46 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/26/22 Comments Have Spoken, Like The First Filing; Pixels Have Woken, Like The First Scroll”

1. First!

   Now I’ve going to watch a bunch of Tex Avery cartoons. Because in a world gone mad, they’re somehow still a very sane thing even The Wolf.

2. (1) What!? Who thought this was a good idea? (Lawyers, of course, but still…) I thought it was bad enough when big studios cracked down on fan sites for using a few images or sound files form a movie. But the name of an author?!

   (10) I still remember reading the Theodore Sturgeon tributes in Locus magazine. I’d read a few issues before, but that was one of the the first issues I really remember reading.

3. (9) Hambly’s Trek novels are worth reading. “Ishmael” is fun; the others are more serious.

4. Is Bimbos of the Death Sun actually genre? I remember it as a straight mystery, despite the fact that it’s set at an SF convention. I might call it genre-adjacent, I suppose, but I thought it stopped short of being actually genre.

5. Clickity

6. Xtifr says Is Bimbos of the Death Sun actually genre? I remember it as a straight mystery, despite the fact that it’s set at an SF convention. I might call it genre-adjacent, I suppose, but I thought it stopped short of being actually genre.

   I’d call it genre in the same way that Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Spade / Paladin novels are genre. The setting makes it genre as our community is itself SSF at times.

7. 3) I don’t want Tennant to return to the role.

   I mean…why?

8. Bimbos of the Death Sun isn’t genre. It’s an outright attack on fandom, making everyone look like, well, the “popular kids” view of us. There’s an immense difference between “laugh at ourselves” and “look! laugh at them! They’re all weird and incompetent and living in fantasy worlds!”

   And I say that, knowing a) that the protagonist is based on a friend of mine from Canada, who was also the best man at a wedding of hers… and no longer speaks of her as a friend.

9. 2) !!!! Can they do that? Like, technologically speaking? Who has control of the ISS? (I mean, doing that on purpose would be actual justification for the US to interfere with Ukraine even if it’s not in NATO on a realpolitik level rather than an ethical one, so I don’t think they’d want to, but even as a threat!)

   15) For me, food in SFF is always going to be symbolized by Redwall and the lavish descriptions of food therein– I remember wanting to try cooking from it, as a child, because there was enough description given of some of the cooking processes that I think you probably could have.

10. Anne Marble says What!? Who thought this was a good idea? (Lawyers, of course, but still…) I thought it was bad enough when big studios cracked down on fan sites for using a few images or sound files form a movie. But the name of an author?!

    I’m assuming that this means that a fanzine cannot use the name Tolkien in the fanzine title? What other restrictions are being placed upon them? Are all words from the Tolkien oeuvre hereby banned from usage by fanzines? Cannot I not have a fanzine called Musings from The Shire?

11. (2) I read this evening that Russia has pulled its team out of the ESA launch site, so the next launch is going to be delayed. Or not Russian.

12. (9) I had no idea there was another Beauty and the Beast novel! (runs, not walks, to Amazon and manages to snag one)

13. 10) Liz Williams has recently published Comet Weather and Blackthorn Winter, the first two in a 4 book series from Newcon Press. These are my 2 favorite fantasy novels of the last 2 years, they follow 4 grown sisters from Somerset, England and the magic they are all involved with. Beautifully written and a lot of fun, these books are well worth reading.

14. 10) I know some folks like Curt Phillips disagree with me, but I feel that McCrumb’s Jay Omega novels, especially the second one, are more the cool kids’ contemptuous mockery than affectionate ribbing (she does that to characters in some of her mysteries as well). And yes, I can understand how that might mark me in some people’s eyes as just the kind of FIAWOL fan she is mocking.

    (And I’m an Old Fan and Tired who is trying to figure out what parts of Europe I can visit on my 2020 TAFF voyage that are not being threatened by Muscovy.)

15. (9) Barbara Hambly will be signing your books, for free, at the Paperback Show: http://www.la-vintage-paperback-show.com/#sthash.dRrVyiEU.SxcTUZlz.dpbs

16. @ Kit Harding. To stay in orbit ISS has to be boosted periodically, the Russians do that. Without boosting it’ll eventually fall.

17. “We’re just referring to the asteroid 2675 Tolkien.”

18. 10) Interestingly, my first encounter with Theodore Sturgeon’s writing had nothing to do with fiction. When I was 11, I began reading Frederik Pohl’s IF. Ted Sturgeon was the resident columnist, and I always enjoyed his comments on science and technology. He had titles like “Just Westing” (a discussion of Westinghouse Inc.’s engineering), “Glop, Goosh, and Gilgamesh” (on asphalt), and “Essay on Coherence” (about lasers). It was in that essay that I discovered that “laser” was not pronounced like the surname of David Lasser. I think the way he told it was “No, junior, ‘laser’ is not the comparative form of ‘lazy.'” He frequently wrote the editorials for Pohl, as well–I discovered many years later that any editorial signed “The Editor” rather than “Frederik Pohl” was probably Sturgeon’s. Then I borrowed a couple of Groff Conklin anthologies from the library and found that Mr. Sturgeon also wrote fiction, things like “Microcosmic God,” “Completely Automatic,” and “Killdozer!”

19. Danny Sichel: I hope that asteroid has a ® stamped on it!

20. Liz Williams’ The Poison Master is probably my favorite Vance pastiche that also stands quite well on its own. I highly recommend it.

21. Tol kien with a very small space

22. 1) It occurs to me that someone gave the Tolkien estate to the spirits of Smaug and Glaurung, a couple of infamously greedy dragons. Or perhaps Sharkey regrouped himself and took it over. I took a look in the FAQ on that site and saw little but orc-talk.

23. @Michael J. Lowrey: I agree with you about Bimbos: I thought it was mean-spirited. I didn’t read Zombies — why would I?

24. 1) Who do they think they are, Harlan Ellison™?

25. (5) “A CD in a plastic jewel box is not intrinsically more poetic than a vinyl LP in a cardboard sleeve.”
    No, but the opposite is. A vinyl LP is esthetically so much more pleasing than a CD in a jewel box. In general, an analog item is always more so than a digital equivalent.

26. bill: I wonder, was that the appeal for me of the USB typewriter?

27. 10) @Rob Thornton I’d describe The Poison Master as Vance-influenced rather than a Vance pastiche – but yes, worth reading. It is not, for instance about a Sarkovy Venefice! In comparison, a lot of Matthew Hughes’ work is Vance pastiches and very recognisable as such.
    (I recently read The Barbarians of Beyond – Hughes authorised “sequel” to Vance’s Demon Princes saga – it was OK, but not a match for the master’s works)

28. (1) Tolkien was registered as a trademark in 2005. (Reg. No. 2941708)

    If it took you until now to notice, it feels safe to conclude that their lawyers aren’t being overly aggressive about this.

29. ISS reboosts are usually performed by the Progress freighter docked to the rear of the station, attitude control is usually done with gyroscopes on the NASA side. Coordination is required between the two systems, when the new Russian module accidentally fired thrusters and spun the station the gyroscopes were fighting the motion which increased the stress on the station.

    The Cygnus freighters have recently been modified to be able to perform reboosts while docked to the forward port, however the Gygnus currently uses an Antares rocket to get to orbit. The first stage of Antares is built in Ukraine using Russian engines, and it has been rumoured that the factory has been deliberately targeted by Russian forces. Cygnus has launched on Atlas V in the past, but there are no more of them available and the replacement Vulcan is behind schedule. Falcon 9 has the capacity to launch Cygnus, but it would need work on interfacing.

30. Brian Gibbons; The Tolkien Estate lawyers would have reviewed the ridiculous claim made in this FAQ. They should have rephrased it to properly reflect what registering the name as a trademark accomplished. Which was not preempting people’s rights to utter the name in fanzines. That’s the point.

31. (10) Sturgeon’s “And Now the News…” reads more and more true to me every day, as I keep up with the news via radio, TV and the web.

32. 1) Tolkien has three trademarks, one granted in April of 2018 and registered in nearly a dozen classes. However, fair use for both Copyright and Trademark still apply. You could use the name in a review of the works, or a course syllabus and people with the last name of Tolkien could still sign their checks without fear of retribution.

    The manner in which these claims are presented, however, makes this look like a case of the estate setting things up for future defense of the mark(s); they are clearly establishing in public what they think the lines. This is usually done to both deter and to make a stronger case if they take a (big, or well-heeled) opponent on.

    4) someone at my university’s entomology department was already making “‘roach butter” back in the 70s. Many Eastern cultures include various insects in their diet and chocolate covered ants and grasshoppers, worms in lollipops.
    Personally, I believe the lack of insects in western diets is one of the contributing factors to the higher incidence of colon cancer in the west. Its the chitin.

    15) Not so A. Bertram Chandler’s Commander John “Gutsy” Grimes, whose nickname was not acquired in battle but in front of the refrigerator. Stories involving gustatory adventures include “Grimes Among the Gourmets”, which relates interstellar negotiations taking place around a dinner table, the meal involving unfamiliar cutlery.

33. @Steve Davidson

    Real-world benefits aside, “It’s the chitin” feels like it belongs with “Fill all your stomachs and fill them right!” and “Vormitash – good as it sounds!”

34. @Steve Davidson: Personally, I get all my chitin from mushrooms.

35. I once marginally increased my coolness level in the eyes of our kid by volunteering to sample some cockroach pilaf at a Milwaukee County Museum (now Milwaukee “Public” Museum; R.I.P.) lecture and demonstration about edible insects. Too chewy (again, the chitin) but the flavor was okay.

36. Somehow the Tolkien estate hasn’t gone after Palantir Technologies, the tech company now worth $36 billion. So fanzines are likely safe. For now.

37. @Mike Glyer

    bill: I wonder, was that the appeal for me of the USB typewriter?

    I couldn’t possibly imagine. Now if you had suggested a Leroy Lettering Set, we could talk.

38. bill — thanks for that Leroy Lettering Set link. The article was interesting, but the comments were fascinating!

39. Palantir Technologies has its own registered trademark on “Palantir”, which covers different sorts of goods and services from the Saul Zaentz Company’s trademarks. And they weren’t the first, the Patent Office shows that there was a trademark filed for Palantir in word processing back in the 1980s.

    But a quick search shows that Barazinbar, Bundushathur, and Zirakzigil are all free.

40. My initial reaction to Bimbos… was indeed that it seemed mean-spirited, but more recently, in the wake of all the revelations of “missing stairs” in fandom, I’ve started to wonder if it isn’t a little more reasonable–or at least understandable–than it first appeared. I haven’t read it in a while, but the fact that it took fandom so long to call out so many of its toxic members, and that it’s an issue we’re still struggling with, makes me wonder if it might not read differently to me if I read it today.

    Not making any bets either way, though, which is why I’m not rushing out to re-read it.

    But I will say that my gender and such probably meant that I had a very different experience of fandom than Ms. McCrumb’s.

41. I’ve read (and enjoyed) Bimbos of the Death Sun. The murder victim, as far as I could perceive, was a fuming compost of all the worst character flaws of several well-known pro authors of the 1980s and prior decades. The idea, I’m sure, was to make him so offal that most reader would cheer when he turned up dead.

    Many young fans of the fiawol persuasion used to get so deeply involved in fandom and its activities that they could barely function in the mundane world. This may not be as true now as it was when I was a neo, back in the mid-1970s, but I roomed with several fen who had trouble with fannish-life/mundane-life balance. One of them was able somehow, via acquiring a few academic credentials, to pursue his mania about Heinlein into writing and publishing a two-volume biography of that author. Mundanely, he was always just barely getting by in the early days, and I’m not sure whether he ever managed to do more than that.

42. Jeanne’s comment above reminded me we knew the same person, and moved me to take a look at an unpublished blog post, “About That Dead Guy”, I wrote shortly after his death was reported. It was a remarkably polite blogpost, for being about someone I had so deeply and completely come to despise. Still, probably best I didn’t publish it.

    But I will note that when his deal to write his Heinlein book was announced in Locus, with an accompanying photo, I was surprised at his change in appearance from when I’d last seen him years before. He’d lost a lot of weight, and was dressed in a well-fitted suit, quite a change from the hand-to-mouth days when his clothes tended to look like Good Will discards. Later heard he might have had an actual job as a clerk as a law office, which probably increased his income by an order of magnitude from the days when I knew him.

43. I’ve been in fandom since.. 1982 I think? I’ve been to a lot of conventions, from small “backyard” cons (one of which I volunteered at for several years) to larger more commercial ones. And I didn’t have an issue with “Bimbos” — I liked it a lot and felt a real kinship to Marion, Jay’s super-sharp girlfriend who spent the whole book dressed as Emma Peel. And the “popular author hates his character and his fandom” trope reminded me of King’s Misery, which is one of my favorites from him. There were negative stereotypes, yes, but I recognized them from my con-going days and didn’t find them much exaggerated. This might be because I was a girl of minor age when I started going to conventions, so I tripped on a lot of “missing stairs” in the days when fen were far more likely to hush things up than to to clean them up.

    And there were plenty of fans with positive attributes in McCrumb’s books as well. Similarly, there were some of the same stereotypes present in the recent “Hawkeye” TV series where the main characters interacted with some medieval LARPers, and while the group was portrayed as goofy, they were also portrayed as good people happy to help others, who just happened to have a goofy hobby they weren’t embarrassed about.

    Given that we had a real-life full-out murderer as an SCA King (Luis Rondon) I don’t find McCrumb’s portrayals of the worst of fandom to be all THAT far off the mark.

44. @Bruce Arthurs: I’m glad the fellow under discussion did come into better times in his life. However, when I met him at Denvention III in 2008, he was still quite fat. We buried the hatchet at that con, by the way. I wrote a positive review of the first volume of his RAH bio, for the excellent reason that it was well-done, thoroughly researched biography. He appreciated what I wrote about the book. However, if Vol 1 was biography, Vol 2 was hagiography. Largely missing from both volumes was in-depth discussion of Heinlein’s fiction; Vol 2 had scarcely any of this. It was just as well the biographer was deceased when I read Vol 2, as I panned it (the whole thing could have been summed up as “and they all lived happily ever after”).

    One bit of constructive info I got from the biographer during Denvention III was the existence of the Virginia Edition project. At the time, it was an impossible dream for me to consider owning a full set of it; I finally blew the requisite three grand or so on it in January 2020, after my life without Gail finally settled down. Or so I thought–I’ve been living as a semi-hermit ever since, guess why?

45. I read Bimbos before I went to a convention (at that time, my only fannish activities had been writing to a ST fanzine (in the 1970s) and later membership in some SF email lists); my reaction was that “some of these characters are creeps, but they’re talking about stuff I care about, so I want to go anyway.” On a fannish mailing list, Bimbos was hugely disliked – but some of the criticisms were factually in error (the convention in that book is not a media convention – it’s clearly a multi-track fannish convention (it has an author for a GoH after all)).

46. Maytree says Given that we had a real-life full-out murderer as an SCA King (Luis Rondon) I don’t find McCrumb’s portrayals of the worst of fandom to be all THAT far off the mark.

    Her Highland Laddie Gone written as Elizabeth MacPherson with its look at the Highland Games took a lot of criticism from that particular culture too. It was, as someone who knew that culture from having promoted Celtic music, quite accurate but egos there are as easily bruised as they are here.

Comments are closed.