(1) THE FINNISH. Finland hosts the World Science Fiction Convention in 2017 — but if you can’t make it to Helsinki, hit the library: more and more Finnish speculative fiction authors are getting English translations, as NPR reports in “Finnish Authors Heat Up The Speculative Fiction World”.
In the middle of Johanna Sinisalo’s novel The Core of the Sun, the reader is interrupted by an ad. It’s for Fresh Scent, a personal fragrance available from the State Cosmetics Corporation of Finland. It’s marketed to woman, although “marketed” is an understatement. In Sinisalo’s nightmarish, alternate-reality vision of her homeland, a tyrannical patriarchy splits women into two classes — docile “eloi” and undesirable “morlocks,” terms cheekily drawn from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine — as part of an oppressive national health scheme that crosses insidiously over into eugenics.
The ad for Fresh Scent is just one of the novel’s many fragmentary asides. In additional to its more conventional narrative, which centers on Vanna, a woman with an addiction to chili peppers (it makes sense a skewed sort of sense, really), The Core of the Sun is made up of epistolary passages, dictionary entries, article excerpts, transcripts of hearings, scripts for instructional films, homework assignments, folk songs, and even fairytales that exist only in Sinisalo’s twisted version of the world. Chillingly, one passage concerning the social benefits of human sterilization is taken from a real-world source, a Finnish magazine article from 1935.
There’s a streak of scathing satire to the book’s fragmentary science fiction, and in that sense it sits somewhere between Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut — but Sinisalo crafts a funny, unsettling, emotionally charged apparition of the present that’s all her own.
(2) SPEAKING OF COLD PLACES. The New York Times captioned this tweet “A Wookie Chills in Washington (Not Hoth)”
Chillin' after #blizzard2016 pic.twitter.com/Gvl9AHxJkN
— Golnaz Esfandiari (@GEsfandiari) January 24, 2016
(3) AN ALARMING INSIGHT.
Yeah, @robertjbennett has social media entirely figured out. #confusionsf pic.twitter.com/G3VktfgkHv
— Michael Lee (@michaellorg) January 24, 2016
(4) DEATH OF A GOLDEN AGE. Saladin Ahmed’s Buzzfeed article argues “Censors Killed The Weird, Experimental, Progressive Golden Age Of Comics”.
In the 1940s, comic books were often feminist, diverse, and bold. Then the reactionary Comics Code Authority changed the trajectory of comic book culture for good.
The comics themselves exhibited wild stylistic variety. A single issue of Keen Detective Funnies could contain one story with gorgeous Art Nouveau-ish illustration, and another with glorified stick figures. The comic books of the Golden Age were also significantly more diverse in terms of genre than today’s comics. On newsstands across America — in an era when the newsstand was an urban hub and an economic juggernaut — comic books told tales of True Crime, Weird Fantasy and Cowboy Love, Negro Romance, and Mystery Men. And Americans bought them.
Even as Amazing-Man and Blue Beetle were rescuing helpless, infantilized women, badass superheroines like the Lady in Red, the Spider Queen, and Lady Satan were stabbing Nazis and punching out meddlesome, sexist cops.
(5) NOW THAT SHE HAS OUR ATTENTION. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s post “Business Musings: Poor Poor Pitiful Me Is Not A Business Model” actually is not a rant telling writers to buck up, it’s a discussion of the true levers of culture change. But it begins with a rant….
Granted, in the recent past, the major publishing companies were the only game in town. But they are no longer the only game in town. A major bestselling writer can—and should—walk from any deal that does not meet her contractual and business needs.
Hell, every writer should do that.
But of course most writers won’t. Instead, an entire group of them beg for scraps from the Big All-Powerful Evil Publishers, proving to the publishers that writers are idiots and publishers hold all the cards.
I already bludgeoned the Authors Guild letter last week, so why am I going back to the same trough? Because this poor-poor-pitiful-me attitude has become the norm in the publishing industry right now, and I’m really tired of it.
The big battles of 2014 and 2015, from all of the fighting over the meaning of Amazon in the past few years to the in-genre squabbling over the Hugo awards that science fiction indulged in last year to the hue and cry indie writers have treated us to over the various changes in Kindle Unlimited since its inauguration have all had the same basic complaint.
Someone—be it a publisher (that Amazon is Evil argument) or a writer (the rest of it)—believes they’re entitled to something, and when they don’t get that something, they complain loudly, on social media or in traditional media or via group letter or through (in sf’s case) hateful spiteful posts about the opposing parties.
Only a handful of people take responsibility for the situation they’re in—if, indeed, they are responsible. Only a few actually analyze why the situation exists.
(6) HIGH PRAISE. The first line in David Barnett’s review of Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds is —
Imagine that Diana Wynne Jones, Douglas Coupland and Neil Gaiman walk into a bar and through some weird fusion of magic and science have a baby. That offspring is Charlie Jane Anders’ lyrical debut novel All The Birds In The Sky.
Do you think that’s a lot to live up to?
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- January 24, 1888 — Typewriter “copy” ribbon patented by Jacob L. Wortman. Harlan Ellison still uses one.
- January 25, 1984 – Apple’s Macintosh computer went on sale. Price tag: $2,495.
(8) TRI ROBOT. Mickey Zucker Reichert, the author of To Preserve, is a working physician and the author of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot Trilogy (To Protect, To Obey, To Preserve). The third book will be published in hardcover by Roc in February.
Nate, has been Manhattan Hasbro Hospital’s resident robot for more than twenty years. Nate’s very existence terrified most people, leaving the robot utilized for menial tasks and generally ignored. Until one of the hospital’s physicians is found murdered with Nate standing over the corpse.
As programmer of Nate’s brain, Lawrence Robertson is responsible for his creation and arrested for the crime. Susan Calvin knows the Three Laws of Robotics make it impossible for Nate to harm a human. But maybe someone manipulated the laws to commit murder.
(9) DOUGH-REY. Kip W. pays tribute to characters from that billion-dollar movie The Force Awakens.
Poe, a flier; a fast male flier
Rey, who scavenges a bit,
Maz, a host who knows the most,
Finn, a white shirt drone who quit,
Snoke, a hologram quite tall,
Ren, a very angry joe,
Beeb, a droid head on a ball,
Which will bring us back to Poe. Poe, Rey, Maz, Finn, Snoke, Ren, Beeb, Poe!
(10) FLEXIBILITY. Nick Osment analyzes the benefits of reading science fiction in “What We Can Learn From a Time Lord: Doctor Who and a New Enlightened Perspective” at Black Gate.
If tomorrow you stepped inside a time machine and found yourself standing in the yard of this man who is separated from being your neighbor only by the passage of a century, then suddenly his opinions would become somewhat more relevant because now you would actually have to interact with him. But they would not become any more credible to you just because you were now hearing them face-to-face. You would still hear them from the vantage of having come from the future.
Now imagine your life today not as if you were living in your own time but as if you were visiting from a hundred years in the future. The weight given by proximity, i.e., these people are my neighbors, is leveled off, much the way that visiting that long-dead neighbor would be. Detach yourself from all the noise of the television and the Internet and your workplace, your college, your local pub. See it from a more objective position — of not being of this time, with the knowledge that this time, too, will pass, and all these people who are speaking right now; they all, too, will be dead and most of them forgotten.
(11) BIGGER ON THE OUTSIDE. 11.22.63, the eight-part event series based on Stephen King’s 2011 novel, premieres Presidents Day, February 15 on Hulu.
11.22.63 is a thriller in which high school English teacher Jake Epping (James Franco) travels back in time to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — but his mission is threatened by Lee Harvey Oswald, falling in love and the past itself, which doesn’t want to be changed
(12) LONG TAIL OF SALES. Fynbospress summarizes the impact of streaming on the music business, and explains the parallels in book publishing to Mad Genius Club readers in “The Importance of Being Backlist”.
In summary, if publishing continues to mirror music, then streaming will continue to increase, but frontlist sales may continue to fall, and it become harder and harder to get discovered in the initial release period. However, backlist volume is growing, and people are discovering their way through the things that have been out there a while. So, while you can and should do some promotion of your latest release – if it fails to take off, don’t despair. Instead, write the next book, the greatest book you’ve written yet. Sometimes you make your money on the initial release surge, and sometimes, it’ll come in having a lot of things out there all bringing in an unsteady trickle.
(13) TWO COMIC CONS MAY SETTLE. A settlement may be at hand in the San Diego Comic-Con’s suit against the Salt Lake Comic Con for for trademark-infringement. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that on Thursday, attorneys for both conventions asked the judge to extend a procedural deadline so that they could work “diligently” on a settlement. The conventions have scheduled a meeting with Adler on Wednesday in San Diego.
Drafts of the agreement have been exchanged,” according to the Thursday court filing requesting the extension, “and the parties hope to soon reach agreement as to all terms.”
San Diego Comic-Con is a trademarked name, and lawyers have argued that the similarity of “Comic Con” in the name of the Salt Lake City event has confused people into thinking the event is somehow associated with San Diego’s convention.
As Salt Lake’s organizers have seen it, the legal battle isn’t just between them and the flagship convention; it’s a threat to the dozens of other comic book conventions around the world that also use “comic con” in their names. Salt Lake Comic Con co-founder and chief marketing officer Bryan Brandenburg previously asserted that if San Diego wins the case, the precedent will allow it to do this to other organizations.
(14) RING OF POWER. Jim C. Hines snapped this photo at Confusion:
.@scalzi recites the Secret Cabal oath: "Let those who worship Hugos' might, beware my power, Tor Cabal's light!" pic.twitter.com/j9zxhfjn9i
— Jim C. Hines (@jimchines) January 24, 2016
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Will R. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Henley.]
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Stevie :
Apart from, you know, what looks like half the Solar system calling him an idiot at various times during the series…
Great story, Wombat, thanks!
See, this is why I kind of prefer Space Opera to Hard SF. How does the FTL Drive work? It works just fine. How do we get gravity on this asteroid? We turn on the artificial gravity.
It’s not scientific, but I’m OK with that. I’d rather something just be This Is A Thing We Have rather than try and explain the How of it all and totally fumble in explaining.
(Though I totally understand why some people feel differently and want the Hard SF.)
Wombat,
Thank you. That was a great story.
Wombat: Oh. My.
RedWombat, I see I have to start my 2016 Hugo Nomination list, now….
<sniffle>
It’s so completely bonkers, I treated it as Fantasy, and consequently really enjoyed the story (more bonkers ideas, intriguing characters, big Space Operatic canvas). I think it was failed by marketing big time: nowhere did it state that it wasn’t a stand-alone story, so it was with a sinking realisation ~50 pages from the end that I knew I was going to have to wait for the sequel. Then I expected the sequel “Superluminal” to complete to duology (there was nothing to imply otherwise) but it didn’t. Then there was supposedly one more to come making it a trilogy…but the publisher declined to go ahead, so the story remains incomplete. So frustrating. I’d read some of his other stuff & A Dry, Quiet War remains one of my all-time favourite short stories.
Jim C. Hines chimes in on that Breitbart article. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
Stoic Cynic said:
I wouldn’t put it past Clarke to reference himself that way. Thanks!
@Darren Garrison:
Huh. The novel I recently finished is set around Ceres, but the colony I have there is a miniature “ringworld” around the planet, so Ceres is the sky, and the ring makes a complete revolution in around 25 minutes to give pretty close to 1g of gravity. I’m aware of (probably only a small fraction of) the things that make that unlikely — the economics being the biggest issue, even setting aside how much of the colonization in my setting seems to be about philosophy — but at least nobody’s being flung off the colony!
That’s obvious from the URL – “fact-checking-Breitbart”? Ha.
Bloody good 🙂
@Vasha: 8% of Pakistan speak Urdu as their native language, but most of the country speaks Urdu as a second or third language. I couldn’t find exact figures, but for instance see the languages of Pakistan Wikipedia article).
With the ballots coming out soon, any predictions on when the slates drop? Or has there been some link that I am not aware of?
Michael Eochaidh said:
Ethnologue to the rescue: there were about 94,000,000 non-native Urdu speakers in Pakistan as of a 1999 census.
I strongly recommend Ethnologue to everyone as the resource of first resort for questions like this.
Speaking of fact checking, I only just realized reading Jim Hines’s piece that the supposed account of Puppy misbehavior apparently passed around Toronto bookstores was Jim Hines’s roundup (possibly). I don’t know why but I had it in my head that it was Scott Lynch’s much more recent statement. Every time I read the various re-tellings my brain must have swapped ‘Scott Lynch’ for ‘Jim Hines’.
Wonderful story, RedWombat.
That is an interesting question. SP4 probably has enough to do a recommended list for Novel but is thin on other categories (and a lot of that seems to be Declan Finn self-promotion).
@Camestros Felapton,
It makes me feel a tiny bit better that I am not the only one to get Hines & Lynch confused.
@Petréa Mitchell: Thanks! Hadn’t thought of that, actually; they’ve gone to a pay wall model recently and I never used them much before.
I’ll add that the 94,000,000 figure is from 1999 and was out of roughly 135,000,000 people per the 1998 census.
Ah, but you did it the other way around! I think that means that on average we both got it right. 🙂
Also I don’t get why I get them confused. Lynch does not fit the model of baldy-beardy-man-SF-writer*
*[this is not an attack on balding men with beards, which is a fine thing to be.]
@Red Wombat: That was thoroughly charming. Thank you.
RedWombat: I don’t know if anybody will want to read this, but there’s a new short story by me at Apex called “Razorback”
Ye gods, you’re good. Just saying.
Thanks on the Urdu figures; however, it’s a remote village and the scenario is that they’re being attacked and running around yelling frantically — don’t you think they’d be yelling in their native language?
Has anybody else read Clair North’s three ‘Gameshouse’ novellas?
@Greg Hullender
Thanks for your points regarding the author’s use of science in adding or subtracting from a story. However I was thrown by your comment:
a “sun-synchronous orbit” is one that is always above the terminator (the line that divides day from night).
That didn’t gel with my memory of looking up “sun-synchronous orbit” (when it was given as a capability of the Rocket Lab planned launches from New Zealand). Checking again, staying above the terminator is a example of a type of sun-synchronous orbit, rather than the definition of the term.
@Camestros
I’ve read one-and-a-half Gameshouses. I liked the first one even though I found the narration oddly distancing, but the second one just seemed to be going on a bit and I haven’t gone back to it yet.
@Camestros Felapton – Has anybody else read Clair North’s three ‘Gameshouse’ novellas?
Just the first one. I liked it a lot, but thought the actual storytelling wasn’t quite up to the level of the worldbuilding, which I thought was superb.
@Red Wombat, your stories hit a sweet spot for me, with the exact right amount of pretty much everything. Plus, a bunch of them crack my heart. Thank you.
I personally think that Razorback is only the second best Ursula Vernon story in that issue of Apex, the other being The Tomato Thief.
(By which I obviously mean that both are great).
@Red Wombat, did I detect further Grandma Harken stories being set up by any chance?
@Camestros
Interesting to hear. Because if we take SP4 at their word until they do something screwy (which is the fair and honest way to do it) it would really boost their “we’re trying to raise participation” claims if we could see some more evidence of that before they release… whatever they release. It would also help with any claims of there being daylight between themselves and Beale.
I did like both Ursula Vernon stories. Pragmatic elderly witches are one of my favorite things ever, and here we have them being moved to do something foolhardy and quixotic without entirely losing their pragmatic character, which is a nice conflict. I did have a couple queries about “The Tomato Thief” — how does a gila monster lose a scale? Reptile skins are one piece, and the “scales” are just a pattern. And comparing a bright white glow to foxfire is off; foxfire is greenish and very dim. But that comparison was made by a desert dweller who hadn’t seen any right?
I whole-heartedly agree. After reading Bryony and Roses and the Tomato Thief, I’ve decided I like Ursula Vernon better in longer stories than in short stories. I think the added length gives room for more … tension? Higher stakes? than in her shorter works. So while I enjoyed Jackalope Wives and Pocosin, I enjoyed The Tomato Thief and Bryony and Roses even more.
@Mark, Ah, but The Tomato Thief is a novelette; different category. Also a fine tale, of course…
@ErrolC
Oops. You know, I have it in my mind that that’s the most useful sun-synchronous orbit (for a variety of reasons), but you’re clearly correct. Thanks for pointing it out.
I liked the second one more I think. I liked the idea of this big Western guy trying to play a deadly game of hide-and-seek in pre-war Thailand and trying to look inconspicuous.
I agree about the distancing on the first one. Thene in the first one was more inherently likable than Remy in the second but Remy was more emotionally involving.
Loved Razorback. I also loved Pocosin from early last year (which will be on my Hugo ballot). I want to believe that the witches and magic from these two stories are linked to eachother. Sadly, I have yet to read much more from Vernon/Kingfisher, but I hope to change that soon (despite my dislike of e-format-only reading).
I think she set up a great premise for a bigger anthology by more writers. A deadly game of Pictionary for example or 19th century geopolitics played as Twister. 🙂
@redwombat I really enjoyed ‘Razorback!’ You have a great way with the mountain setting and I like the extreme-ness of the witches. If that makes sense.
@TheYoungPretender and @Camestros Felapton
Last year it came out on February 1.
https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/sad-puppies-3-the-2015-hugo-slate/
Greg, I think the reason it came out that day was Jan 31 was the last day to buy a membership for Sasquan or MidAmeriCon 2 in order to nominate.
The date is the same this year. Jan 31 is the last day to purchase a membership in MidAmeriCon 2 or WorldCon 75 if you want to nominate for 2016.
I don’t think SP4 will try the ‘head-explodey’ stuff and I doubt they’ll coordinate with VD in anyway. The later they leave their collating the harder it will be for some other group to tailor SP4 into a more overt slate but they have no particular reason to do that.
At MGC Kate P has done 6 posts covering 8 categories
Fan artist
Fan writer
Fan cast
Fanzine & Semiprozine
Pro artist
Editor Short & Long
These are all the harder to reach categories but I would think they’d want to drum up more entries in Related Work and the non-Novel categories before collating a final list.
When does the nomination period finish?
Kip W:
PDFs of images are a rather narrow subset of what I call ebooks – I’m not even sure it counts as a proper ebook. (I would certainly feel cheated if I bought a novel as ebook and recieved it on that format.) However, for what it’s worth, Acrobat Pro exists for Windows too but is a bit pricey. Other professional image/publishing applications can do the same. I assume there are freeware tools that can make this sort of PDF also but I have no suggestions.
MS Word can save in PDF. This is a good choice if you’re making something with more text than images. (And you can make PDFs with only images in it too, but I think that will involve pasting one image to each page so I don’t really recommend it.)
For “true” ebooks, we’re talking epub or mobi. From what I’ve heard, Sigil is the best choice to make epubs. Sigil combined with Amazon’s KindleConverter would then be a good choice for mobi format. I’m sort of weird myself, so I’ve made mobi ebooks by hand-coding HTML and converting it with KindleConverter. (Actually I’ve hand-coded TEI-compliant XML, used a selfmade converter to get html and manifest file, and then used KindleConverter on that. But that’s not a solution I recommend to other people.) Calibre can also do conversions between many different formats.
The perhaps most interesting e-book tools for the non-tech-savvy are browser plugins. Amazon has a plugin called “Send to Kindle” which extracts the text of a webpage and sends it to your Kindle. I use this on e.g. short fiction from Tor.com. I also use a plugin called GrabMyBooks which can do basically the same with multiple pages, allowing you to get e.g. a book published in chapters on the web onto a single ebook file. I haven’t tested that one extensively but it worked well for what I’ve been using it for. Both of these attempts to extract the “main text” of the page – meaning that on a page like this, you get Mike’s text and not the comments and sidebar.
Kip W on January 25, 2016 at 7:59 am said:
LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice) has had “Save as PDF” for longer than pretty much anyone. It’s widely considered to be one of the best, if not the best, PDF creators out there. It may have some other limitations compared to other, similar software, but PDF creation is not an area where it’s noticeably limited.
I should take this opportunity to remind people that OpenOffice itself is effectively dead. Since it’s free software, it’s still widely available on the net, and many people know the name, but you should avoid it and tell your friends that’s its time to upgrade if they use it. When Sun was bought by Oracle, they stopped development*, but refused to give up the name, so OpenOffice is now LibreOffice, and that’s what people should be using instead. Even if you aren’t interested in Open/LibreOffice yourself, please tell your friends who might be!
Sun was famous in the software developer community for ignoring or rejecting outside patches to OpenOffice. LibreOffice, by stark contrast, is a community-driven project which welcomes contributors, and, as a result, has been improving far faster than OpenOffice ever did! It’s still not (and may never be) a 100% replacement for MS-Office, but it’s a far, far better replacement than OpenOffice was, and improving rapidly!
* I’m ignoring the later “Apache OpenOffice” project, because the history of that project is both extremely confusing, and basically irrelevant, since it’s essentially dead at this point as well.
@Johan P:
Some of the tools you mention seem promising. It didn’t feel appropriate to mention that I also make ebooks by formatting a document in InDesign and then outputting it as a PDF, or an EPUB, or MOBI (Calibre is free and handy for format conversions as well, though sometimes limited). I have these options because I do this for money and own (or rent, these bleeding days) the pricey programs.
I was thinking of quick and dirty ebooks without the initiation fee. I should have mentioned that text can be turned into PDF by using Mac’s TextEdit (which can also handle text and pictures, though the pictures simply float between lines without the elegance of runaround). This is handy for turning material from the web to PDFs.
Image-based PDFs are also very handy for sheet music. I get public domain music from IMSLP (and scan some), and they’re much easier to deal with as PDFs than as images. These go onto my tablet, and I can put it on a piano’s music stand and play away.
@Xtifr
More options! Popped up while I was editing this comment. Good to see. Must be terse because editing window is shrinking.
@Darren Garrison
Not defending the plausibility of any of it, and it’s been a while since I read it….but they are underground, “up” is farther in, “down” is out toward the surface.
Thank you, guys! I’m glad you liked it!
Ah–more Harken. Honestly, I hadn’t given it much thought until Apex announced on Twitter that they’re gonna try to wring a Harken story from me every year, so I guess I have a year to think about it.
As for Pocosin and Razorback’s connections, Maggie Gray is the descendant of Elizabeth Gray by a couple of generations or so. And there’s definitely a few more stories there, though they haven’t quite ripened in my head yet.
Wow, Ursula. Well done. Dusty in here…
And if you can make a PDF, you can pretty easily convert it into a “proper” ebook format in a number of ways, e.g. Calibre.
—
Re “Hard SF” vs. “Space Opera”. I like ’em both. Sometimes it’s fun to look at how (and If) something might work; other times it’s fun just to assume it would work and go along for the ride. I really can’t say I think one approach is “better” than the other. They’re both entertaining if done well. (And few things are entertaining when done poorly.) 😀
What can be a bit annoying is when a work tries to put on a veneer of being “hard SF”, and then goes off the rails. I don’t mind a story full of handwavium and unobtanium, but I do mind when the author spends a lot of time trying to justify it and fails. That’s just purely wasted effort.
Camestros Felapton asked:
Let’s just hop over to the MAC2 site, and… oops, they don’t have it listed. Hopefully the deadline will be mentioned on the ballot page.
At a guess, though, it’ll be early March, to accomodate a 2-3 week tallying, checking, and notification period before the semi-traditional Easter weekend announcement.
Camestros Felapton on January 25, 2016 at 2:10 pm said:
They haven’t announced a date yet, but it’s usually early to mid March.
I doubt the finalists will be announced Easter weekend this year. It falls too early.
…and I would assume more counting and collating than would have occurred in previous cycles. I assume the current delay in nominations opening is they are still having to reconcile memberships.
ETA: sh_t, I forgot I’m off-planet late-March and most of April. I won’t get to see what the fallout is. 🙁