(1) SPACE FLOWING PAST THE PORTS LIKE WINE FROM A PITCHER. Here’s a video excerpt from the class “To Space Opera and Beyond with Ann Leckie”, part of the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, in which Leckie discusses the basics of space opera and the definition of it provided by Brian Aldiss.
(2) BEARS DISCOVER MCGUIRE. Reading Omni’s “Best Emerging Fantasy Authors of 2016”, James Davis Nicoll snorted at one of the selections:
They’ve discovered Guy Gavriel Kay! Who they think is an emerging author. But it is not their fault.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia brought the problem to the attention Omni and was given the brushoff.
https://twitter.com/OmniReboot/status/816365793445380096
Moreno-Garcia persisted – since this is just pixels on the internet and not carved in granite, Omni could do something about it even now.
https://twitter.com/silviamg/status/816370224807038976
JJ adds about another of Omni’s choices, “Given her 8-year career, 25 novels and 4 collections, 9 Hugo finalists plus 2 wins, and a Tiptree finalist, I don’t think Seanan McGuire can be considered “emerging”, either.”
(3) NATIONAL SCIENCE FICTION YESTERDAY. Mayim Bialik celebrated #NationalScienceFictionDay on January 2 by showing her readers this historic tome –
Here’s me with the book that inspired GrokNation, Heinlein’s Sci Fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land! For more info on what “grok” means, check this out: http://groknation.com/faq/
(4) BIOLOGY LESSON. An educational graphic the young’uns can study.
(5) BEFORE PALPATINECARE. Motherboard’s Sarah Jeong asks “Did Inadequate Women’s Healthcare Destroy Star Wars’ Old Republic?”
Padme Never Goes to a OB/GYN
Prenatal visits never happen in Episode III, not even offscreen. Despite Anakin’s spiraling paranoia about Padme’s health, doctors or hospitals are bizarrely never mentioned. And the evidence says that Padme never got an ultrasound.
When she confronts Anakin towards the end of the movie—shortly before giving birth—she refers to “our child,” rather than “our children.” It doesn’t make sense for her to be hiding the ball here, she’s making one last emotional appeal to the father of her children, to try to bring him back to the light side. Rather, Padme simply doesn’t know that she’s about to give birth to twins.
(6) DISSENTING VOICE. “Vera Rubin Didn’t Discover Dark Matter” avers Richard Panek at Scientific American.
Vera Rubin didn’t discover dark matter.
Rubin died last weekend, at the age of 88. Headlines have repeatedly identified her as having “discovered” dark matter or having “proved” the existence of dark matter. Even the Carnegie Institution’s press release announcing her death—she had worked as a staff astronomer at Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C., for half a century before her recent retirement—said that she “confirmed the existence of dark matter.” Rubin would have said she did no such thing. I know, because she did say that, to me, on several occasions.
One could make the argument that the correct formulation of her achievement is that she discovered evidence for the existence of dark matter, and while Rubin likely would have acquiesced to that construction, she would have found it incomplete, perhaps even misleading. She would have said that while she discovered evidence for the existence of dark matter, you shouldn’t infer from that statement that dark matter actually exists.
The distinction wasn’t merely a matter of semantics. It was, to her, a matter of philosophy, of integrity—a matter of how science works.
(7) JPL ANNIVERSARY. Thanks to SciFi4me we know “Jet Propulsion Laboratory Celebrates 80 Years With Free 2017 Calendar”.
As part of their 80th anniversary, JPL has released a free 2017 calendar you can download, filled with photos from both JPL and NASA, and including anniversaries and events. They also have an interactive timeline of JPL’s biggest moments. You can access both of these, as well as more history of JPL, over on the JPL website. JPL has regular open houses, and I hope to attend one myself one day now that I’m in Los Angeles.
(8) GETTING THE WORD OUT. A Tom Gauld strip —
(9) NEW PODCAST. The Blastoff Podcast has been launched this week by Jud Meyers and Scott Tipton, creators of Blastoff Comics in North Hollywood.
In the premiere episode, Scott explains the difference between the golden and silver ages of comic books. Then, Jud muses on the child-like wonder of stepping inside a brick and mortar comic shop.
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY
- January 3, 1924 – King Tut’s sarcophagus was uncovered.
- January 3, 2004 — Spirit rover landed on Mars.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born January 3, 1892 – J. R. R. Tolkien
(12)ESCAPING THE SHADOW. Simon Tolkien, grandson of J.R.R., tells how WWI inspired Lord of the Rings (and his own very modest career).
My grandfather, JRR Tolkien, died when I was 14. He remains vivid to me but through child-like impressions – velvet waistcoats and pipe smoke; word games played on rainy afternoons in the lounge of a seaside hotel or standing on the windy beach down below, skipping flat black pebbles out across the grey waves; a box of matches that he had thrown up in the air to amuse me, rising and falling as if in slow motion through the branches of a horse chestnut tree.
These memories did nothing to illuminate who my grandfather was or how he thought beyond a sense of wise benevolence arching over me like that tree. Nothing except for his religion: I remember the emotion in his voice when he recited prayers with me in the evening – not just the Hail Mary and the Our Father but others too – and the embarrassment I felt at church on Sundays when he insisted on kneeling while everyone else stood, and loudly uttering responses in Latin when everyone else spoke in English.
(13) GOOD FAKES. Timothy Anderson’s online gallery includes a set of clever faux vintage Star Wars paperback covers. They start with The Purloined Plans, second row down, toward the right.
(14) SHUTTERED. Crawford Doyle Booksellers on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is closing. Andrew Porter remembers —
The store, at 1082 Madison Ave, New York (between 81st and 82nd), was a bookstore long before 21 years ago. I used to live above it, at 24 East 82nd Street, and when I was a teenager in the early 1960s, and delivered Womrath Library books to subscribers in the neighborhood.
Downstairs, reached by a staircase from the store, there was an antique toy store. At one time, they sold military miniatures, including soldier figures from Donald A. Wollheim’s collection. An occasional visitor, I was told, was a collector by the name of George R.R. Martin. Another small part of my history disappearing into oblivion…
(15) CLIPPING SERVICE. Some of you might like this assortment of topical clips more than Mad Genius Club’s Amanda S. Green did.
Next up, we have yet another call to have a year of publishing nothing but women. Yep, you read that right. Kamila Shamshie has called for 2018 to be the year of publishing only women. Now, I know what you’re going to say. Look at the source of the article. It’s the Guardian. I know. I know. Another bastion of, well, drivel. However, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen such calls, or something similar. Have you forgotten the calls for readers to give up on reading books by men — or non-people of color or other so-called marginalized groups — for a year?
One of the best responses I’ve seen to the Shamshie article comes from Dacry Conroy. These three paragraphs completely dismantle Shamshie’s argument:
Yes! I thought. We do need to take example from the suffragettes, we do need to stop being so polite and seize our own power, raise our voices and… That’s when she lost me. Because what Shamsie suggested we raise our voices to say to the publishing industry was, essentially, “Please let us in. You’re being unfair. Just for one year without any boys in the way and see if the readers like us. It doesn’t have to be right away, 2018 is fine, but give us a go? Please?”
I don’t see the spirit of the independent presses of the 70s and 80s in that. What I see is a spirit of dependence on an industry that infantilizes writers, making them grateful for any morsel of approval and attention, convincing them that a publishing house is the only way to ‘real’ publication. This seems to be particularly so of literary writers (a group to which I do not pretend to belong) who appear to have been convinced that even though they are the keepers of the “artistic flame,” they would not have an audience at all without the festivals, the reviewers and the awards the publishing houses so carefully close to all but their own.
Surely the lesson from the independent presses of the 70s isn’t to plead for someone else to start a press and offer better opportunities, it’s to stand up, use the technology available and become our own publishers. Many of us are already doing that.
(16) THE YEAR IN RPG. Shannon Appelcline, respected RPG industry watcher, delivers a big gaming roundup in “Advanced Designers & Dragons #10: 2016: The Year in Review”.
The Continued Rise of Indies. For several years now, I’ve been talking about the rise of indie games, as several once-indie companies have become major players in the industry. In 2016 a few of them started collecting together other games, turning themselves into publishing houses that go beyond just the particular ideas of their owners.
Evil Hat* was the most notable, with their expansion occurring thanks to the success of the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game (2017?)*. They’ve hired a few people on as full-time employees, which is a luxury in today’s roleplaying industry, let alone the indie industry. Meanwhile, they’re printing and distributing a few successful Kickstarters: Blades in the Dark (2017?)* and Karthun: Lands of Conflict (2017?).
Burning Wheel strikes me as a smaller, more casual organization, but they similarly picked up the publishing and distribution of a few indie games: Dungeon World (2012) and Jared Sorsensen’s Parsely games (2009-2010). This also seems like a more casual partnership, mainly amounting to Burning Wheel HQ, Sage Kobold, and Memento Mori combining forces, like in the Gen Con Forge booth of days gone by, but between Burning Wheel (2002), Torchbearer (2013), and Dungeon World (2012), you have three of the most notable indie fantasy RPGs, all under one roof!
Last year also offered one more example of the indie movement growing and maturing: the blockbuster Apocalypse World (2010) got a second edition (2016).
The Inevitable Kickstarter Report. As in recent years, I’m going to end this review with a look at Kickstarter. And, I think the only description of Kickstarter this year is: wow. I mean, it’s been good for the industry for years, but in 2016 it notched up a higher level of success than ever before.
To start with, we suddenly had 26 pure RPG Kickstarters that raised more than $100,000 in 2016, after years of hovering below 20. Most notably, 7th Sea raised $1.3 million! That’s almost double the previous high, which was Deluxe Exalted 3e, which raised $684,755 in 2013. 7th Sea’s 11,483 backers also beat out the 10,103 backers for Evil Hat’s Fate Core from 2012-2013, a number that I thought might be unassailable.
(17) BEST NEW WRITERS. Rocket Stack Rank has put together a list of stories from Campbell-eligible authors. Greg Hullender explains:
As usual, the entry for each story has a spoiler-free blurb plus a link to a more detailed review. People who have already done their reading for the year and just need to be reminded of which story was which will probably find both of those useful. For people still looking for things to read, we’ve indicated which stories were recommended by us or any of the reviewers we track, and there are links to places to read stories for free (where possible) and otherwise there’s info on how to buy or borrow them.
The graph shows that Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies were the most friendly venues for new authors. Original anthologies are the least.
(18) GROOVY, MAN. @70sscifiart on Twitter shares retro sf covers and art.
11200:
Conquest Of The Amazon
John Russell Fearn https://t.co/3RxJtl0Z7s pic.twitter.com/RHhvMNqvrw
— 70s Sci-Fi Art (@70sscifiart) January 3, 2017
70sscifiart:
Black light Star Trek poster https://t.co/Yl2OVM8B2c pic.twitter.com/HdVGsNFb8g
— 70s Sci-Fi Art (@70sscifiart) January 1, 2017
(19) SUPERFINE. Melville House has a story about a very overdue library book.
Gillett came across the 1,000-page tome when, after her husband’s death, she was sorting through a collection of 6,000 books. Finding the HCS library stamp on the inside cover, she realized the extraordinary truth, and decided to return the book to the school along with a note reading: “I am sorry to inform you that one of your former pupils, Prof AE Boycott FRS, appears to have stolen the enclosed. I can’t imagine how the school has managed without it!”
Perhaps this book helped inspire the Professor’s future career. The little boy once obsessed with snails now has his own portrait hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Based on the rate at Hereford library, the fine could have been charged at 17 pence a day, over 120 years, totalling around £7,446.
(20) ROTSLER AWARD EXHIBIT AT LOSCON. Courtesy of Elizabeth Klein-Lebbink we have a photo of the Rotsler Award Exhibit from Loscon 2016 featuring the art of Ditmar.
(21) SCAVENGERS. This is an animated short film about astronauts who were stranded on a planet a long time ago, long enough that they’ve learned a great deal about the planet’s biological organisms and the interactions between the native flora and fauna.
[Thanks to JJ, Cat Rambo, Cat Eldridge, Mark-kitteh, Bruce Baugh, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark-kitteh.]
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Well, my computer seems to be necrotic. I bought a keyboard for my tablet so I don’t have to input everything via Swype (aka:The Second-Guesser Whose Decision Is Final), but I don’t know how thing will be while I’m waiting for a refurbed computer to replace the previous one. Well, since I can’t do any work, can’t scan anything, can’t edit photos, can’t update my iTunes playlist… maybe this will be all I do, and I’ll become tiresomely omnipresent.
Nah. There’s still Twitter.
Green scroll the pixels, O!
2) Is there a movie or TV show? No? Then they are still emerging.
@5: I’d have said there’s no use pointing out another set of logical holes in Lucas’s universe — especially in the first three movies — but her conclusion about the reason for this set of flaws is at least interesting.
fifth minus one!
[godstalk]
True 5th!
re the JPL Anniversary ….
” Among the aerospace industry, JPL was nicknamed as standing for “Jack Parsons’ Laboratory” or “Jack Parsons Lives”. ” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)
Parsons was an interesting person, with connections to Alastair Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and LASFS (and LASFL).
2) A lot of the authors on this list are not what I’d define as emerging. Guy Gavriel Kay and Seanan McGuire, of course, but also Marie Brennan, Nisi Shawl, V.E. Schwab and Robert Jackson Bennett. They’re all fine authors, but have been around for a while.
15) The article Amanda Green is so upset about dates from June, so she’s kind of late.
17) Thanks for this, Greg. Your list confimred that a writer I wasn’t sure about is Campbell eligible and reminded me of someone whose work I enjoyed but who wasn’t on my Campbell longlist so far.
(4): This is just wrong – the Sarlacc is way bigger than a Graboid. Doesn’t this guy know anything about science?
(2) Eh… to be fair, Guy Gavriel Kay has only been writing less than a century. What is this Omni, anyway? It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Omni I recall as a magazine, but I’ve seen it various places, lately, and it seems to be sub-buzzfeed clickbait.
(5) Kind of brilliant. Agree with Chip Hitchcock about the probability of Lucas having put a whole lot of thought into it.
(15) Guardian throws out bait, MGC, apparently missing the “A Provocation” bit of the article’s title, bites. I’m giving in to the urge to point out that while, on the one hand the MGC crew thinks special snowflake “literary” authors need to get off their asses and publish their own durn selves, on the other hand, those same gritty DIY MGCers complain that they don’t have publishers, magazines, and awards of their own to prop themselves up with.
Currently on book two of the Riddle Master trilogy. This is one of those books that I don’t think sound interesting until I start reading, then I’m completely engrossed.
Just read “The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet” as my first book of the new year. Enjoyable, light, and fun. Decent world-building. Very Whedon.
(17) BEST NEW WRITERS.
This is a reminder that there are more authors eligible for the Campbell Award than just short fiction authors, and a more complete list of Campbell-eligible authors can be seen here.
If you have eligible authors you feel are deserving and you’d like to promote them for the Campbell Award, feel free to add them to that category in the Hugo Nominees 2017 Wikia if they are not already included.
ticky
@JJ
There are a couple of people on the writertopia page who have definitely been publishing for longer than one or two years, though most of them started out as self-published and may have achieved Campbell eligibility via a magazine or anthology sale more recently.
Cora: There are a couple of people on the writertopia page who have definitely been publishing for longer than one or two years, though most of them started out as self-published and may have achieved Campbell eligibility via a magazine or anthology sale more recently.
The eligibility is based on the first year of pubished SFF genre fiction sales which meet certain criteria, not on first year that they published something. A self-published author with small sales numbers, or whose published fiction was non-genre, or who had a story published by a magazine/website which did not meet the required pay levels, would not be Campbell-eligible.
I’m fairly certain Ada Palmer is eligible for the Campbell, for the magnificent Too Like The Lightning, but I don’t see her on the Writertopia list. (Might she have previous publications I’ve missed?)
The other name I’m really rooting for is Charlotte Ashley; F&SF has been publishing remarkable stories by her. “A Fine Balance” last issue was inventive, rich, and a whole lot of fun 🙂
As for (16), RPG’s, I don’t keep up with the publishing scene much, but Evil Hat’s fantastic 🙂
I’m intensely looking forward to Blades in the Dark – a roleplaying game of gangs, scoundrels, and thieves, set in a crowded steampunk city haunted by the spirits of the dead, and designed to be adapted to settings from imperial intrigue to Firefly-esque SF action. John Harper has done a phenomenal job – both developing a brilliant game that does something new and exciting, and no less importantly, building up an active, enthusiastic community of fans and players. The way Harper invested in making the game easy to modify is just inspirational — now the internet’s full of new creations and variations, and there’s a bunch more in the pipes. That’s the kind of thing that gets a roleplaying game a long, productive life 🙂
So I was really pleased to see Evil Hat pick them up, and I’m really looking forward to getting the final product in glorious dead-tree format. 🙂
(I’m a little obsessed right now; I’m busy getting together a bunch of GMs to run a bunch of Blades one-shots at an upcoming convention. If you happen to be in Israel come April… 😛 )
Totally off-topic of any of today’s entries, but I am trying to find the title and author of a short story, 60’s maybe:
Premise of the story was about a science of linguistics or semantics. The government wanted to test people who were going to work in the atomic energy industry to insure they had the intelligence to understand what they were doing. There was pushback to this. Those who pushed back wound up sabatoging an atomic power plant on Long Island, causing an atomic explosion. Through ignorance.
Any help? It seems to … resonate … in these days of post-truth politics.
That might be “Day of the Moron”, by H. Beam Piper.
(2) BEARS DISCOVER MCGUIRE. Emerging from a chrysalis? Somehow the author thinks “new to me” means “emerging,” and Omni is apparently run by a robot.
(4) BIOLOGY LESSON. Heh, luvs it!
(8) GETTING THE WORD OUT. Heh, I dearly love these. And I’d like to buy the version of the book explained by a patronising robot, please!
(17) BEST NEW WRITERS. Random tangential comment: I never noticed the time quotes in their lists before now.
One project for 2017 is to read Kage Baker’s Company novels. Just finished the first, IN THE GARDEN OF IDEN, and gotta admit the descriptions of Bloody Mary’s attempt to reimpose Catholicism on England made me even more uncomfortable about our incoming President and Congress. Deja vu isn’t the right term, but what’s the right word when a historical period seems to have a high synchronization with current events?
13) Also check out the faux movie posters for a Spaghetti-Western version of Star Wars, on a lower row of the gallery.
I believe Writertopia depend on queries to assemble their eligibility list. If someone’s on their list then they’ve been confirmed as eligible (unless there’s an asterisk meaning they’re still checking) but if they’re missing from the list then it probably just means they’ve not come to their attention. As JJ says, previous sales may not have met their definition of pro. A “checked and not eligible” list at the bottom of their page would be handy though.
Greg’s list is very handy though, and I’ve been checking extra stories from a few possibilities based on it. E.g. Mathew Bailey wrote the clever The Birth Will Take Place on a Mutually Acceptable Research Vessel and that I’ve found a fairly amusing story of his in daily sf as well. I suspect I’ll be putting him on my “check back on next year” list.
@Standback
Charlotte Ashley rolled over onto my long list from last year after reading La Heron. Another story by her is excellent news. (Except I’m three issues behind on F&SF, aargh)
Ada Palmer could well make my list as well, if they’d just shut up and take my money by releasing a UK kindle edition.
Re: 15/publishing
(sigh) Yet another “self-pub rules, tradpub drools” rant. I’m with kathodus on this one; why is it that those who screech the loudest about self-pub being the One True Way seem to be the very people who quit self-publishing (or cut it way back) as soon as they could land a Real Tradpub Deal? It’s almost as if the Big Five’s ability to put dead-tree copies in everything from chain bookstores to Walmart actually matters for getting name recognition…
@Mark: There’s no kindle edition available in the UK? :jawdrop:
That’s practically criminal.
(Hate, hate, hate geographical restrictions on bits and bytes. In this particular case, for this particular book, there’s an additional irony to it.)
If you’re at all an audiobook person, and it happens that the audiobook is accessible, that’s what I heard. It was absolutely superb.
—
As for Charlotte Ashley, she also had another story in the interim — “More Heat Than Light”, in May/June. That one didn’t work nearly as well for me, but it was more a “this was ambitious but didn’t work well” — it had great characters and atmosphere, and a great central idea, but it kind of swapped from the former to the latter, splitting the story into two fairly unrelated parts, neither of which worked very well on its own.
I do like the formulation that if you are no longer eligible for the Campbell, you really can’t be considered “emerging” any longer. Although my not yet fully caffeinated result does recall that Mur Lafferty was eligible and won in 2013 although having been in the field for years because of arcane rules regarding eligibility.
Still.
Re: Palmer. My largest beef with Too Like The Lightning was that it feels and acts like half of a larger book. It. Just. Stops. (which reminds me of the original run of the Stross Family Trade novels, which did the same bloody thing)
Oh, I forgot the daily reading update. Knocked out my four graphic novels for Wednesday already – Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham turned out to be a nice mesh of Batman and Lovecraft, then I followed it up with the first three volumes of Star Wars: Darth Vader (1, 2, and Vader Down). Those do a good job of picking up where A New Hope left off, with Vader facing Palpatine’s disappointment over the destruction of the Death Star and laying the groundwork for some of what we see in The Empire Strikes Back. I was rather impressed by the way bits from the prequels were worked in, and the new story plugs what could be seen as plot holes in the original trilogy.
I’m running into an unexpected complication in Graphic Novel Week, though. It appears I was not as diligent as I thought I’d been in cataloging some of my digital comic purchases, so I’m having to plug some of those gaps on the fly. Thus, I find myself in the odd position of adding books to the TBR list just in time to be marked as read. It’s real progress, but it’s not actually knocking down the existing numbers.
I think Thursday might become Serenity day, and I’ve got four more titles set up for Friday, but then I’ll have to dig; those take me to the limit of what I can easily scroll to in the comiXology app. I’ve got plenty of graphic novels on my hard drive, from Humble Bundle and other such deals, but getting ’em onto the iPad can be a challenge. Tablets tend not to like PDFs over about 100 megs, and several of these are big. I might have to squish ’em a bit.
Well, at least I’ve got a couple of days to figure it out. Meanwhile, I think I’ll take in another chapter or two of Indexing: Reflections…
So there is a lutefisk hotline now:
https://twitter.com/pyry/status/816458480399880192
@standback
Glasgow?
ETA: @Hampus
So, is it a hotline to deal with a lack of lutefisk or for cleanup afterwards?
2: Omni has chosen to go the route of “user generated content” for their articles (and probably fiction) as well. I had a discussion with the management team a week or so ago and they are firmly on a path. Anyone can submit anything and authors will receive compensation based on views…some algorithm.
They’ve got a handful of websites and are utilizing this program across those sites…seems similar to the former IO9/jalopnik/other strange names media empire.
2 (again): I may go ahead and re-submit that piece again…it’s already written, was a lite and fluffy piece about alien invasion because I know that Omni used to like to mix flying saucers and science fiction, and so I put on my Ray Palmer hat…though I could also run it on Amazing (or maybe even here…) and would know for sure how many views it got…but I’m also curious to see how the payment algorithm works….
IanP:
They are seriously out of their mind. Now they have renamed lefse roll to “lutefisk taco”! o.O
2:…then again maybe not:
“By transmitting User Content on or through the Services, you grant the Company a nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid, assignable, transferable, sublicensable license to use, reproduce, store, modify, edit (e.g., fixing typos, making editorial changes), truncate, aggregate, display, perform, distribute, prepare derivative works based on, and transmit such User Content, in any medium that now exists or may arise in the future, and otherwise exploit your User Content (including, but not limited to, use of your name in association with your User Content to identify you as the “Creator”) in connection with the Services and the Company’s (and our successors’ and assigns’) businesses, including after your termination of your account or the Services, and you waive any and all moral rights and publicity rights in such User Content. ”
and, later in the TOU
“You may* be paid for user engagement with certain User Content that you submit to the Site. The Company determines amounts payable to users derived from User Content based on proprietary algorithms developed by the Company and subject to change in the Company’s sole discretion, without notice to the User. Generally, the algorithms measure and assign weight to such user engagement metrics as popularity of the content with visitors as measured by number of unique visitors; visitors’ interaction with the content; amount of time spent by visitors on the page; and shares on social media. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Company reserves the right to modify its algorithm at any time,…” emphasis added by me
@IanP
In the tradition of odd tangents, you’ve reminded me that I read a good story in Black Static that’s described as True Detective with zombies in Glasgow. Wetwork by Carole Johnstone. It’s got phonetic Scots dialogue that’s to die for, although it turns out that reading it out loud to yourself on the train to try to puzzle it out gets you funny looks.
@Standback
Even odder is that I can buy an Audible edition, although it’s an eye watering thirty quid right now.
I’ve looked it up and I have actually read More Heat Than Light. Good but not great as I remember it. Felt like it was setting up further stories at the expense of the current one.
15) Clipping Service: I see MGC continues its proud tradition of weak man arguments. Seriously I don’t understand why they get worked up about this; there’s zero chance of it happening in the foreseeable future, and even if it did, wouldn’t that be what self-pub is for?
I am also interested in knowing whether Amanda Palmer is eligible for the Campbell. Does anyone know for sure?
@kathodus: is this your first McKillip? If so you have a lot of good fantasy available to read, all of it a subtle, quiet relief from the overdone work that seems common today.
@Paul Weimer: I do like the formulation that if you are no longer eligible for the Campbell, you really can’t be considered “emerging” any longer. I think that might be a little too restrictive; some authors take longer to become notable. (e.g., I didn’t think much of any of McGuire’s early novels but gave her a second look after a very impressive set of shorter works nominated for Hugos a few years ago. Or consider Tepper’s first two True Game trilogies, and contrast with the Marianne books.) Maybe we need another word for someone who is rapidly improving? The Omni list certainly abuses the word….
People have noted McGuire’s recent awards; Kay got the World Fantasy Award nine years ago. Of the nine prior novels listed in the front of the first edition of Ysabel, I thought three were good-story-weakly-told and six were good-to-excellent. @steve davidson’s discussion makes clear that Omni isn’t worth following unless I’m in the mood for … random … polls.
If you already know whom you want to nominate for the Campbell, then the Writertopia list is a good way to verify that that person actually is eligible. (Writertopia is actually the first link on the page.) But if you’re trying to pick someone to nominate, the RSR list is handy because it lets you glance through stories you already read and say “Oh, was he/she a new writer?” and put a list together that way.
If someone has compiled the equivalent list for eligible writers based on novels they’ve published, we’d be happy to include a link to it.
In the “please let it be good” department:
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/terry-pratchetts-discworld-novel-wee-free-men-heading-to-cinemas
@Joe : I hope so! Strangely I found the TV-productions somewhat lacking. Which is strange – they are good translations of the books, they have the same story, they generaly have good actors – but they are somwhat boring? And not funny. I guess translating a book to a movie does need some changes.
The Felltraders of Endor
(Its “Planet-appreciation-month” for me)
Peer Sylvester:
I, too, found the TV versions of Pratchett oddly boring. I think it must be something about the strong narrative voice, third person sardonic. A filmed version really needs some way to get that quality in without a narrator.
Second-hand book reports, from Mr Dr Science: of Brian Aldiss’s latest, “Apes and Angels” his review is basically “O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” He found it terribly disappointing in every way. He also read “United States of Japan” by Peter Tieryas, and found it arbitrary and self-indulgent as alternate history — and then felt that it fell apart in the last third in plotting, writing, and editing. Both of these he recommended that I not read.
“The Devourer of Gods: Viking Magic in the New World” by Thomas de Mayo was (in theory) *completely* up Mr Dr Science’s alley, but hampered by spotty grammar, word usage, and editing. I may read the next time I crave something that’s not SF.
I didn’t get to the library yesterday, where “Dark Matter” and “Children of Time” are waiting for us, so when Mr Dr started moaning “Boooook! I need a book!” he search our shelves for a re-read and now is in “First Lensman”.
If Amanda Palmer were eligible for the Campbell, that would be very interesting.
(Sorry!)
Ada Palmer, on the other hand: I have never heard of any other fiction by her, and her website does not seem to list any, so I think she’s eligible, in the absence of further evidence.
The fact that her book stops in medias res (actually, when it’s stopping, perhaps that should be in mediis rebus, but anyway) does seem to make it a bad candidate for Best Novel, and is perhaps an argument for the series award, but I don’t think it should be a problem for nominating her for the Campbell.
I think what Greg is doing should be especially helpful, since at the moment authors of novels do tend to dominate the Campbell – which is understandable, but perhaps inappropriate, given that the award is supposed to honour a magazine editor. So it’s a good idea to have our attention directed to eligible short fiction.
I’ve said it here before–a very large percentage of the charm and deepness of Terry Pratchett’s books is in the exposition and description, not in the spoken dialog. Take that away, and you are left with something much more mundane. Take for instance the (almost) opening paragraphs of Wee Free Men:
Translate this to a movie scene: there’s a girl lying on the ground with her hand in the water. There’ s a younger boy playing nearby.
Movies are almost always a pale shadow of the books they are based on.
@ Paul Weimer
If Campbell eligibility were triggered only by novels, I might agree with you, but since one can lose Campbell eligibility on the basis of a single short story in an obscure anthology, I’d like to allow the possibility of a longer period of emergence.
The “emerging” lists that have always annoyed me is when the people on the list have been around a long time but people like the list-maker were simply ignoring them as not worthy of notice.
@steve davidson: The only good thing about those terms seem to be that the license you grant would be nonexclusive. I’m not sure what “fully paid” means in this context, but it probably just means you can’t ask them for money, as they’ve fully paid you $0. Overall: bleah.
@Doctor Science: Hmm:
I’m picturing a shambling zombie looking for a book, instead of brains, to eat. 😉 I’m curious what he/you think of Dark Matter when whichever of you read it, BTW.
@ steve davidson
So, in other words, clickbait.
@Chip Hitchcock – I’m pretty sure this is my first McKillip, though I could possibly have encountered her books in high school. I doubt it, though, as there aren’t enough ‘splodey dragons on the cover to have enticed teenage me. I started The Riddle Master of Hed because of strong recommendations from Filers. I think I’ll go straight to the third novel in the trilogy, rather than taking a break. “Quiet and subtle” is a good way to describe her writing. The climax scene, jurer gur qrnq xvatf bs Ury ner tngurerq va Nahva naq Enrqreyr ernyvmrf ure unys-sbezrq cyna unf tbar pbzcyrgryl njel, jnf n terng pbzovangvba bs uhzbe naq qernq. Napvrag haqrnq xvatf nf fcbvyrq, frysvfu oengf – cresrpg, ohg jub jbhyq unir gubhtug bs vg?
I think I’ll go straight to the third novel in the trilogy, rather than taking a break.
You’re going to want to read the second one first.
Now they have renamed lefse roll to “lutefisk taco”!
Or maybe it’s a lutefisk burrito. (Fish tacos are a thing, but they generally use soft flour tortillas and aren’t rolled.)
@kathodus: Sorry, I didn’t see that you earlier had said you were already reading the second book.
@Aaron – I’m assuming that’s dry humor, but just in case, let me clear up – I just finished the second one. I read the first at some point in 2016 (I forget exactly when). I ended up very confused at the beginning of book 2, partly because the character names are alien to me (I can’t tell off the bat who is male or female for one thing, which isn’t a huge deal, except that it means I have to pay more attention to names than I normally do, or I get lost. By the time I was half way through book two, having skimmed the character list at the back of the book and read a couple synopses of the first novel’s plot on the internet, I was comfortable within the world, again. That, plus the sheer enjoyment of reading McKillip’s prose, is enough to make me want to just dive back in. Plus, I’m not reading two 500+ page novels in the same world, by the same writer, in a row – each one is less than 300 pages.
Lastly (I just remembered this), I was wondering as I read the first two books if the over-arching plot would depend upon some sort of rules-based mythological logic, where the characters all have their destinies and are mostly along for the ride. On the one hand, that’s kind of the case (destiny-wise), but the line Deth utters, “gurl jrer cebzvfrq n zna bs crnpr” blew me away. Fhqqrayl Qrgu’f npgvbaf znqr frafr bhgfvqr fbzr fbeg bs frzv-rfbgrevp zlgu (jurer gur fgbel vf yrff vzcbegnag guna gur yrffbaf vg grnpurf, naq lbh fhfcrpg gung nal shegure ynlref bs zrnavat cregnva zbfgyl gb ybat-ybfg evghnyf be gur yvxr). It was a thunderclap moment. I’d thoroughly enjoyed the two books up until then, but that line took the series to a whole new level for me.
If that last part makes no sense, I can think about it some more and attempt to clarify.
My apologies for somewhat arbitrarily-applied ROT-13 (not sure that’s even necessary with this series and this crowd, but would rather be safe than sorry).
I have to say, it’s pretty cool that Deth’s line, in ROT-13, starts with “Gurl…”
@Aaron – no worries.