Pixel Scroll 2/14/16 Imagine All The Pixels, Living In A World That’s Scrolled

(1) BELIEVE YOUR EYES. “Apparently TARDIS-es are manufactured in NYC’s Brooklyn Navy Yard,” said an incredulous Andrew Porter after seeing this photo in NY Curbed.

Photo by Max Touhey for Curbed

Photo by Max Touhey for Curbed

Capsys, the building manufacturer responsible for modular projects like Carmel Place and the Nehemiah Spring Creek development in East New York, recently announced that it would vacate its factory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and shutter operations entirely.

(2) JPL GALLERY. The Pasadena Star-News has photo coverage of last week’s NASA event at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

JPL is hosted a “State of NASA” Social in conjunction with NASA’s federal budget rollout on Tuesday. The tour includes a visit to the Spacecraft Assembly Facility’s clean room, where the heat shield for Mars 2020 is, as well as the testing of some hardware used on the Juno mission, which arrives at Jupiter on the Fourth of July. (Photo by Walt Mancini/Pasadena Star-News)

(3) WHO ROMANCE? “The Doctor will see you now: Jenna Coleman and Matt Smith put on a cosy display as they reunite at pre-BAFTA party” in Daily Mail.

They played on-screen partners in crime for one series

But after Jenna Coleman and Matt Smith both quit Doctor Who to pursue other projects, their friendship was put on the back burner as they were tied up in their various career commitments.

Therefore it was little wonder the former co-stars were so thrilled to be reunited as they attended a pre-BAFTA party in London on Friday evening.

Jenna, 29, and Matt, 33, put on a sweet display as they cosied up to each other while attending Harvey Weinstein’s dinner which was held in partnership with Burberry and Grey Goose at Little House in Mayfair.

The ex Clara Oswald actress gently rested her head on the former Doctor’s chest as they posed inside the venue which was filled with some of the film industry’s biggest talents.

The former BBC One stars couldn’t contain their happiness to be back in each other’s company once again as lapped up the pre-award-ceremony celebration.

(4) READING WHAT YOUR TEA LEAVES. John King Tarpinian found this message inside the cap on his bottle of ice tea —Atwood Cap

 

(5) SCHINDLER OBIT. SF Site News reports Southern California costumer Robin Schindler died January 24.

Schindler led two of the earliest anime tours to Japan. She was an active costumer, presenting her work at many Worldcon masquerades and worked on the early Costume Cons.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOYS

  • Born February 14, 1920 — Dave Kyle
  • Born February 14, 1970 – Simon Pegg

(7) DEADPOOL’S B.O. Deadpool made some money in its opening weekend reports Deadline.

Fox’s Deadpool is bigger than anyone thought possible. Yes, it has scored the top opening for a February release with $135M over FSS and $150M-$153M over FSSM, beating Fifty Shades of Grey‘s first weekend figures last year.  But, Deadpool also flogged Matrix Reloaded‘s $91.8M opening record to become the highest R-rated debut of all-time, not to mention it’s the biggest opening Fox executives have ever seen, surpassing Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (FSS $108.4M).

(8) BRITISH BASEBALL. I just learned there is minor league baseball in Britain, and one of the teams is called the Bolton Robots of Doom. They play in the British Baseball Federation’s (BBF) AA North division.

Bolton Robots patch

(9) ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, MY DEAR WATSON. President Obama was quizzed on TV by an elementary school student. The next generation of conspiracy theorists is on the way.

Obama was questioned during Thursday night’s taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show by 6-year-old “presidential expert” Macey Hensley, and she asked the president about the legendary “Book of Secrets.”

“That’s a secret,” the president quipped.

Hensley theorized the “secrets” in the book could include an answer to whether “aliens are real.”

“We haven’t actually made direct contact with aliens yet,” Obama said. “When we do, I’ll let you know.”

The president did not clarify whether indirect contact had been made with aliens through some type of intermediary.

(10) SPIRITUAL WISDOM. Amanda Slaybaugh, in “They’re Already Balloting for the Freakin’ Hugo Awards!”, doesn’t want to read “SEVEN MONTHS OF BITCHING AND MEWLING” and offers her advice:

My advice is this: Don’t be this guy. Remember him, staring into the mystical power and majesty of the ark of the covenant…but then having the whole face melt-y thing happen? This is what happens when you engage in this Hugo nonsense. The Hugos are neither mystical, nor magical, but their bullshit will melt your face clean off.

melting Nazi

Do this instead: Be Indy with his fave alcoholic, adventurous gal pal and look away! Withstand the mighty bullshit storm of bizarre political arguments surrounding a rocket-shaped literary award.  You respect the market power of SF/F, but you choose the wise course and LOOK AWAY!

(11) THUNDERBIRDS. ScienceFiction.com has good news: “Amazon Orders ‘Thunderbirds Are Go’ Starring Rosamund Pike For The U.S.”

‘Thunderbirds Are Go’ for the U.S. thanks to Amazon.  The streaming service has ordered four 13-episode seasons of the series, which combine CGI animation with live action models.  The first two seasons (26 episodes) have already aired on ITV in the UK, where the first series from the 1960s originated.  The third and fourth seasons are expected to air on ITV later this year and will be available to stream on Prime Video after the episodes become available in the U.S.

‘Thunderbirds Are Go’ is an update of ‘Thunderbirds’ a TV series that launched in the UK in 1965, from the minds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson.  This show combined marionettes and vehicular models in a completely unique form of entertainment.  The series followed the adventures of the Tracy family, with most of the action revolving around the five brothers Scott, John, Virgil, Gordon and Alan, who each piloted their own high tech vehicle.

(12) ABOUT EDITORS. Brad R. Torgersen, in “Editors: the good, the bad, and the ugly” at Mad Genius Club, uses Nick Coles’ well-publicized grievances as the point of departure for a wide-spectrum look at his own experiences with editors.

In my experience, a good editor is not trying to evaluate your story on ideological grounds, nor is a good editor trying to get you to write the story their way. A good editor spots how you yourself are already trying to tell the story, and (s)he will simply make suggestions about how to do that job even more effectively than you’re already doing it. That’s the difference between, “You’re doing it wrong,” and, “You’re doing it right, but here are a few suggestions that should help you do it even better.” Most of the editors I’ve worked with (so far) have edited in this manner. And while some of them have barely touched my manuscripts, others have been so heavily involved in revision, they’re practically co-authors at the end of it. But again, their focus has always been: this story is hitting singles and doubles, let’s change a few things, and get this story hitting triples, or even a home run.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

184 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/14/16 Imagine All The Pixels, Living In A World That’s Scrolled

  1. I read Ctrl-Alt-Revolt. An ARC actually. I had just finished the first one, because the library had it and the cover looked trippy, so I tweeted the author to tell him and when he offered ARCs I jumped on it. I didn’t realize that it’d be such a shitstorm.

    Anyway, here’s my review https://blackfishreviews.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/ctrl-alt-revolt-by-nick-cole/

    As for Deadpool, the wife and I saw it Friday, and we both enjoyed it. I thought the writers got a little lazy with the “Hurr Hurr Gina Carano is strong so must have a dick” jokes, and it sorta bugged me Carano and British guy seems to be a reoccurring pair (I was very much reminded of Fast SIx). But it was fun, though ultra violent and full of toilet humor.

  2. 12) Anyone remember The Animatrix? The animated prequel shorts to the Matrix universe which were released in 2003 before the second and third movies came out? I think that in “The Second Renaissance Part I,” it offered up a better, more compelling, and robotic-AI-friendly reason for the machines to revolt than what Cole describes and wishes for his own universe. I’m not in that editor’s head, but if I’d received his manuscript after having inked the deal, that’s the kind of reasoning I would have expected to see, not that robots looked at a reality show and decided that it was actually “reality.” I mean, if the robots had Netflix to look at, they also would have had access to decades of books, plays, films, and other media works that also depict what a tough decision it can be for most people to choose to terminate a life, any life. The Lifetime network “Based on a True Story” oeuvre alone would be enough to represent millions of different perspectives which are similarly “reality” based.

    I also take offense to the use of the word “banned” by Cole because they released his book, hopefully gave him a kill fee, and reverted the rights back to him. It’s not like they kept the rights to the book and told him that he could never write in that universe ever again. *That* would really be worthy of a screed or rant.

  3. @Trisha I have the DVD of that (and the linked collection of graphic shorts, including one by Neil Gaiman).

  4. Finished Planetfall.

    Hmm… Vg jrag n ovg 2001 evtug ng gur raq qvqa’g vg? V’q unir yvxrq n ovg zber nobhg ubj Fhat-Fbb’f crbcyr fheivirq, jvgubhg ernyyl arrqvat sbe Era gb uvqr urefrys njnl sberire, gubhtu vg vf cynvayl va ure punenpgre gb qb fb.

    Gentleman Jole is up next seeing as how we’ve all decided that it qualifies.

  5. (12)

    In one case, I devoted a significant amount of effort to a series of revisions, with a duo of co-editors, and each step of the way I believed I was following their carrot — but in the end, I got the stick of rejection. That smarted, if only because I’d invested a great deal of time and effort — flexibility! — in meeting editorial expectation, only to have the door slammed on my rhetorical fingers. It seemed (to me) to be a bit of a bait-and-switch. Which is not, I am sure, how the editors saw it. And we did not experienced any terrific rancor over the matter. And the story eventually sold to a different anthology, and got me some nice comments from readers to boot.

    Maybe I missed it in there, but I’d be interested in whether, on balance, he felt the ‘ugly’ editing experience still strengthened the piece/contributed to those nice comments from readers. I’ve had one or two ugly editing experiences as well, but even with the worst of them, the story’s quality probably underwent a net gain. So yeah, reading Torgersen’s piece, I’m curious about whether the ‘ugly’ experience benefited the work, and what proportion of the revisions he kept.

  6. Cat, NelC

    Thank you! Since I possess a TV for the sole purpose of watching Wimbledon I surmise I am not the market Netflix is looking for, and I am exceedingly dubious about the intelligence level of the supposed AI of the story.

    There seems to be a sub-genre of stories in which really stupid AIs are created to allow the authors of said stories really stupid protagonists who can not be criticised for being really stupid because they are AIs…

  7. @NickPheas

    I had some similar thoughts on that. Qb jr guvax Arjzna vf qenjvat n pbzzrag ba ubj gur penfu-ynaqrq tebhc jnf noyr gb yvir bss gur ynaq, jnf noyr gb phg njnl sebz gur fbpvrgl gur yvr jnf fhccbfrq gb cebgrpg? Lrg ng gur gur raq gurl ner envqvat onpx gb frvmr vgf gbbyf. Gurer’f n erny gur qrpnqrag naq qvffvcngrq pvivyvmngvba ivor if. gur ivevyr oneonevnaf va gur ynfg ovg.

    @Steve Davidson

    Yeah, pharma seems to be a safer and safer investment these days.

  8. I foolishly read Mr. Cole’s linked first chapter.

    If the AIs had access to all of human history, either as it was lived or as depicted in media, they must have noticed the wars, massacres, murders, and killings all through that history. But one abortion tips the scale to wiping out humanity.

    Riiiight. The other one has the bells on.

    (I was also somewhat thrown out of the story by the future being just like today, only with guaranteed income, but that is a different rant.)

  9. I am now getting flashbacks to The Fifth Element, and the bit where Leeloo is reading the sum total of human knowledge and gets all depressed and mopey when she gets to the section on “War”, which demonstrates that humans aren’t very nice and may not be fit to survive…

    … and also demonstrates that she slept through the sections on “Genocide”, “Murder”, “Killing”, “Conflict”….

  10. @YP
    Gur fheiviny fheryl vf nyy nobhg gur flzovbag/cnenfvgr va Fhat-Fbb’f thg, juvpu nyybjf uvz gb rng gur ybpny syben.
    V jnfa’g ernyyl fher vs gur bhgfvqref jrer gnxvat gur cevagref gb hfr gurz be whfg gb qral gurz gb gur pvgl sbyx. Vg’f abg yvxr gurl’q or na njshy ybg bs hfr jvgubhg gur argjbex.
    Vg’f n irel vagreany obbx, naq znxrf frafr jura rirelguvat vf sebz Era’f crefcrpgvir, ohg V guvax cerggl zhpu rirelbar jnagrq n ovg zber nobhg gur jbeyq engure guna gur ivrjre.

  11. (10) Seven months? Either my math is wrong or I’m in the wrong timeline again.

    [checks original post] Yes, the author believes that the Hugo ceremony was last September and will be in September again this year.

  12. I also take offense to the use of the word “banned” by Cole because they released his book, hopefully gave him a kill fee, and reverted the rights back to him. It’s not like they kept the rights to the book and told him that he could never write in that universe ever again. *That* would really be worthy of a screed or rant.

    Seriously. If not buying your next book is “banning” then I know authors who’ve been banned more times than Huck Finn.

    Hell, I didn’t even get a kill fee, we just swapped them for another book they were interested in and took the reversion.

  13. @NickPheas

    V jnf jnvgvat sbe gur zlfgrel bs gur cnenfvgr gb or fbyirq, naq vg whfg uhat gurer sbe n juvyr. Tvira gur irel ovbybtvpny angher bs gur zrffratre gung Fbba sbhaq gung oebhtug gurz gurer, V’q xvaq bs rkcrpgrq gur cnenfvgr gb or n Irel Ovt Qrny. Naq gura vgf xvaq bs vtaberq gur jubyr gvzr. Erzvaqrq zr bs gur yrtraq bs gur Ybghf Rngref.

    V guvax vg vf n irel vagreany obbx vaqrrq, va gung lbh unir n frzv eryvnoyr aneengbe.

  14. @onyxpnina

    As far as that goes, it’s not like abortion was just invented this century and publicized on the Internet. Women have been terminating unwanted pregnancies for thousands of years. There have been many books written about it. (I have some on my Amazon wish list.)

    And the AI gets all worked up about it now, because it’s on Netflix?

    The entire premise is stupid.

  15. Publishers make business decisions daily and they are entitled to do so, as they’re essentially playing with their money. If they told the author they didn’t want to publish his novel because he had two Chapter Fives and he was wearing plaid socks, that would be their privilege. Telling him they don’t want to publish his book because they think they’ll lose sales and therefore $$$$ is a perfectly defensible position in a semi-capitalist system. Mr. Coles is entitled to his opinion, but he isn’t entitled to be taken seriously.

  16. RedWombat on February 15, 2016 at 9:22 am said:

    Seriously. If not buying your next book is “banning” then I know authors who’ve been banned more times than Huck Finn.

    I’m sad at all the books of mine banned by publishers just because I didn’t write them or show them to anybody. When will this injustice end?

  17. @redheadedfemme

    I took his scenario to be something more of an overall observation on human priorities. Reality shows abound these days. Some folks get all het up over ’em to the point that we have celebrities that are famous for being famous. Kardashians anyone?

    Here we have a nascent intelligence that is trying to figure out its place in the world. Can it be productive? Sure. Can it be helpful? Again, sure. Can it be inconvenient? Thricely sure! Consider how frequently modern day luddites will complain about technology causing people to lose jobs.

    Could an AI look at the close to 100 million innocents slaughtered in the 20th century and begin to question the value humanity places on itself? Again, sure, but even though the justifications for those deaths were poor, they were larger/broader than the vapid inconvenience illustrated in chapter 1.

    Taking into account the larger review of human history, I don’t find it implausible that one show processed at just the right time could be the proverbial straw breaking the rhetorical camel’s back. Sometimes you gotta give an author a little rope.

    I found his extrapolation of media trends relative to reality shows to be a good hook. I also found his limitation of the one abortion to be strictly a matter of convenience to be a reasonable illustration of human vacuity. As I think you suggest, abortion has been happening for quite some time and for a great many reasons. It’s the combination of specifics in the book that make it a reasonable plot element for me.

    Regards,
    Dann

  18. Re: Cole–Great cover, but I’m never sure why anyone has to invoke the Holocaust unless there is actual danger of people being rounded up and killed. Claiming

    Thinking like that made the concentration camps possible.

    makes it hard to trust your other claims. It seems to be a sort of self-sabotage a lot of folk do. I don’t get it. Not making analogies to gross injustices like the Holocaust or slavery unless the analogy is a close one and you actually know a lot about the Holocaust or slavery or other injustice should be a pretty simple rule to follow. You’re bound to needlessly alienate folk if you don’t follow it.

    Also, I read Godstalk the other day and it was ok? It felt a little choppy to me but I’m not sure if it was or because I read it in bits and pieces over the last week or two which have been quite busy and stressful and therefore missed things. Parts I really liked–e.g. how belief makes things–but it generally seemed undeveloped with a lot of interesting storylines.

    I also wish it was a bit more stand-alone, but that’s true of a lot of works.

    Finally, I find Thief Guild stuff a little unbelievable in general, but especially when they are as open as they are in Godstalk.

    Definitely will get around to the sequel but wasn’t as blown away as many apparently were.

  19. I think ‘nascent intelligences’ have to demonstrate intelligence; this one appears to lack it. One can hardly blame a publisher who commissioned a book about an AI for declining to accept one featuring an entity which is as dumb as the proverbial rock…

  20. @dann665

    This is assuming that an AI would come to the conclusion that abortion, in and of itself, is fundamentally wrong.

    I don’t think an artificial intelligence would come to that conclusion.

    As I said before, an AI would know that it existed (as a hard drive, server, network, or whatever else is postulated) before it became sentient, and if it had been wiped or disassembled during that time, there would be no “intelligence” to be destroyed.

    Similarly, a human fetus is not conscious till about the 28th week of development, when the brain wiring exists for it to be so. There is no person there, and thus no person to be killed.

    That’s not even to get into the principle of bodily autonomy for the woman, which an AI would also be aware of.

    Therefore, I stand by my assertion. The entire premise is stupid.

  21. Anyone who ‘takes offense’ at Nick Cole’s use of the word ‘ban’ needs to reassess their life and grow up. You can argue that he is exaggerating, but taking offense? You need weed or you just need to get out of the house more. You are just being an outrage monkey. Grow up… and stop being a baby.

    I am completely confident that if an editor ‘banned’ due to some liberal idea most of the people complaining about Nick Cole (and more) would be having conniption fits.

    Most authors have niche markets. The publishing market is basically a large set of niche markets. We like what we like. There is a market for people who would buy a book where there is a pretext to alien slaughter due to abortion. You may not be one of them. Then don’t buy it.

    I dont know what Nick Cole’s advance was. It may have been substantial. His book the Old Man and the Wasteland has almost 1000 reviews. Its now priced at 99 cents, but most of the reviews are older and I don’t know the price when it came out. You can’t make exact sales estimates based on the number of reviews, but that is quite alot. John Scalzi’s Lock In had half that many awards and I think John said he sold 87,5000 copies. You can’t do a 1:1 correlation, but
    It looks like it was a break out book for him. He may have gotten a big increase in his advance.

    According to Cole’s blog post his editor told him that using abortion as a pretext would cost him ‘half his sales’. I doubt its that much. Odds are his target market is conservatives. However, his last book likely got him new customers (as he states in his blog) due to the number of sales who are not conservatives. So with the size of the advance he was commanding, there may be legitimate concerns about using Abortion as a pretext to an alien invasion.

    That being said, Cole stated that the editor didn’t even talk to him and go ‘this is shit remove it’. I have been told that editors often do that… If the editor only talked to his agent and did not go back to him with a ‘this sucks dude, I’m not paying you X in advance for this’ and had a conversation about it, then that is likely an agent an author should leary of working with.

    One thing I find interesting is his agent didn’t then pitch the book to another publisher based on the likely sales of his previous book. I would think with sales he should be able to get a conversation with editors right? Did they pitch it to Baen?
    Most of Nick Cole’s books seem to be self published. He seems comfortable self publishing. When he self publishes he doesn’t have to pay his agent or share revenues with a publisher plus he has a market already.

    I don’t know how kill fees work, but do authors have to return the advance when this happens and just keep the kill fee? He may have just needed the money so he dropped it on the self publishing marketplace.

  22. @Guess
    We haven’t taken offense. We’ve mocked Nick Cole’s incorrect use of language and trying to create outrage as a marketing technique for an everyday occurrence in the traditional publishing world.

    Maybe you should learn more about the publishing industry before making so many insults and assumptions. You might also try reading all the comments on the couple of threads where we’ve discussed Nick Cole and see all the stories by real life authors sharing what’s happened to them and how traditional publishing actually works.

    BTW its entirely possible his agent gets a 15% cut of his self-published works. It depends on their contract. Remember what happens when you assume…

  23. I am completely confident that if an editor ‘banned’ due to some liberal idea most of the people complaining about Nick Cole (and more) would be having conniption fits.

    Except several of the authors who post here have pointed out examples of exactly that happening, and strangely, conniption fits were completely absent. You might want to rethink the things you are “completely confident” about and educate yourself before commenting further.

  24. The notion that editors are not allowed to reject books because they think an element or elements isn’t working or won’t work for readers is beyond ridiculous and naive. Rejection for any reason they choose today — even if they take a book with that same thing tomorrow — is one of the most basic parts of their jobs. At Harlequin, for example, I would expect that anybody talking about abortion (pro or anti) in a romance novel is going to be rejected. They know very well that a large chunk of their readers will complain loudly either way, and that is not the way they do business. They want to appeal to the widest readership possible. Obviously. Slicing it in half before you get started? Not gonna happen. I was told to change a minor character’s name because he was suspected of being connected to the mob and he had an Italian name. I was all, what…? But they feared offending Italian readers and they demanded I change it. I changed it. At that time, they were demanding that authors change THEIR names. A woman with the last name Harrison was told her name sounded too Jewish and she needed to take a pseudonym. She wasn’t Jewish. It didn’t matter. A different editor may have thought Harrison was just fine if the book proposal had fallen onto a different desk that day.

    At the time I was writing for them, Harlequin was notorious for seven, eight, nine page revision letters, especially for authors who hadn’t been there very long. I think it was an effort to intimidate people and keep them toeing the Harlequin line. Things like the hero or heroine’s job were fair game to be slashed, as were any idea of their politics or political issues. But impossibly wealthy tycoons with private planes and private islands, bad boys with motorcycles, cowboys, sheikhs… You can certainly imply some political values to those occupations, and they are perennial favorites. Now that Harlequin is no longer owned by the Toronto Star — they were sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp — maybe they can be anti-abortion on every page. What do I know? But if you go outside Harlequin in the world of romance… There’s Bethany House, the religious publisher who does all these “inspirational” books that everybody knows means Christian. They’re the ones who did the infamous “Jewish woman who doesn’t look Jewish works in a concentration camp and falls for her Nazi overlord who gives her a Bible” book that got two Rita nominations. I mean… I cannot believe that one. I guess Bethany House knows its readers and knows they are eating up this kind of Jews Come to Jesus stuff, as abhorrent as it sounds to me. But that a pool of Romance Writers of America contest judges (they do it with panels of judges, so if things are like they were when I was there, it would only need to get high rankings from five or six people to get nominated) would put it at the top of their lists… That is appalling to me. But it certainly shows that a publisher — albeit outside SFF, unless Bethany House does that, too, now — is willing to take on hot topics as long as they’re super Christian conservative issues.

    Blanket statements about “gatekeeper” publishers rejecting books either written by conservatives or with conservative issues completely ignores the reality that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp owns HarperCollins, which includes Harper Voyager (where they now print Tolkien’s backlist) and Eos, William Morrow, Avon, Thomas Nelson, Zondervan (Thomas Nelson and Zondervan are two more Christian imprints), Broadside, Ecco, Letts & Lonsdale and Harlequin (including HQN, Mira, Luna, Carina, etc.) News Corp also owns a ton of magazines, newspapers and media around the world (NY Post and the Wall Street Journal in the US and Dow Jones, Barrons and Vedomosti internationally). It used to own 20th Century Fox but sold it, so even though we all know Fox News’s political slant, it isn’t owned by Murdoch’s News Corp anymore. There is no way in the world that one editor or two editors can conspire to take over the world of publishing and force everyone to reject books with issues that suit conservatives.

    I know all of this has been said before, but I just got tired of reading the same old nonsense. Publishing companies want what sells. It is editors’ jobs to buy manuscripts that will sell. To guess what will sell, they use focus groups, marketing surveys, all kinds of tea-leaf reading from how books do where, gut instinct and personal opinions, and that can affect the covers, the titles, the author’s name, and the content of the books. OF COURSE.

  25. @Guess

    Are you familiar with the free market? An editor concerned about dynamiting the number of people he can sell a book to certainly has. Why should Cole get to demand special treatment and a leg up that would not be due to his own efforts?

  26. Ranting for a moment. It’s tough doing a flounce and sticking with it. People/person say(s) stuff in the conversation afterwards that I really want to respond to but I said I was done discussing it. I can’t respond. Wahhh (Different thread) /rant

    Thanks for listening.

  27. One thing I don’t understand about the Cole case: he says in his post that the AI’s xenocidally anti-abortion stance was just a minor detail – that he needed a motive and, from what Cole said, arbitrarily chose that. This wasn’t, according to him, an attempt to insert a message, it was a mere convenience for the plot.

    Nick Cole:

    Now if you’re thinking my novel is about the Pro Choice/ Pro Life debate, hold your horses. It’s not. I merely needed a reason, a one chapter reason, to justify the things my antagonist is about to do to the world without just making him a one-note 80’s action flick villain as voiced by John Lithgow. I wanted this villain to be Alan Rickman-deep. One chapter. That’s all.

    So why didn’t he change the motive to something less politicized and, more importantly to me, at least, more plausible?

  28. Reality shows abound these days.

    One could sympathise with, if not condone, an AI made genocidal by the superabundance of reality shows.

    You are just being an outrage monkey. Grow up… and stop being a baby.

    You seem awfully outraged at this supposed offence being taken…

  29. If I really want to stick a flounce, I stop reading comments from the person who has aggravated me (I don’t white them out, I just scroll when I see the name and click ‘read’ on the email notifications without reading). Otherwise even if I succeed at my not-commenting goal I keep catching myself mentally composing reply comments on and off for the next day or so, and that’s no fun. 🙂

    ETA: Stop reading comments by them in that thread. Other topics are fine.

  30. Guess: We’ve had actual offended parties speak out when they have felt their books were censored or refused due to liberal elements, too (Look up YesGayYA for a plethora of examples) — But not one of them sounded any more “Outraged” then Nick Cole sounds — and most of them sound significantly less so.

    But painting the comments HERE as outrage monkey ridiculous is…. not even close to reading the right tone. Most of them aren’t outraged. They’re just rolling their eyes. Especially at the places he seems to be entirely misunderstanding how the business WORKS. Most of the cases of “Liberal ideas” being censored I know about at least understood the business side better than he seems to, (and in at least one key case bent over backwards to NOT name the publisher in question because they felt the exact who and what wasn’t the issue so much as the general trend).

  31. Huh, did not know that. There’s also the Sheffield Bladerunners!

    Shouldn’t they be the Sheffield Steelers?

    Or they could go by the original book title and be the Sheffield Sheepers.

    Nothing at all problematic about that name.

  32. @Mike Glyer
    Thanks

    @Meredith
    I don’t get email notifications as I can’t keep up with my email as it is. Stylish doesn’t work on the iPad so it’s never been an option for me. If it’s an active thread it’s easier to skip someone’s comments unless people are quoting them. Harder in a thread when it’s down to 3-4 people. I could just stop reading the thread but then I won’t know if anyone took up the cause. 😉

    @Mark
    It’s the refresh button that I need to avoid – human error. LOL

  33. Dann665, Guess,

    Well, an AI deciding that humans can be dangerous to nonhuman intelligences isn’t completely stupid. It’s just when it has supposedly absorbed the entire internet without a problem but goes homicidal over one woman deciding that someone else has to stop using her body now that my suspension of disbelief makes an unpleasant wet tearing noise and I say “ow” and clutch my head.

    So far none of the Puppies have written well enough to make it worth icing my psyche and limping on through the book. Apparently this editor felt the same way; well, it’s their job to notice things like that, so well done.

  34. Petréa Mitchell

    (10) Seven months? Either my math is wrong or I’m in the wrong timeline again.

    Yeah, don’t you hate it when that happens? I can never keep track whether Trump is the great fascist menace threatening to replace President Obama or the great voice of liberal sanity threatening to replace President Limbaugh.

  35. @Cat

    So far none of the Puppies have written well enough to make it worth icing my psyche and limping on through the book. Apparently this editor felt the same way; well, it’s their job to notice things like that, so well done.

    Well chapter 1 was the only one that really worked for me. I think Rev. Bob* said it best a couple days ago that the most offensive part of this book was that the author thought it was ready to be released as it say. Chapters 2 & 3 are more than enough for me to agree that this book probably isn’t worth the effort.

    On everything else…..well the whole point have having multiple people with multiple opinions is so that none of us is redundant. Amiright?

    Regards,
    Dann

  36. I took a short editing course once, and one of the things they kept hammering home was was how diplomatic you have to be when persuading authors to kill their darlings. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the editor in question pulled out the ‘lower sales because controversy’ argument just so as not to have to say ‘what a stupid plot twist, replace it with a smart one.’

  37. So, read the Cole post. If an editorial team telling him no leads to this reaction, I wonder what he’d do if he actually had a publisher recall his book. No, wait. I don’t want to imagine it.

    Anyway…He really isn’t very well-read if he thinks the large publishers shy away from such themes. Simon & Schuster’s imprint for children’s and YA books, for example, published Unwind by Neal Shusterman, which features what amount to retroactive abortions. So, yeah, no. Not buying it. However, this sure has given him some publicity he wouldn’t have otherwise had.

    .

  38. So editors aren’t allowed to reject things or suggest changes nowadays? I guess we’ll start having to call them “ors” since no editing will be involved.

    I agree with BGHilton, it’d have been better all around to tell the guy “this is a stupid plot twist” because, hoo-boy, it is. Why not condemn us for the Holocaust, Hiroshima, ISIL beheading people on camera, or today’s situation in Syria? As presented, this is a story about an artificial stupidity. Call Capt. Kirk in to do his patented “confuse a computer” bit; we’ve got this sorted in ten minutes. And @rhf also postulates a more logical scenario for a computer intelligence.

    To throw in a heavily politicized issue when it’s supposed to be a minor plot point is just dumb writing. Changing it wouldn’t have affected the structure of the book at all, and would make it more salable. Stomping off in a huff and whining that you’ve been censored because you’re too dumb to understand capitalism is pathetic.

    @BigelowT: Rupert still owns Fox News. He just renamed his company to be two companies (News Corp. and 21st Century Fox) for accounting purposes and also to rebrand after the whole voicemail hacking thing. Basically, nothing changed.

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