(1) DOG DOESN’T BITE MAN. Can you believe it? Someone is not getting sued. His name is Wil Wheaton: “The library for Storytime With Wil just got a little deeper…”
For a few weeks (months?) I’ve been doing this silly and fun thing on Monday nights. I pick a random Choose Your Own Adventure book from my collection, and I read it on my Twitch channel, letting the audience make the choices for me…
So it’s pretty much a regular thing, now, and I seem to have settled upon 6pm Pacific time every Monday, unless there’s a Kings game or I have some other pressing engagement.
Anyway, I always point out that I am not doing this for money, and I don’t mean to infringe on Choose Your Own Adventure’s IP rights or anything like that. I always point out that I’d rather beg forgiveness than ask permission, and I hope that if CYOA ever stumbles upon my thing, they’ll treat it as free marketing and not a thing to throw lawyers at.
So last week, someone from CYOA emailed me … and it turns out a lot of them at the publisher are fans of my work, including my Storytime with Wil thing!! Not only do they not want to sue me to death, she offered to send me a care package, and it arrived today.
See what good things happen when, for a random example, you don’t raise half-a-million dollars on Kickstarter to turn a fan thing into a moneymaker?
(2) FIRST TIME. Jodi Meadows has written an addendum to her post “Before She Ignites cover reveal” responding to comments like those made by Justina Ireland (reported in yesterday’s Scroll.)
A few people have mentioned they see this as an important cover, because it has a Black girl in a dress. That’s what I want to talk about. I didn’t realize when the cover was being designed (that’s my privilege), but this is the first time a big publisher has this kind of cover.
It shouldn’t be the first time.
The first time a major publisher designed a YA cover with a Black model in a gown, it should have gone to a Black author.
Again, me not realizing that hadn’t happened yet: that was my white privilege at work.
The fact that mine came first is a symptom of the problems in publishing, and who publishing is designed to work for. By the time I knew what was at stake with this cover and the timing, the model had already been hired and her photos taken. At that point, changing the cover would have meant telling a Black model that she couldn’t be on my cover because she’s Black.
I hope it’s obvious why I wouldn’t do that.
Dhonielle Clayton told me I should say all this upfront, but I resisted because I couldn’t think of a way to do that without seeming preemptively defensive or like I wanted a pat on the back. So I just didn’t talk about it. Now I see that was the wrong decision, because this hurts people. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.
Meadows also discusses a soon-to-be-published YA novel by a black author that will feature such a cover.
Some of the names involved in the Meadows story are also sources for Everdeen Mason’s recent Washington Post article, “There’s a new way for novelists to sound authentic. But at what cost?”, which reports how publishers are hiring “sensitivity readers… who, for a nominal fee, will scan a book for racist, sexist, or other offensive content.” From Mason’s article, it appears these readers are used most often for YA fantasy novels.
For authors looking for sensitivity readers beyond their fan base there is the Writing in the Margins database, a resource of about 125 readers created by Justina Ireland, author of the YA books “Vengeance Bound” and “Promise of Shadows.” Ireland started the directory last year after hearing other authors at a writing retreat discuss the difficulties in finding people of different backgrounds to read a manuscript and give feedback about such, well, sensitive matters.
One reader for hire in Ireland’s database is Dhonielle Clayton, a librarian and writer based in New York. Clayton reviews two manuscripts per month, going line by line to look at diction, dialogue and plot. Clayton says she analyzes the authenticity of the characters and scenes, then points writers to where they can do more research to improve their work.
Clayton, who is black, sees her role as a vital one. “Books for me are supposed to be vehicles for pleasure, they’re supposed to be escapist and fun,” she says. They’re not supposed to be a place where readers “encounter harmful versions” and stereotypes of people like them.
(3) WHO’S SECOND? The “America First, <yourcountry/etc here> Second” meme (explained in this CNN news segment) has inspired at least two fannish responses –
- Mordor Second
- Mars Second
(4) HE’S ON THE FRONT. Cool cover by Tom Gauld for the Guardian Review:
Time travellers, ahoy! Guardian Review today. Cover illustration by @tomgauld #illustration #TomGauld #books #HGWells #DrWho pic.twitter.com/kTJLFp2zQl
— Sarah Habershon (@SarahJHabershon) February 11, 2017
(5) ROUNDTABLE REMOVED. Apex Magazine has pulled the “Intersectional SFF Round Table” that Mia Sereno (Likhain) protested in an open letter to the editors quoted in yesterday’s Scroll. Jason Sizemore passed responsibility to those who packaged the roundtable, who also are “Likhain’s publisher” (bolded in the original as shown).
…One correction I need to make regarding Likhain’s email since this is a discussion she chose to take public rather than giving Apex a chance to respond. She says: “It is not your choice to publish RH that I find appalling, but your specific choice to ask her to contribute to a roundtable on, of all things, intersectionality.”
This is not true. Djibril and Rivqa, Likhain’s publisher, invited Benjanun to be on the round table. The round table contains four other people with greater wisdom on what is and is not appropriate when it comes to intersectionality than I will ever possess: Cassandra Khaw, Vajra Chandrasekera, Miguel Flores Uribe, and Rivqa Rafael. Since they participated in the discussion I could only assume they had no issue including Benjanun. Djibril had no issue with Benjanun. Therefore, I felt it was okay to move forward.
In consideration to the concerns expressed by Likhain’s public post, our readers, and the counsel of several friends in the genre community, I have decided to remove the round table from our website….
(6) WHAT WATCH? James Gleick asks Guardian readers “Do we still need Doctor Who? Time travel in the internet age?”
Two generations of TV watchers have been schooled in temporal paradox by Doctor Who, and when one Doctor gives way to the next, as will happen in the next series, the reincarnation generates almost as much speculation as the royal line of succession. Who will follow Peter Capaldi? She will be a Time Lord, after all.
Nor does time travel belong solely to popular culture. The time-travel meme is pervasive. Neuroscientists investigate “mental time travel”, more solemnly known as “chronesthesia”. Scholars can hardly broach the metaphysics of change and causality without discussing time travel and its paradoxes. Time travel forces its way into philosophy and influences modern physics.
How strange, then, to realise that the concept is barely a century old. The term first occurs in English in 1914 – a back-formation from HG Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). Somehow humanity got by for thousands of years without asking, what if I could travel into the future? What would the world be like? What if I could travel into the past – could I change history?
(7) REVISITING AN OLD FAVORITE. Cat Rambo walks the razor’s edge between a fisking and a fond reading of the Doc Savage novel Quest of Qui in her latest blog post.
Cassy, in the process of shedding a box of Doc Savage novels, found out I loved them and passed them along. I remember Doc and his men fondly; while at my grandparents for a Kansas summer when I was twelve or thirteen, I found my uncle’s old books, which included a pretty complete run of the Bantam reprints and reveled in them for years to come.
I’m going back and rereading while making notes because I loved and still love these books; my hope is that I’ll start to notice some patterns as I move through the books and that I’ll be able to talk about pulp tropes, gender assumptions, reading fiction aimed at a gender other than your own, and writerly techniques in an entertaining and (maybe) useful way….
You’d think Doc would train himself out of that tell, but even the Man of Bronze has limits. An alarm clock rings and a knife appears from nowhere and hits Doc in the back. At this point, we discover that he habitually wears a fine chainmail undergarment. The material of the undergarment isn’t specified. Neither Renny nor Doc can figure out where the knife came from; at least, Renny can’t. Doc’s a cagey dude and you’re never really sure what he knows and what he doesn’t. The knife is an ancient Viking relic.
The phone rings; it’s another of Doc’s men, Monk, aka Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair (“Only a few inches over five feet tall and yet over 260 pounds. His brutish exterior concealed the mind of a great scientist,” the frontispiece helpfully informs us) What’s new, pussycat, he asks Doc, only not in those words. An alarm clock just rang in my office and then there was a knife out of nowhere, Doc retorts. Of course the phone goes dead at this point….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- February 13, 1923 – Chuck Yeager, the first man to travel faster than the speed of sound. Born in Myra, West Virginia.
(9) AVOID THE KISS OF DEATH. Leading up to Valentine’s Day, the Horror Writers Association blog presents Mac Child’s latest piece of writing advice, “Love is a Disease: Prevent the Romantic Storyline from Strangling the Scary”.
First, a caveat: There’s nothing wrong with paranormal romance; it’s simply a different genre from horror (and the two genres frequently have a substantial overlap in readers). A romantic storyline, in and of itself, is not a terrible thing at all. This argument is by no means a condemnation of love and the readers who love it.
Romantic fiction uses a different kind of tension—will the protagonist suffer heartbreak? Will the couple get together? End up together?—than the frequently external threats and emphasis on surviving found in horror. In a horror, too much ink spilled about love ends up replacing one tension with another, pulling focus away from whatever monster, human or not, is menacing your hapless heroes.
(10) NEXT CONRUNNER PLEASE. Steve Cooper discussed the latest Conrunner on Facebook and announced he and Alice Lawson will be organizing Conrunner 5.
…We even have a provisional theme – “new con-runners” and with that in mind Conrunner 5 will have a Y.A membership category for those who will be under 40. And we hope to provide bursaries to help members who are relatively new to con-running. We’ve already spoken with the chair of INNOMINATE who will try to find some money for this after pass-along to follow on from the generous donation by Satellite 4 to Conrunner 4. We’ll also be following this up with Follycon and the 2019 Eastercon. There will also be a 2nd Pete Weston memorial scholarship – but how that will be targeted has not yet been fixed.
But Alice and I don’t “Run” Conrunner – we provide the back-bone for others to put on a con-running programme. Claire [Brialey] & Mark [Plummer] did a stirling job this year. Now it could be your turn.
…But let me end by thanking the 70 con-runners who came to Nottingham, and participated in the convention especially the two thirds of members we managed to get on panels. (Next time join earlier and we’ll try and get that closer to 100%). We hope you had an enjoyable and instructive weekend and look forward to seeing you all and many others at Conrunner 5
(11) SELECTIVE EXCERPTS. That’s what Dave Freer always calls these representative quotes, but today I’m really doing it. Plucked from his typical stew of complaints against Puppy-kickers, Scalzi, Tor, and David Gerrold (as well as a big plug for Jon Del Arroz based on taking his story at face value) comes this spot-on statement about the movie Starship Troopers – “Truth in Advertising” at Mad Genius Club.
The other relevant aspect is you shouldn’t be just selling once. The key to success as an author is building a customer base, building a name. Now over on Tor.com they were busy displaying how not to understand this. You see –according to the genius on Tor.com (I hope he runs marketing for the company) – Paul Verhoeven’s STARSHIP TROOPERS was a work of genius satirically parodying that nasty evil Robert A Heinlein that the modern literati of sf love to hate.
(shrug) I don’t care if you agree, or disagree, adore the movie or hate it… the problem is one the writer of the article seems blind to, and yet, when you think about it, is behind almost all the adverse reaction the movie received.
…If Paul Verhoeven had called the movie I HATE HEINLEIN, or HUMAN FASCISTS KILL INNOCENT BUGS the same people now calling it ‘brilliant satire’ would still have loved it… (possibly less, because they enjoyed watching the Heinlein fans get furious), but it would have engendered almost no disparagement. It would also have lost a huge volume of sales to the suckers who believed the advertised name.
(12) LIFE INTERRUPTED. Is it dead or not? There’s a thematically appropriate question for a magazine about ghoulish movies, Fangoria, especially now with there being disputed claims that the magazine has produced its last print issue. Former editor-in-chief Ken W. Hanley announced on Twitter –
For those wondering: there will likely never be another issue of FANGORIA, especially in print, unless there's new ownership.
— Ken Hanley (New Jersey Chimney Dad) (@movieguyiguess) February 12, 2017
Today Fangoria officialdom issued a statement admitting that print publication has been “interrupted” but they hope to make a comeback –
These words are in no way excuses, more the bitter truth about the current circumstances involving our print publication and interruption of production. With time and continued patience from our fans, writers, artists and subscribers we will be working endlessly to make good on any funds owed for magazines and/or articles written. In the meantime, we’ll continue trying to conquer the uphill battle to restore our print issues that our fans urgently long for.
(13) JOCULARITY. Adam Rakunas and Patrick S. Tomlinson have a plan for boosting author revenue – let’s see if this starts trending.
https://twitter.com/rakdaddy/status/831248618317242368
[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Lex Berman, Daniel Dern, Paul Weimer, John King Tarpinian, and an untipped hat for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]
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“Have You No Decency? At Long Last, Have You No Decency, Charlie Brown?”
(11) It would also have lost a huge volume of sales to the suckers who believed the advertised name.
I seriously doubt it. The novel came out in 1959. The movie in 1997.
Further, during that period, the themes and tropes of the novel became STANDARD parts of the cultural toolkit. ‘Aliens’, for example, was a huge success in 1986 and was ALL ABOUT starship troopers (and how they tended to die off really messily), to name but one movie. And Aliens scored half again as much at the box office as Starship Troopers.
The stage was set for the movie by the tropes percolating through cinema before it came out, not by a 40 year old novel famed in the main only by written genre enthusiasts.
I loved Verhoeven’s satire. What they don’t get, however, is that he wasn’t satirizing the novel – but the contemporary American culture and especially the sort of people who were in the theatre wanting to see a blow-em-up bug kill. It used.
To quote Wikipedia:
That’s NOT someone setting out to take down Heinlein.
And if you think his message of “War makes fascists of us all” isn’t relevant, you’ve been asleep for the last fourteen years.
(7) I have a vague memory of Doc Savage making a huge moral shift in the first few books. In one, he kills criminals with abandon and in the next, he’s shooting them with ‘mercy bullets’ and shipping them upstate for a de-bad-ifying lobotomy. Am I misremembering this?
(11) Heinlein’s book was so full of itself, so stuffed with ‘message’ that filming it as is would have been a disaster. At least the movie had come campy fun to it.
Mscounted Fifth!
Deja Vu: The Uncanny feeling that youve scrolled this file before.
(10) NEXT CONRUNNER PLEASE.
I was right in there with them until they christened the membership for people under 40 as “YA”. I admire their intent with that, but I think that the execution is self defeating. Given that the current demographic definition of “YA” is teens/ early twenties, I think that people in the top 1/2 of that age group might consider being labeled “YA” as demeaning. 😐
(11) SELECTIVE EXCERPTS.
I never cease to be amused at how the Puppies who loudly, vehemently, and continuously denounce “message fiction” also loudly, vehemently, and continuously praise alt-right and conservative message fiction. It’s so cute. 😀
5) Jason Sizemore has now substantially revised his reply.
In my rush to take down the “Intersectional SFF Round Table” and to immediately assure our readers that they were being heard, I shared a hastily-written non-apology that was defensive when I didn’t meant it to be, and shut down the very conversation I wanted to have. I am sorry for that. My revised explanation of the decision to remove the round table is below.
Still at the same link.
(7) REVISITING AN OLD FAVORITE.
The fine line “between a fisking and a fond reading”? That there is where entertainment is found.
I think the comment section of MGC has already thoroughly covered the liberals-ruined-starship-troopers on numerous occasions.
If so, no bloody money to their anthology or to them as publishers. I will remember their names as people not to support.
And it is kind of cowardly of Jason Sizemore to remove all references to RH, isn’t it? No elephant here! Nothing to see!
11) The only part I’d argue with is the suggestion that any significant number of people who went to see Starship Troopers had heard of the novel, or of Heinlein. (Well, and the idea that the only ways to relate to Heinlein are uncritical fandom or implacable hatred. I grew up reading and enjoying Heinlein but I could never finish Starship Troopers.)
I’ll even agree that I enjoy watching militarists get furious, although that’s partly nostalgia for the days when every usenet newsgroup had a thread called something like “STARHIP TROPERS SUKKED MAJOR WIND!!!111!!!!!!”.
I only read Starship Troopers last year. You can read it as a hymn to fascism or as a satire. Do non-insane people really give it the straight reading? It’s quite hard to even believe that RAH wrote it with an entirely straight face.
Hurrah, I got a contributor credit today!
Re: Starship Troopers: “Hatred of Heinlein” does seem to be a “sin” that the evil, evil SJWs must all be indoctrinated in, to hear the Puppies tell it. And yet, if one reads Heinlein, today, eyes wide open, the results, for me, are not unalloyed good or evil. (c.f. my work on SFF Audio, where in addition to PKD, we’ve done a couple of Heinlein novels, most recently FRIDAY).
Re: Tomlinson and Rakunas: The two of them have a long standing relationship and fake “feuding”. I watched in surprise and amazement as Tomlinson, working an AR booth at Convergence, signed books of Raksunas’ he sold with HIS name…
@NickPheas Do non-insane people really give it the straight reading? It’s quite hard to even believe that RAH wrote it with an entirely straight face.
I took it seriously at the time but that was when I was in my teens and even more po-faced about things political than I am now. These days I think I’d call it contrarianism, if that’s the right word. Monstrous ideas presented in the detached spirit of “just asking questions”.
I should probably have a bit of a Heinlein re-read, actually. Red Planet, Space Family Stone, and Space Cadet were my favourites when I was a kid but it’s been a long time since I last revisited them.
13) Fangoria’s most likely fallen to the trend of print magazines in general which one of the managers at my local bookstore pointed out this week in telling me they use a service that decides what magazines they stock. The can’t add anything to it, just decided how many they’re stocking. The service sends them more U.K. genre titles than it does ones from here. And he said they’d like to cut their zines stocked by half as they just don’t make money for them.
As a Liberal Democrat-voting Brit, I’m probably so far to the left of the Puppies as to be a veritable Commie, but I grew up on a library full of Heinlein, have everything he wrote on my shelves and go back to them regularly (a Heinlein juvenile makes for a very pleasant bath…). So (as Molesworth would say), “Yah boo sucks!” to their argument…
(Still reading here, just working on a book on user-centred design and a new weekly column so a bit slammed to post regularly…)
(9) Must explain why Koontz, with his damaged hero meets cute with damaged heroine during yet another supernatural sciencey apocalypse is so unsuccessful.
I read Starship Troopers after I had read John Steakley’s Armour and found the latter superior. My mother read half of Starship Troopers, but did not find it worth finishing.
1: Mike, I do agree with the general lesson you are drawing from this situation, but there’s another fly in the ointment there: “it is better to apologize afterwards than to ask permission beforehand”.
NO. The former robs the other party of all involvement, all decision-making capacity and presents them with a fait accompli. It is also a flagrant violation of whatever rules are in operation – otherwise, permission would not be needed.
This is a dodge to avoid authorities rights. Not that I’m a big fan of authority, but this is a slippery slope and it is unacceptable behavior.
Hampus Eckerman :
I read Starship Troopers after I had read John Steakley’s Armour and found the latter superior.
Reading comprehension fail on my part. Latter what? Latter read? Or latter mentioned in your response? Not sure which you found superior.
@Kevin Harkness: You’re correct. In the first two or three books, Doc racks up a tremendous body count of criminals. After that, however, he develops a code against killing and only knocks his opponents out with gas bombs and “mercy bullets” — although the main villain of each book usually ends up dead anyway.
Of course, Doc also “benevolently” performs brain surgery on captured criminals to help them go straight (in The Annihilist this is explained as removing a “violence gland” that Doc has discovered). This is an aspect of the original stories that modern writers tend to quietly kick under the rug.
11: oh, so that’s where that FB discussion came from.
My comment was the following: in order to get satire, the audience needs to know what is being satirized. Verhoeven’s film utterly failed on that score. Had he understood the book and gone this direction (which should be a big no if the theme is understood) he would have satirized the concept of responsibility.
It was a terrible film with ridiculous dialogue, terrible acting, ridiculous-beyond-being-able-to-use-satire-as-an-excuse military tactics. I put it one, maybe two places below Battlefield Earth and on a par with John Carter for most directorial screw-up in SF film.
6: well, here and right now its eight-forty-five watch….
Starship Troopers, the novel, is not itself a satire. It is a serious examination of the meaning of personal responsibility in the face of tremendous temptation, taking place in a carefully constructed fictional laboratory. “Thought experiment” was not a casual, throw-away excuse for writing an SF novel. During the Campbellian era, it was what most of the authors were expected to and trying to do. It was also a carefully constructed debate between two political systems/societal structures and a message that one can not enjoy the luxury of nuanced political debate when survival is the goal.
That last is very much in line with the themes being explored by The Walking Dead tv show.
Pixel haze all around
Don’t know if I’m scrollin’ up or down….
[godstalk]
Doc’s journey from indiscriminate killer to surgical striker is mirrored a bit in “The Lone Stranger,” from MAD comics, which I recently re-read. The opening has the Lone Stranger shooting someone in the head (who just has time to dig the golden bullet out and say the name, “The Lone Stranger!”, which is the cue for the hero to leap onto his horse—or try to—and ride away over the William Tell Overture), but later in the story, he only uses his gun in acceptable ways:
Lucky for the Masked Man, his faithful (for now) assistant Pronto has no such compunctions.
I used to toy with the idea of using Lester Dent’s formula to write a Doc Savage parody where the drug outfit he was fighting would turn out to be run by his five associates, who would use Doc’s own surgical technique to turn him into a stooge at the end, with much humorous repartee between Monk and Ham. Of course, they’re not as gifted, surgery-wise, and he comes out of it a little bit umb-day. Needless to say, I never actually did it: too much work.
@steve davidson During the Campbellian era, it was what most of the authors were expected to and trying to do.
Counterpoint: Pohl & Kornbluth, Robert Sheckley, Alfred Bester, and basically everything else published in Galaxy magazine during the 1950s, plus early Philip K Dick.
@Ghost Bird…are ou trying to say that The Space Merchants, Gladiator at Law, Wolfbane are not thought experiments? They’re certainly satire as well, but they are most definitely thought experiments first and foremost, likewise much of Bester’s and all(?) of Dick’s work.
Other than the nascent new wave stuff, pretty much everything from the mid-40s through the 70s was some form of literary engineering experiment
DirkB:
I found John Steakley’s Armour superior to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.
A (probably apocryphal) anecdote; When James Cameron was told Verhoeven was making Starship Troopers he asked if it would have the powered armor. When told it would not he replied “I already made that movie”.
When I was a younger man I thought both the book and film were deep. I find them both almost unbearably trite now. Aliens, otoh….
@steve davidson “Thought experiment” is an elastic term – my issue was more that you seemed to be saying that writers in the golden age of American satirical SF were expected to produce “a serious examination taking place in a carefully constructed fictional laboratory”. Starship Troopers might be, but it’s hardly a good description of The Midas Plague or Shark Ship.
Coincidentally, the Youtube movie reviewers at Red Letter Media just did a revisit of “Starship Troopers” and noted a parallel to the Gorn episode of Star Trek, where Trek takes one fork in the road and Troopers takes the other one.
Link to that part of the discussion
(Content warning: the gang at Red Letter Media often has a crude sense of humour, and this may not be to your taste.)
I’ve been informed by the Nebula Awards Commission that Hidden Figures is not a genre film and therefore ineligible. Am I correct in assuming that the “or related subjects” language in WSFS rule 3.3.7 would make it eligible for the Hugos regardless of its genre status?
@steve – not sure if I agree with the rights issue on this. I don’t see any difference in streaming a video game (which is, AIUI though I am not a yute) the original rationale for Twitch and reading/playing through CYOA? Aren’t they the same thing? There are hundreds of thousands of hours of video game playthroughs on YouTube etc and no one seems to have an issue with that.
As great as the cover for Before She Ignites is (and it is fantastic), Mary Robinette Kowal’s Of Noble Family was released nearly two years ago with a black girl in a gorgeous gown on the cover. Women of color on book covers is definitely something we need to see more of, but this book isn’t the first to do it. (Although it may be the first YA novel.)
Jonathan Edelstein on February 14, 2017 at 7:53 am said:
But it’s got big-cabinet computers! (I don’t recall whether there were tape drives. Granted, at no point did they spin madly, smoke, and exclaim “Illogical! Does not compute!”) That alone should suffice to genre-qualify it…
AJ: As I understand it, the claim is only that this is the first YA novel from this publisher to do this.
Jonathan Edelstein: Yes, definitely. ‘Or related subjects’ was added specifically to remove doubt about cases like this (in response to the shortlisting of Apollo 13).
11 – Starship Troopers still sells very well today and is highly regarded by the general reading public. See:
https://www.amazon.com/Starship-Troopers-Robert-Heinlein-ebook/dp/B004EYTK2C/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487091968&sr=1-1&keywords=starship+troopers
For both sales rankings (abet not the highest accuracy) but also reviews. 69% 5 star ratings it is well regarded.
Starship Troopers often appears on the US Military lists of recommended reading. Many US Service Men have read it. I know people who have quotes from the book as their internet tag lines.
I’m not surprised that some 770 comments about Starship Troopers were so negative or that they could not see it as anything other than satire or fascist. Compared to the general reading public (see Amazon), the 770 harsh critics ae the outliers.
@Hampus – I’ve heard many excellent things about Armor and have it in my stack.
@Steve Davidson – enjoyed your commentary.
Starship Troopers Movie:
The movie had next to nothing to do with the book. I (and many of my friends) went to see it thinking it would be an ST movie adaptation and were highly disappointed. Today with the internet many of us who saw it would have avoided it. I was angry they called it “Starship Troopers” instead of “Space Marines.”
@1 – Not surprising the Choose Your Adventure people sent Wil more books. I’ve seen a lot of companies do similar things if there is something positive out there that could (or does) help drive sales.
I read the Doc Savage Bantam reprints for years. I stopped, and then Gerry de la Ree bought all them off me and resold them to a guy in Russia who was collecting them. I remember two things about them- the bull fiddle roar of a machine gun (it was always a bull fiddle), and the constant use of thermite to burn/melt things.
I made some thermite when I was still in high school; let’s not talk about what I used it for, but I’ll just mention that the particular railroad siding next to the Lake near where I grew up no longer exists, and nobody pinning anything on me, not this late in the game.
airboy, I enjoyed the novel Starship Troopers (note: I’ve not read it for thirty years, so I have no idea whether or not the Suck Fairy has been at it), and I was only able to enjoy the movie Starship Troopers after I mentally renamed it “Bug Hunt” to divorce it from any pretense of being Heinlein. Reading here that the director never actually read Heinlein’s novel explains much….
(My brother-in-law actually worked on that movie; specifically, the fort-overrun scene. When we commented to him, shortly after it came out, that we’d just seen the movie, he replied “I’m sorry….”)
As all Heinlein novels I have read Starship Troopers and found it entertaining. I was in my teens back then, so I dont know if I would still like it today. But while I really was a big Heinlein fan (while my dad was more into Asimov and Silverberg), I always disliked his overuse of what would now be called “Pro military virtue signaling” though, but was able to read past that.
The movie was entertaining in his own way. I think Ive mentioned it before, but it was made even funnier, because there was a guy sitting in front of us who muttered “What is that S***?” for about 30 minutes and then left.
I wouldnt be caught dead with that wretched pixel.
I read Starship Troopers to death in my early teens. My Berkley paperback copy began to come apart, and I repaired it with black tape. I really don’t want to read it ever again. I thought the movie was mildly amusing.
Speaking as a four-time former Hugo administrator (note, I have nothing to do with the Hugos this year), I’d say that rule 3.3.7 definitely makes it eligible.
69.5%? Well, The Destroyer has 71%. This must prove that the Destroyer-books are well regarded. And that those that speak for The Destroyer clearly talk for Fandom at large.
Starship Troopers – read the book in junior high school, played the game in high school. (Avalon Hill). Oddly, I don’t think I’ve seen the whole movie. I get censored bits of it on one of the movie channels from time to time. Amazed there have been multiple sequels.
Have we done the Tom Gauld cartoon of Neil Gaiman on tour with Odin as his handler?
On the subject of the Starship Troopers movie, there’s the MST3K Academy of Robots’ Choice Awards special where the inhabitants of the Satellite of Love review it (along with other films)
@airboy
Congratulations on demonstrating that the anomaly lies in the MGC view of Heinlein, where any critique seems to be interpreted as unwarranted attacks. Would Heinlein himself have wanted to be immune from criticism?
You have to like EVERYTHING by Heinlein, otherwise you do not like him at all. And by EVERYTHING, I mean Starship Troopers.
Oh, absolutely. If you only read his fiction you wouldn’t think so, because of the risk-taking (in terms of where American popular culture was at the time) and the sense of engagement (so many novels in which a character, or the reader him/herself is being mentored, as if by a teacher who expects to have to deal with your immature thoughts). In real life, few people have such a strong sense of entitlement or dealt with others in such a self-protective, grindingly formal manner as Heinlein.
Well, I only read about sixty or seventy of those books (how many are there?)
And come to think of it, since I never had any reason to compare the two before, they did a horrible job with the Remo Williams movie, almost as bad as with Starship Troopers.
I hated Starship Troopers because they made it a bad example (while claiming to have made it a satire), whereas Remo Williams failed because they didn’t do a good job translating its satire to the screen (the whole thing was just silly, although the fight on the scaffolding around the Statue of Liberty was at least a good idea.)
@Mike
Oh well, I guess we’d better cease all criticism forthwith!
More seriously, if a living author was that touchy with criticism I’d give them very short shrift. I’ve plenty of time for Heinlein, but that includes being realistic about his faults.