(1) CONSUMER COMPLAINT. io9’s Germain Lussier reveals, “Rey Is Missing From New Star Wars Monopoly, And This Is Becoming a Real Problem”.
The problems of female characters being under-represented in geek merchandise is real. But when it’s a secondary character like Gamora or Black Widow, at least toy companies have an excuse. When the girl is not just the star of the movie, but of the whole franchise, that’s another story.
That character, of course, is Rey, the main character of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and the latest problem has to do with Hasbro’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens Monopoly. In the game, the four playable characters are Luke Skywalker, Finn, Darth Vader and Kylo Ren. No Rey.
(2) REWRITING CULTURE. Laurie Penny’s New Statesman post “What to do when you’re not the hero anymore”, while not about marketing oversights, covers some reasons why they should be taken seriously.
Capitalism is just a story. Religion is just a story. Patriarchy and white supremacy are just stories. They are the great organising myths that define our societies and determine our futures, and I believe – I hope – that a great rewriting is slowly, surely underway. We can only become what we can imagine, and right now our imagination is being stretched in new ways. We’re learning, as a culture, that heroes aren’t always white guys, that life and love and villainy and victory might look a little different depending on who’s telling it. That’s a good thing. It’s not easy – but nobody ever said that changing the world was going to be easy.
I learned that from Harry Potter.
(3) GATES KEEPERS. Bill Gates says “The Best Books I Read in 2015” included Randall Munroe’s bestseller —
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, by Randall Munroe. The brain behind XKCD explains various subjects—from how smartphones work to what the U.S. Constitution says—using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language and blueprint-style diagrams. It is a brilliant concept, because if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t really understand it. Munroe, who worked on robotics at NASA, is an ideal person to take it on. The book is filled with helpful explanations and drawings of everything from a dishwasher to a nuclear power plant. And Munroe’s jokes are laugh-out-loud funny. This is a wonderful guide for curious minds.
(4) PHILISTINE TASTE. Cracked delivers “6 Great Novels that Were Hated in Their Time”. Number one on the list – The Lord of the Rings.
The New Republic described the book and its characters as “anemic, and lacking in fiber” which was apparently a real burn back then in the pre-Cheerios days.
(5) TEA TIME. Ann Leckie talks about “Special Teas”.
I am cleaning and organizing my tea cupboard because SHUT UP I DON’T HAVE A NOVEL TO WRITE YOU HAVE A NOVEL TO WRITE that’s why. Also, it had gotten to be quite a disorganized mess and I wasn’t sure what I still had. (Yes, the cats are up next, just gotta remember where I stowed the dust buster.)
Anyway. I came across a sad reminder of Specialteas.com. They were an online tea seller, and they had an East Frisian Broken Blend that was my go-to super nice and chewy for putting milk in tea, and they had a lovely, very grapefruity earl grey.
(6) SHE BLINKED. A video of Ursula K. Le Guin celebrating Christmas Eve at the Farm.
(7) OPEN FOR SUBMISSONS. Apex Magazine has reopened for short fiction submissions. Poetry submissions will remained closed at this time. Apex Magazine’s submission guidelines and the link to its online submissions form can be found here.
(8) COVER WEBSITE TO CLOSE. Terry Gibbons’ site Visco – the visual catalogue of science fiction cover art will go away when its domain name expires February 9, unless someone else wants to take over hosting responsibilities. He posted thousands of images online before moving on to other projects in 2005 – and for the moment, they can still be seen there.
I have tried to find time to do something about Visco at intervals since then but matters came to a head when I got a new Windows 10 computer recently and realised that I no longer have the technology to maintain it. It was developed on a Windows 95 platform – remember that? – using Internet Explorer 3 and such and I guess it is a miracle that it is still accessible at all. But none of the software I used to build it now works on my current machine, so I cannot develop it further even if I had the time.
I could leave Visco sitting there indefinitely, or until advancing technology renders it unusable, but it costs a certain amount of money to run and, more to the point, it is a constant reminder of past glories. So I have decided to let it go to that place in cyberspace where once-loved web sites go to die.
(9) READING RODDENBERRY’S DATA. Joe Otterson at Yahoo! News tells how “’Star Trek’ Creator Gene Roddenberry’s Lost Data Recovered From 200 Floppy Disks”.
Although Roddenberry died in 1991, it wasn’t until much later that his estate discovered nearly 200 5.25-inch floppy disks. One of his custom-built computers had long since been auctioned and the remaining device was no longer functional.
But these were no ordinary floppies. The custom-built computers had also used custom-built operating systems and special word processing software that prevented any modern method of reading what was on the disks.
After receiving the computer and the specially formatted floppies, DriveSavers engineers worked to develop a method of extracting the data.
(10) SIDEBAR TO AXANAR. Kane Lynch’s article in comics form, “Final Frontiers: Star Trek fans take to the Internet to film their own episodes of the original series”, is based on an interview with someone who’s worked on both New Voyages and Star Trek Continues.
(11) BENFORD ON NEW HORIZONS. Click to read Gregory Benford’s contribution to Edge’s roundup “2016: What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent [Scientific] News? What Makes It Important?”
The most long-range portentous event of 2015 was NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft arrowing by Pluto, snapping clean views of the planet and its waltzing moon system. It carries an ounce of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes, commemorating his discovery of Pluto in 1930. Tombaugh would have loved seeing the colorful contrasts of this remarkable globe, far out into the dark of near-interstellar space. Pluto is now a sharply-seen world, with much to teach us.
As the spacecraft zooms near an iceteroid on New Year’s Day, 2019, it will show us the first member of the chilly realm beyond, where primordial objects quite different from the wildly eccentric Pluto also dwell. These will show us what sort of matter made up the early disk that clumped into planets like ours—a sort of family tree of worlds. But that’s just an appetizer….
(12) PU 238. The Washington Post reports the U.S. has resumed making plutonium-238, in “This is the fuel NASA needs to make it to the edge of the solar system – and beyond”.
Just in time for the new year, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have unveiled the fruits of a different kind of energy research: For the first time in nearly three decades, they’ve produced a special fuel that scientists hope will power the future exploration of deep space.
The fuel, known as plutonium-238, is a radioactive isotope of plutonium that’s been used in several types of NASA missions to date, including the New Horizons mission, which reached Pluto earlier in 2015. While spacecraft can typically use solar energy to power themselves if they stick relatively close to Earth, missions that travel farther out in the solar system — where the sun’s radiation becomes more faint — require fuel to keep themselves moving.
(13) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS
- Born January 4, 1785 – Jacob Grimm, the older of the two Grimm brothers. Wilhelm was born the following year.
Tales in the Grimm brothers’ collection include “Hansel and Gretel,” “Snow White,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Rapunzel,” and “Rumpelstiltskin.” The brothers developed the tales by listening to storytellers and attempting to reproduce their words and techniques as faithfully as possible. Their methods helped establish the scientific approach to the documentation of folklore. The collection became a worldwide classic.
- Born January 4, 1643 – Sir Isaac Newton. Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me…
(14) ZSIGMOND OBIT. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who won an Oscar for his achievements in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and worked on a long list of major productions, died January 1 at the age of 85.
His genre credits included The Time Travelers (1964) directed by Ib Melchior, The Monitors (1969) based on Keith Laumer’s novel, Real Genius (1985), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), and The Mists of Avalon TV miniseries based on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novel.
(15) THE YEAR IN COMPLAINTS. The Book Smugglers continue Smugglivus 2015 with “The Airing of Grievances”. (I’m getting a migraine from looking at those GIFS, and I don’t get migraines, just saying…)
SOMEONE IS (ALWAYS) WRONG ON THE INTERNET – PART II: THE SFF EDITION
Speaking of awards: Another BIG thing in SFF fandom happened when the World Fantasy award announced that it would be remodeling its award statuette, which had been a bust of the late HP Lovecraft’s face. (Lovecraft, if you did not know, was an openly venomous racist in his personal opinions and in his writings–both fiction and nonfiction.) This news–from one of the most prestigious international awards for Fantasy and speculative fiction, no less!–was a long time coming, and many of us within the SFF community celebrated this move… but there were people who were SUPER upset. Because, you know, by not using Lovecraft’s face on the award, we were all like ERASING HIM FROM HISTORY FOREVER LIKE MAGIC. Or something.
(16) MORE FEEDBACK. After what others have written about reconciliation this past week, the Mad Genius Club’s Dave Freer sounds practically mellow.
…To the other side this is life or death important. The clique of Trufen who pushed their favorites (and they’re a small, interconnected socio-politically homogenous group of the same people, over and over) have some short term motives in doing exactly what they did last year and the years before. Long term, for anyone with an intellect above gerbil there is a strong motive for the Trufen in general to get rid of that clique and to reach some kind of accommodation with the Sad Puppies. But that clique are powerful and nasty and regard WorldCon and the Hugos as theirs. They have no interest in a future that they do not control completely.
I don’t see the foresight or commitment to take any of the painful (to them) steps they’d have to take to give the Sad or Rabid Puppies a motive for reconciliation, to get them to sharing motives like going to WorldCon. As a writer I simply don’t see characters of sufficient strength or integrity who have the vision or the following to take those steps.
Besides this an election year, both sides will be heated and angry.
We all love sf.
But the motives for our actions are very different.
I am glad I don’t have to write a happy ending for this one. It’d take a clever author to do it convincingly.
(17) RECONCILIATION. Don’t be misled by the placement — I doubt Freer or Gerrold are commenting about each other, just about the same topic. David Gerrold wrote today on Facebook:
…I know that some people have talked about reconciliation — and that’s a good thing. But other people have pointed out why reconciliation is impossible, because for them, the past is still unresolved. I understand that — but rehearsing the past does not take you into the future, it just gets you more of the past.
The only conversation I would be interested in having is not about who’s right and who’s wrong, who should be blamed, and who needs to crawl naked over broken glass to apologize.
No. What a colossal waste of time.
The only conversation worth having is about what you want to build and how you want to get there — stick to the issues and leave the personalities out of this…
(18) PRE CGI. It’s like seeing a star with and without makeup. Bright Side has large format color photos comparing the scenes in “17 favorite movies before and after visual effects”.
(19) GET YOUR RED HOT FOMAX. Charles Rector heartily endorses his fanzine Fomax #7 [PDF file] hosted at eFanzines. Among other things, it has 8 movie reviews and a fair number of LOC’s.
[Thanks to Eli, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Nigel.]
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I’m pretty sure I got the Wright’s Golden Oecumene trilogy in the American Book Shop in Leuven, which sadly closed ten years ago. I don’t think I have since seen any book by Correia, Wright, Torgersen or Williamson on the shelves of a Belgian bookstore.
[1] Lego makes a set with a Rey figure on her little landspeeder thing. Purchased for Christmas.
[16]
Interesting how he’s borrowed GRRM’s “Trufen” terminology without seeming to understand it. What evidence have the Sads ever had that a small, homogenous group is controlling the Hugos? The No Awarding of the slates should have put this lie to rest for good, but they just keep on repeating it, and repeating it, and repeating it…
Anyway, Mr. Freer, if my long time active in fandom makes me one of the Trufen, I also know for a fact I am not part of a small cabal that controls the Hugos (as proof, I predict that my 2015 book will completely fail to be nominated for one) so I MUST be exactly who you’re talking about. And I’m perfectly willing to reach some kind of accommodation with the Sad Puppies.
It requires the Sad Puppies to do three things: 1. Stop attempting to cheat the Hugo nominations with slate voting, 2. Stop acting like jerks toward everyone else in fandom, calling us names, etc. 3. Accept that people have a variety of tastes and opinions, and that if, for example, Hugo voters like a work you don’t personally care for, this is not evidence of conspiracy or shenanigans.
Is that enough accommodation for you? Or is it only accommodation if I agree to tolerate, without complaint, all of the above?
@ThirteenthLetter
Yeah, it was preeeeeetty obvious you posted that first comment just so you could post this second comment. What you really found here was almost universal “meh, individual bookstore owners can do what they like” but if you want to characterize that as “blacklisting” and “removing their works from all stores based on their political opinions” go right ahead and pull up your fainting couch.
Oh, my! What HAVE we become? (Puts hand to forehead, sinks to floor)
You got that right, but it was an easy guess.
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
As an American who is pretty happy with our first amendment, thank you very much, I would like to make a distinction between real Constitutional protections, like what the ACLU or the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund fight for, and the “wahhh, other people told me I was acting like a jerk, that suppresses my freeeeeeedom” whining so many are prone to.
The latter is common among right wingers who HATE the ACLU. Their vision of freedom is basically that of a narcissistic toddler: freedom is when I get to do what I want and nobody else gets to say boo about it.
This might be of interest:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/art-science-fiction-tickets-19838214634
Henry Moore Lecture Theatre
Leeds City Art Gallery
9 January 2016
9:00 – 17:00
Brian Catling [ Keynote ]
Mark von Schlegell [ Keynote ]
Milena Dragicevic
Maxine Gee
Nathaniel Mellors
[1] As far as I can tell from my last couple of trips down the Target toy aisles, Lego is pretty much the only place find Rey. Or General Organa, for that matter.
@ThirteenthLetter
Let’s be clear here:
1. Blacklisting does not mean what you think it means.
2. Think your way through. Do you see a similar issue for mandating that a Christian bookstore must stock pro-choice (by your metric, a “political” view) books? If you don’t, can you explain why there’s a distinction? If you do, can you explain why a private enterprise is somehow obligated to stock certain items – that they have no right to exercise their speech (ie, to stock items based on “politics”)?
Well now I have an idea for the only books to be banned in Ireland and a specific chain of bookshops…
Thirteenthletter:
No. Based on their hateful, homophobic screeds. Don’t you find the writing of John C Wright reprehensible? That says a lot about you.
@James: I wouldn’t be surprised if the source of the rumors were Another Story telling someone that they don’t stock those authors anyway (or that they wouldn’t without checking that they didn’t).
Also, when did Pages reopen? 😉
I passed by a Toronto Indigo (Yonge & Eglinton for the Torontonians) on my way from the dentist to work this morning. Two titles each for Wright (Tor) and Correia – in both cases their latest hardcover and their latest paperback. A shelf and a half for David Weber….
Back to lurking and catching up on my 2015 reading.
@Thirteenthletter, I don’t think you’re seeing what you expected to see – joyous support of blacklisting a small group of right wing authors for being right wing authors – but that isn’t stopping you from reaching your foregone conclusions.
As a modified free marketeer with libertarian leanings, in this thought experiment I’m coming down firmly on the side of businesses acting from self interest. In addition, I take a pretty strict view of First Amendment protections and do not believe that free speech is protected from consequences in the marketplace.
@Michael Eochaidh: I hadn’t checked in on Pages recently, and went by the fact that their website is still up, but in checking more closely it looks like it is still gone. (Similarly, I notice that This Ain’t the Rosedale Library still has their website up despite having been gone for over five years).
If people went to bookstores and threatened to burn them down if they carried “inappropriate books,” then that really would be reprehensible. But going to a bookstore, showing them some of the “ax handles and tire irons” quotes, and asking if they realized that’s the sort of author they’re supporting is a perfectly legitimate use of free speech. The owner is able to hear both sides and make up his or her own mind.
I’ll add, from my time as an activist for GLAAD, that getting a merchant to stop selling a product or a radio show to remove syndicated material is a really hard sell. They’ll listen politely, but unless you can get people to picket outside the place, they’re unlikely to actually do anything.
I can’t find a single work by Noam Chomsky* in either of the two bookshops nearest me. Clearly, this is nothing to do with Chomsky not being a hot seller; it must be politically or personally motivated boycotting. I hope Thirteenthletter will join me in condemning this suppression of free speech and free thought. I am brutally prevented from reading the works of Chomsky! – unless I, y’know, order a copy or something.
*(First marginally contentious person who popped into my head. I studied linguistics, once upon a time, and you heard a lot about Chomsky if you did that.)
(1) CONSUMER COMPLAINT
I have decided I am just not going to buy any “Force Awakens” merchandising that leaves out Rey (when multiple other characters are included).
The erasure of female characters from recent movie tie-in merchandise even in this case where she is the hero and center of the film is, frankly, deeply disturbing to anyone who cares about women, girls, toys, and representation.
So, no garments with group pix of the cast that leave out Rey, no toy sets that leave her out, and no bloody Hasbro “Monopoly” sets (Shame, Hasbro, shame!).
It occurs to me that the author most likely to be affected by this is Wright (he of “tire-iron” fame). You know, the guy who got involved with the boycott of his own publisher (Tor), and who offered to send electronic copies of his books to people who did not want to buy them from Tor.
Does his Super Genius publisher have print editions of any of his work? I didn’t see any available on Amazon.
The Chapters Indigo website has plenty of Correia, Torgersen and JCW books for sale, to name the three I just looked up there. If someone high up in the company wanted them gone, removing them from the database would go a lot faster than yanking them from the shelves. Chapters Indigo has previously gone the “we’re not selling this book, if you want it you can buy a copy somewhere else” route in the past, so I don’t think any Puppy authors are in danger of seeing their books withdrawn from sale by this particular seller.
ThirteenthLetter :
I’d be worried if there was a systematic threat to punish or threaten booksellers who carried Puppy authors. But, even given the spotty hearsay evidence, there’s no such threat – instead, booksellers are merely being made familiar with the antics of the Puppies and making their own decisions.
What you’re objecting to is the idea that people are being held accountable by others and judged on what they’ve said and done.
I didn’t know Canada had a First Amendment, too. Interesting.
It also seems from the anecdata that the “banned” books are still in bookshops – which is fine, it’s up to the owners to decide what to stock/not stock and you’d expect most to base that on commercial decisions – low selling = no/limited shelf space, I’d think.
More puppies chasing their own tales, again, it seems to me.
(1) CONSUMER COMPLAINT. – FYI, the io9 article has been updated with a response from Hasbro (to an eight year old):
https://twitter.com/HasbroNews/status/684205970248089600/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
In case that doesn’t appear, it boils down to a desire not to spoil stuff (as the game was released in Sept) and that more Rey stuff will be coming in the future.
Personally, I still think the Rey with her staff would have been a better fit.
Bilaterally symmetrical heterotrophs!
I mean, I think it’s kind of fadish and won’t last, but I’m into this “eat stuff” scene while it’s cool.
In case that doesn’t appear, it boils down to a desire not to spoil stuff
Which is a really flimsy argument, since Rey appeared as a main character in several trailers prior to the release of the game.
Another thought on the (apparently largely imaginary) latest kerpupple…
On the one side, we have a speculative account that some booksellers in some city may have decided not to stock certain Hugo-nominated* authors.
On the other side, people are reporting that they see those authors’ books on the shelves in those same bookstores.
1/ This could just be concern-trolling writ large
2/ Even if true, could it be that the works by Torgeson, Correia and Wright are not selling well?
If I were a bookseller, my love, with limited shelf space and ambitions of making a profit this year, I might not want to re-order books that are not moving.
But really, I think this is another fiction from the lord of fantasy and imagined outrage. If these people’s books were half as good as their blog posts, they’d … oh wait, I think I see the problem here.
I’m reminded of when Puppy nominee Jeffro Johnson was shocked and appalled to be told that actions have consequences. I hope this isn’t becoming a Puppy trait.
Of course, in this case, we don’t even know the consequences have happened. A whole lot of fuss over a rumour. I’m quite sure Toronto bookshops are likely to have online presences, email addresses, phone numbers – find out whether there’s any truth to it before throwing a hissy fit.
Correia is selling extremely well as far as I know.
Puppy edit: rob_matic said: I voted Tor.. in the…UK
@ThirteenthLetter: World Net Daily, where Beale used to work, has a store, which sells books along with other things. They carry no works by Marx, Chomsky, Lasch, Huxley (any Huxley – Aldous, Thomas, Elspeth, any of them), Darwin, Myers, Serano, Banks, D.G. Jones, H.R. Jones, Busiek, Gerrold, Due, Luo, Liu, Garcia Marquez, de Beauvoir, the Q author, von Junzt, Navison, or me. You have of course made your concern about this kind of censorship by friends and former colleagues of Beale’s known to the Rapid Puppies, and met with the kind of warm acceptance and immediate action you expected from us, right?
Correia is selling extremely well as far as I know.
Overall, probably. In a local area, maybe or maybe not.
@Rose Embolism: That was a wonderful response.
I really like the pair-of-images-with-slider technique, and always love behind-the-scenes comparisons.
@Chris S: Canada does have an equivalent to the First Amendment, which is the typically-less-catchy Section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and lists “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication” among the “fundamental freedoms” which “everyone has.” (http://web.archive.org/web/20140119183913/http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-15.html) While Canadian courts have traditionally been a bit more willing to allow limited infringements of Charter rights “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society” (Section 1) most arguments that could be made based on the First Amendment could be also be applied to this section of the Charter.
Well, something analogous to the American First Amendment.
The repatriation of the constitution and the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was something that happened within my lifetime. Lacks the mythic elements of the standard stories about the framing of the US constitution as a result. But being able to actually see the messy process was pretty interesting.
As a legacy of Pierre Trudeau, the constitution and charter were loathed by the ReformaTories.
Is this an appropriate moment to mention the Jordan Bassior versus the Canadian Constitution story?
@Matthew and James Nicoll – thanks for that, it’s interesting.
I’m a UKian, which sort-of maybe has a constitution if you look at it funny, although some of it is being codified in various laws as EU directives get put into UK law.
Ugh, I hate when people conflate private entities’ decisions with censorship/suppression of free speech, and then I went ahead and did it. To clarify… the only thing that bothers me is that it sounds like someone is informing store owners about certain authors’ bad behavior. Jim Hines’ roundup, IIRC, is a good source for the actual truth of the kerpupple, but the whole thing reminds me of the Tor boycott. I have no problem at all with bookstore owners deciding not to stock anyone’s books, it’s the activism around informing the owners of who they may not want to stock. ETA: and it bothers me a tiny, tiny bit, in a “well, I wouldn’t do that, but different strokes…” kind of way.
Re the US and the 1st amendment – from what I’ve seen, suppressing hate groups makes them more appealing to the young and rebellious. I think Germany, France, etc., have shot themselves in their collective feet by suppressing neo-fascist groups. Those groups thrive in the dark but whither in the light. However, I’m not from Europe, I’ve never been to Europe. My understanding of the situation is neither thorough nor nuanced.
The US, in particular the Pacific Northwest and now the SF Bay Area, has seen a recent growth in the number of Euro-style anti-fascists, and they are basically the other side of the coin – they have much more in common with their far-right counterparts than with anyone not on the extreme left or right. Like the Puppies, they rely on low-information folk with preconceived notions of what the “bad guys” look like. This has made for a very weird year, for me at least, as I find things I love attacked alternately by crazed conservatives (Puppies)and lunatic liberals (Antifa).
re: Nonsense.
A) I’m pretty sure that the city that elected Rob Ford mayor has a few people who’d appreciate the characterization, plots, and views of Larry Correia.
B) A bookstore can stock whatever it damn well pleases and what will sell. If there’s a cross-fertilization between the sci-fi bookshop and LGBT community in Toronto, I’d expect them to have views on someone who thinks they are degenerates who should be beaten with tire irons. On the other hand, A).
C) Many people have me thinking that JCW’s books are excrement. The English teachers who told me to cut, cut, cut are high the list. Ironically, the priests I had growing up. That we are all children of God was driven into me deeper, and earlier, than “you must hate the homos.” I am deeply thankful for the fortune I had in never having priests who seemed to give a shit about the second, and cared a great deal about the first.
Re: Sense
2) – Really a sparkling read. One of the other things I loved about the movie it references is that they had no problem with having Rey’s eyes blaze with intensity and anger as she did all of her things. Intense. Not the help mate. Perfectly willing to be the strong female character. It’s great
12) – Hard to emphasize what big news this is. The inverse square law says go RTGs or go home, really.
Started reading Lagoon. Really seeing what the freaking fuss is about! Good stuff.
To clarify… the only thing that bothers me is that it sounds like someone is informing store owners about certain authors’ bad behavior.
I’m not sure why it should. Doesn’t that person also have the free speech right to express their opinions? The booksellers don’t have to listen, but I don’t see how anyone who is in favor of free speech could disapprove of this sort of decision to get the word out.
@Kathodus
Europe has had far too much experience with what happens when you allow fascists to thrive in the light and is not so blithely confident that allowing them into it will lead to them withering.
That sounds like a feeble excuse from Hasbro given that Rey was featured prominently in the teasers.
I enjoyed
rather more than its illustrious predecessor, and I am now looking forward to the final volume with some impatience. It’s difficult to explain why without spoiling it, but I do commend it to my fellow filers, as well as the rank.
On the other hand, I did my best to appreciate Stephen Baxter’s Squids in Space, and failed, so it’s just as well it dates from the previous century. He’s strong on science but not on people, even of the squid persuasion, which is how I found myself reflecting that there are worse things to worry about than the heat death of the Universe.
@Aaron – Well, first off, there are many examples of free speech that bother me, from Trump’s xenophobia to TB’s vile conflating of Scalzi and child abusers, and beyond.
And this only bothers me a very little bit. I suspect it only bothers me at all because it reminds me of the tactics I’ve recently seen used by “bad guys” – partisans of some side or other in some minor scuffle in the culture wars taking it upon themselves to “educate” neutral people who don’t have a stake in the battle, and who are therefore very unlikely to verify the veracity of the partisans’ claims. The Tor boycott, Antifa getting small shows canceled because the bands playing are “crypto-fascists”… stuff like that. In this case, yes, if they’re showing the shop owners Hines’ roundup, they are giving a balanced and true account, but it’s still the tactic, the active attempt to keep the books off of shelves, that bothers me.
I personally would probably not stock BT or LC, and most definitely not JCW, Tank Marmot, or LA if I ran a bookstore.
I’d heard that one of the problems with finding the Rey figures in stores (the ones sold individually, not these collections where she’s apparently barred for no good reason) were that they were selling too well to keep in stock.
I have’t seen the movie yet, but if once I have, I were to get one figure or memento, it would probably have General Leia on it. Which it sounds like means a heck of a hunt….
______________
I heard that telling about a supposed TO bookseller, and my first thought was Bakka Phoenix. Which, as noted above by a Torontonian, already knew about the kerpupple. Who has checked and seen at least one of the puppy works on the bookshelves.
Shrug. Free market. Why does the right wing scream at the slightest sign of anyone left wing buying the stuff they like and not buying stuff they don’t like? I’m pretty sure it’s that lovely Free Market idea which is how I own Katherine Addison and Rachel Hartman, and not Larry Correia and John Ringo.
As for the bookstore, I suspect bookstores get such petitions to remove works periodically, and 90% of them are round-filed as soon as the person asking is gone. (A few more are considered a while then round-filed, and a tiny percentage are considered to have merit). If the bookstore CONSISTENTLY doesn’t have books their customers like, they lose business, so they’re not likely to act quickly most times. And if they take one seriously, it’s probably not someone whose sales are keeping them afloat; it’s probably someone on the (common) level “We’ll stock a couple of their books and see what happens”.
Now, if the puppies threw this much outrage behind things like Simon and Schuster and B&N’s fight a while back causing multiple books by completely innocent authors to not be stocked in major bookstores — pretty literally destroying careers — then it might be useful energy.
Feeble indeed. Seems that they could have included Leia if that was really the concern rather than make the game a total sausage-fest. They could have included her instead of Finn and not spoiled us all about his allegiances, you know, if they weren’t just back-peddling with bs right now.
To be fair to HasBro, they haven’t yet managed the level of erasure for Rey they did for Black Widow. At least I haven’t yet seen the toy which replaces her character with one of the male cast members in a scene – which they did do to BW. On the other hand, they did include BW in Avengers Monopoly.
@The Young Pretender: Glad you are liking Lagoon! If I may try to be helpful — the glossary at the back, while priceless, is not really complete, so I spent some time looking up Nigerian Pidgin English, Yoruba, and Igbo expressions on the internet and created a Supplement to the Glossary.
@Meredith
I wouldn’t describe myself as blithely confident in that. Outlawing neo-fascis idealogies (to broadly cover Nazis, fascists, etc.) doesn’t seem to be working, either, though maybe the current problems would be worse if that wasn’t the case?
On the one hand, it’s good to know what arguments eg Holocaust deniers make, so they can be debunked. Same with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out neo-nazis, so antisemitic examples are the first to come to mind). But you have to be able to publicly discuss the issue to debunk those claims. That’s the light I’m referencing.
On the other hand, the Holocaust deniers I’ve known simply find new places to repeat their debunked claims, over and over again, so those debunking them have to repeat themselves over and over again, which is exhausting. And if the people who know the truth feel like they’ve done their part and have no more spoons to continue debunking, that’s very dangerous.
The UK may not have a constitution but it does have the Human Rights Act. Until our enlightened rulers repeal it.
Peace:
“That sounds like a feeble excuse from Hasbro given that Rey was featured prominently in the teasers.”
I imagine Disney could probably clear up all of this with a simple one line press release.
“We didn’t want anyone to know who the new Jedi would be.”
If they were really pressed for information, they could mention that they purposefully directed that the trailers be cut in such a way as to make Finn appear to be the more prominent character because the natural inclination of most viewers of the trailers would be to suspect that Finn was going to be the new Jedi, considering that one of them very prominently displayed him with a lightsaber in his hand squaring off against Kylo Ren.
Which is very likely why they had him with Kylo Ren along with Luke and Vader as the characters in this game.
Peace:
“That sounds like a feeble excuse from Hasbro given that Rey was featured prominently in the teasers.”
I imagine Disney could probably clear up all of this with a simple one line press release.
“We didn’t want anyone to know who the new Jedi was going to be.”
If they were really pressed for information, they could mention that they purposefully directed that the trailers be cut in such a way as to make Finn appear to be the more prominent character because the natural inclination of most viewers of the trailers would be to suspect that Finn was going to be the new Jedi, especially considering that one of them very prominently displayed him with a lightsaber in his hand squaring off against Kylo Ren.
Which is very likely why they had him with Kylo Ren along with Luke and Vader as the characters in this game.
This. Also, the absolute view of the freedom of speech makes protecting people from harrassment hard – from the Westboro Baptist Church to Gamergate.
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan – True.
I am puzzled by VD’s failure to claim that he intended to get booted off Goodreads; can it be that he hopes that spurious stories by unnamed people about unnamed book shops will divert attention from his latest debacle?