(1) WE’RE BACK. “Odysseus becomes first US spacecraft to land on moon in over 50 years” – CNN not only has the story, they enlisted Captain Kirk – William Shatner – to help tell it on the air.
The US-made Odysseus lunar lander has made a touchdown on the moon, surpassing its final key milestones — and the odds — to become the first commercial spacecraft to accomplish such a feat, but the condition of the lander remains in question.
Intuitive Machines, however, says the mission has been successful.
“I know this was a nail-biter, but we are on the surface, and we are transmitting,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus just announced on the webcast. “Welcome to the moon.”
Odysseus is the first vehicle launched from the United States to land on the moon’s surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Mission controllers from Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that developed the robotic explorer, confirmed the lander reached the lunar surface Thursday evening….
…After some intense waiting, Intuitive Machines, the company behind the Odysseus lunar landing mission, has confirmed the spacecraft is “upright and starting to send data.”
That’s a major milestone…
(2) 2023 BUSINESS MEETING MINUTES POSTED. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] The 2023 WSFS Business Meeting minutes are now available at the WSFS rules page.
All documents are updated except the Resolutions of Rulings of Continuing Effect, which are still being reviewed by the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee.
(3) HELP PAY TRIBUTE TO STEVE MILLER. Sharon Lee is asking people to send Locus their recollections about her husband, Steve Miller, who died on February 20. This link should work: [email protected].
(4) THE YEAR’S BEST AFRICAN SPECULATIVE FICTION VOLUME THREE: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS. The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction Volume Three anthology is now open to submissions through March 31, 2024. See full guidelines at the link.
This next volume of the series covers works originally published in 2023. It will be published with a release date of late 2024 under the Caezik SF & Fantasy imprint (Arc Manor).
Editors for this volume are Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Chinaza Eziaghighala.
(5) LINK Q&A. “Interview: Kelly Link on Writing Her First Novel” at New York Magazine.
How did you intellectually and practically and physically and spiritually transition from writing short stories to writing a rather long novel?
Even if one is a short-story writer at heart, this is a world of novels. This is a world where readers love novels, which I get. I love them too. But if you’re a short-story writer, any time that you are talking with somebody, they will say, “Well, have you ever thought about writing a novel?”
My husband and I ran a small press for a couple of decades. I had the enormous privilege of working with a bunch of writers on novels. I also, in my writing life, have a group of friends that I meet with, sometimes on a daily basis, and they are all novelists. We spend a lot of our time talking about the possibilities that novels present to a writer. And I love their books. I get to read them when they’re working on them. And eventually, if you’re me, at least, you start to think, Well, what could I do at this length? My very good friend, one of the writers that I work with, Holly Black, said to me about nine years ago, “If you don’t intentionally write a novel, you will write one by accident. And so you might as well plan out how to do it intentionally.”
(6) MYMAN ON THE 2023 HUGOS. Francesca Myman, who attended the Chengdu Worldcon, has written several illuminating posts about the current Hugo Award crisis.
Here’s the first post from February 16:
…The thing that gets me is, if they truly believed they were taking care of people’s safety, and they couldn’t possibly think about it creatively and find other solutions because {reasons}, they were remarkably blasé about a lack of reasonable guidance.
And it does seem that the internal justification was safety. On June 7 Kat Jones says “I’m pointing out examples of both that I find for these fan writers out of an abundance of caution, because I’m assuming we’re talking about the safety of our Chinese con-running friends when we’re making these evaluations. Maybe any fan writer concerns can be mitigated by asking them to curate their voter packet materials with our Chinese friends’ safety in mind?” Of course, “I’m assuming” isn’t the same thing as “I’m asking” and no answers are given.
Then in the February 3 interview, when Chris Barkley asked if people were likely to be endangered on some sort of social or physical level, Dave’s response was some aggrandizing bluster about “the friends I would make and how much I love them and how much I would set myself on fire for them if I needed to,” which inappropriately puts the blame for everything underhanded and weaselly and inexcusable that he did into the laps of the very people he’s claiming to protect.
I’m not here to say Chinese censorship doesn’t exist, we ourselves had to comply with regulations and couldn’t sell magazines and books at Worldcon and it did cause me a considerable amount of stress (and to be fair it was incredibly difficult to obtain any information about exactly what we needed to do to be in compliance, things like whether or not we were allowed to sell digital subscriptions and the actual problem was physical materials sold on site, or whether no sales at all were permitted), but the active participation of Westerners in hand-selecting targets for censorship is stomach-churning….
The second post appeared on February 17:
Soooo while I do think you should read my last long-but-important post about the Hugos, literally the MOST important news about what happened to the Hugos is this: Vajra Chandrasekera on Bluesky linked to a Chinese language post by “zionius” explaining that the supposed “slate” of Chinese voters that was removed from the voting was actually the result of a recommended list from Chinese publication Science Fiction World, their most respected and popular magazine. To be clear, a close analogy is if people removed a batch of Hugo votes from the voting process because they were listed in the Locus Recommended Reading List and voters had too-similar patterns because of that. A recommended reading list is NOT a slate.
Apparently there were one to nine recommendations per SF World category including both Chinese and non-Chinese creators. I suppose the “one recommendation” category, whatever that was, could be tough — but nine recommendations? That’s quite normal for a recommended reading list. The readership of SF World is vast, way higher than Locus, let me tell you that (Chandrasekera claims it’s bigger than that of every western SF magazine put together which seems plausible to me), so they have a ton of influence, but that doesn’t make it illegal….
The third post came out on February 19:
…If McCarty DID receive an earlier heads-up — I’m envisioning something like “you must remove these things because their inclusion will harm us” — we have no way to be sure. And it’s possible I’m wrong here. We lack a WHOLE lot of papertrail, and it’s probably not the worst thing we don’t have it, in terms of all the aforementioned safety concerns.
About which I would like to add: I imagined that if I had been in the committee’s position I would have been most worried about someone saying something about “Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, negatives of China” onstage. But I don’t really have a basis to determine the impact of speeches, so. . .
. . .I asked an expat friend yesterday what the consequences would be if someone, for example, used the Worldcon stage to opine on the political situation in Taiwan, and got an “eek” face emoji.
Eek face emoji situation, I guess. Here’s what he said, which I found particularly illuminating:
“The entire community would face repercussions. Outright censoring, problems for the organizers, attracting Beijing’s ire. The government liaison who helped bring this thing to Chengdu would have severe career blowback and would either lose position or have to pivot and punish to save themselves. It would be a very selfish thing to do and would hurt the Chinese sci fi community significantly. Think of what happened when Bjork called out ‘Free Tibet!’ She said that one phrase on a stage in Beijing and for a decade + afterwards there was a massive crackdown on all artist performances and a massive impoverishment of live music in general. All the festivals struggled. Probably the most damaging thing done to China’s live music scene in the modern era. And Bjork did it because she didn’t know or care about consequences, she just wanted to say her piece. Because the West teaches Westerners that we are morally superior to everyone else and have a right or obligation to ‘speak truth to power’ especially in non white non European places.”
So based on this and other research I absolutely believe safety concerns were real. Which is why I keep coming back around to the point that the best way of handling that was just letting the rules play out and letting Chinese voters take the lead as they were meant to.
(7) ANOTHER ONE ON THE SHELF. “Stephen King Is Baffled by Decision To Keep New Salem’s Lot Movie on the Shelf” reports Comingsoon.net.
Salem’s Lot Still in Limbo
Back in November of 2023, King championed the adaptation of his celebrated vampire novel, saying it had a feeling of ”Old Hollywood” to it. The movie was originally due to be released in 2022, and then in the Spring of 2023, where it lost its spot on the calendar to Warner horror stablemate Evil Dead Rise.
Then came the SAG-AFTRA strike, which reportedly caused Warner Bros. to reconsider a theatrical release altogether, subsequently being eyed for a streaming debut on Max. However, a Warner spokesperson told Variety that ”No decision has been made about the film’s future distribution plans.”
Yet nothing else has been said about the film’s status since.
King isn’t feeling all that patient with Warner Bros. and has once again reiterated his praise for the film while failing to hide his bafflement at its continued release limbo.
”Between you and me, Twitter, I’ve seen the new SALEM’S LOT, and it’s quite good. Old-school horror filmmaking: slow build, big payoff. Not sure why WB is holding it back; not like it’s embarrassing, or anything. Who knows. I just write the fucking things.”…
(8) PRODUCTION ALMOST SHUTTERED, NOW OSCAR CONTENDER. The Hollywood Reporter found out “Why Megan Ellison Saved the Animated Film ‘Nimona’”.
In January of 2021, Megan Ellison got a call from Erik Lomis, the former head of distribution at her company, Annapurna Pictures, asking if she’d like to take a look at a movie whose filmmakers needed a lifeline. Disney was days away from announcing that it planned to shutter Blue Sky Studios, the 500-person, Greenwich, Connecticut-based animation studio it had inherited in the 2019 Fox acquisition, and with that closure, the Burbank media giant would be dropping Blue Sky’s most promising movie, Nimona.
“I wasn’t really engaging in new film projects at the time, but being curious, I said yes,” Ellison said, in an email.
Ellison watched the hand-drawn storyboard reels, which directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane had adapted from ND Stevenson’s 2015 graphic novel, and instantly connected with the title character, a shape-shifter voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz who appears most often as a young woman, but can change into animals or other people. “I had never seen a character like Nimona in a film, let alone an animated family movie,” Ellison said. “I needed this movie when I was a kid, and quite frankly, I needed it right then and there. It was the perfect story to come into my life at that moment.”
Nimona — which has LGBTQ themes that Disney executives wanted to downplay — seemed destined to become a tax write-off before Ellison scooped it up. Now the movie, which Netflix released last June, is nominated for an Oscar for animated feature….
(9) ANALOG SCORES GERROLD INTERVIEW. There’s a “Q&A With David Gerrold” at The Astounding Analog Companion.
Analog Editor: What is your history with Analog?
David Gerrold: I have a long personal history with Analog. My first year of high school was at Van Nuys High. The library was a good place to hang out at lunch time and they had a subscription to Astounding. I started working my way through every issue they had. Astounding represented (to me) the high point of science fiction magazines. It introduced me to so many great stories and writers, that it became a goal. It was decades before I sold a story to the magazine, but that was one of the high points of my career.
This story was a sequel to an earlier piece where Ganny knit a spaceship out of cables and plastic sheeting. I suspect that construction of habitats in space would probably use a lot more fabricated materials than metal. So that was the spark. But once I’d written about how to build the ship, I began to wonder about the interplanetary politics, the economics, and how it all might work where everything is light minutes away from everything else. I think that’s part of the effect that reading Astounding/Analog had on me—I want to know how things work, especially in science fiction.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 22, 1959 — Kyle Maclachlan, 65. I of course came to know Kyle Maclachlan first for playing Paul Atreides in David Lynch’s Dune. Like Timothée Chalamet, who was twenty-six when he played Paul Atreides, Maclachlan also was too old at twenty-five for the teen aged character. Just noting that.
(Remember that I’m not going to not noting everything that he’s done, just what I find interesting,)
It was his first film role which I didn’t know until now, so he was old for an actor getting his film career going.
Next up was Blue Velvet in which he was Jeffrey Beaumont. Definitely genre, as it is a thriller mystery blended with psychological horror. Also directed by David Lynch. Weird film, and even weirder role for film.
He did an excellent job as Lloyd Gallagher in The Hidden, a great SF film. He was not in The Hidden II which was not a great film.
Yes, the Twin Peaks franchise is genre given some of the things that happened here. His Dale Cooper character is played to perfection over to the thirty episodes of the original series and the eighteen episodes of Twin Peaks known as Twin Peaks: The Return and Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series. He was also in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
Did you know that he voiced Superman? Well he did. In one of the better animated films, Justice League: The New Frontier, he was as Kal-El / Clark Kent / Superman. He voiced him very well.
He showed up as Edward Wilde, a librarian in The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, one of the films in The Librarian franchise. Just on the off chance that you’ve not seen it, I’ll say no more as it, but it like all The Librarian franchise, is great popcorn viewing.
He was Cliff Vandercave in The Flintstones, the only Flintstones film worth watching.
Lastly he was in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the dual role of Calvin Johnson / The Doctor.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
- Pearls Before Swine is there when a comic trope collides with an environmental regulation.
- Candorville’s topic of conversation is predictable.
(12) MASTODON UNDER ATTACK. TechCrunch says “Discord took no action against server that coordinated costly Mastodon spam attacks”.
Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications. But Discord has yet to remove the server where the attacks are facilitated, and Mastodon community leaders have been unable to reach anyone at the company.
“The attacks were coordinated through Discord, and the software was distributed through Discord,” said Emelia Smith, a software engineer who regularly works on trust and safety issues in the fediverse, a network of decentralized social platforms built on the ActivityPub protocol. “They were using bots that integrated directly with Discord, such that a user didn’t even need to set up any servers or anything like that, because they could just run this bot directly from Discord in order to carry out the attack.”
Smith attempted to contact Discord through official channels on February 17, but still has only received form responses. She told TechCrunch that while Discord has mechanisms for reporting individual users or messages, it lacks a clear way to report whole servers.
“We’ve seen this costing server admins of Mastodon, Misskey, and others hundreds or thousands of dollars in infrastructure costs, and overall denial of service,” Smith wrote to Discord Trust & Safety in an email viewed by TechCrunch. “The only common link seems to be this discord server.”…
(13) A TUNE, NOT TUNA. “Whale song mystery solved by scientists” reports BBC.
… Baleen whales are a group of 14 species, including the blue, humpback, right, minke and gray whale. Instead of teeth, the animals have plates of what is called baleen, through which they sieve huge mouthfuls of tiny creatures from the water.
Exactly how they produce complex, often haunting songs has been a mystery until now. Prof Elemans said it was “super-exciting” to have figured it out.
He and his colleagues carried out experiments using larynxes, or “voice boxes”, that had been carefully removed from three carcasses of stranded whales – a minke, a humpback and a sei whale. They then blew air through the massive structures to produce the sound.
In humans, our voices come from vibrations when air passes over structures called vocal folds in our throat. Baleen whales, instead, have a large U-shaped structure with a cushion of fat at the top of the larynx.
This vocal anatomy allows the animals to sing by recycling air, and it prevents water from being inhaled….
(14) DEAR SCHADENFREUDE. Between bites of popcorn Shepherd exacted a little payback.
(15) [DELETED]. I apologize for drawing a comparison between Shepherd and Vox Day in the item that formerly appeared in this space. I was wrong to give into the impulse, which vented at Shepherd my emotional reaction to all the Hugo stuff I’ve had to write news about for the last month, something he has nothing to do with. (And if you want to ask why, then, is item #14 still here — Shepherd intended the needle, and I felt it. Ouch.)
(16) MIDNIGHT PALS. But do you know who’s really spinning in his grave? Read this and Bitter Karella will tell you.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Laura, Joyce Scrivner, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Kevin Standlee, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH.]
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Shhh, the pixels are all tucked in their scrolls for the night… let’s make sure they have a pleasant night’s sleep.
(6) Typo (two instances plus a tag): should be Francesca Myman, rather than Myrman.
(14) Typo: should be Neolithic Sheep, rather than Neolitic.
10) I didn’t realize that Maclachlan was younger than Chalamet when he played Paul Atreides in Dune. (Kind of like how Angelina Jolie was younger when she played Lara Croft in the original Tomb Raider movies than was Alicia Vikander in the reboot.)
(1) YES. And this time, we’re coming back to stay.
(5) And sometimes, you write a short or novelette, then another, then another, and the next thing you know, you realize they fit together.
(12) By this time, my lawyer would be contacting Discord, who would Wake Up.
(13) So, a variation on a cat purring.
(16) Ah, yes, someone who desperately wants to be loved in fandom, but isn’t willing to build up to it, but expects it as his due. I’d say he’s long since overdue, and the overdue fines are so large, he can’t afford them.
Jed Hartman: Thanks for so quickly pointing those out! Typos should be fixed anyway, but the second was surely a case of Muphry’s Law in action.
@mark
Did you mean item 15 rather than 16? Or do I have to defend the honor of Bitter Karella? en garde
(1) Yay!
(7) Not another one!
(16) Bitter Karella has great comic timing.
16) I think that Bitter may have misspelled my name on purpose, but that made the thread EVEN FUNNIER to me!!!!!
I’m DEFINITELY going to print this up and frame it! It’s ALMOST as good as winning an actual Hugo Award.
I guess…
Chris B.
Anne Marble: I sit and type corrected. I was speaking of Vox Merda.
(12) They’ve traced it to some kids in Japan who were trying to get even with someone on Discord.
Read The Book of the Ice Trilogy
The Girl and the Stars Did you like Red Sister It’s like that only different, might suffer from a lack of lesbian murder nuns. Didn’t like Red Sister? Probably won’t like this. Didn’t read Red Sister? The trilogy stands alone but same world, different location, and honestly, I’d start with the murder nuns.
Three Stars.
The Girl and the Mountain continues where the last one left off. Moves from one POV to all the POVs–including a himbo without a useful thought in his pretty little head. Not as good as the first book.
2.75 stars
The Girl and the Moon We’re crossing over with the murder nuns now. Half the book felt like it was trying to add context to the end of Holy Sister and that’s it, but I ended up actually liking the ending. It improved the whole book and did a wonderful job of capping off the world of Abeth.
3.25 Stars.
Series as a whole, Four Shiphearts.
The scroll is spinning. I’ll try again tomorrow.
But Gernsback is either spinning in his grave, or laughing his head off.
(14) DEAR SCHADENFREUDE.
Remember when a whole bunch of the people who are complaining really loudly right now about the MPC not sufficiently enforcing and protecting its marks were the same people complaining in 2019 about the MPC trying to enforce and protect its marks?
Pepperidge Farm remembers that, too.
(6) MYMAN ON THE 2023 HUGOS I think that Ada Palmer’s recent piece in Reactor is relevant here:
https://reactormag.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/
Michael Burianyk: Sure. Isn’t that the same piece that was on Palmer’s blog? We linked to that.
Yes, it is the same piece that was on Ex Urbe.
(6) A hundred years from now, when historians write about the human rights abuses perpetuated by China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia etc. etc. and wonder why we all just let it happen, I hope they will unearth documents like the email from this “expat.”
“We knew it was happening, but we didn’t want to impose our Western values on others by complaining about it.”
What cowards we are.
Of course, I suppose it’s presumptuous of me to assume that those future historians will even be allowed to ask those questions. The Holodomor was barely spoken of until the USSR fell.
Uh, my bad. I probably ignored it – filed it away for later reading with all the other things I forget about 🙁
Still, a good reminder, no? 🙂
(10) I’ve always enjoyed his work, whether genre or non- (How I Met Your Mother for example). Happy birthday!
(16) Bitter for the win.
16 – yes fair use exceptions apply, but the acknowledgement of trademark status for the name “Amazing Stories” is still required.
Amazing Stories is a trademark of Steve Davidson and The Experimenter Publishing Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
16 HAHAHAHA
15 Unsurprised. It occurs that if he is paying attention, Brad Torgersen is having a laugh at my expense, specifically
(15) “he knows the actual source of the story was File 770”
I can’t say that it wasn’t, but I saw the bluesky posts before I saw the reporting here and there’s no reason that guy couldn’t have.
@mark “(16) Ah, yes, someone who desperately wants to be loved in fandom, but isn’t willing to build up to it, but expects it as his due. I’d say he’s long since overdue, and the overdue fines are so large, he can’t afford them.”
This seems like a particularly odd take given that she was on the 2022 hugo ballot (and the 2023 one if that counts for anything), and certainly seems to be “build[ing] up to it.”
@Steve Davidson Do regular people add a ‘TM’ to anything except in mockery?
@Jake
Upstream, mark said he made a typo and was referring to “Vox Merda.” mark gets credit for the new name.
Jake:
The coment of Mark makes more sense if you asume he got the number wrong and meaned 15, which VD and JdA both making more sense from that coment.
16.
Another funny aspect, that King is the one who says the Victor Hugopart, the one who won a Hugo.
14/15) I see similar comments in all the expected places.
@Chet Desmond
It was actively hidden by our supposed betters in the media at the time. Walter Duranty and the NYT. Pepperidge Farms remembers.
@Iphinome
Red Sister = lesbian murder nuns
ROFL! In retrospect, that is a pretty good summation. I’m just glad it wasn’t pitched that way or I probably would have missed the entire series – Book of the Ancestor. Individually and as a series, it is top-shelf writing.
Like you, the Girl and the Stars didn’t fare nearly as well with me. I stopped after book 1. Just couldn’t get into it.
Mark Lawrence’s “The Book That Wouldn’t Burn” is a fantastic piece of fiction. I just couldn’t nominate it for Best Novel this year because it clearly is not a complete story.
Speaking of which, my noms are done.
Regards,
Dann
One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. – Golda Meir
The Hugo scandal has now made National Public Radio.
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/23/1233355111/the-hugo-awards-scandal-has-shaken-the-sci-fi-community
McCarty has definitely achieved his 15 minutes of fame. Or infamy, as the case may be.
JJ: the bunch of fanfic writers making jokes about having a 0.00006% of a trophy were not treated as “legally we are obliged to say..” which would be the mark protection reaction. They were personally BLASTED with umbrage and self-righteousness. I was a little on both sides (I have work on AOC, I don’t consider myself even a fractional Hugo winner) but the way they were treated did end up over the top and was not merely “mark protection”. It felt a lot like gatekeeping, something you’re usually against.
This is a really troublesome conclusion to come to from that incident, and I’m seeing it more or less insinuated in some of the discussions here.
6) Very interesting.
8) I thought Nimona was very cute/funny. [Spoiler alert: the whale was the best.]
@Michael Brooks–
When you’re in China, or another authoritarian regime, and want to do or say something provocative, if you are assuming that being from the USA or Europe will protect you from consequences–you might be right! Or you might be wrong.
And either way, you need to think about the consequences for the people, both individuals and organizations, that invited you and gave you a platform there.
Because yes, it can have consequences for them. They may get punished for it even if you aren’t.
If you do it from outside that regime, yes, it’s safer for you, and may not give you that satisfaction of truly speaking truth to power. But it’s also safer for the people you want to help.
Yes, you really do have to stop and think about the consequences, the real, immediate consequences, for your hosts when you are visiting an authoritarian regime.
If the safety of the Chinese members of the Hugo subcommittee was a part of McCarty’s motivation for these shenanigans, it’s the only part of what he did that isn’t wrong.
But yes, I’m still judging him very harshly indeed for the how of it, for the fact that that he and his Western team didn’t resign instead of doing this, and for the things that look like McCarty just imposing his own made-up rules (i.e., toss slate ballots) on the Hugos.
None of them should ever touch the Hugos again.
I agree with Michael Brooks’s comment above. The lesson to take from Bjork’s comments is not that Bjork (and others like her) smugly believe that Western values are superior to Chinese values, but that what the Chinese were doing with respect to Tibet was wrong and deserved to be called out. (and anyone who’s followed Bjork over the years knows that she is perfectly willing to speak out to Western audiences as well).
@Lis Carey
“They may get punished for it even if you aren’t.”
You just gave cover what Hugo subcommittee was doing — acquiescing to and participating in censorship, because of what they perceived might happen to the Chinese members of the committee. Is that really the position you want to take?
I don’t disagree with this at all. My qualm is the apparent conclusion that the Chinese government’s authoritarian response is somehow Bjork’s responsibility, and that the first thing to condemn is not that response, but Bjork’s speech.
Theodore Beale calling the SF community a literary ghetto reminds me a kid trying to save face by saying “well I didn’t want to join your crummy club anyway.” He ran for SFWA president, created a publishing line and got his blog readers to bloc vote its works onto the Hugo Awards ballot. I kinda think he wanted in the club.
I did enjoy the Room 770 deep cut. That shows a commitment to science fiction fandom he didn’t always have back when he wanted to burn it down.
“It now matters very little what happened in Room 770.” — Leigh Edmonds, Habakkuk, spring 1994
I think you’ve got things the wrong way around here—it’s because the rationale provided for the AO3 crackdown was that the MPC had to protect its marks that the recent claims that the MPC has no teeth to its mark have met with such snark and derision. If nobody’d decided that the trademark had to be protected from a joke, there’d be no schaedenfraude at the trademark actually turning out to be made of handshake deals and tissue paper.
@bill–You really should have read my entire comment, not just leapt upon the one line you think supports your nonsense.
McCarty et al. didn’t have to pull the bullshit fuckery they did pull.
If there really were a large number of Chinese ballots, especially Chinese slate ballots tossed (this seems possible but not completely proven), they could have not tossed them, and had an honest final ballot, frustrating maybe for Western fans, but honest and in accordance with the rules.
Potential fallout: Maybe more good Chinese sf gets translated–a real win.
Or, if an honest counting of the votes resulted in works on the final ballot that the Chinese members said couldn’t be there, or weren’t safe to have there, due Chinese censorship practices, Dave McCarty and the rest of the Western members of the Hugo subcommittee could have resigned, gone home, and not explained why till they were home and the convention was well over.
Then we would have a compromised ballot, but the Chinese subcommittee members not endangered because they had kept those questions works off the ballot. The Western members of the subcommittee would also not be compromised, because they did the only thing they could do under the rules: resig rather than participate in creating a compromised ballot.
Result: We still have a Hugo year with asterisks, but everyone understands what happened, we don’t have a compromised and disgraced Hugo subcommittee–and maybe we still get more Chinese sf translated, though the odds aren’t as good.
Dave McCarty and his gang didn’t have to pull this incompetent, bullshit fuckery. Everyone, including them, would have been better off if they hadn’t.
@Dann665
That pitch does very well with some people.
@Iphinome
Absolutely true and nothing wrong with that. I would use it myself if I was speaking to a person whom I thought it would be an attractive feature for them.
Just as with other niche labels (Grimdark, MilSF), overuse tends to limit the exposure of a given work.
Also, I think it is fair to say that there is more to that series than just “lesbian ninja nuns”. A lot more. That’s just a side feature.
In my experience, any work that leads with identitarian labels about the characters or the author tends to be a less-than-stellar work. Unless I already have experience with the author’s work, I tend to pass by works with a pitch that leads with identitarian labels. (e.g. C.T. Rwizi – A House of Gold is one of my 2024 noms. It does have an identitarian aspect, but he never leans into such things in an exclusionary way.)
YMMV.
Regards,
Dann
A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. – Thomas Jefferson
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