilization collapse!” being a left or right thing, I had a discussion with some anarcho-primitives yesterday, where I pointed out the numbers of people that would have to die to go back to Hunter-gathering, and that their utopia wasn’t really kind to anyone other than physically fit males. It was not taken well. Of course anarcho-primitives tend to look at collapse as a theoretical thing, while the right-wing preppers are more or less actually preparing for a collapse.
Anyway, while Hoyt makes some interesting, if not all that original points (I like the continuity argument), I think she drastically underestimated the effects of a large-scale collapse. The modern examples she cites were all local collapses, where resources could be brought in from the outside. A large scale collapse, where the world could be treated as a large Easter Island, would be a different case,
For instance, in her portable generator example, where would they get the fuel for it? If no oil is coming in and being refined, then a portable generator would quickly become a hunk of metal. Bear in mind, of course, that I subscribe to the “fall hard, fall completely” school of apocalypse studies- our civilization is so intertwined, and so dependant on various specialities, that I believe a fall would have drastic, irrevocable repercussions.
Granted, I don’t believe our civilization is as fragile as some do- we have a lot of redundancy in our system. But decreasing our centralization of some things such as power production is a good idea.
Bruce Baugh’s comment about old-school autodidacts seeing things “in vintage 1923 terms” caught my attention, and made me wonder whether the state of copyright law is having an effect on culture that I hadn’t thought of. We now have online libraries of millions of free books from places like Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and elsewhere, and my impression is that these are used enthusiastically by many autodidacts. But because of a 1998 copyright extension, for the past 17 years the comprehensiveness has cut off right at the start of… 1923.
(There are free online books newer than that, but they’re sparser, and tend to be more obscure titles. Copyright terms also vary in different countries, but the big high-profile online book digitization projects are US-based.)
I wonder if copyright terms hadn’t been extended as they have, we’d tend to see a lot more ideas from the 1940s and 1950s in vogue online, more so than ideas from the early 1920s. (Works published in those decades would now all be public domain in the US if copyright terms were the same now as when they were published.) The public domain’s scheduled to move forward again at the start of 2019, just over 3 years from now. I wonder if we’ll see any changes in autodidact cultural assumptions after that happens.
Is it possible comments I’m in the process of drafting show as being in moderation? That seems to be the explanation in this case.
You are indeed correct!
Missed it because he’s not in costume. But it’s hard to see that as a plot mistake; the Eel didn’t bring his gadgetry with him either — as is noted in panel 2. So Stan’s making it out to be an error when it’s more an “I don’t carry it around when I’m in disguise, lummox!” moment.
@ Rose Embolism
Totally this. In discussion around major earthquake prep for L.A., I heard that the city would be out of food in less than a week if the freeways were damaged so that it couldn’t be trucked in.
I have always wondered where they expect to get clothes. These days, how many people know how to turn raw cotton to thread, and thread to cloth? I think a few more know how to get from shearing sheep to a sweater, but not that many. This is a problem for me in many apocalypse stories.
Personally, I have no skills that do not require a computer and a telephone.
@Camestros Felapton: Sorry, my comment was too terse and inadvertently confused two different issues. I completely agree that the novel is quite up front about the appalling sexism of Victorian society. What I meant by its misogynistic streak was something different, as I detailed in one of my comments here:
http://theinferior4.livejournal.com/1000770.html
(Not rot13ed, hence the link.)
@Kurt Busiek:
Yeah, I had a clear memory of the incident, having discussed it years ago with my friend Bill, but had a hard time finding the panel when I went looking today because of the lack of costumes. I do like your theory better than the other explanation, which was Bill’s.
Not quite related, there’s a golden-age Batman story where he fights a vampire. The first page explains how the Batmobile gets to the vampire’s mansion: One night while on patrol, Batman gets lost and stops to ask for directions. This does not appear to be the result of an error, though. They seem to have been comfortable letting Batman start a story by having a brain fart.
If you ever want to see me go into frothing rant mode, those seed canisters they sell preppers will get me there in about five minutes. The people who think they can grow their own food starting after civilization collapses make me want to run around waving my arms in the air. (See also “you should have fixed the dirt” rants.)
Clothes aren’t as immediate a worry for me–there’s a lot of cloth lying around that one could scavenge in the short term–but I’m on some verra expensive meds and I don’t see myself synthesizing them out of the available herbs any time soon. This will be very uncomfortable when my horrific acid reflux turns near-inevitably to esophageal cancer, but at least my husband won’t be around to see it, because none of us can make insulin.
My favored future these days is the solarpunk movement, still very much in its infancy, which is a kind of solar-powered Arts-and-Crafts locavore movement. It doesn’t actually require civilization to collapse, just cheap solar power and a lot of green roofs. Still thoroughly over-optimistic, but at least nobody has to die en masse to get us there.
Gedankenexperiment:
1. If not for modern technology, would you still be alive today?
2. Care to list a few examples?
1. No.
2. There are more examples, but here are two: I have an allergy to wasp stings to the extent that without adrenaline injections, I’d have died at least twice before now. And I’m so shortsighted that without corrective lenses I need to hold a book about a foot away from my face to read effectively.
The people who think they can be self-sufficient almost never have considered the longer term practicalities of adopting such a way of life. Not to mention underestimating how much continuing effort it takes to even approach that way of living. Civilization, we haz it & we loves it.
@John Mark Ockerbloom: Huh. Interesting, and sensible.
1. Probably until recently, although I would possibly have been crippled a bit. In the lest few years, probably not.
2. I am nearsighted, but not so much that I couldn’t function without correction. I wouldn’t be any good at seeing things over long distances, but I can see well enough to get around. On the other hand, I had to have major surgery once after I nearly cut off one of my fingers. Without modern medicine I would have certainly lost the finger, and without antibiotics, infection may have resulted in my losing the hand.
I have adult onset diabetes, which is controlled with a collection of medications (not including insulin, which I may be allergic to). Without those medications, my life expectancy would likely be relatively short. On the other hand, in a post-apocalyptic society, food, especially sugar and carbohydrate rich food, would be in shorter supply, so I’d at least have that going for me.
On the living off the land thing:
Some friends of mine keep wistfully posting smallholdings in Wales to move to. Admittedly, they have a bit more idea than most about self-sufficiency, as they have chickens and an allotment, but I do want to shake them and go “much as I love you dearly, you’re nearing 50, so moving to a subsistence lifestyle in the cold/soggy Welsh marches possibly isn’t the best idea at your time of life.”
As for modern medicine:
1) I’d still be alive, assuming the usual lack of sanitation didn’t kill me
2) I can’t see very far
Based on my observation of Puppy antics throughout 2015, this is only true if we completely redefine “elitism” to mean “logic, accuracy, good manners, and professionalism.”
That’s okay. I don’t want contact, let alone “reconciliation,” with persons who behave as Sad and Rabid Puppies have behaved over the course of 2015. I prefer for us to go our separate ways and not cross paths in future.
1. No
2. I would have died at birth as I needed to be induced early and then out into prenatal care.
I’d be alive if I was a virgin (though likely nearing the end–see high likelihood of esophageal cancer) assuming somebody managed to take my wisdom teeth out with pliers circa age 19 and I survived the experience.
If I was sexually active, I assume I’d have died in childbirth at some point, that being the primary way women checked out.
I have, it must be said, really good eyesight. I suspect I’d have been in a bad way once or twice owing to allergies, but if the hygiene hypothesis is true, perhaps I wouldn’t have after all.
Re: Elitism
I have always thought of the Hugos as a more ‘middlebrow’ and popular award. It’s not juried by a set of professionals and critics. It is voted on by the members of WSFS who are attending / supporting that year’s WorldCon. It’s a rotating pool of recommendations and tastes as the WorldCon traverses across the globe.
They’re close in time, but the vampire story is in DETECTIVE 31-32, and I’m guessing the “Batman gets lost” story is this one, from 37:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_2kjisMm3M9Y/SkI8cmkry1I/AAAAAAAAJKU/6FRHcCTPEiw/s1600-h/wallpaper+Batman+batmobile+Detective+Comics+37.gif
The villain is an evil grocer with a smuggling ring. Yeah, that’s right. When he wasn’t duking it out with vampires, he fought grocers.
LOL!
On what basis does this Puppy commenter think Scalzi has even written the book, never mind turned it in to negative reaction? Scalzi, who often announce completions on his blog, has never mentioned finishing the new book.
Based on reality, as opposed to Puppy inventions, the most likely reason Scalzi won’t have a book out in 2016 is the same reason I didn’t have one out in 2015: the author is running behind schedule, and it makes more sense to halt the merry-go-round briefly and regroup for a saner schedule.
Scalzi was public about being late on delivery in 2015, and the book started being previewed soon after he announced finishing it. Since when, he has spent a long time on tour and engaged in other things.
Realistically, it seems likely that Scalzi and Tor have decided to leave plenty of room on the runway for him to get liftoff on the upcoming releases, rather than running ragged trying to get a book done for 2016 release. This is not unusual, and a far more likely explanation than the Puppy fabrication above.
Another realistic possibility is that they’re holding off on release in 2016 in order to release several books fairly close together, which is now a very common way to create or boost sales momentum. This is not an unusual practice in recent years.
Something to keep in mind about the Puppies is that most of them don’t know anything about publishing and make up to most ludicrous nonsense when talking about it.
P.S. Just realized who that particular Puppy commenting on Scalzi is–the one who is utterly, girlishly obsessed with John.
In particular among the Puppies, VD’s comments typically expose him as very ignorant about publishing and full of bizarre fallacies about it, mostly based on his obsessive need to deny that people who depise him are successful at writing and publishing.
You may being interested in Norman Spinrad’s Songs from the Stars, a small-is-beautiful utopia that begins to fall apart for one character when he realizes they use a lot of stuff their economy clearly cannot produce. And it is not clear where that stuff comes from.
Good lord, somebody said that?
Hell, I didn’t have a trade published book out in 2014. But I had four out in 2015. The major reason was that schedules got shuffled and reshuffled and one was delayed (by them, not me) and they wanted the hamster books over HERE and the other one out in January because they couldn’t get prime table space for December.
I was, honestly, a bit peeved–a year is a long time in a series, and sales suffer–but it wasn’t because I didn’t deliver and it certainly wasn’t because they didn’t think the books would sell.
That’s just how publishing WORKS. Schedules are weird and sometimes erratic and the best laid plans, etc.
Gedankenexperiment:
1. If not for modern technology, would you still be alive today?
2. Care to list a few examples?
I’m not sure – I’m allergic to a particular antibiotic (and most of the ones developed after it). Which makes it yes and no. But it’s 1320, and not of that will be available for another 600-odd years.
@Laura
Well, remember VD was 100% accurate when he stated Scalzi was going to be dropped by Tor.
Wait, er, you mean VD was wrong about that?
VD has zero credibility in pretty much everything – if he said the sun would rise in the East tomorrow, I’d get up to check. I’m astonished he still has so many sycophants, I guess they are immune to reality.
And it’s going to be book one in a new series, so stacking makes sense – write the first two, get the first one out, do events to support it, then drop book two
1. Probably not.
2. Even if food allergies are strictly a modern phenomenon, I had pneumonia several times as a child.
1. If not for modern technology, would you still be alive today?
Seems unlikely!
2. Care to list a few examples?
Folks, I’ve had tongue cancer twice. If not for laser surgery and chemorad, I’d be dead by now or really wishing I was.
Plus, way, way nearsighted. Like -7.50 diopters.
1. Probably I would be fine.
2. I had a 3 inch cut in my foot as a teenager. In premodern times, cuts like that often got infected, so it would depend on my luck.
Of course, this is assuming there weren’t any famines or plague outbreaks where I was.
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t survive long without modern medicine, and I’ve never been able to picture myself as one of those hardy souls living off the land in a post-collapse world.
Heck, here in 1588, I depend heavily on knowing ephedra tea will help me keep breathing, but it’s not like I can get precise dosing with that.
(2) Please tell me that I’m not the only one whose reaction to this is “meh” and mild annoyance at all the uber-hype that’s going to come and frothing from the fangirls who never heard of Dr. Strange till Cummerbund took the part. People who were actually into the comic book may get as excited as they want, however. It’s a book I never read, so I don’t care. And for some reason, while I like fantasy, I just don’t like magic in my comic books. Sufficiently advanced technology and weird-ass mutations, sure, but outright spell casting, no. (Insert Grumpy Cat picture here.)
@Chris S: Jamming third-rate crap from friends and acquaintances and block voting without reading is the issue.
Exactly. There are plenty of well-written things in the genres Puppies extol that could have been nominated. But they didn’t. Instead, it was purely block voting and cabal.
(10) So she’s strawmanning history teachers? Or, charitably, she’s a product of a different school system than most of us here on F770, and thus the difference.
@Bruce Baugh, I think you may have nailed it with the autodidacts reading older work and taking it as gospel (pun only halfway intended).
I personally will be dead pretty darn soon after an apocalypse even if some prepper with a gun doesn’t shoot me and take my stuff. And I wouldn’t see said prepper coming except as an out of focus blob. I’d probably have already died 50 years ago if it weren’t for penicillin, one of those child mortality stats.
@ Ursulas LG and V: Yes. Kids aren’t great story tellers, and they’re creative only in the way they mash up things they’ve seen. But as far as revelations and coherent plotting, not so much.
Gedankenexperiment:
1. If not for modern technology, would you still be alive today?
2. Care to list a few examples?
No, I don’t think so. There was a complication at my birth where the umbilical cord near-strangled me, and without modern medicine I don’t know if I would have survived that. I also had appendicitis at five years old and needed to have my appendix surgically removed, and without that surgery I wouldn’t have made it. Assuming I survived both those events somehow, I would be very nearsighted and missing the tip of one of my fingers, which I had reattached at seven years old. Also my teeth would be a mess without all that orthodontia.
Luckily the preview year seems to be 2004 so I’ve had my appendix out for a decade now.
1. If not for modern technology, would you still be alive today?
Oh, hell, no (although the issue of whether modern technology may be a cause or partial cause of the earliest problems that probably would have ended up in my early death is another thought experiment–my mother has thought for some years that our living in the “downwinder” area–the parts of eastern Washington/northern Idaho affected by the Hanford nuclear reservation’s ongoing release of radioactive materials in air and water before, during and after WWII may be a reason for my really screwed up immune system, though there were other problems as well, some of which I don’t plan to go into detail about).
And I decided at some point early in the Reagan MADD years that I really preferred to be at ground zero having read far too many dystopian sf novels….
I believe I would be alive without modern technology. My mother and my younger sibling wouldn’t, though, because I was a C-section.
I have crappy eyesight too, but in many people it’s caused wholly or in part by modern conditions (primarily the fact that we way overuse our near sight), so I might not have the full penalty from it in the alternate reality we’re discussing.
I certainly wouldn’t be alive if I’d been born in an earlier age with low technology and no antibiotics or tetanus shots. My parents were constantly calling the town doctor to meet us at his office so he could stitch up the gashes and inadvertent piercings I managed to acquire on dozens of occasions. You know the scene in Lethal Weapon 3 where Russo and Gibson start comparing scars? That’s me.
1. If not for modern technology, would you still be alive today?
2. Care to list a few examples?
1. Unlikely. At the very least I’d be crippled somewhat.
2. I was a mature age birth, and those tend to be tricky even at the time I was born. I also used to have several epileptic fits that resulted in injury, but those are somewhat mitigated now with treatment. I’ve also had bouts with diarrhea arising from tainted water et al, which (surprise!) people did regularly die of prior to the introduction of oral rehydration therapy.
@Chris S
VD has zero credibility in pretty much everything – if he said the sun would rise in the East tomorrow, I’d get up to check.
My gold standard for this is the header quote from Day’s RationalWiki page:
It’s by someone called Ursula Vernon, who really seems to have a way with words.
@ Lis Carey (and others about “back to nature”): I’ve never been able to picture myself as one of those hardy souls living off the land in a post-collapse world.
My grandparents on both sides ran wheat ranches which involved a lot of gardening and production of food as well (all without electricity or running water for a good part of my mother’s childhood). My parents got the hell off the farm as soon as they could, and although we lived in the country and had horses and gardened because my mom liked it, I know from experience how incredibly hard it is to produce food that way. *shudders*
I like living well outside of town for various reasons none of which involve working to garden or produce food myself in anyway.
The pastoral is an appealing literary fantasy written by urban dwellers…..
I was a C-section after a 30-hour labor, but assuming that I could’ve survived that, I probably could’ve made it through early childhood. After that point, mega-nearsightedness and asthma (not life-threatening in itself, but enough to severely limit physical activity) would’ve probably made me unable to handle basic survival tasks, so I’d have had to rely on being so charming and entertaining that people would want to feed me. So… not much chance.
Oh, lovely. The Puppies don’t have to produce a slate, ranked by popularity — Chaos Horizon has already done it for them, and makes it clear that they intend to continue doing so as the nomination season progresses.
I’m not going to link to it here. I’m so disgusted at the lack of clue on exhibit. Some of the stuff CH has printed up to this point has been pretty irrational, but this just takes the cake. 😐
I am near-sighted and have a number of minor ailments that are managed with diet. Based on my father’s example I’d probably be alive, but in poorer health. I can function without glasses, but it isn’t always pretty.
(Glasses date back to the 13th century, so are they really “modern” technology? This isn’t to say they would be common, though.)
I do have a number of relatives who would likely be dead or in an asylum without modern medicine.
Gedanken experiment:
1. Likely not.
2. Infected wisdom tooth at age 23. And if that hadn’t done it, the 5th wisdom tooth I had to have removed at the same time (above and behind the upper wisdom tooth on the other side) most likely would have.
My mother had a medical condition that required surgery for her to try to have kids at all, and even then no particular pregnancy was likely to result in a live baby. I think the ratio was 3 living to 5 or 6 not. And I was the least viable of the ones that lived; very preemie for 1961.